Shadow box

The order, “Stand by to ram”, is rarely heard on a US Navy ship—and the order LCDR Maxwell gave after USS BUCKLEY rammed U-66 and sat perched on the sub’s forecastle, “Stand by to repel boarders”, just before German sailors clambered onto BUCKLEY, had not been heard since the days of Commodore Matthew Perry 100 years earlier.

Brent Maxwell Abel was a U.S. Naval Reserve Officer during WW2. He was awarded the Navy Cross for his actions as commanding officer of the destroyer escort USS BUCKLEY (DE-51) when it pursued, rammed and sank the German submarine U-66 during the night of May 5-6, 1944 off the coast of North Africa.

Abel was born in Washington, D.C. but raised by his mother in Scarsdale, N.Y. He attended Harvard College where he was a French major and participated in NROTC. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1940, he moved to San Francisco, California where he practiced estate planning and taxes.

Called to active duty at the start of World War II, he spent a year at Corpus Christi, Texas before assuming command of a sub chaser escorting tanker convoys from refineries in the Caribbean to the mid Atlantic to provide fuel for the European theater of operations. In 1943 he was selected as the commanding officer of the newly- commissioned destroyer escort USS BUCKLEY (DE-51), lead ship in her class of ships whose primary mission was anti- submarine warfare in "hunter killer groups" with escort aircraft carriers (CVE's).

During the pre-dawn hours of his 28th birthday (6 May 1944), Abel's ship engaged a surfaced German submarine, U-66 in the Atlantic about 500 nm off the coast of North Africa in what has been called the "most exciting" submarine engagement of WW2. After the U-boat sank, about half its crew, 36 German sailors, were rescued and taken prisoner by BUCKLEY. This battle is probably the closest naval combat of modern warfare, as BUCKLEY'S crew battled German sailors who swarmed about the destroyer with shell cases, fists and coffee cups, after BUCKLEY rammed the submarine and rode up on its back.

After 3 years afloat, Abel was assigned shore duty at Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, as the Assistant Professor for Naval Science and Tactics. He was released from active duty in January 1946. Returning to civilian life after WW2, for many years Abel was a partner in a large San Francisco law firm where most of his co-workers had no idea of his wartime service that he rarely mentioned.

Years later, one of the German crew survivors contacted Abel and told him, "All of us survivors of the U-66 have always had the desire to get to know our wartime adversaries in the war on the sea and if the opportunity presented itself to say thank you for the fair treatment on board the Buckley and for saving our lives." Mr. Abel then helped organize a reunion of the former foes in Germany where he expressed regret that he could not have saved more lives.

Mr. Abel remained in the active Navy Reserve and retired as a Captain in 1960. He was 89 years old when he died at his home in San Rafael, California in December 2005.

Abel, Brent Maxwell, CAPT