June 17, 1942 - German U-boat saboteurs land at Ponte Vedra Beach

This site is only a few miles from my house.

Florida History Network.

On this day in Florida history - June 17. 1942 - German U-boat saboteurs land at Ponte Vedra Beach




Four Nazi saboteurs departed a German U-boat submarine and landed on Ponte Vedra Beach carrying explosives and money. Their mission: To join up with four other saboteurs who had arrived at Long Island, N.Y. four days earlier and begin blowing up key infrastructure, including electric plants, bridges, train stations, water facilities and factories in the United States.

It was a complex mission, and the men had been carefully chosen and trained. All eight had lived in the U.S. and two were American citizens. Over three weeks of intensive sabotage training in Germany, they were trained in the use of explosives and delayed timing devices. They were given background stories and encouraged to read American newspapers and magazines so they could pass themselves off as Americans.

The first team arrived on Long Island on June 12, 1942. After changing out of their German Navy uniforms and burying them with their stash of explosives, one of the men was discovered by an unarmed Coast Guardsman. The guardsman reported the incident to his superiors but when an armed Coast Guard patrol returned to the site, the four Germans had already taken a train to New York City and checked into a hotel.

A massive FBI manhunt followed the Coast Guard's discovery of the buried explosives but failed to catch the men.

The four who arrived at Ponte Vedra Beach also buried their explosives and boarded trains to Chicago and Cincinnati. They planned to meet in Cincinnati on July 4 to coordinate their missions.

That meeting never took place. While still in New York, one of the members of the New York landing team, George Dasch, confessed to another, Ernst Burger, that he had no intention of carrying out the mission and planned to reveal all to the FBI. Burger agreed that he, too, had been planning to betray the mission. Both men agreed to defect to the U.S. at once.

After Dasch went to the FBI, all eight men were arrested, tried by a secret military tribunal, found guilty and sentenced to death. President Roosevelt commuted Dasch's sentence to 30 years in prison, and Burger's to life in prison because they had turned themselves in. The other six were executed in the electric chair in the District of Columbia and buried in a potter's field.

In 1948, President Truman granted executive clemency to Dasch and Burger and deported them to the American Zone of occupied Germany.


THE JACKSONVILLE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
German Spies Invade Ponte Vedra



German Spies Invade Ponte Vedra
In June 16, 1942, four German spies stepped ashore at Ponte Vedra Beach. In the pre-dawn hours, a German submarine surfaced, a raft was launched, and the four men rowed to shore with a cache of materials. After burying boxes of explosives, they walked to highway 140 and caught a bus to Jacksonville.

Once in the city, they split up. Edward John Kerling and Herman Neubauer checked into the Seminole Hotel. Herbert Hans Haupt and Werner Thiel registered at the Mayflower Hotel – all using assumed names. These German saboteurs were part of a larger plan known as Operation Pastorius.

Operation Pastorius and German landings on the U.S. eastern coast during World War II are the subject of the 2003 publication, They Came to Destroy America: The FBI Goes to War Against Nazi Spies and Saboteurs Before and During World War II. Author of the book, Stan Cohen is speaker for the society’s Thursday, November 6 program.

Cohen’s book recalls life on the Ponte Vedra coastline during the war years:

Blackouts curtains were required for every household to deceive the German submarines patrolling off the Atlantic coast. Ponte Vedra residents were among the very few stateside Americans to witness acts of war firsthand as German submarines sank ships within sight of the shore, and oil from torpedoed tankers blackened the beaches.

Four other German saboteurs, also part of Operation Pastorius, had landed a few days earlier at Amagansett, New York. The operation’s mission was to destroy American aluminum and metal industries, railroads, and utility plants. There were also plans to plant explosives in crowded public locations as bus terminals and department stores.

Unknown to the four German spies in Jacksonville, the FBI had learned of the operation, but the group escaped the city the next morning without notice. Kerling, the ringleader, was eventually brought back to Ponte Vedra to pinpoint the burial site; among the items were blocks of TNT shaped as laundry soap, a device appearing as a pen that could start fires, and a watch that could be set for detonation watch.

The spy informants who landed in New York were imprisoned. The Ponte Vedra foursome were electrocuted within two months of their June 1942 landing.

More reading at this link below.
The Nazi Saboteurs Trial (1942): An Account

The Nazi Saboteurs Trial (1942): An Account