War and Remembrance (188 page)

Adolf Hitler, of course, had no way to quit. He could keep afloat only in blood. From the east, the west, the south, and from the air his end was closing in. His response at this time was the Ardennes offensive, the “Battle of the Bulge.” Back in late August, with all his fronts crumbling, he had ordered a stand-fast on the Russian front and a giant surprise counterpunch in the west. The aim was vague: some kind of success, leading to a cease-fire that did not involve his extinction. The German army and people had rallied around him in fantastic preparations that took months, scraping together their remaining strength and concentrating it in the west.

But all this was essentially dreamy lunacy. In the east the Soviet Union was assembling five replenished army groups, more than two million men with mountains of supplies, for a drive to Berlin. Scarcely a German alive preferred a Russian to an Anglo-American occupation. Hitler was between a torrent and a trickle, so to say, of menace to Germany’s future; and he was damming the trickle and neglecting the torrent, dreaming of a second 1940, another Ardennes breakthrough, a new march to the sea. When Guderian showed him accurate intelligence reports on the Soviet buildup he sneered,
“Why, it’s the biggest fake since Genghis Khan! Who’s responsible for this rubbish?”

The Ardennes offensive lasted two weeks, from mid-December through Christmas. It lives on in American memory chiefly as the time a general said “Nuts!” to a German call for surrender. More prosaically, there were a hundred thousand German and seventy-five thousand Allied casualties, and on both sides, great loss of arms. The western Allies were briefly surprised but recovered. The end was German disaster. In his private circle Hitler was vocally very jolly about having “recovered the initiative in the west.” He never spoke or showed himself publicly anymore.

As the Ardennes push collapsed, the Russians came roaring in from the Baltic to the Carpathians. In crossing Poland, the Red Army overran a vast industrial complex and prison camp at Oswiecim, abandoned except by a few dying scarecrows in striped rags, who pointed out some dynamited ruins as crematoriums where millions of people had been secretly murdered. Events on the Russian front got little play in California newspapers. If there was such a story Byron missed it.

Within four weeks the Russians stood everywhere deep in Germany on the Oder-Neisse River line, at some points only eighty miles from Berlin. Having run hundreds of miles, they paused for resupply. Now Hitler ordered
the bulk of his forces pell-mell eastward, stripping the western front. At that time Eisenhower’s armies, quite recovered from the Bulge, were preparing a Rhine crossing as big as the Russian attack. This frantic shuttling of dwindling armies across Germany from east to west and to the east again at a lunatic’s whim may seem ludicrous today, but it unfolded early in 1945 as very serious military and railroading business inside the Reich. Certainly it prolonged the agony.

Of these tides of battle in Europe Byron had little grasp. He knew more about the Pacific. Even so, MacArthur’s massive Philippines campaign came through to him mainly as a meteor shower of kamikazes on the naval forces. He knew that the British were driving the Japanese out of Burma, because of the dull daily stories about fighting along a river called the Irrawaddy; and that B-29 “Superfortresses” based in the Marianas were setting Japanese cities on fire. But to him the capture of Iwo Jima was the big event in the Pacific — some twenty-five thousand United States Marine casualties, a rock with airfields eight hundred miles from Yokohama! Surely the Japs would quit now.

It was in fact a time of peace feelers, German and Japanese; tenuous, unofficial, contrary to government public policy, and futile. Officially Germany and Japan bellowed defiance and the imminent collapse of their war-weary foes. But both nations were now helpless in the air, and plans took form to topple their intransigent governments with airborne massacres. Like Byron, the Allied leaders were getting impatient for the end.

In mid-February, British and American bombers killed more than a hundred thousand Germans with a single fire raid on Dresden.

In mid-March the Superfortresses killed more than a hundred thousand Japanese in a single fire raid on Tokyo.

These vast slaughters have since become notorious. They went by for Byron, and for nearly all Americans, as just undistinguished headlines of the day’s far-off successes. More people died in these raids than at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but there was no novelty in them. Albert Speer, Hitler’s astute production chief, is reported to have chided an American Air Force general, after the war, for not laying on more raids like Dresden; it was the sovereign way to end the war, he said, but the Allies failed to follow through.

