MY FATHER'S SECRET WAR
The story of a remote silent man who kept his breathtaking past and his real character a carefully guarded secret - until the day his daughter found out who he really was. A World War Two Spy Memoir.
About the Book
MY FATHER'S SECRET WAR is a reporter's account of her investigation into her father's past as she reconnects with him after decades of estrangement. Its meticulously-researched story is also a poignant account of discovery and redemption:
As her remote father becomes increasingly unable to care for himself in later years, Franks uses her journalistic expertise to uncover the secret details of her father's experience as a young Navy lieutenant. To her surprise, she learns that the reserved man she grew up with had, in fact, been a daring spy behind enemy lines in World War II.
When she was a young girl, Lucinda's father was a revered figure, whom she idolized and adored. He was tall and handsome, with courtly manners, given to outrageous compliments. He was an avid lepidopterist whose butterfly collection is now with New York's Museum of Natural History. He watched the stars in the night sky cheek-to-cheek with Lucinda and named the constellations. He cared for his wife, tenderly, in the final months of her battle with cancer and helped preserve her dignity even in the last stages. He was a big-hearted defender of the oppressed and the powerless, a blue-blooded New Englander who was vehemently anti-anti-Semitic.
But Tom Franks was also a troubled man. He was an alcoholic; a failure in his profession; a philanderer; and a frightening figure who verbally raged at his wife until Lucinda clung about his waist begging him to stop. He appeared to be a paranoiac who obsessively collected handguns, stowed them throughout the house (under Lucinda's mattress, under his own mattress, on the bookshelf, beneath the kitchen sink, in the hall closet under a hat) and loaded them with bullets he molded in the basement. He was distant, cold, and abstract, a veteran of World War II who evaded any real discussion of the war: what he had done in it and what it had done to him...
As she grew from a little girl into a young adult, Lucinda came to reject her father - as she felt he was rejecting her. She fled the family and forged a life for herself that didn't include him. And though she would become a success - a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, mother of two bright kids, wife of the district attorney of New York County - she was never able to forgive him for destroying her childhood dream of family happiness. She yearned to find out who the silent, stoical, emotionally inaccessible man she once admired really was.
Ingeniously structured, MY FATHER'S SECRET WAR begins in the present, with a shocking discovery. Lucinda, duty-bound to help pick up the pieces after her father is evicted from his home, finds a hidden cache of war memorabilia. In it is foreign currency from around Europe, false identification cards, photo negatives of blurry military targets, and most disturbingly, a Nazi SS officer's cap with a swastika and skull-and-crossbones insignia. Tom refuses to discuss these things. But Lucinda's reporter's instincts are roused - what had her father done in the war? Who had he had been? What is he hiding?
Lucinda employs every reporter's trick she has to get him to break his oath of silence and finally chip away his facade. Gradually she learns that Tom had been involved in intelligence - but on which side? Could he have been a double agent for the Nazis? She learns he worked for a military organization with the codename Argus - named after the mythical Greek monster with a hundred eyes - part of a culture so steeped in secrecy that even today it has almost never been mentioned in print. ("That is something I just can't talk about," he tells her. "And the record of what really happened at that operation, I don't think you've ever read about it in any book.") Her investigation takes her from the National Archives and Records Administration, to the Washington Navy Yard, to the Library Congress, and back again. She runs up a thousand-dollar phone bill tracking down leads. She discovers other men just liker her father: men scarred and ruined by the war.
Ultimately Lucinda discovers that Tom Franks had been a hero with the American military. He was among the first wave of soldiers to arrive at the Ohrdruf concentration camp, a satellite of the Buchenwald death camp and the first concentration camp liberated by the Allies. He worked undercover as an SS officer, a fisherman, and a dockworker; he trained resistance fighters in the arts of defense, interrogation, and even assassination; he fought in the major battles of the Pacific Theater; he took part in military operations with names like Operation Moonshine, Overcast, and Paperclip; he witnessed horrible atrocities, such as Japanese soldiers using live prisoners for bayonet practice, and was ordered to commit as many horrors as he had seen. His memories from that time would forever divide his life into Before and After; he would never recover from what he witnessed and what he had done in the name of the U.S. military.
As Lucinda learns the truth of her father's past, her admiration and respect for him - so long buried as to seem dead - reemerges. She learns to love her father, and by extension herself; everything he had accomplished becomes hers, awakening in her a confidence and spirituality she had never before possessed. As Tom succumbs to a dementia that consumes him by degrees, Lucinda finds a hidden packet of love letters he'd written to her mother during the war. In a remarkable series of excerpts, she travels backward in time, away from the pathetic, distant man, in a spiteful marriage, to discover a boy poet, full of verve, full of life, full of love. Lucinda discovers that the spirit of the real Tom Franks was killed by the war. The real Tom Franks had been a hero who sacrificed his youth, innocence, and even his family for his country.
A masterpiece of pacing and suspense, and brightened by incandescent prose, MY FATHER'S SECRET WAR is both a page-turning account of long-buried secrets finally coming to light, and a paean to the alchemy of love - how the deep, abiding connection between a child and parent can transform misunderstanding and regret into intimacy and hope, pain into peace, and loss into rebirth.
© 2008 Lucinda Franks. Design by Andreas Viklund.