Under a sunny afternoon sky the sleek grey ship moved slowly down New York Bay. She had 464 silent passengers on board. For them there would be no more cocktails in glittering bars with wide-eyed café socialites, no lavish dinners for affable U.S. businessmen. They were Nazi and Fascist propaganda agents, consular officers and their families, bound homeward to the grim realities of the New Order.
There was many an awkward delay before the U.S.S. West Point finally got away. In San Francisco, 2,570 miles away, debonair Consul General Captain Fritz Wiedemann and Dr. Johannes Borchers, German consul general in New York City, with an entourage of 14 people, had had to cancel their passage on a Japanese liner sailing two days before the President's deadline expired on July 15. The British safe conduct to Japan had arrived too late. Captain Wiedemann talked to Washington and Berlin. Then he chartered three planes, stowed his party and their luggage aboard, and sped eastward. Said the Captain as he peeled $100 bills off a fat bankroll, to pay baggage men: "Well have to win the war to pay for this trip." In Washington, Chargé d'Affaires Dr. Hans Thomsen scraped the Embassy bare of cash to pay the Captain's airline bill ($14,486).
Meanwhile, in Manhattan, glum Germans and sad-eyed Italians were going aboard the West Point. From Ellis Island, where he was taken two months ago for violating U.S. immigration laws, onetime German Minister to Austria Dr. Kurt Rieth was set free. Freed also were Dr. Manfred Zapp and Günther Tonn, U.S. managers of the Nazi Transocean News Service (now closed), who had failed to register with the State Department as foreign agents. The newsmen were to be exchanged for two U.S. newsmen, Jay Allen of North American Newspaper Alliance, Richard Hottelet of United Press, "detained" by the Nazis since March.
Angelo V. Jannelli was close to tears as he joined the long line plodding up the gangplank. He had been Italy's consular agent at Johnstown, Pa. since 1932, had not seen his own country for over 30 years. Said Agent Jannelli: "I've thought of the United States as my home." In Fort Worth, Tex., 72-year-old Consular Agent Atillio Ortolani won permission from the State Department to stay in the U.S. Married to a British wife, with two sons in the U.S. armed forces, Agent Ortolani said he would rather go to a concentration camp than back to Italy.
At midnight the West Point was ready for sea. But still it did not sail. She was held up, rumor said, because 234 U.S. consular officials in Europe, on their way to Lisbon from posts in Axis territory, had been halted near the German and Italian borders, were to be kept in Frankfurt am Main and San Remo until the West Point delivered her passengers in Lisbon.* At 3:15 o'clock next afternoon, she sailed at last.
The West Point carried more armament than any transport ever seen in New York Harbor: at least four guns, including two 5-in. naval guns, anti-aircraft batteries, machine guns, torpedo tubes, a new and secret protection against magnetic mines. In command of her crew of 750 U.S. sailors, 60 Marines, was Captain Frank H. Kelley, U.S.N.