The Baltimore Sabotage Cell: German Agents, American Traitors, and The U-Boat Deutschland During World War I
Dwight R. Messimer. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2015. 280 pp. Appendix. Notes. Biblio. Index. Illus. $35.95.
Reviewed by John Abbatiello
After reading the first few chapters of Dwight Messimer’s The Baltimore Sabotage Cell, this reviewer was not sure if it was a spy novel or a work of history. Superbly researched with extensive explanations of context, the book is certainly an important addition to World War I historical scholarship. A former history professor at California State University–San Jose and an Army veteran, Messimer is one of the world’s leading experts on World War I U-boat operations. His lengthy list of publications includes The Merchant U-Boat: Adventures of the Deutschland (1988), Find and Destroy: Anti-Submarine Warfare in World War I (2001), and Verschollen: World War I U-Boat Losses (2002), all of which were published by the Naval Institute Press.
In a unique study, the author links two important concepts from our nation’s history—World War I German sabotage in America and commercial U-boat blockade-runners—by connecting them to one American citizen named Paul Hilken, a Baltimore businessman with strong German sympathies. Hilken, who was never arrested or charged with a crime, served both as an organizer of a sabotage ring and as a frontman for receiving, berthing, cargo exchange, and crew accommodation of the Deutschland, Germany’s large cargo U-boat designed to break the British blockade and open trade in scarce resources with the United States.
The book opens with a narrative of how Hilken became involved in sabotage and the German government funded his operations. Beginning in 1915, German agents and American sympathizers started fires on merchant vessels and in American factories and spread vials of anthrax and glanders, bacterial infections affecting cattle and draft animals. German army and navy intelligence agencies funded and directed the sabotage campaign.
Hilken was also involved in setting up receiving stations for Germany’s new merchant U-boats, capable of eluding British patrol vessels in order to conduct trade with the United States. Messimer provides detailed accounts of the Deutschland’s two commercial voyages to America. The first one was entirely successful, with the U-boat bringing 163 tons of high-quality dyestuffs to Baltimore. In the years leading up to the war, Germany had provided American industry with 75 percent of its dyestuff requirements; German agents sold the highly coveted cargo at a $6 million profit. Additionally, the Baltimore elite regarded Captain Paul König and his Deutschland crew as heroes and treated them to dinners and gifts to celebrate their achievement. An enthusiastic German-American community saw them as breakers of the “illegal” British blockade, and did not realize that the majority of the crew were German naval reservists who had attended their navy’s submarine training school. The return voyage brought 90 tons of nickel, 401 tons of rubber, and high-quality diesel fuel back to a German war industry suffering from an increasingly effective British blockade.
The second voyage enjoyed less American support due to a brutal U-boat campaign in European waters; fewer German-Americans in New London, Connecticut, where the submarines arrived in November 1916; and labor issues at the docks. Hilken had brought African-American stevedores from his Baltimore operation to do the unloading and loading of cargo in New London, much to the chagrin of the local white dockworkers there. The second voyage brought dyestuffs, pharmaceuticals, and securities to America and returned more rubber and nickel—as well as tin, steel, and silver—to Germany. In the meantime, the U-boat Bremen, a second merchant submarine, was lost at sea. The second Deutschland merchant-submarine voyage to America would be the last, since the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917.
Messimer skillfully discusses issues of diplomatic complaints by the British and French and of American industrial requirements during the war years. He closes the narrative with a history of the Deutschland’s conversion to a war submarine and her three long-range combat cruises. On 24 November 1918, the Deutschland—now named U-155—surrendered to the Royal Navy as part of the Armistice agreement.
Few historians possess a command of the sources on these linked subjects, and Messimer skillfully mines German and American documents to support his narrative. His ability to weave important context into the story—such as race relations, diplomatic negotiations, industrial requirements, and American traitors—makes The Baltimore Sabotage Cell a fascinating study. This reviewer commends the Naval Institute Press for securing yet another important contribution to naval history.
Dark Places of the Earth: The Voyage of the Slave Ship Antelope
Jonathan M. Bryant. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2015. 416 pp. Illus. Notes. $28.95.
Reviewed by Andrew C. A. Jampoler
Slavery was a profitable business for centuries before it was finally recognized as a heinous crime. Throughout the 18th century, everyone in the transatlantic slave trade (except its victims) made money, and often a great deal of it. Slave labor made possible the gold and silver mines and the sugar, rice, tobacco, and cotton—especially cotton—plantations of the New World, the resulting wealth of which made colonialism work, Atlantic trade profitable, and industrialization possible.
