Chapter 5

For Chamberlain's defiant move, like the weak pawing of a cornered robbit, only spurred the Fuhrer to greater boldness. Like lightning, down came the word to our staff to prepare an operation order for an attack on Poland in the fall. Working day and night, with Case Red as a basis, we prepared the plan. On April 5 it went to the Fuhrer under a new code name; Fall Weiss-"Case White." Historic Ironies Case White, the plan for smashing Poland, shaped itself on a few major and classic geographical facts. Poland is a plain; a larger Belgium with few natural obstacles and no real boundaries. The Carpathian Mountains to the south are breached by the Jablunka pass, affording ready access from Czechoslovakia to Cracow and the Vistula. The rivers Vistula, Narew, and San present problems, but in the summer and early autumn the water levels are low and the rivers are in many places fordable by motor vehicles and horses. Poland is itself a political freak, reflecting its formless geography. It has no permanent shape, no continuity of regime or national purpose. it has several times disappeared from the map of Europe, divided up as provinces of stronger and abler powers. Today it is again little more than a Russian province. At Yalto the Allied leaders moved the entire crude geographical parallelogram called "Poland" about two hundred kilometers to the west, to the Oder-Neisse Line. This was done at the expense of Germany, of course, giving to Poland cities, territories, and populations which had been German from time immemorial, and causing the tragic uprooting and resettling of millions of people. Such is war.. to the victor, the spoils; to the defeated, the costs. The Second World War began over the question of Polish territorial integrity, but Poland has not recovered, and will never recover, its 1939 borders. It has lost that part of its territory which, through the deal between Hitler and Stalin, was absorbed into the Soviet union. England went to war with us over the question of these borders, dragging in France and eventually the United States. At Yalta, England and the United States endorsed forever Hitler's gift of Polish territory to the Soviets. Such are the ironies of history. The Polish strategic situation in 1939 was poor. The entire land could be regarded as a weak salient into Germany and German-occupied territory, flanked by East Prussia to the north and Czechoslovakia to the south, and wholly flat and open to a thrust from Germany to the west. To the rear, in the east, the Soviet union stood poised, newly linked to Germany through the nonaggression pact engineered by Ribbentrop, The Fatal Pact insufficient attention is paid to the plain fact that this treaty, hailed at the time as a masterstroke, all but lost Germany the Second World War before a shot was fired. The alliance with Bolshevism (however temporary and tactical) was certainly a repudiation of the Dictator's ideals, running counter to the German national spirit; but this might have been allowable had the tactical advantage proved real. Inpolitics, as in war, only success matters. But the contrary was the case. This pact handed Stalin the Baltic states and about half of Poland, allowing the Slav horde to march two hundred kilometers nearer Germany. Two years later we paid the price. In December 1941, the gigantic drive of our Army Group Center toward Moscow-the greatest armed march in world history-was halted forty kilometers from its goal, with advance patrols penetrating within sight of the Kremlin towers. Had the German forces jumped off from a line two hundred kilometers nearer Moscow, they would have engulfed the Russian capital, deposed Stalin, and won the campaign before the first flake of snow fell on the Smolensk road. England certainly would have made peace then, and we would have won the war. Regarded as a triumph of daring diplomacy even by our enemies, this treaty contained between its lines the two words, finis Germaniae. Seldom in history has there been such a political coup de theetre. Seldom has one so disastrously backfired. Yet we of the Staff who ventured to express doubts at the time, or merely to convey with our eyes our mutual dismay at the news, were very much in the minority. No member of the armed forces, including Hitler's own chief of staff, Keitel, and the chief of operations, Jodl, knew of the secret protocol yielding half of Poland to the Bolsheviks. It was only when Stalin angrily telephoned Ribbentrop in the third week of the campaign, bitterly complaining about the advance of our Fourteenth Army into the southeast oil area, that the Wehrmacht received its specific chop lines, and retreated before the Russians, who airily rolled in without shedding a drop of their own, or of Polish, blood. It was I who received at Supreme Headquarters the staggering telephone call from our military attache in Moscow around midnight of September 16, informing me that the Russians were marching into Poland in accordance with a secret agreement Hitler had made in August. I immediately telephoned General Jodl with the news that the Russians were on the move. His response, in a