As they did so, Cronley saw that there were a large number of Germans in uniforms stripped of insignia. They were either marching purposely between the tents, or just milling around. There also was a scattering of obviously German women and children.
“This is the command post, Lieutenant,” Dunwiddie announced. “We’re home, so to speak, in what used to be the prior’s house when this place was a Carthusian monastery.”
He gestured for Cronley to get out of the jeep and go into the building.
“This is not what I expected,” Cronley announced.
“This is what you get,” Dunwiddie said, and then smiled and asked, “What did you expect, monks walking around in black robes with their heads bowed in prayer?”
He bowed his head and put the tips of his fingers together.
“Yeah. I guess,” Cronley admitted, chuckling.
“That hasn’t happened here for a long time,” Dunwiddie said. “From what I’ve been able to find out, they shut down the monastery here in 1802 during the Secularization.”
“During the what?”
“The secular state—in those days, the kings, dukes, et cetera—took the property of the church away from the bishops and abbots, et cetera.”
“What are you, Sergeant, some kind of historian?”
“In a way. I was majoring in history at Norwich,” Dunwiddie said.
“You went to Norwich?”
Dunwiddie nodded, and then asked: “So why am I not a commissioned officer and gentleman, such as yourself?”
Tiny chuckled when he saw the uncomfortable look on Cronley’s face, and then went on: “Why don’t I answer that while we’re having a little nip to cut the dust of the trail?”
—
One of the rooms in the old building had been converted to a mess hall, and at one end of it was a well-stocked bar.
“This is the ex-officers’ mess,” Dunwiddie explained, “membership limited to former majors and better of the Abwehr. No Nazis or SS—which is usually the same thing—allowed. I think we can sneak you in, despite that gold bar. The rules are also waived for me and a couple of my senior non-coms.”
He turned to the row of bottles. “Bourbon or scotch?”
“Bourbon, please,” Cronley said.
Dunwiddie made the drinks and handed one to Cronley.
“With your permission, Lieutenant, I will introduce you to the German officers at the evening meal, which is served at eighteen hundred. Most of them are good guys, typical officers. Of course, they can’t figure me out. Not only am I black, but an enlisted man, and when Major Wallace isn’t here—and he’s not often here—I’m der Führer.”
“I can’t figure you out either,” Jimmy confessed. “Or the way things are run. Or, for that matter, what we’re doing here.”
“Colonel Mattingly said I was to bring you up to speed on that. So where to start?”
“Norwich?” Cronley suggested.
Norwich University, in Northfield, Vermont, was the oldest of the small group of private military colleges—The Citadel, Virginia Military Institute, and a very few others—producing officers for the armed forces. The graduates of one generally knew all about their brother schools.
“Why not?” Dunwiddie said. “There I was, in the spring of 1944, in beautiful Vermont, finishing my third year at the Norwich School for Boys, a major in the Corps of Cadets, when I had an epiphany. . . .”
“You were a junior at Norwich in 1944?” Cronley asked in surprise.
Dunwiddie nodded.
“Then you can’t be much older than me. I’m class of ’45 at A&M.”
“I would have been in the class of ’45. I became legally able to drink this stuff about nine months ago,” Tiny said, holding up his glass.
“You look a hell of a lot older than twenty-one,” Jimmy said.
“Maybe it’s my complexion. May I continue?”
“Please.”
“As I said, I had an epiphany. I realized that unless I got out of my snazzy Norwich uniform and into an olive drab one, I was going to be one of those very pathetic members of the officer corps who got their commissions a week after they called the war off. So I enlisted.”
“You dropped out of Norwich to enlist?” Cronley asked incredulously.
“As a corporal, because of my Norwich training. It wasn’t quite as selfless as it sounds. I had heard there was a shortage of second lieutenants in ETO—the European Theater of Operations—and that they were meeting the shortage by running a six-week officer candidate school. The plan was that I would get myself sent to Europe right out of basic training, go to OCS, and be a second lieutenant commanding a tank platoon in combat while my classmates at Norwich were still waiting to graduate.”
