Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

"What!"

  "You heard me. Huge carrier raid! All kinds of enormous damage.

  The Yanks are in it, Pam! In it up to their necks this time!

  What else matters? We've won the damned war, I tell you! I must have a drink on it or I'll die.", He splashed whiskey into a tumbler, gulped it, and coughed. "Whew. We've won it. Won it! What a close-run thing. We've really won this damned war. I'll have to rewrite that piece from page one, but by God, what a glorious moment to live in!

  These are the days of the giants, Pam.

  Their footsteps are shaking the earth-"

  "What ships were hit?"

  "Oh, the Yanks aren't talking, naturally. But the damage is immense.

  That much comes straight from the wire services in Honolulu.

  We weren't caught short here, thank the Christ!

  They tried to come ashore at Khota Baru airfield, but we shoved them back into the sea. They did gain a beachhead in Thailand. We'll be marching up there this morning to knock them all on the head. Two crack divisions are on the border, ready to jump off. The Japs have really run their heads into noose this time, and-now what's wrong?"

  The back of her hand to her eyes, Pamela was striding to her bedroom.

  "Nothing, nothing, nothing!" She gestured at the desk.

  "There's your damned draft."

  Tudsbury's broadcast brought telephone calls and cables of congratulations from London, Sydney, and New York. He spoke of vast secret stockpiles and fortifications that he had seen with his own eyes; of heavy reinforcements on the way, as he knew from the highest military sources; of the striking calm of Europeans and Asiatics alike under the bombing. His draft script had cited the street lamps burning during the raid, as a humorous instance of Singapore's sangfroid.

  Hesitantly, apologetically, the censor had asked him to cut this.

  He had amiably agreed.

  Reeling off the statistics of Americars giant industrial resources, Tudsbury closed with this peroration: "Wars are not fought by cold statistics, true, but by warm-blooded suffering men. Yet statistics foreshadow outcomes. This war, though it must yet cause grisly tragedy to mankind, will be won. We know that now.

  "For the grim closing struggle, I can report, Fortress Singapore is ready. Fortress Singapore does not expect a tea party, But it is well prepared for its uninvited guests. Of one thing, let the outside world rest assured. The Japanese will not enjoy - if they ever get close enough to taste it - the bitter brew that awaits them at Fortress Singapore." When he walked into the bar of the Tanglin Club after the broadcast, the people there rose to a man and clapped, bringing tears trickling on his fat face.

  The bombers did not come again to Singapore. There was little word of fighting up-country, either. For Pamela it was a queerly evocative tropical replay of the "phony war" in 1939: the same rift of excitement, the same odd unreality, the same "back to business-as-usual." The blackout was regarded as awkward novel fun, though the shortage of dark cloth gave the club ladies a cause for anxious twittering as they sat rolling bandages in sultry flowery gardens. Air raid wardens in tin hats self-importantly stalked the streets.

  However, there were no air raid shelters.

  This lack bothered Tudsbury. He quizzed the governor.

  "Watery subsoil, dear fellow,-" said the governor. Tudsbury pointed out that at the naval base he had seen giant concrete bunkers deep in the earth endlessly stacked with cannon shells, food, and fuel.

  What about the watery subsoil? The governor smiled at his sharpness.

  Yes, those caverns had been sunk in the swampy ground at great cost, for the security of the Empire. But in the city sugh a drastic measure, quite aside from the expense, would alarm the Asiatic populace.

  Adequate instructions existed for taking shelter in cellars and stone buildings. If required, an elaborate evacuation plan was ready.

  Tudsbury reluctantly accepted all this. He was the lion of the Tanglin Club, Singapore's reassuring radio voice to the world.

  But he had trouble filling his broadcast time. In the first army communiques the Jap invasion vessels were reported retiring, leaving a few troops behind on surrounded beachheads, and these stranded invaders were being wiped out according to plan. Since then the information had been getting sparser. The place names had been sliding strangely southward. One day the communique in its entirety read, "Nothing new to report." A theory began circulating at the white men's clubs.

