May 9, 1942. 4:25 in the afternoon. 28 nautical miles due south of Morehead City, North Carolina. A 165-foot Coast Guard cutter named Icarus was cutting through calm Atlantic waters at 14 knots when her sonar operator picked up a contact off the port bow. The sound was mushy and indistinct, something moving beneath the surface.
Before the bridge crew could process what they were hearing, a German torpedo detonated against the sandy ocean floor, roughly 200 yards off the port quarter. The blast sent a pillar of white water skyward. The concussion shook the hull from stem to stern. Every man aboard felt it in his chest. A Nazi submarine had just tried to kill them.
There was only one problem. Icarus was not a warship. She had not been designed to fight submarines, hunt enemy vessels, or engage in combat of any kind. She was a rum runner chaser. She had been built 10 years earlier to catch bootleggers during prohibition. She displaced 337 tons, roughly half the weight of the submarine sitting beneath her.
She carried a single 3-in gun that had been obsolete before the war even started. Her crew had spent the previous decade stopping smugglers, towing disabled fishing boats, and pulling drowning men out of the water. Now a German U-boat was hiding on the ocean floor directly beneath her hull, and her commanding officer had exactly seconds to decide what to do about it.
His name was Lieutenant Maurice David Jester. He was 52 years old. He had been working the water since 1917. He had never fought a submarine in his life. Nobody on his crew had. The cutter they stood on had been designed to intercept boats carrying cases of illegal whiskey, not to destroy weapons of war carrying 14 torpedoes and a crew of trained killers.
But the torpedo had missed, and Lieutenant Jester was not the kind of man who let someone shoot at him without shooting back. To understand what happened next, you need to understand what Icarus actually was, and more importantly, what she was never meant to be. On January 17th, 1920, the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution took effect.
The manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcohol became illegal across the entire country. Prohibition had begun. And within months, organized crime discovered the most profitable smuggling operation in American history. Foreign ships loaded with whiskey, rum, champagne, and gin anchored just outside the 3-mi territorial limit off the American coast.
They stretched in loose lines from Maine to Florida, floating liquor warehouses bobbing in international waters where no law could touch them. The newspapers called it Rum Row. Off the coast of New Jersey alone, dozens of mother ships anchored at any given time. Some days, there were more. Smaller, faster boats called contact boats would race out under cover of darkness, load up with cases of liquor, and sprint back to shore before anyone could stop them.
The profits were enormous. A single successful run could net thousands of dollars in a night. The demand for illegal alcohol was bottomless. The supply was limited only by how fast the runners could move it ashore. The only force standing between Rum Row and the American coastline was the United States Coast Guard. And in 1920, the Coast Guard was completely outmatched.
Their fleet was ancient. Their ships were slow. The rum runners had faster boats, better engines, and nearly unlimited cash to spend on equipment. The smugglers hired the best mechanics on the Eastern Seaboard to build custom engines. They installed aircraft motors in speedboats. They rigged smoke screen devices that dumped oil onto hot exhaust manifolds, blinding pursuing cutters in a cloud of choking black haze.
Some ran into shoal water so shallow that no Coast Guard vessel could follow. Some dumped their cargo overboard when cornered, sending cases of whiskey to the bottom where divers could retrieve them later. A few even rammed pursuing cutters. Something had to change. The Coast Guard launched a massive shipbuilding program.
First came the 75-foot patrol boats, small wooden craft the crews called six-biters because their daily operating cost was roughly $62.50. Then came the 125-foot cutters, known as buck and a quarters. But even these ships were not enough. The rum runners kept getting faster, more organized, more brazen.
The Coast Guard also pioneered a weapon the smugglers never expected, code-breaking. A brilliant cryptanalyst named Elizabeth Friedman worked for the Coast Guard intercepting and deciphering the radio communications that rum running syndicates used to coordinate their operations. Her work helped convict dozens of smugglers and ringleaders, and her techniques foreshadowed the same kind of signals intelligence that would prove decisive in the Battle of the Atlantic a decade later.
But the front line was still the open water. And on the open water, the Coast Guard needed better ships. So they built the 165-footers, the B-class patrol cutters. 18 vessels, all named after figures from Greek mythology. Thetis, Daphne, Nemesis, Argo, Triton, Galatea, Perseus, and Icarus, the boy from the ancient myth who flew too close to the sun on wings made of wax and feathers.
Icarus was constructed at Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine. She was delivered on March 29th, 1932, and commissioned 3 days later on April 1 of that same year. She cost the United States government $258,000, 165 feet long, 25 feet 3 inches across the beam, a draft of less than 8 feet, shallow enough to follow rum runners into coastal inlets where deeper vessels could not go.
Two Winton diesel engines producing a combined 1,340 brake horsepower turned twin three-bladed propellers and pushed her to a maximum speed of 16 knots. Her original crew was five officers and 39 enlisted men. She was fast enough to chase a rum runner, maneuverable enough to cut one off in tight quarters, and small enough to operate in the shallow coastal waters where the smugglers like to hide.
That was her entire purpose. That was what the taxpayers had paid $258,000 for. Nothing more. The life of a Prohibition era Coast Guard crew was grueling and largely thankless. Long patrols in bad weather, endless cat and mouse games with smugglers who sometimes fought back. The public was often hostile. Many Americans did not support Prohibition, and Coast Guard crews who intercepted liquor shipments were sometimes jeered at when they returned to port.
