Chapter 14

They have bigger matters on their minds. We were a pair of nobodies. I would guess that Goering wanted it to take place, and that Hitler, being there in Karinhall anyway, didn't mind. I got the feeling that he enjoyed sounding off to a pair of Americans who would report directly to you. All three men acted as though the offensive in the west is ready to roll. I don't think they give a damn whether Welles comes or not. If the British are really as set on their terms as Hitler is on his, you'll have all-out war in the spring. The parties are too far apart. Goering, it.;eems to me, is playing a side game by his peace talk. This man is the biggest thug in the Third Reich-He looks like a circus freakthe man is really disgustingly fat and dolled up-but he is the supreme realist in that crowd, and the unchallenged number two man. He has made a good thing out of Nazism, much more than the others. Mr. Gianelli will no doubt describe Karinhall to you. It's vulgar but stupendous. Goering may be smart enough, even though he's riding high, he must realize that no string of good luck lasts forever. If the offensive should happen to go sour, then the man who always wanted peace will be right there, weeping tears over the fallen Fuhrer and happy to take on the job. Ribbentrop can only he described-if you will forgive me, Mr. President-as the classic German son of a bitch. He is right out of the books with his arrogance, bad manners, obtuseness, obstinacy, and self-righteousness. I think this is his nature, but I also believe he echoes how Hitler feels. This is just the old Navy business of the commanding officer being the impressive 'old man," while the exec is the mean crab doing his dirty work. Hitler unquestionably hates your guts and feels you've interfered and crossed him up far too much. He also feels fairly safe defying the USA, because he knows how public opinion is divided. All this'Ribbentrop exprd for him in no uncertain terms, leaving the boss free to be the magnanimous German Napoleon and the savior of Europe. Driving away from Karinhall, I had a reaction like coming out of a trance. I began to remember things about Hitler that I really forgot while I was listening to him and translating his words: the ravings in Mein Kampf, the way he has broken his word time after time, his wild lies, the fact that he started the war, the _Rmesome bombing of Warsaw, and his persecution of the Jews. It's a measure of his persuasiveness that I could forget such things for a while, facing the man who has done them. He's a spellbinder. For big crowds I've heard him do coarse belligerent yelling, but in a room with a couple of nenous foreigners he can be-if it suits him-the reasonable, charming world leader. They say he can also throw a foaming rage; we saw just a hint of that, and I certainly believe it. But the picture of him as a ludicrous nut is a falsehood. He never sounded more confident than when he said that he and the Germans are one. He simply knows this to be the truth. Take away his mustache, and he sort of looks like all the Germans rolled into one.
He isn't an aristocrat, or a businessman, or an intellectual, or anything whatever except the German man in the street, somehow inspired. It's vital to understand this relationship between Hitler and the German people. The present aim of the Allies seems to be to pry the two apart. I have become convinced that it can't be done. For better or worse, the Allies still have the choice of knuckling under to Hitler or beating the Germans. They had the same choice in 1936, when beating the Germans would have been a cinch. Nothing has changed, except that the Germans may now be invincible. The glimpse of cross-purposes at the top may have showed a weakness of the Nazi structure, but if so it's all internal politics, it has nothing to do with Hitler's hold on the Germans. That includes Goering and Ribbentrop. When he entered the room they stood and cringed. If Hitler were the hal&crazy, half-comical gangster we've been reading about, this war would be a pushover, because running a war takes brains, steadiness, strategic vision, and skill. Unfortunately for the Allies, he is a very able man. Rhoda hugged and kissed Pug when he told her about the weekend. He didn't mention Steller's part in what Fred Fearing called robbing the Jews. It wasn't precisely that; it was a sort of legalized expropriation, and damned unsavory, but that was life in Nazi Germany. There was no point in making Rhoda share his uneasy feelings, when one reason for accepting Steller's hospitality was to give her a good time. The chauffeur sent by Steller drove past the colonnaded entrance to Abendrub and dropped them at a back door, where a maid conducted them two flights up narrow servants' stairs. Pug wondered whether this was a calculated German insult. But the spacious, richly furnished bedroom and -sitting room looked out on a fine snowy vista of laKn, firs, winding river, and thatched outbuildings; two servants came to help them dress; and the mystery of the back stairs geared up when they went to dinner. The curving ipain staircase of Abendruh, two stories high, balustraded in red marble, had been entirely covered with a polished wooden slide. Guests in dinner clothes stood on the brink, the men laughing, the ladies giggling and shrieking-Down below other guests stood with the stellers, watching an elegantly dressed couple sliding down, the woman hysterical with laughter as her gireen silk dress pulled away from her gartered thighs. 'Oh my gawd, Pug, I'll DIEI" chortled Rhoda. "I can't possimly! I've practically NOMwGon undemeatbf y don't they wmm a girl!" But of course she made the slide, screaming with embarrassed delight, exposing her legs-which were very shapely-clear up to her lacy underwear. She arrived at the bottom scarlet-faced and convulsed, amid cheers and congratulations, to be welcomed by the hosts and introduced tofellow weekenders. It was a sure icebreaker, Victor Henry though if a trifle gross. The Germans certainly had the touch for these things, Next day when he woke he found a green leather hunting costume laid out for him, complete with feathered hat, belt, and dagger. The men were a varied crowd: Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht officers, other bankers, the president of an electrical works, a prominent actor. Pug was the only foreigner. The jolly group took him wamily into their horseplay and joking, and then into the serious business of the hunt. Pug liked duck-hunting, but killing deer had never appealed to him. General Armin von Roon was in the party, and Pug lagged behind with the hook-nosed general, who remarked that to see a deer shot made him feel ill. In this meeting Roon was more loquacious than before. The forest was dank and cold, and like the others he had been drinking schnapps. They talked first about the United States, where, as it.turned out, Roon had attended the Army War College. Then the general discussed the Polish campaign, and the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, which he surprisingly called a disaster, because of all the ground Stalin had gained without firing a shot. His grasp of the field operations was masterly. His estimate of Hitler, Victor Henry thought, was cold-blooded and honest. Roon scarcely veiled his contempt for the master race theories of the Nazis, or for the Party itself, but he was making out a strong case for Hitler as a German leader, when shots rang out and a nearby hullabaloo drew them to join the party, ringed around a small deer lying dead in blood-spattered snow. A ceremony ensued of horn-blowing and pushing a sprig of fir into the dead mouth over the bloody lolling tongue. Henry became separated from the general. That evening he looked for him before dinner, and was sorry to learn that Roon had been summoned back to Berlin. After dinner, a string quartet played Beethoven in a cream-and-gold French music room, and a fat-bosomed famous soprano sang Schubert songs. The guests listened with more attention than Pug could muster; some, during the lieder, had tears in their eyes. Rhoda felt in her element, for in washington she was a patroness of music. She sat beaming, whispering expert comments between numbers. Dancing followed, and one German after another danced with her. From the floor, she kept darting sparkling looks of gratitude at her husband, until Steller took him in tow to a library, where the actor and Dr. Knopfinann, the head of the electrical works, sat over brandy. As yet, on the weekend, Pug had not heard a word about the war. Conversation had stayed on personal chatter, business, or the arts. 'Ah, here is Captain Henry," said the actor in a rich -ringing voice. "What better authority do you want? Let's put it to him." A gray-moustached man with thick hair, he played emperors, generals, and older men in love with young women. Pug had seen his famous King Lear at the Schauspielhaus. His face just now was purple-red over his stiff collar and buckling starched shirt.
