Victor, surely it's dangerous and silly for a British girl to go rattling aimlessly around in Moscow, with the Huns closing in on all sides." "Yes, it is. Why don't you go to Kuibyshev with her, Talky? Every foreign correspondent in Russia was on that train, except you." "They're all idiots. Getting news right here in Moscow was hard enough. What the devil will they find to write about in that mudhole on the Volga? They'll just drink themselves into cirrhosis of the liver and play poker until their eyes give out. Mine are bad enough. I'm skedaddling. If the Russkis hold Moscow, I'll come back. I hope and believe they will, but if they don't, it's all over. England's at the end of her rope, you know that. We'll all throw in our hands. It'll be the great world shift, and your FDR with his brilliant sense of timing can then face a whole globe armed against him." Victor Henry stumbled to the yellowed mirror and rubbed his bristly chin. "I'd better talk to Pamela." 'Please, dear fellow, please. And hurry!" Pug came outside to fresh snow, bright sunshine, and a ragged burst of Russian song by male voices. A formation of old men and boys, shouldering picks and shovels and lustily shouting a marching tune, was following an army sergeant down Maneznaya Square. The rest of the Muscovites appeared to be trudging normally about their business, bundled up and shawled as usual, but the sidewalk crowds were much thinner. Perhaps, thought Pug, all the rats had now left and these were the real people of Moscow. He walked up to Red Square, past an enormous poster of the embattled motherland, embodied as a shouting robust woman brandishing a sword and a red flag, and smaller posters of rats, spiders, and snakes with Hitler faces being bayonetted by angry handsome Russian soldiers or squashed under Red Army tanks. The square was deserted; white thick snow almost unmarked by footprints carpeted the great expanse. In front of the Lenin tomb outside the Kremlin wall, its red marble hidden by layers of snow-=sted sandbags, two soldiers stood as usual like clothed statues, but there was no line of visitors. Far on the other side, Victor Henry saw a bulky figure in gray walking alone past Saint Basil's Cathedral. Even at this distance he recognized the swingy gait of the Bremen deck and the way she moved her arms. He headed toward her, his overshoes sinking deep in snow speckled black with paper ash. She saw him and waved. Hurrying to meet him across the snow, she threw herself in his arms and kissed him as she had on his return from the flight to Berlin. Her breath was fragrant and warm. "Damn! The governor went and told you." 'That's right." "Are you exhausted? I know you were up all night. There are benches by the cathedral. What are your plans? Are you all set for Kuibyshev? Or will you go to London?" They were walking arm in arm, fingers clasped. "Neither. Sudden change. I've gotten orders, Pam. They were waiting for me here. I'm going to command a battleship, the California." She stopped and pulled on his elbow to swing him toward her,clasped both his arms, and looked in his face with wide glistening eyes. "Command a battleship!' "Not bad, eh!" he said like a schoolboy. "My God, smashing! You're bound to be an admiral after that, aren't you? Oh, how happy your wife will be!" Pamela said this with unselfconscious pleasure and resumed walking. "I wish we had a bottle of that sticky georgian champagne, right here and now. Well! That's absolutely wonderful. Where's the California based? Do you know?" 'Pearl Harbor." She glanced inquiringly at him. 'Oahu. The Hawaiian Islands."Oh. Hawaii. All right. We'll start plotting to get me to Hawaii. No doubt there's a ]British consulate there, or some kind of military liaison. There has to be." 'Aren't you on leave from the Air Force? Won't you have to go back on duty if Talky returns to London?" "My love, let me take care of all that. I'm very, very good at getting what I want" 'I believe that." She laughed. They brushed snow from a bench outside the rail of the bizarre cathedral. Its colored domes shaped like onions and pineapples were half-hidden, like the red stars on the Kremlin towers, under drapings of thick gray canvas. 'When do you leave for Hawaii, and how do you get there?" 'I'll leave as soon as I can, and go via Siberia, japan, and the Philippines." He clasped her hands as they sat down. "Now, Pam, listen-" "Are you going to lecture me? Don't bother, please, Victor. It won't work." "You mentioned my wife. She'll probably come to Pearl." "I should think she would." "Then what have you in mind, exactly?" "My, love, since you ask me, I have in mind that you and I deceive her, decently, carefully, and kindly, until you're tired of me. Then I will go home." This blunt declaration shook Victor Henry. It was so novel, so outside the set rules of his existence, that he only replied with clumsy stiffness, "I don't understand that kind of arrangement." "I know, darling, I know it must seem shocking and immoral to you. You're a dear nice man. Nevertheless I don't know what else to propose. I love you. That is unchangeable. I'm happy with you, and not happy otherwise. I don't propose to be separated from you any more for long stretches of time. Not until you yourself dismiss me. So you'll have to put up with this bargain. it's not a bad one, really." "No, it isn't a bad bargain, but you won't keep it."Pamela's face showed shocked surprise; then into her eyes came an amused glow, and her lips curved in a mature clever smile. "You're not so dumb." "I'm not in the least dumb, Pamela. The Navy doesn't give battleships to dumbbells." A line of olive-painted trucks marked with large red stars came roaring up into the square, rolling past the red brick museum and the shuttered GUM building, and pulled up side by side facing the Lenin tomb. 'We're in a time bind here," Pug went on, raising his voice. 