War and Remembrance (76 page)

TRANSLATORS NOTE:
Roon’s slurs on our army are intolerable. The Germans never won a victory against us in two wars, if one ignores the brush at Kasserine Pass. We even won the Battle of the Bulge. We marched to the Elbe. We could have taken Berlin, had the Allies not already agreed that it would belong in the Russian occupation zone.

Considering our social and political background, and the traditional distaste of Americans for war, our soldiers became damned good. They were irreverent and ingenious, they had initiative, and they fought hard without hate. Roon’s mentality cannot absorb American combat policy, which is quite simple and non-European: to lose as few lives as possible, yet win battles and wars.

Morison does get carried away by Guadalcanal, where the United States Marines in truth put up one hell of a show.
—
V.H.

At sea, the war took on a bizarre form. The sea mission of both sides was support of the troops fighting for Henderson Field. Holding the field, the Americans controlled the daylight hours, when their supply ships could move under the thin air umbrella. But the Japanese, with a much stronger surface force, traversed the Solomons in the darkness so regularly that the Americans called it the “Tokyo Express.” Though missing each other in this alternation of night and day maneuvers, the two navies had numberless brushes, and the Japanese generally had the better of this fighting. But the
Americans won the one all-out clash that counted, the Battle of Guadalcanal.

This was a diffuse four-day explosion of carnage at sea by day and by night. Both sides threw in almost everything they had; the Japanese, to land at last a massive troop reinforcement, the Americans, to prevent it. Eyewitness accounts tell of eerily picturesque nocturnal sea fights: red tracer showers in the darkness, blue-white searchlight beams stabbing for miles, detonating ship’s magazines turning night into day, flaming ships drifting over wide areas of black waters. The losses on both sides were high. In the end only one thing mattered: American airplanes, carrier and land-based, sank seven out of the eleven Japanese troop transports, while the rest were driven up on the beaches and bombed to burned-out hulks. So ended the last Japanese try to retake the island.

Thereafter, as the American forces built up, the Mikado’s troops became the stranded ones. In the end the Tokyo Express brought off this harried remnant in a tropical Dunkirk. But Japan had no rich and idle major power to come to her rescue, as England had had. She never recovered from Guadalcanal.

Admiral King had accomplished his purpose. The marines cursing and sweating under Japanese fire in the tropical night, the airmen spinning to their deaths, the naval officers and men whose bones litter the sea bottom off Guadalcanal, doubtless died damning the higher-ups who had sent them against such odds to such an out-of-the-way place. In the vulgar talk of American fighting men, Guadalcanal was and remains
“that fucking island.”
But war theatres tend to be self-generating, and once King had committed Franklin Roosevelt to the Pacific with Guadalcanal, he was assured of enough men and ships to fight the Japanese while our beleaguered Third Reich was going down; not afterward, when the Japanese would have been entrenched and the Allies war-weary. King may have, in this way, deprived Japan of the negotiated settlement that was her war aim.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:
Roon puts the above vulgarism in quotes in English. Considering the language prevalent in current literature I think the readers of this volume will not be too outraged. Incidentally, that remains my own exact opinion of Guadalcanal.

In view of his biting criticism of Admiral Halsey later on in the Leyte Gulf chapter, I wish Roon had given him his due here. The turnabout in the Guadalcanal campaign occurred when Halsey relieved Vice Admiral Ghormley as ComSoPac. Fatigue had made Ghormley a defeatist, and MacArthur’s spirit was down, too. Halsey’s belligerent and inspiring leadership got everybody going again.
—
V.H.

* * *

N
ATALIE
had pictured a flight via an “underground railroad” as something swift, organized, secretive, hairbreadth, and romantic. All they did in Marciana was wait for a very long time, not communicating with anybody, not even with the villagers. The little walled hamlet of old stone cottages, straggling along a spur halfway up Elba’s highest peak, was picturesque and pleasant enough. The fugitives might have come for a rusticating vacation, except that they weren’t paying.

This delay wore on and on. Castelnuovo seemed unconcerned. He had told Natalie and her uncle little about the plan of escape or the people helping them, and she could understand that. The less she knew, if they happened to be caught, the better. Once when they were alone — almost a month had then passed — he remarked, “Look here, Natalie, everything is all right. Just don’t worry.” She tried not to.

They were housed in a tumbledown cottage of stone and cracked plaster at the end of a steeply climbing alley, which beyond the house became a donkey path through terraced truck gardens and vineyards; where, from sunup to sundown, silent villagers harvested, loading little donkeys with produce and sometimes riding them about. The views were magnificent, though the villagers ignored them as they ignored the newcomers: off to the west the crags of Corsica poking above the water, eastward a hazy line of mainland ridges, north and south green islands of the archipelago, like Capraia and Montecristo, with their little wreaths of cloud; and down the mountainside the blue sea breaking on the wooded coast dotted with fishing villages. Natalie passed much time climbing around up here among the gardens and orchards, enjoying the panoramas, the birdsong, and the sight and fragrance of September fruits and flowers.

