“Thanks, boss,” Aaron added. When they were by themselves, they sometimes talked to each other in Yiddish. Aaron would do that with Ruth, too-but, with her as with Weissman, never when anyone who spoke only English was around. You didn’t want to show American Americans you remembered old-country ways at all.
He went out and got into his elderly gray Nash. The rented house on Irving was only a few blocks away. Aaron smiled as he lit another Chesterfield. He wondered what little Leon had been up to today.
–
Bill Staley parked his behind on a metal folding chair. The seat felt like what it was: steel painted Air Force blue-gray. The chairs must have been ordered by the carload lot, on a contract that put cheapness ahead of everything else-certainly a long way ahead of comfort.
He had the bad feeling he knew what was coming. General Harrison wasn’t the sort to call all his aircrews together unless he had some urgent reason to do so. Urgent reasons did keep offering themselves, dammit. The Red Chinese went right on pushing forward. They spent men in gruesome heaps for every mile they advanced. The next sign they gave that that bothered them would be the first.
An American commander who used, and used up, his troops like that would have been court-martialed. He would have won himself a newspaper nickname like “Butcher” before the brass landed on him, too. Bill figured even a Russian general in the last big war would have thought twice before he expended soldiers as if they were cartridges. The Chinese had men to burn, and burned them.
General Harrison thwacked his lectern with a pointer, the way he had to open the last big meeting. “Gentlemen, I have important news,” he said as soon as the officers and noncoms quieted. “President Truman has authorized the use of atomic bombs against the Chinese inside China. He has not directly ordered us to use them, but he has given General MacArthur permission to send out such strikes if, in his view, the situation on the ground can be improved in no other way.”
Sighs, whistles, and soft hisses floated up from the aircrews. Just like everyone else, Bill Staley knew what that meant. The only word for the present situation on the ground was fubar. The Red Chinese were in Seoul. North Korea’s flag flew above the city, or what was left of it, but the men who’d taken it didn’t belong to Kim Il-sung. They got their marching orders from Mao Tse-tung.
If they hadn’t done such horrible things to the UN forces after they swarmed across the Yalu…If they hadn’t, maybe some kind of stalemate would have developed. Stalemate wasn’t the smashing victory Douglas MacArthur had looked for, but it beat hell out of the fiasco he’d got.
Bombing on this side of the Yalu hadn’t kept the Chinese from flooding down into Korea. No ordinary weapons had. But the United States had extraordinary weapons, and it had decided that repairing things here was important enough to be worth using them.
“So…What we wait for now is the command from General MacArthur,” Matt Harrison said. “I don’t know when that will come, but I don’t think we’ll have to wait very long.”
Bill didn’t think they’d have to wait long, either. MacArthur’s military reputation had been on a roller-coaster ride the past few months. He’d looked like a genius after the Inchon landing. That had retaken Seoul and forced the North Koreans to pull back out of the south to keep from getting cut off by the forces suddenly in their rear. He’d planned on wiping Kim Il-sung’s army-and maybe Kim Il-sung’s country-off the map right after that.
But he hadn’t planned on the Chinese incursion when the forces he led neared the Yalu. He hadn’t planned on it, and he hadn’t been able to stop it. Only stragglers had escaped from the army in the north. Resupplying by air just prolonged the agony, as it had for the Germans trapped in Stalingrad. And the German cargo planes hadn’t needed to worry about jet fighters tearing into them.
So if he was going to put Humpty-Dumpty together again, he’d have to break some Chinese eggs instead. Which was fine if nobody could retaliate. Japan hadn’t been able to when fire fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mao didn’t have any atomic bombs. But Stalin did.
Whether he’d use them or not…was something everybody would find out. Maybe the show of force would overawe him. Maybe he would think Mao had gone in over his head and deserved what he got. Or maybe the world would find itself in the middle of a new big war when not all the scabs from the old big war had fallen off the wounds.
Brigadier General Harrison rapped the lectern one more time. “Something else you need to know, gentlemen,” he said. “Aerial reconnaissance shows that the Russians are moving fighters and bombers onto airstrips in southeastern Siberia, and in Manchuria as well. They are getting ready for trouble, and we are the trouble they’re getting ready for.”
“Great,” muttered a man sitting behind Bill Staley. That was about what he was thinking himself. By World War II standards, the B-29 was indeed the Superfortress. But World War II was over, even if its maladies lingered on. It was 1951. The state of the art had advanced.
In 1917, the Sopwith Camel had been a world-beating fighter. Run it up against a Messerschmitt 109 and it wouldn’t last long. For that matter, a Messerschmitt’s life expectancy against an F-86 would be just as brief.
Bill wished he didn’t think that way. A lot of guys simply did what they were told and didn’t worry about anything past the mission. His mind jumped here and there, every which way, like a frog on a hot sidewalk.
He wasn’t the only one. A flyer stuck up his hand and asked, “Sir, what happens if they try and bomb this air base before we move?”
“Then they involve themselves directly in the fighting and have to take the consequences of that,” Harrison replied. Everybody knew most of the enemy MiG-15s that harassed American pilots had Russians in the cockpit. But those were unofficial Russians, as it were. You couldn’t stay unofficial when you dropped bombs on somebody’s head…could you? Harrison went on, “We do fly a day-and-night combat air patrol, and we have radar sweeping the sky. We won’t make it easy for them.”
Something occurred to Bill. He raised his hand. General Harrison aimed the tip of the pointer at him. He said, “Sir, their heavy bombers will be Bulls, right?” Bull was the NATO reporting name for the Tu-4. “If they paint some of them to look like B-29s, will our fighter jockeys up there recognize them soon enough to shoot them down?”
The base commander opened his mouth. Then he closed it without saying anything. A few seconds later, he tried again: “That’s a…better question than I wish it were. With luck, IFF will alert us that they’re wolves in sheep’s clothing. But, if they look like our planes, we may take them at face value.” His expression looked like that of a man halfway through eating a lemon. “You’ve given me something new to lose sleep over. Thanks a bunch.”
A major who wore the ribbons for the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with two oak-leaf clusters came up to Bill as the gathering broke up. “Good job,” he said. “That’s exactly the kind of thing the Russians are liable to do. They take camouflage seriously. They don’t just play games with it, the way we do half the time.”
“You sound like somebody who knows what he’s talking about, sir,” Bill said.
“Too right, I do. We flew back-and-forth missions a few times, from England to Russia and then the other way. I was on one of them, piloting a B-24. Man, you wouldn’t believe what all they’d do to make an airstrip disappear. We didn’t fly many of those, though. The Reds were nervous about ’em. Partly for what we’d see of theirs, I guess, and partly because they didn’t want their people meeting us. Russians are scared to death of foreigners.”
“I bet I would be, too, if I had Germans on my border,” Bill said.
“Yeah, they’re good neighbors, aren’t they?” The major rolled his eyes. “No wonder Stalin wanted satellites between him and the krauts. But now he’s got us on his border, and he doesn’t go for that, either.”