Authors: James Thayer
By late September, two months after the first delivery of lumber, 100 new barracks, three drill halls, a half-dozen mess halls, a sewage-treatment plant, and many other new structures had been completed. This buildup, the largest training-center expansion of the war, brought the Great Lakes Station's capacity to 68,000 recruits.
Hundreds of thousands of sailors passed through the station during the war. When they arrived fresh from boot camp, they knew how to stand at attention and manipulate the thirteen buttons on their bell-bottom flaps. At Great Lakes they learned the arts of amphibious landing, antiaircraft defense, ship repair, submarine chasing, small-craft operations, fire fighting, and myriad other skills. When they left, they were specialists ready for assignment at sea.
Because very little at the training center was highly classified, security was porous. Perimeter defense consisted of an interlocking wire fence topped with three strands of barbed wire projecting from the top of the fence at an outward angle. The base was bordered on the south by a forest that had been cleared back from the fence for forty yards. The fence ran east and descended a rough embankment to the beach, where it traversed the sand to a breakwater jutting almost a half-mile into Lake Michigan.
Rough, waist-high grass covered the acreage just inside the south fence. A well-worn footpath followed the fence, where shore patrolmen walked the perimeter. Every fourth fence post projected ten feet above the barbed wire and served as a light pole. Hidden in reflector cones, 100-watt bulbs issued distilled light that barely reached the ground. On this November night, lengths of fence between the light poles were draped in almost total darkness.
Two shore patrolmen emerged from the night and walked into the dim nimbus of the next pole. Their black pea coats and trousers merged with the darkness, but their white caps and arm bands stood out like the breakwater beacons
on the lake. Both wore cloth belts on which were attached cartridge pockets and black holsters. The holster flaps were buttoned over their Navy-issue Colt automatics. One sailor had an M1 carbine strapped over his shoulder. The other was being pulled along by an immense black-and-gold German shepherd whose training at heeling had been neglected. Like its master, the dog was anxious to complete its round of the southeast quadrant. A warm rug at the foot of his master's bed waited.
The sailor held the leash from inside his pea-coat pocket. He smoked a short cigarette, and rather than expose his hands to the cold, he let the ashes fall across the coat. His companion also hid his hands from the wind. The heavy stock of the M1 banged irritatingly against his elbow. The rifleman appreciated the dog's constant tension on its leash. Shinnick always walked at his dog's pace. Three days before, the shepherd had had a case of loose bowels, and their patrol lasted an extra forty-five minutes. The CPO had a shit fit when Shinnick explained why they reported late to the guard shack. King was making up for that now as he kept the leash taut. Shinnick stumbled along behind him.
They walked briskly, silently. Their breath rolled around them and was lost in the night. They could hear the distant rumble of Lake Michigan's waves pounding the beach. The graveyard crew would take over on the next round. This was the last tour. The worst tour. Johnson wanted to kick Shinnick's dog into a run. Despite the shepherd, the sidekick, and the guns, the last round always frightened Johnson. Noises behind him crawled up his neck. Shadows lived. By squinting, he reduced his field of vision to the path directly ahead of him. Under no circumstances would he glance over his shoulder. The path, the spectral string of lightbulbs that disappeared in the distance, and the gloomy, concealing woods on the other side of the fence, all terrified Johnson. As they approached the next pallid circle
of illumination, Johnson broke the silence. "This path really spooks me."
"So you keep saying." Shinnick's voice corralled Johnson's thoughts and gave them a nucleus to focus on. "And I keep telling you to transfer to gate duty."
"Nah. The CPO wouldn't buy that at all. What do I tell him? That I'm scared of the dark?"
"Tell him you're allergic to dogs. King won't mind."
"That's one great dog you got. He'd tear to pieces anybody that bothered you. But just let me get attacked, and he'd sit on his haunches laughing."
Shinnick leaned forward and patted the dog's rump. He had heard this routine before. As the southeast-perimeter tour progressed, Johnson always got antsy. He began talking almost at the same spot every round. Shinnick retorted with almost identical comments and suggestions, knowing his sidekick keyed on the voice, not the content.
