Winds of War (68 page)

* * *

Outside 10 Downing Street a single helmeted bobby paced in the morning sun, watched by a few sightseers on the opposite sidewalk. Remembering the grim arrays of SS men in front of Hitler’s marble chancellery, Victor Henry smiled at this one unarmed Englishman guarding the Prime minister’s old row house. Tillet brought him in, introduced him to a male secretary in a morning coat, and left. The secretary led him up a wide stairway lined with portraits - Pug recognized Disraeli, Gladstone, and Ramsay MacDonald - and left him waiting in a broad room full of beautiful old furniture and splendid paintings. Perched on a petit-point sofa, all alone, Pug had plenty of time to grow nervous before the secretary returned to fetch him.

In a small hot cluttered room that smelled of old books and dead cigars, the corpulent old Prime Minister stood near the window, one hand on his hip, looking down at a spread of photographs on his desk. He was very short and very stooped, with graceful little hands and feet; he bulged in the middle, and tapered upward and downward like Tweedledum. As he turned and went to meet Victor Henry, his walk was slow and heavy. With a word of welcome he shook hands and motioned Pug to a seat. The secretary left. Churchill sat in his armchair, put a hand on one arm, leaned back, and contemplated the American naval captain with filmy eyes. The big ruddy face, flecked and spotted with age, looked severe and suspicious. He puffed at the stump of his cigar, and slowly rumbled, “We’re going to win, you know.”

“I’m becoming convinced of that, Mr. Prime Minister,” Victor Henry said, trying to control his constricted throat and bring out normal tones.

Churchill put on half-moon glasses, took up a paper and glanced at it, then peered over the rims at Henry. “Your post is naval attaché in Berlin. Your President has sent you here to have a look at our RDF, a subject in which you have special knowledge. He reposes much confidence in your judgment.”

Churchill said this with a faint sarcastic note suggesting that he knew Pug was one more pair of eyes sent by Roosevelt to see how the British were taking the German air onslaught: also, that he did not mind the scrutiny a bit.

“Yes, sir. We call it radar.”

“What do you think of my stuff, now that you’ve seen it?”

“The United States could use it.”

Churchill uttered a pleased grunt. “Really? I haven’t had an opinion quite like that from an American before. Yet some of your best people here have visited Chain Home stations.”

“Maybe they don’t know what we’ve got. I do.”

“Well, then, I suggest you report to your President that we simple British have somehow got hold of something he can use.”

“I’ve done so.”

“Good! Now have a look at these.”

From under the outspread pile of photographs, the Prime Minister drew several charts and passed them to the American. He dropped his gnawed stub into a shiny brass jar of sand, and lit a fresh cigar, which trembled in his mouth.

The colored curves and columns of the charts showed destroyer and merchant ship losses, the rate of new construction, the increase of Nazi-held European coastline, and the rising graph of U-boat sinkings. It was an alarming picture. Puffing clouds of blue and gray smoke. Churchill said that the fifty old destroyers were the only warships that he would ever ask of the President. His own new construction would fill the gap by March. It was a question of holding open the convoy lines and beating off invasion during these next eight months.

Every day danger mounted, he said, but the deal was bogging down. Roosevelt wanted to announce the lease of Caribbean naval bases on British islands as a trade for the destroyers. But Parliament would be touchy about bartering British soil for ships. Moreover, the President wanted a written guarantee that if the Nazis invaded and won, the British fleet would not yield to the Germans or scuttle itself, but would steam to American ports. “It is a possibility that I won’t discuss, let alone publicly record,” Churchill growled. “The German fleet has had considerable practice in scuttling and surrendering. We have had none.”

Churchill added - with a crafty grin that reminded Pug a bit of Franklin Roosevelt - that giving fifty warships to one side in a war perhaps was not a wholly friendly act toward the other side. Some of the President’s advisers feared Hitler might declare war on the United States. That was another difficulty.

“There’s not much danger of that,” Victor Henry said.

“No, not much hope of that,” Churchill said, “I quite agree.” His eyes under twisted brows looked impish as a comedian’s. Victor Henry felt that the Prime Minister had paid him the compliment of stating his entire war policy in one wily joke.

“Here’s that bad man’s invasion fleet. Landing craft department,” Churchill went on, scooping up and handing him a sheaf of photographs showing various oddly shaped boats, some viewed in clusters from the air, some photographed close on. “A raggle-taggle he’s still scraping together. Mostly the prahms they use in inland waterways. Such cockleshells will ease the task of drowning Germans, as we devoutly hope to do to the lot of them. I should like you to tell your President that now is the time to get to work on landing craft. We shall have to go back to France and we shall need a lot of these. We have got some fairly advanced types, based on designs I made back in 1917. Look at them, while you’re here. We shall want a real Henry Ford effort.”

