For a wonder, the American government seemed to realize as much. Some of the engines Pete heard belonged to P-40 fighters. People said those would blast the Japs’ scrap-metal planes out of the sky. Others came in pairs on fat-bellied B-18 Digby bombers. If the Japanese did come, flying to their bases and blowing them sky-high looked like a pretty decent plan.
The American government also waved its magic wand and turned Philippine Field Marshal Douglas MacArthur back into American General Douglas MacArthur. Some of the guys Pete drank with off duty applauded that. Others just jeered. The longer soldiers had served under MacArthur, the more skeptical they seemed. Pete leaned toward the doubters. MacArthur belonged to the Army, didn’t he? Of course that meant he was likely to screw things up.
Christmas came. So did New Year’s. Pete got a wire from his folks in the Bronx. That was nice, but it might as well have come from another world. The card from the fellows he’d served with meant more to him.
Foreign news didn’t get any better. No one would confuse 1941 with the Millennium, not any time soon. The Nazis and their little friends kept bashing heads with the Reds. The Japanese kept banging away in China. Their foreign minister said, “No power can accept the dictates of another without becoming a slave.” That was the translation, anyhow. Maybe it sounded friendlier in Japanese, but, again, Pete leaned toward the doubters. Then the foreign minister clammed up altogether. Nobody at all took that for a good sign.
Manila went right on having air-raid drills. The day after New Year’s, a nervous antiaircraft-gun crew opened up on a Digby. They shot it down. That was good news as far as gunnery went. Pete didn’t suppose the other Digbys’ flyers thought so. If a bunch of jumpy, half-trained American soldiers could knock a B-18 out of the sky, what would Jap veterans do to them? What would Jap fighters do to them? Those were … interesting questions, weren’t they?
The second Sunday of January was the twelfth. The night before, Pete had gone out and got crocked. He couldn’t remember how many times he’d got crocked on Saturday nights in the Far East. He couldn’t remember what all had happened on some of those nights, either. That was the point, for him and a swarm of guys just like him. If getting crocked on Saturday night wasn’t a great American military tradition, he didn’t know what would be.
Maybe waking up on Sunday morning feeling like death. Pete lived up to that one, in spades. “The fuck?” he muttered, trying to figure out exactly what kind of ungodly racket had ripped him untimely from the womb of sleep—and from the oblivion of all the cheap whiskey he’d poured down the night before.
He didn’t need long to figure out what the racket was: all the air-raid sirens in town were going off at once. “Jesus H. Christ!” groaned the guy in the bunk above his. “Has to be that cocksucking MacArthur. He’s the only asshole big enough to boot us out of the sack at sunup on a fucking Sunday morning!”
If MacArthur was that big an asshole, Pete was all for stringing him up by the balls. He was also all for gallons of hot coffee, a handful of aspirins to finish corroding his stomach lining but quiet his pounding head, and some more ZZZs after the sirens quit screeching.
If they ever did. A moment later, antiaircraft guns added a bass note to the cacophony. More Digbys? Pete wondered vaguely. Some of the guys at the guns would catch hell.
Or would they? If those were Digbys overhead, they were fighting back. Bombs crumped down. They didn’t land that close to the cruiser—but they weren’t that far away, either.
“Holy motherfucking shit! I think we’re under attack!” exclaimed the Marine in the upper.
“Nothing gets by you, does it, Sherlock?” Pete said.
“Huh?” the other guy said. It wasn’t a brilliant comeback, but Pete didn’t gig him for it. Instead, he scrambled out of the bunk, trying to find out what the hell was going on. He didn’t forget his hangover—he would have had to be dead for real to do that—but he did shove it aside. For once, he had more important things to worry about.
Klaxons hooted. “All hands! Battle stations! All hands! Battle stations!” boomed from the loudspeakers.
On light duty, Pete didn’t have a battle station. He got topside as fast as he could anyway. The sky was full of planes and puffs of antiaircraft fire. Shrapnel started pattering down. He suddenly wished for a tin hat. Some of those chunks of shell casing could put your lights out for good if they came down on top of your head.
