The Bastard Brigade

by Sam Kean

  This realization had two effects. First, it pushed American scientists to work maniacally hard on atomic bombs. Second, it convinced the Allies to sponsor a series of desperate missions to sabotage the Nazi bomb project. Spies, soldiers, physicists, politicians—all had roles to play. As one historian said, “Never, perhaps, have scientists and statesmen played for higher stakes, or has the sense of breathless urgency driven men to more extraordinary exertions.”

  The Bastard Brigade recounts these heroic, chaotic, and often deadly efforts—involving not only the likes of Boris Pash and Joe Kennedy, but courageous female scientists like Irène Joliot-Curie and Lise Meitner. Science had certainly contributed to warfare before 1939, but in World War II, the Allies gave scientists guns and helmets and dispatched them into combat zones for the first time. This shadow war paralleled the visible one in many ways, but the men and women involved more or less ignored the movements of troops, tanks, and airplanes, and instead stalked ideas—vast, world-changing scientific ideas.

  Still, the Allies weren’t above playing dirty when the mission called for it. The subject of the first chapter—the country’s first atomic spy, an enigmatic baseball catcher named Moe Berg—stole his friends’ mail, lied repeatedly to superiors, and went AWOL with alarming frequency. For him and others, no tactics were too extreme—air strikes, commando raids, Molotov cocktails, kidnappings—as long as they kept the Bomb out of Hitler’s hands.

  Unlike other histories of the Nazi atomic bomb, this story focuses on the Allies—putting us directly into the minds of the men and women confronted with, perhaps, the ultimate mission. Much of what follows comes from previously unpublished or overlooked sources, which provide new insight into some of the war’s most fascinating yet unheralded characters. All the missions were top-secret, naturally, and those who volunteered for them often had dark motivations for doing so; in some cases they spent as much energy fighting each other as they did the enemy. But if they couldn’t shake their personal demons, they never flinched when facing down the Nazi threat.

  The Bastard Brigade starts in that “low dishonest decade” of the 1930s, with the birth of nuclear fission, and it continues through the epic manhunts of the very last days of the war. The Allies had sacrificed millions of lives conquering North Africa and Italy, not to mention gaining footholds in France and Germany. But with just a few pounds of uranium, they feared, Hitler could reverse the entire D-Day operation and drive the Allies off the continent forever.

  So if the story that follows seems frantic, reckless, or even mad at times, there’s good reason for that. Scientists and soldiers alike were convinced that a madman would soon acquire the superhuman power locked inside the atomic nucleus. And to prevent that, no price was too high to pay.

  PART I

  Prewar, to 1939

  CHAPTER 1

  Professor Berg

  America’s first atomic spy very nearly wasn’t American at all. After fleeing pogroms in Ukraine in the 1890s, Moe Berg’s father Bernard booked passage from London to the United States on a crowded, dirty steamer that reeked of bologna and unwashed bodies. And when he arrived in New York, the ghettoes and tenements there made steerage class seem luxurious. After hearing that foreigners who fought in the Boer War would get automatic British citizenship, he hopped the next boat back to London—only to find that the offer had expired. With great reluctance, he spent his last ten dollars returning to New York, resigned to becoming an American.

  Bernard soon married a seamstress from Romania named Rose, with whom he had three children, and they opened a launderette on the Lower East Side. It was not a success. A chronic reader, Bernard often got so absorbed in his books while ironing that he burned holes in people’s garments. Eventually he admitted his shortcomings and opened a pharmacy in Newark instead, installing his young family in the apartment above. (Because he worked so much—fifteen hours a day—he interacted with them by hollering through a tube that ran upstairs.) As the first Jewish family in their neighborhood, the Bergs suffered occasional discrimination (children would holler, “Hey, Christ-killer!”), but the pharmacy eventually became a social hub in the neighborhood. Bernard was especially renowned for his “Berg cocktails”—laxatives of castor oil and root beer. Before mixing one, he’d ask Mrs. So-and-So how far away she lived. Four blocks, she’d say. He’d then measure out a four-block cocktail and have her chug it. Go straight home, he’d warn her, and don’t dally to talk. People learned the hard way that he wasn’t joking.

