Transcripts For CSPAN2 Peter Finn A Guest Of The Reich 20240

Booktv continues now on cspan2, television for serious readers. Good evening everyone. Tonight we are here with peter finn the National Security editor at the Washington Post and previously coauthor of the book the zhivago affair which was finalist for the National Book six circle award for nonfiction. Hes twice been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his International Reporting and hes won the Robert F Kennedy Journalism Award and the German Marshall Fund Peter R White prize for his foreign reporting. In other words, his nonfiction credentials are very wellestablished. Tonight he is here to present his latest book of nonfiction i guess to the right the story of american heiress gertrude with deborahs dramatic captivity and escape from nazi germany. Please help me welcome peter finn. [applause] thank you everyone for coming out and thank you to a books for inviting me. Im delighted to be here. As she mentioned, my book is about gertrude lesandro and the First American woman in uniform captured by the nazis. Everyone you heard as dirty and i will call her gertie. She was married to a man named sidney who with the outbreak of war was commissioned in the Naval Reserve and served in hawaii and gertie was captured in september 1994. I got a call last week from someone who knew gertie was a friend of gerties daughter and heard about the book and wanted to tell me gertie stories but one of them i will use to open which was that when she was captured and her husband sidney was informed by the military that his wife was now a prisoner of war, his first two words were poor germans. [laughter] and that really tells you a lot about gertie. She was a pretty fierce fearless individual, she was also complicated and flawed which made her a really interesting character study for me. Her life philosophy as she described it was, i dont contemplate life, i live it. I like the first sketch about her background where she came from and then lead you up to her service in world war ii and her capture. Gertie was born in aiken south carolina. She was from an extraordinary wealthy American Family that went back well into Early American History one of her ancestors was the colonial governor of connecticut. Her more immediate family, her grandfather and father were in the carpet and flooring business which was based in amsterdam new york when her father, when her grandfather died and the estate was worth in todays dollars, 1 billion. It gives you a sense of how much money they had. They kind of summered there or in europe and wintered in south carolina. In manhattan gertie had a rollsroyce at her disposal to move her about town the butler every morning left out theater tickets if anyone had a desire to go see the theater. It was an extraordinarily privileged life but gertie was not someone who was content with being a society girl from a very early age she learned to shoot. She loved to shoot things. [laughter] she started out birding but went on and hunted raccoons at night. She did all kinds of stuff. In fact, philip buried the early 20th century playwright who knew the family based a character on her in his play called holiday and subsequently that play was made into a movie and the gertie character was played by Katharine Hepburn who played her as this kind of interesting cocky abrasive Society Woman who was rebelling against the constraints of her family. She first found that when she graduated high school and went to an all girls school in middleburg virginia and instead of doing the usual coming out she asked if she could go hunting in wyoming. Her father agreed, they went out to jackson, which at that time was just a dusty little town with the post office and couple buildings and they hired a guide who took them up into the mountains and several days in she killed in elk it was her first big kill and she never really recovered from the thrill of that. For the next several years she hunted in alaska and canada and other parts of north america she killed bears, she killed moose, she killed goats, she killed sheep. You name it, gertie killed it but her big ambition in life was to go to africa. And in 1927 she was invited to go on an expedition by another wealthy new york family and they crossed the atlantic to naples and took a boat from naples to the horn of africa, disembarked and took the british governors train from there to nairobi. Nairobi at that time was set up to accommodate wealthy american and european hunters. Literally these expeditions were enormous they would hire several cars, several trucks, dozens of africans both who would scout for game but also would act as servants essentially set up the portable toilet, which they got from abernathy in manhattan and had shipped over. Put the toothpaste on their toothpaste toothbrush, clean their clothes and drive them, cook the meals, you name it, it was like hunting deluxe. Endo met first exhibition, gertie was astonished at the range of game and they literally crossed the african plains like feudal lords shooting at everything that moved. But gertie wasnt happy with it. She just found it all a little too luxurious and that there was none of the roughness or the living in the wild that she had done in alaska and canada and north america. So when she came back she decided from that point forward that oliver expeditions would have a purpose. It wouldnt simply be to kill animals. She actually tried to find a purpose in what she was doing. She approached the American Museum of Natural History in manhattan and at that time that museum had about 30 expeditions around the world collecting animals and other specimens and they asked gertie if she would collect a particular african antelope called the night ella. Which she agreed to underwrite the whole thing. If you go to the museum of Natural History today you will see you will see african mammals that have a semicircular display of stuffed animals in a setting with all the fauna and trees and grass that you would expect