On this day in 1942, an ordinary American cargo ship with a single old gun ran into a heavily armed German warship in the middle of the ocean, refused to surrender, and sank it. It is the only time in the entire war that a United States merchant ship destroyed a German surface warship, and the way it happened is almost beyond belief. This is the SS Stephen Hopkins. The Stephen Hopkins was a Liberty ship, one of the plain, mass produced freighters churned out by American shipyards to haul cargo across the oceans. She was not built to fight. Her only real weapon was a single four inch gun mounted on her stern, an old gun manned by a small crew of Navy armed guards and merchant sailors, meant for desperate self defense and nothing more. On the morning of September 27, in the South Atlantic, the Hopkins came out of a curtain of fog and rain and found herself almost on top of two German ships. One was the Stier, a purpose built commerce raider, a warship in disguise bristling with six large guns and torpedo tubes, each of her shells many times the weight of anything the Hopkins could throw. The other was her supply ship. The Germans signaled the American freighter to stop and surrender. Captain Paul Buck refused. He ordered his crew to battle stations and told his single gun to open fire. What followed was a brutal, point blank slugging match between a warship and a cargo ship that had no business fighting one. The Stier's heavy guns tore the Hopkins apart, smashing her engines, setting her ablaze, killing men all across the ship. But the Hopkins gave it back. Her lone four inch gun hammered the German raider again and again, scoring hit after hit low on the hull near the waterline, wrecking the Stier's steering and engine room and starting fires the Germans could not control. Then came the moment that made the fight a legend. The Hopkins's gun crew was cut down, killed and wounded around their weapon. An eighteen year old engine room cadet named Edwin O'Hara, who had escaped the burning engine spaces and knew a little about the gun, ran aft to the shattered, undermanned weapon. With five shells left in the ready box, O'Hara loaded and fired them himself, one after another, single handedly, slamming his last rounds into the German raider. He was mortally wounded doing it. Both ships were doomed. The Stephen Hopkins, blazing and broken, finally went down. But the Stier was hurt even worse. So badly damaged she could not be saved, the German raider was scuttled by her own crew less than two hours later. The little Liberty ship had killed her. The cost was terrible. Most of the Hopkins's crew died, including Captain Buck and young O'Hara. Only fifteen men got away in a lifeboat, and they drifted across the open Atlantic for about a month before finally reaching the coast of Brazil to tell the story. Captain Buck and Cadet O'Hara were honored for their gallantry, and the Stephen Hopkins was enshrined as a gallant ship, the humble freighter that took on a German warship gun to gun and sent it to the bottom on this day in 1942.