CHAPTER XI SHIP BOMBS
Mobilizing destroying agents—The plotters in Hoboken—Von Kleist's arrest and confession—The Kirk Oswald trial—Further explosions—The Arabic—Robert Fay—His arrest—The ship plots decrease.
The reader will recall a circular quoted in Chapter VIII, and issued November 18, 1914, from German Naval Headquarters, mobilizing all destroying agents in harbors overseas.
On January 3, 1915, there was an explosion on board the munitions ship Orton, lying in Erie Basin, a part of New York harbor. On February 6 a bomb was found in the cargo of the Hannington. On February 27 the Carlton caught fire at sea. On April 20 two bombs were found in the cargo of the Lord Erne. One week later the same discovery was made in the hold of the Devon City. All of which accounts for the following charge:
"George D. Barnitz, being duly sworn, deposes and says ... on information and belief that on the first day of January, 1915, and on every day thereafter down to and including the 13th day of April, 1916, the defendants Walter T. Scheele, Charles von Kleist, Otto Wolpert, Ernst Becker, (Charles) Karbade, the first name Charles being fictitious, the true first name of defendant being unknown, (Frederick) Praedel ... (Wilhelm) Paradis ... Eno Bode and Carl Schmidt ... did unlawfully, feloniously and corruptly conspire ... to manufacture bombs filled with chemicals and explosives and to place said bombs ... upon vessels belonging to others and laden with moneys, goods and merchandise...."
Ninety-one German ships were confined to American harbors by the activities of the British fleet, ranging from the Neptun, of 197 tons, in San Francisco Bay, to the Vaterland, of 54,000 tons, the largest vessel on the seven seas, tied up to accrue barnacles at her Hoboken pier, and later, as the Leviathan, to transport American troops to France. Every one of the ninety-one ships was a nest of German agents. Only a moderate watch was kept on their crews, and there were many restless men among them. Every man aboard was liable to command from Captain Boy-Ed, for the German merchant marine was part of the formal naval organization. The interned sailors found shortly that they could be of distinct service to their country without stirring from their ships.
Not far from the North German Lloyd piers in Hoboken lived Captain Charles von Kleist, 67 years old, a chemist and former German army officer. One day there came to him one who spoke the German tongue and who said he came from Wolf von Igel, in von Papen's office. Those were good credentials, especially since the gentleman was inquiring on von Igel's behalf whether Kleist needed any money in the work he was doing. The polite caller returned a few days later with another man, who spoke no German. Von Kleist asked whether he was also from the Fatherland, and was told no, but "we have to use all kinds of people in our business—that's how we fool these Yankees!" Von Kleist laughed heartily, and wagged his head, and went out in the garden and dug up a bomb-case and showed the visitors how it had been made. The visitors were Detectives Barth and Barnitz.
They assured Kleist that von Igel wanted to know precisely what he and his associates were doing, so no money might be paid to the wrong parties. The aged captain wrote out a memorandum of his activities, which he signed, and the detectives proposed a trip to Coney Island as an evidence of good faith, so the three had a pleasant afternoon at the Hotel Shelburne, and the officers then suggested: "Let's go up and see the chief." "Chief" to von Kleist meant von Igel; he agreed, and was taken gently into the arms of the chief of detectives.
He implicated, as he sat there answering questions, Captain Eno Bode, pier superintendent of the Hamburg-American Line, Captain Otto Wolpert, pier superintendent of the Atlas Line, and Ernst Becker, an electrician on the North German Lloyd liner Friedrich der Grosse, tied up at Hoboken. The other conspirators were induced to come to New York, and were arrested at once. Bode and Wolpert, powerful bullies of Paul Koenig's own stamp, proved defiant in the extreme. Becker, knowing no word of English, was pathetically courteous and ready to answer. But it remained for von Kleist to supply the narrative.
Becker, working on the sunny deck of the Friedrich der Grosse, had made numerous bomb cases, rolling sheet lead into a cylinder, and inserting in the tube a cup-shaped aluminum partition. These containers he turned over to Dr. Walter Scheele at his "New Jersey Agricultural Company," where he filled one compartment with nitroglycerine, the other with sulphuric acid. Scheele supplied the mechanics with sheet lead for the purpose. The bombs were then sealed and packed in sand for distribution to various German gathering places, such as, for example, the Turn Verein in the Brooklyn Labor Lyceum. Wolpert appeared there at a meeting one night and berated the Germans present for talking too much and acting too little; he wanted results, he said. Eugene Reister, the proprietor of the place, said that shortly afterward Walter Uhde and one Klein (who died before the police reached him) had taken away a bundle of bombs from the Turn Verein and had placed them on the Lusitania, just before her last voyage, and added that Klein, when he heard of the destruction of the ship, expressed regret that he had done it. Karl Schimmel—the same who had negotiated for the Krag rifles—said later to Reister: "I really put bombs on that boat, but I don't believe that fellow Klein ever did."
