by Peter Finn
In March, after some of the heaviest bombing of the Luftwaffe’s campaign, she told Sidney she was issued a tin hat. “It is the biggest, bulkiest, thickest…affair I ever saw. So becoming! A real Easter bonnet—you would laugh yourself sick to see me swimming under it. I am so afraid it will slip and biff me over the nose which would surely break it.”
Gertie’s good humor vanished the following month when Colonel Tommy Hitchcock, an old friend and the air attaché at the U.S. embassy, was killed while flying a fighter-bomber in southern England. “It was a military funeral and I marched in the honorary escort with thirty officers (I was the only civilian) and it was a shattering experience.”
She despaired of the human toll of the war, and—with some pre-nuclear prescience—wondered at the level of death that would occur in future conflicts. It is “all so sad and frightful, it makes you shudder…think of the destruction there will be if another war follows in another 25 years. You will probably just press a button and everything will blow up.”
* * *
—
By May 1944, the belief that an assault on France was about to happen was ubiquitous in London. “Although we are on the threshold of invasion, I believe we are all far calmer and less jittery than elsewhere,” Gertie said. “I only wish we could go in with the army and not get left behind. That’s the depressing side—getting left behind. Everyone in uniform will get over before the civilian.”
On D-day, Gertie was struck by the composure of the British, offering Churchillian V signs to the planes overhead but unwilling to rejoice until the early battle reports were in.
A month later, London felt deserted and Gertie was restless. “Not a soul in the streets,” she said. She had been practicing her French with her Swiss cook since the previous year and as early as November 1943 had contacted an American friend about renting her apartment in Paris, all in anticipation of the liberation and her part in it. But Gertie wasn’t able to cross the channel as quickly as she wished. “Every big shot I know is over there in the thick of it and I do feel so left out on the outer fringe of it all,” she told Sidney. “Gee I wish I were a man so often—because then I wouldn’t be relegated to the sidelines.”
The invasion of France was followed by a new threat to London when the Nazis began attacking the city with pilotless, low-flying missiles, which looked like small planes when in silhouette against the sky. The Germans called the device the V-1—the Vergeltungswaffe, literally the “revenge weapon.” Londoners called them buzz bombs or doodlebugs, among other names, and dreaded the stuttering sound of the engine cutting out because that meant the cruise missile with its eighteen-hundred-pound warhead was dropping.
Between June and September, when the Allies began to overrun the launching pads in the Pas de Calais in northeastern France, more than three thousand buzz bombs reached London, hitting large sections of the city and killing more than six thousand people. “The pilotless plane, flying bomb, or whatever its correct name may be, is an exceptionally unpleasant thing, because, unlike most other projectiles, it gives you time to think,” George Orwell wrote at the time. “What is your first reaction when you hear the droning, zooming noise? Inevitably, it is a hope that the noise won’t stop. You want to hear the bomb pass safely overhead and die away in the distance before the engine cuts out. In other words, you are hoping that it will fall on somebody else.”
One bomb fell so close to Gertie’s home that the house shook, blowing out glass and creating long cracks in her walls. Londoners, although exhausted, coped with the onslaught, as they had with previous German bombing campaigns. “One is apt to sleep anywhere, on the floor, under the table, or stretched on the concrete floor of a shelter,” Gertie told her husband. “My camp life is standing me in good stead. I can sleep almost anywhere including under a truck, as we used to do in Persia. Do you remember?”
* * *
—
Also in London that summer as the newfangled bombs fell was Jerry Papurt, the OSS major Gertie would meet in Luxembourg in just a few weeks. He had been transferred from Naples to England for counterintelligence training before being deployed to France and was staying in a flat in central London. Papurt also brushed off the German gambit. “The new development of the Germans is interesting as hell,” he wrote. “I’ve watched quite a few of them and it’s a fascinating sight. I’m quite sure they’re of little or no tactical value but they’re devilishly ingenious. Naturally they’ll not have the effect on the people here that the Germans hope they will. These people are tough and it will take more than a scientific toy to make a dent.”
On the night of August 25—the day Paris was liberated—Gertie and some friends hosted the grandest soiree of her time in London, an event to honor veteran fliers of World War I with a dinner in the garden of her home. The guest list of twenty-eight included Donovan; Lieutenant General Carl Spaatz, commander of U.S. air forces in Europe; John G. Winant, the U.S. ambassador to Britain; and a group of senior officers.
The army supplied the food—melon, lobster, filet mignon, salad, ice cream, and cake, an almost unimaginable feast in the city’s exiguous circumstances. There were songs, skits, and toasts on a buoyant evening, made happier by the news from France. Gertie later wrote to her husband, “Those Big Shots are all really swell men, and it gives one quite a kick to know the war is being carried out by such able good fellows.”
In a slightly macabre touch, Gertie had decorated the large U-shaped table she had assembled in her walled garden with a miniature buzz bomb amid the model Mustangs and Hurricanes that were also used for decorations. One of the generals mentioned that he had never witnessed a V-1 attack. Hardly had he spoken, Gertie recalled, than “we heard the faint putt-putt of a deadly doodlebug approaching. It flew low over us and carried its sputtering power into the distance. With a sigh of relief, I looked around the table at the illustrious gathering. To think that one buzz-bomb could have destroyed most of the American high command.”