Nor did Byron make much of the Yalta Conference, which ended as the Dresden raid was taking off. It was hailed in the papers as a cordial triumph of Allied comradeship. Only gradually did a sour counterswell spread that Roosevelt had “sold out” to Stalin. Quite simply, he had traded Balkan, Polish, and Asian geography to Stalin for American lives. Stalin was glad of the trade, and pledged a lot more Russian deaths than he ever had to deliver. Given the facts, Byron Henry probably would have been for the trade. He just wanted to win the war, find his family, and go home.

At Yalta Roosevelt wanted and got from Stalin a renewed pledge to attack
Japan once Germany fell. He did not know that the atom bomb would work. An invasion of Japan, he had been advised, might cost half a million casualties or more. As for the Balkans and Poland, the Red Army already practically held them. No doubt Roosevelt sensed the general American sentiment typified in Byron Henry for being done with the mess, and the indifference to foreign geography. Perhaps he foresaw that modern warfare must soon cease of its own impractical horror, and that geography would then become of little consequence. Dying men sometimes have visions denied to the active and the cunning.

Thus, at any rate, the agony went on and on, and in mid-March the
Barracuda
was ordered back to Pearl Harbor. There it was assigned to a submarine pack that would penetrate the Sea of Japan with FM sonar.

Eighth Air Force Command

Army Air Corps

U.S. Army Post Office

San Francisco

15 March 1945

Pamela, my love,

Remember the Air Corps general who slugged down a bottle of vodka and danced at your Moscow wingding for the ballet people? He’s here in the Marianas on LeMay’s staff. I’m batting out this letter in his office. He’s flying to the States tomorrow and he’ll mail it there. Otherwise I’d probably have to cable you. I want you to meet me in Washington instead of San Diego, and there’s much for you to do meantime. Captain Williams, our naval attaché in London, is a whiz at air priorities. Tell him you’re my bride-to-be and he’ll get you to Washington.

The news is that Rhoda’s husband offered his vacant apartment to me for the run of the lease. That broke the lawyers’ deadlock. I didn’t calculate the financial quid pro quo, I just wrote my lawyer, Charlie Lyons, to drop the arguing. So the house goes to Peters at his price, and we now have a flat on Connecticut Avenue to land in. Charlie will see to the lease and get you moved in; and Peters has quite decently offered to refurnish as you desire.

I’ll be relieved soon, I’m sure. BuPers is speeding up the rotation of sea billets. It’s like the fourth quarter of a won football game, when the substitutes come streaming out on the field for a few plays. I’ll request duty in Washington, and we can start living our lives.

All my movable possessions are in Foxhall Road. If I know Rhoda she’s already crated and boxed them out of sight. Have the stuff delivered to the apartment. There won’t be room for my books, Peters doesn’t strike me as a reader. Leave those crated and I’ll buy bookcases.

Incidentally, Pam, once you’re in Washington, start drawing on Charlie Lyons for expenses. Don’t argue, you’re not to blow in your funds at Washington prices. Please buy yourself all the clothes you need. “Trousseau” may not be an appropriate word, but call it what you will, your wardrobe’s important. You’ve been living for years in uniforms and travel clothes.

Well, there I go again. You’ve chided me before about filling my letters with money matters. I’m a poor hand at “the love stuff,” which is what Warren and Byron, when they were boys, called the romantic scenes in cowboy movies.
I admit it. I’ve really cheated you out of the love stuff, haven’t I? The fact is, Pam, I can read the love poems of Keats or Shelley or Heine with deeply stirred emotions, even gooseflesh, but I can no more express such emotions than I can saw a woman in half. I don’t know the trick. You and I can talk at length about the inarticulateness of American men as we lie naked in bed together. (How’s that?)

