Joe told Nelson and his team all he could about the people he’d encountered, both civilians and network members, and provided the real names, noms de guerre, and physical descriptions of as many as he could remember. The interviewers were aware of the extended time he’d spent at Invalides, and in response to their probing questions Joe spoke at length about the Morins and the part they and the institution itself played in aiding Allied evaders. While he was very forthcoming about the family’s resistance activities and dedication to France and the Allied cause, he was initially hesitant to tell them about his relationship with Yvette. But when one of the interviewers casually mentioned that during their own debriefings at 63 Brook Street both Harry Eastman and Dick Davitt had talked about the Morins—in glowing terms, the officer was quick to point out—Joe realized that it would be foolish for him to conceal the relationship. He therefore told the MIS-X agents that not only were he and Yvette in love, they were engaged to be married. Somewhat to his surprise, the interviewers did not chastise him for what might easily have been considered fraternization with a foreign national during wartime, and actually wished him and Yvette good luck in the future. Encouraged by this response, Joe asked if there was any way the Turma-Vengeance network could be notified of his safe arrival in England. Nelson said he would look into it, and fairly soon after Joe’s arrival in England the Turma-Vengeance network was notified that he was safe, and that information was passed to the Morins.6
The interviewers’ second line of inquiry dealt with the training Joe had been given regarding escape and evasion techniques, and about the utility of the escape aids provided to USAAF combat crews. Had the E&E lectures he’d received both in the United States and following his unit’s arrival in Britain been helpful when he was actually on the run? If not, how could the training be improved? Had he used any of the items in his escape kit? If so, which had he found most useful, and which did he think could be eliminated? Was the amount of currency in his escape purse adequate, and was the silk map accurate?
Though Joe’s interviews at 63 Brook Street were not adversarial and were conducted in a relatively relaxed atmosphere, the extraordinary period of time he’d spent in France compared with most of the other July 14 evaders guaranteed that the questioning he underwent was unusually lengthy and particularly thorough. By the time the process ended on the afternoon of October 22 the MIS-X interviewers led by Major Nelson had amassed a significant amount of information, which over the following two days they edited into the multipage Escape and Evasion Report No. 125.7
Classified SECRET, the document followed a standard format. The first section gave the names, ranks, and crew position of each man aboard Salty’s Naturals, followed by their status: except for Joe and the already returned Larry Templeton, all were listed as MIA. Next came an abbreviated, five-paragraph synopsis of Joe’s experiences up through his first interaction with French civilians connected to an evasion network. As in all E&E reports, the final sentence of the synopsis read simply, “My journey was arranged.” Since the first two pages of the E&E report would normally be circulated to a variety of Allied organizations, the brevity of the synopsis and the lack of any substantive information regarding the individuals and organizations that aided the evader was intended to protect what in today’s intelligence parlance are referred to as “sources and methods.”
The real meat of the E&E report was found in the three appendices that followed the abbreviated synopsis. Appendix B listed all the enemy activity and installations the evader had either personally observed or heard about during his time in occupied territory. In Joe’s case, this included the extensive damage caused by the repeated Allied air raids on the Luftwaffe airfields at Le Bourget and Villacoublay and the Renault vehicle factory outside Paris; and the fact that the increasing numbers of American bombers appearing over the greater Paris area had prompted the Germans to increase the number of large-caliber antiaircraft guns dedicated to the capital’s defense. Appendix C of Joe’s E&E report contained a vastly expanded and far more detailed account of his activities while evading. Handwritten by one of the MIS-X interviewers as Joe spoke, the three-page section listed all the specific names, networks, and addresses missing from the synopsis. In Appendix D Joe addressed the value of his E&E training and equipment, and provided an accounting of when and how he had spent the money in his escape purse.
The final document in the E&E report was a standard form warning all returned evaders not to talk to anyone about their time in German-occupied territory, because “information about your escape or evasion from capture would be useful to the enemy and a danger to your friends.” The returned service member was told to be “particularly on your guard with persons representing the press,” and ordered to “give no account of your experiences in books, newspapers, periodicals, or in broadcasts or in lectures.” At the bottom of the form Joe’s signature acknowledged that he would abide by the restrictions, and that he also understood that the disclosure of any information regarding his evasion to any unauthorized person would make him liable to disciplinary action.8
When his debriefing concluded on Friday afternoon, Joe was informed he could remain at the Special Reception Center through the weekend. He would be allowed to come and go as he pleased, he was told, but was required to return to the facility each evening by midnight. He was also issued travel orders directing him to rejoin the 94th Bomb Group at Rougham by no later than 4 P.M. on Monday, October 25. The orders authorized him to travel by train, and he was provided with a one-way, third-class London & Northeastern Railway ticket and some spending money.
It is unclear how Joe passed his free weekend in London, but it’s safe to assume that he spent much of the time thinking about Yvette. The woman he loved, to whom he was engaged and with whom he planned to spend the rest of his life, was trapped behind the formidable walls of Adolf Hitler’s “Fortress Europe.” She and her parents were in constant danger from the Germans and even from possible spies within the ranks of their own network, and there was absolutely nothing he could do to help or protect them. Nor could he communicate with them, or they with him. His feelings of sadness, helplessness, and longing would likely only have been magnified by the fact that Yvette had turned twenty-two on Thursday, October 21, and he had been unable to celebrate it with her.
