Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (67 page)

Plus, when Cullen looked out to sea, he thought he saw a long, flat shape about 150 feet offshore, kind of like a submarine.

Getting Help

Cullen was alone and unarmed. He suspected the men were foreign agents (this was World War II, after all), but there wasn’t much he could do about it by himself, and he feared that more foreign agents might be on the way. So he pretended to accept the bribe and then ran back to base to get help.

Cullen’s superiors were skeptical, not to mention afraid of what would happen if they sounded a false alarm. So they did nothing...until just before dawn, when they sent Cullen and several other armed men to investigate. The “fishermen” were gone and so was the submarine (it was beached on a sandbar when Cullen first saw it, but had since freed itself). But the men left behind several hastily and poorly concealed caches containing explosives, timers, blasting
caps, incendiary devices, cigarettes, brandy...and German uniforms.

The Nazis had landed on U.S. soil and nobody knew where they were.

SOUNDING THE ALARM

The FBI didn’t learn of the incident until noon and didn’t arrive at the scene until a couple of hours later; by then the saboteurs had already slipped into New York City and checked into a hotel.

J. Edgar Hoover was immediately informed of the landing. “All of Hoover’s imaginative and restless energy was stirred into prompt and effective action,” Attorney General Francis Biddle recalled years later. “His eyes were bright, his jaw set, excitement flickering around the edge of his nostrils.... He was determined to catch them all before any sabotage took place.”

After alerting President Roosevelt to the crisis, Hoover put the Bureau on full alert and launched the largest manhunt in FBI history. He also ordered a news blackout, for three reasons: (1) he didn’t want the saboteurs to learn that they had been discovered; (2) he wanted to avoid a public panic; and (3) he wanted to avoid public embarrassment in the event that the FBI could not catch the German agents.

Secret Heroes

Nobody knew it at the time, but Hoover had nothing to worry about. Colonel George John Dasch, the leader of the Nazi saboteurs, had lived in the U.S. for twenty years before the war and secretly hated the Nazis. The only thing he wanted to sabotage was his own mission, and he had talked one of his compatriots, a naturalized U.S. citizen named Ernst Peter Burger, into joining him. Their plan: Surrender to the FBI.

CRAZY

The two men telephoned the FBI’s New York City Field Office (NYFO) and tried to turn themselves in. It didn’t work, as Curt Gentry relates in J.
Edgar Hoover: the Man and the Secrets:

In most of the large bureau field offices there is what the agents themselves refer to as the “nut desk.” The special agent who had the unwelcome task of manning it that day at NYFO listened skeptically to Dasch’s tale and observed, “Yesterday Napoleon called,” and hung up. Although the whole bureau was on alert, nobody had informed him. He thought the call so ridiculous he didn’t even bother to log it.

With no luck on the phone, Dasch decided to take a train to Washington, D.C., and turn himself in to J. Edgar Hoover at FBI headquarters. He brought with him a suitcase containing $84,000 in U.S. currency, the money his team was supposed to use to fund their sabotage efforts. Burger stayed behind in New York.

HOOVER’S HELPERS

The trip to FBI headquarters didn’t work, either: Nobody believed Dasch’s story, and he was passed from one bureau official to another like a hot potato. No one he talked to would let him speak with Hoover.

Finally, Dasch landed at the desk of D. M. “Mickey” Ladd, head of the bureau’s Domestic Intelligence Division and the man leading the hunt for the Nazi saboteurs. Ladd didn’t believe Dasch either—he figured the strange man with the German accent was some kind of kook who’d somehow learned of the landing at Amagansett and wanted to hone in on the excitement. He listened to Dasch for about five minutes and then showed him the door. After all, Ladd had Nazis to catch.

Surprise!

Dasch lost his patience. As he later wrote in his memoirs: “I seized the suitcase that had been lying on the floor, tore its snaps, and dumped the contents on the desk. The three feet of polished wood were too narrow to hold the eighty-four thousand dollars in cash. Packets of bills cascaded over the sides to create the illusion of a miniature waterfall.”

“Is this stuff real?” Ladd asked.

SPILLING HIS GUTS

Once Ladd confirmed the money was real, the FBI sprang into action. It arrested Dasch and interrogated him for eight days. He told them how he’d been trained, who his contacts were in the U.S., and what his targets were (they included the New York City water supply and the hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls). He told the FBI where to find Burger and the two other men on his sabotage team.

The landings, Dasch explained, were the first of several scheduled to land every six weeks. The sabotage campaign had two goals: the disruption of vital war industries, and the launching of a wave of terror
by leaving time bombs at railway stations, department stores, and other public places.

Acting on Dasch’s information, the FBI picked up Burger and arrested the remaining saboteurs. Burger, like Dasch, cooperated immediately. He volunteered that a second team of saboteurs had landed along the coast of Florida, and FBI agents in Florida began their own roundup. They captured their last man on June 27, two weeks to the day after the landing at Amagansett. Neither sabotage team had been able to attack a single target.

SHHHH!

Hoover decided to keep the details of the arrests under wraps. The official explanation given was that if Dasch’s and Burger’s defection were kept secret, Hitler might think that the East Coast was so heavily guarded that further landings would be futile, not to mention a waste of valuable agents.

Fooling FDR

“This explanation makes of the FBI’s decision an ingenious disinformation ploy,” Gentry writes in J.
Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets.
“It fails to account, however, for why Hoover also felt it necessary to deceive the president of the United States.”

