Comfort to the Enemy (2010)

Comfort To The Enemy

Elmore Leonard

*

Chapter
1

The Hanging Of Willi Martz

A German Prisoner Of War At The Camp Called Deep Fork
had taken his own life, hanged himself two nights ago in the compound'
s w ashroom. Carl Webster was getting ready to look into it. Carl's boss Bob McMahon, 17 years the United States marshal at Tulsa, said there was a question of whether the man did it on his own or was helped. McMahon shook his head over it.

I doubt you'll learn what happened. He's a grenadier, the dead guy, Willi Martz. You ask about it, they look down their nose at you, deciding if they want to tell you anything.

I know what you mean, Carl said. Some of 'em ever talk to you, it's like they're doing you
a f
avor. But then they march off to work like the Seven Dwarfs singing the panzer song, Heiuber Afrikas boden. Or the one about Horst Wessel, that pimp they call a Nazi saint. I never saw a bunch of guys liked to sing so much. And they're serious about it. You imagine GIs singing like that?

The POW camps in Oklahoma were full of Afrika Korps tank crewmen and grenadiers, most of them young and arrogant, hard-shell Nazis by the time they came out of Hitler Youth. A German soldier who wasn't a serious Nazi reported the Allied invasion of Normandy four months ago, read it to the Afrika Korps Nazis in the messhall from the front page of the Okmulgee Daily Times, and the Nazis called him a traitor and threw food at him and knocked him around for spreading enemy propaganda. The Africa veterans refused to believe they were losing the war; any reports of enemy victories had to be lies.

This could be what happened to Willi Martz: he was critical of the Fnhrer or called Goring a fat drug addict, and was lynched in the washroom.

Carl Webster stood before a map of America that covered an entire wall in Bob McMahon's office in the federal court building, Tulsa. Across nearly all of the 48 states were pushpins that showed the locations of the more than 500 POW camps in the country; 35 in Texas, 15 in Oklahoma, 17 across the line in Arkansas, most of the camps in southern states, wher e e nlisted men among the prisoners were put to work in farm labor, as allowed by the Geneva Convention.

Carl would be going to the camp near Okmulgee, his hometown, the one called Deep Fork after the river that ran through that part of the county and separated the camp from Carl's dad's property, a thousand acres of pecan trees and a dozen oil wells pumping for the war effort. Carl's dad Virgil Webster had been wealthy since the oil boom 40 years ago, but didn't act like it. Texas Oil worked the half section they'd leased, paid Virgil in royalties while he tended his pecan trees and Carl, growing up, raised cows for beef, fed them a year and took them to market in a stocktrailer. He was 15 when he shot a man trying to make off with his cows. There were stories in magazines about Carl and a book called Carl Webster: the Hot Kid of the Marshals Service, that told of his facing down fugitive offenders with the warning, If I have to pull my weapon I will shoot to kill.

What Carl couldn't understand about the Afrika Korps guys- 250,000 of them walked over to the British lines in Tunisia and surrendered - they still believed they were winning the war. Carl would say to them, You quit fighting, didn't you? Climbed out of your tanks with your hands in the air?

Yes, of course, but they seemed surprised by the question. They surrendered because they had no fuel for their tanks, no shells for the flak guns, the 88s they used on British armor. Once the RAF cut off our supply lines crossing the Mediterranean, what could we do?

When you give up, Carl said, That's how you tell you're getting beat. And it's gonna get worse. There's no way in the world you guys are gonna win this war. You know how many Germans are here as prisoners? A good three-hundred and fifty thousand. You know how many Japanese we have in camps compared to you guys? Hardly any. You know why? Japs aren't allowed to surrender. It comes to that, they get out a hand grenade and pull the pin.

Carl turned from the map of America to Bob McMahon at his desk, the lawman Carl first met when he shot the cow thief trying to make off with his stock. McMahon came by to investigate and heard how Carl had shot the trespasser out of his saddle at 200 yards. McMahon gave Carl his card with the gold marshal's star on it Carl could feel under his thumb. Bob was 56 now, ready to retire and plant a victory garden, sit and watch his tomatoes grow.

