The Winds of War

the rest of the day plowing through the mound of accumulated paper, Victor Henry felt much better.

Rhoda was waiting for him at home in a bright red dress, with ice and drink mixes ready, and cheese and crackers out. Her manner and conversation stuck him as strange. She gabbled about houses. She was so eager to talk, so voluble, that he had no chance at first to tell her of the White House invitation. Early that afternoon, finding Pug’s note on her dressing table she had rushed with an agent and visited three. All her suppressed guilt feelings focussed on the house business. If only she could convince Pug that she had been diligently looking at houses, she felt her tracks would be covered. This made no sense. She was planning to break the news to him. She acted on nervous instinct, triggered by the short scrawl in Pug’s handwriting: He’s back. Man the bar.

Pug was uninterested in a verbose account of faults in houses he had never seen. But he put up with it. Next, Rhoda chattered on that sore topic, recent promotions: that utter fool, chaser, and drunk, Chipper Pennington, had gotten the Helena; and did Pug know that even Bill Foley was now commanding a destroyer squadron at Pearl Harbor? Pug broke in on Rhoda’s flow of words — this was at dinner, over the meat — to tell her of the President’s invitation. Her mouth fell open. “Pug! Really?” She asked many questions, worried out loud over what she would wear, and gloated about how Annette Pennington and Tammy would feel when they heard this!

It was a bad performance. He was seeing her at her very worst — worse than her worst, for she had never been quite so demoralized, though she looked extremely pretty and her wonderful skin glowed smooth as ever. Pug found himself looking at his wife detachedly, as he judged professional matters. Few wives in their forties can weather such a scrutiny.

That night Victor Henry recognized familiar signals he was not, for the time being, welcome in her bedroom. He did not know why; but he had long ago decided that Rhoda was entitled to these spells, physical or mental, though it seemed too bad after his six weeks at sea. It took him a long time to fall asleep. He kept thinking of the callous happy-go-lucky mood he had found in the capital, the sense that by passing the Lend-Lease Bill, America had done its bit to stamp out Nazism. Nobody appeared to care how much stuff was actually being produced and shipped. The figures at War Plans had appalled him. Conflicting boards and agencies, contradictory directives, overlapping commands by the Air Corps, the Navy, the Army, and the British had overwhelmed the program. Under an amazing welter of meetings, talks, and mimeographed releases, Lend-Lease was paralyzed.

He kept thinking, too, of the contrasts between his wife and the English girl. At last he got up and swallowed a stiff drink of bourbon like a pill.

* * *

Pug cheered up later in the week, as most people did, when Hitler’s deputy Fuhrer, the black-browed fanatic Rudolf Hess, made a solo flight to Scotland, landed by parachute, and demanded to see Winston Churchill. For a day or two it seemed that Germany might be cracking. But the Nazis at once announced that Hess, through heroic overwork, had gone off his head. The British said little publicly. Pug heard from Pamela, who had it from the embassy, that in fact Hess, mad as a hatter, was shut up in a sanatorium, drivelling peace plans.

Certainly in the war news there was no sign of German weakness. They were bagging hordes of British prisoners and mountains of arms in Greece, sinking ships in the Atlantic at a great rate, showering London and Liverpool with fire-bombings worse than any during the 1940 blitz, laying siege to Tobruk, and launching a breathtaking air-borne invasion of Crete, over the heads of the British Mediterranean fleet. This outpouring of military energy to all points of the compass, this lava flow of violence, was awesome. In the face of it, Vichy France was folding up and negotiating a deal with the Nazis that would hand over North Africa to them, and perhaps the strong French fleet too. This was a brutal bloody nose for American diplomats trying to hold France neutral, and keep the Germans out of the African bulge at French Dakar, which dominated the whole south Atlantic.

