by Ronald Weber
Spain continued the procedure as the war went on and increasing numbers of Allied flyers made forced landings in the country or were pulled from the sea by fishermen. Many now had also been downed in occupied Europe and made their way along the escape lines to Spain. Hayes estimated that between the North African landings in 1942 and the Normandy invasion in 1944 some eleven hundred American airmen found safety in Spain. None were refused entry, none interned. After declaring their citizenship they were turned over to American consuls, then to the embassy’s military attachés who were responsible for their care and movement to Gibraltar. The wounded and those in ill health because of the escape journey were cared for in Spanish hospitals and Madrid’s British-American Hospital. For the able-bodied, the release system got them out of Spain and to Gibraltar, on average, in about two weeks.
*
Among American flyers who escaped on the France-Spain-Gibraltar route was twenty-one-year-old Lieutenant Chuck Yeager (later an air force general and one of the intrepid fighter jocks of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff). On his eighth combat mission Yeager had gotten out of a burning P-51 and parachuted to the ground in occupied France, about fifty miles east of Bordeaux. He sprinkled sulfa powder from his survival kit on a leg wound, bandaged it, and studied a silk map of Europe sewn into his flying suit for the escape lines across the Pyrenees to Spain. Getting to the mountains meant eluding German troops, finding friendly locals, and getting help from the French underground. Yeager gripped the .45 automatic pistol that pilots carried and decided to stay hidden until dark, using his parachute for cover against the wet and cold.
In the morning he saw a woodcutter with an axe and rushed him from behind. The man dropped the axe and stared with fright at the pistol. He spoke no English yet seemed to understand when Yeager said he was an American and needed help, and seemed to reply that he would get someone who could speak English. Yeager waited in a nearby stand of trees, wondering if he could trust the woodcutter not to come back with a squad of Germans. When the woodcutter returned he had with him an old man who called out softly, “American, a friend is here. Come out.”
Yeager was taken to a barn behind a stone farmhouse and put in a small tool room in a hayloft. When the door was shut, hay was pitched outside to cover it. Eventually he heard German voices climbing the ladder to the hayloft and imagined them searching the hay. He never heard them leave, and several hours passed before he made out the sound of hay being moved. He had the .45 ready when he heard the old man say outside the door, “It’s me. You’re okay. They’ve gone.”
From the barn he was taken to the farmhouse where a middle-aged woman quizzed him in perfect English about his background and his West Virginia accent. Satisfied with his answers, she told him, “We must be very careful. The Nazis are using English-speaking infiltrators to pose as downed American fliers.” He would be helped, she added, but he must do precisely what he was told. He was taken to the kitchen and given a meal before being returned to the room in the hayloft. Late in the night the village doctor came to the farm to attend to his wound, after which he made a brief speech in French, not a word of which Yeager understood.
About a week later the doctor returned, had Yeager put on the clothes of a French woodcutter, gave him forged identity papers, and the two set off together on bicycles. For two days they traveled at night on country roads and stayed during daylight in farmhouses. At Nerac the doctor turned Yeager over to a farmer, where for the next weeks he was kept in a shed and allowed into the house only to share the family meals. “We loove Americains,” the farmwife would tell him, a line of English that Yeager imagined was learned just for him.
One dark night Yeager and the farmer left on foot, and after a two-day upland walk in deep pine forests he was turned over to a heavily armed band of French resistance fighters who lived in the mountainous region and conducted nighttime sabotage raids. The farmer told Yeager he would stay and work with the band until snow thawed in the high Pyrenees, when he would be led over to Spain.
The commander of the group of twenty-six was a lawyer who spoke English. Few of the other fighters did. They were men who knew the deep woods intimately and stayed constantly on the move, shifting camps twice a day, staying nowhere more than a few hours. If caught they would be turned over to the Gestapo, tortured for information, and shot. As long as he was with them and dressed like a Frenchmen, Yeager believed his fate would be the same since the Geneva Conventions on treatment of POWs would no longer apply to him. Yet he needed the band. He could not cross the mountains alone.
