by Peter Finn
The French were taken to U.S. headquarters in Innsbruck and within days were back in Paris. Separately, the other French prisoners who had been held at Bad Godesberg were also liberated from various locations in southern Germany.
“It was intoxicating to feel free,” Madame Cailliau said.
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On May 7, 1945, General Alfred Jodl, operations chief for the Wehrmacht high command, and Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg signed the surrender papers at Allied headquarters in Reims, France.
“Do you understand the terms of the document of surrender you have just signed?” Eisenhower asked.
“Ja. Ja,” the two general officers replied.
A short time later, the supreme commander dictated a message to his troops: “The mission of this Allied force was fulfilled at 0241, local time, May 7, 1945, Eisenhower.”
Across the Continent, twenty-five thousand GIs lay in unmarked or unregistered graves, Doyle Dickson among them. After the March 31 attack on Brandenburg, a group of French POWs was commandeered to bury the dead in a graveyard. In an effort to help with future identification, each grave was marked by a wooden stake with a metal plate with a name and number that was supposed to match a number on the coffin below.
The Dickson family had first been informed of Doyle’s capture on October 27, 1944, and the news was received “in good spirit by his mother and father,” the OSS noted in a report. On July 19, 1945, the family’s spirits soared. A captain in the OSS told Dickson’s mother, Amy, that Doyle had been released from a POW camp and would be coming home soon. For Dickson’s parents, the notification—coming two months after the end of the war, when they had had no word from Doyle—must have come as an enormous relief.
How the military made such an egregious error is unclear. Nine months later, after finally having been informed that her son was dead, Amy Dickson wrote to Major General Edward F. Witsell, the adjutant general, or chief administrative officer, in the military, to demand an explanation. She told him that given the confusion surrounding her son’s circumstances—his body still had not been located—she could not, despite the death notice, entirely give up the hope that he might be alive.
“I cannot understand why I was told [about his release]. Cannot see any reason for it,” Amy Dickson wrote on March 18, 1946. “If the Captain was mistaken why does he not acknowledge it but since he has not I cannot seem to give up all hope that my son will return yet.”
Amy Dickson went on to ask, “Where is my son buried and may I visit the grave?”
She wouldn’t get an answer for three more years.
A French doctor who was present during the bombing eventually told the American Graves Registration Service approximately where the U.S. servicemen in Brandenburg were buried, but the city was in the Soviet sector, and as tensions between the occupying powers grew, U.S. officials found access “extremely limited,” according to military documents. The Graves Registration Service had no specific information on which servicemen might be buried there except that there were eighteen Americans interred in the city.
On May 1, 1946, Witsell, the adjutant general, wrote back to Amy Dickson. “Your desire for further details concerning the death of your son is most understandable and I sincerely regret that nothing can be added to the information furnished in previous correspondence,” he said. “The official report of death was based on information discovered in captured enemy records and on statements obtained from liberated prisoners of war who were imprisoned in the same camp with your son.”
A few weeks later Witsell’s office told her, “You may be assured that the American Graves Registration Service is endeavoring to locate the graves of our deceased military personnel. This practice will continue until every means of locating the graves has been exhausted.”
U.S. military officials continued to press for access to Brandenburg and in the summer of 1947 found the remains of thirteen GIs from among the eighteen believed buried in the city. (The remaining five were found by a French team in September.) On one grave, the name on the metal plate was “Dickson,” but there were no other tags or identification with the remains.
The eighteen bodies were transferred to the Ardennes American Cemetery in Belgium, where the body suspected to be Dickson was held as “X-4222” pending positive identification. When the military eventually compared Dickson’s dental records with those of X-4222, there was no match, however, forcing officials at the cemetery to examine the records of all eighteen men transferred from Germany.
The Dickson dental chart was then found to be in “exact agreement” with the body buried as Private First Class Niles C. Ballard, a West Virginian who had been serving as a medic in the 168th Infantry Regiment, 34th Infantry Division. (Ballard was subsequently identified as the body designated X-4222.) The mistake was made because Ballard’s driver’s license had somehow ended up in Dickson’s clothing when the bodies were first disinterred in Brandenburg.
In November 1949, the military wrote to Dickson’s parents to let them know that they had finally identified the remains of their son. “I regret that it was not possible to furnish you with this information sooner, however, I feel sure that you realize the necessity of first completing the investigation. Remains have been casketed and are being held in above-ground storage pending instructions from the next of kin.”
The Dicksons decided to repatriate Doyle’s body rather than have him buried at the U.S. military cemetery in Belgium. His casket left the port of Bremerhaven on May 26, 1950. He was buried on July 26, 1950, at the Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery by the Pacific Ocean in San Diego.
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Papurt was buried in the Lorraine American Military Cemetery and Memorial in the French town of Saint-Avold, just eighty miles south of Wallendorf.
Papurt’s brother, Sol, wrote to Gertie after the war to learn what he could about Jerry’s fate. Gertie drafted a reply but it’s unclear if she sent it as the OSS, which she informed about the communication, said it was better that the agency respond to the Papurt family.
