History and mysteries · New Jersey coast and Cape May
Jacob Jones: a rescue patrol becomes a disaster (1942)
Documented history · Source reviewed
After searching a burning tanker for survivors, a Camden-built destroyer was itself torpedoed off Cape May.
Two losses on the same patrol
On February 27, 1942, USS Jacob Jones searched around the burning tanker R. P. Resor before continuing south along the New Jersey coast. At dawn the following day, U-578 attacked the destroyer near Cape May. The Navy history describes two, possibly three, torpedo hits that destroyed the forward and after sections.
Some survivors reached rafts, but explosions from the sinking destroyer’s own depth charges killed additional men in the water. An Army aircraft located rafts and directed the patrol vessel Eagle 56 to them. Twelve men were recovered; one died on the voyage to Cape May.
Keeping the two Jacob Jones wrecks separate
This was DD-130, constructed at Camden and commissioned in 1919. It was not the earlier Jacob Jones lost in European waters during World War I. The shared name can obscure a specifically New Jersey story of coastal patrol and rescue in the opening months of America’s second world war.
Sources and research limits
Naval History and Heritage Command, Jacob Jones II, construction and final-patrol sections. The Navy itself leaves the exact number of torpedo hits uncertain.