Spies in Maine 1944: The U-Boat That Sank the Cornwallis

On 27 October 2026, a dive team from New Hampshire announced that in July, after seven years of searching, it had found the wreck of the Cornwallis. The ship lies almost 400 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Maine, about ten miles southwest of Mount Desert Rock. It was a Canadian freighter torpedoed by a German U-boat on 3 December 1944 and sunk within minutes. Of the 48 people aboard, 43 died, only five survived.

The U-boat had not been looking for the Cornwallis. It had come to drop off two spies, four days earlier, on a remote coast in Maine where hardly anyone lived in winter. In short: the wreck is this week's find and a grave. The story behind it is about two men in city overcoats without hats or boots, whom a Boy Scout and a mother noticed, and about how little the wartime reports told of it.

The Cornwallis was a steamship about 400 feet long (about 120 meters), built in 1921, a Canadian freighter. She had narrowly survived the war once before: in 1942 she was hit off Barbados by a U-boat torpedo and later refloated. In December 1944 she was sailing from Barbados to Saint John in New Brunswick, loaded with sugar and molasses. Aboard were 48 people, among them seven armed guards.

At about six in the morning on 3 December, a torpedo struck her. According to the newspaper reports of the time she sank within minutes. The five survivors were rescued by the fishing trawler Notre Dame of Portland and taken to Rockland. More than a third of the 43 dead came from Nova Scotia. The U-boat had not sought them out, says Don Ferrara of the dive team: "They were just there."

The U-boat was called U-1230, its commander was Lieutenant Commander Hans Hilbig. It had left Kiel in September 1944 and sailed via Norway to North America. Fifty-one days after leaving Norway it reached the American coast at Cape Cod and then entered the Gulf of Maine. Aboard were two men trained in The Hague for the mission called "Unternehmen Elster," in English "Operation Magpie." One was Erich Gimpel, an experienced German agent. The other was William Colepaugh, an American from Connecticut, born in 1918, discharged from the Naval Reserve in 1943 and defected to the Germans in 1944. He spoke little German, Gimpel no English, so he was needed.

The assignment was to gather technical and military information about the Allied effort and report it to Germany by radio, with a transmitter they were to build on the spot. Older versions name the American atomic weapons project as the target, newer ones speak more generally of military and technology facilities. According to accounts it was Germany's second and last attempt to bring agents into the US by U-boat.

As a landing place, Hancock Point in Maine was chosen because it is remote and the U-boat could get close to shore. U-1230 lay eight days on the seabed to evade American patrols. On the evening of 29 November 1944, it entered Frenchman Bay and put the two men ashore in a rubber raft with four sailors, at Crabtree Neck.

That night, the first snow of winter fell at Hancock Point, heavy and wet. Harvard Merrill Hodgkins, a high school senior and Boy Scout, was driving home around eleven in the evening from the Wednesday dance at the Townsend Club, over an unlit, winding road. In his headlights he saw two men walking slowly through the snow, in long city overcoats and slacks, without hats, without boots. They turned their faces away.

That struck him: "You just don't see folks without boots in the snow out here," he said later, and nobody in the area wore a topcoat of that kind in winter. He knew everyone, for in Hancock Point six families lived year-round. The faces were unfamiliar. He got out and followed the footprints, which came from a path leading to Sunset Rocks, a spot he knew from rabbit hunting with his father, a deputy sheriff. The houses on the shore were empty in winter. There was no reason to come from there.

Almost at the same time, Mary Forni, the tax collector's wife and mother of three, was driving home on the same road from her weekly card game. She too saw two men at the roadside, in thin city overcoats, shoulders hunched against the snow. Her husband brushed it off. She lay awake. In the morning she told her neighbor, Harvard's mother, and the two women realized they had seen the same men.

Harvard's father Dana Hodgkins, the deputy sheriff, came back from a hunting trip, heard the story, and at first suspected burglars. His round of the houses turned up nothing. Then on 3 December the Cornwallis sank, and the authorities knew a U-boat was operating off the coast of Maine. Federal personnel were sent to the area. On 4 December, in Bangor, Dana met an FBI agent he knew and mentioned Harvard's observation in passing. Within an hour three agents were in Hancock questioning the boy.

The strangers had already moved on. According to the reports they had taken a taxi to Bangor and gone by train to Portland and then to New York, by other accounts via Boston. There the plan stalled. Colepaugh lost interest in the mission, according to the reports took about $48,000 of the money they had brought, and spent a month partying. On 21 December he left Gimpel alone, and on 26 December he turned himself in to the FBI after a friend made contact. His statements led the agents to Gimpel, who was arrested in New York on 30 December.

The boy's tip was the first evidence that the enemy had come ashore. The breakthrough, however, came from Colepaugh himself.

