W E B Griffin - Corp 03 - Counterattack

by Counterattack(Lit)

  Nice guy. Until I met you, I was a little worried. He is not overly fond of the U.S. Navy officers he's met. But I think he'll get along with you."

  "That's flattering, Sir, but why?"

  "Just a feeling. I think you're two of a kind."

  "Captain, I don't know how soon, but probably within the next couple of days, the rest of my people will be coming in from Hawaii, probably in dribs and drabs. Should I make arrange-ments to put them into that hotel with Koffler?"

  "How many?"

  "One officer, a first lieutenant, and fifteen enlisted men."

  "I'm not trying to tell you how to run your operation, but presumably you'll be moving them, or at least most of them, to Townesville?"

  "If that's where the Coastwatchers are, yes, Sir."

  "Open to suggestion?"

  "Yes, Sir, of course."

  "I think you'd better go up there alone at first. If things work out, you can rent a house for them up there."

  " `If things work out,' Sir?"

  "Commander Feldt can be difficult," Pickering said. "Both the Army and the Navy have sent people up there. He told both groups to `sod off.' Can you guess what that means?"

  "I think so, Sir," Banning said, smiling.

  "I'm hoping that he will see you as someone who has come to be of help, not take charge. If he does, then you can rent a house for your people up there. In the meantime, it might get a little crowded, so we'll put them up in my house, here."

  "Your house, Sir?"

  "Against what I suppose is the inevitable:-my being told to vacate these quarters-I rented a house." He saw the confusion on Banning's face. "A number, a large number, of MacArthur's Palace Guard want me out of here; I am too close to the Divine Throne."

  "I understand, Sir," Banning said, turning from the mirror where he was tying his field scarf to smile at Pickering.

  "I'll call. Right now, as a matter of fact, and have the house activated. If I had known you would have that kid with you, I would already have done it."

  "Activated, Sir?"

  "It comes with a small staff. Housekeeper, maids, a cook. Since I'm not in it, I put them on vacation."

  "That sounds fine, but who pays for it? I'm not sure I'm au-thorized to put my people on per diem."

  "Frank Knox's Confidential Fund will pay for it," Pickering said, "but let me make it clear to you, Banning, that you're au-thorized to do about anything you damned well please. You an-swer only to me."

  He went to a telephone and gave the operator a number.

  "Mrs. Mannshow, this is Fleming Pickering. I'm glad I caught you in. Do you think you could get those people to come off Ninety Mile Beach and start running the house starting to-morrow?"

  He looked at Banning and smiled, and gestured for Banning to make himself another drink.

  (Six)

  top secret

  Eyes Only-The Secretary of the Navy

  DUPLICATION FORBIDDEN

  ORIGINAL TO BE DESTROYED AFTER ENCRYP-TION AND TRANSMITTAL TO SECNAVY

  Menzies Hotel

  Melbourne, Australia

  Wednesday, 20 May 194 2

  Dear Frank:

  I thought it appropriate to report on the status quo here, especially the thinking of the General, insofar as the Battle of the Coral Sea and other events seem to have affected it.

  But before I get to that, let me report the arrival of my own reinforcements. Major Ed Banning arrived yesterday, to-gether with his advance party, one fero-cious Marine paratrooper who must be all of seventeen. The balance of his command is still in Hawaii, trying to get on an airplane for the trip here. If it could be arranged to get them a higher priority without causing undue attention, I sug-gest that it be provided to them. In my judgment, it is more important to get Banning's people here and integrated with the Australian Coastwatchers than it is to send more Army and Marine colo-nels and Navy captains here so they can start setting up their empires.

  Banning, of course, carried your letter, for which I thank you (and the check, for which I thank you even more; if Ban-ning has to start chartering fishing boats, etc., his operation can become very expensive, very soon). And he brought me up to date on Albatross opera-tions in Hawaii, in particular their ef-fectiveness vis-a-vis what happened in the Coral Sea.

  I am very impressed with Banning, but fear that he is less than pleased with me. He made it clear that he considers him-self to be under my orders, which I imme-diately made use of by forbidding him even to think about going behind Japanese lines himself. Because of his Japanese language skills and understanding of their minds, for one thing, and for an-other, because I think he knows too much about Albatross, he is too valuable to risk being captured.

  Now to the General:

  Until he learned that the Japanese had occupied Tulagi, I really didn't think he paid much attention to the fact that the border between his area and Nimitz`s had been moved from 160 degrees east longi-tude, where the Joint Chiefs originally established it, to where it is now. But after the Japs took Tulagi, he became painfully aware that Nimitz now had re-sponsibility for both Tulagi and Guadal-canal, the much larger island to the south.

  He is now convinced that the new divi-sion of responsibility was established-the line changed-by his cabal of enemies, Marshall and King again, to deny him authority over territory he consid-ers essential to his mission of defending Australia. I am finding it harder and harder to fault his logic and support that of the JCS.

  The argument, I know, is that it is the Navy's responsibility to maintain the sea lanes, and that was the argument for putting the border at 160 EL. MacArthur counters that this would hold water only if the Navy were occupying the land in question and using it for that purpose. And, of course, they are not, and have shown no indication that they intend to.

