Asimov's SF, June 2007 Read online

  Japan builds torpedoes that work even when dropped from airplanes. Why don't we? The answer looks obvious. We want to save money. Japan wants to win the war. When fighting a foe who shows such fanatical determination, how can we hope to prevail?

  * * * *

  February 13, 1942—Washington Post

  ADMINISTRATION RIPS NAYSAYERS

  "We Can Gain Victory,” FDR Insists

  President Roosevelt used the excuse of Lincoln's Birthday to allege that the United States and its coalition partners might still win the war despite the swelling tide of opposition to his ill-planned adventure.

  In a national radio address, Roosevelt said, “Those who point out our weaknesses and emphasize our disagreements only aid the enemy. We were taken by surprise on December 7. We need time to get rolling. But we can do the job."

  The President seemed ill at ease—almost desperate—as he went on, “These leaks that torment us have got to stop. They help no one but the foes of freedom. It is much harder to go forward if Germany and Japan know what we are going to do before we do it."

  In the Congressional response to his speech, a ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee said, “The President's speech highlights the bankruptcy of his policies. After promising to keep us out of war, he got us into one we are not ready to fight. Our weapons don't work, and we can't begin to keep our shipping safe. We don't have enough men to do half of what the President and the Secretary of War are trying to do. And even if we did, what they want to do doesn't look like a good idea anyhow."

  Peaceful pickets outside the White House demanded that the President bring our troops back to the United States and keep them out of harm's way. The presence of photographers and reporters helped ensure that White House police did not rough up the demonstrators.

  * * * *

  February 23, 1942—Washington Post

  HOUSE REJECTS RATIONING BILL

  In an embarrassing defeat for the administration, the House of Representatives voted 241-183 to reject a bill that would have rationed fuel, food, and materials deemed “essential to wartime industries."

  "Why should the American people have to suffer for Roosevelt's mistakes?” demanded a Congressman who opposed the bill. “If we rationed these commodities, you could just wait and see. Gas would jump past thirty cents a gallon, and there wouldn't be enough of it even at that price."

  A War Department official, speaking off the record, called the House's action “deplorable.” The only public comment from the executive branch was that it was “studying the situation.” Had it done that in 1940 and 1941...

  * * * *

  March 17, 1942—San Francisco Chronicle

  MacARTHUR BAILS OUT OF PHILIPPINES!

  Leaves Besieged Garrison to Fate

  General Douglas MacArthur fled the Philippines one jump ahead of the Japanese. PT boats and a B-17 brought him to Darwin, Australia. (Incidentally, Japanese bombers leveled Darwin last month and forced its abandonment.)

  "I shall return,” pledged MacArthur. But the promise rings hollow for the men he left behind. Trapped on the Bataan Peninsula in a war they do not understand, they soldier on as best they can. Since Japanese forces surround them, the only question is how long they can hold out.

  Roosevelt hopes MacArthur can lead counterattacks later in the war. Given the disasters thus far, this seems only another sample of his blind and foolish optimism....

  * * * *

  March 23, 1942—The New Yorker

  CAN WE HUNT THE SEA WOLVES?

  German U-boats are taking a disastrous toll on military goods bound for England. In the first three months of the war, subs sank ships carrying four hundred tanks, sixty eight-inch howitzers, 880 twenty-five-pounder guns, four hundred two-pounder guns, 240 armored cars, five hundred machine-gun carriers, 52,100 tons of ammo, six thousand rifles, 4,280 tons of tank supplies, twenty thousand tons of miscellaneous supplies, and ten thousand tons of gasoline. A secret War Department estimate calls this the equivalent of thirty thousand bombing runs.

  And the administration cannot stop the bleeding. Blackout orders are routinely ignored. Ships silhouetted at night against illuminated East Coast cities make easy targets. Businessmen say dimming their lights at night would hurt their bottom line.

  Although the Navy Department claims to have sunk several U-boats and damaged more, there is no hard evidence it has harmed even one German sailor.

