by War
Since he had taken over the consulate, hundreds of people had received visas whose departure would otherwise have been blocked.
A great admirer of A Jew's Jesus Gaither was handling the Jastrow-Henry file himself, takinwno chances on a leak. Nobody else in the consulate knew anything about it.
Once Gaither got back they could count on a prompt departure.
About the Castelnuovos Rabinovitz was less sanguine The headstrong doctor was negotiating directly for passage to Algiers with the Bastia roughnecks who had brought them from Elba. Rabinovitz said these fellows were unreliable, even dangerous, except when deling with old Gaffori. He wanted the Castelnuovos to stay where they were until some safer way to leave opened up. Corsica was a good refuge, with enough to eat and drink.
But Castelnuovo was becoming obsessed with an itch to move on.
"So far, luckily, those scoundrels are asking for more money than he's got," Rabinovitz said. "So maybe he'll stay put. I hope so."
When Byron returned to Marseilles with another pouch for Sam Jones, the vice consul told him that Gaither had returned; and that, on hearing the name and rank of the expected courier from Gibraltar, he had exclaimed, "Hooray!"
"He wants you to report to his office at once. Second floor.
You'll see the sign," Jones said. "Without fail were his words.
Is he an old friend of your family, or something?"
"Not that I know of," Byron replied, with the greatest false show of nonchalance in his life, "tell him I'm coming." He leaped up the stairs to the second floor.
"Well!" exclaimed the consul general, standing up and extending a hand over his desk. "D'Artagnan!" In his yellow pullover and gray slacks he looked like an old tennis pro: tall, stringy, brown, with close-cut straight white hair.
Byron blurted, "Where are they?"
"What? Sit down." The consul general laughed at the impetuous question. "They're in Corsica. Or they were, last I heard. They're fine, the three of them. How the devil have you pulled this off?"
"Corsica!" Byron gasped. "Corsica! God Almighty, so close? How do I get there? Is there a boat? An airplane?"
Gaither laughed again, very agreeably. "Take it easy, young fellow."
"You say they're fine? You've seen them?"
"I've been in touch. They're quite okay. There's no airplane to Corsica. The boat runs three times a week, and it takes eleven hours.
They'll be leaving for Lisbon in a few days, Lieutenant, and-"
"They will? Why, that's marvelous, sir. Are you sure? I have orders to return to the States. I'll get to work on priorities, and maybe take them with me."
"Could be." Gaither shook his head, smiling. "You're an energetic fellow. Aren't you in submarines?- How do you come to be in Gibraltar?"
"Can I talk to them on the telephone? Is there phone service to Corsica?"
"I wouldn't recommend that." Gaither leaned back in his chair, pulling at his lower lip. "Now look, Sam Jones has got an urgent job for you. You'll have to return to Gibraltar tonight. Sam will bring you to my house for dinner about six.
How's that? We'll have a long talk. I repeat, they're fine, just fine, and they'll be out of here in a few days. Incidentally, Sam Jones knows nothing about all this. Nobody does. Keep it that way."
Impulsively Byron grasped his hand. "Thanks."
"All right. Steady does it. Don't get impatient." Jones gave Byron two scaled envelopes to deliver by hand to an unnamed place. A silent ghost-pale young man in a ragged sweater drove him out along the coast in an old taxicab, ceaselessly glancing at the rearview mirror.
The ride took over an hour, ending in a bumpy ride down a dirt road to a small villa within sight of the blue calm sea, almost hidden by overgrown shrubs and vines. A wary woman half-opened the door to Byron's knock. He could see behind her a tall mustached man looking keenly toward the door, hands jammed in the Pockets of a red dressing gown. So he caught a good look at General Henri Giraud; though only long afterward, coming on a picture story of the Casablanca Conference in an old Life magazine, did he read what his courier errands had been about, and who the man had been.
It was after five o'clock when he returned to the consulate.
