by James Philip
Dan knew the answer to that one.
“Because you’re amazing, honey!”
Gretchen lowered her eyes, opened her arms inviting him to rejoin her on the bed. Her husband needed no second invitation and presently they were close in each other’s arms.
“Daddy thinks the President is getting bad advice from the State Department about the Russian situation,” she whispered in Dan’s ear. “Fulbright’s people are afraid JFK will blow up the World again if they don’t finesse things first.”
The papers were full of stories about how SAC had ‘screwed the pouch’ in the October War and ‘missed all the big guns in the Kremlin’. The CIA was a laughing stock and for most of the last couple of months and TV, radio and newspaper commentators had been asking, not unreasonably in the circumstances, how ‘half the Red Army’ had survived the ‘war to end all wars’. For the mass of men and women on the street whose confidence in the vaunted US military machine had been shaken to the core by events in the Mediterranean, and the news of the invasion of Iran and Iraq the mood was gloomy; ever more America First.
However, perhaps the most corrosive thing was that increasingly, US citizens were growing accustomed to seeing their GIs on the streets of their hometowns, or fighting pitched battles with rebels and insurgents in Illinois, or in upstate New York, or carrying out house to house raids in downtown Boston or Houston every night on TV. Across the whole of the Deep South neighborhoods burned and clouds of tear gas wafted down rubble-strewn streets; and every fresh outbreak of violence, rioting, every shooting and every Civil Rights or Klan rally was broadcast on every channel. Worse, all this was happening against a political background in which competing sects within the House of Representatives were waging an unrelenting legislative guerrilla war against the Kennedy Administration, and an economic backdrop in which the great American commercial and industrial colossus was visibly lurching into exactly the sort of recession the savage – now partially reversed - Peace Dividend cutbacks of last year had been designed to avert.
It did not matter that the Union was nowhere near as on its knees as the jeremiads claimed, or that away from the flashpoints in the Deep South, and away from the bomb-damaged cities and that outside the Midwestern cauldron of Chicago life went on in an atmosphere of relative normality.
In some places it was still possible to pretend that there had been no Cuban Missiles War and that nothing had really changed. California was booming, Oregon was an island of tranquility, the whole American South West was relatively peaceful; Boston apart New England was calm and in the main, prosperous.
What had changed was something that had been previously ingrained in the American psyche; one sensed it every day and everywhere one went. The ‘can do, must do’ spirit of years gone by was neutered and people were instinctively defensive, insular, unwilling or unable to look beyond their own personal, local horizons. Insofar as anybody in the United States had ever been his or her brother’s or sister’s keeper, that day had passed; nothing, absolutely nothing was so guaranteed to alienate and frighten seven or eight of every ten voters as the suggestion that their President would ever again bet the nation’s survival on the spin of a thermonuclear coin. Whatever the underlying geopolitical imperatives most Americans had no idea why the US Navy was ‘propping up’ the British Empire in the Mediterranean; so far as most Americans were concerned the Russians could have every single drop of Middle Eastern oil if that was what it took to make peace, any kind of peace with the evil commie bastards.
“JFK doesn’t need to blow up the World again,” Dan thought out aloud. “We just need to back up the Brits in the Persian Gulf and eventually the Russians will come to their senses and back off...”
“What if they don’t? Back off, I mean?”
“We have to rescue the Brits, I suppose. Like we did at Malta...”
“And then what? We fight the Russians in Iraq or Iran? And anywhere else they want to take a shot at us?”
Dan hesitated. Gretchen was testing him, exploring the ground ahead of her next argument with somebody – other than her husband – who did not think the sun shone from one or other of her womanly orifices. This he knew and hugged her closer, wishing he never had to let her go again.
“What’s the alternative?” He prompted. “Okay, so the Soviets still have boots on the ground and a few hundred tanks. So what? We gave them a Hell of a beating and we’ve still got a Curtis LeMay’s B-52 wings and a whole bunch of brand new ICBMs in hardened silos in the Midwest. Don’t forget all our Polaris boats, either.”
Gretchen considered this.
“What if President isn’t prepared to use any of those missiles or aircraft or submarines again unless the Russians attack us first? I mean, attack us in such a big way here in the US that he’s got absolutely no choice but to shoot back? What if every time he thinks about October 27th sixty-two it completely freaks him out? What if Jack Kennedy doesn’t want any more blood on his hands, Dan?”
“We can’t let down the Brits.”
“We did before.”
Now Dan was confused.
“How did we do that?”
He had heard the crazy rumors. Heck, he was one of the junior counsels to Commission investigating the ‘Causes and Conduct’ of the October War! He had heard more crazy things in the last couple of months than he had heard in his whole life, and or read in comic books as a kid! He spent his working day, every ten to twelve hour slog processing documentation and taking witness depositions ahead of the – repeatedly delayed – first sitting of Chief Justice Earl Warren’s first public evidential session. Everybody had their own pet theory about practically everything to do with the war. As for the wild stories that were doing the rounds about stuff that happened in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean in the lead up to the Battle of Washington in December last year well, that was a hole other kettle of fish! He did not have any idea where to start deciphering any of that particular witch’s brew! Some of those tall tales were so dark they were positively Machiavellian!
