Chapter 2

If they do, the Luftwaffe will pound them to a jelly in short order. No, I fear me this round goes to Fritz. No doubt they'll have another go t',Venty years bence, when I devoutly hope to be out to pasture." "But we can't count on the war ending," Natalie expostulated. "Oh, I think you can. I expect peace by July first, if not sooner, Natalie. Then these wartime exit regulations will lapse and your uncle can just pick up and go home. Actually, this gives him the leisure to sort and crate his books. He seemed so concerned about his books." "I want to take Uncle Aaron home tomorrow, and abandon books and everything. Please give him the passport." "My dear, the contradiction in dates is right there in your uncle's expired book. It's incredible how those things used to slip through, but I've seen a hundred such cases if I've seen one. People used to be mighty careless! Now that it's been detected and made a matter of record, he has no more claim to America citizenship, technically speaking, than Hitler does. I couldn't be sorrier, but it's my duty to tell you the law." This man was getting on Natalie's nerves. The use of Hitler's name disgusted her. "It strikes me that your duty is to help us, and that you're not really doing it." He opened his eyes very wide, blinked, drank more P-vian, and slowly stuffed his pipe, staring at the tobacco. "I have a suggestion. It's off the record, but I think it'll work." "Tell me, by all means." He pushed his hair straight up. "Just go." She stared at him. "I mean that! He's got his visa. You've got your passport. Hop a bus or train, or hire a car, and scoot to Naples. Ignore the confinement to Siena. The Italians are so sloppy! Get on the first boat and just leave. You won't be stopped. Nobody's watching your uncle." "But won't they ask for an exit permit?" ,it's a trivial formality, dear. Say you lost it! Fumbling for it, you happen to take out a few thousand lire and put it on the table." He blinked humorously. "Customs of the country, you know." Natalie felt her self-control giving way. Now the man was advising them to bribe an official, to risk arrest and imprisonment in a Fascist country. Her voice rose to shrillness. "I think I'd rather go to Rome and tell the Consul General that you're thwarting the desire of the Secretary of State." The consul drew himself up, smoothed his hair with both hands, put them on the table, and said slowly and primly, "That is certainly your privilege. I'm prepared to take the consequences of that, but not of breaking the law. As it happens, I'm exceptionally busy,several other people are waiting, w-" Natalie understood now how her uncle had fallen foul of this man. With a quick change to a placating smile, she said, 'I'm sorry. I've been travelling for two straight weeks, I've just lost my father, and I'm not in the best of shape. My uncle's disabled and I'm very troubled about him." At once the consul responded to the new manner. 'I entirely understand, Natalie. Tell you what, I'll comb his file again. Maybe I'll come up with something. Believe me, I'd like nothing better than to see Men go." "You will try to find a way to give him a passport?" "Or to get him out. That's all you want, isn't it?" "Yes." "I'll give it my serious attention. That's a promise. Come back in a week." (from WORLD EMPIRE LOST) The False Legend The British have always been brilliant at war propaganda. Their portrayal of the so-called Battle of Britain was their supreme triumph of words. For uninformed people, their propaganda has hardened into history. A serious military discussion has to start by clearing away the fairy tales. After the fall of France, Germany was incomparably stronger than England on the ground, about equally matched in the air, and gravely inferior at sea. Our surface navy was weak and meager; only the U-boat arm had real weight. The vhole problem in the summer of 1940 was to force a decision across a sea barrier. In a set-piece invasion campaign, therefore, the British held the crucial advantage. I have already stated, in my outline of Case Yellow, my belief that had we improvised a surprise crossing in June, when the disarmed British land forces were reeling home from Dunkirk, and their fleet was on far-flung stations, we might have conquered England in a short fierce campaign. But Hitler had passed up that chance. The resilient English had caught their breaths, instituted drastic anti-invasion measures, and marshalled their powerful navy to block a channel crossing, At that point, Germany could only attack in the air, either to force a decision or to blast a path for invasion. At the start one must compare the opposed air forces. Ninety-nine out of a hundred people, including Germans, still believe that a vast