by James Philip
Chapter 60
Friday 7th February 1964
The Communications Room, Corpus Christi College, Oxford
“We have clearly been attacked by former Soviet weapons most likely based in the Soviet Union,” Jack Kennedy drawled.
Margaret Thatcher was tempted to quibble with the use of the inclusive pronoun ‘we’, but thought better of it. She reminded herself that she was speaking with a born again Atlanticist, a man who had rediscovered his defining political and personal convictions in recent weeks. Before the October War he had believed that an attack against an ally of the United States of America was an attack against them all. Now he was restating this sacred article of faith.
“We must retaliate,” the President of the United States of America declared without joy.
“I agree, Mister President,” the Angry Widow replied. “But...”
“For all we know there may be new strikes against our heartlands at any time,” Jack Kennedy remarked.
“There may be,” she admitted. “But,” she repeated, “what I was about to say is that I’d have thought that if the enemy was going to go for the jugular, as it were, he would have done so with his first rather than in a subsequent wave of attacks?”
The man at the other end of the line in a bunker beneath Alexandria had asked himself, and his advisers exactly that question.
“What do your people in England say?”
“Like your advisors they are divided, Mister President.” She paused, looked around the crowded room at the pinched, worried faces and eyes of the radio technicians and her inner circle of Ministers. “However,” she qualified, “I am very clear as to my personal stance on retaliation. Having considered the scientific evidence submitted to and by the three Governments; The USA, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom in the years before the October War, to the negotiations we all hoped would result in a general agreement to ban the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons,” she took a deep breath. She was not in the least worried if the President of the United States of America, his advisors or any of her own close colleagues took umbrage to be reminded of inconvenient facts which she felt to be paramount. “Having reconsidered that evidence it is clear to me that if very many more nuclear weapons – particularly of the larger types that we retain in our stockpiles – are detonated in the atmosphere life itself on our planet will be threatened, and perhaps, ultimately doomed. Yes, we have the capacity to ‘carpet bomb’ every inch of territory we suspect that the evil stain of Red Dawn has touched or holds, but at what price Mister President?”
“Prime Minister, we are at war.”
“I know we are at war, Jack,” Margaret Thatcher remarked, employing the President’s Christian name without thinking it at all odd. Whatever their temperamental, ideological, and emotional differences they were united she believed, in a great common purpose. “Goodness knows how many of my people have perished in the last days and weeks. But you and I have a higher duty than simply to look to the good, or to the survival of our own people. If I learned one thing from my predecessor, Ted Heath, it was that there is a greater cause to which we must all aspire if we are to rebuild a World fit for our children to inherit. Do we honestly want to so poison our World that every second child is stillborn, to so poison everything that we risk breeding a new, mutated version of the human species?”
Jack Kennedy said nothing.
“Even before the war the levels of Strontium-90 and other isotopes directly related to the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, for example Iodine-131 and 133, were many times higher in our children’s bodies than before 1945. Presently, radiation levels in the United Kingdom are routinely two to four times higher than pre-October War. Radioactive isotopes that accumulate in bone marrow and the thyroid gland have half-lives measured in tens of years. We are have already embarked upon a potentially catastrophic millennia-long physiological experiment in living with levels of radiation that previously,” again she snatched a breath of air, “short-term exposure to which would have permanently disqualified any worker in the nuclear industry from ever working with radioactive substances again. Many of our people already live with a visceral terror of the invisible poison in the air we breathe. Frankly, does anyone really know many more bombs we can let off before that air which we must all breathe is blighted forever?”
“Margaret,” Jack Kennedy sighed. “If we allow our enemies to prevail we have no right to survive.”
“Jack,” she responded, hearing the sickness in his heart. “I don’t know the truth of what happened that that day fifteen months ago. What I have learned in my short time in ‘the hot seat’ is that in the final analysis one must do what one believes to be right. I am sure you did what you thought to be the right thing. That was then and this is now. You and I have a choice. Either together we unleash the fires of Hell on our foes; or we draw a line in the sand.” She waited for the man to stop her. In the silence she drew strength. “Or we make a statement for all time that in the heat of battle we had the moral courage to abjure the use of nuclear weapons for the greater good of all Mankind.”
“And what if a second wave of ICBMs rains down on our surviving cities?”
“Then we shall walk towards perdition together, Mister President,” Margaret Thatcher declared, in a trenchantly strident tone that Boadicea of yore would have recognised. “But wouldn’t you rather march with me towards the high moral ground? Wouldn’t you prefer to be able to look your children in the eye in ten or twenty years and say that ‘I did what I knew to be right!’ on that dreadful day in February 1964?”
Chapter 61
Friday 7th February 1964
HMS Talavera, 44 miles SW of Malta
Captain ‘D’ had informed Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher that he planned to take HMS Scorpion under the burning super carrier’s stern so as to add ‘my fire hoses to those of the Enterprise’s own fire fighters’. He had cordially inquired whether the captain of the Battle class destroyer ‘was game’ to ‘join Scorpion in the endeavour?’
