Operation X Ray called for dropping thousands of tiny bats with napalm charges onto Tokyo. (Author’s collection)
Dr. Lytle E. Adams, a dentist who lived in Pennsylvania, and his family were driving home from a vacation in the southwestern United States. He was idly mulling in his mind the peculiar sight of millions of small bats he had seen hanging upside down from the ceilings of Carlsbad Caverns, a chain of huge underground caves in New Mexico. A guide had told Adams that this species was known as Tadarida brasiliensis. It was December 7, 1941.
Dr. Adams’s bat reverie was broken when a news flash blared over the car radio: Pearl Harbor had been bombed. Like nearly all Americans, Adams was outraged and swore to do his part to make the Japanese pay for their sneak attack.
By the time Adams and his family reached home, his fertile mind had hatched a bizarre scheme: Why not develop a technique for using large numbers of bats like those he had seen at Carlsbad Caverns to firebomb Tokyo and other Japanese cities? Most of the houses and many of the buildings there were constructed of flimsy wood, and bats typically head for the rafters in buildings.
Within ten weeks, Adams had drawn up a plan, and through his senator, obtained an audience with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Beset by gargantuan problems because the United States had been woefully unprepared for war, Roosevelt was eager to hear about any idea that might inflict damage and casualties on a ruthless enemy. Speaking with heartfelt enthusiasm, Adams convinced the president that the project should be pursued.
Consequently, the National Defense Research Committee, as well as a similar group in the U.S. Army Air Corps, began conducting experiments on what was labeled the Adams Plan. Some of the more eager technicians envisioned that the war against Japan could be won for the cost of a few million bats.
From more than nine hundred species of bats, Tadarida brasiliensis was chosen for the testing, mainly because there were some one hundred million of them in caves in the U.S. Southwest and readily available to be drafted into the armed forces.
Scientists came up with a plan to refrigerate the bats into hibernation, then strap a tiny amount of napalm and a minuscule parachute onto each one. The combat-ready bats would be hauled aboard Army Air Corps planes and dropped onto Tokyo and other Japanese cities. Many persons involved in the Adams Plan gleefully reflected on how much “face” the Japanese would lose to be outsmarted by a bunch of furry bats.
Operation X Ray called for dropping thousands of tiny bats with napalm charges onto Tokyo. (Author’s collection)
Under the strictest security conditions, Lytle Adams and a group of scientists conducted the first field experiments at a small, remote airport in California on May 15, 1943. As with most tests, problems rapidly surfaced —in this instance, mainly because the bats failed to cooperate. They refused to go into hibernation on demand, nor would they be aroused from sleep on cue.
Another group of bats had the napalm containers strapped to them and, while being loaded into an airplane, escaped from their handlers and flew speedily toward the nearest buildings, which it was hoped they would do. Only the idea was for the structures to be in Japan, not at a small California airport.
Within moments, two hangars and other smaller buildings were raging infernos. Presumably seeking a hiding place, several of the bats flew through the open windows of a parked general’s car. It burst into flame and exploded when the fire reached the fuel tank.
Perhaps understandably, the irate general no doubt was a key figure in getting the Adams Plan promptly canceled.
Disappointed but undaunted, Dr. Adams collared U.S. Navy brass, and more bat firebomb experiments were laid on at the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah. The project was given the code name Operation X Ray.
The tests proved to be quite encouraging, and the navy scientists were enthusiastic. One study indicated that bats loaded with napalm charges could be more productive than any other bomb dropped from the air. It was estimated that a planeload of bat bombs released over Tokyo could set some four thousand fires, as opposed to perhaps three hundred blazes ignited by a planeload of regular incendiary devices.
Major production and subsequent launching of the bat bombs were set for May 1944. However, for no announced reason, the entire project was scrapped—some two and a half years after Dr. Adams had conceived the idea while driving home from New Mexico.1
Even as the thick, oily, black clouds of destruction mushroomed above the shattered U.S. Fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Robert L. Shivers, special agent in charge of the Honolulu office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, telephoned FBI headquarters in Washington, more than five thousand miles away. Much to his astonishment, there was only a brief delay before the connection was made. It was about 2:30 P.M. in Washington.
The telephone operator at FBI headquarters in the Justice Department Building switched the urgent call to New York City, where Director J. Edgar Hoover had gone for the weekend. “The Japanese are bombing Pearl Harbor!” Shivers exclaimed. “It’s war! You may be able to hear the explosions yourself. Listen!”
Shivers gave Hoover a quick rundown on the sketchy reports of the death and disaster. The FBI director ordered Shivers, a twenty-one-year veteran of the agency, to put into effect the war plan that had been formulated months earlier and that called for rounding up nearly one hundred espionage suspects, most of whom were of Japanese ancestry.
Shivers promptly contacted an old friend with whom he had been working closely in recent months, Honolulu Chief of Police William A. Gabrielson, and asked him to put a guard of his men around the Japanese consulate. The action was for “the protection of the consul general, his staff, and the consular property,” Shivers explained.
Gabrielson and Shivers knew there was a far more cogent reason for sending Hawaiian policemen to the consulate. The two law officers had long known that Consul General Nagao Kita, who dressed well, played an enthusiastic game of golf, and considered himself to be a social lion, was the principal spymaster in Hawaii. Gabrielson’s cordon of policemen could keep him and other spies in the building from escaping or continuing espionage activities.
In the past, Bob Shivers had often paid a “social” visit to Kita, mainly as a subtle means of impressing the consul general that the FBI was watching. They traded banter and sipped saki like two old golfing buddies after eighteen holes on the links. Shivers was always the portrait of affability during these curious sessions in the Japanese consulate. Kita inevitably responded with his toothiest grin. “Go ahead, Mr. Kita,” the FBI agent said on one occasion in a mocking but polite tone. “Cruise around the island and see what you can see.”
“Oh, no,” the consul general replied with a chuckle. “Then your men would follow me and chase me.”
Those days of cat-and-mouse between two foes now were over. Honolulu Captain of Detectives Benjamin Van Kuren and Lieutenant Yoshio Hasegawa, who was of Japanese ancestry, were assigned the task of “guarding” the consulate. They rushed to the building with a few colleagues, and soon uniformed policemen with sawed-off shotguns fashioned a cordon around the structure. Van Kuren and Hasegawa knew the consulate layout by heart: they had been surveilling the building for many months.
With war breaking out, the Honolulu policemen were unconcerned with diplomatic niceties. Captain Van Kuren and his men smashed open the rear door and barged in. Van Kuren headed immediately for the code room and threw open the door. On the floor was a large washtub in which two Japanese consulars were feverishly burning their secret codebook and messages that had been sent to and received from Shigenori Togo, the foreign minister in Tokyo.
Bulk paper burns slowly, so Van Kuren and his men were able to grab the codebook and a thick sheaf of messages. Although outwardly calm and collected, Consul General Kita protested that his diplomatic status was being violated.
The retrieved papers were turned over to FBI special agent Bob Shivers at his office in the Federal Building. He handed them to the navy’s intelligence branch to be decoded. When Shivers received the deciphered messages back, he exclaimed to his staff, “My God, if we’d only had this earlier! Look at these!”
TO: Foreign Minister, Tokyo
1. The three battleships mentioned in your X239 of Friday morning, the 5th entered port. They expect to depart port on the 8th.
2. On the same day the [carrier] Lexington and 5 heavy cruisers departed.
3. The following warships were anchored on the afternoon of the 5th:
8 Battleships
3 Light cruisers
16 Destroyers
Coming in were 4 cruisers of the Honolulu type and 2 destroyers.
KITA
FROM: TOGO, FOREIGN MINISTER December 6, 1941
TO: CONSUL, HONOLULU
Please inform us immediately of any rumors of the movements of warships after the 4th.
TOGO
Another decoded message to Foreign Minister Togo clearly indicated that the wily Nagao Kita had arranged for one or more parties to notify Japanese submarines offshore about movements of U.S. warships. The FBI promptly put the finger of suspicion on Bernard Julius Otto Kuehn, who had joined the Nazi Party in Germany in 1930. Since 1936, he and his wife, Friedel, and their offspring had lived in Honolulu, where he first tried the real estate field and then the furniture business and was a flop at both endeavors.
Despite his commercial failures and having no visible means of financially supporting his family, Otto Kuehn had two homes, one at Kalama and the other at Lanikai. Flashlight signals at night from either point could easily be seen by Japanese submarines.
In late 1935, while still in Germany, he had contacted Captain Tadao Yokoi, the Japanese naval attaché in Berlin, and signed a contract for his “services” after he moved to Hawaii. Kuehn would be well paid by Japanese intelligence: two thousand dollars per month (equivalent to twenty thousand dollars monthly in 1999), plus a six-thousand-dollar bonus at the end of each year.
In March 1939, an officer of naval intelligence in Tokyo stopped over in Honolulu to give Kuehn a portable radio and instructions to keep a low profile. When war erupted between Japan and the United States, the German native was to use the radio to send messages to submarines offshore. The underwater vessels would relay the information to naval intelligence in Tokyo.
