Slowly turning away, he saw Gilbert walking toward a small building that had a large “WC” painted on the door. When Gilbert disappeared inside, Jimmy followed him. Soon, six Americans were hiding in the reeking toilet urinals.
Urging them to remain quiet, Gilbert left them to meet the mountaineer who was to accompany them across the Pyrenees. He returned in an hour to say that the Germans had left, but that their mountain guide had been frightened off. It would be necessary to go to another village to find a replacement.
Snow was still falling hard as they boarded another train after dark and traveled through a valley to the village of Quillan. Soaring up behind it were the majestic snow-covered peaks of the Pyrenees. Spain and freedom lay on the other side.
In the frigid darkness, the men trudged through snow to a house on the outskirts of the village. When Gilbert knocked on the door, the shutters of an upstairs window creaked open. It was too dark for Jimmy to see the man’s face, but after a brief exchange of words, he slammed the shutters closed.
A downcast Gilbert told the Americans there was no way to make it through the mountain pass, and they would have to go back to Paris. Thoroughly demoralized, Jimmy boarded the unheated train back to Carcassonne.
It was after midnight when they arrived at the station, and there was no place to go except the waiting room, where a wood-burning stove would at least keep them warm. Unfortunately, the waiting room was crowded with German soldiers who had also been stranded there for the night. Most of them were already gathered around the stove in the center of the room.
The cold, exhausted Jimmy no longer cared if he looked sufficiently French or walked like a Frenchman. Desperate to get warm, he crowded straight into the mix of soldiers until he could feel the welcoming warmth of the stove.
Gilbert was nearly out of money, but he was able to purchase tickets for them on a third-class coach leaving the following morning. After another twenty-hour journey, the train arrived in Paris after curfew, and Jimmy had to wait in the car the rest of the night before walking across Paris to Gilbert’s apartment.
As he plodded through the deserted streets, Jimmy lost his faith that he would ever make it back to England. It was only a matter of time before he was picked up by the Germans and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp. It would be better to have the odyssey over and done with.
Twelve hours of sleep in the quiet of Gilbert’s sixth-floor apartment helped to restore his flagging spirits. He felt ashamed of himself. Gilbert had done everything he could to help them escape, risking his life on their behalf for almost six weeks. He vowed not to lose hope again.
On Christmas Eve, Gilbert came home to give Jimmy the news that another escape attempt was being organized, and a man would soon be coming to escort him to the train station.
As a parting gift, he gave Jimmy a hand-painted Christmas card. The cover depicted St. Nicholas with a lantern in one hand. In the other, he was holding a gift-wrapped package. As he read the message inside, Jimmy realized that Gilbert was the true Santa Claus. The lantern represented hope, the gift-wrapped package his freedom.
Before Jimmy left for the next stage of his journey, the two men embraced. As he had done with his other benefactors, Jimmy promised to come back and visit him when the war was over.
The platform of the Paris train station was crowded with travelers on their way home to celebrate Christmas. When Jimmy’s guide gave him his train ticket, he saw that the destination was Quimper, and he knew that the next escape attempt would again be by boat.
Three hours later, the train arrived in Le Mans, where it was necessary to change trains for Quimper. On the platform, he was given a slip of paper authorizing him to wait in the station during curfew hours for the next train. Finding space on a wooden bench, he fell asleep.
He awoke to someone kicking the soles of his shoes. He groggily looked up into the face of a French gendarme. The man was demanding something, and Jimmy had no idea what it was. With rising irritation, the policeman harshly repeated the same words.
Trying to appear calm, Jimmy pulled out his identity card and handed it up to him. Without looking at it, the policeman tossed it back and angrily repeated the same question. Jimmy suddenly remembered the slip of paper he had been given on the platform. He handed it to the policeman, who glanced at the pass and handed it back, then moved on to the next person.
