Agent Josephine, page 36
Yet in believing that her secret war was over, she was sorely mistaken. In truth, her new role was only just beginning.
Operation Torch had succeeded, but the cost would prove considerable: some 526 American dead, plus double that number of British casualties, almost half of whom would perish when HMS Avenger, a merchant ship converted into an aircraft carrier (escort), was torpedoed by a U-boat in seas just to the west of Gibraltar. The French had suffered around 1,350 dead – soldiers killed following orders, even as they had endeavoured to repulse their liberators.
Yet the prize was glittering. Some 2,000 kilometres of North African coastline, with its strategic ports, now lay in Allied hands. In just three days the Torch armada had succeeded against a well-armed, well-trained military, in good defensive positions. Despite the losses suffered, they were far fewer than senior commanders had feared. Key to that success had been the loose network of Allied intelligence agents, Apostles, Mafia contacts and North African chiefs, who had kept the intelligence flowing and ‘almost entirely eliminated resistance to the landing’, as William J. Casey, then head of OSS European intelligence operations, and a future CIA chief, would conclude.23
Equally important, the largest amphibious armada the world had ever known had endured and overcome. The 850-odd warships of Operation Torch had delivered, across thousands of kilometres of ocean, in an operation that would rival the Normandy landings in terms of logistical challenges. And of course Torch set the tone for things to come. In London, Churchill was ebullient. At last, there was something truly to celebrate. Fittingly, he hailed the first major Allied victory over Nazi Germany by ordering the church bells to be rung across the length and breadth of Britain.24
On 10 November, in London, Churchill delivered his now famous speech, which included these immortal lines: ‘Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.’ He lauded how ‘British and American affairs continue to prosper in the Mediterranean,’ forging a ‘new bond between the English-speaking peoples’. In the same speech he celebrated the victory secured by British forces, at El Alamein, in Egypt, where Rommel’s advance had finally been halted in a ‘remarkable and definite victory,’ one that had been secured even as the last French forces in Casablanca had laid down their arms.25
No one doubted that months of fierce fighting lay ahead, in an effort to liberate all of North Africa. But this did feel like the first hints of spring, after the long and dark winter of Nazi domination. Across the vast swathe of territory seized under Torch, the priority now was shipping in war materiel and men-at-arms. At Casablanca harbour, the quays were still groaning under the off-load from the first armada, when a second convoy arrived – Task Force 38 – consisting of dozens of ships packed to the gunwales. Some 31,790 American service personnel disembarked, including thousands of engineers, signallers, quartermaster and transport troops, medical staff and more. The springboard was being established, ready for the big push across North Africa.26
In Casablanca, ‘a city which combines Hollywood and the Bible,’ as he described it, Patton held meetings with Noguès, the French Resident General, plus the Moroccan Sultan and his key deputies. With all, he stressed the need to bury the hatchet and to unite against the common enemy. At the same time he warned Eisenhower, his commander-in-chief: ‘While I am convinced that Noguès is a crook, I believe that I can handle him.’ For his part, Eisenhower was determined to do everything necessary to bring the French onside. After the fighting and bloodshed, there was much to be done to win their heart and minds.27
Those few in the know appreciated what an incredibly close-run thing Operation Torch had been. The absolute key had been the dual strands of intelligence and deception. In Morocco and Algeria, the Armistice Commission and the Abwehr had been warning Berlin about possible Allied landings since as early as July that year. But as the Abwehr in particular failed to come up with any definitive proof, and as the Allied disinformation campaign had proved so convincing, Hitler refused to be persuaded. Consequently, Operation Torch had taken the Führer by complete surprise.28
His counter-stroke was as swift as many had feared it would be. On 10 November, so even before the final French surrender in North Africa, German forces moved in to occupy all of Vichy France. General de Lattre de Tassigny, a die-hard anti-Nazi, led the French resistance, but while spirited, it proved short-lived. De Tassigny – a First World War hero who’d been wounded multiple times, earning both the Légion d’Honneur from France and a British Military Cross – was tracked down, arrested, and charged with ‘abandonment of duty and attempted treason’.29
Across newly occupied former Free France, other enemies of the Nazi state were being hunted, first and foremost Paul Paillole. Helped by his underground contacts, he managed to get himself across the mountains into Spain, from where Dunderdale managed to secure his onward passage to Gibraltar and from there to London. On 19 December 1942 Paillole flew into Hendon Aerodrome, in north London, where Dunderdale’s deputy was on hand to receive him, whisking him direct to the British spymaster’s office, where Paillole was received with ‘many hugs and congratulations’.30
Feted in London by SIS, Paillole also linked up with de Gaulle and the Free French intelligence service, the BCRA. But there was precious little time to pause or to celebrate. The Torch initiative needed to be seized and capitalised upon. Shortly, Paillole would leave Britain by air, heading for those newly secured North African territories. There, he would establish his new headquarters and reforge his intelligence networks, as all Free French efforts were reorientated to this new and potent Allied springboard.