The Nazis appeared unstoppable. The entrenched, heavily armed British on Crete claimed to be butchering the sky invaders. But floating to earth dead or alive in parachute harnesses, crashing in gliders, on the airborne multitudes came. The confident British communiques grew vaguer. Somehow, they conceded, the Germans at incredible cost had managed to capture one airfield; then one more. It soon became clear that Hitler as doing a new thing in Crete, taking a strong island from the air without sea power, in fact in the teeth of sea power. This was threatening news for England. Aside from the heavy defeat itself, Crete began to look like a dress rehearsal for the end.

And still the United States did nothing. In the inner War Plans circles, a split was widening between the Army and the Navy. Victor Henry’s section wanted strong fast moves in the North Atlantic to save England: convoys, the occupation of Iceland, shipment of all possible arms. But the Army, which now gave England only three months before collapse, preferred a move into Brazil and the Azores, to fact the expected Nazi thrust in the south Atlantic from Dakar. Between these two plans, the President was stalling and hesitating.

Then came the scarifying news that the Bismarck, a new German battleship, had blown up England’s mighty war vessel, the Hood, off Greenland, with a single salvo at thirteen miles, and vanished into the north Atlantic mists! This jolted the country out of its Maytime languor. The President announced a major radio address. Speculation about the speech filled the press and radio. Would he proclaim the start of convoying? Would he ask Congress to declare war? The brawny feat of the Bismarck seemed to show Hitler achieving mastery of the oceans as well the land and the air. The shift of the power balance in the Atlantic was suddenly self-evident and frightful.

Rhoda’s reaction to all this heavy news was loud frantic fretting that the White House would call off the dinner invitation, after she had told all her friends about it. FDR was probably getting ready to go to war. How could he bother with a social dinner, especially with unimportant people like themselves? Victor Henry, to secure some peace, checked with the President’s naval aide. The invitation to the White House stood.

“What do you think, Dad? Will the Limeys get the Bismarck?”

Perched on the edge of the bathtub, Byron observed that Victor Henry still liked to rest one leg on the tub as he shaved. Nor had Pug’s shaving motions ever changed, the successive scrape of cheeks, shin, and neck then the scowl to stretch his upper lip. Byron had sat exactly so as a child countless times, talking to his dad.

“Well, Briny, they claim the Prince of Wales winged her off Greenland there. But those Germans have fine damage control. I’ve been aboard the Bismarck. She’s a floating steel honeycomb. If they were hit they probably just buttoned up the flooded compartments and lit out for home. The British are throwing everything into their search. To hell with convoys, to hell with the Mediterranean! They know where she’s heading — the French coast, as fast as she can skedaddle — and they know the speed she can make. Aircraft ought to find her. Unless” — he rinsed his razor and shook it — “unless the Bismarck is undamaged. In which case heaven keep any convoys she runs across. With that fire control she displayed, she’ll pick off forty ships in half an hour.”

“I wish I were out there,” said Byron, “in that search.”

“Do you?” Pug gave his son a pleased look. Where Byron saw much the same father, Victor Henry saw a pallid, melancholy, thin-faced little boy transformed into a spruce six-foot ensign in blue and gold. Pug wiped his face with a wet towel. “What time is it? Let’s make tracks.”

Byron followed him into his dressing room. “Say, Dad, you’re pretty close to the President, aren’t you?”

Buttoning his dress shirt, Pug said, “Close? Nobody’s really close to Mr. Roosevelt, that I can see. Except maybe this Harry Hopkins.”

Byron crouched on a stool, watching his father dress. “I got two more letters from Natalie yesterday. She’s stuck, after all.”

Pug frowned at the mirror over his bureau. “Now what?”

“Same thing, Dad, this balled-up foolishness about when her uncle’s father was naturalized. He just can’t get that passport renewed. One official makes promises, and the next one fudges on them. The thing goes round and round.”

“Tell your wife to come home, and let him sweat it out.”

“Let me finish, Dad.” Byron waved both hands. “It was all set, they’d even bought steamship tickets. Some formality of approval from Washington just never through. Natalie had to turn back the boat tickets. Dad, they’re ringed by Germans now. Germans in France, Yugoslavia, Greece, North Africa, and for that matter all through Italy. They’re a couple of Jews.”

“I’m aware of that,” said Victor Henry.