Michael Dobbs - Saboteurs

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. 13But 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 further 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. 16Linder 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.

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. 19As 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. 20A 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