One of Icarus’s sister ships, the cutter Daphne, became famous in June of 1932 for an incident the service would rather forget. While pursuing the rum runner Goniff in the North Atlantic, the two crews ran out of conventional weapons to throw at each other and resorted to hurling produce, potatoes, eggs, turnips. One Coast Guard officer was reportedly knocked unconscious by a flying turnip.
The newspapers called it the North Atlantic Vegetable War. That was the world Icarus was built for. Turnips and bootleggers, not torpedoes and submarines. When Prohibition ended with the ratification of the 21st Amendment on December 5th, 1933, Icarus and her sister ships suddenly lost their primary mission.
There were no more rum runners to chase. The 165-footers transitioned to general law enforcement, fisheries patrol, and search and rescue operations. They spent the rest of the 1930s as workaday Coast Guard cutters, enforcing customs regulations, towing disabled vessels, and responding to distress calls along the Eastern Seaboard.
It was steady, unglamorous, essential work. Nobody expected these small ships to ever fire a shot in anger. Then the world changed. After Pearl Harbor and Germany’s declaration of war in December of 1941, the Coast Guard was transferred to Navy operational control. Icarus and the other 165-footers were hastily rearmed for anti-submarine warfare.
Shipyard workers removed the Prohibition era armament and installed a new weapon suite. A 3-in deck gun replaced the older weapons. A Y-gun depth charge projector was bolted to the fantail. Two depth charge racks were welded onto the stern. The ship’s crew expanded from the peacetime complement of 44 to accommodate the additional equipment and watch standing requirements.
Sonar gear was fitted to detect submerged contacts. In a matter of weeks, a rum runner chaser had been converted, at least on paper, into a submarine hunter. Her commanding officer in 1942 fit the ship perfectly. Maurice David Jester was born on May 13, 1889, in Chincoteague, Virginia. Chincoteague was a small island community on the Eastern Shore, where every family made its living from the water.
Oystermen, fishermen, boat builders. The ocean was not a career choice on Chincoteague. It was the only life there was. Jester enlisted in the Coast Guard in 1917, first stationed at the Rehoboth Beach Life Saving Station in Delaware. Over the next two decades, he served aboard five different cutters. He spent years chasing rum runners along the Eastern Seaboard, learning every inlet, every cove, and every trick that smugglers used to evade pursuit.
By 1935, he had risen to chief boatswain, among the highest enlisted ranks in the Coast Guard. He to the West Coast, then returned East in 1939. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, and Germany declared war on America 4 days later, the Coast Guard needed experienced officers desperately.
Jester received a commission as a lieutenant in December of 1941. In January of 1942, at the age of 52, he took command of Icarus. He was old for a warship captain. Most Navy destroyer commanders were in their 30s or early 40s. Jester was a generation older, a former enlisted man who had never attended a Naval Academy, never studied anti-submarine warfare in a classroom, never dropped a depth charge in training or in combat.
But he had spent 25 years reading the ocean, and the ocean had taught him things no classroom ever could. How currents shifted near the continental shelf. How sound behaved differently in warm water versus cold. How a man on the run thought, and how to predict where he would go next. These were skills he had learned chasing rum runners.
They were about to save his life. When Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941, Admiral Karl Dönitz saw an opportunity that he had been preparing for since the war began. The American East Coast was wide open. Coastal cities blazed with light every night, silhouetting merchant ships against the glow like targets in a shooting gallery.
Ships sailed alone, without escorts, without convoy protection, without even basic blackout discipline. The United States Navy had rushed its newest warships to the Pacific after Pearl Harbor and committed its Atlantic forces to convoy duty on the North Atlantic run to Britain. The American coastline was virtually undefended.
Dönitz launched Operation Paukenschlag, drumbeat. Five long-range Type Nine U-boats crossed the Atlantic in January of 1942 and began sinking ships within sight of American beaches. The results were devastating. German submariners had their own name for what followed. They called it the second happy time. It was a reference to the first happy time of 1940 and 1941, when U-boats had savaged British convoys in the North Atlantic.
Now, they were doing it again, this time in American waters, and the killing was even easier. From January through August of 1942, Axis submarines sank over 600 ships totaling more than 3 million tons along the Eastern Seaboard and in the Gulf of Mexico. The losses were staggering. Roughly 1/4 of all shipping destroyed by U-boats during the entire war went down during those 8 months.
Tankers loaded with aviation fuel burned off the coast of New Jersey. The flames visible from the boardwalk. Cargo ships carrying war materials to Britain went down within view of Virginia Beach. Oil slicks blackened the sand from the Outer Banks to the Florida Keys. Bodies washed ashore on public beaches.
Life jackets and debris littered the tideline. Coastal residents could see the orange glow of burning vessels on the horizon at night and hear the muffled thunder of torpedo detonations rolling in across the water. Hotels along the Carolina coast reported guests standing on balconies watching ships die in the darkness.
One prominent historian called it America’s second Pearl Harbor. The American response was shockingly inadequate. Coastal cities refused to impose blackout orders. Resort towns argued that darkening their boardwalks would hurt tourism. The light from those cities silhouetted merchant ships against the coastal glow, turning them into perfect targets for U-boat commanders who simply sat offshore at periscope depth and picked them off one by one.
