The Winds of War

  Pug grunted. “Send him EAT HEARTY—X-RAY—MORE COMING—X-RAY—and sign it MOTHER HUBBARD.”

  The grinning sailor said, “Aye aye, sir,” and trampled down the ladder.

  “As an observer,” Pug called to Commander Baldwin on the bridge below, “I would now be pleased to observe how fast your signal gang can hoist REVERSE COURSE, MAKE 32 KNOTS.”

  When the Plunkett tied up in the Norfolk Navy Yard, Victor Henry went straight to flag quarters on the Texas. Admiral King listened to his report with the face of a scrawny sandstone pharaoh, showing a human reaction only when Pug mentioned the poor performance of the destroyers. The pharaoh face then became slightly more unpleasant. “I am aware of the low level of preparedness in the fleet, and have instituted corrective programs. Now then. On what basis, Captain, did the President choose you for this mission?”

  “When I was naval attaché in Germany, sir, he happened to use me on jobs involving high security. I suppose this fell in that category.”

  “Will you report back to him?”

  “Yes, sir.” Victor Henry jumped to his feet as the admiral walked to a map of the world, newly hung on the bulkhead opposite his desk in place of the photograph of Admiral Mayo.

  “I suppose while out at sea you’ve gotten the news? You know that the Germans blitzed Yugoslavia in one week? That Greece has surrendered”—the admiral ran a bony finger along Adriatic and Mediterranean coastlines hatched in angry fresh red ink—“that this fellow Rommel has knocked the British clear back into Egypt, and is massing to drive on the Suez Canal? That the big British force trapped in Greece will be lucky to pull off another Dunkirk? That the Arabs are rising to throw the British out of the Middle East? That Iraq’s already ordered them out and asked the Germans in?”

  “Yes, sir. We got most of that. It’s been a bad few weeks.”

  “Depends on the viewpoint. For the Germans it’s been a fine few weeks. In a month or so, they’ve tipped the world balance. My considered judgment is that this war’s almost over. There seems to be very little awareness of that here. When the Germans take the canal, master the Middle East, and close the Mediterranean, the British Empire lines will be severed. That’s the ball game. There will be no viable military force left in all of Asia between Hitler and the Japs. India and China will fall to them.” Admiral King swept bony fingers across the Eurasian landmass. “Solid dictator-ruled, from Antwerp to Tokyo, and from the Arctic Circle to the equator. Did you hear about that neutrality deal between the Soviets and the Japs?”

  “No, sir. I missed that one.”

  “Well, they signed a pact—oh, a couple of weeks ago, this was—agreeing to lay off each other for the time being. The press here almost ignored it, but that’s terrific news. It secures the Jap rear”—he waved toward Siberia—“and turns them loose to pick up all these big marbles.” The gnarled hand jumped south and ran over Indo-China, the East Indies, Malaya, and the Philippines; it paused, and one stiff finger glided to the Hawaiian Islands.

  Admiral King stared sourly from the map to Victor Henry and strode back to his desk. “Now, of course the President has to make the political judgments. He’s an outstanding politician and a great Navy President. Possibly his judgment is correct, that politically he can’t do any more now than extend our patrol area. Maybe politically he has to chop hairs about ‘patrolling’ versus ‘convoying.’ But it’s just as belligerent for us to patrol, and broadcast the positions of German U-boats and raiders, as it is to convoy. Just as belligerent, but weak and futile. The British haven’t enough ships as it is to keep the Mediterranean open and cut this fellow Rommel’s supply lines. If we took over convoying, they might have a chance to stay in the game. My opinion hasn’t been asked by the President. You seem to be in his entourage. You might find a moment to make these points.” Ernest King sat, hands folded on the desk, and looked at the captain for a silent minute. “That might be, by sheer accident, the best contribution you ever make to the security of the United States.”

  “Henry! Hey, Henry!”

  Byron groaned, went rigid as a stretching cat, and opened one eye. Lieutenant Caruso and the other officers on the S-45 were used to this waking pattern of Ensign Henry. Until he went rigid there was no rousing him. It sometimes took violent shaking of the limp form.

  “Huh?”

  “Your father is here.”

  “What?” Byron fluttered his eyes and reared up on an elbow. He now occupied the middle bunk of three. “You’re kidding, skipper. My father?”

