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Bradley Hart

June, 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor, Japan appears unstoppable, taking island after island in the Pacific. But the US Navy's codebreaking unit, Station HYPO, makes a major breakthrough. They can now decipher Japan's naval code known as JN-25. JN-25 is how Japan communicates war plans and movements. And HYPO sees chatter of a looming attack on an unknown American target code named AF in the Japanese transmissions. HYPO believes AF is code for Midway Island, just 1,100 miles from Hawaii. But the Navy needs confirmation. A deception plan is formed. A false message is sent from the base at Midway saying they need fresh water, knowing the Japanese will read it. The Japanese, unaware that American codebreakers can now understand their messages, sends an alert out to the Japanese navy that AF is short on fresh water. The trap is set. Midway is the target. On June 4, 1942, Admiral Chester Nimitz uses this intelligence to ambush the Japanese fleet. The Imperial Japanese navy is soundly defeated. Four carriers are destroyed and more than 3,000 people are killed. The Battle of Midway halts Japan's progress in the Pacific and becomes a key turning point in the war. I'm joined now by Michael Bell, executive director of the Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy here at The National WWII Museum. I'm also joined by John Curatola, senior historian at The National WWII Museum, and the author of the book, "Armies Afloat: How the Development of Amphibious Operations in Europe helped win World War II." Thanks for being with us.

Mike Bell

You're welcome. It's great to be here,

Bradley Hart

John. Thanks for being here.

John Curatola

Glad to be here.

Bradley Hart

So what kind of information is being transmitted using these codes? Are these letters home from the sailors onboard these ships? Or are these, what kind of information is being transmitted?

Mike Bell

So for the fleet codes, I mean, ultimately you could have information reports from spotter aircraft. For instance, Japanese aircraft were trying to surveil Midway Island in March and had reported that. And so HYPO originally detected Japanese interest in Midway that early. And then closer to the battle, you actually get the disposition of the Japanese naval forces, you know, where will the carriers be? What their primary targets are. One of challenges that HYPO had was OP-20-G, which is, the Naval Signals Intelligence Command in Washington did not believe that Midway was necessarily the target. You know, they thought, "Well, maybe the Japanese are attacking south, they're going to the Aleutians." And so what they did was arranged for Midway to broadcast in the clear some problems with their water. And so that they could detect this in the Japanese code, really with the intent to convince Washington that Midway really was the target allowing Nimitz to really deploy American forces in a way that could respond to the Japanese dispositions. And so this is an example where, yeah, at the operational level, the codebreaking really provides American forces a decisive advantage, which we'll explore then for the rest of the Pacific War.

Bradley Hart

But let's turn to Midway and Midway Island itself, which is an actual place, of course, it's a place that the Japanese are targeting in the summer of 1942. Why do they care about this place that a lot of Americans at the time, and perhaps even since have never really heard of?

John Curatola

Yeah, there's a couple of reasons why this is important to the Japanese. One, it's pushing out their outer defensive ring they can establish themselves with an airfield there. It puts 'em with an easy striking distance of the Hawaiian islands. Plus, it's also would provide any earlier warning for any American flotillas that might be going into the Japanese defensive ring. Another reason why they're actually going to Midway is the Japanese are big on this idea of decisive battle. They're very Mahanian in thought, which is a naval theorist from the 19th century. And this idea that these big crescendo battles with two fleets crashing together is the best way to establish sea supremacy. And it's something that Japanese very much believe in. And what they're looking to do is to finally, you know, decimate the American surface fleet and its aircraft carriers by luring the Americans into some kind of a fight and then we can finish off whatever they have left over that survived the attack on Pearl Harbor. So it's kind of a two-pronged attack here. One, to take the islands of Midway as a forward-operating base, and to suck the Americans into this large naval battle there in the Central Pacific.

Bradley Hart

So John, what happens in the Battle of Midway itself? How does this battle unfold?

