Fort Miles and the U-Boat Watch
Near Rehoboth Beach, Delaware
During the Second World War, the lonely dunes of Cape Henlopen bristled with guns. In nineteen forty one the old lighthouse reservation was renamed Fort Miles, an Army coastal defense fortress built to guard the entrances to Delaware Bay and the Delaware River from German warships and prowling U-boats. Fort Miles was enormous.
At its peak it housed more than two thousand two hundred soldiers, men and women, and it cost millions of dollars to build, a staggering sum for the time. Its batteries mounted a fearsome mix of artillery, including sixteen inch naval guns capable of hurling shells miles out to sea, alongside twelve inch, eight inch, six inch, and smaller guns. The heavy batteries were buried inside the sand dunes, disguised so a passing submarine would see only shoreline.
Rising above the beach stood tall round concrete fire control towers, four and five stories high, with observation decks on top. Spotters in those towers triangulated the position of any suspicious ship, feeding coordinates to the hidden guns. Several of those eerie towers still stand along the Delaware and New Jersey coast.
Today Fort Miles is a museum inside Cape Henlopen State Park, where you can climb a tower and stand where soldiers once scanned the horizon for the enemy.
