- 5/23/2025
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00:30The submarine, silent, efficient, and deadly.
00:42It was one of the ultimate weapons of World War II.
00:48Yet there's a secret side to the submarine war.
00:51The Second World War was a battleground for tiny, deadly submarines whose very existence
00:57was kept a closely guarded secret.
01:02These clandestine craft and their crews were unsung heroes of the war.
01:08Their attacks were often as deadly to the pilots as they were to the enemy.
01:14From the secret missions of German U-boats to the unique vehicles of demolition in the
01:19Mediterranean to the terrifying miniature kamikaze subs of Japan, the clandestine use
01:25of secret submarines remains one of the little known tales of World War II.
01:32In the shadowy world of espionage, the submarine was seen not as a soldier, but a spy.
01:39Not a warrior, but an assassin.
01:49Submarines are by nature stealthy, difficult to find.
01:55It's very, very hard to see through water.
01:59So in the clandestine world of spies, saboteurs, intelligence collection, submarines have become
02:08a very important system, a very important weapon, if you will.
02:15Submarines start off, of course, as a weapon of secrecy.
02:19During World War II, the Germans looked upon them as potentially the best way to get saboteurs
02:27to the United States.
02:32Submarines have been part of the naval order of battle since the start of this century.
02:39As submarines got bigger, there was a requirement for small, specially designed craft for these
02:45special operations.
02:46And that is what now we mean by midget submarines.
02:52The most basic unit of underwater warfare is not the submarine, but rather the swimmer.
02:59From the time ancient Greek divers bored holes in the sides of enemy warships, the frogman
03:04has been an inherent part of clandestine underwater activity.
03:13By World War II, frogmen were necessary for any beach invasion.
03:21Mines and underwater obstacles often protected shorelines.
03:26Air reconnaissance could discover the obstacles, but someone had to remove them.
03:34Once the obstacles were located, they had to be destroyed.
03:38How do you destroy them?
03:40You send in swimmers.
03:42Which we soon called underwater demolition teams.
03:45Exceedingly brave, well-trained men who would come into the area by landing craft, then
03:52swim out to these obstacles, wire them with demolitions, and blow them up.
04:02In 1942, within months of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy and the newly created Office of
04:07Strategic Services, or OSS, began to train an elite squad of underwater warriors.
04:17This once classified film shows a secret camp in the Bahamas that trained Navy and OSS personnel
04:23to be saboteurs of the sea.
04:28They went through arduous physical training.
04:31They all, of course, had to be expert swimmers.
04:34You're going to swim a few hundred yards from the landing craft to the obstacles.
04:40You're going to stay in the water for minutes, possibly an hour or more, while you carried
04:45out your mission, and then have to swim back several hundred yards to the landing craft.
04:51So the physical requirements, as well as the technical training needed to do the survey,
04:58to plan explosives, was tremendous.
05:05The training of the swimmers included not only the use of explosives, but the teaching
05:09of unique swimming techniques, close combat, and training in special breathing equipment.
05:17Scuba gear had not been invented in 1942.
05:21American divers carried bottled oxygen with a special apparatus that recycled the swimmer's
05:27exhalation.
05:29No telltale bubbles would betray the swimmer's whereabouts.
05:33The danger, however, was that pure oxygen, as an extremely volatile gas, had surprising
05:39effects on the human nervous system.
05:42Prolonged breathing of pure oxygen can cause convulsions, a stroke, or sudden death.
05:50A Navy or OSS swimmer risked his life even before coming near the enemy.
05:58Yet the dangerous training of underwater demolition teams was one of the key factors in the success
06:03of the Allied war effort.
06:07Underwater demolition teams were vital to the invasion of Europe in June of 1944, vital
06:15to the invasion of many of the Pacific islands that we undertook, vital because every invasion
06:25was costly.
06:29Hundreds of American lives were lost in the landing operations.
06:37There's no question if underwater demolition teams had not destroyed some of the defenses,
06:45if they had not surveyed the area so we knew where they were, the losses would have been
06:50not in the hundreds but in the thousands for those landings.
06:57In addition to destroying harbor and beach defenses, Navy and OSS swimmers also attacked
07:02ships themselves.