I’m waiting around here for dinner time. LeMay has invited me to dine. My flag’s in the
New Jersey
while the
Iowa’s
getting a Stateside overhaul, and we just put in here for replenishment. This island, Tinian, is a rock off the southern coast of Saipan, designed by nature as a bomber airfield. It’s a staggeringly vast airport, biggest on earth, they say. The B-29s take off from here to drop their fire bombs on the Japs.

I’m developing a grudging respect for the Japanese. I commanded the bombardment group at Iwo Jima. It was Admiral Spruance’s show, so he gave me something to do. I had battlewagons, heavy cruisers, destroyers pounding away for days at that little island. I don’t believe we left one square yard unblasted. Carrier aircraft bombed it, too. When the landing craft hit the beaches, that island was silent as a tomb. Then, by God, if Japs didn’t swarm up out of the ground and inflict twenty-five thousand casualties on our marines. It was the bloodiest fighting of the whole Pacific. My ships kept socking them, the carrier planes too, but they wouldn’t quit. When Iwo was secured I don’t think there were fifty Japs left alive on it.

Simultaneously their suicide pilots were damn near panicking our task force. Fleet morale is way down. The sailors thought they had the war won, and along comes this menace. Our newspapers are abusing the kamikazes as fanatics, madmen, drug addicts, and whatnot. It’s balderdash. Those same papers spread a legend right after Pearl Harbor about an Air Corps flier, Colin Kelly, diving his plane into a battleship smokestack off Luzon. The press to-do about Colin Kelly at the time was tumultuous. Yet the thing never even happened, Kelly was shot down in a bombing mission. The Japs have thousands of real Colin Kellys. The kamikaze pilots may be ignorant and misled, and they can’t win the war, but there’s a sad magnificence about such willingness to die in young men, and I ruefully admire the culture that has produced them, while I deplore the wasteful, useless tactic.

Spruance is now taking flak about the need for the capture of Iwo Jima, but LeMay wanted an emergency landing field halfway to Tokyo. The B-29s go in vast numbers, and Fitzgerald tells me Iwo has already cut plane losses and picked up air crew morale. Whether it was worth it or not, the blood has been spilled.

I came ashore at Fitz’s invitation to watch the biggest B-29 raid of the war take off and return. Pamela, it’s an indescribable spectacle, these giant machines roaring off in succession for hours. My God, what the American factories have poured out, and what airmen the Army’s trained! Fitzpatrick went along on the raid. It just about wiped out Tokyo, he says, set it on fire from end to end, all those square miles of matchbox houses burning away. He thinks maybe they left half a million dead.

Well, these airedales tend to overestimate their havoc, but I saw that armada take off. It must have created another “firestorm,” like Hamburg and Dresden. An incendiary raid of that magnitude sucks all the oxygen out of the air, I’m told, and people suffocate even if they’re not burned up. So far the Japs are saying nothing about it, but you’ll see plenty of stories on this attack sooner or later.

Here in the officers’ mess I’ve been reading in old papers and magazines about the Dresden raid. The Germans raised quite a howl. Evidently it was a honey. My tour of duty in the Soviet Union equips me to contemplate Dr. Goebbels’s anguished tears over Dresden unmoved. if the Russians had our planes and pilots, they’d do a raid like that on a German city every week till this war ends. They’d do it with joy, and they still wouldn’t half-repay the Germans for the devastation in the Soviet Union and the civilian deaths. I think the Germans hanged more Russian kids as partisans or in reprisals than have died in all the air raids on Germany put together. God knows I pity the Dresden women and children whose charred bodies are piled up in Goebbels’s propaganda photographs, but nobody made the Germans follow Hitler. He wasn’t a legitimate ruler. He was a man with a mouth, and they liked what he said. They got behind him, and they let loose a firestorm that’s sucking all the decent instincts out of human society. My peerless son died fighting it. It’s made savages of all of us. Hitler gloried in savagery, he proclaimed it as his battle cry, and the Germans shouted
Sieg Heil!
They still go on laying down their misguided lives for him, and the lives of their unfortunate families. I wish them joy of their Fuhrer while he lasts.

The Japs seem to take their punishment differently. They richly deserve what’s happening to them, too, but they bear themselves as though they know it.