SOME OF THOSE who had landed in the first wave were still alive and on the front lines as the long, bloody summer turned to fall. On September 1, less than a week after the liberation of Paris, Lieutenant George Kerchner of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, who had led men up the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc, was wounded in the shoulder by artillery fire while taking a German position, labeled “Hill 63” on maps, close to the village of Ty Baol, near the port of Brest, in Brittany.1 In his diary, Kerchner noted, “Attack. Rough! Got hit. Million dollar wound. On way back.”2
Four days after Kerchner’s war ended, Major John Howard arrived back in England with what was left of D Company from the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. One hundred and eighty men, packed into flimsy wooden gliders, had accompanied Howard to France on the night of June 5; now, three months later, on September 5, his boat docked in Southampton with just forty soldiers. The regimental band heralded their arrival, and Howard’s men enjoyed a shower and a hot meal before returning to the very barracks they had occupied during training for D-Day. Howard gazed at the empty beds where his men had once slept. So many had been killed or wounded in ninety-one days of war.
Howard felt terribly alone. “I was the only original officer left with D Company,” he recalled, “for none of my friends or junior officers returned from Normandy with me. I had lost all of my sergeants and most of the corporals. I had seen my closest friend [Den Brotheridge] killed in the first minutes of action in battle. I found myself home, unscathed but for a couple of scars, and I couldn’t wait to see my family again. I can remember trying to pray—to thank God for bringing me back alive—but, instead, I put my head in my hands and wept.”3
Howard was at his home in Oxford, reunited with his wife, Joy, and their two young children, a fortnight later on the morning of September 17. He looked up and saw “planes milling about” in the clear sky, towing Horsa gliders, one of which was flown by Jim Wallwork, the pilot who had landed Howard so close to Pegasus Bridge on D-Day. Howard now knew some large-scale operation was in the offing and that Wallwork, as a highly experienced glider pilot, would be involved. “I silently wished old Jim good luck,” Howard recalled.4 Indeed, Wallwork would be in the thick of the action once again, this time as part of Operation Market Garden, the Allied airborne assault intended to shorten the war by dropping a large force across the lower Rhine in Holland. Beyond the Rhine lay the road to final victory and Berlin.
After landing his glider, Wallwork became involved in desperate fighting, wielding a rifle near the Arnhem bridge, the famous “Bridge Too Far.” Due to faulty intelligence and bad planning, Market Garden ended in major defeat for the British, with the 1st Airborne suffering a crushing blow, losing more than eight thousand men. It never went into combat again.5 “We held one end of the bridge and the Germans held the other—and they wouldn’t give up,” remembered Wallwork. “Not too sporting of them.”6 Wallwork’s unit, the Glider Pilot Regiment, had suffered greatly: More than 17 percent of Wallwork’s comrades were killed.7
The British airborne forces had been humiliated, but Captain Frank Lillyman’s Screaming Eagles enjoyed considerable success during Market Garden. More than 90 percent of Lillyman’s fellow fifteen hundred paratroopers gathered in assembly areas less than ninety minutes after landing, a significant improvement compared with their drop on Normandy.8 At a canal crossing in Best, north of the city of Eindhoven, one of Lillyman’s fellow paratroopers, Private Joe Mann, died protecting his brothers-in-arms when he threw himself on a grenade. Mann was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, one of just two men from the division, incredibly, to receive the medal in World War II.9
Throughout his time in combat, Lillyman had carried a small 16-millimeter movie camera. He had used it on D-Day, recording color images of his fellow Screaming Eagles at an assembly point, and again filmed some of his men in Holland as they escorted more than a thousand German prisoners away from the Best battleground.10 Lillyman then moved north with the rest of the 101st Airborne to an area southwest of Arnhem that would come to be known as “the Island,” where the division would be deployed as regular infantry, fighting off concerted German attacks without yielding a yard of ground.11
Meanwhile, Lieutenant John Spalding, serving still with E Company of the 16th Infantry Regiment, had led his platoon through Belgium in just five days and entered Nazi Germany. For thirty-eight days, according to an after-action report, his company would fight in rain and fog, under “terrific shelling,” beating off “almost continuous strong counterattacks” by Germans determined to hold Aachen, the first German city threatened by the Americans.12
On September 27, Spalding’s luck finally ran out. In yet another shelling, the concussive effect of explosions twice knocked him to the ground and he was hit by shrapnel.13 He managed somehow to crawl to an aid station and was sent back to England, wounded in his right thigh, one of five thousand US casualties in the battle for the ancient seat of Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire, regarded as the First Reich by Hitler and his followers. The struggle for Aachen was deeply unnerving to the American high command, who had not expected such ferocious resistance. How many more GIs would have to die before the rest of Germany was defeated?
