Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  . About Warren, Pug thought, he could have done nothing.

  Warren had always wanted the Navy. By becoming an aviator, he had outdone the father he was emulating. The aviators who survived would become the Navy's next wave of admirals. That was already clear. As for Byron, Pug knew he had forced him into submarines and parted him from his Jewish wife. This was a sunken rock always to be steered around when they were together. Byron would have been called up anyway, and he might even have chosen submarines. But Pug could not clear himself of muddying Byron's life, -proud as he was of the Devilfish's sinkings-of pushing him into hazard.

  A poignant sense engulfed him of the one-way flow of time, of the offhand decisions, the slight impulsive mistakes, that could swell and become a man's fate. There they sat, the little boys he had stiffly disciplined and silently loved, transformed into naval officers and combat veterans. It seemed the work of a master illusionist who could just as easily, if he chose, reverse the trick and change the red-bearded submariner and the broad-chested aviator back into quarrelling lads on a Manila lawn. But Pug knew those lads were gone.

  He himself had changed into a grim old dog, and they too would keep changing in one direction. Byron would at last come to the adult form and personality that still eluded him. WarrenThe strange thing was that Victor Henry could not picture Warren changing any further.

  Warren as he sat there in the sun, holding that beer can, the cigarette slanting from his thin mouth, his body developed, full, and powerful, his face carved in lines of self-confidence and resolution, his blue eyes glinting with suppressed humor, was Warren as he would always be.

  So the father could not help thinking, and as the thought took root, a stinging cold shiver traversed his body.

  He shouted, stepping out of the doorway; "Say, is there any beer left, or have you two problem drinkers soaked it all up?"

  Byron jumped to his feet and brought his father a tall frosty glass of beer.

  "Dad, Natalie's coming home on a Swedish boat! That's what Janice's father has heard, anyway. How about that?"

  "Why, that's glorious news, Briny."

  "Yes, I'm still trying to call the State Department to confirm it.

  But Warren thinks I shouldn't transfer, because SubPac's where all the glory is."

  "I never mentioned glory," said Warren. "Did I say glory?

  I don't give a shit about glory-pardon me, Dad-I said the subs are carrying the fight in this ocean, and you've got the chance of a lifetime to take a hand in history."

  "What else is glory?" said his father.

  Byron said, "What do you think, Dad?"

  Here was the sunken rock again, thought Pug. He answered at once, "Take your transfer and go. This Pacific war will be a long one.

  You'll get back here in time to make all the history you can handle.

  You've never seen your son andnow, why the wise grin?"

  "You surprise me, that's all."

  The telephone was ringing and ringing in the house.

  "By God," Pug said, "that's something to celebrate, Natalie coming home! When were we last together like this, anyway? Wasn't it at Warren's wedding? Seems to me an anniversary party is overdue here also."

  "Right," Warren said. "I remembered the date, but I was flying patrols off Samoa."

  The ringing stopped.

  "Well, I'm for having a champagne dinner at the Moana Hotel tomorrow night," Pug said. "How about it?"

  "Hey! Janice would love that, Dad, getting off this hill, maybe dancing."

  "I'm in," said Byron, getting up and making for the kitchen door. "I buy the wine. Maybe that's my call to Washington."

  Janice came running out on the lanai, flushed and wideeyed. "Dad, it's for you and guess who? Alistair Tudsbury.

  He's calling from the Moana."

  PART TWO

  Midway ah to Midway

  (from World Holocaust by Armin von Roon) TRANSLATORS NOTE.. The German edition opens with an analysis of the Soviet counterattacks in the winter of 1941-1942. For American readers a better-starting point is Roon's fine prologue to the Battle of Midway, which also touches on the Russian picture. The different theatres of war affected each other more than is generally appreciated, and Roon is well aware of the linkages.-V.H.

  The Japanese Surge

  After Pearl Harbor we had to face the United States of America as a full and angry belligerent. We gained a brave but poor comrade-in-arms, a far-off Asiatic island folk with tess land surface and natural wealth than just one American state, California; and a fresh enemy in the field wielding the greatest war-making potential on earth. The odds had mounted against us. Yet in our General Staff we could still see in the situation elements of an upset victory.

  For the bedrock of war is geography, and geographically our posture remained awesome. With one boot on the Atlantic shorli and the other on the snows outside Moscow, the FUhrer bestrode Europe more completely than Napoleon at his far reach, or Charles V of Spain, or the Antonine emperors. From the Arctic to the Mediterranean, every nation was either our ally, or a friendly neutral, or a conquered subject. Under our submarine onslaught, American Lend-Lease help and Brittan's colonial resources were going to the sea bottom. Each month fewer Allied ships were left afloat, for all the feverish work in their shipyards. Churchill himself has confessed in his memoirs, "The one thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat campaign."

  As for the Soviet Union, its winter counterattack had achieved local gains at bloody costs; but as it petered out, our battlehardened troops still gripped the rich bulk of Russia west of the Volga. As a nation we had burned our bridges, and had I turned with one will to fighting the war. Despite England's air bombings, our war production was'still mounting.

