My big news (which you may also have noticed from the return address) is that I am back in the Navy. An officer from the staff of the Commander, Naval Element, U.S. Forces in India came to see me yesterday. He got right to the point. Now that I wasn’t going to be of much use to the AVG, had I given any thought to “coming home”?
I told him that I was obliged to fulfill my contract with the AVG, which has until July 4 to run, but he told me that the AVG was willing to let me out of it. My leg will be in a cast for another month or six weeks, and probably a little stiff after that, and by the time I’d be ready to fly again, my contract would Just about be over.
I thought it was really quite decent of the Navy to take me back as a temporary cripple, but they went even beyond that. We were promised (I guess I can now tell you) that we would be taken back into the Navy with no loss of seniority, and that if we were promoted while in the AVG, we would receive a promotion in the Navy. It seems that the Navy has a policy by which lieutenants (Junior grade) with six months in the war zone are considered eligible for promotion, so they took that into consideration, and then also made good their word to promote me since I had been promoted in the AVG.
What that means is that I’m back in the Navy with a grade (temporary, of course) two grades higher than I was the last time I saw you. I find it hard, frankly, to think of myself as Lieutenant Commander Bitter (all the lieutenant commanders I knew were old men), but it must be so, for that’s what it says on the sign on my bed.
The other good news is that I will be returned to the United States. A hospital ship is en route here, and as soon as they have enough people to fill it up (and there probably will be more than enough by the time it gets here) I’ll be returned to the United States. There is a good chance that I’ll be gone before any letter you might write could get here, so you can save stamps.
I have no idea where I’ll be stationed in the States, but perhaps I’ll be able to come to Memphis to see you. I would like very much to buy you the most elaborate dinner the Peabody dining room has to offer.
Please say hello to Ann, and if you’d like to risk the paper and a stamp, write your
Fond Pen Pal,
Ed
“He’s been hurt,” Sarah said to Ann. “Not seriously. He had some kind of an accident.”
“He’s lying through his teeth,” Ann said.
Sarah looked at her in surprise. Ann walked back out of the bedroom and returned with the manila envelope in which she had all the rest of the story, copies of the radiogram, and the letters from the Chinese embassy and from Peter Douglass, Jr., and the clippings from Time and Life.
“He looks terrible,” Sarah said when she saw the photographs. “He looks starved.”
“He’s alive,” Ann said. “And he’s coming home.”
“Why didn’t you show me this stuff before?” Sarah demanded.
Ann shrugged her shoulders.
“I was suffering from perfectly normal postnatal depression,” Sarah said furiously. “I wasn’t crazy!”
Ann smiled at her.
Sarah thought of something else. “Have you heard from Dick Canidy?”
“Not from or about,” Ann said.
“Well, they’re probably keeping him busy,” Sarah said,
“and he just hasn’t had time to write.”
“Sure,” Ann said. “Either that, or there is a Chinese girl, or girls, or an American nurse, or an English nurse, or all of the above.”
“You don’t know that,” Sarah said.
“I know Richard Canidy, damn him,” Ann said.
4
WARM SPRINGS, GEORGIA
JUNE 8, 1942
The President of the United States and Colonel William J. Donovan took their lunch, fried chicken and a potato salad, on the flagstone patio outside Roosevelt’s cottage. The two were shielded from the view of other patients and visitors at the poliomyelitis care center by a green latticework fence.
Roosevelt had a guest, who vanished immediately on the arrival of Donovan by car from Atlanta. Donovan wondered why he was surprised and shocked. Roosevelt was a man, even if his legs were crippled. Eleanor, he well knew, could be a pain in the ass. Barbara Whittaker was far more charming, and certainly better-looking, and Chesly Whittaker had died in the bed of a woman young enough to be his daughter. Why should he expect Roosevelt to be a saint?
And, he told himself, in any event it was none of his business. He had come to Georgia to discuss the war, and what COI was doing to help win it. Whether Franklin Roosevelt was getting a little on the side had nothing to do with that.
The most important thing on Roosevelt’s mind at lunch was neither the beating the nation was taking in the Pacific nor even the first American counterstroke, Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa, scheduled for the fall. What he wanted to discuss was the superbomb.
Donovan had previously learned that while the experiments at the reactor at the University of Chicago were by no means near completion—they had yet to try for a chain reaction—Dr. Conant of Harvard had reported that the scientists were more and more confident that things were going to work. After these reports Roosevelt had been so confident—or, Donovan thought, so desperate—that he had authorized a virtual blank check on his secret war appropriations funds to go ahead with the effort.
As of June 1, under an Army Corps of Engineers officer, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, the Manhattan Project had come into being, with the mission of developing a bomb whose explosive force would come from atomic fission. Manhattan had been chosen for the project name in the hope that the enormous expenditures about to be made would be connected with Manhattan Island, rather than the facilities being built at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Hanford, Washington, and in the deserts of the Southwest.
The Office of the Coordinator of Information had so far been involved in this program in the operation that had located and brought to the United States Grunier, the French mining engineer who had worked before the war for Union Minière in the Belgian Congo.
