It was a front-page article of The News Herald that demonized the German enemy in a very personal way.

Six days after a U-boat torpedoed two merchant ships near the Mississippi River mouth, the newspaper on Sunday, May 10, 1942, cited unnamed American naval officials who suggested that its captain might be Baron Edgar von Spiegel, who had been the German consul general in New Orleans prior to American entry into the war.

Revealing survivors’ accounts that the U-boat commander spoke “perfect American” English and distributed food, water and cigarettes to the survivors of the ships he had sunk, the anonymous officials told the Associated Press the day before that the incident “brought speculation” that the “intrepid, hard-bitten Nazi, had returned to fight the United States in the waters he knows best.” Von Spiegel indeed had served as a U-boat commander in World War I where he gained a reputation of compassion for aiding survivors of the ships he attacked.

Nevertheless, the story was a deliberate fabrication slipped into the public record by American military censors. The German naval archives confirm that it was Korvettenkapitän (Commander) Harro Schacht in U-507 who sank the two ships and aided their survivors. The German naval archives show no information that von Spiegel returned to U-boats in World War II.

Welcome to the fog of war.

Those few residents of the Gulf Coast old enough today to have lived through the terror of the 1942 U-boat offensive have one thing in common with the Allied merchant sailors, the German sailors who hunted them, and the Americans on patrol who in turn hunted the U-boats: All were blinded by an impenetrable fogbank of censorship, propaganda, misinformation and even honest confusion, unavoidable side effects of the war at sea.

Censorship and secrecy were unavoidable necessities on both sides.

Five weeks after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt invoked a draconian censorship policy for the duration of the war. Under the Code of Wartime Practices for the American Press, the government prohibited publishing any information on troop movements, operations of Navy and merchant ships, military aircraft, the location of military facilities, information on war contracts, and even weather forecasts – unless such information was released by government officials.

While the program aimed at protecting vital operational military secrets as the armed forces geared up for a tough war, it also gave the U.S. Navy an effective cloak to hide its lack of preparedness against the U-boats when the number of attacks soared, and to spin events in its favor despite the facts.

The movement of Allied merchant shipping – individual sailings and convoys alike – was cloaked in secrecy, from the date and time of sailing to the charted route the formation would take as it crossed the ocean. The overarching goal of American and British convoy planners was to release no information that could somehow be intercepted by the Germans and used to locate and attack the ships.

Thus, Allied merchantmen steaming to or from Gulf ports to the East Coast and British Isles were told nothing about the current situation. Richard Wynne, a 20-year-old coal stoker aboard a freighter crossing the Atlantic in March 1943 who survived when his ship was torpedoed and sunk, later recalled that no one had told the crew about the ship’s next port of call, the name of the convoy in which it was traveling, or the extent of the U-boat threat.

“Being a mere fireman, of course, I was not privy to what was really afoot!” he said. Learning later that a total of 42 U-boats had swarmed his convoy and a second one nearby, Wynne added, “In the light of what I know now … I am extremely glad I did not know!"

It was the same for the German crewmen in the U-boats. As a radioman in two U-boats, Martin Beishem was one of a handful of enlisted men privy to the Top Secret messages and reports between his U-boat commanders and U-boat Force headquarters in France; he and other radiomen, after all, were the ones responsible for encrypting and decrypting the communications using the naval Enigma machine.

“The whole Top Secret stuff was made very clear to us radio operators,” Beisheim said in a 2009 interview. “We were not even allowed to reveal anything within the boat. That was forbidden.” He paused and underscored the point: "I couldn't say anything … the secrecy was very serious on board.”

The secrecy didn't just stem from military necessity, it was also a political necessity. In attempts to bolster civilian morale, American officials on many occasions issued comments about the war at sea that were misleading and false.

Navy Secretary Frank Knox used his control over information at one point in November 1941.

After several bloody incidents between U-boats and Atlantic Fleet destroyers aiding British convoys, Knox announced that the U.S. Navy had sunk or damaged fourteen U-boats. Declassified records reviewed after the war showed that not a single U-boat had been sunk.

When the U-boats began their rampage against East Coast shipping in mid-January 1942, it became obvious to senior U.S. Navy officials that mere silence was not going to work; too many sinkings were visible from shore. So on Friday, January 23, a navy spokesman issued a truly remarkable statement to reporters: “There are many rumors and unofficial reports about the capture or destruction of enemy submarines,” the statement said. “Some of the recent visitors to our territorial waters will never enjoy the return portion of their voyage. Further, the percentage of one-way traffic is increasing, while that of two-way traffic is satisfactorily on the decline.”

In fact, the first successful sinking of a German U-boat did not occur until eleven weeks later, on April 14, 1942.

Confusion and uncertainty – the true fog of war – drove the third element of chaos in the war at sea.

U-boat captains famously reported ships sunk that had actually escaped or limped away with survivable damage. Allied patrol pilots reported successful attacks on U-boats that were either inaccurate (the U-boat evaded) or were American vessels misidentified as U-boats. And sometimes, there was a kill, but no one realized it.

Of the twenty-one U-boats that took part in the Gulf campaign, two were sunk while operating there. One of the boats, the Type IXC U-157, never made it very far into the Gulf. Passing close by the Dry Tortugas on June 13, 1942, the boat was attacked and sunk by the Coast Guard

cutter Thetis, killing all 52 onboard. That kill was accurately reported. The fate of another IXC boat, U-166, has come to symbolize the fog of battle.

