by Peter Finn
Dickson hadn’t even gotten the car into second gear when a burst of machine-gun fire raked the ground in front of the jeep. Dickson braked and all four jumped out. Gertie, Dickson, and Jennings lay in a “cowering bundle” on the side of the jeep by a shallow ditch that provided some shelter from the attackers. Papurt was on the exposed side of the vehicle. The Germans were firing a portable machine gun that could unleash over a thousand rounds a minute.
“Geysers of dirt fairly exploded from the hard earth” as the gunner sought his range.
Papurt, in a quiet, unemotional voice, whispered, “They got me through the legs.”
As Gertie tried to look around the tire to see him, bullets whipped by her.
Papurt called out, “Turn the jeep around. It’s our only chance.”
Dickson jumped into the driver’s seat, but the vehicle wouldn’t start. “It’s kaput, sir,” he shouted.
A fresh round of fire erupted, and Dickson was hit as he tried to scramble from the vehicle. Jennings raced around and pulled the young driver back to the sheltered side. The private had been shot in the legs and shinbone, and his right hand had been shredded, leaving three of his fingers barely attached. Jennings urged Papurt to try to drag himself a little closer to the vehicle. “This way, man, so I can bring you over here.”
Gertie was peering under the car, watching Papurt’s slow and painful crawl, when bullets hit the front axle, ricocheted into the engine, and sprayed her face and tin helmet with oil. Around her it puddled in the mud, soaking into her coat. Jennings suddenly rushed out from behind the car and dragged Papurt back.
“I take Bob’s revolver, Bob takes Papurt’s carbine,” Gertie recalled.
Dickson’s wounds were bleeding freely, and he seemed “ghastly” to Gertie. She thought his lips looked faintly blue and his face was ashen, but he managed a weak smile as Papurt was placed close to his side.
“Don’t worry, son,” Papurt said, assuring the young private that he’d get home to tell his war story.
There was, however, no obvious escape route. Around them was only open ground with no cover within even sprinting distance. Gertie was too stunned to be frightened but did, in that moment, experience stomach-churning sensations of regret and guilt: that she wouldn’t see her husband again; that the OSS would be compromised; that she had been so damn stupid to get herself—someone, she thought, who should have remained an office drudge—into this jam.
When Papurt smiled at her and said he’d been in tougher spots than this, she snapped, “The hell you have.”
The four knew their OSS IDs were deeply incriminating and could lead to their being branded as spies, tortured, and possibly shot. Gertie’s hand trembled as she burned the documents with a cigarette lighter. She ground the ashes into the mud and oil by the disabled jeep, scraped earth over them with her toe, and tamped the pile down. Gertie kept her U.S. passport. She likely had been issued a new one after her arrival in London, as the one she had originally traveled to England with noted that she was “on special private business for the Office of Strategic Services.”
“Isn’t that a laugh,” Gertie said. “I love those sorts of things. They are so ridiculous.”
Pinned down, the group held what Gertie called a war council. Jennings was afraid the constant barrage of fire would lead to either the jeep’s gas tank exploding or someone being hit by a ricocheting bullet. “The Germans continued to give us bursts of heavy machine gun fire and we realized the situation was hopeless,” Jennings said. They decided to surrender. Jennings pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket and raised it on the barrel of Papurt’s carbine. The firing from the German position eased and then stopped. Gertie took the moment to sprinkle some sulfur powder from the jeep’s first aid kit on Dickson’s right thigh, left ankle, and fingers. He was shivering and wet, and Gertie pulled a blanket from the vehicle and put it over him.
American artillery now began to rumble, hitting a ridge near the village, kicking up spouts of dirt. U.S. planes circled overhead. “We wished they could look down and see our predicament,” Gertie recalled.
Waiting for German soldiers to arrive, the four OSS members lined up their stories.
“What about you, Gertrude?” asked Jennings.