Following Kleist's information, agents of the Department of Justice and New York police inspected the Friedrich der Grosse, and found quantities of chlorate of potash and other chemicals. They brought back with them also Garbode (mentioned in the charge as "Karbade"), Paradis and Praedel, fourth engineers on the ship, who had assisted in making the bombs, and Carl Schmidt, the chief engineer. All of the group were implicated in the plot to the complete satisfaction of a jury which concluded their cases in May, 1917, by convicting them of "conspiracy to destroy ships through the use of fire bombs placed thereon." Kleist and Schmidt received sentences of two years each in Atlanta Penitentiary and were each fined $5,000; Becker, Karbade, Praedel and Paradis were fined $500 apiece and sentenced to six months in prison. Dr. Scheele fled from justice, and was arrested in March, 1918, in Havana. A liberal supply of vicious chemicals and explosives discovered in his "New Jersey Agricultural Company" implicated him thoroughly, if the evidence given by his fellows had not already done so. When he was finally captured he faced two federal indictments: one with Steinberg and von Igel for smuggling lubricating oil out of the country as fertilizer, under false customs manifests; the other the somewhat more criminal charge of bombing.
On April 29, 1915, the Cressington caught fire at sea. Three days later, in the hold of the Kirk Oswald, a sailor found a bomb tucked away in a hiding place where its later explosion would have started a serious fire. So it came about that when the four lesser conspirators of the fire-bomb plot had served their six months' sentences, they were at once rearrested on the specific charge of having actually planted that bomb in the Kirk Oswald. The burly dock captains, Bode and Wolpert, who had blustered their innocence in the previous trial, and had succeeded in securing heavy bail from the Hamburg-American Line pending separate trials for themselves, were nipped this time with evidence which let none slip through. Rintelen was haled from his cell to answer to his part in the Kirk Oswald affair, and the jury, in January, 1918, declared the nine plotters "guilty as charged" and Judge Howe sentenced them to long terms in prison. Rintelen, alone of the group, as they sat in court, had an air of anything but wretched fanatic querulousness. He followed the proceedings closely, and once took the trial into his own hands in a flash of temper when the State kept referring to the loss of the Lusitania. It went hard with the nobleman to be herded into a common American court with a riff-raff of hireling crooks and treated with impartial justice. In Germany it never could have happened!
If those trials had occurred in May, 1915, the history of the transport of arms and shells would not have been marred by such entries as these:
May 8—Bankdale; two bombs found in cargo.
May 13—Samland; afire at sea.
May 21—Anglo-Saxon; bomb found aboard.
June 2—Strathway; afire at sea.
July 4—Minnehaha; bomb exploded at sea. (The magnetos.)
July 13—Touraine; afire at sea.
July 14—Lord Downshire; afire.
July 20—Knutford; afire in hold.
July 24—Craigside; five fires in hold.
July 27—Arabic; two bombs found aboard.
Aug. 9—Asuncion de Larriñaga; afire at sea.
Aug. 13—Williston; bombs in cargo.
Aug. 27—Lighter Dixie; fire while loading.
On August 31 the White Star liner Arabic, nineteen hours out of Liverpool was torpedoed by a German submarine and sank in eleven minutes, taking 39 lives, of which two were American. Germany, on September 9, declared that the U-boat commander attacked the Arabic without warning, contrary to his instructions, but only after he was convinced that the liner was trying to ram him; the Imperial Government expressed regret for the loss of American lives, but disclaimed any liability for indemnity, and suggested arbitration. On October 5, however, the government in Berlin had changed its tune to the extent of issuing a note expressing regret for having sunk the ship, disavowing the act of the submarine commander, and assuring the United States that new orders to submarines were so strict that a recurrence of any such action was "considered out of the question." If the cargoes could be fired at sea, no submarine issue need be raised. And so fires and bombs continued to be discovered on ships just as consistently as before. The log, resumed, runs thus:
Sept. 1—Rotterdam; fire at sea.