07:05A single man could go into areas torpedoes or aircraft could not.
07:11The Allies were determined to find a way for a single swimmer with the right equipment
07:16to take out a target.
07:19The key was to invent the right equipment with an explosive device small enough to be
07:24carried by one man but powerful enough to do the job.
07:30You had to have a way to effectively get a watertight explosive, hold it close to the
07:36ship and ignite an explosion.
07:40So they devised the limpet mine.
07:44The center portion is two and a half pounds of high explosive that's watertight.
07:51On the outside are six magnets, now they're individually mounted in rubber so that they
07:58could conform to the hull of a ship even if there's barnacles on it.
08:04With two and a half pounds of explosive snug against the hull, once it goes off, the incompressibility
08:14of water will focus the entire explosion into the hull.
08:19And this is designed to produce a hole roughly 25 square feet in size beneath the waterline.
08:31United Underwater Demolition Teams, or UDTs, were responsible for sinking hundreds of tons
08:37of shipping in the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Mediterranean.
08:42Not only were these sea-going saboteurs successful, they helped pave the way for the future.
08:50After World War II, of course, these UDT teams became the basis for the famous SEAL organizations
08:55or Sea Air Land that we formed during the Vietnam War.
09:00And these are among the top special forces in the world today.
09:08The U.S. Navy SEALs, famed all over the world, had their beginnings on the island of Nassau
09:13in World War II, where underwater operatives using comparatively primitive equipment trained
09:19for some of the riskiest and most dangerous assignments in the entire war.
09:27It didn't take long for military planners to devise unique underwater vehicles to perform
09:33similar demolition missions.
09:37These clandestine weapons, some of the smallest submarines ever devised, soon joined the ocean-going
09:43fleets of larger submarines and U-boats in the arsenal of modern underwater warfare.
10:00The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was devastating to the U.S. Navy.
10:07Missiles and torpedo planes sank seven American battleships.
10:14Two days later, a Japanese air assault in the Philippines crippled the U.S. Asiatic
10:19fleet.
10:22Commander Stuart Murray of the naval base at Manila underlined the importance of the
10:26U.S. undersea force when, after surveying the wreckage of the American fleet, he said,
10:32The submarines are all we have left.
10:41But before the Navy could strike back, it had to go undercover.
10:45The first U.S. submarine sorties against Japan were not for combat.
10:50They were missions of espionage.
10:54Submarines are very good for just looking at an area.
10:58And in some operations, such as planning for an amphibious landing, a submarine's periscope
11:05view gives you a better look at the beach sometimes than an aircraft flying over.
11:12Because you're now seeing it from the level of the troops going in, you could get some
11:17excellent photographs of the water level view.
11:22And again, this would be very important for amphibious landings so that you could get
11:27an idea of what the troops and the landing craft coming ashore would see.
11:35Photoreconnaissance through a periscope was not easy.
11:40The nerve-wracking process involved moving close to shore and then filming a 180-degree
11:45panorama, sometimes while under enemy fire.
12:01American submarines were needed for more than just photographing beaches.
12:06Fast fleet subs were needed to attack enemy shipping lanes.
12:12Only one-fifth of all the American subs were obsolete S-class ships built in the 1920s.
12:19They were small, slow, and difficult to maneuver.
12:25As the American fleet geared up to combat readiness, the older S-class subs found new
12:30life as a transport system on secret underwater missions.
12:36Once the Japanese invaded the Philippines in December 1941, we immediately found that
12:42it was difficult to get surface ships in and out of the northern Philippines, especially
12:48the main island of Luzon, because of Japanese aircraft, Japanese surface ships.
12:59So we increasingly used submarines, both to carry things in, primarily ammunition supplies,
13:06and to carry things out.
13:08At one point, we carried out a large number of Army nurses to carry out certain specialists
13:14that we either didn't want the Japanese to capture, such as cryptographers, code breakers,
13:20or other people that we just needed because they were in short supply, such as aircraft
13:24mechanics.
13:28They called these older subs the Spy Squadron and their mission Operation Spyron.
13:34Nineteen submarines were involved in Operation Spyron throughout World War II.