One of the very few known sources of uraninite ore, from which it was theoretically possible to extract uranium 235, was in Katanga Province of the Belgian Congo.
From Grunier it had been learned that there were in fact many tons of uraninite in Katanga Province lying around as by-products of other Union Minière mining and smelting operations. Some of it had simply been removed and pushed aside as slag during copper and tin mining operations.
A few people questioned how much to trust Grunier, for he had been brought involuntarily to the United States from Morocco where he was working in phosphate mining. His family was in France, and he was understandably concerned for their welfare. This concern was promptly used as leverage by COI.
He was thus prevailed upon to draw maps. Donovan then sent an agent to the Belgian Congo from South Africa who had returned with fifty pounds of uraninite ore in twenty bags. The source of each bag was labeled according to which pile of spillings it came from.
Twelve of his packages turned out to be useless. They were not what Grunier thought—or at least so he told the COI interrogators—were supplies of uraninite. Seven more samples had not contained enough uraninite to make refining possible. One of the three good samples had contained an adequate parts-per-million ratio, and the last two, on spectrographic and chemical analysis, proved to be very desirable.
The next question was: Were the samples truly representative of the pile they were taken from, or were they a fluke?
This problem was magnified greatly because of the enormous quantities of uraninite ore required to produce even minute quantities of pure uranium 235. There was, so far as anyone knew, less than 0.000001 pound of the stuff in all the world.
Some scientists believed that as little as an ounce of pure U-235 would be enough to make up the critical mass of an atomic fission bomb. But others, just as knowledgeable, said the minimum figure would have to be at least a hundred pounds.
Thus, to determine how many thousan
ds of tons were going to be necessary to produce as much as fifty pounds of uranium, it was necessary to have refinable quantities. In laboratory terms, that meant a minimum of five tons. For now. And of course much more later, if things went the way everyone hoped they would.
As of December 12, 1941, the German government had informed the Belgian government that under the terms of the armistice agreement between them, the export of copper and other strategic minerals and ores from Belgian colonies to the United States of America was no longer permitted. And all other exports would henceforth be reviewed to make sure they would not accrue to the enemy’s benefit.
Worrying about how to smuggle several hundred tons of ore out of the middle of darkest Africa would, however, have to wait. The job now was to determine if the Katanga ore was what was needed, and the way to do that was to get five tons of it to the United States.
And the way to do that, Donovan decided, was to fly into Katanga and get it.
“You’re working on flying the stuff out, then. Is that right, Bill?” Roosevelt said.
“Yes, Sir,” Donovan said.
“How are you going to do it?”
Donovan was a little annoyed with Roosevelt’s interest in details. It was, in a way, flattering, but it took time. He was often saying to his subordinates that of all the shortages that interfered with the war effort, the greatest was time. There simply wasn’t enough time to do what had to be done. The few minutes it would take to tell the President how he planned to get the uraninite ore from the Belgian Congo would have to come from the total time Roosevelt was able to give him. He would have much preferred to spend this talking about other things.
But Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the Commander in Chief, he reminded himself, and could not therefore be told to stop wasting time with unimportant questions.
“You remember the young man who came to dinner with Jim Whittaker?” he asked.
“Canidy? Something like that?”
“Richard Canidy,” Donovan said. “Ex-Flying Tiger, and more important now, an MIT-trained aeronautical engineer.”
“I’m a little confused. Isn’t he the chap you sent to North Africa after the mining engineer and Admiral Whatsisname?”
“That, too,” Donovan said, impressed but not really surprised that Roosevelt had called that detail from his memory. “At the moment, he’s at Chesly’s house on the Jersey shore, trying to keep the admiral happy and away from newspaper reporters. But he’s also working on this.”
“How is he working on this?”
“He has been provided with the details—weight and distance, I mean, not what has to be hauled or where the stuff is. And he has been told to recommend a way—in absolute secrecy—to move that much weight that far. He’s been getting a lot of help from Pan American Airways.”
“Why not the Air Corps?”
Donovan was very much aware that he had just walked out on thin ice. Pan American Airways beyond question had greater experience in long-distance transoceanic flight than anyone else—including the Army Air Corps. But their greatest expert in this area was Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, “Lucky Lindy,” the first man to fly the Atlantic solo, the great American hero who had not long before enraged Roosevelt and a large number of other important people by announcing that in his professional judgment the German Luftwaffe looked invincible. Lindbergh had then rubbed salt in the wound by involving himself deeply in the America First movement, throwing his enormous prestige behind the notion that America should stay out of Europe’s wars.
Immediately after Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh, who was a colonel in the Air Corps Reserve, had volunteered for active duty. Roosevelt, predictably, had had no intention of letting that happen. Franklin Roosevelt would allow Lindbergh to serve in uniform over his dead body.
Donovan and Lindbergh, however, were friends. And Lindbergh had proved eager to help when Donovan asked for flight-planning advice. When Donovan had told Roosevelt that Canidy was getting a lot of help from Pan American, he meant help from Charles A. Lindbergh personally.