AS FALL TURNED TO WINTER, the Allies became bogged down in the Hürtgen Forest, east of Aachen, in a bitter attrition that would consume eleven American divisions and become the longest single battle ever fought by the US Army. Spalding’s regiment from the 1st Division endured some of the fiercest combat, as did the 2nd Ranger Battalion, which had fought so heroically at Pointe du Hoc, only to be decimated by artillery fire while seizing just one hillside in the Hürtgen. The Americans suffered an extraordinary 71,000 non-battle casualties—trench foot, frostbite, and trauma—so hellish were the conditions in the dark forests, dubbed “the meat grinder” by the fortunate survivors.
One day that dreariest of Novembers, Spalding’s fearless comrade from the first wave, Sergeant Phil Streczyk, finally reached his limit. Wounded in the neck in the Hürtgen, he had refused medical treatment, because it would mean leaving his men; combat had become a sacrament, bonding him to those he commanded as if in holy alliance. But the mortar screams, the vicious wails of Nebelwerfer rockets, and the time-on-target shelling from 88-millimeter guns were too much for even the man whose commanding officer on D-Day had described him as the bravest he had ever met. As shell fragments sliced through the air and tree bursts blasted jagged wooden shards in every direction, he began to shake from head to toe, and then lost his mind. It took several men from E Company to control him before he could be pulled off the line, by which time he had earned four Silver Stars and six Bronze Stars, having fought from North Africa via Sicily to northwest Europe, logging more than 440 days of frontline combat.14
Fighting in the Hürtgen ended on December 16 when Hitler launched his last great offensive in the west, called the Battle of the Bulge because of the sixty-mile-deep penetration of thinly held Allied lines in the Ardennes. The surprise attack involved thirty German divisions, including the reorganized 12th SS Panzer Division, which had been almost completely destroyed in Normandy. The battle would become the largest ever fought by the US Army, with almost twenty thousand US fatalities.
On December 18, with the Allied high command stunned and panicked, Captain Frank Lillyman and the rest of the 101st Airborne were ordered to board trucks and travel, in bitter winter conditions, to the Belgian city of Bastogne to set up a defensive ring. Bastogne was before long surrounded by German troops who outnumbered the besieged Americans three to one. As supplies ran desperately low for the ill-equipped defenders, it was decided that when the skies cleared, a forty-plane resupply mission should be carried out. Two planes of pathfinders would lead the operation, dropping men near Bastogne so they could set up smoke signals and Eureka sets for the main body of C-47 transports bringing in ammunition and medical supplies.
The lead pathfinder plane left England bound for a snow-covered Bastogne at 6:45 A.M. on December 23.15 At the controls was Lieutenant Colonel Joel Crouch, seated beside Vito Pedone, the very same pair who had dropped Captain Lillyman into Normandy on D-Day. Again they were leading the way in a vital mission, this time to help save Lillyman and his fellow Screaming Eagles.
Shortly after takeoff, twenty-five-year-old Sergeant Jake McNiece, a veteran pathfinder, put his head into the cockpit and introduced himself to Crouch and Pedone.
McNiece looked worried.
“You don’t have much confidence in this, do you?” asked Crouch.
“Change that to little or no confidence,” replied McNiece. “I don’t think you can hit Bastogne.”16
“Let’s synchronize our watches,” said Crouch.
They did so.
“At eight-fifteen on the dot I’ll pull us down out of this soup and you’ll see the ground,” said Crouch calmly. “We’ll be right over Lille, France.”
At exactly that time, Crouch pulled out of the clouds, and there, sure enough, was the city of Lille spread out below.
McNiece was impressed.
“The next place we’ll hit is Brussels,” said Crouch.
Crouch gave an exact time.
