Command Decision

by William Wister Haines

  “Frankly, old man, I’m not sure. Nothing’s settled yet but I have reason to think the Chief has confidence in me, and big B-29 jobs are coming up soon, jobs that will start with two stars. The commanders will pick their own chiefs of staff and they’re a cinch for brigadiers to start. Think it over, boy.”

  Martin laughed. “Me, a chief, with all those papers?”

  “Adjutants do that. But if the Chief knew I could add your operational experience to my knowledge of, er, higher echelon procedure, it would wrap it up. He remembers you.”

  “He should,” Martin grinned impenitently.

  “Well, he admires guts.”

  Through the blackout curtain on the window now they suddenly heard a protesting spasm of coughing barks from the tuning of some near-by recalcitrant motor. Inwardly Garnett cursed the distraction. Martin tensed, ears up, forehead furrowed, until slowly the spasm settled into a smooth, muted droning. Then, with a quick shake of his head, he looked back at Garnett.

  “Thanks, Cliff, but as long as Casey will have me…”

  “Ted, he knows there’s nothing for you here as his A 3 but those same eagles. He’d release you. Casey isn’t selfish.”

  “He’d make me go but…”

  “We’d be a perfect team,” urged Garnett. “I’d fight the navy and you could fight the Japs. Think it over and for God’s sake quit this flying. There’s no sense throwing yourself away when by waiting a little…”

  “The Krauts aren’t waiting, Cliff.”

  “Ted, there’ll be good jobs in the Jap war when this one’s washed up.” He saw Martin’s quick smile and hurried. “And those B-29’s are going to be sweet.”

  Martin bit, hard. “What have they done about that frame expansion, Cliff?”

  “They’re getting it. I’ll tell you the whole story later. But I want you to think about this.”

  “Have you spoken to Casey?”

  “Not yet but…”

  “Well, don’t till I think it over or the whole deal’s off. Now, what else does Helen want?”

  “She wants you to pick a godfather for the impending heir.”

  “Who?”

  “Well, we’ve talked about it but of course she wants your views, too. The doctor thinks it will be a boy. R. G. Kane will be a name to conjure with someday, Ted. He’s always been fond of Helen and it would be especially appropriate if it happens while you’re still here.”

  “I’ll think it over,” said Martin shortly.

  “Think it all over, boy.”

  Chapter 9

  From a vantage point in the Ops room Evans watched Kane and Dennis pass on their way back from the light table to the Brigadier’s office. One glance showed him that the dispute had not been settled. Evans followed them into the office.

  “The man doesn’t live who could tell those pictures apart,” Kane was saying.

  “Preliminary twenty-three hundred serviceability, sir,” said Evans.

  He had seen Dennis drop his wife’s letters for this as quickly as he now turned from Kane to the board. He could almost feel the intensity of those eyes on the hand with which he chalked the figures up. Stealing a glance around he saw with indignation that the others were making free of Dennis’s cigars, but the General had eyes only for his board.

  “One twenty-six… that’s fine.”

  “Them guys on the line really got their fingers out tonight, sir.”

  “And they’re still promising twenty-three more in time for bomb loading?”

  It had been a rule of Evans’s army career never to volunteer information. But he had broken several of his own rules today already. Again he had it in his power to assuage some of the anxiety in Dennis.

  “Twenty-five, sir.”

  He was rewarded by a fleeting smile. “Oh… twenty-five! Thank Cahill for me, Sergeant.”

  “Sir, them officers are still waiting.”

  “Let ’em sleep while they wait, but keep ’em.”

  As Evans made for the Ops room he had a further reward in the cool self-possession of the voice Dennis now addressed to General Kane: “Sir, we’ve got the planes and the weather. The people at the groups are waiting for the order….”

  In the doorway itself, however, Evans had to stand aside for the hurried passage of Prescott and Brockhurst.