  And now Japan was debouching on the world battleground with blazing victories!

  Adolf Hitler at once embraced these doughty little Asians as comrades. The mystical bunkum of Nordic supremacy was for Nazi fanatics. We Wehrmacht officers despised it, and we observed with relief that Hitler did too. If a people twelve thousand miles away could help us gain world empire, their skins might be yellow, black, or green for all the Fuhrer cared. The Japanese were not disturbed by Nazi theories, because by their Shinto faith they themselves were the "master race." Unlike our General Staff, the Japanese high command seems to have allowed this rubbish to affect their judgment.

  Military judgment should never stray far from the basic factors of time, space, and force. The key to an Axis upset victory was time. As to space, we had the advantage of operating on strong interior lines in Europe, while our foes were scattered around our rim; but our one effective ally lay on the other side of the globe. The cold arithmetic of force, in the long run, added up much to our disfavor. Yet the Americans at the moment were weak, and their impact in the field was at least a year away.

  Because of their thirst for revenge on Japan, we could expect a fall in their Lend-Lease aid to the hard-pressed British and Russians.

  In short, we still had an edge in time in which to snatch a victory, or compel a tolerable peace.

  The Spherical Battlefield

  In December 1941, with the industrial civilization all around the northern hemisphere leaping into flame, one grand theme loomed through the smoke. The battleground had become the surface of a sphere. This posed unprecedented strategic choices.

  England and Russia had to exert all their strength just to contain Germany, but Japan, the United States, and the Third Reich now had to decide: "Which way to strike?"

  Ever since 1918, as is well known, the American armed forces had been planning for simultaneous war against Germany and Japan. Their notorious Rainbow Five doctrine, drawn up years before Adolf Hitler ever marched, provided a ready answer to the question: eastward, or "Germany first," on the Clausewitz rule, strike for the heart.

  Franklin Roosevelt had the willpower and the sense, in the face of the storm in his country against Japan, to hold to this sound military precept. Under his bluff jol
ly exterior of a Christian humanitarian, President Rooseelt was a devious and frigid conqueror, much more fitted for war on the surface of a sphere than the impulsive, romantic, Europeanminded FUhrer.

  Japan's problem was more complex. To the north lay rich Siberia, half-denuded of troops for the defense of Moscow; to the west, China, on its knees but still mushily resisting; to the southwest, the treasures of indo-China, the indies, and vast India; to the south, New Guinea and white Australia; to the southeast, the valuable island chains athwart the supply line from Australia to the United States. To the east America glowered, distant and -enfeebled, yet thrusting into Japan's Lebensraum its thorny imperialist outposts of Hawaii and Midway.

  Japan's oil stocks were burning down like a candle. Six months earlier, Franklin Roosevelt had embargoed Japan's fuel supply, and this cruel bullying had compelled her to go to war. She lacked steel; she lacked food; she lacked most of the necessities for a long war. A reckoning for her spree of early victories had to come. With her limited strength, in her limited time, Japan had to strike one decisive blow. But-"Which way?"

  For the moment Siberia was out. Before attacking the imperialist plutocracies, Japan had prudently signed a neutrality treaty with the Soviet Union. Hitler had fatuously failed to demand, as a quid pro quo for his declaration of war on the United States, that Japan denounce the treaty and come in against Russia. Thus Japan's rear was safe, and we could not combine with her against the Bolsheviks.

  Truly Germany's position was bizarre! All the members of a world-girdling alliance were attacking us, while Japan, our strongest ally, stayed at peace with Russia, our strongest foe!

  Already the German people were paying dearly for the Fuhrerprinzip, which placed total reliance on Hitler's politics.

  Italy had a sizable navy and air force and numerous troops; but with her cardboard dictator and unwarlike people, she was a drain on our fuel and steel, and her long open Mediterranean coastline was our worst weak spot.

  These factors all pointed one way. Against the English, all three Axis powers could still combine. Even Italy would be of some use in the Mediterranean and in North Africa. Obviously we had one best course: speedily to unite in smashing the faltering British Empire, while going on the defensive against stronger foes-in our case Russia, in Japan's case America. This could be done, and this could be done in time. like nothing else, the fall of England would signal a turn in world history, multiplying the impact of Japan's triumphs in the Far East.

  The Mediterranean Strategy

  The way to destroy the British Empire was by closing the Mediterranean and cutting its lifeline to India and Australia.

  Admiral Raeder had first suggested the plan in 1940. It called for the seizure of Gibraltar, a landing in Tunis, and a drive across Libya and Egypt to the Suez Canal and the Middle East, where we could count on an open-arms welcome from the Arabs and the Persians. A glance at a map shows the glitter of the concept.

  Spain, France, and Turkey, the three major soft spots in our hegemony, would drop into our camp. With French North Africa in hand, the Greater German Empire would become a hard pyramid, based in the south on Sahara sands from Dakar through Egypt, Palestine, and Syria to the Persian Gulf; its apex in Norway under the midnight sun; its western slope the Atlantic Ocean and its fortified coasts; its eastern slope (in 1940) the border with the Soviet Union.

