Clare watched the Tobruk Battalion in a dive-bombing exhibition at Castel Bolognese. One of her dinner companions that night was Major Julian Beck of the 79th Wing, RAF, who had bombed Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s mountain hideout in Bavaria.14 Something masculine in Clare relished the harshness of war, and her versatile mind embraced all the details of strategy, logistics, and technology thrown at her in briefings. Yet at the same time, her outward femininity disarmed her military hosts, who did not realize from her calm and apparent impassivity how much she absorbed.
Next morning, she talked to pilots who had just returned from a mission in the north. One plane was riddled with flak holes, so it was with some trepidation that after lunch she accepted McCreery’s offer of a ride back to Florence in his private aircraft, only to find herself escorted by a flight of Spitfires from the 244th Wing that “kept stunting around” until she was “well beyond the bomb line.”15
A letter from Truscott, addressed to “La Belle,” awaited her in the city. He thanked her for the sprig of edelweiss (“I shall carry it always”) and enclosed an itinerary for her pending Fifth Army visit. When not on tour, he wrote, she could stay at his villa or his hotel suite. In either place they could dine together, “Just the two of us … I will devote myself to you … for as long as you and the war effort will permit it!”16
But Clare did not let the general monopolize her time. The following night, she was photographed playing billiards at the Robertson Club with British servicemen half Truscott’s age. This made news in her constituency and sparked a letter to the Bridgeport Herald, complaining that Mrs. Luce was elected to represent the Fourth District, not to play games with soldiers. “She is not a war correspondent. She is not an entertainer. She is not a Red Cross worker. She is a Congresswoman.”17
Clare hit the road again on Wednesday, March 21, traveling west to inspect Fifth Army positions near the Ligurian Sea. The weather was at last warm, and she broke her journey to chat with GIs from the Tenth Mountain Division. During a lull in enemy gunfire, they had stripped off their shirts to get a tan. She noted that their mental and physical caliber was “extremely high.”18 Unable to resist a 75mm pack howitzer, Clare took aim and fired it. In the process, she broke all her fingernails and almost a knee. She wisecracked that the gun had “more kick than the mules which carried it there.”19
Her curiosity about military life extended to whether the new rations supplied to Allied troops were appetizing. After quizzing men about their preferences, she concluded that a soldier’s ideal meal would include British sardines, Indian mutton and chutney, Italian guava jelly, and Brazilian coffee.20
By Thursday afternoon, she was back on winding roads with a new escort, Major Vernon A. Walters. Multilingual, he was a born intelligence officer, and became a lifelong friend. At an expeditionary encampment just north of Pisa, an Associated Press reporter, Stan Swinton, was on hand to witness the arrival of their mud-spattered Jeep. “Mrs. Luce, a steel helmet covering her blonde hair and clad in an olive-drab uniform cut to her trim figure … somehow managed to look as if she had just stepped from a beauty parlor.”21 On her left lapel she wore a strange Asian medal. Somebody asked her what it was, and she replied, “Order of Chastity Second Class.” The men roared.22
Clare beguiles Fifth Army Group troops in Italy, 1945 (illustration credit 11.1)
Another letter from Truscott awaited Clare in Florence. Could she dine with him on Sunday? “What a glorious woman you are! Never before have I experienced the peace in the soul that I feel today. My only cloud … is the knowledge of days that I must pass without you.… I envy all who are seeing you. God bless you and keep you. Lucian.”23
Opportunities for them to meet were diminishing, so he asked Clare to come on Tuesday to the Roman villa that he had first occupied after the Allies captured the capital. “It’s nice, it’s private.” He had it all planned. They would have an afternoon stroll, or sit in the sun and talk. At dinner, he would quietly contemplate her “and think how beautiful are the lilies of the field.” On Wednesday they would take a Jeep trip to Anzio, and picnic there while he told her “stories of heroism.” Afterward, he would show her the now infamous beachhead where superior German forces had stalled his army’s advance. Until he met her, he had thought “there could be no adequate reward” for those “122 days of misery.”24
Clare knew enough military history to understand that Truscott’s reveries were those of the archetypal soldier, imagining a few hours of bliss before what might be his last battle. She went ahead of him to attend a dinner in her honor hosted by the British Ambassador, Sir Noel Charles, at his lavish apartment in the Orsini Palace.
