Command Decision (3 page)

These latter made Haley in fact Dennis’s professional wife, who did multitudinous essential chores with skill and force, creating a serene efficient background which freed the commander’s concentration for problems beyond the household. It was custom that could make this intimacy a brotherhood or a bondage. These two had served together only a relatively short time. Haley’s own notions of propriety and decorum kept the service rigid. Dennis had wondered at times if Haley, like himself, did not privately regret that the relationship was so inescapably functional. If so he never showed it. He never showed anything. He waited now, dutiful and attentive, for the moment when Dennis should be ready to give thought to the handful of papers he had brought. He always brought papers.

“Anything from the mission?”

“Just the strike signal I woke you for, as ordered, sir.”

“Read it again.”

Haley’s pudgy fingers pulled the right paper nimbly out of the sheaf. He read without emotion.

“‘Primary plastered, Warm here. Martin.’”

“‘Warm’…” mused Dennis.

“Intelligence said they’d fight today, sir.”

“But he says he plastered it, Haley.”

“Yes, sir. And Colonel Martin is always conservative.”

“Ted, conservative?” Dennis looked his astonishment.

Haley had said so because he thought so, but he knew what was the trouble. In the personal notebook in which he recorded his progress toward perfection there was an entry for Exactness and Accuracy of Speech against which he often had to give himself bad grades. Tonight he would have to mark up another one; meanwhile he amplified.

“On operational matters he is, sir. I’ve noticed it.”

Dennis grunted. “I guess you’re right. How’s the board?”

Haley walked to the wall and pulled back one of the curtain masks with relief. When the General was just talking it was impossible to tell where the conversation would lead or what might come up. The board was the purest, indisputable arithmetic.

Dennis followed him over now for a close scrutiny of the welter of crisscrossing chalk columns on the blackboard. He, too, knew it was purest arithmetic and accurate. Haley would have torn a strip off anyone guilty of a digit’s error in it. Dennis, however, was thinking of the fallacy and futility of all arithmetic, of the hopelessness of trying to encompass what Bismarck had called the imponderables into arrangements of ten symbols.

Total war, however, was not his responsibility; the Fifth Division was. This board reflected, minute by minute, every demonstrable measurement of its operating condition. If Dennis had gone to it without question Haley would have stood behind him silently. Since he had asked about it, Haley read aloud the items of foremost concern.

“Thirteen Minor Repairs promised by fifteen hundred, eighteen promised from Major Repair by twenty-three hundred. Twenty-two Maidenheads from Modification arriving stations now. Thirty of those new ones weather-bound in Iceland took off at eleven hundred this morning. They’re already modified and we should have them for tomorrow’s board.”

“That’s final on yesterday’s salvage?”

“Yes, sir. Ten to Major Repair, sixteen Category E.”

“Sixteen…”

Haley could feel the sense of loss in Dennis’s voice. He saw that the General was a little down, anyway, probably about that Jenks business. In the circumstances it seemed to him proper to point out the compensation.

“Of course Major Repair will cannibalize them for parts, sir. And there were only two killed in the crews.”

Dennis nodded. “Are the newcomers from Iceland flying Ferry crews or replacements?”

“Mostly Ferry crews. But you can see, sir, that our crew position is better since those Category E’s. And we’ve had twelve from Flak houses, eighteen from leave and sick, and twenty-eight new from Combat Crew Replacement Center today, sir.”

The General nodded and concentrated now on the subtler revelations of the internal numbers. The board was much better than when he had gone to bed. Haley felt some of the pride in it that a modest wife knows in having made more than the most of her husband’s limited provision. He knew perfectly well how the groups felt about his incessant phoning but the General expected high serviceability. He was frowning now.

“Why is the 641st slow again with Minor Repair, Haley?”

“That instrument man, sir. He was just a watchmaker, you know, a civilian. His work is good but he will fall asleep on his bench toward the end of the night.”

Evans re-entered the room in time to hear the last of this and see the General nod quietly. It was not necessary for him to return while Haley was there but today his new curiosity had brought him back. He could see now that they were almost done with the recital.

