by Ronald Weber
The passengers talk among themselves, play cards, drink, retire to the berths—and plots emerge. The main one is a melodrama that results in a pistol shot, intended for a German diplomat who is actually a spy handler, striking a young Jewish man when he attempts to intervene. The heavy irony is that a Jew saves a German’s life. By the time the plane descends to Long Island, accompanied by the added noise of the engines, all has been sorted out: the wounded man will be rushed to a hospital; the German will be handed over to authorities; and an American author, Rice’s spokesman throughout the play, announces an overarching theme of renewal. With the Jewish man’s act, he proclaims, “my faith and my sense of values have been restored.”
The play’s setting aboard a Clipper was drawn from the well-traveled Rice’s own experience. Just before the war broke out he had flown from London to Marseille to begin a transatlantic flight, a long-standing ambition. The Clipper to New York, carrying just eight passengers, stopped at Horta for refueling, and at first Rice regretted such a brief stay on the green island. When it was learned the plane had been damaged by a wave and the flight would not continue, he was faced with a long wait until a plane from New York stopped at Horta and the stranded passengers were delivered back eastward. In Lisbon they spent several comfortable days as guests of Pan American. When they were finally flown back to Horta, they transferred to their original New York–bound Clipper and flew into the setting sun while treated to a champagne dinner followed by cigars and brandy in the lounge.
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Eric Sevareid, another Clipper veteran, was intrigued enough by the dramatic possibilities of the flights that he wrote a fifteen-page plot sketch for a Hollywood film to be called Lisbon Clipper. An executive at Warner Brothers had provided the title and urged Sevareid to produce a story. What he came up with was a thriller-romance involving an American vice consul in Lisbon and a glamorous Czech actress pursued by both the Gestapo and a young Czech refugee, who loves her yet is attracted to the Nazi cause.
In the end the refugee betrays the Germans, foils their efforts to capture the actress, and she and the vice consul flee to safety on a Clipper to New York. Whether Sevareid actually submitted his sketch is unknown. At any event, when Casablanca appeared in late 1942 he might have detected a distant resemblance to his plot for Lisbon Clipper, despite the large difference that the film’s last-minute escape is to Lisbon and not aboard a Clipper.
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On February 22, 1943, tragedy jolted the romance of the Clippers. After nearly four years of operations and some 240 transatlantic crossings, the Yankee Clipper crashed and sank while landing in Lisbon, with twenty-four lives lost among the thirty-nine passengers and crew. During a shallow bank on the approach a wing tip had caught in the Tagus, and the plane cartwheeled into the water—a matter, as later determined, of pilot error. Among the survivors swimming to shore or rescued by boats was Lorraine Rognan, who performed with her husband in the comedy dance team of Lorraine and Roy Rognan and was traveling in a group of seven entertainers to put on shows for American troops in England and North Africa. Later she gave reporters an horrific account of escaping from the swiftly sinking plane while her husband vanished.
The confusion was terrific. My husband yelled to me to “hold this briefcase while I remove my trousers to swim better and take you.” The water was coming up and I desperately kicked at a window to free him. But he was knocked down as the Clipper began sinking. He cried my name and waved. I cried back his name and saw him go down. The water pushed me out and in less than two minutes I found myself floating on the surface and I was pulled into a boat.
Another survivor from the entertainment group, the popular radio singer Jane Froman, was thrown from the plane into icy water. Unable to swim because of a badly damaged arm and leg, she clung to debris from the wreckage along with an officer of the crew, John C. Burn, until a rescue boat arrived. Both were taken to a small emergency hospital in Lisbon, and for a time it looked as if Froman’s injured leg might have to come off. After long surgery to repair the leg and other serious injuries, she was moved to a convalescent home in a Lisbon suburb. Burn, recovering from a broken back and fractured skull, was transferred to the same facility, and as time went on his relationship with Froman, begun in the Tagus, deepened.
A month after the crash Froman’s husband reached Lisbon on a Clipper and, determining she needed more medical treatment, brought her home on a Portuguese ship, an agonizing two-week journey with Froman in a body cast and strapped to a board. Following more surgeries and bone grafts, she was able to return to performing—even, with the war just ended, flying to Europe to sing before servicemen. After her divorce from her husband in 1948, she and John Burn, now a Pan American pilot, were married. Froman went down the aisle on crutches.
