To Kingdom Come (26 page)

As evening approached, he saw a large barn looming in the distance, and decided it would be a perfect place for a good night’s sleep. It had been a long time since he had last slept under a roof, much less in a bed.

In the course of his travels, he had discovered something new and potentially valuable in one of the pockets of his coveralls. It was a single sheet of paper, and consisted of a list of phrases written in French, with an English translation underneath each one.

The first phrase was
“Je suis un aviateur américain.”
I am an American pilot.

Jimmy couldn’t wait to put it in the hands of the next person he met. Beyond the large barn was a white farmhouse. There were two small children playing in the front yard. When he began walking toward them, one of the children shouted. A few moments later, the front door opened and a woman came outside. Jimmy assumed she was the children’s mother.

He thrust the phrase sheet into her hands. She examined it for several moments.

“Allez,”
she shouted at him, clearly frightened.
“Allez . . . allez.”

“Mersey bo-coop,” said Jimmy, smiling as he moved off, praying she wouldn’t report him to the Germans.

He spent the night in another grove of trees farther down the road. Continuing his journey the following morning, he walked for most of the day before deciding to stop at another farmhouse near the road.

A man of about fifty was churning butter next to a small outbuilding as Jimmy walked up to him. Without trying to say anything, he placed the phrase page in his hands. It took no more than a few seconds to generate a reaction.

The man’s face lit up with pleasure, and he began to dance around the butter churn. After he called into the farmhouse, a woman in her eighties came outside to join them.

In broken English, the man explained that they were White Russians, and their family had settled in France after the Russian Revolution. He gave Jimmy a glass of milk and told his mother to go inside and find suitable clothes for him. She came back with a black cap, an old white linen shirt, black trousers, and a patched black suit coat.

After Jimmy had changed out of his uniform, the man gave him some quick lessons in how to walk like a Frenchman. He mimicked Jimmy’s long, sauntering stride, and shook his head that this wouldn’t do. Then he began walking around the yard with short, mincing steps.

Jimmy practiced in step with him for a few minutes, and the man pronounced himself satisfied. His last gift was a few French coins, along with a small satchel filled with apples, onions, and bread.

“Mersey bo-coop,” said Jimmy in genuine appreciation.

With evening approaching, he came over a hill and saw the Seine River valley stretching out below him. A town lay ahead of him at the edge of the river, and he walked toward it with the short, quick steps. Proud of his new disguise, he headed down the main street, which was filled with shops and people.

Stepping into the first café, he decided to buy a drink with the French coins to quench his thirst. A pretty young barmaid stood behind the counter. There were no other customers. He attempted to use sign language along with his phrase sheet to communicate his order.

He could see the growing alarm in her eyes. Suddenly, she began shrieking at him in French at the top of her lungs. A moment later, she was rushing out the front door into the street, screaming for help.

It was hard to know which of them was more frightened as he followed her outside. Maybe it was the eight days of growth in his beard and the hobo’s clothes. Maybe she thought he was a thief.

By then, a man walking by the café had taken her by the hands and was trying to calm her. When she saw Jimmy coming, her fearful cries resumed with a vengeance. Jimmy was still gripping his French phrase sheet in his hand, and held it in front of the man’s face.

The man glanced at the first line,
“Je suis un aviateur américain,”
and looked back at him with almost instant sympathy. Still holding the barmaid’s hands, he motioned to Jimmy to move along.

With the short, mincing steps, Jimmy hurried down the street toward the river. He decided to forget about a cool glass of beer. He settled for another round of brackish water before resuming his journey to Paris on foot.

He spent that night in an orchard, finishing the provisions given to him by the White Russian Samaritan. The next morning, he began walking again. As the hours passed, he remembered another recommendation he had received from the intelligence officer who had conducted the escape classes back at Grafton Underwood.

“Make your approach to people or homes that are distant from any others,” Lieutenant Celentano had told them. “If the people raise an alarm, you will have time to escape.”

The next farmhouse was definitely isolated from its neighbors. When he approached the side door near the driveway, he looked through a kitchen window and saw a young woman peeling potatoes.

