Herman Wouk - The Winds of War

None of this, he acknowledged, added up to hard intelligence, nor did it impress the professionals at the embassy. There were always, they said, rumors of theatrical surprises. They insisted on sticking to basic facts. The Nazi movement was built on fear and hate of Bolshevism and a pledge to destroy it. The whole theme of Mein Kampf was conquest of “living room” for Germany in the southeast provinces of Russia. A military reconciliation between the two systems was unthinkable. Hitler would never propose it. If he did, Stalin, assuming that it was a trick, would never accept it. The words Henry had encountered most often were “fantasy” and “melodrama.”

He maintained, nevertheless, that the move not only made sense, but was inevitable. Hitler was far out on a limb in his threats against Poland. A dictator could not back down. Yet his combat readiness for a world war was marginal. Probably to avoid alarming the people, he had not even put his country on a war production basis, contrary to all the lurid blustering propaganda of “cannon instead of butter.” Despite this tough talk of Nazi politicians and newspapers, the man in the street did not want a war, and Hitler knew that. A Russian alliance was a way out of the dilemma. If Russia gave the Germans a free hand in Poland, the English guarantee would become meaningless. Neither the French nor the British could possibly come to Poland’s aid in time to avert a quick conquest. Therefore the Poles would not fight. They would yield the city of Danzig and the extraterritorial road across the Polish corridor, which was all Hitler was demanding. Maybe later, as in the case of Czechoslovakia, he would move in and take the rest of Poland, but not now.

Victor Henry argued that the sudden reversal of alliances was an old European stratagem, especially characteristic of German and Russian diplomacy. He cited many instances, fresh from his heavy history reading. He pointed out that Hitler himself had come to power in the first place through a sharp reversal of political lines, a deal with his worst enemy Franz von Papen.

Fully clothed, he fell asleep on the red leather couch, with the report and two carbon copies tucked inside his shirt, after shredding the sheets of carbon paper into the wastebasket. His slumber was restless and brief. When his eyes popped wide open again, the sun was sending weak red rays through the treetops. He showered, dressed, read the report again, and walked five miles from the Grunewald to the Wilhelmstrasse, turning the document over in his mind. Compared to Tollever’s reports, which he had studied, it was a presumptuous discussion of grand strategy, far beyond his competence and his position: the sort of “Drew Pearson column” against which the Chief of Naval Operations himself had warned him. On the other hand, it seemed to him factual. He had already sent in a number of technical reports like Kip’s papers. He intended to write one on Swinemünde. Combat Readiness of Nazi German was a jump into the dark.

In War College seminars, instructors had poked fun at “global masterminding” by officers below flag rank. The question was, now that the paper was written, should he send it or forget it? Pug Henry had written and destroyed many such documents. He had a tendency to reach beyond routine. The result could be good or disastrous. His unsolicited memorandum on battleship blisters had knocked him out of overdue sea duty and landed him in Berlin. That report, at least, had been within his professional sphere as an ordnance man. In diplomacy and grand strategy he was a naïve newcomer. Colonel Forrest knew Germany well and he had waved aside Henry’s suggestion as nonsense. Pug had ventured to talk to the chargé d’affaires, whose only comment had a subtle smile.

A Foreign Service courier was flying to England at 10 A.M., to board the New York-bound Queen Mary . The document could be on CNO’s desk in a week.

Henry arrived at the embassy still undecided, with not much more than a half hour in which to make up his mind. Except for Rhoda, there was nobody whose advice he could ask. Rhoda liked to sleep late. If he called her now, he would probably wake her, and even then could scarcely describe the report on the German telephone. But would Rhoda in any case offer a judgment worth having. He thought not. It was up to him — the courier, or the burn basket.

He sat at his desk in the high-ceilinged, cluttered office sipping coffee, looking out across Hermann Göring Strasse at Hitler’s monumental new chancellery of pink marble. The sentry guards were changing: eight helmeted black-clad heavy SS men marching up, eight others marching away to a drum and fife. Through the open windows he heard the ritual orders in shrill German, the squeal of the fife, the scraping tramp of the big black boots.

Victor Henry decided that his job was intelligence, and that for better or worse this report told truly what he had seen so far in Nazi Germany. He hunted up the courier and gave him the document for urgent delivery to the Office of Naval Intelligence.

Admiral Preble read Combat Readiness of Nazi Germany a week later, and sent one page of extracts to the President. The Nazi-Soviet pact broke on the world on the twenty-second of August, as one of the most stunning surprises in all history. On the twenty-fourth Preble received the page back in an envelope from the White House. The President had scrawled at the bottom, in strong thick pen strokes in black ink:

Let me have V. Henry’s service record .

The announcement of the pact shrieked at Byron and Natalie from the news placards in the Rome airport. They had set out from Siena before dawn in an old Renault, and while the whole world was chattering about the astounding news, they had innocently driven down along the Apennines in golden Italian sunlight amid old mountain towns, wild airy gorges and green valleys where peasants worked their fields. With Natalie Jastrow at his side for a three-week journey that was only starting, Byron was in the highest of spirits, until he saw the bulletins.

He had never found a European airport so busy or so noisy. Gesticulating travellers were besieging the reservation desks. Nearly everybody was either walking fast or running, and sweaty porters wheeling heaps of luggage were snarling at passengers and at each other. The loudspeaker never stopped its thunderous echoing drivel. At the first kiosk, he bought a sheaf of papers. The Italian papers shrilled that this great diplomatic coup by the Axis had ended the war danger. The headlines of the Paris and London newspapers were big, black, and frightened. The German press giggled coarse delight in tall red block letters. The front page of a Swiss newspaper caricatured Hitler and Göring in Russian blouses and fur hats, squatting and kicking out their boots, to the music of a concertina played by Stalin in an SS uniform. Across a Belgian front page, the stark headline was

In a crowded, buzzing airport restaurant, while they ate a hasty lunch of cannelloni and cold white wine, Natalie astonished him by talking of going on. To proceed into a country that might soon be invaded by Germans struck Byron as almost mad.

But Natalie argued that the tourists milling in the airport were mere sheep. If a sudden political change could panic them, they had no right to be in Europe. She had stayed in Paris through the Munich crisis. Half of her American friends had fled, and later had straggled back — those who had not felt too silly. There was always less danger than most people thought. Even in a war, an American passport spelled safety. She wanted to see Poland. She wanted to see Leslie Slote and had given her promise. She would be in and out of Poland in three weeks. The world wasn’t going to end in three weeks.