Between Butch’s one-man assault and the anti-aircraft fire from the task force, the remaining planes were bracketed and their formation nearly broken up.
On his fourth and final shooting pass, as those last bombers prepared to let loose their loads, Butch felt his guns finally run dry and silent. He banked and then leveled off with a seat-of-the-pants plan to run his plane into the side of one of the Bettys if need be.
But then, streaking in from behind and overhead, the cavalry arrived.
Led by Lieutenant Commander John “Jimmy” Thach, several fighters had just returned from their pursuit of the survivors of the first wave. The sight of them evidently convinced this tattered second formation of Bettys to give it up and flee. They dropped their bombs well short of the ships of the task force and split off to run for clear air with the Americans closing in for the kill.
• • •
One of the casualties of Butch’s run had been his radio, so he could neither transmit nor receive as he waited his turn for a landing on the Lex. It hadn’t hit him quite yet, what he’d done; all he felt was anxious to get the wheels back on the runway.
But his anxiousness didn’t last long. After rolling to a stop on the deck, Butch pulled back the canopy and stood up in his seat to a ship-wide cheer so loud and long, it sounded like the Cubs had finally won the Series at Wrigley Field.
Aboard the USS Enterprise, Central Pacific,
near the enemy-controlled Gilbert Islands
Twenty-two months later: November 26, 1943
With time and experience he’d grown accustomed to the rigors and chaos of battle. Every engagement was unique, of course, but that evening, as Butch sat in his cockpit—now in command of his own squadron—the scene outside looked strangely familiar. It was almost as though he’d lived this moment before.
Just like that long-ago day aboard the Lexington, the flight deck of the Enterprise was well-controlled mayhem. And, just like that day, a score of Japanese bombers had been detected on radar, heading in for blood. The Allies were preparing to go up to try to bring them down—but, unlike that first dogfight, this would be a rare nighttime engagement, a daring mission planned by Butch himself.
He completed his preflight checks and his eyes soon found the picture of his wife, Rita, that he’d clipped near the altimeter. Right beside it was another photo—his father and mother on one of their happier days, twenty years earlier. It was cracked and fading from time and much thoughtful handling.
In the end, it seemed as though Easy Eddie had been granted his final wish: He was already forgotten by most, but not by those he’d done his best to protect and care for.
Butch thought for a moment about his father and about everything that had brought him to the deck of this carrier. Two months after his incredible mission to save the Lexington, Butch had returned to the States on extended leave. With his wife by his side, he was escorted to the White House, where FDR himself promoted him to lieutenant commander. He was then presented with the first Medal of Honor awarded to a navy man in World War II.
The citation was for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in aerial combat, but later in the text it was stated more simply: In the course of saving his carrier and countless lives, Butch had performed the most daring single action in the history of combat aviation.
When he’d returned to his native St. Louis, sixty thousand people turned out for the parade that was held in his honor. The event was compared to the celebration of Lindbergh’s homecoming after his pioneering solo flight across the Atlantic.
The war effort needed heroes in the conflict’s earlier years, and Butch could very well have parlayed his well-earned fame into a safe, extended stateside public relations tour. But that wasn’t him. Before long he was back on active duty, first as a trainer and then in combat again.
Now, as Butch peered out his cockpit window and watched the busy deck of the USS Enterprise, he realized he’d been right: this was where he belonged. He took a last quiet moment to give thanks for everything and everyone who’d helped him get there, including a flawed man who’d no doubt be the first to admit he’d been far from the perfect dad.
The deck boss gave him the sign, the flag dropped, the engine roared, and Edward Henry “Butch” O’Hare tore down the runway and took off into the sky, never to return again.
• • •
Six years after being killed in combat and four years after the end of the war he’d helped the Allies win, Chicago’s Orchard Depot was renamed in Butch’s honor: O’Hare International Airport.
8
The Saboteurs: In a Time of War, the Laws Are Silent
The Farm
West of Berlin, Germany
April 14, 1942
The Farm looked like every other large villa in the serene countryside near Berlin. Once owned by wealthy Jewish industrialists, most of these estates were now the property of the Third Reich and had become uniform in their operation and appearance.
But this particular estate was different.
As the sun rose over the center of a million square miles of Nazi-occupied Europe, George Dasch—thirty-nine years old, with long, lanky arms, and a streak of silver through the center of his dark hair—sat through another class on bomb-making. Well-trained German shepherds patrolled the perimeter of the estate, just beyond a large stone wall.
Each student at the Farm had been specifically chosen for a special mission based on their ability to blend into ordinary American communities. All of them had spent time in the United States, most having left only after failing in a string of professional pursuits.
As George watched the instructor demonstrate the bomb assembly for what seemed like the five hundredth time, he looked around the classroom and began to wonder about his classmates. None of them, to his knowledge, had demonstrated any real loyalty to the Nazis or hatred toward the United States. He had neither. Worse, none of them had experience in espionage or military tactics or any of the other skills that might make someone a useful candidate for this kind of mission.
