Evening Star Newspaper, April 20, 1930, Page 77

THE 'SUNDAY STAR, WASHIN GTON, D, €, -APRIL 20, . 1950. On Night Before Americans’ First A A Dark Figure in American Uniform Tried to Sneak Into No Man’s Land on Eve of Cantigny ‘Battle; Had He Escaped, Germans Would Have Been Prepared to Meet Yanks, but Secret Agents Were Lying in Wait—Waiting and Ready for His Break. -HAD THE GERMANS WITH- DRAWN?— PERSHING TOOK NO CHANCES. " G-2 it was that saved the lives of thousands of American doughboys- that dark, rainy September morning 11 years ago when they wiped out the St. Mihiel salient in the 'first independent American attack of the World War. But for G-2, they would have attacked without the terrific preliminary artillery bombardment that for four preceding hours had blasted a path though German barbed wire, trenches and concrete dugouts, smotliered German artillery and machine guns. " It came about in this way: The artillery preparation had been planned far ahead. Three thousand cannons, great and small, were as- sembled to fire a million shells before a single doughboy jumped off. For a time on the day bejore the battle Gen. Pershing seriously con- sidered-gwing up, the preliminary bombardment, firing only a rolling barrage as the infantry advanced. The reason was simple—it looked as if the Germans had gone, evacuated the salient. Late in the afternoon, just a few hours before the bombardment was to start, G-2 reported: *“The Germans have not withdrawn, They are still there.” Gen. Pershing turned to the telephone. “Orders for the artillery preparation stand,” ke said. . At 1 o'clock in the morning, 3,000 guns crashed. At 5 o’clock, after four thunderous hours, whistles shrilled along the 40-mile line and 150,000 infantry scrambled over the top. A few hours later G-2 laid upon Gen. Pershing’s desk a caplured order marked “Streng Geheim” showing that the German' infantry had not withdrawn, and that when our artillery prepara- tion fell, save for one gmall sector, they were still in their trenches. No matter what prisoners or aviators said, the Germans were still in the salient. To attack without artillery preparation was not safe. The news meant that to Gen. Pershing and to Maj. Gen. D. E. Nolan, chief of Intelligence of ' the A . E. F. g G-2 is Army talk for “Intelligence,” ivhich means finding out what the other fellow is up to, one of the most fascinating of military arts. Z'his hitherto untold incident of St. Mihiel is one of many that serve to illustrate the wori~ ings of G-2 and the vital part it played in' winning the A. E. F.s battles, for really the A. E. F. was pretty good at it. Yes, dear old Uncle Sam with his innocent chin-whiskers could move in mysterious ways his wonders to perjorm. 3 EDITOR'S NOTE® This is_one of a series of true World War spy stories. In some instances the author has used intentional inaccuracies to protect American secret agents; otherwise the information is authenticated by fact or by word of participation. N the night of May 27, 1918, German. lookouts crouched in the ruined French village of Cantigny felt as cheerful as one can feel in the front line across no man’s land. The Amer- ican trenches seemed quiet. Even their ex- yberant artillery was almost silent. That day the Crown Prince had surprised Foch, the new allied generalissimo, and broken through the French and British line on the Chemin des Dames, headed toward Paris. A good day! Germany might yet win before too many Ameri- cans came. Tonight their First Division across no man’s land seemed subdued. A perfect eve- ning. “Stille nacht, heilige nacht,” hummed a gray feldwebel, smoking contentedly a drooping cherry pipez whose glow his hand hid. Sud- denly the pipe dropped from his lips and he leaned forward, every nerve and muscle tight, ready to give the alarm. In the darkness where the American front line trenches were he had seen spurts of flame, heard shots. Now he heard a cry. Then silence. .“Was war das?” a companion asked, hurrying up. Both stared and listened, but they saw nothing, heard nothing. - Minutes passed. More - '/IU 0/rRoberIe The traitor continued his treachery. But he had aroused_suspicions among the Belgians. One night as he entered his-honse two men asked him what time it was; then as he stood, watch in l'land, they shot him. ’ minutes. The first hint of dawn came through the ground mist. They relaxed with relief. A nervous sentry, they thought, seeing things— nothing to worry over. Chuckling, they re= lighted their pipes in the shadow of coal-scuttle helmets. Sixteen minutes before six, the matches showed. End of a quiet night. But they never saw the day. With the sudden crash and roar of doom behind the American lines hundreds of guns opened, hurl- ing a torrent of bursting shells that made Cantigny a place where none could stay above ground and live, After the barrage came the doughboys, 3,000 eager fire-eaters of the 28th Infantry, first time over the top in their young lives. They swarmed through Cantigny, and what Germans would not surrender they bayoneted. The first real American attack of the World War was a complete victory. TO make that possible, before a gun fired or a doughboy charged, the Americans had won another victory. It was not in the open war that the world knew, but in the war amid the shadows, the war known to few, who never told—the secret war of spy and counter spy. Sometimes the turn. of tide on its dark battle- fields swayed great events more powerfully than did the struggle in the light of day. So the night before Cantigny there were shots and a cry—then silence. ‘That silence has shrouded to this day what happened to the American trenches. Few have heard of the dark figure of a man in American uniform and helmet, clutching something be- neath his slicker, who started around a traverse of a front-line trench into a little sap jutting into no man’s land. Few knew of two other dark figures, similarly clad, that followed, hid around the traverse corner until their quarry climbed into no man'’s land and started running, bent over in the midst, straight for the German trenches. They both sprang to the parapet. ““Halt!” one shouted sternly, and once more, “Halt!” Then in an instant, “Get him!” Pistols flashed together, and just at the edge of the barbed wire the runner stopped, cried out once, fell and lay still. The pursuers crept up, looked at the putty-gray face. - “Got him,” one whispered grimly, “shot in the back.” THE other held up what had been hidden be- neath the dead man’s slicker. “Trench code-book.” he said. That is why the