'It might embarrass him," Dr. Knopfmann said. "No war talk now. That's out," said Steller. "This weekend is for pleasure." "I don't mind," Pug said, accepting brandy and settling in a leather chair. "What's the question?" "I create illusions for a living," rumbled the actor, 'and I believe illusions should be confined to the stage. And I say it is an illusion to hope that the United States will ever allow England to go down." 'Oh, to hell with all that," said the banker. Dr. Knopfrnann, a twinkling-eyed, round-faced man like the captain of the Bremen, but much shorter and fatter, said, 'And I maintain that it isn't 1917. The Americans pulled England's chestnuts out of the fire once, and what did they get for it? A bellyful of ingratitude and repudiation. The Americans will accept the fait accompli. They are realists. Once Europe is normalized, we can have a hundred years of a firm Atlantic peace." 'IMat do you say, Captain Henry?" the actor asked. "The problem may never come up. You still have to lick England." None of the three men looked very pleased. The actor said, "Oh, I think we can assume that's in the cards-providing the Americans don't step in. That's the whole argument." Steller said, "Your President doesn't try to hide his British sympathies, Victor, does he? Quite natural, in view of his Anglo-Dutch ancestry. But wouldn't you say the people are against him, or at least sharply split?" "Yes, but America is a strange country, Dr. Steller. Public opinion can shift fast. Nobody should forget that, in dealing with us." The eyes of the Germans flickered at each other. Dr. Knopfmann said, "A shift in public opinion doesn't just happen. It's manufactured." "There's the live nerve," Steller said. "And that's what I've found difficult to convey even to the air marshal, who's usually so hardheaded. Germans who haven't been across the water are impossibly provincial about America. I'm sorry to say this goes for the Fuhrer himself. I don't believe he yet truly grasps the vast power of the American Jews. It's a vital factor in the war picture." "Don't exaggerate that factor," Henry said. "You fellows tend to, and it's a form of kidding yourselves." "My dear Victor, I've been in the United States nine times and I lived for a year in San Francisco. Who's your Minister of the Treasury? The Jew Morgenthau. Who sits on your highest court, wielding the most influence? The Jew Frankfurter."He proceeded to reel off a list of Jewish officials in Washington, stale and boring to Pug from endless repetition in Nazi propaganda; and he made the usual assertion that the Jews had American finance, communications, justice, and even the Presidency in their pockets. Steller delivered all this calmly and pleasantly. He kept repeating 'Der jude, tier jude' without a sneer. There was no glare in his eye, such as Pug had now and then observed when Rhoda challenged some vocal anti-Semite. The banker presented his statements as though they were the day's stock market report. "To begin with," Pug replied, a bit wearily, "the Treasury post in our country has little power. It's a minor political reward. Christians hold all the other cabinet posts. Financial power lies with the banks, the insurance companies, the oil, rail, lumber, shipping, steel, and auto industries, and such. They're wholly in Christian hands. Always have been." "Lehman is a banker," said Dr. Knopfmann. "Yes, he is. The famous exception." Pug went on with his stock answers to stock anti-Semitism: the all but solid Christian ownership of newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses, the Christian composition of Congress, the cabinet, and the executive branch, the eight Christian judges out of rune on the Supreme Court, the paramount White House influence of a Christian, Harry Hopkins, and all the rest. On the faces of his hearers appeared the curious universal smirk of Germans when discussing Jews: condescending, facetious, and cold, with superior awareness of a very private inside joke. Steller said in a kindly tone, "That's always the Jewish line, you know, how unimportant they are." 'Would you recommend that we take away what businesses they do have? Make Obiekte of them?" Steller looked surprised and laughed, not in the least offended. "You're better informed than many Americans, Victor. It would be an excellent idea for the health of your economy. You'll come to it sooner or later." "Is it your position," the actor said earnestly, "that the Jewish question really has no bearing on America's entry into the war?" 'I didn't say that. Americans do react sharply to injustice and suffering." The smirk reappeared on the three faces, and Knopfmann said, "And your Negroes in the South?" Pug paused, "It's bad, but it's improving, and we don't put them behind barbed wire." The actor said in a lowered voice, "That's a political penalty. A Jew who behaves himself doesn't go to a camp." lighting a large cigar, his eyes on the match, Steller said, "Victor speaks very diplomatically.
But his connections are okay. One man who's really in the picture is Congressman Ike Lacouture of Florida. He fought a great battle against revising the Neutrality Act." With a sly glance at Pug, he added, "Practically in the family, isn't he?" This caught Pug off guard, but he said calmly, "You're pretty well informed. That's not exactly public knowledge." Steller laughed. "The air minister knew about it. He told me. He admires Lacouture. What happened to the dance music? Ach, look at the time. How did it get to be half past one? There's a little supper on, gentlemen, nothing elaborate-" He rose, puffing on the cigar. 'The American Jews will make the greatest possible mistake, Victor, to drag in the United States. Lacouture is their friend, if they'll only listen to him. You know what the Fuhrer said in his January speech-if they start another world war, that will be the end of them. He was in deadly earnest, I assure you." Aware that he was butting a stone wall, but unable to let these things pass, Pug said, 'Peace or war isn't up to the Jews. And you grossly misunderstand Lacouture." "Do I? But my dear Captain, what do you call the British guarantee to Poland? Politically and strategically it was frivolous, if not insane. All it did was bring in two big powers against Germany on the trivial issue of Danzig, which was what the Jews wanted. Churchill is a notorious Zionist. All this was clearly stated between the lines in Lacouture's last speech. I tell you, men like him may still manage to restore the peace and incidentally to save the Jews from a very bad fate they seem determined to bring on