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by
Herman Wouk
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May 28, 2012 - February 19, 2021
“Her uncle is Dr. Aaron Jastrow, Mr. President, the author of A Jew’s Jesus. He’s had some trouble about his passport. He can’t come home. He’s old and not well, and she won’t abandon him.” Byron spoke as flatly as the President, getting out each word very distinctly. Mrs. Roosevelt put in with a smile, “Why, Franklin, we both read A Jew’s Jesus. Don’t you remember? You liked it very much indeed.” “Dr. Jastrow taught at Yale for years, Mrs. Roosevelt,” Byron said. “He’s lived here almost all his life. It’s just some crazy red tape. Meantime there they are.” “A Jew’s Jesus is a good book,” said
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“Well!” Franklin Roosevelt looked around, his face all at once charged with teasing relish. “May I relay a bit of news?” He took a dramatic pause. “It seems they’ve got the Bismarck!”
“Does it give a position, Mr. President?” said Victor Henry. The President read off a latitude and longitude. “Okay. That’s a thousand miles from Brest,” said Pug. “Well outside the Luftwaffe air umbrella. They’ve got her.”
The President lifted his glass. “The British Navy,” he said. “The British Navy,” the company said in chorus, and all drank.
Palmer, dear— You have a kindly heart that understands without explanations. I can’t do it. I realize we can’t see each other for a long while, but I hope we will be friends forever. My love and everlasting thanks for offering me more than I deserve and can accept. I’ll never forget. Forgive me. Rhoda
“Well, now. The business of Dr. Aaron Jastrow’s passport,” Whitman said genially. “It’s no problem whatever, as it turns out. The authorization was sent out a while ago. It may have been delayed en route, the way things often are nowadays. At any rate it’s all set. We double-checked by cable with Rome. Dr. Jastrow can have his passport any time he’ll come down from Siena to pick it up, and has been so informed. It’s all locked up.” “Good. That was fast work.” “As I say, there was no work to do. It had already been taken care of.” “Well, my son will be mighty glad to hear about this.” “Oh yes.
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43
“… Therefore I have tonight issued a proclamation that an UNLIMITED national emergency exists, and requires the strengthening of our defenses to the extreme limit of our national power and authority…”
“You have been listening to an address by the President of the United States, speaking from the East Room of the White House in Washington.”
Pug’s yeoman brought in two newspapers smelling of fresh ink. The headlines were huge: NO CONVOYS—FDR and PRESIDENT TO PRESS: SPEECH DIDN’T MEAN CONVOYS “Unlimited Emergency” Merely a Warning; No Policy Changes Skimming the stories, Pug saw that Franklin Roosevelt had blandly taken back his whole radio speech, claiming the reporters had misunderstood it. There would be no stepped-up United States action in the Atlantic, north or south. He had never suggested that. Patrolling, not convoying, would go on as before. No Army troops or marines would be sent to Iceland or anywhere else. All he had
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Tudsbury took a large drink of neat whiskey and heavily shook his head. “What’s happened to Franklin Roosevelt? The Atlantic convoy route is the jugular vein of civilization. The Huns are sawing at it with a razor. He knows the tonnage figures of the past three months. He knows that with Crete and the Balkans mopped up, the Luftwaffe will come back at us, double its size of last year and howling with victory. What the devil?”
Pamela took his glass and Pug’s to the small wheeled bar. “Put in more ice. I’ve caught that decadent American habit. Pug, the Empire’s finished. We’re nothing but an outpost of yours against the Germans. But we’re a fighting outpost of forty millions, with a strong navy and a plucky air force. Why, man, we’re your Hawaii in the Atlantic, many times as big and powerful and crucial. Oh, I could make one hell of a broadcast about how preposterous your policy is!” “Thanks, Pam,” Pug said. “I agree with you, Tudsbury. So does the Secretary of the Army. So does Harry Hopkins. They’ve both made
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“The Navy’s my favorite,” he said to Victor Henry, as blue Annapolis ranks swung by with set young faces under the tall hats. “They march better than those West Point cadets. Don’t ever tell any Army men I said so! Say, Pug, incidentally, whom can I send over to London to head up our convoy command?” Pug sat dumbstruck. Ever since the press conference, the President had been sticking firmly to his no-convoy stance. “Well? Don’t you know of anybody? We’ll call him a ‘special naval observer,’ of course, or something, until we get things started.”
