The Winds of War

ability to drive this balky team. After weeks of wild controversy, the vote itself went smooth as oil. The last excitement lay in the crushing of trick amendments. Two to one, the Senate voted in Lend-Lease, while the country and the press barely paid attention. The debate had bored them into indifference.

Yet this vote struck Pug Henry as the key world event since Hitler’s smash into Poland. Here in the yeas of sixty elderly voices the tide might be starting to turn. The President at last had the means to put the United States on a war footing, long before the people were ready to fight. The new factories that must now rise to make Lend- Lease planes and guns, would in time arm the American forces that so far existed only on paper.

That same day he was ordered to fly down to the Norfolk Navy Yard and report to Admiral Ernest King, a dragon he had not met before. King had his flag in the Texas.

Texas was the first battleship to which Pug had ever reported, shortly after the World War, on just such a raw and blowy March day as this, in this same Navy Yard, and possibly at this same pier. With one stack gone, and tripod instead of basket mast, Texas looked much different than in the old coal-burning days. Pug noted in the paint and brightwork topside an arid sepulchral cleanliness. The gangway watch, and the sailors working around the old gun turrets, were starched and scrubbed as surgeons. Outside the four-starred door to flag quarters a glittery-eyed marine presented arms like a clock striking.

King sat behind a desk, showing blue sleeves stiff to the elbow with gold. The bare office was warmed only by a framed picture of Admiral Mayo on the bulkhead. King had a long, thin, deeply scored red face with high cheekbones, a narrow shiny pate, and a sharp nose. Behind him hung a chart of the Atlantic, with bold black letters in one corner, COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, ATLANTIC FLEET. He motioned Victor Henry to a seat, tilted back his chin, and eyed him.

“I received a telephone call from the Chief of Naval Operations yesterday,” he commenced in a sandy voice, “that one Captain Victor Henry of War Plans would report to me directly from the President of the United States.”

Henry bobbed his head as though he were an ensign.

Silence, and the hum of ventilators. “Well? State your business.”

The captain told Admiral King what Franklin Roosevelt desired. The admiral calmly smoked a cigarette in a holder, eyes boring at Henry. Then Pug described his plan for executing the President’s desires. He talked for six or seven minutes. King’s long, weathered face remained immobile and faintly incredulous.

“So! You’re prepared to get the United States of America into this war all by yourself, are you, Captain?” said Ernest King at last, with frigid sarcasm. “Well, that’s one way for an obscure person to go down in history.”

“Admiral, it’s the President’s judgment that this exercise will go off without incident.”

“So you said. Well, suppose his judgment’s wrong? Suppose a U-boat fires a fish at you? What then?”

“If we’re fired on, sir, why, I propose to fire back. That won’t start a war unless Hitler wants war.”

Ernest King nodded peevishly. “Hell, we’re in this war anyway. It doesn’t matter too much when or how the whistle blows. The Japanese are going to kick off against us when it suits them and the Germans. Probably when it least suits us. I agree with Mr. Roosevelt that it very likely won’t happen now. But how about the battle cruisers? Hey? Thought about them? The Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau? They’ve picked off more than a hundred thousand tons in the past month.”

“Yes, sir. I hope the Catalinas will warn us if they’re around, so we can evade.”

Admiral King said, “That’s a big ocean out there. The air patrol can easily miss them.”

“Well, then, the cruisers can miss us too, Admiral.”

After another pause, looking Victor Henry over like a dog he was considering buying, King picked up the telephone. “Get me Admiral Bristol. — Henry, you have nothing in writing?”

“No, sir.”

“Very well. You will discontinue all references to the President.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Hello? Admiral, I’m sending to your office” — King glanced at a scrap of paper on his desk — “Captain Victor Henry, a special observer from War Plans. Captain Henry will visit Desron Eight and conduct surprise drills, inspections, and maneuvers, to test combat readiness. He is to be regarded as my assistant chief of staff, with appropriate authority… . Affirmative. He will be in your office within the hour. Thank you.”

