Now I Know (15 page)

The ship’s owners asked their insurer to compensate them for the loss of the 230 or so slaves “lost” at sea, but instead the insurers filed suit. The jury sided with the ship’s owners, finding that the slaves were no different than horses and that the ship’s captain had the discretion to throw some to their deaths to save the rest.

The insurers appealed. Fortunately, the appellate court found that the captain and crew’s mismanagement of the voyage led to the substandard conditions, and further, on December 1, before the forty-two male slaves were thrown overboard, it had rained, which would have alleviated a lot of the water shortages. The appellate court likened the crew’s acts to murder (which, to modern ears, this clearly is) and ordered a new trial. There is no evidence that this second trial ever occurred.

The insurer never paid the ship’s owners—but that was not the slave merchants’ largest loss. The story of the
Zong
massacre would be told repeatedly by abolitionists, as the repugnant acts of the ship’s crew and ownership hit a chord with the general public.

One of the more notable strategic decisions of the Civil War was the North’s blockade of Confederate ports, cutting the South off from imports, particularly from the Caribbean and Europe. The blockade had mixed success. Smaller, faster ships known as “blockade runners” found it possible to get past the waiting Union navy, with five out of every six ships successfully evading danger. However, the blockade runners were much smaller than the typical cargo ships, and the 500-ship-strong Union blockade managed to destroy 1,500 blockade runners during the course of the war.

The blockade likely also led to the enlistment of African-Americans in the Union army.

On April 12, 1861, the Civil War began as Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter, a Union stronghold on South Carolina’s coastline. Both North and South mobilized their male populations, calling many to arms. But it would not be until January 31, 1863, that the First and Second South Carolina Volunteers, the first African-American battalions, would take to battle for the Union. A mix of bigotry and distrust caused the Northern leadership to delay enlisting African-Americans, and there was the question of whether rank-and-file whites would be willing to fight alongside freedmen or recent slaves.

On the evening of May 12, 1862, the officers of the CSS
Planter
, a Confederate military transport, went ashore for the night. The crew, made up of slaves, was ordered to stay onboard. At 3
A.M.
the next morning, led by pilot Robert Smalls, they carried out a daring escape from the South. After commandeering the ship, the crew steamed off to a nearby wharf where their families were hiding, took them aboard, and made their way up the South Carolina coastline. They signaled, as they’d normally do, whenever they passed near a Confederate fort—the forts, therefore, believed their early-morning cruise was nothing out of the ordinary.

After passing Fort Sumter at about 4:30
A.M.
, Smalls piloted the ship straight toward the Union blockade. The first ship to see the
Planter
was the USS
Onward
, which took aim at the Confederate ship but, seeing the white flag of surrender (a bed sheet) on the mast, boarded it instead. The
Planter
carried four heavy artillery guns, ammunition, and classified documents including a code book and the location of mines within Charleston’s harbor. The capture of the
Planter
was a major boon for the Union. Smalls, who would later become a Congressman, quickly became a hero in the North.

Smalls’s newfound fame earned him a meeting with Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War. Smalls used the opportunity to advocate for the enlistment of other African-Americans, seeing service as a way to help bring the former slaves into mainstream society. Smalls was successful. Following the meeting, Stanton issued an order to Smalls, allowing him to enlist up to 5,000 African-Americans in the Union-controlled South Carolina area. Those men became the First and Second South Carolina Volunteers.

As war swept through Europe in the late 1930s and 1940s, it became increasingly clear that the previously genteel methods of killing each other were no longer going to cut it. On June 22, 1940, the British government established a group called the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret group of spies charged with finding nontraditional ways to disrupt Nazi plans.

The SOE had roughly 13,000 operatives. Many provided support for other fighters, typically to people fighting in the Resistance; for example, in 1943, four SOE operatives in Greece assisted local freedom fighters in the successful kidnapping of the Nazi governor of Crete. But others were saboteurs—and creative ones at that. Which is why, in 1941, the SEO purchased a hundred or so dead rats, formerly used in medical experiments.

Dead rats generally aren’t worth much and, if anything, are a nuisance. (Live rats are probably more so.) This was certainly true for Germans and British alike. Rats had a habit of getting onto trains, and at times, they’d make their way to the boiler room of a steam engine. Firemen, whose job it was to keep tossing coal into the furnace to keep the steam coming, would habitually toss any dead rats into the furnace. So the SOE agents laced these hundred dead rats with a little bit of plastic explosives, enough to sabotage the train and its delivery but not so much as to cause a major disaster (which would cause massive loss of life and prompt an investigation). The rats were then shipped into Germany.

But they were intercepted along the way.

What sounds like a failure, though, turned out to be a success. The Nazis had stopped the first and only shipment of dead rat bombs, but they didn’t know that. All dead rats were now suspect, and German firemen had to be on constant lookout for dead rats among the coal heaps.