Among those killed in the crash were two correspondents, Frank J. Cuhel of the Mutual Broadcasting System and Ben Robertson of the New York Herald Tribune. Robertson’s death drew wide notice. During the Battle of Britain he had covered London for the newspaper PM in the company of Eric Sevareid, Edward R. Murrow, and other newsmen whom the blitz made household names. His critically praised book about the experience, I Saw England, had ended with Robertson flying from England to Portugal, where he had booked ship passage aboard the Exeter for America.
Here in Lisbon [he wrote in the book’s closing paragraph] we had lights and butter and sugar. And in Lisbon we realized how little such things meant to us. In Lisbon we turned our thoughts back to a country that was fighting in darkness—to a great generation of British people who … had learned through suffering. They had learned, and I too had learned, by being with them through those months. In the depth of the English blackout I had seen the stars.
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In his fatal flight aboard the Yankee Clipper to Lisbon, Ben Robertson was on the first leg of a return to England to take up a new position with the Herald Tribune. For correspondents and others for whom England was the final destination, the next stage, following a hotel stay of long or short duration in Lisbon, was ordinarily a flight on a British Overseas Airways Corporation land-based plane or a flying boat taking off from Pan American’s site at Cabo Ruivo. One who went by flying boat was Sheilah Graham, the Hollywood columnist and late love of F. Scott Fitzgerald. In early 1941, shortly after his death, she set off for her native England as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance and a first assignment of interviewing George Bernard Shaw. After reaching Lisbon on a Clipper, she spent only a single night in a hotel before boarding in predawn darkness a BOAC Empire flying boat, which had been stealthily loaded with exhausted and wounded British troops from the fighting in North Africa. The windows of the plane on the flight to Southampton were covered with black cloth and passengers were told to keep complete silence. “For the first time,” Graham wrote of the experience, “I realized that there was a war on.”
The more typical air journey from Lisbon to Britain was aboard BOAC’s commercial service operating from Sintra, and later from the new airfield at Portela, located farther up the Tagus from Lisbon. Landings in England were normally in the west of the country at Whitchurch airfield outside Bristol. When Henry J. Taylor took the route in late 1941, he left his hotel in Estoril in morning darkness, carrying with him a package of a thousand boxes of matches and his overcoat pockets stuffed with lumps of sugar, both gifts for friends in England. On the twisting road to the airport—the sign for it seeming strangely out of place in the ancient hills—he could see the fairyland castles of Sintra in dim silhouettes. The camouflaged civilian plane was ready on the field, the Dutch crew—pilot, co-pilot, engineer, and radio operator—waiting in the office. The aircraft was one of the four American-made Douglas DC-3s that KLM pilots had flown to Britain before German occupation of the Netherlands and were now in use by BOAC. Inside the cabins small signs proclaimed “KLM—Still Flying.” (Some of the Dutch aircraft remained in German hands and were flown by Lufthansa.) Usually the planes had fourteen seats for passengers, with the actual
number aboard determined by the amount of mail carried.
At dawn Taylor’s flight lifted off on a circuitous course over the Bay of Biscay to avoid enemy aircraft. After refueling in Porto, it swung out to the ocean, and the co-pilot came back and led Taylor to the cockpit. He wanted him to see through binoculars a pair of German U-boats running on the surface. When the submarines began to submerge, the plane swiftly sought the cover of clouds. It was possible, the co-pilot pointed out, that the submarines below had Luftwaffe escorts above.
5
Gaiety, Plenty, and Brilliant Lights
We never realized how miserable we had been in warring Italy, before as well as during internment, until we arrived in Lisbon, where the gaiety, plenty and brilliant lights made the somberness of blacked-out, half-starved Europe we had left seem all the more dismal by comparison.
