The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (47 page)

It wasn’t as if the prospect of a war between Japan and the United States was a first-class military secret. The exact plans for fighting it were bound to be secret, of course. But almost every Navy file and leatherneck could give the short version of those plans. (Pete wasn’t nearly sure Army guys could do the same thing: a firm Marine Corps belief was that men who joined the Army were a few ice cubes short of a whole tray.)

When you got down to it, the thing looked simple. The U.S. Navy would steam west from Pearl Harbor. The Japanese Navy would steam east from Tokyo Bay. Wherever they bumped into each other, they’d start slugging away. The last fleet standing would go on and thump hell out of the other side till they got sick of it and gave up. Not subtle. Not pretty. But plans didn’t have to be. They just had to work, and being simple sure didn’t hurt.

Things like aircraft carriers did complicate the game. Pete assumed his side knew how many the Japs had so they could make more. That wasn’t necessarily the wisest assumption, but Pete had never tried to persuade American taxpayers to fork over for national defense. What he didn’t know could hurt him, but he didn’t know that, either.

He figured the fight would look like Jutland from the last war, only bigger. Somebody’d described the English admiral at Jutland as the only man who could lose the war in an afternoon. Both the American and
Jap commanders in the next fight would wear the same mantle, whether they liked it or not—and chances were they wouldn’t.

The logical place for the big smashup was somewhere in Philippine waters. Japan would want to clear the USA out of this colony so close to the Home Islands. Do that and you’d also deprive the U.S. Navy of bases within striking distance of Japan. And the Americans wouldn’t be able to interfere with whatever Japan decided to do in China and French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies.

Which was why Pete wanted to get back to active duty as soon as he could. Every Navy ship had a Marine detachment. On battlewagons and cruisers, Marines served the secondary armament: not the great big guns in the turrets, but the next size down. Marines kept order on smaller warships, and did whatever else people told them to do. If the Navy was going to fight the big fight against the Japs, Pete wanted to be there and join in.

A physical therapist gave him exercises to help him heal faster. He performed them with a dedication that amazed and alarmed the man. “If you tear a tendon working out, you won’t do yourself any good,” the fellow said severely.

“Right,” Pete answered. Take this guy seriously? Forget it! For one thing, he wondered if the therapist was a faggot. For another, he subscribed to the informal Marine Corps creed: anything worth doing was worth overdoing.

The therapist didn’t need long to realize that Pete was hard of listening. “Why are you pushing yourself like that?” he demanded. “It won’t change things by more than a few days one way or the other.”

“Could be a big few days,” Pete said stubbornly. “Could be the difference between getting a ship and staying beached.”

That, the therapist couldn’t very well misunderstand. “Even if you do get beached, Corporal, there’ll still be plenty for you to do,” he said. “Or don’t you think the Japs will try to land troops in the Philippines when the balloon goes up?”

“Huh,” Pete said: a thoughtful grunt. He’d worried so much about the big head-on collision between navies that he hadn’t wasted time with what might happen on land. Maybe he should have.

Or maybe not. “Doesn’t matter whether they do,” he said. “That’ll
just be a watchacallit—a secondary engagement, like. I aim to be where the real action is. I owe those yellow sonsabitches plenty—better believe I do. The more I can give ’em back in person, the better I’ll like it.”

“Well, you won’t like a torn Achilles’ tendon, so take it easy, okay?” the physical therapist said.

“I’ll … try.” Pete couldn’t have sounded more grudging if the man had recommended that he quit screwing for the next five years.

He’d had to quit screwing while he was laid up. He hadn’t been interested, either, not while he was mourning Vera. It would have seemed disloyal to her memory. Come to that, it still did, which didn’t keep him from noticing whenever he spotted anything female and under the age of fifty.

People told dirty stories about military nurses and about how they’d blow you or jack you off if you needed it and you didn’t have anyone of your own to take care of things for you. Pete had hoped those stories were the straight goods. They weren’t just dirty. They were … what was the word?
Therapeutic
came pretty close.

The next sign of their truth he found would be the first. Oh, the gals were one hundred percent nonchalant when they handled your John Henry in the line of duty. But none of them here showed the least bit of interest in doing anything with Pete’s but shoving it in a bedpan.
Too bad
, he thought, and so it seemed.

Time hung heavy. Everything in the Philippines seemed to move as lazily as the ceiling fans that stirred the air without cooling it. There was talk of air-conditioning the hospital, but there seemed to be neither will nor money to get on with the job. The talk was as desultory as everything else. Best guess was that the system would be installed by 1949 or the day before Philippine independence, whichever came last.

People grumbled about the mere idea of Philippine independence. There was already a small Philippine army, under the command of Douglas MacArthur. He served the Philippines with the exalted rank of field marshal, to which he couldn’t aspire in the U.S. Army if he stayed in till he was 147.

“Goddamn Filipinos can fucking well keep him,” said a U.S. Army sergeant in Pete’s ward. “When he ran the Bonus Army out of Washington, my old man and my uncle were two of the guys he rousted.”

“That was chickenshit, all right,” another Army guy agreed. “So how come you joined up if you already knew they’d screw you the same as they screwed your father and your uncle?”

A resigned shrug from the sergeant, who’d got hurt in a car crash. “Shit, man, it was nineteen-fucking-thirty-four. There wasn’t no work nowhere. I knew they’d feed me long as I stayed in. Afterwards? I didn’t give a rat’s ass about afterwards. Crap, I still don’t. Afterwards’ll just have to take care of itself.”

“Boy, I figured the same thing when I signed on the dotted line for the Corps,” Pete said. “I was broke, I couldn’t land a job … World had me by the short hairs.”

“Has it let go since?” the sergeant asked.

“Not hardly,” Pete answered in a high, squeaky voice. Everybody laughed, as if he’d been joking.

listair Walsh approached the personnel office with more trepidation than he’d felt crossing some minefields. All the same, he opened the door, took his place in the queue inside, and worked his way forward. Most of the men in front of him were ordinary privates with ordinary problems. He envied them.

In due course, he presented himself at a window behind which sat a noncom with almost as much mileage as he had himself. “Yes, Staff Sergeant?” the fellow said. “What can I do for you this morning?”

“I should like to make the arrangements necessary for leaving the Army.” Walsh shook his head. That wasn’t right, and he wouldn’t pretend it was. “No. I don’t like it. I’ve never liked anything less—except the notion of staying in and fighting on Hitler’s side.”

He waited for the personnel sergeant to call him an unpatriotic clot or some other similar endearment. The man did nothing of the kind. Nor did he seem surprised. How many other soldiers had come before him with the same request? More than a few, if Walsh was any judge.

“Are you sure of this?” the personnel sergeant asked. “The Army needs men like you—men who know what’s what.”

“Yes, I’m sure. I’m not happy, but I’m bloody sure,” Walsh answered. “And the Army may need me, but I don’t need the Army any more. If it’s going to do … this, it’s not what I took the King’s shilling for all these years ago.”

“You understand, of course, that only a small minority of military personnel feel as you do?”

“No. I don’t understand that at all.” Walsh shook his head. “Blokes I’ve talked with, most of ’em are disgusted to have anything to do with the Nazis except over open sights. Only difference is, they aren’t disgusted
enough
to want to leave. It’s not the same thing, you know.”

“Possibly not.” But the personnel sergeant wasn’t finished: “You also understand that, of the men who wish to resign, we permit only a small proportion to do so?”

“Urrh,” Walsh said—as unhappy a noise as he’d ever made this side of a wound. He’d been afraid of that. He stuck out his chin. “I’ll take my chances. I can’t stomach it any more, and that’s flat.”

“How about this, then?” said the man on the other side of the desk. “You could stay in, with a guarantee from the Ministry of War that you’d never have to serve alongside the German Army.”

“The Ministry of War … makes guarantees like that?” Walsh said slowly.

“Under some circumstances, yes. To some people, yes.” After a moment’s hesitation, the personnel sergeant expanded on that: “It makes the guarantee to men it judges valuable enough to the Army. By your rank and experience, you would be one of those men. And it makes that guarantee where it does not look for any sizable amount of publicity, if you take my meaning.”

“If I blab about it in the nearest pub, the guarantee flies out the window.” Yes, Walsh took his meaning, all right.

“Quite.” The personnel sergeant smiled. “So what do you say to that?”

Regretfully, Walsh answered, “I still want out. It’s not just that I don’t fancy fighting alongside Hitler’s goons. I don’t want Britain fighting alongside them. It goes dead against everything the country stands for.”

“The Government thinks otherwise,” the other veteran said, his smile disappearing. Walsh could hear the capital letter.

“Bugger the Government.” He gave it right back. “Churchill was
in
the sodding government. How did he come to die?”

“It was an accident, a tragic accident,” the personnel sergeant said primly.

“Right, mate. Sure it was. And then you wake up,” Walsh retorted. “You’d better wake up, any road, on account of if you believe that you’ll believe anything.”

“Oh. You’re one of those,” the personnel sergeant said, as if much was now explained. “Let me check something.” He consulted a typed list. Walsh recognized his own name even upside down. The other man made a tickmark alongside it in pencil. His voice went as cold as Norwegian winter: “You still wish to leave his Majesty’s service, then?”

What Walsh wished right at that moment was for a chance to punch the personnel sergeant in the nose. It would have to come some other time, though. Too bad. “Yes. I still want that,” he said heavily.

“Well, we can accommodate you, then, and in jig time, too.” The personnel sergeant reached into a drawer, pulled out forms, and shoved them across the counter at him. “Complete these, and we’ll carry on from there.”

“Right.” Walsh bent to the task. When he came to the line that read
Reason for seeking discharge
, he couldn’t help snorting. The personnel sergeant raised a questioning eyebrow. Walsh pointed to the line and said, “Looks like they want to know why I want the clap.”

“Damned if it doesn’t. Never noticed that before.” The personnel sergeant would laugh at such foolishness. Walsh had trouble imagining a soldier who wouldn’t.

He had no trouble giving his reason.
Adolf Hitler is the enemy of the UK
, he wrote.
I will not serve with German soldiers, or under German officers
. He thought for a moment. That covered most of it, but not all. He added,
It is wrong for any British soldier to do so
. He nodded. Better now. He’d taken care of why he didn’t want to stay in even if they said he didn’t have to go to Russia himself.

He’d expected that resigning from the service would take a lot of paperwork. He hadn’t expected it to take as much as it did. He waded through one form after another. It all boiled down to
I’ve done my bit, and I don’t want to play any more as long as I have to play on Adolf’s side
.