Warren would only give the Spanish authorities his name, rank, and serial number, while repeatedly requesting that the American consulate be notified that he was there. They ignored his request.
Confined to an eight-foot-square cell lined with stone walls and a barred window, he celebrated Christmas Day with a supper of thin soup, bread, and water. After everything he had gone through to get to Spain, he was grateful to have it.
There was a daily exercise period for each prisoner, and the next morning he encountered another man in the prison yard who spoke French. The man said he was there as the result of a false accusation, and told Warren that the Spanish judicial system was totally corrupt.
When Warren told him he was an escaped American officer, the man told him it would be necessary for the American consulate to bid for his freedom. The Germans would also bid, he said. Warren would go to the highest bidder.
The conversation left him confused. If that was true, why wouldn’t the Spanish authorities have alerted the American consul that he was there? They couldn’t make a bid if they didn’t know he was in Spain.
The following day he was gazing out his second-floor cell window when a young man came walking up the alley from the boulevard. The first thing Warren noticed about him was that he was wearing American GI shoes, just like his own. Warren opened the casement window inside the bars and called down to the man, who immediately stopped.
“If you’re an American, please tell our consulate that they are holding an escaped American pilot here,” he shouted in English.
The man said nothing. A moment later, he was gone.
Maybe it was coincidence, but the following day he was released to the custody of an American military attaché at the United States consulate. He was driven to Barcelona, where he was debriefed for several days by an American intelligence officer who wanted to know everything about his adventures with the underground after he had been shot down.
After completing his debriefing, Warren was told that it would be a few weeks before passage could be arranged for him to return to England and then the United States. Warren had only one request. He asked to be provided with a Spanish-English dictionary. He thought three weeks might be enough time for him to become reasonably fluent in Spanish.
The Telegram
Friday, 31 December 1943
Scarsdale, New York
Braxton “Betsy” Wilken
The telegram from the War Department had arrived in November. It was from the adjutant general of the U.S. Army Air Forces. She knew what it would say before she opened the envelope.
DEAR MRS. WILKEN,
IT IS WITH PROFOUND REGRET THAT I MUST CONFIRM THE DEATH OF YOUR HUSBAND, LIEUTENANT RAY T. WILKEN, 0-795,161, WHO HAS PREVIOUSLY BEEN REPORTED MISSING IN ACTION. INFORMATION HAS BEEN RECEIVED FROM THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT THROUGH THE INTERNATIONAL RED CROSS THAT HE WAS KILLED IN ACTION ON 6 SEPTEMBER 1943. I REALIZE THE BURDEN OF ANXIETY THAT HAS BEEN YOURS SINCE HE WAS FIRST REPORTED MISSING IN ACTION AND DEEPLY REGRET THE SORROW THIS LATER REPORT BRINGS YOU. MAY THE KNOWLEDGE THAT HE MADE THE SUPREME SACRIFICE IN DEFENSE OF HIS HOME AND COUNTRY BE A SOURCE OF SUSTAINING COMFORT. I EXTEND TO YOU MY DEEP SYMPATHY. SINCERELY YOURS, J.A. ULIO, MAJOR GENERAL
From the very beginning, Braxton knew just how close to death he always was, even during training. When Ted was going through his B-17 trials, she and the other wives would gather near the control tower to watch their husbands bring the big Fortresses home. One afternoon, she had watched a B-17 come in to land with what seemed like a steeper approach than normal. When the plane hit the ground, it blew up, killing everyone aboard.
She could remember the words she had written to Ted’s mother, Helen, soon afterward:I guess war has made us a very hardened and practical lot. We saw that when Mil Stevens was killed at George Field. You learn to be thrifty with your emotions. Teddy has a dangerous job to do and it must not be cluttered with emotions. That’s the hardest thing all of us Air Corps families have had to learn—to accept—not to question.... It’s an awful easy thing to die, but sometimes to live and do it gracefully is the seemingly impossible thing.