Sept. 7—Santa Anna; fire at sea.
Sept. 29—San Guglielmo; dynamite found on pier.
Now von Rintelen's handiwork was revealed in the adventures of Robert Fay, or "Fae," as he was known in the Fatherland. In spite of the imaginative quality of the enterprise, and the additional guilt which it heaped upon the executives of the spy system, it was not successful. There were vibrant moments, though, when only the mobilization of police from two states and special agents from the Secret Service and Department of Justice averted what would have developed into a profitable method of destroying ships.
Lieutenant Robert Fay was born in Cologne, where he lived until 1902. In that year he migrated to Canada, where he worked on a farm, and later to Chicago, where he was employed as a bookkeeper until 1905. He then returned to Germany for his military service, and went to work again in Cologne, in the office of Thomas Cook & Sons. After a period in a Mannheim machine shop he went home and devoted himself to certain mechanical inventions, and was at work upon them when he was called out for war service on August 1, 1914.
His regiment went into the trenches, and the lieutenant had some success in dynamiting a French position. Conniving with a superior officer, he deserted his command, and was sent to America by a German reputed to be the head of the secret service, one Jonnersen. Jonnersen gave Fay 20,000 marks for expenses in carrying out a plan to stop shipments of munitions from America, and Fay arrived in New York April 23, 1915, on the Rotterdam.
Dr. Herbert Kienzle, a clock-maker, of 309 West 86th Street, had written to his father in Germany bitterly assailing the United States for shipping munitions, and enclosed in his letters information of certain American firms, such as Browne & Sharp, of Providence, and the Chalmers Motor Car Company, of Detroit, who were reputed to be manufacturing them. These letters had been turned over to Jonnersen, who showed them to Fay as suggestions. Upon his arrival in New York, then, Fay called on Kienzle, who, though he was friendly enough, was reluctant to know of the details Fay had planned. Dr. Kienzle introduced Fay to von Papen, and later to Max Breitung, from whom he purchased a quantity of potassium chlorate.
The deserter found his brother-in-law, Walter Scholz, working as a gardener on an estate near Waterford, Connecticut, and brought him to New York on a salary of $25 a week. The two crossed the Hudson to Weehawken, N. J., and set to work to make bombs. Fay had a theory that a bomb might be attached to the rudder of a ship, and so set as to explode when the rudder, swinging to port, wound a ratchet inside the device which would release a hammer upon a percussion cap. Their plan was to have the parts manufactured at machine shops, assemble and fill them themselves, and then steal up the waterfront in the small hours and attach the infernal machines to outward bound vessels. Fay even counted on disarming the police boats before setting out.
It took the two some three months to get the parts made and properly adjusted. Meanwhile they employed their spare hours in cruising about the harbor in a motor-boat. A machinist in West 42nd Street, New York, made the zinc tank which they used as a model, and the two conspirators shortly opened a garage in Weehawken where they could duplicate the bomb cases unmolested.
There came a time when the devices were satisfactory, and Fay actually attached one to the rudder of a ship to make sure that his adjustments were correct. The next move was to obtain explosives. Fay's prejudice against bombs placed in a ship's hold was that they rarely succeeded in sinking the craft; seventy or eighty pounds of high explosive detonated at the stern of a vessel, however, would blow the rudder away and not only cripple the ship but would probably burst a hole in the stern, mangle the screw, and split the shaft.
Captain Tunney, of the Bomb Squad, heard in October that two Germans were trying to buy picric acid from a man who stopped at the Hotel Breslin, and who called himself Paul Seib and Karl F. Oppegaarde, as the occasion demanded. Tunney's men located the two Germans, and some days later learned that they had placed an order for fifty-two pounds of TNT, to be delivered at the Weehawken garage. The delivery was intercepted, a similar but harmless substance substituted for the explosive, and two detective-truckmen took the package away on their truck to deliver it to Fay and Scholz. While they were in New Jersey, Detectives Coy, Sterrett and Walsh found Fay at the Breslin, and followed him back to Weehawken. As he left the garage in the evening in his automobile, the automobile of Police Commissioner Woods followed at a discreet distance. Up the Palisades the two cars paraded, until in a grove near Grantwood, Fay and Scholz got out of their car and disappeared into the woods with a lantern. After a time they reappeared, and returned to the garage, the police following.
