Beyond the Call Page 2

  ‘Lee,’ he said, ‘I don’t know how to start. When my dad left, it devastated all of us. I hated him. My mom despised him. I was always happy up until that day, then not for a long time after. Life got hard; all I felt was emptiness and anger. Then I met your mom, and boy, she saved my life. She saved my life more than once.’

  I was mystified. Suddenly he’d opened up a seam of memory I knew nothing about. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Don’t interrupt me,’ he growled. Having finally allowed his feelings out into the open, he was going to do it his way. ‘I met Eleanor and I was happy again.’ He looked at me. ‘There’s so much I need to tell you that you and your brother and sister never knew.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Dad?’

  ‘In some ways going off to war helped me escape my past for a while; I was so excited. But while I was in Europe something happened to me that changed how I looked at life. It was terrible. I came home from Russia depressed, not caring about my relationship with Eleanor, the military, or anything. I was a mess.’

  I could see that the question about his father had awakened a world of pain. I decided not to push the discussion. Later, as I was leaving to drive back to Virginia, while embracing Dad (the warmest I remember), one of the words he’d used suddenly jumped to the front of my mind.

  ‘Russia?’ I said.

  ‘What, Lee?’

  ‘Russia. You said you returned from Russia after the war. You never said anything about Russia in your stories.’

  He shook his head. ‘We’ll talk about it next time, Lee. I purposely never mentioned it to any of you. In fact I was ordered not to. No one knew about it, except your mom. It was painful then and it’s taken a lifetime for me to recover. It was a dark, evil time.’ He stuffed a ten-dollar bill in my shirt pocket. ‘Here, drive safely.’

  I drove home to Virginia through a snowstorm, which matched my state of mind. Russia? What would an American bomber pilot be doing in Russia? I’d always thought Dad had returned home after serving his tour of duty in England. And why would he have been ordered not to talk about it? It was a dark, evil time …

  The snow flew thick and fast out of the darkness, danced in the headlights, and spattered against the windshield. I didn’t know it at the time, but my drive home was a strange echo of one of Dad’s untold tales – with instead of a heated, comfortable car, a thundering, half-repaired bomber that he had defended at gunpoint from a furious Soviet officer and flown off from a field, limping along at zero feet through a wild Polish snowstorm … and the small group of freed prisoners he took with him, and the trouble it caused when Moscow found out … It was just one of the experiences that had harrowed him in the hidden period between the completion of his combat tour and his return to America.

  I realized there and then that I was being compelled toward a new mission: discovering my father’s secret past.

  I was full of anticipation when I arrived at Dad’s place two weeks later. We shot pool for a while; he loved to play, in spite of his frailty. I was more aware than ever of his deteriorating body. Once a tall man, he was now hunched over, and used a cane. But he was a proud man and wouldn’t accept help. He drove himself everywhere, and always volunteered to drive other residents in the community to their appointments. Dad had a strong sense of giving. He loved to help people, and still gave blood when he could. But that was nothing compared to what he had given of himself during World War II.

  ‘Two weeks ago as I was leaving, you dropped an incendiary on me about spending time in Russia.’

  ‘I did?’ he said dryly.

  ‘Yes, Dad. We all thought you came right home after your tour. What happened in Russia?’

  He was silent for a while. ‘It was a horrific time in my life. I don’t know if I can talk about it even now. I saw atrocities. I saw the worst in people. I was deceived into going there – misled and lied to by my own people.’

  Slowly, piece by piece, the story began to come out. A story bottled up for decades must be hard to tell and keep straight. He skipped over whole episodes, left out details and had to backtrack; some things he struggled to recall, but most were as vivid in his mind as the day they happened. And so were the emotions.

