Donovan

by Richard Dunlop

  That was what Duffy wrote in his diary, but when he was talking with Donovan, as often as not they had heated differences of opinion about things as varied as the merits of Tolstoi’s novels and whether the Hudson or the Rhine was the more beautiful river. Said Duffy,

  Those infernal youngsters of ours have been telling stories about both of us, most of which, at least those that concern myself, attest the loyalty of my friends better than their veracity. There is only one way to take it—as a joke. If either of us gets a clipping in which his name is mentioned, he brandishes it before company under the nose of the other, challenging him to produce small proof of being as great a hero. The other day Captain Ryan gave Donovan an editorial about him from a paper in Watertown, New York. It was immediately brought to mess, and Donovan thought he had scored a triumph, but I countered with a quotation from a letter, which said that my picture, jeweled with electric lights, had a place of honor in the window of a saloon.

  Donovan continued his study of French and went to Paris to represent the Rainbow Division at a meeting to organize the American Legion. Occupation duty after the excitement of war had resulted in a lowering of morale. America’s citizen soldiers wanted only one thing—to go home, or as one man put it, “to see the Statue of Liberty looming up on the horizon.” Donovan, the citizen-soldier hero of the American Expeditionary Force, was one of the men called upon to make suggestions on how to improve morale. He met with Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., Ogden Mills, and Col. Ralph Van Deman. Donovan wrote later,

  I suggested a practical thing to do was to call a group of officers from all over the AEF who knew conditions, that group of officers to meet with representatives of the General Staff. I was called upon as sort of prosecuting attorney to state the case to the General Staff. Previously, Mills and Roosevelt and myself, who may be considered the first three members of the Legion, had agreed to take up the project with these twenty members. This was done. At the time of the meeting, it was decided to have Teddy Roosevelt call a meeting in the United States, and that Bennett Clark would preside at the meeting in Paris.

  The 20 citizen soldiers met for dinner at a French military club in Paris on the night of February 15. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., presided, and once dinner was over he explained the need for a veterans’ organization.

  “It is a nervy thing for us, as a self-appointed committee, to set about such a thing,” he concluded, “but someone has got to do it, and it ought to be done as soon as possible for the good of the men and for the good of the country.”

  One general immediately wanted to know where everybody in the room stood on the question of universal training and a bigger army. Unless he could be sure the new organization would back such purposes, he announced, “I don’t want to have anything to do with the movement.”

  Bill Donovan arose, and his eyes flashed. He announced that it was presumptuous enough even to issue a call for a soldiers’ organization, and that it would be “unthinkable to try to wish any pre-thought-out policies on the unborn babe.”

  “After a heated argument, in which the Colonel was all alone in his contentions,” wrote George A. White, who was present, “it was decided that after the child had been duly born and reared, it could decide for itself whether it wanted mush or hot cakes for breakfast and also what variety of military policy it preferred.”

  It was by then after midnight, and Donovan had managed to win the others to his side. He had spoken up for the enlisted man’s viewpoint.

  Among the other officers present at the Paris meeting was Ned Buxton, who was to be a lifelong friend of Donovan’s. Between the wars, he was a correspondent and a textile manufacturer. During World War II he served in OSS headquarters. He was also Sgt. Alvin York’s commanding officer in World War I. It was Buxton who convinced York, a pacifist, that it was possible to kill German soldiers and be a good Christian. Said York, “He was the first New Englander I ever knowed. I was kinder surprised at his knowledge of the Bible. It made me happy my battalion commander was familiar with the word of God.”

  Orders came for the 165th Infantry to return home. Donovan, back at Remagen, took his final stroll along the Rhine with Father Duffy. Talk returned to what they would do when home in the United States. Donovan said that after his final duties with the regiment, he was going to “run away from it all and go off with my wife on a trip to Japan.”

