“You fellows are Jewish,” Ulmer said to Freddy and Hans. “You know what’s going to happen to you?” Freddy stared back at Ulmer as if the very question offended him. The Nazis had chased him out of his boyhood home in Germany, seized his family business, crushed his father’s spirit, and done God-knows-what to the Jews left behind in Freiburg. Hans’s family in the Netherlands had been torn apart as well. Ulmer was a Waspy Ivy Leaguer from Florida—a nice enough fellow, but not a Jew, and not a European refugee, either—and here he was asking Freddy if he understood the stakes?
“This is our war,” Freddy told him. “It’s our war more than yours.”
5
* * *
The Drop
AIRBORNE OVER THE ITALIAN-AUSTRIAN BORDER
February 25, 1945
The roar of the fighter plane’s four engines pierced the cold night air high above the Austrian Alps. The B-24 Liberator, painted a sleek black to fade into the night sky, carried no American insignia on its tail, nor any other markings to identify its origin. Its human cargo—two Jewish refugees and a Nazi defector, oxygen masks cupped over their faces—huddled in a small hideaway in the back of the plane and waited.
Finally airborne, Freddy, Hans, and Franz were approaching their target—their designated “pinpoint”—in a rugged mountain region teeming with Nazi soldiers and stalwarts. Freddy was eager. Hans was calm. Franz was terrified.
In the pilot’s chair up in the cockpit, walled off from the trio, Army Lieutenant John Billings didn’t like what he saw beneath them. Through the dense cloud cover, his flight crew couldn’t get a decent line of sight on the drop zone. Even in good weather, this would be a treacherous run, so treacherous that Britain’s Royal Air Force, which flew many OSS missions, had refused to fly this one. “At this time of year, it would be extremely difficult to locate the area and make a successful blind drop,” a British aviation officer, polite but firm, had cabled the agency weeks earlier.
Billings was willing to do it. A tall, redheaded New Englander, he had wanted to be a pilot from the time he was three years old, when his father paid for a ten-minute plane ride for the two of them over a rocky field outside Boston. Billings was now all of twenty-one, and his flight crew liked to say that he would give up eating before he would give up flying; the more challenging the assignment, the better. Billings had learned to pilot the B-24 just seven months earlier in South Carolina, but he had already flown dozens of missions across enemy skies in Europe—sometimes dropping five-hundred-pound bombs; sometimes food, weapons, or supplies; and sometimes secret agents for Bill Donovan’s cloak-and-dagger brigade. Billings would describe himself, self-deprecatingly, as a glorified “taxi driver” on these missions; the OSS agents making the jumps, he said, were the ones doing the really hazardous work. He was just glad he got to stay inside the plane.
Billings didn’t hesitate when he was asked to fly the Austrian mission. “If they’re willing to jump, we’ll take ’em,” he told his crewmen. This mission was different from many of his earlier ones. For one thing, he had rarely dropped men inside Nazi-occupied Austria before; few Allied pilots ever had. For another, he had spent the last few days in the company of the motley crew of agents who were at that moment shivering in the back of his plane. That wasn’t normal procedure. OSS demanded such intense secrecy for its missions that the crew in the cockpit was not supposed to even lay eyes on the agents who boarded the aircraft. Billings and his crew would ready the B-24 for takeoff, and only then would the agents climb into what was once the plane’s gun turret—specially adapted to carry OSS agents instead of weapons. Billings only caught sight of the agents when they parachuted out hours later. OSS was so worried about security threats that Billings and the men in the cockpit knew the agents they flew only by the anonymous name of “Joe”—or, in the case of a lone female agent, “Jane.”
But from the beginning, nothing had gone quite as planned on Freddy’s mission. The air force hadn’t gotten OSS the aerial photos of the Alps beforehand, Franz hadn’t received his requisite parachute training, and bad weather had already forced the crew to scrap the mission twice. Five days earlier, Billings had flown Freddy’s team on this same route; they got all the way to the drop zone, deep in Nazi territory, before Billings made the grudging decision to abort. The area was completely closed in by fog; crewman Walter Haass reported that Billings “could see nothing.” In his own leather-bound flight log, Billings wrote later: “3 Joes . . . Bad weather.” The crew turned the plane around and headed back to Italy. As close as they had gotten, the six hours in hazardous skies didn’t even count toward the crew’s military flight credits, since it hadn’t actually been completed. The only solace Billings could take was that he had cruised hundreds of miles, flying dangerously low and near the mountain walls to evade German radar, without drawing any attention from the Luftwaffe’s notorious antiaircraft fire.
