What's In A Name?

SABOTEUR LANDING

For East Hampton residents, surely the most dramatic event of World War II was the landing of four German saboteurs on an Amagansett beach. They paddled a rubber boat from a submarine in to shore, fetching up about three miles east of the old Coast Guard station near the foot of Atlantic Avenue.

The spot is called Saboteur Landing.

Early one foggy morning in June 1942, a 21-year-old Coast Guardsman, John C. Cullen, was making his regular patrol of the beach, armed only with a flashlight, when he saw a figure. "Who is that?" he asked. A voice answered that they were Southampton fishermen who had run aground.

Another voice said something in a foreign language, and Mr. Cullen became suspicious. "You don't know what this is all about," the "fisherman" said, after asking him several questions, and offered him money, suggesting he take it and forget he had seen anyone.

Seeing a chance to escape what could be a dangerous situation, Mr. Cullen took the cash and started west. As soon as the fog hid him, he turned and ran what remained of the three miles back to the station.

When he came back with others, armed, to the spot, they found no one but heard the diesel engines of a U-boat grinding its way off a sandbar. Returning several hours later in daylight, they found a pack of German cigarettes on the beach. There were signs that the sand had been disturbed, and the men dug up four boxes, which were found to contain explosives and German Navy uniforms.

The Germans, meanwhile, had made their way to the nearby Amagansett train station, where they boarded a train to Jamaica, and, after splitting up for a short time, rallied in Manhattan.

The four who landed were George John Dasch, the "fisherman," Peter Burger, Heinrich Heinck, and Richard Quirin. All had lived in America, where they belonged to the German American Bund, the home-grown version of the Nazi Party.

Dasch, for reasons that were never clear, almost immediately went to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and betrayed what was a vast German plot to destroy American industrial plants, railroads, waterworks, bridges, and department stores.

His first approach to the New York City office of the F.B.I., made a day after his arrival, was not taken very seriously. Four days later, he presented himself at F.B.I. headquarters in Washington, D.C.

This time he was held in protective custody and questioned, over a five-day period. During that time, five of his cohorts (four other Germans had come ashore in Florida) were arrested, and the remaining two were captured on June 27. That night, J. Edgar Hoover, the legendary head of the F.B.I., described the plot at an excited press conference in New York and announced that it had been foiled.

The would-be saboteurs were held under heavy guard in Washington and tried before a military tribunal. All were found guilty. Six died in the electric chair; Dasch was given a 30-year prison sentence and Burger a life sentence.

In 1948 the two were freed by order of President Harry Truman. Both returned to Germany.

M.N.