  It was an incredible story – literally incredible. A story of a mission in Soviet territory; a mission so secret that even the OSS had to keep a distance from it because of the diplomatic furor that would blow up if the Soviets knew about it. As a cover, they had picked an innocent bomber pilot and sent him out to a US base in the Ukraine. From there he was sent into Poland. His task: to rescue Allied prisoners of war set loose by the Soviets. He had to help them survive and get them to freedom. He was sent beyond the protection of his own side, beyond the call of duty. He helped not just American POWs but slave laborers and concentration camp survivors; all the lost souls of Poland learned to seek out the American captain.

  Anyone else hearing Dad’s story might have thought the old man was delusional. But he was my father, and I’d known him to be a straight shooter all his life. Although even I had doubts. After all, he’d taken quite a blow to the head from his fall. I knew he wouldn’t invent a story like this, but could he have dreamed it, and convinced himself it was true?

  Dad brought out his cigar box of remaining war memorabilia. I was surprised at what we found in that box. Aside from his pilot insignia, it contained his Air Medal, Bronze Star, and Distinguished Flying Cross, his discharge papers and War Department ID card. Further down was an astonishing item – a passport issued by the United States Embassy in London in January 1945, for travel to the USSR, via Cairo and Tehran, on ‘Official Business’. Inside I saw Dad’s youthful face, looking stern and kind of wary (like he guessed something strange was going on but didn’t know what), stamped over with ‘American Consular Service’. There were also two medals I had never seen before – a French Croix de Guerre and, at the very bottom of the box, a letter from the Russian government, dated 1996, with a commemorative medal awarded for participation in the ‘Great Patriotic War’.

  I was stunned. Aside from the first few items, these were hardly the typical belongings of a bomber pilot stationed in England. I’ll be damned, I thought. The old man had a big secret. He had lived in fear (real or imagined) for 60 years, that if he talked he might get in trouble with the government, or even suffer some sort of retribution from the Russians. He told me he had declined an invitation to an award ceremony for the Russian medal because of that mistrust. According to Dad, the letter and medal would have been round-filed had it not been for Mom’s insistence that he keep them. His bitterness about the Soviets ran deep, and the more I heard of his story, the better I understood why.

  There existed a set of stories within his story, each more intriguing than the last. The rescue of freed POWs was just a part of it – there were seat-of-pants flying adventures, plus encounters with desperate Frenchwomen, seductive Russian spies, Soviet agents, and more. My father was suddenly more of a mystery to me than ever.

  DAD DIED IN 2009, in his ninetieth year. I continued researching his story. There was still a lingering doubt in my mind – could such an incredible story really be true? I wrote to military historians, consulted official histories, and acquired documents from government archives. The more I searched, the more evidence I found that corroborated my father’s story. I found a report he had written, describing an aircraft salvage operation which turned into an impromptu POW rescue and almost led to a diplomatic incident. I found a letter from the commander of the American Military Mission in Moscow, alluding to the ‘exceptional nature’ of Captain Robert M. Trimble’s duties and his outstanding performance. I learned about the indignant letters sent to Stalin by President Roosevelt and Ambassador Harriman, protesting the treatment of freed Allied POWs, and about how Stalin stonewalled his supposed ally.

  Inevitably there were gaps. My father’s mission in Soviet territory was hastily improvised, beyond top secret, and of such a diplomatic sensitivity that even the OSS could only be
involved off the record. But wherever you would expect to find documentation, I found it, and it matched Dad’s story. Even in situations where he didn’t understand what was happening, the historical record made sense of the facts that confused him – such as the misunderstanding which, unknown to him, nearly caused a breach of OSS security in the US Embassy in London.

  Robert M. Trimble was such a meticulously truthful man, and his story so fully corroborated wherever it could be, that I believe we can take his word that his undocumented activities – the long-distance, ad-hoc missions out in the lonely snows of Poland – occurred just as he described them, reliving them as he talked, feeling again the anger, the fear, and occasionally the humor.

  I am proud of my father. America – the land that gave birth to him and shaped him – can be proud of him too. An ordinary American who undertook a most extraordinary mission. This is his story.

