The Dangerous Book of Heroes Page 20

  Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

  All ten toenails were pulled out until her feet were so mutilated she couldn’t wear shoes. A red-hot poker was pressed against her spine, and she endured other tortures. She gave no information. She was sent to Ravensbrück and kept in solitary confinement for ten months, fourteen weeks of it in darkness, ten of those days without food.

  She hung on to her sanity by designing clothes for her daughters in her imagination, redecorating the houses of her friends room by room, and maintaining a strict regimen of smartness. Every day she rotated her skirt one inch so that it would wear uniformly, while every night, curls being the fashion in the 1940s, she curled her hair using strands from her ruined stockings. She also created the fantasy that her organizer, Peter Churchill, was the nephew of Winston Churchill and that they were married. This she told the commandant of Ravensbrück.

  He believed her, and with the Allied armies closing in from north, south, east, and west, he took her with him when he surrendered. She denounced him immediately, and he was tried and executed as a war criminal. Meanwhile, Odette Sansom’s real husband had died in Britain, and she and Peter Churchill did marry after the war.

  Odette Sansom (later Hallowes) was awarded the George Cross and the MBE and spent the remainder of her life helping ex-SOE agents and keeping the memory of those who died. She wrote that war taught her two great truths: “that suffering is an ineluctable part of the human lot, and that the battle against evil is never over.”

  American Virginia Hall, Radcliffe College graduate and traveler, was in Paris when war broke out in September 1939. She joined the French army ambulance service as a private and, with many other “neutrals,” fled to Britain when France surrendered in June 1940. During the battle of Britain and the Blitz she worked as a code clerk in the U.S. embassy.

  As the fighting and bombing raged above, she saw that on the British side of the English Channel were forty million fighting in the cause of freedom, while on the other side were some two hundred million hoping for freedom. She resigned from the embassy in February 1941, stating she was seeking other employment. In fact, she’d been recruited by SOE.

  Hall’s recruitment by SOE was remarkable because she had a wooden leg. In a 1933 hunting accident in Turkey, her shotgun had discharged into her left foot. By the time she reached the hospital, gangrene had set in, and her leg had to be amputated below the knee. She’d christened the wooden replacement “Cuthbert.”

  After completing her initial training in April 1941, Hall openly entered collaborating Vichy France that August. Her SOE cover was as a journalist for the New York Post, reporting the war to America. Her code name was Germaine, but the people of the Resistance networks she set up nicknamed her “la Dame qui Boit”—the lady who limps.

  She was transferred to the Lyons area in early 1942. Hall was forced to work underground when the United States entered the war, using thick French peasant stockings to hide her wooden leg. She helped create and operate escape networks for aircrew and escaped prisoners of war. Through French informers she became known to the French police and the Gestapo. They thought she was Canadian and knew her nickname but not her identity. When Klaus Barbie—“the Butcher of Lyons”—took command of the Gestapo in southern France he launched a wide hunt for her, circulated wanted posters, and offered money for her betrayal. He’s reputed to have said: “I would give a lot to lay my hands on that Canadian bitch.”

  In the winter of 1942, after she’d spent fifteen months in France, SOE withdrew Hall. Her route out of Nazi Europe was over the Pyrenees and via neutral Spain. Her last message to London was “I hope Cuthbert won’t be troublesome.” SOE responded dryly: “If Cuthbert troublesome eliminate him.”

  In May 1943, London posted her to Madrid to set up safe houses, her cover this time being a journalist for the Chicago Times. After four months she returned to Britain for training as a wireless operator. Hall was awarded the MBE. She didn’t want to accept it publicly at the time, so the presentation was postponed.

  The following year she transferred to the new U.S. Office of Strategic Services, now working alongside SOE. OSS needed some experienced agents, and Virginia Hall was an obvious choice. Another American agent trained by SOE was William Colby, future director of the CIA.

