The Winds of War (The Henry Family, #1)

by Herman Wouk

36

The Garden Hose

(from WORLD EMPIRE LOST)

The Falling Crown

For all of Hitler’s military mistakes, and they were many and serious, my professional judgment remains that the German armed forces would have won the war, and world empire, but for one historical accident. His real opponent, produced by fate at this point in time, was an even craftier and more ruthless political genius, with more sober military judgment and greater material means for industrialized warfare: Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Roosevelt’s Feat

Roosevelt’s Difficulty

A Cunning Trick

As this writer has often pointed out, had England made such a peace the British Empire would exist today. The Soviet Union would have been crushed in a one-front war, and instead of a rampant Bolshevism we would see in Russia at worst some pacific, disarmed form of social democracy. But none of this fitted in with Roosevelt’s ideas. He had no intention of allowing Germany to gain ascendancy over the Euro-Asian heartland in a world-dominating partnership with the sea lords of Britannia.

The Real Meaning of Lend-Lease

“My friends, this war is for the mastery of the world. Our aim should be to achieve that mastery ourselves, but with a minimum of blood. Let us encourage others to do our fighting for us. Let us give them all the stuff they need to keep fighting. What do we care? In developing the industries to produce this Lend-Lease stuff, we will be preparing ourselves, industrially and militarily, for world leadership. They will use up all our early models, our discardable stuff, killing Germans for us. Maybe they will do the whole job for us, but that is doubtful. We will have to step in at the end, but mopping up will be easy. We will have gained a world victory with the expenditure of a lot of hardware, which we can turn out faster, and in greater quantities, than all the world put together, without even feeling the pinch. The others will shed the blood, and we will take the rule.” That was what Lend-Lease meant and that was how it worked.

On December 8, 1940, Churchill wrote the American President a very long letter, which deserves a bolder place in history than it now holds. Churchill once said that he had not become Prime Minister to preside over the dissolution of the Empire, but with this letter he dissolved it. Churchill in this document frankly stated that England had come to the end of her rope, in the matter of ships, planes, materials, and dollars; and he asked the President to “find ways and means” to help England in the common cause.

Bargain War-Making

The President asked, and the Congress granted him, power to send arms and war goods wherever he pleased, in whatever quantities he pleased.

37

He asked her about Aaron Jastrow’s situation. Natalie said the impact of the note from the Secretary of State’s office had somehow been frittered away. The fact that Jastrow’s lapsed passport showed a questionable naturalization had fogged his case. Van Winaker, the young consul in Florence, had dawdled for almost a month, promising action and never getting around to it; then he had fallen ill and gone for a cure in France, and several more weeks had slipped by. Now Van Winaker was corresponding with the Department on how to deal with the matter. She had his firm promise that, one way or another, he would work it out. The worst of it was, she declared, that Aaron himself really was in no hurry to leave his villa, now that it seemed just a matter of unravelling a little more red tape. He half welcomed every new delay, though he went through the motions of being vexed. This was what was defeating her. He would not fight, would not put any pressure on the consul to settle the thing. He was writing serenely away at his Constantine book, keeping to all his little routines and rituals, drinking coffee in the lemon house, taking his walks at sunset, rising before dawn to sit blanketed on the terrace and watch the sun come up. He believed that the Battle of Britain had decided the war, that Hitler had made his bid and failed, and that a negotiated peace would soon emerge.

“Bunky, you’d better get rid of that Quaker conscience, or you really will crack up. Remember that it isn’t us who’s doing it. It’s the Germans.” “Not entirely. I never thought much about our immigration laws until this thing started. They’re pernicious and idiotic.” Bunky Thurston drank again and coughed, empurpling his face. “Forty thousand people. Forty thousand! Suppose we admitted them all? What difference would forty thousand people make, for God’s sake, in the wastes of Montana or North Dakota? They’d be a blessing!” “They wouldn’t go there. They’d huddle in the big cities, where there’s still an unemployment problem.” Thurston struck the table with a fist. “Now don’t you give me that stale drivel, Leslie. It’s enough that I have to parrot it all day myself. They’d go anywhere. You know that. They’d sign papers to live out their lives in Death Valley. Our law’s inhuman. Wasn’t America started as a sanctuary from European oppression?”

“Tried to escape,” said Thurston. “The Germans can take Portugal overnight.” “And I’m talking about the arguments that arise in Congress when you try to alter the law,” Slote said, “especially in favor of Jews. Nobody wants any more competition from them, they’re too energetic and smart. That’s the fact of it, Natalie, like it or not.” “We could give refuge to all the Jews in Europe, all five million of them. We’d only be a lot better off,” Thurston said. “Remember your Ruskin? ‘Wealth is life,’ he said. And if that’s a bit too simple, it’s certainly true that wealth is brains.”

