War and Remembrance (55 page)

Why, in fact, did Spruance send off the dive-bombers?

The battle decisions of a commander are not easily analyzed; not even by himself, not even in reminiscent tranquillity. Not all men of war are at ease with words. Events evaporate and are
gone,
especially the evanescent
moments of a battle. The memoirs composed long afterward are as often misleading as illuminating. Some truly proud men say or write little. Raymond Spruance left few words about his Midway conduct.

He was acting in the battle under a Nimitz directive that is on the record: “You
will be governed by the principle of calculated risk, which you shall interpret to mean the avoidance of exposure of your force to attack by superior enemy forces without good prospect of inflicting, as a result of such exposure, greater damage on the enemy.
“ The Navy had a sour slang translation for this: “Sock ‘em and rock ‘em, but don’t lose your shirt”; a standard admonition to a weak force going out against odds. Boiled down, it meant little but “Try to win with conservative tactics.” Few military orders are harder to obey. And he had unwritten orders from Nimitz not to lose his carriers, even if it meant giving up Midway. “We will get it back later,” Nimitz had said. “Save the fleet.”

Some hard truths had been squeezing Spruance, under these hobbling instructions. He was a stranger to the ship, to Halsey’s staff, and to air operations. He could not force a speedup of the appallingly slow launches on the
Enterprise
or the
Hornet
merely by throwing an admiral’s tantrum. In this matter he was in fact helpless. The
Yorktown
had drifted aft below the horizon while recovering its search planes, so he couldn’t consult Fletcher. A Jap float plane had been sighted, and the special intelligence officer who knew Japanese said that it had sent a position report. So the edge of surprise was melting away like butter on a hot skillet. Midway atoll was reported under attack by enemy aircraft. His dive-bombers were circling and circling overhead, burning up gasoline.

Given the distances in the combat triangle, and the known aircraft ranges and speeds, Spruance could hope that his dive-bombers, if,they left now, might reach the enemy in his moment of weakness, when his planes were getting back from Midway low on bullets and gas. But there was one grim catch to that. The PBY had seen only two carriers. Nimitz’s intelligence staff had predicted four or five.
Where were those missing flattops?
Were they coming at Task Force Sixteen from the north, the south — even in an end run from the east? Would they pounce when all his dive-bombers were off, attacking the first two?

An oppressive urgent choice confronted him: either hold back the bombers for a full coordinated attack, and hope meanwhile for news of the missing carriers; or hit out now, gambling that they would show up near the two in sight.

Spruance hit out. It was hardly a “calculated risk.” It was the steepest and gravest of gambles with the future of his Navy and his country. Such decisions — only such once-in-a-lifetime personal decisions — test a commander. Within the hour his far more experienced and stronger opponent, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, would face much the same hard choice.

(from Aaron Jastrows manuscript)

J
UNE
4, 1942,
MIDNIGHT
.

SIENA.

I have just listened to the BBC and to Radio Berlin, hoping for I know not what — a last-minute turnabout in the war news, possibly, to justify putting off a desperate decision. There was none. Under the propaganda cosmetics — the German paint whorish, the British ladylike — one discerns the same grim face of events:
Germany and Japan triumphant.

In my meeting with the archbishop today I encountered a subtle change. His Excellency is something of a peasant, with a red jowly face, a solid build, and an earthy vocabulary. But he is cultured and tolerant. I like him and tend to trust him. This time he received me not in his cozy wood-panelled study, but in his cold grand outer office. He sat behind a splendid old desk. When I came in he did not stand up, but motioned me to a chair. I understood. I am no longer the well-known American author at whose villa he can now and then enjoy a good dinner, fine wine, and jocose pedantic talk. I am a suppliant. The wheel has turned, and the archbishop with it.

Still, he has looked into the matter. As to the Italian authorities, no immediate harm threatens us. Of this he assures me. He knows of no new program to round up Jews. Our status as enemy aliens under house arrest is of course most singular. He has been told we are marked for privileged treatment, and for release to Switzerland when various problems are cleared up. The question of concealing ourselves may therefore not arise.

Still, if it does, hiding out in the countryside would be a possibility, he agrees. But taking refuge in Siena’s environs would be unwise. The story of
famoso scrittore americano
trapped by the war is common Sienese gossip, and no hiding place around here would be secure.

He has cautiously raised the topic with the bishop of Volterra, an old walled town some fifty miles to the northwest, on the winding mountain road down to Pisa. Many years ago, I visited the Etruscan antiquities in Volterra. An alabaster bowl I bought there sits on my desk now, filled with roses. It is a town forgotten by time. The inhabitants are a darkly handsome dour lot.
His Excellency jokes that they are probably Etruscan by blood and pagan at heart. Several people wanted by the Fascist regime are lying low in Volterra. Should the worst come to the worst, he can put us in touch with the Volterra bishop, who will be sympathetic. But he feels we should just keep calm and await our eventual release. He stood up smiling to see me out, thus cutting the meeting quite short.

I am shaken by his having talked to the Volterra prelate. How do I know that he can be trusted? Under all the bland reassurance, the archbishop offers us no hiding place himself; and as for future emergencies, he holds out only a promise of sympathy from the bishop of Volterra, a man I don’t know, who owes me nothing. This dusty outcome brings me to the alternative.

[The following passage in A Jew’s Journey,
eight and a half handwritten pages in all, is in the original manuscript a series of strange marks. Such sections occur all through the notebooks after June 4. The key to the cipher is given in the clear English text below. The first line of the passage looks like this:

I have avoided until now describing the alternative in these pages. Once it contains such things, my notebook becomes a ticking bomb. Bethinking me of Leonardo’s mirror handwriting. I have decided to spell out perilous matters in English, but in the backward-running Yiddish alphabet, which will look to the uninitiated like hen scratchings: a temporary shield against prying eyes, or a sudden pounce by Italian police. A simple device, but the short-term security is good.

