Responsibility for the Black Tom and Kingsland explosions—which took place at a time when the United States was still officially neutral—was eventually traced to the German secret service. Among those implicated in the plot was Franz von Papen, a former German military attaché in Washington and future mentor to Adolf Hitler. It seemed reasonable to conclude that the Germans would try something similar in World War II.
Roosevelt’s suspicions were piqued by an intelligence report dated March 15, 1942, from the U.S. embassy in Switzerland warning that German submarines were transporting groups of “two or three agents at a time” to the coasts of north and central America.3 The report cited a trusted source who had just returned from the German port of Kiel, where he met with the relatives of U-boat men.
Agents carry communications and very valuable explosives . . . They are very familiar with area where they will work and very amply supplied with dollar bills obtained in Sweden and Switzerland. During darkness submarines proceed very near inshore (some commanders related having seen glare New York skyline), whence member submarine crew takes them ashore in hard rubber boats with outboard motors. Well developed plan prescribes that, at moment ordered, agents and accomplices in America will commence simultaneously everywhere on continent a wave of sabotage and terror, chief purpose of which is to cause United States military authorities to keep greatest possible number of troops on home front, reducing thereby to minimum number sent abroad.
The report was discussed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on March 30, and passed on to the intelligence agencies “for appropriate action.” A week later, the president had his naval aide send a memorandum to the navy and the Coast Guard alerting them to the possibility of saboteurs coming ashore. An effective way of dealing with the threat, Roosevelt suggested, would be a “reasonable expansion” of the Coast Guard’s beach patrol service.4 In particular, he proposed equipping the one-man beach patrols with portable radio sets that would allow them instantly to alert their superiors to an enemy incursion. Two-way radio sets were a relatively novel innovation: Roosevelt had seen them used by the Secret Service at his country retreat at Hyde Park in upstate New York, and was much impressed.
As often happened with such missives, FDR’s suggestion about two-way radio sets was filed away and forgotten as one more passing presidential enthusiasm.
AGED TWENTY-ONE, with keen blue eyes, a ruddy complexion, and a deep wave in his hair, John Cullen had been working at Macy’s department store for just over a year when war broke out. As was the custom at Macy’s, he had started out delivering small packages and worked his way up to delivering furniture. His main interests outside work were bowling, dancing, and dates with his girlfriend.
The day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Cullen and his best friend decided to enlist in the marines. They reported to a recruiting station in the Bronx, where a gruff sergeant told them, “If you fellas are ready to ship out tonight, we will take you. If not, leave now.” 5 Their patriotic enthusiasm did not extend to missing Christmas with their families, so they joined the Coast Guard instead.
The Coast Guard was expanding rapidly to deal with the threat posed by German U-boats, and new recruits were sent to a receiving station on Ellis Island, where they were stacked in three-tier bunks. After several weeks’ training, they were dispatched to lifeboat stations along the East Coast for the unglamorous duty of “sand pounding”—walking up and down the beaches to look for ships in distress, drowning swimmers, and German submarines. The lifeboat stations were strung out some six miles apart from each other in a two-thousand-mile chain from Maine to Florida.
Cullen ended up in the little resort town of Amagansett, near the eastern tip of Long Island, on a stretch of coast known as the site of a large number of wrecks and groundings. A false sandbar a few hundred yards offshore had tricked numerous mariners over the years, stranding their boats as the tide washed out. A powerful hurricane had blown through Amagansett in 1938, flattening many beach houses and turning the area behind the seashore into half-empty scrubland.
The lifeboat station was a two-story wood-and-shingle building topped by a lookout tower, with a large boat room downstairs and sleeping quarters upstairs for sixteen men. When on beach duty, Cullen was required to walk or run three miles to a navigation beacon, punch a clock he carried with him to prove that he had reached his destination, and return to the station. At night, he had to make sure that every house facing the sea was completely blacked out. The six-mile circuit took about two hours to complete.
Coast Guard headquarters had responded to the alert for German saboteurs coming ashore by ordering simultaneous patrols on either side of the lifeboat station whenever practical.6 At the Amagansett station, however, the men only had one clock to share between them, so it was necessary to wait for a patrol to return before sending another out. This meant that each stretch of beach was patrolled twice in four hours, once on the way out and once on the way back.
The chance of a coastguardsman running into anyone coming ashore—assuming that the intruder spent roughly twenty minutes on the beach before moving inland—were approximately one in six.
ON THE night of Saturday, June 13, Cullen was assigned the midnight patrol east from Amagansett Lifeboat Station. The west patrol was late getting back, so Cullen did not leave until ten minutes past twelve. He made his way down from the lifeboat station through the sand dunes and past an observation tower and a naval radio station to the beach.
He was alone and unarmed, wearing the standard Coast Guard uniform of dark blue pullover, pants, and black dress shoes. He was unable to see more than a few yards in front of him because of the fog. There were rumors of German U-boats offshore but, even if he were to run into a Nazi sailor or saboteur, Cullen had no idea what to do or how to get help. Apart from a flare gun, he had no means of communicating with his lifeboat station.
