“They might desert,” said Marshall, “we just don’t know how they would manage it. They would be closely watched and not have very many chances under any circumstances. We aren’t certain the German volunteers will be used against us. I consider it more likely they will be used as a police force to maintain order in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. All of those countries are now in rebellion against the Russians. Thus, more armies can be taken from the forces occupying those countries and sent to the front. Further, the OSS reports that their operatives have sighted trainloads of soldiers coming back from the Far East.”
“Makes sense,” Truman said. “How many men are we talking about?”
Marshall again referred to his notes. “These are estimates, but at least half a million from Siberia and maybe another half million from other sources.”
Truman groaned. Counting both the reinforcements from the Pacific and Clark’s army, if either got there in time to help in the next battle, they would total less than a fraction of what the Russians were bringing up. There had been some talk about lowering the draft age to seventeen and raising the upper end from its current high of thirty-five years of age to forty. The potential for the greatest numbers would come from the lower end, but, like Roosevelt before him, he was already catching hell because eighteen-year-olds were in combat. If seventeen-year-olds went to war, the political effects might destroy the entire war effort.
At any rate, it wouldn’t work. First, as they had discussed before, there wasn’t enough time to draft and train large numbers of men. Second, the decision had been made to hold the size of the American military at a certain level in order to keep the economy going, and that made sense. What good did it do to put all these men in uniform if there were no weapons being produced for them to use? There were very real limits to what the Arsenal of Democracy could do.
“Damn,” Truman muttered. “We can shoot down their planes and make more aircraft than they do, and we can make more tanks than they, but their tanks are much better. That pretty well evens out, doesn’t it?” Stimson and Marshall nodded. “Therefore, until and if we can get that bomb of Groves’s working, the difference in this war is numbers, isn’t it?”
“That and supplies,” Marshall corrected. “If they take Antwerp, our resupply effort will be crippled.”
“Well,” said Truman, “we cannot speed up the ships bringing in the Pacific reinforcements and we cannot enlarge the army by changing the draft. If we could get at least some of the Fifth Army across the Alps, it might help take pressure off, wouldn’t it?”
“A little,” Marshall admitted.
There was a pause as a courier knocked and entered with a note from the secretary of state. Truman opened the envelope and read the one-page document quickly.
“Well,” he said with a wide grin, “it would appear the British defeat has served one purpose, other than to get rid of Monty, that is.”
“And what is that, sir?” Marshall asked. He declined to remind the president that the Fifth Army had been stripped to support the invasion into southern France.
Truman handed him the note. “It seems to have scared the bejesus out of the Swiss. The idea of a possible Russian victory seems to have made them change their neutral little minds. They are going to let Clark’s boys transit through Switzerland in order to preserve their financial system. All right”-he chuckled-“if the British can decide to fight alongside the Germans, and the Swiss can give up their neutrality, you can use your Germans as antiaircraft gunners.”
• • •
Tibbetts watched as the flight of three B-29s circled for a landing on the isolated air base outside Reykjavik. Once again, another flight had returned unharmed from the long sortie over Germany. After a couple of false starts, he had devised the tactic whereby each trio of bombers would fly over selected areas of Europe just after a major bombing raid had taken place, either there or nearby. Thus, they would usually catch the Reds on the ground refueling and rearming as the American bombers disappeared to safety. In the first few days of this effort, there had been some attempt by the Russians to attack the bombers. This had cost him two planes, but the attacks had ceased as the Reds realized the bombers weren’t bombing. He presumed the Russians thought they were out for photoreconnaissance purposes. It was as if they didn’t want to waste precious fuel on them. Well, he decided, who cared what they thought? It worked, didn’t it? Now they were over Europe each day. It was as if the planes of the 509th had been given safe-conduct passes.
Tibbetts was pleased that the temporary base was pretty well complete. Men and supplies were housed in a host of Quonset huts. His ground crews had all been shuttled in and he had a full complement of supplies. Even better, the scientists had arrived, and that meant the nuclear material would soon arrive and then be flown to England. He understood that it was coming by warship, the heavy cruiser Indianapolis. Since the Germans had surrendered all their U-boats, the Atlantic was as safe as a pond. Arrival of the nuclear material would end his crews’ period of training and put them into the cauldron. Perhaps, if this bomb worked as the scientists expected, they would be the cauldron itself.
Everyone who knew about the atomic bomb, including Tibbetts, wondered what their target would be. He didn’t think it would be a German city, as they were already pretty well destroyed. He had seen the figures and they staggered him. Bremerhaven was 79 percent destroyed, and Bonn 83 percent, and Hamburg 75 percent. Ironically, Berlin was listed at only 33 percent destroyed by bombing, which was a testimony to the futility of trying to wipe out truly large cities from the air. While he sometimes wondered who went around and counted ruins, he had no reason to doubt the results. The major German cities no longer existed as viable targets. Besides, he reminded himself, we are now at war with Russia, not Germany.
Most of his people had put their money on targets inside Russia, and he had to admit some fondness for that idea. Moscow and Leningrad were everybody’s favorites and there had been some conventional bombing attacks on them. Leningrad was closest and much easier to hit, but there really weren’t many military targets around there, except some navy bases, and the Russian navy, such as it was, had stayed home for this war. Moscow was the capital and contained the military headquarters, and would normally be a juicy target. Unfortunately, it was so far inland and, therefore, so well protected by guns and planes, that the few attempts to bomb it had suffered badly.
There had been three attacks on Moscow totaling 500 bombers that had lost a total of 135 planes. Unacceptable, Tibbetts thought, totally unacceptable. If he were to launch a nuclear assault against Moscow those numbers meant there was the high probability that he would lose a bomber that carried a nuclear bomb, whether it was disguised as a photo plane or not. With so few bombs available, not to forget the highly trained crews, he could not risk the huge cost of failure.
Logically then, that left tactical targets, and they were in a constant state of flux. Tactical targets had the annoying habit of moving.
Tibbetts would have to give considerable thought to what he might suggest as a target. That is, he thought wryly, if anyone would accept targeting input from a mere colonel, even if he was supposed to fly the plane and head the mission. Well, he knew he had access to Ike and he had information about how the bombs might cause damage when they detonated. Perhaps it was time to call in some favors.
E LISABETH W OLF TWIRLED in her skirt and laughed as Logan stared at her white thighs. “Thank you for the razor, Jack. That’s the first time in months that I’ve been able to shave my legs.”