War and Remembrance

by Herman Wouk

  But when she offered to go to Washington and write some stories on the war effort there, he brightened. “Well, why not? Do try your hand, Pam. We know you were drafting Talky’s copy toward the last. When will you let us have ‘Sunset on Kidney Ridge’? We’re frightfully anxious for it.”

  Slote knew of two Foreign Service officers who had disappeared on ferry command bomber flights between Scotland and Montreal. The North Atlantic sky was not the route of choice, certainly not in midwinter. Big comfortable airliners flew the southern route — down to Dakar, a hop across sunny seas to the bulge of Brazil, then north to Bermuda and so on to Baltimore. But that was for big shots. The choices offered him were a ten-day voyage in a convoy, or an RAF ferry command trip.

  On the train to the Scottish airport, he fell in with an American ferry pilot going the same way: a wiry middle-sized Army Air Corps captain with a toothbrush mustache, a wild eye, three banks of ribbons on his khaki tunic, a richly obscene vocabulary, and a great store of flying stories. The two men had a compartment to themselves. The ferry pilot kept nipping brandy, explaining that he was getting plastered and intended to stay plastered until they were well off the Prestwick runway. Crashing on takeoff was a hazard at Prestwick. He had attended two mass funerals of pilots who had died on the runway. Dangerous overloads of gasoline had to be accepted, when you were flying westward into North Atlantic gales. The ferry command had to keep hauling pilots back, because shipping disassembled aircraft by sea was slow and cumbersome, and the U-boats got too many of them. It was the ferry pilots who were really building up the Allied air forces in the war zones. Nobody gave a shit about them, but they were the key to the whole war.

  As the old dusty train clanked its slow way through snowy fields, the pilot regaled Slote with his autobiography. His name was Bill Fenton. A barnstormer before the war, he had since 1937 been doing various flying jobs, civilian and military, for various governments. He had flown cargo carriers on the India-China run (“over the hump,” he called it); taking off from a runway that had to be cleared of cows and water buffalo by a honking jeep, then climbing five miles and more to get over icy storms that whirled higher than Everest. He had joined the Royal Canadian Air Force to ferry planes to England. Now he was flying bombers for the Army Air Corps via South America to Africa, and on across to Persia and the Soviet Union. He had crash-landed in the desert. He had floated for two days in the Irish Sea on a rubber raft. He had parachuted into Japanese-held territory in Burma, and walked out to India on foot.

  By the time they reached Prestwick in a snowstorm, Slote was not only tired, sleepy, and drunk from his share of Bill Fenton’s brandy; he had a whole new vision of the war. In his fumed brain pictures reeled of aircraft crisscrossing the globe — bombers, fighters, transports, by the thousands — battling the weather and the enemy, bombing cities, railroads, and troop columns; crossing oceans, deserts, high mountain ranges; a war such as Thucydides had never imagined, filling the skies of the planet with hurtling machines manned by hordes of Bill Fentons. He had not until now given the war in the air a thought. For once, the everlasting Wannsee Protocol, the map of Poland with the three black circles, and the European trains carrying hundreds of thousands of Jews each month to their deaths faded from his mind. He was moreover so scared at the prospect of the flight that he could hardly walk off the train.

  When they arrived at the airfield the plane was warming up. Waddling out of the check-in office in cumbersome flying suits, heavy gloves, and life vests, with parachutes dangling behind their knees, they could not at first see the aircraft through the falling snow. Fenton led him toward the motor sound. It was inconceivable to Leslie Slote that a machine could take off in this weather. Inside the four-engine bomber there were rio seats. On the board floor about a dozen returning ferry pilots sprawled on pallets. Slote’s armpits coldly dripped and his heart raced as the plane heavily took off. Fenton screamed into his ears, over the engine roar and the groan of retracting wheels, that the weather briefing predicted headwinds of a hundred miles an hour. They might well have to put down in Greenland, the asshole of the Arctic.