  All of this was exacerbated when he learned that the day after he had surren-dered Corregidor, General Wainwright went on the radio in Manila and ordered all forces in the Philippines to lay down their arms. This enraged him for several reasons, not necessarily in proportion to their importance to the war.

  He seemed most enraged (and found it an-other proof that George Marshall stays awake nights thinking up new evil things to do to him) by the fact that Wainwright, apparently encouraged by Washington, no longer considered himself subordinate to MacArthur, and thus surrendered Cor-regidor on his own-without, in other words, MacA.`s authority to do so.

  Second, he is absolutely convinced that Wainwright, again encouraged by Wash-ington, went even further than that, by assuming authority for all U.S./Fili-pino Forces in the Philippines, an au-thority MacA., with reason, believed he still retained, having never been for-mally relieved of it.

  General Sharp, on Mindanao, was specif-ically ordered to surrender by Wainwright. According to MacA., Sharp had 30,000 U.S./Filipino troops, armed, and in far better shape insofar as ammuni-tion, rations, etcetera, than any others in the islands. It is hard to understand why they were ordered to surrender. As it turns out, MacA. has learned that Sharp paid only lip service to Wainwright's or-ders and encouraged his men to go to the hills and organize as guerrillas. He him-self and most of his immediate staff felt obliged to follow orders, and they sur-rendered.

  MacArthur feels a sense of shame (wholly unjustified, I think) for the loss of the Philippines. And he has an at least partially justified feeling that he is being treated unfairly by Washing-ton in his present command.

  Two days after Corregidor fell, he ca-bled General Marshall (ignoring the im-plication that Marshall couldn't figure this out himself) that the Japanese vic-tory in the Philippines will free two in-fantry divisions and a large number of aircraft that they will probably use to take New Guinea, and then the Solomons.

  They will then cut his supply routes to the United States, which would mean the loss of Australia.

  MacA. proposed to go on the counterat-tack, starting with the recapture of Tulagi, and then establishing our own presence on Guadalcanal. In his mind (and in mine) he tried to
be a good soldier and to "coordinate" this with South Pacific Area Headquarters. But he was (a) re-minded that Guadalcanal and Tulagi are not "within his sphere of influence" and that (b) under those circumstances it was really rather presumptuous of him to ask for Navy aircraft carriers, etcetera, to conduct an operation in their sphere of influence, but that (c) he was not to worry, because Admiral Nimitz was al-ready making plans to recapture Tulagi with a Marine Raider battalion.

  There is no way that one small battalion can take Tulagi; but even if they could, they cannot hold it long-if the Japanese establish bases, which seems a given, on either Guadalcanal or Malaita.

  What MacArthur wants to do makes more sense to me than what the Navy proposes to do, unless, as MacA. believes, the Navy's primary purpose is to render him impotent and humiliated, so that the war here will be a Navy war.

  I fight against accepting this latter theory. But what I saw at-and especially after-Pearl Harbor, with the admirals pulling their wagons into a circle to avoid accepting the blame, keeps popping into my head.

  Respectfully,

  Fleming Pickering, Captain, USNR

  top secret

  Chapter Twelve

  (One)

  The Elms

  Dandenong, Victoria, Australia

  22 May 1942

  "Oh, good morning! We didn't expect you to be up so early," Mrs. Hortense Cavendish said, with a smile, to Corporal Ste-phen M. Koffler, USMC, when she saw him coming down the stairway. "Why don't you just go into the breakfast room, and I'll get you a nice hot cup of tea?"

  "Good morning, thank you," Steve said, smiling, but not re-ally comfortable.

  Mrs. Cavendish was as old as his mother, and looked some-thing like her, too. She was the housekeeper at The Elms, a three-story, twelve-room, red brick house set in what looked to Steve like its own private park fifteen miles or so outside Mel-bourne. It was called The Elms, Major Banning had told him, because of the century-old elm trees which lined the driveway from the "motorway" to the house.

  He also told him (You`ve come up smelling like a rose again, Koffler.) that the whole place had been rented by Captain Pickering, and, for the time being at least, he and the other members of Special Detachment 14 would be living there. He explained that the housekeeper was something like the manager of a hotel, in charge of the whole place, and was to be treated with the ap-propriate respect.

  At the moment, Corporal Koffler was the only member of Special Detachment 14 in residence. The day before, Major Ban-ning had driven him out here in a brand-new Studebaker Presi-dent, then had him installed in a huge room with a private bathroom. After that, Captain Pickering had come out and taken Major Banning to the railroad station in Melbourne. Ban-ning was going "up north" to some place called Townesville, Queensland, where the Coastwatchers had their headquarters. He told Steve he had no idea when he would be back, but that he would keep in touch.

  Steve now understood that Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria were something like the states in America, but that was really about all he understood about Australia.

