One 4-Inch Gun Against Six: The Liberty Ship That Killed a German Raider

September twenty-seventh, nineteen forty-two. The South Atlantic, roughly midway between Cape Town and Rio de Janeiro. A Sunday morning of haze and rain squalls, with visibility down to two miles.

The Liberty ship Stephen Hopkins is four months old and has never completed a voyage. She is steaming in ballast from Cape Town toward Dutch Guiana to load bauxite. She measures seven thousand one hundred eighty-one tons. Her designed speed is eleven knots. Her main armament is a single four inch gun on the stern, a weapon of First World War design. The President of the United States has called ships of her type dreadful looking objects. Time magazine has called them ugly ducklings.

Out of the haze, two miles off to starboard, come two ships flying German colors. The smaller one is the auxiliary cruiser Stier. Behind her false panels are six guns of five point nine inch caliber under central director control, two torpedo tubes, and a naval crew of three hundred twenty-four.

The United States Navy would later count six American merchant ships, each carrying a Navy gun crew, that met a German surface raider during the war. All six were sunk.

Stephen Hopkins was one of the six. She did not go alone. Her gunners fired thirty-five rounds in about twenty minutes, and the Germans counted fifteen hits. Those hits jammed the raider's rudder, stopped her engine, knocked out her electrical power, and lit fires her crew could not put out. Before noon, Stier blew up and sank.

It was the only time in the Second World War that an American merchant ship sank a German surface warship. The German captain refused to believe it. He reported that he had fought an American warship.

How does a cargo ship with one old gun sink a warship with six? The answer starts in January nineteen forty-one, with a ship that nobody wanted to be proud of.

In December nineteen forty, with Britain losing merchant ships faster than her yards could replace them, a British purchasing mission ordered sixty cargo ships from American builders, to a plain tramp steamer design from Sunderland. On January third, nineteen forty-one, President Roosevelt told a press conference that the United States would build about two hundred ships of a similar kind for itself. He did not pretend to admire them. He said that nobody that loves ships can be very proud of them, and he described the design as a dreadful looking object. Ten days later, Time magazine ran the story under the headline Ugly Ducklings. The Maritime Commission gave them a better name. It called them the Liberty Fleet.

The first of them, Patrick Henry, was launched at Baltimore on September twenty-seventh, nineteen forty-one, one of fourteen ships sent down the ways that day in what the Commission called Liberty Fleet Day. Keep that date in mind.

The enemy these ships were built to outlast was mostly the U-boat. Germany had a second weapon on the trade routes. The auxiliary cruiser was a merchant ship with a warship's guns hidden behind false bulkheads and dummy deck cargo, and she hunted where Allied ships sailed alone, outside the convoy system. The route around the Cape of Good Hope was that kind of water.

Stier was the last of them to reach the open ocean. She had been launched at Kiel in nineteen thirty-six as the freighter Cairo, four thousand seven hundred seventy-eight tons, with a single diesel engine and a top speed of fourteen knots. The German Navy commissioned her as a raider on November eleventh, nineteen forty-one, under Captain Horst Gerlach.

Germany paid heavily to get her out. When Stier ran the English Channel in May nineteen forty-two, she went with sixteen motor minesweepers ahead of her and four torpedo boats around her. British motor torpedo boats attacked in the early hours of May thirteenth and sank two of the four. Of the two hundred eighty-seven men aboard those two boats, one hundred ninety-nine died. Stier came through untouched and sailed for the Atlantic a week later. No German raider ever made that passage again.

By September she had sunk three ships, and the way each one ended explains what Gerlach expected on the morning of the twenty-seventh.

The master of the British steamer Gemstone judged resistance pointless, called the crew back from his four inch gun, and stopped. Every man aboard was taken off unhurt. The British motor ship Dalhousie fired her stern gun, hit nothing, and gave up within half an hour. Only the tanker Stanvac Calcutta, American owned and carrying a Navy officer and eight gunners, fought to the finish. She hit Stier twice and wounded two men. Stier answered with one hundred forty-eight rounds of five point nine inch and a torpedo, and the tanker rolled over and sank with her flag still flying.

None of this was dishonorable, and none of it was surprising. It was arithmetic.

A five point nine inch shell weighed about one hundred pounds. The shell from a four inch gun weighed thirty-three. Stier's six guns were laid by a central director and served by a regular naval crew. The raider was fast enough to run down an ordinary freighter, so her victims could not escape, and a raider's first salvos went into the bridge and the radio room, so they could not call for help. A merchant captain who stopped his ship saved his crew. One who fought lost his ship anyway.