  Like the Russians fighting Hitler, the military command was cleverly trading space for time, wearing the Japs out in the equatorial jungle, which was as hard on troops as the Russian winter.

  Then there was the "monsoon" theory. Army experts had long held that after October, Singapore could rest easy for half a year, since the enemy could not land during the northeast monsoon. But the Japs had in fact landed. The experts now were explaining that any rash military plan could be tried, but the Japanese invasion, fatally weakened by losses in monsoon surf, was bound to peter, out in the jungle.

  Though Tudsbury broadcast these theories, the absence of hard news gnawed at him. The way he had been welcomed, and the impact of his first broadcast, had pushed upon him the role of optimist, but he felt he was getting out on a limb.

  Then came the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse.

  Here was hard news! Disaster at the outset, with a strong odor of blundering; sickening, yet familiar in British war-making. Two correspondents returned alive from the Repulse, shaken and ill, with historic scoops. Tudsbury had to compete. He burst in on his high military friends, demanded the truth, and got it. The brave little admiral had steamed north, intending to surprise the invasion force, smash it up fast, and escape from the Jap land-based bombers. He had had no air cover. The nearest British carrier was in India. The local R.A.F command had lacked the planes or had missed the signals; that part was vague. Japanese torpedo planes and dive bombers had roared in and sunk both capital ships. The admiral had drowned.

  The Empire lay open now to a Japanese navy -that included ten battleships and six major aircraft carriers, with only a much-weakened American navy at its back to worry about.

  Tudsbury rushed to the Raffles and dictated this hot story to Pamela, centering it on one theme: air power. His broadcast was half an editorial. England had just bought with blood the knowledge that warships could not stand up against land-based air. He pleaded: Turn the lesson against the enemy! The Royal Air Force was the world's greatest air arm.

  Quick massive air reinforcements of Malaya could cut off and doom the Jap invaders. Here was an opportunity worth any sacrifice on other fronts; a turnabout that would redeem the disaster and preserve the Empire.

  He sent the draft to the censor's office by runner. Three hours before broadcast time, the censor telephoned him; the broadcast was fine, except that he could not say the ships had lacked air cover.

  Not accustomed to such interference, Alistair Tudsbury sped to the censor's office in a taxi, sweating and muttering. The censor, a frail blond man with a pursed little smile, shook with terror at Tudsbury's roars, staring at him with round moist little eyes. His military adviser was a navy captain, plump, white-haired, pinkskinned, clad in faultless tropic whites, who gave no reason for his ruling except a reiterated, "Frightfully sorry, old chap, but we can't have it."

  After long arguing Tudsbury thrust quivering grapecolored jowls right in his face, bellowin , "All right, before I go directly to Air Chief Marshal Brooke-Popham, WHY can't you have it?"

  "It's vital military information. We must deny it to the enemy."

  "The enemy? Why, who do you suppose sank those ships?

  My broadcast can bring Singapore such a cloud of fighter planes that nothing like that will happen again!"

  "Yes, sir, that part is splendidly written, I grant you."

  "But unless I say there was no air cover, the story is pointless!

  Can't you see that? Incomprehensible! Idiotic!"

  "Frightfully sorry, sir, but we can't have it."<
br />
  Tudsbury catapulted out to the nearest telephone. The air chief marshal was unavailable. The governor was out inspecting defenses.

  The time before his broadcast shrank. Arriving at the broadcasting studios in a rage, he proposed to Jeff McMahon that he go on the air, read his uncut script, and take the consequences.

  "Good Lord, we're at war, Tudsbury!" McMahon protested. "Do you want us all to go to prison? We'll have to switch you off."

  The fat old correspondent was running'out of indignation and energy. "I broadcast for four years'from Berlin, McMahon," he grated.

  "Goebbels himself never dared to tamper with my scripts like this.

  Not once! The British administration of Singapore does dare. How is that ?"

