The Bastard Brigade

by Sam Kean

  Boris Pash did not dither. Failure to apprehend Joliot could mean the death of Alsos. So when Pash came upon a French barricade a few miles outside of Paris and found the road closed to him, he resorted to duplicity. He located the officer in charge, a mustachioed French major, and pulled him aside. In hushed tones he confided that—sacré bleu!—some rogue American tanks had already made a break for Paris. Pash said he had orders to stop them from entering first, and could easily do so. But if monsieur insisted on blocking his path…

  Non, non! the major cried. You will go—you will stop zhese bad Americans! He ordered the barricade dragged aside. Pash bid him au revoir, and roared off cackling.

  His first stop was Joliot and Irène’s home in the suburbs. Finding them absent, he had a servant telephone Joliot’s lab. Joliot wasn’t there, either, so Pash left a message that Alsos was coming.

  As they drew close to Paris, the Alsos crew saw thick smoke hanging in the sky, framing the Eiffel tower in the distance. Along the way their jeeps came under fire several times, although nothing they considered serious. And amid the gunfire the French people continued to cheer the Americans. Indeed, the city folk were even more intoxicated than their country brethren. “Vive les Americains!” they screamed, and threw so many flowers at the jeeps, Pash recalled, “that we resembled the prize floats in the Pasadena Rose Bowl Parade.” Their little mutt leapt onto the hood and barked in joy.

  The Alsos quartet arrived at the nearest entrance to the city, the Porte d’Orléans, at 8:55 a.m. on August 25. The Porte bordered a square lined with balconies and cafés, and the roar that accompanied the sight of their jeeps—the first Allied troops to enter Paris—was so loud they couldn’t hear each other talk. People rushed forward to grab the flowers on the jeeps as souvenirs, quickly stripping them bare. When the roar subsided, an American pilot who’d been shot down over France ran up, grinning to see some Yanks. He informed them that Nazi tanks were still prowling the Luxembourg Gardens near Joliot’s lab. They could in fact hear tank fire in the distance.

  Pash now had a decision to make. Counting himself, he had four men in two open-top jeeps—no match for tanks. He also suspected that the Allied command would “hang and quarter” him if he cut the line and beat the French into Paris. By all rights, he should hang back.

  On the other hand, screw the French—the bastard unit had a mission. Pash gave orders to roll out, and as the jeeps took off, a mob of jubilant Parisians fell in behind them, cheering and waving rifles in the air. It proved a short-lived adventure. A few blocks on, German snipers began peppering the ragtag troops. Pash’s crew tried to fight their way past them, but they simply couldn’t push any farther in jeeps. As much as he hated to, Pash retreated to the Porte d’Orléans to wait for the French.

  He didn’t have to wait long. After asking around about the jeeps, the mustachioed major at the roadblock realized he’d been duped and informed his superiors. They were furious—those dirty Americans! They had no choice but to start marching. In a roundabout way, then, Pash’s trick spurred the liberation of Paris.

  Back at the Porte, Pash could hear the French coming now: the cheers were beyond deafening this time, seismic in intensity. French tanks started rolling through the square a minute later, and Pash let three pass by him before slipping his jeep in behind.

  His team hewed close to the tanks for several hours, letting them clear out the main pockets of resistance. Then, as soon as they spotted an opening, the Alsos crew peeled off and began weaving toward Joliot’s lab. Four separate times, gunmen on nearby rooftops opened fire, pinning them down. At one point the quartet had to abandon the jeeps entirely, taking cover in doorways and behind trees. (The puppy presumably just laid low.) Some brave French militiamen ran up to help, and with Pash’s men orchestrating a counterattack, they fought their way forward house by house.

  Near the Luxembourg Gardens, another group of French partisans flagged Pash down and warned him that the Germans had posted an antitank gun at the intersection just ahead. An antitank shell would of course vaporize a jeep, but Pash refused to turn around, deciding to make a run for it instead. Without any preliminaries he and the other driver revved their engines and gunned them, blowing through the intersection at top speed. Halfway across, they heard a boom. They’d caught the Germans off guard, and the shell exploded harmlessly behind them. Pash once again cackled.

