Winds of War (105 page)

“Well, of course 1941 isn’t 1905. We’ve got search planes and radar. This time the Japs could get themselves royally clobbered. Still, the nature of this enemy is strange. You can’t rule that possibility out.

“But always remember his objective. When the Japs took on the Czar in 1904 they had no intention of marching to Moscow. Their objective was to grab off territory in their own back yard and hold it. That’s what they did, and they still hold it.

“If war breaks out in the Pacific, the Japs are not going to set forth to occupy Washington, D.C., and my guess is they won’t even menace Hawaii. They couldn’t care less. They’ll strike south for the big grab, and then they’ll dare us to come on, across a supply line ten thousand miles long, through their triple chain of fortified island airfields – the Gilberts, the Marshalls, the Marianas - and their surface and submarine fleets, operating close to home under an umbrella of land-based air.

“So I don’t exactly see us blowing them off the map in two weeks.”

Warren looked around at the more than a hundred sombre young faces.

“Peace in the Pacific once rested on a rickety three-legged stool. One leg was American naval power; the second, the European forces in southeast Asia; and the third, the Russian land power in Siberia.

“The European leg of the stool got knocked out in 1940 by the Germans. Yesterday, the Germans knocked out the Russian leg. Stalin’s not going into any Asian war - not now. So it’s all up to us, and with two legs out of the stool, I would say peace in the Pacific has fallen on its ass.”

Warren had been talking along very solemnly, flourishing his pointer. The joke brought surprised chuckles.

“As to Captain Nugent’s question, what does Hitler’s move mean to us, the answer therefore comes out loud and clear, when you look at the map. Der Führer has sounded general quarters for the
Enterprise
.”

Rear Admiral Colton was first on his feet to lead the applause. Clenching the cigar in his teeth, he pumped Warren’s hand.

Gliding across an imaginary line that splits the Pacific Ocean from the north to the south polar caps, the sunrise acquired a new label, June 23. Behind that line, June 22 had just dawned. This murky international convention, amid world chaos, still stood. For the globe still turned as always in the light of the sun, ninety million miles away in black space, and the tiny dwellers on the globe still had to agree, as they went about their mutual butcheries, on a way to tell the time.

The daylight slipped westward over the waters, over charming green island chains, once German colonies, all entrusted to Japan under her pledge not to fortify them – all fortified. Endeavoring to emulate the white man, Japan had studied European history in the matter of keeping such pledges.

Day came to the city of Tokyo, dotted with charming parks and temples and an imperial palace, but otherwise a flat sprawling slum of matchbox shacks and shabby Western buildings. Catching up with the white man in two generations had impoverished the Japanese; four years of the “China Incident” had drained them dry. Obedient to their leaders, they were bending to their tasks, eating prison fare, building war machines by borrowed blueprints with borrowed metals under borrowed technical advisers, desperately trading silk, cameras, and toys for oil to make the machines go. Ninety million of them toiled on four quake-ridden rocky islands full of slumbering volcanoes, an area no larger than California. Their chief natural resource was willpower. The rest of the world knew little more about them than what would be learned from Gilbert and Sullivan’s
Mikado
.

They were puzzling people. Their Foreign Minister, a little moustached man named Matsuoka, American-educated and much travelled in Europe, gave the impression of being a lunatic, with his voluble, self-contradictory chatter, and his wild giggling, grinning and hissing, so different from the expected deportment of the Oriental. White diplomats guessed that his strange ways must be part of the Japanese character. Only later did it turn out that the Japanese also thought he was demented. Why the militarist cabinet entrusted him with mortally serious matters at this time remains a historical mystery, like the willingness of the Germans to follow Hitler, who in his writings and speeches always appeared to people of other countries an obvious maniac. It is not clear just how crazy Stalin was at this time, though most historians agree he later went stark mad. In any case, the deranged Matsuoka was in charge of Japan’s relations with the world, when the deranged Hitler attacked the deranged Stalin.

Japanese historians recount that Matsuoka obtained an urgent audience with the emperor and begged him to invade Siberia right away. But the army and navy leaders were cool to the idea. In 1939, the army had had a nasty unpublicized tangle with Stalin’s Siberian army, taking losses in the tens of thousands. They wanted to go south, where the Vichy French were impotent, the Dutch were cut off from home, and the beleaguered English could spare little force. Warren Henry’s amateur analysis on the
Enterprise’s
hangar deck had not been wrong on these main alternatives.

