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“The top one’s from Dulles to Donovan. Dulles says Tiny is saying the Kriegsmarine is about to make major changes.”
Canidy, who knew Allen Dulles was OSS deputy director for Europe, raised his eyebrows, then looked at the sheet and started to read.
“Jesus!” he exclaimed after a moment.
He looked back at Fine.
“So, Herr Grossadmiral,” Canidy said, “is going to order all U-boats out of the North Atlantic? After a campaign of—what?—almost four years? Jesus!”
“Good news . . . ?”
“Damn good news,” Canidy said, looking down at the half-dozen Liberty ships at anchor in the harbor. “Especially now that we’re gearing up for invading Sicily. Can never have too heavy of a supply line.”
“Not when, as in last year alone, some seven-point-five million tons of critical war matériel gets sent to the bottom of the ocean. Already, we’re noticing the difference. More than twice the number of Liberty ships are actually making it here.”
The 441-foot-long vessels—known as EC2 (Emergency, Cargo, Large Capacity)—each transported the equivalent of three hundred railroad freight cars in cargo, everything from jeeps and tanks and trucks to munitions and medicine to C rations and soldiers. They were being built—the first in March 1941, with more than three thousand ordered—at eighteen shipyards on every U.S. coast.
Before his first EC2, master engineer Henry J. Kaiser had never built a ship. But using mass-production theories—some that had helped him construct the Bonneville and Hoover dams in record time—he learned, by his seventy-fifth EC2 completed at an Oregon shipyard, how to turn out a finished vessel only ten days after the laying of her keel.
Which became critical, because as the convoys, each with scores of ships heavy with matériel, steamed at eleven knots eastward across the Atlantic Ocean, the Nazi U-boats attacked.
Seeking to choke off the supply line and starve England and the Allied forces, the submarines hunted down the sluggish ships in “wolfpacks,” a deadly tactic devised by Karl Dönitz, whom Hitler just months earlier had promoted to grand admiral and named commander in chief of the German Navy.
Wolfpack torpedoes sunk hundreds upon hundreds of the Liberty ships—many within sight of the U.S. coast, made easy targets when silhouetted by the lights
onshore—to the point that the Allies considered a Liberty ship had earned back her cost if she completed just one trip across the Atlantic Ocean.
“Thanks to Ultra?” Canidy said.
“Yeah, the tide changed, also last year, thanks to Bletchley Park finally cracking the U-boat Enigma.”
Canidy knew that the Government Code and Cypher School, the British code-breaking operation, was at Bletchley Park, forty miles northwest of London. Also known as GCCS, insiders said it stood for Golf, Cheese, and Chess Society.
Different German services used different Enigma machines, the Kriegsmarine’s being among the hardest to decode.
“When Bletchley Park did that,” Fine went on, “it changed everything. In November ’42, the high for our losses was seven hundred and twenty-nine thousand tons. That fell to just over two hundred thousand tons this past January—about the same time Hitler made Dönitz head of the navy.”
“Down half a million tons. That is one helluva change.”
“And as of this month, we’ve lost only thirty-four ships in the Atlantic. Even better, the wolfpacks are now the hunted ones. Dönitz, with his subs being targeted and blasted—he’s lost forty-three this month, which we’re told is twice the replacement rate—is pulling them all back. He’s calling this ‘Black May.’”
Canidy looked at Fine and motioned with the message from Dulles. “And if Dulles is getting this kind of rich intel from Tiny on what the Krauts are doing next, then . . .”
Fine nodded.
Canidy was deep in thought for a moment, then said: “Okay, we’ve got to go in there and get Tubes the hell out. I’m not leaving him at the mercy of the SS with Husky’s D-day around the corner. We also can see if there’s anything from a pack of Hitler Youth to a half-million troops amassing. And if there’s any of that goddamn nerve gas.”
“We?” Fine said. “And how do you plan to deal with Eisenhower?”
“No one else has been able to find Tubes. I know my way around. And as for Ike, no one knows I’ve been there twice, so why the hell not a third time?”
“You said ‘we.’”
“John Craig and me and whoever we need. Right, John Craig?”
John Craig van der Ploeg’s face brightened, and he excitedly said, “Thank you, sir!”
Canidy’s eyes narrowed.
