The Great Society (Timeline 10/27/62 - USA Book 3)

by James Philip

  If General David Monroe Shoup’s life had taught him anything it was that a wise man never, ever underestimated the latent stupidity and cupidity of the people who attached themselves to even the best Presidents.

  Enough was enough!

  ‘My Marines will be employed as a mobile tactical reserve within the Pentagon to mop up any further breach in our internal perimeters. If the opportunity arises this tactical reserve will be deployed aggressively to exploit any error the enemy makes, Admiral.’ Shoup had been implacable. ‘The existence of this tactical reserve, at this time less than a hundred men whom I hope will be reinforced as the night goes on, is too small to hope to successfully defend the western side of the building in the event the enemy mounts a second major assault against that flank. Until such time as we are in a position to counter-attack, my men will not be split into penny parcels; and we will not surrender the tactical advantage of retaining the ability to concentrate at the key moment!’

  It had been at this juncture that Westmoreland had stepped into the fray.

  For all that he was known in Washington as a ‘political general’, something of a ‘corporate executive in uniform’, William Childs Westmoreland had learned his soldiering the hard way. Ten years Shoup’s junior he had been an artilleryman in Tunisia, Sicily, France and Germany and finished Hitler’s War as chief of staff of the 9th US Infantry Division. Although he and Shoup had previously enjoyed prickly, somewhat distant relations Westmoreland had never made any bones about his immense respect for the older man’s combat record and the way he had re-organized the Marine Corps in the years leading up to the October War.

  Shoup was a man who had had his fate thrust upon him and emerged as a legend within the Marine Corps. Transferred to the staff of the 2nd Marine Division in 1943 he had been responsible for planning the assault on Betio, part of the heavily defended Tarawa Atoll. On Guadalcanal the previous year he had given notice of his pugnaciously aggressive style of combat leadership, and had impressed his superiors with the élan with which he had conducted rehearsals for the forthcoming Tarawa operation. When shortly before D-Day the commander of the 2nd Marines succumbed to a nervous breakdown; Shoup had found himself parachuted into what was to be the bloodiest battle yet in the Pacific War.

  Shoup’s landing craft had been sunk under him; then as he came ashore he was hit in the legs by shrapnel and suffered a flesh wound to his neck. Finally reaching the beach he was greeted by a scene of unmitigated carnage. Notwithstanding the dire situation and his wounds he had rallied the survivors, led them off the beaches and pushed inland before the Japanese defenders could mount a co-ordinated counter attack. Throughout the first night on Betio and during the next day as the 2nd Marines continued to take heavy casualties, Shoup had organised and led further assaults, driving the Japanese back before being relieved of command on the second night of the battle. Later Shoup had stoically observed of the battle for Tarawa that ‘there was never a doubt in the minds of those ashore what the final outcome of the battle for Tarawa would be. There was for some seventy-six hours, however, considerable haggling with the enemy over the exact price we would have to pay’. He had subsequently been awarded the Medal of Honour for his part in that ‘haggling’.

  Westmoreland had cleared his throat.

  ‘I entirely concur with General Shoup’s thinking, sir,’ he had said quietly to Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense. The former President of the Ford Motor Company, brought into the Kennedy Administration to re-form and streamline the American military juggernaut in 1961, had looked him in the eye and nodded, wordlessly.

  Shoup had asked Westmoreland to remain in the Flag Plot Room while he paid another visit to the roof to assess the ‘tactical situation’ in the vicinity of the Pentagon. He knew the younger man well enough to know that while he was in the room he would prevent the Admirals and the Air Force people from bending McNamara’s ear.

  The situation was bad enough already without people who ought to know better actively attempting to make it worse!

  Chapter 5

  Tuesday 10th December 1963

  Newsweek Magazine Bureau, Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC

  “There’s a guy on the line who claims to be General Westmoreland, chief!”

  Practically everybody in the Washington Bureau of Newsweek Magazine who had been listening to the President’s state of the union address earlier that evening was hunkered down under tables and behind filing cabinets hurriedly dragged out into the building’s central, windowless corridors. Every window in the building – probably every window in every building along Pennsylvania Avenue – had been blown in and at least two shells, or mortars, had hit the block in the last quarter-of-an-hour. Stray bullets zinged and pinged off the outer walls at a rate of several every minute even though there did not seem to be any fighting going on locally.

  Bureau Chief Ben Bradlee was crawling towards the voice before he had time to think about what he was doing. Inside the main office the teleprinters were still chattering but he had told his people to forget about them; the phones were different. While the lines were up somebody would always be ‘minding’ the phones. That was what being a journalist was all about, a thing in the blood; the thing which had set him moving before he stopped to worry about ricochets and snipers.

  The lights had gone out ten minutes after the first explosions from the direction of the Main State Building at Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon. About an hour ago the power had returned, albeit with variable voltage that made the few surviving light bulbs constantly flicker.

  “Ben Bradlee!” He gasped, taking the handset lying almost flat on the floor of the newsroom. One of his stringers had been shot by a sniper when he put his head above the window sill about an hour ago and his body still lay in Bradlee’s office with half his head missing. “Is that you Westy?”

