Michael Dobbs - Saboteurs

Anxious to maintain control of the investigation, Nirschel instructed Barnes to keep his information “entirely secret” and admit nobody to the lifeboat station. 22He then jumped into a station wagon with another Coast Guard lieutenant, Sydney K. Franken, telling the driver to keep his foot pressed down on the accelerator until they reached Amagansett.

Before leaving Manhattan, Nirschel had alerted Navy Intelligence and the Eastern Sea Frontier—the navy command with responsibility for the entire eastern seaboard—to the incident in Amagansett. Nobody treated the matter as very urgent. According to the war diary of the Eastern Sea Frontier, “the frequent reports of mysterious flares, lights, strangers and other phenomena had become so familiar as false alarms that the customary procedure… was to turn the information over to the Intelligence Officer” without further action. The people at headquarters had become thoroughly skeptical of U-boat sightings: the war diary dismissed Cullen’s claim of spotting a U-boat as of “dubious foundation.” 23

A special submarine tracking room had been installed at Eastern Sea Frontier headquarters on the fifteenth floor of the Federal Building at 90 Church Street, Manhattan. It was staffed by just one officer, a Princeton University geology professor named Harry Hess, who held the rank of lieutenant in the U.S. Navy Reserve. Hess was a brilliant scientist who fully understood that locating German U-boats was key to winning the Battle of the Atlantic. He was constantly looking for new ways to predict their movements from various scraps of evidence, including radio direction finding. But even though Hess had pleaded with the navy to give him enough men for a round-the-clock operation, and had asked for secure telephone communications to be installed between Washington and New York to permit a “direct and immediate” assessment of German U-boat movements, nothing had been done.

There was still little sense of urgency in Washington about transmitting direction fixes on enemy submarines to the field. There were many in the U.S. Navy, including the commander in chief, Admiral King, who dismissed the efforts of Hess and other submarine-tracking enthusiasts as little better than “the mysterious use of a crystal ball, tea leaves, and a Ouija Board.” 24

On this particular occasion, reports of a German U-boat off Long Island had reached Washington the previous evening on the basis of intercepted radio traffic. By plotting the source of the radio signals, submarine tracking stations had placed the U-boat at a location roughly twenty-eight miles south of Amagansett at 8:53 p.m. But this information was not transmitted to Eastern Sea Frontier headquarters on Church Street until 11:30 that night. By this time, Hess had gone off duty. In his absence, the report was handled by the surface controller, who alerted the operations officer of the Third Naval District. The operations officer promised that a Coast Guard cutter would be sent to investigate.

ON AMAGANSETT Beach, several people had spotted the U-boat in addition to Cullen, but they also had difficulty getting anyone to take them seriously. Chief Radioman Harry McDonald was in charge of the Amagansett Naval Radio Station, part of the top-secret network that tracked the movements of enemy submarines all over the Atlantic. By an extraordinary coincidence, a U-boat was now washed up on a sandbar right next to his own radio station. McDonald no longer needed his sophisticated tracking equipment to find a submarine in the middle of the ocean: he could both hear and smell the roar of U-202’s diesel engines.

His first thought was that the ship might be landing a raiding party to destroy the radio station. Afraid that the Germans were coming, he decided to evacuate the station, sending his family to stay with friends. He then called the Coast Guard for further information but was given a curt bureaucratic brush-off.

“I am not permitted to discuss details of possible enemy activity,” said the man who answered the phone. 25

Next McDonald called the army post five miles down the beach, to say he believed a mini-invasion was under way and to ask for extra protection. The duty officer of the army’s 113th Mobile Infantry Unit was unconvinced. “I’m sorry, we can’t leave the premises without orders from the captain.” When the coastguardsmen got through to the army post, they received a similar response: “What are you doing, trying to start something?” 26

Cullen’s direct superior, Jennett, was more concerned about a light in a cottage along the beach than the threat of a Nazi invasion. Such lights were prohibited under blackout regulations, and Jennett believed that someone might be trying to send a signal to the U-boat out at sea. He had already complained about the light to the people who lived in the cottage, but they had paid no attention. He saw a man switch on the light of his front porch and whistle loudly, as if whistling for a dog, return inside, switch the light off, come back outside, and repeat the whole process all over again. It seemed very suspicious. He assembled a group of coastguardsmen and went to investigate.

In the meantime, evidence was turning up to corroborate Cullen’s story. Cullen found a pack of German cigarettes near the spot where he had had his bizarre encounter with the man in the fedora. As dawn was breaking, Barnes and two other coastguardsmen followed some tracks along the beach to the top of the dunes, where they discovered a freshly turned mound of sand. Poking around with a stick, they felt something hard. In a few minutes they came across four wooden crates bound with marlin that could be used as a handle. 27Barnes pried open the crate with a bayonet and discovered a hermetically sealed tin container.

A short distance away, in another newly dug hole, the coastguardsmen found a canvas seabag and two trench shovels. A pair of light blue bathing trunks was lying on the sand, along with a belt and a shirt.

Barnes sent one of his men back to the station to bring up a truck.

AT 3 A.M.—nearly three hours after U-202 first ran aground—Linder noted that the tide was coming in, lifting his boat slightly off the sand. The time had come for one last attempt to escape. In another hour, it would be light, and they would certainly be spotted from land. He must either get off the sandbar now or blow up the boat.

“We will make one last try to free the boat,” he told the crew, his voice echoing through the ship’s loudspeakers. “If it fails, we will go together to captivity. Remember the first commandment: silence is golden.”

He ordered all the men aft so the bow would lift clear from the sand. The torpedoes had already been removed from the tubes. He blew the water tanks again, turning the diesels to full speed ahead, and running the electric motors as well. With each swell of the waves, the boat moved slightly, rocking back and forth like a cradle. “After about four tries she came free,” Linder noted at 3:10. “Hurrah!”

There were “cries of joy” from the men crowded in the stern of the ship as they felt water rushing in under the keel. The cook, Otto Wagner, would later recall that the crew “could hardly believe” the seemingly miraculous twist of fate. “We hugged each other out of sheer happiness.” 28The thirteenth was obviously their lucky day.

There was still one problem to overcome. Believing that the ship was doomed, Linder had ordered one of his officers to take the crewman with appendicitis to the shore. After U-202 had managed to free itself, the officer abandoned the plan and rowed back to the submarine. Both men were hauled back on board.

“This was the only chance for us to get away, otherwise we could have marched in the military parade in New York,” Linder noted in his log, referring to the big “New York at War” procession announced for later that day in Manhattan. “Now we are off, while it is still dark. Evidently no one noticed us from land. All activity was not on the coast, but further inland.”