It began as a joke, for the amusement of spectators, but it didn’t end that way. When they finally stopped, Charity looked very much as if she was going to cry. isltrs cold,” Douglass announced, “and two fans make a lot of wind. I think everybody ought to stay inside.” The ground crew was already at the glistening, somehow menacing twin-engine fighter airplane. There was a ladder against the nose of the fuselage, which sat between the twin-engine booms, and Doug Douglass quickly climbed up it. When he was in the cockpit, a ground crewman climbed the ladder and saw that he was strapped properly into the parachute.
Then he climbed back down and removed the ladder.
There were ten meatballs, each representing the kill of a Japanese aircraft, painted on the fuselage nose above the legend 44 Major Doug Douglass.” The first time Charity saw them, she had thought they were thrilling and very sexy. Now they made her cry, for they reminded her that he was fighter pilot. What fighter pilots did, presuming they could indeed make it across the Atlantic Ocean, was fight. She wondered if she was seeing him for the last time.
Clear!” Douglass called down from the cockpit. The starter ground, and the left engine started. The sudden loud noise startled Chadty.
Then the right propeller began to move, blowing away a cloud of light blue smoke.
She saw Douglass pull a helmet over his head and then snap a face mask in place.
He raised his left hand in a very casual wave. One of the engines roared, and the P-38 moved off the parking stand.
He was almost immediately hidden from their sight by other parked aircraft, but they stood there against the glass of the terminal and waited. Two or three minutes later, they heard the sound of an airplane taking off. Douglassxs P-38C, its wheels already up, flashed past them. The plane turned to the right and was out of sight in thirty seconds.
4ihe’ll be all right, Charity, Ed Bitter said. , it here are no better pilots than Doug.” Charity smiled at him. For him, that was a real apology.
IV [ONE] The Fordn llsinistry B-rlin, re’dy |0 December 1942 The return to Berlin of Helmut von Heurten-Mitnitz, recent German representative to the Franco-German Armistice Commission for Morocco, posed a problem at the highest levels of the Foreign Ministry, No one knew what to do with him.
In some circles, von Heurten-Mitnitz arrived under something of a cloud. There was a suggestion–ever so tactfully phrased, they were, after all, diplomats–that perhaps he had been just a bit too willing to accept the loss of Morocco to the Americans. He might after all have considered making his way to Tunisia. From there, when the Fuhrer decided the time was propitious, the Wehrmacht would launch its counterattack for the recapture of Morocco.
His defenders, who included his brother, the Graf von Heurten-Mitnitz, who was not only a Party luminary but reputed to be one of the few aristocrats with whom the Fuhrer was personally comfortable, pointed out, on the one hand, that transportation between Morocco and Tunisia was currently rather hazardous, and on the other, that Helmut had been ordered onto the Junkers transport which flew him to Italy.
He was defended as well by most of his peers in the Foreign Ministry.
He was a career diplomat, as indeed members of his family had been for centuries. He had done his duty as he saw it, and his duty was to make himself available for further service to Germany rather than to enter American captivity. He certainly could not be held responsible for the Americans blatantly violating French neutrality, or for the French, true to form, flying the white flag the moment they had come under fire.
Some of the less politically savvy of these Foreign Ministry friends proposed that he go to the Reichschancellery to personally brief the Fuhrer about what had happened in Morocco. His brother had gotten him out. E of that. The Graf von Heurten-Mitnitz knew that Adolf Hitler sometimes blamed the messenger for the bad news.
In the politically ill-conceived idea, however, was the seed of a good one, Since the Fuhrer blamed the successful invasion on high-level French perfidy, there was obviously no one better qualified than Helmut von Heurtenmitnitz to prepare for the Fuhrer a detailed report. He would work closely, of course, with Obersturmbannfuhrer Johann Muller, and between them they could come up with a detailed and balanced assessment that would lay the blame where it belonged. With Muller involved, the report could of course in no way be called a whitewash of Foreign Ministry failures or a condemnation of SS ineptitude.