The Moon’s a Balloon

by David Niven

  The Americans and Free French entered Paris on the twenty-fifth and the British, Canadians and Poles rushed headlong for the Channel ports and Belgium.

  With the Germans in full retreat, conflicting plans were put forward for bringing the war to a speedy conclusion and even louder squabbles now broke out between those super prima donnas, Montgomery, Bradley and Patton. Distorted versions of their differences filtered down to the fighting troops and General Barker’s department had a lot of fence-mending to do. I was ordered to Paris to deliver some important documents to an American colonel. ‘Meet him in the bar of the Hotel Crillon’, was my highly sophisticated directive and I hastened south, most anxious to see my favourite city in the full orgiastic ecstasy of her liberation.

  An American corporal was driving my jeep. We got lost in Neuilly till I realised I was only a stone’s throw from Claude’s apartment. I bade the corporal wait, and leaving him festooned with flowers in the centre of a singing, kissing, bottle-waving throng, I pushed my way into the building. My welcome was rapturous but the set-up had changed. ‘Monsieur’ having been deported to a forced labour camp near Essen. Madame and Claude, in their misery, had buried their hatchets, pooled their resources and Claude had moved in upstairs, with the family. They nourished me from the sparse supplies of food and drink, heated water in pails so I could have a hot bath and clucked over me like two hens.

  Luckily, I had kept the documents with me because when I descended to keep my rendezvous at the Crillon the jeep and corporal had disappeared, borne off, he assured me later, on the crest of a wave of hysterical grateful citizenry . Claude saved the day.

  ‘It’s nothing—you take Madame’s bicycle…I come with you!’ From some long-forgotten celebration, Madame produced two small Union jacks and with Claude at my side, bells ringing, and flags fluttering bravely from the handle-bars, we free-wheeled down the whole length of the Champs Elysees to the admiring plaudits of the crowd. Mounted on a woman’s bicycle, I was probably the first British soldier the French of Paris had seen for five years.

  The Guards Armoured Division entered Brussels on September 3rd. Antwerp was freed the next day. The reaction of the French of Paris to their liberation was that of an undertakers’ convention compared to the behaviour of the Belgians. The tired faces of the soldiers glowed—it made everything seem worthwhile.

  That autumn has been described, by the war historians as a ‘lull’—the soldiers didn’t notice it—particularly the British airborne troops who had to fight for their lives at Arnhem, the Canadians struggling on the Leopold Canal or the Americans at Aachen.

  ‘A’ Squadron Phantom, with John Hannay at the helm, was living in great discomfort in fiat, water-logged fields near Geldrop. I spent some days with them en route to a chore in Nimegen near the Meuse where I ran across Tony Bushell, Olivier’s production manager in usual life, and now a company commander with the Welsh Guards. We were reminiscing in the tank park when the earth shook under an appalling explosion. Instinctively, I dived for cover. I looked out to see Bushell roaring with laughter.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, that’s an old friend,’ said Bushell. ‘They’ve got a bloody great gun in a railway tunnel across the river. About once an hour they wheel it out and let of a big one—then they pop back in again. We’re used to it.’

  In early December in Brussels, I found Bobby Sweeney who had been distinguishing himself with the R.A.F. He was on leave.

  ‘They tell me,’ said Bobby, ‘that the wild duck are really flighting in to the flooded farmland on the Scheldt Estuary, let’s go and knock some off.’ A great organiser of comfort, Sweeney conjured up a jeep, guns and ammunition and we set off, accompanied by a carload of Bobbie’s Belgian friends. The shooting at dusk was spectacular. On the other side of the river it must have been equally good because we could hear the Germans taking full advantage of it.

  The Belgian group returned to Brussels after dark but ‘the Comfort King’ had a better idea.

  ‘Nothing in the world like wild duck cooked absolutely fresh…much better than after they’ve been hung,’ he said. ‘One of the best restaurants in Europe is the ‘Panier d’Or’ in Bruges. The Canadians have probably taken the place by now = let’s go in there and if the ‘Panier d’Or’ is still standing, we’ll get ‘em to cook for us.’

