Winds of War (13 page)

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 Wilhelmstrasse, 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 German
was a jump into the dark.

In War College seminars, instructors had poked 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 destroyed many such documents. He had a tendency to reach beyond routine. The result could be good or disastrous. His unsolicited memorandum on 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 grand 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 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 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.

Victor Henry decided that his job was intelligence, and that for better or worse this report told truly what he had seen so far in Nazi Germany. He hunted up the courier and gave him the document for urgent delivery to the Office of Naval Intelligence.

* * *

Admiral Preble read
Combat Readiness of Nazi Germany
a week later, and sent one page of extracts to the President. The Nazi-Soviet pact broke on the world on the twenty-second of August, as one of the most stunning surprises in all history. On the twenty-fourth Preble received the page back in an envelope from the White House. The President had scrawled at the bottom, in strong thick pen strokes in black ink:

Let me have V. Henry’s service record
.

FDR

Chapter
7

The announcement of the pact shrieked at Byron and Natalie from the news placards in the Rome airport. They had set out from Siena before dawn in an old Renault, and while the whole world was chattering about the astounding news, they had innocently driven down along the Apennines in golden Italian sunlight amid old mountain towns, wild airy gorges and green valleys where peasants worked their fields. With Natalie Jastrow at his side for a three-week journey that was only starting, Byron was in the highest of spirits, until he saw the bulletins.

He had never found a European airport so busy or so noisy. Gesticulating travellers were besieging the reservation desks. Nearly everybody was either walking fast or running, and sweaty porters wheeling heaps of luggage were snarling at passengers and at each other. The loudspeaker never stopped its thunderous echoing drivel. At the first kiosk, he bought a sheaf of papers. The Italian papers shrilled that this great diplomatic coup by the Axis had ended the war danger. The headlines of the Paris and London newspapers were big, black, and frightened. The German press giggled coarse delight in tall red block letters. The front page of a Swiss newspaper caricatured Hitler and Göring in Russian blouses and fur hats, squatting and kicking out their boots, to the music of a concertina played by Stalin in an SS uniform. Across a Belgian front page, the stark headline was

1914

In a crowded, buzzing airport restaurant, while they ate a hasty lunch of cannelloni and cold white wine, Natalie astonished him by talking of going on. To proceed into a country that might soon be invaded by Germans struck Byron as almost mad.

But Natalie argued that the tourists milling in the airport were mere sheep. If a sudden political change could panic them, they had no right to be in Europe. She had stayed in Paris through the Munich crisis. Half of her American friends had fled, and later had straggled back - those who had not felt too silly. There was always less danger than most people thought. Even in a war, an American passport spelled safety. She wanted to see Poland. She wanted to see Leslie Slote and had given her promise. She would be in and out of Poland in three weeks. The world wasn’t going to end in three weeks.

It did not cheer Byron to perceive how much she wanted to rejoin Slote. Since the Palio, he had hoped that she was warming to himself. The girl had been downright affectionate during the second Palio, which they had watched without Jastrow, and at one point in the evening - when they were well into a third bottle of Soave at dinner after the race - she had remarked that it was too bad he wasn’t a few years older, and a Jew. “My mother would take to you, Briny,” she had said. “My troubles would be over. You have good manners. You must have lovely parents. Leslie Slote is nothing but an ambitious, self-centered dog. I’m not even sure he loves me. He and I just fell in a hole.”

But now she was on her way to her lover, and a political explosion that had staggered Europe made no difference to her.

By now he knew something of her rash streak. Climbing on mountainsides or ruins, Natalie Jastrow took unladylike chances. She leaped gaps, she teetered along narrow ledges, she scrambled up bare rocks, careless alike of her modesty and her neck. She was a strong, surefooted girl, and a little too pleased with herself about it.

He sat slouched in his chair, contemplating her across the red and white checked cloth, the dirty dishes, the empty wineglasses. The Alitalia plane was departing for Zagreb on the first leg of their flight in little more than an hour. She stared back, her lips pushed out in a wry pout. Her dark gray travelling suit was sharply tailored over her pretty bosom. She wore a black crushable hat and a white shirt. Her ringless fingers beat on the cloth. “Look,” she said, “I can well understand that for you it’s no longer a gay excursion. So I’ll go on by myself.”

“I suggest you telephone Slote first. Ask him if you should come.”

Natalie drummed her fingers. “Nonsense, I’ll never get a call through to Warsaw today.”

“Try.”

“All right,” she snapped. “Where are the damned telephones?”

The long-distance office was mobbed. Two switchboard girls were shouting, plugging, unplugging, scrawling, waving their hands, and wiping sweat from their brows. Byron cut through the crowd, pulling Natalie by the hand. When she gave the operator a number in Warsaw, the girl’s sad huge brown eyes widened. “Signorina - Warsaw? Why don’t you ask me to ring President Roosevelt? It’s twelve hours’ delay to Warsaw.”

“That’s the number of the American embassy there,” Byron said, smiling at her, “and it’s life and death.”

He had an odd, thin-lipped smile, half-melancholy, half-gay, and the Italian girl warmed to it as to an offered bunch of violets. “American embassy? I can try.”

She plugged, rang, argued in German and Italian, made faces at the mouthpiece, and argued some more. “Urgent, emergency,” she kept shouting. This went on for ten minutes or more, while Byron smoked and Natalie paced and kept looking at her watch. With a surprised look, the operator all at once nodded violently, pointing to a booth. Natalie stayed inside a long time, and came out red-faced and scowling. “We were cut off before we finished. I’m choking to death. Let’s get some air.” Byron brought her out into the terminal. “He got angry with me. He told me I was insane. The diplomats are burning papers. . . . It was an awfully good connection. He might have been around the corner.”

“I’m sorry. Natalie, but it’s what I expected.”

“He said I should get the hell out of Italy and go straight home, with or without Aaron. Is that what you’d have told me?” She turned on him. “I’m so
hot
! Buy me lemonade or something.”

They sat at a little table outside an airport café. She said, “Let’s see the plane tickets.”

“I’m sure we can get refunds.” He handed her the envelope.

She extracted her ticket and gave the envelope back. “You get a refund. They burned papers before Munich, too. England and France will fold up now just the way they did then. Imagine a world war over Danzig! Who the hell knows where Danzig is? Who cares?”

“Natalie. That embassy will be swamped. You won’t see much of him.”

“Well, if he’s too busy for me, I’ll do my sightseeing alone. My family lived in Warsaw for years. I still have relatives there. I want to see it. I’m on my way and I’m not turning back.” The girl looked in her pocketbook mirror and jammed her hat further down on her head. “It must be about time for me to check in.”

He held out his hand. “Give me the ticket. I’ll check both of us in while you have your lemonade.”

She brightened, but looked suspicious. “Are you sure you want to go? You needn’t, honestly. I’m releasing you. Don’t come. I don’t want you. Tell Aaron I said that.

“Oh shut up, Natalie. Let’s have the ticket.”

She gave him a playful smile, clutching the green and yellow ticket to her bosom. “Well! Listen to Briny Henry being masterful. The thing is, darling, if anything does go wrong, I don’t ever want to feel I dragged you into trouble.” This was the first time Natalie Jastrow had – however casually - used a term of endearment to him. Byron stood up and pulled the ticket from her gloved hand.

* * *

The scheduled eight-hour trip lasted a day and a half. No connections worked. Their baggage vanished. They spent the night on benches in the Budapest terminal. At Warsaw, they were the only foreigners arriving at the small field in the nearly empty, rusty, shabby LOT plane, which turned right around and took off jam-packed with people fleeing Poland. Disconsolate travellers crowded the fence and watched it go.