War Ghosts

The sea was flat, the weather fair on March 4, 1918, when the Navy's 19,360-ton collier Cyclops put out of Barbados for Baltimore. She was carrying a heavy cargo of Brazilian manganese, badly needed by U. S. steel plants making War munitions. She slipped over the Caribbean horizon and, though no enemy warship was thought to be in the vicinity, she never was heard from again, by wireless or otherwise. Searching craft found no trace of wreckage. Of the 293 people aboard, no body was ever recovered. Said Wartime Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels in his report that year: "There has been no more baffling mystery in the annals of the Navy."

Last week the Navy Department announced receipt of a letter from a onetime Marine sergeant, resident of California. He said that while visiting in San Antonio, Tex., he obtained from an anonymous chance acquaintance a diary purporting to be written by one of four German hirelings who dynamited the Cyclops on the high seas. Excerpts from the diary told how charges had been set in the ship's engineroom, how the diarist and one accomplice had escaped in a small boat and were rescued by a German vessel, how the fugitives and German crew meticulously destroyed all traces of the Cyclops after the explosion.

If German agents did blow up the Cyclops, that was their right--the U. S. was then in the War. But if German agents blew up Lehigh Valley R. R.'s Black Tom Terminal (July 29, 1916) and Canadian Car & Foundry Co.'s Kingsland Assemblying Plant (Jan. 11, 1917), that was not their right and Germany must pay $25,000,000 damages, for the U. S. was then neutral. Last fortnight the New York Evening Post obtained access to and published some of the evidence to be filed by the U. S. in a suit U. S. v. Germany before the Mixed Claims Commission. Surprised were many U. S. citizens, largely convinced that most outcry about German "atrocities" was Wartime propaganda, to learn that there may have been real military sabotage. The evidence would show that Lothar Witzke and Kurt Jahnke, confessed spies, were sent to New Jersey by German Consul General von Bopp of San Francisco to explode Black Tom Terminal, then full of munitions for France, England, Russia. Evidence also has been gathered to prove that a Captain Frederich Hinsch of the North German Lloyd Line, interned in the U. S., ran sabotage operations which culminated in the explosion of the Kingsland, N. J., plant, then making Russian artillery shells. Last week Captain Hinsch was called to the telephone in Bremen, Germany, and asked about such activities.

"I will not talk!" he shouted, slammed down the receiver.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.