Warren Graffhad watched the whole thing unfold from the camera shop and was sure the Greek was about to be arrested. After that incident, they decided to stay in the apartment.
It was the afternoon of September 15 when they heard a familiar rumbling overhead that sounded like distant thunder. A few seconds later, they knew it wasn’t thunder. It was a big stream of heavy bombers, heading for Paris.
Going to the top floor, they watched them through one of the windows.
Even though the formation of Fortresses might soon be dropping their payloads right on top of them, the two Americans felt a thrill of pleasure at seeing them rumbling toward the southern edge of the city.
A minute later, the antiaircraft batteries deployed across Paris began opening up at the leading combat wing. It was the first time the Greek had ever been on the ground looking up at an attack. The German batteries were pumping hundreds of shells into the sky, turning parts of it almost black with explosions as the gunners tried to find the range.
The booming thunder went on and on, with the 88s shooting nonstop at the intruders. He saw a Fortress come shrieking down. It was on fire as it plunged toward earth, and exploded in a big fireball a mile or two away.
Suddenly it seemed to be raining jagged metal. Thousands of cannon shell fragments from the intense barrage, each one the size of his little finger, were raining down all over Paris.
Unlike hard rain, these drops were potentially lethal. He could hear them clattering like steel hail as they landed on the metal roofs and on the cobblestone streets below. This was no summer shower. It went on for at least fifteen minutes as the bomb groups came over to drop their payloads on the targets before turning for home.
As the last roar of the Wright Cyclone engines faded into the distance, the Greek wondered if the 388th, or whatever was left of it after Stuttgart, had been up there in the bomber stream. He grinned at the possibility he might have been bombed by his own group.
Four miles above him, Major Ralph Jarrendt and the rest of the 388th headed back to Knettishall, England, after bombing the Hispano-Suiza Aero Engine Works in southern Paris.
Jarrendt was in the lead wing of the bomber train, once more part of the low group to the 96th. Even though the 388th had lost eleven planes on the Stuttgart mission, new replacements had arrived to make up the difference.
Captain Robert Bernard was leading the high squadron of the 388th. He had taken over Ted Wilken’s plane, Battlin Betsy. It was supposed to be a lucky ship, and so far it was living up to expectations.
Hitting the Road
Saturday, 25 September 1943
Sainte-Savine, France
Second Lieutenant Warren Porter Laws
The previous two weeks had proved to be both the greatest trial and the greatest adventure of his life. No longer was he the sheltered boy forced to remain at home on Halloween because of his mother’s fears. Warren Laws had survived a horrific air battle and had so far escaped the Germans.
Following the fiery deaths of Ted Wilken and the rest of Patricia’s crew, he and Joe Schwartzkopf had spent their first hours in France hiding in a dense thicket near the village of Montgueux. A dozen German soldiers had searched for them unsuccessfully for most of that day.
Warren had been carrying an escape kit inside his flight suit. In addition to chocolate, pain medication, bandages, and a pocket compass, it included a small map of Western Europe. While they hid in the thicket, Joe attempted to bandage Warren’s arm wound as well as his burned hands and fingers. Afterward, Warren carefully examined the map.
In the escape classes Warren had taken at Knettishall, flight crews had been told that the two best escape destinations from France were Switzerland and Spain. He wasn’t sure where Patricia had gone down, but the route they had flown appeared to be a lot closer to Switzerland.
When the German search party finally gave up and drove away in their trucks, the Americans waited two hours to be sure it wasn’t a ruse, and then crawled out of their thicket.
A farmer was plowing a nearby field. Warren decided to ask the farmer where they were. He had taken two years of French in high school, and was carrying a pocket-sized French-English dictionary.
There was no need for a lengthy conversation. As soon as Warren showed him the map, the farmer pointed to a spot southeast of Paris. They were apparently near the town of Troyes, roughly ninety miles southeast of Paris and about 150 miles northwest of Bern, Switzerland. Spain was at least four hundred miles away.
