The U.S. once shelled its own town—for four hours straight

The Morning the War Came to Cape Cod

On the morning of July 21, 1918, tugboat captain Joseph Perry was towing four barges loaded with rocks and gravel past Nauset Beach in Orleans, Massachusetts, when the impossible happened. At 10:30 a.m., a German submarine surfaced 800 yards offshore and opened fire with its deck gun. For the next four hours, U-156 methodically fired 147 shells at the barges, the tugboat, and the shoreline, turning a sleepy Sunday into the only World War I military engagement on U.S. soil. Residents poured from the Congregational church mid-service, watching in disbelief as geysers of water erupted offshore and shells exploded on the beach. One round severed the French transatlantic telegraph cable that ran beneath the sand, cutting communication between North America and Europe for several hours. Captain Perry and his crew abandoned ship and rowed frantically for shore as shells tore through the Perth Amboy, sinking three of the four barges and leaving the tug riddled with holes. Not a single person died, though shrapnel peppered cottages and one shell landed in a marsh barely 100 yards from the village center.

The Response That Changed Naval Warfare

Within 20 minutes of the first shell, four Curtiss HS-1L flying boats roared off the water at Chatham Naval Air Station, six miles south—the first American military aircraft ever scrambled in response to a foreign attack on U.S. territory. Ensign Eric Lingard and his crew spotted the surfaced submarine and dropped two 100-pound bombs, both of which missed as U-156 crash-dived and vanished beneath the waves. The seaplanes circled for hours, dropping additional bombs on suspected periscope sightings, but the U-boat had escaped. The engagement marked a watershed: for the first time, military aviation had responded to an attack on American soil, establishing the precedent for integrated air-sea defense. U-156's commander, Kapitänleutnant Richard Feldt, later reported that the appearance of aircraft forced him to abandon his plan to shell Chatham itself, crediting American air power with saving the town from further bombardment. The Navy immediately expanded aerial patrols along the entire Eastern Seaboard, deploying 22 additional seaplanes to coastal stations from Maine to Florida within the week. By August 1918, U.S. naval aviation had flown over 3,000 antisubmarine patrols, a direct result of the Orleans attack demonstrating the vulnerability of coastal waters.

The Summer Colonists Who Became Souvenir Hunters

Within hours of U-156's departure, Orleans residents descended on Nauset Beach with buckets and shovels, digging for shell fragments in the sand like beachcombers hunting for treasure. Isabella Howe, a summer resident from Boston, recovered a 15-pound shell casing that had crashed through the roof of her cottage at 222 tons of force, embedding itself in her bedroom floor without exploding. She donated it to the Orleans Historical Society, where it remains on display today alongside fragments collected by local children who treated the attack like a Fourth of July fireworks show gone awry. The Perth Amboy's captain, Joseph Perry, salvaged his tugboat and returned it to service within three weeks, proudly displaying the shell holes in the smokestack as badges of honor. He charged curious visitors 25 cents for deck tours throughout the remainder of the war, earning more from battlefield tourism than from his towing contracts. The telegraph cable, repaired by August 2, required engineers to splice in 3,200 feet of new copper wire, a two-week operation that rerouted transatlantic diplomatic communications through Canadian relay stations and delayed armistice negotiations by forcing President Wilson to communicate with Paris via slower channels.

Why Cape Cod Remembers What America Forgot

The Orleans attack remains virtually unknown outside Massachusetts, overshadowed by the larger drama of World War I's Western Front and eclipsed by Pearl Harbor as America's defining moment of foreign assault. Yet the engagement fundamentally reshaped U.S. coastal defense doctrine, prompting Congress to authorize $50 million for antisubmarine warfare in September 1918—the largest single naval appropriation of the war. The Cape Cod National Seashore established a memorial marker on Nauset Beach in 1978, and the Orleans Historical Society holds an annual commemoration every July 21, attended by descendants of witnesses and military historians studying early aviation tactics. In 2018, the centennial drew over 2,000 visitors, including representatives from the German Naval Museum in Wilhelmshaven, who presented a plaque acknowledging the attack as a misguided operation targeting civilians. The event's legacy extends beyond military history: insurance companies used the Orleans shelling to establish the first "acts of war" exclusions in homeowner policies, clauses that remain standard in American insurance contracts today. Three shell fragments recovered in 2015 by metal detector enthusiasts are now held at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, catalogued as the only physical evidence of enemy action on the U.S. mainland during World War I.