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Chapter 16. London, 1943-1945: Tim Nordhall Deep Under

Tim Nordhall flew on a Sabena DC-3 from the Congo to the Canary Islands. From there, he flew to London on a Pan Am DC-4. London was to be his home for the next two years. He loved the city’s atmosphere and antiquity, as with Big Ben (in St. Stephen’s Tower near Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament) shuddering the hour-strokes through fog so thick neither German bomber nor American tourist could navigate—leave it to Cockney taxi jockeys.

Tim underwent several months of general training as an O.S.S. operative. He dabbled in many disciplines, from cryptography to parachuting, from secret radio transmission to elements of spy craft like dead drops and shadowing. In early 1943 he began living a double life.

On the Navy side, as Lt. Tim Nordhall, he worked for Commander Jack Stone, a friendly enough bureaucrat with a Reserve commission and a University of Chicago engineering degree. Jack Stone was 45—a tall, graying, jovial man with crisp blue eyes and a wry little grin. He served in a tangled chain of command that ultimately led to the Allied High Command.

On the O.S.S. side, as Major Robert Malone, things were kept purposely murkier. Officially, he was attached for pay and records to an office in Whitehall, in a back street, behind closed doors and in utter secrecy. It was a place he was never meant to see—save things going haywire one night in autumn 1944.

Tim’s primary contact on the O.S.S. side, as 1943 wore on, was a shadowy figure code-named Jaguar, whose real name Tim did not know. Jaguar was a civil servant someplace in the City of London, or at least pretended to be. They met for the first time a month after Tim’s arrival in London. This was the double or triple agent of whom Ivor Crane had spoken.

Tim spent most of his workweek on the Navy side, as if the O.S.S. side did not exist. He worked with a Naval Intelligence branch that analyzed captured enemy munitions and equipment. Their working location was a village outside London—Tining Mallow to its British workers; Marshmallow Heights to its American work force. Every morning at dawn, a train would come in from the southeast, from London, disgorging about 2,000 men and women in a variety of military and civilian garb, speaking a variety of languages from English to French to Polish and beyond. Some of the work was highly top secret, but most of it had the standard Government nod of Secret. Much of it was carried on in a maze of converted railroad repair workshops belonging to the London tube system, which had sent cars and locos out this way for servicing before the war. In the middle of the sooty little town was the ruin of a glass and iron Victorian structure that had been bombed to rubble early in the Blitz. Inside that hulked a half dozen or more rusting steam locomotives amid piles of debris and coal. The yard had been slated for obsolescence, but now no resources could be spared to clean it up. Like so many other things in a world on hold, that would have to wait for the future after the war, when and if that ever came. The beast of war dragged on and on, year after year, swallowing entire childhoods and youthful years in its bizarre and hideous maw.

Tim and his section, which worked for Jack Stone, were tasked with examining salvaged Axis maritime equipment. Tim shared a small office with two female petty officers who specialized in radio equipment. They were plain young women from the Prairies, who brought with them a small town, white-bread, no-nonsense dedication. They were smart and liked to joke in innocent little ways that Tim found pleasant but frustratingly inhibited.

Tim had a tall, narrow window overlooking a flowerbed bounded by remnant gravel ballast from the town’s fading rail factory days. Tining Mallow was slowly becoming a suburb of London. Before the war, people of the middle manager class had started buying little homes on tidy streets and commuting to the capital to work in its banks and administrative departments. Now the town was swollen with American and British military personnel. Marshmallow Heights had a booming little American Main Street with jazz and bebop joints that swung all night. The pubs might close and open at bizarre hours by American tastes, but soft drinks were on sale at any time, and shifts were forever coming and going at staggered hours, so Main Street glittered with activity around the clock.

There was a large bomber command base not far away, and it was not uncommon to see young women in uniform pouring outside suddenly to watch overhead as a hundred machines droned home— some often with an engine out, or an engine burning and trailing a long smoke plume. Once or twice, Tim watched a hapless B-17 or B-24—quietly engulfed in flames and ugly black roiling gray-black smoke—disappear with a loud clapping echo into the hillsides. Men who had fought to hang on to life, sometimes missing limbs or holding dying comrades, would make it all the way from Dresden or Berlin, only to perish in an Anglo-Saxon hillside. For hours, smoke would mingle with ashen air. There were usually no survivors. The lone little box of a fire engine from the airfield could be seen trundling on its obligatory inspection, far away along stone-walled country lanes, looking ineffectual and out of place, taking its time to get there with flashing blue lights but mute siren.