“The 1948 Berlin Noir Band”
The Second World War was a global catastrophe. Beyond the millions of soldiers and civilians killed, injured, murdered, and maimed, and the financial disasters which the war created for most nations’ and colonies’ economies, it also represented a worldwide global psychological trauma which radically reshaped pre-War societies, values, and power structures, and set in motion forces which would dominate the second half of the industrial 20th Century.
Axis fascism, Nazism, and militarism had been “defeated,” but at a terrible cost. The horrors of the Nazi death machine, the racist brutality of the colonial conquests and conflicts, the tightening screws of authoritarianism in the Eastern Bloc and of skyrocketing paranoia in the Western, which led in turn to the nuclear arms race and the Cold War: they all transformed experience, community, theology, and day-to-day existence. Colonial powers amongst both “winners” and “losers” fought to retain their overseas possessions, and most of the regional wars—from Rhodesia to Algeria to Angola to Congo to Biafra to Latin America to Vietnam—that bloodied the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s resulted from old imperial powers’ attempts to squelch new nations’ (sometimes corrupted or betrayed) striving to be free.
Shaping these regional conflicts, as worldwide geopolitical forces played out in small, vicious, local wars, was the global competition between nations aligned with the Soviet Union (and burgeoning Maoist China) and those aligned with and dominated by the United States, and to a lesser extent by the signators of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. With Churchill’s 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri (“From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent…”), global leaders’ perceptions of “freedom” and “self-determination” hardened into simplistic metaphors about nations at risk of “falling like dominos” to “worldwide communism” or “capitalism,” and threats to their neo-imperial “zones of control.”
These self-perpetuating metaphors would dominate international policies in both Eastern and Western Blocs for nearly a half century. At the “end” of the Cold War in the early 1990s, the tragedy was that, in spite of that era’s heroism, sacrifice, and martyrdom of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, civilians, and freedom fighters, the fall of the Soviet Union—symbolized by the indelible images of Berliners taking pickaxes and sledgehammers to the ugly concrete Wall that had separated their city, and cost hundreds of would-be escapees’ their lives—represented a squandered historical moment. At that moment, with sufficient political vision, will, and hard-won unity amongst the western nations of the NATO Alliance, the former Soviet Union—“a knight dying inside its armor,” to quote the ultimate Cold War storyteller John Le Carré—could have been brought forward into a more modern era of market economy, economic opportunity, international trade and intellectual exchange (despite the horrible flaws of the “free market” western economies, which consistently enriched the wealthy and sent the working and peasant classes into poverty). But the very arrogance that had led western leaders to insist upon communism’s “inevitable” failure, due to its philosophical flaws, was only reinforced by the fall of the Wall, which had resulted from much more complex and realpolitik causes than just “the West’s cause was just.” Nevertheless, Western leaders, some motivated by vengeance, some cynicism, some naivete, and—in the 2020s, we know now—by their own corrupt engagement in a worldwide underground economy that trafficked arms, drugs, and humans, conspired to sell off the former Soviet Union like Bain Capital opportunists selling off the assets of a bankrupted company.
The window of opportunity closed. And that neglect—that agonizingly long and slow moment when the western Powers, primarily motivated by their desire to accrue global interest and enrich their ruling classes, averted their eyes to the corruption, gangsterism, and ethnocentricism of international petrochemical elites—yielded fatal consequences which echo down the decades all the way to January 6, 2022.
The tragic irony was that, in the midst of the hot War’s and then Cold War’s greed, ethnic hatred, and cynical profiteering, there had also been moments when nations and their leaders recognized and actually fixed one or another of the small vats of unnecessary suffering. In the wake of Churchill’s warning and the West’s growing and well-founded paranoia about Soviet intentions regarding the former German capitol of Berlin, Stalin ordered rail, road, and water access to the Allied sectors of that city blockaded, intending to starve the population, prevent the escape of valuable personnel to the West, and—in an ugly foreshadowing of Vladimir Putin’s destruction of Ukrainian grain shipments in 2022-23—blackmail the West to allow its absorption, by threatening to starve its population. Stalin believed that the unified power of the Western economies, which had suffered far less in the Second World War than his own, represented an existential threat to the Soviet Union’s survival. That western unity, which in 1947-48 began to take shape in policy and geographic moves intended to further isolate, and arguably to strangle, the Russian economy, was the most immediate cause of the crisis.
