Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  His career was damned well going into hibernation, he was damned well hungry, and he would damned well eat. And Harry Hopkins's disquisition could damned well wait while he found out what was on Pamela Tudsbury's mind. The spiky handwriting on the airmail envelope from London was obviously hers, and Pug tore it open with more eagerness than he wanted to feel.

  December 20th, 1942

  Dear Victor, This is a mere quick scrawl, I'm just off to Scotland to do a story on American ferry pilots. You surely know that my father's gone, killed by a land mine at El Alamein. The Observer has generously given me a chance at carrying on as correspondent. No use writing about Talky. I've pulled myself together, though for awhile I felt that I had died too, or might as well have.

  Did my long letter from Egypt ever leach you, before you lost your ship? That news horrified me, but luckily hard upon it I learned that you were safe and enroute to Washington, where I myself will shortly be heading. I said in that letter, among other things, that Duncan Burne-Wilke wanted to marry me. In effect, I guess, I asked for your blessing. I received no answer. We have since become engaged, and he's off to India as Auchinleck's new deputy chief of staff for air.

  I may not stay in Washington -long. The great crunch at Stalingrad has given my editor the notion of sending me back to the Soviet Union. But I'vs run into mysterious visa problems which the Observer is working on, and meantime here I come. If I can't ever return to Moscow, for inscrutable Marxist reasons, my usefulness will dim, and I may then just pack it up and join Duncan for a tour of duty as memsahib. We'll see.

  No doubt you know that Rhoda and I met in Hollywood, and that I told her about us. I just wanted to take myself out of the picture, and I trust you're not angry at me. Now I'm engaged to a darling man, with my future all settled, so that's that. I'll be at the Wardman Park Hotel on or about January 15th. Will you give me a ring?

  I can't tell how Rhoda would feel about my telephoning you, though obviously I'm no threat to her. About meeting you of course I want to be open and aboveboard. I just don't propose to pretend you don't exist.

  Love, Pamela So, Pug thought-astonished, amused, impressed Rhoda knew all along and said nothing. Good tactics; good girl. Perhaps she had noticed the London postmark too, when she handed him the letters.

  About the disclosure, he felt sheepish; innocent, but sheepish.

  Rhoda was quite a woman, take her for all in all. Pamela's letter was proper, calm, friendly; in the situation, well put. He ate the large breakfast very cheerily, despite grim clouds tumbling past the window of the bumping Clipper, because of the slight chance that he might see the future Lady Burne-Wilke in the Soviet Union.

  Then he read the Hopkins letter.

  THE white HOUSE

  Jan. 12

  Dear Pug, You pleased the Boss greatly the other morning, and he'll remember it. The landing craft problem won't go away. You might still tackle it, depending on how long Ambassador Standley wants you.

  The svecial request about your daughter-in-law went through, but the Germans queered the effort by moving those people to Baden-Baden.

  Welles says they're in no hazard, and that negotiations for exchanging the whole crowd are well along.

  Now to business: Admiral Standley came back to Washington at his own request because he thinks we're mishandling LendLease. But there -are only two ways to handle LendLease: unconditional aid, or aid on a quid pro quo basis.

  It burns up the old admiral that we give, give, give, asking for no accounting, no justification of requests, no trade-offs. That's our policy, all right. Standley's a wise and salty old bird, but the President as usual is miles ahead of him.

  The President's overall policy toward the Russians is three-pronged, and very simple. Remember it, Pug:

  (1) Keep the Red Army fighting Germany

  (2) Bring the Red Army in against Japan (3) Create a stronger postwar League of Nations with the Soviet Union in it.

  Lenin walked out of World War I in 1917, you know, by making a deal with the Kaiser. Stalin opted out of this war in 1939 by making a deal with Hitler. He'd still be out of it if Hitler hadn't attacked him. The President doesn't forget those things.

  Stalin's rhetoric notwithstanding, I doubt that Hitlerism is such a great evil to him. He too is a dictator running a police state, and he got cozily into bed with Hitler for two whole years. Now Russia's been invaded, so he has to fight. He's a total pragmatist, and our intelligence is that they've been exchanging peace feelers over there.

