Soon they came to a house with lights on in the front, and a parking space out back for several cars. It turned out to be a campground. “Jesus Christ, I’m falling into a trap,” thought Dasch, as he steered his men around the campground. Nobody noticed them. Behind the campground, they found some railroad tracks.
Looking at the tracks, Dasch was struck by “one outstanding fact”:38 he could see a single track to his right, but a double track and then a triple track to his left. He concluded that the village of Amagansett must lie to the left. They took that direction and, after a mile or so, reached the railroad station. It was around five o’clock in the morning, and the ticket office was closed.
“Filthy and wet and as stained as anyone could have been going through water and wet grass,” they cleaned themselves up as best they could. Dasch got rid of his wet clothes—swimming trunks, tennis shoes, tattered shirt, and a pair of socks—by throwing them into a hedge opposite the station.
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 6:59.39 Dasch 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.
CHAPTER SIX
NEW YORK, NEW YORK (JUNE 13, AFTERNOON)
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.1 They 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. 3 The headlines offered a picture of a war still hanging in the balance and a nation gearing up for greater trials:
JAPANESE MAKE LANDINGS IN ALEUTIAN ISLANDS
ENEMY LOST 15 WARSHIPS IN CORAL SEA BATTLE
RUSSIANS REPORTED HURLED BACK
AT VITAL POINT
MARRIED MEN WAIT IN NEW DRAFT BILL
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.4 That 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 81⁄2?”
“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. 6 Dasch 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, whi
le 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.
Dumping the contents of the heavy canvas seabag onto the floor of the captain’s office, they sorted through several pairs of sneakers, two pairs of heavy canvas trousers, five navy jackets, some with German naval insignia attached, a pair of swimming trunks, and a brown gabardine overcoat. They then ripped open the wooden crates, one of which emitted a hissing sound caused by the blocks of TNT coming into contact with air and salt water. 7 At the captain’s suggestion, they completed their examination of the box at the end of a deserted pier.
By the time the officers returned, Coast Guard chiefs had decided that the FBI would have to be brought into the investigation. Back in June 1939, in an attempt to head off inevitable turf fights, President Roosevelt had ordered the heads of the FBI, the War Department, and the navy to coordinate investigations into sabotage and espionage.8 After heated argument, the three agencies came to a working understanding: the FBI would take the lead in investigating sabotage acts on American soil, while military and naval intelligence would be responsible for infiltrating undercover agents abroad. Even though the Coast Guard had been first to learn about the sabotage plot, it would have to recognize the authority of Hoover’s G-men.
It was a painful decision because the FBI under Hoover had the reputation of being the least collegial arm of the government. The FBI director was constantly standing on his dignity and fighting with other agency heads over who was responsible for investigating what. Once the FBI took over an investigation, Hoover’s men shared as little as possible with other government agencies.
At 11 a.m., Baylis called the head of the FBI’s New York office, Thomas J. Donegan, and asked him to come to the Barge Office to discuss “an important matter.” When Donegan arrived, he discovered senior navy and Coast Guard officers assembled around the crates of sabotage equipment. Nirschel and Franken were also present.
The commandant of the Third Naval District, Rear Admiral Edward Marquart, had to rush away to lead the navy contingent in the New York at War parade, which was about to get under way. Before joining the marching bands, he told the Coast Guard to turn over the sabotage materials to Donegan, and to cooperate with Hoover’s men.9 The agreement was that the FBI should take “the lead” in the investigation, and the other agencies would “assist.” But everyone present had a different interpretation of what this meant.
Nirschel and Franken were unhappy at being muscled out of the way by the F.B.I. Having spent the night chasing saboteurs and submarines around Long Island while FBI agents were still asleep, they felt they had a head start on tracking down the invaders and wanted to pursue the leads they had already developed. The FBI would later accuse the two Coast Guard officers of withholding two potentially important pieces of evidence.
One of these items was the $260 in fresh bills used to try to bribe the Coast Guard on Amagansett Beach; the other was a brown vest that had once been part of a suit. Unlike the other pieces of clothing found scattered around the beach, this one had an easily traceable identification mark: a New York dry-cleaning tag was imprinted on the lining.10
HORN AND HARDART was the kind of American institution that Dasch remembered fondly from his nineteen years in the United States. As the world’s largest restaurant chain, serving over half a million people a day, it had pioneered the business of producing and serving inexpensive and reasonably nutritious food through a bank of glass-fronted compartments known as an Automat. The chain also boasted “the best coffee in town,” brewed by a revolutionary drip filter system and dispensed from a chrome dolphin’s head for a nickel a cup. Horn and Hardart was so successful that its coffee-and-pie formula was even celebrated in song by Irving Berlin, composer of “God Bless America”:
Just around the corner, There’s a rainbow in the sky, So let’s have another cup of coffee, And let’s have another piece of pie.
