Saboteurs

by Michael Dobbs

  A few days later, as U-202 traveled down the Newfoundland coast, it received a radio message from another U-boat, alerting them to a 20,000-ton Allied steamer traveling from Halifax to Boston. His hunting instincts aroused, Linder at once ordered an increase in speed to twelve knots, but confided to Dasch that there was only “one chance in a hundred” of sinking it.31 Catching up with the steamer was impossible: it could make twenty knots, four knots more than the U-boat. The only hope of intercepting it was by chance. After a day or so, Linder abandoned the chase, and resumed course for Long Island.

  As they approached their destination, Linder permitted Dasch into the radio room to let him listen to broadcasts from American stations and hear the news. A lot had been happening since the beginning of their trip. The Germans had destroyed Russian forces near the city of Kharkov. Resistance fighters had assassinated the Nazi gauleiter of Czechoslovakia, Reinhard Heydrich; the Germans retaliated by destroying the town of Lidice and murdering several hundred inhabitants. America had achieved a measure of revenge for Pearl Harbor by inflicting heavy losses on the Japanese fleet at the Battle of Midway.

  From America itself, the radio reported preparations for a huge military parade through the streets of New York on June 13, the very day the saboteurs were likely to arrive in the city. But the big news was the institution of gasoline rationing along the eastern seaboard, a move that could seriously complicate the logistics of Operation Pastorius.32 The V-men had been ordered to hide their bomb-making equipment as soon as they came ashore. Once established in America, they were to buy a car or van, return to the landing spot, dig up their sabotage gear, and take it to a safe place. If it was difficult to get gasoline, this plan would have to be reconsidered.

  The principal reason for gasoline rationing was a shortage not of oil but of rubber. On June 12, President Roosevelt explained in one of his fireside chats that 92 percent of America’s normal rubber supply was now under the control of the Japanese.33 Since modern wars could not be won without rubber, every ounce of the nation’s precious rubber stockpile would have to go to the military. By using their cars less, Americans would buy fewer tires, which would reduce civilian consumption of rubber. The government authorized gas stations to pay a penny a pound for old rubber products. Within days, Americans had responded to Roosevelt’s appeal by flooding government collection centers with old tires, rubber shoes, and garden hose.

  During one of his trips to the control room, Dasch observed the operations of the top-secret Enigma machine.34 To his untrained eye, it looked like a cash register attached to a typewriter. The radioman received coded messages in Morse, wrote them down, and then typed them into the machine. Whenever he typed a coded letter, a different letter would appear in a panel on the top of the machine, spelling out the secret message. When the operator wanted to send a coded message to another U-boat or back to headquarters, the process was reversed.

  In a neighboring cubbyhole, another crew member was glued to headphones, listening obsessively to the sounds of the sea, which were magnified as they traveled underwater. An experienced operator could tell a fishing boat from a destroyer by listening to the sound of its engine and counting the number of revolutions. He was also able to tell precisely where the sound was coming from with the help of a locator device shaped like a round disk.

  One day near the end of their trip a coded distress signal arrived from another U-boat in American waters. The crew reported they had been “shot to hell” and were unable to pump any more water out of the leaking vessel.35 There was a silence on board U-202: they all felt for their fellow submariners but were too far away to be of any assistance.

  “Another gang gone,” murmured the radio operator. 36

  “We die like rats and have to fight like snakes,” said the torpedo mate. “I wouldn’t mind dying with a gun in my hand if it meant I could at least come face to face with the enemy.”

  AS THEY sailed around Newfoundland, a medical crisis erupted that typified the challenges facing a U-boat captain. A technician named Zimmermann developed violent abdominal pains and a high fever combined with chills and nausea. Soon he was unable even to walk and could only lie down. In the absence of a doctor, one of the radiomen was serving as a medic. He diagnosed acute appendicitis.37

  Eventually, it might be possible to transfer the stricken crew member to one of the large supply submarines that cruised around the Atlantic with full medical facilities and refueling capabilities for smaller U-boats. But none of the supply boats was in the vicinity, so Linder had to improvise and treat the patient with opium and ice compresses, which did little to reduce his agony. If Zimmermann came close to death, Linder was prepared to remove the appendix himself using crude kitchen utensils—there was no scalpel on board—but he wanted to postpone that decision for as long as possible.

