Comes the War

by Ed Ruggero

  “Speaking of Haskell,” Harkins said, “the CID finally came around, two investigators in civvies. None too happy that their agency had been cut out from the beginning. Haskell blamed it all on Sinnott.”

  “Who is—conveniently—dead.”

  The two men started back toward Grosvenor Street and OSS headquarters, stopping in St. James Square to buy chips from a street vendor. The man handed each of them a cone made from newspaper, the grease staining the headlines. Harkins read as he ate.

  “Look at this,” he said to Wickman. “De Gaulle is forming a new government-in-exile, and he’s invited the Communists to participate.”

  “I thought that’s why Churchill didn’t trust de Gaulle, because he was going to welcome Communists to join his so-called Free French.”

  Harkins ate another handful of chips. “Hard to know who we should trust these days, huh?”

  “That’s for sure,” Wickman said. “I heard that lawyer, Gefner, is getting hauled in front of some sort of ethics board.”

  “Good,” Harkins said. “That’ll save me from having to track him down to beat his ass.”

  Wickman finished his chips and wiped his fingers on a handkerchief. “Did you ever get the second copy of Batcheller’s report from Novikov?” he asked.

  “Yeah. He brought it to that school; it was in the car. Lowell handed it to me. Next afternoon I took it down to Bushy Park, where the main planning cells are. Told my story to a lieutenant, then a captain, then a major; then they had me sit there for another couple of hours until this lieutenant colonel came out to give it a quick read. Then I waited around for some civilian intelligence guy to talk to me.”

  “So were they amazed?”

  Harkins laughed. “Hardly. Guy says Batcheller came up with a pretty clever approach—analyzing the serial numbers—but that the situation with the air assets had already been resolved. I asked him how it came out and he just gave me a funny look.”

  “Like he wasn’t going to tell you anything.”

  “Exactly,” Harkins said. “I told him that people died getting that report put together and delivered.”

  “What did he say to that?”

  “He said, ‘What can I tell you, Lieutenant? Lot of people get killed every day. Maybe it’ll all be over soon.’”

  “That’s it?” Wickman asked. “Maybe it’ll all be over soon? What the hell kind of answer is that?”

  “SNAFU,” Harkins said.

  They crossed Piccadilly, into the neighborhood by the Royal Academy of Arts. One entire block sat empty, whatever building that had been there before removed as if erased, every bit of rubble swept away.

  “I’m seeing Beverly tonight,” Wickman said.

  “Good for you! You got up the nerve to ask her out, huh?”

  “She asked me, actually,” Wickman said, looking both pleased and more than a bit surprised. “And I’m really glad she did. No telling how long it would have taken me.

  “Oh,” Wickman said, reaching into a pocket inside his jacket for a folded sheet of paper. “The navy wrote you up for an award. Pretty impressive, too. You really did all this stuff on that LST?”

  “If I had stopped to think about what was happening, I would have been the first one off the ship.”

  If I’d been in the water, Harkins thought, maybe I could have saved Cortizo, instead of shoving him in to drown. Alone.

  “Haskell told you they can’t actually go through with the award, since—officially—Operation Tiger never happened.”

  “Yeah, he told me. The ultimate irony,” Harkins said. “Maybe the only straightforward, selfless thing I’ve done in the whole friggin’ war so far.”

  “Well, you get to keep this swell-looking piece of paper to show your grandkids,” Wickman said, handing over the printed citation.

  When they turned onto Grosvenor Street, Wickman saw the staff car first.

  “Looks like young Lowell has a new set of wheels.”

  The driver stood by a new car in front of the headquarters building. Lowell saluted as the two officers approached.

  “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” she said.

  “Lowell, I’m surprised you’re willing to be anywhere near the two of us,” Wickman said. “We haven’t exactly been your good luck charms lately.”

  “Oh, I just came by to tell you that I’ll be moving on,” she said.

  “I see,” Wickman said. “Can’t say I blame you.”

