Soldier Spies

by Griffin, W. E. B.

  “I will pick it out myself,” Peis said. “And have it delivered this afternoon.”

  “If it would be all right, I’d rather pick something out myself,” Müller said. “Could that be arranged?”

  “Of course, Herr Standartenführer,” Peis replied. “We could go to the warehouse directly, if you wish.”

  “It’s been a long drive from Berlin, Wilhelm,” Müller said. “Why don’t we go for a drink now to cut the dust, and then have a second to give me the courage to face my mother, and then go to the warehouse?”

  [TWO]

  21 Burgweg, Marburg an der Lahn 1715 Hours 15 January 1943

  “Guten Tag, Wilhelm,” Gisella Dyer said when she opened the door to Peis’s impatient knock. “What can I do for you?”

  There was an arrogance in her tone that he didn’t like. He wondered if providing her to Müller had been such a good idea after all. Müller was obviously taken with her. That could become awkward, even dangerous.

  “For one thing,” he said coldly, reminding her of her position, “you can remember to call me by my rank when there are others around.”

  “Sorry,” she said, but there was more amusement than concern in her voice. She looked over his shoulder down the stairway, her eyebrows raised in curiosity.

  Two Kreis Marburg policemen, one of them an old man, were grunting under the load of a large object as they manhandled it up the stairs.

  "What’s this, Herr Hauptsturmführer?” Gisella asked.

  He ignored the question.

  “I have been looking for you for hours,” he said.

  "I was at the university,” she said.

  "Not in the library,” he said.

  “I was in Professor Abschidt’s office, cataloguing,” she said.

  “You should leave word where you are,” he said.

  The two policemen now had the blanket-wrapped object on the landing. The old policeman, wheezing, supported himself on it.

  “May I come in?” Peis asked.

  Gisella stepped out of the way. He marched into the apartment and peered into each of the rooms as if making up his mind about something. He concluded that discretion dictated that the radio not be put in the sitting room, although that was the obvious place for it, but in Gisella’s bedroom.

  In the warehouse, Standartenführer Müller had been like an old maid. He had spent thirty minutes rejecting one thing after another as “not being quite right for Gisella.” Peis had no idea what Gisella had done to the old fart, but whatever it was, he liked it. Müller was behaving like a schoolboy in love.

  Müller had finally settled on an enormous, floor-model, Fulmar Elektrische Gesellschaft (FEG) combination radio, phonograph, and bar.

  It had been the personal household property of the Jew who before his relocation had been the FEG dealer for Marburg. It came with two cardboard cartons of phonograph records, and a smaller cardboard carton that held the glasses and bottles—genuine Bohemian crystal—for the concealed bar.

  Peis was not at all pleased with Müller’s final choice. For one thing, he had had to go to the trouble of getting a truck and two policemen from the Kreis police station to bring it to Burgweg. For another, something was wrong with the phonograph, and he had to assure Müller that it would be his pleasure to have that repaired. And the radio was capable of listening to the BBC.

  Once she learned that the radio had come from Müller, Gisella would feel free to listen to the BBC, which meant that she would be reported for listening to the BBC, which meant that he would have to have a word with Hauptscharführer (Sergeant Major) Ullberg, who handled such things, to stop him from going further with it.

  There was a straight-backed chair and a small table against the wall of Gisella’s bedroom.

  “Find some other place for the chair and the table,” he ordered. “Put them in another room.”

  “Are you going to tell me why?” she asked.

  “Do what I tell you, if you don’t mind,” he said, but tempered the curtness with a smile. The thought had just flashed through him that Gisella might tell Müller how he was treating her. As smitten with the bitch as Müller was, that could mean trouble for him.

  When she carried the chair from her bedroom, Peis picked up the table and followed her.

  “Just put it down anywhere,” Gisella said. “I’ll decide where to put it later.”

