Part 11 (1/2)

The British Isles were visited repeatedly during the wait by bombing attacks as heavy as any of the war was safe enough but I heard about them, and I cou see the effect on the morale of the officers with who I a.s.sociated. Not that it frightened them-it ma~ them coldly angry. The raids were not directed p1 manly at dockyards or factories, but were ruthless d struction of anything, particularly villages.

”I don't see what you chaps are waiting for,” a fig commander complained to me. ”What the Jerri need is a dose of their own shrecklichkeit, a lesson their own Aryan culture.”

I shook my head. ”We'll have to do it our own way He dropped the matter, but I knew how he and F brother officers felt. They had a standing toast, as s cred as the toast to the King: ”Remember Coventry! Our President had stipulated that the R. A. F. w not to bomb during the period of negotiation, but th bombers were busy nevertheless. The continent w showered, night after night, with bales of leaflets, p~ pared by our own propaganda agents. The first of the called on the people of the Reich to stop a useless w and promised that the terms of peace would not vindictive. The second rain of pamphlets showed ph tographs of that herd of steers. The third was a simf direct warning to get out of cities and to stay out. As Manning put it, we were calling ”Halt!” thr times before firing. I do not think that he or the Pre dent expected it to work, but we were morally ob gated to try.

The Britishers had installed for me a televisor, of the Simonds-Yarley nonintercept type, the sort where the receiver must ”trigger” the transmitter in order for the transmission to take place at all. It made a.s.surance of privacy in diplomatic communication for the first time in history, and was a real help in the crisis. I had brought along my own technician, one of the F. B. I.'s new corps of specialists, to handle the scrambler and the trigger.

He called to me one afternoon. ”Was.h.i.+ngton signaling.

I climbed tiredly out of the cabin and down to the booth on the hangar floor, wondering if it were another false alarm.

It was the President. His lips were white. ”Carry out your basic instructions, Mr. DeFries.”

”Yes, Mr. President!”

The details had been worked out in advance and, once I had accepted a receipt and token payment from the Commandant for the dust, my duties were finished. But, at our instance, the British had invited military observers from every independent nation and from the several provisional governments of occupied nations. The United States Amba.s.sador designated me as one at the request of Manning.

Our task group was thirteen bombers. One such bomber could have carried all the dust needed, but it was split up to insure most of it, at least, reaching its destination. I had fetched forty percent more dust than Ridpath calculated would be needed for the mission and my last job was to see to it that every canister actually went on board a plane of the flight. The extremely small weight of dust used was emphasized to each of the military observers.

We took off just at dark, climbed to twenty-five thousand feet, refueled in the air, and climbed again.

Our escort was waiting for us, having refueled thirty minutes before us. The flight split into thirteen groups, and cut the thin air for middle Europe. The bombers we rode had been stripped and hiked up to permit the utmost maximum of speed and alt.i.tude.

Elsewhere in England, other flights had taken off shortly before us to act as a diversion. Their destina tions were every part of Germany; it was the intentio to create such confusion in the air above the Reich th2 our few planes actually engaged in the serious wor might well escape attention entirely, flying so high i the stratosphere.

The thirteen dust carriers approached Berlin fnoi different directions, planning to cross Berlin as if fo lowing the spokes of a wheel. The night was apprech bly clear and we had a low moon to help us. Berlin: not a hard city to locate, since it has the largest squan mile area of aiiy modern city and is located on a broa flat alluvial plain. I could make out the River Spree a we approached it, and the Havel. The city was blacke out, but a city makes a different sort of black froi open country. Parachute flares hung over the city i many places, showing that the R. A. F. had been bus before we got there and the A. A. batteries on tli ground helped to pick out the city.

There was fighting below us, but not within fiftee thousand feet of our alt.i.tude as nearly as I could judg~ The pilot reported to the captain, ”On line of bearing!” The chap working the absolute altimeter stea ily fed his data into the fuse pots of the canister. Tli canisters were equipped with a light charge of blac powder, sufficient to explode them and scatter tF dust at a time after release predetermined by the fu5 pot setting. The method used was no more than an e ficient expedient. The dust would have been almost a effective had it simply been dumped out in paper bag although not as well distributed.

The Captain hung over the navigator's board, slight frown on his thin sallow face. ”Ready one!” r ported the bomber.

”Release!”

”Ready two!”

The Captain studied his wrist.w.a.tch. ”Release!” ”Ready three!”

”Release!”

When the last of our ten little packages was out of the s.h.i.+p we turned tail and ran for home.

No arrangements had been made for me to get home; n.o.body had thought about it. But it was the one thing I wanted to do. I did not feel badly; I did not feel much of anything. I felt like a man who has at last screwed up his courage and undergone a serious operation; it's over now, he is still numb from shock but his mind is relaxed. But I wanted to go home.

The British Commandant was quite decent about it; he serviced and manned my s.h.i.+p at once and gave me an escort for the offsh.o.r.e war zone. It was an expensive way to send one man home, but who cared? We had just expended some millions of lives in a desperate attempt to end the war; what was a money expense? He gave the necessary orders absentmindedly.

