Armageddon (3 page)

Hansen grunted. He opened the bottom drawer of his desk. His stubby fingers produced a bottle of rye whiskey and a pair of glasses. He poured two oversized drinks and shoved one of them to Sean. He knew again why he had picked O’Sullivan for the Special Mission.

“I lost a brother too. Mark Twain Hansen. First World War. Belleau Wood. We can’t go through this with those people again. They’re sick. They have to be healed. Becoming Nazis ourselves isn’t the way.”

“It always comes back to the same damned confusion,” General. What are we going to do with them?”

“Know the facts and believe in your country. You are here on this mission because our war begins when the shooting stops. Our bullets are ideas ... your folks are immigrants, aren’t they?”

Sean nodded.

“So are mine. My father, God rest his soul, came over by steerage after the Civil War and walked from New York to Iowa in the dead of winter.” The general took a swallow of whiskey and allowed himself the rare pleasure of a moment of nostalgia. “Black Hawk County, Iowa. We homesteaded a section of land. My father’s name was Hans Christian Hansen, after the Danish national hero. All of us were named after American heroes ... except my sister. She died from diphtheria in one of those damned Iowa winters. God almighty ... I’ll see my father to my dying day looking over the newly cut corn fields, standing there like a statue ... smoke coming from his pipe. He’d look at the leaves turning and put those two big leather hands on my shoulders and wouldn’t say much. At Thanksgiving he’d give a toast after he read the Bible and his eyes would fill with tears when he said ... God bless America.”

The tension between the men had passed. Sean thought of his own father and smiled. “My Dad would say, where else in the world could a shanty Irishman put three sons through the university?”

Andrew Jackson Hansen hit his hand on the desk. “That’s what I mean!” his gruff voice filled with enthusiasm. “We have to love America the way our parents did ... naive, sentimental, unsophisticated. The good Lord has been wonderful to our republic. He has given us the wisdom to fight wars with no thought of personal gain. But this time we cannot pack up and go home. We have come of age. We have inherited both the power and the responsibility of the world without seeking or wishing it But ...we must face up to it Our land has grown a magnificent liberty tree and its fruit is the richest ideal of the human soul. But, we cannot go on forever merely eating the fruit of the liberty tree or it will die. We must begin to plant some seeds.”

Damn Hansen, Sean thought. He could move you from anger to tears in a moment.

“My mother was a German immigrant, Sean. She saw a son fight her native country and die in the First World War. That killed her, too. I wouldn’t like the idea of my mother being shot as a hostage.”

Sean nodded that he understood. The long, hard, patient way would press them for a wisdom which they did not know if they possessed. He took the report from the desk. “I’ll do some rewriting.”

A. J. Hansen abruptly returned to the never-ending problems needing decisions on his desk, indicating without a word that the meeting was over.

Sean made for the door.

“By the way,” Hansen said, “do something about
that
woman.”

Chapter Three

T
HE TWO HUGE BUILDINGS
on the right side of Queen Mother’s Gate were dark except for the light of two offices. A light in A. J. Hansen’s office was common. This light usually burned past midnight. No one really knew the number of hours A. J. Hansen worked, but he often remarked, “It’s a goddam good thing there isn’t a union to demand time and a half pay for generals or we’d bust the government’s ass in a year.”

He poured over the usual documents, appended the usual decisions, ate the usual sandwich, drank the usual glass of milk. Tonight it was the seizure of German banks, freezing assets, issuing occupation currency. Tomorrow? Maybe German railroads, maybe German textbooks. But once during each day the immediate problem became engulfed in the greater mission. All the reports were replete with highly worded ideals, but he wondered. Have we Americans lost the stuff? Are we too self-centered, too fat to understand and face up to what has happened to us? Sure, we will fight the war to its end. But what of it when the last shot is fired?

And these sick German people. Can we treat them with kindness? Will they understand it or mistake it for weakness? Indeed, can idealism be a practical solution to a people who have only understood force?

It came to that time of night when a shot of rye and a quick snooze was needed. He stretched out on the couch and covered his burning eyes. He thought of how he mentioned his father to young O’Sullivan today. Was it strange at all? With each passing day he was reaching back to his beginnings to find answers....

