Winds of War (141 page)

“Well, yes, somebody on that big staff should have thought of the reciprocal bearing. But nobody’s head was too clear, and I don’t know - it was one carrier against four or five, anyway. Maybe it was for the best. At least he did try to find a fight. Listen, Dad, our own A.A. shot down many of our planes, and they sure peppered me. It was just a historic snafu all around. Tell me, how’s Briny? Did you see him in Manila?”

The bourbon helped Victor Henry’s sickened spirit, but talking to Warren was better medicine. Slanting light from the living room on his son showed him changed: older, more relaxed, rather hard-bitten, the dangling cigarette almost a part of his features. He had fought with the enemy and survived. That edge was in his bearing, though he deferred carefully to Pug.

“I’ll tell you, Dad,” he said, bringing him a refill from the other room, “I’m not saying this wasn’t a defeat. It was the worst defeat in our history. The Navy will be a hundred years living down the shame of it. But by God, the Congress voted for war today with one dissenting vote! Only one! Think what else could have accomplished that? The Japs were stupid not to move south and dare Roosevelt to come on. He’d have been in trouble.” Warren took a deep drink of bourbon. “What’s more, operationally they blew this attack. They had us flattened with the first wave. All they did the second time was paste the wagons some more and bomb a few smaller ships. What good was that? Our oil farm was sitting behind the sub base, wide open. Dozens of fat round juicy targets you couldn’t miss with your hat. Why, if they’d gotten the oil - and nothing could have stopped them - we’d be evacuating Hawaii right now. The fleet couldn’t have operated from here. We’d be staging a Dunkirk across two thousand five hundred miles of ocean. Moreover, they never hit the subs. They’ll regret that! They never touched our repair shops -”

“I’m convinced,” Pug said. “I’m sure that Jap admiral is committing hara-kiri right now over his disgraceful failure.”

“I said it was a defeat, Dad.” Warren, unoffended, came back sharply but pleasantly. “I say they achieved surprise at high political cost, and then failed to exploit it. Say, it’s another quarter of an hour to dinner. How about one more shortie?”

Pug wanted to examine his mail, but Warren’s acumen was rejoicing his heavy heart, and the strong drink was working wonders. “Well, very short.”

He told Warren about his meeting with Admiral Kimmel. The young aviator flipped a hand at the complaint of too much war material going to Europe. “Jesus, him too? Just a feeble excuse. It’s got to cost several million lives to stop the Germans. Whose lives? Could be ours! The Russians made one deal with Hitler, and they could make another one. The Communists signed a separate peace in 1917, you know. It was the first thing Lenin did on taking over. The whole game here is to keep the Soviet Union fighting. That’s so obvious!”

“You know, you ought to go over in your spare time, Warren, and straighten out Cincpac.”

“I’d be glad to, but I’ll have to move fast to catch him while he’s Cincpac.”

“Oh? You got some inside scoop?”

“Dad, the President isn’t going to resign, and somebody’s head’s got to roll.”

“Dinner, fellas,” Janice’s voice called.

“The only thing is,” Warren said, as they walked in, “those Russians are going to exact payment for all those lives one day. They’ll get to annex Poland, or Czechoslovakia, or some damn thing. But that’s fair enough, maybe. Russia keeps swallowing and then puking up Poland every half century or so. What was it like in Moscow anyway, Dad? What are the Russkis like? How much did you see?”

Pug talked straight through dinner about his adventures in Russia. Janice had provided several bottles of red wine. It wasn’t very good wine, and he wasn’t much of a wine drinker, but tonight he poured down glass after glass, thinking that red wine was really remarkably fine stuff. Continuous talking, another unusual thing for him, eased his heart.

Janice asked questions about Pam Tudsbury, which led him to relate his experiences in England too, and his flight over Berlin. Warren pressed his father for details of the bomb racks and release mechanisms, but Pug could tell him nothing. Warren interrupted Pug’s flow of words to describe his run-in with the Bureau of Ordnance over the bombing assembly of his plane, and the improved rack he had manufactured in the shipfitter’s shop, which the Bureau was now grudgingly examining for possible use in all planes. Pug tried to keep surprise and pride out of his face, saying, “You’ll get no thanks from anybody, boy. Especially if it works! Just a reputation as a troublemaker.”

