On the evening of February 4, 1942, an American oil tanker carrying 88,369 barrels of diesel fuel from Corpus Christi to New York was moving slowly off the New Jersey coast when a German U-boat surfaced about 250 yards off her starboard side. The U-103 was hunting along what the Atlantic seaboard would soon learn to call the Eastern Sea Frontier - that long, mostly defenseless stretch of American coast where German submarines opened a campaign that sank dozens of merchant ships in the first months of 1942. The tanker's name was India Arrow. She had spent twenty years carrying oil between the Gulf, the East Coast, and ports as far as Hong Kong, Colombo, Calcutta, and Rotterdam. Twenty-six of her thirty-eight crew died that night.
The India Arrow slid down the ways at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts, on January 28, 1921. Standard Oil had ordered four new tankers in 1919 to expand its long-haul oil business - the others were the China Arrow, the Japan Arrow, and the Java Arrow. The fleet was named for the Far East trade it was meant to serve. India Arrow was assigned a deadweight tonnage of 12,290 and ten double main cargo tanks that could carry roughly 3.6 million gallons of oil. She was built on the Isherwood longitudinal-framing principle - extra-strong, designed for heavy seas, and rigged with three Scotch marine boilers fitted to burn oil for fuel. Mrs. Harry Dundas, wife of the manager of the Standard Transportation Company's British India branch, christened her. Six months later she made her maiden voyage to Hong Kong by way of San Francisco, carrying 10,800 tons of kerosene.
Through the 1920s the India Arrow ran a global rotation that read like a shipping clerk's atlas. Gulf ports to Hong Kong by way of San Francisco. Hong Kong to Penang. Penang to Rotterdam. Rotterdam to New York. New York to Colombo. Colombo to New York. By 1923 she had made at least two complete circumnavigations of the planet. In September 1923 she found her sister ship, the Standard Arrow, drifting damaged in a Pacific storm and towed her 800 miles to Yokohama. In February 1925 a rogue wave smashed her forward and aft wheelhouses on a run to Shanghai and injured several crew members. She made port, was repaired, and went back to work. She spent the late 1920s running petroleum from California refineries to ports in China and Japan, an oil-trade artery that defined the prewar Pacific.
Beginning in 1927 the India Arrow shifted from the Pacific to the intercoastal trade - San Pedro to New York via the Panama Canal, then Gulf ports to East Coast refineries. On December 30, 1927, she was in dry dock in Hoboken when a fire broke out at the Union Ship Scaling Company pier and spread along the waterfront. The crew released her down the slipway just in time and tugs dragged her upstream to safety. The SS Seneca, less lucky, burned to a total loss. The India Arrow kept working - Beaumont to Boston, Corpus Christi to Providence, Port Arthur to New York. She made the occasional foreign run, including a 1928 trip to Calcutta and a 1931 circumnavigation. By 1938 she was chartered to carry high-octane gasoline from Beaumont to the Navy at Yorktown. War was coming. She did not yet know.
In December 1941, Germany declared war on the United States. By January 1942, U-boat captain Karl Donitz had launched Operation Drumbeat - a coordinated campaign against American coastal shipping. The Atlantic seaboard was almost completely unprepared. Coastal towns kept their lights on at night, silhouetting tankers against the western horizon. There were no convoys. There were almost no escorts. There was no blackout. The U-boats picked off cargo ships and tankers, often within sight of the beach, often after dark when the lighted shore made the targets unmistakable. In the first three months of 1942, more than two hundred merchant vessels were lost along the East Coast and in the Gulf. The India Arrow was one of them - sunk on February 4 within sight of New Jersey by U-103 under captain Werner Winter.
Captain Carl Samuel Johnson commanded the India Arrow on her last voyage. He had a crew of nine officers and twenty-nine enlisted men. The U-103 surfaced at close range and fired six or seven deck-gun shots into the bow section. The diesel fuel ignited. The tanker sank stern-first within minutes. Twelve men survived in a single lifeboat. Twenty-six did not. The survivors drifted for approximately 36 hours in the cold February Atlantic before being picked up. Among the dead were officers who had served on the India Arrow for years, men whose names are now inscribed on the merchant marine memorial in Battery Park in New York City. Their ship rests in approximately 220 feet of water off the New Jersey coast, where she is still visited occasionally by divers. The wreck is marked on charts. The crew is remembered.
The wreck of the SS India Arrow lies at approximately 38.56 degrees north, 73.83 degrees west, in roughly 220 feet of water off the New Jersey coast about 50 nautical miles east-southeast of Cape May. From cruising altitude, the wreck site is well offshore - no land features are visible from directly overhead. Atlantic City International (KACY) is the nearest large airport, about 65 nautical miles northwest. Cape May County (KWWD) lies about 55 nautical miles west-northwest. The site is in the open Atlantic continental shelf waters that German U-boats hunted heavily in early 1942.