W E B Griffin - Corp 07 - Behind the Lines

by Behind The Lines(Lit)

  [THREE]

  The Congressional Country Club

  Fairfax County, Virginia

  1 November 1942

  Technically, the status of Major James C. Brownlee III, USMCR, at the Office of Strategic Services Reception and Training Station-the pressed-into-service Congressional Country Club-was "Agent, awaiting assignment."

  That meant he had successfully completed the training program and passed the "Final Board"-a group of five senior OSS officers who had con-sidered his military background, the comments of his training officers at the Country Club, and then called him in for an hour-long session to finally make the determination whether or not he was the sort of man who could success-fully function behind the enemy's lines.

  Jim Brownlee, a tall, blond, slender, twenty-seven-year-old who wore spectacles, had always wanted to be a Marine. While at Princeton, he par-ticipated in the Marine Corps Platoon Leader's Program, which was rather like the Army's Reserve Officer Training Corps. During the academic year, it ex-posed young men who thought they might like to be officers to courses with a military application. And then, during summer vacations, it gave them six weeks of intensive training in basic military subjects-"The Three M's," marching, marksmanship, and map reading-at USMC Base Quantico, Vir-ginia, and Parris Island Recruit Depot, South Carolina.

  Jim Brownlee intended to apply for a commission in the Regular Marine Corps; but his eyes did not meet the Marine Corps' criteria for the regular ser-vice. Instead, on his graduation from Princeton in June 1937, he was commis-sioned as a second lieutenant, USMCR. After that, he went through the Basic Officer Course at Quantico, and was released to inactive duty.

  He joined Marine Corps Reserve Battalion 14, based in New Orleans, Lou-isiana, as a platoon leader, even though this meant an overnight train ride-at his own expense-each way once a month from his home in Palm Beach, Florida, for the weekend training program. After two years of service with the battalion, he was promoted first lieutenant.

  When he was not training with The Marine Corps, he was Vice President, Domestic Transportation, for the Brownlee Fruit Company (founded by his grandfather, Matthew J. Brownlee). The firm imported bananas-their own production and brokered-from Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, and El Salva-dor. His father was currently President, and his older brother, Matthew J. Brownlee III, was Vice President, Production.

  What his title meant was that his father had put him to work under an expe-rienced longtime traffic manager, as a way to learn the business. Bananas were off-loaded from Brownlee ships at Port St. Lucie, Florida; Mobile, Alabama; and New Orleans, Louisiana. His job was to ensure the smooth flow of the bananas either to regional distribution centers or to the ultimate retailers.

  He liked the challenge of quickly and economically moving vast amounts of bananas-they are, of course, highly perishable-from the off-loading port to their destinations, while keeping them as fresh as possible. At the same time, the intricacies of interstate motor freight laws, tariffs, and the like were rather fascinating.

  Since the whole idea was to teach him the business, he also spent a good deal of time in Central America with his brother. Matthew, who was fifteen years older than he was, devoted his attention pretty much equally to showing Jim the plantation operations and trying to prevent him from giving in to what the Episcopal Church terms the sinful lusts of the flesh with dark-skinned na-tive girls.

  On 15 October 1940, President Roosevelt ordered the mobilization of Ma-rine Reserve Battalions, which did not surprise Jim Brownlee. On April 9, Ger-many had occupied Denmark and invaded Norway. The next month, Germany invaded Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who had promised "Peace In Our Time," resigned 11 May, and Winston S. Churchill took his place.

  What was left of the British Army after the German Blitzkrieg across France was evacuated from Dunkirk on 4 June; and just over a week later, the German Wehrmacht goose-stepped down the Champs Ely sees. On 22 June, the French surrendered to the Germans.

  In July, a Marine lieutenant colonel who spoke to Jim's reserve battalion in New Orleans brought them up to date on the military picture as the Marine Corps saw it. He mentioned that as of 30 June, the total strength of the USMC was 1,732 Officers and 26,545 Enlisted Men.

  He didn't say that the Marine Reserve was about to be mobilized, but he did say that there were obviously not enough Marines in uniform for the pre-sent circumstances.

  Jim Brownlee reported for active duty with his reserve battalion to Marine Base Quantico, Virginia on 1 November 1940. Within a week of their arrival, the battalion was broken up, and its members were scattered all over the world, wherever Marines were serving.

  A Marine Personnel Officer, a major whom Jim correctly suspected was curious how a twenty-four-year-old had become a vice president of a large cor-poration, questioned him at some length about his duties, and then sent him to see a full colonel, who was the G-4 (Supply) Officer at Quantico.

  The Colonel questioned him even more intensively about his knowledge of what the Marine Corps called "Transport." Apparently satisfied with the answers, he told Jim he had been looking for someone with his qualifications, and as of that moment he could consider himself assigned to the G-4 Section as an Assistant Transportation Officer.

  Jim's protests that he was trained as an infantry platoon leader were met with the observation that in the Colonel's experience good Marine officers went where they were sent and did what they were told to do, without com-plaint.

