SHAKEN BY THEIR BRUSH WITH DEATH, and exhilarated by their escape, several of the fourteen men aboard Red Ass exited the B-24 to survey their surroundings. The shard of flat terrain that had proven their salvation was surrounded by craggy hills and mountains. Exactly where they were in relation to the coast and Oran wasn’t clear. The men were still pondering that conundrum when they heard hoofbeats. Suddenly, a hundred or so men armed with antiquated rifles and clubs converged on the aircraft—some on horses, some on camels, some on foot. It was like a scene out of Revolt in the Desert, the bestselling memoir of British Army colonel T. E. Lawrence that many of the men had read as boys.
The horsemen were probably ethnic Berbers known as Riffians, a tribe that had waged a bloody insurgency fifteen years earlier against European colonial rule. They didn’t speak English, but they made themselves understood: They wanted everything.
The marauders swarmed through the plane, grabbing mess kits, canteens, goggles, shaving gear, and anything else they could find. They roughly relieved the men of their wallets and other personal possessions. Some of the intruders made their way to the flight deck and grabbed Epting’s flight manual. Bombardier Al Naum tried to smash his bombsight with his boot before he was forced from the nose compartment. One of the crew’s waist gunners had remained at his weapon to protect the men if needed, with instructions to fire only on Epting’s order. When it became clear that resistance would provoke a slaughter, the gunner was told to stand down. “We thought we were gonna be killed by those people,” Edward Weir later recalled.3
The gunmen had begun to herd the Americans away from the plane when suddenly another group of horsemen approached. The looters disappeared as suddenly as they had arrived. Several men in uniforms cantered up to the bewildered Americans. An officer addressed them in Spanish. They had landed in Spanish Morocco, a possession of neutral Spain.4
The Spanish officer and his men led the Americans to a nearby town and ushered them into a holding pen outside the courthouse. While Spanish soldiers served the Americans wine, hot tea, and cookies, an English-speaking officer began interrogating the airmen, one by one. When the questioning ended, the officer informed the Americans that they wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon. Spain was a neutral country, he explained, and the laws of war required them to hold soldiers of a belligerent nation.
Ben and his comrades had avoided the Germans and Italians, but not the snares of international law. Legally they were internees, not prisoners of war, but they weren’t free to go.
THE AMERICANS WERE DAZZLED BY THE hospitality of their hosts. They were given haircuts and shaves, clean beds, and blankets. They were allowed to roam freely around the town. Jake Epting and the other commissioned officers ate in the mess hall with the Spanish officers, while the enlisted men ate with their Spanish counterparts. They adopted Spanish habits, eating a light breakfast, followed by a more robust breakfast a few hours later, then lunch, and a sumptuous evening meal. After subsisting on canned C-rations for three months, the Americans were awed by the dinner menu: shrimp cocktail, olives, soup, egg omelet, fish, beans, beefsteak, coffee, bananas, bread, and cakes, washed down with Spanish wine.5
Ben and his comrades didn’t know what to make of the hospitality.
Ben was more than wary. He had enlisted to fight America’s Axis enemies. It had taken him a year to get an opportunity to prove himself in combat, and now the Spanish officers were saying they would be interned in Spain for the rest of the war. Ben was being offered an opportunity to sit out the war in style, but he wouldn’t hear of it. The war was his opportunity to prove his patriotism, and he had to get back to it. Ben pulled Jake Epting aside and asked for permission to attempt an escape. Epting gave his blessing.
In early March, Ben made his break.
BEN HAD SEEN ENOUGH OF HIS SURROUNDINGS to be convinced that he could pass himself off as a local. He fashioned a turban from a T-shirt and turned his raincoat inside-out and splattered it with mud, then waited until nightfall and set out in the rain. As he tried to slip out of the enclosure where they were being held, Ben grabbed the wire of a fence. It was electrified. “It scared the hell out of me,” he later recalled.6
He slipped under the fence and set off walking. He passed through two villages. Around dawn, he was nearing the crest of a hill when he encountered a soldier who started yelling at him. Ben bolted. The sentry fired some shots and other security personnel joined the chase. Ben stopped and held up his hands in surrender.
He was marched at gunpoint to a nearby town and thrown into a cage with a dozen or so unkempt prisoners. An English-speaking military officer arrived. When he discovered that the prisoner was one of the American airmen who had been taken into custody the previous week, the officer wanted to know why Ben had tried to escape. Ben tried to explain to the officer the backlash against Japanese Americans back home. “I’m trying to prove my loyalty,” Ben said.