I took a double dose of nembutal and woke up in Canada. I tried to get some news while the plane was being serviced, but there was not much to be had. The government of the Reich had issued one official news bulletin shortly after the raid, sneering at the much vaunted ”secret weapon” of the British and stating that a major air attack had been made on Berlin and several other cities, but that the raiders had been driven off with only minor damage. The current Lord Haw-Haw started one of his sarcastic speeches but was unable to continue it. The announcer said that he had been seized with a heart attack, and subst.i.tuted some recordings of patriotic music. The station cut off in the middle of the ”Horst Wessel”

song. After that there was silence.

I managed to promote an Army car and a driver at the Baltimore field which made short work of the Annapolis speedway. We almost overran the turnoff to the laboratory.

Manning was in his office. He looked up as I came in, said, ”h.e.l.lo, John,” in a dispirited voice, and dropped his eyes again to the blotter pad. He went back drawing doodles.

I looked him over and realized for the first time th the chief was an old man. His face was gray and flabF deep furrows framed his mouth in a triangle. F clothes did not fit.

I went up to him and put a hand on his should~ ”Don't take it so hard, chief. It's not your fault. gave them all the warning in the world.”

He looked up again. ”Estelle Karst suicided this morning. Anybody could have antic.i.p.ated it, but n.o.body d And somehow I felt harder hit by her death than by t death of all those strangers in Berlin.

”How did she it?” I asked.

”Dust. She went into the canning room, and took off her armor.”

I could picture her-head held high, eyes snappir and that set look on her mouth which she got wh people did something she disapproved of. One lit old woman whose lifetime work had been turn against her.

”I wish,” Manning added slowly, ”that I could explain to her why we had to do it.”

We buried her in a lead-lined coffin, then Manning and I went on to Was.h.i.+ngton.

While we were there, we saw the motion pictui that had been made of the death of Berlin. You ha not seen them; they never were made public, but th were of great use in convincing the other nations oft world that peace was a good idea. I saw them wh Congress did, being allowed in because I was Ma ning's a.s.sistant.

They had been made by a pair of R. A. F. pilots, w had dodged the Luftwaffe to get them. The first sh showed some of the main streets the morning after t raid. There was not much to see that would show up telephoto shots, just busy and crowded streets, but if you looked closely you could see that there had been an excessive number of automobile accidents.

The second day showed the attempt to evacuate. The inner squares of the city were practically deserted save for bodies and wrecked cars, but the streets leading out of town were boiling with people, mostly on foot, for the trams were out of service. The pitiful creatures were fleeing, not knowing that death was already lodged inside them. The plane swooped down at one point and the cinematographer had his telephoto lens pointed directly into the face of a young woman for several seconds. She stared back at it with a look too woebegone to forget, then stumbled and fell.

She may have been trampled. I hope so. One of those six horses had looked like that when the stuff was beginning to hit his vitals.

The last sequence showed Berlin and the roads around it a week after the raid. The city was dead; there was not a man, a woman, a child-nor cats, nor dogs, not even a pigeon. Bodies were all around, but they were safe from rats. There were norats.

The roads around Berlin were quiet now. Scattered carelessly on shoulders and in ditches, and to a lesser extent on the pavement itself, like coal shaken off a train, were the quiet heaps that had been the citizens of the capital of the Reich. There is no use in talking about it.

But, so far as I am concerned, I left what soul I had in that projection room and I have not had one since. The two pilots who made the pictures eventually died-systemic, c.u.mulative infection, dust in the air over Berlin. With precautions it need not have happened, but the English did not believe, as yet, that our extreme precautions were necessary.

The Reich took about a week to fold up. It might have taken longer if the new Fuehrer had not gone to Berlin the day after the raid to ”prove” that the British boasts had been hollow. There is no need to recount the provisional governments that Germany had in t] following several months; the only one we are co cerned with is the so-called restored monarchy whh used a cousin of the old Kaiser as a symbol, the 01 that sued for peace.

Then the trouble started.

When the Prime Minister announced the terms the private agreement he had had with our Presider he was met with a silence that was broken only I cries of ”Shame! Shame! Resign!” I suppose it was i evitable; the Commons reflected the spirit of a peop who had been unmercifully punished for four yeai They were in a mood to enforce a peace that wou have made the Versailles Treaty look like the Bea tudes.

The vote of no confidence left the Prime Minister no choice. Forty-eight hours later the King made a speech from the throne that violated all const.i.tutional precedent, for it had not been written by a Prime Minister. In this greatest crisis in his reign, his voice was clear and unlabored; it sold the idea to England and a national coalition government was formed.

I don't know whether we would have dusted Lond to enforce our terms or not; Manning thinks we would have done so. I suppose it depended on the character of the President of the United States, and there is is way of knowing about that since we did not have to do it.

The United States, and in particular the President the United States, was confronted by two inescapable problems. First, we had to consolidate our position once, use our temporary advantage of an overwhelmingly powerful weapon to insure that such a weapon would not be turned on us. Second, some means had to be worked out to stabilize American foreign policy so that it could handle the tremendous power we suddenly had thrust upon us.