Germans did not get the warning of the coming attack that a German sergeant in“the First Division tried to take to them the night before. That is how that ser- geant died, whatever the official records may say. That is how the lives of many Americans were saved, and Cantigny written in our history a surprise attack, swift, sure, successful. Our secret war was sometimes to the knife. In unhallowed conflict, its furtive armies struck ‘at one another over the world. The secret war was not less far-flung nor compli- cated than the World War. “From the ends of the earth to the ends of the earth,” its agents were at their unending game, seeking bits sof information, large and small, to fit somehow into the eternal puszle, “What is the enemy up to?” If war be indeed the sport of kings, then the secret war was the sport of magicians, of necro- mancers, . played with loaded dice. for great stakes, for crowns and filrones, for power and glory, for very existence. A BOUT our secret service in Europe the véry little published is largely fiction. Nor will the truth ever be told. A quick, easy way to let loose over this country—and over others, too—a tempest of anger and hatred, suspicion, scandal and misery would be to publish its secret service records. - No wonder that many such records have been- destroyed, that all the government departments that have such Pan- dora’s boxes keep the lids nailed tight. Never- theless, some things may be told. A Immediately we entered the war we had to build at once a strong defensive organization. But in war-time it 4s easier to thwart enemy spies than to spy successfully upon enemies. For that and other reasons we attempted and accomplished more in counter-espionage, spy- chasing than in actual espionage, spying. At the very beginning we had startling proof of the grimness of our task. The Germans tried to wipe out the original American Expeditionary Force before it set fcot on French soil. Two of the three transport convoys of the 1st Division, A. E. F., were attacked by submarines off the coast of France. The attacks were repulsed, the troops landed, partly because of American secret service. Be- fore the first convoy sailed our naval censorship had intercepted a cable to Amsterdam asking quotations on various quantities of milling ma- chines in lots that corresponded exactly with the numbers of the regiments in the convoys and almost exactly with the numerical strength of each regiment! The address in Amsterdam was one suspected of covering a forwarding station of the German secret service. The sender of the cablegram, who did a small export business in Brooklyn, was already on the allied suspect list. He said he was cabling for a South American firm un- able to connect with Holland because of the British censorship of cables through England. His whole tale sounded so queer that he spent the remainder of the war interned. WHILE their submarines kept trying to torpedo American transports, German secret agents planted bombs aboard American ships leaving our ports as already they had planted them aboard allied ships. All told, they succeeded at least 50 times in New York Harbor alone. Despite every precaution they hid bombs in the coal bunkers of two American troop transports that caught fire at sea. They tried to blow up tipe old German liner, De Kalb, that as a transport crossed and recrossed the Atlan- tic repeatedly with crank-shaft cut four-fifths through by German sabotage—which no one discovered until after the war. The German bombs were often small, covered with tar and shaped to resemble chunks of the coal that hid them. Hardly had. the 1st Division landed at St. Nazaire than the Americans, then without counter-espionage service, heard from the French that German agents were using the islands and coves of the Loire estuary to hide spying upon the dougboys. From then on we knew that they would do us what secret harm they could, whether by putting stones and sand in journal boxes of locomotives, stealing papers and plans, or luring information from our un- suspecting amateur soldiers by liquor, women, even drugs. We had warning in what the German secret service had done already. HE Germans attempted to make drug ad- dicts of American aviators! This was a real plot, with ramifications in several American flying fields in France, especially the fields at Tours, headquarters of the Services of Supply. Its weapons were that worthy pair, cocaine and loose women. Their prey were our young flying cadets in training, just getting used to going into the air, taking each day their lives in their hands, seeing each day some comrade crash. The method was devilishly simple, ' The women, some French, would waylay the Americans at evening when they sought re- laxation from the day's strain. They would lead the way to apartments where, pitying their taut faces and twitching nerves, they would pro- duce liquor. Sometimes the liquor was drugged, often it was merely preliminary te powders that promised “bon slipp, hein?” Before they real« ized it a number of aviators were becoming slaves' of the drug, unable to still the craving that was making its first deadly inroads into - physical and moral strength. “A very serious affair,” said the French. “We must take no chances.” So, in supposed disguises, a squad of their detectives lounged about a small cafe where an American secret agent had arranged to meet some of the ringleaders. The ringleaders never set foot within the door. One look at the dis- guises and they were off. After that it took time to round them up, but it was done. The' scandalous affair of the Black *Book showed again what the German secret service would do. The. American secret service in Switzerland was able to thwart this particular- game through the help of a German, known to this day only as Zero, whose tragic story was told more fully in a previous installment. It was he who revealed without a cent of pay how the Germans in the twilight of their power in the Fall of 1918 hoped to gain advantage in the negotiations that preceded the armistice by the weapon of blackmail. BEPORE 1914 many German agents abroad, not only in France and Russia, but in Eng- 3 land, were women in varied positions; loose women, keepers of brothels and gambling houses, barmaids, governesses, nursemaids, chambermaids in the homes of good, even ex- alted families, and there were man club ser- vants. Most of the secrets such ears would hear would be scandals, about the second apartment this one kept in another part of the city, about Continued on Twenyt-first Page