Operation Pastorius was a plan to attack strategic targets across the United States and cripple US defense industries, and to spread a wave of terror by planting explosives on bridges, railroad stations, water facilities, and public places.
The group selected to carry out the mission were well funded and well trained. They were given counterfeit birth certificates, Social Security Cards, draft deferment cards, nearly $175,000 in American money, and driver's licenses. Then they were put aboard two U-boats to land on the east coast of the United States.
A four man team of German saboteurs successfully landed by U-boat on Long Island, New York, on June 12th, 1942, and took public transportation to New York City. A second four man team landed south of Jacksonville Florida on 16 June 1942, wearing bathing suit attire for the beach. The second team changed into civilian clothing and boarded trains headed north for Cincinnati, Ohio and Chicago, Illinois.
While there was several incidents which might have given their plans away, or where they may have been captured, actually the operation ended because one key German agent in New York City, George Dasch, decided that he loved the United States and hated the NAZIs.
Dasch convinced one team member, his Lieutenant Ernst Burger, to defect with him to the United States. Then Dasch travelled to Washington DC. He called the FBI on the phone and tried to inform them of the German plans, but the FBI agent thought he was a crank, and hung up on him. Dasch then took all his operating funds ($84,000 in cash) and walked into FBI headquarters.
The trial for the eight defendants ended on 1 August 1942. Two days later, all were found guilty and sentenced to death. [1]
President Roosevelt commuted Dasch's sentence to 30 years, and Burger’s to life in prison, because they had turned themselves in and provided information about the others.
The others were executed on 8 August 1942 in the electric chair on the third floor of the District of Columbia jail and buried in a potter's field in the Blue Plains neighborhood in the Anacostia area of Washington.[2]
The main targets of the planned mission was to American economic and industrial facilities: hydroelectric plants at Niagara Falls; the Aluminum Company of America's plants in Illinois, Tennessee, and New York; locks on the Ohio River near Louisville, Kentucky; Penn Salt Factory in Bensalem, Pennsylvania; the Horseshoe Curve, a crucial railroad pass near Altoona, Pennsylvania, as well as the Pennsylvania Railroad's repair shops at Altoona; a cryolite plant in Philadelphia; Hell Gate Bridge in New York; and Pennsylvania Station in Newark, New Jersey.
The saboteurs were instructed to minimize American casualties among the civilian population, so as not to inspire homicidal rage against Germany.
If they were not betrayed by one of their own, would they have been successful, and would it have made any difference?
It happened before:
Germany committed at least one hugely act of sabotage against United States 26 years earlier, in 1916. Germans saboteurs blew up an ammunition trains that was on the “Black Tom” pier in Jersey City on the New York Harbor, while the train was awaiting transfer to load on ships to send to Tsarist Russia for the Allies.
About 2,000,000 pounds (910,000 kg) of small arms and artillery ammunition were stored at the depot in freight cars and on barges, including 100,000 pounds (45,000 kg) of TNT on Johnson Barge No. 17... Jersey City's Commissioner of Public Safety, Frank Hague, later said he had been told the barge was "tied up at Black Tom to avoid a twenty-five dollar charge”.
…Fragments from the explosion traveled long distances: some lodged in the Statue of Liberty, and other fragments lodged in the clock tower of The Jersey Journal building in Journal Square more than 1 mile (1.6 km) away, stopping the clock at 2:12 am. The explosion was the equivalent of an earthquake measuring between 5.0 and 5.5 on the Richter scale and was felt as far away as Philadelphia. [3]
The US investigation following the fire and explosion was not conclusive. The suspicion fell upon guards and workmen at the dock who either were German agents, or allowed them access. It was likely that German agents had started fires with cigars, which led to the explosions.
After World War I the Lehigh Valley Railroad, who was liable for the cost of the goods, sought damages against Germany under the World War I treaty agreement for war reparations. The treaty Commission declared in 1939 that Imperial Germany had been responsible and awarded $50 million in damages, but Nazi Germany refused to pay.