All those thoughts and feelings would still have been clouding Joe’s mind and heart when he set out for Rougham on the morning of Monday the twenty-fifth. The journey was blessedly uneventful, and when he stepped off the train at Bury St. Edmunds station his mood was undoubtedly lifted by the sight of the two other members of the Gunner Trio, Dick Davitt and Harry Eastman. Upon hearing from the 94th Group admin officer that their friend was due to arrive from London, they had talked the man into allowing them to sign out a jeep so they could be the ones to meet him. Having been evaders themselves, they knew how disorienting it would be for Joe to have spent days at Brook Street talking in detail about his experiences in France, only to be jolted back into the reality of daily duty in an operational squadron. And because both Harry and Dick had spent time at Invalides, met the Morins, and knew of Joe’s relationship with Yvette, they also would have clearly understood just how emotionally bereft their friend would be after having to leave both the woman he loved and the couple he had come to see as surrogate parents. The two gunners therefore likely intended the drive back to Rougham to be an opportunity for Joe to vent his feelings, and the trio obviously stopped along the way—at the Sword in Hand, perhaps—because the three-mile journey from the station to the airfield took nearly four hours. No official mention was made of the gunners’ state of sobriety upon finally reaching Rougham, however, and Joe signed back onto the 94th Bomb Group’s rolls late in the afternoon.9
The unit had changed significantly over the three months since the Bastille Day mission to Le Bourget, having lost an additional nineteen Fortresses and fifteen crews in combat.10 Many familiar faces were missing from Rougham’s mess hall and NCO Club, and the influ
x of replacement personnel meant that Joe felt as though he were a newcomer to the organization he’d joined almost a year earlier. That sense of being an outsider was further reinforced by the fact that he’d been “evicted” from his previous quarters. As had happened to both Eastman and Davitt, once Joe had been declared MIA his bunk had been assigned to someone else, and upon his return he was assigned to sleep in a Quonset hut full of strangers. Worse, in the days after Salty’s Naturals went down, the footlockers containing the individual crew members’ uniforms and personal belongings had been inventoried, and those items deemed appropriate for return to their next-of-kin had been boxed and placed in storage pending an official determination as to whether they had been killed in action. It took Joe several days to cut through the red tape that resulted from his not being dead in order to retrieve his belongings, though upon finally opening the box he was pleased to find that several letters from his mother had arrived in his absence.
Different living arrangements and missing personal items were not the only surprises Joe encountered on his return to Rougham. Two days after rejoining the 94th Bomb Group he was promoted to technical sergeant, and at the same ceremony was awarded the Purple Heart in recognition of the injuries sustained on bailing out of Salty’s Naturals.11 On a less positive note, however, he was told that USAAF regulations prohibited a returned evader from participating in further combat missions in the theater in which his evasion occurred, lest he be captured again and reveal under torture the individuals and networks that had facilitated his earlier escape. As a result, Joe was removed from flight status and assigned to the group’s armament section where, he was assured, his expertise as an aircraft armorer would be put to good use until his return to the United States could be arranged.
Although Joe was not upset about being taken off flight status—he knew that a bomber crewman’s life expectancy grew shorter with each mission, and he was now a man with something to live for—he was appalled at the thought of having to leave England. Even though he couldn’t communicate directly with Yvette, before they’d parted she had said she would try to get a message to him. She knew that he was based at Rougham with the 94th Group, and believed that another American evader passing through Invalides might be able to act as a courier. Joe was afraid that if he were transferred back to the States he might never receive word from Yvette, that he wouldn’t know whether she and her parents were safe. He knew it was foolish, but even though she was on the other side of the English Channel and in the heart of German-occupied Europe he still felt that they were connected. Would that connection remain intact if he were on the other side of the Atlantic, or worse, on some Godforsaken island in the Pacific?
In the weeks following his return to Rougham, Joe sought to submerge his anxieties about Yvette’s safety and his fears about their future beneath a tidal wave of work. He spent nearly every waking hour in the armament shop, maintaining and, when necessary, repairing machine guns, turrets, ammunition-feed chutes, bomb racks, and a host of related systems. The only time off he allowed himself was the occasional pub crawl in Bury St. Edmunds, usually in company with Harry Eastman and Dick Davitt. The trio’s time together lasted barely a month, however, for Davitt left for the United States on November 14, and Eastman followed a week later. According to a clerk in the 94th Group headquarters Joe’s own departure was imminent, so he put in a request for some time off. On the same day Harry boarded a C-54A transport in Prestwick, Scotland, for the trans-Atlantic flight, Joe was granted a four-day pass to London.12
On arriving in the British capital on the morning of November 21 Joe headed for the Columbia Club at 95–99 Lancaster Gate, just across Bayswater Road from the north edge of Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park. Built in the mid-1800s as a series of upscale townhouses, in 1920 the structures were consolidated and converted into a hotel. After America’s entry into World War II the building had become the U.S. forces’ primary London billet for both transient personnel and those on leave in the city. Each room contained from two to eight metal bunk beds, with a certain number of beds allocated every week to each of the major U.S. military organizations based in Britain. The free accommodations were basic (less so, of course, for officers), but guests could eat and drink in the club’s dining rooms and bars for far less than it would have cost elsewhere in the city. The building’s central location and the presence of the Lancaster Gate tube station less than three hundred yards away made it an ideal base from which to explore London, and service members could obtain reduced-price tickets to theaters and other entertainment venues.
