By Bartee Haile

Buried in the back pages of a Houston newspaper in July 1942 was a brief account of the sinking on the fifth of the month of a cargo ship “somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico.”

German U-boats were on the prowl off the coast of Texas, but there was no reason to get folks all riled up about it!

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, seashore inhabitants of the Lone Star State had a bad case of the jitters for the first time since the Civil War.  The United States was ...