"Well!
All right. What move shall I make today, then?"
"Go back with Talky to London. You have no choice, so go quietly.
I'll write you or cable you. "When?"
"When I can. When I know."
They sat in silence. The Kremlin wall, painted to look like a row of apartment houses, echoed the shouts of the sergeants and the metallic clash of rifle bolts, as the recruits clumsily did some elementary drill.
"Well, that will be a communication to look forward to," Pamela said lightly. "Can't you give me some hint of its contents now?"
"No."
For some reason this pleased her, or seemed to. She put a hand t'o his face and smiled at him, her eyes full of naked love. "Okay.
I'll wait." Her hand slipped down to the ripped shoulder of his coat.
"Oh, I wanted to mend that. What time is it?" ,it's after ten, Pam."
'Then I must get cracking. Oh dear, I honestly don't want to travel away from you again." They rose and began walking arm in arm.
Among the recruits they were walking past stood Berel Jastrow, newly shaved.
He looked older so, with his scraped skin hanging in reddened folds. He saw Victor Henry, and for a moment put his right hand over his heart.
The naval officer took off his hat as though to wipe his brow, and put it back on.
"Who is he?" Pamela said, alertly watching. "Oh! Isn't that the man who burst into Slote's dinner?"
'Yes," Victor Henry said. "My relative from Minsk. That's him.
Don't look around at him or anything." In the unlit hallway outside her suite, Pamela unbuttoned her own coat and then unbuttoned Victor Henry's bridge coat, looking into his eyes. She pressed herself hard to him, and they embraced and kissed. She whispered, "You'd better write me or cable me to come. Oh God, how I love you! Will you drive with us to the airport? Will you stay with me every second to the last?"
"Yes, of course I'll stay with you." She dashed tears from her face with the back of her hand, then miped her eyes with a handkerchief. "Oh, how glad I am that I dug in my nasty little hoofs!"
Tudsbury came limping eagerly toward the door as she opened it.
"Well? Well? What's the verdict?"
"I was being silly," Pamela said. "I'm going home with you."
Tudsbury looked from her face to Henry's, for the tone was sharply ironic.
'Is she going with me, Victor?" 'She just said she was."
"Gad, what a relief! Well, all's well that ends well, and say, I was about to come looking for you. The R.A.F lads are being flown out half an hour earlier. There's a rumor that a German column's breaking through toward the airport and that it may be under shellfire soon.
The Nark says it's a damned lie, but the boys had rather not take a chance."
"I can pack in ten minutes." Pamela strode toward her room, adding to Pug, "Come with me, love."
Victor Henry saw Tudsbury's eyes flash and a lewd smile curl the thick lips under his mustache. Well, Pamela was human, Pug thought, for all her strength. She couldn't resist exploding the possessive endearment like a firecracker in her father's face. He said, 'Wait.
There's a report Talky must take to London for me. I'll be right back."
'What do you think, Talky?" Pug heard her say gaily as he went out. "Victor's got himself a battleship command, no less, and he's off to Pearl Harbor. That's in Hawaii!"
He returned shortly, breathing hard from the run up and down the hotel staircase, and handed a manila envelope, stapled shut, to Tudsbury.
"Give this to Captain Kyser, the naval attache at our embassy, hand to hand. All right?"
"Of course. Top secret?" Tudsbury asked with relish.
"Well-be careful with it. It's for the next Washington pouch."
"When I travel, this case never leaves my hand," Tudsbury said, "not even when I sleep. So rest easy."
He slipped into a brown leather dispatch case Pug's envelope, which contained two other envelopes, sealed. One was the long typed report for Harry Hopkins, and the other was the letter to the President about the Jews of Minsk.
(from WORLD EMPIRE LOST)
The Bouleversement One week in May 1940 sufficed to upset a balance of power in Europe that had lasted for centuries; and one week in December 1941 sufficed to decide the outcome of World War II and the future global balance of power.
on December 4, our Army Group Center was driving through blizzards into the outskirts of Moscow, and from Leningrad to the Crimea Bolshevik Russia was tottering. The French Empire was long since finished. The British Empire too was finished, though the British Isles still hung feebly on, more and more starved by our ever-expanding U-boat arm. No other power stood between us and world empire except America, which was too weakened by soft living and internal strife to make war. Its industrial plant, half paralyzed by strikes, was still geared to producing luxuries and fripperies. Its military strength lay in an obsolescent navy centered around battleships, riskily based in Hawaii in order to overawe the Japanese, and quite impotent to affect the world-historical German victory that loomed.
Seven days later, on December 11, we were at war with an America transformed into an aggressive military dictatorship, united with one will under a fanatical enemy of the Reich, converting its entire industry on a crash basis to war, and conscripting a vast fresh army and air force in order to crush us. The Red Army on the Moscow front, stiffened with Anglo-American supplies and fresh, primitive, hard-fighting Siberian divisions, had swung over to the counterattack.
