New York at War

by Steven H. Jaffe

  With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, some three thousand Americans—between one-fifth and one-third of them from New York City—joined the Abraham Lincoln Battalion and sailed off to help defend the Spanish Republic against Franco’s, Mussolini’s, and Hitler’s armies. Most “Lincolns” (Bailey and McCormick among them) were Communists, but their ranks also included others stirred by Moscow’s call for an international Popular Front against Fascism—Socialists, anarchists, liberals, and blacks avenging Ethiopia. “As a Jew and a progressive, I would be among the first to fall under the axe of the fascists,” Hyman Katz explained in a letter from Spain to his mother in New York in November 1937.33

  Back home, leftists recognized that the Iberian conflict was a prelude to something bigger. “For the duration of the Spanish agony,” the novelist Albert Halper later wrote, “New York was a city of stirring mass meetings, rallies, and fund raisings. . . . One returned to one’s room or apartment, drained, sickened, unable to sleep.” New York labor unions and left-wing clubs sent several ambulances and thousands of tons of food, clothing, and medicine to the dying Republic (while conservative Catholic groups dispatched funds and supplies to Franco’s victorious rebels). When the survivors of the defeated Lincoln Battalion sailed back to New York in 1938 and 1939, they were greeted as heroes by welcoming crowds on the West Side piers.34

  Yet the flow of international events kept shifting the ground under New Yorkers. When Berlin and Moscow announced their nonaggression pact in August 1939 and proceeded to carve up Poland, Communists abruptly abandoned the Popular Front and blandly argued that Germany’s imperial ambitions were no worse than England’s or France’s (a position they would maintain until June 1941, when Hitler’s tanks rolled into Russia). Disgusted Socialists in the midtown garment district greeted their Communist coworkers with shouts of “Heil Hitler.” In truth, many rank-and-file Communists were shaken by Stalin’s about-face, although most hewed to the party line. Some surmised that the pact was a temporary expedient, merely delaying a collision between Germany and Russia. Beyond that, who could say how far the war would spread? By the summer of 1941, 72 percent of American respondents to a Fortune magazine poll believed Hitler to harbor global, including transatlantic, ambitions. Millions of people in New York and throughout the country, of widely varying political viewpoints, shared a fear Hyman Katz had voiced four years earlier: “If we sit by and let them grow stronger by taking Spain, they will move on to France and will not stop there; and it won’t be long before they get to America.”35

  Across the Atlantic, Nazi leaders were indeed looking westward. In 1938, a Focke-Wulf prototype commercial liner flew nonstop from Berlin to New York, a distance of some 3,900 miles. That same year the Luftwaffe drafted secret guidelines for future long-range bombers. With the outbreak of war in September 1939, Luftwaffe commander in chief Hermann Goering, anticipating the eventual entry of the United States, brought up the possibility of “nuisance raids” by his bombers along the American East Coast, although some of his staff were skeptical. During 1940, the Junkers, Messerschmitt, Heinkel, and Focke-Wulf firms all began preliminary work to design long-range four-engine bombers that would have the fuel capacity to make round-trip sorties from Brest in occupied France to New York and back. The Luftwaffe recognized that such raids would most likely involve a small number of bombers that would have to return immediately after dropping their bombs. Yet such raids might require the Americans to devote inordinate resources to protecting their coast.36

  Delighted by the Luftwaffe’s plans, Hitler was forthright about his ambitions for such raids. He rhapsodized to his architect Albert Speer about New York “going down in a sea of flames,” with its skyscrapers turned into “towers of flame.” In March 1941, after Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Pact with Britain, Hitler lamented “that we had no aircraft capable of bombing American cities.” Two months later, at a conference with his naval war staff, Hitler emphasized the need to occupy the Portuguese Azores and the Spanish Canary Islands as bases from which to attack the United States. Such bases would provide airfields hundreds of miles closer to the American East Coast, cutting flight distances and fuel needs for bombers. While the Germans never occupied the islands, Hitler retained a vivid sense of what he wanted to do to Manhattan.37

