They were in free fall. Billings stared at the control panels but saw no sign of engine trouble, and no sign of Nazi flak hitting the plane, either. He quickly realized they were caught headlong in a ferocious windstorm that was particular to big mountain ranges, especially here in the Alps. He had heard about the notorious storms, called foehns, but had never actually been trapped in one. The warm winds were now crashing over the back side of the mountain and down on top of the B-24 at speeds measuring two hundred miles an hour. The aircraft was plummeting nose first toward the ground. One thousand feet down in just a few seconds, then two thousand feet. Billings cranked the turbo control power, but it was no match for the monstrous winds.
Now three thousand feet down; four thousand feet. The needle for the horsepower was tilting clear off the instrument panel, with the plane now generating even more thrust than Billings had needed at takeoff, and the engine was revving at an alarming twenty-seven hundred revolutions a minute. Yet still they were going down, and Billings was helpless to stop it. Five thousand feet down, then six thousand feet. Slammed downward by the overhead winds, they were now dropping even faster than a plane in an all-out nose dive: well over a mile in just eighteen seconds. Billings braced for the crash. His men were silent. In the back of the plane, the three Joes sucked oxygen from their masks and gripped the thin ledges of their seats. With no windows to reveal what was going on, Freddy peered outside through a tiny open flap in the back of the fuselage at the huge plumes of black exhaust and flames shooting into the sky. He couldn’t see what was happening in the cockpit, but he didn’t have to be a legitimate pilot to know that they were in trouble.
Then, almost as suddenly as the foehn winds started, they stopped. Billings and his crew had only a few moments to regain control of the plane. They struggled to slow their descent and level off the plane, then snaked their way slowly upward foot by foot, making one wide turn at a time, dangerously close between the canyon’s narrow walls. “Turn, turn!” his navigator yelled, so close to one wall that they could almost count the pine-branch needles jutting out of the snow.
The agonizing climb, thousands of feet back up the canyon, took a full twenty-two minutes. As the aircraft lifted its nose over the rim of the mountain and toward the night sky, Billings could finally manage a deep breath. Out of danger for the moment, he thought about heading back to the air base in Rosignano yet again. No one would have blamed him. It was now after midnight. The white-knuckled dive down into the valley had sapped his crew’s energy. Still, Billings knew how badly the lead Joe in the back of his plane wanted to make the drop. After all their starts and stops, Billings himself was invested in making it happen tonight, too. The plane had plenty of fuel left, and he wasn’t returning again with his cargo if he could find another way.
Billings told his crew he wanted to make another pass. They headed back to their original target from days before: those iced-over lakes, ten thousand feet high, now looming in the distance. He veered down toward an opening in another mountain range; it was so narrow that the crew kept on the wing position lights for fear of scraping the mountain walls. They made it through unscathed, but another mountain ridge awaited them on the other side, blocking Billings from getting low enough to drop his passengers. They couldn’t see the lakes that had been so prominent, circled in red, in the photos that OSS had rushed to them. It was as if they had disappeared. Billings wasn’t giving up yet. Almost immediately, he and his crewmen spotted what looked like a clear, flat area several miles to the south. Like an eagle reversing course to swoop down on a fish, the B-24 pivoted toward its latest target. Three thousand feet below them was what looked like a glacier ledge about a mile or so wide, frozen but flat. They had a good look at it, with a clear pathway down. The bombardier relayed word to the Joes: Prepare to drop.
Cruising now at a low speed of about 110 miles an hour, Billings dipped down toward their new pinpoint target. This figured to be their last best hope. He had to decide how close the plane would get to the glacier before he dropped the men. Billings remembered Freddy’s spirited protests back at the base over that very question. Safety regimens demanded a height of no lower than 600 feet, but Freddy, always negotiating for an edge, pushed Billings to drop him just 150 feet above their target; that would give any Nazi snipers in the area less time to shoot at them, Freddy argued. Billings demurred; a drop that low risked crashing a plane that heavy, and their parachutes wouldn’t even deploy all the way in such a short range, he pointed out. Billings wasn’t used to negotiating this way with his Joes—typically he had no contact with them whatsoever—but this time he compromised. “I’ll give you three hundred feet, but no less,” he told Freddy finally, hoping to shut him up.
