Canidy had first met Fine in Cedar Rapids, when he and Eric Fulmar were kids. When he and Eric, horsing around with matches fired from toy pistols intended to fire suction-cup darts, had managed to set an automobile on fire, Fine had rushed to Cedar Rapids to buy the guy a new Studebaker, free them from the clutches of a fat lady of the Juvenile Authority, and, most important, to keep the whole escapade out of the newspapers.
Fulmar had told him Stanley S. Fine was a lawyer who worked for his uncle, who owned most of Continental Motion Picture Studios. His responsibilities included keeping the secret that “America’s Sweetheart,” Monica Carlisle, had not only been married but had a thirteen-year-old son by the name of Eric Fulmar.
The last time Canidy had seen Fine had been here in Washington just before he and Eddie Bitter had gone off to the Flying Tigers. They had had dinner with Chesly Whittaker and Cynthia Chenowith. Fine had some business with Donovan’s law firm.
The more he thought about it, the more it would be an extraordinary coincidence if this B-17 pilot was not the same Stanley S. Fine.
“I think I know this guy,” Canidy said.
“Colonel Donovan thought you might remember Captain Fine,” Douglass said.
“The question you were asked, Canidy,” Baker said, “is whether you think he can handle the mission.”
“According to this, he’s a qualified multiengine pilot with long-distance navigation experience,” Canidy said. “But certainly there ought to be better-qualified people around for something like the African flight.”
“But he could handle it?” Douglass pursued.
“Yeah, I think he could.”
“We’ll arrange for an experienced crew to go with him,” Douglass said. “That’s presuming you can talk him into volunteering.”
Canidy looked at Douglass thoughtfully for a moment.
“You don’t mean talking him into volunteering for just this flight,” he said. “What you want him to do is enlist in Donovan’s Dilettantes.”8
Douglass laughed. “You heard about that, did you?”
“We get newspapers in Deal,” Canidy said.
“The colonel was rather amused by that piece,” Douglass said. “And told me it would probably do us more good than harm.”
“You didn’t answer my question, Captain,” Canidy said.
“You’re right, we want Captain Fine permanently.”
“Why?” Canidy asked.
“You ask entirely too many questions, Canidy,” Baker said.
“He’s another good friend of Eric Fulmar,” Captain Douglass said.
“You gave me that too easily,” Canidy said. “Which means that isn’t the reason you want him.”
“You’re getting very perceptive, Dick,” Douglass said. “But we’re not playing twenty questions. If you don’t like that answer, I’m sorry, but it’s all you get for now.”
“Why have I been picked to recruit him? I hardly know him.”
“When I said that’s all you get for now, Dick,” Douglass said, “I meant it.”
2
CHANUTE FIELD, ILLINOIS
JUNE 28, 1942
An eight-ship flight of B-17Es appeared in the air in the north. Canidy watched from a pickup truck. The truck was painted in a checkerboard pattern, and a large checkerboard flag was flying from its bed. The tail-end B-17E dropped its nose and made a steep descent for a straight-in approach to the runway.
“That’ll be Captain Fine, Sir,” the assistant base adjutant, who was driving the pickup, said to Canidy. “He likes to sit on the taxiway so that he can offer ‘constructive criticism’ of their landings.”
Canidy smiled. The translation of that was “eat ass.”
The assistant base adjutant, a captain, was very impressed with Major Richard Canidy. This was his first encounter with an officer assigned to General Headquarters, Army Air Corps, who was traveling on orders stamped “Secret.” That he was flying a Navy airplane added a delightful touch of mystery.
“This is Major Canidy, Captain,” the base commander had told him. “I want you to take him where he wants to go and do whatever you can to assist him. But don’t ask him any questions.”
The remaining seven B-17Es circled the field in formation. As they passed over, the roar of their engines was awesome. They were simply enormous—and seemed invincible. Canidy let himself dwell for a moment on the incredible logistics problem involved in just getting them into the air. How many gallons of gas had it taken to fill their tanks? How many mechanics were required to service that many engines? For that matter, how many parachute riggers had to be trained just to pack all those parachutes?