  On April 2, the Fighting 69th boarded trains for Brest, where they remained for a few days. Then they sailed aboard two ships for Hoboken. Donovan sailed in the former City of Paris, renamed the Harrisburg. On April 21, he could look out at the southern shore of Long Island and at last glimpse the Statue of Liberty. A flotilla of small boats, tugs, and ferries came down the bay to welcome the regiment. As the ship tied up at a Hoboken pier, a pretty girl on shore shouted, “Hello, Mike!” She was answered by 300 voices. The Fighting 69th was home at last.

  A week after their tumultuous welcome in New York Harbor, the Fighting 69th fell in at the foot of Fifth Avenue. Donovan stood at their head. When somebody suggested that he ought to ride in an open car over the 5-mile length of the parade, he snapped, “It was good enough to go on foot in Europe. It’s good enough now.”

  Donovan’s staff fell into place behind him. Young girls passed out roses, which the men tucked into their web belts.

  A huge crowd had gathered the length of the avenue, a jubilant crowd that laughed and cheered at every little thing—a tot waving an American flag, a young boy with a placard that read “Welcome Dad. The ice man never came to our house all the time you were with Wild Bill!”—anything that lent humor to the festive mood. Near the triumphal arch at the foot of the avenue, where the 69th had gathered, the crowd was having a boisterous good time. Then Col. William J. Donovan drew himself erect to give a command, and the crowd suddenly grew still.

  “Forward, march!” Donovan ordered.

  Bandmaster Henry Zitzmann’s band swung into “Killarney,” and the men who had survived the holocaust in France stepped off smartly. A great cheer went up. The 69th passed up Fifth Avenue to the music of “Garry Owen,” to other Irish and American marches and songs, and to Victor Herbert’s new march, which Father Vincent Donovan had asked the Irish-American to write using Joyce Kilmer’s “When the 69th Comes Home” as the lyrics. (Herbert signed over the royalties from the march to Kilmer’s widow.) Confetti rained from the tall buildings. Wounded men unable to make the march rode in cars at the end of the parade. Will Rogers spoke for New York and most of America when he commented, “If they really want to honor the boys, why don’t they let them sit in the stands and have the people march by?”

  Then what may have been Bill Donovan’s proudest day was over. After the parade concluded, Donovan went to Camp Mills with his brother Vincent. There, in the old campsite where he had first taken command of the First Battalion, he wept. “I can’t forget the men we left behind,” he told his brother.

  In the days that followed, there were other events to show New York’s pride in the 69th. An official reception was held by Mayor John Hylan on the steps of City Hall, and the mayor conferred the freedom of the city on Donovan and his officers. The mayor and a committee headed by Commissioner Rodman Wanamaker gave a dinner in Donovan’s honor, and the entire regiment was honored at a Hotel Commodore dinner. The Lamb’s Club and the Press Association feted Donovan.

  On April 19 the New York World had announced that $150,000 had been raised by the wealthy trustees of the regiment to help find jobs for the returning men and to assist those who might find themselves in need. “All the funds on hand to be turned over to Father Duffy and Colonel Donovan to be used as their experience dictates,” stated the newspaper. Donovan was delighted with this financial help to his men, for he already knew of hardship cases. The Fighting 69th had lost 644 men killed and 2,857 wounded in France, and there were widows and orphans to worry about and men whose injuries would long keep them from earning a living. The nine World War I silver furls to the regiment’s battle flag had not bee
n won easily.

  On Thursday, May 15, it was Father Duffy Day at the Polo Grounds. A band played a concert at 1:30 P.M. while the crowd gathered. The New York Giants were to play the Chicago Cubs at 3:30, but for once it was not the ball game that the crowd had come to cheer. They roared their approval of Father Duffy when the 69th’s chaplain stood up to bless them, and when Wild Bill Donovan arose to speak, there was a cheer that shook the stands.

  Donovan took this moment to say good-bye to his men. “There can be no keener regret than the parting of men who have fought together in a common cause and where friendship has been sealed by the blood of comrades,” he said in the hush that had fallen upon the stadium. “Throughout this war, sustained by the trust of its people at home, inspired by the ancient tradition, this regiment has carried the fight to the foe without faltering.”

