by Herman Wouk
“Could he have been stopped before the war, Mr. Ambassador?”
Halifax looked thoughtful, and spoke straightforwardly. “No. Churchill’s wrong about that. We made mistakes, but given the mood of our people and the French there was no stopping him. They thought war was a thing of the past.”
“A misimpression,” Pug said.
“Rather. Pamela is a lovely woman. Congratulations, and good luck.” Halifax shook hands, smiled a shade wearily, and walked off.
Driving back to the apartment, Pamela remarked, “Lady Halifax says you’re rather a lamb.”
“Is that good?”
“The accolade.”
Back at Peters’s apartment Pug showered, and with the smell of a broiling steak drifting through the open bedroom door, he put on old gray slacks that fitted loosely, much to his satisfaction; an open white shirt, a maroon pullover, and moccasins. It was his customary off-duty dress of peacetime days. He heard the tinkle of ice in a jug. In the living room Pamela, wearing a plain dress and apron, handed him a martini. “My God, I can’t get used to the sight of you like this,” she said. “You look thirty.”
Pug growled, “I don’t function like thirty,” and sat down with his drink. It was a glancing comment on the bedchamber: exquisite joy for him, and he hoped for her, but nothing record-breaking in the newlywed line. Her reply was a throaty laugh and a caress on his neck.
Soon they sat facing each other in the breakfast nook; they ate all their meals there because the dining room was cavernous. They drank red wine, and ate with great gusto, and said many foolish and wise things, laughing almost all the time. Pug was quite reconciled in such moments to being out of the war, though at other times he had qualms about having hung up his arms too soon.
The telephone rang. Pamela went out to the living room to answer it, and came back looking very sober. “It’s Rhoda.”
The instant fear stabbed through Victor Henry’s mind: bad news about Byron. He hurried out. Pamela heard him say, “Good God!” Then: “Wait a minute, let me get a pencil. Okay, go ahead…. Got it. No, no, Rhoda. I’ll see to this myself. Of course, and I’ll let you know.”
Pamela stood in the doorway. He was picking up the telephone again and dialling. “Darling, what is it?”
Mutely he handed her the scrawl on the telephone pad. Natalie Henry German internee hospitalized Army facility Erfurt condition critical malnutrition typhus American Red Cross Germany.
Three days out from Guam, Byron received the message on the Fox schedule. Several submarines equipped with FM sonar were heading for some final training in Guam waters, and then for a wolf-pack penetration of the Sea of Japan. He could not break radio silence. Those were three long days for Byron. Coming into Guam, a mountainous gardenlike island breaking out in a rash of Navy construction and bulldozed roads, Byron paced the forecastle while Philby brought the vessel alongside. He leaped before the Barracuda tied up, and trotted across the decks and gangways of the submarine nest, and all the way to the communications office. No further messages for him; no quick way to get in touch with his father. “You can try a personal,” said a sympathetic watch officer, “but we’re loaded with urgent and operational priority traffic. The kamikazes are raising hell at Okinawa. A routine message won’t hit the sked for maybe two weeks.”
Still, Byron sent the dispatch:
FROM: CO BARRACUDA
TO: BUPERS
PERSONAL RADM VICTOR HENRY WHAT ABOUT LOUIS
The yeoman brought to his cabin the mail from the fleet post office. Amid all the official stuff lay a letter from Madeline. This was as rare an event as a total eclipse of the sun, and ordinarily Byron would have ripped it open on sight, but he went at the Navy correspondence instead, taking work like aspirin to dull his agitation.
What about Louis?
However worrisome the report on Natalie, she was alive, and in American hands. The silence about his son was doubly disturbing, since the boy was evidently not with her. German captivity had hospitalized her with “malnutrition and typhus.” What had it done to a three-and-a-half-year-old child?
After dinner in the wardroom, at which he ate so little and looked so glum that his officers kept exchanging glances, he shut himself in his cabin with Madeline’s letter.
