“He combined compassion and shrewdness in assessing German military and psychological weakness. He said Germany must lose in the end because she was fighting for bad reasons. He seemed terribly young to be a captain until he reeled off his observations. He didn’t see the war as an accident of history complicated by lunacy at the top. He was certainly not in love with war. He said someone had to fight this evil. He refused to dismiss as propaganda the reports of German atrocities. He wanted to get back to the front. The doctors said his lungs would never stand up to more fighting in the trenches.
“So he decided to fly. He wangled a transfer to the Royal Flying Corps. They didn’t ask questions. Men were getting killed faster than recruits came in. He fudged his medical history and nobody looked too close. After five hours’ instruction, he was a fully-fledged combat pilot. It was an indication of how desperately the Allies needed pilots.”
Stephenson reported for duty with No. 73 Squadron of the Royal Flying Corps. His adjutant was another Canadian, Thomas Drew-Brook, who would work for him and Donovan in World War II. Drew-Brook was aghast when he saw this new pilot, with the complexion of an invalid. Stephenson had turned down a safe and honorable job as a staff captain to become a temporary acting second lieutenant in what was widely regarded as the “Suicide Service,” and he brushed aside Drew-Brook’s objections that he was too sick for combat. “If I was heading for an early grave,” he said, “I wanted to dig it myself.” Instead, he won the Distinguished Flying Cross “for conspicuous gallantry and skill in attacking enemy troops and transports from low altitudes.” He became noted for “valuable and accurate information on enemy movements.” His score in downing enemy aircraft climbed. He was awarded the Military Cross for stampeding enemy transport, destroying enemy scouts, and “when flying low and observing an open [German] staff car, attacking it with such success that it was seen lying upside down in a ditch.” The citation offered the highest possible tribute to an airman in those days of the infantryman’s travail: “He is always there when the troops need him.”
A taste for individual combat and a talent for keeping a mental record of everything he saw made a rare combination. As one of 73 Squadron’s two flight commanders, he could not indulge in lone-wolf sorties while on designated patrols. So he assigned himself to solitary missions in his own time and went looking for trouble. An obvious target was the Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen. Stephenson analyzed enemy strategy and decided that the Baron’s brother, Lothar, was the more damaging flier. The Red Baron went after spectacular but sometimes easy victories. Lothar was more interested in effective destruction than in personal glory. For every two of the Red Baron’s victims, Lothar might destroy one undramatic but more dangerous observation balloon. Stephenson committed this view to a paper stating an argument for hot pursuit of enemy pilots like Lothar.
His report caught the attention of the spitfire of a man who then dominated British intelligence. Admiral Sir Reginald (“Blinker”) Hall had advanced the art of secret warfare in the second decade of the century. The nickname “Blinker” referred to a twitch that made one eye flash like a Navy signal lamp. Hall refused to be restricted by his title of Director of Naval Intelligence, and operated beyond maritime horizons. He had served that other rebel against orthodoxy Winston Churchill, when he was First Lord of the Admiralty before the war began. Churchill’s obstinacy brought him into direct conflict with his more politically astute colleagues, and in 1915 he was forced to quit the post. By then, Hall had no further need for protection. He had expanded into every field of espionage. Scotland Yard, investigating a spy case in London, would discover him on the scene. The Secret Intelligence Service became resigned to the fact that a likely recruit in some foreign port would turn out to be Hall’s man. Nobody challenged Admiral Hall as a poacher; too many were indebted to him. He maintained as a cover that the staff in his unassuming quarters, in a backwater of the Admiralty known as Room 40, were only concerned with plotting the movements of enemy warships.
By 1917, Blinker Hall had won respect even among his critics by intercepting and deciphering a telegram that he believed would bring America into the war: the Zimmermann Telegram, dispatched from Berlin to the Imperial German Minister in Mexico. No single crypt-analysis, it would be said for years to come, had such enormous consequences. Hall’s code breakers held history in their hands, and the memory of it would sustain the Admiral through discouraging times.
