Hi M3-SRT8,

The media will publish anything they think will sell papers and never look back. The more bizarre or controversial it is the more papers it will sell. Stories that can’t be proved are especially easy to drag out for days too.

If a story is proven untrue they sometimes try to make a story out that too. If they do print a retraction it will be on an obscure back page etc. They enjoy constitutional protection in this country so there is almost no way to hold them accountable. If Joe told them something & they print it Joe is the only one that might be held accountable and they don’t have to give up his name. Today if you can prove they deliberately distorted a story that damaged you or that they made no effort to get at the truth you might be able to hold them accountable in court but not for these old wartime stories.

To make matters worst typically the reporter knows absolutely nothing about the subject matter – they just take what someone tells them, put their own spin on it and take whatever “literary license” they choose and publish it. If it sells enough papers it advances their career.

I have spent years comparing newspaper accounts of merchant ship sinkings with National Archives records and other records and accounts from others that were there and there are frequently striking differences. Whether the differences are simple misunderstandings of a reporter that is totally ignorant of the subject matter or the fog of war has left whoever is telling the story with the wrong info about what actually happened is sometimes quite difficult to determine – especially when you add whatever the reporter or his management embellished the story with to make it more sensational and therefore more sellable.

Once a bogus story circulates you have multiple folks telling the same story and that is more than enough credibility to get the story published – especially where the reporter can’t do any further research or simply doesn’t care if the story is true or not – it is still a story as far as they are concerned.

Newspaper accounts are good to have and if accurate can provide a lot of insight into what actually happened or what was thought to have happened at the time but you have to research them yourself to determine if they are at all credible. If you spend enough time doing this you will be amazed at just how wrong many newspaper accounts are – especially those written during the war when wartime propaganda, fear for the welfare of their loved ones serving at the front, deliberate government misinformation to keep the real facts from the enemy (and sometimes their own people) and general ignorance by the public about the technology and tactics actually being used. For example there were a great many “U-boat sightings” by people that had no idea what a U-boat looked like. They couldn’t tell the difference between submarines of different nations much less identify a shadow on the water as specifically being a German U-boat. Keep in mind U-boats didn’t generally operate on the surface close to inhabited land in broad daylight for obvious reasons so any sighting would have to be at night or in poor visibility. Being sighted on the surface in shallow water was the kiss of death for a U-boat. Their most effective weapon was stealth – not being detected. Being sunk in shallow water was a huge problem for a U-boat as that would leave its secrets (code book, enigma machine, torpedo technology etc.) within reach of enemy divers so they tried to be especially careful to not be spotted when operating in shallow water.

Lastly, merchant seamen are traditionally some of the world’s best story tellers. I grew up in a merchant marine family. My dad and his brother (and most of their friends) were merchant seamen all of their lives and I have merchant seaman’s papers too but have never used them. Some of my fondest memories as a child are of going to the union hall with my dad and hearing the tall tales his friends would tell me about sea monsters, 100 foot waves, exotic places they had been, wars in foreign countries, mermaids, head hunters and pretty much any other tall tales you can think of. For some of them a shadow on the water became a U-boat when they told the story and a dolphin swimming by became a torpedo that missed etc. especially if they found a gullible reporter to tell the story too. However when you go to the actual records of the encounter you don’t find the stories.

There are hundreds of these stories some of which did get into the papers but much more is known today about what the U-boats did and did not do that most folks interested in U-boats today just laugh and ignore them. Rest assured that others heard the same story you did and someone may have already asked the same questions you did here on the forum in the past. We constantly get questions about this type of myth.

Regards,

Ken Dunn