Winds of War (67 page)

The car was bumping along a muddy detour past concrete dragons’ teeth and a stone wall, ringed in barbed wire, that blocked the highway. Masked workmen were raising clouds of gray dust with pneumatic hammers and drills.

“There’s foolishness for you.” Tillet pointed at the tank trap with his pipe. “Intended to halt invaders. What this rubbish actually would do is reduce the maneuverability of our reserve to zero. Happily Brooke’s taken charge now. He’s cleaning all this out.”

Pug said, “General Alan Brooke, is that?”

“Yes, our best man, a genius in the field. He managed the Dunkirk retreat. I was with his headquarters. I saw him demoralized only once. Headquarters was shifting from Armentières to Lille.” Tillet knocked out his pipe in a dashboard tray and shifted his cold gray eyes to Pug. “The roads were crammed with refugees. Our command cars could hardly move. The Armentières lunatic asylum had been bombed. All the boobies had got out. There must have been two thousand of them all over the road, in loose brown corduroy pajamas, moping, drooling, and giggling. They swarmed around our car, and looked into the windows, dripping saliva, making silly faces, waggling their hands. Alan turned to me. ‘It’s a rout, Ted,’ he said. We’re lost, you know, the whole BEF’s lost. We’ve lost damned war.’ That’s when I said, ‘Never mind, Alan. There are a lot more lunatics on the German side of the hill, including the boss.’ Well, that made him laugh, for first time in days. After that he became himself again. A word in season, the Good Book says.”

“Do you think Hitler’s crazy?” Henry said.

Tillet chewed at his pipe, eyes on the road. “He’s a split personality. Half the time he’s a reasonable, astute politician. When he’s beyond his depth he gets mystical, and silly. He informed me that the English Channel was just another river obstacle, and if he wanted to cross, why, the Luftwaffe would simply operate as artillery, and the navy as engineers. Childish. All in all, I rather like the fellow. There’s an odd pathos about him. He seems sincere, and lonely. Of course, there’s nothing for it now but to finish him off. - Hullo, we almost missed the turn. Let’s have a look at the airfield.”

This was Pug’s first look at a scene in England that resembled beaten Poland and France. Bent blackened girders hung crazily over wrecked aircraft in the hangars. Burned-out planes stood in sooty skeletal rows on the field, where bulldozers were grinding around rubble heaps and cratered runways. “Jerry did quite a job here,” said Tillet cheerfully. “Caught us napping.” The ruined airfield lay amid grassy fields dotted with wild flowers, where herds of brown cattle grazed and lowed. Away from the burned buildings, the air smelled like a garden. Tillet said as they drove off, “Göring’s just starting to make sense, going for the airfields and plane factories. He’s wasted a whole bloody month bombing harbors and pottering about after convoys. He’s only got till the equinox, the damned fool - the Channel’s impassable after about September the fifteenth. His mission is mastery of the air, not blockade. Define your mission!” he snapped at Victor Henry like a schoolmaster. “Define your mission! And stick to it!”

Tillet cited Waterloo, lost for want of a few handfuls of nails and a dozen hammers, because a general forgot his mission. Marshal Ney’s premature cavalry charge against Wellington’s center, he said, surprised and overran the British batteries, gaining a golden chance to spike the guns. But nobody had thought of bringing along hammers and nails. “Had they spiked those guns,” said Tillet through his teeth - puffing angrily at his clenched pipe, chopping a hand on the steering wheel. and getting very worked up and red-faced - “had Marshal Ney remembered what the
hell
his charge was all about, had one Frenchman among those five thousand thought about his mission, we’d be living in a different world. With our artillery silenced, the next cavalry charge would have broken Wellington’s center. We’d have had a French-dominated Europe for the next hundred and fifty years, instead of a vacuum into which the German came boiling up. We fought the Kaiser in 1914 and we’re fighting Adolf right now because that ass Ney forgot his mission at Waterloo - if he ever knew it.”

“For want of a nail the kingdom was lost,” said Pug.

“Damned right!’

“I don’t know much about Waterloo, but I never heard that version. I just remember Blücher and his Prussians showing up at sunset and saving the day.”

“Wouldn’t have been worth a tinker’s dam if Ney had fetched along his hammers and nails. By sunset Wellington would have been in full flight. Napoleon had routed Blücher three days earlier. He’d have done it again with ease.”