John Curatola

Yeah, what happens is a number of factors that come into play here. One, the Americans have a leg up on the Japanese, they know where they're gonna show up, as a result, they can set up a naval ambush, I'll use that term, position just to the north of the Midway Atoll there. And so by understanding Japanese intent, they can certainly develop a game plan, prepare themselves for this inbound Japanese flotilla. And one of the things that weighs heavily on the Japanese mind that has since been kind of forgotten by many of the historians, is that while we have aircraft carriers out there, there's also an unsinkable aircraft carrier called Midway Atoll itself, of which the Japanese are very attuned to the fact that the Americans can sortie, can generate combat power off the atoll itself and itself is an unsinkable aircraft carrier. And this is at a time when air power is really kind of going through a growth in that, can air fleets defeat naval fleets at sea? And can, you know, an air campaign, you know, significantly affect the ground campaign? And these are all new things in 1942 that both fleets and both militaries are kind of grappling with.

Bradley Hart

Mike, turning back to the sort of overall trajectory of the war and and strategy here, what's the importance of the Battle of Midway? Is this a key turning point in the war?

Mike Bell

If you think about up until June 4, 1942, all of the major operations in the Pacific are initiated by the Japanese. After Midway, the Japanese do not initiate any new offensives to note, at least in the Pacific. They'll have Ichi-Go and China, some things of that nature. But the major offensives are initiated by the United States in that Pacific War going forward.

John Curatola

I think that's an important point that Mike just brings out, is that as early as June, 1942, the Japanese are now on the strategic defensive. And this is 1942, the war, of course, is gonna go into 1945. But what Mike talks about is something we tend to forget contextually with regard to Pacific War, because now the Japanese offensives have been blunted, for the most part, in the Pacific. They'll have some ground campaigns, as Mike pointed out, in China, but this is 1942 and they've already been stopped. And I think that's something that we tend to forget about the flow of combat there in the Pacific.

Mike Bell

Another piece that I think is important that you see this rapid development of American intel capability. What I think is interesting about Midway is not just that the codebreakers could break the code, but they could break it so rapidly, what they decrypt could be used very quickly by forces on almost a tactical level as opposed to it would take us weeks to break the code. Literally, they developed a capability within hours to turn this around so that Nimitz and his staff could use this in battles rather than waiting for, you know, "Oh, that was very useful, but it would take us, you know, weeks and weeks to actually exploit that." And so the ability to exploit this, you see this the next year in April 18, 1943 with the shootdown of Admiral Yamamoto. You know, that quickly his itinerary is in Japanese code. We detect that and are to interdict his aircraft near Bougainville, which arguably will set back the Japanese command structure as well. So at each of these, I think the intel collection, it doesn't guarantee the Allied victory, but it certainly provides incredible advantages for Allied forces. And then, you know, over time, the Japanese will change their codes, adjust those, but the codebreakers have been so good at this point, they're able to rapidly a adjust and adapt to that. Station HYPO, for example, Commander Joe Rochefort who's in charge there, has great relations with Nimitz's intel officer. And because of that, that's almost a synergistic effect where they start to see the impact, they trust the intel, you know, whereas back in Washington, you know, OP-20-G, which is the kind of Central Navy Signals Intelligence Command, it is still a little more hesitant, you know, wants to confirm things, which we saw at Midway. Whereas I think Nimitz sees the power of this kind of rapid synergy with that. And I think that'll be important. From my perspective, it allows Nimitz's forces at a number stages in the war to operate faster than the Japanese are able to.

John Curatola

And to your point, Mike, that you just pointed out is, you know, subsequent to the war in decades later, we come up with this idea of what's called the OODA loop, which was coined by an Air force officer named John Boyd. And the OODA stands for observe, orient, decide, and attack. And what that allows you to, "If I know where my enemy is and I can position my forces in a position to gain tactical or operational advantage, and that gives me the initiative, then I can attack when I want to." And as you pointed out, the Americans have that intel, so they've observed where the enemy is, they can orient their defenses, and then they can go ahead and attack in a much faster cycle than their Japanese counterparts can.

Mike Bell

No, I think it's a decisive advantage. I mean, you know, it's hard to argue, you know, what is the fundamental impact on the length of the Pacific War. But arguably you could see how this pace of operations that the Americans were able to have, you know, could shorten the war by several years.

