Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  “You mean it was an ambulance plane? It had red crosses on it?”

  “No, it didn’t. I asked the RAF same thing. Apparently we don’t have any ambulance planes as such. It was a Bombay transport, the same sort you came up on. They do a milk run between here and Heliopolis with anything and anybody they’re asked to carry.”

  “Roger,” said Pickett, seated on a camp bed for the press tent doubled as their accommodation.

  “Well, you saw the start of it yourselves. The Bombay was attacked by the German fighters you watched fly over Burg-el-Arab - Messerschmitt 109F’s,” said the Hussar, reading from notes he had made during his chat with the RAF as he tried to get the story straight.

  “They made stern attacks. As you know these Bombays don’t have rear guns. Both engines were set on fire but the pilot managed to land on some flat ground where it skidded for about eight miles before coming to a halt. While it was on the ground the Messerschmitts continued to strafe it and the fire spread from the engine to the fuselage where the door had jammed. But there were some survivors. They escaped through the cockpit escape hatch which is in the floor.”

  “How many?”

  “Let me see. The pilot, co-pilot, wireless operator, a medical orderly and one of the wounded men - five in all. Most of them were badly burned, especially the wireless operator.”

  Pickett noticed the way the Hussar rubbed the bald bit in his moustache when he said this. “The pilot by the way, despite a bullet in the leg, managed to walk five miles for help until he met an Arab camel herder who put him on one of his beasties and took his to the nearest British army camp. He then insisted on guiding a rescue party back to the wreck. Not a bad performance. Do you want his name?”

  “Why not?”

  “James. Sergeant Pilot James.”

  “Christian name?”

  “Sorry, no. Call him Jimmy. All James are Jimmy in the RAF. By the way, he’s nineteen. Baby pilot. The RAF thinks he did really well to get his plane down. If the door hadn’t jammed they might have all got away with it. Rotten luck.”

  “So how many died?”

  “Let’s see. Lieutenant-General Gott, his first name by the way was William, not Strafer; thirteen of the stretcher cases, two RAF fitters, and, er, one civilian. Seventeen.”

  “A civilian?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who he?”

  “Apparently, he was a senior member of the Palestine Control Commission whatever that is.”

  “What was he doing up at Burg-el-Arab? Does 8th Army have plans to withdraw into Palestine?”

  “Does it look like it?”

  “He must have had a reason for being here.”

  “Look you must remember General Auchinleck is the commander of all the British forces in the Middle East and that includes Palestine. Naturally, he has dealings with the administration there.”

  “What was the name of this civilian?”

  “Sorry, no name.”

  “No name?”

  “It’s probably being withheld until next-of-kin have been informed?”

  “Where was he based?”

  “Jerusalem I should imagine.”

  “Tell me,” said Pickett, holding out his mug while Malley poured all three of them another shot from his whisky bottle. “Patrick kinda touched on this earlier. But what are the chances this was an aerial assassination? Do you think the Germans knew Gott was on that plane?”

  “No. Why should they? These Messerschmitts had apparently been making a nuisance of themselves around Alexandria earlier and been chased away by some Spitfires. They happened to come over Burg-el-Arab just as the Bombay was taking off. Easy meat. It was a fluke. As I said, rotten luck.”

  “But lucky for the Germans,” said Malley. “You won’t replace Strafer Gott in a hurry.”

  “We do have other generals,” said the escort officer.

  What else could he say?

  Afterwards - June, 1943

  Untended trees blocked the sun. Alabaster angels, firm breasted nymphs, solicited from tall weeds about to consume them for a millennium or so, Haifa’s very own Angkor Wat. Faintly on the breeze came the oompahs of a military band though the celebrations of the German surrender in Tunisia, the end of the war in North Africa and the deliverance of the Yishuv, had gone on for so long now they might well have been imagining it.

  It was a humid afternoon but Mitzi found herself shivering and holding more tightly onto Hare’s left arm though she was careful not to throw him off balance because he had only just got used to moving about on one crutch. Next week he was having his first fitting for an artificial leg, foot really for he still had quite a lot left below the right knee. Pinned to the medal ribbons on his left breast was the bronze oak leaf of a mention in dispatches.

