In July 1943, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and a delegation of three hundred officials sailed for Canada aboard the Queen Mary. Churchill and Roosevelt were meeting in Quebec in August to approve plans for the Normandy invasion. During the journey, Professor J. D. Bernal, a distinguished physicist, gave a dramatic demonstration in one of the vessel's luxurious staterooms. He filled the bath with a few inches of water, the shallow end representing the Normandy beaches, the deep end the Baie de la Seine. Bernal placed twenty paper ships in the bath and used a back brush to simulate stormy conditions. The boats immediately sank. Bernal then inflated a Mae West life belt and laid it across the bath as a breakwater. The back brush was again used to create a storm, but this time the vessels survived. Bernal explained that the same thing would happen at Normandy. A storm would create havoc; an artificial harbor was needed.
At Quebec, the British and the Americans agreed to build two artificial harbors for the Normandy invasion, each with the capacity of the great port of Dover. Dover took seven years to build; the British and Americans had roughly eight months. It was a task of unimaginable proportions. Each Mulberry cost $96 million. The British economy, crippled by four years of war, would have to supply four million tons of concrete and steel. Hundreds of topflight engineers would be needed, as well as tens of thousands of skilled construction workers. To get the Mulberries from England to France on D-Day would require every available tug in Britain and on the eastern seaboard of the United States.
The only assignment equal to the task of building the Mulberries would be keeping them secret--proved by the fact that Arthur Barnes and his corgi Fionna were still standing on the waterfront when the coaster carrying the team of British and American Mulberry engineers nosed against the dock. The team disembarked and walked toward a waiting bus. One of the men broke away toward a staff car waiting to return him to London. The driver stepped out and crisply opened the rear door, and Commander Peter Jordan climbed inside.
NEW YORK CITY: OCTOBER 1943
They came for him on a Friday. He would always remember them as Laurel and Hardy: the thick, stubby American who smelled of bargain aftershave and his lunchtime beer and sausage; the thin smooth Englishman who shook Jordan's hand as though searching for a pulse. In reality their names were Leamann and Broome--or at least that's what it said on the identification cards they waved past him. Leamann said he was with the War Department; Broome, the angular Englishman, murmured something about being attached to the War Office. Neither man wore a uniform--Leamann a shabby brown suit that pulled across his corpulent stomach and rode up his crotch, Broome an elegantly cut suit of charcoal gray, a little too heavy for the American fall weather.
Jordan received them in his magnificent lower Manhattan office. Leamann suppressed little belches while admiring Jordan's spectacular view of the East River bridges: the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, the Williamsburg. Broome, who allowed almost no interest in things man-made, commented on the weather--a perfect autumn day, a crystalline blue sky, brilliant orange sunshine. An afternoon to make you believe Manhattan is the most spectacular place on earth. They walked to the south window and chatted while watching freighters move in and out of New York Harbor.
"Tell us about the work you're doing now, Mr. Jordan," Leamann said, a trace of South Boston in his voice.
It was a sore subject. He was still the chief engineer of the Northeast Bridge Company and it was still the largest bridge construction firm on the East Coast. But his dream of starting his own engineering firm had died with the war, just as he feared.
Leamann, it seemed, had memorized his resume, and he recited it now as if Jordan had been nominated for an award. "First in your class at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Engineer of the Year in 1938. Scientific American says you're the greatest thing since the guy who invented the wheel. You're hot stuff, Mr. Jordan."
An enlarged version of the Scientific American article hung on the wall in a neat black frame. The photograph taken of him then looked like another man. He was thinner now--some said more handsome--and even though he still was not yet forty, flecks of gray had appeared at his temples.
Broome, the narrow Englishman, was wandering the office, scrutinizing the photographs and the models of bridges the company had designed and built.
"You have many Germans working here," Broome observed, as if it would be a news bulletin to Jordan. It was true--Germans among the engineering staff and Germans on the secretarial staff. Jordan's own secretary was a woman named Miss Hofer whose family came to America from Stuttgart when she was a girl. She still spoke English with a German accent. Then, as if to prove Broome's point, two mail boys walked past Jordan's door prattling in Berlin-accented German.
"What kind of security checks have you run on them?" It was Leamann talking again. Jordan could tell he was a cop of some sort--or at least he had been a cop in another life. It was written in the poor fit of his threadbare suit and the look of dogged determination on his face. For Leamann the world was filled with evil people, and he was the only thing standing between order and anarchy.
"We don't run security checks on them. We build bridges here, not bombs."
"How do you know they're not sympathetic to the other side?"
"Leamann. Is that a German name?"
Leamann's meaty face collapsed into a frown. "Irish, actually."
Broome broke off his inspection of the bridge models to chuckle at the exchange.