13:44The USS Sea Dragon evacuated American code breakers from Corregidor in 1942.
13:51The USS Swordfish helped Philippine President Manuel Quezon flee from the Japanese occupation.
14:01The USS Narwhal landed U.S.-trained Philippine guerrillas on the shores of Mindanao.
14:10In all, over 1,300 tons of supplies and arms were delivered to the Philippine Resistance
14:16in this manner.
14:21One of the most dramatic rescues by the USS Trout was a mission in February 1942 to deliver
14:27weapons and evacuate Army nurses.
14:32Yet for some, the most important evacuee was not the people, but rather gold.
14:40The Trout goes into the Philippines, delivers the small arms ammunition, and then takes
14:48out 20 tons of gold and silver from the Philippines.
14:54And it's deposited back in the United States for use by the Philippines at the end of the
15:00war.
15:01Well, the Trout gold becomes the basis for legend after legend after legend of Philippine
15:11gold.
15:12It still exists today.
15:15The Philippine Commonwealth's gold reserves were taken out by submarine and some Army
15:20nurses.
15:21Now here you've got 60 or 70 men in the submarine, a load of gold, a dozen or so Army nurses.
15:31One wonders that they didn't defect to some desert island.
15:37Far more dangerous than evacuating personnel from enemy territory was the exact opposite
15:42mission, inserting clandestine operatives behind enemy lines.
15:49Allied spy run found itself the chief means of delivery for Allied spies in the Pacific.
15:56In addition to delivering Philippine resistance fighters and supplies, the secret subfleet
16:02put Americans onto Japanese-held islands as advanced scouts for the Allied forces.
16:10Called the Coast Watchers, these servicemen spent months, even years, behind enemy lines
16:16reporting the movement of Japanese ships.
16:23One such mission was led by Sergeant Carlos Placido.
16:30In May 1944, Placido and five other Filipino-American servicemen boarded the submarine USS Redfin
16:38in Perth, Australia.
16:41The Army enlisted men were in disguise and under top secret orders.
16:47Placido's diary from the time tells the story in his own words.
16:53We reached Perth about 1800, 26 May, 1944.
16:59We made a quick change from Army uniforms to that of the Navy and were warned not to
17:04mention that we were in the Army until we got on the sub.
17:10Mr. Brown said to take care of ourselves and that we were all going to meet again in
17:15Manila.
17:21Days later, the USS Redfin surfaced off the shore of the Japanese-held Palawan Island
17:27Group.
17:31Under cover of darkness, the group of six men went ashore with all the supplies they
17:36would need to survive behind enemy lines for over a year.
17:43Their mission was to set up and operate a clandestine radio station to report on all
17:48Japanese shipping activities.
17:53The Coast Watchers encountered hostile islanders, roving Japanese squadrons, and the unpredictable
17:59weather in the South Seas.
18:07On 26 July, a Japanese gunboat anchored in the bay at 800 yards off the beach.
18:14It tried to land a patrol party, but the guerrillas held them off with rifles and shotguns.
18:21To help these boys, we turned over to them whatever extra arms we had.
18:28On 29 July, we turned on our transmitter.
18:31DAC was already sending weather reports every six hours.
18:36One of Colonel Whitney's first messages said, excellent reports.
18:43The Coast Watchers would be at their remote island station for nearly a year before Japan
18:48was defeated.
18:51And just as their commander had promised, they all met in Manila to celebrate the Allied
18:56victory.
19:01For their service behind enemy lines, every man of the Coast Watchers received the Bronze
19:06Star for heroic achievement.
19:10But before the war ended, the Allies faced a new and deadly secret weapon.
19:16Silent and almost invisible, a new generation of underwater craft was employed to tip the
19:22balance of power in the Mediterranean in favor of the Axis.
19:35While the American submarines of the Pacific were engaged in secret missions, a unique
19:40type of underwater warfare was being perfected on the other side of the world.
19:46The Axis powers were intent on creating a new class of clandestine submarine, one that
19:53was small, fast, and deadly.
20:01As experience of operating and working with submarines grew, there were certain roles
20:06for which these large submarines were no longer suitable, like entering enemy harbors, dropping
20:11off recovering agents, submarines which are specifically built for special operations.
