Coffee Mugs and Courage: How USS Buckley Turned a Night Battle into an American Legend

On an ordinary day at the U.S. Navy Museum in Washington, D.C., visitors walk past rows of sleek missiles and polished brass. They stop for aircraft models, scale destroyers, torpedoes with explanatory plaques.

And then, tucked in a glass case, something looks almost out of place.

A simple, white Navy coffee mug.
The label underneath reads:

Coffee mug used as a weapon – USS Buckley vs. U-66, May 6, 1944.

Most people assume it’s a joke. A metaphor. Some kind of playful nod to sailor culture.

It isn’t.

That mug—one of several like it—really did go to war. And on a moonlit night in May 1944, it was swung in anger on the foredeck of a U.S. destroyer escort as American sailors fought German submariners hand-to-hand, inches from the Atlantic.

This is the story of USS Buckley, Lieutenant Commander Brent Abel, and the night the most advanced naval war in history briefly turned into a brawl fought with pistols, fists, and coffee cups— and why that story still captures the pride Americans feel in the men and women who wear their country’s uniform.

A Small Ship in a Big War

By the spring of 1944, the Battle of the Atlantic was a grinding, relentless campaign. The U.S. Navy and its Allies were slowly winning the war against Germany’s U-boats, but victory had been bought at a terrible cost in ships and lives.

Destroyer escorts like USS Buckley were workhorses of that fight. Smaller and lighter than fleet destroyers, they were designed for one primary purpose: protect convoys and hunt submarines. At 1,400 tons, with two screws and a top speed of about 23.5 knots, Buckley was not built for glory. She was built for duty—escorting merchant ships, screening escort carriers, chasing sonar contacts, braving long, monotonous patrols punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

Her captain, Lieutenant Commander Brent Abel, was 34 years old. He’d been in command less than a year. He was competent, calm, and still relatively new to the brutal chess match of anti-submarine warfare.

In the early hours of May 6, 1944, Buckley sailed as part of an escort carrier group—Task Group 21.11—west of the Cape Verde Islands off Africa. Overhead, a Grumman Avenger torpedo bomber from the escort carrier USS Block Island prowled the night, hunting.

At 2:16 a.m., the quiet broke.

The Avenger’s pilot radioed urgent coordinates: a German submarine on the surface, about 20 miles ahead.

It was U-66—one of the most feared U-boats of the war.

U-66: A Hunter Too Long at Sea

U-66 had earned a grim reputation. She was the seventh most successful U-boat Germany ever sent to sea: 33 Allied ships sunk, more than 200,000 tons of shipping sent to the bottom. Among her victims was the Canadian passenger liner Lady Hawkins, sunk in January 1942 with 246 lives lost—sailors, civilians, servicemen, many of them never recovered.

Now, in May 1944, U-66 was a tired predator. She had been at sea since mid-January—nearly four months of constant danger and fatigue. Her crew was exhausted. Fuel and supplies were low. She was on the surface that night to recharge batteries and rendezvous with a “milk cow” resupply submarine.

Instead, she found Buckley.

Abel ordered flank speed. The escort carrier’s Avenger stayed overhead, guiding Buckley in, calling updates every few minutes as the destroyer escort knifed through a calm, moonlit Atlantic.

It was almost perfect weather for a surface engagement. The ocean was relatively flat. The bright moon painted the sea in silver. Visibility was excellent—for gunners, for lookouts, for men who would soon be staring straight into enemy fire.

And then something strange happened.

The Ruse in the Moonlight

As Buckley closed the range, U-66’s crew mistook her for the friendly supply submarine they were waiting for.

At 3:08 a.m., three red flares arced up from the German boat—a recognition signal.

They thought help was arriving.

Abel realized what he was seeing and made a decision. He held fire. Stayed on course. Closed the distance.

Four thousand yards became three. Two. One.

The gamble was working. Every second of confusion meant a few more seconds to get closer—closer for the 3-inch guns to find their mark, closer for radar and optics to make every shot count. But no deception lasts forever. U-66’s lookouts finally saw the truth.

The German submarine launched a torpedo.

Abel swung Buckley hard to port. The torpedo hissed past, just yards off the starboard side.

At 3:20 a.m., the American ship answered.