  "My dear fellow, the Germans only talk about bing the master race Elsa McMahon's husband said drily. "You're on in ten minutes."

  IN A HEAVY sea, in the early darkness of the morning watch, the U.S.S. Devilfish pounded along the west coast of Luzon toward Lingayen Gulf. Byron stood wedged by the gyroscope repeater on the tiny bridge in sticky foul weather clothes, and with every plunge of the forecastle, warm black spray struck his face. The lookouts were silent-shadows. They wouldn't doze tonight, Byron thought. Except for this sense of heading toward trouble, and for running darkened, Byron's first O.O.D watch under way in wartime was like any other night watch: uneventful peering into the gloom on a windy wet rolling bridge, through long empty hours.

  About the trouble ahead, he knew more than the crewmen.

  This was less a patrol than a suicide mission; Aster had showed him on the Lingayen Gulf chart the shallow depth figures,. and the reefs that nearly blocked the mouth of the gulf. The clear entrance to the east would be crawling with Jap antisubmarine vessels. If an American sub did by some fluke slip- past them to torpedo a troop transport, thereby atertingthewholeinvasionforce-well asasterputit'from then on life aboard might be disagreeable and short.

  Byron accepted all this. Yet Prien's penetration of Scapa Flow to sink the Royal Oak had been as dangerous a venture.

  The U-boat captain had brought it off, and come home safe to a hero's welcome and a medal from Hitler's hands. Advancing through the dark in a lone submarine, toward a huge enemy force that commanded the air and sea, filled Byron with highstrung zest; possibly a stupid feeling, he knew, but a real one. The exec obviously felt the same way. Carter Aster was smoking a long brown Havana tonight. That meant his spirits were high; otherwise he consumed vile gray Philippine ropes. As for Captain Hoban, he was almost fizzing with combat verve.

  Byron's resentment of his commanding officer was gone.

  The captain had ridden him hard, but that contest of wills now seemed his own fault; his persistence in sloth had been childish.

  Branch Hoban was a superb shiphandler. He had proved it again, threading out through the tricky new mine fields laid in Manila Bay to block Jap I-boats. He was a skilled submarine engineer, ready and quick to get his hands dirty on a diesel engine, or to sting them with battery acid. His failings were only those of any Academy eager beaver; anxiety to make a record, tough punctiliousness about paperwork, a tendency to grease four-stripers and admirals. So what?

  He had won E's in engineering and torpedo shooting. Those were the things that mattered in combat. Heading toward the enemy, Hoban was a reassuring boss man.

  When the east showed a faint graying, the captain came up on the bridge for a look at the lowering sky. "Lady wants to submerge at 0600. Why the devil should we, with this visibility? We're a long way from Lingayen. I'm not crawling there at three knots, and let the Salmon and the Porpoise beat me to the attack. Put on four extra lookouts. Conduct continuous quadrant searches of the sky, and go to fulled."."Aye aye, sir." day brightened. The Devilfish nauseatingly cork-, screwed and jarred through gray wind-streaked swells-at twenty knots. Hoban drank mug after mug of coffee, and smoked cigarette after cigarette in a cupped hand, ignoring the spray that drenched him. Coming off watch, Byron foundAster bent over the navigator's chart in the conning tower, gloomily chewing a dead cigar. To Byron's "Good morning," he barely grunted a response.

  "What's the matter, Lady?"

  With a side glance at the helmsman, Aster growled, "How do we know the Jap planes don't have radar? They're full of surprises, those yellow monkeys. And what about Jap subs?

  In daylight we're a sitting tin duck. I want to get to Lingayen fast, too. But I want to get there."

  Over Aster's shoulder, Byron glanced at the chart. The peninsula projected northwestward of Luzon's land mass like the thumb of a yellow mitten; the U-shaped blue space between thumb and hand was Lingayen Gulf. The course line showed the submarine halfway up the thumb.

  Beyond the tip, the projected course was a turn east along the reefs and shoals, then a Turn south back down the whole length of the thumb to the assumed landing beach, the point nearest Manila.