In February 1945 a military court sentenced Gimpel and Colepaugh for espionage to death, they were to be hanged. After the war ended, President Harry Truman commuted both sentences to life imprisonment. Gimpel was paroled in 1955 and returned to West Germany, Colepaugh in 1960. He died in 2005.

The U-boat survived the war. The Cornwallis was its only sunk ship, 5,458 gross register tons of merchant shipping. After the landing Hilbig first sailed north and escaped his pursuers. U-1230 surrendered on 5 May 1945, was taken to Scotland, and sunk on 17 December 1945 as part of Operation Deadlight, with which the British disposed of the surrendered German U-boats.

The plan fell apart, according to the sources, from within. The radio operator, a defector, lost interest in the assignment and turned himself in, and his confession led to Gimpel, who spoke no English and stood alone without him. Their mission to obtain information about American industry and technology was, according to the Press Herald, ultimately without result.

What Colepaugh's interrogation otherwise yielded is, according to accounts, a warning of a U-boat group with V-weapons for New York and Washington. Whether and how far that was true is open, the sources report it only as the interrogated man's statement.

The Nomad Exploration Team of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, began the search in 2019. Eight divers belong to it, among them Danny Allan, Don Ferrara, and Jeff Goodreau. They wanted to find one of the largest still-undiscovered wrecks of New England and recall the catastrophe of eight decades ago. For every hour on the water, says Allan, there were at least ten hours of groundwork: archive research, the ship's blueprints, talks with authors and historians. Fishermen helped too, because after a torpedoing a lot is often left behind, and fishermen know the spots where nets get snagged.

There were three possible locations: where the survivors were found, where the debris was, and where a mariner is said to have pulled up the Cornwallis's compass housing. Added to that were the tides, the weather, and the fog off Mount Desert. On 11 July 2026, early on the second day of the expedition, the team passed the wreck. On the side-scan sonar it lay within 300 feet of the boat, and nobody recognized it. On the second pass, in the last 100 yards of the last track, while the team was reprogramming the GPS, it appeared.

To be sure, says Allan, "you go down and touch it." The dives to almost 400 feet were the hardest he knows: very deep, very cold, strong current. By comparison, the limit for recreational divers is 130 feet. Allan, who has been stuck inside a U-boat and in caves, says they were at the limit of what he is willing to do. On Ferrara's first dive his light failed, he dived practically blind. "You're the first person to see and touch this wreck in 80 years," said Allan, "you're ecstatic, and at the same time it's sobering, because it's a grave. Forty-three people died here." The team wants to visit the wreck at least once a year to document its condition. For the families, says Allan, it is closure.

The same team earlier found another wreck from the war: USS Eagle 56, a US Navy patrol vessel that sank in April 1945 after a violent explosion. Survivors reported a U-boat, but the official inquiry attributed the loss to a boiler failure. Only decades later did persistent research lead to a reassessment, and in 2001 the Navy recognized the sinking as a combat loss caused by a German U-boat. The team found the wreck in 2018 off Cape Elizabeth and made the find public in 2019. Back in 2017 the divers had discovered the William H. Machen off Portsmouth.

The case shows what the author Sara Vladic is after in her book "The Dangerous Shore" (HarperCollins, 2026): the history of America's coasts in the Second World War is less known than that of the fronts, and the reports of the time told it only in part.

TIME magazine wrote on 15 January 1945 that federal agents had followed the spies "almost as soon as they landed." The article reported the arrests but explained neither that Colepaugh had turned himself in nor mentioned Harvard Hodgkins or Mary Forni. The impression was reassuring: the enemy had come, and the authorities were close behind him.

The fuller story gives much more weight to the vigilance of residents and to a spy's decision to surrender. The FBI made the arrests, but that alone does not explain how the landing came to light and how the case was solved, writes Vladic. A teenager noticed the strangers' clothing, a mother did not brush aside her unease. Neither knew the whole story, both recognized that something was worth telling. The beach at Crabtree Neck where the men came ashore has been in the National Register of Historic Places since 2003, as the "Nazi Spy Landing Site."

To wrap up, the short version, so fact and story don't blur.

The story of Hancock Point shows how close the war could come to the home front. That's why every season in HistoryBytes is split into five categories, and this story touches all five: Harvard Hodgkins as a person, Hancock Point as a place, the landing on 29 November 1944 as an event, the vigilance of civilians as an idea, the U-boat U-1230 as an object. That's how the WW2 season builds the whole picture of a war that was not fought only at the fronts.

In Hancock an ordinary road recalls that night. There a teenager noticed the overcoats, and a mother would not let her gut feeling be talked away. Farther out in the Gulf of Maine, on the seabed, lies a freighter that wanted to go home with sugar. Forty-three people died there, and for more than 80 years nobody knew where. That we know now is for the families perhaps the most important thing about this story. The war left many such places, and it takes people to search for them.