Post by Catsmate on Aug 14, 2020 15:54:23 GMT
Fritz Joubert Duquesne
His actual name was Frederick Joubert Duquesne, though he was known as 'Fritz' and the 'Black Panther' and he was born in 1877 (21SEP1877-24MAY1956) in East London, then in the British Cape Colony to a Boer family of French Huguenot descent.
During what can rather euphemistically be called an 'active' life he was a soldier (Boers), spy (Boers and Germany, twice), big-game hunter (advisor to one Theodore Roosevelt), journalist (everywhere), saboteur (South Africa and USA), and confidence trickster (mostly the USA). He had many friends (Roosevelt, Burnham) and enemies (J. Edgar Hoover, Kitchener, Burnham). He may have killed Kitchener.
Oh and he was behind a plan to solve the United States' meat shortages by introducing the hippopotamus to the Mississippi river1.
He fought for the Boers in the Second Boer War and worked as a secret agent for Germany during both World Wars. He gathered intelligence, led spy rings and carried out sabotage missions. He went by many aliases and identities. He was a plausible con-man.
His life.
Duquesne killed another human for the first time when he was twelve; disarming a Zulu who attacked his mother and stabbing him to death. A few months later he was involved in a skirmish and killed several more. His father taught him to stalk and hunt and he was very good at it (he later published numerous articles and lectured on big-game2 hunting) He also developed a fascination, almost an obsession, with the black panther, which he considered the consummate hunter.
Later in life he's be known as the "Black Panther" and used such as a message seal.
At thirteen Duquesne was sent away to school in England. After finishing there he may have attended the University of Oxford and/or the Académie Militaire Royale in Brussels to study engineering. Or he may have befriended a con-man and embezzler named Christian de Vries and gone into partnership. Or quite possibly both; the next two years are pretty much unknown.
Certainly he returned to South Africa aged 21 in 1899 to fight in the war against Britain. Duquesne served in the Boer commandos, then as a staff lieutenant with General Piet Joubert. He was wounded at the Siege of Ladysmith and appointed an artillery captain in the artillery
Duquesne was captured by the British at the Battle of Colenso, but escaped when taken to Durban. This was the first of his escapes from custody.
Duquesne commanded a Boer force that transported a large amount of gold (several tonnes) from Pretoria to be shipped to
the Netherlands for the use of President Kruger. The shipment never arrived; Duquesne said that an argument broke out among the troops guarding the gold and several were killed and wounded. He hid the gold in caves and cleaned up3.
Duquesne rejoined the Boers Battle of Bergendal, but when they retreated they were captured by the Portuguese (who controlled Angola) and interned, at Caldas da Rainha near Lisbon.
His military service effectively over, Duquesne found a new career. He became a professional spy, trickster and counterfeit hero4, a man who was willing and able to reinvent himself at will.
In the Portuguese internment camp in Portugal, Duquesne charmed the daughter of one of the guards, whom he convinced to help him escape to Paris. From there he made his way to England and to Aldershot. Then he infiltrated the British army and arranged to be posted to......South Africa. Where he arrived as a lieutenant in 1901.
Any view he had of the war as a game ended on his return. He developed a deep and abiding hatred of Britain. His biographers say of him:
Duquesne developed plans to sabotage strategic British installations and to kill Kitchener. Unfortunately the wide of one of the men he recruited betrayed them to the British authorities.
On 11OCT1901 Duquesne was arrested in full dress uniform for at a dinner for the Cape Colony governor. The 21 men were charged with "conspiracy against the British government" and espionage. They were court-martialled and sentenced to be shot. Twenty of them did die.
But not Duquesne who was granted clemency in exchange Duquesne for secret Boer codes.
He was imprisoned in the Castle of Good Hope, a old Dutch fortification in Cape Town. He attempted to escape by digging away the mortar between the blocks with a spoon. The attempt went awry when he was trapped by a fallen block of stone.
Duquesne was transferred to a camp in Bermuda with other 'incorrigible' prisoners. It was assumed that the damgerous reefs and sharks would keep them confined.
On the night of 25JUN1902, aged 24, Duquesne slipped out of his tent, crossed a barbed-wire fence, swam two-and-a-half kilometres (avoiding patrol boats) and made his way to the main island of Bermuda.