  PROLOGUE

  MARCH 1945: POLAND

  FREEDOM HELD ITS breath …

  Ten miles east of the Polish city of Lwów, the main rail line, snaking its way through the snow-covered farmlands, passed through a mile-long stretch of forest. On this day, hidden among the pines on a slope overlooking the tracks, shivering in the bitter cold, was a young woman. Her name was Isabelle, and she had been hiding here, keeping an anxious vigil, all through the freezing night. She was waiting for a train. Not just any train: the train to freedom.

  Isabelle was a long way from home, a fugitive in an alien land. Two years ago she had been taken from her home town in France by the German authorities, herded together with other young women and men, and taken away to the Reich. There the captives – the so-called Zwangsarbeiter or forced workers – were incarcerated in camps and put to work: some in the factories, some in the mines, others on the farms of Germany and occupied Poland.1 Isabelle and her compatriots had endured years of captivity, forced labor, hunger, and in some cases, rape.

  The approach of the Russians caused the camps to be evacuated. The Nazis drove the foreign laborers in Poland westward toward Germany, murdering those who resisted. Many escaped the forced marches. But although they were at liberty, they were still far from freedom. Like countless other escapees – laborers, prisoners of war, and even some concentration-camp survivors – Isabelle and her friends took to a fugitive life. Grouping together for safety, some of the Frenchwomen made their way eastward, away from the battlefront. From various camps they came – Zwangsarbeiter camps, concentration camps; a few had escaped the death march from Auschwitz. Hundreds of them, all French, gathered in the countryside around Lwów, some hiding out in farms that had been destroyed when the battlefront passed over the region, others sheltered by sympathetic Polish farmers and villagers. Many, including Isabelle and her friends, hid among the very farms where they had labored; they knew the region, knew the safe places and the local people. The women lived in daily fear of being taken by the Russians, who would treat them as illegal aliens – potential spies and anti-Soviet insurgents – and incarcerate them in their own hellish camps. Sometimes these camps were the very ones the refugees had been liberated from in the first place.2

  Now at last there was hope. Word had reached the groups scattered around Lwów, passed along through the word-of-mouth network that had sprung up among the fugitives: freedom was at hand. Isabelle had dared to go into the city, and there she had found the man who could arrange to get them home to France. He was neither a Pole nor a Russian – he was an American officer. He could arrange for a train to take them to the coast city of Odessa, where they could board a ship bound for home. In small groups the women cautiously made their way to the forest rendezvous in the twilight gloom: there they concealed themselves and waited through the cold night hours.

  The forest wasn’t a regular rail stop. The rendezvous had been arranged by the American officer. He had come to this country to rescue his fellow Americans, he said: helping Isabelle was a side issue, a matter of humanity. He had become a magnet for the lost souls of foreign nations washed up by the tide of war in Poland; he was a conduit to home and liberty, and all who could found their way to him.

  Isabelle believed in the American. She knew the train would come.

  Morning had dawned and slowly worn away; midday had passed, and the train was hours late. If it didn’t come, or if it was filled with Russians, or if any one of a hundred mishaps occurred, all the women could look forward to was more incarceration, more suffering, quite possibly death. Isabelle, her heart sinking, dug into the dwindling reserves of hope that had kept her going through the past two years. The train had to come; it must.

  At this very moment, she knew, the American would be using every trick he could think of to avoid, stall, and sidetrack the Soviet secret police and prevent them discovering and foiling the escape plan. He was a good man, Isabelle believed; perhaps even a hero. But in this world, there were limits to what good men could do. Her faith was wavering, hope slipping from her fingers, when she heard the faint whistle in the distance. She tensed. There was no mistaking it: the sound of an approaching train.

  Would it be the right one? Would there be Russian soldiers on board – or, worse, agents of the secret police? Those creatures were everywhere. This moment would show whether the American was a hero after all. Isabelle’s heart beat faster. As soon as she saw the steam above the trees in the distance, she rose from her hiding place and ran down the slope. Stumbling over the stones, slipping on the ice, she clambered onto the rail bed and stood up in the center of the tracks. She raised the hopeful sign she had made: a sheet of board bearing a single word scratched in charcoal: ‘France.’