in that part of the world. She literally brought those back. She was accompanied on that trip by a curator from the museum to help with the taxidermy and they hired specialists in nairobi. With that, from that point forward most of her expeditions were for that purpose. On that particular trip she took a long two young men that she had met the previous summer in oxford england, the lesandro brothers, sydney and mars. She was kind of infatuated with both of them. She decided to use the expedition as a means to figure out which one might be better as a husband. Sidney won the husband stakes and they subsequently after the expedition he proposed to her when they stopped on the way back from africa at a fabulous villa on the south of france. This was the kind of life she lived. Throughout the 1930s she did many many more expeditions. She went to indochina did an eight month expedition that went up through across northern vietnam into laos, cambodia, back into southern vietnam. She did that for the museum in philadelphia and they brought back a peculiar kind of goat specimen from that museum. Typically of gertie as they got into saigon at the end of toward the end of the expedition the first thing i was to visit and abbecause she wanted to see what it was like to get high on opium. Unfortunately for her the opium was poor quality and the whole thing was a disappointment. But she did at the end of that expedition, which is the scene i described in the book, killed her first tiger. I know. But this gives you a sense of gertie. The way they hunted tiger at that time was they would place recently killed large animals along the trails in the jungle where the tigers typically hunted. They would build a small box maybe waist high or a little more than waist high the hunter in this case gertie would get inside the box and everyone else would retreat and leave her there alone. She would sit in the box and wait until the tiger came. Several people have been killed sitting in these boxes because the tiger took them rather than abshe spent two full days in stifling heat with this rotting carcass 30 feet away from her with her gun stuck out the window. The tiger came around several times and finally he started eating the antelope she shot and killed she shot him and then burst out at the little box she was in and finished them off with a bullet to the head. Of course her husband, who was half a mile or more away, heard the shots and came rushing fearing that the worst mightve happened and why had he ever left her alone in a little box in the middle of the jungle and of course when he arrived, gertie is sitting on the tiger smoking a cigarette. That was gertie. So at the start of world war ii with the attack on pearl harbor and gerties husband sidney got a commission in the navy reserve he was first assigned and they at that time were living on a 7000 acre plantation outside charleston south carolina, which they had bought in 1929. They moved to washington but i was a temporary place for him as he was assigned to hawaii and in august he shipped out and gertie saw him off and sidney later wrote to her about that last day in washington. I will read you a little quote from his letter which he wrote a day or two after i think when he landed in San Francisco from washington before continuing on to hawaii. We talked about the war and other things when we both knew that all we really wanted to say was how much we loved one another and how we dreaded departing. I thought you were wonderful to be able to wave to me as i entered the plane and wish me good luck, my throat was so choked in my eyes so full of tears that i could not say anything and only waved and then plunged into the plane. The wonderful thing about gertie for me as a writer is that this was one of about 500 letters that they wrote to each other over the course of world war ii. Gertie also everywhere she went, whether it was every expedition to africa, indochina, she kept a journal, very detailed journal, some of these trip she would come back with 150 pages of daily notes about what she was thinking what she was doing. Even when she was a prisoner of war later she kept a diary and the german strangely tall exhilarated dial you keeping back pows. All of this raw material in many ways allowed me to create this intimate portrait of gertie that wouldve otherwise been impossible. In when cindy left for hawaii, but gertie was in washington she had two daughters, len dean who at that time was about 11 and bow was about two. She wanted to do something, she first applied to the library of congress but they rejected her because she didnt have a college degree. Then she applied to the red cross but they wouldnt take her because she had two young children. Eventually she used her connections and she had many many connections through american high society and got a job in the office of Strategic Services which was the prewar it was the wartime american Espionage Service forerunner of the cia founded by wild bill donovan the subject of a wonderful novel by Douglas Waller who was a raleigh resident. I recommend it to all of you. Gertie got a job in the Communications Office. Basically all of the incoming and outgoing cables would pass through her hands and she would make sure they had the correct classified grading and they got to the right people so a lot of topsecret material pass through her hands. But gertie hated washington. I think she associated washington first with her separation from her husband which she found totally intolerable and heartbreaking but secondly, she hated it, this was her first time in the workforce. She is now a woman in her late 30s shes never had a job in her life. This is the first job and so she had to reconcile herself to the workplace and also the place of women in the workplace, which was something she had never experienced before and she wrote to her husband about her supervisor. I do all the work that he does all the talk. What burns me up the most is the unbelievable lack of confidence in a womans ability. Men cannot