John Curatola

The one thing that we need to take in consideration, too, when we talk about the Pacific, is geography, how big the Pacific is. And it's important to understand that the United States doesn't fight home games, it fights away games. And the ability to power project across this huge moat, 5,000 miles, called the Pacific Ocean is significant. And by having a leg up on, say, where we think the Japanese are and what they're doing, and then traversing that great expanse gives you a number of strategic, operational, and tactical advantages that we don't always consider.

Mike Bell

The other piece I'd like to throw in, if we think of HYPO, sometimes we just think of the technology, you know, it's the detection of the signal's intel, but it also included linguists and, you know, guys like Joe Rochefort had served in Japan for several years. And so it's an understanding of the culture, the intent. You know, John, as you mentioned, you know, the Japanese, you know, want to have a direct approach, attack the surface combatants. That understanding, coupled with the technical aspect, I think is what gave them a huge kind of advantage in this.

John Curatola

And that's one thing you see, and we've talked about this before, Mike, is how the Americans, both in the European theater or in the Pacific theater, are constantly learning, constantly reviewing, constantly trying to get better in all aspects of warfare, air and land or sea, and adjusting and being able to be more flexible with their approaches where the Axis stays pretty much with what they know prior to the war. They have some innovative doctrines that are established in the 1930s, but as the war unfolds, you see them regressing in terms of innovation, in terms of being able to adapt to a new tactical and operational environment.

Mike Bell

What you kinda laid out, you know, post-Pearl Harbor, it's, how do we seize the initiative? And what you described, you know, one, we don't have the battleships, but what else can we use? Well, we use carriers, well, these series of carrier raids: Rabaul, the Doolittle raid on Tokyo, but you also see it in terms of intellectual, you know, how do we seize the initiative in that way, in codebreaking, in a whole range of things other than just direct action?

Bradley Hart

Days after the Battle of Midway, President Roosevelt creates a new centralized intelligence agency, the OSS or Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to today's CIA, and FDR chooses William J. Donovan to lead this new organization. I'm joined again by Nicholas Reynolds and Jeffrey Rogg. Jeff, thanks again for being here.

Jeff Rogg

Thank you, Bradley. Great to be with you again.

Bradley Hart

Nick, thanks again for being with us.

Nick Reynolds

It's my pleasure.

Bradley Hart

Let's talk more about OSS. So OSS, created in sort of the summer of 1942, as the US is really entering the war. How does Donovan construct this new organization? What's he hoping to accomplish once OSS is formally created?

Nick Reynolds

So he looks at the British model and thinks of doing the kinds of things that the British are up to. And in Britain at this point, you basically have three organizations. You have MI6, which is intelligence, so basically go out there and collect the enemy's secrets and recruit spies. And then you have SOE, which is more about blowing up enemy installations, killing the enemy, than it is about gathering intelligence. And in the background you've got MI5, which is basically internal security, kind of like the FBI, but also does counter intelligence. He thinks of those functions and wants to have them in an American institution. He's particularly enamored of the special operations. So basically what the SOE is doing in the United Kingdom, that becomes the apple of his eye. He starts out when COI, the OSS predecessor, came online, he started out saying that R&A analysis was the apple of his eye. But as the war goes on, special ops really becomes what he's most interested in. And so you see OSS developing branches for each of these major activities. So R&A, research analysis, basically the intelligence processing. So they take the secrets or the open-source information and mold it into reports, and then secret intelligence, people who go out and gather that information, deal with foreign agents, go and break into the enemy safe and get the secrets. And then you got special ops, you've got the saboteurs, the commandos, the people who will parachute in behind the lines and work with the resistance.

Bradley Hart

Well, you know, another example of a household name at this point is J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, who has built himself into sort of this household figure, you know, and if you look at even pulp, you know, crime novels from the 1920s and things like that, I mean the FBI, the idea of the G-man, right? The government man who's an FBI agent, bringing down the bootleggers and the big criminals and stuff. I mean, this has been a cultivated image for J. Edgar for years. I'm gonna just hypothesize that he's not too happy to have a new entrant into this sort of scene and in this area. Nick, what is J, Edgar Hoover thinking in 1940s Washington about Bill Donovan and OSS?