  Hitler’s animosity toward New York was not merely due to its identity as the largest Jewish city in the world, but also fit a more sweeping Nazi hostility toward the United States. Neither Hitler nor any of the other top Nazis had ever been to America, and they were free to concoct fantasies shaped by their consumption of popular stereotypes. Franklin Roosevelt noted shrewdly in 1939 that what impressed Hitler about America was its size and wealth; a combined hatred and barely suppressed envy of American financial might and material abundance ran through Nazi propaganda. At the same time, Hitler and his leading ideologues, Alfred Rosenberg and Joseph Goebbels, saw America as a degenerate society contaminated by the “mongrelized” mixing of diverse races and by effete democracy. “What is America,” Hitler asked a friend, “but millionaires, beauty queens, stupid records and Hollywood?” Yet this “half-Judaized, half-Negrified” culture—purveyed throughout the world via movies, magazines, and jazz—constituted an insidious international threat, one that could even seduce pure Aryans. “Transfer [a German] to Miami,” warned Hitler, “and you make a degenerate of him—in other words—an American.” The führer might have been thinking of his nephew, English-born William Patrick Hitler, who lived in New York City and publicly denounced his uncle as “a menace” in 1939.38

  For Hitler and Nazi ideologues, these assessments of American power and weakness converged in their image of New York City. Manhattan and its famed skyline embodied a rotten culture that needed to be destroyed before it contaminated the rest of the world—not least because the skyline’s message of American glamour, power, and prosperity proved so seductive to Europeans, including Germans. At the same time, because Americans were decadent and corrupted, Manhattan was really a flimsy Hollywood movie set that could be knocked over to reveal the impotence behind it. The Luftwaffe would easily topple the towers after turning them into “blazing bundles of firewood”—provided they could reach New York with adequate fuel reserves. Thus, while Washington, DC, and various industrial targets also loomed in Luftwaffe discussions, New York remained the prime fixation of Nazi fantasy.39

  Following American entry into the war, the German air force and its contractors continued to work in earnest on transatlantic bombers with sufficient fuel to reach New York and return safely. The German high command may have fantasized about destroying New York, but, as during the previous war, some Berlin functionaries saw New York as useful, a metropolis whose still sizeable German community provided cover for espionage. By 1935, the Abwehr (German military intelligence) had managed to establish spies in New York. Over the next five years, operations expanded to include several rings of agents across the country, consisting of German émigrés, many of them naturalized US citizens, and a few Americans of German descent. The Little Casino Restaurant on Yorkville’s East Eighty-Fifth Street—close to Fritz Kuhn’s national Bund headquarters—became a center of operations for agents.

  It wasn’t long before Germany’s network of New York spies began proving its utility. Otto Voss, a mechanic at the Seversky Aircraft plant in Farmingdale, Long Island, smuggled out plans of new fighters being developed for the Air Corps. Rene Froehlich, a soldier stationed at Fort Jay on Governors Island, collected information on troop and ship movements. On a visit to Germany, Queens resident Hermann Lang transmitted plans of a top-secret aerial bombsite from his workplace, the Carl Norden plant on Lafayette Street. Kurt Ludwig drove up and down the East Coast, photographing factories and army bases; sometimes he took along eighteen-year-old Lucy Boehmler from Maspeth to flirt with soldiers and coax information from them. One operative even provided a map showing fifty-two Long Island golf courses, “ideal landing places for German aircraft.” Crewmen on German ocean liners
carried documents and photographs from the West Side piers to Abwehr offices in Hamburg and Bremen.40

  Often, however, the spies were amateurish and sloppy, more interested in Abwehr payments than in being discreet. Some bragged openly in bars and restaurants about their work for the Reich. Bronx resident Guenther Rumrich, who offered his services to the Nazis after reading about World War I spies in the New York Public Library, blundered in 1938, when he tried to secure fifty blank passports from the State Department under false pretenses. Trailed by federal agents and New York police, Rumrich was arrested and named his fellow agents. He and three coconspirators were convicted of violating the 1917 Espionage Act and sent to prison.41