Gertie’s draft letter recapped the events of September 26, 1944, and the wounding of Papurt but without—perhaps kindly—ever admitting there was no purpose to the trip to Wallendorf beyond sightseeing.
“Major Papurt was great company,” Gertie wrote. “He had lots of courage and guts and, although I only met him for the first time on our trip to Wallendorf, I shall keep a happy souvenir of a cheerful personality who was calm and humorous in an emergency.”
Gertie apparently never learned of Dickson’s death and didn’t have to reckon with her role in the decisions that led to it. The harrowing memory of the trembling, wounded young man—whose name, she believed, was Dick—faded into idealization. In her memoir she wrote, “It is the picture of Dick I choose to keep in mind when reflecting on the general character of the American GI in the war just passed: boyish, uninhibited, courageous, resourceful, non-whimpering and with spirit unbroken.”
Epilogue
Back in New York City that summer of 1945, Gertie was quickly unhappy—at Sidney’s continued posting in Hawaii as the war in the Pacific ground on; at the seeming obliviousness of her compatriots to the hardships of conflict; and at the demands of her children, who, once they had their mother back, wanted her undivided attention. “To try and interest myself in Peter Rabbit…nearly kills me,” she complained.
“N.Y.C. is a terrible comedown,” she told Sidney. “Everyone fat, bored, overfed, sodden with liquor [and] stupid.” Gertie, despite her disdain, feasted just as avidly on the bounty of the home front, telling Sidney she had put on five pounds and would soon turn into a blimp. “The food is all too astounding for words and I haven’t stopped drinking milk and orange juice for a minute—to say nothing of ice cream—soft shell crabs, asparagus and soft boiled eggs.”
She was also discovering, to her dismay, that there was little i
nterest in her time as a prisoner. As Nazi Germany surrendered, the demand for war stories flagged, and Gertie’s approaches to magazine editors were discouraging. “It’s too late…now I am told.”
Nor beyond the first stories of her escape had there been much interest in the press in following up on her story, and she suspected OSS-imposed censorship. The press had been “completely throttled,” she told Sidney. “Not a mention of my name in any papers so far.” The New York World-Telegram noted on April 12 that details of her experiences must remain secret “for the duration” but that she had “never looked more attractive than when glimpsed yesterday” in Manhattan.
Gertie was also frustrated that the OSS was not returning her papers, including her POW diary, and insisting that in any story or book she might write, she could not identify the spy organization, a restriction that would drain much of the drama from her account. “The whole thing as you may guess is under such an absurd cloud of secrecy that I hardly know my own name,” she told Sidney, adding in a later letter, “I think it would make a great seller if it is ever allowed to be released.”
Gertie, unlike Jennings, left the OSS on good terms. Donovan wrote to tell her, “You have made a real contribution to this organization and I will always remember the enthusiastic interest and intelligent effort you gave to all the duties you were called upon to perform. Most of all, I am glad your understanding is so clear on what could have been a very tragic experience.” But Donovan’s indulgence didn’t negate an OSS conclusion that “the return of these documents to the owner at the present time might prove a source of embarrassment to the Agency and constitute a definite threat to its security.”
It would be months before she finally got her papers back, and when she published a memoir in 1947—the poorly titled The Sands Ceased to Run—it drew little attention from a public that was too busy catching up on lost time to dwell on yesterday’s derring-do.
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Gertie stayed in touch with many of the people she encountered in Germany, sending letters, cash, food packages, or other gifts in the first years after the war to Gosewisch, Sebastian, Zieschang, and the Griemes. She also established a foundation to help European cities recover. Its first project was the adoption of Flers de l’Orne in Normandy by the city of Charleston. More than three hundred European cities were adopted by American counterparts as the program was picked up by other municipalities.
She also helped Gosewisch move back to the United States. Trading on his language skills, Gosewisch had been hired after the war as a liaison between British military headquarters and the new German authorities in the city of Hannover. He and his family lived on a farm outside the city and began planning their return to New York. Gosewisch’s son was the first to go, facing no barriers because he, like his younger sister, was a U.S. citizen, having been born in Brooklyn.
It took much longer for Gosewisch and his wife to get visas. “How often did I wish together with my wife that I would have never left the States,” he told Gertie in a 1946 letter, before asking her to write a letter of recommendation to the U.S. consul in Bremen, which she did.
In his visa application, Gosewisch asserted that his membership in the Nazi Party and other Nazi organizations was “involuntary”—a falsehood—and he held “no rank and was not an officer” in them, so he argued he was entitled to an exemption under U.S. immigration law that would allow him to enter the United States. His visa was granted.
Gosewisch returned to the United States in September 1951, his passage paid for by Gertie. He eventually settled in Columbia, South Carolina, working for a soft drink company. He and his wife became U.S. citizens in 1958, when Gosewisch changed his first name from Wilhelm to William and his wife changed hers from Henrietta to Rita.
He and Gertie occasionally saw each other—polite but fleeting encounters. “Every Christmas he sends me roses and once in a while we lunch and reminisce,” Gertie said.