Victor Henry couldn’t help staring in wonder at this slumping, smoke-wreathed puddle of an old man, fiddling with the thick gold chain across his big black-clad belly, who with three or four combat divisions, with almost no guns or tanks left after Dunkirk, with his back to the wall before a threatened onslaught of Hitler’s hundred and twenty divisions, was talking of invading Europe.

Churchill stared back, his broad lower lip thrust out. “Oh, I assure you we shall do it. Bomber Command is growing by leaps and bounds. We shall one day bomb them till the rubble jumps, and invasion will administer the coup de grâce. But we shall need those landing craft.” He paused, threw his head back, and glared at Henry. “In fact, we are prepared now to raid Berlin in force, if he dares to bomb London. Should that occur while you’re still here, and if you don’t consider it foolhardy nonsense, you might go along to see how it’s done.” The pugnacious look faded, the wrinkled eyes blinked comically over the spectacles, and he spoke in slow jocular lisping rhythms. “Mind you, I don’t suggest you return to your duty post by parachute. It would save time, but might be considered irregular by the Germans, who are sticklers for form.”

Pug thought it was extremely foolhardy nonsense, but he said at once, “I’d be honored, of course.”

“Well, well. Probably out of the question. But it would be fun, wouldn’t it?” Churchill painfully pushed himself out of his chair, and Pug jumped up. “I trust General Tillet is taking good care of you? You are to see everything here that you’ve a mind to, good or bad.”

“He’s been perfect, sir.”

“Tillet is very good. His views on Gallipoli I regard as slightly unsound, since he makes me out at once a Cyrano, a jackass, and a poltroon.” He held out his hand. “I suppose you’ve seen a bit of Hitler. What do you think of him?”

“Very able, unfortunately.”

“He is a most wicked man. The German badly wants tradition and authority, or this black face out of the forest appears. Had we restored the Hohenzollerns in 1919, Hitler might still be a ragged tramp, muttering to himself in a squalid Vienna doss house. Now, alas, we must be at considerable trouble to destroy him. And we shall.” Churchill shook hands at the desk. “You were in War Plans and you may be again. I recommend that you obtain all our latest stuff on landing craft. Ask Tillet.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We shall require great swarms of the things. Great . . .
swarms
!” Churchill swept his arms wide, and Victor saw in his mind’s eye thousands of landing craft crawling toward a beach in a gray dawn.

“Thank you, Mr. Prime Minister.”

General Tillet was waiting in his car. They went to a room in the Admiralty where huge wall charts showed the disposition of the fleet. In the blue spaces of the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean, the little pins looked sparse and lonesome, but the sowing around the home islands bristled thick. Pins in a thin line marked the great-circle convoy path across the Atlantic; Tillet traced this line with his pipe. “There’s the problem. We breathe through that tube. If Jerry can cut it, we’ve bought it. Obviously we can use some old destroyers you’ve got lying around from the last war, not doing much of anything.”

“Yes, so the Prime Minister said. But there’s a political problem, General. Either Hitler’s a menace to the United States, in which case we need everything we’ve got and a lot more, or he isn’t, and in that case why should we let you have part of our Navy to fight him? I’m just giving you the isolationist argument.”

“Mm, yaas. Of course we hope you’ll think of common traditions and all that, and the advantage of keeping us alive, and the possibility that the Germans and Japanese, dominating Europe and Asia and the oceans, might prove more disagreeable over the years than we’ve been. Now I’m still to show you those landing craft we’ve got up in Bristol, and Fighter Command in Stanmore -”

“If I can, I’d also like to visit Group Operations, Number Eleven Fighter Group.”

Tillet blinked at him. “Number Eleven? Jolly good idea. Take a bit of arrangement but I believe we can lay it on.”

Chapter 32

Victor Henry sat in the lobby of the Savoy, waiting for Pamela and her fighter pilot. Uniforms thronged past, with only a sprinkling of dinner jackets on white-headed or bald men. The young women, in colorful thin summer finery, looked like a stream of excited amorous angels. On the brink of being invaded by Hitler’s hordes, England was the gayest place he had ever seen.

This was nothing like the glum hedonism of the French in May, going down with knives and forks in their hands. Wherever the American had visited in a hard-driving week - and by now this included shipyards, navy and air bases, factories, government offices, and army maneuvers - he had noted the resolute, cheerful spirit, borne out by the rise in production figures. The British were beginning to turn out tanks, planes, guns, and ships as never before. They now claimed to be making airplanes faster than the Germans were knocking them down. The problem was getting to be fighter pilots. If the figures given him were true, they had started with somewhat more than a thousand seasoned men. Combat attrition was taking a steep toll, and to send green replacements into the skies was fruitless. They could kill no Germans and the Germans could kill them. England had to sweat out 1940 with the fighter pilots on hand. But how fast was the Luftwaffe losing its own trained pilots? That was the key, Tillet said; and the hope was that Göring was already throwing everything in. If so, and if the British could hold on, there would come a crack in Luftwaffe performance. The signal, said Tillet, might be a shift to terror bombing of the cities.

