Boston Harbor has several islands in it, and at east 5 of of them had forts built on them. During WWII, these islands were garrisoned and the forts equipped with long range howitzers-capable of sinking battleships. My question: in 1941, it was obvious that the (surface) German Navy was a joke-it had great difficulty sending its ships as far as Norway. So why did anyone think that they could send ships across the Atlantic, to attack Boston? Manning these forts took manpower away from combat operations-and (as far as I know) these guns wer never fired at the enemy.
So why spend all that money on such an unlikely thing?
I wouldn’t want to be the guy who stood up and said we don’t need to protect the harbor from potential German attack. Why take the chance, even if it was unlikely that the Germans were going to be making a visit. Note that German U-boats were patrolling off the east coast, at least occasionally, as far as I am aware…
I also wouldn’t want to be the congressman that didn’t take the federal money for his district and give him an opportunity to place his buddies into homeland defense positions vs active warfare.
German U boats were definitely operating on the east coast. A few were sank there. I can’t find I cite but I was told when I visited fort Baldwin in Maine they had sank a u boat in the kenebec river in front of the civil war fort Popham.
They didn’t prove to be much of a threat so the coastal batteries were probably unessesary. But people were scared and America always has money for military construction.
To clarify, the U-boats weren’t much of a threat to land installations. But Operation Drumbeat, the German submarine offensive against American coastal shipping, was extremely destructive. More American lives were lost than at Pearl Harbor. It was a fiasco for the Anglo-American war effort.
The forts couldn’t help in this case, but I don’t want readers coming away with the impression that German U-boats were ineffective off the US coast. U-boat crews called this “the Second Happy Time.”
You answered it-it was all about money. I cannot imagine why anyone thought that manning the forts made sense.
It wasn’t just Boston harbor, either. I was up in New Hampshire on Sunday, at Odiorne Park, south of Portsmouth. They built gun emplacements there (and elsewhere) to protect the Navy yards at Portsmouth. I’m sure that was ordinary precaution, especially in the wake of Pearl Harbor – you protect your Navy’s bases (there was the Boston Navy Yard at Boston, too), regardless of the perceived seriousness of the threat. Who the hell thought the Japanese Navy was a realistic threat to ships at Pearl Harbor, thousands of miles from Japan?
It’s not just WWWII, either. New York City bristles with forts that were never used. The city has never been successfully defended from a naval attack. But since the Revolutionary War no one has ever seriously tried to attack the city. *
*Although the British famously burnt Washington in the War of 1812, they didn’t attack NYC. Nevertheless, there’s still a blockhouse built for that war in New York:
How soon after Pearl Harbor was the decision made to arm those forts?
It’s easy for us in retrospect to say there was no danger from German surface ships by the time the United States entered the war. But Americans at the time were looking at the recent sorties by the Admiral Graf Spee, the Admiral Hipper, and the Bismarck. Germany still had ships like the Scharnhorst, the Tirpitz, and the Gneisenau. There were memories of when Germany had sent its ships to bombard British coastal towns during World War I. And there were German submarines operating all along the American east coast. So it was unlikely but not impossible that Germany might have decided to launch a naval raid against American coastal cities.
I didn’t say it was made afterwards. But it would’ve been harder to NOT maintain them after a proven attack on US territory.
For the record, though, temporary gun amplacements went up at “Fort Dearborn” in present-day Odiorne Park (that’s the one I mentioned) in early 1942 (definitely post-Pearl Harbor), with the more permanent dug-in one erected in 1943.
http://www.northamericanforts.com/East/New_Hampshire/Fort_Dearborn/history.html
I bet they wished they’d also upgraded Fort Stevens since the sub may have been sunk if the crew had been in a more modern battery. A confrontation that would be comical had it not partially led to the deportations. In that aspect, by taking tens of thousands of productive citizens out of the economy and using thousands of workers worth of resources to transport and guard them, the success of the bombardment was greater than any actual physical damage it could have done.
I suspect there were gun emplacements all along the Atlantic Coast, not just the NE. I grew up near this spot in Texas; during WWII chemical plants were constructed near the mouth of the Brazos River and the harbor at Freeport was considered worth protecting. If that was worth putting a few guns around then the major population centers on the ocean surely would have had something more.
I can remember seeing the bunkers left from WWII in Galveston along the seawall. They are still there today.
As unlikely as you think it was that the NE would be at risk from the Germans, then how absurd was it to think they would get as far into the Gulf of Mexico as those locations? I think Little Nemo’s post gives some insight about why this was done.
Commerce raiders and the pocket bb’s were a credible threat, in the early stages of the war. The navy may have been confident that no surface threat was in the offing, after the german fleet was bottled up, but it would have been a while before the Japanese navy could be regarded as an also ran. The Canal zone was at least on Japanese long range plans, until that was curtailed, but had they taken the canal, I guess that the IJN could have threatened the eastern seaboard.
Declan
Humphrey Bogart took care of that.
I watched Across the Pacific.
However their fuel was burnt, their mines laid and their torpedoes shot, their food eaten and their first aid used.
etc etc
eg Fort Independence was a degaussing station for de-magnetizing the hulls of ships
Those forts also gave the Army a place to transfer officers who had met disfavor but were not bad enough to kick out. Wasn’t that the standard threat? “Do what I say, or by tomorrow you’ll be commanding a mess kit repair depot in Minot, North Dakota!”
I beg your pardon?
It was probably overkill but in war you try to plan for all contingencies. I am sure on December 6, 1941 a lot of people thought a successful carrier-launched air attack on Pearl Harbor wasn’t very likely.
Besides the German surface ships, there was also the navy of the puppet state of Vichy France. Churchill had the Royal Navy attack the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir, French Algeria on July 3, 1940. But there still a Vichy France navy at Toulon which the French scuttled on November 27, 1942 when the Germans tried to seize it.
The 1973-74 British documentary series “The World at War” has someone say that the “recycle pots and pans for guns” drives were largely PR campaigns to get people to buy into the war. Perhaps a part of the coastal fortifications program was part of the same campaign. It took quite a bit of effort to get people on the coast to turn off night lights or use curtains so ships wouldn’t be seen at night by U-boats.
Apparently such efforts to “black out” coastal cities weren’t very successful. I’ve heard that U-boat captains reported that towns and cities along the shores remained very visible throughout the war. Fortunately, except for the incident reported above, no one ever attacked the US mainland. I was shocked to see on recent maps just how close U-Boat reconnaissance came to the shores.
Footage taken from U-123 in New York Harbor at night, showing the city still well lit up and making a fine targeting background.