There still was, and I didn’t hesitate to express it, even if it should result in my being booted incontinently out of the European Theater of Operations. I had to say that I felt my new orders were ill-advised. Had I been given command of that salvage job, I should neither have needed nor wanted a senior salvage officer of the Royal Navy tied round my neck in the guise of a consultant. And assuming, as we must, that the Royal Navy was sending an officer at least as competent as I, and perhaps even more so, to direct that salvage job, he would feel about it exactly as I did—he would neither need nor want nor ask my advice and he would resent my presence as a reflection on his competence. It would be much better for all hands, British and American, if I got out of Selsey Bill. And further, whether that was seen in London or not, they were putting me in a most untenable position—I was being given no authority at all to command with respect to the lifting of the Phoenixs, merely to advise, if asked. The result of that would be that while I had no opportunity at all to avert a catastrophe should the Royal Navy itself now bungle, I was nevertheless, even if never asked anything, right in the line of fire (and so also with me would be Admiral Stark) to catch from both sides of the Atlantic a very generous share of the blame for any ensuing failure.
So I didn’t want any part in the further proceedings on the Phoenixs. No more, I was sure, did that new British salvage officer, due at Selsey tomorrow, want me in them. It would be a favor to us both to take me out of Selsey Bill. I was no longer needed there.
I paused, practically out of breath from expostulating. I had made out a very logical case.
“Anything else?” asked the Deputy Chief of Staff.
“No, sir, that covers it,” I responded.
In tones that in their absolute authority carried me back more than thirty years to the days when it had ordered me like a wooden soldier about the drill ground at Annapolis, Commodore Flanigan’s voice floated over the wire from London into my ear:
“Admiral Stark is not concerned about how either you or your opposite number in the Royal Navy may regard your further stay in Selsey Bill. His orders to you are that you stay on the Channel till after D-day, as consultant to the Royal Navy in the lifting of those Phoenixs. You heard me!”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
We both hung up.
I drove slowly back to the beach, from the seat of the jeep to regard in a completely new light once more that mass of sunken Phoenixs. So now I was to stay awhile on this Godforsaken strip of sand to act as consultant to the lifting of them. What might that mean?
Next morning, I began to find out. About the middle of the morning, the new salvage officer sent by the Royal Navy arrived to take over at Selsey Bill. I had to concede the Royal Navy was not taking its new assignment any too casually—it had sent the best it had.
Commodore MacKenzie and I shook hands. We’d never I met before, but we weren’t strangers to each other. In salvage, which is as international as the world of music, MacKenzie, in spite of the slightness of his stature, was one of the Titans.
Years before, when the crews of the vessels of Kaiser Wilhelm’s High Seas Fleet, interned at Scapa Flow after Armistice Day in World War I, had unexpectedly scuttled their battleships there rather than turn them over to British hands, it was MacKenzie who had been called on to lift the biggest of those ponderous hulks, capsized, many of them. MacKenzie had turned in one of the all-time feats in salvage at Scapa Flow.
MacKenzie had put in a lifetime going through the salvage mill. He would need advice from me as a consultant on how to handle the lifting of the Phoenixs about as much as Beethoven might need the services of a consultant in composing another symphony.
I scanned MacKenzie with interest. One thing about him, being decidedly out of character for a salvage man, puzzled me. Here he was, a Scotsman of all things, come down to the beach to throw himself immediately into the problems of lifting a lot of fouled-up wrecks. And yet his uniform jacket, far from being a war-worn tunic, such as I had seen adorning the figures of all hands in the Royal Navy from Admiral of the Fleet Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham, the First Sea Lord, on down, must have been his very best. Glistening on each sleeve was a broad commodore’s stripe that could not have been brighter had it just been cut from a roll of new gold lace at the tailor’s.
MacKenzie observed my glance. His own eyes dropped admiringly also to the braid on his sleeves. In a marked Scottish accent, he commented,
“Handsome, isn’t it? And new, too. I’ve had it only since yesterday, when the Admiralty ordered me to this job, and all at the same time promoted me to Commodore to give me rank enough to go with the importance of this task.”
