ROBERT FAY AND THE SHIP BOMBS
Robert Fay landed in New York on April 23, 1915. He landed in jail
just six months and one day later--on October 24th. In those six
months he slowly perfected one of the most infernal devices that
ever emerged from the mind of man. He painfully had it manufactured
piece by piece. With true German thoroughness he covered his
trail at every point--excepting one. And five days after he had
aroused suspicion at that point, he and his entire group of fellow
conspirators were in jail. The agents of American justice who
put him there had unravelled his whole ingenious scheme and had
evidence enough to have sent him to the penitentiary for life if
laws since passed had then been in effect.
Only the mind that conceived the sinking of the _Lusitania_ could
have improved upon the devilish device which Robert Fay invented
and had ready for use when he was arrested. It was a box containing
forty pounds of trinitrotoluol, to be fastened to the rudder
post of a vessel, and so geared to the rudder itself that its
oscillations would slowly release the catch of a spring, which
would then drive home the firing pin and cause an explosion that
would instantly tear off the whole stern of the ship, sinking it
in mid-ocean in a few minutes. Experts in mechanics and experts in
explosives and experts in shipbuilding all tested the machine, and
all agreed that it was perfect for the work which Fay had planned
that it should do.
Fay had three of these machines completed, he had others in course
of construction, he had bought and tested the explosive to go into
them, he had cruised New York harbour in a motor boat and proved by
experience that he could attach them undetected where he wished,
and he had the names and sailing dates of the vessels that he meant
to sink without a trace. Only one little link that broke--and the
quick and thorough work of American justice--robbed him of another
Iron Cross besides the one he wore. That link--but that comes later
in the story.
Fay and his device came straight from the heart of the German Army,
with the approval and the money of his government behind him. He,
like Werner Horn, came originally from Cologne; but they were very
different men. Where Horn was almost childishly simple, Fay’s mind
was subtle and quick to an extraordinary degree. Where Horn had
been humane to the point of risking his life to save others, Fay
had spent months in a cold-blooded solution of a complex problem
in destruction that he knew certainly involved a horrible death
for dozens, and more likely hundreds, of helpless human beings.
Horn refused to swear to a lie even where the lie was a matter of
no great moment. Fay told at his trial a story so ingenious that
it would have done credit to a novelist and would have been wholly
convincing if other evidence had not disproved the substance of it.
The truth of the case runs like this:
Fay was in Germany when the war broke out and was sent to the
Vosges Mountains in the early days of the conflict. Soon men were
needed in the Champagne sector, and Fay was transferred to that
front. Here he saw some of the bitterest fighting of the war, and
here he led a detachment of Germans in a surprise attack on a
trench full of Frenchmen in superior force. His success in this
dangerous business won him an Iron Cross of the second class.
During these days the superiority of the Allied artillery over the
German caused the Germans great distress, and they became very
bitter when they realized, from a study of the shells that exploded
around them, how much of this superiority was due to the material
that came from the United States for use by the French and British
guns. Fay’s ingenious mind formed a scheme to stop this supply,
and he put his plan before his superior officers. The result was
that, in a few weeks, he left the army and left Germany, armed with
passports and $3,500 in American money, bound for the United States
on the steamer _Rotterdam_. He reached New York on April 23, 1915.
One of Fay’s qualifications for the task he had set for himself
was his familiarity with the English language and with the United
States. He had come to America in 1902, spending a few months on a
farm in Manitoba and then going on to Chicago, where he had worked
for several years for the J. I. Case Machinery Company, makers
of agricultural implements. During these years, Fay was taking
an extended correspondence school course in electrical and steam
engineering, so that altogether he had good technical background
for the events of 1915. In 1906, he went back to Germany.
