Lieutenant Fay’s Motor Boat
Fay was crestfallen after his arrest. He worried, first, over what his government would think of him when he had left home promising that not a single munitions’ ship would leave New York and reach the Allies; second, because revealing his commission to destroy those ships would place Germany in a bad light with other neutral nations; third, for fear he might implicate the Imperial German Embassy at Washington. He protected the Embassy for a time, and then admitted that his plans had only been waiting a word from von Papen and Boy-Ed for consummation. His mines were all ready to be set, and the attachés, whom he had met, had not given the word. All his clever craftsmanship had gone for nothing.
The bombs were so constructed that they might be attached under water to the rudder-post of a vessel as she lay at her pier. Inside the bomb case was a clockwork, so poised as to fire two rifle cartridges into a chamber of ninety pounds of TNT. Lieut. Robert S. Glasburn, of Fort Wadsworth, who testified at Fay’s trial, is my authority for the statement that the government requires only 100 pounds of TNT, exploded at a depth of fifteen feet under water, to destroy a dreadnought; Fay’s ninety pounds would have torn the rudder out like a toothpick and ripped away the entire after part of the vessel. The helmsman of the vessel himself was unconsciously to have set the bomb off, for the clockwork was geared to a wire attached to the rudder itself in such a way that each normal swing of the rudder would wind up the mechanism until it fired the cartridge. The bomb chamber was fitted with rubber gaskets so that no water would be admitted before the charge had done its work. Fay was a skilful hand, and had done the assembling himself. Scholz bought the materials at various machine shops about New York, Kienzle supplied the mechanisms and approved the finished product. Breitung contributed 400 pounds of chlorate of potash to make a German holiday, and Daeche just hung around and helped everybody.
Fay knew it was easy to approach a pier from the water-side, for he had spent hours fishing idly in the river to determine that very fact. Just as soon as the military attaché said the word, he and Scholz were to put out into the darkness of the river in their fast motorboat and visit ten ships sailing for England and France, donning a diver’s suit, and attaching a bomb to each rudder. He would first slip alongside the police patrol boats, whose haunts he knew, and steal the guns from them, counting on the swiftness of his own craft to get away from pursuers. He even entertained the possibility of visiting the British patrol cruisers outside the harbor to fix bombs to them—though hardly seriously, I suspect. He had made a different type of bomb, resembling a telescope, in which the carefully timed dissolution of a white powder would release a firing pin on a large quantity of potassium chlorate. This type he proposed to smuggle into the cargo. When he had created such a reign of terror in New York harbor that no ship dared leave, he would go to Boston and Philadelphia and do likewise, then to Chicago and Buffalo to paralyze lake shipping, and thence to New Orleans and San Francisco and home by way of New York or Mexico. It was a great pity, he said, that he had been arrested, for this program had been cancelled. He wished he had got word to start sooner. He had had a few bombs ready for some time. Then there came a slack period, and he sent Daeche to Bridgeport on a little side mission for Germany: to get some dum-dum bullets. These Fay intended to forward to Berlin through von Papen to support a protest from Germany to the United States that we were shipping dum-dum bullets to the Allies. We were not, naturally, but that did not prevent his bringing back a few bullets with the jackets carefully notched by a German agent in Bridgeport.
We had heard enough of what he had intended to do, and of his disappointment. What had he accomplished? What ships had he blown up? Was he responsible for the five fires in the hold of the Craigside on July 24? No. Did he make the bombs found on the Arabic on July 27? Did he cause the fires on the Assuncion de Larrinaga, the Rotterdam or the Santa Anna, and did he put a bomb aboard the Williston? He did not, he assured me.
I showed him the Kirkoswald bomb.
“Did you ever see that?”
“No,” he answered.
“Didn’t you make that?”
“I did not,” he replied, and laughed. “That’s a joke. I see now why they sent me over to this country—they wanted someone to make bombs that would do some damage. That’s crude work.”