Winds of War (109 page)

* * *

Gray peace pervaded the wilderness-ringed Argentia Bay in Newfoundland, where the American ships anchored to await the arrival of Winston Churchill. Haze and mist blended all into gray: gray water, gray sky, gray air, gray hills with a tint of green. The monstrously shaped gray-painted iron ships, queer intruders from the twentieth century into the land of the Indians, floated in the haze like an ugly phantom vision of the future. Sailors and officers went about their chores as usual on these ships, amid pipings and loudspeaker squawks. But a primeval hush lay heavy in Argentia Bay, just outside the range of the normal ships’ noises.

At nine o’clock, three gray destroyers steamed into view, ahead of a battleship camouflaged in swirls and splotches of color like snakeskin. This was H.M.S.
Prince of Wales
, bigger than any other ship in sight, bearing the guns that had hit the
Bismarck
. As it steamed past the
Augusta
, a brass band on its decks shattered the hush with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Quiet fell. The band on the quarterdeck of the
Augusta
struck up “God Save the King.”

Pug Henry stood near the President, under the awning rigged at number-one turret, with admirals, generals, august civilians like Averell Harriman and Sumner Wells. Churchill was plain to see not five hundred yards away, in an odd blue costume, gesturing with a big cigar. The President towered over everybody, stiff on braced legs, in a neat brown suit, one hand holding his hat on his heart, the other clutching the arm of his son, an Air Corps officer who strongly resembled him. Roosevelt’s large pink face was self-consciously grave.

At this grand moment Pug Henry’s thoughts were prosaic. BuShips experts were disputing over camouflage patterns. Some liked this British tropical splashing, some preferred plain gray or blue horizontal bands. Pug had seen the mottled battleship through the mist before monochrome destroyers that were a mile closer. He intended to report this.

“God Save the King” ended. The President’s face relaxed. “Well! I’ve never heard ‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee’ played better.” The men around him laughed politely at the presidential joke, and Roosevelt laughed too. The squeal of boatswains’ pipes broke up the dress parade on the cruiser’s deck.

Admiral King beckoned to Pug. “Take my barge over to the
Prince of Wales
, and put yourself at Mr. Harry Hopkins’s service. The President desires to talk with him before Churchill comes to call, so expedite.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Passing from the
Augusta
to the
Prince of Wales
in King’s barge, over a few hundred yards of still water, Victor Henry went from America to England and from peace to war. It was a shocking jump. King’s spick-and-span flagship belonged to a different world than the whipped British vessel, where the accommodation ladder was salt-crusted, the camouflage paint was peeling, even the main battery guns looked pitted and rusty. Pug was aghast to see cigarette butts and wastepaper in the scuppers, though droves of bluejackets were doing an animated scrub-down. On the superstructure raw steel patches were welded here and there - sticking plaster for wounds from the
Bismarck
’s salvos.

The officer of the deck had a neatly trimmed brown beard, hollow cheeks, and a charming smile. Pug envied the green tarnish on the gold braid of his cap. “Ah, yes, Captain Henry,” he said, smartly returning the salute in the different British palm-out style, “Mr. Hopkins has received the signal and is waiting for you in his cabin The quartermaster will escort you.”

Victor Henry followed the quartermaster through passageways hauntingly like those in American battleships, yet different in countless details: the signs, the fittings, the fire extinguishers, the shape of the watertight doors.

“Hello there, Pug.” Hopkins spoke as though he had not seen the Navy captain for a day or two, though their last encounter had been on the train to Hyde Park early in March, and meantime Hopkins had travelled to London and Moscow in a blaze of worldwide newspaper attention. “Am I riding over with you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How’s the President feeling?” Hopkins had two bags open on his bunk in a small cabin off the wardroom. In one he carefully placed papers, folders, and books; in the other he threw clothes, medicine bottles, and shoes as they came to hand. Hopkins looked thinner than before, a bent scarecrow with a gray double-breasted suit flapping loosely on him. In the long, curved, emaciated face, the clever, rather feminine eyes appeared enormous as a lemur’s. The sea voyage showed in his fresh color and bouncy movements.

“He’s having the time of his life, sir.”

