The Secret Warriors
Page 9
“I have been told,” Canidy said dryly, “that there were compelling reasons to leave us behind.”
“Well,” the admiral said, touching Canidy’s arm, “what is important is that you finally got out, and are here. I think you’ll like it. We are guests of a Mrs. Whittaker,” the admiral said. “She is a gracious lady, and an even more gracious hostess.”
“I know Mrs. Whittaker, mon Amiral,” Canidy said. “Before the war, I was often a guest in this house.”
“And is that why you have been sent here?”
“I am honored to have been named your liaison officer,” Canidy said.
“Odd,” the admiral said dryly. “I somehow got the idea that you were my new jailer.”
Canidy, flustered, couldn’t think of a reply.
“Well, I don’t suppose it matters, one way or the other. As there were good reasons for you to be left behind off Safi, I am sure there are good reasons for my house arrest here,” the admiral said, without apparent bitterness. “Come, I will introduce you to my staff.”
The staff consisted of a French Navy captain, an old man who had served aboard the battleship Jean Bart when the admiral had been her captain; a much younger lieutenant commander (Douglass had warned Canidy to be very careful dealing with this one; he was suspected of having strong ties to de Gaulle); and a middle-aged petty officer who looked pathetically absurd in his bell-bottom trousers, seaman’s blouse with flap, and hat with red pom-pom. He performed the dual functions of orderly and clerk.
Half an hour later, Barbara Whittaker returned from shopping in Asbury Park. When Canidy caught sight of the old, sedate Rolls-Royce moving majestically up the drive, he excused himself and went down to meet her.
The Rolls had an A ration sticker stuck on the windshield. The A ration was for nonessential personal vehicles, and provided three gallons of gasoline a week. That would be enough, he thought, to get the Rolls to Asbury Park, but not back. Barbara Whittaker’s ration was obviously being augmented, probably from Navy stocks.
She was out of the car and helping the chauffeur unload grocery bags from the trunk before she saw him. Then she smiled and strode up to him, a tall, silver-haired woman of great dignity.
“Would you be terribly embarrassed if I put my arms around you and kissed you, Dick?” she asked. “I’m so very glad to see you!”
“I’d be unhappy if you didn’t,” Canidy said.
She hugged him tightly. He was surprised at the depth of his own emotion at seeing her again.
“Help Tom and me with the groceries,” she said. “And then we’ll sit on the porch and have some of Chesly’s Scotch and bring each other up to date.”
She’ll want to know about Jimmy, Canidy thought. And obviously, I am expected to tell her as little as possible. Well, fuck that, she’s no German spy. I’ll tell her as much as I can.
She meant it about drinking Chesly’s Scotch. The bottle she produced was older than Canidy. And she asked him about himself and what he was going to be doing while he was at Summer Place, but fortunately she steered away from asking about Jimmy.
This was not an indication of lack of interest in him. It was rather because she was a great lady whose sense of duty forbade asking questions.
“I met Jimmy when he flew into Washington,” Canidy said.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to talk about him, are you, Dick?” she said.
“He has apparently been running around in the jungles of Bataan,” Canidy went on. “I’m sure he has malaria, and he told me he had a tapeworm named Clarence,” Canidy said.
“Oh, my!” she said. “Chesly had one years ago and had a terrible time passing it.”
“He was thirty pounds underweight,” Canidy went on, “and he’s going to have to have some serious dental work.”
“What of his attitude?” she asked.
She means, Is he out of his mind?
“The President had him to dinner, after that business with the newsreel cameras,” Canidy said, and went on to tell her what Jim Whittaker had done to demonstrate what a three-eighths ration was.
“Even under the circumstances, that was extremely rude to Franklin and Eleanor,” Barbara Whittaker said.
“Well, please don’t apologize for him,” Canidy said. “If you do, they’ll know who told you about this.”
She waved her hand to show him she understood, then asked, “Is that why he’s been hospitalized? Why I can’t see him?”
“I think he’s hospitalized because he needs hospitalization,” Canidy said, hoping she would believe it.
“It said in the newspapers that he carried a letter from Douglas MacArthur to the President,” she said. “And General Marshall was there for dinner. Do you know how much Marshall and Douglas MacArthur loathe each other?”
“I’ve heard,” Canidy admitted.
“Does that have anything to do with Jimmy’s hospitalization?”
“I don’t know,” Canidy said after a moment. “I just don’t know.”
She thought that over.
“Chesly and Franklin Roosevelt were not the best of friends,” she said. “But I am unable to believe that Franklin would—”
“Colonel Donovan said he was going to find out what he could,” Canidy said. “I think the thing to do is wait for him to do that.”
She leaned over and patted first his knee and then his cheek.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m sure you shouldn’t have told me any of this, but I’m glad you did.”
“Just make sure Colonel Donovan doesn’t find out,” Canidy said.
“He won’t,” she said.
She stood up.
“When I heard you were coming,” she said, “I had Commander Nadine moved out of your old room. He didn’t like it much, but I told him you were an old friend of the family. Now I’m sorry I said that.”