  He set the table down, went to the door, and motioned for the policemen to pick up the FEG combination bar, phonograph, and radio. It just barely cleared the door, and it was necessary to move Gisella’s bed out of the way before they could get the radio up against the wall.

  “That will be all, thank you,” Peis said to the policemen. “Don’t forget to take the blanket with you.”

  “And the boxes in the truck, Herr Hauptsturmführer? What do we do with those?”

  “You bring them up here, of course,” he snapped.

  When they had gone, Gisella said,“Very nice. Whose is it?”

  “It is a small gift, a token of respect from Standartenführer Müller,” Peis said. “He hopes you are free to spend the evening with him.”

  “Just the evening? Or dinner, too?” Gisella asked, artificially innocent.

  “Listen to me, you dumb bitch,” Peis snapped. “The Standartenführer is a very important man. He can be very useful as a friend.”

  “To both of us,” she said.

  “And very dangerous if displeased. And if he is displeased, I will be displeased. ”

  “What time?” Gisella asked.

  “I will be back here at quarter after six,” he said. “We are to join the Standartenführer at half past six.”

  “We?”

  "It will be a small party,” he said. And then he added:“I want you to think it over, and consider why it is important for the Standartenführer to have a good time.”

  “I will,” she said.

  “Be outside at six-fifteen,” he said. “I will be driving the Standartenführer’s personal car.” He paused, and then added, to prove how important that Standartenführer was,“An Opel Admiral.”

  “An Admiral?” Gisella asked. “The Standartenführer must be an important man. The only other Admiral I’ve seen in Marburg is the Gauleiter’s.”

  “You should consider yourself fortunate, Liebchen, ” Peis said,“to have attracted such a man.”

  “I attracted you,” she said, smiling sweetly. “Why not a Standartenführer?”

  [THREE]

  Headquarters, Eighth United States Air Force High Wycombe 15 January 1943

  Lt. Colonel Edmund T. Stevens was waiting for Canidy just inside the front door of the former girls’ school.

  “You and I are being honored,” Stevens said dryly. “We are to share a VIP suite.”

  “I hadn’t planned to stay over,” Canidy said. “I can’t stay over. I have things to do.”

  “Neither had I,” Stevens said. “That wasn’t mentioned. I’ll have to buy underwear and a shirt and shaving things in the PX.”

  “Fuck ’em,” Canidy said. “Let’s just claim the ‘press of other duties.’”

  “We can’t do that, Dick,” Stevens said. “We can’t let them win this one by default. If we don’t ‘nonconcur,’ then, by default, we’ll ‘concur.’ You know how the system works.”

  “Oh, goddamn the Air Corps!” Canidy fumed. It earned him a strange look from an Air Corps major across the foyer.

  What Canidy had thought would be a meeting lasting no more than three or four hours had turned out to be a full day (a twelve-hour full day), plus five hours of the following day, sitting on a hard-bottomed uncomfortable chair.

  By then, there was a foul taste in his mouth from all the coffee, and his ass was sore not only from all the sitting but also from a rash on the soft skin of his inner thighs. There was apparently something in his new PX shorts that his skin didn’t like. His upper thighs felt like they were on fire. And when the fire let up, they itched.

  He hadn’t wanted to
participate in the meeting at all, correctly suspecting the worst, and had argued futilely when Stevens had “asked” him to meet him at High Wycombe at 0800:

  “Bedell Smith told David Bruce,” Stevens said,“that it was important for us to send ‘someone senior’—by that he meant David—together with our ‘best technical people.’”

  “Doesn’t that leave me out?” Canidy replied, even though he suspected that he was going to have to go, period.

  “Richard,” Stevens said patiently, “there is always a point beyond which resistance is futile. Eight-thirty at High Wycombe. What they call the properly appointed place, at the prescribed time, in the proper uniform. And with that in mind, wear your ribbons.”

  As Canidy had suspected, the purpose of the meeting was to “persuade” the OSS and Naval Intelligence to agree that “after evaluating new intelligence data,” it had been concluded that earlier worries over the effect of German jet aircraft on the strategic bombing of the European landmass had been “overstated” and now posed little threat.

