Twelve Desperate Miles (8 page)

After landing in the city of Vichy, the prisoners were transported to the nearby city of Clermont-Ferrand, home of the Michelin Tire Company. They found themselves jailed in a crowded prison of 260 inmates, crammed into a facility meant for fewer than 200. The prisoners had come from all over the colonies, from French Equatorial Africa to French West Africa to Morocco and Algiers. All of them had been, in Malevergne’s words, “
compromised in the affairs of the Resistance,” but they came from all types of backgrounds: some were thieves, spies, or deserters. “
A lady of light morals” named Betty was also incarcerated. Some, like René Malevergne, were simply categorized as “incorrigibles.”

New prisoners arrived from Morocco on a regular basis, including the Port Lyautey orchestra conductor and two women who were acquaintances of Malevergne: a Madame Mikaeaf and a nurse named Miss Krener. There was a daily flow of inmates into and out of the prison. Those who went to trial and were convicted were immediately replaced by newcomers, so that the overall total of inmates remained
pretty steadily around 260. To keep up their spirits, prisoners would invent songs of honor for each prisoner as he or she was taken off to the court for trial.

The “dean” of the group was Pierre Mendès-France, a former under secretary of state for finance (and future prime minister of France), who offered counsel to prisoners awaiting trial, including Malevergne. Mendès-France, who would soon become Malevergne’s cellmate, was not optimistic about the river pilot’s fate, nor was he sanguine about his own. Regarding Mendès-France’s own situation, at least, Malevergne agreed. The charges against the former minister were trumped up and had no basis, but as Malevergne recorded in his diary, because Mendès-France was a politician and a Jew, “they want to condemn.”

February turned to March, March to April, and April to May. Prisoners came and went. The poor Portuguese ship captain had been taken to a hospital after another breakdown in the prison. There he languished. The Port Lyautey orchestra conductor received nine months in prison. A group of Belgian pilots—not those whom Malevergne and his cohorts had planned to help escape—were given harsh sentences for trying to escape to England. Malevergne learned that one of them, a Lieutenant Fernandez, upon hearing his sentence tore off the insignia of rank on his uniform and flung it to the ground. “I won it for shedding my blood for France,” he told the court. And when his own lawyer tried to pick it up, Fernandez told him, “Leave it alone. I don’t want it anymore.”

Mendès-France was tried and indeed convicted. He got six years in prison and had little hope for an appeal. Malevergne reported that almost immediately upon returning to their cell to await final dispensation of his sentence, Mendès-France began plotting his escape (which was ultimately successful).

Meanwhile, Brunin and Paolantonacci learned that they were to be tried in the nearby city of Gannat, while Brabancon and another Belgian consulate employee, a man named Capart, were to be tried with Malevergne at Clermont-Ferrand. Malevergne and the others were assigned a lawyer, who prepared an extensive brief on their behalf.

A visit from his brother cheered Malevergne. It had been ten years since they’d last embraced. His brother’s wounds, suffered while serving under Pétain at Verdun, had not improved with the passage of time. Pétain had changed much in the years since the war, his brother told René. It must have seemed like a serious understatement to Malevergne. “
I was unstrung” by the visit, he told his diary.

On June 21, Malevergne was brought to court with Brabancon and Capart and heard the charges against him: “
That, being a French citizen, he did, during the course of the year 1940, at various unspecified times, in time of war, give information of a military nature to a foreign power, to wit, Great Britain or its agents, with the intent of helping that power against France, and furnished to said agents information on the possibilities of embarking English forces on the Moroccan Coasts.”

Due to the nature of the charges, Malevergne’s trial was held in a military court and at the bench before him sat seven officers, along with a government commissioner and the clerk who had read the charges.

Brabancon’s and Capart’s cases were heard first, and each took about twenty minutes to defend himself. Then Malevergne was called forward. Once again, his defense was centered on the unreliability of Rocca, the chief witness against him. In his testimony, Malevergne challenged specific details in the deposition and was questioned closely on the same by the commissioner.

There was a recess after Malevergne presented his story, and when the court reconvened, it was time for the lawyers to take the floor. Malevergne worried that his counsel was a little long-winded and wearying the judges with his summation. But the lawyer finished with a flurry, demanding that Malevergne be freed.

Malevergne himself was given an opportunity to say a final word in his own defense. All of the confused allegiances of French patriots in the years of Vichy were delineated in his sincere plea: “
I ask you to stop insulting me by supposing that for a single instant I could pretend to serve any other flag but our own,” said the man who had agreed to aid the
escape to Great Britain of men pledged to fight against the Axis powers, including Vichy France.

When Malevergne finished speaking, he and his two companions, Brabancon and Capart, stood before the court to hear the judgment. It came quickly: Brabancon, six months in prison; Capart, three.

It was now Malevergne’s turn to be sentenced. He faced the seven officers arrayed before him and stood as the clerk snapped open a sheet of paper to announce the decision. As the clerk read the verdict, it took Malevergne a moment to fully comprehend what had just happened. In fact, he thought he’d heard wrong and asked the clerk to repeat what had just been read.

Who knew why he should be spared while the others stood convicted, but there it was. Before the court-martial in Clermont-Ferrand, René Malevergne stood acquitted.

T
he flight to London took twenty-one hours, and Patton, despite the rest he’d gotten on the Stratoliner, was cranky upon arrival. He and his companions—Doolittle, Colonels Kent Lambert, who was part of Patton’s staff, and Hoyt Vandenberg, who was with Doolittle, along with several other staff officers from the United States Army Air Force (both the army and navy had air commands before the air force formed its own separate branch of the United States military)—were driven to the famed Claridge’s Hotel, where accommodations awaited them. The city looked bleak to Patton. He noted in his diary later that it appeared “
half alive with very few people, even soldiers, about.” For good measure, he commented acidly that “all the women are very homely and wear their clothes badly.”

