All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964

by F. C. Schaefer

  This was when a remarkable thing occurred; John F. Kennedy and Curtis LeMay put aside their considerable differences and found a way to work together. The General had been in the dog house ever since the Missile Crisis and his outspoken opinions during this latest emergency had not endeared him to the Administration any better, but on this day he took the floor in the Cabinet Room and calmly and in detail, laid out a plan to stop the North Koreans in their tracks before it even began; if they struck first and held the initiative, there would be no stopping them.

  The Air Force Chief of Staff’s plan called for the use of virtually every strategic long-range bomber in the Pacific in an extensive aerial campaign against the North Koreans that in firepower would rival anything he’d thrown against the Japanese in 1945. The General did not mince words, boldly stating his plan was designed not only to destroy every possible target of military value between the 38h Parallel and the Yalu, but was also calculated to inflict the maximum casualties to break enemy morale. It was total war at its most ruthless; the kind of thing a warrior like LeMay did better than anyone else.

  “Mr. President,” General LeMay reportedly said, “when I’m done with them, the only thing the North Koreans will have left to throw at us will be rocks and sticks.”

  “I know what you are proposing to do,” President Kennedy said as he signed off on LeMay’s plan, “will seem barbaric and cruel to some, but they will come to understand in time.” When it was brought to the President’s attention that some of our bombs were certain to fall on Russian and Chinese military personal, he said our hand had been forced, and it could not be helped now. The orders the President signed authorized the Chief of Staff of the Air Force to make use of every fighter and bomber based not only in the Pacific, but west of the Mississippi if he deemed them needed. LeMay got everything he wanted.

  The scrambling began the instant the doors of the Cabinet room opened; orders went out as the American Air Force turned on a dime. In a matter of hours, a minimum of 200 fighters and bombers, along with at least 30,000 active duty personnel were ready to go to Japan, Okinawa, and the Philippines. It proved to be a very long Saturday of a Memorial Day weekend; LeMay was on the phone from his office in the Pentagon round the clock, pushing everyone to the limits to get the job done. We all heard about the officer in charge of the docks in San Diego who didn’t get a tanker filled with jet fuel seaborne fast enough to suit LeMay, the man literally pissed his pants when he got a call from the Air Force Chief asking to explain why he was a half hour off schedule. Everyone was under the gun because the North Koreans could have launched their attack at any moment.

  President Kennedy would later say the day he made the decision on North Korea was the worst of his presidency. At a few minutes after 7:00 p.m. he went on the air live from the White House, announcing that the “forces of aggression” were once again preparing to launch an attack on a “staunch ally,” and that “our resolve will not falter; we will not shrink from our duty; we will pay the price that must be paid for a people to remain free. This is the debt we owe to those who fell from Inchon to the Chosin Reservoir to Pork Chop Hill.” It was already Sunday morning in Korea, and the bombs began falling just after sunrise.

  I have been asked from time to time by historians about my feelings over what has come to be known as,” “Napalm Sunday,” the first day of the air campaign where the 5th People’s Army was incinerated by the United States Air Force just north of the 38th Parallel. “I’m fine with it,” is always my answer even when they show me pictures of burned corpses heaped in mounds. They say the smell of a hundred thousand burning North Korean infantrymen was truly horrendous when the breeze changed and it blew south over the American lines causing a lot of our guys to vomit. When I’m challenged further about the morality of what happened, I recall my experiences in the first war on the Korean peninsula, and my first hand encounters with the North’s cruelty, and then I point out how a protracted conflict there would have killed far more people than the short, brutal air war we waged in 1964. I had a heated argument over the morality of it with my daughter when she was in college more than a decade later. I have no patience with certain college professors and authors like Noam Chomsky who make comparisons between the United States of the 60’s and Nazi Germany of the 40’s. It is one of the reasons why I often speak at our institutions of higher learning to make sure the record is kept straight. I do it for free.

