by Herman Wouk
“Do you have a choice?”
“I’ve got my orders, but it could be managed.”
“Rinkydink administration in submarines.”
“Sort of.”
Warren had no ready advice to give. His self-confidence was solid and deep; he had overwhelmed Byron from boyhood; yet he had always sensed an original streak in Briny that he lacked. Attracting and marrying a brilliant Jewess, the niece of a famous writer, was a deed outside his range; and given the opportunities of wartime, Byron was fast closing the gap as a naval officer.
“Well, let me tell you a story, Byron. Halsey brought the Doolittle fliers to their takeoff point. I suppose you know that.”
“That’s the word at the sub base.”
“It’s true. When those Army bombers took off from the Hornet, I stood out on our own flight deck and watched them form up and head west for Tokyo. Tears ran down my face, Byron. I bawled.”
“I believe you.”
“Okay. It was a hell of a brave deed, yet what did it amount to? A token bombing to pep up the home front. There’s only one service really hurting the enemy in the Pacific right now, and that’s the submarines. There won’t be another moment like this in your lifetime. If you go to SubLant you’ll boot it. You asked my opinion, and I’m giving it to you. You know Natalie’s okay now, and —”
Janice poked her head out of the kitchen. “Your dad and Admiral Spruance are rounding the Smiths’ terrace, men, going full steam.”
Byron glanced down at his shirt and shorts, and rubbed his beard. “Spruance?”
Warren yawned, scratching a dirty bare foot… “He just drinks a glass of water and goes back down the hill.”
The bell rang. Janice went to answer. The brothers jumped to their feet, as the white-clad admiral, his face streaming sweat, walked out on the porch, followed by their father.
“Byron!” Pug grasped his son’s hand and they embraced. “Well, here’s my submariner, Admiral. I haven’t seen him since Thanksgiving.”
“My submariner’s out in the Tambor.” Spruance patted his crimson face with a square-folded handkerchief. “How’s the hunting been, Lieutenant?”
“Two confirmed sinkings, Admiral. Eleven thousand tons.”
Victor Henry’s eyes brightened. Spruance smiled. “Indeed? You’re ahead of the Tambor. What about the Mark Fourteen torpedo?”
“It stinks, Admiral. It’s a disgrace. My skipper got his three kills with contact exploders. Against orders, but they worked. ”
At the impudent freedom of the response, Pug’s pleasure subsided. “Briny, when torpedoes miss it’s always a temptation to blame the exploders.”
“Sorry, Dad. I know you were involved with that magnetic device.” In peacetime, Victor Henry had received a letter of commendation for his work on it. “It’s gone sour in production, that’s all I can tell you. Even with contact exploders, the Mark Fourteen keeps failing. All of SubPac’s skippers are up in arms, but BuOrd won’t listen. It’s sickening, I tell you, to sail five thousand miles to make a torpedo attack, and then have the fish hit the target with a dull thud. ”
Spruance relieved Pug by commenting, “My son says much the same thing. Admiral Nimitz has taken the matter up with BuOrd.” He accepted a glass of iced tea from Janice, and turned to Warren. “Incidentally, what’s the range of the Dauntless, again, Lieutenant?”
“We tend to think in hours, Admiral. Three and a half hours airborne, more or less.”
The admiral’s expression was abstracted. “Your book range is seven hundred fifty miles.”
Warren tartly smiled. “Sir, just forming up burns a lot of gasoline. Then over the target the fuel disappears like there’s a hole in the tank. Most of us wouldn’t get back from a target at two hundred miles.”
“And the fighters and torpedo bombers?” Spruance asked as he sipped the tea. “Same speed and range?”
“Approximately, sir.” Warren concealed any puzzlement at the questions, answering briskly. “But the TBD is a lot slower.”
“Well!” Spruance emptied his glass and stood up. “Most refreshing, Janice. I’ll be going down the hill now.”
The others were all on their feet. “Admiral, one of the boys can drive you back,” Pug said.
“Why?”
“If you have pressing business, sir.”
