Some six months later, just barely released from school probation, Eric and Dick were allowed—after repeated warnings of what would happen if there was anything but golden behavior—to join a field trip to the Iowa Cattlemen’s slaughterhouse.
Reverend Canidy had not been at all thrilled with the idea of this particular educational activity, especially its gore, of course, which he considered beyond grisly. But he was an educated man, and knew that even the Bible depicted the gruesome sacrifices of animals. He also understood that young teenage boys should not be coddled, and finally gave his reluctant approval to the biology teacher who with great enthusiasm had offered to run the field trip.
The boys had indeed been fascinated with the facility, including the actual processing of the cattle, which the biology teacher had pointed out was conducted as humanely as possible. And with the exception of someone having unlatched a holding pen gate and a score of cows having to be herded back in—fingers were pointed, but Dick and Eric dodged all accusations—there had been no real trouble on the field trip.
The only problem had come that night in the school dining hall. By unfortunate coincidence the main dinner course served to students in both the upper and lower schools was spaghetti with a pulpy red tomato and meat sauce.
When Dick, and then Eric, covered their mouths and moaned a long and deep Mooooo!—and that got picked up by the older boys, who made it echo in the dining hall—many of the younger boys, their plates untouched, went to bed hungry that night. A couple, having rushed to the restroom when their faces went white, fell asleep with completely empty stomachs.
For the next week, Reverend Canidy saw to it that the chefs left red meat off all menus.
* * *
“Who is Mordechaj?” John Craig van der Ploeg repeated.
“Kapitan Mordechaj Szerynski,” Canidy said, looking between van der Ploeg and Fine. “Code name Sausagemaker. He’s a resistance leader in the Polish Home Army. Lost most of his family—including his teenage brother, who the SS dismembered last Christmas—in the Warsaw ghetto. Before I came here from OSS London, I helped with the team that was working with him. Ever hear of Sikorski’s Tourists?”
John Craig shook his head.
“The prime minister of the Government of Poland in Exile is a general—a real warrior—by the name of Wladyslaw Sikorski. When Poland was invaded by Germany in ’39, Sikorski fled with his army and navy to regroup. Now the ones who go back and forth to Poland supplying the resistance—with supplies provided by the OSS—call themselves Sikorski’s Tourists. They, like the Poles trapped in Poland, revere him. He really is one tough sonofabitch.”
John Craig nodded.
“Dick, what do you think are the real chances for the Poles?” Fine said.
Canidy sighed, then shrugged.
“Hell if I know, Stan. In the big picture, I just don’t think anyone gives a rat’s ass about liberating Poland right now.” He waved with his coffee cup uphill, in the direction of Allied Forces Headquarters. “Not with all of AFHQ’s effort going into the biggest picture—taking Sicily and Italy and, ultimately, Normandy.”
Fine shook his head. “It’s been more than five months since the Polish foreign minister gave those details on the concentration camps—and has anything really been done?”
“Done about what?” John Craig van der Ploeg said.
“Count Edward Raczynski,” Canidy said, “gave a speech—‘The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland’—to the United Nations. The SS runs concentration camps that work the stronger prisoners to death—the rest they send directly to death camps. There’re at least a half-dozen camps in Poland alone. I think I brought one of the booklets that a London publisher reprinted with the speech. You should read it for your edification.”
Canidy paused, drained his coffee, then added: “The nasty truth is that the Poles are really being screwed. Especially considering it’s our Bolshevik buddies taking turns with the Krauts to exterminate every Pole they can when the two aren’t bitterly fighting each other and snatching up parts of Poland for their own.”
“The Katyn Massacre?” Fine said, making the question more of a statement.
“That’s one nice example,” Canidy said, his tone bitter. “Our so-called Ally.”
“The mass murder of all those Poles,” John Craig said. “I heard about that. The Russians really did it, huh?”
Just the previous month, in mid-April, Radio Berlin announced to the world that the Germans had discovered the mass graves of more than twenty thousand Polish intellectuals—army officers, businessmen, priests, and other leaders—executed in the Katyn Forest area of the Soviet Union, territory that Nazi forces had taken. The
dates on papers found in the pockets of the dead ended a year earlier, in April 1940—which had been after the Soviet invasion of Poland and after Joseph Stalin’s signing of an order for the execution of the entire Polish Officer Corps.
Reich Minister Joseph Goebbels, relishing the high propaganda value of the horror, declared to the world that what had come to be called the Katyn Massacre was proof that the USSR—and by association its Allies, especially the Americans and the British—were mass murderers.
“Red Joe,” Fine said, “took offense at the accusation that the blood is on Soviet hands. He’s ‘outraged,’ and has unequivocally denied any connection whatsoever. It’s so blatantly a lie you’d expect him to profess not even knowing a Katyn Forest exists.”
Canidy shook his head, disgusted.
“And getting back to all the slaughtering by the Germans,” he said. “The evidence is overwhelming. That’s bad enough, but now we know there is the threat of them using chemical or germ weapons on the battlefield. While Kappler, the SS-obersturmbannführer in Messina, said that he was ordered to stage the howitzer rounds with the Tabun only as insurance, that hothead SS major in Palermo—the same prick who was running the yellow fever experiment that came from Dachau—Müller, that’s the sonofabitch’s name—he found the gas and had to have plans to use it.”
“Fortunately you took it out first,” Fine said.
Canidy met Fine’s eyes, then went on: “Here’s the nice scenario I mentioned to Donovan in London: We know the Germans are testing the Fi-103—those Fieseler ‘aerial torpedoes’—and plan to lob them at London. What’s to stop another hothead SS sonofabitch like Müller from thinking that with the SS already using gas in the death camps—as Poland’s foreign minister unequivocally outlined before the United Nations—and already having it on howitzer rounds, what’s the difference with putting the nerve gas on an aerial torpedo and aiming it at, oh, say, Number Ten and Westminster . . . ?”