She arrived late and last, incensing the wife of Myron Taylor, Roosevelt’s personal envoy to the Holy See. “I wouldn’t have her in my drawing room in New York,” she said to a fellow guest, Harold Macmillan. “Why should she keep me waiting here?”25
Macmillan sat next to Clare at dinner, and was intrigued afterward to see the military contingent zeroing in on her “like bees round a honey pot. She ‘turns it on’ in rather a marked fashion. But that goes very well with the sex-starved soldiery.”26
Clare then disappeared for a couple of days, staying incommunicado with Truscott. Meanwhile at the Pentagon, aides to the Chief of Staff began questioning her whereabouts. She had not bargained for the fact that since her House speech on the Forgotten Front, Marshall was now paying more attention to the Italian war. The Allied spring offensive was due to begin in less than two weeks, and he needed General Truscott’s full tactical attention.
Dr. Morrison C. Stayer, the Surgeon General of the Mediterranean theater, was ordered to track Clare down and send her to the “ZI” (Zone of the Interior, i.e., the United States) without delay. She was affecting morale with her “somewhat inappropriate behavior” and “had to be saved from her own indiscretions.”27
Dr. Stayer was a practical rather than a prudish man. Having observed Clare’s alcohol intake and flirtations in Caserta, he suspected her mysterious absence was due to a drinking binge, a liaison, or both. To avoid publicity, he asked a recuperating soldier, Arthur B. Dodge, Jr., to handle the “sensitive and delicate mission” of finding Mrs. Luce. “General Marshall wants her out of here.”
Furnished with the address of a certain villa in Rome, Dodge and a driver set off there in an army staff car. He announced his mission to a maid who answered the door. Clare appeared in a tweed suit. When Dodge informed her that he had been assigned “to escort you to your transport home,” he was struck by a look of mixed relief and reluctance on her face.
After changing into army fatigues for the drive to Rome’s airport, Clare climbed into the waiting car. Even now, she had to be coquettish with the attractive, mustachioed young officer. “Why don’t you sit in the back with me, Lieutenant, and we can talk?”
Dodge rode with her, but resolutely put her on a flight to Naples. He then called his superior with a discreet message: “Sir, the package has been dispatched.”28
Clare risked Marshall’s wrath by delaying her departure for Washington. Instead, she brazenly returned to Rome on March 29 for another audience with Pope Pius XII. The Holy Father remembered seeing her four months before, and said that he believed American women would be a great influence for world peace after the war.
She then visited Anzio with Truscott. It seemed to mean a great deal to him that they spent their last Italian hours together there, so much so that he wrote a poem for her entitled “Anzio Revisited.”
Sit here and drink this glass of wine with me,
Dear lady. Do you hear the springtime song
A bird is making in that tree? That tree …
Now how the memories begin to throng!
That pine’s the very one which death once sought
Me under while I watched a dog-fight there.
Today, the sky is sunlit—like your hair.
Then sky and sea were wintry as we fought
Up the beach to this cover deep in mud
.
Men crouched against the naked bark, and shell
Came screaming at us—thirsting for our blood.
This quiet wood was once the home of hell.
I’m troubled by the ghosts that haunt this place.
They mock the skull beneath your lovely face.29
On April 7, Clare arrived in Paris. She wanted to see how the benighted city had recovered from the occupation. Reporters lay in wait, and were not disappointed. With the European conflict winding down, she said, American troops must be informed of their immediate future. “Many of them think a boat will be waiting to take them home as soon as the war is over. I think a large number of them are likely to be sent to the Pacific.”30
Lieutenant Colonel Ray J. Stecker, commander of the “Hell Hawks” 365th Fighter Group, was on hand to squire her around town. He had performed a similar function in Italy during her first trip and described those “ten days in December ’44 [as] the most precious of my life.”31 A former champion jock with a Distinguished Flying Cross, Bronze Star, and Croix de Guerre, he was tall, blond, thirty-five, and married. Clare was drawn to such young men who daily risked death, and she offered them solace, which they sometimes took more seriously than she did. Next day, just as Mark Clark’s offensive began in the south, Stecker flew her to Cologne and Marburg.