'For the moment I'll put Rhoda aside, and just talk about you-' She interrupted him. "Victor, love, I know you're faithful to your wife. I've always feared you'd think me a pushing slut. But what else can I do? The time has come, that's all. Ever since I was forced to tell Talky this morning, I've been flooded with joy." Henry sat leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands Clasped, his eyes half closed in the sun glare off the snow, looking at her. Soldiers began piling out of the trucks. Obviously new recruits, they were lining up in ragged ranks in the snow under the barking of sergeants in ankle-length coats, while rifles were passed and handed out. After a long pause Henry said, in a matter-of-fact way, "I know this kind of chance won't roll around again in my life." 'It won't, Victor. It won't!" Her face shone with excitement. "People to whom it happens even once are very lucky. That's why I must go with you. it's a mischance that you can't marry me, but we must accept that and go on from there." "I didn't say I can't marry you," Henry said. She looked astounded. "Let's be clear. If I love you enough to have an affair with you behind my wife's back, then I love you enough to ask her for a divorce. To me the injury is the same. I don't understand the decent kindly deception you talked about, There's a right name for that, and I don't like it. But all this is breaking too fast, Pam, and meantime you have to leave Moscow. The only place to go is LOndon. That's common sense.-hardened tone as he "I won't marry Ted. Don't argue," she said in a started to talk, "I know it's a beastly decision, but it's taken. That's flat. I didn't know about your battleship. That's thrilling and grand, though it complicates things. I can't make you take me along across Siberia, of course, but you had better forbid me. right now, or I'll manage to get to Hawaii myself-and much sooner than you'd believe possible." "Doesn't it even bother you that you're needed in England?" "Now you listen to me, Victor. There's no angle of this that I haven't contemplated very, verythoroughly and long. I wasn't thinking of much else on that four-day auto ride, if you want to know. If I leave old England in the lurch, it will be because something stronger calls me, and I'll do This was dire Ian ag that at gu c t Victor Henry understood. Pamela's gray coat collar and gray wool hat half hid her face, which was pink with cold; her nose was red. She was just another shapelessly bundled-up young woman, but all at once Victor Henry felt a stab of sexual hunger for her, and a pulse of hope that there might conceivably be a new life in store for him with this young woman, and her alone, in all the world. He was overwhelmed, at least for the moment, by the way she had pitched everything On this one toss. 'Okay. Then let's get down to realities, he said gently, glancing at his watch. "Youpve got to make a move today, in a couple of hours. And I have to attend to this little matter of going around to the other side of the world to take command of my ship." Pamela smiled beautifully, after listening with a formidable frown. 'What a nuisance I must be, suddenly draping myself around your neck at this moment of your life. Do You really love me?" "Yes, I love you," Pug said without difficulty and quite sincerely, since it was the fact of the matter. "You're sure, are you? Say it just once more." "I love you." Pamela heaved a thoughtful sigh, looking down at her hands. "Well! All right. What move shall I make today, then?" "Go back with Talky to London. You have no choice, so go quietly. I'll write you or cable you. "When?" "When I can. When I know." They sat in silence. The Kremlin wall, painted to look like a row of apartment houses, echoed the shouts of the sergeants and the metallic clash of rifle bolts, as the recruits clumsily did some elementary drill. "Well, that will be a communication to look forward to," Pamela said lightly. "Can't you give me some hint of its contents now?" "No." For some reason this pleased her, or seemed to. She put a hand t'o his face and smiled at him, her eyes full of naked love. "Okay. I'll wait." Her hand slipped down to the ripped shoulder of his coat.
"Oh, I wanted to mend that. What time is it?" ,it's after ten, Pam." 'Then I must get cracking. Oh dear, I honestly don't want to travel away from you again." They rose and began walking arm in arm. Among the recruits they were walking past stood Berel Jastrow, newly shaved. He looked older so, with his scraped skin hanging in reddened folds. He saw Victor Henry, and for a moment put his right hand over his heart. The naval officer took off his hat as though to wipe his brow, and put it back on. "Who is he?" Pamela said, alertly watching. "Oh! Isn't that the man who burst into Slote's dinner?" 'Yes," Victor Henry said. "My relative from Minsk. That's him. Don't look around at him or anything." In the unlit hallway outside her suite, Pamela unbuttoned her own coat and then unbuttoned Victor Henry's bridge coat, looking into his eyes. She pressed herself hard to him, and they embraced and kissed. She whispered, "You'd better write me or cable me to come. Oh God, how I love you! Will you drive with us to the airport? Will you stay with me every second to the last?" "Yes, of course I'll stay with you." She dashed tears from her face with the back of her hand, then miped her eyes with a handkerchief. "Oh, how glad I am that I dug in my nasty little hoofs!" Tudsbury came limping eagerly toward the door as she opened it. "Well? Well? What's the verdict?" "I was being silly," Pamela said. "I'm going home with you." Tudsbury looked from her face to Henry's, for the tone was sharply ironic. 'Is she going with me, Victor?" 'She just said she was." "Gad, what a relief! Well, all's well that ends well, and say, I was about to come looking for you. The R.A.F lads are being flown out half an hour earlier. There's a rumor that a German column's breaking through toward the airport and that it may be under shellfire soon. The Nark says it's a damned lie, but the boys had rather not take a chance." "I can pack in ten minutes." Pamela strode toward her room, adding to Pug, "Come with me, love." Victor Henry Tudsbury'eyes flash and a lewd smile curl the thick lips under his mustache. Well,P(saw) amelawas(s) human, Pug thought, for all her strength. She couldn't resist exploding the possessive endearment like a firecracker in her father's face. He said, 'Wait.