“Excuse me?” Canidy asked, confused.
“I should have said you were family, period,” she said. She looked down and met his eyes. “We generally have a cocktail at half past six, and then dinner around seven. If you can’t make it until then, you know where to find the refrigerator.”
“Thank you.”
“Welcome home, Dick,” she said, and then she walked off the porch.
2
2745 LAKESHORE DRIVE
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
APRIL 21, 1942
Despite Brandon Chambers’s assurance to Chandler H. Bitter that he would have a report on Ed Bitter’s condition from one of his war correspondents in India within a matter of days, the first amplification of what had happened came to Chandler in the morning mail two weeks after the radiogram from General Chennault.
The envelope was cheap brownish paper, and the letter itself appeared to have been typed on mimeograph paper on a battered portable.
HQ, 1st Pursuit Sqdn, AVG
APO 607 S/F Cal.
25 Mar 42
Dear Mr. Bitter:
By the time you read this you will have heard that Ed has been hurt. I thought you would like to know what happened.
We mounted a two-flight (10 a/c) low-level strafing assault on the Japanese air base at Chiengmai, Thailand. Our squadron commander led one flight, I had the other, and Ed was in line to take the place of either of us if anything should happen.
We went in on oxygen at 20,000 feet, and went down near the field for a strafing run. Some of the ships had 50-pound HE bombs in their flare chutes. There was a lot more antiaircraft on the way down, and many more heavy machine guns on the deck when we got there, than intelligence had led us to expect.
The skipper took a hit and was shot down his first pass, and Ed took a hit Just below his right knee on his third pass. I think it was a glancing shot or a rickoshay (sp?), because the wound, while unpleasant, isn’t nearly the mess it would have been had he taken a direct hit from a .50, which is what the Japs use, we having obligingly showed them how to build them.
Ed managed to get his aircraft up to altitude again, bu
t on the way home he went on the radio and said that he was feeling bad, and faint, and wanted to set down (rather than risk losing consciousness while still in the air).
Luck was with him. There was a riverbed in the middle of nowhere that looked like it was hard enough to take a landing, and he set it down without trouble. Once he was there, and we knew it was safe to land, we were able to land another plane, load him into that, and with the pilot sitting on Ed’s lap and ducking his head to get it out of the prop blast, he was able to make off and get Ed back to the base.
That was the worst part. Once he was on the ground, they gave him something for the pain, did what they could here for his knee, and arranged for him to be flown to India, where there is a brand-new General Hospital (US Army) in Calcutta.
Probably the best indicator of his condition is that he told me Just before he left for Calcutta that he will be back in six weeks. I don’t think so. I think they will probably ship him home Just as soon as they can arrange for it. He is not in danger, so the worst that will happen is that he may have a stiff knee.
I have to cut this off now, because I’m now the squadron commander and I’m finding that means a lot of work.
Ed and I had become good friends, and what I’ve been thinking is that if something like this had to happen, this wasn’t so bad. We’re really going to miss him around here, but he’s going to come out of it all right.
Sincerely,
Peter Douglass, Jr
Peter Douglass, Jr.
Chandler Bitter showed Helen the letter, then suggested she call Brandon and read the letter to him. After that he left for work.
When he returned that evening, she mentioned to him that she had also called Ann Chambers and read the letter to her. Ann was Brandon’s daughter and their niece, and she was working on Brandon’s newspaper in Memphis. Helen had also called Mark and Sue-Ann Chambers in Mobile. The rest of the afternoon she’d spent having Peter Douglass’s letter photographed so that she could send copies to other friends who would be interested.
There was a second letter from the Chinese embassy the next day. Eight flowery paragraphs proclaimed that a second gold miniature Flying Tiger was being sent with the personal gratitude of the Chinese people and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.
Mrs. Bitter had that letter photographed, too, so that it could be sent to sundry and assorted relatives and friends. When things calmed down a bit, she was going to have the letters framed. She was also going to have the second gold Flying Tiger mounted and take it to The Plantation in Alabama. She would hang it all in the library of the family vacation residence there with the other family war memorabilia, some of which went back to the War Between the States.
Helen’s behavior astonished Chandler. He had been married to her a long time, and thought he knew her. What seemed to be the strange truth was that the traditional roles were reversed. He was nearly sick with fear and relief for their child, and she was reveling in his heroism.
3
MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE
MAY 28, 1942
A reporter-photographer team from Time-Life visited the U.S. Army General Hospital in Calcutta in early May looking for “upbeat” stories. The United States of America had been taking a hell of a whipping in the opening months of the war, and with the exception of Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle’s B-25 raid on Tokyo the month before, there was a surfeit of depressing stories of courage in the face of defeat.
It didn’t take them long to find out there were several Flying Tigers in the hospital. One of these had a story that would go over well in New York.
The first story about him appeared in the Time issue of May 28, 1942. There was a one-column photograph of Edwin Howell Bitter in a hospital bathrobe, sitting in a wheelchair with his right leg in a cast sticking straight out in front of him. The cutline under the photograph read: “Civilian” Ed Bitter.