tremulous voice most uncharacteristic of Alfred Jodl, was "Against whom?" So completely was the army in the dark. In the last few days of August, as Case White preparations speeded up, Hitler tried to cash in on Ribbentrop's big political surprise with a comedy of peace negotiations. In the spring, in a calmer mood, he had stated with his usual prescience that the Western powers would not again permit a bloodless victory, that this time there would be battle. We had prepared Case White with feelings varying from misgivings to a sense of doom, because our combat readiness was much below par for a major conflict. We were so low on tanks, to cite just one key item, that even for Case White we had to deploy large numhad only about fifty subbers of Czech tanks of limited value; and the navy marines ready for action.
Worst of all, the Fuhrer was far from ordering full wartime production, even then, for he knew it would be an unpopular move. All in all we were going out on very thin ice. The staff placed no hope in the peace talks. Hitler, however, while going through his planned histrionics with Henderson, apparently got carried away by his own playacting and the constant assurances of Ribbentrop; he began to believe that England might be bluffed once more and might present us with another Munich. At Supreme Headquarters, in the first days of September, nobody could fail to notice that when the Western declarations of war came through, the Fuhrer was surprised and shaken. But there was nothing to do at that point but execute Case White. Strategy The plan called for simultaneous flank attacks from the north and the south, aimed to cut off the Corridor and proceed to Warsaw. The Poles elected to stand all along their indefensible border, thus inviting quick fragmenting, encirclement, and reduction. They should have prepared their main defenses along the lines Vistula-Narew-Bug. This would have prolonged hostilities, and encouraged the British and French to attack our weak holding force in the west. This could have been devastating. Adventurous authoritarian leadership had exposed the German people to a bad risk. However, the gods smiled on us at the time, the Poles proved as inept in their strategic dispositions as they were brave in the field, and the French sat in their camps and fortresses, scarcely firing a shot. Nowadays German commentators write of the "miracle" of the French static defense in September 1939, which made the Polish blitzkrieg possible. It is hard to see where the "miracle" lay. French military thinking was defensive and positional, because such thinking had triumphed in 1918. They had an obsession with the theoretical ten-to-one advantage of the defense in mechanized warfare. There is no doubt that in September France could have sent millions of A well-trained soldiers, with More armored divisions than the Wehrmacht had in Poland, crashing out of the Maginot fortresses, or via the northern plain through Belgium and Holland, into our paper-thin western formations, and rolled to Berlin. But the will was not there. Adolf Hitler's political and military gamble on this vital point proved brilliant. Of all his opponents, he throughout best understood and anticipated the French. Victory The Polish breakthrough phase took approximately four days. Complete tactical surprise was achieved because the hypocritical Polish politicians, though wholly aware of the danger, kept giving their people false assurances. The Polish air force of almost a thousand planes was destroyed on the ground. Thereafter the Luftwaffe freely roomed the skies. Polish ground resistance was moderate to heavy, and our commanders in the field had to admire the bold cavalry dashes against tankformations. Perhaps the legend is true that the Polish horsemen were told by their government that our tanks were papier-mache dummies! In that case, they were soon sadly disabused. The contrast between the possibilities of mechanized warfare and classic military tactics was never more strikingly demonstrated than in these ineffectual charges of the Polish horsemen against iron tanks. Nevertheless, the Wehrmacht too was operating with but a thin knife-edge of fully motorized armored divisions. Our important ground advances were made by infantry masses on foot, exploiting the breakdown of communication" the panic, and the disarray of battle lines created by the narrow panzer thrusts. And while the Luftwaffe played a strong support role, it was the horse-drawn artillery massed outside Warsaw, and not the air bombardment, that in the end knocked out the city's capacity to resist and brought the eventual surrender. This heavy reliance on horses betrayed our serious lack of combat readiness for world war. By September 21 the city was ringed by Wehrmacht forces; and the news from outside was of Polish soldiers being taken prisoner in the hundreds of thousands, of one pocket after another being liquidated, of a total collapse of the front, of a national government Pusillanimously fleeing to Rumania. Yet it was not until September 27 that the city, under a round-the-clock rain of shells and bombs, without food, water, or