flickering pictures

Christopher S. Putnam writes a sad, excellent and Damn Interesting article on the Keystone Kommandos, a group of German spies who landed on Long Island in 1942 with $1 million in today’s dollars, a sabotage mission and lots and lots of explosives. I love historical adventure stuff like this — here’s how it starts:

Just after midnight on the morning of June 13, 1942, twenty-one-year-old coastguardsman John Cullen was beginning his foot patrol along the coast of Long Island, New York. Although this particular stretch of beach was considered a likely target for enemy landing parties, the young Seaman was the sole line of defense on that foggy night; and his only weapon, a trusty flashlight, was proving ineffective against the smothering haze. As Cullen approached a dune on the beach, the shape of a man suddenly appeared before him. Momentarily startled, he called out for the shape to identify itself.

“We’re fishermen from Southampton,” a voice responded. A middle-aged man emerged from the soupy fog, and continued, “We’ve run ashore.” This sounded plausible to Cullen, so he invited the fisherman and his crew to stay the night at the nearby Coast Guard station. The offer appeared to agitate the man, and he refused. “We don’t have a fishing license,” he explained.

Just as Cullen’s suspicions began to grow, a second figure appeared over the dune and shouted something in German. The man in front of Cullen spun around, yelling, “You damn fool! Go back to the others!” Then he turned back to Cullen with an intensity in his expression that left the Seaman paralyzed—for he was now almost certain that he was alone on the beach with a party of Nazi spies.

[…] Cullen’s suspicion was correct, but the man he’d confronted was no hardened military commander. His real name was George John Dasch, a waiter and dishwasher who’d come to the attention of the German High Command for the time he’d spent living in America before the war. He and a team of three similarly inexperienced agents had been given several weeks of intense training at a secret farm near Berlin before being ushered onto a U-boat bound for the US coast. Their mission, led by Dasch, was to sabotage America’s manufacturing and transport sector, and to terrorize the country’s civilian population. It would be known as Operation Pastorius.

The would-be saboteurs aimed to blow up New Jersey’s Pennsylvania Station and the Hell’s Gate Bridge in New York but were all arrested before any damage was done, thanks to the defection of Dasch and another spy. In spite of their help, the two defectors spent six years in prison, and the other six were executed.

Interestingly, the spies were tried in America’s first closed-door military tribunal since the Civil War, and “it was presided over by a panel of seven generals; there would be no jury, no press, and no appeal.” Sound familiar?

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