WASHINGTON — In 1942, 13-year-old Jean Revels lost her father, Capt. Anders Johanson, to a torpedo attack from a German U-Boat.
“My dad went down with the ship and saved all his men,” Revels, now 87, recalled from her home in Charleston, S.C.
Johanson was captain of the SS Dixie Arrow, an American oil tanker sunk off the coast of Cape Hatteras, N.C., on March 26, 1942. Ninety other ships met similar fates off Cape Hatteras, turning the area into the “Graveyard of the Atlantic” and the only American World War II battlefield.
“It’s a burial ground, their tomb, to honor where their last moments living were,” said Dale Revels, Jean’s son.
Preserving this submerged military graveyard is the goal of a proposal from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to expand the already existing Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, which protects the site where the Civil War battleship USS Monitor went down, to include the World War II shipwrecks.
But that idea, first raised in 2014, has met opposition from North Carolina officials and residents who fear further regulation of the waters will cut into livelihoods dependent on tourism and fishing.
“Our concern is not for today but for tomorrow,” said Warren Judge, a member of the Dare County Board of Commissioners. “Our experience has been that within 40 to 50 years we will be prohibited to use the sanctuary and so we are concerned for our future generations’ access to use the resource.”
Tane Casserley, a marine archaeologist and the research coordinator for the Monitor sanctuary, says the concerns are misplaced. People will still be allowed to dive and fish in the expanded sanctuary, he said. What they won’t be able to do is take artifacts off the ships or otherwise damage them.
It was Jean Revels’ discovery in 1998 that the bell of the Dixie Arrow was hanging as a trophy in a Cape Hatteras dive shop that gave rise to the proposal for a sanctuary.
She was appalled at what she felt was the equivalent of grave robbing and began a campaign to protect the final resting place of Merchant Marine vessels. NOAA proposed the expansion in June 2014.
“We need to protect this as a battlefield and a monument for the fallen sailors of the war,” Casserley said. Under current federal law, about six of the 91 wrecks are protected.
David Alberg, the superintendent for the Monitor sanctuary, says a final proposal is in the works, now that the public comment period has ended. The final plan will take in public concerns expressed in comments and gathered during five hearings.
The final proposal “is about working together to honor this history, in so doing showcasing the heritage, and appreciation of the role North Carolina played in World War II,” Alberg said.
“Not many Americans know about it,” he added, “and it needs to be honored.”
