Disciples by Douglas Waller

Author:Douglas Waller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

CHAPTER 21

TO GERMANY

* * *

The Doctor team spent its first five days hidden in the Scheffau farmhouse of the three Austrian deserters. The trio’s leader, who identified himself as Rudolf Steiner, summoned sixteen other deserters to the farm. They were all eager to take up arms against the Nazis and they now became the nucleus for Smets and Blonttrock’s espionage network. On day six, the Austrians and the OSS agents moved to a cabin high up in the mountains, which farmers used in the summer to guard grazing cattle and which afforded the team more security for storing their equipment and transmitting messages. Blonttrock radioed London on March 29 that he needed food, medicine, weapons, and uniforms of the German mountain infantry to equip a guerrilla band of twenty. A plane delivered the supplies in eight parachuted containers three days later along with explicit orders that did not sit well with the partisans: the weapons were to be used to protect the team, not to attack the Germans, which the partisans dearly wanted to do. Such attacks would only invite reprisals, London feared.

Though the region was infested with SS, Blonttrock and Smets needed little protection. They rarely mingled among villagers in the valley, except to occasionally buy black-market food with the reichsmarks they brought with them. (The pair soon realized the identity documents the Bach section manufactured for them had errors and would not survive close inspection.) A number of villagers knew the Americans were in the mountains but never informed on them. The Austrians around Kufstein had long since become fed up with arrogant German officers and were decidedly anti-Nazi. Blonttrock’s only close call came one afternoon as he transmitted from a partisan’s house in the Alpine village of Ellmau south of Kufstein. Field Marshal Robert Ritter von Greim, who had succeeded Göring as Luftwaffe commander on April 26, had decided to relocate his headquarters to Ellmau. A haughty staff officer rapped on the door of the partisan’s home looking for suitable quarters for his field marshal. The quick-thinking partisan showed the adjutant around, except for a bedroom where he said his four children were sleeping. (Blonttrock was in the room with his radio.) Satisfied, the adjutant left and later commandeered the house for Greim to occupy.

Doctor became one of Casey’s most productive teams. Over forty-five days, Blonttrock radioed fifty-two messages with intelligence Smets and his guerrilla gang collected on the deployment of Wehrmacht mountain battalions, artillery batteries, antiaircraft emplacements, and Volkssturm civilian militia around Kufstein, as well as the location of a war factory, an oil depot, Himmler’s private train on a rail track, and a section of the Autobahn southeast of Munich being used as a runway for a nearby jet plane base—all rich targets for Allied bombers. Smets also discovered two POW camps—one with twelve thousand Russian soldiers south of Stuttgart, the other with about fifty prominent captives at the thirteenth-century Itter Castle in North Tyrol. They included former French premiers Édouard Daladier and Paul Reynard, French army commander Maurice Gamelin, and Stalin’s son.

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