Los Alamos, New Mexico
April 20, 1945
Dear Briny —
Sorry I threw you. I thought I’d get to San Francisco during your overhaul. Truly I did. I tried, but I lead a very strange and complicated life nowadays. Letters out of here are censored. I can’t say much about it, but coming and going isn’t all that simple. And Sime is working his fool head off day and night, and I guess I felt guilty about leaving him, and so I just let the whole thing slide. I’m fine, and all’s well. No baby in sight, if you’re curious; not while we’re up on this weird hill cut off from the world, no thanks.
Now about Dad and Mom. The main reason I wanted to come to San Francisco was to have all that out with you. You’re so misinformed and wrong-headed that it’s pitiful. Dad’s just come back to Washington and yes, he’s going to marry Pam Tudsbury, just a quiet private ceremony. I thought of flying there to be with him, poor lonely man, but it isn’t in the cards. I only hope she makes him happy. There’s no reason she shouldn’t, if she really loves him. The age difference doesn’t matter. He’s the best man alive.
Your resentment of that match is plain dumb. You don’t know certain facts, and here they are. Remember Fred Kirby, the big tall engineer you all met in Berlin? Well, he got a job in Washington after that, and he and Mom had a wild two-year affair. Surprised? It’s true. Mom wrote Dad and asked for a divorce. I don’t know all the details, but after Warren died she took it back, and they patched things up. Then when he went to Russia she got into this big romance with Colonel Peters, and that was the end. Whether they had an affair, too, I don’t know, and don’t much care. Mom’s all set now.
But Dad did not have an affair with Pamela Tudsbury, not that I’d condemn him if he had. Good God, what’s the matter with you? It’s wartime. I know he didn’t, because Mama and I got very swozzled one night, when he was off in the Soviet Union and Colonel Peters was falling for her. Mom was all confused and upset, and just spilled everything. Said she’d hurt Dad so bad that the marriage was finished, even though he was sticking it out and had never reproached her, never even mentioned Kirby’s name. Frankly I think Mom was choked by Dad’s forbearance. Pamela told Mom in Hollywood that she and Dad had had an innocent romance, and that after Warren’s death she was bowing out. She did, too.
You are an impossible fellow. Where did you get your fossilized morality from? Dad’s from another generation, and it’s understandable in him, but at that he’s more tolerant than you. I confess you did me a favor in your quaint way, when you knocked out Hugh Cleveland’s bridgework. God, was that ever hilarious. If you’d been any less stern I’d have dragged on and on with Hugh — he kept promising to get a divorce and marry me, you know, that was what that was all about — but a fat toothless man was just too much. And so, bless your neanderthal heart, I broke free in time to marry Sime Anderson, by the skin of my teeth.
Well, now I’m spilling more than I should, but when I do take up a pen once in seven years it just runs. I’ll stop now because I have to cook dinner. Admiral , no less, is coming, and that’s quite an honor around here. Let’s hope the roast doesn’t burn. I do have the crappiest stove. Everything here is tacky and make-do. Most of the scientists’ wives here are older and smarter than little Madeline, but thanks to my home training I cook better than most, and my showbiz background goes for something, too. Some of these big brains even like Hugh Cleveland.
Oh, Briny, I hope Natalie and your boy are all right! That war in Europe is folding up. You’ll hear something very soon, I’m sure. I have painful memories of a mean thing or two I said about Natalie. She intimidated me, she was so beautiful and seemed so dignified and brilliant. And you were being pretty mean about Cleveland then. There’s a
church here and I do go on Sunday, which is more than Sime does, and I pray for your wife and kid.
I hope I’ve straightened you out about Dad. Don’t you know that he worships the ground you walk on? He’d have done ANYTHING to keep your good opinion, except say a word against Mom. He’ll go to the grave without doing that. You and I have an incredible father, as we once had an incredible brother. Mom is — well, she’s Mom. She’s all right.
Good hunting, darling, and good luck.
Love,
Mad
The name of the admiral had been neatly cut from the letter, leaving a rectangular hole.
Byron went ashore that night to the officers’ club and got very drunk. Next morning he was on the bridge as the flotilla put out to sea for a training exercise, then he went to his cabin and slept for twenty-four hours, while Philby accumulated experience maneuvering underwater by the sound of gongs.