and powerful Luftwaffe was defeated by a valorous handful of Thermopylae defenders in R.A.F uniformsr, in the words of the great phrasemaker, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." In fact, both Germany and England had about a thousand fighter planes when the contest began. Germany'bomber command was larger than England's, but the English bombers, at least the newer ones,(s) were heavier, longer-ranged, and more powerfully armed. Hitler and Goering, of course, voiced the most extravagant boasts about the Luftwaffe, to induce the British to make peace. Churchill, on the other hand, played up the fact that England was outnumbered and alone, so as to pull the United States into the war. As a result, the contest took on a false aspect of David against Goliath. British Advantages Not only is the conventional picture distorted on the comparison of forces; it takes no account of the handicaps under which the Luftwaffe operated. Most of the battle was fought over the British air bases. Every German pilot shot down over land was lost, either dead or a prisoner. But a downed British pilot, if he were unharmed, could soon take another plane into the skies. The German pilot had only a few minutes of flying time in which to do battle, for our fighters had a fuel limit of ninety minutes or so, most of which was consumed simply in getting to the scene and returning to base. The British pilot, as soon as he had climbed to combat altitude, could fight until he ran out of bullets or gas. Because of our fighter planes' short range, we could reach only the southeast corner of England. The Luftwaffe was like a tethered falcon, with London at the far end of the tether. The rest of the United Kingdom was,fairly safe from air attack, because unescorted bombers ran a high risk of annihilation. The Royal Air Force could retire beyond range at will for rest and repair; and for beyond the firing line could keep fresh reserves and could rush the building of new planes. Our fighters were further handicapped by orders to fly in close formation with the bombers, like destroyers screening battleships. No doubt this gave the bomber pilots a sense of security, but it hobbled the fighters. In air combat, "seek out and destroy" is the rule of rules. Fighter pilot teams should be free to roam the air space, spot the enemy, and strike first. Goering could never grasp this elementary point, though his fighter aces kept urging it on him. As our bomber losses climbed, he insisted more and more violently that the fighters should nursemaid the bombers, almost wingtip to wingtip. This seriously depressed pilot morale, already strained by prolonged combat and the death of many comrades. Finally, the British in 1940 had one lucky scientific edge. They were first in the field with bottleworthy radar and the fighter control it made possible. They could follow our incoming flights and speed their fighters straight at us. No fuel was wasted in patrol, nor were forces dispersed in search. If not for this factor alone, the Luftwaffe fighter command might have won a quick knockout victory. For in the end the Luftwaffe did all but shoot the Royal Air Force out of the skies. Churchill himself-and he is not interested in praising the German efort-states that in September the battle tilted against his fighter command.
Our attack at that point shifted to strategic bombing of London. Churchill asserts tho' ns G,), mina' "all mistne. In the provocative terror-bombing of our cities which required stern immediate retaliation, and the fact that invasion had to be tried before October 1 or not at all, the shift was almost mandatory. I discuss this point in detail in my daybyday analysis of the campaign. The Purpose of "Eagle Attack" Adierangriff, the Luftwaffe's "Eagle Attack" on England in the summer of 1940, was essentially a peacemaking gesture. It was a limited effort, intended to convince the British that to prolong the war would serve no purpose. The effort had to be made before the attack on Russia, to protect our rear to the westward. That it failed was of course a tragedy for Germany, since we were condemned to carry on this climactic world battle on two fronts. Historians are curiously slow to realize that it was more tragic for England. Germany, after all, entered the war with little to lose, but in 1939 England was the world's first power. As a result of the war, though a supposed victor, she lost her world-girdling empire and shrank to the size of her home islands. Had the Adieranqriff induced her to make peace with Germany in 1940, that empire would almost surely still be hers, so it is hard to understand why the so-called Bottle of Britain was her "finest hour." Her pilots performed with dash and valor, like'their German