Eisenhower chewed at his lip. Among his aides, whispers flew. “Then there’s this other matter,” he said carefully. “The coordinates for this Lair. Tell us about that in detail, Berg.”
Moe rendered a flawless account, ending with Heisenberg pressing the map location of the Wolf’s Lair into Karl’s hand.
Eisenhower’s gaze swept to Karl. “Have you looked where that is on the map?”
Karl stood. “No. I had no maps.”
Groves said quickly, “We can’t be sure that’s the exact hiding place, sir. This was a physicist, after all, called in by Hitler himself to report on this radioactive tonnage the Germans have. Heisenberg’s an amateur hiker, no better than that. He probably got a glance at a navigation map, made a guess.”
Eisenhower frowned. “So?”
Groves voice thickened to a growl. “We should plaster the area. I’ve got the next A-bomb damn near ready to go. Assembling. Two more days, maximum.”
Karl could not stop himself from saying, “Heisenberg is a precise man. He gave the coordinates in detail.” Immediately he thought, Am I just standing up for my profession?
Groves gave a stiff smile, but his face was red and his eyes narrowed to slits. “He got a Nobel Prize for analyzing uncertainty, right? He says there’s no such thing as an exact measurement.”
Karl kept his face blank. “That’s quantum mechanics. It doesn’t apply to bombing mechanics.”
Eisenhower gave a quick, small smile but looked puzzled. He conferred with his aides in murmurs, looked up. “So, Groves, you think we should use our second bomb on that area? To be sure we get Hitler?”
“Damn right, sir.”
“How long until we’ll have a third?”
“Three months, maybe a week or two less. Same as last time. They’re spinning those centrifuges at Oak Ridge hard as they can.”
“I see.”
Silence. Into it Groves ventured, “If we miss him again, there’ll be hell to pay.”
Eisenhower frowned, said nothing. Karl was standing uneasily, sensing that the tension in the room was at a tipping point. Groves was going to get his way. But . . .
He opened his mouth, licked dry lips, and said, “General Eisenhower, I think Heisenberg gave exact map positions because he knew them that precisely. He wants Hitler gone. And I might point out that it is conspicuously easy to take out the Lair with a conventional daylight bomb raid. Use those penetrating bombs we have, the ones I heard about a few months ago.”
Groves barked, “Cohen, shut up! I’m sorry, General, this man is just an atomics guy—”
“Never mind that,” Eisenhower said with a wave of his hand. “It’s a good point. We’ve got many reports from follow-up teams. They say that the fallout from Berlin made people sick many hundreds of miles away. German radio is playing it up big, accusing us of violating the gas warfare provisions of the Geneva Protocol I hear about this from General Marshall, the president, even congressmen.”
Groves’s mouth twitched. “Politicians can’t—”
“That Wolf’s Lair is in East Prussia, legally an ally of ours. Its fallout could blow over onto the Soviets, and into the rest of eastern Europe.” Eisenhower looked around at several nodding heads.
“This is Hitler, sir!” Groves stood up suddenly, voice booming. “We have a chance to end this war with one bomb. I say—”
“Sit down, General,” Eisenhower said sternly. He had the look of a very old and wise cat contemplating a young and inexperienced mouse.
Silence. Eisenhower let it grow, studying the faces around the room. He knows how to command a room by doing nothing, Karl thought. He noticed he was still standing and sat.
“I have to meet with Churchill,” Eisenhower said. “Be ready to convene again.”
People rose and murmured, tension releasing in rising noise. Scraping chairs, worried grumbles. And something else he could not name.
Karl and Moe maneuvered to stay away from Groves. By chance Karl was near the rear door when Eisenhower passed by, flanked by staff, not noticing Karl at all, eyes troubled. The general muttered to an aide as he passed, “That Groves is as bad as Patton. Keep him away from me.”
2.
September 24, 1944
Marthe’s long letter was full of homey details, evoking memories that seemed so far away now.