  He turned to Harkins. “You should take a pass for the next seventy-two hours,” Wickman said. “Come and see me when you’re back and we’ll talk about what’s next for you.”

  “Great,” Harkins said, saluting. “Appreciate the pass.”

  Wickman returned the salute, started up the stairs, then stopped and turned around.

  “You’ve done a helluva job, Lowell,” he said. “It’s been a pleasure working with you.”

  “Thank you, sir,” she said. When Wickman went inside, she turned to Harkins. “So where will you go on your pass?”

  “I was thinking of a nice cruise on the English Channel.”

  Lowell laughed with her head thrown back, which made her look even more like Harkins’ kid sister. Homesickness sat inside his chest like an empty jar.

  “Are you staying here with the ATS and good ol’ Corporal Moore?”

  “Corporal Moore has been keeping her distance from me lately.”

  “Oh?”

  “One could say we came to an understanding. But I still put in for a transfer. Just got the approval this morning.”

  “Where you headed?” Harkins asked.

  “Alexandria, if you can believe that.”

  “Egypt! That’s quite a ways from London. What will you do there?”

  “I volunteered for a program in which I’ll be trained as a nurse. I’ll start in a hospital for prisoners. Germans.”

  “Looking to assuage your conscience?” Harkins asked.

  “Something like that, I suppose, though I found out I am definitely not a pacifist.”

  “Oh?”

  “I only stopped firing at Major Sinnott when I ran out of ammunition.”

  “Nothing like having someone shoot at you to test your commitment as a conscientious objector.”

  “Besides,” Lowell said. “I think that after all this is over there’ll be plenty of us with things weighing on our consciences.”

  An MP in a white helmet approached, saluted Harkins.

  “This your car, Lieutenant?”

  “Not anymore,” Harkins said.

  “I was just getting ready to move,” Lowell answered, stepping to the driver’s side door.

  The MP walked away, and Lowell said, “If we each write to Beverly, send her updates on our addresses, we’ll be able to track one another down. Stay in touch.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Harkins said. “I’d like that.”

  “Well,” Lowell said.

  “Would it be okay if I gave you a hug?” Harkins asked.

  Lowell didn’t answer, but took a strong step forward and wrapped her arms tightly around Harkins’ chest, squeezing his battered ribs and the bandaged wound on his shoulder. He grunted in pain.

  Lowell jumped back. “I’m so sorry!” she said. “I forgot about your injuries.”

  “It’s okay,” Harkins said, his jaw clenched.

  She stepped close again, raised up on her toes, and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Thank you for everything, sir. I hope I’m not being presumptuous when I say I feel good about whatever contribution I was able to make.”

  “You were a big help, Lowell, and I enjoyed working with you,” Harkins said. “Promise you’ll be careful in your next assignment. And don’t let any bullying corporals push you around.”

  “Oh, that part of my life is over.”

  She pulled away from the curb and Harkins waved, but she had her eyes on the traffic and did not see his gesture.

  Harkins walked to the Grosvenor Hotel and its massive American mess, w
here he’d eaten with Wickman in his first few hours in London. Since he was on pass and not in any hurry, he struck up a conversation with two other lieutenants who shared his table. When he mentioned that he was from Philadelphia, one of the men—Harkins thought his name was Durbinski—mentioned that he’d gone to school nearby.

  “Where was that?” Harkins asked.

  “Princeton,” Durbinski said, mopping his plate with a slice of bread.

  “What’d you study?”

  Durbinski shoved the bread into his mouth, used the first two fingers of his right hand to wipe gravy from his bottom lip.

  “Russian literature,” Durbinski said when he’d finished chewing.

  “You working with the Soviets?” Harkins asked.

  Durbinski just raised his eyebrows. He wasn’t about to say.

  “Sorry,” Harkins said. “I was a cop; I have a habit of asking questions like that. Should probably shake it around here.”

  “Probably.”

  “I do have another question you might help me with. You ever hear the name Rodya?”

  “Raskolnikov,” Durbinski said.