“What’s the matter?” “Bathurst finally called. Briny’s sub has been re-routed to Gibraltar. It won’t come to Lisbon at all. No explanation, that’s just how it is.”

Natalie might thrash about here in Lisbon for a while, he calculated; her willpower was formidable; but Gibraltar was probably impossible to get to. She would have to go back to Italy. He would accompany her to Siena, pry Aaron Jastrow loose, and send them both home. If necessary he would wire Washington for a travel time extension. If he could not win Natalie back during all this, he sadly overestimated himself and the tie between them. He had been her first lover, after all. Slote believed that no woman ever really forgot the first man who had had her, ever got him quite out of her system. He finished his breakfast at leisure, then telephoned Thurston. “Morning, Bunky. What did you find out about Natalie’s going to Gibraltar?” “Forget it, Les. That submarine’s here.”

“The original schedule called for three days.” Thurston’s voice turned puckish. “Tough luck, Les. Fantastic girl. I’d sweat out the three days and then see.” In self-defense Slote said calmly, “Yes, she’s all right, but she used to be a lot prettier.”

Half screened by potted palms, she sat on a green plush sofa with Byron. Before them on a coffee table, beside an open dispatch case, lay a pile of documents. The girl’s cheeks flamed, her eyes were gleaming, her whole face brilliantly animated. Byron Henry jumped up to shake hands. He appeared just the same, even to the tweed jacket in which Slote had seen him for the first time slouched against a wall in Siena.

“What now?” Natalie said. “Will you marry me?” Byron said, very solemnly. Natalie said, “I sure will, by God.”

“Well, Bunky’s bowled over by what you’ve done, Byron, just impressed as hell. He’s at your service and wants to help. But he doesn’t know what he can do about that twelve-day requirement for posting banns. Then there’s the Foreign Office’s authentication of the consuls’ signatures. He says that usually takes a week. So—” Slote shrugged, and dropped the folder on the table. “Right, D’Esaguy mentioned both those points,” Byron said. “He thought they could be gotten around. I stopped off at the navy ministry on the way here this morning and gave his uncle a letter. His uncle’s a commodore, or something. He was awfully nice to me, but he only speaks Portuguese. I think he’s working on those snags. I’m supposed to go back to the ministry at one o’clock. Could Mr. Thurston meet us there? That might be a real help.”

At an ancient desk, fussing with papers, sat a dark frog-faced man with gold-rimmed glasses, several gold teeth, and three thick gold rings. He smiled at them and spoke to Thurston in Portuguese. Thurston translated his questions; the man scratched with a blotchy pen on many of Byron’s documents and kept stamping them. Natalie, Byron, and the two witnesses—Aster and Slote—signed and signed. After a while the man stood, and with a lewd gold-flecked smile held out his hand to Natalie and then to Byron, saying brokenly, “Good luck for you.” “What’s this now?” Natalie said. “Why, you’re married,” Thurston said. “Congratulations.” “We are? Already? When did we get married? I missed it.” “At one point there, where you both signed the green book. That was it.” “I haven’t the faintest recollection.” Byron said, “Nor have I. However, I’ll take your word for it. Let’s have that ring, Lady.” Aster put it in his hand. He slipped the yellow band on Natalie’s finger, swept her into his arms, and kissed her.

“I just thought of something,” she said in the elevator. “How did you register?” “Mr. and Mrs., naturally. Big thrill.” “I’m still Natalie Jastrow on that passport.” “So you are.” The elevator stopped. He took her arm. “I wouldn’t worry about it.” “But maybe you should go back and explain.” “Let them ask a question first.”

The lavish pulses and streams of love died into the warm deep sleep of exhausted lovers: Mr. and Mrs. Byron Henry, Americans, slumbering in wedlock in the Palace Hotel outside Lisbon, on a January night of 1941, one of the more than two thousand nights of the Second World War, when so much of mankind slept so badly.

