War and Remembrance

by Herman Wouk

  I should tell you, too, that we saw your family in Hollywood. Your wife said she would try to join you in Hawaii. I hope she has, and I must assume she’s recounted a talk I had with her. Perhaps you’re angry about that. It seemed to me that she’d better know there had been a risk of losing you. She asked me point-blank if we’d had an affair, so I told her. Whether she deserved your steadfastness is a closed question, but you should remember that for her the war when it broke out must have seemed the crash of everything.

  That was how I felt in Singapore. Nothing mattered, nothing, with those snarling yellow men coming on. It was the worst moment of the war and of my life, until you returned from Midway; and I saw in your eyes what had happened, and felt that I was useless to you, and that it was over. That was worse.

  Here in Cairo people are still rattled by the closeness of Rommel, but encouraged by your planes, tanks, and trucks pouring to our Eighth Army via the Cape of Good Hope, and on direct convoy past Malta. Talky has it straight from Churchill — Winnie flashed through here twice this month, raising a cloud of bloody nonsensical trouble — that all this is a drop in the bucket compared to the Niagara of equipment that you’re flooding to the Russians. When or how your countrymen produce all this, I don’t know. Your country baffles me: a luxurious unharmed lotus land in which great hordes of handsome dynamic people either wallow in deep gloom, or play like overexcited children, or fall to work like all the devils in hell, while the press steadily drones detestation of the government and despair of the system. I don’t understand how America works, any more than Frances Trollope or Dickens did, but it’s an ongoing miracle of sorts.

  In London things are bad. The repair of the blitz devastation goes sluggishly. People drag themselves through the rubble in sticky weather on dwindling rations. Those in the know are frozen with fear of the U-boats. I’m not revealing secrets to you, I’m sure; Victor, they have sunk over three million tons just since you entered the war. In June alone they sank close to a million tons. At that rate you can’t mount an attack against Europe, and we can’t hold out much longer. The Atlantic’s becoming impassable. It’s a queer sort of menace, this invisible strangulation that shows up in thinner British bodies, fewer vehicles, sicklier faces, a general flavor of bad-smelling decay, and a creeping defeatism in Whitehall. There are mutters about coming to terms. When Tobruk fell, Churchill survived a no-confidence vote, but it was a red-light warning. Macaulayesque speeches won’t keep him afloat much longer.

  But bad as the surrender of Tobruk hit London, it was nothing to what went on here in Egypt. We missed the worst of it, but we hear it was like the fall of France. Rommel came roaring along the coast, all fueled up and rearmed with masses of stuff he captured at Tobruk. By the time he halted at El Alamein, two hours by car from Alexandria, government bureaus, military head quarters, and rich big shots were all fleeing eastward to Palestine and Syria in every available train and vehicle. Less-favored folk were clogging the roads on foot. In the cities there were strict curfews, empty hotels, abandoned streets and office buildings, looters, trigger-happy patrols, and all the rest. Little of this got past the tough censorship.

  Things are less scary now. Some of the skedaddlers are sheepishly drifting back, but the more prudent ones are staying where they are. Obviously Rommel is retooling and gassing up for another try. There’s little hope for a long respite, such as the Russians had once the Germans bogged down outside Moscow. It doesn’t snow in Egypt.

  Now, a little news about me, and I’ll cease boring you. Duncan BurneWilke is in Cairo to take over the logistics of the air effort against Rommel. Unless I give him a discreet signal to desist, I suspect he’s going to ask me to marry him. I saw quite a bit of him in London. Lady Caroline died of cancer a few months ago. I don’t know whether you ever met her. She was a tremendous swell, most elegant, somewhat bossy and bristly, the daughter of an earl. Duncan married over his head, so to say, for he’s “just” a viscount and his father, who made motor cars, bought the title.

  The marriage hadn’t worked well for a long time. In fact, Duncan once very sweetly proposed to me what we civilized Europeans call an arrangement. Well, I’m not very moral, but I’ve had my standards always. In all my misadventures (strike out Singapore) I’ve been passionately in love, or thought I’ve been. I was terribly in love with you at the time, you old iron man, and it would have been indecent to accept Duncan. The girls around the plotting table at Biggin Hill all sighed and languished after Duncan like a Gilbert and Sullivan female chorus, but the truth is I had no such feeling about him and I still don’t.

