- 2 days ago
A trained German spy lasted only hours after landing on Quebec’s Gaspé coast, and the reason was a small family hotel, a sharp-eyed son, and a town already on edge. In New Carlisle, Earl Annett Jr. notices the details a professional cover story can’t hide: the wrong shoes, old Canadian money, a strange accent, a matchbox, and the smell of someone who has been under water for weeks aboard a U-boat.
This historical war story follows Werner von Janowski as he comes ashore from a German submarine, tries to blend in, and heads for Montreal with forged papers, a radio, a pistol, and a false identity. But the Annett family, a railway man, and a naval policeman all help turn suspicion into an arrest before the morning is over.
For listeners who enjoy World War II stories, military history, spy stories, narrated history, and Canadian war stories, this is a tense true-event account of espionage, counterintelligence, and a small-town capture that changed everything. It’s ideal for history fans, war documentary listeners, and anyone searching for WW2 spy stories, Canadian history, and quiet but gripping historical narration.
This historical war story follows Werner von Janowski as he comes ashore from a German submarine, tries to blend in, and heads for Montreal with forged papers, a radio, a pistol, and a false identity. But the Annett family, a railway man, and a naval policeman all help turn suspicion into an arrest before the morning is over.
For listeners who enjoy World War II stories, military history, spy stories, narrated history, and Canadian war stories, this is a tense true-event account of espionage, counterintelligence, and a small-town capture that changed everything. It’s ideal for history fans, war documentary listeners, and anyone searching for WW2 spy stories, Canadian history, and quiet but gripping historical narration.
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LearningTranscript
00:00On the morning of November 9th, 1942, in the front sitting room of the Carlisle Hotel in New Carlisle, Quebec,
00:08a young man named Earl Annette Jr. was looking at a matchbox on the floor and trying very hard not
00:15to look at it.
00:16It was yellow. It lay beside a leather chair, and in that chair, close enough to touch, sat the stranger
00:23who had dropped it.
00:24Among that stranger's belongings were a loaded pistol and a set of spiked brass knuckles.
00:30A few hours earlier, he had been standing on the deck of a German submarine.
00:35Earl did not know about the pistol. He did not know about the submarine.
00:40He knew only that the matchbox was wrong, that it was the proof he needed,
00:44and that if the man in the chair caught him staring at it, the proof and the man would both
00:49be gone.
00:51Then it got worse.
00:52Earl's baby brother Stanley, not yet two years old, had spotted the matchbox too.
00:58He was crawling straight for it, as fast as a small boy can crawl.
01:03Earl kept his face still.
01:05He kept the conversation going.
01:07Years later, when he was finally allowed to tell this story,
01:11a Toronto newspaper printed his account under a line that tells you exactly how that moment felt from the inside.
01:19I nearly bit my tongue.
01:21I knew I had a German spy.
01:24Think about who is saying that.
01:26Earl Annette was not a policeman.
01:29He was not a soldier because the recruiters had turned him down.
01:33He was the hotel keeper's son.
01:3520 years old, give or take a few weeks, with a ruined knee and no authority over anyone.
01:42The man in the chair was 38, a veteran of German military intelligence, schooled in sabotage, in radio, and in
01:52holding a false story together under questioning.
01:54He carried forged papers, and close to $6,000, and he knew Canada.
02:01He had lived in Ontario for years before the war.
02:05On paper, this is not a contest.
02:08And yet before noon that same day, about six hours after his boots first touched Canadian rock,
02:15that trained agent would say three words to a provincial constable on a moving train.
02:21I am caught.
02:24So the question for the next hour is simple.
02:28Why?
02:29How does a professional, carried across the Atlantic to do a job he had been prepared for,
02:35fail to last a single morning in a small town on the Gas Bay coast?
02:41The easy answer is that he was careless.
02:44Hold that answer loosely.
02:46Before we are done, you will meet a second German agent who made the very same mistakes,
02:52in the very same country, that very same year, and walked around free for two and a half years.
03:00So it was never only the mistakes.
03:03It was who happened to be looking.
03:06If what the Canadians of that small Gas Bay town did that morning matters to you,
03:11a subscribe helps these stories reach more people.
03:15Now, to understand who was looking, you have to understand what 1942 had been like on that shore.
03:23New Carlisle sits on the Baie des Chaleurs, on the south side of the Gas Bay peninsula.
03:28Since May, German submarines had been inside the Gulf of St. Lawrence,
03:34sinking ships within sight of Canadian villages.
03:37People along the Gas Bay coast had been shaken awake by explosions.
03:42They had watched vessels burn.
03:45They had found wreckage, and sometimes bodies, on their own beaches.
03:49The newspapers were forbidden to print most of it,
03:52so the news traveled the old way, from kitchen to kitchen.
03:57Then, in the middle of October, the fairy caribou was torpedoed on her night run to Newfoundland,
04:03and more than 130 people went down with her, women and children among them.
04:09In New Carlisle itself, people lay awake listening.
04:13Out in the bay, at night, they heard dull rumbling and strange metallic sounds that nobody could explain.
04:20Everyone in town drew the same conclusion.
04:23The U-boats were surfacing out there in the dark.
04:27That is the air Earl Annette was breathing.
04:30He had wanted the war badly,
04:32and the enlistment office had taken one look at his knee and sent him home.
04:37So he gave himself a different job.
04:40Remember this, because it matters more than any matchbox.
