by Herman Wouk
“Smells pretty good,” he said, as they passed the tiny galley, where cooks in white were preparing dinner and somehow managing to perspire neatly.
Grobke looked at him over his shoulder. “You wouldn’t care to eat aboard? It’s awfully cramped, but these chaps don’t eat too badly.”
Pug had a dinner appointment with the Tudsburys, but he said at once, “I’d be delighted.”
So he dined elbow to elbow with the captain and officers of the U-boat in the narrow wardroom. He enjoyed it. He was more at home here than in his silk-walled dining room in Berlin. The four young officers were thin-lipped, ruddy, blond, shy; like Americans in their features, but with a different look around the eyes, more intense and wary. They sat silent at first, but soon warmed to the American’s compliments about the boat, and the joking of Grobke, who got into an excellent mood over the food and wine. Stories passed about the stupidity and laziness of navy yard workmen. One of Pug’s best yarns, an incident of crossed-up toilet plumbing on the West Virginia, brought uproarious laughter. He had noticed before the German taste for bathroom humor. The officers told tales, which they considered comic, of their early training: first about the cleaning of latrines, then of electric shocks to which they had had to submit without flinching while their reactions were filmed; exposure to cold and heat past the point of collapse; knee bends until they dropped; the “Valley of Death” cross-country run up and down hillsides, wearing seventy-pound loads and gas masks. An officer emerged the better, they said, from such ordeals. Only Grobke disagreed. That Prussian sadism was old-fashioned, he asserted. In war at sea, initiative was more important than the blind submission that the ordeals implanted. “The Americans have the right idea,” he said, either because he sensed that Pug was shocked, or out of maverick conviction. They feasted on cabbage soup, boiled fresh salmon, roast pork, potato dumplings, and gooseberry torten. Obviously Grobke had ordered up this banquet on the chance that Pug might stay.
Streaks of red sunset showed through the black rain clouds when Henry and Grobke left the submarine. On the dock some crewmen, naked except for trunks, were wrestling inside a cheering circle, on gray mats laid over the crane tracks. Henry had seen everywhere this love of young Germans for hard horseplay. They were like healthy pups, and these U-boat men looked stronger and healthier than American sailors.
“So, Henry, I suppose you join your English friend now?”
“Not if you have any better ideas.”
The German slapped him on the shoulder. “Good! Come along.”
They drove out through the gate. “Damn quiet after five o’clock,” said Pug.
“Oh, yes. Dead. Always.”
Pug lit a cigarette. “I understand the British are working two and three shifts now in their yards.”
Grobke gave him an odd look. “I guess they make up for lost time.”
A couple of miles from the base, amid green fields near the water, they drove into rows of wooden cottages. “Here’s where my daughter lives,” Grobke said, ringing a doorbell. A fresh-faced young blonde woman opened the door. Three children, recognizing Grobke’s ring, ran and pounced on the paper-wrapped hard candies he handed out. The husband was at sea on maneuvers. On an upright piano in the tiny parlor stood his picture: young, long-jawed, blond, stern. “It’s good Paul is at sea,” Grobke said. “He thinks I spoil the kids,” and he proceeded to toss them and romp with them until they lost their bashfulness in the presence of the American, and ran around laughing and shrieking. The mother tried to press coffee and cake on the guests, but Grobke stopped her.
“The commander is busy. I just wanted to see the children. Now we go.”
As they got into the car, looking back at a window where three little faces peered out at him, he said: “It’s not much of a house. Not like your mansion in the Grunewald! It’s just a cracker box. The German pay scale isn’t like the American. I thought you’d be interested to see how they live. He’s a good U-boat officer and they’re happy. He’ll have a command in two years. Right away, if there’s war. But there won’t be war. Not now.”
“I hope not.”
“I know. There is not going to be war over Poland—So? Back to Swinemünde?”
“I guess so.”
As they drove into the small coastal town, Pug said, “Say, I could stand a beer. How about you? Is there a good place?”
“Now you’re talking! There’s nothing fancy, not in this boring town, but I can take you where the officers hang out. Isn’t Tudsbury expecting you?”
“He’ll survive.”
“Yes. Englishmen are good at that.” Grobke laughed with transparent pleasure at keeping the American naval attaché from the famous correspondent.
Young men in turtleneck sweaters and rough jackets sat at long tables in the dark, smoky, timbered cellar, bellowing a song to concertina accompaniment played by a strolling fat man in a leather apron. “Jesus Christ, I have drunk a lot of beer in this place, Henry,” said Grobke. They sat at a small side table under an amber lamp. Pug showed him pictures of Warren, Byron, and Madeline. After a couple of beers, he told of his worry over Warren’s involvement with an older woman. Grobke chuckled. “Well, the things I did when I was a young buck! The main thing is, he’ll be an aviator. Not as good as a submariner, but the next best thing, ha ha! He looks like a smart lad. He’ll settle down.”