Against a Liberty ship the sums looked worse. She was four hundred forty-one feet six inches long, with hull plating about half an inch thick and no armor anywhere. Her engine was a triple expansion steam engine of twenty-five hundred horsepower, turning at seventy-six revolutions a minute. The Maritime Commission's own report to Congress called it the older type of reciprocating engine. It gave her eleven knots. Stier made fourteen.

Stephen Hopkins could not outrun the raider and, on paper, she could not hurt her.

The paper was wrong in three places.

The first was the ship. Her obsolete engine was a decision, not an oversight. Turbines and reduction gears were committed to warships and faster freighters, and there were none to spare. Reciprocating engines could be built by machine shops all over the country that had no other war work. Schmeltzer, the director of the Commission's emergency construction division, put the reason in print in July nineteen forty-one. It was the only way the job could be done on time. The same logic ran through the whole ship, about two hundred fifty thousand parts, prefabricated in sections, welded instead of riveted.

Patrick Henry had taken two hundred forty-four days from keel to delivery. Stephen Hopkins was the seventh Liberty from Henry Kaiser's Richmond Yard Number Two on San Francisco Bay, and her keel went down on January second, nineteen forty-two. She was delivered on May eleventh. One hundred twenty-nine days, the fastest that yard had yet managed. What came out of the process was crude, and it could take punishment. John Bunker, the historian of the Liberty ships, saw this action as a tribute to the design, and wrote that a Liberty absorbed terrific punishment before finally settling beneath the waves.

The second was the gun, and what it was pointed at. The four inch fifty caliber was a destroyer weapon. It armed the Navy's flush-deck destroyers and its S class submarines, and by nineteen forty-two the surviving stock was coming out of storage to arm merchant ships. The gun threw its thirty-three pound shell at twenty-nine hundred feet per second, and a drilled crew could fire eight or nine rounds a minute. On Stephen Hopkins every round, shell and cartridge in one piece, about sixty-four pounds, had to be passed by hand up a hoist from a magazine at the very stern of the ship.

At ten thousand yards that gun was no answer to a five point nine inch battery. At one thousand yards it was a flat-shooting, fast-firing weapon that could hardly miss a target more than four hundred feet long. And the target was not a cruiser. Stier had a cruiser's guns. She had a freighter's hull, the same thin plating as the ship she was shooting at, and packed inside it were diesel fuel, ammunition hoists, a generating plant, and a hold full of torpedoes. A raider was built to win quickly against ships that stopped. She was never built to absorb hits.

The third was the men. A year before this battle, the Navy's Armed Guard had not put a single gun crew to sea. Congress repealed the ban on arming American merchant ships on November seventeenth, nineteen forty-one. The first gun crew went aboard a merchantman on December second. Basic gunnery training ran four weeks. The standing doctrine, as the Navy's administrative history states it, was that an Armed Guard could abandon ship only when sinking was imminent and gunfire impossible. The printed instructions later put it more bluntly. There shall be no surrender and no abandoning ship so long as the guns can be fought.

Stephen Hopkins carried fifteen of these men. Their commander was Kenneth Willett, twenty-three years old, from Sacramento, a Naval Reserve officer commissioned in November nineteen forty. He had served a year in the battleship California, and he left Honolulu in the liner Lurline on December fifth, nineteen forty-one, two days before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Around the fifteen sailors were forty-two merchant seamen, who supplied the loaders and the ammunition passers. The master was Paul Buck, thirty-nine, from Merrimacport, Massachusetts. In the engine room was Edwin O'Hara, eighteen, from Lindsay, California, an engine cadet of the Merchant Marine Cadet Corps on his training year at sea. He had learned the basics of naval gunnery as a cadet, and he had learned more from Willett.

The maiden voyage had already taken them from San Francisco across the Pacific to New Zealand and Australia, and on to South Africa. They left Cape Town on September nineteenth with empty holds.

Both sides were surprised. Stier had met the blockade runner Tannenfels, seven thousand eight hundred forty tons, inbound from Yokohama with rubber, tungsten, and quinine for Germany, and the two ships were lying stopped together. Stier's men had spent the morning over the side, scraping and painting the hull, and had just been called back aboard because the sea was rising. Then a ship came out of a rain squall, so near that the standard German account of the cruise calls it almost alongside.

