Suite 701
The Alvear Palace Hotel
Buenos Aires
1115 14 December 1942
The medical treatment considered most efficacious by Hauptmann Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein of the Luftwaffe for overindulgence in spirits was, perhaps not surprisingly, exactly that considered most efficacious by First Lieutenant Cletus Howell Frade, USMCR. Almost immediately after he was taken to his new living quarters, Peter called Room Service and had them send up a bottle of beer.
When the treatment seemed to work, he called Room Service again and repeated the order.
When it was delivered, he carefully locked the door, then dragged a large steamer trunk from the corner where the bellman left it and opened it. And then, with the blade of a pocketknife issued to all Luftwaffe personnel on flying status, he began to pry loose the cardboard covering the trunk’s bottom.
The removal of the cardboard revealed a half-inch-thick layer of currency, neat stacks of Swiss francs, English pounds, United States dollars, and Swedish kronor. According to his father, he now had the equivalent of just over five hundred thousand dollars in American money. His father would additionally apply for permission to transfer to Peter the equivalent of five thousand dollars American to defray the costs of establishing himself in Buenos Aires in a manner befitting an official representative of the German Reich, with monthly payments of one thousand dollars to follow.
“Some Foreign Ministry bureaucrat will almost certainly lower those numbers, just to feel he’s doing his duty to the Austrian Corporal,” Generalmajor Graf Karl-Friedrich von Wachtstein had said, “but I’m sure they will not deny the request entirely. Just try not to spend it all on the same Señorita.”
When the memory brought tears to his eyes, Peter told himself that the cognac of the previous evening was working on him, as well as the beer now, not foolish and maudlin sentimentality.
He thumbed through a stack of United States twenty-dollar bills, then pulled one out in curiosity and examined it. On one side was a picture of a long-nosed man with flowing silver hair. His name was Jackson. He seemed to recall the Americans had a President named Jackson.
And a general named Jackson. Stonewall Jackson. Defeated the British at New Orleans in 1812. 1812? Same man? Did the Americans put pictures of general officers on their currency? Did American generals become Presidents?
On the other side of the bill was a picture of the White House.
A very attractive, if not very imposing, edifice. Didn’t the British burn this building to the ground in 1812? Or was it…the what? The Rebels—the Confederates—in the Civil War who burned it? There was a Confederate cavalry officer by the name of J.E.B. Stuart…a magnificent warrior. Graf Wilhelm Karl von Wachtstein, then an Oberstleutnant, rode with him as an observer. Because J.E.B. Stuart was not a professional officer, he did not know it was impossible to haul artillery around the battlefield with cavalry horses. The proper method of employing artillery required building emplacements, and then spending a good deal of time and effort “laying in” the cannon, so that the field of fire was known. Ignorant of all this, Stuart hauled his cannon about the battlefield at a gallop, and fired his cannon at the enemy with no preparation whatever, except loading the piece.
With great effectiveness.
Great-grandfather came home to Germany and wrote a book about his experiences, devoting a substantial portion of it to the proven merits of attaching artillery to cavalry, for great mobility and firepower on the battlefield. Peter’s father told him they used the book as a reference at the War College, and that he knew for a fact that it greatly affected the thinking of General Hasso von Manteuffel when he was a student. And consequently it had a great effect on the evolution of the Blitzkrieg philosophy that proved so effective against France and, at least initially, against Russia.
There was a knock at the door.
Who the hell is that?
“I am asleep, come back in two hours!”
“Please, Hauptmann von Wachtstein, open the door,” someone replied in German.
Peter quickly closed the steamer trunk and went to the door and opened it. A small, skinny, middle-aged man in a business suit stood there, holding a gray homburg in his hand.
“May I please come in, Herr Hauptmann? I am Ambassador von Lutzenberger.”
“I beg your pardon, Your Excellency, I had no idea,” Peter said. He opened the door wide, and then with a curt bow and a click of his heels, he stepped aside.
“I’ve been told you often open your mouth before you think,” von Lutzenberger said.
He walked around the suite, opening doors, even looking into the bathroom, and then returned to Peter.
“It is important that we have this conversation,” he said. “And more important that no one else is privy to it.”
“Jawohl, Excellenz.”
“I was given a rather interesting appraisal of your character by Generalmajor Dieter von Haas,” von Lutzenberger said. “It came to me out of the normal channels. By hand specifically, from the Ambassador of Portugal. Do I make my point, Herr Hauptmann?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Dieter von Haas wrote that you are a fine young officer…but with a lamentable tendency to drink and talk too much for your own good—and the good of people around you.”