Winds of War (66 page)

There was no clear-cut moment of victory for the British. They really won when Sea Lion was called off, but this Hitler back-down was a secret. The Luftwaffe kept up heavy night raids on the cities, and this with the U-boat sinkings made the outlook for England darker and darker until Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. But the Luftwaffe never recovered from the Battle of Britain. This was one reason why the Germans failed to take Moscow in 1941. The blitzkrieg ran out of blitz in Russia because it had dropped too much of it on the fields of Kent and Surrey, and in the streets of London. –
V.H.

* * *

Chapter 31

Silvery fat barrage balloons, shining in the cloudless sky ahead of the plane before land came in view, gave the approach to the British Isles a carnival touch. The land looked very peaceful in the fine August weather. Automobiles and lorries crawled on narrow roads through rolling yellow-and-green patchwork fields marked off by dark hedgerows. Tiny sheep were grazing; farmers like little animated dolls were reaping corn. The plane passed over towns and cities clustered around gray spired cathedrals, and again over streams, woods, moors, and intensely green hedge-bounded fields, the pleasant England of the picture books, the paintings, and the poems.

This was the end of a tedious week-long journey for Pug via Zurich, Madrid, Lisbon, and Dublin. It had begun with the arrival in Berlin of a wax-sealed envelope in the pouch from Washington, hand-addressed in red ink:
Top Secret - Captain Victor Henry only
. Inside he had found a sealed letter from the White House.

Dear Pug:

Vice CNO says you are a longtime booster of “radar.” The British are secretly reporting to us a big success in their air battle with something called “RDF.” How about going there now for a look, as we discussed? You’ll get dispatch orders, and our friends will be expecting you. London should be interesting now, if a bit warm. Let me know if you think it’s too warm for us to give them fifty destroyers.

FDR

Pug had had mixed feelings about these chattily phrased instructions. Any excuse to leave Berlin was welcome. The red-ink blare and boasts in the meager newspapers were becoming intolerable; so were the happy triumphant Germans in government offices, chortling about the pleasant postwar life that would start in a month or so; so were the women strolling the tree-lined boulevards, looking slyly complacent in French silks and cosmetics. Pug even felt guilty eating the plunder in the improved restaurant menus: Polish hams, Danish butter, and French veal and wine. The gleeful voices of the radio announcers, claiming staggering destruction of British airplanes and almost no Luftwaffe losses, rasped his nerves as he sat alone in the evenings in the Grunewald mansion looted from a vanished Jew. An order to leave all this behind was a boon. But the letter dismayed him, too. He had not walked the deck of a ship now in the line of duty for more than four years, and this shore-bound status appeared to be hardening.

Walking home that afternoon he passed the rusting olive-painted
Flakturm
, and like nothing else it made him realize how glad how glad he would be to get out of Berlin. People no longer gawked at the high tower bristling at the top with guns, as they had when the girder frame and the thick armor plates had been going up. Guesses and rumors about it had run fast and wild for weeks. Now the story was out. It was an A.A. platform for shooting at low-flying bombers. No high building could get in the lines of fire, for it rose far above the tallest rooftops in Berlin, a crude eyesore. So far the few English raiders had hugged maximum altitude, but the Germans seemed to think of everything. This gigantic drab iron growth, over the playing children and elderly strollers in the pretty Tiergarten, seemed to Victor Henry to epitomize the Nazi regime.

The lonely cavernous house got on his nerves that evening as his quiet-stepping Gestapo butler served him pork chops from Denmark at one end of the long bare dining table. Pug decided that if he had to come back he would take a room at the Adlon. He packed suits and uniforms, the great weariness of an attaché’s existence: morning dress blues, dress whites, evening uniform, khakis, street clothes, civilian dinner jacket. He wrote to Rhoda, Warren, and Byron, and went to sleep thinking of his wife, and thinking, too, that in London he would probably see Pamela Tudsbury. The next day, Pug’s assistant attaché, a handsome commander who spoke perfect German, said he would be glad to take over his duties and appointments. He happened to be a relative of Wendell Willkie. Since the Republican convention, he had become popular with the Germans. “I guess I’ll have to hang around this weekend, eh?” he said. “Too bad. I was going out to Abendruh with the Wolf Stöllers. They’ve been awfully kind to me lately. They said Göring might be there.”

