Saboteurs

by Michael Dobbs

  Sadly, Linder addressed his men over the ship loudspeakers, ordering them to pack a few items of clothing in diver-rescue bags, and prepare to abandon ship. He wrote out a coded message to the U-boat command announcing that he had been forced to surrender after completing his mission of landing the saboteurs. U-202 was “ready for demolition,” he noted in his log. “Radio ready for the last message. There is very little hope left. Worst of all is the helpless waiting for the return of the tide.”

  AS SOON as he had finished speaking to the coastguardsman, Dasch ordered the two sailors to get back to the submarine immediately without waiting for the navy fatigues worn by the V-men. He then rejoined the other saboteurs further up the beach. Quirin and Heinck had heard about his encounter with Cullen from Burger, who had blundered into the middle of the conversation. They were angry at him for failing to carry out the captain’s orders to overpower anyone they met on the beach and send him back to the U-boat.

  A flare exploded somewhere in the distance, straining everyone’s nerves to breaking point. “They are looking for us and it’s all your fault, George,” complained Quirin. “You should have killed that guy on the beach, or we should have done it.”17

  “Now, boys, this is the time to be quiet and keep your nerves,” said Dasch, boasting that he had managed to “buffalo” the coastguardsman into thinking he was someone important.18

  The men were still changing out of the sodden navy fatigues into civilian clothes. Dasch hurried them up, saying undiplomatically, “It takes years to dress bums, let’s get going.” They followed him along the beach, carrying and dragging the heavy wooden crates, until they reached a little gully where a sandy path opened out onto the beach. “Dig,” he ordered, pointing to the ground. “Let’s get that evidence right down here.”

  At this point, Dasch discovered he had left his own clothes and a notebook near the original landing spot, up on the dunes. Burger and Quirin had also lost papers and items of clothing. Cursing to each other and shivering in the cool night air, they crept back along the dunes through the fog, until they stumbled on Dasch’s clothes. Dasch ripped off his drenched socks and navy fatigues, and put on a pair of Scotch tweeds that he had bought at Macy’s a few years earlier for playing golf. He then ordered the others to collect all the navy clothes in the seabag, and bury it at the top of the dunes, together with the shovels.

  Terrified of being discovered, they began crawling inland through the scrub until they reached a row of bungalows. A few hundred yards away, they could see cars and trucks loaded with sailors passing along a road. Searchlights appeared from the direction of the beach, and signal flares exploded in the sky. Sometimes the fog would clear slightly, and they could make out activity along the beach, where coastguardsmen were patrolling.

  “We’re surrounded, boys,” Heinck kept repeating, rattling his companions’ nerves even more.19 As they lay in the scrub grass, wondering what to do next, they could hear the roar of diesel engines from out at sea. The noise could mean only one of two things, Dasch told the others: a U.S. patrol boat moving along the shore or U-202 going full speed ahead.

  A light came on in one of the bungalows near where they were sitting and a door creaked open.20 A telephone rang. They could hear the sound of muffled conversation.

  It was time to move further inland, in the direction of the main road.

  WHEN CULLEN got back to the lifeboat station, he reported his sighting of a stranded boat offshore to his superiors, who were beginning to arrive on the scene. Chief Boatswain’s Mate Warren Barnes, the man in charge of the Amagansett station, put a call through to Coast Guard intelligence in New York at 1:45 a.m. Lieutenant (j.g.) Fred Nirschel, a thirty-nine-year-old former football player who had spent the Prohibition years chasing bootleggers across Lake Erie, picked up the phone in his office on Broadway.21

  Anxious to maintain control of the investigation, Nirschel instructed Barnes to keep his information “entirely secret” and admit nobody to the lifeboat station.22 He then jumped into a station wagon with another Coast Guard lieutenant, Sydney K. Franken, telling the driver to keep his foot pressed down on the accelerator until they reached Amagansett.