It’s difficult to exaggerate slave labor’s role in the international commerce of the 19th century. In 1860, the last year before the Civil War, the United States exported some 5 million bales of cotton, together amounting to roughly 60 percent of all American exports that year. Three-quarters went to feed the spindles of Great Britain and the rest went to those on the continent, sustaining an industry that employed hundreds of thousands and clothed millions. It’s reasonable to assume that not a pound of this cotton left the United States without having first been planted, trimmed, picked, ginned, and baled by a slave.
Slavery remained a lucrative business long after slave trading by Americans and importing slaves into the United States were outlawed in 1808, practically simultaneously with similar prohibitions by the United Kingdom. It continued to be a good business during the decades that followed until the ownership of human beings was itself slowly abolished: in 1834 in their empire by the British; in the United States not until 1865, when the 13th Amendment was ratified; and even later than that elsewhere, in Brazil, for example, not until 1888.
Jonathan Bryant’s thoroughly researched and engaging story of the cruise of the Spanish slaver Antelope focuses on seven years (1820–27) near the beginning of that era of illicit trade and legal ownership, a straddle that in the United States guaranteed the escalating tensions and malfunctioning political compromises that finally erupted in war between the states. As Bryant’s tale of the Antelope’s trials unfolds, he provides enough of the complex political and legal history of slavery in the 19th century to give the context essential to understand what’s happening at sea and in court, and enough about the players in this drama—some like Francis Scott Key familiar, some not—to make it come alive.
Organized in four parts (“Sea,” “Savannah,” “Washington,” and “Legacies”) and bracketed by a prologue and epilogue, Bryant’s story begins with the departure of the brig Antelope from Havana on 24 August 1819 for what her owners expected would be a year-long cruise to obtain several hundred slaves, whom when sold in Cuba would deliver a rich profit to her owners. By the time the Antelope was arrested by the U.S. Revenue Cutter Dallas off the coast of Florida with 281 slaves in her hold on 29 June 1820, what was to have been a routine round trip to West Africa had turned into something very different.
Six months earlier, together with several other slavers off Cabinda, West Africa, the Antelope had been captured by the privateer Arraganta (formerly the Columbia out of Baltimore), which was partway through an identity change meant to align her name and registry with her commission as a privateer. With the Arraganta’s captain and some of her crew crowded on board and perhaps 350 slaves crammed into the Antelope’s hold, the two ships set off across the Atlantic. Weeks later, after her consort ran aground off Brazil, the Antelope continued on alone, searching for a market for her valuable cargo along the Antilles and then up the chain of the Bahamas.
Her arrest by the Dallas began a legal process that inched its way—excruciatingly slowly for the Antelope’s living cargo, who by the end of July had been reduced to 258, more than 100 of them under ten years of age—up through the American court system, starting at district court in Savannah; moving through circuit court in Milledgeville, Georgia; and ending up (three times) before the Supreme Court. At every stage in the process, Bryant reminds us, key decisions were made by individuals or reached by majorities who were themselves slave owners, sitting in places (Savannah, tiny Milledgeville, and Washington, D.C., which was no less southern than Savannah but in 1820 with 13,000 residents nearly twice its size) governed largely by slave owners.
Between 1820 and 1827, the questions the Antelope’s lawyers posed to all of the judges who heard her case—some more than once—did not change: Was the Antelope’s cargo free people wrongly kidnapped and confined, or were they merchandise? If they were merchandise, to whom did these slaves belong, and how were they to be apportioned among Spanish, Portuguese, and other claimants? Who, if anyone, might otherwise be entitled to recompense or reward?
In 1840 the swollen record of trial ended up in the hands of 74-year-old former President John Quincy Adams, then preparing himself to act as defense co-counsel in the famous case of the schooner Amistad, which had been taken over by her cargo of slaves at sea and later seized by the cutter Washington. Thanks largely to Stephen Spielberg’s 1997 movie Amistad, that slaver’s story is much better known than the Antelope’s. Bryant’s excellent book will not correct that imbalance, which is too bad. The story of the Antelope is a fascinating one, less uplifting than the Amistad’s because of how it ended, but no less compelling. I enthusiastically recommend this book.
