Douglass and his group had been accompanied on the mission by photo reconnaissance aircraft, and there was a motion picture record of the five-hundred-pound bombs dropping from Douglass’s wings, and of one of them striking the submarine, and of large chunks of the submarine hull floating lazily through the air. There was no question about it, mistakes counted, it was a confirmed kill.
Newly promoted Lieutenant Colonel Douglass had given in to the “suggestion” by his division commander that he paint a submarine on the nose of his P-38F not because he considered it a victory but because it signified that he had been on the Saint-Lazare raid. He had lost forty percent of his aircraft—and his pilots—on that raid.
A story made the rounds that after the raid Douglass had walked into Eighth Air Force Headquarters and decked the Plans & Training officer who had ordered the mission. And that the bloody nose he’d given the chair-warmer had given the brass a choice between court-martialing a West Pointer who was a triple ace or promoting him, and they’d opted in favor of the promotion.
Today, there was with him in the jeep as it made its way down the parking ramp at Atcham another pilot wearing an identical A-2 jacket with the Chinese flag and calligraphy painted on its back. He was taller and heavier than Douglass, and, at twenty-six, a year older. His name was Richard Canidy, and he had been Lt. Col. Douglass’s squadron leader in the Flying Tigers.
He was not a member of the 344th Fighter Group, nor, despite the gold leaves of a major pinned to his A-2 jacket epaulets, even an officer of the Army Air Corps. Canidy (BS, Aeronautical Engineering, MIT ’38) had first been recruited from his duty as a lieutenant junior grade, USNR, instructor pilot to be a Flying Tiger, and from the Flying Tigers to be a “technical consultant” to the Office of the Coordinator of Information.
The Office of the Coordinator of Information had been redesignated the Office of Strategic Services, and Canidy was now officer in charge, Whitbey House Station, OSS-England, which made him the third-ranking OSS officer in England. Civilians, in a military environment, attract attention. But little attention is paid, particularly at the upper levels of the military hierarchy, to majors. It had been arranged with the Army Air Corps to issue “Technical Consultant Canidy” an AGO card from the Adjutant General’s Office, identifying him as a major, and to ensure that if inquiries were made at Eighth Air Force or SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force) there would be a record of a Canidy, Major Richard M., USAAC.
Canidy was not supposed to be flying with the 344th Fighter Group on this mission. Indeed, if either he or Lt. Col. Douglass had asked their superiors for permission for him to come along, the request would have been denied.
Douglass wasn’t sure why Canidy wanted to go. He guessed that it had something to do with Jimmy Whittaker getting his ass shipped to Australia, and with Eric Fulmar and Stanley Fine having disappeared suddenly from Whitbey House, destination and purpose unspecified. Canidy’s old gang, with the exception of Lt. Commander Eddie Bitter, USN (another ex-Flying Tiger), and of course Douglass himself, had been broken up. A deal like that, being with your buddies, was of course too good to last.
Once, at Whitbey 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 he 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 of a B-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