Chapter Twelve

The War

While Pius kept secret the great discoveries going on beneath the Vatican, World War II exploded into the deadliest conflict in human history. After initial Axis victories, the tide turned in favor of the Allies at El Alamein in the North African desert, the Naval Battle of Midway in the Central Pacific, and bloody Stalingrad in the Russian winter. The victory parades in Rome by Blackshirts carrying fasces around the Colosseum in imitation of the Roman legions disappeared. Mussolini was no Julius Caesar, and the Italian troops were no Roman legions; they died by the tens of thousands in North Africa and Russia. Death, hunger, and disease stalked every corner and almost every family in Rome.

The Church remained neutral — with a wink. Churches and priests throughout Europe were at the mercy of Nazi fanatics, with hundreds already imprisoned at Dachau (along with tens of thousands of Jews). To protect her own, the Church maintained a pretense of neutrality while riding a tiger. In reality the Church secretly carried out a number of efforts to aid the Allies and thwart Nazi power. Although Pius and the Three Amigos remained in secret contact with George Strake during the war years, their respective circumstances could not have been more different.

The Strakes — The War Years

During the war, Strake’s Conroe Field was an important ingredient in fueling the Allied war effort. The Conroe Field produced five hundred million barrels110 of crude oil, the life blood fueling Allied planes, ships, and tanks around the globe. A special pipeline — the so-called Big Inch — was built to carry it and other Texas oil to refineries in the East and then to Europe. Strake’s immense revenues continued to be contributed in substantial part to the pope’s causes. The field also enriched Conroe and formed the basis of the wealth of many others, leading to the discovery of many other smaller oil fields in similar strata in east Texas.

Strake’s restless soul also led him to wildcat in remote areas in other states. Although he enjoyed considerable success in locating new oil fields, neither he nor anyone else would ever duplicate the unexpected success of the Conroe Field.

Before World War II, the late-1930s movie Lost Horizons (based on a 1933 James Hilton best seller) described a valley called Shangri La in the Himalayan mountains that provided a refuge of peace for a World War I veteran from a world that was about to destroy itself in another war. As it turned out, the movie foreshadowed the coming of a second world war. In the mountains of Colorado before World War II broke out, George Strake found the house that would become his haven from the world: his own Shangri La. Long before, while he was on leave from the Army during World War I, George had traveled to Colorado. Like so many others, he fell in love with it, vowing to his best friend that someday he would “buy a mountain.”

In the late 1930s, he found and purchased a unique mountain valley called Glen Eyrie, near Colorado Springs and the Garden of the Gods. The 1,200-acre property had been developed in the gilded age of the 1880s and 1890s by a railroad magnate named William Palmer. As a tribute to his deceased wife and in fulfillment of a promise to her, Palmer built a large Tudor-style castle on the property. (Think of a bigger, better Downton Abbey.) It had been neglected for many years since Palmer’s death by a variety of owners. Strake restored it, turning it into an astounding summer place, its Queen Canyon rivaling in natural beauty the Maroon Bells Valley near Aspen. Its waterfalls, lake, and wildlife made it a summer heaven for the Strakes and their friends escaping hot, humid Houston. George added a more intimate house — the so-called Pink House — for his family and guests, and even added a bowling alley in the massive foyer of the main building. Although Strake would later sell the property for a nominal price to a Christian group, during the summers of the 1940s, it was the Strake family paradise. As the world once again turned to catastrophic war, Glen Eyrie was an oasis of peace.

The Strakes, perhaps not surprisingly, were never direct friends of Howard Hughes — in those days, not the decrepit recluse of later years, but rather the brilliant founder of the early airline TWA and movie producer. Because they both had strong oilfield and Houston ties and were among the wealthiest people in the United States, however, they had many common friends, both in Houston and among Hollywood movie stars.

The deep Catholic faith of the Strake family contrasted with their immense wealth and sometimes created dilemmas for the Strake children. In 1943, Howard Hughes released the film The Outlaw, highlighting Jane Russell’s busty cleavage. Hughes said there are two good reasons for any man to see Jane Russell in a movie, while Bob Hope called the movie star “the two and only Jane Russell.” The Catholic Church condemned the movie, declaring it a mortal sin to see it — a sin of sufficient gravity to cause the loss of salvation. When the young Strake kids were introduced to Jane Russell and other stars of The Outlaw by their parents at Glen Eyrie, they were terrified the entire family was risking eternal damnation.

