Gone to Soldiers (110 page)

Her legs would not work. She must undo her safety belt. She must use her hands and push herself out, get on top of the wing. Although the engine had shut itself off in flight, the hot manifolds could still explode the gas fumes, could still start a fire. Move. She associated the numbness in her legs and the way they would not move with the burning oil she could feel. With her arms and shoulders she dragged herself out and onto the wing. She could not move but lay dangling from it. Her face was covered with blood from a scalp wound. Blood in one eye partially blinded her.

Someone was running across the field she could see from her clear eye. She tried to call to them but she could not get a sound out. Flo is going to be furious with me, she thought, but I tried to bring it down safely, I tried. I did everything I could. I still can't think of any procedure I should have tried.

Everything went black. For a moment longer she heard a boy's voice yelling. Then she lost that too.

When she woke up, it was two days later and she was in a hospital bed in Lawrence, Kansas, with a broken back, multiple lacerations, ten stitches in her skull, four broken ribs and third-degree burns on her left foot. She was alive. That would be the end of that job. She lay in her casts and contemplated the future. To Alaska, somehow, with Flo. Her wife.

DANIEL 8

White for Carriers, Black for Battleships

What Daniel had lost with Louise was the ability to make up romance, to persuade himself of his genuine and passionate interest in a woman who moved him only physically. He worked hard, the feverish long hours of the hermetic discipline of OP-20-G. In the time he had free, he cooked for himself, he read, mostly in Japanese, always striving to perfect his knowledge of the language, to extend his grasp of nuance and his vocabulary, and for exercise he rode his bicycle.

When he saw her stories offered to him as to any casual passerby in the magazines, he felt her disloyalty sharply. It was almost like reading love letters written to someone else. That was what she was doing instead of being with him; that was what she had left him for. Her account of the liberation of Paris had caused a big splash, and since then, she had been writing less behind the lines color and more straight war reporting.

The newspapers showed General MacArthur wading ashore at Red Beach in Leyte, the Philippines, through ankle deep water. Over the net of their intelligence came word of a major Japanese naval offensive, a bold but baroque plan, involving attack from three sides at once in the seas around the landing force on Leyte.

The battle started about 0300 Philippine time. By the time he arrived, signals were flooding in. The plan, as they had figured it out from Japanese decrypts, involved using Admiral Ozawa's battleworn and fake carriers as a sacrifice to draw the American force north, away from their position covering the landing force and from guarding the San Bernardino Strait that protected the approach. In the meantime a pincer operation (one arm led by Kurita, one by Nishimura) would crack down on the helpless invasion forces to wipe them out.

On the big wall map two yeomen moved markers representing Japanese ships and removed those sunk, white for aircraft carriers, black for battleships, red for cruisers, green for destroyers, yellow for submarines. From the long table where he worked, Daniel stared at the pins. An enormous number of ships were involved. It was shaping up as a critical and overwhelming confrontation. As usual they were seeing the battle in reverse from every other American involved, because they were decoding only Japanese messages.

Something strange was happening as October twenty-fourth ended and the twenty-fifth began. Kurita's Japanese fleet sailed through San Bernardino Strait and nothing impeded them. The attacks on them had tapered off and stopped. Where was Halsey's Third Fleet? Then the reports coming in from hundreds of miles to the north, from Ozawa's decoy fleet, indicated they were under heavy attack. It was composed of battleships pretending to be aircraft carriers with new decks, old carriers and carriers without planes. In spite of intelligence warnings of the Japanese plan, Halsey seemed to have sailed off in pursuit.

Fortunately, as Kurita approached the landing beaches, he reported himself again in battle. Who then was fighting the Japanese to defend the landing forces? Daniel could not figure it out. The Japanese under Kurita thought they were fighting the Third Fleet, but the Third Fleet was hundreds of miles away, according to Ozawa, whose sacrifice ships were being picked off and sunk.