“Sir, are we going to convoy?” “You know perfectly well we will. We’ve got to.” “When, Mr. President?” The President smiled wearily at Pug’s bitter emphasis. He fumbled in his pocket. “I had an interesting chat with General Marshall this morning. This was the upshot.” He showed Victor Henry a chit of paper scrawled with his own handwriting: Combat Readiness, June 1, 1941 Army Ground Forces—13% (Major shortages all types arms; rapid expansion; incomplete training; Selective Service Act expiring) Army Air corps—0% (All units involved in training and expansion)
Public Attitude Toward War, 28 May 1941 For getting in if no other way to “win”—75% Think we’ll eventually get in—80% Against our getting in now—82%
“Those are the figures, Pug, for the day after my speech.” “Convoying would be a Navy job, sir. We’re all ready.” “If we get into war,” said the President through a broad smile and a wave at schoolchildren cheering him “—and convoying might just do it—Hitler will at once walk into French West Africa. He’ll have the Luftwaffe at Dakar, where they can jump over to Brazil. He’ll put new submarine pens there, too. The Azores will be in his palm. The people who are screaming for convoy now just ignore these things. Also the brute fact that eighty-two percent, eighty-two percent of our people don’t
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“So far this year, Pug, we’ve produced twenty percent more automobiles than we made last year. And Congress wouldn’t dream of giving me the power to stop it. Well? What about London? You didn’t suggest anybody.” Victor Henry diffidently named three well-known rear admirals. “I know them,” the President nodded. “The fact is, I was thinking of you.” “It wouldn’t work, Mr. President. Our man’s opposite number in the Royal Navy will have flag rank.” “Oh, that could be fixed up. We could make you an admiral temporarily.” From the surprise, and perhaps a little from the beating sun overhead, Pug
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They talked about the great event over the champagne, downing a whole bottle much too fast. Janice and her baby were in fine shape. The little elephant weighed nine and a half whole pounds!
Victor Henry stared at his wife for such a long time that she began to feel odd. He heaved a deep sigh and made a curious upward gesture with both palms. “Well, I’ll tell you, Grandma. I couldn’t agree with you more. The time has come. Let’s go to Foxhall Road by all means. And there we’ll wither, side by side. Well said.”
Pug Henry upended the champagne bottle over his glass, but only a drop or two ran out, as he sang softly: But yes, we have no bananas, We have no bananas today.
Three weeks later the Germans invaded the Soviet Union.
PART THREE
The Winds Rise
44
Barbarossa
(from WORLD EMPIRE LOST)
The Turn East
The Situation on the Map
effort on the European continent, and that was the oil under Rumania. We could get no oil by sea. All of Hitler’s Balkan maneuvers and campaigns of 1940–41 therefore revolved around the Ploesti oil field. The war could not be won in the Balkans, but Germany might have lost it there.
The Grand Strategy Picture
The Center of Gravity
Was Barbarossa Sound?
The Role of Roosevelt
The Convoy Decision
45
JUNE 22, 1941.
At the first paling of dawn, six hundred miles to the west of Moscow, at exactly 3:15 A.M. by myriads of German wristwatches, German cannon began to flash and roar along a line a thousand miles long, from the icy Baltic to the warm Black Sea.
At the same moment fleets of German planes, which had taken off some time earlier, crossed the borders and started bombing Soviet airfields, smashing up aircraft on the ground by the hundreds.
The morning stars still twinkled over the roads, the rail lines, and the fragrant fields, when the armored columns and infantry divisions—multitudes upon multitudes of young healthy helmeted Teutons in gray battle rig—came rolling or walking toward the orange-streaked dark east, o...