Ben’s stay in the rural jail was short. The officer led his prisoner to a waiting vehicle and Ben was driven north to the port city of Melilla. At the seaside air base, he was reunited with the other members of the Epting crew and their passengers from Gambut Main.
Within a few hours, Spanish Air Force officers ushered the Americans aboard a Junkers-52 transport, a gift of Nazi Germany during the Spanish Civil War. Jake Epting and several of the men briefly discussed whether they should try to overpower the Spanish crew and fly to nearby Allied territory, but “thought better of it,” Weir said.7
As the engines throbbed, the Spanish pilot pushed the throttles forward for takeoff and, to the consternation of the American captives, crossed himself as any good Catholic might. The pilot got the plane airborne and turned north toward their unknown destination in Spain.
Chapter 22
PRISONERS IN A GILDED CAGE
As the Junkers transport bearing Ben and his fellow detainees flew northward across the Mediterranean to an unknown destination, Spain was a smoldering preoccupation of US president Franklin Roosevelt. Since 1939, the country had been ruled by Francisco Franco, the military strongman who led Nationalist forces to victory in a four-year civil war that overthrew the elected Republican government. Hitler and Mussolini had forged close ties with Franco, providing men and materiel to his army throughout the civil war. In the spring of 1940, when Germany stood poised to defeat Britain and France in Hitler’s broader European war, the Nazi dictator had assumed that Franco would join the Axis cause, but Franco had demurred—much to Hitler’s annoyance.
Franco needed a source of oil and other economic aid that exceeded the means of the Axis powers, and so, while assuring Hitler of his ideological sympathies, the Spanish caudillo staked out an official policy of neutrality. Increasingly frustrated by Franco’s reticence, Hitler secretly drew up plans to invade Spain, which the German leader viewed as a steppingstone to the conquest of Gibraltar, Britain’s Mediterranean stronghold at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula. Twice in the eighteen months prior to America’s entry into the war, Hitler considered overrunning Spain, but both times stopped short.1
Spain’s status took on even greater urgency for President Roosevelt after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor triggered an Axis declaration of war on the United States. Roosevelt now made keeping Spain out of the war a diplomatic priority. In March 1942, Roosevelt set in motion his plan to achieve this goal by carefully handpicking his ambassador to Madrid.
The envoy was Carlton Joseph Huntley Hayes, a fifty-nine-year-old Columbia University historian. Born and raised in upstate New York, Hayes had majored in history at Columbia at the turn of the century. In 1904, around the time of his graduation, Hayes broke with his Baptist upbringing to convert to Catholicism. In the years that followed, his Catholic faith became a bedrock of his scholarly life. Hayes made a name for himself as an expert on modern European history and nationalism. He concluded that the senseless slaughter of the First World War had been an outgrowth of three destructive threads of modern life: nationalism, militarism, and imperialism. In the great global ideological struggle between left and right that followed the war, Hayes ardently denounced totalitarianism and American isolationism.
The Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s created deep fault lines in American and British political, cultural, and academic life. The cause of Spain’s beleaguered Republican government was championed by the political left in the United States and the United Kingdom. Some twenty-eight hundred Americans fought for the Republican cause with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and 681 died from battle injuries or illness. Throughout the conflict, Roosevelt maintained ties with both the Republican government and Franco’s Nationalist rebels. When Franco entered Madrid and declared victory on April 1, 1939, Roosevelt ignored pressure from the American left to cut diplomatic relations with the new Nationalist government.
In the aftermath of America’s entry into Hitler’s war, Roosevelt’s appointment of Hayes as ambassador to Spain was a shrewd political stroke. By appointing a Catholic of moderate political views, Roosevelt had signaled to Franco his desire for closer relations with Spain. Hayes was no closet fascist, but rather he viewed Franco through a lens of pragmatism: The Spanish leader was an authoritarian, but not a totalitarian in the vein of Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini, Hayes concluded. In his view, America could do business with Franco.
Arriving in Madrid in the late spring of 1942, Hayes set to work shoring up America’s relationship with Spain. He built relationships with Franco and his foreign minister. To win the sympathies of the Spanish elite, he hosted cultural programs that stressed the shared values of the two countries. Balding and bespectacled, with a large nose and stern face, Hayes proved to be a warm and gracious host. One of the most popular events he hosted was a screening of the Hollywood film Gone with the Wind. High government officials and even members of Spain’s Catholic hierarchy turned out for the event.2
Hayes found common ground with Franco in other areas. A trickle of Europeans fleeing Hitler’s depredations had found safe haven in Spain early in the war. After Hayes arrived, the trickle became a torrent. Jews and other displaced people as well as downed Allied airmen made their way from Vichy France through the Pyrenees mountains into Spain and on to safety in Allied-occupied North Africa. By war’s end, Hayes—with Franco’s acquiescence—had aided the escape of forty thousand refugees.