Nick Reynolds

Well, he wishes Donovan would go back to Wall Street and resume the practice of law. Actually, it would've been fine with J. Edgar if Donovan had gotten a combat command, which is what he wanted, and went off to fight the war in the Pacific or the Atlantic. J. Edgar has his own ambitions, not just to be the G-man, the head G-man who captures Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde and the likes of big gangsters. He also wants to be the intelligence czar. In 1940, he presides over the establishment of his own intelligence service, which spreads out into Latin America and is really, by the FBI's own reckoning, a failure. And it's a failure not because they didn't try hard enough, but it's because they hired the wrong people. They hired lawmen to be spies and spies, intelligence officers, are essentially people who break laws, they break foreign laws to gather secret information, and it just doesn't work out. I mean, you got the diligent people who show up for work on time and they dress right and they behave properly. And that's not really what you need. You need people who are a little more like Donovan, you know, maybe a touch more professional discipline than Donovan had, but a little bit more biased for action, A little bit more inclined to do unusual things to get results in a murky world. He's the counterweight to Donovan throughout the war. Whenever Donovan or OSS moves in a direction, there's J. Edgar pulling back. You know, by this time he's a guy who has a lot of power in Washington. He can see Roosevelt occasionally, not as often as he wants, during the war. Nobody can really, except for the, you know, the people inside the White House. You see him exercising that power by suggesting to others in the, you know, the Washington mix, "Hmm," you know? or perhaps leaking information, getting in touch with journalists. And they also all love to write memos. So Donovan writes memos, Hoover writes memos, they flood the White House with memos. I believe there were something like 2,600 memos from the FBI sort of intel reports from the FBI to the White House. And, you know, it appears that most of them were unread. OSS exceeded that number. Ms. Tully, Roosevelt's secretary, simply filed most of these. And you can go and read them in the Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park. And you are probably the second person to read them if you go there because there was the writer and then now there's you. Because the Roosevelt White House was not really interested in written intelligence. There's always this veneer of civility. As Donovan gets more power, that veneer starts to get thinner and thinner, and eventually it's close to open hostility. The word is that they each had a dossier on the other guy, that Donovan keeps a dossier on Hoover and says he's got questionable personal, his personal life is far from above reproach. And likewise, Hoover's got a dossier on Donovan that looks at Donovan's, he was quite a ladies man, shall we say. So these are guys who are ready to play hardball against each other once that veneer of civility gets too thin.

Bradley Hart

What's FDR thinking about this and how is he mediating these disputes between two pretty key people in the intel community?

Jeff Rogg

Well, it wasn't just two. So that's part of how FDR did business. So you have Donovan and you have Hoover, you also have Roosevelt's sort of less official intelligence, not necessarily chieftains, but people privately collecting intelligence. One of them before the war was Vincent Astor, who's a very wealthy American. And he formed his own like gentlemanly amateur shop called The Room. It became The Club by the Second World War. And you know, he was a personal friend. I mean, this is, you know, Northeast American elite American aristocracy. And so he is giving his reports to FDR. Then you have John Franklin Carter, Jay Carter, who was a speech writer, and FDR actually taps him to have sort of an unofficial intelligence office. And you know, in the FDR archives, you have a tremendous amount of information being sent from Carter to FDR. So, and Donovan also is personally bombarding FDR with information too. So there were competing channels, and this is exactly what FDR wanted anyways. I mean, this is FDR's personality. You know, Nick and I have had this discussion about the extent to which FDR was personally invested in intelligence. And I think what, you know, we came at it from different sides initially, but what we settled on is regardless of FDR's intentions, regardless of how much he liked or disliked intelligence, how interested or uninterested he was, he was undeniably influential.

Bradley Hart

One of Donovan's agents will become one of the most decorated spies in American history, referred to by the Germans as the most dangerous woman in Europe. Her name is Virginia Hall.