“Here we are, late as hell.” chirped Pamela, floating up to him in a mauve silk dress. Pamela’s flier was short, swarthy, broad-nosed, and rather stout, and his thick wavy black hair badly needed cutting. Except for the creased blue uniform, Flight Lieutenant Gallard looked like a young lawyer, or businessman rather than an actor, though his brilliant blue eyes, sunken with fatigue, had a dramatic sparkle.

Diamonds glittered in Pamela’s ears. Her hair was done up in a makeshift way. Pug thought she had probably emerged from bed rather than a beauty parlor; and fair enough in the time and place! The notion gave him a pang of desire to be young and in combat. Their table was waiting in the crowded grillroom. They ordered drinks.

“Orange squash,” said Flight Lieutenant Gallard.

“Two dry martinis. One orange squash.
Very
good, sir,” purred the silver-haired waiter, with a low bow.

Gallard gave Victor Henry a fetching grin, showing perfect teeth; it made him seem more of an actor. The fingers of his left hand were beating a brisk tattoo on the starched cloth. “That’s the devil of an order, isn’t it, in the Savoy?”

Pamela said to Pug, “I’m told he used to drink like a proper sponge, but he went on orange squash the day we declared war.”

Pug said, “My son’s a Navy flier. I wish he’d go on orange squash.”

“It’s not a bad idea. This business up there,” Gallard raised a thumb toward the ceiling – “happens fast. You’ve got to look sharp so as to see the other fellow before he sees you. You have to react fast when you do see him, and then you have to make one quick decision after another. Things get mixed up and keep changing every second. You have to fly that plane for dear life. Now, some of the lads thrive on drink, they say it blows off their steam. I need all my steam for that work.”

“There’s a lot I’d like to ask you,” said Victor Henry. “But probably this is your night to forget about the air war.”

“Oh?” Gallard gave Pug a long inquiring look then glanced at Pamela. “Not a bit. Fire away.”

“How good are they?”

“The Jerries are fine pilots and ruddy good shots. Our newspaper talk about how easy they are makes us a little sick.”

“And their planes?”

“The 109’s a fine machine, but the Spitfire’s a good match for it. The Hurricane’s quite a bit slower; fortunately it’s much more maneuverable. Their twin-engine 110 is an inferior machine, seems to handle very stiffly. The bombers of course are sitting birds, if you can get at them.”

“How’s RAF morale?”

Gallard flipped a cigarette in his mouth and lit it with swift gestures of one hand. “I’d say it’s very high. But not the way the papers tell it. Not that dashing patriotic business. I can remember the first time I fought over England, when those dots appeared in the sky just where Fighter Control said they were, I had a bit of that feeling, I thought, ‘Why, damn their eyes, they’re really trying it, and what the hell are they doing flying over my country? Let’s shoot the bloody bastards down!’ But right away I became damn busy trying not to get shot down myself. That’s how it’s been ever since.” He smoked in silence, his eyes wide and far away, his fingers dancing and dancing. He shifted in the chair, as though it were too hard. “It’s a job, and we’re trying to do our best. It’s a lot more fighting than we had over France. You can tell your son, Captain, that fear’s a big factor, especially as the thing goes on and on. The main thing is learning to live with it. Some chaps simply can’t. We call it LMF, lack of moral fibre. The brute fact is that as range decreases, accuracy increases. You’ve
got
to close the range. There’s nothing to do about that old truth of warfare. But there’s always the chap who opens up and blazes away from afar, you know, and runs out of bullets and heads for home. And there’s the one who somehow always loses the bird he’s after in the clouds, or who never finds the foe and aborts the mission. One soon knows who they are. Nobody blames them. After a while they’re posted out.” He fell silent again, looking down at the smoking cigarette in his clasped hands, obviously absorbed in memory. He shifted in the chair again, and glanced up from Victor Henry to Pamela, who was watching his face tensely. “Well, the long and the short of it is, it’s us against the Jerries, Captain Henry, and that’s exciting. We’re flying these machines that can cross all of England in half an hour. Excellent gun platforms. Best in the world. We’re doing what very few men can do or ever have done. Or perhaps will ever do again.” He looked around at the elegant grillroom full of well-dressed women and uniformed men, and said with an uncivilized grin, the whites showing around his eyeballs, “If excelling interests you, there it is” - he made the thumb gesture - “up there.”