“I’ll claim to be an interpreter loaned to you by the American embassy,” Gertie replied. “My job can be…file clerk. File clerk with the embassy in Paris.” That was what she had been told to say at a security briefing in Washington in 1943, just before she left for London. At the time, she had thought it ridiculous that she would need a cover story, but now her training flooded back.
“Sounds reasonable,” said Jennings. “I guess I’m a Naval observer on a mission to the front.”
“What mission?” Gertie asked.
“I was to be told on arrival,” he said.
They looked at Papurt.
“I’m just an ordnance officer,” he said.
“Can they catch you on that?”
“No, I know all about ordnance.”
It was thin stuff, hardly likely to survive interrogation, but would have to do. As to why they were in Wallendorf, the best explanation was the truth: they thought it was in American hands and took a ride to see a small piece of Germany.
Gertie turned to the young driver and smiled at him. All the color had drained from his face. He continued to tremble as he lay on the ground.
“Just a GI, I reckon,” Dickson said. “Nothing to hide.”
An eternity seemed to pass before the German soldiers emerged from the trees.
“Here they come,” Jennings said, standing to face them, issuing a snort of disbelief.
Gertie lit cigarettes for Papurt and Dickson and placed them in their mouths. Then she too stood up.
The soldiers came at them from two directions, guns leveled. “Hands up,” said one in English.
The four were prisoners of war.
And Gertrude Legendre had just become the first American woman in uniform captured by the Nazis.
3
Wyoming
One afternoon in the summer of 1920, Gertie sat on a log along a ridge in the Teton Range. The sun fell in bright shards through the treetops, but it was cool high up in the mountains, and the air was sweet with the smell of pine, fir, and spruce.
Gertie—in full western-gal mode—was wearing a Stetson hat, kerchief, lumberjack shirt, sheepskin chaps, and boots. Her rifle lay across her lap, gripped tightly at the trigger guard as she waited in the vast silence for the sound of hoofbeats.
While most of her contemporaries were celebrating their high school graduations with debutante parties in New York City, eighteen-year-old Gertie instead insisted on an adventure out west with an old friend and a chaperone sent along by her father. Shooting had been a part of her life since she’d picked off birds as a young girl in South Carolina; she was an excellent markswoman before she reached her teens. Later, at the all-girl Foxcroft boarding school in Middleburg, Virginia, she foxhunted, went beagling after rabbits, and tracked raccoons at night under the tutelage of the principal. It was an education in which “outdoor life…was as important as the ‘finishing’ touches that we were receiving,” Gertie recalled.
In Wyoming, Gertie’s party picked up their hunting licenses in Jackson, a dusty backwater with a post office and a few houses, before heading to a dude ranch at the foot of the Tetons that catered to wealthy visitors from back east. They hired a pack train of ponies and with a young cowboy as a guide started to climb. Nights were spent in sleeping bags by log fires at base camp. They passed their days hiking and looking for game in the farther reaches of the range.
Several days in, they spotted a group of five elk through field glasses and took off at a trot to intercept them. As a doe, a bull, then some more does crossed in front of Gertie’s party, the animals sensed their presence and began to lurch away in panic.
Gertie fired and the bull stumbled and crashed into the brush, still running but mortally wounded. They found it some distance away, a not very big animal, lying on its side, with “neither great points nor heavy horn, but it was my elk, my first, on my first real hunt—shot with a bullet through the heart,” Gertie said. “I was filled with pride and the exultation of success…I strode in to camp—all five feet five of me, every inch the successful huntress.”
Over the next seven years, Gertie would continue to hunt in Alaska and Canada—black and Kodiak bears, moose, caribou, mountain sheep, and goats. “If I hadn’t gone on that first trip to the Tetons, I might never have known the thrill of life in the wilderness,” she said. Gertie enjoyed what she described as her “own safe extravagant world” gilded by great wealth but felt that she “wasn’t going to be like most of the girls I knew. I wanted something different, something more than the social whirl.”