“I can imagine. So’s Churchill. Churchill’s like a boy going on his first date. Well, it’s quite a historic moment, at that.” Hopkins pulled dirty shirts from a drawer and crammed them in the suitcase. “Almost forgot these. I left a few in the Kremlin and had to scrounge more in London.”

“Mr. Hopkins, what about the Russians? Will they hold?”

Hopkins paused, a stack of papers in his hand, and pursed his mouth before speaking decisively. “The Russians will hold. But it’ll be a near thing. They’ll need help.” He resumed his hurried packing. “When you fly from Archangel to Moscow, Pug, it takes hours and hours, over solid green forests and brown swamps. Often you don’t see a village from horizon to horizon. Hitler’s bitten off a big bite this time.” He was struggling with the clasp on his suitcase, and Pug gave him a hand. “Ah, thanks! What do you suppose Stalin wants from us most of all, Pug?”

“Airplanes,” Victor Henry said promptly. “‘Clouds of airplanes.’ Same as the French were yelling for last year.”

“Aluminum,” said Harry Hopkins. “Aluminum to
build
airplanes with. Well, let me correct that - his number one item was anti-aircraft guns. Next comes aluminum. Wants a lot of Army trucks, too. Stalin isn’t planning to get beaten in three weeks, or six weeks or three years.” Hopkins tidied the papers in the smaller case, and closed it. “Let’s go.”

The way led through the wardroom, stretching grandly the width of the vessel, furnished like a London club, with dark panelling, easy chairs, rows of novels and encyclopedias, and a bar. When the door to the Prime Minister’s cabin was opened by his valet, a strange sight greeted them. Winston Churchill, barefoot, was contemplating himself in a mirror in morning coat, tie, and yellow silk underdrawers. “Hello there, Harry.” He ignored Captain Henry, slewing a long cigar around in his mouth. “I’m not aware that His Majesty’s First Minister has ever before paid a call on the President of the United States at sea. I saw the President wearing a plain brown lounge suit. But he is the head of state. I am only a minister.” Churchill’s fat aged face was lit with puckish relish of the unique historical problem. “This looks odd, I know. My man of protocol wants me to wear the same old brass-buttoned jacket and cap. But it’s such an informal dress.”

“Prime Minister,” Hopkins said, “You do look more like a Former Naval Person in it.”

Churchill grinned at the whimsical name he used in messages to Roosevelt. He said to the valet, “Very well. The Trinity House uniform again.”

“This is Captain Victor Henry, Prime Minister, of Navy War Plans.”

Pulling down his eyebrows, Churchill said, “Hello there. Have you done anything about those landing craft?”

The eyes of Hopkins and Victor Henry met, and Churchill’s wide mouth wrinkled with gratification. Pug said, “I’m amazed that you remember me, Mr. Prime Minister. That’s part of my job now. The other day I talked with the President at length about landing craft.”

“Well? Is the United States going to build enough of them? A very large number will be called for.”

“We will, sir.”

“Have our people given you everything you’ve requested?”

“Their cooperation has been outstanding.”

“I think you’ll find,” Churchill rasped, as the valet helped him into enormous blue trousers, “that we simple islanders have hit on a design or two that may prove usable.” Churchill spoke slowly, lisping on his
s
’s in a tone that was almost a growl.

Hopkins said a word of farewell to Churchill, and they left. In the passageway, with an incredulous grin, Hopkins remarked, “We’ve been having ceremonial rehearsals for days, and yet he’s fussing to the last minute about what to wear! A very, very great man, all the same.”

As Hopkins shakily stepped aboard King’s barge from the accommodation ladder, the stern rose high on a swell, then dropped away from under him. He lost his balance and toppled into the arms of the coxswain, who said, “Ooops-a-daisy, sir.”

“Pug, I’ll never be a sailor.” Hopkins staggered inside, settling with a sigh on the cushions. I flopped on my face boarding the seaplane that flew me to the Soviet Union. That nearly ended my mission right there.” He glanced around at the flawlessly appointed barge. “Well, well. America! Peacetime! So you’re still in War Plans. You’ll attend the staff meetings then.”

“Some of them, yes, sir.”