  Nevertheless, I suppose I must begin to think of what to do with my life. I can’t go on and on with Talky; for I know he’s failing. Duncan is a dear man, to be sure. I just don’t see plunging into such a commitment now, though it would be ever so swanky a step up for me. Our family’s respectable enough, in fact landed on my long-deceased mother’s side, but I’m just a reasonably educated commoner, and my drawn face, alas, is my fortune. All that’s fine, but Talky still needs me. We’ll stay here for Rommel’s onslaught, and I’m not looking past that. There’s growing confidence here, based partly on Tommy Atkins’s pluck, and partly on those heartwarming rows and rows and rows of olive-painted American trucks and tanks on the Alexandria wharfs.

  Talky’s slumbering noisily in the next room, having taken a sleeping cachet. Churchill’s second whirl-through jangled and exhausted everybody. I must sleep, too. We leave before dawn tomorrow for Alexandria by train, and thence for a press-briefing by Montgomery out at his field headquarters. He’s newly in command and opinions differ here about him. The buzz in the Shepheard’s Hotel bar is about fifty-fifty pro and con; tactical genius, pompous eccentric showoff.

  I really look forward to another trip out to the desert. Difficulties have been made about my gender, since the men strip naked out there to bathe in the sea, or wash, or just keep cool, and they perform natural functions casually. I was excluded from Talky’s first trip, but he missed me and raised a great row, and now I go along. Presumably signals roll along the coast at my approach, “Female, take cover.” I’m sure I’m a damned nuisance, but it’s heartbreakingly beautiful out there — the glittering blue-green sea, the long white sand beach, blinding as snow, and then the slate-gray salt flats, the brackish lakes, the yellow and red sands of the desert dotted with brush — and oh, the sunsets and the clear starlit nights! The magnificent Australian troops stripped to trunks, bronzed as Indians! One of the rottenest aspects of this war, actually, is its beauty. Remember London on fire? And that tank battle in the snow we glimpsed in the distance outside Moscow, the flames from the burning tanks, reflected purple and orange on the mauve snow?

  If not for the war what would I have been doing all these years? Something dull in some dull London office building, or something domesticated in some suburban house or, with luck, town flat. And I would never have met you — an experience, which, with all its chiaroscuro, I treasure as the chief thing in my history.

  I shall give this letter to a U.P. man who is going back to New York. He’ll mail it to your Fleet Post Office address, so you should get it soon. Victor, if it isn’t unreasonable I should like just a word from you that I have your blessing if I go on with Duncan. I myself thought silence the best way to close out our beautiful but guillotined relationship, but then I did have to write you about Byron, and I feel most enormously happy and relieved. You too may feel better writing to me, however briefly. I think we understand each other, though we had to part before we could explore the depths.

  My love,

  Pamela

  The U.P. man did bring this letter to New York, and it entered the complex Navy system for delivering mail to the far-flung ships at sea. Gray sacks for the Northampton followed the cruiser all over the Central and South Pacific; but the letter never caught up before the ship went down off Guadalcanal.

  * * *

  Global Waterloo 1: Guadalcanal

  (from World Holocaust by Ar
min von Roon)

  November 1942! No German should ever hear that month mentioned without shuddering.

  In that one ill-omened month, four concurrent disasters befell our brief imperium: two in North Africa, one in Russia, one in the South Pacific. On November 2 the British offensive at El Alamein, begun in late October, sent Rommel’s Afrika Korps reeling out of Egypt, never to return. On November 8 the Anglo-Americans landed in Morocco and Algeria. From November 13 to 16, the tide turned at Guadalcanal. And on November 19 the Soviet hordes broke through at Stalingrad and began cutting off our Sixth Army.

