10/23/2026
For almost sixty years, the Navy's own records had it wrong, and a German submarine lay hidden in five thousand feet of water off the Louisiana coast. 🌊
On July 30, 1942, the passenger ship Robert E. Lee was in the Gulf of Mexico southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi, with several hundred people aboard, when a torpedo from the German submarine U-166 struck her. Twenty five people died, ten crew and fifteen passengers. The rest went into lifeboats and onto rafts, and were pulled from the water by the patrol craft PC-566, another vessel, and a tug.
Picture that rescue. Hundreds of people in the open Gulf at the end of July, life jackets bobbing on the swells, waiting for a small gray patrol boat to reach them while the sea slowly settled. âš“
The same patrol craft that gathered the survivors had also gone after the submarine. PC-566 dropped ten depth charges, and its crew saw oil and debris on the surface. They reported a kill. The Navy did not accept it. For decades, most historians believed U-166 had been sunk days later, somewhere else entirely. That later attack is now thought to have been aimed at a different submarine.
The truth stayed on the bottom until May of 2001, when a pipeline survey in the Gulf found the wreck of U-166, about forty five miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River, lying in five thousand feet of water. It was announced on June 8, 2001. The Robert E. Lee, a passenger freighter, was the last ship U-166 sank. 🕯️
We tend to think of World War II as something that happened overseas. For Louisiana, it happened off the end of the river. Ships left the Mississippi for the Gulf with the knowledge that submarines were waiting, and the men and women aboard them were ordinary people on ordinary errands.
Some of the most important chapters of the war were written within a day's sail of the French Quarter, and the Gulf kept this one secret for nearly sixty years.