There's a report Talky must take to London for me. I'll be right back." 'What do you think, Talky?" Pug heard her say gaily as he went out. "Victor's got himself a battleship command, no less, and he's off to Pearl Harbor. That's in Hawaii!" He returned shortly, breathing hard from the run up and down the hotel staircase, and handed a manila envelope, stapled shut, to Tudsbury. "Give this to Captain Kyser, the naval attache at our embassy, hand to hand. All right?" "Of course. Top secret?" Tudsbury asked with relish. "Well-be careful with it. It's for the next Washington pouch." "When I travel, this case never leaves my hand," Tudsbury said, "not even when I sleep. So rest easy." He slipped into a brown leather dispatch case Pug's envelope, which contained two other envelopes, sealed. One was the long typed report for Harry Hopkins, and the other was the letter to the President about the Jews of Minsk. (from WORLD EMPIRE LOST) The Bouleversement One week in May 1940 sufficed to upset a balance of power in Europe that had lasted for centuries; and one week in December 1941 sufficed to decide the outcome of World War II and the future global balance of power. on December 4, our Army Group Center was driving through blizzards into the outskirts of Moscow, and from Leningrad to the Crimea Bolshevik Russia was tottering. The French Empire was long since finished. The British Empire too was finished, though the British Isles still hung feebly on, more and more starved by our ever-expanding U-boat arm. No other power stood between us and world empire except America, which was too weakened by soft living and internal strife to make war. Its industrial plant, half paralyzed by strikes, was still geared to producing luxuries and fripperies. Its military strength lay in an obsolescent navy centered around battleships, riskily based in Hawaii in order to overawe the Japanese, and quite impotent to affect the world-historical German victory that loomed. Seven days later, on December 11, we were at war with an America transformed into an aggressive military dictatorship, united with one will under a fanatical enemy of the Reich, converting its entire industry on a crash basis to war, and conscripting a vast fresh army and air force in order to crush us. The Red Army on the Moscow front, stiffened with Anglo-American supplies and fresh, primitive, hard-fighting Siberian divisions, had swung over to the counterattack. Elsewhere Soviet troops were forcing us to retreat from Rostov-the first German retreat since Adolf Hitler had risen to lead us in 1933. One step from the pinnacle of world empire on December 4, the German people on December11 found themselves plunged into a total two-front war, fighting for their lives, menaced from the east and from the west by two industrial giants with five times our population and twenty times our territory. History offers no parallel for this gigantic military bouleversement. The chief cause of it was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Sir Winston Churchill records frankly that when he got the news of this attack, he shed tears of thankful joy, for he knew then and there that the war was won. He wasted no tears, of course, on the American sailors caught by surprise and slaughtered. TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Here is the passage in Churchill: "No American will think it wrong of me if / proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. I could not foretell the course of events. / do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after at//" No tears are mentioned. As previously noted, Genera/ von Roon is not dispassionate in his references to Winston Churchill.-V.H. The Japanese Blunder The Japanese attack was of course quite justified, but it was a hideous strategic mistake. The fall of French and British power had left the far eastern European colonies almost undefended. Japan was the natural thief of this wealth. She needed it to fight her war against China to a finish. The Europeans had come halfway round the earth a few generations earlier to subjugate East Asia and plunder its resources. But now all that was over. Japan was the only strong presence in East Asia. It was far more moral for this Asiatic people to take over administration of this rich sphere, than for a few drunken white civil servants of defunct European empires to continue their pukka-sahib parasitism. Adolf Hitler had sought only friendly ties with this clever hard-working people of destiny. In the General Staff we assumed that Japan would march at the time best suited to her. We approved of this on every basis'of world philosophy. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was tactically an excellent operation, comparable in many ways to Barbaross,3. In both cases a small poor notion caught a big wealthy nation off guard, despite a tense war atmosphere and all manner of advance warnings and indications. In both cases surprise was exploited to destroy on a great scale the enemy's first-line forces. The Barbarossa surprise depended on the nonaggression treaty, then in force with soviet Russia, to lull the enemy. The Japanese went us one better by attacking in the middle of peace parleys. At the time of both attacks, of course, there were loud outcries of "infamy" and "treachery," as though these terms of private morality had any relevance to historical events. A poor nation seeking to supplant a rich one must use the best means it can find; moreover Thucydides saidlong ago that men by a natural law always rule where they are strongest. In history what is moral is what works. The will of God, Hegel taught, reveals itself only in historical outcomes. So viewed, Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor were both idealistic thrusts toward a heroic new world order. The difference was that Barbarossa was strategically impeccableand would have resulted in victory if not for unlucky and unforeseen factors-including this very Japanese attack five and a half months later, which, contrariwise, was such a strategic miscalculation that for once Churchill speaks no more than the truth in calling it suicidal madness. One violation of a cardinal rule is enough to invalidate a strategic plan. The Japanese surprise attack violated two. The two iron laws of warfare that Japan disregarded were: 1. Strike for the heart. 2. Know your enemy. "Strike for the Heart" The rule "Strike for the heart" is only a corollary of the first principle of warfare, the Concentration of Force. This was what Japan's military leaders overlooked. From the moment they correctly decided that the war in Europe was their big chance to take East Asia, a hard choice confronted them: should they first move north against the Soviet union by invading Siberia; or south, to scoop up the weakly held treasures of the European colonies? The move south was the the more tempting, of course. But in warfare one must not be misled by mere easy loot or the line of least resistance. The stakes of the war comprised nothing less than political redistribution of the world's landmasses. It was a radical global conflict, the first true World War. The lineup was classical-the rich against the poor, gold against iron. Germany was the only first-class power on the ascendant side, the side that was seeking to draw a new world map, and her attack on the Soviet union was her great bid. Once master of Russia, Germany would have been invincible. It followed that the Japanese should have moved to help Germany crush the Soviet union. With Germany triumphant, Japan could have taken and held anything in East Asia she wanted. But with Germany beaten, Japan had small hope of keeping even the vastest gains. Had Japan invaded Siberia in 1941, the German drive to Moscow would have succeeded. The Russian counterattacks in December would not have been mounted. The Bolshevik regime would either have fallen or made a second peace of Brest-Litovsk. For what saved Moscow in December was only Stalin's desperate denuding of the Siberian front for reserves to throw into the battle, tipping the scales at the last second by a hair.