04:45Long before any stranger walked into his father's hotel,
04:50Earl had quietly decided that if the enemy ever came ashore on his stretch of coast,
04:56he was going to be the one who noticed.
04:59On the morning of the 9th, he was asleep upstairs, on the third floor where the family lived.
05:05Down in the lobby, a maid named Simone Lubert was cleaning.
05:10She was from the village of Maria, a little way up the bay, short, dark-haired, dark-eyed.
05:17The front door opened, and a man came in carrying luggage.
05:21In thick, accented English, he asked for a bath and some breakfast.
05:27He did not want to stay the night, he said, just a room for the day.
05:32Lubert had no idea what to charge for that,
05:35so she climbed the stairs and woke the owner's son.
05:38It is a small thing, a maid waking a young man to ask about a price,
05:43but notice what it means.
05:45From the very first minute, the stranger was not dealing with a sleepy clerk.
05:50He was dealing with a household.
05:53And the household put him in room 11, one of the best rooms in the hotel,
05:59the only guest room on the ground floor, directly across from the office.
06:05So the stranger shut the door of room 11 and ran his bath.
06:09He had every reason to feel safe.
06:12He had done dangerous work in other countries and walked away from it.
06:16To see why the next three hours are so strange,
06:21you need to know just how good this man was supposed to be,
06:24and what he had buried at the edge of the sea before breakfast.
06:29Five o'clock that same morning, four miles west of New Carlisle,
06:33a man stood at the bottom of a cliff in the dark,
06:36with the baie des chaleurs at his back.
06:38He was wearing the uniform of a German naval officer.
06:42His bags lay beside him on the rocks.
06:45He was alone.
06:47His name was Werner Von Janowski,
06:49and the uniform was not vanity.
06:52It was insurance.
06:54Under the rules of war,
06:55a man taken in uniform is a prisoner.
06:58A man taken in a tweed suit with a radio is a spy,
07:03and spies are executed.
07:05If a patrol came along that cliff in the first hours,
07:09he intended to be a prisoner.
07:11No patrol came.
07:13Now look at him properly,
07:15because the whole question of this story depends on it.
07:18This was not a frightened amateur pushed out of a boat.
07:22Janowski was 38.
07:24German military intelligence, the Abwehr,
07:27had used him for sabotage work in French Morocco,
07:30and again during the invasion of the Low Countries in 1940.
07:34He had a bullet scar on one knee,
07:37and another scar above his left eyebrow.
07:39And here is the part that should have made him close to invisible.
07:44He had lived in this country.
07:46He came to Canada in 1930,
07:49worked as a laborer in southwestern Ontario,
07:53married a Toronto woman,
07:55and drifted back to Germany before the war.
07:57He had every reason to know how Canadians talked and what a dollar bought.
08:04That is the man the Abwehr chose.
08:07So keep the main question in front of you.
08:10Why did he last one morning?
08:13The boat that carried him deserves a moment,
08:16because it tells you what kind of week this was.
08:19She was U-518,
08:22under Friedrich Wilhelm Wissmann,
08:24on his first patrol as a captain.
08:27Janowski had been shut inside her for 44 days.
08:30Exactly one week before the landing,
08:34on November 2nd,
08:35Wissmann slipped into Conception Bay, Newfoundland,
08:38and torpedoed two ore carriers lying at anchor off Belle Island.
08:44One of them was the Rose Castle.
08:47Her steward was Gordon Hardy,
08:4918 years old,
08:51from Ingonish on Cape Breton.
08:53He had been asleep in his bunk.
08:55He came up on deck in his underwear,
08:58climbed onto the rail,
08:59and heard shipmates with a flashlight
09:01warning him that the freezing water would finish him.
09:05He dove anyway.
09:07A second torpedo struck as he went.
09:11Hardy lived.
09:1228 of the men he sailed with did not.
09:16So understand what was running a bath in room 11 a week later,
09:21not a curiosity.
09:23The passenger of a boat that had just killed dozens of seamen within sight of land.
09:29Back to the cliff.
09:30Janowski waited for light.
09:32By about 7 he was chilled to the bone and aching for a bath.
09:37He dragged his luggage up a near vertical face to a grassy overhang at the top,
09:43and there he changed.
09:44Gray sweater,
09:46tweed suit,
09:47felt hat,
09:48a dark coat.
09:49He had brought a shovel.
09:51He dug a hole,
09:52put the naval uniform into a rubber bag,
09:55and buried it.
09:56Remember that hole.
09:58He would be standing over it again very soon,
10:01and not alone.
10:02Then he picked up what he was keeping.
10:05A radio transmitter hidden in his luggage.
10:08Two paperback books that were really his cipher.
10:11A pistol.
10:12A pistol.
10:13Close to $6,000.
10:15And identity papers in the name of William Branton, of Danforth Avenue, Toronto,
10:22built from documents taken from Canadian prisoners of war.
10:25One of those papers was a Quebec driver's license.
10:30Hold on to that.
10:31A Quebec license with a Toronto address.
10:35Somebody in Germany had decided that was good enough.
10:38His orders were to reach Montreal, and the railway would take him there.
10:43All he needed was to look like a man who belonged on a train.
10:47And for the first hour, Canada cooperated.
10:52He walked out to the road, and a car stopped.
10:55The driver was James Cool, a conductor on the Canadian National, who lived out that way,
11:01and was driving his Ford into town to start his shift.
11:04He already had a section hand named Charlie Gallen with him.
11:10Cool gave the stranger a lift into New Carlisle.
