by Peter Quinn
DRUMMOND HOTEL, LONDON
Sitting in the lobby across from clean-shaven Major Thornton Richard Van Hull, Dunne couldn’t help notice that the tense, thick-as-fog mélange of expectation and uncertainty blanketing the city pre-D-Day had dissipated, if not entirely disappeared. The occasional plummet of Hitler’s last-gasp terror weapon, the V-2 rocket—too little, too late to avoid the demise of his thousand-year Reich—sustained whatever dread and doubt persisted.
“The General is sending a team to hook up with the Slovak resistance—what’s left of it—for a rescue attempt.” Van Hull was in a chair next to the fireplace, its layer of red coals half smothered by ash. He was thinner than the first time Dunne met him in Washington three years ago, but his good looks were intact. “General Donovan recommended I enlist you.”
Dunne’s blank expression betrayed no sign of his meeting with Donovan in Paris.
The waiter hobbled over. Spindly neck, scrawny as a pipe cleaner, sprouted from his wing collar. The sole server, he was doing his best to keep up. He hurriedly unfolded a linen cocktail napkin, took the glass of scotch and the side of water from the silver tray, and placed them on it. “Will that be all, sir?”
Van Hull sipped the glass of soda water he’d been drinking when Dunne came in. “For now, yes, thank you.”
“What’s involved?” Dunne preferred his drink the American way, over ice, a request that usually left the English befuddled or offended. He’d ordered water.
Leaning close, Van Hull described the coming mission in the broadest terms. In August 1944, an uprising by the anti-Fascist Slovak rebels succeeded in liberating a contingent of captured American and British fliers. The agents stayed behind to support the Slovak insurgents and locate other downed fliers. Three other OSS teams followed.
By October, a total of twelve agents and thirty-seven newly rescued airmen were being relentlessly hunted by hard-core SS units and forces loyal to Slovakia’s puppet government. Operation Dawson was dropped in to arrange a rescue. Foul weather prevented bringing them out by air. Soon after Christmas, news arrived that the exhausted, half-frozen agents and airmen had been captured.
Latest information from the resistance indicated they were being held in Slovakia. As long as the Germans didn’t move them to the Reich, there was a possibility the advancing Russians might liberate them. But the Russians made no secret of their displeasure at having Brits and Yanks mucking around in what they considered their exclusive theater of operations.
Van Hull drew a crude map of Slovakia on a cocktail napkin and indicated where the mission would be directed. General Donovan believed very strongly—and Van Hull concurred—the OSS should take care of its own. The mission’s job was to assess the possibilities of a rescue. There’d be a full briefing in Bari before they left. The briefing officer assigned from R&A was Major Turlough Bassante, a protégé of Louis Pohl, the cigar-smoking, self-effacing, universally respected chief of statistical analysis.
Having spent time with Pohl and Bassante in Washington and then in London, Van Hull rated Bassante as the top briefer in Special Operations: “He’s brilliant, opinionated, and bitter as an unpaid whore but extremely knowledgeable.” Eager to serve in the field, he’d submitted a strongly worded request for a transfer. General Donovan found it amusing, even circulating it after dismissing it out of hand. Bassante didn’t have the temperament, he said, a truth everyone but Bassante seemed to recognize.
“The general ordered we start with a three-man mission,” Van Hull said. “I told him I preferred to go alone. He dismissed that idea and brought up your name. He said you were experienced and reliable. Brave but cautious. He stressed that: ‘Dunne knows how to deal with trouble and, better yet, how to avoid it. He was a cop, a decorated one.’”
Dunne sipped scotch, swallowed what he thought: Caution grew from fear but wasn’t the same as cowardice. If you weren’t afraid, you wouldn’t be cautious and couldn’t be brave. Reckless, impetuous, irrational—sure. But brave? Bravery was the ability to elevate self-sacrifice over self-preservation, discipline over common sense, individual human will over the most basic of animal instincts, to move beyond fear and caution. No matter how much training or experience, no matter how confident, you wouldn’t know until the moment arrived.
Those who thought otherwise, cocksure they could draw a bright, immovable line between bravery and cowardice, had never been under fire, never felt the surging, suffocating, animal urge for survival. Alongside the luck/unluck of combat—the maddening unpredictability of die/survive—was the iron law of mathematics: The longer you’re in it, the lower the chances of getting out in one piece.