What he may have lacked in technical equipment, Fay made up by the
first connection he made when he reached New York in 1915. The
first man he looked up was Walter Scholz, his brother-in-law,
who had been in this country for four years and who was a civil
engineer who had worked here chiefly as a draftsman--part of the
time for the Lackawanna Railroad--and who had studied mechanical
engineering on the side. When Fay arrived, Scholz had been out of a
job in his own profession and was working on a rich man’s estate in
Connecticut. Fay, armed with plenty of money and his big idea, got
Scholz to go into the scheme with him, and the two were soon living
together in a boarding house at 28 Fourth Street, Weehawken, across
the river from uptown New York.
To conceal the true nature of their operations they hired a small
building on Main Street and put a sign over the door announcing
themselves in business as “The Riverside Garage.” They added
verisimilitude to this scheme by buying a second-hand car in bad
condition and dismantling it, scattering the parts around the room
so that it would look as if they were engaged in making repairs.
Every once in a while they would shift these parts about so as to
alter the appearance of the place. However, they did not accept
any business--whenever a man took the sign at its face value and
came in asking to have work done, Fay or Scholz would take him to
a near-by saloon and buy him a few drinks and pass him along,
referring him to some other garage.
The most of their time they spent about the real business in hand.
They took care to have the windows of their room in the boarding
house heavily curtained to keep out prying eyes, and here, under
a student lamp, they spent hours over mechanical drawings which
were afterward produced in evidence at the trial of their case.
The mechanism that Fay had conceived was carefully perfected on
paper, and then they confronted the task of getting the machinery
assembled. Some of the parts were standard--that is, they could be
bought at any big hardware store. Others, however, were peculiar to
this device and had to be made to order from the drawings. They had
the tanks made by a sheet-metal worker named Ignatz Schiering, at
344 West 42nd Street, New York. Scholz went to him with a drawing,
telling him that it was for a gasolene tank for a motor boat.
Scholz made several trips to the shop to supervise some of the
details of the construction and once to order more tanks of a new
size and shape.
At the same time Scholz went to Bernard McMillan, doing business
under the name of McMillan & Werner, 81 Centre Street, New York, to
have him make special kinds of wheels and gears for the internal
mechanism of the bomb, from sketches which Scholz supplied. At odd
times between June 10th and October 20th McMillan was working on
these things and delivered the last of them to Scholz just a few
days before he was arrested.
In the meanwhile, Fay was taking care of the other necessary
elements of his scheme. Besides the mechanism of the bomb, he had
to become familiar with the shipping in the port of New York, and
he had to get the explosive with which to charge the bomb. For the
former purpose he and Scholz bought a motor boat--a 28-footer--and
in this they cruised about New York harbour at odd times, studying
the docks at which ships were being loaded with supplies for the
Allies and calculating the best means and time for placing the
bombs on the rudder posts of these ships. Fay finally determined by
experience that between two and three o’clock in the morning was
the best time. The watchmen on board the ships were at that hour
most likely to be asleep or the night dark enough so that he could
work in safety. He made some actual experiments in fastening the
empty tanks to the rudder posts, and found that it was perfectly
easy to do so. His scheme was to fasten them just above the water
line on a ship while it was light, so that when it was loaded they
were submerged and all possibility of detection was removed.
The getting of explosives was, however, the most difficult part of
Fay’s undertaking. This was true not only because he was here most
likely to arouse suspicion, but also because of his relative lack
of knowledge of the thing he was dealing with. He did know enough,
however, to begin his search for explosives in the least suspicious
field, and it was only as he became ambitious to produce a more
powerful effect that he came to grief.
The material he decided to use at first was chlorate of potash.
This substance in itself is so harmless that it is an ingredient
of tooth powders and is used commonly in other ways. When,
however, it is mixed with any substance high in carbons, such as
sugar, sulphur, charcoal, or kerosene, it becomes an explosive of
considerable power. Fay set about to get some of the chlorate.
