Burn After Reading (32 page)

The O.S.S., of course, was cloaked in elaborate secrecy and yet … There was the case of a professor who arrived in Washington in answer to an urgent summons. When he showed up, nobody seemed to know anything about the summons, the professor or the job that was supposedly awaiting him.

Quite disturbed, the poor fellow went from pillar to post, shuttling about headquarters on innumerable passes and with grim-faced escorts to assure ironclad security, but he could not clarify the situation. At last it became 5 p.m. and most of the O.S.S. closed down for the day. As a desperate last resort, he decided to call Donovan himself, and tried to obtain his private telephone number. The watch officer in charge of security indignantly refused to divulge such a grave secret. The man tried to obtain the phone number with ruses and subterfuges, but all in vain.

He returned to his hotel, exhausted and desperate, and decided to call a friend to whom he could unload his plight. As he leafed through the phone book, he stumbled upon the secret: the listing of Donovan's number and address.

Hitler's metallic and orderly war was getting into trouble. The stunning precision with which the Germans had begun was seeping out like air from a punctured bag. The Axis appeared to be winning everywhere, but there was something happening that was conspicuous by its absence from the communiqués, something so vague and obscure that it was not yet apparent to the naked eye. A second front was opening in the darkest recesses of the global conflict, in the nocturnal streets and the deadly forests of the occupied lands.

Looking back on those uncertain days, General Sir Colin Gubbins, director of the British S.O.E., thought that the Germans hoped to enslave the conquered peoples and the industries to the full support of their war efforts. “In the end,” he said, “though this strategy may have helped them initially, they were to pay a terrible price for their violation of all the laws of man, their unprovoked aggression of defenseless peoples, for their unimaginable cruelties, practiced on men, women, and children alike. They could not prevent sabotage for all their efforts. They could not prevent the organization of secret armies, though they well knew it was going on.” The overwhelming fact was that the Germans lost control of an important phase of the war—the
secret
phase.

It began in the country which had been first to fall, Czechoslovakia, whose people have a heroic legend. They say there is a ghostly army encamped on the slopes of the Blanik Mountain, watching with eternal vigilance over their land. These are the
Knights of Blanik. When all is going well, they rest in peace; in times of misfortune they come to life and ride out in force to aid their beleaguered country. And in 1940, ghostly knights began to appear.

One was Joseph Skalda, editor of a clandestine newspaper, printed on secret presses in Prague and distributed by volunteers, some of them mere boys, throughout Bohemia and Moravia. Under Skalda's prodding, and the leadership of a few faceless men, who appeared stealthily in the wings, anti-German acts began to occur. By March, 1941, they were sufficiently numerous to induce the Turkish Minister in Prague to send a report about them to his government.

On July 19, Britain recognized the Czechoslovak Government in Exile. That belated favor, grudgingly granted, excited the imagination of the patriots at home. The BBC broadcasts to Czechoslovakia became somewhat bolder and even incendiary. In August, an advance guard of Soviet agents arrived in Czechoslovakia to start an underground based on the Communists and also to organize a network of spies for the Fourth Bureau. Passive resistance became intensified. Listening to the BBC became more widespread. Sabotage multiplied. There were demonstrations against German troops in Prague and Bratislava.

The Nazis instituted a manhunt for Skalda. They arrested him on September 23, and also apprehended fifteen of his aides. Someone broke under the stress of interrogation and talked, probably in exaggerated terms, of a widespread underground movement. The weak-kneed Baron Konstantin von Neurath was replaced as Protector by the ruthless Reinhard Heydrich.

He arrived in the Hradcin, Prague's ancient castle on the hill, on September 27, and went to work at once, hitting right and left, very much in the dark but determined to do too much rather than too little. Premier Elias was arrested, as were three famous generals of the defunct Czechoslovak Army—Bily, Votja, and Horacek—and hundreds of others, some on actual evidence, others on the flimsiest grounds. In the next four days Heydrich had twenty-two Czech patriots executed, including Skalda and
the three generals. In October, he pulled in three hundred and fourteen additional suspects, fifty-eight of whom were either shot or hanged.