Using the compass, Warren and Joe set off to the southeast.
Two miles away, Marcel Vergeot, a café owner in the village of Torvilliers and a member of the French underground, had seen Patricia falling to earth earlier that morning. By the time he reached the crash site on his bicycle, the Germans had recovered the bodies of eight crewmen, and they were lying on the ground near the plane.
Marcel Vergeot knew the American bombers carried a crew of ten. At the crash scene, a young man from Montgueux whispered to him that he had seen parachutes, and Vergeot concluded that there were at least two survivors. He assumed they would probably head for Switzerland, which meant they had to follow one of two routes southeast.
Vergeot wanted to help the Americans, but after three years of German occupation, he had learned to be very cautious. Other men had tried to help downed Allied airmen. They had been arrested and were never seen again. He wrote down the numbers on the vertical stabilizer of the plane: 349.
Still heading southeast away from the crashed Patricia, Warren decided they should keep walking as far as their energy allowed. After crossing a railroad track and a succession of fields, they came to a small orchard, and Joe stopped to fill his pockets with green apples. Farther on, they came to a macadam road heading southeast. Warren decided to follow it.
Aside from an occasional horse-drawn cart, there was no vehicular traffic in the French countryside. A few kilometers down the road, they passed a large farmhouse. Too late to hide, they spotted a group of men coming out of its tree-lined entrance. The Frenchmen’s conversation immediately stopped. As the two fliers walked past, the Frenchmen stared at Warren’s bloody flight suit.
The encounter filled him with foreboding. Any one of those civilians could easily turn them in for a reward. Crossing 150 miles of France on foot suddenly seemed hopeless.
Warren was now in agonizing pain from his burned hands and shoulder wound. As darkness fell he became feverish and told Joe he had to stop. Joe found a clump of bushes near the road where they could hide. Through the long night, Warren was wracked by chills. Joe gave him his own flight jacket to try to keep him warm.
Early the next morning, Marcel Vergeot told his twelve-year-old son, Daniel, to take his bicycle and ride out several miles along the only two roads that led southeast. If he saw any strangers along the road, he wasn’t to talk to them, but to immediately return home and tell him their location.
As dawn broke, Warren’s raw fingers were swollen like blood sausages. Weak from fever, he wasn’t sure how long he could walk. He told Joe that he would have a much better chance to escape if he went on alone.
Joe shook his head. They would escape together or be captured together, he said, telling Warren he would look out for him as long as they remained free. After eating some green apples for breakfast, they crawled out of the thicket and began walking again.
They had barely traveled a mile when Warren was racked by chills again and had to stop. Once more, he told Joe to leave him. Again, Joe refused. The two men had begun walking again when they were overtaken by a boy on a bicycle. The boy stared at them as he passed by, then turned around and disappeared in the same direction he had come.
An hour later, two men on bicycles passed them and pulled off the road into a copse of woods. As Warren and Joe came up, one of the Frenchmen motioned for them to join him under the cover of the trees.
Marcel Vergeot asked them if they were American fliers, and Warren said yes. Marcel showed him a piece of paper with thre
e numbers on it and asked if they were the numbers of his airplane. The numbers were 329. Warren shook his head and said no.
In French, he told him the numbers were 349, the correct numbers. Marcel smiled and told Warren that after dark he would come back and escort them to his home in Torvilliers.
When he returned later that night, he brought along simple peasant clothing for them to wear on the walk back to Marcel’s village. Inside the shuttered café, Madame Vergeot used scissors to trim the dead skin from Warren’s hands and fingers before coating them with a greasy mixture of tannic acid, paste, and kerosene to prevent infection.
Marcel told them that hundreds of American airmen had parachuted into France the previous day, and that the underground was temporarily overwhelmed by the challenge of finding safe houses for all of them.