Moreover, if Napoleon's maxim holds that the moral is to the physical in warfare as three to one, the mere fact of a Japanese assault on Siberia in the autumn might have brought on a Russian collapse. In mid-October panic gripped the Bolsheviks to the highest levels of government, with whole departments fleeing Moscow in disgraceful tumult, and the frightened dictator issuing shrill orders for a levie en masse to save the city. There is even an unconfirmed story that Stalin himself secretly fled, secretly returned when the panic subsided, and had everybody shot who knew of his disgraceful act. Russian rulers operate inside a Byzantine maze, and there is no way of checking this episode. In any case, this was surely the psychological moment of World War II, the once-in-athousand-years opportunity for the Japanese nation. Its irresolute leaders, poorly trained in military thinking and subject to the strange Oriental character mixture of excessive rashness, caution, and emotion, let the moment slip through their fingers to all eternity. History, like a woman, must be firmly taken when she is ready. Otherwise she scorns the fumbler, never forgives him, and never offers him another chance. "Know Your Enemy" The first mistake, then, was to go south instead of north, and to snatch booty instead of triking at the heart. But the Axis might still have won the war despite this dispersion of effort, had Japan not compounded the blunder with a second one that verged on true insanity. Granted the southward strategy, the obvious course was to move into the East Indies with maximum speed and force, consolidate rapidly, and prepare to defeat any American countermove. The Americans might not have moved at all. Tremendous opposition existed in the United States to sending American boys to die for the pukka sohibs in Asia. Roosevelt might have just sputtered harsh words, as he had after all of Adolf Hitler's triumphs. Roosevelt never moved one visible step beyond the range of public opinion. This was the master key to the nature of the enemy. Japan was oblivious to it, because of the distortions of Oriental thinking. Even if Roosevelt had sent his navy, defying half his public, against the entrenched Japanese in East Asia, this fleet would have fought its showdown battle at the end of a long supply line, in enemy waters, within range of Japan's land-based air force. It would have been another Battle of Tsushima Strait, with air power added. This humiliating slaughter in an unpopular cause might have brought on the impeachment of the none too popular Machiavellian in the White House. But even this was not the worst aspect of the Japanese blunder. America had the largest and most advanced industrial plant on earth. This mercenary nation, devoted to the almighty dollar and blessed with wonderful mineral resources stolen from the Indians, had reared an mmense plant capacity for making toys and trifles. But it was a capacityreadily convertible to munitions manufacture on the most fantastic imaginable scale. The whole hope of Axis victory in World War II lay in keeping America divided and soft until the time come to deal with her as an isolated unit without allies. This prospect was in sight. Half of America would have rejoiced at a German victory over the Soviet union. The Lend-Lease program was bogged down in red tape and inertia the day before the Pearl Harbor attack, reflecting the discord and confusion in the people. For this, great credit goes to Adolf Hitler. He was a narrow-minded man, appallingly ignorant of the United States. But his almost female intuition warned him that he must give his blood enemy, Roosevelt, no chance to unite the Americans against him. That is why the Fuhrer swallowed all the President's scurrilous public abuse and compelled the U-boat arm to endure appalling provocation. This wise strategy of the fuhrer was blown to smithereens by Pearl Harbor. Overnight a hundred thirty million quarrelsome, uncertain, divided Americans become one angry mass thirsting for battle. Roosevelt rammed through Congress gigantic war plans and expenditures which a few days earlier would have been utterly inconceivable. The Congress, which in August had extended a mild draft law by a single vote after weeks of debate, now unanimously passed fierce declarations of war, and all Roosevelt's long-plotted stupendous war programs, in a matter of hours. This was the chief result of Pearl Harbor, for the fleet was soon repaired and expanded. In one week Germany passed from the strategic offensive, with world empire in her grasp, to the strategic defensive, with no long-range prospect but to be crushed unless our enemies did something just as stupid and selfdestructive. Nonexistent "Axis" If one asks, "How did Germany permit such a catastrophe to occur?" the answer is that we were not consulted. We found out that Pearl Harbor was the target when the Americans did-when the torpedoes and bombs exploded. The "Axis" of Germany, Japan, and Italy never existed as a military reality. It was a ferocious-looking rubber balloon blown up by propaganda. Its purpose was bluff. The three nations went their own ways throughout the war, and usually did not even inform their partners in advance about attacks, invasions, and strategic decisions. Thus, when Hitler attacked Poland, Mussolini suddenly declined to fight and did not jump in until France was toppling. The Italian dictator invaded Greece without notifying Hitler. Hitler did not inform 11 Duce of the attack on Russia until just before the event. But for this he had good reason. Our intelligence had advised us that anything Mussolini knew went straight to the British via the Italian royal family.