  At the outskirts of the beautiful little seventh-century Flemish town, the Military Police told us that the Germans had indeed been pushed out several hours before. In the centre of the town there was very little damage and we found the ‘Panier d’Or’ intact.

  Bobby was right about the duck—they were sensational but we both underestimated the hospitality of the owner and his family.

  They plied us for hours with every known kind of drink and before we staggered out, they produced their ‘Livre d’Or’ for our signatures. A special page was prepared and after five years of German names, the two first Allied ones were scrawled with a flourish. Outside, a full moon was riding in the cold winter sky. The town, with not a chink of light showing, was unnaturally quiet—not a cat was stirring—it was eerie.

  We started up the jeep and clattered through the deserted streets and back over the bridge to the main road. A Canadian patrol stopped us and told us the facts of life. During our long meal, the enemy had started a vicious counter-attack and the Canadians had pulled back through the town. Half an hour after we left the ‘Panier d’Or’, the centre of Bruges was once more swarming with Germans.

  In the middle of December, I was passing through Spa, American First Army Headquarters in the Ardennes. I spent the day with Bob Low and he showed me the map room of the Intelligence Section.

  ‘What happens here?’ I asked.

  ‘You mean here in Spa?’

  ‘Yes.’

  After all these years I can quote what he said, word for word—it was impossible to forget. He pointed out of the window.

  ‘You see the trees on the top of those hills?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, the other side of those hills, there is a forest and in that forest they are now forming the Sixth Panzer Army and any day now the Sixth Panzer Army is going to come right through this room and out the other side, cross the Meuse, then swing right and go north to Antwerp.’

  ‘Have you told anyone?’ I laughed.

  ‘We’ve been telling them for days,’ said Low. ‘Every day we have to give three appreciations of what we think may happen—that has been our number one appreciation.’

  The next day I went down through the fog-shrouded Forest of the Ardennes to Marche. Within hours the last great German ofensive of the war erupted. Ahead of it, Skorzeny’s Trojan Horse Brigade, American-speaking and wearing. American uniforms, infiltrated everywhere with captured American tanks and half-tracks. Sabotaging as they went, they rushed for the Meuse. The rumours of Skorzeny’s men flew wildly. In my British uniform and jeep with 21st Army Group markings, I had some anxious moments at the hands of understandably trigger-happy G. L’s. Identification papers mean nothing—‘Hands above your head, Buddy—all right—so who won the World Series in 1940?’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea but I do know I made a picture with Ginger Rogers in 1938.’

  ‘O. K. beat it, Dave, but watch your step for Crissake.’

  Time and again I was stopped, and, thanks entirely to Sam Goldwyn, survived.

  At the end of February, the British Army was fighting bloody battles in the Reichwald where a sudden thaw had turned the frozen forest floor into a quagmire. Great battles were in progress for the Roehr and the Maas. During the first week of March, U.S. First Army reached the Rhine at Cologne and two days later U.S. Third Army did likewise at the junction of the Moselle, 9th U.S. Armoured Division that week made their miraculous discovery that the Ludendorf Railway Bridge at Remagen had not been blown, and secured the first small bridgehead across the Rhine, a bridgehead that cried out for exploitation. Montgomery was all set to cross in strength further down
and surge across the Ruhr plain, but first a big build-up, he felt, was necessary. This stoked up all the old friction between Montgomery’s dedication to ‘tidy battles,’ and the American genius for improvisation. The super prima donnas were at it in earnest this time and the heights, or rather the depths of idiocy were surely reached when, according to military historians, Patton telephoned Bradley and said, ‘1 want the world to know Th:—‘ Army made it before Monty starts across.’ I crossed the Rhine at Wessel and I had never seen such destruction—the smoking town had ceased to exist. At Munster nothing was left standing except a bronze statue of a horse. In the open country between Hanover and Osnabruck, both of which were totally ruined, was a huge hastily erected prisoner-of-war cage. There must have been a hundred thousand men already inside when the American Unit I was then with passed them. The first warming rays of the sun were just touching the prisoners. It had rained heavily during the night and now a cloud of steam was rising from this dejected field-grey mass of humanity.

