by James Philip
LeMay was silent for several seconds.
Now the Commander-in-Chief was telling him how he should not his job!
Privately, he regarded deploying the B-52s of the 319th Bomb Wing based at Grand Forks, North Dakota, on a mission half-way around the World to operate from makeshift Soviet bases in southern Russia as a paper, war games exercise. He had instructed the Staff to undertake the preparatory work but realistically, right now he needed the eighteen aircraft of the 93rd and 20th Bomb Squadrons of the 319th to spell the aircraft of the 5136th and 100th Bomb Groups committed to Operation Rolling Thunder in the next few days. Sending those aircraft to the other side of the World was...insane.
He had warned the President that he could have Operation Rolling Thunder in the Midwest or he could have the cockamamie ‘Russian operation’ dreamed up by the idiots at the State Department. He did not have enough aircraft to maintain a viable first strike capability, maintain the momentum of Operation Rolling Thunder and to deploy a separate task force to distant foreign bases as yet unsurveyed by his people.
It was one thing for the President’s National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy to speculate that the missiles of the Minutemen Squadrons and the Polaris fleet could ‘temporarily fill any capability gap’ in the US’s nuclear defenses, but LeMay had no intention of deploying his B-52s to Soviet territory. Quite apart from the inherent impracticality of such a deployment without weeks and months of planning and the pre-positioning of personnel, spares, munitions and hundreds – more likely thousands – of tons of the right quality and specification Avgas ahead of the arrival of the bombers; he did not trust the Russians not to shoot down or impound his aircraft. Moreover, sending the 319th Bomb Group and a squadron of KC-135 tankers – some of which would have to be based in Russia – violated his personal cardinal rule of command; never give a man an order you know that he might disobey.
LeMay had had order his boys to lay waste Wisconsin, to wage war on fellow Americans. Now his President wanted him to order the same men to – if things went wrong – wage war on the British forces in the Middle East.
“The Soviets don’t believe we have the balls to pull the trigger if the British refuse to peacefully disengage in the Gulf,” Fulbright said grimly. “The Russians can’t actually see the Kitty Hawk cruising a hundred miles out to sea. A dozen B-52s flying over the battlefield will, if necessary, send an unambiguous message to all parties in the region.”
Curtis LeMay was nothing if not a practical man.
“What happens if the British call our bluff?”
“They won’t.”
“They might,” LeMay grunted. “Then what? You want me to order my boys to bomb them. The Brits? Jeez, I fought a goddam war side by side with those people not so long ago! Remember?”
Jack Kennedy stirred in his chair.
“General, if it comes to it I will personally issue the attack order. Your conscience will be clear.”
“What about Admiral Bringle’s conscience, sir?”
“Admiral Bringle is the man on the spot. I will not second guess the man on the spot. Besides, he already has his orders.”
LeMay shut his eyes, shook his head.
“Bringle already has orders requiring him to use whatever force he deems appropriate to separate the warring parties in the region, sir,” the former bomber supremo reminded his President. “I told you at the time that those orders were promulgated that we were making a bad mistake. Now you’re asking me to send,” he corrected himself, “ordering me to prepare to send B-52s into action not against the Soviets but potentially, the Brits?”
“Yes,” Jack Kennedy said dully. “We cannot let the Soviets over run the oilfields of the southern Gulf. That is a given, General. Nevertheless, the Administration’s policy is that, notwithstanding we are confronted by Soviet aggression in the region, that our vital short, medium and long-term strategic interests are best served by doing whatever it takes to avert a second nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union. Avoiding another nuclear war trumps all other considerations. Yes, like you I entertain the most severe moral qualms about this; but no, I am not prepared to compromise. We will not allow the British to drag us into another World War.”
LeMay looked to Fulbright, said nothing.
“I need to know if I can I rely on you to alert the 319th Bomb Wing, General?” Jack Kennedy asked.
