The Tenth Day

PROLOGUE

10 p.m. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 10, 1946

NEW YORK CITY

The two women walking west on 59th St. shared a slight resemblance, maybe not as sisters – there was no sign of familial intimacy in their interactions - but there was definitely a physical similarity. A second glance would confirm that one was a bit more stylish than the other. They had moments earlier dined on Irish Stew at Longchamps on Madison Ave., first toasting their upcoming trip by clinking champagne cocktails, and were still feeling the festive mood as they walked. Their bill had come to slightly more than $5, which Lucille Black had paid, since it was at her invitation that Ellen Ferguson had joined her for dinner.

As they walked toward the Plaza Hotel, crossing Fifth Ave. Lucille suggested a brief walk into Central Park for a final breath of fresh air. Ten steps into the park, behind a bush, Ellen Ferguson felt the first sensation of cold steel entering her back. It was the first of five strong plunges of a knife that Lucille had purchased days earlier at a pawn shop in Dallas.

Lucille stripped the dead woman, taking her shoes and jewelry, cramming them into her purse and pockets, leaving the bloody dress, but cutting out the label. She emptied the contents of the dead woman’s large purse into her own, except for a mirror which got tangled in the lining and was left by Lucille. She then tore the label out of the purse before tossing it into a nearby trash can. She covered the body with the recent winter’s scattered leaves.

There had been little religion in Lucille’s life, her mother rousting the church messengers knocking at the door. But Lucille found the Bible at the hospital, nothing much else to read, and while not wholly convinced, found some solace in it. So, she paused to look down at the leaf strewn body and hoped Ellen Ferguson would find her peace.

Dusting herself off, she checked to see if there was any blood on her clothes; there wasn’t. Her gloves were a fright. She slipped them off and dropped them into her purse. She held tightly onto the dead woman’s room key, looked at the room number, now her room number. It was more than a key, more like a membership card, and she wanted to feel its hardness as she walked out of Central Park, into the Plaza Hotel, hurrying through the lobby to ride the elevator to the ninth floor. She found Ellen’s room, the bed that was now hers and collapsed onto it. But only briefly. Standing up, she opened the closet, measured the clothes against her body. The sizing was ideal. The passport was in another purse; she looked at the picture and nodded. Close enough.

She sat on the edge of the bed contemplating the next ten days, snapping out of it to pull open the bedside table drawer. She found the King James Version of the Bible and using a pen to search its pages, finally find what she was searching for and circled it:

Isaiah 13:11: And I will punish the world for their evil, and the wicked

for their iniquity; and I will cause the arrogancy of the proud to cease,

and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible.

She tore out the page and slipped it into one of Ellen’s purses. And only then did she undress, shower and get into the bed. By morning she would be Ellen Ferguson, and all traces of Lucille would have vanished.

DAY ONE

APRIL 12, 1946

ONE

8 a.m. FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 1946

PIER 84, NEW YORK CITY

Pier 84 was a circus. In two hours, the Maxwell Gordon USN, was to leave its berth, and until then, the crowds would grow, the Navy Band would play, and confetti would fly.

Marine Corps Major Jim Stanton climbed to the Top Deck, joining the ship’s skipper, Navy Captain Charles Cooper, deciding against conversation, since he didn’t want to hear once again Cooper’s complaints about how Washington couldn’t stop tampering with the details of this sailing.

Stanton remembered a meeting in New York earlier in the month with Navy and Army brass, when the ship’s schedule had been discussed. When Captain Cooper estimated a late afternoon arrival on the tenth day, an Army colonel inquired as to the possibility of slowing the evening speeds down to allow for a picturesque early morning arrival on the 11th day.

The colonel walked right into the cliché – getting into dangerous waters. Cooper bristled, but his cause was taken up by a more political admiral, who patiently explained that the Navy was not operating a Cunard Line schedule. The Navy’s mission was to be as expeditious as possible, and it would proceed full speed ahead in carrying the women to Bremerhaven. If for no other reason, it would make sense that the longer the women remained afloat the more possibilities there would be for problems. As Stanton would eventually find out, an unusually prophetic statement from the old seaman.

However, the Army did have a vested interest Stanton had to concede, since these were all Army wives.