themselves. Well-how about an omelette and a glass of champagne?" On Christmas Eve, Victor Henry left the embassy early to walk home. The weather was threatening, but he wanted air and exercise. Berlin was having a lugubrious Yuletide. The scrawny newspapers had no good war news, and the Russian attack on Finland was bringing little joy to Germans. The shop windows offered colorful cornucopias of appliances, clothing, toys, wines, and food, but people burned sullenly along the cold windy streets under dark skies, hardly glancing at the mocking displays. None of the stuff was actually for sale. As Pug walked, evening fell and the blackout began. Hearing muffled Christmas songs from behind curtained windows, he could picture the Berliners sitting in dimly fit apartments in their overcoats around tinsel-draped fir trees, trying to make merry on watery beer, potatoes, and salt mackerel. At Abendruh, the Henrys had almost forgotten that there was a war on, if a dominant one, and that serious shortages existed. For Wolf Steller there were no shortages. Yielding to Rhoda's urging, he had accepted an invitation to come back to Abendruh in January, though he had not enjoyed himself there. More and more, especially since his glimpse of the National Socialist leaders at Karinhall, hethought of the Germans as people he would one day have to fight. He felt hypocritical putting on the good fellow with them. But intelligence opportunities did exist at Steller's estate. Pug had sent home a five-page account just of his talk with General von Roon. By pretending he agreed at heart with Ike Lacouture-something Steller already believed, bel-ause he wanted to-he could increase those opportunities. It meant being a liar, expressing ideas he thought pernicious, and abusing a man's hospitality-a hell of a way to serve one's country! But if Steller was trying games with the American naval attache, he had to take the risks. Victor Henry was mulling over all this as he strode along, muffled to his eyes against a sleety rain that was starting to fall, when out of the darkness a stooped figure approached and touched his arm. 'Captain Henry?" "Who are you?" "Rosenthal. You are living in my house." They were near a corner, and in the glow of the blue streetlight Pug saw that the Jew had lost a lot of weight; the skin of his face hung in folds, and his nose seemed far more prominent. He was stooped over, and his confident bearing had given way to a whipped and sickly look. It was a shocking change. Holding out his hand, Pug said, "Oh, yes. Hello." "Forgive me. My wife and I are going to be sent to Poland soon. Or at least we have heard such a rumor and we want to prepare, in case it's true. We can't take our things, and we were just wondering whether there are any articles in our home you and Mrs. Henry would care to buy. You could have anything you wished, and I could make you a very reasonable price." Pug had also heard vague stories of the "resettlement" of the Berlin Jews, a wholesale shipping-off to newly formed Polish ghettos, where conditions were, according to the reports you chose to believe, either moderately bad or fantastically horrible. It was disturbing to talk to a man actually menaced with this dark misty fate. "You have a factory here," he said. "Can't your people keep an eye on your property until conditions get better?" "The fact is I've sold my firm, so there's nobody." Rosenthal held up the frayed lapels of his coat against the cutting sleet and wind. "Did you sell out to the Steller bank?" The Jew's face showed astonishment and timorous suspicion. "You know about these matters? Yes, the Steller bank. I received a very fair price. Very fair." The Jew permitted himself a single ironic glance into Henry's eyes. "But the proceeds were tied up to settle other matters. My wife and I will be more comfortable in Poland with a little ready money. it always helps. So-perhaps the carpets-the plate, or some china?" "Come along and k it ov m taler with my wife. She makes all those decisions. Maybe you can have dinner with us."Rosenthal sadly smiled. 'I don't think SO, but you're very kind." Pug nodded, remembering his Gestapo-planted servants. "Herr Rosenthal, I have to repeat to you what I said when we rented your place. I don't want to take advantage of your misfortune." 'Captain Henry, you can't possibly do me and my wife a greater kindness. I hope you will buy something." Rosenthal put a card in his hand and melted into the blackout. When Pug got home Rhoda was dressing for the charge's dinner, so there was no chance to talk about the offer. The embassys Christmas party had none of the opulence of an Abendruh banquet, but it was good enough. Nearly all the Americans left in Berlin were there, chatting over eggnogs and then assembling at three long tables for a meal of roast goose, pumpkin pie, fruit, cheese, and cakes, all from Denmark. Diplomatic import privileges made this possible, and the guests grew merry over the unaccustomed abundance. Victor Henry loved being back among American faces, American talk, offhand open manners, laughter from the diaphragm and not from the face muscles; not a bow or a clicked pair of heels, not a woman's European smile, gleaming on and off like an electric sign. But trouble broke out with Rhoda. He heard her raising her voice at Fred Fearing, who was sucking his corncob pipe and glaring at her far down the table. Pug called, "Hey, what's it about, Fred?" 'The Wolf Stellers, Pug, the loveliest people your Wife has ever met." 'I said the nicest Germans," Rhoda shrilled, "and it's quite true. You're blindly prejudiced." "It's time you went home, Rhoda," Fearing said. 'And just what does that mean?" she snapped back, still much too loud. At Abendruh Rhoda had loosened up on her count of drinks, and tonight she app ar fuer ong than usual. Her gestures were e ed to berth al getting broad, she was holding her eyes half-closed, and her voice tones were going up into her nose. "Well, kid, if you think people like Wolf Steller and his wife are nice, You'll believe next that Hitler just wants to reunite the German folk peacelily. About that time you need to go back for a while on American chow and the New York Times." 'I just know that Germans are not monsters with horns and tails," said Rhoda, "but ordinary people, however misgidded. Or did one of your frauleins show up in bed with cloven hoofs, dear?" The crude jibe caused a silence. Fearing was an ugly fellow, tall, long-faced, curly-beaded, with a narrow foxy nose; upright, idealistic, full of rigid liberal ideas, and severe on injustice and political hypocrisy.
