The Secret Warriors

Dick Canidy was standing in the fuselage of a Curtiss Wright CW-20 airplane (military designation C-46 Commando) wearing oil-stained mechanic’s coveralls. He had come up to Newark from Summer Place in Deal on a New Jersey Central Railroad commuter train in a business suit, taken a Public Service bus to the airport, walked to Hangar 17, and changed into the coveralls. He had made the same trip every day for the past four days.

Two men, also wearing grease-stained overalls, were with him inside the cavernous main compartment of the C- 46—there was room, in addition to general cargo, for 40 fully equipped troops, or 33 stretchers, or five Wright R- 3350 engines, or their equivalent weight of other goods. One of them was an airframe mechanic on loan from Pan American Airways, and the other was Colonel Charles Augustus “Lucky Lindy” Lindbergh, U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve, Inactive, the first man to have flown solo across the Atlantic Ocean.

Lindbergh and the airframe mechanic were trying to come up with a simple, reliable means of augmenting the C- 46’s fuel-carrying capacity with auxiliary tanks that could be jettisoned in the air. The normal range of the C-46— 1,170 miles at 180 knots—was not going to be enough for the mission planned.

Canidy no longer felt as awed as he had been initially in the very presence of Lindbergh. For one thing, Lindbergh didn’t act like a colonel, much less like one of the most famous and admired men in the world. The lanky aviator Lindbergh had made it almost immediately plain that since Canidy was another flier, he was thus a brother.

He had then proved, in a number of small ways, that he meant what he said. Canidy had shared a dozen cold and soggy hot dogs with the tall, shy hero. Twice, wearing Pan American coveralls, Lindbergh had walked the half mile to the terminal to buy them himself. He had not been recognized. He looked like just one more airplane mechanic trying to fix a broken bird.

That was not to say that Canidy had grown entirely comfortable around Lindbergh. He hadn’t been sure what to call him, for one thing. He certainly couldn’t call him Slim, and—considering President Roosevelt’s refusal to call Colonel Lindbergh to active duty—he wasn’t sure how Lindbergh would react to being called Colonel.

Finally, toward the end of their first day together, he had gathered his courage and asked him what he would like to be called.

“Colonel,” Canidy blurted, “I’m not a major. I’m not really in the Air Corps. I’m just wearing the uniform.”

After the first day, Canidy had not worn the major’s uniform. And two days later, when he walked into the Pan American hangar at Newark Airport, he knew from the look on Lindbergh’s face that he had offended him.

“Mr. Canidy,” Lindbergh greeted him, “as someone who will probably never again wear a uniform, who has never heard a shot fired in anger, I feel a little foolish being called Colonel by the first ace in the American Volunteer Group. Why didn’t you tell me about that?”

He still could not bring himself to call Lindbergh Slim. Connecting one casually dropped fact with another, he learned that Lindbergh had personally laid out, then flown himself, most of Pan American’s long-distance flight routes in South America and across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and that he had an awesome amount of experience with all of the Sikorsky amphibians and seaplanes Pan Am used.

“I think,” he told Canidy over a hot dog and a Coke, “that we’ve already reached the point of diminishing return in seaplane design. The engines—to avoid ingesting water on takeoff or landing—have to be placed very high. To mount them that far above the water, we can’t use aerodynamically efficient wings and engine locations. And if we make these planes any larger, we will have to make their hulls correspondingly stronger, and the weight penalty there is too high.

“There’s no question in my mind that the next step in transoceanic flight is going to be an aerodynamically efficient airframe, designed for flight at very high altitude. Howard Hughes showed me some preliminary drawings of a really beautiful airplane that will carry seventy people at thirty thousand feet at nearly four hundred miles an hour for three thousand miles. The big leap forward will come when they come up with a reliable jet engine. With jets, transport aircraft will actually approach the speed of sound.”

Canidy, who had heard only the most vague references to jet engines, said so, and was astonished to learn from Lindbergh that both the English and the Germans had test-flown jet-powered aircraft.

Lindbergh had already rejected Donovan’s notion that a seaplane, one of Pan American’s Sikorskys, be borrowed for the long-distance cargo flight he wanted. And Lindbergh also had quickly deduced where that flight was headed.

