Learning the tale of an ‘unknown seaman'

Sometimes dead men do have tales to tell. But it’s up to the living to find out what they might be.

A human skeleton that washed up ashore in a small boat on Topsail Island in May 1942 is a tale that is still coming to light.

The unknown sailor was subsequently buried in Burgaw, the county seat of Pender County, where the man was found.

His death certificate was marked “Unknown Seaman,” as was the concrete slab over his grave.

But he was found five days after the HMT Bedfordshire was sunk by the U-558 near Cape Lookout, killing all 37 crewmembers aboard.

Of the 37, only six have been identified from recovered bodies that washed ashore that same year but much further north. They were found in the Outer Banks and were buried in a small British Cemetery on Ocracoke Island.

Because of the distance between the bodies, the Topsail Island remains were assumed to be from the German submarine U-352, which also sank in May 1942.

But questions remained, and in 1992, the American Legion Post in Burgaw, which owned the grave, requested an exhumation from the Superior Court to allow University of North Carolina at Wilmington scientists to attempt an examination and identification of the remains.

Following the exhumation, Jackie Moore of Sloop Point was located.

Moore’s father had found the sailor on the beach with a small boat that had drifted ashore and overturned in the surf. Moore said the man came ashore in a gray lapstrake dorie with a brass plate on it that read, “Made in Portsmouth, England.”

British naval veterans John Munro and Gus Britton in the United Kingdom joined the search for information.

The cook of the HMT St. Zeno, which operated alongside the Bedfordshire, told Munro that the sunken ship did indeed have a small lapstrake dorie. Sometimes towed behind the Bedfordshire, it was used for utility work while based at the Morehead Naval Section Base in North Carolina, the same base it left en route for its fateful encounter with U-558.

Scientists at UNCW determined the remains were of a 5’8” tall man in his 30s who had bad teeth — all been lost prior to his death except for one found in the grave.

Significant also was the high bridge nasal bone of what was left of the badly deteriorated skull. Physical anthropologist Dr. R. Dale McCall found evidence that the man most likely had kidney stones or kidney problems.

The British researchers Munro and Britton were able to locate other former crewmembers of Bedfordshire and also family members of crew members. Several possible candidates were suggested for the dead sailor.

After much searching and research, the investigation came to a dead end and the skeletal remains were stored at UNCW.

Recently released Classified Sixth Naval District Intelligence records from World War II, which were declassified in 1997 and made available to researchers in June, have been found to contain a report on the dead unknown sailor, who had only been suspected to be British.

Photographs of the dead sailor on the beach and the small boat were found with an attached report stating that he was a “British Sailor” and that the British Vice-Consul in Wilmington had given permission for his burial in the small obscure cemetery in Burgaw.

After viewing the newly discovered archive photographs of the skeletonized body, McCall was able to determine the man was older than first thought.

This assessment was confirmed by Dr. Stephen Nawrocki of the University of Indianapolis, a forensic anthropologist frequently called by police agencies to help with discovered bodies.

“From the photos, while not much to go on, seems he could be a white male judging from the facial bones,” Nawrocki said. “(It) seems like the teeth in the lower jaw have been lost before death and some of the bone have (shrunk), leaving the one molar kind of high and dry.”

But the unknown sailor aren’t the only remains still out there.

In 2007, a diver reported human remains in the HMT Bedfordshire wreckage, a report relayed to Joseph Swartzer, the director of the North Carolina Maritime Museums.

“I was told that there had been human remains found by a diver in the wreckage of the Bedfordshire and that the diver had covered them with wreckage so that they could not be found by other divers and disturbed,” he said. “I reported it to the proper British authorities.”

Robert Purifoy, owner and operator of Olympus Dive Charters in Morehead City, said he had heard similar reports.

“I have heard that there are bones that have been seen on the stern part of the wreckage and different people have reported seeing some,” he said.

David Allberg, superintendent and director of the Monitor Marine Sanctuary, said that a current survey of the Bedfordshire wreckage was related to the skeletal discovery.

“We were asked by British authorities to expedite a survey of the Bedfordshire and search for human remains of World War II sailors,” he said.

However, crews with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and several partner agencies that have been surveying the site since early this month says that’s not the case.

“I have not been told of any skeleton in the wreckage,” Maritime archaeologist and principal investigator Joe Hoyt said.

The British, for their part, support NOAA’s statement.

“(NOAA) asked me if they could do a metallurgical survey of the wreck of the Bedfordshire and we authorized them to do a non-intrusive survey, just the outside,” Commander Matt O’Grady of the British Embassy’s Naval Staff said. “As far as we are concerned, the ship is a war grave, and the (human remains) will remain where they are.

“The NOAA survey and human remains are not related and separate.”

With the sailor’s remains at UNCW and more believed to be in the wreckage of the sunken Bedfordshire it remains to be seen whether further steps will be taken to retrieve and identify the dead.

“If the skeleton at the university is determined to be British, then it will be handled at that time,” O’Grady said.