Again, on the dot, Crouch arrived over Brussels. Again, McNiece poked his head into the cockpit.
“Well,” said McNiece, “this gives me a little more hope.”
“In about fifteen minutes,” said Crouch, “I’m going to give you a green light. You get out of here. If you do your job, I’ll do mine.”17
“I gotcha.”18
It was just after 9 A.M. when Crouch approached Bastogne. He had hoped for a fighter escort from the Ninth Air Force, but the promised protection had not shown up, so he found himself flying alone in an unarmed plane, just above the heavily forested Ardennes. Crouch peered through his windscreen, looking for a cemetery he’d been told to use as a landmark to guide his way.
There it was—dead ahead.
Crouch looked at Pedone, who switched on the green jump light.
“Stand up and hook up!”19 cried McNiece.
Men were about to jump when anti-aircraft fire filled the sky, the explosions like dry peas shaken in a tin can. Tracers fizzed past the plane’s windows and shrapnel hit the fuselage with a hollow popping sound. One piece punctured the plane’s thin skin and passed right between two paratroopers. Crouch could see the German guns ahead of him. He dived fast, throwing his passengers off balance, buzzing an artillery emplacement, and then quickly regained height. “The suddenness of this maneuver,” recalled one pathfinder, “caught us by surprise and most of us sank to our knees due to the ‘G’ force exerted.”20
Crouch pushed forward on his control stick.
“As soon as I level off,” he told Pedone, “give them the green light.”21
Sixty seconds later, the green light flashed once more and the pathfinders scrambled out of the C-47’s door and into the frigid air, dropping into the graveyard and then letting off orange smoke grenades.22 One pathfinder turned a switch on the radar set strapped to him. Crouch spotted blips on the cathode ray screen of the radar set in his cockpit. He sent a radio message—the supply operation was a go—and then was heading for home. He spotted German tanks below and gave their position over the radio in the hope that dive bombers could destroy them.
Later that day, guided by the pathfinders Crouch had delivered, forty C-47s dropped vital supplies out of the blue skies. The cloud cover had finally lifted, allowing a clear view of the battlefield and heralding round-the-clock bombing sorties by the Allies for the first time during the Battle of the Bulge. Hundreds of brightly colored parachutes drifted down above Bastogne as paratroopers, some of them down to their last few rounds of ammunition, raced to bring in the bundles that proved an invaluable lifeline. In less than five hours that day, 114 tons of supplies were dropped to the Americans holding Bastogne.23
The day after Christmas, elements of George Patton’s 3rd Army reached Bastogne and the German siege ended. Elsewhere in the Ardennes, the Allies fought to push the Germans back in temperatures that plummeted to twenty below zero. The relief of Bastogne was headline news around the world, and the Screaming Eagles’ heroics lifted spirits back home, where the grinding war in Europe and the Pacific, as well as escalating casualties, had some politicians wondering about the public’s stomach for finishing off both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
On January 16, 1945, the Screaming Eagles were once more on the attack, pushing the Germans back toward the fatherland. Eight miles northeast of Bastogne, Captain Frank Lillyman ordered his unit from the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment to take the town of Bourcy. One paratrooper remembered Lillyman telling him to operate a machine gun in a tank and being grateful when another man climbed up into the screeching and squealing Sherman instead. In an encounter with a German Tiger or Panther tank, the Sherman stood little chance unless fitted with a high-powered British 76.2-millimeter gun. Standard rounds from a regular M4 Sherman “bounced off the [German tanks] like ping-pong balls,” recalled one of Lillyman’s comrades.24 If you were unlucky enough to find yourself in a Sherman when hit, you had just a few seconds to get out. If the tank burnt, as most did with startling ease, you had a 50 percent chance of surviving.25
The Allies had forced the Germans back to their starting line in the Battle of the Bulge by January 22. The last great battle on the Western Front was over. Hitler’s final gamble had failed, at the cost of 100,000 German soldiers. The defeat of Nazi Germany was now inevitable as the remnants of Hitler’s once glorious armies were squeezed between the western Allies and the vengeful Red Army, which was sweeping inexorably from the east toward Berlin, raping and pillaging as it did so with Bolshevik abandon.