racial cousins. But England threw away her last chance to prolong her world role, linked to a vigorous rising continental power; after that, she allied herself with Bolshevism to crush that power, Europe's last bastion against barbaric Asia; and she become as a result a weak withered satellite of the United States. This debacle was all the work of the visionary adventurer Churchill, to whom the people had never before given supreme office. Churchill cost himself in the role of St. George saving the world from the horrible, German dragon. He had the pen and the tongue to push this legend. He himself always believed it. The English believed it long enough to lose their empire, before becoming disillusioned and voting him out. Hitter and England Of all things, Hitler wanted no war with England. To this, I can personally testify. I do not need to, for it is written plainly in his turgid and propagandistic self-revelation, Mein Kampf. I saw his face at a staff conference on the day that England gave its strategically insane guarantee to Poland. I saw it again by chance in a corridor of the chancellery, on September 3, when contrary to Rib aive,) t.eons (--t of bad weather, bentrop's assurances, England marched.
That time, it was the face of a shattered man. It is impossible to understand what happened in 1940 without having this fact about Adolf Hitler firmly in mind, for from the start of the war to the end, German strategy, German tactics, and German foreign policy were never anything but this man's personal will. No world-historical figure, when entering the scene, ever made his aims and his program clearer. By comparison, Alexander, Charles XII, and Napoleon were improvisers, moving where chance took them. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote in bombastic street-agitator language what he intended to do upon attaining power; and in the twelve years of his reign he did it. He wrote that the heart of German policy was to seize territory from Russia. That effort was the fulcrum of the Second World War, the sole goal of German arms. He also wrote that before this could be attempted, our traditional enemy France would have to be knocked out. In discussing England, Hitler in Mein Kampf praises the valor of the race, its historical acumen, and its excellent imperial administration. Germany's grand aim, he says, must be a Nordic racial alliance in which England maintains its sea empire, while Germany as its equal partner takes first place on the continent and acquires new soil in the east. From this conception Hitler never departed. When Churchill spurned his many peace offers, he felt a frustrated fury, which he vented on the Jews of Europe, since he felt that British Jewry was influencing Churchill's irrational policy. Almost to the hour of his suicide, Hitler hoped that England would see the light and would come to the only sensible arrangement of the world that was possible, short of abandoning one half to Bolshevism, and the other half to the dollar-obsessed Americans-the outcome the world must now live with. In these considerations lies the secret of the failure of Adierangriff; of our arrival at the coast, facing panicky England, without an operational plan for ending the war; and of the persistently unreal air about the Sea Lion plan, which, after elaborate and costly preparations, never came off. In the last analysis, the set-piece invasion did not sail because Hitler had no heart for beating England, and somehow our armed forces sensed this. The Air Battle The battle went in several stages. The Luftwaffe first attempted to make the British fight over the Channel, by attacking shipping. When the R.A.F would not come out and fight for the ships, Goering bombed the fighter bases. This forced the British fighter planes into the air. After knocking them about pretty badly, Goering-pushed by Hitler because of unconscionable British bombing of our civilians-sent in his bombers in the great Valhalla waves against London and other major cities, hoping to cause the people to depose Churchill and make peace. Hitler's July 19 speech, though perhaps a little blustery in language, had set forth very generous terms. But all was in vain, and the October rains and fogs closed gray curtains on the weary stalemate in the air. So ended the "Battle of Britain," with honors even, and England badly battered but gallantly hanging on.
