Under Fire

by Griffin, W. E. B.

  “And if I showed up over there, wouldn’t that be raising the stakes?” Fleming Pickering thought aloud.

  “With all possible respect, General, sir, what I had in mind—and Charley agrees—is to stash you quietly in the Imperial, but let the word get out that you’re there. In case, for example, Commodore Ford just happened to be in the neighborhood.”

  Commodore Hiram Ford was chairman of the board of Trans-Pacific Shipping.

  And that sonofabitch is entirely capable of showing up there and trying to take over the conference.

  “This your idea or Charley’s?”

  “Mine, Pop,” Pick said. “Come on! What the hell! You could see the Killer and Ernie. And I’ll have you back by next Thursday.”

  “If you and Charley agree that I should.”

  “We do,” Pick said, firmly.

  What the hell. The alternative is watching the waves go up and down in San Francisco Bay until Patti gets home. And it’ll do her good to have to wait for me for once.

  “I’m with the State Department, myself,” the asshole in the window seat announced.

  Why doesn’t that surprise me?

  “Are you really?”

  “I’ve just been assigned to General MacArthur’s staff.”

  “That should be an interesting assignment,” Pickering said, politely.

  “I’m to be his advisor on psychological warfare.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m looking forward to working with him,” the asshole said. “From what I understand, he’s an incredible man.”

  “Yes, I would say he is,” Pickering agreed.

  And the first thing you’re going to have to learn, you simpleton, is that no one works with El Supremo, they work for him.

  And the second is that the only advice Douglas MacArthur listens to is that advice that completely agrees with his positions in every minute detail.

  [TWO]

  HANEDA AIRFIELD TOKYO, JAPAN 1155 1 JUNE 1950

  Fleming Pickering politely shook the hand of the State Department asshole in the window seat—who actually thought Douglas MacArthur would be grateful for his advice—and wished him good luck in his new assignment.

  Then he walked forward to the cockpit and stood and waited while Pick went through the paperwork associated with the end of a Trans-Global flight. Then he followed Pick and the rest of the crew down the ladder pushed up to the cockpit door.

  Pick waited for him at the bottom of the ladder, touched his arm, and nodded across the tarmac toward two nattily dressed military policemen who stood guard over a well-polished Douglas C-54 that bore the bar-and-star insignia of an American military aircraft, and had “Bataan” lettered on either side of its nose.

  “That’s MacArthur’s, right?” Pick asked.

  “It says ‘Bataan’ on the nose,” Pickering replied, gently sarcastic. “I think that’s a fair assumption.”

  “Doesn’t look like there’s much wrong with it, does there?” Pick asked.

  “I think that’s probably the best-maintained airplane in the Orient,” Pickering said. “What are you driving at?”

  “Just before we came over here,” Pick said, “I had a call from Lockheed. The military laid a priority on them for a new 1049, to replace the war-weary C-54 of your pal MacArthur. So Lockheed’s going to give him the next one off the line, which was supposed to be mine, and which I need.”

  “He is the Supreme Commander, Allied Powers,” Pickering said. “And you’re just a lousy civilian.”

  “Spoken like a true general,” Pick said, with a smile.

  “Yes, indeed, and why aren’t you standing at attention in my presence?”

  Pick laughed and waved his father ahead of him toward the door in the terminal marked CUSTOMS AIR CREWS ONLY.

  Trans-Global’s Tokyo station chief was waiting for them outside customs. Pickering didn’t know him, but the man obviously knew who he was.

  I suppose, as MacArthur is El Supremo of Japan, I am El Supremo of Pacific & Far East. But what does this guy think I’m going to do to him? Eat him alive?

  “I’m Fleming Pickering,” he said, offering his hand with a smile.

  “Yes, sir, I know. Welcome to Tokyo. How was your flight, sir?”

  “Very nice,” Pickering said. “Did you get the word about how little time it took us?”

  “Yes, sir,” the man said. “And we should have official confirmation within the hour.” He turned to Pick. “Congratulations, Captain.”