One by one, at ninety-second intervals, the B-17Es detached themselves from the formation and began to land. By the time the first wheels touched down on the wide concrete runway, Fine’s plane had stopped a third of the way down the parallel taxiway, shut down its inboard engines, and turned its nose toward the runway.
The captain drove the pickup over next to it, and Canidy saw in the pilot’s seat a thin-faced, ascetic man with horn-rimmed glasses. He wasn’t at all like the man Canidy remembered. Captain Stanley S. Fine was wearing a leather-brimmed cap with a headset clamped over it. He looked down at the pickup truck, then turned his attention to the first plane landing.
A minute later, a sergeant in sheepskin high-altitude clothing came to the pickup. He saw Canidy’s gold leaf and saluted.
“Sir, Captain Fine wants to know if you’re waiting for him.”
“Yes, I am, Sergeant,” Canidy said.
When the message was relayed to him, Fine looked down at the pickup truck again, without recognition. His eyebrows rose in curiosity, and he smiled. Then he looked away and didn’t look back at Canidy until the last of the B-17Es had landed. Finally he held up his index finger as an “I’ll be with you in a minute” signal and disappeared from view.
He appeared on the ground shortly afterward walking around the tail section of the aircraft, holding his cap on his head with his hand against the prop blast of the idling engines. He was wearing a tropical worsted shirt and trousers and a horsehide leather A-2 jacket.
He saluted Canidy. “Is there something I can do for you, Major?”
“We’ve met, Captain Fine,” Canidy said.
Fine’s eyebrows rose in question.
“The first time was when Eric Fulmar and I tried to burn down Cedar Rapids. The last time was in Washington the spring before the war. We had dinner with Colonel Wild Bill Donovan and Cynthia Chenowith.”
“Dick Canidy,” Captain Fine said, extending his hand. “I don’t know why I didn’t recognize you. I guess I expected you to be halfway around the world.”
“I’m much better-looking than I used to be,” Canidy said.
Fine laughed. “I saw in the papers, of course, that Jim Whittaker got out of the Philippines. I wondered what happened to you.”
“I got out of China,” Canidy said.
“But you were in the Navy,” Fine questioned, indicating Canidy’s Air Corps uniform.
“And you were a lawyer,” Canidy said as they shook hands. “Things change. The war, I hear, has something to do with that.”
Fine laughed again, then said, “Well, I’m glad you did, and I’m glad to see you. But I suspect this is not a coincidence.”
“Can your copilot handle parking that aircraft?” Canidy asked.
“Interesting question,” Fine said dryly. “I suppose he has to learn sometime, doesn’t he?”
He turned to the airplane and made gestures telling the copilot to take the airplane to its parking place.
“Curiosity is about to overwhelm me,” Fine said to Canidy.
The conversation was interrupted by a roar from the B- 17’s outboard port engine. The copilot, Canidy thought, was running the engine much too fast to taxi.
The copilot retarded his throttle to a more reasonable level, and the B-17E began to move.
Fine and Canidy exchanged the smug smiles of veteran pilo
ts over the foibles of new ones. Then Fine said, “He’s got a hundred thirty hours’ total time. He’ll learn.”
“Can we talk in your BOQ? Do you have a roommate?”
“We can talk there,” Fine said.
Fine’s room was in a frame building so new it smelled of freshly sawed lumber.
Fine led Canidy to his spartan quarters—two small rooms, with the studs exposed, and a shared bathroom with a tin-walled shower—and told him to make himself comfortable.
“Close and lock the door, please, Stan,” Canidy said, then reached into his tunic and took from it a tiny American flag on an eight-inch pole. He waved it at Fine.
“In case you miss the symbolism,” he said, “I’m waving the flag at you.”
“I don’t think I’m going to like this,” Fine said, laughing.
“You always carry a flag around?”