Ready Then. Ready Now. Ready Always: More Than a Century of Service by Citizen-Sailors
Commander David F. Winkler, U.S. Navy Reserve. Washington, DC: Navy Reserve Centennial Book Committee, 2014. 208 pp. Index. Illus. $34.95.
Reviewed by Rear Admiral Tom Brooks, U.S. Navy (Retired)
At first glance, Ready Then. Ready Now. Ready Always looks like an attractive coffee-table book—it is 9 by 12 inches, full color, and of top-quality paper—produced for public-relations and recruiting purposes. It is, of course, all of that. But more important, this book contains serious history. Dr. David Winkler, the primary author, is the staff historian for the Naval Historical Foundation. The author of several well-researched and -written books, his professionalism shows not only in the book’s clear, lucid style, but also the way he has blended the “voice” of its many contributing authors to create a smooth-flowing text.
Ready Then. Ready Now. Ready Always was funded and published by the Navy Reserve Centennial Book Committee to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the official founding of today’s Navy Reserve. The Navy League, Association of the U.S. Navy, U.S. Navy Memorial, and, of course, the Naval Historical Foundation participated in the committee and supported the book’s publication. A host of serving and retired Reservists also funded the effort.
Although the formal authorization of the Naval Reserve Force came in March 1915 (its name changed to Naval Reserve in 1919), citizen-sailors had been augmenting the American Navy since 1775. They filled out the crews of Navy ships and privateers in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 and replaced the officers and sailors who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. Toward the end of the 19th century, a number of states formed naval militias, which became the foundation for the Naval Reserve Force a generation later. Many naval militias disappeared with the creation of the Naval Reserve, but some continued to exist up until modern times. Today, only New York operates a state naval militia.
By the end of World War I, almost 300,000 Reservists had served in the Navy. The first women had been recruited into the Naval Reserve Force in 1917, and the Reserve Flying Corps had trained some 2,700 naval aviators. Like the Navy at large, the Naval Reserve suffered from inadequate funding during most of the early interwar period, but continued to operate and create imaginative volunteer programs. These volunteers would begin to be called to active duty in 1940 and would significantly contribute to the outcome of World War II. At the time of the Battle of Midway, some 90 percent of naval aviators had received their wings through Naval Reserve training programs. By the end of the war, over 50 percent of all officers in the surface fleet were Reservists.
While the impact of the Reserve organizations in World War II are generally well understood by the public at large, less known are their contributions during the Korean War, when ships, sailors, aircraft, and aviators were called up to respond to the invasion of South Korea. Very often these were the same ships, aircraft, and personnel who had fought in World War II only five years before.
With the Cold War came the return of the draft, and the regular and Reserve forces expanded greatly. While there was no broad call-up of reserves for the Vietnam War (approximately 1,000 Seabees were called up in 1968), many Reservists voluntarily came back on active duty and served with great distinction. Three of the Medals of Honor awarded to sailors during the Vietnam War were awarded to Reservists.
Less appreciated is the contribution of the Navy Reserve during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. More than 21,000 Reservists were called up to support Operation Desert Storm and the liberation of Kuwait. Call-ups continued for the subsequent Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. Perhaps more significant, Reservist volunteers were solicited to fill Individual Augmentation billets. Thousands responded and continue to respond to this day, with some serving multiple tours. In fact, in some Navy communities, more Reservists have served on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan than have regular Navy personnel.
This story is presented in exquisite detail in Ready Then. Ready Now. Ready Always and accompanied by interesting vignettes and biographies. The collection of pictures and illustrations is one of the best in this reviewer’s experience. Anyone who is or was a part of the Navy Reserve will want to own a copy of this book. But beyond that, anyone with an interest in naval history would be delighted to have this book in his or her library. The book can be ordered online at upress.qg.com/nhf#sthash.MjebKwBr.dpuf.
Matthew Fontaine Maury, Father of Oceanography: A Biography, 1806–1873
John Grady. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishers, 2015. Illus. Notes. Index. Bibliography. 354 pp. $45.00.