Andrew Jackson Hansen was second in line for the throne, the family farm, and as he put it, “didn’t give a lusty crap for farming.” He became the first of the Hansen family to strike out with his father’s reluctant blessings. He supported himself through the University of Iowa, in a classical way, waiting on tables, mopping halls. In the summer he lumberjacked some in Wisconsin and was a roustabout in the tent shows which pocked the Midwest after the turn of the century.

His first woman was a hootchy-kootchy dancer who took a fancy to him during the sophomore vacation. A. J. thought about her off and on for many years.

By World War I he had earned his degree and was teaching history, economics, and political science at River Ridge Military Academy in Michigan to upper-economic-strata boys who couldn’t have been less interested in history, economics, and political science. He joined the Army.

When his father died, a revered old man in that part of Iowa, the farm went to Tom Jefferson Hansen, who had always been cut out for that life. He ran it prosperously to this day with his sons.

The end of the war found A. J. Hansen at the rank of Captain and deeply involved in a program which sent food to starving Europe and later to Russia. He remained in the Army, cursing that his administrative and organizational ability kept him from ever receiving a fighting command.

In fact his only battles were with the Congress, Army brass, and a civilian public which largely considered the military as social lepers and fascists between wars.

Within the Army, Andrew Jackson Hansen had committed the initial sin of not being a graduate of West Point and therefore not a member of the West Point Protective Association. Secondly, in the regular Army it was standard practice to stud a male heir so that he might carry on the tradition of that Long Gray Line.

A. J. married a lovely woman from the Midwest who neither lushed nor shacked during his long tours of duty away from home and presented him with three daughters, none of whom turned out to be “army brats” and all of whom happily married nonmilitary men.

Despite his blatant disregard for tradition and an inability to keep his mouth closed at the discreet moment, Hansen’s genius in new programs and his unflinching acceptance of the role of whipping boy kept him at the right hand of the chiefs of staff.

In 1938 Colonel Hansen became an overnight sensation heading a committee to draw up the Army’s manpower needs. His report called for the immediate integration of Negro draftees and volunteers into all combat units.

A fellow officer from Georgia on the committee loyally reported this to some fellow generals from Virginia, Georgia, and Mississippi before Hansen was to go to Congress with the report.

“Andy. We aren’t going to stand by and let you push this nigger thing with the Congress,” a well-known artillery officer from Alabama warned as spokesman for the purity group. “Would you want a nigger officer leading your own son into combat?”

Hansen replied that it was a problem of semantics as he had no sons and he delivered the manpower report to Congress.

This not only infuriated the southern officer corps dedicated to the preservation of a white, Aryan army, but also the southern senators and congressmen who passed upon army promotions.

When the noise had simmered down Hansen found himself exiled to one of those remote posts where the Army punishes its mavericks and gives them time to reflect sins, pay penance.

His numerous requests for transfer to command a combat regiment went unanswered. By the time Pearl Harbor was attacked the powers-to-be figured Hansen had paid for his crime ... besides he was badly needed for a new program.

The program was G-5, Military Government.

In the beginning, G-5 trained lawyers at the University of Virginia. After the landings in North Africa if became apparent that military government law could not stop epidemics, do police work, counter-intelligence, mend broken roads and sewers.

Hansen searched both in and out of the Army for former mayors and city managers, for doctors, port and sanitation engineers, and bankers, newspapermen, linguists, and food experts and transportation and communications people, and made them officers.

At the Hore-Belisha Barracks at Shrivenham, England, he assembled two thousand experts with their British and French counterparts. Although they were older men, they worked as strenuously as paratroopers. They were assigned future German cities and towns in A, B, and C units according to size.

And in London at Queen Mother’s Gate fifty hand-picked men worked and lived under rigid security. These men broke down and studied every detail of the Nazi and German structure. Decisions came after laborious, detailed appraisal and went into the manuals often only after hot arguments.

Hansen stretched his squat body, blinked his eyes open, and returned at half pace to his desk.

