The men in Michael Dobbs' Saboteurs were like the gang that couldn't shoot straight.
"All in all, they were a mediocre lot," Dobbs says of the eight men who conducted the Nazi raid on the United States in 1942. The men landed from two German U-boats in mid June, never engaged in sabotage, were quickly rounded up, tried and, in less than two months, six had been executed.
Their story has been told before, but never so fascinatingly as by Dobbs, a Washington Post reporter. An immense news story at the time, it serves as a cautionary tale for today. Saboteurs is a book to set alongside last year's Agent 146, Erich Gimpel's account of his failed espionage attempt in 1944.
The eight were all German-Americans - one was a U.S. citizen - who had lived in the United States in the 1920s and '30s but had gone back to Germany. There they were lured into training for a program called Operation Pastorius, which was to conduct sabotage operations within the United States.
There is scarcely an aspect of the story that is without comic-opera overtones. The plan did not have universal backing among Nazi authorities, many of whom had little confidence in the people they were training.
With reason, as it turned out. One of the men, while traveling to the submarine that would transport the saboteurs, got drunk in a Paris bar and announced that he was a secret agent. Another - one of the leaders, named Dasch - left incriminating documents behind on a train.
(Originally there were to be nine saboteurs, but one arranged to have himself left behind by faking a case of gonorrhea.)
The biggest flaw in Operation Pastorius, as the author concludes, "was the lack of ideological commitment and cohesion among its principal protagonists." With possibly one exception, the men seemed largely motivated by a desire to flee the miserable conditions of the Third Reich.
Indeed, once they reached the United States - one U-boat landed off the Hamptons on Long Island, the other off Jacksonville - the men made no attempts at sabotage or espionage. The landing of the Long Island party, which the author tracks more closely than the other, had elements of farce.
It was immediately discovered, by accident, by a Coast Guardsman on foot patrol, who, having no idea what he had stumbled onto, quickly left. The spies fumbled around, making one error after another.
The Americans fumbled, too. No one in authority took the reports of the sub sighting seriously, even after it became stuck on a sandbar and was observed by dozens of people. The beached U-boat, having given the Americans ample opportunities to nab it, finally managed to break away.
Dasch almost immediately called the FBI in New York to confess, but he was dismissed as a nut. The other seven, suspicious of one another, did little more than go shopping.
Within a month they were all rounded up. What followed was an ego-driven campaign by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to ensure that the bureau received sole credit, even though other agencies were involved and it was actually Dasch's freely offered confession that broke the case.
Equally as interesting is the swift legal process they were subjected to, not least because it is echoed in the ways those detained as terrorism suspects are treated today. The Bush administration cited the saboteurs' Supreme Court case as a legal basis for establishing military tribunals.
President Franklin Roosevelt wanted a speedy trial, followed by speedy executions. He got his wish. A hand-tailored military commission held the trial in secret, making up rules as it went along.
All eight were found guilty and sentenced to electrocution. Two sentences were commuted; the remaining six were put to death Aug. 8, also in total secrecy.
What will stay with readers of Saboteurs is how arbitrary it all seemed: who lived, who died and why. But then, to put it in the vengeful context of the times - only eight months after the attack on Pearl Harbor - no more arbitrary than the deaths of American boys at virtually that moment at Guadalcanal.
- Reviewer Roger K. Miller, a newspaperman for many years, is a freelance writer and reviewer for several publications.
"Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America," by Michael Dobbs, Knopf, $24.95, 300 pages