Victory felt as distant as ever to those serving in the Allied front lines. Indeed, there was no respite from the bitter winter, the coldest in living memory, for the grunts pushing deeper and deeper into the Third Reich, trudging through snowdrifts, seeing the stiff corpses of dead comrades piled up in gruesome stacks. It was so cold that half the weapons in some units ceased to function, unable to fire bullets. In one day alone, Lieutenant John Spalding’s E Company in the 1st Division lost twenty-two men from frostbite.26 One man was carried from a foxhole, frozen in a sitting position. On February 24, near the Roer River, Spalding himself, having only recently returned to his unit, was admitted to a rear aid station with an “upper respiratory tract infection,” according to a medical report.
Spalding was also suffering from depression and severe anxiety, also known as combat fatigue.27 The body and mind could take only so much. There were no “iron men” on the front lines, as one US Army assessment of rampant mental breakdowns put it.28 The average time given before a soldier was mentally shattered by combat was two hundred days.29 Some men, of course, were broken in their first minutes under shellfire, while others fought for months on end and appeared mentally unscathed—until it was too late.
Still, Hitler’s legions fought on, in defense of their homeland, out of fear and hatred of the fast-approaching Bolshevik hordes. Consumed by anger and the basest of urges, the Red Army’s sole rewards for the loss of millions of comrades were German females of almost any age. Brainwashed by Hitler, whose malignancy was all they had known, German teenagers fought with an astonishing fury. In the last three months of the war, more than 300,000 German soldiers would die each month, three-quarters of them on the Eastern Front, where the Wehrmacht had been bled dry after four years of total, industrial slaughter and genocide.
Late that February, the 5th Rangers who had landed on the Dog White sector of Omaha Beach and had somehow survived the long, bloody trek into the fatherland found themselves fifty miles east of Luxembourg, fighting against the 6th SS Mountain Division. In just nine days, Hitler’s men with the twin lightning bolts etched on their helmets killed more than half of all the Rangers lost in the entire war.
For Charles “Ace” Parker, who had led his men from Omaha to Pointe du Hoc on D-Day, the battle of Irsch-Zerf, which raged from February 23 to March 4, was worse even than Normandy. In just one incident, near the Saar River, under accurate and high-velocity artillery fire, Parker lost a third of his men—six killed and eighteen wounded. Drenched in sweat despite the freezing mist, taking just one hill from Hitler’s finest “broke our hearts,” he recalled, as he and his men scrambled at night under the weight of heavy packs through forests so densely packed that each man, terrified of being left alone, was “hanging on the very breath of his pal in front of him.”30
THE PACE OF THE ALLIED drive picked up as spring beckoned and the winter snows began to melt. Advanced armored units rolled toward the banks of the swollen Rhine River, the last major obstacle on the road to Berlin.
On March 24, Colonel Joel Crouch was back at the controls of a C-47, this time as the lead pilot for the 17th Airborne during Operation Varsity, an Allied assault across the Rhine—the largest airborne operation in history to be carried out in one place on one day. At 7:17 A.M., Crouch lifted off from an airfield at Chartres, France, carrying men from the 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment, including its commanding officer, a tough-talking thirty-four-year-old New Yorker called Colonel Edson Raff. Two hours later, leading an armada of C-47s dubbed “Thunder from Heaven,” Crouch was approaching the Rhine when Raff, known as “Little Caesar” to his men because of his stocky physique, leaned into his cockpit.
“I’ll bet you a case of champagne,” said Crouch, who had worked with Raff before, “that we drop you right on the button.”
It was too good an offer to refuse. Crouch was a damn fine pilot, but Raff knew only too well, having commanded the first US paratroop unit to jump into combat, in November 1942, how difficult it was to hit a drop zone with real accuracy. Back in North Africa, that first time, he’d been dropped thirty-five miles from his objective, breaking several ribs as he hit the ground.
“You’re on!” said Raff.
At 9:51 A.M., Crouch was over the Rhine, the last natural bulwark between the Allies and Berlin, a willow-fringed swirl of brown water that represented the last hope for the German people and which Hitler had, according to one perceptive journalist, “called upon in this climactic hour as if it were the protecting almighty Jehovah of his dark religion.”31
A red light flashed on—Raff and his fellow jumpers had four minutes until bailout. They stood up and hooked up, each laboring under the weight of ninety pounds of weapons and equipment. Smoke and haze covered the drop zone. Crouch would need all the skill he could muster. The green light glowed.
