The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (9 page)

Roosevelt planned the ploy in advance. Assembling for one of the official meetings, he leaned over to Stalin to indicate the Prime Minister, who’d developed a head cold. In a stage whisper audible to all, Roosevelt said, “Winston’s cranky this morning, he got up on the wrong side of the bed.”When the translation was complete, the President noted a vague smile crease Stalin’s mouth. He pressed on, teasing Churchill for his Britishness and his John Bull resemblance. Churchill was offended and scowled, turning ever redder, until Stalin broke into a belly laugh. For the first time in three days of meetings, Roosevelt felt an intimacy open between him and Stalin. At that moment, for the first time, he called the Marshal “Uncle Joe.” It was a miscalculation. Stalin’s mirth dissolved. He made to leave the table. Only when Roosevelt made the reference into a compliment, comparing him to the cherished American “Uncle Sam,” was the Marshal mollified.

At another session regarding the postwar fate of Germany, on Churchill’s sixty-ninth birthday, Stalin joked that at the end of the war fifty thousand German officers should be selected for execution. Churchill found this in bad taste. For comedy Roosevelt played the role of peacemaker, chiming in that Stalin’s figure was too high, a compromise should be reached. They should only shoot forty-nine thousand. Churchill left the room in disgust, and was brought back by a cajoling Stalin. Then Roosevelt’s eldest son, Elliott, a captain in the Army Air Corps, turned antic, exclaiming, “Hell, why not shoot a hundred thousand!” Stalin went over and wrapped his arm around the young man’s shoulders.

Major decisions were made at Teheran. Uncle Joe was satisfied. Churchill was corralled. Roosevelt viewed the conference as a great success.

Now that the war’s end is in sight, he sees no reason to change that formula. Let no one alter. Or falter.

Harry Hopkins returns with the proposed cable to Churchill. The President scans it. He changes the date of his arrival in Malta from February first to the second, the same day the presidential party is expected in Yalta. This way there’ll be no time for an official meeting with Winston. Maybe dinner.

He tells Harry, “Send this to Uncle Joe too. That’ll lock down the schedule and we shouldn’t hear any more about it.”

“Done.”

Harry turns to go. The man’s shoulder blades protrude beneath his suit coat.

Roosevelt takes up a cigarette. He thinks of Winston and his cigars. Big ostentatious ones, which the Prime Minister has trouble closing his lips over. He talks without taking them out, making his scratchy, constant voice even more strident. Roosevelt likes Winston Churchill, admires his flights of Victorian rhetoric. He’s sorry he has to make one of the most extraordinary men of history, leader of one of the world’s great and courageous nations, look so small.

The President spreads both hands over his legs, squeezes powerful fingers over the deadened thighs. He looks at Harry’s wraith wrists swinging while the man walks away, the flesh pasty on the back of his friend’s neck. Harry, who’s been trying to die for years now.

Roosevelt thinks about the spell that came over him an hour ago in front of Maloney. Exhaustion. Confusion. Goddammit.

Roosevelt swallows a bilious tang, a fear. He lights his cigarette to chase the taste. After one puff he snuffs the cigarette.

Harry and me, Winston and Joe. America. England. This whole planet of men and nations. Our peace will be costly. But it’s coming. We’ll all birth it together.

He sits back and lowers his eyelids. One thing about the White House, it does not disappear when you close your eyes. He feels the Oval Office nudge him, history like Iago in his ear whispers, “Open your eyes, Franklin.”

He complies. The old dead presidents of the room tell him.

They speak with dozens of voices.

Don’t ever be sorry. For anything you do as President.

We know what we’re talking about, son.

History is not made by men who are sorry.