She found her vocation in hunting expeditions, the purview of the very wealthy, breezing across the world with her crisp calling cards, American spunk, and license to kill. The animals she felled were brought back to major U.S. institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Gertie “was a real ‘let’s get cracking, let’s get the show on the road’ kind of girl,” her daughter recalled. “She just wanted to taste everything, and try everything, have a ton of fun.”
Gertie came from New York and New England stock, stretching back many generations on both sides of the family into colonial America, where one ancestor had been governor of Connecticut. Among the more famous of her relatives was her grandfather Henry Shelton Sanford. He served as President Lincoln’s minister to Belgium and ran secret operations on the continent to disrupt supplies to the Confederacy. “In my view, it is most important to prevent a thousand arms or hundred weight of powder going home to the enemy than to secure ten times that amount for ourselves,” said Sanford, a polyglot who had previously served as an American diplomat in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and Frankfurt, Germany. He set up a network of informants at key European ports and in factory towns to monitor Confederate agents while tirelessly promoting the Union cause.
At a diplomatic reception in Paris in 1864, he met Gertrude DuPuy, a Philadelphian. They wed, and their daughter Ethel, born in 1874 and educated in Europe, was Gertie’s mother.
Much of the family’s fortune was built by Gertie’s paternal grandfather, Stephen Sanford, a West Point graduate and distant relative of Henry’s. He oversaw the growth of a family carpet company, founded in 1842 in Amsterdam, New York, into a major brand. He also developed a Thoroughbred farm—called Hurricana—in the Mohawk valley, a pursuit that began as a hobby but became its own thriving venture.
Stephen Sanford married Sarah Jane Cochran, from New Orleans, and their son John was Gertie’s father. Both father and son would represent upstate New York districts in the House of Representatives.
John and Ethel were married in 1892 in the central Florida town of Sanford, founded by Ethel’s father, Henry. John was forty-one; Ethel was nineteen. “Father was a businessman, forthright, blunt, an athlete, not particularly interested in the arts,” Gertie said. “Mother was quiet, thoughtful, sensitive; absorbed by music, art, literature and the theater.” She spoke French to her children.
The difference in age and temperament would eventually make itself felt. The couple became estranged and stopped speaking to each other; they communicated through notes sent back and forth on the elevator in their Seventy-Second Street mansion in Manhattan. Gertie gingerly said there was “less companionship” as they got older.
John and Ethel had three children: Stephen, known as Laddie, who became an international polo player; Jane, who would marry an Italian diplomat and confidant of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini; and Gertrude, the youngest, born in Aiken, South Carolina, on March 29, 1902.
At Stephen Sanford’s death in 1913, Gertie’s father inherited an estate estimated at $40 million—close to $1 billion in today’s dollars. Under John Sanford, the family business continued to grow, becoming a booming national enterprise that sold flooring from New York to San Francisco and generated enormous wealth for the family. Sanford, like his father, was a major figure in horse racing, and the sport—along with golf and watching his son play polo—was one of his few indulgences. “Horses, my mares, my stable…[keep] me out in the air, it keeps me active and among my friends,” he said, dismissing other pursuits of the wealthy as pointless. “To put me on a yacht is like putting a man in jail, with the additional risk of drowning.”
Sanford’s colt George Smith won the Kentucky Derby in 1916, and in 1923 the family became the first American owners to win the English Grand National with the horse Sergeant Murphy. Gertie’s mother, Ethel, and her brother, Laddie, were in Liverpool to watch the grueling steeplechase; only seven of twenty-eight starters finished the thirty-fence course. The American winners were congratulated by the king.
Gertie’s family moved with the seasons between Amsterdam and Aiken, the family’s winter home about twenty miles northeast of Augusta, Georgia. “My memories of those early days in the South are happy ones,” Gertie recalled, “of ponies, picnics, costume parties, the smell of wisteria and jasmine.” As she got a little older, and the family’s social ambitions grew, summer brought vacations in Newport, Rhode Island, or Maine, and trips to England and France, where John Sanford also kept racehorses at a farm he had bought in Normandy. The Sanfords—along with a governess, a tutor, two cars, and a chauffeur—were in France in the summer of 1914 when World War I broke out. Near the French coast, while attempting to reach a ferry to England, they had their Rolls-Royce and chauffeur requisitioned by a French general; both eventually turned up in London unscathed.
