The Second Sun, page 1
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This book is dedicated to all the American families who lost sons and daughters, husbands, and fathers to the cauldron that was the Second World War, and then had to watch as Germany and Japan were rehabilitated in pursuit of a necessary strategy to keep America safe in the postwar world. Even though they could see the logic, it must have been extremely difficult to suppress their fury at our new allies.
ONE
STRAHLUNG
WASHINGTON, DC, MARCH 1945
My desk intercom buzzed. “Captain Bowen,” my secretary said, “there’s a call from the commander of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard on line one.”
“Which one?” I said.
“Sir?”
“There’s a Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine, and then there’s the naval shipyard in Portsmouth, Virginia.”
“That’s the Norfolk Navy Yard, sir,” she reminded me. “This will be New Hampshire.”
“Smart aleck.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. Sir,” she said tartly. Marianne was my civilian secretary and a real crackerjack. I couldn’t survive without her, and she well knew that. She was a war widow. Her husband had been killed on the USS Vincennes back in those first bloody weeks of the naval campaign for Guadalcanal. That always seemed to me to have just happened, but it had been three years ago. Three long years.
“Okay, okay,” I said, and picked up the line. “CNO’s office, Captain Bowen speaking.”
“Captain, this is Admiral Tommy Carter, CEC. I’m the Commander, Portsmouth Naval Shipyard.”
Instinctively, I straightened up in my office chair. “Yes, sir. How can I help you, sir?”
“I’ve got a situation up here involving a surrendered German U-boat. I called my bosses in BuShips, and they specifically told me to call the CNO’s office. They told me to call you.”
Aw shit, I thought. Here comes another can of worms. German U-boat?
“Yes, sir?” I said.
“You remember that after the Germans surrendered, Admiral Doenitz ordered all their U-boats to go find an Allied warship, wherever they could, surface, and then surrender to it?”
“Correct, sir.”
“Five days ago, a U-boat surfaced in the Atlantic and surrendered to a small Canadian corvette that was transiting alone back from the UK to her home port in Halifax. This happened about five hundred miles northeast of here. This corvette is small, with a max speed of eighteen knots. They reported to their operational commander in Halifax that this sub was big—really big. They sent a prize crew aboard and then discovered there were civilians aboard as well. Japanese civilians.”
That got my attention. Japanese on a U-boat?
The admiral continued. “There was no way a corvette could take the U-boat’s crew aboard, so Halifax went to our ComEasternSeaFrontier in New York and asked if we could send a destroyer to help out and then escort the U-boat here, to Portsmouth, which is the US base nearest to their position. Eastern Sea Frontier said yes. Tugs are mustering right now to go bring the boat alongside one of our piers at 1100 this morning.”
“Okay,” I said. “This won’t be the first one. I think Norfolk’s got three of them so far. Nazi U-boat skippers don’t want to surrender to a British ship, so they’re making the transit west to surrender to us instead.”
“Can’t hardly blame them,” the admiral said. “After what they did to England. But: I sent a liaison officer from my staff out on the destroyer to rendezvous with the corvette and take over the escort. He’s a line officer, but his billet here is as my intel officer. He went aboard the sub, made a quick tour while it was underway, and then sent me a message from the destroyer. He says the sub is much bigger than our Balao class and that there’s something ‘off’ about this sub.”
“Such as?”
“Well, no torpedo tubes, for one. And he thinks there’s a second deck. We build subs here at Portsmouth, as you know. Never heard of one with two decks. He confirmed the civilians were two Japanese nationals who were carrying Third Reich papers, complete with the logo of the SS. He said nobody aboard the ship would or could—he’s not sure which—speak to him except the captain, who kept asking him, in broken English, if they could please be taken to an American base.”
“What did he tell them?” I asked.
“He told them with a perfectly straight face that there was an excellent naval prison where they were going.”
I laughed. Of course, there was—the Portsmouth Naval Prison, where the Navy sent officers and enlisted men who’d been convicted of prison-worthy serious crimes at a court-martial. It was like the Army’s Fort Leavenworth pen, but scarier, I thought. I’d seen pictures—a massive, alabaster-white pile built in the last century, with fifty-foot stone walls and turreted towers, all of it looming above a fast-flowing river that acted like a moat.
“But here’s the thing,” the admiral went on. “I thought someone from ONI ought to come up here to check this thing out, so I called them, too. They told me the same thing that BuShips did, that the CNO’s direct staff—OpNav—was running the surrender program for German ships, and that they, ONI, had their hands full with matters much farther east of here.”
“I understand, Admiral,” I said. Boy, did I. The Office of Naval Intelligence was infamous in Washington naval circles for executing a bureaucratic lateral arabesque when anything sounded like a real problem. I reminded myself to find a way to pay those smug phonies back for this one. But now:
“Let me suggest you get the U-boat alongside an empty pier,” I said. “Put armed guards on its weather decks and around the pier, and close that entire pier to everybody. Remove the entire ship’s company, including their guests, to the penitentiary, but keep them separate from the main population. Separate the officers and those two mystery civilians from the crewmen if you can. Do all this the moment she lands and shuts down so they can’t scuttle it. I’ll go find the right guy here in DC to get up there and deal with this. May I have your secure number, please?”
