The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (2 page)

JANUARY 20, 1941
, was a miserable, frigid day in
Philadelphia. Sleet made the roads anywhere from dangerous to impossible. Ice clung to power lines, too, and its weight brought some of them down. Peggy Druce wouldn’t have wanted to be without electricity in this weather. If you didn’t use coal, if you had an oil-fired furnace that depended on a pump, losing power meant that before long you’d start chopping up your furniture and burning it so you
didn’t freeze to death.

Washington lay less than a hundred miles south, but it was conveniently on the other side of the cold front. Lowell Thomas assured his nationwide radio audience that it was in the forties, with clouds moving in front of the sun every now and then but no rain and certainly no
sleet. Peggy, who hadn’t seen the sun since last Friday, was bright green with envy.

“We are here
on this historic occasion to observe the third inauguration of President Roosevelt,” Thomas said in his ringing, sonorous tones. “This is, of course, the first time in the history of the United States that a President will be inaugurated for a third term. And, with the nation plunged into war little more than a week ago through the Empire of Japan’s unprovoked attacks on Hawaii and the Philippines,
the President surely has a lot on his mind.”

Peggy wished Herb were sitting there beside her listening to the ceremony, too. Things weren’t so easy between them as they had been before she got back from Europe. She wished like hell some of what had happened there hadn’t happened. Those wishes did as much, or as little, good as ever. Still, she would have enjoyed what were sure to be his sarcastic
comments about the ceremony farther south.

But her husband had taken the Packard in to his law office regardless of the slick, icy roads. He hadn’t called with tales of accidents, and neither had the police or a hospital, so Peggy supposed he’d made it downtown in one piece.

He was bound to have the radio on if he wasn’t with a client, and maybe if he was. Herb was always somebody who kept up
with the news. Till Peggy got stuck in war-torn Europe, she’d wondered whether that had any point. She didn’t any more.

Lowell Thomas dropped his voice a little: “Ladies and gentlemen, Chief Justice Hughes will administer the oath of office to President Roosevelt. With his robes and his white beard, the Chief Justice looks most distinguished, most distinguished indeed. He also gave the President
the oath at his two previous inaugurations.”

Only a few old men wore beards in these modern times. Well, Charles Evans Hughes was pushing eighty. He’d probably grown his before the turn of the century, decided he liked it, and kept it ever since. He’d come as close as a bad Republican turnout in California to unseating Woodrow Wilson in 1916. The world would be a different place if he had. Peggy
wasn’t sure how, but she was sure it would be.

“Are you ready to take the oath, Mr. President?” Hughes sounded
younger than he was, even if rumor said he would step down from the Court before too long.

“I am, Mr. Chief Justice.” No one who’d ever heard FDR’s jaunty voice could mistake it.

“Repeat after me, then,” Hughes said.

And the President—the third-term President—did: “I, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

“Congratulations, Mr. President,” the Chief Justice said.

“They are shaking hands,” Lowell Thomas said quietly.

In the background, applause rose like the sound of surging surf. “Thank
you very much,” Roosevelt said, and then again, a moment later, “Thank you.”

“He is holding up his hands to still the clapping,” Thomas noted. But the clapping didn’t want to still. Back in 1933, FDR’d said we had nothing to fear but fear itself. Well, we had other things to fear now, starting with Japanese planes and carriers and battleships and soldiers.

“Thank you,” Roosevelt said once more.
Slowly, the applause ebbed. Very slowly: it was as if people didn’t want the President to go on, because if he did they would have to look out across the sea at the big, dangerous world. Into something approaching quiet, FDR continued, “Believe me, I do thank you, from the bottom of my heart. What greater honor can any man claim than the continued confidence of the American people?”

That drew
more applause and cheers. Now, though, they quickly died away. “I am going to tell you the plain truth,” Roosevelt said, “and the plain truth is, things could be better. When I ran for reelection promising not to send American boys off to fight in a foreign war, I meant every word of it.”

Peggy coughed as she inhaled cigarette smoke. Nobody in the United States played a deeper political game
than FDR. When he started going on about what a plain, simple fellow he was, that was the time to hold on to your wallet.