“Bill Donovan won’t tell me where this flight is going,” Lindbergh said, “and if you know, I suppose you can’t tell me either. But unless you tell me it’s a waste of my time, I’m going to work on the idea that it’s probably some place on the west coast of Africa.”

Lindbergh shrugged. “And since there is some question about where my sympathies lie in this war, I don’t suppose I’ll be asked to fly this mission. That means, I suppose, that you will.”

“Huh!” Lindbergh snorted, and then went on: “Well, we’ll proceed on the notion that you’ll be flying it.”

“I really don’t know, Colonel,” Canidy pursued. “I’ve never flown anything but fighters—and a Beech D18S.”

“They’re sending kids with a hundred twenty hours’ total time to Europe as B-17 aircraft commanders,” Lindbergh said. “How many hours did you say you have, Ace?”

Canidy didn’t reply. He had more than 2,000 hours in the air, more than twice 120 hours in combat, but he was reluctant to say so.

Lindbergh chuckled, then went on: “Far down the west coast of Africa. Perhaps as far as South Africa. The way to do that is with a Curtiss.”

“Because it can fly faster and higher than a Sikorsky, and when we solve the problem of auxiliary fuel tanks, maybe a thousand miles farther.”

Lindbergh had arranged for a Pan American Stratoliner, the civilian version of the Commando, to be flown to Newark. The story was let out that it had been requisitioned by the Air Corps. While one crew of workmen stripped the seats, the carpets, and the sound-deadening material from the cabin, another crew removed the glistening white paint and Pan American insignia from the outside skin. Then Hangar 17 was isolated and placed under guard by Air Corps military policemen. Canidy came to understand that isolating aircraft and cargo was a routine procedure these days.

Whenever a crew from Pan American was doing something that did not require his expertise, Lindbergh talked to Canidy at length about long-distance, high-altitude flight. In the course of these discussions, Lindbergh and Canidy prepared more than a dozen flight plans, all based on the idea that the departure point would be either the Azores or one of the American air bases in England. Though they didn’t know where they were going, or even where they would leave from, Lindbergh seemed determined to have a flight plan prepared for every possibility.

Lindbergh also spent long hours showing Canidy around the Curtiss’s cockpit, familiarizing him with the controls and the peculiarities of the aircraft, while delivering conversational lectures on how to milk the most mileage from its twin 2,000-horsepower Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp engines. He gave no consideration to the fact that Canidy had never flown the Curtiss. Lindbergh seemed to believe that little problem could be solved in an hour or two in the left seat, going around the pattern shooting touch-and-go landings.

Although Canidy was by no means modest about his flying ability—he was, after all, a pretty good fighter pilot— flying the Curtiss when the time came made him more than a little nervous.

And—there being no question in his mind that Lindbergh had correctly deduced where the plane was headed—what he had come to think of as the African flight wasn’t all Canidy had to deal with.

His primary duty was still the baby-sitting of Admiral de Verbey at Summer Place, and there were always other problems with that—most of them small but time-consuming ones with the guards. They developed colds. One of them fell over a piece of driftwood on the beach, dislocated his shoulder, and nearly died of exposure before he was found. And then disputes between the guards over the duty roster had to be resolved.

Canidy and the admiral had quickly dropped the polite fiction that Canidy was his liaison officer. The admiral knew that he was being politely held prisoner. To pretend otherwise would have been insulting.

And the admiral placed yet another demand on Canidy’s time. In what Canidy came to think of as his Great Summer Place Mistake, on his second or third night in Deal—caught up in the excitement of the game—he had played some first-class bridge, wiping out the admiral and Mrs. Whittaker and awing the ex-FBI agent who had been drafted for a fourth.

The admiral thereafter saw in Canidy a bridge player worthy of his own considerable talent. From then on, whenever Canidy sat down near a flat surface, the admiral started drawing up chairs and shuffling cards. Canidy soon realized that he should have dropped the cards on the floor the first night.

And then the admiral announced, dead serious, that he intended to steal—he said “restore to service against the Boche”—the battleship Jean Bart, the largest vessel in the French Navy, currently at anchor “under German monitor-ship” in Casablanca harbor.

