by Sam Kean
Worse, each day’s delay only increased the chances that the Nazis would bundle Amaldi up and whisk him away to Berlin, putting him beyond the reach of Alsos. That’s why an increasingly desperate Pash drew up plans to grab the scientist first, a mission he dubbed Operation Shark. It called for sending an American agent or two into Rome to persuade Amaldi to defect. They’d then sneak him out of the city and rendezvous with a submarine twenty miles away, on the Mediterranean coast. From there the submarine would smuggle Amaldi back to Naples for interrogation. Similar missions along the Adriatic Sea, on Italy’s eastern coast, would target other physicists. And if the physicists resisted? Well, the agents would bludgeon them on the head and drag them along by their hair. Easy-peasy.
At first Pash envisioned leading these raids into Rome himself, but Washington quickly put the kibosh on that—he knew too much about the Manhattan Project to risk capture. So Pash threw his energy into organizing the raids, which turned out to be labor enough. For one thing, contacting Amaldi and other targets proved tougher than expected. The Nazis, ruthless in a way the Italians weren’t, had wiped out the underground resistance in Rome, making it difficult to reach anyone outside official channels. That meant sending in undercover agents, which meant involving OSS. Wild Bill Donovan’s boys didn’t balk at the idea: Operation Shark was just the sort of caper they relished, and OSS was already working with Mafia dons in southern Italy to open doors there, so the agency had a good chance of succeeding. But dealing with OSS added more layers of bureaucracy and caused more delays.
Pash finally got word that OSS agents had contacted Amaldi in Rome, as well as another physicist in Turin several weeks later; arrangements to slip them out were under way. All OSS needed was a submarine. That detail, however, was proving a headache. The British technically controlled the seas around Italy, so Pash had to secure their permission to slip a sub in. But the British didn’t trust the bastard brigade any more than the Americans did, because Pash once again refused to explain his mission. German U-boats still haunted the seas anyway, making a submarine run risky in the extreme. Pash ended up wasting whole weeks flying back and forth to London and Washington and Naples trying to arrange things.
It didn’t help that OSS kept changing the mission for reasons that Pash couldn’t fathom. They suddenly wanted to swap out the submarine for PT boats, the kind Jack Kennedy had captained. However frustrated, Pash bit his tongue and hustled up some PTs. Even worse, OSS twice scheduled extractions and then scrubbed them without explanation—once without bothering to tell Pash. He had stayed up all night to hear how the mission went, fretful and anxious, and come dawn was furious to learn that nothing had happened.
Pash had just about blown his fuse when, in late spring, after months of preparation, the entire operation collapsed. On May 30, U.S. military officers arrested an Italian agent code-named Morris. OSS had hired Morris to help infiltrate Rome and make contact with Amaldi and others. Unfortunately, they hadn’t done their homework, and Morris turned out to be a double agent; he’d been tipping off the Nazis for months about operations in Italy and North Africa. When the military raided his apartment in Naples, they found classified documents related to Shark, including the names of people involved and a timeline for the operation.
The army appeared to have stopped Morris before he warned the Germans about Shark. But no one knew for sure, and Pash couldn’t risk an agent walking into a trap with Amaldi. Operation Shark was dead.
Most of the fault for this mess rested with OSS, but Pash—a supposed security expert—also took some blame. Even worse for his reputation, his entire scientific team soon quit, convinced Alsos was a waste of time. The bastard brigade’s chief bastard had already angered several officers in Naples, and now Washington was looking askance as well. Most frustrating of all, after months of work, Pash had learned exactly zero about the Nazi atomic bomb.
CHAPTER 39
Biscay Blues
It was a long, cold, depressing winter for Joe Kennedy in the Bay of Biscay—dangerous from a military point of view and dispiriting from a personal one.