light, with many foflaisttsmbiun buildings in ruins, with disease spreading, finally gave up its vain hopes of deliverance from the West, and surrendered. Observations From first to last, the Fuhrer and his propagandists played down the Polish campaign as a local Police action, a "special task" of the Wehrmacht. Hitler personally cancelled many sections of Case White dealing with rationing, troop mobilization, and transport, with one aim in mind: to soften the impact on the German people. This political meddling represented a considerable setback to operations, and precious months passed before the damage was righted. I may say here, that due to similar Party and Fuhrer interference, which never ceased, the war effort was never, by professional standards, organized fully or properly. The shabby farce enacted at our radio station at Gleiwitz near the Polish border on the night of August 31-the pretense that Polish soldiers had crossed over to attack the station and been repulsed, the dressing of condemned political prisoners in Polish uniforms and the scattering of their bullet-riddled bodies near the station, as an excuse for starting the invasion-none of this trivial humbug was known to the Wehrmacht. We were irrevocably on the march toward Poland seventy-two hours earlier. I myself did not learn of the incident until the Nuremberg trials; I was too busy at the time with serious matters.* Himmler was probably responsible. Poland in 1939 was a backward and ill-informed dictatorship of reactionary colonels and politicians with fantastic territorial aims, a government extremely brutal to minorities (especially the Ukrainians and the Jews) and unjust and mendacious to its own people; a government that pounced like a hyena on Czechoslovakia at the Munich crisis and tore aprovince from that country in its hardest hour; a government that clumsily played a double game with Germany and the Soviet union for twenty years; and to the last tried to talk and act like a major military power when it was in fact as weak as a kitten. It was to support this reactionary, bluffing, bigoted dictatorship that the democracies embarked on the Second World War. That government quickly and ignominiously fell to pieces and disappeared forever. But the war went on, and its starting point was soon all but forgotten. Some day, however, sober historians must again give the proper emphasis to these absurd paradoxes that governed the provoking of the world's biggest war. The final absurdity of this inept start to a terrible global struggle was that Czechoslovakia, betrayed by England in 1938, did not fight, and in the whole war period lost less than one hundred thousand people. Poland, supported by England in 1939, fought and lost almost six million dead (though about half of these were Jews). Both countries ended up as Communist puppets under the heel of the Soviet union. Which government then was the wiser, and which people the more fortunate? When great powers fall out, small powers do well to bow to the storm wind, in whichever direction it blows strongest. That was what the Poles forgot. The veracity of this statement is questionable.-V.H. TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: The reader will have to grow used to the German habit of blaming other countries for getting themselves invaded by Germans. This note recurs throughout General von Roon's book, as through most of their military literature. Officers raised under the General Staff system apparently lost the power to think in other terms. Roon's discussion of the Polish government and the British guarantee are the telling passages in his preliminary sketch of Case White. -V.H. GERMAN ARMY ATTACKS POLAND; CITIES BOMBED, PORT BLOCKADED; DANZIG IS ACCEPTED INTO THE REICH The New York Times, raising its voice to suit the occasion in its Teight-column once-in-a-generation italic headlines, topped the sprawl of newspapers on the desk under Hugh Cleveland's stocking feet. The other papers had headlines far larger and blacker than the Times's genteel bellow. Tilted back in his shirt-sleeves in a swivel chair, a telephone cradled between his head and left shoulder, Cleveland was making quick red crayon marks on a sheaf of yellow typing paper and sipping coffee as he talked. Eight years in the broadcasting business had made him deft at such juggling. Though he looked the picture of busy contentment, his voice was angry. His morning show, called Who's in Town, featured interviews with celebrities passing through New York. The war crisis, suddenly roaring into the Columbia Broadcasting System, had snatched off Cleveland's secretary to the newsroom for emergency service, and he was protesting to the personnel office, or trying to. He still could not get through to the manager. A short girl in a flat black straw hat appeared in the open doorway.