Sam Jones said, rubbing his eyes and yawning, "Ready to go to the boss's house? He's waiting to give you dinner."
Natalie put on the white dress for the Friday night meal and arrayed LADuis in his cleanest shirt and jumper.
Rabinovitz was coming, and they were going afterward to his apartment in the Old Town. She had herself proposed this in all innocence, during their last chat in the clamorous living room. She wanted to be alone with him, to talk in unhurried peace. Yet the last time she had invited herself to a man's flat, her love affair with Slote had ensued; and, a bit laggardly, this thought was troubling her.
On impulse she pinned to her dress the brooch of purple stones that Byron had given her in Warsaw.
On this night she did something she had not done before in her life; she lit Sabbath candles. It seemed more mafinerly to do it than to decline, when Mrs. Mendelson, a stout, incessantly busy, incessantly cheerful red-faced woman, came to tell her the candles were ready. Scrubbed and dressed-up children crowded around their mothers by the long dining table, where eight candlesticks stood on a fresh white cloth.
Covering her head with a kerchief, putting the match to two cheap sputtering candles, stammering the Hebrew blessing'as Louis watched her with enormous eyes, Natalie felt decidedly peculiar. Mrs. Mendelson elbowed her and made a genial joke to the others: "Zeh, ri vert by unz a ganzer rebbitzin.
("Look, we're making her into a rabbis wife.") Natalie sheepishly joined in the laughter.
While the children were being, fed, Rabinovitz arrived.
Above the piping tumult of the children, he said, "Jim Gaither's back. I missed him at the consulate, but I'll go and see him tomorrow morning. That's a pretty piece of jewelry."
When the children swarmed out of the dining room, the adults gathered at the reset table. Rabinovitz was just sitting down beside Natalie when the doorbell rang. Mendelson answered it. He came back to tap Rabinovitz on the shoulder, and without a word Rabinovitz got up and left. He tended to come and go like a wraith, and nobody commented.
The, seat was left vacant beside Natalie. Twelve people, including several famished new transients, fell to the meal. It was all black market fare, obviously: baked fish, fish soup, and boiled chickens, the bones of which the transients loudly gnawed to splinters.
Brown bottles of fiery potato spirits went round, and Aaron Jastrow quaffed more than his share.
Ever since his arrival, Aaron had been holding forth At table, overawing even Mendelson. Tonight he was in good form. The sacrifice of Isaac came up, for it was in the Sabbath Torah reading. Mendelson had a brash atheist of a son-in-law named Velvel, his partner in the plumbing business, characterized by a lot of bushy red hair and strong opinions. Velvel said the story envolved the Jewish God as a fictitious Asian despot, and the author as a Bronze Age savage. Coolly Aaron put Velvel down. "The story's about Abraham, not God, don't you understand, Velvel? Even a goy like ICerkegaard could see that. Read Fear and Trembling some time. The people of Father Abraham's time burned children to their gods. Archaeology confirms it. Yes, Abraham took up the knife. Why? To show for all time that he cared no less for God than the pagans did for their bloody idols. He trusted God to make him drop the knife before he hurt the boy.
That's the whole point of the story."
"Beautiful," said Mendelson, adjusting a large black yarmulka on his white hair. "That's a beautiful interpretation- I must read Kierkegaard."
"And suppose," Velvel grumbled, "God hadn't told the old fanatic to drop the knife?"
"Why, the Bible would end at Genesis twenty-two," Aaron retorted, smiling. "There'd have been no Jewish people, no Christianity, no modern world. Holocausts of children might. still be going on. But you see, He did tell him to drop it.
Western civilization turns on that s
tark fact. God wants our love, not the ashes of our children."
"What a depressing conversation," said Mrs. Mendelson, jumping up to collect dishes. "Burning children, slaughtering a boy! Feh!
Velvel, play something happy."