The only American force that seemed to be left to oppose Kurita's force in what was shaping up as a fierce battle could not be causing any problem to the Japanese—nothing but a handful of escort carriers, destroyers and destroyer escorts. They were not even armored. They had nothing to launch at the big battleships besides a few torpedoes. They had only weapons suitable for use against human bodies and small vessels. That could not be who was fighting.

Halsey had six new battleships. When he went in pursuit of the decoys, he must have split his force and left half of it, although why hadn't they been in the strait where they were supposed to be, instead of right off the landing beaches? The battle had ceased to make sense.

The Japanese were reporting many sinkings of American vessels, but they were getting hit also. Daniel felt frustrated, in common with everyone around him, because they could not comprehend what was happening. Losses on both sides continued to mount, but the names reported did not match the names of battleships or carriers in Halsey's group. Who were the Japanese fighting? Who was defending the soldiers and marines on the beaches, wide open and vulnerable to attack from the water?

Finally Kurita sent a message that he was withdrawing. The staff at OP-20-G were critical of Kurita, and with their inevitable confusion of viewpoints, muttered that he ought to be sacked. Yamamoto, shot down at a rendezvous they had established, would never have allowed a withdrawal at such a critical point, would never have faltered in sight of his objective. Of course Kurita was recovering from dengue fever, but nonetheless, they were all for firing him.

The battle made even less sense when it was over and the facts began to establish themselves. Halsey had taken his entire fleet with him. The strike force under Kurita had been fought off by that handful of unlikely light ships under Rear Admiral Sprague. They had borne loss after loss, planes from the escort carriers continuing to make mock bombing runs long after they had run out of anything to attack with.

Only afterward did Daniel notice that toward the end of the engagement, small Zeke planes with bombs strapped under their wings had dived straight into the
Santee
and the
St. Lo
. Gradually he began to understand that this was the secret weapon that the Japanese had been referring to in their signals. OP-20-G speculations had run to new types of bombs, a Japanese version of the German inventions of the late war, jet fighters, rockets, snorkel submarines.

Now he knew: the secret weapon was the willingness of young pilots to kill themselves if they could take a ship with them. They need not be well trained: all they had to do was fly once and crash once. The planes could be minimal: they were designed for one mission without return. It was most economical and unfortunately effective. They were flying in under the radar and then climbing briefly to dive on the ship of their choice. The American ships with their wooden decks proved especially vulnerable. They had a name, these suicide pilots. Of course, Daniel thought, kamikaze: the divine wind that had saved Japan from Kublai Khan's invasion fleet. Through the winter they heard more about the glorious suicides.

The New Year came and went in a wave of slush, while Bing Crosby crooned about a white Christmas and the papers were full of the Ardennes German offensive they were calling the Battle of the Bulge. Abra and he were writing regularly. They served as safe confidants for each other, for they were not only in different countries but knew the protagonists of each other's dramas. She was claiming to be finished with Oscar, but she had written that before, then returned to the affair.

Compulsively he read Louise's articles. Often he learned more from them than from her letters. She wrote as often as Abra did, but less honestly, he thought. They were short, rushed, often breathless letters.

I had a bath this morning, a whole real even somewhat warm bath. I cannot recall the last bath I had. Oh, yes I can. It was in Rheims where I also shared a bottle of wonderful champagne with my fellow scribblers. The champagne was cold, the bath was hot, the food was real and I slept in a bed. That has, needless to say, hardly been the case since. Usually the food is cold, the bed is wet ground, and the alarm clock is a shell
.

The page just got crumpled because Sad Sack, the company dog, sat on it in order to get my attention. So many of the GIs pick up pets, you'd be surprised. Animals get the worst of war. Far more of them get slaughtered than people
…

From
Collier's
, he learned she had been trapped in a German encirclement for five days during the Battle of the Bulge. If the Germans captured her, what would they have done with her? Raped her? Shot her? As a Jew, would she be sent to a camp? Why did she need to place herself in danger? He was convinced her frustration in OWI had led to this vindication through fire, but suppose she got herself killed?