Behind her, in the big central offices of CBS News, the hubbub over the war news was still rising. Secretaries were rattling at typewriters or scampering with papers, messenger boys ran with coffee and sandwiches, knots of men in shirt-sleeves gathered at the chattering teletypes, and everybody appeared to be either shouting, or smoking, or both. "Mr. Cleveland?" The girl's voice was sweet but shaky. Her awed round eyes made her look about sixteen. Cleveland put his hand on the mouthpiece of his telephone. "Yes?" "The personnel office sent me up to you." "You? How old are you?" "Twenty." Cleveland appeared skeptical, but he hung up the telephone. "What's your name?" 'Madeline Henry." Cleveland sighed. "Well, okay, Madeline. If you're in the pool, you must know the ropes. So take off that cartwheel and get started, okay? First get me another cup of coffee and a chicken sandwich, please. Then there's tomorrow's script"-he rattled the yellow sheets-"to be typed over." Madeline could bluff no further. She was in New York to buy clothes. The outbreak of the war had prompted her to walk into CBS to see if extra girls were needed. In the employment office a harried woman wearing yellow paper cuffs had thrust a slip at her, after a few questions about her schooling, and sent her up to Cleveland. "Talk to him. If he likes you, we may take you on. He's screaming for a girl and we've got nobody to spare." Stepping just inside the door and planting her legs apart, taking off her hat and clutching it, Madeline confessed that nobody had hired her yet; that she was visiting New York, lived in Washington, had to go back to school, detested the thought of it, feared her father too much to do anything else, and had just walked into CBS on an impulse. He listened, smiling and surveying her with eyes half-closed. She wore a sleeveless red cotton frock and she had excellent color from a sailing weekend. "Well, Madeline, what does it add up to? Do you want the job or not?" "I was thinking-could I come back in a week or so?" Hi pleasant look faded. He picked up the telephone. "Get me Personnel again. Yes, you come back sometime, Madeline." She said, "I'll fetch you your coffee and sandwich right now. I can do that. I'll type your scripttoday, too. Couldn't I work for you for three weeks? I don't have to go back to school until the twenty-second. My father will kill me when he finds out, but I don't care." "Where's your father? In Washington?" "He's in Berlin. He's the naval attache there." "What?" Hugh Cleveland hung up the telephone and took his feet off the desk. "Your father is our naval attache in Nazi Germany?" 'that's right." 'Imagine that. So! You're a Navy junior." He threw a five-dollar bill on the desk. "All right. Get me the sandwich, Madeline, please. White meat, lettuce, pepper, mayonnaise. Black coffee. Then we'll talk some more. Buy yourself a sandwich too." "Yes, Mr. Cleveland." Holding the bill, Madeline rushed into the outer hall and stood there dazed. Having heard the Who's in Tourn program a few times, she had at once recognized Cleveland's peculiarly warm rich voice; a real broadcaster, with his own program, and all at once she was working for him. That was wartime for you! A girl swishing by with a bag of food told her where to buy sandwiches. But twenty chattering girls swarmed at the takeout counter of the luncheonette off the lobby. She went out on Madison Avenue and stood blinking in the warm sunshine. The New York scene was normal. Crowds marched on the sidewalks; cars and buses ed both ways in a stench of fumes; people carried packages into and stream out of stores and looked in windows. The only novelty was that the news vendors with fresh stacks of afternoon papers were crying war. Madeline ran to the big drugstore across the street, where the soda fountain was jammed with secretaries and shoppers, talking and laughing over bowls of chili or soup. The usual sort of people were wandering through the aisles, and cheap clocks. A fat old buying toothpaste, lotions, aspirin, candy, blonde woman in an apron and cap quickly made up her sandwiches. "Well, honey, who's going to win the war?" she said sociably as she peppered the chicken. "Let's just hope Hitler doesn't," Madeline said. "Yes, isn't he something? Sieg Heil! Ha, ha. I think the man's crazy. I've always said so, and this proves it." She handed Madeline the sandwiches. "Well, honey, so long as we keep out of it, what do we care who wins? Madeline bought an evening paper that offered gigantic headlines but no fresh news. just to scan such a dramatic front page was novel fun. Though the war was happening so far away, Madeline felt a springtime quickening in her veins. A scent of freedom, of new action, rose from the headlines. The President hadannounced at once, very firmly, that America was staying out of it. But things were going to be mighty different from now on. That was inevitable! All her thoughts were about the letter she would write to her father, if only she could get this job. Cleveland, feet on his desk again, a flirtatious smirk on his face, was telephoning. He nodded at Madeline and-as he went on coaxing some girl, in his warmly rumbling voice, to meet him at Toots Sbor's restaurant -he wolfed the sandwich. "Why don't you eat the other one?" Madeline said. "I'm not hungry." "Are you sure? I don't want to rob you." He hung up and unwrapped her sandwich. "Ordinarily I don't eat much during the day, but with all this war talk-" He took a great bite and went on talking. "Thanks. I swear I'm as hungry as I get at funerals. Ever notice how famished you get at a funeral, Madeline? It's the sheer delight of being alive, I guess, while this Now listen, you want other poor joker's just been buried in a dingy hole. i e to work for me for three weeks, is that it? That'll be fine. It'll give me a chance to look over what's around in Personnel." He flourished a brown envelope at her. "Now then. Gary Cooper is at the Saint Regis, Room 641this is a sample Who's in Town script. Take it to him. We may get him for Thursday." "Gary COOPER? You mean the movie star?" Madeline in astonishment zoomed words like her mother. 