“You mind if I call you Fin?” Van Hull asked.
“I prefer it.”
“Good. I prefer you call me Dick.”
“Not Thornton? That’s the name the general used when he introduced us in D.C.”
“He made a habit out of that, even when I asked him not to. Loathed that name since I was a kid. I’ve always used Dick or Rick. Even Richard is okay. I’d rather be a Richard the First than a Thornton the Fourth.”
“Richard the First, a.k.a. ‘The Lionheart.’”
“You know your English history.”
“I know my Errol Flynn. The Adventures of Robin Hood.”
“The general said you’d be blunt. He admires that quality. I do, too, so I’ll be up front. At this point, it appears the captured men are still in Slovakia. But it’s possible they’ve been taken back to the Reich. If that’s the case, this is a fool’s errand.”
“It’s also possible they’ve already been shot.” Dunne didn’t bring up the incident at La Spezia, Italy, the previous March. He didn’t have to. It was common knowledge how, in accordance with Hitler’s Commando Order, the Wehrmacht summarily executed an OSS mission of fifteen men in uniform captured on a legitimate military mission. No one could say with certainty how many other agents had been caught and killed on the spot.
“But the Wehrmacht knows a final reckoning is near.”
“I’m not sure they care about reckonings. The SS doesn’t, that’s for certain.”
Van Hull slumped into the chair.
It struck Dunne that perhaps Van Hull wasn’t as much a fan of bluntness as he made. “‘Ours but to do or die,’ that’s a favorite line of the general’s.”
“From Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade.’”
“Another chapter of history I learned from Errol Flynn.”
“The poet wrote, ‘Theirs but to do and die,’ a more fatalistic rendering. Truth is, there’s a personal angle. Lieutenant Michael Jahn … one of the captured … he’s a friend.” Van Hull put the glass to his lips, eyed the room over the rim fleetingly.
“When I was a cop—”
Van Hull interjected, “A decorated one, the general said.”
“We had a rule. Never mix the personal with the professional.”
“I respect that, Fin. The decision is yours.” Van Hull crumpled the paper cocktail napkin-cum-map and tossed it on the coals. It smoldered before bursting into flame.
Per Donovan’s instructions, Dunne didn’t bring up the order he’d been given. Wasn’t this mission, be some other and probably with someone less seasoned than Van Hull. He mouthed what was as close to the truth as he could get: “I’m in.”
“We leave for Bari the day after tomorrow, at oh-seven-hundred. Major Bassante likes to talk. Never uses one word when he can use three. But he’s the best briefer we have. Too thorough for some—but the way I see it, you can never be too thorough.”
“Be prepared.”
“Boy Scouts’ motto.”
“Good motto, good advice.”
“You ever a Scout?”
“They don’t give merit badges for misdemeanors. I chose reform school instead.”
Van Hull lifted his drink. “Here’s to a successful mission.”
Dunne tapped his glass to Van Hull’s: “Here’s to staying alive.”
As Dunne was getti
ng ready for bed, there was a knock on his door. Bud Mulholland stepped hesitantly into the room. He was recently back from a successful mission in Yugoslavia in which scores of Allied fliers had been rescued, and was quartered on the floor above. He turned down Dunne’s offer of a drink. He wasn’t sure he should have come, he said, but decided Dunne deserved to hear what he had to say, even though it made him feel like a snitch.
“Are you sure you don’t want a drink?” Dunne said.
“Maybe a small one.”
Dunne fetched two glasses from the bathroom and poured an inch of scotch in each.
Mulholland perched on the end of the bed and focused on the rug as he spoke. He’d heard about the upcoming mission with Van Hull, and after he’d spotted them earlier in conversation at the Drummond decided to fill in Dunne on what he knew: “This is intended not as an accusation but as a piece of useful information, and the more useful information you have, the better the odds of getting through.” He downed the contents of the glass.
Before he’d headed out to Yugoslavia, Mulholland said, he’d met a Dutch cabaret dancer at a hotel near Piccadilly Circus. They were headed to her room when she noticed the door of the adjacent room ajar. A heel protruded. He’d pushed the door open. Van Hull was sprawled unconscious on the floor, an empty whiskey bottle by his side. There were more empties on the bureau. They lifted him onto the bed and closed the door.