Nick Reynolds

Virginia Hall's an interesting case, you know, upper-class Baltimore East Coast background. She was a clerk in the State Department between the wars. And she's somebody who grew up riding and hunting and in a freak hunting accident, she shot off, well, she injured her leg, which was her left leg, which was then amputated below the knee. And so, you know, it's bad enough to be a woman who wants to be in the foreign service. So there was a bias against, there were just a, you know, a tiny fraction of the foreign service officers were women. And she applied repeatedly to move out of clerical and be a full-fledged foreign service officer. And then after she injured her leg, she was told, "Hey, look, sorry, we don't take cripples." That got up to Roosevelt, actually. She was well enough connected so that the message got to Roosevelt that the state department's not taking cripples. Then the answer became, "Well, she wasn't that good a clerk, so why should we make her an officer?" And her attitude seems to be, "Well, I'll show you. I'll show you what I can do." In the fighting in France in 1940 she drove an ambulance for the French army. And then when that fighting was over in the summer, so June, 1940, she winds up in England doing, you know, working irregular basis for the American Embassy. She still had her state department ID card as it were. There, she gets in touch with the SOE. The SOE is willing to use her. The special operations executive is willing to, they can't parachute her in because she's got a wooden leg, so they find other ways to get her in country. And she's basically a, she's a field organizer. She's trained as a communicator and sometimes to make the men feel more comfortable, they're told, the resistance on the ground are told, "Well, she's not really in charge, she's just the communicator." But in fact, she really does have, in both of her major roles, she is somebody who's making decisions and exercising important leadership. She operates in occupied France until November '42. And then she gets out, she walks, walks, out of France over the Pyrenees to escape from the Germans who figured out who she is and are coming after her. So this is hard enough when you have two perfectly good legs, excruciatingly painful and difficult when you have one wooden leg. But she makes it. And then she tells SOE, "Well, send me back, I'm ready." And they said, "No, they know who you are. They'll find you." OSS says, "Well, we'll take a chance on you." And so she goes back to France in the spring and early summer of 1944, and basically does the same sort of thing with OSS circuits.

Bradley Hart

And she survives the war.

Nick Reynolds

She survives the war. She gets the Distinguished Service Cross. She's never a member of a military so she's a civilian doing all these jobs. And her deployments are as a civilian. After the war, she's the only civilian woman to be awarded the American Distinguished Service Cross.

Jeff Rogg

There's a famous picture of her actually being presented a medal by Donovan, and I think she was the first and maybe one of the only, you know, females to win this intelligence medal. That was one of the virtues of the OSS is, you know, and one of the virtues I think, of intelligence in general and special operations is the realization you can't just have a bunch of the same people trying. It doesn't work in every place. You know, you need a diverse range of people to do different types of missions and different kind of skills. And the other thing I should mention, 'cause I emphasize it more about Virginia Hall, is she lived where a lot of other people died because she was smart and clever and didn't get caught, and she would avoid meetings where she just sensed something was wrong. And she knew not to stay on the radio too long. Radio operators, even in the OSS, had a very short half-life because the Gestapo and the Abwehr used radio interception equipment to identify where radio signals were coming from. So, you know, Virginia Hall is someone who we really need to remember as like a real, you know, American intelligence heroine.

Nick Reynolds

She was enormously successful and she did things that, the OSS gave her an opportunity to do things that could not have done otherwise. If you read, there's like a number of biographies of Virginia Hall out there, and the early biographies are kind of like, "Well, it was this woman with a wooden leg and she did this and that." And it's almost like you don't really focus on Virginia Hall as an agent and a person with agency more specifically. And compare that to what people say about President Roosevelt, right? If you read a Roosevelt biography, there'd be a long thing in there about, you know, when he contracted polio, how hard he had to work to overcome polio and how he went on to become president and do all the things that he did. So I'm saying, you know, let's go back and give people like Virginia Hall the credit that they have not fully received before this. Yes, she got a DSC, but, you know, look at the determination there in this person and what she accomplished and this, the existence of, you know, OSS gave her a mechanism for doing this. You know, it's not why OSS existed, but, you know, so I guess I'm celebrating the achievements of specific OSS people who really rose above their challenges, and every day they had a chance to become people that they weren't without OSS

Bradley Hart

In the summer of 1942, a stunning German operation is uncovered on American soil. Two German U-boats, one sent to Florida, the other to Long Island, brings eight Nazi agents with a mission to destroy key infrastructure targets. It's called Operation Pastorius. I'm joined again by John Fox, official historian at the FBI. John, thanks so much for joining us.