But Matsuoka insisted that by signing the Tripartite pact with Germany and Italy, Japan had pledged to help them if they were attacked; and the German invasion clearly had taken place to fend off a Russian attack. Morality therefore required Japan to invade Siberia at once. As for the nonaggression pact with Russia - which he had himself negotiated - Russia never kept pacts anyway. To attack right now was vital, before Russia collapsed, in order for the onslaught to appear honorable, and not just picking up pieces. Matsuoka called this position “moral diplomacy.”

One high-placed official is supposed to have commented quite seriously at this time that the foreign minister was insane; to which an elder statesman replied that insanity in Matsuoka would be an improvement. So much one can sift from the Japanese record.

The official secret decision was to “let the persimmon ripen on the tree” - that is, not to attack the Soviet Union until its defeat looked like more of a sure thing. For the China war went on and on, an endless bog, and the Japanese leaders were not eager to take on heavy new land operations. The thrust south looked like the easier option, if they had to fight. Planning for this was to proceed. Matsuoka was dismayed, and he soon fell from office.

At the time of sunrise in Tokyo, the sun had already been traversing Siberia for over three hours, starting at Bering Strait. Before bringing a second sunrise to the battlefront, it had eight more hours to travel, for the Soviet Union stretches halfway around the globe.

Amid the invasion rumors of May and June, a bitter story had swept through Europe, crossing the frontiers between German-held and free territory. A Berlin actress, the story went, resting after lovemaking with a Wehrmacht general, persuaded him to tell her about the coming invasion of Russia. He obligingly took down an atlas of the world and began, but she soon interrupted him:

“
Liebchen,
but what is that great big green space there all across the map?”

“Why that,
Liebchen,
as I told you, is the Soviet Union.”

“
Ach so.
And where did you say Germany was?”

The general showed her the narrow black blob in mid-Europe.

“
Liebchen,
the actress said pensively, “has the Führer seen this map?”

It was a good joke. But the nerve center of the Soviet Union was not in Vladiavostok, at the far eastern end of the green space. The sunrise of June 23, passing west of the Russian capital, shone out within the hour on German columns, twenty-five miles advanced toward Minsk and Moscow in one day, through the massed forces of the Red Army and its heaviest border defenses.

Chapter 46

Purple lightning cracked down the black sky, forking behind the Washington Monument in jagged streams. July on the Potomac was going out, as usual, in choking heat and wild thunderstorms. “There goes my walk home,” Victor Henry said. Through the open window, a tongue of cool air licked into the stifling, humid office, scattering heavy raindrops on the wall charts. It began to pour in the street, a thick hissing shower.

“Maybe it’ll break the heat wave,” Julius said. Julius was a chief yeoman who had worked with him in the Bureau of Ordnance, a fat placid man of fifty with a remarkable head for statistics.

“No such luck. The steam will be denser, that’s all.” Pug looked at his watch. “Hey, it’s after six. Ring my house, will you? Tell the cook dinner at seven.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Tightening his tie and slipping into a seersucker jacket, Pug scooped up papers from the desk. “I want to study these figures some more. They’re kind of incredible, Julius.”

With a shrug and wave of both hands, Julius said, “They’re as good as the premises you gave me to work from.”

“Jehosephat, if it comes to that many landing craft for the two oceans, how can we build anything else for the next three years?”

Julius gave him the slightly superior smile of an underling who, on a narrow topic, knows more than the boss. “We produce sixty million tons of steel a year, sir. But making all those hair dryers and refrigerators and forty different models of cars too – that’s the problem.”

Pug dove through the rain to a taxicab that drew up at the Navy Building. A very tall man got out, pulling a soft hat low on his head. “All yours – why, hello there.”

“Well, hi!” Pug pulled out his wallet and gave the taxi driver a bill saying, “Wait, please. – How long have you been in Washington, Kirby?

“About a month.”

“Come home with me for a drink. Better yet, join me for dinner.”

“Thanks, but I don’t think I can.”