11:14Think about that from Janowski's seat.
11:16Six weeks under the Atlantic.
11:18A cold dawn on a cliff, and the first Canadians he meets offer him a ride.
11:24Nobody asks for papers.
11:26He is set down in a quiet town, and the hotel gives him one of its best rooms,
11:31hot water, and breakfast in the dining room.
11:34If you had stopped the clock right there, you would have said the Abwehr chose well.
11:40But the clock did not stop.
11:42The owner's son was awake now, and Earl Annette had a habit no German planner could have known
11:47about.
11:48As a boy, he had been the hotel's bellhop.
11:51He used to sit on the wooden porch beside the front entrance, listening for cars, and when
11:57one came, he would run out, jump on the running board, and try to talk the driver into stopping.
12:02He had been sizing up strangers since he was small, so he looked at this one, and he started
12:08at the bottom.
12:09His shoes, Earl wrote later, were quite different from anything he had ever seen.
12:15A brown summer shoe with a thick, light-colored sole that looked like rubber, and an odd welt
12:22around the toes.
12:24In November, on the gas bay.
12:27Then the coat.
12:29A dark gabardine top coat, not quite cut the Canadian way.
12:35Shoes and a coat.
12:36It is nothing.
12:38A traveler can wear what he likes.
12:42But Earl had now looked twice, and a man who has looked twice keeps looking.
12:48What turned a second look into a certainty was not something anyone saw.
12:53It was something Earl's father caught in the air—a smell.
12:59Earl Annette Senior had met that smell exactly once before in his life, and he knew precisely
13:06where.
13:07Years before the war, when Earl Annette Senior was a boy, an uncle took him deep into the
13:13hold of a fishing boat.
13:14The Annettes of the gas bay had fishermen in the family.
13:18He never forgot the air down there, closed in below the deck, an air that belonged to no
13:24building on land.
13:25On the morning of November 9th, in his own hotel, Earl Senior met that smell for the second
13:32time in his life.
13:33It was coming off his guest.
13:35His daughter Marguerite caught it too, and half a century later she tried to put it into
13:41words.
13:41A kind of shut-up smell, she said, but not a smell like anything shut-up on land.
13:48Her father did not need that many words.
13:50He said it out loud to her sister Geraldine.
13:53That's strange.
13:55He's been underwater.
13:56He's been in the water somewhere.
13:59Stop on that sentence.
14:00Because of where and when it was spoken.
14:03This is the coast where people lay awake listening to metal noises out in the bay.
14:08On this shore, in this month, a man who has been underwater means exactly one thing.
14:1444 days inside a submarine had soaked into Janowski's clothes, and one bath in room 11 was not going
14:22to take it out.
14:24From that moment, the Annette men, father and son, believed they had a spy under their roof.
14:30Believing is not knowing.
14:33So watch how the rest stacked up over the next hour, and notice that not one piece of it came
14:40from a policeman.
14:41First, the money.
14:43When the stranger paid Simone Lubert, he handed her a one dollar bill for the bath and breakfast,
14:49and a second one for cigarettes.
14:52They were not the dollar bills in your father's wallet in 1942.
14:57They were the big ones.
14:59Large size, Dominion of Canada notes from the first world war.
15:04Noticeably bigger than the money Canadians had been carrying for years.
15:09They were still legal.
15:11In a few backwaters, you might still be handed one.
15:14But they were getting rare, and this man had produced two in a row.
15:19There were many more in his luggage.
15:22Picture the next part.
15:24Janowski has finished breakfast and settled into a chair in the lobby, smoking.
15:29Directly across from him is the reception desk, and behind that desk stands Earl Senior with
15:36the two bills in his hands, turning them over, studying them, while the man who paid with
15:42them sits a few steps away.
15:44Second, the cigarettes.
15:46Word reached Earl that this guest, plainly a heavy smoker, did not seem to know what a
15:52package of cigarettes cost.
15:59Third, and this is the one that belonged to young Earl.
16:04The story of how the man got there.
16:07The stranger had come to the hotel on foot, carrying his bags.
16:12Asked how he had reached town, he said he had come on the bus.
16:16The bus from Chandler?
16:17Yes, yes, he said, the bus from Chandler.
16:22Chandler is about 75 miles east along the coast.
16:26And as anybody in New Carlisle could have told him, there was no longer any bus from Chandler.
16:33Now here is the detail I most want you to keep.
16:36Even with a bus, the lie would have failed in this particular building.
16:40The Annettes did not only run the hotel, they ran a taxi service, and the only driver was
16:47Earl's sister Marguerite, the same young woman who used to meet American tourists off
16:52the train at Mattapedia and drive them 200 miles of coast road to Gaspé.
16:57A traveler stepping off a bus with luggage did not walk to the Carlisle.
17:02He was driven there, by an Annette.
17:05Earl worked it through and came out certain.
17:08The man was lying about the first hour of his day.
17:12The sisters added their own.
17:15Marguerite heard it in his voice.
17:17He spoke English, she said, but with a kind of guttural speech in the back of his throat.
17:23Geraldine, whose job was carrying water and butter to the tables in the dining room, saw
17:29it in his face.
17:30Very cold eyes, she remembered.
17:33A cold smile.
17:34So count what this household had by mid-morning.
17:38A smell from below the waterline.
17:41Money from another war.
17:43A smoker who did not know the price of tobacco.
17:46Summer shoes in November.
17:49A bus that did not exist.
17:51A voice that fit nowhere.