  “Let’s hold off on that until we get confirmation,” Pick said. “But thanks anyway.”

  “Captain, Mr. Ansley asks that you come to base operations. Apparently, there’s some paperwork connected with certification. . . .”

  “I figured there would be,” Pick said. “Dad, there’s no reason why you have to wait around here for God knows how long.” He turned to the station chief. “We have wheels to take my father to the hotel, right?”

  “Right outside,” the station chief confirmed.

  “I’ll see you at the hotel,” Pick said.

  The wheels turned out to be a 1941 Cadillac limousine. Pickering wasn’t pleased with that, but realized that saying anything to the station chief would make him sound ungrateful.

  “Charley Ansley’s told me what a fine job you’ve been doing here,” Pickering said, offering his hand to the station chief.

  That wasn’t exactly true. It was an inference: If this fellow wasn’t doing a hell of a good job, Charley Ansley would have canned him long ago.

  “That’s very kind of Mr. Ansley, sir,” the station chief— whose name had never come up—replied, almost blushing with pleasure.

  Pickering got into the backseat of the limousine. The station chief waited at the curb until the limousine was out of sight.

  This is not the first time I’ve been driven from an airfield into Tokyo in a limousine. The circumstances were different the last time. The last time, Japanese soldiers and police and ordinary civilians lined the streets, bowing their heads toward the cars of their American conquerors.

  I was involved in that goddamn war, literally from the first shots until the last act.

  But that was a long time ago, General, and incidentally, General, you’re not a general anymore.

  On December 7, 1941, wakened by the sound of low-flying aircraft, Fleming Pickering had gotten out of his bed in the penthouse suite of the Foster Waikiki Beach Hotel in Honolulu and watched the Japanese attack on the Navy base at Pearl Harbor.

  He had been enraged, not only at the Japanese sneak attack, but also at what he perceived to be the nearly criminal incompetence of the senior military—especially the senior Naval—officers in Hawaii, who he felt had been derelict in allowing such an attack to happen.

  He had sailed that night to Seattle, Washington, aboard the Pacific Princess, the flagship of the Pacific & Far East fleet, which had been commandeered by the U.S. Navy and was to be converted to a troop transport. Its speed, it was theorized—and later proven—would make it immune to Japanese submarine attack.

  Once in the United States, Pickering had immediately gone to Washington to volunteer for service as a Marine again. Brigadier General D. G. McInerney, USMC, with whom he had served—both of them sergeants—at Belleau Wood in France in the First World War, more or less gently told him there was no place in the Marine Corps for him, and that he could make a greater contribution to the war effort by running Pacific & Far East.

  It was the second time he had been, so to speak, rejected for government service.

  Before the war had involved the United States—but when he had known that war was inevitable—he had been offered “a suitable position” in the “Office of the Coordinator of Information,” later renamed the Office of Strategic Services. Swallowing his intense dislike of the Coordinator of Information himself, Colonel William “Wild Bill” Donovan, he had gone to Washington for an interview and found that what Donovan had in mind was a bureaucratic post under a man for whom Pickering ha
d a profound disgust.

  Forced to admit that Mac McInerney was right—he was not qualified to be a Marine captain, much less a Marine colonel, which is what he had more than a little egotistically had in mind—Pickering had gone from McInerney’s Eighth and “I” Streets office to the Foster Lafayette Hotel, across from the White House, where he was staying in the apartment of his close friend, Senator Richardson K. Fowler (R., Cal.). Once there, nursing his rejection, he had promptly crawled most of the way into a quart bottle of the senator’s Famous Grouse.

  When Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox had appeared unannounced in the apartment to see Senator Fowler, Pickering had lost little time in sharing with the Secretary his opinion that “the Pearl Harbor admirals” should be court-martialed and that Knox himself should resign. Almost as an afterthought, he told Knox that he would fight the Navy’s intention of commandeering the entire Pacific & Far East fleet—they could have the Pacific Princess and the other passenger ships, but that’s all—all the way to the Supreme Court.

