The Lost Airman

by Seth Meyerowitz

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  This book is an original publication of the Berkley Publishing Group.

  Copyright © 2016 by Seth Meyerowitz.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY CALIBER and its logo are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  For more information, visit penguin.com.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-19396-3

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Meyerowitz, Seth, author.

  The lost airman : a true story of escape from Nazi-occupied France / by Seth Meyerowitz ; with Peter F. Stevens.—First edition.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-59240-929-7

  1. Meyerowitz, Arthur, 1918–1971. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Underground movements—France—Biography. 3. United States. Army Air Forces. Bombardment Squadron, 715th—Biography. 4. Airmen—United States—Biography. 5. Escapes—France—History—20th century. 6. Taillandier, Marcel, 1911–1944. 7. France—History—German occupation, 1940–1945—Biography. I. Stevens, Peter F., date. author. II. Title. III. Title: True story of escape from Nazi-occupied France.

  D802.F8M47 2016

  940.54'4973092—dc23

  [B]

  2015025114

  First edition: January 2016

  Jacket photographs: B-24 Liberator © Dmitri Kessel / Getty Images; Sky © Mark Owen / Arcangel Images.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the author nor the publisher is responsible for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Version_1

  For my grandfather Arthur . . .

  and the men and women of France who saved his life.

  CONTENTS

  ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  MAP

  FOREWORD

  PROLOGUE A Needle in a Haystack

  1. “Just a Milk Run”

  2. Purple Heart Corner

  3. Hit the Silk!

  4. “What’s in His Hand?”

  5. Marcel

  6. The Shed in the Woods

  7. War in the Shadows

  8. “Crazy-Mad”

  9. Aka Georges Lambert

  10. A Long Shot at Best

  11. Playing the Part

  12. A Narrow Escape

  13. Trouble in Beaumont-de-Lomagne

  14. Death in the Pink City

  15. The Gestapo at the Door

  16. Hiding in Plain Sight

  17. Not a Moment Too Soon

  18. The Maquis

  19. Meet Lieutenant Cleaver

  20. Unlikely Friends

  21. “It’s Time”

  22. Misery in the Mountains

  23. “One of the Worst Days in My Life”

  24. Parting Ways

  25. A Perilous Trek

  26. Stranded

  27. Good-bye, Georges Lambert

  28. Death to France

  29. “Welcome Back to the War”

  30. “It Is Therefore SECRET”

  31. Rockaway Beach

  EPILOGUE

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SOURCES

  NOTES

  FOREWORD

  ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

  January 2012

  So, here I am, sitting on a plane on my way to Europe. It is the middle of January 2012, and this will be my first time in Europe. I am headed on an adventure, a personal pilgrimage of sorts, some sixty-eight years in the making. I am hoping to pay tribute to Arthur Meyerowitz and a valiant band of French men and women who saved his life in 1944. I’m filled with excitement and unable to sleep. I have no idea what awaits me in France, what vestiges remain of Arthur and what or who I will find when I arrive. The thought that I might talk with people who actually knew the airman Arthur Meyerowitz conjures emotions I could not have imagined a month ago.

  Less than a month ago I didn’t know Arthur Meyerowitz, at least not in the way that you can really “know” someone. I knew he was born in the Bronx. I knew he had a brother, Seymour, and his parents were David and Rose. I knew that he went to war to fight for his country at twenty-five (a few years younger than I am now) and when he took HIS flight to France aboard a B-24 bomber named Harmful Lil Armful he too didn’t know what to expect or what awaited him. What he did know was, more likely than not, he wouldn’t be coming home. Staff Sergeant Arthur Meyerowitz was a top-turret gunner in the U.S. Army’s 8th Air Force and he was going to war.

  I knew that Arthur hadn’t made more than two flights before he was shot down by the Luftwaffe and that his family desperately hoped for news from the War Department. It was months before any news would come. He was considered MIA, an American Jew in Nazi-occupied France, and he was in trouble. No one knew if he was alive or dead until he stumbled into Gibraltar more than six months later. And, lastly, I knew that people in France had saved his life. I could remember that the French national anthem was played at my bar mitzvah and other big family events but never understood the magnitude or the true significance of what it had meant.

  This is what I knew for my whole life about my grandfather Arthur. Then, in December 2011, all of that would change.

  ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

  How it all started:

  It started with an invitation to Spain. I had met some people while vacationing in Mexico and they invited me to visit them in Madrid. I looked at the logistics and realized I could make it work, in under a month no less. I asked my father, Arthur’s son, where Arthur had been in France. I wanted to see if perhaps I could visit those places and look around. There was no information to pass on; my father simply didn’t have insight for me. Arthur died more than ten years before I was born, and a box of letters and a couple of vague stories were the only things that remained of Arthur’s wartime experiences.

