by David Weber
“I thought Stanton had already published that,” Benjamin said.
“Ah.” Elzbietá had a remarkably sharklike smile for such an attractive woman, he thought. “That’s what Stanton thought, too. But a friend of mine who still wears the uniform is on the staff at History and Heritage Command. He just came across an entire file—a fat one—that’s part of that declassification dump Archives is planning. Everybody knows the relationship between King and Marshall was…less than cordial, on a personal level, let’s say. They were both pretty careful about putting things in writing through formal channels to cover their posteriors if something went south on them. But this seems to be a file of private memoranda going back and forth between the two of them very quietly and without being appended to the official record, with input from the Pacific naval commanders, including Mountbatten, but not including General Eisenhower.”
“They were discussing Eisenhower’s logistics for an invasion of Soviet Russia with his naval commanders without making him a party to it? You’re suggesting he was deliberately cut out of the link?” Benjamin asked carefully.
“Actually, that’s not what I think at all,” Elzbietá replied. “I think Eisenhower and Spruance, especially, may have been even closer than most people realize. Eisenhower’s decision to appoint him as our first postwar ambassador to Japan certainly indicates the two of them respected one another enormously, but the consensus seems to be that that respect came after First Fleet put his men ashore and kept them there. Before that, their working relationship was good—Eisenhower was always good at keeping command teams working in harness, despite some pretty damned prickly personalities—but it doesn’t seem to have been especially cordial. I’m starting to wonder if that was really true.”
“Why?” Benjamin let his chair come back upright, planting his forearms on his desk, and his eyes were intent.
As department chairman, he pretty much had his pick of graduate and postgraduate students to mentor, and he’d been deeply impressed by Commander Abramowski’s credentials when they came across his desk. There weren’t that many history students at Castle Rock University who’d been awarded the Navy Cross and Silver Star, or who already had master’s degrees in aerospace engineering from the University of Michigan. That would have been more than enough to intrigue him, even without her admissions interview. He’d liked what he’d seen of her there even more than he’d expected to, although he’d come to suspect there might be darker places inside her than she allowed the rest of the world to see. Whether or not that was true, though, she definitely had one of the sharpest minds he’d ever encountered. He wasn’t certain why she’d decided to pursue a doctorate in history instead of aerospace, but she was going to make a tremendous teacher. In fact, she was carrying a double assistantship in the classroom right now, although she didn’t really need the income, and her lectures were packed.
“Actually,” she said now, “I’ve come across a couple of hints in the already explored correspondence between King and Marshall that made me wonder where King was getting some of his arguments. I couldn’t find any paper trail from anyone on King’s staff to support them or show how they might have evolved in his mind. Now I’m beginning to wonder—especially in light of this new file—if maybe Eisenhower wasn’t slipping them to him and using Spruance and Turner as his conduit.”
“Ike Eisenhower, the self-effacing master of coalition warfare, conspiring against the man who planned the entire invasion?”
“First, you know as well as I do that Eisenhower was a tad less ‘self-effacing’ than his postwar public image suggests. When he felt strongly about something he went after it, and he’d spent enough time between World War I and the Transpacific War to understand how back channels work. If he thought Marshall and his logistic planners were making a mistake, he’d do whatever he thought he had to do to fix it. And, second, you know Marshall was a lot more pissed off than he showed by what he thought was President Dewey’s readiness to cave in to Churchill and Alexander. Or, for that matter, by the fact that Dewey wouldn’t let him out of Washington to command Oz in person. The sticking point for him, though, was that the US was providing seventy-five percent of the warships and something like eighty-five percent of the transports and supply lift for Oz, which meant the US—as the senior partner—should have had the deciding vote on how those transports were used. And it’s clear from the Joint Chiefs’ internal memos and reports that Marshall was totally focused on getting the troops ashore and keeping them there. As far as he was concerned, LeMay and Eaker’s needs were clearly secondary, which, to be fair, made a lot of sense. The existing air bases in Japan were close enough to support Oz until the ground forces were several hundred miles inland, and if they didn’t get several hundred miles inland, there wouldn’t be any Siberian bases to need extra transport.”
She shrugged.
“It’s not like Churchill and Alexander were the only people arguing that the Army’s entire function was to get the B-29s, Lincolns, and B-36s close enough. They were probably the most vociferous about it, though, and Marshall had his heels dug in pretty firmly against their ‘importunate enthusiasm.’ Dewey was hesitant about overruling him—mostly because he had the sense to stay out of the professionals’ way—and I think there were probably times he wanted to throttle Churchill himself. Admiral Leahy had favored the Air Forces’ argument, and as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs he’d been able to press it pretty effectively, until his Electra crashed at Hickam Field. When Marshall became Chairman, the emphasis shifted, and the only two uniformed officers in Washington with the clout to stand up to him were King and Arnold. But Arnold was the Air Force chief of staff, which meant Marshall could—legitimately—argue that he was looking after his own service’s best interests. That made King the key, both because he’d become the Navy’s chief of staff when Leahy was killed and because Marshall knew that Ernest J. King probably liked Winston Churchill even less than he did.