More than two hours later, Billings and his crew landed right back where they had started: at a new Allied air base in the coastal city of Rosignano in Italy’s Tuscany region. The Allies had set up the base only recently as their forces surged north toward Austria and Germany, hurriedly laying down six-inch-thick strips of asphalt for runways. Freddy was dejected to find himself back at the base; six hours in the air, hunched so tightly in his small cocoon in the back of the plane that his legs ached, and all for nothing. He trudged off the plane with Hans and Franz in tow, then disappeared behind the back wing, heading for a military vehicle waiting to take them to their quarters for the night. From the cockpit, Billings peered out the window to get a look at the mystery Joes, but they were nothing but shadows in the dark.
Billings and his flight crew gathered for breakfast the next morning under a tent that served as a temporary mess hall. The three Joes appeared as well, and now, in the light of day, they had faces. One was tall and skinny. Another had a prim, serious Germanic look. The third man, who acted like the leader, was short and squat and smiled a lot. They sat by themselves at a rickety picnic table and conversed in German, chowing on the day’s serving of mystery meats, powdered milk, and an egg concoction drizzled in something called “jungle butter,” which never seemed to melt.
Billings glanced over at them, unsure what to do. One of his crewmen, who spoke German, decided to approach the trio to introduce himself. It might be a violation of normal protocol, but the latest weather forecast indicated they had nothing but time on their hands. They were stuck together for a while. His curiosity getting the better of him, Billings soon wandered over as well. He wanted to see for himself what sort of men these agents were. Freddy introduced himself. “Joe,” he said with a mischievous laugh.
The first thing Billings noticed was their clothing. The tall one and the short one were each wearing olive-drab American aviator uniforms. The serious-looking one had on a heavy trench coat; it was unbuttoned, and Billings could see a Nazi officer’s garb peeking out from underneath. “He’s the German,” Freddy said, pointing at Franz. “He’ll lead us to safety.”
Freddy explained the thinking to Billings with a jarring nonchalance: they planned to ski down the Alps once they landed, but if Nazi soldiers spotted them and confronted them, their cover story would be for Franz, the Nazi, to say that he had captured two crashed enemy aviators. Franz was dressed as an Alpine ski patrol captain, and assuming he outranked any Nazi soldiers they met up with, he would insist on taking his prisoners to the Gestapo himself to earn the credit for their capture. And if he didn’t outrank the soldiers? Well, Freddy would worry about that scenario later.
The American uniforms were the brainchild of the OSS planners in Bari; they believed that if Freddy and Hans were captured, the Nazis might treat them somewhat humanely as “regular” soldiers and POWs under international treaties, rather than executing them on the spot as spies. So the thinking went. OSS didn’t want them carrying forged German papers for that same reason. Pure foolishness, and naive, Freddy and Hans thought; Americans caught with gold, radios, and c
ode books, but they were just regular soldiers, not spies? They didn’t like the idea, but they had little choice but to go along with it, American uniforms and all.
As for the actual purpose of the mission, Freddy was cryptic. A shrug of his shoulders told Billings that he wasn’t willing to get into the details. Top secret; operational security and all that. Billings gathered that it had something to do with ferreting out intelligence about the Nazi train lines. FDR had just met with Churchill and Stalin a few weeks earlier at Yalta, with victory in sight, and the Alpine operation was designed as a critical part of that last push. Freddy talked big, but how exactly he planned to gather all this secret information on the Nazis in their Tyrolean stronghold, he didn’t say. It all sounded implausible and almost suicidal to Billings as he listened, but Freddy was stoic. “We’ll go down the mountain and handle whatever comes up,” he said with another shrug.