  “A challenge,” I thought to myself. I was pretty computer savvy, having grown up fascinated by computers and the Internet. I learned to build websites at the age of twelve and had transitioned that into a career in the online marketing world. In some ways, I had been training most of my life to crack this case. I could not have imagined, however, just how remarkable a story awaited me.

  First I looked through a forgotten box of letters written in French to my grandfather from the French men and women who had saved him. Once I got online, it took me only about twenty-four hours to make my first major discovery: Arthur’s recently declassified government file and debrief from when he turned up in Gibraltar some six months after the Germans blasted Harmful Lil Armful out of the skies above France.

  Within thirty-six hours I found a book about the Resistance by a scholar name Bernard Boyer, whose pages included some of the French men and women who had written to Arthur after the war. By the end of the first week, I was on the phone with Patrick, the son of Gisèle Chauvin, a brave and amazi
ng Resistance operative who took Arthur in at one of the most perilous points of his journey and surely saved his life.

  So, here I am, flying to meet Patrick and his family. Going to meet Bernard, whose father was the head of a Resistance group who saved Arthur as well. I have appointments to meet museum directors and local historians who could help me unravel my grandfather’s harrowing odyssey in Occupied France all those years ago. I even persuaded my father to accompany me on this search, this once-in-a-lifetime journey. All of this has happened in about three weeks.

  January 3, 2015

  It is just over seventy-one years since Arthur’s journey into France and just about two years from my first trip there. I was lucky enough to make two more trips to France in November of 2013 and then in August of 2014 with some of my family. There were eight of us and it was truly incredible to be able to bring my family and the Chauvins together. We spent several wonderful days with Patrick and his family, and three generations of Meyerowitzes got to experience what it was like to be in France, in the towns and places our father, grandfather, and great-grandfather survived in. We went back to the Chauvins’ home in Lesparre, went to the maquis outside that town, visited Toulouse and the landmarks there and made some amazing memories that I’m sure Arthur could never have imagined.

  We are just days away from submitting our first draft of this manuscript and I can’t believe how far the story has come and how much more we have uncovered. With the help of countless experts, archive visits, solid research by our writer, Peter Stevens, and some lucky finds, we have been able to piece together this incredible story, one that is so much more in-depth than I ever could have imagined.

  I have taken the time to put the story I’ve discovered down on paper and hope I have done it justice. I hope it pays respect to the French families and individuals who risked and, in many cases, gave up their lives for Arthur. A single man in a massive war.

  So now I think I know Arthur. At least more than I had when this all started. He was an incredible man and fought through so much to make it back home to his family. He was brave and heroic but knew he could never repay those people who had saved him more than seventy years ago. This is my attempt to repay the favor, to expose this adventure and shed light on the French Resistance groups and the war that was being fought on the ground in France. Not the war fought by the Allied and Axis armies. Instead the war fought by the people of France who wanted their freedom and gave all they had to secure it but still found it in their hearts to make the ultimate sacrifice for a man they never knew who just dropped from the sky one day.

  Here is Arthur’s story, and the story of countless people whom he crossed paths with. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I’ve enjoyed putting it together.

  PROLOGUE

  ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

  A NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK

  On June 26, 1944, a young man lurched across the searing sand of Rockaway Beach, New York. As he picked his way through a maze of blankets, beach chairs, and umbrellas, throngs of beachgoers stared at him. He looked out of place in long pants hiked up to his ankles and a sweat-dampened, white button-down shirt embroidered with his name. Among the crowd in bathing suits and trunks, it was not his attire that caught people’s attention. It was the cardboard sign he held aloft. He was looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

  The young man had received a frantic telephone call an hour earlier at the beachfront candy store where he worked. An urgent voice had launched him out into the sweltering heat with a message he had hastily scrawled on the cardboard. He was hoping to find someone, a husband and wife whom he had never met, had never even seen.

  Scores of men and women were watching the candy clerk as they enjoyed the hot summer day, some casting brief glances, others staring intently. They instinctively understood the sign’s message. America had now been at war with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan for some two and a half years, and most people on the beach knew someone in uniform. Many had lost a loved one in action. As more and more beachgoers realized what the young man was doing, they stepped aside to let him pass. A handful of the more curious ones trailed him down the shoreline.

  Frequently wiping his brow, squinting from the sunlight, he wandered up and down the beach for more than an hour, his face flushed from the heat and visibly sunburned. As the minutes dragged on, he could not help but think that he had been dispatched on a well-intentioned but futile errand. He wondered what the chances were that his message would find the two total strangers in the dense crowds. Still, he kept walking, with the sign over his head, through the forest of umbrellas.

  He stopped to take a few long breaths, his arms aching from holding up the sign. Several yards behind him, a middle-aged couple and a pretty, black-haired young woman stumbled through the thick white sand toward him. Tears streamed down their sun-darkened faces. They had spotted the words hastily scrawled on the cardboard sign.