“Jesus!”
“But, as you may have heard at A&M, the best-laid plans of mice and men sometimes go agley. Sure enough, just as soon as I arrived at the Second Armored Replacement Company, an officer—a light colonel by the name of Mattingly—showed up to take me to the commanding general . . .”
“Why?”
“. . . who was Major General Isaac Davis White, Norwich ’23, a classmate of my father’s. I suspect Pop wrote him I was coming. General White suggested—and when I. D. White suggests something, by comparison it makes Moses’s graven-on-stone Ten Commandments seem like a grocery list written on toilet paper—that the thing to do was send me to the 203rd Tank Destroyer Battalion.
“White officers, black troops. There, in a couple of months, I could pick up a little experience, maybe make sergeant, or even staff sergeant, and he would then feel justified in directly commissioning me. All OCS was, General White said, was the ETO version of Rook year at Norwich, and I’d already gone through that.
“Five weeks later, I was acting first sergeant of Charley Company of the 203rd.”
“How did that happen?”
“When the 203rd started taking out German armor, the Germans shot back. They were very good at that. Charley lost a lot of good people, including most of our officers and non-coms. Mattingly showed up at my hospital bed—”
“You were wounded?”
Tiny nodded.
“Not badly. Anyway, Mattingly told me that General White ‘suggested’ that since Charley Company had to be reconstituted—filled with replacements and trained—what the company needed more than a second lieutenant was a good first sergeant. He’d worry about making me a second lieutenant later. So I did that.
“And then, later, after Mattingly had made bird colonel, he decided he needed a company of good troops for OSS security and laid that requirement on General White, who sent him Charley Company—less officers, because he didn’t want them seeing things they shouldn’t and then running their mouths when they went home—on indefinite temporary duty. So here I am.”
“That’s a hell of a story,” Cronley said.
“Yeah.”
“So, what happens now? About you getting a commission?”
“Well, that was finally offered. But if I took it—the Army doesn’t like to leave directly appointed second lieutenants where they’ve been enlisted men—I knew I’d wind up as a platoon leader in, say, the 102nd Quartermaster Mess Kit Repair Company, or in some other outfit unimportant enough to let black officers command black troops, and I didn’t want that.”
He met Cronley’s eyes, and added, “What’s going on here is important. I wonder if you understand just how important.”
Cronley said aloud what he was thinking: “It doesn’t seem fair.”
“You are a naïve second lieutenant, aren’t you, Lieutenant? With all possible respect, Lieutenant, sir.”
“There was a tactical officer at A&M who was always saying the first thing a second lieutenant should do is find a good non-com and listen to him. It looks like I’ve found him.”
“I would say that’s a fair assessment of our situation,” Dunwiddie said. “May I refresh the lieutenant’s libation, sir?”
“Thank you. And I don’t mean that just fo
r the Jack Daniel’s.”
[FOUR]
Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge G. Frade
Morón, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina
1005 10 October 1945
Despite several large signs in Spanish and English proclaiming ONLY AUTHORIZED VEHICLES BEYOND THIS POINT, a number of unauthorized vehicles were lined up on the tarmac in front of the passenger terminal.
There were two Mercedes-Benz and one Leyland buses, a spectacular flaming red with black fenders Horch soft-top touring sedan, a custom-bodied 1940 Packard Super 180 convertible, an only slightly smaller 1940 Packard 120 convertible, and a 1939 black Mercedes closed sedan.
The occupants of all the vehicles were awaiting the arrival of South American Airways Flight 207. It had originated in Berlin, and then—after stops at Rhine-Main Airfield, Frankfurt am Main, Lisbon, Portugal, and Dakar, Senegal—had headed out over the Atlantic Ocean.
