Once, at Whithey House, Douglass with most of a quart of Scotch in him, had looked at the others with a sudden wave of warmth: They were good guys, the best, and they were his buddies; he would never, as long as be lived, have better friends. And then he had made what had seemed in his condition to be a profound philosophical observation: “War, like politics, makes strange bedfellows.”
The undisputed leader of the gang, the best natural commander Douglass had ever seen–and the test had been combat–was Canidy. And Canidy was not, like Douglass (West Point) and Bitter (Annapolis), a professional warrior, but almost the antithesis, an MIT-trained aeronautical engineer who made no secret that he found most of the traditions sacred to the professional military hilarious.
The wise man, the philosopher so to speak, of the gang was Captain Stanley S. Fine, a tall ascetic Jew who had been a Hollywood lawyer before he had been recruited for the OSS from command ofaB-17 Squadron. If closing with the enemy and killing him with bare hands was the ultimate description of a warrior, then the gang’s most ferocious members were unlikely warriors. Eric Fulmar was the son of a movie star and a German industrialist, and Jimmy Whittaker was a wealthy socialite who addressed the President of the United States as “Uncle Franklin.”
Douglass knew that if coincidence had thrown these men together in any normal military organization, and if, improbably, they had become buddies there, any commanding officer with enough sense to find his ass with both hands would have broken up the gang and transferred them as far from each other as possible–as awesome threats to “good military order and discipline.”
But they weren’t in any normal military organization. They were in the Office of Strategic Services.
It. Col. Douglass knew more about the OSS than he had any right to know.
He wasn’t even supposed to know about Whithey House, much less spend most of his free time in the requisitioned mansion, the ancestral home of the Dukes of Stanfield. But he was a special case. Not only had he been Dick Canidy’s wingman in the Flying Tigers, but his father was Captain Peter Douglass, Sr.” deputy director of the OSS, Colonel Wild Bill Donovan’s number two.
David Bruce, Chief of London Station, and his deputy, It. Col. Ed Stevens, simply ignored Douglass’s illegal presence at Whithey House when they saw
him there. Canidy and the others didn’t talk about what they were doing in Douglass’s presence, or tried hard not to, but it was difficult to remember all the time that Douglass didn’t have the Need-to-Know, and things slipped out.
When Canidy had hinted that he wouldn’t mind getting checked out in the P-38E Douglass had known that the next inevitable step would be for him to go along on a mission. But it would have been difficult to tell his old squadron commander, on whose wing he had first experienced aerial combat, that that was against regulations and therefore impossible. It would have been difficult if he had wanted to say “no,” and he didn’t want to say no.
He was the group commander, and no one asked questions when they saw him personally showing an Air Corps major around a P-38F, or when he scheduled a couple of P-38Fs for training nights and went along with the major.
If Dick dumped a P-38F while he was learning, Douglass decided, he would just say that he was flying it. That would work unless Canidy killed himself, in which case it wouldn’t matter. That fear turned out to have been academic.
Canidy hadn’t had any trouble with the P-38E He was a good pilot, and an experienced one. He had several thousand hours in the air. Many of Douglass’s pilots had less than two hundred fifty.
When the jeep stopped in front of the revetment in which waited the P38F that Canidy would fly today, and Canidy started to get out, Douglass touched his arm.
“I’ll fly your wing, if you like, Skipper,” he said.
Canidy smiled at him, touched by the gesture.
“I’m just going along for the ride, thank you, Colonel,” he said.