Not once did real staff talks take place among the "Axis" armed forces. England and America were having such conferences a year before Pearl Harbor/ They followed a combined strategy throughout in close cooperation with the Bolsheviks. Now they can reflect at leisure on the wisdom of helping Stalin destroy us, and losing the Slav flood to the Elbe. But Allied operations were a model of combined strategy, while "Axis" strategy was a nullity. It was every man for himself, and unhappy Germany was tied to second-rate partners who made rash wild plunges that ruined her. Yomamoto's Role Why did Japan take this aberrant, foredoomed course? She had burst into modern history with the sneak attack on the Russian navy at Port Arthur in 1904, and perhaps was obsessed with this way for yellow men to beat white men. The Japanese Naval Staff favored the right move: a seizure of the indies, and a showdown with the United States Navy-if one should occur -in Japanese waters. But Pearl Harbor was conceived by one Admiral Yamamoto, the commander-in-chief of the fleet, who forced it on his navy and government by threats ' to resign. Yamamoto opposed the war with the United States entirely, on the grounds that against an enemy with an industrial superiority of seven to one, the attempt was hopeless. But he insisted that if he had to fight, he wanted to knock out the American fleet at the outset. To the broader effects of the attack, he was blind. The Naval Staff considered the attack too risky a gamble, but Yamamoto prevailed. Tactically, of course, he was vindicated. As long as men read and write, "Pearl Harbor" will be a synonym for successful surprise attack. it is as much a part of world language as "Waterloo." How, indeed, could the Japanese fleet assemble, steam across the Pacific to within two hundred miles of Hawaii, elude all United States intelligence efforts and all its sea and air patrols, and catch its Army and navy by surprise? This mystery is doubled and tripled by the postwar revelation that the United States had broken Japan's codes and was reading her secret diplomatic cables! The record of the Pearl Harbor investigation by the American Congress runs to millions of words. Still the mystery remains. As a German staff officer, I look upon Pearl Harbor as an abstract battle problem like Salamis or Trafalgar. Yamamoto's operation surprised the Americans precisely because it was such a foolish thing to do, such an outrageous gamble, such bad strategy, such muddled politics, and such unsound psychology, Even if it succeeded, it was just about the worst move the Japanese could try. Therefore the Americans made the mistake of shutting it from their minds. The Japanese irrationally went ahead and did it, and it happened to work.
A little-noted passage in the hearings, from the interrogation of the cashiered Admiral Kimmel, may provide a key to the mystery. Aerial torpedoes in those days needed to be dropped in deep water in order to straighten out and make their run. The minimum depth, according to American technical opinion, was about seventy-five feet. Pearl Harbor is thirty feet deep. The danger of a torpedo plane attack on the battle fleet was therefore called "negligible," and no torpedo nets were rigged. On December 7, aerial torpedoes hit seven battleships and wreaked vast havoc in Pearl Harbor. For the Japanese had devised a torpedo that could be launched in less than thirty feet, and their pilots had practiced shallow launchings from May to December! This sums up the mental difference in 1941 between the two nations. Did Roosevelt Plan It? The historical suspicion arose, and still lingers, that Roosevelt and his top aides conspired to cause the Pearl Harbor defeat. On this theory, they concealed from the Hawaiian command their certain knowledge that Japan was about to strike, obtained from decoded diplomatic telegrams, so as to keep the armed forces there unprepared for the blow. Roosevelt, on this view, decided that getting America solidly into the war was more important militarily than the loss of his battleships. This conjecture originated with the military leaders who were caught napping. They and their supporters maintain it to this day. Roosevelt was, of course, capable of this dastardly action. He was capable of anything. But the record shows that the Pearl Harbor command, and all the United States forces in the Pacific, certainly knew that war was imminent. Indeed, all they had to do was read the newspapers. In any case, there is no acceptable excuse for professional military leaders ever to be surprised, even under the most lulling and peaceful of circumstances. it happens, but it is not excusable. No evidence has turned up, in exhaustive investigations, that Roosevelt knew where the blow would fall. The Japanese kept the secret of the intended target perfectly. Their own top diplomats did not know it. Our Supreme Headquarters did not know it. it was never entrusted to a coded cable. The American military men were surprised because, like the Red Army in June, they were psychologically unprepared for war. On the eve of the attack, the officers at Pearl Harbor no doubt observed the sacred American Saturday night ritual of getting stinking drunk, as did most of their men, and so when the first bombs fell, they were incapable of manning their numerous planes and A.A. guns to defend themselves. Here the rule "Know the enemy" definitely helped the Japanese. If American forces, wherever stationed, are ever attacked again, the proper time will always be Sunday morning. National character changes very slowly. Roosevelt would have been far better served by a victory at Pearl Harbor than by a disaster. Success in repelling the blow would have raised the martial spirit higher. The Americans werea long time recovering mentally from the Pearl Harbor defeat. Roosevelt was not an imbecile, and only an imbecile would have forgone a chance to countersurprise the oncoming exposed Japanese fleet and sink it. Roosevelt did not warn the Pearl Harbor command of an imminent air strike because he, like everybody else, did not know and could not guess that the Japanese would act as grotesquely as they did. The Conspiracy theory of Pearl Harbor is a trivial excuse for professional failure. It is of course absolutely the case that by cutting off Japan's oil supply and then brusquely demanding, as the price of restoring it, that the Japanese make peace in China and stay out of East Asia, Franklin Roosevelt forced Japan to attack. There was no other honorable escape for this proud warlike notion from the Corner into which he squeezed them. But these global political maneuvers, at which he was a grand master, he performed openly. The newspapers were full of the diplomatic exchanges, so talk of conspiracy is silly. Roosevelt probably hoped to the last that he could bully and bluff this smaller, weaker nation into obeying him without war. Hitler would have played that situation exactly the some way. However, there was this difference: the German armed forces would not have let him down by being surprised, as Roosevelt's did. We were soldiers. TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Roon's professional acumen is most striking when German conduct is not in the picture. With his appraisal of the Pearl Harbor surprise, I unhappily concur. He neglects the reo/ bungling and stupidity that went on in Washington during those days, as well in Hawaii; but his conclusion must be accepted that there is excuse for co(as) mmandersinthefieldtobesurPrised-Asimilarfailurebyourarmedservic(never) esin(an) the nuclear age will spell the end of American history. There will be no margin for recovery next time.
