Agents-Provocateur
17 JUNE 1942
AGENTS-PROVOCATEUR
The waters off Ponte Vedra, Florida, were not particularly rough this dark evening of June 17th, 1942, certainly not enough to prevent four men from shuffling onto the deck of a German submarine. They worked quietly inflating their collapsible rubber raft. U-584 had crept within a few hundred yards of a deserted stretch of the Florida coast, away from prying eyes. The four had to get ashore quickly while circumstances still favored their enterprise. They paddled toward the beach where they changed into civilian clothes and buried their raft and four crates of explosives. The four split-up, two heading in the direction of Chicago and two toward New York. To German eyes this landing went well, certainly better than the one four days earlier on Long Island.
At least two teams of German infiltrators were landed on the US coast during 1942. On June 13th, U-202 put the first four-man team ashore near Amagansett, New York. Our Atlantic Coast was poorly guarded, but this unlucky team happened onto the only patrolled stretch for 100 miles. Coast Guard SN2 John C. Cullen was nearly finished with his nightly circuit as the four splashed out of the surf in front of him. He hailed them assuming they were fishermen who had run aground. But Cullen thought he overheard one of the men say something in German. Suspicious but outnumbered, Cullen played along; he even accepted $300 the men offered to forget the whole incident. He returned hastily to the East Amagansett Coast Guard Lifesaving Station where a detail was immediately formed to investigate. A thick fog shrouded the Germans’ escape in the meantime, and the Guardsmen could locate no clue to their arrival. His shipmates ribbed Cullen for hallucinating, while BMC Warren Barnes called the Third Naval District Intelligence Office to report the event. A joint investigation by the Naval Investigative Service (NIS) and the FBI located the landing site and the buried equipment, including a watch cap bearing a swastika.
Hitler’s sabotage plot might well have worked had not one of the Germans, Georg Johann Dasch, turned himself in to the FBI on June 18th. Through his cooperation the seven others were corralled before they accomplished any mischief. German records reveal that yet another agent was landed in North America–five months later in November 1942 on the southern shore of the Gaspe Peninsula, Quebec. At the time our government wished not to arouse public fear by ordering coastal blackouts, and few boats were available for patrols. This allowed the landing of agents-provocateur and other enemy operations to be conducted off our coast with relative ease.
All eight saboteurs were tried for espionage by a military commission in July 1942. All eight were convicted and sentenced to be hanged.
Watch for more “Today in Naval History” 21 JUN 26
CAPT James Bloom, Ret.
Blair, Clay. Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939-1942. New York, NY: Random House, 1996, pp. 603-05.
Hickam, Homer H., Jr. Torpedo Junction. Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, 1989, pp. 248-52.
Morison, Samuel Eliot. History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Vol 1 The Battle of the Atlantic. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1947, p. 200.
ADDITIONAL NOTES: Georg Dasch, Heinrich Heinck, Richard Quirin and Ernst Burger landed from U-202 on Long Island, while Edward Kerling, Herbert Haupt, Werner Thiel and Hermann Neubauer landed in Florida. Their targets included the Niagara hydroelectric facility, the ALCOA aluminum plant in Tennessee, the Ohio River locks at Louisville, Kentucky, the Pennsalt chemical plant in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, and the Horseshoe Curve railroad link near Altoona, PA. The operation was codenamed “Pastorius” for Francis Daniel Pastorius, who founded the first German settlement in North America, Germantown, near Philadelphia, in 1683.
Georg Dasch and several other members of these teams had previously lived in America, in the case of Dasch for 19 years. Dasch even served a three-year hitch in the American Army. Upon outbreak of the war in Europe Dasch was recalled to Germany for further training, but there he began to see the injustice of the Nazi system. By 1942 he had significant doubts about the German cause. It has been argued that Dasch’s attempt to bribe Seaman Cullen was a deliberate effort to raise suspicions and betray the operation.
The executions of six saboteurs were carried out in 1948, however Dasch and Burger had their sentences commuted by Franklin Rooseverlt for their cooperation. President Truman later granted these two clemency and deportation to the American sector of post-WWII Germany.
