LONDON The four men wading ashore on a Florida beach wearing nothing but bathing trunks and German army hats looked like an unlikely invading force.
Declassified British intelligence files describe how the men were part of Nazi sabotage teams sent to the U.S. in June 1942 to undermine the American war effort.
They were trained in bomb-making, supplied with explosives and instructed in how to make timers from "easily obtainable commodities such as dried peas, lumps of sugar and razor blades."
Fortunately for the U.S., they were also spectacularly unsuccessful.
"It was not brilliantly planned," said Edward Hampshire, a historian at Britain's National Archives, which released the wartime intelligence documents Monday. "The Germans picked the leader for this very, very poorly. He immediately wanted to give himself up."
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