At the war’s outset a German admiral named Karl Dönitz had mocked Allied efforts to hunt submarines with planes, saying, “An aircraft can no more kill a U-boat than a crow can kill a mole.” At the time Dönitz was right, but new technologies soon drove the moles to near extinction. Allied scientists managed to shrink radar equipment to fit inside planes, which the Germans had considered impossible. They also shrunk down their sonar to fit inside buoys, and made the gear robust enough to drop the buoys from planes into the sea, where they pinged any subs that passed by. German engineers did fight back with defense measures, including the so-called pillenwerfer, which was basically a gigantic Alka-Seltzer tablet. When released into the water surrounding the sub, it produced trillions of bubbles that absorbed some of the incoming waves instead of reflecting them back. But Allied sonar and radar just kept getting better, and plane crews also learned to spot subs visually—either by the oil slicks they left behind or their sharklike shadows from above. They could then use phosphorus flares to expose them when they surfaced for air. Once located, submarines became vulnerable to attack by depth charges, and in tandem these tactics all but annihilated the U-boat fleets off France. For every twenty German subs that set out in the winter of 1943–44, the Allies destroyed nineteen.
That’s not to say the Allies didn’t suffer, too. German fighters often escorted U-boats, and because they were much nimbler than the sub-hunting planes, they sent dozens of flaming wrecks into the sea. On one excursion in November, Kennedy’s crew had to fight off two German hawks simultaneously and barely survived; a few months later they had to make an emergency landing when an engine got knocked out. Other planes proved less lucky. By March 1944, Joe’s squadron had lost three dozen of its 106 men, including several friends of his.
What really upset Joe was that, despite all the danger, hunting subs offered no chance for personal glory. Crews succeeded or failed en masse, and Joe’s patrol planes seldom killed subs themselves, only marked them for others. Unlike his kid brother, Joe never had a chance to distinguish himself as a hero, and he considered ditching Europe altogether and joining a unit in the Pacific.
Little did he know, his salvation was already in the works. In the spring of 1944 General Eisenhower made destroying the huge concrete bunkers in northern France a priority, and over the next few months the Allies dropped fifteen million pounds of explosives on them. Several attacks featured the new 12,000-pound “earthquake bombs,” which caused tectonic booms when they landed. The mysterious V-3 bunker at Mimoyecques was pummeled especially hard, enduring a dozen raids involving 2,200 hundred planes; the surrounding landscape looked stricken with smallpox afterward, pitted and scarred with overlapping craters. Overall, these raids cost the Allies 450 planes and 2,900 men—and did zero good. Reconnaissance photos showed that activity at the bunkers never slowed a whit. Soldiers and supplies kept pouring in, and the bunkers kept expanding. The most devastating bombs in the Allied arsenal were impotent.
Allied leaders began scouting around for new strategies, and they soon hit upon a doozy. In March 1944 a navy captain suggested taking old, “war weary” Liberator bombers and, instead of selling them for scrap, turning the planes themselves into bombs. That is, he suggested packing them with explosives and slamming them into targets. Given the expense involved, not to mention the danger, the project made sense only for the most impregnable sites, and the bunkers in northern France shot to the top of the list.
The army and navy worked independently on these flying bombs—the navy called its scheme Project Anvil, the army Project Aphrodite—but the general idea was the same. Each mission required two planes, a mother ship and a baby ship. The babies were the war-weary bombers, and to get the projects rolling, the military turned loose a crew of mechanics to strip every last component from them, inside and out: ammo bins, bomb racks, benches, tables, turrets, guns; they even removed load-bearing structures, an
d had to shore up the bombers’ interiors with timbers. In all, the mechanics (who had a hell of a good time with this) removed four tons of metal, lightening the bombers by almost one-quarter. As soon as the mechanics finished, other crews came along and filled the babies back up with explosives. They used either napalm (gelled gasoline) or nitrostarch (acids mixed with cornstarch, a common ingredient in hand grenades of that era). The explosives came packed in crates, and each bomber held roughly ten tons of crates. Thus loaded, the bomber became a bomb.