38

“Look, Natalie. Why not send Aaron a wire that we’re married, and go straight home?” “I can’t do that.” “I don’t want you going back to Italy.” Natalie raised her eyebrows at his flat tone. “But I have to.” “No, you don’t. Aaron’s too cute,” Byron said. “Here, let’s finish this wine. As long as you or I or somebody will do the correspondence and dig in the library and keep after the kitchen, the gardeners, and the plumbers, he won’t leave that house. It’s that simple. He loves it, and he doesn’t scare easily. He’s a tough little bird, Uncle Aaron, under the helplessness and the head colds. What d’you suppose he’d do if you sent him that wire?” Natalie hesitated, “Try to get me to change my mind. If that failed, make a real effort to leave.” “Then it’s the best favor you can do him.” “No. He’d make a mess of it. He’s not good with officials, and the stupider they are the worse he gets. He could really trap himself. Leslie Slote and I together can get him on his way in short order, and this time we’ll do it.” “Slote? Slote’s en route to Moscow.” “He’s offered to stop off in Rome and Siena first. He’s very devoted to Aaron.” “I know who he’s devoted to.”

“Go back there for two months. No more. That should be plenty. If Aaron’s not out by April first or before, it’ll be his own doing, and you come home. Book your own transportation, right now.”

The desk clerk emerged from the door, busily shuffling papers. “Sorry, passports not ready yet.” “I need mine!” Natalie’s tone was strident. The clerk barely lifted his eyes at her. “Maybe this afternoon, madame,” he said, turning his back.

With the key, the desk clerk, showing large yellow false teeth in an empty grin, handed him two maroon booklets. Natalie snatched hers and riffled through it as they walked to the elevator. “Okay?” he said. “Seems to be. But I’ll bet anything the Gestapo’s photographed it, and yours too.” “Well, it’s probably routine in this hotel. I don’t think the Portuguese are denying the Germans much nowadays. But what do you care?”

“Oh, I guess nobody can experience such joy without paying. That’s all. If you must know, I’ve been in a black hole all afternoon. It started when we didn’t get our passports back, and those Germans were standing there in the lobby. I got this horrible sinking feeling. All the time we were sightseeing, I was having panicky fantasies. The hotel would keep stalling about my passport, and you’d sail away in the submarine, and here I’d be, just one more Jew stuck in Lisbon without papers.”

“I loathe Lisbon, Briny. I always have. I swear to God, whatever else happens, I’ll regret to my dying day that we married and spent our wedding night here. It’s a sad, painful city. You see it with different eyes, I know. You keep saying it looks like San Francisco. But San Francisco isn’t full of Jews fleeing the Germans. The Inquisition didn’t baptize Jews by force in San Francisco, and burn the ones who objected, and take away all the children to raise them as Christians. Do you know that little tidbit of history? It happened here.” Byron’s face was serious, his eyes narrowed. “Maybe I read it once.” “Maybe? If you had, how could you forget? Anybody’s blood should run cold at such cruelty. But somehow, what’s happened to Jews in Europe over the centuries is just a matter of course. What was Bunky’s pretty phrase? Fish in a net.”

“Mainly that Hitler’s always been in the German bloodstream,” Byron said, “and sooner or later had to break out. That’s what Leslie told me in Berlin. He gave me the list to back up his view. I think he pretty well proved it. I used to think the Nazis had swarmed up out of the sewers and were something novel. But all their ideas, all their slogans, and practically everything they’re doing is in the old books. That thing’s been brewing in Germany for a hundred years.”

“The whole thesis is banal and phony,” Natalie said, “this idea that the Nazis are a culmination of German thought and culture. Hitler got his racism from Gobineau, a Frenchman, his Teutonic superiority from Chamberlain, an Englishman, and his Jew-baiting from Lueger, a Viennese political thug. The only German thinker you can really link straight to Hitler is Richard Wagner. He was another mad Jew-hating socialist, and Wagner’s writings are all over Mein Kampf. But Nietzsche broke with Wagner over that malignant foolishness. Nobody takes Wagner seriously as a thinker, anyway. His music disgusts me too, though that’s neither here nor there. I know you’ve read more in this field than I have, Slote, and I can’t imagine why you gave Byron such a dreary loaded list. Probably just to scare him off with big names. But as you ought to know, he doesn’t scare.”

“We created Hitler, more than anybody. We Americans. Mainly by not joining the League, and then by passing the insane Smoot-Hawley tariff in 1930, during a deep depression, knocking over Europe’s economy like a row of dominoes. After Smoot-Hawley the German banks closed right and left. The Germans were starving and rioting. Hitler promised them jobs, law and order, and revenge for the last war. And he promised to crush the Communists. The Germans swallowed his revolution to fend off a Communist one. He’s kept his promises, and he’s held the Germans in line with terror, and that’s the long and short of it. Why, there isn’t a German in a thousand who’s read those books, Briny. It’s all a thick cloud of university gas. Hitler’s a product of American isolation and British and French cowardice, not of the ideas of Hegel and Nietzsche.”

