Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  But now he lights up and puffs calmly, as the Commandant takes him around to the back of the bunker, while they wait for the gas to do its work.

  He shows Himmler the enormous and ever-expanding area of the mass graves, and explains the mounting problems. For hundreds of meters, in every direction, there are vast mounds of earth here and there in the grassy field. A rail track runs through them, ending near a large hole-with earth piled high beside it, where the special kommandos are still digging. The expression on Himmler's face sharpens. His lips disappear as he puffs the skin around them in his curious fashion; a sure signal that he is intensely interested.

  For the first time since their arrival at the bunker, he speaks; in a low calm voice, not to the Commandant, but to an aide, a tall good-looking colonel, who pulls off his black glove and makes rapid notes on a pad.

  The gate in the back fence swings open. From the open back door of the bunker comes a cart heaped high with naked bodies rolling toward the inspection party on the rails, hauled and pushed by different Sonderkommandos, the burial detail.

  As the cart passes the SS officers, there is a whiff of the disinfectant, rather like carbolic acid. The naked people look not much different than they did less than half an hour ago, except that they are absolutely still now, streaked with excrement, and all jumbled together, some with jaws hanging open and wide eyes fixed and staring-old men, little children, pretty women, in an inert heap. One can still admire the looks of the women and the charm of the kids.

  These Jew kommandos couldn't be more businesslike about the whole thing. Where the rails end, they crank the cart up so that the bodies slide to the ground in a tangle. A few of them push the cart back toward the bunker. The rest, together with the diggers who come climbing out of the pit, haul the bodies to the edge of the hole by an arm or a leg-some of therp use big meat hooks, which the Commandant finds personally distasteful -and toss the dead down out of sight.

  Reichsfuhrer Himmler is interested. He walks to the edge of the pit, and observes the kommandos laying out the warm naked bodies in rows, and sprinkling white powder on them. This, the Commandant explains, is quicklime. Something must be done, because the water table of the whole area is being contaminated. The bacteria count even of the drinking water at the SS barracks has gone up to the danger level. In the long run, as he has repeatedly complained to Berlin, burial is no answer; certainly it won't be once the actions that Lieutenant Colonel Eichmann has projected, on a scale of hundreds of thousands of Jews every few weeks, start to materialize.

  The whole system will break down, he insists, if drastic steps are not taken at once. Nothing is adequate. The cottage bunker is a makeshift. Another one is being readied nearby, but it too is only a stopgap. The crematoriums remain pretty models in the Central Building Board office, and Berlin has simply been ignoring the disposal problem.

  The Commandant, in his honest preoccupation with this serious matter, pours out his heart to the Reichsfuhrer SS, while the special kommandos continue to cart out bodies, throw them in the hole, and stack them in rows. So caught up is he in his pleas that when he sees the dead baby girl come tumbling out of the cart with the broken branch in her hand it does not bother him.

  Sincerity pays off. He can see that he is making an impression.

  Himmler gives a sharp jerky nod; he puff'S out his mouth so that his lips disappear, and he glances around at his aides.

  "So?" says the Reichsfuhrer. "And what is next?"

  "The crematoriums will be built," he says next day to the Commandant, in a private meeting just before going to the aerodrome.

  The meeting is almost over. The last serious request, for permission to use Jews in sterilization experiments, which the Commandant put with some trepidation, has been cheerfully granted.

  They are in an inner office at the Building Board.

  Only Schmauser, the SS general in charge of all of south Poland, and therefore of Auschwitz, is present.

  "The construction of crematoriums will take priority even over I.

  G. Farben," Himmler states. "They will be completed before the end of the year. Schmauser will override all other projects in this province for labor and materials." Himmler waves his black swagger stick at the general, who hastily nods. "You will hear from me further about the disposal problem. You have told me all your difficulties, and given me an honest look at Auschwitz. I am satisfied that you are doing your best under very tough conditions. It is wartime, and we have to think in terms of war. Assign your best construction crews to the crematoriums. When they are completed, liquidate the crews.

