On the streets, Jack and Curt found Paris still lighthearted. The day was fine, and people were going about their business and pleasure the same today as they had been yesterday.
Curt wanted to go to the Gare du Nord to arrange railroad travel to Arras.
“I want to go with you,” Jack said.
Curt shook his head. “Not a good idea. It could be a very dicey trip. The Krauts will start bombing the railroads soon.”
“I want to go,” Jack insisted.
Curt bought tickets for Arras, on a train leaving the next morning.
Jack did not check out of the Royal Monceau, assuring the management that he would return within a week and wanted his suite held for him, with his luggage in it, so he could come back whenever he wanted to.
May 11 was another fine spring day. They reached the railroad station before they saw the first evidence of the major battle that was now raging in Belgium. Dazed Belgian refugees stumbled off the trains from the north. The station was crowded with grimly phlegmatic soldiers, trudging in ragged columns toward the trains that would carry them to the places the Belgians were fleeing.
Curt had brought with him a middle-aged Frenchman named Jean-Pierre Belleville, a communications engineer who was the other half of Lear Broadcasting’s Paris “bureau.” His job would be to patch through telephone communication so Curt Frederick could broadcast live reports to the States. Curt had described Belleville as an expert at improvisation, the aptitude they would most surely need. He was a sad-faced man in an olive-colored double-breasted suit, carrying a case filled with tools.
On the trip north, Jack, Curt, and Jean-Pierre were the only civilians in a car filled with French officers. A colonel and a captain shared their compartment. The officers were oddly confident, certain the Germans were making a major mistake.
At Arras, Jean-Pierre Belleville proved to be the improviser Curt had promised he was—and a consummate scrounger, too. He found them two rooms in a small hotel and a table in a restaurant that was still open.
Shortly after dawn Jack was awakened by the wail of air-raid sirens. He stood at his window and looked for the planes. He saw some: black specks slowly coming toward him. An antiaircraft battery located in a park a few blocks from the hotel opened fire. This was Jack’s first experience of war.
When the planes came closer, Jack recognized them as Junkers-87 Stukas—dive-bombers. He had seen pictures of them. He counted six. They flew slowly over the town, apparently oblivious to the black puffs of flak that burst around them. When they went into their dives, the pilots turned on the infamous sirens meant to terrorize civilians below. They disappeared from Jack’s sight, behind buildings across the street. He heard the thump of bombs and saw towers of yellowish smoke rising lazily into the bright morning sunlight. Finally he saw the Stukas again, in the distance now, flying away.
He dressed quickly and went downstairs. He spotted Curt in a telephone kiosk, talking earnestly. As Jack approached the kiosk, Curt raised his hand in a gesture to tell him not to speak. Jack stopped and listened. Curt was broadcasting!
The ubiquitous Jean-Pierre had somehow managed to put through a call to Boston, and Curt was on the air describing the raid. He had held the telephone instrument out and had caught the sounds of the antiaircraft fire, the Stuka sirens, and the explosion of bombs.
Jean-Pierre had been scouting for a car and had come up with a twelve-year-old Mercedes-Benz sports touring car, painted white. Though a tangled mass of folded leather behind the passenger seats suggested a top might be raised, the car was open. The front fenders turned with the wheels. The exhaust from each of six cylinders left the engine through a gracefully curved nickel-plated pipe. Not one but two spare tires hung from the rear. The owner-driver was a white-haired Fleming with whom only Jean-Pierre could communicate.
They ate quickly and left before seven o’clock.
As they drove east, the driver explained to Jean-Pierre that he was using secondary roads because all the main routes had been appropriated by the army. Jean-Pierre explained to Jack and Curt. The countryside impressed Jack as neat, in contrast to what he had grown up with in California. Fences were straight and orderly, houses were in good repair, fields and orchards were neatly tended.