At first he was excluded from nighttime operations, staying behind with a cook and others guarding the camp. Finally the commander invited him to take part in a supply drop. The men lighted flares to illuminate a field, and when a British Lancaster bomber made a low pass a signal was sent with a flashlight. The plane then made another pass at a higher altitude and dropped a fifteen-hundred pound canister on two parachutes. The men rushed to the drop and hoisted the canister onto a cart pulled by two oxen. The entire operation took fewer than five minutes.
In a barn under lantern light the canister was opened; inside were weapons, ammunition, counterfeit franc notes, bread and meat ration stamps, plastique explosives, and fuses and timing devices. Yeager told the commander he knew how to use the explosives. Back in camp after the weapons had been buried in caches around the countryside, he showed how to set the timing on the fuse devices and how to cut up cords of plastique and attach fuses. Impressed, the band put him in charge of the work, their terrorist bomb maker.
Despite the danger involved, resistance fighters slipped into villages to make purchases, using their counterfeit rations stamps and money. One day Yeager was told to accompany two men to town. “Don’t worry,” the commander said. “Just stay with the men.” After a short walk they reached a van on a logging road; when the back door opened a young man motioned Yeager inside. Nothing was said, but Yeager understood the time had come: the van was headed south into the Pyrenees. They drove for hours before the van stopped in the backstreet of a village, and Yeager was taken to another truck with its engine idling.
Three other escaping airmen were in the truck together with a Frenchmen who spoke English and explained they were outside Lourdes and heading into the foothills. He gave hand-drawn maps to each of the flyers showing the paths they were to take over the mountains. He told them they could go as a team or in pairs, and it would take them four or five days, depending on the weather. The crossing would be hard and dangerous; they might meet German patrols, smugglers, refugees, other escaping military men. The way mapped out for them was to the south because Spaniards in the north were said to turn in American pilots to the Gestapo for a reward.
It was after midnight when the truck stopped. The flyers were given filled knapsacks and told they were at the starting point. A hundred yards ahead was a shed where they could spend the night, but they were not to talk or start fires. At first light they should begin the climb.
In morning rain they set off. By noon Yeager and another flyer, a navigator on a B-24 downed in France, had reached the timberline. The other two flyers were far behind. Yeager and the navigator stopped to eat bread, cheese, and chocolate from their knapsacks; when the others still had not reached them, they moved on. They were at six or seven thousand feet and in freezing wind and wet snow, the ridges they crossed slick with ice. As they climbed higher the air thinned, and they stopped every ten or fifteen minutes, nearly exhausted and leaving Yeager wondering how many escapees actually made it over the Pyrenees. They had been given four pairs of socks and wore two pairs at a time, but their boots leaked and they worried about frostbite.
Late into their fourth day the two men were ready to give up. They thought they were near the Spanish border, but clouds limited visibility to fifty feet. They nearly bumped into a lumberman’s cabin, and with pistols drawn went in and found it empty. The navigator took off his boots, hung his wet socks on a bush outside, and both men fell asleep inside the cab
in. When a passing German patrol noticed the socks and opened fire through the cabin door, both men went through a rear window and spun down a long log slide into a creek deep with water.
Yeager’s partner had been hit in the knee by the German fire, and when the two got across the creek Yeager saw that only a tendon attached his upper and lower leg. With a penknife Yeager cut the tendon and used the silk remains of his parachute in his knapsack to wrap and tie the stump of the leg. The navigator was unconscious but breathing; they were now fairly well hidden from the Germans above. Yeager decided to stay where they were until dark, then somehow try to drag the navigator up the glazed mountainside and continue on to Spain.
