War and Remembrance (13 page)

His muffled answer came, “Well, nobody was expecting this. There are no land-based Jap bombers with the range to hit Singapore. Brooke-Popham told me that himself.”

“Then what on earth is going on?”

“Carrier raid, maybe. Of course, the
Prince of Wales
will intercept and sink any flattop around, if the RAF doesn’t get them first. One can’t reckon on suicidal madness in the enemy.”

Soon he hurried out of his room, untidily dressed. The bombing had moved farther off, but planes still drummed in the sky. She was at the desk, half-nude in her brief nightgown, dully leafing a typescript, hair falling around her face. “This broadcast is obsolete now, Talky.”

“Why? My military summary stands. That’s the meat of it. It’s twice as timely now! I need a new opening about this onslaught, and a resounding wind-up. Have a go at those, won’t you? I’ll redictate your draft when I return.”

“Where the devil do you think you’re going, during an air raid?”

“Army Public Relations. I rang Major Fisher. He’s holding a press conference right now, and — what’s the matter?”

Her head was sinking on the desk in her naked arms. “Oh, it just depresses me so! The whole thing, starting up again out here.”

“Courage, girl. These aren’t Germans. The planes up there are made of bamboo shoots and rice paper. We’ll smash these bastards. Ye gods, look at the lights, will you? This town’s really ablaze like a Christmas tree.
Somebody
will catch hell for being asleep on watch! I’m off. You’ll draft that new stuff?”

“Yes, yes. Go along,” she muttered into her arms.

Pamela was thinking that Clipper flights would certainly stop at once; that the sea lanes to Hawaii would become infested with Japanese submarines; that in fact she was cut off from Victor Henry for years or for good. To have come so far in vain! Would she even be able to get out of Singapore?

Dawn was breaking, and a faint cool breeze through the open french windows was freshening the room with garden scents, when her father burst in, trumpeting like a mad elephant, “Pam! Pam, have you heard?” Still in her nightgown, she looked up blearily from the typewriter. “Have I heard what?”

“Why, you silly frippet, we’ve WON THE WAR!” Tudsbury’s eyes
were bulging from his head, and his hands were shaking. “Those yellow sods have gone and attacked
Pearl Harbor!”

“What!”

“You heard me. Huge carrier raid! All kinds of enormous damage. The Yanks are in it, Pam! In it up to their necks this time! What else matters? We’ve won the damned war, I tell you! I must have a drink on it or I’ll die.”

He splashed whiskey into a tumbler, gulped it, and coughed. “Whew. We’ve
won it.
Won it! What a close-run thing. We’ve really won this damned war. I’ll have to rewrite that piece from page one, but by God, what a glorious moment to live in! These are the days of the giants, Pam. Their footsteps are shaking the earth —”

“What ships were hit?”

“Oh, the Yanks aren’t talking, naturally. But the damage is immense. That much comes straight from the wire services in Honolulu.
We
weren’t caught short
here,
thank the Christ! They tried to come ashore at Khota Baru airfield, but we shoved them back into the sea. They did gain a beachhead in Thailand. We’ll be marching up there this morning to knock them all on the head. Two crack divisions are on the border, ready to jump off. The Japs have really run their heads into a noose this time, and —
now
what’s wrong?”

The back of her hand to her eyes, Pamela was striding to her bedroom. “Nothing, nothing, nothing!” She gestured at the desk. “There’s your damned draft.”

Tudsbury’s broadcast brought telephone calls and cables of congratulations from London, Sydney, and New York. He spoke of vast secret stockpiles and fortifications that he had seen with his own eyes; of heavy reinforcements on the way, as he knew from the highest military sources; of the striking calm of Europeans and Asiatics alike under the bombing. His draft script had cited the street lamps burning during the raid, as a humorous instance of Singapore’s sangfroid. Hesitantly, apologetically, the censor had asked him to cut this. He had amiably agreed.

Reeling off the statistics of America’s giant industrial resources, Tuds-bury closed with this peroration:
“Wars are not fought by cold statistics, true, but by warm-blooded suffering men. Yet statistics foreshadow outcomes. This war, though it must yet cause grisly tragedy to mankind, will be won. We know that now.