With the assistance of two members of a Boer Relief Committee he escaped the island to the United States, first to Baltimore and then to New York.
In New York Duquesne found work as a journalist, for the New York Herald mainly, and wrote adventure stories and pieces about Africa. Even after the war was ended by treaty Duquesne never returned to South Africa.
In New York he published three novels, one serialised in a French newspaper and many other pieces.
He became a 'travelling correspondent' sending copy to New York from around the world; including the Russo-Japanese, the Riff Rebellion in Morocco, and the Belgian Congo.
It was around this time that Duquesne finally met Frederick Russell Burnham, a highly decorated American who served as Chief of Scouts for the British Army in South Africa (and who he'd been ordered to kill during the war).
This led to the 'American Hippo Bill' legislation (which was never passed) which would have paid for the importation of hippopotami to the Louisiana bayous, as both a food source and to control the water hyacinth then clogging southern river systems.
The plan was enthusiastically supported by former US President Theodore Roosevelt and was backed by the US Department of Agriculture and many newspapers.
Alas the bill fell just short of passing.
Duquesne became Roosevelt's shooting instructor and accompanied him on hunting expeditions. He also published several newspaper articles on Roosevelt's hunting trip to Africa and safari big game hunting in general
In DEC1913 Duquesne became a naturalised American citizen.
Duquesne became a German spy in 1914, even before the Great War erupted and worked for German Naval Intelligence in Bahia in Brazil. There his role was to disrupt commercial traffic to countries at war with Germany. He also passed on useful importation on shipping to Europe and was responsible for numerous explosions on British merchant ships, sinking at least 22.
After his cover was blown and pursued by British Agents Duquesne moved to Buenos Aires and faked his death. In 1916 he had evaded British intelligence and returned to New York, arriving in May. He left for Europe in June, and (allegedly) while posing as the Russian Duke Boris Zakrevsky he joined Field Marshal Kitchener on HMS Hampshire for the voyage to Russia.
On board, Duquesne signaled a German submarine that torpedoed the cruiser. Duquesne escaped using a life raft and was rescued by the submarine.
By JUL1917 Duquesne was in Washington DC where he used his connection with Senator Robert Broussard to infiltrate the US Army. Curiously he also filed patents for an underwater electromagnetic mine, which he attempted to sell to the US Navy.
Next he posed as one Captain Claude Stoughton of the Western Australian Light Horse and appeared before New York audiences in uniform to regale them with war stories and promote the sale of Liberty Bonds.
Weirdly, or not, "Captain Stoughton's" career took off and was quite profitable.
Until it all came crashing down. Duquesne had insured the cargoes he'd used as cover for his bombs and filed claims for them. On 17NOV1917 he was arrested for insurance fraud. The British authorities were also looking at Duquesne for "murder on the high seas, arson, faking Admiralty documents and conspiring against the Crown".
While awaiting extradition to Britain Duquesne pretended to be partially paralysed and sent to the prison ward at Bellevue Hospital. It took almost two years but on 25MAY1919, with his extradition to Britain and the inevitable death sentence imminent, Duquesne disguised himself as a woman and escaped by cutting the bars of his cell and climbing over the barrier walls.
Duquesne escaped to Mexico and then to Europe; what he got up to for the next six years are unknown.
In 1926 he was back in New York under a new identity, Frank de Trafford Craven, and worked for Joseph Kennedy.
All sent well for about five years but on 23MAY1932 he was arrested.
Despite an audacious attempt to fool police, where his biographer confirmed his false identity, Duquesne was charged. However due to a combination of British refusal to pursue his war crimes, the statute of limitations and a degree of public notoriety he was freed.
By early 1934 Duquesne was working for the 'Order of 76' an American pro-Nazi organisation, as an intelligence agent. In JAN1935 he began working for the US Works Progress Administration. As Duquesne was known to Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who was rebuilding the German military intelligence organisation, the chief of operations for the Abwehr in the USA (Colonel Nikolaus Ritter) contacted Duquesne. Ritter had been friends with Duquesne even before the rise of the Nazi party.
On 03DEC1937 the two men reconnected and Duquesne became agent DUNN.
