The way led through the wardroom, stretching grandly the width of the vessel, furnished like a London club, with dark panelling, easy chairs, rows of novels and encyclopedias, and a bar. When the door to the Prime Minister’s cabin was opened by his valet, a strange sight greeted them. Winston Churchill, barefoot, was contemplating himself in a mirror in morning coat, tie, and yellow silk underdrawers. “Hello there, Harry.” He ignored Captain Henry, slewing a long cigar around in his mouth. “I’m not aware that His Majesty’s First Minister has ever before paid a call on the President of the United States at sea. I saw the President wearing a plain brown lounge suit. But he is the head of state. I am only a minister.” Churchill’s fat aged face was lit with puckish relish of the unique historical problem. “This looks odd, I know. My man of protocol wants me to wear the same old brass-buttoned jacket and cap. But it’s such an informal dress.”
“Prime Minister,” Hopkins said, “you do look more like a Former Naval Person in it.”
Churchill grinned at the whimsical name he used in messages to Roosevelt. He said to the valet, “Very well. The Trinity House uniform again.”
“This is Captain Victor Henry, Prime Minister, of Navy War Plans.”
Pulling down his eyebrows, Churchill said, “Hello there. Have you done anything about those landing craft?”
The eyes of Hopkins and Victor Henry met, and Churchill’s wide mouth wrinkled with gratification. Pug said, “I’m amazed that you remember me, Mr. Prime Minister. That’s part of my job now. The other day I talked with the President at length about landing craft.”
“Well? Is the United States going to build enough of them? A very large number will be called for.”
“We will, sir.”
“Have our people given you everything you’ve requested?”
“Their cooperation has been outstanding.”
“I think you’ll find,” Churchill rasped, as the valet helped him into enormous blue trousers, “that we simple islanders have hit on a design or two that may prove usable.” Churchill spoke slowly, lisping on his s’s, in a tone that was almost a growl.
Hopkins said a word of farewell to Churchill, and they left. In the passageway, with an incredulous grin, Hopkins remarked, “We’ve been having ceremonial rehearsals for days, and yet he’s fussing to the last minute about what to wear! A very, very great man, all the same.”
As Hopkins shakily stepped aboard King’s barge from the accommodation ladder, the stern rose high on a swell, then dropped away from under him. He lost his balance and toppled into the arms of the coxswain, who said, “Ooops-a-daisy, sir.”
“Pug, I’ll never be a sailor.” Hopkins staggered inside, settling with a sigh on the cushions. “I flopped on my face boarding the seaplane that flew me to the Soviet Union. That nearly ended my mission right there.” He glanced around at the flawlessly appointed barge. “Well, well. America! Peacetime! So—you’re still in War Plans. You’ll attend the staff meetings, then.”
“Some of them, yes, sir.”
“You might bear in mind what our friends will be after. It’s fairly clear to me, after five days at sea with the Prime Minister.” Hopkins held out one wasted hand and ticked off points on skeletal fingers. He seemed to be using Victor Henry as a sounding board to refresh his own mind for his meeting with the President, for he talked half to himself. “First they’ll press for an immediate declaration of war on Germany. They know they won’t get that. But it softens the ground for the second demand, the real reason Winston Churchill has crossed the ocean. They want a warning by the United States to Japan that any move against the British in Asia means war with us. Their empire is mighty rickety at this point. They hope such a warning will shore it up. And they’ll press for big war supplies to their people in Egypt and the Middle East. Because if Hitler pokes down there and closes the canal, the Empire strangles. They’ll also try, subtly but hard—and I would too, in their place—for an understanding that in getting American aid they come ahead of Russia. Now is the time to bomb the hell out of Germany from the west, they’ll say, and build up for the final assault. Stuff we give Russia, it will be hinted, may be turned around and pointed against us in a few weeks.”
Victor Henry said, “The President isn’t thinking that way.”
