The Lost Airman

by Seth Meyerowitz

  Dear Mrs. Meyerowitz:

  It has been my fervent hope that favorable information would be forthcoming and that you might be relieved from the great anxiety which you have borne during these months. It is therefore with deep regret that I must state that no further report in his [Arthur’s] case has been forwarded to the War Department. 2

  The family also enlisted the help of friends and neighbors to inquire about Arthur’s status. Max B. Goldman wrote to a War Department contact in early 1944:

  I would consider it a great favor if you could obtain any further information possible in connection with this case [Arthur’s status] and either call me by phone or wire me. 3

  David Meyerowitz went to work each day, trying to hold his own fears in check. For Seymour Meyerowitz, the wait was gut-wrenching. He prayed every day for his big brother’s safe return, as Rose insisted he do. Still, Seymour saw the papers and the movie newsreels, the news of heavy losses in bombing raids over Hitler’s Fortress Europe. He tried to emulate his mother’s faith that Arthur would come home. Alone at night with only his own thoughts, he was gnawed by doubt.

  For Esther Loew, the strain was growing worse. David, Rose, and Esther’s family grew increasingly worried about her as the weeks dragged on and still no word came of Arthur’s whereabouts. Esther knew other young women who had already received the news that boyfriends, fiancés, and husbands were never coming back.

  Rose constantly consoled Esther, urging her to hold on for Arthur’s sake. Although Rose had nothing but her faith to sustain that belief, it kept her going. She was convinced that her son was just the one who would beat the odds and make it home to them again.

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  At the beginning of April 1944, Taillandier decided that it was time to bring Arthur back to Toulouse. Jeno had arranged for a transfer of the two Gestapo agents who had interrogated the airman, and the agent who had stalked him had simply vanished without a trace.

  Arthur was elated when Taillandier came for him. He was ready physically and mentally to resume life as Georges Lambert and glad to hear that he was even returning to 96, boulevard Deltour. Although a few twinges of emotion tugged at him when his maquis comrades hugged him and bade him a heartfelt bonne chance, he understood that they actually envied him because he was leaving.

  In another maquis, a few miles outside of Lesparre, one of Arthur’s early benefactors had been hiding from the Gestapo. Dr. Pierre Chauvin had endured about two weeks of abuse at the Gestapo’s hands after he and Gisèle had been seized. He did not reveal anything about Brutus or Arthur and was released; Gisèle, however, remained imprisoned. They had been unable to break her at the Villa Calypso or the Fort du Ha, but now she had been transferred to Fresnes Prison. There, a new and even harsher regimen of starvation, sleep deprivation, and beatings awaited her as the Nazis attempted to pry information from her about her comrades. If she survived that, a concentration camp awaited her next.

  At Fresnes, some of the toughest Resistance captives had finally given in to the abuse and blurted out names in hopes that the Nazis would end the agony with a bullet to the head. As Gisèle and other female Resistance fighters had heard, the Gestapo at Fresnes had cut off the heads of several women who refused to betray their comrades, and had done this slowly.

  Pierre returned home to find his mother-in-law, Mercédes; his maid, Simone; and his three children still at the house. Perhaps suspecting that the Gestapo had released him solely to shadow him in hopes he would lead them to other Resistance operatives, he managed to sneak away undetected to a maquis about an hour from Lesparre in order to protect his family.

  He spent several weeks at the maquis, providing medical treatment to other escapees. After his arrival, two of Simone’s brothers came to the hideout after the Gestapo cracked down hard in and around Lesparre. They had been kicking down doors in search of Brutus operatives and dragging them off to the Villa Calypso. As a message to the locals, the Germans seized several people who allegedly sympathized with the Resistance and warned the townspeople that anyone who did not provide information about the shattered unit was under suspicion.

  With her daughter already arrested and perhaps dead and with Pierre in hiding, Mercédes was worried that the Gestapo would return to the Chauvin home and haul her away, too. She took the three children to a Lesparre neighbor. However, a few days later, she learned that the neighbor, likely concerned that she was also under suspicion, had taken the children a mile and a quarter away to a house in the town of Liard. It was near the maquis. Nervously, Mercédes rushed there as fast as she could to pick up the children, pushing a small cart for the infant, Patrick.

