“Your name’s not on the passenger list,” said Craig when I walked into the waiting room of the Patuxent airport. “You’d better see what you can do about it.” It was a hot spring night and I had just flown down from Washington, expecting to board a transatlantic plane which was scheduled to take off at midnight.
“There must be some mistake,” I said. “I checked on that just before I left Washington.” Craig went with me to the counter where I asked the pretty WAVE on duty to look up my name. It wasn’t on her list.
“Let’s see what they know about this at the main office,” she said with an encouraging smile as she dialed Naval Air Transport in Washington. The next ten minutes were grim. The officer at the other end of the line wanted to know with whom I had checked. Had it been someone in his office? I didn’t know. All I knew was that I had to get on that plane. I had important papers which had to be delivered to our Paris office without delay. Was I a courier? Yes, I was—well, that is, almost, I faltered to the WAVE ensign who had been transmitting my replies. “Here, you talk to him,” she said, adding, as she handed me the receiver, “I think he can fix it up.”
After going through the same questions and getting the same answers a second time, the officer in Washington asked to speak to the yeoman who was supervising the loading of the plane. He was called in and I waited on tenterhooks until I heard him say, “Yes, sir, I can make room for the lieutenant and his gear.” Turning the phone over to the WAVE, he asked with a reassuring grin, “Feel better, Lieutenant?”
I was so limp with relief that I scarcely noticed the tall spare man in civilian clothes who had just come up to the counter. “That’s Lindbergh,” said Craig in a low voice. “Do you suppose he’s going over too?”
Half an hour later we trooped out across the faintly lighted field to the C-54 which stood waiting. Lindbergh, dressed now in the olive-drab uniform of a Naval Technician, preceded us up the steps. There were ten of us in all. With the exception of three leather-cushioned chairs, there were only bucket seats. Craig and I settled ourselves in two of these uninviting hollows and began fumbling clumsily with the seat belts. Seeing that we were having trouble, Lindbergh came over and with a friendly smile asked if he could give us a hand. After deftly adjusting our belts, he returned to one of the cushioned seats across the way.
Doors slammed, the engines began to roar and, a few seconds later, we were off. We mounted swiftly into the star-filled sky and, peering out, watched the dark Maryland hills drop away. We dozed despite the discomfort of our bent-over positions and didn’t come to again until the steward roused us several hours later with coffee and sandwiches. Afterward he brought out army cots and motioned to us to set them up if we wanted to stretch out. As soon as we got the cots unfolded and the pegs set in place, he turned out the lights.
Craig was dead to the world in a few minutes but I couldn’t get back to sleep. To the accompaniment of the humming motors, the events of the past weeks began to pass in review: that quiet April afternoon at Western Sea Frontier Headquarters in San Francisco when my overseas orders had come through—those orders I had been waiting for so long, more than a year. It was in March of 1944 that I first learned there was a chance of getting a European assignment, to join the group of officers working with our armies in the “protection and salvaging of artistic monuments in war areas.” That was the cumbersome way it was described. The President had appointed a commission with a long name, but it came to be known simply as the Roberts Commission. Justice Roberts of the Supreme Court was the head of it. It was the first time in history that a country had taken such precautions to safeguard cultural monuments lying in the paths of its invading armies.
It was the commission’s job to recommend to the War Department servicemen whose professional qualifications fitted them for this work. I had been in the Navy for two years. Before that I had been director of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, one of San Francisco’s two municipal museums of the fine arts. The commission had recommended me, but it was up to me to obtain my own release. I had been in luck on that score. My commanding officer had agreed to let me go. And more important, my wife had too. Only Francesca had wanted to know why Americans should be meddling with Europe’s art treasures. Weren’t there enough museum directors over there to take care of things? Of course there were in normal times. But now they needed men in uniform—to go in with the armies.
And after all that planning nothing had happened, until three weeks ago. Then everything had happened at once. The orders directed me to report to SHAEF for duty with the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section, G-5, and additional duty with the Allied Control Council for Germany.