After coffee, there was a screening of a short documentary titled When Next I See Paris that began with shots of the city before the war and ended with footage of the D-day landings. The party wound down with renditions of “April in Paris” and “Lili Marlene,” a song loved by Axis and Allied troops alike:
My love for you renews my might
I’m warm again, my pack is light.
It was an appropriate farewell to London. Gertie’s orders to report to Paris were on their way.
8
Wallendorf
In the early afternoon of September 26, 1944, Gertie sat on a pile of rubble and broken plaster outside one of the few largely intact buildings in the German village of Wallendorf. Chickens ran around in front of her, pecking the ground beside an American caisson left behind by the U.S. troops that Gertie’s party had expected to find upon their arrival. Instead, Major Papurt and the driver, Doyle Dickson, lay wrapped in blankets on bedsprings in the building behind her, shivering from their wounds and, in the case of the young private, drifting in and out of consciousness. He was badly wounded in the right thigh, part of one of his heels had been shot away, and Gertie was worried about gangrenous infection. “He was such a nice looking boy,” she thought, who should be at home thinking about football.
Their German captors told them no one could be moved until the American shelling eased.
Gertie and Jennings, the navy lieutenant commander, along with two German soldiers, had carried the wounded men from the destroyed jeep across a great meadow to the burned-out village, fording the Sauer River on a small flatboat. Gertie toyed with escape, ludicrously informing a soldier through sign language and her badly broken German that she was just off to get some medical help. As she walked away, he yelled at her to get back, pointing out German positions in the hills where soldiers would happily fire on her; as if dealing with a recalcitrant child, he took her by the arm back to her comrades. U.S. planes circled
overhead—frustratingly oblivious, Gertie thought, to her ordeal. Suddenly she was, as another American prisoner of war put it, “a nonentity in the huge business of war.”
“I felt a dreadful sense of guilt,” Gertie said. “Why had I been so keen to plunge into such an adventure which common sense would have forbidden. But adventure that was it!…Danger and adventure, they quickened the pulse and challenged me. I wondered why I was made that way.”
Exploring the building on her own, Gertie found some unexpected loot: two or three dozen bottles of wine, loaves of coarse bread, American flour, and granulated sugar—the detritus of both former German residents and retreating American troops. With their German guards, the prisoners drank a little and feasted on pancakes made on a portable brazier. The German soldiers seemed to regard their American prisoners as more of a nuisance than any great capture or threat and moved around them with disinterested ease.
At four in the afternoon, a German medic arrived to administer tetanus shots to Papurt and Dickson and dress their wounds. He was followed two hours later by another soldier leading a scrawny horse hitched to a farm wagon. Papurt and Dickson were loaded onto the wagon. The soldier pulled so harshly on the horse’s bit that Gertie itched to chastise him but restrained herself for the sake of the wounded men; she wanted them to get medical care as quickly as possible.
With the horse and wagon leading the way, Gertie and Jennings immediately behind on foot, and two soldiers following, the group began a steep climb through the woods leading out of Wallendorf. On the way up the hill, Papurt, who had largely remained alert throughout the ordeal, slipped Jennings some papers that he had found on himself, and the navy commander managed to crumple them up and toss them away without the guards noticing. Dickson occasionally moaned as the wagon bounced roughly in the dirt.
Gertie, whispering to the others, again contemplated escape, but Papurt warned her not to, running a finger across his throat. “You’d better forget about it,” he whispered. Too many Germans in the woods. They arrived, drenched in sweat from the climb, at a farmhouse and stable. Gertie and Jennings were taken to a nearby two-room bunker, and a hush fell over the soldiers inside as the Americans were brought in.
An officer looked Gertie up and down and, speaking in French, asked her, “How long will the war last?”
Gertie shrugged. “Not long.”
“What were you doing in Wallendorf?”
“Oh…just riding,” Gertie said, briefly explaining their visit to Wallendorf.
The officer feigned a smile: “Such a pleasant pastime during war.”
“We thought Wallendorf was in American hands.”
The officer shuffled some papers. “Do not worry,” he said. “You will probably be exchanged as soon as higher authorities are contacted.”
Gertie and Jennings glanced at each other in surprise. For Jennings, this was a fanciful notion, but for Gertie a distinct possibility, though one she had not really considered until now. Throughout the war, the Allies and Nazi Germany had exchanged noncombatants in deals brokered by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The officer pulled down a bottle and some glasses from a shelf that also held cans of American corned beef hash and tomatoes, more abandoned food happily swept up by the covetous Germans.
Gertie tossed back the drink—Jamaican rum.
Another officer decided to try out his English.
“It is a nice day, is it not?” he asked.
“Yes, a lousy day,” Gertie replied.