The following night the two Americans were taken to a small farm in La Rivière-de-Corps. It was owned by a middle-aged man named Leon Nelle, and his farm would be their home for several nights while long-term arrangements were being made for them.
Monsieur Nelle was a patriot, but quite eccentric. Each night before retiring, he would put on his be-medaled World War I uniform coat and sing “La Marseillaise” at the top of his prodigious lungs. It seemed odd behavior for a man who was housing two escapees and presumably trying to avoid notice.
Assisting Allied fliers wasn’t Monsieur Nelle’s only occupation. The second night after their arrival, a heavily armed man arrived at the farm in the early hours of the morning. He conversed with Monsieur Nelle in fluent French before turning to address Warren in English.
The man explained in an English accent that he was an operative of the British SOE (Special Operations Executive), which supported the French underground with weapons, explosives, and logistical support, while undertaking sabotage missions against German installations.
After getting Warren’s and Joe’s names and serial numbers, he said he would radio his controllers in England to report that the fliers were alive and well. It wasn’t until later that Warren realized the agent was also looking to confirm that they were genuine.
They stayed at the farm for five days. On September 12, Monsieur Nelle told Warren that the underground had found a safer place for them to stay. That night they were taken on foot to a charcuterie in the village of Sainte-Savine, which sat on the main road to Troyes. The owner, Joachim LeDantec, lived on the second floor above the shop with his wife and daughter. Warren and Joe would share the attic.
Once they settled in, the days passed slowly. Warren spent his waking hours studying his French-English dictionary, and then practicing phrases with Madame LeDantec and her daughter, Anne Marie. He hoped that becoming fluent would enhance their chances of escape.
For his part, the perpetually hungry Joe Schwartzkopf was tormented by the aromatic smells of sausage, cheese, and roasting meat emanating upward from the shop below.
On September 20, Warren celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday. It was no different from any other day, although he found himself constantly thinking about his fiancée, Libby. He hoped she was weathering the news of his having gone missing with the same spirit and pluck she had demonstrated during their courtship.
It had not started well. After one of their first dates, Libby wasn’t sure he was the one for her. “He’s not my type,” she confided to her diary. But his earnest sincerity had slowly won her over, and when she agreed to marry him, he took the next step in the old-fashioned way.
“I’ve got to go and ask your father,” he had said.
Libby’s father was a building contractor, and at that time he was constructing a new four-story house near Danbury. He was on the roof when the couple arrived at the building site.
“Mr. Minck, I’d like to talk to you,” Warren shouted up to him.
“Can’t you tell me from down there?” her father had called out to them, not wanting to descend all the way down the sets of ladders.
“I want to marry your daughter,” Warren shouted up to the roof.
Mr. Minck came straight down the ladders.
“I think you should wait,” he told Warren as soon as he was on the ground. Libby’s parents were strict Catholics. Warren was Protestant. The Mincks had deep reservations about mixing religions.
Libby spoke right up to him. “When he comes back from the war, Dad, we’re going to get married.”
Sitting in the safe house, Warren only wished he could let her know he was safe.
One afternoon, he was studying French in the upstairs parlor when he heard the noise of a heavy vehicle rumbling slowly past the house in the street below. Glancing outside, he saw a huge truck and trailer filling the road that ran east through the village.
Strapped to the bed of the trailer was a wrecked airplane. From its shape and size, Warren knew it was a B-17. When he saw the painting of the half-naked girl on the fuselage, he knew it was Patricia. The Fortress was being hauled back to Germany to be melted down for new German weapons.
The sight of their destroyed plane brought home the loss of Ted Wilken and the rest of the crew like a fresh stab to the heart. When Warren asked Monsieur LeDantec what had happened to the dead crewmen, the Frenchman told him that Ted and the others had been temporarily buried near the crash site. Simple wooden crosses now marked their resting place. In the days since the plane had gone down, villagers had covered their graves with fresh flowers.
