So here he was, on the side where he’d wanted to be since he got to Poland, even if they didn’t fully trust him. The only reason he hadn’t deserted to the rebels right away was that he’d feared the Red Army would squash them the way a nasty little boy squashed caterpillars under his shoes.
And his fears seemed all too likely to come true. Russian heavy bombers came over Warsaw almost every night. Vasili crouched in the cellar of the cheap, battered block of flats where he had a room. The Russians had bombed Harbin before they took it, but not like this. These explosions seemed to shake the very fabric of the city.
Of course, the Russians could hit Warsaw with an A-bomb. That would settle the city for good. The Poles insisted that Molotov had promised Truman he wouldn’t A-bomb any more cities. They were sure he wouldn’t bomb Warsaw that way. Then again, they were also sure he was a prime liar.
Whatever had been rebuilt in Warsaw went up in flames or fell down in the explosions. Like other healthy young people in the city, Vasili stood in line in bucket brigades that did not nearly enough to fight the fires. And then the Red Army pushed up from the south and started shelling the Polish capital. The rebels did all they could to hold the tanks and soldiers away from the city. All they could wasn’t nearly enough.
People began to give up on the uprising. The government of the People’s Republic—the government of Russian puppets and stooges—had Soviet planes drop leaflets promising amnesty to anyone who came out and pledged loyalty by the end of October. Your freedom will continue undisturbed if you do, the leaflets said.
Vasili thought that was funny. So did Ewa. “What kind of freedom do they give us if it runs out at the end of the month?” she asked anyone who would listen. Vasili listened a lot, since he worked at the drugstore.
“You would think running away from their own capital with their tails between their legs might have given the people in the People’s Republic a clue about how much everybody loves them,” he said.
Love was one thing. Fear was another. Bombs and shells had a brutal logic of their own. The Communists had sabotaged Radio Warsaw’s transmitter before they fled. The rebels had a station with lower power that worked intermittently, in between explosions and losses of electricity. They broadcast appeals for aid to England, France, and the USA.
No aid came. Not a soldier, not a rifle, not a cartridge, not a can of beans. As far as the Western democracies were concerned, the USSR was welcome to Poland.
On Sunday the twenty-sixth, Poles filled their battered churches to pray for deliverance from the enemy at the gates. A young priest up from the south, a firebrand named Karol Wojtyla, preached an impassioned sermon of courage and defiance. Vasili went with Ewa to hear him. He cared very little for Catholicism, but he was coming to care more and more for the girl.
Wojtyla pounded the pulpit as he cried, “God has made us free souls! What God has made, man has no power to take away from us! Anyone who dares to try will burn in hell forevermore!” What he said was the usual thing that came from the mouths of patriots around the world. The way he said it…When he said it, people who listened to him believed. Even Vasili, who didn’t share his faith and understood him only imperfectly, felt his back stiffen and his blood heat while he listened.
But Father Wojtyla hadn’t finished when the Red Army started shelling Warsaw in earnest. People went running out of the church before the priests offered Holy Communion. Vasili grabbed Ewa’s hand and pulled her toward the door.
“Deus vobiscum!” Father Wojtyla called to the emptying crowd. Then he switched to Polish: “Get out! Get safe! God knows why you’re doing it!”
Vasili’s heart jumped when Ewa squeezed him back. They quickly discovered they’d fled the frying pan for the fire. Shturmoviks roared in just above the rooftops to bomb and strafe and rocket and napalm the Varsovians. Vasili used what was practically a rugby tackle to throw Ewa down behind a pile of bricks and stones that might offer some shelter from the attack planes. To make sure she didn’t try to stick her head up and see what was going on, he flopped on top of her.
“What are you doing?” she yelled in his ear. To her, it must have seemed close to criminal assault.
“Trying to keep you alive, dammit!” he shouted back over the roar of the Shturmoviks’ engines and the explosions going off close by. A cannon shell slammed into the rubble heap a moment later. It didn’t get through, which went a long way toward making his point for him.