“I’m alone,” said Victor Henry.

Kirby hesitated. “Where’s your wife?”

“Spending my money in New York. She saw off our daughter-in-law and grandson on a plane to Hawaii. Now she’s shopping for furniture and stuff. We bought a house.”

“Oh? Did she get the one on Foxhall Road?”

“That’s the one. How’d you know about it?”

“Well - I ran into Rhoda when she was house-hunting. You were out at sea, I guess. We had lunch and she showed me the place. I was all for it.”

“Got much to do?” Pug insisted. “I’ll wait for you.”

“As a matter of fact,” Kirby said abruptly, “I only have to pick up some papers. Let me dash in here for a minute. I’ll be glad to have that drink with you.”

Soon they sat together in the cab, moving slowly in the clogged rush-hour traffic of Constitution Avenue, in torrents of rain. “What are you doing in this dismal town?” Pug said.

“Oh, this and that.”

“U know what?” grinned Pug, stressing U for uranium.

Kirby glanced at the bald round head and red ears of the driver.

“Driver, turn on your radio,” Pug said. “Let’s catch the news.”

But the driver could only get jazz, buzzing with static.

“I don’t know what you hope to hear,” Kirby said, “except that the Germans are another fifty miles nearer Moscow.”

“Our department’s getting edgy about the Japs.”

“I can’t figure out the President’s order,” Kirby said. “Neither can the papers, it seems. Okay, he froze their credits. Does it or doesn’t it cut off their oil?”

“Sure it does. They can’t pay.”

“Doesn’t that force them to go to war?”

“Maybe. The President had to do something about this Vichy deal that puts Jap airfields and armies in Indo-China. Saigon’s a mighty handy jump-off point for Malaya and Java - and Australia, for that matter.”

Kirby deliberately packed his pipe. “How is Rhoda?”

“Snappish about various foul-ups in the new house. Otherwise fine.”

Through puffs of blue smoke, the scientist said, “What do we actually want of the Japs now?”

“To cease their aggression. Back up out of Indo-China. Get off the Chinese mainland. Call off that Manchukuo farce, and free Manchuria.”

“In other words,” said Kirby, “give up all hope of becoming a major power, and accept a military defeat which nobody’s inflicted on them.”

“We can lick them at sea.”

“Do we have an army to drive them out of Asia?”

“No.”

“Then don’t we have our gall, ordering them out?”

Pug looked at Kirby under thick eyebrows, his head down on his chest. The humidity was giving him a headache, and he was very tired. “Look, militarist fanatics have taken charge there, Kirby. You know that. Slant-eyed samurais with industrial armaments. If they ever break loose and win southeast Asia, you’ll have a yellow Germany in the Pacific, with unlimited manpower, and most of the oil and rubber in the world. We have to maneuver while we can, and fight if we must. The President’s freezing order is a maneuver. Maybe he’ll work out some deal with them.”

“Appeasement,” Kirby said.

“Exactly, appeasement. We’ve been appeasing them right along with the oil shipments. So far they haven’t attacked south and they haven’t hit Russia in the back. I think the president’s just feeling his way, day by day and week by week.”

“Why doesn’t he declare war on Germany?” Kirby said. “Why this interminable pussyfooting about convoys? Once Russia collapses, the last chance to stop Hitler will be gone.”

“I can tell you why Roosevelt doesn’t declare war on Germany, mister,” spoke up the taxi driver in a rough, good-humored Southern voice, not looking around.

“Oh? Why?” said Kirby.

“Because he’d be impeached if he tried, that’s why, mister. He knows goddamned well that the American people aren’t going to war to save the Jews. He glanced over his shoulder. Blue eyes twinkled in a friendly fat face, smiling jovially. “I have no prejudices. I’m not prejudiced against the Jews. But I’m not prejudiced for them, either. Not enough to send American boys to die for them. That’s not unreasonable, is it?”

“Maybe you’d better look where you’re driving,” said Pug.

The cabbie subsided.

“It’s a nice spot,” Kirby said. They were on the back porch and Pug was pouring martinis. The house stood on a little knoll, topping a smooth lawn and a ravine of wild woods. A fresh breeze smelling of wet leaves and earth cooled the porch.