"The way you act, Johnson, you'd think we're right in the middle of Germany. The only people anywhere near us are the rich folks who live on the other side of the fence on the lake."
"Then why the hell are we freezing our butts off, carrying this ice-cold rifle, and walking that monster you call a dog?"
Each time Johnson commented on King, Shinnick patted the dog's flanks. "Just in case. You never know. The krauts may decide that rather than the British coast, they're going to begin their invasion on the Lake Michigan coast." Both men laughed.
Their joke was prophetic. Fifty yards south of them, across the fence, hidden by dense forest, three German stormtroopers prepared for the assault on the Great Lakes Naval Training Center.
The barrel of Willi Lange's Schmeisser followed the guards' progress as they walked into the obscurity between
light poles. Hans Graf lay in the underbrush beside him. He had made two trips from the truck. Despite having lugged the 160-pound crate of explosives from the van through 300 feet of underbrush and then repeating the journey for the ladders, Graf was not breathing hard. He turned sharply to the sound of breaking twigs. Erich von Stihl crunched toward their position. In the crystalline night, the sound of rustling bushes was alarmingly loud. Lange watched the shore patrolmen's backs as they walked away from them, in and out of spots of light. The sailors heard nothing.
Von Stihl dropped to the ground near Graf. He slipped off the heavy backpack and peered across the forty yards of cleared land to the fence. He saw the shore patrolmen receding along the fenceline.
"How often?"
Lange had left the truck twenty minutes before and had kept a chilling vigil near the edge of the fence clearing. He glanced at his wristwatch.
"Roughly every fifteen minutes. At least, the guards before these guys came by fifteen minutes ago."
"Did they have a shepherd, too."
"Yes, it seems they all do."
Goddamn Abwehr intelligence. They hadn't mentioned the dogs. Against guard dogs, the stormtroopers' chances of being caught were logarithmically increased. The human threshold of awareness is very low. A shore patrolman will not see and not hear certain movements. This sensory obtuseness gives an intruder a margin of error. Not so with dogs. German commandos are taught to assume that any dog, not just a German shepherd, will detect even the slightest movement within 100 feet of him. And shepherds are not just any dog. They have a 600-pound bite that can snap an arm as if it were balsa wood.
"What do you make of the guards?"
"They might as well be in their barracks. They're not interested in patrolling tonight," Lange whispered. "They walked with their chins down and didn't look into the woods. Even the dog seemed to be in a hurry."
"What about the fence, Graf?"
The SS lieutenant held a pair of miniature binoculars to his eyes. "Just like we thought. I don't see any insulators, so it isn't electrified. But there's a thin strand of wire running through the fence about halfway up. It's a motion detector. If we jiggle it or cut it, an alarm'll go off somewhere."
"With only fifteen minutes between patrols, we'll have to hide the ladders once we're over. Let's go."
Von Stihl slung his backpack over his shoulder and grabbed one end of the ladders. He looked both ways and broke from the clearing toward the fence, dragging the ladders behind him. As the bottom of the ladders passed, Graf lifted them and followed the colonel. Lange covered them until they reached the darkness between two light poles, then left his position and ran toward them.
Their fence-breaching maneuver was called the arch. It was as old as war and almost impossible to defend against. The top strand of barbed wire was ten feet above the ground. The ladders they had purchased that day were each fourteen feet long. Graf jabbed his ladder's legs as hard as he could into the ground several feet away from the fence, then backed toward the fence until the ladder was at an angle, with its top rung directly over the topmost strand of barbed wire. After von Stihl stepped on the lowest rung of Graf's ladder to act as a counterweight, Willi Lange quickly climbed to the second-highest rung. He was totally supported by the human pylon, Graf, and counterbalanced by von Stihl. Von Stihl pivoted the second ladder so Lange could grab it and pull it up to him. Lange lowered the bottom of the second ladder to the ground on the other side of the
fence. He hammered it into the ground so it would not slip and then connected the clasps they had rigged that afternoon.
"Let's try it," Lange whispered.
