Oh, it happened; British troops sacked Washington DC in 1812 – but that was when Canada was a serious military base for the British.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/moranmustangs.org\/johnt\/files\/2010\/01\/WhiteHouseBurning.jpg\")
British troops burning Washington DC in 1812. Some liberals claim this was the Tea Party.<\/p><\/div>\n
But as Canada receded into relatively pacific independence and various other powers’ attempts to turn Mexico and the Caribbean into bases succumbed to America’s enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine (and, mostly, tropical diseases), America’s position as a great, isolated, isolationist power gradually coalesced.<\/p>\n
Not that other powers didn’t want to take a run at it.<\/p>\n
Germany in particular was fascinated with cracking America’s invincibility \u00a0Back in 1899, a German naval captain, Adolf Golzen, drew up a plan to blockade New York and Long Island and, as a coup de grace,\u00a0<\/em>land German infantry on Long Island to create a bridgehead. \u00a0These troops would consolidate a foothold on the then-sparsely-populated island, while raiding into Manhattan. \u00a0It seems far-fetched, and it was, although not perhaps for the reasons you’d think; the force the Germans planned to land may have outnumbered the entire regular US military at the time.<\/p>\n During World War I, the Germans pondered building Zeppelins that could bomb New York – but those plans were shelved at the end of the war.<\/p>\n Hitler pulled them out of the file cabinet when he started planning his war. \u00a0New York in particular obsessed him; seeing it as a major Jewish population center, he dreamed of pounding New York into rubble.<\/p>\n He sent the German aircraft industry onto a long quest to build a bomber that could carry a ton of bombs to New York and return – and had his planners develop lists of targets for them to hit once they were <\/em>built.<\/p>\n The Messerschmidt 264 "Amerika", designed to be able to reach targets in America as well as prowl the Atlantic to find targets for the U-boats. Oddly - for a nation known for great cars and engineering - the Germans never developed an aircraft engine capable of reliable long-range performance. .<\/p><\/div>\n To his last days, as the Russians poured into Germany, his scientists worked on fanciful guided missile and long-range jets capable of bombing the city.<\/p>\n But as the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the Germans had a much more practical means of attacking the US. \u00a0The fall of France had given their U-boats – Unterseeboote, <\/em>or\u00a0submarines – bases only 2,000 miles from the US coast.<\/p>\n And the commander of the German U-boat force, Admiral Karl D\u00f6nitz, saw the opportunity.<\/p>\n But at the beginning of 1942, he had only five boats available that could easily reach the east coast of the United States. \u00a0Obsessed with choking off Britain, Hitler had ordered the construction of hundreds of smaller “Type VII” U-Boats, capable of about thirty days of cruising, enough to patrol to the mid-Atlantic without much support.<\/p>\n German Type VII (top) and Type IX U-boats. Note that the Type IX was about twenty feet shorter than the typical American submarine of World War II, which were designed for the even longer ranges of the Pacific Ocean.<\/p><\/div>\n There were fewer of the larger, longer-legged Type IX boats – a few dozen, in early 1941 – and many of them were busy prowling the South Atlantic and even as far afield as the Indian Ocean to raid British commerce. \u00a0Of the entire German U-Boat fleet, only five Type IX boats (U-123, U-130, U-66, U-109, and U-125) were available when Germany declared war on the US..<\/p>\n The U-505, on permanent display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, was a Type IXc boat that spent its 11 war patrols in the South Atlantic and Caribbean - but also patrolled off the US East Coast, sinking a few ships. One of few U-boats to survive the war, it was captured by US forces in 1944; we'll come back to that in a couple of years. And if you've ever taken a tour of the cramped, claustrophobic U-Boat, do try to imagine what it was like riding the thing for 80-days at a shot -a typical patrol for a Type IX boat. <\/p><\/div>\n The Admiral called it Operation Paukenschlag<\/em>\u00a0– “Drumbeat”.