  Before leaving Manhattan, Nirschel had alerted Navy Intelligence and the Eastern Sea Frontier—the navy command with responsibility for the entire eastern seaboard—to the incident in Amagansett. Nobody treated the matter as very urgent. According to the war diary of the Eastern Sea Frontier, “the frequent reports of mysterious flares, lights, strangers and other phenomena had become so familiar as false alarms that the customary procedure . . . was to turn the information over to the Intelligence Officer” without further action. The people at headquarters had become thoroughly skeptical of U-boat sightings: the war diary dismissed Cullen’s claim of spotting a U-boat as of “dubious foundation.”23

  A special submarine tracking room had been installed at Eastern Sea Frontier headquarters on the fifteenth floor of the Federal Building at 90 Church Street, Manhattan. It was staffed by just one officer, a Princeton University geology professor named Harry Hess, who held the rank of lieutenant in the U.S. Navy Reserve. Hess was a brilliant scientist who fully understood that locating German U-boats was key to winning the Battle of the Atlantic. He was constantly looking for new ways to predict their movements from various scraps of evidence, including radio direction finding. But even though Hess had pleaded with the navy to give him enough men for a round-the-clock operation, and had asked for secure telephone communications to be installed between Washington and New York to permit a “direct and immediate” assessment of German U-boat movements, nothing had been done.

  There was still little sense of urgency in Washington about transmitting direction fixes on enemy submarines to the field. There were many in the U.S. Navy, including the commander in chief, Admiral King, who dismissed the efforts of Hess and other submarine-tracking enthusiasts as little better than “the mysterious use of a crystal ball, tea leaves, and a Ouija Board.”24

  On this particular occasion, reports of a German U-boat off Long Island had reached Washington the previous evening on the basis of intercepted radio traffic. By plotting the source of the radio signals, submarine tracking stations had placed the U-boat at a location roughly twenty-eight miles south of Amagansett at 8:53 p.m. But this information was not transmitted to Eastern Sea Frontier headquarters on Church Street until 11:30 that night. By this time, Hess had gone off duty. In his absence, the report was handled by the surface controller, who alerted the operations officer of the Third Naval District. The operations officer promised that a Coast Guard cutter would be sent to investigate.

  ON AMAGANSETT Beach, several people had spotted the U-boat in addition to Cullen, but they also had difficulty getting anyone to take them seriously. Chief Radioman Harry McDonald was in charge of the Amagansett Naval Radio Station, part of the top-secret network that tracked the movements of enemy submarines all over the Atlantic. By an extraordinary coincidence, a U-boat was now washed up on a sandbar right next to his own radio station. McDonald no longer needed his sophisticated tracking equipment to find a submarine in the middle of the ocean: he could both hear and smell the roar of U-202’s diesel engines.

  His first thought was that the ship might be landing a raiding party to destroy the radio station. Afraid that the Germans were coming, he decided to evacuate the station, sending his family to stay with friends. He then called the Coast Guard for further information but was given a curt bureaucratic brush-off.

  “I am not permitted to discuss details of possible enemy activity,” said the man who answered the phone.25

  Next McDonald called the army post five miles down the beach, to say he believed a mini-invasion was under way and to ask for extra protection. The duty officer of the army’s 113th Mobile Infantry Unit was unconvinced. “I’m sorry, we can’t leave the premises without orders from the captain.” When the coastguardsmen got through to the army post, they received a similar response: “What are you doing, trying to s
tart something?” 26

  Cullen’s direct superior, Jennett, was more concerned about a light in a cottage along the beach than the threat of a Nazi invasion. Such lights were prohibited under blackout regulations, and Jennett believed that someone might be trying to send a signal to the U-boat out at sea. He had already complained about the light to the people who lived in the cottage, but they had paid no attention. He saw a man switch on the light of his front porch and whistle loudly, as if whistling for a dog, return inside, switch the light off, come back outside, and repeat the whole process all over again. It seemed very suspicious. He assembled a group of coastguardsmen and went to investigate.