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Stalin was surprised. Since his was the only word or attitude in Russia that mattered, the Red Army and the entire nation were surprised. The attack was an unprecedented tactical success, on a scale never approached before or since. Three and a half million armed men surprised four and a half million armed men.
Many facts of this most gigantic of land wars, which the Russians call Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voina, “The Great Patriotic War”—“Second World War” is not a phrase they favor—may never be known. The Communist historians assert that Stalin was to blame for neglecting intelligence warnings, and that is why the German surprise attack was successful. It is a very simple way to look at the amazing occurrence. So far as it goes, it is true.
Slote had gone to bed very late and he was still asleep. Natalie had sent him a joyous screed, for suddenly Aaron Jastrow had received his passport! He actually had it in hand and they were getting ready to leave on a Finnish freighter sailing early in July; and going by ship would even enable Aaron to retrieve much of his library. Knowing nothing of Byron’s action at the White House, Natalie had written to thank Slote in effervescent pages. The news astonished the Foreign Service man, for in Italy he had felt he was encountering the cotton-padded stone wall that was a State Department
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Stalin and Molotov were waiting a while before sharing their astonishment with the people they had led into this catastrophe. But at the front, several million Red Army men were already sharing it and trying to recover from it before the Germans could kill them all.
Had Natalie Henry been walking this street, she could not possibly have recognized her relative, Berel Jastrow. Shorn of a beard, the broad flat Slavic face with its knobby peasant nose gave him a nondescript East European look, as did the shoddy clothing. He might have been a Pole, a Hungarian, or a Russian, and he knew the three languages well enough to pass as any of these. Though over fifty, Berel always walked fast, and this morning he walked faster. At the bakery, on a German shortwave radio he kept behind flour sacks, he had heard Dr. Goebbels from Berlin announce the attack, and in the
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In the turmoils of 1916 he had landed in a mixed German and Austrian unit. Early in his army service he had learned to bake and to cook, so as to avoid eating forbidden foods. He had lived for months on bread, or roasted potatoes, or boiled cabbage, while cooking savory soups and stews which he would not touch. He knew army life, he could survive in a forest, and he knew how to get along with Germans, Russians, and a dozen minor Danubian nationalities. Anti-Semitism was the normal state of things to Berel Jastrow. It frightened him no more than war and he was just as practiced in dealing with
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Berel’s wife and daughter had died in the winter of 1939 of the spotted fever that had swept bombed-out Warsaw. At that time the Germans had not gotten around to walling up the Jews; and using much of his stored money for bribes, Berel Jastrow had bought himself, his son, and his daughter-in-law out of the city, and had joined the trickle of refugees heading eastward to the Soviet Union through back roads and forests. The Russians were taking in these people and treating them better than the Germans had, though most had to go to lonely camps beyond the Urals. With this remnant of his family
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“Let’s leave today.” “Let’s wait a week,” said the father. “They’re three hundred kilometers away. Maybe the Red Army will give them a good slap in the face. I know the manager in the railroad ticket office. If we want to, we can get out in a few hours. Siberia is far off, and it’s no place for a Jew.”
Clever though he was, Berel Jastrow was making a serious mistake. The Germans were jumping off nearer Minsk than any other Soviet city, bringing another surprise, compared with which even their invasion of Russia has since paled in the judgment of men.
Behind the advancing soldiers, out of range of the fire flashes and smoke of the cannonading, certain small squads travelled, in different uniforms and under different orders. They were called Einsatzgruppen, Special Action Units, and they were something unparalleled in the experience of the human race. To place and understand these Special Action Units, one needs a brief clear picture of the invasion.
But the Special Action Units had no military purpose. Their mission concerned the Jews. From the time of Catherine the Great, Russia had compelled its millions of Jews to live in the “Pale,” a borderland to the west, made up of districts taken in war from Poland and Turkey. The revolution had ended the Pale, but most of the Jews, impoverished and used to their towns and villages, had stayed where they were.
