Command Decision

by William Wister Haines

  “You’re going to tell him?”

  “He’s the Chief.”

  Chapter 6

  Long before the late nightfall of the British summer the Division Headquarters and its outlying stations again took on the accelerating pulsations of activity.

  There was a rhythmic cycle in this life that began its slow rise once more from the final counting in after the mission. For the combat crews this was an ending; another mission checked off, another restorative interlude for the brief unreality of food and sleep, of music, games, or women. Especially after a second successive long mission pure fatigue claimed most of them.

  Only a hardy few, those whose natural energy was inexhaustible, those whose nervous structures could not unwind, those who had taken benzedrine too late, lingered on at the mess, thumbed through the records in the lounge, changing them after the first few bars of each tune, and then sat looking numbly at the barren expanse of the V-mail blanks or, taking their bicycles from the racks, wheeled out of the station in quest of different excitement.

  Most of the men, with a headshake at that serene twilight sky, made straight for the sack, there to snore or lie tense, trying to evoke the smell of hamburger in juke joints or the patterns of moonlight on country club terraces as the fragments of the phonograph tunes echoed on the corrugated iron roofs.

  In the villages around them girls who had learned the new portents of peaceful heavens saw the hope vanishing and settled again to another twenty-four hours of dread. And through their ears, as through those of farmers and villagers, of crews tossing in their cots, of hares and partridge chicks and foxes prowling the beetroot and kale patches in the Lincolnshire gloaming, there drummed now from every side in universal chorus the rising hum of myriad motors tuning.

  For now the work of the base personnel rose with a jerky tempo to the tune of the motors. Along the lanes muffled jeep lights bounced crazily over bumps their dim projection had not revealed. Down by the bomb dumps panting tractors chugged the dollies into place. Then their crews cut their switches and paced off through the cool grass the requisite distance for smoking while they watched the coming of the evening stars and waited the details of the loading decision.

  Along every highway, through every station, around every perimeter track, and to every parking stand the petrol trucks rumbled on the last lap of the journey that had brought their cargo through sub-haunted waters from Arabia and the Caribbean. Deft hands and wrenches maneuvered the hoses. Then with the soft whirring of still more motors the weary truck tires began to contract again and the bulbous doughnuts of the Fortresses spread and distended under the inflowing burden as dry tanks gurgled and burped.

  Now above and around the Forts themselves, on platforms and catwalks and cowlings, with chain hoists that lifted motors like matches and wrenches smaller than matches, the crews clambered and cursed and toiled in a disciplined frenzy of activity. Motors coughed and spluttered, roared into thunder or choked into vacuums of quick silence. Starting engines whined and squealed, generators purred. Hammers and scissors, files and hacksaws and riveters, incised with sure surgery around the gaping shot wounds, ripping, replacing, restoring, and finally polishing new strength and surface into the old contours of the bodies. In the motors themselves men stripped and dismantled and searched, deeper and ever deeper seeking with calipers and gauges and electric pulsations the subtler maladies of friction and metal fatigue.

  In the gloom muffled work lamps twinkled like fireflies. Wrenches slipped, skin vanished into long bleeding cuts. Lungs coughed with protest against ubiquitous monoxide. Voices rose with cursing or exultation. Hurrying chiefs looked oftener and oftener at their watches. Every passing bicycle or jeep slowed up to receive or pass on with blasphemy the information that there was as yet no further information.

  In the cook shacks other men waited for the word. Already the standard things were done. Bread was baking, beans boiling, stew meat and potatoes poured from the machines into rising conicles in the great caldrons. Cans gasped under the knives and then yielded their contents with a gurgle. But there too the absence of final word delayed the final arrangements. The padlocks guarding the combat crews’ fresh eggs and oranges were still locked. Their keys remained deep in the pockets of scowling mess sergeants who pondered the comic strips in the Stars and Stripes spread out on their tables as they, too, waited.

  Outside the staff offices at both Division and Group Headquarters the continuous opening and shutting of doors slashed the blackout with quick shards of the bright internal light, as men hurried to and fro, exchanging with each other the news that there was no news yet.

  They too were cursing the delay. The chairs were set and the blackboard sponged against the morning’s briefing. But the tiered cords of maps waited in their bins until it was decided which particular acres of them must be folded and marked long before take-off. In other rooms men fingered and studied blankly the miniature planes whose numbers duplicated those on the monsters now gutted for repair work on the parking stands. Each phone call was a resurrection, moving one of the symbols into its place in the toy formation on the blackboard which would precede and dictate tomorrow’s formation in the sky… if there was to be a formation.

  Through all of these and a hundred other forms of preparation men worked always with uncertainty in their minds, measuring everything they did by it. Every part of the process could be brought so far, and nightly was brought so far, toward the final forms of preparation. This in itself was more than enough to occupy most of the men most of the night. But in itself this also was only a preliminary to the final frenzy which would begin with the certainty of a mission and then the unfolding final details of bomb load, gas load, degrees of repair, destination, courses, timings, frequencies, and all the other innumerable and vital details which must somehow be worked out through the steadily dwindling interval to the deadline of the take-off.