Joe had timed his trip to London perfectly, for when he returned to Rougham on Thursday the twenty-fifth—just in time for Thanksgiving dinner in the mess hall—his travel orders were waiting for him. They directed him to report to the USAAF Air Transport Command detachment at RAF Prestwick no later than 4 P.M. on Wednesday, December 1, for “onward movement to the Zone of the Interior,” the official military term for the continental United States. Joe initially thought he would be taking the train on the three-hundred-mile journey to Scotland, but on the day before his departure from Rougham he was told that he and a few other men also bound for the States would be flown to Prestwick. Joe assumed the aircraft would be the 94th Group’s “station hack,” a small, twin-engine C-45 utility transport used to ferry people, equipment, and spare parts between Rougham and other fields.
But on the following morning the jeep carrying Joe and the other homeward-bound aviators rolled to a stop in front of a B-17 whose engines were already running. The Fortress was on its way to Prestwick to pick up some incoming replacements, and someone in base operations had decided the bomber might as well carry Joe and the other departing airmen on its way north. The aircraft carried no bombs, but because German fighters were known to stage surprise raids into the skies over northern England and Scotland, the Fortress’s gunners were all on board and their weapons were provided with full combat loads of ammunition. Joe and his fellow passengers packed themselves and their duffle bags into the bomber’s waist, from just aft of the ball turret to just ahead of the right-side crew entry hatch, and settled in for the flight. Though Joe left no record of his thoughts about the trip to Prestwick, it was his first time aloft in a B-17 since the day Salty’s Naturals had gone down over France, and we may assume that the flight had something of a déjà vu quality. The acrid smell of burning Avgas, the bomber’s bumping and swaying in reaction to turbulence, and especially the movements of the waist gunners as they scanned the surrounding skies for any hint of trouble would certainly have reminded Joe not only of how that previous flight had ended, but also of those who had not survived it.
The journey to Prestwick passed without incident, and after a night spent in the base’s transient NCO quarters Joe joined twenty-two other U.S. servicemen aboard yet another four-engine aircraft, this one a Douglas C-54A Skymaster transport fitted to carry a mix of cargo and passengers.13 Though the plane carried USAAF markings it was operated by an eight-man crew from Trans World Airlines, which provided flight personnel for many of the noncombat military aircraft routinely transiting the North Atlantic ferry route. Just as the 94th Bomb Group’s B-17s had done on their flight to England, the Skymaster leap-frogged the Atlantic, though in the opposite direction. Following overnight stops in Greenland and Newfoundland the C-54A landed at National Airport outside Washington, D.C., on December 5.
The travel orders Joe had been issued before leaving Rougham directed him to report to Mitchell Field on New York’s Long Island, but upon arrival there on December 6 he was immediately put aboard a military bus for the one-hundred-mile trip to the U.S. Army Air Forces Personnel Redistribution Center in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Opened just four months earlier, the facility’s purpose was to receive all USAAF members returning to the continental United States from overseas and “after examination and re-evaluation assign them to appropriate stations, detail them to rest camps or effect their separation from the service.”14 The weeklong process included an
intensive records check intended to correct any problems with the returning airman’s pay, legal affairs, or allotments; a thorough medical examination; and mental-health screenings.
Joe’s status as a returned evader ensured that during the course of several mental-health interviews he was questioned closely about the emotional effects of being shot down, losing crewmates, and being forced to go on the run in enemy-occupied territory.15 Joe was required by regulations to discuss any personal relationships he might have formed while in France, so he spoke of Yvette and the fears he had for the safety of her and her parents. The Army psychiatrists doing the interviews would not have been surprised by the fact that Joe had fallen in love while overseas, since many thousands of American service members had romantic or sexual liaisons while deployed, but his actual engagement to someone inside German-occupied Europe may well have struck them as a new facet to an otherwise fairly common theme.
Joe’s chats with the psychiatrists obviously did not raise any red flags, for he was ultimately classified as fit for further active service. In keeping with the USAAF policy mandating special treatment within the redistribution system for former prisoners of war, escapees, and returned evaders, after being cleared for duty Joe was given his choice of available postings. He requested assignment as a flexible gunnery instructor somewhere in the western United States—presumably to be closer to his father in Washington and his mother in Alaska. No such positions were immediately available, however, and Joe was instead ordered to USAAF Redistribution Center No. 3 in Santa Monica, California, for fifteen days of rest and recuperation. Following his time there, he was told, he would be granted four weeks of home leave. Upon his return to duty he would be given the first available assignment that matched his preferences.
Escape from Paris Page 19
