"On the evening of November 30, 1939, the State Department received word from the U.S. embassy in Mexico of an alleged plot to bomb the intake towers at the dam. German agents discovered in Mexico City were planning the attack in order to paralyze the aviation manufacturing industry located in Los Angeles. This would be accomplished by cutting off power transmission over the dam's high-voltage lines. Two German agents living in Las Vegas, one of them an explosives expert, had reportedly made a dozen trips to the dam to investigate the feasibility of the plan. They intended to attach bombs to the intake towers from a boat, which they would rent under the pretense of a fishing excursion."

Safeguarding Hoover Dam during World War II
Prologue Magazine, Summer 2003, Vol. 35, No. 2
By Christine Pfaff (source)

the Wanderling

After the U.S. embassy disclosed German agents in Mexico were putting into place an actual attack against Hoover Dam that they fully intended to pull off, a whole host of government agencies went into action devising any number of ways to protect the dam from destruction. They immediately increased security patrols, locked off specific areas of the dam, implemented closer scrutiny of individuals, tour groups, packages, and vehicles entering and leaving the dam. Floodlights were installed to illuminate the channel above the intake towers. A wire net was hung from a cable stretched across the lake making it impossible for boats to get within three hundred feet of the intake towers. Other suggestions included camouflage, smoke screens, and cables across the gorge at various levels to stop incoming aircraft. Everything was considered except one thing, underwater upstream access. And late in December 1944 the Germans took advantage of it.

During World War II the Germans were obsessed with destroying Hoover Dam. One plan after the other came on the table. There is a story on the internet that shows up in a half a dozen places about a German attempt to take out the dam using a submarine. The story tells of the supposedly last mission of the German submarine U-133 that was to travel up the Colorado River from Baja, California and destroy the dam. The same story is repeated basically over-and-over, word-for-word, on all of the internet sites except for maybe one or two that leave out the so-called source. When the source is cited it is always a somewhat questionable and rather elusive publication called the USS Shaw Newsletter from the year 1996.

In a sort of epilogue to the internet story, nearly all of the articles then go on to explain why the so-called mission could not have been accomplished the way it is written. The U-133 could not have carried enough fuel to make it from Europe to it's designated target, there were a bunch of dams on the river in the way before it would have ever got to Hoover Dam, etc., etc. Of course none of them mention the fact that on March 14, 1942, barely three months into the war, the U-133 sank with all hands off the coast of Greece due to navigation error and a mine explosion and that the loss was fully substantiated in 1994 by a diving team that managed to locate and confirm the identity of the wreck --- a substantiation that occurred two full years before the USS Shaw Newsletter was even published. So said, there is absolutely NO way the U-133 could have been involved in any way shape or form regarding Hoover Dam or any sort of an attack against it. For the record the USS Shaw was decommissioned in October 1945 and sold for scrap in July 1946. For more please see Footnote [1].

Not one thing regarding the alleged attack by the U-133 or any other submarine has been discovered in official German records nor has anything shown up on the American side. As for the internet source, nobody I know, including myself, has been able to run down a copy of the 1996 USS Shaw Newsletter that supposedly ran the original article. Neither have I been able to learn who the author was and where his or her original source for the story came from.

However, so said, the inability of the U-133 to have accomplished the mission because it had long been sitting on the bottom of the Mediterranean in 78 meters of water with a hole blown in it's hull, and the fact that no official records on either side have surfaced indicating any attempt on Hoover Dam by a submarine, there is actually more truth to the story than myth. It is the facts that are wrong, at least as far I know it, and it had nothing to do with the U-133 or any other known numbered German submarine. It has more to do with what the Germans call Vergeltungswaffen, or translated into English: retaliatory weapon, reprisal weapon, sometimes V-weapon or vengence weapon.

For me the story starts when I was 14 or 15 years old visiting my Stepmother, or actually my ex-stepmother by then, for the summer and not anywhere even remotely close to being near the Colorado River or Hoover Dam. More specifically, near Muroc Dry Lake, or as it is better known, Edwards Air Force Base, located in the Mojave Desert a 120 miles or so north of Los Angeles, California. In those days, and from years before, one of my ex-stepmother's longtime friends was a woman by the name of Pancho Barnes, famed aviatrix and stunt pilot. Just before World War II Pancho Barnes built and owned what eventually came to known throughout the war and several years afterwards as the Happy Bottom Riding Club, a dude ranch right on the edge of Edwards Air Force Base that featured a motel, an abundance of riding horses and thoroughbreds, a restaurant, three landing strips, a dance hall, gambling den, an ever present bevy of Hostesses, and a world-famous bar which catered to military personnel from the nearby air base along with all of her Hollywood friends. The ranch became famous for it's all night parties and high-flying lifestyle of her guests.

In 1952, following a change of command at the air base, friction between Pancho and the base commander began to increase because of the number of flights in and out of the Club's landing strip and what the commander called an encroachment into the base's airspace. When the government attempted to buy her property allegedly to expand the air base runways and Pancho refused, a series of unproven allegations surfaced that the Happy Bottom Riding Club was, among other things, a brothel. The Air Force slapped an off limits on the ranch, effectively banning servicemen from going to the club. Falling on hard times and basically deserted when the government moved to appropriate the ranch, Pancho sued. Then, on November 13, 1953, shortly after she beat the government and won the lawsuit, the ranch, under very, very suspicious circumstances, burnt to the ground, some even say, although it was never proven, from a possible strike from the air.[2]

My ex-stepmother stepped into the picture when the Air Force placed the off limits decree on the Club in 1952. She had a California liquor licence and owned several bars in Los Angeles. Pancho, as a friend from their old Laguna Beach days, in a casual conversation with my ex-stepmother, who supplied hostesses for the club on and off over time, suggested she open a facility similar to Pancho's now, or soon to be, defunct Club --- only far enough from the air base that they could not mess with it, but still close enough that it was easily accessible --- AND with NO known or on the surface affliation or ties with Pancho. So she did, opening the closest bar in those days to the air base south gate, somewhat east and south of Pancho's old place, duplicating almost all of the same amenities and wide open services except for an airstrip. The airstrip at Pancho's was FAA approved. For whatever reason any plans for an airstrip at my stepmothers' ended in nothing but a long string of red tape and roadblocks. Otherwise, there was a bar, swimming pool, dance hall, rodeos and boxing matches on the weekends, at least two dozen one-armed-bandit slot machines in a secret hidden room, and just like Pancho's, a flock of ever present hostesses. Of course, anybody with any amount of horse-sense would have noticed that not only a number of the hostesses but John, the Club's old manager, the head bartender, cook, and even the dishwasher ended up working at my stepmother's place at one time or the other.[3]

As for me, my stepmother entered my life several years following the death of my mother when my father decided to remarry. My new mother, or stepmother as the case may be, after noticing I was showing a fairly high level of artistic ability for a young boy, asked my Uncle, an artist, to come oversee me. Several years into their marriage my dad and stepmother went on an extended trip to Mexico and South America and during the two-year period they were gone their marriage deteriorated to such a point it ended. So, by their return, the summer of 1952, me being under the guardianship of my uncle had, a couple of years before, long come to a screeching halt, first because of the aformentioned decision of my father and stepmother to leave the country and secondly, by their decision to divorce sometime during their trip. Our de facto family dissolved and my uncle went back to the Taos, Santa Fe area and I went to live first with a foster couple, then after running away, with my grandmother. However, at the end of May 1953, just a week or so before my first year in high school was about to end, my uncle called. He was all excited and without even thinking about school wanted to know if I thought my dad would let me catch a Greyhound bus as soon as I could and meet him in Kingman, Arizona. He said it would be an adventure of a lifetime and that he expected all hell to break loose in a few weeks because the samething that had happened out in the flatlands near Roswell had happened in the desert near Kingman. He told me the news had filtered down to him through some Native Americans who had scouted the area. He said a couple of the Hualapai trackers who were part of the group could get us in through the back door. When I asked my dad if I could go he blew his stack. He got on the phone and started yelling at my uncle that he was filling my mind with all kinds of "weird and useless shit" and to stay away from me and keep his "cock-and-bull stories" to himself. Needless to say that was the end of it and I didn't get to go. Instead, my dad sent me to my ex-stepmother's ranch for the summer and told the hard drinking every other word was a cuss word ranch foreman Leo, who had been at one time, a World War II Pacific Fleet Navy boxing champion, to not let me "wander off."[4]

Pancho Barnes' place was a club, that is, a real club, or at least a faux-real club, where an actual dues paying membership was required to access the facilities --- and that membership, as far as service men was concerned, was limited almost exclusively to officers. My ex-stepmother's place had no such restrictions. She used to say, "Officers, enlisted men, ranchers, farmers, truck drivers, Indians, even entertainers, they're all welcome." It was under the auspices of that open umbrella that I first learned of a German submarine going up the Colorado River during World War II.

Most of the military personnel that showed up at my ex-stepmother's place were Air Force. However, a number of Navy personnel showed up from China Lake on a regular basis, and a number of those were old navy buddies of the ranch foreman. There were always wide open goings-on in the bar and dance hall on Saturday nights, especially during the summer, and Sunday morning would almost always find a bunch of GIs laying around nurturing hangovers. Although I was there during the summer as the son of the owner it was not like I was a prince. My ex-stepmother had a whole series of jobs for me to do around the place to "earn my keep" as she would often tell me. One of those jobs, besides shoveling horse manure and cow dung after the once-a-month weekend rodeos, was to help the swamper that cleaned up the place following the Saturday night bashes by gathering up and rinsing tons of old beer bottles (usually stuffed with cigarette butts put out in stale beer), emptying and washing ashtrays, wiping down tables and chairs, hoeing out the restrooms and barf and sweeping the dance hall floor and stage with oiled sawdust.

Invariably on those Sunday mornings the ranch foreman Leo, the ex-sailor that he was, besides being a Pacific Fleet boxing champion, would hold court with a number of Navy guys sobering up over coffee and having a little breakfast. A few tables down along the edge of the dance hall there always seemed to be several Air Force guys doing the samething. Me cleaning up between tables made me privy to the conversations and going ons between both groups. It came up one day that there was or used to be a Japanese battleship out in the middle of the dry lake that the Air Force used for bombing practice. I asked the Navy guys about it and they told me it was a mock-up, that it looked like a battleship but was actually modeled after a Japanese Atago-class, the second vessel in the Takao-class heavy cruisers, and made of wood and chicken wire.

After talking about the mock-up battleship that had been given the name Muroc Maru, a Chief Petty Officer stepped into the conversation and told me that toward the end of World War II there was an actual REAL German submarine that used to be out on the dry lake. They had taken all the heavy parts like the motors and batteries out of it as well as all the secret stuff, then bombed and straffed the hull and conning tower over and over in target practice until all that was left was a few small hunks of metal and a couple of guages with German writing on them. Then he said, in September or October of 1947 there was a huge rainstorm that flooded the lake with 5 or 6 inches of water and turned the lake bed into a sloppy mess. All the pieces that were left on the surface simply sank into the mud.

The Chief said he could prove it because he was on a team that dug up some of the parts and that he had kept a few pieces back as souvenirs. He said a few years after the rainstorm some intelligence whoop-de-doo in Washington got a hair up his ass that the sub should have had a brass plate with some numbers on it screwed on some bulkhead and they wanted that plate. When they learned the sub had been blown to bits and laying all over the dry lake bottom they put together a team to see if the plate could be found, of which, again because he had been a onetime submariner, the Chief was a member. After a few days with mine detectors, digging holes all over and tip-toeing around unexploded ordinace, they gave up. The weekend after the Chief told the story he came in with a bag full of pieces of copper tubing and small brass pipes, one with a guage attached that had German writing on it and threw it on the table in front of everybody saying the stuff was part of the booty from the dig he had been on. After that I wanted to know everything about the submarine. Everytime I saw him I him asked more and more questions. He did tell me a few interesting things, like for example, even though he was a submariner, it was in conjunction with the sub that he heard the word "snorkle" for the first time. Pretty soon he started to avoid me or just did not show up. One day I had the ranch foreman talk a Navy buddy of his, in exchange for a case of beer, to take me clear across the desert to the bar the Chief had going to instead of my stepmother's just to talk to him. When he saw how serious and intense I was over the subject, he began to take me under his wing and started to tell me a lot more. The Chief, you see, as far as the facts regarding the submarine was concerned, was more that just some conspiracy-nut lifer with a bag full of brass trinkets as the below quote will show from source so cited:

"As a former submariner he had been assigned to a quickly put together Navy team sent out from close by (for the Navy) China Lake to recover the craft. Although they arrived too late to actually be in charge, he was ordered to consult with the Army team on how to remove, float, and transport the semi-damaged vessel. The POW folk, especially the spit-and-polish camp provost marshal Captain Cecil Parshall, felt they were being looked down on as not really being military enough by their Army brethren and didn't like how the fly boys had treated them. Since the Navy sort of ended up losers in it all too, the POW folk, ordered by higher ups to cooperate after the Army whined about it, thinking they would have an ally, simply aced out the Air Corps personnel and brought in the Navy, asking the Chief, who had been on the scene as well, to join their interrogation team."

La Palma Secret Base

One day just as I was about to leave the ranch for the summer the Chief came to me and said there was a man he wanted me to meet. Parked out in the shade under a row of cottonwood trees along the entrance to the main ranch facilities was a bright, shiny brand new '52 or '53 Chevrolet pick-up truck. The driver got out as the Chief and I walked up, leaving an older man wearing a drop-rim Panama style straw hat sitting alone on the passenger side. The Chief, after motioning me to see the passenger, joined the driver as they walked toward the bar. When I stepped up to the the door of the truck the man in the hat never looked at me, continuing to stare out through the windshield and over the hood all the time I was there. He asked, "Why do you want to know so much about the submarine, boy?" I told him I just thought it was weird that a submarine was out in the middle of the desert.

He told me the submarine was German. It had been towed behind another sub to an island in the Sea of Cortez, arriving sometime late in the year 1944 and hiding in a cove until it received a "go" signal. Where it started from he did not know. When the sub left the island it headed on it's own power up the mouth of the Colorado River with a skeleton crew.[5] It was when the sub reached a point on the river called Laguna Dam, 12 miles North of Yuma, that he came into the picture. He belonged to a work crew made up of predominantly German men whose job it was was to pull the sub out of the river, disassemble it into five parts, load the parts onto trailers and truck it north to a designated spot beyond Parker Dam. There they were to reassemble it and disappear.

Although the sub would not have been able to have traversed the river any farther north than Laguna Dam anyway, the dam was selected as the spot where the sub was to be dismantled for two reasons. First was the design of the dam itself and the outcome of that design through to it's actual physical completion. It was built unlike any other dam on the river ever or since. The design and how it was constructed was absolutely perfect for easily pulling a submarine or any other craft out of the river and being able to dismantle it. For one thing, Laguna Dam was actually a diversion dam. It diverted the water of the river to the sides to smaller dammed channels that redirected or diverted the water from it's normal downstream flow into the channels. To accomplish the task a 4780 foot long nearly flat concrete spillway was built stretching clear across the river bed from California to Arizona and back. The upper portion or the top of the spillway, that is, facing the down flow of the river, was barely above the top-out level of the river's normal flow. The downstream side, because of the almost airstrip like 150 foot wide spillway and the slight down-angle slope, the edge was only just submerged as it reached the water. As you can see from the graphic below it would be almost like working on concrete airstrip, easily conducive for pulling out, dismantling, loading, and transporting.

4780 FOOT AIRSTRIP LIKE SPILLWAY BUILT ACROSS THE COLORADO RIVER
(please click image)

Secondly, which seems kind of trite considering the mission, was because the whole of the facade across one of the dam's bridges had swastikas recessed an inch-and-a-half into the heavy concrete, and the powers that be who set the mission into motion, because of the incredible coincidence of both the dam construction and the swastika emblems all being at the same place at the same time, viewed it as if not a sign from heaven, at least a positive omen in a Nazi Germany Occult sort of way.

(please click image)

THE SO-CALLED SWASTIKA BRIDGE ON THE ARIZONA SIDE OF LAGUNA DAM

The man in the truck told me his part of the mission went off without a hitch. He said whoever laid out the logistics knew exactly what they were doing. The sub, although huge, was somewhat smaller than a typical submarine and had been orginally designed by the makers to be able to be broken down into five sectionalized parts, including the conning tower, so that it could be transported overland by rail or truck.[6] The man in charge had every tool, crane, winch, lights, chains, and route figured out right down to the last nut, bolt and stopsign. What did not work was a second part of the plan. The sub came up river with a skeleton crew because a full crew, including an experienced captain was supposed to meet at the dam.

The experienced captain was Commander Jurgen Wattenberg, a German submarine officer of some notoriety that was at the time, being held in an American POW camp. Cecil Owen in an article titled The Arizona Prisoner of War Great Escape perhaps says it best:

"Wattenberg was shuffled from one camp to another, for nobody wanted to keep him. He was considered a 'Super Nazi' because he caused trouble everywhere he was sent. Finally he was transferred to Papago Park prisoner of war camp, in the Arizona desert. This location was only 13 miles from the city of Phoenix, the capital of Arizona. The camp covered several thousand acres and was divided into two sections. (One section for German and Italian prisoners and one section for Japanese prisoners.)"

Wattenbergs's constant trouble-making and eventual transfer to Papago Park POW camp was all a part of a much larger master plan to get him as close as possible to the Colorado River. As soon as he arrived at the camp he set about orchestrating an escape, putting into place an elaborate scheme that included a 178 foot long tunnel reaching beyond the compound fences that ended right along a canal. When the tunnel was completed and the escapees were ready to go with false IDs, civilian clothes, etc., word was somehow passed to the submarine waiting in the Sea of Cortez. On December 23, 1944, a total of 60 men including Wattenberg and a select crew to man the submarine escaped (for more on Wattenberg see Footnote [10] below).

Wattenberg was about mid-way on the list of teams leaving the camp. That way if early members were caught the escape could be aborted. If the last members leaving were caught the ones who left early could be long gone. The intent for Wattenberg's crew, after exiting the tunnel, was to slip into the waist-deep water of the Cross Cut Canal and using canoes, float down the canal to the Salt River, then to the Gila River and on to the Colorado River where they would meet up with the submarine. Special canoes had been constructed which could be taken apart and carried through the tunnel in pieces. Whoever built them had blocked the drains in the shower and successfully tested the assembled canoes for water-tightness sufficiently enough for Wattenberg to be willing to use them. The thing is, although three or four members of his crew did show up at the Laguna Dam where the submarine was being disassembled, Wattenberg never did.

The trucks had to travel at night to keep detection low, so, even if Wattenberg did show up at the dam, the trucks were long gone because they only had a small window of opportunity to reach the first hiding spot. The sub was eventually reassembled and launched without an official captain along the shores of the lake somewhere north of Parker Dam. According to the man in the truck, after he and the crew did their part he did as he was told, disappear. Of course, he said, the mission was never accomplished and he heard later that the seamen were found nearly freezing to death and dying of thirst wandering across the middle of the desert and eventually returned to the prisoner of war camp.

What was the mission? According to the Chief the submarine had come up the Colorado River from the Gulf of California on a secret mission to destroy Hoover Dam and got hung up on a sandbar and some rocks somewhere east and south of Nelson, Nevada, between El Dorado Canyon and an area now flooded by Lake Mojave. Apparently damaged and unable to free itself without additional men and equipment, and with no commander, the crew simply abandoned her.

Shortly thereafter, the nearly freezing to death members of the now ragtag group of German sailors began raiding shacks and approaching homes in the outlaying area around Searchlight, Nevada looking for food and water and mumbling about a submarine they abandoned on the river. Locals, thinking what they had to say was a bit farfetched and that the sailors were really no more than escapees from the Arizona POW camp, contacted camp officials. As rumors began filtering in about some sort of "iron" vessel or what today would be called a UFO crashed along the river bank and it was discovered many of the Germans were not listed on camp records, eventually it was brought to the attention of higher up U.S. military authorities. The Army got to the scene first and somehow able to free the submarine and keep it afloat long enough to get it back downstream to a spot they could get it out of the water. Not knowing it could be disassembled, after much discussion, they put two modified M26 Tank Transporters back-to-back creating an articulated hauler-carrier much like the one that was designed in later years for the M65 Atomic Cannon, then hauled the submarine to Muroc Dry Lake. The Chief knew all this he said because he was on a select team of former Navy submariners that was sent to the scene in an effort to beat the Army from getting there first.