The Czechs' answer to Heydrich's sanguine orgy was defiance. The underground now went into action on an impressive scale. Help came also from London. Mysterious planes flew in leaders to take the places of those whom Heydrich had murdered. They also dropped supplies.

The Heydrich terror continued. On a single day in January, 1942, twenty-three workers were shot on suspicion of sabotage. In April, there was an increase of sabotage in Bohemia and Moravia, with tragic consequences at Tetchen and Bohumin: Heydrich hanged twenty-five patriots in the former city, and had six shot in the latter.

May came with the tidings of spring to find the underground better organized than ever, and emboldened by Heydrich's failure to stamp out resistance despite his savage campaign. The aid received from abroad also helped tremendously. On May 5, during an RAF raid on the Skoda Works in Pilsen, an especially important group of men was dropped, with containers in which were concealed super-secret pieces of special equipment. The BBC broke in with an unusually strong attack on Heydrich, and from then on, it made the Protector the sole target of its barbs.

The situation was getting worse by the day and Heydrich decided to start an all-out campaign this time, to liquidate the last vestiges of the underground once and for all. He had the plans drawn and then arranged for a trip to Berlin to lay them before Hitler and Himmler for their approval. He was full of excitement and talked confidently of the future, of the great plans he had for Czechoslovakia after it had regained its sense, as he put it.

But by then, Reinhard Heydrich was himself living on borrowed time. He was to die violently before the month was out, killed by a bomb from the Resistance he could not conquer.

If the secret war began in Czechoslovakia, Russia was not far behind.

On July 25, 1941, the Russian campaign was just thirty-three days old; the communiqués of the German High Command were coming in batches, announcing new victories. Yet one cryptic communiqué spoke of some haphazard guerrilla activity in the combat zones, aimed mainly, and not very effectively, at the German supply lines. It was the first mention of a phantom force, which the Soviets were pitting against the invaders.

It was a glorious summer and the Germans enjoyed the scenic beauty of the land. They were especially enchanted by the virgin forests, as a poetic German correspondent then wrote, “broad green walls into which the rugged roads seemed to penetrate vertically like bright gleaming shafts.” That same idyllic forest was soon to lose its enchantment when the Germans found it swarming with the dark soldiers of that phantom force. It “no longer inspired us with such dreams,” the correspondent wrote after a two-hour encounter with those men, “as we had had during the first stage of the journey. There it stood, silent, dark, and menacing, on either side of the road. The shadows of the night and the fogs of the marshes crept up in thin veils between tree trunks. An oppressive, nervous feeling began increasingly to possess us.”

On September 12, a brief communiqué mentioned a German patrol “in action against bandits in no-man's land.” On November 5, bandits were mentioned as doing demolition work after the retreat of a Red Army contingent. Nine days later, the intelligence officer of the German 11th Army was sufficiently impressed to write a memorandum about those bandits.

“According to available reports,” he wrote, “a well-organized, centrally-directed partisan organization is operating in the southern part of Crimea. It has at its disposal large and small bases in the Jaila mountains, which are well provided with arms, food, herds of cattle and other supplies.” Their task
seemed to be, he added, the destruction of signal and traffic installations, and raids on the rear services of the German army, especially its supply columns. A few of them were spies.

By then, several of the bandits had fallen into the hands of the enemy, and the Germans had a chance to size them up. They scandalized their captors for more reasons than one. “Already their outward appearance and their garments mark them as bandits,” wrote a Major Schaefer. “Generally speaking, they do not wear uniform with insignia of rank, but plain clothes of all sorts, or in other words, bandit's civvies. They masquerade as innocent peasants. Some wear civilian clothes and an odd piece of uniform, so that they can swiftly change, like a chameleon, in accordance with requirements. We met bands in German uniforms, complete with insignia, and others with two uniforms, a German and a Russian, one over the other.”