On 1 December 1942, Josephine was finally discharged from the Comte Clinic. She headed directly to Marrakesh, to rest and recuperate. She would spend such magical times in the Red City, but also ones that were full of pain. No matter where she might travel in Africa she would always come back to this place. She felt a deep and residing love for Marrakesh, and it was only natural that she would return here, when she was seeking to heal.31
As Christmas approached she found herself in the Mamounia Hotel – Churchill’s favourite place to stay in Marrakesh, where he loved to paint the views over the gardens – as the staff prepared for the coming festivities. With Morocco’s liberation they would have added poignancy. Abtey had remained in Casablanca, organising a cadre of Free French volunteers to fight in the Allied cause, and Josephine’s focus was on regaining her strength, so she could rejoin the struggle.
But she started to feel sick and feverish. Finally she called a doctor, who diagnosed paratyphoid, a bacterial fever. While paratyphoid was eminently treatable, it would mean she would have to spend a second Christmas bed-bound. Abtey came to join her, as she endured her nineteenth month fighting to be well. Once more, she held out a fevered hand to him. ‘Why do I have the despicable misfortune of being nailed once again to this damn bed, instead of being in the fight?’ she lamented.32
He could offer no easy answers.
Instead, and for a second time, he found himself erecting Christmas garlands in her makeshift sickbay – ‘a branch of a fir tree, which I decorated with stars, moons, suns and houses cut out of tinfoil, candles, oranges and lemons.’33 Consumed by fever, Josephine was deaf to the noisy Christmas celebrations echoing up from the hotel bar. As she drifted into sleep, Abtey slipped away, drawn by the sounds of laughter and singing in English – American officers celebrating the festive season.
Barely had he made the bar, when a familiar yet sinister voice cried out a greeting. It was Major Randegg. Abtey could barely believe his eyes. The Abwehr agent was dressed in an American officer’s uniform, and surrounded by similarly attired figures, which included several of the US military’s top brass. Appalled, Abtey decided to blow Randegg’s cover there and then.
Addressing a figure wearing the uniform of an American general, he declared: ‘This man’s name is Peter Randegg, General! He belongs to the Nazi secret service!’
Both the general and the accused burst into laughter. Over several glasses of whisky – ‘on the rocks, of course!’ – all was revealed. In truth, Randegg was a double agent. While masquerading as an Abwehr spy, he was actually working for the Americans and had never once ‘wished for the victory of Nazism’. In fact, as they had pitted their wits against each other in Morocco, Randegg had come to believe that it was Abtey who was an agent of Berlin, and more specifically of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the intelligence service of the SS.34
Randegg had got his people in Washington to check on Abtey. As his passport and identity turned out to be false, and bearing in mind the shadowy nature of his work, what else was Randegg supposed to conclude? Sure enough, he’d reported Abtey to Colonel Harthammer and SS Captain Stutz, in an effort to neutralise him. It was only recently that he’d realised his mistake. As all of this was revealed at the bar of the Mamounia, Abtey realised how mistaken he had been about Randegg. They were natural allies, but neither had known it, and each had come so close to having the other rubbed out.
