Photo By Lori Stewart | Current view of the Soo Locks on the St. Marys River showing the city of Sault Ste....... read more read more
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by Lori S. Stewart, USAICoE Command Historian
SECURITY AT THE SOO LOCKS
On 15 March 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order creating the Military District of Sault Ste. Marie. This followed recommendations by federal agencies, including the War Department’s assistant chief of staff, G-2, for increased security of the vital transportation corridor on the international border with Canada. As part of these security measures, the U.S. Army’s Corps of Intelligence Police (CIP) investigated possible sabotage and subversion activities by enemy agents.
In the early World War II period, Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada, were small but bustling towns facing each other on the St. Marys River. Forming the border between the United States and Canada, the river boasted one of the world’s busiest shipping canals. A series of gravity-fed locks, the Soo Locks, had been built in the mid-1800s to help vessels safely navigate the river’s rapids and twenty-one-foot drop between Lake Superior and Lake Huron. By the 1880s, the U.S. government assumed ownership of the locks, through which flowed much of the iron ore mined in northern Michigan and Minnesota. In the early 1940s, nearly 90 percent of all U.S. iron ore moved along the river to war production factories in the east. Additionally, Canadian grain was shipped along the river, through the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway, to overseas markets.
Within twenty-four hours of Great Britain and Canada declaring war on Germany, armed soldiers were patrolling both sides of the river. Huge searchlights lit up the night skies and anti-aircraft guns were positioned to intercept German aircraft. Beginning in September 1940, officials from the U.S. Advisory Commission for the Council of National Defense and the Federal Bureau of Investigation urged the War Department to secure the locks immediately. Brig. Gen. C.H. Bonesteel, commander of the U.S. Army’s Sixth Corps Area, within which the locks were located, added his recommendations in early January 1941. The War Department’s assistant chief of staff, G-2, Brig. Gen. Sherman Miles, also completed a detailed intelligence study of the area. His report recommended more robust security procedures at critical defense points, the transfer of an infantry battalion from Camp Custer to Fort Brady, both in Michigan, and stationing a Coast Artillery unit within the area.
In response, on 15 March 1941, the president issued the executive order, and the War Department created a “District of Sault Saint Marie” defense sector in the Sixth Corps Area. More than 7,300 soldiers were soon stationed at Fort Brady near the Soo Locks, and barrage balloons were hoisted overhead to reinforce the anti-aircraft ground installations. A postwar article in the Chicago Tribune called Sault Ste. Marie “the most heavily guarded inland city in the United States.”
While most eyes were turned to the sky for an overt German aerial assault on the locks, the Sixth Corps Area’s detachment of the CIP was more concerned with potential covert operations of enemy spies and saboteurs. The Sixth Corps Area encompassed eighteen million residents of the states of Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, which included a large population of German Americans. In June, the CIP detachment of nine men (half its authorized strength) was increased to fourteen and then again to twenty-nine. The actual numbers of agents on the ground, however, fluctuated as agents departed for short periods to complete their schooling. By the end of 1941, on average, the detachment had twenty-two agents covering approximately 167,000 square miles.
Unfortunately, the CIP detachment did not produce regular reports for the entire period of the war, so assessing whether the heightened fears of enemy sabotage and subversion were warranted is difficult. Presumably, the threat lessened after the first couple years of the war. In mid-1943, the War Department considered any German attack on the Soo Locks to be remote and withdrew nearly two-thirds of the troops stationed at Fort Brady. By the end of the year, most of the defensive positions had been abandoned. The CIP detachment continued to investigate the few rumors of enemy activity around the locks throughout the rest of the war but spent the bulk of its time conducting background checks of potential counterintelligence agents.
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| Date Taken: | 03.08.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 03.08.2024 16:46 |
| Story ID: | 465793 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 202 |
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