  The next day, nursing a monumental hangover as he flew back to San Francisco, he was convinced that his drunken attack on Knox—for that’s unquestionably what it had been—had ended once and for all any chance of his ever again serving in uniform.

  He was wrong. A few days later, Helen Florian, his secretary, had put her head in his office and announced that Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox was in her office and wanted to see him.

  Pickering was convinced that it was payback time for their encounter in Senator Fowler’s apartment. Knox was almost certainly going to tell him, with justified relish, that the U.S. Navy was commandeering every vessel in the P&FE fleet and the P&FE building, “for the duration,” and that he was to be out of the building by five o’clock.

  But that wasn’t what Knox had had in mind at all.

  Knox said that he suspected—human nature being what it was—that the reports he was getting—and would be getting—from the admirals in the Pacific—men with a lifelong devotion to the Navy—would understandably paint the situation to the advantage of the Navy, rather than as what it actually was.

  What he had to have, Knox said, was a cold, expert appraisal of what was going on out there from someone who knew ships, and shipyards, and the Pacific, and wasn’t cowed by thick rows of gold braid on admirals’ sleeves.

  Someone, for example, who had spent his lifetime involved with the Pacific Ocean; someone so unawed by rank and titles that he had told the Secretary of the Navy he should resign.

  Within days, a hastily commissioned Captain Fleming S. Pickering, U.S. Navy Reserve, boarded a Navy plane for Hawaii, his orders identifying him as the Personal Representative of the Secretary of the Navy.

  Pleased with the reports Pickering had furnished from Pearl Harbor, Knox ordered him to Australia to evaluate the harbors, shipyards, and other facilities there. He arrived shortly before General Douglas MacArthur did, having escaped—at President Roosevelt’s direct order—from the Philippines to set up his headquarters in Australia.

  Pickering became an unofficial member of MacArthur’s staff, but by the time of the First Marine Division’s invasion of Guadalcanal, was convinced that his usefulness was pretty much at an end.

  Aware—and not caring—that Knox would certainly be annoyed and probably would be furious, Pickering went ashore on Guadalcanal with the Marines. He offered his services to the First Marine Division commander, Major General A. A. Vandegrift, in any capacity where Vandegrift thought he might be useful, down to rifleman in a line company.

  The First Division’s intelligence officer had been killed in the first few hours of the invasion, and Vandegrift—who had come to admire Pickering’s brains and savvy while they were planning the logistics of the invasion—named Pickering “temporarily, until a qualified replacement could be flown in from the United States,” to replace the fallen incumbent.

  The day after his qualified replacement arrived, so did the U.S. Navy destroyer Gregory, under dual orders from the Navy Department: Deliver urgently needed aviation fuel to the island, and do not leave Guadalcanal until Captain Fleming Pickering, USNR, is aboard.

  En route to Pearl Harbor, the Gregory was attacked by Japanese bombers. Pickering was on her bridge with her captain when her captain was killed. Pickering, as senior officer of the line aboard—and an any ocean, any tonnage master mariner—assumed command of the destroyer, skillfully maneuvering her until the attack was over, whereupon he passed out from loss of blood from the wounds he had suffered when the first bomb struck.

  He was flown to the Navy Hospital in San Diego, where, as he recuperated, he decided that his wound would probably spare him from a court-martial, and that he would quietly be released from the Navy.

  He was, instead, summoned to Washington, where, on the Presidential yacht, Sequoia, President Roosevelt not only gave him—at the recommendation of the Navy’s Commander-in-Chief, Pacific—the Silver Star for his valor in “assuming, despite his grievous wounds” command of the Gregory, but informed him that he had that day sent his name—at the request of Secretary Knox—to the Senate for their advice and consent to his appointment as Brigadier General, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve. He would serve, the President told him, on Knox’s personal staff.

  He soon found out what Knox had in mind for him to do.

  Literally hidden in one of the “temporary” wooden buildings erected during World War I on the Washington Mall was the USMC Office of Management Analysis, even its name intended to conceal its role as the personal covert intelligence operation of Secretary Knox.

