by Ronald Weber
Once he had altitude, Ilfrey realized he did not know if enough fuel had been put into the plane to get him to Gibraltar—and also realized he was without parachute or helmet. But the weather was good, the Portuguese villages below were picturesque, and he reached the Rock without incident. Only when he was on the ground and warmly greeted by other members of his squadron who had also failed to reach Oran did it sink in that he had escaped one situation for another.
An American colonel gave Ilfrey a vigorous dressing down for not destroying his plane in Lisbon and threatened to send both pilot and plane back for internment in Portugal. Then he changed course and told Ilfrey not to worry. Ilfrey later heard through rumor that the colonel had cabled Washington that orders to send the offending pilot back to Lisbon had unfortunately come too late, and he had already rejoined his squadron in North Africa. From the published diaries of Captain Harry C. Butcher, General Eisenhower’s wartime aide, Ilfrey would also learn that a diplomatic flap over his escape had reached all the way to the supreme commander, who had at least been willing to consider sending him back to Lisbon since the Portuguese, in a recent incident, had rescued and returned a group of American servicemen. Butcher wrote about Ilfrey:
One of our American pilots flying a P-38 from U.K. to Gib landed at Lisbon for gas, having lost one spare belly tank, was told he was thereby interned. Told the airdrome official he wanted to clear his supercharger, or something, got back in plane, started motor, and dashed away, leaving his jacket with identification papers. Fearful of a diplomatic upset for thus flaunting Portugal, which has been friendly, and of indicating a “mightier than thou” attitude, Ike had [General Albert] Gruenther radio our Ambassador at Lisbon the story and to be prepared to answer questions frankly. Consideration would be given to return the lad and plane for internment. Recently an American paratroop plane came down at sea off Portugal, the crew was rescued, taken ashore in Portugal, and allowed to depart as “experienced seamen.”
As for Jim Harman, he rejoined the flying group in North Africa some four months after Ilfrey. Engine trouble had forced him down in Lisbon, and the Portuguese had immediately clamped him in jail for a few days, then moved him to an internment camp. Toward the end of his third month in the camp the American legation had provided him with civilian clothes and moved him out of Portugal on a foreign liner. Unsurprisingly, Harman held Jack Ilfrey personally responsible for his Portuguese sojourn.
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A series of forced landings inside Portugal had provided the backdrop for Minister Fish’s communication with the State Department about Portugal’s treatment of downed men and aircraft. When at the end of 1942 two fighter planes had come down in Lisbon, the pilots had tried and failed to destroy them. At the same time a twin-engine bomber was damaged in a landing in northern Portugal near Porto. The pilot of the bomber made no resistance and turned over his papers to authorities. Some two weeks later eleven P-39 Airacobra fighter planes, blown off course by storms and short on fuel, landed in Lisbon, after which one of the pilots tried unsuccessfully to destroy his plane by flinging a grenade at it. A front-page story in the New York Times reported that Portuguese pilots flew the Airacobras to a military base near Sintra while the American pilots were interned in a fortress in Elvas, some one hundred miles east of Lisbon near the Spanish frontier.
The press account added that the eleven fighters had been escorting two four-engine American bombers passing over Portuguese territory, but a follow-up story the next day said reports from Lisbon indicated the fighters were part of a much larger formation on the way from England to Gibraltar to bolster Allied air strength in North Africa. A third story, by the Times’ military expert, Hanson W. Baldwin, supplied more detail. The P-39s were being “flight-ferried” to Gibraltar, and rather than escorting the bombers, the fighters, flying at reduced speed, were guided by the navigational capability of the larger planes on a flight across the Bay of Biscay and over or around the Iberian peninsula.
