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by
Herman Wouk
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May 28, 2012 - February 19, 2021
I love you. Briny
“The ‘phony war’ has ended. A fierce air, sea, and land battle is raging for Norway. NBC brings special bulletins from the war capitals that tell the story. “London. In a lightning attack, without warning or provocation, Nazi Germany has invaded neutral Norway by sea and air, and German land forces have rolled into Denmark. Fierce resistance is reported by the Norwegian government at Oslo, Narvik, Trondheim, and other key points along the coast, but German reinforcements are continuing to pour in. The Royal Navy is moving rapidly to cut off the invasion. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the
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“Paris. In an official communiqué, the French government announced that the Allies would rally to the cause of democratic Norway, and would meet the German onslaught quote with cold steel unquote. Pessimistic commentators pointed out that the fall of Norway and Denmark would put more than a thousand additional miles of European coastline in German hands and that this would mean the collapse of the British blockade.
“Berlin. The propaganda ministry has issued the following bulletin. Forestalling a British plan to seize Scandinavia and deny Germany access to Swedish iron ore and other raw materials, the German armed forces have peaceably taken Denmark under their protection and have arrived in Norway by sea and air, where the populace has enthusiastically welcomed them. Oslo is already in German hands, and the life of the capital is returning to normal. Scattered resistance by small British-bribed units has been crushed. The Führer has sent the following message of congratulation to…”
Natalie had stopped taking her father seriously at about the age of twelve; he was just a businessman, a sweater manufacturer, a temple president, and she was then already a brash intellectual snob. Since then she had become more and more aware of how her father’s sense of inferiority to Aaron Jastrow, and to his own daughter, permeated his life. Yet she was prostrated when he died. She could not eat. Even with drugs she could not sleep. Her mother, a conventional woman usually preoccupied with Hadassah meetings and charity fund-raising, for many years completely baffled by her daughter,
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She was shocked back into her senses by two events, one on top of the other: Byron’s return from Europe, and the German attack on France.
24
Case Yellow
(from WORLD EMPIRE LOST)
The Great Assault
In the spring of 1940, seven days sufficed for our German armed forces to upset the world order. On May 10, the English and French were still the victors of Versailles, still masters of the seas and continents. By May 17 France was a beaten, almost helpless nation, and England was hanging on for her life.
The Maginot Line
Generalissimo Maurice Gamelin, “the world’s foremost professional soldier,” as the Western journalists called him, was supposed to have a masterly plan to beat us.
The new concept was to build in peacetime a great wall of linked fortresses with the strongest modern firepower. No matter how many millions of men a future enemy might hurl against this wall, they would all drown in their own blood. On this theory, France had constructed a chain of fortresses united by underground tunnels, the Maginot Line.
Beginning at the Swiss Alps, it ran along the French-German border for more than a hundred miles to a place called Longuyon. There it stopped. Between Longuyon and the English Channel, there still remained a hole of open level country, the boundary between France and Belgium, at least as long as the Line itself.
In short, the wisest military brains in France had decided not to finish the Maginot Line. Instead, there was the Gamelin Plan. If war came, the French and British armies would be poised along the unfortified Belgian border. If the Germans did try to come through there again, the Allies under Gamelin would leap forward and join the tough Belgian army of two hundred thousand men on a strong river line.
Outcome of the Plan
We were pouring around the north end of the Maginot Line through the supposedly “impassable” Ardennes country, and flooding westward across France. Thus we cut off the French and British armies which, following the Gamelin Plan, had duly leaped forward into Belgium. Our Eighteenth Army under Küchler was also coming at them from Holland to the north. They were trapped.
Shadows on the Victory
The cancer already afflicting Germany at that hour, unfelt by all but a handful in the innermost circle of command, was amateur military leadership. We had watched the symptoms crop up in the minor Norway operation. Our hope was that our inexperienced warlord, having been blooded in that victory, would steady down for the great assault in the west.
Hitler had a bad fit of nerves, fearing a French counterattack from the south—no more likely at that moment than a Hottentot counterattack—and halted Rundstedt’s army group for two precious days. Fortunately Guderian wangled permission for a “reconnaissance in force” westward. Thereupon he simply ignored the Führer and blitzed ahead to the coast.
Then followed an incredible tactical blunder. With the British expeditionary force helplessly retreating toward the sea, but far behind in the race and about to be cut off by Guderian’s massed tanks, the Führer halted Guderian on the River Aa, nine miles from Dunkirk, and forbade the tank divisions to advance for three days!
During these three days the British rescued their armies from the Dunkirk beaches. That is the long and short of the “miracle of Dunkirk.” Had Hitler not halted Guderian, the panzers would have beaten the foe to Dunkirk and cut him off. The British would have lost over three hundred thousand men and officers, the bulk of their trained land force, in the Flanders cauldron.
His Worst Mistake
There we were at the sea, millions strong, armed to the teeth, flushed with victory, facing a beaten, disarmed, impotent enemy across a ditch forty miles wide; but our infallible Leader, who had all staff activities so firmly in his grip that nobody could make a move without his nod, had somehow overlooked the slight detail of how one got to England.