Most military writers still blame Goering for our "defeat" over England. But this falls into the trap of the Churchillion legend that the Luftwaffe was beaten. That Germany's sparkling air force could do no better than fight a draw, I do, however, lay to Goering's charge. Despotic political control of an armed force, here as in Case Yellow, again meant amateurism in the saddle. Hermann Goering was a complicated mixture of good and bad qualities. He was clever and decisive, and before he sank into stuporous luxury, he had the brutality to enforce the hardest decisions. All this was to the good. But his vanity shut his mind to reason, and his obstinacy and greed crippled aircraft design and production. Until Speer come into the picture, the Luftwaffe was worse hit by bad management and supply on the ground than by any enemy in the air, including the Royal Air Force in 1940. Goering vetoed excellent designs for heavy bombers, and built a short-range air force as a ground support tool. Then in 1940 he threw the lightly built Luftwaffe into a strategic bombing mission beyond its capabilities, which nevertheless almost succeeded. As a ground support force, the Luftwaffe shone in Poland and France and in the opening attack on the Soviet union. It fell off as our armies got further and further away from the air bases; ut for quick knockout war on land, its achievements have yet to be surpassed. In popular history-which is only Churchill's wartime rhetoric, frozen into historical error-Hitler the raging tiger sprang first on Poland, then insensately turned and tore France to death, then reached his blood-dripping claws toward England and recoiled snarling from a terrible blow between the eyes from the R.A.F. Maddened, blinded, balked at the water's edge, he turned from west to east and hurled himself against Russia to his doom. In fact, from start to finish Hitler soberly and coolly-though with selfdefeating amateurish mistakes in combat situations-followed out the political goals laid down in Mein Kampf, step by step. He yearned to come to terms with England. No victorious conqueror ever tried harder to make peace. The failure to achieve this peace through the Eagle attack was of course a disappointment. It meant that our rear remained open to nuisance attack from England while we launched the main war in the east. It meant we had to divert precious limited resources to U-boats. Above all it meant the increasing intervention of America under Roosevelt. The Final Tragedy These nagging results of British obduracy festered in Adolf Hitler's spirit. He had in any case an unreasonable attitude toward the Jewish people. But the regrettable excesses which he at last permitted trace directly to this frustration in the west. A Germany allied with England even with a benevolently neutral England-would never have drifted into those excesses. But our notion was beleaguered, cut off from civilization, and we became locked in a mortal combat with a primitive, giant Bolshevist country. Humane considerationswent by the board. Behind the line, in conquered Poland and Russia, the neurotic extremists of the Nazi Party were free to give rein to their criminal tendencies. Hitler, enraged by the Churchillion opposition, was in no mood to stop them, as he could have with one word. When crossed, he was a formidable personality. This was the most important result of the "Battle of Britain." TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Roon's discussion of the Bottle of Britain is unacceptable. It is not a Teutonic trait to admit defeat gracefully. I have read most of the important German military books on the war, and few of them manage to digest this bitter pill. But Roon's far-fetched thesis that Winston Churchill's stubbornness caused the murder of the European Jews may be the low point in all this literature of self-extenuation. His figures on the airplanes involved in the battle are unreliable. To be sure, few statistics of the war are harder to pin down. Depending on the date one takes as the start, the original balance of forces differs. Thereafter the figures change week by week due to combat losses and replacements. The fog of war at the lime wos dense, and both commands riddled ,with, tangled records. Still, no official source I have read calls it an equal match, as Roon calmly does. His assertion that the attack was a "peacemaking gesture" is as ridiculous as his claim that the outcome was a draw. If there is ever another major war, I devoutly hope the United States armed forces will not fight such a "draw." "Popular history" has it right. Goering tried to get daylight mastery of the air, the two fighter commands slugged it out, and he failed; then he tried to bomb the civilian population into quitting, First by day and then by night, and failed. The British fighter pilots turned the much larger Luftwaffe back, and saved the world from the Germans. The sea invasion never come off because Hitler's admirals and generals convinced him that the British would drown too many Germans on the way across, and in Churchill's words, "knock on the head the rest who