The peace of Glen Eyrie with its waterfalls, quiet canyons, wildlife, and nearby Eagle Lake, could not have contrasted more vividly with the increasing desperation of Rome and its endangered Jews.

July 1943

The Allies destroyed the Italian and German armies in North Africa and then reached across the Mediterranean to Sicily. The spectacle of Italian crowds in Palermo and other cities wildly cheering the arrival of U.S. General Patton caused the Italian military to depose and imprison Mussolini. Walter Carroll led a team of Allied military officers to Rome, arriving at 2:30 a.m. to receive in secret the surrender of Italy from the new Italian government.111 The Germans struck first, however, before the nighttime surrender could take effect. Freeing Mussolini in a bold raid led by the Waffen-SS, the Germans set up a puppet Italian government and seized control of their former ally.

Strangely paralleling the activities of Nero, a new monster strolled in and took control of the Eternal City after the collapse of Mussolini’s government in July 1943. Adolf Hitler, like Nero, targeted a religious minority — the Jews. His minions wreaked their cruelty not in public arenas, but mostly in less public concentration camps. It was the same base, cruel execution of men, women, and children made even more widespread and sinister by modern communications and the use of modern technology to create an assembly line of death for millions of innocent people. The Nazis began a roundup of Italy’s large Jewish population for deportation to concentration camps in the North, where most of them faced extermination. The ancient Jewish population of Rome and Italy was targeted for death.

The Refugee Bureau

The Three Amigos hit upon a happy scheme to deceive the Nazis, while paradoxically aiding Axis prisoners of war. After the catastrophic German losses in North Africa and Sicily, the Allies held several hundred thousand German and Italian prisoners, including the remnants of Rommel’s Africa Corps as well as many Italian civilians interned in Libya. Montini placed Carroll and McGeough in a special Vatican Refugee Bureau ostensibly to aid the Germans and Italians held by the Allies. The choice of two Americans to lead the Bureau seemed logical to the Nazis and Fascists, as they would be best able to deal with their fellow Americans who held most of the prisoners and internees. They did actually aid the Axis prisoners, but this (unknown to the Nazis) was only a small part of what they did. The true aim of the Refugee Bureau was to save the Jews and Rome, while aiding the Allies. The Bureau provided a cover for Carroll and McGeough to cross Allied lines and actually meet with Allied leaders. They also used the Bureau to aid refugees the Nazis did not have in mind — Jewish refugees and escaped Allied POWs. Much of the Vatican Refugee Bureau’s funding came from Catholic Charities USA, whose largest funder was George Strake. (He joined the Executive Committee of Catholic Charities in 1940, following Walter Carroll’s visit.) Drawing also upon virtually unlimited financing deposited in a bank in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Carroll and Montini embarked upon dangerous schemes to aid the Allies, save Rome, and save as many Italian Jews as possible, still using the Refugee Bureau as a cover.112

Carroll and McGeough exchanged their United States passports for Vatican passports, repeatedly crossing enemy lines to bring intelligence and requests for Rome’s preservation from Pope Pius XII to General Mark Clark, commander in Italy, and General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff.¹¹³ The two priests were virtually the only Americans in Rome — an enemy capital. On at least one occasion, Carroll carried Pius’s message directly to Washington, D.C., and met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt for two and a half hours. Discovery of these activities would have brought execution.¹¹⁴

Saving Rome

In July 1943, more than nine hundred Allied bombers attacked the rail yards in Rome, which were being used to support Axis troops in the south, killing more than 4,500 Romans. This was one of only two Allied air raids on Rome — the other was a pilot error — which together caused thousands of deaths in 1943 and 1944. McGeough and Montini worked directly with “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the United States’ OSS (later the CIA) to reduce or eliminate casualties, while rescuing both the Jews and downed Allied pilots. Meanwhile, Nazi storm troopers ruled Italy, with the SS rounding up Jews and many others for transportation to extermination camps.