  In the meantime, evidence was turning up to corroborate Cullen’s story. Cullen found a pack of German cigarettes near the spot where he had had his bizarre encounter with the man in the fedora. As dawn was breaking, Barnes and two other coastguardsmen followed some tracks along the beach to the top of the dunes, where they discovered a freshly turned mound of sand. Poking around with a stick, they felt something hard. In a few minutes they came across four wooden crates bound with marlin that could be used as a handle.27 Barnes pried open the crate with a bayonet and discovered a hermetically sealed tin container.

  A short distance away, in another newly dug hole, the coastguardsmen found a canvas seabag and two trench shovels. A pair of light blue bathing trunks was lying on the sand, along with a belt and a shirt.

  Barnes sent one of his men back to the station to bring up a truck.

  AT 3 A.M.—nearly three hours after U-202 first ran aground—Linder noted that the tide was coming in, lifting his boat slightly off the sand. The time had come for one last attempt to escape. In another hour, it would be light, and they would certainly be spotted from land. He must either get off the sandbar now or blow up the boat.

  “We will make one last try to free the boat,” he told the crew, his voice echoing through the ship’s loudspeakers. “If it fails, we will go together to captivity. Remember the first commandment: silence is golden.”

  He ordered all the men aft so the bow would lift clear from the sand. The torpedoes had already been removed from the tubes. He blew the water tanks again, turning the diesels to full speed ahead, and running the electric motors as well. With each swell of the waves, the boat moved slightly, rocking back and forth like a cradle. “After about four tries she came free,” Linder noted at 3:10. “Hurrah!”

  There were “cries of joy” from the men crowded in the stern of the ship as they felt water rushing in under the keel. The cook, Otto Wagner, would later recall that the crew “could hardly believe” the seemingly miraculous twist of fate. “We hugged each other out of sheer happiness.”28 The thirteenth was obviously their lucky day.

  There was still one problem to overcome. Believing that the ship was doomed, Linder had ordered one of his officers to take the crewman with appendicitis to the shore. After U-202 had managed to free itself, the officer abandoned the plan and rowed back to the submarine. Both men were hauled back on board.

  “This was the only chance for us to get away, otherwise we could have marched in the military parade in New York,” Linder noted in his log, referring to the big “New York at War” procession announced for later that day in Manhattan. “Now we are off, while it is still dark. Evidently no one noticed us from land. All activity was not on the coast, but further inland.”

  In fact, they had been seen from the shore. Standing by the water’s edge, several coastguardsmen could see the outlines of a long, narrow boat lying very low in the water. They watched, fascinated, as the U-boat revved up its diesel engines, turning slowly in the direction of the sea. “It was so close it looked as if it was ashore,” one of the men later recalled. 29

  Barnes, the petty officer in charge of the Amagansett Lifeboat Station, was also on the beach when the diesel engines started up for the final time. The engines were so loud he immediately concluded that a boat must be trying to pull itself off the sandbar. He noted “a heavy odor of oil in the air.” As he returned to the station, he saw the boat proceeding west, in the direction of Manhattan. When he phoned his superior to report what was happening, the noise of the engines was clearly audible at the other end of the line.

  By the time Barnes emerged from the station, the submarine had turned around, and was heading toward the ocean. “Which way is it going now?” he yelled to a coastguardsman on top of the observation tower.

  “Eastwards,” the lookout replied.

  Barnes was not quite sure that the boy knew his east from his west, so he asked if he was facing the ocean.

  “Yes.”

  “Which hand is it moving towards?”

  “My left hand.”30

  The boat was indeed moving east, toward the Atlantic. According to the Eastern Sea Frontier war diary, Coast Guard headquarters failed to respond to the original report of a German submarine in the vicinity of Amagansett the previous evening. “No ships were dispatched to the area until after the reported landing,” the war diary concluded, and “no action was taken” as a result of the radio direction finding. 31

  Despite ample opportunities to capture it, U-202 was permitted to escape.

  DAWN BROKE over Amagansett Beach to reveal an expanse of golden sand at the edge of a prairie. The Hamptons in 1942 bore little resemblance to their appearance today: there were no sprawling beach communities, no smart boutiques, no immaculately manicured lawns and glistening swimming pools, hardly any paved roads. There were not even many trees. Instead there were miles of rough scrubland and a few sandy paths leading down from the East Hampton–Montauk highway to a wide, windswept beach.