Since the tide was out, the beach was particularly wide, almost a hundred yards from the water’s edge to the dunes. Cullen did not want to get lost in the fog, so he stuck close to the ocean where the sand was firmest. He amused himself by singing the latest hit songs, such as “I’ve Got a Girl in Kalamazoo” by Glenn Miller. There was one tune, in particular, that he could not get out of his head. Played by the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra, it had been the number one song in America for the past five weeks:
Tangerine,
She is all they claim
With her eyes of night and lips as bright as flame
Tangerine.
When she dances by
Señoritas stare and caballeros sigh
And I’ve seen
Toasts to Tangerine
Raised in every bar across the Argentine.7
He had been walking for about fifteen minutes, and had covered just under half a mile, when he spotted a group of three men holding a dark object in the surf, silhouetted against the misty sea. It was rare to run into anyone at this time of night: under the blackout regulations, everybody not in uniform was meant to be off the beach.
“Who are you?” Cullen yelled.8 He shined his flashlight in the direction of the strangers, but it was of little use in the fog, so he turned it off.
One of the men came toward him, shouting out a question.
“Coast Guard?”
“Yes. Who are you?”
“Fishermen. From East Hampton. We were trying to get to Montauk Point, but our boat ran aground. We’re waiting for the sunrise.”
“What do you mean, East Hampton and Montauk Point?” said Cullen, surprised that the fishermen would run aground less than five miles from their starting point and fifteen miles from their destination. Logically, they should be further out to sea. “Do you know where you are?”
The stranger acted cagey. “I don’t believe I know where we landed. You should know.”
“You’re in Amagansett. That’s my station over there,” the coastguardsman replied, gesturing back over his head through the mist. “Why don’t you come up to the station, and stay
there for the night?”
The other man hesitated a little, before murmuring, “All right.” They walked together a few steps in the direction of the lifeboat station. Then the stranger changed his mind.
“I’m not going with you.”
“Why not?”
Another hesitation.
“I have no identification card, and no permit to fish.”
“That’s all right. You better come along.”
“No, I won’t go.”
Cullen made a motion to grab the stranger’s arm. “You have to come.”
Although the stranger spoke fluent English, he seemed strangely out of place. He didn’t look much like a fisherman. He was wearing a red woolen sweater with a zipper up the front, a gray mechanic’s coat, gray-green dungarees, white socks, tennis shoes, and a dark brown fedora hat.9 His pants, Cullen noticed, were dripping wet. The stranger seemed anxious to distract Cullen’s attention from his two companions. Rather than submit to the coastguardsman’s authority, he abruptly changed the subject.
“Now listen, how old are you, son?”
“Twenty-one.”
“You have a mother?”
“Yes.”
“A father?”
“Yes.”
“Look, I wouldn’t want to kill you. You don’t know what this is all about.”
The stranger reached into the left pocket of his pants and pulled out a tobacco pouch with a thick wad of bills.
“Forget about this and I will give you some money and you can have a good time.”
“I don’t want your money.”
Another man appeared out of the fog, from somewhere higher up the beach, wearing only a dripping bathing suit and a chain with some medallions around his neck. He was dragging a canvas bag, which was also wet, through the sand. “Clamshells,” said the man in the fedora hat by way of explanation. “We’ve been clamming.”
The newcomer began saying something in a language that Cullen could not understand but that sounded vaguely like the German he had heard in war movies. The use of the foreign language seemed to upset the man in the fedora. He immediately put his hand over the other man’s mouth, ordering him, in English, to shut up and “get back to the other guys.” He then took Cullen’s arm, saying, “Come over here.”
After a few steps, the stranger produced more money from the tobacco pouch, shoving what he said was three hundred dollars into Cullen’s hands. By now, Cullen was very worried. His life had been threatened, and he was outnumbered, at least four to one.
“Take a good look at my face,” said the stranger, removing his hat and coming closer. “Look in my eyes.”
The stranger’s eyes were dark brown, almost black. He was thin, and seemed to be about five feet six inches tall. He had unusually long arms, a large hooked nose, and prominent ears. His most noteworthy feature, apart from a thin, elongated face, was a streak of silvery gray that went through the middle of his combed-back black hair.
“Look in my eyes,” the stranger repeated. “Would you recognize me if you saw me again?”
“No sir, I never saw you before.”
“You might see me in East Hampton some time. Would you know me?”
“No, I never saw you before in my life.”
“You might hear from me again. My name is George John Davis. What’s your name, boy?”
It had been a bizarre conversation, and Cullen was not about to reveal his real name.
“Frank Collins, sir,” he mumbled.
With that, he backed away from the strangers, clutching the bills in his hand. The man in the fedora seemed willing to let him go, even though he and his companions could easily have overpowered him. Once Cullen reached the safety of the fog, he ran for his life.
