Hitler's peace

Reilly was a smooth-faced, dark-haired man, with hooded eyes and the hard look of a former bootlegger. He came from Montana, but it might just as well have been Connemara, with a touch of the Spanish Armada. He wore a double-breasted, nicely cut flannel suit and was never very far from Roosevelt’s right ear, into which he would sometimes whisper something important. He had dropped out of George Washington, where he had studied law, to work for the Farm Credit Administration, investigating cases of fraudulent lending agencies. Reilly transferred to the Secret Service in 1935, and in that capacity had always worked at the White House. This I learned from Harry Hopkins while we waited in the plane for Reilly and one of the other agents to carry Roosevelt bodily up the aircraft steps. Once the president was aboard, the doors were closed and the C-54 began to taxi up the runway.

“Did you know that there’s a town called Oran in the state of Iowa?” Hopkins asked me as the four Pratt amp; Whitney engines revved louder. “That’s my home state. Ever been to Sioux City, Professor? Don’t go. That’s my advice. There’s nothing there. My father was from Bangor, Maine, and he went west to look for gold. Never found any. He became a harness maker instead. You know anything about horses?”

I shook my head again.

“Keep it that way. Unpredictable animals. Dad got his leg broke by a runaway team in Chicago. Best thing that ever happened to him. He sued the freight-line owners for ten thousand dollars and bought a harness shop with the proceeds, in a place called Grinnell, Iowa. Don’t ask me why he went there. He hated the place. But we buried him there just the same.”

I smiled, and for the first time I saw why FDR liked having Hopkins around; in addition to a dry sense of humor, which the president seemed to share, there was something very commonsensical about Harry Hopkins.

Three and a half hours after leaving La Senia we reached El Aounia Airfield, about twelve miles northeast of Tunis. It was less than eight months since Allied forces had inflicted a decisive defeat on Rommel in the area, and wrecked aircraft still littered the ground on both sides of the runway. It was an unnerving sight to behold from the vantage point of a plane that had yet to land safely, even if the wrecks were German planes.

The president’s C-54 was met by his two sons, Elliott and Franklin Junior. Franklin Roosevelt Jr.’s ship, the USS Myrant, had suffered bomb damage at Palermo and was undergoing repairs at Gibraltar. At least that was the story they had put out. Meanwhile, Elliott Roosevelt commanded a photo-reconnaissance squadron that was stationed in the area.

We drove through the ruins of the ancient city of Carthage, destroyed by the Romans in 146 B.C., to Tunis, where, next to the Zitouna, the city’s largest mosque, FDR and his immediate party were staying in the famous Casa Blanca. Formerly the seat of the Tunisian government, the Casa Blanca was currently being used by General Eisenhower as his operational headquarters. Vacating the Casa Blanca for the duration of the president’s stay, Eisenhower, together with Hopkins and the rest of us, was accommodated in La Marsa, about twenty minutes outside the city center, in a beach-front French colonial house, a great wedding cake of a place with enormous and ornate blue doors.

The city of Tunis was bigger than I had imagined, and I thought it neither very Arab nor very African. Nor, for that matter, very French, either. After a short nap, I took a quick look at the famous souk and the mosque, and then sought out the Cafe M’Rabet, where I was to meet the OSS man in Tunis.

Ridgeway Poole had a Ph. D. in classical archaeology from Princeton and, already the author of one book on Hannibal and the Punic Wars, he had jumped at the chance of working for the OSS just a few miles from Carthage. He had been stationed in Tunis for just three months, working under vice-consular cover, but he knew the area very well, having worked on an important prewar excavation of the Antonine thermal baths. Fluent in Arabic and French, he seemed entirely at home in the cool interior of the cafe, sitting on a little platform, shoes off, smoking a sweet-smelling water pipe and sipping Arab tea.

“Sit down,” he said. “Take off your shoes. Have some tea.” Poole waved a waiter toward us and ordered without waiting for me to agree. “Pity you’re not here very long,” he said.

“Yes, isn’t it?” I said, trying to conceal my lack of enthusiasm for the second large North African town I’d seen that day.

“Donovan’s reserved you a room at Shepheard’s Hotel, in Cairo, which, all being well, is where he will meet you for lunch tomorrow. Lucky you. I wouldn’t mind a weekend at Shepheard’s myself.”

“Have you any idea how long we’re going to be there?”

“Donovan said at least four or five days.”

“I’ve an old girlfriend in Cairo. I wonder if I might be able to send her a telegram.”

“No problem. I can fix that for you.”