With the Airacobras held in Portugal, all in good condition, the State Department suggested that Fish argue for their release on grounds they should be treated like belligerent warships and permitted to depart within forty-eight hours. Mounting such an effort, Fish responded, was unwise. It was British practice not to seek release of planes; moreover, the planes had been on military missions and armed, and if allowed to leave Portugal—so Portuguese authorities would likely reason—all the belligerent powers “would soon take much greater liberty with operations in the neighborhood of Portugal confident that if they had fueling difficulties they could always fall back on Portuguese airports to save themselves.” Fish added: “It would not appear to me to be to our advantage to have the German long-range bombers which occasionally operate off the Portuguese coast placed in a position where they could regularly risk running short of fuel and count on the Portuguese to help them get home.”
The fate of the planes was resolved not by release but purchase. Fish was told that the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington were recommending a policy of selling Portugal aircraft of “non-confidential character” forced down in the country. Pilots consequently would be instructed not to attempt destruction of such planes. When the State Department contacted the British about adopting a similar policy, it learned that one was already in place. Fish replied to news of the Joint Chiefs’ policy by reminding the State Department that three months earlier he had reported Portugal’s offer to buy the planes presently interned and had heard nothing back from Washington.
In subsequent telegrams Fish was ordered to pursue the sale, with the War Department placing a price tag on P-38s and P-39s, without spare parts or munitions, of twenty thousand dollars each. Fish expected the Portuguese Ministry of War to accept the terms (it did, with the transferred planes put in service by the country’s military) and concluded in a message to the State Department that “this appears to be the most satisfactory solution practicable inasmuch as [the] Portuguese obviously will not consider any action in re these planes which might be possibly interpreted as a violation of neutrality.” The sale, he added, might also bring about the early release of eighteen American pilots presently held in Portugal.
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Among the advantages to the warring powers of having Portugal outside the war was that Lisbon’s open port offered a mutually acceptable meeting ground for formal exchange programs, with arrivals and departures carefully timed to maintain the country’s balancing act of equal treatment. For the United States, exchange deals began soon after Pearl Harbor and the declarations of war by Germany and Italy. In Rome at the time, Reynolds and Eleanor Packard gloomily recalled an old wartime joke: “What is the difference between a diplomat and a foreign correspondent? The diplomat is sure to get home.” The Rome bureau chief of the United Press for the preceding three years, Reynolds Packard realized that he and his wife Eleanor, also an accredited correspondent, might well be interned for the length of the fighting. On the other hand, with important contacts in and out of Italy, they both knew their chances of getting away were better than most aliens who suddenly found themselves on enemy soil.
Shortly after going to the American embassy to have their passports renewed, the Packards were taken into police custody, with Eleanor allowed to return to the couple’s apartment under watch of a detective while Reynolds was put in Regina Coeli prison with other male correspondents. The following day he was released and placed with five other correspondents in a bleak boardinghouse. After a time it was learned that all American correspondents would be moved to Siena while the American and Italian governments haggled over a list of names for exchange between the two countries—and haggled too over dividing up apartments, cars, furniture, radios, and other goods that would be left behind.
In late December the correspondents were taken by police escort to Siena, where they put themselves up in the Excelsior Hotel, nearly empty except for a few other detained guests. The newsmen, seven in all, split the cost of another room to convert to a common area despite the fact
, as the Packards noted, “from then on, it was a plot out of a Dostoevski novel.” In Rome they had all been cutthroat competitors; now they had to live together in a tight society with no end in sight. They were allowed nearly full freedom to do as they wished in Siena but strictly forbidden any contact with the local population.
Soon grown to nine, the group—along with the Packards it included Herbert L. Matthews and Harold Denny of the New York Times, Mrs. Paul Getty of the New York Herald Tribune, David Colin of NBC, and Dick Massock of the Associated Press—ran through a string of hobbies: bridge; visiting churches, galleries, and antique shops; bicycling (the police made no objection to long excursions); drawing with charcoal and crayons, using themselves as models; ping pong and tennis; beard-growing competitions; and bird-raising contests based on the number of hatched eggs. Everywhere they went in Siena they were given, surreptitiously, preferred treatment by the locals: cinema tickets were often free; grocery stores allowed them more food than rationing permitted; anonymous presents of champagne came from Italian businessmen passing through town. One of the correspondents kept a rented radio in his room, monitored BBC broadcasts, and kept the others informed of war news with written summaries.
