War Stories III

by Oliver North

  Adolf Hitler’s dreams of world conquest died in the rubble of Stalingrad. The German army would never recover from its first major defeat. And Hitler’s worst nightmare had come true: America was now in the war.

  Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus

  CHAPTER 4

  PLUNGED INTO WAR 1941

  Every American born before 1930 that I have interviewed for War Stories remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing when they learned that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. They recall the date—Sunday, 7 December 1941—who they were with, and that on the radio President Roosevelt called it “a day of infamy.” They all also recollect knowing that, whether we wanted to be or not, America was now at war.

  Yet, for those already fighting in the great cataclysm of World War II, the day passed like so many before and after. The fact that the United States was now a combatant didn’t alter the agony and bloodshed a bit. Few of the combatants already engaged were even aware that the attack on Pearl Harbor had happened—nor could they foresee what it would mean for the outcome of the struggle.

  For Wehrmacht and Russian soldiers locked in a frozen death-grip at Leningrad, the date of 7 December 1941 was just another day of pounding each other with artillery and hoping to survive sub-zero temperatures. At the center of the Eastern Front, despite Red Army losses of nearly two million dead and an equal number taken prisoner, Zhukov’s 1st Shock Army was in the second day of a two-week counter-attack through snowdrifts that would keep the Germans from storming the gates of Moscow. In the Crimea, Army Group South were moving their unit into position for another failed assault on Russian defenses at Sevastopol.

  Even before the U.S. entered the war, FDR and Churchill were preparing a strategy to defeat Hitler when they met off Argentia, Newfoundland, in August 1941.

  It was much the same for participants in every other theater of war. In the North Atlantic, a Royal Canadian Navy corvette escorting a convoy from the U.S. to Britain collided with a merchantman in the midst of a German U-boat attack—sending twenty-three sailors to an icy death. In North Africa, Erwin Rommel’s 240-day siege of the Australians at Tobruk was in its last horrible hours as Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck’s British armored columns smashed into the Afrika Corps in Operation Crusader. And in China, Chiang Kai-shek’s battered and poorly equipped army—barely holding the Nationalist Chinese “capital,” Kunming—was under relentless air attack from other Japanese bombers.

  But if “Pearl Harbor Day” was unremarkable to the soldiers, sailors, and airmen already fighting, bleeding, and dying in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the North Atlantic—it was anything but routine to the leaders of those countries. Though it would take Congress another full day to declare war on Japan, Canada did so that very afternoon.

  Ships bombed at Pearl Harbor.

  Hours before the U.S. declaration on 8 December, Churchill’s government in London and the rest of the British Commonwealth, already at war with Germany and Italy, decided for war against Tokyo. Then, on 11 December, Hitler and Mussolini declared war on the United States—to which Congress reciprocated that afternoon. Churchill’s great hope—that the U.S. and Britain would become “co-belligerents against Fascism”—was finally realized.

  But in the days immediately after the Japanese surprise attack, it became apparent that despite all the warnings, America’s military was still woefully unprepared for war on a global scale. The Selective Service Act had narrowly passed in 1940, but it wasn’t until 12 August 1941 that Congress extended the term of service beyond twelve months and authorized the movement of U.S. personnel overseas. The bill passed the House of Representatives by a single vote.

  Though building larger, more effective U.S. fighting forces languished while war consumed Europe, America did begin to expand and improve its intelligence and counter-intelligence capabilities. Unconstrained by restrictions that isolationists in Congress imposed on the military, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover began a quiet expansion of “the Bureau” shortly after Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939.

  U.S. tanker struck by German U-boat.

  Hoover had read with alarm the reports of espionage and sabotage operations being conducted in Europe by Hitler’s Abwehr, the intelligence department of the German Armed Forces. He correctly assumed that if war came, Hitler would attempt similar operations in the United States and Latin America—and he wanted the FBI to be ready. Hoover set out to recruit as many bright new field agents as he could squeeze into his budget. One of those “early hires” was Ken Crosby, a young lawyer in Atlanta. Crosby would help crack one of the biggest German spy rings of World War II.