  As U-202 worked its way down the coast, the fine weather gave way to heavy fog, and Linder was forced to order lengthy dives for fear of running into American patrol boats. As he explained to Dasch, American destroyers and subchasers had better sonic monitoring equipment than German U-boats: above water, they would hear a submarine sooner than a submarine could hear them.38 Traveling underwater threatened to delay their arrival in Long Island beyond June 11, the first night of the new moon, the best time for landing the saboteurs on the beach.39 The U-boat High Command expressed irritation with Linder, criticizing him in a coded message for failing to adopt “the most efficient course.”

  Linder may have been making slower progress than his superiors would have wished, but he was doing better than the commander of the second U-boat, Kapitänleutnant Joachim Deecke. Submarine U-584 had been following a more southerly route than U-202. Linder received a message from Deecke informing him that he would not be able to land his saboteurs in Florida until around June 17, four or five days after the U-202 group.

  Aboard U-202, the saboteurs’ nerves were getting frayed. Burger noticed that Quirin and Heinck kept to themselves, talked in a low voice, and shut up whenever he or Dasch approached. Heinck, in particular, seemed more and more apprehensive the closer they came to America.40

  Burger was also nervous, and worried about his wife back in Germany. During the trip, he had made friends with a crew member who had previously served with the storm troopers, like Burger himself. He bribed the former storm trooper to ignore the strict instructions of the captain and deliver a letter to his wife, assuring her he was fine.41

  Burger also made friends with the ship’s cook, Otto Wagner, a fellow Swabian. Before he left the boat, he wanted to eat something that reminded him of home, so he asked Wagner to prepare a meal of Swabian noodles, or spaetzle, with sauce. Decades later, Wagner would still remember Burger’s explanation for his special request:

  “I have a feeling that our expedition is going to go wrong.” 42

  THE AMERICAN system for tracking U-boats was still very primitive in June 1942, when U-202 appeared off the Long Island shore. The commander of the U.S. Navy, Admiral Ernest King, was a notorious Anglophobe, unwilling to accept advice, much less direction, from the British, despite their long experience in combating the U-boat menace. A sailor of the old school, King believed that it was very difficult, if not impossible, to predict U-boat movements, and that the gains were not commensurate with the effort.

  American attitudes began to change in the spring as a result of the carnage inflicted by the German shooting spree along the East Coast. Allied losses in this sector alone in March, April, and May totaled 142 ships, or 818,000 tons. In May, King finally agreed to set up a U-boat tracking room in Washington, modeled on the British submarine tracking room in the Admiralty in London.43 Even though Allied code breakers were still unable to break the four-rotor Enigma system used by the U-boats, other intelligence flowed into the room from the British, the U.S. Coast Guard, and a network of wireless direction finders along the eastern seaboard.

  The Allies had lost track of U-202 after it left Lorient on the first stage of its trip across the Atl
antic. As it surfaced off Long Island, on the afternoon of Friday, June 12, the boat emitted a burst of radio signals clearly audible to American monitors. By plotting the source of the signals from several points along the coast, the monitors were able to fix the location of the U-boat: roughly twenty-eight miles south of the fishing village of Amagansett in the Hamptons.

  ABOARD U-202, Linder was trying to chart a course through the fog, much like a blind man tapping his way along a street.44 The only way to determine his exact position was the traditional one—by using a sextant to fix the position of the boat relative to the sun and the planets—but the heavens had been invisible for the past two days because of the fog. He believed he was off East Hampton, the agreed-upon landing point for the saboteurs, a few miles down the coast from Amagansett. But it was impossible to be sure.