Next morning Chief Flynn was called into the hunt—the morning of Saturday, October 23—and he assigned two special agents to the case. The police department directed two detectives to watch the woods at Grantwood where the conspirators had gone the night before. Detectives Murphy and Fennelly, each equipped with linemen's climbers, arrived at the wood-road about noon, and spent the next eleven hours in the branches of a great oak tree which commanded the road. The perch was high and the night wind chilly, but the watchers were rewarded at last by the twin searchlights of an approaching car. Out of it stepped Fay and Scholz. The men in the branches saw by the light of the lantern which Scholz carried that Fay placed a package underneath a distant tree, walked to a safe distance, exploded a percussion cap, watched the tree topple over and went away, apparently satisfied with the power of his explosives.
Robert Fay, who made bombs with which he hoped to
cripple the shipment of munitions to Europe
Meanwhile other detectives were watching the rooming house at Union Hill where Fay and Scholz lived, and they saw the two come in about 4 o'clock in the morning. Scholz had very little sleep, for there was a ship leaving next day for Liverpool. He left the house at 7 A. M. and went to the garage. Thereupon three detectives returned to the great oak tree at Grantwood. About noon Fay and his brother-in-law drove up, and unlocking the door of a rude hut in the wood, took out a bag, from which they poured a few grains of powder on the surface of a rock. Fay struck the rock with a hammer; a loud report followed, and the hammer broke in his hand. A moment later he heard a twig snap behind him. He turned, and saw a small army of detectives with drawn revolvers closing in on him. Fay protested and pleaded, and offered to bribe the detectives for his freedom, but he was locked up with Scholz. The two had stored in a warehouse several cases containing their completed bomb mechanisms; the police confiscated from their various caches five new bombs, 25 pounds of TNT, 25 sticks of dynamite, 150 pounds of chlorate of potash, two hundred bomb cylinders, 400 percussion caps, one motor-boat, one chart of New York harbor showing all its fortifications and piers, one foreign automobile, two German automatic pistols and a long knife—a considerable arsenal.
Their confessions caused the arrest of Paul Daeche, who had furnished them with explosives, Dr. Kienzle, Breitung, and Engelbert Bronkhorst. Fay received a sentence of eight years in the penitentiary, but after America went to war, Atlanta became too confining for his adventurous spirit, and he escaped the prison, and is believed to have crossed the Mexican border to safety. Scholz was sentenced to four years, and Daeche to three. Kienzle, Breitung and Bronkhorst were not tried, their apparent ignorance of Fay's designs outweighing in the jury's mind their obvious German sympathies. Kienzle, upon the declaration of war of April 6, 1917, became an enemy alien, and was interned.
So Lieutenant Fay never qualified in active service as a destroying agent. Yet he was profligate in his intentions. He offered two men $500,000 if they could intrigue among the shippers in order that a ship laden with copper for England might wander from the path of convoy into German hands, and he even entertained the fantastic hope, with his chart and his motor-boat and his bombs, of stealing out of the harbor to the cordon of British cruisers who hung outside the three-mile limit and attaching his bombs to their rudders, that the German merchantmen might escape into the open sea.
On October 26 the Rio Lages caught fire at sea; fire broke out in the hold of the Euterpe on November 3; three days later there was fire aboard the Rochambeau at sea; the next day an explosion occurred aboard the Ancona. And so the list runs on:
Dec. 4—Tynningham, two fires on ship.
Dec. 24—Alston, dynamite found in cargo.
Dec. 26—Inchmoor, fire in hold.
1916
Jan. 19—Sygna, fire at sea.
Jan. 19—Ryndam, bomb explosion at sea.
Jan. 22—Rosebank, two bombs in cargo.
Feb. 16—Dalton, fire at sea.
Feb. 21—Tennyson, bomb explosion at sea.
Feb. 26—Livingston Court, fire in Gravesend Bay.
April saw the round-up of the group who had been working under the Hamburg-American captains, and although numerous fires occurred during May, 1916, in almost every case they were traced to natural accidents. The number mounted more slowly as the year advanced. With the entrance of America into the war, and the tightening of the police cordon along the waterfront, the chance of planting bombs was still further reduced, but waterfront fires kept recurring, and until the day of ultimate judgment in Berlin, when each of Germany's arsonists in America comes to claim his reward, none will know the total of loss at their hands. It was enormous in the damage it inflicted upon cargo, but it is improbable that it had any perceptible effect upon the whole export of shells for Flanders and France.