The Air-Raid Warden Was a Spy: And Other Tales From Home-Front America in World War II (23 page)

Huffberg had been recruited into a Nazi spy ring that had been operating in Detroit with considerable success since late 1941. The brains and motivating force behind the network was Grace Buchanan-Dineen, a glamorous beauty. Well bred and a graduate of exclusive Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, she was also an “alumna” of a spy school known as the Academy in Hamburg, Germany.

After Huffberg entered the Navy, he continued his role as a spy for the Mata Hari of Detroit by merely changing his focus from industrial espionage to harbor surveillance. Information obtained at New York harbor was shuttled by coded letters to Buchanan-Dineen, and she rushed it along to her Nazi controllers in Hamburg.

At about the same time that Huffberg had been sent to Sheepshead Bay, the Federal Bureau of Investigation uncovered clues that indicated an organized spy ring was operating in the Motor City, and G-men were infiltrated into the Ford plant under the guise of being genuine employees.

Information was soon developed that Grace Buchanan-Dineen was the unlikely chief spymistress and that her gang had been paying big money to obtain secret blueprints of tanks and airplane engines.

In late 1943, the FBI swooped down on the Nazi gang, arresting Buchanan-Dineen, Huffberg, and other members of the network. Facing the electric chair for wartime espionage, the wealthy Vassar grad sang like a canary. At her trial in early March 1944, she pleaded guilty and received a twelve-year term in prison.

A short time later, Huffberg went to trial, wearing his Navy uniform (he was presumed innocent until proven guilty). He, too, faced the electric chair. Soon after the trial opened, he began going through a series of strange gyrations. On the witness stand, he gave nonsensical replies to the prosecutor’s questions.

Psychiatrists were brought in to examine Huffberg. After weeks of questioning, they concluded that he was “mentally unbalanced” and the case against him was dismissed.

A Patriotic Heroine’s Long Ordeal
115

But was this seemingly bright young man truly “crazy”? Many press observers doubted it. Rather, the resolution of his case may have been a means for getting him off the hook because he had provided the FBI with an abundance of information that enabled a deep dent to be put in the Nazi espionage apparatus in the United States.
¹³

Marine Commander’s Dilemma

G
ENERAL THOMAS HOLCOMB,
commandant of the Marine Corps, was skewered on the horns of a dilemma. Men wearing the famous globe-and-anchor insignia were trained to fight, and Holcomb feared that the introduction of women into the organization would create confusion, dissension, and major morale problems.

Yet, after the marines had taken heavy casualties in the Pacific during the latter part of 1942, he knew that beefed-up manpower would be needed on the long and bloody road to Tokyo. So he asked Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox to provide the Corps with as many women as possible to be used in noncombat roles, thus releasing a greater number of men for essential combat duty.

Knox approved Holcomb’s request, and plans were developed to establish the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve (MCWR) in February 1943. Forty-sevenyear-old Ruth C. Streeter was given the rank of major and appointed director. Enthusiastic and energetic, Streeter held both private and commercial pilot licenses. More than any of the directors of the women’s components, she had firsthand knowledge of what the war was all about: three of her four grown offspring were in the service, one in the Army and two in the Navy.
¹⁴

A Patriotic Heroine’s Long Ordeal

I
N THE MIDWEST CITY OF COLUMBIA, MISSOURI,
Anna Froman Hetzler had spent the past few days in anxious concern. She knew that her daughter, thirtyfive-year-old Jane Froman, was to fly to Lisbon, Portugal, in a Pan American Airways Clipper, a large amphibian aircraft. Like countless other mothers across the United States with an offspring going overseas and into a war zone, she prayed for her daughter’s safety.

Jane Froman was beautiful and talented, a star in Hollywood movies, on the Broadway stage, and on nationwide radio networks. Public opinion polls rated her as America’s most popular female singer. Now she was going on a tour of Europe to entertain American servicemen and servicewomen.

Late in the afternoon, Anna, who was on the faculty at Christian College (later Columbia College), responded to a knock on the door at her home. It was

Jane Froman, America’s most popular songstress, underwent more than thirty operations after miraculously surviving an airplane crash on the way to entertain American troops. (Courtesy of Columbia College)

February 24, 1943. A Western Union boy handed her a telegram. She felt faint, knowing that the next of kin were notified of overseas casualties in this manner.

With trembling hands, Anna opened the yellow envelope and read the message from Washington: “Your daughter Jane Froman has been seriously injured . . . ” The terse message did not disclose that the songstress was in a Lisbon hospital and hovering on the brink of death.

Jane, in fact, was lucky to have survived. Before leaving New York, she and another entertainer, Tamara Swan, had been assigned seats next to each another in the largest compartment. They remained in these seats for the most of the flight but, as the Clipper neared Lisbon, the two women switched places.

When the airplane glided down for what promised to be a routine landing on the Tagus River, it suddenly plunged into the water with tremendous impact. Swan, who was in the seat assigned to Froman, was killed instantly.

Jane’s mink coat, blouse, shoes and stockings were ripped off. She suffered a broken right arm, a compound fracture of the right leg, a left leg nearly severed below the knee, three broken ribs, and a rash of cuts and bruises. Countless tiny bits of metal and wood from the Clipper were embedded in her body.

Froman was one of thirteen survivors afloat in the turgid water with night descending upon Lisbon. Another who escaped instant death was John Curtis Burn, the copilot, who had been hurled near the songstress. Although he had received a fractured spine and a skull fracture, he somehow made his way to Jane and kept her head above water by clinging to a piece of the wreckage.