Kuehn was to be a Japanese “sleeper,” a planted espionage agent who would lay low until notified that it was time to act. His Japanese code name was “Ichiro Fujii.” However, Kuehn apparently was unhappy with a sleeper role, and he began strolling around the U.S. Fleet anchorage at Pearl Harbor and even drew up a plan for a sneak attack by the Japanese Navy against the bastion. All of this activity did not go unnoticed by the FBI or the local U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). Both agencies were undermanned, but on occasion they put tails on Kuehn to keep track of his actions.
After Consul General Kita had taken up his duties in Honolulu in March 1941, he and Kuehn worked out a covert contact scheme. When Kita wanted to see the German, he did so by mailing him a postcard signed “Jimmie” to Kuehn’s post office box 1476 in downtown Honolulu.
FBI suspicions that Kuehn was a Japanese spy had intensified after his wife returned from a trip to Tokyo and deposited twenty thousand dollars in a Honolulu bank.
In the wake of the Japanese sneak attack, the FBI hauled in Kuehn for questioning. He was shown the Kita/Togo message referring to signaling Japanese submarines offshore. Finally, the German confessed that he was the one who was to signal the underwater vessels, but he swore that he had never done so. The FBI was unimpressed with his disclaimer.
A few weeks later, a board of U.S. Army and Navy officers, convened under martial law, tried Kuehn and sentenced him to be shot to death as a spy. Later, however, the sentence was commuted by higher authority to fifty years at hard labor. Apparently the sentence reduction had been ordered by the White House so the Nazi regime in Berlin would not seize on Kuehn’s execution to kill any U.S. spies who might fall into German hands in Europe.2
Lieutenant de vaisseau Jean Philippon was one of the ten French Navy officers and fifteen hundred French sailors the Germans had kept on active duty at the Kriegsmarine arsenal at the port of Brest after the 1940 armistice. German Navy officers were impressed by Philippon, who clearly held an enlightened view that accepted the Nazi occupation of much of France.
Friendly and personable, the Frenchman had no qualms about fraternizing with German officers at the port, three hundred miles west of Paris at the tip of the Brittany Peninsula, and he often drank with them late into the night. There were times when the Germans, their tongues loosened by Calvados, would reveal secret information to their congenial young French friend.
It was through these late-night drinkfests that Philippon (code-named Hilarion), a highly productive spy for the French underground, learned that the Germans were building U-boat shelters at Lorient, a small port on the southern coast of Brittany. The pens would serve as homes for the submarine wolf packs wreaking havoc in the Atlantic Ocean.
Hilarion belonged to a network called Confrérie Notre-Dame (CND), and he was operating in one of France’s most closely watched cities. The Gestapo, the Abwehr, and the Milice (French traitors who were policemen under the Germans) were everywhere.
Radio detection vehicles were highly active in and around Brest. Hilarion and the operator assigned to him to send messages to London bicycled about the city with dismantled radios in their pockets, for no two transmissions were made from the same house or building.
In late December 1941, Hilarion radioed more information about the work the Germans were doing on the submarine pens at Lorient. Construction had just gotten under way, but when completed the pens’ twenty-two-foot-thick roofs would be able to withstand the heaviest bombs the British had in their arsenal.
Hilarion insisted that the Royal Air Force Bomber Command attack these new pens immediately, but he received back a haughty reply: “The base will be attacked when it is finished.”
This decision would prove to be a disastrous one.
In Lorient, the name of Jacques Stosskopf was hated by the patriotic citizens. A skilled engineer, the Frenchman had accepted a German invitation to continue in charge of the Lorient shipyard, where the submarine pens would be built. He became a trusted collaborator of the Germans.
Equally despised by Lorient people were the handful of French engineers who had worked for Stosskopf in the navy yard prior to the war and who remained when the Germans took over. What the townsfolk did not know was that Stosskopf and his engineers were all loyal Frenchmen who risked their lives almost daily to keep the British informed about the arrival and departure of German U-boats from this important base.
Because he was trusted by the Germans, Stosskopf easily gathered secret information that would not be available to other spies. He knew the number of British and neutral ships sunk by each submarine returning from a prowl into the Atlantic Ocean. And he knew the names of the U-boats that never returned to Lorient and presumably had been sunk.
Stosskopf was regarded so highly by the Germans that when they began combing France for workers to ship to the Third Reich, he was able to retain most of the 4,500 French civilian employees at the yard. Only 147 were forced to depart.
One night a British submarine surfaced off Brittany, and Stosskopf was there to greet the team of commandos who paddled ashore in a rubber dinghy. They had come on a reconnaissance mission, and Stosskopf briefed them on details about the region. He was even able to sneak one commando into the U-boat base, presumably to get firsthand information for a forthcoming RAF bombing attack on the pens.
A few months later, an agent in the Confrérie Notre-Dame was captured by the Gestapo, and under excruciating torture he betrayed Stosskopf, who was immediately arrested.
When the townspeople of Lorient learned that the hated Stosskopf had suddenly vanished, they told one another that his cronies in the Kriegsmarine had rewarded the Frenchman with an even more illustrious post elsewhere.
After the liberation of Brittany by American forces (with the substantial aid of armed members of the French underground) in August 1944, the new boss of the Lorient shipyard held a mass meeting of the workers. They were flabbergasted to hear that General Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French forces, had posthumously awarded to Stosskopf the stars and decorations of a commander of the Legion of Honor.
After the war, the Lorient facility would be renamed the Jacques Stossk opf Navy Yard.3
Soon after the veil of night fell over France, a battered old car chugged up to a roadblock on the outskirts of Clermont-Ferrand in central France. The lone occupant, a member of the resistance, felt a cold chill race up his spine. Piled in the back and on the passenger seat were many bundles of illegal underground newspapers that he was carrying to a distribution point in the basement of a patriot’s home. It was April 1942.
Two men wearing the gray-green uniform of the Wehrmacht and swinging lanterns approached the car. Despite the terror in his heart, the Frenchman kept his poise. He held up one of the carefully wrapped bundles and declared calmly, “These are government circulars announcing new rationing procedures and I’m taking them to German headquarters in Clermont-Ferrand.”
Suspicious, one German held his lantern to be able to read the top sheet of paper, then said, “All right, you can go on.”
The sheet the German had scanned was indeed a government piece, and the French producers of the underground newspaper had taken the precaution to place one of the sheets atop each bundle for just such situations that had now confronted the driver.
Immediately after the signing of the armistice in June 1940, the Germans had taken over the media, and it was produced largely by French collaborators. Much of the space in these German-controlled newspapers and magazines was devoted to propaganda and the printing of orders and regulations. The lack of genuine news distressed the French people, so within a few months, covert publications began to spring up, and soon their circulation soared.
As the underground press became ever more powerful, building civilian morale and exasperating the German masters in France, efforts were made repeatedly by the Gestapo and the French Milice to wipe out this menace. But their task was difficult, much like trying to swat flies in a dark room.
Physical obstacles to covert publishing were daunting. Collectively, hundreds of tons of newsprint had to be found, and the Germans had made it illegal to sell that commodity. Some paper was bought on the black market. Underground members were planted in the so-called legitimate press, and they arranged to pilfer some newsprint.
Once a group had located newsprint and ink, a search was launched to find a press, which would have to be located in a small print shop in remote locales not patrolled by the Germans or the Milice. In these instances, the print shop owner either participated in the production of the publication, or he left a key to his place when he departed for the day.
At about midnight, a small resistance group would stealthily enter the building, set the type, and make the press run. Hidden outside in the shadows would be lookouts to warn of approaching danger. Once the papers were printed, the type was rapidly put back in cases and the plates were melted down. The next day, the shop returned to its normal routine, often printing pamphlets and circulars for the Germans.
Not all of the clandestine newspapers were printed in small shops. One publication was run off the press of a large Paris hotel that was entirely occupied by Germans. Wehrmacht officers idling in the plush lobby paid no attention to the faint rumble of the basement press, which was used to print the hotel’s menus. Eventually the secret operation was moved for fear that the Germans would recognize that the battered type on their dinner menus was identical to that of the “terrorist” newspapers they had seen on occasion.
Perhaps the trickiest venture of all by an underground publisher was the launching of a German-language newspaper called Unter Uns (Among Ourselves). Its target was the occupying Wehrmacht, and mainly it printed graphic stories of the horrors and agonizing deaths being inflicted on the German Army in savage fighting in the Soviet Union.
In late March 1942, Unter Uns published a lengthy account of a daring raid by British commandos in which they stole a top-secret German radar from its site at Bruneval, France, on the English Channel coast. The German-controlled French press had ignored this blockbuster story.
One week later, disaster struck: the two publishers of Unter Uns were approached by several Gestapo agents, and in the ensuing gun battle, the two Frenchmen were killed.
Distribution of the clandestine newspapers was as dangerous as the printing, and could result in execution for those involved. However, there was no shortage of eager volunteers to take the papers door to door: housewives, students, merchants, doctors, priests, laborers. Circulation techniques became so ingenious that copies even reached inmates in prisons and jails.
Two years after Adolf Hitler took control of most of France, there were many covert newspapers and magazines being printed and distributed, with a combined press run of some three hundred thousand weekly. Perhaps two million French men and women read the sheets.
The underground publications were not journalistic works of art. Yet to French citizens, in whose breasts the flame of resistance was burning ever brighter, the outlaw publications were beacons of hope. At this stage in the war, the covert newspapers and magazines were more important to the French underground than sabotage or other violent acts, for the resistants needed recruits, money, and information.