“Go by all means,” said Pug. “You might pick up some dope about how the Luftwaffe’s really doing. Tell your wife to take along a pair of heavy bloomers.” He enjoyed leaving the attaché staring at him, mystified and offended.

And so he had departed from Berlin.

* * *

“How the devil do you keep looking so fit?” he said to Blinker Vance, the naval attaché who met him at the London airport. After a quarter of a century, Vance still batted his eyes as he talked, just as he had at Annapolis, putting the plebe Victor Henry on report for a smudged white shoe. Vance wore a fawn-colored sports jacket of London cut, and gray trousers. His face was dried and lined, but he still had the flat waist of a second classman.

“Well, Pug; it’s pretty good tennis weather. I’ve been getting in a couple of hours every day.”

“Really? Great war you’ve got here.”

“Oh, the war. It’s going on up there somewhere, to the south.” Vance vaguely waved a hand up at pellucid heavens. “We do get some air raid warnings, but so far the Germans haven’t dropped anything on London. You see contrails once in a while, then you know the fighters are mixing it up close by. Otherwise you listen to the BBC for the knockdown reports. Damn strange war, a sort of airplane numbers game.”

Having just toured bombed areas in France and the Low Countries, Henry was struck by the serene, undamaged look of London, the density of the auto traffic, and the cheery briskness of the well-dressed sidewalk crowds. The endless shop windows crammed with good things surprised him. Berlin, even with its infusion of loot, was by comparison a bleak military compound.

Vance drove Victor Henry to a London apartment off Grosvenor Square, kept by the Navy for visiting senior officers: a dark flat on an areaway, with a kitchen full of empty beer and whiskey bottles, a dining room, a small sitting room, and three bedrooms along a hall. “I guess you’ll be a bit crowded here.” Vance said, glancing around at the luggage and scattered clothes of two other occupants in the apartment.

“Be glad of the company.”

Blinker grimaced, winked his eyes, and said tentatively, “Pug, I didn’t know you’d become one of these boffins.”

“Boffins?”

“Scientific red-hots. That’s what they call ‘em here. The word is you came for a look-see at the newest stuff, with a green light from way high up.”

Victor Henry said, unstrapping his bags, “Really?”

The attaché grinned at his taciturnity. “You’ll hear from the Limeys next. This is the end of the line for me - until I can be of service to you, one way or another.”

The loud coarse ring of a London telephone, quite different in rhythm and sound from the Berlin double buzz, startled Pug out of a nap. A slit of sunlight gleamed through drawn brown curtains.

“Captain Henry? Major-General Tillet here, Office of Military History.” The voice was high, crisp, and very British. “I’m just driving down to Portsmouth tomorrow. Possibly drop in on a Chain Home station. You wouldn’t care to come along?”

Pug had never heard the expression
Chain Home
. “That’ll be fine, General. Thank you.”

“Oh, really? Jolly good!” Tillet sounded delighted, as though he had suggested something boring and Pug had been unexpectedly gracious. “Suppose I pick you up at five, and we avoid the morning traffic. You might take along a shaving kit and a shirt.”

Pug heard whiskeyish laughter in the next bedroom, the boom of a man and the tinkling of a young woman. It was six o’clock. He turned on the radio and dressed. A mild Schubert trio ended, one he had often heard on the Berlin station, and news came on. In a calm, almost desultory voice, the broadcaster told of a massive air battle that had been raging all afternoon. The RAF had shot down more than a hundred German planes, and had lost twenty-five. Half the British pilots had safely parachuted. The fight was continuing, the announcer said. If there were any truth in this almost ludicrously understated bulletin, Pug thought, an astonishing victory was shaping up, high and invisible in the sky, while the Londoners went about their business.

He found Pamela Tudsbury’s number in the telephone book and called her. A different girl answered, with a charming voice that became more charming when Victor Henry identified himself. Pamela was a WAAF now, she told him, working at a headquarters outside London. She gave him another number to call. He tried it, and there Pamela was.

“Captain Henry! You’re here! Oh, wonderful! Well, you picked the right day to arrive, didn’t you?”

“Is it really going well, Pam?”

“Haven’t you heard the evening news?”

“I’m not used to believing the radio.”