Ships continued to sail independently rather than in escorted convoys, despite the British having learned years earlier that convoy was the only proven defense against submarine attack. The Navy, stretched impossibly thin across two oceans, had almost no anti-submarine assets available for coastal defense. The waters between Cape Hatteras and Cape Lookout, North Carolina, became the deadliest stretch of ocean in the Western Hemisphere.
The warm Gulf Stream pushed north through this region, creating conditions that submarines could exploit. The continental shelf dropped away nearby, giving U-boats deep water for evasion just miles from the shipping lanes. Mariners gave this stretch of sea a name that stuck for the rest of the war. They called it Torpedo Alley.
By early May of 1942, German submarines had sunk 87 Allied merchant vessels along the East Coast, plus the destroyer Jacob Jones. America had managed to destroy exactly one U-boat in its own coastal waters, U-85, sunk by the destroyer USS Roper on April 14. That U-boat went down with all hands. No prisoners were taken.
No intelligence was gathered. The Germans were winning the Battle of the Atlantic and winning it badly. Into this disaster stepped the Coast Guard. Old cutters, Prohibition-era patrol boats, vessels designed to chase smugglers and rescue drowning sailors, were pressed into front-line anti-submarine service as part of a desperate stopgap called the Bucket Brigade.
These small ships patrolled assigned sectors of the coastline, hunted for periscopes, escorted merchant convoys through the most dangerous waters, and prayed they did not find what they were looking for. It was a mismatch that bordered on absurd. A German Type 7C submarine displaced nearly 870 tons submerged.
It carried 14 torpedoes, five torpedo tubes, an 88-mm deck gun, a 20-mm anti-aircraft cannon, and a crew of trained submariners who had been fighting since 1939. It could dive below 200 m. It could cross the Atlantic without refueling. Icarus displaced 337 tons. She carried one 3-in gun, a Y-gun depth charge projector, and two depth charge racks on the stern.
She had a crew of former rum chasers who had been at war for exactly 5 months, but she also carried something the U-boats did not expect. She had sonar, and she had depth charges. And she had a 52-year-old captain from Chincoteague, Virginia, who was not afraid of anything that moved beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
On the other side of this collision was a man who wanted glory more than anything else in the world. Kapitänleutnant Helmut Rathke was born on December 3, 1910, in Chicken, East Prussia. He entered the German Navy in 1930, and came on active duty in 1935. He served aboard surface ships for years, circumnavigating the globe twice.
He trained at the torpedo school at Mürwik. He was methodical, disciplined, and deeply ambitious. American interrogators would later describe him as holding unqualified admiration for Adolf Hitler and National Socialism. Rathke wanted the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. In the German submarine service, that decoration was the mark of an ace.
It went to U-boat commanders who sank roughly 100,000 tons of Allied shipping. Men like Günther Prien, who sank a British battleship inside the Royal Navy’s own anchorage at Scapa Flow, Otto Kretschmer, the tonnage king, Erich Topp, one of the deadliest commanders in the fleet. These were legends. Rathke intended to join them.
On August 28th, 1941, he received his first submarine command, U-352. A brand new Type VIIC, built at the Flensburger Schiffbau Gesellschaft shipyard in Flensburg, Germany. 220 ft long, five torpedo tubes, 14 torpedoes, a crew of 46 men. The city of Flensburg officially adopted the boat and painted its coat of arms on the conning tower.
There was one problem. Helmut Rathke was not good at commanding a submarine in combat. His crew discovered this on his first war patrol. U-352 departed in mid-January of 1942 as part of Group Schlie operating south of Iceland. Rathke spotted a steamer and prepared to attack. Escorting corvettes drove him off before he could fire.
Later, he launched a spread of four torpedoes at a destroyer. Every single torpedo missed. He returned to the submarine base at Saint Nazaire, France in early March of 1942. Two months at sea, zero ships sunk, zero tons credited, zero progress toward the Knight’s Cross. While U-352 sat in the massive reinforced concrete submarine pens at Saint Nazaire undergoing repairs, British commandos launched one of the most audacious raids of the war.
On March 28th, 1942, Operation Chariot sent the old destroyer HMS Campbeltown ramming into the Normandy dry dock gate and demolished it with delayed action explosives. The attack happened literally around Rathke’s boat. Saint Nazaire burned. Explosions rocked the port. British commandos fought through the streets, and Rathke sat in his submarine pen untouched waiting for his next patrol, still dreaming of the kills that would bring him glory.
Erich Topp, one of the most respected commanders in the German submarine fleet, reportedly offered a blunt assessment of Rathke after the war. According to post-war accounts, Topp indicated that Rathke was less than the best option to command a U-boat. That assessment was shared by members of Rathke’s own crew.
According to crewman Heinz-Karl Richter, Rathke was consumed by his obsession with winning the Knight’s Cross. That obsession drove him to take risks that experienced commanders would never consider. He was a stern disciplinarian, what the crew considered a martinet, punishing minor infractions with a harshness that bred resentment rather than loyalty.
His men followed his orders. They did not follow him willingly. Rathke’s second and final patrol began in early April of 1942. U-352 crossed the Atlantic slowly to conserve fuel. The weather turned warm as they moved south. Crew members sunbathed on the deck during surface runs. They rendezvoused with the supply submarine U-459 northeast of Bermuda, topped off their fuel tanks, and continued toward the American coast.
