Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  Julia was promoted to Clerk within the Director’s office in the spring of 1943, and at the beginning of the summer she became Senior Clerk, reaching the salary of $1,800 a year, all of which was transferred to the First Trust and Savings Bank of Pasadena.

  When a new section concerning air-sea rescue opened in midsummer, Julia was transferred out of Donovan’s office. Several branches of government were involved, but the OSS paid for the office personnel, equipment, and space. The Information Exchange of the Emergency Rescue Equipment (ERE), started by Harold Coolidge and Henry Steel to aid fliers downed at sea, was located in Temporary A Building at the corner of Second and T streets. Julia dubbed it the “fish-squeezing unit” because one of their experiments was to see if survivors in life rafts could squeeze a fish and drink the water from the fish’s body. Julia and her colleague Alice Carson carpooled to the market and bought the fish for their test. Naive, perhaps, but certainly in keeping with the experiments of America’s first espionage organization. ERE’s most important work was developing exposure suits, and their pioneering work, according to one of Julia’s colleagues, became “the founding of the Coast Guard’s air-sea rescue service.”

  The OSS budget was “largely unvouchered,” claimed one historian, who documented that Donovan bought ships, houses, printing plants, and planes. “Every eccentric schemer with a harebrained plan for secret operations (from phosphorescent foxes to incendiary bats) would find a sympathetic ear in Donovan’s office.”

  Histories of the OSS are filled with stories of the early attempts at black espionage against the Germans and the Japanese. Because the OSS was filled with Ivy Leaguers and professors, and Donovan did not want to stifle action and creativity, there were some inventive plans to sabotage the enemy’s reputation in occupied lands, including the manufacture of a substance that smelled like dung, to embarrass the Japanese in China.

  Only Donovan’s closeness to Roosevelt kept him safe from his detraetors. The military believed that the OSS was a “fly-by-night” organization; West Pointers called it “Donovan’s dragoons;” the isolationist Charles Lindbergh said the organization was “full of politics, ballyhoo, and controversy;” J. Edgar Hoover was a bitter rival; and Herr Goebbels called it a “staff of Jewish scribblers.” By the end of the decade, it was clear to everyone that “Donovan’s Dreamers” were idealistic and “helter-skelter but brilliant,” a far cry from the view that today demonizes its successor, the Central Intelligence Agency.

  Long before Julia was promoted from Senior Clerk to Administrative Assistant, she was supervising an office of forty people (directly overseeing eight), securing office furnishings, hiring clerical help, and initiating procedures related to financing, office security, and supplies. When Julia wanted to talk to Lieutenant Commander Earl F. Hiscock (Coast Guard Reserve, which eventually took over the unit) about the many sinkings of merchant vessels carrying supplies to Europe (this bureau was gathering all the information on sinkings, survivors, and possible new equipment), she turned over the waste-basket to sit on and talk to him at eye level, according to her friend Alice Carson, who later married Hiscock.

  While Julia was working six days a week in a domestic branch of America’s Secret Intelligence, she lived in her cramped apartment in the Brighton Hotel with a two-burner hot plate on top of a refrigerator in her living room. She did what she later called “some minor cooking” and had “nice crowded parties.” Alice Carson, who graduated from Smith the year Julia enrolled, remembered eating a fried chicken dinner at Julia’s apartment. Julia remembered, “I got chicken fat all over the wallpaper,” in her awkward attempt at cooking.

  Another friend whom she met in the “fish-squeezing unit” was Jack Moore, art school graduate and Army private who worked for a civilian named Paul Child in the Presentation Division (photography, graphics, maps). Jack and Julia met in the Naval Yard because the ERE needed some graphics. His boss had just been shipped out to New Delhi to work for Supreme Commander Mountbatten, and Moore would soon follow. Moore, who would be the initial illustrator for her first cookbook, thought of Julia “as a woman of extraordinary personality. She was just not any kind of an American stereotype. By virtue of necessity—I mean, here is this six-foot-two-inch-tall American woman looking down on all the males she ever meets—she had to evolve a sense of herself that was different from the person who is a physically standard specimen.”