But he had his human side. He had seduced the wife of his collaborator on a best seller about the Spanish Civil War. This lady he had recently parked in England with an infant daughter, and he was now-so the talk ran-making passes at every available German woman, and even some American wives. Rhoda had once half-seriously told Pug that she had had trouble with Freddy on the dance floor. All the same, Fred Fearing was a famous, able reporter. Because he detested the Nazis, he tried hard to be fair to them, and the propaganda ministry understood this. Most Americans got their picture of Nazi Germany at war from Fearinles broadcasts. Victor Henry said, as amiably as he could, to break the silence, "It might be easier to navigate in this country, Rhoda, if the bad ones would sprout horns or grow hair in their palms or something." nWhat Wolf Steller has in his palms is blood, lots of it," Fearing said, with a swift whiskeyed-up pugnacity, 'He acts unaware of it. You and Rhoda encourage this slight color blindness, Pug, by acting the same way." it's Pug's job to socialize with people like Steller," said the charge mildly, from the head of the table. "I propose a moratorium tonight on discussing the Germans." Colonel Forrest was rubbing his broken nose, a mannerism that signalled an itch to argue, though his moon face remained placid. He put in, nasally, 'Say, Freddy, I happen to think Hitler just wants to reorganize central Europe as a German sphere, peacefully if he can, and that he'll call off the war if the Allies will agree. Think I should go home, too?" Fearing en-dtted a column of blue smoke and red sparks from his pipe. "What about Mein Kampf, Bill?" 'Campaign document of a thirty-year-old hothead," snapped the military attache, "written eighteen years ago in jail. Now he's the head of state. He's never moved beyond his strength. Mein Kampf's all about tearing off the southern half of Russia and making a German breadbasket of it. That's an old Vienna coffeehouse fantasy. It went out of the window once and for all with the pact. The Jewish business is bad, but the man's doing his job with the crude tools at hand. That unfortunately includes anti-Semitism. He didn't invent it. It was big on the German scene before he was born." "Yes, time for you to go home," said Fearing, gulping Moselle. "Well, what's your version?" Now plainly irritated, the military attache put on an imitation of the broadcaster's voice. "Adolf Hitler the mad house painter is out to conquer the world?" "Oh, hell, Hitler's revolution doesn't know where it's going, Bill, any more than the French or Russian revolutions did," exclaimed Fearing, with an exasperated wave of his corncob-"it's just raging along the way those did and it'll keep going and spreading till it's stopped. Sure he moves peacefully where he can. Why not? Everywhere he's pushed in there have been welcoming groups of leading citizens, or traitors, you might say. In Poland they swarmed, Why, You know that France and England have parties ready right this second to cooperate with him. He just has to strike hard enough in the west to knock out the ins and bring in the outs. He's already got Stalin cravenly feeding him al ssi ii I the Ru an o and wheat he needs, in return for the few bones he threw him in the Baltic." With swinging theatrical gestures of the smoking pipe, Fearing went on, "By 1942, the way things are going, you may see a world in which Germany will control the industries of Europe,the raw materials of the Soviet union, and the navies of England and France. Why, the French fleet would go over to him tomorrow if the right admiral sneezed. He'll have a working deal with the japs for exploiting Asia and the East Indies and ruling the Pacific and Indian oceans. Then what? Not to mention the network of dictatorships in South America, already in the Nazis' pocket. YOu know, of course, Bill, that the United States Army is now two hundred thousand strong, and that Congress intends to cut it." "Well, I'm against that, of course," said Colonel Forrest. 'I daresay! A new bloody dark age is threatening to engulf the whole world and COngress wants to cut down the Arinyl" 'An interesting vision," smiled the charge. "Slightly melodramatic." Rhoda Henry raised her wineglass, giggling noisily. "Lawks a mercy me! I never heard such wild-eyed poppycock. Freddy, you're the one who should go home. Merry Christmas.Fred Fearinies face reddened. He looked up and down the table. "Pug Henry, I like you. I guess I'll go for a walk." As the broadcaster strode away from the table, the charge rose and hurried after him, but did not bring him back. The Henrys went home early. Pug had to hold up Rhoda as they left, because she was halfasleep, and unsteady at the knees. The next pouch of Navy mail contained an Alnav listing changes of duty for most of the new captains. They were becoming execs of battleships, commanding officers of cruisers, chiefs of staff to admirals at sea. For Victor Henry there were no orders. He stared out of the window at Hitler's chancellery, at the black-clad SS men letting snow pile on their helmets and shoulders like statues. Suddenly, he had had enough. He told his yeoman not to disturb him, and wrote three letters. The first expressed regret to the Stellers that, due to unforeseen official problems, he and Rhoda would not be coming back to Abendruh. The second, two formal paragraphs to the Bureau of Personnel, requested transfer to sea duty. In the third, a long handwritten letter to Vice-Admiral Preble, Pug poured out his disgust with his assignment and his desire to go back to sea. He ended up: I've ed twenty-five years for combat at sea. I'm miserable, Admiral, and maybe for that reason my wife is miserable. She's falling apart here in Berlin. it's a nightmarish place. This isn't the Navy's concern, but it's mine. If I have been of any service to the Navy in my entire career, the only recompense I naw ask, and beg, is a transfer to sea duty. A few days later another White House envelope came with a scrawl in black, thick, slanting pendl. The postmark showed that it had crossed his letter.
PugYour report is really grand, and gives me a helpful picture. Hitler is at rybody's reaction is a little different. I'm destrange one, isn t he? Eve lighted that you are where you are, and I have told C.N.O that. He says you want to return briefly in May for a wedding- That will be arranged sure to drop in on me when you can spare a moment. FDR Victor Henry bought two of Rosenthal's C)riental carpets, and a set of English china that Rhoda particularly loved, at the prices the man named. His main motive was to cheer her up, and it worked; she gloated over the bargains for weeks, and never tired of saying, truly enough, that the poor Jewish man's thankfulness to her had been overwhelming. Pug also wrote the Stellers about this time that, if e invitation held, he and Rhoda would come back to Abendruh after all. If his job was intelligence, he adedded, he had better get on with it; moreover, the moral gap between him and Steller seemed to have narrowed. Notwithstanding Rosenthal's pathetic gratitude for the deal, his possessions were Obiekte. New Year's Eve Midnight Briny dearI can't think of a better way to start 1940 than by writing to you. I'm home, typing away in my old bedroom, which seems one-tend, as large as I remembered it. The whole house seems so cramped and cluttered, and God, how that sen,ll of insecticide wipes away the years. Oh, my love, what a Marvelous place the United States is! I had forgotten, completely forgotten. When I reached New York, my father was already out of the hospital -I learned this by phoning home-so I blew two hundred of my hundred dollars on a 1934 Dodge upend ve to 0 da I y dmiedn. tViYaes,WIaswhainntgton. I wan co I tiro Fl ri i really oo- More of that later, but let me assure ed to see Sltoetde tto see the Capitol dome and the you that he got little comfort out of the meeting. But so help me, Briny, I mainly wanted to get the feel of the country again. Well, in dead of winter, in lousy weather, and despite the tragic Negro shantytowns that line the ds down South, t roa he Atlantic states are beautiful, spacious, raw, clean, full of wilderness still, exploding with energy and life. I loved every billboard, every filling station. it's really the New World Old World's might Th pretty in its rococo fashion, but it's rotten-ripe and going insane. Ilank God I'm out of it. Take Miami Beach. ive always loathed this place, y It's a measure of my present frame of mind that I regard evenou know. Miami Beach with affection. I left here a raging anti-Semite. It jars me even now to see these sleek Jews without a care in the world, ambling about in their heavy wearing furs, or pearls and tans and outlandish sun clothes-often diamonds, my dear with pink or orange shirts and shorts. The Miami Beachers don't believe in hiding what they've got. I think of Warsaw, and I getangry, but it passes. They're no different, in their obliviousness to the war, from the rest of the Americans. much The doctors say my father's coming along fine after a heart attack that all but did him in. don't like his fragile look, and he doesn't do but sit in the sun in the garden and listen to the news o, the radio. He's terribly worried about Uncle Aaron. He never used to speak much of him (actually he used to avoid the subject) but now he goes on and on about Aaron. My father is terrified of Hitler. He thinks he's a sort of devil who's going to conquer the world and murder all the Jews. But I guess you're waiting to hear about my little chat with Leslie Slote-eh, darling? Well-he was definitely not expecting the answer I brought back to his proposal! When I told him I'd fallen head over ears in love with you, it literally staggered him. I mean