Even before US entry in the war Duquesne was under FBI surveillance, and knew it (once confronting an agent following him) being widely experienced in espionage. It wasn't until 1941 that he was arrested, and during that time he operated the Duquesne Spy Ring. Duquesne was the subject of a personal briefing to Roosevelt by Hoover.
On 28JUN1941 the FBI arrested Duquesne and 32 German agents. All 33 members of the Duquesne Spy Ring were convicted, ending most German espionage in the United States. Duquesne, aged 64, was sentenced to 18 years in prison, beginning his sentence at Leavenworth in Kansas, but was transferred to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield in 1945. He was released in 1954, lectured occasionally and died in 1956.
Personality.
Duquesne was intelligent, manipulative and chameleon-like in his ability to 'wear' new identities and covers. He was handsome and charismatic, fluent in several languages (at least nine). An FBI agent, Raymond Newkirk, who arrested him said of Duquesne "the Duke was a very interesting talker but he always had to be the center of attention".
Game use.
Duquesne could appear in a scenario anytime from 1900 to 1940, from a schoolboy to a hardened spy. There are sufficient gaps in the known details of his life to accommodate almost anything. He could have been a time traveller (he seems perfect for the Time Agency) and merely mixed up in strange happenings.
Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?
1. No I'm not making that up (and to avoid having to repeat that, nothing in this piece is fabricated by me until I get to the gaming stuff).
The Crazy, Ingenious Plan to Bring Hippopotamus Ranching to America
2. Traditionally 'big game' referred to the Big Five African animals; Lion, Leopard, Cape Buffalo, Elephant and Rhinoceros
3. Which involved killing the wounded Boers and Africans. And perhaps the unwounded.
4. The Flashman parallels are striking. Though Duquesne was not at all a coward.
He was one of the craftiest men I ever met. He had something of a genius of the Apache for avoiding a combat except in his own terms; yet he would be the last man I should choose to meet in a dark room for a finish fight armed only with knives.
Frederick Russell Burnham
Frederick Russell Burnham
His actual name was Frederick Joubert Duquesne, though he was known as 'Fritz' and the 'Black Panther' and he was born in 1877 (21SEP1877-24MAY1956) in East London, then in the British Cape Colony to a Boer family of French Huguenot descent.
During what can rather euphemistically be called an 'active' life he was a soldier (Boers), spy (Boers and Germany, twice), big-game hunter (advisor to one Theodore Roosevelt), journalist (everywhere), saboteur (South Africa and USA), and confidence trickster (mostly the USA). He had many friends (Roosevelt, Burnham) and enemies (J. Edgar Hoover, Kitchener, Burnham). He may have killed Kitchener.
Oh and he was behind a plan to solve the United States' meat shortages by introducing the hippopotamus to the Mississippi river1.
He fought for the Boers in the Second Boer War and worked as a secret agent for Germany during both World Wars. He gathered intelligence, led spy rings and carried out sabotage missions. He went by many aliases and identities. He was a plausible con-man.
His life.
Duquesne killed another human for the first time when he was twelve; disarming a Zulu who attacked his mother and stabbing him to death. A few months later he was involved in a skirmish and killed several more. His father taught him to stalk and hunt and he was very good at it (he later published numerous articles and lectured on big-game2 hunting) He also developed a fascination, almost an obsession, with the black panther, which he considered the consummate hunter.
Later in life he's be known as the "Black Panther" and used such as a message seal.
At thirteen Duquesne was sent away to school in England. After finishing there he may have attended the University of Oxford and/or the Académie Militaire Royale in Brussels to study engineering. Or he may have befriended a con-man and embezzler named Christian de Vries and gone into partnership. Or quite possibly both; the next two years are pretty much unknown.
Certainly he returned to South Africa aged 21 in 1899 to fight in the war against Britain. Duquesne served in the Boer commandos, then as a staff lieutenant with General Piet Joubert. He was wounded at the Siege of Ladysmith and appointed an artillery captain in the artillery
Duquesne was captured by the British at the Battle of Colenso, but escaped when taken to Durban. This was the first of his escapes from custody.
Duquesne commanded a Boer force that transported a large amount of gold (several tonnes) from Pretoria to be shipped to
the Netherlands for the use of President Kruger. The shipment never arrived; Duquesne said that an argument broke out among the troops guarding the gold and several were killed and wounded. He hid the gold in caves and cleaned up3.
