The Air-Raid Warden Was a Spy: And Other Tales From Home-Front America in World War II (30 page)

Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower wrote from London to a general in the Pentagon: “This will not be just another battle. All our chips will be on the table!”

British Major General Frederick Morgan, the architect of the original operation against Normandy, told Allied commanders: “If the Germans obtain as much as forty-eight hours warning of [our plan], the chances of success are small. And longer warning spells certain disaster.”

In London, the cleverest brains in the Allied camp were orchestrating a master deception scheme code-named Fortitude South. It was designed to keep Adolf Hitler and his generals in the dark about the time and locale of der Grossinvasion.

Cornerstone of the plan was a fictitious U.S. Army group, supposedly commanded by General George Patton, who had been brought to England from the Mediterranean in recent weeks. In Berlin, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (High Command) regarded Patton as the Allies’ boldest battle leader, so he seemed to be the obvious choice to command the cross-Channel assault.

Patton’s fake force of one million men would assemble in southeastern England, only twenty miles across the Channel from the region in France known as the Pas de Calais. The deception goal was to coerce German intelligence into concluding that the Allies would strike there. Actually, the true landing beaches would be two hundred miles to the southwest in Normandy.

Fortitude South became an elaborate deception on a massive scale. Movie-set designers from Shepperton Studios were called in, and they supplied the fictitious Patton army group with landing craft, tanks, artillery, trucks, and artillery pieces—all of inflatable rubber.

Meanwhile, the air over southeastern England crackled with a flood of bogus radio messages that were passed back and forth between nonexistent command

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posts and headquarters. All of this heavy radio traffic (generated by a signals battalion) was closely monitored by the Germans along the Pas de Calais.

In the United States, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and his agents were playing a key role in Fortitude South. It evolved after G-men had taken into custody a Dutch native, Walter Koehler. He claimed that German intelligence officers had sent him to America to gather information on Allied plans for the looming invasion. However, the spy said he had had a change of heart and now was eager to be an agent for the United States.

Koehler turned over to the FBI agents the secret code given to him before he left Germany and the radio over which he was to send messages to Hamburg. Hoover assigned Koehler the code name Albert van Loop.

Making certain that the fifty-two-year-old Dutchman did not betray the FBI, he was kept under guard in a fleabag hotel in Manhattan. At the same time, a pair of G-men who spoke the German language were working from a small, secluded house on Long Island, not far from Manhattan, and established radio contact with Hamburg, using van Loop’s secret ciphers.

A selected group of FBI men created ongoing scripts for van Loop’s reports to Hamburg (there would be a hundred and twenty-two of them). The messages were a careful blend of truths on insignificant matters, half-truths, and outright lies.

One day van Loop (that is, the FBI imposters) informed his German controllers that he had obtained a job as a night desk clerk in a Manhattan hotel, which had been taken over by the U.S. Army to lodge officers bound for England. Curiously, Hamburg never asked the identity of the hotel, which existed only in the fertile minds of the FBI agents stage-managing the fraud against Adolf Hitler.

In the weeks ahead, van Loop radioed Hamburg with troop convoy sailings (all of them phony). From the nonexistent Army officers staying briefly in the hotel, he passed along the designations of the phantom units that were going to join General Patton’s dummy Army Group in southeast England.
¹

A Spy in Allied Headquarters?

L
ATE IN MAY 1944
employees at a Chicago post office accidentally opened a badly wrapped package and discovered a collection of official-looking documents of a kind that they had never seen. Most puzzling was that the word “Bigot” was stamped in large red letters on each piece.

A postal official rushed the package and its documents to Sixth Army headquarters in Chicago, where a general and three colonels inspected them. They, too, were mystified by the Bigot designation. Only much later would they learn that security officers in England used Bigot to signify that a person

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or an office had been cleared to be told the projected date and locale of the Normandy invasion.

Despite their confusion over the word Bigot, the Sixth Army officers knew that the documents disclosed the landing beaches, the strength of the various assault units, and the approximate date of Overlord, code name for the invasion.

Army intelligence agents and the FBI promptly launched a probe of what appeared to be a frightening security breach. It seemed as though the Germans had a spy right in the London building in which planning for the invasion was being conducted. Tension increased when the FBI and the Army agents found that the address, on Division Street, was in a neighborhood that was home to hundreds of German immigrants. The female addressee was questioned, and she identified the handwriting on the package as that of her brother, an Army sergeant assigned to General Eisenhower’s headquarters. The sergeant and his sister were of German ancestry—but so were eleven million other loyal Americans.

In London, meantime, the sergeant was grilled intensely. Time after time he gave the same answer. He had been working constant fourteen-hour days and was near exhaustion and worried about his sister, who was ill, in Chicago. The Bigot documents were supposed to have been sent to the Division of Transportation in Washington, so he must have written his sister’s Division Street address without realizing he was making a mistake. His tired mind had confused the two Division addresses.

