Casualties of War: The Advocate Trilgy Read online

  DiGarre paused to allow Harry to absorb that much. He tilted his head back, took a puff on his cigar, and let the smoke out to gather over his head like a luminous cloud. “Harry, there’s military targets in every one of the occupied countries. Some have civilian laborers, some use slave labor. Some are close to residential areas and historical landmarks. Our allies accept the fact that hitting those targets means hitting things we wish we didn’t have to, even in their home countries. It means people who shouldn’t suffer are going to suffer, and they accept that, too. Even the people on the ground — the poor slobs drafted into building the sub pens at Calais, the dock workers at Antwerp, the guys just doing their jobs in the stockyards at Rouen — they all know they’re going to take a beating right along with the krauts. They take it because they figure we wouldn’t do it if we didn’t have to; that’s the implied contract. The question is, would they take it if they thought we were just laying our eggs anywhere we damned well pleased? Would they take it if they thought we’d broken the faith?”

  “If we become suspect in that regard,” the RAF captain broke in, “we risk balkanizing the alliance still further. And there’s the question of certain strategic neutrals, such as Spain and Turkey. If the Germans make the claim against us, in all probability it will be dismissed as typical Nazi folderol. But if we indict, we substantiate the German claim and give over a propaganda weapon possibly strong enough to move the neutrals further from us and closer to the Axis. It could be just the tool someone like Mr. De Valera, for example, and his cronies in Dublin could get no end of use from to further their separatist movement at our expense.”

  “What’s the reaction of the Belgians?” Harry asked. “The target is in their country.”

  “That’s all we’d need,” DiGarre sighed. “Another country heard from.”

  The RAF captain twitched in his seat, prodded by those deep aches Harry had glimpsed in him earlier. He took a small pillbox from his breast pocket, a cue for DiGarre, who crossed back to the liquor stand and returned with a glass of water. “There is no official Belgian government-in-exile,” the RAF captain’s flat voice stated. “As for King Leopold, our information is that he may be — and the Germans suspect as much — some sort of component in the Belgian resistance despite claiming otherwise. That being the case, and if the Germans have informed him of the incident, and even if he believes them, it’s doubtful that he’d make any statement that would compromise us. The King wants the Germans out of Belgium as much as we do.” The RAP captain placed two small white tablets from the pillbox on his tongue and washed them down with the water.

  DiGarre’s cigar had grown short. He stubbed it out, walked to his desk, and drew another from the humidor. “I wish you’d try a piece of that cake, Harry” He took a moment to light his fresh Havana, then asked, “You think we’ll win the war? I’m asking you straight. I don’t want all that Why We Fight stuff about Mom and apple pie or God being on our side and all. Practical, strategic point of view — we going to win?”

  The question seemed so irrelevant that Harry was at a loss for an answer. DiGarre waited patiently. “I’m not a strategist, sir, but I’d say so. We seem to have the industry, the manpower — ”

  “The leadership?” DiGarre smiled wryly. “Yes, we’ll win. Eventually. Maybe in three years, maybe five. That’s a long time. I really wish you’d try that cake, Harry.”

  It was obviously more than a casual suggestion, so Harry cut himself a sliver and took a bite. “You were right. Your wife is a good cook.”

  “Thank you, Harry. Tastes different, doesn’t it?”

  “Different?”

  “From the way that cake would’ve tasted a year and a half ago. It should taste different. No eggs, no butter, no milk. They gave that up, Harry. They give us their old pots and pans and steel wool. They have meatless days and grow vegetables in their backyards. Women wait in line for hours for one pair of rationed nylons so we can have silk for parachutes. Women are building airplanes and tanks; they get together in clubs and roll bandages. I was just reading about someplace up in Oregon where the ladies stick their kids in twenty-four-hour playrooms so they can work three shifts building Liberty ships. They give us their sons, Harry They give up a lot. You see this map behind me? Take a good look. We had a good year this year. The pendulum is finally swinging our way. In the Pacific, Guadalcanal’s ours and Yamamotos dead. On this side of the world the krauts have lost so many subs that Doenitz has pulled his U-boats out of the North Atlantic.” He raised the red tip of his cigar toward the map. “The Germans have been backing out of Russia since they lost Stalingrad and the Reds broke the siege at Leningrad. We took back North Africa and Sicily, and I’m not giving away any big military secret when I tell you we’ll be on the Italian boot inside a month. But see all this, Harry? This shaded area? All this in gray?” Emphatically, then: “Do you see it?”

