DATE: Thursday, July 3, 1997                TAG: 9707020719

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B3   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Military 

SOURCE: BY W. THOMAS SAWYER JR. 

                                            LENGTH:   90 lines

THE DAY HAMPTON ROADS WATCHED WORLD WAR II IN JUNE 1942, MINES DESTROYED SEVERAL SHIPS JUST MILES OFF SHORE.

Fifty-five years ago this summer, an explosion tore through the tanker Robert C. Tuttle as it steamed toward Norfolk from Key West, Fla., and thousands of vacationers at Virginia Beach were startled to witness the start of an apparent sea battle just six miles offshore.

I was 13, living at 35th Street, and I was sure the blast had been the work of a torpedo: The concussion we heard and felt was much greater than the muffled thumps of depth charges we'd become accustomed to that spring. Several nights we'd been shaken awake by barrages against real or imaginary U-boats, and oil had covered the Oceanfront's sand for weeks at a time.

So that day - June 15, 1942 - I jumped on my bike to ride down the Boardwalk to the Coast Guard Station at 24th Street.

Offshore the stricken tanker had gone down by the head until its bow touched bottom in 54 feet of water. As I got to the Coast Guard Station shortly after the 5:05 p.m. explosion, the crew was launching a 26-foot motor surfboat. Even as it did, another explosion erupted off the stern of a second tanker, the Esso Augusta, knocking out its power.

The Battle of the Atlantic had come to Hampton Roads.

That evening we watched the tiny surfboat's white hull, and that of the Little Island surfboat, weaving among the huge ships of the convoy, explosions all around.

The ``battle'' continued. Escorts dropped depth charges. An Army bomber skimmed over the scene, then dropped its bombs.

It was when the destroyer Bainbridge dropped eight depth charges - and got, in return, nine explosions - that the Navy realized it wasn't facing torpedoes.

Though the public wasn't to learn the details for years, a field of 15 mines had been laid by the German submarine U-701 early on June 13, 1942. These mines were deposited on the sea floor and designed to detonate when they detected the magnetic field of a ship above them.

The British antisubmarine trawler Lady Elsa, one of two dozen such vessels lent to the United States to combat the U-boat menace, braved the field's still-unexploded mines four times to tow the 11,237-ton Esso Augusta to safety, giving up only after snapping the last of four tow lines.

The Robert C. Tuttle's crew abandoned ship in three lifeboats, bringing with them the body of their second assistant engineer, Rubin Redwine of Baltimore. The living transferred to other ships, leaving Redwine alone in a boat as the three were pulled ashore.

A crowd gathered on the beach silently witnessed his landfall, unaware that the day's carnage had only just begun. Shortly after 8 p.m., a trawler leading two other ships northward along the shore disappeared in the dark bloom of another explosion and sank in less than two minutes.

This was the 161-foot Kingston Ceylonite, another British armed trawler manned by members of the Royal Navy Patrol Service. Of the 36 souls aboard, 20 were lost.

Headlines breathlessly described the ``grim war drama'' played out ``before eyes of thousands,'' The Virginian-Pilot confidently labeled the episode the work of a torpedo and noted that it ``drew an excited audience of resort residents and vacationers who banked a 3-mile stretch of beachfront to gain a clear vantage point to watch the action a bare five miles off shore.''

The Esso Augusta was towed into Hampton Roads the day after its mining, and the Robert C. Tuttle was salvaged and moved to shelter around Cape Henry on June 21. The Tuttle's bad luck didn't end there: A day after its move, a spark in the ship's pump room set the tanker ablaze.

Meanwhile, local shipping remained at risk from the U-701's handiwork. On June 17, two days after mines claimed the Tuttle, Esso Augusta and Kingston Ceylonite, the ore carrier Santore set off another. It sank.

The terrible price paid by the Kingston Ceylonite's crew became gruesomely evident over time. Body parts washed ashore and were buried in the dunes at Little Island, at the southern tip of Sandbridge, and in the sand at Duck, N.C.; and in the following weeks the bodies of three crewmen of the Kingston Ceylonite, along with five unidentified bodies presumed to be from among the ship's company, washed onto beaches in Virginia and North Carolina.

The dead were buried in Duck and in the churchyard at Oak Grove Baptist Church in Creeds, and decades later a couple of monuments - one of them in the Oak Grove cemetery, the other at the Oceanfront - were erected to honor them.

Today, 55 years after the event, I need not behold those monuments to experience sharp memories of this little-known sliver of Hampton Roads history - the day when the Battle of the Atlantic closed to within sight of the shore. MEMO: W. Thomas Sawyer Jr., a Virginia Beach native, is a licensed

master mariner and amateur researcher. ILLUSTRATION: Virginian-Pilot File Photo

The British Antisubmarine trawler Lady Elsa, far left, tried four

times to tow the tanker Esso Augusta to safety, giving up only after

snapping its last tow line.

Photo

A portion of the front page of the Virginian-Pilot on June 17, 1942

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu