The Winds of War

golden, the leaves were fresh green, and the sky was the blue of a WAAF uniform. What a world! What an idiocy in these Europeans to dump fire and explosives on each other’s habitations, built with such hard work! All things were washed clean, or at least he was seeing them with a child’s clear inquisitive eye — a shiny automobile, a shop- window dummy, a box of red geraniums on a windowsill. He noticed that the sidewalk gave off tiny sparkles in the late sunlight.

The American flag fluttering from the second story of the embassy struck Pug with a pang of pride. Its red, white, and blue seemed so rich, its slow waving so full of majesty, that a sixty-piece orchestra might have been playing “The Star-Spangled Banner”; but there was no orchestra in the square, only discordant loud traffic noise. He sat on a bench for a moment looking at the flag, suffused with zest for life and a burning wish to live a long time yet in this radiant world through which he had been walking blind as a bat. This grim stocky obscure American Navy captain sat bemused on a London park bench, undergoing an exaltation for which he finally found the name. At first he had thought his exhilarated mood was the snapback from the bombing mission, the plain joy of being alive after brushing death in a diving plane, in a whirl of blue cones and exploding colored balls. But it was something more. Nothing like this had happened to him in twenty-five years, and he had not expected it ever to happen again, so recognizing it had taken him this long. Nothing could be simpler. He had fallen in love.

A black Cadillac pulled up at the embassy door and discharged an admiral whom Pug recognized, two Army generals, and Blinker Vance. Pug hastened across the street.

“Hey, Pug!” Admiral Benton offered a fat hand. This holy terror, his old boss at War Plans, was a short rotund man with a shiny round face and a bald round head. Pug liked him, despite his short temper, because he was a smart and driving worker, wasted no words, admitted ignorance, and took blame when the blame was his. He was a gunnery expert too, the Navy’s best. His weakness was opinionated political theorizing; he thought the New Deal was a Communist plot.

Blinker Vance brought the four men to a quiet second-floor conference room panelled in cherry wood. He left. They sat themselves at one end of a long polished table with twenty chairs upholstered in blue leather. Admiral Benton took the head, with the two generals on either side of him and Pug below the younger-looking one. “Now, goddamn it, Pug,” Benton began, “the ambassador says if he’d known about this observer flight of yours, he’d have stopped you. He’s dead right. We don’t want to give the Army and its Air Corps” — he gestured at the other men — “the idea that the Navy trains goofy dare-devils.” Benton sounded very pleased with Pug. “These gentlemen and I have been waiting for you to get back from that blamed fool excursion. This is General Anderson and General Fitzgerald here is Army Air Corps.” Benton glanced at the others. “Well, shall we get at it?”

General Fitzgerald, who sat beside Pug, danced long lean fingers together. He had wavy blond hair and a handsome thin face; he might have been an artist or an actor, except for the stone-hard look in his pale blue eyes. “Admiral, I’d like to hear about the captain’s bomber ride myself.”

“So would I,” said Anderson. Victor Henry now recognized him as Train Anderson, a West Point football star of around 1910. Anderson was heavy and jowly, and his thin hair was smoothed tight on a pink scalp.

Victor Henry narrated his bomber adventure in a matter-of-fact way.

“Great!” Benton burst out when Pug came to the explosion of the gasworks.

The three senior officers listened tensely to the account of his return trip in a damaged aircraft; the jettisoning of all removable weight to maintain altitude; the final thirty miles flown at a few hundred feet. When Pug finished, Train Anderson lit a cigar and leaned back on a thick elbow. “Quite a yarn, Captain. It amounted to a token bombing though, didn’t it? Berlin sounds untouched, compared to this place. “You’ve been to the docks, I presume?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We toured them today. The Germans are making mincemeat of the area. At this rate, in a week London will cease to be a port. Then what happens? Famine? Plague?”

“That’s a big dock area,” Pug said. “Their repair and fire-fighting crews are good, General. Things look worse than they are.”