crawled ashore." A navy remains a handy thing to have around when the going gets rough. I hope my countrymen will remember this. There was no clear-cut moment of victory for the British. They really won when Sea Lion was called off, but this Hitler backdown was a secret. The Luftwore kept up heavy night raids on the cities, and this with the U-boat sinkings made the outlook for England darker and darker until Hitler attacked the Soviet union. But the Luftwaffe never recovered from the Battle of Britain. This was one reason why the Germans failed to take Moscow in 1941. The blitzkrieg ran out of blitz in Russia because it had dropped too much of it on the He/ds of Kent and Surrey, and in the streets of London.-V.H. ILVERY fat barrage baloons, shining in the cloudless sky ahead of the S plane before landcame in view, gave the approach to the British Isles a carnival touch. The land looked very peaceful in the fine August weather. Automobiles and lorries crawled on narrow roads, through rolling yellowand-green patchwork fields marked off by dark hedgerows. Tiny sheep were grazing; farmers like little animated dolls were reaping corn. The plane passed over towns and cities clustered around gray spired cathedrals, and again over streams, woods, moors, and intensely green hedge-bounded fields, the pleasant England of the picture books, the paintings, and the poems. This was the end of a tedious week-long journey for Pug via Zurich, Madrid, Lisbon, and Dublin. It had begun with the arrival in Berlin of a wax-sealed envelope in the pouch from Washington, hand-addressed in red ink: Top Secret-Captain Victor Henry only. Inside he had found a sealed letter from the White House. Dear Pug: Vice C.N.O says you are a longtime booster of "radar." The British are secretly reporting to us a big success in their air battle with something called "RDF." How about going there now for a look, as we discussed? You'll get dispatch orders, and our friends will be expecting you. London should be interesting now, if a bit warm. Let me know if you think it's too warm for us to give them fifty destroyers. FDR Pug had had mixed feelings about these chattily phrased instructions. Any excuse to leave Berlin was welcome. The red-ink blare and boasts in the meager newspapers were becoming intolerable; so were the happy triumphant Germans in government offices, chortling about the pleasant postwar life that would start in a month or so; so were the women strolling the tree-lined boulevards, looking slyly complacent in French siM and cosmetics. Pug even felt guilty eating the plunder in the improved restaurant menus: Polish hams, Danish butter, and French veal AL and wine. The gleeful voices of the radio announcers, claiming staggering destruction of British airplanes and almost no Luftwaffe losses, rasped his nerves as he sat alone in the evenings in the Grunewald mansion looted from a vanished Jew. An order to leave all this behind was a boon. But the letter dismayed him, too. He had not walked the deck of a ship now in the line of duty for more than four years, and this shore-bound status appeared to be hardening. Walking home that afternoon he passed the rusting olive-painted Flakturm, and like nothing else it made him realize how glad he would be to get out of Berlin. People no longer gawked at the high tower bristling at the top with guns, as they had when the girder frame and the thick armor plates had been going up, Guesses and rumors about it had run fast and wild for weeks. Now the story was out. It was an A.A. platform for shooting at low-flying bombers. No high building could get in the lines of fire, for it rose far above the tallest rooftops jn Berlin, a crudeeyesore. So far the few English raiders had hugged maximum altitude, but the Germans seemed to think of everything. This gigantic drab iron growth, towering over the playing children and elderly strollers in the pretty Tiergarten, seemed to Victor Henry to epitomize the Nazi regime. The lonely cavernous house got on his nerves that evening, as his quiet-stepping Gestapo butler served him pork chops from Denmark at one end of the long bare dining table. Pug decided that if he had to come back he would'take a room at the Adlon. He packed suits and uniforms, the great weariness of an attache's existence: morning coa dress blues, dress whites, evening uniforn-4 khakis, civilian street clothes, civilian dinner jacket. He wrote letters to Rhoda, Warren, and Byron, and went to sleep thinking of his wife, and thinking, too, that in London he would probably see Pamela Tudsbury. Next day Pug's assistant attache, a handsome co mander who spoke perfect German, said he would be glad to take over his duties and appointments. He happened to be a relative of Wendel! Willkie. Since