Getting one of these flying bombs off the ground was harrowing. The one component of the original plane left intact was the pilot’s seat, and if you’ve ever overloaded a moving van, you can imagine the feeling of rumbling down the runway here: furniture piled to the ceiling all around you, looming over your shoulder, shifting ominously with every bump. Except in this case, it’s not lamps and bookshelves knocking about, it’s napalm. And really, the pilot was the lucky one. While the plane had only one seat, the Anvil/Aphrodite missions required two people to fly, a pilot and an engineer. That meant the engineer had to squat down during takeoff, wrap his arms and legs around the pilot’s seat, and hope to god for a smooth ascent.
Once airborne, the pilot would settle into a cruising altitude of 1,800 feet. The engineer would peel himself off the floor and set up the plane’s autopilot—a series of gyroscopes that controlled pitch, roll, and yaw. Each gyro had to be calibrated independently, and they would do most of the work of getting the flying bomb to France. But not all of it. Actually steering the plane into the bunker would require finer control than the autopilot could provide, and here’s where the mother ship came in. The mother had remote-control capabilities, allowing it to nudge the baby left or right and send it into a dive. The only problem was, given the crude state of electronics at the time, you couldn’t just buy a remote-control kit and install it. Several different custom-made circuits had to be wired up and calibrated, and this could only be done midflight. All told, this equipment took the engineer roughly half an hour to set up.
When this step was finished, the engineer would radio a code word to the mother ship (e.g., “flyball” or “change pictures”) and the mother ship would take over. His mission complete, the engineer would descend into the belly of the plane via trapdoor and wriggle through a two-foot-wide crawl space toward an emergency escape hatch. There, he’d strap on a parachute and—trying to ignore the propeller whirring a few feet from his head—fling himself out into the wild blue yonder.
Meanwhile, the pilot would go through a series of checks to make sure the remote-control circuits worked. With this confirmed, he’d point the baby toward France and send it into a gentle dive at 175 miles an hour. Then he’d lower himself through the trapdoor and retrace the engineer’s path toward the parachute hatch. He’d have to hurry here, because the plane was already sinking, and parachuting out at any height below a thousand feet was tantamount to suicide. Last thing before jumping, he’d arm the explosives. This involved locating several cables on a large bank of electronics and jerking them out—essentially cocking the world’s largest revolver. Then, Geronimo! Assuming the plane was still over England, he’d land in a field or a pasture. If not, he’d take a dip in the Channel.
From here on out, the mother ship—flying high above the baby—would steer it over to France. (The baby was painted white or yellow on top to make it easier to see.) Once the baby drew within range of the bunkers, someone in the mother ship would hit the “dump switch” to snap the elevators on the baby’s wings into the down position. This would send it careening into the bunkers and rid the world of Hitler’s atomic rockets in a huge explosion.
The most dangerous part of the mission involved the so-called jump team, the pilot and engineer in the baby ship. Because while this wasn’t quite a Japanese kamikaze mission—in theory, they both survived—it wasn’t much safer. You might as well try to surf a torpedo up to an aircraft carrier. The number of ways the mission could go awry is too long to list, but a few things stand out. Explosives are inherently unstable, and electronics back then were pretty dodgy, so a rocky takeoff or some midair turbulence could detonate the payload. Equally dangerous was the act of exiting the plane. It’s easy to forget in our age of skydiving grandmothers, but parachuting—especially at such low altitudes—was once considered a desperate maneuver: military manuals often advised pilots to crash-land if at all possible, even if their planes were full of fuel, rather than risk jumping out. And after all this peril, Anvil/Aphrodite had a slim chance of succeeding anyway. As large planes, bombers could hold an impressive amount of explosives, but they were actually too well engineered for this type of mission: they were so stable in flight that it was hard to make them plummet on command. Worst of all, while the concrete bunkers in France spanned several football fields, the most vulnerable points, especially the V-3 gun muzzles at Mimoyecques, were only a few yards wide.
But once again, fear of Hitler’s “wonder weapons” overrode all other considerations, and in the spring of 1944 the U.S. Navy began plans to convert war-weary PB4Y-1 Liberators into flying bombs. Fortunately for Joe Kennedy, the Liberator happened to be the plane with the super-complicated cockpit that he’d already mastered—and Project Anvil was just the sort of recklessly heroic mission he’d been dying to fly.