  Her promotion at the end of 1943 placed Julia closer to her dream of more active service, even if it meant returning to files again. She became Administrative Assistant in the Registry of the OSS, returning to Donovan’s office. There was a $600 raise for the new year and a feeling of being part of America’s first espionage organization. Donovan had decided he could not collect intelligence by having all his people in Washington, DC, and began establishing bases around the world. Julia wanted to serve overseas (her brother John was in German-occupied France, though they had no news of his whereabouts). When she heard the organization wanted volunteers for work in India, she applied. She was free, white, and thirty-one.

  Chapter 6

  INDIA INTRIGUE

  (1944 – 1945)

  “A cook should possess generous worldly experience.”

  NORMAN DOUGLAS, South Wind

  THE THREE WOMEN had their orders to leave Newport News, Virginia, by troop train on February 26 for Wilmington, California. Julia McWilliams, Eleanor (Ellie) Thiry, and Dr. Cora DuBois (a well-known anthropologist) had been sworn to secrecy, a vow that precluded keeping a diary. “If people ask you why you are here, tell ’em you are file clerks,” they were instructed. “We were a very bedraggled-looking bunch,” said Julia. The civilian women were a source of curiosity and amazement to the soldiers on the train, wrote Ellie Thiry, who (against orders and with several others) kept a diary of her experience. Ellie had dark, curly hair and was practical (she would always decorate the women’s living quarters).

  SLOW BOAT TO INDIA

  After a week by train, there were seven more days in California being “orientated” in a barracks, attending movies and lectures, being issued fatigues and gas masks and told to practice ship evacuation by rope over the side. Rewarded with a couple of days of free time, the women went to the McWilliams home in Pasadena, where they met Julia’s handsome father, now the object of several widows’ attentions. Until they headed for Wilmington, their port of embarkation, the women filled the house on South Pasadena Avenue with laughter.

  With bedroll, canteen, gas mask, and pith helmet on her back, Julia and nine other women boarded the SS Mariposa, a cruise ship serving as a troopship. They were greeted that March 8 by band music, wolf calls, and whistles, the only women on board with more than 3,000 men. This raucous reception stoked the flames of adventure in some, fear in others. In addition to Julia, Cora, and Ellie, there were Rosamund Frame, Virginia (known as Peachy) Durand, Mary Nelson Lee (of the Virginia Lee family), and two other women. “An utterly strange experience,” wrote Julia, who had started a short-lived diary (entitled “Oh So Private”) two days out to sea. Naturally, the captain set aside a portion of the deck “exclusively for the gals,” said Peachy. “We were called girls,” insists Julia (who was called Julie). The next morning Julia organized the women to spread the word they were traveling missionaries. The ploy never worked.

  Among the civilians on board was Gregory Bateson, an eminent British anthropologist (married to Margaret Mead) who spoke Malay. He was six feet five inches tall and looked “like a sardonic horse,” Paul Child later described. He “had a veritable genius for making the obvious obscure,” wrote one OSS colleague, but another called him a “dazzling conversationalist.” Julia liked him, and not just because he was her height: “He always looked like his pants were falling off because they hung low on his hips. He and I took Chinese lessons on the deck of the ship. He was very interesting because he was asking about relatives and relationships.” These conversations with Bateson, DuBois, and some of the other well-educated civilians (such as Rosi
e Frame, who was giving the Chinese lessons) made Julia feel she had been “vegetating” mentally, physically, and spiritually.

  Julia longed to talk to someone to help “crystallize” her ideas about this voyage. Hence the origin of a new diary. “What kind of mind do I have?” she asked herself after being in the presence of “anthropologists, world thinkers, and missionaries” on board. She questioned her religious beliefs, her lack of permanence, the war, even the designs that one woman seemed to have on her (probably Cora DuBois, a lesbian who was to head the Research and Analysis Division in Ceylon). Julia’s initial revulsion, based on inexperience and fear, was soon replaced by what would become a lifelong friendship. Years later Julia would say that “the OSS was my first encounter with the academic mind.”

