For God and Country. Mark Bowlin
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structure that Sam had ever seen. Mostly constructed in the eighteenth century, the palace itself had well over a thousand rooms, while the palace grounds boasted numerous gardens and other equally beautiful buildings over its thousands of acres. It was known as the “Little Versailles,” but Sam saw nothing about it that qualified as little. As a wealthy man in his own right, Sam was stunned at the opulence of Caserta.
An MP passed them through the barricade after checking their orders, and they were directed to an outlying building serving as a mess hall on the palace grounds. They didn’t know when they’d get another hot meal, so they headed for lunch first. While they drove along a magnificent avenue lined with tall trees, Sam took in the beauty of Caserta and then suddenly laughed out load as Ebbins had crept into his thoughts again.
As Sam had borne the brunt of most of Perkin’s practical jokes over his lifetime, he was delighted at the thought of Ebbins being brought up short by Colonel Wranosky. He had no particular opinions one way or the other about the Nisei officers, but his innate sense of fairness and a long-standing antipathy toward Ebbins had led him to high expectations of an eventual revenge by Perkin when he learned of the incident the night before. His cousin hadn’t disappointed, and Sam chuckled again.
He was even happier when they arrived at the mess hall. A triumphant pair of privates greeted the crestfallen Perkin, and a gloating Private Kulis crowed, “We took a back road. Ha–ha! I told Vince we’d beat y’all here!”
1230 Hours
Fifth Army Headquarters, Caserta, Italy
While Captain Finley-Jones sought out the senior British officer on the Fifth Army staff and Sam and Private Fratelli staked out a table and a coffee pot, Perkin and Private Kulis went to track down Lieutenant Commander Jimmy Cardosi.
Cardosi was a naval intelligence officer who’d been in Italy since before the landings on Sicily the previous July. He had helped prepare the battlefield for the landing forces on that island and then moved to the mainland in anticipation of the landings at Salerno. Working sometimes on his own, sometimes with the Office of Strategic Services, sometimes with his British counterparts, and almost always with the Neapolitan mob, he helped to once again shape the battlefield. He had walked through Italy dressed as an itinerant laborer looking for field work. He got a good feel for the population’s weariness of war and the fascists, their fear of the Germans, and the unlikelihood of any meaningful opposition from the Italians to the Allied landings. Cardosi’s reports, sent back to Allied planners through contacts in the OSS, helped drive the decision to land at Paestum and Salerno, even though he personally preferred the beaches at Formia and Gaeta.
As soon as it was clear that the landing force had permanently established its lodgment at Salerno, Cardosi was moved onward to Naples. It was there he reached his limits, watching impotently as the Germans systematically took their revenge on the city. Industry was looted or destroyed; the port was savaged as ships were sunk in the channel and the valuable cranes destroyed; the people were terrorized and forced into labor battalions. It was the most wanton violence Cardosi had ever witnessed against a civilian population.
When the Allies finally took Naples, they found a city population that was on the verge of starvation and living among disease and filth. They also found a lieutenant commander in desperate need of some relaxation and time away from the war. After two weeks’ leave on the island of Capri, he was assigned to the Fifth Army as a naval intelligence liaison officer to General Clark’s staff, a job that the recovering officer found to be extremely boring. So he looked for other ways to help out, and one of the passing assignments that he received was the investigation into the German terror bombings in Naples.
It was a puzzle that slowly came together during the month of November. His growing list of contacts in the Camorra, prompted by gold bullion and the word of an Italian-American capo in a New York prison, began to report on rumors of a German intelligence team that specifically targeted Americans. This German team was reportedly responsible for planting time bombs in areas where American soldiers were likely to congregate: Italian army bases, bus depots, museums, and the Naples post office.
It was during the San Pietro operation that LCDR Cardosi came to Perkin’s attention, and together they began to complete the puzzle. But Perkin had other duties to attend to, and Cardosi had been left to finish the analysis on his own. His briefing to Perkin and Kulis showed that his time had not been wasted.
“Since I saw you last, Captain, I submitted an interrogation request on the soldiers that you guys captured at Pisciotta. They had been shipped to a prisoner camp in Palacios, Texas—”
“Hey, Palacios is just north of where Sam and I are from.”
Cardosi nodded. “You have to love life’s little ironies, don’t you? So those fellows were sent to Camp, uh, Hulen in Palacios, where they were working out on the economy for local farmers: picking hayseeds or cotton balls or whatever you rednecks do down there. The CIC sent over some interrogators, and these guys talked without much, um, persuasion. It seems they’d rather talk and continue to work and almost live outside the wire than to spend the remainder of the war in solitary.
“This is what we’ve learned. They all worked at a separate Abwehr command in Rome. The commanding officer is our buddy, Major Douglas Grossmann, and his deputy was Captain Mark Gerschoffer. We knew all that already. Grossmann had an American mother, killed in a bombing raid, and a German father. His upbringing was primarily American, and he went to high school in Coronado, California. Now, take a gander at this.”
Cardosi pulled a large photograph from a folder and passed it over to Perkin. “Naval intelligence made a copy of this from his high school yearbook. Is this the guy you saw in Ogliastro?”
Perkin studied the photograph intently and tried to recall that day. He had stopped in the village looking for Able Company and chatted briefly with a man fitting Grossmann’s description and wearing the uniform of a major in the US Army. The student in the picture looked intelligently at the camera. A nice looking kid, Perkin thought, but a choirboy can grow up to be a killer too.
“It’s him. A lot younger, but definitely him. That’s damn good work!” Perkin was impressed. A lot of effort had gone into this investigation—this photo had to have been flown to Europe.
“Thanks. The Office of Naval Intelligence has made this a priority at my request. There’s more. His soldiers believe that he came back to Germany for college, and one of them thought he graduated in 1935 or ’36 with a degree in either language or linguistics. One of his soldiers non-concurred and said the major graduated with a degree in the classics. If they hadn’t said he was a womanizer, I’d have marked him as a homo. Either way, they agreed he went to the University of Heidelberg. After graduation, he went directly into Hitler’s expanding army as a junior intelligence officer.
“The interrogation reports indicate that after the war began, he served in France and was posted to Italy after Pearl Harbor. He’s never been directly in combat, only support activities. As I said, he’s described as a lady’s man, a good leader who takes care of his troops, a moderate to heavy drinker, a smoker. Fluent in English, German, French, and Italian, and—get this—Latin. Proficient in Spanish and Romanian. He was trained in Berlin to speak English with multiple accents, including West Coast and East Coast American, English upper class—what they call Etonian—and Welsh blue collar. I have a list of aliases that he’s used—my favorite is Neville Drinkwater, which is what he favors when he impersonates an Englishman. Physically, he’s exactly as you described him. Blond hair, blue eyes, slight build—uh, about 1.7 meters tall or about 5 feet 7 inches, and about 65 kilograms, which is just shy of 145 pounds.”
“Any thoughts on how he regards the United States? Does he have divided loyalties?” Private Kulis spoke for the first time.
“That’s a damn good question, shipmate. That’s why I asked it myself. They didn’t know. The whole group had either spent extensive time in the US or had American parents like Grossmann and Gerschoffer. They all claimed to have been deeply upset with the war against us, but they may have been blowing smoke up our asses. Hard to say. But there’s a possibility we may be able to turn him, if that’s