CHAPTER 40
The Fat Captain
After months of idling, Alsos finally saw some action in Italy in the summer of 1944. The Allies toppled the mountaintop monastery of Monte Cassino in mid-May, and the rest of the exhausted country fell in short order, including Rome on June 4. Boris Pash packed the remainder of his crew into jeeps and raced the 120 miles north from Naples. They entered the city on June 5 at 8 a.m. and immediately set off to find Edoardo Amaldi, hoping against hope that the Germans hadn’t absconded with him.
They hadn’t. The moment Pash and company stopped their jeeps near Amaldi’s house, a mob of children surrounded them, awed to see real Americans. The soldiers smiled and patted their heads but didn’t linger. Operation Shark documents had described Amaldi as a slim five foot five, with “blue eyes, chestnut hair, [and] tortoiseshell glasses,” and Pash was immensely relieved to find someone of that description at the address indicated. After six futile months Alsos had snagged its first target.
Pash explained to Amaldi that Alsos would have to detain and debrief him, which Amaldi accepted with good humor. Indeed, he was flattered that the mighty Americans took an interest in him; they even called him doctor. When the Germans had taken over Rome, he said, they’d cared only about rounding up military officials, ignoring scientists completely.
However relieved he was to see Amaldi, Pash didn’t remember their conversation quite as fondly. He was actually cringing inside the whole time, waiting for Amaldi to rebuke him for the botched Shark mission. Finally Pash couldn’t stand the tension any longer and broached the subject himself: “We are certainly sorry, Dr. Amaldi, to have caused you difficulty and danger.”
The physicist asked what he meant.
“I’m referring to the time our agent contacted you, with that plan to cross the lines.”
Amaldi looked bemused. “There must be some mistake, Colonel Pash. I had not heard of such a plan.”
Now it was Pash’s turn to look perplexed. “Do you mean to tell me, Doctor, that you were not alerted to be at a beach area in late February, to be picked up by a PT boat?”
Amaldi blinked. He had no idea what Pash was talking about.
The truth hit Pash all at once. The delays with Shark, the shifting plans, the unexplained cancellations: OSS had been bullshitting him the whole time. Perhaps OSS really had intended to help him and had merely bungled things. Or perhaps they’d never intended to help and had simply been stringing Pash along. Perhaps it was all part of some larger scheme he couldn’t discern. Regardless, they’d played Pash for a fool. He managed to maintain his composure in front of Amaldi, saying that he must have misunderstood something back at his base. “But the wheels in
my head,” he recalled, “were grinding out sparks.”
When they finished talking, Pash gave Amaldi strict orders to stay in Rome, then left to hunt down another physicist. After that, Pash retired to his room at a local hotel, along with the rest of Alsos, planning to debrief Amaldi and others the next day. But just as Pash was settling down to a postdinner glass of Chianti, Amaldi knocked on his door, looking shaken.
There’s an American captain in the lobby below, Amaldi said. He has orders to take me away.
“By what authority?” Pash asked.
“Orders from the president of the United States,” Amaldi said. American attention might be flattering, but this seemed absurd.
Confused, Pash went to investigate. In the lobby he found a “big hunk” of a man with heavy eyebrows lounging in a chair. The captain looked Pash up and down and smirked. “Colonel,” he said, “looks like you and I are going to have to reach an understanding.” Amaldi, he said, was going with him.
All the frustration of the past six months erupted inside Pash. “Attention!” he barked. The captain looked startled. “Attention!” Pash barked again, and the man jumped to his feet. He stood a good half-foot taller than Pash, but the colonel got right in his face. “What is this all about?”
The captain protested that Pash was interfering with a vital mission regarding Amaldi. “This is secret, Colonel. But since you got yourself into this—well, I’ll tell you. I am to deliver him to the Alsos mission in Naples.”