It was all pretty surreal, George thought, and so atypical of the way the Nazis normally operated. Loyalty and allegiance to the Third Reich were everything to them. He’d expected to be interrogated, maybe even tortured, in an attempt to break him. He’d prepared for the inevitable pain that was to come; worked to control his heart rate and breathing, and he thought carefully about how he would answer questions about his time in the United States. How would he fake the animosity they would so desperately want to see? He worried that he’d never be able to pull it off. He worried that he’d be labeled a sympathizer of the enemy and executed, his body thrown in some shallow grave outside the Farm.
But George didn’t need to worry about any of that, because the interrogation never came.
There were no questions, no torture, and no threats against his family.
Now he and his classmates were inside the Farm, training for an incredibly difficult and important mission—and none of them had the slightest idea how they’d gotten there.
New York City
Monday, December 8, 1941
John Cullen thought he was minutes away from becoming a U.S. Marine.
That morning he, along with hundreds of other tall, blue-eyed twenty-one-year-olds, set out for the New York City Armed Services recruiting station. He wanted to hit back against the Japanese personally, violently, and immediately.
Well, not quite immediately. After all, Christmas was just over two weeks away. He figured he could sign up now, spend one more Christmas with his family, and then ship out right afterward.
John entered the recruiting station, waited in line, and eventually reached a Marine sergeant who looked to be straight out of Hollywood central casting. “We’re here to sign up,” he said, pointing to the friend he’d brought along.
“If you fellas are ready to ship out tonight, we will take you,” snapped the sergeant. “If not, leave now. Don’t have no time for those who prioritize holidays over freedom
.”
John and his friend looked at each other. Neither of them wanted to be the first to say what they were thinking—but, to the sergeant, the look on their faces was obvious.
They left the Marine recruiting station and joined the Coast Guard instead.
The Farm
Wednesday, April 29, 1942
5:30 P.M.
George carefully mixed the chemicals and prepared the detonator as he was taught—but he knew it was hopeless. Remembering details was not his strength. That might be okay when it came to names and dates and places, but when those details meant life or death, bad things were bound to happen.
Would the bomb explode? At the right time? With enough power?
Creeping through the darkness, looking in every direction for anything out of place, George attached the bomb to the fuel tank and turned to leave. As he did, a series of explosions stopped him dead in his tracks. The noise was incredible. George covered his head with his arms, his ears ringing, eyes burning from the smoke and legs singed by sparks.
Then it all stopped just as quickly as it had started. The fireworks were done; the drill was over. George had failed.
That night, every student at the Farm took a version of the same final exam. Every student failed.
The next day, they received their assignments.
They were headed for America.
The Farm
Thursday, April 30, 1942
9:15 A.M.
“There will be two teams of four men,” the heavyset instructor told his students. “U-202 will take Team One to New York’s Long Island. U-584 will take Team Two to the east coast of Florida. The subs will get as close to shore as possible, surface briefly, and then each team will take a small rubber boat to the shore.”
George and his seven classmates stared incredulously at the instructor. If the bomb-making classes had seemed surreal, this plan—or whatever it could be called—seemed downright absurd.
“Your first task will be to bury the TNT crates on the beach—you’ll retrieve these later, right before the attacks are set to begin. In the meantime, you’ll go out and find lodging and clothing and begin to blend back into the American society. This should not be difficult; you’ve all done it before.”
The instructor, sweat dampening his forehead and cheeks, then began to explain the carefully selected targets designed to cripple American morale and frustrate industrial production.
“This bridge is called the Hell Gate Bridge. It connects Queens to the Bronx. Team One is going to blow it up.
“This bridge crosses Horseshoe Curve. It’s critical to the Pennsylvania Railroad. . . .
“These two factories in Pennsylvania process cryolite, which is needed for aluminum production. . . .”
He continued down the list, explaining the need for each operative to memorize the targets, which included bridges, railroads, canals, factories, and, most important of all, he said, a series of aluminum factories in east Tennessee.
“You can’t make a war plane without aluminum,” he said. “And every blue cross you see on this map is a factory that produces it.” Many of the crosses were dotted around a small town, just south of Knoxville, called Alcoa.
“Team One”—he looked at George, who had been selected as its leader—“your job is to blow out the electricity at these power plants for eight hours. Eight hours. That’s all it takes. After eight hours of no electricity, the metals will harden. If the metals harden, the stoves break. If the stoves break, the factory dies. If the factory dies, the aluminum supply dries up. If the aluminum dries up, there are no new planes.”
He paused to dramatize the moment, as though some of the students might not be taking it seriously enough.
“And if there are no more American planes, we win the war.”
Long Island, New York
Saturday, June 13, 1942
12:25 A.M.