—Reynolds and Eleanor Packard, Balcony Empire
Air transport back to England was hardly an option for several thousand troops of the British Expeditionary Force left stranded behind German lines after the mass evacuation from Dunkirk in May and June 1940. Along with downed Royal Air Force flyers, their best chance of escape was to try, following the armistice in late June, to make their way south through unoccupied France to Spain and Portugal. Those picked up along the way by Vichy authorities were interned as prisoners of war in such places as Marseille’s Fort St. Jean, where their confinement was light. Yet they were still considered fighting men and expected to plot returns to duty.
In July 1940 Donald Darling, a young military officer of M19, a British unit with a mission of helping get escapees and evaders back to England, was sent to Lisbon to organize overland escape lines running from Marseille to Barcelona and finally to either Gibraltar or Lisbon. (A parallel American group, MIS-X, worked closely with the British after American entry into the war.) Darling was a good fit for the job since he had lived in France and Spain, spoke both languages, and had knowledge of the mountain terrain of the Pyrenees. After meetings with the British ambassador in Lisbon, he moved on to Madrid to examine the situation there, and found Ambassador Samuel Hoare opposed to clandestine British operations inside Spain on grounds that they put Anglo-Spanish relations at risk.
Darling returned to Lisbon and, under cover in the British embassy as the repatriation officer, set up his escape operation. With easy access to people coming and going between Lisbon and Marseille, he soon was in contact and passing money to the highest-ranking officer of troops held in Fort St. Jean. Darling also learned of Varian Fry’s rescue effort in Marseille, one that now included getting British soldiers and airmen as well as important exiles out of France. In effect, Fry had become a British secret agent, recruited for the work—as Darling might have been startled to learn—by Samuel Hoare.
In the autumn of 1940, after accompanying Heinrich Mann and Franz Werfel and their wives and Golo Mann on their journey from Marseille to Lisbon, Fry had returned through Madrid and made a call at the British embassy. Here the ambassador struck a deal with the neutral American whose undercover work presumably posed less of a threat to his relations with Franco: he would give Fry ten thousand dollars for use in moving captured or hidden British troops in France over his mountain routes into Spain, from where the British would provide Spanish fishing boats to carry them to Gibraltar. The British also agreed to transport to Gibraltar a group of Italian and Spanish refugees Fry was helping, though with the condition that troops and refugees move on separate vessels.
Hoare offered Fry the money in British pounds, but there was risk in bringing such a sum across the border. Fry asked to have it wired to New York, from where it could be drawn on from Marseille. Besides, acting as a British agent was dangerous enough without worrying about carrying around a large amount of money. Fry was not only expanding his assignment for the Emergency Rescue Committee but, of more concern, threatening his entire Marseille operation if the covert work for the British came to light. Nonetheless, as soon as he was back in Marseille he got in touch with the British internees in Fort St. Jean through a young British officer, Captain Frederic Fitch. Fry told him about the border escape routes he used and passed along some of Hoare’s money. Fitch thought the overland way a better bet than waiting around for ships, and fugitive British troops were soon on their way from Marseille to the Pyrenees route operated by Lisa and Hans Fittko from Banyuls. Once across the French border the men were instructed to surrender to the Spanish authorities as POWs under the Geneva Conventions, then wait for a British consular official from Barcelona to pick them up and dispatch them to Gibraltar.
For the Fittkos, working with the troops was a pleasure since they were young, strong, cheerful, and did exactly what they were told without asking questions. They were mostly tall and pale, however, and stood out from the local population, causing the Fittkos to resort to what they called the “Britannia-Special” method in guiding them out of the village to the mountain trail. They got the troops on the move between three and four in the morning, when it was unlikely that French border police had yet stirred for duty.
By early February 1941 the money the British had given Fry, now mostly spent, had by his account “gotten out about 125 officers and men, including at least one secret agent and a handful of veteran pilots.” Another fifty thousand dollars, he calculated, “would have been enough to take care of the remaining 300 members of the B.E.F. [British Expeditionary Force] in Southern France and the next 200 R.A.F. men to come down from the occupied zone.” When his secretary Lena Fischmann decided to take the Lisbon route herself, she carried a message to Ambassador Hoare in Madrid requesting the additional funds. Fry heard nothing back.
