By Wednesday afternoon, June 7, Donovan could no longer be caged. Deyo flatly refused to lend him a boat to go ashore, but if Donovan could hail a passerby, the admiral said he could not stop him. That was enough for Donovan to escape. He strapped on his helmet and battle kit and pinned his Medal of Honor ribbon to his fatigues. With Bruce and Shadel, he clambered down a swinging rope ladder and fell part of the way, plopping into a launch that happened by filled with aviators shot down over the beach and three corpses. The launch helmsman agreed to take Donovan further in, where he climbed aboard a destroyer escort and convinced its bewildered skipper he had urgent spy business ashore where his agents awaited him. The lieutenant commander sailed his ship as close to the beach as he safely could so this mysterious general with a Medal of Honor pinned to his chest could hail an empty landing craft vehicle passing by and order it to lay alongside the destroyer. A swarthy-looking sailor from Chicago manned the LCV. Donovan perched up on a ledge next to the helmsman for a better view and traded stories with him about Chicago gangsters. It looked as if he and Bruce would have to swim the last twenty yards to shore, but Donovan spotted a DUKW amphibious truck and shouted at the Duck driver to draw near. Donovan and Bruce climbed onto the front hood of the DUKW for the ride to dry land.
The battle at the three eastern beaches assigned to British and Canadian forces—Sword, Juno and Gold—had gone pretty well the first and second days. A seasoned German division had just arrived at Omaha Beach in the center, however, and turned the shore into a murderous killing field for the wet and frightened infantrymen struggling through frigid surf and maddening obstacles to reach the shelter of dunes and cliffs. Nearly three thousand lay dead, wounded, or missing after the first day. But the 7th Corps (part of Lieutenant General Omar Bradley’s American 1st Army) had landed at Utah Beach, where Donovan’s DUKW sat parked, and suffered only about two hundred casualties, far below what had been expected, and the corps had already begun to march inland. Even so, the beach, now in a state of organized chaos as equipment and men streamed ashore, remained a hot zone as Donovan sat with Bruce on the DUKW’s hood scanning his field map.
Donovan heard the drone of a plane motor along with the thudding sound of machine gun fire and looked up. Four German Messerschmitts approached, strafing the beach. He rolled nimbly off the hood to the sand beside the DUKW for cover. Bruce was slower to react and fell on top of Donovan. He discovered to his horror that the rim of his steel helmet had gashed Donovan’s chin, and blood now gushed down his neck. Bruce was terrified he had cut a vital artery and was about to kill the leader of America’s spy service. Donovan, however, cheerily got up after the planes passed, dusted the sand off his uniform, and dabbed his chin with a handkerchief.
Donovan ditched the DUKW and began to trudge inland with Bruce, hoping he could catch up with OSS agents or French guerrillas he felt sure were nearby. After several miles of walking they were halted by a young Army lieutenant in command of a forward antiaircraft battery, who demanded to know what they were doing out there. Eyeing the stars on Donovan’s collar, the Medal of Honor on his chest, and the dried blood on his neck, the lieutenant asked it respectfully. Donovan told the incredulous officer he was hunting for secret agents. He spotted three French peasants a couple hundred yards ahead digging up roots and vegetables in a large open field enclosed at the far end by a thick hedge. “Those are some of my boys and I must interrogate them,” Donovan told the lieutenant.
The officer thought waltzing into an open field with German soldiers still around was a crazy idea but Donovan practically sprinted off before he could stop him. With Bruce running to catch up, Donovan reached the far end of the field near the hedgerow, but by then the Frenchmen had disappeared. Suddenly enemy machine gun fire erupted not far from the hedgerow. Donovan and Bruce dove to the ground. With bullets whizzing overhead, Donovan turned to Bruce and said in a whisper: “You understand, of course, David, that neither of us must be captured. We know too much.”
“Yes, sir,” Bruce dutifully answered. Each of them had only a revolver strapped to his waist.
“Have you your pills with you?” Donovan asked in a low voice.