The next train pulled into Quimper after midnight. He was about to get off when his guide, who was sitting in another row of the car, motioned to him to remain in his seat. A few minutes later, the train was diverted onto another track, where it continued west across the Brittany peninsula.
Early the next morning, the train stopped at a small seaside village. When the guide left the train, Jimmy followed him. In the basement of a house near the quay, he joined a group of more than thirty escapees. They were to leave France that very night. Christmas night. Without question, freedom would be the finest Christmas present he had ever received.
The escape boat was lying in a small bay near the village. At ebb tide, the escapees were to wade out to the boat and climb aboard. When the tide was full, they would sail for England.
He felt a rush of pure adrenaline as they divided up into small groups and headed toward the pier. Through one of the house windows along the street, he could see a family gathered in song in front of a piano, and heard the refrain of a familiar Christmas carol.
Suddenly, a patrol of German soldiers with flashlights emerged from the corner of a side street and came straight toward them. It was well past curfew, and they had no permit papers to be there if the Germans stopped them.
Jimmy and the others turned at the corner, desperately hoping they wouldn’t be ordered to stop. Once more, an angel was riding his big shoulders. The Germans kept moving down the street.
At the water’s edge, the tide had begun to rise. It was ankle deep, and Jimmy took off his shoes and socks to wade out to the boat. Most of the airmen were already aboard when he finally reached the darkened craft. He was about to pull himself over the transom when one of the Frenchmen in the boat said, “Turn around and go back. The escape is off!”
A disheartened Jimmy Armstrong made his way back to the house they had just left. A resistance leader was waiting there for them.
“We could not leave tonight,” he told them, “but you will be in England soon.”
Once more, the men were divided up. Jimmy and another airman were taken to an apartment in the nearby coastal village of Douarnenez. It was occupied by Madame Evelyn Malhomme, and had a spectacular view of the bay.
In the days that followed, Jimmy learned that her husband was in a German concentration camp called Buchenwald, and that her two sons were fighting with the Free French army under General de Gaulle. Jimmy turned out to be the same age as one of her sons, and it soon became clear that his presence was relieving the loneliness of not having her own sons at home.
One afternoon she came back to the apartment and told them that another boat had been readied to take them to England, and that they would be leaving the next night. As a keepsake of their time together, she gave Jimmy a small porcelain bell of a Brittany maid. Around the maid’s waist, she had tied four tiny strands of red yarn. Jimmy didn’t know what to say. He had nothing to give her back except his gratitude, then and for always. He tried to convey those words to her.
“Au revoir,” she said to him. “Bonne chance.”
The fishing boat was named Breiz-Izel. It was forty feet long and tied to a long dock at the edge of the harbor. As darkness fell, Jimmy and the other Allied airmen were brought to the boat in small groups. There were two holds, one fore and one aft. Jimmy was directed to the one in the stern.
When he climbed down into it, he was dismayed to discover that it was only a shallow crawl space. There was no room to sit up, much less stand. He hated confined spaces, and as one of the first aboard, he had to crawl farther and farther away from the hatch until he was hard against the outer hull. There were thirt
y escapees, and after they were all aboard, there was no room to move. Jimmy lay on his stomach in the pitch-black compartment and tried not to dwell on his fears.
Someone said that he now knew what it was like for a sardine lying in a tin can. No one laughed.
An underground agent arrived to tell them that the captain was planning to wait for the outgoing tide. Then he would release the dock lines and the boat would silently drift out into the bay. Once they were far enough away from shore, he would start the engine and head for England.
By now, Jimmy had learned not to get his hopes up. He could only rely on his prayers, along with the actions of the brave men and women who had saved him up to that point.
The minutes slowly dragged on into hours. One of the men became incontinent, and the air soon turned foul. Long after midnight, Jimmy heard footsteps clomping above him on the wooden deck. An escapee lying near the open hatch quietly announced to the others that the boat was moving.
Suddenly, the stillness of the night was rent by a loud scream.
“Halt!” someone yelled. “Halt!”
