The Lost Airman

by Seth Meyerowitz

  Arthur and Taillandier walked just a few blocks to a red-brick apartment house on a dead-end side street and climbed several flights of stairs to the top floor. Taillandier knocked twice on a scarred wooden door, and it opened a crack to reveal an elderly woman wearing glasses and cradling a gray cat. Nodding at Marcel, she let them in and closed the door quickly.

  Wordlessly, she took them to another door, opened it, and led them into a cramped passageway and up a creaking stairway to yet another door. She rapped once on it and called out Cleaver’s name softly. A bolt on the other side of the door slid open with a rasp, and Marcel, Dissard, and Arthur entered. In the middle of the small annex, not unlike the ones where Arthur had stayed, a wiry man with pale blue eyes and cropped, dyed dark hair faced them. He was wearing civilian clothes, and his face still bore bruises and cuts.

  Arthur walked up to him and shook his hand. Cleaver insisted that Arthur call him “Frank.” Marcel and Madame Dissard left the two men alone.

  When Taillandier came back upstairs to get Arthur, he opened the door to find the two men engrossed in conversation. “Time to leave,” Taillandier said. 8

  Disappointment flashed across Arthur’s face. The kind of rapport he had quickly developed with Cleaver was exactly what the leader of Morhange wanted. Both men would have to rely on each other in their escape attempt, and it would be easier if they liked each other.

  Throughout late April and into May 1944, Arthur visited Cleaver several times a week. According to Cleaver, “Mrs. Dissard, Marcel, and Sergeant Meyerowitz were the only people with whom I conversed for nearly a month.

  “Most of my information about the world outside, such as it was, came from Meyerowitz. He was out and about frequently as ‘Lambert,’ and sometimes went with Marcel to the Frascati . . . I marveled at how effectively Meyerowitz played his role as a deaf mute. Somehow he fooled the Germans, the police, and even the local crowd time after time. Despite the danger he confronted every time he went out, I envied him a tad. Hidden away as I was, each moment of each day varied between tedium and sudden bursts of fear every time I heard a vehicle pull up near the house.”

  Arthur could relate to all of Cleaver’s feelings of isolation punctuated by sheer anxiety. Cleaver found an escape of sort in the large number of books in Dissard’s apartment, remarking that he “read more than at any time since my schoolboy years.” Marcel hinted at just how fortunate they all were to have Madame Dissard still operating as the chief organizer for the entire Resistance escape line in southwestern France. Without her efforts, the southern escape routes might not have been open. Luckily for both Cleaver and Arthur, they had been brought to Toulouse to be helped by the O’Leary Line in the south of France. The English and American airmen were even luckier that Marcel had taken a personal interest in getting them out of France.

  As Arthur and Cleaver’s trust and friendship grew, they talked about their lives, about Esther and Dorothy, and other deeply personal matters. Arthur reminded Cleaver “in a number of ways” of Cleaver’s own flight engineer, Sergeant Raymond Hindle. To Cleaver, “aside from a bomber’s pilot . . . the most important man aboard is the Flight Engineer. He knows both the inner and outer workings of the craft as well if not better than the pilot, and the training for the job requires both high intelligence and the knack of thinking quickly under the most unimaginable duress.”

  Arthur became comfortable enough with Cleaver to discuss the biggest disappointment in the American’s military life: “how he had been accepted as a pilot candidate but had been forced out by an injury.”

  Cleaver was not surprised at all that Arthur had wanted to be a pilot: “Aside from his genuine intelligence—as with so many Americans, the lack of university does not reflect a second-rate intellect—his ability to pass himself off as ‘Lambert’ shows his knack for thinking quickly on his feet and never letting down his guard.” Courage and a quick mind were the cornerstone traits of the best pilots.

  Cleaver remembered that he and Arthur talked without letup for hours and credited those conversations with helping him keep his sanity. Jokingly, the pilot wrote that there were days when the only conversation he had was with Miff, the cat.

  To Cleaver, Arthur detailed how he had come to Toulouse and how so many brave French men and women had helped him every step of the way. “To his utmost credit,” Cleaver wrote, “he never revealed one name of any man or woman who had aided him. We both knew the necessity for such secrecy.”

