German border as Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia. Some of those things had been machine-gun bullets and 105mm shells and 500kg bombs. They’d come down, much too close to her head.
“Looks like Manila got caught napping,” Herb remarked, exhaling more smoke. “Hawaii’s not so bad. We were ready for ’em there-but why didn’t we spot ’em while they were on the way, darn it?”
“Maybe they came from a funny direction,” Peggy said.
“Maybe they did-but we ought to be looking every which way at once when there’s liable to be a war on, don’t you think?” Herb opened the Inquirer to get a look at the inside pages. He shook his head. “We were ready in Hawaii, and we still lost a carrier and a battlewagon and some of the fuel store we’ve got there.” He held up a page with a photo for Peggy. She supposed it was smoke from burning fuel oil or whatever the hell. It looked more like a volcano going off.
“What about Manila?” she asked.
“It’s a lot closer to the Japs, and it got hit a lot harder,” Herb answered. “They’ll probably try invading the Philippines if they haven’t already.” He went to another inside page. “MacArthur says, ‘We shall prevail.’ That sounds pretty, doesn’t it?”
“It sure does,” Peggy said. “I wonder how he expects to do it, though.”
“Ha!” Her husband finished the toast and stubbed out his cigarette. “There’s the sixty-four-dollar question, all right.”
“What does FDR have to say about it?” Peggy asked, adding, “There wasn’t anything on the front page.”
Herb nodded, acknowledging that she’d looked as she brought in the paper. He settled his bifocals more firmly on his nose as he looked for an answer. He grunted, not much liking what he found. “A White House aide says, ‘Obviously, we are at war. Obviously, we didn’t want to be.’ ”
“Our goldfish could tell us that much, and we haven’t got a goldfish,” Peggy said.
“Yeah, I know.” Herb nodded. Then he let out a different grunt, one that said Now we’re getting somewhere. “The President’s going to address Congress at noon. Emergency session. It’ll go by radio all over the country.”
Peggy wondered how many people would miss church to hear him. It was still Sunday morning here-still very early Sunday morning on the Pacific Coast. It had been Sunday morning for quite a while in Manila, though. Hawaii had got hit at midday Saturday, their time.
When Peggy remarked on that, Herb grunted one more time, now as if to convey Well, what do you expect? “Some of the guys there were still sober, I bet,” he said. “Odds are that’s why they did better.”
“Why does everybody get smashed on Saturday night?” she wondered.
His look told her she could have asked a better question. She thought he’d grunt yet again, but he fooled her: he only rolled his eyes. “You’re in the service, what else is there to do?” he said. Then, slowly and deliberately, he lit another cigarette. His cheeks hollowed as he took a deep drag. When he let it out in twin streams through his nose, he looked like a locomotive venting steam. Peering down at the paper rather than at Peggy, he went on, “If they’ll have me, hon, I’m going to put the uniform on again.”
“Oh, no!” But that was dismay, not surprise. Peggy knew him too well for such a thing to surprise her. She did take her best shot at changing his mind: “You did your bit the last time around-your bit and then some.”
Herb chuckled sourly. “If they have to stick a Springfield in my paws, the USA’s in deep water, all right,” he admitted. “But I know some stuff I didn’t back in 1918. All kinds of things’ll run smoother if somebody like me who knows the ropes is there to keep an eye on ’em.”
She imagined swarms of canny, successful middle-aged men with gimlet eyes and skeptical stares descending on war plants all over the country and telling Army regulars how to do their jobs better. “If you think the regulars will thank you for it, you’re nuts,” she predicted.
She squeezed another chuckle out of him. This one might in fact have been amused. “They may hate us, but they’ll need us.”
Maybe he was right, maybe wrong. Maybe the Army wouldn’t take him back. Peggy hoped it wouldn’t and feared it would. She said, “I don’t remember the last time I wanted a drink so bad first thing in the morning.”
