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the customer had no intention of paying for whatever was taken. I was given a twenty-five-dollar check as a reward, and even though I had gone about it all wrong, I was very proud!116

In June 1943, General Hawley appointed Loyal to the first Anglo-American medical mission to the Soviet Union. Accompanied by two agents of the Soviet secret police, the seven members of the mission flew to Moscow via Gibraltar, Tripoli, Cairo, and Tehran. Their suite at the National Hotel was bugged, Loyal noted in his memoir. He also noted the large portraits of Charlie Chaplin and Paul Robeson on display beside those of Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt at the headquarters of the Soviet’s cultural exchange organization. After spending the Fourth of July at Spasso House, the residence of the American ambassador, watching Mickey Mouse cartoons and lunching on hot dogs and Coca-Cola, and attending a performance of Swan Lake with an audience of factory workers whose body odor Loyal found

“overpowering,” their tour of Moscow hospitals and research institutes began. One of his American colleagues, Harvard professor Elliot Cutler, Loyal writes, “had insisted upon taking a million units of penicillin as an intro-ductory gift, like taking wampum to the Indians. The drug had just been released for use and was scarce. It was received coldly with the statement that it was nothing new to them and was available for the care of their wounded.

This was the first bald demonstration of their facility for lying to support their claims to priority and superiority.”117

At the Institute for Neurological Surgery, Loyal was so dismissive of a demonstration of the Russians’ nerve graft technique, which he undiplo-matically pointed out had been proven “completely useless” during World War I, that the other members of the mission “were not hesitant later in indicating that my doubting attitude might well impair the entire success of the mission and, if carried into other fields, might even destroy the alliance between the Western nations and the Soviet Union and allow Germany to win the war.”118 But at dinner that evening the institute’s head, General Burdenko, rearranged the place cards so that Loyal was next to him, and he heaped praise upon the American for his bluntness and honesty; Loyal saw this as a lesson in how to handle Communist apparatchiks.

On July 11 the mission traveled to the front, 125 miles southwest of Moscow, where they toured the wards of a casualty-clearing station hidden in a thick forest and were served caviar, smoked fish, strawberries, and large quantities of vodka. A second feast awaited them that evening at an 1 4 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House evacuation hospital, and although Loyal refused to participate in all the obligatory vodka toasts, he still became violently ill during the night. The next morning at breakfast, the Russian medical officer who had mocked him for switching to water the night before complimented him for standing up to his hosts’ demands.119 One wonders how many times Loyal told these tales of how to handle the Soviets to his son-in-law before including them in his 1973 memoir.

His wartime Russian experience became part of the Loyal Davis legend. A 1962 magazine profile summarized it thus: “He was greatly impressed by the prompt field treatment given the wounded by the Red Army doctors—both men and women. He found, however, that Russian surgeons at times used inferior techniques because the Kremlin did not permit a free exchange of knowledge between them and their American counterparts.”120

By the beginning of August, Loyal had returned to Oxford and resumed his battle with his nemesis, General Malcolm Grow, the surgeon to the Eighth Air Force, who was now taking credit for first recognizing high-altitude frostbite. A week later Loyal was ordered to Washington to present his studies at the Pentagon. At a meeting with Colonel Walter Jensen, a top Air Force medical officer, Loyal was again confronted by General Grow, whom he angrily