Ike reported to Churchill that the Burgomaster of Weimar and his wife, forced to confront what their nation had wrought in that camp, had gone home and hanged themselves.18
Revelations of a different kind awaited Clare at Nordhausen, a town fifty miles north of Weimar, in the Harz Mountains of Thuringia. As a member of the Military Affairs Committee, she was intrigued to discover that it was here, in late 1943, that Hitler’s armament czar, Albert Speer, had established Dora-Mittelbau, a subterranean slave labor factory for the manufacture of secret experimental weapons. Thirty sub-camps on the perimeter of Dora were built aboveground for thousands of workers, to replace the spent or dead from the main facility. Troops of the 104th U.S. Infantry Division had found only two survivors among three thousand scattered bodies in one of these interim shelters. Allied air attacks were responsible for some of the fatalities.19
As for Dora itself, a camouflaged work site carved out of old gypsum mines on the side of a green mountain, Clare at first thought it was a disused salt mine. Inside the unobtrusive entrance, there was a network of well-lit, air-conditioned tunnels, the central one about a mile long. It took the visitors fifteen minutes to travel to the end in a Jeep. Along the way, Clare saw transverse corridors housing a variety of up-to-date machine tools and assembly belts. All the equipment had been installed by Speer to make the V-1 and V-2 pilotless guided missiles—the “V” standing for Vergeltung, meaning “retribution.” In retaliation for the bombing of Germans by the Royal Air Force, Hitler had hoped, before D-Day, to obliterate the British capital with them, but many of the pilotless bombs ran out of fuel or malfunctioned. Others were destroyed by antiaircraft fire or shot down by fighter planes. Nevertheless, three thousand Londoners had been killed by rockets in the last year of the war.20
For eighteen months, the delegation was told, sixty thousand men had worked here continuously, in an underground temperature no higher than 59 degrees Fahrenheit. They had been given no water for washing, had only truncated oil barrels for toilets, and slept in neighboring warrens on tiers of makeshift bunks. Short of sunlight and proper nourishment, twenty thousand had died, taking many German technological secrets with them.21
As Clare marveled at the assembly lines, still gleaming with rows of incomplete rockets, she concluded that such destructive inventions “can only be hatched secretly by nations which limit interior freedom.”22 What she did not yet know was that her own country was working on an even more devastating war product.23
Still wearing the khaki tunic and slacks she had at the outset, Clare arrived at Bergen-Belsen, near Hanover in Lower Saxony. By the time it was freed on April 15, it had become a dumping ground for sixty thousand sick inmates from other prisons. Anne Frank and her sister had been transferred there from Auschwitz at the end of October 1944. Both lived only four more months, succumbing to typhus a few weeks before the camp was liberated.24
The Franks were buried, but Clare saw corpses “stacked like boards, thumbs and ankles interlocked fifteen and twenty deep,” awaiting interment. For the first time, she understood the import of the word stiffs as applied to gunned-down victims by hoodlums in Hollywood gangster movies. She tried to make conversation with a few survivors, reminding herself that some of them may have been among the finest minds in Europe. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Parlez-vous français?” Unthinkingly, she reached into a breast pocket for a cigarette, whereupon a few prisoners rushed at her and grabbed for the packet. Beating them off, she screamed, “Get away from me!”
Her reaction was instinctive, and she felt shamed by it. “I realized in that moment what it was like to be a Nazi. I was treating them like animals, too.”25
14
VICTORY IN EUROPE
Being on the move is no substitute for feeling.