“They can’t attack now!” Ewa said. “The propaganda the Red Poles dropped gave the city till the thirty-first.”
“They’re Russians. They’re Soviet Russians.” Vasili didn’t want her connecting him to the Red Army, even if he’d been an unwilling part of it. “They can do whatever they please. It’s all for the proletariat, right?”
“Right,” Ewa said. “When can we get up?”
“When this eases off a little, we can try,” Vasili said.
But it didn’t ease off. The Shturmoviks came over in waves, one after another. The artillery fire went on and on. The only blessing Vasili could see was that the Russians weren’t close enough to throw Katyushas into the heart of the city. Cries and shrieks of mortal agony gave high notes to go with the bass thunder of explosives.
The church fell in on itself with a rending crash. A shell fragment struck sparks off the broken brickwork bare centimeters above Vasili’s head. That made up his mind for him. “We’d better find a cellar if we can, if it doesn’t take too long,” he said.
“Christ have mercy, it’s about time,” Ewa said. “You’re squashing me flat.”
“Sorry.” He tried to hunch over as he got up. “Stay low, for heaven’s sake.”
Seeing someone disappear into a hole in the ground, Vasili and Ewa followed. It was more a cave than a cellar, but it was better than nothing or the junk pile they’d used before. As Vasili ducked into it, he heard another note joining the symphony of destruction: the rumble of God only knew how many diesel engines, all growling forward at once. That could mean only one thing. The Red Army and its tanks were moving on Warsaw.
—
Harry Truman eyed a badly printed leaflet in a language full of consonants in combinations so rich in Z’s, they would have sent a Scrabble player straight to heaven. His gaze swung to a typed translation. “The Polish Communists said they would give the rebels till today, till Halloween, to give themselves up?” he said.
“That’s right, sir.” Omar Bradley nodded.
“But the Russians stormed into Warsaw last Sunday? Five days early?”
“Yes, sir,” the Secretary of Defense said.
“Pretty low even for the Russians, don’t you think?”
“Do I think so? Of course I do. But, considering all the agreements they’ve danced up and down on when they saw some gain by doing so, this is par for the course. They didn’t even break an agreement, not in the legal sense. They just had their Polish stooges say they’d do one thing but then did something else instead.”
“I don’t like it, not even a little bit,” Truman snapped. “I’ve got a good notion to give Ambassador Zarubin a piece of my mind. He’d understand me when I did it, too. More direct than it would be with Molotov.”
“Mr. President, forgive me, but I recommend that you hold back here,” Bradley said. Truman looked at him in surprise. The former general went on, “I do, sir. We agreed to give the Russians a free hand in Eastern Europe. The ambassador will throw that in your face and say it’s none of our business. Unless you’re ready to back up your protest with military action, making it only dissipates our strength. A threat you don’t back up is a wasted threat.”
Truman chewed on that for a second. Then he sighed. “Well, when you’re right, you’re right. I won’t miss meeting Zarubin face-to-face; I’ll say that.”
“He’s an ugly bruiser, isn’t he?” Bradley said.
“As a matter of fact, yes,” Truman replied. Georgi Zarubin looked like a middle-aged ex-prizefighter. He had a widow’s peak w
ith deep wings of bald scalp to either side. His eyebrows beetled. His Tatar cheekbones were scarred. His mug, in short, was not an advertisement for Bolshevism.
But he was smarter than he looked. He’d been Stalin’s ambassador to the UK till this new war broke out. Now that peace was back, Molotov had sent him here to Philadelphia. Unlike Hitler, who’d had a jumped-up champagne salesman for a foreign minister, the Soviet leaders were careful about who carried out their foreign policy. Neither Litvinov nor Molotov was lovable, but they were both capable. The same held true for Gromyko, the Soviet ambassador to the UN. And it also seemed to be true for Georgi Zarubin.
“Elections coming up Tuesday,” Bradley remarked.
“Yes. That’s the big trick or treat, isn’t it?” the President replied. “It will be good to have Congress back in working order, anyhow. I’m afraid the Republicans will pick up a boatload of seats, though.”