20:18They were called midget subs, X-craft, or sneak craft.
20:24The leaders in this development were the Italians.
20:30Mussolini's navy had created an elite squadron of special attack weapons, the 10th Light
20:35Flotilla, or Deci Mammas.
20:40The special attack squadron began by improving an odd design from the First World War.
20:46Called the Maiali, it was essentially a manned torpedo.
20:52The device carried two men who wore diving suits, masks, and used a primitive form of
20:58scuba gear.
21:00The forward man was the pilot who steered the craft underwater toward the target.
21:06This artist's conception from a once classified OSS film shows how the second man detached
21:12the torpedo's warhead and attached it to the targeted ship's hull.
21:18After setting a timed fuse, the drivers of the Maiali then returned to their base.
21:27The concept was simple and ingenious.
21:30All it took was crude driving skills and steely nerve.
21:36The men of the 10th Flotilla had that kind of audacity.
21:41The Maiali is actually a nickname, the Italian word for pig, given to the craft by one of
21:46its inventors, Sub-Lieutenant Aelius Tozai.
21:52Well its proper name is Siluro Alentecorsa, which means slow running torpedo.
21:57But during trials they had problems in keeping the things afloat.
22:01And once, after one sunk underneath Tozai, he said, that pig got away from me.
22:06And the name stuck.
22:07And henceforth they were known as pigs.
22:11One of the most daring and most successful raids by the 10th Flotilla was on the British
22:16Mediterranean harbor at Alexandria.
22:21In the same month as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, three tiny Maiali attacked Alexandria
22:26Harbor.
22:28They wreaked havoc on the British ships there, shifting the balance of power in the Mediterranean.
22:35Three craft were used.
22:37They were taken to just off the harbor at Alexandria by the Italian submarine Schire,
22:45where the crews were released.
22:47They boarded the torpedoes and then went off to do their bit.
22:51As luck would have it, the gateway to Alexandria Harbor was opened that night to allow British
22:57ships in, and they just followed in.
23:01They then went their three separate ways to find their targets.
23:06Two of them succeeded in finding their targets, which were the battleships Valiant and Queen
23:11Elizabeth.
23:12The third found its target, the tanker Sagona, and all were successful.
23:21The mission was more than a victory for the 10th Flotilla.
23:24It was a bitter defeat for the entire British Navy.
23:29The significance of the attack lies in that because these two battleships were damaged,
23:35the Royal Navy was effectively removed as an offensive force in the eastern Mediterranean.
23:40Effectively, there was nothing, no serious Royal Navy force in the Mediterranean after
23:46these two battleships had been damaged.
23:50The 10th Light Flotilla began to expand its repertoire.
23:55Exploding surface craft were the logical extension of the manned torpedo.
24:01These 16-foot boats had their noses filled with explosives.
24:07The operators simply pointed the craft toward the target, hit full speed, and then ejected
24:12before the craft hit.
24:20The boat could go where a pig could not, for its foldaway rudder allowed the boat to
24:24simply float over the top of protective anti-submarine nets.
24:31The exploding boat concept was copied by the Germans, who added a crude radio control system.
24:42The 10th Light Flotilla used both pigs and exploding boats in a dawn raid on the British
24:47harbor at Malta in July 1941.
24:51An exploding boat failed to destroy the harbor netting because the pilot ejected too soon.
24:59The second boat hit its mark, but only because its pilot, Lieutenant Carabelli, refused to
25:05eject, riding his speeding bomb to his own death.
25:12The attack on Malta was a failure, but it did not stop the Italian team.
25:18The 10th Flotilla now aimed its secret weapons at an even bigger target, the British harbor
25:24at Gibraltar.
25:27Headquartered secretly in an old Italian tanker, the Mialis attacked and sank British merchant
25:33ships at will.
25:37But the 10th Flotilla had a brazen plan that would top them all.
25:42A midget submarine attack on New York harbor.
25:47The attack on New York was perhaps the most audacious operations which the decimamus planned
25:53during the war.
25:55They planned to use a small midget submarine called a CA-class submarine, which would be
25:59carried in a well carved into the forward casing of a submarine called Leonardo da Vinci.