Reynolds Packard was playing billiards in a Siena café when he learned the Americans were to report to the local police chief. When told they were moving to Rome, one of the correspondents let out a loud cheer. “I’m as relieved to get rid of you as you are to go,” the chief responded with a smile. The Excelsior Hotel presented the internees with bottles of champagne as a parting gift.
The correspondents were escorted to Rome by detectives and installed in the Grand Hotel, where they spent eight days, eating in the best restaurants and enjoying relative freedom. On May 13, 1942, they left Rome on the last of four trains departing at different intervals for the French-Spanish border and carrying diplomats and American citizens who had been detained in the country, the number equal to that of Italians allowed out of America. In unoccupied France the train took on Vichy detectives, and from the windows the correspondents got glimpses of the Riviera: hotels shut up, tennis courts and golf courses overgrown with weeds, people walking or bicycling and carrying knapsacks to pick up any fruit or wood they might find off the roads. When the train arrived at Cerbère on the Spanish border, the passengers boarded another exchange train for Barcelona, Madrid, and eventually Lisbon.
Late at night the train reached the Portuguese border, but it was not allowed to cross until the chartered Swedish liner Drottningholm, bringing Italian and German diplomats from America, had docked in Lisbon. When at last the train entered Portugal, the correspondents rushed to a frontier café for the first genuine coffee they had drunk in months. But only in the Lisbon railway station did they finally have a sense of complete freedom, though there remained an ocean to cross. British and Yugoslav correspondents they had known in the past came to shake their hands while Italian detectives, who had been with them the entire journey, said polite goodbyes and hurried to shops to buy goods no longer available at home.
Like other new arrivals in Lisbon, Reynolds and Eleanor Packard were dazzled by the bright lights and abundant food. “To eat what one wanted,” they wrote, “to dance, to walk on brightly lighted streets at night, to drink real coffee, to smoke American cigarettes—all trivial things in themselves, but in their sum total they went a long way toward representing the differences between comfort and hardship. The Portuguese complained of a shortage of gasoline, but there were many taxis, and we thought that if the Portuguese had nothing more than that to worry about they were indeed lucky.” For their first days in the city the Packards and other correspondents also were allowed to write and transmit what the Packards called “really good broadsides at the Axis.” Then, after Rome and Berlin protested, the Portuguese censors clamped down.
The overcrowded Drottningholm—painted white, brightly lit, diplomat in bold lettering on each side—weighed anchor on May 22 and arrived in New York near the end of the month. The official passenger list issued by the State Department included 25 correspondents and their families from Italy and Central Europe along with a 154 American diplomatic officials and families and a few private citizens. Among the diplomats was Admiral William D. Leahy, who had resigned as ambassador to Vichy France after he was appointed President Roosevelt’s chief of staff. His wife had died shortly before, and her body was being returned home.
Also with the diplomats was the American minister to Hungary, Herbert C. Pell, a wealthy aristocrat who had begun his foreign service career in 1937 when his friend President Roosevelt appointed him to head the ministry in Lisbon. (The U.S. diplomatic presence in Portugal was elevated to embassy status only in 1944.) Pell soon found himself in what he called “the dullest and least important post in Europe.” About his only task was to send a required weekly report to Washington: “Every Friday I would write a letter to the Secretary of State: ‘Sir, I have the honor to enclose a copy of the official journal. I am, respectfully.’ There was nothing more to do until the next Friday when the same letter had to be signed again.” With time on his hands, Pell spent most of it on leisurely drives about Portugal. Then came the war, and with it his reassignment in early 1941 from Portugal to Hungary. (When the exchange ship arrived in New York, reporters noted that Pell’s mass of luggage included eighty-five cases of French, Spanish, and Portuguese wine. He was never one to travel lightly or inconspicuously. When he left Lisbon for his new post in Budapest, he journeyed across wartime Europe in a three-vehicle motorcade—an American station wagon loaded with belongings, a limousine in which Pell and a secretary rode, and a truck carrying gasoline and spare parts, each vehicle with its own chauffeur.)