And so, in the wake of Stalin’s blockade—which aimed to keep Western food and medical supplies out of Berlin and the Eastern Bloc, and to keep scientists and other “valuable personnel” within—the US and UK cranked up the briefly-dormant wartime machine which had delivered the planes, tanks, personnel—and bombs—that had defeated Nazi Germany. Over approximately 14 months of the “Berlin Air Lift,” they flew 250,000 missions, dropping food, fuel, supplies, and even candy for children, into the beleaguered city. There were C-47s and C-54 transports, but there were also B-29 bombers—the same which had delivered the Fat Man and Little Boy bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Stalin took note and ended the land-route blockade by September of 1949.
As a result, Berlin was, in the immediate post-WWII years as it had been during the 1920s Weimar Republic, a peculiarly lawless, mysterious place, full of crooked characters, violent criminals, and rapacious grifters, alongside the ordinary citizens struggling to recover and rebuild families and houses and neighborhoods within an economy in tatters. Carol Reed’s The Third Man, featuring one of Orson Welles’s most iconic roles as the charming and utterly amoral con man Harry Lime, written by ex-spook Graham Greene and shot on location in 1948 Vienna, like Fellini’s 1944 Roma, città aperta, captures in near-documentary style the bombed-out locations and amoral psychological environment of other, similarly-exhausted Axis cities But at least as effective a portrait of defeat among the urban populations of post-War Germany is Ross Thomas’s The Eighth Dwarf, set in 1946 California and Berlin, which features among its cast of characters a cynical, hard-drinking ex-OSS operative, a Romanian dwarf who is an expert con-man and may be a scion of minor nobility, and a deadly American Nazi-hunter who is slowly losing his mind but who still represents a valuable commodity for anyone who can employ his skills in another of those post-War hot spots—as, for example, Palestine. Thomas, born in 1926, had been a journalist, a combat soldier in the Philippines, a PR flack, and a political operative before turning to spy novels, and he knew the worlds in which he set his stories (the classic is Out on the Rim, featuring a cast of superannuated War in the Pacific veterans, returned to the archipelago).
With regard to the BNRO: those members who had remained in Hollywood during the War, after completing their backstage and clandestine work involving the writing, shooting, promotion, and—much less well-known—espionage swirling around the Bogart/Bergman classic Casablanca (1942),
had spent the intervening years in a variety of locations, for an equal variety of reasons. But the Los Angeles Basin—hot, dry, sprawling west out of the mountains toward the sea, and an explosively growing community in those years—had been their recurrent rendezvous.
Some percentage had been recruited by Roosevelt's administration to help Hollywood handle the ramping up of production in response to the war. This Hollywood contingent of the BNRO had ended up being responsible for much of the subtext and the subversive musical cues in the Casablanca soundtrack (recorded late summer 1942—see elsewhere in the Correspondence).
From 1942, others had worked with Wild Bill Donovan, director of the wartime Office of Strategic Services, to liaise with Bassanda partisans, in the run up to the planned invasion of Sicily, which had been planned at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, which the film Casablanca had almost seemed to predict.
In that same summer of 1943, a contingent of Bassandans, particularly armorers and stunt coordinators, who had remained in Los Angeles after the completion of Casablanca (see elsewhere in the Correspondence), were present during the assault by U.S. Army soldiers on leave against Latino males who they accused of dodging the draft. In these street fights, which became notorious as the Zoot Suit Riots, the Bassandans took the side of the Angelenos; one commented, “We’re fighting the fascists over there, but we’re just as ready to fight the racist bastards over here.”