“No,” Canidy said. “I stole this one from your group commander’s desk while he left me to check out my orders.”
Fine smiled. “They apparently checked out,” he said. “What do they say?”
Canidy handed him the orders.
“They don’t say much, do they?” Fine said when he had read them. “Except that whatever you’re doing has the approval of the Air Corps. And that it’s secret. I used to be in the motion-picture business, you remember, and this has all the earmarks of a Grade B adventure thriller. A mysterious officer appears, carrying secret orders. Are you now going to ask me to volunteer for a secret, dangerous mission, from which there is virtually no chance of returning alive?”
“I’d say the chances are sixty-forty,” Canidy said, “that you’ll get back all right.”
Fine looked at him long enough to see that he was serious.
“I’ll be damned!” he said.
“There’s a mission, a long-distance flight, that we would like you to undertake,” Canidy said.
“We?” Fine asked. “Who’s ‘we’?”
“I can’t tell you that yet,” Canidy said.
“Hey, come on!”
Canidy shrugged and smiled.
“Well, let’s see, Dick,” Fine said. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with Colonel Donovan, would it?”
“Colonel who?” Canidy asked innocently.
“And you are also forbidden to tell me where I would be going, or for how long, or why. Right?”
“How long will it take you to pack?” Canidy asked.
“That would depend on where I would be going, and how long I would be gone. Will I need my fur coat or short sleeves?”
“If I were you, I wouldn’t leave anything behind.”
“I’m usually not much of a drinker,” Fine said. “And taking a drink right now probably isn’t very bright, but I’m going to have one anyway. Scotch all right with you?”
“I’m driving, thank you just the same,” Canidy said.
Fine took a bottle of Scotch from a shelf in his closet and poured two inches of it into a water glass.
“And if I tell you ‘Thanks, but no thanks’?” he asked.
“They wouldn’t have sent me after you,” Canidy said, “if they didn’t need you.”
Saying that seemed to embarrass him, Fine saw, although Canidy tried to cover it by waving the little American flag again.
I don’t know why I am surprised about this, Fine thought. I should have known that sooner or later the service would require me to do what it wants me to do, as opposed to indulging me in the acting out of my personal fantasies.
On December 9, 1941, Stanley S. Fine, Vice President for Legal Affairs, Continental Motion Picture Studios, Inc., who had been in New York on business when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, took the train to Washington to see Greg Armstrong, a friend from law school who had given up corporate law to serve his country in uniform.
When he found Greg, who was working in one of the temporary buildings—from the First World War—near the Smithsonian Institution, he quickly saw that his friend thought Stanley Fine had gone off the deep end. Even though Greg professed to understand why Fine wanted to come into the service, and even why Fine wanted to fly, it was clear that Greg thought that flying was the last thing Stanley should be doing. But still, he went through the motions.
“There’s two ways you can handle the flying thing, Stanley,” he said. “You can apply to one of the aviation cadet selection boards. If you’ve got a pilot’s license—what did you say you have?”
“I’ve got a commercial pilot’s certificate with five hundred ten hours, and an instrument ticket, single-engine land.”
“Okay. What I’m saying is that you can certainly get into the aviation cadet program. Which means after you got your wings, you would be either a flight officer or a second lieutenant. Or, Stanley, you can go in the service as a lawyer. With your years of practice, you can start out as a captain.”
“I don’t want to be a lawyer.”
“Hear me out. You’re a captain. I can have that paperwork for you in two weeks. You get a commission, and they tell you to hold yourself ready for active service. While you’re waiting to be called, you apply for flight duty. Send them a certified copy of your licenses, and so on. They’ll probably jump at you. But you do have a senator in your pocket who can do you a favor, don’t you?”
“Do I have to do that?”
“You don’t even have to go in the Army, Stan. You’re a married man with three kids. And movies are going to be declared an essential war industry. I heard that last week. If you want to play Errol Flynn in Dawn Patrol, though, you’re going to need a senator.”
