“Battle stations, battle stations,” the loudspeakers boomed.
“Boat crews, man your boats. Davit crews, stand by to launch rescue boats.” The B-17 came right over the Atmore, so low they could see the engine exhausts, and so close that some of the crew swore that there had been no machine-gun turrets on it, or gun positions in the fuselage.
The B-17 flew right into the cliffs on the west shore of Little Ross Bay and exploded.
When the rescue-boat crews finally made their way to the crash site, they found they had been preceded by an Army Engineer lieutenant and eight men, and by a first lieutenant wearing a SHAEF Patch.
Both the lieutenant (j. g. ) commanding the rescue boat landing party and the lieutenant from the Engineer platoon were immensely relieved when the officer from SHAEF, a Lieutenant Jamison, told them that the crew of the B-17 had parachuted to safety about an hour before, so it would not be necessary to search the crash site for bodies.
Both junior officers had questions, The Engineer lieutenant wondered, If there was no crew in that thing, how come it hit that wbatever-the-fuck-it-was we built rigbt in the middle?
The Lieutenant (j. g. ) wondered, If that was an accident during a routine training fligbt, how come they sent us up here maybe twelve hours before that plane took off?
And both of them were very curious about Lieutenant Jamison, How come a SHAEF office, not even Army Air Corps, just happened to be on the western shore of Little Ross Bay when the B-l 7 crashed?
And how did he know the crew had parachuted to safety?
But Jamison hadn’t wanted to talk to them, and there was no one else they could think of who would have the answers, and the brass seemed hysterical about secrecy, so they kept their mouths shut.
TWO] Batthyany Palace Holy Trimly Square Budapent, Hungary IIIS Hours 21 January 1943 Beatrice, Countess Batthyany and Baroness von Steighofen, was wearing a sable coat that reached nearly to her ankles when she walked across the parquet floor to take the telephone call.
Under the coat, she wore a tweed skirt and two sweaters. Her feet were in a pair of sheepskin-lined over-the-ankle boots that had once belonged to her late husband, and her legs were encased in knitted woolen stockings reaching over her knees. Her red hair was somewhat sloppily done up in a loose bun, into which she had just stuck the side pieces of a rather ugly pair of tortoise shell spectacles.
The Countess had been reading when informed of the telephone call, and Batthyany Palace was as cold as a witch’s teat. The palace, directly across Holy Trinity Square from St. Matthias’ Church, had been built at approximately the same time (1775-77) as the royal castle (1715-70) atop Castle Hill, and it had always been difficult to heat.
Without adequate supplies of coal, it was now damned near impossible.
The irony was, she had coal, lots of it. There were half a dozen coal mines running around the clock on Batthyany property. The problem was in getting the coal from the mines to Batthyany Palace. That required trucks.
She had been allocated one truckload per month, and she didn’t always get that. Even when she did, one truckload was nowhere near enough to heat the palace.
She didn’t bother trying to heat the lower floor, nor the upper two floors.
They had been shut off with ugly, and rely not very effective, wooden barriers over the stairwells. Only the first floor was occupied.
The Countess was living in a five-room apartment overlooking Holy Trinity Square, but she often thought she might as well be living in the basement for all she saw of the square. Most of the floor-tosceiling windows had been timbered over to hold in the heat from the tall, porcelain-covered stoves in the corners of the rooms.
The two windows leading to the balconies over the square, and, in the rear, the garden that were not timbered over were covered with seldom-opened drapes.
The telephone beside the Countess’s bed had stopped working two months before. When she had–personally, after her butler had gotten nowhere with them–c’led the Post office people to complain, she had been rudely informed that there was a war on, and that they couldn’t tell her when there would be someone available to come fix it.