by Hall, Gerald
Untimely Excursions
Book #4 of the Yesterday’s War series
By Gerald L. Hall
Dedicated to my wife who is known to all as ‘Rev Bev’. She’s the good Shepherd that this old ‘sheepdog’ has been working together in love with for over twenty-four years. She has been and continues to be my ‘walking, talking miracle’.
Copyright Pending 2020, Gerald Hall
Image credits: Cover Art by Gerald Hall
Edited by: David Monhollen
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission by the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.
Prologue:
Cavill Astronautics Launch Site
Kalumburu, Western Australia
March 18, 1952
Doctor Werner von Braun watched from just outside the control bunker as his latest rocket design proceeded towards the launch pad onboard a large wheeled transport. This rocket was more than twice as large as the V-2 rocket that Werner had helped designed during the Second World War. Once the large rocket arrived at the large concrete launch pad, it was attached to a large hydraulic erector that lifted the rocket to an upright position.
Harold Cavill and his children were, once again, watching the preparations for the launch of von Braun’s latest technological wonder. They were standing next to Werner after having flown in that morning from Derby.
“Doctor, we all hope that the rocket will launch without any malfunctions this time. While the explosion shortly after launch was very exciting, my children and I would rather prefer to see your rocket go all the way into space, this time.” Harold told the German rocket scientist who had been working for Harold since very shortly after the end of the war in Europe.
“Herr Cavill, I am very confident that we will have a very successful launch this time. We have found and eliminated the last of the flaws that prevented other launches from achieving their goals. Like you and your children, I want to see my rocket fly all the way to reach its destination as well.”
“How much longer before your rocket is due to launch, Doctor?” Harold asked, all four of his children eagerly standing right behind him.
“Our launch countdown has less than ten minutes left to do. This will give us just enough time to get inside the safety of the control bunker here.”
“Of course. Come on, kids. We need to get inside now. We will still have an excellent view of the launch.”
“Sure, Dad.” Judith, the oldest immediately replied with a bright smile. She immediately led the others quickly down a set of stairs behind the bunker that led inside.
After Werner and Harold entered the bunker, a technician immediately closed the structure’s heavy steel door behind them.
“You have very spirited but polite Kinder, Herr Cavill. I imagine that you are very proud of them. They all certainly appear to be very bright like yourself.”
“Yes, I am. All four of my children are very intelligent as well as being very well behaved. But they take after both of their parents in many ways. Actually, two of my children, Beatrice and James are very much like their mother. They are quite technically adept, of course. But they both want to become pilots and live life on the edge, I’m afraid.
My other two children, Judith and my oldest daughter Sarah are much more like me. Their aptitudes lend themselves more towards engineering and management.”
“Then they will enrich the world and humanity throughout their lives as their father has already done. Naturally, it is hard to keep our children safe from everything, I fear. All that we can do is prepare them for the dangers ahead, the best that you can.” Werner pleasantly responded.
The countdown towards launch quickly progressed until it was less than a minute remaining. Everyone in the launch bunker seemed to be on edge in one way or another. With a few seconds remaining, the rocket’s motor roared to life. When the clock reached zero, the launch pad’s hold-down clamps were released. The rocket began to slowly climb up into the sky. Cheering erupted from within the bunker as everything appeared to work well.
Harold could see his children intently watching the rocket ascend. It was as though they were all willing the rocket upward. It was as though they wanted the rocket to succeed even more than Doctor von Braun himself. The minutes after the rocket’s motors were first ignited seemed like an eternity until a technician inside the bunker announced that the rocket had successfully met all of its speed and altitude goals without any malfunctions.
Everyone breathed a sigh of relief with that announcement. Then Harold turned towards Werner and spoke.
“Congratulations, Doctor. It appears that you were able to pull it off finally without any problems.”
“Thank you, Herr Cavill. Of course, I did not do this all by myself. I had a great deal of help from many talented people here. Of course, this is only the beginning.” Werner insisted.
“Of course. Doctor von Braun, my next question is how long will it be before you will be able to launch artificial satellites into a useful orbit about the Earth?” Harold asked.
“Herr Cavill, I’m sure that we can launch a small payload into orbit with only a few modifications to this rocket now. I suppose the greater objective is launching a useful payload into orbit, isn’t it?”
“That is correct, Doctor. We will have to substantially increase the amount of mass that we can launch into orbit. I know that you dream of men into space and eventually to have them living on other worlds. You know that I share that dream also.”
“Give me another six months with the funding that you have provided so far, Herr Cavill. I will be able to launch at least two hundred kilograms into a one thousand kilometer orbit by then. I am sure that you will have a useful payload within that parameter by then for me to launch into space.
I have already started testing small multistage rockets. It will not take my team very long to build such a rocket with many proven components from the design that we launched successfully here.” Werner confidently declared.