  Even more spectacular was the error in judgment made by the Abwehr itself in 1940, when its officers forced German-born William Sebold, an American on vacation in the fatherland, to agree to become a spy when he returned to New York. Gestapo agents threatened to kill him if he refused. But Sebold promptly went to the FBI and became a double agent. Over the course of sixteen months, FBI agents filmed from behind a “mirror” in Sebold’s West Forty-Second Street office, as Lang and others boasted about their exploits; a shortwave radio set up in a house in Centerport, Long Island, sent false espionage reports in Sebold’s name back to Germany. In June 1941, in what J. Edgar Hoover called the “greatest spy roundup in U.S. history,” thirty-three German agents were arrested and tried in a Brooklyn courtroom, with Sebold as key prosecution witness. All thirty-three were convicted and imprisoned. (Still fearing the Nazis, Sebold assumed a new identity and left New York under an early version of the federal witness protection and relocation program.) Committed to cultivating pro-Allied public opinion without violating official American neutrality, President Roosevelt used the evidence of Nazi espionage to advance his case that Hitler posed a threat on both sides of the Atlantic, a threat Americans had to prepare for.42

  Sunday, December 7, 1941, dawned cold and clear in New York City. New Yorkers perusing their Times over breakfast learned from Tokyo correspondent Otto Tolischus that “the Japanese people as a whole are normally friendly and polite” but that they blamed American diplomatic intervention for delaying Japanese victory in their war with China. That afternoon, many New Yorkers listened to their radios, following the New York Giants–Brooklyn Dodgers football game at the Polo Grounds on the Mutual Broadcasting System. At about 2 PM, an announcer’s voice broke into the game: “We interrupt this broadcast to bring this important broadcast from United Press: Flash! The White House announces Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor!” From New Jersey, a disbelieving man called the Mutual switchboard operator and told her, “Ha! You got me on that Martian stunt; I had a hunch you’d try it again.”43

  Mayor La Guardia immediately placed the officers of New York’s Japanese consulate under police supervision. Starting on the evening of December 7, the police and the FBI began rounding up 2,500 Japanese New Yorkers and transporting them to Ellis Island for precautionary internment. Agents also seized the briefcase of Morito Morishima, the city’s Japanese consul general, at his office in Rockefeller Center and found in it several strips of film with photographs of the Washington Monument, the Manhattan skyline, and various bridges in the Washington and New York areas; apparently, the threat of Japanese attack or sabotage was not limited to the West Coast, after all. The shock waves of disbelief, confusion, and even relief that the expected crisis had finally arrived reverberated through the city.44

  That night a teleprinter in Lorient, on the Atlantic coast of occupied France, delivered the news of Pearl Harbor to Admiral Karl Doenitz, U-boat commander in chief. The report caught Doenitz (as well as Hitler) completely off guard, as Tokyo had not shared its plans for the surprise attack with its allies in Berlin. Doenitz walked to his Situation Room, where a three-foot-diameter world globe allowed him to plot the courses of the submarines that had been ravaging Allied shipping for over two years. He now plotted the distance between his U-boat pens at Lorient and various potential target zones in the Western Hemisphere. Of pressing interest to Doenitz was the fact that the distance from Lorient to the waters off New York City, three thousand nautical miles, would permit each of his long-distance U-boats a total of between six and fifteen days to torpedo ships approaching or leaving New York harbor, before having to refuel. The admiral waited a mere four days for Hitler’s impulsive declaration of war against the United States on December 11, at which point the American coast became fair game. In the days to follow, Doenitz would put his Operation Paukenschlag (“Operation Drumbeat”) into play, with dire consequences for seamen working the waters off the Atlantic coast of the United States. New York City’s real war was about to begin.45

  As the torpedo slammed into the hull of the Coimbra, it ignited the tanker’s eighty thousand barrels of oil and sent a blinding sheet of fire boiling up into the night sky. Surveying the blaze from the bridge of U-boat 123 a quarter of a mile away, Kapitanleutnant Reinhard Hardegen estimated its height as over six hundred feet above the Atlantic’s choppy surface. Somehow, crewmen aboard the stricken British tanker managed to ready a gun on the stern deck to fire at their attacker. Hardegen promptly ordered a second torpedo. This one sent the Coimbra to the bottom, taking thirty-six men with her. Several others, some of them wounded, boarded a raft and a dory and began the long row toward the shore of eastern Long Island, some twenty-seven miles distant, in the early morning hours of January 15, 1942.