By early May, Rathke had reached the waters off North Carolina, torpedo alley, the hunting ground where other U-boat commanders were stacking up kills at an astonishing rate. Tankers, freighters, cargo vessels, all sailing without escort along the coastline, easy targets for a competent submarine commander. Rathke was not a competent submarine commander.
Off Cape Lookout, he reportedly encountered the Swedish freighter Freden and engaged in a prolonged cat-and-mouse pursuit, firing multiple torpedoes at the merchant ship. Every single one missed. Two war patrols, 76 days at sea, multiple attacks attempted, and Kapitänleutnant Helmut Rathke had not sunk a single Allied ship.
The Knight’s Cross was a fantasy. His crew knew it. His fellow commanders knew it. The only person who did not seem to know it was Rathke himself, and that ignorance was about to cost his crew everything. On the afternoon of May 9th, 1942, Rathke spotted a vessel through his periscope heading south along the Carolina coast.
If you want to know what happened next, please like this video. Every like pushes this story to someone who has never heard of the Coast Guard Cutter Icarus or the 52-year-old rum chaser who destroyed a Nazi submarine. This story deserves to be told. Please subscribe. Back to Rathke. He studied the approaching ship through his periscope.
He saw a vessel making good speed heading south. According to post-war accounts, he mistook it for a much larger target, possibly a small freighter or an armed patrol vessel worth sinking. Two failed patrols, zero kills, a crew losing confidence in him, a medal that would never come at this rate. Rathke made his decision.
He would attack. He called action stations. The crew moved to their battle positions. Torpedo men prepared a bow tube. Rathke maneuvered U-352 to periscope depth and lined up his shot carefully. The target was approaching from dead ahead. It was not a large freighter. It was not a valuable convoy escort. It was Icarus, a small Coast Guard Cutter that had been built to catch bootleggers selling whiskey.
Rathke gave the order to fire. A single torpedo, believed to be an electric model that left no visible wake, left the forward tube and streaked toward Icarus. It ran straight for a moment, then broached the surface briefly before diving again. Then it went deep, too deep. The water off Cape Lookout was only about 120 ft from surface to bottom with a soft sandy floor.
The torpedo struck the ocean bed roughly 200 yd off Icarus’s port quarter and detonated against the sand. The explosion was massive. A column of white water erupted from the surface. Every man on Icarus felt the shock wave through the deck plates, but the torpedo had not hit the ship. It had missed entirely.
And in missing, it did something catastrophic for Rathke. It marked the submarine’s approximate position as precisely as a flare dropped in the water. Rathke heard the detonation through his pressure hull. He believed he had scored a hit. He may have briefly raised his periscope to confirm the kill. What he saw instead was Icarus, completely undamaged, turning hard to port, and coming straight at him at full speed.
The hunter had just become the hunted, and the hunted was a 52-year-old rum chaser who did not appreciate being shot at. Lieutenant Jester did not hesitate, not for 1 second. The instant that torpedo detonated, he understood exactly what had happened. A submarine had just tried to kill his ship and his crew. The explosion had marked the approximate location of the attacker as clearly as a signal flare.
Jester shouted orders from the bridge. “Hard left rudder. All ahead full.” He swung Icarus around in a tight arc, the kind of sharp, aggressive turn that her Prohibition-era designers had built into her hull for chasing rum runners through crowded harbors and narrow coastal inlets. The ship heeled hard to starboard. The bow came around fast.
Jester pointed his cutter directly at the spot where the torpedo had detonated. His sonar operator was already tracking the contact. The return was clearer now, harder, more defined. The U-boat was close, very close. Moving slowly, trying to go deeper, trying to press against the bottom and hide, but there was nowhere to hide.
The water was only 120 ft deep. A Type 7C submarine sitting on the sandy bottom in 120 ft of water was a fish in a barrel. There was no deep trench to run to, no temperature layer to mask its sonar signature, no room to maneuver. Rathke had attacked in the worst possible water for a submarine to fight in, and now he was about to pay for it.
Jester reached the edge of the disturbance from the torpedo blast. He gave the order. His crew rolled depth charges off the stern racks and fired them from the Y-gun, laying down a diamond pattern of five charges. Five heavy steel canisters filled with high explosive sank through the warm Carolina water and detonated in rapid sequence around the estimated position of the submarine.
The irony was devastating. Jester had dropped his first pattern of depth charges almost exactly on the spot where Rathke had taken U-352 to the bottom hoping to sit still and silent while Icarus passed overhead. The same sandy bottom that had swallowed the German torpedo now held the German submarine in place like a trap.
The shallow water amplified the shock waves. Every explosion hammered the hull. Inside U-352, the world came apart. The concussions struck the pressure hull like giant fists. Glass gauges shattered across the control room. Instruments tore loose from mountings. Every light in the boat went dark except the dim red emergency lamps.
The periscope was destroyed, twisted and jammed in its housing, completely useless. An officer in the conning tower was killed instantly. Crewmen were hurled off their feet into bulkheads and machinery. Equipment crashed from overhead racks. Water began seeping through ruptured seals and cracked fittings.
