Historic Nazi Re-Enactment Saturday
A spirited re-enactment of the historic events of June 13, 1942, is set for Saturday at 6:30 p.m. at the Amagansett Life Saving and Coast Guard Station and nearby on Atlantic Avenue Beach.
Seventy-three years to the day after four Nazi saboteurs landed on the beach, armed with a plot to destroy New York City’s transportation infrastructure and terrorize Americans at home as World War II raged overseas, Hugh King, East Hampton’s town crier and director of the Home, Sweet Home Museum, will direct the fourth annual re-enactment in which a young coast guardsman intercepted the saboteurs, thereby altering the course of history.
The action will begin and end at the Life Saving and Coast Guard Station, the 1902 structure that has undergone an extensive renovation. Mr. King will direct Sonny Sireci, Carl Irace, Evan Thomas, Ted Hults, and Samantha Ruddock in their portrayal of American coast guardsmen and Nazi saboteurs. This year, the re-enactment will feature musical accompaniment by Rumor Has It, a barbershop quartet that will portray the Andrews Sisters and Patti Page, popular vocalists of the era. The event is free and open to the public. In another first, grandchildren of one of the participants, Carl Jenette, will attend the re-enactment.
Shortly after midnight on June 13, 1942, the trained German saboteurs landed in the fog on the beach near the Coast Guard station. Their U-boat stuck on a sandbar, they had rowed ashore in a collapsible rubber boat filled with explosives, clothing, several thousand dollars in cash, and a two-year plan to blow up aluminum and magnesium plants, canals, bridges, waterways, and locks, according to the Eastern Sea Frontier War Diary, a document held at the National Archives and Records Administration.
A 21-year-old coast guardsman, John Cullen, was patrolling from the Atlantic Avenue station when he encountered the men on the beach to the east of the station. The saboteurs offered him $400 to keep quiet. Mr. Cullen took the money, ran back to the station, and reported the incident to Mr. Jenette. The saboteurs made their way to the Amagansett railroad station and, from there, to New York City, where they were captured.
Mr. Cullen’s interception led to the arrest of four more saboteurs who had landed at Ponte Vedra Beach, south of Jacksonville, Fla., on June 17. On June 27, J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, announced the arrest of all eight saboteurs, and events that would surely have terrorized the U.S. population and impeded the war effort were averted.
In a letter to The Star in 2011, the late Capt. Milton Miller, who served in both the Coast Guard and the Navy before and during World War II, wrote that, “If John Cullen had been killed and his body buried behind a sand dune, or at sea, no one would have ever known what happened to him. New York City would have been destroyed and it would have affected the whole nation.”