Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler (15 page)

The unit’s Nos. 33 and 34 Troops were sent back into the line in February 1943 during the middle of the Tunisian campaign—courtesy of Cdr. Fleming, the Royal Marines troop now had jeeps to increase their mobility. During the following months, they met up with several other colorful special forces units that had been operating throughout the North African campaign, including Col. David Stirling’s Special Air Service (SAS), the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), and Popski’s Private Army. The jeeps of No. 33 Troop were soon bristling with multiple machine guns in the manner of the SAS, and
30 CU
also copied the LRDG in obtaining supply trucks to increase their radius of action and independence of movement.

While 30 CU was now able and ready to fight for the spoils of war, the British First Army in Tunisia had created its own ad hoc intelligence-gathering unit, known as S-Force. This had no permanent organization but was commonly configured around a company of infantry and a military police detachment, with any other miscellaneous attachments judged necessary for the task in hand. Accordingly, S-Force was slow to deploy and cumbersome in action. The quicker reactions of the self-sufficient 30 CU were graphically demonstrated on the night of April 21, 1943. During that day a German
Tiger heavy tank
—a formidable new threat to Allied armor that was the subject of much fearful speculation—was disabled at Medjez-el-Bab. Any captured example would be of immense value for technical analysis, as neither Britain nor the United States had any comparable tank even on the drawing board. As dusk fell, British troops attempted to drag away the fifty-six-ton behemoth but were driven off by German forces with the same intention. The recovery team called for infantry support but none was forthcoming; S-Force was alerted but was slow to react. Fortunately, 30 Commando Unit was on hand. They arrived quickly in their heavily armed jeeps, recaptured the Tiger, and protected the troops as they hauled their trophy away. This Tiger, undoubtedly the greatest technical prize of the Tunisian campaign, provided stark proof of the superiority of German weapons technology.

Following the Axis surrender in Tunisia, elements of 30 CU went on to serve during Operation Corkscrew on the island of Pantelleria in the Strait of Sicily, on Sicily itself during Operation Husky, on the Greek islands, in Corsica, and in occupied Norway. In November 1943, the unit returned to Britain to begin preparing for the next year’s landings in Normandy. The following month it was renamed
30 Assault Unit
, Royal Navy. This decision was in reaction to Hitler’s infamous October 1942
Kommandobefehl
(commando order), which demanded the immediate execution after interrogation of all British commandos captured by German forces under any circumstances, even if surrendering. The mere change of title was not, of course, recognized by the SS as legitimate protection. Nevertheless, 30 Assault Unit was now ready for its most extraordinary campaign of the war.

ON JANUARY 11
,
1943
,
DURING THE ASSAULT
on Tripoli in North Africa, a pair of British Eighth Army armored cars of the 11th Hussars slowed to a halt at the center of the Roman amphitheater at Leptis Magna. There was just time for a photograph of the crews against the extraordinary backdrop of one of the world’s most magnificent classical ruins. However, Lt. Col. R. Mortimer Wheeler of the Royal Artillery looked on in dismay as the heavy armored vehicles cracked the ancient Roman flagstones under their weight. As a peacetime archaeologist and keeper of the London Museum, Mortimer Wheeler winced at the damage that was being inflicted on one of the wonders of antiquity. He immediately consulted Brig. Maurice Lush, a civil affairs officer (CAO) at the British Military Administration in Tripolitania. Although Lush was baffled that anyone should be concerned about the “broken buildings,” he prudently delegated the protection of the site to Mortimer Wheeler and another gunner officer and colleague from the London Museum, Maj. John Bryan Ward-Perkins. This decision proved to be the genesis of an extraordinary organization consisting of specially qualified British and American officers with the remit to identify and, if possible, prevent the destruction of cultural buildings and monuments in the path of the Allied armies. They would be known as the “
Monuments Men
.”

