Built in 1918 at Camden, New Jersey, the S.S. Black Point was a coal collier owned by Sprague Steamship Co. of Boston, Massachusetts. She was 369 feet long, 55 feet at the beam, and was carrying 7500 tons of coal under Captain Charles Prior, with 41 merchant seamen and a 5-man U.S. Navy Armed Guard gun crew aboard. At 1740 hrs, a torpedo struck the aft magazine, tore away 40 feet of the stern, and the ship sank at 1755 hrs, killing eleven merchant seamen and one Armed Guard sailor. The S.S. Kamen sent an S.O.S. that was received at 1742 hrs by the frigate USS Moberly, which was joined by USS Atherton and USS Amick in searching for the attacker, while the S.S. Kamen and U.S. Coast Guard vessels rescued 34 survivors. The German submarine U-853 had torpedoed the ship in 95 feet of water 3.2 nautical miles from this site. At 1930 hrs, sonar pinpointed the submarine as she tried to escape to the open sea. USS Atherton dropped 13 magnetic depth charges at 2029 hrs, later attacked with hedgehogs at 2324 hrs, and USS Moberly also dropped hedgehogs at 0200 hrs. At 0605 hrs, the blimps K-58 and K-16 from Lakehurst, New Jersey, arrived, dropped a sonobouy into the oil slick, and heard hammering on metal; about ten minutes later a long shrill shriek was heard, the hammering stopped, and all became silent. A later blimp attack used 7.2-foot rocket bombs, and at 1045 hrs U-853 was officially declared sunk with no survivors. A diver from the U.S.S. Penguin later reported bodies strewn inside the submarine and a hull split by depth charges and hedgehogs. German High Command had issued orders on May 4, 1945, to cease hostilities at once, though whether U-853 had received them was unknown. The loss of the S.S. Black Point on May 5, 1945, was remembered as the last ship sunk in the Atlantic Theatre of War, and the dead were honored along with the U.S. Navy Armed Guard and Merchant Seamen of World War II who carried vital war material and personnel around the world.