  “He’s in the wardroom. Care to join us?”

  In his underwear, unshaven, mussed, and blinking, Byron stumbled to the doorway of the tiny wardroom. “Holy cow. You really are here.”

  “You heard your commanding officer say I was.” Immaculate in dress blues, Victor Henry frowned at his son over a coffee cup.

  “They’ll tell me anything on this boat to get me out of my bunk. They’re all fiends.”

  “What the devil are you doing in the sack at noon?”

  “I had the midwatch. Excuse me, sir, for coming out like this. Be right back.” Byron quickly reappeared in a freshly starched khaki uniform, groomed and shaved. Victor Henry was alone. “Gosh, Dad, it’s good to see you.”

  “Briny, a midwatch isn’t major surgery. You’re not supposed to take to your bed to recover.”

  “Sir, I had it two nights in a row.” He poured coffee for his father and himself. “Say, this is a real surprise. Mom said you were somewhere at sea. Have you been detached from War Plans, Dad?”

  “No, this was a temporary thing. I’m heading back now. I was visiting the Texas. I saw the S-45 on the yard roster and thought I’d look in.” Victor Henry scanned his son’s thin face. “Well? How goes it?”

  “Oh, first-rate. Swell bunch of guys on this boat. The skipper is 4.0, and the exec, I’d really like you to meet him. Lieutenant Aster. He was a witness at my wedding.” Byron grinned the old half-melancholy, half-amused grin that never failed to charm Pug Henry, and most other people. “I’m glad to see you. I’m lonesome.”

  “What’s your wife’s situation? Is she on her way home yet?”

  Byron gave his father a veiled glance that hinted at his standing grudge about Natalie. But he was in a good mood and responded amiably. “I don’t know. We got in this morning from maneuvers. The yeoman just went for the mail.”

  Pug put down his cup. “Incidentally, will your boat be in port on the twenty-sixth?”

  “I can find out. Why?”

  “Nothing much. Just if you are, and if you can get overnight leave, you’re invited to dinner at the White House.”

  Byron’s deep-set eyes opened wide. “Cut it out, Dad.”

  “Your mother and Madeline, too. I don’t guess Warren can fly in from Pearl Harbor. But if you’re around, you might as well come. Something to tell your children about.”

  “Dad, how do we rate?”

  Victor Henry shrugged. “Oh, a carrot for the donkey. Your mother doesn’t know about it yet.”

  “No? Dinner at the White House! Mom will go clear through the overhead.”

  Lieutenant Aster, carrying a basket of mail, poked his head into the wardroom. “Briny, Carson’s got a fistful of letters for you at the gangway.”

  “Hey. Good enough. This is my exec, Dad, Lieutenant Carter Aster. Be right back.” Byron vanished.

  Seating himself at the narrow wardroom table and slitting envelopes with an Indian paper cutter, Aster said, “Excuse me, sir. Priority mail.”

  “Go ahead.” Victor Henry studied the blond officer as he attacked the letters. One could sometimes guess, by the way a young man went at papers or a book, the kind of officer he was. Aster traversed the pile fast, scribbling a note here and a checkmark there. He looked good. He pushed the basket aside and poured coffee for himself when Henry held up a hand to decline.

  “Lieutenant, you were a witness at Briny’s wedding?”

  “Yes, sir. She’s a wonderful girl.”

  “Ho
w’s Briny doing?”

  Aster’s jolly reminiscent smile disappeared. The wide mouth became a slash of tight lips. “In his work?”

  “Yes, let me have it straight.”

  “Well, we all like him. There’s something about Briny, I guess you know that. But for submarines… don’t get the idea that he can’t measure up. He can, but he won’t bother. Briny just slides along the bottom edge of tolerable performance.”

  Victor Henry was not surprised; still, the words hurt. “People run true to form, I guess.”

  “He’s way behind on his officer qualification book. Now he knows his way around the boat, sir, he knows the engines, the compressed air system, the batteries, all that. He stands a good diving watch. He has a knack for trimming the boat and keeping her at the depth the captain wants. But when it comes to writing reports on time, or even logs, keeping track of records and dispatches and the crew’s training books—an officer’s main work—forget it.” Aster looked Byron’s father in the eye. “The skipper sometimes talks of beaching him.”