  Historians tend to miss the awful simultaneity of the fourfold smashup. Our German authors harp on Stalingrad, with casual treatment of the Mediterranean and silence on the Pacific. The communist pseudo-historians write as though only Stalingrad was happening then. Winston Churchill dwells on El Alamein, a minor textbook battle, decided by the lopsided British advantage in Lend-Lease supplies. The U.S. writers stress their walkover in French North Africa, and strangely neglect Guadalcanal, one of America’s finest campaigns.

  The Global Waterloo was in fact a swift, roaring, flaming reverse all around the earth of our war effort, history’s greatest—on the seas, in desert sands, on beaches, in jungles, in city streets, on tropical islands, in snowdrifts. In November 1942, the world-adventurer Hitler, to whom we Germans had given our souls, lost the initiative once for all. Thereafter the hangmen were closing in on him, and he was fighting not for world empire but for his neck.

  Militarily speaking, the situation even then was retrievable by sound military tactics, and we had great tacticians. Manstein’s classic fighting withdrawal from the Caucasus after Stalingrad, to cite but one instance, will find a place one day in history with Xenophon’s march to the Black Sea. But Hitler as warlord could only go on compounding his own pigheaded mistakes. Since nobody could loosen his terror-grip on our armed forces, he dragged the German nation down with him.

  The Far Reach of the Third Reich

  To understand Hitler’s swollen pride before his fall, one must picture Germany’s situation before November 1942.

  For the modern-day German reader, this is difficult. We are a cowed people, ashamed of our mighty though Faustian past. Our defeated and shrunken Fatherland is sundered. Bolshevism bestrides one half; the other half cringes to the dollar. Our economic vigor has revived, but our place in world affairs remains dubious. Twelve brief years of Nazi mistakes and crimes have eclipsed the proud record of centuries.

  But in the summer of 1942, we were still riding high. On the eastern front, the Wehrmacht was rebounding to the attack. After storming Sevastopol and clearing the Kerch peninsula, we were thrusting two gigantic armed marches into the Soviet southern gut; one across the Don toward the Volga, the other southward to the Caucasus oil fields. Stalin’s armies were everywhere fading back before us with big losses. Rommel’s stunning capture of the Tobruk fortress had opened the way to the Suez Canal and had all but toppled Churchill.

  Our comrade Japan had won Southeast Asia, and in Burma was advancing to the borders of India. Her grip on prostrate China’s coastal provinces was solid. Her defeat at Midway was shrouded by the fog of war. Her armies were still triumphing wherever they marched. All Asia trembled at the shift of world forces. India was rent with riots. Its Congress voted for the immediate withdrawal of the British, and an Indian government-in-exile was forming to fight on the Japanese side.

  In Arctic waters, with the famous rout of the PQ-17 convoy at the end of June, we severed the Lend-Lease supply route to Murmansk, a body-blow to the already staggering Red Army. This defeat epitomized the British decline at sea. The convoy screening force, warned that our heavy surface ships were approaching, ordered the merchant vessels to disperse and hightailed it home to England! The shades of Drake and Nelson must have wept in Valhalla. The slaughter that ensued was mere rabbit-shooting by our aircraft and submarines. The cold seas closed over twenty-three merchant vessels out of thirty-seven, and one hundred thousand tons of war matériel, with much loss of life. Churchill’s shamed message to Stalin cancelling the Murmansk run brought an angry Slav howl. The grotesque alliance of capitalism and Bolshevism was sorely strained.

  On the visible evidence, then, we were triumphing in the summer and autumn of 1942 against all the odds, even with the United States thrown into the balance against us, even with all of Hitler’s miscalculations.

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:The Murmansk run was suspended during the summer months of long Arctic daylight, then resumed. In December, British destroyers escorting another convoy outfought a German task force, including a pocket battleship and a heavy cruiser. Hitler waxed so wroth at this fiasco that he ordered the fleet scrapped, and the guns put to use on land. Admiral Raeder resigned. Donitiz took over, but the German surface fleet never recovered from Hitler’s tantrum.

  Roon’s appreciation of Guadalcanal which follows is detached and reliable. No Germans were fighting there. —V.H.