Most of the underground newspapers and magazines developed their own character, especially those produced by occupational groups. France’s doctors fought back through their covert journal, Le Médecin Français. Scathing editorials declared that the Germans were deliberately trying to wipe out vast segments of the French population by denying physicians sufficient gasoline, especially in rural areas. Soon the fuel ration for doctors was hiked by the German authorities.
Large numbers of young French males were being rounded up and shipped to Germany to work in war plants. Before leaving, each worker had to have a certificate stating that he did not have a contagious disease (which might spread to German citizens). Le Médecin Français urged doctors of France to reject almost every man presented to them for examination and to make certain that known French collaborators were certified for immediate shipment.
French educators had their own vocal press, l’Université Libre. Its editorial thrust was to protect the standards of French education from encroachment by the German authorities. It howled loudly that a campaign had been launched by the occupying power to dilute French schools by cutting back sharply on supplies of books and papers and, more importantly, by badgering and arresting teachers and professors whose lectures were not consistent with Nazi views.
Le Palais Libre, the newspaper of the lawyers, called attention to the repeated abuses by German authorities of the French legal system, including jailing French judges who refused to hold in custody people the Gestapo had arbitrarily arrested and had not charged with crimes.
La Terre, the farmers’ clandestine newspaper, gave these natural-born resistants suggestions to conceal harvests from the Germans and send the crops to resistants hiding in the mountains and forests. Moreover, the farmers should delay threshing if their property had been taken over by the Germans.
Even humor, the most slashing editorial weapon of all, went underground. Le Gaullois concentrated on comical and sarcastic articles and anecdotes. Cartoons focusing on the Germans as buffoons were received with glee by French readers and with anger by the occupying authorities.
For the eight hundred thousand railroad men, their Bulletin des Chemins de Fer carried ringing exhortations for them to prevent the Boche (Germans) from applying their strategy to carry France’s precious manpower, goods, art, and metals to Germany “by paralyzing his troop movements, isolating his units, immobilizing his supplies, breaking his power, and precipitating his defeat.”
The Bulletin described techniques for sabotage without causing permanent damage, and listed the names of the tiny percentage of railroad workers known to be currying favor with the Nazis. It suggested that a heavy packing case “accidentally” dropped on a collaborating coworker’s toes would put him out of action for a considerable length of time.
There was a bit of closing advice: As soon as the collaborator had recovered and returned to work, greet him by repeating the above technique —on his other foot.4
Forty miles up the old north road from London, just outside the ancient village of Tempsford, snuggled a top-secret airfield and a complex of Nissen huts, collectively called Gibraltar Farm. This was the covert base of the Royal Air Force Moon Squadrons, so named because most of their flying was done over Nazi-occupied Europe in periods of moonlight, when conditions were favorable for clandestine operations.
Flying mainly Lysanders—small, maneuverable airplanes capable of landing and taking off in short spaces—the mission of the Moon Squadron pilots was to deliver spies to France and to bring back espionage agents. These male and female agents had been recruited and trained by the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which Prime Minister Winston Churchill had created early in the war with this stirring directive: “Set Europe ablaze!”
SOE, under its “D” (code for the chief), Charles Hambro, had offices at 64 Baker Street in London, not far from the fictional home of the legendary Sherlock Holmes. From its beginning in mid-1940, the agency was cloaked in secrecy. There were no markings or signs anywhere in the building to indicate that a government agency was housed there.
The true name of the spy agency, its correct address—even its existence —were known to but a handful of high-level officials. The Air Ministry knew SOE by a different set of initials, the Admiralty knew it by yet another set. Both thought the agency was located at an address other than the correct one.
By early 1942, about two and a half years after Great Britain went to war against Nazi Germany, Chief Hambro had created a widespread and sophisticated organization to provide intelligence and to conduct sabotage. Each country in Europe that had been overrun by Adolf Hitler’s war machine had its own section in SOE, which directed espionage and sabotage operations within its own country and which recruited, trained, and infiltrated its own agents. The SOE-dispatched agents, in turn, would recruit their own spies and organize them into clandestine networks.
Known inside the agency as The Firm, SOE landed some spies in rubber dinghies, others parachuted from Whitley bombers, but the main infiltration source comprised the Moon Squadrons. Their Lysanders, called Lizzies, had been stripped of guns, armor, and other equipment to provide room for one agent passenger, known as a Joe.
All of the Moon Squadron pilots were exceptionally skilled. Their task was incredibly demanding. They were invariably confronted with an operation fraught with peril—not the least of which would be savage torture by the Gestapo and eventual execution if a flight was betrayed and Germans were waiting on the ground for the Lizzie.
Without benefit of a navigator, a Moon Squadron pilot had to locate a flyspeck field in the vast darkness of occupied Europe, using only a map and whatever landmarks—villages, roads, rivers, lakes —he might detect in the moonlight. He would have to avoid Luftwaffe fighter planes searching the skies, ack-ack guns, and searchlights. It was not a job for those with faint hearts and weak knees.
All the time the Moon Squadrons had been running an espionage shuttle service across the English Channel, top officers in the German secret service were giving a high priority to its activities. A few hundred Abwehr agents in France and the Low Countries had been sent in recent months to try to break up the underground networks that were being aided and abetted by the Lizzies.
A directive went out from Berlin for every effort to be made to capture one of the Lysanders so that Nazi aeronautical engineers could study it and perhaps devise countermeasures to thwart its actions. Snaring a Moon Squadron pilot also would be most desirable, because the Abwehr knew very little about the covert organization, or even where it was based.
In the middle of March 1942, one of the ace Moon Squadron pilots, Flight Lieutenant John “Whippy” Nesbitt-Dufort, was at the controls of a Lysander while winging across the blacked-out countryside of northern France. An hour earlier, he had taken off from Gibraltar Farm with the mission of dropping off the Joe with him and picking up another.
Lysander aircraft used by the British to drop off and pick up agents in German-held Europe. (National Archives)
Whippy Nesbitt-Dufort, a lean, congenial officer with an engaging sense of humor and a buoyant personality, had no qualms about imbibing when off duty. He would tell a fellow pilot, “Let’s go into the village and have a drink or six!”
Whippy was a free spirit, and he had had his share of close calls while on missions. On one occasion his Lizzie touched down on a dark pasture, skidded and bumped along the grass wet with dew, and ground to a halt. The plane’s door flew open, the Joe leaped out, raced away, and was swallowed up by the night.
Moments later, Whippy heard shots ring out. As it developed, the Joe he was supposed to pick up was pedaling frantically toward the pasture on a bicycle and being pursued by Gestapo agents.
Perspiring heavily from the exertion, the Joe leaped off the bicycle, hurtled over an earthen hedgerow, and ran out into the pasture. Nesbitt-Dufort already had the Lizzie rolling when the Joe, gasping for breath and with bullets whizzing past the Lizzie, sprawled into the cramped space vacated minutes earlier by the other Joe.
Always irrepressible, Whippy called out cheerily, “Good evening to you, sir. And a beautiful evening, indeed!”
Now, on his current mission, Whippy knew he was in big trouble. A thin coat of ice had formed on the wings, causing the Lizzie to steer erratically. As a result, he became lost, was nearly out of gasoline, and was gliding downward for a crash landing in a field. This could be a disaster, he knew. The pasture could be saturated with tree stumps and ditches.
“Hold your hat!” Whippy called out to the nervous Joe moments before the Lysander crunched onto the wet field, skidded for more than fifty yards, thudded into a ditch, and nosed over with its tail pointing upward. Miraculously, perhaps, neither man was hurt, and they scrambled out of the aircraft.
For several moments, Whippy calmly stood and viewed the Lysander, then exclaimed, “My goodness, I could do with one or six drinks!”
Following instructions, the flight lieutenant began preparations for destroying the Lysander. He exploded the SFF (Secret Identification Friend or Foe apparatus), which sent “friendly” signals of distress to British radar stations, then fired a Verey pistol at the fuselage, setting the plane afire.
Nesbitt-Dufort and the Joe raced to an empty building to hide and contemplate their next move. Whippy thought that the Lizzie was cremated, but the plane had been nearly out of fuel, so the flames could not be fed. The tiny blaze flickered out.
Shortly after dawn, a German motorcycle patrol discovered the Lysander, which was largely intact. Word was flashed up the chain of command. Down from Berlin came precise instructions: The Lysander was not to be dismantled, but rather loaded intact onto a large flatbed truck and hauled—with tender care—to a place where it could be carefully examined by experts.
A German work crew, admonished by officers to be extremely gentle, used a crane to hoist the plane onto the flatbed. Knowing the value the brass in Berlin had placed on the Lysander, the German captain in charge of the recovery operation perspired freely as the truck began to inch cautiously across the rough field and onto a dirt road. No doubt the officer breathed easier when the flatbed truck reached a smooth, hard-surfaced road.
Some three miles along, the crawling truck neared a level railroad crossing and, snail-like, edged onward. Suddenly the escorting Germans heard a frightening sound—that of a train racing toward the crossing at fifty miles per hour. Moments later, the locomotive hit the truck broadside, smashing the vehicle and the Lysander into smithereens.
