“Can we do it, sir?”
“Make the Captain of the Yard an information addressee. He’ll damn well get us out of here.”
“Aye aye, sir. We’ll be short an officer. Ensign Bulotti’s hospitalized for two weeks.”
“Damnation. That I forgot. Well, we sail with four officers, then. Stand watch-and-watch till we get to Pearl, and try to hook us a fresh ensign out of the sub pool there.”
“Captain, do you know anybody in ComSubPac Personnel?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Well enough to swipe an ensign off new construction?”
To Aster’s saucy grin, Hoban returned a droll grimace. “Got someone in mind?”
“There’s this ensign, a shipmate of mine off the S-45 who’s just reported aboard the Tuna. It’s two whole months away from shakedown.”
“Is he a good officer?”
“Well, unfortunately he’s a sack rat and goof-off.”
“Then what do we want him for?”
“I can make him deliver. In a pinch he’s resourceful and courageous. His father’s a captain in War Plans, and his brother flies an SBD off the Enterprise.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad. What class is he?”
“He’s a reserve. Look, Captain,” Aster exclaimed, at Hoban’s wry expression, “the officer pool will be full of reserves. You’re not going to keep a whole wardroom of regulars. Not on the Devilfish. Byron stands a good diving watch, and I know him.”
“Byron?”
“His name’s Byron Henry. Briny, they call him.”
“Okay, maybe I’ll telephone Pearl. Kind of a dirty trick to play on this Briny, though, isn’t it? New construction, based in Pearl, is a lot better duty than going to Manila in the Devilfish.”
“Tough titty.”
Hoban looked curiously at his executive officer. He did not yet have Aster sized up. “Don’t you like him, Lady?”
Aster shrugged. “We’re short a watch stander.”
The Pacific showed no combative specks to the westward-moving sunrise. Early sunlight slanted into the hangar deck of the Enterprise, moored to buoys in Pearl Harbor, on disembowelled airplanes, half-assembled torpedoes, and all the vast clutter of the floating machine shop that this deck was in peacetime. Sailors in greasy dungarees and officers in khakis were at work everywhere. Through the steel hollow, smelling as all carriers do of gasoline, rubber, metal, and sea air, a boatswain’s pipe reverberated above the workaday noise, followed by a Southern voice on the loudspeaker: “Now hear this. Meeting of all officers in the wardroom in ten minutes.”
Warren Henry climbed out of the cockpit of an SBD, wiping his hands on a greasy cloth. He put on his khaki cap, saying to the sailors working with him, “That’s me. Wish me luck.”
When he arrived in the wardroom, officers in khaki shirts and black ties already filled the chairs and lined the sides. Amidships, against the forward bulkhead, stood the movie screen, and on the green baize of a nearby table a slide projector rested. The captain, a chubby man with thick prematurely gray hair, rose and strode before the screen as soon as he saw Warren. “Gentlemen, I guess you’ve all heard the news. I’ve been keeping track on the shortwave, and it seems clear already that Der Führer has caught Joe Stalin with his hammer and sickle down.” The officers tittered formally at the captain’s pleasantry. “Personally I feel sorry for the Russian people, saddled with such lousy leadership. The few times I’ve encountered their navy officers, I’ve found them friendly and quite professional, though somewhat odd in their ways.
“The question is, how does this affect the mission of the Enterprise?
“Now, as many of us know, Lieutenant Henry of Scouter Squadron Six is something of a red-hot on military history. I’ve asked him to give us a short fill-in here, before we get on with the day’s work, so that—attention on deck!”
Rear Admiral Colton appeared through a doorway, and with the noisy scrape of scores of chairs, all the officers stood up. He was a barrel-chested man with a plump purplish face scarred by plane crashes, a naval aviator dating back to the Langley, now ComAirPac’s chief of staff. The captain conducted him to a leather armchair hastily vacated by his exec. Lighting an enormous black cigar, the admiral motioned at the officers to take their seats.