~ * ~

January 11, 1945, 1330 hours

SHAEF headquarters

Reims, France

if you take the face of every man, woman, and child of kansas
and you blend them all together, you will get the face of General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Bandy has snapped a hundred photos of the General for
Life.
In every one, Bandy captures the chin of a stolid farm lad, the eyes of a veteran plainsman, the soft cheeks and skin of the dairymaid, the crinkles of a girl, the doll hair of a tyke. Somehow, when Bandy releases the shutter, Ike never has his eyes closed, his mouth askew, or his hat cockeyed. He is composed when he’s angry, balanced when hurried, firm when sweet. He is the erect American everyman from Abilene.

Bandy stands near the door and waits. He’s in a large octagonal room that used to be a banquet hall in this former technical school for boys. The crystal chandelier dangling overhead must weigh a ton. War maps festoon every inch of wall and table. Wax pencil arrows in black, red, blue, and green crosshatch them all, a crazy quilt of troops and machines on the move, eyeing each other across Europe, antagonistic colors.

Female staffers operate banks of telephone connections, plugging and unplugging. Young men in crisp olive drab uniforms stride left and right shuttling sheaves of paper to someplace or another, where Bandy supposes they drop one and pick up a replacement. Other bright young men lean over the maps, drawing, erasing, measuring life and death in crayon. Every sound in the big room and the other rooms down the hall makes the same amount of noise, no one endeavor in here stands out. SHAEF, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, hums. Bandy watches Eisenhower in the center of it all, chain-smoking Camels. The General points, pats young men on backs, talks into phones, ponders over spread-out charts, all the while emitting smoke.

Bandy left home three days after New Year’s.
Life
magazine sent a car up from Memphis to ferry him to an air base for a flight to Norfolk, where he boarded a Navy supply ship to London, then a quick flight to Paris, a car to Reims. The trip took six days. He wrote no letters to Victoria on the voyage, they didn’t part the best of friends. She’ll be all right, Bandy thinks. She always has been. This time is no different.

She doesn’t understand, is the problem. Bandy taps his foot on the worn oriental carpet. Twenty feet away Ike taps his foot on the same carpet, impatient with some progress report he takes over the phone. Bandy’s camera bag loops over his shoulder. Inside it are a new 35mm Leica and his old battle-ax Speed Graphic. They weigh much more than merely their poundage. They’re not just Bandy’s tools, they’re his purpose. Take the cameras away and he’s only a tobacco farmer, a man, flesh and blood, not exceptional at all. But with them he can stand so close to the flames of history he can toast a marshmallow. What he sees, the whole United States sees. But him first.

Eisenhower hasn’t noticed Bandy yet, the General’s focus is tightened to where it doesn’t extend past his corona of tobacco fumes. Others walk in and out of his clouds. Eisenhower embraces what importance they bear for whatever time it takes, then moves like a little bit of Kansas weather over someone or something else to do with the war. Bandy wonders if Eisenhower isn’t breathing some good old Tennessee leaf in those Camels.

Eisenhower jabs a cigarette out in an ashtray on the huge map table. He digs into his shirt pocket for the pack, finds it empty. Scowling, he crumples it into a ball. Bandy tosses a fresh pack through the air, spinning it to land and skid across the map right in front of Ike. The General looks up. His head tilts for a moment at who would toss things at the Supreme Allied Commander.

“Charley?”

“General.”

Eisenhower unwraps the pack, considering Bandy.

“You went home, I heard.”

“I came back, sir.”

“I take that as a failure on my part, son. I apologize. Your wife ticked?”

“Plenty, sir.”

“You’ll give her my apologies. Come over here.”

Bandy advances to the table, opposite Ike, who lights up, then runs a palm over his hair, thin and pale as Midwestern corn silk.

Eisenhower has long appreciated the value of good relations with the press. He knows America cannot wage a prolonged, costly war without popular support back home, and only the press can create that. Ike has always treated those men and women armed only with cameras or notepads as valuable members of the Allied team. He has promised them to be honest and open, and Bandy considers that for the most part the General has kept his word. Ike knows many of the journalists by name. Back in Washington, before taking command of the Allied European Force, Ike became an admirer of Bandy’s battle photography in
Life.
While others are ducking, Charles Bandy is standing. When others are holding their ground, Charles Bandy is creeping forward, to get shots of the soldiers from the front when they advance too. Eisenhower values courage. He rewards Bandy for his gumption as well as his contribution to the war effort with access to the Supreme Commander that other photogs and reporters are denied. The General and Bandy first met three weeks before D-Day. Bandy saw a man who spoke in plain terms, who knew his job and was loyal in how he went about doing it. A man who appreciated a good tobacco farmer.

