Winds of War (60 page)

“Goodness, you’ve been thinking with might and main, haven’t you?”

Victor Henry came through the doors to the terrace. Byron glanced up, and said coolly and distantly, “Hi, looking for me?”

“Hi. I understand you’re driving Madeline to the airport. Don’t leave without me. I just talked to Washington and I’ve got to scoot back. Your mother’s staying on.

“When’s the plane?” Natalie said.

“One-forty.”

“Can you lend me some money?” she said to Byron. “I think I’ll go to Washington on that plane.”

Pug said, “Oh? Glad to have your company,” and went back into the club.

“You’re going to Washington!” Byron said. “Why there, for crying out loud?”

She put a cupped palm to Byron’s face. “Something about Uncle Aaron’s citizenship. While you’re in New London, I can take care of it. My God, what’s the matter? You look as though you’ve been shot.”

“You’re mistaken. I’ll give you the fare.”

“Byron, listen, I do have to go there, and it would be plain silly to fly down to Miami and then right back up to Washington. Can’t you see that? It’s for a day or two at most.”

“I said I’d give you the fare.”

Natalie sighed heavily. “Darling, listen, I’ll show you Aaron’s letter. He asked me to talk to Leslie Slote about his passport problem, it’s beginning to worry him.” She opened her purse.

“What’s the point?” Byron stiffly stood up. “I believe you.”

Warren insisted on coming to the airport, though Pug tried to protest that the bridegroom surely had better things to do with his scanty time. “How do I know when I’ll see all of you again?” Warren kept saying. Rhoda and Janice got into the argument, and the upshot was that the Henrys plus the bride and Natalie all piled into Lacouture’s Cadillac.

Rhoda on the way out had snatched a bottle of champagne and some glasses. “This family has been GYPPED by this miserable, stupid war,” she declared, handing the glasses around as Byron started up the car. “The first time we’re all together in how many years? And we can’t even stay together for twelve hours! Well, I say, if it’s going to be a short reunion it’s damn well going to be a merry one. Somebody sing something!”

So they sang “Bell Bottom Trousers” and “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” and “I’ve Got Sixpence” and “Auld Lang Syne” as the Cadillac rolled toward the airport. Natalie, crowded between Rhoda and Madeline, tried to join in, but “Auld Lang Syne” was the only song she knew. Rhoda pressed a glass on her, and filled it until wine foamed over the girl’s fingers. “Oops, sorry, dear. Well, it’s a mercy your suit’s black,” she said, mopping at Natalie’s lap with her handkerchief. When the car drove through the airport entrance they were singing one Natalie had never even heard, a family favorite that Pug had brought from California:

Till we meet, till we meet

Till we meet at Jesus’s feet

Till we meet, till we meet

God be with you till we meet again

And Rhoda Henry was crying into her champagne-soaked handkerchief, stating that there were tears of happiness over Warren’s wonderful marriage.

PART TWO – Pamela

Chapter 27

As France was caving in, people began at last to perceive that a main turn of mankind’s destiny now hung on flying machines. Of these there were only a few thousand on the planet. The propeller warplanes of 1940 were modestly destructive, compared to aircraft men have built since. But they could shoot each other down, and unopposed, they could set fire to cities far behind battle lines. Massive bombing of cities from the air had, for some years after the First World War, been considered war’s ultimate and unthinkable horror. But by 1940, the Germans had not only thought of it, but had twice done it: in the Spanish Civil War and in Poland. The Japanese, too, had bombed China’s cities from the air. Evidently the ultimate horror was quite thinkable, though the civilized term for it, strategic bombing, was not yet in vogue. The leaders of England therefore had to face a bitter decision: whether to send their few precious planes to fight over France against the Germans, or hold them back to defend the homeland’s cities and shores.

The French had even fewer planes. In the years before the war, instead of constructing an air fleet, the French had built their Maginot Line. Their military thinkers had argued that aircraft were the scouts and stinging insects of war, useful, annoying, hurtful, but incapable of forcing a decision. As the French state, under the punch of German dive bombers, flew to pieces like a Limoges vase hit by a bullet, its premier issued a sudden frantic public appeal to President Roosevelt to send “clouds of airplanes.” But there were no clouds to send. Maybe the French premier did not know what a paltry air force America had, or that even then, no fighter plane in existence could travel more than a couple of hundred miles. The level of information among French politicians at the time was low.