  2

  Dennis knew very well not only the continuously changing physical condition of his command throughout this vigil but its emotional and nervous state. It had been his life’s work to control and manage the energies of other men, training and restraining them until orders gave them final release in purpose for which there never could be entirely adequate preparation.

  The job was, of course, too big for any one man and the service his country had created to cope with it understood this. No one man did it. Dennis, like the rest, was only part of it, as dependent upon orders from above as the men who now cursed him were dependent upon orders from him. Kane might be dead in a ditch, drunk in a boudoir, stalemated in passionate dispute with still Higher Command, or cutting his fingernails; it did not matter. He had left an order with Dennis not to send out the field order until he returned.

  The whole Division knew, of course, that Dennis had kept every phone it possessed hot in his search for Kane. But, by an ethical code as strong as the order itself, it did not know and could never know that Dennis was powerless to act until he could find his superior. The Division might think what it wanted. Dennis knew the army well enough to know that it probably thought him afraid to act until he could pin responsibility on Kane, but it would never know from him the truth of why he was waiting, under a more wearing tension than any of the men who chafed around him. By the same token he realized that he himself might never know why Kane was waiting; there were always more reasons than met the eye. In the meantime he could do nothing more than wring from every minute the maximum possible preparation that could be made in the present situation and then try to set the others an example of composure and equanimity while he, too, waited. Not since the beginning of the war had he permitted himself to ponder the deeper reasons of why he waited.

  Dennis had been the only son of a promising young doctor in a small Middle Western city. He had idolized the father who often played baseball with the neighborhood kids on the dusty lots and set fingers with competence and jocular reassurance in the gaslit office in their house. In the morning he was allowed to help h
is father into a linen duster before they started, together, the brassbound, leather-strapped car that was the wonder of the neighborhood.

  As he grew older Dennis himself was allowed to open the brass petcocks and pour compounds of benzine and ether into the cylinders. They both loved the car and though Mrs. Dennis predicted with mournful pride that their experiments would blow up the whole city, they never did. Sometimes they cranked it until their arms ached; then suddenly its motor caught with resounding bursts and the doctor waved back triumphantly as he roared off at a giddy twenty miles an hour to the hospital where he was worshiped. Everywhere Dennis went, from the trackworkers’ shanties down by the yard to the glittering marble edifice of the bank, he was greeted with affection, respect, and a solicitude that warmed the casual words of the universal “How’s the doc?”

  Since earliest recollection his one determination had been to study medicine and practice with his father. While he was waiting for this there had been another war in which fourteen-year-old boys were not wanted. The doc had become Captain Dennis of the Medical Reserve and while they were in the first pride of his duty overseas he had been killed in a forward dressing station in the Argonne, leaving the young doctor’s normal legacy of debts and good will, and a prematurely serious son.

  Dennis might still have gone to medical school but he was aware of the sacrifices it would have entailed for his mother and even more aware, within himself, that the soldier had begun to overshadow the doctor in his memory of his father. When part of his heritage of good will crystallized into the offer of an appointment to the Military Academy he had accepted with a feeling of consecration.

  He had become a First Classman before his expanding view had been seriously troubled by the prospect of life in a peacetime army. By then the government was offering a selected few from his class flying training.

  He was fully aware that it was the uniform which had made him an aviator. It was more than a fair bargain; it was a binding pact. He was still a young man when the lucrative world of civil aviation first beckoned and then begged him greedily, but for him the decision was a simple one. The government had educated him; the obligation became all the graver with his dawning realization that only men like himself could hope to educate the government.

  After that realization there had not only been no further doubts; there had been no time to doubt. Each step in his own steady progress from proficiency to eminence in an exacting profession was only a tactical victory in the interminable campaign against the entrenched tradition. The real fight was never with the finite problems of momentum and gravity but with the anachronistic power of saber and broadside. It had been a struggle to save the propeller from the sword, against the certain time when only the propeller could save the sword. But the time had come upon them with the struggle still undecided internally. Now the propellers were buying more time, at a price.

  Dennis knew it was not immodesty which made him consider himself one of the few competent judges of the precariousness, the desperate uncertainty of even this bargain for time. He was one of the small earnest fraternity who had foreseen the essential outlines of this struggle long before the cries from Europe and then the thunderclap from Pearl Harbor had finally awakened even the dullest of his superiors. It was why they had sent him here, to buy them time with a minimum of the propellers for which he had worked and begged so long.

  He had come with the conviction that it could be done. He had faith in the planes which carried years of his own work in most of their essential parts. He had faith in his crews and in the people from which they came, faith in the capacity of an awakened country to produce enough more planes and crews, with time.

  But time was always the essence of it. His first perception of the jet plane, now panting on the threshold of operational use, had revised even his own narrow estimate of the time margin against which he was working. In this development of the jet principle he had seen and accepted a revolution that would make propellers themselves as obsolete as they had made the kind of thought that still governed them.