Sixteen Minutes of Fire

Buckley opened fire with everything she had. The first 3-inch salvo struck forward of U-66’s conning tower, shredding the deck area and knocking out the submarine’s own deck gun almost immediately.

The destroyer escort’s full armament joined in:

3-inch main battery guns

40 mm Bofors anti-aircraft guns

20 mm Oerlikon cannons

Tracer arcs stitched the night. Shells slammed into the German submarine’s topside. The conning tower took hit after hit. The U-boat fired back with its lighter automatic weapons, but most rounds flew high or went wild.

Then U-66 fired again—this time from her stern tubes. Abel saw the torpedo wake and ordered another violent turn. Once more, the “fish” missed by the narrowest of margins.

The range fell to point-blank. At one point the two vessels were only about 20 yards apart, thundering along on roughly parallel courses. Buckley’s guns raked U-66 from bow to stern.

In just sixteen minutes, Buckley’s crew fired:

105 rounds of 3-inch shells

2,700 rounds of 20 mm

418 rounds of 40 mm

The submarine was ablaze around the conning tower. The Germans were visible through the flames, still manning weapons, still trying to fight back.

And then Abel faced a problem no textbook covered.

What do you do when a destroyer escort gets so close to a submarine that there’s no room left to shoot?

“Ram the Submarine”

At 3:29 a.m., Abel made a choice no destroyer escort commander had made in modern naval warfare.

He ordered a hard right turn.

And he rammed the submarine.

Buckley’s bow climbed up onto U-66’s forward deck and locked there, steel grinding against steel, two ships welded together for a few surreal, deadly minutes.

It was an ancient tactic, out of place in a war of radar and sonar. Ramming hadn’t been standard practice since the age of sail and early ironclads. But Abel didn’t have the luxury of doctrine. The submarine was too close for most of his weapons. He was out of options—except one.

The collision twisted Buckley’s bow and opened wounds below her waterline that would haunt her for the next twelve days. But in that moment, the battle changed character completely.

Because now, the enemy wasn’t downrange.

He was climbing onto the deck.

The Night the Navy Went Back to Boarding Pikes

As the two ships ground together, German sailors poured out of U-66’s conning tower and forward hatches. Some carried pistols. Others had knives. They swarmed across Buckley’s foredeck.

The Americans thought they were being boarded. Their instincts were exactly right.

U-66’s first officer, Oberleutnant zur See Klaus Herbig, was leading a boarding party. It was a desperate gambit. He knew they couldn’t win a prolonged firefight on the American ship. His goal was to create enough chaos—enough diversion—to give his captain a chance to break free and maneuver for a killing blow.

For the first time in more than a century, sailors in the United States Navy found themselves in hand-to-hand combat on the deck of a warship.

Buckley’s crew met the boarders with whatever they had:

Thompson submachine guns

M1911 pistols

Rifles and shotguns

But close-quarters combat is messy and fast. Magazines run dry. Weapons jam. Targets appear suddenly at arm’s length instead of through a gunsight.

So the sailors did what Americans have done in every war when the situation turns primitive:

They improvised.

They swung 3-inch shell casings like clubs.
They threw anything that wasn’t bolted down.
They fought with bare fists.

They grabbed coffee mugs off mess tables and out of the galley and hurled them like stones.

One German sailor actually fought his way inside the ship and reached the wardroom. There he ran into a steward’s mate—no rifle, no pistol—who grabbed the nearest object, a heavy coffee pot, and beat the intruder back toward the ladder until other crew members arrived and took him prisoner.

Two minutes. That was all it lasted. According to Buckley’s action report, the hand-to-hand fighting spanned less than 120 seconds. But in that time, sailors on both sides were hit, wounded, knocked unconscious.

Herbig’s boarding attempt failed. Overwhelmed by numbers and firepower, the Germans who had made it onto Buckley’s deck eventually shouted their surrender.

The Americans, still locked bow-to-bow with the blazing submarine, turned back to the larger problem: breaking free before both vessels dragged each other under.

The Final Blow and a Grenade in the Night

Abel ordered engines reversed. Buckley backed off U-66, leaving five German sailors on the American deck to be disarmed and secured as prisoners.

But U-66 wasn’t finished.

The damaged submarine, still under power, swung around and rammed Buckley in turn, striking the American ship’s starboard side near the engine room. The impact tore open plating, sheared off the starboard propeller shaft, twisted the stern, and opened the sea to the machinery spaces.