  There was not a chair on board except at the dinner table, so the women sat on their life vests or on their bunks. Because Julia typed the ship’s newspaper, she got below deck and learned about the sailors’ attitude toward the war, which fell far short of her patriotic idealism. She wrote sketches of each woman for the newspaper: Ellie joined the ship’s band, which practiced each day; the petite and dark-haired Rosie Frame was breaking all the hearts on board—even Bateson thought her “a little minx”—but she was romancing a man named Thibaut de Saint Phalle.

  In cabin 237, the nine women slept on three triple-decker bunks, using one tub for cold saltwater baths, one toilet, one sink, and one drawer each for their personal items. Two cups of water in their helmets washed their panties. When they docked on March 28 in Australia and took on fresh water, the women soon had their bunks strung with lines of drying clothes. Naked bodies moved about, looking for missing socks. Julia remembered with discomfort the “mass living” at the Katharine Branson School and Smith College. Compensating for the lack of privacy was the beauty of the sunsets, the star-studded nights, and ahead India and China, the greatest adventure of her life.

  Because of the possible presence of Japanese submarines, they had a military escort during the first week in April before reaching Bombay (they were originally assigned to land in Calcutta). On the thirty-first day, Julia later said on several occasions, “the ship drew up to the coast and I could see and smell the haze. Oh, my God, what have I gotten myself into? After that, I never had any fright.” Despite a bad cold, Julia could smell the leafy cigarettes, incense, and ancient dirt of India when she and Peachy disembarked on Easter Sunday.

  India housed many war-weary British and American military. The CBI (China, Burma, India) personnel called themselves Confused Bastards in India. Julia did not share the cynicism of those Americans who had been there a few months and picked up the British colonial hatred of the Indians; they called her an “eager beaver.” “Have met practically no one who likes India. I do,” she wrote in her diary. She described the lazy clip-clop of gharries, squeaky shoes, the white-jacketed, skirt-panted men with black crooked-stick umbrellas, and baskets of fruit and vegetables with live chickens softly lying in the middle. The children would swarm around her, curious and laughing: “You desire to sit?” they said to the tall American woman.

  She accompanied a few of the men, including Joseph R. Coolidge (another OSS colleague, a cartographer, who kept a diary of the train and boat trip), to dinner and then on a merry motor tour of the red-light district. She liked John Bolton-Carter, a South African, who invited her and Mary Nelson up for drinks. She later went golfing and dancing with him. Rosie Frame, fluent in Mandarin as the daughter of missionaries in Peking, wanted to go to China, but was first sent to New Delhi. The women remaining shared a comfortable house for a week, shopping and sightseeing freely until there were severe explosions at the docks. Soon they were told they would not go to New Delhi but to Ceylon, where Mountbatten had moved his headquarters. The confusing orders were snafu (situation normal, all fucked up).

  There was “a killing train ride across India, four in a compartment with a tremendous lot of luggage,” Julia wrote (though fifty years later she described the trip as “beautiful” and “fascinating”). Ellie Thiry and another woman slept on top, Julia and another woman on the bottom. The dust rushed into the train’s every crack from the vast and relentlessly flat terrain. When they stopped, Julia was struck by the yelling of “incomprehensible languages.” One Singhalese police officer talked to her at length about Buddhism and the 150-year oppression of Ceylon (a pear-shaped island near the southern tip of India) by the English. The heat bothered everyone except rail-thin Julia. From Madras they ferried to the island. At every stop there were groups of officers to escort them around town (“pursued by the U.S. Navy,” is the way she expressed it), men about whom she speaks disparagingly in her diary.

  LAND OF THE LOTUS EATERS

  On April 25 they arrived in Colombo, Ceylon (later to be called Sri Lanka), and were met by S. Dillon Ripley (“I always liked his looks”), head of the Secret Intelligence Division there. A year younger than Julia and typical of the OSS brass, Ripley, a Yale and Harvard biologist and ornithologist, was an authority on the birds of the Far East and had lived in the region. He would later spend two decades of his life administering the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

  “I want to fish and shoot, and meet some active sports! But this is Wah.” She settled for swimming in the Indian Ocean. Colombo was a hot and steamy port city, ten degrees from the equator. Gnats hovered in the air above her head as if buzzing in a thick soup. At 8 A.M. the next day they boarded what the Americans called the Toonerville Trolley (Julia called it the Mountbatten Special, for it was run by the British). They traveled through lush tropical hills to reach Kandy, a safe headquarters 1,200 feet above sea level.

