Posted: July 12, 2010 - 6:10am
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By JESSIE-LYNNE KERR, MORRIS NEWS SERVICE
Last week's swap of 10 admitted Russian spies swiftly deported after their FBI capture in the Northeast brings to mind one of the most famous espionage incidents of World War II that took place on our shore.
On June 16, 1942, the German submarine U-584 surfaced about 50 yards from shore near Ponte Vedra Beach. It let off four trained Nazi agents dressed as American civilians, who made their way to the sand.
Operation Pastorius was authorized by Adolf Hitler shortly after the Nazi dictator's declaration of war on the United States. The aim was to show that Americans were not safe within their homeland.
The four agents came ashore in a raft about four miles south of the Ponte Vedra Inn and buried four waterproof boxes of explosives and money in the sand. It was a humid, foggy morning as they made their way to Alice and Roy Landrum Jr.'s combination post office, store, service station and ice house on Ponte Vedra Boulevard.
Alice was the Ponte Vedra Beach-Palm Valley postmaster; Roy was the St. Johns County sheriff's deputy for the area. Alice would later recall that one of the men came inside the store and asked about the bus schedule to Jacksonville. The other three stayed outside as they waited for about an hour until the bus arrived. They then departed in the direction of Jacksonville Beach.
Alice Landrum told a reporter 20 years later that the one who came inside and spoke to her didn't have an accent. She thought they were laborers working on The Innlet hotel, then under construction.
The bus took the men to downtown Jacksonville where they split up, two checking into the Mayflower Hotel and two into the Seminole Hotel. They went shopping for some clothes and toilet articles and one got a haircut. The next day they were gone.
They were supposed to return here to claim their buried explosives and money, but they never did. Just 51 days later, all were dead, electrocuted by the U.S. government. The explosives and cash were dug up on the beach by FBI agents.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover said at the time that the four men had come "to maim and to kill." They and four others who had landed four days earlier off Long Island in New York were the keys to a fantastic, two-year plan of sabotage personally initiated by Hitler, he said. It collapsed, however, when the leader of the New York team, George John Dasch, 39, and the oldest, became convinced the sabotage plot was doomed for failure and contacted the FBI five days after landing.
Their mission was to conduct a reign of terror in the U.S. blowing up defense plants, railroad lines and terminals, hydroelectric plants and water supplies for cities. Hoover declared them "magnificently trained" and well supplied with cash. When one of those who landed in New York was arrested, he was wearing a money belt containing $82,500. In all, the eight men had been carrying $175,000 in U.S. currency. All of the Germans were selected because they once had lived in the U.S.
The Florida team was led by Edward Kerling, 32, who had lived in the U.S. for 11 years, working as a chauffeur for wealthy residents of a New York suburb. Also landing here were Herbert Haupt, 22, a would-be Luftwaffe pilot who liked flashy jewelry; Werner Thiel, 35, a former toolmaker who had worked in Fort Myers; and Hermann Otto Neubauer, 32, who after returning to Germany had been wounded by artillery fire on the Russian front.
The two teams were to rendezvous in Cincinnati on July 4 that year. But before that could happen, Dasch informed fellow conspirator Ernest Peter Burger, 38, that he intended to betray the Nazis and go to the FBI, hoping for leniency. Dasch went to see the FBI in Washington, and agents at first thought him a crackpot. He was not taken seriously until be dumped $84,000 cash on an agent's desk.
All of the plotters were taken into custody over the next two weeks.
Fearful that a civilian court would be too lenient, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered them tried by a military tribunal, the first military trial of civilians since the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Their lawyers tried to have the trial moved to a civilian court, but the U.S. Supreme Court refused.
The eight were tried, found guilty and sentenced to death. But Roosevelt commuted Dasch's sentence to 30 years and Burger's to life because they had turned themselves in and exposed the others.
The other six were executed on Aug. 8, 1942, in the electric chair on the third floor of the District of Columbia jail. They were buried in a potter's field called Blue Plains in the Anacostia area of Washington.
President Harry S. Truman in 1948 granted executive clemency to Dasch and Burger with the condition they be deported to the American Zone of occupied Germany.
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