The United States had been involved in World War II for six months. Blackouts had been imposed on the nearby village in the Hamptons and so there were no nearby lights to shine on the dark figures. The dense fog helped to hide them as they came toward the shore but that was not enough to keep them hidden from John Cullen as he walked along the shore. As John Cullen questioned the men they claimed that there were just fishermen who had run aground.
If the sight of the raft and the violation of curfew were not enough to make Cullen question the story, the clothes of the men were also suspect. George Dasch gave his name to Cullen as George John Davis and his fedora, red zipped sweater, and tennis shoes were not the typical look for a Long Island fisherman. Cullen urged the men to return with him to the Coast Guard station. They refused. It was at this point that George Dasch realized they had aroused too much suspicion in the young seaman. So they tried another tactic.
He told Cullen that he didn’t want to have to kill him and proceeded to pull a bunch of cash from a tobacco pouch in his pants. He shoved a wad of cash into Cullen’s hands and told him to forget about what he saw. Cullen knew that he was unarmed and outnumbered and therefore took the money which by some accounts was $260 and by others $300 and left the men. Before he did, he noted that one of the men seemed to be speaking a foreign language.
John Cullen made his way to the guard station slowly at first but breaking into a run once the fog hid him from view. The Guard Station was half a mile away and once he got there he burst through the doors and shouted: “There are Germans on the beach!” The men rushed out of the guard station and looked out the water just in time to see the submarine heading back out to sea. With reinforcements, Cullen returned to where he had seen the men. The explosives remained but the men were gone.
The loss of the explosives was a setback for Dasch and his men but not a big one. While at their sabotage training camp outside of Berlin they had been taught well. They even knew how to make timers out of nothing more than dried peas, lumps of sugar and razor blades. They were also trained for their mission by visiting factories and transportation facilities in order to learn about vulnerabilities and places to target.
There were two cells of Nazi saboteurs that were dispatched from a German submarine base at Lorient, France. The first was dispatched on May 26, 1942, for Long Island and the second left four days later headed for Florida. Both groups were given $175,000 which was supposed to be enough to fund the cell’s operations for two years. They were also given names of Nazi sympathizers written in invisible ink on handkerchiefs. The mission was given the name Operation Pastorius and not even their discovery by the U.S. Coast Guard was enough for them to realize their mission was doomed to fail.