  Victor Henry said sadly, “That bad?”

  “In a way he’s kind of nuts, too.”

  “How, nuts?”

  “Well, like last week, we had this surprise inspector aboard. We fired this dummy torpedo and surfaced to recover it. We hadn’t tried a recovery for a long time. It was a rough sea, raining, cold as hell. The torpedo detail was out there trying to retrieve the thing. It was bobbing up and down, banging and crashing against the hull, and we were rolling like mad, and the sailors were slipping around with lifelines tied to them. It was awful. They messed about for an hour and couldn’t hook that fish. I was sure somebody would get drowned or crushed. The inspector got tired and went below. The skipper was exploding. The deck gang was soaked and frozen and falling all over itself. Well, as you know, a dummy warhead’s hollow, and the fish floats straight up and down. Briny was the officer on that detail. Suddenly he took the hook, stuck it in his lifeline, and by Christ if he didn’t go and jump on that torpedo! He timed it so right, it looked easy. He hung on, with these icy waves breaking over him, riding that yellow steel dummy head like a goddamn bronco. He secured the hook and then got knocked off. Well, we hauled him in half-dead and then we hoisted the fish aboard. The skipper filled him full of medicinal brandy. He slept eighteen hours and was fine.”

  Victor Henry said, clearing his throat, “He took a stupid chance.”

  “Sir, I’d like to have him on any boat I ever command. But I’d expect to wear out two pairs of heavy shoes, kicking his ass for him.”

  “If the occasion arises, let me buy you the brogans, Lieutenant,” said Pug.

  “She’s pregnant!” Byron catapulted into the little wardroom, arresting himself by grabbing the doorway. “Natalie’s pregnant, Dad.” He brandished torn-open letters. “How about that? Hey, Lady, how about that? Boy, I feel strange.”

  “Fast work,” said Aster. “You better get that gal home for sure, now. Pleasure to meet you, Captain. Excuse me.”

  The executive officer slid out from behind the table with his mail basket.

  “Any news on her coming home?” Victor Henry asked.

  “She says Leslie Slote really built a fire under the consuls this time. She and Jastrow should be on their way by—well, maybe by now! She’d better be, or I’ll desert and go fetch her, Dad. My kid’s going to be born in the United States.”

  “That’s great news, Briny. Great.” Victor Henry stood, putting a hand on his son’s shoulder. “I’ve got a plane to catch. You’ll find out about the twenty-sixth, won’t you? And let me know.”

  “The what? Oh, yes.” Byron was sitting with his chin on both fists, reading a closely written airmail sheet, his face lit up with happiness. “That dinner. Yes, sir, I’ll telephone you or something.”

  “I’m sure you have a load of paperwork, after your maneuvers. Get at it, boy.”

  “Oh, sure,” said Byron. “So long, Dad.”

  “I’m happy about your wife, Byron.”

  Again the veiled glance, again the amiable tone. “Thanks.”

  Rhoda was in bad turmoil. Palmer Kirby had returned from England in April, while Pug was at sea. The cherry blossoms were early that year; and in Virginia and North Carolina, where they went on a four-day drive like a honeymoon, the countryside was flooded with fragrant blossoms. Rhoda came back to Washington committed in the strongest terms to leave her husband and to marry Kirby.

  The decision seemed clear, simple, and natural to Rhoda in the bedrooms of wayside hotels, and on long walks amid the peach and plum blossoms of the southland. But when Kirby went happily off to Denver to put the big old house in order for a new life, leaving her in a home full of Henry photographs and mementos, the simplicity of the vision, and some of its charm, started to fade.

  Rhoda’s inexperience was misleading her. An investment of more than twenty-five years of love and intimacy—even if it has gone slightly sour—usually should not be liquidated. Its equivalent in romance, in thrills, or even money, can seldom be recovered. So hardheaded bad women tend to decide. Rhoda’s trouble was that, in her own mind, she was still a good woman, caught up in a grand passion which consumed all moral law. One misstep during her husband’s long absence in Germany—at an age when many men and women make missteps—had led to another and another. Her desire to keep her good opinion of herself had completed her confusion.