  Realization of this had only brought him to the other side, the never-ending duality of the struggle. It was never enough to realize it; the struggle was in forcing the realization upon other people—in this case, paradoxically, upon Kane, who had been himself a legend among the pioneers for propellers. He not only had to make Kane see it, he had to make him act upon it in time. Minute by minute the decisive time, the present ephemeral gift of this favorable weather, was ticking away while his people waited for him and he, with an inner compounding of the gathering tension around him, waited for General Kane.

  3

  Corporal Herbert McGinnis was a victim of this general tension but he considered with more accuracy than he really knew that he was also a victim of Sergeant Evans. He had done the eight-to-four shift in the General’s office and was happily contemplating his Saturday night off when he had been summoned back to fill in for Evans, who was said to be absent on a special mission for the General.

  It particularly irked him because for this night McGinnis had had designs upon a newly arrived Red Cross girl in the Enlisted Men’s Canteen. He had waited patiently for an hour when most of the gunners would be asleep and most of the base personnel busy. His plan had been to strike up conversation over coffee and doughnuts and consolidate his ground with an offer to dance if that seemed tactically sound. Then when the girl had had time to realize that she could trust him he intended to sit down with her on the sofa in the ping-pong room and show her his new snapshot of Herbert McGinnis, Jr., age four months and three days.

  The men in Hut Six not only had not seen the snapshot but emphatically and vocally did not want to see it. Except for this girl in the Red Cross there was no one in England who did want to see it. She, in fact, had not asked to but McGinnis had watched with green eyes the time she had spent admiring the brats of other men. He considered that it would be practically a favor to show her a kid that really did have some individuality to him. Instead he was spending his Saturday night making a computation of the Division’s claims for General Dennis.

  Like Evans, McGinnis was a graduate gunner, but they had little in common beside their uniforms and the service of General Dennis. McGinnis, at twenty-two, was a man of substance in his native Maryland. He had his own house, stock, implements, a half interest in forty sheep, and a hundred and sixteen acres clear. Mrs. McGinnis could and did handle a hundred and sixty turkeys a year. In addition to this gift she had brought him two cows and the ultimate certainty of her father’s oystering Bugeye. The McGinnises were people who could have had a tractor loan from any bank in the county. They took more pleasure in forgoing than in possessing the tractor.

  McGinnis had told the clerks at the induction center his purposes as straightforwardly as he told anyone who asked. He had come to fight the enemy until he was whupped; then he was going home. It surprised him thereafter in army life to meet men who had not been sent directly to a gunnery school.

  He had learned gunnery as methodically as he had once learned disking. He practiced it with the same unemotional excellence—thereby, as his last citation read, reflecting great credit upon himself and the Army Air Forces.

  His social life in the army was less successful. At the end of his tour his modesty and diligence had recommended him for a job in the General’s office. He had taken it with the quiet confidence of a man used to advancement in his fortunes but he got along poorly with the cynical enlisted personnel of the headquarters staff.

  On operational and combat status McGinnis, like most of the others, had always been too tired to care what went on around him. With less to do he had undertaken to improve the normal level of conversation in Hut Six. The result was that the foulest mouth in Hut Six lost three teeth and McGinnis lost his hard-earned Tech stripes. He was back up to Corporal now but he still smoldered over having been demoted for decency. The sight of Evans, prospering through the career of profligacy that made McGinnis shudder for him, salted the woun
d. He wrote his wife that the army was deteriorating.

  McGinnis was still thinking of his grievances shortly after ten that night as he worked over the General’s claim board. He disliked working in the General’s office itself but he knew that a man who did his duty had nothing to fear and he had been ordered to do it in there. The General paid no more attention to him than to the furniture but it made him uncomfortable; even now he could not help overhearing every word of the General’s angry voice talking over the phone:—

  “I’ve told you four times he said he was going to visit groups and then come back here; that’s all I know… well, tell the Embassy they don’t want him any more than I do.”

  The phone slammed down and McGinnis started guiltily. He disliked even involuntary eavesdropping but he had begun to be interested in the frantic search for General Kane. He did not see why Dennis cared whether he found Kane or not; what was more, he did not approve. He knew that Kane was a very big wheel indeed in some remote and awful headquarters but he had run out twenty-five missions without seeing him and expected the war to be concluded on the same basis. The sages of Hut Six said that Kane spent his time undressing Duchesses and drinking tea with Ambassadors, and McGinnis felt that Dennis would do well to avoid such a man. He frowned now and industriously recrayoned a faultless number as General Dennis came over to view the board.

  “How they coming, Corporal?”

  “Three more destroyers and a probable from them guys they fished out of the Channel, sir.”

  “Anything on that other crew in the ditch?”

  “Not yet, sir. That British sub is still standing by.”

  “I’ll be in the hole with Colonel Martin.”

  Dennis was gone before McGinnis could think of any way to communicate his disapproval of this unseemly concern over General Kane. He was still scowling over it when the anteroom door opened and Evans strolled in with an air of languid complacency. In spite of private resolutions McGinnis found himself speaking as he had learned to speak in the army.