  At 4:30 p.m. they reached the courtyard that fronted Joliot’s lab. Far from celebrating, however, they took a good, hard look around. Most intelligence reports had painted Joliot as a collaborator—all those Germans in his lab. Were they holed up in there now? Had Alsos dodged all that rifle and tank fire just to get killed here? Sure enough, someone opened up on them as soon as they dismounted from the jeeps. But the shots were coming from behind them, from a church belfry, and after Pash’s crew returned fire and chased the gunmen away, the neighborhood fell silent. A minute later an assistant of Joliot’s descended the steps of the lab and greeted them.

  Not quite believing his luck yet, Pash made his way inside to Joliot’s office, where the great scientist shook his hand, every bit as happy to see the Americans as the Americans were to see him. Joliot knew full well about his reputation as a collaborator and was worried about reprisals. “I am afraid for my life,” he admitted. “I shall be grateful if you can give me protection.” Just like that, Alsos had snagged one of the top nuclear physicists in the world.

  Pash and his men were overjoyed. “Lightning-A has struck Paris!” one of them crowed, referring to the Alsos logo, the white α with the red lightning bolt. Pash liked the boast so much that he adopted “Lightning-A” as the nom de guerre of his advance scouting team for the rest of the war.

  To celebrate their triumph, Lightning-A held a feast that night. As the guest of honor, Joliot generously turned his chemistry lab into a kitchen, allowing the Americans to cook food over Bunsen burners and drink champagne from beakers until the wee hours of the morning. It’s hard to imagine Irène tolerating such an invasion, but Joliot had always been more of a bon vivant than the woman he married.

  The next day turned out to be one of those glorious Paris afternoons that make you wonder why anyone would ever live elsewhere. Pash recalled “the golden-red leaves on the trees, the aroma of roasting chestnuts… [the] pretty girls on bicycles, riding along the Champs.” Cafés were blasting the American dance music forbidden during the occupation, and the Alsos crew got so swept up in the excitement that they partied right through a second night. Pash later admitted that when he finally reported to the new army headquarters in Paris on August 27, he was still pretty “befogged.”

  But the message waiting at HQ—“a shock more disturbing than a bomb blast,” he said—sobered him right up. His orders? To stop hunting foreign scientists and start hunting one of his own men. To his astonishment, “Samuel Goudsmit was now Alsos’s target.”

  A few days earlier Goudsmit had flown from London to northern France, planning to meet Pash there and accompany him to Paris. In his tactless way, he groused about every leg of the trip. His plane was fogged in for hours at the airport, and he got so hungry that he had to beg sandwiches from Red Cross workers. The plane’s cold metal bucket seats reminded him of “toilets in kindergarten.” Cherbourg, his first stop, was little more than “tents and barracks and mud.”

  He was supposed to meet Pash in Cherbourg, but Boris was nowhere to be found. So after several hours—and plenty of begging—Goudsmit and a few companions threw their sixty-five-pound duffel bags into a truck and rode the hundred-plus miles to army headquarters near Rennes, to resume searching there. In some ways it was a pleasant ride—the weather was gorgeous, and French people flashed V-signs and shouted “Vive l’Amerique!” the whole way. At the same time, the truck kept having to swerve around land mines and bombed-out vehicles. Goudsmit then saw several dead bodies being pulled out of rubbled homes; the sight of one breathlessly beautiful corpse on a stretcher particularly haunted him.

  Many more h
ours later than it should have taken, they arrived at Rennes—at which point Goudsmit realized that his duffel bag was missing. Either it had been bucked off somewhere along the road, or some cagey French thief had pinched it. He was mortified. Here it was, his first day on the front, and he’d already misplaced everything. Typical longhair. Goudsmit filed a report about the bag, then resumed looking for Pash. He still hadn’t found him by dusk, when he was shunted to a cot in a dilapidated girls’ school. He spent the night listening to the moans of refugees and trying to ignore the stink of the overflowing toilets.