  “Sure is, Ben,” the other man replied levelly – his tone analogous to that of a man gravely discussing the pros and cons of changing the batting order in a junior league ball game - through hissing static and regular clicks on the line. “What’s it looking like from where you are?”

  “I have no idea,” the Newsweek Chief confessed. “The last time one of my guys looked out of the window he got shot.” After the initial shock of the huge explosions and the deafening clatter of gunfire in the street Ben Bradlee had forced himself to get a grip and to take stock. The building had been shot at and damaged by nearby explosions but nobody had actually targeted it. Therefore, the Newsweek Bureau was not a priority target; and life continued. A voice in the back of his head told him that Westmoreland was ringing contacts in Washington to get a handle on the situation.

  That was not a good sign.

  “Sorry about that. A lot of good people have got hurt tonight.”

  Ben Bradlee would remember the calm reassurance of Bill Westmoreland’s demeanour every time he looked back on that terrible December night in 1963. Westy was worried but he was not panicking, just methodically working his way through the options.

  “There were at least two big bombs at Justice,” he reported, collecting the garbled stories which had streamed into the Bureau that evening. “The Embassy district was hit real hard. They say the State Department is burning. I’ve heard a lot of movement out along Pennsylvania Avenue but I don’t think any of it is heavy armour. These guys have got Bazookas and fifty calibre machine guns but I don’t think they’ve got tanks. We’ve been getting reports of hit squads – maybe four, five or six men with automatic rifles – hunting down cops, pulling people out of cars and going into government buildings. The last time I risked a look I could see at least half-a-dozen Washington PD cruisers burning on Pennsylvania Avenue.” Ben Bradlee took a pause for breath and asked questions, not expecting an honest answers. “I heard the Army parked tanks on the White House lawn about an hour before all this started? Tanks and a cordon of Marines in full combat gear? Is that right?”

  “Yeah,” the other man confirmed tersely. “But that was
just an exercise. Nobody knew this was going happen.”

  “Do you know what’s going on?”

  “No. Not yet. We’ve captured a few religious weirdoes and back-woodsmen at the Pentagon. They’re the sort of guys who think people who live in cities are the Devil’s spawn and claim that God told them personally to complete his work of Revelation. This thing hit us where it would hurt the most but I’m getting the feeling that it may already running out of steam in some places. The initial assault was obviously fairly well planned and co-ordinated but what’s been going on since is just an orgy of violence and killing. You got any reports of rioting?”

  “Yes. All over DC. Is it right that these bastards hit Bethesda Hospital?”

  “Yeah, they tried to but the Navy – well, somebody in the Navy, anyway – had armed shore patrols on the gate when the crazies drove up. The insurgents have gone for hospitals, railway stations, and shot up metro trains. They don’t seem to want to hold ground, just to destroy property, infrastructure and to kill as many people as possible.”

  “This isn’t any kind of coup d’état?” Ben Bradlee asked bluntly.

  “If it is nobody’s told me about it! If it was a coup d’état you’d have thought they’d have concentrated all their forces on the White House, Capitol Hill and seized the TV and radio stations. Granted, there’s fighting around the House of Representatives but they lit off gas tankers outside the two major TV stations. We’ve got a large number of intruders in the Pentagon but we’ve got them where we want them and we’ll do something about that when we’re good and ready. Keep your head down, Ben. I’ll get somebody to ring through to you on this line every thirty minutes for updates.”

  Chapter 6

  Tuesday 10th December 1963

  Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama

  Fifty-one year old Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun since July 1960 the Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center – formerly Nazi Party member No. 5,738,692, and Allgemeine SS Sturmbannführer, SS membership No. 185,068 - only rarely dwelt on his childhood days in Berlin during and after the First World War, or those incredible days at Peenemunde when every week he and his people had been breaking totally new ground in applied rocket design. Back then they had been writing the rules of for the future of space exploration. Nevertheless, outside the inner circle of the trusted kameraden who like him had been spirited out of defeated Germany in 1945 under the auspices of Operation Paperclip, he almost never spoke about anything that had happened to him prior to May 1945.

  The past was another country; literally so in von Braun’s case.

  Fortuitously, immediately after the war nobody in America had cared much about his complicity – or otherwise – in the outrageous excesses of the regime he had served; later in the 1940s and early 1950s his new masters had grown curious, mostly idly, until, pragmatic people that they were, the launch of Sputnik had finally eradicated all doubt, scruple and conscience from the debate. After the shock of Sputnik – losing the first march in the ‘space race’ – the United States military and that part of the Washington political elite that von Braun actually considered to be in some sense ‘sentient’, had rowed in behind him and his kameraden as if he and his people were beloved prodigals joyously returned to the fold. That had been in 1958; and by then a dozen years had been lost. If the Americans had given him a free hand in 1945 he would have put a man on the Moon by now, or would at least be in the process of putting one on it soon. But no, his hosts had relegated him to the sidelines. His people had spent five years trying to get the US Army to understand the technology of the V2s it had captured in Germany in 1945; and then frittered away more years restricted to scaling up old Nazi rocket designs. True, the Jupiter booster had emerged from this period but there had been no breakthroughs, no great leaps forward and all the time the Soviets had been catching up and in some respects, overtaking American space technology. The tragedy of the situation was that he and the kameraden had already envisaged a massively scaled up multi-stage version of the V2 in 1945.