  “No, I think it’s Rodya.”

  “I heard you. Rodya is the pet name of a character named Raskolnikov, from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. His mother calls him Rodya. Any Russian school student would know that.”

  “What’s he like?” Harkins asked. “The character, I mean.”

  “Well, completely amoral, for one thing. Thinks he’s exceptional, above the law. Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, the name just came up, that’s all.”

  Durbinski stood, picked up his tray of dirty dishes. “Well, if you run into anyone with that name, I’d say you should keep your distance.”

  “Thanks for the tip,” Harkins said.

  He watched Durbinski wade through the crowd to the exit, then he followed. When he left the hotel, it was raining hard, a proper downpour. Maybe a drought breaker instead of an annoying drizzle or omnipresent fog. He picked up a Stars and Stripes from the hotel lobby and held it over his head as he jogged back to OSS headquarters. By the time he got there both the newspaper and his uniform were soaked.

  He stood on the top step and looked out over sidewalks crowded with men and women in uniform, hurrying on their varied missions. The whole city, probably the whole island, hummed with a palpable energy, and soon all that energy would transform into movement and violence, a comet burning toward France. He would get dragged along with it, of course, which was all right with him. He would have a role to play, even though he wasn’t sure, at this moment, what that would be. He only hoped his path eventually led back home.

  SUPREME HEADQUARTERS, ALLIED EXPEDITIONARY FORCES

  CITATION

  For conspicuous gallantry in action with the enemy off the coast of southern England, on 28 April 1944, the SILVER STAR is hereby awarded to First Lieutenant Bernard Edward Harkins, Army of the United States, who, at great personal risk to himself, rescued five men from a burning and sinking ship.

  LST___ part of Operation TIGER was on fire and in imminent danger of sudden capsizing after being struck by German torpedoes when Lieutenant Harkins spotted a group of sailors and a soldier trapped behind a bent watertight door. Refusing an opportunity to save himself by abandoning ship, Lieutenant Harkins made his way toward the men across the slanting deck, moving closer to the flames and into seawater covered in highly combustible fuel oil. When he could not get the hatch open, he climbed back up the deck to secure a tool, which he used to shatter the stuck dogs, thus freeing at least five men inside from certain death. Presented with another opportunity to save himself, Lieutenant Harkins instead entered the compartment, which was rapidly filling with water, and helped another junior officer extricate a sailor whose leg had been severed. Lieutenant Harkins and the ensign got the unconscious wounded man overboard, swimming and towing him to safety until they were rescued by a U.S. Coast Guard craft.

  Lieutenant Harkins’ quick thinking and resolute behavior in the face of grave danger resulted in the rescue of five men who most certainly would have been lost with the ship. His actions reflect great credit upon himself, the Military Police Corps and the armed forces of the United States.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “All fiction arises from conflict,” a professor once told me. That has stuck with me because I find it to be true.

  The conflict that formed the original center of this story for me was the tension between the claims of the U.S. Eighth Air Force “bomber boys” that they could win the war singlehandedly through strategic bombing of Germany and Eisenhower’s demands that he control all air assets for the invasion of the continent. There really were arguments at the general officer level and Eisenhower did threaten to “go home” if he didn’t get the resources he thought essential to the success of Operation Overlord. (See Lynne Olson’s brilliant Citizens of London and Last Hope Island for more, as well as Stephen Ambrose’s D-Day.)

  During the time this debate was going on, there was no hard proof that the bombers were reducing German war production, just the oft-stated claims of air force commanders. After the war, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which measured the effects of the air campaign, found that although bombing did hamper the German war effort, it achieved nowhere near the results claimed by the Eighth Air Force. Then, in my research, I ran across this fascinating tidbit: an economist with the OSS did a postwar analysis of the serial numbers of German war equipment destroyed or captured on the western front and found that vehicle production, in particular, had increased during the period that the U.S. Army Air Forces claimed that Germany was on the brink of collapse.

