10:00 or 11:00 and start writing what he learned the night before and before braden comes, he's very unpopular with the ambassador because the ambassador kind of makes desk checks. the previous

but he wants to continue to serve his country and doing something for the war effort. and he goes to the ambassadors, kind of a lot of nerve, he goes to the ambassador and he says, look, you know, i have done all this great stuff for you. i set up this crook factory and we did all this reporting. and now i want you to support me on something else. and the ambassador heard him out. and said, well, what's that? he says, i want to go looking for german submarines off the north coast of cuba. have we heard this before?

okay. is this part of hemingway family lore? lester after the war -- lester is always the little brother. you know, he's got to keep quiet, but after the war lester says, you know, ernest got the idea from me. we can't prove that but there is circumstantial evidence to that effect. so ernest though he's going to go one -- he's going to do his brother one better. he's going to outdo his brother by not only finding the germans, okay, reporting their presence, doing the naval intelligence thing, but he's going to sink submarines as well from the pilar. and the idea is that the pilar is going to pretend to fish and that's going to be its cover, going to be fishing. he had another cover as well which was doing oceanographic

research for the american museum of natural history in new york. so there were a couple of instances that he was aware of, a german submarine is approaching fishing boats and saying, hey, you know, we'll take your catch and your fresh food. so ernest says while i wait for them to come alongside and then my high-lie players are going to lob hand grenades down the open hatches and they're going to machine gun the germans on the deck. say what you want about the office of naval intelligence. but they don't think this is a good idea. probably put it in the same category, maybe they have a hemingway file, i don't know, you know, here's lester's ideas. here's ernest's ideas we don't like them much better. and there was a wonderful guy there that ernest knows, who's just his kind of man. it's -- his name is john

thomason. a u.s. marine colonel. he's written short stories, and colorful memoirs. he's a sketch artist. he's a heavy drinker. and he and ernest have gotten along very well. they collaborated on the anthology. and thomason says ernest, this isn't going to work. if you try this, you're going to get yourself killed. ernest says i don't care, i want to do it anyway. ernest is not a guy you said no to easily. and they give in. so the office of naval intelligence, this is all very hush hush. very secret. ernest loves that. the office of naval intelligence sends him gear, direction findings so he can locate german submarines. they send him some hand grenades to lob down the hatches while the germans of course are just sunning themselves on deck and paying no attention to what's

going on around them. they give them weapons and ammunition and one marine nco to make it all work. so off ernest sails into this part, i'm not going to go over there to point again, but take my word for it. where those lines converge on the north coast of cuba that's where -- that's the general operating area for ernest and over -- so the second half of 1942 and much of 1943, that's what ernest is doing. they don't see much. they see probably -- they probably cited one german submarine and it was going the other way. and so at the end of the day, this mission is really empty handed. after the war, it's kind of

interesting one of the questions i asked myself was, when did the german -- what did the germans do around here, and did -- or even think of having supplied depots that ernest and lester thought they might have. and as far as i can tell the answer is no. the concept the germans came up with was having submarines that were outfitted as supply ships. so what they would do with a forward deployed submarine. one that's operating in this area is to arrange a rendezvous with the milk cow as they called it. and they would b food and ammun they'd carry on. maybe it was worth a try in 1942. ernest wasn't the only guy to try this. there's some literature out there about what's called hooly gann's

boats and they patrolled the east coast looking for germans. so on this one, the score is, yeah, good try, ernest. and, you know, too bad it didn't pan out for you. and he probably would have gotten killed if the germans had actually come alongside for water and fish. so ernest does live to fight another day. and now we're in late 1943. so the germans have sunk all that american shipping. in the -- especially in the first part of 1942. while we're getting on a war footing. we enter the war in december of 1941. we're playing catch-up ball in early 1942. but by late 1943, the focus of the war has shifted back across the atlantic. american troops have invaded north africa. the brits have pushed the germans east from al alamain and

egypt and the americans and brits are talking about invading the continent of europe. so martha, martha is the only woman in ernest's life who really was close to a match for him. you know, her writing at both fiction and nonfiction stands on its own two feet. and she's about ten years younger than ernest. she is going, ernest, cuba is yesterday's story. we need today's story. we need to go to europe. we need to position ourselves for the -- for the invasion, for what's going to happen out there. ernest resists. he says i have an important mission here in cuba and she goes off for a while to europe. he stays home, he writes her. he's an amazing letter writer. he writes five, six, seven letters a day and these letters, you know, they're not like tweets. you know, he's writing two,