He nodded to Lieutenant Commander Warren Tygrett, the captain’s executive officer, who had walked over to stand beside Cooper. The three men – Stanton, perhaps the tallest of the three - were in dress uniforms, the Naval officers in their dark winter blues, Stanton in his Marine Corps forest green woolen trousers and the long jacket known in the Marines as a blouse, all displaying their combat ribbons. All wearing visored caps.

Stanton could feel the dockside energy, women arriving, cabs leaving, luggage being carried aboard and realized how quickly America was adapting. It was almost eight months since the mushroom clouds had hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the war along with its daily agonies of War Department telegrams, sending America on to its next adventure.

The country was responding, putting four years of war behind, industry switching overnight from banging out tanks to rolling out cars, airlines creating overseas commercial routes, and less and less uniforms were being seen in bars and on the street. Stanton would be out of his in a month. That’s what he was told when given this last assignment to head up the security detail on a ship with 397 women. An assignment far below his rank – a security detail like this usually drew a lieutenant or, stretching it, a captain, but it was an important run and they wanted him.

He draped his hand on the rail, felt a flutter, knew he couldn’t show it shaking – damn, he was only 34 – reassuring himself that this crossing would be the snap the senior brass said it would be. A smoke might be the thing here, mellow him out some, not that he could light up on duty. Or even off-duty, since he was trying to quit. But one of those Luckys in his cabin would really be fine right now.

Tygrett said something to the captain, who nodded. Stanton had found Tygrett to be amiable enough, remembering, however, that first impressions of fellow military officers were irrelevant. Stanton looked at the crowd of women waiting to board, and their relatives surrounding them, then briefly down to the slapping of the water against the ship’s hull far below, then back up, glancing behind him into the Bridge and the Wheelhouse with its glistening brass, knobs and dials and polished woods, the telephones to communicate throughout the ship. He caught Captain Cooper looking at him, and snapped out of his reverie, requesting they start boarding as scheduled. Capt. Cooper checked his watch and told him to proceed, turning to Commander Tygrett, ordering him to prepare the crew.

~ ~ ~

Diane Mason sat in the rear of a cab that threaded through the swelling traffic under Manhattan’s West Side Highway, barely hearing the cab driver as he came to a stop outside Pier 84.

Have a good trip, miss. I just hope your husband is doing to the Germans what they would have done to us. Diane squashed her cigarette in the ash tray, handed him a $5 bill, got her change - turned her bags over to a sergeant in the Army’s Quartermaster Corps and dashed onto the pier and into a sea of bodies caught in last minute embraces.

She looked at the women lined up in front of the gangway. The first post-war Easter was only nine days away on this morning of April 12, 1946, and it wouldn’t have taken a fashion columnist to gauge its influence on the women leaving - new hats with veils, sweet pea bonnets, white pique berets, broadtail jackets, wool short coats, silver foxes. How ill at ease most of them seemed in their new clothes. In contrast, Diane, in her double-breasted camel hair topcoat, was as much at ease as you might expect in a general’s wife.

The gangway caught Diane’s eye, barely swaying in the light breeze of the spring morning, beckoning like a magic carpet. You stepped onto it in New York and you stepped off 3,583 nautical miles later in Bremerhaven. You left the Happy Days Are Here Again tempo of a post-war victorious America and arrived to the funeral dirge of a defeated, weary Germany.

The recently painted Maxwell Gordon, gently bobbing at the pier, appeared to be straining to get on with it, anxious to carry this first group of Army wives on its ten day voyage across the Atlantic.

~ ~ ~

Stanton walked down to the Lounge Deck of the ship, where he was joined by Master Sergeant Martin Rudd, who wore an MP band on his dress jacket sleeve and a .45 on his hip. Rudd was almost too delicate-looking to be a Marine Corps master sergeant, but, if so, he didn’t seem to be aware of it, handling his troops with the assurance and strength expected of his rank.

Stanton had met Rudd a few weeks earlier when they made their first visit to check out the ship, guided about by Lt. Commander Tygrett, and had returned twice to complete boarding plans and security postings.

Stanton’s men below had moved the ladies into an inner roped-off area, separating them from the crowd here to see them off - there were shouts back and forth, with relatives leaning over for last minute hugs and instructions.

What do you think, Major? Rudd asked.

I want 397 bodies counted and double-counted, names checked and double-checked. No more, no less, Stanton said. Easy to stop someone now, but tricky as hell to catch ‘em once they’re aboard. I don’t want to be shooing relatives off this ship. Though, I can’t imagine what damn fool would want to get on this ship if she didn’t have to. Nobody’s writing romantic novels about this version of Europe, or what’s left of it.