He did just that, a staggering feat of will and endurance. At the summit of the mountain, at sunrise, he saw in the distance a road he believed was in Spain. He slid his partner back down the mountain, and when they reached the road, the man only faintly breathing, left him beside it in the hope a passing motorist would see him. (A police vehicle, Yeager later learned, passed within an hour. The flyer was taken to a hospital where most of his stump was removed. Six weeks later he was sent home.) Yeager continued south on the road for some twenty miles, and when he found a village turned himself in to the local police. He was put in a filthy jail cell but not searched, which allowed him to use a small saw from the survival kit still with him to cut through brass bars and locate a small rooming house a few blocks from the police station. The police ignored his escape, and after dinner and a hot bath he fell into a long sleep. Two days later an American consul knocked on his door.
When Yeager left Spain for Britain, the first evader in his squadron to make it back, he was twenty pounds heavier and deeply tanned. The American consul had settled him in a resort hotel in Alma de Aragon, where for six weeks he ate and took the sun while his release and that of other evaders was worked out in a deal for shipments of oil to Spain.
*
With the Allied landings in North Africa, a tide of Frenchmen swept over the Pyrenees into Spain in hopes of joining the forces matched against Germany and Italy. Within three months of the landings, Ambassador Hayes in Madrid put the number of Frenchmen already in Spain at ten thousand. Germany pressured Spain to ship them back to France or intern them; Britain and America wanted them accepted humanely as refugees, then moved on to North Africa. The latter request put Spain in the dicey position of allowing on its soil what could be construed by the Third Reich as recruitment of military men for the Allied cause.
After lengthy discussion Spain took the chance, and the government informed Hayes that the refugees could be evacuated on French ships from the port of Cadiz. Then, just before the first group of some fourteen hundred held in northern Spain was set to move by rail to the southern port, the government decided that Cadiz could not be used, nor could any Spanish port. The reason was the flexing of Nazi muscle: Spain had been told that any refugee ships leaving her ports would be sunk. As an alternative, Spain suggested the use of Portuguese ports, either Lisbon or Setúbal, and Hayes flew to Lisbon to begin talks with American minister Bert Fish and Portuguese authorities. Salazar, who had the final word, delayed his decision yet finally consented to the French leaving from Portugal if the United States made a formal request, and made it in a form he found acceptable. Setúbal, a large port just south of Lisbon, was agreed upon as the embarkation point.
At the end of April 1943, after complicated arrangements for exit and transit visas, trains, food supplies, and British ships, 850 French military men sailed at midnight from Setúbal for Tunisia. Through that spring and summer other groups followed, with finally 16,000 of what Hayes called fighting Frenchmen were moved to North Africa and integrated with Allied forces.
*
In January 1943 Minister Fish in Lisbon sent a telegram to the State Department outlining Portugal’s manner of handling Allied airmen and planes downed on its territory. Both were immediately interned, with the planes never released (before the North African invasion, Fish noted, none were in a condition worth retrieving), and crews were held in custody until—as the minister prudently put it—authorities were able to “convince themselves that due respect had been shown to the principle of Portuguese sovereignty,” then quietly moved to Allied control. With the Portuguese endlessly cautious about neutrality issues, the release process was always delicate—and best conducted, Fish added, outside the attention of the American press and radio. (Fish may have feared Portugal’s reaction to reports such as one that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1943: the Portuguese police, said the article, had the habit of looking the other way with downed American flyers since, in their practical way, they “do not relish feeding and housing interned pilots for the duration.”)
What Fish sketched out for Washington was the rule with downed flyers. Lieutenant Jack Ilfrey was the exception. Two months before the minister’s telegram to Washington, the young American fighter pilot had bypassed diplomatic delicacy by releasing himself from Portuguese custody.
