Greg Iles - Black Cross

“I’ve had about all I can stand from this whelp,” Major Dickson said. “Let’s stop this charade.”

“Just a moment, Clive,” said the officer on General Little’s left, a Guards major. “Let’s hear him out. I suspect he’s a member of the ‘bomb the railways’ school. That’s it, isn’t it, Mr. Stern? You want the RAF to bomb the railways leading to the concentration camps?”

“No, Major.”

“Ah. Then you must be one of the advocates for forming a Jewish Brigade to take part in the invasion. I should have known. You saw some action in North Africa, didn’t you?”

“That is not why I’ve come.”

General Little slapped his palm down on Stern’s file. “Then why the devil have you come? Put an end to the bloody suspense, will you?”

“General Little,” Stern said, “I understand politics. I know that a Jewish Brigade would contain the seeds of a Jewish army, which could return to Palestine after the war and fight the British and the Arabs. I do not ask for that. I know it’s been suggested that the Polish Resistance try to destroy the Nazi gas chambers. But the Poles are too weak to do this, and even if they weren’t, they would not risk their lives to save Jews.”

“Too bloody right,” Major Dickson muttered.

Stern ignored him. “I do have a certain amount of military experience, and I realize that bombing the railways leading to the camps is impractical. Rail tracks are relatively easy to repair, and the Nazis could always substitute trucks for rolling stock.”

Brigadier Smith could see that the young man’s realistic assessments had gotten the attention of General Little and the Guards officer, if not Major Dickson.

“General,” Stern concluded, “my request is simple. I am asking you for four heavy-bomber sorties over Germany and Poland. I have the names and exact locations of four concentration camps at which Jews are being gassed and shot to death at a conservatively estimated rate of over five thousand per day. That’s five thousand per day in each camp . In the name of humanity — in the name of God — I ask that those four charnel houses be wiped from the face of the earth.”

The silence in the room was total. Major Dickson sat up and stared wide-eyed at Stern. After the initial shock dissipated, General Little cleared his throat. “Do you mean, Mr. Stern, that you want these camps bombed with the Jewish prisoners inside them ?”

“That is exactly what I mean, General.”

Duff Smith felt a thrill of satisfaction.

“He’s mad,” said Major Dickson. “Absolutely barking.”

“I’m quite sane, Major,” Stern said. “And quite serious.”

“And I am quite sure,” General Little said, “that Messrs. Shertok and Weizmann, in all their desperate pleadings, have suggested nothing so drastic as this. You claim to speak for the Jewish people in asking for this madness?”

Stern spoke calmly and clearly. “General, Weizmann and Shertok are political men — distant from the truth of what is happening in Europe. The idea of bombing the camps was first suggested by members of the Jewish Underground in Poland and Germany. I have talked to some who escaped. General, I have looked into the eyes of women who had their infants snatched away by the heels and crushed against walls by SS officers. I have listened to fathers who watched their sons bayoneted as they stood weeping not a meter away—”

“That’s enough,” Little said sharply. “I don’t need a lecture on the horrors of war from you.”

“But these people are not at war, General! They are civilian noncombatants. Innocent women and children.”

General Little gazed down at the papers Stern had brought, then looked up and began speaking in a soft voice. “Lad, I can’t help but admire the courage it takes to make a request like that. But your request simply cannot be considered seriously. Not even from a purely military standpoint. Our bombers don’t have the range to reach these camps. Their fighter escorts can’t fly that far—”

“That’s no longer true, General,” Stern interrupted. “The new American P-51 Mustangs have a range of 850 miles. That puts the camps within striking distance from Italy.”

“You’re surprisingly well informed,” Little rejoined. “But even so, there’s the question of diverting military resources for nonmilitary missions—”

“But those Jews are being used as slave labor for the war industries!”

Little raised his hand. “The sole objective of the Allied air forces is to wipe out the war-making capacity of the Reich. That means oil production, ball-bearing plants, synthetic rubber — not civilian detention camps. If we were to bomb these camps, our raids would give Hitler the perfect opportunity to claim that we killed all the Jews who have died in captivity. And there remains the issue of our acting specifically for Jewish civilians. If we redress the grievances of the Jews by reprisal bombings, every other wronged group will line up for the same service.”

“And don’t forget,” Major Dickson added, “these Jews are legally German citizens. Hitler has said from the beginning that the Jewish question is an internal German problem, and he is technically right.”

General Little frowned at Dickson. “What we cannot ignore is the fact that the Nazis have close to a million Allied prisoners in their hands. Forty thousand British taken at Dunkirk alone. We have relatively few German prisoners. We can’t afford to start playing the reprisal game, especially with prison camps. Hitler could resort to even more unpleasantness than he has already.”

“Unpleasantness?”

“Look here, Stern,” Little went on, “Captain Owen wrote to me about your father being trapped in Germany. That’s a hard thing, I know. We’ve all lost loved ones in this war. But that’s the nature of the game. I lost a brother in France in 1940. Bloody senseless. A British girls’ school could have put up more of a fight than the Frogs did. But in times like these . . .”

Duff Smith nearly groaned aloud. Here was the fatuous, patronizing Englishman at his worst. I lost a relative, so why should you raise a wind about yours? Much less a million of them, eh? So hard to get one’s mind round numbers of that size, what ?

“It seems to me,” Little said, examining a page from Stern’s file, “that these numbers are exaggerated. In all honesty, I’ve found that to be a Jewish trait. Don’t blame you at all, really. Best way to get attention in a crowd. Two million Jews murdered? Why, in the bloodiest battle of the Great War only six hundred thousand lives were lost. Let’s be rational, Stern. Let’s face facts. It’s my guess someone’s fiddled these figures. With the best of intentions, perhaps, but fiddled them just the same. Someone with political motives, as you said before.”

Brigadier Smith saw the young man’s shoulders sag as he began to absorb the futility of his mission. “I don’t know why I expected you to believe what is happening,” he said. “Most Jews in Palestine don’t even believe it.”

General Little motioned for a sergeant to escort Stern out.

“But let me say this!” Stern cried as the British soldier took his arm. “My father is somewhere inside Germany at this very moment. Alive or dead, I don’t know. But if he is alive, he would beg you to do exactly as I have asked. General, to refuse to bomb these death camps on the grounds that it would kill innocent prisoners is merely misplaced sentiment . Destroying the gas chambers and crematoria is the only way to slow down Hitler’s extermination program. By killing a few thousand innocents, you could save millions! Isn’t that the most fundamental idea of warfare? Sacrificing the few for the many?”