“But we have had war delivered to us no matter how little we want
it.” The President let anger rise in his voice. “And our freedom is threatened not only in the Far East. Whoever wins the great European struggle, liberty will be the loser.”

He was bound to be right about
that. Whether Hitler beat Stalin or the other way around, the winner would be big trouble for the rest of the world. Right now, with France and England trailing along in his wake because he’d pulled German troops out of France, the Nazi seemed to have the edge on the Red. But there could be more big switches after the one Daladier and Chamberlain had pulled. Nobody would know under which shell the
pea lurked till all the sliding around stopped.

Some people suspected Roosevelt’s intentions, too. “No European war!” a man yelled, loud enough for Lowell Thomas’ microphone to pick it up.

Hitler hadn’t declared war on the United States. If he did, it would hurt his palsy-walsy relationship with the last two surviving Western European democracies. It wouldn’t do the Third
Reich
any good, either.
Peggy’d spent much more time in Nazi Germany than she ever wanted. The Germans didn’t understand how strong the USA could be. But even the
Führer
seemed to want to take things one step at a time.

“I do not intend to get us involved in a European war,” Roosevelt said firmly—so firmly, in fact, that Peggy got that wallet-clutching urge again. Did that yell come from a shill? Then the President
proceeded to hedge: “I did not intend to get us involved in war against Japan, either. The only things I know for certain now are that the road ahead will be long and hard and dangerous, and that the United States of America will emerge triumphant at the end of that road.”

He got another hand then. Peggy remembered that, back in the days of ancient Rome, people used to keep track of how many
times the Senate applauded the Emperor when he addressed it. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she did. Maybe Herb told her once upon a time—they’d rammed a big dose of Latin down his throat in high school and college. Somebody needed to keep track of the ovations in Washington today.

“We are going to become the arsenal of democracy, as I said in my Fireside Chat not long ago,” the President
continued. “We must be strong enough to defeat the enemy in the Far East and to ensure that no enemy anywhere in the world can possibly defeat us.”

Yet again, people clapped and cheered. How many of those people had the faintest idea what war was like? Oh, some of the men would have gone Over There a generation before. They’d seen the elephant, as their grandfathers would have said in Civil War
days. Most of FDR’s audience, though, didn’t really have any idea of what he was talking about.

Peggy did. She’d watched the Nazis storm into Czechoslovakia and promptly start tormenting Jews. She’d watched them march off freighters and into Copenhagen, ruining her chances to get back to the States for a while. She’d huddled against their bombs—and, while she was stuck in Germany, against English
bombs, too, and maybe even against French and Russian bombs as well.

So she knew as much about what war was like these days as anyone who hadn’t carried a rifle could. Some people cheering Roosevelt would find out just that way. And others would learn when young men they loved came back maimed or didn’t come back at all. Would they still be cheering then?

The truly scary thing was, all the anguish
and agony Roosevelt wouldn’t talk about in an inaugural address were going to be needed. The horror Peggy had seen and gone through in Europe made her much too sure of that.

SARAH GOLDMAN EYED
the clerk behind the barred window in the Münster
Rathaus
with nothing but dismay. She’d never faced this fellow before. It wasn’t that he was gray-haired and had a hook where his left hand should have
been. No one young and healthy would have sat behind that window. Young, healthy German men wore
Feldgrau
these days, not a baggy brown suit that reeked of mothballs.

But a button gleamed on the clerk’s left lapel. It wasn’t the ordinary swastika button that proved somebody belonged to the Nazi party. No: The gold rim on this button showed that the clerk was one of the first 100,000 Party members.
He’d been a Nazi long before Hitler came to power, in other words. He’d like Jews even less than most National Socialists.

“You wish?” he said as Sarah came to the head of the queue. He sounded polite enough for the moment. Well, why not? She was a pretty
girl—not beautiful, but pretty. And, with her light brown hair, hazel eyes, and fair skin, she didn’t look especially Jewish.