  Britain urges the United States to begin convoying, as she has done. U.S. Navy big shots continue to believe this is unnecessary. How they can maintain this in the face of losses so staggering is strange and troubling, but they do.

  The issue is causing a rift between the United States and one of her two most important allies. Last Wednesday, Roosevelt wrote to Churchill, “My navy has definitely been slack in preparing for this submarine war off our coast.... By May 1 I expect to get a pretty good coastal patrol working."

  Churchill fears May 1 will be much too late.

  "Those of us who are directly concerned with combatting the Atlantic submarine menace are not at all sure that the British are applying sufficient effort to bombing German submarine bases,” said U.S. Admiral Ernest J. King.

  As the allies bicker, innocent sailors lose their lives for no good purpose.

  * * * *

  March 24, 1942—New York Times

  NEW YORKER OFFICES RAIDED

  Magazine's Publication Suspended

  A raid by FBI and military agents shuttered the offices of The New Yorker yesterday. The raid came on the heels of yet another article critical of the war and of the present administration's conduct of it.

  "We are going to close this treason down,” said FBI spokesman Thomas O'Banion. Mr. O'Banion added, “These individuals are spreading stories nobody's got a right to know. We have to put a stop to it, and we will."

  He did not dispute the truth of the stories published in The New Yorker.

  ACLU attorneys are seeking the release of jailed editors and writers. “These are important freedom-of-speech and freedom-of-the-press issues,” one of them said. “We're confident we'll prevail in court."

  March 26, 1942—Philadelphia Inquirer

  PEACE SHIPS SAIL

  Reaching out to Germany and Japan

  More than fifty American actors, musicians, and authors sailed from Philadelphia today aboard the Gustavus Vasa, a Swedish ship. Sweden is neutral in Roosevelt's war. Their eventual destination is Germany, where they will confer with their counterparts and seek ways to lower tensions between the two countries.

  Another similar party also sailed today from San Francisco aboard the Argentine ship Rio Negro. Like Sweden, Argentina has sensibly stayed out of this destructive fight. After stopping in Honolulu to pick up another anti-war delegation there, the Rio Negro will continue on to Yokohama, Japan.

  "We have to build peace one person at a time,” explained Robert Noble of the Friends of Progress. His Los Angeles-based organization, along with the National Legion of Mothers and Women of America, sponsored the peace initiative. Noble added, “The Japanese did the proper thing under the exigencies of the time when they bombed Pearl Harbor. Now it is all over in the Pacific, and we might as well come home."

  Noble has been arrested twice recently, once on a charge of sedition and once on one of malicious libel. The government did not bring either case to trial, perhaps fearing the result.

  Some of the travelers bound for Germany and Japan have volunteered as human shields against U.S. and British bombing. There is no response yet from the governments under attack to their brave commitment.

  Bureaucrats in the Roosevelt administration have threatened not to allow the peaceful performers and intellectuals to return to the United States. Travel to their destinations is technically illegal, though a challenge to the ban is underway in the courts. This vindictiveness against critics is typical of administration henchmen.

  * * * *

  April 3, 1942—transcript of radio broadcast
<
br />   THIS IS LONDON

  People in the States ask me how the morale situation is over here. They ask whether the English have as many doubts about which way their leaders are taking them as we do back home.

  The answer is, of course they do. If anything, they have more. They've been hit hard, and it shows. Nearly two years ago, Germany offered a fair and generous peace. A sensible government would have accepted in a flash.

  But Churchill had seized power a few months earlier in what almost amounted to a right-wing coup. He refused a hand extended in friendship, and his country has taken a right to the chin. London and other industrial cities have been bombed flat. Tens of thousands are dead, more wounded and often crippled for life.

  "Look at France,” a cab driver said to me the other day. “They went out early, and they have it easy now. We just keep getting pounded on. I'm tired of it, I am."

  Calls for British withdrawal from Malta and North Africa grow stronger by the day. Sooner or later—my guess is sooner—even Churchill will have to face the plain fact that he has led his country into a losing war....