I felt lonely so invited the Ureys and Fermis over for dinner. They were full of questions about you and the work—so is the entire world since Berlin! I knew nothing useful, of course, and plied them with food! I made one of my favorite recipes, a wonderful chicken en croute—you remember? It’s a five-star creation since it’s hearty enough to fill up the men, fancy enough to impress the daylights out of the women, and can readily be prepared ahead of time—terrific for the hostess! Martine did her best as hostess too. Elisabeth looked at it all with big round eyes.
Enrico said he has a job for you in the Fermi Lab (that’s what the Ureys called it—big laugh from Enrico) when you get back. He wonders if you’re still interested in his using the uranium reactor for electrical power, now that you’ve had a huge success with the bomb. A fine evening! I think perhaps Urey might have a job for you at Columbia, too.
Our youngest is growing nicely and has not yet quite learned to cry havoc. Elisabeth walks to catch up to her sister. They miss you, Martine especially—where’s Daddy, she cries. So do I.
The girls had head colds, Marthe went on, which she, still new to English, struggled to find a word for, inventing “stuffedupedness” instead.
Karl sat back on his bunk and thought. The walls were so thin he could hear someone who reliably snored like a train and another who played a leitmotif of nasal mutter. Marthe’s cuisine had always been fine, after some rookie meals in their first year of marriage, and he thought about the chicken en croute. A far cry indeed from the mess hall, or what he could find in most of London—greasy fish and chips or cardboard-like pub grub.
Marthe had added a postscript on the back of the last piece of onionskin paper, and enclosed some photos.
Anton writes he is on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific, no more details (security). He says it is big enough to be a city and yet tilts in high seas. He wants to see action, “get in the game,” he calls it.
Get in the game, indeed. But this wasn’t like soccer—the one athletic event Anton had talked Karl into, with disastrous, humiliating results. After that, Karl had contented himself with taking Anton to a baseball game—where they had seen Moe Berg play. The world was connected in odd ways.
He studied the photos. One immediately made him embarrassed at his irritation only moments before, about his sleeping conditions.
Anton beamed forth from the center of it, hands clasped almost as if in restrained joy. Karl’s face burned. These men were facing true danger right now and looked as if they were off on a fun trip, no thought of their future.
The next underlined the point.
On the back of this one, Marthe’s delicate blue ink penmanship read, He’s wearing a helmet with his back to us, at the firing position of the big gun. This is a big ship, to use such guns!
Karl judged, from the flat deck to the right, that this was an aircraft carrier. The long, thin barrel pointed up must be antiaircraft. He recalled the futile bursts of antiaircraft below the bomber he’d flown in to Berlin. Here was Anton, manning antiaircraft on a ship, against Japanese attacks. We’re in the same line of business, really . . . killing the enemy.
The enlisted’s bunks
Naval gun
He had largely ignored the Pacific campaign, but did know that rumors were running that the next big battle was to liberate the Philippines. Another arm of the war reached north toward Japan, with the goal of getting within bomber range of the island. There, commentators thought the next targets were a place called Iwo Jima and, beyond that, Okinawa—the first of the Japanese home islands, a formidable bulwark with a heavily defended mountain. Pundits said the Japanese would fiercely defend both, but Okinawa
was their homeland, and for the invading navy and marines would be a huge maelstrom of suicide attacks in brutal conditions. He hoped Anton wasn’t headed for any of these places. But the look on Anton’s face told him that the men actually facing such catastrophes didn’t seem deterred. They brimmed with confident joy.
He listened to snoring and bombers taking off in the dead of night and thought the long, slow thoughts that came up from his unconscious when he was tired yet somehow alert.
The world is full of odd people trying to get even. . . . Who had said that? Certainly this war was getting odder by the day. The events in France and Switzerland had altered him in ways he could not say. Everything before this war—and they were already starting to give it capitals when they spoke, the War—seemed now to have the rusty patina of ancient history. Even dinners with the Ureys and Fermis were memories wreathed in nostalgia for him, from a world without German corpses and veils of death dust. He was thinking of this when he finally fell asleep.
3.
