John Cullen, Son of Bayside Who Foiled Nazi Saboteurs
On December 7, 1941, the Second World War found its way to the U.S. when Japan conducted a military strike on Pearl Harbor. Yet this was not the only time the war reached our doorstep. In June of 1942, John Cornelius "Jack" Cullen patrolled the Coast Guard station at Amagansett, Long Island, when he encountered a suspicious man in civilian clothes standing on a foggy beach.
Cullen was born on October 2, 1920, in Manhattan. Soon after, his family moved to Bayside. He enlisted in the Coast Guard at age 21 shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack and, after completing basic training, was assigned to the Amagansett station. On the night of June 13, 1942, Cullen was walking his three-mile patrol route from the station to the uninhabited tip of Long Island, equipped with nothing but a flashlight and a flare gun. Twenty minutes into his patrol, he found the mysterious man. As he approached, he noticed two others in bathing suits standing knee-deep in the water. The man, who claimed to be holding a bag full of clams, said he was a fisherman and offered Cullen $300 to let him go. He instead turned out to be Nazi saboteur George Dasch, who was brought there by U-boat to destroy U.S. infrastructure and hobble the war effort.
Cullen instinctively distrusted the man and ran to the station to report him. By the time the Coast Guard arrived, Dasch and his men were gone. The Coast Guard smelled the diesel of the U-boat as it fled. In the search for Dasch, they found discarded German cigarettes, uniforms and swimsuits, boxes containing explosives, false IDs, equipment, and several thousand dollars in cash. The FBI interrogated Cullen and, with the information he provided, went on a nationwide manhunt for Dasch. They apprehended the German agent and his men near Jacksonville, Florida. This was the first time a wartime enemy agent set foot on U.S. soil since the War of 1812. In response, the Coast Guard initiated the Beach Patrol a month later, in July 1942. Cullen received the Legion of Merit medal, then retired from the Coast Guard in 1946. He passed away on August 29, 2011.
The sources I consulted are “Jack Cullen, Nazi Invaders and The Founding of the Coast Guard Beach Patrol” by historian William H. Thiesen, and the New York Times article “John Cullen, Coast Guardsman Who Detected Spies, Dies at 90.”
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