“We never let down the Brits,” he objected, wondering even as the words escaped his lips if he really believed that any more.
“Didn’t we? What if it was true that we hit the Russians without telling the Brits?”
“The President wouldn’t have done that.”
“No? We bombed British ships and bases last year?”
“Yeah, but that was traitors in the line of command...”
Gretchen nuzzled his shoulder and bit him playfully.
“Owww...”
“The Administration never gave anybody a straight answer about what had actually happened,” she reminded him.
“All the guys responsible were probably killed at the Pentagon during the rebellion,” Dan argued, he thought reasonably.
“Which was all very convenient, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, but...”
Gretchen pushed him and Dan lay on his back.
In a moment she had moved on top of him and she was looking into his eyes.
“I hate this place too,” she confessed. “An apartment somewhere in the city would be perfect. Somewhere within walking distance of the Department of Justice, somewhere of our own; I happen to know just the place.”
She answered his next question without making him ask it.
“I’ll deal with Daddy.”
Dan hugged her.
“Did I tell you I love you, lately.”
“No, and that was very remiss of you!”
Chapter 10
Sunday 7th June 1964
First Army Headquarters, Manhattan, Illinois
The Corps of Engineers had begun fortifying the command complex in January soon after Major General Colin Powell Dempsey had taken command of the miscellaneous infantry and mechanized units then comprising the ‘Chicago Front’.
Dempsey’s first act in command had been to concentrate his scattered resources into highly mobile battle groups, institute ‘trip-wire’ picket lines separating
the rebel-held northern two-thirds of the shattered city from the less damaged southern third, and begun rotating his by then exhausted men into warm, dry winter quarters knowing that the ice and snow would do his army’s work for it – literally freezing the front lines in place – until mid March. By the early spring the supply and ordnance depots at Gary Indiana, and around Joliet, a few miles north east of the small village of Manhattan, had been fully stocked ready for Operation Rectify involving simultaneous ground and air attacks designed to encircle and starve out the three main ‘enemy’ strong points in the wrecked city.
Then forty-eight hours before Operation Rectify kicked off – with three hundred tanks and ninety thousand troops moving up to the start lines - Dempsey had been sacked; the politicians had got cold feet and while US Army and Marine Corps units, Air Force squadrons, and half-a-dozen old destroyers hurriedly pulled out of reserve and sent down the St Lawrence Seaway to the Great Lakes waited for the postponed orders to go into action, the insurgency had blossomed out of west and north Chicago and spread like a virus. Thus far the contagion had seeded itself west as far as Rockford, and north along the coast of Lake Superior to swallow Milwaukee and at least five thousand square miles of southern Wisconsin.
Weak and demoralized National Guard garrisons had melted away before the terrifyingly well organized tide of ragged ‘soldiers’ sweeping out of the ruins of the Windy City in captured tanks, armored personnel carriers, trucks, pickups and cars. Across Wisconsin as many as a dozen towns and hamlets had already fallen to insurgents who had been living in the Chicago refugee camps built along Interstates 41, 43, 90 and 94. It was as if the whole eastern half of the state had been harboring exactly the same poison as the wrecked suburbs of the city all along. The catastrophe had broken without warning like a tsunami falling upon a sleeping coastal town; the seizure of Milwaukee was the headline news but militarily what was happening in the countryside was a disaster of barely unquantifiable dimensions. Several Army depots and two small air bases had already fallen to the insurgents virtually intact and the rebellion which had had the character of a mass criminal conspiracy the previous fall, now resembled a nihilistic, remorseless crusade conquering ground hand over fist in whichever direction it turned.
In retrospect the failure to attack the rebels before they broke out of their winter strongholds had been a monumental blunder. That had been the last chance to contain the uprising within the boundaries of the city; it had been lost and now, a cursory look at the developing situation on the maps in First Army’s operations bunker documented a humiliating rout with towns falling like dominoes before the onrush of the horde.
The whole thing beggared credulity; even now the Army had practically no idea who or what it was fighting. That the ‘who’ or the ‘what’ was threatening to run rampant across hundreds, thousands of square miles of Illinois and Wisconsin, that it seemed capable of materializing out of nowhere, striking and disappearing into the landscape at will behind US lines was simply an adjunct to the greater, all-consuming nightmare.
The berserkers coming at the soldiers manning the barricades or hunkered down in hastily dug trenches sometimes wore red crosses on their chests, more often than not a man, or a woman, emerged from a crowd of civilians with a gun or knife or a grenade. Even where a garrison survived, or mounted a rearguard, blocking defense, the night rang with gunshots and in the morning the bodies of men and women lay intertwined in a bloody dance of death on the ground. An ambush could happen anywhere, at any time.
Two battalions of the 3rd Marines had been flown in to reinforce the 32nd Infantry Brigade at Madison, eighty miles west of Milwaukee but it was only a matter of time before the rebels outflanked the city’s hurriedly thrown up defenses.
