The Winds of War

by Herman Wouk

  Nothing in the document surprised Henry. He had heard it all before, in arguments with Army war planners. But here the Army was taking its case to the President, either through Marshall, or by some devious route which the President in his usual fashion kept open. The document was a scorcher indeed; if it leaked to isolationist senators, it might well end Lend-Lease, kill Selective Service, and even start an impeachment drive. Hence he was taken aback to see that it existed at all.

  Roosevelt had called for the preparation of a “Victory Program,” a fresh start to unlock the paralysis of Lend-Lease and war production. Half a dozen agencies had tangled themselves and the big industries into impotence—the Army and Navy Munitions Board, the War Resources Board, the Office of Emergency Management, the National Defense Advisory Commission, the Office of Production Management. Their heads were jockeying for presidential favor; all Washington was bewildered by the flood of new initials; shortages and bottlenecks were mounting; and actual munitions were being produced in a feeble trickle. To break this up, Roosevelt had ordered the armed forces to list everything they needed to win a global war, and to work out new priorities from this master list.

  For weeks planners like Victor Henry had been calculating possible American invasions of France, Africa, Germany, Italy, China, and Honshu, air strikes against industrial cities, and joint operations with the British and even the Russians. The Army and the Navy, not particularly trusting each other, were hardly communicating about the program. Each had prepared a draft, and each had of course called for the greatest possible share of manpower and industrial output. They had been at the greatest pains to keep the Victory Program secret and the papers few. The document now in Victor Henry’s hands was a sharp critique by the Army of the Navy’s demands.

  “How about some orange juice?” the President said, as a steward entered with a pitcher on a tray. “Wouldn’t you like that? Felipe squeezes it fresh. He’s gotten hold of some glorious oranges.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Pug sipped at a glass of foaming juice. “This thing needs a paper just as long in reply, Mr. President. Essentially, the Navy and the Army are just using two different crystal balls. That’s inevitable. The Army’s the big service, and it’s ultimately responsible for the security of the United States. No argument there. They figure they may have to fight the Axis single-handed, after Russia and England fold. That’s why they demand so much. They arrive at the army of nine million men by working backward from the total manpower of the United States. It’s the biggest force our country can field.”

  “And we may well need it,” said the President.

  “Yes, sir. It’s mainly on Lend-Lease that we see the thing differently. The Army says we want to give away too many arms and machines which the Germans may capture and use against us. But our contention is that even if the Soviet Union does go down soon, and the British too, a hell of a lot of Germans will have to die first to lick them. And every German who dies is one less German who’ll be shooting at us one day.”

  “I agree,” the President said, very flatly.

  “Well, then, Mr. President, shouldn’t we at any cost strengthen these people who are killing Germans right now? We can rebuild and replace lost matériel pretty fast, but it takes twenty years to raise a live Boche to replace a dead one.”

  The President observed with a slight grin, “Well said. But Lend-Lease isn’t the only bone of contention here. I notice the Navy wants a pretty hefty share of our total steel production.”

  “Mr. President”—Pug leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands outstretched, talking as forcefully as he could—”Hitler didn’t beat England last year because he couldn’t land the strongest army in the world on a coast a few miles away. He had all the ships he needed to carry them across. But he couldn’t dock them on the other side. Assault from the sea is a tough battle problem, Mr. President. They don’t come much tougher. It’s easy to put your men ashore, one place or another, but then how do you keep the defenders from wiping you out? Your men are stranded. The defenders have all the mobility, the numerical superiority, and the firepower. They can concentrate and crush you.” As Pug talked, the President was nodding, cigarette holder drooping between his teeth, eyes piercingly attentive. “Well, sir, the answer is special craft that can hit an open beach in large numbers. You throw a large force ashore, and keep it supplied and reinforced until it captures a harbor. Then you can pile in with your regular transports, your luxury liners too—if you’ve got ’em—and your invasion’s on. But those landing craft, you need swarms of them, sir, of many different designs. This analysis has been assigned to me. It looks as though we’re going to have to manufacture something like a hundred thousand, all told.”