He gave it to me with obvious relief.
OpNav is the Navy’s abbreviation for the Navy’s headquarters staff. The head of the Navy is the chief of naval operations, a four-star admiral. OpNav: operations, naval. There is a vice chief, and then several deputy chiefs of naval operations for specific policy areas: naval air, surface ships, submarines, the Navy’s budget, logistics, public affairs, strategic plans and policy, etc. The vice chief is a four-star. The deputies are three-stars, or vice admirals. Within their directorates are division directors—usually two-stars, or rear admirals.
I’m a surface ship captain who’d spent 1942–43 as captain of a destroyer in the Guadalcanal campaign, then as captain of a heavy cruiser from 1943 into early 1945. After that I’d been pulled back to Washington, supposedly to the Plans and Policy Directorate, which dealt with war plans, strategy, and most importantly, relations with the Army, Marines, and the Army Air Forces, which were often fraught with bureaucratic conflict. In early 1945, while I was awaiting actual orders and still hoping hard for another command at sea, I was informed that I was going instead to the small, personal executive staff of the CNO himself. I would have no title, nor any office staff other than a secretary. The assignment officer had told me that I was going to join the CNO’s so-called Strategic Planning Committee. There were only four of us, and our job was to solve thorny Navy headquarters problems by going around, through, over, and even under the increasingly large naval bureaucracy that had grown up in Washington to run and, presumably, win this goddamned war against Germany and Japan. One down, one to go.
To say that there was interservice competition for roles, missions, and most importantly, budgetary money in Washington by 1945 would be the gross understatement of the year. The Army and Navy headquarters staffs had grown exponentially since Pearl Harbor, but the Army staff was twice the size of ours because it incorporated the explosive growth of the Army Air Forces arm, which had grown in size and importance. Even with the war in Europe officially over, the Army Air Forces were quickly becoming an equal to the entire naval air effort in the Pacific as we closed in on Japan. While almost the entire US Navy was preparing for the invasion of Okinawa and, ultimately, Japan itself, the Army Air Forces were actually bombing the Japanese homeland. In the constant bureaucratic maneuvering between the two military departments, Army and Navy, that fact carried a lot of weight.
The war with Japan was most definitely not over, and in fact was getting bloodier by the day. The invasion of Japan had been seen as the Götterdämmerung of America’s war effort ever since Pearl Harbor. Recently the Joint Chiefs had formally ordered the invasion of Okinawa. That meant that forces—huge forces—would soon go in motion to assemble off the home islands. U ltimate victory was pretty much assured, but at what cost? If the recent Iwo Jima invasion was any indication, the human cost of going into the home islands would be beyond belief.
We’d “won” in Europe, although the nagging suspicion, Washington-wide, was that the Soviet Union was going to be the Next Big Problem. Because Mother Russia had been absorbing and thus holding down several German armies, its government claimed that America owed them a debt of material, money, manpower, and food. Ironically, Hitler’s blunder in invading Russia had ultimately made the Normandy invasion possible because so much of his army was locked in a battle to the death on the eastern front.
President Roosevelt had quickly seen the value of Russian armies tying down German armies, even as the Russian people suffered terribly. He’d made sure that the United States did its best to send relief to them, even as the realization dawned across Washington that the Soviets had much bigger ambitions in postwar Europe. The problem now was that, by all “insider accounts,” Roosevelt was dying in office. He had been such a stalwart, oversize, totally involved, often prescient and equally often tyrannical player in this titanic game of total world war that his absence would create a crisis of its own. Everybody knew it, probably even his vice president, a somewhat unknown factor named Harry S. Truman. I’d been to several high-level briefings at the White House, mostly as a minor horse-holder, but I had never once even seen the vice president.
Hitler’s Germany had been utterly defeated, and only now were the Allies and their populations beginning to understand the full depth of Hitler’s Final Solution. Far-seeing elements of the Allied governments were making the argument that Germany would have to be reconstituted if the Russians were ever to be checked, but the international outrage at what the Germans had been doing in their euphemistically called “labor camps” was making that entire effort extremely difficult.
I went down the hall to the CNO’s office and asked for a minute with his executive assistant, a rear admiral named Henry Carlstein. He was a newly promoted flag officer but absolutely not new to Washington and its many intrigues. I liked working for him because I rarely had to explain the antecedents of any problem. He’d seen it all before. I told him about the Portsmouth situation. He seemed a bit underwhelmed until I mentioned the Japanese passengers with German SS papers.
“Say that again?” he said, suddenly looking up.
“Two Japanese nationals—officers, civilians, we don’t know, but they had Third Reich identification papers, issued by the SS HQ in Berlin.”