The issue was finally settled in 1953 for $95 million (interest included) with the Federal Republic of Germany. The final payment was made in 1979.
Did that the single act of espionage alone affected the war in Russia, or the revolution of 1917? Probably not. The United States was able to replace the lost ammunition and explosives, and Russia also received ammunition and weapons from allies England and Japan, and was still fighting against the Austria-Hungarian and German armies until the Russian Revolution.
Similarly, if the eight saboteurs in 1942 had not been betrayed by their leader, the chances of success were slim. The FBI was still knew that they were somewhere in the United States, and despite some bungles, the FBI had a description of Dasch and Burger from the US Coast Guard. Herbert Hoover was conducting a quiet manhunt for them.
“Successful execution” would require that a key part of the American infrastructure could be damaged beyond repair.
The hydroelectric plants at Niagara Falls were primary providers or electricity to New York state and Ontario, generating 900,000 kW by 1942. The success of these hydroelectric utilities were due to the engineering feat of Nikola Tesla, who invented the system for long distance transmission of electricity there in 1896.
These utilities were vulnerable, as demonstrated by the catastrophic collapse of the Schoellkopf Power Station in June, 1956 which destroyed two thirds (2/3) of the plant. Six generators capable of producing 322,500 horsepower had been demolished. Damage was estimated at $100 million dollars. The most devastating was the sudden loss of 400,000 kilowatts of power from the power grid.
The locks and dam at the falls of the Ohio River were built in the 1920’s to replace older locks and dams for navigation that were built in the late 1800’s.
Catastrophic damage to any of the locks and dam would have disrupted barge traffic along the entire river system.
The Penn salt (later Pennwalt) and cryolite factories provide crystalline sodium hexafluoroaluminate which was crucial for electrolytic processing of Bauxite for aluminum production. Sabotage would cut off a crucial raw material supply for aircraft production. Yet the United States had redundant factories here also.
(Note: There is a large natural deposit of cryolite in Greenland. Donald Trump was not coming entirely out of left field with his offer to buy Greenland; more like the the third baseline )
Some of the targets that the Germans had selected were incomprehensibly massive, even in the first year of America’s entry into the war, the vast industrial workings of America were only beginning to create some of the largest factories in the world starting in 1942.
These enormous manufacturing sites were scattered across America, and were mostly redundant to each other.
For example, Chicago:
The United States had very little capacity for manufacturing military munitions in 1939 when World War II broke out. Since the manufacture of munitions required specialized equipment and techniques there were no existing plants that could be converted. The solution to the lack of capacity was to create a large network of interlocking ammunition plants. They would be government-owned, but contractor-operated (GOCO). More than 60 plants would be constructed between June 1940 and December 1942.
The Joliet Ammunition facility near Chicago moved 450 farms for a 40,000-acre (160 km2) facility. One half of which, the Elwood facility packed explosives into artillery shells, while the other half, the Kankakee facility, made TNT and general explosives.
TNT production at the Kankakee works continued until August 1945 with a peak output of 5.5 million short tons (5.0×106 t) per week.
At 2:45 a.m. on June 5, 1942, a large explosion on the assembly line at the Elwood facility resulted in 48 dead or missing and was felt as far as Waukegan, Illinois, on the shore of Lake Michigan over 60 miles (97 km) north. Assembly Lines were located in separate buildings which were separated by substantial distances limiting major damage to the facility as a whole.
From a United Press newspaper article written at the time, "Explosion shattered buildings of one of the units of the $30,000,000 Elwood Ordnance plant gave up the bodies of 21 workers Friday. Army officials said 36 more were missing from the blast that could be felt for a radius of 100 miles. Another 41 were injured, five of them critically, from the explosion that leveled a building.... Not one of the 68 men inside the shipping unit when the blast occurred escaped death or injury."[4]
Yet the explosion only affected one of the twelve production units out of action temporarily, and operations continued in the other sections in the factory.