Gerlach rang for full speed, hoisted the battle flag, and signaled the stranger to stop. German records put Stier's first salvo at eight fifty-four in the morning. The Americans kept a different zone time, and Second Engineer George Cronk later wrote it down as nine thirty-eight. Tannenfels stood off and jammed the American distress calls.

On the Liberty ship, Buck took one look through his glasses and ordered the general alarm. Then he ordered hard left rudder. Stephen Hopkins swung from a heading of three hundred ten degrees to two hundred sixty, directly away from the Germans. It looked like flight. It was the opposite. The turn put the raider dead astern, where the four inch gun could bear, and it showed her gunners the narrowest target the ship could offer. His medal citation says that he skillfully maneuvered his ship, so that the heavier guns could be trained on the raider.

The cost came at once. The second German shell hit amidships and killed two men. Willett was crossing the boat deck toward the stern when a shell burst near him, and shrapnel tore into his stomach. He kept going aft. Beside the wheelhouse, Chief Mate Richard Moczkowski was shot through the chest and the left forearm. The chief steward, Ford Stilson, bandaged him where he lay, and recorded that the mate went on shouting to the captain to keep her turning, with her stern bearing on the enemy.

Forward, Second Mate Joseph Layman got both of the thirty-seven millimeter guns into action against the larger German ship. The six machine guns, four of fifty caliber and two of thirty caliber, opened on both. At about nine o'clock by the German clock, with the raider one thousand yards astern, the four inch gun fired.

Willett's order was to aim at the waterline. The first round threw spray over the raider's foredeck. The second was a hit. Thirty-five rounds in roughly twenty minutes works out to one every thirty-five seconds, each of them passed up by hand from the magazine below.

Two of the early hits decided the battle. One jammed Stier's rudder hard to starboard. The other cut the oil supply line to her engine and stopped it. The raider drifted through a half circle, unable to steer. Then her electrical power failed. The ammunition hoists stopped, so that every hundred pound shell had to be carried to the guns by hand. The torpedo tubes could not be fired. And the fire pumps were dead, in a ship where leaking oil was already burning in the engine room.

Stier was still a warship, and she still had six guns to one. The two ships lay about one thousand meters apart and wrecked each other. The Germans fired more than fifty salvos of five point nine inch and some nine hundred rounds from their light guns, and Tannenfels joined in with her machine guns. A shell wrecked the forward gun platform and killed Layman's loaders. Another came through the side into the engine room and burst the starboard boiler. Steam filled the machinery spaces, the men on watch died at their posts, and Stephen Hopkins slowed to one knot. A German salvo blew the radio room apart with Radio Officer Hudson Hewey still sending.

Gerlach ordered every gun onto the freighter's stern. By the German account, as one gun crew was cut down, another took its place, until there was no one left. Sailors fell, and merchant seamen stepped in to load. Then a shell reached the magazine under the gun tub. The explosion killed or wounded everyone on the platform. Willett, who by then was working the gun almost alone, was thrown to the deck and wounded again.

The gun was silent. Then it fired again.

O'Hara had come up from the wrecked engine room. He found the four inch gun deserted, damaged but workable, with five rounds left in the ready box. He loaded, aimed, and fired all five by himself. His citation credits him with direct hits near the waterline of the second raider. He was mortally wounded soon afterward, and he went down with the ship.

About twenty minutes after the first salvo, Buck sounded abandon ship. One lifeboat could still be launched. A shell burst beside it on the way down, killing two men and wounding four. Willett was last seen on the main deck, covered in blood, cutting life rafts loose for other men. Buck never reached the boat. His citation states that he remained on the bridge and went down with his battered ship. Stephen Hopkins sank by the stern at about ten o'clock, with her flag still flying.

Stier outlived her by less than two hours.

She was holed below the waterline and flooding. Fires were burning through the ship, fed by oil, with no pumps to fight them and her helm still jammed hard over. Tannenfels could not come alongside to help in the rising sea. The fire was working toward Number Two hold, where the torpedoes were stowed, and the valves that could have flooded it were out of reach. Gerlach's engineers got the engine running again. It no longer mattered. He ordered his crew and his prisoners into the boats and had scuttling charges set. At eleven forty Stier blew up and went down. The Americans in the lifeboat, by then lost to sight in the rain, heard the explosion.

The German count was three dead and thirty-three wounded, and fifteen hits from the four inch gun out of thirty-five rounds fired. Stier's cruise had lasted one hundred forty days. She had sunk four ships, and the fourth had killed her.