Elsewhere Soviet troops were forcing us to retreat from Rostov-the first German retreat since Adolf Hitler had risen to lead us in 1933.
One step from the pinnacle of world empire on December 4, the German people on December 11 found themselves plunged into a total two-front war, fighting for their lives, menaced from the east and from the west by two industrial giants with five times our population and twenty times our territory.
History offers no parallel for this gigantic military bouleversement. The chief cause of it was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Sir Winston Churchill records frankly that when he got the news of this attack, he shed tears of thankful joy, for he knew then and there that the war was won. He wasted no tears, of course, on the American sailors caught by surprise and slaughtered.
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Here is the passage in Churchill: "No American will think it wrong of me if / proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. I could not foretell the course of events. / do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death.
So we had won after at//" No tears are mentioned. As previously noted, Genera/ von Roon is not dispassionate in his references to Winston Churchill.-V.H.
The Japanese Blunder
The Japanese attack was of course quite justified, but it was a hideous strategic mistake.
The fall of French and British power had left the far eastern European colonies almost undefended. Japan was the natural thief of this wealth. She needed it to fight her war against China to a finish.
The Europeans had come halfway round the earth a few generations earlier to subjugate East Asia and plunder its resources. But now all that was over. Japan was the only strong presence in East Asia. It was far more moral for this Asiatic people to take over administration of this rich sphere, than for a few drunken white civil servants of defunct European empires to continue their pukka-sahib parasitism.
Adolf Hitler had sought only friendly ties with this clever hard-working people of destiny. In the General Staff we assumed that Japan would march at the time best suited to her. We approved of this on every basis'of world philosophy.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was tactically an excellent operation, comparable in many ways to Barbaross,3. In both cases a small poor notion caught a big wealthy nation off guard, despite a tense war atmosphere and all manner of advance
warnings and indications. In both cases surprise was exploited to destroy on a great scale the enemy's first-line forces. The Barbarossa surprise depended on the nonaggression treaty, then in force with soviet Russia, to lull the enemy. The Japanese went us one better by attacking in the middle of peace parleys.
At the time of both attacks, of course, there were loud outcries of "infamy" and "treachery," as though these terms of private morality had any relevance to historical events. A poor nation seeking to supplant a rich one must use the best means it can find; moreover Thucydides said long ago that men by a natural law always rule where they are strongest. In history what is moral is what works.
The will of God, Hegel taught, reveals itself only in historical outcomes. So viewed, Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor were both idealistic thrusts toward a heroic new world order.
The difference was that Barbarossa was strategically impeccableand would have resulted in victory if not for unlucky and unforeseen factors-including this very Japanese attack five and a half months later, which, contrariwise, was such a strategic miscalculation that for once Churchill speaks no more than the truth in calling it suicidal madness.
One violation of a cardinal rule is enough to invalidate a strategic plan.
The Japanese surprise attack violated two.
The two iron laws of warfare that Japan disregarded were: 1.
Strike for the heart.
2. Know your enemy.
"Strike for the Heart"
The rule "Strike for the heart" is only a corollary of the first principle of warfare, the Concentration of Force. This was what Japan's military leaders overlooked.
From the moment they correctly decided that the war in Europe was their big chance to take East Asia, a hard choice confronted them: should they first move north against the Soviet Union by invading Siberia; or south, to scoop up the weakly held treasures of the European colonies? The move south was the the more tempting, of course. But in warfare one must not be misled by mere easy loot or the line of least resistance.
The stakes of the war comprised nothing less than political redistribution of the world's landmasses. It was a radical global conflict, the first true World War.
The lineup was classical- the rich against the poor, gold against iron. Germany was the only first-class power on the ascendant side, the side that was seeking to draw a new world map, and her attack on the Soviet Union was her great bid.
Once master of Russia, Germany would have been invincible. It followed that the Japanese should have moved to help Germany crush the Soviet Union. With Germany triumphant, Japan could have taken and held anything in East Asia she wanted. But with Germany beaten, Japan had small hope of keeping even the vastest gains.
Had Japan invaded Siberia in 1941, the German drive to Moscow would have succeeded. The Russian counterattacks in December would not have been mounted. The Bolshevik regime would either have fallen or made a second peace of Brest-Litovsk. For what saved Moscow in December was only Stalin's desperate denuding of the Siberian front for reserves to throw into the battle, tipping the scales at the last second by a hair.
Moreover, if Napoleon's maxim holds that the moral is to the physical in warfare as three to one, the mere fact of a Japanese assault on Siberia in the autumn might have brought on a Russian collapse. In mid-October panic gripped the Bolsheviks to the highest levels of government, with whole departments fleeing Moscow in disgraceful tumult, and the frightened dictator issuing shrill orders for a levie en masse to save the city. There is even an unconfirmed story that Stalin himself secretly fled, secretly returned when the panic subsided, and had everybody shot who knew of his disgraceful act.
