Hitler's peace

On one particular occasion, however, the defensive posture assumed by FDR’s bodyguards seemed to go beyond what was reasonable. The morning of the nineteenth, the Iowa sighted the fourth escort group; it comprised the light cruiser Brooklyn and five destroyers, two of them American and three British. While watching the new escort group through binoculars on the flag bridge, FDR’s cape blew off. A young seaman fetching the cape off the air-search antenna had climbed up to return it to the president, only to find himself wrestled to the deck by Agents Pawlikowski and Rowley, guns drawn and faces contorted with alarm.

“For Christ’s sake,” yelled Admiral King, “are you two guys too dumb to see that the boy was only fetching the president his cape?”

That was the moment when Captain McCrea turned on me. “This is all your fault,” he hissed at me. “I blame you and your loose talk about German spies for this.”

It was a nice sentiment. I went back to my cabin, filled a glass with scotch, stood in front of the mirror, and toasted myself silently. “Here’s to the satisfaction of being right,” I told myself.

After that I kept to my cabin, rereading the books I had brought and drinking up much of what remained of Ted Schmidt’s supply of Mount Vernon. I even wrote the letter of condolence to his widow, and then rewrote it when I was sober, editing out all the stuff about how his last words had been about her. But that didn’t make any difference. It still left me feeling depressed as hell. I couldn’t help but let my mind’s eye picture Debbie Schmidt reading it and then, in my romantic little scenario, flagellating herself over the way she had behaved toward him. A psychiatrist would probably have told me I had in fact written another letter to Diana.

The State Department would certainly have forwarded the letter to Mrs. Schmidt. But thinking to speed its journey home by writing Schmidt’s home address on the envelope, I searched his bag, looking for his address book, only to discover it was missing. For a brief stupid moment, I considered reporting the theft to the captain, and then rejected the idea. McCrea would hardly have thanked me for alleging that yet another crime had been committed aboard his precious battleship.

It was just my luck that whoever had stolen Ted Schmidt’s address book should have ignored Donovan’s Louis Vuitton suitcase containing all those Bride intercepts.

But who had taken the address book? After all, what good was a State Department employee’s address book in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean? It looked even less useful now that we were about to land in North Africa.

At 1800 hours the combined task group reached a point about twenty miles west of Cape Spartel, not far from Tangier. All the ships went to general quarters, for now we were in range of enemy attack from the air. The voyage was almost over.

The Iowa and its escort group were due to come through the Straits of Gibraltar at night, under a blackout. That had been the intention, but powerful Spanish searchlights had managed to mark the ship out, providing a very easy target for any German submarines that might have been in the area. I’ve never liked cruises very much. But we were lucky.

The ship finally anchored at Oran, where Mike Reilly, the head of the White House Secret Service detail, came aboard to supervise the president’s disembarkation. With the ship’s entire crew mustered on deck, FDR was lifted into a motorized whaleboat on the port side of the ship and then lowered into the water, whereupon his boat came around to the gangway and Harry Hopkins and the Secret Service climbed in alongside their beaming president.

I had expected to want to kiss dry land when once again I was standing upon it. Instead, I almost fell on it. It felt strange to be on land, and I lurched unsteadily as my legs, used to compensating for the movement of a ship’s deck underneath my feet, adjusted suddenly to being on solid ground. But it’s also possible I was just a little drunk.

There was hardly time to look around Algeria’s second-largest city and its busy port, where infamously the British had bombed the French navy, before a U.S. Army sergeant with a Wiener schnitzel ear and a nose like a bicycle saddle asked me for my name. When I gave it to him he handed me a slip of paper showing two numbers, and directed John Weitz and me to the car that, as a part of the presidential motorcade, would transport us fifty miles to the United States Army airstrip at La Senia.