  Meanwhile, final preparations were under way for the landing of the V-men. Dasch gave each member of his group a money belt and pocket money. Linder ordered the men to go through their belongings and remove potentially incriminating German items such as cigarettes. The saboteurs also tried as best they could to straighten out the civilian clothes they would wear in America: after three weeks in a seabag, they were very wrinkled.45

  As the submarine nosed its way toward the shore, Linder summoned his officers and the saboteurs to decide how to carry out the landing operation. 46 He planned to sail toward the coast at very slow speed using just his electric motors, rather than the noisy diesel engines, to avoid alerting the Coast Guard. He would keep the deck a few inches above the surface of the waves until the boat scraped the sandy sea bottom, indicating that it was close to the shore. He would then land Dasch and his men, blow his water tanks to lift the U-boat off the bottom, and make off.

  For the landing operation itself, Linder selected two of his strongest sailors to row the saboteurs ashore in a rubber dinghy he had brought along for this purpose. A line would be attached to the dinghy to guide the boat back to the submarine once the V-men were ashore. If the landing party encountered anyone patrolling the beach, Linder ordered, they were to overpower him and send him back to the submarine for interrogation. In addition to removing a potential threat to the mission, the capture of a coastguardsman would provide the German navy with intelligence on American coastal defenses. 47 The sailors would also bring back the navy fatigues worn by the saboteurs during the landing operation.

  When the U-boat surfaced, it was still extremely foggy. As planned, they had arrived on an almost moonless night, with visibility less than a hundred yards. From his post in the control room, Linder could not make out the shoreline, but he could hear the pounding of the surf against the beach, suggesting they must be very close to land.

  The U-boat touched the sea bottom with a shudder and then swung around with the tide so it was parallel to the shore, with the heavier starboard side facing land.48 By now, it was nearly midnight, U.S. Eastern War Time, six o’clock in the morning in Berlin, the time kept by the U-boat fleet. Linder ordered the landing party up on deck, along with their crates of bomb-making equipment and the seabag full of civilian clothes. “Christ, this is perfect,” murmured Dasch, as he emerged onto the fog-shrouded deck.49

  The saboteurs were dressed in the navy clothes they had picked up in Berlin. Quirin and Heinck wore German marine caps with swastika insignias, Dasch a dark brown fedora hat. They scrambled into the dinghy, Dasch squatting in the stern, Burger next to him clutching both the seabag and a briefcase crammed with bundles of fifty-dollar bills.

  Linder told the sailors to pull away from the submarine at a ninety-degree angle so they would be heading toward the shore. But after a few minutes’ rowing, they lost their sense of direction. The fog was so thick it was impossible to make out either the shoreline or the submarine. At times the roar of the surf seemed to be coming from the right, at other times from the left. They must have been going around in circles.

  “Come on boys, let’s go to it,” yelled Dasch, straining to listen to the crash of the waves against the beach.50 Somehow, they managed to sort out the correct direction of shore, but then a succession of three huge waves hit the dinghy with full force, drenching everybody and filling the little boat with water. The crates with explosives had been carefully water-proofed, but the seabag was dripping wet. Two of the men lost their paddles, another his cap. As the waves propelled them across the surf, Dasch used a long oar to reach out for the ocean bottom. When he felt the sand, he jumped out of the boat together with the two sailors, landing in waist-high water.

  “We made it, boys.”51

  They dragged the boat onto the beach, along with the boxes. As their eyes became accustomed to the different shades of black—dark black sea, gray-black sky, silvery black sand—the men from the U-boat could just make out a broad expanse of beach stretching up a gentle incline to brush-covered dunes. They hauled the boxes to a rickety fence by the dunes, hurriedly covering them with sand in case they ran into a coastguardsman. Burger pulled a raincoat out of the seabag and spread it on the sand. 52 He then removed bundles of sodden clothing from the bag, one for each man, and placed them on the raincoat.