  At her own request Hall returned to France in April 1944; a Royal Navy fast patrol boat landed her in Brittany. From the central Haute-Loire region she reported German troop movements and liaised with Resistance groups in support of the D-day landings. Like Noor Khan earlier, Hall at one period sent and received messages from the attic of the local police chief. After D-day her Resistance networks were involved in blowing bridges, sabotaging communications, and harassing and reporting the German retreat.

  She returned to the United States in 1945 and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. Once again, she didn’t want to accept the award publicly so it was presented privately. After the war she joined the Central Intelligence Group, which President Truman formed after dissolving the OSS and which evolved into the Central Intelligence Agency. She worked for the CIA until her retirement in 1966. She died in 1982 at age seventy-six.

  Nancy Wake was also living in France when the war began in 1939. Born in Wellington, New Zealand, and brought up in Sydney, Australia, she was working as a journalist in Paris when she met and married Henri Fiocca and moved to Marseilles.

  With the creation of Vichy France in 1940, France extended the war against Britain from its colonies abroad, while at home it began the arrests and deportation to death camps of seventy-five thousand Jews. Nancy and Henri became an integral part of a successful Marseilles escape route out of Vichy France. The route through Spain and Portugal took out Royal Air Force aircrew, escaped prisoners of war, and refugees from the French. The couple was soon high on the police list of suspects. Wake’s exploits were attributed to an agent the French police named “the White Mouse” by 1943 there was a reward of one million francs for her capture. Inevitably, Wake was betrayed, but she fled to Gibraltar using her escape route. Henri continued operating in Marseilles; later he was betrayed, interrogated, tortured, and executed.

  Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

  In Britain, SOE recruited and trained Wake, commissioned her captain, and gave her the code name Hélène. She was parachuted back into France, to the Auvergne region, in April 1944. There she led the Resistance in months of increasing combat action before and after D-day, action that included sabotage, guerrilla war against German units, and even an attack on a Gestapo center. Wake developed into a ferocious soldier—“like five men,” a Frenchman described her.

  In 1945 in London, Nancy Wake was awarded the British George Medal and the U.S. Medal of Freedom; later she received many French medals. She is the most decorated servicewoman of World War II. “I hate wars and violence,” she said, “but if they come, I don’t see why we women should just wave our men a proud goodbye and then knit them balaklavas.” France had just granted women suffrage the previous year.

  All the women agents of SOE enlisted as volunteers in the FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry), the first-ever women’s military force, raised in London in 1907. In consequence, they were not prevented by the Geneva Convention from fighting and they served around the world. Fifty-two FANY were killed during World War II, thirteen in the French section of SOE. They are all our mothers and sisters.

  Recommended

  Young Brave and Beautiful by Tania Szabó

  The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America’s Greatest Female Spy by Judith Pearson

  The White Mouse by Nancy Wake

  SOE: The Special Operations Executive, 1940–46 by Michael Foot

  Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS

  by Elizabeth P. McIntosh

  FANY Memorial, Saint Paul’s Church, Knightsbridge, London

  The Siege of the Alamo

  Within fifty years of the siege of the Alamo, it had become an emotional—even spiritual—milestone
in the creation of the United States of America. The cry “Remember the Alamo!” was heard on many subsequent U.S. battlefields.

  Like all good legends, the siege of the Alamo has its dead heroes—Colonel Travis, Jim Bowie, and Davy Crockett; its live heroes—General Houston, Susanna Dickinson, and Joe the slave; and its villains—General Santa Anna and the Mexican army. No true event is ever that simple though. The full details of what happened are still not known, and today, remembering the Alamo is to step back almost two hundred years, to 1835.

  North America was then a vastly different continent than it is today. The United States was a fledgling nation of just twenty-six states. In the north, Canada was British. In the northwest, present-day Oregon and Washington were joint U.S.-British colonies, while in the west and south, Mexico was a large, newly independent nation. North of the Rio Grande, Mexico included most of present-day California, Nevada, Utah, Kansas, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma—and Texas.