<\/p>\n D\u00f6nitz gave Drumbeat a big patrol area – from the Chesapeake Bay up to the Saint Lawrence – and told them to focus on on bigger ships. over 10,000 tons.<\/p>\n And so in late December of 1941, the five boats sallied forth.<\/p>\n It may seem incredible in retrospect, for those who remember the fleets that the US and Britain sent forth later in the war – the thousands and thousands of ships that carpeted the English Channel on D-Day, the thousands of warships and thousands more support and supply ships that carried the war across the Pacific – but the US east coast was very sparsely defended in early 1942. \u00a0To watch the entire US coast, the Coast Guard had a few dozen aircraft, mostly obsolete, and three operational cutters, along with a polyglot collection of WWI-vintage patrol boats, converted yachts and wooden “sub-chasers”. \u00a0The Army Air Force had a few dozen bombers based on the East Coast. \u00a0And on any given day, the Navy would have two destroyers, and the AAF a couple of short-ranged B-25 bombers, on duty to guard the entire Eastern Seaboard.<\/p>\n So short was the US of aircraft to watch for U-boats on the East Coast, the Army Air Force was forced to enlist civilian aviation enthusiasts. So was formed the "Civil Air Patrol". Today, they focus on finding wayward hunters and snowmobilers; seventy years ago, they scoured the ocean for U-boats. A U-boat couldn't tell the difference between a private plane and a patrolling bomber loaded with depth charges - so they'd submerge, greatly shortening their range and hampering their search for targets. And occasionally the CAP would radio a target to the Air Force, which could take more aggressive action. Ro so went the theory; while coordination improved with time, inter-service rivalry and focus on other areas of the war hindered such coordination.<\/p><\/div>\n Naturally, inter-service rivalry being what it was, these units could not communicate with each other, much less coordinate their efforts.<\/p>\n It was 70 years ago today, about 75 miles off the coast of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina – directly east of the spot where the Wright Brothers had made their first flight a little over 38 years earlier – that U66<\/a>, commanded by Korvettenkapit\u00e4n <\/em>Richard Zapp, stalked the American tanker <\/a>Allan Jackson<\/a>, \u00a0<\/em>a 7,000 toni tanker loaded with 72,000 barrels of oil and bound for New York. \u00a0(We’ll encounter the U66 again in a couple of years).<\/p>\n The SS Allan Jackson.<\/p><\/div>\n Zapp hit the tanker with two torpedoes and slipped away. \u00a013 of the ship’s crew of 35 were picked up the next day by an American destroyer.<\/p>\n Zapp returns from patrol, atop the conning tower of the U66. The boat would be sunk in one of the most bizarre incidents of the war (well get to that in 2014). But although over 3\/4 of U-boat crewman would die during the war, Zapp survived the war.<\/p><\/div>\n In and of itself, the sinking of the Jackson <\/em>was a minor event – one of thousands of ships sunk by U-boats during the war.<\/p>\n But the episode was the first in what became an epic – and largely unreported – bloodbath along the East Coast, and one of the greatest examples of bureaucratic incompetence in the history of this country.<\/p>\n A freighter, down by the stern off the US coast, viewed from the conning tower of the U-boat that had just torpedoed it.<\/p><\/div>\n The British – who, remember, were reading Germany’s U-boat communications in very nearly real-time by this point, thanks to their code-breaking operation that we talked about six months ago <\/a>– had warned the Roosevelt Administration at the highest levels that Paukenschlag <\/em>was underway, and to expect U-boat attacks.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/imgres?q=Messerchmidt+ME264&um=1&hl=en&client=safari&sa=N&rls=en&biw=1394&bih=732&tbm=isch&tbnid=FfigGO8cCY1ScM:&imgrefurl=http:\/\/www.militaryfactory.com\/aircraft\/detail.asp%3Faircraft_id%3D759&docid=qgxNodg472HR9M&imgurl=http:\/\/www.militaryfactory.com\/aircraft\/imgs\/messerschmitt-me264-amerika_2.jpg&w=800&h=335&ei=B4cRT8OMOsGQiAK52aTPDQ&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=131&vpy=174&dur=455&hovh=134&hovw=321&tx=158&ty=47&sig=110984773684888409363&page=1&tbnh=64&tbnw=153&start=0&ndsp=28&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0\")
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