bear to have their world encroached on by more efficient women, men hate to give women power. So that pretty much summed up her attitude to that workplace and washington, which she found supremely bureaucratic hugely distant from the actual war fighting and the place where she would for the first time in her marriage, separated from her husband. For all these reasons she started to agitate to get out. First she tried to go to hawaii to join her husband but the navy had a strict rule that that wives could not join in their officer husbands in hawaii. When that was ruled out, she spoke to donovan and the head of oss and inveigled the transfer to london. Gertie left for london in mid 1943 took a boat from philadelphia to lisbon and then a flying boat plane from lisbon to southampton taking a wide arc around the bay of biscay to avoid german fighters. It had to make an Emergency Landing which was a fairly typical arrival anywhere for gertie. She also left washington without her daughters. Both of them were placed in the care of longtime nanny and governess and gertie, frankly, her husband said in some letters, do you not feel that you might want to stay with them . The youngest is two, she might need you. But gerties position was, i have worlds to conquer as i have places to go i have things to see. Frankly, her relationship with her daughters remained fraught throughout their lives. I dont think her daughters ever quite forgave her for the absences and her approach to mothering. She took the same job in london in the Communications Office moving the topsecret traffic in and out and london was the center of all oss operations in london. They were the liaison with the governments in exile like the dutch and the checks. They were planning for dj and postdday operations and they began to infiltrate people into france in advance of the invasion. There was a whole lot of topsecret stuff going on and a lot of it was passing through gerties hands. But then gertie came and went and gertie was still there and board stupid could not believe that all the men were gone and she was still stuck in this office they were given a five day leave so gertie went to the bar at the hotel ritz and she was having a drink when she crossed paths with a guy called bob jennings naval aviator also in the oss that she had known from london. Gertie socialized all the time in london. At house parties, went to other peoples house parties. Played golf, went hunting. This is mostly in the evenings or weekends. She hung out with general patton and the u. S. Ambassador to london and with lots of general officers. Gertie knew everyone. And she knew jennings so they started to talk and they were a bunch of war correspondents and other officers there. The war correspondents were telling them they were going to head to luxembourg the next day to get close to pattons headquarters and get closer to the fighting. So gertie and jennings, said we should go to. So over the next two days it was a pretty eventful trip because the car kept breaking down but eventually three days later they made it to luxembourg city. Jennings said, we had hoped to hear or see or experience a little fighting but doesnt look like its going to happen. And then asaid im driving up to this Little German village called the waldorf, which is the first German Village captured by the allies it was just over the border from luxembourg and if youd like to come with me we can all go. You will be back by lunch. They had a private called doyle dixon who was the driver and all four of them sped off. Dixon, jennings and gertie. What they didnt know was, the americans had taken waldorf and in fact had pushed further in when orders came to vote because the american command was concerned about u. S. Forces getting too far ahead of the supply line. Papert generally believed the town was still in american hands. They drove right in. They barely had they seen the sign waldorf when the first shot ring out initially they were a little quizzical about this asking themselves why would someone shoot at us . Papert jumped out they looked around nothing abthey decided to push on which was a really unbelievably bad decision. At that point you really shed light pull back and figure out whats going on so they push on just a tiny bit and machine gun fire breaks out. They all jump out of the jeep pepper is hit in the legs and he screams at dixon try and get the car started again, dixon jumps into the car, his badly wounded. Eventually because they are in essentially an open area they decided they have to surrender. So they put a white handkerchief on the top of a rifle, hold it up, the germans come down and gertie becomes the First American woman in uniform captured by the nazis because she was wearing Womens Army Corps uniform. She was commissioned, she had to have uniform entering the theater of operations. Thus begins gerties very strange time as a prisoner of the nazis. She initially was bound from place for place but ended up at castle in western germany in dietz, which was a special error marked Interrogation Center for prisoners of special interest. The place the castle was populated by interrogators, german interrogators all of whom had lived in the united states. When they arrived they were greeted by people in german uniforms speaking with american accents. Some of these guys prewar had been truck drivers, some guy who interrogated gertie ran a lunch counter in brooklyn others were children of diplomats but they were a loose line due to this Interrogation Center and they all initially believed that gertie and the others might be spies and they ran a series of parallel interrogations to try and break them. They all had discussed their story in the period before the germans came down and gertie played kind of did see file clerk at the embassy who just didnt know why she was here and had accidentally stumbled across the lines and she pulled it off remarkably. They never learned that she was oss and that is to her enormous credit. She was interrogated several times and no