The 'Antique' American Destroyer That Climbed Onto A U-Boat's Deck And Fought It With Shotguns And Knives

November 1st, 1943. 0153 hours. The North Atlantic, 690 miles north of the Azores, at 49 degrees north, 31 degrees west. USS Borie, a destroyer launched in 1919, picks up a radar contact at 8,000 yards. Fifteen-foot seas. High wind. Almost no visibility. The contact is U-405, a Type VIIC U-boat on her eighth war patrol, commanded by a 37-year-old Korvettenkapitän with two years in the boat.

Borie is 24 years old. She was designed for the First World War and finished too late to fight in it. Her commanding officer is a 30-year-old reserve lieutenant. She has no sister ship within 10 miles, and the escort carrier she works for cannot fly in this weather.

Sixty-four minutes later U-405 is on the bottom with all 49 of her crew. For ten of those minutes the destroyer sat on top of the submarine, bow across the U-boat's foredeck, while American sailors fought the German crew with Tommy guns, shotguns, a flare pistol, a thrown sheath knife and an empty shell case. Not one American died in the fight.

Then the ocean took its price. How a ship that old won a fight that strange, and why winning it killed her, is a story about what the Navy had built around its oldest destroyers by the autumn of 1943.

In the spring of 1943 the Battle of the Atlantic turned, but it did not end. Admiral Dönitz pulled his wolfpacks out of the North Atlantic convoy lanes in May and sent them south and west, toward the central Atlantic route that carried American troops and supplies to North Africa and the Mediterranean. Out there, beyond the reach of shore-based aircraft, the U-boats refueled from tanker submarines the Germans called Milchkühe, milk cows. One milk cow could keep a dozen attack boats at sea for weeks longer. Kill the refueling meetings and the whole central Atlantic campaign starved.

The American answer was the hunter-killer group. An escort carrier, a small flight deck on a merchant hull, carried Wildcat fighters and Avenger torpedo bombers. Three or four destroyers screened her. Guided by radio direction finding and decoded German signals, the group did not wait beside a convoy for the U-boats to come. It went to where the U-boats were meeting.

Task Group 21.14 was built around the escort carrier USS Card under Captain Arnold J. Isbell. Between August and the end of October 1943, Card's aircraft sank eight U-boats, among them the tanker boats U-117 and U-460. The group would receive the Presidential Unit Citation for the period from July 27th to October 25th, 1943. The citation credits Card, her aircraft and her escorts with forcing the complete withdrawal of hostile U-boats from the supply route.

Card's escorts were USS Borie, USS Barry and USS Goff. All three were flush-deck destroyers of the Clemson class. All three had been laid down before the Treaty of Versailles was signed.

On October 31st, Card's Avengers caught two U-boats on the surface together and sank one of them, U-584. The other escaped. With the weather closing in and his aircraft about to be grounded, Isbell sent one destroyer out alone into the dark to run down the boat that got away. He sent Borie.

On paper this was a poor choice of weapon.

Borie was laid down at William Cramp and Sons in Philadelphia on April 30th, 1919, launched on October 4th and commissioned on March 24th, 1920. Her hull and machinery cost 892,847 dollars. She was a Clemson-class flush-decker, the same class this channel followed into Balikpapan, and everything said against those ships in the Pacific applied to her in the Atlantic. 1,215 tons. 314 feet 4 inches long, and less than 32 feet in the beam. Four funnels. The fleet called them four-pipers, and by the 1930s it called them worse.

The design had known faults. For antisubmarine work the faults were specific. The hull was long, narrow and light, and it rolled badly in a seaway, which matters to a ship that has to hold a sonar contact in a North Atlantic gale. The turning circle was wide, a product of a narrow V-shaped stern, which is a real handicap against a submarine that can turn inside you. Dozens of the class had been scrapped under the London Naval Treaty. Fifty flush-deckers had been handed to Britain in the 1940 destroyers-for-bases deal, precisely because the United States Navy considered them surplus.

