The probabilities were a hundred to one that some flight of our own bombers, off course somewhere, over California or New York or Alaska—anywhere—had been mistaken for enemy planes. It was a thought that immediately, or soon, Hashed through the minds of some millions of city dwellers who picked up telephones all over U.S.A. and heard the two words: Condition Yellow.
With the skies above the continent crossed and crisscrossed by American flights, how could they be sure? Why wouldn’t spotters be liable to error? After all, there hadn’t been any sign of hostility whatever on the enemy’s part.
Even men at the top of military and Government intelligence agencies—men “cleared” to know all the known facts—hesitated. There had been nothing from behind the Iron Curtain to indicate the assembly of long-range planes, the gassing up, the bombing up, the vast number of activities required to launch a “surprise” attack. If this was “it,” the experts thought almost as one man, the Soviets had outdone the Japs in their surprise onslaught on Pearl.
The experts, however, reacted dutifully. Others did not.
In cities on the West Coast, the East Coast, and in the South and the Middle West, hundreds of thousands of ordinary persons, men and women, ready for Christmas, thinking the world on the verge of assured and eternal peace, decided for themselves. They were not as well indoctrinated in the meaning of duty as the professionals. It had to be an error, these myriads thought-and went back to lunch, to the TV set, to mowing the lawn in Miami and shoveling snow in Detroit.
Not Henry.
When his brother-in-law came into the hall and said, “Something wrong? You’re ghost-white!” Henry smiled and nodded.
“Maybe, Jim. Look. Don’t say anything to the women.
Ask Chuck to step in, willya?”
Charles came. “Lord, Dad! What’s wrong?”