  The Burgomaster of Hanover said that at least 60,000 corpses were still under the rubble of his city. Bremen was no better.

  Hitler had started the whole horrible shambles but looking at the places where his chickens had come home to roost, I watched the miserable survivors picking around in the ruins of their towns and was unable to raise a glimmer of a gloat.

  In a siding near Liebenau, I came across a freight train, its flat cars loaded with V.2 rockets destined for London. In the woods nearby, was a slave labour camp where they had been made. The notices in the camp were in Italian, French, Czech, Polish, Dutch, Yugoslav, Russian and Ukrainian. The liberated workers were wandering dazedly all over the place, asking how to get home, mingling with the dead-eyed prisoners from the concentration camps, gaunt and shuffling, conspicuous in their black and white stripes.

  By May 8th, the war in Europe was officially over, but people were still being killed and Hitler’s werewolves were still hopefully stretching piano wire at head height from trees on either side of the roads. To avoid decapitation, the wiser jeeps now carried sharpened iron stanchions welded to their radiators. The routes west out of Germany were becoming clogged with an estimated eight million homeward-bound displaced persons pushing their pathetic belongings on bicycles or dragging them in little home-made carts. One became hardened to the sight of people lying under trees or in ditches too exhausted or too hungry to take another step.

  On a country road near Brunswick, I drove through an attractive red-roofed village on the outskirts of which was a large manor house. Two tow-headed little boys were playing in the garden. A mile or so away, I passed a farm wagon headed for the village. I glanced casually at the two men sitting up behind the horse. Both wore typical farmer headgear and sacks were thrown over their shoulders protecting them from a light drizzle. We were just past them when something made me slam on the brakes and back up. I was right, the man who was not driving was wearing field boots. I slipped out from behind the wheel, pulled my revolver from its holster and told the corporal to cover me with his Tommy gun.

  I gestured to the men to put their hands over their heads and told them in fumbling German to produce their papers.

  ‘I speak English,’ said the one with the field boots, ‘this man has papers—I have none.’

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

  He told me his name and rank—‘General.’

  ‘We are not armed,’ he added, as I hesitated.

  Sandhurst did it—I saluted, then motioned to them to lower their hands.

  ‘Where are you coming from, sir?’

  He looked down at me. I had never seen such utter weariness, such blank despair on a human face before. He passed a hand over the stubble of his chin. ‘Berlin,’ he said quietly. ‘Where are you going, sir?’

  He looked ahead down the road towards the village and closed his eyes. ‘Home,’ he said almost to himself, ‘it’s not far now…only…one more kilometre.’

  I didn’t say anything. He opened his eyes again and we stared at each other. We were quite still for a long time. Then I said, ‘Go ahead, sir,’ and added ridiculously…’please cover up your bloody boots.’

  Almost as though in pain, he closed his eyes and raised his head, then with sobbing intake of breath, covered his face with both hands and they drove on.

  On 13th May, Churchill spoke from London and the whole world listened—or did it?

  ‘…we have yet to make sure that the simple and honourable purposes for which we entered the war are not brushed aside or overlooked in the months following our success, and that the words ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘liberation’ are not distorted from their true meaning as we have understood them. There would be little use in punishing the Hitlerites for their crimes if law and justice did not rule, and if totalitarian or police governments were to take the place of the German invaders…’

  I cannot claim to have exerted much pressure on the squabbling field marshals and generals but way down the scale, attached to various units, I must have done what General Barker wanted. At any rate, in September, he pinned the American Legion of Merit on me and the British Army gave me—

  1 suit, worsted grey

  1 hat, Homburg, brown

  2 shirts, poplin, with collars

  1 tie, striped

  1 Pair shoes, walking, black—and above all

  my FREEDOM.