Clare marked her forty-second birthday near the French lines on April 10, while Allied forces—three out of four of them American—raced toward the river Elbe. Simultaneously, the Soviets took Vienna, depriving Truscott of his dream to capture the capital of Hitler’s homeland. At dusk, he wrote Clare a “commemorative” letter, saying that in her company he had been “truly and completely happy” for once in his life.
Without hope, this would indeed be a dreary world. Therefore like Cinderella I shall await the wand of the fairy godmother to do for me what I cannot do for myself—bring us together again. Meanwhile, be it one year or twenty, I shall not be sad ever, only joyful and thankful for the one complete and perfect association of my life. Do you recall that in the garden at Villa La Speiga I railed a bit at the fate that had delayed our meeting until the afternoon of my life? I am over that. I am only grateful to whatever kind fate brought us together even for such a brief period.
Thus I shall be a better man and a better soldier than ever before because there is again serenity in my soul. The battle is on as you know and in just forty eight hours this Fifth of yours will be on its way to Berchtesgaden, and in its commander’s pocket a bit of edelweiss will spur him on and bring him luck, and in his heart a great love, always.32
13
OPENING OF THE CAMPS
For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; either hid, that shall not be known.
—SAINT LUKE’S GOSPEL, 12:2–3
Clare heard of Franklin Roosevelt’s death near the German battle lines on Thursday, April 12. In Moscow, the news stunned even Josef Stalin, who clung silently for a time to the hand of Ambassador Averell Harriman. And in Tokyo, to a background of solemn music, a radio announcer proclaimed “the passing of a great man.”1
Leaving Heidelberg for Paris three days later, on what she assumed would be the first leg of her journey home, Clare suddenly suffered a gastric disorder and checked into the American hospital in Neuilly for a few days.2 While there, she had leisure to absorb news reports, coming thick and fast, of the nightmarish conditions that Allied troops were finding in German concentration camps. She recovered just in time to seize on an invitation from General Eisenhower to join a British-American political delegation that would visit some of these Nazi labor and extermination facilities and publicize the horrors found there.
The delegation’s first stop on April 21 was Buchenwald, a five-hundred-acre compound in East Germany.3 Named incongruously after nearby forests of beech trees, the camp sat on the north slope of a hill, overlooking the exquisite city of Weimar, where Bach, Goethe, Schiller, Liszt, and Nietzsche once lived. Recent Allied air raids had wrecked the eighteenth-century houses of the poets (hitherto preserved as national shrines) as well as the architecturally fine main square.4
Clare and her companions—Representative John Kunkel of Pennsylvania and Leonard W. Hall of New York, as well as ten British members of Parliament—learned that Buchenwald could accommodate a maximum of 120,000 prisoners at a time.5 But over a four-year period, 51,000 of Hitler’s “undesirables,” among them Jews, Communists, Gypsies, Fascist resistance fighters, convicted criminals, and homosexuals, had died from overwork, starvation, or disease.6 Thus, it was a greatly diminished population of some 60,000 all-male inmates, including Poles, Hungarians, and Russians, that the Sixth Armored Division of Patton’s Third Army had found on April 11. By far the greatest proportion were Jews. Clare learned that they were the only people in any camp with numbers tattooed on their wrists.
A guide met the delegation at an iron entrance gate embellished with the words Recht oder Unrecht—Mein Vaterland (“Right or Wrong—My Country”). Inside, along a main avenue aptly named Blood Street, Clare was startled to encounter a bunch of skeletal figures in blue-and-white-striped prison garb, staring at her dull-eyed.