“I hope not. If Hitler wins in Russia, he wins the world. If he loses in Russia he’s finished, even if the Japanese move. The fight over there is of inconceivable magnitude. There must be seven million men shooting at each other, Pug. Seven million, or more.” Hopkins spoke the figures slowly, stretching out the wasted fingers of both hands. “The Russians have taken a shellacking so far, but they’re unafraid. They want to throw the Germans out. That’s the war now. That’s where the stuff should go now.”
“Then this conference is almost pointless,” said Pug. The barge was slowing and clanging as it drew near the Augusta.
“No, it’s a triumph,” Hopkins said. “The President of the United States and the British Prime Minister are meeting face to face to discuss beating the Germans. The world will know that. That’s achievement enough for now.” Hopkins gave Victor Henry a sad smile, and a brilliantly intelligent light came into his large eyes. He pulled himself to his feet in the rocking boat. “Also, Pug, this is the changing of the guard.”
Winston Churchill came to the Augusta at eleven o’clock. Among the staff members with him, Captain Henry saw Lord Burne-Wilke, and a hallucinatory remembrance of Pamela Tudsbury in her blue WAAF uniform distracted him from the dramatic handshake of Roosevelt and Churchill at the gangway. They prolonged the clasp for the photographers, exchanging smiling words.
All morning, recollections of England and Pamela had been stirring Pug. The OOD’s very British greeting at the Prince of Wales ladder, the glimpses of London magazines in the wardroom, Winston Churchill’s voice with its thick s’s, had wakened his memory like a song or a perfume. Góring’s 1940 air blitz on London already seemed part of another era, almost another war. Standing well back in the rank of King’s staff officers, this short unknown Navy captain, whose face would be lost in the photographs, tried to shake irrelevancies from his brain and pay attention.
In an odd way the two leaders diminished each other. They were both Number One Men. But that was impossible. Who, then, was Number One? Roosevelt stood a full head taller, but he was pathetically braced on lifeless leg frames, clinging to his son’s arm, his full trousers drooped and flapping. Churchill, a bent Pickwick in blue uniform, looked up at him with majestic good humor, much older, more dignified, more assured. Yet there was a trace of deference about the Prime Minister. By a shade of a shade, Roosevelt looked like Number One. Maybe that was what Hopkins had meant by “the changing of the guard.”
The picture-taking stopped at an unseen signal, the handshake ended, and a wheelchair appeared. The erect front-page President became the cripple more familiar to Pug, hobbling a step or two and sinking with relief into the chair. The great men and their military chiefs left the quarterdeck.
The staffs got right to business and conferred all day. Victor Henry worked with the planners, on the level below the chiefs of staff and their deputies where Burne-Wilke operated, and of course far below the summit of the President, the Prime Minister, and their advisers. Familiar problems came up at once: excessive and contradictory requests from the British services, unreal plans, unfilled contracts, jumbled priorities, fouled communications. One cardinal point the planners hammered out fast. Building new ships to replace U-boat sinkings came first. No war matériel could be used against Hitler until it had crossed the ocean. This plain truth, so simple once agreed on, ran a red line across every request, every program, every projection. Steel, aluminum, rubber, valves, motors, machine tools, copper wire, all the thousand things of war, would go first to ships. This simple yardstick rapidly disclosed the poverty of the “arsenal of democracy,” and dictated—as a matter of frightening urgency—a gigantic job of building new steel mills, and plants to turn the steel into combat ma
chines and tools.
Through all the talk of grand hypothetical plans—hundreds of ships, tens of thousands of airplanes and tanks, millions of men—one pathetic item kept recurring: an immediate need for a hundred fifty thousand rifles. If Russia collapsed, Hitler might try to wrap up the war with a Crete-like invasion of England from the air. Rifles for defending British airfields were lacking. The stupendous matériel figures for future joint invasions of North Africa or the French coast contrasted sadly with this plea for a hundred fifty thousand rifles now.
Next morning, boats from all over the sparkling bay came clustering to the Prince of Wales for church services. On the surrounding hills, in sunlight that seemed almost blinding after days of gray mist, the forests of larch and fir glowed a rich green.