Montini, Carroll, and McGeough labored to dissuade the Americans from further attacks on the Eternal City. Rome was the Germans’ logistical and transportation base. In a real sense, all roads led to Rome. An important part of the mission of the Three Amigos was to dissuade the Americans from taking the logical military step of destroying the Germans’ logistical and transportation center by bombing Rome. In effect, they had to ask for the terrible sacrifice of enduring thousands of Allied casualties to preserve the Eternal City.

The Allied invasion at Salerno in Italy’s toe led only to a slow, bloody Allied advance north along the Italian Boot, so the Allies determined to strike directly at Rome through massive landings at Anzio in central Italy, less than forty miles from Rome. The Anzio landing on January 22, 1944, miscarried. The Allies were bottled up in a small beachhead perimeter — sitting ducks for the German artillery. Winston Churchill described the invasion as a great whale beached on the sand. For three long months until late May 1944, the pinned-down Allies suffered 43,000 casualties, some of their greatest single casualties of the war — vastly greater than those who would later die on the beaches of Normandy. Two Ranger Battalions lost 761 out of 767 men. It was the most disastrous Allied landing of World War II. The Nazis marched Allied prisoners captured at Anzio to Rome. There they photographed them in staged marches past the Colosseum, surrounded by Nazi soldiers, a publicity stunt designed to humiliate the United States.

Carroll’s trips back and forth across the warring lines took a terrible toll on him. His travels took him to Washington to meet with FDR for several hours, and he took several trips to Algiers to meet with Allied leaders. He went to the dangerous Anzio beachhead to minister to and share the suffering of the Allied troops trapped and dying there by the thousands. All the while he forwarded intelligence reports from behind German lines to General Mark Clark and his staff. In April 1944, Carroll suffered a major heart attack at Anzio, nearly ending his life. In typical fashion, as soon as he could stand again, although gray, weak, and frail, he renewed his activities, meeting with Clark and Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Bedell Smith, to aid the Allies, save the Jews, and preserve the city of Rome.115

Against all odds, Rome was not destroyed like so many other ancient cities of Western Europe — Cologne, Warsaw, Kiev, Hamburg, and others, which did not survive the ravages of World War II. Walter Carroll was largely responsible. As General Mark Clark, Allied Commander in Italy, later said, “Without the helpfulness and intelligence of Carroll, the outcome in Italy would have been much different.”¹¹⁶ Also without Carroll’s efforts, it is likely that the Necropolis would have become a buried afterthought in a new set of ruins produced by modern warfare.

Rome was and is the Eternal City. The city contains the physical remains of more than two thousand years of Western civilization, from the Romans through the Dark and Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Beyond its significance to Christians and Italians, it stands at the heart of much of Western history and culture from the Roman Republic through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. With its collection of buildings like the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the Forum, and its works of art like the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, the statues of Bernini, the Sistine Chapel, and the Pietà of Michelangelo, Rome is truly the legacy of mankind.

On June 3, 1944, Walter Carroll’s mother was interviewed by the Pittsburgh Press. Asked whether she was anxious for her son since Rome was about to fall, she said she was not, as she was sure he would be nowhere close. She must have been quite surprised to learn the truth. General Clark entered Rome in June 1944 with Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Bedell Smith, riding in a Jeep guided by Walter Carroll, en route to meet directly with Pope Pius XII. Carroll was noticeably gray. The photo of their entry into Rome became one of the iconic photos of World War II, published even in Pittsburgh. Mrs. Carroll’s reaction upon seeing it is unknown.

In addition to saving Rome from the advancing Allies, the Vatican had an equally difficult task of preventing Rome’s destruction by the retreating Germans. Pius and Kaas negotiated with Catholic German generals to designate Rome as an “open city” — apparently in direct violation of an order from Hitler to SS General Karl Wolff to seize the Vatican and Pope Pius XII.