Billings now zeroed in on the glacier poking out from the mountain, about ninety-five hundred feet aboveground. In the back of the plane, the Joes readied themselves, while Haass—who had escaped Nazi Germany himself as a boy—stood behind them to serve as jump master and time the choreography. The Joes took off their oxygen masks and removed the plywood board over the Joe hole on the floor, the only thing separating them from the sky below.
The opening was the size of a large manhole; a huskier man might have to wiggle his way through it, but the three of them would have no difficulty. They lined up in position—Freddy first, then Franz, then Hans. They needed to jump in quick succession; a delay of even a second or two could mean missing the ledge of the glacier and drifting thousands of feet farther down into unknown terrain. Back at training at Bari weeks before, Dyno Lowenstein had warned them of the risks. “The slightest hesitation when you jump, it counts for a few miles,” he said. It wasn’t just the timing of the men that mattered; their supplies needed to reach them on the ground, too. In rapid sequence, the flight crew would have to release the cargo-filled drums and hit their mark closely enough for the men to find them all on the ground.
Freddy sat down on the edge of the Joe hole, his legs dangling, like a kid on a swing set. He could still remember the pain in his father’s face that day aboard the SS Manhattan seven years earlier, as they were fleeing Germany, when they learned that Hitler had taken over Austria. Now here he was, dropping into that very place to try to help free the country from the Nazis. Freddy double-checked the straps on his back; they held a single parachute that, unlike those of other paratrooper units, had no emergency backup if something went wrong. The parachute was tethered to the plane so it would rip away automatically once he began his descent. Strapped to his legs was a heavy bag with essential supplies the team would need immediately after they landed—including water and food rations for three days, flashlights, compasses, maps, a radio transmitter, and a specially designed fountain pen with a tiny piece of film hidden inside containing OSS’s secret radio codes. The leg bag was supposed to hold just the essentials—but Hans had slipped in another chemistry book before they left the base. Freddy objected. A chemistry book? Just needless extra weight, he’d said. But to Hans, that qualified as essential, and Freddy wanted to keep his partner happy. So the book stayed.
“Here we go!” Freddy said, perched on the edge of the Joe hole. He smiled. This was the moment. Finally, finally. He was two hundred miles inside Nazi territory, two hundred miles from the nearest Allied troops in Italy. The danger of the moment enthralled him; there were no last-minute nerves, no hesitation.
Freddy had made it all sound so easy when he was trying to ease Franz’s jitters over his first-ever parachute attempt: Just jump down and hang on to your harness, he told the Nazi defector now waiting behind him at the Joe hole. Freddy had done it himself a million times, he assured him. But for all of his talk and self-assurance, Freddy left out one thing: he had never actually jumped out of an airplane before, at least not one that was moving. Sure, he had done practice jumps at the Maryland country club, but those were from a mock plane sitting safely on the ground on what used to be the putting green, as he strapped into a harness—with no parachute—and tumbled into a landing pit just a few feet bel
ow. And he had done practice jumps at North Carolina from a high tower—with a parachute that time. But jumping off an actual plane flying more than 110 miles an hour? In the dead of night, over Nazi skies, onto the biggest mountain range in all of Europe? No, never. Not once. But Franz didn’t need to know that part; Freddy just needed his Nazi tour guide to stay calm and make it to the ground.
The cockpit relayed the final signal to Haass in the bomb bay. “Ready, ready, ready, go!” he yelled. Freddy thrust himself through the Joe hole and dropped down effortlessly. His parachute unfurled on cue moments later, and the rope line attaching him to the aircraft broke away neatly, leaving him alone and untethered in the Alpine sky. He was free.