An American destroyer slowly nosed its bridge alongside the battleship, exactly level with the main deck, and a gangplank was thrown across. Leaning on his son’s arm and on a cane, Franklin Roosevelt, in a blue suit and gray hat, lurched out on the gangplank, laboriously hitching one leg forward from the hip, then the other. The bay was calm, but both ships were moving on long swells. With each step, the tall President tottered and swayed. Victor Henry, like all the Americans crowding the destroyer bridge, hardly breathed as Roosevelt painfully hobbled across the narrow unsteady planks. Photographers waiting on the Prince of Wales quarterdeck were staring at the President, but Pug observed that not one of them was shooting this momentous crippled walk.
He thought of Franklin Roosevelt as he had first known him—the young Assistant Secretary of the Navy, the athletic cocksure dandy, the obvious charmer and lady-killer, full of himself, on top of the world, bounding up and down a destroyer’s ladders and spouting salty lingo. The years had made of him this half-disabled gray man, heaving himself one agonized step at a time over a gangplank a few feet long; but here was enough willpower displayed, Pug thought, to win a world war. A ramp could have been jury-rigged and laid across with ease. Franklin Roosevelt might have wheeled over in comfort and with dignity. But in his piteous fashion he could walk; and to board a British battleship, at Winston Churchill’s invitation for church parade, he was walking.
His foot touched the deck of the Prince of Wales. Churchill saluted him and offered his hand. The brass band burst forth with “The Star Spangled Banner.” Roosevelt stood at attention, his chest heaving, his face stiff with strain. Then, escorted by Churchill, the President hitched and hobbled all the way across the deck, and sat. No wheelchair ever appeared.
As the sailors massed in ranks around the afterdeck sang “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” and “Onward Christian Soldiers,” Winston Churchill kept wiping his eyes. The old hymns, roared by a thousand young male voices in the open air under the long guns, brought prickles to Victor Henry’s spine and tears to his eyes. Yet this exalting service made him uneasy, too.
Here they were, men of the American and the British navies, praying as comrades-in-arms. But it was a phony picture. The English were fighting, the Americans were not. The Prime Minister, with this church parade under the guns, was ingeniously working on the President’s feelings. Here was diamond cut diamond, will against will! Churchill was using everything he could, including Roosevelt’s supposed religious tendency, to move him. If Franklin Roosevelt could come away from this experience without giving a promise to declare war on Germany, or at least to lay down an ultimatum to Japan, he was a hard man; and the weeping old fat politician beside him was playing a damned hard game himself, for which Victor Henry admired him.
The British chaplain, his white and crimson vestments flapping in the wind, his thick gray hair blowing wildly, read the closing Royal Navy prayer: “… Preserve us from the dangers of the sea, and from the violence of the enemy; that we may be a security for such as pass upon the sea upon their lawful occasions… and that we may return in safety to enjoy the blessings of the land, with the fruits of our labors… and to praise and glorify Thy Holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord…”
A few British sailors cautiously moved out of ranks. One, then another, sneaked cameras from their blouses. When nobody stopped them, and the two leaders smiled and waved, a rush began. Cameras appeared by the dozens. The sailors swarmed into a laughing, cheering ring around the two men. Pug Henry, watching this unwonted disorder on a warship with mixed feelings of amusement and outrage, felt a touch on his elbow. It was Lord Burne-Wilke. “Hello there, my dear fellow. A word with you?”
Either the British worried less about fire than the Americans, or they had found a good way to fake wood panels. Burne-Wilke’s cabin had the dark, warm, comfortable look of a library den. “I say, Henry, what is your position on shipboard drinking? I have a fair bottle of sherry here.”
“I’m for it.”
“Good. You’re dry as a bone in your service, aren’t you? Yet last night the President served us an excellent wine.”
“The President is the source of all Navy regulations, sir, and can tailor them to his desires.”
“Ah? Jolly convenient.” Burne-Wilke lit a cigar, and they both sipped wine. “I suppose you know that this ship crossed the ocean without escort,” the air commodore resumed. “Our first night out of England, we ran into a whole gale. Our destroyers couldn’t maintain speed, so we zigzagged on alone.”
“Sir, I was appalled to hear about it.”