  The crowd waited for more, but Donovan sat down, having said what he had to say. There was a silence and then renewed applause for this valiant commander and his men. Bill Donovan, now a national hero, was mustered out of the army.

  PART TWO

  The President’s “Secret Legs”

  1919–1941

  10

  Siberian Adventure

  FOR THE FIRST 20 MILES out of Vladivostok, the train ran north along the coast of Peter the Great Bay. Smoke belched from the locomotive and drifted in a cloud out over the water. Soot blew in the coach windows, opened to catch the breeze from the Sea of Japan.

  The date was July 11, 1919, and the train was an extraordinary one. In several of the cars and on the locomotive itself, soldiers of America’s Siberian Expeditionary Force, their rifles and machine guns at the ready, kept a sharp eye on the tracks ahead and on the forests and fields through which the railroad ran. Under strict orders from President Wilson, the American Army was neutral in the struggle between the Whites and the Bolsheviks for control of what had once been the czar’s Far Eastern empire. Both partisans and Bolsheviks wrecked trains, regardless of what flag flew from the front of the boiler.

  A Cadillac automobile rode on a flatcar. It belonged to Maj. Gen. William S. Graves, commander of the U.S. forces in Siberia. The general himself rode in a bare compartment with two companions. He stared moodily out the window from time to time, for he was a blunt soldier, not at all pleased to be making the political journey upon which the train had started. One of the other men was Roland Morris, American ambassador to Japan, and charged by the State Department in Washington with handling the Russian question in the Far East. Beside him sat a stocky 36-year-old colonel in neat, almost natty, civilian clothing. He had a guileless face and a gentle voice, both seemingly out of keeping with his reputation as one of America’s premier war heroes. This was William J. Donovan on his first important intelligence mission.

  The roots of America’s World War II Office of Strategic Services and the Central Intelligence Agency, which was to succeed it, run deep through the tangled history of the 20th century. It may be said that the taproot reached back to this train and this man on that hot day along the shores of an Asian sea. In the weeks that lay ahead, Donovan was to learn a great deal of lasting importance, not only about what was happening in Siberia but about how interdepartmental rivalries both in Washington and in the field made it possible for foreign interests to manipulate American policy. What he learned was going to stand him in good stead when, more than two decades later, he was made director of his country’s first comprehensive strategic intelligence service.

  Bill Donovan had returned to Buffalo from his military service in Europe in early May. His restless mind was already preoccupied with affairs far across the Pacific, where he was convinced the seeds of another war were being sown. One day he talked to John Lord O’Brian, one of his law partners, who had gone to Washington to serve as an intelligence aide in the Justice Department when America declared war. O’Brian, who had since become an intelligence adviser to President Wilson, was looking for somebody to go to Siberia as a secret presidential agent. Conflicting reports were reaching the President from State Department and military representatives in Siberia, and such an agent was needed to provide objective information on conditions in the Russian Far East.

  Walking beside the Rhine with Father Duffy in early April, Donovan had planned to take Ruth on a long-delayed honeymoon trip to Japan. He told O’Brian that they would make the trip now. Then he would go on to Siberia for the President. Donovan was told that under no circumstances should he inform General Graves, Ambassador Morris, or the consul general in Vladivostok that he was on a confidential mission.

  Ruth was delighted at the prospect of a trip to the Far East. The children’s grandmother took care of David and Patricia, and the Donovans set off on what seemed to be a romantic journey. The trip across America by train and across the sea on a luxury liner was indeed a restful and happy one.