As U-66 slid past, an American sailor glimpsed the open conning tower hatch and did something simple and devastating: he dropped a hand grenade inside.

Flame burst from the opening. The submarine, still moving at about 15 knots but now grievously wounded, continued on a short, fatal run. Her hatches remained open. Men were abandoning ship, leaping into the Atlantic.

At 3:41 a.m., U-66 slipped beneath the surface for the last time, fire still burning inside, diesel engines still turning in the darkness, her captain still aboard.

In sixteen minutes of shooting and a few minutes of ramming and brawling, one of Germany’s most feared U-boats had been destroyed by a ship many in the Navy saw as a modest escort, a background player.

But Buckley’s own survival was far from guaranteed.

“You Save Lives First. You Settle Scores Later.”

The price of victory was heavy damage.

Buckley’s starboard shaft was severed. Water poured into the engine room. Bulkheads trembled under the strain. The engineering crew fought flooding, shored up watertight doors, and coaxed the remaining port engine back to life.

They were more than 500 miles from the nearest port. They had one functioning screw. Their hull was gashed open. The Atlantic was still a war zone.

And 36 German sailors—enemies minutes earlier—were now struggling in the water.

Lieutenant Commander Abel didn’t hesitate.

He ordered rescue operations.

Boats went over the side. Lines were thrown. American sailors who had just defended their ship with pistols and coffee mugs now leaned over the rails, hauling exhausted German submariners out of the sea one at a time.

Some of the rescued were burnt from fire below decks. Some were bleeding from gunshot or shrapnel wounds. Others were simply broken by months at sea and the shock of seeing their home, their steel world, slip beneath the waves.

But they were no longer combatants. They were shipwrecked sailors.

Naval tradition is older than flags and national anthems: you save lives first. You settle scores later.

Those 36 men owed their survival to the very ship that had just destroyed their submarine. They were later transferred to USS Block Island, the escort carrier whose aircraft had first found U-66.

Twenty-four of their shipmates, including U-66’s commander, went down with the boat.

Limping Home on One Engine

As dawn broke on May 6, Abel took stock. The picture wasn’t pretty.

Port engine: operational but stressed

Starboard shaft: gone, sheared clean off

Hull: holed and patched, integrity compromised

Distance to a major repair yard: more than 2,000 nautical miles

New York was the closest port with the facilities Buckley needed. Boston Navy Yard could do the repairs, but first the ship had to get across the North Atlantic on one engine, with a twisted bow and a hole in her side.

Abel decided to risk it. He set a course for New York.

Task Group 21.11 reorganized around the damaged escort. USS Block Island provided air cover overhead. Two other destroyer escorts took station as protective screens. They all understood the stakes. A crippled escort was an inviting target for any U-boat still lurking in the Atlantic.

For twelve days, Buckley lived on borrowed time.

The engineering crew nursed the port engine like a wounded heart. Damage control parties reinforced welds, checked pumps, and listened for ominous changes in the groan of hull plating. The ship’s speed rose and fell as conditions—and the engine’s temper—dictated: 13 knots when things looked good, down to 6, even 4 knots when temperatures spiked and oil pressure sagged.

Weather threatened them more than once. A small system kicked up swells nearing the limit of what Buckley’s hasty repairs could withstand. Waves slammed her damaged starboard side; water seeped through seams and patches. Men worked in shifts, tightening, welding, pumping. Sleep came in short, shallow bursts.

At one point, a submarine contact appeared 70 miles away—close enough to be worrying, fast enough to be lethal if it came hunting. Aircraft from Block Island tracked it for hours before concluding it was heading away. The scare, though, brought Buckley’s vulnerability into sharp relief. She could not run. She could barely maneuver. If another U-boat found her, the fight might be short and one-sided.

Meanwhile, back home, the story was starting to spread.

Front-Page News and Breakfast-Table Weapons

As Buckley crept toward New York, her battle became a sensation.

On May 14, 1944, The New York Times ran the story: a destroyer escort had sunk a German submarine in an engagement that included hand-to-hand combat. The Associated Press picked it up. Radio broadcasts repeated the headline. War bond pitches and morale talks used the tale.

But what captivated the public was a single, almost absurd detail from the action report: the coffee mugs.