But it is now time to get acquainted with Fay’s fellow
conspirators, and to follow them through the drama of human
relationships that led to Fay’s undoing. All these men were
Germans--some of them German-Americans--and each in his own way
was doing the work of the Kaiser in this country. Herbert Kienzle
was a dealer in clocks with a store on Park Place, in New York. He
had learned the business in his father’s clock factory deep in the
Black Forest in Germany and had come to this country years ago to
go into the same business, getting his start by acting as agent
for his father’s factory over here. After the war broke out he had
become obsessed with the wild tales which German propaganda had
spread in this country about dum-dum bullets being shipped back for
use against the soldiers of the Fatherland. He had brooded on the
subject, had written very feelingly about it to the folks at home,
and had prepared for distribution in the United States a pamphlet
denouncing this traffic. Fay had heard of Kienzle before leaving
Germany, and soon after he reached New York he got in touch with
him as a man with a fellow feeling for the kind of work he was
undertaking to do.
One of the first things in Fay’s carefully worked-out plan was
to locate a place to which he could quietly retire when his work
of destruction should be done--a place where he felt he could be
safe from suspicion. After a talk with Kienzle he decided that
Lush’s Sanatorium, at Butler, N. J., would serve the purpose. This
sanatorium was run by Germans and Kienzle was well known there.
Acting on a prearranged plan with Kienzle, Fay went to Butler and
was met at the station by a man named Bronkhorst, who was in charge
of the grounds at the sanatorium. They identified each other by
prearranged signals and Fay made various arrangements, some of
which are of importance later in the story.
Another friend of Kienzle’s was Max Brietung, a young German
employed by his uncle, E. N. Brietung, who was in the shipping
business in New York. Young Brietung was consequently in a position
to know at first hand about the movements of ships out of New York
harbour. Brietung supplied Fay with the information he needed
regarding which ships Fay should elect to destroy. But first
Brietung made himself useful in another way.
Fay asked Kienzle how he could get some chlorate of potash, and
Kienzle asked his young friend Brietung if he could help him out.
Brietung said he could, and went at once to another German who was
operating in New York ostensibly as a broker in copper under the
name of Carl L. Oppegaard.
It is just as well to get better acquainted with Oppegaard because
he was a vital link in Fay’s undoing. His real name was Paul Siebs
and for the purpose of this story he might as well be known by
that name. Siebs had also been in this country in earlier days
and during his residence in Chicago, from 1910 to 1913, he had
gotten acquainted with young Brietung. He, too, had gone back to
Germany before the war, but soon after it began he had come back
to the United States under his false name, ostensibly as an agent
of an electrical concern in Gothenburg, Sweden, for the purpose
of buying copper. He frankly admitted later that this copper was
intended for re-export to Germany to be used in the manufacture of
munitions of war. He did not have much success in his enterprise
and he was finally forced to make a living from hand to mouth by
small business transactions of almost any kind. He could not afford
a separate office, so he rented desk room in the office of the
Whitehall Trading Company, a small subsidiary of the Raymond-Hadley
Corporation. His desk was in the same room with the manager of the
company, Carl L. Wettig.
When Brietung asked Siebs to buy him some chlorate of potash Siebs
was delighted at the opportunity to make some money and immediately
undertook the commission. He had been instructed to get a small
amount, perhaps 200 pounds. He needed money so badly, however, that
he was very glad to find that the smallest kegs of the chlorate
of potash were 112 pounds each, and he ordered three kegs. He paid
for them with money supplied by Brietung and took a delivery slip.
Ultimately this delivery slip was presented by Scholz who appeared
one day with a truck and driver and took the chemical away.
Fay and Scholz made some experiments with the chlorate of potash
and Fay decided it was not strong enough to serve his purpose. He
then determined to try dynamite. Again he wished to avoid suspicion
and this time, after consultation with Kienzle, he recalled
Bronkhorst down at the Lush Sanatorium in New Jersey. Bronkhorst,
in his work as superintendent of the grounds at the sanatorium, was
occasionally engaged in laying water mains in the rocky soil there,
and for this purpose kept dynamite on hand. Fay got a quantity of
dynamite from him. Later, however, he decided that he wanted a
still more powerful explosive.