  KEN CROSBY, FBI

  Washington, DC

  15 December 1941

  On 2 September 1939, I was working in a law office in Atlanta, Georgia, when I read the news of Germany invading Poland. On one of the inside pages was a little squib that said simply that in view of the unrest in the world, Congress had appropriated an increased budget for the FBI to hire more agents. The article noted that FBI applicants had to be lawyers, and I was a lawyer. I put the newspaper down, walked straight to the FBI office, applied, and three months later—in December 1939—I was FBI agent number 831 in Washington.

  In early 1940 I finished my training. The FBI “Academy” was then in Washington, DC—at the Justice Department. From there, I went to Boston for my first assignment and then in early 1941 I was selected to work undercover in counter-espionage out of the New York field office.

  The unit I was assigned to was already working against the Abwehr—Hitler’s intelligence service. The Germans clearly anticipated that the United States was going to get in the war. They were trying to steal all the blueprints, details of armaments, shipping information, the names of the ships, the cargo of the ships—and conduct as much spying as they could—before the U.S. became a combatant. They also wanted to prepare for sabotage operations in the U.S. once we entered the war. And they were doing a lot of their preparations in Latin America.

  The Germans had couriers going back and forth on ships, passing along all the information they could about Lend-Lease supplies, war production, our armaments industries, shipments to England, and the like. Often they relied on German immigrants and American citizens of German descent.

  The office I was assigned to had been doing undercover work in connection with the Duquesne spy ring—the biggest espionage case in our history. When investigation of the Fritz Duquesne case started in 1940, leads were developed in Latin America that indicated there were German intelligence agents operating inside the United States.

  William Sebold was key to breaking the spy ring. Sebold had been born in Germany, served in the Kaiser’s army in World War I, but had immigrated to the U.S. in 1921 and become an American citizen. In 1939 he returned to Germany to see his mother. While he was there, the Abwehr pressured him into spying for them by reminding him that he had family in Germany. They actually blackmailed him into serving them.

  But before returning to the U.S., Sebold secretly told a U.S. consular officer in Cologne about the Abwehr threats and the training they had given him. When he arrived in New York on 8 February 1940 he showed the FBI agents from my unit everything that his German “controller” had given him: a watch with a secret compartment, coded messages and communications procedures, a big pile of money and micro-photographs he’d been given to pass on to other German agents working in the U.S. and Latin America.

  We set him up in an office under the assumed name they had given him and even built a clandestine radio transmitter/receiver, just as they had instructed him. He really was very bold—and very brave. I was one of the agents who worked with him almost every day.

  We manufactured bogus information for him to transmit and started watching all of the people he had been told to contact. Sebold was so convincing that his Abwehr controller in Germany began directing all of their other agents in the region northeast to Sebold’s office to pass on their intelligence. By the time we shut it down after si
xteen months, Sebold was the U.S. “controller” for thirty-three German agents.

  The office that the FBI set up for Sebold was constructed with a mirror in the hallway—and it had special two-way glass in it. From Sebold’s side, it looked like any other mirror—but we always had agents with cameras on the other side—looking into the room so that we could film and photograph the German agents who came to meet with him.

  Fritz Duquesne was one of the most senior German intelligence operatives in the United States. He was operating from a “front company” in New York called “Air Terminals Company” and one afternoon in the spring of 1941, I was “behind the mirror” when Duquesne walked into Sebold’s office to pass on a report. Duquesne was known to be very cautious, suspicious of everything. He looked around the room awfully carefully—clearly checking for monitoring equipment. And then he walked up to the mirror and stares right into it—like he’s looking straight at me.

