quickly dropped the polite fiction that Canidy was his liaison officer. The admiral knew that he was being politely held prisoner. To pretend otherwise would have been insulting.
And the admiral placed yet another demand on Canidy’s time. In what Canidy came to think of as his Great Summer Place Mistake, on his second or third night in Deal—caught up in the excitement of the game—he had played some first-class bridge, wiping out the admiral and Mrs. Whittaker and awing the ex-FBI agent who had been drafted for a fourth.
The admiral thereafter saw in Canidy a bridge player worthy of his own considerable talent. From then on, whenever Canidy sat down near a flat surface, the admiral started drawing up chairs and shuffling cards. Canidy soon realized that he should have dropped the cards on the floor the first night.
And then the admiral announced, dead serious, that he intended to steal—he said “restore to service against the Boche”—the battleship Jean Bart, the largest vessel in the French Navy, currently at anchor “under German monitor-ship” in Casablanca harbor.
The first time Canidy learned this, he was torn between amusement and concern for the admiral’s mental health. Telling himself that humoring the feisty little old man was the price he was going to have to pay to keep the admiral happy, he had reluctantly presented himself at Admiral de Verbey’s war plans room—a glassed-in porch on the second floor—to be “briefed.”
Charts of Casablanca harbor, the mouth of the Mediterranean, and the eastern Atlantic had been thumbtacked to the walls. The halves of a Ping-Pong table, resting on folding chairs, now held large sketches—drawn from memory—of the battleship itself. Deadly serious, the admiral had used the charts and drawings to show Canidy how the vessel could be seized by a small force and by judicious use of watertight doors, and how the vessel could afterward be refueled under way at sea.
By the time the admiral finished outlining his plan to steal the sixth- or seventh-largest naval vessel in the world from under the noses of the German forces in Casablanca, Canidy was no longer convinced that the old man was living in cuckoo land. Improbable was not quite the same thing as insane.
First of all, the admiral had made it clear that his chief and only reason for stealing the Jean Bart was as a symbol. Removing the ship from the shaming control of the Germans would not just humiliate them; more important, it would profoundly challenge the belief now held by most Frenchmen that since nothing could be done against the Boches, the logical thing to do was accommodate them.
And Admiral de Verbey’s plan to seize the battleship met the first test of any good naval tactic: simplicity.
In compliance with the terms of the Franco-German armistice, the battleship still remained in French hands with her full crew and enough ammunition for both her main turrets and her extensive complement of antiaircraft cannon and machine guns. In the event of an attack by any enemy—read English or American—against the sovereign soil of neutral France, the Jean Bart was expected by the Germans to respond with all its firepower.
For several reasons, the Germans were not particularly worried that her crew would turn the Jean Bart’s weaponry on them or suddenly decide to let loose the lines and go to sea. For one, the honor of the French Navy was at stake. France had signed an armistice with Germany. Marshal Pétain, as Chief of the French State, had through official channels ordered her captain to remain in port, and to defend French soil.
More practically, the Jean Bart’s fuel tanks were virtually dry. She was regularly refueled, but with only enough oil to run one of her four engines at steaming speed for twelve hours. That was not nearly enough fuel for a dash for the open sea. A dash like that would require all four engines running at full power.
It was, however, sufficient fuel to provide electrical services and power for her turrets and separate cannon and their ammunition hoists. Each of her four engines was run in turn, which kept all four in good running order.
According to the admiral, there were thus only two major problems to be overcome in the “liberation” of the Jean Bart. The first was the question of the willingness of her captain to fly in the face of his honor and violate his orders.
The presence of Vice Admiral de Verbey on the scene would handle that problem. He was not only