Stephenson’s cool appraisal of enemy aviation, in a period when combat in the sky was regarded as chivalrous jousting between young daredevils, pleased Hall. The leather-skinned Admiral studied the fuzzy-cheeked aviator’s record, noting that Stephenson was already skilled in what Hall regarded as the heart of future secret intelligence—wireless traffic. Stephenson had also proposed to file and cross-index weaknesses in enemy aircraft and manpower, for swift reference. He thought the Germans had vulnerabilities in character that should be exploited. Decoys could be used to lure pilots into dogfights far from their own lines so that they would be distracted by the fear of running out of fuel. This was not the game according to the rules of chivalry, thought Hall, who was no great sport himself when it came to war.
Having advocated the elimination of key enemy fliers, Stephenson practiced what he preached. He went after Lothar von Richthofen, and almost won for himself the red (“presumed dead”) label in Admiral Hall’s card index.
Lothar kept to a section of the Western Front where British bombers operated during the German offensive of March 21, 1918. Stephenson was leading all three flights of 73 Squadron as part of the bomber escort. “We were joined at 16,000 feet by Bristol fighters of 62 and 22 Squadrons,” he recalled later. “Tommy Drew-Brook was attacked by a Fokker Tripe Red with black lines about four inches wide in a wavy pattern on both sides, down the length of the fuselage. Tommy was below me and to port. I did a diving turn and opened fire at about eighty yards.” The Fokker made an Immelmann turn, gaining height and reversing direction. Stephenson recognized the style of Lothar. “We span, dived, looped and tried every trick to get in the finalizing burst. My Camel had two Vickers firing through the prop, and it was the more maneuverable aircraft, too. So it was no discredit to Lothar that I fought him down to hedge-hopping and into a clump of trees. He wasn’t killed, but he never flew again—except as a passenger.”
A fellow aviator in that operation was the American writer Arch Whitehouse, who recorded Stephenson’s career as an air ace: “The air war that began over Flanders was new. It bred a new kind of warrior. No airman contributed so much to the English-speaking cause as Stephenson.” Whitehouse was given a rare glimpse of Bill Stephenson’s inner self—something that evaded observers throughout the years—when he got from Stephenson some verse written to cheer him up during a bad patch:
Why, flier shearing the rare strata of air
Knowing the awakening of speed shared by no bird
Why, when the whole ocean of resilient air is yours
Stoop to consider the cramped earth? . . .
Note with aloof and precise observation
gestations in opening mushrooms of
The crude flame and expelled dust
That foul the floor of your cage.
And remember that you alone
Can escape through the single door
Open to Heaven.
The lines ended with a note to Whitehouse: “In other words, cheer up! We’re all on borrowed time.”
Flying a lone patrol on July 28, 1918, Stephenson spotted a lumbering French reconnaissance plane in difficulties. Seven Fokker D-VIIs were maneuvering to attack. He broke up the formation, but a French observer, in the confusion, fired a burst into Stephenson’s Camel. He was hit in the leg and crashed behind the lines. Wounded again in the same leg by a German gunner, he was taken prisoner.
He made several abortive escapes. “They were not well planned,” he said later. “But I wanted to get back to the squadron. The air war seemed crucial. The Germans were near collaps
e but they still had good aircraft and pilots in reserve. Anyone on our side with firsthand experience of them was still needed.”
The Germans also realized that each veteran Allied aviator was worth a dozen new American or British war planes. Stephenson was put under close guard at Holzminden, a maximum-security prison where important captives were held. The camp commandant, Hans Niemayer, vented his hatred for Anglo-Saxons in private beatings and public taunts. “He was a German who had lived before the war in Milwaukee and returned to fight for the Kaiser,” Stephenson said later. “He was proud of his Americanisms. One day he lined us up because he’d uncovered an escape plan. ‘You think I don’t know what’s going on!’ he yelled. ‘But I tell you, I know damn-all!’ ”
Stephenson nursed his injured leg and exaggerated his handicaps to persuade the guards that he could not escape. A week after entering camp, he had plotted its layout. He knew the weak points in the perimeter fence; the distance to the nearest village where he could shelter and change his clothes; and how far to Allied lines. He got this information by disguising his contempt for his captors and extracting what he could from casual contacts, even though it meant listening in seemingly friendly silence to Niemayer. By October 1918, less than three months after being first captured, he was ready for the final attempt.
