Battleground Page 5

  The Supreme Commander leaned his head toward Captain Pickering and, covering his mouth with his hand, waited until Pickering had leaned toward him, and then said,

  “Mrs. MacArthur would be pleased if you would come for a little supper and bridge.”

  “I would be honored, Sir.”

  “And could you have that Korean Signal Officer come too? After supper, of course?”

  “I’m sure I can, Sir.”

  The “Korean” Signal Officer was Lieutenant “Pluto” Hon, a New York-born, MIT-educated mathematician, assigned to the staff as a cryptographic officer and Japanese-language linguist. A mere lieutenant was far too low in the military social hierarchy to be asked to dine with The Supreme Commander and his lady, but his bridge playing skill got him into The Supreme Commander’s suite for bridge after dinner.

  “Good,” MacArthur said. “I’ll give you to Jeanhe this time, and he and I will whip you badly.”

  “Sir, will you take a look at this please?” Pickering asked.

  “Something you want, Pickering?” MacArthur asked, suspiciously.

  “Something that just came to hand, Sir,” Pickering said, and handed the onion skins to him.

  MacArthur took the sheets from him. Pickering saw the distress in Colonel Willoughby’s eyes that showed he no longer had The Supreme Commander’s attention.

  MacArthur read the summary carefully, grunting once or twice, and shaking his head.

  “You believe this is accurate?” he asked.

  “Yes, Sir. I think that’s the best information presently available.”

  “You’re an amazing fellow, Fleming,” MacArthur said. “I’d love to know where you got this.”

  MacArthur handed the onion skins back to Pickering and stood up. Pickering saw in that—with relief—that MacArthur did not expect an answer.

  Colonel Willoughby interrupted himself in mid-sentence as everybody in the room stood up and came to attention.

  “Willoughby, something has come up. Captain Pickering and I have to leave. That was a first-class briefing. Make me a one-page summary, would you please, at your first opportunity?”

  “Yes, Sir,” Colonel Willoughby said.

  “Keep your seats, gentlemen,” MacArthur ordered, and then marched back up the aisle with Pickering and then Lieutenant Colonel Huff trailing after him.

  “What was that you gave The General?” Huff asked.

  “I’m sorry, Sid,” Pickering said. “I can’t tell you.”

  “I’m The General’s aide,” Huff argued.

  “I’m sorry, Sid,” Pickering repeated.

  He saw the anger in Huff’s eyes.

  He really hates me, Pickering thought. Hell, if I was in his shoes, I’d hate me, too. But he really doesn’t have the Need to Know what those onion skins say, and I don’t want him asking questions, of me or anyone else, about how I got them.

  The elevator was waiting. They rode up in it to MacArthur’s office.

  “Sid,” MacArthur ordered, as he swept through the outer office, “will you get us some coffee, please? And have Sergeant Thorne bring his book? And then see that we are not disturbed?”

  “Yes, Sir,” Huff said.

  Pickering saw that Sergeant Thorne already had his stenographer’s notebook and a half dozen sharpened pencils in his hand. He still had time to make it to the inner door and open it for MacArthur.

  Once in his office, MacArthur waved Pickering into a leather sofa. He walked to his desk, laid his gold encrusted cap on it, and then sat on the forward edge of the desk, supporting himself with his hands, looking upward, obviously deep in thought.

  A staff sergeant appeared with a silver coffee set, put it on the coffee table in front of the sofa, and left.

  When the door closed, MacArthur looked at Pickering.

  “Pickering,” he said solemnly, “my heart is so filled with thoughts of the nobility of the profession of arms that words may fail me.”

  Pickering, not having any idea how he was expected to respond to an announcement like that, fell back on the safe and sure: “Yes, Sir,” he said.

  “The first message,” MacArthur went on, now looking at Sergeant Thorne, “is to Admiral Nimitz.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Thorne said.

  “My dear Admiral,” MacArthur began. “Word has just come to me of your glorious victory and of the incredible courage and devotion of your men which made it possible.”

  He stopped abruptly. He looked at Pickering. “Pour some of that coffee for us, will you please, Fleming? Thorne, will you have some coffee?”

  “Not just now, thank you, Sir,” Sergeant Thorne said.

  MacArthur pushed himself off the desk and walked to the window.