  Fearing that Pash had abandoned him, the next morning Goudsmit talked an officer into lending him a jeep and driver for a last-ditch search of the sprawling headquarters and surrounding towns. Sure enough, he heard rumors that Pash was already inside Paris and had probably snagged Joliot. Although miffed, Goudsmit could do nothing but hurry to Paris himself. But when he asked about transportation, the replies were curt: a scientist didn’t rate a ride anywhere, much less to Paris. Once again he learned that he was just about the last priority in the army.

  Like Pash before him, Goudsmit now had a decision to make. Pash was skeptical that academic scientists could contribute much to Alsos—they were simply too slow and timid. He’d in fact recently grumbled in a letter to a friend that “we may miss the boat in Paris if Sam doesn’t get off the dime”—that is, stop fretting and show some damn initiative. Goudsmit didn’t know about the letter, but he’d no doubt sensed the colonel’s irritation and wanted to prove him wrong. Moreover, Goudsmit needed to prove something to himself. Driving around that day, he later recalled, “I was getting more and more excited and mad, thinking of the responsibility I had.” He’d wanted so badly to contribute to the war, to fight Hitler—yet he’d been bucked off and left behind yet again, abandoned like a duffel bag on the side of the road. He had to get to Paris.

  Still unsure of his plan, he grabbed a road map of France and some extra rations. He then approached the driver who’d been tooling him around. He knew they weren’t supposed to leave the area, but Goudsmit had a few tricks up his sleeve—or had at least read about them in detective novels. He asked the driver, What were the exact orders your officer gave you?

  “He told me to take you wherever you want to go.”

  This was just what Goudsmit hoped to hear—ambiguity. “Fine,” he said. “Paris!”

  “Yes, sir.” If the officer hadn’t been smart enough to spell out his orders, that wasn’t Goudsmit’s fault. They left at dawn the next morning.

  When the officer realized that the longhair had hijacked his jeep, he reported it stolen and put out an APB to arrest one Samuel Goudsmit on sight. But with the map he’d pinched, Goudsmit could steer the driver around every checkpoint, and with the extra rations, they didn’t need to stop for food. Goudsmit later called the caper “my first evil deed.”

  As they entered Paris, Goudsmit tensed: he could hear gunfire coming from every direction. He’d last seen the city in 1938, before the war started, before his parents disappeared. He’d long wondered whether he’d ever see it again, and the churn of emotions as they rolled through different neighborhoods was overwhelming. He had to fight back tears upon seeing the Sorbonne, where he’d once lectured about quantum spin—back when he was still a scientist with promise. The city was looking ragged in places, yes, with ugly scars from the war. But it somehow retained that old magic—it was still beautiful, still Paris. After a few more blocks he gave in and wept openly.

  The tears stopped abruptly at Joliot’s laboratory. Upon arrival he realized that Pash knew all about the stolen car. It turned out that the jeep belonged to one of the top colonels at Rennes, a big swinging dick who was royally pissed off. Goudsmit tried to play down the incident. “I guess we can settle down to business right away,” he said hopefully. Pash countered by asking him whether he thought he could do his job from inside a jail cell.

  Goudsmit scrambled to explain himself—until he saw Pash grinning. After all, Pash had pulled an equally dirty trick in breaking through to Paris, and no one hated empty-headed administrators more than the chief of Alsos. He practically slapped Goudsmit on the back. Welcome to the war, longhair. Goudsmit just about melted with relief, and no doubt flashed that dopey smile of his. He’d proved himself at last. And just as he’d hoped, it was now time to settle down to business—to start hunting for the Nazi nuclear bomb.

  CHAPTER 47

  Zootsuit Black

  Although an army guy, Lieutenant Colonel Roy Forrest liked Joe Kennedy. The navy’s Project Anvil and the army’s Project Aphrodite were basically the same mission, but interservice rivalries had driven a wedge between the two. Instead of working together and trading tips, army and navy pilots had formed cliques on their miserable air base and would bark insults at each other whenever they crossed paths. A navy sentinel even pulled a gun on some army fellows for snooping around the navy planes. And Joe Kennedy—rich, pious, an ambassador’s son—seemed a special magnet for hostility.

