by James Philip
Miranda sat up, blinking. She ran her fingers through her hair. Her Aunt must have washed the puke out of it and cleaned her up. She remembered nothing. She winced as she tried to wriggle into a more upright posture. Wayne, the black guy had been very big and she had goaded him mercilessly...
“I’m sorry,” she muttered.
Molly Fleischer instantly enveloped the young woman in a protective bear hung, clasping her to her ample warm bosom, stroking her head.
“No harm done, petal,” she cooed. “Harvey went down to City Hall and talked to the Commissioner. Your folks don’t need to know about anything that happened last night...”
The stentorian tones of the announcer came over the air.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the man announced gravely, ‘the President of the United States of America.”
There was a gap, a silence of two to three seconds which seemed much longer, an age of breathless troubled waiting.
“My fellow Americans,” said the familiar voice that reached out into homes and resonated about hearths like no other since his legendary predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s death in 1945. It was a voice that had always spoken to the hopes and fears of all generations; a voice that had divided and yet retained the power to beguile, momentarily, unconsciously even his most virulent detractors. It was also the most familiar voice in the World, the voice of a man – who despite everything that had happened – sincerely believed that he, truly and rightfully spoke for the free World. What was left of it, anyway. “My fellow Americans,” the voice said again, “and to this great nation’s friends, wherever they may be, near and far,” the voice was stilled for an instant, for dramatic effect, “may God be with you in this time of trial.”
Molly Fleischer sat on the bed, her arm protectively extended around her ‘niece’s’ shivering shoulders.
“I will not lie to you,” the President promised. “A terrible thing has happened. That I had no choice but to order the Armed Forces of the United States to attack the Soviet Union makes the tragedy of the last twenty-four hours no less tragic. To be forced to do terrible things by one’s enemies in time of war is the great tragedy of war.”
The women looked at each other for reassurance.
“The Soviet Union has not launched a fresh attack against the North American Continent for several hours. It may be that we have destroyed the enemy’s capacity to wage nuclear war against us but the Army, the Navy and the Air Force remain vigilant and at the highest state of readiness to repel further attacks, should they come.”
Oh God!
It might not be over!
“Yesterday, nuclear strikes were launched from the island of Cuba. Many thousands of Americans perished and were injured in Houston, Texas City, Galveston and in Florida. I make no apology for ordering a massive retaliation against the regime in Cuba which initiated that cowardly sneak attack. It was not my Administration’s wish or purpose to make war on the Soviet Union other than as a last resort in the event that the survival of the American people was at issue. However, confronted by an implacable foe, I was faced with no choice but to fight to preserve America, to preserve the lives of as many Americans as possible, and to vanquish those who would do us harm forever.”
Miranda was asking herself which part of her Aunt Molly’s assertion that ‘things aren’t as bad as they could have been’ bore any relation to what she was actually hearing the President say?
“The great city of Seattle was hard hit, as was Chicago and Buffalo. Boston and other places were only saved from greater devastation by the vagaries of war. I do not yet know how many Americans have died; but our dead and injured in this cataclysm will be numbered in the millions. We should count our blessings. Much of our country remains untouched by the holocaust unleashed upon us. Sadly, in Germany, France and in Great Britain the destruction is widespread, most likely on a scale far beyond that which we have thus far experienced. Our thoughts and our prayers must go out to our brave allies in their hour of trial. We now know that Russia not only went to war with the free World but made war on its communist neighbour, China, raining a large number of bombs on the northern regions of that country. In the Far East, our ally Japan was attacked. Understandably, as you listen to this broadcast many of you will be worried for the safety of loved ones and friends in our wounded cities, or serving abroad with our gallant Armed Forces...”
Miranda had stopped listening.
“On the beach,” she whispered.
“What’s that, petal?”
“That book. On the Beach. You know, by Nevil Shute. They made a film of it a year or two back with Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire, and Anthony Perkins, I think. There’s a nuclear war in the northern half of the World and eventually the radioactive cloud travels south and kills everybody...”