Two weeks later, the admiral who was so hot on the FM sonar held a farewell luncheon for the skippers of the wolf pack. Some Navy nurses came, too; to add glamour, as he put it. The Guam nurses were a tired beaten-down lot, what with the casualties pouring in from Okinawa, and the sexual demands of hordes of young servicemen, fended off or yielded to; but they smirked and giggled dutifully with the submarine captains. “You fellows are sailing to finish the job we started,” shouted the admiral in his little speech, “to sink everything that floats and flies a Jap flag!”
Byron knew that the admiral meant well, and had even asked Nimitz in vain for permission to go with the wolf pack. But the whole FM caper was unnecessary, in his view. He had penetrated the Sea of Japan two years ago with Carter Aster in the Moray, via La Perouse Strait. They could enter the same way now, probably at less hazard than through the Tsushima Strait mines. They were planning to leave that way, after all. But the FM sonar had been developed with much trouble, expense, and scientific ingenuity; and the admiral was damned well going to use it. Nobody was asking Byron’s opinion. He had convinced his crew that he would get them through the mines; few sailors had transferred, and none had deserted.
The wolf pack sailed, and reached Japan without incident, seeing no shipping whatever on the way. Transiting the mine field was a long tense misery. The FM sonar, dubbed by the sailors, none too affectionately, “Hell’s Bells,” rang for fish, kelp beds, temperature gradients, and mine cables, with fine changes in tone. Byron bypassed the danger for the most part, by creeping along at maximum charted depth, below the antisubmarine mines that set off the bells at a hundred feet. The riskiest moment came when he surfaced, just once, to be sure where he was. He took quick bearings, satisfied himself that his submerged dead reckoning wasn’t being thrown off by the current, and proceeded. On two occasions, mine cables grated slowly along the clearing wires, all the way down the hull. Nasty minutes, but that was the worst of it.
His patrol sector was in the southeast, so he had to wait while the rest of the wolf pack crawled north into station. The thick Jap traffic ran peaceably past his periscope, showing lights at night, moving unescorted by day, like shipping in New York harbor — small passenger vessels, coastal cargo carriers and tankers, assorted small craft, even pleasure sailboats. He saw no warships. When the slaughter began at a scheduled hour, Byron was holding a clumsy little freighter in his sights. He turned the periscope over to Philby, who neatly and exuberantly torpedoed the victim.
All in all, over the two weeks of the pack’s assault, the Barracuda sank three ships. On the last two, in 1943, Aster would have scorned to expend torpedoes. All the torpedoes worked quite well now. The traffic dwindled after the first sinkings alarmed the Japs. Targets became scarce, and Byron crept here and there off the west coast of Honshu, admiring the pretty landscape.
At the rendezvous in La Pérouse Strait, eight of the nine submarines showed up. The wolf pack left in a welcome fog. Once clear of aircraft search range, they ran for Pearl Harbor on the surface, exchanging cheerful notes on their scores, and worried inquiries about the missing Bonefish. The Barracuda resumed copying Fox, but nothing came in for Byron. Entering port on July fourth, the flotilla encountered no jubilation, no ceremony. Byron went straight to the telephone office and put in a call to his mother, not knowing where his father was. It went through quickly, but there was no answer.
ComSubPac’s operations officer jumped up to throw his arms around Byron when he came into the office. “Hey, Byron! Christ, what a sweep!”
“Bill, I request relief.”
“Relief! Are you out of your mind? Why?”
The operations officer sat down and heard the story out, chewing his lips and looking hard at Byron. His comment was tentative and cool. “That’s rough. But look here, your wife may be home by now. Maybe she’s got your boy, too. Why don’t you find out first? Don’t go off half-cocked like this. You’re on your way to a great record.”
“I’ve made my record. I request relief, Bill.”
“Sit down. Stop pounding my desk. That isn’t necessary.” Byron was in fact slamming his fist on the glass top.
“Sorry.” Byron dropped in a chair.