“I’ll get what I want - bombs that fall straight and hit.”

Over brandy, back on the dark screened porch, Pug, now fairly close to being drunk, asked his son what he thought he should do, with the
California
command gone. It was an honest question. His son impressed him, and he thought Warren might give him good advice.

Warren laughed and said, “Dad, learn to fly.”

“Don’t think I haven’t thought of it.”

“Well, seriously, you’d better go back to Cincpac’s staff tomorrow and pound desks till you get a command. They probably believe that you draw a lot of water with the President. You’ll get what you ask for. But you have to move fast. If Mr. Roosevelt remembers that you’re on the loose again, he’ll send you on some other mission. Although I don’t know, it must be very interesting work, at that.”

“Warren, I hope you believe me - thanks, thanks, boy, just a little more, this is damn good brandy - nearly everything I’ve been doing in the past two years has given me a swift pain in the ass. I don’t know why Mr. Roosevelt chose in his wisdom to make a sort of high-octane errand boy out of me. I’ve talked to great men face to face, and that’s a privilege, sure. If I were planning to write a book or go into politics, or something along that line, it would be dandy. But the bloom soon comes off the rose. You’re a zero to these people. It’s in their manner. You have to watch every sentence you utter and keep your eyes and ears peeled for every move, every word, every tone of some bird who may go down in history, but he’s just another man, basically, and maybe even a big criminal, like Stalin or Hitler. I think you have to have a taste for associating with great men. There are people who do, God knows, who crave it, but I’m not one of them. I never want to get out of sight of ships and the water again, and I never want to see the inside of another embassy.”

“How did it ever start, Dad? Here, have some more.”

“No, no, Warren, I’m feeling no pain at all as it is. Well, okay, just wet the bottom of the glass - thanks, boy. How did it start? Well -”

Pug recounted his prediction of the Nazi-Soviet pact, his visits to the President, his assembling of the planes for England, and his reports from Berlin. He felt he was getting loose-tongued. “Well, that’s the idea. I’ve never discussed these things before with anybody, Warren. Not even your mother. You strike me now as a thoroughgoing professional officer. It does my heart good and it gives me pleasure to confide a little in you. Also I’m drunk as a fiddler.”

Warren grinned. “Ha! You haven’t told me a thing. That story about the planes for England cropped up in
Time
a couple of months ago.”

“I’m well aware of that,” said his father, “but I wasn’t the one who spilled the beans. You didn’t see
my
name in that story.”

“I sure didn’t. Dad, don’t you know why the President likes you? You’ve a keen mind, you get things done, you don’t talk - a rare enough combination - and added to all that, you don’t want the job. He must be up to his nates in these people you describe who keep shoving to get near him. He must find you refreshing as well as useful. There can’t be many patriots in Washington.”

“Well, that’s an interesting thought. I don’t know why you’re buttering me up, but thanks for calling me a patriot with a keen mind. I do try to be as keen as the next guy, Warren. Possibly I was a wee bit mistaken in that small dispute about carriers versus battleships. If I’d been ordered to the
Enterprise
, for instance, instead of the
California
- which might well have been, had I ever learned to fly - I would have a command right now, instead of a skinful of booze. Thanks, Warren. Thanks for everything, and God bless you. Sorry I did so much talking. Tomorrow I want to hear all about your tangle with the Zeroes. Now if my legs will support me, I think I’ll go to bed.”

He did not stir till noon. Janice was out on the lawn, playing with the baby on a blanket, when her father-in-law emerged yawning on the screen porch in a white silk kimono, carrying a manila envelope.

“Hi, Dad,” she called. “How about some breakfast?”

He sat in a wicker chair. “You mean lunch. No thanks, I’m still off schedule from the travelling. Your maid’s bringing me coffee. I’ll have a look at my mail, then mosey down to Cincpac.”

A few minutes later Janice heard a loud clink. Victor Henry sat upright staring at a letter in his lap, his hand still on the coffee cup he had set down so hard.

“What’s the matter, Dad?”

“Eh? What? Nothing.”

“Bad news from home?”

“That coffee’s mighty hot. I burned my tongue. It’s nothing. Where’s Warren, by the way?”