(please click image)

An interesting part of the discredited U-133 story that appears over and over on the net is that it was piloted by a Captain Peter Pfau --- and that there is no record of there ever being a U-boat commander named Pfau --- hence, none of the story could be true.

Of course, how the story has been set out above the sub had been operating on a skeleton crew with the intention of picking up Wattenberg at Laguna Dam so there was no commander per se,' Pfau or otherwise. The thing is, in German the letter V is pronounced "fow," rhyming with the English word "brow." The letter V is close to being a homophone for the surname Pfau. Der Pfau = the V, i.e., the V-weapon --- in German: Vergeltungswaffen; translated into English: retaliatory weapon, reprisal weapon, sometimes vengence weapon. Somehow in the story the pronunciation of the letter V turned into word Pfau and applied to being the commander, as in commanDer Pfau, when in reality it refered to the sub itself as Der Pfau, the V-weapon. When Wattenberg was to show up and take over the submersible he was to command "der pfau," corrupted into Commander Pfau.

A V-weapon may have been on schedule by powers that be to bring the dam down, that is, how it was going to be destroyed, but, what followed after that is not clear. It appears to be more of a suicide mission than anything else, especially if the sub itself was somehow the weapon. If not, it is not likely that it could have survived any amount of onrushing water from an instantly destroyed dam --- and maybe the reason Wattenberg never showed up. The Germans were just never big on suicide missions. Maybe the sub was going to be set on auto pilot or remote control after it got close to the base of the dam and the crew would scurry up the walls of the canyon to sit back and watch their handiwork.

Some have suggested maybe the crew was going to gain entrance to the dam from river level and inflict some sort of damage from the inside. However, there wasn't enough crew members to accomplish such a mission on any sort of a high level. So too, if such a mission was put into place the need for a submarine would be negligible unless the submarine itself was part of the plan for the destruction. It would have have been much easier to have put a bunch of men in rubber rafts downstream in the middle of the night and just snuck up on the dam. After all, back at Laguna Dam a whole bunch of men disassembled the sub and then reassembled it miles upstream without ever being detected or caught in the process of doing so.

The problem I have is what the Army found 'in' or about the sub that they felt was so important it had to transported clear across the desert to Muroc Dry Lake fully intact and all in one piece --- then only a short time later to not need it and allow it to become target practice to such a point that it was blown to pieces.

The thing is, the dam is solid concrete 660 feet thick at the base narrowing to 45 feet at the top. That is a lot of thick concrete to undo. What was the sub made of or carrying that the Germans could have developed that would have accomplish such a task to such a point that the submarine itself would come to be called a vengeance weapon? The mission had all probabilities of being detected prior to reaching or accomplishing its goal, so for the Reich to have incorporated some sort of non-conventional top secret weapon they had on the shelf such as an operational heavy water bomb or the German Atomic Bomb --- or something even more non-probable such as a particle beam delivery system requiring something as large as the sub to power it is questionable at best. Plus, nothing has ever come forward indicating the Germans had any sort of weaponry similar to the task or at that level they were willing to transport that far abroad. The closest thing in their handbag was much more conventional and can be found in what has been given the code name Prufstand XII, which delt with V-2 rocketry and submarines. For the Hoover Dam operation there could have been a hybrid version constructed making the submarine itself the delivery system. The following quote, from the source so cited, refers to the previously mentioned Chief Petty Officer who became a member of the Papago Park Prisoner of War Camp Interrogation Team:

"He was a Chief Petty Officer and former submariner who just happened to end up being stationed at China Lake Naval Ordnance Test Station when all of the submarine on the Colorado stuff was going down. The Navy had caught wind of the grounded submarine almost at the same time as the Army Air Corps. It was just that the Army beat them to the prize. The Navy argued since it was a submarine it should fall under their jurisdiction. The Army insisted it was really not much more than a mobile rocket launch pad, and, since it was V-2 related it should be theirs --- even though, as it was described later by the captured crew it seemed closer to a large-diameter short-range high impact Rheintochter R1 Variant with detachable wooden stabilizer fins and driven by a solid propellant engine generating 165,000 pounds of thrust that accelerated the missile to Mach 1 within the first 1,000 feet of travel rather than being exclusive liquid fueled V-2 related --- the Army still said tough, it was in their possession and they expected to keep it."

La Palma Secret Base

(for more on the Rheintochter R 1 please click)

People start jumping up and down saying how would it have been known that the rocket, especially so by regular crewmen or anybody else for that fact, that the missile was specifically a Rheintochter R 1 --- as most of the German rocketry stuff, beyond buzz bombs and V-2s, didn't come to light until well after the war. Besides, at the time the same people ask, what proof was there that the Germans had the capability, interest, or even thought about launching rockets from a submarine.[7]

Since such a German attempt against Hoover Dam has never been revealed officially or admitted to by any authority, high level or otherwise, it follows of course the same would be true regarding the release of the type or name designation of any sort of a missile it may or may not have transported. At the time of the interrogation circa early-mid 1945, although there had to be specialized members of the crew that were trained in how to set-up, prepare, operate, and launch the missile, and thus then known the name, there was never specifics passed on to me that the suspected weapon being transported by the submarine was in fact a Rheintochter R 1.

The fact that I report the missile as being a Rheintochter R 1 is based on research, pure and simple, primarily extrapolated from one comment told to me by the Chief Petty Officer. Now, while it is true I was only a 14 or 15 year old at the time --- which makes the Chief's comments a lot of years ago --- I remember his comment like it was yesterday, remembered clearly for the same reason most people would remember it. The Chief said during interrogation former crew members stated that the rocket had wooden fins.

Wooden fins! Give me a break. As a kid I was raised on Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and during that same period I was witness to the flyover of the giant object of an unknown nature that crossed through the Los Angeles night sky associated with what has since come to be called the Battle of Los Angeles or the UFO Over L.A., and never once did I ever hear of an operational rocket or space related vehicle of any type that had anything close to having wooden fins. When the Chief said the rocket had wooden fins I NEVER forgot it. From there the rest was easy because the Germans just did not build many or any rockets other than the Rheintochter R 1 with Wooden Fins. In later years, once I pinpointed the rocket, finding out it's specifications, say for what I have written here, was just a matter of minor legwork.

At the period of time we are talking about, circa 1953, it is my belief and still is up to this day, that is highly unlikely the Chief, a World War II submariner, would have been privy to the fact that the Germans had a rocket with wooden fins. So too, I find it impossible as well that he could make up such a thing out of whole cloth, and even if he did, why would he. I was a 15 year old boy or so with no formal training or knowledge into rocketry in those days and I found it incredulous that such a thing would even be considered for a military missile let alone actually be put into use. The Chief's assertions are highly credible after the fact, that is when the Rheintochter R 1 came to light and that they did in fact have wooden fins. Also adding to the credibility, unlike V-2s and the vast majority of other operational German retaliatory type rocketry weapons, which used liquid fuel which in turn would make transporting and use extremely difficult, the Rheintochter R 1 was solid fueled. The real secret though is in it's destructive payload. It is there where the real vengeance weapon takes over. Most likely the rocket wasn't an off the shelf version. In that it would be traveling only a short distance after having left the launch pad the rocket itself, which could reach Mach 1 in a 1000 feet, probably was less weight but carried a much larger, heavier payload. So too, the rocket may have been guided or aimed to hit or go into a special spot like the thermal exhaust port in the Death Star in Star Wars, a Achilles heel so to speak. It also could have carried a highly secret explosive (i.e., thermobaric explosive derivative) or device that had to have to been put together or mixed on the spot prior to launch, and/or both or all. We'll never know.

Although it must be said, it is an interesting fact that the Rheintochter R 1 currently on display at the Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center, which had been on display previously in the National Air and Space Museum from 1976 to the early 1980s --- after which it was completely restored to its original condition and paint scheme for exhibit at the Udvar-Hazy Center, had been acquired by the Smithsonian from the U.S. Navy in 1969. Now, if it was the same one the Army inherited when they hauled the submarine to Muroc Dry Lake and unwilling to part with at first, but somehow later maybe made to do so, is not known. It is just interesting that the Navy had a Rheintochter R 1, a missile never officially known to be associated with sea-borne, water, or Navy type stuff, yet still fell into their hands in such a manner that in 1969 they could donate it to the Smithsonian. It is arguable to the point that I would have to agree to the fact that if the Germans had one submersible, the one designed to destroy Hoover Dam, that could launch a Rheintochter R 1, then there is a possibility there could have been more --- and the U.S. Navy could have got their hands on it.

One quick thing before moving on. The Germans did have a fully operational unmanned pulse-jet aircraft, the so called flying bomb, with the designation V-1, that did have wooden wings. However, wings on an airborne aircraft type flying craft is a much different thing than fins on a rocket. It should be noted as well that for the the V-1 to be fully operable, it required a huge long sturdy well built launch ramp, of which no parts or material to assemble, build, or construct such a ramp were ever reported as being found or recovered associated with the German Hoover Dam submersible. So too, the V-1 was a fairly well known commodity, familiar to most involved with the Hoover Dam operation. Plus, no matter how you cut it a V-1 wasn't a rocket, it was a jet, a pulse jet. Rockets carry their own fully combustible fuel, be it solid or liquid, no air is necessary --- that's why they are able to operate in space. Jets, on the other hand, require air (i.e., lots of it and being in it, for the oxygen of course) to be fully operational. Because of the length of a typical V-1 launch ramp and how it was constructed it would be highly difficult to incorporate, steady, and aim a sub for an accurate V-1 launch. Rumors have it that a long abandoned framework-like metal structure in various stages of construction or dismantling, with all the similarities and configurations of a V-1 launch ramp, was discovered out in the open desert a few years after the war some 50 miles or so south-south west from Hoover Dam. For full details as they have come down to me, please click the following image:

(please click image)

The Germans were however, on the ropes and willing to try almost anything. The end of the war was closing in on them and one last major coup such as destroying the dam could have possibly turned the tide in their favor, given them a breather, extended it long enough to regroup, or to finish the development, operational reliability, and production on some of the weapons they were working on such as the V-1 flying bomb, the V-2 rocket, Me 262 jet fighter and the massive six engine 7000 mile range Ju 390 designed to bomb the city of New York.[8]

PHOTOSHOP RENDITION OF GERMAN BOMBER OVER NEW YORK CITY AUGUST 28, 1943
(please click image)

How could a German sub get from Europe to the Colorado River in the first place?

The German sub that went up the Colorado did not reach the mouth of the river under it's own power, but, as reported previously, towed by another sub to an island in the gulf late in the year 1944. Like the towed sub there is no official documentation of the tug-sub found among German records or if it even was German. So too, with it's eventual fate. All indications up to this point lean heavily toward the submarine that did the towing as being the infamous Japanese Ghost Submarine I-12 after having rendezvoused with the German U-181 mid-Pacific and transferring the towing-task to the I-12 as reported below from the source so cited:

"The V-2 hauling U-195 and 219 transferred the major item of their quote cargo, unquote, over to the U-181 in the Indian Ocean with the U-181 then taking it toward the Pacific. There, at a point undisclosed the U-181 was met by the infamous long-range ghost-like Japanese submarine I-12. The I-12 took over eventually ending up at the La Palma Secret Base sometime around mid-December, 1944. After a minor shakedown and testing in and around the secret base and just off shore by German crew members, the cargo was taken a 1000 miles north by the powerful trans-oceanic I-12 to the mouth of the Sea of Cortez that lies between the Baja Peninsula and mainland Mexico, then another 1000 miles north to Isla Angel de la Guarda, also called Archangel Island, off Bahia de los Angeles --- or one of the other smaller islands nearby and hidden in a cove."

La Palma Secret Base

The map below, provided through the courtesy of Dr Samuel Banda and his blog that discusses the contents of this page at a fairly in depth level, albeit in Spanish, alludes directly to the above paragraph as found in La Palma Secret Base. The map closely illustrates the routes traveled by the various vessels involved in the transport of the Hoover Dam Attack Submersible from Europe to the dam as I've laid them out. To wit, on the upper left of the map, the red line shows the portion of the trip that the first two vessels, the U-195 and the U-219, traveled from the submarine pens in France to a point somewhere in the India Ocean where, around the period November 14-15, 1944 the two subs met the U-181. There the cargo was transferred to the U-181(purple line). The U-181 then transported the cargo to an unknown location somewhere in the Pacific Ocean where she met the long range aircraft equipped Japanese ghost submarine the I-12 (green line). The I-12 traversed eastward over the remaining portion of the Pacific towing the cargo to the La Palma secret base located along the coast of the lower southern reaches of Mexico. The cargo, that is the Hoover Dam Attack Submersible, a specially constructed unnumbered off-the-books rocket equipped German U-boat, underwent a few shakedown tests then towed north into the Sea of Cortez by the I-12 to an island just south of where what water is left of the Colorado River flows into the gulf. There, the submersible, under her own power traveled north to the Laguna Diversion Dam where she was disassembled into five parts and trucked further north along the river.

(for larger size click image then click again)

After the mid-Pacific transfer records indicate the U-181 returned to it's base in Penang, Malaysia. As to the I-12's eventual fate, it is all over the map, having been reported as being sunk a half a dozen times in a half a dozen places. A complete rundown on the route and travels of the German sub from leaving its pens in occupied France to Archangel Island in the Sea of Cortez can be found by accessing the La Palma Secret Base link above. The most interesting thing about the I-12 is that it is the ONLY one of its type that the Japanese ever built. The question is, for what specific reason? She was the last known of the giant aircraft equipped Japanese submarines operating in the eastern Pacific, all the others having departed years before. Facts borne out by kills against allied shipping well east of Hawaii are solidly confirmed for the I-12 at least up to as late as October 1944. She was also the only Japanese submarine that late in the war that was in any sort of a position to have accessed the submarine facilities of Magdalena Bay in Baja California.

Placing the I-12 at Isla Angel de la Guarda puts her and, as it has been reported, possible German submarines as well, floating around clear up at the top of the Sea of Cortez. So said, there is an American who has been in contact with me over a period of time that is a sometime resident of the Sonoran village area along the northern west coast of the Sea of Cortez known as Las Dunas Santo Tomas. He has told me there are parts of a wrecked U.S. Navy F6F Hellcat that shows up scattered in the sand along the beach during extra low tide events. A long time local, an old Mexican man, told him the wreck happened sometime in 1942 or 1943. Although the plane washed ashore later the old man said his father rescued the pilot who told him "they" had bombed a German ship or submarine although he wasn't sure of which. A few weeks later American troops arrived in Puerto Penasco, also known as Rocky Point, about 75 miles north, taking trawlers down to the site, loading up many large crates and boxes and returning to the states with them.

Is there evidence of German U-boats in Mexico's Sea of Cortez?

Over and over on the net, almost any serious attempt researching or fact finding the possibility of a German U-boat attack against Hoover Dam during World War II something similar to the following comes up:

"The last mission of the German U-Boat U-133 was said to be a daring raid to blow up Hoover Dam during the Second World War. The U-boat reportedly traveled up the Baja Peninsula to the Colorado River, then up the river to Laughlin, Nevada. It was stopped by sandbars, and the captain, named Peter Pfau in the story, with 54 sailors, scuttled it. The truth is that a VIIC type U-boat could never have traveled from Europe around the Cape of Good Hope to California; it didn't have the fuel range. This type of U-boat had to use some of its water tank storage for extra fuel to make it to the east coast of North America from Europe. There is also no record of a U-board commander named Pfau."

With that, whoever writes the stuff let it go at that, with all the implications leaning toward not only was it not done, under any circumstance it could NOT have been done. However, if you have read what has been presented to this point, most of what is presented in the typical quote above has been discredited and supplanted with numerous viable options. First, it is made quite clear the U-133 was destroyed long before the dam attack being reported to have taken place, so the U-133 could not have been in play under any circumstances. Secondly, not only has it been made clear that the sub that WAS in play was not the U-133 but that it was transferred from Europe NOT under it's own power but towed to islands at the top of the Sea of Cortez --- and in saying so, made clear how. Third, the Commander Pfau thing that people continually go on-and-on about has been fully explained and laid to rest. Even so, similar quotes continue to show up and be used as the end all of the end alls.

Then there are those who constantly cite the length of the submarine as being a major hindrance navigating any distance up the Colorado. The following is from Footnote [6] which should redirect most queries moot on the subject and possibly even lay to rest those concerns:

"The combined length of the assembled components of a Type XXIII would make it somewhere just over 110 feet long. Critics continue to argue that such a length would prohibit a vessel to navigate the Colorado. However, according to The Colorado River: Was It Navigable during the heyday of regular riverboat transportation on the Colorado in late 1860s, the most powerful boat on the river was the Mohave I with a length of 135 feet. The Mohave I set a record of 10 days and two hours to navigate all the way to El Dorado Canyon, a distance of 365 miles. The El Dorado landing used by the steamboats in those days was located approximately 30 miles south of the present day location of Hoover Dam.

"The Mohave II was launched in 1876 as the successor to the Mohave I. The Mohave II was the longest steamboat to ever run the river at 149.5 feet, 31.5 feet at the beam and displacing 188 tons. The Mohave II was the only two stacker ever to run the river."

For a German submarine to have gone up the Colorado River it would have to be a given that at least one, if not more, German submarines had been in the Sea of Cortez at one time or the other. No official records have ever surfaced that any German submarines were anywhere near or off the Mexican Pacific coast, let alone in the Sea of Cortez --- or that such an endeavor against Hoover Dam was planned to such a point that it was actually carried out. World War II historians say no as do experts on the movements and whereabouts of U-boats. However, just regular folk, that is, people on the ground say otherwise including my own uncle, of whom I get into regarding his personal experience involving a U-boat and himself in the Sea of Cortez a few paragraphs down. First however, if not the most obvious it is at least the most graphic with pictures and all, the aforementioned F6F Hellcat:

THE F6F NAVY HELLCAT
NAZI SUBS AND THE BAJA MEXICO CRASH SITE

Secondly, is Anthony C. Acevedo. Acevedo, unlike my uncle who was a civilian and non-combatant, Acevedo was a highly decorated U.S. Army medic who was captured in World War II by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge and held in a POW camp until the end of the war. Although Acevedo was born in the United States (July 31, 1924, San Bernardino, California) his mother and father were both born in Mexico. In 1937, at age 13, his father and stepmother (his mother died when he was a year-and-a-half years old) were deported to Mexico and he and his three brothers and two sisters followed. The family moved to Durango where his father, an architectural engineer, became the director of Public Works. Because his father was a civil engineer he was commissioned by the Mexican Government to construct landing strips for U.S. forces during the war as well as being involved in a PT boat project in the Gulf of California. Acevedo, at age 17 returned to the U.S. to study medicine. In that he was still a U.S. citizen, in August of 1942, just one week after he turned 18, he was drafted.

One morning early, after he had been in the prison camp only a short time, three SS guards with machine guns entered the barracks and made everybody go outside and stand at attention. A man Acevedo called a Gestapo Field Marshal went up and down the ranks. When he got infront of him the man stopped and motioned him out of the line. He was put into an interrogation room alone where the Gestapo officer began questioning him. The officer said Acevedo, as a medic, "knew things" others did not. Acevedo gave only his name, rank, and serial number. Then the officer, who spoke both English and Spanish fluently, threw a dossier on the table, opened it and began reading.

There was information on when Acevedo left Mexico to return to the U.S. and that he intended to study medicine before he was drafted into the Army. The officer cited information about two employees that worked for Acevedo's father, names and everything. He also knew that his father had his two employees arrested for being German spys. The question is, why would a Gestapo officer, clear across the world from Mexico in the middle of a war know of or even be concerned with two employees of a Mexican civil engineer --- and that Acevedo, a prisoner of war amongst hundreds of prisoners, was the son of that engineer? After the war Acevedo answered that question:

"Two friends and myself discovered that two of my father's employees were spying for German U-Boats docked in the Sea of Cortez, Baja California, Mexico. One of my friends had studied Morse code and had detected the messages while we swam next to a building where the code was coming from. When my father made the discovery he had them immediately arrested." (source)

In that Acevedo was drafted one week after he turned 18 means the two German submarines were docked in the Sea of Cortez at least before August of 1942 for Acevedo and he friends to have overheard the sending of Morse code. A former Texas Ranger named Rufus Van Zandt, who was an undercover Special Services intelligence officer during the war, was assigned by the U.S. government to keep his eyes and ears open for Japanese or German activity south of the border. Using long established credentials as a guide for hunters and fishermen in Mexico as a cover and a long friendly relationship with Yaqui Indians he had developed over time, Van Zandt used a clandestine group of Yaqui raiders he had put together to investigate the existence of the German subs, all to no avail.