  "Say, Lady, did you ever hear of Gunther Prien?"

  "Sure. The kraut that sank the Royal Oak at Scapa Flow.

  What about him?"

  "He gave a lecture in Berlin. I was there." Byron ran a finger along the line of reefs. "He penetrated Scapa Flow through stuff like this. Found a hole and slipped through on the surface."

  Aster turned his long-jawed face to Byron, forehead knotted, mouth corners curled in his strange cold smile.

  "Why, Briny Henry, you getting eager to polish medals?

  You?"

  "Well, we'd get there faster if we cut through the reefs, wouldn't we? And we'd duck the destroyers up at the entrance."

  Aster's satiric look faded. He reached for the coastal pilot book.

  A-OOGHA! A-OOGHA! A-OOGHA!

  "Dive, dive, dive." Branch Hoban's voice, urgent but calm, boomed through the boat. The deck pitched forward.

  Lookouts dropped trampling through the dripping hatch, followed by the O.O.D, the captain, and last the quartermaster, slamming the hatch and dogging it shut. Byron heard the old hiss and sigh, as though the boat were a live monster taking a deep breath, and felt in his ears the sudden airtightness, before the chief below called, "Pressure in the boat!" The Devilfah slowed, plowing sluggishly downward with loud gurglings and sloshings.

  Hoban wiped his streaming face. "Whitey Pringle spotted a low-flying plane. Or maybe it was a seagull. Pringle has good eyes.

  I didn't argue. The sun's starting to break through, anyhow, Lady.

  Level off at three hundred."

  "Aye aye, sir," Aster said.

  Byron slithered down to the control room, and walked forward on the downslanted deck. The Christmas tree of small lights on the port bulkhead, flashing the condition of every opening in the hull, showed solid green. The planesmen at their big wheels had calm eyes fixed on the depth gauges; no trace of combat anxiety here.

  "Blow negative to the mark!" The routine procedure scarcely registered on Byron. In the forward torpedo room he found Chief Hansen and his crewmen affwng warheads to two torpedoes newly loaded aboard.

  Byron's eyes smarted; he had had no sleep since the departure from Manila, but he wanted to confirm torpedo readiness for himself Hansen reported all six bow tubes loaded; all fish checked out in working order; the new secret exploders ready for insertion in the warheads.

  Racked along the bulkheads were yellow dummy warheads, which in peacetime had been filled with water for practice shots; compressed air would empty them, and the torpedoes would float for recovery.

  Unpainted iron warheads full of TNT now tipped the torpedoes; impossible to detonate without exploders, yet Byron had seen the crew handle these gray warheads with gingerly respect for the havoc and murder in them.

  As Byron drank coffee with the torpedomen, crouched on a bunk slung over a torpedo, Lieutenant Aster appeared. "By the Christ, Briny, he's going to try it."

  "Try what?"

  "Why, that notion of yours' He's been studying the chart and the sailing directions. We're going to surface and look for a break in the reefs. He wants to talk to you a
bout that U-boat skipper's lecture."

  In a sparkling noonday, the black snout of the submarine broke the surface. Byron stepped unsteadily out into brilliant hot sunshine on the pitching slippery forecastle, still ash with foaming seawater.

  Lookouts and leadsmen in bulky life jackets stumbled and slipped after him. He could not help a swift glance up at the cloudless blue sky.

  After the stale air below, the fresh wind was delicious as always, and the pleasure was sharper today because of the danger. Dead ahead, where the dark ocean merged into green shallows, foaming breakers roared against tiny palm islands and jagged brown rocks.

  White gulls came cawing and screeching over the submarine.

  "All ahead one-third! Heave your leads!" Hoban's shout from the bridge was muffled by the heavy wash on the hull and the grinding sound of the breakers. Coral heads were showing, far down in the deep-pink spires, rounded gray domes. The Devilfish was heading for a notch between two rocky little islands.