German commanders were furious over the loss of this prized booty and ordered an all-out search to be launched for the British pilot. Unaware of the slapstick scenario unfolding around his Lizzie, Whippy Nesbitt-Dufort had been taken in tow by members of the French underground, furnished native clothing, and hidden about fifteen miles from where thousands of pieces of the Lysander were strewn. Five weeks later, Whippy was able to contact England by radio, and a Lysander was dispatched on the first moonlit night to pick him up.
Returning to Gibraltar Farm after nearly two months, Whippy breezily greeted welcoming comrades: “What I need is one or six drinks!”5
Soon after adolf Hitler sent his booted German legions to take over peaceful Norway in April 1940, a notorious collaborator, Vidkun Quisling, founded Nasjonal Samling, the Norwegian Nazi Party. Nearly two years later, the traitor was appointed “minister president” by the führer and became the most hated man in Norway.
The German occupation force had long been trying to gain control of Norwegian churches by enlisting clerics to support a “holy crusade against communism.” When Quisling took power on February 1, 1942, one of the few native clerics with Nazi sympathies announced that he would hold a special service in the cathedral at Trondheim to celebrate the new regime. Not a single person showed up.
That same afternoon, however, at the regular service conducted by the dean of the cathedral, hundreds of Norwegians crammed into the building, and scores of others spilled outside. A day later, the dean was removed from his post by Quisling. In protest, nearly every other pastor in Norway resigned. However, they would continue to perform their duties before relatively small gatherings, but Norway’s churches would remain empty throughout the war.
Infuriated by the defiance of the clergy, Quisling ordered the arrest of Bishop Eivind Berggrav, primate of the Norwegian Lutheran Church and a key leader in the underground. To intimidate other clergy and bring them into line, Quisling planned to try Berggrav before a kangaroo court and have him executed.
Berggrav’s arrest became known that same day to Lieutenant Colonel Theodor Steltzer, a staff officer at German headquarters in Oslo. Since reaching Norway in late 1940, Steltzer had been playing a dangerous game. He belonged to the Schwarze Kapelle (Black Orchestra), the secret group of high-ranking German military and government leaders whose goal was to get rid of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime.
Soon after his arrival in Oslo, Steltzer had established clandestine contact with Bishop Berggrav and the Norwegian underground, and he tipped off the resistants about impending Gestapo raids and other important information. Now he immediately contacted an ally, Helmuth von Moltke, a legal adviser to the Abwehr in Berlin, and asked him to intervene on Berggrav’s behalf with the intelligence agency’s chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who was a leader in the Schwarze Kapelle.
Canaris rushed Moltke to Oslo, where the lawyer and Colonel Steltzer argued to the German High Command that executing Norway’s most popular cleric would trigger massive unrest among the population. Consequently, Quisling was ordered to release the bishop from prison and put him under house arrest in Oslo.
Bishop Eivind Berggrav continued as a Norwegian underground leader by wearing many disguises, including that of a policeman. (Authors collection)
Norwegian policemen thought to be loyal to the Nazis guarded the house, but they were patriots and looked the other way when the bishop sneaked out the door countless times to meet with the Norwegian underground during the remainder of the war. Because Berggrav’s face was widely known to the Germans, he became a master of disguises. At various times he posed as a policeman, as a college professor complete with thick-lensed eyeglasses and fake mustache, and as a junk dealer pushing a dilapidated cart.
After the war, Colonel Theodor Steltzer, who had saved the bishop’s life, was honored by grateful Norwegians by being presented to the restored national leader, King Haakon VII, who had been in exile.6
In early June 1940, a secret British organization known as MI-9 began wrestling with an unprecedented and unforeseen problem: How could hundreds, perhaps thousands, of British soldiers cut off from their units and in hiding in France be rescued from under the noses of the Germans?
A week earlier, 850 vessels of all shapes and sizes had begun evacuating some 340,000 British soldiers trapped at the small Channel port of Dunkirk, France, but many men had to be left behind.
The daunting task of locating and evacuating the British refugees fell into the hands of Brigadier Norman R. Crockett, head of MI-9, the War Office intelligence branch. Section IS9(d) was responsible for conducting covert operations in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands to rescue the military evaders.
Section IS9(d) was located at 5 St. James Street in London, and one of its chambers was known as Room 900. So the evade-and-escape organization was called Room 900, and its existence was known only to a select few military and government officials.
Within a month after the Dunkirk debacle, Brigadier Crockett began organizing escape lines. Most of the cut-off British soldiers were hiding near the Channel coast. But German forces were guarding the ports and beaches, making it impossible to smuggle evaders directly across to Britain. Consequently, the escape lines would have to extend all the way from northeastern France westward to the towering Pyrenees Mountains at the French-Spanish border.
In one of its first moves, Room 900 sent Donald Darling (code-named Sunday), an MI-9 agent posted at Gibraltar, to neutral Spain, where he was to forge links at the western end of the escape lines. Bright and energetic, he established safe houses where the escapees could hole up until transportation to Britain could be arranged for them.
Sunday then traveled to Lisbon in neutral Portugal, where he organized a system for the evaders to be carried across the Channel to Britain by boat.
At the same time Sunday was in Spain and Portugal, Room 900 arranged for an unlikely secret agent, Nubar Gulbenkian, to create an operation to escort the escapees over the rugged Pyrenees, where they could be taken in tow by Sunday’s agents.
Gulbenkian was in his early thirties, wealthy, and an official in the neutral Iranian legation in London. For whatever his motives, he had sought out British agents and volunteered to carry out undercover assignments in foreign countries.
Disguised as a traveling salesman, Gulbenkian was to go to the city of Perpignan, on the French side of the Pyrenees, and make contact with a garage owner known as Parker, whose real name was Michel Pareyre. He had been recruited as an MI-9 agent by Sunday.
Room 900 officials told Gulbenkian that he was to arrange with Parker for the payment of guides to escort British escapees over the Pyrenees. His Majesty’s Treasury would pay forty pounds for each British officer and twenty pounds for other ranks. The plan was for Parker to hide British escapees in his garage, then turn them over to guides. The guides would sneak the escapees into Spain.
As planned, Nubar Gulbenkian met Parker several days later in a café at Perpignan. Neither had seen the other before. As recognition signals, Parker was reading a French newspaper upside down, and the Iranian asked him, “Have you a Parker pen?” The discussion was brief, for the Gestapo in disguise had heavily infiltrated the region. The MI-9 agent told Parker that he would be paid only on results and that money due him would be held in London until the end of the war. The Frenchman agreed to that arrangement.
While Donald Darling in Spain and Portugal and Nubar Gulbenkian along the Pyrenees were creating links at the far end of the escape lines, Captain Ian Garrow had been risking his life almost daily in German-held France organizing a system for getting the evaders to the French-Spanish frontier.
Energetic and resourceful, Garrow had been cut off when his Scottish 51st “Highland” Division was overrun near Dunkirk. Rather than try to get to England, he chose instead to remain in France and help other British soldiers to escape from the Continent.
Garrow was confronted by enormous obstacles, other than the quite real threat of being arrested by the Gestapo and possibly executed for his covert activities. There was a lack of funds, he had no radio communication with London, and he did not speak a word of French.
During the next year, however, the captain organized an escape line from Paris (where evaders were collected from northern France) to the Pyrenees. There the garage owner code-named Parker and the agents he had recruited escorted the refugees across the mountains to Sunday’s men.
By mid-1942 Garrow’s “underground railroad” was shuttling the evaders for hundreds of miles to sanctuary in Spain. Disguised in civilian clothes, they traveled singly or in tiny groups by foot, bicycle, horse and cart, bus, car, and train.
Finally, Garrow’s luck ran out. He was betrayed by a civilian, arrested by Vichy France police, and sent to prison. But he had set the pattern for escape lines for others to follow.
At the same time that Garrow had been marooned at Dunkirk two years earlier, a Coldstream Guards officer, James Langley, was with the rear guard. After most of the British Army had left the fireswept beaches, Langley was seriously wounded. His soldiers carried him on a litter to the shore, where a few small boats were preparing to sail for England. But a Royal Navy skipper explained that he could not be taken aboard because a litter would occupy as much space on a ship as would four men standing up.
A day later, Langley was captured. He was put in a German prisoner-of-war camp, where a British surgeon had to amputate his mutilated left arm. His leg had been so shattered by shell fragments that he could get around only by crawling. Later he was transferred to a hospital in Lille, France.
Despite his physical injuries and weakened condition, Langley managed to escape from the hospital only four months after being wounded. Then he made his way alone to Spain, and he reached England in a small boat on almost the first anniversary of his capture at Dunkirk.
British Army officials were preparing to discharge Langley because of his physical handicaps. But he raised such a protest that he was assigned to active duty in Room 900. In the months ahead he organized the escape of many British soldiers from the Continent.
By now the RAF and the U.S. Eighth Air Force, based in England, had been increasing the frequency and weight of their attacks on facilities used by the German war machine in France and the Low Countries, and fliers were being downed in greater numbers than before.
Soon Langley began hearing reports from his agents across the Channel about the actions of a Briton who was running great risks to help evaders get out of France. On one occasion the mystery man, Harold Cole (his true name), had smuggled six British airmen out of German-occupied France to the Pyrenees. Before departing, the senior officer of the group had asked the escort for his name so that his courage and resourcefulness could be recognized by the Crown at some future date.
“I’m Inspector Thompson of Scotland Yard,” Cole replied.