Still others, particularly those with particularly extended linguistic skills beyond even those common amongst ethnic Bassandas, were involved in various early strategic moves against Fortress Europa: some served as liaisons with partisans during the run-up to 1944’s Operation Husky, the planned invasion of Sicily, while others had assisted in the Operation Mincemeat deception in June, which had feinted at Sardinia.
All of these probing attacks against fascist Europe culminated with the allied landings at Sicily on 10th July. Spearheaded by American paratroopers and British glider infantry the Allied forces managed a landing, but quickly found themselves stuck on the beaches at Anzio, pinned down by machine gunners and mortars on the bluffs above. Resupply ships couldn't get in and the Allied troops struggled to find their way off the deadly beaches.
The great American combat cartoonist Bill Mauldin recalled this era in describing the adventures of the 10th Mountain Division, an international group of combat irregulars including Americans, Canadians, indigenous Native Americans, Basque immigrants, and Bassandans, ferocious fighters who had been training for the invasion of Norway, but by January of 1944 found themselves on the beach at Anzio. Mauldin tells the story of these special forces forming up giant combat patrols, arming themselves with peculiar and well treasured individual weapons, blacking their faces, and making forays against the German besiegers. Having been trained in hand to hand and knife combat by Dermot Pat O'Neill, an ex-instructor for the Shanghai International Police, they so terrified the enemy that the Germans and Italian troops pulled further and further back from the Anzio beaches, having learned to dread those mornings when they might awake find a comrade in the same foxhole with his throat cut and a black diamond playing card left on his chest.
It is known that there were other contingents of Bassandans and their allies—not aligned with the group who had worked in ‘42 on Casablanca but rather serving behind the lines—who were part of the summer 1944 fighting in the Bocage country of Normandy just outside of the port ofSt. Lô. After a successful but bloody assault up the beaches on D-Day, Allied forces had been slowed dreadfully by the hummocky and tussocky hedgerow landscape of the Norman countryside. Breton and Norman BNRO members, fighting under the command of Colonel Thompson and Ismail Durang, and with the navigational and linguistic skill of Binyamin Biraz Ouz, whose family background connected them readily with the partisans, these Bassandans made tangible contributions to Operation Cobra when U.S. forces, including elements of the 101st Airborne, broke out from Normandy and dashed east toward the Ardennes and the German border. Though the Bassandans were more comfortable with boats then with aircraft, their common cause with Polish fliers had led to the incorporation of some Bassandans into the RAF’s international squadrons.
By early 1945, it was evident both that Germany would be defeated and that the Soviets were likely to reach Berlin first, despite the most desperate and dangerous forward sprints by elements of the western Armies. In light of this, a series of secret missions were undertaken, none successful, by western intelligence forces who hoped to take Hitler alive, and perhaps use him and other members of the High Command as bargaining chips for a negotiated division of Germany. But, once having advanced past the Vistula, the Soviets had paused, in early February, about 60 kilometers east of Berlin.
One night a few weeks later, small troupe of anonymous, seeming “civilians,” dressed in nondescript clothes, but some carrying instrument cases, airlifted out of Van Nuys Airport on board the electromagnetic, oscillating screw-retrofitted C-47 plane called Le Oiseaux Vert (The Big Green Bird). As is revealed in secret OSS files only released decades later, Le Oiseaux Vert flew a nearly non-stop transcontinental and then transatlantic itinerary, possibly making one clandestine landing at a secret airstrip outside Washington DC, where it was reputed to have disgorged or onboarded some additional, though also unknown passengers. Two nights later, in a possibly-unrelated event, a towed RAF glider crash-landed on the grounds of the Zoo, just a few hundred meters west of the Fuhrer Bunker; Waffen-SS troopers of Hitler’s own personal division found the wrecked glider empty of human sign—nor was it understood how the glider could have traveled over 400 air-miles without any radar or audio sign of a powered tow-craft. There was no sign, living or dead, of crew or passengers, and the glider itself was entirely unmarked—nor were there any maps or navigation aids to be found in the smashed remains of its cockpit.
By 30 April Hitler was dead, and by early May Jodl had surrendered the German army at Rheims. And the Bassandans had disappeared into the city’s civilian population.