Michael Dobbs - Saboteurs

Since it was practically impossible to travel from either Russia or Germany to America, the “boys” were surprised to see Dasch walk through the door of Mayers, around nine o’clock on Monday evening. He seemed reluctant to say where he had been since they last met, and instead insisted on immediately starting a two-handed pinochle game. He boasted that he had plenty of money, adding, “Thank God, I don’t have to work as a waiter anymore.”

His principal opponent was a German Jew named Fritz Muller, an old waiter buddy. Aware of Dasch’s constant financial problems, Muller was stunned to hear him say he would not mind losing some money at cards, as he had $83,000 in reserve. He would have put this down to bragging, but he saw Dasch break open several large bills. While Muller played for his usual two-dollar stake, his opponent placed side bets of $30 and $40 a game with other people in the club.

As the game became more and more intense, other waiters gathered around the table, urging Dasch to tell them about life in Russia and joking about his sudden reappearance. To the persistent questions about how he got back, he would only reply, “I’m here—what difference does it make how I came?” One friend speculated that he must have come by plane; another said the only way of getting to the United States from Europe these days was by submarine. At this, Dasch’s face went white, but he brushed the remark aside: “Never mind the wisecracks.” 21

By the second day, he was exhausted, and could be heard mumbling to himself, “If I talk, it means death.” But he seemed addicted to the pinochle table. A “pinochle fiend,” in the phrase of one of his fellow waiters, he was fascinated by the game’s seemingly infinite variations. Win a trick, meld, watch the points pile up. He could play for hours in search of the holy grail of pinochle players, the magic combination of two Queens of Spades and two Jacks of Diamonds, the three-hundred-point “double pinochle.”

The marathon game finally sputtered to a halt around 8 a.m. on Wednesday when Dasch, by now several hundred dollars richer than when he arrived, announced he would pay everyone’s bill for food and drink. He told one of the waiters he was in the United States on a mission for the Russian secret service, and had an appointment with the Russian embassy in Washington. To Mayer, on the other hand, he said he had to go to Washington “to see Mr. Hoover,” as “I’ve got something to explain to him.” 22

On his way out the door, he gave a five-dollar bill to a waiter with a hard-luck story about losing all his money at cards and repaid an old ten-dollar debt to another waiter, known as Johnny the Polack. He then disappeared into the morning rush-hour crowds. The card-playing binge had lasted for almost thirty-six hours.

Calming his nerves was certainly one explanation for Dasch’s bizarre behavior. But if his own account of his actions is to be believed, he was guided by another, equally important, motivation: he wanted to give the second group of saboteurs a chance to turn themselves in to the FBI rather than be arrested on the spot, as soon as they landed in Florida. He thought in particular of the young Chicago boy, Herbie Haupt, who seemed to see the sabotage mission as his best chance of going home to his family. As Dasch later put it, “To be a real decent person I had to wait, to give every person a chance to say what I had to say.” 23

From his conversations with Linder aboard U-202, Dasch knew that the second party of saboteurs under Edward Kerling was likely to land in America around June 17, the very day he staggered out of Mayers.

AFTER ESCAPING the depth charge attack from the British plane on its first day out of Lorient, U-584 had had a fairly routine Atlantic crossing. One day, it accidentally met another German submarine traveling on the surface. Later Kapitänleutnant Joachim Deecke tried to chase a 20,000-ton Allied freighter, but it was traveling too fast, and its zigzag tactics made it impossible to get close enough to fire his torpedoes.

The landing of the V-men from U-584 went much more smoothly than the landing from U-202 just four days earlier. Even so, there were some anxious moments. As he navigated the shoreline south of Jacksonville, Deecke had to dodge an American patrol boat and a barrage of zeppelin observation balloons monitoring the coast for enemy submarines. 24The little zeppelins were particularly tiresome creatures, very difficult to shake off.

Eventually the submarine got within several hundred feet of a wide sandy beach near Ponte Vedra. Deecke ordered the bow tanks to be flooded, so that his boat nudged against the sand, its decks peeking out of the water. A thin sliver of moon glowed in the sky, making the night a little less impenetrable than the mist-shrouded obscurity that had enveloped U-202, but dark enough nonetheless. Unlike their counterparts from U-202, the men from U-584 were dressed only in bathing suits and German marine caps as they came ashore in a rubber dinghy. 25They assumed that the Nazi swastika insignia on the caps would be sufficient to give them prisoner of war status as German soldiers if they were captured on landing. Their civilian clothes were zipped up in waterproof bags.

After depositing their passengers on the beach, the two crewmen from the submarine scooped up a can of American sand to take back with them to Germany. They could hear some girl bathers chatting and giggling a little to the north of the landing spot. They used flashlights to signal Deecke that the landing had gone according to plan and returned to the U-boat almost immediately.

A slender man with wavy brown hair and heavy jaw, Kerling made a quick tour of the beach to make sure there were no inhabited houses nearby and that nobody had seen his men land. 26He then selected a place to hide the four boxes of explosives and other sabotage gear, all practically identical to those brought ashore by Dasch’s group. The spot he chose was easy to remember: a grove of palm trees on a little hill next to a wire fence, halfway between the beach and the road. The saboteurs buried the boxes just as a gray dawn was breaking, and threw the spade into the sea, where it would be taken out by the tide.

Dressed in swimsuits and carrying their clothes in bundles under their arms, they then walked north from Ponte Vedra Beach in the direction of Jacksonville Beach. For the next four hours, they lounged around on the beach, swimming and relaxing like vacationers. While still in their bathing suits, they gave a cheery wave to a passing police patrol car, and received a wave in return. 27At around eleven, they put on their clothes and caught a bus into Jacksonville, some forty-five minutes away.

Like Dasch’s group, they decided it was safer to split up into pairs. Kerling and Neubauer, the injured soldier with the American wife, checked into the Seminole Hotel in downtown Jacksonville under the names of Edward Kelly and Henry Nichols. 28Haupt and Thiel found rooms in the Mayflower Hotel, just a block from the bus station. As an American citizen, Haupt registered under his own name: if questioned about where he had been over the last year, he planned to claim he had just returned from a long trip to Mexico. Thiel signed as William Thomas.

That afternoon, they went on a shopping expedition, just like their comrades from U-202. Haupt, who had the most expensive tastes and felt deprived of consumer goods in Germany, felt particularly at home in American stores. He had his hair cut and got something to eat, and then proceeded to make a string of purchases: a three-piece tan suit from a fashionable New York tailor, a pink-gold Bulova wristwatch, some neckties and shirts, underclothes, a tan leather suitcase, silk handkerchiefs, and several pairs of shoes. 29The others limited themselves to the basics.