Operation Pastorius… When Terrorism was Called Sabotage

Prior to what we now call terrorism, enemies of America engaged in what was called sabotage. In a case coded named Operation Pastorius, German Saboteurs were given a quick course in sabotage techniques, given nearly $175,000 in American money and put aboard two submarines to land on the east coast of the United States. Their mission was to stage sabotage attacks on American economic targets: hydroelectric plants at Niagara Falls; the Aluminum Company of America's plants in Illinois, Tennessee and New York; locks on the Ohio River near Louisville, Kentucky; a cryolite plant in Philadelphia; Hell Gate Bridge in New York; and Pennsylvania Station in Newark, New Jersey.

Sounds eerily like several of the terrorist plots of today.

On June 13, 1942, the German submarine, U-202, the Innsbruck, carrying George John Dasch as the head of a team of three other saboteurs, landed in Amagansett, New York about 115 miles east of New York City on Long Island. A Coast Guardsman, John C. Cullen, spotted the Germans coming ashore, and one of them tried to bribe him. Cullen, however, returned to his station and reported the encounter to his superiors; but by that time the Germans, weary from their transatlantic trip, had taken a train into New York City.

The second submarine, U-584, with another four-member team headed by Edward Kerling, landed at Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, south of Jacksonville on June 16, 1942. Without any incident, this second group of Germans started their mission by boarding trains to Chicago and Cincinnati.

Two of the Germans in New York, Dasch and Ernest Burger, decided to back out of the mission. Dasch went Washington, D.C., and turned himself in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. None of the other saboteurs knew of the betrayal. Over the next two weeks, Burger and the other six were arrested, and all eight were put on trial before a seven-member military commission on specific instructions from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. They were charged with 1) violating the law of war; 2) violating Article 81 of the Articles of War, defining the offense of corresponding with or giving intelligence to the enemy; 3) violating Article 82 of the Articles of War, defining the offense of spying; and 4) conspiracy to commit the offenses alleged in the first three charges.

Lawyers for the accused attempted to have the case tried in a civilian court, but were rebuffed by the Supreme Court in Ex parte Quirin. The trial began July 8 in Assembly Hall #1 on the fifth floor of the Department of Justice building in Washington.

All eight defendants were found guilty and sentenced to death. Roosevelt commuted Burger's sentence to life and Dasch's to 30 years. The others were executed on August 8, in the electric chair on the third floor of the District of Columbia jail and buried in a potter's field called Blue Plains in the Anacostia area of Washington. In 1948, President Harry S. Truman granted executive clemency to Dasch and Burger on the condition that they be deported to the American Zone of occupied Germany.

Talk about justice! They landed in the U.S. on June 13, 1942; there trial began on July8, and 6 of the 8 defendants were executed on August 8.

Either we are at War, or we are not. Terrorism is just the 21st Century name for what the 1940’s vernacular called a spy or saboteur. FDR had it right in 1942, but unfortunately in 2006 President Bush has bought into trying to fighting what John Kerry called “more sensitive war on terror.”

Maybe I should start looking for some Urdu language lesson CD-ROMs.

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