Bruce had been issued the poison tablets but hadn’t brought them along, thinking the last place he’d be was flat on his stomach with Germans firing at him. He apologized profusely.
“Never mind, I have two of them,” Donovan whispered and began hunting for his L tablets while Bruce peered through a hole in the hedge looking for the machine gun nest.
Donovan disgorged everything from his pockets onto the ground beside him: hotel keys, passport, currency of several nationalities, photographs of his granddaughter, travel orders, newspaper clippings. Then he realized he had left his pills in the medicine cabinet in his room at Claridge’s. If we get out of this jam, he told Bruce, “you must send a message” to the hall porter at Claridge’s and tell him not “to allow the servants in the hotel to touch some dangerous medicines in my bathroom.”
Donovan took his revolver out of his holster and looked through the hole in the hedgerow. “I must shoot first,” he whispered to Bruce.
“Yes, sir,” Bruce answered, almost breathlessly. “But can we do much against machine guns with our pistols?”
“Oh, you don’t understand,” Donovan explained. “I mean if we are about to be captured I’ll shoot you first. After all, I am your commanding officer.” Then, Donovan said, he would shoot himself.
Bruce was not particularly enthralled with that prospect. Fortunately, American and British warplanes roared above and they soon heard the whine of artillery shells streaking over them and exploding ahead. Crouching down, Donovan and Bruce ran across the field to safety.
On their way back they stumbled onto the 7th Corps command post in a deserted barn. General Bradley stood inside, bleary-eyed from little sleep the night before with staff officers and newsmen crowded around him as he pored over tactical maps of the inland terrain. He had had a busy day racing from one field headquarters to another bucking up the morale of his commanders, visiting the wounded at aid stations and dodging German artillery fire along the way. He now was intent on joining the Utah and Omaha landing forces at all cost to form a single beachhead. Bruce thought they should turn around and leave the harried Army commander alone. Bradley had grudgingly accepted the OSS detachment but thought it would prove useless. He believed the British spy service was far superior not only to Donovan’s organization, but also to his own Army intelligence, which he complained was a “dumping ground for officers ill-suited to line command.”
Donovan, however, strutted up to Bradley and delivered a polite salute. “General,” he began, interrupting the briefing Bradley had been receiving at the map table. “Colonel Bruce and I have just been trying to establish contact with some of our agents. As I have always predicted, it is going to be easy to get intelligence from behind German lines. I would like to send Bruce to spend some time with the First Army as soon as possible, and I’ve instructed him to give you all the help he can.”
Donovan’s chutzpah flabbergasted Bruce. Bradley had more important things on his mind at the moment than visiting firemen from the OSS and Bruce was sure he knew Donovan had been banned from Normandy. He thought Bradley would erupt now. But the Army commander answered in an even voice: “Bill, I would be very glad to have Bruce at my headquarters later on. But suppose you now go back to wherever you came from.” Bradley returned his attention to the tactical maps on the table.
It was almost dark when Donovan reached the beach. He was delighted with what he thought had been a diplomatic breakthrough with Bradley. Bruce didn’t have the same impression from their curt encounter with the 1st Army commander, but he decided not to dampen his boss’s enthusiasm. Donovan vacuumed intelligence on the way to the shore and scribbled impressions into a notebook, which he later put in a thoughtful six-page memo to Roosevelt. Clearly his earlier misgivings had been unwarranted, he concluded; the Germans did not have the resources to meet the Allied att
ack at every landing point. He had stopped along the way to interrogate a prisoner and try out his German. The Wehrmacht captain told him he was “overwhelmed” at the sight of the Allied armada and realized he was witnessing a historic event. Despite his close call with a Messerschmitt, Donovan noticed that the Luftwaffe had managed to put only a small contingent into the air, which told him “the Germans no longer have an air force that belongs in the Big League,” he wrote FDR. Likewise, the fact that the Germans could muster only a few submarines to harass the invasion fleet demonstrated they were no longer a naval power as well. In the months ahead, “there will be a lot of hard going,” Donovan wrote another friend, “but something has died in the German machine.”
