“Yes. Cavity magnetron. One gets rid of the grid in a vacuum tube, you see, and one controls current flow with an external magnetic field. That allows for the more powerful pulses. It takes a bit of designing, but your people will certainly work it up in due course.”
“No doubt. Got any cavity magnetrons for sale?”
Both Tillet and Dr. Cantwell burst out laughing, and even the enlisted men at their scopes turned around and smiled.
The scarlet-faced group captain peered at a scope where a boyish operator was chattering into a headphone. “Hullo, looks like we have another circus heading this way. Forming up over Le Havre again. A couple of dozen would you say, Stebbins?”
“Thirty-seven, sir.”
Excitement thickened in the dark room as reports came from several scopes. A young duty officer wearing headphones strolled from scope to scope, making notes on a clipboard, talking to the operators. To Pug Henry’s eye this was smooth expert work, like the controlled tumult in a submarine conning tower during an attack run.
General Tillet said, “I take it you think rather well of our cavity magnetron.”
“It’s a major breakthrough. General.”
“Hm. Yaas. Strange, isn’t it, that warfare has come down to fencing with complicated toys that only a few seedy scholars can make or understand.”
“Pretty useful toys,” said Pug, watching the duty officer write down the ranges and bearings that the radar operators were barking. “Exact intelligence of the enemy’s location and movements, without disclosing your own.”
“Well, of course. We’re damned grateful to our boffins. A few Englishmen did stay awake while our politicians kicked away air parity and all the rest of our military posture. Well, now that you’ve had a look, would you just as soon pop back to London? I thought we might have to stay here a day or two to see action, but Jerry’s been obliging. We can break our trip overnight at some decent hotel, then whip up to London. A couple of people there would like a word with you.”
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 attache 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 grace. 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.”