  A separate peace on that front is always Possible, if Germany makes a substantial offer.

  That may not be in the cards just yet. Hitler would have to show his people some territorial gains for all the German blood he's spilled. The more we strengthen the Russians, the less likely it is that Stalin will make such a deal. We want him to throw the Germans clear out of Russia, and not stop there, but drive on to Berlin. This will save millions of American lives, because our war aim is to eradicate Nazism, and we won't quit till we do.

  So, it's a confusion of objectives to look for quid pro quos from Lend-Lease. The quid pro quo is that the Russians are killing large numbers of German soldiers who won't oppose us one day in France.

  We have not exactly lived up to our commitments on Lend-Lease.

  We're at about 70 percent. We've tried, and our aid is massive, but the U-boats have taken a big toll, the Japanese war is a drain, and we had to cannibalize Lend-Lease to mount the North African landings.

  Nor have we lived up to our promise of a second front in Europe, not yet. So we are in no position to get tough with the Russians.

  Even if we were, it would be bad war-making. We need them more than they need us. Stalin can't be fooled about such a fundamental reality.

  He is a very complicated figure, very difficult to deal with, a sort of Red Ivan the Terrible, but I'm damn glad we've got him and his people in the war on our side. I'm candid about that in public, and take a lot of lumps for it.

  Admiral Standley will want you to try to obtain quid pro quos. He has a high opinion of your ability to handle Russians. It's true that they could loosen up a lot on air transport routes, military intelligence, shuttle bases for our bombers, release of our airmen downed in Siberia, and so on. Perhaps you'll make Standley happy by succeeding where others have failed. But on the basic issue, General Marshall has told the President that nothing the Russians can give us as a Lend-Lease trade-off would change our strategy or tactics in this war.

  He approves of unconditional aid.

  The President wants you to know all this, and to resume sending him informal reports, as you did from Germany. He mentioned again your prediction of the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939, and he requested (not wholly humorously) that if your crystal ball warns you of any moves toward a separate peace over there, to let him know fast.

  Harry H.

  Scarcely an encouraging letter; Pug was on his way to serve under a former C.N.O, and here was an order right at the start to bypass the old admiral with "informal reports" to the Commander-in-Chief. This new post promised to be nothing but a quagmire. Pug took from his dispatch case a sheaf of intelligence documents on the Soviet Union, and dug into them. Work was the best refuge from such thoughts.

  The Clipper was diverted to Bermuda; no explanation. As the passengers were lunching in a beach hotel they could see" through the dining room windows, their flying boat heavily.. lifting away into the rain. They remained in Bermuda for weeks.

  In time they learned that the aircraft had been recalled to take Franklin Roosevelt to the Casablanca Conference. The conference by then was the great news on the radio and in the press, sharing the headlines with the growing German collapse at Stalingrad.

  Pug did not mind the delay. He was in no great hurry to get to Russia. This little green isle far out in the Atlantic, in peacetime a quiet flowery Eden without automobiles, was now an American naval outpost. Jeeps, trucks, and bulldozers boiled around in clouds of exhaust and coral dust; patrol bomber
s buzzed overhead, gray warships crowded the sound, and sailors jammed the shops and the narrow town streets.

  The idle rich in the big -pink houses seemed to have gone underground, waiting for the Americans to sink all the bothersome U-boats, win the war, and go away; the black populace looked prosperous and happy, for and the fumes and noise.

  The commandant put up Pug in his handsome newly built quarters, complete with tennis court. Besides playing occasional tennis or cards with the admiral, Pug passed the time reading up on the Soviet Union.

  The intelligence papers he had brought were thin stuff. Poking around in Bermuda's library and bookstores, he came on erudite British books highly favorable to the Soviets, written by George Bernard Shaw, and a man named Laski, and a couple named Beatrice and Sidney Webb. He ground sedulously through these long stylish paeans to Russian socialism, but came on little substance that a military man could use.