By 1918, the Sanfords were living at 9 East Seventy-Second Street, just off Central Park—a palatial town house built in 1896 with oak and iron entry doors and “giant French windows with garlands, cartouches, scrolls and other details applied in profusion.” The same architects had designed the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. An elevator took guests to the sitting rooms of Ethel Sanford, where she frequently entertained. There were also six bedrooms on the upper floors. The broad main hall and library were on the first floor and the kitchen and servants’ quarters on the ground floor, and below them a large wine cellar extended out under the street. It was a mansion fit for an industrial titan.
Gertie moved to New York City after graduating from the Foxcroft School. In her senior year, only one classmate planned to go on to college. “We probably thought that she was a little strange,” said Gertie. For most of her peers, a career was not deemed necessary if even considered. Life in the 1920s was “a blur of parties, dances, theater and music,” facilitated by the Rolls-Royce and chauffeur that Gertie and her sister, Jane, shared to move around Manhattan. A Broadway professional taught the girls how to sing and dance. Each day the butler placed theater tickets on the hall table in case anyone had a hankering to go to a play or musical. Gertie never lost her taste for skits and adored hosting costume parties. One of her more famous events was baby themed, with everyone carrying rattles and wearing bonnets. At another of her galas, with the circus as a motif, Gertie arrived on the back of a baby elephant.
Gertie’s mother died from cancer in November 1924; she was only fifty-one. In her writings, Gertie dwelled little on Ethel’s death—“It seemed that she was sick only that month, but perhaps it was longer.” Shortly after the funeral, “Father decided Janie and I needed to go away on a trip that winter, and he sent us off with Doctor Coffin, who had been with me to Wyoming and Canada, as chaperone on my various fall hunting trips. Now he was to take us to Syria, Palestine and Egypt.” The highlight of the journey was a cruise up the Nile from Cairo to Edfu on a chartered dahabeya. At Luxor, they entered the recently opened tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamen. Little had yet been touched or removed, and “the treasures were piled
high.”
* * *
—
In late 1927, Gertie—whose hunting exploits in North America were occasionally chronicled in the New York papers—was invited, along with her brother, Laddie, to go on a safari in East Africa. Harold Talbott, a director of the Chrysler Corporation and a future secretary of the air force, and his wife, Peggy—“one of those twenties top-drawer charmers”—came by the Sanfords’ box at the Saratoga racetrack to ask them to come. For Gertie, it was the fulfillment of a long-held wish, and, to her delight, “Father agreed.”
After crossing the Atlantic, they took an old Italian ship, the Giuseppe Mazzini, from Naples, passing through the Suez Canal to Port Sudan, where the visitors swam in the Red Sea—in a “sheltered spot away from the barracudas.” The ship stopped again at Aden, in southern Yemen, where Gertie found the water “blue as the Mediterranean and hot as Antibes in summer.” The passengers spent their days on deck chairs reading and their evenings watching movies and drinking. The group celebrated Christmas Eve aboard. “We drank scads of champagne,” Gertie said, describing a “free-for-all roughhouse at the ship’s bar.” Someone poured beer over her head. “It was an epic evening,” she concluded.
At the port of Mogadishu, Gertie remarked to her diary on the “wonderful build” of the “naked wiry black people” ashore. She was genuinely curious about native peoples but also infused with a racial superiority endemic to the globe-trotting white Americans of the time. Africans were hired to serve and obey. During the expedition, Harold Talbott felt entitled to give a “public whipping” to a porter for an alleged infraction.
Gertie rejected some of the racist characterizations of Africans by the New York newspaper reporters who later interviewed her, telling them of Ethiopians, for instance, that “they are called savages, but they are not savages. They live a quiet life, subsisting on the cattle they raise and rarely become hostile.”