(please click image)

Faced with the threat of an attack on the Pacific west coast of the United States during World War II by the Japanese, including Baja California being used as a potential backdoor or a staging area, in a cooperative effort with the U.S., Mexico mobilized troops and units of the Mexican Army, most notably the First Air Regiment of the Mexican Air Force (Fuerza Aerea Mexicana (FAM)) to establish bases of operations in Baja in order to patrol and protect their shores.

On March 20, 1942, around the same time Acevedo was reporting having seen two German submarines in the Sea of Cortez, during a routine patrol a pilot for the Mexican Air Force, Lieutenant Leopoldo Meza, flying under the banner of the First Regiment, came across a submarine just along the surface 30 miles east off the coast of Sinaloa, Mexico. Meza strafed the submarine with nearly a full belt of machine gun fire. However, circling back around for a second pass, the sub, apparently remaining operable enough within reason, was somehow able to escape, disappearing underwater without a trace.

All the reports on the attack always list it as happening 30 miles off the coast of Sinaloa, then follow that up with brackets saying (Pacific Ocean). Meza's plane was said to be operating out of Baja California, most likely the southern portion somewhere north or inland from La Paz. Sinaloa is a Mexican state on the mainland of Mexico of which the northern half faces the Baja Peninsula and the Sea of Cortez while the southern half faces directly into the Pacific Ocean. What I take from Meza's report is that the sub he attacked was still in Pacific waters having not yet entered the Sea of Cortez. I only speculate that the sub was either coming or going to or from the Sea of Cortez because the distance between Baja and the mainland state of Sinaloa is at a minimum of 130 miles wide. Thirty miles off the coast of Sinaloa doesn't give you very many places to go or come from if the gulf wasn't part of it.

In conjunction with reports of Meza's attack it is often stated by others, that is, other than Meza and who themselves weren't there, that the possibility exists what he strafed that day in the water off Sinaloa was not a submarine, but was in fact instead a whale. Blue whales found in the Baja and Pacific waters seldom if ever reach 100 feet in length while whale sharks, inhabiting the same general area, are stretching it at 40 feet. Except for the 110 foot special mission sub in 1944 that was towed from the La Palma secret base to Isla Angel de la Guarda, also called Archangel Island, off Bahia de los Angeles in the Sea of Cortez, most German U-boats of the era ranged between 200 to 250 feet in length. The Japanese I-Type submarines deployed up and down the U.S. and Mexican Pacific west coast during the same period were 345 to 380 feet long. Hard to believe, considering the typical U-boat was at least twice the size of the largest whale and the I-Type Japanese submarine was three times plus the length, that either could be misconstrued to be a whale.

On a more personal level, at least for me anyway, my uncle in 1943, and not long after the war started, inadvertently stumbled across some rather alarming Axis-induced fifth column like activities in the desert southwest, more specifically that German U-boats were operating in the Sea of Cortez, and was shot point blank by foreign operatives and left to die because of it. In 1970 he repeated to me how the events unfolded:

My uncle, who I cite often in my works, was not only a fairly well established artist he was also as well, what I call a biosearcher. Prior to his death in 1989, as a biosearcher, he had more than a half dozen plant species named after him following years of trekking, searching, and discovering previously unknown and unnamed plants all over mostly remote and hidden areas and sections of the desert southwest. In 1943 he was biosearching alone in the then largely uninhabited mountainous and desert-like terrain in the central section of New Mexico between the New Mexico and Arizona border on the west and the north-to-south flowing Rio Grande on the east.

In the process of his biosearching he came across two men, and unusually so, both Asian. One of men was flat on his back all but unconscious and visibly quite ill after apparently having been bitten by a rattlesnake with the bite being left untreated. My uncle, after using the healing properties of indigenous plants he gathered up, soon found the man up and around. One of the men who had a rudimentary use of English told my uncle they were Japanese, were testing soil samples for radioactivity, and had been left off in Mexico by a submarine. By then my uncle was wanting to beat a hasty retreat but before he could one of the men shot him in the back. They took his truck and although they left him to bleed out he survived. In 1985 a book titled The Japanese Secret War authored by Robert K. Wilcox was published. In the book, completely independent of anything my uncle told me, Wilcox, in his own research, writes about the two Japanese spies doing soil testing in Arizona and New Mexico and the U-boat they arrived in, of which I in turn write about as found in the source so cited:

"Wilcox's book that, for the first time brought to the public's attention Japanese agents having been in the desert southwest during World War II specifically tasked with testing soil samples for radiation, was published in 1985. It was in 1970, fifteen years before Wilcox's book was published that my uncle told me about his 1943 encounter with Japanese spies soil testing deep into state of New Mexico and the fact that according to their own testimony, they had initially been brought to Mexico via German U-boat from Europe."

THE JAPANESE SECRET WAR

Joseph Curry, an American treasure hunter living in Alamos, Sonora Mexico has repeatedly stated the existence of an intact German U-boat sitting in 80 feet of water in the Sea of Cortez off the coast of Sonora. During World War II, under the cover of a heavy storm apparently a junior officer and two seamen from the submarine attempted to go ashore in a rubber raft. All three, fully dressed in uniforms of German submariners, were found on the beach drowned four miles north of suspected location of the sunken submarine. The officer was carrying official documents in a waterproof pouch that suposedly implicated a U.S. citizen as a potential German agent. According to reports Curry has received, the sub is located within sight of shore on a sandy bottom, supposedly half buried listing about 20 degrees from an upright position. The periscope is almost exposed when an unusually low tide occurs.

Curry met an agriculture pilot while doing some aerial fumigation work he became friends with that claims he was flying over the region at mid-day and saw the sub clearly, but since that sighting, has been unable to find it again (that is where the information that the sub is partially buried in the sand and listing comes from). Curry also talked to an Indian who was fishing from a small boat on a windy day in the same area when the prop from his outboard motor hit something and broke the shear pin. Since the choppy sea did not allow him to see very far in to the water he was unable to clearly make out what he hit although he was sure it was not some floating object. He replaced the pin, and noticed that the prop was bent as though it had hit something hard like a metal pole or post near the surface. A few days later when the water was calm he returned to where he thought it had happened, but found nothing.

Curry's original informant, now deceased, claims her brother, a Mexican naval officer, investigated the incident involving the dead sailors. The documents obtained from the body of the officer are the source of the story about meeting a sabotuer from the US. There is no date associated with the investigation of the dead sailors. According to Acevedo the submarines he was talking about prior to August of 1942 were docked, so there would be no need to go ashore in a rubber raft during a storm. If there is any relationship between the submarine Curry reports and the one that was laced with machine gun bullets by Lieutenant Meza just south of the entrance into the Sea of Cortez is not known.

There are reports, or at least strong rumors to the effect, that a German U-boat stopped at the La Palma Secret Base along Mexico's southern Pacific Coast in Chiapas for refueling long after the Japanese stopped using it on a regular basis, only to show up along the Mexican northwest coast off Sonora late in the year of 1944. The U-boat, said to be the U-196, was a long range Type IXD2 under the auspices of the Gruppe Monsun (Monsoon Group) operating out of Penang, Malaysia.

Officially, on November 30, 1944, the U-196 left Penang to undertake a war patrol around Australia with two other boats. When she failed to respond to repeated transmissions requesting her position sometime around December 1st, she was listed as missing in the Sunda Straits south of Java, effective December 12, 1944.

What actually happened members of the German military stationed in Japanese territory in collusion with some crew members of the U-196 fled Djakarta in 1944 with a cargo hold full of gold. It is not known if the crew was originally mandated under official orders to transport the gold outside of Japanese territory and secrete it someplace for safe keeping or not. It did however, disappear. When and if it was discovered the U-196 was gone and possibly not having met an ill fate as surmised it was too late, being well beyond the reach of German authorities and the arm of the Gestapo.[9]

However, if the alleged submarine was instead sent as a transport vessel for escapees from the Papago POW camp that ocurred on December 24 and/or if Wattenberg was intended to be one of the escapees along with his crew after Hoover dam is another thing. It would have presented a formidable challenge to transport Wattenberg or any of the others safely and expediently to somewhere in the Sea of Cortez off the coast of Sonora immediately following the destruction of the dam with all of the downstream discharge --- unless their intention was to cross the desert north and use the secretly parked and unmarked C-47 found on a remote Nevada airstrip discussed in the next paragraph below in some capacity.[10]

Sometime before the end of World War II, and not long after the Papago Park POW camp escapes of December 23, 1944, a fully fueled and operable C-47 with no markings and painted in the flat tan desert color of the Afrika Korps --- with a white underbelly --- was found parked beneath camouflage netting on a remote Nevada desert airfield thought to be what in recent times has come to be known as Scotty's or the Bonnie Claire airstrip, a basically remote forever abandoned X shaped strip with no real known history about 125 miles north of Las Vegas. As if it wasn't bad enough once discovered, the unmarked C-47 was eventually traced back as being one of thirty-nine C-47s used in Operation Torch, the invasion of Vichy French North Africa in November, 1942, in of which a great number of the 47s were either destroyed, lost, or ended up unaccounted for. The plane was stripped of all except bare necessities, even the landing and anti-collision lights were gone. The only thing inside was 20 or so brand-new parachutes divided and stacked along each side of the cargo bay, double the amount in count of bailout rations and canned water. Sitting neatly in their holders near pilot and co-pilot's seats were flight charts mostly related to Mexico and Baja California along with instructional and operational manuals all written in German.[11]

Why a Submarine and Not an Attack by Air?

Except for one very desperate last ditch effort by the Nazis to attack Hoover Dam by air just at the end of the war, only to be aborted because of the German unconditional surrender, they pretty much followed the Japanese lead eliminating the use of aircraft for any attempt designed to destroy the dam.

The Germans, learning from the Japanese experiences, knew that the U.S., to ensure against a potential air attack from the Pacific side, at the beginning of the war, proposed to build a network of radar stations covering the full length of the coast from the Canadian border into Baja Mexico. Actually, a total of 72 sites were proposed, of which 65 were eventually built. However, according to The Radar Dilemma, at the start of the war not much more than ten or so were in place let alone operational, and most of those were pretty much concentrated around Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. Within weeks of their attack on Pearl Harbor, and possibly even before, the Japanese began probing U.S. radar capability up and down the Pacific coast, sometimes with clandestine operatives, and had a pretty good handle on where radar coverage was effective and where it was weak or nonexistent. That is why when they did decide to attack the U.S. mainland along the Pacific coast there was such a difference in how each of the attacks were carried out.

The Japanese submarine that shelled the oilfields near Santa Barbara on February 23, 1942, was aircraft equipped. The plane was not launched because the Japanese as well as the submarine captain knew that the radar along that section of the coast was at least adequate. Those involved with the aerial bombing against Mt. Emily in Oregon on September 9, 1942 were well aware, as did their superiors higher up the chain, that a "radar gap" existed along the heavily wooded area of the Oregon coast, especially between Fort Bragg, California and Cape Perpetua, thus allowing unobstructed aircraft penetration.

----------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------(to increase imaage size click then click again)

In reference to the Santa Barbara shelling, take note of the photo above left. It has long been attributed to show the actual shelling that night. If you notice, along the upper right hand edge of the photo there is a drawing outlining the North American Pacific west coast ranging from just above Vancouver to below Baja. The location of Santa Barbara and the Ellwood refinery is clearly marked with a small darkened circle as well as Japanese writing in bold script. Somewhat above the heavier or bolder script is a lighter script with a small circle on the coastline apparently marking Cape Mendocino, the area of operation the I-17 was assigned. Lower down is another circle with Japanese writing apparently indicating the location of the city of Los Angeles.

The color graphic map on the far right showing the same coast line configuration is from an article with a full page expandable map from the Los Angeles Examiner newspaper dated Sunday, November 7, 1937. The color map depicted the Earth's northern hemisphere with most of the Pacific from roughly the edge of China's eastern coastline and Japan to about the mid west of the United States, concentrating on Hawaii in the center and down the Alaskan coast, along Canada, the U.S. and Mexico's Baja peninsula. The theme of the article and map was to show that long before December 7, 1941 the Japanese could have attacked Pearl Harbor and the U.S. continental mainland prior to any radar or enforcement being put into place, eliminating of course, any need for an attack on Hoover Dam by the Germans or anybody else if the Japanese efforts had been successful. For more, including a huge expandable version of the full color Examiner map please visit:

HOW JAPAN COULD HAVE ATTACKED THE U.S. IN 1937

As far as the southern reaches of the radar network was concerned, and unknown by most people still, there were at least three radar sites built and commanded by the U.S. Army in Mexico along the coast of Baja California to protect the southern approaches to San Diego. According to Mexican Forts known sites included Station B-92 at Punta Salispuedes, located 22 miles northwest of Ensenada (later moved to Alasitos, 36 miles south of Tiajuana); Station B-94 at Punta San Jacinto, 60 miles south of Ensenada; and Station B-97 at Punta Estrella, south of San Felipe on the Gulf of California (aka Sea of Cortez). It is not clear when all three of the radar sites were in full operation, but it is known through outside observers that the Punta Estrella site was operational and fully staffed by April of 1942.

With the extent of the operational radar coverage along the coast from Los Angeles south into Mexico and both sides of the Baja, almost any successful access to Hoover Dam by air across the 300 mile breadth of California from the Pacific or up it's underbelly via Baja was practically impossible --- hence the move by the Germans to the use of a submarine.

As to the reports of a planned aerial attack by the Germans against Hoover Dam that was aborted because of their surrender, they had coordinated the attack through a combined effort between themselves and the Japanese. During the first half of 1945 the Japanese had honed a serious set of plans to destroy a good part of the Panama Canal, specifically the Gatun Dam, with the attack emanating from the Atlantic side rather than the Pacific side. To do so they designed and built a series of giant, super long distance submarines, the I-400 Class, each capable of carrying three powerful aircraft.

According to Secret Japanese Submarine Bases on the Pacific West Coast, in July 1945 the attack flotilla was assembled for the first time, consisting of two of the newly designed I-400 Class submarines, the I-400 and I-401. They were joined by two smaller subs capable of carrying two aircraft each, the I-13 and I-14. In that the two smaller subs did not have the fuel capacity for the round trip to Panama, they were to either refuel from the two larger subs or abandoned after the attack. The Germans planned to use one of the subs and enter the Caribbean launching all three planes on a one way trip toward Hoover dam from off the coast near Brownsville, Texas, coordinating the timing of the destruction of the dam with the Japanese attack against the canal --- basically coming through the backdoor and bypassing any of the west coast radar. However, the Germans surrendered May 8, 1945 and when the submarines left their base July 23, 1945, they were under a new set of orders. Each one departed separately, with a rendezvous set at sea for August 16th off Ponape Island, the Carolines. On August 5th while at sea the I-400 suffered an electrical fire that forced her to surface to repair the damage. The I-401 set a new rendezvous point but the I-400 did not receive the message and the subs missed each other. The strike date was set for August 17th, but Japan surrendered on the 15th.(see)

AND NOW THIS:

In Footnote [9] I make mention of my day long meeting/interview with Johann Kremer, World War II Kriegsmarine U-boat veteran and onetime crew member of the infamous U-boat captain, Jurgen Wattenberg. Although informal, during our meeting we discussed and he clarified much of what I have presented here, probably more than anyone has ever done in relation to similar subject matter. It should be noted, Kremer, along with Wattenberg and about 60 others, was one of the escapees from the Papago Park POW camp in Arizona although it wasn't his first escape. When I was a young boy Kremer attempted his first POW escape from a camp he was interned in near Roswell, New Mexico. By pure happenstance, the same night of the escape I was sleeping along a river about half way between Roswell and the small town of Artesia with a Native American spiritual elder waiting for my uncle to show up when Kremer and two other escapees, seeing our fire, walked into our camp looking for food. More at Footnote [9].

In the end it is still the wooden fins that cinched it all.

JAPANESE MIDGET SUBMARINES
A-BOMBS, MIDGET SUBS, AND THE CALIFORNIA CHANNEL ISLANDS

THE COLORADO RIVER: WAS IT NAVIGABLE?

EARLY COLORADO RIVER STEAMBOAT LANDINGS
FROM THE DELTA TO THE VIRGIN RIVER

COMMANDER JURGEN WATTENBERG

SEE ALSO:

THE BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES: THE RADAR DILEMMA

THE NAZI'S PLOT TO BLOW UP HOOVER DAM

THE BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES: 1942 UFO

WORLD WAR II COMES TO REDONDO

1944 GERMAN ATOMIC BOMB

LAGUNA DIVERSION DAM

CLICK
HERE FOR
ENLIGHTENMENT

ON THE RAZOR'S
EDGE

E-MAIL
THE WANDERLING
(please click)

As to the subject of donations, for those who may be so interested as it applies to the gratefulness of my works, I invariably suggest any funds be directed toward THE WOUNDED WARRIOR PROJECT and/or THE AMERICAN RED CROSS.

FOOTNOTE [1]

In the above main text to of which this footnote is footnoted to I write:

"(O)n March 14, 1942, barely three months into the war, the U-133 sank with all hands off the coast of Greece due to navigation error and a mine explosion --- and that the loss of the U-133 was fully substantiated in 1994, two full years before the USS Shaw Newsletter was even published --- by a diving team that managed to locate and confirm the identity of the wreck. So said, there is absolutely NO way the U-133 could have been involved in any way shape or form regarding Hoover Dam or any sort of an attack against it."

The following below, is found on UBOAT.NET Myth and Stories, albeit debunking it much in the same way as I have. Nevertheless, the story continues to be presented in one form or the other over-and-over elsewhere on the net, ad infinitum, as if it were fact:

U-133's mission to destroy the Hoover Dam

According to an article from 1996 U-133's last mission was to travel up the Colorado River from Baja, California and destroy the Hoover Dam. The article is from the USS Shaw's newsletter. The article states that U-133, piloted by Captain Peter Pfau along with 54 sailors made it to as far as Laughlin, Nevada before sandbars made them abort their mission and scuttle the sub.

This is only a cute story, U-133 would never have made it that far (see map showing its approximate path from St. Nazaire, a suitable base, to the target) as its fuel supply would never have allowed this (not even close, the type VIIC could make it to the US east coast by filling up part of its water tanks with fuel but even then it was stretching it). There was also no U-boat commander named Pfau.

Had such an unusual and daring raid been attempted during the war, people would talk and we would know about it by now.

Follow up: A reader pointed out that "... would also have been impossible for the fact that they would have had to somehow bypass the Parker and Imperial Dams (both of which opened in 1938), would have to traverse the entire length of the Colorado River without being detected (I assume that they would have to be surfaced for the duration of the journey to aid in navigation), and would arrive in the Gulf of California only to discover that the Colorado River is not as traversable as one might think."

THE COLORADO RIVER: WAS IT NAVIGABLE?

USS SHAW: HER FATE AND HISTORY

FATE OF THE U-133

(to see the actual route followed please click image)

Please note the route in red of the submarine going from Europe around South America on the above graphic is from the discredited report of the attack on Hoover Dam by the U-133. The actual route was a four-part journey leaving from Europe from the same location, but going instead around the tip of South Africa into the Pacific eventually to be picked up by the long range Japanese sub the I-12 and taken to the La Palma Secret Base for a shake down cruise prior to being towed into the Sea of Cortez.

To see a map of the actual four-part journey please click the map-image above. For a larger size click a second time. For your own edification the four-part journey map does however, show up again further down in the main text, albeit in context with full explanation.

THE SINKING OF THE I-12

FOOTNOTE [2]

The following quoted paragraph is from the works of USC film school graduate Nick Spark who did a ton of historical background research for a documentary on Pancho, the quote appearing at the source so cited:

"From the start, the fire seemed suspicious. Jack Leird, the ranch foreman, told a reporter that the blaze started in the dance hall 'with a puff of smoke' followed by a loud explosion. Other witnesses stated that the explosion had so much force, it blew out one end of the dance hall. Pancho was convinced the blaze was arson -- perhaps even a bomb."(source)

In Pancho's personal opinion, and the one she related most to close friends, was that the then Colonel to be Major General Stanley Holtoner, the base commander of Edwards AFB at the time, was involved. As mentioned in the main text above, animosity between she and the base commander continued to grow over a number of reasons until it reached a point that Holtoner, who never liked Barnes, put her place off limits to base personnel.

