“Dawkins,” the Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps said, without any preliminaries, “this is a heads-up on an Urgent TWX you’re about to get from the JCS. In essence, it says by Direction of the President, Brigadier General Fleming Pickering, USMCR, will shortly be in San Diego. Give him whatever he wants, and tell him anything he wants to know.”
“Yes, sir?” General Dawkins said.
“Do just that, Dawkins. Give him whatever he wants and tell him anything he wants to know.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
General Dawkins waited for the Commandant to continue. And continued to wait until a dial tone told him that the Commandant, having said all he wished to say, had terminated the conversation.
Dawkins put the phone back in the cradle and mused, aloud, “I wonder what the hell that’s all about?”
“What what’s about?”
“That was the Commandant. I’m about to get an Urgent TWX from the JCS informing me that Brigadier General Fleming Pickering is coming here, and I am to give him whatever he asks for and tell him anything that he wants to know.”
“Pickering?”
“He was on Guadalcanal, G-2 for a while when Goettge got killed . . .”
Craig nodded, indicating he knew who Dawkins was talking about.
“And the last I heard got out of the Corps the minute the war was over.”
“What’s he want here?”
“I have no idea. Whatever it is, it’s Direction of the President, ” Dawkins said.
Craig pursed his lips thoughtfully, and then both men returned to the most pressing problems involved in forming, organizing, and equipping a provisional Marine brigade under orders to sail within ten days.
[TWO]
U.S. NAVY/MARINE CORPS RESERVE TRAINING CENTER ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI 1920 5 JULY 1950
Captain George F. Hart pulled his nearly new unmarked blue Chevrolet into a parking slot behind the building, stopped, and reached for the microphone mounted under the dash.
“H-1,” he said into it.
Hart was thirty-two years old, nearly bald, and built like a circus strong man.
“Captain?” Dispatch responded. H-1 was the private call sign of the Chief, Homicide Bureau, St. Louis Police Department. Dispatch knew who he was.
“At the Navy Reserve Training Center until further notice. ”
“Navy Reserve Training Center, got it.”
“You have the number?”
“I think so.”
“ ‘Think’ don’t count. Know. Check.”
“Yes, sir,” the dispatcher said, his tone suggesting he didn’t like Captain Hart’s tone.
“I have the number, Captain,” the dispatcher said, and read it off.
“That’s it,” Hart said.
“Yes, sir,” the dispatcher said.
Hart put the microphone back in its bracket, turned the engine off, got out of the car, went in the backseat and took from it a dry cleaner’s bag on a hanger, locked the car, and then entered the building through a rear door to which he had a key.
He often thought the U.S. Navy/Marine Corps Reserve Training Center looked like a high school gymnasium without the high school.
The ground floor was essentially a large expanse of varnished wooden flooring large enough for two basketball courts, and there were in fact two basketball courts marked out on the floor, their baskets now retracted up to the roof. At one end of the floor was the entrance, and at the other rest rooms, and the stairway to the basement, which held lockers and the arms room.
On one side of the floor were the glass-walled offices of the Naval Reserve, and on the other, the glass-walled offices of the Marine Corps Reserve.
Hart unlocked the door with “COMMANDING OFFI-CER” lettered on the glass, then closed it, locked it, and checked to see that the venetian blinds were closed. One was not, and he adjusted it so that no one could see into his office.
His office was furnished with a desk, a desk chair, two straight-back chairs, two chrome armchairs, a matching couch, and a double clothing locker.
He unlocked the doors to both, then started getting undressed. First he took off his jacket, which revealed that he was wearing a shoulder holster. The holster itself held a Colt Model 1911 .45 ACP semiautomatic pistol under his left armpit. Under his right armpit, the harness held two spare seven-round clips for the pistol, and a pair of hand-cuffs.