Carl was married to Louly Brown, seven years now but no children; they were ready to start a family, the war came along to hold up their plans. At the time they met people believed Louly was Pretty Boy Floyd's girlfriend, not just a cousin of his wife's, and Louly let them believe it till she got tired of the act she was putting on.

In 1942 Carl was 36 when he tried to enlist in the First Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas, and was turned down because of his age and hi s i rregular heartbeat. He tried using his influence as a famous lawman -news stories and the book written about him -a U
. S
. marshal who had shot and killed a dozen armed offenders in the line of duty. He was told the First Cavalry did not have a regiment for inexperienced middle-aged men. Next he tried the Marine Corps, Virgil's choice when he ran away from home at 16, serving with the marine detachment aboard the battleship Maine when the dons blew her up in Havana harbor in February of '98; and was with Huntington's marines at Guantanamo when a Spanish sniper sent him home aboard the hospital ship Solace. Virgil wrote a letter to the Marines but it didn't do Carl any good. He was turned down. But now the sailor in the Tulsa recruiting office had an idea. You have a trade, you can join a navy construction battalion, the Seabees. They don't care how old you are.

Carl went for it: joined the Navy, made it through boot camp and came out of advanced Seabee training at Port Hueneme, California, a Bosun's Mate First Class, assigned to Construction Battalion Maintenance Unit 585. In a letter home he told Louly most of these guys had no idea how to wear a sailor hat; he told her he'd gotten a tattoo, Carlos on his left shoulder in blue script with red highlights for a buck.

When they closed the apartment in Tulsa Louly had moved in with Virgil and his common-law wife Narcissa Raincrow near Okmulgee. But now Louly wrote to say she felt she had to get out of their house, she didn't fit in with their ways.

Louly said in her letter, You know how old your dad is? He's seventy. He sits all day with newspapers and gives you his opinion of world events, and I'm tired of nodding my head.

To escape, Louly joined the Women Marines, which Virgil called the BAMs, the Big Ass Marines. By the time Carl was in New Guinea ready to make the 200-mile jump to Los Negros in the Admiralty Islands, where CBMU 585 would maintain an air strip, Louly was a gunnery instructor at the Marine Air Base, Chapel Hill, N
. C
.

Carl wrote to Louly from New Guinea saying, Believ
e i
t or not, the First Cavalry is the outfit that took Los Negros from the Japs, the first action in their history they didn't ride in on horses. The island is secure, the cavalry's waiting on us to come and get the air strip in shape. General MacArthur referred to taking Los Negros as 'putting the cork in the bottle,' but I don't know what he meant by it.

Barely two months later on Los Negros, Carl became CBMU 585's first and only medals winner when he was shot by Japanese soldiers who weren't supposed to be there: a Purple Heart for his gunshot wounds and a Navy Cross for killing the last two Japs on the island. Carl said it was the only shootout he was in he didn't see coming. His wounds left him with a limp until his honorary discharge, back to wearing his marshal's star, by the end of June, 1944.

He told Louly in a letter he was amazed at the number of camps they'd built and all the P
. O. W
.'s they brought over in the two years he was away.

The troop ships take our boys to Europe and come back loaded with Germans. They're full-up in England, no room for any moreuin case you were wondering who's winning the war. Are you still showing jarheads how to get the most out of a Browning machine gun?

*

Carl said to his boss he'd talk to Jurgen before investigating the suicide. Jurgen Schrenk, a young captain who'd been a member of Rommel's reconnaissance team: he was one of the interpreters for the 2200 prisoners at Deep Fork, a camp for officers, noncoms and enlisted men, nearly all of them Afrika Korps.

You'll have to find him first, McMahon said. Jurgen's busted out again, the fourth time this year.

Four times that we know of, Carl said. I think he slips out whenever he feels like it and gets back before he turns up missing. He has to be seeing some girl.

If he is, McMahon said, and she knows he's a POW, she can be brought up on a charge of treason.

It's why he won't tell where he goes, Carl said. I've talked to him enough. He sounds lik
e s
ome guy lives up the road, talks with hardly a speck of accent, but you can hear it if you listen. Like the way he says Ah-frica. You know he lived in Detroit a couple of years, in the Thirties when his dad brought the family over. The dad was an engineer with Ford Motor in Germany, some kind or production expert. Jurgen was in his teens when they went home. Three years later he's driving a tank into Poland. Forty-one he went to North Africa with Rommel and he's been here since forty-three. He acts stuck-up if other POWs are around, but not to the point you want to hit him. He thinks he's smarter than I am.