  But Forrest didn’t mind Kennedy. The boy knew his stuff and handled the slurs against him with grace. So as a goodwill gesture, Forrest invited Kennedy over occasionally for a nip of whiskey before dinner. In return, Kennedy did Forrest a solid a few weeks later. Forrest had been complaining one night about the ruinous cost of liquor during the war—$20 ($280 today) for a fifth of bourbon. The next day Kennedy knocked on his office door and mentioned that he could get booze cheap in London, $1.40 for a fifth. He just needed transport.

  Forrest rolled his eyes. “Sure, Joe. And you’ll throw in the Tower of London if I act fast, right?”

  But Kennedy insisted: he had connections at the embassy and could get liquor at cost. When Forrest realized Kennedy was serious, he called in his assistant. “Shag ass over to the flight line,” he told him, “and get one of those unloaded babies and fly it over to London for a new set of plugs.” Then he turned to Kennedy. “Lieutenant, I just learned of a flight leaving right away for London. Maybe you can catch a ride.” Six hours later Kennedy knocked again and cooed, “Delivery boy!” He handed Forrest a case of scotch, along with gin, crème de menthe, and two cases of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Total cost: $16.80 for the scotch, with the rest on the house. Yes, Roy Forrest liked this Kennedy boy just fine.

  Shortly afterward, Aphrodite got grounded and Kennedy was tapped as the first Anvil pilot. Out of both professional and fatherly interest, Forrest wandered over one afternoon to check out Kennedy’s plane, Zootsuit Black. The exterior looked a little silly, frankly. Stripped of all its guns, Zootsuit Black was helpless in the air, so a carpenter had mounted two black broomsticks on the underside to pass as machine guns in case they encountered enemy fighters. The interior was far more impressive. Forrest couldn’t help but whistle at all the advanced electronics that engineer Bud Willy had rigged up. Willy had even installed television cameras on the nose cone, which allowed the mother ship to see exactly what Zootsuit saw in real time. Pretty slick.

  Forrest was less impressed with the arming panel, which controlled the explosives. In fact, when he got up close and scrutinized the circuits, he was horrified. The navy had been bragging up and down about its ability to arm the explosives remotely, via radio signals, but to Forrest the panel looked like a hack job, thrown together in just two weeks and full of bad soldering and poorly grounded wires. “This looks like something you’d make with a No. 2 Erector set and Lincoln Logs,” he remembered thinking. Did they really trust this thing?

  That night Forrest voiced his concerns to his superior, a colonel. They were sitting at the bar on base, and when Forrest finished explaining the problem, the colonel shrugged. That’s the navy’s problem, he said. But that panel could kill him, Forrest countered. Besides, weren’t they all fighting the same war?

  The colonel raised his martini and toasted Forrest’s “wild imagination.” “When the navy blows up its drone,” he said, “give me a ring. Nobody wanted the navy here in the first place.”

  If only Forrest had k
nown that a trio of navy electricians shared his fear about the kludgy arming panel. During test flights near Philadelphia the detonation circuits had kept popping on accidentally, possibly due to radio interference. In response, Bud Willy had added a safety measure. The details get a little gnarly, but the explosives were controlled by two distinct circuits. The first armed the explosives, like cocking a gun; the second pulled the trigger. One substep of the arming process involved a coil of wire called a solenoid. Solenoids become magnetic when an electric current flows through them, and in this case the magnetized solenoid would tug on a metal bar. That bar was attached to a few nearby fuses, and when the bar moved, the fuses were armed. In essence, then, moving the bar primed the payload to explode.

  During normal operation that movement wouldn’t happen until the mother plane ordered it. But let’s say a stray radio signal came in. This would start current flowing through the solenoid too early. This would in turn shift the bar prematurely and cock the gun when the pilots were still inside, an unacceptable risk. So for safety’s sake, Willy physically blocked the bar with a metal pin to prevent premature movement. The pilot simply had to pull out the pin before jumping. Problem solved.