“You can see it in the correspondence that’s already been published. Marshall was a lot more willing to listen to King’s arguments than he was to Arnold’s or the Brits’, and sometime in June, King’s position started shifting toward beefing up the Air Forces’ logistic priority in the early stages of Oz. What I’m thinking is that if Eisenhower thought he had a serious problem, King would have been his best shot at changing Marshall’s mind, and if he didn’t want the Chief of the Joint Chiefs to know he was telling tales out of school, Spruance, Turner, and Nimitz—but especially Spruance, given his personal relationship with King—would have been the best conduit to King. I doubt he’d have considered it ‘conspiring against’ Marshall. But I also doubt that he’d have let that stop him if he felt strongly enough that a major mistake was in the works, and someone convinced Marshall to agree to shift a quarter of Second Army’s dedicated shipping to LeMay’s bombers less than two months before the landing after fighting it tooth and nail for almost a year. The assumption’s been that Arnold convinced him King had a point, but I think that’s a mistake. I think it was King who convinced Marshall that Arnold had a point, and if Eisenhower was weighing in behind the scenes…”
She shrugged, and Benjamin nodded thoughtfully. Operation Oz, the twin-pronged thrust out of Manchukuo and occupied Japan into the Soviet Union, had been far and away the largest amphibious operation in the history of the world. Only a navy the size of the one the Transpacific Allies, and especially the United States of America, had built out of the ruins after Pearl Harbor could even have contemplated something like it. Elzbietá’s four million figure was only for the initial assault forces; it didn’t count the three million additional ground personnel and the two and a half million Army Air Forces and Royal Air Force personnel of the follow up echelons. Nor did it include the thousands of tanks and artillery pieces, the tens of thousands of trucks, halftracks, and jeeps, and the millions upon millions of tons of supplies which had been transported from North America to the Sea of Japan and thence across thousands of miles of howli
ng wilderness over the roads and railroads hacked out of the Siberian tundra. Nor, for that matter, did it include the construction equipment to build those roads and railroads…and the dozens of major air bases needed to support the bombing offensive which ultimately brought the Soviet Union to its knees.
Operation Oz’s sheer size and audacity was the primary reason Stalin had concluded that it had to be a deception move. He’d had absolutely no conception of the transport possibilities of blue water shipping, but he’d had a very good notion of the distances involved and the lack of anything like a decent transportation net in his own extreme eastern provinces. And although the Western Alliance had developed extremely sophisticated tactical air forces, neither side in the Great Eastern War had possessed the additional resources to create genuine strategic air forces. The concept of a bomber like the B-36 that could carry 72,000 pounds of bombs to targets four thousand miles away, at altitudes of 43,000 feet and cruising speeds of almost three hundred miles per hour, never occurred to him in his darkest nightmares. Nor had he been witness to the massive fire raids with which the USAAF had levelled Japan’s cities or the effects of “earthquake” bombs like the Royal Air Force’s 22,000-pound “Grand Slam” or the USAAF’s 43,000-pound T-12 “Cloudmaker.” That fatal blind spot had left him totally unprepared for what the Anglo-American heavy bombers could do to his wartime industry at what were literally transcontinental ranges.
So perhaps it really wasn’t very surprising that he’d seen instantly that his enemies’ most logical course of action—and the one he’d most feared—would be to funnel the Anglo-American forces entering the Great Eastern War through Europe. That would allow them to use the excellent rear-area transportation systems the Western Alliance had devised to bring them to bear on his western front rather than throwing them against the Siberian and Mongolian frontiers he’d denuded under the pressure of the relentless offensives Kaiser Louis Ferdinand and his allies had already brought to bear. The last thing any sane general would do would be to commit an entirely separate army—a modern, mechanized army—to an advance across thousands of miles of virgin wilderness with some of the most brutal winter weather in the world.
He’d been wrong about that, but he’d been in good company. Before the Transpacific War, George C. Marshall’s master plan would have been an opium dream. After the Transpacific War, the world had been introduced to an entirely new standard of amphibious warfare; it just hadn’t known it yet. And the dazzling success of Operation Oz had been the capstone of the United States’ triumphant resurgence—even more than the surrender of Imperial Japan, in many ways—from the worst series of defeats in its history to overwhelming victory. The United States had emerged from the conflict as the strongest military and economic power in history, so it really wasn’t surprising that the war’s historiography had descended into hagiography almost before the 1950s were over.
The reaction and revisionism of the seventies and eighties had been entirely predictable, under the circumstances, and most of Operation Oz’s field commanders, from Patton to Harmon to Galloway, had seen their actions and decisions dissected by skeptical Monday morning quarterbacks. But Dwight Eisenhower—the commander whose armies had fought their way from Vladivostok to the Yenisei River and who’d signed the Soviet Surrender for the Transpacific Allies—had emerged with his reputation intact. The “Wizard of Oz”—much as he’d loathed that appellation, it had probably been inevitable—and his persona as an “Aw, shucks,” dedicated, unassuming, apolitical, and militarily brilliant but politically naïve field commander had played a major role in his nomination to succeed Thomas Dewey in the White House.