I could only gawk in silence at MacKenzie’s new glory. So that explained the newness of his braid—till yesterday, like myself, he’d been only a captain—the highest rank held, so far as I knew, by any salvage officer in the British service. Some London tailor must have sat up all the night turning out that jacket so MacKenzie might make his initial appearance on Selsey Bill in all the radiance of his new and exalted rank as Commodore, commanding His Majesty’s Salvage Forces.
Being human, I could hardly repress a sigh. I was still a captain. But there, as result of my battle with Royal Engineers over the Phoenixs, stood MacKenzie, suddenly made Commodore! Had he been told, I wondered, how all that had chanced to come about? Probably he hadn’t the vaguest idea; he gave no indication of it.
So with the anomaly explained of a display of brand-new gold braid adorning the jacket of a salvage man about to tackle a job for which the normal garb was the oldest clothes he had, the discussion proceeded. MacKenzie must know that I had orders from American naval headquarters to remain till after D-day as consultant on his task; did he?
Yes; the Admiralty had informed him of it.
Very well, I’d be there on the beach and glad to help him in any way—he had but to ask. But he’d have to ask. I had no desire of intruding any unwanted advice on him, nor any even less wanted suggestions on his men (which suggestions would most likely be misinterpreted as orders from me, with much resulting confusion).
Meanwhile, I’d appreciate knowing his plans regarding those two Dutch schuits the Royal Engineers had provided at Selsey Bill. What part should they have in his plans?
MacKenzie shrugged his shoulders. He wasn’t counting on them; none—probably. He was mustering at Selsey Bill every salvage tug, every usable salvage barge or scow on which pumps could be placed, all the salvage pumps, and every salvage master and man, whether naval or commercial, he could lay hands on in every British port.
The complete salvage forces of all Britain had already been ordered to converge on Selsey Bill—by that evening, the vanguard would be arriving. In a day or so more, his forces for the job at Selsey Bill should be adequate, regardless of the two Dutch schuits.
MacKenzie thanked me for my offer of assistance—he greatly doubted he’d be asking for any, however. He’d have officers and men enough; they were all skilled in the business; and he could trust them to handle what he asked of them. Still, should he need advice, he’d not hesitate to ask. We shook hands again and parted, MacKenzie to take over from the Royal Engineers, I to consider what I might do round about Selsey Bill to make myself useful till D-day other than on the lifting of the Phoenixs. For I well knew that MacKenzie had not the slightest intention ever of asking any advice from anybody regarding the floating of the Phoenixs. And as an actual fact, he never did. Nor did he need it.
Left as a sort of fifth wheel for the lifting project at Selsey Bill, I tried to find out from such of the Grosvenor Square staff as oscillated between London and the Channel, what they might know as to what in London had led to any such queer assignment for me.
Had it been Stark’s idea, knowing the vital importance of the Mulberries to the invasion, to hold me on the spot to sound an alarm, perhaps, should matters again start to go haywire? Or had perhaps the British themselves suggested it to him, as some sort of sop to salve American feelings at not being a
ssigned the task?
But no one could enlighten me. None knew.
However, I did hear from one aide his account of how Stark had managed to get by that reiterated British “No!” of a few days before, to frustrate the delaying action of the Royal Engineers over the matter of substituting steel pipe for rubber suction hoses as a proper solution to their dilemma and to force the visit I’d seen. Stark had gone directly to the King with his demands for a change, something no other American in England, not even our Ambassador, would have been able to do, nor dared even to try.
“The King?” I laughed outright. Suppose Stark had; what of it?
What power did the King of England have to order anything? Every schoolboy in America knew that in Britain today, the monarch was but an ermine-bedecked figurehead; the Prime Minister was the actual ruler.
My informant from Stark’s staff, almost English himself now from his years in London, eyed me tolerantly.
“Too bad, old chap, you haven’t been in England longer, or you’d know what every Englishman knows, even if every American schoolboy doesn’t. Tradition is what rules England—this tradition, that tradition, tradition over all. England is ruled more by tradition than by the Prime Minister. And that’s where the monarchy comes in; it is the tradition that holds Britain together. It was Edward the Eighth’s attempt to flout British tradition over who may be Queen that skidded him off his throne, and put his more tradition-minded brother George on it.
