The Winds of War

Cincpac, none of it would have happened. He’s been so ready and eager for war, his tongue’s been hanging out. He’d have kept this goddamn fleet in condition Zed, and on dawn and dusk GQ’s for a year. He’d have run patrols till the planes fell apart. He’d have been the most hated son of a bitch in Hawaii, but by God, when they came he’d have been waiting for ‘em! Why, we stripped ship in November. We’ve run darkened ever since, with warheads in our torpedoes, and bombs in the planes, and depth charges on ready. Of course he does go galloping about like an old mule with a bee up its ass.”

Warren described Halsey’s futile dart south of Oahu looking for Japanese carriers. The direction had seemed dead wrong to Warren Henry and the other fliers. The only place for the Japs to be lurking was north, where they could dash straight for home after the strike. But Halsey — so they later learned — had received a direction-finder report of heavy radio signalling to the south, so southward he had roared, launching all his torpedo planes and dive bombers. For hours the planes had scoured over empty seas, till the Enterprise had sheepishly summoned them back. The report had been the commonest of direction-finder errors, a reciprocal bearing. The Japs had lain in the exact opposite direction-north. By then, of course, catching up with them had been hopeless.

His father grunted incredulously. “Is that what happened? God Almighty, that’s nearly as stupid as the battleship performance.”

“Well, yes, somebody on that big staff should have thought of the reciprocal bearing. But nobody’s head was too clear, and I don’t know — it was one carrier against four or five, anyway. Maybe it was for the best. At least he did try to find a fight. Listen, Dad, our own A.A. shot down many of our planes, and they sure peppered me. It was just a historic snafu all around. Tell me, how’s Briny? Did you see him in Manila?”

The bourbon helped Victor Henry’s sickened spirit, but talking to Warren was better medicine. Slanting light from the living room on his son showed him changed: older, more relaxed, rather hard-bitten, the dangling cigarette almost a part of his features. He had fought with the enemy and survived. That edge was in his bearing, though he deferred carefully to Pug.

“I’ll tell you, Dad,” he said, bringing him a refill from the other room, “I’m not saying this wasn’t a defeat. It was the worst defeat in our history. The Navy will be a hundred years living down the shame of it. But by God, the Congress voted for war today with one dissenting vote! Only one! Think what else could have accomplished that? The Japs were stupid not to move south and dare Roosevelt to come on. He’d have been in trouble.” Warren took a deep drink of bourbon. “What’s more, operationally they blew this attack. They had us flattened with the first wave. All they did the second time was paste the wagons some more and bomb a few smaller ships. What good was that? Our oil farm was sitting behind the sub base, wide open. Dozens of fat round juicy targets you couldn’t miss with your hat. Why, if they’d gotten the oil — and nothing could have stopped them — we’d be evacuating Hawaii right now. The fleet couldn’t have operated from here. We’d be staging a Dunkirk across two thousand five hundred miles of ocean. Moreover, they never hit the subs. They’ll regret that! They never touched our repair shops -”

“I’m convinced,” Pug said. “I’m sure that Jap admiral is committing hara-kiri right now over his disgraceful failure.”

“I said it was a defeat, Dad.” Warren, unoffended, came back sharply but pleasantly. “I say they achieved surprise at high political cost, and then failed to exploit it. Say, it’s another quarter of an hour to dinner. How about one more shortie?”

Pug wanted to examine his mail, but Warren’s acumen was rejoicing his heavy heart, and the strong drink was working wonders. “Well, very short.”

He told Warren about his meeting with Admiral Kimmel. The young aviator flipped a hand at the complaint of too much war material going to Europe. “Jesus, him too? Just a feeble excuse. It’s got to cost several million lives to stop the Germans. Whose lives? Could be ours! The Russians made one deal with Hitler, and they could make another one. The Communists signed a separate peace in 1917, you know. It was the first thing Lenin did on taking over. The whole game here is to keep the Soviet Union fighting. That’s so obvious!”

“You know, you ought to go over in your spare time, Warren, and straighten out Cincpac.”