Later, a French woman, who was being sought by the Gestapo for her participation with the resistance, and her family arrived in England. She told authorities that an Inspector Thompson had made their escape possible.
By now, Scotland Yard was curious to uncover the true identity of Inspector Thompson. So the French woman was invited to Scotland Yard to look at photographs of all of the Yard’s inspectors. None of them was Thompson. Then, acting on a hunch, a detective showed her a rogues’ gallery of wanted felons.
“Why, there is Inspector Thompson!” she exclaimed, pointing to the image of Harold Cole, a fugitive from a murder charge.
Only after the war would British sleuths piece together the full truth about Cole. A few months before the conflict erupted in September 1939, he had disappeared after learning the police were trying to locate him for the homicide. Later, after the British Army had been sent to France to whip Adolf Hitler, he popped up in Paris wearing the uniform of a British soldier, claiming that he had escaped from Dunkirk. In fact, he had never been in the army.
After France surrendered in May 1940 and the Wehrmacht occupied much of the country, a latent patriotic instinct may have been ignited in Cole. Apparently on his own volition, he began assisting British evaders.
Somewhere along the way, Cole was arrested by the Gestapo and, in exchange for not being executed, agreed to continue his work on the escape lines but keep the Gestapo informed in advance of his activities. Although he had previously helped many escapers to get to England, his treachery now resulted in a large number of helpers being arrested and shot by the Gestapo.
Wearing the uniform of a German captain, Cole was in Paris when Allied spearheads approached the city in August 1944, and he fled eastward on the heels of the retreating Wehrmacht. About a year later, a few months after Victory in Europe (V-E) Day, Cole was taken into custody by U.S. authorities in Germany while posing as a captain in British intelligence.
Under armed guard, Cole was brought to Paris and ensconced in a U.S.-operated prison. Within days, he stole an American sergeant’s uniform and walked out the front door, unchallenged.
Cole holed up in a cheap rooming house, and the landlady reported him as a deserter. When French police arrived to take him into custody, a shoot-out erupted. The part-time hero, part-time villain was hit in the head by a bullet and died instantly.
During the war, the escape lines had brought back some five hundred British soldiers and perhaps three thousand Allied airmen. Not all the evaders had made it home, however. German and Vichy French prison camps held hundreds who had been apprehended while trying to reach Spain.
The cost of rescuing so many had been heavy. Some five hundred French, Belgian, and Dutch patriots who had aided the evaders were known to have been executed by the Germans. The true figure might have been several times that number.7
Major Bernhard KrÜger, youthful, ambitious, hard-driving, was summoned to an office in Berlin in July 1942, and sworn to secrecy by a small group of German intelligence officers. Then a bombshell was dropped on Krüger: He was to take charge of a master plot designed to throw Great Britain’s economy into chaos by counterfeiting British currency. Code-named Operation Bernhard, the scheme had been conceived by forty-two-year-old Heinrich Himmler, the one-time chicken farmer who now held the exalted rank of Reichsführer. As chief of the Gestapo and the SS, Himmler was Germany’s second most powerful man.
Responding with typical alacrity, Major Krüger tried to recruit skilled experts at the Reichsbank and the Reich Printing Company, but even in wartime and at great personal risk, they declined to get involved in printing another nation’s currency.
Undaunted, the resourceful major rapidly rounded up the technicians he needed from concentration camps, whose inmates included large numbers of men who had excelled in civilian life before being judged “enemies of the people.” Those selected were transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where a counterfeiting plant had been set up in an isolated compound surrounded by electrified barbed-wire fences.
Legitimate money printers around the world would have been envious of the sophisticated plant. Plates were engraved with meticulous care. Craftsmen had been threatened with the gas chamber if they tried some trickery to purposely insert a slight flaw in the plates that could result in the printed currency being detected once it got into circulation.
A German manufacturer, sworn to secrecy under pain of execution, provided the most modern of printing machinery. But perhaps the most crucial contribution of all to Operation Bernhard was the production by a prominent German paper company, long known for the high quality of its products, of Bank of England paper, with its elaborate watermarks.
By late 1942, all the kinks had been smoothed out and presses were running at full speed. Some four hundred thousand bogus British banknotes were being shipped out of Sachsenhausen each month, and this counterfeit currency was being used all over the world to finance German clandestine operations.
During the first half of 1943, London bankers became highly alarmed. Something irregular—and no doubt illegal—was taking place in Europe. A flood of fake British banknotes from Madrid, Lisbon, Zurich, Istanbul, and Stockholm, all in officially neutral countries where the Germans were known to have extensive espionage networks, were pouring into London.
Officials of the Bank of England knew that there was only one source for a counterfeiting operation on such a massive scale: Nazi Germany. These British financiers were deeply worried because with so much bogus money afloat around the world, confidence could be lost in the traditionally rock-solid British note, even to a point where the Allied war effort could be jeopardized. Such a calamitous eventuality was precisely what Reichsführer Himmler had envisioned when he hatched the scheme.
Suddenly the Bank of England jolted the financial world by announcing that it was taking from circulation all its notes and would replace them with currency of a new design. This drastic action may well have been taken in the nick of time, just before the British economic system might have been wrecked by the Nazi plot.8
On a warm afternoon in early October 1942, Donald Q. Coster, a vice consul at the U.S. consulate in Casablanca, French Morocco, was sitting with a friend at a table in a dingy waterfront café. “Vice consul” was only a cover. Actually, Coster was a spy for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and he was in the café, a popular hangout for seamen, to listen for information on ship movements.
In civilian life Coster had been a Madison Avenue advertising firm executive in New York City. When war had broken out in Europe in late 1939, he had given up his cushy job for the challenge of driving an American Field Service ambulance for the French Army. He was captured, spent several quite unpleasant weeks in German hands, was released, and came back home to join the U.S. Navy.
Coster’s fluency in the French language resulted in his being assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). With Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of French Northwest Africa, being prepared in mid-1942, Coster discovered that, unbeknownst to him, he had “volunteered” for service with “Wild Bill” Donovan’s OSS.
Soon the former advertising executive found himself seated in the Washington office of Bill Donovan and was informed that, effective immediately, he was a “vice consul” in the pay of the State Department. But he would take his orders from the OSS.
“Casablanca is the most important place in the world at this moment,” Donovan declared in a mysterious tone. “And you are going to Africa, to Casablanca.”
Coster swallowed hard. It appeared that he, a total amateur in the cloak-and-dagger business, was going to be plunged right in the center of intrigue and espionage hijinks.
“French Northwest Africa will be invaded one of these days,” Donovan continued, “by either the Germans or the Allies. Your job will be to help strengthen an Allied deception scheme to coerce the French Army in North Africa and German intelligence to believe that if the Allies invade, we will go ashore at Dakar.”
“Yes, sir!” replied Coster, who felt the blood draining from his face.
Dakar, a major port in Sénégal on the western coast of Africa, lies 1,440 miles southwest of Casablanca. Dakar was a plausible locale for an Allied invasion. It was directly across the Atlantic from Brazil, which declared war on Germany in August 1942, becoming the first South American nation to do so.
To reinforce the many-faceted Dakar deception plan, Coster was to plant misleading information with Major General Theodor Auer, chief of the German Armistice Mission, whose function in Casablanca was to enforce the terms the Nazis imposed when the French Army had surrendered in the spring of 1940.
“How you accomplish that task will be left to your ingenuity,” Donovan added. “Auer is cunning, ruthless, and knows all the tricks to catch spies.”
Coster felt a choking sensation. Dancing before his mind’s eye were a horde of Gestapo agents, cutthroat assassins, and ingenious Nazi torture techniques.
In Washington, the new OSS recruit was rushed through a quick course of instruction in the code he was to use. And little else. All he knew about espionage was what he had seen in Hollywood movies.
Now, at the disreputable waterfront café in Casablanca only a month before D-Day for Torch, two young men, obviously searching for a table at which to sit in the packed room, meandered near Coster and his friend, also a “vice consul.” Coster invited the men to share his table, hoping to gain information on ship movements.
The two strangers accepted and sat down. One, named Walter, was especially talkative. His friend hardly said a word. Walter told Coster that they were Austrians who had been in France when that country was conquered by the Wehrmacht in 1940. A short time later, Walter said, they had been jailed by the Vichy government, the puppet French administration headed by senile, eighty-four-year-old Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain.
“We managed to escape and fled to Casablanca,” Walter confided. His companion nodded in agreement.
While the chitchat continued, Walter happened to mention about “running on to Teddy Auer” on a Casablanca street. A chill shot up Coster’s back. This, no doubt, was General Theodor Auer, the sinister chief of the German Armistice Commission.
“I knew him [Auer] in Paris before I was interned,” the talkative Walter continued. “When we got to Casablanca, my partner here and I made a deal with him. We supply him with secret information and he keeps us out of jail.”
Seeing the concerned look on Coster’s face, Walter quickly added, “Of course my partner and I are very anti-Nazi.”
Coster’s mind was in a whirl. Here, by accident, was the pipeline he had been seeking to General Auer. Or had these two friendly Austrians been planted to coerce the vice consul’s true role from him? Did they really hate the Nazis? With the specter of being found dead soon in a dark Casablanca alley hovering over him, Coster decided to take a risk. He would pose as a loudmouthed, rich playboy who drank too much and talked too much. While “drunk” he would spill the beans that the Americans and the British were preparing to invade at Dakar.