  Mitzi loathed cemeteries. She found nothing restful about them. And the baroque sugar icing with which these Germans sought to conceal the decay beneath she thought ridiculous. Only the stark simplicity of that great lump of stone for their 1914-18 dead inspired a grudging respect. Something scuttled about her feet and Mitzi gave a little shriek then saw it was a large lizard that froze and turned its baleful eyes on her before disappearing down a crack in one of the gravestones.

  “I thought it was a snake,” she told Hare.

  “Probably a damn good place for snakes,” he said. Mitzi squeezed his arm.

  Calderwell heard her cry out. He knew it had been a mistake to bring Mitzi along, especially in her condition. She was too excitable. Not that you could tell she was three months gone, she still looked very trim in the uniform she would shortly be putting aside. Perhaps you could tell her breasts were fuller, a bit more rounded. That was all. He wondered whether she had told Hare yet. He sometimes suspected she told him most things and she had made a couple of visits up here to see him at the new officers’ convalescent home on Carmel. She was determined to show him it didn’t matter. Sometimes he felt he was in danger of losing his bride to the foot Hare had left outside Tripoli three months after second choice Montgomery had shoe horned Rommel out of El Alamein with massed artillery and infantry and then never stopped advancing.

  It was exactly the kind of battle a lot of people said Strafer Gott would never have fought. So perhaps Wagner had done them all a favour if he had done anything at all. The RAF always insisted that those Messerschmitts were in the air anyway. How much he contributed to the Dieppe debacle twelve days later by drawing attention to British postal censors’ sensitivities about Canadian troop movements in southern England was also questionable. But it may have added to the Germans’ heightened state of alert.

  Brushing aside the caress of a weeping willow, he walked back towards Mitzi and Hare. “Everything all right?”

  Mitzi, still hanging onto Hare’s arm, was bent forward trying to read a mossy epitaph. “Mitzi thought she saw a snake,” explained Hare. “But it turned out to be a very Teutonic looking lizard, coalscuttle helmet, the lot. Perhaps you could arrange to intern it.”

  “It could have been a snake,” said Mitzi. “This is the sort of place they make their house.”

  “There’s a few snakes buried here all right,” said Calderwell. “I’ve just seen a couple of Wagners - his relatives I suppose.”

  “I thought I saw another one back there. I’ll go and have a look,” said Hare who detached himself from Mitzi and hobbled off. Calderwell watched him go, a casualty of the craving signals intelligence had for the highest, most forward and inevitably the most mined ridge lines from where they could trawl deep into the enemy’s wireless telegraphy.

  “There’s an interesting one here Walter,” said Mitzi, pointing to the epitaph she had been trying to read. “An English woman married to a German. They have her maiden name in brackets. It was Brown. Do you think his mother could have been English?”

  “It’s possible. His English was excellent. We have his name. I suppose we could check.”

  “I suppose it’s a pity he can’t be buried with his people.”


  “I think he knew there was not much chance of that. Soldiers are usually buried where they fall and he was a bloody spy, poncing about behind our lines in our uniform. He must have known we weren’t going to ship him back six hundred miles for a state funeral in the family plot.”

  “So why did you want to come here?”

  “Curiosity I suppose. I didn’t even know this place existed. Something else as well.”

  “Yes?”

  Calderwell looked a bit embarrassed. “Well, he asked me to come here and say a prayer for him. I know it sounds daft but at the time it didn’t seem much to promise a dying man and he did fulfil his half of the bargain. He did give me his name. Then I got busy and it’s been, well, almost a year.”

  “And have you?”

  “What?”

  “Said a prayer for him?”

  “I can’t think of anything to say.”

  “I shouldn’t bother if I were you,” said Hare. Despite the crutch, neither of them had heard his return. “He’s buried here anyway.”

  “What?”

  “You had better come and take a look.”