  From what Major Banning had told him, and from what he'd heard from the other guys, the Japs were probably going to take Australia. He had heard Major Banning talking to Lieutenant Howard back in `Diego about it. Steve had long ago decided that if anybody would have the straight poop about anything. Major Banning would. Major Banning had told Lieutenant Howard that he didn't see how anything could keep the Japs from taking Australia, as long as they took some island named New Guinea first. And he really didn't see how the Japs could be kept from taking New Guinea.

  To tell the truth, the closer they got to Australia, the more nervous Koffler had become. More than nervous. Scared. He tried hard not to let it show, of course, in front of all the Army and Navy officers on the airplane (he was, after all, not only a Marine, but a Marine parachutist, and Marines aren't supposed to be nervous or scared). But when the airplane landed, he would not really have been surprised if the Japs had been shelling or maybe bombing the place. That would have meant they'd have started fighting right away. He had cleaned and oiled his Spring-field before they left Hawaii, just to be double sure.

  But it hadn't been that way at all. There was no more sign of war, or Japs, in Melbourne than there was in Newark. Mel-bourne was like Newark, maybe as big, and certainly a hell of a lot cleaner. Except for the funny-looking trucks and cars, which the Australians drove on the wrong side of the road, and the funny way the Australians talked, sort of through their noses, you'd never even know you were in Australia.

  He'd spent his first night in a real nice hotel, and Captain Pickering had given him money, and he had had a real nice meal in a real nice restaurant. The steak was a little tough, but he had no call to bitch about the size of it-it just about covered the plate-and he had trouble getting it all down. Then he went to the movies, and they were playing an American movie. It starred Betty Grable, and he remembered seeing it in the Am-pere Theatre in East Orange just before he joined the Corps. And that started him off remembering Dianne Marshall and what had happened between them. And between the movie and the memories, he got a little homesick... until he talked himself out of that by reminding himself that he was a Marine parachut-ist, for Christ's sake, and not supposed to start crying in his god-damned beer because he was away from his mommy or because some old whore had made a goddamned fool out of him.

  The table in the breakfast room was big, and the wood sort of glowed. There was a bowl of flowers in the middle of it. When he sat down at it, he looked out through windows running from the ceiling to the floor; outside he could see a man raking leaves out of a flower garden. There was a concrete statue of a nearly naked woman in the garden, in the middle of a what looked like a little pond, except there wasn't any water in the pond.

  Mrs. Cavendish followed him in in a moment, and laid a newspaper on the table. Right behind her was a maid, a plain woman maybe thirty years old, wearing a black dress with a little white apron in front. She smiled at Steve, then went to one of the cabinets in the room, and took out a woven place mat and silver and set it up in front of him.

  "What would you like for breakfast?" Mrs. Cavendish asked. "Ham and eggs? There's kippers."

  Steve had no idea what a kipper was.

  "Ham and eggs would be fine," he said. "Over easy."

  "We have tomato and pineapple juice."

  "Tomato juice would be fine," Steve said.

  "The tea's brewing," Mrs. Cavendish said. "It'll just be a mo-ment."

  She and the maid left the room. Steve unfolded the newspaper. It was The Times of Victoria. The pages were bigger than those of the Newark Evening News, but there weren't very many of them. He flipped through it, looking in vain for comics, and then returned to the first page.

  There were two big headlines: rommel nears tobruk and nazi tanks approach Leningrad. There was a picture of a burning German tank, and a map of North Africa with wide, curving arrows drawn on it.

  Steve wondered why there wasn't anything in the newspaper about the Japs being about to invade Australia.

  He went through the newspaper, mostly reading the advertise-ments for strange brands of toothpaste, used motorcars, and something called Bovril. He wondered what Bovril was, whether you ate it, or drank it, or washed your mouth out with it, or what.

  The maid delivered his ham and eggs, cold toast in a little rack, tomato juice, and a tub of sour orange marmalade. He had just about finished eating when the maid came in the breakfast room.

  "Telephone for you, Sir," she said, and pointed to a telephone sitting on a sideboard.

  The telephone was strange. There was sort of a cup over the mouthpiece, and the wire that ran from the base to the handset was much thinner than the one on American phones; it looked more like a couple of pieces of string twisted together than like a regular wire.

  "Corporal Koffler, Sir," Steve said.

  "Good morning, Corporal," a cheerful voice said. "Lieuten-ant Donnelly here." He pronounced it "
leftenant," so Steve knew he was an Australian. "Yes, Sir?"

  "I'm the Air Transport Officer, Naval Station, Melbourne. We have two things for you. Actually, I mean to say, two ship-ments. There's several crates, priority air shipment, and we've been alerted that several of your people are scheduled to arrive about noon."

  "Yes, Sir."

  "Your Captain Pickering said to send the crates out there by lorry, and that you'll meet the aircraft. Any problems with that?"

  "No, Sir," Steve said, an automatic reflex. Then he blurted, "Sir, I'm not sure if I can find... where the plane will be. Or how to get back out here."

  Lieutenant Donnelly chuckled. "Well, you'll be able to find your way about soon enough, I'm sure. In the meantime, I'll just send a map, with the route marked, out there with the lorry driver. Do you think that will handle it?"