17. The Second Happy Time began with American entry into the war
Before the declaration of war between the United States and Germany, American destroyers had fired on several U-boats. One, USS Reuben James, had been sunk by the Germans. The United States Coast Guard had also destroyed a German weather station in Greenland. When a declaration of war formalized what was already a fact of life in the Atlantic, Doenitz deployed his long-range U-boats on the American East Coast. U-boats were off American shores by the second week of 1942. There they discovered that the US did not employ a coastal blackout at night. They also found few destroyers prowling the American coastal waters.
Ships moving along the coast were silhouetted against the lights of the shoreline, creating perfect targets for the German skippers, many of them experienced by more than two years of war. The first wave of U-boats remained on the American coastline for three weeks before returning to France. By February 6, when the last boat departed for home, 156,000 tons of American shipping had gone to the bottom. Many of the sinkings were seen from the shore. The U-boats left having been unhindered by the American Navy. It was the beginning of what the Germans called the Second Happy Time, and a worse disaster for the United States than Pearl Harbor had been.