Most of the planes overhead had unfamiliar lines—but not that unfamiliar, not to him. He’d seen them every now and then in China. He’d seen the big red meatballs on their wings and fuselages, too. Sure as hell, they were Japs. He didn’t know why he should be so surprised and outraged, but he was. The Philippines belonged to the US of A, God damn it to hell! Those enemy warplanes had no business coming here, no business at all.
Overhead, a brightly painted Peashooter dueled a Japanese fighter. Americans laughed at the shit the Japs manufactured, but the plane with the meatballs was far faster and more maneuverable than the (admittedly obsolescent) American machine. The Peashooter spun toward the ground, trailing a plume of fire and smoke. No parachute blossomed in the muggy air. Scratch one American flyer, Pete thought.
Then the Japanese fighter’s pilot spotted him and the other Marines and sailors on the Boise’s deck. He dove on them, machine guns blazing. Pete couldn’t move fast no matter how much he wanted to—and he wanted to one hell of a lot. Bullets spanged off steel. Wounded men screeched. The fighter roared away at not much over stack height.
Something not nearly far enough away blew up with a rending crash. Of course the Japs were coming after the Far East Fleet. Small as it was, they were bound to have carriers offshore. They’d want to make damn sure nobody could go after those precious ships.
They knew how to get what they wanted, too. A bigger explosion followed the first one. An enormous cloud of black smoke toadstooled up into the sky.
“Rifles!” yelled another Marine coming up from below. “I’ve got rifles, so we can shoot back at the lousy yellow bastards!”
Pete gratefully grabbed a Springfield. You could shoot down a plane with a rifle. (You had to be mighty goddamn lucky—mighty goddamn lucky—but you could.) And even if you didn’t shoot anything down, you were trying to. You were in the fight. No—you were in the war. It had taken almost two and a half years, but the United States was finally in the war.
WAR! THE HEADLINE on the Philadelphia Inquirer took up most of the space above the fold. Peggy Druce had to turn the newspaper over to learn that Japan had launched attacks on the Philippines and Hawaii, and was also moving into French Indonesia and British Malaya.
It wasn’t that she didn’t already know some of that—she and Herb had been glued to the radio ever since news of what was going on halfway around the world broke here in the States. But the paper had more details than the hasty radio bulletins she’d heard before, many of them delivered by men who sounded as if they could hardly believe the copy they were reading.
She brought the Inquirer in to her husband, who was eating fried eggs and buttered toast and getting down a second cup of coffee heavy with sugar and almost white with cream. She remembered some of the rationed breakfasts she’d had in Europe, and what passed for coffee in Germany. Americans didn’t always understand how lucky they were.
She handed Herb the front page without a pang. She’d glanced at the headlines, and he’d fill her in on anything important she might have missed. He took the Inquirer with a word of thanks. As soon as he had it in front of him, he lit a cigarette. Breathing out smoke, he said, “Lord, what a mess!”
Peggy nodded but didn’t answer. She’d been in the middle of such an exploding mess. Herb, of course, had seen and done even worse things when he went Over There a generation earlier. That wasn’t quite the same, though. The mess then had already exploded by the time he got to it. He knew what he was supposed to do and how to go about it. Things now were up in the air, as they had been when Peggy found herself too close to the G
erman border as Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia. Some of those things had been machine-gun bullets and 105mm shells and 500kg bombs. They’d come down, much too close to her head.
“Looks like Manila got caught napping,” Herb remarked, exhaling more smoke. “Hawaii’s not so bad. We were ready for ’em there—but why didn’t we spot ’em while they were on the way, darn it?”
“Maybe they came from a funny direction,” Peggy said.
“Maybe they did—but we ought to be looking every which way at once when there’s liable to be a war on, don’t you think?” Herb opened the Inquirer to get a look at the inside pages. He shook his head. “We were ready in Hawaii, and we still lost a carrier and a battlewagon and some of the fuel store we’ve got there.” He held up a page with a photo for Peggy. She supposed it was smoke from burning fuel oil or whatever the hell. It looked more like a volcano going off.
“What about Manila?” she asked.