It had never occurred to Peter Christopher to hesitate for a moment.
‘I’ll be right beside you, sir!’
Damage control parties under the direction of the Executive Officer, Miles Weiss, the Master at Arms, Spider McCann, and his new right hand man, Petty Officer Jack Griffin had hauled hoses forward onto the fo’c’sle, and threaded another virtually to the cross-brace of the towering lattice foremast. Every available man seemed to be on deck wrestling with the snaking canvass monsters, braced for the moment when every pump on the ship went to work.
The heat of the raging inferno on the USS Enterprise’s flight deck began to burn unprotected skin at two hundred feet. Only men in full anti-flash balaclavas, fire-proofed overalls and clumsy asbestos mittens could venture onto the bridge or further forward. Other men ducked behind the superstructure as Talavera to port, and Scorpion to starboard nosed slowly under the overhanging maelstrom.
The carrier was steaming slowly into the wind at around seven knots to stop the fire blowing down the length of her eleven hundred feet flight deck. Incredibly, helicopters were shuttling to and from the stricken USS Long Beach, where the cruiser slowly foundered some ten miles to the south. With fires blazing out of control on the latter third of the flight deck and in at least one of the hanger deck compartments below it; men were re-fuelling Sea Kings near the bow so that the mercy missions could continue uninterrupted. Many of the Long Beach’s survivors had been lifted onto HMS Oudenarde and HMS Broadsword which Captain ‘D’ had sent to her aide while enlisting Talavera in the foolhardy attempt to pump sea water into the stern of the huge carrier.
HMS Aisne had been within a mile of the airburst; she was gone with all hands. The USS Long Beach had been almost as close to the epicentre of the blast. Her enormous box-like bridge – which had looked like something out of a Buck Roger’s comic – was part crushed, part shattered and everything above deck was wrecked or hanging over her side. One of her forward m
issile magazines had caught fire and every few minutes a fresh explosion racked the doomed cruiser. Like the Enterprise she sat beneath a spreading pall, her fires flashing red and orange between the banks of roiling, oily smoke. Unlike her huge consort she was dead in the water, sinking by the bow and listing twenty degrees to starboard in the oddly benign Mediterranean chop.
“Stop PORT!” Peter Christopher shouted.
Above him and to his right the fires roared deafeningly. The destroyer drifted into the carrier’s churning wake. He had read about small ships being dragged into the sides of big ships – really big ships – and the Enterprise was the biggest thing he had ever seen afloat. Next to the leviathan Talavera was dwarfed into virtual insignificance. Through the smoke he glimpsed the Scorpion working nearer and nearer the impossibly high grey steel flank of the monster.
He cupped his hands to his mouth and bawled: “Turn on the fire main!”
He and Miles Weiss had hurriedly discussed the complete insanity of what they were trying to do as if it seemed like the most routine of peacetime evolutions. It had been a short, abbreviated little chat. Peter had informed his friend that he would try not to collide with the American aircraft carrier; while Miles Weiss was to worry about putting as much water as possible onto and into the burning ship. They had decided not to worry about the risk of being blown up by a stray bomb or a rocket falling off the fiery stern of the Enterprise; and if there were further big airbursts in the area they would deal with that nearer the time. The best plan was to worry about the things they could do something about, and ignore everything else. They hoped Admiral Lord Nelson – and Peter’s father back in Malta, if it still existed – would approve.
Something blew up onboard the big carrier.
Shrapnel and debris rained down within a few feet of Talavera’s bow.
The stream of water from the two hoses on the fo’c’sle reached out for the Enterprise, touched her grey flank near the waterline and slowly, slowly crept up her side as the destroyer drew closer and closer, and even closer until the streams of water boiled violently off nearly red hot hull plates. Belatedly, the hose up in the foremast coughed and burped into action. It spewed forth a less concentrated jet of water but serendipitously, almost immediately every drop it discharged from its lofty nozzle was pouring straight into a blackened, flaming gash in the plating ten feet beneath the armoured flight deck.
“Half-astern STARBOARD!”
Filthy grey-black smoke was tumbling down into the ever narrowing gap between the Talavera’s starboard side and the Enterprise making it impossible to know, at any given moment, how much clearance there was between the ships.
Talavera was so close to the behemoth that she was pitching and rolling in her wake. There was a brief, unhappy rending of metal as the starboard aluminium yard of the foremast scraped along the side of the bigger ship and disintegrated.
Water from the hoses was pummelling the sides of the carrier.
Talavera was so close the jets of water turned to soaking mists as they played on the superheated plates, struck the massive overhang of the flight deck, and poured over the edge of the overhanging steel cliff like small waterfalls. As the water fell onto the deck it sizzled before slowly, it began to cool the metal underfoot. One of Scorpion’s fire hoses misdirected a torrent of water directly across the Talavera’s bridge, momentarily knocking Peter Christopher and several other men down.
Struggling to his feet he realised the ship felt strange beneath his feet.
“Full astern BOTH!”
It was too late.
HMS Talavera’s bow swung in an inexorable, slow arc towards the impregnable bulk of the burning super carrier’s stern.