He had no interest in solemn reflection or prayers about what might await him on enemy ground below. Freddy was not the praying type. He simply floated. All he could think about as he drifted down was how beautiful the night sky looked from his vantage point, with the moonlight cascading off the ice-capped mountain ranges all around him. The night was still and quiet save for the rumbling of the Liberator, which was now growing quieter in the distance.
With no hint of Nazi flak fire, it all felt so peaceful. After being hunched for hours once again in the back of the plane, with the heavy supply bag pinching off his circulation, it felt good just to stretch his aching legs. Time seemed to stand still for those eternal few seconds of weightlessness—until the moment that his army boots met the cold, hard embrace of the glacier. He rolled onto the ice and snow to brace his fall. He had made it. As cold as the snow felt, it was warmer than the freezing holding area in the back of the plane.
As soon as Freddy had dropped, it was Franz’s turn, but he wasn’t nearly as eager. Haass, the jump master, gave him the signal, but Franz wasn’t moving. “Go, go, go!” Haass shouted. The mission’s third man seemed frozen. One second passed, then two, then three. Hans, standing behind him and waiting for his turn, was getting anxious now. They had to stay in sequence. He gave Franz a gentle shove from behind, and the Nazi defector, willing or not, disappeared into the night sky to return to his homeland.
Hans stepped up quickly to the empty hole himself, not bothering to sit down. He wanted to make the jump standing up. He was eager to reunite with Freddy on the ground, eager to finally start their mission, even if this wasn’t the mission he had envisioned. He wasn’t parachuting back into his homeland in the Netherlands as the intrepid son, as he’d once imagined. No, this wasn’t the place that the military claimed, all those months ago in Texas, that they would send him to help liberate—an empty inducement, he was now convinced. This wasn’t where his family had gone missing. His Nazi-occupied homeland in the Netherlands, if his parents and Robbie were even still there, was more than five hundred miles north of here through the heart of Hitler’s Reich. That trip might come another day, he hoped. For now, he was dropping down from the skies of Austria, one of the last major battlegrounds of the war, and the chance to fight the Nazis here for his adopted country instead felt like a noble substitute.
Hans stood tall as Haass gave him the “go” signal, as tall as he could without hitting his head in the cramped quarters. He took a single step and dropped his long, skinny frame through the Joe hole with plenty of room to spare, following Freddy down into the Alpine Mountains.
With the last of their human cargo now unloaded, Billings circled above the glacier and waited, while his crew searched for any signal of life on the ground—from the Joes, they hoped, not from the Nazis. The minutes passed slowly. Then from the ground came a beam through the darkness, faint but unmistakable. It was a solid green light. Whoops broke out on the plane. That was it, the signal from Freddy for a safe landing. “Everything OK,” it meant.
All the men on the ground needed now were the supplies. Billings circled back to the drop zone again and zeroed in on the green light. The flight crew untethered their cargo in sequence: first the large metal drums filled with reams of supplies, and then, with some difficulty, the long packages of skis meant to get the men down the mountain. In case OSS should ever again get the idea to drop its agents onto a mountaintop, a crewman noted in his after-action report that “skis are hard to get out—too long and unwieldy in plane.”
Moments after the cargo was dumped, the parachutes deployed, floating down toward the green light. With their mission finally complete after all the starts and stops, Billings began his ascent. The green beam of light shone in the distance as the plane climbed higher, but a crewman noticed that it was now flashing. Another message, it seemed; different from the last one. Was there trouble on the ground? If there was a sequence to the flashing lights, a code of some sort, the crew couldn’t make it out. They had no way to tell what it meant, if anything. The Liberator’s work was done, in any case; there was nothing more they could do now. Godspeed to the Joes.
Billings and his crew headed south back to the base in Rosi-gnano, nearly four hundred miles away. “We never dropped a team in worse country,” Haass, the jump master, would marvel. Billings summed up the final leg of the trip even more succinctly. In his flight log, just below the two entries for their failed attempts, he wrote simply: “Success.”