In April of 1952, during one of their heated discussions that typically boiled over into the verge of an out-and-out argument, Holtoner reportedly told Pancho he could arrange to have her ranch "napalm bombed off the desert". An article appearing in the New York Times dated April 23, 1953, page 33, attested to General Holtoner's threat, as well as in other newspapers of the day. The Times article, which can be reached via the link below, opened with the following headline:

THREATS TO BOMB RANCH CHARGED TO AIR GENERAL

Athough my uncle and I had flown out of Pancho's Happy Bottom Riding Club under some rather hasty arrangements made by my stepmother when I was around ten years old or so, we missed each other and I didn't meet her until she showed up at my ex-stepmother's place one afternoon with my ex-stepmother. I remember she told me she knew Howard Hughes as my ex-stepmother had told her I had met Hughes.(see) At first, other than her knowing Hughes I had no clue who she was or her background. However, as the day wore on it dawned on me she was the same person whose ranch my uncle and I had flown out of four or five years earlier. During that flight the pilot, who I met a second time only just the year prior to the one we are talking about here when he flew me to Santa Fe in a North American AT-6, told me Pancho had been a stunt pilot in the movies, most notedly Hughes' 1930s film on World War I Zeppelins titled Hell's Angeles. I quickly forgot about Pancho but, in that the movie had to do with Zeppelins, I didn't forget about it --- harping and harping until I figured a way to see it. The thing is, in those days it wasn't like you could just go out and get a DVD. My stepmother had to pull all kinds of strings to get a private screening. Even so, much to my dismay, to this day, almost everything I know about Pancho Barnes has primarily been brought to my attention second hand and well after the fact.

I did see her husband Mac on-and-off on occasion when I used to drive north to what I called my High Mountain Zendo. He was associated with and semi-ran a then small dump of a place he and Barnes owned called the Jawbone Cafe and Motel on Highway 14 a few miles south of where it intersects with Highway 395, the route I took to and from the Zendo. The first time I stopped to introduce myself we talked so long I lost track of time and ended up staying the night.

The Jawbone Canyon Store as it is today is nowhere near what it was like back when Pancho's husband Eugene "Mac" McKendry operated it. First of all, in those days Highway 14 was just a two-lane road and the cafe and store, added together, was like I say, a small dump of a place. Lauren Kessler in her book THE HAPPY BOTTOM RIDING CLUB: The Life and Times of Pancho Barnes (2000) describes it best:

"(The) grocery store, windowless and jammed with shelving was barely 250 square feet. The Jawbone Cafe was about as small. Whatever eating was done --- and there wasn't much, because traffic was sparse in these parts --- was done on one of two ancient picnic tables baking in the roadside dust. The gas station had two pumps that sometimes worked."

That was basically the way I remember the place when I was on my way to the Zendo. Over the next 30 years except for a few slight modifications and stuck-on makeshift expansions, that was the way it remained until it burned down December 14, 1998.

--------------------

AND NOW THIS:

Several paragraphs back I write:

"Even though my uncle and I had flown out of the Happy Bottom Riding Club with arrangements made by my stepmother..."

There are two or three incidents that I write about elsewhere that are interwoven in my various stays in the desert with with my stepmother. The above quote refers to a time many years before she opened the dance hall bar, a time when when I was around ten years old and she bought her first ranch in the Mojave Desert. The whole of the western edge of the ranch property line ran right along the Southern Pacific mainline that came up out of Los Angeles headed toward Sacramento --- and vice versa --- and doing so by traversing over the lower end of the Sierras by using the infamous Tehachapi loop. That took the tracks and the trains that used them right by the ranch on the way to the switchyards in Mojave and then over the mountains. During the time I lived on the ranch it was still well before the introduction of diesel-electrics. Instead, Southern Pacific depended on the giant 6000 horsepower 4-8-8-2 cab forward steam locomotives to pull the 100-plus car trains up out of Los Angeles and over the Tehachapis.

Just past the northwestern corner of the ranch was a major siding and watering stop the freights used to use to take on water and/or move over to let the highspeed passenger limiteds by. Basically, to cut to the quick, my older brother and cousin, the young teenagers they were, hopped one of the freights ending up 500 miles away in Sacramento. My uncle and I flew up there out of Pancho Barnes Happy Bottom Flying Club to pick them up. That story is elaborated on in:

RIDING THE CAB FORWARDS

A second big thing that happened was when her ranch house mysteriously burned down and going through the rubble I found her genuine Colt Walker in the debris basically unharmed. Colt Walkers, produced in 1847, was a .44-caliber black-powder revolver, one of the heaviest most powerful pistols ever made. In 2008 a fully documented Colt Walker that was known to have been owned by a Mexican War veteran sold at auction for $920,000. Around the time of the fire the Colt she had may have been pushing a hundred thousand in value or more. For more on how the Colt fit into the scheme of things see:

LOUIS L'AMOUR

To see photos of what remains of the Happy Bottom Riding Club and what it looks like today click the following:

THE HAPPY BOTTOM RIDING CLUB

GOOGLE EARTH SATELLITE VIEW

FOOTNOTE [3]

Pancho Barnes was born into wealth and an upper class social status. In her final days she ended up in ill health living in a dirt floor stone hovel out in the middle of the desert, destitute, broke, and, except for her dogs, alone --- her high powered Hollywood types and famous aviator friends gone, as well as all of her money. As Lauren Kessler in her book THE HAPPY BOTTOM RIDING CLUB: The Life and Times of Pancho Barnes (2000) writes:

"(She, Pancho, was) a woman who cut a wide swath through life, a person who lived life as if life had no consequences. When she was young and wealthy, the darling of Los Angeles press, the confidant of exciting and powerful men, her brash ways were admired, her uniqueness was her charm. But now that she was old and living in a shack with only dogs for company, the same character traits were interpreted differently. Now she was a crazy old lady. Now some people thought she was drunk or on drugs or senile."

Except possibly for the aviation aspect of it all, my ex-stepmother's life paralleled Pancho's life nearly step by step. She was just much more mysterious and low profile. Although she was extremely wealthy when we entered each other's lives, she had not inherited the money --- it was just unclear where she got it or how she earned it. Plus, until she married my dad and took his last name she had at least three aliases and just as many passports. During the war and post war years she was a regular at heady celebritiy nightspots like Ciro's, the Tracadero, and Coconut Grove, hobnobbing on a first name basis with a slew of Hollywood bigshots. The same was true with influential California politicians as well as Los Angeles area mob figures such as Jack Dragna and Johnny Roselli as well as people providing services to the shady fringes of those circles such as the infamous Brenda Allen.

Once my ex-stepmother came to the desert and stayed for awhile, as with Pancho Barnes, things began falling apart. There were fires in which she lost buildings, businesses, homes, money, fur coats, jewelry, and antique guns. She went from a beautiful woman with class and suave to an old lady living in dump full of goats and dogs, her once perfect hair with never a strand out of place to straw, her feet once emaculately manicured and oiled to gnarly with dried heels filled with open cracks, her wealth and once powerful friends gone.

"On November 13, 1953 Pancho Barnes' place burnt down, totally destroyed by fire. In 1958 or 1959 my ex-stepmother's place burnt down, totally destroyed by fire. On January 22, 1962 Willie Martello's El Rey Club burnt down, totally destroyed by fire."

EL REY CLUB: Resort, Casino, Brothel

Although there is no clear evidence or hard facts that any of the above three incidents are connected --- after all, it isn't likely that any entity or associated group would leave a trail --- one can, if reading my material regarding all three of the above, easily sense a rather blaring inference of a connection. The results for Pancho, my stepmother, and Martello, in the end, were all the same even if the dots can't actually able be connected.

It should be noted that relative to me and my brothers in the early years in the desert, both Pancho Barnes and Johnny Roselli were responsible for the personal safety of my older brother, who was barely into his teens then, from undue harm at the hands of a freight yard railroad bull --- an episode fully chronicled unusually enough in Riding The Cab Forwards.

Probably the most infamous desert rat to have ever tread the sands of the Mojave Desert, Walt Bickel, once said, "The desert does funny things to you." Such seems to have been the case with Pancho Barnes and my ex-stepmother. For much more on my stepmother's place including a lot more specifics, please see:

THE CODE MAKER, THE ZEN MAKER

SHANGRI-LA, SHAMBHALA, GYANGANJ, BUDDHISM AND ZEN

The slot machines in the secret hidden room at my stepmother's ranch had been in storage in a lumber yard in Big Bear City, California, after having been removed from an upstairs room in the the Sportsman's Tavern, once owned by noted western movie sidekick Andy Devine. My stepmother's ranch foreman Leo and another man, with me tagging along, took a big old truck up the back road into Big Bear and with the help of a couple of other men already there, loaded the machines into the back of the truck. For more on the slot machines see:

JOHNNY ROSELLI, SLOT MACHINES, AND THE FBI

ROY ROGERS AND ANDY DEVINE

FOOTNOTE [4]

"(My dad) got on the phone and started yelling at my uncle that he was filling my mind with all kinds of 'weird and useless shit' and to stay away from me and keep his 'cock-and-bull stories' to himself. Needless to say that was the end of it and I didn't get to go. Instead, my dad sent me to spend the summer with my stepmother on her ranch in the Mojave Desert, or actually my ex-stepmother as she had become by then, and told the hard drinking every other word was a cuss word ranch foreman Leo, who had been at one time, a World War II Pacific Fleet Navy boxing champion, to not let me 'wander off.'"

Less than two months later, with my father basically out of the picture because of me staying at my stepmother's ranch for the summer, and, even though my father had told my uncle to keep his cock-and-bull stories to himself as well as the ranch foreman not to let me wander off, my uncle called again. Only this time not necessarily to me but my stepmother, talking to her specifically without anybody else's knowledge.

My uncle, as mentioned previously, lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He phoned my stepmother in July of 1953 to tell her he had been in the small community of Las Vegas, New Mexico, not far from Santa Fe, and a few hours before sunset saw a passenger train go through town headed west. He wanted my stepmother to know that the locomotive, a huge steam powered 4-8-4 pulling a special Boy Scout train on its way to Santa Ana, California, bore the Santa Fe road number 3774.

Eight years before, when I was six or seven years old, I was onboard the all Pullman car first-class-only passenger train Number 19 Santa Fe Chief out of Chicago on its way to Los Angeles --- being pulled by #3774. Between Flagstaff and Williams, Arizona, near midnight and running behind schedule, the Chief hit a 55 mph marked curve at over 90 mph, derailing with the locomotive sliding off the tracks on its side for over 500 feet. The rest of the 14 car train ended up in various stages of derailment and wreckage on and off the track, some cars remaining upright with two actually staying on the tracks undamaged. Although I escaped unharmed, the fireman and three passengers were killed. 113 fellow passengers along with 13 train employees injured, among them the severely injured engineer.(see)

My uncle didn't know if the #3774 was going to be the motive power all the way through to the Los Angeles area, but even if it wasn't, he said, it should be going at least to Barstow and possibly into the Cajon Pass sometime the next day --- roughly 15 hours or so from the time he called. My stepmother, knowing the full story on how the #3774 had impacted my life immediately dispatched both the ranch foreman and me in a jeep out across the desert toward Barstow to try and catch it.

RACING THE #3774 FROM LUDLOW TO BARSTOW

The first phone call from my uncle asking me to meet him in Kingman, Arizona --- in which I was not allowed to participate by my dad, but my uncle went ahead and went anyway --- and associated with the so-called Kingman Incident, only came up once between us, and then only briefly, many, many years later following a discussion my uncle had with major UFO buff Frank Edwards. For more on the Kingman incident and how it relates to all of the above see:

KINGMAN UFO

JUDITH ANN WOOLCOTT

FOOTNOTE [5]

THE STERN-WHEELER COCHAN, COLORADO RIVER, YUMA AZ, CIRCA 1900

It appears the Germans knew exactly what they were doing. Most people that know anything about the Colorado River Delta and where the river is suposed to dump into the Sea of Cortez would argue that any sort of navigable access would be impossible. The Germans had been playing a waiting game for just the right time and in a freak of nature, it just so happens that in 1944, things were different. The following two paragraphs are found in THE COLORADO RIVER: WAS IT NAVIGABLE?:

"The Southern Pacific Railroad reached the Colorado River in 1877. While the steamboats still had business, the railroad quickly became the transport method of choice. Johnson sold out to the railroad in 1878. Paddle-wheelers continued to feed the railroad for a period of time, but the construction of the Laguna Dam in 1909 closed the river to steamboats coming up the gulf from going any further than 14 miles north of Yuma.

"Thirty-two years later, following the advent of a series of larger dams being built upriver from Laguna Dam, except for an unusual four year period 1942-1946, any sea-going access to the river from the Sea of Cortez disappeared because the river itself stopped flowing out into the gulf before it ever even reached the end of the delta."

As well as the below third paragraph:

"Thus, because of the opening of the spillways at Hoover Dam combined with two powerful hurricanes, especially the one in 1941, for a brief several year period (1942-1946) access from the gulf to Laguna Dam was once again possible. After that things returned to closer to how it had been when the lakes were being filled. However, in 1983 flood conditions occured at Hoover Dam and the spillways were once again opened. That 1983 downstream outflow contributed significantly to flushing out the river and a new brief access period from the gulf."

FOOTNOTE [6]

There was a German submarine built to just such specifications, the Type XXIII. It was a shallow-draft vessel designed to operate in inland and coastal waters. It was also designed in four sections so not only could it be transported by rail but that the sections could easily be concealed in a standard boxcar so that its movements would not be revealed. More than likely the submarine used in the assult on the dam was, if not specifically built for the mission, was a modification of the Type XXIII.

In an extra added insight, you may remember the Chief said even though he was a submariner, it was in conjuction with the sub that he heard the word "snorkle" for the first time. The Type XXIII was one of the earliest model submarines to use a snorkle.

Type XXIII section description

Section	description	weight (tons)	length (feet)
1	stern, steering installation, silent speed motor, gearing	11.5	30 ft 2.25 in
2	main engines and motors	14	19 ft 8.25 in
3	control room, forward living quarters (part)	18	24 ft 7.25 in
4	bows with torpedo tubes, forward living quarters (part)	16.25	32 ft 9.75 in

(source)

The combined length of the assembled components of a Type XXIII would make it somewhere just over 110 feet long. Critics continue to argue that such a length would prohibit a vessel to navigate the Colorado. However, according to The Colorado River: Was It Navigable during the heyday of regular riverboat transportation on the Colorado in late 1860s, the most powerful boat on the river was the Mohave I with a length of 135 feet. The Mohave I set a record of 10 days and two hours to navigate all the way to El Dorado Canyon, a distance of 365 miles. The El Dorado landing used by the steamboats in those days was located approximately 30 miles south of the present day location of Hoover Dam.

The Mohave II was launched in 1876 as the successor to the Mohave I. The Mohave II was the longest steamboat to ever run the river at 149.5 feet, 31.5 feet at the beam and displacing 188 tons. The Mohave II was the only two stacker ever to run the river.

Looking back over history and converstations garnered from the chief petty officer and the man in the truck, over time I have come to the opinion that any submarine used in such an attempt would not be a known or production line numbered model but a combination of specially assembled or selected parts for a specific one-time-only attack against the dam. A hybrid of sorts --- part submarine, part rocket, part rocket launcher, part bomb, based around what is called a Lafferenz Capsule, albeit, self-propelled rather than towed.

In a nuntshell, the Lafferenz Capsule was an underwater launch platform designed to be towed behind a submarine to about 100 miles off the coast of New York and fire a V-2 or similar type rocket into the city. Wherein any attack against New York the distance covered by the rocket plus the ability to carry a warhead of sufficent explosive power was important, such was not the case for Hoover Dam. What was important was short distance penetration power on impact AND the overall close-in detonation properties of the explosive, most likely designed to hit at the narrower width of concrete toward the top of the dam but below the water level.

FOOTNOTE [7]

Type XXI Elektroboat U-Boat

--

Project Ursel, considered by the Wehrmacht as a Vergeltungswaffen, a V-weapon, i.e., vengeance weapon, was a German rocket program specifically designed to launch missiles from a U-boat, most specifically against a pursuing surface vessel. They were installed on latter production Type XXI U-boats. Although completely different missions, long term self-defense for the XXI, one shot destruction of the dam for the other, almost all of the general rocket launching technology, for example the stabilization needed for firing a missile accurately from a floating-motion platform, etc., would easily be cross-applicable for use with the type of submersible craft implemented for use by the Germans against Hoover Dam.

FOOTNOTE [8]

"An otherwise non-descript former airman, after interjecting he was of course sorry to hear about my uncle, said that my uncle's experience was nothing compared to what happened to him during World War II while stationed stateside. Although he wasn't shot like my uncle, he came close after being captured and held at gunpoint on U.S. soil near Sault Ste Marie by a whole slew of well armed German commandos infiltrating and taking over a good portion of a starkly remote U.S. air base located in the far northern reaches of Michigan, an air base with three nearly perfectly matched 300 foot wide 5520 foot long concrete runways, all hooked together forming one huge gigantic triangular shape as shown below in a series of continually expanded satellite views, a story of which I get into elsewhere."

The Ghost and the Haunted B-29

When people read about a German submarine going up the Colorado to destroy Hoover Dam a good number of them just shake their heads in disbelief. True, it is hard to believe both in it's scope and through to it's fruition. However, like I mentioned earlier, the Germans were on the ropes. The end of the war was closing in on them and one last major coup at the level of blowing up the dam could have possibly given them the boost they needed.

If you think Hoover Dam is farfetched, try New York City. More than once New York had been in the crosshairs of the German military. First in World War I and again under a variety of methods in World War II. Except for Fate intervening they came close --- and their methods for their planned attacks were within reason.

As found in ZEPPELINS: High Altitude Warships, near the end of World War I an attack on the city of New York composed of three special type of rigid airships called Height Climbers was being put into place and advocated by Korvettenkapitan Peter Strasser. To demonstrate the successful completion of such an attack to the German High Command, Strasser had flown the L-59 nonstop from Bulgaria to the Sudan in Africa and back. The newer Height Climbers had even greater range. Before he had a chance to put the attack into motion, what was to be the lead ship, the L-70, was caught coming in over England at the low altitude --- for a Climber --- at around 17,000 feet and shot out of the sky with Stasser in command. The two other ships trailing behind immediately raised altitude beyond the range of the fighters and escaped. With Strasser dead and the L-70 gone the New York raid was shelved.

In World War II it was no longer Zeppelins but long range fixed wing bombers, most notedly the massive six-engined Ju 390, and again, just at the end of the war.

It has been reported that a Ju-390 left Europe coming in over Canada crossing into U.S. airspace to photograph defense plants in Michigan only to exit out over the Atlantic sometime after noon on August 28, 1943 by coming in behind any east-facing aircraft detection systems and passing directly over New York above the Empire State Building.

The difficulty most historians have with such a claim is that the Ju-390's first flight is officially stamped into the records as happening two months later, on October 20 1943 although the date of that first flight has been found to be debatable. Further in the main article above I make mention of C-47s, an American built two engine troop and transport plane allied forces used in Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa. A C-47 from that operation was found a few years later on a remote desert airstrip in Nevada fully fueled with pilot flight instructions written in German. As to that same invasion, Operation Torch, a person onboard a convoy ship supplying the beachhead snapped a picture of an aircraft that suggests a Ju-390 was flying as early as November 1942. The six-engine aircraft in the photograph looked exactly like a Ju-390 and clearly showed a white band around it's fuselage ahead of the tail, a marking used to designate German aircraft used in the Mediterranean and the north Africa campaign. That a plane with the unusual six engine configuration of the Ju-390 was operational enough to participate in an attack on a convoy nearly a year before the alleged overflight of the U.S. clearly shows the potential for such an overflight to have happened.

Ironically, without any fanfare or raising controversy, and with the existence of such a German bomber totally unknown to all except possibly the U.S. high command at the time and only then in the operational theater at the time, a drawing of a six engine German bomber by a New York based artist named Harry Ramsey showed up in a publication dated January, 1944.(see)

(please click image)

For years, a highly credible second report has surfaced that sometime around September 17-19, 1944 a large six engine aircraft painted very dark green and black paint crashed in the sea off Owls Head Lighthouse, Maine. A resident of Burlington, Vermont, Ruben Paul Whittemore, has reported he had relatives who witnessed the recovery of three bodies found in the Penobscot river estuary on September 28, 1944 and taken by the U.S. Coast Guard to Rockland Maine Station. One of the witnesses states he saw one body in a uniform later identified as a German Luftwaffe Signal Corps Uniform, (grey-blue with yellow/brown collar tabs).

