by Ronald Weber
From Lisbon, Howard and Chenhalls went to Madrid for another round of talks, film showings, and receptions that went on for nearly two weeks. Back in Portugal, the pair returned to the Atlântico for a period of rest and sun before returning to England. When it was learned that Howard’s film The First of the Few, considered one of his best, had never been seen in Lisbon, the interlude was lengthened while a print was shipped from London and invitations hastily went out for a private screening at Estrela Hall of the British embassy. The film was intended to add final luster to the propaganda value of Howard’s Lisbon-Madrid tour, all the more so since one of those attending the showing would be the present Portuguese propaganda chief, Tavares d’Almeida, who afterward would host a dinner in Howard’s honor at the Aviz.
To ready themselves for the flight home, just before the film screening Howard and Chenhalls moved from their Estoril hotel to the Aviz. On the morning of June 1, 1943—after the film had been shown the previous evening, the dinner party given, and Howard received a gold medallion from Tavares d’Almeida for the best film of 1942—Howard and Chenhalls left for the airport and their return flight to England. The British airliner they flew, the Ibis, was shot down over the Bay of Biscay, with all passengers and crew lost.
In a front-page story the New York Times reported that the aircraft “was apparently the victim of German planes on unusually active reconnaissance along the seldom-molested air transport lane from neutral Portugal.” It was generally understood, the story added, that commercial liners flying between Lisbon and London carried only civilians, so it was unlikely the plane was mistaken for a military transport. Later information revealed that a swarm of eight German Junkers flying from Bordeaux had deliberately attacked the unarmed liner. “I am being followed by strange aircraft,” the Dutch pilot had reported over the radio. “Putting on best speed… . We are being attacked. Cannon shells and tracers are going through the fuselage. Wave-hopping and doing my best.” On two previous occasions the Ibis had taken fire from the Luftwaffe, but this was the first, and would be the only, fatal attack on the Lisbon-London route.
That the plane’s wreckage and the bodies of its passengers and crew were never found only intensified the question of why the scheduled and clearly marked airliner flying a daylight route had been targeted. The attack could have been simply a mischance of war. One of the German airmen that day gave weight to the possibility when, well after the event, he recalled the anger of the Luftwaffe group upon returning to their base in France:
On our return, we were told that we had shot down a civilian aircraft with VIPs on board. I can still remember quite clearly that we were all rather angry particularly because no one had told us, before, that there was a scheduled flight between Lisbon and the UK. If we had, it would have been an easy thing for us to escort the DC-3 to Bordeaux.
A glaring omission in the explanation was that the Germans were fully aware that for nearly three years there had been regular civilian flights between Lisbon and Britain.
But what eventually turned a puzzling situation into a mystery, one enduring to this day, was a famous political actor suggesting that he played a role in the death of the famous film actor. Winston Churchill, in his memoirs of World War II, wrote as follows about his return with Anthony Eden to England after his discussions in North Africa with General Eisenhower and other military leaders about the invasion of Sicily.
As my presence in North Africa had been fully reported, the Germans were exceptionally vigilant, and this led to a tragedy which much distressed me. The daily commercial aircraft was about to start from the Lisbon airfield when a thickset man smoking a cigar walked up and was thought to be a passenger on it. The German agents therefore signaled that I was on board. Although these neutral passenger planes had plied unmolested for many months between Portugal and England and had carried only civilian traffic, a German war plane was instantly ordered out, and the defenceless aircraft was ruthlessly shot down. Fourteen civilian passengers perished, and among them the well-known British film actor, Leslie Howard.
Churchill added that the Germans were impossibly stupid if they believed that “with all the resources of Great Britain at my disposal I should have booked a passage in a neutral plane from Lisbon and flown home in broad daylight.”