Eclipse
Sunday, 26 September 1943
Chicago, Illinois
Braxton “Betsy” Wilken
Since the birth of her daughter, Kathy, a month earlier, she had been staying at her mother’s elegant ten-room apartment on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive. On September 9, Braxton was enjoying the stunning view of Lake Michigan when the doorman called up to say that a Western Union messenger was in the lobby to deliver a telegram.
Braxton had received another telegram from Ted just three days earlier. Dated September 6, 1943, it read, “CHECKING ON DAVE . . . WILL WRITE BETTY ... LOVE TED.”
The handful of words reflected everything that was fine and generous about Ted as a man. Dave was a fellow B-17 pilot in England. Ted had met him during bomber training and they had become good friends. Dave was married to Betty, who along with Braxton had trailed after their husbands from one installation to the next before the two pilots were deployed to the Eighth Air Force in England.
Dave’s Fortress had not returned from a recent combat mission, and he had been reported missing in action. Ted’s telegram meant that he wanted Braxton to let the distraught Betty know he would do his best to try to find out if Dave had survived before he wrote to her.
This latest telegram wasn’t from Ted. It was from the War Department.
I REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT THE COMMANDING GENERAL EUROPE AREA REPORTS YOUR HUSBAND SECOND LIEUTENANT RAY T. WILKEN MISSING IN ACTION SINCE SIX SEPTEMBER. IF FURTHER DETAILS OR OTHER INFORMATION OF HIS STATUS ARE RECEIVED YOU WILL BE PROMPTLY NOTIFIED.
ULIO THE ADJUTANT GENERAL
First Dave and now Ted, both in the same week. She was devastated.
Braxton knew that Ted would want her to remain strong, both for herself and their new baby. On their last night together before he went overseas, he had spoken to her about the possibility he wouldn’t come back. He knew the odds of surviving twenty-five missions in the summer of 1943.
She had already gone through the emotional agony of their parting in Spokane, Washington, after Ted left with his crew in their new B-17. She was pregnant with Kathy, and Braxton’s stepfather had arranged a berth for her on the Northern Pacific to come back east.
Over the course of the two-day journey, she had cried without respite, leaving her sleeping berth only to go to the bathroom. It was as if she was enduring the grief of his loss without even knowing his ultimate fate. By the time she reached Chicago, Braxton was emotionally spent. She slowly recovered at her mother’s home.
After hearing the news that Ted was missing, Braxton’s stepfather was spurred to
action. Chester “Red” McKittrick was the chief financial officer of the Chicago Tribune and the right-hand man of the aging newspaper baron Colonel Robert McCormick.
Red had plenty of friends in Washington and the Pentagon, and he now called on them to find out if Ted might have survived. As the days passed, none of his contacts came back with solid information. The family could only wait.
On September 18, Braxton received a v-mail letter from Gene Cordes, the original bombardier on Ted’s crew, who had been too ill on the morning of September 6 to go on the Stuttgart mission.
Gene was suffering from survivor’s guilt, suggesting in his letter that the outcome might have somehow been different if he had been with the rest of them. He wrote that he had talked with many of the crewmen who had survived the mission to try to find out what had happened to Patricia. No one was certain, but one of them reported that he had seen parachutes from a Fortress that he thought was Ted’s going down short of Paris.
Gene was sure Ted was still alive. It was impossible for him to accept that Ted wouldn’t have made it. He urged her not to give up hope that he was in France and being sheltered by the French underground.
Whatever his fate, Braxton vowed that she would neither wallow in misery nor allow herself to become an object of pity. Their love was a private matter. It was between her and Ted. She would not share her grief with anyone else. He would want it that way.
For now, all she felt was a growing numbness.
Greek Holiday
Thursday, 14 October 1943
Paris, France
Second Lieutenant Demetrios Karnezis
“Your time has come,” said Monsieur Maraceaux.
To Kingdom Come Page 20