the Republican convention, he had become popular with the Germans. "I guess I'll have to hang around this weekend, eh?" he said. "TOO bad. I was going out to Abendruh with the Wolf Stellers-They've been awfully kind to me lately. They said Goering might be there." "Go by all means," said Pug. "You might pick up some dope about how the Luftwaffe's really doing. Tell your wife to take along a pair of heavy bloomers-l' He enjoyed leaving the attache staring at him, mystified and vaguely offended. And so he had departed from Berlin. How the devil do you keep looking so fit?" he said to Blinker Vance, the naval attache who met him at the London airport. After a quarter of a century, Vance still batted his eyes as he talked, just as he had at Annapolis, putting the plebe Victor Henry on report for a smudged white shoe. Vance wore a fawn-colored sports jacket of London cut, and gray trousers. His face was dried and lined, but he still had the flat waist of a second classman. "Well, Pug, it's pretty good tennis weather. I've been getting in a couple of hours every day." "Really? Great war you've got here." "Oh, the war. It's going on up there somewhere, mostly to the south." Vance vaguely A,aved a hand up at the pellucid heavens. "We do get some air raid warnings, but so far the Germans haven't dropped anything on London. You see contrails once in a while, then you know the fighters are numng it up close by. Otherwise you just listen to the BBC for the knockdown reports. Damn strange war, a sort of airplane numbers game." Having just toured bombed areas in France and the Low Countries, Henry was struck by the serene, wholly undamaged look of London, the density of the auto traffic, and the cheery briskness of Itbe well-dressed sidewalk crowds. The endless shop windows crammed withgood things surprised him. Berlin, even with its infusion of loot, was by comparison a bleak military compound. Vance drove Victor Henry to a London apartment off Grosvenor Square, kept by the Navy for visiting senior officers: a dark Hat on an areaway, with a kitchen full of empty beer and whiskey bottles, a dining room, a small sitting room, and three bedrooms along a hall. "I guess you'll be a bit crowded here," Vance said, glancing around at the luggage and scattered clothes of two other occupants in the apartment. "Be glad of the company." Blinker grimaced, winked his eyes, and said tentatively, "Pug, I didn't know you'd become one of these boffins." "Boffins?" "Scientific red-hots. That's what they call 'em here. The word is you came for a look-see at their newest stuff, with a green light from way high UP." Victor Henry said, unstrapping his bags, "Really?" The attache grinned at his taciturnity. "You'll hear from the Limeys next. This is the end of the line for me-until I can be of service to you, one way or another." The loud coarse ring of a London telephone, quite different in rhythm and sound from the Berlin double buzz, startled Pug out of a nap. A slit of sunlight gleamed through drawn brovrn curtains. "Captain Henry? Major-General Tillet here, office of military History." The voice was high, crisp, and very British. "I'm just driving down to Portsmouth tomorrow. Possibly drop in on a Chain Home station. You wouldn't care to come along?" Pug had never heard the expression C-n Honw. "That'll be fine, General. Thank you." "Oh, really? jolly good!" Tillet sounded delighted, as though he had suggested something boring and Pug had been unexpectedly gracious. "Suppose I pick you up at five, and we avoid the morning traffic? You might take along a shaving kit and a shirt." Pug heard whiskeyish laughter in the next bedroom, the boom of a man and the tinkling of a young woman. It was six o'clock. He turned on the radio and dressed. A mild Schubert trio ended, one he had often heard on the Berlin station, and news came on. In a calm, almost desultory voice, the broadcaster told of a massive air battle that had been raging all afternoon. The PAF had shot down more than a hundred German planes, and had lost twenty-five. Half the British pilots had safely parachuted. The fight was continuing, the announcer said. If therewere any truth in this almost ludicrously understated bulletin, Pug thought, an astonishing victory was shaping up, high and invisible in the sky, while the Londoners went about their business. He found Pamela Tudsbury's number in the telephone book and called her. A different girl answered, with a charming voice that became more charming when Victor Henry identified himself. Pamela was a W.A.A.F now, she told him, working at a headquarters outside London. She gave him another number to call. He tried it, and there Pamela was. "Captain Henry! You're here! Oh, wonderful! Well, you picked the right day to arrive, didn't you?" "Is it really going well, Pam?" "Haven't you heard the evening news?" 