During the first week a fat very ugly girl, who had more warts than words, brought them net bags of vegetables and fruit, coarse bread, goat’s milk and cheese, and sometimes fish wrapped in wet seaweed. After that Anna Castelnuovo foraged and shopped in the small marketplace. If rationing existed on Elba, there was no way of knowing it in Marciana; if there were
carabinieri,
they were incurious about the mountain towns. Natalie’s edginess faded. The cottage had only two dark moldy-smelling rooms — one
for the Castelnuovos, one for herself and her uncle — with an outdoor privy, and a wood-burning stove layered with black grease. She had to fetch water in pails from a communal pump, sometimes standing in line with barefoot children, and she slept on straw. But she and her baby were free from the menace of Werner Beck in a quiet remote hideout. For the time being, that was enough.

Aaron Jastrow took to the halt with philosophic placidity. Old Sacerdote had given him as a parting gift a mildewed Bible in Hebrew and Italian from the Follonica beach house. All day he sat on a bench under an apple tree with this Bible and his dog-eared Montaigne. Toward evening, he would walk out on the donkey paths. He seemed to have shed, with his tight work routine, his irritating traits. He was calm, undemanding, cheerful. He was letting his beard grow out, and looking more and more like an aging peasant. When Natalie one sunny morning late in September fretted to him about the inaction he shrugged and said, “Would you mind waiting out the whole war on Elba? I wouldn’t. Unlike Napoleon, I’ve no delusion that the world greatly misses or needs me.”

The Bible was open on his lap. She peered at the pages of heavy Hebrew lettering and old-fashioned Italian print, all stained and mottled with time and sea damp. “Why are you reading that, exactly?”

“Aristotle said” — Aaron faintly grinned — “that in his old age he became more interested in myth. Care to join me?”

“I haven’t studied Hebrew since I walked out of the temple’s Sunday school when I was eleven.”

He made room on the bench. She sat down, saying, “Oh, what the hell, why not?”

He turned the book to the first page. “Do you remember anything? Read.”

“Let’s see. That’s a
B. Beh-ray-shis.
Right?”

“Summa cum laude! ‘In the beginning.’ Next?”

“Oh, Aaron, I’m a dolt at this, and I’m really not interested.”

“Come now, Natalie. If you don’t like to learn, I like to teach.”

Heavy double knocks at the wooden door.

A young man smiled at Natalie in the doorway, stroking a droopy black mustache. The pudgy olive face was insolent and uncultured; the brown eyes took her in with a gleam of appetite; the baggy corduroy trousers and short red jacket were like stage clothes.
“Bonjour, de la part de Monsieur Rabinovitz. Prêts à partir?”
Strange harsh accent.

An open hay wagon blocked the alley, hitched to a bony mule twitching long ears.

“Eh? Partir? Tout de suite? Je crois que oui, mais
—
entrez?”

He shook his head, grinning.
“Vite, vite, je vous prie.
“

Castelnuovo sat at the table with the others in the back room, eating the monotonous daily lunch of bread and vegetable soup. “Good!” He wiped his mouth and stood up. “I’ve been expecting him for a week. Let’s pack up.”

Aaron said, “Who is he?”

The doctor made a vague gesture. “He’s a Corsican. Please hurry.”

The fugitives bumped downhill for hours in the slow wagon, heading west. Miriam and Louis larked about in the hay. They stopped and got off at a fishing settlement, a few houses on a stony beach. Nobody was around, but rough clothes drying on lines and damp nets draped on beached rowboats showed it was inhabited. The Corsican led them aboard a sailing boat piled with fishing tackle, tied to a rickety wooden pier. Two unshaven men in ragged sweaters came out of the blue-painted deckhouse and hoisted a filthy gray sail. The boat heeled and went slipping out to sea, as the two men shouted hoarse gibberish at each other. The mule, left tied to a tree, stared after the boat like an abandoned child.

Natalie braced herself against the deckhouse, watching Miriam and the baby play on a pile of dry nets. The young Corsican, whose throaty patois sometimes lost her, said the worst was over. They had met no police, and the coast guard seldom patrolled here, so they were free of the Fascists now. Once in Corsica she and her friends would be safe, and they could remain as long as they chose. Corsica had rigid traditions about fugitives,
les gens qui prennent le maquis.
Corte, where he lived, was an old rebel citadel in the mountains. German and Italian armistice commissioners avoided Corte for their health. His own name was Pascal Gaffori. His older brother, Orlanduccio, who lived in Marseilles, had shipped often with Monsieur Rabinovitz on French freighters in peacetime. Now Orlanduccio had a job in the harbor master’s office. The Marseilles waterfront was full of Corsicans, and the Resistance in the port was very strong.

The wind was plastering Natalie’s old brown wool dress against her, and as he talked the Corsican was taking in with relish the curves of her breasts and thighs. Natalie was used to the eyes of men, but this blunt stare was unsettling. Still, there was no menace in his gaze, only strong Latin appreciation — so far.

Did he know, she asked, trying to distract him, what the further plans were? He did not. They would stay with his family until some message came from Monsieur Rabinovitz. Had he talked to Rabinovitz? No, he had never met Monsieur Rabinovitz, all this had been arranged by his brother. Were the two men in the deckhouse also his brothers? He snorted. They were Bastia fisherman, doing this for money. Times were bad, the armistice commission had beached the fishing boats. Hulls were drying up, seams
were opening; these fellows had spent two days secretly caulking their bottom. They were tough guys, but she need have no fear of them.