he tottered to a chair and fell in it, pale as a ghost. Poor old Slote! A conversation ensued that went on for hours, in a bar, in a restaurant, in my car, in half a dozen circuits on foot around the Lincoln Memorial in a freezing wind, and finally in his apartment. Lord, did he carry on! But after all, I had to give him his say. The main heads of the dialogue went something like this, round and round and round: Slote: It's just that you were isolated with him for so long. Me: I told Briny that myself. I said it's a triumph of propinquity. That doesn't change the fact that I love him now. Slote: You can't intend to marry him. It would be the greatest possible mistake. I say this as a friend, and somebody who knows you better than anyone else. Me: I told Byron that too. I said it would be ridiculous for me to marry him, and gave him all the reasons. Slote: Well, then, what on earth have you in mind? Me: I'm just reporting a fact to you. I haven't anything in mind. Slote: You had better snap out of it. You're an intellectual and a grown woman. Byron Henry is a pleasant light-headed loafer, who managed to avoid getting an education even in a school like Columbia. There can't be anything substantial between you. ME: I don't want to hurt you, dear, but-(this is the way I walked on eggs for a long while, but in the end I came flat out with it) the thing between Byron Henry and me is damned substantial. In fact by comparison, just now, nothing else seems very substantial. (SloteVlunged in horrid gloom.) Slote (he only asked this once): Have you slept with him? ME: None of your business. (Jastrow not giving Slote any cards to play she can help. Slote sunk even deeper in g.) SLo-rE: Well, 'la coeur a ses raisons," and all that, but I truly don't understand. He's a boy. He's very good-looking, or rather, charming-looking, and he is certainly courageous. Perhaps That's assumed an outsize importance for you. ME (ducking that sore , who needs trouble?): He has other nice qualities. He's a gentleman. I never knew the animal really existed outside of books any more. Slote: I'm not a gentleman, then? ME: I'm not saying you're a boot or a cad. I mean a gentleman in the old sense, not somebody who avoids bad manners. SLOTIR: You're talking like a shopgirl. You're obviously rationalizing a temporary physical infatuation. 'That's all right. But the words you're choosing are corny and embarrassing. Me: All that may be. Meantime I can't marry you. (Yawn) And I must go to sleep now. I want to drive four hundred miles tomorrow. ( xit Jastrow, at long last.) E All things considered, he took it well. He calmly says we're getting married once I'm over this nuttiness, and he's going ahead with his plans for it. He's remarkably sure of himself, to that extent he remains very much the old Slote. Physically he's like a stranger now. I never kissed him, and though we spent an hour in his apartment, very late, he never laid a hand on me. I wonder if the talk about gentlemen had anything to do with it? He never used to be like that, I assure you. (I daresay I've changed too!) Maybe he's right about me and you. I choose not to look beyond the present moment, or more truly beyond the moment when we stood by the fire in my bedroom and you took me in your arms. I'm still overwhelmed, I still love you, I still long for you. Separated though we are, I've never been so happy in all my life. If only you were here right this minute! I said you see things too simply, but on one point you were just plain right. Aaron should leave that stupid house, let it fall down and rot, and come back to this wonderful land to live out his days. His move there was stupid-His remaining there is ii becilic. If yon u can convince him of itand I'm writing him a letter too-I'd feel a lot better about your coming back. But don't just abandon him, sweetheart. Not yet. Wait till my plans jell a bit. Happy New Year, and I hope to God that 1940 brings the end of Hitler and this whole grisly nightmare, and brings us together again.
I adore you. Natalie Three letters came straggling in during the next few weeks. The first two were shallow awkward scrawls: I'm the world's worst letter writer-sure miss you more than I can say things are pretty dull around here now without you... sure wish I could have been there with you in Lisbon.... Well, got to get back to work now... She read Byron's embarrassing banalities over and over. Here on paper was just the young featherweight sloucher she had first seen, Plopped against a red Siena wall in the noon sun. Even his handwriting fitted the picture: slanting, undistinguished, the letters small and flattened. The pathetically flourishing B of his signature stood out of the mediocre penmanship. All of Byron's frustrated yearning to amount to something, to measure up to his father's hopes, was in that extravagant B. All his inconsequence was in the trailed-off, crushed "... Byron." Poor Briny! Yet Natalie found herself dwelling on the artless empty scribblings as though they were letters of George Bernard Shaw. She kept them under her pillow. They contrasted most cruelly with her other preoccupation, for to pass the time she had hauled out her master's thesis, already three quarters written in French: "Contrasts in the Sociologismic Critique of War: Durkheim's Writings on Germany, 1915 1916 and Tolstoy's Second Epilogue to War and Peace, i869." She was giving thought to translating it, and enrolling in Columbia or NYU in the fall to finish it off and get her degree. It was a good thesis. Even Slote had read sections with approval, if now and again with a thin Oxonian smile. She wanted not only to finish, but to revise it. She had started with the anti-French, proGerman bias of most American university opinion between the wars. Her experiences in Poland had inclined her to agree much more with Durkhelm about Germany. These things were as far beyond the writer of the letters under her pillow as the general theory of relativity. It would give Briny a headache just to read her title. But she didn't care. She was in love. Popular songs were sweetly stabbing her: songs about women infatuated with worthless men, whining cowboy laments about absent sweethearts. It was as though she had developed a craving for penny candy. She was ashamed of gratifying her fancy, but she couldn't get enough of these songs. She bought records and played them over and over. If Byron Henry wrote stupid letters, too bad. All judgments fell away before her remembrance of his eyes and his mouth and his arms, her delight at contemplating a few ill-written sentences because they came from his hand. A much better letter came along: the answer to her first long one from Miami Beach, severalpages typed with Byron's odd offhand clarity. He somehow never struck a wrong key in his quick rattling, and his pages looked like a stenographer's work. Natalie darling: Well, that's more like it. A real letter. God, I waited a long time. I skipped all that stuff about the USA and Miami, to get to the Slote business, but then I went back and read it all. Nobody has to tell me how good the United States is, compared to Europe. I'm so homesick at this point, I could die. This is quite aside from my yearning for you, which remains as strong as if you were in the room downstairs. I'm beginning to understand how iron filings must feel around a magnet. Sometimes, sitting in my room thinking about you, the pull gets so strong, I have the feeling if I let go of the arms of my chair I'd float out of the window and across France and over the Atlantic, straight to your house at '316 Normandie Drive. Natalie was enchanted with this imaginative little conceit, and read it over and over. Slote only thinks he's going to marry you. He had his chance. By the way, I'm more than one-third through Slote's list of tomes about the Germans. Some of them aren't available in English, but I'm slogging along with what I can get. here's not much else to do here. The one reward of my isolation in this godforsaken town is the one-man seminar that A.J. is conducting with me. His view is more or less like Slote's, and I'm getting the picture. The Germans have been the corners in Europe ever since Napoleon, because of their geographical place, their numbers, and their energy, but they're a strange dark people. All of these writers Slote listed eventually come out with the pedantic destructiveness, the scary sureness that they're right, that the Germans have been gypped for centuries, that the world's got to be made over on their terms. What it boils down to so far for me is that Hitler is, after all, the soul of presentday Germany-which is self-evident when you're there; that the Germans can't be allowed to rule EuroPe because they have some kind of mass mental distortion, despite their brilliance, and can't even nile themselves; and that when they try for mastery, somebody's got to beat the living daylights out of them or you,ll have barbarism triumphant. A.J. adds his own notion about the "good GermanY" of Progressive liberals and the "bad Germany" of Slote's romantics and nationalists, all tied in with geographical location and the Catholic religion, which sort of loses me. (Wonder if any of this will get past the censors? I bet it Will. The Italians fear and loathe the Germans. There's a word that passes around here about Mussolini. They say he's the monkey that opened the tiger's cage. Pretty good.) Getting A.J. out of here seems to be a bit of a project, after all. There was a minor technical foul-up in his naturalization, way, way back. I don't know the details, but he never bothered to correct it. The new consul general in Rome is a sort of prissy bureaucrat, and he's creating difficulties. All this will straighten out, of course-they've said as much in Rome-but it's taking time.