On the southwest side of Chicago, the government decided in 1942 to manufacture Wright Cyclone R-3350 engines, as designs for the 4-engine B-29 Superfortress were already leaping off the drawing board.
The Wright Cyclone engines for those bombers were manufactured in the assembly complex by Dodge-Chrysler. Chrysler made 18,000 engines for B-29 bombers. But by the end of the war, the buildings were no longer needed. These structures are exhaust ports for the engine test platforms. (After the war the factory made Tucker automobiles, then later Tootsie Rolls)
Photo Credit: Albert Kahn Associates Architects
The factory was located between Pulaski Road and Cicero Avenue, just north of 79th Street. Directly south of Midway Field a complex of 19 buildings for the site, comprising six million square feet of factory space. The main building alone covered 82 acres.
Photo Credit: Albert Kahn Associates Architects
The engines were assembled at the factory, then moved to Midway Airport through massive tunnels. Then the bomber engines flew directly from the Chicago factory to the assembly plants in Omaha, Seattle, Atlanta, and Wichita. (The factory tunnels were later a funky underground shopping center featuring “head shops” for the hippies in the 1960’s and 1970’s.)
The Chicago factory site was/is studded with these towers. Some say that they were anti-aircraft towers.; (?) suggesting that there were guards and watchmen even to watch the sky.
The existing Aluminum Company of America's (later Alcoa’s) plants in Illinois which also produced Aluminum wings and fuselages. The Aluminum factory in McCook, Illinois (later Reynold’s) at one time was the largest single factory under one roof.
The Western Electric Company manufactured the radios and radar sets in nearby Cicero. Western Electric employed over 40,000 people during its height during and immediately after World War II.
The list of other factories that were involved in defense production included almost every American industrial brand name of the twentieth century across the Midwest; including Boeing, Briggs (later Briggs and Stratton), Desoto, General Motors Fisher Body, Frigidaire, Firestone, Goodyear, Goodrich, Hudson, Packard, Libby-Owens Glassworks, …[5]
And Chicago was not the only manufacturing site for US bombers’ components. Other manufacturers we in Akron, Cleveland, and Dayton, Ohio; Lansing, Michigan;;
The assembly plants in Kansas City, Kansas; Omaha, Nebraska; Tulsa Oklahoma; Atlanta; Seattle; Willow Run, Tennessee; Kentucky; Fort Worth Texas;…
An exploded view of a B-29, showing many of the main components as assembled in Nebraska. The Chrysler DeSoto nose section is separated from the Goodyear built bomb bay fuselage sections. The Hudson built rear fuselage sections with the Goodyear vertical and horizontal tail and control surfaces can be seen. The main wing center section was built by Martin Omaha but the outer wing section components built by Hudson are visible. The Fisher Body engine nacelles have Chrysler built engine cowlings attached. Frigidaire propellers for the Dodge built engines are not attached yet.
Of the defence projects started by the United States, the production of B-29 Bombers was the most expensive of the war. The delivery system for the atomic bomb was more expensive than the bomb itself.
The one US operation begun in Chicago that may have had the greatest effect on the final outcome of the war is the Manhattan Project. However the German teams of saboteurs probably never knew about this project, or where the various scattered parts of the operation were carried out.
In Chicago, America’s most secret project was underway. In July, 1942, the Army Corps of Engineers leased 1,025 acres of Cook County Forest Preserve land to build a secret military research facility. Dubbed, “Site A,” the land was supposed to be the original home of the first atomic engineering experiments.
Site A was also known variously as Argonne, for the French forest where the famed World War I battle took place, and “The Country Club,” for the Palos Park Golf Course located there before World War II. [6]
Now the Forest Preserve Site is called Red Gate Woods.