Sometime in the mid to late 1990s a scuba diver came across what appeared to be a radial aircraft engine laying on the seabed some distance off the cliffs from the Owls Head lighthouse and traced it along with other pieces of wreckage strewn across the sand back to the main body of the craft the engine and pieces apparently came from. She recovered what has been said to be a constructor's plate with raised lettering, albeit somewhat eroded but still readable, with the following:

RMZ WURKE Nb 135?34 (Allgemiene)
JUNKERSMOTORENWERKE (Agts: Haan)
FWU WURKE Nb 135?34 (Gbs: Fliegeroberstkommando Rdt.)

Most people who ascribe any amount of credibility to the downed craft said to be laying in the water off the coast of Maine pretty much agree it's mission was not recon like the August 28, 1943 flight, but to bomb New York. Evidence has surfaced in some quarters the attack would not have been conventional in nature either but possibly nuclear.

If you have gone to the Prufstand XII site previously cited you will recall the intention was to tow a V-2 missile across the North Atlantic in a specially designed watertight container behind a U-boat then setting it up vertically for launch against US eastern seaboard targets - particularly, New York and possibly Washington DC. The first three containers weren't contracted to be built until December 1944 --- after the disappearance of the Ju-390 off Owls Head --- and the first subs didn't show up off the coast until March of 1945. By then the U.S. was waiting.

1944 GERMAN ATOMIC BOMB

FOOTNOTE [9]

My stepmother died in December 1985 at age 81. Late in the year 1984, almost exactly one year to-the-day before she died, after not seeing or hearing from her for a whole decade my stepmother contacted me out of the blue through my younger brother. After she and I went about apologizing to each other for being so remiss in not seeing each other for so many years she told me she called because her long time former ranch foreman Leo was in desperate need to contact me. Leo told me he had a badge or medal of some kind that came into his possession years before that had been taken from a German submariner that had escaped from a POW camp in Arizona. He heard through old contacts there was going to be a reunion of sorts of former camp POWs and he felt there was a good chance the submariner was going to attend. Leo told me he himself was too old, sick and weak to travel, but knew, since I was aware of the full extent of the story, would I, for him, be willing to return the medal to the ex-POW --- and if he wasn't there to seek out someone who could get it back to him or his heirs.

The very instant I saw the medal I knew I had seen it before. It was way back in the summer of 1953. That summer, with my stepmother's approval, sometime between the time I became a friend or acquaintance of the Chief Petty Officer mentioned in the main text above but before I was going to leave the ranch at the end of summer, the Chief, along with the ranch foreman Leo, took me across the desert to a location along the Colorado River to see where the sub was found and how it was hauled out.

During that trip, when we holed up for the night in the old mining town of Searchlight, Nevada, in a place called the El Rey Club: Resort and Casino, the Chief showed me a number of trinkets and things like ID cards and stuff related to the sub's crew, or at least prison camp internees he somehow had. I clearly remember the medal being amongst them, because I, the 15 year old boy or so that I was, even pinned it on --- with Leo in turn grabbing at it telling me to "get that fuckin' thing off your shirt." It was sometime after that the medal must have fallen into Leo's possession.

On Monday, January 7, 1985, and on-and-off almost all of the next day, without getting into a whole lot of the logistics other than the fact the former POW wasn't where he was supposed to be according to what the foreman told me, he having already left, with me then having to chase him all over Arizona clear to the Grand Canyon and back --- and still not catching him until he ended up at the Riverside Hotel and Casino along the Colorado River in Laughlin, Nevada. There I dutifully returned his medal, which was actually a U-boat War Badge, and in doing so, in an oddball sort of way, with near tears in his eyes, set into motion for he and I to be best friends like a couple of long lost old Army buddies or Navy shipmates.

As for the ex-POW, his name was Johann Kremer. He said that he had escaped side-by-side along with the infamous U-boat captain, Jurgen Wattenberg and 60 others from the Papago Park POW camp in Arizona and, like Wattenberg, never made it to their intended goal, the Colorado River. But here he was now, 40 years later, after visiting the Grand Canyon the day before, standing there next to me along the Colorado River recounting tales of days gone by.

However, tales or no, what really cinched it between us, opening all doors allowing him to open up and share any and all information between us without inhibition, which might have not been done so otherwise for a person that was unknown to him, was a second pin --- a pin that was personally given me by one of Kremer's POW submarine comrades --- that I gave to Kremer. The quote below, from the source so cited, alludes to the meeting between Kremer and I in Laughlin:

"Even though time and age had taken a semi-slight toll on both of us, me from a boy to a man, Kremer into his 60s from his early 20s, I still somehow knew him almost the instant I saw him, or at least so after a few minutes anyway. He was one of the three men that came into my camp that night along the river. Refreshing his memory he recalled one of his shipmates, in the dark, had inadvertently stepped on my leg or foot as they entered the camp.(source)

At the above linked source I mention that as I laid on the ground that night in my sleeping bag, or bed roll or sleeping pad as the case may be, as the three POWs entered the camp, one of the men, apparently not seeing me clearly in the dark, stepped on my foot. What I didn't mention at the source --- because I really didn't want to get into it at the time --- was that the same man, when they got up to leave, stopped to pin something on my jacket. Because it was so cold and he had no gloves or warm clothes on, he was shivering so much he was unable to pin whatever he was trying to pin on me, even dropping it a couple of times. The third attempt he just handed it to me, patted me on the head and left with his buddies. A few hours later one of the three was shot dead, two captured and one of the two wounded.

What the man tried to pin on me and eventually just gave me, and probably the only physical item of any value or importance he had with him at the time, was a German U-boat 2d Flotilla cap hat pin, the 2d Flotilla being the unit of which he served with when captured. It was that exact same pin given me by Kremer's fellow submariner that freezing January night of 1943 in New Mexico, along with the U-boat War Badge the ranch foreman Leo gave me, that I gave Kremer when I met him in Laughlin in 1985.

Although the stories regarding each of the pins individually is a little more complicated than I want to get into here, especially since the Flotilla pin had disappeared over a several year period only to reappear again basically out of nowhere one day, cutting to the quick regarding the pin Leo gave me breaks down thus:

Toward the end of the war the Chief Petty Officer ended up on the POW camp interrogation team and absconded with the badge, just taking it whether the POW liked it or not. The badge fell into Leo's hands along the way and after he found out how important it was, the one time Pacific Fleet boxing champion and staunch anti-Nazi he was, apparently with a different set of values than the Petty Officer and the war long over, vowed, regardless of the Chief's actions, one sailor to the next, given the chance, he was going to return it.

The thing is, as tranquil as it all seemed, my meeting with Kremer in Laughlin wasn't the first time I ever met him. In a previous paragraph I write that the story is a little more complicated than I want to get into here. I say so because of that first meeting, a meeting that occurred when I was just a young boy and he attempted his first POW escape from a camp he was interned in near Roswell, New Mexico. I was sleeping along a river one night about 20 miles south of the camp with a Native American spiritual elder waiting for my uncle when Kremer and two other escapees, seeing our fire, walked into our camp looking for food. See:

THE SPIRITUAL ELDER AND THE SANTA FE CHIEF

Getting back to Kremer and our time together at the Riverside, with absolutely no connection with what was going on between the two of us then or ever --- nor why he was in Laughlin in the first place --- Kremer was approached by a man who identified himself as a former Kriegsmarine U-boat crew member. The man told Kremer he was at the time, currently living a few miles south from a place along the coast of the Sea of Cortez in Sonora, Mexico called Las Dunas Santo Tomas, and had been doing so since before the end of World War II. Initially, after that short introduction and with me in attendance the man was hesitant to say much of anything more. However, apparently Kremer feeling comfortable enough with me and having taken me into his confidence he assured the man, in so many words, I was someone to be trusted. Even so, while the three of us were together Kremer and the other man only spoke in German so I really didn't get the full gist of the story he was telling, although intermittently Kremer would turn and explain to me parts of the conversation. During the conversation the man, after removing something from what looked like a well-worn bowling bag he had next to him on the floor, set a small open-top olive drab cloth bag on the table that contained within itself a rather snug fitting cardboard box.

The small bag was definitely one-time military. Printed on the outside in black, not in German, but English, was a series of words and numbers. With me being basically left out of the conversation and with nothing to do I indiscreetly nudged the bag around toward me so I could read the words and numbers more clearly. In the process I discovered the bag and box, which was maybe six or seven inches high and about 3X5 wide and width, to be quite heavy. The printing read 7.62 MM NATO Linked 100 RDS.

Eventually the man opened the top of the cardboard box. Inside, with me expecting to see a bunch of 7.62 NATO rounds, was instead, what looked to me like two small cast or a cut into a couple of pieces gold ingot about the size of two paperback pocket books back-to-back. When the man pulled one of the pieces part way out to show Kremer, it is exactly what it was. The man made it clear that during the war he was never an internee or prisoner at the Papago Park POW camp, but instead had been a crew member on a submarine he identified as a Type IXD2 from the Monsun Gruppe 33rd Flotilla operating out of Penang, Malaysia, and without clarifying, or at least as Kremer excluded or related it to me, said he ended up in Mexico and that there was more gold where that came from.

One of the things I recall vividly from the meeting --- because to me it was so interesting and so off subject --- was that even though Laughlin wasn't that far north from the place he left in Mexico, he had been on the road several days. He said it took him longer than the distance would indicate because not only he couldn't speak English but he didn't have any papers. Thus said, even though it was only somewhat over three hundred miles, it had taken him days to get to Laughlin. I remember it specifically because he said, as it was translated to me, his 60th birthday was coming up the very first part of March and after taking care of some business in the U.S. somewhere in the mountains near Kingman, Arizona, he had to get back to some rendezvous spot to meet some guy that was going to get him back across the border and home. If the home he was alluding to was in Germany or in Mexico, what his birthday had to do with it, or why the need to go into the mountains somewhere near Kingman or what his ultimate fate after that was, I don't know, although I have my suspicions.

There is a small Arizona town right on the Mexican border called Lukeville that was named after the World War I American of German immigrant descent come war hero and flying ace Frank Luke Jr., known famously on both sides of the action as "the balloon buster." Luke was born in Phoenix, the third generation of an early line of Arizona German immigrants. His grandfather, Charles August Luke, was a member of a mining contingent attacked by Native Americans in Alumn Wash near the Silver Hills mine on September 22, 1866, ending in all members of the party killed except Luke. Alumn Wash and the Silver Hills mine are close to and in the surrounding area of the onetime bustling mining town, but now ghost town, of Chloride in the mountains north of Kingman.

In 1972 a popular television series of the time, Kung Fu, was first aired. In the series a young boy was being trained to be a monk by a Shaolin master, the boy often being called "grasshopper" by the master. A friend of mine from my old Army days had been stationed in Germany and while there married a German woman after which they had two kids. On occasion I overheard the mother affectionately calling the youngest of her two children, a boy, grasshopper, and did so in her native language, German. I recognized the German word for grasshopper during the conversation being spoken in German between the former submariner from Mexico and Kremer. Why either of the two, at that time or any other time, would be talking about grasshoppers one way or the other was beyond me.

However, what I consider as valid answers to all of the above questions pretty much came together for me one day out of the blue a few years later when I decided to go to Chloride for the first time. I took U.S. 93 to Arizona CR 125 which goes right into Chloride --- and that's when it dawned on me. The building complex that forms the small inhabited area at the turnoff spot where 125 intersects with 93 is called Grasshopper Junction. It is my belief that when "grasshopper" came up in the conversation between the submariner and Kremer they were talking about Grasshopper Junction. For whatever reason there was some sort of a connection between Frank and Charles Luke, Chloride, and the residual German community spread throughout the general area, and I think the Silver Hill mine or Alumn Wash had something to do with it. Apparently the man who only spoke German, on his way from Laughlin on the way to wherever he was going, was going to pass through Grasshopper Springs.

(please click image)

CHARLES AUGUST LUKE

AS A LITTLE EXTRA ADDED INSIGHT:

ZUNI-TYPE ROSETTE PETROGLYPH IN THE VALLEY OF FIRE
NOT FAR FROM THE VEGAS STRIP AND COLORADO RIVER.

ZUNI ROSETTE AT TOP IMPERIAL SEAL BOTTOM

A few years after my meeting with Kremer in Laughlin I was once again in the Desert Southwest. Only this time I was cutting across Arizona from Phoenix to Flagstaff on my way to Santa Fe, New Mexico to see my Uncle who was quite ill. In the process of that cutting across I went through the mile-high old mining town of Jerome hoping to catch up with a onetime army buddy of mine who lived there. As it was, I was told he wasn't in town and not expected back for two or three days. Jerome is a small community built on the side of a mountain about 300 miles north of the Mexican border in a fairly rugged area of Arizona. It is full of boutique-like arts and crafts stores, antique shops and little restaurants. In one of the antique shops in a glass case in with a bunch of costume jewelry, old watches and other trinkets I came across something that appeared to me as being rather odd, a heavily weathered if not ancient cast ingot looking all the same as being gold. Inset on the top surface were bas-relief markings, of which one appeared to be the sacred rosette on the Native American tribe called Zuni. Along with the rosette symbol was what looked like Asian script, possibly Chinese or Japanese. There had been rumors to the effect that the Zuni were impacted by a large influx of Japanese from across the Pacific in the 13th century, but nothing ever discovered was so blatant as to have recognizable Asian script associated with it. As for the ancient Zuni there is no record of them ever having an interest in gold, and surely they never possessed the ability to cast it. However, I thought, since time immemorial the Japanese did. When I asked the woman behind the counter about the ingot she confirmed it was gold and said the owner took it out of his safe now and then and put it in the glass case just to attract attention. If it was actually for sale or not she didn't know. When I asked to speak with the owner I was told, like my army buddy, he wasn't there.

The gold ingot continued to nag away at me, so on my way back from Santa Fe, rather than go the fastest and most convenient route I redirected myself through Jerome, hoping this time to see my army buddy and possibly speak with the store owner. As it was, I was able to do both. The store owner, who was an up there in age old man, told me that sometime right after the end of World War II a rather disheveled young man showed up staying in one of the abandoned shacks on the edge of town. The shop owner said one day the young man, who spoke with an accent, came to him and offered him the ingot for what seemed a reasonable price saying he needed the money to get back home. When pressed as to where home was, the young man said Germany. After the shop owner determined the ingot was gold he gave the young man the cash price they agreed on and the young man left never to return.

When I asked the shop owner if the ingot was for sale he quoted such a high price it was beyond reason. He said the ingot was worth way more than simply just its weight in gold because it was in fact a valuable artifact having nothing to do with the Zuni, but a relic from the war. When I asked him how so, he didn't have or was unwilling to give an answer. Still, there was something about the ingot that drew me to it, so I asked if I could make a pencil rubbing of the surface markings and have them evaluated as to their meaning, and if they proved to be anything of worth I would give him the price he requested. He agreed. Rather than go home I returned to Santa Fe to show my uncle the pencil rubbing. My uncle said the symbol did have a strong appearance to the Zuni Sacred Rosette, but he felt other things were at work. He said he knew a man who knew a man who knew a man that might know the story behind the markings. The man said sure enough, even though the markings were not the best casting and my pencil rubbing reflected that, he had seen several gold bars over the years exactly like the one the rubbing was from, usually sold by Germans or after having been bought from someone who was German. He said the Asian script was Japanese and the seal was not Zuni but the Imperial Seal of Japan. Basically the script related that the gold ingot was the property of the Emperor and was 999.9 pure. The man said the story he heard was that the Germans were submariners that had come up the Sea of Cortez with a hoard of Nazi gold that they buried along the border on the U.S. side. Over the years the bars would show up here and there, but nothing like a hoard. If the story was true, someplace along the border there was still a lot of gold. When I asked him why the Imperial Seal of Japan and not a Nazi swastika he didn't know.

BOXERS, GERMAN SUBMARINES, AND THE DESTRUCTION OF HOOVER DAM

WHAT OF WATTENBERG AND KREMER?

Except for the part above regarding the German U-boat 2d Flotilla cap hat pin, this footnote, Footnote [9], up to THIS point also shows up as a footnote in The Strange Odyssey of the German U-boat U-196. However, from here on out there is a big difference. The difference being that what follows does not show up on the U-196 page, or any where else for that fact, primarily because of what is being presented is directly related specifically to the submarine attack on Hoover Dam that the main page here focuses on and the U-196 page and others don't. To wit, the quote below as found above in the main text:

"(My) dad sent me to my ex-stepmother's ranch for the summer and told the hard drinking every other word was a cuss word ranch foreman Leo, who had been at one time, a World War II Pacific Fleet Navy boxing champion, to not let me 'wander off.'"

As you can see, in the above quote from the main text I write that the foreman, Leo, was a one time World War II Pacific Fleet Navy boxing champion. Later, as found in the footnote, I write that Leo had heard through old contacts there was going to be a reunion of sorts, or a Commemorative Observance as they called it, of former camp POWs and he felt there was a good chance the submariner was going to attend. As it came down to me from Leo, his old contacts were associated through an event that circulated around a fellow boxer he knew named Jeep O'Neal. As I understand it O'Neal had at one time, been a MP guard at one or more of the Arizona POW camps and in the process fought in several organized boxing matches between himself and POWs. O'Neal died in January 1984 after a long illness, about a year before Leo was finally able to catch up with me. Leo did however, attend the funeral in Phoenix and it was there he came in contact with who he referenced to me as old contacts.

In the main text above I write the following about the ranch my stepmother owned and where I spent most of the summers during high school:

"Otherwise, there was a bar, swimming pool, dance hall, rodeos and boxing matches on the weekends, at least two dozen one-armed-bandit slot machines in a secret hidden room, and a flock of ever present hostesses."

It was through Leo and the weekend boxing matches on the ranch that Jeep O'Neal came into the picture, thus then eventually leading to the meeting with the former German POW in Laughlin.

In a general sort of way I remember those boxing matches well, maybe not any specific individual match, but for sure the events and all the hub bub surrounding them, including the Damon Runyon type characters that inhabited the crowd and the gambling that went with them --- as well as the boxing ring itself. I used to climb under the ropes onto the canvas, jump up and down and phony spar or shadow box as they call it and bounce off the ropes. My stepmother always said she was going to get some of the big time L.A. wrestlers like Baron Michele Leone and Freddie Blassie, who Leo the ranch foreman knew from his old World War II Navy days, to come up and wrestle, but she never did. Blassie did show up hobnobbing with Leo for a good part of the day once, but I never met him.

At the end of one of the boxing days, some of those Runyonesque types, knowing I was the "son" of the owner and having been ferrying bet money between them on some of the matches invited me to sit down and have dinner with them. My stepmother, circulating through the crowd, after noticing me at the table with some fairly risky types, came over to see if all was well. In small talk one of them said they had come up for the day from Del Mar and would soon be heading back to continue their gambling on the thoroughbreds, then asked if I could go back with them and learn about the horses. My stepmother, having a complementary bottle of wine sent to their table, asked to let her think on it.

Later, when she and I were alone she told me I was welcome to go if I liked but to be aware, despite their appearance and demeanor they were pretty rough types, possibly some even packing heat. That night I left with them riding in the back seat of a brand new 1953 Cadillac convertible with the top down, the whole of the trip to Del Mar done mostly at flat out high speed. In the afternoon of second day, and nearly $500 bucks ahead thanks to their suggestions, I took a train to L.A. where I was met at Union Station and taken back to the ranch. Little did I know at the time that for the whole trip I was being watched closely, albeit from a distance, by one of my stepmother's employees.

As it was, about two years before, one of those same Runyonesque types mentioned above had pretty much saved me from a possible beating one night from some gun wielding mobster. Not even 12 years old I was working part time in he kitchen of one of Gardena's notorious card rooms called the Normandie Club when five or six rough looking suit guys burst through the back entrance headed toward the casino or management offices. One of the men, thinking he recognized me, stopped and started roughing me up. One of the men he was travelling with stepped in and stopped him. The same man doing the stopping was one of the group of men I went to Del Mar with, he remembering me and the two of us reminiscing about it during our trip. See:

THE NORMANDIE CLUB

Jeep O'Neal was another thing. Like I say above, Leo and O'Neal came to know each other and become friends because of the weekend boxing events held on the ranch. O'Neal either boxed several matches at the ranch or promoted matches. In the process O'Neal being a one time guard in the Arizona POW camps came up and one thing led to the next.

Which brings me back to the main text. I write that the Chief Petty Officer brought a man in a pick-up truck to the ranch to talk with me with of which the following unfolded:

"He told me the submarine was German. It had been towed behind another sub to an island in the Sea of Cortez, arriving sometime late in the year 1944 and hiding in a cove until it received a 'go' signal. Where it started from he did not know. When the sub left the island it headed on it's own power up the mouth of the Colorado River with a skeleton crew. It was when the sub reached a point on the river called Laguna Dam, 12 miles North of Yuma, that he came into the picture. He belonged to a work crew made up of predominently German men whose job it was was to pull the sub out of the river, disassemble it into five parts, load the parts onto trailers and truck it north to a designated spot beyond Parker Dam. There they were to reassemble it and disappear."