—EUDORA WELTY
When Congresswoman Luce broadcast an account of her tour from London on April 26, she was pessimistic about the likelihood of Germany’s bombed-out cities being rebuilt. “They had better salt the streets the way they did in Carthage and forget them.” As for the concentration camps, “It’s hard for ordinary people in the democracies really to believe that torture can be … state policy.” Responsibility for the Nazi atrocities fell squarely upon Germans. Until they acknowledged their guilt, they should not be admitted “into the decent family of nations.”1
Clare flew home two days later, hearing en route that Italian partisans had captured and shot Benito Mussolini, then hung his body upside down in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto. When her clipper landed in Miami on May 1, she exited the plane to news of Adolf Hitler’s death. “Golly golly!” she exclaimed to reporters. “It’s like the end of a dreadful nightmare.” Her language was trite, but she promised that on Capitol Hill she intended to advocate “a hard peace for the Germans.”2
On May 3, Clare rose in Congress. “Mr. Speaker, I wish to address the House briefly on the subject of the Buchenwald and Nordhausen camps.” But first she asked that the report of her British parliamentary colleagues be inserted into the Congressional Record. She could testify that it was “in no sense exaggerated.” It was as if she hoped that British understatement would balance the dramatic rhetoric of her own findings.
No American … can imagine what grisly tortures were visited upon some of the prisoners for the smallest infraction of the camps’ inhuman disciplines. No words can describe them or evoke the ghastly sights and sounds and the unutterable smells that day and night afflicted all the occupants of these infernos, two among many in Germany. Existence for human beings at Buchenwald, Nordhausen, Bergen-Belsen, Ohrdruf, Langenstein, Dachau and other extermination centers was a descent into the bowels of hell.3
From what she had seen and heard, the “beatings, burnings, hangings, clubbings, foul mutilations, and massacres practiced in these charnel houses” were merely part of a larger Nazi policy of “death by slow starvation.” The dead and dying, she went on, “were difficult to tell apart at the hideous barracks of Nordhausen.” She gave a detailed description of the underground facility, where the Nazis had not flinched at “using the blood and fat of men as one uses fuel to stoke secret furnaces and fire secret weapons.” When the fuel was exhausted, the human containers had been scrapped.
Torture for torture’s sake is nothing new.… The Coliseum at Rome had witnessed even more senseless orgies of sadism than those intermittently practiced by the jailers of these camps. But carefully calculated starvation of hundreds of thousands of human beings in the building of a modern aggressive war machine—this surely is something new and terrible in the world.
What most struck her was the creativeness of Nazi cruelty. Nordhausen had produced “the most ingenious and devastating weapons yet tried on earth,” which “already challenged the supremacy of the heavy bomber as a strategic weapon.” She foresaw the development of “radio-guided, motor- and jet-propelled missiles, with tremendous warheads,” that “can be hurled thousands of miles with great accuracy.” Ending her address with an appeal to the international peace organization currently forming in San Francisco, she said that if it hoped to prevent future wars, it must first guarantee the liberty of individuals and do away “with the imprisonment of men anywhere in the world for their political convictions.”4
Newspaper typefaces documenting the last hours of the war in Europe grew larger and bolder in the days immediately following Clare’s speech. On May 4, the New York Herald Tribune announced:
NAZI SOLDIERS SURRENDERING BY THE THOUSANDS
ALLIES BOMB MILITARY EXODUS TO DENMARK
DOENITZ’S AIDE HOPES TERMS WILL BE “GENEROUS”
On the same day, The New York Times ran wrenching photographs of a leveled Berlin, now in Russian hands. It was “one great tombstone,” wrote a Stars and Stripes reporter. The only signs of life in the city, once home to four million people, were a few dispirited shovelers clearing remnants of toppled masonry and dead bodies. Clare would not have recognized the beautiful capital she visited as a nineteen-year-old. The Hotel Adlon had vanishe
d, as had the State Opera building. Even the elegant Unter den Linden boulevard was obscured by layers of gray powder and reportedly reeked of sewage and death.5
At 2:41 A.M. on May 7, 1945, in a schoolhouse near Rheims, General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, watched General Alfred Jodl and Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg sign an unconditional surrender of all German land, sea, and air forces. For the Western Allies, Victory in Europe, henceforth known as V-E Day, came into effect officially a minute before midnight. For the Soviets it began a day later, with a signing ceremony in the Berlin suburb of Karlshorst.6 And so, one week after the death of its instigator, the most ferocious war the Continent had ever seen came to an end.7
