Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  Hitler summoned General von Brauchitsch, the army commander-in-chief, and his chief of staff, General Balder, to a midnight meeting. He screeched insults, called Fuhrer Directive Number 39 "drivelling nonsense," and declared that there would be no withdrawals on the eastern front; that every German soldier would dig in where he stood, there to fight or die. He summarily relieved Brauchitsch and took personal command of the army-a corporal, relieving a field marshal! The new strategy, of course, went glimmering, for the heart of it was the release of forty or fifty divisions from this east to clean up the Mediterranean. No doubt this was why our January agreement with Japan came out so thin and trivial.

  What had happened to Hitler's thinking?

  Returning to his gloomy snowbound field headquarters, he had had to face some nasty facts. Against staff advice he had driven for Moscow into December. Weather and supply difficulties had halted our cold exhausted troops in exposed positions.

  Russian counterattacks had begun, and local penetrations were occurring. Most unsettling, for a dictator used to nothing but victories! Hitler was haunted by the spectre of Napoleon. We all knew that; copies of Caulaincourt's Memoirs were actually forbidden at staff headquarters, like pornography in a boys' dormitory. Our shaken Fuhrer undoubtedly pictured the front disintegrating, the Wehrmacht routed, the Germans harried out of the land by the Cossacks. This was mere nightmare. Our broad solid front from Leningrad to the Black Sea was nothing like Napoleon's narrow, horse-mounted penetration to Moscow on thin supply lines. But the false analogy obsessed Hitler, so he issued his draconic "Hold or Die" order, and took personal command to see that it was obeyed.

  Granting that every supreme commander is entitled, to his nuit blanche fears, there was no need to send to the Japanese such a dispiriting scrap of paper. Had Hitler dispatched even a small military mission to Tokyo-perhaps Admiral Raeder with General Warlimont or myself - it might have sufficed to tip the scales for the Kuroshima strategy. Or if Hitler, after Pearl Harbor, had invited some high Japanese commanders to Berlin to consider joint planning, we might have closed the Mediterranean a forced England to her knees even while the Russian remained static in the frozen snow, and we tooled up for our summer Caucasus thrust. But no Japanese liaison officer was ever admitted to Supreme Headquarters.

  "Hold or Die Some historians and military analysts still hail the "Hold or Die" order on the eastern front as Hitler's great achievement, a deed of sheer will that "saved" the Wehrmacht. But the truth is that with this order, the Austrian adventurer's star began to wane. The political chief needs detachment in the midst of a war, to keep the big picture in view. Once Hitler took on supreme field command, in which he was merely a headstrong dabbler, he was lost.

  The "Hold or Die" order was in point of fact a hysterical military blunder. Defiant toughness in adversity is a sound doctrine; however, elasticity of defense is another. Far outnumbered in Russia, we excelled the Slav hordes in leadership, fighting ability, and maneuvering skill. Hitler's order froze maneuver, paralyzed leadership, and discouraged fighting spirit by commanding meaningless death. Our image of invincibility evaporated. A new German soldier appeared in Russian propaganda: "Winter Fritz," a pathetic helmeted scarecrow with icicles on his pinched nose, "holding and dying" in an untenable PCST.

  An thus Raeder's plan, the last coherent idea for German victory, faded. One can Turn one's imagination free for extravagant pictures of what might have been; Japanese battleships and aircraft carriers sailing into the Mediterranean under the Rising Sun flag, through a Suez Canal flying the swastika! The political effect would have shaken the earth. And it was feasible. Our defensive lines in Russia, properly shortened and reinforced under Directive Number 39, would have held toughly and bathed the Russian earth in Bolshevik blood. Japan could easily have shielded her Pacific perimeter against the weak Americans in the spring of 1942, with small holding forces.

  But dismiss all this as wistful romance. it remains a sober fact, attested by the Churchill memoirs, that Japan could have taken Madagascar at will, and cut the supply line up the east Africa coast to Egypt. There would then have been no Battle of El Alamein. The starved British African army would have fallen to Rommel in June after his brilliant coup de main at Tobruk.

