WWII meteorologists lost at sea awarded medals
Bodies from ship hit by German U-boat were never found
The U-boat first spotted the Muskeget’s masts emerging from a rain squall in the distance, and despite a heavy ocean swell, it moved in to attack.
It was 2:54 on the afternoon of Sept. 9, 1942, in the submarine-infested waters of the North Atlantic. The German sub, U-755, saw the U.S. Coast Guard’s aged weather ship was a choice target.
Among the 121 men on board were four civilian meteorologists from the U.S. Weather Bureau who were transmitting crucial weather reports amid World War II’s Battle of the Atlantic.
On Thursday, 73 years after U-755 stalked the American ship, the four men became the first National Weather Service employees to get the Purple Heart for service in the line of duty. They had been eligible for the medal, which could be given to civilians killed in battle during World War II, according to Capt. Jeremy Adams of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the weather service.
But they had never been put in for it.
That recently discovered lapse, along with the U-boat’s grim account of the sinking, cleared the way for the medals, officials said.
Lester S. Fodor, 27, a weather observer from Cleveland; Luther Brady, 27, an assistant weather observer from Atlanta; George Kubach, 24, an assistant weather observer from San- dusky, Ohio; and Edward Weber, 24, a junior weather observer from Brooklyn, were awarded the medals posthumously in a ceremony at the Naval Heritage Center in Washington.
Gone without a trace
The four, all volunteers, perished when U-755 hit the Muskeget with two torpedoes about 400 miles northeast of Newfoundland.
The sub heard the explosions, then the sounds of the Muskeget’s boilers and bulkheads bursting. Kapitänleutnant Walter Göing, the 28-year-old Uboat captain on his first patrol, brought his new sub to the surface. He spotted survivors in the water and in a life raft, according to the log he kept.
There was little wreckage, he recorded, and he left the area.
But several hours later he came back. There were two life rafts tied together, holding eight men. They began shouting, but all Göing could hear was that they were from an American ship named Muskogee, or Mukited, or something like that.
He took note of the probable tonnage of the vessel, and departed for his patrolling station.
A few days later, when another U.S. weather ship reached the area, there was no trace of the Muskeget. No bodies were ever recovered. It was the only weather ship lost during the war, officials said.
According to records supplied by NOAA, the men’s families were told that they would be notified promptly if anything new turned up. Agonizing months passed. On Oct. 12, 1943, Margaret Fredenberg of Athens, Pa., wrote to the Navy personnel office in Washington. Kubach, a tall, bespectacled man who had flunked a Navy eye test, was her fiance.
“Can you tell me any information regarding the whereabouts of the officers or compliment of the … ‘Muskeget’?” she wrote.
Her letter was passed to F.W. Reichelderfer, head of the Weather Bureau. He informed her that Kubach had been declared dead a month earlier.
She wrote back, pleading to know what had happened:
“Certainly a boat couldn’t just disappear without leaving some clue. … Our country can’t afford to have morale broken down by conditions of this sort. Can’t someone do something?”
Reichelderfer replied. “Nothing further has been learned,” he wrote. “The long time that has elapsed makes it extremely doubtful that any account of what happened will ever be known.”
‘ The right thing to do’
About three years ago, Robert Pendleton, 76, a private historian who specializes in Purple Heart research for the Coast Guard, was trying to see how many people on the Muskeget received the medal.
He found that while the rest of the ship’s military crew had, the four weathermen had not, he said in a telephone interview from his home in Ocala, Fla.
“There were a lot of oversights like that,” he said. “They just went through the cracks.”
Pendleton said he learned through research that the Muskeget had been attacked by U-755, and got the submarine’s log from the National Archives, which has a trove of U-boat documents.
He alerted the Coast Guard’s Atlantic-area historian, William Thiesen, who told officials at NOAA.
It was quickly determined that the four men deserved Purple Hearts, said James P. Delgado, director of maritime heritage at NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries.
“It was the right thing to do,” he said.
Genealogists at NOAA and the Coast Guard began researching the four men and trying to track down their families. Relatives of three of the four were located, he said. The family of Luther H. Brady, who reportedly had studied at Emory University and the University of Georgia, could not be found.