  There would be 150 sorties in the first three days, and 27 planes were shot down with most of the crews killed upon impact, but it stopped Pyongyang cold in its tracks and saved the Republic of South Korea. Once this became clear, the big worry was the Soviet and Chinese reaction; for that reason alone, the readiness of all America forces worldwide was raised to DEFCON 3 on May 25th and all military reservists were notified that they could be called back to active duty if necessary.

  If we had known for sure what was happening behind the closed doors in the Kremlin, the President might well have raised the readiness level even higher.

  The Soviets had routed the Shah’s military and occupied the northern half of the country in record time, but when they began pushing south to the Persian Gulf, their hastily thrown together plan ran into serious trouble because Malinovsky had rushed into battle with too few troops to get the job done. They should have paused and consolidated their gains, but the plan required them to reach the Gulf before the West could mount a countermeasure. Thus they had to beat a clock of their own making

  By the time the Soviet’s 68th Mechanized Division began its advance south on or around May 15th, it was facing an opposition force of a hundred thousand and growing by the day. Some of these irregulars were made up of units of the Shah’s army and air force, but many of them were simply civilians determined to resist being subjugated to the rule of “Godless infidels.” Whatever their motivation, they inflicted massive casualties upon the Soviets right from the beginning. When the Soviets responded with bombing campaign far more savage than anything we did in Cuba, Vietnam or Korea, the Iranian will to fight grew even stronger. On the day we launched our preemptive strike on North Korea, the Soviet commander in Teheran sent a message to Marshall Malinovsky stating that he would need another 200,000 troops immediately and acknowledging that the goal of reaching the Persian Gulf by the target date was not going to happen. The General was relieved of his command and packed off to Siberia the next day, but his replacement could do no better. Soviet warships had already passed through the Straits of Hormuz, but there would be no Red Army to greet them at the Iranian ports.

  Washington breathed a palpable sigh of relief when first reports of the Soviet setbacks in Iran came in; many were already resigned to a Russian occupation of the country. These reports detailed the scope of the active resistance to the Soviet attack and how it had become a holy cause in the Arab world as young men from as far away as North Africa found their way to Saudi Arabia and Iraq before slipping across the border or the open waters of the Gulf to join the fight. To our detriment, we did not pay enough attention to the emerging leadership of the Iranian opposition with its call for all Moslems to stand up to the foreign invaders no matter who they might be; it was in one of these reports that I first heard then name of the Ayatollah Khomeini mentioned.

  I am more than willing to concede that we should have given him and his cause more attention. What we had absolutely no intelligence on was the Kremlin and who was in charge there; only a few surmised what the real truth and I’m glad to say one of them was Ralph Gillison.

  “They got Old Nikita locked in some room behind the walls of the Kremlin,” he said at one point when another report on what might be happening in Moscow came to the White House. “Locked up tight and only brought out when they need a show.”

  “What makes you say that?” I asked him. “When you get kicked out over there, you’re lucky if you end up in some one-room shack far east of the Urals with only a pot to piss in.”

  “Old Nikita knows how to talk the talk, b
ut also he knows how to keep his horns reigned in just enough so no one gets fatally gored. He showed as much back in October a year ago; this chicken shit stuff in Iran reeks of something done after a palace coup.” Colonel Ralph Gillison should have been head of the CIA. If he had, a lot of problems would never have come to pass.

  What became the final crisis of that long month of May in the year of 1964 began completely out of sight of the rest of the world in a military district in Poland where units of the Polish People’s Army were fulfilling their part as a cog in the Warsaw Pact. Despite being locked up tight behind the Iron Curtain and having the Communist Party line rammed down their throats daily, the good people of Poland knew full well what was happening in the rest of the world, thanks not only to Radio Free Europe and illegal radio reception of the BBC, but also to a whispering grapevine with deep roots which ran the length and breadth of the Soviet military machine, stretching from Iran to every command in Eastern Europe where the Red Army was stationed.