The thickset man in Churchill’s account was presumably Alfred Chenhalls, who bore some physical resemblance to the British leader and smoked cigars. But subsequent investigations of the loss of the Ibis—especially in books by the British journalist Ian Colvin in 1957, by Howard’s daughter Leslie Ruth Howard in 1959, and by his son Ronald Howard in 1981—set out other and more detailed explanations for what took place. Among them was that Leslie Howard was the focus of the attack because of his anti-Nazi filmmaking and the possibility that during his speaking tour of Portugal and Spain he was also gathering information for British intelligence. Another was that other passengers were the targets: a British wolfram expert; Tyrell Shervington, general manager of Shell Oil in Portugal, who had been a source of information to British intelligence in Lisbon; Wilfrid Israel, a German Jew who had been in Portugal and Spain as part of an effort to transport young Jewish refugees to Palestine (about whom more in the following chapter); and a British inspector general of embassies whom the Germans might have mistakenly identified as a military general. (When toward the end of 1943 Aline Griffith, a newly trained OSS agent on her way to the Madrid station, took a Clipper flight from New York, she was surprised it was going to Lisbon by way of Bermuda. She had thought the flight was traveling through Brazil and Morocco. “The route is changed for extra precaution,” explained an American four-star general aboard the flight. “The Germans attack everything crossing the Atlantic. Not long ago, they downed a plane from Lisbon with Leslie Howard aboard. They were after a friend of mine, an English general. Unfortunately, he was a friend of Howard’s, too. We suspect the German agents were able to trace his whereabouts because of the movie star’s publicity.”)
The most astonishing explanation was that those aboard the Ibis were sacrificed to keep a precious wartime secret. In his book about the flight, Ian Colvin noted that at the time of the attack the Luftwaffe was in a state of day-and-night alert over the Bay of Biscay—and the only reason for doing so, in his opinion, was Churchill’s intended flight home. Although they might only have been part of a deception campaign, rumors had been widespread in Lisbon that Churchill would be passing that way. “It would not have been possible,” Colvin wrote, “even with the best intelligence, to clock his departure and pinpoint his aircraft. So a wide net was spread in those days, and a high state of alert maintained.” While there was no evidence that the Germans had issued a “Kill Churchill” order, Colvin leaned in that direction. Nonetheless he switched in his book’s final pages to an entirely different explanation by relating a story attributed to an Allied intelligence officer who in late 1944 had been sent to Australia to lecture military figures about the necessity of secrecy in event of an invasion of Japan. To make his point, the officer told of an airliner shot down the year before, after leaving Lisbon.
As Colvin related the officer’s story, British intelligence had intercepted a message from a German transmitter in Lisbon giving Berlin names, obtained by German-paid agents watching Portela airport, of passengers flying from Lisbon to London on June l, 1943. Such messages were not uncommon, but with Churchill flying home at the same time this one drew special attention. The British could remove passengers named in the message from the plane or cancel the flight altogether, but doing so might alert the Germans that their coded messages were being read by the Allies. “That would lead,” Colvin wrote, “to enemy wireless silence in Lisbon, the picture would become blurred, the mastery of intelligence might be lost.” And he added: “It was decided at the top, so I am told by an officer who was present at the lecture [in Australia], that no action was to be taken.” So the Ibis was allowed to fly to guard the all-important secret that the Allies were penetrating German radio traffic.
Colvin closed his book with the reservation that he could not officially confirm what he had related about the Australian lecture. In 2005 the American historian Douglas L. Wheeler maintained, in a brief newspaper account, that the plane carrying Leslie Howard had indeed been sacrificed to shield the Allied intelligence program known as Ultra, operating from Bletchley Park in England, which decoded German messages. From information provided by former intelligence officers, Wheeler concluded that for several years intelligence figures from the United States, Britain, and Australia were taught that Britain had intercepted a German radio message that suggested the plane would be attacked. But to keep the Germans both from learning about Ultra and to protect Churchill, who was making a return flight to England at the time, “the British”—as Wheeler wrote—“did not warn, cancel or divert” the flight of the Ibis “but let it take off to its doom.”