So far as Captain Hart knew, he was the only white shirt in the department who elected to carry a .45. Only white shirts—lieutenants and higher; so called because their uniform shirts were white—were allowed to carry the weapon of their choice. Sergeants and below were required to carry the department-issued handgun, either Smith & Wesson or Colt .38 Special five-inch-barrel revolvers. Plainclothes cops and detectives were required to carry two-inch-barrel .38 Special revolvers.
When Hart had come home from World War II to become a detective again, he had ignored that regulation, and carried a .45. As a detective, he had shot two people with a .38 Special, neither of whom had died, and one of whom, despite being hit twice, had kept coming at him until he hit him in the head with the pistol butt. The people he had shot in the Corps with a .45 had gone down and stayed down, usually dead. He had decided that he would rather explain to an investigating board how come he had shot some scumbag with a .45 rather than the prescribed .38 Special than have a police department formal funeral ceremony and his picture hung on the wall in the lobby of police headquarters.
As it turned out, he had been a captain five months before he had to use the .45, and by then, of course, it was his business what he carried.
He put all of his civilian clothing on hangers and hung them, and the shoulder holster, in the left locker, then took a fresh Marine Corps khaki uniform from the dry cleaner’s bag. He laid the shirt on his desk and pinned the insignia on carefully. His ribbons included the Bronze Star medal with V-device, and a cluster, indicating he had been decorated twice. He also had the Purple Heart medal, which signified he had been wounded. And he had, souvenirs of Parris Island, silver medals indicating he had shot Expert with the M-1 Garand Rifle, the U.S. Carbine Caliber .30, the M-1911A1 pistol, the Browning Automatic Rifle, and the Thompson machine gun.
He put on the fresh uniform and examined himself in the mirror mounted on the door of the left locker.
He looked, he thought, like a squared-away Marine captain, who had seen his share of war, and was perfectly qualified to be what he was, commanding officer of B Company, 55th Marines, USMC Reserve.
That was pretty far from the truth, he thought. Baker Company was an infantry company. Every Marine in Baker Company, from the newest seventeen-year-olds who had not even yet gone through boot camp at Parris Island through the non-coms, most of whom were really good Marines, many combat tested, to the other four officers, two of whom had seen combat, was absolutely delighted that the old man, the skipper, the company commander was a World War II veteran tested—and wounded, and decorated for valor—in combat.
The problem with that was that he wasn’t an experienced, combat-tested, infantry officer. The first—and only—infantry unit in which he had ever served was Company B, 55th Marines, USMC Reserve. The only Table of Organization (TO&E) unit in which Captain Hart had ever served was USMC Special Detachment 16.
USMC Special Detachment 16 had been formed with the mission of supporting the Australian Coastwatchers, men left behind when the Japanese occupied islands in the Solomons, who at great risk to their lives had kept tabs on Japanese units and movements. He had been assigned to Detachment 16 because command of it had been given to Brigadier General Fleming Pickering, and then Sergeant Hart had been Pickering’s bodyguard.
He’d won the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart fair and square with Detachment 16, going ashore on Japanese-held Buka Island, but that had been his last combat. Immediately after returning from Buka, he had been given a commission as a second lieutenant—not because he had done anything outstanding as a sergeant, but because his bein
g an officer was more convenient for General Pickering.
The convenience had nothing to do with General Pickering’s personal comfort, but rather with giving Hart access to one of the two most closely held secrets of World War II, MAGIC—the other was the development of the atomic bomb. Cryptographers in the United States and Hawaii had cracked many—by no means all—of the codes of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy. Second Lieutenant Hart’s name had appeared on a one-page typewritten list of those who held a MAGIC clearance.
The list was headed by the name of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, followed by those of General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, and worked its way down through the ranks past Brigadier General Pickering—who reported directly to Roosevelt—to those of the junior officers who had broken the code, and those—like Hart—who handled the actual decryption of MAGIC messages in Washington, Hawaii, and Brisbane.
