McFarlane was awakened at 0332 hours on February 9, 1942 in his room at the Park Sheraton. It was Anderson from FBI.
“Commander, do you know what’s going on at Pier 88?”
“No.”
“Well the Normandie is on fire and listing badly. Better get down here as fast as you can.”
“On my way!”
He grabbed a taxi on that freezing and snowy February morning. As they approached Tenth Avenue he could smell the burning debris and see thickening black smoke moving quickly toward the northeast on glacial gusts of wind. Forty-Eighth Street was a chaotic jumble of fire trucks, ambulances and police cars competing for space closer to the waterfront. A few worried city cops were attempting to unravel the traffic jam since Mayor La Guardia and his staff were scheduled to appear with the press in tow in a few minutes.
The huge ship was listing ominously as smoke continued to rise relentlessly from every lower hatch. Big hoses from fireboats kept pumping steady streams of water in a failing attempt to extinguish the fire. Helpless workers crowded the piers amazed as the colossal metal structure of the mortally wounded giant twisted slowly but inexorably to its death. Welders, carpenters, and metal workers on the early morning shift to convert the luxury liner into a giant troop transport already renamed Liberty were stopped by the soldiers at the entrance of the pier.
Because of the tremendous heat generated by the fire it was impossible to approach the sinking luxury liner. McFarlane was told that one or possibly two men had been killed in the ‘accident’…but everyone was questioning whether it really was an accident. Some men on the night shift thought they heard a muffled jolt under the ship a few minutes past 3 a.m. McFarlane couldn’t reach any provisional conclusions until the ship’s hull could be inspected, which was impossible until the fire stopped. The Normandie’s French captain was still nominally in charge and his officers produced the complete blueprints of the ocean liner and McFarlane ordered that they be immediately translated into English.
One week later, once the Normandie was nothing but a burnt out hulk resting on its side, two navy divers McFarlane had summoned from Newport News secretly managed to inspect the smoking hull using powerful underwater lights. They examined the external damage done to the ship still generating heat underwater. It took several hours in the icy waters amid incandescent floating debris before an accurate picture emerged. Captain Smith in charge of the diving team was wrapped in a blanket after the final dive when he entered the trailer parked on the West Side Drive where ONI had established a command post. Smith whispered to McFarlane that he had seen and felt with his own hands an open gash four feet by four in the lower central portion of the hull. It was large enough to have quickly flooded the engine room, then very slowly the entire hold. Along with the lightened ship emptied of its insides it explained why the listing kept increasing in such slow geometric fashion hours before the ship finally capsized. McFarlane was alarmed by Smith’s discovery,
“Captain, I must insist that this is a top secret naval intelligence matter, your orders are to maintain total secrecy, not word of this to anyone, not even your colleagues. Is that clear, Smith?”
“Yes, sir, absolutely clear.”
McFarlane knew that kind of news couldn’t filter out under any circumstances and could spell disaster for civilian defense throughout the country. It would be a major shock as traumatic as a second Pearl Harbor in our own backyard if it were to reach the public. The top brass had to decide how best to handle it.
Persistent rumors of massive numbers of infiltrated saboteurs and fifth columnists among Japanese, German and Italian nationals as well as recently naturalized citizens were being repeated everywhere. Just two months after December 7th the Normandie sinking would be viewed as a catastrophic intelligence failure. McFarlane knew that many officers and sailors at ONI in Washington had been reassigned on the President’s personal orders immediately following Pearl Harbor. The former assistant secretary of the navy, now president of the United States with a special interest in intelligence and naval matters, was intent on handling those matters personally.
McFarlane looked at the pier as the divers were collecting their gear into a navy truck. He had to be sure that Captain Smith and his men would keep the information secret and decided to recommend an immediate promotion and a decoration for the men in the unit.
He saw this as confirmation it was a modest frogman operation since far greater firepower was required to sink a ship that size in a single explosion. They really needed at least four hundred more kilos of TNT or two perfectly targeted torpedoes that would have blown up the pier in the process. Whoever pulled this off could only carry a limited amount of explosives under water and therefore had to be a solo operator, but a very good one capable of still more tremendous damage.
McFarlane examined secret details of the Valiant and the Queen Elizabeth sinkings at Alexandria, in Egypt. They used classic six hundred pound bombs in those attacks. The Brits eventually caught two Italian deep-sea demolition divers as they were ashore and attempting to leave the city. It was a first class job but oddly enough had very poor intelligence planning and support. They got caught using actual British pound sterling that wasn’t valid currency in the Middle East instead of Egyptian pounds. The mission planners in Italy had apparently failed to do their homework thoroughly.
“The Italians,” McFarlane thought “that’s what this looks like, an Italian operation! It was an underfunded, but still very daring attack, requiring unusual physical courage on the part of the divers, since McFarlane couldn’t conceive a lone operator being able to pull it off. In order to succeed they had to rely on the local Italian-American underworld and the hoodlums controlling the waterfront! Perhaps this was the warning signal of a monumental disaster in the making.”
He immediately transmitted a top-secret report back to ONI headquarters in Washington and met with Anderson at FBI who listened quietly to the commander’s reasoning,
“It makes perfect sense, the fishing boats off Long Island are almost all Italian owned and operated. They could easily be providing assistance to German U-Boats, supplying them with fresh water and food that subs are always short of. If they’re not stopped they could paralyze the entire East Coast and prevent convoys from even leaving the harbor.”
McFarlane was getting restless.
“We have to follow this thread wherever it takes us. I’m going to raise hell at headquarters and demand more people for my unit if we’re going to produce results!”
The FBI interviewed the fishermen but found no potential suspects among the Italians in the New York area certainly none that could remotely fit the profile of underwater saboteurs.