Читать книгу Throttled! The Detection of the German and Anarchist Bomb Plotters - Thomas J. Tunney - Страница 6

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For the past twenty-three years I have been a member of the police department of the City of New York. It is a long time, in any single job. The department is comparable in size to a manufacturing establishment of the first magnitude—it employs more than ten thousand men—and its occupations are varied enough to suit the inclinations and ambitions of any man. And so I went through the mill, graduating from one duty to another until in 1914 I was an acting captain, and had been in charge of various branches of the Detective Bureau in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

My duty was the detection of crime, my specialty, meaning by that the special branch of crime with which I had been most often thrown into contact, was bomb-explosions. As far back as 1904 there were a number of mysterious explosions in New York which caused considerable property damage, and there I made the acquaintance of the bomb itself. It was an interesting subject for study, and a wicked weapon in use. I managed to pick up information of bomb-manufacture in several ways: Black-Handers, in prison, told me how they had made their missiles; at the New York office of the Du Pont explosives company I had an opportunity to study blasting; the publications of the Bureau of Mines furnished more information, the practice of the Bureau of Combustibles of our own department proved interesting and instructive, and I found myself before long forced to become something of a student of chemistry.

The difference between our work and the work of the laboratory chemist, however, was that in our case there was no time to make an explosive mixture and test it—some criminal usually had done that for us, and we were called to the scene to find out, from such clues as the wreckage afforded, the name and address of the criminal. The laboratory chemist mixes ingredients and counts his work done at the moment of explosion; the detective begins at that moment a stern chase, and a long one, back to the ingredients and the man who mixed them.

By the early part of 1914 I had seen a good deal of experience in tracing bomb outrages to certain of the anarchistic and Black Hand elements in the population of the city. As the year wore on these occurrences became so numerous as to warrant special attention, and on August 1, the approximate date of the outbreak of war in Europe, Police Commissioner Arthur Woods created in the police department the Bomb Squad. I was in command, and reported direct to the Commissioner. As the volume of work increased, and more men were taken on, the Commissioner delegated his supervision of the Bomb Squad to Guy Scull, who was then Fifth Deputy Police Commissioner, and who is now a major in the United States Army. That supervision was later passed on to Nicholas Biddle, a Special Deputy Commissioner, who, as I write this, is lieutenant-colonel in the United States Army, in charge of the Military Intelligence Bureau in New York; and following Mr. Biddle, Fuller Potter, another special Deputy Commissioner, and now a major in the Military Intelligence, directed the policies of the Squad.

Within a few months the personnel of the Bomb Squad included the following picked men: George D. Barnitz, Amedeo Polignani, Henry Barth, George P. Gilbert, Edward Caddell, Patrick J. Walsh, Jerome Murphy, James J. Coy, Valentine Corell, James Sterett, Henry Senff, Michael Santaniello, Joseph Fenelly, Joseph Kiley, Charles Wallace, William Randolph, Thomas Jenkins, and Anthony Terra—all detective sergeants, and George Busby, a lieutenant. To this list were added the names of James Murphy, Robert Morris, Thomas J. Ford, Walter Culhane, Vincent E. Hastings, Thomas J. Cavanagh, Louis B. Snowden, Thomas M. Goss, Daniel F. Collins, Frederick Mazer, Edward J. Maher, Walter Price, William McCahill, and Cornelius J. Sullivan. It made a list of fine material for the work which we were called upon to do, and no one will begrudge me here a word of tribute to their aptitude, their courage—to all of the qualities which made them such able and vigilant guardians of the neutrality of our country during the years preceding our entrance into the war. Many of the Bomb Squad went to war later: Barnitz became a junior lieutenant in the United States Navy, in intelligence work of a high order. Barth, Caddell, Corell, Fenelly, Jenkins, Walsh, Sterett, Santaniello, Randolph, James Murphy, Morris, Ford, Culhane, Hastings, Cavanagh, Snowden, Goss, Collins, Price, Mazer, Maher, McCahill and Sullivan became sergeants in the Corps of Intelligence Police of the National Army. And after I became connected with the Military Intelligence Branch of the War Department, I had frequent occasion to deal during the war in coöperation with the men whom I have mentioned in service.

Lieutenant-Colonel Nicholas Biddle, Military Intelligence

My first desire in taking charge of the Squad was to suppress the activities of persons using explosives to destroy life and property. What knowledge of the physics and chemistry of explosives my experience had accumulated I passed on to the men. These periods of instruction went into considerable detail. We discussed the kinds of explosives used, their relative strength, their ingredients, the methods of detonating them, the containers into which they were loaded, and the use of clockwork, fuses, acids and gas-pressure to explode them. Special and explicit instruction was given for the handling of unexploded bombs—a bomb bearing an electrical attachment should not be placed in water, for example, as water is a conductor of electricity; it is wise never to smoke in the presence of explosives, even if you think you know that certain kinds of explosives “never explode by fire.” The only thing you can depend on explosives to do one hundred times out of one hundred, is what you don’t expect them to do. The Bomb Squad was told never to—and why never to—carry bombs on passenger trains, cars or ferries, or anywhere near where metals were being shipped. The Bomb Squad was instructed not to remove a bomb found in a position where its explosion would not endanger life and property, but to send for an expert and wait until he arrived on the scene, and was told which positions were dangerous and which were not. Altogether we conducted a rather thorough course in explosives.

As the war grew in proportions, and the interest of America in the conflict became more and more intimate, the activities of the Bomb Squad became somewhat diverted from the object for which it had been primarily organized, and its title was changed to the “Bomb and Neutrality Squad.” We had not expected in August that the German would try to tip over our neutrality with bombs, but that is what he did, and that is what kept us grimly busy for three years, until our own nation had gone to war with those who had so long been waging war upon her. And that is how the stories which follow come to be told.

Not that the entrance of the United States into the war put a stop to the activities of the Squad. I have already cited those who entered the national service. Their presence in the Naval and Military Intelligence, their close relations with those whom they left behind in headquarters, with such men as Commander Spencer Eddy and Lieutenant Albert Fish of the Navy, Colonel Biddle and Major Potter of the Army, and with the Corps of Intelligence Police, made possible a degree of coöperation in spy-hunting in New York which would have been impossible to develop within a short time with any other set of men, and which went far towards preserving our domestic security.