“Now the more astute a Prime Minister is, the more he bends to tradition and doesn’t risk his neck bucking it. And that’s where English regard for tradition makes the King a powerful figure—the more knowing as a politician the Prime Minister is, the more power it gives the King in advising on policy. And nobody should underrate Churchill as a politician.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I conceded reluctantly, “but with so damned much British respect for tradition around, how ever then did an outsider like Stark get by it to the King?”
That, it seemed was just a freak. Not another American in London could have wangled it. For Stark was no outsider. It seemed that Admiral Harold Stark and His Majesty, George VI, were to each other, just two old salts—old shipmates. Odd, wasn’t it?
It had all stemmed from a time, almost thirty years before, when George wasn’t so important in the British scheme of things. He wasn’t in line for the throne. His older brother, Edward, Prince of Wales, was the assured successor. George, as an unneeded younger brother in the monarchial plan of life, was quite expendable, now that Edward had got by babyhood and gave every indication of living a long while more.
So in World War I, while the Prince of Wales was solicitously being kept out of harm’s way, his younger brother George wasn’t. George, already a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, went to sea in World War I with the British Grand Fleet, to take his chances along with every other Briton there afloat, against the exploding shells from the heavy guns of von Tirpitz’s formidable High Seas Fleet at Jutland, the bloodiest naval battle ever fought. The British, in that fierce slugging match, had lost many of their biggest ships and thousands of officers and men from admirals on down.
George’s vessel, the Iron Duke, leading the battleline at Jutland as Jellicoe’s flagship, though the major target for German shells, had survived that battle and so had George. And it had happened also shortly thereafter, when we came in as Britain’s ally, that who should be assigned to the Iron Duke as liaison officer and observer of German battle tactics for the U. S. Navy but young Harold Raynsford Stark, of Admiral Sims’ American staff?
Nothing makes close friends like danger shared in common. With another Jutland always a daily possibility to the Grand Fleet cruising in the mists of the North Sea, there was plenty of danger to be shared. Harold Stark, though American, and George, though Duke of York, found additionally that they were exceptionally congenial. So friends and shipmates once in the Iron Duke, they stayed friends and shipmates forever after. Even unto the day when George found himself unexpectedly King of England and in the middle of another vicious war, and Harold Stark, now as Admiral commanding U. S. Naval Forces in Europe, found himself with a war problem vital to the success of the coming invasion and making no progress at all in the proper solving of it.
So Stark had cut the Gordian knot, by-passed all chains of command, American and British, civil and military, and regardless of all repercussions and their probable effects on him, had gone directly to his old shipmate, his last remaining hope in avoiding catastrophe, with his problem.
George, once a seagoing naval officer himself, saw it as his friend Stark saw it, as vitally important. There was but one man in Britain who could make Churchill do anything, and that man was George. But knowing Churchill apparently, he didn’t choose to go about it that way. George, as King of England, got hold of his Prime Minister. That problem of the Phoenixs at Selsey Bill, his friend, Admiral Stark, felt was being mishandled. And to him, the King, from Stark’s account, such seemed most likely also. Had Churchill himself personally looked into that very important matter of the Phoenixs?
No? Would Churchill, then, go personally to Selsey Bill to look into it? He, George, was deeply concerned over it. He would, of course, rest on his Prime Minister’s good judgment after Churchill had seen it; so also, it went without saying, would his friend, Admiral Stark. But to ease his monarch’s mind, Churchill must go himself to look; he must take no subordinate’s words for it that all was well.
Whatever Churchill may have thought of George’s friend, Admiral Stark, for having maneuvered his King into making that (shall we say?) suggestion to him, nevertheless like the very loyal English subject that he was, he went immediately to Selsey Bill to avoid further distress to his monarch, George VI. And evidently, immediately thereafter, to avoid further distress to himself, he had promptly snatched the task there on the Phoenixs from the Royal Engineers.