The first time Canidy learned this, he was torn between amusement and concern for the admiral’s mental health. Telling himself that humoring the feisty little old man was the price he was going to have to pay to keep the admiral happy, he had reluctantly presented himself at Admiral de Verbey’s war plans room—a glassed-in porch on the second floor—to be “briefed.”

Charts of Casablanca harbor, the mouth of the Mediterranean, and the eastern Atlantic had been thumbtacked to the walls. The halves of a Ping-Pong table, resting on folding chairs, now held large sketches—drawn from memory—of the battleship itself. Deadly serious, the admiral had used the charts and drawings to show Canidy how the vessel could be seized by a small force and by judicious use of watertight doors, and how the vessel could afterward be refueled under way at sea.

By the time the admiral finished outlining his plan to steal the sixth- or seventh-largest naval vessel in the world from under the noses of the German forces in Casablanca, Canidy was no longer convinced that the old man was living in cuckoo land. Improbable was not quite the same thing as insane.

First of all, the admiral had made it clear that his chief and only reason for stealing the Jean Bart was as a symbol. Removing the ship from the shaming control of the Germans would not just humiliate them; more important, it would profoundly challenge the belief now held by most Frenchmen that since nothing could be done against the Boches, the logical thing to do was accommodate them.

In compliance with the terms of the Franco-German armistice, the battleship still remained in French hands with her full crew and enough ammunition for both her main turrets and her extensive complement of antiaircraft cannon and machine guns. In the event of an attack by any enemy—read English or American—against the sovereign soil of neutral France, the Jean Bart was expected by the Germans to respond with all its firepower.

For several reasons, the Germans were not particularly worried that her crew would turn the Jean Bart’s weaponry on them or suddenly decide to let loose the lines and go to sea. For one, the honor of the French Navy was at stake. France had signed an armistice with Germany. Marshal Pétain, as Chief of the French State, had through official channels ordered her captain to remain in port, and to defend French soil.

More practically, the Jean Bart’s fuel tanks were virtually dry. She was regularly refueled, but with only enough oil to run one of her four engines at steaming speed for twelve hours. That was not nearly enough fuel for a dash for the open sea. A dash like that would require all four engines running at full power.

It was, however, sufficient fuel to provide electrical services and power for her turrets and separate cannon and their ammunition hoists. Each of her four engines was run in turn, which kept all four in good running order.

According to the admiral, there were thus only two major problems to be overcome in the “liberation” of the Jean Bart. The first was the question of the willingness of her captain to fly in the face of his honor and violate his orders.

The presence of Vice Admiral de Verbey on the scene would handle that problem. He was not only the former captain of the Jean Bart, but was also now the senior admiral not under the German thumb. If he ordered her to sea, his orders would be obeyed.

The second problem, fuel, was by no means as hopeless as it might first appear. Though the main tanks were officially empty, there was still residual fuel—many tons of it—in each tank, left there because it was beyond the reach of her between-the-tanks fuel-transfer pumps.

But by setting up portable pumps, the “empty” tanks could rather easily be pumped dry of their “residual” fuel, and that fuel transferred to the “active” tank. The admiral’s calculations had determined that there would be enough fuel in the “active” tank to run all Jean Bart’s four engines at full power for almost two hours.

That would see her out of the harbor and into the Mediterranean. There she would be met, the admiral planned, by an American tanker and an escort, preferably of destroyers and a cruiser. If the escort—and the Jean Bart herself—could provide defense against the aircraft the Germans would send after her, sufficient fuel could be transferred in an hour to give the Jean Bart the means to sail into the Atlantic out of range of German aircraft. Then full refueling could be accomplished more or less at leisure.

What the admiral still required, and what Canidy decided to get for him, were a few technical facts: How much fuel per minute could be pumped from a tanker into the Jean Bart’s tanks? Using how many lines? What was the pressure of the lines? At what speed could a U.S. Navy tanker steam while her fuel lines were attached to the Jean Bart? In what sea conditions?

“You ever think of making an investment in a bridge, Canidy?” Douglass said. “I’m sure the admiral has one he’d be willing to sell you cheap.”

But two days later, probably because Douglass had decided it would keep the admiral happy and away from the press, a messenger delivered an enormous stack of technical manuals containing details of U.S. Navy tanker refueling techniques and capabilities.