Bode now disclosed to Dr. Scheele a most infernal plan. He was instructed to invent a bomb of simple mechanism, which could be placed in a ship’s cargo or its coal and which would not explode, but set fire to anything inflammable with which it came in contact. It must be devised to operate at any predetermined time after it was placed on board.
To Dr. Scheele, a great chemist himself and possessed of every secret of the greatest nation of chemists in the world, this was a simple order. In his instructions he was forbidden to apply for his materials to any American concern through which the purchase might ever be traced. Consequently, he asked for technical assistance and was referred to Captain Carl Schmidt, the chief engineer of the Friedrich der Grosse, one of the great German liners interned at Hoboken. Schmidt placed at his disposal Charles Becker, the electrician of the Friedrich der Grosse. From him he obtained sections of lead pipe and thin sheets of lead and tin. The chemicals were easily obtained from strictly German sources.
Dr. Scheele now made a few experiments and quickly evolved a bomb that was as simple as it was efficient. It consisted merely of a section of lead pipe, about two and a half inches in diameter and three or four inches long. This cylinder was separated into two water-tight compartments by a thin disk of the sheet tin. In one of the two compartments was placed a chemical, and in the other a corrosive acid. The ends were then sealed and the bomb was complete. The acid slowly ate its way through the tin partition, and when at length a tiny hole was made, the acid and the chemical mingled and their action was to produce, without noise, a heat so intense that it melted the lead in the cylinder and the whole bomb flowed down into a molten mass so fervent that it would ignite any ordinary substance, such as coal or wood. No timing mechanism was necessary. The thickness of the tin partition determined the time at which the bomb would act. By careful experiment, Dr. Scheele was able to manufacture bombs that would become effective in two days, four days, six days, eight days—at will. For example, if the tin partition was made one sixtieth of an inch in thickness, the bomb would operate in forty-eight hours. The thickness necessary for the longer periods was established by actual test.
As soon as the bomb was perfected, its manufacture was undertaken on a big scale. Soon the workroom aboard the Friedrich der Grosse was turning out thirty-five of these “cigars,” as the Germans called them, every day. Altogether, before the game became too dangerous and Dr. Scheele was forced to flee, nearly five hundred bombs were manufactured.
Next came the necessity for an organization to place these bombs upon the ships. First, the ships themselves must be known—their sailing dates, their names, their berths and cargoes. Through German sources of information, the data about merchant ships were gathered and by Dr. Carl Schimmel, another German agent in New York City, were listed and classified. These records were placed at the disposal of the bomb-placing squad.
Captain Carl Wolpert was in charge of this work. He was the superintendent of the Atlas Line, a subsidiary of the Hamburg-American Steamship Company, and an officer of the German Naval Reserve. Armed by Scheele with the “cigars,” by Schimmel with the list of ships, and by Von Rintelen with unlimited money, Wolpert chose a group of trusted lieutenants from among the Germans in New York. These men frequented the water-front and the neighbouring saloons, where they sought out stevedores, who could be bribed to place the bombs where they were directed. Fortunately for the lives of seamen and for the property of the Allies, many of these men took the German money but threw the bombs into the bay. Enough, however, earned their blood money so that many ships were set afire on their voyage across the Atlantic, some of them burning to the water’s edge, most of them being greatly damaged, the total loss figuring well up in the millions of dollars. Many a captain in mid-ocean fought the flames on his vessel, from the second or third day of his voyage, all the way into port. A fire would break out in his bunker coal; it might be quenched, only to break out in the cargo two days later, and perhaps a day after that start up again in the coal.
This fiendish work was done in cold blood, do not forget, at the command of the Imperial German Government, at its expense, under the direction of one of its most highly placed aristocrats, by one of Germany’s greatest chemists, with the coöperation of officers of the German Navy and with the cognizance of the German Ambassador to our friendly Government. Here was no passion of battle, no extemporized savagery of revenge. It was a calculated atrocity, perpetrated by the highest authorities of one of the most “civilized” of the “Christian” nations, using the most technical processes of one of the most complex arts of modern life. The magic by which the slimy refuse of burning coal is transmuted into dyes which give to paints and fabrics the splendour of the dawn and the beauty of the rose, was here debased to the infamous uses of treachery and murder.
THE END
