Robert Adams - A Man Called Milo Morai

Completely lacking any air force, the Greeks had been aided in this regard by elements of the British forces engaged against the Italians in North Africa. Had the British not constructed airbases and supply points on the Greek mainland and on Crete, chances are good that Mussolini’s Teutonic allies would have allowed Visconti-Prasca and his stymied, stalemated army to twist slowly in the wind of the Albanian mountains until hell froze over solidly. But the German high command, just then preparing to invade their sometime ally, Russia, and not at all savoring the thought of Greek-based British planes menacing a flank of their Russia-bound army, elected to drag the well-singed Italian chestnuts from out of the Greek fire.

When once the Nazi propagandists had thoroughly cowed the leaders of Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, forced them in their terror to sign degrading treaties and sent in German troops to occupy and prepare for an invasion of Greece, Britain sent General Henry Wilson with upward of sixty thousand British troops from North Africa (where they, too, had recently inflicted a humiliating defeat on Italian arms in the deserts).

But Wilson’s sixty thousand and the remainder of Papagos’ hundred and fifty thousand proved just no match for the Waffen-SS, Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe units thrown against them in their hastily erected position. The German invasion had commenced on April 6, and by April 29 the shattered remnants of the Greek army had surrendered and the only British still remaining in Greece were either captives or corpses.

The conquest of Crete took only about ten days and was a purely Luftwaffe victory, even the ground troops being of the Luftwaffe Fallschirmjager or airborne troops. The lightning-fast victories of German arms made it abundantly clear to a closely watching world that only large, strong, well-trained and, above all else, well-supplied and well-armed forces could represent any sort of a match for the triumphant forces now scouring Europe and the Balkans with fire and steel.

The United States of America was not as yet formally a warring nation, but only fools could doubt that she soon must be such. This became more than abundantly clear when the U.S. Navy destroyer Kearny , while helping to protect a Canadian merchant convoy in the waters off Iceland, was torpedoed by a German U-boat on October 17, 1941. A brand-spanking-new vessel replete with all modern appurtenances, DD Kearny survived the torpedoing and limped back to port safely. But not so with the elderly four-stacker DD Reuben James , two weeks later. The James was torpedoed without warning, the deadly “fish” struck her main magazine and the explosion ripped her completely in two. The bow section sank immediately and the stern section stayed afloat only long enough to explode into millions of pieces; all of the ship’s officers went down with her, and a bare forty-five of her men were saved.

“If you don’t want to go to war,” First Sergeant Jethro Stiles remarked to Milo, “then isn’t it a bit silly to allow your warships to escort the merchant shipping of a combatant? Roosevelt—or someone very close to him, at least—wants us in the war against Germany and Italy, you can bet your GI shoes on that, my friend. Of course, it may well be economics, pure and simple. Arming for a war and then fighting it is a surefire way of pulling a country out ,of a depression. He’s tried damned near everything else, the crippled old socialist bastard, so maybe he figures this war business to be his last card. I tell you, Milo, the people of this country are going to live to heartily regret allowing that man and his near-Bolshevik cronies to play their socialistic New Deal games on the citizens and institutions and economy of this country. And now he and they are going about making damned certain that, like Wilson, they drag us into another war in which we have no real business.”

Stiles sighed deeply, then shrugged. “Naturally, I could well be wrong on the whys. Roosevelt and his Red-loving friends may just be all a-boil to help Mother Russia, but that’s as poor a reason to send Americans to be killed and butchered as any of the others. Josef Stalin is as much a murderous animal as is Adolf Hitler, if not more so; power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and Stalin has been in power for longer than Hitler, so we can be certain that he has become far and away more barbaric. And if proof of that last were needed, consider his recent purge of his own army’s officer corps.

“If this is Roosevelt’s reason for plunging our nation into another European war, it is akin to making alliance with a bear to fight a pack of wolves; even if we win, what is there to stop the bear from attacking and eating us? Maybe that’s just what Roosevelt and his crew want to happen.

“Maybe it’s what is ordained, too. Russell and Wells and not a few others seem to be of the opinion that socialism is the wave of the world’s future. Sometimes I get the sinking feeling that we—the world’s republics and monarchies—are at the best only fighting a grim, foredoomed, rearguard action against that which is to be.”

Abruptly, he switched back to his everyday, workaday voice and manner. “Oh, shit, Milo, if I keep on in this fucking vein, I’ll be singing ‘Einsamer Sonntag’ and opening a few of the larger, more important of my own veins.”

“‘Lonely Sunday’?” queried Milo. “I don’t think I’ve heard of that song, Jethro.”

“It’s called ‘Gloomy Sunday’ in this country and other English-speaking countries. It was written some years ago by a Hungarian, I believe, and has become infamous because so very many people, worldwide, suicided while listening to it. Also, it is said, every artiste who recorded it has come to a bad end.

“Which, my friend, is precisely the end you and I are going to come to if we don’t get cracking and have this report ready for our little captain to turn in to Colonel Oglethorpe on Monday.”

One weekend in late 1941, one class having just finished and another not due until the middle of the coming week, Stiles and Milo had left the skeleton-manned company in the hands of a weekend charge of quarters and taken a few days of accrued leave together at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Free-spending Jethro had easily snagged a brace of attractive and complaisant “ladies” to share the beachside cottage he had earlier rented. When he and Milo were not fishing in the icy surf or enjoying their catch along with a plentitude of other foods and alcohol, they enjoyed the attentions of their bed warmers.

On the Sunday afternoon, Milo and the two women sat close to the driftwood fire blazing on the hearth while Jethro basted for the last time a bluefish stuffed with herbs, spices, breadcrumbs, onions and finely chopped shellfish. The aroma of the baking^fish, of the horse potatoes baking with it and of the other savories simmering in the battered saucepans atop the gas burners filled the small parlor with mouthwatering cheer every bit as much as did the opened magnum of champagne and the two unopened still-chilling ones nestled in a washtub full of cracked ice.

Pleasantly tiddly, Milo had but just arisen from his place to fetch a fresh magnum when he heard rapid footsteps ascending the shaky stairs, then an even more rapid pounding on the front door. He opened it to admit their landlord, Huell Midgett, a long-retired Coast Guard chief of about sixty years.

Politely ignoring the two female “guests,” the old petty officer took a few breaths so deep as to set his beerbelly and multiple chins ajiggle, then said, “Boys, ain’t none of my own bizness, of course, but you two is both of you Army off sers. Ain’t you?”

Jethro looked up from the fish and smiled. “Close enough, Chief Midgett, close enough. We’re noncoms, but first-three-graders. Why?”