Mulholland didn’t let on to his escort he knew Van Hull, and didn’t say anything to anyone until now. “You know I don’t talk out of school, Fin, and you know how I regard the major. But I’ll give you a bit of advice. He’s got an Achilles’ heel, and I’m not trying to play the poet. We know the type. Doesn’t get drunk every day, sometimes not for weeks, even months, but once the cork is out, there’s no putting it back. Long as you’re in the field with Van Hull, everything should be fine—but it’s always good to keep every possibility in mind.”
BARI, ITALY
Dunne and Van Hull flew from London to Bari. A dozen other OSS operatives were aboard, all bound for Yugoslavia, Greece, “the Balkans.” Dunne fell asleep over the angry whitecaps of the English Channel, woke as the plane prepared to land.
“It’s not wine-dark.” Van Hull stared out the window. He had a movie star’s profile. Below, waves rolled south to north, unperplexed, lapping at the Italian shore.
“What’s not ‘wine-dark’?”
“‘The wine-dark sea.’ Homer’s description of the Mediterranean. What color do you see?”
Dunne gazed out the window. “Blue.”
“‘Azure’ is the word Lord Byron used: ‘And now upon the scene I look / The azure grave of many a Roman; / Where stern Ambition once forsook / His wavering crown to follow woman.’ Perhaps when mixed with blood the sea takes on the color of wine, the way they say it did at Tarawa. Or Normandy. But I doubt that was Homer’s point.”
Dunne continued looking out the window. They were about to land. After all the flying, all the jumps, all the missions, he still never felt entirely at ease in an airplane. He gripped the seat. In the spring before the Normandy invasion, he’d worked at an auxiliary airstrip in Sussex, training the all-volunteer Operational Groups, or OGs, that General Donovan created as part of Operation Jedburgh, the joint Allied effort to land clandestine forces across Nazi-occupied Europe.
The job of trainers was to instruct gentlemen in the art of ungentlemanly warfare, turning college grads into killers and saboteurs adept at sowing confusion behind enemy lines, conducting hit-and-run raids, contacting partisans, and waging the small-scale warfare that tied down large numbers of enemy troops.
As the long-awaited assault on occupied France drew near, the OG missions grew in number. The last contingent was the best Dunne had worked with, a quartet of three-man teams already intensively groomed for combat at the OSS camp on what had been the grounds of the Congressional Country Club, outside Washington, D.C. Their enthusiasm matched by appreciation of what they were up against, they emerged from training as skilled paratroopers, versatile with small arms and adept in hand-to-hand combat.
The heightened preparations—hurried, confused, sometimes contradictory—left no doubt the invasion was imminent. A last-minute directive required them to share a borrowed Halifax piloted by a baby-faced Brit with a half-dozen Free French paratroopers. A persnickety RAF lieutenant nursing a widely shared resentment at the Yanks’ increasing control over clandestine operations forced Dunne to stay behind and sit inside a Nissen hut to complete the necessary paperwork.
Soon after the plane took off, it was recalled due to high winds. Wheels almost touching the ground, a capricious, ferocious gust of wind jerking up the right wing. In an apparent attempt to abort the landing, the inexperienced pilot gunned the engine. Left wing planted itself in wet, pliant earth; plane pivoted, pinwheeled, crashed, burst apart in a centrifugal circle of orange-yellow fireworks.
A scrum of would-be rescuers—on foot, in ambulances and fire engines—rushed the flaming, upside-down wreck, as if there were anybody to rescue. The fire engines prepared to douse the shattered, belly-up hulk as the intense, fuel-fed fire reduced the recruits from hardened, battle-ready agents into char, suet, cinders, soot.
The pilot announced they were nearing Bari. Everyone should prepare for landing. Dunne silently repeated the Suscipiat, one of the prayers from the Mass he’d memorized as an altar boy at the Catholic Protectory, a single tongue-twisting Latin sentence: Suscipiat Dominus sacrificium de manibus tuis, ad laudem et gloriam nominis sui, ad utilitatem quoque nostram, totiusque Ecclesiae suae sanctae.
Why remember almost nothing else of the responses? Why remember the Latin but not the English translation?
Why remember one thing and not another?
Nobody could remember everything, but remembering some things was important, even if it didn’t seem so at the time.