In the same month, George Stout, an art conservator at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, wrote a letter to Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery in London, suggesting the creation of a “conservation corps” to accompany the frontline troops and forestall the destruction of important historical buildings and monuments. This letter coincided with the arrival on the desk of Lt. Col. Sir Charles Woolley—a world-famous archaeologist and a former colleague of T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia)—of a report by Wheeler and Ward-Perkins about their efforts to protect Leptis Magna. Woolley approached senior figures at the Casablanca Conference, urging the formation of a conservation unit before the next campaign was undertaken. In Woolley’s words:

Prior to this war
, no army had thought of protecting the monuments of the country in which and with which it was at war and there were no precedents to follow.… All this was changed by a general order issued by [Gen. Eisenhower] just before he left Algiers, an order accompanied by a personal letter to all Commanders.… The good name of the Army depended in great measure on the respect which it showed to the art heritage of the modern world.

On June 23, 1943, President Roosevelt established the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historical Monuments in War Areas—later known more succinctly as the Roberts Commission after its chairman, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts. At the outset, equipment and transport were sorely lacking, and the aim of accompanying the frontline troops was not achieved during the invasion of Sicily on the night of July 9–10, 1943. The first of the Monuments Men, Capt. Mason Hammond, USAAF—a classics professor from Harvard—landed on July 29. Fortunately, the damage to most of the classical sites had been slight; Gen. George S. Patton, commanding the U.S. Tenth Army and himself a keen military historian, had taken Hammond’s directives seriously. Dismayed by the sight of the roofless Greek temples at Agrigento, Patton demanded to know if this damage had been caused by American firepower. A local farmer replied through an interpreter that this was not the case—it had happened during “the last war.” When Patton asked which war he meant, the interpreter said that the farmer was referring to the
Second Punic War
of 218–201 bce.

On September 3, 1943, the Allies landed on mainland Italy. The Fascist regime was simultaneously overthrown and Italy capitulated, but the country was immediately occupied by German troops under Field Marshal Albert Kesselring. After fierce resistance, the Allies entered Naples on October 1, 1943, at a cost of much damage to the city. Both the Allies and the Germans now accused each other of atrocities and cultural vandalism, but it was the Hermann Göring Panzer Division that had looted many of the greatest Neapolitan works of art.

The Allies’ eighteen-month advance northward would be delayed repeatedly by a succession of skillfully sited and stubbornly held defensive lines in difficult mountainous terrain. By January 1944, the Allied armies were stalled in front of the Gustav Line that guarded the approaches to Rome. The defensive emplacements were dotted along the ridgelines and mountaintops where the ancient
Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino
towered over the strategic Rapido valley and Highway 6 to Rome. Built in 529 ce, the abbey was a symbol of everything that the Monuments Men were trying to protect from destruction, but their hopes were to be dashed. Although not actually incorporated into the Gustav Line, the dominating heights of Monte Cassino allowed observation over many miles. Despite pleas from the Vatican and after two major ground assaults had failed to capture it, the abbey was pulverized by 1,400 tons of bombs by the U.S. Fifteenth Army Air Force. This was greatest failure of the Monuments Men during the war. Despite the sacrifice of the abbey, it still took several more months of heavy fighting before the position finally fell to Polish and French North African troops on May 18, 1944.

With the breaking of the Gustav Line, Rome was now within reach of the Allies, but there seemed to be every likelihood that the city and its millennia of treasures would be destroyed in costly street fighting. Uncharacteristically, Hitler declared both Rome and Florence “open cities”—meaning that Germany would abandon its defensive if necessary to prevent the destruction of those cities, which he held in cultural awe. Florence, the birthplace of the Renaissance, was the inspiration for his vision of Linz, and in May 1938, he had spent over three hours in the Uffizi Gallery in the company of his Axis partner Benito Mussolini. The Führer was utterly enraptured but Il Duce less so. As he trailed behind Hitler, he was heard to mutter
“Tutti questi vaffunculi quadri!”
(“All these fucking paintings!”)