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Witnessing Gertie’s discontent after returning home, Sidney reminded her she couldn’t always live her life at top speed and that her sense of deflation was not unlike the letdowns she had felt when an expedition was over. “We would revel in the luxuries of hot baths and soft beds for a few days and then there would be a strange yearning for sunrises and sunsets. For the cold winds that sweep over one’s sleeping bag and whip your cheeks in the morning,” he recalled, with a nostalgia that was more Gertie’s than his.
Sidney also cautioned that the war against Japan could continue for a long time yet and they would not be quickly reunited. Gertie immediately began to agitate for a move to Hawaii, contacting James Forrestal, her friend who was secretary of the navy, and her contacts at the American Red Cross to find some way out to her husband. But she met the same bureaucratic roadblocks as in 1942 and 1943. The navy would in no circumstance allow the wives of officers to join their husbands on the islands.
Gertie’s old suspicions about Sidney’s faithfulness returned with a jolt when she discovered from a mutual friend that her husband had opened a dress store with a woman named Gerry in Hawaii. “You have told me nothing about it yourself…and I am wondering why the secret from me?” she asked in a letter. “Is it because of your partnership with Gerry that I trust is only a business one—or what?
“From people returning from the island I hear you run a restaurant and a bar also,” she added. “You must have quite a setup out there and be busy as a bird dog.”
Gertie’s feelings of rejection flooded back with the knowledge that Sidney had what appeared to be a secret life, and the discovery prompted a rare instance of anguished introspection in a letter to her husband:
Our life apart is not something either of us will be able to share or understand. We have lived it alone, each separately. We have each had different thoughts, reactions poles apart. We may take up the threads as in the past but the gap between whether for better or for worse will never be known or felt or understood by the other…
Maybe to you the time meant freedom. I think it has and it has probably been just what you needed and wanted. To me it has meant courage for I have been lonely in spite of my active full exciting life. I have kept at the highest sort of pitch of activity which has nothing to do with one’s inside. Physically busy, mentally occupied but utterly alone. Maybe everyone is really alone all the time as it’s hard to ever feel how the other feels, but there is something that makes living worthwhile if you have another person to think of, make them happy and love. As I read this over I doubt if you can follow what I mean as I find it confusing to try and explain and feel I have expressed it very badly. The children don’t fill my gap, never have and never will. They are awfully sweet but I can’t be satisfied with that.
Although Gertie might not have secured passage to Hawaii, her lobbying seems to have obtained a consolation, albeit a temporary one: a summer assignment to the Advanced Naval Intelligence School in Manhattan for Sidney. And by the time he returned to U.S. Pacific Command in August, Gertie was reassured of his commitment to her.
“How I loved being with you again, what heaven it was to be beside you, to look at you, to feel you—no one on earth Darling has such sweetness—such thoughtfulness, and such charm. I just love you so because I love everything about you,” she wrote to him on August 8. “I appreciate your patience with my lousy jealous streak that crops up and eats my heart out—I’ll be damned if I’m not going to get the better of it and control it somehow…
“Above everything on this earth I want you to go on loving me—it’s all that counts, and I know I must conquer jealousy to keep it.”
A week later, Japan surrendered, but it would be early October before Sidney was finally discharged from the military. He was awarded the Bronze Star Medal for meritorious service.
That winter the couple were back at Medway, their spread outside Charleston.
“T
he plantation is something,” Sidney wrote to his brother in December, “it is just about three times as much work as the Navy, and never stops.”
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On March 8, 1948, Sidney died of a heart attack. He was only forty-four. He was buried at Medway, on a hillock by the lake in front of the house. The Medway staff, led by the head carpenter, who was a Baptist minister, sang “Give Me That Old Time Religion.” When the service was over, Gertie was handed a shotgun, which she raised and fired over the grave.
Death seemed to stalk Gertie’s family. Her sister Jane’s husband, the Italian diplomat Mario Pansa, drowned in July 1946 while swimming at Torre Astura, south of Rome. The couple had emerged unscathed from the war, though not without facing some danger. Pansa was forced into hiding before the Americans reached Rome so he would not be killed by more extreme fascists. He and the Italian foreign minister had been attempting to broker a peace with the Allies.
Morris Legendre and his wife were killed in a plane crash in the Gulf of Mexico in February 1953. Their bodies were never recovered. Two other Legendre brothers also died young.
Gertie never got over the loss of her husband. She died at Medway on March 8, 2000—exactly fifty-two years after Sidney. She was ninety-seven. Gertie had suffered a series of small strokes over the preceding two years but never lost her lust for the life well lived. On her last birthday, her daughter, arriving from California, found her laid up with a “sickly, airless smell of rubbing alcohol and unwashed skin in the room” but still worrying about what Pucci pants or shirt to wear with what suede shoes to her party. She was unable to make it down to see her guests but insisted they stay and have fun.
“The power of dying, of waiting to die, for the same moment Daddy had died, was undeniably the fulfillment of a psychic wish on her part,” her daughter Bokara wrote in her memoir.