8
Holding Out Hopes
The world is at war and I am comforting refugees, holding out hopes which, when I hold them out, I myself am almost convinced cannot be fulfilled.
—Howard Wriggins, Picking Up the Pieces from Portugal to Palestine
When Varian Fry flew into Lisbon in August 1940 to begin his secret rescue assignment, one of his fellow passengers on the Clipper was Alexander Makinsky, a Rockefeller Foundation medical doctor on his way to the Unitarian Service Committee’s recently opened office in the city. Passing through Portuguese customs, Fry, with Emergency Rescue Committee money attached to his leg, stayed close to Makinsky, hoping it would appear they were both visiting dignitaries and thus be given the same casual inspection. Neither had any difficulty, and for Fry it marked the start of a period in which he often leaned for help on figures associated with the Unitarian Service Committee (USC). Before leaving for Marseille, Fry acquainted himself with such other Lisbon aid organizations as the Red Cross, the YMCA, the American Friends Service Committee, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Catholic Relief Services, and HICEM, the merged name of three Jewish immigration societies. Yet both in Lisbon and Marseille his tie with the Unitarians would have special importance.
“In those days Rescue was our work,” Charles R. Joy of the USC’s Lisbon office wrote of his group’s mission, the capital letter perhaps only a matter of emphasis—or calculated to distinguish the Unitarian task from what most established charities typically characterized as refugee relief or assistance. In origin the USC was modeled on the Quakers’ American Friends Service Committee, and while cooperating in the work of this and other such aid efforts, it had a particular concern with rescuing illegal refugees and anti-Nazi figures wanted by the Gestapo. More broadly, what set apart the USC, and helped make it a dependable collaborator for Fry’s work, was an open commitment to the Allied cause at a time when most relief workers went about their duties under a protective umbrella of wartime neutrality. When the Quakers launched a program of widespread food distribution in France, the Unitarians voiced strong opposition on grounds the supplies would surely end up in German hands. As the war progressed there would be other displays of partisan action that distanced the USC all the more from colleagues in other humanitarian endeavors. In an interview given in the 1960s, Elisabeth Dexter, who with her husband, Robert Dexter, directed the USC’s Lisbon office following Charles Joy’s tenure, made emphatically clear the distinctive position of the USC:
We rather specialized in illegals for two reasons. One was that the illegals on the average were outstanding people… . Then, also, we specialized in illegals because neither the Joint [the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee] nor the Quakers who both had offices there [Lisbon] liked to work with illegals. They did at times, but it was really against their principles because both felt that they could help more people in the long run if they did not go counter to the laws of the country… . I know that sometimes they helped people when they weren’t supposed to, but they were very glad indeed if we could take them off their hands.
The Unitarian project in Europe had begun in early 1939 when a young minister and his wife from Massachusetts, Waitstill and Martha Sharp, came to Prague to work with the Czech Unitarian Church and assist in refugee movement to the United States and other countries. The Sharps returned home with the start of the war, but their overseas work was carried on with the formation in May 1940 of a service committee based in Boston, with William Emerson as chairman and Robert Dexter as executive secretary. In June a Lisbon office was opened as European headquarters, and the Sharps returned to take charge. When they learned that among the refugees now streaming south through unoccupied France there was a great shortage of food and especially milk for infants, they devoted their first weeks in Lisbon to getting condensed milk shipped by rail to Marseille. They traveled to Marseille themselves to arrange for the distribution, with Martha staying behind to continue the work in France after Waitstill returned to Lisbon to set up aid activity with refugees who had reached the city. The Unitarian office soon became Fry’s Lisbon connection by supporting his clients as they arrived and helping locate ocean transport. As Waitstill Sharp recorded, involvement with Fry turned into a routine part of his duties:
The days defy description. They were filled from seven o’clock in the morning until midnight, and sometimes after, with interviews, searches for persons about whom the Emergency Rescue Committee had cabled from America, or their agent [Fry] had cabled from Marseille; appeals and interventions at the American Export Line, the Pan American Airways, the French Consulate, the [Portuguese] International Police … the British Embassy, and, daily, at the American Consulate.