John Fox

You're welcome. Thank you.

Bradley Hart

John, let's talk about June, 1942. This is a really dramatic moment in the war. Battle of Midway is essentially going to be taking place shortly, but at this moment, the US has been in the war for about six months, and Nazi Germany is going to launch what I find to be one of the most remarkable and, frankly, underknown stories of the war, it's something that seems to be ripped from a Hollywood screenplay, known as Operation Pastorius. Take us through the background of Operation Pastorius.

John Fox

In the aftermath of the Duquesne spy ring, Nazi intelligence came to focus more in, you know, the European theater. They had lost so many sources in the United States itself that they were looking for other ways to get information about us. And these especially included working through South and Central America. In fact, you know, we talked a bit about our special intelligence service operations in the FBI, but one of the main things they were working with doing was working with the Coast Guard and the Navy and the Army to identify a Nazi radio circuits and agents in those countries. And as far as it went, the Nazis, of course, knew that they had a huge intelligence gap with regards to what was going on in the United States itself. And not only that, but they were realizing that the fact that the US continent, the North American continent, was largely inviolable to Nazi war efforts. You know, their bombers wouldn't be able to reach us effectively, their submarines could, at best, do extremely limited damage, you know, to US facilities and so forth. They wanted to make a big splash that would have an effect, a limited effect, at least on US manufacturing, but even more so, a big effect on US morale. And so they hatched this plan to basically clandestinely insert squads of saboteurs in the United States to enmesh themselves with local pro-German Americans who are largely keeping their heads down, pro-Nazi Americans, keeping their heads down. And then launch a series of sabotage campaign attacks against key US strategic facilities. As you mentioned, in June, Nazi submarines took two groups of four trained saboteurs, landed one on Amagansett, Long Island, and one a couple of days later at point Ponte Vedra, Florida with a large caches of explosives and detonating devices that they would then use for their sabotage attacks.

Bradley Hart

Who are the men who were involved in this? Who are the saboteurs?

John Fox

They were a combination of Germans who at least spoke some English, and Americans or, you know, Germans who had been in America, lived there for some time, and then came back. People like George Dasch and Neubauer and Quirin and others. They were people who had family connections or communal connections over here, basically recruited as, for lack of a better word, the best possible infiltrators that they could find in the midst of wartime. The problem of course is that, that by that point, those who tended to be heavily associated with America were out of Germany, and those who were so pro-German in America that they would, you know, support the Nazi war effort had probably gone back to Germany. So there wasn't a whole lot to choose from. You know, this was as professional a group as they could come up with. You know, in some ways it's a desperation move. You know, by this period in the war, things are going fairly rough, you know, and this group was really meant to make a splash not to actually, you know, be a gathering intelligence or have any real big strategic effect on the war effort.

Bradley Hart

It seems to me that much of this plan is designed to cause chaos effectively, to blow up strategic facilities, bridges, dams. Fortunately, none of that comes to fruition. Let's talk about the landing on Long Island, which really in some ways blows Operation Pastorius before it's even begun. What happens to these four saboteurs when they land?

John Fox

You know, they're landed, obviously, you know, in the dark. They come ashore. They almost immediately encounter a young Coast Guard ensign and basically have two options, "We can bribe him or we can kill him," and they decide to bribe him, you know, and the Coast Guard ensign is a bright young guy and it's like, "Okay, four guys, and this is pretty fishy here. I might as well, you know, take the money and then go back and report it." And that's exactly what he does. But by that point, of course, the saboteurs had buried their cache and were heading to New York City, but as you said, it's a made-for-movie reality.

