By James Heinz
Memorial Day is about remembering those who gave their lives for this country. One of those was Carl Zeidler, Milwaukee’s singing mayor.
Zeidler was born in Milwaukee in 1908. He attended West Division High School and graduated from Marquette Law School in 1929. In 1931 he became an assistant city attorney and was noted for many successful prosecutions of local Nazis and also for banning pinball machines.
Photo at top of page: Carl Zeidler courtesy of Milwaukee Public Library
In 1940 he ran for Mayor against 6 term incumbent Daniel Hoan. His campaign manager was Milwaukee native author Robert Bloch, who later wrote the thriller Psycho. Zeidler ran mostly on his good looks, charm, and ability to sing popular songs in five different languages. His campaign also invented the modern balloon drop. He won in a landslide.
Carl Zeidler resigned as Mayor of Milwaukee and was commissioned a lieutenant junior grade in the Naval Reserve on April 8, 1942. Wikipedia says he asked to be assigned to the most dangerous duty there was. The Navy assigned him to the U.S. Navy Armed Guard.
The U.S. Navy Armed Guard was established to provide crews to man the guns aboard civilian merchant ships. Wikipedia tells us that “The assignment as an Armed Guardsman was often dreaded because of the constant danger. Merchant ships were vulnerable, being slow and unwieldy, while lacking armor and having light firepower at best.”
SS LA SALLE courtesy of American Battle Monuments Commission
Carl Zeidler was assigned to the merchant ship SS LA SALLE, a 5,462 ton steam freighter launched in 1920 in Mobile, Alabama. She had a civilian crew of 8 officers and 32 crewmen. Carl Zeidler’s 20 man Naval Armed Guard was aboard to man her one four inch gun, four 20 mm guns, and two 0.30 caliber machine guns.
In 1942 she left New York for Cape Town, South Africa via the Panama Canal with a cargo of 6,116 tons of steel, trucks, and ammunition. She was unescorted when she left the Canal Zone on September 26, 1942, and was told to maintain radio silence to avoid giving her position away. She was expected to arrive in Capetown on November 1.
Nothing was heard from the LA SALLE again. No trace of her or her crew was ever found. The ship was declared missing on November 7, 1942.
On December 11, 1944, Carl Zeidler was declared missing and presumed dead. WMHS files say that as late as 1947 the Zeidler family resisted having a ship named for Carl in the hope that he was somehow alive somewhere.
The mystery was resolved after the war when an historian came across the log of a German U-Boat. At about the same time the LA SALLE set sail, the German naval high command began diverting U-Boats away from the heavily defended North Atlantic convoy routes into less well defended areas like the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. One of these was U-159, a type IXC submarine. The IXC U-Boat has a Midwestern connection: The famous U-505 U-Boat on display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago is a Type IXC U-Boat.
U-159 on right courtesy of Wikipedia
U-Boat.net tells us what the U-159 log revealed: “At 22.50 hours on 7 Nov 1942 the unescorted La Salle (Master William Arthur Sillars) was hit by one torpedo from U-159 about 350 miles southeast of the Cape of Good Hope…The torpedo ignited the cargo of ammunition and the ship exploded, creating a fireball hundred meters (300 feet) high and completely destroyed the vessel. Bits of wreckage fell around the ship for several minutes afterwards and slightly wounded three men on watch in the conning tower of the U-boat. It is reported that the explosion was heard clearly at Cape Point Lighthouse over 300 miles away.” The position was given as 40° 00’S, 21° 30’E – Grid GR 7599
There were no survivors.
Milwaukee’s Forest Home Cemetery photo by James Heinz
A cenotaph at Milwaukee’s Forest Home Cemetery commemorates Carl Zeidler. When I visited, a small American flag had been placed in front of Carl’s name. Carl Zeidler is remembered someplace else as well:
New York City
His is one of the over 4,600 names engraved on one of the 19 granite pylons of the East Coast Memorial in Battery Park at the south end of Manhattan Island. The Memorial commemorates “in proud and grateful remembrance” Americans who died in the Atlantic in World War II.
Battery Park courtesy of American Battle Monuments Commission
This Memorial Day, proudly and gratefully remember Carl Zeidler and all our other Carl Zeidlers from all of our wars.
Postscript: In 1943 U-159 was sunk by a U.S. Navy patrol plane south of Haiti. Like the LA SALLE, there were no survivors.
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James Heinz is the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society’s acquisitions director. He became interested in maritime history as a kid watching Jacques Cousteau’s adventures on TV. He was a Great Lakes wreck diver until three episodes of the bends forced him to retire from diving. He was a University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee police officer for thirty years. He regularly flies either a Cessna 152 or 172.