  As soon as he reached Tokyo, Donovan had gotten in touch with Morris, who had been directed to make a fact-finding trip to Omsk, and asked if he might accompany the ambassador to Siberia. He mentioned nothing of his confidential mission. Morris wired the acting secretary of state on July 7:

  Colonel Donovan of the 165th (formerly 69th) New York Regiment, Rainbow Division, is extremely anxious to go to Omsk with me in a purely private capacity and at his own expense. He is deeply interested in the situation in the Orient, and I have valued my talk with him as he brings to these problems a refreshing point of view, representative, I think, of our younger Americans who were privileged to fight in France. I believe it would be helpful in many ways if he could take back to America his own direct impressions. I am sure he would also be of assistance to me both by his personality and in testing my own impressions and conclusions. While not asking you to assume any responsibility if I should take him, I would appreciate an expression of your views. Please reply to Vladivostok.

  Donovan and Morris left Japan by boat for Vladivostok on July 10 and were at the American consulate there when Morris received a reply to his cable: “For Morris, yours, July seventh, nine P.M./confidential, for the Acting Secretary of State. I can see no objection to your taking Colonel Donovan if you wish to do so.”

  Left behind in Tokyo, Ruth was upset. She had understood why her husband had interrupted their honeymoon to return to Buffalo when World War I began, and she had understood as well why he went to Europe for the War Relief Commission and then served on the Mexican border before returning to Europe with the Fighting 69th. The world was at war, and other women also had given up their husbands. This was different. America was not at war, and she had set out with Bill on what was to be a second honeymoon. Now he was leaving her in Tokyo, telling her that he and Ambassador Morris were going to Siberia. The ambassador had requested that he go, he said, and it was his patriotic duty to make the trip. They were going to investigate the White Russian government of Adm. Aleksandr Kolchak. He had no idea how long he would be gone. Ruth could either return to America or wait for him in Japan. She chose to go home to Buffalo and her children.

  Roland Sletor Morris, with whom Donovan crossed the Sea of Japan, was a prominent Philadelphia lawyer who had risen through Democratic politics until in 1917 President Wilson sent him as ambassador to Japan. From Tokyo he kept a close eye on the increasing signs of Japanese imperialism while striving to foster better relations between the United States and Japan. With the outbreak of civil war in Russia, President Wilson asked Morris to handle the Russian question in the Far East.

  In Vladivostok, Donovan and Morris met General Graves, who had received a message from Washington: “If the American Ambassador to Japan, Mr. Roland S. Morris, goes to Omsk, you will go with him.” Graves had sent a message back to Washington objecting to the trip. He did not want to depart from the strict neutrality demanded of him by the President and feared that to go to Omsk would imply his support of Admiral Kolchak and the White Russians. On July 7 he received a second cable from the War Department. “If Morris goes to Omsk, it is desired you accompany him.”

  Am
erica’s Siberian intervention had begun in August 1918, while the war was still raging in Europe. Graves, commanding the Eighth Division in training at Camp Fremont near Palo Alto, California, received an encoded message in July from the War Department ordering him to take the first and fastest train from San Francisco to Kansas City. There he was to proceed to the Baltimore Hotel and ask for the secretary of war. If the secretary was not there, Graves was to wait for him. Newton D. Baker, secretary of war in Wilson’s cabinet, was waiting at the hotel.

  Baker informed the general that the President had picked him to head an American expedition to Siberia. He handed him a sealed envelope and remarked, “This contains the policy of the United States in Russia, which you are to follow. Watch your step; you will be walking on eggs loaded with dynamite. God bless you and good-bye.”

  Wilson himself had had a hand in drafting the contents of the envelope. American troops were to go to Siberia to safeguard military stores gathered there for the war against Germany. With the collapse of the czar’s regime, there was a considerable risk that German and Austrian prisoners released in Siberia would be able to capture the supplies. The American troops were also to assist the Czech Legion, which had broken away from the Austrian Army on the Russian front and was attempting to reach Siberian ports from which its 40,000 men could reenter the war on the Allied side. Finally, the Americans were to help the Russian people as they established their own political institutions out of chaos. They would aid in the operation of the railroads so that vital food and clothing could move to isolated towns and villages, but they were to remain strictly neutral in the civil war between the White and Bolshevik factions.