Shortly after receiving the formal confirmation of his death from the War Department, she wrote a letter to David Parry, another B-17 pilot in England and a good friend of Ted’s. David and his wife, Edith, had gone through training with Ted and Braxton. After Ted went missing, David had written her to say that soon after the birth of Kathy, Ted had proudly brought the photograph of Braxton and the baby over to his quarters in Framingham, and they had shared a celebratory toast to his new family.
Now David was writing back.
Dear Betsy,
Edith has already written that she has seen you and that you have accepted the news of Ted’s death with dignity and courage. I’m glad, not only for your sake but for Ted’s, who would be the first to make a crack about widow’s weeds if ever you should wear them. It’s curious how tenuous in wartime that line of demarcation becomes that separates the quick from the dead. It’s sometimes hard to remember just who in the group has gone down and who has missed breakfast for a couple of mornings. I can’t offer you the solemn conventional condolences because I know Ted would laugh at me. I wonder if you feel the same way.
Two crews finished up the other day. I still have three to go, which is like saying that if the black comes up three more times at Roulette I’ll break the bank. If I do get back, I am looking forward more than almost anything to seeing you again and saying some of the things I can’t now. The three of us will go somewhere and talk about the fun the four of us had, and shall always have, and we shall have a drink for Ted. Take good care of Kathy. Love, David
There were no guarantees in life or love. Her principal regrets were that they would never make more babies together, never grow old together, and she would never have the chance to know what he would have become if he had lived.
In early December, Braxton moved back to Scarsdale. She had grown up there. Her friends were there. She rented a small furnished apartment near the Bronx River and moved in at the start of the New Year.
Her closest friend was Jane Eaglesham. They had gone to school together. Jane had been one of the prettiest girls in their class, but she had been in a terrible automobile accident and her face was horribly disfigured. Aside from Braxton, her school friends no longer wanted to see her.
In the wake of Ted’s death, they began spending a lot of time together. One of Braxton’s new missions in life was to see that Jane had dates like she used to in college before the accident.
Living alone with Kathy in the little apartment gave her a lot of time to think about both the past and the future. She and Ted had shared so many interests. In addition to being lovers, they were best friends. He had been a whole man, and he had loved her.
She had admired so much about him, his intelligence, his natural leadership, his sense of the nonsense of life, and his generosity to anyone in need. If she were ever repaid the money he had lent to fellow officers and crewmen in their training days, it would pay for Kathy’s college education.
At one point, Braxton remembered their last serious conversation on the night before he left. Ted had given her his thoughts on the things she needed to do if he was killed. He hadn’t dwelled on it, but one meaning was clear. If anything happened to him, he hoped she would find someone else.
Get on with it, she thought as the days continued to pass. You will not be a moaning war widow. You still have a life to live the best way you know how. The New Year is at hand. You will find a new reason to live.
On the Run
Friday, 21 January 1944
Douarnenez, France
Second Lieutenant Jimmy Armstrong
He had survived enough adventures to last a lifetime.
There had been many times over the four months he had been on the run when Jimmy was sure he was about to be captured, and only a twist of fate had saved him from a prisoner-of-war camp, or worse.
He had arrived in P
aris on the night of September 20, exactly two weeks after Yankee Raider had gone down. After spending two days at the tiny apartment of the medical intern who had brought him to the city, he was turned over to two young Parisians named Maurice and George. They picked him up in a wood-burning flatbed truck and transported him across Paris to the suburb of Drancy.
Maurice was the bartender of a café, and he celebrated Jimmy’s arrival by pouring out three full glasses of cognac. He and George then demonstrated how it should be quaffed in one long swallow. The harsh liquor brought tears to the twenty-one-year-old’s eyes, which engendered a good deal of laughter from the Frenchmen.
George brought out a pistol from under his belt, along with a wad of ration tickets he had stolen the night before from a government office. The coupons helped to supply the needs of their resistance cell.