  If there was little threat from the jets or the flying bombs, there was no point in keeping that sharp an eye on them. What the Air Corps called “reconnaissance assets,” the P-38s and the B-26s fitted out as photographic reconnaissance aircraft, which were presently spending countless hours looking for jets and/or flying bombs, or facilities that might build or house them, could be diverted to “more productive” activity.

  Eighth Air Force could not just assign their reconnaissance aircraft where they wanted to. They—and SHAEF—were operating under a mandate from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that gave OSS requests for intelligence gathering the highest priority.

  Unless they could get the Joint Chiefs to revoke the mandate, which was very unlikely, the only option they had was to get the London station of OSS to agree that the reconnaissance was no longer necessary. They had pulled out all stops to do just that.

  The Air Corps brass had a clear position: The Germans weren’t close to fielding operational jet fighters. Even if sometime in the bye-and-bye they did actually manage to put a “handful of operational aircraft up,” they would scarcely be effective against the wall of machine-gun fire a “block” of bombers could set up.

  The Air Corps had made a concerted effort, at an enormous expenditure of matériel, to locate German jet-propelled aircraft and/or flying bombs and had been unsuccessful. It was therefore logical to presume that even if the Germans had such Buck Rogers experimental weaponry on their drawing boards, they were a long way from getting them into the air, much less operational.

  It therefore followed that it was no longer necessary to continue the expenditure of reconnaissance assets at the present level. Reconnaissance would not be discontinued, of course. It would continue whenever assets could be spared from other, more pressing utilization.

  The Air Corps paraded their experts, both professional airmen and commissioned civilians. All of them had decided—either professionally or because they knew which side their bread was buttered on—that the two-star generals were right.

  The Navy didn’t give much of a damn. Neither the jet fighters, because of their limited range, nor the flying bombs, because they could not be precisely aimed, posed any threat to ships at sea that they could see; the Navy quickly caved in.

  That left in effect a hung jury. Against one wise and highly experienced major general and his experts stood one inexplicably difficult retreaded light colonel, and one ex-fighter pilot, still wet behind the ears.

  Canidy believed, and Stevens trusted his judgment, that the current intelligence—actually the lack of it—proved that the Air Corps had not been able to find where the Germans were building or testing their jets and their flying bombs. It did not prove there were no jets.

  Nothing the Air Corps had come up with disproved Donovan’s—and now Canidy’s—belief that there were jets and flying bombs. Unless something was done about them, the jets were going to shoot down B-17s and B- 24s by the hundreds. And the flying bombs would certainly be sent against London, maybe even New York. In that case, more, not less, reconnaissance was necessary.

  “General,” Stevens said finally. “I’m afraid that the OSS must nonconcur with the conclusions drawn in your draft report.”

  “In other words, Colonel, you are putting your judgment, and that of your major, against everything we’ve shown you here?”

  “General, with respect, the OSS has information that makes the existence of operational German jet aircraft seem far more likely than your people believe.”

  “But which considerations of security make it impossible for you to share with us, correct?” the general asked icily.

  “Yes, sir, I’m afraid that’s the situation,” Stevens replied.

  “Then there is not much point in going on with this meeting, is there?”

  “Sir, I would suggest that everything has been covered,” Stevens said.

  The general nodded, and simply got up and walked out of the room.

  If the meeting was to be considered a battle, Canidy thought, the Air Corps had lost. But the OSS’s victory, if that’s what it was, was worse than hollow. A large number of men, men like himself, men like Doug Douglass, were going to die because the OSS—which in fact meant Canidy, Richard— insisted on photographing every spot in Germany that looked likely to contain something interesting about jet airplanes and flying bombs.

  Both Stevens and Canidy fell asleep in the backseat of the Princess on the way to London. There didn’t seem to be anything to say, and the steady stream of expert opinion thrown at them, plus the growing acrimony, had left them exhausted.