“It’s a lot closer to the Japs, and it got hit a lot harder,” Herb answered. “They’ll probably try invading the Philippines if they haven’t already.” He went to another inside page. “MacArthur says, ‘We shall prevail.’ That sounds pretty, doesn’t it?”
“It sure does,” Peggy said. “I wonder how he expects to do it, though.”
“Ha!” Her husband finished the toast and stubbed out his cigarette. “There’s the sixty-four-dollar question, all right.”
“What does FDR have to say about it?” Peggy asked, adding, “There wasn’t anything on the front page.”
Herb nodded, acknowledging that she’d looked as she brought in the paper. He settled his bifocals more firmly on his nose as he looked for an answer. He grunted, not much liking what he found. “A White House aide says, ‘Obviously, we are at war. Obviously, we didn’t want to be.’ ”
“Our goldfish could tell us that much, and we haven’t got a goldfish,” Peggy said.
“Yeah, I know.” Herb nodded. Then he let out a different grunt, one that said Now we’re getting somewhere. “The President’s going to address Congress at noon. Emergency session. It’ll go by radio all over the country.”
Peggy wondered how many people would miss church to hear him. It was still Sunday morning here—still very early Sunday morning on the Pacific Coast. It had been Sunday morning for quite a while in Manila, though. Hawaii had got hit at midday Saturday, their time.
When Peggy remarked on that, Herb grunted one more time, now as if to convey Well, what do you expect? “Some of the guys there were still sober, I bet,” he said. “Odds are that’s why they did better.”
“Why does everybody get smashed on Saturday night?” she wondered.
His look told her she could have asked a better question. She thought he’d grunt yet again, but he fooled her: he only rolled his eyes. “You’re in the service, what else is there to do?” he said. Then, slowly and deliberately, he lit another cigarette. His cheeks hollowed as he took a deep drag. When he let it out in twin streams through his nose, he looked like a locomotive venting steam. Peering down at the paper rather than at Peggy, he went on, “If they’ll have me, hon, I’m going to put the uniform on again.”
“Oh, no!” But that was dismay, not surprise. Peggy knew him too well for such a thing to surprise her. She did take her best shot at changing his mind: “You did your bit the last time around—your bit and then some.”
Herb chuckled sourly. “If they have to stick a Springfield in my paws, the USA’s in deep water, all right,” he admitted. “But I know some stuff I didn’t back in 1918. All kinds of things’ll run smoother if somebody like me who knows the ropes is there to keep an eye on ’em.”
She imagined swarms of canny, successful middle-aged men with gimlet eyes and skeptical stares descending on war plants all over the country and telling Army regulars how to do their jobs better. “If you think the regulars will thank you for it, you’re nuts,” she predicted.
She squeezed another chuckle out of him. This one might in fact have been amused. “They may hate us, but they’ll need us.”
Maybe he was right, maybe wrong. Maybe the Army wouldn’t take him back. Peggy hoped it wouldn’t and feared it would. She said, “I don’t remember the last time I wanted a drink so bad first thing in the morning.”
To her amazement, Herb built her a strong one and himself one stronger yet. “What the dickens?” he said. “We don’t go to war every day, thank God. And if we get sleepy later on, so what? It’s Sunday.” Ice cubes clinked as he raised his glass. “Here’s to the USA!”
“To the USA!” Peggy echoed. The bourbon hit her hard in spite of her morning coffee. But Herb couldn’t have put it any better. What the dickens? So what? They both had another hefty knock after the first one. The newspaper stopped being interesting. Reading felt like too much effort. And, on the morning the United States found itself at war, the funnies weren’t very funny.
Peggy turned on the radio. She and Herb took turns spinning the dial. Music and prayers—many of them hastily and badly written to take account of suddenly changed circumstances—and confused war news came from one station after another. Peggy didn’t worry about any of it. She was paying attention to the state of the nation, which was what the times called for.
A little before noon, Herb turned the dial to 610 for WIP, the Mutual Broadcasting System’s local affiliate. No doubt most stations would carry FDR, but you could count on that one. Right on the hour, an announcer spoke in hushed tones: “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States addressing a joint session of Congress … Here is the President.”
“Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, members of the Senate and the House of Representatives, yesterday the Empire of Japan attacked American possessions without warning or provocation,” Roosevelt said, his voice raspy with anger. “The Empire’s despicable action shows that its leaders think us weak and irresolute. Like it or not—and no sane man can relish war—we are at war with the Japanese. They have started this fight. We will finish it, and we will win it.”
A great cheer rose from the members of Congress. FDR went on to ask them to make a formal declaration of war against Japan. That cheer told Peggy he’d get exactly what he asked for.
he Ivans were getting frisky. Somewhere a long way ahead lay Smolensk. The orders for Willi Dernen’s regiment said it was one part of a giant pincer that would help encircle the Russian city. But to encircle a place, you first had to nip round behind it. The orders came out of Berlin, and Berlin didn’t get what was going on all these kilometers to the east.
Willi hadn’t shaved since … he couldn’t remember quite when. His face fungus helped a little when it came to keeping his cheeks and chin warm. It would have done more if it weren’t full of rime from his breath. And he was better off than many. He had his greatcoat and the sheepskin vest underneath. And he had a pair of fine felt boots some Russian didn’t need any more. His feet wouldn’t freeze … too soon.
Compared to those of his buddies still stuck with Wehrmacht-issue gear, he was well off. Compared to the French and English, whose cold-weather clothing was nowhere near so good as what the Germans made, he was incredibly lucky.
But the Poles didn’t have to scrounge to get their hands on stuff like this. They knew ahead of time what these winters were like. Seeing German troops collect pitying stares from a bunch of damn Poles was galling, to say the least.
Red Army men had clothes made for this hideous weather, too. They also had gun oil that didn’t freeze up when it got really cold, unlike the fancy shit the Germans used. Willi carried a little tube of that, taken from the dead Russian who’d supplied him with valenki. The action on his Mauser still worked just fine.
He shared the gun oil with his friends. He even shared it with Awful Arno, more from expediency than affection. Baatz might be the world’s biggest pain in the ass, but he was almost as dangerous to the bastards on the other side as he was to his own men.
Fighting went back and forth, back and forth. German panzer lub
ricants didn’t like the bitter weather any better than German gun oil did. Sometimes you could get panzer support, sometimes not. Russian panzers didn’t seem bothered. They had wider tracks than German machines, too. They could go through or over mud and snowdrifts that made German panzers bog down.
Squatting by a fire in a hut in a wrecked village, Willi said, “If the Ivans even halfway knew what the fuck they were doing, they could run us back into Poland in about a week and a half.”
“Nah.” Adam Pfaff shook his head. He was as grimy and shaggy as Willi. “We’d hang on for two weeks, easy.”
Arno Baatz crouched by that crackling blaze, too. He didn’t growl at Pfaff for defeatism. He just bummed a papiros off of him. There might not be much tobacco in the damn things, but what there was was a lot stronger than German-issue smokes. Willi also had some papirosi in a greatcoat pocket. It wasn’t as if there weren’t plenty of dead Russians to frisk.
“Poor brave stupid shitheads,” he went on. “Their officers tell ’em to do something, they keep on trying to do it, no matter how dumb it is.”
“You mean, like charging off to surround Smolensk?” Adam Pfaff inquired. Awful Arno stirred at that, but for a wonder he didn’t say anything. Maybe he was taking mental notes. If he was—well, fuck him.
And Willi shook his head. “No, not like that. We’re trying all kinds of ways to do it.”
“None of ’em’s come close to working yet,” Pfaff said. Arno Baatz stirred again.
Willi ignored him. “But they’re all different,” he said. “The Russians keep doing the same goddamn thing over and over, no matter how many of ’em get killed. It’s like they don’t care, or they don’t dare get any ideas for themselves.”
“Always more Russians to throw in,” Baatz said. For once in his life, he wasn’t even close to wrong. Soviet generals spent men the way a sailor on leave spent money on girls. More where those came from seemed to be their guiding principle. The Germans always killed more enemies than they lost themselves. But the Ivans kept on coming.
The War That Came Early: The Big Switch Page 45