I scarcely dreamed, when I began
A Jew’s Journey,
that I would be using spy tricks in writing it! My life’s candle sputters and flares as it burns down, making melodramatic shadows leap about me. Yet I intend to record everything of consequence that happens from now on. By touching a match to tinder-dry faggots in my fireplace, I can in seconds reduce this book to ash.

To the alternative, then.

A Sienese doctor has revealed himself to us as a Jew and a secret Zionist. He plans to flee Italy with his family, hoping to reach Palestine; he is sure that all of Europe’s Jews are doomed. Avram Rabinovitz, the tough Palestinian organizer of the
Izmir
voyage, has been in touch with this man, whose departure plans are now complete. Tomorrow he will send a confirming message to Rabinovitz. They are willing to include us in the flight arrangements. I must tell the doctor by morning whether we wish to come along.

The plan envisages an escape route via Piombino, Elba, Corsica, and Lisbon. The nub of it is a Turkish ship, once again; this time a freighter,
which carries a cargo of Turkish tobacco from Istanbul to Lisbon every two months. This flavoring tobacco is important to the Allied war effort, so the vessel has British clearance. The ship’s captain reaps a fortune by stopping at dead of night off Corsica and taking on Jewish stowaways for gold. In Lisbon we and our Zionist friends would part company. They would hope to go on to the Holy Land, one way or another, and we of course would simply walk into the American consulate.

The doctor does not blink at the hazards of this project. Italian and French underground groups are both involved. Rabinovitz deals with both. Sticky points abound from the start at the Siena bus station to the end at a Lisbon wharf. The whole thing could scarcely be less inviting.

Yet this is our last chance to struggle free; otherwise, in an ever-darkening war scene, we must helplessly wait. If I believed that release to Switzerland was genuinely in prospect, I would brave it out here. My rule, “When in doubt,
wait,”
has served me well in life. But for a Jew in Europe, I begin to grasp, all rules are confounded. The compass needle spins in a violent magnetic storm. Even without those unthinkable broadcasts hanging over me, I would be tempted to flee. The archbishop pooh-poohs the stories of secret Nazi massacres of Jews; and anyway, he says, no Italian government will ever give Jews over into German hands, as the occupied countries are doing. So he thinks. He sits in an archdiocesan palace. My safety trembles on a thread.

If an Allied victory were in sight, if only as a glow from below the horizon, I would not budge. A month ago that was my resolve. Against the huge Allied array of raw materials, factories, and manpower, I couldn’t see Germany and Japan ever winning. Rather, I was sure, Tocqueville’s vision was coming to birth, of a world divided between America and Russia; these two great unions, aided by the doughty though sinking British imperium, would roar into central Europe, shatter the moonstruck Hitler tyranny, and set free not only the occupied countries, but the benighted bled-white Germans. Nor could Japan long survive the end of Hitler.

But what is now sinking in, after shock upon shock, is the example of Macedón. The forces of Alexander were small in number, compared to the hordes of Asia. But his phalanx smashed gigantic empires, and humbled the whole known world to his tiny state. Cortez, an adventurous butcher leading a handful of bravos, plundered and destroyed Montezuma’s empire. Pizarro did the same to the great Inca civilization. Wars are won by will, by readiness to die, and by skill in killing, not by advantages, however lopsided, in numbers.

One hoped that the Russian winter, having halted the Germans outside Moscow, might have blunted the
furor Teutonicus
once for all. Alas, the monster was but leaning on his sword, catching his breath to spring again.
The Italian papers show mind-boggling photos of the siege of Sevastopol. Nightmarishly huge guns are throwing shells tall as houses at the city. A perfect rain of artillery fire and aircraft
is
blanketing Sevastopol with smoke like a volcano in eruption. Following on the Russian defeat near Kharkov, the grinning mannikin Dr. Goebbels is announcing astronomic bags of prisoners. On the high seas, Hitler’s U-boats are so close to cutting the American supply route to Europe that the Allied press itself trumpets alarm, admitting that the sinkings are in the millions of tons. In North Africa, the British once again flee before Rommel.

Meanwhile, Japan grows in military stature like a genie towering up out of a bottle. The list of Japanese conquests is Kiplingesque: Singapore, Burma, Java, and now they threaten India! The photographs of defeated and captured white men look like the end of civilization. Dejected British prisoners in Singapore squat on the ground as far as the camera can focus; and on palm-lined Philippine roads, columns of unshaven, ragged, bowed Americans march to captivity from Bataan under the guns of scowling yellow dwarfs.

The lesson was writ plain by Thucydides centuries before Christ was born. Democracy satisfies best the human thirst for freedom; yet, being undisciplined, turbulent, and luxury-seeking, it falls time and again to austere single-minded despotism.

I may be giving way to gloom, blinded by scanty information and a dismal ambience. The pinched nagging shabbiness of life in wartime Italy, with the poor food and drink, weakens one’s body and mind. I have not tasted decent meat or wine since the American journalists left. The rationed vegetables are stunted or rotten. The clayey bread sticks in one’s throat. Still, I believe I am thinking straight. An Allied victory in the near future seems to me too silly to be discussed. The tides of war do not reverse so easily. The opposite is the more likely quick result: collapse of the Soviet Union, expulsion of the British from Asia and of the Americans from the Pacific, and an Axis triumph on terms. Otherwise the prospect is for stalemate. If the war drags on long enough, a tortuous Allied victory may ensue as Axis-plundered metals, fuel, and food run out. But the fall of Hitler in 1945 or 1946 will not help Natalie, her baby, or me. We would probably not survive such a long wait; but more than that, a showdown with Werner Beck cannot be put off many months, let alone several years.