  I thought, “Can this guy see me? Maybe this mirror isn’t working right. If he sees me, I’m in real trouble—I’ve blown the whole case.” Duquesne put his face within twelve inches of my face behind the mirror—as though he was looking me right in the eye. My heart was beating so loud, I was sure he could hear it. I was ready to collapse! Then, he pulled out his pocket comb and started combing his hair!

  I don’t think I took a breath until he finished and walked away. When he did, I was soaked in sweat.

  Shortly thereafter, on a Sunday night, my FBI unit carefully orchestrated the arrest of all thirty-three members of the spy ring. We had great evidence under the Espionage Statute—which had to be complied with in order to get a conviction—and all of them were convicted and went to jail.

  In a way it’s too bad we shut it down when we did. The Espionage Act provides for execution in time of war—so if we had waited until after Pearl Harbor was bombed before making the arrests, Duquesne and most of his agents probably would have been hung.

  Crosby’s assessment about the sentence that Duquesne and his cohorts would have received is correct. On 13 June 1942, eight German saboteurs were apprehended after being put ashore by U-boat—four on Long Island and four more on the coast of Florida. At Hoover’s insistence, and with the support of Attorney General Biddle, all were tried in secret military tribunals and in August—just two months later—six of the eight were executed. The remaining two—named as “cooperating witnesses” in the trials—were sentenced to life in prison. The trials would set a precedent for dealing with non-military enemy combatants that would be used throughout the war for prosecuting spies and saboteurs and is still cited today for dealing with terrorists.

  This new process for dealing with spies reflected other changes in U.S. counter-espionage, intelligence collection, and “special operations” capabilities precipitated by America’s entry into the war. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Hoover reorganized the FBI, creating a permanent office for counter-intelligence and counter-espionage. U.S. “offensive intelligence” capabilities were also transformed following the declaration of war.

  On 27 May 1941, concerned about Japanese moves in the Pacific, President Roosevelt had declared a “State of Emergency” in an effort to accelerate preparations for hostilities. Using his emergency powers, FDR appointed Brigadier General William Donovan—a World War I hero—as the Coordinator of Intelligence on 11 July. Donovan’s appointment created immediate friction—within the War and Navy Departments as well as with the FBI—and slowed his plans for building U.S. covert action capabilities.

  In June 1942, Donovan’s organization was renamed the “Office of Strategic Services”—the OSS. The following month, the War Department activated the First Special Service Force, and placed it at Donovan’s disposal to conduct “espionage, sabotage, intelligence collection, and support for internal resistance” behind enemy lines. The OSS—often in cooperation with the British Special Operations Executive—would go on to conduct some remarkably successful espionage and intelligence operations.

  The transformation in U.S. counter-espionage and intelligence capabilities brought about by our entry into the war reflected the changes taking place in every other part of American life. The expansion of industrial production—ships, planes, tanks, weapons, and ammunition—that had begun as a consequence of “Lend-Lease” now accelerated dramatically. Unemployment, which had hovered near 10 percent through most of 1941, now dropped dramatically as millions of men responded to calls for military volunteers and draft notices. American women—who had never thought of joining the labor force—now found opportunities in the Armed Forces, government service, war production plants, and shipyards.

  American mobilization couldn’t happen overnight, however. Britain, Russia, and China may have gained a powerful new ally against the Axis Powers—but the immediate effects were hardly positive. In the closing days of 1941 and the opening months of 1942, the Allies were subjected to a series of disasters. On Christmas Eve 1941, after a heroic fight, the U.S. Navy and Marine garrison on Wake Island finally succumbed to the Japanese. The following day, Hong Kong fell. And on 15 February 1942, Singapore was captured—along with 135,000 British, Indian, and Australian troops.

  On 8 March Rangoon, Burma, was seized by the Japanese and the next day the Dutch government in exile surrendered the entire Netherlands East Indies. On 9 April, 80,000 U.S. and Filipino soldiers surrendered to the Japanese on Bataan and on 6 May 1942, the island fortress of Corregidor in Manila Bay was captured—ending all but guerilla resistance in the Philippines.