'I'm not used to believing the radio." She gave an exhilarated laugh. "Oh, to be sure. The Berlin Radio. MY God, it's nice to talk to YOU. Well, it's all quite true. We've mauled them today. But they're still coming. I have to go back on duty in an hour. I'm just snatching a bite to eat. I heard one officer say it was the turning POirlt of the war. By the way, if inspection tours are in order for you, you might bear in mind that I'm working at Group Operations, Number Eleven Fighter Group." "Will do. How's your fiance?" "Oh, Ted? Fit as a flea. He's on the ground at the moment. He's had a busy day! Poor fellow, old man of the squadron, just turned twenty-nine. Loo here, any chance that we can sec you? Ted's squadron gets its spell off ops next'week. We'll undoubtedly come down to London together. How long will you be here?" "Well, next week I should still be around." "Oh, lovely. Let me have your number then, and I'll call you. I'm so glad you're here." He went out for a walk. London wore a golden light that evening, the light of a low sun shining through clear air. He zigzagged at random down crooked streets, along elegant rows of town houses, and through a green park where swans glided on calm water. He came to Trafalgar Square, and walked on through the Whitehall government buildings and along the Thames to Westminster Bridge. Out to the middle of the bridge he strolled, and stood there, looking at the untouched famous old City stretching on both sides of the river. London's top-heavy red buses and scuttling black little taxis streamed across the bridge amidan abundant flow of private cars. Berlin's sparse traffic had been mostly government or army machines. London was a no Flakturmcivilian city still, he thought, for all the uniforms. It had The British seemed to have produced their navy and their R.A.F from the mere table scraps of the prosperity still visibly spread here. Now these table-scrap forces had to hold the line. His job was to make a guess whether they would; also, to see whether their new electronic stuff was really advanced. Looking at this pacific and rich scene, he doubted it. He dined alone in a small restaurant, on good red roast beef such as one could only dream of in Berlin. The apartment was dark and silent when he returned. He went to bed after listening to the news. The claimed box score for the day was now a hundred thirty German planes down, forty-nine British. Could it be true? The small bald moustached general, in perfectly tailored khakis, smoked a stubby pipe as he drove, a severe look on his foxy much-wrinkled face. It had occurred to Victor Henry, after the phone conversation, that he might well be E. J. Tillet, the military author, whose books be greatly admired. And so he was; Tillet more or less resembled his book-jacket pictures, though in those the had looked twenty years younger. Pug was not inclined to start a conversationwith(man) this forbidding pundit. Tillet said almost nothing as he spun his little Vauxhall along highways and down back roads. By the sun, Pug saw they were moving straight south. The further south they went, the more warlike the country looked. Signposts were gone, place names painted out, and some towns seemed deserted. Great loops of barbed steel rods overarched the unmarked roads. Tillet said, pointing, "To stop glider landings," and shut up again. Victor Henry finally tired of the sin e and the beautiful rolling scenery. He said, "I guess the Germans too Ikea chad beating yesterday." Tillet puffed until his pipe glowed and crackled. Victor Henry thought he wasn't going to reply. Then he burst out, "I told Hitler the range of the Messerschmitt log was far too short. He agreed with me, and said he'd take it up with Goering. But the thing got lost in the Luftwaffe bureaucracy. It's a great mistake to think dictators are all-powerful! They're hobbled by their paper shutters, like all politicians. More so, in a way. Everybody lies to them, out of fear or sycophancy. Adolf Hitler walks in a web of flattery and phony figures. He does an amazing job, considering. He's got a nose for facts. That's his mark of genius. You've met him, of course?" "Once or twice." great admirer of mine, or so"I had several sessions with him. He's a he says. His grasp is quick and deep. The gifted amateur is often like that. I said Goering was making the same mistake with his fighter planes designing them for ground support-that the French were making with their tanks. You don't have to give a ground support machine much range, because the fuel trucks are always close at hand to fill them up. Those French tanks were superb fighting machines, and they