Again he applied to Kienzle, and this time Kienzle got in touch
with Siebs direct. By prearrangement, Kienzle and Siebs met Fay
underneath the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge, and there
Siebs was introduced to Fay. They walked around City Hall Park
together discussing the subject; and Fay, not knowing the name of
what he was after, tried to make Siebs understand what explosive he
wanted by describing its properties. Siebs finally realized that
what Fay had in mind was trinitrotoluol, one of the three highest
explosives known. Siebs finally undertook to get some of it for
him, but pointed out to him the obvious difficulties of buying it
in as small quantities as he wanted. It was easy enough to buy
chlorate of potash because that was in common commercial use for
many purposes. It was also easy to buy dynamite because that also
is used in all quantities and for many purposes. But trinitrotoluol
is too powerful for any but military use, and it is consequently
handled only in large lots and practically invariably is made
to the order of some government. However, Siebs had an idea and
proceeded to act on it.
He went back to the Whitehall Trading Company, where he had desk
room, and saw his fellow occupant, Carl Wettig. Wettig had been
engaged in a small way in a brokerage business in war supplies, and
had even taken a few small turns in the handling of explosives.
Siebs had overheard him discussing with a customer the market price
of trinitrotoluol some weeks before, and on this account thought
possibly Wettig might help him out. When he put the proposition up
to Wettig the latter agreed to do what he could to fill the order.
In the meanwhile Fay had sent another friend of Brietung’s to
Bridgeport to see if he could get trinitrotoluol in that great city
of munitions. There he called upon another German who was running
an employment agency--finding jobs for Austro-Hungarians who were
working in the munitions plants, so that he could take them out of
the plants and divert their labour from the making of war supplies
for use against the Teutons. The only result of this visit was that
Brietung’s friend brought back some loaded rifle cartridges which
ultimately were used in the bombs as caps to fire the charge. But
otherwise his trip was of no use to Fay.
Carl Wettig was the weak link in Fay’s chain of fortune. He did
indeed secure the high explosive that Fay wanted, and was in
other ways obliging. But he got the explosive from a source that
would have given Fay heart failure if he had known of it, and he
was obliging for reasons that Fay lived to regret. Siebs made
his inquiry of Wettig on the 19th of October. The small quantity
of explosives that he asked for aroused Wettig’s suspicions and
as soon as he promised to get it he went to the French Chamber
of Commerce, near by, told them what he suspected, and asked to
be put in touch with responsible police authorities under whose
direction he wished to act in supplying the trinitrotoluol.
From that moment Fay, Siebs, and Kienzle were “waked up in the
morning and put to bed at night” by detectives from the police
department of New York City and operatives of the Secret Service
of the United States. By arrangement with them Wettig obtained a
keg containing 25 pounds of trinitrotoluol, and in the absence of
Fay and Scholz from their boarding house in Weehawken, he delivered
it personally to their room and left it on their dresser. He told
Siebs he had delivered it and Siebs promptly set about collecting
his commission from Fay.
Siebs had some difficulty in doing this, because Fay and Scholz,
being unfamiliar with the use of the explosive, were unable to
explode a sample of it and decided that it was no good. They had
come home in the evening and found the keg on their dresser and had
opened it. Inside they found the explosive in the form of loose
white flakes. To keep it more safely, they poured it out into
several small cloth bags. They then took a sample of it and tried
by every means they could think of to explode it. They even laid
some of it on an anvil and broke two or three hammers pounding on
it, but could get no result. They then told Siebs that the stuff
he had delivered was useless. Wettig volunteered to show them how
it should be handled. Accordingly, he joined them the following
day at their room in Weehawken and went with them out into the
woods behind Fort Lee, taking along a small sample of the powder
in a paper bag. In the woods the men picked up the top of a small
tin can, built a fire in the stump of a tree, and melted some of
the flake “T. N. T.” in it. Before it cooled, Wettig embedded in
it a mercury cap. When cooled after being melted, T. N. T. forms a
solid mass resembling resin in appearance, and is now more powerful
because more compact.