“I’m sure that you will, Doctor. I look forward to seeing that. I’m sure that my children feel the very same way. But for now, we must leave now. We need to fly back to Derby shortly. I’m afraid that my business demands quite a bit of my time. ”
Chapter One:
The White House
Washington, D.C.
June 24, 1952
President Thomas E. Dewey stood behind his desk in the Oval Office and looked out through the window at the grounds of the White House. He had spent the past seven and a half years deconstructing much of what the previous Roosevelt administration had done in building a massive Federal Government apparatus. In doing this, President Dewey has shrunk substantially the size and scope of the Federal Government. Some of the social safety net programs were retained such as Social Security, in a modified form. But Dewey and many of his fellow Republicans wanted to get rid of any vestiges of socialism within the Federal Government. They had done much of this with the support of many Southern Democrats like John Nance Gardner who had opposed FDR on a variety of issues. This political coalition managed to defeat most of the attempts by the rest of the Democrat Party to preserve the core of Roosevelt’s New Deal and its socialist agenda.
But now, someone else had to be the standard bearer for the Republican Party in the 1952 Presidential elections, especially with the passage of the Twenty-Second Amendment which limited individuals to serving only two full terms as President. This Amendment was passed in the wake of the unprecedented three terms that FDR served in the White House. Conservative Republicans and De
mocrats alike did not want another ‘President for Life’.
His Vice-President, former Ohio Governor John W. Bricker was expected to run to succeed President Dewey. But Governor Robert Taft had been working hard on his own bid for the Republican nomination. Governor Taft had been a long-time political rival to President Dewey.
President Dewey was interrupted from his thoughts by a knock on the door. He turned to see it open for Vice-President Bricker to enter the Oval Office.
“Sir, I was wondering if you had a few moments to spare to talk?” Dewey’s Vice-President asked.
“I barely have time to breathe around here. But for you, I will make time. Your support has been extraordinarily helpful during some very challenging times, John.”
“Thank you, Sir. You’ve dodged a lot of slings and arrows coming from the Democrats over the course of the last eight years too. I don’t know if I could have survived all of that.”
“You will do just fine. I know that the primaries have already started. But I have a great deal of confidence in you.”
“Thank you, Sir. But Governor Taft is pushing pretty damned hard. He’s right on my heels in terms of delegate count. The convention next month is going to be very close, I’m afraid.”
“I know the feeling, John. Bob Taft was right on my heels too about eight years ago, as you remember.”
“Whoever wins the nomination and the election is going to be facing a lot of difficult issues, Sir. We’ve reduced our military strength about as far as we dare. In fact, the Army isn’t much larger than it was at the beginning of the war. The aviators of our new Air Force continue to ask for additional funding so that they can develop more of these new jet warplanes to match what the Germans are fielding. The Navy is close to its original strength, but except for the six newest battleships, the service’s capital ships are all aircraft carriers.”
“Well, almost all of the Navy’s ships larger than a destroyer are little more than ten years old. We didn’t have a whole lot of choice after Roosevelt’s debacle in the Western Pacific but to build more new warships, of course. But things could have been a lot worse if our surviving commanders didn’t pull a rabbit or three out of their hats. There is also what Churchill managed to accomplish. We really dodged a bullet with the old Soviet Union. I wouldn’t have believed the scale of mass murder that Stalin had perpetrated. Hitler’s death toll even paled in comparison to what Stalin did according to the intelligence that we obtained after the signing of the Armistice.”
“Churchill was certainly right to cut off aid to the Bolsheviks and to convince us to do the same. The Soviets and the Germans managed to bleed each other dry. Then, not long after they captured Moscow and killed Stalin, the German generals running things in Berlin suddenly decided to sue for peace. Something scared them, Sir.”
“As unlikely as it might seem, our people in Central Intelligence believe that a single man from Australia said something that scared the Germans very badly. This man is probably the wealthiest man in that entire country too. But what really scared me was when I learned that FDR’s old crony Harry Hopkins tried to sell the damned Bolsheviks a bunch of uranium ore behind the backs of our own military.
Now, the scientists working for our Defense Department are still arguing whether or not some sort of super bomb could be made using this uranium, but that fool Hopkins should have known better than to let the Soviets have even an ounce of the stuff. There were a lot of reports that came out after Harry Hopkin’s death from stomach cancer that claimed that he was either a sympathizer of the Soviets or that he was actually a Communist himself. Regardless of the reason for Harry Hopkins’ treachery, America and the rest of the world really were very lucky that his scheme was detected in time to stop it. We also managed to scoop up quite a few spies working for the Bolsheviks at the same time.”