  Mexicans had fought for and gained their independence from Spain in 1821 under General Iturbide. In 1823 he was ousted as emperor by General Victoria, who was himself ousted by General Antonio López de Santa Anna in 1824.

  The United States wanted to expand its territory, but there were only two alternatives. North lay Canada, which it had invaded twice in the War of 1812 and had there been defeated by Britain. Mexico, on the other hand, was weak from many internal problems. Their common western border had been agreed to in 1819; it lay along the Sabine River, the Red River, the Arkansas River, and north to Oregon. To the east of the border were the U.S. lands of the Louisiana Purchase; to the west were the lands of Mexico. At that time, Mexican land cost one-tenth the cost of land in the United States. Mexico allowed immigration, and so American settlers flocked across the border into Texas. Slavery in Mexico had been abolished in 1824, but as long as the immigrants obeyed the rest of the constitution, the authorities turned a blind eye to the African slaves imported by Americans.

  Some Americans, like Moses Austin and his son Stephen, cooperated with the Mexican government, so that by 1830 some five thousand Americans had emigrated peacefully to their Austin settlements. Others were not so cooperative, and there had been several invasions of Texas.

  As early as 1812 an American group marched in from Louisiana, captured the town of San Antonio de Béxar (San Antonio), murdered the Spanish governor and his officers after they’d surrendered, and declared what they called the state of Texas. Spanish forces, of which one was Lieutenant Santa Anna’s, wiped them out. Bonapartist exiles from France invaded near Corpus Christi in 1818 and declared a republic, and in 1819 more Americans invaded and declared a state. After 1821, independent Mexico reestablished its authority, but those who wished to were allowed to remain in Texas.

  Spain attempted to reconquer Mexico but was defeated in 1829 by General Santa Anna. In 1830 Mexico called a halt to immigration, levied customs duties on imports, and organized its province of Texas into three departments, each with its own garrison and forts. One of those forts was the former 1724 Franciscan mission of San Antonio de Valero, on open ground immediately outside San Antonio. Because of the cottonwoods that grew there, it came to be called the Alamo, after the Spanish name for the tree.

  At that point, American immigrants and their slaves made up 75 percent of the thirty thousand people of Texas and were becoming dissatisfied with their Mexican government. In 1832, Santa Anna took complete control of the Mexican government and suspended the constitution. From then on, Texas was a powder keg waiting to explode.

  Things came to a head in 1835 when American immigrants, calling themselves “Texians,” rebelled at Zacatecas. Unrest spread across the province until in October the Texian rebels joined together in an armed insurrection. A rebel Army of the People was raised. One of its generals was immigrant and former governor of Tennessee Sam Houston. The Texas Revolution had begun.

  Across Texas, one after the other, the Mexican garrisons were defeated by Texan forces. The Mexican soldiers retreated farther into Mexico, south and west over the Rio Grande. The last garrison to fall was the Alamo, on December 9. Twenty-one Mexican cannons, including one eighteen-pounder, were captured.

  The rebels declared their support for the previous constitution. Most of the Texans with property and businesses then returned to their homes. As far as they were concerned, the Mexicans were defeated. The small Texian army was left to the control of a provisional government.

  Meanwhile, south of the Rio Grande, President and General Santa Anna had not been asleep. He quickly raised an army of conscripts, raw recruits, and convicts preferring to serve an army than a prison sentence. In response to the armed Americans still flocking into Texas, the Mexican congress passed a resolution: “Foreigners landing on the coast of the Republic or invading its territory by land, armed, and with the intent of attacking our country, will be deemed pirates and dealt with as such, being citizens of no nation presently at war with the Republic and fighting under no recognized flag.”

  Importers of arms and ammunition were to be similarly treated, and Santa Anna sent a letter to President Andrew Jackson warning that any Americans found fighting in Mexico would be considered pirates. In 1835 pirates caught in the act were immediately executed.