There was another huge explosion high overhead.
The burning carcass of an F-4 Phantom lurched over the side of the flight deck, balanced for a precarious, heart-stopping moment and then rolled off the Enterprise directly above HMS Talavera’s bridge.
[The End]
Author’s Endnote
Thank you again for reading Timeline 10/27/62 – Book 4: Red Dawn. I hope you enjoyed it - or if you did not, sorry - but either way, thank you for reading and helping to keep the printed word alive. Remember, civilisation depends on people like you.
* * *
As a rule I let my books speak for themselves. I hope it does not sound fuddy-duddy or old-fashioned, but broadly speaking I tend towards the view that a book should speak for itself.
However, with your indulgence I would like briefly – well, as briefly as is possible without being overly terse – to share a few personal thoughts with you, the reader about the Timeline 10/27/62 World.
I was not yet seven-and-a-half years old in October 1962 when I realised my parents were paying an awful lot of attention to the radio, devouring every line of print in their daily newspaper and were not quite themselves, a little distracted in fact, now that I think about it. I heard the word ‘Cuba’ bandied about but did not know until much later that the most dangerous moment of my life had come and gone without my ever, as a child, knowing it.
I was not yet eight-and-a-half years old when one day in November 1963 the World around me came, momentarily, to a juddering halt. I had heard the name of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and I even knew that he was the President of something called the United States of America. I did not know then that he was a womanising, drug dependent and deeply conflicted man who had lied to the American people about his chronic, periodically disabling illness which in any rational age ought to have disqualified him from the Presidency; but I did know that he was a charismatic, talismanic figure in whom even I, as a child more interested in soccer, model trains and riding my new bicycle, had invested a nameless hope for the future. And then one day he was gone and I shared my parents’ shock and horror. It was not as if a mortal man had been murdered; JFK had become a mythic figure long before then. It was as if the modern day analogue of King Menelaus of Sparta - hero of the Trojan Wars and the husband of Helen, she of the legendary face that launched a thousand ships - had been gunned down that day in Dallas.
The Cuban Missiles crisis and the death of a President taught a young boy in England in 1962 and 1963 that the World is a very dangerous place.
Many years later we learned how close we all came to the abyss in late October 1962. Often we look back on how deeply Jack Kennedy’s death scarred hearts and minds in the years after his assassination.
There is no certainty, no one profound insight into what ‘might have happened’ had the Cold War turned Hot in the fall of 1962, or if JFK had survived that day in Dallas. History is not a systematic, explicable march from one event to another that inevitably reaches some readily predictable outcome. History only works that way in hindsight; very little is obvious either to the major or the minor players at the time history is actually being made. Nor does one have to be a fully paid up chaos theoretician to know that apparently inconsequential events can have massive unforeseen and unforeseeable impacts in subsequent historical developments.
Consider the example of Adolf Hitler.
If Corporal Adolf Hitler had died in a gas attack on the Ypres salient in Belgium on 14th October 1918 – as he might well have died that day – it is possible that there would have been no Holocaust, no Nazi Party, and no death camps.
Notwithstanding, with or without Hitler it is also possible, more likely probable, that there would have been a second general European War two or three decades later, albeit not the one we actually had. Hitler’s war aims in 1939 were strikingly similar to the Kaiser’s in 1914, unsurprisingly because most of what we regard as being his war aims were in fact drafted by members of exactly the same military caste which had been so keen on war in 1914, and had been so embittered by Germany’s crushing defeat in 1918. While I readily concede that no senior officer of the German General Staff went so far as to write a book extolling the necessity for lebensraum – or ‘living space in the East’ – Hitler was by no means the only man in Germany in the 19
20s and 1930s who publicly and unashamedly yearned to expand the Pax Germanica, the German Peace, into the Baltic States, Poland, White Russian and the Ukraine. Moreover, it was not Adolf Hitler who invented the ‘myth of the betrayal of Versailles’. The invention was the convenient fig leaf behind which the High Command of the vanquished German General Staff hid behind – all the better to gloss over its numerous egregious military and political war time blunders - to undermine and discredit the democratic legitimacy of the post-war Weimar Republic which to a man, its members detested.
Adolf Hitler was an undeniably horrible, bad, psychopathic despot who was very good at public speaking and without him German history between the World Wars would have been different in character but not necessarily in outcome. Basically, there is no way in which we can actually know that Corporal Hitler’s demise in the 14th October 1918 gas attack would have prevented World War II; or with or without the little corporal’s survival, that another even more catastrophic and tragic war was, sooner or later, inevitable.
I do not pretend to know what would have happened if the USA and the USSR had gone to war over Cuba in October 1962. One imagines this scenario has been the object of countless staff college war games in America and elsewhere in the intervening fifty-three years; I suspect – with a high level of confidence - that few of those war games would have played out the way the participants expected, and that no two games would have resolved themselves in exactly the same way as any other. That is the beauty and the fascination of historical counterfactuals, or as those of us who make no pretence at being emeritus professors of history say, alternative history.