17:54Six things and not a policeman in the building.
17:58And there, you might think, is the answer to our question.
18:03The Germans put a man ashore with the wrong shoes, the wrong money, and the wrong story.
18:09And he walked into a hotel run by people who noticed.
18:13Careless spy.
18:15Sharp family.
18:17Finished.
18:19It is a good answer.
18:21It is also not enough.
18:24And what Earl did next shows he knew it.
18:27Look at that list again, the way an outsider would.
18:31Old bills are legal tender.
18:33There is no law against odd shoes, or a foreign voice, or smelling like a boat.
18:42A man can be wrong about a bus.
18:45Every item has an innocent explanation, and the guest in the lobby was a professional at
18:51supplying them.
18:53All the Annettes really held was a feeling, shared by one household.
18:58So Earl did the hardest thing available to a twenty-year-old who believes he has just
19:04found his first spy.
19:07He said nothing.
19:09He did not challenge the guest.
19:11He did not let his face change.
19:14He let the man sit and smoke.
19:16Because a feeling, on its own, catches no one.
19:20And if you doubt that, consider this.
19:23Much of what you have just heard had already happened once.
19:26Six months earlier, on another quiet stretch of the Canadian coast, to another German agent,
19:33with the same old money in his pocket.
19:36People found him odd, too.
19:38And that time, nobody did a thing.
19:42On the night of May 14th, 1942, a German submarine surfaced in the Bay of Fundy, and after midnight,
19:50a rubber boat carried a man named Alfred Langbein into the New Brunswick shore near the village of St. Martin's.
19:58He buried a naval uniform.
20:00He buried a radio.
20:02Then he walked into the village with Canadian money that was years out of date.
20:07He went into Hutge's general store and paid with it.
20:11Nobody behind the counter questioned the bills.
20:15He asked people how to get out of town, and they were surprised, a little amused, and kind.
20:21They helped him on his way.
20:24Now follow that man.
20:26He went to Montreal, and then to Ottawa.
20:28He lived on German funds for two and a half years.
20:33Some of it in the capital of a country at war with Germany.
20:37And he was never caught.
20:40On November 1st, 1944, with the money running out, he walked into a naval intelligence office
20:47in Ottawa and gave himself up.
20:49Same service, same out of date money, same foreign accent.
20:55One agent free for nearly 30 months.
20:59The other finished before lunch.
21:01I am not blaming a storekeeper in New Brunswick.
21:05Taking a stranger's money and pointing him down the road is what decent people do.
21:10That is exactly the point.
21:13The clues were there in St. Martin's, too.
21:16Clues do not arrest anybody.
21:19Somebody has to decide that a paying customer is an enemy and then act on it.
21:24With nothing solid to go on, at the risk of looking like a fool.
21:29So our question has just changed shape.
21:32It is no longer why the spy slipped.
21:36It is why, in this one town, somebody acted.
21:41So go back to the lobby of the Carlisle, mid-morning on November 9th, and watch what the Annettes
21:47did with their feeling.
21:48Earl Sr. moved first.
21:51Living at the hotel was a retired banker named Johnston, a man who could draw anyone into
21:58conversation.
21:59Earl Sr. quietly told him what he suspected, then walked him over and introduced him to
22:05the guest, who, in the account built from the police files, was calling himself Mr.
22:11Bernhardt, formerly of Paris.
22:15Johnston sat down and asked friendly questions.
22:18He wrote afterward that he was quite aware he had someone of unusual interest, and that
22:24he governed himself accordingly, without giving the man the slightest inkling of his suspicion.
22:31And here is the counter-move.
22:33The guest had his answers ready.
22:35He was a Parisian, he said.
22:38He had come to Canada in 1921 and taken out naturalization papers.
22:44Think how neatly that works.
22:46The accent explained.
22:49The cut of the coat explained.
22:51This is what training looks like.
22:53Not a disguise.
22:55A story that turns every oddity into a detail.
22:59And remember who is telling it.
23:01A man a few hours off a submarine, with a loaded pistol in his luggage, making easy conversation
23:09with a retired banker.
23:11Then Earl Jr. joined them.
23:13There was a dog in the room, and Earl kept up a stream of talk about it.
23:18It's a clever one, the stranger said.
23:20But he was not really listening.
23:21He was shifting in the leather chair and peering out the window.
23:25He had asked about the train, the one that ran up the bay to Matapedia, where it met the
23:31line to Montreal.
23:32The answer was about 10 past 11.
23:35So the feeling now had a deadline.
23:38Before long, this man would be on a train.
23:41And after that, he would be one more stranger in a big city.
23:46Everything the family had noticed would leave town with him.
23:50The Annettes offered him the hotel's taxi to the station.
23:53He declined.
23:54I think the walk will do me good.
23:57And that is when Earl saw it.
24:00On the floor beside the leather chair lay a small yellow matchbox the man had dropped.
24:05You already know this moment.
24:07It is where we began.
24:09Earl barely stopped himself from blurting it out.
24:12There was no way to pick the thing up without the stranger noticing.
24:16And little Stanley was already crawling for it.
24:19Earl held his tongue.
24:21The stranger stood, took his bags, and went out the door.
24:25And then the matchbox was in Earl's hand.
24:30Camp Safety Matches.
24:33A picture of two men smoking pipes sitting on logs.
24:37And the words, in French, made in Belgium.
24:41Belgium had been under German occupation for two and a half years.