Just over an hour before, it had established radio contact with the SAA station in Montevideo, Uruguay—120 miles east of Buenos Aires—and reported its estimated time of arrival at Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge G. Frade. SAA Montevideo had then telephoned to SAA Jorge Frade—and to some other interested persons—the imminent arrival of the Ciudad de Rosario, a Lockheed Constellation aircraft.
Even with its landing gear extended and its flaps fully down as it made its approach to Jorge Frade, the Ciudad de Rosario was, in the opinion of both her pilot in command, Cletus Frade, and her first officer, Hans-Peter von Wachtstein, one great big beautiful bird.
“Hansel,” Frade ordered, “inasmuch as our women and little ones are probably down there watching, please try very hard to get us on the ground without splattering us all over the runway.”
Von Wachtstein responded with a gesture, holding up his left hand balled into a fist, except for the center finger, which was extended. Then he moved that hand to the throttle quadrant and, with a gentle touch that most surgeons would envy, began to retard engine power.
—
As the Ciudad de Rosario turned on final, the two men in the huge Packard got out and walked to the Horch.
“Dorotea,” General de Brigada Bernardo Martín, who was in mufti, said to Señora Dorotea Mallín de Frade, “we need a quick word with Cletus, and we should have it in private.”
Señora Frade—often referred to as Doña Dorotea, a term recognizing her position within the Argentine social hierarchy—was a tall, long-legged, twenty-two-year-old blue-eyed blonde with a marvelous milky complexion. She looked like what came to mind when one heard the phrase “classic English beauty.”
“I gather you want this ‘private word’ before I see him?” she asked.
Martín nodded.
“Go to hell, Bernardo,” she said. “Wives go to the head of the line.”
She indicated the woman sitting behind her, twenty-two-year-old Señora Alicia Carzino-Cormano de von Wachtstein. Alicia was the Spanish-Italian version of Doña Dorotea. She had glowing olive skin, lustrous black hair, and dark eyes.
The two had been friends since infancy.
“Dorotea,” the Reverend Kurt Welner, S.J., asked, smiling, “why can’t you ever be as sweet as you look?”
Father Welner liked to refer to himself as a simple priest, but that was some distance from reality. He was recognized to be the Éminence Grise behind the thrones of both the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires and the Papal Nuncio to Argentina. He was confessor to President Farrell and many other very prominent Argentines.
“And you can go to hell with Bernardo,” Doña Dorotea said.
“This is important, Dorotea,” Martín said.
“I really don’t understand why you keep doing this,” Doña Dorotea said. “You know damned well that the moment I finally get to see my husband, he’s going to tell me everything you said.”
“But you won’t have heard it from us,” Martín said.
She threw up her hands in a mocking gesture of surrender.
“You can have three minutes with him,” she said. “After which Alicia and I will appear at the foot of the steps with our weeping children in our arms.”
The children to whom she referred were in the backseat of the Horch under the care of a nanny.
“Fair enough,” Martín said, chuckling and smiling. “Thank you.”
—
The Ciudad de Rosario touched down smoothly. Immediately came the roar of its four eighteen-cylinder radial Wright R-3350 engines as the propellers were moved into reverse pitch.
The aircraft slowed, not quite quickly enough to make the first turn off the runway, but enough to easily make the second. It taxied toward the passenger terminal and the cars and trucks on the tarmac.
This triggered a series of actions. Two Ford pickup trucks—one with a flight of stairs and the second with a conveyor belt mounted in their beds—came onto the tarmac and waited for the Constellation to park. A second set of stairs, much narrower and mounted on wheels, was pushed onto the tarmac by ground handlers.
Four officers of the Immigration Service of the Argentine Republic got out of the Leyland bus, and a priest and two nuns got out of each Mercedes bus.
As soon as the Ciudad de Rosario stopped and the engines began the shutdown procedure, the truck-mounted wheels and conveyor belt were put against the rear passenger door and the smaller stairs against the door behind the cockpit.