Bradley Hart

And the key player here is a man named George Dasch.

John Fox

George John Dasch, yes. When Dasch gets to New York, he actually calls the FBI, says, "I'm gonna be coming down to Washington and I wanna report this," you know. And he ends up doing exactly that. Dasch is of course the leader of the group. He's supposed to coordinate it. And basically they were all supposed to come, you know, land, integrate, and then get back together to plan out their spree of sabotage efforts there. And Dasch decides, you know, he gets cold feet, you know, depends on whose words you take, but certainly by the time he's at New York City, perhaps he's been reflecting on the fact that he's already been found once decides to turn himself in. So comes down to Washington D.C. with the group's cache, stays at the Mayflower Hotel, which isn't all that far from FBI headquarters and calls in and says, "I'd like to speak to Mr. Hoover." Well, most people don't get to talk to Mr. Hoover right off the bat, even when they claim they are part of a German secret covert mission. So he is basically debriefed by an FBI agent, and in the meanwhile, of course, his hotel room is searched and they find the cache and they end up basically leading Dasch along to get as much information as possible and obviously have a pretty easy time getting the first group of four. Takes a couple extra days to get the next group of four, you know, down in Florida, but pretty easily identify one of them based on some coded message that Dasch had in his possession. Within about two weeks of the landings, the FBI has arrested all of these guys, and they are very quickly brought up before military tribunal run by the US Army in a Department of Justice conference room. They appeal to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court rejects their appeals, they are convicted, and most of the group is executed as basically a big warning sign to the Germans that this kind of activity doesn't fly. Dasch is put in jail through the war and then eventually deported. There was a second saboteur who also was considered to have cooperated enough, had a longer jail sentence, and then also was deported.

Bradley Hart

It's a pretty remarkable moment by a number of standards we have. We have German saboteurs landing on a beach with explosives and money and American clothing and things like that, trying to blend in. We have two of these saboteurs who essentially turn state's evidence, Dasch being the leader of that sort of group. And then you have this massive manhunt that takes place on a massive scale, but very abruptly and only for a short period of time. And in some of my research, I've seen documents that were, or letters, that were sent in from all over the country of people saying, "Oh, the guy who you're looking for, he looks like my next door neighbor, or he looks like, you know, this person I saw in the newspaper recently." How big is this moment? In the midst of the war going on, I mean, the FBI suddenly has this huge case on its hands.

John Fox

That kind of nationwide hunt is something we're actually really good at, in part because of our network of offices, in part because of our wide liaison with state, local, you know, tribal law enforcement, our network, of course, you know, the FBI is in charge of the criminal identification information of the country. So that entire network of information sharing is there. So to that extent, we are, you know, uniquely suited to do that kind of investigation. Yeah, obviously, a lot of this was done kind of quietly because you don't want to tip 'em off sort of thing. And of course, as soon as the last ones are arrested, you know, the White House very much wants to make an example of them. We weren't going to try to drag this out as, you know, either a, you know, a double agent-type operation or a false one. Not at least, it wasn't an intelligence gathering operation to begin with. It was meant as a different kind of covert activity. So the splash is just the shock that German subs would land enemy agents on our soil that they would come so prepared. And, you know, of course the press photos and all of the explosives are pretty impressive.

Bradley Hart

There's a great photo that we'll link to on our website, it's an FBI photo of agents digging up the cache from Florida. And it's such a great photo because they're sort of in suits. They've taken off their jackets, but they still have their dress shoes on, digging up the sand to recover this cache. It's really a remarkable photo.

John Fox

The G-man image was very powerful. And the heat of a Florida beach as you're digging for explosives, did not change the demands of that image.

Bradley Hart

In part three of our series, a new type of warfare begins in the shadows. Covert operations, elite units with missions deep in enemy territory, and we'll hear directly from some of the men on the front lines of these dangerous missions. Be sure to subscribe to "The Secret WWII" wherever you get your podcasts to get our latest episodes when they come out and check out our website for additional resources for each episode, reading lists featuring the work of our experts, and links to videos and oral histories from the collections here at The National WWII Museum.