On 77th anniversary of U-boat attack off Jacksonville Beach, new monument honors 19 killed

April 10th 2019 Florida Times Union By Matt Soergel

On 77th anniversary of U-boat attack off Jacksonville Beach, new monument honors 19 killed



On a Friday night in 1942, Germany brought World War II to within eyesight of the bustling amusement parks and bars of Jacksonville Beach as a U-boat torpedoed a giant oil tanker, setting off an explosion that could be seen from St. Augustine to St. Marys, Ga., and perhaps even beyond.

Nineteen of the 48 men on the SS Gulfamerica were killed. Some died in the initial explosion. Some died by drowning. Some died in the burning water around their ship.

On Wednesday, the 77th anniversary of the attack, a marker bearing their names was unveiled in Jacksonville Beach. It’s only right that the men be remembered, said historian Scott Grant.

“They died by an act of war, 4 miles off the coast here,” he said. “Nineteen guys were killed by Germans, right off there, 4 miles off the coast. People stood on shore and watched them die.”

The marker is now among those at a veterans’ memorial park at Beach Boulevard and Second Street North. It was placed there by Daughters of the American Revolution chapters in Ponte Vedra and Neptune Beach.

It lists the names of those who died: merchant mariners Carl William Albrecht, John Bartholomew Aubert, Robert Jerry Banks, Manuel Rufino de Brito, Jesse Gerald Jr., Horace West Jones, Lucius Joseph Lastrap Jr., Manuel Johnson Medina, Michael James Monahan, Howard Benjamin Pittman, Joseph Edward Risso, Hugh Horace Sanders, Alton Upshaw, Richard Andrew Van Pelt, Augusto Domingo Viotto, James Kyron Walker and Willie Rodman Welch; and two Navy men, apprentice seamen James N. Montgomery and William Glenn Rhodes.

Grant, who’s given many public presentations on the Gulfamerica, choked up as he spoke of Rhodes, a South Carolinian who was terribly injured in the burning water in the April 10 attack. He suffered for two days before he died, something his family didn’t find out until they applied for his gravestone years later and found his death listed as April 12. Rhodes’ father later moved to Jacksonville, Grant said, as if it were a way to be close to his son.

The Gulfamerica was on its maiden voyage from Texas to New York, hugging the coast, when it was spotted by German submarine U-123, captained by Reinhard Hardegen.


Korvettenkapitän Hardegen received many decorations including the "U-boat War Badge with Diamonds"

Hardegen, who was responsible for the sinking of more than 20 ships during World War II, lived until June 2018, dying at 105.

He came back to Florida in 1990, saying in a Times-Union story that he wanted to “show Americans that the enemies of yesterday are friends of today.”

He was in America to help promote “Operation Drumbeat,” a book by the late University of Florida historian Michael Gannon about the German U-boat campaign to sink merchant ships near the American coast in the months after the United States entered the war.

Gannon estimated that almost 400 ships were sunk and about 5,000 merchant mariners were killed in the U-boat attacks — about twice the fatalities of Pearl Harbor.

According to his captain’s log in 1942, Hardegen had taken his U-boat into the mouth of the St. Johns River on April 9 for a good look at the naval base at Mayport. He then took it south off the coast of St. Augustine, where it surfaced around dusk the next day, so close the crew joked they could see girls on the beach.

A lookout spotted the SS Gulfamerica headed north toward Jacksonville Beach. The U-123 stalked it and then maneuvered into position.

For the U-boat, conditions were ideal for killing. The coast was not yet under blackout orders, and Hardegen could see the Gulfamerica clearly silhouetted by the bright lights of Jacksonville Beach — the amusement park, the boardwalk, the pier, the hotels and the cars.

He gave the order to launch a torpedo from about a mile away. It took four minutes to get to its target, but the explosion on the oil tanker was gigantic.

As the tanker’s crew lowered life boats into the water, the U-boat then went between the beach and the doomed ship to fire upon the Gulfamerica’s hull and its antennae. It was a brazen act, coming so close to shore — an act designed, Grant said, as psychological warfare.

Indeed, as Hardegen wrote in his log: “All the vacationers had seen an impressive special performance at [President Franklin D.] Roosevelt’s expense. A burning tanker, artillery fire, the silhouette of a U-boat, how often had all of that been seen in America?”

Hundreds, if not thousands of people witnessed the explosion, and the curious later flocked to the beach to see the ship, which took six days to sink. But the local newspapers printed nothing about it until April 15 when a front-page story told of Vasco R. Geer, a Jacksonville native and the ship’s chief engineer, who escaped on a lifeboat.

Details were deliberately vague: The story did not say what the name of his ship was, where it was going and where the attack took place. Wartime policies required newspapers to withhold such information until it “can no longer profit the enemy.”

At the marker dedication Wednesday, a witness to the sinking, Dorothy Permenter, told how her mother yanked her out of bed and took her, with the rest of her family, to the seawall outside her house at 22nd Avenue South to see the blaze.

Permenter was 6, a month away from turning 7, but she remembers it, she said, as if it were yesterday: The sight of Germans running on the deck of the submarine, firing at the sinking ship. The burning water. And wondering what happened to the man she saw jump off the Gulfamerica.

Permenter also remembers the tar that washed up on the beach for years to come, a grim reminder of the sinking. “The sand would wash up and cover it,” she said, “then the sand would wash away, and then there would still be some of the tar.”

Matt Soergel: (904) 359-4082

Photos: A Look Back: The sinking of SS Gulfamerica off Jacksonville Beach

April 10, 2019 at 3:39 pm
The oil tanker SS Gulfamerica sank off the coast of Jacksonville Beach in 1942 after an attack by German U-boat 123.