The Soldier Spies (Men at War 3)

15 January 1943

Lt. Colonel Edmund T. Stevens was waiting for Canidy just inside the front door of the former girls’ school.

“You and I are being honored,” Stevens said dryly. “We are to share a VIP suite.”

“I hadn’t planned to stay over,” Canidy said. “I can’t stay over. I have things to do.”

“Neither had I,” Stevens said. “That wasn’t mentioned. I’ll have to buy underwear and a shirt and shaving things in the PX.”

“Fuck ’em,” Canidy said. “Let’s just claim the ‘press of other duties.’”

“We can’t do that, Dick,” Stevens said. “We can’t let them win this one by default. If we don’t ‘nonconcur,’ then, by default, we’ll ‘concur.’ You know how the system works.”

“Oh, goddamn the Air Corps!” Canidy fumed. It earned him a strange look from an Air Corps major across the foyer.

What Canidy had thought would be a meeting lasting no more than three or four hours had turned out to be a full day (a twelve-hour full day

), plus five hours of the following day, sitting on a hard-bottomed uncomfortable chair.

By then, there was a foul taste in his mouth from all the coffee, and his ass was sore not only from all the sitting but also from a rash on the soft skin of his inner thighs. There was apparently something in his new PX shorts that his skin didn’t like. His upper thighs felt like they were on fire. And when the fire let up, they itched.

He hadn’t wanted to participate in the meeting at all, correctly suspecting the worst, and had argued futilely when Stevens had “asked” him to meet him at High Wycombe at 0800:

“Bedell Smith told David Bruce,” Stevens said,“that it was important for us to send ‘someone senior’—by that he meant David—together with our ‘best technical people.’”

“Doesn’t that leave me out?” Canidy replied, even though he suspected that he was going to have to go, period.

“Richard,” Stevens said patiently, “there is always a point beyond which resistance is futile. Eight-thirty at High Wycombe. What they call the properly appointed place, at the prescribed time, in the proper uniform. And with that in mind, wear your ribbons.”

As Canidy had suspected, the purpose of the meeting was to “persuade” the OSS and Naval Intelligence to agree that “after evaluating new intelligence data,” it had been concluded that earlier worries over the effect of German jet aircraft on the strategic bombing of the European landmass had been “overstated” and now posed little threat.

If there was little threat from the jets or the flying bombs, there was no point in keeping that sharp an eye on them. What the Air Corps called “reconnaissance assets,” the P-38s and the B-26s fitted out as photographic reconnaissance aircraft, which were presently spending countless hours looking for jets and/or flying bombs, or facilities that might build or house them, could be diverted to “more productive” activity.

Eighth Air Force could not just assign their reconnaissance aircraft where they wanted to. They—and SHAEF—were operating under a mandate from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that gave OSS requests for intelligence gathering the highest priority.

Unless they could get the Joint Chiefs to revoke the mandate, which was very unlikely, the only option they had was to get the London station of OSS to agree that the reconnaissance was no longer necessary. They had pulled out all stops to do just that.

The Air Corps brass had a clear position: The Germans weren’t close to fielding operational jet fighters. Even if sometime in the bye-and-bye they did actually manage to put a “handful of operational aircraft up,” they would scarcely be effective against the wall of machine-gun fire a “block” of bombers could set up.

The Air Corps had made a concerted effort, at an enormous expenditure of matériel, to locate German jet-propelled aircraft and/or flying bombs and had been unsuccessful. It was therefore logical to presume that even if the Germans had such Buck Rogers experimental weaponry on their drawing boards, they were a long way from getting them into the air, much less operational.

It therefore followed that it was no longer necessary to continue the expenditure of reconnaissance assets at the present level. Reconnaissance would not be discontinued, of course. It would continue whenever assets could be spared from other, more pressing utilization.

The Air Corps paraded their experts, both professional airmen and commissioned civilians. All of them had decided—either professionally or because they knew which side their bread was buttered on—that the two-star generals were right.

The Navy didn’t give much of a damn. Neither the jet fighters, because of their limited range, nor the flying bombs, because they could not be precisely aimed, posed any threat to ships at sea that they could see; the Navy quickly caved in.

That left in effect a hung jury. Against one wise and highly experienced major general and his experts stood one inexplicably difficult retreaded light colonel, and one ex-fighter pilot, still wet behind the ears.

Canidy believed, and Stevens trusted his judgment, that the current intelligence—actually the lack of it—proved that the Air Corps had not been able to find where the Germans were building or testing their jets and their flying bombs. It did not prove there were no jets.

Nothing the Air Corps had come up with disproved Donovan’s—and now Canidy’s—belief that there were jets and flying bombs. Unless something was done about them, the jets were going to shoot down B-17s and B- 24s by the hundreds. And the flying bombs would certainly be sent against London, maybe even New York. In that case, more, not less, reconnaissance was necessary.

“General,” Stevens said finally. “I’m afraid that the OSS must nonconcur with the conclusions drawn in your draft report.”

“In other words, Colonel, you are putting your judgment, and that of your major, against everything we’ve shown you here?”

“General, with respect, the OSS has information that makes the existence of operational German jet aircraft seem far more likely than your people believe.”