  Both the American and the Englishman recounted the events of the nights their planes had been shot down. When Arthur stopped for a moment, he seemed lost in his own private reverie. He then looked at Cleaver “and said he only wished that the pilot and co-pilot of his B-24 had behaved as selflessly as I had.”

  Cleaver was genuinely flattered, though surprised by Arthur’s vivid description of Lieutenant Philip Chase’s conduct as Harmful Lil Armful’s demise unfolded. Cleaver found Chase’s actions unfathomable—it had never occurred to him not to stay in the cockpit as long as possible. He had been trained in the principle that “as with a Naval Captain, the pilot should be the last man off.”

  “I also told him that his pilots merited court-martial for their abysmal performance and cowardice,” Cleaver wrote. “The crew merited far better.” He “had no doubt that if Meyerowitz had been able to go through pilot training without injury, he would have behaved far differently than his pilot in January.”

  Both Arthur and Cleaver were united in two purposes: to see their girlfriends and families again and to get another chance to fight the Nazis. For Arthur, the rumors of the wholesale murder of Jews filled him with a rage he could not fully articulate. He had lost count of how many times he had seen Gestapo agents hauling off men, women, and children simply because they were Juden (Jews). Although most citizens of Toulouse despised the Nazis and Vichy police and would do nothing to help them, a deeply anti-Semitic streak throughout Vichy France led collaborating officials to help the Nazis locate and deport French Jews to the concentration camps.

  Cleaver’s anger toward the Nazis was also personal. London lay in ruins after the Blitz of 1940–1941, tens of thousands of his fellow British men, women, and children dead or maimed. Even now, in the spring of 1944, German “buzz bombs,” V-1 rockets, and a newer, even more lethal missile, the V-2, indiscriminately rained down and slaughtered people all over England.

  At the beginning of May 1944, Taillandier repeatedly assured Arthur and Cleaver that the invasion was nearly at hand. The step-up in bombing raids all around the region attested to that welcome news for all three men. However, at the same time, the Germans grew ever more relentless in their search for Resistance saboteurs and escaping Allied airmen. Cleaver could hear and Arthur could see the increase in Nazi armored cars and troop carriers patrolling the city streets. Every day, Arthur was finding himself stopped and ordered to show his papers.

  Life in Toulouse grew tenser and more dangerous throughout May, and the Gestapo was planning a brutal crackdown in June against anyone suspected of cooperation with the Resistance. At the top of the Nazis’ hit list was the mysterious “Ricardo,” and they were already rounding up and torturing “suspicious” men and women in an attempt to ferret out the identities of the shadowy Resistance leader and his operatives.

  With things in and around Toulouse guaranteed to worsen once the Allies stormed ashore somewhere in France, Taillandier was determined to get Arthur and Cleaver moving before the invasion.

  In mid-May, Taillandier brought both sobering and heartening news to Cleaver about his crew. Flight sergeant and rear gunner Donald Hoddinott had perished when his parachute failed to open in time. Cleaver hoped that Hoddinott’s family might find some measure of comfort in the knowledge that “he died in the brave performance of his duty.” 9

  Cleaver learned that Flight Sergeant and Wireless Operator John Franklin and Flight Engineer and Sergeant Raymond Hindle had parachuted safely
near Châteauneuf-sur-Charente, buried their parachutes, and been taken in by the local Resistance. Taillandier told Cleaver that both of his men had been guided over the Pyrénées to Spain, but the Frenchman did not reveal the names to Cleaver of anyone who had helped the pair.

  In the final week of May, Taillandier vanished. Thoulouse told Arthur that he was not to go out for a few days, but to stay put. After several days went by without Cleaver receiving a visit from Taillandier, and Madame Dissard brushed away the pilot’s questions, he began to fear that something had happened to the Frenchman. Arthur worried about the same thing, agonizing that the worst had overtaken his friend and that he and Cleaver might be left stranded.