At first light on November 9, 1942, Ilfrey had left a base at Land’s End in England as part of a large nonstop flight of twin-engine, twin-tailed P-38 Lightnings on their way to Oran in North Africa for combat in Operation Torch. (After Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, age forty-three, flew Lightnings in North Africa in 1943—he was attached to an aerial photo group commanded by the president’s son, Colonel Elliott Roosevelt—he wrote: “It’s a fine machine. I wish I’d been given that present in my twenties.” He was flying a Lightning over France in 1944 when he and the plane were mysteriously lost.) A B-26 bomber led the way on a flight plan across the Bay of Biscay, down the Spanish and Portuguese coasts to the Straits of Gibraltar, and along the African coast to French Morocco and Oran. The distance was fifteen hundred miles, and the fighter planes were outfitted with external fuel tanks that could be dropped when emptied. Still, they would be squeezing out every drop of fuel to make the flight. If they ran short, the pilots were instructed that Gibraltar was the first place for an emergency stop.
Ilfrey, flying in a group of eight fighters, was over the Bay of Biscay when one of his plane’s external tanks accidentally fell off, taking with it 150 gallons of fuel. Another pilot flew close and held up a printed sign: one belly tank. The pilots had been told to keep radio silence, and Ilfrey nodded that he understood about the lost tank. The decision he now faced was whether to return to England or see if his fuel would hold out to Gibraltar. He wanted to remain with his squadron and not miss out on combat in North Africa, so he chose Gibraltar.
Over the Bay of Biscay the bomber and the fighters had to alter course to avoid thunderheads, and Ilfrey realized he was using up too much fuel. He veered off from his group and headed for what he hoped was land. When he saw it, he checked his maps and plotted his position as about at Portugal’s northern boundary with Spain. He turned south and flew down the coastline to the mouth of the Tagus River. His maps indicated Lisbon was twenty to thirty miles upriver. He had been given little briefing about forced landings in enemy or neutral countries beyond a pilot’s duty to destroy his plane and equipment. But briefings or not, his fuel was so short he had no choice but to come down. When he saw a big airport with inviting runways just outside Lisbon, he circled once and landed.
Immediately six men on horseback, armed with pistols and sabers and outfitted in plumed hats and colorful trousers, charged toward him. They gestured frantically that he was to taxi toward an administration building, and while Ilfrey did so he tore up his maps and papers and tossed the pieces out the cockpit.
When he shut down his engines in front of the building, people rushed the plane from every direction while the horsemen surrounded it. With a man who spoke English, Ilfrey was led toward the administration building, along the way noticing on the airport apron American-made Douglas DC-3s with German markings. The pilots of the airliners were inside the building and remained present and silent while Ilfrey was given cake and coffee, told the American legation had been notified of his presence, and then q
uestioned at length by a Portuguese official. Ilfrey refused all answers. The crowd about him seemed decidedly pro-German, and he assumed anything he said about his plane or his mission would be handed over to the Nazis.
Another official told him that Portuguese policy was to intern all foreign pilots and planes. Ilfrey was then introduced to a Portuguese pilot, who explained that the country’s air force was made up mostly of interned British, German, and French planes; the P-38 would be its first American fighter, and he would fly it to a military base. Ilfrey and the pilot walked together out to the P-38, and while it was being refueled the pilot asked questions about the cockpit mechanism. Ilfrey, seated in the cockpit, saw that his parachute and Mae West were gone along with his billfold and overnight bag. With the Portuguese pilot sitting on the wing, Ilfrey showed him how the plane was operated, all the while feeling guilty that he had not followed orders to destroy it. Beyond the plane, the horsemen were still present together with a large crowd of onlookers. No one from the American legation had yet appeared.
A familiar sound in the air caught Ilfrey’s attention, and when he looked up he saw another P-38 on one engine coming in for a forced landing. As the horsemen dashed off toward it, Ilfrey seized the moment. He fired his plane’s two engines, creating a gust of wind that, the plane holding still, blew the Portuguese pilot from the wing and sent the crowd beyond chasing their hats. Ilfrey shut the canopy, gave the plane full power, and shot straight ahead, ignoring the runway and all else until he was in the air. Looking back, he caught the identification mark of the P-38 on the runway. It was Jim Harman’s, a pilot in his squadron.