  “Read that back, please,” he said.

  Sergeant Thorne did so.

  “Strike ‘admiral,’ make it ‘Chester,’ ” MacArthur ordered. “Strike ‘made it possible.’ ”

  “Yes, Sir,” Sergeant Thorne said.

  MacArthur walked to the coffee table, picked up the cup Pickering had just poured, and stood erect.

  “Read it, please.”

  “My dear Chester, Word has just come to me of your glorious victory and of the incredible courage and devotion of your men.”

  “Move ‘has just come to me’ to the end of the sentence,” MacArthur ordered, “and read that.”

  “Word of your glorious victory and of the incredible courage and devotion of your men has just come to me.”

  MacArthur considered that a moment.

  “Better, wouldn’t you say, Fleming? Not yet quite right, but a decent start.”

  “I think that’s fine, General,” Pickering said.

  “I would be grateful for any suggestions you might care to offer,” MacArthur said. “This sort of thing is really very important.”

  Gracious and considerate, Pickering thought. But important?

  And then he realized why it was important.

  And not only as a footnote in the History of World War II, he thought, when someone got around to writing that. That cable is an olive branch being offered to the Navy. Nimitz is supposed to be a salty sonofabitch, but he’s human, and getting a cable from MacArthur addressed, ‘My dear Chester’ and using phrases like ‘glorious victory’ and ‘the incredible courage and devotion of your men’ is going to have to get to him.

  Is MacArthur aware of that? Is that the reason for this? Or is it just what he said, that his heart was ‘filled with thoughts of the nobility of the profession of arms’ and nothing more?

  It’s probably both, Pickering decided. And I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and think it is mostly emotion. But he is not unaware of the ancient tactic of putting your enemy off guard, either.

  “General, I wouldn’t presume to attempt to better that,” Pickering said.

  MacArthur didn’t hear him.

  “The Battle of Midway will live in the memory of man—strike ‘memory of man,’ make it ‘hearts of our countrymen, alongside Valley Forge,’ ” he dictated. “Got that, Thorne?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “I am having trouble,” MacArthur said, “recalling significant U.S. Naval victories. If only he’d said something, I could compare that to ‘Don’t give up the ship,’ or ‘Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.’ ”

  For God’s sake, Pickering. Don’t chuckle. Don’t even smile. He’s deadly serious.

  “If I may say so, Sir, Valley Forge seems appropriate. A small band of valiant men, with inadequate arms, showing great courage against overwhelming odds.”

  MacArthur considered that for a moment.

  “Yes,” he said. “I see what you mean. Valley Forge will do. Thorne, add ‘forever’ after ‘live’—‘will live forever.’ ”

  “Yes, Sir,” Sergeant Thorne said.

  “Read the whole thing back,” MacArthur ordered.

  Master Sergeant Thorne stood almost at attention before General MacArthur’s desk as The Supreme Commander read the fifth—and Thorne ho
ped last—neatly typed version of his Personal for Admiral Nimitz.

  MacArthur handed it back to him.

  “Give that to Captain Pickering, please.”

  Pickering read it, although he knew it by heart.

  “I think that’s fine, Sir,” he said. “The language is magnificent.”

  “From the heart, Pickering. From the heart.”

  Sergeant Thorne put his hand out for the Message Form.

  “I can take it downstairs, Sir,” Pickering said. “I have to see Lieutenant Hon anyway.”

  Downstairs was the Cryptographic Office and Classified Document Vault in the hotel basement.

  “Very well,” MacArthur said.

  “Sir, I have the Personal for General Marshall ready, too,” Sergeant Thorne said.

  “Well, give that to the Captain, too,” MacArthur said. “Two birds with one stone, right?”

  Thorne left the office and returned with two envelopes. One was sealed. He took the Personal for Admiral Nimitz Message Form from Pickering and sealed it in the other.

  “If that’s all you have for me, Sir?” Pickering said.

  “I appreciate your assistance, Fleming. See you at six?”

  “And I’ll tell Lieutenant Hon to stand by from seven, Sir?”

  He involuntarily glanced at his watch. It was quarter to two. He had been in MacArthur’s office for nearly three hours. That seemed incredible. There had been interruptions, of course, but they hadn’t taken much time at all. There had been two calls from Mrs. MacArthur and a dozen officers seeking decisions. MacArthur had wasted little time making them. Most of that time had been spent composing MacArthur’s Personal for Admiral Nimitz.