'Who else? He may ask you questions about the show and about me. So listen and get this rundown in your head. We work inchwiatirhso,ubtoaonks auience in a little studio, very relaxed. It's a room with a rug, really nice, like a library in a home. It's the same room Mrs. Roosevelt uses for her show. We can do the script in extra big type, if he needs show runs an hour and a half. I started this 71 that. He can take five minutes or fifteen. e whole '34 and did it there show in Los Angeles back in for three years. I called it 0-ver the Coffee then. Maybe he heard it. Of course he may be too busy to go into all that. Anyway, act as though you've been with the show for a while.Too dazzled and excited to talk, Madeline held out her hand for the envelope. Cleveland gave it to her, saying, "All set? Anchors aweigh. For Christ's sake, don't ask him for his autograph. Telephone me if there's any holdup. Don't fail to reappear. Madeline blurted, "You must have had some very stupid girls working for you," and hurried out. A maid opened the door of the hotel suite where Gary Cooper, in a gray suit, sat eating lunch at a wheeled table. The star rose, immensely tall and slim, smiling down at Madeline. He put onblack-rimmed glasses, glanced over the script as he drank coffee, and asked questions. He was all business, the farthest thing from a bashful cowboy; he had the manner of an admiral. When she mentioned the Over the Coffee show he brightened. "Yes, I remember that." Almost at once, it seemed, she was out on the sunny street again, overwrought, thrilled to her bones. "England mobilizes! Hitler smashes into Polandi)) the news vendor at the corner hoarsely chanted. "Bless your little heart!" Cleveland said as she came into the office. He was banging rapidly at a typewriter. "Cooper just called. He likes the idea and he's in." Ripping the yellow sheet out of the machine, he clipped it with others. "He remarked on what a nice girl you were. What did you say to him?" "Hardly anything." "Well, you did a good job. I'm off to interview him now. There's tomorrow's script. Do a smooth copy of the red-checked pages, then get the whole thing to mimeo instanter. Room 309A." Cleveland stepped into his shoes, straightened his tie, and threw on a rust-colored sports jacket. He scratched his heavy blond hair, and grinned at her, raising thick humorously arched eyebrows. She felt she would do anything for him. He was charming, she decided, rather than actually handsome. There was something infectiously jovial about him, a spark of devilish amusement in his lively blue eyes. She was a bit disappointed to see, when he stood up, that though he could not be more than thirty-one or so, his stomach bulged. But it didn't matter. He paused at the door. "Do you mind working nights? You'll get paid overtime. If you come back here around eight-thirty tonight, you'll find Thursday's rough on my desk, with the Cooper spot." "Mr. Cleveland, I haven't been hired yet." "You have been. I just talked to Mrs. Hennessy. After you get that script to mimeo, go down and fill out your papers." Madeline toiled for five hours to finish the script. She turned it in, messy though her work was, hoping it would not end her radio career then and there. At the employment office she learned she was starting at thirty-five dollars a week. It seemed a fortune. She took her aching back to the drugstore, made a quick dinner of a chocolate drink and a bacon and tomato sandwich, and walked back to CBS. Over the tall black Madison Avenue buildings, checkered with gold-lit windows, a misty full moon floated in a sunset sky. This day when Hitler's war began was turning out the most delightful in Madeline Henry's life. On Cleveland's desk the interview with Gary Cooper now lay, a mass of crude typing, quick scrawls and red crayon cuts. The note clipped to it said: Try to copy it all over tonight. See you around ten.