26:06Now even if they had just planted a couple of limpet mines on one or two hulls in New
26:10York harbor and done the merest amount of damage, the fact that the Axis powers had
26:15actually got in to an American harbor and committed an act of aggression in American
26:21waters would have had huge psychological consequences.
26:26But history stepped in between New York harbor and her date with the pig.
26:33On September 3rd, 1943, Mussolini fled his collapsing government and Italy surrendered.
26:45The 10th Flotilla, one of Italy's few military success stories of the war, was disbanded.
26:54Unlike its Italian partners, the German Navy had little success with clandestine watercraft.
27:02The German midget submarine program was a total disaster.
27:06All their submersibles and midget submarines were built in a hurry without proper testing
27:10and they were just thrown into combat.
27:14The German designed Biber and Molk were one-man subs that carried two torpedoes.
27:23Neither sub had a single successful mission.
27:29The third one-man German sub was named the Neger.
27:34The Neger was perhaps the most lethal one of all.
27:37This again was another single-man craft and it consisted of two G-7 electric torpedoes,
27:43one slung below the other.
27:46The upper one contained the operator who was literally wedged into his position.
27:52Once in, he could do no more than move the control column.
27:56He steered the craft toward the target and then released the second torpedo, which was
28:02the one that went away and did the damage.
28:06Unfortunately in some cases the second torpedo wouldn't release and when the motor was started
28:11it took both of them to destruction.
28:16Still the tiny underwater vehicles of the Axis powers held their own.
28:21Few other weapons of the war created so much strategic advantage with so little investment
28:26of men and resources.
28:30They were very successful in two ways.
28:32Firstly in terms of shipping sunk or damaged.
28:35They accounted for just under 100,000 tons of British-American merchant shipping sunk
28:41plus two British battleships damaged.
28:45But we must also look at their success in the wider term in that they forced the British
28:49and later the Americans to spend a huge amount both in resources and manpower in fortifying
28:55every harbor in the Mediterranean.
29:04In the Pacific another revolution was taking place in the world of submarines.
29:10The Japanese Imperial Navy had created an entire fleet of midget watercraft called the
29:15Kōhyōteiki.
29:20The war opened in the Pacific with the Japanese carrier attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December
29:261941.
29:27What a lot of people have forgotten is five Japanese midget submarines were also launched
29:35from launch submarines to attack the ships inside the harbor.
29:40One or two of these did get into the harbor, did fire torpedoes.
29:47In the end five Kōhyōteiki were used at Pearl Harbor and their success is open to
29:54interpretation.
29:56One was sunk outside the harbor entrance.
29:58Two were sunk inside the harbor.
30:01One simply disappeared.
30:02No one knows what happened.
30:05And the fifth was washed ashore.
30:08If you go to the Naval Academy in Japan there's an exhibit of each man who had been in that
30:16submarine attack.
30:19They're like gods, but one of them isn't there and it's the one man who survived.
30:25He's the first prisoner of war taken by the Americans.
30:30The Kōhyōteiki midget submarines proved largely ineffective, but by 1945 with Allied
30:38victories against the Japanese a new role was designed for the midget submarines.
30:45The suicide mission.
30:51Two months before the better known Kamikaze flying squadron was created in 1944, Japanese
30:58naval officers had designed the Kamikaze submarine.
31:04These are suicide weapons.
31:05They're designed to be built cheaply and in large numbers carrying a single man crew who
31:12would expend himself against Allied shipping.
31:18The suicide pilots and sailors accepted their fate, whether they went to their deaths in
31:24submarines, planes or the specially designed Kamikaze jet.
31:31Had we not dropped the atomic bombs, there's no question that besides hundreds if not thousands
31:37of aerial Kamikazes, our amphibious ships, our fire support ships, our landing craft
31:44themselves would have been attacked by thousands of these human torpedoes and these midget
31:50submarines.
31:54In fact, several of the suicide sub-operators drove their crafts out to sea after the Japanese
32:00surrendered to die like samurai in an act of underwater Heraklion.
32:09Throughout the war, the Allies would find themselves unprepared for attacks from tiny
32:14underwater weapons.