  Inside the office Kane looked up at the interruption with obvious relief. Swallowing his annoyance, Dennis observed now that Brockhurst was looking disturbed and skeptical, his forehead creased with a heavy frown. Prescott, however, had taken on a new animation. His face glowed with the happy flush of creative endeavour.

  “General Kane, I think this time I can promise you something really good. I borrowed some of General Dennis’s draftsmen and I’m having them make three-by-five mountings for the panels, flat white board with glossy black lettering. The first title will be ‘Doom of an Axis Torpedo Factory….’”

  “Jesus F. Christ!” Dennis exploded. Kane whirled on him, but Brockhurst was faster. Stepping between the two he blocked Kane with his shoulder.

  “General Dennis, what’s so tragic about destroying a torpedo factory? Aren’t they worth-while targets?”

  “The last one might be. The first twenty-odd will scarcely inconvenience them.”

  “But if it’s a start…?” persisted Brockhurst.

  Dennis didn’t care whether the correspondent ever learned the theory of bombardment or not but he had seen Kane and Garnett look at each other over that reminder. He amplified, speaking ostensibly to Brockhurst. “The navy can win the sub war in the Atlantic if they get their fingers out. Can they strike the Germans in Germany?”

  Brockhurst nodded quietly but Garnett took it up now.

  “You forget the interservice co-operation angle, Casey.”

  “Did you get my memorandum to your bosses on that?”

  “He did not,” said Kane. “You know that was too provocative.”

  “It was generous, sir,” Dennis retorted. “I wrote them, Cliff, through channels, that I’d take any naval target in Germany the day after they took those battleships in and shelled the fighter plane factory at Bremen.”

  “Can I use that?” asked Brockhurst eagerly.

  “God no!” said Kane. “Half the United Chiefs are admirals.”

  Kane had recognized that memorandum as one of the best staff papers he had ever seen, terse and undeniable with Dennis’s clarity and force. He had pondered the possibility that it might cut through some of their overriding restrictions like a blowtorch. But he had had to ponder also the hazard of applying heat to higher councils.

  “Sir,” said Dennis, “may I send the order?”

  “Casey, we can’t lose another forty planes at Schweinhafen the day after we’ve told them we destroyed it.”

  “Sir, you can wait till the mission has taken off to send the correction. If you will release the Division to my discretion on the weather now…”

  “No. Whichever of us got hung we’d still be sabotaging the Chief.”

  “If we don’t we’re sabotaging bombardment, sir.”

  2

  Kane did not reply at once. He was conscious of the eyes upon him and acutely aware of the reservation with which Brockhurst was now palpably weighing everything he heard. But he was not thinking of Brockhurst or even of Dennis now. He would have to answer Dennis. What troubled him was answering the older questions which the Brigadier’s passion had rekindled deep within Kane himself.

  Frowning with abstraction he walked over to Dennis’s desk, selected and cut a cigar through a silence so tense that Major Prescott did not even risk offering to light it for him. The steady drone of the motors outside carried clearly through the muffling of the blackout curtains; their insistence was a sound always in the background of his thought. It had reawakened another Kane.

  “Casey,” he said, “we’re not sure. I’ve spent twenty-five years doing and preventing things that would have made or wrecked the Air Corps. The Chief has spent thirty. You don’t realize ho
w we’ve fought…”

  “No?” challenged Martin.

  “No!” Then, remembering where Martin had spent the day, he softened his voice. “You’re giving your youth. We’ve already given ours. Casey has named a son after Billy Mitchell… long after. We took Billy’s side when it meant Siberia. They dead-ended the Chief in a cavalry school. I went with him and stayed. I amended the Army Regulation for the Disposal of Manure for him, in longhand. They didn’t give us typewriters in those days.

  “But we never gave up. We did those crazy publicity stunts and we kept our own fund for the widows. We wrote anything we could get printed, we went down on our knees to Hollywood for pictures, we tested without parachutes, we flew the mail through solid glue. The year Goering won the Munich Conference without throwing a bomb our whole appropriation wasn’t as big as the New York City public safety budget… and we bought a lot of Congressmen liquor out of our own pockets to get it.”