The car went over the crest of a hill. Ahead, beyond green empty pastureland, lay the blue Channel, shining in the sun, and a hairline of French coast all along the horizon. They got out and stood amid high grass and red poppies blowing in a cool sea breeze. After an impressive silence, broken only by birdsong, Tillet said, “Well, there you are. You’re looking at Hitler’s France.”

Turn by turn they scanned the coast through a telescope Tillet brought out of the car’s trunk. Small images of houses and ships shimmered on the far shore.

“That’s as close as Jerry’s ever come,” Tillet said. Close enough, too.”

“The Germans took all the neutral attachés on a tour of France not long ago,” Pug said. “Brought us clear to the coast. The poppies are growing over there, too. We saw your chalk cliffs, and the Maginot Line guns they were pointing at you. Now I’m looking down the wrong end of those guns.”

Tillet said, “They’re no problem. They lob a few shells over for terror, but they fall in the fields. Nobody’s terrorized.”

Running westward along the coast, they passed through silent boarded-up villages, thickly tangled with barbed wire. Camouflaged pillboxes stood thick along the hills and in the towns. Pug saw a children’s merry-go-round with the snouts of cannon peeking from under the platform of painted horses. Along the flat stony beaches, jagged iron rods spiked up, festooned with wire. As waves rose and fell, queerly shaped tangles of pipe poked above the water.

Pug said, “Well, you’re not exactly unprepared.”

“Yes. Adolf was decent enough to give us a breather, and we’ve used it. Those pipes out beyond the waterline are just the old Greek fire idea. We set the sea ablaze with petroleum, and fry the Germans we don’t drown.”

Barrage balloons came in sight over the hills to the west. “Ah. Here we are.” Tillet pulled up under a spreading old tree. “Portsmouth has two possible restaurants, but the city’s taken a pasting. They may be short of crockery. I have some sandwiches and coffee in the boot.”

“Perfect.”

Pug trotted up and down the road, restoring circulation to his numb heavy legs, then sat beside Tillet under the tree. They ate the lunch wordlessly. Tillet appeared to have no small talk whatever. Pug did not mind, being more or less like that himself. “Look there.” Tillet said, gesturing with the last of his sandwich. In the blue sky a patch of orange was flowering over the city, a barrage balloon on fire. “They’re back today, after all. More coffee?”

“No thanks.”

“Now, what’s the damned fool doing hitting poor Portsmouth again? Yesterday he was going inland where he should be.” Tillet deftly packed the lunch things and got his binoculars. The air vibrated with the distant thump of A.A. firing and the hum of planes. “Shall we get along down there? I imagine it’s a feint. It doesn’t look like much of a show.”

“Right.”

Climbing in the car, Pug paused, and scanned the sky high to the east. “Look there, General.”

Tillet squinted skyward, saw nothing, and used his binoculars. His eyes widened. “Yes. That’s more like it.” He passed the binoculars to Victor Henry. The binoculars resolved the gray moving dot into swarms of airplanes moving north in tight V’s across the cloudless blue.

“Heinkels, a lot of 109’s, and some 110’s,” Pug said. “More than a hundred of them.”

“No Stukas? They’re sitting birds. Our pilots say it’s hardly sporting to go after them.”

“I don’t see any crooked wings up there. But they’re pretty far off.”

“Care to join our observer corps, Captain Henry?” Tillet’s voice to him was slightly more cordial.

More barrage balloons over Portsmouth burst into flame and went writhing lazily down in black smoke. Fires were burning on the docks: white smoke trails crisscrossed the blue sky. The car passed a black plane nose down, burning in a grassy field, its markings hidden by flames. By the time they reached Portsmouth, fire fighters were streaming water on the blazes, and people were out in the streets gawking. Though buildings were smashed and burning and rubble heaps blocked many streets, the town did not look anything like Rotterdam, or even some of the badly hit French towns.

“Care to inspect the damage? You’re welcome to, but it’s a dreary sight. I’m thinking we might go straight on to the Chain Home station. Since Jerry does seem to be coming over today, you might find it interesting.”

“Sure thing.”

They had the ferry to themselves. The old wooden boat rolled nauseatingly on the little stretch of open water to the Isle of Wight.

“People forget how choppy this Channel is,” said Tillet, clinging to a stanchion and raising his voice above the wind and the engine thump. “If the Germans do cross, they may arrive too seasick to fight. It’s a factor.”