General Martín and Father Welner started up the narrow stairs. They were about halfway up when the door behind the cockpit opened. Enrico Rodríguez stood in it, and turned to announce their presence, whereupon the door was slammed closed.
The cockpit door was not opened for some time, and not until after Martín had hammered on it with his fist.
In the Horch, Doña Alicia laughed, then said, “Good for you, my darling!”
—
Father Welner entered the airplane first.
Hans-Peter von Wachtstein was still in the co-pilot’s seat. Cletus Frade was standing in the area behind the pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats doing some sort of administrative work with two other men in SAA pilot’s uniforms—there were two complete crews on each flight; it was a long way between Berlin and Buenos Aires—and Father Welner waited until he had finished before speaking.
“Let us all thank the Lord for another safe flight,” he said.
“Thank Hansel, Your Holy Eminence,” Frade said, not very pleasantly. “The only thing God provided was a lot of turbulence and one hell of a headwind.”
The priest did not seem offended.
“Bernardo,” he said, “I suspect our Cletus woke up on the wrong side of his airplane.”
“If I didn’t need you two,” Frade said, “you’d still be outside on the ladder.”
He pointed at Martín, and went on: “The only way you could have known when we were coming is because you’ve slipped someone into SAA Montevideo who called you and told you. Now I’m going to have to fire everyone there and replace them with people who work for me, and not the Bureau of Internal Security.”
Von Wachtstein climbed out of the co-pilot’s seat.
General Martín did not deny the accusation, instead asking, “You say you need us? Curiosity overwhelms me.”
“Hansel and I have gone into the smuggle-deserving-Germans-into-Argentina business ourselves,” Frade said. “We need to smuggle someone out of the airport, and we need a libreta de enrolamiento for our friend right away, this afternoon. Whatever your other faults, you two are very good at arranging things like that.”
Von Wachtstein was now smiling broadly. The other two SAA pilots, who knew who the priest and Martín were, looked uncomfortable.
“Well, you’ve got my attention,” Martín confessed. “Are you going to tell me where you found this deserving German?”
“Some friends of ours who were looking for her found her,” Frade said.
“You mean some of your OSS friends?” Martín said.
“I’ve told you and told you, Bernardo, we don’t even know what those ini
tials stand for. And besides, don’t you read the newspapers? The OSS no longer exists.”
“I read that, but I’m having a hard time believing it,” Martín said. “Where is this deserving German?”
“Enrico, would you ask Frau von Wachtstein to come up here, please?”
“Frau von Wachtstein?” Father Welner blurted.
“Don’t add bigamy to your list of Hansel’s other sins, just yet, Your Eminence,” Frade said. “Try to give him the benefit of the doubt.”
Martín chuckled.
Elsa appeared in her Officer Equivalent Pinks and Greens skirt and tunic uniform.
“Gentlemen, may I present my sister-in-law, Frau Elsa von Wachtstein?” von Wachtstein said.
Father Welner quickly recovered.
“My dear child, I’m Father Welner. Welcome to Argentina.”
“Thank you,” Elsa said.
“Does that mean we get the libreta de enrolamiento?” Frade asked.
“That’s no problem,” Martín said. He put out his hand to Elsa. “Frau von Wachtstein, I’m General Martín.”
“How do you do?”
“What I suggest we do,” Martín said, “is that I put Frau von Wachtstein in my car and drive her to the house on Libertador. That’ll solve the problem of getting her through Immigration and off the airfield . . .”
There was not an Argentine police officer—or any other official—who would dare stop a car driven by the chief of the Bureau of Internal Security for any reason, much less to demand the identity documents of anyone in it.
Peter von Wachtstein saw the look on Elsa’s face.
“I’ll go with you, Elsa,” he said.
“. . . leaving Father Welner to explain to your wives what you two are doing with this beautiful young woman,” Martín concluded.
“Thanks, Bernardo,” Frade said. His tone of voice reflected his sincerity.
“De nada,” Martín said. “Enrico, open the door and see if they’re finished out there.”
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