  “Seven,” MacArthur confirmed.

  (Three)

  First Lieutenant Hon Song Do, Signal Corps, U.S. Army Reserve (his very unlikely nickname was “Pluto”), and Captain Fleming Pickering, USNR, had an unusual relationship for an Army first lieutenant and a Navy captain. This had its roots in Hon’s duties at SWPAO. There was virtually nothing classified SECRET or above in Supreme Headquarters SWPAO with which Lieutenant Hon was not familiar.

  Lieutenant Pluto Hon was carried on the books as a cryptographic-classified documents officer. He was one of half a dozen so designated; and he performed those duties carefully and diligently. Only a very few people knew his primary function, however; for Pluto Hon had a MAGIC clearance. He was thus privy to the same information made available in Melbourne solely to MacArthur himself; his Intelligence Officer, Colonel Charles Willoughby; and Captain Fleming Pickering, Personal Representative of the Secretary of the Navy.

  Hon, a mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before the war, was directly commissioned into the Army’s Signal Corps, where mathematicians were critically needed for cryptographic operations. It had then been learned that not only was he fluent in written and spoken Japanese, he was steeped in the subtleties of Japanese culture.

  When word of Hon’s knowledge of Japanese culture reached the cryptographic-intelligence community, he was quickly transferred from Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, to Pearl Harbor, where the Navy code-breaking operation was located, and then to MacArthur’s headquarters.

  In one of the most closely held secrets of the war, Navy cryptographers at Pearl Harbor had succeeded in breaking many—though by no means all—of the Japanese military and diplomatic codes. The operation involved with decrypting the Japanese messages was called MAGIC; it was a major American triumph.

  Still, once the intercepted messages were decrypted, most of them did not make complete sense; for the intercepted messages were all deeply impregnated with Japanese culture and traditions. Thus analysts were needed who were not only familiar with the language but who could almost feel and react to the messages the way a Japanese would.

  Lieutenant Hon was also one of the very few people who had unquestioned access to the Classified Documents Vault. When a Top SECRET document was signed out, and later returned, it was his duty to make sure it had been returned in its entirety. It would be impossible to do that without counting pages and looking at the maps.

  Additionally, he had other duties involving Captain Fleming Pickering, USNR, personally. Since Pickering had been charged by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox to provide his assessment of what was going on, and since very often his assessments were not flattering to any number of highly placed people, these assessments had to be kept secret not only from the enemy but from everybody in Supreme Headquarters SWPOA as well.

  Hon personally encrypted all communications between Pickering and Secretary Knox, and was thus privy to information known only to Pickering.

  And on top of that, they had become friends. Pickering not only genuinely liked the outsize Korean, he felt a little sorry for him: The nature of Hon’s duties shut him off from other junior officers; and off duty, he was in Australia. Australians did not like Asiatics—there were rigid immigration and even tourist regulations against them. It made no difference to them that Pluto Hon was a native-born American and an officer in the United States Army.

  Lieutenant “Pluto” Hon stood up when Pickering walked into his tiny office. He was eating a Hershey bar.

  “Good afternoon, Sir.”

  Hon had a thick Massachusetts accent. Pickering, a Harvard man himself, knew the dialect well. Hon was also a large and tall man, which Pickering thought of as another inconsistency. Orientals were supposed to be slight.

  “How goes it, Pluto?” Pickering said, “I don’t suppose you’ve got another Hershey bar?”

  Hon took a small box of them from a desk drawer and handed it to Pickering.

  “Aren’t they feeding the brass these days?” Hon asked.

  “I was sitting at the foot of the throne,” Pickering said, as he unwrapped the Hershey bar. “The emperor was not hungry, so we didn’t eat.”

  Pluto chuckled. “I also have peanuts,” he said.

  “Thank you, this will hold me. I’m eating at the palace, too. Where you will play bridge starting at about seven.”

  “I don’t mind,” Hon said. “He’s one hell of a bridge player.”

  “Tonight it’s the Empress and me against you and the throne,” Pickering said.

  “What have you got for me to brighten my otherwise dull day?”

  “Two personals,” Pickering said. “Oh, and before I forget it ...”