  On the road to Liard, several black sedans roared past her, followed by troop carriers filled with steel-helmeted German soldiers in their field-gray uniforms. Half-tracks—armored cars—with swivel turrets and heavy-caliber machine guns brought up the caravan’s rear. Mercédes realized that they were headed for the maquis, but she could do nothing about it. It was too late. She had no idea whether Pierre was still there or not. She kept pushing the cart the last half mile to the house and waited for the first echoes of gunfire and explosions.

  Within ten minutes the sudden shrieks of birds pouring from trees to the rear alerted her. The din crashed down the road and all around her.

  Someone had likely managed to alert the men in the maquis just before the Germans started to encircle the shelter. As covering fire from small “firing holes” punched into the lair’s stone walls pelted the Germans, men spilled outside and scattered in all directions. Machine-gun blasts downed several men as bazooka rounds pummeled the maquis. Flames began to flare and then engulf the shelter. Defenders staggered out of the building, still firing, and were quickly cut down by the Germans. Gestapo officers strode up to the fallen fighters, kicked them, and put a single Luger round into each man’s head just to be sure. One of Simone’s brothers lay dead near the maquis. The other was still running.

  Dozens of soldiers pursued Frenchmen deeper into the woods or across farmland. Only a handful eluded the relentless Germans. Pierre Chauvin was one of them.

  Just as she reached the house, she saw Jean-Claude and Monique peering out a window and heard Patrick wailing inside. Mercédes turned as heavy footsteps thudded close by. A young man, panting, his eyes wide and bulging, stumbled past her and fell against the door of a barn just across the street. Three plainclothes Gestapo men in long, black leather jackets were closing fast on the Frenchman and nearly knocked down Mercédes in their pursuit. Each of the Germans held a gleaming Luger.

  One of the Nazis paused, aimed carefully, and squeezed off one round. It slammed into the young man’s back and knocked him down onto the road. He lay there, thrashing, trying to get up, his legs useless. Slowly, the trio walked up to him and pumped several bullets into his head.

  Mercédes ran into the house. Clutching the squalling Patrick, she told the older children to cover their eyes and to get into the cart. She handed Patrick to Monique and pushed the cart past the dead freedom fighter and the blood pooling around him. She looked straight ahead, refusing for the sake of the children to let the Gestapo see any trace of the fury and contempt simmering inside her.

  As Robert guided the Citroën from the maquis, Marcel handed Arthur something—his identification card and papers. The American was headed back to Toulouse, but with no idea of how long he would have to remain there. He understood that when Taillandier believed the moment was right, he would orchestrate Arthur’s escape immediately. Once again, Arthur would have to remain patient but be ready to move in an instant. It could not come soon enough for him. The arrest at the Frascati and the torture at the hands of the Gestapo had both terrified and enraged him. He wanted the chance to pay back a Gestapo agent or two before or even during the escape attempt. His hatred of the Nazis and their treatment of his French friends nearly matched his desire to see home again.

  CHAPTER 19r />
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  MEET LIEUTENANT CLEAVER

  In early April 1944, Arthur resumed his life as Georges Lambert in Toulouse. He left the house at 96, boulevard Deltour each day except Sunday to help Monsieur Thoulouse at the paint store. He constantly looked around on the streets for any sign of the Gestapo agent who had trailed him in March; after a week or so, the airman realized that Taillandier and his men had taken care of the problem. Thoulouse had told neighbors that Georges had returned after a visit to family in Soulac-sur-Mer. Judging by the friendly nods and waves from them, Arthur was comfortable with the belief that locals took his host at his word.

  Although heartened by his sense that the Gestapo operative was not coming back, Arthur never let his guard down. Morhange operatives came and went from Thoulouse’s home. Just as before, Arthur knew them only by their first names. During his weeks at the maquis, a major change had occurred for the people of Toulouse and the Nazi occupiers. The Allies had unleashed the controversial Transportation Plan full bore, with B-24s, B-17s, and British Halifax, Lancaster, and Stirling bombers pummeling any French rail centers that might help the Germans send reinforcements to the Atlantic coast after D-Day. Although the raids never targeted the center of Toulouse, they pounded rail lines, factories, German supply depots, bridges, and other military targets just outside the city. At night, the walls of Arthur’s bedroom quaked from the not-so-distant bomb blasts, tiny bits of plaster falling around him.