  “I see it, sir.”

  “That’s the territory that’s still occupied, dominated, or allied with the krauts. That’s what the German Reich is today. Most of continental Europe, in fact. Quite a piece of grazing land, wouldn’t you say? A lot of fighting left.”

  Yes, sir.

  “They sacrifice because were on a sacred crusade, Harry. To them, it’s Good versus Evil and nothing less. It doesn’t register with them that the Reds were no friends of ours before the war and they probably won’t be after, or that nobody elected DeGaulle, or that we may just be fighting to save our own hides. They sacrifice because they believe in what we’re doing, Harry. That’s our other priority: making them believers. Taint the crusade, and you create doubt. Doubt begets hesitation. You know the old ditty about for want of a nail the shoe was lost?”

  “Are you telling me,” Harry said incredulously “that you think the whole Allied war effort is going to grind to a halt because of — ”

  “Hell, no, Harry! Hell, no!” DiGarre chuckled. “Tell you the truth, nobody has the vaguest idea of what would happen. Could be that whole Murrow bunch beats a big drum for this and it wouldn’t bring sweat on a cow’s brow.”

  “You just think it’s an unacceptable risk.”

  DiGarre wandered to the conference table and scanned the piled yellow paper spewing out of the teleprinter, then resumed his seat at the marble table, his face now quite cold. “I think if the possibility exists that this could cause just one American boy in a foxhole to so much as nick his finger — that this war could go on for one second longer than it needs to — then it’s an unacceptable risk.”

  “As we told you, Major Voss,” the RAF captain said, “We’re discussing priorities.”

  “I’m well aware of what we’re discussing,” Harry said. “See here, Major,” the RAF captain went on. “Jerry has been doing this sort of thing since Spain, and the Eye-ties since Ethiopia, and the Nips of course — ”

  “I wasn’t aware that the actions of the Axis powers constituted a mitigating factor,” Harry snapped.

  The captain’s small, lopsided mouth twisted in a caustic smile. He made no pretense at concealing his disdain. “The Royal Air Force has been engaged in nighttime area bombing over German population centers since we began our air counteroffensive in 1940.”

  “We’re not talking about the RAF,” Harry responded. The RAF captain’s smile twisted a little tighter. “Ever since your people mounted the first American air raid little more than a year ago they’ve been trying to prove the efficacy of daylight precision bombing. You may’ve heard of the results at Ploesti and Schweinfurt. Quite cost-ineffective, to say the least.”

  DiGarre’s shoulders heaved in begrudging agreement. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to start taking another tack.”

  “Shall I tell him?” the RAF captain asked, almost eagerly.

  The general took a moment to weigh the strategic value of proceeding. He nodded as he inhaled from his cigar, then said, through a cloud of acrid blue smoke, “Harry, what you’re about to hear is classified. Any breach of security means the next court-
martial you work on will be your own.”

  The RAF captain shifted in his seat, trying to make himself more comfortable. “Approximately three weeks ago, beginning the night of 24 July, the RAF was joined by elements of the American Eighth Air Force in bombing the German city of Hamburg. They bombed the city that night, then again on the following day and the day after, and then again on the night of 27-28. The newsreels have depicted the event as yet another successful air attack against the Reich with no further details. As for those omitted details: Reports from our agents in Germany are still rather sketchy, but what we know thus far is that the initial destruction from the sustained bombing was devastating. There were also some unanticipated secondary effects. Apparently, some manner of freak weather condition was at work in the target area, something to do with odd winds or some such. In any case, coupled with the enormous destructive force of the bombings and resultant fires, some sort of blast-furnace effect was created. Our Intelligence people have been using the word ‘firestorm.’ This ‘storm’ generated heat to one thousand degrees centigrade. People were incinerated in their shelters. The updraft was great enough to pull trees from the ground. One report cited that even the river running through the city was afire. Our assumption is that the oil spillage from the ships at the docks combusted from the heat. Reconnaissance photos show half the city of Hamburg is gone. Approximately eight hundred thousand Germans have lost their homes, between thirty and fifty thousand inhabitants are probably dead, which means the Germans suffered more dead in four days than we did during any one month of the Blitz. While the participation of your Air Force in such actions is singular to date, we feel they will now be seriously considering their enormous impact on the enemy in light of their comparatively light cost.”

