The Winds of War

for an attack on Poland in the fall. Working day and night, with Case Red as a basis, we prepared the plan. On April 5 it went to the Fuhrer under a new code name; Fall Weiss-"Case White." Historic

o the north and Czechoslovakia to the south, and wholly flat and open to a thrust from Germany to the west. To the rear, in the east, the Soviet union stood poised, newly linked to Germany through the nonaggression pact engineered by Ribbentrop, The Fatal Pact insufficient attention is paid to the plain fact that this treaty, hailed at the time as a masterstroke, all but lost Germany the Second World War before a shot was fired. The alliance with Bolshevism (however temporary and tactical) was certainly a repudiation of the Dictator's ideals, running counter to the German national spirit; but this might have been allowable had the tactical advantage proved real. Inpolitics, as in war, only success matters. But the contrary was the case. This pact handed Stalin the Baltic states and about half of Poland, allowing the Slav horde to march two hundred kilometers nearer Germany. Two years later we paid the price. In December 1941, the gigantic drive of our Army Group Center toward Moscow-the greatest armed march in world history-was halted forty kilometers from its goal, with advance patrols penetrating within sight of the Kremlin towers. Had the German forces jumped off from a line two hundred kilometers nearer Moscow, they would have engulfed the Russian capital, deposed Stalin, and won the campaign before the first flake of snow fell on the Smolensk road. England certainly would have made peace then, and we would have won the war. Regarded as a triumph of daring diplomacy even by our enemies, this treaty contained between its lines the two words, finis Germaniae. Seldom in history has there been such a political coup de theetre. Seldom has one so disastrously backfired. Yet we of the Staff who ventured to express doubts at the time, or merely to convey with our ey

e, they were soon sadly disabused. The contrast between the possibilities of mechanized warfare and classic military tactics was never more strikingly demonstrated than in these ineffectual charges of the Polish horsemen against iron tanks. Nevertheless, the Wehrmacht too was operating with but a thin knife-edge of fully motorized armored divisions. Our important ground advances were made by infantry masses on foot, exploiting the breakdown of communication" the panic, and the disarray of battle lines created by the narrow panzer thrusts. And while the Luftwaffe played a strong support role, it was the horse-drawn artillery massed outside Warsaw, and not the air bombardment, that in the end knocked out the city's capacity to resist and brought the eventual surrender. This heavy reliance on horses betrayed our serious lack of combat readiness for world war. By September 21 the city was ringed by Wehrmacht forces; and the news from outside was of Polish soldiers being taken prisoner in the hundreds of thousands, of one pocket after another being liquidated, of a total collapse of the front, of a national government Pusillanimously fleeing to Rumania. Yet it was not until September 27 that the city, under a round-the-clock rain of shells and bombs, without food, water, or light, with many foflaisttsmbiun buildings in ruins, with disease spreading, finally gave up its vain hopes of deliverance from the West, and surrendered. Observations From first to last, the Fuhrer and his propagandists played down the Polish campaign as a local Police action, a "special task" of the Wehrmacht. Hitler personally cancelled many sections of Case White dealing with rationing, troop mobilization, and transport, with one aim in mind: to soften the impact on the German people. This political meddling represented a considerable setback to operations, and precious months passed before the damage was righted. I may say here, that due to similar Party and Fuhrer interference, which never ceased, the war effort was never, by professional standards, organized fully or properly. The shabby farce enacted at our radio station at Gleiwitz near the Polish border on the night of August 31-the pretense that Polish soldiers had crossed over to attack the station and been repulsed, the dressing of condemned political prisoners in Polish uniforms and the scattering of their bullet-riddled bodies near the station, as an excuse for starting the invasion-none of this trivial humbug was known to the Wehrmacht. We were irrevocably on the march toward Poland seventy-two hours earlier. I myself did not learn of the incident until the Nuremberg trials; I was too busy at the time with serious matters.* Himmler was probably responsible. Poland in 1939 was a backward and ill-informed dictatorship of reactionary colonels and politicians with fantastic territorial aims, a government extremely brutal to minorities (especially the Ukrainians and the Jews) and unjust and mendacious to its own people; a government that pounced like a hyena on Czechoslovakia a