  The Pacific Theatre

  All of Europe from the Bay of Biscay to the Urals could be sunk without a trace between Honolulu and Manila, yet the Pacific campaigns were fought over far greater distances than that. Unheard-of military space, unprecedented forms of combined land, sea, and air combat: such is the fascination, of the Pacific conflict. The period in history when such operations were feasible came and went quickly. A high point was the six-month melee which raged in the skies, on the water, under the water, and in the jungle, for the possession of a small airfield that accommodated sixty planes: Henderson Field on Guadalcanal.

  Guadalcanal is a neglected campaign, a small Pacific Stalingrad swirling around that landing field. Had it been a British victory, Churchill would have written a volume about it. But Americans are apathetic toward their military history. They lack the European sense of the past, and writers of broad culture.

  In my restricted research * I have yet to come upon an adequate relating of the Stalingrad and Guadalcanal campaigns, but one might say that the Second World War turned on those poles. We reached the Volga just north of Stalingrad in August. The Americans landed on Guadalcanal in August. General Paulus surrendered at Stalingrad on February 2, 1943; the Americans secured Guadalcanal on February 9. Both battles were desperate and successful defenses of a waterfront perimeter: the Russians with their backs to the Volga, the Americans on a beachhead with their backs to the sea. Both battles were head-on clashes of national wills. With both outcomes the tide in a war theatre turned, for all the world to witness.

  German readers must never forget that the war had a global dimension. We are obsessed with Europe, and that is how the Bolshevik historians also write. But under Adolf Hitler’s flawed but kinetic leadership, our nation broke the ice of the entire world imperial system. For six years a world storm raged, and all was fluid. The land masses of thé planet, fifty-eight million square miles of real estate, were at hazard. The Asian samurai surged forward to form an alliance with the Nordic soldier, seeking a just redistribution of the earth’s habitable surface. That two martial showdowns should simultaneously explode on two sides of the globe therefore lay in the nature of this wrenching world convulsion. The stunning halt of the Japanese onrush at Midway resembled our halt before Moscow in December 1941. These were chilly warnings. But the fatal crunches came later and in parallel, at Stalingrad and Guadalcanal.

  The differences of course are substantial. If we had defeated the Red Army at Stalingrad, history in its present form would not exist; whereas had the Americans been thrown off Guadalcanal, they would probably have returned later with new fleets, air groups, and tank divisions, and beaten the Japanese elsewhere. Stalingrad was a far vaster battle, and more truly a decisive one. Still, the parallels should be borne in mind.

  Admiral King

  It was a wheeze in the American navy that Admiral Ernest King “shaved with a blowtorch.” A naval aviator with a long record of achievement, including the raising of a sunken submarine in the open sea, King had been put out to pastu
re on the General Board, an advisory panel for old admirals with no place to go. His cold driving personality had not made him loved. He had bruised egos and damaged careers. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt appointed him Commander-in-Chief of the United States Fleet. King is said to have observed, “When things get tough they send for the sons of bitches.” In the Wehrmacht, alas, when “things got tough” the Führer sent for the sycophants.

  Besides the problem of the rampaging Japanese, King had to contend with the fixed Roosevelt-Churchill policy, Germany First. The Combined Chiefs of Staff were neglecting “his” war in favor of the bigger conflict. King’s cold-blooded solution was the attack on Tulagi, which evolved into the Guadalcanal campaign.

  Japanese War Aim

  Despite some blustering rhetoric, the Japanese were not seeking to crush the United States of America in war. Their aim was limited. In their view, Southeast Asia was none of America’s business. Thanks to our conquest of Europe the time had come to throw out the imperialist exploiters, and to found a peaceful Greater East Asia for the Asians, including a pacified China; a so-called Co-prosperity Sphere under Japanese leadership, friendly to the coming world master, Germany.

  Their military aim was a quick conquest of the desired areas, then a tough perimeter defense on interior lines. The hope was that the far-off prosperous Americans would tire of a costly war in which they were not very interested, and would make a face-saving peace. This might well have worked, except for the attack on Pearl Harbor, which roused in the proud Yanks, and especially in their fine navy, an irrational cowboy thirst for frontier vengeance.