  Despite the winter weather, General Santa Anna moved his army northward to Texas in late December, training his men as they marched. Some veterans and volunteers joined along the way until he crossed the Rio Grande on February 16, 1836, with between fifteen hundred and two thousand men. The winter was unusually bitter that year, with snowfalls in Texas of fifteen inches. As well as hypothermia, his army was thinned by dysentery, and by the attacks of Comanche Native Americans—who still considered Texas their land.

  Santa Anna’s determined march through the snow caught the Texans by surprise. The Mexican army reached San Antonio on the afternoon of the twenty-third, three weeks earlier than expected. The Texan garrison withdrew into the Alamo mission, while the residents of San Antonio fled into the surrounding countryside. A further six hundred Mexican troops arrived on February 24, and the mission was surrounded. The second siege of the Alamo had begun.

  General Sam Houston, meanwhile, had ordered the small Texian force to demolish the Alamo fortifications. He saw no strategic importance in the location, and he knew the small force there could not fight the Mexican army. He planned to have the Texians retreat, to allow time for reinforcements to join them.

  Colonel Neill, in charge at the Alamo, did not want to abandon or destroy the mission. Houston sent adventurer and knife fighter Jim Bowie—a colonel of the volunteer forces of the Texian army—to assist Neill’s retreat. They were to remove the cannons and blow up the mission. Yet Bowie and Neill were of like mind. Both detested the idea of giving up land to an enemy. Instead, Bowie wrote directly to the provisional governor Henry Smith. He requested more “men, money, rifles, and cannon powder” to defend the Alamo, finishing with the plea: “Colonel Neill and myself have come to the solemn resolution that we will rather die in these ditches than give it up to the enemy.”

  Overriding Houston, Governor Smith promised Neill and Bowie his support. He ordered twenty-six-year-old lieutenant colonel William Travis of the regular army to raise a legion of cavalry to reinforce the Alamo. With the majority of Texians returned home, Travis could gather only twenty-seven men. With these, he rode into San Antonio on February 3 and reported to Colonel Neill. Five days later, more American adventurers arrived. It was a small group of riflemen from Tennessee, led by Davy Crockett.

  Copyright © 2009 by Matt Haley

  Crockett, a famous frontiersman, sharpshooter, bear hunter, and congressman from Tennessee, had suffered in the recent elections of 1835. Despite eight years in Congress, he had not had a single bill passed by the House, and his political popularity had waned. When asked what would happen if Tennesseans didn’t reelect him, he’d replied famously: “You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas.” They didn’t reelect him, he did go to Texas,
and by chance he rode into San Antonio on February 8.

  With news of a severe illness in his family and due for leave, Neill departed. He placed Travis, the highest-ranking regular officer, in charge and on February 11 rode out. At this time, there was no knowledge of any imminent Mexican attack. Santa Anna’s army crossed the Rio Grande five days later.

  The experienced but increasingly ill Bowie did not get along with the younger Travis. Colonel Bowie’s volunteers would not obey Lieutenant Colonel Travis, and Travis’s regulars would not obey Bowie. It was a dangerously divided command. A vote of the men was called, and Bowie won. He got drunk that night, caroused through San Antonio, and released the convicts from the town jail. In remorse, he agreed with Travis that each would command his own men as well as cosign the other’s orders until Neill returned.

  From a provisional-government convention at Washington-on-the-Brazos, General Houston again sent orders for Travis and Bowie to destroy the Alamo and withdraw. He had no doubt that with cannons, a Mexican army would defeat the outnumbered Texians. The mission was fortified but only against attacks from Native Americans, not from a modern army. It was not a regular fort.

  Travis and Bowie disobeyed Houston and prepared to defend the Alamo. The mission had already been strengthened under the direction of engineer Green Jameson. Wooden firing gangways had been erected behind the nine-and twelve-foot-high walls, the captured Mexican cannons strategically positioned, wooden palisades reinforced, and a secondary defense of earthen breastworks dug inside the walls. There was little more they could do.