New Yorkers were jubilant at the news. Half a million crowded Times Square, laughing, dancing, waving flags, tooting horns, and kissing strangers as ticker tape floated down.8 But in Washington, government employees were ordered to keep working, and the streets of the capital stayed relatively empty when President Truman announced on the radio the “solemn but glorious hour” of peace.9
At sixty-one, he had only just moved into the White House and felt unprepared for the onerous task that faced him. He now had to ponder a state secret that Roosevelt had not shared with him as Vice President. “Within four months,” Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson wrote, “we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb of which could destroy a whole city.”10 The prospect of being pressured by his own and Allied military leaders to end the Pacific war with this new weapon, coupled with the task of wheedling money from Congress for postwar recovery programs, compounded Truman’s anxieties, as did a cable from Churchill about the Russians: “An iron curtain is drawn down upon their front. We do not know what is going on behind.”11
Clare echoed the Prime Minister’s concern in a speech at Columbia University on May 27. She warned that Stalinism was “rushing over Europe and Asia at a greater speed than Nazi ideas did ten years ago,” and that thirteen nations in Europe were already controlled by local or Muscovite Reds. “Germany is the battleground where either democracy or Communism will win.”12 Two days later, in a broadcast entitled “Shall It Be One World?” for NBC’s Blue Network, she took up again the subject of burgeoning antidemocratic threats, an obsession that she would trumpet for the next forty years.
During the war, she noted, America had given the Soviet Union $8 billion in matériel, buttressing what was now the “the strongest military and industrial power in Europe.” Since Stalin might now turn to help the West defeat Japan, he could become the most formidable force in Asia. There were already strong Marxist organizations in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Mexico, Central and South America, the Near East, and China. It was also no secret that Indian intellectuals were “looking toward their near and mighty neighbor … for guidance in the technique of revolution.” Meanwhile, “we have our own Earl Browder”—an allusion to the Stalinist head of the Communist Party USA.
She drew a parallel between Communist and Nazi totalitarianism, saying that it was as murderous to throw a farmer off his land, or send him to a Siberian gulag, as to incarcerate a Jew in a concentration camp.
This cannot long remain two worlds, as it is today—the world of totalitarianism and the world of liberty. Indeed, as our conflict with Nazi totalitarianism proved, these two worlds are doomed to come into conflict. It must, and will be one world sooner or later.
Shall it be one world in which all mankind crawls and cringes in the darkness of slavery? Or shall it be one world in which all the great nations of mankind love and live in the light of freedom?13
15
FRAGMENTATION
If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.
—GIUSEPPE DI LAMPEDUSA
Clare experienced a letdown as she settled once more into the humdrum duties of congressional life. It had been the same after her last trip to the front, but this time she felt worse. Peace in Europe, and probable peace in the Pacific later in the year, would bring to an end her thrilling involvement with commanders in the field. For the most part, her attraction to men-at-arms was visceral and intellectual rather than merely sexual, and they were beguiled by her understanding of their missions, as well as by her extraordinary personality and looks. Generals in both theaters were confessedly in love with her—Lucian Truscott in Europe and Charles Willoughby in the Pacific, not to mention Ray Stecker and the long list of officers, American and British, who at least found her irresistibly beautiful. It had been that way with Clare ever since her teenage flings with the White Russian Alexis Aladin and Julian Simpson—career soldiers both, and in the case of the latter, a man for whom she still yearned.
She was enough of a femme fatale to encourage current beaux in their fantasies of marriage, but doubted such dreams could survive the war. Willoughby, certainly, was both handsome and free, but none of them had a chance of competing in peacetime with Henry Luce’s wealth and power. It was true that since 1939 she had gotten no sexual satisfaction from her husband, and frustration on that score mounted now that she was back in Washington and had to watch her social behavior.