McMahon said, Is he?

He remembers what he reads and plays it back like it's something he thought of. I talk to Wesley about him. Wesley says if he's up to something besides seeing a girl, he doesn't know what it could be.

Wesley was the former Adair County Sheriff, now Colonel Wesley Sellers, commander of the Deep Fork POW camp.

That's right, McMahon said, you and Wesley go back a ways.

He was with the posse the time we cornered Peyton Bragg and Peyton tried to run off on us. Wesley told the newspapers I shot Peyton with a Winchester driving away at four hundred yards, in the dark.

I remember, McMahon said, and it was only what, three hundred? You always managed to have reliable witnesses.

People can't help but exaggerate wanting t
o t
ell
a g ood story. What the Krauts do, Carl said, is lie with a straight face thinking they're funny. You notice other Krauts standing around trying not to grin. Jurgen does it, but doesn't seem to care if you catch on. The thing about Jurgen, he's a likeable guy. He says he got along great with Rommel. Why wouldn't he? He gets along with everybody. Wesley says he could have Jurgen transferred to another camp, but what's the harm of his slipping out for a few days? He always comes back, doesn't he? There're camps where they even let the POW officers go out, as long as they stay within fifty miles.

McMahon said, I'm not going to worry about it till I have to.

Carl said, Not when you have a bigger percentage of inmates trying to bust out of federal prisons than these guys wandering off. They've never had it so good.

Carl Webster had been dealing with POWs pretty much as a full-time job since coming home with his medals. The Provost Marshal's office in Washington had asked Carl to keep an eye on the POWs in Oklahoma. He talked to young officers like Jurgen and read what he could find on Adolf Hitler and the Wehrmacht, learning about the SS and the Gestapo, and got to see Nazi Party films on Hitler taking over Germany in 1934. Carl said they were fairly boring movies, hundreds o f t housands of Krauts goose-stepping past Hitler and giving him the old Sieg Heil.

Out of three-hundred and sixty thousand German POWs in this country, Carl said to McMahon, we get about a hundred escape attempts a month. That's three a day from the more than five hundred camps across the country. Jurgen says the easiest way is to walk off a work crew out on some farm. You know officers and noncoms don't have to work if they don't feel like it, but it's a way to get out of the camp. I met Jurgen for the first time, he was working for my dad, swatting pecans off the trees with a bamboo pole. Jurgen gets twenty a month for being an officer. Generals get forty bucks. I doubt any of them work. Von Arnim, who ran the show in North Africa? He's at Camp Clinton in Mississippi. It's one of the biggest camp we have with ten generals there, each one with his own house and his orderlies. But the enlisted men, they're all out on farms working morning to night. Muskogee County, POWs work a month to bring in the spinach at harvest time.

They were farmers back home, McMahon said. They miss it.

Jurgen showed me pictures he has from Tunisia. He'
s i
n his Afrika Korps shorts, the kind he wears all the time, no shirt on. He's grinning, wants you to see his perfect teeth. In one he's brushing his hair out of his eyes, bleached from the African sun, smiling, always smiling. I told him he could be a poster bo y f or the Happy Nazi Party. He says he was a Hitler Youth poster in 1936.

Tell him, McMahon said, if he has a girlfriend it's okay, we won't bother her.

You mean till the war's over.

Some lonely farm girl, McMahon said, doesn't care he's the enemy. Or he gets by playing he's American.

I think he could.

She picks him up on the highway and takes him home. She's alone, her husband could be off fighting Germans.

Carl said, Two or three days with her, the MPs find him sitting in the OK
Cafe
, at the counter with PW stenciled on the back of his shorts. He gets solitary and bread and water for a week. Jurgen told me escaping was a jokeunothing to it. He's still tan -I think he works at it. It gets cold, he puts on an overcoat with the shorts. In some of the Africa pictures that's what he's wearing, the overcoat over bare legs. Smiling. He's twenty-six, he's been a soldier going on six years.