Dasch had enjoyed his first American meal in the original Horn and Hardart in Philadelphia, back in 1922, soon after jumping ship. Penniless and speaking only a few words of English, he had cadged a fifty-cent piece from a stranger, which he promptly spent at the Automat.11
Dressed in their new suits, Dasch and Burger headed for the Horn and Hardart in Macy’s after leaving their bags at the Governor Clinton. Dasch showed Burger how an Automat worked: change a dollar bill with the lady “nickel throwers,” feed the nickels into the machine, turn the knob, and pick up your meal. After weeks without fresh food on U-202, Dasch chose two different kinds of salad—“my weakness, especially in the summertime”—a bottle of milk, and a piece of coconut pie. He then led his companion upstairs to a table in a cavernous chrome-and-glass eating hall. 12
As they were enjoying their meal, they were taken aback to see two German-looking types appear in the dining hall in loud striped jackets, open sports shirts, neatly pressed pants, and shiny new shoes. The transformation was remarkable: a few hours before, Quirin and Heinck had looked like refugees on the run. After complimenting his subordinates for “looking so neat,” Dasch told them to get something to eat.
“Aren’t you glad to be back in the United States?” he asked with a smile, once they returned to the table with their plastic trays. They agreed that there was a positive side to life in America.
The top priority was to find the others a place to stay, and decide their next rendezvous point. Dasch recommended the Hotel Chesterfield, just around the corner. He said they would all meet again the following day at 1 p.m. at the Swiss Chalet restaurant on West Fifty-second Street. If they were unable to make this appointment for any reason, they would get together at 6 p.m. at Grant’s Tomb, near Columbia University.
Quirin and Heinck paid no attention to Dasch’s recommendation of the Chesterfield, and relied instead on the advice of a passerby, who suggested the Martinique Hotel on Broadway and Thirty-second Street. They checked in under the names of Richard Quintas and Henry Kaynor, sharing a double room for five dollars a night.
In the meantime, there was more shopping to do. Macy’s was running its annual Father’s Day Sale—leather wallets down to $1.98 from $2.98!— and was just the place to pick up a few more suits and shirts. “Today’s Father is a busy man indeed,” the ads proclaimed. “He’s probably busier than he’s ever been on his job and even some of his spare time is given over to defense activities. So this year give him clothes for his precious leisure moments.”13 The store even managed to make a patriotic slogan out of its traditionally low prices: “A Macy gift is proof of your thrift.”
Dasch and Burger headed for the men’s department, where they bought shirts, underwear, handkerchiefs, ties, pants, and another couple of suits, plus a Lord Elgin wristwatch for Dasch. They then purchased three suitcases to haul everything back to their hotel a few blocks away. Not long afterward, Quirin and Heinck appeared in the store on a similar mission.
WHILE THE saboteurs were shopping at Macy’s, American bombers and fighter planes were roaring over Manhattan. Tanks with names like Lincoln, Ball of Fire, and Hellzapoppin’ moved up Fifth Avenue, as hundreds of tons of tickertape floated down from surrounding skyscrapers and rooftops, creating the illusion of a snowstorm in the sweltering heat. The area around Penn Station, where Dasch and his companions spent most of their time, was almost deserted as New Yorkers flocked to Fifth Avenue for the big parade.
The authorities were even more vigilant than usual, mobilizing ten thousand policemen to guard against acts of sabotage by e
nemy agents as well as more mundane crimes, such as pickpocketing. A series of giant floats passed the reviewing stand outside the New York Public Library, including an “Axis War Monster” float in which a mechanical dictator crushed human beings to death by the thousand while loudspeakers blared “Heil Hitler!” and “Il Duce!” Another float celebrated the exploits of Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle and a small band of American pilots who had boosted morale at home by dropping a few bombs over Tokyo two months earlier.
The soldiers and sailors were followed by war industry workers carrying banners proclaiming they were on their guard against saboteurs. Then a detachment from the merchant marine, including 150 survivors from U-boat sinkings in the Atlantic. “The Axis Subs Don’t Scare Us,” read one much-applauded banner; “We Deliver the Goods.” There were also loud cheers for a group of German-American trade unionists who carried an outsized figure of a worker aiming a sledgehammer at a swastika. Other slogans captured the feverishly patriotic mood:
I Need America, America Needs Me
Buy Stamps to Stamp out the Axis
Don’t Talk
Keep ’Em Sailing
Open a Second Front Now
Remember Pearl Harbor
Attended by two and a half million people, one-third of the city’s population, this was “the greatest parade” in New York’s history, Mayor La Guardia told reporters, as he wiped the sweat off his face in the humid eighty-degree heat.14 The only parade likely to surpass it was when the boys “came home victorious.”