  He took the onion skins from his pocket and handed them to Hon.

  “Burn those for me, will you?”

  Hon took them and matter-of-factly started to read them.

  “This must be the straight poop,” he said. “KLW is a Lieutenant Commander named Ken Waldman. In MAGIC.”

  “How can you be sure?” Pickering asked, and then, without waiting for a reply, asked, “You know him?”

  “Who else would have this much hard data this quick? Yeah, I know him. He was at MIT, too.”

  He held one sheet of the onion skin over a metal waste basket and touched the flame of his Zippo to it. It caught fire so quickly that Pickering suspected it had been chemically treated to do that.

  Hon lit another sheet.

  “You get this from that commander who flew in this morning?”

  “Yeah. A commander.”

  “Mine had a briefcase chained to his wrist and a gun,” Hon said. “He stopped in here and asked where he could find you before he gave me his stuff.”

  “Must be the same guy.”

  “What’s the personals?”

  “One to Nimitz. Powerful words of congratulation,” Pickering said, and handed the envelope to Hon.

  Hon tore it open and started to read it.

  “What’s the other one?”

  “Personal to Marshall.”

  “What’s it say?”

  “I don’t know, it’s sealed,” Pickering said, and handed it to him.

  Hon read it, raised his eyebrows, and handed it to Pickering. “Based on my vast professional military experience, I don’t think he’s going to get away w
ith that.”

  Pickering was reluctant to take the document, but curiosity overwhelmed his reticence. His curiosity was rationalized by his orders stating that it would be presumed he had the Need to Know anything that interested him. And as Hon turned to his cryptographic machine to encode the Personal to Nimitz, he read the Personal to Marshall.

  FROM SUPREME HQ SWPOA

  TO WAR DEPARTMENT WASH DC

  FOLLOWING EYES ONLY GENERAL GEORGE C. MARSHALL CHIEF OF STAFF

  PERSONAL FOR GENERAL MARSHALL

  MY DEAR GEORGE X I HAVE TODAY DISPATCHED VIA OFFICER COURIER INITIAL PLANS FOR AN OPERATION I WOULD LIKE TO COMMENCE AS SOON AS I CAN OBTAIN AUTHORITY FROM THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF X IT IS MY INTENTION TO STRIKE IN THE NEW BRITAIN DASH NEW IRELAND AREA USING THE US 32ND AND 41ST INFANTRY DIVISIONS AND THE AUSTRALIAN 7TH DIVISION ALL PRESENTLY IN AUSTRALIA X ONCE DRIVEN FROM NEW BRITAIN DASH NEW IRELAND THE JAPANESE WOULD BE FORCED BACK TO TRUK X TO ACCOMPLISH THE INITIAL ASSAULT AND FOR A PERIOD NOT TO EXCEED THIRTY DAYS THEREAFTER MY PLAN WOULD REQUIRE THE USE OF PAREN A PAREN ONE INFANTRY DIVISION TRAINED AND EQUIPPED FOR AMPHIBIOUS OPERATIONS X PAREN B PAREN AIR COVER FROM CARRIER BASED AIRCRAFT X PAREN C PAREN A SUITABLE NAVAL FORCE TO BOMBARD THE HOSTILE SHORE AND GUARD SHIPPING LANES X ONCE THE BEACHHEAD IS ESTABLISHED I CAN QUICKLY BEGIN AERIAL OPERATIONS FROM EXISTING FIELDS AND WILL NOT HAVE FURTHER NEED OF NAVAL ASSISTANCE X I MOST EARNESTLY SOLICIT NOT ONLY YOUR SUPPORT BUT ONCE YOU HAVE READ THE DETAILED PLANS YOUR WISE COUNSEL AS TO THEIR EFFICACY X TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE X WITH MY MOST SINCERE EXPRESSION OF REGARD I REMAIN AS ALWAYS FAITHFULLY DOUGLAS X END PERSONAL TO GENERAL MARSHALL

  “The Navy’s not going to loan him the First Marines and a couple of aircraft carriers,” Hon said when he was sure Pickering had had time to read the Personal to Marshall. “Are they?”

  His fingers were still flying over the cryptographic machine’s typewriter keys as he talked. Hon always baffled Pickering when he did that. How could one part of his brain type while another part engaged in conversation?