By Ed Offley
It was a moonlit summer night in the Gulf of Mexico as the 8,032-ton British oil tanker Empire Mica steamed slowly along the Panhandle coast, heading from Texas to the British Isles via the Florida Strait. No land was in sight, but lookouts could make out a flash of light on the horizon every thirty seconds from the Cape San Blas Lighthouse just over the horizon seventeen miles away.
Neither Master Hugh G.B. Bentley nor his 46-man crew knew it, but their journey was about to end in disaster.
Eighty years ago, World War II came to the northern Gulf of Mexico in a sudden eruption of violence as the 479-foot-long tanker and its cargo of 12,000 tons of highly flammable vaporizing oil exploded in a massive fireball. Shortly before midnight on June 28, 1942, the 8,032-ton tanker was struck by a pair of torpedoes from the German U-boat U-67. The attack killed 27 crewmen and British naval gunners. Only one lifeboat with Bentley and thirteen crewmen survived the inferno.
Although the United States had been at war with Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire for six months, Panama City Beach and the rest of the Florida Panhandle to date had escaped the ravages of the war – particularly the U-boat assault against shipping that since mid-January of that year had already sunk over 500 Allied merchant ships.
Like all of the other ship captains navigating through the Gulf of Mexico, Captain Bentley would have been well aware that the U-boat threat was all around them. Capitalizing on the success of his assault on east coast shipping, Admiral Karl Dönitz had ordered his long-range Type IX U-boats operating in the Caribbean to expand their patrols north into the Gulf of Mexico. Oil tankers bearing precious fuel supplies to the United Kingdom were a top priority: Of 37 ships attacked since the Gulf campaign kicked off on May 4, U-boats had attacked 22 oil tankers.
U-boat attacks in the Gulf, now in their ninth week, were showing no signs of ending. U-67 and seven other U-boats had sunk twenty-nine ships totaling 164,963 gross tons. Equally bad for the Allies, the attacks had killed 395 merchant seamen and naval gunners.
With a significant number of sinkings taking place along the direct southeast route from Texas to the Florida Strait, Bentley chose what he thought was a safer route. He opted not to steer Empire Mica on the 710-nautical-mile straight-line course, but instead steamed along the 100-fathom-curve hugging the Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida Gulf coasts. Unfortunately, one veteran U-boat commander had already suspected his targets were taking this evasive route and had positioned U-67 just offshore from Cape St. George.
It was just before 11:30 p.m. on June 28 that lookouts perched on U-67’s cramped bridge sighted what they first called out as two small vessels approaching fast about forty degrees off the U-boat’s starboard bow. But when Kapitänleutnant (Lieutenant Commander) Günther Müller-Stöckheim climbed up out of the cramped conning tower to look for himself, the 27-year-old U-boat commander quickly realized it was a large vessel approaching their position. Captain and crew quickly went to battle stations.
Müller-Stöckheim and his 50-man crew were hardened veterans of the Battle of the Atlantic. On three previous patrols since commissioning in January 1941, U-67 had sunk four Allied merchantmen totaling 24,833 gross tons. Thus far in its current patrol, the U-boat had already sunk three more ships for an overall total of 39,000 gross tons.
The previous week, U-67 had lurked off the mouth of the Mississippi River, where they sank one ship and damaged another. But when three days went by without a single sighting of an Allied ship, Müller-Stöckheim decided on a different approach.
In the early hours of June 24, Müller-Stöckheim wrote in his Daily War Diary, “Came to course 10 [degrees]. Intention: operate on traffic from and to Pensacola and Mobile …. ” The next day, after dodging several patrol planes but still seeing no ships, he wrote, “Since nothing was met during the advance to the east, it is logical to assume that if traffic is in fact evading to the east, it moves to the north just offshore … Probably Cape San Blas will be the focal point.”
That estimate was about to pay off with one of U-67’s largest successes.
Taking his time, Müller-Stöckheim shadowed the tanker as it continued on an eastbound course toward Florida’s Big Bend. “It is very bright,” he later wrote in his Daily War Diary, “but I hope he does not recognize [the presence of a U-boat] very much.” Finally, closing to point-blank range – just three-fourths of a nautical mile from the target – he ordered “Los!” (“Release!”). Two steam-driven G7a torpedoes raced off and struck Empire Mica on its port side.
In a report to U.S. naval authorities twelve days after the attack, Bentley noted that the back-to-back torpedo strikes effectively destroyed the Empire Mica, leaving the crew no option but to flee the massive fire.
The survivors were rescued by a Coast Guard auxiliary vessel after four hours and landed at Apalachicola. The next day, Bentley and six of the Empire Mica survivors were taken by boat to Panama City 45 miles to the north, where they were treated for burns and injuries.
The gutted, burned-out hulk of the Empire Mica drifted for nine hours before finally sinking upright in 120 feet of water, but not before Müller-Stöckheim surfaced U-67 the next morning to allow his crewmen to view the abandoned tanker. Also coming upon the stricken ship was an Army patrol plane from Pensacola that spotted a plume of smoke on the horizon and located the vessel several hours before it finally capsized and sank.
U-67 and its crew resumed patrolling south of the Mississippi delta. During the next two weeks they sank another three ships, bringing their total to six totaling 32,236 gross tons before finally heading back to Nazi-occupied France. Müller-Stöckheim and his men would make two more successful war patrols in late 1942 and early 1943, amassing a total of 101,000 tons of Allied shipping sent to the bottom of the sea. But their luck ran out on May 10, 1943, when a bomber from the jeep carrier USS Card sank the U-boat with depth charges in the mid-Atlantic. Only three men on watch on the bridge survived the sinking.
Today, the only reminder that exists of that fateful night in late spring 1942 is the giant bronze propeller of the Empire Mica. Salvaged by commercial divers, it dominates the entrance to the famed Captain Anderson’s Restaurant at 5551 N. Lagoon Drive in Panama City Beach.
