Griffin W.E.B. - Honor Bound 04 - Death and Honor

“As you were,” Graham ordered, and he walked toward the verandah, smiling and with his hand extended.

There were four sergeants on the roster of what, in a document classified Top Secret in OSS headquarters, was officially known as OSS Western Hemisphere Team 17, code name Team Turtle. A sunken ship is sometimes said to have “turned turtle.” The original mission of the team had been to cause the sinking of the Reine de la Mer, an ostensibly neutral Spanish merchantman actually engaged in replenishing German submarines in Argentina.

There had been five sergeants until Technical Sergeant David G. Ettinger had been murdered and mutilated in Montevideo. He had been killed with an ice pick in the ear, and his penis had been cut off and inserted into his mouth. Agents of the German SS-SD had correctly decided that the discovery of his mutilated body would make it clear to the German-Jewish communities of Buenos Aires and Montevideo that any contact with a fellow Jewish refugee from Germany now working for the Americans would become known and both would be punished.

Ettinger’s assassination had deeply saddened and angered the members of Team Turtle. Especially the team’s other Jewish member, Sergeant Sigfried Stein, their explosives expert. Stein, also a refugee from Nazi Germany, said he was not surprised, however, at anything done by the Gottverdammt Nazis.

The other two sergeants were Technical Sergeant William Ferris, who was the weapons and parachute expert, and Staff Sergeant Jerry O’Sullivan, who operated the team’s highly secret radar.

Standing on the verandah with them were the officers: Captain Maxwell Ashton III and First Lieutenants Anthony J. Pelosi and Madison R. Sawyer III. Ashton and Pelosi, both assistant military attachés at the U.S. embassy, were in uniform, complete to the silver aiguillette of military attachés. Sawyer, whom Graham was about to tell he had just been promoted to captain, was wearing U.S. Army riding breeches, boots, and a blue polo shirt.

Sergeant Ferris, Captain Ashton, and Lieutenant Sawyer all met the criteria of social prominence that allowed critics of the OSS to complain that the acronym really stood for Oh, So Social. They all came from wealthy, socially prominent families.

Sergeants Stein and O’Sullivan and Lieutenant Pelosi did not. Stein was the only one of them who had a college degree (an E.E., earned at night school at the University of Chicago). Lieutenant Pelosi had barely made it through vocational high school in Chicago. And O’Sullivan had dropped out of high school in his sophomore year.

The latter two had been the beneficiaries of the Army’s system of testing all enlisted men for their general intelligence and ability to learn. Scores on the Army General Classification Test determined where one would serve in the Army. Generally speaking, an AGCT score of 100 would send the new soldier to a technical school (the Signal Corps, for example) and an AGCT score of 110 would see the soldier as a ripe candidate for Officer Candidate School.

After basic training, Private O’Sullivan (ACGT 142) was sent to the Signal School at Fort Monmouth for training in the new, still highly secret technology of radio ranging and direction, called “Radar,” and Private Pelosi (AGCT 138) went from Fort Dix to Fort Belvoir, from which he emerged just over three months later as a duly commissioned officer and gentleman of the Corps of Engineers.

Now-Sergeant O’Sullivan had volunteered for an unspecified hazardous assignment overseas to get him out of the classrooms at Fort Monmouth, where he had been assigned to teach classes of newly commissioned officers— whose stupidity had astonished him—the basic principles of radio ranging and direction.

Meanwhile, Second Lieutenant Pelosi had volunteered for an unspecified hazardous assignment overseas to get him out of the 82nd Airborne Division, where he had come to understand that engineer second lieutenants spent most of their time digging latrines and fixing roads and looking for land mines, and you had to be at least a captain before they would let you near any real demolition work.

Both applications had been quickly accepted by the OSS, who had put out the call for volunteers, O’Sullivan’s because he knew more about radio ranging and direction than the OSS expert who interviewed him, and Pelosi’s because several very senior officers of the OSS had done business with the Chicago firm of Pelosi & Sons Demolitions Inc., which enjoyed a fine reputation for being able to take down twenty-story buildings with explosives without shattering windows across the street. One telephone call had confirmed that “Little Tony” was indeed part of the Pelosi clan and had been “taking things down” since he had joined the Boy Scouts.

Pelosi and Ashton were the only two of the Americans who were legally in Argentina. They had diplomatic passports and diplomatic carnets attesting to their status as military attachés.

The others—and the radar set—had been infiltrated into Argentina from the U.S. Army Air Forces base at Pôrto Alegre, Brazil, in a Lodestar flown— after only four hours of instruction—by Cletus Frade, who had never set foot in one before, never mind sat in its left seat.

Frade, who had been born in Argentina, was considered by the Argentine government therefore to be an Argentine, and thus was in the country legally. Some, perhaps most, of his activities in Argentina could be considered treason against the country of his birth, and for some time that had been a genuine concern.

But then, during the coup d’état of 19 April 1943, most doubts vis-à-vis his allegiance to Argentina had been dispelled, at least in the mind of General of Division (Major General) Arturo Rawson, who came out of the coup as president of the Governing Council of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Argentina.

What had happened was that one section of Operation Blue—the plan for the coup d’état—had taken into consideration the possibility that the coup would in fact fail. Blue had been written in large part by El Coronel Jorge Guillermo Frade, Cavalry, Ejército Argentino, Retired, before his assassination, when it was anticipated that he would become president of the Governing Council of the Provisional Government.

In such an event, the leaders of the failed coup would have to have a means to get out of the country—their alternative being the firing squad. And Operation Blue had dealt with that problem: El Coronel Frade was to fly his Staggerwing Beechcraft to the airfield at the Campo de Mayo army base, and use it to transport himself and other senior officers to either Uruguay or Brazil.

By the time the coup began, El Coronel Frade was dead and the Beechcraft on the bottom of Samborombón Bay, having been shot down as Cletus Frade led an American submarine to the Reine de la Mer.

Cletus, who had read Operation Blue after he found it in his father’s (then his) safe at Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo, decided that since his father had put his fellow officers in danger, Cletus was honor bound to carry out his father’s wishes. He flew the Lockheed Lodestar to Campo de Mayo and placed it—and himself—at the disposal of General Rawson.

The coup didn’t fail, and the Lodestar wasn’t needed.

But toward the end of the coup, as two columns marched toward Argentina’s Casa Rosada, General Rawson confided in Cletus Frade that he had lost contact with both columns. He needed to get directions to them, otherwise unnecessary blood would be shed.

That didn’t seem to be much of a problem for Cletus Frade, who had been flying Piper Cubs over the prairies of Texas since he was fourteen, and where the standard method of getting messages—and often lunch—to someone on the ground was by dropping them in pillow cases out the window of a Cub. He told Rawson they could do the same thing using one of the Ejército Argentino’s Piper Cubs.