“You go up there,” he said immediately. “Right now. Tonight. Contact me on my secure line when you find out who or what they are. And, and this is important: you, personally, go aboard that boat, find out what she’s carrying. Take the CO of the boat with you. Make him show you. If he balks, tell him he’ll be hanged that very day if he doesn’t. Nazi-style. In a basement. With piano wire.”
“Seems extreme,” I said. “He did surrender, pretty much as ordered.”
“He’s a German, and a Nazi,” Carlstein spat. “I’m no longer certain there’s any difference between the two, but he’d expect nothing less in different circumstances. Go. I’ll brief the Boss.”
TWO
PORTSMOUTH NAVY YARD
Admiral Carter graciously sent a Navy staff car for me when I got off the train in Portsmouth the next day. I was shown into his office twenty minutes later. Rear Admiral Tommy Carter was at least ten years older than me, with gray hair and a pleasant aspect. He was CEC: Civil Engineering Corps, the Navy’s shipbuilders, maintainers, naval architects, and fixit corps. He exhibited none of the I’m an admiral, you’re just a captain mannerisms I’d often encounter in Washington. He seemed relieved that I was there.
“This boat is definitely something different,” he said after coffee had been passed around. His young lieutenant intelligence officer was present for our meeting, as was his chief of staff, one Captain Jarrel Gray, also a CEC officer.
“I saw the crew,” the admiral said. “They’re arrogant, as if they’re special, but they’re also maybe scared of what we’re going to find aboard that boat that might get them killed.”
“And the two Japanese?”
“They’re calm, silent, and of course, inscrutable. They gave me the impression that they expect to be executed quite soon.”
Uh-oh, I thought. “Admiral, if you will, sir, call that prison,” I said. “Put those two under isolation and twenty-four-hour surveillance, right now. They are likely to try to kill themselves if they get the chance. They may not have surrendered, but they’ll feel dishonored. In fact, transfer them to the naval hospital here into a suicide-prevention clinic with twenty-four-hour, in-person surveillance. Restrained.”
The admiral nodded at his chief of staff, who left the room to see to my “requests.” If the admiral was upset with my giving orders, he made no sign of it. I always tried to be polite, but my role on the CNO’s executive staff was to defuse problems before they had a chance to grow. The people I talked to in that tone of voice tended to recognize that. It wasn’t personal arrogance on my part, even if it might look that way. An admiral is an admiral, whether he’s line, engineering, supply, or medical corps, and I was just another captain. Aboard a ship, a captain was somebody. In Washington, Navy captains and their Army counterparts, colonels, were a dime a dozen. Within the Navy, the fact that my phone number was listed as a part of the CNO’s executive office carried weight. It didn’t hurt that I was also six one and had been a hobby weightlifter for years. I typically did not enter an office. I mostly loomed in the doorway for a moment until all conversation stopped.
The train trip had taken all night from Washington to Portsmouth with lots of delays because wartime freight traffic always took precedence over the passenger trains. We didn’t get in until the next morning. The admiral offered to have me over for dinner at his quarters that evening but I respectfully declined. I was tired from a diet of seven-day weeks and the high pressures of working at the four-star level at headquarters. My briefcase was full of problem papers, none of them classified but no less complex. The CNO often wanted his small brain trust’s candid opinion on just about everything to balance what his enormous staff was telling him in great volume. Two of our small group handled operational problems; the other two handled the equally important snarls of the eternal budgetary and influence competition between the two services. This one sounded quasi-operational, but when the CNO’s executive assistant says go, we go. Right now, my plan was to hit the O’Club for a drink and dinner, then go back to the BOQ and on to bed. I needed to be clearheaded and rested for this U-boat mystery bright and early tomorrow morning.
Japanese in Germany, I thought, as I enjoyed a small brandy after dinner in the nearly empty O’Club. What in the world had they been doing in Germany? True, what we had called the Axis powers during the war had been Germany, Japan, and, to a lesser extent, Italy. Nobody in Washington who’d seen news films of Mussolini’s theatrical antics took Italy all that seriously, except perhaps the British convoys that had suffered under Italian air attack in the Mediterranean. But the Germany–Japan Axis was something else altogether. Germany, under Hitler, had wanted domination of the Western world; Japan, suzerainty of Asia. That said, though we’d been using that term, Axis powers, since 1941, it was hard to imagine that there was much detailed cooperation between the two, if only because there were twelve thousand physical miles between them. This strange submarine might shed a light on that assumption, I thought. But what?
THREE
A REALLY BIG SUBMARINE
A Navy Yard staff car picked me up at 0700 the next morning and delivered me to the end pier at the Navy Yard’s shoreline, Pier 5. I wasn’t in uniform, but rather was wearing a set of Navy-blue overalls with no insignia. I’d been aboard some operational submarines in the Pacific, and they were necessarily hostile to expensive uniforms. I could see the U-boat, alone at the pier, distinctive in its pinkish-gray warpaint. It was indeed big, maybe twice the size of some of the captured attack boats down in Norfolk. There was no gun on the foredeck, and no antiaircraft guns on the conning tower. The lieutenant had said that there were no torpedo tubes, either.