  Churchill would then probably have fallen too; and the war would have taken a major favorable turn for us.

  Instead, the Mediterranean strategy dwindled into a phantom "Great Plan," the global stroke with which Hitler would wind up the war after beating Russia. He liked to talk about it at dinner, and that was what it remained: table talk.

  The Forgotten Victory

  The great Japanese navy dawdled and dawdled. Not until the end of March was Admiral Nagumo, the conqueror of Pearl Harbor, given a real task. Until then he roamed the blue ocean wastes in minor carrier strikes, "cracking eggshells with a sledgehammer," as the commentator Fuchida says. Japan's fast battleships swung to anchor at their base near Hiroshima as the sands of time trickled away. in March Nagumo finally sailed westward to hit British surface and air forces in the Indian Ocean.

  The purpose was to support the Japanese army's advance into Burma.

  Here at last was a trial run of the Kuroshima strategy, and a huge victory resulted. Nagumo's dive-bombers sank an aircraft carrier, two heavy cruisers, and a destroyer. He demolished two bases in Ceylon, and much merchant shipping. His Zeroes wrought such havoc among the defending Swordfish, Hurricanes, and Spitfires that Winston Churchill in his memoirs confesses the Royal Air Force was never so outfought over Europe. The surviving British battleships fled to British East Africa. British seapower, after two centuries of hegemony, vanished from the Indian Ocean. De facto, it became a Japanese lake. Western historians pass over this stupendous event, except for Churchill, who candidly records his own real shock and fear at the time.

  Thus the Kuroshima concept was vindicated. Madagascar, the African coast, the Suez Canal, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean itself, lay open to the advance of the Japanese fleet. But now it was too late. Nagumo was recalled for other operations.

  The Axis edge in time had run out unused, The Doolittle Raid A brave if harebrained Yankee propaganda action at this time, the notorious Doolittle terror raid against Tokyo, stung Imperial Headquarters into making at last the long-deferred decision, "Which way?" In near-panic, they chose the worst possible course.

  Underestimating the Americans is a mistake their enemies often make. They seem frivolous and easygoing; in fact they are highly mechanically minded,- and capable of considerable ferocity once aroused. The Yanks were too weak in the Pacific just then for anything but light carrier raids. However, they concocted this savage little stunt, the launching of a few Army Air Force bombers against Tokyo from the decks of a carrier. Since Japanese patrols covered only carrier plane ranges, this achieved total surprise. it had no military effect beyond random murder of civilians, a practice the Americans kept up through Dresden and Hiroshima. The aim was to inspirit the home folks and to jolt the foe.

  Technically it was no easy feat. Butthe Americans modified the bombers and altered carrier routine in their usual clever fashion.

  A group of volunteer pilots under the able army flier Doolittle made the sneak attack. Out of a clear , bombs exploded over Tokyo.

  America, rejoiced, the world was astounded, and Japan was jarred to its foundations. After only four months of war the sacred emperor had been exposed to Yankee bombs!

  Yamamoto, the daring supreme admiral who had made the Pearl Harbor decision, now determined that this must not happen again; that the impudent Americans must be taught a lesson, and pushed forever out of carrier range. The answer to a which way" thus came, clear and fatal: "Eastward!" Eastward, where there was nothing material to be gained; but eastward, where the American fleet might be forced to come out and be annihilated. And Japan would seize an enemy outpost, from which she could ward off all future Doolittle outrages. So Nagumo was recalled and the die was cast. Eastward!

  In this way, with su
ch misguided leadership, we and the Japanese turned our backs on each other, sparing the British Empire. We each rode off in the wrong direction on the spherical battlefield. The Wehrmacht set forth on the long march to Stalingrad, and the Japanese navy sailed for Midway.