Pug joined in a song he recognized. He had no ear and sang badly off-key. This struck Grobke as hilarious. “I swear to God, Victor,” he said, wiping his eyes after a fit of laughter, “could anything be crazier than all this talk of war? I tell you, if you left it to the navy fellows on both sides it could never happen. We’re all decent fellows, we understand each other, we all want the same things out of life. It’s the politicians. Hitler is a great man and Roosevelt is a great man, but they’ve both been getting some damn lousy advice. But there’s one good thing. Adolf Hitler is smarter than all the politicians. There’s not going to be any war over Poland.” He drained his thick glass stein and banged it to attract a passing barmaid. “Geben Sie gut Acht auf den Osten,” he said, winking and dropping his voice. “Watch the east! There’s something doing in the east.”
The barmaid clacked on the table two foaming steins from clusters in her hands. Grobke drank and passed the back of his hand over his mouth. “Suppose I tell you that I heard the Führer himself address the senior U-boat command and tell them there would be no war? You want to report that back to Washington? Go ahead, it happens to be true. You think he’ll start a war against England with seventy-four operational U-boats? When we have three hundred, that’ll be a different story, and then England will think twice about making trouble. And in eighteen months, that’s exactly what we’ll have. Meantime watch the east.”
“Watch the east?” Victor Henry said in a wondering tone.
“Aha, you’re a little curious? I have a brother in the foreign ministry. Watch the east! We’re not going to be fighting, Henry, not this year, I promise you. So what the hell? We live one year at a time, no? Come on, I have a tin ear like you, but we’ll sing!”
Victor Henry sat with his old portable typewriter on his knees, in the rosewood-panelled library. The magnificent antique desk was too high for comfortable typing; and anyway, the machine scratched the red leather top. It was not yet four in the morning, but the stars were gone, blue day showed in the garden, and birds sang. White paper, yellow paper, and carbons lay raggedly around him. The room was cloudy with smoke. He had been typing since midnight. He stopped, yawning. In the kitchen he found a cold chicken breast, which he ate with a glass of milk while he heated a third pot of coffee. He returned to the library, gathered up the top white pages of his report to the Office of Naval Intelligence, and began reading.
COMBAT READINESS OF NAZI GERMANY
An Appraisal
Nazi Germany is a very peculiar country. The contradictions strike the observer as soon as he arrives. The old Germany is still here, the medieval buildings, the quaint country co
stumes, the clean big cities, the order, the good nature, the neatness, the “thoroughness,” the beautiful scenery, the fine-looking people, especially the children. However, there is an extra layer of something new and different: the Nazi regime. It’s all over the face of this old country like a rash. How deep it goes is a serious question. The Nazis have certainly put up a highly patriotic, colorful, and warlike façade. The swastika flags, new buildings, marching battalions, Hitler Youth, torchlight parades and such are all very striking. But what is behind the façade? Is there a strong potential for war-making, or is it mainly political propaganda and bluff?
This report gives the first impressions of an officer who has been in Germany four weeks, and has been digging for facts.
It is common knowledge that since 1933 Germany has been frankly and even boastfully rearming. Even before the Hitler regime, however, the army surreptitiously armed and trained in violation of the Versailles Treaty, with Bolshevik help. Once the Nazis took power, though the Russian contact was dropped, the rearming speeded up and became open. Nevertheless, twenty years ago this nation was disarmed. Seven years ago it was still helpless compared to the Allies. The question is, to what extent has that gap been closed by Hitler? Building a modern combat force is a big-scale industrial process. It takes material, manpower, and time, no matter what vaunting claims political leaders make.
Two preliminary and interesting conclusions emerge from the facts this observer has been able to gather.
(1) Nazi Germany has not closed the gap sufficiently to embark on a war with England and France.
(2) The regime is not making an all-out effort to close the gap.
The next five pages contained ten-year figures—contradicting many intelligence reports he had read—of German factory production, of the expansion of industry, and of the output of machines and materials. He drew heavily on his own reading and inquiries. He presented comparisons of French, British, and German gross national products and of strength on land, sea, and in the air, during this decade. These numbers indicated—as he marshalled them—that Germany remained inferior in every aspect of war-making, except for her air force; and that she was not pushing her industrial plant very hard to catch up. Contrary to popular opinion all over the world, there was no feverish piling of arms. This emerged by a comparison of plant capacity and output figures. He described in passing the desolate peace that fell over the Swinemünde navy yard at the usual quitting time. There was not even a second shift for constructing U-boats, the key to German sea warfare. He argued that the edge in the air would rapidly melt away with the present British speedup in making airplanes and buying them from the United States. As to land war, the swarming uniforms in the city streets were quite a show; but the figures proved that France alone could put a larger, longer trained, and better equipped army in the field.
On a U-boat, passing through the squadron’s tiny flag office, he had seen scrawled on the outside of a mimeographed report some figures and abbreviations that he thought meant: operational, 51—at sea, 6; in port, 40; overhaul, 5. These figures met the intelligence evaluations of the British and the French. Grobke had claimed seventy-four operational boats, a predictable overestimate when talking big to a foreign intelligence officer. But even exaggerating, Grobke had not gone as high as a hundred. Fifty U-boats were almost certainly the undersea strength of Nazi Germany, give or take five, with perhaps only thirteen under construction. In 1918 alone Germany had lost more than a hundred U-boats.