Generals and admirals did not themselves sit down at the MAGIC machines and punch its typewriter-like keys. Second Lieutenant Hart, and a dozen others like him, did.
And, in a very real sense, Hart’s MAGIC clearance had been his passport out of the fighting war. No one with a MAGIC clearance could be placed in any risk at all of being captured.
And then, in early February 1943, President Roosevelt had named General Pickering OSS Deputy Director for the Pacific. All of the members of USMC Special Detachment 16 had been “detached from USMC to duty with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), effective 8 August 1943” and that remark had been entered into the service-record jackets.
That remark was still in Captain Hart’s service records, and he knew that both his first sergeant and the gunnery sergeant had taken a look at his records, and suspected his officers had, too. In their shoes, he would have taken a look.
There were other remarks entered sequentially in his jacket, after the “detached to OSS” entry, that he knew his men had seen:
5 May 1944 Promoted Captain 4 October 1945 Relieved of Detachment to OSS 4 October 1945 Detached to USMC Inactive Reserve 18 April 1946 Detached to USMC Organized Reserve 18 April 1946 Attached Company B, 55th Marines, USMC Reserve, St. Louis, Mo., as Commanding Officer
Hart knew that his service records jacket, combined with everyone’s knowledge that he was the Chief of the St. Louis Homicide Bureau, painted a picture of George Hart that was far more glamorous than the facts: a decorated, wounded Marine who had been an OSS agent in the War had come home to the police force, and for patriotic reasons had joined the active reserve.
There had been questions, of course, about his wartime service, which he had declined to answer.
How could he have answered them?
I wasn’t really an OSS agent, fellas. What I was was a bodyguard to a general who had a MAGIC clearance.
What’s MAGIC?
He could not have answered that question. In 1946, anything connected to MAGIC was classified; as far as he knew, it still was.
It was far easier to say what he had said.
“I’d rather not talk about that, you understand.”
They understood. They had all seen the movies about the OSS. OSS agents didn’t talk about the OSS.
Until now, it hadn’t made any difference. He had joined the Marine Corps Organized Reserve because the recruiter who had made the pitch had pointed out that he would draw a day’s pay and allowances for one four-hour training session a week, plus two weeks in the summer, which wasn’t bad money, especially since he had acquired a wife and ultimately three children to support on a police lieutenant’s pay.
And if he put in a total of twenty years combined active duty and reserve service, there would be a pension when he turned sixty, something to consider, since police pensions were anything but generous.
On assuming command of Baker Company, he had had virtually no idea what a company commander was supposed to do, or how to do it. But he’d inherited a first sergeant who did have an idea, and who initially led him by the hand through the intricacies of commanding a company.
And he had taken correspondence courses in all kinds of military subjects from the Marine Corps Institute. And he asked questions of the regular Marine Corps officer assigned as instructor/inspector at the Navy/Marine Corps Reserve Training Center.
The I&I was an Annapolis graduate, but he had never been in a war, and he treated Captain Hart, who had, with respect and a presumption of knowledge on Captain Hart’s part that Hart knew he really didn’t deserve.
But with a lot of hard work, the I&I and Hart had turned Baker Company into a first-class reserve infantry company, at 94 percent of authorized strength, with everybody but the kids-yet-to-go-to-boot-camp trained in their specialty.
Which was not, Hart realized, the same thing as saying Baker Company was prepared to go to war under the command of Captain George S. Hart. It looked like that was going to happen.
Hart had just finished tucking his shirt into his trousers, and making sure the shirt placket was precisely aligned with his belt and fly, when there was a discreet knock on the glass pane of his door.
“Captain? You in there, sir?”
Hart recognized the I&I’s voice.
“Come in, Peterson,” Hart called.
“Good evening, sir,” First Lieutenant Paul T. Peterson, USMC, USNA ’46, a slim, good-looking twenty-five-year-old, said as he came through the door.