32:18Their response was to fight fire with fire, to create their own squadrons of secret submarines
32:23that would match their enemies in size and deadliness.
32:33When the British harbored Alexandria was attacked by Italian midget submarines, the effect was
32:38devastating.
32:41The entire Allied fleet in the Mediterranean was crippled for the duration of the war.
32:49The news of the victory by the Italian 10th Flotilla reached Churchill himself, who as
32:54former Lord of the Admiralty had a special interest in the security of His Majesty's
32:58Navy.
33:02Churchill was infuriated when news of Italian attacks reached him and he demanded in one
33:08of his very, very testy notes as to why we weren't doing the same thing.
33:12So Britain's entry into this field was entirely reactive.
33:15The Italians had harmed us.
33:17We were going to use the same methods against them and the Germans.
33:22The British Navy went to work building a special attack craft of its own, patterning its design
33:28after a captured Italian Miale.
33:32Once it was designed, an elite corps of Royal Navy volunteers began training to use the
33:37British version of the Italian pig, now dubbed with the more dignified title of chariot.
33:46By the end of 1943, the British were getting expert advice and guidance on using the human
33:52torpedo from their former enemy.
33:56With the surrender of Italy, members of the infamous 10th Flotilla now joined hands with
34:01the British Navy to train and even operate the chariots.
34:06So you have the unique situation of former members of Decemimus, freshly released from
34:11British prisoner war camp, using British chariots to attack German-controlled Italian ships
34:19in Italian harbours.
34:21War makes strange bedfellows.
34:25Another midget submarine was developed by the British, but this one was cloaked in secrecy.
34:31The British SOE, Special Operations Executive, was an espionage agency designed to cause
34:37confusion and destruction behind enemy lines.
34:43It was from SOE labs that a unique creation emerged, a craft designated the Sleeping Beauty.
34:53Sleeping Beauty was the smallest operational submarine used in World War II.
34:58It also has another distinction.
35:00It was the only submarine up until that time that had ever been designed exclusively by
35:07and for an intelligence service.
35:09Now, it was quite effective.
35:12It had a maximum speed of four and a half knots with a range of 12 miles, or if you
35:18slowed it down to three knots, you could go up to 40 miles.
35:23It was silent, it was fast, but it had no means of navigating.
35:28So what the SOE did was develop a system called porpoising, where the operator would
35:34surface, visually sight the compass or visually take a compass reading, then go underwater.
35:41It had a maximum depth of 50 feet, travel for a few hundred yards, come up again, surface,
35:47get his bearings, go underwater again.
35:50And this was very effective and was designed to evade detection by either a sentry on the
35:57shore or a lookout on a ship.
36:01The Sleeping Beauty was also used by American OSS operatives and saw action in an attack
36:06on the Singapore harbour in June 1944.
36:13But a far more elaborate clandestine craft was being built by the best engineers of the
36:17Royal Navy.
36:19They called it the X-Craft.
36:24The British X-Craft was a four-man midget submarine and it was perhaps the most successful
36:28of all the midget submarines built by any Navy, largely because it was designed and
36:32built by professional naval architects who knew what they were doing.
36:36It had a lot of other uses other than sinking ships.
36:40For example, the British organisation COP, Combined Operations Pilotage Parties, used
36:45X-Craft to conduct covert reconnaissance of the Normandy beaches in January 1944, before
36:53the D-Day landings.
36:58The mission the X-Craft would be most remembered for was the attack on the German battleship
37:03Tirpitz.
37:08Shown here at her christening, the Tirpitz was a seemingly unsinkable threat to Allied
37:13ships in the North Sea and on the supply routes between England and Russia.
37:24Six British X-Craft submarines were towed to the Norwegian fjords by submarine motherships
37:30in September 1943.
37:33Rear Admiral C.B.
37:35Berry would later call it one of the most courageous acts of all time, for it became
37:41a one-way mission for the British sailors involved.
37:50Of the six craft that took part, two were lost on the journey from the UK to the Norwegian
37:57coast.
38:00X-5 disappeared.
38:02No one knows what happened to her.
38:05X-6 and X-7 successfully entered Tirpitz's anchorage, laid their charges underneath the
38:13battleship, and then made their escape.