Borie had spent her youth on the far side of the world. The Black Sea in 1920. Two tours with the Asiatic Fleet, from 1921 to 1925 and again from 1929 to 1932. By 1943 her plating had two decades of salt behind it.

Her opponent had been built for exactly this ocean. The Type VIIC displaced 769 tons on the surface and ran 220 feet long. U-405 came from Danziger Werft and had been in commission since September 17th, 1941, under the same captain throughout, Korvettenkapitän Rolf-Heinrich Hopman. She carried an 88 millimeter deck gun and 20 millimeter anti-aircraft guns on the platforms aft of her conning tower, part of the heavier flak armament U-boats were receiving that year to fight off aircraft. Her pressure hull was built to take the sea at depths beyond 700 feet. A destroyer's side plating was not built to take anything of the kind.

So the matchup at 0153 looked like this. A thin-skinned 24-year-old hull, in seas she had never handled well, hunting a modern submarine with a veteran captain, at night, alone. If the U-boat stayed down, Borie's wide turning circle gave it room to slip away. If the U-boat came up, it had more automatic weapons than the destroyer did.

That reading missed three things.

The first was the refit. In the winter of 1942 to 1943, Borie went into the yard at New Orleans. She came out with surface search radar, the equipment that would find a U-boat's conning tower at 8,000 yards on a night when no lookout could see 800. She kept her four 4-inch guns and her 3-inch anti-aircraft gun. She gained 20 millimeter Oerlikon cannon. She carried depth charge racks at the stern and depth charge projectors that threw charges out to either side, so that a pattern could bracket a target rather than merely follow it. And she had a 24-inch searchlight, a piece of equipment nobody considered a weapon.

Radar to find the boat, sonar to hold it underwater, depth charges to force it up, guns to finish it on the surface. None of that was new by itself. What the refit did was put the complete 1943 antisubmarine kit into a hull the Navy had already paid for in 1919.

The second was the age of the ship, turned around. Borie could still make 27 knots, far more than any U-boat could manage on the surface. The purpose-built escorts coming out of American yards in 1943, the destroyer escorts, were good ships, but they were designed around 21 to 24 knots. The old four-piper could run down anything she found. That night she was steaming at 22 knots when the contact appeared, and she went to 27.

The third was the crew, and this is the part no specification sheet records. Lieutenant Charles H. Hutchins of the Naval Reserve was 30 years old, and was described at the time as the youngest destroyer commander in the Navy. His executive officer, Lieutenant Philip B. Brown, had an idea that must have looked eccentric in a radar-equipped ship. Over the preceding months Brown repeatedly ran a drill for what the crew should do if the ship ever found herself alongside a surfaced submarine, too close for the main guns. Small arms were to be broken out from their lockers. Men knew where to go and what to pick up. The ship had three full patrols with Card behind her, from July to October, and the drill had been run until it was routine.

An old hull, then, but with modern sensors in it, speed to spare, and a crew that had rehearsed the one situation nobody expected to happen.

The night began well. Shortly after 1943 hours on October 31st, Borie's radar found a surfaced U-boat. It was U-256. Borie ran in, the boat dived, and Hutchins made three depth charge attacks. The submarine was forced briefly to the surface and went down again leaving a large oil slick. Hutchins believed he had a kill and signaled Card: "Scratch one pig boat; am searching for more." In fact U-256 was badly damaged and crawled home to France. The second half of the signal was the accurate part.

At 0153, about 26 miles from the first attack, radar reported a new contact at 8,000 yards. Hutchins went to 27 knots. At 2,800 yards the radar contact faded as the boat dived, and at almost the same moment sonar picked it up. Borie ran over the contact and dropped her pattern.

The depth charges brought U-405 to the surface close aboard. Hopman chose to fight it out on top, and he had reason to. Borie's searchlight came on and the range was 400 yards. The destroyer opened with her 4-inch guns and her 20 millimeter. U-405's flak crews answered, and their 20 millimeter shells hit Borie in the forward engine room and around the bridge. It was the only damage German gunfire did all night. Borie's Oerlikons swept the submarine's deck and killed every exposed man on it. The 88 millimeter deck gun never fired a round. A salvo of three 4-inch shells blew it off the boat.

