Henry Burbage
An Ocean City garage owner, and the resident the Associated Press quoted on 22 December 1941 when gunfire offshore shook the town's houses for an hour and a half. He said the explosions came in bursts — 'three or four quick explosions, then silence, followed by other outbreaks' — and continued at intervals for more than ninety minutes. The Coast Guard would not comment; the Army forts at Lewes and Fort Saulsbury said they had not been firing. He is one of the very few ordinary residents of Ocean City the campaign can name in the first fortnight of the war.
In the record (1)
1941 · 1941-12-22
On 22 December 1941 gunfire offshore shook the houses of Ocean City for an hour and a half and was heard eight miles inland at Berlin. The Coast Guard would not comment.
'Loud explosions offshore rattled windows and slightly shook houses in this resort city today and were heard in Berlin, Md., eight miles inland.' Henry Burbage, an Ocean City garage owner, said the explosions 'continued at intervals for more than an hour and a half' — 'there would be three or four quick explosions, then silence, followed by other outbreaks.' G. E. Henry of Berlin confirmed that they shook houses and rattled windows. 'Coast Guard officials here would not comment.' The sounds were heard all along the lower Delaware coast; Army officers at Fort Miles, Lewes, and at Fort Saulsbury reported hearing them and said neither fort had fired its guns. The Aberdeen proving grounds was firing that day, and on 16 December the Navy Department had asked the paper to give notice that heavy firing would be heard in the Tangier Sound area during target practice through 26 December — but Tangier Sound is on the far side of the peninsula. The Salisbury Times headed it 'HOUSES SHAKE AT OCEAN CITY / Navy Denies Rumor Of Battle In Atlantic'. Fifteen days after Pearl Harbor, and four months before the tanker David H. Atwater was shelled off Assateague, Ocean City had already heard the war at sea and been told nothing about it. — 1942 FULL PASS, 2026-08-11 [confirmed]: Confirmed, and the route to answering its open question has been tested and reported. The Eastern Sea Frontier war diary for DECEMBER 1941 was located and fetched: as digitised it contains only the cover page and table of contents — Chapters I-III and Appendices I-III — with NO day-by-day Enemy Action Diary or Patrol Log. The daily-log appendices first appear, in the digitised run, with April 1942. So the 22 December 1941 explosions are NOT in the online frontier record and remain unexplained; that is now a measured result rather than an untried lead. What the April 1942 diary does show is that this kind of report DID travel: on 5 April 1942 the Ocean City Coast Guard Station's report of heavy gunfire offshore went through ComFive into the frontier's log with a position on it. Whatever the town heard in December 1941, the machinery that would have recorded it existed within four months.
Source · checked 2026-08-11