  The year between Jim's call to active duty and Pearl Harbor went quickly, and he took a certain satisfaction from his work. He was more than a little surprised to learn how much truck operators serving the Marines had been able to get away with before he laid his expert eye on the invoices they had ten-dered.

  He received during that year three letters of commendation for his official file and a wholly unexpected promotion to captain.

  The attack on Pearl Harbor surprised him, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, he did not think the Japanese had the technical capability to strike with such strength at such a great distance. For another, though a surprise attack on the United States was possible, in his view, he thought it would probably come on the Panama Canal, either from the Germans in the Atlantic or the Japanese in the Pacific, or conceivably both.

  On 8 December, he applied for transfer to duty with troops. His letter came back within a week, denied. He applied again thereafter on a monthly basis, and on a monthly basis his request was denied. In April 1942, he was promoted major. The ceremony was held in the office of the Commanding General. After offering his congratulations, he said he hoped it would mean the end of the monthly requests for transfer.

  In May 1942, a memorandum from Headquarters USMC crossed Major Brownlee's desk. Applications were being solicited from officers for a non-specified duty of an intelligence nature. Preference would be given to those with fluency in one or more foreign languages, and/or who had spent time out-side the continental United States.

  He submitted his application and promptly forgot about it, sure that it would suffer the same fate as his requests for transfer to duty with troops.

  Two weeks later, his orders came through. He was transferred to some-thing called the Office of Strategic Services and ordered to report within forty-eight hours to the National Institute of Health Building in Washington, D.C.

  There he was interviewed by another board of officers. This one consisted of three men in civilian clothing; two of them spoke Spanish. At the conclusion of the interview, one of the Spanish speakers shook his hand, offered his name, and said, "Please give my best regards to your brother. But don't tell him where, or under what circumstances, we bumped into each other."

  That same afternoon, Jim Brownlee was transported in a Buick station wagon to the former Congressional Country Club to begin training.

  The training was difficult, but not nearly so difficult for Major Brownlee as it was for some of his fellow trainees who had enter
ed the OSS directly from civilian life-he had taken pains to keep himself in shape at Quantico and thereafter. Two fellow trainees had never held a weapon in their hands before coming to the Country Club.

  As the training proceeded, he began to wonder where he would be as-signed. He gradually came to the conclusion that because of his fluency in Spanish, it would either be in Spain or somewhere in South America. In Spain, the policy of the United States Government was to keep Generalissimo Franco, known as "El Caudillo," neutral. If South America, he rather suspected he would be in Argentina, where the military-dominated government was in ev-erything but name an ally of the Germans. It was common knowledge around the Country Club that both the OSS and the FBI were deeply involved in Ar-gentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay.

  There was a decent library at the Country Club, and Jim Brownlee spent many of his evenings trying to learn as much as he could about the history and politics of South America. He felt he would be given an assignment shortly after he completed the training and then got past the Final Board.

  That didn't happen. Despite his "Agent, awaiting assignment" status, no assignment was forthcoming. What did happen was that someone in the office realized that he was the senior Marine officer present at the Country Club, and consequently, that administrative responsibility for all Marine Corps personnel assigned to the OSS was logically his.

  At first, in what he believed was the interim between the completion of his training and his assignment, he didn't mind at all. For one thing, it gave him something to do, and he rather liked guiding fellow Marines through the rocks and shoals of Country Club training.

  But then he began to worry if the same sort of thing that happened to him at Quantico was happening to him at the Country Club. Good administrators were hard to find. And more and more Marines had been accepted by the OSS.

  The last thing in the world he wanted was to be sort of a Marine Mother Hen. He wanted to get out on assignment and do something more concrete against the enemy than shepherd other Marines through training. He was no closer now to being what he thought of privately as a "fighting Marine" than he had been at Quantico.

  This awareness was made even more painful with the arrival at the Coun-try Club of First Lieutenant Robert B. Macklin, USMC. Macklin was not only a rather handsome man, but his uniform-and his person-were adorned with the symbols of what Jim Brownlee wanted rather desperately to be, a Fighting Marine. Macklin wore the ring of the United States Naval Academy at An-napolis. Colored ribbons on the breast of his well-fitting uniform indicated that he had seen service in the Pacific, and that he had twice been wounded. His face was scarred from one wound; and his slight limp, which he tried but failed to hide, suggested that the wound that caused it had been more severe than the one on his face.

  He wore the wings of a parachutist. And when asked, he revealed that he had been wounded with the USMC 2nd Parachute Battalion storming the beach at Gavutu during the invasion of Guadalcanal. Brownlee had heard that the Marine paratroopers at Gavutu were literally decimated-one out of ten Paramarines were killed or wounded.

  "I really have only one question, Lieutenant," Brownlee said. "With all the service you've seen, I should have thought by now that you would be at least a captain."

  "The Major will note," Macklin replied, demonstrating impeccable mili-tary courtesy, "that my service records have been misplaced."

