Winter of the World

‘Why do you need to explain this to the public? Roosevelt is President, isn’t he? He should just do it!’

‘Next year is election year. He wants to get re-elected.’

‘So?’

‘American people won’t vote for him if they think he’s involved them unnecessarily in the war in Europe. So he wants to put it to them as part of his overall plan for world peace. If we have the Four-Power Pact, showing that we’re serious about the United Nations organization, then American voters are more likely to accept that the invasion of France is a step on the road to a more peaceful world.’

‘This is amazing,’ Volodya said. ‘He’s the President, yet he has to make excuses all the time for what he does!’

‘Something like that,’ Woody said. ‘We call it democracy.’

Volodya had a sneaking suspicion that this incredible story might actually be the truth. ‘So the pact is necessary to persuade American voters to support the invasion of Europe.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Then why do we need China?’ Stalin was particularly scornful of the Allies’ insistence that China should be included in the pact.

‘China is a weak ally.’

‘So ignore China.’

‘If the Chinese are left out they will become discouraged, and may fight less enthusiastically against the Japanese.’

‘So?’

‘So we will have to bolster our forces in the Pacific theatre, and that will take away from our strength in Europe.’

That alarmed Volodya. The Soviet Union did not want Allied forces diverted from Europe to the Pacific. ‘So you are making a friendly gesture to China simply in order to conserve more forces for the invasion of Europe.’

‘Yes.’

‘You make it seem simple.’

‘It is,’ said Woody.

(iv)

In the early hours of the morning on 1 November, Chuck and Eddie ate a steak breakfast with the US Marine 3rd Division just off the South Sea island of Bougainville.

The island was about 125 miles long. It had two Japanese naval air bases, one in the north and one in the south. The marines were getting ready to land halfway along the lightly defended west coast. Their object was to establish a beachhead and win enough territory to build an airstrip from which to launch attacks on the Japanese bases.

Chuck was on deck at twenty-six minutes past seven when marines in helmets and backpacks began to swarm down the rope nets hanging over the sides of the ship and jump into high-sided landing craft. With them were a small number of war dogs, Dobermann Pinschers that made tireless sentries.

As the boats approached land, Chuck could already see a flaw in the map he had prepared. Tall waves crashed on to a steeply sloping beach. As he watched, a boat turned sideways to the waves and capsized. The marines swam for shore.

‘We have to show surf conditions,’ Chuck said to Eddie, who was standing beside him on the deck.

‘How do we find them out?’

‘Reconnaissance aircraft will have to fly low enough for whitecaps to register on their photographs.’

‘They can’t risk coming that low when there are enemy air bases so close.’

Eddie was right. But there had to be a solution. Chuck filed it away as the first question to be considered as a result of this mission.

For this landing they had benefited from more information than usual. As well as the normal unreliable maps and hard-to-decipher aerial photographs, they had a report from a reconnaissance team landed by submarine six weeks earlier. The team had identified twelve beaches suitable for landing along a four-mile stretch of coast. But they had not warned of the surf. Perhaps it was not so high that day.

In other respects, Chuck’s map was right, so far. There was a sandy beach about a hundred yards wide, then a tangle of palm trees and other vegetation. Just beyond the brush line, according to the map, there should be a swamp.

The coast was not completely undefended. Chuck heard the roar of artillery fire, and a shell landed in the shallows. It did no harm, but the gunner’s aim would improve. The marines were galvanized with a new urgency as they leaped from the landing craft to the beach and ran for the brush line.

Chuck was glad he had decided to come. He had never been careless or slack about his maps, but it was salutary to see first-hand how correct mapping could save men’s lives, and how the smallest errors could be deadly. Even before they embarked, he and Eddie had become a lot more demanding. They asked for blurred photographs to be taken again, they interrogated reconnaissance parties by phone, and they cabled all over the world for better charts.

He was glad for another reason. He was at sea, which he loved. He was on a ship with seven hundred young men, and he relished the camaraderie, the jokes, the songs, and the intimacy of crowded berths and shared showers. ‘It’s like being a straight guy in a girls’ boarding school,’ he said to Eddie one evening.

‘Except that that never happens, and this does,’ Eddie said. He felt the same as Chuck. They loved each other, but they did not mind looking at naked sailors.