“I’d be glad to, but I’ll have to move fast to catch him while he’s Cincpac.”

“Oh? You got some inside scoop?”

“Dad, the President isn’t going to resign, and somebody’s head’s got to roll.”

“Dinner, fellas,” Janice’s voice called.

“The only thing is,” Warren said, as they walked in, “those Russians are going to exact payment for all those lives one day. They’ll get to annex Poland, or Czechoslovakia, or some damn thing. But that’s fair enough, maybe. Russia keeps swallowing and then puking up Poland every half century or so. What was it like in Moscow anyway, Dad? What are the Russkis like? How much did you see?”

Pug talked straight through dinner about his adventures in Russia. Janice had provided several bottles of red wine. It wasn’t very good wine, and he wasn’t much of a wine drinker, but tonight he poured down glass after glass, thinking that red wine was really remarkably fine stuff. Continuous talking, another unusual thing for him, eased his heart.

Janice asked questions about Pam Tudsbury, which led him to relate his experiences in England too, and his flight over Berlin. Warren pressed his father for details of the bomb racks and release mechanisms, but Pug could tell him nothing. Warren interrupted Pug’s flow of words to describe his run-in with the Bureau of Ordnance over the bombing assembly of his plane, and the improved rack he had manufactured in the shipfitter’s shop, which the Bureau was now grudgingly examining for possible use in all planes. Pug tried to keep surprise and pride out of his face, saying, “You’ll get no thanks from anybody, boy. Especially if it works! Just a reputation as a troublemaker.”

“I’ll get what I want — bombs that fall straight and hit.”

Over brandy, back on the dark screened porch, Pug, now fairly close to being drunk, asked his son what he thought he should do, with the California command gone. It was an honest question. His son impressed him, and he thought Warren might give him good advice.

Warren laughed and said, “Dad, learn to fly.”

“Don’t think I haven’t thought of it.”

“Well, seriously, you’d better go back to Cincpac’s staff tomorrow and pound desks till you get a command. They probably believe that you draw a lot of water with the President. You’ll get what you ask for. But you have to move fast. If Mr. Roosevelt remembers that you’re on the loose again, he’ll send you on some other mission. Although I don’t know, it must be very interesting work, at that.”

“Warren, I hope you believe me — thanks, thanks, boy, just a little more, this is damn good brandy — nearly everything I’ve been doing in the past two years has given me a swift pain in the ass. I don’t know why Mr. Roosevelt chose in his wisdom to make a sort of high-octane errand boy out of me. I’ve talked to great men face to face, and that’s a privilege, sure. If I were planning to write a book or go into politics, or something along that line, it would be dandy. But the bloom soon comes off the rose. You’re a zero to these people. It’s in their manner. You have to watch every sentence you utter and keep your eyes and ears peeled for every move, every word, every tone of some bird who may go down in history, but he’s just another man, basically, and maybe even a big criminal, like Stalin or Hitler. I think you have to have a taste for associating with great men. There are people who do, God knows, who crave it, but I’m not one of them. I never want to get out of sight of ships and the water again, and I never want to see the inside of another embassy.”

“How did it ever start, Dad? Here, have some more.”

“No, no, Warren, I’m feeling no pain at all as it is. Well, okay, just wet the bottom of the glass — thanks, boy. How did it start? Well -”

Pug recounted his prediction of the Nazi-Soviet pact, his visits to the President, his assembling of the planes for England, and his reports from Berlin. He felt he was getting loose-tongued. “Well, that’s the idea. I’ve never discussed these things before with anybody, Warren. Not even your mother. You strike me now as a thoroughgoing professional officer. It does my heart good and it gives me pleasure to confide a little in you. Also I’m drunk as a fiddler.”

Warren grinned. “Ha! You haven’t told me a thing. That story about the planes for England cropped up in Time a couple of months ago.”

“I’m well aware of that,” said his father, “but I wasn’t the one who spilled the beans. You didn’t see my name in that story.”

“I sure didn’t. Dad, don’t you know why the President likes you? You’ve a keen mind, you get things done,