  “A hundred thousand!” The President tossed his big head. “Why, all the shipyards in the United States couldn’t do that in ten years, Pug, even if they stopped doing everything else. You’re talking sheer nonsense. Everybody exaggerates his little specialty.” But Roosevelt was smiling in an excited way and his eyes were lighting up. He spoke of landing boats the Navy had used in the last war, when he was Assistant Secretary, and of the disastrous British landing at Gallipoli. Victor Henry took from his briefcase pictures of German invasion craft and of new British models, and some designs for American boats. The President scanned these with zest. Different craft would perform different missions, Pug said, from a big landing ship to cross the ocean with a great load of tanks and trucks in its belly, to little amphibious tanks that could crawl out on land, chug back into the water, and maybe even submerge. Roosevelt obviously loved all this. Under the spread of pictures and sketches lay his solitaire game, scattered and forgotten.

  “Say, have you fellows ever thought of this?” The President seized a yellow ruled pad and sketched with crude black pencil strokes as he talked. “It’s an idea I had back in 1917, studying the Gallipoli reports. I sent it to BuShips, sketches and all, and never heard another word. I still say it has merit, though it hadn’t crossed my mind again until this minute. Look here, Pug.”

  The drawing showed an oblong, flat-bottomed craft. Amidships on an arching frame, over the heads of crouched soldiers, an airplane engine whirled its big propeller in a screened housing. “I know there’s a stability question, with all that weight so high, but with a broad enough beam, and if you used aluminum—you see that boat could go right up on the beach, Pug, through marshes, anywhere. Underwater obstacles would be meaningless.” The President grinned down at his handiwork with approval, then scrawled at the bottom, FDR—on board USS Augusta, en route to meet Churchill, 7 August 1941. “Here. Don’t bury it the way BuShips did! Look into it. Maybe it’s just a wild notion, but—Well! Will you look at Old Man Sunshine, pouring through that porthole at last!”

  The President put on the white hat, and smoothly slid into his wheeled kitchen chair, pressing his hands on the table with almost simian strength to lift and move himself. Victor Henry opened a door to the sun deck. Roosevelt wheeled himself briskly across the gray-painted wooden ramps over the coaming. “Ah! Doesn’t this feel swell! Warm sun and ocean air. Just what the doctor ordered. Give me a hand, Pug.” The President eased himself into a blue leather reclining chair, in an angle of the deck structure sheltered from the wind. They were looking aft at the long gray guns and the foaming wake of the gently pitching cruiser. “I still say you’ll never find the shipyard or Navy Yard space for those landing craft, Pug. There are the merchant ships to build, the destroyer escorts, the carriers. You’re going to have to use factories wherever you can find them—on rivers and inland waterways—hundreds of little factories.” President Roosevelt cocked his head, staring out at the sea. “You know? This program could be a godsend to small business. Congress has given us all kinds of trouble about that. There’s a real thought. Money going out to small factories in many states—” The President lit a cigarette, deftly cupping the match against the breeze. “Very good. Let me have your notes on that Army paper, Pug. Just write them up yourself, and give them to me tod
ay.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “Now I’m extremely interested in that landing craft problem, but I don’t want you getting bogged down in it. Once the Victory Program is finished, let’s detach you from War Plans, and send you out to sea. You’re overdue.”

  Victor Henry saw that he had scored with Roosevelt and that the moment was favorable. He said, “Well, Mr. President, for a long time I’ve been yearning to be exec of a battleship.”

  “Exec? Don’t you think you can command one?”

  Trying hard not to show emotion in face or voice, realizing that a lifetime might hang on the next few words, Henry said, “I think I can, sir.”

  “Well, you’ve been delayed on the beach by unrewarding jobs. The Commander-in-Chief ought to have a little say in this. Let’s get you command of a battleship.”

  The President spoke lightly. But the ring in his cultured voice, the self-satisfied tilt of his head, the regal way he held the arms of his chair and smiled at Captain Henry, showed his relish for power and his satisfaction in bestowing largesse.

  “Thank you, Mr. President.”

  “Now, Pug, you’ll find Chief Yeoman Terry in the flag office. Will you tell him to come here?”