V.H. as he sat on the back la" S'ENS-n of lost time haunted Victor Henry three o'clock in the morning, Aof the Army and Navy Club in Manila at en thousand listening to a broadcast of a football game going on elev miles away. Overhead, as always on Army-Navy game night, Orion sprawled brilliantly across half the heavens. On the roads outside Moscow the constellation had blazed brightY, too, but far down toward the southern horizon. crowd of officers from both services, and a Pug sat on the grass amid a sprinkling of their Filipino girlfriends. Wives had long since been sent -Navy night-fresh-cut lawn grass, from home. The old smells of Army Spam, rum, women's perfume and the rank smell of harbor water-the gi o, the heat, the sweaty feeling even in a cotton shirt and paper lanterns, to interservice jokes and insults, all pulled him back in spirit slacks, the old amazingly unchanged. The jumpy overa dozen years. life in Manila was wrought embassy people in Tokyo had been speculating that there might be no Army-Navy game, that either the Japanese would go to war by Thanksgiving, or that at least the American armed forces would be on hA alert. Yet there stood the same old display board, with the flat white football that would slide back and forth on a string across the painted gridiron.
There were the mascot animals-Army mule in a brown blanket, Navy goat in a blue one-tethered and waiting for the comic moments. It might just as well be sleepy 1928, Pug thought. Only the floodlights blazing across the bay at the Cavite Navy Yard for all-night repair work suggested that it was November 1941, and that the Navy was slightly bestirring itself for an emergency. The loudspeakers bellowed above the chatter on the lawn, and the radio reception tonight was better than in some years. This game still had its old ritual fascination for Pug; he was following it tensely, smoking a cigar. Once his nostalgia had been keen for the tough youthful combat on the grass, the slamming of bodies, the tricky well-drilled plays, above all for the rare moments of breaking free and sprinting down the field, dodging one man and another with the stands around him a roaring sea of voices. Nothing in his life had since been quite like it. But long ago that nostalgia had departed; those grooves of memory had worn out. To think that lads much younger than his own two sons were out on that chilly field in Philadelphia now, made Victor Henry feel that he had led a very long, multilayered existence, and was now almost a living mummy. "Pug! I heard you were here." A hand lightly struck his shoulder. His classmate Walter Tully, bald as an egg and deeply tanned, smiled down at him; Tully had left the submarine school to take command of the undersea squadron at Manila. He gestured at a crowded table near the &splay board. "Come and t with us." "Maybe at the half, Red." It was decidedly an anachronism, but everybody still used the nickname. "It's more like the old days, sitting on the grass." "You're dead right. Well, I'll join you." "Now you're talking. Sit you down." Tully had played Academy football too, and he listened to the broadcast as intently as Pug. After a while the white football slid all the way for an Army run to a touchdown. Amid yells, cheers, and groans, a young lieutenant unloosed the mule, jumped on its back, and galloped around the lawn. "Oh, hell," Pug exclaimed. Tully shook his head. "We're going to lose this one, old buddy. They've got a fine backfield. We could use Pug Henry in there." "Ha! Fifteen-yard penalty for illegal use of wheelchairs. Say, Red, you're the original Simon Legree, aren't you?" "How do you mean?" "I mean sending the Devilfish out on exercises the night of the ArmyNavy game. What's the matter, you think there's a war threatening or something?"Tully grinned at the heavily ironic tone. "It was Branch Hoban's idea. they're going alongside for two weeks starting today-they're due in at noon-and he wanted to get in some drils. You'll see plenty of Byron." clilli only be here till the Clipper leaves."Yes, I hear tell you've got the California. That's just great, Pug." The game resumed. After some dull skirmishing the white -shap shot far across therm ball board; Navy had intercepted a pass and run it deep into Army territory. Pug and Tully got to their feet and joined in the Navy Yells of "Beat Army! Goal! Goal!" while an ensign happily paraded the goat around. The half ended righth after the touchdown. Cheerily Red Tully ordered drinks from a passing steward. itlet's stay here on the grass, Pug. Tell me about Romhia.His happy grin changed to a tough sober look as Victor Henry described the tank battle he had observed and the October 16 panic in Moscow. "Jesus, you've really been in there! I envy you. And here we sit, fat, dumb, and happy. They told me you flew here via Tokyo." "That's right." "What's the straight dope, Pug? Are those bastards really going to fight? We're getting some scary alerts here, but at this point we're kind of numb." "Well, our people there are worried. The ambassador talked to me at length about Japanese psychology. They're a very strange nation, he said, and hara-kiri is a way of life to them. The odds don't matter much. They're capable of executing a suicidal plan suddenly, and he fears they will." Tully glanced around at the nearby couples on the grass or on folding chairs, and dropped his voice. "That checks out. Admiral Hart received a straight war warning today, Pug. But we've been hearing nervous chatter from Washington, on and off, all summer and fall. In July when ihey landed in Indo-China and Roosevelt shut off their oil, we all thought, here goes! The squadron ran dawn and dusk GQ's for a week, till it got kind of stilly. Should I start that up again?" Pug gestured his puzzlement with turned-up palms. "Look, I talked to some businessmen one night at a dinner party in the embassy, Americans, British, and one jap, a big-time shipbuilder. The jap said the straight word, right from the Imperial Court, is that war with the USA is unthinkable. Everybody there agreed. So-you pays your money and you takes your choice." "Well, all I know is, if they do go, we're in trouble. The state of readiness in the Philippines is appalling. The people themselves don't want to fight the japs. That's my opinion. The submarine force is so short of everything-torpedoes, spare parts, watch officers, what have you-that it's simply pitiful. Speaking of which, when did you see Byron last?" 