Coster’s assessment of his two new friends proved to be accurate. A few days later, Walter and his companion called on General Auer and told him about the drunken State Department official’s revelation that Dakar would be the invasion target. Auer was delighted. He broke open a bottle of champagne and shared it with his two spies, who had just pulled off an intelligence bonanza—or so it seemed.
Just past midnight on November 8, 1942, the Allied invasion of the French colonies of Morocco and Algeria struck at three places—including Casablanca—along one thousand miles of North African coastline. In spite of comic-opera blunders by green and partially trained U.S. Army and Navy units, the assault troops got ashore in strength and pushed inland rapidly.
On the outskirts of Casablanca, a convoy of three German staff cars rounded a street corner and came upon an American platoon. Brakes squealed and the vehicles lurched to a halt. “Komm heraus, Schweinehunds!” (Come out, you sons of bitches!) a GI shouted, pleased to have had the chance to use the German phrase he had been honing for weeks. Ten impeccably attired members of the German Armistice Commission emerged slowly with their hands in the air.
At the same time, far to the south, a large number of U-boat wolf packs were circling around Africa’s western shore off Dakar, waiting to ambush an Allied invasion convoy that never came.9
Field Marshal Günther Hans von Kluge, leader of Army Group Central on the Eastern Front, was a favorite of Adolf Hitler and a hero to the German people. A courageous soldier and a skilled tactician, he was one of the few generals who would stand up to the führer. When Hitler telephoned with some new battlefield idea, Kluge would respond condescendingly: “But my dear führer, what you suggest simply is not practicable. You must come down out of Wolkenkuckucksheim [cloudy cuckooland].”
Although Kluge recognized the Nazi regime as the lawful government of Germany and had sworn the Fahneneid (blood oath), pledging strict obedience to Hitler, by November 1942 the field marshal was convinced that the führer was taking Germany down the road to destruction.
But when Kluge’s senior operations officer, forty-one-year-old Colonel Henning von Tresckow, delicately broached the subject of the urgent need to “eliminate” Hitler, the field marshal listened but was noncommittal. “I am a soldier, Tresckow, not a politician!” he replied evenly.
Despite the rebuff, Tresckow was encouraged by Kluge’s failure to respond angrily—or even to have the colonel arrested and court-martialed. So Tresckow plunged ahead with his efforts to eliminate the führer.
Tresckow came up with a simple plan of action: Hitler would be lured to Kluge’s headquarters and riddled with bullets by guns in the hands of German soldiers especially picked for the task. Lieutenant Colonel Georg von Boeselager, holder of the Knight’s Cross with oak leaves and swords, Germany’s highest award at the time for valor, eagerly accepted the challenge to form and lead this commando-type unit. An evaluation report described him as “a spirited cavalry officer who thinks boldly ... the idol of his men.”
Boeselager found that there was no shortage of volunteers. They were selected from his own twenty-two-hundred-man Cavalry Regiment Center, which, according to the plan he and Colonel von Tresckow had painstakingly drawn up, would be assigned to field security around Kluge’s headquarters on the day of the führer’s visit.
Success of the plot would depend on Field Marshal von Kluge’s willingness to invite Hitler to his headquarters on the specious pretext of raising the morale of the troops. Hitler would be shot down not long after he stepped down from his four-engine Condor aircraft and began walking through the towering forest that shielded Army Group Center’s command post.
Boeselager’s tough combat veterans chosen for his assassination unit, all armed with Schmeisser submachine guns, would then spring forward to engage in a firefight with Hitler’s thirty SS bodyguards, all fiercely loyal and pledged to give their lives for the führer if need be.
If Hitler’s penchant for erratic schedules and sudden changes in timetables would make it impossible to kill him before he reached the headquarters, then he would be riddled with bullets while eating lunch in the mess hall, presumably with Field Marshal von Kluge at his side. Ten officers from Boeselager’s regiment volunteered to do the mess hall shooting.
Now everything was ready for the coup d’état. But when Colonel von Tresckow approached Kluge about his role in the plot, the field marshal’s nerve failed at the last minute. No doubt the specter of the führer being blasted out of his chair by a group of decorated German combat veterans blazing away with Schmeissers in the middle of lunch was more than Kluge could bear.
Kluge’s argument was that “neither the world, nor the German people, nor the German soldier would understand such an act at this time.” Consequently, Boeselager and his hit men would have to bide their time.
A half a year later, in the summer of 1943, German conspirators pledged to the termination of Adolf Hitler felt that the time was ready to strike. The Wehrmacht had suffered disastrous setbacks on the Eastern Front, the Americans and the British had invaded and conquered Sicily, and the RAF Bomber Command continued to pulverize Germany’s cities at night while the U.S. Eighth Air Force pounded German industrial facilities by day.
Highly decorated Captain Axel von dem Bussche, who had been sent to a hospital near Berlin several weeks earlier after taking a Soviet bullet through the lungs, eagerly volunteered to be an assassin. Twenty-three years of age, Bussche had been determined to get rid of Hitler, a man he earlier had admired as a god, because of an episode in the Soviet Union several months earlier.
Captain von dem Bussche, a devout and compassionate young man, and the infantry company he commanded had just been involved in a bloody fight to capture a key town in the Ukraine. While they were taking a short break near the ruins, Bussche saw a squad of SS soldiers herding perhaps a hundred civilians into a field. While Bussche watched in horror and disbelief, the ragged townspeople were forced to dig a pit, then lie down in their own mass grave. Then the SS men riddled the hapless natives with Schmeisser bullets until all the victims were dead.
Bussche, courageous in battle, was badly shaken for days by the fact that he had not tried to stop the murders. He was ashamed to have once sworn unswerving loyalty to the man he now considered to be a mass murderer—Adolf Hitler. Bussche rejected the oath he had taken to the führer. “He has broken the oath to God a thousand times,” Bussche assured himself.
Although still weak from his serious wounds, the captain was released from the Berlin hospital, and while on leave to recuperate his strength, he and other conspirators held lengthy discussions on the technique to be used in killing Hitler. They finally decided on a scheme that called for an excuse for a lowly captain, Bussche, to get close to Hitler, who would be flanked by sharp-eyed SS bodyguards. Bussche would have a bomb with a four-and-a-half-second fuse concealed in his coat. Once he was near the führer, Bussche would activate the fuse, then wrestle with Hitler long enough for the blast to blow them both to smithereens.
In October 1943 the first gusts of Arctic cold whistled over the Russian steppes, and many commanders complained that their men’s winter combat uniforms were inadequate. A Berlin manufacturer rapidly turned out a few experimental samples of new winter garb, but the design would need Hitler’s approval before mass production could begin.
Learning of the new design, Bussche and his fellow plotters felt that this could provide the perfect means for killing Hitler. It would be arranged for Bussche to be in charge of five men flown to the führer’s battle headquarters, Wolfsschanze, in East Prussia, to model the new gear.
While conspirators at high levels began the subtle task of persuading Hitler to name a firm date for the modeling of the winter clothing, Bussche locked himself in his quarters and began experimenting with the type of bomb he would build. He inserted a fuse from a hand grenade into an explosive charge. Although the fuse would hiss when burning, he would mask the noise by faking a coughing fit moments before grabbing the führer in a bear hug.
During the last week in November, the captain concealed his homemade bomb in a satchel of clothing and flew from Berlin to Wolfsschanze. Checking into an army camp ten miles from Hitler’s headquarters, he hid his bomb and waited for a summons to model the uniforms. Meanwhile, the führer had agreed to inspect the new design, but he refused to be pinned down to a specific day or hour.
Bussche’s first order of business was to check with an officer at Wolfsschanze to confirm that the experimental uniforms had arrived from the Berlin mill. The new garb could not be found. Checking with the mill, the captain was stunned. A dozen uniforms had been put in a boxcar of a train sitting on a railroad siding in Berlin. But during a heavy British bombing raid that night, the boxcar containing the clothing became a charred, twisted wreck.
The would-be assassin had no alternative but to wait for the mill management to acquire bolts of cloth and produce a fresh consignment. However, Bussche, a battle-tested leader, could not risk drawing attention by loitering around a rear-echelon headquarters. So he concealed the homemade bomb in a musette bag and headed back to the Eastern Front to take command of his company.
Before departing, Bussche was told by another conspirator, Major General Helmuth Stieff, a staff officer at Führerhauptquartier (the führer’s headquarters), that when Hitler agreed on a new date for the modeling, an excuse would be concocted to pull the captain back from the front so he could carry out the assassination scheme.
Hitler’s evil guardian angel continued to watch over him, however. In January 1944 a Soviet artillery shell exploded at Captain von dem Bussche’s feet, and the blast knocked him unconscious. A few hours later, surgeons at a field hospital amputated his shredded leg, leaving him alive but unable to proceed with his covert mission.
Despite the assassination-plot failures, Henning von Tresckow, now a general, was determined to persevere. But his subtle search to find someone to murder Hitler proved to be futile until he accidentally discovered a likely candidate in an unlikely place—Captain Eberhard von Breitenbuch, the personal aide to Field Marshal Ernst Busch, one of the few generals still fiercely loyal to the führer.