  Understood?"

  "Understood, Herr Reichsfuhrer."

  "I promote you to Obersturmbannfuhrer. Congratulations.

  Now I am on my way."

  Lieutenant Colonel! SPot promotion!

  A week later, Ernst Klinger is promoted, too, to Untersturmfuhrer.

  At the same time, he receives a different assignment for his construction crew. They have a new designation: Arbeitskommando, Crematorium fl..

  Midway (from World Holocaust by Armin von Roon) One of the decisive battles in the history of the world was fought at sea at this time on the other side of the globe, almost unnoticed in Germany, even in our Supreme Headquarters. The failure of our Japanese allies to furnish us the truth about Midway amounted to bad faith. However, Hitler hated gloomy news, and most likely would have ignored an honest.report of it.

  The serious German reader must grasp what happened at Midway in June 1942 to understand the course of the entire war.

  Strangely, the democracies themselves gave Midway small play at the time. In the United States the news of the battle was scanty and inaccurate. To this day few Americans grasp that at Midway their navy won a sea victory to stand in military chronicles with Salamis and Lepanto. For the third time in planetary history, Asia sailed forth to attack the West in force, with ultimate stakes of world dominion. At Salamis the Greeks turned back the Persians; at Lepanto the Venetian coalition halted Islam; and at Midway the Americans stopped, at least for our century, the rising tide of Asiatic color. Pacific battles thereafter were in the main futile Japanese attempts to recover the initiative lost at Midway.

  Before Midway, for all the missed chances and miscalculations of Adolf Hitler and the Japanese leaders, the war still hung in the balance. Had the United States lost this passage at arms, the Hawaiian Islands might well have become untenable. With his West Coast suddenly naked to Japanese might, Roosevelt might have had to reverse his notorious "Germany first" policy. The whole war could have taken a different turn.

  Why then is this decisive event so underestimated? The anomaly stems from the nature of the battle. Victory at Midway turned partly on the analysis of Japanese coded radio traffic. The feat could not be revealed in wartime.* The United States Navy's version of Midway was foggy and guarded, and it came out several days late. A long time passed before the setback to Japanese war plans was fully assessed. So the realities of Midway were obscured. The war rumbled on, and the battle faded from sight, as Mount Everest can be obsrured by a whirl of dust raised by a truck. But as time passesi this turning point looms ever larger and clearer in the military history of mankind.

  "Flattop' Warfare

  The German reader accustomed to land warfare needs a brief sketch of the tactical problem at sea. On the water of course there is no terrain. The battleground is all one smooth level unbounded field.

  This simplifies combat as the land Sol(Jier knows it, but adds weight to fundamental elements. The aircraft carrier developed as a radical advance in range of firepower.

  In ancient sea fighting, warships rammed each other, smashed each other's banks of oars, cast arrows, stones, lumps of iron, or flaming stuff across a few feet of open water. Sometimes they came alongside each other with grappling hooks, and soldiers leaped across and fought on the decks. Long after guns were initalled in men-o'-war, hand-to-hand waterborne fighting continued. John Paul Jones won the first big sea fight for Amer
ica by grappling and boarding the British man-o'-war, Serapes, exactly as a Roman sea.captain would have done to a ship of Carthage.

  But the great nineteenth-century, revolutions in science and industry brought forth the battleship, a giant steam-driven iron vessel, with rotating centerline guns that could fire a one-ton shell almost ten miles to port or starboard. All modern nations hastened to build or buy battleships. The front-running race between our own shipyards and England's to build, ever-bigger 'in fact, a Chicago newspaper did dig out and print the story of the code-breaking.