  During the last week of May, a rumor raced through units of the Polish Army stationed outside of Warsaw that they were about to be deployed to Iran and put under Soviet commanders who would push them out front in the advance to the Persian Gulf - in other words, they would be cannon fodder, dying on the front lines in place of Russian infantrymen. Overnight the word spread through the ranks, and a consensus was reached among the lower ranks that no matter what, they would not leave their barracks and get on any trains, even if it meant disobeying a direct order from a superior officer. In any Communist country, this is rank treason, the kind that earns you a firing squad, not a court martial.

  Naturally, the Polish high command did not react well to even the hint of mutiny in the ranks and the suspected units were ordered confined to their quarters and their officers were arrested. By then word that Polish sons were about to be sent to die in a Russian war had spread to the civilian population, and they rallied behind their soldiers by blocking the road in front of army camps and the railway stations - there were rumblings from some of the steel mills that the workers would walk out if any move were made to compel the Polish Army to fight in Russia’s war. The Catholic Church gave their blessing to a movement that had overnight become resurgence of Polish national pride.

  Gasoline was thrown on this fire when a new rumor swept through the ranks that since the loyalty of the Polish Army was suspect, divisions of the East German Army were preparing to move into Poland to massacre a Polish rifle company as an example to the others. If there is one thing that enrages every Pole no matter what their political leanings, it is the thought of German troops crossing their borders, natural since memories of the second World War are still quite fresh and searing in that part of the world. It did not help when the leader of Poland, Wladyslaw Gomulka and the head of East Germany, Walter Ulbricht, had issued statements of fulsome support for the Soviet invasion of Iran on the day after it was launched; statements which received a lot of attention in the state-run press.

  On the first day of June, thousands of Polish shipyard workers in Gdansk threatened to walk off their jobs and fight for their country if the Germans dared to cross their border again. Behind the Kremlin walls, this news provoked a furious reaction, for there was one thing all the factions in the Politburo agreed upon: territory taken in the Great Patriotic War at the cost of much Russian blood would never be given up, and no dissension in the ranks of the captive nations would be tolerated. Their fears were that Poland, or any of the other Eastern European nations might want to emulate the Cuban people and be freed of Communist rule. On that same first day of June when Polish shipyard workers stood up, orders went out raising the alert status for the entire Warsaw Pact. The great fear in the Kremlin was that NATO would take advantage of any crisis behind the Iron Curtain and exploit it to launch a preemptive strike.

  Because of two decades of hard work by the CIA and the British MI5, our intelligence out of Poland was very good; I dare say we knew of a few developments before Moscow learned of them.

  What we did not know was what was happening inside the Kremlin, where cracks had appeared in the unity of the junta as soon as it was clear that the Iranian adventure was not going according to plan. According to later accounts, there were some quite heated meetings among members of the Politburo, where fingers were pointed, and at one point, blows were exchanged before the two parties were pulled apart. But no one had an easy fix; it was too late to turn around in Iran and the only course they could see ahead was to send in more troops. Then overnight, an insurrection broke out in Poland and suddenly these bureaucrats and Communist party hacks were staring into the apocalypse. It was Suzlov, the hardest of the hardliners, who carried the day this time, demanding the Warsaw Pact begin mobilizing in case of a full out attack from the West. “Now would be the time for the Americans to do it,” he is recorded as saying in notes taken at the meeting. “They have the taste of blood in their mouths.”

  The war hawks, led by Shelepin, and Semichastny had determined that an even greater show of force was an absolute necessity if the they were to ultimately prevail. This meant a deliberate mobilization of the Warsaw Pact as a means of intimidation, first of NATO, lest they come to believe they could exploit a situation behind the Iron Curtain at the Soviet Union‘s expense, and second, the situation itself - the mutinous soldiers in Poland or anywhere else in Eastern Europe who might subscribe to the heretic notion that Moscow didn’t call all the shots in that part of the world. To ice the cake, orders were sent out to reduce every city in Iran not in Russian hands to rubble, and when it was done, bomb them again just make the rubble dance. A cable was sent to the Soviet ambassador to Poland, making sure he knew to impress upon the country’s leadership that any and all mutineers among its armed forces should get the extreme penalty once this crisis was passed so anyone in the future would think long and hard before challenging Soviet authority.

