To Kingdom Come (31 page)

It marked the end of Ira Eaker’s air offensive against Germany.

In Washington, President Roosevelt was asked about the extraordinary losses the Eighth was absorbing. For the first time, the president did not offer a strong defense of daylight precision bombing.

Hap Arnold publicly declared it to be a major victory, stating that the ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt had been rendered “completely useless” and that “no moving machinery will operate without ball bearings.”

It was a huge exaggeration, but one that underscored the fragile level of confidence by Arnold’s fellow war commanders in his cherished goal of destroying Germany’s capacity to make war with precision bombing alone. Desperate to make the case that the Eighth’s efforts had now brought the Luftwaffe close to capitulation, Arnold fired off another cable to Eaker:

“It appears from my viewpoint that the German Air Force is on the verge of collapse ... Can you add any substantial evidence of collapse?”

The suggestion was ludicrous. If either side in the air war was on the ropes at that point, it was the Eighth Air Force. One day after the battle, Ira Eaker responded to Hap Arnold’s cable. His demands were explicit:

“Rush replacement aircraft and crews.... Send every possible fighter here as soon as possible. Emphasize early arrival of additional P-38s and Mustangs. . . . Give us 5000 auxiliary droppable tanks for fighters as soon as possible.”

Arnold immediately complied with Eaker’s requests, diverting the first shipments of P-51 Mustangs that had been slated to go to the Pacific and North Africa to England instead.

It would take nearly two months for them to begin arriving. In the meantime, Arnold demanded that Eaker resume the air offensive against German strategic targets with strikes of at least five hundred Fortresses on each mission.

It wasn’t to be. In November, Eaker mounted only two raids with a force exceeding five hundred bombers, and neither was a deep-penetration raid. Arnold’s legendary impatience reached a climax.

In early December, Hap Arnold met in Cairo with Air Chief Marshal Portal of the RAF to discuss the future of the combined bomber offensive in Europe. In assessing the American contribution, Portal made the case that Ira Eaker was doing everything he could to achieve the Allied bombing goals with the assets he had to work with.

His presentation fell on deaf ears.

Arnold declared to Portal that according to his inspectors the Eighth was utilizing only 50 percent of its available aircraft on combat missions, while the utilization figure in the other combat theaters was 70 percent. The failure of the air offensive against Germany, he said, was a direct result of Eaker not utilizing his planes in sufficient numbers to get the job done.

On December 4, the first shipments of long-range P-51 Mustangs began arriving in England. Eaker’s urgent requests had finally borne fruit. His staff estimated that by early January, the Eighth would have enough fighters with jettisonable belly tanks to escort the Fortresses all the way to Germany and back.

That same day, President Roosevelt announced his decision to name General Dwight Eisenhower to be the supreme commander of the Allied forces that would invade Europe in 1944.

A few days later, Hap Arnold flew to Tunis to meet with Eisenhower. In the first planning session, Eisenhower told Arnold that he wanted General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz to be his senior air commander. Arnold agreed.

On December 9, Arnold flew to meet with Spaatz at his headquarters in Foggia, Italy. Together, they decided to recommend a shake-up of the air theater commanders. Ira Eaker would be transferred to the Mediterranean command. General Jimmy Doolittle, the hard-driving veteran of the daring Tokyo raid in 1942, would be given the Eighth Air Force.

Arnold now had to tell Ira Eaker he was out of his job. Months earlier, he had promised Eaker that if a change was to be made, he “would be the first one to hear of it.” Dealing with unpleasant duties involving an old friend, however, wasn’t one of Arnold’s strong points. Instead, on December 18, he sent Eaker an official cable through channels:

“It has been decided that an American will take over command of the Allied Air Force in the Mediterranean now held by Tedder. As a result of your long period of successful operations and the exceptional results of your endeavors as Commander of the Air Force in England, you have been recommended for this position.”