How damned lucky, he thought, we have been able to fight our wars, pack up and go home. This was the true heart of the matter now. The military had been given the responsibility of G-5. Yet, American generals have never had to worry about combining a military victory with a political victory. Their minds could only think and plan the destruction of the enemy. Lord give me the strength to fight our own people as well as the Germans.

Chapter Four

S
EAN WORKED FAR INTO
the night, even after General Hansen had retired. He pondered on the revisions of
PREROGATIVES OF MILITARY GOVERNMENT COMMANDERS IN GERMANY
until they were within the framework of top policy. To hell with it, Sean thought. He’d ask Hansen to transfer him into a combat unit. But the general was even more alone than he, and battling greater forces. There was that instinct between men that told him Hansen needed him.

There would be little the German people would have to answer for beyond the misery they had created for themselves. Some reparations, some personal suffering, but nothing to compare with the tears and the blood they had caused. Already the damned lawyers had determined there was a difference between “criminal” Nazis and “noncriminal” Nazis.

Sean penciled through his passage on hostages and wrote instead: “When we enter Germany the purpose of Military Government is to expedite Allied victory. We will rule firmly but fairly, keeping in mind American tradition of not using brutality on the enemy civilian population. Military Commanders shall use armed force only in the event of resistance. Failure of the German population to carry out orders will be combated by imprisonment, fines or loss of food ration in extreme cases.”

Sean jerked the paper from the typewriter. “Gott bless the gutt kind Amerikan soldiers,” he cursed, ripped the paper up and threw it into the wastebasket He rubbed his temples. “Oh God, Liam, what shall I do?”

Did his brother cry out from the grave for revenge? Did Liam really want an answer for his death? Even when Liam had been bloodied by a bully and Sean and Tim sought to avenge him Liam said, let him go, don’t hurt him. Can’t you see, he attacked me because he was scared and confused?

Fight back, Tim said. Fight back, Liam. Too many people will drink your blood if they know you won’t fight back.

Liam said, revenge for the sake of revenge is immoral.

What do you remember most when it all fuses in blurs at two o’clock in the morning and when it all must be remembered in a few golden moments? Tim, Liam, Sean in the caves below Sutro Baths. The ocean pounding against the rocks. The water leaping up, trying to defy gravity. Liam O’Sullivan reading Eugene O’Neill’s
Beyond the Horizon
to his two older, spellbound brothers....

“Oh, Liam. Your life was too good for them to take. Twenty-two-year-old boys shouldn’t die in lonely places called Kasserine Pass ...”

The omnipresent map of Germany hung over Sean’s head. He stared at it. took the torn paper from the wastebasket, and retyped it, and then he went on to the next section.

WEHRMACHT: GERMANY’S REGULAR ARMY.

Policy: The Wehrmacht has fought a conventional war against American forces. However, atrocities against civilian populations have been catalogued by counter-intelligence. Particular brutality has been evidenced against the Greeks, Slavic peoples and Jews. Military Government must determine to what extent the Nazis dominated the Wehrmacht. In those areas under Wehrmacht command where atrocities were committed we must hold the Wehrmacht commander responsible as a war criminal.

Dammit, Sean thought, I won’t back down. If the army commander were allowed to blame the Nazis for atrocities in his area, we would be digging legal traps for ourselves that would leave hundreds of crimes unanswered.

Yet Sean knew in his heart that no regular German Army general would ever have to answer in a court

Then who was guilty?

Before him were a half-dozen books, each as thick as a Manhattan phone directory. These were the “official” guilty, the Blacklist. This was the heart of the Nazi cancer. But wasn’t the whole German body infected? Sean had argued endlessly that Nazism was the historical and political expression of the entire German people.

He opened the index to the Blacklist to support his report ...

BOOK ONE: NAZI ORGANIZATION:

GROUP ONE: PARA MILITARY ORGANIZATIONS SERVING THE NAZIS:
These groupings are not the conventional armed forces serving Germany (Army, Navy, Air Force, etc.)
ALL OF THE BELOW LISTED ARE TO BE DISBANDED UPON OUR ENTRY INTO GERMANY AND THEIR RECORDS SEIZED.