Physicist Enrico Fermi spearheaded a team of scientists to design and construct the first working uranium and graphite nuclear reactor under Stagg Field on the University of Chicago campus, then later rebuilt the reactor on Site A.
As rebuilt the “Chicago Pile-2” held 10 tons of uranium metal, 42 tons of uranium oxide, and 472 tons of graphite. The reactor core was shielded by six inches of lead and four feet of wood, and was capped by a small laboratory.
The CP-2 reactor at Site A.
Research labs connected to the reactor room, and a library filled with books and papers complimented the scientists’ experiments. A critically important machine shop meant that in-house machinists could produce the materials necessary to keep the reactor running smoothly. A medical-suite, cafeteria, and dormitory allowed for on-base living and research to continue uninterrupted. Placed inside the Forest Preserve and boasting recreational spaces for tennis, basketball, football, golf, and hiking, Site A gave the site’s 100 personnel an isolated and amenable environment to carry-on their important work.[7]
The world’s first water-cooled reactor, originally designed as a plutonium production reactor, also began construction in March 1943 at Site A, and became functional on May 15, 1944.
The US project to produce heavy water for Site A, and later for the water cooled reactor in Hanford Washington (Site B), was also dispersed to secret factories at the Morgantown Ordnance Works in Morgantown, West Virginia; at the Wabash River Ordnance Works, near Dana and Newport, Indiana; and at the Alabama Ordnance Works, near Childersburg and Sylacauga, Alabama.
The enriched Uranium for the “Little Boy” bomb was produced by the Tennessee Valley Authority. The Plutonium for “the gadget”, AKA the Fat Man bomb, was produced at the Hanford Site B reactor.
Throughout the war the allied sabotage operations and allied bombing raids against the Nazi Norwegian heavy water plants and hydroelectric power stations stopped Nazi research to make a plutonium bomb. It turns out that Hitler’s scientists did not try enriching the uranium, but only experimented with natural Uranium, with less successful results than Enrico Fermi’s Graphite mediated Uranium reactor.
Yet, in the hypothetical: The one German act of espionage that would change history…
If the German saboteurs in 1942 had been able to delay the Manhattan Project by a month or two, then Harry Truman would not have a nuclear threat to bluff Stalin with and shut down the regime of Emperor Hirohito in August 1945.
It would have been possible that Russia would have time to invade the entire Korean peninsula in 1945, cutting off and driving back Japanese armies. Thus there would have been no “Korean Conflict”. Then, with assurances that Soviet Armies would stop invading Europe (not likely), the United States Navy would provide the water-taxi for Russian troops to invade Japan alongside US troops.
Or,
The war in Europe may have continued longer, with the Allies accepting a new alliance with German Armies against invading Soviet Armies sweeping towards the Atlantic Ocean. Possibly the “first use” of the atomic bomb would be against massed Soviet Armies. The bulk of US forces would be shifted to Europe and could not make a troop build-up to invade Japan. Instead the Japanese would be isolated and the nation would be allowed to starve to death.
While the World War would continue without the atomic bomb to put a punctuation point at the end, the British forces would never have tolerated the assassinations, murders, and bombings by Zionist partizans in Palestine in 1946, and there would have been harsh military reprisals by British troops. Zionist refugees would remain in detention camps. The Zionists would likely have been unable to receive arms and ammunition from Stalin and there would have been no founding of Israel. Great Britain would also maintain their hold and influence with Arab Nations in the 1950’s.
Harry Truman’s executive order to racially integrate all US military forces in the face of Russian Armies in the heat of battle against Soviet forces, instead of during the Cold War, would not cause him to be viewed as a “race traitor” by his own Democratic Party. FDR had already ordered that white people and black people would have to work in the same factories in the same place at the same time, for the war effort in 1943. It would be likely that the civil rights bill of 1948 would have passed to give Black communities the same benefits that FDR’s New Deal gave to white communities before the war..
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