Hutchins turned in to ram.

Hopman saw it coming and threw his helm hard to port. He very nearly made it. Then a large wave lifted Borie's bow, and instead of cutting the U-boat in two, the destroyer came down on top of her. Borie's forefoot settled across U-405's foredeck. The two ships were locked together, at first nearly at right angles, then, as the sea and both crews worked at it, in a V only 25 to 30 degrees from parallel, with the submarine lying along the destroyer's port side.

Here the paper comparison reversed itself in the worst possible way. Borie's 4-inch and 3-inch guns could not depress far enough to hit a target lying under her own bow. The U-boat's 20 millimeter guns could bear on the destroyer's bridge at a range of a few yards. All the Germans had to do was reach them.

This was the situation Lieutenant Brown had drilled. Within seconds of the collision the small arms were out. Tommy guns, rifles, pistols and riot shotguns lined the port rail. One Oerlikon could still bear. The executive officer and a signalman fired from the bridge. The 24-inch searchlight stayed fixed on the conning tower, so that every German who came out of the hatch stepped into a white glare with the muzzles already on him. The Americans could see the polar bear painted on the conning tower.

The Germans kept coming. Man after man ran for the flak mounts, and some reached them and got off a burst before they were cut down. One was hit in the chest by a Very flare. Fireman First Class David Southwick threw his sheath knife at a German running for a gun. The blade took the man in the stomach and he went over the side. Chief Boatswain's Mate Walter Kurz, captain of the number two 4-inch gun, could not fire his gun at all, so he threw an empty 4-inch shell case at a sailor climbing toward a 20 millimeter mount. It hit the man in the head and knocked him into the sea.

It lasted about ten minutes. By the end of it roughly 35 of U-405's 49 men were dead or overboard.

But the sea was doing to Borie what the Germans could not. Every swell ground the destroyer's thin plating against the submarine's pressure hull, and the pressure hull won. Seams opened along Borie's port side. The forward engine room began to flood. Hutchins wrote afterward, "We were impressed by the ruggedness and toughness of these boats."

The ships worked free. Hopman, with most of his crew gone and his boat holed, still handled her with real skill. He turned in tight circles inside the destroyer's wide turning radius, the one known weakness of the four-pipers, and Borie could not get her guns on. Both sides tried torpedoes. Both missed.

So Hutchins switched off the searchlight. In the dark, Hopman straightened out and ran for it, which is what Hutchins wanted. The light came back on with the U-boat on a steady course. Borie swung to bring her broadside and her depth charge projectors to bear, and fired a shallow-set pattern that went into the water on both sides of the submarine. The explosions bracketed U-405 and stopped her turn toward the destroyer. A 4-inch shell then hit her and brought her to a halt.

About 14 Germans came up and signaled surrender. They launched yellow rubber rafts and lowered wounded men into them on stretchers. The last man off wore an officer's cap. At 0257, U-405 sank slowly by the stern, and Borie's crew saw her explode underwater.

Hutchins recorded that when the submarine sank, a yell went up from all hands that could probably be heard in Berlin.

Borie closed to pick up the survivors. The men in the rafts fired star shells, which the Americans took for a distress signal. Then another star shell answered from the darkness. A second U-boat was on the surface nearby. A lookout reported a torpedo passing close aboard. Hutchins had a crippled ship and no choice. Borie turned away at the best speed she had, zigzagging, straight through the rafts. None of U-405's 49 men was ever found.

The measurable result of the action is simple. One Type VIIC sunk with all hands. One more, U-256, damaged badly enough to abandon her patrol. In 64 minutes of gunfire at ranges from 400 yards down to zero, Borie had several men wounded and nobody killed.