three, seven, eight, nine, ten pages to various correspondents. so there's a lot of correspondence between martha and ernest and they call each other names like bug and mookie and what not. and anyway, he stays in cuba, writes these sort of teenage romance letters. drinks, she goes off to europe. she's doing a good job as a correspondent. and getting ready for the big show. and the pressure is building up on here. how am i going to get ernest over here and save my marriage? she's not stupid. she wants to save her marriage. who does she turn to save her marriage? she goes to the oss. and on her travels in yureurope she happens to go to bari, italy and encounters the naval chief there. it's bob joyce, the same guy

from havana. bob joyce thought the state department was too stuffy, too conventional, no room to breathe, i'm getting out of here, i'm going to find something exciting to do during the war. so he leaves the foreign service and joins the oss and they send him to europe. martha says to him, bob, can you help? ernest wants me to come home. at one point she says i am prepared to obey the orders of my master and commander. she usually doesn't talk like that. and -- but, you know, really be better if we could figure out a way for oss to get him over here. bob joyce says okay, i'll do what i can. and he writes an amazing series of messages across the atlantic to oss headquarters saying, hey, it goes to donovan's office. i mean, it's not -- you know, this is a cable, this is kind of personal for the cable.

goes to the two assistant directors of the oss. and joyce is saying, let's get ernest -- if you get in touch with him, you know, you arrange a meeting face to face with him. you'll see all the things he can bring to the table for oss. he's got foreign language. he's got area knowledge. he knows about special operations. after all he wrote "for whom the bell tolls." an early special operator. and he's run this intelligence service for us in cuba. he can do great things for oss. he senses some kind of push back -- he senses the push back before it occurs and he basically adds verbiage to the effect of so what if he's been married three times, so what if he's not differential to people in high places, so what if he was active on the loyalist which is the communist supported side in the spanish civil war. it doesn't work.

oss -- they listen long enough and think about it and they circulate the paper around the oss looking for somebody who would be willing to take ernest on and the decision is basica y basically, you know, too prominent a figure, too much of an individualist, we can't have him here. they look at special intelligence which is the espionage side of the house running agents. they look at morale otipaganda. they don't look at -- nobody thinks that they want this 45-year-old out on a battlefield doing tactical intelligence so they don't look at that. they sent a letter back to joyce, this is a nonstarter, we're not going to sign up ernest f toss. a good call. ernest had mixed feelings about

loved joyce. he loved what bumby did in the oss, but he was critical of anybody -- even in the oss which is the haven of free thinkers in the american war rt conventional buc government behs just drives ernest crazy and he yeah, there were some great people in oss, but there was also a lot of chicken dot dot dot. in oss. so ernest ha an official relationship with oss at this point. but he does go to europe. martha finally -- her argument carries the day. off they go to -- they both go off to europe. martha's been the correspondent for collier's. ernest arranges for himself to

be collier's which is a demotion for martha. he gets a seat on t atlantic, a in touch with martha and says i asked them, but they won't take women. i'm sorry. you can't come on the plane. i'll fly over and meet you there. i have arranged passage for you. the passage that martha got was on an ammunition ship crossing the atlantic. anyway, they both make it to london by may 1944. d-day remember is coming up in june 1944. there, ernest hangs out with a lot of journalists, soldiers, writers, socialites. meets pamela churchill who is -- who's randolph's wife and who eventually runs off with avril harriman and becomes the american ambassador in paris at the end of her life.