  TRANSLATOR'S note: this analysis is a study topic at the Naval War College. I have lectured on it. As an army officer, Roon tends to minimize the logistical problems of sea supply lines spanning the whole Indian Ocean, and the flanking threat by sea and air from India.

  Still, the best course for the Axis in the spring of 1942 may well have been to hold against us and Russia, and hit the British hard from both sides. Losses to U-boats were reaching a peak.

  A Japanese drive toward Suez, combined with Rommel's advances in North Africa, might have had grim consequences for the Churchill government.

  If Churchill had fallen, itcould have been a long step to a separate peace.

  But Roon throughout ignores the fact that combined operations are not congenial to totalitarian governments. Typically they are founded by extremists and fanatics, who come to power through conspiracy and crime. Once power is seized and the conspiracy becomes a government, these traits persist As thieves tend to fall out, so totalitarians make poor allies. - V.H.

  BRIGADIER GENERAL LACOUTURE had been misinformed about Natalie's whereabouts.

  A black cloudburst was drenching Siena at midday. In a bad mood, Jastrow was writing at his study desk by lamplight, beside a streaming window. Rainy weather made his shoulders ache; it stiffened his old fingers; and the words always flowed better when he worked out in the sunshine. Natalie's quiet tap signalled, "Minor matter; if you're busy, ignore.

  "Yes? Come in." The passage he was writing demanded a long further look at Martin Luther's views on celibacy. Feeling the weariness of his years and the endlessness of his task, Jastrow welcomed the break. In the shadows cast by the lamplight, her bony face looked pale and sad. She was still not over the blow of their detainment, he thought.

  '."Aaron, have you ever met Mosd Sacerdote?"

  "That Jew who owns the cinema, and half of the real estate on the Banchi'di Sopra?" Pettishly he pulled off his glasses. "I may have.

  I know who he is."

  "He's on the telephone. He says you've met at the archbishop's palace."

  "What does he want?" Jastrow waved the glasses in annoyance. "If he's the man I remember, he is a walleyed and very glum old gent."

  "He'd like you to autograph his copy of A Jew's Jesus.

  "What? After I've been here eleven years, he asks that?"

  "Shall I say you're busy?"

  With a slow calculating little grin, Jastrow breathed on his glasses and polished them." 'Sacerdote," you know, means Cohen in Italian. "Priest." We'd best find out what Mr. Moses Cohen actually wants. Let him come after my nap."

  The storm had passed, the sun shone, and raindrops sparkled on the terrace flowers when an ancient car wheezed up to the gate. Natalie picked her way around puddles to greet the pudgy elderly man in black.

  Jastrow, drinking tea in a lounge chair, waved Sacerdote to a bench beside him.

  "Well, well. The Italian edition, Il Gesil d' un Ebreo," Jastrow said, as the old man handed him a plain blue-bound volume, one of two he carried. Donning glasses, Jastrow turned the pages of cheap coarse paper. "I no longer have a copy myself. Isn't this rather a collector's item? The printing was only a thousand or so, back in 1934."

  "Oh, yes. Very scarce. Very precious. -Ah, thank you, no milk and no sugar." Natalie was pouring tea at a small portable table.

  Sacerdote spoke Italian with a pure Tuscan accent, mellifluous and clear. "A prize possession, Dr. Jastrow. A fine book. Your discussion of the Last Supper, for instance, carries such impact for our young people! They see Last Suppers on church walls, and they attend Passover seders-not always willingly-but they don't connect the two until you do it for them.

  Your proof that the Romans executed Jesus as a political radical, and'that the Jewish common people really loved him, is most important.

  If only that were better understood! Our mutual friend the archbishop once mentioned that very passage to me."

  Jastrow inclined his head, smiling. He loved praise, however trivial, and these days got little of it. "And the other book?"

  Sacerdote extended to Jastrow a scuffed little volume.

  "Another scarce item. I have been spending much time on it lately."

  "Why, I didn't know anything like this existed." He held it out for Natalie to see. "La Lingua Ebraica Contemporanea.

  Imagine!"

