War and Remembrance (38 page)

“Two confirmed sinkings, Admiral. Eleven thousand tons.”

Victor Henry’s eyes brightened. Spruance smiled. “Indeed? You’re ahead of the
Tambor.
What about the Mark Fourteen torpedo?”

“It stinks, Admiral. It’s a disgrace. My skipper got his three kills with contact exploders. Against orders, but they worked. ”

At the impudent freedom of the response, Pug’s pleasure subsided. “Briny, when torpedoes miss it’s always a temptation to blame the exploders.”

“Sorry, Dad. I know you were involved with that magnetic device.” In peacetime, Victor Henry had received a letter of commendation for his work on it. “It’s gone sour in production, that’s all I can tell you. Even with contact exploders, the Mark Fourteen keeps failing. All of SubPac’s skippers are up in arms, but BuOrd won’t listen. It’s sickening, I tell you, to sail five thousand miles to make a torpedo attack, and then have the fish hit the target with a dull thud. ”

Spruance relieved Pug by commenting, “My son says much the same thing. Admiral Nimitz has taken the matter up with BuOrd.” He accepted a glass of iced tea from Janice, and turned to Warren. “Incidentally, what’s the range of the Dauntless, again, Lieutenant?”

“We tend to think in hours, Admiral. Three and a half hours airborne, more or less.”

The admiral’s expression was abstracted. “Your book range is seven hundred fifty miles.”

Warren tartly smiled. “Sir, just forming up burns a lot of gasoline. Then over the target the fuel disappears like there’s a hole in the tank. Most of us wouldn’t get back from a target at two hundred miles.”

“And the fighters and torpedo bombers?” Spruance asked as he sipped the tea. “Same speed and range?”

“Approximately, sir.” Warren concealed any puzzlement at the questions, answering briskly. “But the TBD is a lot slower.”

“Well!” Spruance emptied his glass and stood up. “Most refreshing, Janice. I’ll be going down the hill now.”

The others were all on their feet. “Admiral, one of the boys can drive you back,” Pug said.

“Why?”

“If you have pressing business, sir.”

“Not necessary.” As he went out, Spruance beckoned to Pug to follow him. Closing the front door he paused, squinting at Victor Henry in the noon sun. He looked much sterner when he put on the big white cap. “Those boys of yours are different in character, but they’re both cut from the same cloth.”

“Byron should curb his tongue.”

“Submariners are individualists, as I well know. It’s good they’re both in port. Spend all the time with them you can.”

“There’s much to do on my ship, Admiral.”

Spruance’s face took on a sudden hard cast. “Henry, this is for your information only. The Japanese are heading east in great force. They’re already at sea. Their objective is to seize Midway Island. A Japanese base a thousand miles from Hawaii is unacceptable, so Admiral Nimitz is sending everything we’ve got up there. We’re about to fight the biggest battle of the war.”

Pug groped for a response to these stunning words that would not sound defeatist, alarmed, swaggering, or plain stupid. The
Hornet,
the
Enterprise,
with possibly the patched leaky
Yorktown
and their meager train, against that Japanese armada! At least eight carriers, perhaps ten battleships, only God could know how many cruisers, destroyers, submarines! As a fleet problem, it was too lopsided for any peacetime umpire to propose. His hoarse words came unbidden, “Now I know why you don’t want to go on the beach.”

“I won’t just yet.” The calm eyes glowed in a way Victor Henry never forgot. “Admiral Halsey has gone to the Cincpac hospital. Unlucky outbreak of a skin disease. He can’t fight this battle. He has recommended to Admiral Nimitz that I assume command of Task Force Sixteen, so I’ll transfer my gear to Halsey’s flag quarters this afternoon. My new assignment starts after the battle.”

This was just as stunning as the first disclosure. Spruance, a nonaviator,
taking the
Enterprise
and the
Hornet
into battle! Trying to maintain a level tone, Pug asked, “The intelligence is all that certain, then?”

“We think so. If all goes well, we may achieve surprise. Incidentally, I intend to invite you to the battle conference.” He held out his hand. “So as I say, spend some time with your boys while you can.”

Returning to the back porch, Pug Henry paused in the shadows of the doorway. His sons were talking on the lawn now, folding chairs pulled close, each clasping a beer can.
Cut from the same cloth!
They looked it. What could they be discussing so earnestly? He was in no hurry to interrupt them. He leaned in the doorway, taking in the picture he might not see again for a long time, trying to digest Spruance’s savage news. He was ready himself to sail against those odds in the thin-skinned
Northampton.
He had been paid through thirty years to prepare for such an encounter. But Warren and Byron, in their twenties, were just starting to taste life. Yet on the
Northampton
he would be the safest of the three.

In these two young men in gaudy shirts and tan shorts — one lean and red-bearded, the other big and solid, with gray-sprinkled hair — he could still see ghostly shadows of the boys they had been. Byron had smiled just such a smile at five. Warren’s emphatic push of both hands outward had been his main gesture as an Academy debater. Pug remembered Warren’s great moment, his graduation from the Academy, a battalion commander with a prize in modern history; and poor Byron’s sad Columbia commencement, when he had almost failed to graduate because of an overdue term paper. He remembered the rainy March day in 1939 when he had received his orders to Germany, and Warren had come in all sweaty from tennis to say he had applied for flight training, and Byron’s first letter from Siena about Natalie Jastrow had arrived. He would break into their talk soon, Pug thought, to ask about her. Not yet. He just wanted to look at them a little longer.

