"So we mee1again ' '. .. a111agonis1s McCormick (al left) and Oes1en s/and fora snapshol on 1he wa1erfro111 in Hamburg, Germany in Oc1ober 1983.
me the name and address of a West German Historical Center, through which I was able to reach ex-Commander Oesten, who still lives in Hamburg and with whom I have maintained correspondence for the past four years. From files at the FBI and the National Archives I was able to obtain dozens of declassified documents describing the role of German agents in Argentina during World War II. This was prev iously suspected in a general way, but the documents were very specific. The Germans actuall y had two es pionage agencies operating in Buenos Aires-Abwehr, the intelligence branch of the Wehrmacht (German Armed Forces) which functioned through the German Embassy, and Sicherheitsdienst , known as SD, which was the espionage arm of the Naz i Party and operated in the underground . SD was staffed by agents who had been sent to Argentina as representatives of German firms. The leader of the group was Johannes Siegfried Becker, known as the Haupsturmfuhrer, who was born in Leipzig in 1912 , became a second lieutenant of infa ntry in the German Army, and in 1937 was sent by the Nazis to Buenos A ires as a representati ve of Deutsche Hand werks Gesell schaft of Berlin. Throughout the war SD was reinforced and financed by the Nazi Government, which sent men and material s to Buenos Aires via U-boats and " neut ral" Spanish ships. During 1943-44, SD operated at least nine clandestine shortwave radio stations in and aro und Buenos A ires sending nightly dispatches to Germany regard ing Allied ship movements and other information of milita ry o r political significance. The second m¡a jor breakthrough in my research came in 1981 , when I fo und at the National Archives a copy of a US Naval Intelligence Report from the American Embassy in Buenos Aires , dated July 9, 1944- which was actually while our ship was discharging cargo in Montev ideo, en route to Buenos Aires. This reported the appearance of a new shipping company in Buenos Aires. That firm , Cosi!dex SA , had recently purchased a 25-year old , 200-ton , coal-burning Argentine freighter, renamed it SS Besugo, and equipped it with a radio-telephone! For the past several years I have pursued va ri ous US intelligence sources , trying to establish an identification of Besugo as the small freig hter which followed William Gaston out of Buenos Aires in July 1944. In 1983 the FBI advised me that it had located " 1000 pages of documents bearing on your research," but thus far has released none of them to me, even though I agreed to pay the costs for an official FBI researcher. Meanwhile, I have taken a new approach to the project. In June 1984, I placed an advertisement in the English-language Buenos Aires Herald, seeking a research aide to locate Argentine documents bearing on the subject. I received more than 100 replies from Argentine journalists, histo rians, translators , etc. In late 1984, I was able to reach an ag reement to collaborate on a proposed book with an Argentine journalist-historian who held a sensitive position in Buenos Aires during World War II , who is still acquainted with several of the surviving principals in the story, and who was a guest at our home in Connecticut while on a business trip to New York City in October 1984.
Epilogue Although I have never seen another crew member of William Gaston since 1944, I have kept in touch with our former enemy, Jurgen Oesten. In October 1983 on a trip to Europe, my wife and I were the guests of Oesten and his wife Edith in Hamburg, and we also met several of their children and gra ndchildren . The Oesten family speaks excellent English in addition to German and French . Oesten is an extraordinary man . He was born in Berlin in October 1913, the son of a German sculptor. As a yo ung man he SEA HISTORY, SPRING 1985
had an urge to "see the sea ," and , in 193 1, at age 18, secured an appointment to the German Naval Academy at Flensburg . When World War II broke out in September 1939, Oesten, then only 25, was already in command of U-61. Later he commanded U-106 with great distinction , and then served two yea rs ashore on the staff of Admiral Doenitz before being g iven command ofU-861. Oesten was one of the most successfu l U-boat captains, sinking 23 A llied ships and damaging several others, including the British battleship Malaya. His third command , U-861 , was one of the big, 1600-ton, type IXD U-boats, des igned fo r long-ra nge missio ns and also capable offunctioning as an underwater cargo carrier. U-861 , with a crew of 64, sailed from Kiel in April 1944, attacked five Allied ships off Brazil and South Africa , delivered technical equipment to the Japanese in Malaysia , and carried critical raw materials back to orway, arri ving in Ap ri l 1945. She could not return to Germany, since advanci ng British armies had occupied the North Sea Coast. After VE-Day early the fo ll owi ng month , Oesten was o rdered to sail U-861 to Liverpool , England , where the raw materials were di scharged . Later, under orders of the Allied High Command , U-861 and about 100 other captured German U-boats were scuttled in the North Atlantic. After the war, Oesten returned to defeated and destroyed Germany. He eventually formed his own companies to design and install air cond itioni ng systems on ships in Europe and in the Middle East and Far East. He became a very successful businessman and in 1983 retired to li ve very comfortabl y in residential Hamburg. During our visit there he seemed rather reluctant to talk abo ut the war, wh ich holds painful memories for him. He had spent the entire Nazi era in the Kriegs marine, most of the time at sea. He met Adolf Hitler a few times wh ile on Doenitz's staff and described the Fuhrer as " mad , but mes merizing." One of the other ships in this story, USS Matagorda, had an interesting later career in he r own right. After serving for another year as a seaplane tender she was picked in 1945 to be the A llied press ship for the invasion of Japan and was eq uipped with the most modern communication apparatus. That mission was, of course, scrubbed after Hi ros hima and Nagasaki and the surrender of Japan. In 1969 she was designated as a target ship by the US Navy and was sunk in the Central Pacific off Hawaii. Thus, of the four ships which had brief encounters in July 1944, onl y the fa te of the little Argentine steamer Besugo remains a mystery. The others , William Gaston , U-861 and Matagorda, are lying in hundreds of fathoms of water, thousands of miles apart , along with the thousands of other hulks lyi ng on the bottom of the sea as a result of all past naval wars and natural maritime disasters . J,
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Harold }. McCormick was born in 1914 in Ft. Wayne, Indiana and was an advertising and public relations executive there before joining the US Naval Reserve in 1942. Now retired from The Sperry and Hutchinson Company of New York, he lives with his wife of 38 years in Stamford, Connecticut. 19