The electric motors were likely disabled or severely damaged. Rathke struggled to assess the situation. His boat was blind. The periscope was gone. He could not see the surface. He could not see Icarus, but he could hear her. The churning of her twin propellers was clearly audible through the hull, circling overhead, coming around for another pass.
Jester was already setting up his second attack. He could see the evidence on the surface. Large air bubbles were rising from the depths, the kind that came from a damaged pressure hull venting atmosphere. Oil appeared on the water, spreading in an iridescent sheen across the calm surface. The submarine was hurt.
Jester intended to finish the job. He ordered a second depth charge run. Three more charges dropped in a V pattern bracketing the contact. The explosions rolled through the water. More bubbles erupted at the surface, more oil. The sonar return was changing, growing weaker, less defined. The submarine was breaking apart or flooding or both.
Jester circled again. He dropped a single additional charge directly on the last confirmed position. This one brought up a spreading slick of colorless light diesel fuel that fanned out across the surface, unmistakable evidence of a ruptured fuel tank. Inside U-352, Rathke later estimated that approximately 60 depth charges had been dropped on his boat.
In reality, Jester had used far fewer. But in the pitch darkness of a crippled submarine, with the hull ringing like a bell from repeated explosions, with water spraying through cracked seams and men screaming in the red emergency lighting, every single charge felt like 10. The damage was beyond repair at sea.
Rathke had no periscope, no reliable propulsion, a flooding boat, and a dead officer in the conning tower. He had two options: surface and surrender, or stay on the bottom and die with his entire crew. The Knight’s Cross was no longer relevant. Rathke gave the order to blow all ballast tanks, surface the boat.
At approximately 5:09 in the afternoon, U-352 broke through the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. She came up hard and steep, at a 45° angle, stern down, bow pointing toward the sky. Water cascaded off her hull in sheets. The conning tower emerged first, then the forward deck, then the gun platform with its 88-mm deck gun still mounted.
Jester saw her surface roughly 1,000 yd from Icarus. The submarine was clearly crippled, listing, damaged, and trailing oil, but she was still a warship. She still carried an 88-mm deck gun capable of penetrating Icarus’s thin hull. She still had a 20-mm anti-aircraft cannon. If the German crew reached those weapons and got off even a few well-aimed rounds, they could sink the small Coast Guard Cutter in minutes.
A single hit from the 88 below the waterline would be enough. Jester did not wait to see what the Germans planned to do. He gave the order to open fire immediately. Icarus’ .50 caliber and .30 caliber machine guns erupted first, raking the conning tower and the exposed deck with sustained bursts. Rounds ricocheted off the conning tower plating and chewed into the deck structure.
Then Jester swung the ship hard to bring his 3-in deck gun to bear on the target. The gun crew had trained for surface engagements, but they had trained against rum runners, not submarines. It did not matter. They found their target fast. The first round from the 3-in gun fell short, but it skipped off the surface of the water and ricocheted directly through the conning tower.
The second round overshot. Then the gunners locked in their range and elevation. According to the Office of Naval Intelligence report compiled after the engagement, Icarus fired 14 rounds from her 3-in gun. Six struck the hull and conning tower directly. One additional ricochet also hit home.
Seven rounds out of 14 found their target. For a crew whose primary training had been interdicting smugglers and conducting search and rescue operations, it was remarkable gunnery. 33 German sailors poured out of the conning tower hatch in what the official report described as clock-like precision. One after another, they tumbled from the hatch and dropped into the Atlantic.
They were abandoning ship. Rathke later stated that the angle of the submarine was too steep to reach or man the deck gun, and that Icarus was already firing directly into his crew as they emerged. There was no fight left to give. The boat was sinking. The crew was in the water. U-352 was finished. Jester altered course and prepared to ram the submarine if it showed any sign of resistance. Ramming was not necessary.
At approximately 5:14 in the afternoon, U-352 rolled and slipped beneath the surface for the last time. The stern went under first, then the conning tower, then the bow. She settled onto the sandy bottom in about 120 ft of water, listing to starboard, trailing a stream of air bubbles and diesel fuel.
Icarus ceased fire. The entire engagement, from the first sonar contact to the submarine’s final dive, had lasted less than 50 minutes. A Coast Guard cutter that had been built to chase bootleggers had just destroyed one of Adolf Hitler’s submarines. German sailors bobbed in the warm Atlantic swells. Some were wounded.
Some were bleeding from shrapnel injuries sustained inside the submarine. Some were in shock, staring blankly at the sky. They had been trained to expect no mercy from their enemies. The propaganda they had been fed told them Americans were brutal, uncivilized, vengeful. Several shouted in broken English as Icarus circled nearby.
“Do not shoot us. Do not shoot us.” They raised their hands above the water. Some waved pieces of white clothing as makeshift surrender flags. Lieutenant Jester faced a decision that no regulation, no training manual, and no previous wartime experience had prepared him for. There were no standing orders regarding the recovery of enemy submarine survivors from American coastal waters.
The concept had simply never come up before. The only previous U-boat destruction in these waters, U-85 by the destroyer Roper just 3 weeks earlier on April 14, had produced no survivors at all. That submarine went down with every man aboard. The Navy had never written a protocol for this situation because the situation had never occurred.
Jester radioed naval headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia, and requested instructions. He told them he had destroyed a submarine and that German sailors were in the water. He asked what he should do with them. According to historical accounts, the response from Norfolk was blunt and merciless. Let the Germans drown. Do not recover them.