“I need …” She
had to nerve herself to speak louder than a whisper. “I need to arrange the paperwork for my wedding.” There. She’d said it, and loud enough for him to hear it, too.

“You should be happy when you do that, dear.” The clerk might be graying and mutilated, but he noticed a pretty girl, all right. Behind the reading glasses that magnified them, his own pale eyes seemed enormous as he studied her.
He held out his good hand. “Let me have your identity booklet, and we’ll begin.”

“All right,” Sarah said as she took the indispensable document out of her purse. It wasn’t all right, and it wasn’t going to be.

He held the document down with the hook and opened it with the fingers of his meat hand. He was no slower or clumsier than someone who hadn’t got hurt. How many years of practice and repetition
lay behind him?

“Oh,” he said in a voice suddenly colder than the nasty weather outside. Of course the booklet bore the big stamp that said
Jude
. The Nazis had made all German Jews take the first names Moses or Sarah. Since Sarah already owned the one required for women, she’d briefly confused the bureaucracy. She didn’t confuse the clerk now. She just irritated him, or more likely disgusted
him. He shook his head. “
You
wish to … marry?”

“Yes, sir,” she said. Staying polite wouldn’t hurt, though it might not help, either. “It’s not against the law for two Jews to marry each other, sir.”

That was true—after a fashion. Law for Jews in Germany these days was whatever the Nazis said it was. Jews weren’t even German citizens any more. They were only residents, forced to become strangers
in what most of them still thought of as their
Vaterland
.

“Well …” the clerk said ominously. He pushed back his chair and stood up. He was shorter than Sarah expected; the chair let him look down on the people he was supposed to serve. Shaking his head, he went on, “I must consult with my supervisor.”

The stout middle-aged woman behind Sarah in line groaned. “What’s eating him?” she said.

Sarah only shrugged. She knew, all right, but she didn’t think telling would do her any good. She waited as patiently as she could for the clerk to return. The woman and the people in the queue behind
her
grumbled louder and louder. Anything that made him leave his post obviously sprang from a plot to throw sand in the system’s gear train.

He came back after three or four minutes that seemed like
an hour. With him came another functionary, this one a little older, who also wore an
alter Kämpfer
’s gold-rimmed Party button on his lapel. The newcomer eyed Sarah as if he’d have to clean her off the bottom of his shoe.

“
You
want to get married?” he said, his voice full of even more revolted disbelief than his subordinate’s had held.

“Yes, sir,” Sarah repeated. Whatever she thought of him,
she carefully didn’t show.

“And your intended is also of Hebraic blood?”

“That’s right.” Sarah supposed her family had some Aryans in the woodpile. Isidor Bruck looked like what everybody’s idea of looking Jewish looked like. He came by it honestly—so did his father and mother and younger brother.

“What is his name?” the senior bureaucrat asked. She gave it. The senior man sneered. “No, that
is not correct. He is Moses Isidor Bruck, and will be so listed in our records.”

“Sorry,” said Sarah, who was anything but. She was mad at herself. She’d just been thinking about the forced name change, but she’d forgotten to use it. Nobody remembered … except people like the ones on the other side of the window.

“I see by your documents that you are twenty years old,” the senior man said. “And
what is the age of the other Hebrew?” It was as if he couldn’t even bear to say the word
Jew
.

“He’s, uh, twenty-two,” Sarah answered.

“Why is he not here to speak for himself?” the bureaucrat demanded.

“He’s working, sir. He’s a baker, like his father.” Bakers never starved. When rations for most German Jews were so miserable, that wasn’t the smallest consideration in the world.

“Mrmp.” The
functionary was anything but impressed. He scribbled a note on a form, then glared out through the bars that made him look
like a caged animal. But he and his kind were the ones who kept Jews in the enormous cage they’d made of the Third
Reich
. “And what is your father’s occupation?”

“He’s a laborer,” Sarah said, as steadily as she could. “He used to be a university professor when Jews could
still do that.” Both Nazi bureaucrats scowled. To wipe those nasty expressions off their faces, Sarah added, “He’s a wounded war veteran, too. Wounded and decorated.”