“They’ll work with you on our foreign policy, anyway,” Bradley said.
“Oh, yes. Politics stops at the border, pretty much. Even the worst isolationists rallied round the flag after the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. They’ll give me a hard time on things we have to do at home, though. Some of those people barely think the Federal government’s entitled to coin money, let alone spend it.”
Omar Bradley’s visage was less stern and craggy than George Marshall’s had been, but not by a great deal. “If they vote against funds for rebuilding in their own districts, they won’t stay in office long,” he said, and that forbidding face showed a smile for a moment.
“Yes, but a lot of them will come from the Midwest, which wasn’t touched,” Truman said. “The way it’ll look to them is, Washington—I mean Philadelphia, dammit—wants to tax them till their eyes pop to rebuild the coasts. They don’t miss Manhattan or San Francisco. A lot of them think the country’s better off without places like that.”
“How do you aim to get around them?” Bradley asked.
“It’s simple. I’m going to veto any bill that has money for the Midwest unless there’s money for the coasts in it, too. I don’t think they’ll be able to override me. If they can, the country’s really gone to hell in an atomic handbasket.”
The Defense Secretary coughed discreetly. “What about your successor, whoever that turns out to be?”
“If it’s Stevenson, there’s no issue. He’ll do what’s right.” Truman didn’t think Stevenson stood a chance against the Republicans, but he was damned if he’d say so in public. He might have said it to Marshall; not even Marshall’s face suspected how much the man behind it knew. But Marshall was gone.
Omar Bradley wasn’t George Marshall; he was just as close as Truman could come to Marshall. He did know the question he had to ask: “Suppose it isn’t Stevenson, sir?” He stated no opinion about how likely he thought that chance was, or about whether he thought it would be good or bad.
“Eisenhower understands that it’s all one country. I give him that much,” Truman said. “Nixon…Nixon is an ugly piece of work, and I don’t just mean when he looks in the mirror. But he’s an ugly piece of work from California. He would see the need—I hope he’d see the need—for getting the coasts, the ports, in full working order again. Los Angeles isn’t nearly so much without its port. Same with Seattle. San Francisco is already a going concern again.”
“That’s all true, Mr. President,” Bradley said.
Truman pointed a finger at him. “You served with Eisenhower, under Eisenhower, in the last war. What did you think of him as a general?”
Bradley blinked. He might not have looked for such a blunt question. If he hadn’t, he only proved he didn’t know the man he served under very well. After a moment’s pause for thought, he said, “He’d never make anyone forget Rommel or Zhukov as a strategist. But that wasn’t really what he had to do. He held us and the English and the French and the Poles and all the other little contingents together and kept us all going the same way. For that, he deserves as much praise as you can give him. I’ll tell you, sir, I wouldn’t have wanted to ride herd on Montgomery and Patton and de Gaulle at the same time.”
“Mm, there is that,” Truman admitted. Bradley’s appraisal was more generous than he’d expected. Then again, Bradley might have penetrated to the heart of the mystery. Eisenhower hadn’t been in a position where he made policy. He’d carried out orders from FDR and Marshall, and got all his partners in the anti-Hitler coalition to do the same thing. As Bradley’d implied, some of those partners had strong opinions of their own, too.
“The other thing I have to give him is, he doesn’t panic if something goes wrong,” the Secretary of Defense said. “He just tries something else. If we’d failed at D-Day, he had a statement ready that took all the blame. And he would have started working on a different way to invade Europe, or at least telling the people who worked on things like that to get busy. He would have got results from them, too.”
Truman had always thought of Eisenhower more as a corporate executive than a soldier. Bradley changed his perspective of the man who’d probably succeed him. When you had an organization as large and complex as the American military had become, perhaps you needed some corporate executives at the top, to keep everybody below them working smoothly.
With a sigh, Truman said, “I wish this would have turned out better. We followed the best intelligence estimates about what the Red Chinese would do if MacArthur advanced to the Yalu, and they turned out to be wrong. And we followed the best intelligence estimates about what Stalin would do if we A-bombed those Manchurian cities, and they turned out to be wrong, too. So this is what’s left now that most of the dust has settled.”
