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U-boats Down East
By Peter Nichols — Fall
2004
The coast of Maine, with all its serried tentacles of land dangling down into the cold North Atlantic, spans more than 3,500 miles and has 6,000 islands. You could spend a lifetime of summers exploring this incredible cruising ground. East of Mount Desert Island, the cruiser will come upon the true Down East of Maine, where the harbors are not so self-consciously picturesque and facilities for pleasure boats grow scarce. Few cruisers make it this far, to a world 60 years behind the rest of New England. Frenchman’s Bay, between Mount Desert Island and Schoodic Point, is such a place.
It’s where the Nazis cruised during World War II.
Germany’s famous submarines, the U-boats, frequently reached the eastern coast of the United States during WWII. They harried convoys bringing supplies to Europe and through their periscopes provided Germany with firsthand visual observations of the American war effort along the coast. Throughout the war there persisted a fear all along the eastern seaboard that U-boats would find a lonely spot on which to land spies.
Harold W. Coffin, a Maine electric company employee who installed and serviced power lines, was highly sensitive to the possibilities of Nazi infiltration from offshore. He got himself attached to the Army’s Harbor Defense Intelligence unit in Portland and began officially snooping for enemies. Soon enough he fastened his attention on Gustav Jansen, who lived in Hancock, an isolated community Down East of Bar Harbor. Jansen wanted an underground power line run to his one-room cabin on Hancock Point, at the head of Frenchman’s Bay. The cost of the service, as opposed to the more usual overhead wire, would be almost as much as the cost of Jansen’s entire cabin. But once the line was buried, nothing would be visible from the road to betray the presence of a house hidden away in the trees.
“As I considered the whole proposition, an uneasy suspicion of a sinister purpose behind it all began to take form,” Coffin wrote in his unpublished memoirs. His suspicions were fanned after meeting Mrs. Jansen, “a typical buxom German blonde with a genuine accent that came straight from the Old Country.”
After much talk about the cost, Jansen finally elected to have overhead wires, but Coffin’s concerns were not assuaged. He determined that the cabin provided ideal features for enemy infiltration by submarine: easy access to deep water; proximity to a highway; concealment; shelter.
His appraisal proved well-founded. On the night of November 29, 1944, a U-boat surfaced over Cod Ledge, two miles east of Mount Desert Island. In the dark it made its way past Egg Rock and the Porcupine Islands into Frenchman’s Bay and hove-to off the western tip of Hancock Point.
Ashore, Harvard Hodgkins, a high school student, Eagle Scout, and son of the local deputy sheriff, was driving home to Hancock Point from a Saturday night dance. In the falling snow he passed two figures carrying suitcases and wearing “dark clothing of an unfamiliar type.” Farther on he stopped the car, got out, and saw that their footprints led toward the shore. He drove home and told his father. At daybreak the deputy found a rubber boat concealed in the rocks. The FBI was alerted. They found the two men, trailed them to New York, and arrested them. Coffin was convinced the German agents had spent their first night ashore in Jansen’s cabin, though Jansen had disappeared.
Many years later an American naval officer found that his West German opposite had served aboard U-boats. He knew of at least 80 Nazi spies and saboteurs who had landed on the Maine coast. He was able to describe the waters of Frenchman’s Bay in detail.
Today, you can follow the U-boat’s course and picnic ashore on Hancock Point. |
