I remember, when I was young, my parents neighbor talking about his military service during WWII. His favorite story was about when he finished his basic training at Fort Dix NJ and shipped out for his first assignment. He told of he and his fellow troops being loaded onto a train in the middle of the night with blacked out windows so they couldn't see where they were going nor could the train be spotted as it moved through the night.
An hour or so later the train came to a halt, and most onboard were betting that they had traveled to Philadelphia to be transported on a ship. A trip to nearby Maguire Air Base would have been only a few minutes if they were to fly out, so a troop ship, they surmised, it must be.
To their surprise, especially for any that were locals, the area around them was all too familiar. They were in Atlantic City. As the story went on, our neighbor joked that he spent the first year of the war walking on the beach, which technically was true, but there was more to it than that.
Germany had a plan to keep the US from supplying our allies in England, and a big part of that plan was to blockade the Delaware Bay. Upriver from the bay was the Philadelphia Naval Yard, where warships were being built. Then there were the numerous docks along both the Camden and Philadelphia waterfronts that loaded cargo ships destined to cross the Atlantic. Also upriver was the ammunition plant at the Frankford Arsenal, as well as the many oil refineries that fueled the war effort.
Germany decided that their U-boats were the perfect answer to bottling up the river and bay, and routinely torpedoed ships that sailed out into the ocean. It became an all too common sight at the time to see black smoke and flames from ship fires not too far off New Jersey beaches.
Those soldiers walking the beaches were there to spot saboteurs trying to make a landing in the dark of night, which may or may not have happened, but there were reports of a German sailor who, when captured, had a ticket stub from a Stone Harbor movie theater in his pocket.
WHYY has a good read about the history of submarine warfare off the Jersey coast linked below, so check it out.
#wwll #newjersey #germany #u-boats
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