  As it turned out, a British submarine had taken Taillandier and Jeno to Algiers for a meeting with Colonel Paillole to discuss pre-D-Day sabotage operations and ambushes around Toulouse. With the invasion date slated for early June, Taillandier decided on the return trip to France that he could no longer wait to move Arthur and Cleaver.

  On May 28, 1944, an unnamed female courier delivered a message from Taillandier to both the American and the Englishman: be ready to move out at any time.

  For Arthur, relief that Marcel was alive mixed with equal measures of anticipation and nervousness. After nearly five months in Occupied France, it was time. He was finally getting the chance to escape.

  CHAPTER 21

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  “IT’S TIME”

  Taillandier simply could not wait any longer to move Arthur and Cleaver. With the long-awaited Allied invasion of France—Operation Overlord—at hand, the Resistance was awaiting their final orders to arrive from London. Secrecy surrounding the invasion site and date was so tight that Paillole could not reveal either the location or the date to his top operatives throughout France until literally a few hours before the Allied armada left ports along the eastern coast of Great Britain.

  For Arthur and Cleaver, the danger in Toulouse had never been greater. Paillole had warned Taillandier that the Germans, alerted by the staggering increase in Allied bombing runs along the entire French coastline, knew the invasion was perhaps just hours away. They just didn’t know where. The Gestapo, Abwehr counterintelligence agents, and the police were cracking down harder than ever on the Resistance and rounding up hundreds of people in hopes that someone, anyone, might reveal information about the invasion under torture. That was precisely the reason that even Taillandier and Resistance leaders in France itself had not been told where and when the strike would come.

  In and around Toulouse, Morhange was launching increased attacks on German convoys, trains, munitions depots, and other military installations. Their intention was to pin down as many troops as possible and prevent them from rushing to whichever coastal spots the Allies invaded. The Gestapo and Vichy police were launching building-to-building searches for Resistance safe houses and hidden Allied airmen.

  The escape routes across the Pyrénées to Spain were hazardous and an arduous trek under the best of circumstances, but now the Germans were scouring every road and every mountain pass for any hint of Resistance activity.

  After a restless night, Arthur arose early in the morning of May 29, 1944, shaved, bathed, and got dressed. He went downstairs and ate a small breakfast of grapes and bread with Thoulouse, who told him that he was not to leave the house and that someone would come for him early in the evening. Arthur went upstairs and packed his few belongings and secondhand clothes in the battered suitcase.

  He was ready to leave Toulouse. His constant brushes with the Gestapo and police were beginning to chafe at his psyche, as did the memory of his merciless beating by the Gestapo. With luck, he might be able to make it home by his birthday, in August.

  Just after twilight, Thoulouse returned from his paint store, and a knock on the door a few minutes later brought Arthur out of a parlor chair and to his feet. Thoulouse opened the door and Taillandier and Jeno stepped inside quickly.

  They walked up to him. Although Marcel was “someone who was afraid of nothing,” there was no mistaking the grim intensity fixed on his features. Jeno stepped behind a parlor window, opened a shutter an inch or two, and scanned the street.

  “It’s time . . .” Taillandier said.

  Arthur stared at them for several moments, his emotions churning as he weighed those longed-for words. Nodding, he replied: “I’m ready.”

  He shook Thoulouse’s hand, thanked him for all he had done, and followed Taillandier and Jeno outside to a now-familiar black Citroën. Both Frenchmen looked in every direction as Arthur climbed into the backseat. Robert was not at the wheel this time. Instead, the glowering face of Andrés Fontes peered straight ahead. He was wearing the long black leather overcoat and fedora favored by plainclothes Gestapo and police.

  A dark van that Arthur recognized as the same official type used by the Nazis and the police to transport prisoners was parked behind the Citroën. Taillandier and Jeno got into it and trailed the car as Fontes pulled away from the curb. Within seconds, Arthur realized they were heading toward the street where Cleaver was hiding.

  Cleaver was waiting, too. He had received the same message as Arthur: be ready to move out in the early evening. He opened the annex door in response to a soft but insistent knock from Madame Dissard and followed her downstairs to the hall of the apartment building. Like Arthur, he was clad in civilian clothes and a beret. Madame Dissard pointed at the Citroën outside.