Standing before the screen, Warren started in the modest monotone of most Navy instructors, hands on hips, legs slightly apart. He made the conventional deprecatory joke about his ignorance, then went straight at the topic.
“Okay. Now, naturally, our concern is the Japanese. In theory, there should be no battle problem here. We’re so much stronger than Japan in military potential that any Jap move to start a war looks suicidal. So you hear civilians say we’ll blow the little yellow bastards off the map in two weeks, and all that poppycock.” Some of the young officers were smiling; their smiles faded. Warren hooked a blue and yellow Hydro-graphic Office chart over the movie screen, and took up a pointer. “Here’s a chart of the Pacific. People shouldn’t talk about blowing anybody off the map without a map in front of them.” Warren’s pointer circled the French, Dutch, and British possessions in southeast Asia. “Oil, rubber, tin, rice—you name what Japan needs to be a leading world power, and there it sits. With what’s happened to the armed forces of the European empires since 1939, it’s almost up for grabs. And the first thing to notice is that it’s all in the Jap back yard. We have to steam for days, far past Japan, just to get there. The territory in dispute, in any Pacific war, will be ten thousand miles or more from San Francisco, and at some points only eight hundred miles from Tokyo.
“Well, so our government’s been trying to keep the Japs quiet by letting them buy from us all the steel, scrap iron, and oil they want, though of course the stuff goes straight into the stockpile they need to fight a war against us. Now, I have no opinion of that policy—”
“I sure have,” came a sarcastic gravelly growl from the admiral. The officers laughed and applauded. Colton went on, “It’s not fit for tender ears. Sooner or later they’ll come steaming east, burning Texaco oil and shooting pieces of old Buicks at us. Some policy! Go ahead, Lieutenant. Sorry.”
Quiet ensued as Warren took away the chart. A pallid slide flashed on the screen, a situation map of the Russo-Japanese war.
“Okay, a little ancient history now. Here’s Port Arthur,” Warren pointed, “tucked far into the Yellow Sea, behind Korea. Jap back yard again. Here’s where the Japs beat the Russians in 1905. Without a declaration of war, they made a sneak attack on the Czar’s navy, a night torpedo attack. The Russkis never recovered. The Nips landed and besieged this key ice-free port. When Port Arthur finally fell, that was it. The Czar accepted a negotiated peace with a primitive country, one-sixtieth the size of his own! It was as great a victory for the Japs as the American Revolution was for us.
“Now I personally think our history books don’t give that war enough play. That’s where modern Japanese history starts. Maybe that’s where all modern history starts. Because that’s where the colored man for the first time took on the white man and beat him.”
In one corner, near the serving pantry, the white-coated steward’s mates, all Filipino or Negro, were gathered. When the topic was not secret, they had the privilege of listening to officer lectures. Glances now wandered to them from all over the wardroom, in a sudden stillness. The Filipino faces were blank masks. The Negroes’ expressions were various and enigmatic; some of the younger ones tartly smiled. This awkward moment caught Warren unawares. The presence of the steward’s mates had been a matter of course to him, hardly noticed. He shook off the embarrassment and plowed on.
“Well, this was a hell of a feat, only half a century after Perry opened up the country. The Japs learned fast. They traded silk and art objects to the British for a modern steam navy. They hired the Germans to train them an army. Then they crossed to the mainland and licked Russia.
“But remember, Moscow was a whole continent away from Port Arthur. The only link was a railroad. Lo
ng supply lines licked the Czar. Long supply lines licked Cornwallis, and long supply lines licked Napoleon in Russia. The further you have to go to fight, the more you thin out your strength just getting there and coming back.
“Incidentally, at the Naval War College, war games often start with a sneak attack by the Japs on us, right here in Pearl Harbor. That derives from the Port Arthur attack. The way the Jap mind works, why shouldn’t they repeat a trick on the white devils that once paid off so well?
“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 could 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 Vladivostok, 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.
46
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sp; 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.”