SUMMER OF ’42
A dense curtain of fog gripped the coastline of Long Island, New York, in the early hours of June 13, 1942, parted here and there only by misty beams of moonlight. Amagansett Beach, a sheltered stretch of rolling dunes and tall grasses, was deserted, serene.
But from 500 or so yards out, a German submarine was disgorging a rubber lifeboat that would silently bring to shore George John Dasch, Ernest Peter Burger, Heinrich Heinck, and Richard Quirin, all top graduates of the Nazi sabotage school at Quenz Lake, just outside Berlin. They carried more than $90,000 in U.S. currency, flawlessly forged Social Security and Selective Service cards, and enough explosives to cripple American airplane production and other war-vital industries.
The surreptitious landing on Long Island was the opening episode of Operation Pastorius, a frighteningly ambitious sabotage plan devised by the Abwehr, the Nazi intelligence agency. Four days later, another German submarine would deposit a second team of four saboteurs in Ponte Vedra, Florida, just south of Jacksonville Beach. The two teams were to rendezvous later at Chicago’s Commodore Hotel.
Somewhere, the capital of the United States was just a pushpin on an Axis map.
It was less than six months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The German high command, though confident of its military might in Europe, deeply feared the sleeping American industrial giant, which was just now bringing assembly-line efficiency to war production. The German war machine had been buried by an American onslaught once before; Adolf Hitler was determined not to let it happen again.
Now, with the first saboteurs safely landed, members of the submarine crew reeled in a tow rope attached to the collapsible lifeboat. Heinck and Quirin sat on the beach, calmly puffing on German cigarettes and sipping from a bottle of brandy. Dasch, the team leader, heard an unfamiliar voice call out and turned to find himself on the receiving end of a flashlight beam.
Dasch walked directly toward its source, confronting 21-year-old John Cullen, a second-class Coast Guardsman assigned that night to patrol the beachfront. Cullen, of course, wanted to know who these men were and what they were doing; Dasch gamely replied that they were Southampton fisherman run aground. At that moment, however, Burger emerged through the fog, dragging a bag and saying something in German. “Shut up, you damn fool,” Dasch barked. But it was already too late.
After realizing that Cullen was unarmed, Dasch threatened him, suggested he “forget the whole thing,” and pushed a wad of bills on him as a bribe. With some hesitation, Cullen accepted the money, thinking it most important to get back to his Coast Guard station in one piece. “Now look me in the eyes,” Dasch said. As Cullen stood eyeball to eyeball with this stranger—who kept repeating, “Would you recognize me if you saw me again?”—he had the distinct impression he was being hypnotized.
As Cullen backed away and disappeared through the mist, Dasch assured his men that everything was all right, and
