The American DIY Fleet That Patrolled for Nazi U-Boats

In the dark, uncertain months after Pearl Harbor, when America had been drawn into World War II, German U-boats began prowling U.S. waters, preying on Allied shipping. At least one U-boat even nosed brazenly into New York Harbor. The U.S. Navy, reeling from the devastation at Pearl Harbor, was already stretched thin across both the Atlantic and Pacific. Up and down the East Coast, merchant ships burned and sank within sight of American beaches, their oil-slicked wreckage washing ashore.

But, as had happened 18 months earlier at Dunkirk, ordinary citizens stepped forward where the military could not. “Time after time,” Coast Guard records state, “these auxiliaries took their tiny boats out ... to haul drowning, burned merchant seamen from the sea."

They were businessmen, fishermen, college students, Boy Scouts and even retired bootleggers. The government officially dubbed them the Coastal Picket Patrol. They called themselves by another name: the “Hooligan’s Navy.”

On December 11, 1941, four days after the attack at Pearl Harbor, the United States declared war on Germany. Barely a month later, a lurking U-boat (short for the German Unterseeboot) torpedoed the 5,269-ton merchant ship SS City of Atlanta—within 10 miles of the North Carolina coast. Forty-three of the Atlanta’s 46 crew members perished.

More attacks followed. In the next seven months, German U-boats roaming along the East Coast and Gulf of Mexico sank 233 merchant ships—many ferrying desperately needed fuel and supplies to the Allied effort. The losses threatened not only America’s wartime economy, but also the Allies’ very survival.

“Shipping,” British Prime Minister Winston Churchill later wrote, “was at once the stranglehold and sole foundation of our war strategy.”

In April 1942, with the Atlantic ablaze, Alfred B. Stanford, commodore of the Cruising Club of America, made an audacious offer to the U.S. Navy: His club’s fleet of private yachts, crewed by volunteer sailors, would patrol the coastline, watching for U-boats and rescuing survivors of their attacks.

Admiral Ernest J. King, chief of naval operations, accepted. Thus was born the Coastal Picket Patrol, a fleet of mostly civilian boats pressed into service under U.S. Coast Guard command.

By that summer, 550 small craft—everything from sleek yachts to motor cruisers to weathered fishing boats—were patrolling the coasts in a grid pattern. Eventually, some 2,000 private vessels joined in—what naval historian Edward Offley, author of The Burning Shore: How German U-Boats Brought World War II to America, called “tiny auxiliaries.” The effort attracted notable volunteers like novelist Ernest Hemingway, who patrolled the Florida Straits in his 38-foot cabin cruiser Pilar, equipped with machine guns, grenades, bazookas—and an unusual coffin-shaped explosive device. Motion picture tough guy Humphrey Bogart, meanwhile, took to the waters off the California coast in his own 38-foot yacht, Sluggy.

Most Hooligans’ boats were modestly armed, often with just a radio, a .50-caliber machine gun and maybe a few 300-pound depth charges. Many carried less—sometimes only rifles, boat hooks and flashlights.

Each boat’s owner usually held the temporary naval rank of chief boatswain’s mate, and crews were often comprised of a mix of Cruising Club members, college-age sailors, Boy Scouts with maritime badges—and, it was claimed, retired bootleggers. One Coast Guardsman described them as “adventurers and undraftables.” Naval historian Dennis L. Noble wrote that “almost everyone who declared he could reef and steer, and many who couldn’t, were accepted.”

Their nickname, Hooligan’s Navy, implied playfully that, relative to the well-trained, well-disciplined U.S. Navy, they were a group of undisciplined ruffians. It may also have referred to the popular comic strip character of the time, “Happy Hooligan,” a well-meaning bumbler—sometimes unpolished but always enthusiastic and determined.

The picket boats operated from the New England coast all the way down to the Gulf Coast. About 200 vessels also patrolled along the West Coast, primarily in the Pacific Northwest. Their mandate was simple: Watch for anything unusual—smoke, oil slicks, gunfire or the thrum of submarine engines—and radio in reports to the Coast Guard.

There are no verified accounts of U-boats sunk as a result of a Hooligan sighting. When submarines did surface near them, they usually dove quickly and slipped away, unwilling to waste torpedoes on small craft. But the patrols played a vital supporting role—spotting wreckage and debris, rescuing survivors and coordinating with Navy and Coast Guard aircraft units.

In 1942, during one two-week period alone, auxiliary crews rescued 151 survivors of submarine sinkings, according to C. Kay Larson, former national historian of the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary. When the SS Potrero de Llano was torpedoed in May of that year, Larson writes, auxiliarists in search of survivors “drove their little boats right into the flames” spreading over the water. In July 1942, one auxiliarist diverted a family holiday cruise off the Florida coast, dangerously overloading his vessel with the survivors of a torpedoed tanker and navigating heavy seas without lights through narrow channels to get everyone to safety.

The program peaked in November 1942 with nearly 2,000 boats in commission, a figure that dropped steadily as the war’s focus shifted to Europe. The program petered out by the end of 1945.

Though they lacked training and heavy armament, America’s coastal picket volunteers made an impact. Coast Guard historian Robert Desh argues that their presence forced Germany to change its U-boat tactics, limiting the subs’ freedom of movement close to shore and boosting morale among merchant seamen who knew help was nearby in an emergency.

“It certainly had an influence on what the Germans were doing,” says Desh.

Like the British civilians who rescued hundreds of thousands of trapped troops from Dunkirk, America’s “Hooligans” did what needed to be done—with whatever they had. And in wartime, that made a difference.