Russian rulers operate inside a Byzantine maze, and there is no way of checking this episode.
In any case, this was surely the psychological moment of World War II, the once-in-a-thousand-years opportunity for the Japanese nation.
Its irresolute leaders, poorly trained in military thinking and subject to the strange Oriental character mixture of excessive rashness, caution, and emotion, let the moment slip through their fingers to all eternity. History, like a woman, must be firmly taken when she is ready. Otherwise she scorns the fumbler, never forgives him, and never offers him another chance.
"Know Your Enemy"
The first mistake, then, was to go south instead of north, and to snatch booty instead of triking at the heart. But the Axis might still have won the war despite this dispersion of effort, had Japan not compounded the blunder with a second one that verged on true insanity.
Granted the southward strategy, the obvious course was to move into the East Indies with maximum speed and force, consolidate rapidly, and prepare to defeat any American countermove. The Americans might not have moved at all.
Tremendous opposition existed in the United States to sending American boys to die for the pukka sohibs in Asia. Roosevelt might have just sputtered harsh words, as he had after all of Adolf Hitler's triumphs. Roosevelt never moved one visible step beyond the range of public opinion. This was the master key to the nature of the enemy.
Japan was oblivious to it, because of the distortions of Oriental thinking.
Even if Roosevelt had sent his navy, defying half his public, against the entrenched Japanese in East Asia, this fleet would have fought its showdown battle at the end of a long supply line, in enemy waters, within range of Japan's land-based air force. It would have been another Battle of Tsushima Strait, with air power added. This humiliating slaughter in an unpopular cause might have brought on the impeachment of the none too popular Machiavellian in the White House.
But even this was not the worst aspect of the Japanese blunder.
America had the largest and most advanced industrial plant on earth. This mercenary nation, devoted to the almighty dollar and blessed with wonderful mineral resources stolen from the Indians, had reared an mmense plant capacity for making toys and trifles. But it was a capacity readily convertible to munitions manufacture on the most fantastic imaginable scale. The whole hope of Axis victory in World War II lay in keeping America divided and soft until the time come to deal with her as an isolated unit without allies.
This prospect was in sight. Half of America would have rejoiced at a German victory over the Soviet Union. The Lend-Lease program was bogged down in red tape and inertia the day before the Pearl Harbor attack, reflecting the discord and confusion in the people.
For this, great credit goes to Adolf Hitler. He was a narrow-minded man, appallingly ignorant of the United States. But his almost female intuition warned him that he must give his blood enemy, Roosevelt, no chance to unite the Americans against him. That is why the Fuhrer swallowed all the President's scurrilous public abuse and compelled the U-boat arm to endure appalling provocation.
This wise strategy of the fuhrer was blown to smithereens by Pearl Harbor.
Overnight a hundred thirty million quarrelsome, uncertain, divided Americans become one angry mass thirsting for battle. Roosevelt rammed through Congress gigantic war plans and expenditures which a few days earlier would have been utterly inconceivable. The Congress, which in August had extended a mild draft law by a single vote after weeks of debate, now unanimously passed fierce declarations of war, and all Roosevelt's long-plotted stupendous war programs, in a matter of hours.
This was the chief result of Pearl Harbor, for the fleet was soon repaired and expanded. In one week Germany passed from the strategic offensive, with world empire in her grasp, to the strategic defensive, with no long-range prospect but to be crushed unless our enemies did something just as stupid and selfdestructive.
Nonexistent "Axis"
If one asks, "How did Germany permit such a catastrophe to occur?"
the answer is that we were not consulted. We found out that Pearl Harbor was the target when the Americans did-when the torpedoes and bombs exploded.
The "Axis" of Germany, Japan, and Italy never existed as a military reality.
It was a ferocious-looking rubber balloon
blown up by propaganda.
Its purpose was bluff. The three nations went their own ways throughout the war, and usually did not even inform their partners in advance about attacks, invasions, and strategic decisions.
Thus, when Hitler attacked Poland, Mussolini suddenly declined to fight and did not jump in until France was toppling. The Italian dictator invaded Greece without notifying Hitler. Hitler did not inform 11 Duce of the attack on Russia until just before the event.
But for this he had good reason. Our intelligence had advised us that anything Mussolini knew went straight to the British via the Italian royal family.
Not once did real staff talks take place among the "Axis" armed forces.
England and America were having such conferences a year before Pearl Harbor/ They followed a combined strategy throughout in close cooperation with the Bolsheviks. Now they can reflect at leisure on the wisdom of helping Stalin destroy us, and losing the Slav flood to the Elbe. But Allied operations were a model of combined strategy, while "Axis" strategy was a nullity. It was every man for himself, and unhappy Germany was tied to second-rate partners who made rash wild plunges that ruined her.
Herman Wouk - The Winds Of War Page 109