Stephenson had been permitted to work in the kitchen. Bit by bit, he acquired utensils from which he fashioned wire cutters, a crude knife, and a simple compass. When he was ready to break out, he stole Niemayer’s family portrait from the commandant’s office as an insult, “so that he would have no illusions about our relationship.” With the photograph stuffed under a stolen German Army greatcoat, he was away to freedom an hour before dawn.
He reached Allied lines within three days, and characteristically submitted a detailed report, this one on enemy prison camps.
A copy of the report went to Room 40, where Admiral Blinker Hall was tagging the handful of youngsters he wanted to coach for a new world of secret intelligence. The problem was that Stephenson was too well known. He had a record of twenty-six aircraft shot down in the comparatively short flying career that followed combat experience in the trenches. He had the French Legion of Honor and Croix de Guerre with Palm to add to his other medals. He was known as “Captain Machine-Gun” in the ring, where he had won the interservice lightweight world boxing championship on the same program as Gene Tunney, who had won the heavyweight title for the U.S. Marines. Tunney turned professional and became undefeated world champion, enjoying an influence that would later help Stephenson’s work in World War II, for the two men became business partners and life-long friends. In 1918, Hall was about to withdraw behind the scene, where he would manipulate intelligence affairs for the next twenty-five years. He thought it best to have Stephenson transferred to the neutral zone of test-flying foreign war-planes. “As Chief Test Pilot at the Royal Flying Corps Reconstruction Center,” the Admiral wrote him later, “you flew more different types of international aircraft than any other pilot known to me.”
Stephenson did not share the easygoing attitude of the sportsmen fliers who romanticized aerial warfare. In his account of the first air war, written privately for Hall, he noted that the Royal Flying Corps had initially gone into combat with fewer than fifty aircraft, under the command of a cavalry general who had got off his horse and learned to fly at the age of forty-nine. His chief of staff had been a Boer War veteran who literally floated around for years in balloons. Each pilot had to ferry to France his own plane, carrying a small stove, soup cubes, and field glasses. Maps were provided by Monsieur Michelin, whose tire companies gave away automobile guides. All the aircraft were cannibalized; undercarriages designed for Morane Parasols were twisted to fit on BE8s; engines built for Farmans were shoehorned into the mountings of RE2s. Gunners qualified if they could load a cavalry carbine, drop metal darts onto German heads, and did not mind filling their large jacket pockets with rocks to fling at enemy aircraft. Technology had advanced under the pressure of war, but Stephenson was afraid that in a long period of truce the Allies would fall behind and find themselves ill-prepared to confront a more militarily advanced enemy.
He was still test-flying when he became entranced by the whole range of new ideas associated with aviation, as Hall guessed he would. He had a mathematical mind that his flying reflected. A cool application of tested principles could get a pilot out of tight spots. Even the seemingly harum-scarum Flying Corps recognized this in a requiem sung at mess parties:
He died in an hour and a quarter
And this was the reason he died;
He’d forgotten the fact that iota
Was the maximum angle of glide.
Not only did Stephenson know that if you lifted the nose an iota beyond the angle of glide in a dead-engine landing, you were finished, but also he suggested a new wing design that improved the gliding angle. His boisterous colleagues, feeling they had already made their covenant with death, tended to think only of each day. They were regarded with condescension by regular officers of the older established services, but not by Admiral Hall. He had picked out an older man, William Wiseman, gassed in the same German offensive that disabled Stephenson, and had sent him to Washington as chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service in the U.S. for the balance of World War I.