With the Allied landings in France now imminent, it would be the task of the Monuments Men not just to protect Europe’s historic heritage but also to find Hitler’s
immense hoard of artistic plunder
and return it to its rightful owners. In the spring of 1944, the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFA&A) teams congregated at Shrivenham in southwest England in readiness for D-Day. Other specialized units of military hunters were also being prepared to cross the Channel; in the fog of war, the trails they followed would eventually cut across those of Bormann’s conspiracies at several points. One of these organizations would be searching for signs of Hitler’s atomic weapons program and another for his looted gold.

IN AUGUST 1939
,
A MONTH BEFORE THE OUTBREAK
of World War II, a group of concerned scientists, including Albert Einstein, had written to President Roosevelt to warn him of the dangers inherent in Germany’s lead in the field of theoretical physics. Their expressed concern that “extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed” led to the formation of the
Uranium Committee
to undertake nuclear research, but progress was dilatory. On October 9, 1941, Roosevelt was apprised of the findings of the British nuclear research program, code-named the MAUD Committee, later Tube Alloys, on the feasibility of the use of uranium for a bomb. The U.S. government displayed little interest until Pearl Harbor wrenched it into the war in December 1941. The Office of Scientific Research and Development was established the following month, resulting in the creation of the
Manhattan Project
into which the researches of the MAUD Committee were subsumed.

The first experimental nuclear reactor, built at the University of Chicago and named Chicago Pile-1, achieved a successful self-sustaining chain reaction on December 2, 1942, under the direction of Enrico Fermi, an émigré from Fascist Italy. By now, the scale of the scientific and industrial effort required to devise and construct an atomic weapon was recognized by the military director of the program, Gen. Leslie R. Groves, and his scientific director, J. Robert Oppenheimer. Numerous universities across the United States, Canada, and Great Britain embarked upon pure and applied research into the separation of uranium isotopes to produce weapons-grade material capable of nuclear fission and to investigate the properties of plutonium for an alternative type of atomic bomb. Over three years, some $2 billion and 130,000 personnel were devoted to the Manhattan Project, the largest military and industrial undertaking of World War II. It was comparable in size to the entire American automobile industry at that time.

Meanwhile, Gen. Groves and other military leaders were increasingly concerned as to the pace of atomic weapons development in Germany. At the instigation of Gen. George C. Marshall, an intelligence-gathering unit was established to determine the level of German progress and to disrupt any atomic weapons program. By early 1943, OSS sources in Europe were reporting rumors that German
Wunderwaffen
or “wonder weapons” would soon enter service, so it was logical to assume that the Germans were at the forefront of atomic weapons technology. For much of World War II, those entrusted with the direction of the Manhattan Project firmly believed that the Allies and Germany were engaged in a life-or-death race to develop the atomic bomb. There was no doubt that if Germany won, then London would be the first target for nuclear annihilation.

In reality, the Germans lagged far behind, due largely to the divisive nature of Nazi governance (see
Chapter 3
). Unlike the Manhattan Project, with its strictly centralized control under Gen. Groves, German nuclear researchers were overseen by several bodies, including the Army Ordnance Office, the National Research Council, and even the Postal Ministry. Furthermore, the scant resources were divided between nine competing development teams all pursuing different agendas. Before the war, Germany had been the world leader in theoretical physics, culminating in the discovery of the theory of nuclear fission in December 1938, but since many of the leading figures in this field were Jewish, their work was increasingly dismissed as “
Jewish physics
.” Of about twenty-six nuclear physicists at work in 1933, more than half would soon emigrate, including fourteen past or future Nobel laureates. Several of these Jewish refugees joined the Manhattan Project.

By January 1944, Bletchley Park had deciphered several messages concerning ballistic rocket development, but none referring to a uranium bomb. Taking these together with information from their other assets on the continent, MI6 and the Directorate of Tube Alloys (which had superseded the MAUD committee in late October 1941) concluded that there were no concerted plans for a German atomic bomb, but the Americans were not convinced. Understandably, as Groves later wrote,