“Let’s go!” Raff shouted, and then jumped. His men followed, clearing the plane in just ten seconds. Before long, parachutes filled the skies above the city of Wesel as far as the eye could see.32
Crouch lost his bet. Raff and some five hundred of his men landed two miles from their designated drop zone, and Raff once again found himself marching to where he was supposed to be. Long after the war, Crouch and Raff would cross paths once more and, after a lighthearted argument, Crouch agreed to pay for half a case of champagne.33 The finest pathfinder pilot of World War II, who had flown the lead plane in operations in Sicily, mainland Italy, Normandy, and Belgium, and finally across the Rhine,34 Crouch would go on to enjoy a long and successful postwar career in the air, dying in Hawaii in 1997 at the age of eighty-six.35
The superb British glider pilot Jim Wallwork also took part in Operation Varsity, his fourth airborne operation of the war. This time Wallwork was not at the controls of a Horsa glider, as on D-Day, but piloting a large Hamilcar carrying an anti-tank gun to support the sixteen thousand Allied paratroopers dropped that morning of March 24 onto the eastern side of the northern Rhine. According to one account, Wallwork came across a paratrooper who had been killed, removed his parachute, and later sent it to the dead man’s pregnant fiancée: “Her mother made a wedding gown from the white nylon and with leftover material made a Christening dress for [the] child.”36 Yet again, Wallwork fought on the ground before finally returning to England as the Germans fell back. Operation Varsity would later be viewed as the most successful airborne operation of the war.
By the time Wallwork was back in England, a traumatized Lieutenant John Spalding had been sent to the United States. On May 5, the day Berlin fell to the Soviets, he entered 250th Station Hospital, Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, to undergo special treatment for severe combat fatigue.
It was just after 8 A.M. on May 7, near a small town in Czechoslovakia, when a colonel from Spalding’s regiment, which had suffered almost eight thousand casualties in World War II, listened as a message crackled from a radio set.
“Cease all forward movement.”
It was finally, after 443 days of combat, all over.
“It’s about goddamn time,” blurted one officer who had fought in North Africa and all the way across Europe.37 “Only one man who came overseas with Company E originally,” noted a young lieutenant in a final combat report, “is still with the organization, but all those who are or have ever been a part of it, have a right to be proud.”38
In capitals around the world, there was ecstatic celebration. Winston Churchill, the leader who had arguably saved Western civilization by standing so strong in the dark days of 1940, addressed a vast crowd in Whitehall, in the heart of London. “This is your victory,” he shouted. “It is the victory of the cause of freedom in every land.”39
As the free world erupted in euphoria, one of the very first to fight to liberate France, Major John Howard, was “coming round from [an] operation,” he recalled, “feeling nauseous and very groggy.” The operation had followed months of pain since a traffic accident that had mangled his leg the previous November.40 His wife, Joy, and their two children visited Howard but could not lift his spirits. They departed to go to a party, leaving Howard almost alone on his ward, depressed, “unable to forget all the dear friends I’d lost in the war who had not seen peace restored.”41
By contrast, for Colonel James Rudder, V-E Day was enormously joyful; he later described it as the greatest of his life other than his wedding day.42 Now commanding the 109th Regimental Combat Team of the 28th Infantry Division, he celebrated at his headquarters, southwest of Frankfurt on a large country estate, and was photographed with other officers, grinning from ear to ear, a glass raised high. The former high school football coach and teacher had been begged to stay on in the army but would have none of it, preferring to return to his wife, Margaret, and their five children in Texas and civilian life. He had received every possible award for valor in the year since scaling the heights at Pointe du Hoc—all except the Medal of Honor.
In a replacement depot in Le Havre, one of Rudder’s finest combat commanders, Ace Parker, heard a radio broadcast of Churchill’s victory speech in London. A loudspeaker had been hung between two trees. Some men listened to the “rotund voice” of Churchill as if being preached to by the Almighty. No one cried tears of joy or cheered. They were just glad to be alive. The overwhelming emotion was relief.
