Michael Digby, Burn, Bomb, Destroy: The German Sabotage Campaign in North America 1914-1917 (Philadelphia, Oxford: Casemate Publishers, 2021)
The neutrality years of World War I (1914-1917), which ended with the U.S. Declaration of War against Germany on April 6, 1917, have produced a host of books over the last 100 years. Contemporary journalists summarized their wartime reporting, German and British agents and officials wrote their memoirs, and with the declassification of U.S., German, and British government archives scholars have attempted to piece together in an objective way what happened. Michael Digsby is joining authors such as Mark Arsenault, Bill Mills, Jules Witcover, and Howard Blum who have tried to present the highly complex history of the German sabotage campaign in a condensed, easier to digest format for a wider audience interested in history.
Burn, Bomb, Destroy, which was the description the German sabotage agent Franz Rintelen provided to investigators about his brief mission to the US in 1915, captures the imagination of the reader about what happened. Unable to prevent U.S. military supplies from reinforcing France, Great Britain, and Russia on the stalemated European battlefields, the Imperial War Department decided in 1915 to shift from hurting British (and Canadian) interests to order direct attacks on American industry, commercial shipping, US labor relations, and the US-Mexican border. The campaign culminated in an “explosion of almighty proportions” (Prologue) when German agents blew up the Allied loading terminals at Black Tom Island in the New York harbor in July 1916. The European war had come to the homeland. Nine months later the US was at war with Germany.
Digsby, a bomb technician and bomb detective who worked with the FBI, wanted to add the perspective of his background to the plethora of works written about the topic. In easy-to-read prose, the author tells the stories of the Vanceboro Bridge bomber Werner Horn, the bomb maker and inventor Walter T. Scheele, and the colorful Horst von der Goltz who abandoned a German sabotage mission and turned up in 1916 trials as a star witness for U.S. prosecutors, courtesy of the British government. Sabotage plots on the West Coast, near Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore complement the picture of a vast German conspiracy to bring America to its knees. In a departure from many scholars before him, Digsby correctly asserts that while there certainly were some amateurs within the German intelligence corps, a focus of many earlier books, for the most part German agents displayed a high level of sophistication, especially as the war progressed.
The author fails in his quest to tell the story of the German sabotage campaign from a new perspective. He presents some new information, for example that Walter Scheele was called to Germany in “the early summer of 1914” (p38) to receive instructions for his wartime service, or that the German Ambassador Count Bernstorff was ordered to initiate a sabotage campaign in the US in August 1914, or that Horst von der Goltz was a successful German intelligence agent before 1914, but the poor citing of sources makes it impossible to determine whether these claims are based on research or conjecture. Many quotes in the text are not cited. The book also contains many factual errors, for example that von Wedell’s office used stolen passports to falsify travel documents for German reservists (p11; von Wedell bought these passports from American citizens or citizens of neutral countries), that von Wedell “fled to Cuba” (p11; He fled to Germany but died on an English ship that hit a mine), that members of the British navy boarded “passenger and cargo ships departing North American ports” (p10; Ships were boarded off the British isles), that von Papen “served as ambassador to Austria from 1934-8, then, as the Nazi party rose to power…” (p218; The Nazi party took power in 1933), that von Papen served two years in prison (p219; He fought against a prison sentence in 1949 and was acquitted). Franz Bopp, the German consul general at San Francisco was not noble (for example p101; in the text “Franz von Bopp”), Franz Rintelen traveled under “Emile V. Gasché,” not “Gauche” (p47), and the Carl Heyden and Carl Heynen in the text are the same person just misspelled.
The book conflates two distinct strategic goals of the German government. In 1914, Germany wanted to attack British and French interests, such as the Welland Canal and Canadian railroads, while remaining non-violent in the U.S. The author claims that sabotage against the U.S. commenced with the start of the war in 1914 (pxvi) and cites several texts which ordered German agents in the U.S. to attack Canada in November 1914. He does not cite the main sabotage order against U.S. interests issued in January 1915. This order became a key document in the Mixed Claims Commission proceedings in the 1920s and 30s which caused Germany to eventually pay millions in damages to U.S. claimants.
In the quest of telling a short, pithy, popular history, the 220-page book, Burn, Bomb, Destroy, lacks precision, even when discounting the many factual mistakes in the text. The author uses some archival sources, which are not clearly cited (author, date, file), but some of the crucial stories, for example the missions of Franz Rintelen and Horst von der Goltz, the role of Franz von Papen, and Ambassador Count Bernstorff rely almost entirely on their memoirs. Von der Goltz, for example, starred in U.S. movies and very little of the contents of his book about his career in intelligence has ever been corroborated. Franz Rintelen made a career as a successful writer in post war Great Britain. His bestselling memoirs are proven to contain vast exaggerations of his mission and success as a German agent. Von Papen wrote his memoirs to clear his name. The author uses early accounts, for example by the journalist John Price Jones and author Edgar French Strother. Price Jones worked for the Providence Journal during the war, a propaganda outlet of the British government. His book The German Spy in America was published in England in 1917 for propaganda purposes. Strother’s book on the Hindu-German conspiracy was sanctioned by the Justice Department in 1918 as a propaganda piece. Attorney General Thomas W. Gregory wrote the foreword. While these books have value as contemporary and original sources, they must be used in the proper context.
Any research into this period of modern intelligence warfare helps fill the remaining voids in depicting the formation of U.S. counterintelligence capabilities and the challenges of non-linear warfare. The challenge for any author in the field of intelligence history is to mold a complex set of events and data into a simplified, easy-to-read yet precise text. While the book is easy-to-read, Michael Digsby failed to maintain factual precision.