World War II Love Stories Read online

  Roger and Rosemarie on holiday in Cornwall: she soon grew to love England.

  Roger got a job selling insurance and Rosemarie had several jobs—helping in a school and a hospital, and working in the Sudanese embassy—in between raising their three children. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, they were finally able to travel back to East Germany and see Werner Manger and her best friend from school, Elfriede Schulze, but many others had disappeared and Rosemarie was glad she had got out when she could. It must have been hard sometimes to be in one of the thousands of families that were split down the middle by the Iron Curtain, but Rosemarie was always a positive person, and there was never any question that she made the right decision in marrying Roger, who was the love of her life.

  …there was never any question that she made the right decision in marrying Roger, who was the love of her life.

  ENTERTAINING THE TROOPS

  In May 1941, Bob Hope went to March Field, California, to do a radio show for some airmen stationed there, and it went so well that he spent the rest of the war touring American military bases in England, Africa, Sicily, and the South Pacific. He explained later that, “The reason for our overwhelming welcome from troops all over the world … was that we spelled, more than anything else, ‘home.’” Dozens of other American entertainers followed suit, including Bing Crosby, Lena Horne, the Andrews Sisters—and Louis Armstrong, whom Rosemarie saw playing in Gardelegen. Pin-up Betty Grable, “the girl with the million-dollar legs,” sent autographed pictures of herself to the troops and replied personally to all the letters she received. The British also sent entertainers to the front line; comedians such as Tommy Cooper and Frankie Howerd got their first breaks performing for the troops. Vera Lynn became “The Forces’ Sweetheart” and traveled to Burma, India, and Egypt. “We’ll Meet Again,” which she performed, was one of the most famous wartime songs.

  Returning soldiers are entertained by the Andrews Sisters, Maxene, LaVerne and Patty at Pier 90 in New York, September 29, 1945.

  American comedian Bob Hope entertains troops in 1945.

  Allen Dulles & Mary Bancroft

  Shrewd, ambitious, and highly sexed, Allen Dulles never let his marriage stand in the way of his conquests.

  Mary’s “coming out” is announced in the Cambridge Chronicle, October 15, 1921. There was a thé dansant at their house, at which a small orchestra played.

  “It should work out very well,” said spymaster Allen to his new recruit, Mary, on what was only their third meeting, before anything had happened between them. “We can let the work cover the romance—and the romance cover the work.”

  Mary was the daughter of an upper-class, Harvard-trained lawyer father who suffered from a depressive illness, and a poor Irish mother who had died giving birth to her. She had a difficult relationship with the woman her father married next, but was close to her stepmother’s father, Clarence Barron, owner of The Wall Street Journal. Barron encouraged young Mary to study people of all types, even “gamblers and crooks.” It was advice she took to heart and that would stand her in good stead later in life.

  Mary was a clever but restless teenager, who had no trouble attracting men with her lively wit and shapely legs. She dropped out of Smith College, Massachusetts, after a year and at the age of 18 married a friend from school days, Sherwin Badger, of whom she soon grew bored. It was an era in which, she later wrote, “there was plenty of experimenting with different partners,” though they did it discreetly. Tragedy struck when their first baby died of fever, but two more followed—a son, Sherwin Jr., and a daughter she named Mary Jane. Then she fell in love with a pianist called Leopold Godowsky and, by the summer of 1933, after 12 years, her first marriage was over.

  Leopold decided not to leave his wife for her but, in any case, within months Mary had met the man who would become husband number two, a Swiss accountant called Jean Rufenacht. She wasn’t remotely in love with him but thought he would at least be good to her—a hope she realized was futile after the first time he knocked her out cold during an argument. Despite her misgivings, she traveled to Switzerland with Jean in 1934, only to receive the terrible news during the voyage that her father had succumbed to his depression and committed suicide.

  It was an era in which, she later wrote, “there was plenty of experimenting with different partners…”

  She and Jean married and set up home in Zurich. Mary began to study the teachings of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, in an attempt to shed light on her own complex psyche and the emotional traumas she’d been through. She ended up in analysis with the great man himself and soon became a strong advocate of his methods. Her husband was away from home on business for long stretches, and she passed the time by perfecting her French and German, writing a novel, and taking lovers.

  During trips into Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, Mary was horrified to see the repressive regime at close quarters and was distressed when the fighting began, but in the end she decided to stay in neutral Switzerland for the duration of the war. In the spring of 1942, she was asked by Gerald Mayer of the American Legation in Bern to write analyses of Nazi speeches and articles in the German media, to which she happily agreed, pleased to be able to contribute to the American war effort in some small way.

  One of the portents of coming war—German troops march into the Rhineland on March 7, 1936.

  “Scores of Affairs”

  Allen came from a family immersed in politics and religion: one of his grandfathers and an uncle were both US secretaries of state, while his father and his other grandfather were Presbyterian ministers. He graduated from Princeton University and went into diplomatic service, serving in several European countries, before returning to the States to earn a law degree in 1926. He accepted a job with the prestigious law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, and during the course of his work for them in the 1930s met Hitler and Mussolini and observed what was happening in their countries. When war began, he was one of those who argued vociferously that the United States could not remain neutral, and he personally helped a number of Jews to escape from Germany to the United States.