It was a strange rendezvous, there in the darkness and the icy water. In shock and numbness, they carried on a casual conversation. Burn said that he

A Patriotic Heroine’s Long Ordeal
117

had been a fan of Jane’s for years, but had never expected to meet her adrift in a river.

Despite the idle chatter, both knew they were goners unless rescuers arrived soon. Some forty-five minutes after the crash, a launch fished the couple out of the water, and they were rushed to a Lisbon hospital.

John Burn recalled: “Jane was by far the worst hurt of the survivors, but she didn’t whimper in the water or afterward. In the hospital, she kept telling the nurses to take care of the other survivors. All during the first night, when she was suffering so severely, she kept sending people to see how I was getting along.”

Jane had made her Broadway debut in the hit musical Ziegfield Follies of 1934 with Fanny Brice and a young hoofer named Buddy Ebsen. Meanwhile, she had her first smash record, singing “I Only Have Eyes for You” in her deep, resonant voice. By now, Jane was a national celebrity and was hauling in $1,000 weekly, an imposing salary in the Great Depression era.

In the spring of 1935, Froman took a train to Hollywood where she made her first movie, Stars Over Broadway, with Pat O’Brien, one of Tinsel Town’s most gifted actors, and noted singer James Melton. Three years later, she did her second Hollywood flick, Radio City Revels, and in 1940, she was back on Broadway, starring in Keep Off the Grass with comedian Jimmy Durante.

Meanwhile, one of Jane’s most ardent fans was President Franklin Roosevelt. On five occasions, she was invited to the White House to entertain guests and to warble the President’s special request, “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”

With her White House connection, it was logical that she was among the one hundred foremost entertainers to be invited to participate in USO shows for servicemen and women when the United States went to war. Jane wired her acceptance in less than an hour, fully aware that the commitment to her country would deprive her of many highly paid show business performances.

Fifteen months after the United States was bombed into the global conflict at Pearl Harbor, Jane Froman, broken badly in body and in spirit after the Pan American Clipper’s plunge into the Tagus River, was in a Lisbon hospital and being rolled into an operating room. Her last conscious plea was for the Portuguese doctors not to amputate her nearly severed left leg. They didn’t.

At the same time, John Burn, the Clipper copilot who had saved Froman’s life by keeping her afloat in the Tagus until rescued, also was undergoing extensive surgery for his multiple injuries. While recuperating in the weeks ahead, Jane and John became good friends.

A month after the Clipper crash, Jane had a visitor, Stanton Griffis, a multimillionaire New York businessman who had heard her sing on Broadway and the NBC radio network. He was chairman of the board of Madison Square Garden (the site of countless major sports events), owner of Brentano’s nationwide book chain, and a top executive of Paramount Pictures in Hollywood.

Griffis was purportedly touring Lisbon and other neutral capitals to explore the business situation. Actually, he was a spy for the Office of Strategic
Services (OSS), the U.S. cloak-and-dagger apparatus. Three months earlier, he had been in Scandinavia, where, despite the fact that he was under surveillance by the Gestapo, Griffis organized Allied spy networks in Finland and Sweden.

Now, in the Portuguese hospital, Stanton Griffis was shocked at Jane Froman’s condition. She was feeble; her face was milk-white, and she had shrunk to about ninety pounds. As soon as he arrived back in the United States aboard a Clipper a few days later, he set wheels to turning in Washington to get the singer back to New York for sophisticated medical treatment.

Jane’s mangled body precluded her flying on a Clipper. She would have to be in a ship where she could stretch out. The only oceangoing accommodation that could be located for her was a berth on a small Portuguese freighter, the Serapa Pinto. Chances were excellent that she would never arrive in New York. Either she would die in the Atlantic enroute, or the freighter would be torpedoed by one of the scores of German U-boats (submarines) lurking along the sea-lanes between Europe and New York.

The snail-like Serapa Pinto did have to dodge one torpedo, but it finally steamed into New York harbor late in April 1943, two months after the Tagus River episode. An ambulance carried Jane to Doctors Hospital.

A few days later, Jane’s mother Anna visited the medical center. She struggled to conceal her horror over the daughter’s appearance—emaciated, face drawn and pale.

Jane smiled and joked weakly, “Well, Mom, it’s better than going on a diet!”

But it was no joke; Jane had lost forty-two pounds in eight weeks. Yet her determination was evident. “I’m going to keep both of my legs,” she told her mother, “no matter how hard it may be!”

In the weeks ahead, the entertainer underwent a series of operations, including a bone graft on the mangled leg. She was never given assurances that the leg could be saved. “We’ll do our best,” the doctors had said.

Six months after the accident, Jane decided to go back to work, even though she was still a semi-invalid. Doctors felt that work would be good therapy, and enormous medical bills were piling up. Incredibly, neither the U.S. government nor Pan American Airways would pay a penny of her hospital expenses.

Lou Walters, a Broadway producer, signed Froman to a contract to appear in the musical Artists and Models. The show was planned and partly rehearsed in her room at Doctors Hospital.

Artists and Models opened at the Broadway Theater amidst the customary hoopla. For each performance, Froman was carried from the hospital to the theater, wearing a thirty-five-pound body cast. During each show, stagehands, behind a closed curtain, carried her on and off the stage twenty-two times.

In show business terminology, Artist and Models was a turkey. It closed after six weeks in the wake of scaldings by media critics. Froman came out of