The ranking military officer in the United States hesitated.
It did not matter that he thought what he was being ordered to do was just plain…wrong.
He had taken the oath.
The President was his Commander-in-Chief.
It would take at least fifteen days – assuming the full cooperation of the Soviet authorities - to put the necessary facilities in place in Russia to enable the first six 319th Bomb Group B-52s to operate over Iraq.
The way things were looking in the Persian Gulf that would probably be too late to make much difference. His best intelligence was that the Red Army would be on the northern shores of the Gulf and that Abadan Island would be invested by then.
Separating the warring parties might by then to be academic; with the Soviets victorious on land and the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force driven back to their Saudi Arabian bases.
LeMay suspected that this was the scenario the President and his Secretary of State actually envisaged playing out in the coming weeks, and that the commitment to deploy the 319th Bomb Group was window dressing for the benefit of the Russians.
The trouble was that wishful thinking was a very, very bad way to conduct foreign policy, and a potentially catastrophic way to plan military action.
When LeMay spoke it was with a heavy heart.
“Yes, sir,” he grunted. “The 319th will be alerted for operations in the Middle East as soon as I leave this place.”
Chapter 45
Thursday 2nd July 1964
Washington, District of Columbia
The heavily defended convoy carrying Dr Martin Luther King, the leading members of the Civil Rights Movement, their family members and their friends and ‘guest’ marchers halted in the grounds around the southern bend of the US Marine Corps Memorial Circuit on the western bank of the Potomac. Although it was still only mid-morning it was a glorious, hot, cloudless day and the ranks of Marines, Army Rangers, National Guardsmen and policemen were already sweating.
A phalanx of pressmen and photographers surged forward.
Camera’s fired like a volley of musketry.
Miranda Sullivan stepped down from her bus and surveyed the faded greenery of the park around her. Today the March passed the nation’s most hallowed ground, the cemetery where the dead of its wars were buried in the parkland of what had once been Robert E. Lee’s mansion.
With the entrance to the Arlington National Cemetery the marchers would turn to the east to cross the Arlington Memorial Bridge over the Potomac, crossing from Virginia into the District of Columbia. On the eastern bank of the river the great throng, perhaps as many as fifty or sixty thousand people presently choking the parks and roads bordering the Potomac side of Arlington, would stream around both flanks of the Lincoln Memorial, down both sides of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, past the World War II Memorial and the great obelisk in memory of George Washington to take possession of the recently re-opened National Mall all the way up to the steps of the scaffolding-shrouded US Capitol Building.
Most commentators predicted that one in every two Washingtonians who had ‘stuck it out’ since the fighting in December, or who had since returned to the city – now the site of the biggest single reconstruction project on the planet – would join the crowds in and around the Capitol.
Miranda viewed the sweating soldiers and policemen thoughtfully.
There had been isolated incidents, attacks on groups of marchers, shots fired and over a hundred people injured in the March thus far; but to everybody’s astonishment no deaths, and no violence on the scale of anything routinely seen in Mississippi, Alabama and elsewhere in the
South most weekends. But on this penultimate ‘marching day’ the caravanserai of the Civil Rights Movement had come to Washington and in two days time Dr King would lead his people up Broad Street South to City Hall in Philadelphia.
Today was the first of the two ‘big’ marches.
“Well, Miss Sullivan,” Ivan Allen, the Mayor of Atlanta remarked after turning to offer his wife a helping hand down from the bus, “we seem to have a another fine day for marching!”
Miranda nodded.
“I’m sure Dr King is right when he says a greater power is looking after us all,” she suggested, more in hope than conviction.