  The locomotive thundered toward her, shaking the ground under her feet. Holding her sign in the air, Isabelle waited for freedom … or death.

  Three months earlier …

  Telegram M-22121

  December 22, 1944

  SECRET

  To: General Carl A. Spaatz

  US Strategic and Tactical Air Forces in Europe

  Request for Personnel

  Due to existing conditions at Poltava, it is requested that you send two Counter-Intelligence personnel to that base for duty.

  New subject: At the present time there are only two rated pilots in Poltava. Due to the increasing number of flights from Poltava to areas behind the front lines for purpose of picking up crews and bringing parts to damaged bombers, an additional pilot is needed. This pilot should have both four-engine and twin-engine experience.

  Major General Edmund W. Hill

  U.S. Military Mission, Moscow

  Chapter 1

  ONE LUCKY BASTARD

  30 DECEMBER 1944: DEBACH, ENGLAND; BASE OF 493RD BOMB GROUP, US EIGHTH AIR FORCE

  THE WINTRY AFTERNOON light was beginning to fade to dusk as the formation of B-17 Flying Fortresses streamed in over the Suffolk coast. The individual bombers began peeling off from the formation, joining the airfield circuit and lining up to land. Some, shot with holes, were limping as they covered the last leg of their journey home. One Fortress was absent, its crew having bailed out over the sea.1 The 493rd Bomb Group, along with the other groups in its division, had been to bomb the marshaling yards at Kassel, Germany, and they hadn’t been welcome.

  Landing lights glittering on their wings, the heavy bombers touched concrete with a rubbery squawk and rolled on down the runway, swung onto the taxiways, and headed, engines rumbling, toward their dispersal areas around the airfield. Some jolted, wings tipping awkwardly, as they taxied over the pits and breaks in the concrete. Debach (pronounced Debbidge by locals, to the bewilderment of some American personnel) was the last of the heavy bomber airfields built for the Eighth Air Force. The construction was poor, and the runways had already deteriorated to the point where the 493rd might soon have to move elsewhere.2

  Avoiding the worst pitfalls, B-17 Big Buster eased to a halt on its hardstanding. In the cockpit, Captain Robert M. Trimble and his copilot, Lieutenant Warren Johnson, went through the elaborate ritual of shutting d
own the shuddering aircraft, flicking switches and sliding levers. One by one the four huge propellers chopped and swished to a halt, and a hush punctuated by the ticking of cooling metal settled on the cockpit.

  ‘Home she comes!’ said a voice on the interphone.

  Trimble and Johnson smiled at each other as the last switch was flicked and the dials dropped to zero. Home – now there was a thought to heal a weary heart. Captain Trimble and his crew had been in England for nearly six months, and flown their fill of missions: today had been the 35th, and their tour of duty was complete.3 Robert Trimble had beaten the odds, and it was time to go home. Home, where his wife, Eleanor, and the baby daughter he hadn’t yet seen were waiting for him. Little Carol Ann had been born exactly two months ago, while her father was flying into Germany on his 25th combat mission, heading for the fearsome target of Merseberg. As if fate was working in his favor that day, the bombers were recalled due to low cloud over the target, and they flew back to England unharmed.4 That had been a lucky day, and this was another.

  One by one the crewmen dropped through the escape hatch onto the concrete. Some stretched their stiff backs; a few went to the edge of the concrete, unfastened the layers of coveralls, heated suit, pants, and underwear, and watered the frosty grass, sighing with relief. Tired but jubilant, the nine men tossed their gear on the waiting jeeps and climbed aboard, joking and taunting one another, free of the silent gloom that often came over them as the adrenaline drained away at mission’s end. Captain Trimble dropped into the jeep’s passenger seat.