Like many of the better wreck dives off this coast, the 36-mile boat ride due south out of Morehead City can take the better part of an hour and a half. Topping the list of historic war causalities that divers come to North Carolina to explore is the wreck of the WE Hutton. By the close of that same year, U-boat operations had swelled in rank along the US continental shelf (between Maine and the Florida Keys), and their effectiveness could be measured by close to 100 kills with only 21 losses of the own. History can also account for their first series of strikes against American shipping, in 1941, with operation Paukenschlag (Drumbeat), comprised of five type-IX class boats.īetween their arrival in US territorial waters, 27 December 1941 and 6 February 1942, the drumbeaters had sunk 25 ships. Torpedo AlleyĬommanded by Admiral Karl Donitz, Germany’s U-boatwaffe historically proved to be one the most-effective offence weapons on the high seas during the first two years of World War Two.

The most infamous in US history was the onslaught created by Germany's marauding U-boats right on our doorstep. I don’t think there is an East Coast Atlantic wreck diver who is not unfamiliar to just how many wreck sites were created by the ‘Battle of the Atlantic’. What makes the number of wrecks off North Carolina’s Outer Banks, from Cape Hatteras south to Cape Fear, so interesting is that while half were victims befallen to nature’s whims (namely storms), the other half were sent to the bottom by human confrontations.

Lake Huron alone holds 1,100 documented wrecks in its belly. North Carolina’s Outer Banks In Search of Historic ShipwrecksĮven the Great Lakes can boast about having more wrecks than the Carolina coast.

World of warships north carolina guide