“Really? Rather sporting of the British Prime Minister, don’t you think, to give the Hun a fair shot at him on the open sea? Three thousand miles without air cover or surface escort, straight through the entire submarine fleet?”
“You had your good angels escorting you. That’s all I can say.”
“Oh, well, at any rate here we are. But it might be prudent not to overwork those good angels, what? Don’t you agree? On our way back, every U-boat in the Atlantic will certainly be on battle alert. We shall have to run the gamut.” Burne-Wilke paused, studying the ash on his cigar. “We’re stretched thin for escorts, you know. We’ve rounded up four destroyers. Admiral Pound would be happier with six.”
Victor Henry quickly said, “I’ll talk to Admiral King.”
“You understand that this cannot be a request from us. The Prime Minister would be downright annoyed. He’s hoping we’ll meet the Tirpitz and get into a running gun fight.”
“Let me start on this now, sir.” Pug drank up his sherry, and rose to his feet.
“Oh? Would you?” Burne-Wilke opened the cabin door. “Thanks awfully.”
On the afterdeck, the photographing was still going on. Officers with cameras were now shouldering sailors aside, as the two politicians cheerfully chatted. Behind them stood their glum chiefs of staff and civilian advisers. Hopkins, squinting out at the sunny water, wore a pained expression. The military men were talking together, except for Admiral King, who stood woodenly apart, his long nose pointing seaward, his face congealed in disapproval. Pug walked up to him, saluted, and in the fewest possible words recounted his talk with Burne-Wilke. The lines along King’s lean jaws deepened. He nodded twice and strolled away, without a word. He did not go anywhere. It was just a gesture of dismissal, and a convincing one.
Amid much wining and dining, the conference went on for two more days. One night Churchill took the floor in the Augusta wardroom after dinner, and delivered a rolling, rich, apocalyptic word picture of how the war would go. Blockade, ever-growing air bombardment, and subversion would in time weaken the grip of Nazi claws on Europe. Russia and England would “close a ring” and slowly, inexorably tighten it. If the United States became a full-fledged ally, it would all go much faster, of course. No big invasion or long land campaign would be needed in the west. Landings of a few armored columns in the occupied countries would bring mass uprisings. Hitler’s black empire would suddenly collapse in rubble, blood, and flame. Franklin Roosevelt listened with bright-eyed smiling attention, saying nothing, and applauding heartily with the rest.
On the last day of the conference, just before lunch, Admiral King sent for Pug. He found the ad
miral in undershirt and trousers in his cabin, drying face and ears with a towel. “Task Unit 26 point 3 point 1, consisting of two destroyers, the Mayrant and the Rhind, has been formed,” King said without a greeting. “It will escort the Prince of Wales to Iceland. You will embark in the Prince of Wales as liaison officer, disembark in Iceland, and return with our task unit.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“You’ll have no written orders. But we’re not in the kind of spot we were in last time. In confidence, we’ll soon be convoying all ships to Iceland. Maybe by next week. Hell, our own marines are occupying the place now. The President’s even sending a young officer along as a naval aide to Churchill while he tours our Iceland base. Ensign Franklin D. Roosevelt, Junior.” King spoke the name with an expressionless face.
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, Henry, how are you at languages?”
“It’s a long time since I tried a new one, Admiral.”
“Well, a military supply mission will go to the Soviet Union in September. If Russia’s still in the war by then, that is. Mr. Hopkins has brought up your name. He appears impressed, and the President too, by your expertise on landing craft and so forth. Now your service record has been checked, and it seems you claim a ‘poor to fair’ knowledge of Russian. Hey? How is that? That’s very unusual.”
“Admiral, I put that down when I entered the Academy in 1911. It was true then. I don’t remember ten words now.” Henry explained the circumstances that had given him Russian-speaking chums in his Sonoma County boyhood.
“I see. Well, it’s there on the record. Upon returning from Iceland you will be detached from War Plans to prepare yourself, with an intensive refresher course in Russian, for a possible trip to the Soviet Union on special detached duty. You’ll have interpreters. But with even a smattering, your intelligence value will be greater.”