First SEALs (31 page)

With the waters heavily mined, the OSS called on Italian fishermen for help. In late January and early February, the MU hired several of these anglers to make a reconnaissance of a projected base. They did so and located a man who owned a great deal of property in the area. “This man agreed to organize partisans if MU would supply the arms.” MU, of course, agreed. The fishermen carried the landowner and two San Marco men back to the area. The two successfully relayed information about German patrols and helped organize the partisans. When the Germans closed in on their positions, it was again the local fishermen who were able to exfiltrate the agents successfully.

The OSS continued relying on these locals for some time and outfitted four fishing boats with machine guns. The hazardous conditions meant that the British were unwilling to put vessels in the water, even though Italians were willing to make the runs. A report noted, “They rely on their shallow draft and good fortune” to avoid the mines.

In spite of the hazards, the OSS had moved Company D and two PT boats into the region, stationing them in the city of Livorno. “It was agreed that it would be best and wise to keep the boats here to stand in case there
were
any change.”

However, the MU suffered a devastating setback that deprived it of the use of one of its PT boats and one of its best operatives.
On the morning of Saturday, January 13, Morde and another OSS operative climbed on board P-584 to meet with Ward Ellen, who skippered the craft. They met and discussed trivial matters from 8:30 a.m. until just before 9:30, when Morde went back to shore. He later recalled what happened next: “I had gone about 100 yards when I heard an explosion, but thought it came from another direction, since the sound was muffled by the wind, and a pile of bombed out buildings separated me from the pier near where Ellen's boat was tied up.” Morde went aboard the other OSS boat, P-568 and was speaking with its captain when a crewman burst in.

“Come quick,” the sailor shouted. “There's been an explosion on the other boat!”

Morde took off running and reached the scene “in two minutes flat, in time to see the crew of a U.S. salvage ship nearby pouring fire extinguisher fluid into the still burning interior of the P-584.” Taking charge, Morde ordered everyone off the craft, knowing that it had thousands of gallons of high-octane gas on board that had not yet exploded. “Had that 3,800 gallons gone up, so would half of the harbor and at least six large ships nearby.”

Still, the damage done by the smaller explosion was extensive. Although conscious, Ward Ellen was in shock and “badly burned about the face, head, hands, and feet. The skin hung in shreds.” Despite his injuries, “before Lieutenant Ellen would allow himself to be taken to the hospital, he insisted on personally seeing that every member of his crew had reached safety.” That task accomplished, a Jeep whisked the officer and the other agent who had been meeting with Morde to the nearby hospital as quickly as possible. There the pair “were swathed in facial and hand [bandages] for nine days, while their burned portions swelled, as all burns do. They were kept drugged for much of the time. Hair such as eyebrows had been singed off, and their faces with closed eyes for a time looked like two brown and red cabbages.”

A
ROUND THE SAME TIME
, the OSS shipped Sterling Hayden back home for some R&R. The movie star-turned-operator met briefly with the vice president of the United States. After a short rest, Hayden headed back to Europe, this time assigned to work with the First Army outside Germany. There Hayden felt that he came face to face with the real war for the first time. “
For three and a half years I had managed to sidestep the war,” he wrote. “War in the sense it is known only to the man in the line who fights—with no real knowledge of why it has to be, no commitment beyond his conditioned response to military discipline and love of country. That and the lack of any practical alternative.”

Once an idealistic believer, Hayden was becoming disillusioned with war. He added, “The horror of war was finally clear as it swallowed men whole, rejected their identities, dulled their senses, lashed them with terror, then spewed them into this raid or that patrol, any time of day or night. . . . The average citizen hated military service, not so much because of the dislocation of his life and the sacrifice it involved, but simply because suddenly he was booted about, ordered around, and slammed up into the line because ‘they' said so.”

The First Army assignment also brought him into contact with members of other military branches who had little use for the OSS. Reporting for duty, he met with Colonel B. A. Dixon, the G-2 of the First Army, in Dixon's office trailer located outside Spa, Belgium. When Hayden entered, the colonel was meeting with several of his officers, and all were smoking and drinking cognac.

“
I don't mean to be impertinent,” began the colonel, “but what in hell is a Marine captain doing up here tonight?”

“Well, sir, I—,” stammered Hayden.

“Ah ah,” Dixon stopped him, raising a hand. “Don't tell me. You're OSS—ten thousand dollars says you're one of Donovan's beagles. Right?”

Hayden confirmed the colonel's suspicion.

“Well, if you're looking for Hitler, he's not here,” joked Dixon, pouring Hayden a drink. “Gentlemen, I am going to tell you about the OSS. The OSS is the most fantastic damned organization in all of our armed forces. Its people do incredible things. They seduce German spies; they parachute into Sicily one day and two days later they're dancing on the St. Regis roof. They dynamite aqueducts, urinate in Luftwaffe gas tanks, and play games with I.G. Farben and Krupp, but ninety percent of this has not a goddamned thing to do with the war.”

Hayden conducted several missions during his time with the First Army and later was assigned to do some mundane port inspections. He would survive the war and return to Hollywood to star in several infamous roles.

Meanwhile, deep in Austria, Jack Taylor doubted he would ever return to Hollywood.