The voice was loud enough to raise the dead. Jimmy immediately imagined a German sentry standing at his post in the harbor as he aimed his rifle at the boat and pulled the trigger.
The escapee near the open hatch called out that someone onshore had turned on a searchlight. It was another failed attempt, thought Jimmy as he waited for the boat to stop or be turned around.
But this time the captain kept going. Jimmy heard the engine start, and the throttle was opened wide for full power. As the minutes ticked by, the men waited fearfully for a German patrol boat to intercept them.
When Jimmy felt the boat begin rolling back and forth from side to side, he realized they must be in the ocean. Soon the rolling action was joined by a rocking motion as the boat plowed into deep troughs and then came out of the crashing waves. The simultaneous rocking and rolling was nauseating.
After the first man began vomiting, it became contagious. A few of the men began spewing at both ends. As the hours passed, the sounds of men retching continued unabated. Jimmy no longer cared if he lived or died. He just wanted the motion to stop.
As the ferocity of the storm increased, cold seawater began sloshing through the open hatch and splashing the deck of the shallow hold. One of the French seamen shoved the hatch closed. Now we’re trapped, Jimmy thought.
Fetid water from the bilge began soaking the deck they were lying on, soon rising a foot above the deck. He was about to scream out to the captain that they were drowning when he heard a diesel pump come on and the water level slowly began to recede.
The storm only got worse. At one point, the bilge pump stopped working, and the water level began to rise again. Jimmy heard the hatch cover being removed, and a flashlight beam lit the hold. One of the seamen crawled over the prone bodies of the airmen until he reached the pump. It had been fouled by food, clothing, and human waste.
The boat continued plowing through the raging sea all that night and into the next day. Eighteen hours after they had come aboard, the waves and wind finally began to subside.
One by one, the men were allowed to climb out of the hold onto the deck. Jimmy was completely spent. He could only sit with his back to the side of the hull and thank divine providence for his deliverance.
At dawn of their second day at sea, the captain called out that they were approaching a harbor. He hoisted two flags to the top of their mast, one French and the other English.
As they slowly chugged into the harbor, Jimmy was astounded to see a fleet of Allied warships, including destroyers, corvettes, and amphibious landing craft. They were in the vast port of Falmouth.
A patrol launch met them as they approached the pier, and an English officer came aboard. After the French captain explained that he was carrying thirty escapees from France, the Frenchman expressed surprise that he was allowed to enter Falmouth without being intercepted by a military vessel.
“We’ve been confined to port for two days because of the storm,” said the English officer.
Against All Odds
Thursday, 2 March 1944
Normandy, France
Jagdgeschwader 2 “Richthofen”
Oberstleutnant Egon “Connie” Mayer
In January, the American heavy bombers had begun hitting the Fatherland again, and in ever greater numbers. German intelligence estimates suggested that formations exceeding a thousand Fortresses would be bombing targets deep inside Germany in less than two months.
The bombers were now protected by a new American long-range fighter, an ominous development feared by Connie Mayer since the previous fall. The P-51 Mustang was a formidable weapon, and ideal for the job of escorting the Fortresses all the way to the deepest targets in Germany and back.
It was getting far more difficult for his Jagdgeschwader to penetrate the escort screens of American fighters to attack the bomber formations. The Focke-Wulf 190 could outturn the P-51, but the American fighter was faster. Overall, the performance of the two planes was about equal. The difference was in the skill and experience of the pilots facing each other in combat.
The American pilots were getting better all the time. Their training was long and arduous, and they came to Europe prepared to fight. The Luftwaffe’s replacement pilots were relatively green and untested. Germany was losing the battle of attrition.
Connie Mayer had led Jagdgeschwader 2 without pause through the fall and winter of 1943, enjoying his finest day in the air on December 1, when he shot down four American P-47 fighters and a B-17 in less than thirty minutes.