  * * * *

  April 5, 1942—AP story

  THE PHILIPPINE FRONT

  Sergeant Leland Calvert is a regular guy. He was born in Hondo, Texas, and grew up in San Antonio. He is twenty-nine years old, with blond hair, blue eyes, and an aw-shucks grin. He is a skilled metalworker, and plays a mean trumpet. He's a big fellow—six feet two, maybe six feet three. Right now, Leland Calvert weighs 127 pounds.

  That is how it is for the Americans stuck on the Bataan Peninsula. That is also how it is for the Philippine troops and civilians crammed in with them. There are far more people than there are supplies, which is at the heart of the problem.

  "I don't know who planned this,” Calvert said in an engaging drawl. “I don't reckon anybody did. Sure doesn't seem much point to it. Hell, we're licked. Anybody with eyes in his head can see that."

  Way back in January, rations for 5,600 men in the 91st Division were nineteen sacks of rice, twelve cases of salmon, three-and-a-half sacks of sugar, and four carabao quarters. A carabao is a small, scrawny ox. Well, everybody and everything on the peninsula is scrawny now. Feeding 5,600 people with those supplies makes the miracle of the loaves and fishes look easy as pie.

  And that was January. Things are much worse now. Sergeant Calvert has eaten snake and frog—not frog's legs, but frog. “Snake's not half bad,” he said. “I drew the line at monkey, though. I saw a little hand cooking in a pot, and I didn't think I could keep it down.” I asked him about the monkey's paw story, but he has never heard of it.

  Disease? That's another story. Leland has dysentery. He has had dengue fever, but he is mostly over it now. He is starting to get beriberi, which comes from lack of vitamins. Beriberi takes the gas right out of your motor. I ought to know—I have it, too. Leland does not think he has got scurvy, but he knows men who do.

  He has got malaria. Most people here have got it. Again, I am one of them. The doctors are out of quinine. They are also out of atabrine, which is a fancy new synthetic drug. And they are plumb out of mosquito nets. Something like a thousand people are going into the hospital with malaria every day now. Without the medicines, there is not much anyone can do for them.

  "If I knew why we were here, I would feel better about things,” Leland said. “This all seems like such a waste, though. We're fighting for a little stretch of jungle nobody in his right mind would want. What's the point?"

  Seems like a good question to me, too. It doesn't look like anyone here has a good answer. I don't know when I'll see that Girl again. I don't know if she'll ever see me again. I wish I could say the effort here is worth the candle. But I'm afraid I'm with Leland Calvert. This all seems like such a waste.

  * * * *

  April 14, 1942—Honolulu Star-Bulletin

  ADMINISTRATION PURSUES VENGEANCE POLICY

  According to a Navy Department source, two aircraft carriers and several other warships sailed from Midway yesterday, bound for the Japanese home islands. Aboard one of the carriers, the Hornet, are U.S. Army B-25s. Pilots have secretly trained in Florida, learning to take off from a runway as short as a flight deck.

  The theory is that the B-25s will be able to strike Japan from farther out to sea than normal carrier-based aircraft could. Most of Roosevelt's theories about the war up till now have been wrong, though. Maybe the planes will go into the drink. Maybe the Japanese will be waiting for them. Maybe some other foul-up will torment us. But who will believe this force can succeed until it actually does?

  Given the administration's record to date, in fact, many people will have their doubts even then. As a wise man once said, “Trust everybody—but cut the cards."

  * * * *

  April 21, 1942—Washington Post editorial

  BLAMING THE TOOLS

  Everyone knows what sort of workman blames his tools. Franklin Roosevelt claims that, if a Hawaiian newspaper had not publicized the plan of attack against the Japanese islands, it might have succeeded. He also claims we would not have lost a carrier and a cruiser and had another carrier damaged had secrecy not been compromised.

  This is nonsense of the purest ray serene. The Navy tried a crackbrained scheme, it didn't work, and now the men with lots of gold braid on their sleeves are using the press as a whipping boy. This effort, if we may dignify it with such a name, was doomed to fail from the beginning.