“For the grim closing struggle, I can report, Fortress Singapore is ready. Fortress Singapore does not expect a tea party. But it is well prepared for its uninvited guests. Of one thing, let the outside world rest assured. The Japanese will not enjoy
—
if they ever get close enough to taste it
—
the bitter brew that awaits them at Fortress Singapore.

When he walked into the bar of the Tanglin Club after the broadcast, the people there rose to a man and clapped, bringing tears trickling on his fat face.

The bombers did not come again to Singapore. There was little word of fighting up-country, either. For Pamela it was a queerly evocative tropical replay of the “phony war” in 1939: the same lift of excitement, the same odd unreality, the same “back to business-as-usual.” The blackout was regarded as awkward novel fun, though the shortage of dark cloth gave the club ladies a cause for anxious twittering as they sat rolling bandages in sultry flowery gardens. Air raid wardens in tin hats self-importantly stalked the streets. However, there were no air raid shelters.

This lack bothered Tudsbury. He quizzed the governor. “Watery subsoil, dear fellow,” said the governor. Tudsbury pointed out that at the naval base he had seen giant concrete bunkers deep in the earth endlessly stacked with cannon shells, food, and fuel. What about the watery subsoil? The governor smiled at his sharpness. Yes, those caverns had been sunk in the swampy ground at great cost, for the security of the Empire. But in the city such a drastic measure, quite aside from the expense, would alarm the Asiatic populace. Adequate instructions existed for taking shelter in cellars and stone buildings. If required, an elaborate evacuation plan was ready. Tudsbury reluctantly accepted all this. He was the lion of the Tanglin Club, Singapore’s reassuring radio voice to the world.

But he had trouble filling his broadcast time. In the first army communiqués the Jap invasion vessels were reported retiring, leaving a few troops behind on surrounded beachheads, and these stranded invaders were being wiped out according to plan. Since then the information had been getting sparser. The place names had been sliding strangely southward. One day the communiqué in its entirety read,
“Nothing new to report.”
A theory began circulating at the white men’s clubs. Like the Russians fighting Hitler, the military command was cleverly trading space for time, wearing the Japs out in the equatorial jungle, which was as hard on troops as the Russian winter.

Then there was the “monsoon” theory. Army experts had long held that after October, Singapore could rest easy for half a year, since the enemy could not land during the northeast monsoon. But the Japs had in fact landed. The experts now were explaining that any rash military plan could be tried, but the Japanese invasion, fatally weakened by losses in monsoon surf, was bound to peter out in the jungle. Though Tudsbury broadcast these theories, the absence of hard news gnawed at him. The way he had been welcomed, and the impact of his first broadcast, had pushed upon him the role of optimist, but he felt he was getting out on a limb.

Then came the sinking of the
Prince of Wales
and the
Repulse.
Here
was hard news! Disaster at the outset, with a strong odor of blundering; sickening, yet familiar in British war-making. Two correspondents returned alive from the
Repulse,
shaken and ill, with historic scoops. Tudsbury had to compete. He burst in on his high military friends, demanded the truth, and got it. The brave little admiral had steamed north, intending to surprise the invasion force, smash it up fast, and escape from the Jap land-based bombers. He had had no air cover. The nearest British carrier was in India. The local RAF command had lacked the planes or had missed the signals; that part was vague. Japanese torpedo planes and dive bombers had roared in and sunk both capital ships. The admiral had drowned. The Empire lay open now to a Japanese navy that included ten battleships and six major aircraft carriers, with only a much-weakened American navy at its back to worry about.

Tudsbury rushed to the Raffles and dictated this hot story to Pamela, centering it on one theme: air power. His broadcast was half an editorial. England had just bought with blood the knowledge that warships could not stand up against land-based air. He pleaded: turn the lesson against the enemy! The Royal Air Force was the world’s greatest air arm. Quick massive air reinforcements of Malaya could cut off and doom the Jap invaders. Here was an opportunity worth any sacrifice on other fronts; a turnabout that would redeem the disaster and preserve the Empire.