An hour and a half east of Arras they crossed the Belgian frontier and began to encounter files of refugees on the road. Sleek Belgian horses pulled farm carts piled high with furnishings. People who had no horses pushed handcarts. The great majority of the refugees were women. Their men were in the army. Only elderly people, pregnant women, and tiny children rode in the carts. The rest walked, stolid and resigned.
Abruptly the Flemish driver shrieked and pointed at the sky. He ran the car off the road and charged through a field of newly sprouted grain, the car bouncing and twisting. He stopped only when they reached a row of poplars a hundred meters from the road. There he threw himself out of the car and tried to crawl under it.
Jack crouched behind the car and wondered if it would stop machine-gun bullets. Thinking maybe the engine block would, he slipped forward and squatted as close as he could get to the car without touching the hot exhaust pipes. He saw two twin-engine airplanes. Before he heard the clatter, he saw the winking yellow lights on machine-gun muzzles.
The two planes swept along the road, strafing the refugees. First he saw horses rear and fall. Then he saw people blasted off their feet as they ran. He saw blood and flesh fly. He heard screams.
The Germans made just one pass and then were gone.
The driver rose, dusted himself off, and spoke to Jean-Pierre. Jean-Pierre spoke to Curt, and Curt translated: “He says we must move on. There is nothing we can do. We can’t help those people.”
“We can’t leave them lying there!” Jack yelled.
Jean-Pierre translated Jack’s protest, then the Fleming’s response. “He won’t stay here. There are too many for us to help. Anyway, the Boches will be back. From now on, we stay as far as we can from refugees. They attract strafing.”
Jack knew that what the Fleming said was true. He and his companions could not help the dying Belgians. They had nothing with which to help them: no medicine, no skills. Even if they tried to carry some to a village and a doctor, they could not take more than one or two. Anyway, the driver was determined not to take the risk.
They couldn’t argue with him. If he left with the car . . .
Three
A LITTLE FARTHER ALONG THE ROAD, THE FLEMING STOPPED to mount white flags on the Mercedes. There were nickelplated sockets on either side of the hood, and into them he stuck what looked like flagstaffs cut from pool cues, to which were tacked square white rags.
The four men were silent as they drove on. Each one coped with his emotions as best he could. There was nothing to say.
They saw fewer refugees. Those they did see looked stunned as they plodded impassively on. The Fleming scattered them with loud blasts of his horn and sped past. Twice they saw bodies lying beside the road.
“The Germans did the same thing in Poland,” Curt observed, speaking at last. “They strafe the secondary roads to drive the refugees onto the main roads where they’ll impede the progress of the armies. It’s totally cold-blooded.”
On a stretch of road where there were no refugees in sight, a Stuka flew over. It did not fire on them or drop a bomb—whether because the Flemish driver waved at the pilot, because the car flew white flags, because it was a German-made car, because it was heading east, or because the pilot just didn’t want to bother, they could not guess.
Well before noon they reached the Meuse River at Dinant. There they stopped for lunch, and Curt hovered over a radio set, listening to the bulletins. The word was that the French and Belgian armies were moving toward the Meuse and would take a stand on its west bank. German armored columns were advancing steadily through the Ardennes. Important battles would be fought on the Meuse.
The last bulletin Curt heard before they set out again was that German tanks had been seen on
ly forty miles to the east. At the bridge over the Meuse a Belgian officer tried to block them, saying it would be dangerous to go farther and in any case they might get in the way of Allied military operations. Curt asked him if the Belgians meant to move east of the river—knowing very well that they did not. As to the danger, he and Jack were neutrals, Americans, and would not be harmed by the Germans, particularly when they were seen driving a car flying white flags.
This raised a point. Jean-Pierre Belleville and the Flemish driver were not neutrals. They would have to stay in Dinant. The Fleming was not willing to let the two Americans drive his car, so Jack bought it from him, paying him cash—with the understanding that he would sell it back to him when he and Curt returned.
The Belgian officer pronounced them damned fools but made no further attempt to stop them.