September 25, 1944
Richard Feynman leaned back with a grin, feet on his desk, hands behind his neck, chair tilted at a jaunty thirty-degree angle. “Y’know, I feel the same way about Groves as Ike does.”
Karl had just finished telling Feynman, Freeman Dyson, and Luis Alvarez about the meeting with Eisenhower. No one had told him not to, after all. Moe would have disapproved, but he wasn’t here, in the physicists’ office at the air base, just next to the building where the second A-bomb was nearly done.
“I wish Groves would go away and stop trying to run everything,” Luis added. “We know how to do this without him looking over our shoulders.”
Karl considered the exchange with Eisenhower, which he had not related in any detail, just some veiled hints. “He wants a hand in deciding how to use the bomb. Probably thinks he made it happen—sort of. But he’s not really a combat officer. Army engineers aren’t, unless they’re at the front. So he frets and takes it out on you.”
Freeman stirred his tea and said with soft deliberation, “I like my tea strong enough for the spoon to stand up in it. This war ration stuff is pitiful.”
They looked at one another blankly, talk exhausted. Freeman said, “Let’s get out, go for a walk, enjoy the weather.” Karl got his point: Less chance of being overheard, too.
Alvarez nodded, and Feynman said, “Sure. I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me. Like Groves. But without me along.”
Getting into the fresh autumn air of England was a breath of life for Karl, after so many days in rooms. The British aircrews had spread out into the distant fields to eat lunch, far from the constant buzzing of taxiing bombers. Karl noticed a man lolling on a grassy bank eating a lunch, in a pose reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Adam in the Sistine Chapel, but reaching for another sandwich rather than the hand of his Creator. Not, of course, that Karl believed in a Creator at all.
There were American fliers in among the rolling fields too, a change since Karl had been sent to France. He asked about it.
“Some ground crews came in yesterday,” Freeman said, “specialists in this new bomber of yours—the B-29. I was sent out here as well, though I cannot fathom why. The order did not say.”
Luis sat on a stump and unwrapped some indigestible-looking glop he had sneaked away from the mess hall. Karl shook his head when Freeman offered some melted chocolate. “I don’t want to lose the memory of those pastries in Switzerland.” Though the best were from the Germans, he thought guiltily. He was still processing that sudden, startling meeting. Thank God—the one he didn’t believe in—he had then the sense to remain nearly silent. Never pass by a chance to shut up. Maybe he should now—secrets were secrets—but now he needed to talk.
He thought about Marthe’s letter, the offer from Fermi, and maybe even a faculty position, from Urey’s hint. He didn’t want to take more academic work. He wanted to do things. Nuclear power reactors were a grand prospect. Yes—he wanted that, as soon as this horrible war was done. Not weapons. Never.
He turned to Freeman, who was conspicuously straying away from the guys in the A-bomb assembly group, eyeing the trees for birds. “Look, I found out some things—”
“Hey!” a soldier called, running out to them. “Groves has come in, wants to see you all.”
Karl sighed. Once again, at the beck and call of big shots in uniform. Yellowing leaves of an early autumn muttered softly in an easy wind, and he wanted to stay outside. He was not made for war.
Trudging back to the base, where machines labored into the fragrant air, he thought of the war and how a fancy-pants knowledge of nuclear physics had gotten him into it. Something ironic there, for sure. He knew now that after seeing the bombers in their arc over the countryside, with all that implied, he would not be able to think or feel the warm English certitudes: slow, rhythmic cricket matches on the summer green, the clink of teacups at polite garden parties in the vicarage, the sweet smell of grass after a fresh rain on a July morning. Instead his world would be raw and strange now.
• • •
Groves said, “We’ve just won a battle.”
“I take it that’s a metaphor,” Karl said guardedly.
“Moe and me”—Groves slapped Moe on the back, startling the big man—“we held our own in a meeting about who goes after the Wolf’s Lair. It’s now a joint Brit-American operation.”
“Great,” Karl said, though he didn’t really see how this mattered.
“I need to go into a meeting right now with you guys.” He nodded at Karl, Freeman, and Feynman. “I want a show of force, bringing in the people who found out where it is.”