  They both knew that by the time they reached Berkeley Square, their reluctance to give in to the Air Corps would have preceded them. And they would have to justify it to David Bruce.

  Two further annoyances awaited Canidy at Berkeley Square. The first came from Sergeant Major Davis: Ann Chambers had called to say she had gone to Nottingham, purpose unspecified, with Meachum Hope, and would be gone three days. The second came from Bruce himself, who announced that the CID (the Criminal Investigation Division of the Provost Marshal’s Office) had caught one of the cooks at Whitbey House selling food rations on the black market. He would of course have to be court-martialed.

  Since Canidy was not a bona-fide officer and could not legally convene a court-martial himself, the chief of station “suggested” the way to handle it was to transfer the thief to Richodan, where Major Berry, the Richodan commandant, “was equipped to handle this sort of thing.”

  For reasons Canidy had never understood, Major Berry had been taken into the OSS after proving himself an incompetent working for Bob Murphy in Casablanca. Canidy knew Berry to be the sort of sonofabitch who would joyously throw the book at the thief.

  And Canidy was also more than a little aware that he himself had “diverted” from “the war effort” a Packard, a Ford, a B-25, and several tons of foodstuffs and liquor. Having set that example, he could not in good conscience send a corporal to the stockade for selling a couple of hams, or a couple of roasts, to get beer money.

  “I’ll handle it,” he said. “I’ll throw the fear of Christ into him. It won’t happen again.”

  “Once is more than enough, Canidy,” Bruce said.

  “I don’t want him, during a break from cracking rocks at Litchfield, telling the other prisoners all the interesting things he’s seen at Whitbey House.”

  The chief of station’s face tightened at that. His thinking had gone no further than “thieves must be punished.”

  “I’ll leave it up to you, then,” he said after a moment, and then went on to more serious matters:“About that meeting in High Wycombe, if you and Ed Stevens are in agreement, I’ll back you to the hilt.”

  “The Air Corps has been heard from, I gather?”

  “In the last forty-eight hours my phone has been ringing off the hook,” Bruce said, smiling just a little. “As I was saying, since you and Colonel Stevens seem to
be in agreement, I will, of course, stand behind you. But I want you to know that it’s clear to me that you could have presented your case with a good deal more tact. Your position will prevail, but at a terrible price insofar as good relations among OSS and Eighth Air Force and SHAEF are concerned.”

  The truth was that Canidy had been as tactful as he knew how, and that the complaints had been an attempt by the Air Corps to have his objections overridden. But if he said so, he knew that the chief of station would take that reasoning as nothing but another manifestation of Canidy’s “bad attitude. ”

  “I’m sorry they took offense,” he said.

  “I really wish I could believe that, Dick,” the chief of station said sadly. Bruce reminded Canidy of a master at St. Mark’s School. Every time the boys had gotten in trouble, the master had been sorrowful, not angry.

  “It’s true, David,” Canidy said with as much sincerity as he could muster.

  “Well, it’s water under the damn, I suppose,” David Bruce said. “But I wanted to get that out of the way before the meeting.”

  “Oh, Christ, not another meeting! I’m meetinged out!”

  “You may find this one interesting,” Bruce said, gesturing for Canidy to precede him out of the office.

  Outside, Bruce stepped ahead and climbed the narrow, squeaking flight of stairs to what had been the servants’ quarters. Under the slant of the roof were now storerooms and small conference rooms.

  Bruce stopped before one of the conference rooms and knocked at the door.

  Colonel Wild Bill Donovan opened it.

  [FOUR]

  “Hello, Dick,” Donovan said. “I have just been hearing in some detail about your war with the Air Corps.”

  Colonel Stevens, who was sitting at a small table with Stanley Fine, chuckled.

  “That’s not true,” Stevens said. “I just told him that to my considerable astonishment you were the picture of tact and calm reason.”