  Allen was an extremely charming man, with a knack for making people like him. In 1920, he had married Clover Todd, the daughter of a professor at Columbia University, but he was wildly unfaithful to her throughout their marriage. His sister estimated that he slept with “at least a hundred” other women and made no attempt to hide the affairs from his wife. Instead, he wrote to her about them in letters home from foreign trips: there was “a rather good-looking” English woman with whom he “danced and drank champagne till quite late” and “an attractive (not beautiful) Irish-French female” with whom he stayed “till the early hours.” In one letter to Clover, he confessed he didn’t deserve her, as he was “rather too fond of the company of other ladies.” But for some reason she put up with his behavior.

  In June 1942, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was formed—an intelligence agency designed to coordinate all espionage behind enemy lines and direct their information to help the military services. Allen was appointed head of the Swiss operation and sent to Bern, where he lived at Herrengasse 23 for the duration of the war. One of his first tasks was to find volunteer recruits who would help to interview the thousands of refugees pouring into Switzerland from all over Europe. He was impressed by the insightful analyses written by Mary and asked to meet her for drinks early in December 1942 at Zurich’s Hotel Baur am Lac. He sized her up quickly at that meeting, judged her to be articulate and attractive, and offered her the job of intelligence agent, which she was more than happy to accept.

  Government minister Peter A. Jay with Allen Dulles (right) at the State Department in 1947, the year the CIA began operations.

  …he was “rather too fond of the company of other ladies.”

  A few days later, Allen invited Mary to dinner at his hotel and during the evening asked if he could borrow some bed linen as his new apartment had none. When he came to pick up the linen, he made his announcem
ent, “We can let the work cover the romance—and the romance cover the work.” Mary was surprised and wondered, “What romance?” But she was delighted to become his mistress as well as his spy. Her marriage to Jean was on the rocks and Allen’s wife was back in the United States; they were attracted to each other and nothing stood in their way. Their affair began.

  Espionage Swiss-style

  Mary and Allen slipped into a routine of speaking on the telephone every morning at 9:20 a.m., when he briefed her on her rendezvous for the day, using a combination of American slang and ridiculous names for people that only they would understand. Once a week she traveled by train to Bern, checked into a hotel near the station, then took a taxi to Allen’s apartment, where they spent the day preparing a briefing for Washington. In the evening, he would call in his daily report on a secure radio telephone, leaving them free to spend the night together.

  Mary soon fell head over heels in love. “The speed with which he could think, the ingenuity with which he could find solutions to even the most complicated problems, were thrilling to me,” she later wrote in her autobiography. She decided to divorce Jean but when she told Allen, he advised her bluntly, “I can’t marry you. And I probably wouldn’t even if I could. But I want you and need you now.” Mary was hurt and disappointed, but admired his frankness and decided that she wanted to be with him, regardless of what the future held.

  She soon realized that sex was a physical need for Allen rather than an emotional act. He once stopped by her house unannounced and demanded that they perform the act quickly on the sofa in order to clear his head for a forthcoming meeting. She knew he had other lovers, too, so when he asked her to translate the memoirs of Hans Bernd Gisevius, a member of the German intelligence service (the Abwehr), Mary felt no compunction in sleeping with the German double agent. Gisevius was part of a secret resistance movement against Hitler, and Allen wanted Mary to assess whether he could be trusted. When she reported that she believed he could, he became a key contact for the OSS. Gisevius told Allen in advance about several plans to assassinate Hitler and, after the failure of the attempt on July 20, 1944, Allen helped him to escape again into Switzerland.

  CODES AND CODEBREAKERS

  Allen and Mary spoke on the telephone using American slang terms that would have been incomprehensible to any Swiss or German spies listening in. In the Pacific, American forces relied on Navajo Indians to transmit messages in their own language, which the Japanese could not interpret. Top-level messages on all sides were transmitted in complex codes, however, and the race was on to decipher those used in the enemy’s messages. At Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, England, in 1941, mathematician Alan Turing devised a machine that managed to break the German “Enigma” code, which gave them the ability to locate German U-boats in the Atlantic and protect shipping. Some believe this intelligence victory shortened the war by as much as two years. In America, in September 1940, codebreakers of the US Army Signals Intelligence broke the Japanese “Purple” code and learned that Japan was about to break off peace negotations—though they didn’t learn in time about the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  Part of a code-breaking machine at Bletchley Park, outside London.

  The codebreakers of Bletchley Park. So secret was the work that took place here that it wasn’t revealed until 1974.