One of the first persons Patton met the next morning at Norfolk House in London, headquarters for the Joint Allied Command, was an old friend, Major General Lucian Truscott, who was there to brief him and Doolittle on the existing outline for the invasion. First, second, and third drafts of the plans had been gone through by members of the British chiefs of staff’s offices and Eisenhower’s command, and the British were becoming more and more insistent that the Mediterranean side of the invasion predominate, Truscott told him. Naval resources were simply insufficient to attack both the Atlantic coast in Morocco and the coast of Algiers, they said. The more important part of the battle, because it was nearer to German forces in Tunisia, was on the Mediterranean side.

Not surprisingly, Patton’s mood was unimproved by this outline for invasion. The emphasis on the Mediterranean assault meant that he’d have to fight for resources for his western attack. Perhaps not surprisingly, Patton felt that his western command would be crucial to the overall success of the campaign. He asked Truscott and his staff to help him
draw up initial estimates and plans for his needs to help bolster his argument for shifting resources to that area. Then he suggested that Truscott join him in the actual invasion. According to Truscott, Patton was insistent: “
Dammit, Lucian,” he said, “you don’t want to stay on any staff job in London when there’s a war going on. Why don’t you come with me? I’ll give you a command.”

A soldier acknowledged for his abilities at training men, Truscott had been sent to London earlier that year to observe the methods of Great Britain’s amphibious and commando forces under the command of Lord Admiral Louis Mountbatten. In the process, Truscott had become the U.S. Army’s chief expert on these relatively novel and ultimately crucial components of modern warfare. Early in the summer he had helped organize and staff the first American version of the British commando forces, which would become the U.S. Army Ranger group, headed by Colonel William O. Darby and trained, that summer, in Northern Ireland and Scotland.

Like Patton, Truscott had originally been a cavalry officer. The two had first met ten years earlier when both served under General Douglas MacArthur at Fort Myer, near Washington. Both had participated in the infamous rout of the Bonus Marchers from the Capitol Mall in July 1932. They’d subsequently become friends and met periodically over the years, including in 1941 in Louisiana, serving with opposing forces during that summer’s army war games. Though Lucian Truscott Jr.’s background was a far cry from Patton’s, the two shared a number of interests and had similar straightforward styles. They were combat soldiers, good at leading and inspiring their troops and getting the most out of them in war.

Born to hardscrabble circumstances in 1895 in Texas, Truscott was raised primarily in Oklahoma, the son of an itinerant country doctor who frequently moved his family around from one fresh-timber town to the next in the newly formed Sooner State. The most notable moment in Lucian’s youth was an accident that wound up scarring Truscott for the rest of his life.
As a child wandering around in his father’s office, Lucian
Jr. got his hands on a bottle of carbolic acid and decided to take a sip. His father probably pumped his stomach to emit the poison, but the acid wound up shredding the lining of his throat, leaving Truscott with a distinctive voice, described by one writer, as similar to “a rock-crusher.”

To help the family make ends meet, Truscott went to a normal school and got his teaching certificate at the ripe old age of sixteen. He took his first job at a country school near his family’s home in Stella, Oklahoma, but teaching turned out not to be the life for him. When the United States entered World War I, Truscott enlisted in an officers’ training program designed to quickly turn young recruits with potential into military leaders. A first generation “90-day wonder,” Truscott was sent off to Arizona for three months to learn how to command troops.

Truscott never made it to Europe for the war, remaining instead in the Southwest; but soon after the armistice, he had decided that he was suited for the military and would stay in the army. In the succeeding years, his career took him to many of the peacetime army stops that George Patton had made, including Hawaii and Texas, where Truscott, like Patton, indulged in a newfound passion for polo. Truscott was also stationed at Fort Riley and wound up teaching at the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth. The gravelly voice, skilled horsemanship, and leathery demeanor of an Oklahoma cowboy gave him instant presence, and Truscott developed a reputation as a fine and tough trainer of men.

It was at that Fort Myer posting in 1932 where he met Patton that Truscott first crossed paths with Eisenhower, too. Ike was serving as an aide to Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur.

Truscott spent the remainder of the 1930s slowly moving up in the ranks of the peacetime army. He was reunited with Eisenhower just before the war, serving on “Ike’s” staff in Fort Lewis in the state of Washington, prior to the war games in Louisiana and his departure for the combined staffs assignment in London.

In contrast to Patton’s bluff and drama, Truscott could appear to be a laconic and distant figure. Robert Henriques, an Englishman who was
part of Mountbatten’s combined staff in London and ultimately a close and important aide to Truscott in the Operation Torch planning in both England and the United States, was less than impressed when he first met Truscott. In fact, he thought that the American was
a little “dim.” In meetings, Henriques reported, Truscott was “withdrawn almost to extinction and almost inarticulate. Like a student, conscientious but not very bright, he attended every conference as an observer and exclusively fulfilled this function, sitting at the table for hours with a perfectly blank face. When invited to comment by Mountbatten … he usually shook his head.”

Henriques would soon realize that his initial assessment was far from accurate. He’d mistaken Truscott’s thoughtfulness and consideration for dullness. He was somehow more “comprehensible” in the United States than in England, Henriques felt. “That soft Texan drawl, inaudible in London, now seemed infinitely friendly, purposeful, easy on the ear.… That Texan handshake and slow, very wide smile was instantly reassuring.” Later, he would write of Truscott: “He inspired intense affection.…”

While there were moments in the months ahead when Patton questioned whether he’d made the right decision in his spontaneous request that Truscott join his North African adventure, they were fleeting. Unassuming Lucian Truscott would prove to be one of the great generals of the war.