And anyone looking at his administration after he succeeded Dewey should have figured out that “politically naïve” had to be just a little wide of the mark, Benjamin reflected now. But if ElzbietáBs right, this would be a major shift in our understanding of Oz’s internal dynamics. No wonder she wants to jump on it!
He felt a surge of the sort of intellectual excitement which had attracted him to history in the first place, and a matching admiration for the scholar sitting on the other side of his desk. He reminded himself that the fact that a possibility was intriguing and exciting didn’t necessarily make it true. Nor, for that matter, did the fact that he found the presenter of that possibility considerably more attractive—and not just for her undoubted intelligence—than her faculty advisor really ought to.
Oh, screw that! he thought tartly. Yes, you find her more attractive than you’ve found anyone since that frigging drunk killed Miriam. But neither one of you has ever even come close to crossing the line. And you know damned well she is onto something here. You can smell it the way you smelled the Molotov-Matsuoka correspondence when you were working on your doctorate.
Speaking of which…
“I think this definitely bears looking into, Elzbietá,” he said. “And in addition to Naval History, I came across some stuff in the declassified files over at Langley when I was researching the Magic intercepts that might have some bearing on this. Peripherally, at least.”
“Oh?” She straightened in her chair, right eye narrowing intently.
“Hang on, a second,” he said, and turned to his computer to call up the files. “I was looking for the intercepts of the Russo-Japanese diplomatic traffic, specifically of anything between Tatekawa and the Foreign Ministry.”
He glanced up at her, and she nodded. General Yoshitsugu Tatekawa had been Japan’s ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1940 and throughout the Transpacific War. When US codebreakers cracked the “Purple codes,” they gained access to the vast majority of Japan’s diplomatic communications during the war. That had been less useful operationally than their ability to read JN-25, the Japanese Navy’s most secure codes, but it had proven exceptionally useful in other ways.
Tatekawa hadn’t been the only Japanese embassy official sending home long, detailed cables about his host country, but the amount of information the compulsively secretive Stalin had shared with him had been astounding. At least thirty or forty percent of the “official” information had, in fact, been less than accurate, of course. Stalin’s decision to intervene in the Balkans, which was what had kicked off the Great Eastern War, had been predicated at least in part on his belief that the desperate situation in the Pacific would keep the United States and the British Empire safely out of any conflict in continental Europe or Asia. After all, in 1942 and 1943 it had looked very much as if the Anglo-Americans were headed for dismal defeat—especially after the fall of Midway and the devastating carrier raids on the Hawaiian Islands and Balboa, the Pacific terminus of the Panama Canal. Stalin had had every reason to encourage the Japanese to head south and southeast, away from his own frontier, especially after their border clashes in 1939. So convincing Japan of his Five-Year Military Plan’s overwhelming success had been very much in his interest.
Tatekawa had been no one’s fool, however, and he and his military attaches had done a far better job of penetrating to the reality—which, admittedly, had been pretty damned impressive in its own right—behind the official façade. And he had painstakingly labeled any suspect data as “unconfirmed” or—even more damning—“unconfirmable” when he reported his findings, exhaustively, to his Foreign Ministry superiors in Tokyo.
Which meant he had also reported them to the codebreaking teams in San Francisco, Washington, Delhi, and London.
Even before the Transpacific Allies’ entry into the Great Eastern War, the Anglo-Americans had been sharing intelligence information about the Soviet Union with the Western Alliance, although they’d been careful to conceal its source. And Tatekawa’s reports had been priceless when it came to planning the strategic bombing offensive out of Siberia and Mongolia in 1949 and 1950.
“What I found,” he went on, turning back to his computer as the menu he’d been looking for came up, “was a fat folder of Purple intercepts which had been pulled together at the request of Eisenhower’s chief of staff. And he’d been spec
ifically looking for additional information on the Krasnoyarsk Economic Region. That was nineteen hundred miles from Vladivostok, which seemed like quite a reach to me if he’d been thinking only about the landings and the immediate aftermath. But if Eisenhower was looking for infor—”
His voice stopped, chopped off in midword as unbelievable agony exploded through his brain. His head snapped back, his eyes slammed shut, and his entire body convulsed as a sudden, roaring madness engulfed him.
“Doctor Schröder?” He heard Elzbietá’s voice through the tumult, but it was far away and dim, and he couldn’t answer it anyway. “Doctor Schröder? Benjamin?”
He was vaguely aware of a hand on his shoulder, but it, too, was far away, distant, lost in the hurricane as his mind fought to sort out the insanity.
He sat in his chair in the office which had been his for the last five years. He knew it had! Yet at the same time, in that moment, he knew it hadn’t been. He knew he didn’t even have tenure yet, much less the department chair. He knew his father was alive and well…and simultaneously that Klaus Schröder had died sixteen years ago in…in a terrorist attack? That was…that was insane!
And yet, in that moment, it was true. It was true! It was as true as the world he’d always known.
