On June 13, 1942, Coastguardsman John Cullen stumbled upon one of the most outrageous acts of war that, until 9/11, had ever taken place on American soil. During a routine midnight beach patrol along a dark and foggy beach on Long Island, he came across a group of men dragging their boat from the surf up onto the beach. Their responses to his questions, and their subsequent attempt to bribe him with a fistful of money, led him to suspect something dire and dangerous. Without any weapons save a flashlight, he wisely backed away into the fog and ran back to the Coast Guard station for assistance. By the time he and his mates had returned with weapons at ready, the group of men were gone.

John Cullen reported the situation to his commander and subsequently to the FBI. Acting on this information and working quickly and efficiently all the men in “Operation Pastorious”, the code name of the German invasion of America designed to disrupt our industrial capabilities, were captured.

FDR ordered that a military commission hear the case. This was the first such tribunal to be convened since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and was conducted in the strictest secrecy. The prosecution team was headed by Attorney General Francis Biddle and the Army’s Judge Advocate General Myron Cramer. 

The trial took one month and all men were found guilty. Two were sentenced to prison, one for thirty years, and one for life. The other 6 were sentenced to the electric chair, a sentence that was carried out at noon the day of their sentencing.

When the nation is at war, the capture of enemy combatants must be dealt with swiftly and judiciously. Anyone found attempting acts of war within our borders must be dealt with exactly as FDR did.

 

It was the winter from hell. Temperatures below zero, snow up to the men’s knees and blinding snow storm blizzards. It was, by all accounts, the worst winter in Europe in centuries. To make matters worse, January 1945, had been one of the worst months of fighting that the European Theater had seen. The Allied Army, after being caught by surprise and losing ground to Hitler’s forces in the Battle of the Bulge had fought back to regain all the ground that had been lost. Slowly, yard by freezing yard, they had taken back land that had already been won, two months ago, and then lost. Finally at the end of January they stood on the edge of Germany, right up against the Siegfried line.

It had been horrifyingly hard work--sleepless 20 below zero nights with inadequate protection from the cold, exhausting assaults through knee-deep crusted snow against massive light arms and armored resistance, hand to hand combat in many cases, and then the impossible task of digging into the frozen ground to hunker down for another sleepless night before doing it all again the next day.

It was an offensive strategy that Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton all believed in so strongly that against all human reasonableness, they pressured the men beyond belief to perform acts of extreme heroism, courage, commitment, that lesser men would have given up on long ago. Why Eisenhower did this is a lesson to us today that we must understand.

There is no doubt that Eisenhower could have stopped his offensive assaults when he hit the Siegfried Line. A massive protective barrier, it gave the Germans the cover they needed to regroup. No reasonable military person would have thought it wrong to stop the offense, rebuild the lines, replace the tired, hungry and freezing veterans with new blood, and strengthen the weak spots in preparation for a spring final assault upon Germany. But Eisenhower had played football and everyone that has ever played the game knows the one hard and fast rule…The best defense is a good offense!!  And so, with exhausted men, in icy cold conditions, he ordered the offensive assault on the Siegfried Line.

It was Patton that said it best—“In war, the only sure defense is offense, and the efficiency of offense depends on the warlike souls of those conducting it.”  And so the American army slogged forward, bone tired, famished, battle weary and frozen, and eventually pushed the Germans all the way back to Berlin.

Today, in the war on terror, it would be good to know that our commander-in-chief and our military leaders all know and understand this principle. It would be even better for our safety and security if the American public knew this and believed in it. If they don’t, we are in for failure after failure in our attempts to defeat the terrorists until such time as someone comes along who does believe in it and crushes the terrorists in an overwhelming offense. 

So instead of chanting “Defense, Defense” as the fans do at football and basketball games, we need to start chanting—“Offense, Offense!!!  If we don't, prepare to lose ground to the terrorists....

Anyone reading my blog by now realizes how strongly I feel that intelligence gathering procedures are the most important part of any battle or war. As poor as our American intelligence has been in the present war, poor intelligence is not new to warfare in North America.

In 1758, British and Colonial provincials made a major error in their first assault upon Fort Carillon (later renamed Ticonderoga by the British), a French held fort on the waterway entrance from New York to Canada.  Although the British forces greatly outnumbered the French forces 16,000 to 4,000, the French forces won the battle that day.  General Sun Tzu would have loved the battle because one of the major reasons that the British lost was one of Sun Tzu’s favorite principals. 

Sun Tzu, if you do not already know, was a Chinese general that lived 2,500 years ago and wrote the manual—“The Art of War”—a manual read around the world by military organizations.  In it Sun Tzu outlines several principals that are generally recognized as necessary to win a war.  One of those states, “All warfare is based upon deception”. 

If only the British commander, General James Abercrombie, had read the manual before the battle, he might have been more successful.  But apparently he had never heard of Sun Tzu.  However, the French commander, Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, whether he had read Sun Tzu or not, applied the principal of deception with wondrous results.

Knowing the British would send scouts (spies) to watch the fort preparations, Montcalm skillfully hid the main fortifications from view and created what looked like to the British scouts to be a flimsy half hearted weak fortress. With the British scouts looking down on the busy French forces, Montcalm ordered all his men to look busy building the weak fortress.

The scouts brought the word back that the fortress was weak and vulnerable. Abercrombie sent more spies to check it out and they reported back with the same information. Acting on this information, and unaware that there was not only a strong impenetrable fortress hidden in the woods, but also a horrible array of fallen timbers with sharpened points hidden in front of the deception, Abercrombie ordered the assault. 

Historians note that Abercrombie lost the battle because he lost control of his forces and the attack was badly managed. However, the real reason he lost was his poor intelligence reports.

Let’s hope that American military experts have heard of Sun Tzu and are fully aware that the enemy has heard of him also.