New York at War (35 page)

The “Enemy Alien Menace” looms over the Woolworth Building and lower Manhattan in a
New York Herald
editorial cartoon, 1918. Cartoon by W. A. Rogers,
The Breath of the Hun,
in
New York Herald,
March 28, 1918. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.

Pain, humiliation, and fear were real in the German American households of New York. “I did expect from my neighbors and fellow citizens a fair estimate and appreciation of my honesty and trustworthiness,” lamented merchant Theodore Ladenburger, who had been a New Yorker for a quarter century. “It had all vanished.” “You couldn’t walk the street with a German paper under your arm,” Helen Wagner, a young girl living on the Upper East Side, later recalled. “You’d be abused from one end of the block to the other. . . . We kept speaking German at home, but we avoided it on the street.” The golden age of German New York was over.
⁵⁹

Late in the afternoon of June 2, 1918, Mrs. Clarence Westbrook of West Fifty-Eighth Street, one of 217 passengers aboard the steamship
Carolina
bound from Puerto Rico to New York, was sitting on the ship’s deck when she noticed something strange breaking the surface of the water. “There comes a submarine,” she said to a fellow passenger. A minute later, a six-inch shell sent a plume of water skyward just astern of the steamer. Terrified passengers stumbled out of the ship’s dining room as three more warning shells hit the water. The German U-151 approached, flying the “Abandon Ship” pennant, its crew manning the submarine’s deck guns. Soon nine lifeboats and one motor launch, carrying the
Carolina
’s passengers and 113 crewmen, were pulling away from the steamer. “Is everybody off your ship?” an English-speaking officer asked Captain T. R. D. Barbour from the U-boat’s deck. “I’m going to shell her.” As the boats pulled toward the New Jersey shore forty miles away, six shells shattered the
Carolina
’s hull, sending it to the bottom with a cargo of sugar, forty thousand letters, and fifty-four sacks of parcel post. Two days later, a marching band of Shriners on the Atlantic City boardwalk faced the ocean and played “The Star-Spangled Banner” as vacationing bathers helped twenty-nine exhausted survivors onto the beach from one of the
Carolina
’s boats. Germany had brought the war to the waters off New York.
⁶⁰

The
Carolina
was, in fact, the last of U-151’s prey on June 2. All day long, frantic wireless messages had been arriving at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and other coastal stations from vessels claiming they were under attack from a German submarine. By the time the U-boat’s gunners shot and sank the
Carolina
, they had already dispatched two cargo steamers and three schooners, all American, in the waters fifty miles off Barnegat Light, New Jersey. Captain Kenneth Lowry of the freighter
Texel
had been shocked when a German officer—perhaps the same man who would later hail the
Carolina
—boarded his ship, shook hands, and then announced in faultless English, ‘I’m sorry I have to do this, Captain, but this is war, you know. Get your men off as quickly as possible.”
⁶¹

Over the previous week, the submarine had laid floating mines in the busy shipping lanes off the mouths of the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays and near the Ambrose Channel into New York, and had used a scissor-like device to cut the underwater telegraph cables linking New York to Nova Scotia and Panama. Now, on June 2, Captain Heinrich von Nostitz ordered 448 people (and Micky, the
Texel
’s cat) into eighteen lifeboats. Over the next two days, survivors landed on New Jersey beaches or were rescued at sea by ships that brought them into Delaware, Boston, Hoboken, and New York. By then, thirteen of the
Carolina
’s passengers and crew had drowned when a storm overturned the ship’s motor launch.
⁶²

U-151 was one of six submarines dispatched by the German admiralty in the late spring and summer of 1918 to wreak havoc along the American East Coast. The American troops and supplies pouring into France were fortifying the Allies to score the war’s knockout blow. By the summer of 1918, ten thousand American men a day boarded troop transports, most of them embarking at Hoboken on the makeshift flotilla of British cargo ships, US Navy vessels, and converted ocean liners that made up the “Atlantic Ferry.” Every possible corner of these floating barracks was crammed with doughboys; one private aboard the steamer
Kashmir
described his berth as “the blackest, foulest, most congested hole that I ever set foot into.” The liner
Aquitania
carried six thousand troops; the
Leviathan
could carry over ten thousand. U-boat raids, Berlin decided, might daunt the Americans and temporarily halt their transatlantic traffic, giving the German army breathing space for a counteroffensive. While most transports sailed in convoy, escorted by vigilant American and English cruisers and destroyers, a crafty U-boat captain might get lucky. If submarines torpedoed a large transport, the loss of life could dwarf that of the
Lusitania
disaster and spread terror up and down the American coast.
⁶³

As survivors of U-151’s rampage straggled across the New York docks and told their stories to waiting reporters, the destroyer
Preble
left the harbor in pursuit of the predator. In the city, most New Yorkers were reasonably sure they were protected from direct submarine attack by a wire cable net strung across the Narrows, by the gunboat
Amphitrite
stationed there, and by small armed boats called “Submarine Chasers” that patrolled the bay and Long Island Sound. They would have been alarmed, however, to learn how close U-151 came to their shores. From the deck of the submarine on the night of May 28, just days before the attack on the
Carolina
, Lieutenant Frederick Koerner later recalled, “we had our first sight of the bright lights of Broadway, the great glow that hangs over New York City after dark. The splendor of the Western metropolis filled us with a restless longing.”
⁶⁴