Brother Andre weaned them from reading from the cardboard cheat sheets placed on the altar steps. A gentle Frenchman, he never cuffed them the way some of the other brothers did, slapping a boy for the slightest infraction. As well as doing his best to give the boys some French—au revoir, bon jour, merci—he conveyed his love of Latin.
When Brother Andre called the attention of the other altar servers to Dunne’s mastery of the prayers—“Listen to Fintan, mes garçons, he has it down parfaitement”—how proud he felt.
“Totiusque.” A word you could taste. Like licorice. Who cared what it meant? You could make it mean anything you want: “Good luck,” for example.
Dunne went to Mass occasionally, to confession when he felt the need, ditto for praying. Hail Marys and Our Fathers mostly. Prayers he didn’t remember learning, with words he didn’t think about, just repeated. The one prayer that he carefully articulated, that made him feel as though he was actually praying, was the one whose words he didn’t understand: Suscipiat.
It was a smooth landing. As they exited the plane, sun-warmed, flower-scented Italian air jolted Dunne with an instantaneous, involuntary reverie of Cuba, eve of war, honeymoon with Roberta in the Hotel Barcelona, melancholy reminder of a distance greater than miles measured; a distance felt in the heart, the kind he’d experienced the week before, on his final leave in London before leaving for Bari, when he’d gone to see Cover Girl at a USO movie night. Gene Kelly and Rita Hayworth crooned the lyrics of “Long Ago (and Far Away).”
A lone soldier started to cry. Before long, muffled sobs filled the hall. Old-timers and newly arrived joined in. Technicolor beauty almost too much to bear, Rita could reduce any GI to tears. This case, the blame belonged to the contagion rampant among pining, lonely men (mostly) and boys (many), civilians at heart (almost all): Not just lust—susceptible to instant relief (self-administered or purchased)—but homesickness, the only permanent cure out of reach and unavailable.
When the lights came up, tears had dried. Men skulked out, avoiding each other’s eyes, like college boys leaving a Times Square peep show.
The others from the
plane piled on the truck waiting to take them to the base. There was no room left for Dunne and Van Hull. A jeep was ordered. They rode into the green-brown foothills until they reached two landing strips lined with B-17s and their Mustang escorts and a sprawling village of Quonset huts. Unpleasant, pervasive odor of gasoline, latrines, and disinfectant hung in the air.
They were quartered in small rooms in a hut on the far side of the airstrips. Van Hull excused himself and went off to take a nap. Dunne unlocked the door to his room. Atop the dented, chipped olive-green metal desk directly ahead was a manila envelope. Typed on the label was his name, and beneath—in all caps—CONFIDENTIAL: FOR YOUR EYES ONLY. Inside was the familiar spiral-bound briefing book. He flipped it open to the title page: OPERATION MAXWELL.
Van Hull’s snoring wafted through the paper-thin walls. After his sleep on the plane, Dunne didn’t feel tired. He stuck the briefing book in the top drawer. On his initial missions, he’d devoured the contents. Experience taught that the briefer would do his best to give a crash course in the complexities they’d encounter, making it easier to sift important stuff from fluff conjured up by an overzealous former academic eager to duplicate his Ph.D. dissertation.
He opened the desk drawer to look for stationery on which to write a letter to Roberta. There were several sheets as well as a well-thumbed book he mistook for the Bible until he picked it up: How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie.
The pages were heavily underlined. The section heads were Carnegie’s play on the Ten Commandments—Moses as salesman instead of prophet—“Six Ways to Make People Like You” or “Twelve Ways to Win People to Your Way of Thinking.” It must have been left behind by a previous occupant who wisely concluded, whatever its postwar applications, it wasn’t going to be of much use behind enemy lines.
He started a letter to Roberta. By now she understood that though it mentioned nothing explicit, a multipage letter meant he was about to leave on a mission. (It would be flown back to London and postmarked from there.) He decided to finish it later, tucked the unfinished pages in the top drawer. He lay down—pillow’s soft, clean, scent closer to feminine than anything else on the base. Rita Hayworth came back, chemistry with Gene Kelly, lyrics so resonant of that night at Ben Marden’s when he’d fallen in love. Just one look and then I knew, so true, that all I longed for long ago (how did songwriters get it so right?) was you! Just you! His snoring soon joined Van Hull’s.