Meantime, over the fields of Belgium and France, British pilots had learned something important. They could knock down German flying machines. They knocked down many; but many British planes fell too. As the Battle of France went on, the French implored their retreating allies to throw in all their aircraft. This the British did not do. Their air commander, Dowding, told Winston Churchill that twenty-five squadrons had to be kept intact to save England, and Churchill listened to him. The French collapse thus became foredoomed, if it had ever been anything else.

At the height of the debacle, on June 9, in a letter to old General Smuts, Winston Churchill explained himself. The military sage had reproved him for failing to observe a first principle of war:
Concentrate everything at the decisive point
. Churchill pointed out that with the short-ranged fighter planes then in the air on both sides, the side that fought nearer its airdromes had a big advantage. “
The classical principles are in this case modified by the actual quantitative data
,” he wrote. “
I see only one way through now, to wit, that Hitler should attack this country, and in so doing break his air weapon. If this happens, he will be left to face the winter with Europe writhing under his heel, and probably with the United States against him after the presidential election is over
.”

Winston Churchill, today an idealized hero of history, was in his time variously considered a bombastic blunderer, an unstable politician, an intermittently inspired orator, a reckless self-dramatizer, a voluminous able writer in an old-fashioned vein, and a warmongering drunkard. Through most of his long life he cut an antic, brilliant, occasionally absurd figure in British affairs. He never won the trust of the people until 1940, when he was sixty-six years old, and before the war ended they dismissed him. But in his hour he grasped the nature of Hitler, and sensed the way to beat him: that is, by holding fast and pushing him to the assault of the whole world, the morbid German dream of rule or ruin, of dominion or
Götterdämmerung
. He read his man and he read the strategic situation, and with the words of his mouth he inspired the British people to share his vision. By keeping back the twenty-five squadrons from the lost Battle of France, he acted toughly, wisely, and ungallantly; and he turned the war to the course that ended five long years later, when Hitler killed himself and Nazi Germany fell apart. This deed put Winston Churchill in the company of the rare saviors of countries, and perhaps of civilizations.

With France and the Low Countries overrun, and the Germans at the Channel, England now lay within range of the Luftwaffe’s fighter planes. The United States was safe from air attack in 1940, but the onrolling conquest of Europe by the Germans, combined with the growing menace of Japan, posed a danger to the future safety of the United States. The question arose: if selling warplanes to the British would enable them to go on knocking down German aircraft, killing German pilots, and wrecking German bomber factories, might not that be, for American security, the best possible use of the aging craft while new, bigger, and stronger machines were built in the inaccessible sanctuary across the ocean?

The answer, from the United States Navy, the Army, the War Department, the Congress, the press, and the public, was a roaring NO! Franklin Roosevelt wanted to help the British, but he had to reckon with that great American NO. Churchill, with the power of a wartime chief of state, had not sent planes to France, because the survival of England depended on them. Roosevelt, presiding over a wealthy huge land at peace, could not even sell planes to England without risking impeachment.

* * *

It was a shock for Victor Henry to see Franklin Roosevelt out from behind the desk in a wheelchair. The shirt-sleeved President was massive and powerful-looking down to the waist; below that, thin seersucker trousers hung pitifully baggy and loose on his fleshless thigh bones and slack lower legs. The crippled man was looking at a painting propped on a chair. Beside him stood the Vice Chief of Naval Operations for Air, whom Victor Henry knew well: a spare withered little naval aviator, one of the surviving pioneers, with a lipless mouth, a scarred red face, and ferocious tangled white eyebrows.

“Hello there!” The President gave Victor Henry a hearty handshake, his grip warm and damp. It was a steamy day, and though the windows of the old study were open, the room was oppressively hot. “You know Captain Henry, of course, Admiral? His boy’s just gotten his wings at Pensacola. How about this picture. Pug? Like it?”

Inside the heavy ornate gold frame, a British man-o’-war under full sail tossed on high seas beneath a storm-wracked sky and a lurid moon. “It’s fine, Mr. President. Of course, I’m a sucker for sea scenes.”