“Yes, Sir. The resulting scandal had to be kept quiet because of the classified nature of the whole uranium issue though. Otherwise, FDR would probably have died in office from the sheer humiliation rather than us winning the following election.”
“Yes, there is that. But we have to not only be concerned about you winning the nomination. We have to get you past the general election in November as well. You can bet that the Democrats are going to try to convince the American people that we, the Republicans, don’t care about the common man. They will try to make a martyr out of FDR and claim that there is all kinds of surplus funding available to resume all of FDR’s old New Deal social welfare programs, especially now that the war is over.”
“Sir, if we go down that road again, we are going to build up so much debt that the American government will never be able to pay it all back. Just paying back the interest on the national debt will eat up so much of our spending that some really important programs will have to be cut. People will be hurt and our national security endangered. We can’t have that happen again.”
“That is one of the areas that you, I and Bob Taft all agree on. But can we get that message across to the American people. They need to know that massive deficits will not just hurt them, but those deficits will also hurt American children, grandchildren and even the great-grandchildren of this generation in the long run.”
“Yes, Mister President. But we all know that the American people can be very fickle, especially when one party has been in control for more than a couple of terms here in the White House. FDR’s extended presidency was clearly an aberration. It would best be considered more of a cult of personality towards him than a true reflection of his leadership and policies. It also coincided with one of the worst economic periods in our nation’s history. The fact that you and I are standing here right now is proof of this.”
“There are a lot of voters who are not happy about their government benefits being taken away from them though, Sir. They have mostly been blaming you, though Congress is also getting some of the blame as well.”
“I know. I have been trying my best to get Congress to pass legislation to help create more private sector jobs so that these people can be earning a paycheck instead of a government handout.”
“There are probably a few million Americans who appreciate your efforts, Sir. The problem that there are also several million more who only care about what the government can do for them. They are the ones who supported FDR and will probably not be voting for our party in November.”
A frustrated President Dewey turned and breathed an audible sigh for a moment before replying.
“The sad part is that I don’t know a single damned thing that I can do that will change their minds without destroying our budget and making things much worse for America in the long run. The rest of the world is not making things any easier on us. The Japanese attacks on the West Coast are still hurting our economy. They also showed that we cannot hide behind the oceans from the rest of the world either.”
“At least we were able to avert another international crisis when we got the British, French and Israelis to back off on their attempt to overthrow the Egyptian government over the issue of the Suez Canal.” Vice President Bricker noted.
“True, but the British and French still kept control of the canal. The anger in the Islamic world led to Turkey being taken over by an Islamist government. The Turks were already tilting in that direction anyway with their support of Egypt along with the support of Syria.” President Dewey explained.
“That’s true, Sir. The French certainly made the Turks pay dearly for that support though. The French used Barracuda torpedo bombers that they had purchased from the British to torpedo and sink that old German battlecruiser that had been turned over to the Turkish Navy during the First World War.
The daring of those French aviators operating from that aircraft carrier that was still half battleship made headlines for several days. I guess no one had figured that the French would dare replace all of the fighters aboard that ship with additional torpedo bombers. They wrecked that Turkish battlecruiser and half of the rest of the Turkish Navy that morning.”
“Africa and the Middle East are other areas of potential conflict. The Israelis have managed to firmly consolidate their hold on the Palestinian Mandate after the departure of the British. The Hashemite’s are not very happy, nor are the Syrians over the territory that they lost to the Israelis.” The President opined.
“They probably should not have tried to attack the Israelis in the first place, Sir. King Abdullah should not have listened to the Egyptians when they called upon all of the Arabs to attack Israel. He was damned lucky that the Israeli’s stopped at the west bank of the Jordan River and didn’t decide to drive all the way to Amman. Syria also got away with only losing the strategic terrain of the Golan Heights.”
“Lebanon seems to be getting along well enough with the Israelis, fortunately. It would be a shame to spoil the openness and beauty of Beirut with the destruction of a war.” President Dewey replied.
“The Israelis seem to be operating from a position of strength in the region, Sir. Their military is second to none in the area to start with. But what or who is providing them with the resources to build and maintain it is still unclear.”
“My Secretaries of State and Treasury tell me the same thing, though most of the Israeli military operates equipment of Australian design or is war-surplus from the various combatants in the European War. Israel is operating on a very thin financial base right now, but they are rapidly improving their own industrial base. Israel is no longer just a nation of deserts and olive farms.
We will just have to keep a close eye on events there. But I don’t want to make any commitments one way or another considering the players here. It’s not our fight and I want to keep it that way.” President Dewey firmly declared.
“Is that how we are going to treat Africa as well, Sir?”
“I certainly hope so. There are too many places there where there are no real good guys for us to support. We should just let people like the Belgians handle whatever they want to deal with. The South Africans and Rhodesians are doing well enough down on the southern tip of the continent.”