CATHERINE
Washington: 1945-1946
11
On the morning of May 7, 1945, at Rheims, France, Germany surrendered unconditionally
to the Allies. The thousand-year reign of the Third Reich had come to an end. Those
insiders who knew of the crippling devastation at Pearl Harbor, those who had watched
Dunkirk narrowly miss going into history as England’s Waterloo, those who had
commanded the RAF and knew how helpless London’s defenses would have been against
an all-out attack by the Luftwaffe: All these people were aware of the series of miracles
that had brought victory to the Allies—and knew by what a narrow margin it had missed
going the other way. The powers of evil had almost emerged triumphant, and the idea was
so preposterous, so contrary to the Christian ethic of Right triumphing and Evil
succumbing, that they turned away from it in horror, thanking God and burying their
blunders from the eyes of posterity in mountains of files marked TOP SECRET.
The attention of the free world turned now to the Far East. The Japanese, those short,
nearsighted comic figures, were bloodily defending every inch of land they held, and it
looked as though it was going to be a long and costly war.
And then on August 6, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The destruction
was beyond belief. In a few short minutes, most of the population of a major city lay dead,
victims of a pestilence greater than the combined wars and plagues of all the Middle Ages.
On August 9, three days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped, this time on
Nagasaki. The results were even more devastating. Civilization had finally reached it
finest hour; it was able to achieve genocide that could be calculated at the rate of x number
of millions of persons per second. It was too much for the Japanese, and on September 2,
1945, on the battleship Missouri, General Douglas MacArthur received the unconditional
surrender of the Japanese Government. World War II was ended.
For one long moment when the news was flashed, the world held its breath and then
let out a grateful heartfelt cheer. Cities and hamlets around the globe were filled with
hysterical parades of people celebrating the end of the war to end all wars to end all wars
to end all wars…
The following day, through some magic that he would never explain to Catherine,
Bill Fraser was able to get a telephone call through to Larry Douglas on an island
somewhere in the South Pacific. It was to be a surprise for Catherine. Fraser asked her to
wait in her office for him so that they could go to lunch together. At 2:30 in the afternoon,
she buzzed Bill on the intercom system.
“When are you going to feed me?” she demanded. “It’ll be time for dinner soon.”