Eaker’s shock after reading the cable turned to rage. With the invasion of Europe coming, the Mediterranean theater would become a backwater. This wasn’t a promotion. It was a sacking. Arnold hadn’t even had the decency to tell him in a personal communication. The cable had obviously been written by a member of his staff.

Eaker had personally built the Eighth Air Force from scratch. After all his months of requesting the long-range fighters that would change the course of the air war, they were finally starting to arrive, and no thanks to Arnold. Now that Eaker was poised to show what the Eighth could accomplish, Arnold was trying to take it away from him.

He had been as loyal a subordinate as any man could ask for, only to be humiliated in the end. He had often acceded to Arnold’s demands against his better judgment and then watched his air crews pay the price for the mistakes.

They were his boys. He couldn’t count the number of times he had gone to the base hospitals across southern England to pin medals on men who had had their arms and legs shot off.

After privately brooding about what to do, Eaker decided to fight for his job. He cabled Arnold his response. It was hard not to make the words sound like begging. He was.

“Believe war interest best served by my retention command 8th Air Force: otherwise experience this theater for nearly two years wasted. If I am to be allowed any personal preference, having started with the Eighth . . . it would be heartbreaking to leave just before climax . . . request I be allowed to retain command 8th Air Force.”

That same day, Eaker sent a separate cable to Eisenhower, informing him that
“Arnold proposes new assignment for me,”
and requesting that he be allowed to remain in command of the Eighth.

Arnold’s response to Eaker’s cables preceded Eisenhower’s. It left no doubt about the outcome. It also ended their twenty-five-year friendship. Eaker would never get over the betrayal.

“... it is unfortunate that you cannot, repeat, not stay and retain command of the organization . . . the broader viewpoint of the world-wide war effort indicates the necessity for a change.... I cannot, repeat, not see my way clear to make any change in the decisions already reached.”

On December 23, Ira Eaker received the official order relieving him of command of the Eighth Air Force. The following day, he cabled Arnold an equally impersonal reply:

“Orders received. Will be carried out promptly January 1.”

On Christmas Day, Eaker finally received Eisenhower’s reply to his cable asking to stay:

“Your personal message reached me en route to my base headquarters,”
it read.
“As you well know, I would be more than delighted to have you with me. I note that your orders have already been issued, but the fact is, as I have just informed General Marshall, your transfer was proposed to me specifically by General Arnold in a brief conversation in Sicily and I agreed because of the absolute necessity of finding an outstanding man for the post of Air CINC of the Mediterranean.”

He was going to the goddamn Mediterranean.

In Washington, Hap Arnold celebrated Christmas Day on General’s Row at Fort Myer, Virginia. His estranged wife, Bee, had returned from her self-imposed exile to join him there for the holiday. She seemed to be less judgmental on his failures as a husband, and he thought there might be a chance for a genuine reconciliation.

Desperate Journey

Saturday, 25 December 1943
Girona, Spain
Second Lieutenant Warren Porter Laws

F
rom his second-floor prison window, he could see men and women hurriedly crossing the sidewalk at the end of the narrow alley facing the boulevard. It was Christmas Day, and most of the people were rushing along with packages under their arms, probably heading home to enjoy the holiday with their families.

After a perilous climb across the snow-choked Pyrenees, Warren had made it to Spain, but now the authorities wouldn’t let him contact the American consulate and were threatening to turn him over to the Germans.

It had been a long journey to reach his prison cell.

Warren had spent most of September and October holed up with Joe Schwartzkopf in a succession of safe houses around Troyes, about six miles from where
Patricia
had been shot down. German soldiers occupied the town, and after a week or two in one place, the two Americans would be moved at night to a presumably safer location.

Warren had occupied his six weeks of captivity as productively as he could, spending almost every waking hour studying the words and phrases in his pocket French-English dictionary, and then practicing colloquial French with their host families. By mid-October, the teachers’ college graduate was not only completely fluent but spoke it with barely a trace of his American accent.