  In the last days of March 1944, animated meetings at Thoulouse’s house among Taillandier, Jeno, and other Morhange agents indicated that something big was up. It seemed especially true when Taillandier took Arthur to lunch at the Frascati on April 2, the first Sunday of the month. Arthur had not been back to the bistro since his return to Toulouse. If the Frenchman believed it was safe enough to take Georges Lambert to the café again, Arthur trusted his judgment.

  With the weather unseasonably warm, the bistro was packed. Even though the Frascati teemed with Nazis, this was the way that Taillandier and Morhange operated. Still, Arthur could not help but scan the café for any sign of the Gestapo agent who had seized him a few weeks earlier. Taillandier smiled and shook his head at the notion that he would have left such an important detail to chance.

  Taillandier was certain that on this mild Sunday afternoon, the police and Germans were more concerned with controlling revelers and enjoying the unofficial celebration of spring themselves. He had invited Jeno and several other Morhange leaders to meet him in the Frascati to plot a daring raid against the local Gestapo. Arthur, wearing his well-rehearsed blank expression, was able to piece together just enough French to realize that Taillandier was detailing a coming ambush against the Gestapo; if he pulled it off, the action could yield more intelligence about the Gestapo, the police, and their collaborators than ever before.

  After lunch, Taillandier walked back with Arthur to 96, boulevard Deltour and stepped inside to speak with Thoulouse. Arthur turned to Taillandier and asked, “Can I go with you?” 1

  Marcel smiled faintly, respect glinting in his hard brown eyes, and shook his head. It was simply too risky.

  Arthur did not see Marcel for nearly a week after the meeting. The Frenchman finally reappeared at Thoulouse’s house the following Sunday. The Morhange strike, against a heavily guarded Gestapo outpost on the fringe of the city, had yielded two large briefcases crammed with top-secret documents. The contents outlined upcoming Gestapo and police operations as well as the names of informers.

  Over several glasses of wine with Arthur and Thoulouse, Taillandier, speaking first in French and then in English, for Arthur’s sake, informed them that on the raid, Morhange had rescued a “top-priority” prisoner from the Nazis. He was a Royal Air Force bomber squadron leader named Lieutenant Richard Frank Wharton (R.F.W.) Cleaver. Cleaver and his squadron, whose specialty was not unloading bombs but delivering munitions and supplies to drop zones for the French Resistance, were crucial components of the preparations for D-Day, in June 1944. He was part of the 644th Tactical Bomber Group and the Germans knew how badly the British wanted him back and had intended to turn his capture into a propaganda coup through newsreels and radio conduits such as “Axis Sally” (the collective name American GIs gave to the German and Italian women who broadcasted propaganda for the Axis powers during the war).

  Taillandier told Arthur that it was vital that Cleaver be returned to his command and that Morhange was entrusting him to help with that mission. It was up to Arthur to show Cleaver the ropes and for the two men to protect each other, Taillandier explained.

  Inwardly, Arthur was elated that now he could actively help his French friends. The fact that Taillandier and his operatives trusted him to aid the escape of such a high-priority asset as Lieutenant Cleaver showed how highly they respected the American airman for his courage and endurance, as well as his ability to keep his head under stress. His instinctive decision to drop his photo identification and papers while being arrested by the Gestapo had proven his mettle to Morhange. Further, his ability to keep quiet and not give up any information was a telling sign of the grit of the American.