Madeline groaned; she was terribly tired. She put in a call to Warren at the bachelor officers' quarters of the Pensacola flying school. He wasn't there, but an operator with a Southern accent like a vaudeville imitation offered to track him down. In the smoky newsroom, girls kept crisscrossing with long teletype strips or paper cups of coffee, men were talking loud and fast, and the typewriter din never stopped. Through the open door Madeline heard contradictory rumors: Poland was already collapsing, Hitler was on his way to Warsaw, Mussolini was flying to Berlin, the French were pressing England for another Munich deal, Hitler was offering to visit Chamberlain. The telephone rang at ten dclock and there was Warren on the line, with music and laughter in the background. He was at the beach club, he said, at a moonlight dance on a terrace lined with palm trees. He had just met a Marvelous girl, the daughter of a Congressman. Madeline told him about the CBS job, and he seemed amused and impressed. 'Say, I've heard Who's in Town," he said. "This fellow Hugh Cleveland has an interesting voice. What's he like?" "Oh, very nice. Do you think it's all right? Will Dad be furious?" "Matty, you'll be back at school in three weeks, before he even knows about it. Where will you stay?... Oh, yes, that's an all-women hotel, I know that one. Ha! Little Madeline on the town." "You don't oh ect?" "Me? Why, I think it's fine. just be a good girl, and all that. What's the word at CBS, Madeline? Is the war on? The scuttlebutt down here is that England is chickening out." "Nothing but here too, a dozen an hour. Is your date really the daughter of a congressman?"P "YOu (rumors) bet, and she is a dish." "TOugh life you're leading. How's the flying coming?" "I groundlooped on my second solo landing, but don't write Dad that. I'm doing better now. it's great." "Good, you're still here," Cleveland said, walking into the office a few minutes after this conversation. With him was a tall beauty in a black straw hat much Wider than Madeline's, and a gray silk dress. Her gardenia perfume was too strong for the small office. Cleveland glanced at Madeline's typed pages-'Need a little practice, ehr "I warm up as I go along.-Her voice trembled. She Cleared her throat. "Let's hope so. Now look, do you by any chance know of an admiral named Preble? Is he some high muckymuck?" "Preble? Do you mean Stewart Preble?"Stewart Preble, exactly. Who is he?""Why, he's the Chief of Naval Operations.)) "That's a big job, eh?" Madeline was used to civilian ignorance of the armed forces, but this shocked her. "Mr. Cleveland, there's nobody higher in the United States Navy." "Fine. Then he's our boy. I just found out he's at the Warwick. We keep tabs on the big hotels, Madeline. Now let's get off a letter to him." He leaned on the edge of the desk and started to dictate. The yawning beauty crossed glorious legs, lit a cigarette, and leafed the Hollywood Reporter. Madeline desperately tried to keep up, but had to plead with him to go slower. Don't you know shorthand?" "I can learn it quickly enough." Cleveland glanced at his watch and at the beauty, who drooped her eyelids contemptuously at Madeline. Madeline felt like a worm. Cleveland rumpled his hair and shook his head. "Look, you know these Navy characters. Write him a letter, that's all. Invite him to come on the Thursday morning show. Mention Gary Cooper, if you want to. Sign my name, and take it over to the Warwick. Can you do that?" 'Certainly." "Fine. Wendy and I want to catch a ten o'clock movie. She plays a bit in it. Say, this Preble fellow, does he know your father? How about that, Wendy? This Idd's father is our Navy attache in Berlin." Wendy yawned. Madeline said coldly, "Admiral Preble knows my father." "Well, how about mentioning that, then?" He gave her his persuasive impish smile. 'I'd really like to get him, Madeline. Admirals and generals are usually crappy guests. Too cautious and stiff to say anything interesting. But there's a war on, so for the moment, they're hot. See you in the morning. I go on at nine, you know, so get here not later than eight." As he had told Madeline, Warren was dancing away this first night of the war in moonlight, with a congressman's pretty daughter. The moon floats out in space, some thirty diameters of the earth away, shining on the just and the unjust as the cloud cover allows. It had lent dim but helpful light to the columns of young Germans in gray uniforms, miles and miles long, trudging across the Polish border. Now Europe had rolled into the sun, giving the Germans better illumination to get on with the work, and the same moon was bathing the Gulf of Mejdco, and the terrace of Pensacola's HarborView Club. The German General Staff had carefully planned on the moonlight, but the silver glow fell on Warren Henry and Janice Lacouture by a pleasant chance. Everyone said it was the best club dance in years. The big headlines, the excited radio broadcasts, had created a pleasurable stir in flat quiet them more glamorous; war was in the air, and however remote the combat, Pensacola. The student aviators felt more important and the girls found these were warriors. The talk about the German attack soon gave way to homier topics, however: the horse show, the new base commander, recent flying accidents, recent romances. Der Fuhrer, for these happy people, remained the queer hoarse German of the newsreels, with the wild gestures and the funny mustache, who had managed to start up a European mess, but who could scarcely menace the United States just yet. Lieutenant (junior grade) Henry took a different view. The invasion really