IT TOOK Cullen no more than five minutes to run back to the lifeboat station. Most of his fellow coastguardsmen had gone to sleep; he woke them with shouts of “There are Germans on the beach” and “Let’s go.” Nervous and out of breath, he spilled out his story to his immediate boss, Boatswain’s Mate Second Class Carl Jennett, an old salt who thought he had seen everything. Jennett had spent too much time responding to false alarms to believe his subordinate’s story immediately: it was not until Cullen produced the crumpled bills from his pocket that Jennett began to take him seriously. 10
Jennett opened up the storeroom, and handed out .30 caliber Springfield rifles and ammunition to his men, none of whom had handled firearms before. He loaded the rifles for Cullen and six others, put the safety catches on, and gave them a two-minute lesson in how to fire the guns. Before heading out the door, Jennett called the neighboring lifeboat station, six miles up the coast at Napeague, to alert them to what was going on.
Outside the station, the men saw a car coming down the road, its headlights dimmed to a narrow slit in accordance with the blackout regulations. Not knowing who was in the car, and thinking it might be headed toward the beach to pick up the Germans, Jennett and his men hid on the side of the road. But the car turned toward the lifeboat station. The passengers turned out to be two coastguardsmen returning from a party.
By the time they got back down to the place where Cullen had run into the man with the streak in his hair, it was close to 1 a.m., half an hour after the incident.11 They fanned out across the beach, combing the area carefully, but there was no sign of the strangers.
“Stay here while we search the dunes,” Jennett ordered, leaving Cullen at the spot where he had last seen the Germans.12 Two other coastguardsmen kept him company.
As they waited on the beach for the return of the others, Cullen and his companions caught whiffs of what smelled like burning diesel fumes wafting in from the sea. The fog was still very thick. But somewhere beyond the breaking waves, they could make out the silhouette of a long, low-lying boat that tapered down at each end, with a kind of deckhouse in the middle. A light blinked through the mist. Every few minutes, the boat would turn on its engines, as if attempting some kind of maneuver.
Thinking that the Germans might be coming back, or that the boat might fire on them, Cullen and the others ducked behind a fence. They felt scared and vulnerable: a war that a few hours ago had seemed far away was suddenly right there, on the beach.
ABOARD U-202, the mood had turned from elation at a relatively successful operation to panic. At first, everything appeared to go smoothly. The thick fog had provided perfect cover for the landing of the V-men. The sailors who rowed the saboteurs ashore in the rubber dinghy had kept a line attached to the U-boat. They tugged on the line when they wanted to return, and were hauled back in.
When Linder heard about the encounter with the coastguardsman, he was angry with Dasch for failing to send him back a prisoner, in accordance with his orders.13 But his anger was soon overshadowed by a more immediate crisis: his ship was stuck on the sandbar.
The U-boat had swung around parallel to the beach during the disembarkation of the saboteurs. Preoccupied with the dinghy, Linder did not pay enough attention to his own boat, which was being pushed further onto the sandbar with every swell of the waves. By the time he realized what was happening, the tide was running out and the U-boat was stranded.
From the bridge of U-202, Linder could just make out a man with a flashlight moving about on the beach. He assumed it was one of the V-men signaling that everything was all right. He tried to free the submarine from the sand by running the diesel engines and the electric motor at full power, but nothing happened. He then ordered the torpedoes to be removed from their tubes to raise the bow. To make the boat as light as possible, he blew the water tanks and dumped diesel fuel overboard. By switching one of his propellers to forward and the other to reverse, and pushing the rudder in the direction of the backward-running propeller, he was able to rock the boat, a maneuver known to English-speaking sailors as “sally ship.” But although U-202 “hopped around like a frog on the beach,” it failed to come free.14
“No luck,” Linder recorded in his log. “Boat stuck too fast. I flooded down furth
er so I wouldn’t wash further up on the beach. I tried the same maneuver (blowing with air and full speed astern) in spite of the danger of being heard on the land. This attempt also failed.” 15
By 1 a.m., the mist was getting lighter and land was becoming visible. By comparing his position to the charts, Linder could see that his ship was lying about two hundred yards from the beach, almost perpendicular to the Amagansett Naval Radio Station. Despite navigating in the fog, he was within a couple of miles of his intended landing place. He could see a “house and some sort of tower” on the beach, as well as two tall masts of the radio station, off slightly to his left. “Automobiles are going by all the time in both directions, but do not stop at our landing place. A dog barks long and loudly. Periodically a single machine gun is fired, but at some distance away.”
Linder was amazed that his ship was not discovered and fired upon immediately. Searchlights were scanning the sea from a point near the lifeboat station, but were ineffective because of the low visibility and the fact that they seemed to be directed upward. He concluded that the Americans on shore had mistaken his diesel engines for the drone of aircraft.
By now, the ship was “fairly high and dry, with a cant of 40°.” Low tide was due at 2:14. In contrast to his chief engineer, who was a nervous wreck, and the rest of the crew, who were worried about spending the rest of the war in a prisoner of war camp, Linder was calm and controlled. He prepared to scuttle the boat and destroy the top-secret Enigma codebooks. His engineers placed explosive capsules around the ship.
A further nightmare was the crewman with appendicitis, Zimmermann, now in the sixth day of his agony.16 Linder had used up the ship’s entire supply of opium on the stricken mechanic, to little apparent effect: he was in greater pain than ever. The only solution now was to send Zimmermann ashore with one of his officers and to prepare the rest of the ship’s crew for surrender.
Saboteurs Page 11