Other than Josephine’s, there was another case of debilitating sickness in the Mamounia Hotel that December. Ollie Stewart, the black American war correspondent, had been stricken down with what seemed like food poisoning. In passing, a member of the hotel staff mentioned that ‘the woman who sings, Madame Baker,’ was also ill and confined to her room. Stewart immediately sensed a story. Hauling himself out of his sickbed, Stewart tracked her down. Josephine actually seemed pleased to see him. She’d lost track of her mother, Carrie, she explained. Amid all the chaos of war, her family must have moved, and she begged Stewart to find her ‘through your newspaper’.35
Stewart vowed to do just that, while also breaking the news that Josephine Baker was very much alive. His story, syndicated via the Associated Press (AP), was published world-wide. It duly announced that ‘Josephine Baker Is Safe,’ as the headline ran in the New York Times.36 Josephine was quoted as saying: ‘There has been a slight error – I’m much too busy to die.’37
In truth, she was putting a brave face on things. The present sickness, coming as it did on the heels of her long struggle with death, was hard to bear. She was worried if she would ever truly be well. Her legs were stick-thin, her body emaciated. Would a time ever come when she could sing and dance and captivate, as she had before?
In fact, she was about to rise again, finer than ever – a phoenix from the ashes of war.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Die Another Day
With the story breaking that Josephine Baker was back from the dead, others came calling. One was Sidney Williams, the first black director of the American Red Cross. By the time he sought her out, Josephine was convalescing in the Marrakesh villa that she and Abtey had shared prior to her long illness. Williams, who had worked in St Louis prior to the war, was charged with establishing a Liberty Club in Morocco, a Red Cross café-cum-social-club where US servicemen could grab some quality downtime.1
The American armed forces were heavily segregated, and black soldiers were mostly barred from front-line roles. Many of those charged with setting up the Liberty Clubs saw them as an opportunity to highlight the nonsense and injustice of such blind discrimination. As George W. Goodman, the director of the American Red Cross in Britain, expressed it, his aim was to ‘indicate as nearly as possible that color [sic] really does not run off and that human impetus comes out of the mind, not the complexion’.2 Sidney Williams was cut from similar cloth. In Marrakesh, he was determined to open a club where black and white GIs could mix freely, one of the first of its kind.
Having learned that she was still very much alive, he was desperate for Josephine to headline the opening night. At first she was hesitant. She could barely stand. The very idea of staying on her feet for any length of time was daunting. If she tried, even for a short while, she saw dark spots swimming before her eyes. The wound from her surgery still carried stitches and was painful. She had not so much as sung a note or danced a step for two years. She was down to a fraction of her former weight, and she worried that no amount of makeup or costumes could disguise her gaunt, emaciated frame. Upon visiting her at the Comte Clinic, one high-society French portrait artist had lamented that there was nothing left of her to paint.3
Regardless, she agreed to Williams’ request. In part, she did so out of a chill and brittle desperation. It was so incredibly sad and dispiriting to discover that even as the Allies were locked in a do-or-die struggle to vanquish Nazism – a system of beliefs based upon the mythical existence of an Übermenschen, an Aryan master-race, ruling over the Untermenschen, sub-humans – so those at the hard end of that war were likewise being segregated. It went against everything she had been fighting for, not to mention raising the ghosts of her past.
In 1917 Josephine had been caught up in the horrific race riots that had rocked her home town. In fact, it was one of the main reasons she had been so desperate to get out. Trouble flared in East St Louis, a grimy and smoke-enshrouded industrial quarter sliced through with railroad tracks and terraced slum housing, and where families lived in abandoned rail-cars. Tensions had been rising for months, and in July 1917 it had exploded – mobs torching districts and looting and lynching. It was the worst race riot in US history, a congressional report recording how at least thirty-nine black people and nine white people had been killed (though the numbers were very likely higher).