“Fifty-eight crews then for fifty-three certain planes so far, not counting the Iceland bunch. Is all leave still canceled?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And eleven crews graduate today?”

“If they get back, sir.”

“We lose ’em, anyway. Let’s see, we put up a hundred and forty-four this morning…”

“Two were Category E, sir. Collisions. And three aborted, but two of them are promised in that fifty-three for tomorrow.”

“Fifty-three and one thirty-nine is one ninety-two. What can you promise me for tomorrow?”

Haley looked blank. “I can’t promise anything but that fifty-three until we get today’s landing count and battle damage, sir. If you’d like a projection based on previous experience…”

“Never mind,” said Dennis.

They both knew that previous experience was meaningless against today’s target. That was where the projections, all the arithmetic for that matter, always collapsed. Dennis could and often did work the whole long equation in his head.

So many missions meant so many hits; so many tons on the ones that hit (an internal equation of planes sent and distance) meant such-and-such a density of destruction in so wide a radius. Such-and-such a destruction over so wide a radius meant so many weeks, or degrees, of deprivation to Germany of something
y
useful or
x
vital. The net result might be a pockmark for industrial court plaster; it might be a deep true split in the structure that time and more bombs could widen.

It was possible. It was why the Fifth Division, all the divisions, were here. Men could make the plan as Dennis had helped to do. They could be directed to execute it, as he was. They could measure resources and intentions for this execution, but they shared control of it with the weather and the Germans.

Dennis knew the phones in Berlin were hot this minute with orders for new concrete, steel, labor, machinery. Somewhere else in Germany (Intelligence now thought it was probably Potsdam) Galland was doing his own arithmetic. His was in fighters that took only one motor and one pilot apiece and had not a quarter of the bomber’s vulnerable surface. And he always had at least six hours more to repair and redispose. In many ways Dennis envied him. On the other hand he never knew whether he’d have to fight on the morrow. Dennis did. He spoke now.

“Ted said ‘Warm.’ Make out leave passes for 10 per cent but hold ’em till we get a count. How do the boys feel?”

“They’re too tired to feel, sir,” said Haley.

The arithmetic was over and Haley knew they might as well not have done it. It was always meaningless until the landing count, and battle damage from the day’s mission were tabulated. But the General checked his board after every absence from the office. Only then would he take up the rest of his problems. Haley braced himself slightly.

“Well, what else?”

“Another rape case, I’m afraid, sir.”

“Combat crew or base personnel?”

“A navigator, sir.”

“Nuts. When’s a navigator had time to get raped?”

Haley understood this to be partly jocular but it wasn’t safe to joke until he got past the critical point of this case.

“Complaint was he did the raping. Last night, sir.”

Evans was wondering how even a lieutenant could be stupid enough to get himself into trouble over something so simple. Navigators had flying pay and should have many accesses to whiskey. It was Evans’s experience of women that even if you knocked ’em flat and forced ’em while they fluttered, a few drinks and a little patience afterwards left no problems worse than a return engagement. He noted with approval that the General was as skeptical as he was.

“A navigator raped somebody between yesterday’s mission and today’s? Who’s complaining, the girl or her mother?”

“Her mother, sir. Mrs. Daphne Magruder, Tranquillity Cottage, the High Street, Undershot-Overhill.”

Evans almost laughed aloud. There was a lieutenant for you. There wasn’t an enlisted man on the station who couldn’t have handled that pair. Most of them had. Astonishment betrayed him into an inadvertence.

“I know them people, sir.”

“No doubt,” said the General. But his mind was on Haley, who could now see the critical question coming. It came.

“Did our boy go there alone?”

“I’m afraid he did, sir.”

“Damn it, Haley, I’ve told you before: when these boys tomcat they’re to go in pairs. How can you expect one man, flying missions, to keep the whole family happy?”

