This is the second of a two-part series laying out a tour of historic East End sites to help you commemorate Veterans Day.
Last week, we visited Camp Hero, the former Army installation whose mysteries inspired the hit TV series “Stranger Things,” and Camp Wikoff (now known as Montauk County Park), where thousands of soldiers, including Teddy Roosevelt and his famed Rough Riders, were quarantined after the Spanish-American War.
This week, let’s start in downtown Montauk and head over to the eponymous Navy Beach, where, in 1917, the Navy established the 33-acre Naval Air Station Montauk as the U.S. entered World War I. Scruffy and industrial today, the base once included a huge hangar for reconnaissance dirigibles (aka blimps!) and hangars for seaplanes.
A few decades later, when World War II began, the Navy again acquired land in the area, including the legendary Montauk Manor. The Navy built jetties, seaplane hangars, barracks, and an enormous concrete base where torpedoes were assembled.
They dredged the harbor to test the torpedoes, which would be launched with aircraft following their path until the torpedoes’ fuel ran out. At that point, the torpedoes would be hauled back, and those that passed inspection were shipped out to blast enemy submarines.
Go online and you can find footage of a test launch. Whispers of the Naval installation remain along Navy Beach Road all the way to Eckart Park.
Head to Route 27, aka POW/MIA Memorial Highway (PMMH), and go west. You’ll be driving along the Napeague Stretch. You know that radio tower you always whiz by that annoyingly mars the view? Well, take a little detour onto the spur road and stop this time — because it served a vital role in World War II.
Built in 1927, there were once two towers that transmitted high-frequency signals across half the globe. The great hurricane of 1938 knocked them both over. One was resurrected and pressed into service during World War II and was responding to over 10 distress calls from ships a day. The tuning huts remain intact, sort of.
Looks a little more interesting now, doesn’t it?
Continue west on the PMMH to Amagansett, and hang a left on Atlantic Avenue to the beach, where you’ll find the Amagansett Life-Saving Station, meticulously maintained by local volunteers and donations.
By now, the story of the four Nazi saboteurs who landed via a U-Boat on Atlantic Beach at 12:10 a.m. on June 13, 1942, is well-known. Carrying explosives that they hurriedly buried in the dunes, their plan was to blow up aluminum and magnesium plants, along with canals, bridges and other infrastructure critical to America’s wartime effort.
A quick-thinking 21-year-old local seaman, John C. Cullen, feigned accepting a bribe, but in fact reported the quartet.
The saboteurs boarded a Penn Station-bound train in Amagansett. One, George Dasch, would eventually turn himself in to the FBI, and another cooperated, leading all to be captured before they could blow anything up.
By doing so, the two managed to save their lives, having their death sentences commuted after a trial before a military commission found them guilty. The other two — along with another crew of four saboteurs that landed in Ponte Verda, Florida, and were able to get inland as far as their target city, Chicago — were executed.
After a look at the Atlantic Beach dunes where the saboteurs buried their devices, go back on PMMH and continue west. At the first signal light as you’re leaving Amagansett, give a kind nod to the VFW Hall on your right. You probably know it as the place that has the Shoe-Inn sale. But it’s really a genial gathering place for our modern-day heroes whom we’re honoring this weekend.
Continue east, where your next stop will be cerebral and unlikely: the East Hampton Library. Head to the Long Island Collection room and politely ask the overwhelmed but highly cooperative archivists to see the understated yet powerfully moving typescript history of East Hampton during World War I, compiled by the then-town historian, J. Calvin Hadder, with the assistance of his wife.
In it, you’ll find an accounting of the numerous people who volunteered in the great European war. What I find remarkable is that they are us.
Local store clerks mingled in with the generations-old East Hampton names and the Manhattan swells who summered on the East End. There were Brahman artists who painted ships to camouflage them from German U-Boat torpedoes (Arthur Turnbull Hill). A salvage unit operator, Oscar Marshon Mott, whose duties included recovering corpses from the battlefield, where he saw such sights as words could scarce describe, like: “The dead [who] in many cases covered the ground for acres, so thick that they nearly touched each other.”
And women, like the young, beloved summer resident Dorothy “Dolly” Hamlin, a volunteer nurse who attended to flu patients until she succumbed to the disease herself, and of whom was written, “Few, indeed, are the summer girls that come into our quiet village [Amagansett] and take the interest in our social, civic and religious betterments that Dorothy Hamlin did.”
Armistice Day would arrive one day late in the then-remote town of East Hampton, November 12, 1918, but when it did, it came with a star-spangled bang, announced by a train triumphantly whistling all the way from Amagansett to Montauk.
In a joyous, spontaneous burst, a parade was organized for 8 p.m. East Hampton residents quickly festooned their cars and houses. They marched that evening from “the village green and back to Clinton Hall, where a patriotic mass meeting was held.”
It was the first of East Hampton’s Armistice Day — now Veterans Day — parades.
Let’s join the tradition they started by saluting our veterans — including my late Purple Heart-decorated dad — this weekend.
A note: I consider this a living document and welcome any additions and corrections. I hope it may inspire East Hampton residents to again rally to support our troops by perhaps formally organizing this tour next year.
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