Jack drove, going slowly, taking care not to appear to be in any purposeful hurry. It took half an hour to reach the village of Rochefort, which was nearly abandoned. A store had been looted, and some of its merchandise lay on the sidewalk. A café was open. Two men lay on the floor, passed-out drunk. Three others remained erect only by clinging to the bar. A forlorn woman, apparently a prostitute, sat at a corner table, drinking wine as if it were the last she’d ever taste.
The proprietor stood behind the bar. He too was drunk. He reached to a shelf behind him and handed Jack and Curt two bottles of red wine. “It is free,” he said. “Today everything is free. Tomorrow I have no business.” He nodded toward the prostitute. “She will have business. Her mother did, the last time.”
They accepted the wine and put it in the car. There on the street before the café they heard for the first time the thunder of artillery.
At the edge of the village, Curt asked Jack to stop. “Let’s talk about going back,” he said. “The Belgian officer may be right—I mean, that we’re a pair of damned fools.”
“The Stuka flew right over us and paid no attention,” Jack pointed out.
“The next one might not.”
“Well, then, tell me something. If you were alone, if I weren’t with you, would you go on or go back?”
“I’m a war correspondent,” said Curt. “It’s my business to go on. It isn’t yours.”
“In other words, I hire you, so I should send you out to face danger and go back myself,” Jack said as he shoved the Mercedes in gear and drove northeast on the road to Marche.
The main road from Bastogne to Namur passed through Marche, and it was on the outskirts of the town that they met the Germans.
Jack turned a corner, and there, sitting at one side of the street, apparently not wanting to block traffic, was a German tank. It was a Panzer IV, as they would learn. Two men in black uniforms, wearing garrison caps, with their shirtsleeves rolled up in the spring sunshine, stood on their tank and were talking to two infantrymen in field-gray uniforms and bucket helmets. A school-age boy in short pants stood a short distance away, staring curiously.
One of the black-uniformed men, the tank commander, turned and looked at the white Mercedes. His expression suggested that he had just wandered onto a circus lot and was confronting two clowns. With a firm, curt gesture, he ordered Jack to drive up to the tank.
He spoke to them in German. Jack understood enough to know that he was asking who they were.
“We are Americans,” Curt told him in English. “Neutrals.”
“What are you doing here?”
“We are journalists, foreign correspondents.”
The tank commander jumped down and walked to the car. “Your passports, please,” he said brusquely.
Curt handed him his passport. He examined it carefully, then asked for Jack’s.
The tank commander was a muscular blond man of thirty years or so. He fixed a mildly contemptuous smile on the white Mercedes. “War correspondents,” he muttered as he handed back the passports. “Wait here.”
He returned to the tank and climbed up. A man inside handed him a radio microphone, and he communicated for a minute or so.
Jack and Curt waited. In ten minutes a car drove up, and an officer stepped out.
“I am Captain Hans Ritter,” he said. “Abwehr—German military intelligence. We know who you are, Mr. Lear, Mr. Frederick. You left Paris, where you stayed at the Royal Monceau, Mr. Lear, then traveled to Arras, to Dinant, and—”
“You know a great deal,” said Jack.
“We know something more, Mr. Lear. We know you are a Jew. And we are going to show you that we do not abuse Jews.”
Four
JACK AND CURT DINED THAT EVENING IN NEUFCHTEAU ON bread and soup from a field kitchen, supplemented by their two bottles of red wine. Captain Ritter and an Abwehr colonel named Cassell were with them.
The archetype of a German professional military officer, Cassell spoke almost no English. Jack spoke imperfect German to him, explaining that his grandfather and grandmother had been German.
Through Ritter, Cassell told them, “You must forgive me, but I am very busy. I need hardly tell you what is about to happen. Within the next forty-eight hours this great war is won or lost. I assure you, gentlemen, it is won—by the German Reich.”
Jack did not mention the strafing of refugees. He had something else in mind and did not want the Germans to decide he was hostile. “We would like to be able to observe your attack on the Meuse and broadcast a live account to the United States.”
“You want to tell the story of this battle? I will arrange it.”