“Because Pan American knows more about this sort of thing than the Air Corps,” Donovan said.
Roosevelt grunted, but accepted that. If he had asked if Lindbergh were involved, Donovan would not have lied to him. But he hadn’t asked, which was just as well as far as Donovan was concerned.
“And you think it can be done?” Roosevelt asked.
“Canidy tells me it can,” Donovan said.
“You seem to place a good deal of trust in him, Bill,” the President said. “He seems possessed of a number of interesting secrets.”
“There are two schools of thought about multiple secrets, Mr. President,” Donovan said. “If people are limited to one secret at a time, you wind up with a lot of people who have to be watched. On the other hand, if one man has a number of secrets, we only have to worry about security for him. And, right now at least, I don’t intend to send Canidy himself to the Congo. He’s just setting the operation up. In the end, I think it will turn out that we’ll use an Air Corps crew.”
Roosevelt thought that over a moment.
“They would like that, I think,” he said, grinning. “They have the responsibility, you know, of dealing with airplanes.”
“Yes, I know,” Donovan said, just as sarcastically, “and as I understand things, I’m supposed to be dealing with intelligence. You will doubtless be surprised to learn that sometimes, despite our best efforts, that puts me and the Air Corps in conflict.”
“Is that just a general philosophical observation, Bill? Or do you have something specific in mind?”
“German fighter aircraft propelled by jet engines,” Donovan said after a pause.
The President smiled very broadly, his cigarette holder cocked high between his teeth. He was enj oying the exchange.
“You will doubtless be surprised, Bill,” he said, “when I tell you that when I mentioned those aircraft to George Marshall, he told me that the Air Corps was not very concerned about them. In fact, they had—with great tact, of course— asked if such aircraft weren’t really a tactical concern of theirs, rather than a strategic concern of yours.”
“Then they’re wrong about that, too, Franklin,” Donovan said flatly.
“Are they indeed?”
“Will you listen to me?”
“Of course,” Roosevelt said. “How can I refuse?”
“As it has been explained to me, the Air Corps tactic for Europe is massive bombing from high altitude of German military targets by heavy bombers, B-17s and B-24s. The Air Corps believes that the massed heavy armament of a large flight of carefully arranged bombers can throw up a relatively impenetrable wall of fire against German fighters.”
“And you don’t think they can?”
“Not against German fighters, armed with cannon, that are flying three times as fast as the bombers,” Donovan said.
“The Air Corps disagrees with that, of course,” Roosevelt said. “And they also believe that the Germans are a long way from having fighters powered with jet engines off their drawing boards.”
“The first flight of a jet-powered German aircraft took place on August 27, 1939,” Donovan said, “at an airfield near Berlin.”
Roosevelt looked at him sharply.
“The Luftwaffe will flight-test within a month or so one of the twelve Messerschmitt ME-262 fighter planes currently being built in underground, bombproof facilities in Augsburg. The ME-262 is powered by a centrifugal Junkers 004 engine, designed by a man named von Ohain, which is supposed to be a great improvement over the radial jet engine they’ve used up to now.”
It was a moment before Roosevelt spoke.
“I was about to insult you, Bill, by asking if you were sure of your information,” he said. “I won’t do that, of course. But do you realize what a spot you’re putting me in with the Air Corps?”
“If the Germans get these fighters operational, Franklin, we will not be able to accept the losses they will inflict on our bomber force�
�either in a tactical sense or a public-relations sense. That, I respectfully submit, is indeed a strategic consideration.”
“And how do you suggest we stop them?” Roosevelt asked.
“That would be the Air Corps’ business,” Donovan said. “Once they recognize the problem, I’m sure they’ll know how to handle it. My people tell me that manufacturing jet engines is considerably more difficult than building piston engines. Not only are they more complex, but they require special metals and special metallurgy. If we can take out the smelters, the special steel mills, or the machining facilities, perhaps we can slow down their development. I doubt if we can stop it, but I think we should be able to slow it.”
“Damn!” Roosevelt said.
“I don’t think we can ignore the problem. It will not go away, Mr. President,” Donovan said.
Roosevelt turned and glared at him, his eyes cold, his eyebrows angrily raised. “What exactly is it, Colonel Donovan,” he asked icily, “that you wish me to do?”
“Mr. President, I respectfully suggest that you tell the Air Corps you have given COI intelligence responsibility vis-à-vis German jet aircraft, and then direct them to turn over to me what intelligence they have in their files.”
Roosevelt snorted. “That’s all you want, their files?”
“I want the authority to look into German jet planes,” Donovan said. “And I don’t want to be in competition with them while I’m at it.”
“They’re not the enemy, Bill,” Roosevelt said, his temper now in check.
“Their intelligence, Franklin, is being evaluated by Air Corps officers who simply cannot ignore their knowledge that every one of their superiors, every one of them, is dedicated to the theory that heavy-bombardment aircraft can defend themselves. None of them wants to hear about any challenge to that devout belief.”
The Secret Warriors Page 10