  It was well-known that Allen was an American spy, and it should have been difficult for him to operate freely, but he had some major successes. He made contact with many Germans opposed to Hitler’s regime, including Fritz Kolbe, who gave him information about plans for a new Messerschmitt Me 262 fighter aircraft and passed on more than 1,600 documents; German economist Gero von Schulze-Gaevernitz, who would go on to play a key role in negotiating the surrender of German troops at the war’s end; and Gisevius, who helped him to communicate with resistance groups inside Germany. Allen also helped in the creation of resistance groups in France and Italy, reported on the existence of a laboratory creating rockets at Peenemünde, in northwestern Germany, found out about the coastal defenses in Pas de Calais, France, and detailed the damage caused by Allied bombing raids.

  Allen with his wife, Clover, July 11, 1955. She was witty, astute, and compassionate, but according to Mary, she and Allen had terrible fights at times.

  Mary’s affair with Allen continued until fall 1944 when, after the liberation of France, Allen’s wife, Clover, was able to join him in Bern. Soon after Clover arrived, Allen invited Mary to meet her and, much to her surprise, she found she liked her lover’s wife very much indeed. It didn’t take Clover long to assess the situation and she said to Mary, “I want you to know that I can see how much you and Allen care for each other—and I approve.” They became friends for life, but that was the only time Mary’s affair with Allen was referred to by either one.

  THE PLOT TO ASSASSINATE HITLER

  There had been many plans among resistance operatives in Germany to kill the Führer. In November 1939, a bomb was placed in a hall where he was speaking, but it detonated after he had left. After the defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943, when it became obvious that Germany could not win the war, several officers began to plot among themselves. One of these, Claus von Stauffenberg came to the fore when he was appointed a chief of staff to Hitler on July 1, 1944. After several aborted attempts, on July 20th he placed a briefcase containing a bomb near Hitler at a meeting in his Prussian headquarters, then excused himself to make a telephone call. The bomb went off, killing three and injuring 11, but Hitler merely suffered a burst eardrum. Most of the plotters, including von Stauffenberg, were shot the next day and thousands more suspected of resistance were rounded up by the Gestapo. One side effect of the failed plot was to destroy most of Allen’s network of contacts in Germany, as so many of them were executed.

  The death certificate of Claus von Stauffenberg, executed after the failure of his plot to kill Hitler.

  In January 1945, Allen and Clover went to Ascona on the Swiss-Italian border and met SS General Karl Wolff for secret negotiations over the surrender of German troops in Italy. Clover was not allowed to be party to his work in the way that Mary had been and, so that the men could talk in peace, she was sent out in a rowboat on Lake Maggiore, Italy, while they confirmed the details of what became known as Operation Sunrise.

  Weeks later, Mary and Clover traveled together to Kreuzlingen on the Swiss-German border and looked across at all the houses with white flags flying and Red Cross symbols pinned on their roofs. At last they could see that the war truly was over, and the relief they felt was immense.

  Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy is briefed by CIA chief Allen Dulles on July 23, 1960, about the plans to try and topple Fidel Castro in Cuba.

  A Strong Family Friendship

  After the war, Allen was made chief of the OSS in Berlin for six months before returning to the United States to work for the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He was made its director in 1953 and presided over several controversial foreign policies: the overthrow of the governments of Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954; a failed attempt to overthrow President Sukarno in Indonesia in 1958; and plots to assassinate Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and Fidel Castro in Cuba. He introduced U2 spy planes and was instrumental in the Bay of Pigs operation in 1961, when CIA-funded revolutionaries tried to invade Cuba. President John F. Kennedy discharged him after that, but he was soon reinstated and later served on the Warren Commission that investigated the President’s assassination in 1963.

  Mary accompanied Gisevius to Nuremberg in 1946 to hear him testify against Nazi officials, including his boss Hermann Göring. She divorced Jean in 1947 and in 1953 returned to live permanently in the States. The previous September, her daughter Mary Jane had married Horace Taft, grandson of William Taft, the 27th president of the United States, and had been given away by none other than Allen. In January 1969, Clover phoned Mary to tell her of Allen’s death from influenza and pneumonia. The two women remained friends until Clover’s death in 197
4, after which Mary kept in touch with her daughter Joan.

  Hans Bernd Gisevius testifying in defense of an old colleague at Nuremberg in 1946. Mary accompanied Gisevius to the trials there. When she asked if he wanted to go, he replied, “Of course not. Who likes to jump into ice water?”

  Mary’s affair with Allen Dulles had been an unusual one in many respects, conducted in an isolated country during dark times, when they both had important and potentially dangerous work to do. But they came through it with an extraordinary bond of trust and respect that would transcend continents and marriages. It was love of a particularly unconventional kind.

  It was love of a particularly unconventional kind.

  Hudson & Betty Turner

  “The Yanks all had the same line, you know. They told me I was beautiful, and I knew damn well I wasn’t.”

  Hudson (see here) and Betty, on the right (see here) with a girlfriend in New Zealand. He was 20 and she was 17 when they met.

  Hudson Turner was only 18 when he joined the army, but he distinguished himself in action in the Pacific, coming home with three Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart. Among his many wartime memories, he couldn’t forget the cute girl he’d dated during a brief stopover in Auckland.