Dan's Papers - February 15, 2008

One of the most fascinating historical events ever to take place in the Hamptons was the landing of four Nazi spies in Amagansett during World War II. They came ashore in rubber boats from a German submarine on June 13, 1942 in the middle of the night, buried their gear, Nazi uniforms, weapons, money and the explosives they intended to use at a later date for sabotage. And they put on civilian clothes that would make people who might see them think they were surfcasters, walked to the Amagansett Railroad Station and took the morning train to New York City. They carried fishing poles.

The landing at Amagansett and a similar one in Ponte Vedra, Florida two weeks later, were the only occasions in American history when uniformed soldiers of a country we were at war with successfully breached the defenses of mainland United States. That both groups, now in civilian clothes and never having done any harm, were apprehended within a few weeks of the landing does not change that fact.

Now it turns out that the landing of the soldiers at the spot where Atlantic Avenue dead ends at the beach (and where Atlantic Avenue Beach is today), came within 300 yards of disrupting a secret and war-altering Navy operation taking place in a small oceanfront brick house within sight of the spot where the Nazis came ashore.

The existence of this operation, which dramatically altered the course of World War II, was not known until a few months ago, when local historian Bob Hefner was in Washington researching Life Saving Stations and Coast Guard operations and happened to come across some top secret papers from that era that were being declassified and made public for the first time.

Hefner gave a talk about his find last Friday evening at the Clinton Academy Museum on Main Street in East Hampton. The place was packed with people, and was standing room only. Hefner not only had papers, but also photographs of this operation in Amagansett that he projected on a screen and spoke about with the help of a PowerPoint indicator.

"In the course of things, I learned that one of the Navy men involved in this operation was Vito DeMai, who, after the war, came to settle here in Amagansett and lives in town today. I spoke to him about it last week. 'I don't know if I have permission to tell you anything about this,' he said."

The brick building and the secret operation inside had begun in 1940, two years before. At that time, America was not at war and Pearl Harbor had not yet taken place. The local people knew there was something going on there. But they were completely mistaken about what it was.

Twenty years earlier, in 1920, two huge 500-foot-tall steel towers were constructed in Napeague, halfway between Amagansett and Montauk, to use Morse code to communicate with ships at sea. They were the wonder of the age and people, correctly, knew what they were all about.

It therefore seemed no surprise to anybody that in 1940 the U. S. Navy would build this brick building on the beach and alongside it construct a series of 20-foot-tall aerials in a grid pattern. The Navy told anyone who asked that this was a Navy radio station monitoring the activities of the American naval ships at sea in the same way that the towers in Napeague were monitoring the ocean liners and freighters. People believed them.

To get a full understanding of exactly what this station was involved with - and there were 30 naval officers at work in three shifts 24 hours a day every day there (the single men lived in a barracks they built on Bluff Road at the back of the beach) - you need to know the history of World War II.

The attack on Pearl Harbor took place on December 7, 1941. However, more than two years earlier, on September 1, 1939, Hitler's armies invaded Poland. And within days, Germany was officially in a state of war with France and England, because those countries had treaties requiring them to defend Poland.

Here in America, conservatives urged President Roosevelt to stay out of this conflict. But Roosevelt knew that if the huge German armies prevailed over both France and England, this would pose a serious threat to the security and integrity of America.

Publicly, he announced that we would not go to war. But he also announced that we had a treaty with England and would embark on a program of sending them weapons and supplies across the Atlantic by boat. We would become the "arsenal of democracy," he said in a speech. And so, in 1939, we began to turn out artillery guns and tanks and ammunition to send to the British on a lease basis.

The Germans, however, were ready. They had by that time assembled a huge armada of submarines, which they called U-boats, and they declared that if anybody tried to send arms and guns to England, their U-boats would sink them. And sink them they did.

In 1939 and 1940, thousands and thousands of American freighters were torpedoed and sunk in the Atlantic Ocean by U-boats, causing a huge loss of American lives. The number of ships that got through to England was less than half of what we were sending. It was turning into a disaster, and something had to be done, and quickly.

The U-boats, it was known, operated in groups known as wolfpacks. Under water, they communicated with one another by radio. Roosevelt, meeting with his cabinet, ordered that large American warships accompany the freighters and be equipped with depth charges capable of blowing up U-boats underwater. He also ordered that a communications system be set up to eavesdrop on the Germans and determine the location of the wolfpacks so the warships could find them and the freighters avoid them. With the knowledge of a wolfpack, a freighter could outrun an underwater U-boat.

On a wall map, four seaside locations in the continental United States were selected for the building of secret communications outposts that working together as a group could determine the whereabouts of the U-boats in the Atlantic. They were soon built in Winter Harbor, Maine; Cheltenham, Maryland; Jupiter, Florida and Amagansett, New York.

The naval officers at these outposts would listen to the German wolfpack communications, note the direction from where the communications had come, and then forward these coordinates over normal telephone lines to the main operations center for this operation located on the Mall in Washington. The main operations center would determine the location of the German U-boats by triangulating the coordinates given to them by the observers at these outposts and, as a result, pinpoint these locations immediately and transmit them by secret code to the American warships at sea.