Freeman blinked doubtfully. “I did nothing at all—”
“You’re to show I got Brits on my side of the argument too,” Groves said gruffly. His practiced glower focused on Freeman, who averted his eyes and quite pointedly said nothing.
They marched—no other word for it—to three wooden buildings over near the end of the landing strip. EXEC OFFICER a sign said, leading to an ordinary war-issue room with wooden chairs and a long table, maps laid out on it. Karl saw the map was of Poland, with a crosshair on a position that had to be the Lair.
Various British officers stood oddly at attention with USAF men, and Groves went through some military rituals Karl had seen and still didn’t understand. They reminded him of the stiff manners imposed on boys and girls attending their first formal dance, girls in dresses like flowers, boys in uncomfortable suits and ties for the first time, just as Karl had been—nervous nods and invitations, swanky swing music, false anxious smiles, awkward missteps. . . .
But he had launched into memories, a symptom of the homesickness that beset him now. He snapped himself back into the moment.
Once seated, Groves said, “I and General Eisenhower want an American component to this assault.”
A Royal Air Force officer whose breast pocket ID read ALDISS said mildly, “Understood. The prime minister has been on the line about you. I am forced to agree.”
A meaningful pause, nothing said but glances around the table. Aldiss continued, “As deputy air marshal, I have assigned the Lancasters to the first run. They are more used to daylight raids. A morning hit.”
Groves scowled. “We get the night?”
“No sir, you have later in the same day, using your B-29s.”
“I think we should go in first—”
“I understand we will follow a two-shot strategy, as approved by our superiors.” Aldiss raised an eyebrow.
Karl admired how Aldiss glided smoothly in with his approved accent, as if explaining arithmetic to a slow child. “Our Lancasters hit them hard. Give the Germans time to think the raid is over, have them come out. If Hitler is still alive, he would emerge and get away as fast as he can.”
Groves frowned. “B-29s are high-altitude fliers, damn it. I like having them out of antiaircraft range.”
Aldiss nodded, pointing to some air recon photos on the table. “But they
carry heavy tonnage. And we will deal with the ack-ack first, as is standard. Hitler would escape most probably by air. Perhaps to reach his Bavarian redoubt, the Eagle’s Nest. But we can pin him to his Wolf’s Lair by making this nearby airfield”—he held up several close-ups—“a pincushion in our Lancaster squadron raid. No one can take off from it after we’ve put a hundred or two craters in it.”
Groves consulted a USAF officer next to him. Karl had not even noticed that guy before. Things were moving faster than he could process. Not his game, no. “Granted,” Groves said. “I want an American wing to go in on the second raid. Say, an hour after the first.”
“Accepted. The PM made that clear. This would be a low-altitude run, necessarily. We will put spotter craft ahead of your formation to suggest where to pinpoint.”
“I’d say so. Colonel Baxter”—turning to the USAF officer—“who do we have to command that squadron?”
Baxter looked unsettled but managed a steady tone. “In my judgment, we have several men who could lead that. They have experience going after close-in targets—trains, convoys, ships in canals or at harbor. They’re training on B-29s right now.”
Groves smiled slightly. Karl could see he was glad to be somewhat in control of the conversation. “Who are those?”
Baxter considered, said forthrightly, “There’s Cogburn, who is as fine a target man as we have. He is scrupulous about not hitting civilians and will pull out if he has any doubt about the target being German military. A religious man about that too.”
Groves drilled in. “How many missions?”
“Over twenty-five. I should think he is the best choice for you.”
“Who else?”
“There’s a Dobson fellow, not my favorite, but with a good hitting record. Twenty-something missions. We have fighters assess the damage after a fighter-bomber raid, and they say Dobson hits targets, sure—but also, everything nearby. Kinda sloppy. He seems to think that anything next to, say, a tank formation is likely to be infantry or support troops. In a fraction of a second, you sometimes have to make that call. I think he goes over the line on that, but he is accomplished.”
The Berlin Project Page 38