  The Japanese juggernaut continued unabated for more than four months until their first defeat in a dramatic engagement, 3–6 June 1942, off the tiny island of Midway. Though American morale was raised by the lopsided victory—the U.S. lost 307 men, 150 planes, and one carrier while the Japanese lost 3,500 men, 325 aircraft, and four carriers—it did nothing to improve the situation in the European theater.

  By the summer of 1942, as the Wehrmacht renewed its offensive against Russia, German U-boats were operating with impunity off the east coast of the United States—jeopardizing the delivery of war materiel, food, fuel, and clothing that were essential for keeping Britain and the Soviet Union in the fight against Hitler. During June and July 1942—the worst months of losses in the North Atlantic—U-boats sank more than a million tons of Allied and neutral shipping.

  These losses prompted American planners to quietly reassess the “Europe First” war strategy that Roosevelt and Churchill had secretly decided at their conference at sea off Argentia, Newfoundland, in August 1941. Without the assurance that massive numbers of troops and huge quantities of supplies could be safely moved across the Atlantic, a “Second Front”—so desperately wanted by Stalin—would be too costly.

  German U-boat successes in the Atlantic had climbed significantly after they established “home ports” on the Bay of Biscay, following the fall of France in June 1940. But improvements in British radar, sonar, and convoy procedures had diminished losses of Allied ships and cargo in the months immediately prior to Pearl Harbor. On 4 September 1941—three months before the U.S. and Germany were at war with each other—a U.S. destroyer, the USS Greer, alerted by a British patrol plane out of Bermuda, had attacked a German submarine off the U.S. east coast, prompting FDR to declare an expanded U.S. “neutrality region” and announce that U.S. ships were authorized to “shoot first” at Axis warships inside the zone. Then, while escorting a convoy to Newfoundland on 17 October—still six weeks before the U.S. declaration of war—the USS Kearny was hit by a German torpedo. The U.S. Navy destroyer, with eleven dead sailors aboard, managed to make it back into port—but the action created a firestorm in the

  American press. To avoid further provocation, Hitler ordered Admiral Karl Dönitz to move his “wolf packs” of submarines further away from the U.S. coastline.

  But once the United States was in the war, all restrictions on U-boat activity were lifted. When the U.S. moved crucial naval forces to the Pacific and geared up for war on two fronts, German
U-boats moved in—hugging the east coast and operating with impunity in the Gulf of Mexico.

  For eight months after the attack on Pearl Harbor—until the assault on Guadalcanal in August 1942—the U.S. “played defense” against the Axis powers. After the fall of the Philippines, the U.S. Navy had to carry most of the burden. One of the participants, Philadelphia native Charles Calhoun, was aboard the USS Sterett, helping shoulder the load.

  LIEUTENANT (JG) CHARLES CALHOUN, USN

  USS Sterett DD-407

  16 November 1942

  After 1939, the American people began to pay attention to what was going on in Europe. Many U.S. citizens were either immigrants from there or descendents of Europeans—and they were increasingly concerned about Hitler. There was a lot of news about his aggression—and it was alarming.

  That’s one of the reasons why a lot of us entered the service before the U.S. was in the war—that and the Depression. When our military started to grow—very slowly at first—a lot of young men saw it as an opportunity to get a decent job. The military didn’t pay much, but it was work.

  I came into the Navy because my father had been a merchant mariner during World War I. He was killed in an accident in 1918. I got a commission in the Navy as a communications officer and was sent to a brand-new destroyer—the USS Sterett. She was launched in 1938 so she was one of the newest ships in the fleet. She was initially sent to Hawaii as part of the Pacific Fleet, but in June of ’41 she was reassigned to Bermuda to enforce the U.S. neutrality zone because the German U-boat threat had gotten worse.