  Bernard and Rose’s youngest child, twelve-pound Moe, arrived in 1902. With Bernard working all the time, the boy had complete freedom to pursue his passion, baseball. He’d toss around balls, apples, oranges, anything vaguely spheroid, at any hour, and even as a child, he was the best catcher in Newark. He’d squat behind manhole covers, holding a glove that looked as big as a pillow in his tiny hands, and let local cops fire heaters at him. “Harder!” Berg would cry. “Harder!” Finally one cop wound up and really smoked a pitch. Berg staggered back and almost toppled. But he held on—no adult could get one past him. Hearing of this prodigy, a local church all-star team scooped him up. They insisted he use a Christian pseudonym, Runt Wolfe, but Runt quickly became the squad’s star.

  The only person not impressed by Moe’s baseball prowess was his father. A reluctant U.S. citizen, he never could embrace this most American of sports. He looked down on ballplayers as clods and contrasted them with his real heroes, scholars. But the thing was, Moe was pretty sharp in the classroom, too, graduating from high school at sixteen and winning admission to Princeton University. There, following one of his father’s passions, he majored in Romance languages, taking six courses some semesters; he dabbled in Sanskrit and Greek to boot. When Berg later became famous, no quirk of his would attract more attention than his faculty for languages. Some admirers claimed he spoke six, all fluently; some said eight; others a dozen.

  To his father’s distress, Berg also played baseball for Princeton’s Tigers. Ivy League games often drew huge crowds back then, up to twenty thousand people, and Berg blossomed into the team’s star shortstop. It helped that he stood six foot one, and had huge mitts: “shaking hands with him was like shaking hands with a tree,” an acquaintance remembered. In Berg’s junior year the Tigers almost beat the world champion New York Giants in an exhibition game at the Polo Grounds, losing 3–2. He then led the Tigers to a 21–4 record his senior year—including an 18-game winning streak—and hit .337, including .611 against rivals Harvard and Yale. He and the team’s second baseman that year, another linguaphile, would discuss on-field defensive strategies in Latin to prevent the other team from catching on.

  Now, you might think that a tall, well-built, all-American shortstop at Princeton with a flair for Romance languages would be a popular guy, and people did admire Berg. But mostly from afar; he had few real friends at school. In part, this was Princeton’s fault. Most Princeton boys (it was an all-male university then) had attended fancy prep schools, and some showed up for classes in chauffeured cars. Berg, meanwhile, toiled to afford the $650 tuition, working as a camp counselor in New Hampshire each summer and delivering Christmas packages over winter break. The expensive habits he affected—smoking jackets, scented hair oil—didn’t fool anyone. Being Jewish didn’t help, either. His senior year the Princeton baseball nine elected someone a little more suitable (read: WASPy) as team captain, which stung. And when it came time to join an eating club (the Princeton version of a fraternity), he got voted into one—on the condition that he not get pushy and advocate for other Jews. Humiliated, Berg refused to join.

  But the isolation wasn’t all Princeton’s fault. Berg’s essential trait, the one that defined the whole course of his life, was his furtiveness. He was handsome and witty. Men admired his erudition and athletic skill. Women cooed when he whispered in French and Italian. But he never attended parties, never asked anyone to dinner, never let anyone get close to him. He was an incorrigible loner, constantly pushing people away, and
he cultivated an air of inscrutability.

  Two ball clubs, the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Robins (later the Dodgers), tried to sign Berg out of Princeton in 1923—in part because attendance was sagging, and they figured a Jewish star would provide a boost. But Berg hesitated; he’d set his heart on attending graduate school at the Sorbonne in Paris that year. He did finally sign, however, figuring that he could attend the Sorbonne during the off-season. (You know, like most ballplayers.) Of the two clubs, the Robins had the worse record, which meant that Berg could play immediately. So to his father’s further shame, he signed a $5,000 contract ($71,000 today) that summer. A few days later in Philadelphia, in his first at-bat, he singled and drove in a run.