  The past never really went away.

  Von Braun had been born in Wirsitz in 1912, then in Prussia but now Wyrzysk in Poland. He was the second of three sons born into the minor nobility of the German Empire; his father had served as Agriculture Minister in the Reich Cabinet of the Weimar Republic, and his mother claimed distant ancestry through both her parents to a slew of medieval monarchs including Philip III of France, Valdemar I of Denmark, Robert III of Scotland, and Edward III of England but her sons had never known how seriously to take such claims.

  Von Braun had developed a passion for astronomy as a boy. He had been something of an infant prodigy; even now he remained a gifted classical pianist capable of playing Beethoven and Bach from memory, and a cellist who had had youthful pretentions of pursuing a career in conducting and composing.

  However, that part of his past was inextricably intertwined with another, less comfortable history. He would never have survived as the Technical Director of the Army Rocket Center at Peenemunde if he had not been a member of the Nazi Party. Moreover, as the privileged, superbly educated, prodigiously able son of a well off Prussian family he could not plausibly deny that in his younger days – in hindsight – he had been enthused by the German revival under Hitler, albeit without ever being overly ‘political’. He was not, nor had he ever been an anti-Semite and during the war he had been far too busy doing what he construed to be his patriotic duty to notice, let alone worry about the industrial scale atrocities carried out by the SS. Yes, he had joined the SS; by the middle of the war Himmler and the SS had had a stranglehold on the whole Vergeltungswaffen - V-weapons or ‘Vengeance Weapons’ – program so he had had no choice in the matter!

  These were mantras from which never departed; the same mantras the kameraden from the old days at Peenemunde who now held all but one of the major technical directorships at the Marshall Space Flight Center clutched close to their hearts along with their immensely precious American passports.

  ‘To us, Hitler was still only a pompous fool with a Charlie Chaplin moustache!’

  It was not true but what was truth in a world turned upside down?

  In the Fuhrer’s Reich only an idiot stood on his ‘moral objections’ when a man learned that Heinrich Himmler had personally ‘invited’ one to join the SS!

  Von Braun was a tall broad handsome man with a natural presence. There were grey flecks in his hair and worry lines on his face, and always, a strange restlessness as if some inner dynamo was forever trying to compensate for all the wasted years. He might have dreamed of building a Moon rocket since earliest childhood but Hitler had forced him to build the world’s first ballistic missile; subsequently, the Americans had mandated he build a rocket capable of carrying small payloads into low Earth orbit.

  And then a little over a fortnight ago it had seemed as if the President had granted him the keys to the kingdom.

  “A little over a month before the war I committed this great country to the goal of putting a man – an American – on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth by the end of this decade. As I told Congress in 1961, I believe that no single space project in this period will be more impressive to Mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. I say to you, my fellow Americans, that having passed through the valley of the shadow of death we owe it to the rest of Mankind to think the unthinkable and to fulfil our manifest destiny!”

  The dream first dangled before him in the early days of the Kennedy Administration had been suddenly revived. And it seemed, cruelly snatched from his grasp yet again.

  This morning he was watching grainy TV pictures of Washington DC burning, of great public buildings shrouded in smoke, of streets littered with bodies and the detritus of war, and the whole massive former Redstone Arsenal complex around him was in the process of being locked down by an ad hoc force of Alabama State National Guards, NASA – Nationa
l Aerospace and Space Administration – security contractors, local policemen and a small detachment of Marines flown in from Tullahoma, Tennessee.

  Those pictures from Washington reminded him of the devastation in Germany in 1945. There was a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach as if the wheel of history was turning anew and this time he was going to be on the wrong side of it. If the Moon had seemed a long way away yesterday – a quarter of a million miles – today it might as well be on the other side of the Galaxy.

  “This looks bad,” von Braun’s deputy and old friend Eberhard Rees observed quietly. Fifty-five year old Eberhard Friedrich Michael Rees, a balding serious man cut a much less flamboyant figure than his Director. Unlike von Braun he had arrived at Peenemunde in 1939 by a relatively conventional route having studied engineering at the University of Stuttgart, and achieved his masters degree at Dresden University of Technology in 1934. When he was recruited by the Wehrmacht he was the assistant manager of a steel mill in Leipzig; in the middle years of the Second World War he was managing the fabrication and assembly of the V-2 rocket, and by the end of that war he was von Braun’s trusted right hand man. Of all the kameraden brought to America from Germany in October 1945, no two men were so inextricably linked to the Nordhausen V-2 assembly factory and its adjoining concentration camp deep in the Harz Mountains where countless slave labourers had been worked, beaten and starved to death in the spring of 1945, than von Braun and Rees. Although neither had had their own fingerprints on the war crimes committed at Nordhausen, it was incontrovertible that neither man had ever intervened to ameliorate, let alone transform the murderous SS regime at that place. Even eighteen years after the war the two friends knew that one day that stain on the face of humanity might yet come back to haunt them. “Very bad.”