  He found harshly negative books, too, by various defectors and debunkers; lurid accounts of fake trials, mass murders, gigantic famines engineered by the government, and secret concentration camps all over the communist paradise, where millions of people were being worked to death. The crimes ascribed to Stalin in these books seemed worse even than Hitler's reputed malefactions. Where did the truth lie?

  This blank wall of contradiction brought back vividly to Victor Henry his last trip to the Soviet Union, with the Harriman mission; the sense of baffled isolation there, the frustration of dealing with People who looked and acted like ordinary human beings, who even projected a hearty if shy charm, and yet who could suddenly start behaving like Martians, for sheer inability to communicate, and for icy remote hosfility.

  When his flight was rescheduled, he bought a three-volume

  " paper-bound history of the Russian Revolution by Leon Trotsky to read on the way. Pug knew of Trotsky as a Jew who had organized the Red Army, the number two man under Lenin during the revolution; he knew too that on Lenin's death Stalin had outmaneuvered Trotsky for power, had driven him into exile in Mexico, and -at least according to the unfriendly books-had sent assassins who had brained him there. He was surprised at the literary brilliance of the work, and appalled by its contents. The six days of his trip across the Atlantic, over North Africa, and up through the Middle East to Tehran passed easily; for when clouds shut off the magnificent geography unreeling far below, or he was. waiting for a connection, or spending a night in a dismal Quonset hut on an air base, he had Trotsky to Turn to.

  This intermingling of a flight across much of the globe with a ming epic of czardom's fall was quite an experience.

  Trotsky wrote of sordid plots and counterplots by squalid formidable men to seize power, which gripped like a novel; but there were long passages of stupefying Marxist verbiage which defeated Victor Henry's earnest efforts to get through them. He did dimly grasp that a volcanic social force had broken loose in Russia in 1917, reaching for a grand utopian dream; but it seemed to him that on Trotsky's own testimony-and the book was intended to celebrate the revolution-the thing had foundered in a sea of sanguinary horror.

  Except for hopping from one hot dusty base to another, Pug saw little of the war in North Africa, where, from radio reports, Rommel was giving the invaders a bad time. Green jungles slipped by, empty deserts, rugged mountains, day after day. The Pyramids and the Sphinx at last drifted past far below, and the Nile, glittering in its, band of greenery. A half-day delay in Palestine enabled him to drive to old Jerusalem, and walk the crooked streets where Jesus Christ had borne his cross; then he was back in an aircraft high above the earth, reading about plots, imprisonments, tortures, poisonings, shootings, all in the name of the socialist, brotherhood of man, inevitable under Marxism.

  When he got to Tehran he was just beginning the third olume, and he left the unfinished book on the plane. At his next stop, Trotsky was not a welcome import.

  "The whole point, Henry," said Admiral Standley, "is to get through to this General Yevlenko. If anyone can do it, you can."

  "What's Yevlenko's official position, Admiral?"

  Standley made a frustrated gesture with gnarled hands. "If I knew and I told you, you'd be no better off. He's Mister Big on Lend-Lease, that's all. He's a hero, I gather. Lost a hand in the battle for Moscow. Wears a fake hand in a leather glove."

  They were at the long dinner table in Spaso House, just the two of them. Arrived from Kuibyshev scarcely an hour earlier, Pug would have been glad to forgo dinner, take a bath, and Turn in for the night. But it was not to be The little old admiral, who looked lost in this grand and spacious embassy, formerly the mansion of a czarist sugar merchant, had developed a great head of steam about Lend-Lease, and with Pug's arrival the safety valve popped.

  In Washington, said Standley, he had gotten the President's promise that the Lend-Lease mission would be subordinated to him - The orders had gone out, but the head of the mission, one General Faymonville, was blandly ignoring the President. Growing red in the face, hardly touching his boiled chicken, Standley;ttruck the table with a fist over and over, declaring that Harry Hopkins must be at the bottom of this, must have told Faymonville that the order didn't mean anything, that the prodigal handouts should continue. But he" Standley, had come out-of retirement to take this post at the President's request. He was going to fight for America's best interests come hell or Harry Hopkins.