However, before the experiment could be concluded, one of the swarm
of detectives who had followed them into the woods stepped on a dry
twig, and when the men started at its crackling, the detectives
concluded they had better make their arrests before the men might
get away; and so all were taken into custody. A quick search of
their boarding house, the garage, a storage warehouse in which Fay
had stored some trunks, and the boathouse where the motor boat was
stored, resulted in rounding up the entire paraphernalia that had
been used in working out the whole plot. All the people connected
with every phase of it were soon arrested.
Out of the stories these men told upon examination emerged not
only the hideous perfection of the bomb itself, but the direct
hand that the German Government and its agents in this country had
in the scheme of putting it to its fiendish purpose. First of all
appeared Fay’s admission that he had left Germany with money and
a passport supplied by a man in the German Secret Service. Later,
on the witness stand, when Fay had had time enough carefully to
think out the most plausible story, he attempted to get away from
this admission by claiming to have deserted from the German Army.
He said that he had been financed in his exit from the German
Empire by a group of business men who had put up a lot of money to
back an automobile invention of his, which he had worked on before
the war began. These men, so he claimed, were afraid they would
lose all their money if he should happen to be killed before the
invention was perfected. This tale, ingenious though it was, was
too fantastic to be swallowed when taken in connection with all
the things found in Fay’s possession when he was arrested. Beyond
all doubt his scheme to destroy ships was studied and approved by
his military superiors in Germany before he left, and that scheme
alone was his errand to this country.
Far less ingenious but equally damning was his attempt to explain
away his relations with Von Papen. The sinister figure of the
military attaché of the German Embassy at Washington leers from the
background of all the German plots; and this case was no exception.
It was known that Fay had had dealings with Von Papen in New York,
and on the witness stand he felt called upon to explain them in a
way that would clear the diplomatic service of participation in his
evil doings. He declared that he had taken his invention to Von
Papen and that Von Papen had resolutely refused to have anything to
do with it. This would have been well enough if Fay’s explanation
had stopped here.
But Fay’s evil genius prompted him to make his explanation more
convincing by an elaboration of the story, so he gave Von Papen’s
reasons for refusal. These were not at all that the device was
calculated to do murder upon hundreds of helpless men, nor at all
that to have any part in the business was to play the unneutral
villain under the cloak of diplomatic privilege. Not at all. At the
first interview, seeing only a rough sketch and hearing only Fay’s
description of preliminary experiments, Von Papen’s sole objection
was:
“Well, you might obtain an explosion once and the next ten
apparatuses might fail.”
To continue Fay’s explanation:
“He casually asked me what the cost of it would be and I told him
in my estimation the cost would not be more than $20 apiece. [$20
apiece for the destruction of thirty lives and a million-dollar
ship and cargo!] As a matter of fact, in Germany I will be able to
get these things made for half that price. ‘If it is not more than
that,’ Von Papen said, ‘you might go ahead, but I cannot promise
you anything whatever.’”
Fay then went back to his experiments and when he felt that he had
practically perfected his device he called upon Von Papen for the
second time. This time Von Papen’s reply was:
“Well, this thing has been placed before our experts and also we
have gone into the political condition of the whole suggestion. Now
in the first place our experts say this apparatus is not at all
seaworthy; but as regards political conditions I am sorry to say
we cannot consider it and, therefore, we cannot consider the whole
situation.”
In other words, with no thought of the moral turpitude of the
scheme, with no thought of the abuse of diplomatic freedom, but
only with thoughts of the practicability of this device and of the
effect upon political conditions of its use, Von Papen had put the
question before technical men and before Von Bernstorff, and their
decision had been adverse solely on those considerations--first,
that it would not work, and second, that it would arouse hostility
in the United States. At no stage, according to Fay’s best face
upon the matter, was any thought given to its character as a
hideous crime.