Josephine was aged just eleven at the time. She’d watched, aghast, as hundreds had fled – men, women and children running for their lives, with some of the youngest carrying their beloved pets. The horrors were so seared into her memory that she would speak of them again and again throughout her life. When interviewed for Esquire magazine in 1964, she would say of the riots: ‘I was a little girl, and all I remember is the people. They ran across the bridge from East St Louis to escape the rednecks… I never forget my people screaming… I see them running to get to the bridge. I have been running ever since.’4
No wonder that coming face-to-face with a segregated US military had proved so unsettling. Josephine shared her feelings with Abtey. He had heard of how the Nazis had pasted posters across occupied France, banning entry to ‘any black-skinned man’ – no matter whether ‘chocolate, cream and tanned, even slightly’. Frankly, Abtey hadn’t been surprised to witness that from ‘Hitler’s men’, but he had assumed those prejudices to be confined to the enemy. It was shocking to discover that skin colour was such a divisive issue in America. ‘I had thought that these were practices very personal to those we were fighting against.’5
But Abtey was in two minds about whether Josephine should perform. Was she really even physically capable? Were the risks worth it? Her doctors were dead against it. They ruled it out completely, or at least they tried to. When they realised Josephine would not be dissuaded, they issued dire threats about the possible consequences.
‘You’re being extremely stubborn, madame,’ one cautioned.
‘If de Gaulle hadn’t been stubborn, Doctor, you and I would be in concentration camps,’ she retorted.6
Josephine was a firm believer that ‘[W]e die when we choose to… we abandon the fight and let go. That moment had not come… Too much remained to be done.’7
Even so, this first breaking of her Comte Clinic purdah would prove a desperate and gruelling trial. The Liberty Club lay on Rue Chevandier de Valdrôme, just a few blocks west of the clinic where she had spent her long months of sickness. Returning to Casablanca in February 1943, she sat before the club’s make-up table, trying to do her best to disguise the ravages of almost two years spent knocking on death’s door. But her face was hollowed out like a mask, her skin dull and lustreless, her arms and legs matchstick-thin.
She chose to wear a blue polka-dot dress, not because it was her favourite, but because it was voluminous and might hide her skeletal form. The sweat on her brow and the pain from the surgical incision warned her to take it easy, even as she stepped towards the curtain. The club was bursting, cram-full of black and white officers drawn to the pull of her celebrity and her reputation as a performer without compare. Troops had even clambered onto the roof, clustering around air vents and windows to try to catch a snippet of song or a glimpse of the famed magic - that was if she could still deliver, against all the odds.
The audience was studded with dignitaries, including US General Mark Clark, Eisenhower’s deputy on Operation Torch. Offering her heart in her hands, Josephine stepped onto the stage. She opened with a ‘Negro lullaby’, a nod to the heritage she shared with many of those who formed her audience, before moving on to a song by George Gershwin, whose popular hits included ‘An American in Paris’ and ‘Summertime’ from his opera Porgy and Bess. The Gershwin number had been carefully chosen by Josephine, to showcase ‘the poetry of the American soul’.
She closed her short repertoire, perhaps inevitably, with ‘J’ai Deux Amours’, the song that she had belted out in the trenches and bunkers of the Maginot Line. Her theme tune. As she descended a low staircase built upon the stage, she began to sing the opening lines: ‘I have two loves/ My country and Paris./ By them always/ My heart is ravished…’8 It appeared as if she had transformed the song into an anthem as she sank to her knees, hands clasped in prayer – a prayer for strength, for victory, for liberty.
As the last lines faded away, and the American Army band accompanying her fell silent, a hush settled over the auditorium. Many had been moved to silent tears. But this was the calm before the storm. Moments later, the cheers and whoops erupted, as the entire audience rose to its feet. Having sung those few songs, Josephine was desperate to dance. But her head was reeling, her stomach felt as if it were on fire, her sight was flickering and the air of the auditorium seemed as if it were thick with mist, or alive with insect swarms.9
