On the afternoon of 30 November 1942, Captain Günther Gumprich climbed down into his launch and pulled away from the side of his ship. He had only just left the German auxiliary cruiser Thor when the supply tanker Uckermark exploded. The blast wrecked the tanker, and fire spread to Thor, to the old Australian liner Leuan, and to the Japanese Navy vessel Unkai Maru No. 3.
All four ships were lost, along with several smaller harbor craft. From his launch a short distance away, Gumprich watched his command burn. Thor had come into Yokohama on 10 October 1942 after 324 days at sea, during which she had captured or sunk ten Allied ships. She looked like what she had been built as: a fruit ship of under 4,000 tons.
That was the entire point. Hidden behind false fittings along her sides, she carried six guns of nearly six inches, and her crew had spent the better part of a year pretending to be anything but a warship. Now she tied up at Shinko Pier in a harbor belonging to an ally, with nobody left to fool. The crew had earned their rest.
On her first cruise in 1940 and 1941, Thor had fought her way clear of two British armed merchant cruisers. One of them, the Carnarvon Castle, took eight hits and lost six men killed, while Thor came out of the fight untouched. She then sank a third, the Voltaire, and pulled nearly 200 of her crew from the sea. Her second cruise, under Gumprich, was the one that brought her to Japan.
Thor’s floatplane machine-gunned the Australian passenger liner Nankin, and the raider’s guns opened up at long range. The liner’s crew tried to scuttle her and abandoned ship, but a German boarding party patched her up and sailed her on as a prize, renamed Leuan. The Nankin’s passengers, women and children among them, went from ship to ship, reached Yokohama in July, and were sent by train to an old convent at Fukushima, about 250 kilometers north of Tokyo. They were not classed as prisoners of war, so the Red Cross did not hear of them until March 1944.
At home in Australia, they had been listed as missing at sea, presumed dead. The mail from the Nankin went another way. The mailbags reached the German naval attaché in Tokyo, and historians have linked them to a summary of Pacific shipping prepared in Wellington, built on decoded Japanese signals and sent by ordinary post. How much it told the Germans and the Japanese remains a matter of argument.
For seven weeks, Thor rested and refitted alongside the Uckermark, which before a change of name had been the Altmark, the ship British sailors had boarded in a Norwegian fjord in February 1940. The Uckermark had come up to Japan carrying aviation gasoline. Chinese laborers were cleaning out her tanks, and a tank that has held gasoline holds its vapor long after the fuel is gone. Nobody agrees on how many died in the explosion.
The Japanese count is 102: 61 Germans, 36 Chinese, and five Japanese. Western accounts give 13 from Thor and 53 from the tanker, 66 Germans in all, leaving the Chinese and local dead as a number nobody wrote down. The German War Graves Commission lists 71 from the two ships. Three figures, three ways of counting, and none of the books that cite them can say for certain which is right.
Among the dead on the waterfront was a peddler from the Goto Islands who made his living selling odds and ends to the crews of foreign ships. Many years after the war, his grandson became a well-known film actor. Nobody agrees on the cause either. The usual explanation is a careless spark in the tanks, a worker chipping rust or lighting a cigarette where the vapor had not been cleared.
The emperor’s brother, Prince Takamatsu, noted in his diary that it was probably the work of a fifth column. No published Japanese finding has ever turned up, and the physical evidence went to the bottom of the harbor. The local paper stood by its single-line report calling it a merchant ship fire, a description accurate in the narrowest possible sense. The matter was treated as secret and stayed little known until old glass plate photographs from the Yokohama customs house surfaced.
By that evening, a great many German sailors in the port no longer had a ship. The first thing their navy offered them was passage home. On 17 December 1942, the blockade runner Doggerbank sailed from Yokohama for France by way of Kobe, Saigon, Singapore, and Jakarta. She had begun life as a British freighter until the raider Atlantis captured her in 1941, and she carried rubber, fats, and fish oil for the factories of Europe.
She also carried 365 people, many of them survivors of the Yokohama fire. She was running several days ahead of her expected schedule. At 9:53 on the night of 3 March 1943, far out in the Atlantic west of the Canary Islands, the German submarine U-43 put three torpedoes into her, its crew believing she was a British steamer. Doggerbank sank almost at once.