Freddy reached into his pocket. “See this?” he asked Billings. He pulled out a tiny camera—a black 16 mm Minolta about the size of his index finger. Billings had never seen a camera so small. Freddy explained that he might need it to secretly photograph documents. He reached into another pocket, this time producing a loaded .32-caliber pistol. “This is just a ‘scare’ pistol,” he said. “If I have to use it,” he added with a sly grin, “I’m finished.” He also showed Billings how OSS had taught him to pick locks. The pilot and his flight crew were now soaking up the wily agent’s every word, waiting to see what he would do next. Joe, or whatever his real name was, seemed less a soldier to them than a magician.
Freddy, in his aviator’s uniform, then got to talking about flying and his own experiences as a pilot. He told Billings how he had trained to fly airplanes as a teenager in Germany before the war; how the Nazis had sent him to Spain to help Franco in the civil war; how he was piloting a German plane there when he was shot down over the North Sea. A fisherman pulled him out of the water, he said, and he went to the Allies’ side. That was how he wound up fighting the Nazis for OSS.
Billings listened to the tale, fascinated; the smiling German-American soldier seemed able to do just about anything. Almost none of the story was true, of course. As a teenager in Germany, Freddy had taken a glider lesson—once—but that was the limit of his experience as a pilot. Billings and his flight crew, experts in aviation, were buying it all. Another disguise, another facade for Freddy. If he was going to ultimately fool the Nazis, he figured he would try his disguises out on his fellow Americans first to see which ones worked.
After their aborted mission the night before, Freddy was anxious to get back in the air, but the storms weren’t letting up. He thought they might be able to use the delay to their advantage. If nothing else, it might buy them time to obtain the aerial photos that could help them determine a suitable drop point. He and Hans sent a short cable back to the OSS base in Bari. “Last night’s flight unsuccessful [on] account of weather,” Freddy wrote. “Have pictures arrived?” True to form, he ended the military dispatch with an unlikely sign-off: “Love Freddy.”
As it turned out, an American P-38 surveillance plane had managed to get the aerial photos the day before, and the air force phoned Bari to let them know—but by then Freddy’s team was already in the air. “We got your pictures today, and we’ll try to develop them tonight,” an air force lieutenant reported to OSS. “Tell him it’s too late,” a supervisor yelled across the room; Freddy and his team were outside of radio contact, and Bari couldn’t reach them. “No, don’t,” interjected another officer. If the operation was delayed for some reason, he said, “we might have the chance to get the pictures to the team tomorrow.”
Ulmer and his people were elated to learn from Freddy’s cable the next day that they were still in Allied territory in Italy. Ulmer convinced the air force to rush another plane to Tuscany, secreting the long-sought photos inside a mail bag. The aerial views were crisp and clear, providing a snapshot of the mountaintop barely a day old. As OSS feared, the pictures revealed few flat or navigable areas amid the rugged terrain that could be considered for a landing spot. But Ulmer and his people had circled for Freddy, in red crayon, a pair of small frozen lakes sitting side by side at an altitude of about eleven thousand feet. It was a tiny target, but it gave Freddy more to work with than he had the day before.
As the storms let up the next night, the Joes got off the ground and managed to fly into Austria almost as far as the drop zone once again, but there was virtually no break in the cloud cover. Restless, Freddy relayed word from the intercom at the back of the plane that he wanted to make the drop anyway. Billings overruled him. They were turning around. Again. “Bad weather,” Billings wrote for a second time in his flight log, right below the first entry.
Freddy felt cursed. He could tick off all his military travels like postcards from a stale road trip that had dragged on far too long. From the peanut fields of Alabama to the unforgiving desert of Arizona. From a posh country club in suburban Washington, DC, to the tip of northern Africa and on to a villa in southern Italy. And now he was stuck again for four more days at another military base in Italy. For what? The ultimate payoff was still taunting him, still out of his grasp. The air base at Rosignano was certainly a nice enough place—another picturesque setting, in the heart of Tuscany’s wine country, just twenty-five miles down the coast from the famed Leaning Tower of Pisa—and there were plenty of comfortable beds for them at the villas converted into military quarters. They got to sleep late, too. But the place lost even its small bit of luster after their second night stranded there. Their hosts at the base from Company D grew tired of their unexpected visitors after an ugly spat—something about untidiness, but no one seemed sure—and they kicked them out of their villa. Freddy and the whole crew had to camp in tents for the next two nights.