- Now the conventional wisdom is that the buried central bank gold, known as "Kruger's Millions" is nonsense, just a legend. However, there are plausible rumours of gold found hidden.
Duquesne rejoined the Boers Battle of Bergendal, but when they retreated they were captured by the Portuguese (who controlled Angola) and interned, at Caldas da Rainha near Lisbon.
His military service effectively over, Duquesne found a new career. He became a professional spy, trickster and counterfeit hero4, a man who was willing and able to reinvent himself at will.
In the Portuguese internment camp in Portugal, Duquesne charmed the daughter of one of the guards, whom he convinced to help him escape to Paris. From there he made his way to England and to Aldershot. Then he infiltrated the British army and arranged to be posted to......South Africa. Where he arrived as a lieutenant in 1901.
- Duquesne was serious effected by what had happened to his family. British troops has burned and destroyed hism family farm (part of Kitchener's scorched earth policy). He also found that his sister had been raped and killed (it's believed by Africans). His mother was seriously ill (and would die) in a British concentration camp.
Any view he had of the war as a game ended on his return. He developed a deep and abiding hatred of Britain. His biographers say of him:
....the fate of his country and of his family would breed in him an all-consuming hatred of England.
[he became] a walking living breathing searing killing destroying torch of hate.
On 11OCT1901 Duquesne was arrested in full dress uniform for at a dinner for the Cape Colony governor. The 21 men were charged with "conspiracy against the British government" and espionage. They were court-martialled and sentenced to be shot. Twenty of them did die.
But not Duquesne who was granted clemency in exchange Duquesne for secret Boer codes.
- Duquesne always claimed that he'd never betrayed the Boers but actually created false codes that would mislead the British.
He was imprisoned in the Castle of Good Hope, a old Dutch fortification in Cape Town. He attempted to escape by digging away the mortar between the blocks with a spoon. The attempt went awry when he was trapped by a fallen block of stone.
Duquesne was transferred to a camp in Bermuda with other 'incorrigible' prisoners. It was assumed that the damgerous reefs and sharks would keep them confined.
On the night of 25JUN1902, aged 24, Duquesne slipped out of his tent, crossed a barbed-wire fence, swam two-and-a-half kilometres (avoiding patrol boats) and made his way to the main island of Bermuda.
With the assistance of two members of a Boer Relief Committee he escaped the island to the United States, first to Baltimore and then to New York.
In New York Duquesne found work as a journalist, for the New York Herald mainly, and wrote adventure stories and pieces about Africa. Even after the war was ended by treaty Duquesne never returned to South Africa.
In New York he published three novels, one serialised in a French newspaper and many other pieces.
He became a 'travelling correspondent' sending copy to New York from around the world; including the Russo-Japanese, the Riff Rebellion in Morocco, and the Belgian Congo.
It was around this time that Duquesne finally met Frederick Russell Burnham, a highly decorated American who served as Chief of Scouts for the British Army in South Africa (and who he'd been ordered to kill during the war).
- Burnham was involved in the immature British espionage service at the time and may have been keeping track of Duquesne.
This led to the 'American Hippo Bill' legislation (which was never passed) which would have paid for the importation of hippopotami to the Louisiana bayous, as both a food source and to control the water hyacinth then clogging southern river systems.
The plan was enthusiastically supported by former US President Theodore Roosevelt and was backed by the US Department of Agriculture and many newspapers.
Alas the bill fell just short of passing.
Duquesne became Roosevelt's shooting instructor and accompanied him on hunting expeditions. He also published several newspaper articles on Roosevelt's hunting trip to Africa and safari big game hunting in general
In DEC1913 Duquesne became a naturalised American citizen.
Duquesne became a German spy in 1914, even before the Great War erupted and worked for German Naval Intelligence in Bahia in Brazil. There his role was to disrupt commercial traffic to countries at war with Germany. He also passed on useful importation on shipping to Europe and was responsible for numerous explosions on British merchant ships, sinking at least 22.
After his cover was blown and pursued by British Agents Duquesne moved to Buenos Aires and faked his death. In 1916 he had evaded British intelligence and returned to New York, arriving in May. He left for Europe in June, and (allegedly) while posing as the Russian Duke Boris Zakrevsky he joined Field Marshal Kitchener on HMS Hampshire for the voyage to Russia.