She had to be particularly careful right now, because Stecker was in town, having left Europe at about the same time she had. He was staying at the Wardman Park Hotel, while going through the process of demobilization. Following that, he would resume his career as a “dealer in wool and animal hairs” in Massachusetts. Harry, who had briefly visited the capital to welcome Clare home, embarked on a lengthy trip to Asia, leaving his wife and her air ace free to continue their liaison through mid-June. Before going north, Stecker wrote her a farewell note.
My Darling: The time has finally arrived when we must part. Each time it gets worse but each time we leave each other more of ourself. It is not right for a person to be as happy as I have been these last six weeks.… I love you deeply, Clare, for the fine beautiful woman you are. Your talents are legion, but darling they are overshadowed by your talent of a loving kind pure woman.… I can make you so happy, so much wanted, so much needed you would love me always as you do now.1
The effect of this was somewhat negated when he wrote again to say that his wife had agreed to a divorce. He plainly expected Clare to get a similar release and marry him. But she promptly squashed this fantasy by not responding and not being available for his calls.2
A mutual acquaintance reported to Willoughby that Clare looked taut and restless that spring, glancing constantly at her watch, as though anxious to be somewhere else. The general was not surprised: he knew her susceptibility to strain and tendency to be depressed out of the limelight.3 His own feeling of pity for her was sharpened by resentment that she had not written to him since February, except for a casual wire at the end of her European trip.4
He sent a jealous letter that accused her of wasting her “great talent and charm” on Field Marshal Alexander’s “second-rate professional outfit.” Clearly suspecting her of dallying with other officers, he felt shunted aside. He quoted a “stiletto” passage in one missive from her that had pierced his heart: “Time has delivered its soft, imperceptible, lingering mortal blow just as we foresaw it would. You know when you come back, I shall be deeply fond of you, and yet many things have happened to both of us, that will make us strangers.”5
She also received a wistful letter from General Truscott. “I did not reach Berchtesgaden … I’m told the Air lads laid the place flat.” He was establishing new headquarters on the west shore of Isola di Garda. “Of course I shall dream a bit of other villas and other associations.”6 He was coming home soon on leave, to be feted in his native state of Texas. “The great American public must have its spectacles.”7 After that, he would visit Washington and hoped to see her.8
While awaiting this reunion, Clare spent solitary nights at the Wardman Park, finishing an outline for a novel. She mailed it to Truscott for his opinion. He recognized himself as her thinly disguised protagonist and respond
ed tactfully, writing that he did not think “a fictional hero on a forgotten front” was an appropriate vehicle for her views on postwar American foreign policy.9
Their subsequent reunion, circumscribed by his Pentagon and family commitments, consisted of cocktails and dinner at the Wardman Park on Sunday, June 24.10 More than two months had passed since they had last seen each other. They felt the awkwardness of a couple whose romance had flourished in an alien, dangerous environment and could not survive transposition to native soil. Their paths must now diverge. Lucian not only had a wife of twenty-six years and three children to consider, but was slated for an administrative position in occupied Germany.11 Clare had to confront the specter of Henry Luce, back in New York that evening from his extensive Far Eastern trip and hoping to see more of her now that the war in Europe was over.
Truscott summed up their relationship in a letter permeated with regret:
It is perhaps just as well that we were both too old, too wise, too devoted to the task in hand, too conscious of duties to be done, and books to write and lives to be lived—to fall in love—or I might have written you a love letter. I might have cried against fate that so arranged history. I would certainly have devoted pages and pages to saying what a glorious person you are. Since we are old, I must write drivel like this and sign off
Yours L.12
As the summer progressed, Clare began to show signs of sexual frustration. One night she dropped in on Isabel Hill’s son John, a soldier in his early twenties, who was staying at the Wardman Park Hotel. He was already in bed, and she embarrassed him by ruminating on what the consequences of leaving her husband might be. “Would it be awful to have a romance, John?” she asked, pulling at his bedsheets. But he did not encourage her.13
Price of Fame Page 15