The men know the procedure, and I’ll be down there with them, Rudd answered.

Stanton checked his watch. Okay, let’s see if we can do it without having a crisis. I doubt it, but let’s try. He and Rudd walked down to the Shelter Deck, down a ramp, across the gangway and onto the pier.

The women filed in - slender ones, heavy ones, some beaming, some wiping away tears. The only children were teenagers. Those with young children would wait for the Army ships that were being retrofitted to accommodate them. The first was scheduled for the following week. The women presented their Army identification, which had been mailed to them along with their instructions. The Navy Band was playing This Is My Country as they marched onto the ship.

Their long term luggage had been picked up at their hotels the day before and was stowed in the Hold Deck. The larger long term luggage, which had been shipped earlier from their home cities directly to an Army warehouse, had been transferred to the ship the previous day. The women carried with them their short term travel luggage, which was secured with Army name tags, and dropped off in an assigned area near the ship. The bags, checked against a master sheet which listed the assigned cabin numbers, were taken to the cabins by the crew, entering the ship on a gangway leading to the Second Deck.

TWO

10 a.m. FRIDAY, APRIL 12

PIER 84, NEW YORK CITY

From above Stanton watched Diane Mason come aboard. He had spent two weeks off and on with two smooth-talking Army captains from Madison Ave. trying to convince Diane to take this trip on the Maxwell Gordon, explaining how seriously the Army needed a spokeswoman for the ladies, the wife of a general. Her husband was the highest ranking officer represented on the ship, Major General Barry Mason, attached to the staff of General Mark Clark, Commanding General of Germany. The problem was Diane had other travel plans – she had wanted to fly on Pan Am’s new route to Europe, rather than spend ten days on a ship with 400 women. She offered the rationale that she wasn’t particularly suited for the role of spokeswoman, since she wasn’t a real Army wife, her husband being a wartime appointee. The captains had persuaded the reluctant Stanton to join the meetings, where he forced himself to push the Army’s position, putting aside his personal feelings of seeing her side.

Finally, it took a colonel from the staff of the Commanding General of the First Army, driving in from Fort Jay on New York’s Governor’s Island, to lend the gravitas and one morning over cheese Danish, she consented, and the Madison Avenue captains went back to their daily routines of lunchtime cocktails and dealing with the press. And Stanton went on to prepare for the trip.

Diane joined the women crowded against the rails, and with no friends or relatives below she waved farewell to the country that had treated her so well these past 32 years.

Lucille stepped onto the gangway, hair trimmed, curled and resting under a dark pill box hat, easily among the smarter-looking women in her tweed suit and heels, carrying her alligator purse and patent leather hat-boxes, as testimonial to the fashion sense of Ellen Ferguson, whose clothes she was wearing and who Lucille had now become. Why shouldn’t she look pretty and rested - she hadn’t done anything the past year, had she?

An Army bus waiting outside the Plaza Hotel had earlier ferried Lucille and a number of the wives to the pier, and once there she watched as they lined up to show their credentials. She showed them Ellen’s, and the Army officer handed her a packet with a cabin assignment. Among the sheets of information was a diagram of the ship, an explanation as to how the ship would be conforming in time as it passed through the six time zones – upon entering a new zone the change would be effected at midnight, moving one hour ahead in each instance. There was only one bad moment: a Marine near the check-in desk who gave her a cursory glance as he did the other women, then snapped his head back as if he recognized her. But the line was moving on and he resumed his position. What was that? It flitted through her mind quickly and forgotten just as quickly.

Lucille, now on the crowded Lounge Deck, squeezed through to the rail, joining the women waving a final goodbye to the festive crowd below. Who would be down there to wave back at her?

At 10:40 a.m., Stanton joined Captain Cooper on the bridge and told him the group was aboard ship and secured. Okay, major, he said, let’s go sailing. The band was given the signal and struck up Auld Lang Syne and as the music faded into the breeze, there was a final cheer from the wives aboard ship and the relatives on the pier.

The Maxwell Gordon, with the rumble and vibration of its engines only partially in action, moved slowly out of its slip toward the middle of New York Harbor, the tiny tugboats towing it through the Narrows, the fading peals of the bell being rung by the quartermaster signaling the start of the watch, the air vibrating from the ship’s horns bellowing its farewell.