  Our weak southern ally, Italy, would be safely locked within an Axis lake. The island of Malta, Britain's flinty little bastion in mid-Mediterranean, would starve and fall. The riches of Africa would flow in ships to German -Europe. We would gain the oil of the Persian Gulf, and the raw materials of Asia. From the bulge of Dakar we would dominate opulent South America. it was the beckoning of the golden age, the dawn of the German world imperium itself.

  As early as 1940, and again for a while in 1941, Hitler had shown serious interest in this farseeing plan. The Arabs of the region loathed their French and British masters, and the Arab Freedom Movement welcomed our propaganda and agents.

  Hitler had actually explored with Franco the Gibraltar question.

  But the cautious -Spaniard had equivocated, and the FUhrer's heart had been in the coming assault against Russia, so Barbarossa had temporarily eclipsed. the Mediterranean strategy.

  But now the hour of this historic idea had surely come. A strong German presence had arisen in Greece, Crete, and Yugoslavia. Rommel was on the march in Africa. The Soviet menace had been rolled back almost one thousand miles, far out of bombing range of the Fatherland.

  The naval forces of England were stretched paper-thin, and the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse had created a seapower vacuum in the Indian Ocean. Australia and New Zealand wanted their troops back from North Africa to defend Singapore and their own homelands. We were, in fact, witnessing the crack-up of the British world system before our eyes.

  When the foe is staggering, that is the time to knock him out.

  At that moment, we had the world's strongest navy allied with the world's strongest army. If Japan would assault the British Empire westward via the Indian Ocean, while we attacked eastward overland along the Mediterranean littoral, would not this antiquated imperium be crushed like a rotten hazel nut in a steel nutcracker?

  The Kuroshima Strategy

  There emerged in Japanese naval circles at this time a wonderfully conceived secret war plan, the Kuroshima strategy. it showed professional insight and daring worthy of a Manstein.

  The swift fall of the British plutocracy, and a different end to the Second World War, were real possibilities under this plan.

  Captain Kameto Kuroshima was the senior fleet operations officer of the Japanese.fleet; an eccentric intellectual of unmilitary habits but flashy strategic genius. it was he who had designed the masterly Pearl Harbor attack. Ever since, the Japanese navy had been studying long-range follow-up plans'. thrusts to the east, to the south, to the west. The navy's fighting spirit was high, and Captain Kuroshima's concept of "westward operations" was the counterpart of our Mediterranean strategy.

  His ideas still stir the soul: Operations should be timed to synchronize with German offensives in the Near and Middle East The objectives would be a. destruction of the Britiih fleet b. capture of stritegk points and elimination of enemy bases c. establishment of contact between the Japanese and European Axis forces.

  Kuroshima's superior, Rear Admiral Ugaki, put aside his own breathtaking plan for seizing the Hawaiian Islands, and set his entire staff to studying Kuroshima's scheme. At that time a Japanese-German military agreement was actually being negotiated in Berlin. Unhappily, it turned out to be a shallow document. The scant two pages made no provision for joint staff studies or combined strategy. The globe was parted into two "operational zones" by a line through western India.

  Orotund generalities followed: west of the line Germany and Italy would destroy the enemy, east of the line Japan would do likewise, etc etc.

  Empty pleasantrift about exchanging information' cooperating in supply, and conducting the "trade war" closed the footling instrument.

  Discouraged by this diplomatic bungling, the Japanese navy planners gave up "westward operations" as a lost cause.

  Alas!

  Hitler Berserk

  Ironically, Hitler just then had been re-examining Raeder's Mediterranean strategy.

  An isolationist American newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, had got hold of the top-secret Rainbow Five war program, and had printed the full text under big black anti-Roosevelt headlines.* This strange act of treason was of course a fine intelligence break for us. The document was unmistakably genuine; Hitler referred to it in declaring war on America. it called for a gigantic invasion of Europe in 1943 by a newly recruited United States Army of millions, with the British Isles as the main invasion base, and large British supporting forces.

  Admiral Raeder pounced on this information. Clearly a knockout of England would foil the whole scheme and stun the United States.

  Even while Hitl
er was mulling this over, the Japanese smashed Pearl Harbor. Euphoric days ensued. Hitler heard the navy, the army,* and the Luftwaffe argue in favor of Raeder's plan. He fully grtisped the main idea-to crush theweakest foe in speedyjoint Axis attacks-and at last he indicated tentative approval, and went off to the eastern front. Our staff speedily worked up FQhrer Directive Number 39, switching to the defensive in Russia, with the necessary withdrawals and preparations of rear positions; and we forwarded it to him at his headquarters.

  Thereupon all the devils came storming out of Hell!

  Roon is in error. The Tribune printed excerpts from the top-secret "Victory Program," a resources analysis-V.H.

  "Army advocacy was less than unanimous. my memorandum in support of Raeder survives in my files. Generals on the Russian front tended to scorn the Mediterranean strategy as a "fantasy " it was no more a "fantasy," as it turned out, than the notion of beating the soviet union. -A.v.R.