On the night of Nov. 29, 1944, two German sailors rowed a rubber boat to the shore of Crabtree Neck in Frenchman Bay, Maine, left two spies on the beach and rowed back to their submarine. Four days later that same boat, U-1230, put a torpedo into a Canadian freighter called the Cornwallis. The U.S. Navy’s Eastern Sea Frontier War Diary, now held by the National Archives, records that the sinking is what pointed officials toward agents being landed in the Mount Desert area. The SS Cornwallis shipwreck, in other words, is the moment a secret mission gave itself away.
That is the part of this story that still doesn’t add up. A submarine on a spy run had every reason to stay invisible. It fired anyway, and 43 of the 48 people aboard the Cornwallis died. Then the wreck vanished for more than 80 years, until a volunteer dive team found it nearly 400 feet down this summer. We lined up the Navy’s own diary, the wartime loss record and the divers’ account to rebuild what happened, day by day.
A freighter that had already been torpedoed once
The Cornwallis was no stranger to U-boats. She was launched in Vancouver in 1921 as the Canadian Transporter and later renamed when she moved to Canadian National Steamships, CBS News reported. On Sept. 11, 1942, a German submarine torpedoed her at anchor in Barbados. She settled into shallow water, was raised, patched and repaired, and went back to work.
On Nov. 20, 1944, she left Barbados again with bagged sugar and barrels of molasses, bound for Saint John, New Brunswick. She sailed with no escort and no convoy, according to the loss record kept by uboat.net. Forty-eight people were aboard, including seven gunners. Her master was Emerson Horace Robinson. She carried a 4-inch gun, a 12-pounder and machine guns on the bridge. CBS reports none of them were ever fired.
What the Navy’s war diary says about U-1230
The Eastern Sea Frontier diary is the closest thing we have to a play-by-play from the American side. The excerpt on the Maine landing comes from its November 1944 chapter, and it is blunt about what the Navy pieced together.
According to the diary, the two agents boarded U-1230 at Kiel on Sept. 24, 1944. (Published histories of the operation put the boarding on Sept. 22, so the dates don’t match.) The boat entered the Navy’s frontier waters sometime between Nov. 16 and Nov. 21. On Nov. 16, Berlin radioed the submarine and told it to land the agents somewhere other than Frenchman Bay. The commander, Kapitänleutnant Hans Hilbig, stuck with his original plan.
The boat reached the area off Mount Desert Rock on Nov. 21 and loitered there for eight days. On Nov. 29 it “headed in toward Frenchman Bay,” the diary says, surfacing about half a mile off Crabtree Neck and creeping within 300 yards of shore. Then “two sailors rowed the two agents ashore” in a rubber boat and went back aboard.
Four days later, the diary notes, the Cornwallis “was sunk on 3 December,” and the attack “confirmed earlier anticipations.” Read that line slowly. It says the Navy already had a hunch before the torpedo hit. The sinking turned the hunch into a working theory.
Two men, $60,000 and a Times Square newsstand
The spies were Erich Gimpel, a German intelligence agent, and William Colepaugh, an American from Niantic, Connecticut. Histories of the operation, which Germany called Elster, or “Magpie,” say Colepaugh had been discharged from the U.S. Navy in 1943 and went over to the Germans in 1944. The two men came ashore with $60,000 in cash, a backup stash of 99 diamonds, two pistols, a Leica camera, secret inks and microdots, according to those accounts. Their job was to gather technical intelligence on American shipyards, aircraft plants and rocket work.
They didn’t stay hidden long, even on land. A 17-year-old Boy Scout named Harvard Hodgkins and a local woman, Mary Forni, both noticed two strangers walking from the shore that night. Hodgkins, the son of a deputy sheriff, saw footprints coming up from the beach. His father contacted the FBI about five days later, according to histories of the case.
By then the pair were in New York, spending freely from an apartment on Beekman Place. On Dec. 21, Colepaugh walked out on Gimpel with $48,000. He then confided in an old schoolmate, and agents arrested him on Dec. 26 in Richmond Hill, Queens. Gimpel was picked up Dec. 30 at a Times Square newsstand. A military tribunal on Governors Island sentenced both men to death in February 1945. President Truman commuted the sentences to life, CBS reported, and both were later paroled.