Official U.S. Navy documentation listed “several General Mess coffee cups” under ammunition expended. Medical officers examining German survivors noted facial injuries and wounds consistent with ceramic impacts—patterns about three inches across, roughly the size of a Navy mug.

In a war of battleships, bombers, and tanks, the idea that American sailors had driven back a German boarding party with their breakfast dishes was irresistible. It sounded like something out of folklore—but it was true.

Abel and his crew didn’t see themselves as legends. They saw themselves as professionals who had used what was at hand when standard weapons weren’t enough.

But by the time Buckley neared the U.S. coast, the ship was famous.

Repairs, Medals, and a Bent Bow

On May 18, USS Buckley, under tow after her exhausted port engine finally seized, slid into New York Harbor. Crowds gathered on the shore. Cameras waited. Reporters jotted notes. The little escort that had rammed a U-boat and fought with coffee mugs had come home.

The initial inspection in Brooklyn quickly confirmed what the crew already knew: the ship was badly hurt. She was soon towed to Boston Navy Yard, where dry dock revealed the full scope of the damage.

Her bow was bent 12 degrees to port from the collision with U-66.

Several forward compartments were crushed.

The starboard propeller shaft wasn’t just broken—it had torn and cracked the stern tube.

Flooding in the engine room had played havoc with electrical systems.

The port engine, run beyond its limits to get the ship home, was ruined and had to be rebuilt.

Navy engineers estimated at least six weeks of intensive repair work. In dock, Buckley’s scarred hull became a physical statement about what close-quarters combat could do to modern steel warships.

While the welders and machinists worked, the brass caught up with the story.

On August 31, 1944, at Boston Navy Yard, the Navy formally recognized what had happened that night west of Cape Verde. Lt. Cmdr. Brent Abel received the Navy Cross, one of America’s highest awards for valor.

His citation praised his:

“Extraordinary heroism and distinguished service”

Bold high-speed night approach in bright moonlight

Rapid silencing of U-66’s guns despite incoming torpedoes and automatic fire

Decision to ram

Leadership in repelling a boarding attempt

Other officers and enlisted men received Bronze Stars and commendations. The entire crew earned a Navy Unit Commendation. Buckley herself gained a battle star.

The official citations didn’t mention coffee mugs. The Navy sticks to tactics and leadership in its formal language. But the mugs stayed in the reports—and in the public imagination.

A few of those mugs never went back into service. Sailors quietly tucked them away as keepsakes. Years later, one of them would end up in that glass case in Washington, D.C., labeled simply: “Coffee mug used as weapon.”

Back to Sea—and Back to Ordinary Heroism

The war didn’t end with U-66.

By mid-June 1944, Buckley was back in fighting trim. Her bow was straightened and rebuilt, her machinery repaired, her seams renewed. After refresher training, she returned to the work she’d been built to do: escort duty and anti-submarine patrols.

From July through November 1944, she shepherded convoys across the Atlantic to North Africa, protecting slow merchantmen from a still-dangerous U-boat threat. In April 1945, she helped sink another German submarine, U-548, in a more typical anti-submarine engagement using coordinated sonar and depth charges. No ramming. No boarding. Just methodical, deadly professionalism.

When the war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945, USS Buckley had more than earned her place in naval history:

Two U-boats sunk

Countless ships escorted

Thousands of miles sailed in harm’s way

And one unforgettable night when the war came down to arms’ length and coffee mugs.

She was decommissioned in 1946, placed in reserve, reclassified and re-reclassified over the years as the Navy’s needs changed. For decades she sat in a “mothball fleet,” her paint fading, her systems aging, her bent bow still visible—a scar that never fully disappeared.

In 1969, USS Buckley was struck from the naval register and sold for scrap. The physical ship was cut apart and recycled.

The story stayed.

Enemies, Then Shipmates in Memory

War is violent, but memories can soften with time.

In 1973, almost three decades after the battle, a letter arrived for Brent Abel. It was from Hermann Hartmann, one of the 36 U-66 survivors Buckley had pulled from the Atlantic.

Hartmann wanted to say thank you—for saving his life, for the fair treatment he and his shipmates had received as prisoners. He wrote not as an enemy, but as an old sailor talking to another man who had shared the same deadly stage one night long ago.

The exchange led to something nobody would have imagined in the smoke and chaos of May 1944: a reunion.