  Since it was June, vacationers were already coming out from New York to occupy the dozen or so modest bungalows strung along the beach. Amagansett had recently been discovered by a circle of avant-garde painters around the heiress Peggy Guggenheim and her lover, Max Ernst, but it was still a quiet, secluded spot. The lifeboat station stood out from the other buildings because of its size and location next to the beach; it has since been sold and moved inland, and is today dwarfed by multimilliondollar mansions.

  It was now four hours since the landing of the saboteurs and an hour since U-202 had pried itself loose from the sandbar. America’s military machine was belatedly mobilizing itself. Several dozen soldiers from the 113th infantry unit arrived on the beach, followed by an army lieutenant, alone and somewhat bewildered. He had been roused from his bed by repeated phone calls and was “looking for his men.”32 Barnes suggested diplomatically that the army keep behind the sand dunes, well clear of the beach itself. His own men were patrolling the beach, and they were armed and jittery, not a good combination. He himself had almost shot one of the soldiers as a suspected Nazi.33

  Around 4:15 a.m. the men on the beach again heard the sound of a boat revving up offshore.34 This was either U-202 making its final escape after picking up the seaman with appendicitis or, more likely, a Coast Guard cutter investigating the reports of a U-boat washed up on the sandbar. The sound died away after a few minutes, as the boat went out to sea.

  The Coast Guard intelligence officers, Nirschel and Franken, arrived at the lifeboat station at 4:30, having made the three-hour trip from Manhattan in just over two hours. Barnes returned from the beach at the same time, together with his haul of four wooden crates and a very wet seabag. The two lieutenants used a can opener to slice open the sealed container inside the crate already opened by Barnes. A variety of sabotage devices—including time bomb mechanisms, detonator caps with lead wires attached, and vials containing inflammable liquids—spilled onto the floor of the boat room.

  “Timing devices,” murmured one of the lieutenants, as he examined the fake pen and pencil set. His colleague discovered a German inscription on the pack of cigarettes found on the beach—“D. Mosel, Hamburg-München”—and the French words “Allumettes de Sûreté” on a box of matches.35 Soon the floor of the boat room was littered with German naval uniforms, explosives, and other instruments of
sabotage.

  Excited by their findings, the officers imagined a starring role for themselves in uncovering a Nazi sabotage plot. They ordered Barnes to return to the beach and fill in the holes he and his men had dug “in such a manner it would not be noticeable that the material had been removed.” 36 They also insisted that their own visit to Amagansett be kept secret. Their idea at this point was to return the following night in civilian clothes and keep watch over the beach near the arms cache, on the assumption that the Germans would return to pick up their equipment. In the meantime, they instructed the coastguardsmen to load the sabotage gear into their station wagon.

  Before leaving for New York, Franken questioned Cullen about his strange encounter on the beach, and signed a receipt for the money offered him as a bribe. It turned out not to come to $300—as the stranger had claimed—but $260, consisting of two fifty-dollar bills, five twenties, and six tens.

  In the excitement, nobody thought to ask the obvious questions: If the invaders were not on the beach, where were they? And where were they likely to be headed?

  DASCH’S MAIN concern was to get away from the beach as soon as possible. This meant heading in the opposite direction from the sound of the surf. As dawn was breaking and he could see a little better, he led his men away across the scrub to the East Hampton–Montauk highway. He knew from the coastguardsman he had met on the beach that they were somewhere near Amagansett. He had a vague sense of the local geography, having worked in the area a few years previously, but had no idea whether the village lay to the left or to the right.

  The saboteurs decided to explore along the main road, without knowing where it would lead. To avoid being seen, they kept behind a hedgerow. They were wet and exhausted, and suspicious of one another. Quirin insisted they all go through their pockets, looking for anything that might give them away. They were alarmed to discover that Burger had two draft registration cards, one in his real name, another waiting to be filled up.37 Dasch demanded that he tear up the empty registration card.