25

SURVIVING

J
ACK
T
AYLOR WAS TRANSFERRED
back to Morzinplatz and assigned a cell with several other prisoners. As in Taylor's first stay at the prison, the Germans dealt brutality to the inmates. He later recalled,

Toward the end of March, a woman doctor (M.D.) [taken prisoner by the Germans] was brought into Cell 3 and as was the custom, every personal article including eye glasses was withheld. After several days, another woman prisoner was placed in her cell who had better eyes and discovered that the doctor had lice. The doctor was horrified and begged for her glasses so that she could pick them from her garments, but her pleadings were unheeded. There was no opportunity to bathe or wash clothes. About the same time, another woman, Martha Russ, was brought in and had to have her wrists chained behind her back to the bars so high that she could barely touch the floor. In the night, through exhaustion, her feet slipped out from under and she was left hanging. Her screams were horrible. Later, I got possession of the order for the mistreatment of Martha Russ signed by her
Kriminalrat.
[Investigator] . . . Toilet paper was non-existent and we were rationed to three small pieces of newspaper or scrap-paper. I always read the scrap paper first and to my surprise found the above order torn in two. It had been written on the back of a useless mimeographed sheet to save paper and when the Meister handed it to me, he saw only the one
original mimeographed side. The order directed the Meister to hang Martha Russ by her wrists backwards every night, no food for three days and not to bother the Referrent with any requests.

On March 31, 1945, Taylor and the other prisoners in the Morzinplatz were awakened at 3:00 a.m. and informed they would be leaving immediately. The Russians were just fifty kilometers away, and the Germans were evacuating the prisoners before the invading army could free them. Taylor and thirty-seven others were taken to the train station. The former dentist recalled, “I was terribly surprised to see the West railroad station absolutely untouched by bombs and everything functioning normally, also the yards were full of coal cars. Farther out, in the yards there were evidences of heavy bombing but all tracks were intact and functioning.”

Taylor and his comrades were loaded onto a train filled with refugees. He and one of his Austrian companions, Schmeisser, plotted a night escape attempt, but “at the last moment Schmeisser backed out saying his wife and child would be murdered if he escaped.” Taylor later regretted that he didn't flee without his friend, writing, “I had the windows partially open and blamed myself a thousand times later for not going ahead alone but, due to American bombings [of Austria], the entire civilian attitude towards Americans had changed so that it was questionable whether anyone would take one in alone. With an Austrian speaking that particular dialect it was a 50–50 chance.”

While Taylor's train was steaming deeper into the Austrian countryside, the rest of his Dupont team was also devising a plan to escape captivity. Considered traitors to the German army, Grant, Perkins, and Underwood faced beheading. Held in a temporary prisoner cage, a bowling alley in Austria, they tunneled out of the compound. Once outside, the men split up. After weeks of avoiding partisans and evading German patrols, all three miraculously made their way back to OSS headquarters in Italy.

On the train, Taylor saw a glimpse of the horrors that were to come at his final destination: Mauthausen. One of the other prisoners had previously been incarcerated at Mauthausen and warned that the conditions were even worse than at Dachau, where this same prisoner had also been held. Soon Taylor and the other captives would experience the horrors of the camp firsthand: “We arrived at Enns at 0400 and marched 8 km to Mauthausen, crossing the Danube by ferry just at dawn,” he remembered. “We could see, on the hill, the lights of the most terrible Lager in all Germany which was to become our home until execution.”

26

MAUTHAUSEN

MARCH–APRIL 1945, MAUTHAUSEN CONCENTRATION CAMP, AUSTRIA

The rusty barge pulled up to a small wooden dock on the Danube, and the SS guards pushed the thirty-eight prisoners off the craft. Freely using the sticks they carried, the Germans prodded the condemned men up a steep hill. Jack Taylor paused briefly, turning his head for a last glance of the dark waters of the Danube, now far behind him. To the side of the hill he noticed a massive rock quarry and a long stone stairway descending into its depths. He observed sickly looking, painfully thin men methodically hauling massive rocks step over step. The stream of skeletal inmates fed the line like a conveyor belt in a factory. “They were the most terrible looking half-dead creatures in filthy ragged stripes and heavy wooden shoes,” reported Taylor. “And as they clanked and shuffled along the cobblestones, they reminded me of a group of Frankensteins. We kidded ourselves saying we would look the same in a few days, but we were all struck with cold, dread terror.”

As the thirty-eight men trudged forward to what would be for most their final destination, they saw a high wall topped with an electric barbed-wire fence that guarded the camp. The group of prisoners didn't know it yet, but the guards often maniacally tossed inmates
onto the fence, electrocuting them to death as a twisted form of entertainment.

To their left, below the main camp, they saw a line of squat, windowless buildings. Originally built as stables for horses, the low sheds were first repurposed to house POWs and then later converted into a “hospital,” a place that no one would ever willingly enter for treatment.

The maniacal SS Officer Hans Prellberg was waiting outside the entrance to receive Taylor and the group as they approached the gates. Mauthausen was the epicenter of a constellation of approximately twenty-six satellite camps administered by the SS. In total they held over 91,000 prisoners. The work camps primarily furnished slave labor for various German war industries. Prellberg worked over the prisoners and was “particularly brutal as he slapped, punched, kicked and beat most of us over the head with a cane belonging to a crippled Slovak in our group,” recalled Taylor. “Two young Russians and a Hungarian were unmercifully beaten because they did not understand German. All commands were given in German and I had to keep extremely alert to save myself similar beatings.”

Taylor's group was forced to join a larger group of prisoners. The guards reiterated the camp rules and regulations. “If you attempt to escape and are recaptured, you will be shot immediately, like this,” announced one officer. He pulled out his pistol and shot a prisoner standing nearby who had recently attempted escape.