  The Japanese missed it. evidently. president Roosevelt wisely ignored this treason. instead of prosecuting it in a blaze of publicity. -V.H. battleships was a prime cause of the First World War. Even before that, English capitalists had obligingly built a fleet of these monsters for the Japanese, who in 1905 used it to trounce czarist Russia at Tsushima Strait. Only one other large battleship engagement ever took place. At the Battle of the Skagerrak, in 1916, our High Seas Fleet outfought the British navy in a classic action. Twenty-five years later, at Pearl Harbor, the type went into final and futile eclipse. The battleship was the dinosaur of sea warfare, misbegotten and shortiived. Each one was a drain on a nation's resources like the equipment for many army divisions. But it did bring longrange firepower into sea war. The trajectories of its big guns required a correction for the curvature of the earth! Thus the industrial age brought man face to face with the physical limits of his tiny planet.

  After the First World War a few farseeing naval officers perceived that the airplane could far outrange the battleship's big guns. it could fly hundreds of miles, and the pilot could guide his bomb almost onto the target. Against the crusty advocacy of battleship admirals, they fought and won the argument for building "flattops," seagoing airdromes. Pearl Harbor settled the twenty-year dispute in an hour, and the Pacific conflict became an aircraft carrier war.

  TRANSLATOR'S NOTE-. I was a battleship man all my life. Roon ignores the role of the battleship in maintaining the balance of power for a turbulent half-century, though nobody can disagree that it failed at Pearl Harbor. His casual claim of German victory in the Jutland stand-off (Battle of the Skagerrak) is ridiculous. The Imperial German High Seas Feet never sailed to fight after Jutland. Much of it was scuttled at Scapa Flow. Eventually Hitler scrapped the rest, after the Bismarck was sunk and the other battleships immobilized at their moomvs by RAFbombs.-V.H.

  Carrier Combat Tactics

  All Pacific flattops, U.S. and Japanese, carried three kinds of airplanes.

  The fighter plane was defensive. It escorted the attacking planes to the target, and protected them by knocking down fighters that tried to intercept them, it also protected its own fleet against enemy attackers, by hovering overhead in a combat air patrol.

  There were two attacking types: the dive-bomber plane and the torpedo plane. The dive-bomber dropped its missile through the air.

  The torpedo-plane aimed for the death blow below the waterline; its technique was riskier, its missile heavier. it had to fly for many minutes on a straight course low over the water, and slow down to drop its torpedo. During this approach, the torpedo plane pilot was suicidally vulnerable to AA fire or to a fighter plane attack. He therefore needed strong fighter protection.

  Carrier battle doctrine was the same in both navies. The three types of aircraft were launched for a mission by squadrons. The fighters, dive-bombers, and torpedo Olanes would join up and wing together to the target. The fighters would engage the defending fighters, the dive-bombers would attack, and when the enemy was most distracted the vulnerable torpedo planes would slip in low for the kill. This was called coordinated attack, or deferred departure.

  In this scheme there were variations: i.e a fighter could carry a light bomb; and the Japanete from the start designed their torpedo plane, the Type-97 bomber, as a two-purpose machine.

  Instead of a torpedo, it could. carry a very large fragmentation bomb, ihus giving it a strong capability against and targets as well.

  On this dual-purpose Japanese bomber, in the end, the whole battle turned.

  Code breaking Intelligence too was crucial. By analysis of encoded radio traffic and by fractional decipherment of the code, the Americans discerned the enemy battle plan. The Japanese should have foreseen and avoided this. In modern war all codes and ciphers must be frequently replaced. This was a standard rule in our Wehrmacht commands. One has to assume that the enemy is copying all the broadcast gibberish, and that what the mind of man can devise the mind of man can unravel. Japan's communication doctrine called for code replacement, but her navy's preparations for Midway were plagued by both overconfidence and hurry. The hurry resulted from the Doolittle raid.

  Navy Code Book C had been in use by the Japanese since Pearl Harbor. Aided by pioneer use of IBM machines, American and British teams had worked on the texts for half a year. A Code Book D was supposed to go into use on April first. Had this been done the Japanese signals for the Midway alftack would have been secure. But the.replacement was postponed to May first and then to June first, in the post-Doolittle scramble. On June first the opaque curtain of Code Book D did at last fall, but by then only three days remained before the battle, and Japan's plan was largely known to the enemy.

