I was watching a US WWII propaganda film, and one of the things they mentioned was looking out for sabotage. Were there ever any real examples of enemy sabotage in US factories during the war?
I believe a couple fires and explosions in the US during WW II have been blamed on sabotage but I can’t come up with a fast response/example where one has been proven. That’s one of the problems historically with sabotage; you know about the cases where the people were caught and convicted beforehand but some of the successes will look like what they were designed to look like; common accidents.
Operation Pastorius was an attempt by Germany to conduct sabotage operations throughout the U.S. The main reason it did not succeed was that the group was betrayed by a couple of its own members, who turned them in to the FBI.
Germany also launched a failed sabotage mission against Britain (Operation Lena).
So it was a valid potential threat, even if the known sabotage attempts were unsuccessful.
And on the other side, Heisenberg claimed after the war that he was deliberately sabotaging the Nazis’ atomic bomb project, which he was in charge of. True? Who knows, but it was certainly run incompetently enough (in retrospect) to be plausible.
There were several other fires around New York at war-related installations, a couple in Ohio and some of the west coast that were suspected. One I recall reading about ages ago was an aviation fuel/refinery fire I believe in Ohio; the person responsible/blamed was a German-American worker with close ties back home. Did he do something on purpose and die as a result? Did he act on his own? There were even some signs that it could have been a suicide. But to prove sabotage; there just wasn’t the evidence left.
If you go back to World War I when America was neutral in 1916 the “Black Tom Explosion” in New York City killed seven people and damaged the Statue of Liberty. It was an act of German sabotage.
People generally agree American intelligence and law enforcement agencies did a good job in limiting Axis sabotage in WW2.
You had the OSS formed in June 1942, which in part coordinated various intelligence work by State, Treasury, Navy and War departments. Even the predecessor to that, the OCI, was established in 1941, with a lot of help from the British who were pretty good at it.
The nearly total lack of sabotage in the U.S. is one of the most remarkable things about that war. You’d think that out of all the millions of people with German heritage, a few thousand, a few dozen, could be induced to commit sabotage. The horrible injustice we perpetrated on Japanese citizens should have radicalized even more. There are a million ways to cause damage; you don’t need to be a suicide bomber. Yet sabotage was a factor only in movies and books and comics and radio shows, all of which mined it constantly for plots for the good guys to foil. Sabotage was very real in Europe; though you can argue how much serious damage it did the fact of it was a constant. So it should have been an issue here as well. It wasn’t. Remarkable.
“Sabotage comes from the French word saboter, which literally means “walk noisily.” That’s funny, because the last thing you’d want to do when committing an act of sabotage is stomp around and get caught. It’s believed that sabotage came into use in 1910 as a noun, and then later in 1918 as a verb. Apparently, people only became so cruel in the last century or so.”
I learned in French I or II in high school, or elsewhere whence I cannot cite, a more basic source is from the practice by Dutch POWs working in German factories throwing their wooden shoes (sabots) into the machinery.