Battle of the Gulf: Archaeological Investigations in the other American Theater of World War II U-boat Operations

Author(s): Douglas Jones

Year: 2015

Summary

Following the early success of Operation Drumbeat off the American East Coast, German Naval Vice Admiral Karl Dönitz turned his periscopes towards similarly wide-open hunting grounds in the Gulf of Mexico. For a brief but intense period beginning in the spring of 1942 U-boat attacks claimed over 50 Allied Merchant Marine casualties in the Gulf, and crippled many more.  Over the last decade many of these wrecks have been located during federally-regulated oil and gas surveys, and subsequently been the subjects of archaeological and biological studies. This paper will highlight the historical and archaeological research that has been conducted to date, the role of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management in this process, and where continued research on Battle of the Gulf wrecks may head in the future. 

Cite this Record

Battle of the Gulf: Archaeological Investigations in the other American Theater of World War II U-boat Operations. Douglas Jones. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, Seattle, Washington. 2015 ( tDAR id: 433775)

Keywords

Temporal Keywords
World War II

Spatial Coverage

min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 473