In the black North Atlantic, the Coast Guard cutter Campbell found a German U-boat on the surface and turned straight toward it. The ships met at point-blank range. Guns flashed, depth charges detonated, and steel tore open steel. When it ended, U-606 was sinking—and Campbell was powerless, flooding, and hundreds of miles from land.
The fight on February 22, 1943, was only one violent piece of the Battle of the Atlantic, but it shows what convoy duty demanded from Coast Guardsmen: hunt the submarine, protect merchant sailors, rescue the enemy when he surrendered, then save your own ship with whatever tools and nerve remained.
The “Queen of the Fleet” enters the Bloody Winter
Commissioned in 1936, Campbell was one of the Coast Guard’s 327-foot Treasury-class cutters. These long-legged ships were built for high-seas patrol work, but World War II turned them into convoy escorts. Their endurance and ability to keep speed in heavy weather made them valuable in the mid-Atlantic, where merchant ships crossed beyond dependable air cover.
By February 1943, Commander James A. Hirshfield and Campbell were escorting westbound Convoy ON-166 from the United Kingdom toward North America. A German wolf pack attacked during the period sailors called the “Bloody Winter.” The work was relentless: radar contacts, sonar runs, depth-charge attacks, torpedo warnings, and ships burning astern of the convoy.
During the battle, the Norwegian tanker Nielsen Alonso was torpedoed and left behind. Campbell, serving as a rescue vessel while the convoy pressed on, recovered all 50 surviving merchant mariners from their boats. A U-boat then fired a torpedo toward the cutter and the stricken tanker. Campbell counterattacked and resumed the long chase back toward the convoy, which was roughly 40 miles away.
A radar contact at 4,600 yards
At 7:26 that evening, lookouts saw star shells and gun flashes over the horizon. The convoy was still fighting. At 8:15, Campbell’s repaired radar picked up a contact at 4,600 yards. The cutter approached at 18 knots and sighted a submarine on the surface.
It was U-606, commanded by Oberleutnant Hans-Heinrich Döhler. The submarine had already attacked ships in ON-166 and had been damaged by the Polish destroyer ORP Burza. In darkness and drizzle, Burza lost sight of the U-boat. Soon afterward, Campbell found it.
Hirshfield ordered full right rudder and closed to ram. As the cutter passed the submarine, two depth charges went over and exploded beneath U-606, lifting the boat in the water. The contact between the vessels was glancing rather than head-on—but it was still catastrophic. A bow hydroplane from the U-boat sliced into Campbell below the waterline beside the engine room.
Too close for the five-inch guns
The range collapsed to almost nothing. Campbell’s five-inch guns could not depress far enough to bear on the submarine, so her three-inch and 20-millimeter crews took over. Searchlights pinned the U-boat while gunfire struck its deck and conning tower.
One of those batteries was an all-Black three-inch gun crew led by gun captain Louis Etheridge. They maintained point-blank fire while the cutter’s engine room filled with seawater. Etheridge was later awarded the Bronze Star, becoming the first African American in Coast Guard history to receive it.
Below decks, the collision wound was winning. Water reached the electrical system, shorting circuits and extinguishing the lights. Commander Hirshfield was wounded by shell fragments but remained in command. At nearly the same moment Campbell lost power, U-606 had been rendered defenseless. German sailors began abandoning their boat, and Hirshfield ordered cease-fire.
That order matters. Seconds earlier, the men in the water had been the enemy. Now they were shipwreck survivors. A pulling boat under Lieutenant Arthur Pfeiffer rescued five members of U-606’s crew. A second boat-launching attempt went wrong and dumped Campbell’s boarding party into the freezing sea, but those men were recovered as well.
The second battle was damage control
U-606 went down, with official Navy records crediting both Campbell and ORP Burza. The cutter survived the gunfight, but she was dead in the water with a flooded engine room, a badly opened hull, German prisoners aboard, and 50 rescued merchant sailors already crowding the ship.
Hirshfield transferred the merchant survivors, prisoners, and most nonessential Coast Guardsmen to Burza. A skeleton crew stayed aboard. Commander Earl Cowart directed the damage-control work in darkness, and the men fabricated a patch over the gash to slow the flooding. Cowart later received the Silver Star for his leadership.
The convoy had to continue. Campbell remained exposed in hostile water, screened first by Burza and other escorts. For four days the cutter rolled without propulsion while her reduced crew kept the patch in place and the ship afloat. The British tug Tenacity finally arrived on February 26 and began the roughly 800-mile tow to St. John’s, Newfoundland.
Campbell reached St. John’s on March 3. She was repaired and back on convoy duty by late May. Hirshfield received the Navy Cross for his actions during the battle and the long fight to preserve his command.
A cutter that refused to die
The encounter is sometimes reduced to a clean sentence: Campbell sank U-606. The real story is messier and better. A Polish destroyer helped cripple the submarine. A Coast Guard cutter found it, attacked at arm’s length, and was nearly lost in the process. Gun crews fought while engineers and damage-control parties battled the sea. Then Coast Guardsmen stopped firing to rescue surrendering submariners.
Even Campbell’s famous mascot, Sinbad, remained aboard while much of the crew evacuated. The cutter later served in Korea and Vietnam and stayed in commission until 1982, earning her “Queen of the Fleet” nickname across a 46-year career.
For another Coast Guard story from the same brutal winter, read the Escanaba rescue after the sinking of Dorchester. You can also follow the war into Gulf waters with the final patrol of U-166, or browse more verified stories in the Fair Winds journal.
Fair winds to the escort crews who stood between the convoy and the dark.
Sources
- U.S. Coast Guard Historian’s Office: “Campbell, 1936”
- U.S. Coast Guard Historian’s Office: “Queen of the Fleet and the Battle of Convoy ON-166, Part 1”
- U.S. Coast Guard Historian’s Office: “Coast Guard Cutter Campbell, Part 2”
- Naval History and Heritage Command: “Close Quarters Antisubmarine Warfare”