Eventually he learned from Donald Darling—the message delivered by Charles Joy, who had come from Lisbon to Marseille on Unitarian relief work—not to send any more British troops overland into Spain. Fry understood this to mean the Spanish were no longer cooperating in releasing the men to British officials. In the future, said Darling, he was to send escapees directly to Gibraltar by sea. Fry had virtually given up hope of finding boats in Marseille, and when Leon Ball located a seaworthy fishing trawler with sails and a backup motor capable of carrying seventy-five to Gibraltar, it seemed too good to be true. The price was steep, about $4,500, but Fry decided it was worth a try. But he would hand over all the money only when the passengers were actually at sea.
The plan was to bring the trawler from where it was anchored to the harbor; the passengers—sixty British troops and fifteen refugees, including some Italians—would gather with food and water to last four days in a location near the lighthouse, where the trawler would pick them up and head directly out to sea. When Fry informed Captain Fitch about his agreement with Hoare not to mix troops with refugees, Fitch said the chance for large-scale escape was too rare to worry about such niceties.
As a precaution, Fry left Marseille on the night of the escape so, if it went wrong, he could deny involvement. When he returned he learned how it went wrong. The passengers had waited until two o’clock in the morning before returning to town in small groups to avoid attracting police attention; meanwhile there had been negotiations in Snappy’s Bar, a favorite hangout of officers held in Fort St. Jean, involving the trawler captain, Captain Fitch, and Leon Ball. The trawler captain maintained he could get the boat from the owner only when all the money due was paid up front. Fitch resisted but finally was persuaded to hand it over. The trawler captain left with the money, never to return.
For Fitch, though, the affair was far from over. The British POWs kidnapped two or three men said to be members of the trawler captain’s gang, took them to Fort St. Jean as hostages, and roughed them up to find out the whereabouts of the captain and the money. In time the police came and removed the hostages. Since Fitch and the troops were already prisoners, they were not arrested, but a trial of the hostages ensued during which Fitch in testimony claimed that the money given the trawler captain had come from a collection taken up among men interned in the fort. The court accepted
his word, and the hostages were given short sentences for being parties to fraud. The trawler captain and the money remained at large.
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In January 1942 Donald Darling switched his escape operation from Lisbon to Gibraltar, the Rock being the only piece of Europe still in British hands. Here he ran a one-man MI9 center both welcoming newly arrived escapees and evaders from occupied territory and quizzing them about details of their movements. It took time to confirm identities, then time to line up ship transport or, for special cases, air flights to England.
In the same period the American embassy in Madrid was engaged in its own work of gathering information from downed American airmen reaching Spain and refugees crossing from France. Pumping informants, as Ambassador Carlton Hayes termed it, was a top priority of the Allies, the work in Madrid carried out by the embassy’s military attaché officers. Later in the war, with the Allies on the march across France, Hayes would tell President Roosevelt (in the hope that neutral Spain and Portugal would not be pressed too hard to end all trade arrangements with Germany) that “65 percent of Allied intelligence—and 90 percent of American—concerning German military dispositions in France are derived from our intelligence services in Spain while the Spanish looked away.”
Hayes also informed Roosevelt that Spain had allowed large numbers of American flyers to leave the country and return to combat. The first American airmen to find themselves in Spanish territory came with the Allies’ Operation Torch landings in North Africa. In November 1942 three transport planes carrying paratroopers from England mistakenly landed in the Spanish rather than French zone of Morocco. Spain moved the planes, pilots, and troops to Madrid, but rather than keeping the men interned, the usual practice in neutral countries, they were put in the custody of the embassy’s military attachés and housed in hotels.
When Hayes began working with the Spanish foreign office for their release, he ran into a precedent established by the British. In the early part of the war more German and Italian planes on bombing runs over Gibraltar had been forced down in Spain than British planes, and consequently more Axis men were interned in the country. Britain had worked out an informal deal with Spain for the release of crew members: one Axis flyer for one British flyer. With the North African invasion and more Allied planes in the air, Hayes thought the arrangement needed change and launched a dubious argument that airmen forced to land were like shipwrecked mariners rather than fighting men, and should be helped in leaving the country. After some pondering, the Spanish foreign ministry agreed, and in February 1943 the paratroopers were moved through Gibraltar to their command in North Africa.