Donovan walked up to the only DUKW he could see on the beach. The driver, a Brooklyn boy, told him he had been sent there to wait for Bradley. “He’s in the field and won’t be back for a long time,” Donovan told the GI. “Meanwhile, Colonel Bruce and I are on urgent business for the President and must rejoin our ship at once.” To Bruce’s amazement Donovan also convinced the Brooklyn driver he had once defended a friend of his in a New York criminal case. He succeeded in commandeering Bradley’s ride. The DUKW took them to a landing craft and they began vessel hopping until they finally reached the Tuscaloosa.
Donovan eventually managed to debark the cruiser with Bruce when it weighed anchor the evening of June 9 off Plymouth. By the third day of Overlord, the window for the Germans repulsing the invaders had shut. Allied soldiers and supplies poured in. They struggled the first month to seize ground and break out of the Normandy pocket, but break out they did. Another 276 OSS, British, and French commandos, called Jedburghs for their training site near Jedburgh, Scotland, would be air-dropped in three-man teams the next four months to organize more than twenty thousand French guerrillas cutting tracks, derailing trains, and ambushing German truck convoys. All told, 523 OSS commandos fought behind enemy lines in France during 1944. Eighteen of them died, fifty-one were wounded, and seventeen were missing in action or captured by the Nazis. Allied aerial bombing and the Maquis’s sabotage and guerrilla attacks succeeded in delaying for two days German reinforcements from arriving at the Normandy front, which Eisenhower considered critical to establishing a beachhead—although Donovan confided to Roosevelt that he thought the Army Air Force’s destruction of French bridges and oil installations did far more to slow the German counterattack than the Maquis.
By itself, the French resistance amounted to only pinpricks against the better armed and trained Germans, who continued to make the Maquis pay dearly for their attacks. Donovan ended up believing the French resistance had been a mixed blessing. After Normandy, the Maquis ranks swelled and “everyone was climbing on the bandwagon,” he said. Some fought well. “In other places their value was nil.” But though their physical strength was puny, the Maquis still wielded symbolic power. They gave their countrymen hope and self-respect. They also reminded those who collaborated that the day would come when traitors would be held accountable.
DONOVAN LEFT LONDON on June 13. He asked Bruce for a copy of everything in his station files so he could catch up on European operations during the flight back. Bruce talked him out of it by saying that the plane would never lift off the ground with that many documents. Back in Washington, Donovan made the rounds with stories about what he saw during the landing. Roosevelt booked a lunch, eager to hear about the fighting at Normandy. The signs he saw of German “disintegration, spiritual as well as physical” made him optimistic, Donovan told FDR. Even the normally reserved Stimson recorded in his diary that Donovan “gave us some very interesting points and comments from his observations.” The spy chief had been struck by the power and accuracy of naval gunfire during Overlord, which became the artillery batteries for Bradley’s Army divisions as they moved forward from the beach, he told the war secretary. Donovan also sent a letter to Forrestal with his observations from the Tuscaloosa bridge and Utah Beach—a not so subtle notice to the new Navy secretary that he didn’t have enough clout yet to keep Donovan from the front.
Chapter 24
Intelligence Failures
TOWARD THE LAST week in June 1944, Donovan bumped along in a jeep on a southern highway leading into Rome. David Crockett, who had tended to him in Caserta when he had the flu, drove. In the back seat Putzell sat crammed between bags with Colonel Edward Glavin, a West Pointer and seasoned military man Donovan had just brought in to head the OSS’s Italian operations. Donovan, who had spent only a week back in Washington after the Normandy landing, was eager to reach the Italian capital, which Clark had finally liberated at the beginning of June after a slow and bloody campaign in the south. Hitler had ordered Kesselring not to raze Rome when he retreated; it was strategically unimportant. The German occupation soldiers streamed north out of the city in convoy trucks, stolen cars, motorcycles, bicycles, pushcarts, or anything else they could find on wheels. Peter Tompkins had his agents track stay-behind Nazi spies and compiled long lists of collaborators who would need to be rounded up. As Clark’s soldiers entered on June 4, Tompkins also became an unofficial intermediary in the turnover of law enforcement in Rome between the Italian police chief and the city’s German commander, who was stinking drunk that day.