She gave an exhilarated laugh. “Oh, to be sure. The
Berlin
radio. My God, it’s nice to talk to you. Well, it’s all quite true. We’ve mauled them today. But they’re still coming. I have to go back on duty in an hour. I’m just snatching a bite to eat. I heard one officer say it was the turning point of the war. By the way, if inspection tours are in order for you, you might bear in mind that I’m working at Group Operations, Number Eleven Fighter Group.”

“Will do. How’s your fiancé?”

“Oh, Ted? Fit as a flea. He’s on the ground at the moment. He’s had a busy day! Poor fellow, old man of the squadron, just turned twenty-nine. Look here, any chance that we can see you? Ted’s squadron gets its spell off ops next week. We’ll undoubtedly come down to London together. How long will you be here?”

“Well, next week I should still be around.”

“Oh, lovely. Let me have your number then, and I’ll call you. I’m so glad you’re here.”

He went out for a walk. London wore a golden light that evening, the light of a low sun shining through clear air. He zigzagged at random down crooked streets, along elegant rows of town houses, and through a green park where swans glided on calm water. He came to Trafalgar Square, and walked on through the Whitehall government buildings and along the Thames to Westminster Bridge.

Out to the middle of the bridge he strolled, and stood there, looking at the untouched famous old city stretching on both sides of the river.

London’s top-heavy red buses and scuttling black little taxis streamed across the bridge amid an abundant flow of private cars. Berlin’s sparse traffic had been mostly government or army machines. London was a civilian city still, he thought, for all the uniforms. It had no
Flakturm
. The British seemed to have produced their navy and their RAF from the mere table scraps of the prosperity still visibly spread here. Now these table-scrap forces had to hold the line. His job was to make a guess whether they would: also, to see whether their new electronic stuff was really advanced. Looking at this pacific and rich scene, he doubted it.

He dined alone in a small restaurant, on good red roast beef such as one could only dream of in Berlin. The apartment was dark and silent when he returned. He went to bed after listening to the news. The claimed box score for the day was now a hundred thirty German planes down, forty-nine British. Could it be true?

* * *

The small bald moustached general, in perfectly tailored khakis smoked a stubby pipe as he drove, a severe look his foxy much-wrinkled face. It had occurred to Victor Henry, after the phone conversation, that he might be E. J. Tillet, the military author, whose books he admired. And so he was; Tillet more or less resembled his book-jacket pictures, though in those the man had looked twenty years younger. Pug was not inclined to start a conversation with this forbidding pundit. Tillet said almost nothing as he spun his little Vauxhall along highways and down back roads. By the sun, Pug saw they were moving straight south. The further south they went, the more warlike the country looked. Signposts were gone, place names painted out, and some towns seemed deserted. Great loops of barbed steel rods over-arched the unmarked roads. Tillet said, pointing, “To stop glider landings,” and shut up again. Victor Henry finally tired of the silence and the beautiful rolling scenery. He said, “I guess the Germans took a bad beating yesterday.”

Tillet puffed until his pipe glowed and crackled. Victor Henry thought he wasn’t going to reply. Then he burst out, “I
told
Hitler the range of the Messerschmitt 109 was far too short. He agreed with me and said he’d take it up with Göring. But the thing got lost in the Luftwaffe bureaucracy. It’s a great mistake to think dictators are all-powerful! They’re hobbled by their paper shufflers, like all politicians. More so, in a way. Everybody lies to them, out of fear or sycophancy. Adolf Hitler walks in a web of flattery and phony figures. He does an amazing job, considering. He’s got a nose for facts. That’s his mark of genius. You’ve met him, of course?”

“Once or twice.”

“I had several sessions with him. He’s a great admirer of mine, or so he says. His grasp is quick and deep. The gifted amateur is often like that. I
said
Göring was making the same mistake with his fighter planes - designing them for ground support - that the French were making with their tanks. You don’t have to give a ground support machine much range, because the fuel trucks are always close at hand to fill them up. Those French tanks were superb fighting machines, and they had thousands of them. But the wretched things could only run fifty, sixty miles at a crack. Guderian drove two hundred miles a day. Some difference! The French never could get it into their heads that tanks should mass and operate independently. God knows Fuller, de Gaulle, and I tried hard enough to explain it to them.”