  Taillandier got out of the van and into the Citroën with Fontes, Arthur, and Cleaver. Fontes slipped the sedan into gear and pulled away from the curb, followed by the van, which Jeno was driving. No one said a word.

  Before departing Toulouse, the car and the van made two more quick stops. At a safe house they picked up a haggard-looking Frenchman who had been jailed for aiding the Resistance, escaped, and been taken in by Morhange. At another safe house on the eastern edge of the city, Andres and Jeno stopped again, this time to pick up two Belgian men wanted by the Nazis. The pair were pale and trembling as they were loaded into the van with the Frenchman.

  Arthur breathed a bit easier as the two vehicles finally left Toulouse behind and swung onto a dirt road winding into the countryside. Then, after twenty minutes, he was surprised when they left the rural road to merge onto a highway. Taillandier turned to the American and the Englishman and told them that they were driving 209 kilometers (130 miles) directly southwest to Perpignan, a city near the Spanish border. If all went well, the trip should take around two or three hours.

  Everywhere they looked, German tanks and other armored vehicles were rumbling west along both sides of the highway. The route was safe because Allied bombers were not targeting the plains, foothills, and peaks of the central and eastern Pyrénées because they were not close enough to the anticipated invasion landing sites on the Atlantic coast. That meant that the Germans were trying to move troops closer to the coast by night and also that they were searching for any hint of Resistance activity between Perpignan and the border. The bombers would wait until the armored columns passed west of Toulouse.

  If the cars were stopped, Taillandier and Fontes had forged police papers that would inform the Germans that the car was transporting prisoners to Perpignan for questioning by the Gestapo. In the van behind them, Jeno, with his German identification documents, would back them up by saying that he was personally transporting additional prisoners with Taillandier and Fontes.

  En route to Perpignan, Arthur could make out little of the passing landscape in the darkness, but had a sense of the car climbing upward. The two vehicles slowed down and pulled to the side of the highway three times to stop and pick up four more men, who hopped into the van. Taillandier said that they were “four guides for our trek across the mountains.” 1

  At several German checkpoints, soldiers waved the vehicles to a stop. Turning their flashlights on the occupants, the Germans judged that the haggard passeng
ers were, in fact, prisoners being transported. The forged police papers produced by Fontes and Jeno convinced the sentries to let the car and van continue on their way. Finally, lights twinkled ahead of the car.

  Arthur was correct that their route had started with a climb and had now leveled off. Much of the drive from Toulouse to Perpignan wound through the foothills and ridges of the approaches to the hulking Pyrénées. Perpignan was a city of some three hundred thousand people on the Roussillon plain, eight miles from the Mediterranean Sea and eighteen miles from the Spanish border.

  Even in the darkness, Arthur could make out the looming mass of foothills and mountains between the city and the border.

  They drove deep into the city and stopped at its southernmost fringe at one of the modest stucco homes that appeared to be the type virtually everyone in the city lived in. As soon as the two vehicles entered a garage and parked, Taillandier led Arthur and Cleaver into a bulkhead at the rear of the house and into a dank, musty basement cluttered with stacked wood, old furniture, and a heap of old blankets in one corner. Just before descending through the bulkhead, Arthur had taken another quick glimpse at the towering mass of the Pyrénées, wondering again how they were supposed to get over them. He told himself that Taillandier knew what he was doing and that if other escapees had made the trek, he could manage it as well, no matter how grueling.

  When the Frenchman and the two Belgians piled into the cellar, followed by the four guides, Arthur and Cleaver were both dismayed at the two Belgians’ behavior; they seemed to be arguing with each other and with one of the guides. Taillandier glared at them, and they shut up, but continued to shoot angry glances at the guide.

  Taillandier ordered everyone to get as comfortable as they could and be ready to move out before dawn. They would have to risk daytime travel to the foothills as the Germans were stopping every vehicle that tried to head out at night for the mountain approaches. In the past, they would have risked the nighttime passage, but the Germans’ heightened alertness in late May and early June had resulted in several failed escapes by Resistance members and Allied airmen.