In 1978, former crew members of USS Buckley traveled to Germany to meet surviving members of U-66. They were older now—gray hair, slower steps, the sharp edges of youth worn down by time. But the memories of that night were still bright.

They swapped stories and photographs. The Germans brought early-war pictures of U-66 and her crew, grinning on deck before the full cost of the Atlantic campaign was known. The Americans brought the action report, complete with the infamous line about coffee cups listed as ammunition.

Both sides remembered the violence: the boarding, the gunfire at point-blank range, friends lost in seconds. Both sides remembered, too, the rescue—American sailors hauling German sailors out of the dark sea.

Herbig, the first officer who had led the boarding party, attended. He didn’t apologize for trying to seize Buckley’s deck; it had been his duty. Abel didn’t apologize for ramming; it had been his. They had done what their countries asked, as well and as bravely as they could. Now they could shake hands and share the burden of memory.

Their bond didn’t come from politics or ideology. It came from having seen war at its most primal, in a battle fought at a range measured not in miles, but in feet.

What the Coffee Mugs Really Mean

The story of USS Buckley and U-66 became required reading at the U.S. Naval Academy, where midshipmen study it as a case in tactical flexibility and leadership under pressure. Analysts have dissected the engagement from every angle—timing, weapon effectiveness, damage control decisions.

They ask why the German captain chose to attempt boarding instead of diving and disengaging. They calculate how close U-66 came to fatally damaging Buckley with her counter-ram. They debate whether Abel’s decision to ram was too risky or exactly right for that moment.

But for many Americans, the story resonates less as a technical case study and more as a symbol of something enduring: the character of citizen-sailors in a democracy at war.

There is pride in the courage it took to drive a lightly built destroyer escort straight at an enemy submarine in the dark, knowing a single torpedo could end the ship and every life aboard.

There is pride in the toughness and grit of young Americans who met a boarding party not with fear, but with whatever they could grab—rifles, shell casings, a coffee pot from the galley.

There is pride in the discipline that held when the shooting stopped and the same men who had fought at arm’s length turned immediately to saving the lives of their former enemies in the water.

There is pride, too, in what came after: decades of quiet, ordinary American lives—law practice, families, careers—lived by men whose most famous sixteen minutes happened in the middle of the Atlantic, years before most people who hear their story today were born.

When Brent Abel died in 2007 at the age of 91, his obituary inevitably led with USS Buckley and U-66. Not because he asked for it, but because that is what others remembered: the night he took a small ship into a big fight and brought his men home.

Pride in the People Behind the Steel

World War II has been called the last “good war,” a conflict where the lines between right and wrong were stark and the stakes were nothing less than the survival of free nations. The machinery of that war was enormous—shipyards, factories, airfields, rail lines spanning continents.

But all that steel and all that power still came down, again and again, to human decisions and human hearts.

The story of USS Buckley is not just about a ship. It’s about the kind of people who climb a gangway knowing that, if the moment comes, there may be no playbook to follow—only judgment, courage, and whatever is at hand.

It’s about a 34-year-old lieutenant commander who was willing to ram rather than let an enemy escape or strike first.

It’s about a steward’s mate who met an armed intruder with a coffee pot instead of cowering.

It’s about engineering crews who worked without sleep to keep one wounded engine turning for nearly two weeks, because giving up wasn’t an option.

It’s about sailors who, when told to pull enemy submariners out of the water, didn’t argue, didn’t hesitate—because they understood that there is honor not only in victory, but in mercy.

Those are American values in motion: initiative, adaptability, quiet courage, and a belief that even in war there are lines you don’t cross.

The coffee mug in the museum isn’t famous because it’s quirky. It’s famous because it captures, in one humble object, the spirit of a generation that went to sea for the United States of America and did whatever it took to get the job done.

When we talk about pride in the American military—past, present, and future—it’s easy to think of giant carriers and advanced jets. Those are worthy of pride. But so are the small ships and the small moments: a bent bow, a ruined engine, a few exhausted men standing watch on the dark ocean, and a chipped mug gripped in a white-knuckled hand.

On a moonlit night in 1944, far from home, USS Buckley and her crew proved something simple and profound: that in the most modern of wars, human courage still matters most.

And sometimes, when your back is against the rail and the enemy is on your deck, the difference between survival and defeat is just a handful of ordinary Americans—and a coffee cup.