“Not necessary.” As he went out, Spruance beckoned to Pug to follow him. Closing the front door he paused, squinting at Victor Henry in the noon sun. He looked much sterner when he put on the big white cap. “Those boys of yours are different in character, but they’re both cut from the same cloth.”
“Byron should curb his tongue.”
“Submariners are individualists, as I well know. It’s good they’re both in port. Spend all the time with them you can.”
“There’s much to do on my ship, Admiral.”
Spruance’s face took on a sudden hard cast. “Henry, this is for your information only. The Japanese are heading east in great force. They’re already at sea. Their objective is to seize Midway Island. A Japanese base a thousand miles from Hawaii is unacceptable, so Admiral Nimitz is sending everything we’ve got up there. We’re about to fight the biggest battle of the war.”
Pug groped for a response to these stunning words that would not sound defeatist, alarmed, swaggering, or plain stupid. The Hornet, the Enterprise, with possibly the patched leaky Yorktown and their meager train, against that Japanese armada! At least eight carriers, perhaps ten battleships, only God could know how many cruisers, destroyers, submarines! As a fleet problem, it was too lopsided for any peacetime umpire to propose. His hoarse words came unbidden, “Now I know why you don’t want to go on the beach.”
“I won’t just yet.” The calm eyes glowed in a way Victor Henry never forgot. “Admiral Halsey has gone to the Cincpac hospital. Unlucky outbreak of a skin disease. He can’t fight this battle. He has recommended to Admiral Nimitz that I assume command of Task Force Sixteen, so I’ll transfer my gear to Halsey’s flag quarters this afternoon. My new assignment starts after the battle.”
This was just as stunning as the first disclosure. Spruance, a nonaviator, taking the Enterprise and the Hornet into battle! Trying to maintain a level tone, Pug asked, “The intelligence is all that certain, then?”
“We think so. If all goes well, we may achieve surprise. Incidentally, I intend to invite you to the battle conference.” He held out his hand. “So as I say, spend some time with your boys while you can.”
Returning to the back porch, Pug Henry paused in the shadows of the doorway. His sons were talking on the lawn now, folding chairs pulled close, each clasping a beer can. Cut from the same cloth! They looked it. What could they be discussing so earnestly? He was in no hurry to interrupt them. He leaned in the doorway, taking in the picture he might not see again for a long time, trying to digest Spruance’s savage news. He was ready himself to sail against those odds in the thin-skinned Northampton. He had been paid through thirty years to prepare for such an encounter. But Warren and Byron, in their twenties, were just starting to taste life. Yet on the Northampton he would be the safest of the three.
In these two young men in gaudy shirts and tan shorts — one lean and red-bearded, the other big and solid, with gray-sprinkled hair — he could still see ghostly shadows of the boys they had been. Byron had smiled just such a smile at five. Warren’s emphatic push of both hands outward had been his main gesture as an Academy debater. Pug remembered Warren’s great moment, his graduation from the Academy, a battalion commander with a prize in modern history; and poor Byron’s sad Columbia commencement, when he had almost failed to graduate because of an overdue term paper. He remembered the rainy March day in 1939 when he had received his orders to Germany, and Warren had come in all sweaty from tennis to say he had applied for flight training, and Byron’s first letter from Siena about Natalie Jastrow had arrived. He would break into their talk soon, Pug thought, to ask about her. Not yet. He just wanted to look at them a littl
e longer.
About Warren, Pug thought, he could have done nothing. Warren had always wanted the Navy. By becoming an aviator, he had outdone the father he was emulating. The aviators who survived would become the Navy’s next wave of admirals. That was already clear. As for Byron, Pug knew he had forced him into submarines and parted him from his Jewish wife. This was a sunken rock always to be steered around when they were together. Byron would have been called up anyway, and he might even have chosen submarines. But Pug could not clear himself of muddying Byron’s life, and — proud as he was of the Devilfish’s sinkings — of pushing him into hazard.