luncheonette off the lobby. She went out on Madison Avenue and stood blinking in the warm sunshine. The New York scene was normal. Crowds marched on the sidewalks; cars and buses ed both ways in a stench of fumes; people carried packages into and stream out of stores and looked in windows. The only novelty was that the news vendors with fresh stacks of afternoon papers were crying war. Madeline ran to the big drugstore across the street, where the soda fountain was jammed with secretaries and shoppers, talking and laughing over bowls of chili or soup. The usual sort of people were wandering through the aisles, and cheap clocks. A fat old buying toothpaste, lotions, aspirin, candy, blonde woman in an apron and cap quickly made up her sandwiches. "Well, honey, who's going to win the war?" she said sociably as she peppered the chicken. "Let's just hope Hitler doesn't," Madeline said. "Yes, isn't he something? Sieg Heil! Ha, ha. I think the man's crazy. I've always said so, and this proves it." She handed Madeline the sandwiches. "Well, honey, so long as we keep out of it, what do we care who wins? Madeline bought an evening paper that offered gigantic headlines but no fresh news. just to scan such a dramatic front page was novel fun. Though the war was happening so far away, Madeline felt a springtime quickening in her veins. A scent of freedom, of new action, rose from the headlines. The President hadannounced at once, very firmly, that America was staying out of it. But things were going to be mighty different from now on. That was inevitable! All her thoughts were about the letter she would write to her father, if only she could get this job. Cleveland, feet on his desk again, a flirtatious smirk on his face, was telephoning. He nodded at Madeline and-as he went on coaxing some girl, in his warmly rumbling voice, to meet him at Toots Sbor's restaurant -he wolfed the sandwich. "Why don't you eat the other one?" Madeline said. "I'm not hungry." "Are you sure? I don't want to rob you." He hung up and unwrapped her sandwich. "Ordinarily I don't eat much during the day, but with all this war talk-" He took a great bite and went on talking. "Thanks. I swear I'm as hungry as I get at funerals. Ever notice how famished you get at a funeral, Madeline? It's the sheer delight of being alive, I guess, while this Now listen, you want other poor joker's just been buried in a dingy hole. i e to work for me for three weeks, is that it? That'll be fine. It'll give me a chance to look over what's around in Personnel." He flourished a brown envelope at her. "Now then. Gary Cooper is at the Saint Regis, Room 641this is a sample Who's in Town script. Take it to him. We may get him for Thursday." "Gary COOPER? You mean the movie star?" Madeline in astonishment zoomed words like her mother. 'Who else? He may ask you questions about the show and about me. So listen and get this rundown in your head. We work inchwiatirhso,ubtoaonks auience in a little studio, very relaxed. It's a room with a rug, really nice, like a library in a home. It's the same room Mrs. Roosevelt uses for her show. We can do the script in extra big type, if he needs show runs an hour and a half. I started this 71 that. He can take five minutes or fifteen. e whole '34 and did it there show in Los Angeles back in for three years. I called it 0-ver the Coffee th

does he know your father? How about that, Wendy? This Idd's father is our Navy attache in Berlin." Wendy yawned. Madeline said coldly, "Admiral Preble knows my father." "Well, how about mentioning that, then?" He gave her his persuasive impish smile. 'I'd really like to get him, Madeline. Admirals and generals are usually crappy guests. Too cautious and stiff to say anything interesting. But there's a war on, so for the moment, they're hot. See you in the morning. I go on at nine, you know, so get here not later than eight." As he had told Madeline, Warren was dancing away this first night of the war in moonlight, with a congressman's pretty daughter. The moon floats out in space, some thirty diameters of the earth away, shining on the just and the unjust as the cloud cover allows. It had lent dim but helpful light to the columns of young Germans in gray uniforms, miles and miles long, trudging across the Polish border. Now Europe had rolled into the sun, giving the Germans better illumination to get on with the work, and the same moon was bathing the Gulf of Mejdco, and the terrace of Pensacola's HarborView Club. The German General Staff had carefully planned on the moonlight, but the silver glow fell on Warren Henry and Janice Lacouture by a pleasant chance. Everyone said it was the best club dance in years. The big headlines, the excited radio broadcasts, had created a pleasurable stir in flat quiet them more glamorous; war was in the air, and however remote the combat, Pensacola. The student aviators felt more important and the girls found these were warriors. The talk about the German attack soon gave way to homier topics, however: the horse show, the new base commander, recent flying accidents, recent romances. Der Fuhrer, for these happy people, remained the queer hoarse German of the newsreels, with the wild gestures and the funny mustache, who had managed to start up a European mess, but who could scarcely menace the United States just yet. Lieutenant (junior grade) Henry took a different view. The invasion really interested him, and that was how he first caught the interest of Janice Lacouture. At the Academy he had excelled on the subject of the World War. They sat in a far corner of the terrace in the moonlight soon after they met, and instead of talking aviation or making a pass at her, this student pilot told her about the Schlieffen Plan to capture Paris, and the way von Moltke had fatally tampered with it; about the feat of German railroading that had made the Tannenberg victory possible; about the strategic parallels of 1914 and 1939. He had begun with the usual aviator chitchat, which after years of Pensacola dating stupefied Janice. But once they began on the war and she allowed her own knowledge of history and politics to show, he turned serious. It had been an exciting talk, the sort in which lovers sometimes discover each other without speaking a romantic word. Despite the big Lacouture nose, a mark of French ancestry, and rather irregular front teeth, Janice was one of the belles of Pensacola. Her mouth, skin, and hazel eyes were lovely; her figure so striking that all men automatically stared at her as at a fire. She was tall, blonde, with a soft pushing voice, and a very lively manner. Her family owmed the largest house in the club estates. The L-acoutures were solidly rich, from two generations in the timbering that had destroyed the Gulf pine forests for hundreds of miles, and turned northern Florida into a sandy insect-swarming waste. Her father was a wonder in somnolent and self-satisfied Pensacola, the first Lacout'ure who