The cost came afterward. Borie had severe underwater damage along her whole port side. The forward engine room and the generators were flooded, and only the starboard engine still turned, in an after engine room that was itself taking water. Steam and water lines had parted, and most of the fresh water for the boilers was gone. Salt water got into the fuel. Speed fell to 10 knots, then lower. Hutchins had sent Card a jubilant report of the sinking before anyone understood the damage. Then the power failed and the radio went silent.

Lieutenant Morrison R. Brown, the engineering officer, kept his men at their stations in the flooding engine spaces to hold what power the ship had. The crew worked below decks by kerosene battle lantern. They formed a bucket brigade. They fired off the remaining torpedoes and threw over the side everything that weighed anything: the gun director, the lifeboat, the torpedo tubes, the 20 millimeter guns, the machine guns, the small arms they had used on the U-boat, tons of tools, more than 100 mattresses. They kept ten rounds for each 4-inch gun.

At about 1100 the communications officer got the Kohler emergency generator running on Zippo lighter fluid and torpedo alcohol, and a distress call went out. An Avenger from Card found her through the murk.

It was not enough. Horta in the Azores was about 690 miles away. Iceland, Ireland and Newfoundland were each about 900. The task group sat near the middle of five reported wolfpacks, a storm front was coming, and every hour Barry and Goff spent beside Borie was an hour Card steamed unprotected. With the ship still settling and night coming on, Hutchins ordered abandon ship at 1630.

The water was 44 degrees Fahrenheit. The seas had built to 20 feet. The men had been awake and fighting, first a submarine and then the flooding, for most of a day. Three officers and 24 enlisted men died in the water between Borie and the rescue ships. Hutchins reported that many of the lost were simply unable to get over the side. Every one of Borie's dead died after the battle was won.

Even then the old hull would not go. She floated empty through the night. At first light on November 2nd, the destroyers tried to sink her with torpedoes, which ran wild in the heavy sea. A 4-inch shell from Barry set a small fire on her bridge. Finally an Avenger of squadron VC-9 from Card put a 500 pound bomb into her, and USS Borie sank at 0955.

For the action the ship's company received three Navy Crosses, two Silver Stars and a Legion of Merit. Hutchins received the Navy Cross. So did Morrison Brown, posthumously, and Machinist's Mate Second Class Randolph Saum for his work in the flooded engine room. Borie shared the Presidential Unit Citation awarded to Card's group and earned three battle stars.

The wider result belongs to the system she was part of. The refueling network that the central Atlantic campaign depended on was being destroyed boat by boat, and the hunter-killer groups did most of the destroying. By the end of 1943 the tanker U-boats were nearly gone and Dönitz could no longer keep wolfpacks on the American supply route to the Mediterranean. The troops and cargo for Italy, and later for southern France, crossed an ocean that groups like Card's had cleared. In those groups, through the worst months, much of the screening was done by four-pipers that the Navy had once been glad to give away.

The Navy honored the name quickly. A new Allen M. Sumner class destroyer, DD-704, was commissioned as USS Borie in September 1944, less than a year after the first one went down.

Return to 0153 on November 1st, 1943. A 24-year-old destroyer, alone in 15-foot seas, turns toward a radar contact at 8,000 yards.

Everything the critics said about her was true. She was old. Her plating was thin, and it failed. Her turning circle was wide, and a good U-boat captain used it against her. She could not point her main guns at an enemy lying under her own bow.

What the critics left out was the rest. It was a radar set fitted at New Orleans that found the boat when no human eye could. It was depth charge projectors that could put a pattern on both sides of a target. It was 27 knots from turbines built in 1919. It was a searchlight used as a weapon, and an executive officer who had drilled his men for a fight at arm's length that no doctrine said would ever happen. And it was a fireman with a sheath knife and a chief with an empty shell case who did not wait to be told.

Borie was not a good ship by the standards of 1943. She was a well-used one. The Navy put the right equipment in her, put her in the right kind of group, and gave her to officers who trained for the improbable. On the night it counted, that outweighed a quarter century of age. She sank a U-boat, crippled another, lost nobody to the enemy, and had to be bombed by her own side before she would go under.