Reviewed by Mary DeCredico
Author John Grady’s preface to Matthew Fontaine Maury, Father of Oceanography: A Biography, 1806–1873 notes that no one has undertaken a biography of Maury for more than 50 years and that it is time for a new appraisal of his life and work. In great detail, he outlines how his biography is vastly different from that of Francis Lee Williams’ Matthew Fontaine Maury: Scientist of the Sea (Rutgers University Press, 1963). Among the chief differences are his discussions of Maury’s “keen interest in politics,” his financial problems, how his Huguenot roots heavily influenced his religious views, and his interactions with Maximillian, France’s puppet emperor in Mexico during the American Civil War.
Born in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, in 1806, Maury lived with his family on property purchased from the Revolutionary War hero “Light Horse Harry” Lee. The family suffered a series of financial missteps that ultimately forced them to relocate several times until they settled in Franklin, Tennessee. Shortly thereafter, Matthew Maury’s older brother John was appointed an acting midshipman in the U.S. Navy. That would be the former’s first glimpse of a life in the naval service.
Maury entered Harpeth Academy in Franklin, an experience that would dramatically change his life. The headmasters of Harpeth were especially influential, as was his cousin, Abram Maury. At Harpeth, Maury learned about the U.S. Military Academy and became enchanted with the idea of studying math and science. But Maury’s father was adamantly opposed; he had already lost one son to the Navy. He needed Maury to work the cotton fields.
Tragedy struck the Maury family twice. John succumbed to yellow fever in Norfolk in 1824 and Abram died in 1825. Determined “‘to make myself a useful man,’” Maury turned to his congressman, Sam Houston, who recommended him to Congress. Despite the bitter opposition of his father, Matthew Fontaine Maury became an acting midshipman in 1825. That same year, he was ordered to the frigate Brandywine, which had the great honor of escorting the Marquis de Lafayette back to France.
According to Grady, Maury was disappointed with the lack of instruction in navigation and shipbuilding he received on board the Brandywine. His next cruise, to relieve the Pacific Squadron, afforded him the opportunity to visit ports in the Sandwich Islands and Tahiti. Grady argues that all the naval knowledge Maury attained on that cruise was acquired on his own.
In October 1839, Maury suffered a severe injury, breaking his thigh and tearing ligaments, when the stagecoach he was riding to Fredericksburg, Virginia, overturned. The accident required a lengthy recuperation period. Although Maury wanted to stay on active duty, his injuries precluded sea duty. Ultimately, he found himself superintendent of the Naval Observatory. Grady details all of the scientific work Maury accomplished and contends: “Maury in his time was seen in the same way as Hyman Rickover in the twentieth century. Both men’s influence far transcended the Navy.”
Maury would continue to make tremendous contributions, studying weather, pushing for the establishment of a national weather service, experimenting with transatlantic cables and writing the critically acclaimed The Physical Geography of the Sea. But personal squabbles and Navy politics almost drove him out of the service; because of his leg injury, the Naval Affairs Committee found him unfit for sea duty. Maury fought it and ultimately was reinstated at the rank of commander. But as Grady notes, bigger challenges lay ahead.
As the political crisis of the 1850s escalated, Maury watched and worried. When Virginia seceded from the Union in 1861, Maury resigned his commission, but U.S. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles “ordered the [Southern naval officers] all dismissed and stricken from the Navy Register.”
Perhaps Maury’s greatest contribution to the Confederacy was his development of torpedoes, or mines. He also laid obstructions in the James River to ensure the Union Navy could not navigate it to take the Confederate capital at Richmond. Despairing of the Southern cause midway through the war, Maury engaged in negotiations with Emperor Maximillian in Mexico to create a “New Virginia.” That dream died when Maximillian suspended any colonization.
Maury’s post-war career was mixed. He worked at the Virginia Military Institute, briefly served as president of the University of Alabama, was offered the presidency of St. John’s College, and tried to build a national weather system. But he never fully regained his health after the 1839 accident and died peacefully in 1873.
To be sure, a new biography of Matthew Fontaine Maury is warranted, but Grady’s falls short. There are several historical errors. For example, the 1860 presidential election was not a four-way race: Lincoln ran against Douglas in the free states and Bell, Douglas, and Breckinridge in the slave states. Lincoln only received Southern votes in western Virginia. The political chronology of the 1850s is also off. More problematic is the cloying language Grady uses. Typical is his description of the condition of the University of Alabama when he arrived: “The grounds and the buildings were as scarred as a Confederate veteran.”
The real value of Grady’s biography is in the exhaustive footnotes and bibliography, which will provide future biographers with rich sources to analyze the “Pathfinder to the Seas.”