The device itself was studied independently by two sets of military
experts of the United States Government with these results:
First, that it was mechanically perfect; second, that it was
practical under the conditions of adjustment to a ship’s
rudder which Fay had devised; and third, that the charge of
trinitrotoluol, for which the container was designed, was nearly
half the quantity which is used on our own floating mines and which
is calculated upon explosion twenty feet from a battleship to put
it out of action, and upon explosion in direct contact, absolutely
to destroy and sink the heaviest superdreadnaught. In other words,
beyond all question the bomb would have shattered the entire stern
of any ship to which it was attached, and would have caused it to
sink in a few minutes.
A brief description of the contrivance reveals the mechanical
ingenuity and practical efficiency of Fay’s bomb. A rod attached
to the rudder, at every swing the rudder gave, turned up, by one
notch, the first of the bevelled wheels within the bomb. After a
certain number of revolutions of that wheel, it in turn gave one
revolution to the next; and so on through the series. The last
wheel was connected with the threaded cap around the upper end of
the square bolt, and made this cap slowly unscrew, until at length
the bolt dropped clear of it and yielded to the waiting pressure
of the strong steel spring above. This pressure drove it downward
and brought the sharp points at its lower end down on the caps of
the two rifle cartridges fixed below it--like the blow of a rifle’s
hammer. The detonation from the explosion of these cartridges would
set off a small charge of impregnated chlorate of potash, which in
turn would fire the small charge of the more sluggish but stronger
dynamite, and that in turn would explode the still more sluggish
but tremendously more powerful trinitrotoluol.
The whole operation, once the spring was free, would take place in
a flash; and instantly its deadly work would be accomplished.
Picture the scene that Fay had in his mind as he toiled his six
laborious months upon this dark invention. He saw himself, in
imagination, fixing his infernal box upon the rudder post of a ship
loading at a dock in New York harbour. As the cargo weighed the
ship down, the box would disappear beneath the water. At length
the ship starts on its voyage, and, as the rudder swings her into
the stream, the first beat in the slow, sure knell of death for
ship and crew is clicked out by its very turning. Out upon the sea
the shift of wind and blow of wave require a constant correction
with the rudder to hold the true course forward. At every swing
the helmsman unconsciously taps out another of the lurking beats
of death. Somewhere in mid-ocean, perhaps at black midnight, in a
driving storm, the patient mechanism hid below has turned the last
of its calculated revolutions. The neckpiece from the bolt slips
loose, the spring drives downward, there is a flash, a deafening
explosion, and five minutes later a few mangled bodies and a chaos
of floating wreckage are all that is left above the water’s surface.
This is the hideous dream Fay dreamed in the methodical 180 days
of his planning and experimenting in New York. This is the dream
to realize which he was able to enlist the coöperation of half a
dozen other Germans. This is the dream his superiors in Germany
viewed with favour, and financed. This is the dream the sinister
Von Papen encouraged and which he finally dismissed only because
he believed it too good to be true. This is the dream Fay himself
on the witness stand said he had thought of as “a good joke on the
British.”
In this picture of infernal imaginings the true character of German
plottings in this country stands revealed. Ingenuity of conception
characterized them, method and patience and painstaking made them
perfect. Flawless logic, flawless mechanism. But on the human
side, only the blackest passions and an utter disregard of human
life; no thought of honour, no trace of human pity. It happened in
the case of Fay that the agent himself was ruthless and deserved
far more than what the limit of existing law was able to give him
when he was convicted of his crimes. But through all the plots Von
Papen, Von Bernstorff, and the Imperial German Government in Berlin
were consistent. Their hand was at the helm of all, and the same
ruthless grasping after domination of the world at any price led to
the same barbarous code of conduct in them all.