Sea Scouts in the Roanoke Area Council began during World War II, with the first local ship being chartered in December, 1942, at Oakland Baptist Church in the Williamson Road area. The next boat to form was in May, 1944, at Calvary Baptist Church, closer to downtown. Later that same summer, in August, 1944, these two Roanoke ships joined with Salem Sea Scouts of the ship “Longwood” for a week-long cruise in the Chesapeake Bay. They would put in at Severna Park, MD, which is north of Annapolis, and float down the Severn River into the bay.
Keep in mind, the world was still at war during this time. What we now know, but the Roanoke scouts didn’t fully know then, was that the Chesapeake Bay was crawling with German submarines. I went on a “deep dive” to see the extent of the German U-Boat presence in the Chesapeake, and found references to our “largely undefended” east coast during WWII.
On June 12, U-Boat 701 laid mines at the entrance of the Chesapeake Bay, and no less than two commercial cargo vessels were sunk in a matter of days. Meanwhile, the two Roanoke newspapers mentioned nothing of this. The story was prevalent in Norfolk, as the explosions of each sinking could be seen for miles, but the threat to our homeland was not widely reported in southwestern Virginia.
Even a month later, the Chesapeake Bay was still considered quite safe by the local Roanoke council as it sent a delegation of 23 troop leaders, including Scout Executive R.W. DuBose, to spend a week aboard a schooner sponsored by Region 3. The purpose of the leadership cruise was to study “problems of sea scouting,” according to the Roanoke World News of July 20, 1942. Apparently this “blind eye” approach to safety in the bay continued throughout the war, as our Sea Scouts conducted an annual float on the same risky waters each summer.
I will leave this story open at this point, hoping for better discernment of the situation, but for now I am left in amazement at how the news was filtered to the degree it was, and how that act of self-protection led to some very unsafe practices based on the resulting decisions.
History always leaves the door open for new information to come along.
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