An investigation of the sergeant’s background disclosed only that he had been a loyal American and a dedicated soldier. But there were eight post office employees and at least four officers at Sixth Army headquarters who knew the D Day secrets. The FBI sternly warned each of them that any loose talk could result in tragic consequences for their country. Then a tail was put on each postal employee until after D Day.

A court-martial was recommended for the sergeant, but no action was taken. However, he was kept under constant surveillance, his telephone was tapped (as was his sister’s in the United States), and he was not allowed to leave his quarters until after the invasion.

The weird episode was not over, for there were security officers in Washington who were convinced that the leakage had not been accidental, that it was in some manner connected with the Chicago Tribune, a large-circulation newspaper based in the same city in which the sergeant’s sister lived.

Owned and published by Robert H. McCormick, a bitter foe of President Roosevelt and his New Deal domestic program, the Tribune had been held with deep suspicion by the Pentagon (and millions of Americans with loved ones in the Pacific) six months earlier when it had printed top-secret information that the Allies had broken the Japanese code. Cracking the code meant that the American commanders were able to learn in advance about Japanese plans and
intentions, thereby saving thousands of lives and vastly increasing chances for

U.S. victories.

Official suspicion against the Tribune would surface again when it was discovered that, with D Day for Normandy drawing close and correspondents in England barred from leaving the country for security reasons, an editor of the Chicago newspaper had been caught trying to sneak out of the country in a U.S. transport plane.

Despite intensive probing by the FBI and military intelligence officers, no connection between the Chicago post office episode and the Tribune was ever established.
²

Two Broadcast Rivals Called Up

D
AVID SARNOFF,
head of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), arrived at his office high in a skyscraper at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City and was handed an urgent message from the War Department. He had held a commission in the Army Reserve for many years, and now the fifty-two-year-old tycoon was being ordered to active duty for ninety days. It was early March 1944.

Sarnoff, whose penniless parents had emigrated from Russia when he was a boy, was mystified by the secrecy of his call-up. There was no mention of his assignment. All he knew was that he was to proceed to London on the first available airplane.

Colonel Sarnoff reached London on March 20 and was billeted at Claridge’s, the city’s most prestigious hotel. No doubt he was surprised to learn that his long-time archrival, William S. Paley, also a reserve colonel, was already in London. Paley was head of the Columbia Broadcasting Company (CBS).

Twenty-four hours after his arrival, Sarnoff learned the nature of his special mission. It had a unique twist. After twenty years of broadcast rivalry, he and Bill Paley were to work as a team to organize and coordinate the maze of wireless circuits that would be required to flash the news of D Day to home-front America and the world.
³

Tributes to a Fallen Female Pilot

E
ARLY ON THE MORNING OF
April 3, 1944, twenty-three-year-old Evelyn Sharp, burdened with flight gear, strolled toward the twin-engine P-38 “Lightning” fighter plane at an air base near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She was to ferry the sleek aircraft to an Air Corps base in the southwest.

Like other female pilots, Sharp was now known as a WASP. Earlier, the War Department had combined the female components of the Army Air Corps

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WASPs in Texas plan cross-country flight. (National Archives)

into one organization. The new formation would be called the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) under Jacqueline Cochran, who had been head of the Women’s Flying Training Detachment.

Evelyn, an orphan, had been adopted by the Sharp family of Ord, a small town in Nebraska. As an energetic teenager, she had taught many children in the town to swim and to ride horses. At fourteen, Evelyn embarked on a love affair with airplanes, and before she turned eighteen, she had earned a pilot’s license.

The vivacious youngster became a heroine of sorts when she had flown in Ord’s first sack of airmail letters. Later she thrilled the townspeople by doing acrobatic stunts, and she taught several young Ord men, now serving in combat, how to fly.

Now, outside Harrisburg, Evelyn, who was regarded as the most skilled pilot in her WASP group, climbed into the cockpit of the P-38 and lifted off. Within seconds one of the engines died, and the plane plummeted toward the ground. The pilot died instantly.

Although Evelyn Sharp and the other one hundred WASPs had been ferrying warplanes for millions of miles around the United States the women were not bona fide members of the military. She did not qualify for Army death benefits. So the WASPs at their ferrying base near New Castle, Delaware, took up a collection and sent Evelyn’s family in Ord more than $200 to help with the funeral expenses.

Betty Gilles, the squadron commander at New Castle, wanted a uniformed WASP at the final rites, so the women pilots pooled their money to buy a railroad ticket for Nancy Batson to accompany Evelyn’s body to Ord. An undertaker met the train and helped remove the coffin.

Late that afternoon, the coffin was wheeled into a room at the funeral home. While Nancy sat nearby with a heavy heart, the Sharp family grieved over the open casket of their once beautiful daughter. Steadily, townspeople poured into the funeral home, most of them crying profusely.

Spotting her uniform (which WASPs had to pay for themselves), a man asked Nancy if he could drape the casket with an American flag. That remark struck a chord of anger with her. None of the WASPs flew with insurance or benefits—and received no official honors if they were killed. Now this fine young woman who died for her country was going to be buried anonymously, as far as the Army was concerned. “Of course,” Nancy finally told the man. She should be interred just like the military heroine she was.