  CHAPTER 1

  ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

  “JUST A MILK RUN”

  December 31, Early Morning of New Year’s Eve, 1943

  Seething Airfield, Norfolk, England

  An icy gust slapped against Staff Sergeant Arthur Meyerowitz as he stepped outside from the 448th Bomb Group’s aluminum-walled mess hall just after 5 a.m. Wincing, he turned up the fleece collar of his leather bomber jacket and tugged his cap and earmuffs tightly. He peered for a few moments at the neat rows of cylindrical barracks arrayed on frost-cloaked farmland along the southern flank of Seething Airfield, home to his unit, the 715th Squadron, in Norfolk, England. He lingered on the mess hall’s stoop as other airmen and pilots brushed past him.

  A hell of a way to spend the last day of the year, he thought, but he had to do the premission checks for Harmful Lil Armful, a B-24 Liberator in the 448th Bomb Group. He had been up since 2:30 a.m., when he had been rousted from sleep by an officer’s flashlight and ordered to go out with Harmful Lil Armful, whose flight engineer and top-turret gunner, Sergeant George Glevanick, had just been rushed to the base hospital. Now, after the premission briefing and breakfast, Arthur steeled himself for his second mission.

  His maiden mission had come on December 24 aboard a B-24 named Consolidated Mess. The target was a Nazi V-1 missile site at Labroye, a relatively short hop across the English Channel in the Pas-de-Calais, in northern France. With luck, Arthur might be back at Seething in time for the New Year’s Eve parties that he had planned to attend on base and in Norwich, some ten miles away on the east coast.

  Lucky bastard, he mused about Glevanick, shivering. At least Glevanick was guaranteed to make it into 1944. Then Arthur lowered his shoulder against the raw wind and stepped off the stoop onto a muddy path that wound toward three concrete airstrips.

  A few yards from the mess hall, Arthur spotted a group of young Englishwomen, slowed down, and removed his cap and earmuffs as he passed them. Despite the early hour, they were waiting to pick up their 8th Air Force boyfriends who had two-day passes for New Year’s Eve and Day. Usually, the girlfriends had to stand outside the main gate, but they had been allowed on the base for the holidays after a security check.

  As they waited for their airmen to emerge from the building, the women were chatting amid a swirl of cigarette smoke. Running his hand through his dense, dark hair, Arthur shot them a grin. Several smiled back at the handsome twenty-five-year-old airman.

  A pretty blonde spotted Arthur’s shoulder patch, which was emblazoned with the image of a grinning, muscular rabbit clad in a superhero’s costume and cape who was perched atop a light blue bomb.

  “The 715th, is it? Where are the Rabbits off to, then, in such a rush so close to New Year’s?” she called out.

  “We’ve got a date with some Germans,” he replied.

  “Good luck—and give the bastards our regards,” another woman chimed in as Arthur picked up his pace and waved. 1

  Attention f
rom women was something Arthur was used to. The five-foot ten-inch, 160-pound staff sergeant possessed the street smarts and swagger of his Bronx neighborhood, and he exuded a confidence to which women were drawn. Before enlisting in the Army, Arthur had loved dressing stylishly, heading to the Garment District and stretching part of his paychecks into good deals on fashionable clothes. His family was accustomed to seeing beautiful young women on his well-tailored sleeves.

  At Norfolk, Arthur enjoyed chatting with attractive Englishwomen, but it never went beyond a few pints and dances in town or on base. Tucked in the breast pocket of his flight suit, his wallet held a snapshot of Esther Loew, his dark-haired, dark-eyed girlfriend back in the Bronx. An aunt had introduced him to the pretty twenty-one-year-old Esther before he had shipped out to England, and he was quickly smitten, so much so that he had considered marriage. He had decided, however, that with the casualty rate of bomber crews in the European and Pacific theaters of operation reaching the highest of any service branch—even more than the submarine fleet—he could not justify making her another in the sadly burgeoning ranks of young war widows. Still, she intended to wait for him, and he could not talk her out of it.

  Arthur carried another memento of home besides Esther’s photo. Around his neck was a thin gold chain with a chai, the Hebrew symbol for “life.” His mother had given it to him before he had left for England.

  As the rows of B-24s lining the airstrip materialized through the mist and freezing rain, Arthur had no time to think of Esther and of his parents and brother back in New York. Harmful Lil Armful had to be inspected, and his crewmates depended on Arthur, the flight engineer, to make sure that the plane was fit to fly. Everyone knew that the Allied invasion of Fortress Europe loomed. The waves of American and British bombers pounding German targets in France around the clock were “preparing the ground” for Operation Overlord, the largest amphibious assault in history. What no one except the top brass knew yet was where and when the Allies would strike across the British Channel.