Parker had fought all across Europe, having landed eleven long months before with the 5th Rangers on Bloody Omaha on D-Day. He had slept in smashed farmhouses in the blackened ruins of so many villages. He had crawled day and night, nose often pressed to the shell-ravaged ground of Nazi Europe, where nineteen million civilians now lay dead. For almost a year, he had known its seasons, its beauty, as well as the terrors of its dense, primeval forests, where he’d shivered in snow-crusted foxholes. “I took a long, deep breath,” he recalled, “and slowly that small fist of vague tension deep in the viscera loosened its grip.” At last, after the deaths of more than 130,000 of his countrymen, Europe had been liberated. His job was done.
Parker was confined to camp and therefore forced to celebrate victory over a desultory dinner of Spam followed by canned fruit salad.
“Is this a meal fit to be set before conquerors on the night of their victory?” asked a smart-ass officer, a Stanford graduate.
“Hell, no!” someone replied. “Not when we just made the world safe for democracy again.”
“I wonder what the losers are eating tonight?” asked Parker.
“Probably the same as us, if I know my armies,” said the Stanford graduate.
Parker wanted to be in the streets with the people he’d helped set free. He wanted one last night to enjoy the France he had come to love.
“Jesus Christ,” someone finally said, “we’ve got to celebrate tonight.”
Parker and several other officers made their escape, jumping a wall and then wending their way through drab working-class suburbs into the heart of the city. Parker looked at the passersby and couldn’t help but see the young faces of the men who had been killed and now lay buried in graveyards all across Europe, men who hadn’t known what they were fighting for and wouldn’t have understood what they’d won even if they’d lived. Being alive, like Parker, would have been more than enough for the men he led on D-Day, who had crouched down in that landing craft as H-Hour neared and the guns started to scream. They had tried to survive with a “zest that only the young have for living.” So few had succeeded.
Le Havre was a disappointment. There were no raucous crowds, no crammed bars of GIs and mademoiselles hugging and singing “La Marseillaise.” It was as if the heavily bombed port had shut up shop and gone to bed early, wanting to sleep off the trauma and humiliation of the war.
On the way back to camp, Parker came across a bar. He could hear the voices of Americans getting drunk, so he went inside.
“There’s a babe who takes guys upstairs,” said a GI. “They say she’s a marvel. You don’t even have to move. She does everything.”
“She’d do great in an old man’s home,” said Parker.
It was a depressing dive. Parker wished he was back in Germany with the 5th Ranger Battalion, with the men he’d fought with, not drinking vile plonk and looking at a middle-aged whore in a gingham dress, hair pulled back in a prim bun. Then the bar jumped to life and his fellow soldiers were running for the doors—military police had arrived. Parker scurried upstairs, leaving his cap on the bar. Then he felt a warm body beside his.
“Pour la victoire,” whispered the woman in the gingham dress.
Why not?
Her soft hand held his, and she led him to a room with a lonely bed. “She was France,” Parker later recalled, “shabby, war-ravaged, badly used, and importuning. And I loved France.”
“Pour la victoire.”
Parker and his fellow officers traipsed, tired and dispirited, back to their camp. “The war against Hitler was over,” recalled Parker. “No artillery fire grew louder in the distance to chill the marrow of our bones. At the end of the road there was no bloody, godforsaken beach resounding with the cries of mortal agony. There was only a dreary Replacement Depot into which we would have to sneak undetected on the first leg of the long journey home.”43
BACK IN THE UNITED STATES, two days later, on May 9, Lieutenant John Spalding entered a rehabilitation program.44 A medical report stated, “He attends calisthenics, orientation classes and group psychotherapy sessions. In the afternoon he plays golf. At the present time his principal symptoms are in the nature of nervousness, anxiety, fatigability, irritability, depression, insomnia and battle dreams. He has feelings of indecisiveness, uncertainty, and insecurity. He attributes the cause of his illness as due to 120-days continuous combat as a Rifle Platoon Leader, worry over heavy casualties in his outfit and provoked by stress of 4-1/2 years of regimentation . . . He feels that he cannot train troops anymore because of his hatred for guns.”45
The first officer to break out from Omaha Beach would forever be scarred by the trauma of war. He insisted he was no hero. “I didn’t do a thing,” he told a local reporter in late 1945. “My men did it all. Don’t give me the credit.” Spalding’s marriage fell apart not long after he left the hospital, but then he found love again and remarried in October 1946, had three children, and rose to a management position in a clothing store. It seemed as if he had put the war behind him and found happiness and a sense of purpose again. He was drawn to politics, serving as a Democrat in the Kentucky House of Representatives for two terms beginning in 1947. Tragically, one night in November 1959, while his children were asleep in a nearby room, his second wife picked up a rifle after a fierce argument and shot him from close range in the heart. The .22-caliber bullet was small but lethal. Spalding died at just forty-four years of age, in a pool of his own blood on his bedroom floor.
