The Man with the Iron Heart

Lou realized he’d used English again. The DP understood yes and no and shit and fuck, but not much more. Lou returned to Yiddish: “Maybe the Nazis will quit once we get rid of their leader.”

“Maybe they will-but it’s about as likely as snow is black,” Birnbaum said. Lou snorted; he’d heard that one from his old man more times than he could count.

They passed into another valley. This one wasn’t the one where Birnbaum had been made to dig, either. “Hell,” Lou said with a sigh. They drove on. Moses had wandered in the wilderness for forty years. The way Germany was unraveling, Lou wasn’t sure he had forty days and forty nights. That was…what? Noah’s flood. But Lou thought this one was flowing the wrong way.

When soldiers came home from Europe right after V-E Day, they came back to the United States in triumph. Pretty girls greeted them with flowers and kisses. They paraded through the streets. The same for the GIs and Marines coming back from the Pacific.

It wasn’t like that now. Harry Truman wasn’t bringing men home from Germany because he wanted to. He was doing it because Congress was giving him no choice. He was dragging his heels and grabbing at things as the new anti-occupation majority forced him down this road. And he, and all the branches of government he could still command, were doing their level best to pretend none of this was happening.

No press releases announced when troopships brought soldiers home from Germany. No welcoming committees waited for the returning troops. If the War Department could have disguised them with false noses and false names, it would have.

Diana McGraw didn’t think that was right or fair. The way things had gone wrong in Germany wasn’t the soldiers’ fault. If the American government hadn’t put them in an impossible situation…But it had, even if it was still too stubborn to believe as much.

And so she waited for a Liberty ship chugging into New York harbor. With her were local leaders of the movement to bring the troops home. And, since it was New York City, with them were more reporters and cameramen than you could shake a stick at.

The press didn’t bother her. She kept looking back over her shoulder toward the buildings behind the harbor, though. Any sniper lurking there had a clean shot, all right. The warm wetness of Gus van Slyke’s blood splashing her arm…She shivered, though the autumn day was mild enough. For several years after Ed came back from Over There, he’d wake up shrieking from nightmares where he revisited what he’d been through. Now Diana understood why.

“What exactly are you doing here today?” a reporter from the New York Times asked her.

She was ever so glad to get away from her own thoughts. “Our troops deserve a proper welcome,” she answered. “They haven’t done anything wrong.” Instead of a picket sign, she carried a big American flag today. Her colleagues had flags, too.

The reporter eyed the tired-looking ship, which tugs were nudging into place against the pier. Soldiers crowded the deck. They were staring at the amazing New York City skyline. Diana understood that, even if she’d looked at the buildings in a different way. You thought you could stay blase about how New York looked. After all, you’d seen it a million times in the movies, right? But the difference between the movies and the genuine article was about like the difference between a picture of a steak dinner and the real thing on the table in front of you.

After a bit, the reporter’s gaze slid from the GIs to their welcoming committee. “Don’t you think they would have liked to see people closer to their own age?” he asked.

Diana looked at the people on the pier in a new way. Most of them, like her, had been born in the nineteenth century. And those were definitely twentieth-century men on the ship. “I suppose they would,” she admitted, which made the man from the Times blink. “But if we weren’t here, they wouldn’t see anybody at all. That would be wrong, no matter what Truman thinks. So here we are.”

She wasn’t quite right. At the base of the pier stood a big olive-drab tent, with MPs flanking it. A sign above the open flap said U.S. ARMY DEPROCESSING CENTER, and, in smaller letters just below, ENTRY REQUIRED. Of course there would be paperwork to finish before soldiers could set foot in the United States again. But the soldiers or clerks or clerk/soldiers inside the tent weren’t what a returning GI wanted to see and hear.

The tugboats pulled away from a Liberty ship. Sailors pushed through the soldiers so they could lower the gangplank. The far end thudded down onto the pier. The young men in olive-drab cheered and whooped.

“Welcome home!” Diana and the rest of the welcomers shouted, waving their flags. “Welcome back!”

Still in neat Army single file, the soldiers tramped past them toward the deprocessing center. “Who are you folks, anyways?” one of them asked.

“We’re the people who got you out of Germany, that’s who,” Diana answered proudly. Moses might have told the children of Israel I’m the person who got you out of Egypt in the same tone of voice.

And the way the returning soldier’s face lit up told her she hadn’t wasted her time with him. “Much obliged, ma’am!” he exclaimed, and marched on.

Several other young men thanked the welcomers, too. But a skinny kid with curly brown hair and a nose like the business end of a churchkey opener stopped in front of Diana and said, “You’re Mrs. McGraw, aren’t you?”

Diana smiled. “That’s right,” she said, not without pride.

“Well, you can geh kak afen yam,” the kid told her. She didn’t know what it meant, but it didn’t sound like a compliment. And it wasn’t, because the soldier went on, “You’ve gone and messed up the whole country, that’s what you’ve done. We need to be in Germany. We need to stay there. If the Nazis grab it again, that’ll be the worst thing in the world.”

“We aren’t stopping the Nazis,” Diana said.

“We sure were slowing ’em down,” the soldier said. “Once we’re all gone-”

She went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “All we were doing-are doing-over there is bleeding for no reason.” She’d had this argument dozens of times before. She was ready to have it again. Ready? She was eager.

And so was the returning GI. “It’s not for nothing,” he insisted hotly. “It’s-”

The guy behind him, who was half again his size, gave him a shove and cut him off. “C’mon, Izzy. Move it, man. This ain’t the place for politics. I wanna go get my Ruptured Duck, darn it.” Having ladies around kept even most soldiers talking clean.

Izzy plainly thought it was a perfect place for politics. But the momentum of the crowd swept him down the pier. He was bound for the deprocessing center whether he wanted to go there or not.

Hearing what the bigger soldier called him made a light go on in Diana’s head. “Oh,” she said. “I should’ve known.”

Several of the New York-based activists nodded wisely. “You can’t expect those people to be reasonable,” a man said. The New Yorkers nodded again, almost in unison.

“Well,” Diana said, and then, a beat later, “Most regular Americans appreciate what we’re doing, anyway.”

“I should hope so!” the man agreed. He waved his flag. More and more soldiers coming home from Germany clumped by them.

Hans Klein had set the International Herald-tribune right in the middle of Reinhard Heydrich’s desk. The picture on the front page was plenty to seize the Reichsprotektor’s attention. There was a long file of marching U.S. soldiers, photographed with New York City’s skyscrapers in the background. GIS LEAVING OCCUPATION DUTY, the headline read. Heydrich stared and stared. A picture of a beautiful woman was nothing next to this. He hadn’t felt so splendid since…when?

Since that Czech’s gun jammed. More than five years ago now, he thought, wonder filling him. So much had happened since, so very much. Not all of it was what he’d expected. Not much of it was what he’d wanted. And so many things had yet to happen. The Reich and the Party would be redeemed.

Klein came in. Had he been skulking in the corridor, waiting for Heydrich to pick up the marvelous newspaper? His grin said he had. “How about that?” he said.