The partisans came from all walks of life. A band of three men consisted of a young Red Army straggler, a sixty-year-old engineer from Feodosia, and a Tartar. A two-man team was made up of a twenty-three-year-old Russian cobbler and a thirty-four-year-old school teacher from Kerch. By March, 1942, the front no longer was confined to those neat lines drawn on General Staff maps. It was everywhere. On March 6, even Dr. Goebbels wrote in his diary: “An SD report informed me about the situation in occupied Russia. It is, after all, more unstable than was generally assumed. The partisan danger is increasing week after week. The partisans are in control of large areas in occupied Russia and are conducting a regime of terror there.” On April 29 he added: “The danger of the partisans in the occupied areas continues to exist in unmitigated intensity. They have caused us very great difficulties during the winter, and these by no means ceased with the beginning of spring.”

Partisan warfare was no accidental response of the Russians. As early as 1934, speaking of a possible future war against the Soviet Union, Stalin said, “It would be the most dangerous war for the bourgeoisie, because such a war will be waged not
only at the fronts but also at the rear of the enemy.” And on the twelfth day of the war, Stalin issued a special order to all men, women and even children, throughout the Soviet Union, to go into action as partisans.

“In areas occupied by the enemy,” his decree read, “guerrilla units, on foot and horseback, must be formed and diversion groups created to combat enemy troops, to foment guerrilla warfare everywhere, to blow up bridges and roads, to destroy telephone and telegraph communications, to set fire to forests, depots and trains. In occupied territories conditions must be made unbearable for the enemy and all his collaborators; they must be pursued and annihilated wherever they are, and all their measures must be brought to naught.”

Within a week, Stalin's general order was made specific in a directive by the Central Committee of the Communist Party (as distinct from the General Staff of the Red Army, for this was a “patriotic” matter which the Party proposed to handle). Partisan headquarters were set up in Moscow. Its chief of staff was a promising young Communist Party functionary, Ponomarenko. He was given the rank of lieutenant general, a staff, and the equipment. The rest was left to him and he made the most of it.

According to General Sir Reginald F. S. Denning, a British expert on guerrilla warfare, Ponomarenko's army-in-rags made a “considerable contribution to the defeat of the German armies.” After the war, Stalin went so far as to assert that had it not been for the partisans, the Soviet Union would never have succeeded in defeating the Germans.

Ponomarenko cited examples of partisan achievements in 1945 when he prepared a report: “The destruction by Ukrainian guerrillas of troops guarding Sarny railway junction; the blowing up of large bridges on the rivers Ptich and Drissa; the rout by the Byelorussian guerrillas of the Germans at Slavnoye station; the rout of the garrison and the destruction of military objectives at Slutks; the blowing up by Orel troops of big Navlya and Vygonits bridges, when the whole of the German guards
there were wiped out; the rout by Smolensk guerrillas of the garrison at Prigorye station and the destruction of trains in it; the operations of the Leningrad guerrillas, which ended in the killing of General von Wirtz and his bodyguard; the complete rout of four garrisons by Karelo-Finnish guerrillas on the island of Bolshoi Kremenets; the blowing up of the Savkin bridge and the extermination of the Sutok garrison by Kalinin guerrillas; the rout of an army corps headquarters at Ugodsk Zavod by Moscow guerrillas; the Sdatsk operation, which ended in the annihilation of one thousand two hundred officers and men of the Third German Jaeger Infantry Division, carried out by Crimean guerrillas.”

According to Ponomarenko, in just two years of partisan warfare behind the lines, his guerrillas killed thirty generals, three hundred thousand German soldiers and hundreds of Soviet collaborators. A chambermaid blew up Friedrich Kube, the German governor general of Byelo-Russia; another woman partisan killed Fabian Akinchitz, chief of the German secret service in Minsk; and still another killed Friedrich Vench, commandant of the town of Baranovichi.

During the same period (between 1941 and 1943), Ponomarenko's ragamuffins derailed three thousand trains, blew up three thousand two hundred and sixty-three bridges, destroyed one thousand one hundred and ninety-one tanks and four hundred seventy-six planes. Germany had a total of six million six hundred thousand dead from all causes on all fronts. Of these, Ponomarenko claimed his partisans had killed more than a million officers and men. At the peak of their activities, in 1944 in the Crimea, partisans mounted a thousand raids on roads and railways in the German rear
within a period of only seven hours.
“And these raids,” Field Marshall von Manstein added, “happened every single day.”