A poignant sense engulfed him of the one-way flow of time, of the offhand decisions, the slight impulsive mistakes, that could swell and become a man’s fate. There they sat, the little boys he had stiffly disciplined and silently loved, transformed into naval officers and combat veterans. It seemed the work of a master illusionist who could just as easily, if he chose, reverse the trick and change the red-bearded submariner and the broad-chested aviator back into quarrelling lads on a Manila lawn. But Pug knew those lads were gone. He himself had changed into a grim old dog, and they too would keep changing in one direction. Byron would at last come to the adult form and personality that still eluded him. Warren —
The strange thing was that Victor Henry could not picture Warren changing any further. Warren as he sat there in the sun, holding that beer can, the cigarette slanting from his thin mouth, his body developed, full, and powerful, his face carved in lines of self-confidence and resolution, his blue eyes glinting with suppressed humor, was Warren as he would always be. So the father could not help thinking, and as the thought took root, a stinging cold shiver traversed his body. He shouted, stepping out of the doorway; “Say, is there any beer left, or have you two problem drinkers soaked it all up?”
Byron jumped to his feet and brought his father a tall frosty glass of beer.
“Dad, Natalie’s coming home on a Swedish boat! That’s what Janice’s father has heard, anyway. How about that?”
“Why, that’s glorious news, Briny.”
“Yes, I’m still trying to call the State Department to confirm it. But Warren thinks I shouldn’t transfer, because SubPac’s where all the glory is.”
“I never mentioned glory,” said Warren. “Did I say glory? I don’t give a shit about glory — pardon me, Dad — I said the subs are carrying the fight in this ocean, and you’ve got the chance of a lifetime to take a hand in history.”
“What else is glory?” said his father.
Byron said, “What do you think, Dad?”
Here was the sunken rock again, thought Pug. He answered at once, “Take your transfer and go. This Pacific war will be a long one. You’ll get back here in time to make all the history you can handle. You’ve never seen your son and — now, why the wise grin?”
“You surprise me, that’s all.”
The telephone was ringing and ringing in the house.
“By God,” Pug said, “that’s something to celebrate, Natalie coming home! When were we last together like this, anyway? Wasn’t it at Warren’s wedding? Seems to me an anniversary party is overdue here also.”
“Right,” Warren said. “I remembered the date, but I was flying patrols off Samoa.”
The ringing stopped.
“Well, I’m for having a champagne dinner at the Moana Hotel tomorrow night,” Pug said. “How about it?”
“Hey! Janice would love that, Dad, getting off this hill, maybe dancing —”
“I’m in,” said Byron, getting up and making for the kitchen door. “I buy the wine. Maybe that’s my call to Washington.”
Janice came running out on the lanai, flushed and wide-eyed. “Dad, it’s for you and guess who? Alistair Tudsbury. He’s calling from the Moana.”
PART TWO
Midway
The Road to midman
(from World Holocaust by Armin von Roon)
TRANSLATORS NOTE:The German edition opens with an analysis of the Soviet counterattacks in the winter of 1941-1942. For American readers a better starting point is Roon’s fine prologue to the Battle of Midway, which also touches on the Russian picture. The different theatres of war affected each other more than is generally appreciated, and Roon is well aware of the linkages.— V.H.
The Japanese Surge
After Pearl Harbor we had to face the United States of America as a full and angry belligerent. We gained a brave but poor comrade-in-arms, a far-off Asiatic island folk with less land surface and natural wealth than just one American state, California; and a fresh enemy in the field wielding the greatest war-making potential on earth. The odds had mounted against us. Yet in our General Staff we could still see in the situation elements of an upset victory.
For the bedrock of war is geography, and geographically our posture remained awesome. With one boot on the Atlantic shore and the other on the snows outside Moscow, the Führer bestrode Europe more completely than Napoleon at his far reach, or Charles V of Spain, or the Antonine emperors. From the Arctic to the Mediterranean, every nation was either our ally, or a friendly neutral, or a conquered subject. Under our submarine onslaught, American Lend-Lease help and Britain’s colonial resources were going to the sea bottom. Each month fewer Allied ships were left afloat, for all the feverish work in their shipyards. Churchill himself has confessed in his memoirs, “The one thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat campaign.”