The Air Force was flying round the clock ground support missions; but how did you fight an enemy who never concentrated except in the hours before an attack? Any kind of competent commander could lose a whole Army out in that wild country and most of the time the Air Force had no idea what it was actually bombing.
The situation was so dire that elements of the 101st and 106th Airborne stood ready to drop into Madison; if the town fell there was nothing to stop the rebels surging all the way north to the Canadian border. Although Minneapolis was still calm the panic had already started in Rochester Minnesota, two hundred miles north east of Madison.
Contagion...
It was a thing sixty-two year old General George Henry Decker had never imagined – not in his worst nightmares – could possibly happen on American soil. What was happened in Illinois and Wisconsin was a thing that had not happened on American soil since 1865. Civil society had disintegrated in the ruins of Chicago, the traditional loyalties to surviving institutions of public authority had been subverted, become warped by the horror of the situation, and in the absence of strong leadership and – self-evidently – a will to use the required level of military force to rectify matters, it was now apparent that whole communities had gone over to the enemy. In Milwaukee and elsewhere National Guard units had deserted, defected, or mutinied. Because of political meddling and indecision the Chicago Front had become a text book example, an object lesson in ‘too little too late’.
The disgraceful Federal neglect of the ramshackle refugee camps scattered across Illinois and Wisconsin had - with the wisdom of twenty-twenty hindsight – been perfect breeding grounds for rebellion. There were stories of whole camps turning on camp administrations, murdering and torturing government staff and local police detachments. The inmates of several camps had stormed into nearby towns in the Wisconsin hinterland and begun to loot and rape, exact their revenge on the well-fed, fat, uncaring locals who had watched them – the dispossessed, the damaged and the sick, the new dregs of society – suffer in silent indifference. Civil order had not so much broken down in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois as it had ceased to exist. Other than where isolated Army or Marine garrisons still held out, there was no law, no order, no civic decency...
Decker was feeling every one of his sixty years.
The Chief of Staff of the United States Army had thought he was done with soldiering two years ago, having retired on 30th September 1962. He had served his country for the best part of four decades – joining the Army straight out of college back in 1924 – in peace and war and he was tired. Nevertheless, when General Harold ‘Johnny’ Johnson was killed in a terrorist atrocity in England in April his President had asked him to dust off his old uniform and step up to the plate. Notwithstanding that there were younger, possibly abler men in the service, when his commander-in-chief spoke Decker had returned, somewhat wearily, to the colors.
Unfortunately, from what he had seen and heard lately that was the last time the President had made up his mind about anything to do with practically anything. Despite Decker’s strident calls to reinforce the ‘Chicago Front’ in early May the Administration had been bleeding First Army dry right up until the last week when the lid had finally blown off the pot. Once Operation Rectify had been indefinitely postponed units assigned to it had been drawn off for firefighting duties in the Deep South, to reinforce the police in the northern big cities, and bizarrely, given its America First prognostications, ahead of a planned effort to re-enforce the post-October War skeleton US garrisons on Okinawa, in the Marianas and in the Philippines.
Colin Dempsey had had ninety thousand combat troops under his command in late March, currently there were less than thirty thousand ‘effectives’ in First Army’s sector of operations extending from southern Illinois to the western borders of Iowa and Wisconsin.
Decker had attempted to veto each and every dilution of First Army’s strength in the Midwest. He would have resigned his commission had not Curtis LeMay told him – face to face in no uncertain terms, as was Old Iron Pants’s way – that: ‘George, if you think we’re in the shit now; what do you think is going to happen if we start passing the ball before we get tackled?’
LeMay was a ball-breaker but he was right.
The only real question was whether the Union would survive long enough to anoint his successor. From where George Decker stood November’s general election was so far distant as to belong to some almost inconceivable future epoch.
Contagion.
When Decker had retired less than two years ago the US Army was, on paper at least, sixteen divisions strong. Substantial elements of three of those divisions remained in Korea but forces elsewhere in the Pacific had been pared to the bone by the nonsensical Peace Dividend cuts of the previous year; leaving the Marine Corps to hold the line in Japan, Okinawa, Guam, Saipan and the Philippines. The argument was - or had been until the Red Army poured over the border in Iran two months ago - that the Soviets had bombed half of China back into the Stone Age and SAC had handed out the same medicine to the Russian Far East, so North Korea apart, the ‘threat vector’ to Japan and the US’s other ‘island aircraft carriers’ in the region was minimal. In Europe the Army had lost the equivalent of six fully equipped divisions, not to mention numerous other assets then and since in Turkey, the Balkans, Italy and of course, the United Kingdom.
The previous year’s slicing and dicing of the Army’s budget appropriation had at one point reduced its North American-based manpower to approximately sixty-one thousand effectives, excluding National Guard units. In practice the 2nd and 3rd Marine Divisions, both based ‘at home’ had added twenty-three thousand men to the Army’s roster. In ‘normal times’ this would hardly have been any cause for concern but in a scenario in which the US Army was suddenly the Federal Government’s police force and constantly fighting fires – including pacifying the area around Washington DC and ‘containing’ Chicago, for example – every staff exercise which had ever been conducted talked about troop requirements in the hundreds of thousands, not tens.