“I was being silly,” Pamela said. “I’m going home with you.”
Tudsbury looked from her face to Henry’s, for the tone was sharply ironic.
“Is she going with me, Victor?”
“She just said she was.”
“Gad, what a relief! Well, all’s well that ends well, and say, I was about to come looking for you. The RAF lads are being flown out half an hour earlier. There’s a rumor that a German column’s breaking through toward the airport and that it may be under shellfire soon. The Nark says it’s a damned lie, but the boys had rather not take a chance.”
“I can pack in ten minutes.” Pamela strode toward her room, adding to Pug, “Come with me, love.”
Victor Henry saw Tudsbury’s eyes flash and a lewd smile curl the thick lips under his moustache. Well, Pamela was human, Pug thought, for all her strength. She couldn’t resist exploding the possessive endearment like a firecracker in her father’s face. He said, “Wait. There’s a report Talky must take to London for me. I’ll be right back.”
“What do you think, Talky?” Pug heard her say gaily as he went out. “Victor’s got himself a battleship command, no less, and he’s off to Pearl Harbor. That’s in Hawaii!”
He returned shortly, breathing hard from the run up and down the hotel staircase, and handed a manila envelope, stapled shut, to Tudsbury. “Give this to Captain Kyser, the naval attache at our embassy, hand to hand. All right?”
“Of course. Top secret?” Tudsbury asked with relish.
“Well — be careful with it. It’s for the next Washington pouch.”
“When I travel, this case never leaves my hand,” Tudsbury said, “not even when I sleep. So rest easy.”
He slipped into a brown leather dispatch case Pug’s envelope, which contained two other envelopes, sealed. One was the long typed report for Harry Hopkins, and the other was the letter to the President about the Jews of Minsk.
Chapter 57 — The Pearl Harbor Catastrophe
(from WORLD EMPIRE LOST)
The Bouleversement
One week in May 1940 sufficed to upset a balance of power in Europe that had lasted for centuries; and one week in December 1941 sufficed to decide the outcome of World War II and the future global balance of power.
On December 4, our Army Group Center was driving through blizzards into the outskirts of Moscow, and from Leningrad to the Crimea Bolshevik, Russia was tottering. The French Empire was long since finished. The British Empire too was finished, though the British Isles still hung feebly on, more and more starved by our ever- expanding U-boat arm. No other power stood between us and world empire except America, which was too weakened by soft living and internal strife to make war. Its industrial plant, half paralyzed by strikes, was still geared to producing luxuries and fripperies. Its military strength lay in an obsolescent navy centered around battleships, riskily based in Hawaii in order to overawe the Japanese, and quite impotent to affect the world- historical German victory that loomed.
Seven days later, on December 11, we were at war with an America transformed into an aggressive military dictatorship, united with one will under a fanatical enemy of the Reich, converting its entire industry on a crash basis to war, and conscripting a vast fresh army and air force in order to crush us. The Red Army on the Moscow front, stiffened with Anglo-American supplies and fresh, primitive, hard-fighting Siberian divisions, had swung over to the counterattack. Elsewhere Soviet troops were forcing us to retreat from Rostov — the first German retreat since Adolf Hitler had risen to lead us in 1933.
One step from the pinnacle of world empire on December 4, the German people on December 11 found themselves plunged into a total two-front war, fighting for their lives, menaced from the east and from the west by two industrial giants with five times our population and twenty times our territory.
History offers no parallel for this gigantic military bouleversement. The chief cause of it was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Sir Winston Churchill records frankly that when he got the news of this attack, he shed tears of thankful joy, for he knew then and there that the war was won. He wasted no tears, of course, on the American sailors caught by surprise and slaughtered.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Here is the passage in Churchill: “
No tears are mentioned. As previously noted, General von Roon is not dispassionate in his references to Winston Churchill. — V.H.
The Japanese Blunder
The Japanese attack was of course quite justified, but it was a hideous strategic mistake.
The fall of French and British power had left the far eastern European colonies almost undefended. Japan was the natural heir of this wealth. She needed it to fight her war against China to a finish. The Europeans had come halfway round the earth a few generations earlier to subjugate East Asia and plunder its resources. But now all that was over. Japan was the only strong presence in East Asia. It was far more moral for this Asiatic people to take over administration of this rich sphere, than for a few drunken white civil servants of defunct European empires to continue their pukka-sahib parasitism. Adolf Hitler had sought only friendly ties with the clever hard-working people of destiny. In the General Staff we assumed that Japan would march to the time best suited to her. We approved of this on every basis of world philosophy.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was tactically an excellent operation, comparable in many ways to Barbarossa. In both cases, a small poor nation caught a big wealthy nation off guard, despite a tense war atmosphere and all manner of advance warnings and indications. In both cases surprise was exploited to destroy on a great scale the enemy’s first-line forces. The Barbarossa surprise depended on the nonaggression treaty, then in force with Soviet Russia, to lull the enemy. The Japanese went us one better by attacking in the middle of peace parleys.
At the time of both attacks, of course, there were loud outcries of “infamy” and “treachery,” as though these terms of private morality had any relevance to historical events. A poor nation seeking to supplant a rich one much use the best means it can find; moreover Thucydides said long ago that men by a natural law always rule where they are strongest. In history what is moral is what works. The will of God, Hegel taught, reveals itself only in historical outcomes. So viewed, Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor were both idealistic thrusts toward a heroic new world order.
The difference was that Barbarossa was strategically impeccable and would have resulted in victory if not for unlucky and unforeseen factors — including this very Japanese attack five and a half months later, which, contrariwise, was such a strategic miscalculation that for once Churchill speaks no more than the truth in calling it suicidal madness.
One violation of a cardinal rule is enough to invalidate a strategic plan. The Japanese surprise attack violated two.
The two iron laws of warfare that Japan disregarded were:
