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(Saturday, June 13, 1942, about 12:10 a.m. EDT; during Operation Pastorius, part of the American Theater of World War II) — The first of two four-man Nazi sabotage teams arrived early this morning in the United States, disembarking from U-202 at Amagansett, New York, about 100 miles east of New York City, on Long Island, at what today is Atlantic Avenue beach.
The team, led by George John Dasch, came ashore wearing German Navy uniforms so that, if they were captured, they would be classified as prisoners of war rather than spies. They also brought their explosives, primers, and incendiaries; buried them along with their uniforms, and put on civilian clothes to begin an expected two-year campaign in the sabotage of American defense-related production.
When Dasch was discovered amid the dunes by unarmed Coast Guardsman John C. Cullen, Dasch offered Cullen a $260 bribe Cullen feigned cooperation but reported the encounter. An armed patrol returned to the site but found only the buried equipment; the Germans had taken the Long Island Rail Road from the Amagansett station into Manhattan, where they checked into a hotel. A massive manhunt was begun.
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Dasch called one of his team members, Ernst Burger, into their upper-story hotel room and opened a window, saying they would talk, and if they disagreed, “only one of us will walk out that door — the other will fly out this window.” Dasch told him he had no intention of going through with the mission, hated Nazism, and planned to report the plot to the FBI. Burger agreed to defect to the United States immediately.
On June 15, 1942, Dasch phoned the New York office of the FBI to explain who he was but hung up when the agent answering doubted his story. Four days later, he took a train to Washington, D.C., and walked into FBI headquarters, where he gained the attention of Assistant Director D. M. Ladd by showing him the operation’s budget of $84,000 in cash. Besides Burger, none of the other German agents knew they were being betrayed.
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The other four-member German team headed by Kerling landed without incident at Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, south of Jacksonville, on June 16, 1942. They came on U-584, another submarine. This group came ashore wearing bathing suits but wore German Navy hats. After landing ashore, they threw away their hats, put on civilian clothes, and started their mission by boarding trains to Chicago, Illinois, and Cincinnati, Ohio.
The two teams were to meet on July 4, 1942, in a hotel in Cincinnati to coordinate their sabotage operations. But over the next two weeks, Burger and the other six German team members were arrested and eventually executed (only Dasch and Burger were spared the death penalty).
