August 11, 2004
by Jack Irion
Jack Irion, PhD, is Chief, Social Sciences Unit, of the Minerals Management Service of the Department of the Interior.  Dr. Irion’s role during the mission is to serve as the Contracting Officer’s Technical Representative (COTR), the person who ensures the purposes and contracted responsibilities of the overall mission are fulfilled.

Battlefield Archaeology at the
Alcoa Puritan

At 6,450 feet deep, the 6,795-ton freighter Alcoa Puritan is the deepest site visited by the Deep Wrecks Survey team.  Because of the extreme depth, it takes over an hour just to lower the ROV to the seafloor to begin work.  As we began our survey, evidence of the Alcoa Puritan’s last struggle soon became apparent in the form of numerous gaping holes in the vessel’s hull plates. 

On May 6, 1942, the Alcoa Puritan’s course from Port of Spain, Trinidad, to Mobile, Alabama carried into the path of the waiting U-507.  A few minutes before noon, a torpedo streaked through the still, blue water, barely missing the Alcoa’s stern.  Her startled Captain, Yngvar Krantz, ordered his vessel full speed ahead to try to outrun the U-boat and turned her to present as small a target as possible.  The U-507 surfaced and gave chase.  At a distance of about a mile, the U-boat opened fire on the unarmed freighter with her deck guns.  With a top speed of 16 knots, the Alcoa was no match for the faster U-507.  Over the course of the next 40 minutes, the crew of the U-boat fired around 75 rounds with her 10.5cm and 3.7cm deck guns, scoring nearly 50 hits and disabling the Alcoa’s steering gear.  Now helpless and disabled, the Alcoa’s crew prepared to abandon ship.  After allowing the crew to get clear of their stricken vessel, the U-boat moved to her port side and fired a torpedo just below her number 4 hatch.  The doomed vessel sank in less than five minutes but all of her crew survived.

As the Deep Wrecks Survey Team inspected the scene of the Alcoa Puritan’s last resting place, we were initially struck by the lack of debris immediately around the wreck.  Unlike the Robert E. Lee that we had surveyed just the day before, the site immediately around the Alcoa was surprisingly clean.  As we persisted in surveying our grid lines to the south of the wreck, we came upon a large debris field over a thousand feet away from the main wreck.  Small objects like chairs were found interspersed with large parts of the ship like the top of one of her two large cargo cranes.  The team’s archaeologists speculated that this was the actually scene where the torpedo struck the Alcoa and that her hull came to rest over a thousand feet away after falling through water over a mile deep.  This theory seemingly was confirmed by the discovery of a surprising artifact – an expended brass shell casing from the U-507’s 10.5cm deck cannon.  Because this single artifact so invoked the U-boat war in the Gulf, the decision was made to raise this cannon shell from the first U-boat to enter the Gulf and preserve it for future generations.  Once we return to port, the shell casing will go to Texas A&M University for conservation.  In the meantime, it appears that Tropical Storm Bonnie has interfered with our plans to visit the site of the Anona, which lies directly in her path and we move off to the west.  As a result of weather conditions, the decision was made to drop our planned visit to the Anona in favor of collecting additional data at some of the other sites.  As with most scientific investigations, our research thus far has raised as many questions as it has answered.

Above and left: The 10.5cm shell casing recovered from the Alcoa Puritan site. This is almost certainly part of one of the approx. 75 shell fired by U-507, the first U-boat to enter the Gulf of Mexico.