There is no way that one small battalion can take Tulagi; but even if they could, they cannot hold it long-if the Japanese establish bases, which seems a given, on either Guadalcanal or Malaita.
What MacArthur wants to do makes more sense to me than what the Navy proposes to do, unless, as MacA. believes, the Navy’s primary purpose is to render him impotent and humiliated, so that the war here will be a Navy war.
I fight against accepting this latter theory. But what I saw at-and especially after-Pearl Harbor, with the admirals pulling their wagons into a circle to avoid accepting the blame, keeps popping into my head.
Respectfully,
Fleming Pickering, Captain, USNR
top secret
Chapter Twelve
(One)
The Elms
Dandenong, Victoria, Australia
22 May 1942
"Oh, good morning! We didn’t expect you to be up so early," Mrs. Hortense Cavendish said, with a smile, to Corporal Stephen M. Koffler, USMC, when she saw him coming down the stairway. "Why don’t you just go into the breakfast room, and I’ll get you a nice hot cup of tea?"
"Good morning, thank you," Steve said, smiling, but not really comfortable.
Mrs. Cavendish was as old as his mother, and looked something like her, too. She was the housekeeper at The Elms, a three-story, twelve-room, red brick house set in what looked to Steve like its own private park fifteen miles or so outside Melbourne. It was called The Elms, Major Banning had told him, because of the century-old elm trees which lined the driveway from the "motorway" to the house.
He also told him (You‘ve come up smelling like a rose again, Koffler.) that the whole place had been rented by Captain Pick ering, and, for the time being at least, he and the other members of Special Detachment 14 would be living there. He explained that the housekeeper was something like the manager of a hotel, in charge of the whole place, and was to be treated with the appropriate respect.
At the moment, Corporal Koffler was the only member of Special Detachment 14 in residence. The day before, Major Banning had driven him out here in a brand-new Studebaker President, then had him installed in a huge room with a private bathroom. After that, Captain Pickering had come out and taken Major Banning to the railroad station in Melbourne. Banning was going "up north" to some place called Townesville, Queensland, where the Coastwatchers had their headquarters. He told Steve he had no idea when he would be back, but that he would keep in touch.
Steve now understood that Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria were something like the states in America, but that was really about all he understood about Australia.
From what Major Banning had told him, and from what he’d heard from the other guys, the Japs were probably going to take Australia. He had heard Major Banning talking to Lieutenant Howard back in ‘Diego about it. Steve had long ago decided that if anybody would have the straight poop about anything. Major Banning would. Major Banning had told Lieutenant Howard that he didn’t see how anything could keep the Japs from taking Australia, as long as they took some island named New Guinea first. And he really didn’t see how the Japs could be kept from taking New Guinea.
To tell the truth, the closer they got to Australia, the more nervous Koffler had become. More than nervous. Scared. He tried hard not to let it show, of course, in front of all the Army and Navy officers on the airplane (he was, after all, not only a Marine, but a Marine parachutist, and Marines aren’t supposed to be nervous or scared). But when the airplane landed, he would not really have been surprised if the Japs had been shelling or maybe bombing the place. That would have meant they’d have started fighting right away. He had cleaned and oiled his Springfield before they left Hawaii, just to be double sure.
But it hadn’t been that way at all. There was no more sign of war, or Japs, in Melbourne than there was in Newark. Melbourne was like Newark, maybe as big, and certainly a hell of a lot cleaner. Except for the funny-looking trucks and cars, which the Australians drove on the wrong side of the road, and the funny way the Australians talked, sort of through their noses, you’d never even know you were in Australia.
He’d spent his first night in a real nice hotel, and Captain Pickering had given him money, and he had had a real nice meal in a real nice restaurant. The steak was a little tough, but he had no call to bitch about the size of it-it just about covered the plate-and he had trouble getting it all down. Then he went to the movies, and they were playing an American movie. It starred Betty Grable, and he remembered seeing it in the Ampere Theatre in East Orange just before he joined the Corps. And that started him off remembering Dianne Marshall and what had happened between them. And between the movie and the memories, he got a little homesick . . . until he talked himself out of that by reminding himself that he was a Marine parachutist, for Christ’s sake, and not supposed to start crying in his goddamned beer because he was away from his mommy or because some old whore had made a goddamned fool out of him.
The table in the breakfast room was big, and the wood sort of glowed. There was a bowl of flowers in the middle of it. When he sat down at it, he looked out through windows running from the ceiling to the floor; outside he could see a man raking leaves out of a flower garden. There was a concrete statue of a nearly naked woman in the garden, in the middle of a what looked like a little pond, except there wasn’t any water in the pond.
Mrs. Cavendish followed him in in a moment, and laid a newspaper on the table. Right behind her was a maid, a plain woman maybe thirty years old, wearing a black dress with a little white apron in front. She smiled at Steve, then went to one of the cabinets in the room, and took out a woven place mat and silver and set it up in front of him.
"What would you like for breakfast?" Mrs. Cavendish asked. "Ham and eggs? There’s kippers."
Steve had no idea what a kipper was.
"Ham and eggs would be fine," he said. "Over easy."
"We have tomato and pineapple juice."
"Tomato juice would be fine," Steve said.
"The tea’s brewing," Mrs. Cavendish said. "It’ll just be a moment."
She and the maid left the room. Steve unfolded the newspaper. It was The Times of Victoria. The pages were bigger than those of the Newark Evening News, but there weren’t very many of them. He flipped through it, looking in vain for comics, and then returned to the first page.
There were two big headlines:rommel nears tobruk andnazi tanks approach Leningrad. There was a picture of a burning German tank, and a map of North Africa with wide, curving arrows drawn on it.
Steve wondered why there wasn’t anything in the newspaper about the Japs being about to invade Australia.
He went through the newspaper, mostly reading the advertisements for strange brands of toothpaste, used motorcars, and something called Bovril. He wondered what Bovril was, whether you ate it, or drank it, or washed your mouth out with it, or what.
The maid delivered his ham and eggs, cold toast in a little rack, tomato juice, and a tub of sour orange marmalade. He had just about finished eating when the maid came in the breakfast room.
"Telephone for you, Sir," she said, and pointed to a telephone sitting on a sideboard.
The telephone was strange. There was sort of a cup over the mouthpiece, and the wire that ran from the base to the handset was much thinner than the one on American phones; it looked more like a couple of pieces of string twisted together than like a regular wire.