About Warren, Pug thought, he could have done nothing. Warren had always wanted the Navy. By becoming an aviator, he had outdone the father he was emulating. The aviators who survived would become the Navy’s next wave of admirals. That was already clear. As for Byron, Pug knew he had forced him into submarines and parted him from his Jewish wife. This was a sunken rock always to be steered around when they were together. Byron would have been called up anyway, and he might even have chosen submarines. But Pug could not clear himself of muddying Byron’s life, and — proud as he was of the
Devilfish’s
sinkings — of pushing him into hazard.

A poignant sense engulfed him of the one-way flow of time, of the offhand decisions, the slight impulsive mistakes, that could swell and become a man’s fate. There they sat, the little boys he had stiffly disciplined and silently loved, transformed into naval officers and combat veterans. It
seemed the work of a master illusionist who could just as easily, if he chose, reverse the trick and change the red-bearded submariner and the broad-chested aviator back into quarrelling lads on a Manila lawn. But Pug knew those lads were gone. He himself had changed into a grim old dog, and they too would keep changing in one direction. Byron would at last come to the adult form and personality that still eluded him. Warren —

The strange thing was that Victor Henry could not picture Warren changing any further. Warren as he sat there in the sun, holding that beer can, the cigarette slanting from his thin mouth, his body developed, full, and powerful, his face carved in lines of self-confidence and resolution, his blue eyes glinting with suppressed humor, was Warren as he would always be. So the father could not help thinking, and as the thought took root, a stinging cold shiver traversed his body. He shouted, stepping out of the doorway; “Say, is there any beer left, or have you two problem drinkers soaked it all up?”

Byron jumped to his feet and brought his father a tall frosty glass of beer.

“Dad, Natalie’s coming home on a Swedish boat! That’s what Janice’s father has heard, anyway. How about that?”

“Why, that’s glorious news, Briny.”

“Yes, I’m still trying to call the State Department to confirm it. But Warren thinks I shouldn’t transfer, because SubPac’s where all the glory is.”

“I never mentioned glory,” said Warren. “Did I say glory? I don’t give a shit about glory — pardon me, Dad — I said the subs are carrying the fight in this ocean, and you’ve got the chance of a lifetime to take a hand in history.”

“What else is glory?” said his father.

Byron said, “What do you think, Dad?”

Here was the sunken rock again, thought Pug. He answered at once, “Take your transfer and go. This Pacific war will be a long one. You’ll get back here in time to make all the history you can handle. You’ve never seen your son and — now, why the wise grin?”

“You surprise me, that’s all.”

The telephone was ringing and ringing in the house.

“By God,” Pug said, “that’s something to celebrate, Natalie coming home! When were we last together like this, anyway? Wasn’t it at Warren’s wedding? Seems to me an anniversary party is overdue here also.”

“Right,” Warren said. “I remembered the date, but I was flying patrols off Samoa.”

The ringing stopped.

“Well, I’m for having a champagne dinner at the Moana Hotel tomorrow night,” Pug said. “How about it?”

“Hey! Janice would love that, Dad, getting off this hill, maybe dancing —”

“I’m in,” said Byron, getting up and making for the kitchen door. “I buy the wine. Maybe that’s my call to Washington.”

Janice came running out on the lanai, flushed and wide-eyed. “Dad, it’s for you and guess who? Alistair Tudsbury. He’s calling from the Moana.”

Midway

(from
World Holocaust
by Armin von Roon)

TRANSLATORS NOTE:
The German edition opens with an analysis of the Soviet counterattacks in the winter of 1941-1942. For American readers a better starting point is Roon’s fine prologue to the Battle of Midway, which also touches on the Russian picture. The different theatres of war affected each other more than is generally appreciated, and Roon is well aware of the linkages.—
V.H.

The Japanese Surge

After Pearl Harbor we had to face the United States of America as a full and angry belligerent. We gained a brave but poor comrade-in-arms, a far-off Asiatic island folk with less land surface and natural wealth than just one American state, California; and a fresh enemy in the field wielding the greatest war-making potential on earth. The odds had mounted against us. Yet in our General Staff we could still see in the situation elements of an upset victory.

For the bedrock of war is geography, and geographically our posture remained awesome. With one boot on the Atlantic shore and the other on the snows outside Moscow, the Führer bestrode Europe more completely than Napoleon at his far reach, or Charles V of Spain, or the Antonine emperors. From the Arctic to the Mediterranean, every nation was either our ally, or a friendly neutral, or a conquered subject. Under our submarine onslaught, American Lend-Lease help and Britain’s colonial resources were going to the sea bottom. Each month fewer Allied ships were left afloat, for all the feverish work in their shipyards. Churchill himself has confessed in his memoirs,
“The one thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat campaign.”

As for the Soviet Union, its winter counterattack had achieved local gains at bloody costs; but as it petered out, our battle-hardened troops still
gripped the rich bulk of Russia west of the Volga. As a nation we had burned our bridges, and had turned with one will to fighting the war. Despite England’s air bombings, our war production was still mounting.

And now Japan was debouching on the world battleground with blazing victories!

Adolf Hitler at once embraced these doughty little Asians as comrades. The mystical bunkum of Nordic supremacy was for Nazi fanatics. We Wehrmacht officers despised it, and we observed with relief that Hitler did too. If a people twelve thousand miles away could help us gain world empire, their skins might be yellow, black, or green for all the Führer cared. The Japanese were not disturbed by Nazi theories, because by their Shinto faith they themselves were the “master race.” Unlike our General Staff, the Japanese high command seems to have allowed this rubbish to affect their judgment.