When she came to the door, he removed his peasant cap and said, “Bonn-jorr,” hoping it wouldn’t send the girl into a screaming fit. He heard another voice behind her in the kitchen, and a well-dressed matronly lady stepped forward to join her at the doorway.

Jimmy held up his crumpled phrase sheet, and in butchered French attempted to tell her he was an American aviator. She still seemed confused, and he showed her the dog tags hanging from his neck.

At that, the lady smiled. A few minutes later, he was sitting down to the best breakfast he had enjoyed since leaving the States. In broken English, the woman introduced herself as Madame Raymonde Laurent, and told him that she had relatives in New York, and that she loved America. As he finished the meal, Jimmy’s optimism about his chances for escape began to soar.

Madame Laurent dispatched the young woman to bring back “Madame Price,” who apparently spoke fluent English. Jimmy was waiting in the side yard when a tall middle-aged woman arrived. In perfect English, she told him that her name was Annie Price and that she lived in the next village of Triel. She asked him to accompany her there.

Her small stone cottage was abutted by two others, but no one appeared to take notice of their arrival. While Annie cut up carrots and onions for soup, she told Jimmy that she had been born in Brighton, England. After completing her education, she had married a young Frenchman and moved to this village. She was now divorced; one of her sons was in the French army in Indochina, and another worked in Germany.

After supper, Annie told him that a man in the village named Edward Cotterell would be arriving shortly to interview him. Jimmy was naturally anxious, but she assured him that the old man was also English and had been imprisoned by the Germans until he was released due to failing health.

Later that evening, Monsieur Cotterell arrived with three men. The others looked like farmers, and were big, impassive, and uncommunicative. The interview turned out to be an interrogation, and the twenty-one-year-old soon realized that his life was at stake if he couldn’t prove he was really an American.

After an hour of pointed questions about his training in the United States, his recent missions, and details about his air base at Grafton Underwood, the old man pronounced himself satisfied. If he hadn’t been, the other three men were there to end the charade.

The next morning, another man arrived at Annie Price’s house with the news that Jimmy would be leaving by train for Paris. He was a medical intern, and treated Jimmy’s burns with a soothing salve. He also brought him a gray wool suit, white shirt, and red tie. While Annie set about tailoring the suit to his larger dimensions, Jimmy shaved for the first time in twelve days and enjoyed a cold bath.

On the afternoon of Monday, September 20, exactly two weeks after the Stuttgart raid, the medical intern escorted him to the Triel train station and handed him a ticket to Paris. Although he accompanied Jimmy in the rail car, he remained some distance away in case of the American’s discovery or arrest.

When they arrived at Saint-Lazare station in Paris, he was instructed to walk straight to the exit gate. The intern told him that a few nights earlier there had been an insurrection in Paris, and the French gendarmes were now out in force checking identification papers. The fearful Jimmy began to imagine that every man in the station who looked at him was a possible Gestapo agent who would suddenly demand to see his papers.

But then he was through the gate and into the dark night. He followed the intern through the streets of Paris toward the apartment where he would be staying. At one point in the journey, he looked up and saw the darkened silhouette of the Eiffel Tower outlined against the starry sky.

He was on his way.

The Back of the Tiger

Monday, 20 September 1943
Eighth Air Force Command Headquarters
Bushy Park, England
Major General Ira Eaker
2100

S
omeone had tipped off Hap Arnold to the Stuttgart fiasco, and he was livid.

As soon as the commanding general arrived back in Washington on September 9, he had sent a cable to Eaker requesting a full report on the mission. Eaker and Fred Anderson, who at Claridge’s had assured Arnold the bombing results were “excellent,” worked together on a more candid assessment.

On September 10, Eaker responded to Arnold’s cable with a confidential memorandum entitled
Further information on Stuttgart mission as requested your A3517 September 9th.

“No further information available as to bombing results at Stuttgart,”
Eaker began,
“but pictures taken of Offenburg marshalling yards which were attacked by 1 part of formation show direct hits on at least three trains, an overhead bridge, dispatch control buildings, warehouses, and on single cars in area.