38:16But they were detected while doing so, shot at, and both were sunk, their crews becoming
38:24prisoners.
38:26The captured X-Craft crews were taken aboard the Tirpitz herself, just before the charges
38:31blew holes in the hull of the battleship and destroyed her turbines.
38:37Though they were now POWs, the British crews experienced the satisfaction of seeing the
38:43mighty Tirpitz crippled.
38:48With their successes and their failures, the midget submarines and clandestine sneak craft
38:53are a little-known story of World War II.
38:58These tiny underwater warriors sunk over 100,000 tons of shipping, despite the fact
39:04that they were small, primitive, and often as dangerous to their crews as to their targets.
39:14But nothing came close to the damage caused by the U-boats of the German Navy.
39:19They terrorized the Atlantic as the unchallenged masters of underwater warfare.
39:28Yet a lesser-known chapter of the war concerns the mysterious, and just as legendary, stories
39:33of the U-boat as a vehicle for spies.
39:45Perhaps the most successful weapons system of World War II was the German U-boat.
39:52Stealthy, quick, and powerful, the U-boat dominated the Atlantic Ocean.
40:00U-boat commanders called the early years of the war the happy time, during which they
40:04sank Allied shipping at will, unhampered and unconcerned by their enemies' ineffective
40:09anti-submarine measures.
40:13The Battle of the Atlantic was the battle that we never won.
40:21The U-boat war started on September 3rd, 1939, when World War II began, and it didn't end
40:32until the middle of May, 1945, when the last of them surrendered.
40:42It was the only weapon that also could really win the war for Hitler, for most of the conflict.
40:56Because it was so effective as a combat weapon, very little attention has been paid to the
41:01U-boat as a weapon of espionage and clandestine warfare.
41:07Yet these deadly ship-killers played a small but vital role in the Nazi campaign to bring
41:13the war to America.
41:17The Germans at the beginning of the war believed that the highest priority would be to destroy
41:25American ability to manufacture airplanes and other weapons of war.
41:32And so they decided to do a reprise of what the Germans had done in World War I, namely
41:40get people to commit acts of sabotage in the United States.
41:45You have to remember that in 1942 there were no ballistic missiles and there were no long-range
41:51bombers, and so America was out of Hitler's reach.
41:54He couldn't drop a bomb on a steel mill or a munitions plant, so this was his way of
42:00slowing down American production.
42:05The ambitious plan of the Nazis was to put highly trained teams of German operatives
42:10disguised as Americans on U.S. soil, armed with the best sabotage weaponry Germany could
42:17devise.
42:20The only way to insert the saboteurs was by sending U-boats to the very shores of America.
42:28On June 2, 1942, this plan, called Operation Pastorius, began.
42:39The submarine U-202 surfaced silently off the coast of Long Island.
42:45Four men put ashore, carrying crates of explosives and fuses.
42:51A week later, four more German operatives landed off the coast of Florida, also carrying
42:56explosives, mines and fuses, as well as detailed plans for a devastating strike at the very
43:03heart of the American war industry.
43:09But the sabotage operation failed completely.
43:14Within weeks, the German saboteurs were all in jail, their mission unmasked, their attack
43:19thwarted before it could even begin.
43:25And at the head of the roundup was the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover, who proudly announced his
43:30agency's good work.
43:32The recent landing of saboteurs from Nazi submarines sounds a new alert for all Americans.
43:41These saboteurs were apprehended before they could carry out their plans of destruction.
43:49The real story was much less dramatic.
43:54After the German saboteurs were not captured by good police work, the saboteurs were turned
44:00in by their own leader, George Dasch.
44:04Fellow saboteur Edgar Berger also confessed and helped the FBI find the Florida contingent.
44:12At this point in the investigation, J. Edgar Hoover himself stepped in.
44:16J. Edgar Hoover, at this stage, did not enjoy a very good reputation with the American public
44:23or the American press.
44:24And he was going to use this opportunity to put himself back in the good graces with the
44:31American public.
44:33He was going to go down as the man who captured the eight Nazi spies.
44:38And what he did was he used all of Dasch's and Berger's testimony to round up the spies
44:46and didn't give either Dasch or Berger any credit at all.