The seven-year hunt for the Cornwallis shipwreck
So where was the SS Cornwallis found? The New Hampshire based Nomad Exploration Team, a self-funded group of technical divers, located the wreck on July 11, 2026, and announced it in late October. Gizmodo reports the team made five trips between 2019 and 2026 and swept more than 50 square miles with side-scan sonar, after archival research cut the search down to three regions. They confirmed the ship by matching what they saw to her blueprints.
The site sits about 400 feet down near Mount Desert Rock, in water around 42 degrees with tidal currents up to roughly 10 knots. “Very quickly we discovered why it had not been found,” diver Danny Allan told Gizmodo. Teammate Jeff Goodreau called it “pretty much the worst-case scenario” for diving. The team plans to go back with a remotely operated vehicle.
Part of the problem is that the paper trail can’t agree on where she went down. The uboat.net record puts the sinking about 10 miles southwest of Mount Desert Rock. Gizmodo describes the site as roughly 25 miles off the Maine mainland. Older public summaries list a depth near 300 feet, while the divers found her at about 400. When the records disagree by miles, the search box gets big fast. Last month we covered a pipeline crew that stumbled onto a 400-year-old Baltic wreck, and it took a lucky break there too.
Why would a spy sub give itself away?
This is the open question. Hilbig had just pulled off the hard part. His passengers were ashore. Every hour he stayed quiet bought them more time to disappear into New York. Instead he attacked a merchant ship in the same waters, which the Navy’s own diary says helped point investigators toward a landing.
No record we read gives Hilbig’s reasoning. The diary shows he had already ignored one order from Berlin about where to put the agents ashore. Whether the torpedo was a calculated choice, an opportunity he couldn’t pass up, or a plain mistake, the documents don’t say. What they do show is the cost: 43 people lost in under 10 minutes, and a spy mission that came apart within a month.
What Skeptics Say
The strongest ordinary explanation is that there is no deep mystery in the sinking at all. U-1230 was a warship. Sinking unescorted Allied cargo ships was what U-boats did, and the uboat.net record says the Cornwallis was alone. Once the agents were off the boat, a skeptic would argue, Hilbig simply went back to his normal job. The Navy diary also says the attack “confirmed earlier anticipations,” which suggests the Americans were already suspicious before the torpedo, so the sinking may not have blown the mission as much as the story implies.
Skeptics also point out that the legends around Elster outran the facts. Claims that Gimpel was sent to sabotage atomic bomb work are not supported by the official records, according to histories of the operation. Colepaugh’s later story that U-boats were carrying rockets aimed at New York and Washington never panned out. And the wreck staying lost for 81 years needs nothing strange to explain it: 400 feet of cold water, hard currents and wartime positions that don’t agree with each other will hide a ship just fine. Finally, the identification so far rests on the divers’ own blueprint comparison. We have not seen an independent confirmation from Canadian or U.S. authorities, and the planned ROV survey should settle it. We took a similar hard look at old government files in our piece on the green fireballs over Los Alamos.
The 43 who never made it to Saint John
Lost in the spy story are the people on the ship. According to uboat.net, the dead included the master, 35 crew members and seven gunners. Six people made it off the ship alive, and one of them died of the cold before help came, CBS reported. A fishing boat, the Notre Dame, pulled the last five out and landed them at Rockland, Maine.
Next week is Veterans Day here and Remembrance Day in Canada. The men of the Cornwallis were merchant sailors and gunners, not headline names, and the wreck off Maine is their grave. It is worth saying their ship’s name out loud, the same way we did for four World War II veterans over 100 honored in Ocala. You can find more stories like this one on our Historical Events and Analysis page.
Everybody remembers the spies. Almost nobody remembers the 43 people who died four days later. Merchant crews and the gunners riding with them took the same torpedoes as anybody in uniform and got a lot less credit for it. I hope that ROV footage ends up with the families and the war records in Canada, and I hope that wreck gets treated like the grave it is.
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Rocci J. Stucci is the founder and CEO of Stucci Media and host of The Rocci Stucci Show.