Leave them in the water. Jester was not satisfied with that answer. He was a Coast Guard officer, a lifesaver by training, by tradition, and by personal conviction. He had spent 25 years pulling men out of the water, regardless of who they were or how they got there. Fishermen, sailors, smugglers, drowning swimmers. The Coast Guard did not ask a man’s nationality before throwing him a line.
Jester contacted the 6th Naval District and asked for a second opinion. The 6th District told him to go back and rescue the survivors. That is exactly what Maurice David Jester did. He brought Icarus alongside the group of German sailors struggling in the water and ordered his crew to begin pulling them aboard. Ropes were thrown.
Arms reached down. One by one, the enemy sailors were dragged over the gunnel and onto the deck of the ship they had tried to destroy less than an hour earlier. The rescue took roughly 45 minutes. 33 men were hauled out of the Atlantic. Many were exhausted and struggling to stay afloat. Some were bleeding from shrapnel wounds or internal injuries caused by the depth charge concussions.
Among the survivors was Kapitänleutnant Helmut Rathke himself, the man who had fired the torpedo that started this engagement. The captain who had tried to sink Icarus was now standing on her deck, dripping wet, a prisoner of war. Three members of Icarus’s crew spoke German. They conversed with the prisoners.
The Germans were openly astonished by their treatment. They had expected to be shot in the water or at best handled roughly. Instead, they were given dry clothes, medical treatment, and food. Several German sailors asked the Americans how much money or what promotions they would receive for sinking a submarine. The question revealed how differently the two military cultures thought about duty.
The Coast Guard crew had not been thinking about rewards or decorations. They had been thinking about surviving the afternoon. One German sailor was in critical condition. Machinist’s Mate Gerd Reuschel had suffered catastrophic injuries during the sinking. His leg had been severed. Rathke himself had tried to apply a tourniquet while they were both still in the water.
The medical staff aboard Icarus worked to save Reuschel through the night. Their efforts were not enough. Reuschel died aboard the cutter before it reached port. U-352 had carried a total complement of 46 men. 13 died during the sinking and in the water. Reuschel made 14 dead. 32 living survivors remained. Jester composed a radio message that would become one of the most famous communications in United States Coast Guard history.
It was terse, factual, and devastating in its simplicity. Contacted submarine. Destroyed same. Latitude 34° 12 and 1/2 minutes north. Longitude 76° 35 minutes west. Have 33 of her crew members on board. Proceeding Charleston with survivors. No embellishment. No boasting. Contacted submarine. Destroyed same. Four words.
That was the voice of a Chincoteague Waterman who had spent a quarter century on the ocean. The sea had taught him that when the job was done, you reported it plainly and moved on. Icarus arrived at the Charleston Navy Yard on the morning of May 10, 1942. She delivered 32 living prisoners and the body of Gerd Reuschel.
The prisoners were photographed, documented, and turned over to the Office of Naval Intelligence for interrogation. The intelligence officers quickly realized the significance of what Jester had delivered. These 32 German submariners were the first enemy prisoners of war brought to the American mainland since the war of 1812.
130 years had passed since the last time a foreign enemy combatant had been taken prisoner on continental United States soil. The last time it happened, the enemy was the British Empire. Now it was the Third Reich. And they had been captured by a 165-ft rum runner chaser with a single 3-in gun. To prevent the German High Command from learning the fate of U-352, American authorities classified the entire engagement and withheld all public information for approximately 1 year until about May of 1943.
Rathke and his crew vanished into the prisoner of war system without a trace. As far as Admiral Dönitz and the U-boat command in Lorient knew, U-352 had simply disappeared. One more submarine that failed to report in. One more crew that never came home. The ocean swallowed them, and the Americans said nothing.
Gerd Rössel was buried with full military honors at Beaufort National Cemetery in South Carolina. Grave number 18 in the post section. His headstone remains the only marked burial for a member of U-352’s crew on American soil. The rest of his shipmates who died that day still lie entombed inside the wreck on the floor of the Atlantic, where they have rested undisturbed for more than eight decades.
The Office of Naval Intelligence interrogation of U-352’s surviving crew took months. The delay was partly strategic, but mostly caused by one man, Helmut Rathke. Even in the water, moments after his submarine went down, Rathke had been shouting warnings to his crew. Do not give information to the Americans. Say nothing. Name, rank, serial number only.
Aboard Icarus, while still soaking wet from the Atlantic, he lectured his men twice about maintaining silence. In the prisoner of war camps, reportedly beginning at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, before transfer to other facilities, Rathke was permitted to maintain direct control over his crew, and he exercised that authority with an iron grip.
He imposed close confinement on his own sailors for offenses like speaking to American guards. He ordered infantry drill as punishment for minor infractions. He ran his prisoner of war barracks exactly like a submarine under his command. Every man reported to him. Every man obeyed him. The American interrogators documented this behavior in detail, filling an annex to their report with the list of punishments Rathke imposed on his own men during captivity.
But Rathke’s iron discipline was also revealing. A commanding officer who had performed well in combat does not need to threaten his own crew into silence. A captain who had done his duty does not fear what his sailors might tell the enemy. Rathke’s obsessive control over his men was not confidence. It was fear.
