Poorly organized naval defense in New Orleans
LeMaistre, who spent time in naval intelligence, describes how poorly defended New Orleans was during World War II. Poor intelligence complemented poor defense: he learned about German activity from commercial tanker captains and about Japan from an issue of <cite>Fortune</cite> magazine. As they built a library of information, LeMaistre and his fellow sailors worked closely with the FBI, despite the self-aggrandizing influence of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with George A. LeMaistre, April 29, 1985. Interview A-0358. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- ALLEN J. GOING:
-
What kind of significant or insignificant experiences would the
Navy—would you like to get on record?
- GEORGE A. LeMAISTRE:
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[laugh]
Some of the stories really don't bear repeating.
- ALLEN J. GOING:
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[laugh]
At least not for the public record.
- GEORGE A. LeMAISTRE:
-
Actually I was in New Orleans for about a year and two months in Naval
Intelligence. And it was a right interesting experience. I don't know if
I've told you or not, but the most dangerous work I did during the war
was in New Orleans. I was in two or three invasions, but none of them
was as difficult as the work down there. And most people really don't
know yet the extent of the submarine warfare in the Gulf.
- ALLEN J. GOING:
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I remember you mentioning that once before.
- GEORGE A. LeMAISTRE:
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We started losing ships to a submarine which we thought was
German—turned out to be Italian—in February of
1942, which was really about a month and a half after all of us had
reported down there. The alarming state of the defenses of the United
States was really shocking. I would never have believed if anybody had
told me how poorly defended we were. Mexico could have invaded New
Orleans. We had one 75 mm. gun at the Burrwood Section Base, which is
105 miles south of New Orleans on the river, where the river runs into
the Gulf. And that gun was used to fire salutes and things like that. It
was not used for defense. There wasn't another weapon between there and
Algiers Section Base in New Orleans, and the number of boats that the
Navy had was practically zero. The Army had many more boats than we did.
They used them in rescues for Army aircraft, and that sort of thing. Of
course, the Navy had the Naval Air Station in
Pensacola, and they had a naval training station out on the Lake.
[Pontchartrain]
- ALLEN J. GOING:
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But New Orleans was a major . . .
- GEORGE A. LeMAISTRE:
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There was a Navy base out on the Lake where they trained, and the Algiers
Navy base was a base where supply ships and things like that would come
in and load up but there were not any armored vessels over there.
Immediately when the war started they were extremely busy putting guns
on merchant ships. But in the first six weeks I was down there we set up
a system of travel control where our officers had to board every ship
that came into the port of New Orleans, and interrogate the captain to
find out where he had been. In fact, one of those early ships, I
remember, was a Swedish vessel called the Temnaren. It
had just come out of the Baltic after going up between Russia and
Finland, taking on a load of timber, and they brought it down and
discharged it some place in Holland or somewhere like that and then came
around with another cargo for New Orleans, and came over here to load
sugar or something of that sort. And we got more information about where
various vessels were, where the Germans were basing their pocket
battleships, and things like that, just from talking with those skippers
who were not involved in the war at all.
- ALLEN J. GOING:
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Just observing.
- GEORGE A. LeMAISTRE:
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This man from Sweden remembered having seen the
Scharnhorst and several others, but they were heading in to
the place where they were based. That was material
that we didn't have. Our intelligence was really pathetic.
- ALLEN J. GOING:
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I guess there had not been much intelligence operations developed prior
to when we got into the war.
- GEORGE A. LeMAISTRE:
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The best information we had about the nation of Japan was an issue of
Fortune magazine which was devoted to the country of
Japan early in the year before the war started. That was about as much
information as we had about it.
- ALLEN J. GOING:
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A stark contrast from the way it grew in the war years—well it
expanded into the CIA and military intelligence. I guess there wasn't
much there.
- GEORGE A. LeMAISTRE:
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It was a matter of taking a lot of time to get all that information
together.
- ALLEN J. GOING:
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That's mainly what you all were doing.
- GEORGE A. LeMAISTRE:
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And then we would try to recruit some people. One of the first things we
did was to take on a number of old FBI agents, who had either gotten out
of the service or had transferred out of the bureau—something
of that sort. People who really had something to give to the Navy. They
were extremely helpful in setting up the interrogation and examination
procedures. I would say that our relationship with the FBI was not
always real good. The FBI would do anything in the world for you if they
got all the credit.
- ALLEN J. GOING:
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They reflected J. Edgar Hoover.
- GEORGE A. LeMAISTRE:
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That's right. They were just an elongation of the shadow of J. Edgar
Hoover, and that's the way he thought. One of the amusing things that
happened was they caught a big gangster, Alvin
Karpis, in New Orleans right at the beginning of the war, and Hoover
flew down from Washington to make the arrest.
- ALLEN J. GOING:
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I remember that vaguely.
- GEORGE A. LeMAISTRE:
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They blocked off Jefferson Avenue, the big boulevard that goes out to the
lake. Canal Boulevard, I guess it is, or Jefferson
Boulevard—one of those—anyway, it was a fourlane
with a median in the middle. They blocked it off for about three blocks.
They had about 60 FBI agents. They had about 50 deputy sheriffs. They
had policemen everywhere around there surrounding this apartment house
where Karpis had been spotted. And he came walking out of the
house—he must have been stupid, because anybody could see
there was no traffic out there, he must have known something was wrong,
because they turned every car off that was coming that way. Hoover jumps
out of the car and calls him by name and tells him to freeze.
- ALLEN J. GOING:
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Did they have movie cameras?
- GEORGE A. LeMAISTRE:
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Oh, they had everything. The newsreel was there and everything. But when
they got him under arrest—he didn't resist or
anything—they said put the cuffs on him, and out of 165
[laugh]
officers, not a single pair of handcuffs was to be found. They
had to tie Alvin Karpis's hands together with a necktie to take him to
jail. But at any rate the FBI office in New Orleans and the Naval
Intelligence worked very closely together. People who ran that office
over there were extremely helpful.