Crockett pulled the jeep up to the ornate Grand Hotel Plaza in the city’s historical center. The doorman at the front instantly recognized Donovan, and they were ushered to a second-floor suite, where porters brought up pails filled from a nearby fountain for washing because the hotel had no running water. The dining room’s waiters served the few customers at tables full-course meals. The soup du jour, the boeuf à la mode, and fruits de saison were all made from black market Army rations the cooks had doctored. Word spread like wildfire that Donovan was in town; Crockett was sure that all manner of enemy agents had quickly booked rooms around their suite to plant listening devices in the walls, floors, and ceilings, so Donovan conducted all his sensitive business in the street outside. “Italy is the cesspool of intelligence,” he told Crockett. But Donovan was there to clean up his own dirty pond.
His operation in Italy was a mess. Glavin and Putzell launched an intensive probe of all the intelligence activities the OSS had in the country. Donovan assigned Crockett to look into the compromise of the Vittoria station in Rome. They came back with a long list of problems. The men running Donovan’s Italian operations were enthusiastic but amateurish, his advisers told him. He had three separate intelligence programs underway in the country: some seventy Italian and Sicilian Americans Max Corvo and Vincent Scamporino first brought to Algiers who were now at Brindisi in southern Italy, the OSS intelligence detachment assigned to Clark’s 5th Army further north at Caserta, and a group of OSS special operations commandos in Corsica who were organizing partisans in northern Italy. The three worked independently, at times they feuded with one another, and generally they created bureaucratic chaos in the field, Glavin found. A lot of the military intelligence Corvo’s outfit at Brindisi collected was vague. The political intelligence the OSS outposts in Palermo and Naples gathered was worthless. Money was being wasted. Some OSS officers were even pocketing cash on the side, speculating on fluctuating exchange rates among the Italian lira, the Algerian franc, and the U.S. dollar.
In Rome, Donovan had two competing and overlapping operations—Menicanti’s and Tompkins’s—with each man insisting that he was the head of the city’s clandestine operations and no one at headquarters settling the dispute. Crockett reported that Menicanti was a “very rough, ruthless gangster type.” Tompkins, he concluded, was courageous and sincere, but the young man was in way over his head and “did a very sloppy job of security.” Counterintelligence officers sifting through the Vittoria station wreckage concluded that the Germans knew about Tompkins before he even arrived in Rome and by March they had a good read on his activities in the city. The ridiculous-looking beard he grew as a disguise instead made him stand out in the capital city, they decided, and made it easier for the Gestapo to track h
im. “It seems quite probable,” the OSS security men theorized in a later report, that the Germans let Tompkins roam freely so they could follow him and gather up the Italians he recruited as agents. By early spring, the Germans, in fact, had convinced four of the snitches they captured by following Tompkins to work for them as double agents. The most important turncoat in Tompkins’s network turned out to be Franco Malfatti, the Socialist Party’s military intelligence officer, who “betrayed OSS to the SD,” the security officers reported.
The British were angry over what they considered a slipshod OSS operation in Italy. Even reputable Italian politicians complained to Donovan that “any scoundrel” in their country could get the ear of an OSS officer and sell him worthless information or a shady spy mission. Personnel problems had grown acute for the entire U.S. Army in Italy, with poorly trained replacements arriving from stateside, almost mutinous morale among weary front-line troops, and an alarming number of desertions or GIs shooting themselves in the foot to escape combat. Even so, the OSS operational breakdowns and security lapses in Italy had become a black eye for the agency. “Our Italian intelligence units have given me cause for anxiety,” Donovan admitted in one cable to Glavin. He blamed his troubles on the Italian Americans Corvo had recruited. He thought they were mostly unreliable and addicted to political intrigue. Corvo thought Donovan and other snobby WASPs in the OSS were prejudiced against Italian Americans. But Donovan was as much at fault for the mess. The jumbled OSS organization in the country, after all, was his creation.
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