(Ed Caram/Courtesy photo, via NOAA) Their mission: To join up with four other saboteurs who had arrived at Long Island, N.Y. four days earlier and begin blowing up key infrastructure, including electric plants, bridges, train stations, water facilities and factories in the United States. Operation Pastorius was a failed German intelligence plan for sabotage inside the United States during World War II.The operation was staged in June 1942 and was to be directed against strategic American economic targets. Many Americans did not know German U-boats were waiting off shore. The operation was named by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the German Abwehr, for Francis Daniel Pastorius, the leader of the first organized settlement of Germans in America. Operation Pastorius was a failed German intelligence plan for sabotage inside the United States during World War II.The operation was staged in June 1942 and was to be directed against strategic American economic targets. Hitler's feared U-boats sank hundreds of freighters and tankers off the United States during World War II. In less than seven months, U-boat attacks would […] On Jan. 13, 1942, German U-boat attacks officially started against merchant ships along the Eastern Seaboard of North America. In late February 1942, German submarines attacked four merchant ships right off the east coast of Florida near Cape Canaveral. And a camera captures incredible images of the German U-boat ... Sunken Nazi Sub Slumbers Off Louisiana Coast ... by the German U-166 in 1942 and sank 45 miles off the coast of Louisiana.

Four Nazi saboteurs departed a German U-boat submarine and landed on Ponte Vedra Beach carrying explosives and money. Others like the U128 and 504 hunted off the Florida coast Appearing in the warm tropics near Aruba and Trinidad raomed U67, U129, U156, U161, U502- all IXC Type. Lieutenant Commander Reinhard Hardegen, skipper of the German submarine U-123, had already drawn Georgian blood in January 1942, when his U-boat sank the freighter City of Atlanta off the coast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. But there were lesser landings, as well, such as at Amagansett, New York, and Ponte Verdra Beach, Florida. German U-Boats sank over twenty-four ships off of Florida's Atlantic and Gulf Coasts during World War 2. That’s right. The submarine was sunk in 1942 by aircraft fire.

There were at least two mini-landings in America, engineered by Germans, of course, not Allies. Lorient, submarines U-123 and U-201 outbound.Photo Bundesarchiv, Bild 101II-MW-4260-37 Kramer CC-BY-SA 3.0 Each of these subs could linger around for 2-3 weeks time before returning. From then until early August, German U-boats dominated the waters off the East Coast, sinking fuel tankers and cargo ships with impunity and often within sight of shore. While one of the smallest segments of the huge German war effort, the German submarine force was one of the most potent, sinking thousands of ships and killing thousands of world sailors, including many off the coast of the United States. In the midst of World War II, two German submarines actually put men ashore at both of those locations.

The German U-576 departs Saint-Nazaire, France, on the Atlantic coast, in the early 1940s. Four days later the SS Gulfamerica sank, 65 feet under water. The 5,200-ton merchantman was based in Savannah, and many of the forty-three sailors who died in the attack were residents of the city. What historians and researchers find most fascinating about this find is that this submarine makes it difficult to deny that that Nazis did not escape the war and fled to Argentina.