  Such was the stringency of the clothing rationing that Major General Robert Laycock, D.S.O., Chief of Combined Operations, asked me if I could spare him my discarded khaki shirts. It was an unbelievable feeling to be free again. Primmie was due to have the second baby in November so we took little David and treated ourselves to a holiday of luxury at the Ferryboat Inn on the Helford River. Then I cabled Goldwyn to the effect that I was ‘available’.

  Goldwyn generously replied that he was giving me a new five-year contract at a mouth-watering figure and that in the meanwhile, he was loaning me out to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger to star in A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven in the U.S.)

  This was a huge relief because although I had been disguising, it from Primmie, I was extremely nervous about my future. Six months is too long for an actor to be out of business—six years is almost certain disaster. A whole new breed of stars had taken over the movie audiences and at thirty-five I had’ good reason to be worried. I was also highly apprehensive lest I had forgotten how to do it.

  Powell and Pressburger wrote a brilliant screenplay. Kim Hunter, played the girl and my old friend, Raymond Massey, the ‘heavy’. Jack Cardiff’s fantastic colour photography helped enormously to make this picture a big success on both sides of the Atlantic and in Britain it was chosen as the first Royal Command Film.

  After Primmie produced Jamie, we set about planning our new life. Although she had never seen California, I had described it all to her so carefully that she knew exactly what she wanted—‘an old house, falling down, that we can do over, a big rambling garden for the children and dogs, and a view of the mountains or the ocean.’

  She was wildly excited at the prospect of going, but nervous about the people she would meet.

  ‘I’m not nearly beautiful enough,’ she would say. ‘I’ll be lost in all that glamour.’

  She started buying old furniture, Regency mostly, for the house she could visualise. Vivien Leigh, a great expert, spent hours with her foraging around in the antique shops of Windsor, Amersham and Beaconsfield.

  The problem of obtaining transportation to the U.S. appeared insurmountable; with over two million American servicemen champing at the bit to get home, there was obviously no room for a family of foreigners. General Barker came to the rescue and told me that he had secured a berth for me, alone with the 101 Airborne Division leaving in a week’s time in the Queen Mary but Primmie and the children would have to wait at least three months. We decided that I should go on ahead to take up my contract and find, if possible, our dream house.

  I gave myself a farewell party
for two hundred at Claridge’s. So that nobody could be wrongly dressed, Primmie borrowed a tiara and a ball gown and I wore an open-necked shirt and my trousers, worsted, grey.

  All the guests had one thing in common; at some time in our lives they had been specially nice to us. It was a funny mixture—duchesses, policemen, actors, generals, privates, hospital nurses, taxi drivers, country squires and Mrs. Wisden.

  I took a sadistic delight in standing at the door and personally winkling out the gatecrashers.

  ‘Please go away…you’ve never been nice to me in your life.’

  The evening cost a fortune but no matter—great days were ahead—we could save money later.

  Next morning, I went to collect my sailing permit.

  ‘Sorry, old man,’ said the official, ‘can’t give you that till you show us your income tax clearance from the Inland Revenue.’

  Off I went to another dreary government office. Thick white tea cups with G.R. on them littered the untidy desks.

  The man who interviewed me was a thin, self-important civil servant with a particularly active Adam’s apple. He produced a file.

  ‘Now, let’s see, you want to leave the Old Country do you—emigrating are you?’

  ‘No, I’m going back where I came from…to the United States. I have a contract to work there.’

  He turned the pages of a file.

  ‘Now let me see…in 1939 you left the United States and came back to this country. Why was that?’

  ‘To join up…for the war.’

  ‘Yes, we all know that, we read the papers at the time but nobody asked you to come, did they? It’s not as if you were called up, is it? You paid your own way, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, then, obviously you came here intending to reside again in Great Britain, so that confirmed you a resident of Great Britain for tax purposes and we are back-taxing you on your world earnings from the time you left here in 1934.’