“This is terrible!” he exclaimed. “Terrible!”
“I’m afraid you’re right, sir.” George Marshall nodded gravely.
“They keep coming forward,” Truman said. “We knock out the first wave of tanks and drunken infantrymen. They send in another one, just as strong and just as ferocious. We knock that out, too. Then they send in the third wave, and it rolls over whatever we have left after we took out the first two.”
“It’s standard operating procedure for the Russians, Mr. President,” the Secretary of Defense said. “The Germans found out all about it. One of their generals said, ‘A German soldier is worth two or three Russians-but there’s always a fourth one.’ ”
“There sure as hell is.” Truman scowled at the map. “What are we going to do? The way it looks to me is, we don’t have enough men to stop them, not even with England and France doing their best to help.”
“It looks the same way to me,” Marshall said.
“We can’t let them gobble up our piece of Germany. They won’t stop there, either. They’ll take the Low Countries, too. And they may take France. What have we got then? Europe Red all the way to the Atlantic. That isn’t a disaster, George. That’s a catastrophe!”
“There are things we can do about it,” Marshall reminded him.
“Atom bombs. It comes down to more goddamn atom bombs.” Truman did some more scowling. “You were right-I made a mistake when I authorized using them in Manchuria. And the whole world is paying because I did.”
He might have found a way to blame the decision on Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur had agreed with it, certainly. He’d thought it would help his troops in North Korea. It probably had. The Red Chinese were having trouble bringing men and supplies into Korea. Aerial reconnaissance and intercepted radio transmissions proved as much.
But MacArthur and Truman had both miscalculated-guessed wrong, if you wanted to get right down to it-about how Stalin would react. And, in the end, the responsibility lay with the President. It always did. If you took the responsibility, you also had to shoulder the blame. The buck really did stop here.
“No point dwelling on what might have been. We’ve got to deal with the world as it is,” Marshall said. “And the world as it is has too many Russians in it, and they’re too far west.”
“I just got a cable from Adenauer in Bonn,” Truman said. “From Adenauer in a bomb shelter in Bonn, which he took pains to point out.” The President made a sour face. Konrad Adenauer was a confirmed anti-Nazi, which had made him a good man to lead the new, hopeful Federal Republic of Germany. But he was also stiff-necked and sanctimonious.
“And what did he say from his bomb shelter in Bonn?” Marshall rolled his eyes. When he was Secretary of Defense, he’d also had to deal with the German politico. His expression argued that he hadn’t enjoyed it.
“He begs me-that’s his word, not mine-not to use atom bombs on the territory of the Federal Republic,” Truman answered. “He says the damage they would cause outweighs any military advantage they’d give. He says his people would have a hard time staying friends with a country that did that to them.”
“If we don’t do it, in another week or two there’s liable to be no Federal Republic to worry about,” Marshall said.
“I understand that,” Truman said, with another harassed glance toward the map. “The trouble is, I’m sure Adenauer understands it, too. He may have the tightest asshole in Western Europe, but he’s no dope.”
Marshall sent him a quizzical look. Truman had seen a few of those from the distinguished soldier and diplomat since succeeding Franklin D. Roosevelt. He knew exactly what they meant: that FDR never would have said such a thing. Well, too stinking bad, the President thought. When he slogged through Tacitus in the Latin, he’d been horrified to discover that the Roman historian called a spade an implement for digging trenches. As far as Truman was concerned, a spade was a spade, or maybe a goddamn shovel.
“Of course, sir,” Marshall said, “if we drop atom bombs all over the Federal Republic, Adenauer won’t have much left even if they do drive the Russians back.”
“That’s what he said in the wire.” The President sighed. “It’s his country.”
“Only about as much as Japan is Hirohito’s.” As usual, Marshall had a point. The United States called the shots in western Germany. Or the United States had called the shots till the shooting started. The Secretary of Defense went on, “He doesn’t say anything about atom bombs on the Russian zone?”
“No. I told you, he’s no dope. He knows he can’t make us pay attention to him on anything outside his borders.” Truman drummed his fingers against the side of his leg. Then, suddenly, he grinned. “I bet he hopes like anything the wind’s blowing from west to east when we bomb his ex-countrymen.”
Marshall’s face twitched in a sort of vestigial smile. “I bet you’re right, Mr. President.”
“If we do it again, it won’t just be the Russian zone there,” Truman said. “We’d better clobber the other satellites, too. That will slow the reinforcements going through them, and it may give them a hint they’re backing the wrong horse in the race.”
“I wouldn’t count on that, sir.” Marshall explained why he sounded dubious: “Those regimes are full of Stalin’s hand-picked men. Rokossovsky, the Polish Minister of War, was a Russian marshal during the war.”
“I understand,” Truman said. “But you’d hope that, after a few atom bombs, even people with the MGB sitting on them might get frisky. No guarantees-I understand that, too. Still, you’d hope.”
“Ah. I see what you’re saying.” Marshall nodded. “Yes, you would hope-you do hope. At the end there, the Italians rose up and shot Mussolini and his mistress and Achille Starace.”
Truman snapped his fingers. “Starace! Thank you! I never remember that Fascist bastard’s name.”
“He was a big wheel in Italy once upon a time,” Marshall observed.
“Sure he was. But he’s not important enough for anybody to want to keep him in mind now-anybody who doesn’t have your head for details, I should say.” The President sent what was almost a bow in Marshall’s direction. Then he continued, “Those Red bosses in Warsaw and Prague and Budapest and East Berlin, they’re smart enough to see the writing on the wall. If it looks like people are gonna shoot them and hang them upside down from lampposts, how long will they stay in love with Stalin?”
“That’s a good question, all right,” George Marshall said. “If we bomb Warsaw and Prague and Budapest and East Berlin, those people won’t be around to worry about it. Stalin will have to find someone else to pass on his orders.”
“I don’t want to do that. It would be like dropping a bank vault to squash an ant. Most of the people in those cities despise Communism as much as we do.” Truman hadn’t worried about such things when he ordered the Manchurian cities hit. Europeans were people to him, people who could have ideas like his. Chinese were just…Chinese.
“So you want to take out smaller towns, then? More places with important rail lines?” Marshall said. “Shall I make a list for your approval?”
“Yes, do that. We’ll break a lot of eggs, but I don’t want to drop the whole bushel basket at once, not if I can help it,” Truman said. “And it will get Adenauer off my back-for a while, anyway.”
–
Konstantin Morozov stuck his head out of the cupola and warily peered ahead. His T-54 sat hull-down behind a low swell of ground nobody who hadn’t been a tank commander for a while would even have noticed, much less exploited. You got to be a veteran commander by starting to notice such things-and by killing the new fish and the jerks who didn’t.
The T-54, he was discovering, had a design flaw nobody in the Red Army’d talked about. Talking about it would have cost some engineer his cushy dacha or his Stalin Prize or maybe his neck. Not talking about it meant tank crews had to find out about it the hard way, in combat…or buy a plot before they could.