Over on the Arlington bank of the Potomac there were few signs of the fighting which had destroyed half the city a little less than seven months ago. However, across the river savage battles had raged around the Lincoln Memorial and on both sides of the National Mall, the great buildings of the Smithsonian had been systematically looted by the rebels – the government claimed by ‘criminal gangs’ - and later gutted by fire as the Marines had had to go room by room flushing out fanatical ‘stay behind’ suicide squads. The December fighting had spread into the streets and blocks beyond the museums of the Mall, and although a valiant defense by a combined National Guard and Washington PD force had kept the rebels out of the US Capital Bazooka rounds and petrol bombs had started fires which had at one stage threatened to consume the northern wing of the great structure.
Louise Allen, the Mayor of Atlanta’s wife, had done her best to engage Miranda in conversation on the trip down from Baltimore that morning. The ‘VIP marchers’ had been put up in Army and Navy bases overnight in between the last three ‘march days’.
Miranda had been unusually tongue-tied, too wrapped up in her own thrall of remembrance to be her normal, loquacious self.
She quirked a hesitant smile at Ivan Allen.
“I wish I had your faith, sir,” she apologized. “I think the war has split us – well, people of my generation – into two camps; those with and those without faith. There’s no room for anything in between anymore.”
The Mayor of Atlanta smiled.
“There are many kinds of faith, Miss Sullivan,” he rejoined gently. “You and I are here because we have faith in the rightness of our cause, because we believe in something higher than our own personal interest. We believe that we can be better individually, and as a people. And,” he guffawed softly, “we both believe in Dr King.”
Miranda nodded.
The crowd around her suddenly parted.
Martin Luther King shook hands with his friend Ivan Allen. The leader of the movement’s wife, Coretta exchanged kisses with Louise Allen, and then pausing to size up Miranda for a moment, smiled before enveloping her in an embrace. Dr King was more circumspect, he shook Miranda’s hand with something akin to solemnity.
“Dwayne died because he dreamed of this day,” he said, gripping her hand in his and looking her in the eye. “Today and on Saturday, we change history, Miranda.”
Miranda had very nearly swooned the first time she had met Martin Luther King. He was – literally – like no other man she had ever met. It seemed almost cheap to call whatever he had ‘magnetism’, or even ‘animal magnetism’. The word ‘presence’ did him scant justice. The man was simply magical; when he walked into a room that room became his room. It was hardly surprising women threw themselves at him. It was not that he was overwhelmingly handsome – he was but in an impressive way, not the superficial movie star way of so many of her parents friends and associates in Hollywood – but more in the timbre of his voice, the empathy in his eyes and the way he seemed capable of effortlessly infusing one with a belief in the rightness of things.
Miranda had come to terms with her prom night infatuation with King.
To be in the man’s thrall was only natural.
Soon the whole World would be under his spell.
Miranda lost herself in the man’s gaze.
“I will always be there for you,” she heard herself saying.
Chapter 46
Thursday 2nd July 1964
Map Room, US Navy HQ, Camden, New Jersey
Curtis LeMay stormed into the subterranean hub of the US Navy’s worldwide operations room in a Biblical rage. The 5136th Bomb Wing had lost two B-52s overnight and reports were coming in about another ‘blue on blue’ screw up which had wiped out a company of the 3rd Marines at Eau Claire, the last blocking position along Interstate 94 between the rebels and the bridges across the Mississippi at Minneapolis.
It was early afternoon on a scorching day and already there were confirmed accounts of organized and armed bands of ‘rioters’ attacking the ‘March on Philadelphia’ in the National Mall in Washington, of shots being fired and worse, the big networks had finally got their acts together in refusing to permit military censorship of the horrific pictures now coming out of DC.
And twenty minutes ago he had been handed a crazy message sheet about a new, potentially monumental FUBAR coming out of the Persian Gulf.
“What’s going on in the fucking Gulf?” He demanded of Admiral David McDonald, the Chief of Naval Operations. His tone was very much that of a man asking: ‘And what fine mess have you gotten me into now!”
The other man had been leaning over the global map table with his hands resting on its surface. Slowly, very slowly her straightened, shot his cuffs and took a deep breath. The blond Georgian had the look of a man about to commence his lonely walk to the scaffold.