  Leslie Slote was a coward. He knew it. He had given up fighting it. Even riding in a car with a fast driver gave him bad nerves. Every airplane ride, just a one-hour hop in a DC-3, was an ordeal. This man now found himself in a stripped-down four-engine bomber, setting out to cross the Atlantic westward in December; a howling rattletrap that sucked in the cold through whining and whistling air leaks, climbed through hail that made a machine gun racket on the fuselage, and bucked, dipped, and swerved like a kite. Slote could see, in dim light from iced-up windows, the greenish faces of the sprawled pilots, the sweat-beaded foreheads, the shaking hands bringing cigarettes or bottles to tight mouths. The fliers looked fully as terrified as he felt.

  Fenton had explained on the train that the North Atlantic head winds were strongest at low altitudes. Planes flew high to climb over the weather and conserve fuel in the thinner air; but up there they could accumulate ice too fast for the de-icers to work. Also, the carburetors could get chilled from pulling in subzero air, and they could ice up. Then the engines would quit. That no doubt was the way so many planes vanished. When ice began to build up you could keep trying to climb above the wet cold into the dry cold, where one needed an oxygen mask to survive. Otherwise you had to drop back down fast, maybe down to the wave tops, where warmer air would melt your ice. Against his better judgment, Slote had asked him, “Can’t the icing conditions prevail right down to the water?”

  “Hell, yes,” Fenton had answered. “Let me tell you what happened to me.” And he had launched into a long hideous anecdote about a near-spin into the water off Newfoundland under a heavy ice load.

  The plane kept climbing and climbing; loose things persisted in sliding toward the rear. Some pilots huddled under ragged blankets and snored. Fenton too stretched out and closed his eyes. A sudden metallic crashing and banging along the fuselage stopped Slote’s heart, or so he felt. Fenton blinked, grinned at Slote, and pantomimed ice forming along the wings, and rubber de-icers cracking it off.

  Slote wondered how anybody could sleep in this howling torture chamber in the sky, hammered at by breaking ice. He could as soon sleep, he thought, nailed to a cross. His nose was freezing. There was no sensation in his hands or feet. Yet he did doze, for a nasty sensation woke him: a smell of rubber, a cold thing pressed to his face as in anesthesia. He opened his eyes in the dark. Fenton’s voice yelled in his ear, “Oxygen.” Somebody lit a dim battery lamp. A shadowy figure was stumbling here and there with masks that trailed long rubber tubes. Slote thought he had never been so cold, so numb, so sick all over, so ready to die and get it over with.

  All at once the plane dived, roaring. The pilots sat up and looked about with white-rimmed eyes. It was an obscure comfort in Slote’s agony that these skilled men were so scared, too. After a horrendously steep long dive, ice crashed along the fuselage once more. The floor levelled off.

  “Never make Newfoundland,” Fenton yelled in Slote’s ear. “Greenland it is.”

  Ven Der Fuehrer says,

  “Ve iss der Master Race,”

  Ve Heil (phfft!)

  Heil (phfft!)

  Right in Der Fuehrer’s face.

  In the wooden barracks beside the Greenland runway, this song was grinding out of the phonograph, hour after hour. It was the only record on hand. The airfield, a treeless spread of steel netting sunk into mud and drifted over with snow, was a drearier place than Slote had imagined could exist on earth. The runway was short and chancy, so the refueled aircraft had to wait for endurable takeoff conditions.

  Not to luff Der Fuehrer

  Iss a great disgrace

  So ve Heil (phfft!)

  Heil (phfft!)

  Right in Der Fuehrer’s face.

  Here in this witless ditty, Slote thought, was the fatally soft American idea of Hitler and the Nazis — the ranting boob, the dumbbell followers, the heils and the razzes. The music
al arrangement mixed various funny noises — cowbells, toy trumpets, tin cans — with the oom-pahs of a German band. The pilots were playing cards or lolling about, and when the record ended somebody simply moved the needle back to the start.

  Fenton lay on the bunk underneath Slote’s, leafing a girlie magazine. Slote leaned over and asked him what he thought of “Der Fuehrer’s Face.” Fenton yawned that it was getting to be a pain in the ass. Climbing down, Slote sat beside the captain and unburdened himself about the massacre of the Jews, bitterly observing that when a song like that could amuse people, it was small wonder that nobody believed what was happening.