Fear that the Americans would learn the truth about U-352. That the truth was this: two war patrols, 76 days at sea, not a single ship sunk. Not a single ton of Allied shipping sent to the bottom. Multiple torpedo attacks, everyone a miss. A commanding officer so desperate for recognition that he attacked a target he had misidentified in water too shallow for his boat to escape against a vessel whose anti-submarine weapons he had fatally underestimated.
The interrogators noted his obsession with the Knight’s Cross. They documented his admiration for Hitler. They recorded the assessments of his peers. Fellow commanders reportedly viewed him as a poor choice for submarine command. His own crew considered him a tyrant. His superiors had given him a brand new U-boat, and he had wasted it on a converted rum chaser he mistook for something worth killing.
The cruelest irony of all was this: Rathke had spent months dreaming of sinking 100,000 tons of Allied shipping. He never sank a single ton. The only ship he ever successfully engaged was his own. The sinking of U-352 was a genuine victory at a time when victories were desperately scarce. It was the first U-boat destroyed by the United States Coast Guard in World War II.
It produced the first enemy prisoners taken in American coastal waters. It demonstrated that the small aging cutters of the bucket brigade were capable of doing far more than anyone had expected. But in the larger history of the war, the Coast Guard’s role in the Battle of the Atlantic has been consistently and deeply overlooked.
The Navy took credit for most anti-submarine successes. The big fleet destroyers, the escort carriers, and the hunter-killer groups with their dramatic open-ocean pursuits dominated the newspapers and later filled the history books. The Coast Guard cutters, small, lightly armed, and originally designed for entirely different purposes, fought the entire war in the Navy’s shadow.
When the Coast Guard was transferred to Navy operational control on November 1, 1941, its vessels became part of the larger fleet, and their accomplishments were often recorded simply as Navy actions. Yet the Coast Guard’s contribution was enormous. Coast Guard crews manned 351 Navy vessels and nearly 300 Army Transportation Corps vessels during the war.
Coast Guardsmen served on landing craft at Normandy, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. Coast Guard cutters escorted convoys across the North Atlantic through some of the worst weather and heaviest submarine activity of the war. Coast Guard cutters and Coast Guard manned naval vessels sank 11 enemy submarines, with a 12th credited to a Coast Guard aircraft.
Only six Navy Cross decorations were awarded to Coast Guard personnel during the entire conflict. The first of those six went to Lieutenant Maurice D. Jester of the cutter Icarus. But when the war ended and the official histories were published, the Coast Guard was a footnote. The men who served on those small ships returned to peacetime duties.
They went back to rescuing fishermen, enforcing maritime law, and maintaining navigation aids. The war became something they mentioned only to each other, if they mentioned it at all. Jester himself was promoted to Lieutenant Commander after the sinking. He appeared on the cover of Life magazine for a brief moment of national fame. Then the war moved on.
New battles, new heroes, new headlines. By 1944, Jester had retired from active duty. He was advanced to the rank of Commander upon retirement, a recognition of his wartime service. He returned to a quiet life away from the sea. 33 years after the sinking, a dive boat captain named George Purifoy began searching for the wreck of U-352.
Purifoy operated the Olympus Dive Center out of Morehead City, North Carolina. He had heard the old stories. He knew the approximate coordinates from declassified naval records. He spent nearly a decade looking, running search patterns over the sandy bottom off Cape Lookout. In 1975, Purifoy found her.
The wreck lay roughly 26 miles south of Morehead City in approximately 115 ft of water, listing to starboard on the ocean floor. The hull was largely intact. The conning tower still stood upright. The deck gun pointed silently into the current. Inside the sealed compartments, in spaces that had not been opened since May of 1942, the remains of crewmen who went down with their boat rested in the darkness where they had died.
The discovery transformed U-352 from a forgotten casualty of war into something unexpected. She became one of the the popular dive destinations on the American East Coast. Divers traveled from across the country to descend through warm, clear water and swim along the hull of a real German submarine.
Marine life had claimed the wreck completely. Red barbier fish swarmed around the conning tower. Amberjack patrolled the deck. Corals and anemones covered every exposed surface in vivid color. The instrument of war had become a garden. The United States Navy designated the wreck as an official war grave. Penetrating the hull or removing artifacts is strictly prohibited.
Navy divers welded several hatches shut to protect both the human remains inside and any unexploded ordnance. The wreck was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2015. A scale replica of U-352 is displayed at the North Carolina Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores, where visitors can study the submarine that never sank a ship, but became one of the most visited underwater sites in the Western Hemisphere.
Then something remarkable happened. The survivors came back. In 1985, the Olympus Dive Center hosted a reunion. Former crew members from both Icarus and U-352 traveled to Morehead City, Americans and Germans. Men who had tried to kill each other 43 years earlier stood on the same dock, shook hands, and shared their stories.
According to accounts from the dive center, former German radio operator Kurt Krueger asked Purifoy to dive the wreck and recover his uniform coat, which was still inside the submarine after more than four decades underwater. Purifoy reportedly brought it up from the bottom of the Atlantic and returned it to the man who had worn it on his last day aboard U-352.
In 1992, on the 50th anniversary of the sinking, a formal memorial service was held over the wreck site. Crew members from both ships attended. A PBS documentary series called Return to the Sea filmed the event in an episode titled Reunion. Former enemies stood together on the deck of a boat floating above the grave of U-352.