The story itself seemed sure to satisfy the editor’s demand for something upbeat:
There are five American “civilian” patients in the new U.S. Army General Hospital in Calcutta. Their bills are paid by the Chinese government. They are employees of the American Volunteer Group who were “inJured on the Job.” The Job 24-year-old ex-Navy pilot Edwin H. Bitter, of Chicago, was injured doing was strafing the huge Jap air base at Chiengmai, Thailand, in a worn-out Curtiss P-40B Warhawk, an aircraft the Chinese were able to get for their American volunteer pilots to fly only because the British turned them down as obsolescent for service against the Germans in Europe.
Bitter downed nine Japanese aircraft in his “obsolete” P-40 before he himself was downed by ground fire in Thailand. He was rescued from certain imprisonment and possible execution as a “bandit” when another “civilian” Flying Tiger pilot managed to land his Warhawk on the dry riverbed where Bitter had crashed. He squeezed the wounded flier into his cockpit and took off again. Names of AVG pilots still fighting the Japanese are not released.
Annapolis graduate (’38) Bitter sees no future for himself in the U.S. Navy, which, he says, “has no use for people with stiff knees.” When he is able, he will return to his “civilian Job” as a Flying Tiger.
Life magazine, ten days later—it took time to get all the photographs necessary for a photo-essay to the United States—had a longer story about the AVG men in Calcutta, but by then Time had been published.
It was not known whether the order had come from President Roosevelt himself, or from Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, who had been wounded as a sergeant charging up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt in the Spanish-American War, but the word came down from way up high:
“Get that fellow Bitter back in the U.S. Navy as soon as he can be sworn in, even if you have to do it with him on a stretcher.”
Not long afterward a letter addressed to Miss Sarah Child that bore the return address “LtComdr E. H. Bitter, USN, Det of Patients, USA Gen Hospital, APO 652, San Francisco, Calif.” appeared in Sarah and Ann’s box in the Peabody Hotel in Memphis. Before Sarah saw it, Ann Chambers took the letter and kept it in her purse until she found time to steam open the envelope over a teakettle and read it. Ann had opened all of Sarah Child’s mail since the visit to Memphis of Sarah’s mother.
When Sarah’s mother had asked her husband to take her to Memphis to see her daughter, Joseph Schild—Sarah had Americanized the German-Jewish Schild to Child before going off to college—had desperately wanted to believe that time and the maternal instincts of his wife had overcome her first reaction to the news that their unmarried nineteen-year-old daughter was pregnant.
Her first reaction—rage and fear—had put Sarah’s mother into the Institute of Living, a private psychiatric hospital in Hartford, Connecticut, for six weeks. But Joseph Schild had taken his wife out of the IOL against medical advice when she asked to go to Memphis.
Sarah shared a suite in the Peabody Hotel in Memphis with her best friend from Bryn Mawr, Ann Chambers. There was no question in Joseph Schild’s mind that Ann, the daughter of Brandon Chambers, the newspaper publisher, was in Memphis as much to give Sarah refuge from her mother in New York as she was to work for her father’s newspaper.
But with the world in flames, with the European continent in the hands of the Germans, with most of their European relatives either missing or in hiding from the Nazis, with the United States fighting what looked to be a losing battle for its very existence, Joseph Schild reasoned that his wife would see that their daughter’s pregnancy was a joyful thing and an affirmation of life.
In Memphis, at his first sight of Sarah, Joseph Schild’s eyes filled with tears. Not tears of sadness, he realized, but rather because Sarah looked like a living Madonna. Her skin glowed, her somewhat solemn eyes glistened.
“Bitch!” his wife had screamed at their daughter in the suite in the Peabody. “Godless whore! Why don’t you and your bastard die!”
Joseph Schild had had to physically restrain his wife until the hotel could find a doctor who would come to the suite and sedate her.
Ann Chambers decided that this was not the moment to tell Sarah that Eddie had been injured, had almost been killed. Postnatal depression had come sooner than it usually did, and with a greater severity than the doctor had expected. In the delivery room he had thought admiringly that Sarah was a tough little cookie.
Sarah was in the hospital ten days, and then—still depressed—returned to the suite in the Peabody. There was a nurse all day, but she was alone when the nurse left at five until Ann came home from The Advocate. Which meant that Ann often had to rush home when she would have preferred to work.
In their suite, Ann steamed open the letter over a teakettle on a hot plate, read the letter, carefully resealed the envelope, and then went to Sarah’s door. She flung the door open and, waving the letter, went inside.
“Poppa is finally heard from!” she cried.
Sarah turned the envelope in her hands and saw the return address.
“Oh, my God!” she said. “He’s in the hospital!”
Then she tore it open and read it.
Calcutta, India
7 April 1942
Dear Sarah:
I have continued to receive your fine and regular letters, and regret that I have been such a terrible correspondent. I was involved in a small accident, slightly injuring my leg, and am spending, as you might have noticed from the return address, some time in the hospital. I hasten to say that I am really quite well, and there is no cause for concern. And being in the hospital finally gives me a chance to answer your many letters.