  Pickering, in addition to his other duties, was named its commander, and in effect became director of covert intelligence operations for the Navy.

  In February 1943, after General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander, Southwest Pacific Ocean Area, and Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, U.S. Navy Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, had made it abundantly clear that neither would have anything to do with Colonel “Wild Bill” Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services in their theaters of operation, President Roosevelt had solved that problem by issuing an executive order naming Brigadier General Fleming Pickering, USMCR, as OSS Deputy Director for the Pacific.

  Although Pickering hated the appointment—before the war, he and Donovan had once almost come to blows in the lobby of New York City’s Century Club, and he was still smarting over the insultingly low-level job Donovan had offered him before the war—Pickering had to admit it was Roosevelt at his Machiavellian best.

  Neither MacArthur nor Nimitz would—or could— protest the appointment. MacArthur had written glowingly to Roosevelt about Pickering’s service in Australia, and Nimitz had personally ordered Pickering decorated with the Silver Star for his valor on board the destroyer sent to bring him off Guadalcanal.

  Pickering had served as the OSS’s Deputy Director for the Pacific—which included, so far as the OSS was concerned, both China and India—for the rest of the war. The last time he had been in Tokyo had been as a member—arguably the second senior member—of the team flown into Japan to arrange the details of the surrender. He had left Japan two weeks later, and taken off his uniform a week after that.

  [THREE]

  THE DEWEY SUITE THE IMPERIAL HOTEL TOKYO, JAPAN 1430 1 JUNE 1950

  “I think we did it,” Malcolm S. “Pick” Pickering said to his father as he came through the door. “Made our time official, set another record, I mean.”

  “Who did this?” Pickering asked, gesturing around the huge, elegantly furnished suite.

  “I hope so,” Pick said, ignoring the question. “Ford is here. It would really piss him off.”

  “Who did this?” his father repeated. “Isn’t this a bit much for one man?”

  “Mom did it,” Pick said, just a little sheepishly. “She knows the guy who owns it—or maybe the general manager, somebody at the top—and set it up. I think he owed her a favor, or something.”

  And what that does is get her off the guilt hook: If Flem is with Pick, and in th
e best suite in the best hotel in Tokyo, then there’s no reason for me to feel guilty about leaving Ol’ Flem alone.

  “And what time do the geisha girls arrive?”

  There was the sound of a gentle chime.

  “That must be them,” Pick said, smiling.

  It was instead a full colonel of the United States Army, in a tropical worsted uniform, from the epaulets of which hung the aiguillette of an aide-de-camp, and on the lapels of which was a shield, in the center of which were five stars in a circle, which was the lapel insignia of an aide-de-camp to a general of the Army.

  There aren’t that many five-stars around anywhere, and only one in Japan. This guy is El Supremo’s aide.

  How the hell did he know I was here?

  “May I help you, Colonel?” Pickering asked.

  “Sir, you’re General Pickering?”

  “That was a long time ago, Colonel.”

  “Sir, I’m Colonel Stanley. I’m an aide-de-camp to General MacArthur. . . .”

  “I sort of guessed you were,” Pickering said, chuckling, waving his hand at the colonel’s uniform. He turned and motioned for the colonel to follow him into the suite.

  “Colonel Stanley,” Pickering went on, “this is my son, Captain Pickering, of Trans-Global Airways, who tells me he has reason to believe that he set a speed record today, bringing us here. We were about to have a drink to celebrate that, and I hope you’ll join us.”

  The colonel shook Pick’s hand and said it was a pleasure and offered his congratulations, “but with your permission, General, I’ll pass on the drink. It’s a little early.”

  “Relax, Colonel,” Pickering said. “I won’t tell El Supremo. Scotch all right?”

  “Yes, sir,” the colonel said. “Scotch would be fine.”

  Pick went behind the bar.

  “Dad,” he said, amused, “there’s a note here. It says, ‘When the services of a bartender are required, please press the button.’ Do I press the button?”

  “No,” Pickering said, flatly. “Is there any Famous Grouse?”