  Reliable sources inform us that the Army pilots involved were not even told they would attempt to fly off a carrier deck till they boarded the Hornet. The Japanese have twice our carrier force in the Pacific. Why were we wasting so much of our strength on what was at best a propaganda stunt? Are we so desperate that we need to throw men's lives away for the sake of looking good on the home front?

  Evidently we are. If that is so, we should never have gotten involved in this war in the first place. Our best course now, plainly, is to get out of it as soon as we can, to minimize casualties and damage to our prestige. We have already paid too much for Roosevelt's obsessive opposition to Japan and Germany.

  * * * *

  April 25, 1942—New York Times

  READING THE OTHER GENTLEMAN'S MAIL

  U.S., British Codebreakers Monitor Germany, Japan

  "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail.” So goes an ancient precept of diplomacy. But for some time now, the United States and Britain have been monitoring Germany and Japan's most secret codes.

  War Department and Navy Department sources confirm that the U.S. and the U.K., with help from Polish experts, have defeated the German Enigma machine and the Japanese Type B diplomatic cipher machine.

  The most important codebreaking center is at Bletchley Park, a manor fifty miles north of London. Other cryptographers work in the British capital, in Ceylon, and in Australia. American efforts are based in Washington, D.C., and in Hawaii.

  Purple is the name of the device that deciphers the Type B code. It is not prepossessing. It looks like two typewriters and a spaghetti bowl's worth of fancy wiring. But the people who use it say it does the job.

  Getting an Enigma machine to Britain was pure cloak-and-dagger. One was found by the Poles aboard a U-boat sunk in shallow water (not, obviously, anywhere near our own ravaged East Coast) and spirited out of Poland one jump ahead of the Germans at the beginning of the war.

  Why better use has not been made of these broken codes is a pressing question. No administration official will speak on the record. No administration official will even admit on the record that we are engaged in codebreaking activity.

  Only one thing makes administration claims tempting to believe. If the United States and Britain are reading Germany and Japan's codes, they have little to show for it. Roosevelt dragged this country into war by a series of misconceptions, deceptions, and outright lies. Now we are in serious danger of losing it.

  * * * *

  April 26, 1942—Chicago Tribune

  WHITE HOUSE WHINES AT REVELATIONS
r />   In a news conference yesterday afternoon, Franklin D. Roosevelt lashed out at critics in the press and on the radio. “Every time sensitive intelligence is leaked, it hurts our ability to defeat the enemy,” Roosevelt claimed.

  As he has before, he seeks to hide his own failings behind the veil of censorship. If the press cannot tell the American people the truth, who can? The administration? FDR sure wants you to think so. But the press and radio newscasters have exposed so many falsehoods and so much bungling that no one in his right mind is likely to trust this White House as far as he can throw it.

  * * * *

  May 1, 1942—Los Angeles Times

  FDR'S POLL NUMBERS CONTINUE TO SINK

  Franklin D. Roosevelt's popularity is sinking faster than freighters off the East Coast. In the latest Gallup survey, his overall approval rating is at 29 percent, while only 32 percent approve of his handling of the war. The poll, conducted yesterday, was of 1,191 “likely” or “very likely” voters, and has an error margin of ±5 percent.

  Polltakers also recorded several significant comments. “He doesn't know what he's doing,” said one fifty-eight-year-old man.

  "Why doesn't he bring the troops home? Who wants to die for England?” remarked a thirty-one-year-old woman.

  "We can't win this stupid war, so why fight it?” said another woman, who declined to give her age.

  Roosevelt's approval ratings are as low as those of President Hoover shortly before he was turned out of office in a landslide. Even Warren G. Harding retained more personal popularity than the embattled current President.

  * * * *

  May 3, 1942—Washington Post

  VEEP BREAKS RANKS WITH WHITE HOUSE

  Demands Timetable for War

  In the first public rift in the Roosevelt administration, Vice President Henry Wallace called on FDR to establish a timetable for victory. “If we can't win this war within eighteen months, we should pack it in,” Wallace said, speaking in Des Moines yesterday. “It is causing too many casualties and disrupting the civilian economy."