but not openly known role (due to his public diplomatic position) in numerous Jewish- related refugee transit evacuations: the rescue of Hungarian Jews from Bergen Belsen, Jewish children from Romania, and many eminent intellectuals fleeing Europe to find refuge in Turkey, Palestine, and the United States. In personal subterranean concert with the Vatican's representative to Turkey, Papal Nuncio Cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (1881–1963), they devised false visa schemes to facilitate the documents needed for transit through Turkey for fleeing refugees. Steinhardt and Ira Hirschmann of The War Refugee Board secured leaky boats wherever possible with no assurance of the safety of such vessels but the hope that anything might succeed if tried. While there were successes, sadly there were also tragedies and losses. Cardinal Roncalli was elected in 1958 by the Vatican conclave to become Pope John XXIII and subsequently was canonized as a saint. The highest note of his papacy was Vatican II, also known as the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). On August 1, 1943, Operation Tidal Wave, the air attack by U.S. Army Air Forces based in Libya and Southern Italy, began their daring strategic bombing mission over the Ploiesti refineries and oilfields in Romania in order to deny the German war machine of needed fuel. This was aided by the uses of the Norden bombsight for pinpoint accuracy. This is now considered by many World War II military historians as one of the costliest and bloodiest missions of the war. Of the 53 aircraft and 660 crew members lost, many had little or no fuel to return to their bases, so they were instructed to ditch in neutral Turkey where there was a substantial American presence to assist and on which to fall back. Many a dark unlit night following the bombing raid, Steinhardt and his daughter, in a jeep with a small convoy of his embassy military personnel, sortied out into the wilds and deserts attempting to locate and return wounded American pilots, destroy the bombsights so the Germans would not know of their existence, return with the wounded, secretly patching them up by the embassy medical team and moving them quietly through channels back to their points of origin. Some were slipped out to the coast at Izmir and quietly put on sailboats bound for Lebanon or Palestine. Two flyers were smuggled out when Mrs. Steinhardt and her daughter suddenly announced their "shopping trip" to