While they waited in Rosignano for a break in the weather, Billings’s crew decided to take the plane out to run some tests on the instrument panel. Billings invited Freddy and Hans to go along with them for the ride—in the cockpit this time. It was an upgrade, if only temporary. Freddy jumped into the copilot’s seat next to Billings, while Hans took the bombardier’s spot ahead of them in the nose of the plane. They began cruising around the bay, and a few minutes into the flight, Billings remembered Freddy’s own supposed training as a pilot. “Do you want to fly a little bit?” he asked his passenger. “Oh, yeah!” a surprised Freddy said.
Freddy grabbed the control-wheel yoke in front of him before Billings could change his mind. He showed no hint of nervousness. He had always been someone who lived for the moment, but his moments lately had been filled mainly with frustration. Now he was at the helm of a B-24, the biggest bomber plane in America’s fleet. This wasn’t exactly the way he imagined the scene playing out when he was a boy in Freiburg, when he would march through the house in his father’s military belt, turning Heinrich’s Iron Cross over in his hands and dreaming of someday becoming a German pilot. Even so, the adrenaline coursed through him to the rhythm of the Liberator’s four propellers, as he steered the aircraft across the bay off the Ligurian Sea.
Freddy was just a hundred feet in the air, practically skimming the water below him. The plane’s belly buzzed the roof of the villa that served as base headquarters for the 885th Air Squadron, rattling the officers inside. Then he sped straight for a small gap in the mountainside nearby. Billings thought for a moment that he might have to intercede and reclaim control of the plane as it neared the mountains. But just as they approached the ridge, Freddy yanked the yoke back hard toward his chest and began an abrupt, ninety-degree turn straight up the side of the mountain. Then, almost at a stall, he rolled the plane upside down and reversed course in the exact opposite direction, toward the base. Billings stared at his young copilot in disbelief; Freddy had executed a perfect “Immelmann Turn,” an aerial acrobatic feat named for a German flying ace in World War I. And he didn’t seem to even realize what he had done. He relied on pure instinct. This kid really is quite a pilot, Billings thought
to himself.
To Freddy, the whole business of flying a thirty-six-thousand-pound fighter came with beguiling ease. He already figured that he knew everything there was to know about engines, and he remembered enough about aeronautics from what the Germans had taught him in that gliding class in high school years ago. What other training did he need? If anything, the bulky B-24 was a little slow for his liking; he wished he could crank the engines a little harder as he skimmed along the Italian coast.
“Okay, that’s enough. Thanks,” Freddy said, yielding control back to Billings to land the aircraft. He’d had his moment in Tuscany, and he was done for now. On an otherwise hapless trip, the impromptu joyride left Freddy and Hans almost giddy. The two OSS men “had [a] good time” on the flight, Haass noted in his report. The base officers weren’t nearly so pleased. Back on the ground, Billings was summoned to headquarters to explain to the colonel why his B-24 had buzzed their building so closely. An apologetic Billings took the heat for the episode himself, covering for his onetime copilot.
The next night, the men prepared for yet another run. The weather was still ominous, but it looked like there might be a break in the storm clouds over the Alps just before midnight. “We’re going to do it tonight, one place or another,” Freddy said to Billings. It was less a prediction than a demand; Freddy was acting as if he were in charge—not only of the mission, but of the airplane as well. Billings brushed aside the bravado; in a few short days, he had already learned that “Joe” was nothing if not confident.
They took off at ten o’clock that night, hoping the third time might actually be the charm that had eluded them. Once again, they hit storm clouds above their target. There was no way they could make the drop. Billings was now growing almost as frustrated as Freddy. He decided to try a second target about three thousand feet lower within the valley, below the rim of the mountains. Just as the plane dipped below the ridgeline, it jerked downward without warning and began screaming straight toward the canyon floor nearly ten thousand feet below them.
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