  Hardegen exulted at this, his third “kill” since leaving the German submarine base at Lorient, France, three weeks earlier. Already, U-123 had torpedoed and sunk a British steamer three hundred miles east of Cape Cod and a Norwegian tanker sixty miles southeast of Montauk, Long Island, with a combined loss of over eighteen thousand tons of shipping, seven thousand tons of general cargo, twelve tons of fuel oil, and 110 lives. U-123 was the lead vessel of Admiral Doenitz’s Operation Paukenschlag. The admiral recognized that if a concentrated U-boat onslaught sank Allied vessels faster than they could be built, the toll on shipping would effectively cut the transatlantic supply line to Britain. With its economy throttled, England could never become the launch pad for an Allied invasion of continental Europe. The U-boats’ chokehold would leave the island’s people nearly starved and its factories and vehicles bereft of oil; Winston Churchill would be driven to his knees, enabling Germany to fight a one-front war against Russia. Paukenschlag was Doenitz’s demonstration to Adolf Hitler that U-boats must be concentrated off the American coast in order to win the war.46

  A few hours before sinking the Coimbra on January 15, Hardegen had ventured near the acknowledged target for the raid. “My mission was to get to New York,” he later wrote. When Hardegen had unsealed his instructions at sea, two American guidebooks to New York City tumbled out of the envelope. The brightly colored cover of one showed skyscrapers and the Statue of Liberty towering over a scene of colonial Dutchmen trading with Indians and bore the legend “1626—Bought for Twenty Four Dollars. 1939—Valued at Twenty Four Billion!” More germane to Hardegen’s task, the guidebooks included fold-out tourist maps of the city—maps that showed the location of the Ambrose Channel leading into the port.47

  As a young naval cadet, Hardegen had visited New York during a round-the-world German training cruise nine years earlier. Like many tourists, he had ventured to the top of the Empire State Building and gazed out on the bright lights, skyscrapers, distant factories, piers, and moored ships spread before him. Hardegen and Doenitz both knew that New York harbor, the world’s busiest, was destined to play a crucial role in the war. On the evening of January 15, the commander brought U-123 in for a close look.48

  Due south of Rockaway Beach, U-123 bobbed on the surface. The submarine was so close to shore that Leutnant Horst von Schroeter “could see the cars driving along the coast road, and I could even smell the woods.” But the real attraction was to the west: clearly silhouetted against the sky were the three-hundred-foot Parachute Jump and the Wonder Wheel, the world’s largest Ferris wheel, bot
h at Coney Island, and beyond them the red lights of a radio beacon on Staten Island. And behind them all was a glow in the night sky—the reflected gleam of Manhattan’s millions of lights on the clouds above. Hardegen found himself musing whether the Broadway shows were letting out just over the horizon, and the jazz clubs tuning up for a night of revelry. Already, on the wireless below, his men had been listening to the Gramercy Chamber Trio, broadcast by Manhattan’s WNYC, after passing up WOR’s “The Goldbergs,” a popular comedy about a Bronx Jewish family.49

  Hardegen turned back to business. While the camouflage-gray hull of U-123 was surrounded by a medley of oblivious fishing smacks and tugs on the harbor’s outer reaches, a worthy prize—a big tanker or cargo ship heading into or out of New York—was nowhere in sight. As tempting as the Ambrose Channel and New York harbor might have been, Hardegen knew that once he entered and wreaked havoc, he might not get back out alive. Instead he turned his vessel east, sinking the Coimbra. From there he ventured south and found rich hunting grounds along the coastal route favored by freighters and oil tankers shuttling between New York, Philadelphia, and the Gulf Coast ports. Off Cape Hatteras he sank three more ships. He was soon joined by the five other U-boats of Paukenschlag. Over the next four weeks, the six submarines sank twenty-one Allied cargo ships in the waters between Newfoundland and South Carolina. So commenced what the submariners called “the great American turkey shoot.”50