Haley understood that the General’s exasperation was directed not at him but at the essential stupidity of preventable trouble. He also knew that Dennis knew the trouble was not really preventable. They might as well order men to catch cold two at a time.

“I’ll have the order repeated, sir.”

“Have you told the Judge Advocate?”

“Not yet, sir. We’re bottlenecked on navigators and this man has ten missions left to go.”

Evans had been thinking hard. The General was always fussy about his board but there had been a warning for the wary in the minuteness of this last examination. If he was going to send ’em three days running it would be hard to get off the station tonight.

“Excuse me, sir. Would the General like to square… that is, have this matter attended to by negotiation, sir?”

“Yes.”

“If I could have an order on Mess Supply for two gallons of ice cream and a few hours off, sir…”

He let his voice trail off just short of a promise. The General looked at Haley, who considered and nodded slightly.

“Get it and get going.”

“With the General’s permission, sir, these matters are better attended to in the evening.”

“All right. What else, Haley?”

Haley now produced the letter from the Society for the Preservation of Cultural and Artistic Treasures Against Vandalism. He had been severe with the clerk who had suggested replying in counter complaint that such heavy embossed paper imperiled soldiers with piles. He knew, however, that Dennis would probably be severe with him about it, and though he extended the letter he summarized to save Dennis’s time and temper.

“I’m afraid it was our Division hit that goddamned cathedral, sir. The man’s changed his story. You remember, sir, first he said they were shot up and lost a motor and were straggling, so he salvoed into cloud to lighten ship?”

“They
were
shot up,” Dennis remembered.

“Yes, sir. Next time out the man got hit. He’s in the hospital now and says he wants to tell the truth. He says the war’s made him an atheist and when he saw he couldn’t reach the target with his bombs anyway he threw ’em into that cathedral just to show God what he thought of one of His lower echelons.”

Dennis ignored the proffered letter. “Could he have got home with his bombs?”

Haley hesitated. Privately he thought the man should have but he was not being asked what he thought.

“He was deep in France on three motors, sir.”

“Go to the hospital and chew his ass out,” said Dennis. “Tell him for me we don’t haul bombs through the sub belt to waste on atheism or any other religion. Then write the Society it was an emergency necessary to save life. Now, anything else?”

“Nothing of consequence, sir.”

“Get the weatherman.”

Haley called curtly through the Ops door and Major Belding Davis shuffled in, unmilitary, untidy, and unconcerned about it as always. He was a first-rate civilian meteorologist and he considered it the army’s own fault to have put him in uniform. It had been done because the army feared civilians as it feared everything it could not regulate; the result was to make a bad officer out of a good scientist. Davis knew that he did not need regulation. He was conscientious and diligent. The uniform simply made him resentful and the rank made everyone under him resentful.

The one bright spot in the matter for him was that General Dennis seemed to understand this. His dealings with Davis were strictly professional and he paid no attention to anything else. Davis had learned to respect the General’s knowledge of meteorology up to a point. Beyond that it was hopeless because the General was incurably subjective about weather. He thought, as most people did, only of its accommodation to his own purposes.

Davis was familiar, from civilian life, with this attitude, but the army had produced a variation on it that troubled him. Weather, for military understanding, was studied, estimated, and prophesied at two-hour intervals in each one of innumerable ascending headquarters from Operating Group to Hemisphere Commander.

The readings and estimates were made by different men, having access to different parts of the same available data; the prophesies reflected the many differences. At first Davis had thought this merely another instance of the superfluity and confusion of all things military. Lately he had begun to realize that as weather was a determinative factor in action, its readings fixed responsibility for ordering that action.

Davis now briefly explained the current readings, taking as always a grim satisfaction in the fact that even Army Regulations could not make nature disclose its intentions in the same forms to different men at two-hour intervals.

“General Kane’s people refuse concurrence pending further development, sir. But I think when I bring you the eighteen hundred map….”

Today Dennis was unusually impatient. He strode to the masking curtain and pulled it back from the Operational map.

“Show me what
you
think on this map and keep your mouth shut about what you see,” he said.