In the two weeks between the Amagansett landing and the capture of the last saboteur, Hoover sent FDR three different “personal and confidential memos” keeping the president updated on the progress of the manhunt. None of the memos mentioned the fact that Dasch had turned himself in or that he and Burger were cooperating fully, nor did they admit that the arrests of the Florida saboteurs were possible only because of the information Burger had volunteered to the FBI.

Instead, in the memos Hoover moved the date of Dasch’s “arrest” to two days after that of his compatriots to make it look like their capture had led to his, and not vice versa. The director gave all of the credit to the FBI, which had nearly blown the case.

GOING PUBLIC...SORT OF

Hoover announced the arrests—his version, anyway—in a public
press conference on June 27. The story made headlines across the country:

FBI CAPTURES 8
GERMAN AGENTS
LANDED BY SUBS

As the
New York Times
reported at the time, Hoover “gave no details of how the FBI ‘broke’ the case. That will have to wait, FBI officials insist, until after the war.” The press had little choice but to speculate on how the arrests had been made, and much of the speculation erred on the side of the FBI, according to then-Attorney General Francis Biddle:

It was generally concluded that a particularly brilliant FBI agent, probably attending the school in sabotage where the eight had been trained, had been able to get on the inside, and make regular reports to America. Mr. Hoover, as the United Press put it, declined to comment on whether the FBI agents had infiltrated not only the Gestapo but also the High Command, or whether he watched the saboteurs land.

THANKS, GUYS

What did Dasch and Burger get for: (1) singlehandedly destroying Hitler’s entire North American sabotage program; and (2) handing Hoover his biggest intelligence coup of the war? (Dasch was hoping for a Congressional Medal of Honor.)

Not much. Like the other six saboteurs, they were hauled before a military tribunal, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death. Acting on the recommendation of military commission, however, President Roosevelt commuted Dasch’s sentence to 30 years of hard labor and Burger’s to life at hard labor. Everyone else was executed within a month.

Dasch and Burger languished in prison until 1948, when President Truman pardoned both men and ordered them deported to Germany. There, according to Gentry, “they were treated as traitors who not only had betrayed the fatherland, but also were responsible for the deaths of six of their comrades.”

This article by Donald Katz first appeared in
Outside
magazine in 1987. We’ve had it in our files for awhile, waiting for the opportunity to use it. Now that we’ve created our “Extended Sitting Section,” this is perfect. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this bizarre story.

B
ACKGROUND

Some 11 years ago I first heard of the strange pastime called ferret-legging, and for a decade since then I have sought a publication possessed of sufficient intelligence and vision to allow me to travel to northern England in search of the fabled players of the game.

Basically the contest involves the tying of a competitor’s trousers at the ankles and the subsequent insertion into those trousers of a couple of peculiarly vicious fur-coated, foot-long carnivores called ferrets. The brave contestant’s belt is then pulled tight, and he proceeds to stand there in front of the judges as long as he can while animals with claws like hypodermic needles and teeth like number 16 carpet tacks try their damndest to get out.

From a dark and obscure past, the sport has made an astonishing comeback in the past 15 years. When I first heard about ferret-legging, the world record stood at 40 painful seconds of “keepin’ ’em down,” as they say in ferret-legging circles. A few years later, the dreaded one-minute mark was finally surpassed.

The current record—implausible as it may seem—now stands at an awesome 5 hours and 26 minutes, a mark reached last year by the gaudily tattooed 72-year-old little Yorkshireman with a waxed military mustache who now stood two feet away from me in the middle of the room, apparently undoing his trousers.

“The ferrets must have a full mouth o’ teeth; no clipping. No dope for you or for the ferrets. You must be sober, and the ferrets must be hungry—though any ferret’ll eat yer eyes out even if he isn’t hungry.”

LONG LIVE THE KING

Reg Mellor lives several hours north of London atop the thick central seam of British coal that once fueled the most powerful surge into modernity in the world’s history. He lives in the city of Barnsley, home to a quarter-million downtrodden souls, and the brunt of many derisive jokes in Great Britain. Barnsley was the subject of much national mirth recently when “the most grievously mocked town in Yorkshire”—a place people drive miles out of their way to circumvent—opened a tourist information center. Everyone thought that was a good one.

When I stopped at the tourist office and asked the astonished woman for a map, she said, “Ooooh, a mup ees it, luv? No mups ‘ere. Noooo.” She did, however, know the way to Reg Mellor’s house. Reg is, after all, Barnsley’s only reigning king.

Mr. Reg Mellor, the “king of the ferret-legging,” paced across his tiny Yorkshire miner’s cottage as he explained the rules of the English sport that he has come to dominate rather late in life.

“Ay lad,” said the 72-year-old champion, “no jockstraps allowed. No underpants—nothin’ whatever. And it’s no good with tight trousers, mind ye. Little bah-stards have to be able to move around inside there from ankle to ankle.”

THE KING AND I

Finally, then, after 11 long years, I sat in front of a real ferret-legger, a man among men. He stood now next to a glowing fire of Yorksire coal as I tried to interpret the primitive record of his long life, which is etched in tattoos up and down his thick arms. Reg finally finished explaining the technicalities of this burgeoning sport.

“So then, lad. Any more questions for I poot a few down for ye?”

“Yes, Reg.”

“Ay, whoot then?”

“Well Reg,” I said. “I think people in America will want to know. Well...since you don’t wear any protection...and, well, I’ve heard a ferret can bite your thumb off. Do they ever—you know?”

Reg’s stiff mustache arched toward the ceiling under a sly grin.