So, I thought? Was that the way it happened? It seemed that kings might have their uses, after all. A whole army of G.I.’s, though they would never know it, would have cause, come D-day, to thank George VI for their lives.
CHAPTER 14
In my new station as a salvage consultant at Selsey Bill who was quite unlikely ever to be further consulted, I had for a brief time excellent opportunity to concentrate attention on our view from the beach at what lay beyond the horizon, waiting us on the Far Shore. No longer was I distracted from that prospect by complete submersion in the details of how somehow to provide something to overcome or evade what we should meet there.
Like most others involved in the planning, I knew what we had with which to hit the enemy. So also did the enemy know all that with the solitary exception of the Mulberries. These, though as unhideable as the Washington Monument, he gave no indication of ever seeing through. (General Jodl, Nazi Chief of Staff for the West, came to the conclusion these concrete structures must be intended by us to be floated across the Channel as replacements for the piers and wharves we should find destroyed in the French ports we hoped to capture. That being Jodl’s opinion, in true Nazi fashion, no one subordinate to Jodl felt called on to do any speculating as to whether Jodl might be wrong.)
But what did the enemy have to hit us with when H-hour arrived? That was what was giving our G.I.’s nightmares.
Some of it we knew, some we could guess at, much of it lay wholly in the realm of pure speculation. And in that realm of speculation, Joseph Goebbels, conductor of a propaganda orchestra the like of which no war had ever seen before, played on our nerves like a virtuoso to create an aura of mystery and terror cloaking the Far Shore, sufficient to fill with fear the stoutest heart waiting on the Near Shore for D-day and make its owner unfit to fight.
On that propaganda field of battle, even if we had had anyone equal to Goebbels, which by far we hadn’t, we and our British friends were at a tremendous disadvantage. We were free peoples with a tradition of freedom; our enemies suffered under no such handicap. Anybody in Britain, soldier or civilian, who had or co
uld get near a radio set (and who amongst the million Americans waiting on the Near Shore for the assault to be launched, couldn’t?) was free to turn on Radio Berlin, Radio Luxembourg, or Radio Calais for their broadcasts to us in English, and get the straight dope on the devilish fate the Nazis had awaiting us, directly from Dr. Goebbels himself.
But those air-waves were not a two-way street, for us to exploit in reverse. In totalitarian Germany and her overrun satellites, Adolf Hitler wasn’t leaving anybody free to listen to us. Round the tuning knob of every radio set in Germany, in Occupied France, in every other occupied country (and that meant practically all Europe) by Nazi edict hung a card containing, in the language of the country, a warning:
“Think—Before you Tune.”
It was as much as any listener’s life was worth to tune an Allied station. For any station, if tuned in, must be turned up full volume, loud enough for all the neighbors to hear—and promptly to report to the Gestapo should it be other than Nazi. And prowl cars, fitted with delicate electronic detection gear, roamed the streets to detect any clandestine receivers or anyone suspected of listening on so low a volume or on earphones so as not to be audible outside—except to those damnable electronic detectors. So in that battle of nerves on the air, our ability to hit back at Goebbels was puny in the extreme, compared to what he could do and was doing to us. For every European listener, at the risk of his life tuned in low on us, Goebbels had 10,000 hearers in England tuned in full blast on his maestros.
There was that fugitive British Fascist, Lord Haw-Haw—William Joyce—Goebbels’ star. Outside of Winston Churchill, not a person lived in Britain who could match Haw-Haw in effectiveness as a speaker. The man was amazing. Had he stayed in England and gone to Parliament, as certainly he would have, even the Prime Minister would have had trouble standing up to him in debate. Many a time I listened to him on the air from Berlin, discussing for the benefit of his fellow Britons, but occasionally for that of us Americans, whatever wartime situation was hottest in the headlines. He’d base his. excellently developed and persuasively presented argument on 99 44/100% fact—things you knew actually were so. And then with those facts, he’d unostentatiously mix in 56/100 of 1% of poisonous fiction on matters you didn’t know and couldn’t possibly quickly check, and leave you gasping helpless to combat his wholly logical conclusion—always, that you were fighting on the wrong side.
The Far Shore Page 11