  Dazed by the last turn of the conversation, Victor Henry walked back into the President’s suite, and interrupted a chat between General Marshall, Admiral King, Admiral Stark, and General Watson, sitting relaxed on a couch and armchairs in splendid uniforms. The four elderly awesome heads turned at him. Admiral King gave him a puzzled scowl. Pug crossed the room as fast as he could without running, and went out.

  It was for this chat, lasting less than an hour, that Franklin Roosevelt had evidently summoned Victor Henry to the Augusta. Except at a distance, the Navy captain did not see the President again all the way to Newfoundland.

  Pug no longer tried to fathom the President’s purposes. He did not feel flattered when Roosevelt summoned him, or put out when the President forgot he was alive. He was under no illusion that he held a high place in the President’s esteem, or that anything he said or did influenced the course of history. The President used other obscure men. The identities and missions of some were fogged in secrecy. He himself knew of a marine colonel who ran presidential errands in Japan, China, and India; and an elderly Oregon lumberman, a friend of his own father, whose specialty was buying up scarce war materials in South America, to deny them to the Germans. Pug counted himself among these small fry, and took the President’s use of him as the result of random impulse. Roosevelt liked him because he was knowledgeable, got things done, and kept his mouth shut. A lucky guess about the Nazi-Soviet pact had earned him more credit for acumen than he deserved. There was also the odd phrase Roosevelt had used: “When you talk, I understand you.”

  Still, the President’s promise of a battleship command gave Victor Henry sleepless nights. Only two of his classmates had battleships. He went to the flag office and checked the Navy Register, to narrow down the possibilities. Of course, new construction—the North Carolina class, or the Indiana class giants—was out of the question for him. He would get a modernized old ship. The deadline for delivering the Victory Program was less than a month off. Scanning the records, he noted that places might open up within a couple of months in the California or the West Virginia. This was a heady business for Captain Victor Henry, after thirty years in the Navy, checking over the battleship roster to guess which one he might soon command!

  He tried to crush down his elation. Henry admired the President, and had moments when he almost loved the gallant cripple with the big grin and the boundless appetite for work. But he did not understand Roosevelt or trust him; and he did not in the least share the unlimited devotion to this man of people like Harry Hopkins. Behind the warm jolly aristocratic surface, there loomed a grim ill-defined personality of distant visions and hard purpose, a tough son of a bitch to whom nobody meant very much, except perhaps his family; and maybe not they, either. It might be that Roosevelt would remember to get him a battleship command. It was equally likely that some new job would put the promise off until it faded. Roosevelt had taught Victor Henry what a great man was like; the captain thought time and again of the Bible’s warning, that the clay pot should keep its distance from the iron kettle.

  Gray peace pervaded the wilderness-ringed Argentia Bay in Newfoundland, where the American ships anchored to await the arrival of Winston Churchill. Haze and mist blended all into gray: gray water, gray sky, gray air, gray hills with a tint of green. The monstrously shaped gray-painted iron ships, queer intruders from the twentieth century into the land of the Indians, floated in the haze like an ugly phantom vision of the future. Sailors and officers went about their chores as usual on these ships, amid pipings and loudspeaker squawks. But a primeval hush lay heavy in Argentia Bay, just outside the range of the normal ships’ noises.

  At nine o’clock, three gray destroyers steamed into view, ahead of a battleship camouflaged in swirls and splotches of color like snakeskin. This was H.M.S. Prince of Wales, bigger than any other ship in sight, bearing the guns that had hit the Bismarck. As it steamed past the Augusta, a brass band on its decks shattered the hush with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Quiet fell. The band on the quarterdeck of the Augusta struck up “God Save the King.”

  Pug Henry stood near the President, under the awning rigged at number-one turret, with admirals, generals, and august civilians like Averell Harriman and Sumner Welles. Churchill was plain to see not five hundred yards away, in an odd blue costume, gesturing with a big cigar. The President towered over everybody, stiff on braced legs, in a neat brown suit, one hand holding his hat on his heart, the other clutching the arm of his son, an Air Corps officer who strongly resembled him. Roosevelt’s large pink face was self-consciously grave.