Then came the crucial paragraph, which he had typed with many pauses, and which he anxiously read over and over.
What follows gets into prognostication, and so may be judged frivolous or journalistic. However, the impression that this observer has formed points so strongly to a single possibility, that it seems necessary to record the judgment. All the evidence indicates to me that Adolf Hitler is at this time negotiating a military alliance with the Soviet Union.
Arguing in support of his idea, Victor Henry alluded to the Rapallo Treaty of 1922, when the Bolsheviks and the Germans had stunned a European economic conference by suddenly going off and making a separate deal of broad scope. He pointed out that the present German ambassador in Moscow, Schulenburg, was a Rapallo man. Litvinov, Russia’s Jewish pro-Western foreign minister, had recently fallen. Hitler in two speeches had left out his usual attacks on Bolshevism. A Russo-German trade agreement had been in the news, but suddenly the papers had dropped all mention of it. He cited, too, the remark of a man high in the U-boat command, “Watch the east. Something’s happening in the east. I have a brother in the foreign ministry.” And he cited Hitler’s pledge to the U-boat officers that there would be no war over Poland.
None of this, he acknowledged, added up to hard intelligence, nor did it impress the professionals at the embassy. There were always, they said, rumors of theatrical surprises. They insisted on sticking to basic facts. The Nazi movement was built on fear and hate of Bolshevism and a pledge to destroy it. The whole theme of Mein Kampf was conquest of “living room” for Germany in the southeast provinces of Russia. A military reconciliation between the two systems was unthinkable. Hitler would never propose it. If he did, Stalin, assuming that it was a trick, would never accept it. The words Henry had encountered most often were “fantasy” and “melodrama.”
He maintained, nevertheless, that the move not only made sense, but was inevitable. Hitler was far out on a limb in his threats against Poland. A dictator could not back down. Yet his combat readiness for a world war was marginal. Probably to avoid alarming the people, he had not even put his country on a war production basis, contrary to all the lurid blustering propaganda of “cannon instead of butter.” Despite this tough talk of Nazi politicians and newspapers, the man in the street did not want a war, and Hitler knew that. A Russian alliance was a way out of the dilemma. If Russia gave the Germans a free hand in Poland, the English guarantee would become meaningless. Neither the French nor the British could possibly come to Poland’s aid in time to avert a quick conquest. Therefore the Poles would not fight. They would yield the city of Danzig and the extraterritorial road across the Polish corridor, which was all Hitler was demanding. Maybe later, as in the case of Czechoslovakia, he would move in and take the rest of Poland, but not now.
Victor Henry argued that the sudden reversal of alliances was an old European stratagem, especially characteristic of German and Russian diplomacy. He cited many instances, fresh from his heavy history reading. He pointed out that Hitler himself had come to power in the first place through a sharp reversal of political lines, a deal with his worst enemy, Franz von Papen.
Fully clothed, he fell asleep on the red leather couch, with the report and two carbon copies tucked inside his shirt, after shredding the sheets of carbon paper into the wastebasket. His slumber was restless and brief. When his eyes popped wide open again, the sun was sending weak red rays through the treetops. He showered, dressed, read the report again, and walked five miles from the Grunewald to the Wilhelm-strasse, turning the document over in his mind. Compared to Tollever’s reports, which he had studied, it was a presumptuous discussion of grand strategy, far beyond his competence and his position; the sort of “Drew Pearson column” against which the Chief of Naval Operations himself had warned him. On the other hand, it seemed to him factual. He had already sent in a number of technical reports like Kip’s papers. He intended to write one on Swinemünde. Combat Readiness of Nazi Germany was a jump into the dark.
In War College seminars, instructors had poked rude fun at “global masterminding” by officers below flag rank. The question was, now that the paper was written, should he send it or forget it? Pug Henry had written and later destroyed many such documents. He had a continuing tendency to reach beyond routine. The result could be good or disastrous. His unsolicited memorandum on the battleship blisters had knocked him out of overdue sea duty and landed him in Berlin. That report, at least, had been within his professional sphere as an ordnance man. In diplomacy and gran
d strategy he was a naïve newcomer. Colonel Forrest knew Germany well and he had waved aside Henry’s suggestion as nonsense. Pug had ventured to talk to the chargé d’affaires, whose only comment had been a subtle smile.
A Foreign Service courier was flying to England at 10 A.M., to board the New York–bound Queen Mary. The document could be on CNO’s desk in a week.
Henry arrived at the embassy still undecided, with not much more than a half hour in which to make up his mind. Except for Rhoda, there was nobody whose advice he could ask. Rhoda liked to sleep late. If he called her now he would probably wake her, and even then he could scarcely describe the report on the German telephone. But would Rhoda in any case offer a judgment worth having? He thought not. It was up to him—the courier, or the burn basket.
He sat at his desk in the high-ceilinged, cluttered office, sipping coffee, looking out across Hermann Göring Strasse at Hitler’s monumental new chancellery of pink marble. The sentry guards were changing: eight helmeted black-clad heavy SS men marching up, eight others marching away to a drum and fife. Through the open windows he heard the ritual orders in shrill German, the squeal of the fife, the scraping tramp of the big black boots.