Hart could see that the platoon sergeants were forming the men on the glossy varnished floor.
“How goes it, Paul?” Hart asked.
“I don’t know,” Peterson said, turning from closing the door. “This Korea thing . . .”
“Yeah,” Hart said.
“What do you think?” Peterson asked.
“I think we’re going to get involved over there,” Hart said.
“You hear anything, sir?”
Hart shook his head, “no.”
But the White House—Jesus Christ, The White House!!!— was looking for Killer McCoy, and the Killer hadn’t come by St. Louis with his wife as he said he was going to.
The Killer, the last I heard before he called and said he was coming to St. Louis, was stationed in Tokyo. As an intelligence officer.
And now the White House is looking for him!
Korea is right next door to Japan, and if anything is going to happen over there, the Killer will have a damned good idea of what and when. And probably why.
Hart was a cop, a good cop, a good detective, and he had heard from his father, also a cop, and now believed that good cops developed a special kind of intuition.
He intuited that there was going to be a war in Korea, despite what the President had said about it being a “police action,” and that meant that Company B, 55th Marines, was going to be called to active duty.
“Neither have I,” Peterson said. He looked at Hart. “Do you think there’s anything we should be doing?”
Jesus Christ, you’re supposed to be the professional Marine. Why ask me?
“I’ve been giving it some thought, Paul,” Hart said. “Yeah, there is. And I’m not sure you’re going to like what I’ve decided to do.”
“Sir?” Peterson asked, at exactly the same moment as there was another knock on the glass of the door.
“We’re ready, skipper,” First Sergeant Andrew Mulligan called.
“Right,” Hart called, and started toward the door.
The moment he came through the door, Mulligan bellowed, “Ten-hut on deck,” and Company B, 55th Marines, lined up by platoons, popped to attention. Lieutenant Peterson stood in the open door.
Hart, trailed by Mulligan, marched across the varnished floor until he was in the center of the formation. He did a left face, so that he was facing the executive officer, First Lieutenant William J. Barnes, who had been a technical sergeant in World War II, and commissioned after he had joined the organized reserve.
Hart barked: “Report!”
Lieutenant Barnes did an about-face and barked, “Report! ”
The platoon leaders, standing in front of their platoons, did an about-face and barked, “Report!”
The platoon sergeants saluted their platoon leaders, and reported, in unison, “All present or accounted for, sir!”
The platoon leaders did another about-face, saluted Lieutenant Barnes, and announced, in unison, “All present or accounted for, sir.”
Lieutenant Barnes did an about-face and saluted Captain Hart.
“Sir, the company is formed. All present or accounted for, sir.”
Hart returned the salute.
“Parade Rest!” he ordered.
The company assumed the position of Parade Rest, standing erectly, feet twelve inches apart, their hands folded stiffly in the small of their backs.
The entire little ballet, Captain Hart judged, had been performed perfectly, even by the kids who hadn’t earned the right to wear the Marine Corps globe and anchor by going through boot camp.
Hart looked at his men, starting at the left and working his way slowly across the ranks and files.
Oh, to hell with it!
“Stand at ease,” he ordered.
That was not the next step in the prescribed ballet, and he saw questioning looks on a lot of faces.
“You did that pretty well,” he said. “Only two of you looked like cows on ice, and you know who you were.”
Fifty men decided the skipper had detected a sloppy movement on their part, and vowed to do better the next time.
“There will be a change from the published training schedule,” Hart announced. “Based on my belief that there are several things always true about the Marine Corps, first that there is always a change in the training schedule, usually unexplained.”
He got the laughter he expected.
“The second truth is that every Marine is a rifleman.”
His tone was serious, and he knew he had their attention.
“The third truth, and you may find this hard to believe, is that company commanders are sometimes wrong. I really hope I’m wrong now, and I want to tell you that I don’t know a thing more about the possible mobilization of the Marine Reserve—of Baker Company—than you do.”
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