24:45Every box of imported matches sold in Canada had to carry an excise stamp.
24:52This one had none.
24:54It had never crossed a Canadian shop counter.
24:58It had come into the country in that man's pocket.
25:02A man who had lived in Canada since 1921 had no business carrying it.
25:08For the first time, the Annettes had something a skeptic could hold in his hand.
25:14And the man it belonged to was walking away from them, toward the station.
25:19One local history says Earl had already telephoned the provincial constable that morning about
25:25the strange money.
25:26If he did, no constable had come.
25:29So there was a matchbox, two old dollar bills, a train due at ten past eleven, and nobody with
25:37a badge.
25:38Here the knee comes back.
25:40When the recruiters rejected him, Earl had taken the train to Montreal for an operation,
25:46hoping to fix the leg and get into uniform.
25:50He spent six weeks recovering.
25:52The operation was a failure, and the knee stayed bad for the rest of his life.
25:57That is the leg he now went out the door on, after a man who had turned down a ride.
26:03He was not going to arrest anyone.
26:06He had no power to.
26:08But he had thought of one more test, and it needed no policeman.
26:13It needed him to sit down right beside the stranger, with a cigarette in his hand, and
26:18no light.
26:19The railway station at New Carlisle, late that morning.
26:23Behind the ticket window sat Dewey Smollett.
26:26In front of it, a man in a felt hat was setting down a grip and a briefcase.
26:32He asked for a one-way ticket to Mattapadia.
26:35The fare was three dollars and forty cents.
26:38Smollett remembered what happened next, and he told it in three short sentences.
26:43He pulled out a big roll of bills.
26:45I noticed that.
26:47Then he peeled off a twenty.
26:49It was a new issue twenty, nothing like the old dollar bills at the hotel.
26:54But listen to the sentence in the middle.
26:56I noticed that.
26:58A ticket agent in a small gas bay station, in November of 1942, watching a stranger's
27:04hands.
27:05That is, one more Canadian looking.
27:08Keep count of them.
27:10The stranger took his ticket and sat down to wait.
27:13And Earl Annette came in after him.
27:16Put yourself where Earl was.
27:18He had followed a man he believed to be a German agent.
27:21He had a yellow matchbox picked up off his own floor.
27:24And there was a weakness in it.
27:26A matchbox on a hotel floor could have been dropped by anybody.
27:31To make it count, he had to tie it to this one man.
27:34So he did what I think is the nerviest thing anyone did that morning.
27:39And it involved no weapon at all.
27:42He walked over and slipped into the seat beside him.
27:46Remember what was in that luggage.
27:48Earl did not know.
27:50You do.
27:51He offered the stranger a cigarette.
27:53Then he put another in his own mouth and did not reach for a light.
27:58Kind of cold out, he said.
28:00And he waited.
28:02Sure enough, the stranger reached into a pocket and drew out a box of matches.
28:08Camp safety matches.
28:09The twin of the one from the sitting room floor.
28:12Now the box from the hotel had an owner.
28:15Not some other guest.
28:17This man.
28:18They sat and smoked.
28:20The hotel keeper's son and the agent, side by side.
28:24The stranger made conversation.
28:27Mattapadia, he said.
28:28A small place, I suppose?
28:31Yes, said Earl.
28:32Quite small.
28:33There is really nothing there.
28:35Listen to that exchange again, knowing what you know.
28:39The man who told a banker he had lived in Canada for 21 years is asking a local what the
28:45next
28:45junction looks like.
28:47And the local is answering pleasantly and giving nothing away.
28:52Janowski had been trained to hold a false story under pressure.
28:55For the second time that morning, the one holding a story under pressure was Earl.
29:02Then the train came in.
29:04The stranger picked up his bags and climbed aboard.
29:07And here Earl hit the wall every amateur hits.
29:11He had everything except the power to do anything.
29:15He could not hold a train.
29:18He could not open a bag.
29:20In a few minutes, the best evidence he would ever have was going to roll away up the bay.
29:26Hold on to the next name because the morning turns on him.
29:30On duty with that train was a naval policeman named Johnny Lozinski.
29:36He was stationed at Gas Bay and his job was to keep traveling sailors in line as they rode
29:42the railway.
29:43Sailors, not spies.
29:46Earl went straight to him.
29:48Lozinski's own statement gives it plainly.
29:51He was met by Annette and told that a suspicious character had just boarded.
29:56Then, in his words, I went back in the train, followed by Annette, who showed me the passenger
30:03in question.
30:04So, picture the two of them walking through the car.
30:08The sailor's policeman in front, the young man with the bad knee behind, passed a passenger
30:14in a tweed suit who gave no sign he knew he had just been pointed out.
30:19Lozinski could have laughed it off.
30:21He did not.
30:22He took a 20-year-old civilian seriously enough to leave his train.
30:26But what they wanted now was the provincial police, and in New Carlisle, that meant Constable
30:32Alphonse Ducheneau, the senior provincial officer in town.
30:37Ducheneau lodged at La Maison Blanche.
30:40If that name means nothing to you, it meant a good deal to the Annettes.
30:45The Maison Blanche was the other hotel in town, the competition.
30:49So Lozinski and Earl left the train standing at the platform, got into a car, and drove there.
30:56Stop and take stock, because this is the moment the whole capture could have died.
31:02The spy is aboard, ticket bought, story intact.
31:07He has passed a banker, a ticket agent, and a naval policeman without a hand laid on him.
31:14The train will not wait for long.