So I won't abandon A.J. now. But even if your plans aren't clear by mid-april, I must come home then and I will, whether A.J. does or not. Aside from my brother's wedding, my father's on fire to get me into submarine school, where the next officer course starts May 27. The course lasts six months, and then there's a year of training in subs operating around Connecticut. So even in the unlikely event that I do enroll-I'll only do it if the war breaks wide open-we could be together a lot. Siena's gotten real dumpy. The hills are brown, the vines are cut to black stumps. The people creep around the streets looking depressed. The Palio's off for 1940-It's cold. It rains a lot. But in the lemon house, anyway, the trees are still blooming, and A.J. and I still have our coffee there. I smell the blossoms and I think of you. I often go in there just to take a few breaths, and I close any eyes and there you are, for a moment. Natalie, there has to be a God or I wouldn't have found you, and He has to be the same God for both of us. There's only one God. I love you. Briny "Well, well," Natalie said aloud, as tears sprang from her eyes and dropped on the flimsy airmail paper. "You miserable chestnut-haired devil." She kissed the pages, smearing them orange-red. Then she looked at the date again: February 10, and this was April 9-almost two months for an airmail letter! There was no point in answering, at that rate. He might be on his way back now. But she seized a pad and began writing. She couldn't help it. Natalie's father was listening to the radio in the garden. They had just eaten lunch and her mother had gone off to a committee meeting. As Natalie poured loving words on paper, a news broadcast came drifting in on the warm air through the open window. The announcer, with rich dramatic doom in his voice, spoke words that arrested her pen: "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 Gernwny 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 reinforcenxnts are continuing to pour in. The Royal Navy is moving rapidly to cut off the invasion. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, declared this morning, 'All German vessels entering the Skagerrak will be sunk-" Putting aside the pad and pen, Natalie went to the window. Her father, sitting with his back to her in blazing sunshine, his bald, sunburned head with its gray fringe tilted to one side, waslistening with motionless intensity to this shattering development. "Paris. In an official communique, the French government anno,itnced 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 arnwd forces have peaceably taken Denmark under their protection and have arrived in Norway by sea and air, where the population 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 Fuhrer has sent the following message of congratulation to. Natalie came out into the garden to talk to her father about the shocking news, and was surprised to find him sleeping through it, his head dropped on his chest. The radio was blaring; and her father usually hung on the news broadcasts. The shadow from his white linen cap obscured his face, but she could see a queer expression around his mouth. His upper teeth were protruding ludicrously over his lip. Natalie came to him, and touched his shoulder. 'Ta?" He did not respond. He felt inert. She could see now that his upper plate had worked loose. "Pal' As she shook him his head lolled and the cap fell off. She thrust her hand inside his loose flowered sport shirt; there was no heartbeat under the warm clammy skin. In the instant before she shrieked and ran inside to telephone the doctor, she saw on her dead father's face a strong resemblance to Aaron Jastrow that in his lifetime she had never observed. She walked through the next weeks in a fog of shocked grief. 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 'lot sleep. Her mother, a conventional woman usually preoccupied with Hadassah meetings and charity fund-raising, for many years completely baffled by her daughter, pulled out of her own grief and tried in vain to comfort her. Natalie lay in her room on her bed, wailing and bawling, almost constantly at first, and in spells every day for weeks afterward. She suffered agonies of guilt for neglecting and despising her father. He had loved her and spoiled her. When she had told him she wanted to go to the Sorbonne for two years, that had been that. Shehad never even asked whether he could afford it. She had felled him with her bizarre misadventures and had experienced no remorse while he was alive. Now he was gone, and she was on her own, and it was too late. He was unreachable by love or regret. The radio news-disaster on disaster in Norway, German drives succeeding, Allied landings failing, the remnants of the Norwegian army retreating into the mountains where the Germans were hunting them down-came to her as dim distant rumors. Reality was only her wet pillow, and the stream of middle-aged sunburned Jews paying condolence calls, and all the endless talk about money problems. 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. The Great Assault Modern war is characterized by sudden swift changes on the grand scale. 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. On paper, the odds had been heavy against Fall Gelb ("Case Yellow"), our plan for attacking France. The figures of the opposing forces had certainly comforted the L-nemy and disturbed us. But put to the test, Case Yellow (revised) brought a big victory. Our soldiers man for man proved superior to the best the democracies had. Our High Command used well the lessons of massed armor and gasoline-engine mobility learned ;n. the defect of A/,rid War I at the hands of British tank battalions. The Anglo-French world hegemony stood unmasked as a mere historical husk. it still commanded the seas and the access to raw materials; its resources for a long war were superior to ours; but without the will to use them these advantages were meaningless. Persia had greater resources than Alexander the Great. In judging Hitler, historians must recognize that he sensed this weakness of the other side, and that of the General Staff erred. We assumed that professional opponents preparin(we) g with dueurgency towagewar. Butin fact their count(our) rymen would not face realities,(were) and their politicians would not tell the people unpleasant truths. Adolf Hitler gambled the future of Germany, and therefore of Europe, and therefore of the existing world order, on one heavy armed thrust. It succeeded beyond anybody's expectation, including his own. Besides ordering the attack over the pessimistic objections of our staff, Hitler also, almost at the last minute, adopted the bold Manstein Plan for an (IT asic jelljafti(from WORLD EMPIRE LOST) armored strike in force through the bad Ardennes terrain, to turn the left flank of the Maginot Line. This departure from the classic Schlieffen Plan achieved total surprise, and led to Rundstedt's magnificent race across northern France to the sea. It split the Allies, sent the British fleeing across the Channel in an improvised flotilla of pleasure yachts, coal scows, and fishing boats, and ended the shaky French will to fight. Thereafter we marched south to Paris against fastcrumbling resistance. And so Germany achieved in a few weeks, under a former corporal, what it had failed to do in four years of desperate combat under Kaiser Wilhelm 11. The technical key to our victory in France was simply that we massed our armor into whole spearhead divisions, like iron cavalry, thus restoring speed and movement to the battlefields of the industrial age, supposedly paralyzed forever into trench warfare by the strength and range of mechanical firepower. We learned this from the works of the English tactician Fuller and the French tactician de Gaulle, analyzing the lessons of World War I. The French army, with armored strength superior to our own, ignored these Allied thinkers, and scattered thousands of tanks piecemeal among the infantry divisions. This question of how to use the new self-propelled armor had been much disputed between the wars. We took the right path of Fuller, de Gaulle, and our own Guderian. Our opponents took the wrong one. The coordination of dive-bombing with these new ground tactics hastened the victory. The Maginot Line The world was stunned. For months Western newspapers and magazines had been printing maps of Europe, showing imaginary battle lines for the coming campaign. The French commander-in-chief, 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. In modern war, according to this rumored "Gamelin Plan," industrial firepower gave the defense an advantage over the offense of ten or fifteen to one. France had spent one and a half million soldiers' lives in World War I proving that the massed infantry attacks of Napoleon no longer worked against machine guns and cannon. There would be no more Verduns. 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. If we Germans did not attack, then between the land wall of the Maginot Line and the British sea blockade, the economic life would be choked out of us. Finally the Alliedarmies would sally forth from the Line to deliver the coup de grace, if revolution did not topple Hitler first, and bring our generals crawling for peace terms, as we had in 1918. So ran the newspaper talk in the West during the sitzkrieg. Informed military men had a question or two about this Maginot Line. it was indeed a marvel of engineering, but was it not too short? 