“Mr. President, we won the war,” Bradley said. “Don’t you think Molotov would be happy to trade places with you?”
“Molotov’s never happy,” Truman said. “I don’t know if he has a wife and children, or if they’re still alive. If they are, I might want to trade places with him. That’s me talking as Harry Truman, of course, not as the President.”
“Yes, sir,” Bradley said. “Molotov was married to a Jewish woman. Stalin sent her to a labor camp four years ago. Beria turned her loose. The report that reached me said she asked how Stalin was, and fainted when she heard he’d died. Children? I don’t know. But she’s still with us.”
“Then I won the war and Molotov won the battle.” Truman sighed again.
BRUCE MCNULTY HAD to cross the San Francisco Bay to look for work in his chosen profession. The airlines’ offices in San Francisco itself remained out of commission. The ones in Oakland, though, were still operating at something close to normal.
“Well, well,” said the nice young personnel man who interviewed him for United Airlines. “You have a very impressive record.” He’d gone through the papers that showed Bruce had flown B-25s in the last war and B-29s in this one. “I’m sure you’d have no problems with any plane in our fleet.”
He didn’t sound all that enthusiastic, no matter how nice he seemed. “But…?” Bruce asked. “There’s a but, isn’t there?”
The nice young man—a plate on his desk said his name was Dave Simpkins—looked faintly embarrassed. “I’m afraid there is, Mr. McNulty. We’re fully staffed at the moment, and we have a waiting list of pilots interested in joining the airline. Most of their qualifications are as strong as yours, I’m afraid.”
Bruce took himself off to Continental Airlines, whose Oakland office was only a few blocks from United’s. The nice young personnel man at Continental was named Vic Torre. He had more five o’clock shadow than Dave Simpkins. Otherwise, the two of them might have been stamped from the same mold.
“I’m sorry,” he said, after he, too, examined Bruce’s papers. “You’re very well qualified, but we aren’t hiring right now. There are more pilots out there than airline slots to fill them. That’s too bad, but Uncle Sam trained an awful lot of them during the last war.”
“Yeah,” Bruce said sourly. Considering how many men he’d trained with, he knew too well
Vic Torre was right.
“I am sorry,” the personnel man said again.
“I even believe you. But so what? Sorry doesn’t put groceries on the table. What am I supposed to do now?”
“You could always go back into the Air Force. If anybody can use what you know, the people who taught it to you are the ones.”
“No, thanks.” Bruce violently shook his head. “Either I wouldn’t do anything that matters for the next twenty years or they’d give me another plane with an atom bomb in it. You know what happened across the bay? I’ve done that too many times. Enough blood’s on my hands now. I won’t put any more there no matter what.”
“I…see.” Vic Torre looked at him as if he’d just grown another head, one that might have sprung from a werewolf’s neck. Well, you didn’t meet a mass murderer every day of the week. Bruce was sure he wasn’t the only American murderer hustling for a job right now, though. Gathering himself, Torre said, “Some people would call you a hero.”
“The Air Force did. I’ve got the medals to prove it,” Bruce said. “I don’t care. I’m never doing that again, period. Exclamation point, even.”
“You might try some of the smaller airlines,” Torre said. “They have more turnover than we do. Or there are other pilots’ positions that don’t involve passengers at all.”
Bruce McNulty stared at him. “Thanks, Mr. Torre,” he said. “Damned if you aren’t right.”
He remembered talking with Daisy about that very thing. He’d gone on about how much fun he could have flying a cropduster in the Central Valley. He also remembered how much fun he’d had in the cockpit of that Piper Grasshopper when he played air tourist over Belgium. Zooming around in a biplane low above the fields would give the same kind of kick.
Everything came with a downside, though. Cropdusting wouldn’t pay the way ferrying people around the country in a big, elegant airliner did. You could sock away some serious jack if you did that for ten or fifteen years. And it would still be flying…after a fashion.
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