“Went to the ship. He expects to be back for dinner, but I guess we can never be sure about anything anymore.”

“That’s exactly right.”

His voice and his manner were strained and queer, she thought. Covertly she watched him read and reread two handwritten letters, looking from one to the other, leaving a pile of office mail unopened.

“Say, Jan.” He stood, stuffing the mail back in the big envelope.

“Yes, Dad. You’re sure you won’t eat something?”

“No, no. I don’t want to eat. I’m a little tireder than I figured. I may even crawl back in the sack for a bit.”

When night fell, his bedroom door was still shut. Warren came home after seven. Janice told him what had been happening. He cautiously rapped at his father’s door.

“Dad?”

Rapping louder, he tried the knob and went into the black room. Soon he came out with an empty brandy bottle. The cork and foil lay in his palm. “It was a fresh bottle, Janice. He opened it and drank it all.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s just out. Out cold.”

“Maybe you should look at his mail.”

Warren gave her a frigid glare, lighting a cigarette.

“Listen,” she said with mixed timidity and desperation, “those letters, whatever they were, upset him. You’d better find out what the trouble is.”

“If he wants me to know, he’ll tell me.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Eat my dinner.”

Warren did not speak again until he finished his meat. He sat silent, looking straight ahead when food was not before him. “Dad’s taking the
California
thing hard,” he finally said. “That’s the whole trouble.”

“Well, I hope that’s all.”

He said, “Did you listen to the evening news?”

“No.”

“Big air strike on Manila. They made a mess of the Cavite Navy Yard. That’s all the news Washington put out. But the communicator on the
Enterprise
told me two submarines were bombed and one was sunk. That one was the
Devilfish
.”

“Oh God, no!”

“And there’s no word on survivors.”

“Maybe it’s a mistaken report.”

“Maybe.”

“Warren, I feel in my bones that Byron is all right.”

His chilly grim face looked much like his father’s. “That’s comforting. Till we get some more definite information.”

Chapter 61

To military specialists, “Clark Field” is the name of a United States defeat as grave as Pearl Harbor. With this catastrophe at the main Army airfield on Luzon, the Philippines lost their air cover; the Asiatic Fleet had to flee south; and the rich south sea islands and archipelagoes were laid bare at a stroke for conquest. There has never been a rational explanation for what happened there. Yet Congress did not investigate it. Nobody was relieved. History still ignores Clark Field, and remembers Pearl Harbor. Clark Field was half a day late for immortality. Two great disasters five thousand miles apart in one day are boring, and like any good editor, history has cut the repetition.

Clark Field occurred half a day later than Pearl Harbor because the Japanese could not, for all their clever planning, arrange for the dawn to come up everywhere at once. They gave up hope of surprising the Philippines, for the sunrise took five hours to traverse the bulge of ocean from Hawaii. Their bombers waited for good weather in starting from Formosa, and droned straight in over the main island of Luzon just before high noon, expecting alert and violent opposition. The ground observers, on a war footing after the Pearl Harbor news, sent a spate of reports to the command center, tracking the attackers from the coast all the way to their objective. They got there unopposed, nevertheless, and found the fighters and bombers of the Far East Air Force - a formidable armada, built up in recent weeks as the hard core of resistance to Japan - lined up on the ground. This ignominious occurrence remains unaccounted for. It was the Japanese, this time, who were surprised, very pleasantly so. They laid utter waste to General Douglas MacArthur’s air force, and flew away. Thus ended, in a quarter of an hour, any hope of stopping the Japanese in the south seas. No course remained for the American forces there but last-ditch stands and surrenders.

The Japanese at once set about to cash in on this startling success. Step one was to make Manila Bay uninhabitable for the United States Navy. Two days after Clark Field a horde of bombers came in and carefully, painstakingly destroyed the Cavite Naval Base at their leisure, having no air defenders to worry about. The
Devilfish
and Byron Henry were at dead center of this attack.

When the attack actually began, Byron was ashore with a working party, drawing torpedoes. The terrifying wail of the siren broke out not far from the big open shed of the torpedo shop. The overhead crane clattered to a halt. The echoing clanks and squeals of repair machinery quieted down. Chiefs, torpedomen, and machinists’ mates in greasy dungarees trotted away from their benches and lathes to take battle stations.