  Harry looked to DiGarre.

  “It has to be considered,” the general said. “If the people back home have to choose between their sons and kraut civilians, the hausfrau is going to lose.”

  “I think you’ll find,” the RAF captain continued, “that to the public at large — at least here, where the bombs fall — the Germans are the enemy. Not the German Luftwaffe, not the German Wehrmacht, but the Germans.”

  “We’re not talking about Germans here,” Harry said through clenched jaws.

  “Yes,” the RAF captain mused. “That does bring up the point as to whether you would press this case as you have if we were. And if not, then it’s apparently not the act itself that troubles you, eh, Major? I suppose that hypocrisy is like influenza; even the doctor gets it.”

  Harry’s mouth began to open and he could feel his vocal chords tighten in preparation for something shrill and nasty, but DiGarre stepped in first.

  “What we’re talking about is easing the American public into a frame of mind that’ll tolerate the deliberate infliction of massive civilian casualties and equally massive collateral damage. Now, obviously, the boys who flew those planes are the ones going eyeball-to-eyeball with the krauts and frankly Harry the boys are not squawking. They’d rather fly another Hamburg milk run than go through the meat grinder again over Schweinfurt.” DiGarre left Harry to his thoughts for a moment as he finished his drink, studying him over the tops of his spectacles. “Well, Harry?”

  “That’s a hell of an agenda you have, General.”

  “That’s what they pay me for,” the general said grimly.

  They had shown Harry how calculating they could be and in doing so, he’d begun to appreciate how extensive those calculations were. The thought that came to him so stunned him that he wasn’t, at first, aware that he’d spoken aloud. “You set Halverson up.”

  “What do you mean,” said DiGarre, his voice soothingly inquisitive, “by ‘set him up’?”

  “Harry,” Ryan cautioned.

  But Harry didn’t hear Ryan’s warning. “You asked General Halverson for an assessment on the 351st after the Germans hit them. He stalled to buy time for the raid. He didn’t send the report up until the day before the raid was scheduled, thinking it’d be too late for you to scrub the mission. But they had to postpone. You had an extra two days — ”

  “Major,” the general said heavily, “I’ll bet enough paper crosses my desk each day to give every man, woman, and child in my grand home state of Kentucky something new to read each week.”

  “No,” Harry said. “You would’ve been looking for this. Like you said; you have accounting to do. I can’t believe you wouldn’t’ve read the report as soon as Halverson’s messenger showed up. If the raid had come off, everybody would’ve been a hero. The guys on the raid’d get a medal or something, the heat would’ve been off Halverson. And you would’ve been in the clear, too. But if the raid went sour, you could just say you didn’t know anything about it. It would all fall on Halverson’s head.”

  Harry braced himself for the retaliatory fusillade. The sun moved another degree in the sky and a painfully bright glare swept across the windows behind the general. The rows of taped crosses dissolved in the glare.

  “Harry,” DiGarre said, “we’ve hit you with an awful lot here. Why don’t you think over everything we’ve talked about. Talk it over with your two associates. They have a stake in this too, you know. This could be very beneficial for all of you. Then, come by sometime tomorrow and let me know your thinking on the matter. Fair enough? Thank you for coming.”

