Herbert R. O'Conor
Governor of Maryland · active 1939-1947
Governor of Maryland through the war. On the evening of 10 April 1942, at a defense meeting conducted by the Linthicum Heights Women's Club, he told his audience that a ship had been sunk 'at our very doors', that the bodies of thirteen seamen had been taken to Ocean City, and that they and others had been 'shot down in cold blood by the crew of the Axis submarine' as they crowded into their lifeboats - the earliest public statement the campaign has found of what happened off this beach on 2 April 1942, and one that matches the U.S. Navy's own war diary exactly on the number and the manner. He would not name the ship. He is also the Governor whose rubber-and-gasoline conservation appeal the Ocean City council cited on 11 September 1942 when it resolved to try to stop the autumn's colored excursions, and whose blackout order for Maryland cities of 5,000 or more the campaign has carried since 1941 on a retrospective's word alone.
In the record (1)
1942 · 1942-04-10
Nine days after the sinking the Governor of Maryland told a women's club near Baltimore that the bodies of thirteen seamen had been taken to Ocean City, and that they were shot down in cold blood in their lifeboats.
The Navy's war diary said thirteen. So, publicly, did Herbert R. O'Conor. Speaking on the evening of 10 April 1942 at a defense meeting conducted by the Linthicum Heights Women's Club, and reported by the Associated Press under a Baltimore dateline the next day, the Governor said American seamen had been 'shot down in cold blood' by an Axis submarine 'as they crowded into lifeboats after their ship was sunk' - and the ship had been sunk 'at our very doors'. 'The sinking occurred "off the coast," O'Conor said... The bodies of 13 seamen were taken to Ocean City, Md.' And in his own words: 'The experience of these men were indeed harrowing. Some of the seamen whose corpses came to Ocean City, as well as others whose lives were lost, were shot down in cold blood by the crew of the Axis submarine.' He then called on every man, woman and child in Maryland to make the war effort their first consideration. Two things make this remarkable. The first is the corroboration: thirteen, at Ocean City, machine-gunned in the boats - an exact match, from a state politician on a platform, to a United States Navy operational log neither he nor the newspaper had seen. The second is what he would not say. The paper's next line is 'For understandable reasons' and the sentence about the Navy Department that follows it: the ship is never named. She is not named in this story and the name David H. Atwater does not appear anywhere in the Salisbury Times for the whole of 1942. Maryland's Governor told the state its dead had come ashore at Ocean City and could not tell it off what.
Source · checked 2026-08-12