  It was just behind the line of palm trees that marked the frontier between the British military and German civilian cemeteries. The graves were less overgrown here and the light was better. But there was no headstone, just a modest gravestone much smaller than average and easy to miss. A large flat stone had been placed at one end of it but below it a stonemason has carved the name in large capitals. HIER RUHT OTTO ALEXANDER WAGNER 19 May 1892 - 3 AUGUST 1893.

  “He didn’t want me to come here to say a prayer. He wanted me to see this,” said Calderwell.

  Before they could stop her Mitzi had bent down to the infant’s grave and removed the large, flat stone.

  “NO Mitzi!” yelled Hare.

  “Oh Christ!” said Calderwell.

  Mitzi looked at them both in astonishment. “There is just a matchbox underneath it,” she said and went to pick it up.

  “Don’t touch it!” shouted Calderwell and pulled her back by the sleeves of her drill shirt.

  “Leave me alone,” said Mitzi, twisting out of his grip. “You are frightened of a matchbox?”

  “It’s what the matchbox might lead to Mitzi,” said Hare. “He was good at making small things that made a big bang.”

  “Just take Mitzi back a little ways will you David?” said Calderwell.

  When they were far enough behind him Calderwell went down on his haunches and examined the matchbox which appeared to have been partially flattened by the stone. It was a local brand. He opened the blade of his pocket knife and slid it gently underneath the box to see whether or not it might be snared on a string or wire that once pulled might remove the pin from a grenade type detonator. There didn’t appear to be anything there.

  “Walter, please, leaves it alone. Come away,” shouted Mitzi who was beginning to understand why a matchbox could be very frightening indeed.

  “Should we get the sappers?” inquired Hare. He was thinking it might be connected to a big one dug in beneath the gravestone. Lang’s people had once planted a huge bomb in a cemetery. Fortunately, they failed to fill the grave guaranteed to bring the mourners they had targeted. This time they might be luckier. Calderwell should leave well alone and he and Mitzi should be a sight more than twenty feet away. “Can you see anything?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Calderwell. “I see a squashed matchbox.” And holding his breath he snatched it up. Mitzi shrieked.

  Nothing happened.

  “Didn’t I tell you Captain David Sir?”

  “When you’ve been bitten by a snake,” said Hare, “you’re frightened of a twig - even if it turns out to be a matchbox.”

  All the box contained was a piece of cardboard torn from a Players cigarette packet. Something was written on it in pencil but even at arm’s length Calderwell could not make it out and reluctantly passed it to Hare. “I’m hopeless in this light.”

  Hare didn’t have much trouble. “It’s from the bible,” he said. “It says, Let us do evil that good may come. Romans, chapter three, verse eight.’ The R of Romans and the numbers of chapter and verse have all been underlined.”

  “It’s a religious thing,” snorted Mitzi. “It could be anybody.”

  “No, it couldn’t,” said Calderwell.

  “Don’t you remember?” said Hare. “R38 was their radio call sign. Romans, chapter three, verse eight. I suppose he’s signing off.”

  ***

  And that would have undoubtedly been the end of it as far as Calderwell was concerned if the Templer’s mother hadn’t been looking very hard for her son. After nine months without hearing from him she had written to the Red Cross in Geneva asking if their mission in Berlin would make inquiries. Some weeks later she received a short acknowledgement and then heard nothing more until the early summer of 1944 when, at about the time of the Normandy landings, the Red Cross informed her that her son had been reported missing “in the Middle East theatre”.

  He was not, she noted, “missing believed killed” but simply, “missing” and therefore there was hope, and certainly mothers have hoped for less reason. She spent the next few months trying to get the Red Cross to find out where he had gone missing and under what circumstances. They were unable to help. She wrote to the War Office in London asking if a German officer of that name was being held in any British prisoner-of-war camp in the Middle East or elsewhere. For her troubles, she eventually received a frosty reply from the department concerned stating that the War Office was not in the habit of discussing the whereabouts of individual German prisoners with members of their family. Nor were matters allowed to rest there.