A more urgent concern for Roosevelt was the question of Franco’s commitment to military neutrality—an issue that loomed ever larger as 1943 began. Based on months of conversations with Franco and Foreign Ministry officials in Madrid, Hayes communicated to Washington his optimism that Franco intended to remain on the sidelines. But he was far less convinced Hitler would respect Spain’s continued neutrality. In a January 15, 1943, cable to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Hayes reported steady improvement in US relations with Spain following the Operation TORCH landings in North Africa, and he urged the US to offer “military assistance to Spain in the event of German aggression.” Furthermore, he suggested a German invasion might occur “between the latter part of February and May.”3
As part of Roosevelt’s intensifying efforts to keep Franco out of the war, the powerful Catholic archbishop of New York, Francis Spellman, arrived in Madrid in early February 1943. During his week in Spain, Spellman met privately with Franco and reported to Roosevelt that the Spanish strongman did indeed appear committed to neutrality.
Despite the encouraging cables arriving in Washington from Hayes and his top diplomats in Madrid, Spain remained a potentially game-changing wild card in the European war. If Franco cast his lot with Hitler and attacked the British stronghold at Gibraltar, or allowed Hitler to invade Spain and control access to the Mediterranean, the Allied summer plans to invade Sicily would be jeopardized.
It was against this backdrop of high-stakes Allied and Axis intrigue that Ben and thirteen 93rd Bomb Group comrades arrived in Spain in early March 1943.
BEN AND THE OTHER AMERICANS EMERGED from the Junkers into the sunlight of Zaragoza, a provincial capital in Spain’s northeast Aragon region. They were herded aboard a bus and driven southwest into the mountains. After a journey of about ninety minutes, the bus stopped and the Americans were ushered into a luxury hotel in the spa town of Alhama de Aragon.
The past year of war had seen the town play host to a small colony of about twenty-five interned Allied air personnel from the United States, Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Palestine, and South Africa. Confined to hotels paid for by their governments, the Americans were among more than one hundred US military personnel interned by Spain at that point in the war.
Ben’s place of “confinement” was the Hotel Termas de Pallares, a popular spa and casino opened in 1863. The four-story brick structure had been constructed in the Romanesque Mudéjar style popular in Aragon, blending Moorish tastes with traditional Roman and Christian architecture. Marble statues adorned the entrance and a tiled patio overlooked lush gardens with strutting peacocks and a thermal lake where guests could bathe or sun themselves while lying in lounge chairs on a sandy beach.
Beyond the cavernous marble-tiled lobby lay a genteel world of dark-paneled salons, chandeliers, and high-ceilinged hallways. The main dining room could seat two hundred guests, and an al fresco dining area decorated with Moorish tile mosaic a hundred more. Guests could soak in soothing mineral waters in the hotel’s communal spa in the basement or in claw-footed porcelain tubs in the privacy of their elegant rooms. The Americans were technically prisoners, yet they had the privileges of a paying guest. For Ben and the other internees of modest origins, the Termas de Pallares transported them into a world of Gatsby-like luxury and excess.
Each day for the internees began with a knock at the door and breakfast served in bed. From 8:00 to 10:00 a.m., the men swam and bathed in the clear thermal lake a short walk from the hotel building. At 1300 hours, they gathered in the dining room for a hearty lunch of meat, potatoes, peas, salad, red wine, and bread made from flour supplied by the US Embassy. Afterward, the men adjourned to a large salon to gaze out on the National Highway and the well-manicured park beyond. Games of bridge (sometimes joined by an English-speaking Spanish gentleman), chess, checkers, and Ping-Pong ensued. The activities paused for a midafternoon snack of tea, coffee, and olives, followed by another two hours at the lake.
Back at the hotel, the airmen gathered around a shortwave radio in the lobby to catch the evening BBC news broadcast from London. They spent much time at the bar, drinking wine and nibbling shrimp. They attended evening dances in the casino and screenings of French, Italian, German, and American films. The hotel’s daily activities culminated with a late dinner.4
As Ben and the others soon discovered, Alhama de Aragon was a compact town of about a thousand inhabitants, tucked into a limestone gorge carved by the ribbon-like Rio Jalón as it threaded its way northeast through the mountains. Some of the most prominent buildings, including the town hall, echoed Aragon’s Moorish influence.