31:16And everything now depends on whether a provincial constable will get up and come because the
31:23son of the rival hotel keeper says he has found a German spy.
31:28Here is Earl's own sentence about that meeting, written afterward.
31:34They seemed doubtful about my spy theory.
31:37His sisters remembered it more bluntly.
31:40Marguerite said the constable just took it as a joke, probably, because he did not want
31:45to go down and check the fellow out.
31:48There it is.
31:49This is the St. Martin's moment.
31:51The noticing has been done.
31:54The shoes, the smell, the money, the bus, the matches, all of it, by a maid, a father,
32:02two sisters, a banker, a ticket agent, and a young man the recruiters had sent home.
32:12At La Maison Blanche, Earl Annette stood in front of a constable who thought he was being
32:17told a joke.
32:18Look at what Earl had to push against.
32:21He was twenty.
32:22He was the son of the rival hotel.
32:25He had no rank, no warrant, and a theory that sounded like something out of a pulp magazine.
32:32And the train was standing at the platform.
32:34He did not back down.
32:36There is a recollection, set down years later by a woman who grew up along that bay, that
32:43Earl told the police if they would not arrest the man, he would make a citizen's arrest
32:48himself.
32:49I cannot prove those were his words.
32:52What the record does show is who was standing beside him.
32:56Johnny Lazinski, a naval policeman on duty, had seen the passenger with his own eyes and
33:02had come to say so.
33:04Dean Beebe, the historian who went through the police files, puts it carefully.
33:09Perhaps it was Lazinski's presence that tipped the balance.
33:13Whatever tipped it, Duschenno moved.
33:16He was a stout man, and he ducked into the police car with his partner Lazinski and Earl.
33:22Four men, one car, and a train about to leave.
33:26They reached the station just as it was about to pull out.
33:31What happened next took seconds.
33:34Dushenno and Lazinski hopped aboard.
33:37The second policeman drove hard for Bonaventure, the next stop, nine miles down the track, to
33:43be waiting when the train came in.
33:46And Earl was left behind.
33:49He had done the one thing only he could do.
33:52He had carried a feeling from a hotel lobby to a man with the power to act on it, and
33:59he
33:59had refused to let it be laughed away.
34:02Now it was out of his hands, rolling west.
34:06If he was wrong, the whole town was about to hear that the Annette boy had sent the police
34:13after a paying guest.
34:15Inside the car, Lazinski knew the face, and Duschenno had Earl's description.
34:21The constable found the passenger and sat down with him.
34:26I want to be fair to Duschenno here.
34:28Whatever he thought back at the hotel, on that train he did the job properly.
34:33He did not grab the man.
34:35He talked.
34:36Easy conversation that turned, a little at a time, into questions.
34:41The passenger was ready.
34:42His name was William Branton.
34:45He was a radio salesman from Toronto, a radio salesman.
34:49Hold that thought for about one minute.
34:51Then Duschenno asked for identification, and here the detail I asked you to keep comes due.
34:57The man produced a national registration certificate.
35:01Every adult in wartime Canada carried one, but this was the bilingual card, the kind issued
35:07only to residents of Quebec, and the address on it was Danforth Avenue, Toronto.
35:12With it came a Quebec driver's license.
35:15Same name.
35:16Same Toronto street.
35:17To an office in Germany, those were two good Canadian documents.
35:22To a Quebec constable, they made no sense at all.
35:25A Toronto man does not carry Quebec papers.
35:28The French and English halves of the country had been stitched together by somebody who had
35:33never lived in either.
35:35So Duschenno asked to look inside the luggage.
35:38And the trained agent, the veteran of Morocco and the Low Countries, the man with a story for
35:44the banker, and a story for the bus, said this.
35:49I am caught.
35:51I am a German officer.
35:54It was roughly six hours since he had stood at the foot of that cliff, and about three since
36:00he had asked a maid for a bath.
36:03Duschenno kept searching.
36:04Out came a set of spiked brass knuckles, a loaded automatic pistol in a leather holster
36:11with spare rounds, pills and tablets, close to $6,000 in bills and coin.
36:19And inside the suitcase, the radio salesman's only radio, a transmitter built to reach Germany.
36:27He had not reached for the pistol.
36:30He had not reached for the knuckles.
36:33He simply stopped.
36:35Now set the two sides of this morning against each other.
36:38On one side, a submarine, forty-four days at sea, forged papers, a cipher, a weapon, and
36:47years of experience.
36:49On the other, a maid who did not know what to charge, a father who remembered a smell,
36:55a ticket agent who watched a roll of bills, a sailor's policeman who agreed to take a
37:01look, a constable who finally got in the car, and a young man with a matchbox who would
37:07not let any of them drop it.
37:09If you kept count, with the two sisters and the banker, that is nine Canadians.
37:15Only one of them had been waiting for a spy.
37:18So here is the answer as it stands.
37:20He was caught in hours because his cover had been built for a crowd, and he walked into
37:26a place with no crowd.
37:28Every lie he carried was good enough for a city, where nobody knows the bus timetable.
37:34In New Carlisle, everybody did.
37:37And one of them refused to shrug.
37:40That is true.
37:42It is still not the whole of it.
37:44Notice his exact words, not, I am a spy, I am a German officer.
37:51Even at the instant of capture, he was already making his next move, and it led straight back
37:57to that hole on the cliff.
38:00He told the police where to dig.
38:02They took him out there, and the rubber bag came up, and the naval uniform came out of it.