“One thing more, Colonel,” said Jack. “We left a French national and a Belgian national in Dinant. Employees of Lear Broadcasting. I would be most grateful if they could receive safe conduct from Dinant to wherever we may be.”
Captain Ritter grinned. “The Fleming who rented you the car is in our employ. Your redoubtable Monsieur Belleville is ignorant of that fact. Dinant is in our hands now. The men you speak of are in our custody. They will be released to you. No difficulty.”
A German lieutenant named Huntzinger drove the white Mercedes, which now flew German flags. A command car followed, carrying technicians and equipment. Their broadcast post was set up on a hill east of Sedan, from where they had a view of the river, the town, and the wooded hills behind the town where the French awaited the German assault.
The technicians arranged to transmit on an army frequency to a relay station in Bastogne, from which the signal was sent to Norddeutchsche Rundfunk in Hamburg, which transmitted to the same receiving station on Cape Cod that had received the interview with Hitler and his Sportspalast speech in 1938.
Lieutenant Huntzinger explained what they saw. The attack began with an hours-long artillery barrage, supplemented by incessant Stuka dive-bombing attacks on the French positions, particularly on the French artillery situated in the woods behind the town. By the time German infantry units began to cross the Meuse in large rubber boats, the smoke and dust from the explosions hung so heavy over the town and river that the French could hardly see the boats and sank very few. German infantry stormed through Sedan and up to the heights behind, where they drove the gunners away from the artillery that could have saved the French. By the middle of the evening it was apparent that the German army was crossing the Meuse at Sedan all but unopposed.
Curt was on the air. For hours, listeners to the Lear stations heard the sounds of the battle and his voice telling Americans what was happening in France: “Here at Sedan on September 2, 1870, the French Emperor Napoleon III surrendered to the German army in one of the worst military disasters in the history of France. Tonight, May 13, 1940, it appears that the equal of that disaster may be developing.”
For the German army it was a military coup. For Lear Broadcasting it was a journalistic coup.
Five
EVEN AFTER FRANCE HAD FALLEN TO THE GERMANS, CURT Frederick could have stayed indefinitely in Paris. He and his network were regarded by the Germans as basically friendly. He had not been able to get Betsy out of town before the Germans arrived, but they were nev
er in any danger. In fact, in many ways Paris was still Paris that summer of 1940, at least for the citizens of neutral nations. Still, any broadcasts from there would have been subject to strict censorship.
Jack ordered him to move his base of operations to London. Curt took Jean-Pierre Belleville and his wife with him, but anticipating a German attempt to invade the British Isles, he sent Betsy home. She was scheduled to cross the Atlantic on a Cunarder, but on its eastbound voyage it was sunk by torpedoes. She went instead on a modest American ship.
Back in the States, Jack spoke at three dozen dinners, describing what he had seen in Belgium in May.
“They cared nothing for the lives of those people. Children. Pregnant women. Old people. To drive them onto roads where they would impede the flow of Allied troops and supplies to the front, they machine-gunned refugees without mercy. I saw them lying on the ground. I saw their blood. I saw their torn flesh. I heard their screams. And I saw or heard no sign of regret from the German officers who so kindly helped us to broadcast descriptions of their victory.”
America Firsters complained that Jack Lear was using his network to help Roosevelt drag the nation into war.
Time used his portrait on a cover and published an extensive account of Jack Lear’s adventures in Belgium in May of 1940.
Time did not know and did not mention that he had invited Solomon Weisman to visit him and had joined B’nai B’rith.
ELEVEN
One
1941
THE MAN CURTIS FREDERICK HAD BROUGHT TO BOSTON WAS not really his brother. His name was Willard, but it was not Willard Frederick. What was more, he was not working on a biography of William Lloyd Garrison. He had wept when Curt married Betsy, and he’d wept again when Curt left for Europe and said he could not take him along. He endured life in Curt’s Cambridge apartment until January of 1941 when Curt wired him from London that he should come over and share a London flat with him.
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