  Shortly afterwards, she was visited by a gentleman about her son’s age whose calling card declared him to be a Detective Sergeant from the Cambridge Criminal Investigation Department which he rather wished he was instead of being assigned to Special Branch who did a lot of the spadework for MI5. Exceedingly boring it was too even when he had anything to do. He asked lots of questions about her background, her father’s missionary activities, her marriage to a German Templer in Ottoman Palestine and the son he had fathered. The answers he took down in pencil in his immaculate Pitman’s shorthand in a spiral notebook, consuming rather too much of that week’s sugar ration in the refills of tea he consumed. When he had finished, he thanked her kindly and said he didn’t think anyone would be bothering her again. He was right.

  Then an old friend from Palestine, whose late husband had served in the police force there, suggested that she contact them at the Russian Compound in Jerusalem because she had heard that the police were in charge of a large prisoner-of-war camp near Latrun. As straws go she thought it worth clutching. She wrote to them explaining her Templer connections and enclosing two photographs asking that they might be returned. One showed them side by side. He was wearing a striped tie with a Harris Tweed jacket. He looked very English. On the back was written in pencil: Norwich, May 1939. The other bore the rubber stamp of a Munich portrait studio and was the one of himself in full dress SS regalia he had sent her just before the outbreak of war. There was a faint smile on his lips. He did not look English.

  As it happened her friend was quite wrong about police involvement with the POW camp at Latrun. The army ran it. By November of 1944 the police had enough on their hands with the increase in Jewish terrorism: roads were being mined, armouries raided. In Cairo Stern Gang assassins had mortally wounded Lord Moyne, the British Minister for the Middle East. The letter with its startling photograph might well have been ignored had not Templers come back into Calderwell’s life in rather a big way.

  The month before two German parachutists and a Palestinian Arab, one of the Mufti’s entourage in Berlin, had been picked up in a cave near the Ein Pariah spring not all that far from the Ramallah road. Both the Germans turned out to be Templers. They had been dropped in uniform with weapons, a radio and gold coin as the first instalment of a military mission to assist the revolt th
at the Mufti, still in comfortable Berlin exile, had assured them was tying down two British divisions.

  “But there isn’t an Arab revolt,” Mitzi had said when Calderwell first told her about the prisoners. “Only a Jewish one.” She was carrying their 18-months old son David in one arm and welcomed this opportunity to talk about his father’s work, something they rarely seemed to do nowadays.

  It was suspected that other Templer parachutists might still be at large and because Calderwell was considered the expert he was taken off his other duties to investigate. Since it was a Templer related matter, the photograph and the letter from the widow in East Anglia eventually found its way to his desk. There was, of course, no doubting who it was.

  “I beg to report,” he wrote to the Inspector General’s office, “that this German officer died from wounds in a casualty clearing station near El Alamein on 7th August 1942. Perhaps his mother could be informed.” The Inspector General would know exactly what he was talking about because he had been promoted on the strength of it. But it didn’t hurt to remind them. When he had a moment he would notify the army’s Graves Registration that a name needed changing.

  Author’s Note

  In the summer of 1946, over a year after the end of hostilities in Europe, Lieutenant Fritz Deininger, a Templer who spoke fluent Arabic, surrendered to the British authorities in Mandate Palestine. He was the only one of three parachutists dropped in the autumn of 1944 to evade capture. After he realised that the Mufti had lied, and Palestine was not in the grip of another Arab rebellion, the German had used his good Arabic to find work as a labourer and bided his time.

  Today most Templers are to be found in Germany and Australia, the latter descendants of the people interned there by the British over half a century ago. Those searching for Levantine traces of the movement will find Israel’s only German war memorial on the outskirts of Haifa in their overgrown cemetery.

  Other things have not been allowed to get so mossy. Long after the war, the attempt by some Jewish terrorists in British Mandate Palestine to barter a wartime pact with the Nazis continued to be a source of friction in Israel. In 1992 Professor Avishai Margalit, an Israeli historian, disclosed in The New York Review of Books that among the people who knew of these overtures was one Yitzhak Yezernitsky who later changed his last name to Shamir and became prime minister