  "The Zionist organization in Milan brought it out long ago.

  A small group, but well funded." Sacerdote dropped his voice.

  "Our family may go to Palestine."

  Natalie stopped slicing cake and cleared her throat. "How on earth will you get there?"

  "My son-in-law is arranging that. I believe you know him.

  Doctor Bernardo Castelnuovo, he treats your baby."

  "Of course. He's your son-in-law?"

  With a weary gold-toothed smile at the surprised note, Sacerdote nodded.

  "He's Jewish, then?"

  "Nowadays one doesn't flaunt it, Mrs. Henry."

  "Well, I'm amazed. I had no idea."

  Jastrow handed back the primer, unscrewed the cap of his pen, and started to write on the flyleaf of "Gesa d' un Ebreo.

  "Don't you feel secure here? You're contemplating a very risky journey. We know that from experience."

  "You refer to your time aboard the boat Izmir? My son-in-law and I partly financed the sailing of the Izmir."

  Natalie and Jastrow exchanged astonished glances. "This evening is the Sabbath, Dr. Jastrow. Won't you and your niece come and dine with us? Bernardo will be there. How long since you've had a real Sabbath meal?"

  "About forty years. You're very kind, but I imagine our cook has already started dinner, so-I' Natalie spoke up curtly. "I'd like to go."

  Aaron said, "And Louis?"

  "Oh, you must bring the infant!" Sacerdote said. "My granddaughter Miriam will adore him."

  Jastrow completed his scrawl on the flyleaf. "Well, then, we will come. Thank you."

  Sacerdote clasped the book. "Now we have a family treasure."

  Natalie ran a hand over her hair, pulled straight back in a bun.

  "What happened to the Izmir? What happened to Avram Rabinovitz, do you know?

  Is he alive?"

  "Bernardo will tell you everything."

  The Sacerdotes and the Casteinuovos lived in the modern part of Siena outside the ancient walls, atop an ugly stucco apartment house which Mosd Sacerdote owned, and which he called a "palazzo." The lift was not working, and they had to climb five flights of musty stairs.

  Manipulating several keys and locks, he let them into a roomy apartment, full of appetizing dinner fragrances, highly polished heavy furniture, whole walls of books, and elegant silver and china in massive breakfronts.

  Dr. Casteinuovo met them in a hallway. Natalie had never though much of him; a small-town doctor, but thebest Siena could offer, and his gallant office manners had rather charmed her. His heavy black hair, liquid brown eyes, and dark long face gave him the wholly Tuscan look one saw in old Siena paintings. It had never crossed Natalie's mind that this man might be a Jew.

  In the dining room the doctor presented them to his wife and mother-in-law, who also looked quite Italian: both stout, both dressed in black silk, with heavy-lidded eyes, large chins, and similar sweet unworldly smiles. The mother was gray and unpainted; the daughter had brown hair and wore a touch of lipstick. In sunset light that reddened the tall windows, they were preparing to light Sabbath candles on a lavishly set table. As they donned black lace caps, a sallow little girl in brown velvet ran lightly into the room. Halting by her mother's skirt, she smiled at the baby on Natalie's arm.

  The candles flared up in four ornate silver candlesticks. The two women covered their eyes and murmured blessings. The, girl droppe
d in a chair, holding out her arms and piping in lucid Italian, "I love him.

  Let me have him."

  Natalie put the infant in Miriam's lap. The thin pale arms closed around the baby in a comically competent way. Louis looked her over and nestled against her, hanging on her neck.

  Sacerdote spoke hesitantly. "Would you be interested, Dr. Jastrow, to come to the synagogue with us?"

  "Ah, yes. The archbishop did tell me, years ago, that a synagogue did exist, somewhere down near the Piazza del Campo." Jastrow sounded surprised and amused. "Is it architecturally interesting?"

  "It's just an old synagogue," Castelnuovo said irritably.

  "We're not very religious. Father is the president. It's never easy to assemble ten men, so I go. One sometimes hears new! there."