Five boats got away. On 29 March, a Spanish tanker came across one of them with a single man still alive in it, Fritz Kurt, and landed him on Aruba. Kurt said fifteen men had started out in his boat. His account of the weeks in that boat ends with the captain dead by his own hand.
Men who had walked out of a burning harbor in Japan died in the Atlantic on their way home, sunk by their own navy’s torpedoes for the offense of being early. The men left behind in Japan with no ship to go to were put up at an inn at the hot spring of Ashinoyu in the hills of Hakone, a long way from saltwater. A few officers found their way home by submarine. Gumprich stayed.
On the last day of 1942, a month after losing his ship, he was awarded the Knight’s Cross for Thor’s second cruise. For the first months of 1943, he was a decorated captain with nothing to command. Then another raider came into Japan for a refit at the Mitsubishi yard. The Michel’s captain fell ill, and Gumprich got her.
On 1 May 1943, Michel sailed from Kobe on what turned out to be the last cruise any German raider made. She went down into the Indian Ocean. Before dawn on 15 June, she attacked the Norwegian motor ship Hoey Silverdawn, killing 27 of her crew, and six survivors were taken aboard as prisoners. Two days later, the little motor torpedo boat she carried on deck, a craft named Esau, hit the tanker Ferncastle with two torpedoes.
Thirteen more Norwegians went below as prisoners. Gumprich worried that lifeboats from his victims would reach land and report him, so he took his ship south of Australia and out into the Pacific. Around 10 September, far out in the eastern Pacific, he sank a third Norwegian, the tanker India, with all 41 of her crew. Nobody outside the raider learned what had become of the India until the war was over.
Then Michel turned for Japan, for Yokohama, and another refit, with her 19 prisoners still aboard. On the other side of the war, the submarine Tarpon was working the approaches to Tokyo Bay. Her commander was Lieutenant Commander Thomas Wogan, a Philadelphian who had taken her over in the summer of 1942. Tarpon knew these waters well.
She had broken the passenger cargo ship Fushimi Maru in two off the Honshu coast in February 1943. In October, Tarpon was back off Honshu on her ninth war patrol. On the night of 16 October, near Yokohama, she picked up a ship and tracked her, and her officers took her for a large auxiliary. At 1:56 in the morning of 17 October, Tarpon fired four torpedoes, and the target stopped dead in the water.
Then the target started moving again and came straight at the submarine. Tarpon went deep, passed underneath her, came up on the far side, and fired three more torpedoes. One hit the stern. A last torpedo struck where the first had struck.
The Navy’s history of the boat says the ship exploded and disappeared. Eight torpedoes and four attacks, and by one account, the raider was gone in under a quarter of an hour. 263 men died on Michel. 110 survived and made it ashore in Japan.
Gumprich was not among the survivors. He had stepped off one raider into a launch moments before she burned, and now he went down with the next. So did the 19 Norwegians held below decks. Men who had come through being sunk once by this same raider died inside her, sunk in turn by a submarine crew that had no idea anyone but the enemy was aboard.
How many of the Yokohama survivors were among the dead is precisely where the papers give out. Michel’s own log for the cruise was lost, most likely with the ship. No crew list for her last voyage has surfaced in published sources. One English-language history says Gumprich rallied Thor’s survivors and took Michel out with a composite crew, but it gives no names and no numbers, and nothing else supports it.
Their captain is the one man who can be placed in both disasters with certainty. Every other name stays where the fire and the sea left it. Tarpon never knew what she had done. Her crew reported a large auxiliary sunk, and that is what went home with them.
Only after the war, when the Navy went through the enemy’s own files, was the ship identified as Michel, the first German raider sunk by an American submarine in the Pacific. The positions tell the rest. The sinking site most sources give, set beside the one on file for the Tatsuta Maru, places the two wrecks about fifteen nautical miles apart and eight months apart in time. Wogan never went looking for a commerce raider, and until the war was over, he did not know he had met one.
Every ship bound for Yokohama had to come up through that stretch of sea. Tarpon simply stayed where the traffic was. The Germans were buried in Yokohama’s foreign cemetery under a stone that says in Japanese that the German crew rest here. A small service is still held there every November.
Tarpon finished her patrol and was back at Pearl Harbor on 3 November 1943. The men of Thor who had stayed waited out the war in the hills at Hakone. And ships bound for Yokohama kept coming up through the same water.