Busch had succeeded the wounded Field Marshal von Kluge as commander of Army Group Center on the Eastern Front. Back in 1938, when General Ludwig Beck tried secretly to have the army High Command go on record as opposing Hitler’s march to war, Busch and another senior officer had been the only ones who declined to endorse the proposal.
Early in March 1944 Busch was ordered to fly to southern Germany and report to Adolf Hitler at Berghof, the führer’s large and ornate retreat perched on the Obersalzberg, 6,208 feet above the picturesque village of Berchtesgaden. Busch was supposed to present a briefing on the situation along the Army Group Center front and explain why the Wehrmacht was suffering one defeat after another.
Busch promptly called in Eberhard Breitenbuch and told him to prepare for the flight to the Berghof. Within the hour, the captain was in touch with General von Tresckow and suggested that this could be a golden opportunity to “liquidate” Hitler inside the retreat. Tresckow suggested that the field marshal’s aide use a new type of bomb with a one-second fuse, but the captain refused the suggestion. He explained that he was an expert marksman, and if he could smuggle a pistol into the führer’s presence, he could not miss a shot to the head.
Breitenbuch collected the documents that Busch would need for briefing Hitler, left behind an envelope with a letter to his wife in case the plot was successful, and slipped a pistol into a trouser pocket. Soon the field marshal and his aide were in a four-engine Condor winging toward Berchtesgaden. They reached the Berghof at noon on March 11.
As was his custom, the fifty-four-year-old absolute master of eighty million Germans kept Field Marshal Busch cooling his heels in an anteroom to the fifty-by-sixty-foot chamber where visitors were received. Breitenbuch struggled to mask his anxiety, and he wondered if any of the SS guards had noticed the bulge in his pocket where the pistol was concealed.
After a lapse of what seemed to be an eternity, an SS lieutenant colonel said that Hitler would now receive the field marshal. Busch headed for the door, followed closely by his aide, lugging Busch’s heavy briefcase. The young captain grew even more tense. In moments the führer, whom he considered to be the scourge of Germany, would be dead with a bullet in his head.
Busch reached the heavy double doors leading into the great room and was about to enter when an SS major stepped in front of Breitenbuch. This is the end, the captain reflected. But the SS man merely said, “No aides permitted inside, by the führer’s order.”
Shrugging, the field marshal took the briefcase from his aide and walked into the room, where Hitler greeted him warmly. Busch sank into a plush, oversized chair surrounded by large oil paintings, ornate tapestries, and classic statuary and soon launched a lengthy presentation on why things had gone wrong on the Eastern Front.
Outside, in the empty anteroom, Captain Breitenbuch was undergoing the torments of the damned. Had the Gestapo tapped General von Tresckow’s telephone? Was the murder plot known? At any moment, the captain expected SS men to barge into the anteroom and arrest him. He wondered nervously how he could get rid of the incriminating pistol in his pocket.
At midafternoon, after Breitenbuch had suffered mental agony for three hours, Busch strolled back through the two doors, and soon he and his aide were flying in the Condor back to the Eastern Front.
General von Tresckow and Captain Breitenbuch discussed the curious scenario at the Berghof. Why had the aide suddenly been barred? Neither could broach a reason. They could only conclude that the führer had exercised the Fingerspitzengefühl (intuition in the fingertips, or a sixth sense) for which even his staunchest enemies in Germany had long given him credit.10
In the posh Miramar Hotel in Fedala, Morocco, U.S. and French military leaders gathered to smoke the peace pipe. Lieutenant General George S. Patton Jr. and other American officers were in high good spirits, elated to have the fighting halted. So were most of the Frenchmen. However, Admiral François Michelier, the commander at Casablanca and a diehard supporter of the German puppet government in Vichy, France, was grim, even sullen. It was November 11, 1942.
Three days earlier, American and British forces, sailing from the United States and the United Kingdom, had stormed ashore at several key points along a twelve-hundred-mile stretch of coastline in French Northwest Africa. Code-named Operation Torch, the invasion had been launched to confront Adolf Hitler with a second front, thereby taking some of the heat from Josef Stalin’s hard-pressed armies in the Soviet Union.
After a two-day fight with French forces whose commander, Admiral Jean Darían, was loyal to the Vichy government, a cease-fire was called. It was not a French surrender, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Allied commander, was quick to point out. Rather, it was a halting of the bloodshed so the French armed forces in Northwest Africa could join with the Americans and the British in battling “our common enemy, Nazi Germany,” Eisenhower declared.
After the peace parley in Fedala, General Patton returned to his headquarters in Casablanca, the major objective his Western Task Force had seized. With time on his hands, Patton traveled to Rabat to call on the sultan, the traditional military and political leader of Morocco.
After entering the sultan’s grounds of several hundred lavishly manicured acres, Patton and his aides reached the palace itself, a huge, three-story white building of Moorish architecture. The Americans were met by the grand vizier, who wore a white robe with a hood and had a scraggly beard and an enormous set of gold-inlaid teeth. The general pondered that he must have been at least ninety-two years of age.
U.S. troops carried this two-language leaflet ashore. (Author’s collection)
The ancient one announced in cracked English that the sultan had graciously consented to see Patton, which, the general reflected, was the reason he had made the dusty jaunt from Casablanca. Patton, his aides, and an entourage of the sultan’s confidants walked up three flights of stairs, then entered a long room covered with thick, beautiful, and obscenely expensive rugs. At the end of the long chamber on a raised platform sat the sultan, who was a man in his midthirties with a mostly clean-shaven face, as opposed to the bearded legacy of scores of predecessors over the centuries.
As instructed earlier by his protocol aide, Patton walked briskly up the room, then halted before the platform and bowed from the hips, much to his consternation but in the interest of good relations with the Moroccan leader. The sultan rose regally, shook hands with Patton, and both men sat down.
During their conversation, the sultan spoke in Arabic, so there were long pauses while an interpreter translated the words into French, a language Patton spoke fluently. This procedure annoyed the general, for the Americans knew the sultan spoke French and English quite well. Rumor had it that he had graduated under an alias from Oxford University in England.
Patton masked his irritation, feeling it was important to have the leader of millions of North African Muslims regard the invaders favorably. What the fiery general did not know was that the gracious and friendly sultan was a spy for Nazi Germany.
A few months before the invasion, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, and one of his top aides, General Erwin von Lahousen, a tall, astute Austrian, had flown from Berlin to Morocco, where they recruited the sultan as a secret agent. Now the ruler presumably would provide the Abwehr with details of his long talks with General Patton. It was a high priority with Adolf Hitler that the military intentions of the Western Allies be learned so that countermeasures could be taken.
On January 13, 1943, just over three months after the sultan had hosted Patton, President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, along with their chiefs of staff, began a conference (code-named Symbol) at Casablanca to discuss future strategy. Perhaps through the sultan, the Germans seemed to know that the two Allied leaders were coming and that the discussions would be held at the fashionable seaside resort Anfa, four miles outside the city. On the first night after the arrival of the president and the prime minister, the moans of air-raid sirens caused lights to be extinguished at the Anfa.
For a half hour, the heads of state, generals, and admirals engaged in chitchat by candlelight that illuminated the whiskey bottles on the table. The all-clear was sounded. No bombs fell. Presumably a lone German reconnaissance plane had flown over to scout the situation around the Anfa.
Two nights before President Roosevelt was to depart from Casablanca, he played host at a lavish banquet to “my good friend the sultan of Morocco.” Much to the dismay of Winston Churchill and Roosevelt’s closest civilian confidant, Harry Hopkins, no alcoholic beverages were available, in deference to the sultan’s Muslim religious beliefs.
On January 25 Symbol broke up, and President Roosevelt and his entourage left Casablanca in his personal airplane, Sacred Cow. In Berlin that same day, General von Lahousen wrote in the diary at Abwehr headquarters: “Orders have been received [from Adolf Hitler] that the letter received from the sultan of Morocco should be kept top secret. It contains information of the highest strategic and political importance.”
The letter was the sultan’s detailed recollections of his conversation with President Roosevelt at the Casablanca banquet. What the Moroccan leader had learned would never be known, but it was likely that his lengthy communication contained reference to a factor of utmost importance to Berlin: that the British and Americans would continue operations in the Mediterranean in 1943, rather than launch a cross-Channel assault from England against northern France, as the German leaders had feared.11
Two of the brightest stars in the Nazi hierarchy were SS General Reinhard Heydrich, the thirty-six-year-old chief of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the intelligence branch of the Schutzstafel (SS), and his top deputy, SS Major General Walther Schellenberg. At thirty years of age, Schellenberg was the youngest general in the German armed forces.
Both men had been selected for their posts by Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, who, as head of the Gestapo and the SS, was the second most powerful man in the Third Reich. No doubt Himmler saw in the two young men reflections of his own character: a blend of keen and innovative minds with the ruthless instincts and morals of gangsters.
Tall, slim, and blond, Reinhard Heydrich was a first-class fencer, an excellent horseman, and a talented violinist. Extremely ambitious, he envisioned the day when all German espionage services would be united under one leader: himself.
Walther Schellenberg, equally ambitious, had studied to be a physician for two years, but he changed his mind and earned a law degree at the University of Bonn. He first came to Himmler’s attention by giving a lecture on German law in which he castigated the Roman Catholic Church, a primary target of Nazi leaders.