Maurice’s girlfriend, Monique, arrived shortly afterward and prepared Jimmy’s dinner. Later that night, she escorted him upstairs to the room he would be sharing with her and Maurice.
She pointed out the single mattress on the floor in the corner where he would sleep. It was only a few feet from the double bed she shared with Maurice. After falling asleep that night, Jimmy was awakened to the first of their many ardent sexual encounters. Each time he thought they were finished, the couple would somehow find renewed energy, and their bleating cries would rise to the next crescendo. He didn’t get much sleep.
A few days later, Maurice escorted him to the studio of a local photographer, who took his picture for the false identity papers that were being prepared for him. On the way back to the café, they passed a massive building with high walls around it.
In mangled English, Maurice explained to him that it was once the Drancy prison, and that it now housed several thousand Parisian Jews who were being sent to Germany. Jimmy couldn’t understand why the Jews needed to be kept in prison, or why they were being sent to Germany.
He was sitting in the café one afternoon when two young men accompanied by an attractive blonde sat down at his table. His nervousness receded when one of the men began talking to him in Americanized English with a distinct Southern twang. He said his name was Floyd Terry, and that he was a B-17 waist gunner from Dallas, Texas. The other man was an RAF bomber pilot who had been shot down on a night mission to Milan, Italy.
They were staying in the nearby suburb of Bobigny with the blond woman, who introduced herself as Theodorine Quenot. Maurice’s café was a clearinghouse for escaping airmen, and she had come to replenish her food coupons. Like George and Maurice, “Madame Q” despised the Germans and was doing everything she could to drive them from French soil.
After Jimmy’s long nights of enduring the amatory pleasures of Maurice and his mistress, Jimmy begged her to let him stay with the other escapees. She agreed and he moved in the next day. The three Americans were joined soon after by Andrew Lindsay, a red-haired American B-26 pilot from Monmouth, Maine.
The stolen food coupons allowed the Americans to eat well. In the evenings, they played hearts at the kitchen table while listening to the nightly BBC news broadcasts on her small radio.
The days passed by slowly.
In mid-October, Madame Q woke the airmen to tell them that they would be leaving Paris for the next stage of their journey to freedom. By then, Jimmy had new identity papers that identified him as Jean Riber, a pork butcher from Reims.
After packing their few belongings, the airmen were picked up in a canvas-covered truck. Inside, there were six more Americans, including John Heald, Jimmy’s original bombardier, who had been shot down while flying with another crew on a mission to Paris in August.
That was when Jimmy realized how many French patriots must be involved in helping him and the others. Their courage in the face of possible execution by the Gestapo was astonishing to him.
At the Paris train station, the ten Allied fliers were divided into pairs and handed off to five members of the resistance who were to serve as their guides. Jimmy saw that his ticket was marked Quimper. He had no idea where it was, but once the train left the station, he knew they were traveling west. When he disembarked at their first destination with his escort, the platform was filled with German soldiers in bright green uniforms. He was so much bigger than the Germans that he worried he would stand out like a sore thumb.
Remembering the White Russian’s tutoring of how to walk like a Frenchman, he made short mincing steps toward the exit and passed safely out of the station. The escort picked him up on the street and led him across the town to a large three-story house surrounded by a high brick wall.
Its owners were Jacques and Madeleine Mourlet. By day, Jacques was a wine merchant. At night he assumed the role of the Scarlet Pimpernel. Instead of helping French aristocrats escape the guillotine, his specialty was spiriting Allied airmen as well as Frenchmen seeking to join the Free French army out of occupied France.
Madeleine, who spoke fluent English, was stunningly beautiful, and Jimmy, along with his nine fellow guests, was immediately smitten. On the night of their arrival, she served them all a delicious dinner accompanied by ample quantities of wine.
Looking around the table at one point, Madeleine focused her eyes on Jimmy.
