Customer Reviews

A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs of a Wartime Boomtown

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In January, 1934, the Ethyl-Dow Chemical Co. began operation of their plant extracting bromine from sea water at Kure Beach. On April 1, they published a 7-page supplement to the Sunday Star-News with full details of the construction, process,personnel, and local involvement.

For the first time in history man extracted an element from sea water. The extracted bromine was converted to ethylene dibromide, the scavenger that allowed tetraethyl lead to prevent knocking in gasoline engines without fouling the engines with
lead deposits.

The product of this plant and a second built in Freeport, TX, were vital in the high-octane aviation gasoline that kept Allied planes flying in WW II.

The author completely neglects this significance and concentrates on nurturing a myth of a U-boat attack on the plant.

On the night of 24-25 July, 1943, the plant received a warning and was ordered to shut down about 1:30 AM. I interviewed Carl Moore who was working in the ethylene
dibromide building. He said that after he had shut down the unit he went to the top of the building, the highest in the plant, and saw some escort vessels moving about in the water.
He said no shots were fired. Monroe Shigley was the manager of both the NC and TX plants. He confirmed the shutdown and said no shots were fired.

I applied for and provided the documentation for the historic marker about the plant that was erected. The marker makes no mention of an attack that never happened.

Jones relies on the creator of the attack myth, Horton, for the mythical story, and, worse, for a mythical description of the process. Horton worked in the personnel department and had no reason to be on the plant at 2AM. After the emergency shutdown, he concocted the submarine attack story and has been telling it ever since.

Horton was a local businessman and became a New Hanover county commissioner. The myth grew long legs because it was not possible to refute it absolutely until the 1990s when the world learned of the British success breaking the German Enigma machine codes. It was not possible to employ this information in
attacking U-boats until the U. S. Navy and the Royal Navy deployed hunter-killer groups of escort carriers with destroyers and destroyer escorts to hunt them. Also in the 1990s the complete German U-Boat records were published along with the complete details of anti-submarine actions by Allied ships and aircraft. Then it was confirmed that Doenitz pulled his U-boats away from the U. S. coast in May, 1943. By July of 1943 there was no U-Boat within hundreds of miles of Kure Beach. I provided all of this information to Jones while he was writing his book, but he chose to nurture the myth. The final nail in the coffin of the myth was driven home when a young man reading my collected papers at the NHC Library in February, 2005, referred me to <uboat.net> which reported that from June, 1943, the Atlantic U-Boats left their bases without deck guns. Robert Sterns' "Type
VII U-Boats" confirmed that the last deck gun attack took place in the spring of 1942, with the removal of deck guns being ordered November 14, 1942. Any U-Boat prowling the Atlantic in July, 1943, had no gun to attack the bromine plant.