An olive-painted military car awaited them at the landing. They drove across the bucolic island passing one mansion after another shuttered and dead amid rolling wide lawns and shrubbery sprouting and flowering rankly.

They saw no other car on their way to a cluster of iron and wooden huts around steel towers thrusting toward the sky, a grim blotch on the green holiday island.

A tubby man with a scarlet face, the group captain in charge of the station, offered them tea in his little office, chatting about the raid on Portsmouth. He also mentioned with some pride a large sea bass which he had hauled from the surf at dawn. “Well, shall we have a look at how things are going? There’s rather a large attack been laid on today, I believe.”

Victor Henry’s first glimpse of British radar scopes at Ventnor, in a small stuffy room lit by one red light and foul with smoke, was a deep shock. He listened intently to the talk of the pale, slender man in gray tweed called Dr. Cantwell, a civilian scientist, as they inspected the scopes. But the sharp green pips were news enough. The British were miles ahead of the United States. They had mastered techniques that American experts had told him were twenty years off.

The RAF could measure the range and bearing of a ship down to a hundred yards of less, and read the result off a scope at sight. They could do the same to a single incoming airplane, or count a horde of airplanes, and give the altitude too. These instruments were marvels compared to the stuff that he had seen tested on the
New York
last year and that the Navy had ordered in large quantities. Pug Henry had two immediate thoughts: that the United States Navy had to get hold of this equipment; and that the British were far better prepared for war than the world knew. He admired the quiet sense of drama with which General Tillet had bowled him over. That was well done. But it all hung on the fact that they had these remarkable radars. Here was a moment of confrontation between America and England masked in a casual visit, in an offhand atmosphere, in a smoky, dim little room smelling of electric machinery, on a playground island deserted by the rich, facing the displaced Maginot Line guns.

“We have nothing like this,” he said.

“Mm?” said Dr. Cantwell, lighting a cigarette. “Are you sure? They’re pretty far along at MIT, we understand, with this sort of thing.”

“I know what we’ve got.” Pug saw on General Tillet’s face, in the red light, the shadowy gleam that comes of drawing a good hand of cards: a deepening of lines, a brightening of eyes, nothing more. “How the devil do you obtain such a sharp beam? I pressed our boys on this. The answer was that it was a question of stepping down to shorter and shorter wavelengths. Beyond a certain point you can’t do that, they say, and still get the power to shoot out the pulses to any distance.”

The scientist nodded, his eyes almost shut, his face as blank as possible. But he too, Pug thought, was a happy man.

“Mm, yes, that’s the problem, isn’t it?” he mumbled. “But they’ll certainly get around to the answer. It’s a question of tube design, circuitry, and so forth. Our cavity magnetron does a pretty good job, at that. We’re not entirely displeased with it.”

“Cavity magnetron?”

“Yes. Cavity magnetron. One gets rid of the grid in a vacuum tube, you see, and one controls current flow with an external magnetic field. That allows for the more powerful pulses. It takes a bit of designing, but your people will certainly work it up in due course.”

“No doubt. Got any cavity magnetrons for sale?”

Both Tillet and Dr. Cantwell burst out laughing, and even the enlisted men at their scopes turned around and smiled.

The scarlet-faced group captain peered at a scope where a boyish operator was chattering into a headphone. “Hullo, looks like we have another circus heading this way. Forming up over Le Havre again. A couple of dozen would you say, Stebbins?”

“Thirty-seven, sir.”

Excitement thickened in the dark room as reports came from several scopes. A young duty officer wearing headphones strolled from scope to scope, making notes on a clipboard, talking to the operators. To Pug Henry’s eye this was smooth expert work, like the controlled tumult in a submarine conning tower during an attack run.

General Tillet said, “I take it you think rather well of our cavity magnetron.”

“It’s a major breakthrough. General.”

“Hm. Yaas. Strange, isn’t it, that warfare has come down to fencing with complicated toys that only a few seedy scholars can make or understand.”

“Pretty useful toys,” said Pug, watching the duty officer write down the ranges and bearings that the radar operators were barking. “Exact intelligence of the enemy’s location and movements, without disclosing your own.”

“Well, of course. We’re damned grateful to our boffins. A few Englishmen did stay awake while our politicians kicked away air parity and all the rest of our military posture. Well, now that you’ve had a look, would you just as soon pop back to London? I thought we might have to stay here a day or two to see action, but Jerry’s been obliging. We can break our trip overnight at some decent hotel, then whip up to London. A couple of people there would like a word with you.”