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Still another diplomat in the Drottningholm group was the former first secretary of the American embassy in Berlin, George Kennan. With the German declaration of war on the United States, Kennan and other Berlin personnel and their families together with American officials and journalists from throughout Europe had been swiftly interned under Gestapo supervision in a hotel in Bad Nauheim, a small spa town near Frankfurt. For five months Kennan was both in charge of what he termed “this motley group of hungry, cold, and worried prisoners” and the intermediary with their captors. Complaint among the internees was constant, with grousing about food topping the list. The daily fare was German civilian rations, not as ample as prisoners of war were entitled to; nor were the internees allowed Red Cross parcels that normally went to prisoners. When the 130 captives finally left Frankfort for Lisbon and the exchange ship, all were emaciated.
The trip was made aboard two special trains. Crossing Spain at night it was necessary to lock the doors to keep the prisoners, especially the journalists among them, from getting off at rail stations in a hunt for liquor and possibly being left behind. Kennan had charge of one of the trains, and when it reached a Portuguese border town (“our first breath of peace and normalcy,” he recalled) a member of Lisbon’s American legation was waiting. Kennan went out for a meeting, leaving the train locked behind him, and afterward asked if breakfast was possible at the station. It was.
Thereupon I [Kennan wrote], who had been for five months on the receiving end of the food complaints, took final revenge upon my fellow internees by repairing to the station buffet and eating a breakfast of several eggs, leaving the rest of them to nurse their empty bellies over the remaining six or seven hours of rail journey before making themselves sick, as all of us did, on the rich fare of Lisbon.
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One of the war’s late exchanges in Lisbon took place in early March 1944 when a group of some 600—mostly American diplomats, correspondents, relief workers, and wounded POWs—left on the chartered Swedish liner Gripsholm for New York. The ship had just brought more than twelve hundred French and German internees to Lisbon. Among the French-German collection were former Vichy diplomats, 130 German troops who had been wounded or were considered mental cases, and a large number of women and children. Most of the 150 American
civilians on the outgoing ship had been seized from Vichy France after its occupation by German troops and held for barter for more than a year in the resort town of Baden-Baden.
The wounded Americans in the exchange party had come by rail to Lisbon, and the Portuguese Red Cross had cared for them in an emergency hospital before sending them in ambulances to the ship. One of the men, Lieutenant Robert Janson, had bailed out of a burning B-17 bomber over Germany and, his back broken, had spent seven months in German hospitals before ending up in a camp for captured airmen, Stalag Luft III in Poland. (A month after Janson was brought to Lisbon, the camp was the site of a mass tunnel escape that became the subject of The Great Escape, a 1950 book by an Australian writer and camp prisoner, Paul Brickhill, and in 1963 a popular film of the same name.) In a log he kept, Janson wrote of the train journey in unheated cars through Germany and France to Hendaye, where the occupants were housed in a German camp and served dinner by Spanish women. They could now glimpse Irun in Spain and on Sunday hear chimes from a church. From Sunday to Thursday they waited in the camp; then, at 3:30 in the morning, they were roused from sleep and led in heavy snow to a train station, where one car was waiting for them, again without heat. At the station a trainload of diplomats came in, most of them from Latin America, and half were placed on the same train as the POWs.
It was a happy moment when the train crossed the border with, as Janson wrote in reference to his prison captors, “no goons on board” and the diplomats in good humor after their own long internment. At the first stop in Spain a doctor and nurses dressed the wounds of some of the men and attended the sick. An American colonel appeared and gave out information about what to expect in Lisbon and on the exchange ship. For the first time Janson began feeling he was on his way to home.