What the man in the pick-up truck explained to me was basically the first part of the plan to destroy Hoover Dam by the use of a submarine. The second part, of which he was only vaguely familiar with, involved Kremer, Wattenberg, and several other POWs that were former U-boat crew members. In the same way that the man in the pick-up told me in 1953 when I was a teenager on my stepmother's ranch about the first part, Kremer, in 1985 with me as an adult, told me about the Colorado River and the second part. Of Kremer I write, in so many words, that he escaped from the POW camp right along with his U-boat commander, Captain Jurgen Wattenberg. Then, continuing, I throw in an almost toss away line that reads:

"(He) and Wattenberg never made it to their intended goal, the Colorado River. But here he was now, 40 years later, after visiting the Grand Canyon the day before, standing there next to me along the Colorado River recounting tales of days gone by."

Toss away line or not, it was then, when Kremer and I were standing along the Colorado River that he revealed to me what he and Wattenberg's role were in the second part of the plan, which I have in turn presented in the main text above --- whether anybody likes what he told me or not. He was there, almost everybody else on the planet wasn't --- except maybe for Wattenberg.

The following photograph, besides reaching out into a greater sphere of things generally, has a lot in common with much of the content specifically found within the fabric of this footnote as well as being tentacled back deep into the content of main page and the world beyond.

The photograph so presented deals with the World War II German submarine U-196 of which her last assignment was with the Monsoon Group's 33rd Flotilla operating out of Penang, Malaysia. The picture on the left depicts a crewmember of the U-196 while the right shows the U-196 being refueled mid-ocean while on patrol.

What's interesting is that the U-196 crewmember is wearing a cap just like the one I've shown in the footnote, plus as well, as you may have noticed, he is also wearing a U-boat War Badge exactly like the one shown at the top of the footnote that plays such a prominent role in what is being presented. Although both the cap and pin of which I have written about refer back to the U-162 and the 2d Flotilla of which the former POW Johann Kremer I met in Nevada was a member, what I am actually trying to get across is how universal throughout the German submarine service such decorations, medals, and uniforms were. So, for members of the U-162 and the U-196 to have similar hats and badges would not be all that unusual. However, in our case here it goes much further than just hats and badges, re the following between Kremer and a man in Laughlin as mentioned previously above in Footnote [9]:

"The man made it clear that during the war he was never an internee or prisoner at the Papago Park POW camp, but instead had been a crew member on a submarine he identified as a Type IXD2 from the Monsun Gruppe 33rd Flotilla operating out of Penang, Malaysia."

For the record, the U-196 was a Type IXD2 from the Monsun Gruppe 33rd Flotilla operating out of Penang, Malaysia.

For those who may be so interested, below is a link that will take you to a photograph of Wattenberg with an Arizona journalist named Lloyd Clark standing along the same Colorado River on the Nevada side of the river in Laughlin that Kremer and I stood. It was taken during the same period of time I was meeting with Kremer. In the photo, behind Clark and Wattenberg, who is shown wearing a black cap and jacket, can be seen --- and clearly so --- the hotel towers of the Riverside Casino in Laughlin.

CAPTAIN JURGEN WATTENBERG ON THE COLORADO RIVER, 1985

THE STRANGE ODYSSEY OF THE GERMAN U-BOAT U-196

LOST AND MISSING U-BOATS FROM WORLD WAR II

PAGAGO PARK POW CAMP, ARIZONA

FOOTNOTE [11]

People are constantly dogging me as to my source for the existence of a fully fueled and operable C-47 with no markings and painted in the flat tan desert color of the Afrika Korps --- with a white underbelly --- found parked under camouflage netting on a remote Nevada desert airstrip.

It goes back to my high school days and friend I knew by the name of Kent.

Years after high school Kent went on to own, or at least be the man responsible for the full restoration of a legendary World War II fighter plane known as a P-40 Warhawk, sometimes called a Tomahawk, the same type plane that became famous as a Flying Tiger.

The first time I remember seeing Kent was one day in high school on the way to an assembly. I was moving with the normal flow of students just entering a narrowing section of the concrete pathway that led into the auditorium from the outside when I heard a ruckus behind me. Turning I saw a widening circle of students open up until I was on the edge of the circle. In the center were two students in the midst of a pretty much one-sided brawl, with one student clearly having the upper hand. That student was Kent. Why the fight occurred or who the first aggressor was I really have no idea, but from then on, because of the outcome, I felt that Kent would be the kind of guy you would want to stay on the good side of. He was to tell me later he 'pounded the crap out of the guy fair and square' --- besides Kent said, he asked for it.

While still in high school Kent went on to buy and restore a 1932 Ford roadster, which inturn made him a hero amongst a wide segment of the high school population. One day in one of the classes that the two of us shared, instead of doing anything that remotely resembled anything close to school work, I was sketching in class like I aways did, only this time I was making a rather intricate drawing of a P-40 Flying Tiger, one of my favorite fighter planes. The drawing caught Kent's eye and as it was, turned out to be his favorite planes too --- that is, ever since just like me as a kid, he had seen the black and white 1940s movie Flying Tigers with John Wayne. It was odd that this guy who could go around pounding guys at will whenever he wanted and was a hero because of his 32' roadster would even talk to me let alone have an interest in P-40s, but he did, enough so that we became close enough to call each other by our first names when we passed each other in the halls. At the time a real feather in my cap. As for the movie the Flying Tigers, Lentz and me, from the L.A. Times article so cited:

"To a child growing up in wartime Los Angeles, the world--with its wailing sirens, blackouts, and palpable fears of invasion--was a frightening place. Torrance resident Kent Lentz remembers that when he was 6, a John Wayne film called 'The Flying Tigers' temporarily eased his anxiety about World War II, holding out hope that the United States would win what was then a losing fight.

"The 1942 movie chronicled the exploits of a band of maverick American fighter pilots battling the Japanese over the skies of South China. For Lentz, the film's most memorable feature was the aircraft the American pilots flew --- the P-40 Tomahawk."(source)

Years later I caught wind that Kent was, of all things, restoring a P-40, actually the EXACT same P-40 I have provided a link to above, and had it in a hanger at the airport in Torrance, California. One day on a whim I went by to see what was going on. Several aviation buffs were there that day milling around each trying to out talk the other about their great expertise and knowledge in things aviation, and of which two, a high school history and geography teacher from someplace I didn't catch and a ceramics teacher from a nearby high school in Torrance, were talking about a crashed C-47 that one of them found years before in the San Bernardino Mountains. When I heard him say he was just a kid when he stumbled across the wreck of a C-47 in the mountains and it still had parachutes, clothing and other personal effects, thinking it might be a World War II wreck and possibly associated with the unmarked one found parked in the desert in early 1945 my ears perked up. Now, while I wasn't able to talk with the one guy who had found the C-47 for some reason or the other, I did to talk to the other guy in the conversation, the ceramics teacher, who filled me in on the gist of their discussion. Once he told me the plane went down in 1952 I sort of lost interest. However, what is important to us here is what else the ceramics teacher told me.

Sometime shortly after the end of the Korean War the ceramics teacher had joined the Air Force and ended up stationed at Castle Air Force Base located in the center of California's San Joaquin Valley. The ceramics teacher told me he had always considered himself an avid aviation buff and having missed being in World War II because he was too young, was constantly badgering the older airmen for war stories. One day one of the older guys told him that near the end of the war he was assigned to a small group of other airmen and a couple of officers on some sort of an organized ground search. Their search ended after several days when they eventually came across what they were looking for. According to the airman the fruit of their search endeavors turned out to be nothing less than a fully fueled and operable unmarked C-47 carefully hidden from the air under camouflage netting out in the middle of the remote Nevada desert somewhere west and south of Death Valley not far from the Sierras. Inside they found a bunch of parachutes, maps, and the operational procedures on flying a C-47 written in German. The two officers, acting as pilot and co-pilot, fired up the engines and took off leaving he and the other airmen on the ground to hike back. What ever happened to the C-47 he never learned.

BONNIE CLAIRE AIRFIELD IS A REMOTE X-SHAPED DIRT AIRSTRIP 3 MILES WEST OF RT 267, 3 MILES FROM THE GHOST TOWN OF BONNIE CLAIRE, NEVADA
(WITH THANKS TO PAUL FREEMAN)

The ceramics teacher told me that at the time he thought the whole thing sounded farfetched until one day the airman that told him the story came by and handed him a large envelope. The airman told him after many years in the service he would be retiring in a few days and wanted him to have what was in the envelope. When he opened he envelope he found the operational procedures on how to fly a C-47 --- written in German. The airman told him he had taken it from the C-47 the day they found it and stuffed it in his his shirt without anybody's knowledge.

Thinking I had a goldmine on my hands I asked to see it. He told me a few years before, because he had been stationed at Castle Air Base and still held a strong affinity toward the place along with many fond memories, he had sent it to the Castle Air Museum thinking they might find it a bit of interesting Air Force history. When I checked on its whereabouts with the museum, nobody I talked to knew anything about ever having, ever receiving, or ever seeing an operational procedure handbook for a C-47 written in German. Like the eventual fate of the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark it is probably stashed away in some box gathering dust lost among a whole bunch of other boxes stashed away somewhere that nobody knows the whereabouts of or the contents of. For those who haven't done so please see the following heavily C-47 related footnote :

OPERATION TORCH

In the main text above I write:

"Invariably on those Sunday mornings the ranch foreman Leo, the ex-sailor that he was, besides being a Pacific Fleet boxing champion, would hold court with a number of Navy guys sobering up over coffee and having a little breakfast. A few tables down along the edge of the dance hall there always seemed to be several Air Force guys doing the same thing. Me cleaning up between tables made me privy to the conversations and going ons between both groups."

Going about my business on one of those Sunday mornings and virtually unseen, I overheard in passing --- and compeletly out of context --- one of the China Lake Navy men mention something about a "Flying Tiger lady" who worked, or had worked at one time, somewhere on the base. When I questioned him about it everything he told me seemed to lean toward the person being Olga Greenlaw, onetime of the A.V.G., or Flying Tigers, who wrote the all time definitive book on the Flying Tigers, The Lady and the Tigers (1943). Apparently, and what I didn't know at the time, she had divorced Harvey Greenlaw, the second in command of the A.V.G., remarried and moved to Inyokern (or possibly nearby Cummings Valley where her new husband owned an over 700 acre ranch) and taken a job at the China Lake facility. If she was still an employee at China Lake at the time of the conversation I either don't recall specifically or it was never made clear. So too, if she ever made it to my stepmother's establishment or Pancho Barnes' Happy Bottom Riding Club is not known either. However, knowing what I know of Olga Greenlaw now, and considering the timimg of it all, she most likely showed up at at Pancho's.

P-40: FIGHTER IS A REBUILT PIECE OF WWII HISTORY

CURTISS-WRIGHT HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

BONNIE CLAIRE, NEVADA

THE FLYING TIGERS
THE BOY IN THE MAN REMEMBERS THE LEGEND

(please click)

A TWO-TRACTOR M65 ATOMIC CANNON CIRCA 1950's. TWO BACK-TO-BACK
M26's- CREATED A SIMILAR CARRIER TYPE VEHICLE FOR THE SUBMARINE

Above is a photograph of a captured two-man Japanese midget submarine that in 1943 was used for a war bond drive. During most of 1943 the submarine was trucked all over the United States pretty much as you see it, going to almost every major city in the U.S. and those inbetween. The submarine is Type A Kō-hyōteki-class with an overall length of 78 feet 5 inches, the same kind of Japanese two-man sub that washed up on the beach just south of the pier in Redondo Beach, California in October of 1942 after being bombed. It is believed the German submarine used in the attempt to destroy Hoover Dam, at about 30 feet longer, albeit designed to be dismantled into several sections, was transported in one piece by the Army to Muroc Dry Lake in a similar fashion as seen in the photo.

JAPANESE MIDGET SUBMARINES
A-BOMBS, MIDGET SUBS, AND THE CALIFORNIA CHANNEL ISLANDS

WORLD WAR II COMES TO REDONDO

THE WANDERLING'S REDONDO HIGH SCHOOL CHUMS

(please click image for full movie)

The above video is a complete start-to-finish version of the original black and white 1940s Flying Tigers movie that both Kent and I saw as kids that in turn so enamored us with P-40s. If link doesn't show up try HERE

Just a few months short of turning 22 years old I had the good fortune of actually meeting a World War II pilot said to have flown with the Flying Tigers. I was riding in the cab of a truck used to transport race cars around the country driven by one of the world's top sports car mechanics by the name of Joe Landaker. We were on our way to Miami, Florida to load the transporter on a boat to be shipped to Nassau for the Bahamas Speed Weeks when the engine of the transporter sucked a valve. In the close knit world of top mechanics, in that we were in Florida, Landaker contacted his friend, another world famous mechanic, NASCAR ace Smokey Yunick. The two of them repaired the broken engine post haste right along the freeway and soon we were on our way to the docks and Nassau. As it was, Yunick, a pilot in World War II, among other flying chores, was said to have flown for the Flying Tigers. For more see:

OF COBRAS, SCARABS, MASERATIS, AND ZEN

Since the above meeting I have met several other former pilots with the Flying Tigers, all members of the original A.V.G., the American Volunteer Group, with probably the most notable being William McGarry (1916-1990). The meeting with McGarry came about during a sand storm one day at a gas station while holing up inside a quickie mart in Coachella Valley sometime in the early 1980s. I was returning from a trip exploring around the Anza-Borrego Desert near Agua Caliente Springs in California. I had become privy to what I thought was some possibly relevant information regarding a round wooden shield-like object that had been found in the desert near the thought to be location of the so-called Lost Viking Ship, that at the time I felt was information well worth pursuing. Although the information turned out to be a false lead and quite bogus, and except maybe for being shot at by a bunch of aberrant pothunters or grave hunters over stolen artifacts, the fact that I went to the Anza-Borrego in the first place ended up being quite a little goldmine for me personally in that I happened across McGarry. Except for the sandstorm what could be better, lost Viking ships in the desert and P-40s.

McGarry and I arranged to meet and did so the next day starting early in the afternoon, talking way into the evening and night at the La Quinta Resort located sort of half way between the Anza-Borrego Desert and where he lived. It was there he regaled me with much of his Flying Tigers adventures, more or less as found in the previous paragraphs from the Times obituary.

For whatever reason, and I still have no clue as to why even to this day other than perhaps an ingrained love of the Flying Tigers I carried with me from childhood, and that McGarry must have sensed in some fashion, he told me that earlier that day he had contacted a fellow A.V.G. pilot named Jim Cross (James D. Cross) who lived only a few minutes away in Palm Desert asking him to join us, and of which he did, adding a third Flying Tiger pilot to my "have met" roster.

TANGO SQUADRON AIR MUSEUM, CHIANG MAI

THE P-40 FIGHTER PILOT DAN ROWAN

FOOTNOTE [10]

Wattenberg was infamous throughout the annals of the war for a number of reasons. In December 1939 he was an officer onboard the Admiral Graf Spee during a major battle between she and several British warships off the coast of Argentina. The battle is summed up in the quote below from the source so cited:

"(T)he battleship-like German heavy cruiser the Admiral Graf Spee, a so-called 'pocket battleship,' was heavily damaged in a heated battle with British warships off the coast of South America. She took refuge in the River Plate estuary, a river outlet that empties into the Atlantic between Buenos Aires, Argentina on the south and Montevideo, Uruguay on the north. Under the captain's orders the ship limped into Montevideo for repairs and evacuate the wounded. The captain was told it would take at least two weeks to make the ship seaworthy. Uruguay, being a neutral country and following the rules of the Hague Convention of 1907, the Graf Spee was not entitled to stay in port longer than 24 hours without risking internment. The captain, not sure he could make the run across the estuary to Buenos Aires because of damage to the ship and an increasingly larger British threat beyond the confines of the estuary, rather than risk the lives of his crew, decided to simply scuttle her. The crew was removed and thus then, interned in the 'more friendly to Germany' Argentina for the duration."(source)

During his internment Wattenberg contacted members of the local German community and through his efforts and initiative they supplied him and others with civilian clothes and paperwork. By 1941 Wattenberg and all but six of the Graf Spee's officers had crossed over the Andes into Chile, flying back to Germany by civilian airliners.

AND NOW THIS:

People jump up and down over and over as to why Wattenberg was the ONE specifically selected, needed, or required commander to captain the Hoover Dam attack-submarine over any other high-boot commander. Especially so such a coordinated effort by the Axis Powers to build and bring the one-off one of a kind sub-weapon from Europe --- requiring not only a trip half way around the world, via the Pacific yet, but the transference on the high seas at least twice as well as involving the cooperation of four different submarines and two different countries and in the process, go to all the trouble of manipulating the American POW system through payoffs, German sleeper agents, or sheer luck, to ensure that only one certain single individual, Wattenberg, would end up at the in the Papago Park prisoner of war camp in Arizona just at the right time.

There are two answers. The opening paragraphs above to this footnote attest to the first reasons why. Secondly, it is my opinion that someone in the German High Command had a hair in his ass.

As for why Wattenberg? There are a number of reasons. He was a loyal, trusted member of the NAZI hierarchy. He was the only person trusted enough. He knew his way through prison camps. He knew personally and had many previous crew members who served loyally under him interred at the camp. He had long been briefed as on the mission, carrying the plans for full execution of the attack in his head AFTER he was to take over when the submarine reached its position on the Colorado River at the Laguna Diversion Dam. And, unlike any of his peers, according to interviewed captured internees that crewed the submarine, briefed if not trained in the functions and operation of the Rheintochter R1 Variant.

Despite all his loyalty and trust by the powers that be, in the end the WHY of Wattenberg never showing up at Laguna Dam, especially so when several lower ranking members of his crew made it, has never been made clear and one of the true mysteries and unanswered questions of the German Submarine Attack on Hoover Dam.

OPERATION TORCH

Operation Torch was the over-arcing name designation for the entire invasion campaign of Vichy French North Africa in November, 1942. Imbedded within the main operation were a number of smaller operations of which Operation Villain was one. It was under Operation Villain that the aforementioned 39 C-47s came into play.

The plan was to use paratroopers of the 2nd Battalion 509th Parachute Infantry Regiment to seize Tafaraoui and La Senia airfields in Algeria.

A full compliment of 2/509 PIR paratroopers left England aboard 39 C-47's with the intention of flying over Spain into North Africa. No sooner had the formation left England than it was scattered due to unforecasted bad weather and after that, never able to reform. One plane landed at Gibraltar, four were interned in Spanish Morocco, two landed at Fez in French Morocco and three were reported as flying over Le Senia and being driven off by anti-aircraft fire.

Over a dozen C-47's were clustered together after landing on the western edge of the Sebkra d'Oran' dry lake without air dropping their troops. Ten other C-47s dropped their parachutists in the same area then landed at the eastern edge of the Sebkra and inturn, taken prisoner. Some of the paratroopers under command of Major William P. Yarborough attempted to march around the Sebkra and seize Tafaraoui airfield, a distance of over 20 miles. After covering roughly ten miles, and basically stranded because the terrain was so difficult to traverse, they radioed for help. Three C-47s, after siphoning fuel from sister ships, took off to retrieve them. No sooner had they picked up the troopers than six French Dewoitine fighter planes strafed the fuselages. The pilots turned the planes around making it toward the Sebkra crash landing at 130 miles per hour. The French fighters made three more strafing runs on the grounded aircraft, killing five and wounding fifteen. In the end just 14 planes of the original 39 planes were operational enough to fly right away, with a number missing or unaccounted for. So too, only 15 paratroopers out of the whole band that filled the 39 planes were judged fit enough to return to combat on an immediate basis. An accurate count on the dead, wounded and missing unclear.

Operation Villain was a complete fiasco, for the most part a total flop from one end to the other. Its over-arcing operation, Operation Torch initially wasn't far behind although eventually through the hard work, dedication and pure perseverance, in less than six months in North Africa the tide had turned in the Allies favor with the Germans fully on the run. Re the following regarding 100 German troop transports loaded to the gills with soldiers being secretly ferried out of Africa and caught by a group of P-40 Warhawks in what has become known as the "Goose Shoot":

"On Sunday, April 18, 1943 the U.S. Army Air Force's 57th Fighter Group stationed at El Djem, Tunisia in North Africa, on a routine mission over Cape Bon had 46 P-40 Warhawks in the air along with 18 British Spitfires flying top cover. Low on fuel and basically returning to base they came across a 100 plane flotilla of German JU-52 German troop transport planes flying just above sea level over the Mediterranean, escorted by 50 Messerschmitt fighters. Catching the Germans completely off guard, while the Spitfires drew off the Messerschmitts and kept them busy, the P-40s split into pairs diving on the enemy planes tearing the transports to shreds, with an overall kill count of 77 enemy aircraft destroyed."

