BURN, BOMB, DESTROY 
The German Sabotage Campaign in North America 1914-1917

For many Americans, the First World War was a European war, fought “over there” as the popular 1917 song goes—in the blood-soaked battlefields of Verdun, the Somme, and in Flanders Field—not on American soil.

But Walter Nicolai, chief of the German intelligence service known as Abteilung III-B, envisioned the war differently. A student of irregular warfare, his plan called for the creation of a network of saboteurs and spies, supported by scientists, diplomats, complicit American journalists, couriers, financiers, and surrogates, to wage a secret war on the American homeland long before the United States ever entered the war.

While a neutral America slept, German agents set out to destroy America’s industries and war-fighting capabilities, executing sabotage missions against railway bridges and waterways linking the U.S. and Canada, aboard burning and exploding ships in the Atlantic Ocean, in the smoldering ruins of bombed factories, munition plants, bridges, warehouses, horse depots, and seaports throughout the country, and in secret workshops where deadly germs, poisons, and homemade bombs were designed and manufactured.

These direct-action missions and intelligence-gathering operations included the poisoning of cattle, food, and medical supplies; injecting deadly germs into warhorses and mules destined for Europe; carrying out assassinations from Maryland to Texas; bombing the United States Capitol; inciting racial unrest; encouraging labor strikes at American businesses; and sowing division amongst the American public by planting fake news stories and pro-German propaganda in newspapers, movies, and magazines.

It was a dastardly form of warfare on a scale which the United States had never experienced and for which it was caught woefully unprepared.

This is the story of a campaign of terror and destruction carried out on the American homeland which ultimately led to an American declaration of war.

THE BOMBS, BOMBERS AND BOMBINGS OF LOS ANGELES

In the crime annals of Southern California, little mention is made of the many bombs, bombers, and bombings plaguing the region since the turn of the Twentieth Century. There has been no shortage of airplane bombings, car bombs, boat bombings, suicide bombers, acts of terrorist bombings, and bombings committed by losers, loners and lunatics. That they occurred in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, long before the words ‘Al Qaeda’ were ever spoken, is mostly forgotten.

The author, a serving detective and bomb technician, reviewed police, fire, court, and coroner’s archives, noting a somewhat one-dimensional and impersonal look at many of these cases. His analysis of these cases and interviews of many of the bombers, their victims, the bomb detectives and bomb technicians, reveals a more in-depth and fascinating look at these events. 

A BOMBING IN THE WILSHIRE-PICO DISTRICT

A relentless campaign of terror and anarchy gripped the United States throughout the first two decades of the 20th Century involving hundreds of bombings committed by extremist elements within the American labor movement, Italian anarchists, German saboteurs, ‘Red’ agitators, street hooligans, and lunatics, all with an axe to grind and a desire to advance their causes through the use of explosives.

Amidst this chaos, a nascent group of amateurs embarked on their own sordid bombing spree—committing murder and sabotage, assaulting, threatening, and blackmailing witnesses, setting fire to a church and a private home--before blowing up the residence of a prominent Los Angeles attorney. 

What follows is a true 1919 Los Angeles story. It tells the tale of a shrewd and conniving woman with a powerful ‘little black book’ intent on stealing her murdered husbands’ real estate empire, then avenging the loss of that fortune by using her fawning and all-too-willing gentlemen suitors to carry out a brazen conspiracy of murder, arson, and bombing.