Saving the Jews

Equally as difficult as saving Rome was saving Italy’s ancient Jewish population. Here Montini, Carroll, and McGeough again played leading roles.117 For example, on the outskirts of Rome, the Church owned a dilapidated estate called the Janiculum Hill Property, with a building named Casa San Giovanni¹¹⁸ as its centerpiece. This served as a dormitory for Jews and other refugees in a “labyrinth of underground rooms and tunnels ventilated by shafts hidden by the outside shrubbery.”¹¹⁹ The property had been acquired by the Church with Strake’s financing for use by North American Catholic organizations prior to World War II. It was directly across from a building occupied by the Gestapo.¹²⁰ Much like an underground railroad, Carroll and McGeough hid more than one hundred of Rome’s Jews there at a time during the Holocaust, along with 1,200 sheep bought to provide agricultural cover.¹²¹ They disguised the Jewish refugees, sometimes mixed with downed Allied pilots, as shepherds. (There is no record of how well the Allied pilots actually performed as shepherds.) The stories of the so-called Roman Escape Line, along which Allied prisoners of war were shepherded through Rome (often in cassocks) to Allied lines farther south, are the stuff of legend.

Carroll engaged in a bevy of other schemes and scams to save Italy’s Jews — ranging from hiding them in the bottom levels of ancient Roman catacombs to dressing them in cassocks.122 Another person working with Montini on this operation was Father Hugh O’Flaherty, a fiery Irishman known as the Irish Pimpernel for his activities and schemes in defeating the SS and saving the Jews.¹²³ When the SS placed a death warrant on O’Flaherty’s head and drew a white line across St. Peter’s Square to mark the boundary beyond which priests would be killed for such activities, the Refugee Bureau continued with its schemes from inside the Vatican itself.

While the Nazis captured and killed several hundred thousand Italian Jews, a substantial majority of Jews in Italy were saved — a feat not achieved in any other European country. Carroll’s biographer, George Kemon, stated that the Vatican was responsible for saving some 850,000 Jews, “more than all other religious groups and relief organizations combined.”¹²⁴ At all times, Carroll drew upon seemingly unlimited and mysterious funds from a bank in his hometown of Pittsburgh.

At war’s end, the Allies liberated tens of thousands of starving, diseased prisoners in the terrible concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald. Within twenty-four hours of their liberation, Walter Carroll and Joseph McGeough arrived first at Dachau and then at Buchenwald with convoys of food, medical supplies, and more than fifty medical personnel.¹²⁵ In at least six other concentration camps, the Refugee Bureau appeared soon after liberation, saving many thousands of victims of the Nazis. Given the horrific starvation and terrible medical condition of the inmates, it is clear thousands would have died without the timely relief provided by the Bureau. There is no way to estimate the incalculable number of lives saved by these activities. An Italian inmate of Dachau at the time of Carroll’s arrival would later write of their despair turning to joy upon seeing Carroll’s caravan.126

Carroll’s activities were the stuff of legend, and stories about them multiplied. One story circulating shortly after World War II concerned the legendary, irascible General George S. Patton. Patton seized a Catholic seminary in Germany to use as a military headquarters, throwing the German seminarians onto the street. Carroll traveled to Patton’s headquarters to confront him, demanding return of the seminary to the Church. At first General Patton refused. A war was in progress! But Carroll challenged him again with a divine power even greater than the mighty Third Army, and crusty George Patton surrendered for the only time during World War II, telling his aides to “turn that damn building back to the pope.”¹²⁷ To Patton’s discomfort, Carroll stayed in the southern German castle that Patton was using as headquarters until the order was actually carried out.¹²⁸

War’s End

The Catholic Church has various Papal Orders that may be awarded to laymen to recognize their contributions to the Church and the world. The highest of these is the Order of St. Sylvester, named after the pope who reigned during the construction of the original St. Peter’s Basilica, circa 330. Within the Order there are various ranks, the very highest of which is Knight Commander — the highest possible recognition of a layman by the Catholic Church. There are only a handful of living recipients of this honor. In July 1944 (immediately after the liberation of Rome), Wild Bill Donovan, head of the American OSS and later the CIA, was presented this honor by Pope Pius XII to recognize his efforts with Walter Carroll to save Rome from destruction. In 1946, George Strake was likewise made a Knight Commander of St. Sylvester, receiving the recognition in person from Pope Pius himself. This is an honor conferred on laymen of extraordinary merit, such as Oskar Schindler of Schindler’s List fame, who was later presented the same honor.