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, therp, still remained a hole of open level country, the boundary between France and Belgium, at least as long as the Line itself. In 1914, we bestial Germans had attacked through Belgium precisely because this hole offered such a flat fine road to Paris. Couldn't we just go around the famous Maginot Line and come down by that route again? The proponents of the Gamelin Plan met such questions with ironic smiles. Yes, to run the Line straight through Belgium to the sea would have been very fine, they said. But that was up to the Belgians, who insisted on preserving their neutrality instead. A for cornpletinq thr" I;the in French territory, it WOLII , had to cut through a hundred thirty miles of important industrial areas. Moreover, at the time when it might have been done, a mood of economy had come over the government. The people wanted shorter hours and higher pay. The cost would have been astronomical. Also, subsurface water in the area made a tunnel system difficult. Also, by then Hitler was in power, and extending the Line might have provoked the bellicose Fuhrer to do something rash. 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, Given the enormous advantage of defense in modern warfare, a German attack on such a narrow front would bloodily collapse. Outcome of the Plan We did attack, though not exactly where the Plan called for us to do so. Five days later, Generalissimo Gamelin was fired. 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 KOchler was also coming at them from Holland to the north. They were trapped. On the morning of May 15, the prime minister of France telephoned his defense minister to ask what countermeasures Gamelin was proposing. The minister answered, according to history, "He has none."At an urgent conference in Paris next day at the Quai d'Orsay, Winston Churchill, who had desperately flown over from London, asked Generalissimo Gamelin, "General, where is the reserve-the masse de manoeuvre-to bring up against the German breakthrough?" The world's foremost professional soldier replied, according to Churchill's memoirs, "Aucune." (There isn't any.) General Weygand relieved him. We took the Maginot Line from behind with no trouble, since the guns pointed the other way; marched off to captivity sferred all the the French armies found sitting inside the forts and tunnels; tran cannon to the English Channel for use against the British; took all the stored food and equipment in the labyrinth; and left a few light bulbs to illuminate the empty concrete passageways. So the Maginot Line remains to this day. The French passed from the stage of historical greatness. Germany's implacable enemy of the centuries had at last come to grief. Strategically, they had guessed wrong on the use of industrial power in war, and had wasted their national energy and treasure on an enormous tragic joke in steel and concrete: half a wall. Tactically, when General Gamelin said, "Aucune," the military history of France was over. Shadows on the Victory In the headquarters of the Supreme Command, the victory over France, while welcome and exhilarating, had its worrisome aspects. Some of us who were present at the signing of the armistice watched with heavy hearts as the Fuhrer danced his little jig of triumph in the sunshine of Compagne. We were torn between pride in this feat of German arms, this virile reversal of the 1918 defeat, and our inside knowledge of tragic errors the capering Dictator had made or tried to make. These were completely covered up for the world at large by the rosy glow of success. Germany in that hour was like a virgin at a military ball, all radiant with the blushes aroused in her by the admiring eyes of handsome officers, and all unaware of a fatal cancer budding inside her. 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. But, six days after the breakthrough, when Rundstedt was rolling to the sea, with Guderion's panzers in the van and all enemy forces in flight, Hitler had a bad fit of nerves, fearing a French counterattack from the south-no likely at that moment than a Hottentot counterattack-and halted Rundstedt's army group f(more) or two precious days. Fortunately Guderion wangled permission for a "reconnaissance in force" westward. Thereupon he simply ignored the Fuhrer 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 Guderion's massed tanks, the Fuhrer halted Guderion on the River Aa, nine miles from Dunkirk, and forbade the tank divisions to advance for three days/ To this day nobody has factually ascertained why he did this. Theories are almost as abundant as military historians, but they add little to the facts. 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. I discuss in detail, under my section "Fantastic Halt at the River Aa," the preposterousness of the excuse that the terrain around Dunkirk was too marshy, and too crisscrossed by hedges and canals, for tank operations. The fact is that finally Guderion did advance, after seventy-two mortal hours in which the first golden chance for quick victory in World War II slipped from our grasp. Hermann Goering's Luftwaffe, was supPoed to take over from the halted armored divisions and finish off the British. Perhaps Hitler relished this notion of letting a Nazi air marshal in at the kill, instead of the distrusted Army General Star4. History records what Goering accompliehed. But if final victory was denied us, at least we had vanquished France; that much seemed indisputable. Yet on June 6 even this was momentarily cast in doubt when Hitler had another brainstorm. Paris, he suddenly declared, was not the objective; what our armies should do next was cut southeast in force and capture the Lorraine basin, so as to deny France its coal and armaments industries! Fortunately the momentum of operations was beyond even the Fuhrer's power' to meddle. We took Paris even while a number of divisions went wheeling needlessly into Lorraine. His Worst Mistake But worse than all these mistakes-so bad that history will forever stand amazed at the fact-the Wehrmacht arrived at the English Channel without any Plan of what to do next! There we were cit the sea, millions strong, crammed to the teeth, flushed with victory, facing beaten, disarmed, impotent enemy across a ditch forty miles wide; but our infallible Leader, who had all staff activitie, 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. Here nevertheless was a moment for greatness, such as comes once in a thousand years. Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon in their time had made mistakes as major as any of Hitler's. What they possessed to balance and outweigh these was generalship: the ability to divine and seize a favoring moment with the utmost speed and audacity. Yes, we had no plan for invading England, but had the British had a plan for crossing the Channel from Dunkirk in ascropedtogether 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 to London. The rescued expeditionary force was a disarmed rabble; all its equipment lay abandoned in Flanders. The Home Guard was a pathetic raggle-raggle of old men and boys. Opposing our invasion would have been the Royal Air Force and the British fleet, two formidable fighting organizations. But had Hitler seized the first moment in June, using every available vessel afloat in western and northern Europe-there thousands-to hurl an invasionbodyacrosstheChannel,thefleetwouldhavebeencaughtby(were) 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. Assuredly we would have taken very heavy losses. The attack phase and the supply problem would have cost dearly. Again we would have been staking all on one throw. But in the hindsight of history, what else was there to do? I have several times requested in writing, from American and German archivists, a copy of a draft memorandum I wrote in June 1940, outlining for headquarters discussion a plan for exactly such an immediate cross-Channel assault. My requests have gone unanswered. The memorandum is only a curiosity, and I have no way of knowing whether it has actually survived. At the time Jodl returned it to me without a single word, and that was the end of it. The Aborted Invasion Seelwew (Sea Lion), the invasion scheme scrambled together in the ensuing months, proved an exercise in leisurely futility. Forcing the Channel, once the British had caught their breath and fortified their coast, needed a complex buildup. Hitler never really pushed it. Against England he had lacked the greatness to dare all; and we gradually saw that he lacked the stomach to dare much. He merely allowed Goering to waste his Luftwaffe over the British aerodromes far inland, while the army and the navy frittered away weeks that stretched through the summer, disputing over the operation plan, and passing the buck back and forth. In the end, "Sea Lion" was abandoned. Germany certainly had A the industrial plant and the military strength to mount the invasion, but not the leadership. Wen an ounce more of boldness in battle might have won a worlci, Hitler faltered; and the professional generals were all in impotent subjection to this amateur. That was the real "triumph" of the Fuhrerprinzip in the summer of 1940. In retrospect, the wrong leader danced the jig.
