Tojo’s boys had no air support. No warships gave them a hand. But Japan had owned Saipan since the end of the First World War. The Japs had dug in but good, and camouflaged all their bunkers and dugouts and strongpoints. Anybody who wanted them dead had to come kill them, and they commonly took a deal of killing.
Still, once the Americans got off the beach and into the jungle, it was only a matter of time, and of how big the U.S. butcher’s bill would be. American officers used the punishment brigade instead of Marines where things were hottest. That was what punishment brigades were for.
Mike acquired a flesh wound on his leg, another on his arm, and an abiding hatred for all American officers except the ones in his outfit. His hatred for the Japs, oddly, shrank each day as he killed them and they tried to kill him. They were in the same miserable boat he was. They had to stand and fight. He had to go to them and fight. If you didn’t go to them, you either got shot on the spot by MPs who trailed the punishment brigade or you earned a drumhead court-martial and the services of a firing squad. If you went forward, you might make it. Mike went forward.
He lived. So did Luther Magnusson, despite a shrapnel gash along the side of his jaw. But the brigade, despite being built up again after Tarawa, melted away like a snowball in Death Valley.
Puffing greedily on a cigarette from a C-ration pack, Magnusson said, “I think the Germans are better professional soldiers than these guys. The krauts, they have the doctrine down like you wouldn’t believe. Everybody does, generals down to privates. They know what to do, and they know how.”
“These guys, all they do is mean it,” Mike said. The wound on his arm didn’t hurt, but it itched like a bastard. He scratched the bandage. You weren’t supposed to do that, but everybody did.
“Yeah. That’s about the size of it,” Magnusson agreed.
Just how much the Japs meant it, they saw a few days later. Japanese soldiers with nowhere left to go charged the Americans behind a great red flag. Anyone who could walk, wounded or not, armed or not, went to his death hoping to take some of the enemy with him. And, since Japan had held Saipan for so long, there were civilians on the island, too. Thousands of them leaped to their deaths from cliffs on the eastern coast rather than yielding to the Americans.
“What can you do with people like that?” Mike asked when it was finally over.
“Damned if I know.” After watching women throw children off a cliff and then jump into the Pacific after them, Captain Magnusson had the air of a man shaken to the core. Mike understood that; he felt the same way himself. It was like getting stuck inside a nightmare where you couldn’t wake up and get away. As a matter of fact, combat in general was a lot like that. Luther Magnusson shook his head and spat. Quietly, he repeated, “Damned if I know.”
* * *
Paris fell. Charlie heard there were practically orgies in the streets when the Allies entered the long-occupied French capital. The stories varied, depending mostly on the imagination of who was telling them. The Germans in France skedaddled toward the Reich.
In Italy, the Allies ground forward. The Germans there were stubborn. They’d hold a line as long as they could, then fall back a few miles and hold another one. The rugged terrain worked for the defenders.
And the Russians! Trotsky’s men drove the Nazis back over the frontier they’d had before the Eastern Front exploded. Finland bailed out of the war. Romania switched sides with treacherously excellent timing. Bulgaria bowed out, too. Sure as the devil, Trotsky was going to gobble up most of the Balkans. Red Army tanks rolled all the way to the Vistula, to the suburbs of Warsaw.
Hitler still had a few cards up his sleeve. When Slovakia rebelled, he squashed it before the Russians could help. And he stopped Hungary from asking for an armistice by kidnapping the admiral who’d run the landlocked country and putting in a passel of Hungarian Fascist fanatics horrible enough to satisfy even him.
But the writing was on the wall. Most of the world could see it, even if Hitler couldn’t or wouldn’t. The Allies were going to win the war. The Axis was going to lose. It would happen sooner, not later.
In the United States, anybody who wanted work had it, and was probably making more money than he (or she-especially she) ever had in his (or her) life. Quite a few people who might not have wanted work were working hard anyway, in one or another of Joe Steele’s labor encampments. By now, those had been around long enough, most of the country took them for granted. Why not? Most folks knew somebody or knew of somebody who’d got himself (or, again, herself) jugged.
Tom Dewey rolled and sometimes flew across the country as if his pants, or possibly his hair, were on fire. He promised to do better with the war and less with the labor encampments than Joe Steele was doing.
He couldn’t say much else. But it would have been hard to do better with the war than Joe Steele was already doing in the fall of 1944. Anyone who paid any attention at all to the headlines or listened to the news on the radio could see that. And the labor encampments were old news. People took them in stride, the way they took bad weather in stride. You tried not to say anything stupid where some squealer could overhear it and pass it on to the Jeebies. And you got on with your life.
Charlie found Thelma Feldman’s address in a New York City phone book. He put a hundred-dollar bill in an envelope with a sheet of paper folded around it so no one would know what it was. One Sunday, he told Esther he had to go in to the White House. Instead, he went to Union Station and took a train up to Baltimore. When he got there, he left the train station so he could drop the envelope in a streetcorner mailbox. Then he turned around and went back to Washington.
He didn’t want the editor’s wife to know from whom the money came. He also didn’t want anybody from the White House or the GBI to know he’d sent it. That kind of thing wasn’t illegal, which didn’t mean it couldn’t land you in the soup.
Esther wouldn’t have minded. If she’d known what he was doing, she would have kissed him or maybe even dragged him off to the bedroom to show what she thought of it. But not even the Jeebies could pull what she didn’t know out of her.
Sometimes Charlie remembered the days when he didn’t need to worry about things like that. He also remembered millions of people out of work, and his own fears of winding up in a bread line. So parts of life were better now, even if other parts were worse. Life was like that. If you got something, you mostly had to give up something else.
Joe Steele wasn’t going to give up the White House, not to the likes of Tom Dewey. Charlie was convinced the President would win an honest election, maybe not so easily as he had against Alf Landon, but without any trouble. With the apparatus he had in place, chances were he wouldn’t lose even if he told people to vote for the other guy.
He seemed to feel the same way. He asked for only a few campaign speeches from Charlie. His theme, naturally, was winning the war and staying prosperous after peace came. None of that was exciting, but Charlie could see it was what he needed to say.
With time on his hands-and with his conscience none too clear in spite of sending Thelma Feldman that C-note-he visited the watering hole around the corner from the White House more often than he had been in the habit of doing.
Every so often, he would run into John Nance Garner there. Garner was a drinker’s drinker. He rarely seemed out-and-out drunk, but he rarely seemed sober, either. By all the signs, he started as soon as he got up and kept on till he went to bed. Not too much at once, but never very long without, either.
“Congratulations, sir,” Charlie told him one afternoon. “You’re the longest-serving Vice President in American history.”
John Nance Garner glared at him. “Ah, fuck you, Sullivan. It don’t mean shit, and you know it as well as I do.”