'I guess about six months ago. Why?""Well, he has more damn brass! He walked into my office the other day and asked for a transfer to the Atlantic command. His own skipper had turned him down and Byron was trying to go over his head. I sure ate him out about that. I told him, Pug-I said this, word for word-that if he weren't your son I'd have kicked his ass out of my office." Victor Henry said with forced calm, "His wife and baby are in Italy. He's worried about them." 'We're all separated from our kinfolk, Pug. It just isn't in the cards to transfer him. I'm trying to comb submarine officers our of tenders and destroyers. I'd do anything within reason for a son of yours, but-"- "Don't put it that way. Byron's just another officer. If you can't do it, YOU can't "Okay. I'm glad you said that." "Still, his family problem is serious. If it's possible, transfer him." "There is this little problem of the japs, too." "No argument." Victor Henry was taking some pains to keep his tone light and friendly. A crowd roar poured from the loudspeakers, and he said with relief, "Okay! Second half." When the game ended, many people were stretched out asleep on the grass, under a paling sky streaked with red. White-coated boys were still passing drinks and huddled Navy officers were bawling "Anchors Aweigh," for their team had won. Pug declined Captain Tully's invitation to break and went up to his room for a nap. He had stayed in a room like it-perhaps in this very one-on first reporting to Manila, before Rhoda had arrived with the children to set up housekeeping. High-ceilinged, dingy, dusty, with featureless old club furniture and a big perpetually turning and droning fan, the room hit Pug again with a strong sense of lost time and vanished days. He turned the fan up high, stripped to undershorts, opened the french windows looking out over the bay, and sat smoking cigarette after cigarette, watching the day brighten over the broad blue harbor and the busy traffic of ships. He was not sleepy. He sat so for more than an hour, scarcely moving, while gathering sweat trickled down his naked skin. thinking of what? Seeing pictures generated by his return to Manila. Pictures of himself and Byron under a poinciana tree at the white house on Harrison Boulevard, working on French verbs; the boy's thin face wrinkling, silent tears falling at his father's roared exasperation. Of Warren winning a history medal, an English medal, and a baseball award at the high school; of Madeline, fairylike in a gossamer white frock, wearing a gold paper crown at her eighth birthday party. Pictures of Rhoda crabbing about the heat and the boredom, getting drunk night after night in this club, falling on her face at the Christmas dance; of the quarrel that put an end to her drinking, when he coldly talked divorce. The smell of the club's lawns and halls, and of the spicy Manila air, gave him the illusion that all this was going on now, instead of belonging to apast more than a dozen years dead. Pictures of Pamela Tudsbury in Red Square. Of the dreary mud streets of Kuibyshev, the all-night poker games, the visits to farm communes, the stagnant slow passing of time while he waited for train tickets; then the two-week rail ride across Siberia; the beautih Siberian girls selling fruits, flat circular bread, sausage, and hot chickpeas at tiny wooden stations; the single track of the railroad stretching backward from the last car, a dark straight line through a pink snow desert, pointing straight at a setting sun that flattened like a football as it sank to the horizon; the long stops, the wooden benches in the "hard" coach, the onion breaths and body smells of the local travellers, some white, some Mongol, in queer fur hats; the awesome three-day forest stretches; the ugly miles on miles of huts in Tokyo; the wretchedness of the Japanese, the hate you could feel in the back of your neck on the street, the war weariness and poverty so much worse even than Berlin; the half-dozen letters to Pamela Tudsbury he had drafted and torn up. Through all these strange scenes Victor Henry had preserved a happy sense that he was moving toward a new life, a fulfilled life he had almost despaired of, a life delayed, postponed, almost lost, but now within grasp. When he thought of Rhoda it was usually as the effervescent Washington girl he had courted. He could understand falling in love with that girl and marrying her. The present-day Rhoda he pictured with detachment, almost as though she were somebody else's wife, with all her faults and all her charms seen clear. To divorce her would be cruel and shocking. How had she offended? She had been giving him an arid, half-empty existence -he now knew that-but she had been doing her best. Yet the decision evidently lay between being kind to Rhoda and seizing this new life. He had written the letters to Pamela as he had written the one about the Minsk massacre-to get a problem on paper for a clear look at it. By the time he arrived in Tokyo, he had decided that letters were too wordy and too slow-travelling. He had to send one of two cables-come, or DOre'T comis. Pamela needed no more than that. And he had concluded that Pamela was wiser than he, that the first step should indeed be a love affair in which they could test out this passion or infatuation before wounding Rhoda; for it might never come to that. In bald fact the prescription was a shackup. Victor Henry had to face the novel notion-for him-that in some circumstances a shackup might be the best of several difficult courses. In Tokyo