“Well,” he said with a wide grin, “it would appear the British defeat has served one purpose, other than to get rid of Monty, that is.”
“And what is that, sir?” Marshall asked. He declined to remind the president that the Fifth Army had been stripped to support the invasion into southern France.
Truman handed him the note. “It seems to have scared the bejesus out of the Swiss. The idea of a possible Russian victory seems to have made them change their neutral little minds. They are going to let Clark’s boys transit through Switzerland in order to preserve their financial system. All right”-he chuckled-“if the British can decide to fight alongside the Germans, and the Swiss can give up their neutrality, you can use your Germans as antiaircraft gunners.”
• • •
Tibbetts watched as the flight of three B-29s circled for a landing on the isolated air base outside Reykjavik. Once again, another flight had returned unharmed from the long sortie over Germany. After a couple of false starts, he had devised the tactic whereby each trio of bombers would fly over selected areas of Europe just after a major bombing raid had taken place, either there or nearby. Thus, they would usually catch the Reds on the ground refueling and rearming as the American bombers disappeared to safety. In the first few days of this effort, there had been some attempt by the Russians to attack the bombers. This had cost him two planes, but the attacks had ceased as the Reds realized the bombers weren’t bombing. He presumed the Russians thought they were out for photoreconnaissance purposes. It was as if they didn’t want to waste precious fuel on them. Well, he decided, who cared what they thought? It worked, didn’t it? Now they were over Europe each day. It was as if the planes of the 509th had been given safe-conduct passes.
Tibbetts was pleased that the temporary base was pretty well complete. Men and supplies were housed in a host of Quonset huts. His ground crews had all been shuttled in and he had a full complement of supplies. Even better, the scientists had arrived, and that meant the nuclear material would soon arrive and then be flown to England. He understood that it was coming by warship, the heavy cruiser Indianapolis. Since the Germans had surrendered all their U-boats, the Atlantic was as safe as a pond. Arrival of the nuclear material would end his crews’ period of training and put them into the cauldron. Perhaps, if this bomb worked as the scientists expected, they would be the cauldron itself.
Everyone who knew about the atomic bomb, including Tibbetts, wondered what their target would be. He didn’t think it would be a German city, as they were already pretty well destroyed. He had seen the figures and they staggered him. Bremerhaven was 79 percent destroyed, and Bonn 83 percent, and Hamburg 75 percent. Ironically, Berlin was listed at only 33 percent destroyed by bombing, which was a testimony to the futility of trying to wipe out truly large cities from the air. While he sometimes wondered who went around and counted ruins, he had no reason to doubt the results. The major German cities no longer existed as viable targets. Besides, he reminded himself, we are now at war with Russia, not Germany.
Most of his people had put their money on targets inside Russia, and he had to admit some fondness for that idea. Moscow and Leningrad were everybody’s favorites and there had been some conventional bombing attacks on them. Leningrad was closest and much easier to hit, but there really weren’t many military targets around there, except some navy bases, and the Russian navy, such as it was, had stayed home for this war. Moscow was the capital and contained the military headquarters, and would normally be a juicy target. Unfortunately, it was so far inland and, therefore, so well protected by guns and planes, that the few attempts to bomb it had suffered badly.
There had been three attacks on Moscow totaling 500 bombers that had lost a total of 135 planes. Unacceptable, Tibbetts thought, totally unacceptable. If he were to launch a nuclear assault against Moscow those numbers meant there was the high probability that he would lose a bomber that carried a nuclear bomb, whether it was disguised as a photo plane or not. With so few bombs available, not to forget the highly trained crews, he could not risk the huge cost of failure.
Logically then, that left tactical targets, and they were in a constant state of flux. Tactical targets had the annoying habit of moving.
Tibbetts would have to give considerable thought to what he might suggest as a target. That is, he thought wryly, if anyone would accept targeting input from a mere colonel, even if he was supposed to fly the plane and head the mission. Well, he knew he had access to Ike and he had information about how the bombs might cause damage when they detonated. Perhaps it was time to call in some favors.
E LISABETH W OLF TWIRLED in her skirt and laughed as Logan stared at her white thighs. “Thank you for the razor, Jack. That’s the first time in months that I’ve been able to shave my legs.”
Logan flushed. “You’re welcome.” He still wasn’t comfortable talking strictly feminine topics. First body odor and showering, and now leg shaving. What was his world coming to? Apparently such discussions came more easily to Europeans than they did to comparatively puritanical Americans. The last time Lis had worn the skirt, he had noticed the obvious fact that she hadn’t shaved her legs in a long time. While some of the blond German women could get away with it, a dark-haired girl like Lis could not. He’d been told that many European women didn’t shave as a matter of course.
An airdrop had brought them an abundance of safety razors and blades. More than enough to share, especially since General Miller had not revoked his permission to grow beards. Many of the soldiers, Logan included, had gotten fond of their furry growth, and Miller was keenly attuned to what he could do for his men to make them happy in what was now openly referred to as Goddamn Potsdam.
Once again, they were outside in the warm sun. Elisabeth stopped her impromptu dance routine and sat down beside him on the rickety bench. Technically, he was still on duty but the bunker was only a short distance away and in plain sight. Bailey would call if anything came up. Casual arrangements like this were common up and down the perimeter, and Jack wasn’t the only one in the company doing it.
“You know, Jack, it wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time, my family and I were really quite comfortable. Regardless of where we were and even in the depths of the Depression, we always had enough money to buy both necessities and a few luxuries. Father was high enough in the diplomatic hierarchy to command a decent income, and we had rental properties that provided other money. I never had to do without pretty dresses, nice shoes, cosmetics, books, anything.” She lifted her foot, again showing a little bit of leg. “I was even able to shave my legs whenever I wanted to.” She laughed wryly. “Of course, as a young girl I never wanted to because it burned my skin. I tried to convince my mother that only evil women shaved.”
“Did it work?”
“Of course not. She said if I didn’t I would look like a bear. Did I look like a bear?”
Jack put his arm around her waist and pulled her more tightly to him. “Yeah, and the type of bear I wanted to hibernate with.”
She jabbed him in the stomach. “Be nice. Besides, it isn’t even winter.”
“I just hope we’re not here in the winter,” he said sincerely. Like most of the men in the garrison, he was astonished at the length of time they had been in Potsdam and the fact that no end was in sight to their precarious existence. As he had thought and said so many times before, these days in the sun were a blessing to be enjoyed while they could, since they surely could not last.
“Me neither,” she said. “I want to get back to someplace that’s real. Not just for me, but for Pauli. He deserves a better life than this. He needs a home, playmates, and a school. I may have been spoiled with what we had amid the privations of the Depression, but it wasn’t an evil spoiling. Surely there can’t be anything wrong with having loving parents.
“We weren’t plutocrats,” she added, “just normal people trying to live their lives. Now look at us. We’ve been reduced to little more than beggars living in caves and wearing rags.”
She rested her head on his shoulder. Sometimes she was overwhelmed by the enormity of the disasters that had befallen her, and who could blame her. She was still only twenty, an age when many young women of her social and economic class were still single and in school. Instead she found herself in a refugee camp in a besieged city, wearing cast-off clothing made from curtains, eating a foreign army’s rations, washing infrequently, and being unabashedly grateful when a friend gave her something so she could perform an act of personal hygiene.
Worse was the feeling of helplessness. What would the future bring? For her and the others with her, was there a future at all? At any time a Russian shell could crash down and end any discussions of the future. It was something they had to live with and deal with. Thus, they were relatively unconcerned about sitting outside. If
