The Winds of War

Churchill had appeared strong, ruddy, springy, and altogether ten years younger. Now his cheeks were ashy, with red patches.

“Hullo. Don’t we have a development here?”

Little black coffin-shaped markers dotted the wide blue spaces, and an officer was putting up several more, in a cluster close to the battleship’s projected course. Farther on stood large clusters of red pins, with a few blue pins.

“This new U-boat group was sighted by an American patrol plane at twilight, sir,” said the officer.

“Ah, yes. So Admiral Pound advised me. I suppose we are evading?”

“We have altered course to north, sir.”

“Convoy H-67 is almost home, I see.”

“We will be pulling those pins tonight, Mr. Prime Minister.”

“That will be happy news.” Churchill harshly coughed, puffing at his cigar, and said to Pug Henry, “Well. We may have some sport for you yet. It won’t be as lively as a bomber ride over Berlin. Eh? Did you enjoy that, Captain?”

“It was a rare privilege, Mr. Prime Minister.”

“Any time. Any time at all.”

“Too much honor, sir. Once was plenty.”

Churchill uttered a hoarse chuckle. “I daresay. What is the film tonight, General Tillet?”

“Prime Minister, I believe it is Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, in Saps at Sea.”

“Saps at Sea, eh? Not inappropriate! The Surgeon-General has ordered me to remain in bed. He has also ordered me not to smoke. I shall attend Saps at Sea, and bring my cigars.”

Pug Henry’s enjoyment of Saps at Sea was shadowed by an awareness that at any moment the battle ship might run into a U-boat pack. Germany skippers were adept at sneaking past destroyer screens. But the film spun to the end uninterrupted. “A gay but inconsequent entertainment,” the Prime Minister remarked in a heavy, rheumy voice, as he plodded out.

Clement Attlee’s broadcast the next day packed the wardroom. Every officer not on watch, and all staff officers and war planners, gathered in the wardroom around one singularly ancient, crack-voiced radio. The battleship, plowing through a wild storm, rolled and pitched with slow long groans. For the American guest, it was a bad half hour. He saw perplexed looks, lengthening faces, and headshakes, as Attlee read off the “Atlantic Charter.” The high-flown language bespoke not a shred of increased American commitment. Abuse of Nazi tyranny, praise of “four freedoms,” dedication to a future of world peace and brotherhood, yes; more combat help for the British, flat zero. Some sentences about the free trade and independence for all peoples meant the end of the British Empire, if they meant anything.

Franklin Roosevelt was indeed a tough customer, thought Captain Henry, not especially surprised.

“Umph!” grunted Major-General Tillet in the silence after the radio was shut off. “I’d venture there was more to it than that. How about it Henry?”

All eyes turned on the American.

Pug saw no virtue in equivocating. “No, sir, I’d guess that was it.”

“Your President has now pledged in a joint communique to destroy Nazi tyranny,” Tillet said. “Doesn’t that mean you’re coming in, one way or another?”

“It means lend-Lease,” Pug said.

Questions shot at him from all sides.

“You’re not going to stand with us against Japan?”

“Not now.”

“But isn’t the Pacific your fight, pure and simple?”

“The President won’t give a warning to Japan. He can’t, without Congress behind him.”

“What’s the matter with your Congress?”

“That’s a good question, but day before yesterday, it came within one vote of practically dissolving the United States Army.”

“Don’t the congressmen know what’s happening in the world?”

“They vote their political hunches to protect their political hides.”

“Then what’s the matter with your people?”

“Our people are about where yours were at the time of the Munich pact.”

That caused a silence.

Tillet said, “We’re paying the price.”

“We’ll have to pay the price.”

“We had Chamberlain then for a leader, sir,” said a fresh-faced lieutenant. “You have Roosevelt.”

“The American people don’t want to fight Hitler, gentlemen,” said Pug. “It’s that simple, and Roosevelt can’t help that. They don’t want to fight anybody. Life is pleasant. The war’s a ball game they can watch. You’re the home team, because you talk our language. Hence Lend-Lease, and this Atlantic Charter. Lend-Lease is no sweat, it just means more jobs and money for everybody.”

An unusually steep roll brought a crash of crockery in the galley. The crossfire stopped. Victor Henry went to his cabin. Before disembarking in Iceland, he did not talk much more to the British officers.

Chapter 48

The Atlantic Charter, like the elephant, resembled a tree, a snake, a wall, or a rope, depending on where the blind took hold of it.

Axis propaganda jeered at its gassy rhetoric about freedom, cited enslaved India and Malaya, noted the cowardice of the degenerate Americans in evading any combat commitment, and concluded that it was all a big empty bluff, tricked out with the usual pious Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy, to cover impotent hatred of the triumphant New World Order, which a thousand Atlantic Charters could no longer roll back.

In the United States, a howl went up that Roosevelt had secretly committed the country to go to war on England’s side. A cheer went up — not nearly so loud — for the most glorious document in man’s struggle toward the light since the Magna Carta.

British newspapers implied that much more than this fine charter had been wrought at Argentia Bay; but for the moment the rest had to be hushed up.

The Russians hailed the meeting of Roosevelt and Churchill on a battleship at sea as a triumph for all peace- loving peoples everywhere; hinting that, as was well known, a second front in Europe now was crucial, and the Atlantic Charter, failing to mention a plan for this, was somewhat disappointing.

No reaction was stronger or blinder than the one that swept the immured Jews in Minsk.

The Germans had confiscated their radios. The penalty for possessing one was death. A sixteen-year-old boy had heard the Russian broadcast imperfectly on a tiny receiving set rigged in his attic. He had joyously spread the story that Roosevelt had met Churchill, and that the United States was declaring war on Germany! The effect on the ghetto of this lie was so wonderful, so life-giving, that one may wonder whether falsehood may not sometimes be a necessary anodyne for souls in torment.

The spirit of the Minsk Jews had recently been shattered. They had resigned themselves, with the coming of the Germans, to be herded into a few square blocks, to be forced to register for work, to be arrested and maltreated, to endure hooligan raids and perhaps even shootings. This was a pogrom time. German pogroms could be expected to be very bad. But Jewry survived pogroms.

Then one night gray trucks had swarmed into the ghetto, and squads of Germans in unfamiliar dark uniforms had cleared out the dwellers along two main streets, house by house, loading the people into the vans — for resettlement, they announced. Some of the Germans were brutal, some polite, as they pushed and urged the people into the trucks. In other streets, behind barred doors, other Jews wondered and shivered. What had happened afterward according to reports brought by partisans who haunted the woods — was so hideous and unbelievable that the Minsk Jews were still trying numbly to come to grips with it. The gray vans had driven five miles away, to