In the early months of World War II, they ranged almost at will along the U.S. The major threat to shipping bound to and from Delaware Bay came from the extraordinarily successful submarines of the Nazi Kriegsmarine. Secrecy about every aspect of the base was absolute. It boasted two 16-inch naval guns capable of throwing a 55-gallon barrel of lead almost 25 miles four 12-inch guns in two separate batteries four six-inch guns on armored swivel carriages eight eight-inch guns mounted on railroad cars, four of them concealed in earthen bunkers 16 155mm mobile guns three four-gun batteries of 90mm to be used against torpedo boats and four three-inch guns permanently mounted at the northernmost battery on the cape.Īll this was overseen by 2,000 troops housed in 85 barracks, 60 tents and eight mess halls, many of whom patrolled the beaches regularly with dogs. Miles was acre for acre one of the most heavily fortified bits of geography in the world. One sunken ship blocking the channel would have been disastrous. Gasoline for British bombers and Russian tanks, fuel oil for Royal Navy battleships and British locomotives and all the factories of the Allied cause all depended on free passage through Delaware Bay. Though much of the oil would eventually travel to and from those refineries by pipeline, in the years before and early in the war, its only pathway lay up Delaware Bay, through the narrow, shoal-flanked shipping channel guarded by Cape Henlopen and its coastal approaches to the south. Naval Shipyard at Philadelphia, some 90% of the future Allies’ oil-refining capacity lay upstream in New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the vicinity of Marcus Hook. In addition to the DuPont chemical plants at Wilmington and the U.S. Its reason for being was the wealth of industry that lay up the Delaware River. entry in what was looming as World War II.
Things I could find no record of at all.”Īccording to Pearson and various other sources, federal land known as the Cape Henlopen Reservation was transferred to the War Department in 1938 in anticipation of possible U.S. But there are still lots of holes in the story. “Whenever I would stumble on an old bunker or a concrete foundation for a building, I would try to find out what it was,” Pearson said. But other towers lay far outside the original boundaries of the fort, almost as far south as the Maryland line. Part of that land included four of the towers.
Various land swaps over the years transferred part of its original 1,440 acres to the Navy, the city of Lewes and the state. Miles had been disarmed in 1945 and broken up 11 years later,” Pearson said. Pearson’s persistent curiosity led him to become a volunteer historian at Cape Henlopen State Park, tirelessly roaming the park’s 3,200 acres in his Jeep and poking around in state and federal archives in search of its World War II past-a past all but forgotten in 1964 when the park was born.
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