The Empire Mica was neither the first nor the last casualty of U-boat attacks in the Gulf of Mexico(now the Gulf of America) during the summer of 1942. The body of water, which stretches from the shores of Florida to Texas to the Yucatán Peninsula, was a target of Operation Drumbeat, a broad initiative undertaken by the Germans during the Battle of the Atlantic, a six-year fight for control of the eponymous ocean. Beginning in January 1942, just a few weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Nazis set out to sink any Allied commercial shipping vessels in American coastal waters. By May, the campaign had expanded into the Gulf, where 24 German U-boats hunted, with great success, into 1943.
Over the course of that brief, concentrated period, U-boats sank 56 Allied ships and damaged another 14, losing just one of their own submarines in the process. (The Allies also sank two U-boats in the Straits of Florida, which connect the Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean.) In these first months of the Gulf campaign, the Germans “thoroughly dominated [the U.S., which was] completely unprepared,” says military historian and author Martin K.A. Morgan. “I struggle to sometimes make people fully appreciate the extent to which the Germans brought the [Americans] to their knees quickly.”
As we note in our textbook, many Americans do not know that World War II did indeed reach our shores. Palomba continues:
Throughout the Gulf campaign, the U.S. Office of Censorship limited the press’s coverage of the sinkings. The reasoning was twofold: to prevent widespread panic among the American public and to avoid informing the Germans just how destructive their campaign was. This censorship has created a blanket of silence that persists even today. “By not having it out there, it’s created historical amnesia,” says Malcom. “It never really took root in the public consciousness, and in a large way still hasn’t today.”