On February 7, 1942, they gave a going-away party at Continental Studios. It was held on Sound Stage Eleven, and Max Lieberman had it catered by Chasen’s, so the people in the Continental commissary could attend. There was one big head table on a four-foot platform built especially for the occasion. It sat sixty-eight people, and it was draped with bunting. Behind it hung an enormous American flag. Everybody else sat at ten-seat round tables.
With the exception of Max and Sophie Lieberman, the guests at the head table were Continental employees about to enter the armed forces.
The honorees were introduced alphabetically, and Max Lieberman made it through best boys and truck drivers and clerks and scenery painters and even two actors until he got to Stanley Fine, who was his nephew—Sophie’s sister Sadie’s boy—and who was the nearest thing he had to a son. That was when he got something in his throat, and then in his eye, and so Stanley took over for him at the mike and introduced the others while Uncle Max sat blowing his nose and wiping away tears.
The founder and chairman of the board of Continental Studios got control of himself by the time Stanley had finished the introductions. He reclaimed the mike and announced that in case anybody was wondering, everybody had his job waiting for him, so they should get the lead out of their ass and win the war. Meanwhile, Continental had movies to make.
Captain Stanley S. Fine, Judge Advocate General’s Corps, had entered upon active duty for the duration plus six months on May 1, 1942.
His initial duty station was the U.S. Army Air Corps Officers’ Reception Station, Boca Raton, Florida. The Adjutant General of the United States Army was led to understand that assigning Fine to the Army Air Corps would please the junior senator from California, and he so ordered.
When Captain Fine reached Boca Raton, he learned that the U.S. Army Air Corps Officers’ Reception Station had only three weeks before been the Boca Raton Hotel and Club, an exclusive, very expensive resort. The Air Corps had taken it over for the duration, rolled up the carpets, put the furniture in storage, closed the bar, installed GI furniture and a GI mess, and turned the place into a basic training camp for newly commissioned officers.
Fine’s fellow student officers had also been lawyers, or doctors, dentists, engineers, wholesale grocers, paper merchants, trucking company executives, construction engineers, or other civilians whose occupations had a military application and who had been directly comm
issioned into the services.
He had been at Boca Raton six weeks when his senator’s influence was again felt.
Captain Fine was engaged in a class exercise in the administration of military justice. He was playing the role of prosecutor in a mock court-martial when a runner summoned him from the classroom—which had been the card room of the Boca Raton Hotel—to the station commander’s office.
“I don’t understand this, Captain,” the station commander said, “but we are in receipt of orders assigning you to the Three-forty-fourth Heavy Bombardment Group at Chanute Field. It says for transition training to B-17 aircraft. You’re not a pilot, are you?”
“I have a civilian license, Sir.”
“I never heard of anything like this before,” the colonel said. “But orders are orders, Captain.”
When he reported to the 344th Bombardment Group at Chanute, he was sure there was no way he would be permitted to become a pilot.
“The only time you have is in Piper Cubs and a Beechcraft?” the colonel asked.
“I’m afraid so, Sir,” Fine said.
“I hope you can fly, Fine,” he said. “And not just because you know some important politicians and the general told me to give you every consideration.”
“I wanted to fly very badly,” Fine said. “I thought I needed some help. That now seems rather childish.”
“If you can fly,” the colonel said, “I’d like to make you a squadron commander. I’ve got a lot of very healthy, very impetuous young men who need a stabilizing influence. In my day, it took ten years to make captain. Now we’re making them in a year, and then making them B-17 aircraft commanders with a hundred twenty hours’ total time. It’s working better than I thought it would, but I would still like as many officers like you as I can get. I really need officers with five hundred hours and some instrument experience. Who can really navigate.”
“I was about to say that I might well be more use as a lawyer,” Fine said.
“That’s not my decision to make,” the colonel had told him. “I have one other officer, Major Thomasson, who was an aircraft commander before last week. I’m going to introduce you to him, explain the situation, and see what he thinks.”
The Secret Warriors Page 15