  "Yes, of course," Brownlee said. "I'm sure they'll turn up."

  Lieutenant Robert B. Macklin devoutly hoped they would not. He was de-lighted when a master gunner in Officer Personnel at Eighth and "I" informed him that his records were missing but they were going to send him to the OSS anyway, and "hope they turn up."

  With a little bit of luck, they wouldn't ever turn up, which meant The Corps would have to "reconstruct" a new set. With just a little more luck, the "reconstructed" records would not contain a copy of the devastating Officer's Efficiency Report he had received from Captain Edward Banning, the S-2 of the 4th Marines in Shanghai.

  Lieutenant Macklin had given that efficiency report, and its potential ef-fect on his career, a good deal of thought. Now that he had time to consider it, he was no longer surprised that Captain Edward J. Banning wrote all those despicable-and untrue-things about him. Under the circumstances, Macklin now realized, it was perfectly understandable that he did.

  For one thing, while Banning was a career officer, he did not graduate from the Academy. If memory served, Banning went to the Citadel. If not the Citadel, then to VMI or Norwich, one of those quasi-professional private mili-tary colleges that for some reason, most likely political, were permitted to com-mission their graduates into the Regular Service. It was common knowledge that Norwich, Citadel, and VMI graduates were jealous of those who went to Annapolis and West Point, and that whenever the opportunity presented itself, stuck knives into the unsuspecting backs of those who had that privilege.

  Furthermore, at the time, Banning's own career was in jeopardy, and he had no one to blame for that but himself. While the Citadel, or wherever he actually went, wasn't the Academy, Banning must have had the opportunity to learn what would be expected of him, in his personal life, as a Marine officer. Teaching potential officers what would be expected of them was one of the major reasons the Army and the Navy sent West Point and Annapolis gradu-ates to serve on the staffs of the private military schools.

  Becoming involved, as Captain Banning did, with a Stateless Person, a Russian woman, was conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman, in fact, if not in the law. If the war hadn't come along, it would have meant the end of Banning's career, and he must have known that.

  Banning, furthermore, should have known better than to become close to an enlisted man, particularly one like Corporal "Killer" McCoy. McCoy was typical of the enlisted men in the 4th Marines, a product of the lower classes, obviously without a decent education. For those people, service in the Marines meant three square meals a day, a cot, and the opportunity to frequently forni-cate with the native women.

  There are reasons for the line drawn between officers and enlisted men. Banning certainly knew about the line and the reasons for it, and he chose to ignore it. At the same time, it was perfectly clear that McCoy knew all about Banning's Russian mistress-and God only knows what other secrets Banning was hiding. That knowledge gave him a totally unacceptable advantage over an officer.

  And then there was the matter of Lieutenant Ed Sessions's support of McCoy's outrageous charges. So far as that was concerned... it was, in fact, very disappointing. As a fellow graduate of the Academy, Sessions should have demonstrated at least a modicum of loyalty toward a fellow alumnus when that alumnus was under attack by an enlisted man. But Sessions not only knew that Banning was going to write his efficiency report but that Banning had gone off the deep end where Killer McCoy was concerned, and would take his enlisted buddy McCoy's word against anyone else's about what really hap-pened. So he went along.

  The usual mechanism to keep personality conflicts out of efficiency re-ports was their review by a more senior officer. But that failed. Major Puller, the reviewing officer, already overworked preparing the 4th Marines' move to the Philippines, had the choice between believing Banning, whom he knew, and an officer who wasn't in their clique. It was as simple as that.

  His subsequent assignment as a mess officer at Quantico was, Macklin knew, a direct result of Banning's efficiency report. That sort of duty does not fall to graduates of the Naval Academy. But he resolved then to do the best job he could.

  And then-and he still found this incredible-Corporal Killer McCoy showed up at Quantico as an officer candidate. The only officer candidate in his class from the ranks. The only one who had not spent two weeks in a col-lege classroom, much less taken a degree.

  In the matter of his encounter with McCoy at Quantico, Macklin was will-ing to admit that he made an error in judgment. On the one hand, obviously, he owed it to The Corps to do whatever was necessary to keep such a man from being commissioned. On
the other hand, he should have approached the appro-priate officer at the school and told him what he knew of McCoy from personal knowledge-information that made the notion of commissioning him an offi-cer absurd on its face.

  His personal knowledge would reveal that McCoy was not only insubordi-nate and untruthful, but the reason he was known in China as "Killer" was that he had become embroiled in a barroom, or brothel, encounter with Italian Ma-rines; he'd stabbed two of them fatally. Some sort of technicality kept him from getting what he deserved-twenty years to life in the Portsmouth Naval Prison. But clearly a man with murderous instincts who wallowed in drunken-ness and depravity was not qualified to be a Marine officer.

  At the time, however, doing something official did not seem to be the best course of action. His good intentions, his concern solely for the good of The Corps, it seemed at the time, might be misunderstood.