had thousands of them. But the wretched things could only run fifty, sixty miles at a crack. Guderian drove two hundred miles a day. Some difference! The French never could get it into their heads that tanks should mass and operate independently. God knows Fuller, de Gaulle, and I tried hard enough to explain it to them." The car was bumping along 4 muddy detour past concrete dragons' teeth and a stone wall, ringed in barbed wire, that blocked the higbwa-". Masked workmen were raising clouds of gray dust with pneumatic hammers and drills. "There's foolishness for you." Tillet pointed at the tank trap with his Pipe. "Intended to halt invaders. What this rubbish actually would do is reduce the maneuverability of our reserve to zero. Happily Brooke's taken charge now. He's cleaning all this out." Pug said, "General Alan Brooke, is that?" "Yes, our best man, a genius in the field. He managed the Dunkirk retreat. I was with his headquarters. I saw him demoralized only once. Headquarters shifting from Armentires to Lille." Tillet knocked out his pipe in dashboardtrayand(was) shifted his cold gray eyes to Pug. "The roads were crammed with refugees.(a) Our command cars could hardly move. The Armentieres lunatic asylum had been bombed. All the boobies had got out. There must have been two thousand of them all over the road, in loose brown corduroy pajamas, moping, drooling, and giggling. They swarmed around our car and looked into the windows, dripping saliva, making silly faces, waggling their hands. Alan turned to me. it's a rout,. Ted," he said. 'We're lost, you know, the whole BEF's lost. We've lost the damned war." That's when I said, 'Never mind, Alan. There are a lot more lunatics on the German side of the hill, including the boss." Well, that made him laugh, for the first time in days. After that he became himself again. A word in season, the Good Book says." "Do you think Hitler's crazy?" Henry said. Tillet chewed at his pipe, eyes on the road. "He's a split personality. Half the time he's areasonable, astute politician. When he's beyond his depth he gets mystical, pompous, and silly. He informed me that the English Channel was just another river obstacle, and if he wanted to cross, why, the Luftwaffe would simply operate artillery, and the navy engineers. Childish. All in all, I rather like the fellow. There's(as) an odd pathos about him.(as) He seems sincere, and lonely. Of course"there's nothing for it now but to finish him off.-Hullo, we almost missed that Turn. Let's have a look at the airfield." This was Pug's first look at a scene in England that resembled beaten Poland and France. Bent blackened girders hung crazily over wrecked aircraft in the hangars. Burned-out planes stood in sooty skeletal rows on the field, where bulldozers were grinding around rubble heaps and cratered runways. "Jerry did quite a job here," said Tillet cheerfully. "Caught us napping." The ruined airfield lay amid grassy fields dotted with wild flowers, where herds of brown cattle grazed and lowed. Away from the burned buildings, the air smelled like a garden. Tillet said as they drove off, 'Goering's just starting to make sense, going for the airfields and plane factories. He's wasted a whole bloody month bombing harbors and pottering about after convoys. He's only got till the equinox, the damned fool-the Channel's impassable after about September the fifteenth. His mission is mastery of the air, not blockade. Define your mission!" he snapped at Victor Henry like a schoolmaster. "Define your mission! And stick to it!" Tillet cited Waterloo, lost for want of a few handfuls of nails and a dozen hammers, because a general forgot his mission. Marshal They's premature cavalry charge against Wellington's center, he said, surprised and overran the British batteries, gaining a golden chance to spike the guns. But nobody had thought of bringing along hammers and nails. "Had the), spiked those guns," said Tillet through his teeth-puffing angrily at his clenched pipe, chopping a hand on the steering wheel, and getting very worked up and red-faced-"had Marshal They remembered what the hell his charge was all about, had one Frenchman among those five thousand thought about his mission, we'd be living in a different world. With our artillery silenced, the next cavalry charge would have broken Wellin ton's center. We'd have had a French-dominated Europe for the next hundred and fifty years, instead of a vacuum into which the German came boiling up. We fought the Kaiser in 1914 and we're fighting Adolf right now because that ass They forgot his mission at Waterloo-if he ever kne", it." "For want of a nail the kingdom was lost," said Pug. "Damned right!" "I don't know much about Waterloo, but I never heard that version.