  Turning the pages of naked females, Bill Fenton calmly remarked, “Shit, man, who doesn’t believe it? I believe it. Those Germans have to be weird people, to follow a nut like Hitler. Some of them are fine aviators, but taken as a nation they’re a menace.”

  Ven Herr Goebbels says,

  “Ve own de Vorld and Space,”

  Ve Heil (phfft!)

  Heil (phfft!)

  Right in Herr Goebbels’ face.

  Ven Herr Goering says,

  “Dey’ll neffer bomb dis place,”

  Ve Heil (phfft!)

  Heil (phfft!)

  Right in Herr Goering s face…

  “But what can anybody do about the Jews?” Fenton tossed the magazine aside, stretching and yawning. “Fifty million people will die before this war’s over. The Japs have been fighting the Chinese since 1937. Do you know how many Chinese have starved to death? Nobody does. Maybe ten million. Maybe more. You ever been to India? There’s a powder keg. The British can’t keep the lid on much longer. When India blows, you’re going to see Hindus and Sikhs and Moslems and Buddhists and Parsees cutting each other’s throats till hell won’t have it. The Germans have killed a lot more Russians than Jews. This world is a slaughterhouse, man, it always has been, and that’s what all these fucking pacifists keep forgetting.”

  Iss ve not der Supermen?

  Aryan pure, Supermen?

  Yah! ve iss der Supermen

  Sooper DOOPER Supermen!

  Fenton enjoyed the sound of his own voice, and he was getting worked up. He sat erect and poked Slote on the shoulder. “Tell me this. Is Stalin any better than Hitler? I say he’s the same kind of murderer. Yet we’re flying half of the bombers we’re producing over to him — free, gratis, and for nothing, and some damn good pilots are getting killed at it, and I’m risking my own ass. And why? Because he’s our murderer, that’s why. We’re not doing it for humanity, or for Russia, or for anything except to save our own asses. Christ, I feel sorry for the Jews, don’t think I don’t, but there just isn’t a thing we can do about them but beat the shit out of the Germans.”

  So ve Heil(phfft!)

  Heil(phfft!)

  Right…in…Der… Fuehrers…face.

  At the enormous Canadian Air Force Base outside Montreal, Slote telephoned the Division of European Affairs, and the division chief told him to hurry along to the Montreal airport and catch the first plane to New York or Washington. While this was going on, Fenton passed the telephone booth. A tall pretty girl in a red fox coat was clinging to his arm, hips rolling with each step, devouring the pilot with lustrous green eyes. A casual wave with his smoking cigar at the booth, a man-to-man grin, and the ferry pilot passed from view. A short life and a merry one, thought Slote, with a flicker of rueful envy.

  To his pleased surprise, Slote found that he did not mind the takeoff of the DC-3, or the bumpy climb through heavy clouds. The airliner seemed so huge, the interior so luxurious, the seat so broad and soft, the stewardess so entrancing, that it was more like being on the Queen Mary than on something flying through the air. He cold not tell whether the bomber ride had cauterized, as it were, his fear of flying, or whether he just had no nerves left, and was on the verge of a total crack-up. Anyway, not to be frightened was delightful.

  He had snatched a Montreal Gazette from the newsstand. Now he unfolded it, and a picture of Alistair Tudsbury and Pamela on the first page made him sit up. They stood beside a jeep, Tudsbury grinning in balloonlike army fatigues, Pamela looking pinched and bored in slacks and a shirt.

  SUNSET ON KIDNEY RIDGE

  By Alistair Tudsbury

  By wireless from London. This dispatch, dated November 4,1942, the famous British correspondent’s last, was dictated shortly before he was killed by a landmine at El Alamein. Edited by his daughter and collaborator, Pamela Tudsbury, from an unfinished draft, it is reprinted by special permission of the London Observer.