To her amazement, Herb built her a strong one and himself one stronger yet. “What the dickens?” he said. “We don’t go to war every day, thank God. And if we get sleepy later on, so what? It’s Sunday.” Ice cubes clinked as he raised his glass. “Here’s to the USA!”
“To the USA!” Peggy echoed. The bourbon hit her hard in spite of her morning coffee. But Herb couldn’t have put it any better. What the dickens? So what? They both had another hefty knock after the first one. The newspaper stopped being interesting. Reading felt like too much effort. And, on the morning the United States found itself at war, the funnies weren’t very funny.
Peggy turned on the radio. She and Herb took turns spinning the dial. Music and prayers-many of them hastily and badly written to take account of suddenly changed circumstances-and confused war news came from one station after another. Peggy didn’t worry about any of it. She was paying attention to the state of the nation, which was what the times called for.
A little before noon, Herb turned the dial to 610 for WIP, the Mutual Broadcasting System’s local affiliate. No doubt most stations would carry FDR, but you could count on that one. Right on the hour, an announcer spoke in hushed tones: “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States addressing a joint session of Congress… Here is the President.”
“Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, members of the Senate and the House of Representatives, yesterday the Empire of Japan attacked American possessions without warning or provocation,” Roosevelt said, his voice raspy with anger. “The Empire’s despicable action shows that its leaders think us weak and irresolute. Like it or not-and no sane man can relish war-we are at war with the Japanese. They have started this fight. We will finish it, and we will win it.”
A great cheer rose from the members of Congress. FDR went on to ask them to make a formal declaration of war against Japan. That cheer told Peggy he’d get exactly what he asked for. he Ivans were getting frisky. Somewhere a long way ahead lay Smolensk. The orders for Willi Dernen’s regiment said it was one part of a giant pincer that would help encircle the Russian city. But to encircle a place, you first had to nip round behind it. The orders came out of Berlin, and Berlin didn’t get what was going on all these kilometers to the east.
Willi hadn’t shaved since… he couldn’t remember quite when. His face fungus helped a little when it came to keeping his cheeks and chin warm. It would have done more if it weren’t full of rime from his breath. And he was better off than many. He had his greatcoat and the sheepskin vest underneath. And he had a pair of fine felt boots some Russian didn’t need any more. His feet wouldn’t freeze… too soon.
Compared to those of his buddies still stuck with Wehrmacht -issue gear, he was well off. Compared to the French and English, whose cold-weather clothing was nowhere near so good as what the Germans made, he was incredibly lucky.
But the Poles didn’t have to scrounge to get their hands on stuff like this. They knew ahead of time what these winters were like. Seeing German troops collect pitying stares from a bunch of damn Poles was galling, to say the least.
Red Army men had clothes made for this hideous weather, too. They also had gun oil that didn’t freeze up when it got really cold, unlike the fancy shit the Germans used. Willi carried a little tube of that, taken from the dead Russian who’d supplied him with valenki. The action on his Mauser still worked just fine.
He shared the gun oil with his friends. He even shared it with Awful Arno, more from expediency than affection. Baatz might be the world’s biggest pain in the ass, but he was almost as dangerous to the bastards on the other side as he was to his own men.
Fighting went back and forth, back and forth. German panzer lubricants didn’t like the bitter weather any better than German gun oil did. Sometimes you could get panzer support, sometimes not. Russian panzers didn’t seem bothered. They had wider tracks than German machines, too. They could go through or over mud and snowdrifts that made German panzers bog down.
Squatting by a fire in a hut in a wrecked village, Willi said, “If the Ivans even halfway knew what the fuck they were doing, they could run us back into Poland in about a week and a half.”
“Nah.” Adam Pfaff shook his head. He was as grimy and shaggy as Willi. “We’d hang on for two weeks, easy.”
Arno Baatz crouched by that crackling blaze, too. He didn’t growl at Pfaff for defeatism. He just bummed a papiros off of him. There might not be much tobacco in the damn things, but what there was was a lot stronger than German-issue smokes. Willi also had some papirosi in a greatcoat pocket. It wasn’t as if there weren’t plenty