There was something oddly relaxed about these exchanges—even as the bunker occasionally trembled when the constant shelling got closer. These soldiers and many others Gertie would encounter already carried the faint dishevel of defeat. Retreat had been unexpected and humiliating. Nazi Germany was back inside its western border, and the next push of the Allies loomed; on the eastern front, the Russians ground forward with a bloody inexorability.
Gertie asked if she and Jennings could check on Papurt and Dickson. The two men were still in the open air on the back of the wagon, and at Gertie’s insistence they were carried into a cellar beneath the stable, where fifteen or twenty soldiers lay about, some snoring loudly. They had barely settled the men on some straw when two German officers descended the steps—“dull black boots and then dark faces under the black visors of high-grommetted caps.” One wore a monocle, and the second waved his Mauser pistol around with a theatricality Gertie thought should be reserved for B movies. She was treating the debacle as another adventure to be observed with a kind of detached insouciance.
“Madame,” said the first officer in French, “you and this man are to go with us.”
“But what about our friends?” Gertie asked.
The monocled German explained that they would be taken to a hospital in the morning, and with another wave of his pistol the second officer dismissed Jennings’s entreaties that he and Gertie be allowed to stay with the wounded men.
“One moment,” Gertie said, “please.”
As she turned around, Papurt told them they had better leave. “I’ll take care of the boy,” he said.
Gertie dropped to Dickson’s side. “It looks like we have to go with them. Are you all right?”
“Yeah…yeah,” he said.
She turned to the first officer and asked for cigarettes, lit them, and placed them in the mouths of Papurt and Dickson.
As she left the bunker, she cast a final glance at the two men, queasy as to their fates.
Gertie and Jennings were placed in a large open troop carrier, armed guards on either side of them, with the two officers up front. They came down the other side of the hill and then turned southwest along the Westwall—in the moonlight, parts of its fortifications looking like rows of giant concrete teeth protruding from the ground. The flash and boom of cannons convulsed against the night sky, and Gertie felt as if she were driving through a dry electrical storm back in South Carolina.
Around midnight, they arrived in Trier, a small city on the Moselle River. There were few people on the street, and Gertie was ushered into a dark, brick building where she immediately tripped over the feet of a sleeping soldier. The soldier barked at her in German until he sat up in alarm when he saw the officers following behind. Gertie and Jennings were separated, and she was led to a room where she was asked to sit opposite “a wizened little man in military uniform wearing spectacles” who reminded her of a predatory animal and a second soldier, an overweight sergeant who spoke French and seemed to Gertie as if he should be running a restaurant in Austria. The questioning was perfunctory, and Gertie for the first time rattled off her cover story about being an embassy file clerk without serious challenge.
“Why did you come so far forward?” the German asked.
“I wanted to see what it was like near the front,” Gertie replied.
The interview over, a second officer, who had questioned Jennings, walked in and began to chat amiably with Gertie in perfect English.
In a strange interlude, they briefly discussed people they knew in the horse business in Ireland before he said, “I’m sorry but we have no accommodations in this building. You are to continue your journey.”
They left in a small sedan accompanied by two new soldiers who argued violently about directions between stops for beer at various taverns. By dawn, they had reached Wittlich, about twenty-five miles northeast of Trier. On the edge of town, they passed a formation of young boys with small wooden guns over their shoulders, singing a marching song. They were led into a large barracks-like building and directed to sit on wooden benches in the hallway. A soupy meal of meat and potatoes followed, and Gertie was allowed to wash in a large communal shower—a privilege that became farce when the water turned scalding hot and she had to flee with soap suds still caking her hair and her uniform soaked from the steam. “Nearly fried to a crisp,” she recalled.
&nbs
p; Jennings and Gertie spent the day in a small room chitchatting but restless, because the German soldiers had told them they could be moved again at any moment. They were being bounced from unit to unit deeper into Germany, but without being told their ultimate destination. When they emerged onto the street in Wittlich that evening, a German Messerschmitt and a U.S. plane were engaged in a dogfight right over the city, swooping like feuding birds of prey. The two Americans were whisked to an air raid shelter packed with German officers, soldiers, and civilian staff who greeted them with stares. “I was struck by the silence,” Gertie said.
The all clear sounded after fifteen minutes, and Gertie and Jennings were led to a truck camouflaged with pine boughs. A young, sheepish GI sat in the back. He explained that he had gotten separated from his unit and eventually fell asleep in a pillbox where he was discovered by German soldiers. They had taken his overcoat, and he was cold. The truck, with its lights dimmed to a pinpoint, crawled along in the darkness for several hours before it rendezvoused with a second vehicle. Gertie was moved into the cab of the truck, and Jennings and the GI were put in the second vehicle. “I hope this is not goodbye, pal,” she said to Jennings as he left.
A guard stood outside on the running board of Gertie’s truck watching the sky for enemy planes—standard practice, she soon realized: “The reaction [to] our terrific might in the air is evident when you realize that automobile traffic is almost always made at night, except in cases of extreme emergency,” she noted. “The majority of people I observed were intensely nervous and jittery.”