so he meets -- in this kind of milieu, that's where he meets the head of oss for europe. third richest woman in the rat united states. he is the son of an ambassador. and he's -- you know, a genalvi. loves the finer things in life. they run into each other in london and after they ran into each other, talk about fan mail, bruce goac that he had just met ngquote, patriarch cal, with his physique, much like god, as

painted by michelangelo. here's a ernest as he's getting ready to go to europe. he's grown this beard by the way because of irritation from the sun during the war patrols on pilar. so ernest eventually shaves his beard. and goes to europe. he is there as a war correspondent. he is driving around the battlefie battlefield, looking for excitement. ernest gets a jeep from the army and he gets a private. and that's the -- you know, that sort of task force hemingway. and he's going around looking for good stories. the big story in august of 1944 is going to be the liberation of paris. everybody can feel it building. nobody knows exactly how it's going to unfold. or where the stepping off point is going to be for paris. ernest is -- he's doing a pretty

good job as sort of a journalist tactical recon guy and he guesses it's probably over here, going to be in this general direction. west of paris. and that's what -- that's the region that he targets as he's driving around. here he is. reading the map with the private red pellky who was lucky to survive the war because ernest got him into a lot of tight corners. ernest while he's driving with red bumps into a group of french resisters who he later describes as, you know, naked to the waste, armed with -- somehawher in france. armed with unconventional weapons of various sorts but really enthusiastic. they happen to be communists. as you may know, the french resistance kind of -- two major

flavors. these guys happened to be communists, which doesn't bother ernest at all. they kind of elect him unofficial leader. they have a leader of their own, but they say that, you know, whatever ernest does, that's going to be okay with us. and so now task force hemingway is red pellky, ernest and the 12 guys from the french resistance. ernest more officially, unofficially, take your pick, he comes up with u.s. uniforms and weapons and ammunition for these guys. and then -- while he's doing this, while he's doing the errands he runs into david k.u. bruce, totally by chance. bruce is getting ready for paris and ernest says, hey, david, i've got it all figured out. it's going to happen at this place, 23 miles west.

he looks at the map. everybody has to come through here. why don't we go there? and bruce says, oh, okay. you know? so at this point, ernest is kind of leading american intelligence operations for a day or two in that theater. and so here they are, that's bruce on the left. that's the french resistance guy in the middle. there's ernest on the right. ernest is kind of overweight at this point. he's 6', 220 or so during the war. kind of a little extra to love for a bit. when bruce gets there, he goes looking for ernest. ernest set himself up in a hotel, pretty good hotel with a good kitchen and a good cellar. has to have a good wine cellar. and he finds ernest's bedroom and this is how he describes it.

nest's bedroom was the nerve center of the operations. boys and girls reporting from as far as versailles. army gear littered the floor. revolvers of every nationality were heaped on the bed. the bathtub was filled with hand grenades and the basin with brandy bo brandy bottles and under the bed was an rash of army whiskey. bob kappa, the famous photographer encountered the same scene and wrote in his autobiography that 15 enthusiastic young men from the french resistance were taking after the large charismatic american who spoke their language. copying his sailor bear walk and

spitting short sentences. hemingway is famous for short sentences even in the speech, from the corners of their mouths in different languages. so this is kind of the -- this is the manning table here. and this -- this group establishes an intelligence op center, and these three, the three in the picture, they run tactical intelligence ops for four or five days before paris is liberated. what do they do? well, ernest himself goes on a few recons. he goes until the germans shoots at him. he pulls his head down and slightly more sophisticated ops are conventional patrolling. capturing and interrogating german prisoners. they capture more german prisoners than they can handle

and they don't have people to guard them. ernest says, take off their pantbes, they won't run away and put them to work in the kitchen. if you go down to the kitchen, there's a bunch of german prisoners and they don't have on anything below the waist and ernest has them peeling potatoes. local knowledge. they talk to people who live in the area that the troops are going to pass through on the way to paris and get information about the germans and the passability of roads and this sort of thing.oo intel and bruc sure it works its way up the chain. gets to the operators who are going to need it. it's not spectacular. it's not war-winning intel. but it's good, solid tactical intelligence. so ernest gets at least a "b," b-plus for this. then the push to paris happens.

it fills up with the armored division, charles de gaulle, a large group of famous who ernest pushes around. he kind of appoints himself head of the -- head press man there. and he actually slaps some of them around when they complain about why does he get the good rooms and the best food and wine. one of them is andy rooney, by the way. a bunch of senior intelligence officers show up. and then it's off to paris. ernest is in the van with bruce of this french armored division. of course they have got to stop for a couple of firefights. ernest never drove through a firefight that he didn't like. then they get into paris. and it's pandemonium. ernest's wish has sort of come true. this picture doesn't picture the