Ruminatrix
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Saturday, Jun 28, 2003
Bunkerland
A weekend out of town in Montauk (water too cold to swim in), a week of dawn-to-past-dusk workdays afterwards -- pretty soon a weblog's gone to weeds. Or maybe just overgrown with all the rain. And now the sun is out at last it's hard to stay indoors again.
During World War II the hills just below Montauk Point held a barracks/gymnasium, disguised as the church of a "typical" fishing village, its spire an observation post. It was part of Camp Hero. First the base housed 16" gun-batteries protecting the entry to Long Island Sound, and later a military radar station looking for Soviet bombers New York-bound. Now it's open to the public, or at least the above-ground portions of it.
I don't know why the melancholy of empty seaside forts appeals to me. But they feel haunted, either by their vanished garissons or by the returning beachgoers who replace them. Airplanes made all those coastal bases as obsolete as battleships, but there are plenty of other surviving blockhouses bunkers and casemates left --- they are indestructible, even as the ocean reclaims them with its relentless erosion. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
Eleven miles up the road from Camp Hero in Amagansett, in the ill-fated Operation Pastorius, four German saboteurs went ashore from a U-boat in June of 1942 with instructions to blow up American power stations(four more were landed in Florida) . One of them, after checking the expired dollar bills he had been issued for money, turned himself in to the FBI almost immediately. The eight became legal pioneers of a sort, as their secret trials at the Justice Department set the precedent for the still-evolving (or -devolving) treatment of "enemy combatants" during wartime in this country. Six went to the electric chair; two were imprisoned then released in 1948. Nowadays, GPS- equipped and able to call in airstrikes rather than carrying plastique, wouldn't they be considered "Special Forces," the vanguard of a modern fighting force?