38:07If the story stopped on that train, you would write Janowski off as a fool.
38:14The people who handled him next did not find a fool.
38:18The man who could not get past a hotel keeper's son was about to spend the better part of a
38:25year in the hands of Canada's federal police.
38:28And by the end of it, it would not be clear who had been handling whom.
38:34Before that day was over, the people of New Carlisle got a look at what Earl Annette had
38:39caught.
38:40The prisoner had asked to put his naval uniform back on, and Constable Ducheneau, for reasons
38:46nobody has explained, let him.
38:49Earl was still following, still watching, and he wrote down what he saw.
38:55The man wore his uniform coat and hat over civilian trousers, with three provincial policemen
39:01around him.
39:03And he was saluting everyone he met with a mock British salute.
39:07That was the counter move.
39:09The moment he was caught, Janowski began to talk.
39:13And what came out was a new story, complete and ready made.
39:18He was no spy.
39:19He was a submarine officer.
39:21He had made three landings on the Gaspé coast, in uniform, at Métis, in Gaspé Bay, and at
39:29Paspebiac, to see what shipping lay in the harbors and whether the shorelights were decoys.
39:34A naval officer on reconnaissance.
39:38A man for a prison camp, not a rope.
39:42It was invention from end to end, and he was telling it within hours of saying, I am caught.
39:48Now watch Earl, because he was not finished.
39:52That night, a captured enemy agent was being kept in a bedroom at La Maison Blanche, on the
39:58waterfront, and for all anyone ashore knew, a German submarine was still out in the bay.
40:06Earl did not trust the constable as a policeman, and he did not like what he was seeing.
40:11So at about twenty-five past eleven, he walked into the Maison Blanche with a neighbor, a thirty-seven
40:18year old lawyer named John Sheehan.
40:22His sister Geraldine tagged along uninvited.
40:25They stood with the hotel manager and his wife at a big plate-glass window overlooking
40:31the water.
40:32Earl recorded what came next.
40:35A car's lights were put out, then on, then out.
40:40A flashlight began signaling over the water from the wharf.
40:45And at eleven forty, in his words, distinct signals came from the water in the form of a
40:52very bright light, at two different intervals.
40:56I cannot tell you for certain who held that flashlight or what they hoped to draw in.
41:02I can tell you that a twenty-year-old with a bad knee was standing at a window near midnight
41:07beside a lawyer, noting the time.
41:10And I can tell you that the constable did move his prisoner out of that hotel bedroom and into
41:16the cells of the New Carlisle Courthouse for fear a raiding party from a U-boat might try
41:22to take him back.
41:24Then the professionals arrived.
41:26And here our question gets its last layer.
41:31At the jail, the deputy sheriff Gus Goulet, a man with an arm damaged in the First World
41:37War, woke his prisoner and gave him breakfast.
41:41Janowski stood very stiff and bowed with a snap of his heels.
41:46This is a very good breakfast, he said.
41:49You don't get eggs in Germany this time of year.
41:53The Navy sent an intelligence officer from Ottawa, Lt. Wilfred Samuel, fifty-six, a man
42:00who had questioned U-boat crews before.
42:03Samuel came away with a phrase worth remembering, a fluent and fertile liar.
42:10Then, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police took him.
42:13Inspector Clifford Harvison started him on the road to Montreal, and at a lunch stop the
42:19prisoner offered to tell the truth, if his life could be guaranteed.
42:23The Mounties decided on something Canada had never tried.
42:26They would turn him.
42:28He would sit in Montreal under guard and tap out messages to Hamburg as if he were free.
42:34And they would write the messages.
42:37They called him Watchdog.
42:39I am not going to pretend it went well.
42:42Two weeks after the arrest, Newsweek told its readers to watch for word of a German submarine
42:48commander captured near New Carlisle.
42:51The following June, a New Brunswick newspaper printed the tale of a hotel keeper's wife who
42:57had nabbed a German officer, right down to the large-sized dollar bills.
43:01A British officer from MI5, Cyril Mills, came over to help and sat tensely through every
43:09transmission.
43:10And then there were Hamburg's replies.
43:12One read, Everything well at home, full appreciation, and everyone sends greetings.
43:19The prisoner himself judged an answer like that too formal to have come from his wife.
43:25His masters had drafted it, he said.
43:28They knew.
43:29No German agent was ever caught through Watchdog.
43:34No U-boat was ever trapped.
43:37BB's conclusion from the files is that Janowski almost certainly managed to warn Germany he
43:44was in enemy hands.
43:46So here is the last layer.
43:49This man was not a fool.
43:52Give him a room, an officer across the table, and a contest of stories, and he could hold
44:00his own against the national police force for nine months.
44:05That was his training.
44:07That was his ground.
44:09The Annettes never gave him that contest.
44:12Nobody at the Carlisle Hotel accused him of anything.
44:17Nobody asked him a question he could recognize as an interrogation.
44:22They looked at his shoes.
44:25They caught the smell of his clothes.
44:27They turned over his dollar bills, knew their own bus timetable, and picked a matchbox off
44:35the floor.
44:42And by the time a man with a badge sat down beside him, there was nothing left to lie
44:48about.
44:49And the catch held.
44:50In the summer of 1943, the Mounties and their British advisor killed the case.
44:57In that August, the prisoner was flown to England, to the British interrogation center known as
45:03Camp 020, where he stayed locked up until the war was over.
45:09Every word he ever sent from Canadian soil, he sent as a captive.