It was a hot, dry day. As she followed the guide through the ill-kempt grounds, whirling winds blew dust into her eyes and coated the walls of wooden huts and brick housing. The gusts also brought odors of rotting bodies and human waste. Although press gangs of German civilians from outside the complex were supposed to have cleaned up for a week under American supervision, Clare’s chief impression was of “intense general squalor.”7
One of the first dormitories the delegation saw consisted of small rooms with windows and cement floors. Four of these, Clare learned, had been used as a camp brothel, where non-Jewish prisoners employed in supervisory jobs were allowed to have sex for twenty minutes at a time. Female inmates, brought from other camps, had become “prostitutes” under duress. The same verminous huts were now a makeshift medical facility, treating men in advanced states of emaciation. About one hundred a day had been dying when the Americans took over. The rate had already dropped by almost two-thirds, but doctors expected few of the survivors to last. Clare understood why, when she noticed that the thighs protruding through scanty cotton garments of men still barely breathing were no thicker than normal wrists.8
Clare in Buchenwald barracks, April 1945 (illustration credit 13.1)
Among the younger prisoners was Elie Wiesel, a seventeen-year-old Romanian. He had gone down with food poisoning three days after liberation, and was hovering between life and death.9
About eight hundred children remained in the camp. They had been forced to work alongside adults, on eight-hour shifts seven days a week, in nearby quarries or at a large munitions factory. Their basic daily ration had consisted of a bowl of watery soup and a chunk of dry bread.
Clare with Buchenwald survivors, April 1945 (illustration credit 13.2)
Clare and her colleagues moved on to the white-walled basement of the mortuary block. Its ceiling was eight feet high, and according to the guide, more than a thousand inmates had been hanged from it on hooks. Those dying too slowly were finished off by executioners with clubs shaped like potato mashers. One of these was still stained with blood.10 A large electric lift carried the dead from the basement to a yard above, where SS guards, anxious to flee the advancing Allies, had stacked them on the ground or in carts. Some piles were still there. Clare scrutinized the naked, decomposing bodies. None bore obvious marks of violence.
Off the yard stood the camp’s crematorium, a row of capacious arched ovens. Many of them, she noted, were “still full of splintered, charred remains and blackened skulls of corpses.”11
Near the end of the tour, a camp official briefed the delegates on the sterilization experiments that had continued in Buchenwald’s laboratories even after “the policy of exterminating Jews had long superceded that of castrating them.” They then heard about Ilse Koch, wife of the camp’s commandant, who had collected articles made of human ski
n. The members of Parliament took one of her lampshades and other samples for forensic analysis.12
A reporter heard Clare muttering repeatedly, “It could happen to us in twenty years.” After he told her that army camera crews had shot copious footage of the camp’s atrocities for public distribution, she voiced her approval. “Everyone should see these films and never forget them.” She brushed aside a cameraman’s suggestion that some scenes were too horrible for popular viewing. “No one wants to believe such things could happen. But they have happened here.”13
Her own comprehension was strained further, as some inmates of Buchenwald told her they had been transferred there from an even worse facility in southeast Poland, Auschwitz-Birkenau.14 Auschwitz was reportedly an extermination center (Treblinka being another) so efficient that between May and July 1944 alone, it had eliminated four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews, disposing of them at the rate of twelve thousand a day.15 Women, children, and men unfit for work were routinely herded into a mammoth shower-bath, stripped naked, and sprayed with Zyklon B, a nerve gas comprising amethyst-blue crystals that was routinely used in pest control. More than a million people had died at Auschwitz, most of them under the authority of Adolf Eichmann, head of the Jewish Office of the Gestapo. His obsession was to destroy “every single Jew he could lay his hands on.”16
Every day of her tour, Clare learned more about Nazi torture and annihilation policies. The delegation’s next stop was Buchenwald’s sub-camp, Ohrdruf, a little to the west near Gotha. Generals Patton, Eisenhower, and Bradley had already visited and the last had vomited at the sight—no longer available to her—of shallow graves filled with more than thirty-two hundred naked, emaciated bodies, lice crawling over them.17
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