Joe Schwartzkopf was astonished. To him, it seemed like Lieutenant Laws had actually become a Frenchman, including adopting some of their physical gestures. Sometimes Warren would start talking to him in French, forgetting that he couldn’t understand a word. Then he would stop and give Joe an apologetic grin.

They were staying with a family in Troyes when a Catholic priest came to see them. Introducing himself as Abbé Jean Bonnard, he told them that they were being sent on to Paris to join the Burgundy escape line, one of the many groups working to repatriate escaped Allied airmen.

On October 17, Warren and Joe, along with two other Americans who had been sheltered in Troyes, boarded a train for Paris’s Gare du Nord. Upon their arrival, the four men had been instructed to wait on a specific platform until a woman wearing white gloves approached them with the correct code words.

When they arrived at the train station, Warren led them to the specified platform, but the woman in white gloves didn’t appear. The Americans had no way of knowing she had been arrested by the Gestapo after leaving her house to meet them.

As the hours passed, Warren knew that something must have gone wrong, but their only recourse was to keep waiting. The nightly curfew hour was approaching when he finally concluded they would have to fend for themselves.

Warren was the only one in the group who could speak French, and the others asked him to try to find them a safe haven. He found it in the form of a scrub woman who was cleaning the stall of a food vendor in the waiting room of the station.

In escape classes back at Knettishall, Warren had been told that the safest potential ally was a Catholic priest. Next best was someone from the working class. Warren thought the cleaning woman had a sympathetic face.

In colloquial French, he described their situation to her and asked for help. Amazingly, she believed everything he told her. She said that her work shift was almost over, and that the Americans were welcome to spend the night at her one-room apartment.

In the morning, Warren proposed that they return to Troyes, and the other three agreed. Confident in his ability to now pass as a Frenchman, he bought their tickets and led them to the proper train. By midday, they were back where they started. Abbé Bonnard divided the men up again, and found new safe houses for them while another escape plan was organized.

Warren and Joe ended up at the farm of a man named Marcel Doré. It was the perfect place to hide. Monsieur Doré was an animal renderer and spent his days picking up dead horses, cattle, and other farm stock. After hauling the animals back to the farm, he and his men sawed them into large pieces that went into huge metal vats, where wood fires kept the carcasses cooking twenty-four hours a day.

A constant stench filled the air around the farm, and the Germans rarely came to search there. No one else came there, either, except British agents of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). It was their local base of operations.

In late November, Warren was recruited by the SOE operatives to participate in an upcoming resupply operation. A resistance unit near Troyes needed weapons, ammunition, and radio parts.

A single-engine Lysander airplane was coming from England and would arrive before dawn in the nearby countryside. The pilot would only land after he saw an agreed upon configuration of flashlight beams aimed at him from the ground. For this operation, the configuration was to be the French Cross of Lorraine.

At three the next morning, Warren was waiting in the pasture with a dozen members of the local Maquis, all armed with rifles and hand grenades. When they heard the plane coming, the men switched their flashlights on. The pilot landed the Lysander along the vertical line of the French cross. The precious cargo was quickly unloaded, and the plane took off again a few minutes later.

The Maquis’ next mission was to be an attack on a local power station. Warren had agreed to join them again, but before the mission could be mounted, Abbé Bonnard arrived at the Doré farm to tell him that the Burgundy escape line was operational once more, and that he and Joe would be leaving for Paris right away.

They arrived there safely, and spent the next two weeks at a safe house near the Eiffel Tower. An underground agent came to tell Warren that he would be leaving on a train the next morning for Perpignan in the southwest corner of France. From there, he would cross the Pyrenees into Spain.

The agent told Warren and Joe that it would be necessary for them to split up. He said that another American they were harboring was having severe emotional problems. Because Warren had become fluent in French, he was the best choice to help the troubled American make it to Spain.