Hunters & Hunted

CALL IT TREASON (344 pp.)--George Howe--Viking ($3.00).

"Intelligence work" meant almost anything in World War II, from picking up bedroom gossip in Lisbon to sieving through trade statistics in Washington, and almost anybody with a college degree could get into the intriguing act. But when the army needed combat intelligence in a hurry, it usually sent out none but hand-picked "Joes." This fast-moving novel, which won the first $15,000 award of the Catholic Society of the Christophers (TIME, April 14, 1947), tells what happened when the army dropped three volunteers behind the German lines in the last winter of fighting.

One of the agents was 19-year-old "Happy," honest, innocent son of a Berlin doctor, and sometime medical corporal in the Luftwaffe. The Nazis had destroyed his father's practice and he wanted to see them destroyed. After special training by U.S. instructors, he got a new name. For his tools of trade he also got forged identification papers, a supply of Reichsmarks, ration stamps, sandwiches, a revolver, compass and a cyanide tablet. His assignment: to travel 400 kilometers in a broad, jagged semicircle behind the enemy's lines, find where two "missing" German divisions were stationed and make his way back to the Americans.

Grey Bread. The other two had a separate job. "Tiger," who had been a German Communist, had the job of spreading disaffection in Mannheim. "Paluka," a Ukranian who had joined the Free French, was to be Tiger's radio man. All three were flown over the lines. Then they jumped, buried their parachutes, established their" directions, threw away their compasses and started walking.

From that point on to its tragic end, most of Call It Treason is Happy's story. His plane had been spotted, and he found himself in a world where everybody seemed to be talking about spies. He had moments of luck (trucks that picked him up at just the right moment); he also suffered from blunders--his own and those of the men who had trained him. American phrases had crept into his speech, and his conversation had grown self-conscious and artificial. But he was principally separated from the people around him because he no longer shared their defeat or their hopes, the undercurrent of panic, their confusion, their bitterness, or their dull conviction that the retreat of the German army would be stopped.

Each of the agents met his crisis in his own way. Happy's fate was sealed when the pursuit forced him off the highways and into the headquarters of one of the divisions he had come to Germany to find; too many people got a good look at him, and remembered his face later.

Forged Documents. Author Howe himself served in an OSS detachment doing intelligence work with G2, Seventh Army. For this reason, perhaps, his story has an air of solid authenticity when he writes of the training of agents, the forged documents, the mistakes and casualties. He is less successful when he analyzes the motives of Happy and Tiger in betraying their country.

Essentially, Call It Treason is a forthright story of flight, pursuit and death, of the hunters and the hunted. Of its kind it is a good one.

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