  As his colleagues were attending to the baggage, Dasch took a quick walk around the beach. After a few steps, he cursed quietly to himself. He could see a beacon flashing in the distance: they must have landed near a Coast Guard station. There was no time to lose. He ordered his men to hurry changing out of their naval fatigues into civilian clothes. He then ran back to the seashore to the sailors, who were searching for the lost paddles. He was helping them get the boat out of the water and drain it when he realized to his horror that there was someone else on the beach.

  A tall figure was walking toward them through the fog, swinging a flashlight.53

  PART TWO

  FREEDOM (JUNE 13–27, 1942)

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE BEACH (JUNE 13, MORNING)

  SIX MONTHS after Pearl Harbor, foreign-inspired terrorism was low on the list of the concerns of ordinary Americans. Even though German U-boats were known to be off the East Coast, the idea of Nazi saboteurs coming ashore to wreak havoc behind American lines seemed far-fetched, even ludicrous. Enemy sabotage missions were the stuff of Hollywood movies rather than daily newspaper headlines.

  For most Americans, the war in Europe and Asia was still a long way away. American boys might be dying in places like Corregidor and Bataan, but there was still a quality of innocence about domestic life. People had grown accustomed to the protection afforded by two great oceans: the American homeland seemed an oasis of peace and relative prosperity, somehow insulated from the murderous passions afflicting the rest of the world. Saks Fifth Avenue was still advertising its semiannual clearance sale; Irving Berlin was still performing on Broadway; Joe DiMaggio was still hitting home runs in Yankee Stadium.

  The sense of American invulnerability was reflected in the low priority placed on homeland security. The defenses set up along the eastern seaboard in the immediate aftermath of America’s entry into the war were “scanty and improvised,” in the words of the army’s official history.1 They were strengthened somewhat in April as a result of the growing U-boat menace and intelligence reports that the Germans might be trying to land saboteurs along the coast. But there were many glaring holes, caused in large part by bureaucratic turf fights between the agencies responsible for homeland defense.

  In theory, the navy was responsible for combating the enemy at sea; the Coast Guard patrolled the beaches; the army defended the coastline. In practice, all these responsibilities overlapped. Both the army and the navy ran radio interceptor stations along the coast, listening to U-boat communications. The army’s Eastern Defense Command included mobile infantry units charged with responding to enemy incursions; as a result, army commanders were perpetually feuding with the Coast Guard over who was responsible for beach defense. The navy had primary responsibility for the anti-U-boat campaign, but ordering and enforcing a blackout to prevent submarines from attacking ships silhouetted
by lights on shore was the job of the army.

  To make matters even more complicated, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was charged with combating attempted subversion or sabotage, assisted by the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Military Intelligence Division of the army. The head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, had a reputation as a skilled, sometimes ruthless, bureaucratic infighter constantly seeking to advance the interests of his agency, even if it meant running roughshod over everyone else.

  Each of the agencies responsible for homeland defense had its own chain of command and jealously guarded its rights and prerogatives, some of which dated back to the War of Independence. Although War Department officials had tried to cut through the red tape and come up with a workable system of interagency cooperation, the people who actually patrolled the beaches, manned the coastal defense guns, and listened to enemy communications were barely on speaking terms with one another.

  If there was one person in Washington who took the threat of internal subversion very seriously, it was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As assistant secretary of the navy during World War I, Roosevelt had been responsible for naval intelligence, and he constantly suspected the Germans of plotting attacks against American military installations. Some of these suspected plots were the figment of his own hyperactive imagination and lifelong fascination with the cloak-and-dagger, but others were real enough. In July 1916, saboteurs blew up a huge ammunition depot on Black Tom Island in New York Harbor opposite the Statue of Liberty, killing seven people and destroying two million pounds of munitions intended for Allied forces in Europe.2 It was the greatest explosion in the history of New York City, and could be heard in Philadelphia, nearly a hundred miles away. Thousands of heavy plate-glass windows fell out of skyscrapers and office buildings in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and pieces of shrapnel landed as far away as Governors Island. Six months later, in January 1917, the roar of exploding munitions again shook New York City, this time from a fire in a shell assembly plant near Kingsland, New Jersey.