Michael Dobbs - Saboteurs

At six, Dasch noticed smoke coming out of the station chimney, suggesting that the stationmaster was up and about. He examined the timetable. The first train of the morning—an express from Montauk all the way through to Jamaica, in Queens—was due at 6:59. 39Dasch went up to the ticket office, feigning nonchalance as he asked for four one-way tickets to Jamaica.

“We were going fishing, but it’s a nasty foggy morning, and I guess we will go back home,” he told the stationmaster, Ira Baker. 40

They were the only passengers to board the train at Amagansett. Soon afterward, Baker discovered some wet clothes in the station hedge. Thinking nothing of it, he threw the items into the incinerator.

IT WAS AN ENORMOUS relief to be on the train. They felt exposed and out of place—four young men just off a submarine, wearing filthy, tattered clothes, embarking on a crazy adventure—but, to their relief, none of the other travelers seemed at all interested in them. Soon, they were soaking up half-forgotten glimpses of Americana through the train window: outsize American cars running alongside the track, single-family homes, loud clothes, big-boned meat-and-corn-fed people. 1They began to sense that they had already accomplished something unique just by making a seemingly impossible journey across the ocean between two warring nations.

After suspecting Dasch of double-crossing them on the beach by allowing the coastguardsman to go free, the other saboteurs were now more trusting of their unpredictable chief. The most dangerous part of their trip seemed to be over. “I accept you as our leader,” murmured Heinck, shaking Dasch’s hand. 2

Dasch sat behind Heinck and Quirin so that he could help them out if they were questioned by the conductor: their English was not as good as his or Burger’s. While boarding the train, he had picked up a stack of newspapers which he handed out to his companions so that they could blend in with all the other early morning travelers. He used his own paper to conceal an embarrassing gash in his golf pants, which he had ripped on a nail in the Amagansett station. 3The headlines offered a picture of a war still hanging in the balance and a nation gearing up for greater trials:

After months of setbacks, Americans were finally getting some good news from the Pacific: U.S. warplanes operating from aircraft carriers in the Coral Sea had destroyed three Japanese aircraft carriers in the Battle of Midway. Commentators were already talking about revenge for Pearl Harbor and a possible “turning point” in the Pacific theater. But elsewhere the war news was grim. The British were on the run from Rommel’s Afrika Korps in North Africa, and the Germans were at the gates of Sevastopol in the Crimea.

On the home front, the newspapers carried reports of gasoline rationing and the latest opinion poll from George Gallup, which suggested that 79 percent of Americans viewed the German government, rather than the German people, as “our chief enemy.” The message that there were “Good Germans” as well as “Bad Germans” was reinforced by a new Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie called Nazi Agent starring Conrad Veidt in the dual role of a loyal German-American and his evil twin brother, a Nazi spy. “A tautly intriguing spy movie,” reported the New York Times, noting with satisfaction that, in Hollywood at least, good always triumphed over evil.

Another news item concerned preparations for the big military parade through New York City that very afternoon. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia had urged Manhattan residents and office workers to display the Stars and Stripes as a symbol of the city’s “grim determination to do the utmost in helping to defeat Hitler.” He was expecting half a million people to take part in the procession, and several million spectators to line the route along Fifth Avenue. It certainly looked as if there would be a lot of American patriots in the streets by the time Dasch and his fellow saboteurs arrived in town.

THEY ARRIVED in Jamaica, the Queens terminus of the Long Island Rail Road, soon after nine. A sprawling suburb full of cheap clothing stores, it was the ideal place for the men to make themselves more presentable before their arrival in the big city. Dasch suggested that they split into pairs to avoid attention. He would stick with Burger; Quirin would team up with Heinck. They agreed to all meet at the Horn and Hardart Automat in the basement of Macy’s department store in Manhattan at three o’clock that afternoon.

After storing his bag in a dime locker at the station, Dasch set out with Burger on a shopping expedition. They still had some concerns about the American money given them by Kappe back in Lorient. The fifty-dollar bills were part of the same series, all marked by the letter B on the face of the bill, so they made a rule never to cash more than one of the bills at a time. 4That way, they would be more difficult to trace.

Dasch’s first order of business was to buy a new pair of trousers. Holding the newspaper in front of his ripped pants, he walked into the first clothing store he found and bought a pair of brown slacks for $6. But the pants needed tailoring, so he went next door and purchased a pair of ready-to-wear pants for $1.69. He put them on right in the store, and walked out feeling “a little better.” 5

Next stop was the Regal Shoe Store on Jamaica Avenue, where he and Burger got shoes and socks. Feeling more confident about their spending power—they had close to $90,000 tied around their waists and in their pockets—they stopped to have their new shoes shined. Having been poor most of his life, Dasch was beginning to enjoy himself: he had always wondered what it would be like to be waited upon, rather than to wait on others. He later recalled asking “the little nigger boy” who shined his shoes whether “you could use a pair of shoes size 8½?”

“Yes sir, man,” the boy replied enthusiastically, whereupon Dasch rewarded him with his castoffs.

Over the next two hours, the two saboteurs went on a shopping spree, replacing everything they had worn on the beach. At a haberdashery, they bought shirts, underwear, ties, and handkerchiefs. They then went to a clothing store next door to purchase a brown gabardine suit for Dasch and a gray flannel suit for Burger. While the suits were being altered, they obtained new underwear and shirts, and ducked into the rest room of a restaurant to wash and shave.

That afternoon, Dasch and Burger took a Long Island Rail Road train into Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan. They found a hotel opposite the station entrance, the Governor Clinton, whose twelve hundred rooms all offered “bath, radio, circulating ice water, and servidor,” a trapdoor within the room door where clothes or shoes could be left for a valet. 6Dasch registered under the name of George John Davis, of St. Louis, Missouri, at 1:15 p.m.; Burger, as previously planned, used his own name. Dasch was assigned room 1414 at a rate of five dollars a night; Burger was across the corridor in 1421.

Quirin and Heinck also acquired new wardrobes, consisting of shirts, socks, underwear, pants, and sports jackets, plus various toiletries, while they were in Jamaica. They tied their old clothes in bundles and threw them in a trash can. After eating and getting a shoeshine, they took the subway into Manhattan, getting off at Thirty-fourth Street for their rendezvous with Dasch and Burger at the Automat.

THE TWO Coast Guard intelligence officers, Nirschel and Franken, had also headed into Manhattan from Amagansett with the sabotage equipment loaded in the back of their station wagon. They took their booty to the Barge Office on the Battery, the New York headquarters for the Coast Guard, where they were directed to the office of Captain John S. Baylis, commander of the Port of New York.