A Lion in the Grass

2-2

Raymond was astonished. He looked around the table at the composed faces of the others and saw he was the only one who didn’t know what Donovan had in mind. If they were not all looking so serious, it might have been comical, he thought.

“These gentlemen are jumping into Yugoslavia with British intelligence to try to get a handle on who’s doing what to whom there, the problem being that the resistance leaders seem to be more focused on fighting each other than the Germans,” Donovan said. “The Brits have already sent in a couple of teams and come up with nothing. They’re spending entirely too much effort trying to decide who should be the captain of the resistance. We’ve no time for that. We don’t give a damn who the captain is. What we want is to put arms and supplies in their hands and point them at the Germans. It’s easy. Whoever does it best, gets the most.”

There were some nods but no one spoke. They waited. Was this how OSS made all its plans? Raymond wondered. Four guys in a room with a couple of maps, waiting for a visionary to speak?

“While the Brits go clodhopping around the country,” Donovan continued, “we’re going to sail right in with some goods and get things cracking. We’re not going to tell them. Farish and Seitz here will keep them mollified, and will give us a heads-up if we need to adjust our plans in any way.”

Donovan paused. He appeared to be awaiting a question or a reaction. None came, and Raymond thought he looked irritated. When he continued, he looked directly at Raymond. “I do mean sail. To get things started, I want you to take a sailboat across the Adriatic to Yugoslavia from here.” He drew a line from Bari, on the Italian coast, to the Dalmatian coast. “You’ve sailed in these waters. You know the harbors, the people, the customs. If you do it right, we don’t think the Germans will be suspicious.”

sailRaymond was dumbfounded. Donovan was overestimating his sailing experience on the Yugoslavian coast. Did he have good information? He had been a kid. He was still a kid. And then it dawned on him.

“You’ve spoken to my father?”

Donovan shrugged, and a tiny grin curved up the sides of his mouth. “Now and then. We go way back.”

“I was a boy when we sailed there.” And I’m still a boy.

AndI’m still a boy“It makes no difference. You captained that boat into a harbor at night without a bump.”

The memory of the incident, not to mention that Donovan had the details, made Raymond nervous. He had been thirteen. The winds that day had been fickle and they had not made port by dark. There was no moon, and they could see no lights on an island not far off the coast they thought they were near. They’d not even been sure they were at the harbor entrance they saw on their charts and not just off another part of the rocky shoreline. His father had made him take the helm. “Take it slow, son, and we’ll feel our way in,” he’d said. As they inched forward, listening for surf on rocks and indications of the harbor, like a dog barking or a bell from a marker buoy, his father had occasionally said, “It feels like we should move a touch to the starboard. What do you think?” In the end, they were guided by a lone, dim candle in a window of a small house on a tiny bay just to the west of the main harbor shown on their chart. The chart had no indication of the bay. After they’d dropped anchor, Raymond had shaken for an hour.

“My father was with me.”

“And you passed the test. That’s good enough for me.”

“What kind of boat is it?”

Donovan waved his hand in dismissal. “I’m sure you’ll find something when you get there.” He paused for a moment. “And I assume you’ve heard that the Italian forces agreed yesterday to lay down their arms.”

Raymond and the other men were shocked. Their faces showed it. No one had to speak.

Donovan chuckled. “We’re very good at keeping secrets from each other. In any case, the army plans to keep it quiet in case the Germans don’t know about it yet. They want to get our boys up the boot before the Germans regroup. They’re not sure either whether the Italian forces in Yugoslavia are part of the deal, or even if they know about it. So we’ve got to move fast.”

And that was that. Donovan launched into deployment information for each of them. Raymond was to find transport as soon as possible to Cairo, where he was to report to Major Dutton, who was planning the shipment of arms and supplies to the coast of Yugoslavia. After Donovan left, Farish and Seitz reviewed with Raymond the routes into Yugoslavia from the Dalmatian coast and arranged a tentative rendezvous for the end of the following month. Colonel Bruce returned with written orders for each of them, which they would need for their transport.

Raymond thought he should keep his thoughts to himself, but he couldn’t. “I’m not sure I entirely understood General Donovan,” he said, hoping he had put it as tactfully as possible.

The men laughed. “No one really understands Donovan,” Bruce said. “Depending on your point of view, he’s either unconventional or just plain crazy.” He added that Donovan was more creative than methodical and would propose schemes that astounded everyone around him. His strategies sometimes led to missions that were outside the conventional military wisdom. Although he’d had his share of failures, his results made the tactics he employed look prescient.

As they were about to leave the room, Raymond looked at his orders. “There’s a mistake in my rank, sir. I’m an ensign,” he said to Bruce.

Bruce shook his head. “No mistake, Lieutenant Hatcher. You’ve been promoted. He does that sometimes. You’re probably the youngest lieutenant JG ever to serve in the navy.”