  Memory quickened in him as he spoke. But now Brockhurst broke in.

  “Why don’t you tell this story?”

  “You don’t sell stories in uniform,” said Kane. “We were still taking turns with obsolete junk when the country was told we were going to have an air force of fifty thousand planes. No one bothered to say how long it would take to make them, or how long it takes to make a pilot with a chance to live. Oh no! We were going to have fifty thousand planes and our boys were never going to fight in foreign wars. So the country went back to sleep and we started making a modern air force… out of promises… and what was left over after the best of our planes and teachers had been given to every goddamned ambassador in Washington.”

  “Wasn’t that smart, to get experience?” asked Brockhurst.

  “There wasn’t any experience for daylight precision bombardment. The Germans and British had tried it and said it couldn’t be done. The Chief said it could. And there were times when some of us had to force his hand… but there was never a time when he wasn’t taking the rap. We were just beginning to get the tools to get started when we were in it ourselves, with a double war and a fifty-thousand-plane paper air force that didn’t add up to fifty serviceable bombers….”

  He shook his head, trying to clear it again. But when he looked up those steady gray eyes were still fixed inexorably upon him.

  “Maybe we did boast and exaggerate. We had to get the public behind us. Who was telling the public the truth then? A hell of a lot of our stunting was encouraged, higher up, to cover the difference between what the country was promised and what it had.

  “We used to dream of Fortresses to use in mass formations of—six! My God, Casey, if we’d had, even in 1941, what you’ve lost this week we would have had a Munich of our own with the Japs that would have made Hitler’s Munich look like a Rotary meeting. But instead we had diplomacy and a good-neighbor policy. Now we’re beginning to get an Air Force and you want me to risk the whole thing on a premature show-down.”

  Losses hit Dennis below the belt. For him the hardest duty of the war had been learning to live with his losses. Night after night and hour after hour of every waking day they were with him always in the background of everything he had done and the foreground of everything he must do.

  He had thought about them as deeply as he could think without finding solace. What explanation there might be beyond the limitations of his own thought he did not know. He realized that he had spent the best efforts of an active mind on problems essentially rational, mechanical, and soluble. The freedom Dennis was entrusted to defend depended upon his killing Jenks. It must be done as an example to other young men who might be reluctant to kill or be killed in defense of the concept of freedom that biologically indistinguishable young men in Germany were similarly encouraged to destroy.

  It had all been done before and would be done again. The battle cries differed; the end was homicide. Dennis judged, on past performance, that they would continue it, intermittently, until the race had achieved its only inferable purpose in extinction. The evidence seemed plain that of all the purposes men had, the most certain and recurrent was homicide.

  The experiment of precision bombardment was, he still considered, a promising therapy. It could no more end wars than a doctor can confer immortality. It did appear to promise a quicker, cheaper termination of this particular homicidal fever than the previous practices of bloodletting by bayonet. It was unproved, but the idea of reducing opposition by disarmament rather than by death seemed sound, if feasible.

  For this Dennis had taught himself to look past the doom in the strained young faces that swarmed off the trucks from the replacement centers. He himself had had a voice in determining the duration of the tour of duty that fixed the mathematical odds at two to one against the individual’s survival. He had been able to do it by looking beyond the boys he could see toward the indeterminable point where this never-ending stream of immolation would finally stop. It was not enough to think of the boys who were here. He had to think of the ones who might be spared coming.

  For this he knew that forty planes was cheap for a target of consequence. One boy killed for statistical effect was wanton murder. For this he knew that milk runs over France were a delusion that could only mean more telegrams to different families later. An occasional easy mission was, of course, indispensable. There had to be a limit to what was asked of any individual. The current requirement of twenty-five missions was as close to that limit as he had dared to recommend.