They honored the men who did not come home from both nations. The ocean that had divided them in war united them in memory. Rathke himself reportedly sent a personal letter of thanks to Jester and his crew for the humane treatment his sailors received after being pulled from the water. The man who had ordered a torpedo fired at Icarus thanked the men who pulled his crew from the sea instead of following the order from Norfolk to let them drown.
Rathke had been held as a prisoner of war until May 17, 1946, more than a year after Germany’s surrender. He returned to Flensburg, the same city that had adopted his submarine and painted its coat of arms on the conning tower. He lived quietly there for the rest of his life. The Knight’s Cross that had consumed his ambition during the war was never awarded.
It was never even close to being awarded. He died on October 7th, 2001, at the age of 90. The submarine commander who dreamed of becoming an ace, who never sank a single ship, who threw away his boat and 14 of his men for a target he mistakenly believed would bring him glory, outlived nearly everyone else in this story. Maurice David Jester died on August 31, 1957 of heart disease.
He was 68 years old. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery among the heroes of every American war. His Navy Cross citation described his actions on May 9th, 1942: “Extraordinary heroism, destruction of an enemy submarine, capture of prisoners, professional seamanship and courageous leadership under fire.” For decades after his death, Jester’s name was known only to Coast Guard historians and the aging veterans who had served alongside him.
Then, in 2023, the United States Coast Guard commissioned a new fast response cutter and gave it his name. USCGC Maurice Jester, hull designation WPC 1152. A new ship bearing the name of the old rum chaser who destroyed a Nazi submarine 81 years earlier. Every patrol that vessel conducts, every rescue it performs, every law enforcement action it carries out happens under the name of a man who proved that the size of your ship matters far less than the quality of the person commanding it.
This story asks a question that has no simple answer. How did a ship built to chase bootleggers destroy a modern submarine? The machinery does not explain it. Icarus was outgunned, outweighed, and designed for a completely different mission. The answer is about two men and the choices they made. Jester was not a trained submarine hunter.
He was a waterman from a barrier island in Virginia who had spent his entire adult life learning the ocean. He read currents, tides, weather, and wind the way other men read newspapers. 25 years of chasing rum runners had taught him to react instantly, to trust his instincts, to read an adversary’s next move before it happened. When a torpedo exploded off his port quarter, he did not freeze, he did not retreat.
He turned his ship directly into the attack and charged. Rathke was a trained submarine commander with every advantage, better technology, a larger vessel, a crew of specialists. But he was governed by vanity. He saw what he wanted to see through that periscope, a target that would bring him closer to the glory he craved, not a Coast Guard cutter equipped with sonar and depth charges operating in water shallow enough to trap him on the bottom.
His need to prove himself overrode his tactical judgment. He fired a torpedo he should never have launched at a target he should never have engaged in water where his submarine could not survive a counterattack. The sea does not reward ambition, it rewards competence, it punishes arrogance. A man who has spent 25 years learning the water will always outperform a man who believes the water owes him something.
Jester respected the sea, and it gave him everything he needed that afternoon. A clear sonar contact, shallow water that pinned his enemy in place, calm conditions that let his depth charges sink true, and a crew that followed him without hesitation because he had earned their trust through decades of shared hardship, not through threats or punishment.
Rathke respected nothing but his own ambition. He commanded through fear where Jester led through competence. He chased personal glory where Jester pursued duty. When the depth charges came raining down, Rathke discovered what the ocean thinks of a man who values decoration over seamanship. It buries him. U-352 still rests on the sandy bottom of the Atlantic, 26 miles south of Morehead City, North Carolina.
Divers visit her every summer. They descend through blue-green water and swim along the hull of a submarine that never sank a ship, never earned its captain a medal, and never fulfilled the ambitions of the man who commanded it. Corals cover the conning tower where 33 men tumbled into the sea.
Fish dart through spaces where sailors once stood at their battle stations. The deck gun points into the current, aimed at an enemy that sailed away 84 years ago. 115 ft above, the surface of the ocean is calm. Charter boats motor past carrying tourists who have no idea what lies beneath them. Sailboats drift on the Gulf Stream. The water catches the Carolina sunlight and throws it back in 10,000 directions.
Nothing about this stretch of sea suggests that a rum runner chaser and a Nazi submarine once fought a battle here that produced the first enemy prisoners of war on the American mainland in over a century. That is the story. A bootlegger chaser against a submarine. A 52-year-old enlisted man from Chincoteague against a 31-year-old Naval Academy graduate from East Prussia.
A 337-ton cutter against an 870-ton war machine. On paper, Icarus should have been the one at the bottom of the Atlantic. On the water, she was the one still floating when the smoke cleared. Now, you know it. But, most people do not. Most people have never heard the name Icarus.
They have never heard of Maurice David Jester. They do not know that the United States Coast Guard hunted and destroyed U-boats during World War II. They do not know that a ship designed to catch bootleggers sank one of Hitler’s submarines off the coast of North Carolina. That is where you come in. Hit that like button right now.
Not for us, for them. For the crew of Icarus who sailed a rum runner chaser into combat against a submarine and won. For Lieutenant Jester, who turned his ship into the attack when headquarters told him to let the survivors drown and did both. Destroyed the enemy and saved the men inside it. Every like sends this video to someone new.
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