  Two months to the day after they had left Washington together, Julia and Peachy were sharing a large room in the Queens Hotel in Kandy. She liked Mary Nelson and Cora DuBois and Peggy Wheeler (daughter of General Raymond Wheeler, a Deputy Supreme Allied Commander), but “Peachy and I see eye to eye,” she told her diary. “Peachy was like our kid sister, a woman with dark hair, innocence, and enthusiasm,” she remembered years later. They slept in canopy beds (four-posters with mosquito netting) and contended with clogged drains and occasional water.

  Life is pastoral and easy-going [she wrote]. We are wakened at 7:15 by our room boy who knocks heavily at the door, murmurs “Morning, Missie,” and paddles into the room in his bare feet carrying morning tea and fruit. We leisurely dress, leaving 5 minutes for breakfast, and at 8:05 our 2-ton truck is at the door of the Queens Hotel and we are off, at the fast clip of 19 to 24 miles an hour to our office, 7 miles away.

  Headquarters was a tea plantation—a colonial estate called Nandana—where they worked in basha (palm-thatched) huts connected by cement walks and surrounded by barbed wire. Primitive, airy, and comfortable is the way Julia described it. Her basha was just beyond Mountbatten’s botanical garden. Supreme Commander Lord Louis Mountbatten (who oversaw the OSS) had arrived April 15 to live in the King’s Pavilion; “Kandy is probably the most beautiful spot in the world,” he declared, settling into the miniature white palace. Everyone ate lunch together in a thatched mess hall on a hill about three-hundred yards from the offices, which closed about 5 P.M. The civilians then had two hours of sunlight for tennis and golf (“It was nice to have a transportable hobby”).

  A Shangri-La setting with a sinister purpose: guerrilla warfare against the Japanese. The move to Kandy, according to historian Barbara Tuchman, signaled a “direction [to] the sea … providing a fleet base in the Indian Ocean” to attack Japan, for General Stilwell believed “the future of Asia was at stake.” The headquarters camp looked over the lake to the surrounding mountains and the flowering trees and terraced rice paddies below. Eighty degree temperatures (Julia described it as “skin-warm”), banyan trees, and monkeys. “Land of the Lotus Eaters,” one woman called it. The wide porch of the main bungalow had deep summer chairs. Palm-straw padding covered the walls and roof, and the appearance was rustic but neat. Colonial.

  Kandy was inhabited by
gentle Singhalese, who were Hinayana Buddhists (as opposed to the Hinu Tamil or the fierce-looking black Muslim Moors in the north). Their gongs and fire crackers punctuated the days. The women wore saris; the OSS women wore cotton dresses. Heavy work was done by small elephants, who would bathe in the lake at the end of each day. Coolidge remembers the day that Julia climbed on one of the elephants, straddling its neck, and the animal produced an erection of at least three feet. “When she dismounted, the thing was still evident, and she crowed with laughter.”

  Though she knew more about golf clubs than international cables and espionage, Julia, with a high security clearance, was head of the Registry, which processed all classified papers for the invasion of the Malay Peninsula. After spending the second day filing treatises, she wondered in her diary, “Why did I come over as Registry. I hate this work.” Yet she soon discovered she was good at organizing the central headquarters for dispatches, sensitive orders, and espionage/sabotage for the South East Asia Command (SEAC), headed by forty-four-year-old Mountbatten (Supremo, in British shorthand).

  General Douglas MacArthur, according to several OSS historians, did not cooperate with Donovan’s OSS or Britain’s MI6, whose work in Southeast Asia was under Mountbatten and was directed from this island off the east coast of India. The word was that MacArthur, who had his own Army Intelligence, hated Donovan (a civilian) and threatened to arrest any OSS caught in his territory. The intellectuals disdained the Regular Army, and the attitude was mutual.