The Air Corps general laced his fingers daintily together. “Have you been in the public shelters, Henry? We visited one during a raid. Nothing but a shallow cement hole. A hit would have killed everybody. All stinking of unwashed bodies and urine, all jammed with nervous jittery old folks and crying kids. Big crayon scrawl on the ceiling, “This is a Jew War. We visited the underground, too, last night. A mob of people sleeping on the tracks and the platforms, a sanitation nightmare, a setup for an outbreak of typhus.”

“Sickness and casualties are running far under their estimates, sir,” Pug said, “There are thousands of empty hospital beds.”

“So this man Vance told us,” put in Anderson. “Well, they’ll fill ‘em. Now, Captain Henry, you’ve been an observer here, and you’ve been sending optimistic reports to the President recommending all-out assistance.”

“Not wholly optimistic, sir, but recommending full assistance, yes.”

“Possibly you’re a bit out of touch with what’s happening on the other side of the water. So let me read you something. It’s from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a red-hot New Deal paper.” He took out his wallet, unfolded a neatly cut newspaper clipping, and intoned through his nose:

“‘Mr. Roosevelt today committed and act of war, turning over to a warring power a goodly portion of the United States Navy. We get in exchange leases on the British possessions. What good will these leases be if Hitler should acquire title to these islands by right of conquest? Of all sucker real estate deals in history, this is the worst. If Mr. Roosevelt gets away with this, we may as well say good-bye to our liberties and make up or minds that henceforth we live under a dictatorship.’”

“That’s a Roosevelt supporter talking,” observed Anderson, puffing violently on the cigar. “Now, we’re proceeding from here to a dinner at the Army and Navy Club, in half an hour or so, with some British generals and admirals. We already have the list of the war materials they want. It would strip our armed forces clean. We have to make cabled recommendations to the President within five days. He’s already let them have — in addition to these fifty warships — virtually all our seventy-five-millimeter field guns, several squadrons of naval aircraft, half a million rifles, millions of rounds of ammunition—”

“He hasn’t given ‘em away, General,” Benton observed. “The Limeys have paid cash on the barrelhead.”

“Yes, luckily the Neutrality Act compels that, but still it was a goddamned lie to call the stuff surplus. Surplus! We don’t have any surplus! You know that. Fifty destroyers! All this without any authorization from Congress. All things we’re short of. And now Congress is passing a draft law. Our boys will be drilling with broomsticks! There’s going to be an accounting one day, you know. If the British fold and this stuff winds up in German hands — a possibility to be reckoned with — the accounting will not be far off. All who have taken part in these transactions, or even advocated them” — here General Anderson turned a belligerent face at Victor Henry — “I warn you, stand a good chance of hanging from lamp posts on Constitution Avenue.”

After a silence, Admiral Benton said mildly, folding his hands over his stomach, “Well, Pug, I’ve told these gentlemen that I know you, and that any dope you put out is reliable. We’ve got a big responsibility. We’ve been handed one hell of a hot potato. So get down to the short hairs. What makes you think the British will keep fighting, after the way the French folded? No horseshit now.”

“All right, Admiral.”

To begin, with, Victor Henry said, the British had made better use than the French of the time between the wars. He described their scientific advances, the strength and disposition of the battle fleet, the fighter control system he had seen at Uxbridge, the figures of German and British plane losses, the morale of the fliers, the preparations along the invasion beaches, the Chain Home stations, the production of aircraft. Fitzgerald listened with his eyes closed, his head flung back, his fingers dancing. Benton stared gravely at Pug, pulling at an ear as he had in War Plans meetings. Train Anderson, wreathing himself in smoke, also looked hard at Pug, though the glare was fading to a frigid calculating expression.

Pug gave as sober and clear an account as he could, but it was an effort. As he plodded through his military facts, Pamela Tudsbury shimmered in his mind’s eye, shifting with afterimages of the flight over Berlin. He felt in an undisciplined mood and was hard put to it to keep a respectful tone.

“Now wait, Pug, this RDF you’re so hot on,” Benton interposed, “that’s nothing but radar, isn’t it? We’ve got radar. You were with me aboard the New York for the tests.”

“We haven’t got this kind of radar, sir.” Victor Henry described in detail the cavity magnetron. The senior