Hitler's peace

During the Atlantic voyage of the Iowa, the Washington Times-Herald had published the rumor that an international conference of major importance was about to be held in Cairo, and I wanted to find out if these rumors were being reported on German radio. I was hardly surprised to discover that they were, and in detail. Not only was Radio Berlin reporting that Churchill and Roosevelt planned to meet General Chiang Kai-shek in Cairo, but also that a conference of the Big Three, “to decide on military plans of great magnitude against Germany,” would take place at another location in the Middle East immediately afterward. On the face of it, I could hardly imagine that the Cairo conference could now proceed safely. And the Big Three conference now looked about as secret as a Hollywood divorce. Mike Reilly might as well have sent a press release to Hedda Hopper.

I kept on listening, hoping to learn more, turning up the volume as, for a moment, the signal from Radio Berlin seemed to fade away. Or at least, that was my intention. But somehow I managed to feed the German-speaking voice straight through the main loudspeaker. At almost full volume, it sounded like a speech at a Nuremberg party rally.

Panicking a little as I realized what I had done, I whipped off the headphones and tried to flick the switch that would cut the speaker. All I managed to do was find yet another pretuned German-language frequency. I jumped up and closed the open window quickly before trying, a second time, to switch off the radio. I was still examining the front of the Telefunken set when the door burst open and two U.S. Military Policemen stormed into the radio room and leveled their carbines at my head. I raised my hands instinctively.

“Turn it off,” yelled one of the policemen, a sergeant with a face of weathered brown brick.

“I don’t know how.”

The policeman worked the bolt on his carbine so that it was ready to fire. “Mister, you’ve got five seconds to turn it off or you’re a dead man.”

“I’m an American intelligence officer,” I yelled back at him. “It’s my fucking job to monitor German radio broadcasts.”

“And it’s my job to protect the president’s ass from German assassins,” said the sergeant. “So turn off the goddamn radio.”

I turned to face the radio, suddenly aware of the very real danger I was in. “Friendly fire” they called it, when your own side killed you. Which probably didn’t make it feel any better. I was about to experiment with another switch on the German radio when the MP said, “And don’t try to signal to anyone, either.”

I shook my head and, hardly certain of what I was doing, stood back from the radio, still keeping my hands up. I don’t have any excuse for this kind of cowardly behavior except to say that sometimes I get a little nervous when there’s a dumb, trigger-happy Okie pointing a loaded rifle at my head. I’d seen the metal hole at the end of the wooden part. It looked like the Washington Street traffic tunnel.

“ You try to turn it off,” I yelled. “This isn’t my radio and I don’t know how.”

The MP sergeant spat copiously onto the dirt floor, took a step forward, and fired, twice, at the radio, which ended the German broadcast, forever.

“Now why didn’t I think of that?” I said. “Shoot the radio. Let me find you a German newspaper and you can shoot that, too.”

“You’re under arrest, mister,” said the MP, and, grabbing hold of one of my wrists, he handcuffed me roughly.

“Do they train you boys to think when you’re standing up?” I asked.

The two MPs frog-marched me outside the radio hut toward a group of jeeps that were now parked in the middle of the airbase. In the distance, surrounded by more MPs and oblivious of what had just happened, the president was inspecting Colonel Roosevelt’s recon squadron. But as we neared the first group of jeeps, I saw Agents Rauff and Pawlikowski throw down their cigarettes and walk toward us.

“Tell these two clowns to uncuff me,” I told them.

“We caught this guy using a German radio,” said the MP who had fired the two shots.

“He makes it sound like I was telling Hitler the president’s telephone number.”

“Maybe you were at that,” sneered the sergeant.

“I was monitoring a German news broadcast. On a shortwave receiver. I was not transmitting a message. As an OSS officer that’s my job.”

“Show us,” Rauff told the MP, and, still handcuffed, I found myself marched roughly back into the radio hut.

“This is a German radio, all right,” said Rauff, examining the equipment. “Be easy to send a message to Berlin on this.”