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  On the evening of Wednesday April 5, 1944, at 10:30 p.m., the British crew of a Halifax B Mk V Bomber, of the 644th Squadron, boarded their aircraft. At the throttle of the Halifax LL228 “A” for code name “Able,” was twenty-four-year-old Squadron Commander Lieutenant R.F.W. Cleaver. As they soared down the runway of the Royal Air Force base at Tarrant Rushton, Dorset, in central England, Cleaver guided the bomber aloft and took the lead position in a formation of forty-four Halifax and Stirling bombers bound for targets in southern France. Cleaver, just four days short of his twenty-fifth birthday, was one of the RAF’s best bomber pilots, already known for his coolness under fire and deft reflexes in the cockpit. In October 1943, he had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) “in recognition of gallantry and devotion to duty in the execution of air operations for No. 295 Squadron, Royal Air Force, during the invasion of Sicily.” According to the citation, “after successfully dropping a glider [full of commandos] at the target in Sicily, he returned to North Africa with a badly shot up plane with three damaged engines.” 2

  Cleaver’s olive-drab-colored bomber, with the usual distinctive red, white, and blue British bull’s-eye circles on both sides of the fuselage, could reach a top speed of 275 miles per hour and a top cruising altitude of 15,000 feet; but his plane and the others that night were not loaded with bombs. Instead, his Halifax was crammed with arms, ammunition, and explosives for the Resistance. The bombers’ “targets” that night were designated drop zones in southwestern France where Resistance fighters would be waiting.

  Cleaver and his fellow pilots that night had been specially chosen for one of the war’s most dangerous tasks—to fly no higher than three thousand feet over the English Channel and Occupied France in order to muddle German radar on the way to the drop zones. At such a low altitude, the bombers were more vulnerable to flak than usual. Smaller and lighter than the B-24, whose tail structure was similar, the Halifax could deliver nearly as many five-hundred-pound bombs as the B-24.

  Cleaver’s mission fell under the command of Great Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE). After the fall of France in 1940, the SOE was created to aid sabotage and subversion behind enemy lines in France; Cleaver’s job was to drop vital supplies and munitions there so that the Resistance could blow up trains, bridges, and factories. If the Gestapo got their hands on pilots delivering supplies to the Resistance, they were treated no better than captured Resistance fighters.

  As Cleaver led his squadron over the Channel, the crew settled in for their long flight to a drop zone in the department of Charente-Maritime, near the southwestern coast of France. They flew less than a thousand feet above the churning whitecaps. A Resistance unit called Bir Hacheim would be waiting at the drop zone
—if all went according to plan. Cleaver noticed that “there was a good moon that night.” 3 That meant that visibility for low-flying planes was good, but that German observers could spot the planes by eye, even if the radar did not pick up the formation.

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  “Frank” Cleaver was proud of the 644th, whose motto was “We Sow the Seeds of the Dragon,” a fitting term for the cargo in the Halifax’s bomb bay. Flying with Cleaver that night was the five-man crew he had come to trust and respect on fourteen previous drops to the Resistance: Pilot Officer Norman Wyatt; navigator Flight Sergeant John Franklin; wireless operator Flight Sergeant Donald J. Hoddinott; rear gunner Sergeant Alan Matthews; and bomb aimer and flight engineer Sergeant Raymond Hindle. The copilot, Wyatt, like Cleaver, was university educated and hailed from Britain’s upper middle class, which was still called the gentry.

  The rest of the crew came from the lower reaches of Britain’s class system, but in the Halifax, none of the social conventions held true. The men were united in purpose and tightly knit in the air and on the ground, and Cleaver insisted every crew member call him Frank.

  If not for World War II, Richard Frank Wharton Cleaver’s path would likely have ensconced him in a comfortable role in the family’s shipping business, memberships at upscale gentlemen’s clubs, and an equally comfortable marriage and home life in Kent. He was engaged to Dorothy Elliott, an attractive schoolteacher from an upscale family.

  Cleaver was born on April 9, 1920, in Portland, Maine, while his parents were visiting relatives in that state and Boston. There was never a question of dual citizenship. He was English, pure and simple. A top student and gifted athlete with wavy blond hair and blue eyes, Cleaver was schooled at the Sevenoaks School, one of England’s oldest and most prestigious private academies, where he was a star runner for the Kentish school’s track team. He also had a passion for fast cars and airplanes. Against his parents’ wishes, he took flying lessons while at university.