  In the early hours of June 5th, cables began pouring in from NATO’s Supreme Commander, General Lyman Limnitzer, detailing a sudden frenzy of Warsaw Pact activity - infantry and mechanized units were being moved into forward positions, as extra fighter wings arrived in East Germany and Czechoslovakia.

  A full meeting of the NSC was called at 2 p.m. in the Cabinet Room, one attended by the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff as well. For a half hour John F. Kennedy sat and listened as first the Secretary of Defense, then the CIA Director, Mr. Bundy and finally General Taylor, outlined the extent of the apparent mobilization behind the Iron Curtain and what our options were in the face of an imminent Soviet attack.

  They painted a bleak outlook if the Warsaw Pact scored the first blow with their massive numbers of men, airplanes and tanks. “We have to capability of stopping them,” Secretary McNamara told the President, “but not before we lose most of West Germany.”

  Mr. Bundy stated that once the Warsaw Pact had seized the initiative, it was fifty/fifty at best they could be stopped short of the English Channel.

  That is unless we went to the nuclear option, the only thing guaranteed to halt the Soviets, the kicker being it guaranteed an equally harsh response. Everyone in the room knew it.

  That is, almost everyone. “You have to strike first, Mr. President,” General LeMay said, speaking up only after the point was made how the odds overwhelmingly favored the Soviets if they landed the first blow. “You absolutely cannot allow the Russians to make the first strike; we can do to them what we did to the North Koreans.” He went on to summarize how a massive and sustained air attack upon the Warsaw Pact’s offensive capabilities could fatally cripple any planned offensive against Western Europe before it got started.

  I must say it was masterful in the way he rattled off the number of bombers he had at his command and the amount of firepower they could deliver with devastating effect. “In East Germany alone,” LeMay said at one point, “we can drop in two days the equivalent of all the conventional bombs that fell on Japan in the last six months of the war.” When it was brought up how this mig
ht provoke to Soviets to go to nuclear, the General dismissed this possibility with, “I see little chance of it happening.”

  Mr. Rostow spoke up almost immediately after the General and said LeMay’s plan might be our only viable option; he was seconded in this opinion by General Earle Wheeler, the Chief of Staff of the Army. Secretary McNamara said a full mobilization of NATO could begin as soon as the British, the French and the Germans were notified, something which would take no more than an hour. This was one of the few meetings where the Vice President spoke; Lyndon Johnson reminded everyone of the sacrifices made by thousands of American boys in two World Wars to preserve freedom in Europe and that the American public would never forgive this administration if it allowed that freedom to perish on its watch.

  The final decision was in the President’s hands. “I am not totally convinced,” he said when everyone else was finished, although later accounts, including more than one memoir, would leave out the word “totally.” The President went on to state that since our forces were already at DEFON 3, it was not necessary to order a full mobilization of NATO at that point. Therefore this meeting of the NSC was adjourned for twenty-four hours unless events dictated otherwise.

  And with that, John F. Kennedy pushed himself up from his chair, and with his back ramrod straight, strode through the door, leaving shocked and silent room behind him.

  “What the hell just happened?” General LeMay was heard to snort.

  I beat a hasty retreat to my basement office, where I informed Ralph Gillison what had just occurred. “Something’s up,” was his comment, “something big, you know how much Kennedy likes to do things outside of channels.”

  Not ten minutes later the phone rang at my desk. It was the Attorney General. “Colonel Maddox,” he said, “my brother believes that if we’re seriously talking about launching a Super Pearl Harbor attack against the Soviet Union, then this situation has gotten about as far out of control as it had better go. He intends to talk face to face with Khrushchev or whoever is calling the shots in Moscow and intends to do it in the next few days. You and I are going to make it happen, be in my office in the Justice Department building in half an hour.”