Hanging up, King folded bony hands over his flat stomach and, staring at Victor Henry, he spoke in formal drone. “Captain, I desire that you now form out of Desron Eight an antisubmarine screen, and proceed to sea to conduct realistic tests and drills. This includes forming up screens on cooperative merchant vessels which you may encounter. You will of course avoid provoking belligerent vessels that may sight you. I desire you to keep security at a maximum and paperwork at a minimum. For that reason my instructions are verbal. You’ll conduct yourself similarly.”

“Understood, Admiral.”

A chilly smile moved one side of Ernest King’s mouth, and he reverted to his natural voice. “Perfect horseshit, but that’s the story. In the event of an incident, it will be a hanging for all hands. That will be all.”

* * *

Even in the North Atlantic in March, even in a destroyer, even on such risky and peculiar business, going back to sea was a tonic. Pug paced the bridge of U.S.S. Plunkett all day, a happy man, and slept in the sea cabin by the chart house.

On clear nights, no matter how cold the wind and how rough the sea, he spent hours after dinner alone on the flying bridge. The broad dark ocean, the streaming pure air, the crowded stars arching overhead, always made him feel what the Bible called the spirit of God hovering on the face of the waters. Down the years even more than his childhood Bible training this religious awe inspired by nights at sea had kept Captain Henry a believer. He spoke of this to nobody, not to ministers who were his old friends; he would have felt embarrassed and mawkish, for he was not sure how seriously even they took the Lord. On this voyage the Almighty was there for Victor Henry as always in the black starry universe, a presence actual and lovable, if disturbingly unpredictable.

Officially Pug was an observer of the “exercise,” and he kept to that role, leaving operations to the commander of the destroyer screen. He interfered once. On the second day after the join-up off Newfoundland, the long ragged columns of merchant ships, stretching across the horizon, plowed into a snowstorm. Lookouts were coming off their posts almost too stiff to move, and covered with icicles. Plunging up and down over huge black waves, ships a mile apart were losing sight of each other. After reports of minor collisions and near-misses in the zigzags, Pug called into his sea cabin Commander Baldwin, who headed the screen, and the British liaison officer.

“I’ve been figuring,” he said, pointing to a chart, and hanging on to his gyrating chair. “We can gain an advance of half a day by proceeding on a straight course. Now maybe there are U-boats out there in all that stuff, and then again, maybe there aren’t. If they’re going to try to penetrate a screen of fifteen American destroyers, well, with seventy-one juicy crawling targets, zigzagging won’t help much. Let’s head straight for Point Baker, turn over this hot potato, and skedaddle.”

Mopping snow from red eyebrows under an iced-up parka hood, Commander Baldwin grinned. “Concur, Captain.”

Pug said to the British signal officer, a little quiet man who had come in from the stormy bridge smoking a pipe upside down, “Give your commodore a flag hoist: DISCONTINUE ZIGZAGGING.”

Day after day, Victor Henry and Commander Baldwin ate breakfast from trays in the sea cabin, reviewing courses of action in case of a German attack. Each morning the screen conducted combat drills, in a ragged style that enraged Pug. He was tempted to take over and work these units hard; but to maintain the dull calm of the operation was paramount, so he did nothing. Unmolested, the first Lend-Lease convoy steamed straight eastward. About half the time bad weather shrouded the ships. On the crystalline days and bright moonlit nights Victor Henry remained clothed and awake, drank gallons of coffee, and smoked his throat raw, now and then dozing in the captain’s chair. Whether U-boats saw the convoy and laid low because of the American destroyers fanned ahead of it, or whether it got through undetected, Victor Henry never knew. They arrived at Point Baker, a dot of latitude and longitude on the wide empty sea, without a single episode of alarm.

A feeble yellow sun was just rising. The convoy began steaming in a pattern ten miles square, in a ring of desolate ice-flecked black water and pearly sky, waiting for the British. Victor Henry stood on the flying bridge peering eastward, hoping that the Plunkett’s navigator knew his job. Since the return from Berlin, he had never felt so well. He had read a lot of Shakespeare in his mildewed seagoing volume, and had