“So am I, but d’you know he’s got the rigging wrong?” The President accurately pointed out the flaws, with great relish for his own expertise. “Now how about that. Pug? All the man had to do was paint a sailing ship - that was his whole job - and he got the rigging wrong! It’s positively
unbelievable
what people will do wrong given half a chance. Well, that thing’s not going to hang in here.”

During all this, the admiral was training his eyebrows like weapons at Victor Henry. Years ago, in the Bureau of Ordnance, they had violently disagreed over the deck plating on the new carriers. Junior though he was, Henry had carried his point, because of his knowledge of metallurgy. The President now turned his chair away from the painting, and glanced at a silver clock on his desk shaped like a ship’s wheel. “Admiral, what about it? Are we going to put Pug Henry to work on that little thing? Will he do?”

“Well, if you assigned Pug Henry to paint a square-rigger. Mr. President,” the admiral replied nasally, with a none too kind look at Pug, “you might not recognize it, but he’d get the rigging right. As I say, a naval aviator would be a far more logical choice, sir, but -” He gestured reluctant submission, with an upward chop of a hand.

The President said, “We went through all that. Pug, I assume somebody competent is tending shop for you in Berlin?”

“Yes, sir.”

Roosevelt gave the admiral a glance which was a command. Picking his white hat off a couch, the admiral said, “Henry, see me at my office tomorrow at eight.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Victor Henry was left alone with the President of the United States. Roosevelt sighed, smoothed his thin rumpled gray hair, and rolled himself to his desk. Victor Henry now noticed that the President did not use an ordinary invalid’s wheelchair, but an odd piece of gear, a sort of kitchen chair on wheels, in and out of which he could easily slide himself. “Golly, the sun’s going down, and it’s still sweltering in here.” Roosevelt sounded suddenly weary, as he contemplated papers piled on the desk. “Isn’t it about time for a drink? Would you like a martini? I’m supposed to mix a passable martini.”

“Nothing better, sir.”

The President pressed a buzzer. A grizzled tall Negro in a gray gabardine jacket appeared and deftly gathered papers and folders out of various trays, while Roosevelt pulled wrinkled papers from one pocket and another, made quick penciled notes, jabbed papers on a spike and threw others in a tray. “Let’s go,” he said to the valet. “Come along, Pug.”

All down one long hall, and in the elevator, and down another hall, the President glanced at papers and scrawled notes, puffing at the cigarette holder in his teeth. His gusto for the work was evident, despite the heavy purple fatigue smudges under his eyes and the occasional deep coughs racking his chest. They arrived in a small dowdy sitting room hung with sea paintings. “That thing isn’t going to end up in here either,” said the President. “It’s going in the cellar.” He handed all the papers to the valet, who wheeled a chromium-stripped bar beside his chair and left.

“Well, how was the wedding, Pug? Did your boy get himself a pretty bride?” said the President in chatty and warm, if faintly lordly tones, measuring out gin and vermouth like an apothecary. Henry thought that perhaps the cultured accent made him sound more patronizing than he intended to be. Roosevelt wanted to know about the Lacouture house, and wryly laughed at Victor Henry’s account of his argument with the congressman. “Well, that’s what we’re up against here. And Ike Lacouture’s an intelligent man. Some of them are just contrary and obstinate. If we get Lacouture in the Senate, he’ll give us real trouble.”

A very tall woman in a blue-and-white dress came in, followed by a small black dog. “Just in time! Hello there, doggie!” exclaimed the President, scratching the Scottie’s head as it trotted up to him and put its paws on the wheelchair. “This is the famous Pug Henry, dear.”

“Oh? What a pleasure.” Mrs. Roosevelt looked worn but energetic: an imposing, rather ugly woman of middle age with fine skin, a wealth of soft hair, and a smile that was gentle and sweet, despite the protruding teeth stressed in all the caricatures. She firmly shook hands, surveying Pug with the astute cool eyes of a flag officer.

“The Secret Service has an unkind name for my dog,” Roosevelt said, handing his wife a martini. “They call him The Informer. They say he gives away where I am. As though there were only one little black Scottie in the world. Eh, Fala?”