  It was probably the highlight of his rookie season. Although a graceful fielder, with a blistering arm, he was young and skittish and made too many errors to play full-time. Worse, he struggled to adjust to Major League pitching. Although he rarely struck out, he didn’t hit for power and was far too slow to leg out hits; a manager once cracked that Berg looked like he was running the bases in snowshoes. He batted just .186 in 49 games, and a scout that summer summed up Berg’s prospects in four words: “Good field, no hit.”

  Instead of working on his hitting, Berg skipped town for the Sorbonne that winter. Tuition was cheap ($1.95 per course, $28 today), so he gorged himself on classes, sitting in on twenty-two. Topics included French, Italian, Latin of the Middle Ages, and “The Comic in Drama.” Berg was particularly interested in tracing the “bastardization” of Latin as it spread through Europe. (“The farther Caesar’s legions trekked from Rome,” he later explained, “the more the pure Latin become diluted with the words and idioms of the people they were trying to subjugate.”) He was a feisty student, too. Before one European history course—which covered the fraught decades leading up to the Great War—he declared, “If it becomes too one-sided, I’ll tell the professor to stick the course up his—.” But overall the classes more than fulfilled his expectations. In a letter home he declared that he would have paid five dollars to hear some of the individual lectures, they were that good: “For what I am getting out of it, I ought to endow a chair in the Sorbonne.”

  While in Paris, Berg also picked up a lifelong habit of reading several newspapers a day, often in different languages. Although he owned few possessions, newspapers were something he got territorial about. He’d haul them back to his room by the armful and read a few stories here, a few stories there. Then, according to some recondite filing system, he’d drape them over chairs, dressers, bathroom plumbing, even his bed, intending to pick them up again later. He called these half-read periodicals his “live” papers, and woe betide anyone who touched a live paper. Berg would explode in rage, flinging the pages and stomping off to buy a “fresh” one, no matter how late at night or how lousy the weather. Only when he’d finished a paper and pronounced it “dead” could people touch it. No one ever figured out why he got so upset over this—it was part of the mystery of Moe.

  Unfortunately for Berg’s baseball career, he gorged himself on more than newspapers in Paris, taking full advantage of the city’s cuisine. A typical day started with chocolate and buttered croissants for breakfast, and for dinner he’d stuff himself at restaurants for fifty cents. Drink tempted him as well. In one letter home he declared, “[I] shall probably drink no more water. The wine is very strengthening.” He made no attempt to exercise beyond walking, and gained at least ten pounds that winter. As a result, he showed up for spring training in March in dreadful shape and got demoted to AAA ball.

  Thus began a long, frustrating stint in the minors, hopping from the Minneapolis Millers to the Toledo Mud Hens to the Reading Keystones. (The demotion must have vexed his father, too.) But during his second season of purgatory, Berg collected 200 hits and 124 RBIs, and in 1926 the Chicago White Sox snagged him for $50,000 ($700,000 today), a gigantic contract. Not wanting to miss another chance, Berg worked hard and rewarded the Sox by playing the best baseball of his life over the next few years.

  Berg owed some of this improvement to his switching to a more natural position. He told different versions of the story over the years, but in August 1927, the Sox’s starting catcher got injured in a collision at the plate. A few days later, the backup split a finger open during a doubleheader. Then the backup’s backup, the last catcher on the roster, got knocked silly in another collision in Boston. The manager groaned: What the hell are we going to do now? Berg, sitting on the bench, apparently jerked a thumb toward a teammate, a chubby first baseman who’d caught in the minors. “You’ve got a catcher right here,” he said. But the manager had his back turned and didn’t see Berg’s gesture; he only heard his voice and thought Berg was volunteering—or being a wiseacre. He turned and looked his budding shortstop up and down. “You ever catch?”

  “In high school,” Berg answered.

  “Why did you quit?”

  “Because of something a man said. He said I was lousy.”

  “Who was that man?”

  “My coach.”

  “Well, get in there and let’s see if he knew what he was talking about.”

  Berg said aye aye and began strapping himself into the catcher’s upholstery. “If the worst happens,” he announced to the bench, “kindly deliver the body to Newark.”