  It was a dismissal. Harry stood. There wasn’t much room between the settee and the table and he barked his shins on the sharp, stone edge. With his hand on the gnarled brass knob of one of the double doors, he hesitated, then faced back toward them. Ryan was at the liquor stand, and the RAF captain was standing by the windows, massaging the small of his back. DiGarre sat like some divinely appointed king, sunk deep in his chair, an ankle carelessly tossed across the opposite knee, his fingers knitted across his chest, his smoldering cigar rolling slowly from one corner of his mouth to the other.

  Harry left.

  *

  If Harry seems naive, a bit oblivious to what we might condescendingly point out to him was painfully obvious — “War is hell, old boy!” — he merely shared what remains a prevailing schizophrenia regarding some of combat’s more unsavory truths.

  At the time a benumbed Harry was leaving General DiGarre’s office, millions back in his home country paid their two bits to sit riveted by the film Destination Tokyo. They huddled in darkened cinemas and cheered Cary Grant and his submarine crew of fresh-faced lads as they slunk about under the sea. They cheered their torpedo ambush of defenseless Japanese cargo ships. Sorry Tojo, but war is hell, you know!

  Afterward, they crossed the way to another cinema, set down another two bits for Action in the North Atlantic (from the very same studio, no less), where this time the fresh-faced young Americans manned a cargo ship, and were fighting off skulking German submarines. Curiously, cinema fans did not accept the actions of the U-boats and their sneery-faced Kapitäns as more war is hell. They booed and hissed what they considered to be Teutonic villainy.

  A year earlier I’d been sharing drinks with a colleague from the American photo magazine Life, and he told me of a complaint they had received concerning a particular photograph they had run. The picture was of a British tank officer in hospital, wounded during the North African campaign. The young captain’s arm and eye were swathed in bandages, and he lay between two other gauze-draped men. After publication, there came a letter objecting to the running of such material for the sake of other young soldiers. “Must they,” wrote the correspondent, a woman from Rochester, New York, “go to fight with a horrible ending in their minds?”

  So, don’t condescend to poor old Harry. If any number of us truly believed that war is hell, how could we ever have permitted another war after the first one? On that score, we are hypocrites and liars all.

  *

  As he left the Ganymede, Harry was barely aware of the salutes of the guards at the wrought-iron gates. Without conscious direction, he passed through Brook Gate into Hyde Park, wandering until he found hims
elf on the esplanade along the Serpentine. Sticky, hot, and very, very tired, he found an isolated bench by the water and sat himself down.

  The warm afternoon made his eyes heavy. A breeze stirred the lake, nudging the water into the bank with quiet, licking noises. Across the lake, Harry could see a nanny feeding the swans with her two preschool charges. The children squealed nervously, thrilled and terrified at the closeness of the large white birds.

  Above, marring the pastel blue sky, were the brooding gray shapes of barrage balloons staggered out over London in a swaying phalanx. But if Harry dropped his gaze just a few degrees, the city vanished. Brompton, Belgravia, Mayfair and General DiGarre’s headquarters, the looming balloons...all disappeared behind the thick branches of the trees about the park, and the only noises he could hear were the lapping water, the chiming laughter of the children, the trumpeting of the swans.

  A tune, a faint whistle, came to him on the breeze. It took Harry’s fogbound mind a moment to remember the words:

  In Dublin’s fair city

  Where the girls are so pretty

  I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone...

  Harry turned, following the whistling, and saw a man on the esplanade. He was perhaps Harry’s age, though the face showed a good deal more weathering (no doubt as much a product of scotch and cigarettes as wind and rain). He wore a shapeless dark suit that had been out of style even before wartime rationing had made matters of style academic, and a fraying Panama hat. He walked with an odd, rolling gait, almost a limp.

  I whistled the next verse:

  As she wheeled her wheelbarrow

  Through streets broad and narrow

  Crying cockles, and mussels

  Alive, alive-o...

  Chapter Eight – Fidei Defensor

  Himself and his mention of Cathryn had touched a chord of loneliness in me that evening, and it had resonated through a restless sleep. Eventually, I slid out of bed, not bothering to strap on the apparatus. I hopped to the table where I’d left the bottle Himself and I had shared, then hopped over to the window where the blackout curtains were open and London lay outside dark and quiet.