  At this grand moment Pug Henry’s thoughts were prosaic. BuShips experts were disputing over camouflage patterns. Some liked this British tropical splashing, some preferred plain gray or blue horizontal bands. Pug had seen the mottled battleship through the mist before espying monochrome destroyers that were a mile closer. He intended to report this.

  “God Save the King” ended. The President’s face relaxed. “Well! I’ve never heard ‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee’ played better.” The men around him laughed politely at the presidential joke, and Roosevelt laughed too. The squeal of boatswains’ pipes broke up the dress parade on the cruiser’s deck.

  Admiral King beckoned to Pug. “Take my barge over to the Prince of Wales, and put yourself at Mr. Harry Hopkins’s service. The President desires to talk with him before Churchill comes to call, so expedite.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Passing from the Augusta to the Prince of Wales in King’s barge, over a few hundred yards of still water, Victor Henry went from America to England and from peace to war. It was a shocking jump. King’s spick-and-span flagship belonged to a different world than the storm-whipped British vessel, where the accommodation ladder was salt-crusted, the camouflage paint was peeling, and even the main battery guns looked pitted and rusty. Pug was aghast to see cigarette butts and wastepaper in the scuppers, though droves of bluejackets were doing an animated scrub-down. On the superstructure raw steel patches were welded here and there—sticking plaster for wounds from the Bismarck’s salvos.

  The officer of the deck had a neatly trimmed brown beard, hollow cheeks, and a charming smile. Pug envied the green tarnish on the gold braid of his cap. “Ah, yes, Captain Henry,” he said, smartly returning the salute in the different British palm-out style, “Mr. Hopkins has received the signal and is waiting for you in his cabin. The quartermaster will escort you.”

  Victor Henry followed the quartermaster through passageways hauntingly like those in American battleships, yet different in countless details: the signs, the fittings, the fire extinguishers, the shape of the watertight doors.

  “Hello there, Pug.” Hopkins spoke as though he had not seen the Navy captain for a day or two, though their last encounte
r had been on the train to Hyde Park early in March, and meantime Hopkins had travelled to London and Moscow in a blaze of worldwide newspaper attention. “Am I riding over with you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How’s the President feeling?” Hopkins had two bags open on his bunk in a small cabin off the wardroom. In one he carefully placed papers, folders, and books; in the other he threw clothes, medicine bottles, and shoes as they came to hand. Hopkins looked thinner than before, a bent scarecrow with a gray double-breasted suit flapping loosely on him. In the long, curved, emaciated face, the clever, rather feminine eyes appeared enormous as a lemur’s. The sea voyage showed in his fresh color and bouncy movements.

  “He’s having the time of his life, sir.”

  “I can imagine. So’s Churchill. Churchill’s like a boy going on his first date. Well, it’s quite a historic moment, at that.” Hopkins pulled dirty shirts from a drawer and crammed them in the suitcase. “Almost forgot these. I left a few in the Kremlin and had to scrounge more in London.”

  “Mr. Hopkins, what about the Russians? Will they hold?”

  Hopkins paused, a stack of papers in his hand, and pursed his mouth before speaking decisively. “The Russians will hold. But it’ll be a near thing. They’ll need help.” He resumed his hurried packing. “When you fly from Archangel to Moscow, Pug, it takes hours and hours, over solid green forests and brown swamps. Often you don’t see a village from horizon to horizon. Hitler’s bitten off a big bite this time.” He was struggling with the clasps on his suitcase, and Pug gave him a hand. “Ah, thanks. What do you suppose Stalin wants from us most of all, Pug?”

  “Airplanes,” Victor Henry said promptly. “‘Clouds of airplanes.’ Same as the French were yelling for last year.”

  “Aluminum,” said Harry Hopkins. “Aluminum to build airplanes with. Well, let me correct that—his number one item was anti-aircraft guns. Next comes aluminum. Wants a lot of Army trucks, too. Stalin isn’t planning to get beaten in three weeks, or six weeks, or three years.” Hopkins tidied the papers in the smaller case, and closed it. “Let’s go.”