He sent the draft to the censor’s office by runner. Three hours before broadcast time, the censor telephoned him; the broadcast was fine, except that he could not say the ships had lacked air cover. Not accustomed to such interference, Alistair Tudsbury sped to the censor’s office in a taxi, sweating and muttering. The censor, a frail blond man with a pursed little smile, shook with terror at Tudsbury’s roars, staring at him with round moist little eyes. His military adviser was a navy captain, plump, white-haired, pink-skinned, clad in faultless tropic whites, who gave no reason for his ruling except a reiterated, “Frightfully sorry, old chap, but we can’t have it.”

After long arguing Tudsbury thrust quivering grape-colored jowls right in his face, bellowing, “All right, before I go directly to Air Chief Marshal Brooke-Popham, WHY can’t you have it?”

“It’s vital military information. We must deny it to the enemy.”

“The
enemy?
Why, who do you suppose
sank
those ships? My broadcast can bring Singapore such a cloud of fighter planes that nothing like that will happen again!”

“Yes, sir, that part is splendidly written, I grant you.”

“But unless I
say
there was no air cover, the story is pointless! Can’t you see that? Incomprehensible! Idiotic!”

“Frightfully sorry, sir, but we can’t have it.”

Tudsbury catapulted out to the nearest telephone. The air chief marshal
was unavailable. The governor was out inspecting defenses. The time before his broadcast shrank. Arriving at the broadcasting studios in a rage, he proposed to Jeff McMahon that he go on the air, read his uncut script, and take the consequences.

“Good Lord, we’re at war, Tudsbury!” McMahon protested. “Do you want us all to go to prison? We’ll have to switch you off.”

The fat old correspondent was running out of indignation and energy. “I broadcast for four years from Berlin, McMahon,” he grated. “Goebbels himself never dared to tamper with my scripts like this. Not once! The British administration of Singapore does dare. How is that?”

“My dear fellow, the Germans only talk about being the master race,” Elsa McMahon’s husband said drily. “You’re on in ten minutes.”

I
N
a heavy sea, in the early darkness of the morning watch, the U.S.S.
Devilfish
pounded along the west coast of Luzon toward Lingayen Gulf. Byron stood wedged by the gyroscope repeater on the tiny bridge in sticky foul weather clothes, and with every plunge of the forecastle, warm black spray struck his face. The lookouts were silent shadows. They wouldn’t doze tonight, Byron thought. Except for this sense of heading toward trouble, and for running darkened, Byron’s first OOD watch under way in wartime was like any other night watch: uneventful peering into the gloom on a windy wet rolling bridge, through long empty hours.

About the trouble ahead, he knew more than the crewmen. This was less a patrol than a suicide mission; Aster had showed him on the Lingayen Gulf chart the shallow depth figures, and the reefs that nearly blocked the mouth of the gulf. The clear entrance to the east would be crawling with Jap antisubmarine vessels. If an American sub did by some fluke slip past them to torpedo a troop transport, thereby alerting the whole invasion force — well, as Aster put it, from then on life aboard might be disagreeable and short.

Byron accepted all this. Yet Prien’s penetration of Scapa Flow to sink the
Royal Oak
had been as dangerous a venture. The U-boat captain had brought it off, and come home safe to a hero’s welcome and a medal from Hitler’s hands. Advancing through the dark in a lone submarine, toward a huge enemy force that commanded the air and sea, filled Byron with high-strung zest; possibly a stupid feeling, he knew, but a real one. The exec obviously felt the same way. Carter Aster was smoking a long brown Havana tonight. That meant his spirits were high; otherwise he consumed vile gray Philippine ropes. As for Captain Hoban, he was almost fizzing with combat verve.

Byron’s resentment of his commanding officer was gone. The captain had ridden him hard, but that contest of wills now seemed his own fault; his persistence in sloth had been childish. Branch Hoban was a superb ship-handler. He had proved it again, threading out through the tricky new mine fields laid in Manila Bay to block Jap I-boats. He was a skilled submarine engineer, ready and quick to get his hands dirty on a diesel engine, or to sting them with battery acid. His failings were only those of any Academy eager
beaver; anxiety to make a record, tough punctiliousness about paperwork, a tendency to grease four-stripers and admirals. So what? He had won E’s in engineering and torpedo shooting. Those were the things that mattered in combat. Heading toward the enemy, Hoban was a reassuring boss man.