P-40 GOOSE SHOOT

Below you will find a link called Curtiss P-40 that relates back specifically to the fact that the P-40, for the most part, was the major allied plane of choice in the comic strip series Terry and the Pirates by Milton Caniff. In the strip Caniff created a fighter pilot he called Flip Corkin. Corkin was based on a real life fighter pilot of then Major Philip G. Cochran. Most of the Corkin character's adventures in the strip circulated around the use of P-40s in the China-Burma-India theater during World War II with the planes so illustrated carrying all the markings of the Flying Tigers. The real life pilot, Philip G. Cochran, however, before any CBI affiliation, earned his reputation as the squadron commander of "J" Squadron flying P-40s in North Africa as part of the 33rd Fighter Group.

Hardly anyone ever puts P-40s and aircraft carriers together. However, Cochran's P-40 equipped "J" Squadron, arrived off the coast of North Africa with several others, flying from the deck of a flattop, with his squadron being the first to catapult P-40 Warhawks from the deck of a aircraft carrier and recover them in Casablanca. Re the following from the source so cited:

"While the idea of catapulting the P-40s may have been a cutting edge idea, the actual execution of the plan would prove to be less than simple. Although the ship was equipped to accommodate aircraft operations, the P-40s were not able to operate off a ship because they were too heavy. After stripping the Warhawks of ammunition, navigation equipment, and excess fuel, Major Cochran (squadron commander) and his deputy flight lead were catapulted from the ship, breaking both the catapults in the process, thus leaving 34 pilots to determine how they were going to launch. Throughout the remainder of the day, all but three aircraft were able to make it to Casablanca; two aircraft went down where the pilots were recovered and one went down without the pilot being recovered.

"The invasion was in its early stages, and organization systems were fragile if not nonexistent. Finding no assignments and no place to go, Cochran decided to keep the group together and headed off in the general direction of the war. By inquiring locally as they flew short hops, they eventually found an Army infantry unit at a flat spot in the desert who were more than happy to have their own air cover.

"Cochran immediately set up a training schedule for his recruits, commandeered infantry trucks to find supplies, fuel, and ammunition from wherever they could be borrowed or pilfered, and in a few weeks had a cohesive fighting squadron. Being formed outside of Air Force jurisdiction and having no official number, they dubbed themselves the 'Joker Squadron,' and adopted bright red scarves are their symbol."(source)

CURTISS P-40

(please click)

P-40 GOOSE SHOOT

P-40 WARHAWK
PEARL HARBOR SURVIVOR

RHEINTOCHTER R 1

Even though I never heard of an operational rocket or space related vehicle of any type that had anything close to having wooden fins I did however, interestingly enough, soon afterward gain a certain high level of expertise reworking wood to an immaculate state of finish similar to that of the fins. Re the following:

"Me being a regular at the marina came about because of the woodie wagon I spent so much time re-doing. The wood on the wagon was in such an immaculate state of restoration, having arrived at such a state only after hours and hours my own personal painstaking endeavors, that it attracted attention whenever I drove it. One of the persons it attracted was the skipper of a yacht come marlin boat moored in the Marina Del Rey harbor owned by the grown son and heir of a major multimillionaire oil man. The skipper was so taken by my talents working the wood he hired me to do the brightwork on the boat he skippered."(source)

I was in the 15 year old bracket during the summer I first learned about the connection between the German submarine and Hoover Dam. A year or so after that I got my first drivers license and not long after that my woodie wagon. In restoring the wagon I scraped, sanded, smoothed, bleached, stained, and spar varnished the wood beyond the brightest of the brightwork on the most expensive yacht. It was because of the expertise of my endeavors that several years later I was hired by the skipper. I could not open a can of spar varnish, then or up to this day, without thinking about the finish of the wooden fins on a Rheintochter R 1.

ZEN AND THE ART OF WOODIE WAGONS

MARMON-HERRINGTON 4X4 FACTORY BUILT FORD WOOD STATION WAGON

BEFORE THE START OF WORLD WAR TWO MY STEPMOTHER BOUGHT A BRAND NEW
FOUR WHEEL DRIVE FORD WOODIE FROM THE FACTORY JUST LIKE THE ONE ABOVE
(please click image)

Three years later, within a day or two of the third year anniversary of the train wreck, July 3, 1947, found me and my uncle traveling in the desert southwest having passed through Williams, Arizona on our way to Fort Sumner, New Mexico to visit the gravesite of Billy the Kid. We stopped at the crash site to pay reverence to those that died and my survival. While my uncle sat in the truck I walked the tracks where the wreck occurred. In the three short years since the derailment barely a sign of anything having happened remained, the wind along with the heavy downfall of summer monsoons nearly erasing the 500 foot groove and other marks caused by the huge Baldwin locomotive and passenger cars. If a person was unfamiliar with what happened it would have been unobservable.

As we left the crash site my uncle told me the story about me sitting in the waiting room of some train station in Arizona with the tribal spiritual elder late at night waiting for him, my uncle, to arrive and take me to California. The spiritual elder was quite obviously Native American and I was quite obviously not. A lot of people seemed concerned with me traveling with an Indian, that is, except for an older man who seemed concerned that I might be bored.

He came over and sat next to me and asked if my dad was in the war. I told him no that he worked in the shipyards. Asking if I liked comic books he opened his suitcase and pulled out one called Blue Bolt. All the while he was thumbing through the pages like he was looking for something he was telling me he had a son in the war and that his son was a pilot. After he reached a certain spot he folded open the pages and pointed to a story about a group of American pilots that shot down 77 German planes in one outing. Then, carefully reading the story page by page and pointing to the different pictures he told me that his son was one of the pilots. My uncle told me with that I took the book from the man's hands completely fascinated, so much so I read the story over and over without stopping or setting it down. The man, seeing how much I appreciated the comic and the story, said I could have it. After that my uncle said I continued to read it again and again all the way back to California and months afterwards. That story is covered extensively in:

P-40 GOOSE SHOOT

(please click)

RIDING THE CAB FORWARDS

"It has been reported that a Ju-390 left Europe coming in over Canada crossing into U.S. airspace to photograph defense plants in Michigan only to exit out over the Atlantic sometime after noon on August 28, 1943 by coming in behind any east-facing aircraft detection systems and passing directly over New York above the Empire State Building. Ironically, without any fanfare or raising controversy, a drawing of a six engine German bomber by a New York based artist showed up in a publication dated January, 1944."

Harry Ramsey was a cartoonist, a comic book illustrator during World War II and beyond who was known for his excellent job drawing P-40s, having done all of the illustrations for Claire Chennault and his Flying Tigers in 1942 and the Goose Shoot in 1944 among many others. In so saying, he wasn't brand new at aircraft configurations or what they looked like. Even so, the question still remains, how is it Ramsey came up with the idea of a six-engine German aircraft? Especially a spread across the wing type. Did he just happen to look up from his drawing table on the afternoon of August 28, 1943 and see the fly over of the six-engine Junker and simply incorporate them into his story published January 1944 as though they as a bomber were an everyday German plane? The following is found on the Goose Shoot page:

When my uncle discovered in some roundabout way that he actually knew Harry Ramsey, the artist who did the drawings used in the Goose Shoot, my uncle, knowing how much I loved the story decided to put into place a situation where the two of us could actually meet.

At the time we were talking I didn't know the difference between one German bomber and the next, and for the most part still don't to this day. What was most intriguing for me was that when (Ramsey) was creating the drawings for the story neither did he. One day at lunch or over coffee or drinks, and still struggling with his dilemma to complete the story, he mentioned his bomber problem to a fellow artist who just happened to be a cartoonist drawing comics day-to-day for the same publishing company.

The next day his fellow artist went through his morgue and came up with a series of three or four pencil sketches he drew dated August 1943 of a huge six engine plane with a German insignia on the fuselage he saw flying by his high perch window one day in the sky over New York. Since nobody was excessively over interested in drawings some low level cartoonist drew, he just stuck them away in his morgue. With a few minor changes such as the tail section, from two vertical stabilizers to one, Ramsey used the same low level cartoonist's drawings for his own bomber inspiration.

The range of a Ju-390 was said to have been just slightly over 6,000 miles. Depending where the plane lifted off, a round trip bombing run from somewhere in German occupied Europe, say Mont-de-Marsan near Bordeaux to New York as it has been reported and back during World War II, would have been in the 7,200 mile range. That would make the Ju-390 coming up short by at least 1,200 miles, running out of fuel someplace over the north Atlantic on its return unless it was refueled somewhere, somehow along the way.

It was hoped for by the Germans that they could use the Azores as a refueling stop either coming or going or both. However, by the time the flight was to be put into motion the Azores had already fallen well within the sphere of the Allies and unavailable to the Axis. In that the U.S. over-flight was intended to be a one off round trip sortie, putting into place an elaborate or long term refueling facility would be unnecessary --- not only that, besides blatantly giving away any of their secret intentions, such a facility would also be difficult to construct, support, and defend.

The flight of the Ju-390 from Europe coming in over Canada and into U.S. airspace to photograph defense plants in Michigan only to exit out over the Atlantic sometime after noon on August 28, 1943 by coming in behind any east-facing aircraft detection systems and passing directly over the city of New York is a total different animal. Compared to a strict bombing run on New York and back, flying in over Canada and exiting directly out over the Empire State Building would put somewhere in the vicinity of 1,200 additional miles on a round trip flight --- meaning of course, ending up with a major fuel deficit of at least 2,400 miles returning to Europe.

The Germans knew with the flight distant capabilities of the Ju-390 they could make it to the defense plants in Michigan and back IF the Azores were included. However, the Azores had long been removed from the equation. As usual the Germans had a plan --- or at the very least an ace up their sleeve, no matter how unplayable it may have appeared on the surface. That plan circulated around a practically secret location 350 miles north of the defense plants where two of the Great Lakes, Lake Superior and Lake Huron practically come together at Sault Ste. Marie. It so happened, directly under their flight plan from Canada to Michigan, on the U.S. side right at that conjunction of the two Great Lakes and out in the middle of nowhere, there existed a massive, little used, little known and little defended giant air field.

-----

That airfield, originally built to defend the Soo locks on the Sault Ste. Marie canal had, as depicted above, a triangular shaped configuration of three interconnecting over 5,000 foot long concrete runways. The plan was to use the airfield for a refueling stop. The aircraft would still be carrying some fuel when it set down, just not enough for a complete round trip, and knowing it would take thousands of gallons to top it off and, although there was a possibility the airfield had a store of aviation fuel somewhere, not wanting to take a chance the Germans wanted to ensure not only its availability but that the total control was under their own hand by not tipping their hand. A method was devised and put into place to refuel it. Before the Ju-390 ever left Europe German agents scrounged around for a couple 2 1/2 Ton 6x6 airfield fuel trucks or equivalent.

The location of the airfield was less than six miles due south through the forest from Pendills Bay which is wedged along the lakeshore between the larger Whitefish Bay of the even larger Lake Superior. A ship or a boat with fuel obtained or loaded in Canada from a mother ship would meet the trucks somewhere along the shore near the outlet of Pendills Creek offloading the fuel however difficult, albeit giving a direct easy access through the woods to the airfield.

Trucks of that nature typically carried around 750 gallons of fuel which, to top off the Ju-390, would require either several trucks or several trips or both, none of which is known how it was done. German commandos secured the area long enough for the landing, refueling and takeoff, all of which apparently went off without a hitch. How the offloading of fuel from the ship or boat to shore was accomplished or how the trucks were filled is not known with any amount of certainty. However, over the years following the war quite a number of empty 44 gallon drums similar to the one pictured below were found up and down along the beach and under the water not far Pendills Creek. The tops of the drums were stamped with a number of German words including the date 1943. The words translate roughly into: Kraftstoff = fuel; Feuergefahrlich = highly inflammable or combustible; Wehrmacht = unified armed forces of Nazi Germany.

The above graphic depicts a JU-52, the type troop transport that was on the recipient or loosing end of P-40s during the 100 plane North Africa Goose Shoot. Notice the three engine tri-motor configuration, a big difference when compared to the six engine plane depicted by Howard W. Ramsey in the Goose Shoot.

P-40 GOOSE SHOOT

As to any standing military use or dis-use of the airfield during the time period refered to for the German black ops refueling of the Ju-390, the following has been adapted and presented here from the much longer multi-page article so cited:

Just when the townspeople became used to having 12,000 U.S. military personnel in their town, businesses, and their backyards (where anti-aircraft weapons were sometimes positioned), the buildup was reversed. Before the year 1943 was half over the War Department ordered that by September 1st the entire Sault area contingent be reduced to less than 2,500 officers and men. The aircraft warning installations and anti-aircraft emplacements were also to be abandoned. By the end of 1944 there was only one company of men left at nearby Fort Brady.

WHEN WORLD WAR II CAME TO THE SAULT

RACO ARMY AIRFIELD, RACO MICHIGAN

THE GHOST AND THE HAUNTED B-29

"Two friends and myself discovered that two of my father's employees were spying for German U-Boats docked in the Sea of Cortez, Baja California, Mexico. One of my friends had studied Morse code and had detected the messages while we swam next to a building where the code was coming from. When my father made the discovery he had them immediately arrested."

The source for Acevedo's quote, directly above as well as presented by me in the main text, has been extrapolated from the segment as found below, part five of seven segments of a full page on Acevedo linked further down.

The seven segments found on the full page so cited is actually a plain-text version of a secret handwritten journal Acevedo kept as a POW in a German prisoner of war camp during World War II. A PDF version of his original handwritten version (except for a few missing pages) is also linked below.

A few days later, in the morning, we heard the sound of barrack door chains rattle. Three SS troopers walked in with their machine guns pointing in all directions, behind them a Gestapo Field Marshall walked in wearing a long leather black coat, tall boots and a monocle over his eye. It was just like in the movies; he looked all around studying each of us while he smoked a cigarette with holder at the other end. Finally he motioned towards me pointing with his finger. The German guards pushed me to follow him. I was the only one singled out. We entered a room furnished with only two chairs and a table. He sat on one side and I at the other, then immediately began to interrogate me. He said, "You medics know what’s going on behind the lines!" I told him I knew nothing and said all I know is my name, rank and serial number. He just laughed at my answers and said, "No, no ,no.....you know something!". I repeated I knew nothing of what was going on, "I’m only a medic". He countered with, "Oh yes you do! I’ve heard this story many times. You know something. Look, I know all about you." To my amazement he proceeded to tell me that I was born in San Bernardino, California and lived in Pasadena, California, with my cousins; that my parents moved us to Durango, Mexico; knew that my father was a civil engineer and had been commissioned by the Mexican Government to construct airplane landing strips for U.S. forces and was also involved in a PT boat project with an associate out of Texas; and knew of two employees that worked for my father. He added, "Isn’t that the truth?". I said, "I don’t know. How do you know?". "Look, I’m not dumb!", he responded and spoke in both English and Spanish, fluently. At this point I felt pinned but maintained my composure as best I could. He continued, "You left Mexico when you were 17 to return to the U.S. to study medicine. You decided to enter the Army. That we know. I also know that your father had his two employees arrested" Two friends and myself discovered that two of my father’s employees were spying for German U-Boats docked in the Sea of Cortez, Baja California, Mexico. One of my friends had studied Morse code and had detected the messages while we swam next to a building where the code was coming from. When my father made the discovery he had them immediately arrested. As the field Marshall continued his interrogation, he told me he also knew of a Schweader family and a sailor cousin of theirs who deserted from the Graf Spee German battleship which fought the battle of Montevideo. He made it to Durango and subsequently sold my father a rifle. The family was part of a colony of German families living in Mexico.

ANTHONY ACEVEDO

ACEVEDO: A WARTIME LOG, BAD ORB IX-B

"During the First World War the U-boat war badge already existed. Commander of the submarine units was trying to establish a newer badge at the outbreak of the Second World War, which was executed on the 13 October 1939. Since then the U-boat War Badge could be awarded to 'officers, noncommissioned officers and to submarine crews who worked in campaigns against enemies and proved themselves on two or more sailings against them.'"

Mainly because of time constraints many people have questioned the ability of Kremer actually being awarded a U-boat War Badge or having one in his possession in that he spent a good portion of the war in U.S. stateside POW camps.

As so stated in the above quote from the source cited at the end of this section, submarine crews who worked in campaigns against enemies and proved themselves on two or more sailings were eligible to receive the badge. Kremer was on his third of three highly successful war patrols under Wattenberg when captured and became a POW under U.S. auspices. Between his second and third sailing, the U-boat he helped crew, the U-162, was in the sub pens in Lorient for routine maintenance from June 8, 1942 until July 7, 1942. It was during that one month period prior to his third patrol he was awarded his badge. Kremer told me he had it with him when he was captured and was able to keep it with him as well as a number of other personal items primarily through what he called "his good looks and subterfuge" right up until the time it was taken from him at the POW camp by who he called some interrogation guy.

U-BOAT WAR BADGE

If you have gone to Footnote [5] you would have learned that because of the opening of the Hoover Dam spillways on August 14, 1941, combined with two powerful hurricanes, especially the one only a month later on September 19, 1941, a hurricane that now days would not only be classified as a Cat 5 but also went straight up the gulf, for a brief several year period (1942-1946) access from the gulf to Laguna Dam was once again possible. After that things returned to more like it had been when the lakes were being filled --- basically nothing but dry hardpan where the river once reached the Gulf. However, in 1983 flood conditions occurred at Hoover Dam and the spillways were once again opened. That 1983 downstream outflow contributed significantly to flushing out the river and a new brief access period from the gulf. The graphic below shows what the 4780 foot long Laguna Dam concrete spillway looked like during that 1983 flood stage.

It is believed the exact same flood conditions, and most likely possibly even more so thanks to the two hurricanes coming up from the south, existed leading up to the time just before the German submarine started up the Colorado River toward the dam, thus then creating an almost unhindered access from the gulf.

Because the water was spread out across a nearly mile wide spillway at Laguna Dam there was no excessive flow pressure caused by the river breeching the spillway, and when it did it had no more than an eight inch to one foot depth. If the submarine was not actually disassembled into pieces on the spillway it was most likely pulled up onto the concrete and taken to dry land on the Arizona side and dismantled. Notice in the two graphics below how much water was available on the downstream side of the 4780 foot long spillway in the old days as seen on the left and how there is almost totally none now as shown in the graphic on the right. The whole area that was once water and river has now mostly been filled in with natural growth foliage, in turn blocking any serious or major waterborne travel either upstream or downstream.

-----
THEN_____________________________________________NOW

Above is a photograph of a captured two-man Japanese midget submarine that in 1943 was used for a war bond drive. During most of 1943 the submarine was trucked all over the United States pretty much as you see it, going to almost every major city in the U.S. and those inbetween. The submarine is Type A Kō-hyōteki-class with an overall length of 78 feet 5 inches, the same kind of Japanese two-man sub that washed up on the beach just south of the pier in Redondo Beach, California in October of 1942 after being bombed. It is believed the German submarine, at about 30 feet longer, albeit dismantled into several sections, was transported in a similar fashion.

JAPANESE MIDGET SUBMARINES
A-BOMBS, MIDGET SUBS, AND THE CALIFORNIA CHANNEL ISLANDS

WORLD WAR II COMES TO REDONDO

------
ALMOST ANYONE KNOWING REDONDO WOULD RECOGNIZE THE COLOR PHOTO ON THE RIGHT AS BEING ALONG THE ESPLANADE

I was in Searchlight, Nevada, with my stepmother before I met up with Leo and the Chief. She and I had flown up to Searchlight in a twin engine Beechcraft Queen Air, the pilot and plane provided by Pancho Barnes. My stepmother was on what she called a business trip of some sort, so with me going along I was in that part of the desert before Leo and the Chief, who I was told I would be meeting up with us later. What my Stepmother's business was per se' I was never privilege to, however she did meet with a man named Willie Martello, the owner of a casino in Searchlight called the El Rey Club. Since Pancho provided our transportation I figured she must have been involved in some fashion. I know when the meeting with Martello was over and they adjoined to the cafe part of the casino, in a rather interesting series of events my stepmother had to pull her nickel plated .25 semi-automatic Baby Browning out of her purse and aim it at some woman after she threw a half full glass of ice water at her.

