Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

“Perhaps not,” replied the marshal, his right hand alternately opening and closing to a fist, leaving a finger pointing at the Ljubljana pass. “But the Yugoslavs might stop themselves. With Serbs versus Croats. In any case, Colonel, by the time the Yugoslavs reach southern Germany, the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket could have expanded. No — what we need are more troops. And quickly — so that we can annihilate NATO.” His arms swept across the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket. “Before they can catch their breath. We need to destroy their convoys — and we need more men.”

“You’re thinking,” proffered the colonel, “of the Far East divisions.”

The marshall nodded. In the Far Eastern military theater, the Soviet Union, ever wary of the long-standing and often bitter border disputes with China’s one point four billion and India’s eight hundred million, maintained over fifty divisions, almost a million men, fifteen thousand tanks, sixteen thousand artillery and mortar pieces, and more than fifteen hundred tactical aircraft.

“I have already requested them,” said the marshal. “Whether I get them is another matter.”

“I’m sure you’ll get what you need, Marshal,” said the colonel optimistically.

“Why is it,” the marshal asked no one in particular, running thick, stubby hands through thinning white hair as he looked at the red-flagged bulge on the wall map that marked the disposition of the Soviet armies’ deep penetration of Germany, “that the young are so incurably optimistic?”

A soldier brought the marshal’s tea. “Is it,” continued the marshal, picking up the hard cube of sugar, “because they have no history? Or is it because they have not seen the defeats?” He raised the glass of tea, sucking the hot, steaming liquid through the cube of sugar until it disintegrated in a crunch of tobacco-stained teeth. “I think it is because they have not smelled war,” the marshal answered himself.

Until this moment the colonel had thought he had very much been in the war, but the marshal’s voice, utterly devoid of sentimentality, hard in its every estimate, conveyed to him the sudden truth that up till now, what he had thought was war had only been war behind the front lines, in the relative comfort of albeit makeshift headquarters in the ancient German capitals. Suddenly the colonel felt he needed the comfort of knowing that more men were coming. That thousands would come to aid them — so as to crush the British, American, and Germans in one decisive stroke. To bury all uncertainty.

“Marshal?”

“Yes?”

“Sir — this is meant as no criticism, but I was wondering if it might not be more efficient if we carried out all disposition-of-forces information by radio phone rather than by dispatch rider.”

“You’re worried about our gasoline supply for the armor, eh? Well, so am I. Our supply line is overextended, and I realized that every drop—”

“No, sir. I meant, wouldn’t it be faster — better — to rely on our electronics rather than—”

“Faster,” said the marshal, “of course. But better?” He grimaced, but there was also the hint of a smile. “I don’t think so.”

The colonel was flabbergasted. Had the marshal not attended officers’ school? But the colonel would later remember the incident as the turning point of his military career — the point at which the marshal had dragged him out of the twentieth century into the new age.

Four thousand miles away, it was late afternoon, a stiff easterly clearing New York of its pollution haze, the twin towers of the World Trade Center reflecting the turquoise sky like two enormous slabs of green ice towering above the skyline. But the high wisps of cirrus cloud and the vibrant color of the sky went unnoticed by Adm. John Brentwood. The only reason he noticed the high winds was because of their baleful howling by his New York Port Authority office on the seventieth floor. The retired admiral had resisted the move to the Trade Center as long as he could, citing, truthfully, that even the confusion of the short move from the Port Authority offices around Battery Park would cause delay in the crucial matter at hand: his office’s overseeing the loading and departure of the vital Atlantic convoys.

“No problem, Admiral,” his secretary had concluded. “Everything’s on disk. In the old days we’d need fifty trucks and a month of overtime. Now — we’ll have everything up here, three days maximum.”

“Three days we can well use here,” Brentwood had grumbled, his pen skimming over the latest cargo manifest — nearly all ammunition and aircraft parts.

They had tried flying several replacement squadrons of Thunderbolts and F-111s over the Atlantic with extra fuel in drop tanks and midair refueling. But the Russians could see them coming across the Atlantic, and though the weather was worsening over the mid-Atlantic ridge, the Russian pilots had managed to intercept. For a while the Americans and Canadians were losing more pilots at sea than over European soil. Pilots downed in Europe stood a reasonable chance of chopper pickup, providing they didn’t come down in enemy territory. But for those who were shot down over the Atlantic, the rescue rate was less than 5 percent, for even though the pilots’ radio beacons had a minuscule failure rate, the Atlantic was simply too vast to patrol for lost pilots, when every spare available aircraft was being used to help ferry materiel or conscripted for antisub patrols.

Because of the high losses of combat pilots over the Atlantic, sixty-eight in the first two months of the war, women pilots — whom the army air corps had used in peacetime to ferry the vitally needed planes to Europe — were now, albeit reluctantly, being considered as combat pilots. An editorial in The New York Times, a usually harsh critic of Army General Freeman’s “cowboy” tactics, now brought his name back to national prominence by praising him for having had the foresight to use women chopper pilots in the daring and successful raid in and out of Pyongyang, the editorial going on to severely criticize the Pentagon’s failure to have trained women as combat pilots.

The Times also criticized the slow rate of convoy departures, so that while John Brentwood was happy that Freeman, his youngest son’s commander and someone Brentwood Senior greatly admired, was being mentioned again, sending signals to Washington that “more aggressively innovative thinking” was needed, the retired admiral bridled at the implicit criticism of the Port Authority. And it didn’t help John Brentwood or any of his colleagues when the Nagata joke had reached the “Tonight Show,” the Port Authority becoming the butt of one of Leno’s comedy routines. Leno suggested that maybe “what the New York Port Authority should do is put a congressman on every ship. With that much hot air aboard — no way it would sink!”

Now, high in his new office, Brentwood, his office’s computer notwithstanding, was confronted by hills of files, piled upon and about his desk. No matter how many computers you had to punch in all the variables, from not stowing yeast, sugar, or rice cargos together to the myriad problems about where and how to get enough ships, in the final analysis the decisions often had to be made on an old sailor’s gut instinct. The major problem was that the deficiencies of the United States’ aging mercantile marine were now starkly evident, after having been virtually ignored by every administration since Reagan, despite persistent predictions by the Pentagon that the ten thousand merchant sailors in the United States were far short of the twenty-two thousand required in war.

For Brentwood, it meant requisitioning, cajoling, recommissioning anything that would float and help bolster the old fleet, most of which had been taken out of mothballs to be used for the dangerous three-thousand-mile journey from North America to the ports of France and Britain. But while many ships were called, and many willingly lent to the government for cash equity later on, only 30 percent of these craft were approved as seaworthy, the others, to the chagrin of many a proud yachtsman or sailor, not qualifying because they could not maintain the required seventeen-knot convoy speed.