he had actually hesitated outside a cable office, on the point of cabling: come. But he had walked away. Even if it were the best course, he could not yet picture himself bringing it off; could not imagine conducting a hole-in-corner affair, even if with Pamela it did not seem a squalid or immoral idea. It was not his style. He would botch it, he felt, and weaken or tarnish his work as the new captain of the California. So he had arrived still undecided in Manila. And in Manila, for the first time since his talk with Pamela Tudsbury in Red Square, an awareness of his wife Rhoda began to overtake him and the reality of Pamela to fade. Manila was saturated with Rhoda, the good memories and the bad memories alike, and with his own hardened identity. Red Tully, his classmate, a bald commander of all the submarines of theAsiatic Fleet; the Army-Navy game, in which he had last played twenty-eight years ago, when Pamela had been an infant a few months old; the dozens of young Navy lieutenants on the club lawn, with girlfriends Pamela's age-these were the realities now. The wild Siberian scenery was a fading patchwork of mental snapshots. So was the incandescent half hour on Red Square. Was it really in the cards for him to start over, to have new babies learning to talk, little boys playing on grass, a little girl twining arms around his neck? Manila above all recalled to Pug the pleasure he had taken in his children. Those days he looked back on as the sweetest and best in his life. To do it all once again with Pamela would be a resurrection, a true second life. But could a rigid, crusty man like himself do it? He had been hard enough on his kids in his thirties. He was very tired, and sleep at last overtook him in the chair, as it had in the Tudsburys' suite in the Hotel National. But this time no cold caressing fingers woke him. His inner clock, which seldom failed, snapped him awake in time to drive out to Cavite and watch the Devilfish arrive. Byron was standing on the forecastle with the anchor detail, in khakis and a life-jacket, but Pug failed to recognize him. Byron sang out, as the Devilfish nosed alongside the pier, 'Holy smoke, it's my father. You Dad! Dad!' Then Pug perceived that the slim figure with both hands in his back pockets had a familiar stance, and that his son's voice was issuing from the lean face with the curly red beard. Byron leaped to the dock while the vessel was still warping in, threw his arms around Victor Henry, and hugged him hard. Kissing that scratchy hairy face was a bizarre sensation for Pug. "Hi, Briny. Why the foliage?" 'Captain Hoban can't stand beards. I plan to grow one to my knees. God, this is a monumental surprise, Dad." From the bridge an officer shouted impatiently through a megaphone. jumping back on the moving forecastle like a goat, Byron called to his father, "I'll spend the day with you. Hey, Mom wrote me you're going to command the California! That's fabulous!" When the vessel was secured alongside, the Devilfish officers warmly invited Victor Henry to lunch at a house in the suburbs which they had rented. Pug caught a discouraging look from Byron, and declined. 'I live aboard the submarine," Byron said. They were driving back to Manila in the gray Navy car Pug had drawn from the pool'. "I'm not in that setup." 'y not? Sounds like a good thing." "Oh, neat. Cook, butler, two houseboys, gardener, five acres, a swimming pool, and all forpeanuts when they split up the cost. I've been there for dinner. They have these girls come in, you know, and stay ovemightdifferent ones, secretaries, nurses, and whatnot-and whoop it up and all that." "Well? Just the deal for a young stud, I should think." "What did you do, Dad, when you were away from Mom?" "Think I'd tell you?" Pug glanced at Byron. The bearded face was serious. "Well, I did a lot of agonized looking, Briny. But don't act holier-than-thou, whatever you do." "I don't feel holier than thou. My He's in Italy. That's that. They can do as they please." 'What's the latest word on her?" "She's flying to Lisbon on the fifteenth. I've got a picture of the kid. Wait till you see him! It's incredible how much he looks like my baby pictures." Pug had been poring over the snapshot in his wallet for two months, but he decided not to mention it. The inscription to Slote was an awkward detail. "God, it's rotten, being this far apart," Byron exclaimed. "Can you picture it, Dad? Your wife with a baby you've never even seen, on the other side of the earth-no telephone, a letter now and then getting through by luck? It's hell. And the worst of it is, she almost got out through Switzerland. She panicked at taking a German airplane. She was sick, and alone, and I can't blame her. But she'd be home by now, if there'd been any other way to go. The Germans! The goddamned Germans." After a silence he said with self-conscious chattiness, "Hot here, isn't it?" "I'd forgotten how hot, Briny." "I guess it was pretty cold in Russia." "Well, it's freezing in Tokyo, too." "Say, what's Tokyo like? Quaint and pretty, and all that?" "Ugliest city in the world," Pug said, glad for a distracting subject. "Pathetic. A flat shantytown stretching as far as the eye can see. Downtown a few tall modern buildings and electric signs, and crowds of little Japanese running around. Most of the people wear Western clothes, but the cloth looks to be made of old blotters. You see a few women dressed Japanese doll-style, and some temples and pagodas,. sort of like in San Francisco's Chinatown. It's not especially Oriental, it's poor and shabby, and it smells from end to end of sewage and bad fish. Biggest disappointment of all my travelling years, Tokyo. Moreover, the hostility to white men is thick enough to cut with a knife." "Do you think they'll start a war?""Well, that's the big question." Victor Henry's fingers drummed the steering wheel. 'I have a book on their Shinto religion you'd better read. It's an eye-opener. The ambassador gave it to me. Here are people, Briny............