  She still liked—perhaps loved—and also feared Pug, but his career was a growing disappointment. For a while she had hoped that his “in” with President Roosevelt might lead to big things, but that was not happening. Some of her friends were preening over their husbands’ new commands: battleships, destroyer flotillas, cruisers. The rivalry of Digger Brown, Paul Munson, and Harry Warendorf was exactly paralleled among their ladies. Rhoda Henry was becoming the wife of a man bogged in twilit shore jobs after more than twenty years of racing along with the front-runners. Evidently Pug didn’t have it. This was bitter medicine for Rhoda. She had always hoped that he would someday become at least a Deputy Chief of Naval Operations. After all, she had preferred him to fellows who had since gone on to careers like bank president, steel executive, army general. (These men had not necessarily proposed; if she had dated and kissed them, she considered them possibilities sacrificed for Pug.) Now it seemed he might not even make rear admiral! Certainly that limited goal was receding with every month he spent in a Navy Department cubicle while his competitors accumulated command time at sea. With such thoughts Rhoda Henry was working herself up to tell Pug that she had fallen in love with another man. But she did not look forward with dewy pleasure to this, and she teetered, ready to be pushed either way.

  She missed his return from the convoy trip. He had not telephoned from Norfolk, for he knew that she liked to sleep late. Arriving by airplane in Washington, he found the house empty, cook off, Rhoda out, mail overflowing his desk, no coffee. He couldn’t blame anybody, but it was a cold homecoming.

  At the War Plans office, by chance, he encountered Pamela Tuds-bury. She had not gone back to England with Burne-Wilke. Secretaries cleared for Very Secret were rare, so the British Purchasing Council had requisitioned her for a while. Spry, springy, refreshingly unmilitary in a yellow and green cotton frock, Pamela greeted him with the warmth he had not found at home. He asked her to lunch with him in the Navy cafeteria. During the quarter hour it took to bolt a sandwich, pie, and coffee, Pamela spoke of her unhappiness at being left behind by Burne-Wilke. “I want to be there now,” she said, eyes somewhat moist. “Not that I really think the end is at hand, as some do. But in the wee hours, one does begin to picture how one accommodates to German military police and street signs. It’s a nightmare that now and then gets terribly real.” She shook her head and smiled. “Of course it’s darkest before the dawn. You poor man. You’ve got a splendid color. The sea so obviously agrees with you. You look ten years younger. I hope it lasts, or that you get back to sea.”

  “Well, I’ve tried to walk a lot a
nd play tennis. It isn’t the same.”

  “Of course not.”

  He asked her for further news of Ted Gallard, but there was none. They parted with a casual good-bye. All the rest of the day, plowing through the mound of accumulated paper, Victor Henry felt much better.

  Rhoda was waiting for him at home in a bright red dress, with ice and drink mixes ready, and cheese and crackers out. Her manner and conversation struck him as strange. She gabbled about houses. She was so eager to talk, so voluble, that he had no chance at first to tell her of the White House invitation. Early that afternoon, finding Pug’s note on her dressing table, she had rushed out with an agent and visited three. All her suppressed guilt feelings focussed on the house business. If only she could convince Pug that she had been diligently looking at houses, she felt her tracks would be covered. This made no sense. She was planning to break the news to him. She acted on nervous instinct, triggered by the short scrawl in Pug’s handwriting: He’s back. Man the bar.

  Pug was uninterested in a verbose account of faults in houses he had never seen. But he put up with it. Next, Rhoda chattered on that sore topic, recent promotions: that utter fool, chaser, and drunk, Chipper Pennington, had gotten the Helena; and did Pug know that even Bill Foley was now commanding a destroyer squadron at Pearl Harbor? Pug broke in on Rhoda’s flow of words—this was at dinner, over the meat—to tell her of the President’s invitation. Her mouth fell open. “Pug! Really?” She asked many questions, worried out loud over what she would wear, and gloated about how Annette Pennington and Tammy Foley would feel when they heard this!

  It was a bad performance. He was seeing her at her very worst—worse than her worst, for she had never been quite so demoralized, though she looked extremely pretty and her wonderful skin glowed smooth as ever. Pug found himself looking at his wife detachedly, as he judged professional matters. Few wives in their forties can weather such a scrutiny.