Velvel got his guitar and struck up a Sabbath hymn, Yah Ribon, which everyone sang. Even Natalie knew that this SO instrument playing violated orthodox rules. In the Mendel n menage everything went eccentrically. The women cleared the table and brought on tea and coarse cakes, and the singers grew very jolly in a ditty about an Old King Cole sort of rabbi sendin for fiddlers, drummers, fifers, and so on. Natalie joined the women in the kitchen to get the dishes and pots washed before the electricity went off. In the dining room Velvel began to play an old lullaby, Rozhinkes mit Mandlen (Raisins and Almonds). ms song was now Aaron's solo; he was vain about knowing all the Yiddish verses. Softly accompanied by the guitar, Aaron began the haunting nonsense refrain that stirred Natalie's heart with powerful childhood echoes: Under my darling's cradle Lies a little white goat.
The little goat went into business, That will be your career.
Raisins and almonds, Sleep, little boy, sleep, dear.
She heard the outside door open and close. Avram Rabinovitz appeared in the kitchen doorway, his face pale and smiling. "Natalie?"
She came to the doorway, drying her hands on her apron. In the hallway, redolent of Sabbath food aromas, dim light from a wall bracket fell slantwise on Byron in his gray raincoat, standing with a large valise in one hand, and a leather pouch in the other. Natalie's legs almost gave way at the shock. He looked much changed, but there was no mistaking him.
"Hi, darling," Byron said.
Watterloo Torch (from World Holocaust by Armin von Roon) The Torch assault on North Africa was an Anglo-American gesture to placate Stalin. Since the day we invaded the Soviet Union, he had been nagging the British to open a "second front NOW in Europe." This demand was empty noise and Stalin knew it. The British were too weak for that.
But once Japan was goaded into the Pearl Harbor attack, enabling Roosevelt to make the gleeful plunge into world war, Stalin's demand became clamorous. The unscathed American Union, sitting prosperous and happy beyond bomber range, could field ten million men. its capacity for making the tools of war was immense, and the Soviet Union was hardpressed.
Yet the warmongering President had only a hill-trained expanding army of green recruits, led by an unblooded officer cadre. Civilian morale was unstable. Mild rationing ordinances brought wails of contest; austerities that we Germans had been taking for granted for years seemed to the spoiled Americans the end of the world. what was worse -and this was fundamental, and Roosevelt knew it-like the italians, the American people were incapable of accepting substantial battle losses. This fact shaped all of Franklin Roosevelt's war decisions, including the North African landing.
Roosevelt's solution of his problems can be starkly stated. The formula that won world empire for the U.S.A. was twofold: 1. Germany First.
2. Shed German blood by shedding the blood of others.
How Roosevelt did it will be an enduring study for political and military historians.
Roosevelt In Trouble
Roosevelt's people did not share his aim of "Germany First."
They wanted to avenge Pearl Harbor. As Wake Island and the Philippines fell to yellow-skinned attackers, the racial outrage of the Americans grew intense. Thousands of Japanese Americans were thrown into concentration camps, precisely like Jews behind the German lines, and for precisely the same reason: they were wartime security risks.
The weepy indignation with which Roosevelt protested our security measures concerning the Jews was not in evidence on this matter.
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: The Nisei were abominably treated because of war hysteria. They were not murdered en masse, they all survived the war, and they got their property back. It was an indefensible business, but the distinction seems to escape General von Roon.-V.H.
Moreover, the President soon discovered that war was not all beer and skittles.* Along his Atlantic coast and in the Caribbean, our U-boats played havoc at night, when the glow from the brightly lit coastal cities set up the targets. Strident calls for arms and action poured in on Roosevelt from the retreating Philippine defenders, from the forces in Hawaii, from the hardpressed Chinese, from England's home front, from the British in Africa, Burma, Australia, India, and-loudest and ugliest-from the Soviet Union. Yet American war production was not in gear, and Roosevelt had his own army and navy to equip. He was in trouble.