[The End]
Author’s Endnote
Thank you again for reading Timeline 10/27/62 – USA Book 1: Aftermath. I hope you enjoyed it - or if you didn’t, sorry - but either way, thank you for reading and helping to keep the printed word alive. Remember, civilisation depends on people like you.
California Dreaming, the sequel to Aftermath will pick up the story of the characters inhabiting Aftermath, walking with them through the changed reality of their worlds and the altered landscape of American political, economic, cultural and military lives in the wake of World War III.
* * *
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 1920s 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’. That 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.
Nobody can claim ‘this is the way it would have been’ after the Cuban Missiles Crisis ‘went wrong’. This author only speculates that the Timeline 10/27/62 Series reflects one of the many ways ‘things might have gone’ in the aftermath of Armageddon.
The only thing one can be reasonably confident about is that if the Cuban Missiles Crisis had turned into a shooting war the World in which we live today would, probably, not be the one with which we are familiar.
A work of fiction is a journey of imagination. I hope it does not sound corny but I am genuinely a little humbled by the number of people who have already bought into what I am trying to do with Timeline 10/27/62.
Like any author, this author would prefer everybody to enjoy his books – if I disappoint, I am truly sorry – but either way, thank you for reading and helping to keep the printed word alive. I really do believe that civilization depends on people like you.
One last note of thanks: to Tom Kruse, the narrator of the unabridged audio book of ‘Aftermath – Book 1 of the Timeline 10/27/62 USA Series’. I am delighted to announce that later this year Tom and I will be working together again on the audio book of ‘California Dreaming – Book2 of the Timeline 10/27/62 USA Series’.
Other Books by James Philip
The Timeline 10/27/62 World
The Timeline 10/27/62 - Main Series
Book 1: Operation Anadyr
Book 2: Love is Strange
Book 3: The Pillars of Hercules
Book 4: Red Dawn
Book 5: The Burning Time
Book 6: Tales of Brave Ulysses
Book 7: A Line in the Sand
Book 8: The Mountains of the Moon
Book 9: All Along the Watchtower
(Available 1st June 2017)
Book 10: Crow on the Cradle
(Available 27th October 2017)
Timeline 10/27/62 - USA
Book 1: Aftermath
Book 2: California Dreaming
Book 3: The Great Society
Book 4: Ask Not of Your Country
Book 5: The American Dream
(Available 27th October 2017)
Timeline 10/27/62 – Australia
Book 1: Cricket on the Beach
(Available 20th December 2017)
Book 2: Operation Manna
(Available 20th December 2017)
Other Series and Novels
The Guy Winter Mysteries
Prologue: Winter’s Pearl
Book 1: Winter’s War
Book 2: Winter’s Revenge
Book 3: Winter’s Exile
Book 4: Winter’s Return
Book 5: Winter’s Spy
(Available 31st January 2017)
The Bomber War Series
Book 1: Until the Night
Book 2: The Painter
(Available 31st March 2017)
Book 3: The Cloud Walkers
(Available 31st March 2017)
Until the Night Series
Part 1: Main Force Country – September 1943
Part 2: The Road to Berlin – October 1943
Part 3: The Big City – November 1943
Part 4: When Winter Comes – December 1943
Part 5: After Midnight – January 1944
The Harry Waters Series
Book 1: Islands of No Return
Book 2: Heroes
Book 3: Brothers in Arms
The Frankie Ransom Series
Book 1: A Ransom for Two Roses
Book 2: The Plains of Waterloo
Book 3: The Nantucket Sleighride
The Strangers Bureau Series
Book 1: Interlopers
Book 2: Pictures of Lily
Audio Books of the following Titles
are available (or are in production) now
Aftermath
A Ransom for Two Roses
California Dreaming
Heroes
Islands of No Return
Love is Strange
Main Force Country
Operation Anadyr
The Pillars of Hercules
The Plains of Waterloo
Winter’s Pearl
Winter’s War
* * *
Details of all James Philip’s published books and forthcoming publications
can be found on his website www.jamesphilip.co.uk
* * *
Cover artwork concepts by James Philip
Graphic Design by Beastleigh Web Design