  The Damaged Carriers

  The Japanese faults of overconfidence and hurry showed up after the Coral Sea battle, a carrier skirmish that took place when they tried to capture Port Moresby in New Guinea, to create an air threat to Australia. The expedition ran afoul of two American carriers. The Japanese had the better of the two-day melee, a comedy of blundering decisions and airborne blindman's buff in bad weather, during which the opposing vesseli never sighted each other. The Japanese sank the big flattop Lexington and an oiler, and damaged the Yorktown. They lost a light carrier, and took bomb damage and aircraft attrition in the fleet carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku.

  The flattops of both sides went limping home from the Coral Sea.

  Fourteen hundred Yankee workmen at Pearl Harbor, laboring around the clock, patched up the badly hit Yorktown in three days, and it fought at Midway. But the two damaged Japanese flattops were dropped from the operation. The high command refused a postponement to train and replace air crews, and ordered no urgent repair effort. To ensure a full moon for the landing, or for some such footling reason, the weight of two carriers was nonchalantly forgone.

  Plan and Counterplan

  Yamamoto's battle plan for Midway was the work of Captain Kuroshima, who had devised the great but aborted "westward" strategy.

  His judgment seems to have waned. The Midway scheme was grandiose in scope and dazzling in its intricacy, but it lacked two military virtues: simplicity, and concentration of force. It was a dual mission, always a hazardous business.

  1. Capture Midway atoll.

  2. Destroy the United States Pacific Fleet.

  The plan started with a replay of Pearl Harbor, a surprise carrier strike at the atoll. Under Admiral Nagumo, four careiers-instead of the six originally called for-would approach from the northwest by stealth. They would wipe out the air defenses at a blow, and the landing force would then capture the atoll before Nimitz could interfere. It was assumed (quite soundly) that Nimitz would have to come out and fight, no matter how weak he was. Ymamoto himself planned to lie with his battleships several hundred miles astern of Nagumo, out of aircraft range, Prepa to close and annihilate the Nimitz fleet elements that would survive Nagumo's air onslaught.

  The plan included a feint at the AlOutian islands off Alaska.

  The other carriers would blast American naval bases, and an invasion force would land. The feint might decoy Nimitz's meager forces far to the north, thus enabling Yamamoto to get between the Pacific Fleet and the Hawaiian Islands, a stupendous opportunity; if not, Japan would still seize and hold the Aleutians, thus tearing loose the northern anchor of the American line in the Pacific.

  So, despite his overwhelming advantage in Power, Yamamoto elected to base his
operation on deception and surprise; but there was no surprise. Nimitz gambled that what his decoders told him was true, and that he might win against odds by surprising the surprisers. He thus cut the Gordian knot of military theory: should operations be based on what the enemy would probably do, or on the worst he could do? Chester von -Nimitz even shrugged off the barbed nagging from Washington of Fleet Admiral King, who kept pointing out that the Japanese fleet might be heading for Hawaii. Had Nimitz proved wrong, his disgrace would have been greater than that of the Pearl Harbor commander-in-chief who was cashiered.

  But Chester von Nimitz was made of good stuff. He was of pure German military descent, and he had bred true. His Texas family traced its line directly to one Ernst Freiherr von Nimitz, an German major, with a crowned coat of arms.

  This ancestor in turn derived from von Nimitz military forebears going back to the Crusades. Recent, generations of Nimitzes, lacking the means to keep up the aristocratic style of life, had dropped the "von," and of course in Texas it would have been a handicap.

  Nimitz made one simple grand decision: to ambush Yamamoto. He determined to position his carriers well northeast of Midway, as Nagumo's carriers were steaming down from the northwest. in this deadly game played.around a wide water-girl bulge of the earth, much hung on who saw whom first. Placing his heavy pieces so, concealing them by distance, Nimitz seized a big advantage.