“Fighter opposition intense from time shortly after P-47s left formation until picked up again on return route. At least 200 fighters attacked,”
he wrote in reference to Luftwaffe opposition.
“Gunfire at Stuttgart intense and accurate.”

As to losses,
“Because of size of force involved and intensity of enemy opposition, both fighter and antiaircraft, it is impossible to determine exactly the cause of losses even after thorough interrogation of crews ... Of the 45 planes lost, 7 lost to fighters; 12 airplanes went down in Channel, damaged by antiaircraft and fighters and running short of fuel because of necessary use of extra power. Most of the others probably due to fighters but no definite determination can be made . . . 107 of returning B-17s damaged, 3 salvaged.”

Arnold remained incensed. Three hundred thirty-eight Fortresses had been sent to destroy two massive complexes of ball-bearing and magneto factories. They had apparently destroyed three trains. He concluded that the Stuttgart mission had been “a complete failure,” and immediately began prodding Eaker to resume the air offensive against German industrial targets.

Eaker was well aware of Arnold’s mercurial personality. In the course of a day, he might receive one cable overflowing with praise, followed a few hours later by another cable deriding his lack of commitment to advancing the air force’s strategic goals.

He remained unmoved. Eaker refused to send the Eighth’s heavy bombers back to Germany again until the Eighth had made good on the losses of planes and crews from the Stuttgart mission.

On September 7, 9, 15, and 16, bomber command dispatched the Eighth’s depleted groups to attack lower-priority targets in France. None of the strikes were maximum efforts, and the bomber forces never exceeded three hundred planes. Increasingly inclement weather over Europe often precluded any mission at all.

As the days passed, Arnold grew increasingly frustrated at the lack of action.

Each morning in Washington, he met at 0830 with the other military chiefs of staff. Invariably, George Marshall would ask Arnold about the previous day’s operations of the Eighth. More often than not, an infuriated Arnold would have to say, “Nothing to report.”

The tone of his cables sharpened further. He simply couldn’t understand why after sending the Eighth nearly a thousand Fortresses, Eaker could barely muster three hundred to attack.

“To us here in the United States,” he cabled Eaker two weeks after the Stuttgart mission, “it looks as if the employment of large numbers of heavy bombers has not been followed through by your headquarters and staff.”

An equally frustrated Eaker couldn’t seem to make Arnold understand the cumulative impact of the heavy losses and battle damage the Eighth had sustained in attacking Germany without long-range fighters.

He could only try to stay on the back of the tiger.

Thursday, 23 September 1943
Eighth Air Force Bomber Command
Forty-first Combat Air Wing
Brigadier General Robert Travis

After reading the official reprimand he had received from General Eaker, Bob Travis wondered whether his air force career might be over before he ever had a chance to prove himself. What did they expect from a warrior?

The whole damn thing was pathetic, probably cooked up by some paper-pushing, brass-kissing bed wetter on Eaker’s staff who had it in for him. Bob Travis was a combat commander, not a desk jockey.

On September 2, shortly after his arrival in England, he had sent a personal note to Colonel “Pop” Arnold, a senior officer in his former command, who was now at the Twenty-ninth Bomb Group, Gowen Field, Boise, Idaho. Travis had already asked General Williams, his division commander, to transfer Pop to his staff.

Travis had written the letter after flying as an observer on several missions to France, and a few days before he assumed command of the Forty-first Combat Wing. In addition to giving Pop a heads-up on some of the things he needed to bring with him when he left for England, Travis had taken a moment to comment on the deficiencies of the Eighth Air Force machine gunners:

Pop ... anything said about gunnery in the past was not enough. The air is full of Bosche sometimes 2 to 300 and they are shooting real bullets. We have to fight our way in and out. We are paying with lots of crews because our gunners can’t shoot. I could have got one bastard with a skeet gun that my nose gunner missed yesterday. They come close but the boys won’t lead and swing through ...