  But, if the therapy was to succeed, the country had to get its bodies’ worth out of those twenty-five missions. To send two hundred planes over an easy Channel target, even if they returned without a scratch, meant the loss, by graduation, of eight competent crews; it meant the country had to provide eight more green crews. It meant saving the boy who was here now to kill the boy who was training at home. By longer projection it meant saving aviators to kill infantrymen, in a ratio not determinable.

  There were times when Dennis doubted that Kane remembered this. He knew that many of his senior’s burdens were imponderables even more elusive than the terrible ratios which tormented himself. But some of these imponderables were part of a peacetime past. Kane was still fighting the bitter clinical disputes which had preceded this experiment in blood itself. It was possible that his long struggle for the knife had vitiated his capacity to use it.

  Dennis had read that the human body replaces itself, tissue by tiny tissue, so systematically that every seven years sees a complete change in the structure. Studying Kane now he wondered if the human character and spirit likewise changed to different substance in the old mold under the same inexorable combustion of time and energy. This man fumbling with his apprehensions of past problems was not the Kane he had known. Or Dennis was not himself. Strain had changed one of them. To believe he was the one was to believe himself unfit for this command. It was possible but others had to judge that. Now he cut through the continuing tirade of Kane’s lamentations curtly.

  “Sir, that’s all true. But the point of the whole struggle was to get the Air Force in time.”

  He walked over and tapped the Swastika on the wall.

  “They’re still ahead of us technically. It’s enough. These things can be the end of bombardment unless we check them now.”

  “Casey,” protested Kane, “I’ve lived with the things that can be the end of bombardment. Do you remember the fight to get our first Fort? Do you realize how the navy wants them now, for sub patrol and to protect the repairing of those battleships air power couldn’t hurt? Do you realize how the Ground Forces want our pilots for company commanders? Do you know how the British want these Forts for night bombing? Do you know there’s a plan to fly infantry supplies to China with bombers? Do you know what the Russians want? Don’t you realize the United Chiefs are half admirals, the Consolidated Chiefs half British? Don’t you know why the whole Air Corps holds its breath every time the Prime Minister goes to Washington?

  “On Tuesday every damned one of these factions will
have a voice in that meeting. Everyone has some pet reason for wanting us to fail, some sure-fire strategy of naval blockade or attrition by defensive, or building a road across the Himalayas, or breaking German morale with pamphlets or any other sure-fire way to keep a nice war going.

  “Tuesday, this Tuesday, they’ll be waiting for the Chief like buzzards and you want to send him in there with three days of prohibitive losses hanging over the allocation we need to prove our theory.”

  “Damn it, sir. It isn’t a theory any more. We got Posenleben beyond fighters, with one division. And Ted did wreck that torpedo plant today even if it was the wrong target.”

  Martin held his breath at the outburst but this time it was with hope. Kane had his temper firmly in control again. He seemed to be measuring every word Dennis spoke. Rising now he walked over for a long look at the two red crosses before turning back to them. There was no trace of rancor in his gravity.

  “I know, Casey. With time and planes we can do the same thing to any factory in Europe. But they don’t know it yet and the whole thing’s at stake here and now. It isn’t just a matter of a few losses this week or even a lot in six months. The Germans are going to kill a lot more of our people. But they won’t be any deader than the ones who’ve been killed in the last thirty years, to give us air power.

  “You can concentrate on Germany but I’m fighting the tough part of this war against the Ground Forces and the navy and the Congress and the White House and the people and the press and our goddamned allies, every one of them with a different idea of fighting this war just as the last one was fought, only more slowly.

  “You think I don’t know that the boys call me old Percent? You think I’ve enjoyed spreading this mug of mine around the press like a divorced heiress? You think I haven’t known what they could do to me for the statistics I’ve juggled, the strike photos I’ve doctored, the reports I’ve gilded? You can worry about losses and you should. But I’ve spent twenty-five years watching men, my friends, killed and broken and disgraced and discarded for one single idea… to get us an Air Force. Now you want me to gamble the whole thing to save a few casualties next winter.”