  "Say, inciientally, Pug," said Standley with a sudden glare, when I've talked to this General Yevlenko socially, he's referred to you more than once as Harry Hopkins's military aide. Hey? How's that?"

  Pug answered cautiously, "Admiral, when we came over with Harriman in 1941, the President wanted an eyewitness report from the front. Mr. Hopkins designated me to go, because I'd taken a crash course in Russian. I met Yevlenko out in the forward area, and maybe the Nark man who accompanied me put that idea into his head."

  "Hell. Is that so?" The ambassador's glare slowly metamorphosed into a cunning wrinkled grin. "I see! Well, in that cast, land's sakes, don't ever disabuse the fellow. If he really thinks you're Garry Hopkins's boy, you may get some action out of him. Garry Hopkins is Father Christmas around here."

  Pug could remember first meeting William Standley ten years ago, when as Chief of Naval Operations he had visited the West Virginia; a straight austere little four-star admiral in white and gold, number one man in the Navy, saying a kind word to the lowly Lieutenant Commander Henry about the battleship's gunnery record. Standley was still full of fire, but what a change! During that dinner it seemed to Victor Henry that he had relinquished the post at Cincpac in order to help a touchy old man cannonade at gnats. On and on the grievances poured out. The gifts of the Russian Relief Society, which Standley's own wife had worked hard for, weren't being acknowledged. The American Red Cross aid wasn't getting enough thankful publicity in the Soviet Union.

  The Russians weren't giving any quid pro quos for Lend-Lease. bone-weary after the elaboration of these gripes for perhaps an hour and a half, Pug ventured to ask Standley over coffee what the purpose would be in seeking out General Yevlenko.

  "That's business," said the Ambassador. "We'll get to it in the morning. You look a bit bushed. Get some sleep.

  Possibly because the sun shone brightly into the ambassador's library, or because he was at his best in morning hours, their next meeting went better. There was in fact a touch of the C.N.O about Standley.

  Congress was debating the extension of the Lend-Lease act, he explained, and the State Department wanted a report from the Soviets on how Lend-Lease supplies had helped them on the battlefield. Molotov had agreed "in principle-a fatal Russian phrase, which meant an indefinite stall. Molotov had referred the request to Yevlenko's LendLease section. Standley had been hounding Faymonville to keep after Yevienko, and Faymonville claimed he was doing his best, but nothing was happening.

  Worse than nothing, actually. In Stalin's latest Order of the Day, the dictator had stated that the Red Army was bearing the whole weight of the war alone, with no hel
p from its allies! Now, how would that go down with Congress? These damned Russians, said Standley coolly, just didn't comprehend the depth of anti-Bolshevik feeling in America. He admired their fighting spirit. He just had to save them from themselves. One way or another he had to get that statement about the battlefield benefits of Lend-Lease. Otherwise, come June there might be no more Lend-Lease. The whole alliance might collapse, and the whole damned war might be lost. Pug did not argue, though he thought Standley was exaggerating. No doubt the Russians were being boorish, and his first thankless task was to hunt down General Yevienko, force him to face that fact, and try to get something done about it.

  It took him two days of trudging through the Moscow streets ridged with black unremoved ice, amid crowds of shabby pedestrians, from one official structure to another in the government's uncharted maze, just to find out where General Yevlenko's office was. He could not obtain a telephone number, not even an accurate address. The British air attache, whomhe had known in Berlin, finally took him in hand and pointed out the building where Yevlenko had not long ago given him a red-hot dressing-down, over the diversion of forty Lend-Lease Aircobra fighters to the British forces in the North African landings. But when PUg tried to enter the building, a silent burly red-cheeked young sentry put a bayonetted rifle athwart his chest, and was deaf to his protests in sputtering Russian. Pug went back to his office, dictated a long letter, and brought it to the building. Another sentry accepted it, but days passed without an answer Meantime, Pug met General Faymonville, an affable Armenian not much like the monster Standley had described.