On July 30, 1942, the patrol craft USS PC-566 was escorting the passenger liner Robert E. Lee from Trinidad to New Orleans. The two ships were some 50 miles southwest of the Mississippi River pass when U-166 hit the 5,184-ton American liner with a single torpedo. The ship sank after 15 minutes with 10 crewmen and 15 passengers killed, but 120 other crewmen and 259 passengers escaped in six lifeboats and eight rafts. Many of them were survivors of earlier U-boat attacks on other ships.

Lieutenant Herbert Claudius, commander of the 175-foot-long patrol boat, went to general quarters as his men manned their 3-inch cannon, four anti-aircraft guns and a solitary depth-charge rack. Racing to a spot where he estimated the U-boat was hiding, the young naval reservist ordered his crew to drop several depth charges. The Gulf water churned and blasted skyward, and lookouts sighted oil and debris.

But they weren’t sure.

Claudius reported to his superiors that he had a possible kill on a U-boat but could not say for certain.

For that, Claudius was reprimanded, relieved of command of PC-566, and dispatched to duty ashore for the rest of the war. His superiors were furious for the young officer’s cheek; he had not yet had formal anti-submarine warfare training.

It took 72 years for the Navy to formally acknowledge that Claudius and his crew had sunk U-166. After the wreckage was located in 2001, National Geographic Explorer Robert G. Ballard surveyed the U-boat in the summer of 2014. Underwater images confirmed that one of PC-566’s depth charges had wrecked the bow and likely detonated several torpedo warheads. The Navy posthumously awarded Claudius the Legion of Merit medal with a combat “V."

It had taken seven decades for the fog of war to finally lift.

After seventeen weeks of carnage at sea, the 1942 U-boat offensive in the Gulf finally came to an end on September 5, when U-171 passed back into the Florida Straits after a 25-day patrol that had netted three Allied ships totaling 17,641 gross tons.

But the U-boat war itself wasn’t over; it merely moved on to other maritime theaters.

As in previous U-boat offensives like the six-month campaign along the East Coast earlier that year, U-boat Force commander-in-chief Admiral Karl Dönitz and his staff concluded that the growing risks posed by stiffening defenses and a newly imposed coastal convoy system rendered the Gulf no longer cost-effective. From a high of six U-boats patrolling in the Gulf on July 16, the number of boats operating there swiftly declined to just one or two for the rest of the summer.

Indeed, U-171 proved to be an exception in the latter phase of the campaign. Of the last eight U-boats to enter the Gulf during July and August, five scored no hits at all, and two more sank just one Allied merchantman apiece.

During the fall and winter of 1942 and the first five months of 1943, Dönitz aimed the focus of his campaign against Allied shipping up in the North Atlantic convoy runs between North America and the British Isles. This culminated in a series of bloody convoy attacks in March 1943 that briefly caused panic in Allied naval headquarters on both sides of the Atlantic. The U-boat force was surging in size – the average number of U-boats at sea peaked in May 1943 to 118, nearly double the 61 operational boats at the start of the Gulf offensive twelve months earlier – but Allied anti-submarine warfare forces and new merchant ship hulls were also growing at an equivalent rate.

The climax of the long maritime battle took place far from the Gulf of Mexico. In several particularly bloody convoy battles south of Iceland in May 1943, a combination of reinforced Allied warships and additional long-range patrol planes sank an unprecedented thirteen U-boats, turning the tide against Germany once and for all.

The Gulf campaign had been a significant success for Admiral Dönitz in his war against Allied shipping. In particular, the focus on sinking oil tankers paid off in the Gulf with the destruction of 28 oil tankers. That brought to more than 150 the number of giant bulk carriers lost to the U-boats since America’s entry into the war.

Nevertheless, the Germans failed to achieve their strategic goal of strangling the British economy. Allied ship construction in 1942 and thereafter vastly exceeded losses at sea, and once the U-boats were routed in the May 1943 battles, the flow of arms, supplies and Allied troops to the United Kingdom expanded and accelerated.

As for the 23 U-boats that took part in the Gulf campaign, only four were lost during or immediately after their patrols. The Coast Guard cutter Thetis sank U-157 in the Straits of Florida, and the patrol boat USS PC-566 destroyed U-166 and its 54-man crew in a depth-charge attack off the mouth of the Mississippi. Two others, U-158 and U-171, went down in the North Atlantic and Bay of Biscay, respectively, while returning from the Gulf.

While the other nineteen U-boat crews made it back to port in France for long-anticipated rest and leave before their next missions, most would be dead by war’s end. Eleven of the nineteen went down in various attacks in 1943, four more in 1944, and the last in 1945. The crews of only three of the U-boats survived the carnage. Of 1,221 volunteer U-boat men who took part in the Gulf campaign, only 249 escaped death. The 972 fatalities comprised 79 percent of the officers and crewmen who took Germany’s war to the shores of the Gulf of Mexico.

In the summer of 1943, 50 U.S. Army soldiers of Battery C, 13th Coastal Artillery, arrived at the west side of the dredged ship channel into St. Andrew Bay. There, they hastily erected temporary quarters and deployed two 155-mm. artillery cannons near the west jetty. Their mission was to protect the channel and shipping into the bay from German U-boats.

But the U-boats were long gone. After just six months, the guns were removed and the unit transferred elsewhere.

All that was left to mark the brief and terrible war in the Gulf were the two circular foundations of the Army cannons, and the hulk of the British tanker Empire Mica lying on the Gulf seabed 17 miles offshore.