In the meantime Leo and the Chief arrived in the ranch pick-up truck, eventually meeting my stepmother and me at a scrub brush lined airfield a couple of miles south of town where the Beechcraft was parked. It was the motel part of the El Rey club where Leo, the Chief and I stayed, re the following as found on the El Rey link so sourced:

When I saw Leo drove onto the airfield I could immediately see he was traveling with another man, of which I would have no reason to believe why he should be. The man oddly enough, turned out to be a Chief Petty Officer I knew from China Lake Naval Air Station that hung around my mom's bar on the ranch.

"As soon as Leo and the Chief arrived and my Stepmother and Leo talked in private for few minutes, then took off in the Beechcraft headed toward California. Leo, the Chief and I, with me riding in the back of the truck, headed toward the El Rey for dinner and a nights sleep. After dinner in the motel room the Chief showed me a number of trinkets and things like ID cards and stuff related to a German submarine crew, or at least prison camp internees he had somehow, explaining each item one by one as he went through them. The next morning, and the real reason my stepmother had Leo and the Chief come up to Searchlight, they took me across the desert to a location probably not even 20 miles away along the Colorado River to see where, in late 1944 German U-boat was found and how the military went about hauling it out and taking it back to Muroc Dry Lake."

Several years before the above event, when I was eight years old, I was traveling with a neighbor of the people I was living with at the time called a Curandero. I had gone to the very top of Spirit Mountain at 5,642 feet overlooking the the exact same spot the sub had been found, which was about seven miles away as the crow flies. The curandero, who had no concerns about submarines if he even knew of them at all, told me there was an island submerged beneath the lake called Cottonwood Island that was, like Spirit Mountain, of deep spiritual significance to the Native Americans who inhabit the area.

THE EL REY CLUB: RESORT, CASINO, BROTHEL

The version of the New York Times article so alleged to in the main text above appeared in print on April 23, 1953, page 33 of the New York edition with the headline: "Threats to Bomb Ranch Charged to Air General." To view the complete article requires a purchase of the article from the Times through their Order Reprints service. However, prior to any purchase of that specific article the Order Reprints page offers the following thumbnail of the article which includes the headline and the first paragraph:

Threats to Bomb Ranch Charged to Air General

Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES APRIL 23, 1953

LOS ANGELES, April 22 -- Alleged threats by Brig. Gen. Joseph Stanley Holtoner, commanding officer of the Edwards Air Force Base, to bomb her resort ranch were related to Federal Judge James M. Carter today by Miss Florence Pancho Barnes, also known as a flier. She asks $300,000 damages for injury to her resort business.

I have however, for my readers, been able to retrieve a complete and unabridged United Press version that appears for all practical purposes, at least information-wise, to be basically the same as the Times article, albeit as it appeared in the Lubbock Evening Journal, Lubbock, Texas, Thursday, April 23, 1953, page 3, and presented here for educational purposes at no charge:

THREAT TO BOMB RANCH CHARGED

General Accused By Woman

LOS ANGELES. April 23 U.P. Florence Pancho Barnes, pioneer aviatrix, charged in federal court Wednesday that Air Force Brig. Gen. Joseph S. Holtoner threatened to bomb her out of her Mojave Destert dude ranch. Miss Barnes accused Holtoner of making the threats because of efforts to serve a subpoena in connection with her S300.000 civil suit for damages against him. Holtoner is commanding genera] of Edwards Air Force Base near Muroc, Calif., which adjoins Miss Barnes' dude ranch. "He said he'd bomb my place; burn it up with napalm bombs," Miss Barnes told Federal Judge James M. Carter. "I'd like Congress to answer for him," the round-faced aviatrix said. "They made him an officer but they didn't make him a gentleman." Mrs. Barnes appeared in court as her own attorney after her civil suit was transferred from state to federal court at the request of the U. S. attorney's office which is handling the general's defense. In her action. Miss Barnes accused the general of instituting a boycott against her as part of the government's effort to condemn the ranch she valued at $1,500,000 for only $180,000. She charged the alleged boycott in which service personnel were warned to stay away from her ranch was ruining her business.

Notice Pancho tells the Federal Judge, in court, that the good general had told her in no uncertain terms, "he'd bomb my place; burn it up with napalm bombs." Then what happens, the place burns down under mysterious circumstances with witnesses reporting they heard not only loud explosions but saw whole walls blown out. I'm with Pancho on this one, and as far as her place being a brothel, Pancho was no madam. That was left for others to do.

-----

To find out how the dog and pony show works that one has to through to purchase the full New York Times version of the article click HERE

RACING THE #3774 FROM LUDLOW TO BARSTOW

My stepmother and my uncle had a fabulous working relationship. It was she that put together the package that ensured my uncle was my guardian. It was she that picked up the tab on all of our adventures. And it was she that pulled all the strings getting us out of any misadventures we were always finding ourselves in.

In any case, when my uncle called my stepmother that July of 1953 to tell her he had been in Las Vegas, New Mexico, not far from Santa Fe, and a few hours before sunset saw the #3774 go through town headed west pulling a special Boy Scout train on its way to Santa Ana, California. He didn't know if it was going to be the motive power all the way through to the Los Angeles area or not, but even if not it should be going at least to Barstow and possibly down into the Cajon Pass sometime the next day --- or as my uncle said, roughly 15 hours or so from the time of his phone call. My stepmother, knowing the impact the #3774 had on my life immediately dispatched the ranch foreman Leo and me in a jeep out across the desert toward Barstow to try and catch it.

We reached Barstow before the train, so we headed out on Route 66 to try and intercept it as far east as we could and follow it back. Which we did. Cutting across the desert in the jeep from 66 to the AT&SF mainline, then trying to parallel the locomotive using the barely discernible rock strewn and no bridges service road into Barstow is a ride I'll never forget. The locomotive, just like my uncle said, was #3774. If it went any further west than Barstow is not clear, however, if we take Walker's word for it that no Class 3765s went through the Cajon Pass in 1953 at all, including on the Boy Scout specials, it seems that Barstow is as far as it got.

SANTA FE LOCOMOTIVE #3774

On Sunday mornings the ranch foreman Leo, the ex-sailor that he was, besides being a Pacific Fleet boxing champion, would hold court with a number of Navy guys sobering up over coffee and having a little breakfast.

On one of those Sunday mornings, a number of those sailors that had been stationed in San Diego at one time or the other brought up the fact that a weird and little-known railroad sometimes called the Southern Pacific's San Diego and Arizona Eastern Railway and sometimes called by other names that used to run passengers into Mexico from San Diego and clear over to the desert near El Centro and back that all of them had used going into and out of Mexico from San Diego had shut down passenger service after years and years of running the service. They came up with this big idea that turned out to be probably my biggest jeep adventure of all time. One of the sailors said he had seen where a jeep could be adapted to run on railroad tracks so we should take the ranch jeep down there, fix it to ride on the rails, and drive it into Mexico and the U.S. One of the other guys piped in saying that during the war, at least during the early part of the war, 1942 or so, the Army had regular patrols along the railway looking for saboteurs and that he had met a soldier that said that's exactly what they did, fixed up jeeps so they could run on the rails. Everybody figured, what the heck, if the Army could do, so could the Navy and most likely, even better.

The next thing I knew a bunch of sailors with Leo driving and me tagging along headed south toward the Mexican border. According to Leo we would be crossing the border into Mexico at Tecate about 20 miles south east of San Diego. Leo said he knew we could pick up the railroad tracks in an isolated area a short distance east out of town. Everybody was jumping up and down all for it like a bunch of drunken sailors --- of which they were. Leo figured the only way we could get away with it was for the whole thing to be done on the QT, especially me not saying one word to my stepmother. Not worried my stepmother would stop it, but not wanting to be blocked from going I most dutifully complied. Once we decided to go and head for Tecate the whole thing was approached it like a secret mission.

A YOUNG BOY AND HIS JEEP: ADVENTURES IN THE DESERT

THE JEEP, NEVADA, AND THE RED-HAIRED GIANTS

WORLD WAR II SURPLUS JEEPS
NEW, STILL IN A BOX FOR $50.00

(please click image)

V-1 FLYING BOMB LAUNCH RAMP IN THE DESERT SOUTHWEST

Most people who are familiar with my online works know that when I was in high school and spent the summers on the ranch owned by my Stepmother, or ex-stepmother as the case may be in that she and my dad had divorced by then, that she had a whole series of ranch-like jobs, or chores as she called them, for me to do, some less glamorous than others. One of those chores, on the slightly more glamorous side than shoveling up horse poop, was cleaning up the tables located in and around the floor space on either side of the dance hall on Sunday mornings following the western hoedowns and minor ruckuses from the night before. That same chore included as well, serving and bussing the tables for the breakfast hold overs and those nurturing headaches from that same night before. Even though I was a worker bee just doing his job, most were aware I was the son of the owner which in turn gave me a little more status and leeway with the customers and any interaction thereof.

One Sunday morning a man stepped up to the table the ranch foreman was having breakfast with a group of friends and introduced himself as a geologist while at the same time handing the foreman a photograph. The geologist said he had overheard a conversation a week of so before where basically the same group was discussing a German submarine attack on Hoover Dam. Before they had a chance to throw him out he quickly interjected that during World War II he had worked as a stereograph photo interpreter for the OSS. Right away hearing the acronym "OSS" and with most knowing what it meant their ears perked up with the foreman asking him to sit down.

The geologist told the group with the war over and now a civilian, his area of employment expertise was investigating large geologic land forms after finding them through photographic aerial surveys, an almost direct job cross-transformation from his previous duties with the OSS except now he was employed by major and even minor oil companies primarily because of an incident that caused a national frenzy in 1948 near the small northwestern corner town of Aztec, New Mexico.

The man said that some time back during the routine viewing of aerial surveys of the outwash plain due west of the Colorado River and about 70 miles south-south-west of Hoover Dam he came across a land form that had all the appearances of being the remains of a very ancient meteorite impact crater. As far as he was concerned, although previously unidentified and unnamed, the aerial photographs clearly showed discernable remnants of a circular crater outer ring sporting a diameter of approximately 18 miles with a well defined vestige of a central peak. Right away, hoping to possibly get credit for the discovery of a previously unknown impact crater, maybe even having it named after him, he packed up his four wheel drive former Army ambulance converted to a camper van and headed out to the desert to see if any conclusions to what he saw in the photo-survey might have merit.

On his second day of exploration he heard what sounded like the sputtering of the engine of of small plane in trouble. Searching the sky he saw some distance away what looked like a Piper Cub type plane spewing a line of dark to gray smoke out behind it and going down. He immediately got into his truck and started out across the desert to see if he could attend to the matter in some fashion. When he got on the scene it was a Piper Cub type spotter plane with Air Force markings, the pilot sitting alone in the shade of some boulders nearby. He said he had been on his way to an Air Force base north of Las Vegas when the engine caught fire. He tried to level off and set the plane down as easy as possible but the terrain was too rough to allow it, breaking the landing gear and flipping the plane nose down tail up. The pilot said he had time to get out a May Day before everything went dead and that he expected somebody to be there for him without the passage of any amount of time.

Nobody showed up by nightfall so the man made dinner and the two of them crashed for the night. The next morning sitting around drinking coffee a small two man bubble-canopy chopper with only the pilot showed up. After joining for coffee the two of them got in the helicopter and headed out. Before they did they told the man they would appreciate it if he didn't say anything about the plane, the crash or any of the events associated with it. In the process he asked if either of them knew anything about a manmade structure a few miles southeast that appeared to be in the stages of either being built or torn down but in either way, abandoned for a long time nevertheless. Neither of them knew anything about it but the pilot said he would scope it out, flying in the structures direction when they left. The man got in his van and headed in the same direction arriving at the structure some time later. He got out, took a few pictures, did some rough measurements, got back in his van and went back to what he was doing before he heard the plane a few days before

As an OSS photo interpreter during the war he had seen pictures of similar structures before, but while at home he did additional research to see if his hunch was correct, and it was. It was after that he showed up at the ranch and passed the photo around explaining to the group and especially so the ranch foreman what the structure was he saw. Since I never had the photo in my possession where I owned it and it belonged to me, the photo shown a couple of paragraphs below is not the actual photo the man passed around, but it is so close to the original I am including it here for the reader to get a good idea as to what the photo he passed looked like. What the original photo showed and that I saw, was a man-made bolted together single rail metal ramp of some sort standing all by itself out in the middle of the American southwest desert.

The ex-OSS man said after much scrutiny of hundreds of survey photos he was able to find it and get some idea as to its size, length, and location. The thing is, when he went back some weeks later with a friend to help take more photographs along with additional and more accurate on the ground measurements of the structure, there was no sign of it nor did it look like anything had ever been there. He had driven in with his 4X4 van along with his friend to the spot where the small plane went down first and, although the plane as expected was gone, the firepit from he and the pilot's overnight stay was still there. From there he drove across the desert to the spot where the structure was, or at least should have been and nothing. It was gone.

(please click image)

However, when the structure was dismantled and removed without a trace, what the dismantlers didn't know was that when the man was there the first time after leaving the pilot, since he was on BLM or federal land, he wrote out a mining claim statement giving all the locations and descriptions as necessary to file a claim, then put the papers into a Walter Raleigh or Prince Albert-like pipe tobacco tin and stashed it under a pile of rocks. When he did, taking into consideration any sudden heavy rains or flash floods, he built it on higher ground some distance up and away from the structure.

Like the native people that carved the giant stone heads and erected them all over the island of Rapa Nui, after they completed nearly 800 and set most of them upright they suddenly stopped and seemingly just walked away leaving at least 300 unfinished with the tools they worked with just left beside them. The structure in the desert was the same way. If it was being assembled or dismantled is not known, however, although no specific tools were found and not all of the parts were accounted for, there were pieces of metal railings, bracing or struts, and a large number of nuts and bolts of different sizes scattered all over. Because of some kind of gut intuition or instinct the man gathered up a bunch of the materials and buried them near his stone monument after measuring off 25 paces exactly due north. Whoever dismantled and hauled everything off never saw the monument nor the buried material because neither site were disturbed. He also told the group that when he returned home his place had been totally ransacked and all his notes and survey photos gone.

The man, seeing a certain amount of skepticism, even though talking with a group that believed in the possibility of the Germans attacking Hoover Dam with a submarine, told the foreman that he could take him to the spot where he buried parts of the structure, dig them up and show him. The foreman, who fought in the Pacific during World War II had zero knowledge about V-1's found the whole idea interesting but not sure, since a V-1 and a submarine doing the same job was sort of redundant, which agency or agencies in the Third Reich would be responsible. He knew the submarine was true, now he wanted proof of the launch ramp. He also knew to do so would require at least two days off. Taking me with him would also assure an OK from his boss, my stepmother. I went along and I saw the parts.

The ramp was located not far across the California Nevada state line on the California side, around 50 miles south-southwest of Hoover Dam roughly 35 miles parallel west of Davis Dam. The launch starting point, i.e., the lower end of the ramp, was on the south-southwest end, the higher part, the terminus of ramp launch on the east-northeast end. So said, such positioning made the long-length axis of the ramp low end to high launch direction aimed directly straight toward Hoover Dam. Once altitude was achieved the fully unobstructed south facing outside downstream front surface of the dam was fully exposed to an unhindered impact of a potential V-1 launch.

There are a few of things important here. First, the V-1, although crude and cheap to build, it should still be considered a fairly formidable weapon, especially for its time. Unmanned, it carried a nearly one ton destructive payload over a distance of at least 150 miles at over 350 MPH. Secondly, the V-1 was not a rocket. It was powered by a jet engine known as a pulse-jet. No rocketry was involved. So too, although the V-1 was a missile, it wasn't a guided missile, at least in the classical sense. After being launched in a fixed direction toward the target a mile measuring device or counter was set so that after covering a certain distance the engine shut off and the V-1, no longer being powered, just fell out of the sky, Hopefully, for the senders, if the math was right, it fell on the target. For the recipients, their hope was just the opposite. It is thought in a Hoover Dam attack the intention would be for the V-1 to just slam into the outward facing wall head-on with a 2000 pound payload.

There was one more thing the Germans had up their sleeve. A piloted version of the V-1 flying bomb designated the Fi-103 Missile: Reichenberg IV, shown below. Notice the cockpit. The short wingspan, inherit in the basic V-1 design anyway, would be however, perfect for an attack on Hoover Dam flying up the Colorado River between the narrow high canyon walls, although it is not known how maneuverable a manned version of the V-1 was. It shows how desperate the Third Reich was getting late in the war. The Reichenberg IV was basically a kamikaze-like suicide bomb. If you think the whole attack on Hoover Dam is crazy think about it for a minute --- the Germans building manned flying suicide bombs. The pilot can get in, but he can't get out.

MANNED FLYING BOMB: FI-103 REICHENBERG IV. NOTICE THE COCKPIT AND SHORT WING SPAN

V-1 LAUNCH RAMP

FOR A DIFFERENT VIEW OF ANOTHER LAUNCH RAMP WITH FULL SCREEN SIZE CLICK IMAGE THEN CLICK AGAIN

Photo © David P Howard

Available for reuse under this Creative Commons licence

V-1 FLYING BOMB 1942-1952

THE INCIDENT AT AZTEC

In September of 1950 a hardbound book called Behind the Flying Saucers was published, immediately becoming an overnight best seller if not an overnight sensation. Written by a man named Frank Scully, the book told about a disc-shaped airborne metallic-like craft said to be extraterrestrial that had supposedly crashed near a small northwest corner community of New Mexico called Aztec in 1948. A number of dead alien bodies scattered around the craft were also said to have been found as well. In 1952, two years after the book went on the market, in the first of two articles published in True Magazine, Scully's story was totally debunked and proven to be nothing but a full on hoax.

Although the content of the book was debunked top to bottom, what came up about the debunking, was that the author Scully, didn't try to pull a fast one but that he himself had totally been scammed. The "scammers" who bamboozled Scully into thinking their story was true as made up of two men, one named Newton and the other, a scientist said to be a doctor, named GeBauer. Their idea for the book was to widen the circle of the number of people who would be willing to buy an electronic device they "invented" that had the ability to find oil by just scanning it over the ground. Such a device was known as a doodlebug in the industry and worked like a divining rod to find water only Geiger counter-like, electronically. The two were taken to court after swindling a rube out of $18,500 for such an oil finding device that could easily be bought for $3.50 in a surplus store, the device being really no more than a tuning unit from surplus Army radio transmitters.

However, between the two year period between the time Scully's book came out and the time it was debunked, as a best seller, it did just what the the two scammers wanted, heighten interest in the possibility of finding oil using an electronic device. Not to be left out, the traditional oil companies began their own searches on the side, electronically and otherwise, hence the use of the World War II OSS stereograph photo interpreter.

In an offside, it should be noted that one of the nicknames for the V-1 was doodlebug.

FRANK SCULLY

Several years later Scully's book played a huge role in another downed saucer incident known as the 1953 Kingman UFO.

During the period between the March 1948 date of the Aztec story and the September 1952 debunking of that story, there was a young boy to teenager who was originally loosly tagged by the pseudonym Chukka Bob until his name was discovered then revealed, living in Farmington, New Mexico, that graduated from high school there in 1950.

Farmington is located only a few miles southwest of the small community of Aztec, the site of the suspected UFO crash Scully wrote about. Scully said the crash happened in March of 1948, Chukka Bob's sophomore year, but it wasn't until spring of his senior year, after Scully's book was published, that the story really took off for him. He and some of his buddies, as did a lot of his classmates, went out to visit the crash site and shared and compared stories day after day. In 1949, before graduation, he joined the New Mexico National Guard and placed on inactive duty because most of his unit had been sent to Korea. In May of 1951, a year after his graduation from high school, he was placed on active duty status and sent to Fort Bliss, Texas bordering up to and just south of White Sands New Mexico. In December, 1952 he received an Honorable Discharge. By then the True Magazine article debunking Scully and the Aztec crash had been published and although the content of the article let a lot of wind out of his sails on his once youthful perspective of UFOs, the exuberance and thrill of it all never truly faded.

After his discharge he went to college earning a B.S. in Electrical Engineering. Following his graduation he rejoined the military, commissioned as an officer, and sent to Vietnam. During his time in college Chukka Bob became an eyewitness to the Kingman event. See:

JUDITH ANNE WOOLCOTT
AND THE LOST KINGMAN UFO LETTERS

KINGMAN UFO 1953