6
* * *
The Glacier
SULTZTALER GLACIER, AUSTRIA,
ELEVATION 10,500 FEET
February 26, 1945
The skis. Where were the damn skis?
The three Joes had been trudging in the dark, through snow that was waist-high in spots, for nearly four hours now, struggling to gather up the supplies the B-24 had rained down on them from all directions. It was almost six o’clock in the morning; Freddy could see the sun just beginning to peek over the ridge of the Alps to the east.
This had been pristine ground when they first tumbled down onto it just after two o’clock in the morning. There was no sign that the snow and ice had been disturbed by human activity in weeks, maybe longer; even the Nazi Alpine patrols hadn’t ventured this far up in the mountains in the dead of winter. But as the three OSS men crisscrossed the mile-wide glacier for hours in search of their supplies, the untouched landscape soon became pockmarked with boot prints and trenches. Every few steps sank them deeper into what seemed like an unending sea of cold, white quicksand.
In the pitch-black night, Franz wasn’t even certain where exactly they were on the mountain range: somewhere very high up, he knew, but he didn’t have to be an Alpine ski master to know that. With all the changes in the drop site and his own last-minute jitters, Franz seemed to have lost his bearings on his own home turf. It didn’t help when he realized that he had forgotten to pack his flashlight in the bag of essentials. At least Freddy and Hans had theirs.
They continued traipsing through the dark to look for any foreign objects in the snow. Billings’s flight crew thought they had hit a bull’s-eye when they dropped all the gear down by parachute. Word filtered back to OSS at Bari that the packages “dropped almost on top of Freddy’s green ground signal.” But that would be news to Freddy. With the Alpine winds whizzing through the valley, the cargo drop was more scattershot than bull’s-eye. The men had found each other on the ground quickly enough, with Freddy’s green light acting as a beacon, but finding their cargo, spread across the wide glacier, was proving to be a much more exhausting task.
Short of breath from the altitude, they barely spoke as they traversed the cold ground one slow, sunken step at a time. They eventually stumbled onto one of the metal canisters, then another, then a long, skinny package with two pairs of wooden skis and poles inside. They began unpacking and gathering up their supplies. But they realized they were still missing one package—containing two more pairs of skis. They needed all four pairs: one set for each of them to ski down the mountain, and the fourth for Franz to use as a sled to transport their supplies.
They kept looking. Still, nothing. They had looked everywhere. They were frustrated and freezing; all their winter gear, including giant white snow capes meant to camouflage them in the snow, could provide
only so much warmth after they had been rummaging around on an Alpine glacier for four hours. They snacked on Spam for sustenance and tried to figure out what to do. Peering up at the daunting mountainside, Freddy surmised that the final package might have gotten caught in a gust of wind and sailed over the ridge entirely. The missing skis could be in Italy now, for all he knew.
Freddy faced a dilemma. It would be daylight in another hour, which would certainly make their search for the skis easier, if they were anywhere to be found on the glacier. But the light of day would also make it easier for any Nazi patrols across the valley, or mountain hunters, to spot them on the open glacier, even in their camouflaged capes. Freddy decided to cut their losses and keep moving down the mountain any way they could. They needed to find a temporary refuge; maybe they would stumble onto one of the Alpine ski huts that Franz had said were common on the mountain.
Together, they decided that Franz would use both pairs of skis, one for himself and one to carry the supplies, just as planned. That left Freddy and Hans to walk down the mountain in Franz’s path. Or slide. Or belly-crawl. There were no skis for either of them. Just as well, Freddy thought. Back in Bari, Hans had told the officers at OSS about all the skiing he had done as a boy. Freddy suspected that Hans, hailing from the flatlands of the Netherlands, was bluffing—just to make sure he got himself a spot on the Alpine mission. It was a maneuver that Freddy himself might have tried if he hadn’t skied as a boy in Germany. In truth, Hans had as much experience with skis as Franz did with a parachute. If they put the lanky Dutchman on skis for the first time in his life, who knew what might happen to him speeding down an Alpine cliff? He might be better off walking, Freddy thought.
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