Spalding’s extraordinarily courageous comrade-in-arms, Sergeant Phil Streczyk, suffered an equally sad fate. He had returned to New Jersey after the war, married a local girl with whom he had four children, but was tormented by his wounds and memories of combat, and committed suicide on June 25, 1958. Among his belongings, inexplicably, his family discovered a ribbon for a Medal of Honor, the award he should have received for his actions on June 6, 1944, when he led the first Americans off Omaha Beach.46
AFTER PEACE HAD BROKEN OUT, Captain Frank Lillyman chose to stay on in devastated Europe, having won twelve decorations, including the Distinguished Service Cross. He wanted to retain his rank of captain and eagerly accepted a job offered by the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA. Lillyman was told he would be in charge of a three-man unit, complete with jeep and radio, which would aid in the evacuation of British prisoners of war from the ruins of the Third Reich.
Lillyman and his team met one evening in late May 1945, just a few weeks after the end of the war in Europe, at a villa on a farm in southern Bavaria called Gut Krumbach. The farm was a base for an Allied intelligence unit, which was interrogating suspected members of the Gestapo, the Nazis’ notoriously brutal secret police.
One of the Allied officers at the interrogation center introduced himself to Lillyman.
“How do you do?” said the officer. “I am Captain Mason, British Intelligence Service, excuse the uniform.”
Captain Mason was of medium height, with light hair and close-set eyes.47 He said that although he was wearing an American lieutenant’s uniform, he had recently been promoted to captain. That meant he in fact held the same rank as Lillyman. Mason added that he was in the middle of interrogating a suspect who was refusing to cooperate.
Lillyman got a good look at the suspect, a dentist called Eugen Krug. He had marks on his face from where Mason had punched him earlier in the evening.
Mason asked if Lillyman wanted to join the interrogation.
Lillyman agreed.
“Doctor Krug,” one of the interrogators asked, “do you know how to box?”
A table in the villa’s living room was moved to the side. According to one account, Lillyman “began to spar with the helpless dentist.” Before long, Krug looked as if he’d gone twelve rounds with the famed heavyweight Joe Louis.
The group of interrogators finished with Krug around 1 A.M., at which point his head wounds were bathed in eau de cologne and he collapsed. He was eventually released, having failed to provide useful information.
Lillyman had no inkling that he had been made complicit in the ever more sadistic actions of an impostor, the most notorious British traitor of the war. Mason was in fact thirty-nine-year-old Harold Cole, a Londoner who had discreetly worked with Nazi intelligence services for more than three years, betraying at least 150 members of the French Resistance, a third of whom were then murdered by the Gestapo. As a biographer of Cole put it, “Everyone who had passed through the unspeakably brutal war just ended had been marked by the experience. But Cole had been to the very dark heart of the evil and returned. His aura had fed upon the violence and grown; Cole thereby drew others into his decaying orbit.” Among those drawn into Cole’s “dark spiral” was the D-Day hero Captain Frank Lillyman.48
Lillyman had been conned by Cole, yet he did have some reservations about him at first. Why was this British captain wearing an American lieutenant’s uniform? Then there was the blatant thieving. As Lillyman spent more time with this supposed Captain Mason, he noted that he “spent considerable time in seizing anything that struck his fancy—cheese, wines, perfume, jewelry, and automobiles.” Cole also had a nasty penchant for backhanding women who did not cooperate.