Graf carefully lowered his arms. The ladders settled three or four inches and stood firm. The arch was complete. Lange lifted one leg over onto the inside ladder and tested it with his weight. It held. Carrying the explosives, von Stihl and Graf followed Lange over the ladder arch
The arch was dismantled with the same precision. Graf dragged the ladders into the tall grass fifty feet north of the fence, where they could not be seen by the patrols. Elapsed time since they had left the woods: two minutes, fifteen seconds.
Von Stihl knew the layout of the southeast quadrant of the training center as if it were his parents' backyard in Stuttgart. The most southeasterly building at the base was the security hut, located twenty yards from the embankment that dropped to the Lake Michigan beach. The hut had been built hurriedly with plywood and light beams. It was no larger than the living room of a modest house.
Thirty yards north of the security hut was a large garage containing six amphibious landing crafts used in training assaults on the beach. Fresh dirt lay loosely around the corner support posts, indicating it was one of the many new structures at the station. The surrounding grass had not fully recovered from the trampling it had endured during the garage's recent construction. The ground near the doors was compacted and rutted from that day's use of the vehicles.
The next building in line near the embankment was a weather-observation training post. An immense window for spotting weather formations over the lake had been cut into the lake-side wall. Under construction on the weather-
shack roof was a three-story observation tower. The third-story floor had been installed, and two of the walls were in place. Several sawhorses and racks of lumber lay on the ground near the building.
Last in line was a four-foot-high stand made of thick beams. Mounted on the stand were three antiaircraft guns used for training destroyer-bound seamen. This was a dry training site. There were no shell carts or empty casings strewn on the ground near the guns. A wooden stand had been built behind the gun stations, so an instructor could look down at the pom-pom recruits and yell. A single-strand antenna projected above the stand, connecting the instructor to the target airplane. The double-barrel pom-pom guns were pointed to the night sky in a mute, uniform row.
The German stormtroopers ran in low crouches toward the row of four structures. The terrain was uneven and pockholed, and the grass was knee-high. The year's first snow had melted and refrozen. Ice crystals snapped under their shoes. Flakes of ice caught in von Stihl's socks and melted, freezing his ankles. He yearned for his combat boots instead of his dilapidated hobo's shoes. Graf followed, effortlessly hauling the explosives. Lange lagged behind and stopped every thirty paces to check over his shoulder and listen. Lake Michigan's winter roar drowned all other sound.
Light shone through the security shack's window. It was the southeast-quadrant security chief's headquarters. He would be inside coordinating the evening's patrols. He would be their unwitting time fuse.
Von Stihl did not slow as he approached the window. The waves eliminated any need for stealth. He trotted across the dirt road that connected the four outbuildings to the main base. He tried to control his breathing as he peered
through the window into the shack. No one was inside. He wiped condensation from the window and looked again. The security man was not at his post.
"He's making it easy for us," von Stihl said as Graf came alongside. "He's not here. Let's rig the matting. It doesn't matter if he's coming or going. As long as he steps on it."
Graf surveyed the shack's interior through the window, then looked above him. Attached to a corner of the shack were two sirens. Their wiring was tacked onto the hut's plywood exterior and entered the building through a small hole in the wall. There would be a switch inside the hut to throw the sirens.
A thin, peccant smile crossed Graf's face. "Nothing says we blow everything at once, is there? As long as they all go?"
Von Stihl nodded hesitatingly.
"You wire the front step like we planned, but wire only the antiaircraft guns," Graf said, helping the colonel with the pack. "I'm going to make this night even more memorable for our dear security chief."
"You'll guarantee three detonations?" von Stihl asked, trusting Graf's instinct at this type of work.
"You'll wish you could see the security man's face when they blow."
They carried the explosives and backpack to the front step of the shack. Von Stihl could just barely make out Willi Lange's shadow. The Wehrmacht corporal had posted himself sixty yards down the dirt road in the direction from which possible intruders would approach. He crouched in the ditch at the side of the road, vigilant, shivering.
Graf took a small tool kit and a roll of wire from the pack. He twisted the hut's doorknob, and the door opened freely. "Wouldn't you know it?" He laughed. "Probably the only unlocked building on this whole base is the security hut."