When he thought of her, it was in bed, her silky skin against him, heat and softness. Lately other images intruded from the photographs accompanying the stories: Louise, her body lost in vast male gear, smiling warmly but diffidently from under the nozzle of a huge piece of artillery or straddling a ruined wall or peering out of the turret of a tank. He looked at those bizarre images and thought, she will never come back. He felt as if she were being processed by the war into something else, if not a corpse then a being he did not know, perhaps did not want to know.

Abra was frank about her terror at the rockets. Perhaps the growth he noticed in her letters was one reason Oscar had asked her to marry him. Daniel wondered why after waiting so long, she had not instantly accepted. She wrote back:

What is offered so grudgingly after so long is not the same thing that might have been offered originally, fresh and exciting and warm. Let's just say the offer is a little stale by now and I have other ideas. I'm working on establishing my freedom, and then enjoying it
.

Once her letters had been all shallow joking and flirting, but he thought they had both come to appreciate having each other to confide in.

Daniel noticed a marked difference between the personnel who dealt primarily with the Enigma transcripts from the German forces and those who dealt with the Japanese codes, which he thought reflected the different attitudes of the bulk of the Navy, engaged westward, and the bulk of the Army, engaged eastward. The high spirits of those oriented toward the conflict in Europe had been depressed by the German offensive in December, but were again on the rise. They looked beyond the war, speculating, planning, politicking. They retooled old ambitions and designed new ones.

Those engaged with the Pacific war watched a rising curve of resistance and losses, longer and longer battles and fiercer and more lacerating refusals to yield an inch of terrain. There were no mass surrenders. As the war moved closer to Japan, every aspect grew bloodier and the costs mounted. No one looking toward the Pacific thought they would soon be demobilized. Daniel did not rush to make new plans or revise old ones. He saw the war stretching on and on, a year, a year and a half, two years. By then, Japan might be only barren mountains and burned towns, and the United States might be poorer by a million young men. He could not share the cheerful anticipation of those oriented toward Europe. To him the prospects looked grim indeed.

NAOMI 9

Belonging

During that winter the dreams began to weaken. Only once in a while did she enter the place under the mountain where the flying bombs were made, where hunger never stopped, where cold penetrated to the bones wrapped in loose papery skin. Seldom now did she look out through Rivka's eyes at the evil glistening walls of the cave pressing in on her.

She was working in Fenniman's bakery. She dropped her books at home, grabbed a bite of lunch and hurried off to the bakery, where she put on a white smock over her school clothes. It smelled sweet and hot and yeasty all through the winter when home was always cold and drafty, not enough coal to heat the house. There were always ends and broken pieces of dough to eat or bring back.

She felt important. She had a job, just like an adult. Every Thursday she received a paycheck. She took it straight to the bank and put it in her own private account. Then she drew out her own allowance for the week and the four dollars she paid Aunt Rose. She had an account in the same bank as Ruthie and Uncle Morris and Aunt Rose.

Mostly she sold behind the counter, but Sundays when she could come in early, she helped bake. That was her favorite day. When she baked, she felt as if she were a good person. Ruthie had got her this job, and at first she had not known what to think about it. Then she decided it was good that she was not in the flat upstairs all the time with Leib and the toddler David. The Fennimans had always liked her, since that hot June when Mrs. Fenniman, Alvin and she had helped Mr. Bates.

Trudi was pregnant again. Leib said it didn't matter and had nothing to do with what he felt for Naomi. In the Bible, he said, all the important men had more than one wife. A man like himself needed more than one woman, and he needed Trudi and Naomi both. Since the weather had turned cold, the things he did with her, he did upstairs, which made Naomi nervous.

She loved Leib, she could not help loving him because he felt to her as wide as the sky. Love for him was something she lay under as Rivka toiled under her mountain. Maybe that was why she had gradually stopped dreaming of Rivka, because she belonged now to Leib and not to Rivka. As much as she had hated the dreams, she missed them. She felt disconnected. Maybe Rivka was still trying to talk to her. Maybe Rivka was dead. She would have known a year ago, known instantly, but not any longer. She had put Leib in between Rivka and herself.