  The sun hangs huge and red above the far dust-streaked horizon. The desert cold is already falling on Kidney Ridge. This gray sandy elevation is deserted, except by the dead, and by two intelligence officers and myself. Even the flies have left. Earlier they were here in clouds, blackening the corpses. They pester the living too, clustering at a man’s eyes and the moisture in the corners of his mouth, drinking his sweat. But of course they prefer the dead. When the sun climbs over the opposite horizon tomorrow, the flies will return to their feast.

  Here not only did these German and British soldiers die, who litter the ground as far as the eye can see in the fading red light. Here at El Alamein the Afrika Korps died. The Korps was a legend, a dashing clean-cut enemy, a menace and at the same time a sort of glory; in Churchillian rhetoric, a gallant foe worthy of our steel. It is not yet known whether Rommel has made good his escape, or whether his straggle of routed supermen will be bagged by the Eighth Army. But the Afrika Korps is dead, crushed by British arms. We have won here, in the great Western Desert of Africa, a victory to stand with Crecy, Agincourt, Blenheim, and Waterloo.

  Lines from Southey’s “Battle of Blenheim” are haunting me here on Kidney Ridge:

  They say it was a shocking sight

  After the field was won,

  For many thousand bodies here

  Lay rotting in the sun;

  But things like that, you know, must be

  After a famous victory.

  The bodies, numerous as they are, strike the eye less than the blasted and burned-out tanks that dot this weirdly beautiful wasteland, these squat hulks with their long guns, casting elongated blue shadows on the pastel grays, browns, and pinks of the far-stretching sands. Here is the central incongruity of Kidney Ridge — the masses of smashed twentieth-century machinery tumbled about in these harsh flat sandy wilds, where one envisions warriors on camels, or horses, or perhaps the elephants of Hannibal.

  How far they came to perish here, these soldiers and these machines! What bizarre train of events brought youngsters from the Rhineland and Prussia, from the Scottish Highlands and London, from Australia and New Zealand, to butt at each other to the death with flame-spitting machinery in faraway Africa, in a setting as dry and lonesome as the moon?

  But that is the hallmark of this war. No other war has ever been like it. This war rings the world. Kidney Ridge is everywhere on our small globe. Men fight as far from home as they can’ be transported, with courage and endurance that makes one proud of the human race, in horrible contrivances that make one ashamed of the human race.

  My jeep will take me back to Cairo shortly, and I will dictate a dispatch about what I see here. What I am looking at, right now as the sun touches the horizon, is this. Two intelligence officers, not fifty yards from me, are lifting the German driver out of a blasted tank, using meat hooks. He is black and charred. He has no head. He is a trunk with arms and legs. The smell is like gamy pork. The legs wear good boots, only a bit scorched.

  I am very tired. A voice I don’t want to listen to tells me that this is England’s last land triumph; that our military history ends here with a victory to stand with the greatest, won largely with machines shipped ten thousand miles from American factories. Tommy Atkins will serve with pluck and valor wherever he fights hereafter, as always; but the conduct of the war is passing out of our hands.

  We are outnumbered and outclassed. Modern war is a clangorous and dreary measuring of i
ndustrial plants. Germany’s industrial capacity passed ours in 1905. We hung on through the First World War by sheer grit. Today the two industrial giants of the earth are the United States and the Soviet Union. They more than outmatch Germany and Japan, now that they have shaken off their surprise setbacks and sprung to arms. Tocqueville’s vision is coming to pass in our time. They will divide the empire of the world.

  The sun going down on Kidney Ridge is setting on the British Empire, on which — so we learned to say as schoolboys — the sun never set. Our Empire was born in the skill of our explorers, the martial prowess of our yeomanry, the innovative genius of our scientists and engineers. We stole a march on the world that lasted two hundred years. Lulled by the long peaceful protection of the great fleet we built, we thought it would last forever. We dozed.

  Here on Kidney Ridge we have erased the disgrace of our somnolence. If history is but the clash of arms, we now begin to leave the stage in honor. But if it is the march of the human spirit toward world freedom, we will never leave the stage. British ideas, British institutions, British scientific method, will lead the way in other lands, in other guises. English will become the planetary tongue, that is now certain. We have been the Greece of the new age.