44:51George Dasch and the other seven operatives were given a military trial, found guilty,
44:57and sentenced to death.
45:03To the dismay of Hoover, President Roosevelt intervened and commuted the sentences of Dasch
45:08and Berger to life imprisonment.
45:14The tale of German spies landing from U-boats became so well known that it began to take
45:19on a life of its own.
45:24One of the effects of the landings of the saboteurs was it was greatly publicized.
45:32The public became knowledgeable about this, mostly because the FBI was so proud of what
45:39it had done.
45:40Well, it produces all kinds of rumors from Maine to Florida that there are saboteurs,
45:47that there were spies being landed by submarine.
45:50There are still people in Maine today who will tell you stories about submarines, German
45:54submarines landing men in Maine.
45:58They're going to a shore to buy fresh vegetables.
46:02It never happened, but it's wonderful stories.
46:10As the war drew to a close in 1945, the U-boat entered the world of clandestine activities
46:16and the world of legend.
46:22The end of World War II, as the battle for Berlin reached its crescendo and the Soviets
46:30captured the capital city, captured Hitler's bunker, Hitler was gone.
46:37Martin Bormann, one of his chief lieutenants, was gone.
46:41Some other officials were missing.
46:44End of World War II, where are the Nazi leaders?
46:49Where's Hitler?
46:49Where's Martin Bormann?
46:50Where are some of the other leaders?
46:52They can't be found.
46:55At the same time, some U-boats are missing.
47:01Long after the Nazi defeat, there were persistent rumors of U-boats secretly ferrying out Nazi
47:07gold, Nazi weapons, and Nazi leaders.
47:14And the spread of U-boats evading captivity with the cream of the Nazi high command, creating
47:19a veritable underwater Reich.
47:24U-boats were said to deliver Hitler himself to Argentina, where the Nazis planned to rise
47:29again.
47:31The rumors had a clear basis in established facts, but the facts were much less dramatic
47:38than the legends.
47:42Two of the German U-boats, when they were all ordered to surrender, decided they did
47:47not want to be imprisoned by the Allies.
47:49They would take their submarines across the Atlantic to South America, where they would
47:54be interned in neutral countries.
47:58These two submarines disappear, and then they appear a couple of months later in South American
48:04countries.
48:05The thought is that these were used to clandestinely carry possibly Hitler, certainly Martin Bormann,
48:12and other German bigwigs out of the Reich to South America.
48:18Well, in reality, the only people on those two submarines were their crews.
48:25To me, there's a lot of irony in the fact that Germany gets invincible in legend when
48:31it wasn't invincible in reality.
48:33I mean, in legend, Germans do all kinds of things.
48:38They get submarines to deliver their leaders to South America.
48:42They get submarines to take sacred German objects and hide them in Antarctica.
48:48All kinds of legends grow up.
48:51But the legends, nothing ever comes of any of this.
48:54None of them is true.
48:56But there's something about a submarine in an awful lot of those legends.
49:03The legends of escaping U-boats and secret submarines are some of the most compelling
49:07tales of World War II, whether or not there is any truth to them.
49:13For the submarine, by its very nature, is surrounded by an air of mystery and intrigue.
49:21There's a certain psychological fear of submarines, because you never know when it's going to
49:28appear and the first sign you'll have there's a submarine is a torpedo hitting your ship.
49:38So I wouldn't use the word romance, but there's a certain mystique about them.
49:47Mystique aside, there is no doubt that submarines played an important, if little known, role
49:52in clandestine operations of World War II.
49:58And it was from the discoveries made in World War II that submarines became the premier
50:03weapon of spycraft during the Cold War.
50:08The nuclear power behemoths that functioned as electronic eavesdroppers, spy senders and
50:14mobile arsenals, the military muscle of the Cold War, could not have served as effectively
50:19without the lessons learned in such missions as the attack of the X-craft, the gold evacuation
50:27of the USS Trout, and the harbor raids of the Sleeping Beauty.
50:35The very fact that the story of the secret submarines is almost unknown to the world
50:40at large, perhaps proves the success of these strange and mysterious craft as unique weapons
50:47in the arsenal of the spy.
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