In June 1942, Nazi saboteurs landed by U-boat with explosives meant for Horseshoe Curve. The plot died in fifty-six days.
A Pirep featured story · KAOO Altoona-Blair County, Altoona, PA
Just after midnight on June 13, 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor, the German submarine U-202 surfaced fifty yards off Amagansett Beach on Long Island and lowered a rubber raft into the Atlantic. Four men climbed in. They wore German Marine uniforms over civilian clothes; the uniforms were meant to ensure prisoner-of-war status if they were caught on the beach, after which the civilian clothes would let them disappear into the country. The raft carried four waterproof boxes of explosives, fuses, blasting caps, and incendiaries. The men carried about $175,000 in American cash.
The mission was called Operation Pastorius, after the leader of the first German settlement in colonial America. Hitler had personally approved it. The target list was specific: Horseshoe Curve, the 220-degree wraparound on the Pennsylvania Railroad's Pittsburgh-Philadelphia main line. Niagara Falls hydroelectric plants. ALCOA aluminum smelters in Tennessee. Newark Penn Station. The Hell Gate Bridge in New York. Cut the rail line at Horseshoe Curve and you would choke freight movement between the East Coast and the Midwest war factories.
The four men walked into a Coast Guardsman almost immediately: John Cullen, 21 years old, patrolling the beach unarmed. The leader, George Dasch, pressed $260 into his hand and told him to forget what he had seen. Cullen waited until they were out of sight, then ran two miles back to his station and reported everything.
Four more Germans landed in Florida four nights later. By then Dasch had already lost his nerve. He called the FBI's New York office, then traveled to Washington, checked into the Mayflower Hotel, and walked into the Bureau on June 19 to confess, laying the $84,000 he was still carrying on the desk between him and the agents.
All eight saboteurs were arrested by June 27. A military commission tried them in secret. Six were executed by electric chair at the District of Columbia jail on August 8, 1942, fifty-six days after the U-boat landing. Dasch got thirty years and Ernst Burger, who had also cooperated, got life; both were deported to Germany in 1948.
Horseshoe Curve never had an explosive go off near it. The arrests were announced as an FBI triumph; what stayed secret for years was that the plot had been handed to the Bureau by its own leader. The curve is still there. Norfolk Southern still runs fifty-plus trains a day around it. Land at Altoona-Blair County and the curve is five miles west, the same target Hitler approved in June 1942.