There was no public information on the British Secret Intelligence Service in those days. The operating budget was buried from sight. The Official Secrets Act was applied with such rigor that Sir Compton Mackenzie, an honorable man with an immense following as a writer, was prosecuted and severely punished for a vague postwar account of his work in SIS. Such an attitude had persisted for centuries. Only occasionally were prominent names mentioned in connection with the secret services of the monarch: Cardinal Wolsey, Walsingham, Thurloe, and Rudyard Kipling. Wiseman’s name came into public print because he had functioned in the United States, where it was not easy to conceal these things. A good deal of fun was poked at intelligence chiefs disguised behind initials. Much emphasis was laid upon the constipated nature of an agency that allegedly drew recruits from a small privileged class and the old-boy net. The ridicule was a welcome smoke screen. Stephenson met none of the fictional criteria but he met the real requirements, including the courage of a man of imagination who can visualize the bloody and painful consequences of his own actions.
* Whitney Shepardson, first London chief of the Office of Strategic Services in World War II, later president of the CIA-funded Free Europe Committee, 1953–56.
2
“My Lord! There are most uncommon creatures here among those who have this vast and appalling War-job—men about whom our great-grandchildren will read in their school histories; but of them all, the most extraordinary is this naval officer—of whom, probably, they’ll never hear.” Thus wrote U.S. Ambassador Walter H. Page in London to President Woodrow Wilson in 1916, referring to Admiral Blinker Hall. Hall did not think the end of the fighting meant an end to danger. Modern weapons and new methods of mass communication produced new possibilities for tyrants. His warnings, like those of others, were swept away in the postwar wave of revulsion to war and disenchantment with military leaders.
In New York, the crowds turned out to cheer the 69th Regiment as it paraded down Fifth Avenue, with Colonel William Donovan marching on foot at the head of his men. His regiment had earned the title “The Fighting Irish,” and their chief was famous as “Wild Bill.” In explanation of his decision not to ride on horseback, as tradition required, he said: “If it was good enough to go on foot through Europe, it’s good enough now.” At the end of the day, in the empty silence of Camp Mills, where the regiment had been quartered before going to war, he wept. “I can’t forget the men we left behind,” he told his brother, Father Vincent Donovan.
“The most tragic thing about the war was not that it made so many dead men, but that it destroyed the tragedy of death,” wrote the American poet John Peale Bishop. “Not only did the young suffer in the war, bu
t so did every abstraction that would have sustained and given dignity to their suffering.”
A future prime minister of Britain, Harold Macmillan, returned to the university city of Oxford, found it full of ghosts, and later wrote the words that spoke for a lost generation: “Bitterness ate into our hearts at the easy way many elders seemed to take up again and play with undiminished zest the game of politics.”
The game of politics demanded the dismantling of the war machine. The public wanted it so. Military budgets were slashed. Aviation in England was returned to private enterprise. Test pilots were out of jobs. Stephenson was put through Oxford and the forerunner of Cranwell Aeronautical College, where he concentrated on Admiral Hall’s favorite subject, radio communications. Stephenson went back to Canada with a private vision of a new world in which science would bring order and peace.
His ideas got a cool reception. He sought Canadian backing for popular broadcasting. This seemed an inevitable consequence of wartime developments in radio. But he was a stripling of twenty-three. On the home front he had to take his place in line as if still a child, although he had outlived his allotted span in the war, where each day after the age of twenty was a bonus. He was hired by the University of Manitoba to teach math and science while he studied the province’s experiments in public broadcasting. “I had a guilt feeling that I should have died with the others,” he recalled. “Being still alive, I had an obligation to justify my survival.”
Among his notes appeared fragments of verse. One, from Wordsworth, indicates his frame of mind:
Who is the happy Warrior . . .
That every man in arms would wish to be?
—It is the generous spirit . . .
A Man Called Intrepid Page 3