interested him, and that was how he first caught the interest of Janice Lacouture. At the Academy he had excelled on the subject of the World War. They sat in a far corner of the terrace in the moonlight soon after they met, and instead of talking aviation or making a pass at her, this student pilot told her about the Schlieffen Plan to capture Paris, and the way von Moltke had fatally tampered with it; about the feat of German railroading that had made the Tannenberg victory possible; about the strategic parallels of 1914 and 1939. He had begun with the usual aviator chitchat, which after years of Pensacola dating stupefied Janice. But once they began on the war and she allowed her own knowledge of history and politics to show, he turned serious. It had been an exciting talk, the sort in which lovers sometimes discover each other without speaking a romantic word. Despite the big Lacouture nose, a mark of French ancestry, and rather irregular front teeth, Janice was one of the belles of Pensacola. Her mouth, skin, and hazel eyes were lovely; her figure so striking that all men automatically stared at her as at a fire. She was tall, blonde, with a soft pushing voice, and a very lively manner. Her family owmed the largest house in the club estates. The L-acoutures were solidly rich, from two generations in the timbering that had destroyed the Gulf pine forests for hundreds of miles, and turned northern Florida into a sandy insect-swarming waste. Her father was a wonder in somnolent and self-satisfied Pensacola, the first Lacout'ure who had ever bestirred himself in politics. In Washington Janice had grown up farseeing and sober. She had majored in economics and American history at George Washington University, and she was about to start law school. She wanted to marry a public man; a congressman, a senator, a governor; with luck, why not a future President? This was hard on the young men who fell for her beauty and chic. Janice was out for big game, and she had acquired a reputation for frostiness which amused her. The last thing she had expected was to meet anybody worth knowing during her enforced summer in Pensacola. And of all people, a naval aviator! Nevertheless there was something different about Warren Henry. He was oddly appealing, with those pen ctrating eyes, bony ramshackle frame) graysprinkled hair, and easy smile, with its hint of shrewdness and immorality. He acted as though he knew women far too well for an Annapolis honor student. This did not trouble her; it added tang to Warren. They stopped talking after a while and danced close-hugged in the moonlight. The Pensacola onlookers began inquiring about the background of the lieutenant junior grade with the scar; for Warren's ground loop had given him a forehead wound requiring nine stitches. The naval aviators told each other with envy who the Lacouture girl was. When Warren returned to the bachelor officers' quarters he found two telephone messages from Mrs. Tarrasch. This was his Baltimore divorcie; the woman of thirty for whom he had risked expuwon from the Academy; the woman with whom he had spent the afternoon in bed the day his parents had sailed off to Germany. In his third Academy year, he had come upon her as the lady hostess in a tearoom. Responding to a bold remark, she had agreed to see him after the restaurant closed. She was a clever little woman, with a hard-luck story about two beastly husbands; she was a reader, a lover of the arts, and hungrily passionate. Warren had grown attached to her, and had briefly even thought of marrying her, when she had once roused his jealousy by going off with an older man for a weekend. Byron had talked him out of that, rendering him the greatest service in the power of a brother. Helene Tarrasch wasn't a bad woman, simply a lonely one. If young officer candidates are to be kept by law from marrying, then the lively ones win find one or another Mrs. Tarrasch. warren's worst mistake had been asking her to come to Pensacola, but he had been three years at sea. Now she was installed at the San Carlos Hotel as the receptionist in the main dining room. But how obsolete she suddenly was! Not only because of Janice Lacouture; Hitler's invasion of Poland had given the future a shape. Warren believed the United States would be at war within a year. The prosBut he was going to iqy in this war, pect glittered. He might get killed and if God allowed, he was going to get a good war record, Warren believed in God, but thought he must be much more broad-minded than the preachers made him out. A Being who could create something as Marvelous as sex was not likely to be priggish about it; Warren was fond of saying that God had clearly given a man balls not for beauty but for use. Sitting in his bleakly furnished room with the old-fashioned high ceiling, trying to ignore his room-mate's snores, Lieutenant Henry looked out of the window at the quiet moonlit lawn in front of the b.O.Q and allowed his mind to run to golden postwar fantasies. Politics attracted him. His avid history study had taught him that politicians were the leaders, military men only the mechanics, of war.