The operations officer offered him a cigarette. Taking a confidential tone he began to reveal surprising secrets. Russia was coming into the war. Sub-Pac had the word. MacArthur was going to land in Japan; first on Kyushu, then Honshu. The Sea of Japan was going to be zoned off between U.S. forces and the Russians. So it would be a whole new ball game. The only fat pickings left were in the Sea of Japan, and ComSubPac wanted to pour on the Hell’s Bells forays, and really clean up. while he could. “The submarines have won this war, Byron, you know that. But no job’s done until it’s over. You’re doing superbly. Lady Aster would have been proud of you. Don’t walk away from a fight.”
“Okay,” Byron said. “Thanks.”
He was not angry at the operations officer. The man’s purpose in life was fat pickings. He went to the office of the admiral, the enthusiast for FM sonar, and got right in. Byron calmly described to the admiral his talk with the operations officer.
“Admiral, here it is,” Byron said. “You may want to court-martial me for desertion, or you may not. I’m going to see my wife, and find my son if he’s alive. Please give me orders to enable me to do this. I’ve tried to serve. If I find my family, and the war’s still on, I’ll fly back here and take an FM submarine into Tokyo Bay. I’ll take one into Vladivostok, if you want me to.”
The admiral, with an annoyed squint and a jutting jaw, said, “You have one hell of a nerve.” He began looking through papers on his desk. “Whatever your personal hardship, I don’t appreciate being told off like that.”
“Sorry, Admiral.”
“I have a letter here from CNO, as it happens — now where the devil is it? Here we are. CNO wants a team of experienced skippers to inspect captured U-boats over in Germany. Preliminary reports are that those boats look better than ours. Embarrassingly so. The only way to get the real dope is to go out with the skippers and operate them. Do you know any German?”
“Sir, I speak it well.”
“Interested?”
“God, I’ll be so grateful, Admiral!”
“Well, you have the operational background. You’ll have to qualify your relief on the FM sonar first. Give him a week of runs in the dummy field off Molokai.”
“Aye aye, sir. Thank you and God bless you, Admiral.”
“Say, Byron, how did your FM sonar perform?”
“Magnificently, sir.”
“Greatest thing since canned beer,” said the admiral.
98
THE usual pile of mail after a patrol lay on Byron’s bunk, including a heavy manila envelope from his father. Byron pounced on it. A handwritten letter was clipped to the bulky sheaf of papers inside.
14 June 1945
Dear Byron:
I know you re out on operations, so I’ve opened your mail from Europe. Here it is, as of now. In case this envelope goes astray, I’ve made facsimiles. Natalie’s story fills Pamela and me
with horror. Horror is too weak a word. We still can’t grasp that an American girl went through these things, but it seems she just got caught in the mill.
Here in the U.S.A. the true facts are only now starting to sink in. General Eisenhower brought the press into Buchenwald, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and all those places. The papers have been full of the pictures and the accounts. Natalie’s survival shows her stamina, and perhaps the effect of our prayers, too. But prayer didn’t help the millions who got massacred. The decisive thing was that this man Rabinovitz’s outfit was working in Thuringia. That I call miraculous intervention. I believe that’s why she’s alive. His letter gives the details.
For a long time Pamela’s been asking me, “What’s this filthy war all about? Why did your son have to die? What have we achieved?” Now it’s clear. The political system that could perpetrate such foul deeds had to be wiped off the planet. It was damned powerful, too. The combined strength of the Russians, the British, and ourselves barely contained the thing. It could have overrun the earth. Because the Japs made league with it, we had to crush Japan too. Warren died in a right and great cause. I know that now, and I will never think otherwise.
Your little boy was well many months after he was taken out of Theresienstadt, since Natalie saw that snapshot of him on the farm outside Prague. Don’t give up hope. The search may take a long time. If you want to telephone me, I’m at the White House, office of the Naval Aide. That’s my new job. Evenings, Republic 4698 is our apartment number. Pam joins me in sending love,
Dad
Below this, on a single sheet of paper with an Army Medical Corps heading, Byron read these few typed words: