had not yet organized a coastal defense system. ![]() In his 2014 history The Burning Shore, military historian Ed Offley wrote that the U-Boats had concentrated their efforts along the Carolina coast for its relative safety the U.S. Off the North Carolina coast alone, four U-Boats had been sunk in the summer of 1942. By the summer of 1942, however, a combination of improved Allied intelligence, stronger coastal defenses, including anti-submarine technologies and air reconnaissance, and the all-important implementation of the convoy system, had weakened the U-Boat force. The enemy fleet had collectively inflicted enormous damage to merchant shipping along the East Coast and elsewhere in the first six months of the war. ![]() The waters off the Carolinas had been swarming with U-Boats since the United States entered the war in December, 1941. (Civil authorities had imposed blackouts to hide the profiles of merchant marine ships from lurking U-Boats.) It’s John’s favorite place to sit and admire the view.) Everything was swathed in a darkness accentuated by the blackout curtains that houses had hung to make the coastline less visible. and his wife, Lorena, both of whom would have been in their mid-50s at the time, were sitting on the porch in their rocking chairs (one of the chairs is still on the porch. The now infamous story that Gregory’s grandmother told him goes like this: On the night of July 24, John E. “It wasn’t just because my grandparents saw it, but lots of other people at the time, too.” “It’s a tradition among the old timers on Kure Beach that this happened,” says John Gregory III, who along with his sister, now owns a shorefront cottage built by his grandparents in the late 1930s. If the incident actually occurred-and many believe it didn’t-it would have been the only time the East Coast of the United States was attacked during the Second World War. It was here on a July night in 1943 that a German U-Boat supposedly surfaced and fired shots at a factory complex located a half-mile off shore. Motels with names like “The Hang Ten Grill” and “The Salty Hammock” bespeak a chilled-out lifestyle in this summer community, located 15 miles south of Wilmington, North Carolina.īut just down Atlantic Avenue, a narrow four-block-long road from Kure (pronounced “Cure-ee”) Beach Fishing Pier, an old seaside cottage bears witness to a time when things weren’t all sunshine and Cheerwine along the Carolina coast. Kids in bathing suits walk barefoot along Fort Fisher Boulevard moms and dads lug lawn chairs to the sand.
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