What some New Yorkers feared in the wake of the June 2 attacks was a new and terrible weapon, one that could attack from the sky. As they knew, the Germans had used zeppelins and airplanes to drop bombs on London and Paris. The artist Joseph Pennell had unsettled them with a Liberty Loan poster that envisioned a shattered Statue of Liberty and a flaming Manhattan conquered by German submarines and planes. Now, the Arctic explorer Robert Peary and aviator Alan Hawley announced that U-boats might easily carry “seaplanes” to bomb coastal cities. Army aviators taking off from Governors Island surveyed the city at night, noting that the “winding path of lights” on Broadway might guide enemy bombers. Under police orders, the city practiced a nighttime blackout of electric signs and most public lighting, with authorities warning that “New York may know to the full the experience of London, which has total darkness at night.” They also installed air raid sirens at factories around the city, encouraged office workers to practice emergency evacuations, and told residents to seek shelter in their cellars in case of an attack. Most New Yorkers saw the threat as remote (it was, in fact, nonexistent, since the Germans had not placed planes on U-boats, despite Peary’s and Hawley’s claim). But on July 1, a siren drill at a factory sent scared people scurrying into basements throughout the South Bronx. Eight days later, another siren test at the Con Edison plant on East Fortieth Street alarmed thousands in midtown, who asked each other, “Is it an air raid?” A new kind of war had arrived at the city’s doorstep, at least as a possibility.
⁶⁵

The Statue of Liberty and lower Manhattan are battered by an imagined German U-boat and airplane attack in Joseph Pennell’s poster, 1918. Lithographic poster by Joseph Pennell,
That Liberty Shall Not Perish from the Earth: Buy Liberty Bonds. Fourth Liberty Loan,
1918. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.

Over the course of six months in mid-1918, U-151 and five other submarines sank a total of ninety-one American, British, Norwegian, and other ships worth $25 million in coastal waters from North Carolina to Newfoundland. By the time the last U-boat returned to Germany, they had taken 368 lives. The submarines, moreover, had successfully eluded the US Navy. But the German admiralty could not really count the raids as successes. Not one troopship had passed before the crosshairs of a U-boat’s periscope. While von Nostitz and his fellow captains were sinking schooners, nearly 1.5 million American soldiers crossed safely to France in convoys. The raids were a last gasp of a navy that, in a matter of weeks, would be facing mutiny and defeat.
⁶⁶

The U-boat campaign did have two notable effects, one of them in Germany itself. Flaunted by German newspapers, the raids brought a moment of bitter pleasure to a war-weary population. The American sitting “on the other side of the great herring pond” was now feeling “the fist of the war lord,” the Cologne
Volks Zeitung
crowed. On the eve of German collapse, propagandists spun fantasies of New York’s downfall. Doughboys on the Western Front must have scratched their heads when they read leaflets dropped from German balloons that described how “thousands of Brooklynites are sleeping in cellars fearing a night bombardment. Some of the wealthiest are moving toward Chicago. The few Wall Street brokers who must remain downtown in Manhattan are engaging cots in Turkish baths in the Woolworth building and other skyscrapers.”
⁶⁷
Sprung from the fertile imagination of a German government writer, the leaflet did little to demoralize American troops, whatever effect its fantasies might have had on German readers.

The other effect of the U-boat raids, felt in New York and along the coast, was the conviction that “hyphenates” and “pro-Germanists” surely had played some mysterious role in the attacks. Surely, many easterners thought, German Americans must have been using local beaches to flash signal lights to guide the subs to their targets. Some allegations were even more outlandish; a seaman swore to reporters that he had glimpsed an officer from the U-140, which had sunk his tanker, in a New York saloon—no doubt sheltered by his immigrant countrymen. No hard evidence ever surfaced to implicate German Americans in the U-boat attacks, but this did not prevent the navy from prohibiting anyone of German or Austrian birth from entering a new “barred zone” running the entire length of the Atlantic coast. Although a few German-born drivers of milk trucks were arrested for entering the zone along the Hudson River, most German New Yorkers, accustomed to such treatment by now, responded with sullen compliance.
⁶⁸

Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, arrived in New York to the accompaniment of church bells, sirens, foghorns, and singing in the streets. On the Lower East Side, the day became “a great block party,” resident Lewis Feuer later recalled. “The Kaiser in effigy was berated, while American flags and banners waved from lines strung from houses across the street. The children sang ‘Over There’ and ‘My country, ’tis of thee’; the men in uniform were heroes.” Other festive days followed, as the Atlantic Ferry started running in reverse and transport ships began to disgorge thousands of new veterans onto the harbor’s docks.
⁶⁹

It was a delirious, exciting moment for New Yorkers. Doughboys were returning to a city the war had transformed into the world’s leading creditor, the world’s busiest port, and the cultural capital of what would soon be dubbed the Jazz Age. Men who had left New York feeling they had something to prove came back proudly, with memories and stories of their friends who had fallen dead or wounded on the battlefield. Irish New Yorkers reveled in the prowess of their Fighting Sixty-Ninth and its scrappy chaplain, Father Francis Duffy, whose bravery and leadership under fire earned him more decorations than any other clergyman in the army’s history. Manhattan Italians helped reelect one of their own, a gallant young army aviator named Fiorello La Guardia, to Congress. Abraham Krotoshinsky was no longer just a Polish Jewish barber on Park Row; he was also a decorated hero who had helped rescue the Seventy-Seventh Division’s “Lost Battalion” during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. He returned to a city where many of his brethren had come to embrace the Allied cause, encouraged by the overthrow of the czar by Russian revolutionaries and by British promises of a Jewish state in Palestine. Black New York’s own 369th Infantry, the Harlem Hellfighters, marched home with the bitter knowledge that most black enlistees had been consigned to menial labor by the US Army. But they could take pride in the combat role their unit had been allowed to play by the French army and in the Croix de Guerre awarded to their members. “We return,” W. E. B. Du Bois wrote for the black veterans. “We return from fighting. We return fighting.”
⁷⁰