“Carrier Division Seven has engaged ships of the Australian, British and New Zealand Persian Gulf Squadron. Things are unclear at present. Specifically, whether the engagement is ongoing and or,” he shrugged, tight-lipped, “all or part of the ABNZ force has been destroyed.”
Curtis LeMay came to a staggering halt two paces away from the Navy man. For perhaps the first – and only - time in his adult life at that moment a five year old child wielding a very small feather could have floored the rambunctious veteran airman with a simple waft of his downy weapon.
He regarded the CNO with frank disbelief for several seconds.
“What...” He muttered, his lower jaw momentarily hanging slackly.
McDonald took a deep breath; around him staffers were shrinking back into the shadows of the Map Room.
“Responding to the British adopting a threatening operational posture,” he explained, clearly not really believing – or rather, not wanting to believe - what he was actually saying. “Carrier Division Seven engaged the ABNZ battle group based around the carrier HMS Centaur...”
LeMay was tempted to ask somebody to kick him.
This had to be a bad dream.
He needed to wake up!
But David McDonald was still talking.
The problem was that hardly any of the words coming out of his mouth made sense.
“We are also receiving confirmed reports of nuclear detonations over central Iraq...”
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs felt like he had been jabbed with a cattle prod. Suddenly, he had shaken off his brief incredulity like a bear shaking off the freezing waters of the river in which he has been hunting migrating Salmon. When next he spoke it was as himself, fully in control, The Big Cigar, the man who had talked about bombing the Soviet Union back into the Stone Age.
“Who used nukes? Was it us?”
McDonald shook his head.
“No, sir.”
Okay, so it was the British!
The Russians did a lot of dumb things but they were not about to drop nukes on their own territory.
LeMay’s mind immediately turned to specifics.
“Has the President been informed?”
“Yes, sir. All incoming command signals are being copied to the White House Situation Room in real time.”
LeMay joined the Chief of Naval Operations to study the ‘table’.
“What else has gone wrong?” He demanded brusquely.
When the shit hit the fan something else always went wrong.
> “Kitty Hawk has sustained underwater damage.”
LeMay had mistakenly imagined he had got a grip.
Now he exploded: “How the fuck does the biggest carrier in the World sustain ‘underwater damage’ in a fight with some pissant little World War Two flat top a quarter of its size, David?”
“I don’t know,” the CNO confessed angrily.
Curtis LeMay’s entourage was hovering in the background keen to keep well out of the line of fire.
Their chief looked over his shoulder.
“Send to Grand Forks,” he barked. “The 319th is to go to DEFCON TWO.”
He forced himself to slow down.
This was what had happened on the night of the October War; everything had seemed to be calming down and then things had started moving faster and faster...
“Is Carrier Division Seven still actively engaged?” He asked coolly, sternly in command without a trace of anger.
“Possibly, sir. We’re waiting on reports from Kitty Hawk’s airborne early warning and control birds confirming ground zeros for the two suspected nukes...”
“Just two? Over central Iraq?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Air bursts?”
“Probably, why?”
Curtis LeMay sighed.
“We supplied the Brits several one megaton bombs before the October War for their Blue Streak missile program. Airburst those eggs at the right altitude they’d put out big EMPs. Maybe big enough to take down the Soviets’ communications net across the whole of Iraq for several hours.”
McDonald was still not on the same wavelength as the airman.
This was entirely understandable given that he was wholly preoccupied unraveling the ongoing conundrum of why exactly the Kitty Hawk and her escorts had elected to swat a part of the ABNZ Persian Gulf Squadron into oblivion. A couple of A-4 Skyhawks circling overhead would have immediately curtailed the Centaur’s flight operations; and any one of Kitty Hawk’s screening cruisers or destroyers could – at any time in the last twenty-four hours – have sailed up to the British carrier and basically persuaded it to stand down.