Despite his suspicions, Lillyman became more and more involved with the sadistic cockney in a borrowed uniform, especially after he secretly checked Cole’s papers one morning, while Cole was taking a bath, and found an identification card that appeared to confirm the man’s status as a British intelligence officer. To Lillyman, Cole was reminiscent of the calm and calculating British pathfinders he had met; Lillyman had even imitated them from time to time, dropping the odd “bloody” into his conversation.
Mason proved to be a malign influence on the impressionable American captain. Before long Lillyman was copying Cole’s mockery of posh British officers, striking a riding crop against his jump boots as he put on a fake accent. Whipping prisoners until they screamed was also par for the course. Lillyman was “still looking for the thrills” he had found in combat and was also, according to one report, “one of those fellows who just couldn’t quit when the flag was waved.”49
It all ended in murder. Late on the night of June 8, 1945, within two days of the anniversary of D-Day, the first American to drop into France was drinking heavily with Mason and two of his accomplices. They then drove a man named Georg Hanft, whom Cole had futilely yet brutally beaten in the hopes of discovering the whereabouts of a fortune in gems and gold, toward a forest near Ravensburg. Lillyman was seated up front, beside the driver, armed with a Colt .32 pistol. Hanft continued to deny that he had hidden a fortune. The car pulled off a road and entered a beech forest.
In the beam of the car’s headlights, Hanft was put against a tree, and then Cole hit him over the head with the barrel of his pistol.
Lillyman stood and watched. “I can still see the poor little bastard standing there,” he later recalled. “He was asked something in German and just threw his arms out in a shrug as if to say, ‘What can I say?’”50
Again he was pistol-whipped, then a kick in the groin from Lillyman.
It was after midnight.
Cole demanded the truth.
Hanft had nothing to add.
Cole lifted his Sten gun and sprayed Hanft, and then two other men pumped bullets into his doubled-up body. Cole put his pistol to Hanft’s temple and finished him off. The group went their separate ways. Cole assumed he would be hunted by British intelligence once they found time to fully investigate his crimes and interview some of his victims. That summer, he was indeed apprehended by the British after a girlfriend in Paris tipped off police, but he managed to escape their custody, this time disguising himself in a GI’s uniform. He would finally be shot dead on January 8, 1946, in Paris by a French police detective, a Resistance veteran, and buried in a pauper’s grave.51
Captain Frank Lillyman probably regretted his liaison with Cole for the rest of his days, for it cast an ugly shadow on what had been a stellar record in combat. He was questioned at length in France before returning to the States, but he steadfastly denied being a murderer. “I did not take part in the shooting,” he swore. The other three men who had been present at the murder stated that Lillyman had in fact been involved in the shooting, but no criminal charges were ever brought against him.52
When not in combat, Lillyman had often killed time since D-Day by scribbling letters and making sketches and fantasizing about a dream vacation he would take with his wife and daughter. After he returned home to Skaneateles, New York, that fall of 1945, he had a few drinks one night and wrote a letter to the Hotel Pennsylvania, in New York City, after reading an advertisement that promised special treatment for guests who were veterans. “I’d like a suite that will face east,” jotted Lillyman, “and English-made tea that will be served to me in bed . . . For breakfast, a fried egg with yolk pink and the white firm, coffee brewed in the room so I can smell it cooking . . . No military title . . . ‘Mister’ will be music to my ears . . .”53
Lillyman also wanted a “grey-haired motherly maid” to look after his daughter while he ate lobster Newburg and filet mignon.
“Can you do it?” he challenged.54
They sure could. A few weeks later, in November 1945, a concierge greeted Lillyman and his wife and four-year-old daughter, Susan, and assured them that “everything was set.”55 Lillyman had turned up wearing his twelve wartime decorations, including the Distinguished Service Cross, and before long he was enjoying a five-room suite, complete with a sideboard full of booze and a sunken bathtub. He was even photographed by the press lying in bed with a cooked breakfast, feted by Life magazine as the cheeky combat veteran cocky enough to ask for and receive the perfect homecoming, unlike so many of his peers who were struggling silently with trauma and depression.
Lillyman would stay in the army, retiring in 1968 as a lieutenant colonel. He died of a stroke in 1971 at Walter Reed Hospital, aged fifty-five, and was remembered in a New York Times obituary as a “dreamer” who had been “much honored as the first American paratrooper to drop behind German lines during the Normandy invasion in World War II.”56