With few new destroyers to combat the German Navy in World War II, the U. S. Navy recalled to duty the aging World War I four-stack destroyers, which it had mothballed after the Washington Disarmament Conference of 1921-22. That's how the USS Roper (DD-147)happened to be steaming south from Norfolk, Virginia, to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, on 13 April 1942, engaged in routine submarine detection.
At midnight, a new watch crew took over. The spring night was clear and starlit. The sea was almost calm, and glints of phosphorus brightened the Roper's wake. To starboard, sailors on duty could make out Wimble Shoal Light off North Carolina's coast.
At six minutes past midnight, the Roper's radar picked up an object bearing 1900 true at a distance of 2,700 yards. Lieutenant Commander Hamilton Howe, the commanding officer, decided to investigate. The Roper's underwater detectors soon detected propeller sounds. Howe increased speed to 20 knots, and bow lookouts began to see the wake of a small vessel, evidently trying to run away at high speed.
As the Roper closed on her suspect, Howe sounded the alarm for battle stations and ordered all weapons ready to fire. As the destroyer gained ground, the vessel changed course. The Roper changed, too, pulling up to 700 yards astern of the unknown vessel.
Suddenly, a torpedo raced toward the Roper, narrowly missing her. The destroyer had a U-boat on the run!
"When the distance had been reduced to 300 yards, the fleeing vessel cut sharply to starboard," Howe wrote later in his action report. "At this instant, using the 24-inch searchlight, she was positively identified as a submarine [moving on the surface]. The searchlight was held on her, and fire was opened first with the machine guns and then the 3-inch battery. The machine guns cut down the submarine personnel rushing to man their gun."
At that moment, Coxswain Harry Heyman, manning gun 5, scored a direct hit on the U-boat's conning tower. It was the young sailor's first shot in combat. Water began to pour into the ruptured submarine. In the glare of the Roper's searchlight, the German crew scrambled out of the disabled sub as she began to sink. Screaming and shouting, they plunged into the waters, some without life jackets.
Howe ordered a torpedo fired to finish off the submarine, but before it could be done the U-85 sank, settling stern first.
Knowing that U-boats usually hunted in pairs, Howe waited as long as he possibly dared, then ordered his crew to circle cautiously and drop depth charges. He had heard too many stories of humane skippers torpedoed by a second submarine while rescuing survivors of a sinking vessel. So, with the Germans shouting and swimming in the water, the Roper dropped a barrage of 11 depth charges. The powerful underwater concussion killed those not already drowned.
When their bodies were later recovered, some of the Germans were wearing civilian clothes with their wallets filled with U. S. currency and identification cards. They had been preparing to row ashore in a rubber raft when the submarine was discovered. The Roper had averted a landing of German spies on U. S. shores.
For the rest of the night, the Roper scoured the area for other submarines. She radioed reports of her kill to the naval base at Norfolk. At daybreak, a Navy PBY patrol plane arrived to look for oil slicks and debris. Two other planes arrived to drop smoke floats to lead the destroyer to German bodies kept afloat by life jackets. Before the two-hour operation ended, seven Navy planes, a dirigible, and a British trawler were helping.
Clothing and dog tags provided the names of the German bodies hauled aboard the Roper. Two were officers, one of them the U-85’s captain. From life jackets floating empty on the water, it was clear that others had sunk beneath the waves. Altogether, 29 bodies were recovered.
Navy headquarters radioed the Roper to mark the site of the sinking with a buoy and then return to port. When the destroyer reached the Virginia capes hours later, the bodies were transferred to Norfolk Naval Air Station for intelligence evaluation. That night, they were buried in secrecy at the nearby military cemetery at Hampton.
But the Navy had not finished with U-85. A rescue ship stood over the site while divers went below to enter the U-85's hull and obtain data about Germany's latest technology. Destroyers circled the area to protect the operation, but increasing underwater U-boat contacts finally broke off the diving efforts.
The U-85 was one of Hitler's newest 500-ton submarines, built to press the underseas war begun in 1940. She had been completed in June 1941 and was on her second foray into U. S. waters when she met her death off Wimble Shoal Light. In her career, the U-85 had sunk two ships and escaped four plane and two destroyer attacks.
Today—40 years later—the U-85 rests in 14 fathoms off the Carolina coast.