The outpost at Atlantic Beach in Amagansett had been in full operation all day and all night for a full year by the time the Nazis waded ashore on June 13, 1942. The Nazis did not know this operation was there. And those manning their posts did not know the Nazis were there. Undoubtedly, had they met up and had the Nazis realized what they were looking at, they would have destroyed the American operation before moving inland.

"The Nazi landing, dramatic as it was, was a small sideshow compared to the naval radio station," Hefner said. "Four Nazis were not going to alter the war. But the naval radio station did."

Historians call what went on in the ocean between 1940 and 1943 the Battle of the Atlantic. By 1943, although the war was still underway, it was pretty much over. The Americans, much to the bafflement of the Nazi high command, were locating the U-boat fleets and wiping them out. Weapons, troops, tanks, planes, guns and ammunition were now flowing in a steady stream to England for what would, the next year, be the D-Day invasion of Normandy liberating France and leading to the Nazi surrender. What few U-boats remained stayed in their pens in Bremen and elsewhere along the German coast. But the four outposts continued on, and did not end their operations until the war ended in 1945. Today that brick building, moved up to Bluff Road adjacent to the East Hampton Marine Museum, serves as the offices for the East Hampton Town Trustees. The East Hampton Marine Museum is the former Single Men's Navy Barracks.

As for the Nazi landing in World War II, the site of the landing was chosen by the German High Command from maps that showed the location of the Long Island Railroad and the Amagansett Railroad Station just a short walk up Atlantic Avenue.

U-Boat 202, captained by Hans Heinz Linder, took 14 days to cross the Atlantic from Germany. Spirits were high. And because this was a single, lone U-boat on a secret operation, it crossed the Atlantic under complete radio silence, which is why they never came to the attention of the Navy radio station operators in Amagansett even though, in the end, they were right under their noses, and even though in the middle of that dark, foggy night both the Germans and the Americans were wide awake and conducting military operations just a few hundred yards from one another.

I should also say that though this part of Bob Hefner's talk at the Clinton Academy Museum last Friday night did focus on this startling war-altering revelation, the talk was mostly about the history of the Life Saving Service and subsequently the United States Coast Guard, which, in 1942, ALSO had a building at Atlantic Avenue Beach and was, for an entirely different reason, also fully manned 24 hours a day. Quite by chance the operations of the Coast Guard that night resulted in the later unraveling of the Nazi spy operation.

"For years and years before 1942," Hefner said, "sailors and passengers of ships at sea were shipwrecked during storms on the ocean beaches of eastern Long Island almost monthly. In the 1880s, a group called the United States Life Saving Service was formed. That service built wooden lifesaving stations every six miles along the beach. Here on the East End, they were at Ditch Plains, Hither Hills, Napeague, Amagansett, Georgica, Mecox and Southampton. The men lived in these buildings and the life saving boats were garaged there too."

Hefner showed slides of these proud men and these structures. The men wore special uniforms while on duty, the same way that firemen wear special uniforms today.

They had many occasions to save lives. They'd either drag their 28-foot boats out of the garages on wheeled carts down to the sea and launch them through the surf to the crippled ship, or they'd use an elaborate arrangement called a breeches buoy, where a gun would fire a rocket dragging a clothesline from shore to the distressed ship, that after being secured by the ship's crew, would result in the overhead crossing of a chair in which a lifesaving man would be able to sit and either accompany or carry back to shore a passenger or crewmember from a distressed ship. One at a time, all could be saved. He showed pictures of these operations.

By 1942, the government had long since created the United States Coast Guard, which merged with these stations from the Life Saving Service in 1915. All day and all night, coastguardsmen would patrol the beaches, looking for shipwrecks or other problems.

After Pearl Harbor, a new "problem" might be some Nazi soldiers. If you see such an operation, run back to the Coast Guard Station and report it to superiors, the men were told.

And so it was that at 3 a.m., Ensign John Cullen, walking the beach, came upon the Nazis burying their supplies. He approached them - they had already dressed up as fishermen - and asked them what they were doing at that hour of the night. George Dasch, the leader of the German operation, was as surprised to see Cullen as Cullen was to see him. Dasch handed Cullen $350 in cash and told him not to tell anybody about them. Cullen ran off, and immediately ran into the Coast Guard Station just a hundred yards away - that's how close he was on this six-mile walk he was taking - and breathlessly told the Coast Guard officers what he saw and what they had given him.

The Nazis got away to the train station and to New York. American soldiers arrived on the scene before dawn and dug up the boxes. And the radiomen, all within sight of this, just kept working away, hoping nobody would bother them. It was a busy 35 hours down at Atlantic Avenue Beach.

By the way, the boxes the Nazis buried that the Army dug up were on the beach about two hundred yards to the east of where the comfort station at Atlantic Avenue Beach is today. Hefner noted it with a red PowerPoint dot on the screen.