The SOE concluded that the subsequent drop in efficiency of German trains was a boon, albeit from their perspective, an accidental one. As the
Guardian
would later report, official word from the SOE was that “the trouble caused to [the Nazis] was a much greater success to us than if the rats had actually been used.”

With rare exception, American involvement in World War II was focused in Europe and the Pacific. Few acts of war took place on the North American continent, a function primarily of the United States’s geographic isolation. But this did not keep the Germans from attempting to bring the war Stateside. In fact, on June 13, 1942, four German operatives landed at Amagansett, New York, near the eastern tip of Long Island. Three days later, another four Nazis came ashore at Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, just south of Jacksonville.

Their orders? To wreak havoc on America’s infrastructure.

The eight were trained as saboteurs and given targets: hydroelectric plants, a chemical plant, shipping locks in the Ohio River, and, of particular note, the railway industry. Hell Gate Bridge in New York, a four-track bridge that allowed for the transport of both passengers and freight across the East River bordering Manhattan, was specifically targeted, as was Newark, New Jersey’s main train station. Horseshoe Curve, a railroad pass in central Pennsylvania that connected the Pittsburgh steel industry to the industrialized population east, was also on the list of places to be sabotaged, as were the Pennsylvania Railroad’s nearby repair yards. Had the plan succeeded, America’s industrial complex would have stalled.

The plot failed when two of the conspirators instead attempted to defect. George Dasch, who headed up the team, went to the FBI in Washington, D.C., instead of to his German-assigned target. He attempted to turn himself in and, with co-conspirator Ernst Burger (an American citizen), told the FBI about the plot. However, the two were written off as mere nutcases. Dasch was not to be ignored, however. He returned to the FBI, dropped over $80,000 on the desk—money he received to execute the planned sabotage—and was taken seriously. After hours of interrogation, Burger and the other six Nazis were arrested.

Justice was swift. In July, all eight would-be saboteurs—including Dasch—were convicted of various war crimes and sentenced to death by electrocution. On August 8, 1942, six of the eight were indeed executed, but Burger and Dasch were spared. President Roosevelt commuted Burger’s sentence to life in prison and Dasch’s to thirty years. Six years later (after the war), President Truman granted clemency to both so long as they accepted deportation to American-occupied Germany.

The two lived out their remaining days—Burger lived to be sixty-nine years old, Dasch died at age eighty-nine—as men without a country. The United States viewed them as enemy combatants, never issuing them a pardon, whereas the pair’s German compatriots viewed them as traitors who turned on their fellow soldiers.

During World War II, Nazi Germany took many prisoners of war (POWs), as is common in warfare. Nazi concentration camps were the scenes of endless horrors, but POW camps were relatively humane (again, relatively). The Nazis even allowed the home nations of the POWs to send them mail. Specifically, the Nazis allowed the Allies to send care packages to those imprisoned, which included items such as playing cards and board games.

The Allies used this minor bit of hospitality to their strategic advantage.

The United States worked with the United States Playing Card Company to come up with a special type of Bicycle-brand playing cards. Those cards held escape maps within them, printed directly on the cards. As recounted by the company’s official website, when moistened, the cards’ glue—a special type of glue used for this purpose—would weaken. The cards’ faces would peel away, revealing detailed escape plans.

The United Kingdom pulled off a similar trick. In 1941, British intelligence worked with John Waddington Ltd., the UK company licensed to make Monopoly games, to produce a special version of the classic board game. According to
Mental Floss
magazine, these sets came with a cornucopia of clandestine goodies. Maps, printed on silk to avoid destruction by weather, were hidden within the box. The games also included metal files and magnetic compasses to facilitate an escape. And included beneath the Monopoly money was real money—French, German, and Italian notes were among the fake bills.

These board games would be collectors’ items today, but unfortunately finding one would be a trick all to itself. All the spy-enhanced Monopoly sets were destroyed after the war, according to
ABC News
.

Norfolk, Virginia is about 600 or so miles from Jacksonville, Florida. Depending on what route you take and how fast you drive, it would take you about nine or ten hours to deliver a piece of mail—say, a postcard—from one city to the other. If you took a plane, assuming you weren’t held up in security or delayed on the tarmac, it would take just over an hour and a half. That’s pretty good, but for decades, postal authorities aspired to deliver the mail faster. Much faster.

And in 1959, the U.S. Postal Service managed to deliver 3,000 pieces of mail from the Norfolk area to Jacksonville in twenty-two minutes. How?

It put them on a nuclear missile.

In the early 1930s and into the 1940s, many postal services were experimenting with the idea of using rocketry as a way to expedite mail delivery. The first known attempts were in Austria in 1931, but the experiments failed to yield long-term use. Around the same time, a German businessman and rocket scientist named Gerhard Zucker became an evangelist for the idea, traveling around both Germany and the United Kingdom to find an audience for his ideas. He ran some test flights in the south of England with mixed results; some of the envelopes exploded along with one of the rockets, but another flight successfully delivered the test mail. No one bought Zuckers’s service, but others tried to recreate it themselves.