As for the Soviet Union, its winter counterattack had achieved local gains at bloody costs; but as it petered out, our battle-hardened troops still gripped the rich bulk of Russia west of the Volga. As a nation we had burned our bridges, and had turned with one will to fighting the war. Despite England’s air bombings, our war production was still mounting.
And now Japan was debouching on the world battleground with blazing victories!
Adolf Hitler at once embraced these doughty little Asians as comrades. The mystical bunkum of Nordic supremacy was for Nazi fanatics. We Wehrmacht officers despised it, and we observed with relief that Hitler did too. If a people twelve thousand miles away could help us gain world empire, their skins might be yellow, black, or green for all the Führer cared. The Japanese were not disturbed by Nazi theories, because by their Shinto faith they themselves were the “master race.” Unlike our General Staff, the Japanese high command seems to have allowed this rubbish to affect their judgment.
Military judgment should never stray far from the basic factors of time, space, and force. The key to an Axis upset victory was time. As to space, we had the advantage of operating on strong interior lines in Europe, while our foes were scattered around our rim; but our one effective ally lay on the other side of the globe. The cold arithmetic of force, in the long run, added up much to our disfavor. Yet the Americans at the moment were weak, and their impact in the field was at least a year away. Because of their thirst for revenge on Japan, we could expect a fall in their Lend-Lease aid to the hard-pressed British and Russians. In short, we still had an edge in time in which to snatch a victory, or compel a tolerable peace.
The Spherical Battlefield
In December 1941, with the industrial civilization all around the northern hemisphere leaping into flame, one grand theme loomed through the smoke. The battleground had become the surface of a sphere. This posed unprecedented strategic choices. England and Russia had to exert all their strength just to contain Germany, but Japan, the United States, and the Third Reich now had to decide: “Which way to strike?”
Ever since 1918, as is well known, the American armed forces had been planning for simultaneous war against Germany and Japan. Their notorious Rainbow Five doctrine, drawn up years before Adolf Hitler ever marched, provided a ready answer to the question: eastward, or “Germany first,” on the Clausewitz rule, strike for the heart. Franklin Roosevelt had the willpower and the sense, in the face of the storm in his country against Japan, to hold to this sound military precept. Under his bluff jolly exterior
of a Christian humanitarian, President Roosevelt was a devious and frigid conqueror, much more fitted for war on the surface of a sphere than the impulsive, romantic, European-minded Führer.
Japan’s problem was more complex. To the north lay rich Siberia, half denuded of troops for the defense of Moscow; to the west, China, on its knees but still mushily resisting; to the southwest, the treasures of Indo-China, the Indies, and vast India; to the south, New Guinea and white Australia; to the southeast, the valuable island chains athwart the supply line from Australia to the United States. To the east America glowered, distant and enfeebled, yet thrusting into Japan’s Lebensraum its thorny imperialist outposts of Hawaii and Midway.
Japan’s oil stocks were burning down like a candle. Six months earlier, Franklin Roosevelt had embargoed Japan’s fuel supply, and this cruel bullying had compelled her to go to war. She lacked steel; she lacked food; she lacked most of the necessities for a long war. A reckoning for her spree of early victories had to come. With her limited strength, in her limited time, Japan had to strike one decisive blow. But — “Which way?”
For the moment Siberia was out. Before attacking the imperialist plutocracies, Japan had prudently signed a neutrality treaty with the Soviet Union. Hitler had fatuously failed to demand, as a quid pro quo for his declaration of war on the United States, that Japan denounce the treaty and come in against Russia. Thus Japan’s rear was safe, and we could not combine with her against the Bolsheviks.
Truly Germany’s position was bizarre! All the members of a world-girdling alliance were attacking us, while Japan, our strongest ally, stayed at peace with Russia, our strongest foe! Already the German people were paying dearly for the Führerprinzip, which placed total reliance on Hitler’s politics. Italy had a sizable navy and air force and numerous troops; but with her cardboard dictator and unwarlike people, she was a drain on our fuel and steel, and her long open Mediterranean coastline was our worst weak spot.