“You might bear in mind what our friends will be after. It’s fairly clear to me, after five days at sea with the Prime Minister.” Hopkins held out one wasted hand and ticked off points on skeletal fingers. He seemed to be using Victor Henry as a sounding board to refresh his own mind for his meeting with the President, for he talked half to himself. “First they’ll press for an immediate declaration of war on Germany. They know they won’t get that. But it softens the ground for the second demand, the reason Winston Churchill has crossed the ocean. They want a warning by the United States to Japan that any move against the British in Asia means war with us. Their empire is mighty rickety at this point. They hope such a warning will shore it up. And they’ll press for big war supplies to their people in Egypt and the Middle East. Because if Hitler pokes down there and closes the canal, the Empire strangles. They’ll also try, subtly but hard - and I would too, in their place - for an understanding that in getting American aid they come ahead of Russia. Now is the time to bomb the hell out of Germany from the west, they’ll say, and build up for the final assault. Stuff we give Russia, it will be hinted, may be turned around and pointed against us in a few weeks.”

Victor Henry said, “The President isn’t thinking that way.”

“I hope not. If Hitler wins in Russia, he wins the world. If he loses in Russia he’s finished, even if the Japanese move. The fight over there is of inconceivable magnitude. There must be seven million men shooting at each other, Pug. Seven million or more.” Hopkins spoke the figures slowly, stretching out the wasted fingers of both hands. “The Russians have taken a shellacking so far, but they’re unafraid. They want to throw the Germans out. That’s the war now. That’s where the stuff should go now.”

“Then this conference is almost pointless,” said Pug. The barge was slowing and clanging as it drew near the
Augusta
.

“No, it’s a triumph,” Hopkins said. “The President of the United States and the British Prime Minister meeting face to face to discuss beating the Germans. The world will know that. That’s achievement enough for now.” Hopkins gave Victor Henry a sad smile, and a brilliantly intelligent light came into his large eyes. He pulled himself to his feet in the rocking boat. “Also, Pug, this is the changing of the guard.”

Winston Churchill came to the
Augusta
at eleven o’clock. Among the staff members with him, Captain Henry saw Lord Burne-Wilke, and a hallucinatory remembrance of Pamela Tudsbury in her blue WAAF uniform distracted him from the dramatic handshake of Roosevelt and Churchill at the gangway. They prolonged the clasp for the photographers, exchanging smiling words.

All morning, recollections of England and Pamela had been stirring Pug. The OOD’s very British greeting at the
Prince of Wales
ladder, the glimpses of London magazines in the wardroom, Winston Churchill’s voice with its thick
s
’s, had wakened his memory like a song or a perfume.

Göring’s 1940 air blitz on London already seemed part of another era,, almost another war. Standing well back in the rank of King’s staff officers, this short unknown Navy captain, whose face would be lost in the photographs, tried to shake irrelevancies from his brain and pay attention.

In an odd way the two leaders diminished each other. They were both Number One Men. But that was impossible. Who, then, was Number One? Roosevelt stood a full head taller, but he was pathetically braced on lifeless leg frames, clinging to his son’s arm, his full trousers drooped and flapping. Churchill, a bent Pickwick in blue uniform, looked up at him with majestic good humor, much older, more dignified, more assured. Yet there was a trace of deference about the Prime Minister. By a shade of a shade, Roosevelt looked like Number One. Maybe that was what Hopkins had meant by “the changing of the guard.”

The picture-taking stopped at an unseen signal, the handshake ended, and a wheelchair appeared. The erect front-page President became the cripple more familiar to Pug, hobbling a step or two and sinking with relief into the chair. The great men and their military chiefs left the quarterdeck.

The staffs got right to business and conferred all day. Victor Henry worked with the planners, on the level below the chiefs of staff and their deputies where Burne-Wilke operated, and of course far below the summit of the President, the Prime Minister, and their advisers. Familiar problems came up at once: excessive and contradictory requests from the British services, unreal plans, unfilled contracts, jumbled priorities, fouled communications. One cardinal point the planners hammered out fast. Building new ships to replace U-boat sinkings came first. No war materiel could be used against Hitler until it had crossed the ocean. This plain truth, so simple once agreed on, ran a red line across every request, every program, every projection. Steel, aluminum, rubber, valves, motors, machine tools, copper wire, all the thousand things of war, would go first to ships. This simple yardstick rapidly disclosed the poverty of the “arsenal of democracy,” and dictated - as a matter of frightening urgency - a gigantic job of building new steel mills, and plants to turn the steel into combat machines and tools.