On board, Duquesne signaled a German submarine that torpedoed the cruiser. Duquesne escaped using a life raft and was rescued by the submarine.
- This is a fascinating story but unproven, as is the claim that Duquesne was awarded the Iron Cross or reached the rank of Colonel.
By JUL1917 Duquesne was in Washington DC where he used his connection with Senator Robert Broussard to infiltrate the US Army. Curiously he also filed patents for an underwater electromagnetic mine, which he attempted to sell to the US Navy.
Next he posed as one Captain Claude Stoughton of the Western Australian Light Horse and appeared before New York audiences in uniform to regale them with war stories and promote the sale of Liberty Bonds.
Weirdly, or not, "Captain Stoughton's" career took off and was quite profitable.
Until it all came crashing down. Duquesne had insured the cargoes he'd used as cover for his bombs and filed claims for them. On 17NOV1917 he was arrested for insurance fraud. The British authorities were also looking at Duquesne for "murder on the high seas, arson, faking Admiralty documents and conspiring against the Crown".
While awaiting extradition to Britain Duquesne pretended to be partially paralysed and sent to the prison ward at Bellevue Hospital. It took almost two years but on 25MAY1919, with his extradition to Britain and the inevitable death sentence imminent, Duquesne disguised himself as a woman and escaped by cutting the bars of his cell and climbing over the barrier walls.
Duquesne escaped to Mexico and then to Europe; what he got up to for the next six years are unknown.
In 1926 he was back in New York under a new identity, Frank de Trafford Craven, and worked for Joseph Kennedy.
All sent well for about five years but on 23MAY1932 he was arrested.
Despite an audacious attempt to fool police, where his biographer confirmed his false identity, Duquesne was charged. However due to a combination of British refusal to pursue his war crimes, the statute of limitations and a degree of public notoriety he was freed.
By early 1934 Duquesne was working for the 'Order of 76' an American pro-Nazi organisation, as an intelligence agent. In JAN1935 he began working for the US Works Progress Administration. As Duquesne was known to Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who was rebuilding the German military intelligence organisation, the chief of operations for the Abwehr in the USA (Colonel Nikolaus Ritter) contacted Duquesne. Ritter had been friends with Duquesne even before the rise of the Nazi party.
On 03DEC1937 the two men reconnected and Duquesne became agent DUNN.
Even before US entry in the war Duquesne was under FBI surveillance, and knew it (once confronting an agent following him) being widely experienced in espionage. It wasn't until 1941 that he was arrested, and during that time he operated the Duquesne Spy Ring. Duquesne was the subject of a personal briefing to Roosevelt by Hoover.
On 28JUN1941 the FBI arrested Duquesne and 32 German agents. All 33 members of the Duquesne Spy Ring were convicted, ending most German espionage in the United States. Duquesne, aged 64, was sentenced to 18 years in prison, beginning his sentence at Leavenworth in Kansas, but was transferred to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield in 1945. He was released in 1954, lectured occasionally and died in 1956.
Personality.
Duquesne was intelligent, manipulative and chameleon-like in his ability to 'wear' new identities and covers. He was handsome and charismatic, fluent in several languages (at least nine). An FBI agent, Raymond Newkirk, who arrested him said of Duquesne "the Duke was a very interesting talker but he always had to be the center of attention".
Game use.
Duquesne could appear in a scenario anytime from 1900 to 1940, from a schoolboy to a hardened spy. There are sufficient gaps in the known details of his life to accommodate almost anything. He could have been a time traveller (he seems perfect for the Time Agency) and merely mixed up in strange happenings.
Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?
1. No I'm not making that up (and to avoid having to repeat that, nothing in this piece is fabricated by me until I get to the gaming stuff).
The Crazy, Ingenious Plan to Bring Hippopotamus Ranching to America
2. Traditionally 'big game' referred to the Big Five African animals; Lion, Leopard, Cape Buffalo, Elephant and Rhinoceros
3. Which involved killing the wounded Boers and Africans. And perhaps the unwounded.
4. The Flashman parallels are striking. Though Duquesne was not at all a coward.