Byron went to the red marble fireplace and touched a match to papers under a pile of kindling and logs. “The S-45 leaves this morning.” “This very morning, eh? Too bad. Where to?” “I don’t know. The fall of Tobruk has changed the mission—which to tell you the truth, I never exactly knew in the first place. Something about surveying submarine facilities in the Mediterranean.”

“Briny, one thing you should know. Back in November, Aaron was so sick he thought he might die. I had to take him to a specialist in Rome. It was a kidney stone. He lay in the Excelsior for two weeks, really in torture. Finally it cleared up, but one night, when he was very low, Aaron told me that he’d left everything he has to me. And he told me what it added up to. I was amazed.” She smiled at him, sipping her wine. Byron looked at her with slitted eyes. “I guess he’s sort of a miser, like most bachelors. That’s one reason he moved to Italy. He can live handsomely there on very little. Aaron’s actually kept nearly all the money he made on A Jew’s Jesus, and it brings in more every year. The book on Paul earned quite a bit too. And before that he’d saved a lot of his professor’s salary. Living in Italy, he hasn’t even paid taxes. Aside from the value of his house, Aaron’s worth more than a hundred thousand dollars. He lives just on his interest. The money is invested back in New York. I had no idea of any of this. Not the slightest. That he would leave anything to me never crossed my mind. Nevertheless, that’s how things stand.” Natalie took Byron’s chin in her hand and pushed it this way and that.

“Lady’s going to come back for me at six.” “Six? Why, that’s hours and hours. Big big chunk of our marriage left to enjoy. Of course you have to pack.” “Ten minutes.” “Can I go with you to the boat?” “I don’t see why not.”

The submarine was dwarfed by a very rusty tramp steamer berthed directly ahead, with an enormous Stars and Stripes painted on its side, an American flag flying, and the name Yankee Belle stencilled in great drippy white letters on bow and stern. Its grotesquely cut-up shape and crude rivetted plating looked foreign, and thirty or forty years old. It rode so high in the water that much of its propeller and mossy red bottom showed. Jews lined the quay in the drizzle, waiting quietly to go aboard, most of them with cardboard suitcases, cloth bundles, and frayed clothes. The children—there were quite a number—stood silent, clinging to their parents. At a table by the gangway, two uniformed Portuguese officials, under umbrellas held by assistants, were inspecting and stamping papers. Policemen in rubber capes paced up and down the queue. The rail of the ship was black with passengers staring at the quay and the Lisbon hills, as freed prisoners look back at the jail to savor their liberty.

“Well, I guess this is it,” he said. “So long.” Natalie was managing not to cry; she even smiled. “Getting married was the right idea, my love. I mean that. It was an inspiration, and I adore you for it. I feel very married. I love you and I’m happy.” “I love you.”

Byron walked along the forecastle and stood opposite his bride, almost close enough to reach out and clasp hands. She blew him a kiss. His face under the peaked khaki cap was businesslike and calm. A foghorn blasted. The submarine fell away from the dock and black water opened between them. “You come home, now,” he shouted. “I will. Oh, I swear I will.” “I’ll be waiting. Two months!” He went to his duty station. With a swish of water from the propellers, the low black submarine dimmed away into the drizzle.

“Hello, old Slote,” she said, when she found a telephone and managed to make the connection. “This is Mrs. Byron Henry. Are you interested in buying me a breakfast? I seem to be free. Then let’s push on to Italy, dear, and get Aaron out. I have to go home.”

39

Washington in January 1941, after London and Berlin, struck him as a depressing panorama of arguments, parties, boozing, confusion, lethargy, and luxury, ominously like Paris before the fall. It took him a long time to get used to brilliantly lit streets, rivers of cars, rich overabundant food, and ignorant indifference to the war.

He cared about the war; and he cared about the future of the United States, which looked dark to him.

The Navy was as preoccupied as ever by Japan. Every decision of the President to strengthen the Atlantic Fleet caused angry buzzes and knowing headshakes in the Department, and at the Army and Navy Club.

It suited Hitler’s book at the moment not to declare war on the United States—that was all. It apparently suited the American people in turn to fake neutrality while commencing a sluggish, grudging effort on the British side, arguing every inch of the way. These two simple facts were being lost in the storm of words.

Lord Burne-Wilke and his delegation were in Washington on vague missions of observing or purchase. Supposedly the talks were low-level explorations binding on nobody, and supposedly the President, the Army Chief of Staff, and the Chief of Naval Operations took no cognizance of them. In fact, by the first of March these conferences were finishing up a written war operations plan on a world scale. The assumption was that Japan would sooner or later attack, and the key decision of the agreement lay in two words: “Germany first.”