Yes, we had no plan for invading England, but had the British had a plan for crossing the Channel from Dunkirk in a scraped-together flotilla of cockleshells? Under the spur of necessity, despite the total disorganization of defeat, despite fierce Luftwaffe bombardment, they had moved three hundred thousand men across the water. Why then could not we, the strongest armed force on earth in the full tide of victory, do a “Dunkirk in reverse,” and throw a force of armored divisions across the Channel to an undefended, helpless shore? There was nothing on the ground in England to oppose our march
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But had Hitler seized the first moment in June, using every available vessel afloat in western and northern Europe—there were thousands—to hurl an invasion body across the Channel, the fleet would have been caught by surprise, as it had been in the Norway operation. We would have been across before it could mass to counterattack. The aerial Battle of Britain would have been fought out in the skies over the Channel, under conditions vastly more favorable to the Luftwaffe.
The Aborted Invasion
Germany certainly had the industrial plant and the military strength to mount the invasion, but not the leadership. When an ounce more of boldness in battle might have won a world, Hitler faltered; and the professional generals were all in impotent subjection to this amateur.
25
BIG GERMAN BREAKTHROUGH IN BELGIUM! Still Not Our Fight, Declares Lacouture
Janice gave Byron a slow female blink. He was even handsomer than Warren, she thought. His eyes had an eager aroused sparkle. She kissed him.
“… You ask, what is our policy? I will say, it is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory—victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror… I take up my task with buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men…”
“You have just heard the newly appointed Prime Minister of Great Britain, Winston Churchill.”
Victor Henry said, “Fred, are you working on a uranium bomb?”
“You can just tell me it’s none of my goddamn business, but”—Pug sat on the bed—“all that stuff there zeroes in on the uranium business. And some of the things I couldn’t get, like the graphite figures, why, the Germans told me flatly that they were classified because of the secret bomb aspects. The Germans are fond of talking very loosely about this terrible ultra-bomb they’re developing. That made me think there was nothing much to it. But that list of requests you sent gave me second thoughts.”
“Where do you come into it?” Kirby rubbed his pipe against his chin. “Okay, how do you separate out isotopes of a very rare metal in industrial quantities? One notion is to shoot it in the form of an ionized gas through a magnetic field. The lighter ions get deflected a tiny bit more, so you stream ’em out and catch them. The whole game depends on the magnetic field being kept stable, because any wavering jumbles up the ion stream. Precise control of voltages is my business.”
Kirby uttered a short baritone laugh. “The real question here is the Germans. How far along are they? This cuteness of theirs about pure graphite disturbs me. Graphite comes into the picture at a late stage. If Hitler gets uranium bombs first, Pug, and if they happen to work, that could prove disagreeable.”
What Congress is starting to think about is the prospect of us on our own, against Hitler and the Japanese.
“Warren’s thirty-day leave has been cancelled. The wedding’s been moved up. Warren and Janice are getting married tomorrow. They’ll have a one-day honeymoon, and then he goes straight out to the Pacific Fleet. So. Number one: You’ve got to get to Pensacola by tomorrow at ten.”
She turned to his father. “How long is the school?” “It’s three months.” “What will become of him afterward?” “My guess is he’ll go straight out to the fleet, like Warren. The new subs are just starting to come on the line.”
Byron took one of his father’s cigarettes, lit it, inhaled deeply, and said as he exhaled a gray cloud, “Natalie and I are getting married.”
26
Cramming in a premature night with Janice had been an impulse of this new bursting love of life he felt. He was rushing to fly a fighter plane from the U.S.S. Enterprise, because war threatened. It was a star-spangled destiny, a scary ride to the moon. For all his mental motions of regret at leaving Janice, and remorse at having enjoyed her a little too soon and a little too much, Warren’s spirit was soaring.
Warren was older, heavier in the face, more confident, more than ever on top of the world and ahead of his brother: so Byron felt. Those new gold wings on his white dress uniform seemed to Byron to spread a foot. About flying Warren was relaxed, humorous, and hard. He had mastered the machines and the lingo, and the jokes about his mishaps didn’t obscure the leap upward. He still spoke the words “naval aviator” with pride and awe. To Byron, his own close calls under fire had been stumblebum episodes, in no way comparable to Warren’s disciplined rise to fighter pilot.
Warren had never before envied his younger brother anything. He envied the red stitch-marked scar on his temple—his own scar was a mishap, not a war wound—and he even somewhat envied him the Jewess, sight unseen.
“She is. I know the religious problem exists—” Warren grinned and ducked his head to one side. “Ah, Byron, nowadays—does it really? If you wanted the ministry—or politics, say—you’d have to give it more thought. Christ, with the war on and the whole world coming apart, I say grab her. I look forward to meeting that girl. Isn’t she a Ph.D. or something?” “She was going for an M.A. at the Sorbonne.”
Byron wistfully smiled, and it struck Warren once more how good-looking his brother had become. “Long time since you and I went to church together.” “Yes. Janice likes to go. I guess if these walls aren’t falling in on me now, there’s still hope for me. You know, Briny, all this may work out pretty well. If you do get into subs, you can put in for duty at Pearl. Maybe the four of us will end up there together for a couple of years. Wouldn’t that be fine?”
He had “derivative citizenship” from his father’s naturalization around 1900; but because of his long residence out of the country, difficulties had arisen. There seemed to be conflicting records of his age at the time of his father’s naturalization. The man in Rome, a decent enough person to talk to but an obsessive bureaucrat, had pressed searching questions and demanded more and more documents, and Aaron had left Rome in deep confusion.
The tone was polite enough. The gist was that as a stateless person in wartime I faced serious complications, but he thought he had found a way out. Congress has recently passed a law admitting certain special classes of refugees. If I were to apply under that law, I probably would have no further trouble, being a prominent Jew. That was his recommendation.