Stanton had been issued office space near the Navy offices on the Boat Deck, but had declined when first visiting the ship, saying that he wanted to be in the center of things, with more direct access to his men. In truth he wanted separation from the Navy, from the other officers, even to a degree from his own men, whose working security office was located on the Hold Deck, administered by Sgt. Rudd. He found his area of solitude on the Second Deck in two adjoining cabins, bunking in one. In the other he had the bunks removed and converted into his office - a desk, filing cabinet, three wooden chairs facing the desk. A chart detailing the Marine detachment - a platoon of 36 men on board - was tacked to the wall, along with a line diagram of the ship, a roster of the ship’s departmental responsibilities among other of the ship’s notices.

He was waiting to meet with his senior NCOs, nothing that hadn’t been discussed before – there was to be no military bullshit with the wives. But it had to be hammered home. The rules were for the troops, not the wives. He was at his desk looking at Rudd’s duty roster when Rudd arrived with two NCOs. He thought it best not to get into the politics of what had precipitated this trip, the politics, both civilian and military.

When he made it through Officers Candidate Class, soon to be renamed Officers Candidate School, then onto The Basic School, where new Marine lieutenants were indoctrinated in the duties of infantry leaders, he had been assigned to Intelligence – training at the Francis Scott Key Hotel in Frederick, Md., the Navy’s venture into this dark new world. The OSS was just getting started, which was to become the CIA, and the Marines being the Marines he had been sent to a lot of places where bullets were flying; perhaps, the Marines had its own interpretation of Intelligence.

Because he had been privy to Intelligence matters, he had some knowledge of what this trip was about beyond the obvious. While it appeared that the government was doing something noble in sending the wives to the troops, as with most of everything conceived in Washington, politics was leading the way.

The war in Europe had ended May 1945, and Germany had been divided into four zones, American, French, English and Russian. The War Department, soon to be renamed the less confrontational sounding, Defense Department, had its reasons to suspect Russia’s intentions, and wanted Russia to know that America planned to maintain a serious military presence in Germany.

However, it had a problem. The Army had been sending men home at an accelerated rate, stripping itself of the necessary bodies to police the 15 million civilians in Austria and Germany alone. The Army was committed to keep a force of 375,000 in Europe, over a million around the world. Chief of Staff Dwight Eisenhower, concerned that the Army was running out of troops, halted the discharges in Europe until replacements arrived. It was a decision which led to some serious morale problems: in January, 1946, nine months after the end of the war, a mob of American soldiers in Paris marched down the Champs Elysees to the American Embassy, chanting, Get us home. Soldiers were demonstrating as well in Frankfurt, Germany.

Desperate for a solution the War Department devised a plan to send Army wives to join their husbands overseas, sort of a Trifecta – a triple win: not only would this calm the boys, but also fire a cannon over Russia’s bow, letting them know the U.S. was in Germany for the long run. And, because there was now a core group of soldiers at ease with remaining in Europe, the Army could resume sending major troop transports back home.

Transporting the wives was going to be a big program, officially to be launched in April, 1946. However, the Army bureaucracy got mired down in the transport details, upgrading the Army ships in deference to the many generals’ wives scheduled for the first sailing. Work was under way for special diet kitchens to allow Army nurses to prepare baby formulas, play pens for older children and a four room section set aside for teenage boys.

The War Department, annoyed and anxious to move forward, sent the Army a message ordering an immediate first run of Army wives to sail on an available Navy ship, the USS Maxwell Gordon. The goading worked, since the Army high command hurriedly rallied its transport arm for a sailing to be led by the wives of Generals Mark Clark and Lucius Clay. However, that was still a week away. Meanwhile, the more or less regulation Navy ship, the USS Maxwell Gordon, silently cut through the Narrows, heading for the Atlantic. Stanton was aboard because with the Navy you get either Navy or Marine security.

Accompanying Rudd were two tech sergeants, thick-chested Eric Ellis, from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Bill Rather, a lean Kentuckian, both of whom struck Stanton as being up to the job, crisp and efficient, and for this trip, no need for anything more.

Help yourselves, Stanton said, nodding to the coffee pot. Only Ellis reached for a cup and poured. Rudd stared at the ship’s diagram and then turned back. He shoved his open pack of Lucky Strikes at them. The lamp is lit, gentlemen. Ellis and Rather both reached for