45:14He never spent one free day in Montreal on Germany's business.
45:18Which leaves one piece of unfinished business.
45:22In time, the authorities put a value on what Earl Annette did that morning.
45:28It arrived at the hotel about five weeks later, in an envelope, and the men who carried it
45:33wanted a receipt.
45:35In duplicate.
45:37On December 18, 1942, two policemen walked into the Carlisle Hotel.
45:44One was Sergeant Paul Shapedos of the Mounted Police.
45:47The other was Constable Ducheneau.
45:50They had brought an envelope.
45:52Inside it was $300 in cash, and they wanted duplicate receipts for it.
45:59That was the reward.
46:00And here is a strange small fact about it.
46:04Half a century later, Earl's surviving sisters said they had never been told there was any
46:10reward at all.
46:12No money was ever shared out among the family.
46:16Where it went, nobody can now say.
46:19What the Annettes got instead was silence.
46:23The capture was a state secret, kept out of the newspapers by the censors even as it leaked
46:29around the edges.
46:30The old dollar bills and the yellow matchbox had gone to the provincial police.
46:36So for the rest of the war, the family that caught the spy had one thing to show for it.
46:43After all the excitement, someone went back into room 11 and found a piece of strapping
46:49from the stranger's luggage, jammed behind the radiator.
46:53And others stepped forward.
46:55I do not grudge the constable anything.
46:58He got on the train.
46:59He asked the right questions.
47:02By the end of 1943, he had been decorated for it.
47:07The retired banker assured the Mounties that he personally was the only one who had had an
47:13interview of any length with the man before his arrest.
47:17And on May 15, 1945, in the Quebec legislature, Premier Maurice Duplessis declared that the
47:26constable's vigilance alone had solved the case.
47:31Vigilance alone.
47:32By chance, the answer had been printed one day earlier.
47:36On May 14, with the war in Europe over and the censors finally silent, the Toronto Daily
47:44Star ran a story headed, Quebec Spycatcher Tells His Own Story.
47:50The byline was Earl J. Annette.
47:53And the line they put with it is the one you heard in the first minutes of this film.
47:59I nearly bit my tongue.
48:01I knew I had a German spy.
48:03That was his recognition, his own words in a newspaper, two and a half years late.
48:09Now the others.
48:11Werner von Janowski sat out the war in British custody.
48:15In July of 1945, he was moved to an internment camp in the British zone of Germany, and he
48:22was released in 1947.
48:24The town where he was born, in East Prussia, now belonged to Poland.
48:29He found work as a translator.
48:31He died in February of 1978, on holiday in Spain.
48:37The submarine that carried him, U-518, was sunk in April of 1945, with every man aboard.
48:47Alfred Langbein, the agent nobody caught, spent the last months of the war in an internment
48:53camp in New Brunswick, and was then sent home.
48:56Cyril Mills, the MI5 man who had listened to every transmission, sailed home in September
49:03of 1945 to rebuild his family's circus.
49:08Clifford Harvison rose to command the whole of the Mounted Police.
49:12He published his memoirs, and for years his version of Watchdog was the only one there
49:18was.
49:19It took a journalist, Dean Beebe, and thousands of pages of files pried loose in the 1990s
49:27to show how it had really gone, and to put the hotel keeper's son back at the center of
49:33it.
49:33And Earl Annette's life ended on the same bay.
49:38So far as the record shows, he never got the uniform he wanted.
49:43He died in August of 1977, in hospital at Maria, the village Simone Loubert had come from.
49:51He was 54.
49:53There was a huge crowd at his funeral in New Carlisle, and among them was the premier of
50:00Quebec.
50:01René Levesque had grown up in that town.
50:04He was three months older than Earl.
50:07As boys, before they went off to separate schools, one French and one English, they had
50:13played kick the can together with Earl's sister Geraldine.
50:16It was apparently the first time Levesque had ever set foot inside the town's Anglican
50:23church.
50:24He came for Earl.
50:26One more thing.
50:27The stretch of cliff four miles west of town, where a man in a German uniform buried a rubber
50:34bag one November morning.
50:36The Annette family later bought it, and in 2015, students at New Carlisle High School wrote
50:43and staged a play about that morning.
50:45Their history teacher was Earl's great nephew.
50:49They gave it a title that holds the whole of Earl's morning in four words.
50:54What if I'm wrong?
50:56So go back, one last time, to the front sitting room of the Carlisle Hotel.
51:02A leather chair.
51:04A yellow matchbox on the floor.
51:06A baby crawling toward it.
51:08And a young man the recruiters did not want, keeping his face still.
51:13Why did Canadians catch a trained German spy in a matter of hours?
51:19Because he had been trained to beat policemen and interrogators.
51:23And in 1942, Canada had very few of those who knew the game.
51:28What it had on that coast was people who had lived with the war at their doorstep for six
51:33months.
51:34They knew their own bus, their own money, and their own matches.
51:38And one of them would not let it go.
51:42He had no badge, no rank, and a bad knee.
51:45The German officer said the rest himself, I am caught.
51:51And the people who made him say it were a family, running a small hotel on the gas bay.
51:57Thank you for spending this hour with me.
52:00If you think what the Canadians of New Carlisle did that morning deserves to be remembered,
52:05a like genuinely helps it find more people.
52:09And if you would like to hear more, we are here every week.
52:14If your father, your grandfather, or your uncle served in the Second World War, I would
52:20be honored to hear about him in the comments.