“You look the least like a Frenchman,” she declared with a charming smile. “You are strictly American.” He took it as a compliment.
The next afternoon, another man arrived at the villa. He was wearing a long brown leather trench coat and matching wide-brimmed leather hat. To Jimmy, he looked like the archetypal spy.
Introducing himself as Fanfan, he informed the assembled airmen of their proposed escape plan. On a designated night, they would board a fishing smack and be transported by sea to a rendezvous with a high-speed British navy launch. Fanfan was waiting for the radio signal that would specify the night of the rendezvous.
Late that evening, Jacques received a hurried telephone warning that his house was about to be raided. A German collaborator in the village had informed the police that Jacques was harboring Allied escapees.
In a frenzied rush, the ten airmen gathered up their belongings.
The cars carrying the gendarmes were arriving at the front of the villa while Jacques led the ten airmen through a rear passage in the stone wall. After leaving them in a nearby copse of woods, he went back to his house.
It was well past midnight when he returned, saying that Madeleine had finally convinced the police that the accusation was false. He was sure they were still watching his house, so he had arranged another temporary hiding place for them until the radio signal came from England.
It turned out to be the small home of an elderly Catholic priest. After welcoming them with a short prayer, he ushered the ten men upstairs to a twelve-foot-square room, gave them blankets, and urged them to rest. The floor was soon crowded with snoring fliers.
They were confined to the room for four days and were only allowed outside at night to use the privy behind the house. Each day, the angelic Madeleine would arrive with baskets of bread, cheese, and fruit.
Once confined to the room, tempers began to grow short. One of the pilots began referring to the hulking Jimmy as “Li’l Abner,” because his pants’ legs barely reached the tops of his high-top GI shoes. When Jimmy asked the pilot if he would enjoy being hanged by his feet out the window, the officer quickly apologized.
On their fifth day in the small room, Fanfan arrived with bad news. The English launch was not coming. There would be no rendezvous. It was necessary for them all to return to Paris.
Arriving back at the Paris train station, Fanfan paired off the ten airmen again and sent them off with a new set of escorts. Jimmy and another pilot went with a man in his thirties named Gilbert Virmoux to an apartment building in the heart of Paris.
Two other Allied airmen were in Gilbert’s apartment when they got there. They had been English machine gunners on a Lancaster bomber. Gilbert’s apartment was on the sixth floor and consisted of one large room. The toilet was on the se
cond floor and was shared by all the occupants of the narrow building.
One morning, Jimmy met a Jewish woman who was being hidden in an apartment on one of the lower floors. She spoke excellent English, and told him how fortunate she had been in escaping the roundup of Jews in her neighborhood. She told him that the Germans were arresting every Jew in France, stripping them of their possessions and property, and sending them to camps in Germany.
Her account of the German cruelty filled him with a desire to return to the war.
At the end of November, Gilbert Virmoux told Jimmy he was taking him and the others to be “toughened up” with a week of hard exercise at a place in the country. The following day, they traveled by rail to a small village in the countryside, and then walked several miles to an imposing French château.
Another group of Americans was already there. For the next ten days, he and the others sawed firewood and hiked forest trails, slowly regaining the fitness they had lost while in hiding. One of the fliers told Jimmy that they would be going out of France over the Pyrenees.
It was mid-December and the weather had grown sharply colder when Gilbert confirmed that he would be escorting them all to a town in southern France, from which they would hike across the mountains into Spain.
Boarding another train, they traveled south toward Carcassonne, a medieval fortress town near the Spanish border. Near the city of Toulouse, it began to snow. By the time they reached Carcassonne, it was nearly a foot deep.
How could they get across the mountains? Jimmy wondered. He didn’t even have an overcoat, much less hiking boots. The question was almost rendered moot when he stepped down to the platform and headed toward the station exit.
Jimmy suddenly stopped short. Fifty feet away, a German officer was checking the papers of every traveler. Standing alongside him were three soldiers with unslung machine guns.
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