He achieved his ninetieth victory on New Year’s Eve, shooting down a B-24 Liberator over Melun-Villaroche. On January 7, 1944, he had another brilliant day, downing four heavy bombers flying in the same formation.
On February 5, Connie Mayer became the first pilot in the Luftwaffe to achieve one hundred victories on the western front, destroying a P-47 fighter over Arguen. A day later, he shot down two more.
Mayer was emotionally and physically exhausted. He had been in almost constant air combat for nearly two years. He had flown hundreds of sorties, shot down twenty-six four-engine bombers, a dozen P-47s, and fifty-one English Spitfires.
Unlike the American fighter pilots, all of whom were allowed to return home after completing a combat tour, there was no going home for Connie Mayer. He was in it to the end.
On March 2, he led a formation of Fw 190s up to intercept a massive B-17 bomber formation heading for Frankfurt, Germany. It was protected by nearly two hundred P-51, P-47, and P-38 fighters.
Fifty miles northeast of Reims, France, Mayer confronted a large formation of B-17s. His staffel was badly outnumbered, but he had often fought against great odds with success. It was his trademark to take the offensive, regardless of the numbers.
While diving on one of the Flying Fortresses, he failed to notice a formation of twenty-nine American fighters poised to attack him from above. A P-47 flown by Lieutenant Walter Gresham of the 358th Fighter Squadron found Mayer’s Fw 190 in his sights and he fired a short burst of .50-caliber machine-gun bullets into the German’s fuselage.
Mayer’s fighter turned over onto its back and plunged over into a steep dive, blowing up when it hit the ground near the village of Montmédy. The Luftwaffe pilot who had owned the skies over France was dead at the age of twenty-six.
Cloak and Dagger
Friday, 3 March 1944
Basel, Switzerland
First Lieutenant Martin “Andy” Andrews
After Andy’s encounter on the train to Zurich with Allen Dulles, the head of the American spy network in Europe, Andy’s first day as an internee in Switzerland became increasingly unpleasant. In Zurich, he had been taken under armed guard to the office of the head of Swiss military intelligence.
The tall, austere army colonel motioned Andy to a chair in front of his desk, and curtly requested a full briefing from him on his mission to Stuttgart. Andy politely responded that he could
say nothing until he met with an American military attaché.
The colonel flew into a rage. Picking up a sheaf of Swiss newspapers from his desk, he held them in front of Andy’s face and shouted, “What do you mean you can’t tell me anything about your mission? It seems you people are perfectly willing to talk to our journalists!”
For the first time, Andy learned that four other American bombers on the mission to bomb Stuttgart had also ended up in Switzerland. Glancing at the newspapers, he could see long passages of quotes from some of the American crew members who had spoken freely with Swiss reporters.
“I can’t answer for their actions, Colonel,” said Andy, “but I am not at liberty to say anything connected with U.S. military matters.”
The colonel angrily dismissed him, saying, “I would advise you not to try to escape, Lieutenant. Our soldiers are very good shots.”
Along with the rest of the crews interned after the Stuttgart mission, Andy and his crew spent the next two months in a temporary holding camp in the Jura Mountains. Morale fell quickly. Some of the pilots shared Andy’s sense of guilt at having flown out of the war, particularly those whose planes had been undamaged. Others began to realize they might have to languish in an internee camp for years.
Andy committed himself to helping raise the men’s spirits, as well as his own.
Using the small library of books provided by the Salvation Army, he began teaching courses in English literature, history, and geometry. In the afternoons, he taught English to Swiss children in the village. There was a shortage of texts, so Andy wrote stories for the children to read. It all helped to pass the time.
In November, Andy’s crew was transferred with several others to a new camp at Adelboden. Morale immediately improved when the Americans arrived on a bus and saw their new home.
The evergreen-dappled village of Adelboden was nestled in a beautiful sun-drenched valley in the heart of the Bernese Alps. A ski resort before the war, it had elegant hotels, picturesque Swiss chalets, good restaurants, and well-stocked shops.
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