Weekend Sailors and Ex-Rumrunners Hunted Nazi U-Boats Off the East Coast of the US

German U-boats operated along the American East Coast in the first half of 1942 with something close to impunity. Merchant ships loaded with fuel and supplies bound for the war in Europe were being torpedoed within sight of beachgoers in New Jersey and the Carolinas.

The Navy, still ramping up for a two-ocean war, didn’t have anywhere near enough destroyers, patrol craft or aircraft to cover the entire coastline. Into that gap sailed some of the least likely combatants of the Second World War: weekend yachtsmen, Boston lawyers, Boy Scouts and, according to more than one account, a handful of former Prohibition-era rumrunners who suddenly found their smuggling boats requisitioned for a very different kind of coastal patrol.

A Yacht Club Commodore Makes an Offer

The idea came from Alfred B. Stanford, commodore of the Cruising Club of America, who in the spring of 1942 approached the U.S. Navy with an unusual proposal: Let his club’s fleet of private sailing yachts, crewed by volunteer civilian sailors, patrol the coastline watching for U-boats and rescuing survivors of their attacks. Stanford’s reasoning had a genuine tactical logic behind it. A sailboat under wind power alone gives off no engine noise and no wake that a submerged submarine’s hydrophones could easily detect, unlike a Navy patrol boat running on diesel engines.

Admiral Ernest J. King, chief of naval operations, accepted the offer. On May 4, 1942, King formally requested that the Coast Guard Reserve organize a unit to supplement coastal antisubmarine and rescue operations, and the Coastal Picket Patrol was born, placed under overall supervision of Commander Vincent Astor, a Naval Reserve officer and noted yachtsman himself.

Officially, it was the Coastal Picket Patrol. Sailors called it the Corsair Fleet. Almost everyone else called it, with equal parts admiration and derision, the Hooligan Navy.

Read More: The Coast Guard’s Missions Extend Far Beyond Search and Rescue

Who Actually Crewed These Boats

The Coast Guard had reclassified its Coast Guard Reserve as the Auxiliary back in February 1941, specifically to create legal authority for exactly this kind of arrangement: pressing privately owned sailing yachts, motor cruisers and fishing boats into government service for neutrality enforcement and, soon after, direct antisubmarine patrol.

Yacht owners typically remained in command of their own boats, commissioned with the temporary enlisted rank of chief boatswain’s mate. Their crews were a genuinely strange cross-section of American civilian life: college students, Boy Scouts, beachcombers and, as multiple historical accounts note, more than a few ex-bootleggers and former rumrunners whose relevant qualification was that they already knew how to move a small boat along the coast at night without being noticed.

Each boat was typically equipped with a machine gun, four depth charges and a radio — and was expected to attack any U-boat it encountered whenever possible. By the summer of 1942, roughly 550 small craft, everything from sleek racing yachts to weathered fishing boats, were patrolling the coast in an organized grid pattern along the 50-fathom curve of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. The fleet peaked in November 1942 at 1,873 boats simultaneously in commission with the Coast Guard Reserve. In total, 2,067 converted private motor and sail craft served in the patrol over its lifespan, numbered CGR1 through CGR9040, with gaps in that numbering sequence representing boats that were surveyed by the Coast Guard but ultimately never taken into service.

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What the Boats Actually Accomplished

By most military assessments, the Hooligan Navy’s small, slow, feebly armed boats were never going to sink a U-boat outright, and by the time enough of them were outfitted and their crews trained, the worst of the U-boat blitz along the East Coast was already subsiding. But the patrol’s real value turned out to be detection, coordination and rescue rather than direct combat.

Auxiliary crews spotted wreckage and debris, radioed submarine sightings back to Navy and Coast Guard aircraft units for follow-up, and pulled survivors directly out of the water. In a single two-week period in 1942, auxiliary crews rescued 151 survivors of submarine attacks.

There were moments of genuine, if largely bloodless, confrontation. On Sept. 15, 1942, the picket boat Edlu II was patrolling south of Montauk Point when the crew spotted a surfaced U-boat roughly 100 yards away. When Edlu II closed the distance to engage with machine guns, the U-boat’s captain, apparently unsure what he was actually facing, crash-dived and fled the area.

In a separate and stranger encounter recorded in Coast Guard accounts, a German U-boat captain reportedly surfaced right alongside one of the picket boats, stepped out onto his own deck, and called out in fluent English: “Get the hell out of here, you guys! Do you want to get hurt?” Whether apocryphal or not, the story captures something true about the mismatch: These were amateur sailors going nose to nose with a professional submarine force, and both sides seemed to know it.

The Fleet’s Quiet Dissolution

As the U-boat threat along the American coast faded through 1943, so did the need for the Hooligan Navy. The fleet’s numbers declined steadily from its November 1942 peak, falling below 1,000 boats by November 1943, under 500 by April 1944, and under 100 by June 1945. The last of the requisitioned civilian craft were formally disposed of by the end of that year, and by then, most of the men who’d crewed them had either rotated into more conventional Coast Guard or Navy service or simply returned to civilian life.

Of the more than 214,000 personnel who served in the Coast Guard during World War II, roughly 92 percent came through the Coast Guard Reserve, the same broader organizational umbrella that made the Hooligan Navy possible in the first place. It remains one of the stranger and more genuinely improvised chapters of the American war effort: For a critical stretch of 1942 and 1943, part of the nation’s coastal defense against Nazi Germany’s submarine fleet was quite literally handled by whoever in the yacht club could be talked into it.

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