Coastguard Seaman Second Class John Cullen was just beginning his midnight patrol. Dressed in his standard Coast Guard uniform, he walked along the beach through the Long Island fog, quietly singing to himself “I’ve Got a Girl in Kalamazoo.”
Some days he regretted turning down the Marines in favor of the Coast Guard. He imagined himself training for the upcoming invasion of Guadalcanal and taking the fight to the enemy. Instead he was pounding sand on beaches nine thousand miles away, patrolling a dark and quiet coastline from . . . what, exactly?
The good news was that he felt safe; the bad news was that he felt very alone.
In reality, he was neither.
Fifteen minutes into his patrol, John saw the most unlikely of sights: people. The fog was too thick to be sure of it, but it looked like they were pulling a dinghy out of the surf and onto the beach. Shining his flashlight toward them, its light doing nothing but illuminating the fog, he called out, “U.S. Coast Guard. Who are you?”
“Coast Guard?” shouted back one of the strangers. He had dropped the dinghy and was walking toward John.
Cullen could barely make out in the darkness the other three strangers busying themselves unloading materials of some kind out of the dinghy and onto various points along the beach.
“Yes. Who are you?” John asked.
“Fishermen. From East Hampton,” the man replied.
The man bore no resemblance to a fisherman. He wore a red woolen sweater, tennis shoes, a dark fedora hat, and pants that had been soaked through. Besides, he had no fishing supplies.
“We were trying to get to Montauk Point, but our boat ran aground,” he said, his long, lanky arms flailing. “We’re waiting for the sunrise to continue.” He was a thin man, shorter than average, with a streak of silver running through the middle of his jet-black hair.
“What do you mean, East Hampton or Montauk Point?” asked John. The two locations were twenty miles from each other, and these supposed fishermen were only five miles from where they said they’d started. Fog or no fog, John thought, who misses their landing spot by fifteen miles?
“Do you know where you are?” he asked the man in the odd clothes, with the odd accent and even odder story.
“I don’t believe I know where we landed,” he replied. “But you should know.”
“You’re in Amagansett. That’s my station over there,” John said, pointing up the beach to a building that was barely discernible through the fog. “Why don’t you come up to the station and stay the night?”
“All right,” the stranger said. But then, after a few steps, he stopped.
John’s suspicions grew. The bizarre stranger seemed even more nervous than before. If he were truly a lost fisherman, he would have no reason not to come to the Coast Guard station.
But John was now quite sure that this was no fisherman. And so the mysterious man’s next statement confirmed what John already knew.
“I’m not going with you.”
Shangri-La
Catoctin Mountain Park, Maryland
Saturday, June 13, 1942
12:30 A.M.
In a large house set inside the most isolated of country estates, the President of the United States slept alone and undisturbed, his face a picture of a man at peace. The fate of his republic, and perhaps a few others as well, hinged on the choices he made during the day—but the night was his. He slept soundly at this weekend retreat in the mountains north of Washington, this place he had repurposed as a retreat and named Shangri-La after the fictional Himalayan utopia.
Yes, it was true that his nation and its allies were losing a war in which the very freedom of mankind was at stake. And yes, MacArthur was trapped in the Philippines, while Rommel was racking up victories in North Africa and half of America’s fleet lay useless at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. But Franklin Delano Roosevelt had carried the nation through a depression. There was nothing, he believed, he could not bend to his iron will—and that included the Nazis.
Amagansett, Long Island
Saturday, June 13, 1942
12:35 A.M.
“What
do you mean you’re not coming with me?” John Cullen asked.
“I have no identification card, and no permit to fish.”
“That’s all right. We’ll sort it all out.”
“No, I won’t go.”
“You have to come,” Cullen said, grabbing for the man’s arm.
“Now listen,” the man replied, his tone suddenly changing, his hands trembling, his eyes narrowing, his accent becoming clearer. “How old are you, son?”
“Twenty-one,” replied John.
“You have a mother?”
“Yes.”
“A father?”
“Yes.”
“Look, you have no idea what this is all about. I don’t want to kill you. Forget about this and I’ll give you some money and you can go have a good time.”
“I don’t want your money,” John said, his heart beginning to race.
A second man was now visible through the fog, coming closer and dragging a large canvas bag. He started speaking in German to the man John had been questioning.
“Shut up,” the man called out in English, looking mortified. “Go back to the other guys.”
The other man did as he was told and retreated.
“Take a good look at my face,” the man said as he removed his dark fedora, reached into a tobacco pouch, and stuffed a wad of money into Cullen’s hand. “Look into my eyes. Would you recognize me if you saw me again?”
“No, sir,” John lied. He knew he would never forget the odd streak of silver hair through the middle of the stranger’s head, but the time for honesty had passed. He was unarmed and powerless over these men, whoever they were. “I never saw you before.”
“You might see me in East Hampton sometime. Would you know me?”
“No, I never saw you before in my life.”
“You might hear from me again. My name is George John Davis. What’s your name, boy?”