Boyish and charming, Schellenberg hoped to one day replace Heydrich as chief of the SD, but that goal did not interfere with the close relationship the two men had. They complemented one another perfectly. All one of them had to do was to throw out a vague idea—such as kidnapping two British spies in the Netherlands, or planting an agent in the home of the British ambassador in Turkey—and the other would elaborate on the scheme and carry it out to perfection.
One day in 1942, Schellenberg was seated in a comfortable chair in Heydrich’s ornate Berlin office, and the two men were discussing possible Machiavellian operations. Suddenly Heydrich hit on a novel espionage plot: Establish a place in Berlin where foreign notables could come and relax amid attractive company and, involuntarily, give up information important to the Third Reich.
Schellenberg took that thread of an idea and embroidered on it without further consultation with his boss, Heydrich. Heydrich’s brainstorm would be known as the Kitty Salon, and it would become quite famous and popular among notables, foreign and domestic, in Berlin.
A large number of the prettiest and most vivacious prostitutes were rounded up and sworn to secrecy. Their task was to “entertain” the foreign dignitaries, subtly ply them with alcoholic drinks, and extract information from them. Also recruited as “hostesses” for the Kitty Salon were a number of Berlin women who had high social standing. They claimed to have volunteered for the undercover duty through patriotism, to help the fiihrer.
The scheme exceeded the fondest expectations of the two SD leaders. A large number of foreign diplomats and high-ranking military officers in civilian clothes spilled out secrets in this paradise filled with hidden microphones, tape recorders, and cameras.
One visitor to this posh brothel was Count Galeazzo Ciano, who was married to the only daughter of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. To the surprise of no one, after the 1930 nuptials Ciano rose rapidly in the foreign service, and in 1936 the thirty-three-year-old count reached the top: foreign minister.
Ciano dealt often with Nazi leaders, and he had signed the Pact of Steel in an elaborate ceremony in Berlin on May 22, 1939. If either Germany or Italy were to go to war, the pact stated, “the other power will immediately come to its partner’s aid with its full military strength.”
If Count Ciano had any moral scruples, he kept them concealed. To him, morality in international relations was a fairy tale. Morals in his private life were equally nonexistent. Despite these flaws, many women found him to be witty and charming and were attracted by his classic good looks.
In February 1943, after the war began to turn against the Axis Powers (mainly Germany and Italy), bombastic Benito Mussolini began reshuffling his government in what would be a losing effort to retain power. Son-in-law Ciano was appointed ambassador to the Vatican. Four months later, after the Western Allies had conquered the island of Sicily and were preparing to leap across the Strait of Messina and invade mainland Italy, mild little King Victor Emmanuel III summarily booted out Adolf Hitler’s good friend Mussolini from the post he had held for twenty-one years. The monarch then had Mussolini arrested and locked up at an undisclosed locale.
A short time later, Count Ciano—quite wisely, no doubt—vanished from Rome, leaving his wife, Edda, behind. Soon he popped up in Berlin, a curious place for him to take refuge in light of the fact that his opposite number in the Third Reich, Joachim von Ribbentrop, detested him. So did Heinrich Himmler, the SS chief.
No doubt Walther Schellenberg’s SD agents were monitoring the hidden bugs in the infamous Kitty Salon when their ears must have perked up: one of the “guests” that night was Count Ciano. Before he could leave the ornate establishment of pretty young women, the Italian was pounced on by Schellenberg’s men and put in jail.
In happier times, Count Galeazzo Ciano (left) and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. (National Archives)
Now began a cat-and-mouse game between the incarcerated Italian count and top Nazi officials in Berlin. Since 1940, Reinhard Heydrich’s agents had known that Ciano kept a voluminous diary, and they learned that he had shown portions of it to friends that disclosed Adolf Hitler’s double dealings with foreign dignitaries.
That diary had to be tracked down. Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop offered to free Ciano in exchange for all copies of his diary. Apparently the proposal was either refused or Ciano insisted on time to think it over. No doubt he realized that his best chance of escaping the firing squad or the hangman’s noose was his incriminating diaries.
A German woman known only as “Frau Beetz” had been assigned as Ciano’s interpreter. She visited him in his cell almost daily. Actually, Beetz was an SD agent whose task was to coerce Ciano into disclosing the location of the diary. In a curious twist, the woman apparently became enamored of the handsome, charismatic count, and she became more interested in helping the Italian get out of jail than she was in Nazi goals.
Ciano, growing more desperate each day, took a gamble and put his faith in Frau Beetz. Had his judgment been wrong, he could have been signing his own death warrant. He told her where the diary was hidden, and she found an excuse to go to Rome, recover the document, and turn it over to Edda Ciano.
Edda contacted German authorities in Rome, handed over six volumes of transcriptions of harmless conversations between her husband and German leaders over the years, but refused to give up the diary unless the count was released.
Meanwhile, Ciano had been taken to Scalzi Prison in Verona, a city in northern Italy. On instructions from his father-in-law, Benito Mussolini, who had set up a caretaker government after being rescued from captivity by German commandos, the count was charged with treason.
Dragged from Cell 27 on January 11, 1944, Galeazzo Ciano was shot to death in the courtyard of Scalzi Prison. Had he not succumbed to the lure of the Kitty Salon, he might have escaped to neutral Switzerland and survived the war.
Prolonged efforts by Reinhard Heydrich and Walther Schellenberg to locate and confiscate the Ciano diary proved to be in vain. On the day before her husband was riddled with bullets, Edda Ciano reached Geneva with the diary. Soon she released it to the Chicago Daily News for global publication in serial form.12
Night had cast its veil over Bern, the medieval, picturesque Swiss capital, as the hulking figure ambled up to the building at Herrengasse 23. Squinting in the dim glow of a streetlight, Hans Bernard Gisevius, an Abwehr agent under the cover of a German vice consul, discerned the lettering on a small sign next to the door: “Allen W. Dulles, Special Assistant to the U.S. Minister.”
The sign was merely part of the games that those involved in international intrigue play. Dulles, as nearly all of the one hundred or so German spies roaming about neutral Switzerland knew, was actually the OSS station chief in Bern, a hotbed of espionage.
Gisevius rapped on the door and was greeted by Dulles himself. It was a strange rendezvous indeed: the American spymaster and a key figure in the Abwehr, the Nazi intelligence agency. It was February 1943, and the war’s fortunes had begun to turn against Adolf Hitler after more than three years of largely battlefield successes.
Despite his deceptively mild appearance, Dulles was tough-minded and cagey. He was fond of tweed jackets and bow ties. He wore rimless spectacles and was a stereotype of Hollywood’s version of a kindly college professor.
During World War I he had gained experience in undercover activities doing the same job he was now performing a war later—collecting intelligence from inside Germany. In the earlier conflict, his cover had been as an employee of the U.S. State Department.
Dulles’s guest on this night, Hans Gisevius, who had a stiff Prussian bearing, had joined the Gestapo in 1933, shortly after Adolf Hitler came to power, only to be ousted six months later because of his lack of enthusiasm for the Nazi cause. Then he became a member of the Berlin Police Department, but he was fired for criticizing the elite SS, the führer’s bodyguard.
In 1939, just before the outbreak of war, the 270-pound Gisevius joined the Schwarze Kapelle, the small conspiratorial group bent on ousting Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr and a leader in the Schwarze Kapelle, took Gisevius as an agent and assigned him to the consulate in Zurich to be the eyes and ears of the German anti-Hitler conspiracy in Switzerland.
Gisevius first had tried to establish a covert contact with the British secret service in Switzerland, but he had been rejected. However, Allen Dulles had decided to take a chance on this incomparable pipeline into the highest levels in Berlin.
After a secret meeting with the big German, held on a dark side street, Dulles had been impressed with his sincerity. Subsequently, Gisevius made numerous nocturnal visits to Herrengasse 23, and plans were worked out between the two men for Gisevius to recruit couriers to bring high-grade intelligence out of Berlin to Dulles.
One evening, as the two men were dining at Herrengasse 23, Dulles’s female cook cracked the kitchen door a few inches and listened. She had not seen Gisevius before and did not know who he was. However, she was surprised that Dulles and his guest were conversing in German.
Her curiosity aroused, the woman sneaked into another room and inspected the guest’s hat. In it were the initials H.B.G.
Within an hour, the cook left the premises and headed for the German consulate, where she informed an official about the hulking man with the closely cropped hair who was meeting secretly with the American master spy in Switzerland.
For the previous few weeks, Dulles’s cook, a Swiss, had been on the German embassy payroll and assigned the task of reporting on “suspicious” visitors at Herrengasse 23.
When Vice Consul Gisevius reported for work the next day, he was confronted by two consulate officials, who accused him of treason. A quickwitted man, Gisevius feigned deep indignation and loudly rebuked the two men. Of course he had visited Dulles, and there was good reason for his doing so: The American was providing him with secret intelligence about the Allies.
Glowering down on the now subdued consulate officials, the six-foot-five Gisevius said that he was willing to forget their impertinence, but if they valued their jobs, they had better forget what Dulles’s cook had told them.
Before the day was out, Gisevius made secret contact with Dulles, and the American master spy promptly fired his cook, learning for the first time that she was a Nazi spy. For his part, Hans Gisevius learned a valuable lesson: A secret agent must never display his initials inside his hatband.13