  From there it was only a short leap to the question, “What if that information had been available before D-Day? Who would have an agenda around its use or suppression?” Soon my doodling was swirling with interested and competing parties, from Soviet spymasters to American turncoats to my overworked protagonist.

  There are other places in the novel where fiction intersects with history.

  Colonel Joseph F. Haskell, West Point Class of 1930, ran the Jedburgh program—which put Allied operatives on the ground in occupied France—out of the London office of the OSS. Haskell’s father had served with OSS chief “Wild Bill” Donovan in the First World War, and Haskell’s older brother John also served in the OSS. By all accounts Joe, a former cavalry officer, was both efficient and likable, and he did have contacts that helped the OSS secure air assets.

  The 787th Squadron of the Eighth Air Force flew B-24 Liberators, not the B-17 Flying Fortress. Both bombers had gunners whose job was to engage enemy fighters that approached from below the aircraft, but it was the peculiar design of the B-17 ball turret that sometimes left gunners trapped when the mechanism to raise and lower the plexiglass ball was damaged. An aircraft that lost control of its landing gear was forced to do a belly landing; I combined the two circumstances.

  The characters use terms that were common, especially among American GIs, in describing the confusion and inefficiency of the vast military bureaucracy that had grown up over just a few years and consisted mostly of amateurs. FUBAR meant “Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition”; SNAFU meant “Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.”

  I used that state of confusion to justify a bit of poetic license: the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, CID, would likely have investigated the murder of an American civilian and would have worked alongside London police. It is true, however, that CID only became operational in January 1944; I thought it plausible that pushy OSS agents could have taken a role. I confess to playing fast and loose with rules governing courts-martial.

  The spring of 1944 did see an increase in Luftwaffe air raids, though the final attack of the so-called Baby Blitz occurred on the night of 18–19 April 1944, about thirty hours before the beginning of this story.

  Operation Tiger was a large-scale rehearsal conducted by the Allies along the Devon coast on beaches where the landing condition
s were similar to those the invaders would find in Normandy. In a cascading series of errors, Royal Navy ships protecting the landing craft were off station or monitoring the wrong radio frequencies. A few fast-moving German schnellboot (literally: fast boat) armed with torpedoes found the fleet in the early morning darkness of 28 April 1944 and attacked. Three LSTs were hit, two of them sank quickly and one, its stern heavily damaged, limped to shore. Many soldiers and sailors were killed outright; others would die of hypothermia in the chilly waters. Some GIs who had been issued life belts were not trained in their use; some of those men drowned because they wore the belts incorrectly. In all, more than seven hundred soldiers and sailors lost their lives.

  The Operation Tiger disaster, also called Slapton Sands for the stretch of beach, was kept secret until after the successful invasion of the continent. Unfortunately, there have been a few ill-considered reports (one by the usually reliable NPR) that the secret was kept for decades after the war. In fact, articles about the disaster appeared later in the summer of 1944. Families were told that their loved ones died in a training accident. There is a memorial on the beach, consisting of a U.S. Sherman tank dredged from the Channel by a British civilian.

  The Polish 303 Squadron was made up of aviators who, after the collapse of their country, made their way to England to join the fight against the Nazis. They amassed a remarkable fighting record; the Royal Air Force gave them credit for helping save Britain in those critical 1940 air battles, at a time when Great Britain was the last holdout against Hitler. After the war, these Polish aviators were excluded from official victory celebrations by the same people they had helped save. Churchill’s government slighted them so as not to offend Stalin, who had no intention of returning Poland to the Poles.

  The massacre of Polish soldiers and civilians by the Soviets at the Katyn Forest took place just as the fictional Lieutenant Wronecki maintains. German propaganda blamed the Soviets in order to drive a wedge between Stalin and the other allies; their efforts failed, but for once the Nazis were telling the truth.

  I owe special thanks to my friend Jeff Holland, native of Manchester, England, whose suggestions on dialogue helped ensure that the British characters spoke English, not American English; or worse, an American writer’s idea of how British people sound.