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Roon's biting discussion of the Maginot Line and the French leadership leaves little more to be said. My friends in the Royal Navy stoutly deny that even in lune the Germans could have made it across the Channel. They would have thrown in every last ship they had, of course, to drown the invaders. It is a moot point, but in my judgment Roon makes out a fair case. The U-boats, which he does not mention, would have wreaked havoc in the narrow Channel against a defensively positioned fleet. Roon is on weaker ground in blaming Hitler for the lack of staff plans for an invasion. Had they had a feasible one ready, he might have activated it, as he did the Manstein Plan. Apparently, there was in the files a sketchy naval staff study, and nothing more. The German General Staff in World War II had a strange tendency not to see beyond the next hill, or maybe they preferred not to look.-V.H. BIG GERMAN BREAKTHROUGH IN BELGIUM! Still Not Our Fight, Declares Lacouture AssiNc a newsstand on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh PStreet, where a fresh stack of afternoon papers fluttered under a cobblestone, Janice Lacouture said to Madeline, "Oh gawd, there's Daddy again, sounding off. Won't your folks be impressed!" Madeline was helping her shop for her trousseau. Rhoda, Pug, and Byron were due at three o'clock in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, aboard the cruiser Helena. Janice's first encounter with Warren's mother was much on her mind, far more so than the bad war news. A rough May wind swooped along the avenue, whipping the girls skirts and hats. Madeline clutched a package with one hand and her hat with the other, peering at the two-column photograph of Congressman Isaac Lacouture on the Capitol steps, with three microphones thrust in his face. "He's handsome, you know," she said. "I hope you'll like him. He's really an awfully smart man," Janice said, pitching her voice above the wind. "Actually the reporters have pushed him further than he ever intended to go. Now he's way out on a limb." Madeline had redecorated the little flat. The walls were pale green, with cream-and-green flowered draperies. New Danish teak furniture, austere and slight, made the place seem roomier. jonquils and irises in a bowl on the dining table touched the place with spring and youth, much as the two girls did when they walked in. It was not a flat where one expected to find a Communist boyfriend. Indeed Madeline had long since discarded the poor popeyed trombone player in brown-something Janice had been relieved to learn. Her current boyfriend was a CBS lawyer, a staunch Roosevelt man and very bright, but going bald at twenty-six. She called her telephone answering service, briskly jotted notes on a pad, and slammed the receiver down. "Rats. I can't go with you to meet my folks, Janice, after all. Isn't that a pain? Two of the amateurs have loused out. I have to spend the afternoon listening to replacements. Always something!" She was clearly quite pleased with herself at being kept so busy. "Now. Do you happen to know a man named Palmer Kirby? He's at the Waldorf and he says he's afriend of the family." Janice shook her head. Madeline rang him and liked his voice with his first words; it had a warm humorous resonance. "You are Rhoda Henry's daughter? I saw your name in the book and took a chance." "Yes, I am." "Good. Your family was very hospitable to me in Berlin. Your mother wrote me they'd be arriving today. I just thought they might be tired and at a loose end, their first evening in New York. I'd like to take all of you to dinner." "That's kind of you, but I don't know their plans. They won't arrive till one or so." "I see. Well, suppose I make the dinner reservations? If your folks can come, I'll expect you all in my suite at six or so. If not, just give me a ring, or your mother can." "I guess so, sure. Thank you. Warren's fiancee is visiting me, Mr. Kirby." "Ike Lacouture's daughter? Excellent. By all means bring her." Off Madeline went, brimming with zest for existence, while Janice changed into warmer clothes for the Navy Yard. Madeline was now the "program coordinator" of The Walter Field Anwteur Hour. Walter Field, an old ham actor, had stumbled into great radio popularity with the hackneyed vaudeville formula of amateur entertainment. Suddenly made rich, he had gone into a whirl of big real estate deals, and just as suddenly dropped dead. Hugh Cleveland had stepped in as master of ceremonies. Madeline still fetched chicken sandwiches and coffee for him, but she now also interviewed the amateurs. She remained Cleveland's assistant for his morning show, and she was making more money than ever. For Madeline Henry, May 1940 was as jolly a month as she had ever lived. In the Brooklyn Navy Yard the wind was stronger and colder. The cruiser was already tied up at the pier, fluttering a rainbow of signal flags strung down from the mast to stem and stern. Amid a swarm of waving, shouting relatives on the pier, war refugees were streaming off the gangway. Janice found her way to the customs shed, where Rhoda stood by a heap of luggage, blowing her nose. The tall young blonde in a green wool suit and toque caught Rhoda's eye. "Well, isn't this Janice? I'm Rhoda Henry," she said, stepping forward. "The snapshots didn't do you justice at ALL." "Oh, yes, Mrs. Henry! Hello!" Rhoda's willowy figure, modish straw hat, and fuchsia gloves and shoes surprised Janice. Warren's father had struck Janice, during their brief meeting in Pensacola, as a coarse-grained weather-beaten man. By contrast Mrs. Henry seemed youthful, elegant, even sexy. This was true despite the woman's reddened nose and frequent sneezing.