“Take a look, Charley.”

The General waves a hand clutching a Camel over the map. The glowing tip is like a meteor streaking over embattled Europe. Bandy hasn’t an idea how to decipher the marks, arrows, and labels, but the shooting star he knows is a good omen.

A staffer approaches bearing paper. Eisenhower fends the soldier off. This is to make Bandy feel special and to curry favor, and Bandy is willing to let this work in him, flattered.

“Here’s what we’ve got,” Ike says. “We’ve won back most of what Hitler took here in the Bulge.” The cigarette circles between Luxembourg and the Netherlands, swirling a hazy ring. “We’re on the German border all the way from Switzerland to Holland.” Ike’s arm must make a broad sweep, for the map is enormous. Then he points, too far to reach. “In the east, the Reds are massing on the Polish border along the Vistula River. They’re supposed to jump off any time now. That’ll take even more pressure off us.”

The General looks up to Bandy. He winces behind a puff. Bandy sees the chiseled face go grim, like staring out of Abilene at a twister coming. “I’ve got almost four million American, British, Canadian, and French soldiers. Hitler’s got one million facing me, tired, cold, and beat to hell. I’m ten-to-one in tanks. Three-to-one in planes. Three-to-one in artillery. We can’t lose to the Germans.”

Bandy studies Eisenhower a beat.

“General. You don’t mind my saying so, you don’t look too happy about it.”

“I am most days, Charley. Right now, I’m not.”

“Can I ask why, sir?”

“Because we still might lose to the British.”

“Monty.”

Eisenhower lets Bandy say the name. The General nods.

Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery. The English hero of El Alamein, the most popular general with the British people since Wellington and the least liked of all the Anglo officers among the Americans.

In the American press corps, the enmity between Montgomery and Eisenhower—including Ike’s general officers, mainly Patton and Bradley— is well known, even if it goes unreported. Monty is viewed by the American brass as something far less than the Great Captain the British press makes him out to be. The Americans remember past battles: Sicily, Falaise, and particularly the debacle of Market-Garden, Monty’s brainchild, where he was thwarted in a spectacular land-air effort to clear a path through Holland into northern Germany. That collapse was costly and embarrassing. Given the responsibility of opening the Dutch port of Antwerp, Monty captured the city but failed to open the port approaches in the Scheldt estuary, leaving them in German hands. Because of this all Allied forces are suffering logistical shortages. Field Marshal Montgomery is thought by the Americans to be too considered and cautious in his conduct of battle. He is a master of the “set piece” strategy, where every item of combat is subjected to a timetable and prescribed course of action. Patton, the old warhorse who gallops at every opportunity, has called Monty a “tired old fart,” a general who always wants more and accomplishes less than any other officer in the Allied forces. The American style in battle is to probe and exploit. Monty tends to be inflexible and tidy. But Montgomery is Prime Minister Churchill’s favorite, and he does possess a record of valor from the years before the Americans joined the war effort. Monty has lobbied Churchill to be named the single commander of all land forces in western Europe, the role he filled with success during the Normandy campaign. But once the Americans were fully in the war and supplying the lion’s share of men and materiel, it was deemed inappropriate in Washington and Paris for their troops to be commanded by an Englishman. In September Monty was forced to hand land forces command over to Eisenhower and accept relegation to army group command, on an equal level with General Bradley. Ike, the Supreme Commander in Europe, has kept the role of ground forces C-in-C for himself and will not surrender it to Monty. Or Churchill. He won’t have it.