“Thank you, Mr. Speaker,” the Democrat from New York said pointedly. “If I may take up my remarks from the point where I was interrupted…No one is talking about pulling our troops out of Germany. And even if we were to remove them for any reason, the Russians would not proceed to occupy the western zones. I can guarantee that, because-”
He got interrupted again, by a different Republican this time: “How can you guarantee it? Who told you? God? God’s the only one who knows what the Reds are liable to do next.”
“
“Or maybe we’ll just let them keep it,” another Democrat put in. “We know we can deal with Uncle Joe-we’ve been doing it since 1941. But does anybody want to let the Nazis get up off the mat after all we did to knock ’em flat? That’s what taking our troops out of Germany means, whether you like it or not.”
Jerry muttered under his breath. That was the administration’s trump card. Truman and his backers tried to make anybody who favored removing troops from Germany seem pro-Nazi. As far as Jerry was concerned, it wasn’t even slightly fair. “Mr. Speaker!” he called, jumping to his feet.
“Mr. Duncan has the floor,” Sam Rayburn intoned.
“Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The problem is, thousands of our men are getting killed and maimed for no good reason. Thousands, Mr. Speaker, more than a year after this war was alleged to be over. And for what? For what? Are we one inch closer to putting down the German fanatics than we were the day after what was called V-E Day? If we are, where’s the evidence?”
“Are you asking me, Mr. Duncan?” Rayburn inquired. “I am not a military man, nor do I pretend to be.”
“I understand that, Mr. Speaker,” Jerry said. “But the military men have no answers, either. They say so- and-so many fanatics have been killed. So-and-so many bunkers have been uncovered, and so-and-so many weapons have been captured or destroyed. And I say, so-and-so what? They don’t say the fanatics will quit any time soon. They don’t say the fanatics will quit at all-which seems wise, because they show no signs of quitting. But if these men show no signs of quitting, if we can’t put them down,
“I will speak to that,” the Democrat from New York said.
“By all means,” Rayburn told him. “Please go ahead.”
“Thank you, Mr. Speaker,” the New Yorker said.
He had even more reason to be polite than Jerry did. Jerry was on the other side; he wouldn’t get anything out of Sam Rayburn no matter what. But a Democrat who offended the Speaker of the House could find himself almost as unhappy about his office space and his committee assignments as your run-of-the-mill Republican. Like a lot of politicians, Rayburn had a long memory for slights.
The Democrat from New York turned to Jerry Duncan. “What we’re currently doing in our occupation zone- and what our allies are doing in theirs-is very simple. We are preventing Heydrich and the Nazis from taking over Germany again. President Truman thinks that’s a job worth doing. I agree with him.”
It was certainly the strongest argument the Democrats had. Nobody in the United States-hell, nobody in his right mind-had a good word to say about the Nazis. “Is this the best way to do that, though? Is this even close to the best way?” Jerry asked. “We were supposed to have knocked the Nazis over the head last May. How long will we have to stay in Germany? The Secretary of State talked about forty years. Do you want your grandsons shot at by German partisans in 1986? Do you think the American people will put up with spending forty years and God knows how many billions of dollars trying to drain a running sore?”
“If we leave, Heydrich wins. Do you want that?” the New Yorker said.
“If we stay, we throw away thousand-tens of thousands-of lives and those billions of dollars. Do you want
“We can’t let the fanatics drive us out,” the Democrat said.
“We can’t let them bleed us white, either,” Jerry Duncan said. “They pick their spots. They plant mines under a road or bombs in wreckage beside it. Our boys can’t pick up an ashtray without being afraid it’ll blow up in their hand. They can’t take a drink without being afraid it’s poisoned-look what the fanatics did to the Russians on New Year’s Eve. And when one of those maniacs with a truckload of explosives blows himself up, he costs Heydrich one man. He doesn’t cost him a truck, ’cause that’s one of ours, stolen. He takes out anywhere from a dozen to a hundred GIs. And we can’t stop it. By all the signs, we can’t even slow it down. Are you looking forward to forty more years of that?”
By the look on the Democratic Congressman’s face, he was looking forward to getting the hell out of there and having a long, stiff drink-or maybe three or four long, stiff drinks. “We are paying a price,” he said. Sam Rayburn jerked like a man who’d just found out he had a flea in his shorts. Democrats weren’t even supposed to admit that much. Doing his best to make amends, the New Yorker hurriedly went on, “But we’d pay a much higher price if we cut and run. We might pay the price of World War III.”
“So you’re saying it’s worthwhile to go right on bleeding till 1986?” Jerry asked.
“I don’t believe we’ll have to do that, or anything like that,” the Democrat from New York said. “I think we can defeat the fanatics in a reasonable amount of time. I think we will, too.”
Jerry pounced: “Then you’d favor a timetable for getting all our troops out of Germany?”
“I didn’t say that!” the New Yorker squawked.
“Sure sounded like you did,” Jerry said. By Sam Rayburn’s glower, he felt the same way.
“President Truman has said a timeline is unacceptable. I agree with him. A timeline just tells the enemy how long he has to wait before he wins,” the Democrat from New York said.
“In that case, you
Several people listening to the debate up in the gallery started to applaud. Sam Rayburn used his gavel. “Order! Order!” he called. They went on clapping. He banged the gavel some more. “We must have order,” he declared. “I will have the gallery cleared if this continues.”
Slowly, the people who’d applauded quieted down. Jerry figured he’d made his point, at least to them. The unhappy look on the New York Democrat’s face said he did, too.
“Wow!” Lou Weissberg eyed the swarms of GIs with grease guns and M-1s, the halftracks, and the Pershing heavy tanks surrounding the Nuremberg jail. Mustang fighters roared low overhead. “We could’ve captured half of Germany with a force this big.”
“Yeah, well…” Howard Frank let his voice trail off. He needed a few seconds to find a way to say what he was thinking. When he did, it turned out to be bleakly, blackly cynical: “Look how much all our security helped old Adenauer.”
Lou grunted. In a way, that was applicable. In another way, it wasn’t. “Heydrich’s goons wanted Adenauer dead. You gotta figure they’ll try a rescue here if they try anything at all.”
“Who knows? Who the hell knows anything any more?” Captain Frank said wearily. “We’ve given ’em a big concentration of our own troops to shoot at, and an asshole with a mortar is awful hard to catch.” Another P-51 thundered past at just above rooftop height. “Even with planes overhead, he’s still hard to catch,” Frank continued with a mournful sigh. “And besides, maybe Heydrich wants the other Nazi big shots dead. Then nobody can claim he doesn’t deserve to be
“If he lets us try ’em, we’ll take care of that for him,” Lou said. “But he doesn’t want to do that, either.” He pointed northwest, toward the shattered Palace of Justice. “If the fanatics had let the trial go on, we would’ve hanged those bastards by now. Better than they deserve, too.”