  The Sox lost the game, but Berg played well. That night, while teammates went carousing, he joined a mass protest against the Sacco and Vanzetti executions on the Boston Common, and when the Sox shipped out for New York the next day to play the dreaded Yankees, the manager penciled him in as the starting catcher. As Babe Ruth stepped into the batter’s box in the bottom of the first, he smirked and said, “Moe, you’re going to be the fourth wounded White Sox catcher by the fifth inning.” Moe replied that he was going to call for a barrage of inside pitches on Ruth. That way, “We can keep each other company at the hospital.” They both laughed. But the catcher laughed last: with Berg calling pitches, the mighty Babe struck out twice that day and never hit a ball out of the infield. Berg picked apart the rest of Murderer’s Row in similar fashion, and added a single and an RBI in the decisive three-run sixth inning, helping the White Sox win 6–3.

  Nevertheless, Berg’s manager didn’t trust his new catcher and kept scouring the East Coast for minor leaguers and semipro lads. History remains grateful that he didn’t find anyone, because as Berg got more comfortable behind the plate, he developed into one of the top catchers in the American League. Teams quickly learned not to test his arm on the base paths, and with his experience as a shortstop, few pitches got by him; he once set an AL record by playing 117 straight errorless games. Aside from fielding, he excelled at the cerebral side of baseball. He catalogued every batter’s weakness, and with his constant patter and diabolical pitch calls, he easily got inside their heads; pitchers rarely called off his signs. Catching proved an advantage at the plate as well. With a better understanding of how pitchers thought, he developed into a serviceable pull hitter, regularly stroking fastballs down the left-field line. Even his glaring weakness, a lack of foot speed, proved no real handicap now—catchers are supposed to plod. In 1929, his best season, Berg hit .287 in 107 games and collected 101 hits. He even garnered a few votes for MVP.

  Incredibly, Berg did all this while attending law school at Columbia University in the off-season. When other players took trains back to Alabama and Texas to chop wood in October, Berg schlepped up to Manhattan and—having started classes three weeks late due to baseball commitments—busted his ass catching up on contracts and finance law. “I worked like a Trojan,” he once said, “thinking always of February and the south [for spring training] once more.” Teammates thought the whole arrangement queer, sportswriters amusing. The White Sox owners found it frustrating, since he often missed spring training in Shreveport while finishing up classes. But Berg insisted on attending, probably because of his father. Even when his son blossomed into a poor man’s MVP candidate, Bernard refused to attend any games. Whenever s
omeone mentioned the catcher around the pharmacy in Newark, he’d turn his head and spit. “A sport,” he’d scoff. Law was vastly more respectable.

  So after Berg took the New York bar exam one spring—a series of long essay questions—and reported to Chicago for the season, he kept checking the New York Times each day in the library to see if he’d passed. He finally saw his name listed—one of 600 to qualify, out of 1,600. “Think of the poor suckers who flunked,” he gloated. “I was never happier in my life.” He phoned Bernard with the news.

  His father was terse: “You didn’t have to call long distance. I read the papers.” With that, he hung up on his son.

  Six months after his best Major League season, Berg suffered a devastating injury. In April 1930, during an exhibition game in Little Rock, he dove back to first base during a pickoff attempt. His spikes got caught in the dirt, and he tore a ligament in his right knee and ended up needing surgery at the Mayo Clinic. He sat out a few months and tried coming back, but clearly wasn’t healthy. A midseason bout of pneumonia weakened him further. All in all, the injury and the illness wiped out the next two years, limiting him to twenty games with Chicago and (after Chicago cut him) ten with Cleveland. With his future in baseball looking shaky, he began practicing law on Wall Street in the off-season to make money. He hated it.

  In 1932, after two years of rehab, Berg had recovered enough to sign with the Washington Senators. But he simply didn’t have the same spring in his legs anymore. His once adequate hitting deteriorated; he was slower than ever, becoming an outright liability on the base paths; and he simply couldn’t squat for hours in the sun on that knee. So Washington demoted him to bullpen catcher. Berg would never again be mistaken for someone who collected MVP votes.