Waitstill Sharp’s link with Fry would also extend to taking a personal hand in helping get his troublesome client Lion Feuchtwanger out of France and into Portugal. As Fry’s stellar guide Leon Ball led the writer and his wife over the Pyrenees, Sharp, on his own way back to Lisbon after another trip to Marseille, took their luggage by rail across the border into Spain—as Fry himself had earlier done with the luggage of Heinrich and Golo Mann and Franz Werfel and his wife. Then on the train from Barcelona to Lisbon, Sharp handed Feuchtwanger his briefcase to carry, the large Red Cross emblem on it meant to provide a measure of disguise on the journey. As it did. In a railway bathroom, a Gestapo officer in an adjacent stall spotted the briefcase at Feuchtwanger’s feet and initiated a brief chat but otherwise ignored him. At the Portuguese border, however, an American journalist called out Feuchtwanger’s name as he waited in a customs line, causing others to take notice. Sharp firmly told her to keep quiet, which she did after complaining she was only looking for a scoop.
Sharp had one more role to play in the extended drama of getting Lion Feuchtwanger to safety. In Lisbon in late September 1940 the two boarded the Excalibur together, the writer using Martha Sharp’s return ticket since no others were available, while his own wife waited for another ship. In New York, press reports noted that Feuchtwanger was accompanied by Waitstill Sharp of the USC, who had obviously been part of a “thrilling rescue” but, unlike the talkative literary celebrity, was saying nothing about it to reporters.
With her husband in America, Martha Sharp returned to Lisbon to continue the work of getting milk and food supplies out to children in unoccupied France. She also began the frustrating labor of satisfying immigration requirements for getting a select number of refugee children and adults from Marseille to Lisbon and finally to the United States. When she found transport for herself to New York in early December 1940, she brought with her two children and four adults; when another ship docked on December 23, she was there to greet the rest of her refugees. A press story the following day reported that among the Excambion’s 185 passengers were “twenty-five refugee children of five nationalities, the first group of its kind to come here since the war began.” Martha Sharp was left unmentioned, though it was noted that the children, ages three to thirteen, had come under the joint auspices of the Unitarian Service Committee and the United States Committee for the Care of European Children, and that representativ
es of the two organizations had met the ship.
Martha Sharp continued working with the USC in the United States as a member of its board of directors and an effective fund-raiser for the organization. In February 1945 she returned to Lisbon to take over the USC office temporarily after the current directors, Robert and Elisabeth Dexter, suddenly resigned following a dispute with officials in Boston. (Waitstill Sharp had earlier taken a position with a relief agency in Cairo.) After learning that Portugal had asked the American ambassador to close down the office as a “friendly gesture to Portugal”—presumably a reaction to the USC’s long involvement with illegal refugees—she went to work trying to patch up relations with the Salazar regime.
Another chore was negotiating with the secret police to get Spanish Republican refugees, who at the time made up the largest number of the USC’s Lisbon clients, out of Portugal to permanent settlement in Mexico and Venezuela. She also visited refugees held in Caxias, the ancient fort-turned-prison outside Lisbon, where upgrades to first-and second-class cells were available for inmates able to pay for them, with third class—often with dirt floors and without beds or mattresses—the freely provided accommodation for everyone else. Other visits were made to USC clients in Caldas da Rainha, a three-hour ride from Lisbon aboard a wood-burning train, where she found that the thousand or so refugees still there had formed a hospitality center in a pink farmhouse surrounded by flowers but lacking any plumbing. Although classes were offered in the center, and books and magazines were available, the atmosphere of idleness was stifling since no one, regardless of prior training or education, was allowed to work while awaiting resettlement. Before leaving Lisbon for good in September 1945, Martha Sharp managed to get all of her clients freed from the town, with more than half of them off to permanent destinations.