"German Krieg ist koin Honigiecken.
Still, the Anglo-American planners had to go to work on a second front. The American General Staff officers, who had yet to smell gunpowder, were thinking in textbook terms: force the Channel coast as soon as possible, and smash across the northern plains to Berlin. But the British hated that notion. They proposed operations in Norway, in North Africa, in the Middle East; anywhere, in fact, but where we stood in force. Let the Red Army grind up the Wehrmacht; and if that meant a weak postwar Russia. all the better!
The "transatlantic essay contest" between the two staffs, as it came to be known, swayed back and forth. Roosevek allowed the letters, memoranda, visits, and conferences to run on and on.
He never strongly backed General Marshall in the American proposal: 1. A vast buildup of men and supplies in Britain; 2. A contingent scheme for an emergency landing in France in 1942, if Russia seemed about to collapse; 3. Otherwise, an all-out cross-Channel attack in 1943.
Roosevelt did not push for this because something very different was in his mind.
Roosevelt's Basic War Plan
The Battle of Midway set him free to destroy Germany in his own fashion.
Before that, with an all-triumphant Japan menacing his rear, he could make no big move against us. Had Yamarnoto won at Midway-as by all the odds he should have-public opinion would have forced Roosevelt to go all-out in the Pacific. But with the great Nimitz-Spruance victory in hand, he could devote his "forested mind" to winning world rule with other pebple's blood. In effect, this meant at all costs keeping the Soviet Union in the war.
Franklin Roosevelt's bask plan for winning the Second World War was to take Germany from the rear with. a brute mass of Russian troops. Everything else was secondary. He saw his main chance cold and straight. Militarily, it was a clear and brilliant plan; and brilliantly, alas, did it work.
This explains his hardheaded distribution of American supplies.
He starved his Pacific forces so that they barely made it through the fierce Guadalcanal campaign, while he lavished materiel on the ungrateful and ever-demanding Russians through the Persian Gulf and the northern route. And he amply supplied the British in Egypt via the Cape of Good Hope and the Red Sea, while Rommel's stalled army withered under Hitler's neglect.
Thus Roosevelt made sure that when his raw troops went ashore in French North Africa against feeble Vichy opposition, our tough and dashing Afrika Korps would be embroiled at a disadvantage, two thousand miles away at El Alamein.
Romevehian Chicaney
Moreover, he skillfully put the blame on the British for reneging on the second front in France.
He allowed the O'transatlantic essay contest" to drag on until Marshall reported to him from London that the two staffs were stalemated. Admiral Ernest King had long been pushing for a turn to the Pacific; and the frustrated and infuriated Marshall, a stiff autocrat in the George Washington image, advised the President that an all-out shift to the Pacific was the only answer to British obduracy.
This was:the moment Roosevelt had been playing for. In his lordly fashion, he notified his Joint Chiefs through his gray eminence, Harry Hopkins, that it would be wrong to "pick up our dishes and leave."
Roosevelt loved to use homely phrases to mask his subtle machinations.
The western Allies had to fight the Germans somewhere in 1942, to keep faith with Russia. if the British were really all that cautious and battle-w
orn, why, he would graciously give in and accept one of their-proposals: French North Africa was all right with him.
Marshall warned that opening the Mediterranean theatre meant cancelling the cross-Channel attack in 1943; but in soldierly fashion he did Roosevelt's bidding. So Torch took form as a concession by Roosevelt to the British, when in fact it was just what he wanted.
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: General von Roon here ventures into mindreading. Mr. Roosevelt-as I observed him-sometimes from close at hand-was an astute improviser, solving problems day by day with common sense, and a good grasp of historical facts and logistical limits. For the long view he was smart enough to trust long heads like Marshall and King, which sufficed - V. H.
Churchill shouldered the responsibility to bring Stalin the bad news, for Roosevelt was ostensibly "giving in" to him, by sending the American army into an operation' which could not fail.