War and Remembrance (29 page)

(b) The
nationalist
concept: the Reich as a rising world force, the natural successor to the British Empire; a German culture purged of foreign strains; armed forces on the Bonapartist basis of “the nation in arms”; a hard mystical loyalty to king, to soil, and to old Christian virtues.

Cutting across both ideas came
socialism,
with its sentimental and poisonous farrago of world brotherhood, egalitarianism, and the abolition of private property. But nationalism was the truly German essence. Whenever the nationalist Reich prevailed — in 1866, in 1870-71, in 1914, in 1917 —we were strong and victorious. Whenever the liberal and socialist elements surfaced, Germany suffered.

It was Adolf Hitler’s political genius to weld the mystique of the nationalist Reich to the rabble-rousing appeal of socialism.
National Socialism
resulted, an explosive mass movement. The modified socialism of Hitler was unobjectionable to the army. It amounted to spartan economic controls, and basic employment, health, and welfare measures for all the people except the Jews.

But the Jews were the backbone of German liberalism. Liberalism had given them the rights and privileges of citizens. Liberalism had turned them loose to use their energy and cleverness in finance, the professions, and the arts. These people who had been kept apart were now to be seen everywhere — prosperous, exotic, holding high places, and indiscreetly displaying their new-won gains. To the Jews, liberalism was their salvation. Therefore, to a dedicated nationalist like Adolf Hitler, the Jews appeared as ultimate enemies.

Tragically, it all depended on the point of view.

The Actual Power of the Jews

Yet all attempts to justify the territorial solution finally fall before one practical historical truth. The Jews proved unable to save themselves, or to influence anybody else to save them; and self-preservation is the test of a nation’s true power.

The Jews beyond Hitler’s reach looked on helplessly while their European blood brothers were going to an obscure but grim fate. Where then was their political stranglehold on the West, that Hitler took as an article of faith? Where was their boundless wealth, when they could not induce or bribe a single country — not even one small South American republic —to open its doors? In 1944, where was their all-penetrating influence, when the secret began to leak out, and they in vain implored the Anglo-Americans to bomb Auschwitz?

These things speak for themselves. Hitler exaggerated the threat of the Jews, and badly led astray the well-meaning German people. The Jews would have served us well. Their weight in manpower, skill, and international influence, added on our side instead of subtracted from it, would have been most welcome. Perhaps the war might even have ended differently!

For if the Jews outside Europe lacked the power to command deliverance, they did have a strong voice. Their outcries lent credence to Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s unfair portrayal of our folk as Huns and savages, even while we were fighting the battle of Christendom against the Red hordes. And so arose the two policies fatal to our cause —“Germany First,” and “unconditional surrender”—which ranged the two powerful plutocracies irrevocably on the side of Eurasian Bolshevism.

Had the Nazi regime handled the millions of Jews under our rule with wisdom, none of this need have happened. This is the tragic military paradox of the territorial solution. The Jews were not strong enemies; but they might have been strong friends. Seen in this light, the Nazi policy toward the Jews must be called a costly military blunder. But the armed forces were
not consulted and cannot be blamed. This is the inescapable conclusion from the prime surviving document of the matter, the Wannsee Protocol.

TRANSLATORS NOTE:
When I first submitted this article in translation to the
U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings,
the editor, Vice Admiral Turnbull C. “Buck” Fuller, USN, returned it with a large red-ink scrawl,
“Just what is the purpose of offering to the Proceedings this obtuse, cold-blooded, sickening drivel?”
He was an old salt and a good friend. I wrote under his words,
“To show ourselves what we might be capable of,”
and sent the piece back. Six months later the article appeared in the
Proceedings. /
met Buck Fuller on many occasions thereafter. He never once referred to Armin von Roon’s essay. He still has not.
—
V.H.

* * *

U.S.S. NORTHAMPTON

Plan of the Day, i February 1942

1. Commencing at sunrise, Task Group 8.1 (this vessel with
   Salt Lake City
   and
   Dunlap)
   will bombard Wotje atoll in the northern Marshall Islands.
   

   a. Air strikes from
   Enterprise
   will neutralize enemy air strength and shore batteries before bombardment commences.
   

   b. Charts of these enemy waters being old and unreliable, and hazards from coral reefs abounding, condition Zed will be set at 0000 hours.
   

2. Northampton
   is proud to be flagship of Bombardment Group North, under Vice Admiral Halsey’s Task Force 8, as the Pacific Fleet at last hits back at the treacherous Nips throughout the Marshall and Gilbert island groups.
   
3. “This is It.” All hands govern themselves accordingly.
   

JAMES C. GRIGG

EXECUTIVE OFFICER

“Commence firing!”

The
Northampton’s
three turrets thundered out white smoke and pale fire. The deck jerked and shuddered. Though plugged with cotton, Victor Henry’s ears rang. The flash, the roar, the smell of gunpowder from this first salvo at the enemy that had wrecked Pearl Harbor and the
California,
filled him with exultation. Astern, at the same moment, the
Salt Lake Citys
main battery blasted and flamed, and the two clusters of eight-inch projectiles, plain to see with binoculars, arched off toward the vessels anchored in the lagoon.

Off the port quarter, the rim of the sun was blazing up over a sharp horizon. The two cruisers and the destroyer
Dunlap,
flying huge battle flags, were steaming in column at full speed, broadside to the smoking green lump on the sea that was Wotje Island. The
Enterprise
planes, mere specks in the sky (Warren’s no doubt among them), were heading back to the carrier, barely visible to the north. They had struck the island at dawn, on schedule.