Tannenfels reached France on November second with both crews aboard. Gerlach reported an action with an unidentified American warship. Told that his opponent had been a cargo ship with one four inch gun, he refused to believe it. He maintained that he had fought an armed merchant cruiser, or at the least an auxiliary warship, and that she had answered him with six inch and four inch guns. Stier's first officer, Ludolf Petersen, said afterward that they could not but feel that they had gone down at the hands of a gallant foe.

The Americans knew none of this. Their distress call had been jammed, and nobody ashore knew the ship was gone. Nineteen men were in the one lifeboat, several of them badly wounded, with Cronk, the only surviving officer, in command. He had a boat compass, no chart of the South Atlantic, and no other instruments. After a day of searching turned up only empty rafts, he set a course for South America.

The boat was at sea for thirty-one days. By the fourth week the daily ration was an ounce of pemmican, an ounce of chocolate, half an ounce of malted milk tablets, and one biscuit for each man, with water caught from the rain squalls. Four men died and were buried at sea. On October twenty-seventh the fifteen who were left, ten merchant seamen and five Navy gunners, came ashore at a fishing village on the coast of Brazil. Cronk's citation gives the distance as twenty-two hundred miles. That was how the United States learned there had been a battle. The survivors reported that they had seen the raider abandoned and heard her blow up. Confirmation came only after the war.

The recognition followed. Willett received the Navy Cross. By the end of the war one hundred forty-four thousand nine hundred seventy officers and men had served in the Armed Guard, and the Navy's own count in nineteen forty-six showed five Navy Crosses among them. The Merchant Marine Distinguished Service Medal, the highest decoration a merchant seaman could be given, went to six men of this one crew. Buck, Moczkowski, Layman, and O'Hara received it posthumously. Cronk and Stilson lived to wear it. Fewer than one hundred fifty were awarded in the whole war. The ship herself was named a Gallant Ship.

In March nineteen forty-four, Willett's mother christened the destroyer escort Kenneth M. Willett. At Kings Point, the Merchant Marine Academy named O'Hara Hall for its cadet. The Academy lost one hundred forty-two cadets during the war, and it is still the only federal service academy entitled to carry a battle standard.

The Navy's administrative history of the Armed Guard, written in nineteen forty-six, does not often reach for comparisons. For this action it made an exception. It says that this exploit equals anything in John Paul Jones' experiences. It is one of the few in naval history where a lightly armed ship was able, by gunfire, to sink a vessel with virtually the armament of a cruiser.

The strategic footnote belongs to the Germans. Stier was the last raider Germany ever got into the Atlantic. Komet tried the same Channel route that October, and a British motor torpedo boat sank her off the French coast, seventeen days after Stier went down. When the American submarine Tarpon sank the raider Michel off Japan in October nineteen forty-three, the campaign was over. The disguised raider had always depended on merchant ships that stopped when told to. By March nineteen forty-two the United States Navy was arming merchant ships at the rate of two hundred a month.

And the ugly ducklings kept coming. Six weeks after Stephen Hopkins went down, the yard that built her assembled the Liberty ship Robert E. Peary in four days and fifteen and a half hours. In nineteen forty-four the same yard delivered a second Stephen Hopkins. The first had taken one hundred twenty-nine days from keel to delivery. The second took twenty-eight. American yards completed two thousand seven hundred ten Liberty ships before the program ended.

September twenty-seventh, nineteen forty-two. One year to the day after Liberty Fleet Day. A freighter built in one hundred twenty-nine days, with an engine the Maritime Commission itself called the older type, a gun of First World War design, and fifteen sailors under a twenty-three year old reservist. She meets a warship, one that Germany had spent two torpedo boats and one hundred ninety-nine lives to put on the ocean.

It was not luck. It was a captain who turned his stern to the enemy in the first minute, so that his one gun could bear. It was a wounded officer who told his gunners to aim at the waterline, and kept them at it for thirty-five rounds. It was merchant seamen who stepped into a gun crew as it died. It was an eighteen year old engine cadet who could load, lay, and fire a four inch gun by himself, because someone had taken the trouble to teach him. And it was the raider herself, a cruiser's battery in a freighter's hull, built for victims who stopped.

The comparison on paper had counted the guns. It had not counted what the guns were mounted on, or who stood behind them.

Roosevelt had called her kind a dreadful looking object. The German captain who fought her wrote her down as a warship.