Pug was still seething over the messy catapulting of his own four spotter planes. One craft had just missed going into the sea. Another had been twenty minutes loading on the catapult, for the crane had jammed. Damned bad start! Admiral Spruance, standing beside him on the bridge in the brightening dawn, had said not a word, but disappointment at the performance
had radiated from him. He was clearly disappointed too at the lack of targets in Wotje. There were no warships, only a scattering of merchantmen. Halsey’s first hit-and-run raid against the Japs would not amount to much if the pickings were no better at the other atolls.

But even this minor gunnery action began badly. The enemy ships weighed anchor made smoke, and dodged and twisted in the lagoon, hard to see and harder to hit. Not one visibly sank or even flamed under continuous heavy gunfire. The spotter planes reported splashes as hits, then corrected themselves. A nervy little minesweeper sortied from the lagoon, shooting its popguns and zigzagging. The destroyer
Dunlap
engaged it at point-blank range, with five-inch salvos that kept churning up futile splashes in the sea. Lookouts on all three ships next began sighting periscopes, in a hysterical wave of reports. Neither Pug Henry nor the admiral could see the periscopes, but Spruance had little choice. He ordered an emergency turn. The attack fell apart. The three warships milled about on the quiet sunny sea off the smoking island, preoccupied with dodging reported torpedo tracks and avoiding collisions. At last Pug Henry resolved to ignore periscopes and torpedo wakes he couldn’t see. Heading into Wotje on a firing course, he blasted away at the elusive merchant vessels, lavishing the costly shells to give his crew at least the experience of failure, the exposure to the thumping shore batteries, the practice of rushing shells from magazine to gun breech, the smell and the sound and the fear of combat; and to force into the open the humiliating realities of a warship system still clogged with peacetime fat.

Rear Admiral Spruance, issuing order after order on the TBS, finally regained a semblance of control. The
Dunlap
sank the minesweeper. The three ships formed up, moved in close to shore, and set ablaze most of the island’s rickety buildings. But the shore batteries found the range, and colored splashes began howling up around the attackers. When Spruance saw the
Salt Lake City
straddled twice, he called a cease-fire. Ordering Captain Henry to lead Task Group 8.1 back to the
Enterprise
screen, the admiral left the bridge frozen-faced. The action had lasted an hour and a half.

“Meeting of all officers not on watch in the wardroom,” Pug said to Jim Grigg.

“Aye aye, sir,” said the exec, his countenance under the new blue-painted helmet as fallen as Spruance’s.

A subdued crowd of young men in khaki got to their feet as the captain came into the long narrow room. He kept them standing for his short talk. They had just taken part in a nuisance raid, he said. They had failed to be much of a nuisance. A long war lay ahead. The
Northampton
would commence improving its combat readiness. Dismissed.

All day, all evening, past midnight, department heads were summoned to the captain’s quarters, where, speaking without notes, he ticked off weak
points and ordered remedial action. The
Northampton’s
poor showing had not greatly surprised Pug Henry. In his first month or so as captain, sizing up his ship, he had kept his eyes and ears open and his mouth more or less shut. There were too many raw recruits and draftees aboard; the experienced personnel, enlisted and officers alike, were a sparse lot. Ship routine went well, spit-and-polish was adequate, but everything was slack, grooved, comfortable, and faintly civilian. Still, the men looked good to Pug, and he had been waiting for just such a crisis to show his hand.

He startled all the officers from the exec down with his hard manner and precise criticisms, for they had been taking him as a quiet sort, out of touch after all his years on the beach. The conferences went on for fourteen straight hours. Alemon kept brewing and serving fresh coffee, pot after pot, and made hamburgers for dinner, which Grigg and the captain ate as they conferred. When Grigg, having taken hundreds of notes in his “urgent” notebook and drunk a dozen cups of coffee to stay alert, looked ready to faint, Pug quit. “Prepare a dispatch to ComCruPac,” he said, “requesting a tug with target upon our return to base.”

“We can’t break radio silence, sir,” said Grigg nervously. “Not for that.”

“I know. Send a scout plane with it.”

Halsey’s task force, a long column of gray warships streaming battle flags, entered Pearl Harbor to a wild welcome: sirens, whistles, bells, cheers, and rainbows of flags decking every ship in port. For journalists and radio commentators the raid had been a mighty shot in the arm. They were hailing Admiral Halsey’s gigantic attack on the Marshalls and Gilberts as the resurgence of American power in the Pacific, the turn of the tide, the proof of the resilience of free governments, and so on and so forth. Coded intercepts of battle reports had told Victor Henry a different story. Air attacks at Kwajalein had destroyed some planes and probably sunk a few small ships. The coordinated air strikes by the
Yorktown
in the Gilberts had produced small results. Surface bombardments had nowhere been effective.

The captain summoned his officers to the wardroom as soon as the
Northampton
moored. They had all been out on deck enjoying the tumultuous victory greeting, and they looked fresh and happy. “Let’s understand one thing,” he said. “The purpose of all the hoopla out there is to boost civilian morale. Hirohito isn’t losing any sleep over what this raid did. As for what the
Northampton
did, the less said the better. We sortie at dawn for gunnery runs.”

He had some trouble obtaining the target vessel. ComCruPac summoned him by messenger mail to explain his failure to schedule liberty for his crew after their arduous combat cruise. He went ashore and brusquely confronted the chief of staff, an old classmate. The
Northampton
had to be
jolted into war, he said. Wives, girl friends, bars, beds, would all be there when the cruiser returned from forty-eight hours of hard drills. He got a promise of a target.