by James Philip
“I hate to say it, Al,” the soldier reminded the fifty-three year old Governor of Washington dryly, “but if you recollect our conversation when we first talked about this I said this was going to be messy.”
“Yes, you did!” Governor Rosellini conceded without real venom. He respected and trusted the unflappable veteran old soldier who had become his right hand man; and he knew better than to try to interfere with anything that was going on in and around Bellingham that evening. Reinforced with units from the Oregon and California State National Guards the operation would continue however messy things got in the next few hours. Bellingham was a weeping sore on the face of American democracy, a scandalous affront upon the very notion of the rule of law. Notwithstanding the spreading pall of disorder and the near complete collapse of respect for the pillars of the old, pre-war status quo – police, politicians, the law, and the inalienable right to free speech – in large areas of the bomb-damaged northern states, Rosellini and his fellow West Coast Governors, Republican Mark Odom Hatfield of Oregon, and Democrat Pat Brown of California, had determined that in the absence of Federal intervention, they would together ‘wage total war’ on the lawless enclaves within their own West Coast states. Together they had determined that Bellingham, the biggest and most poisonous of these ‘cancers’ in their midst, would be placed back under the ‘rule of law’ even if they had to raise it to the ground to do it!
The example of Bellingham would, hopefully serve as an object lesson to the gangsters and crazies infesting parts of several bomb-damaged big cities elsewhere and holed out in the Cascade, Rocky and the Sierra Madre mountains preying on the surrounding countryside up and down the whole Western seaboard.
“What is your plan, General?”
The question was entirely rhetorical and both men; friends and brothers in arms now, understood as much. The Governor had given the old soldier a free hand and he was not about to meddle at the last minute.
Major General Colin Dempsey looked to the darkening, rain pregnant skies and imagined he heard the first whispers of the approaching aerial storm. In the Second World War he had been with Patton in North Africa, Sicily and France before he was wounded at Bastogne in the Ardennes, and called back to work at the Pentagon. He had been slated to join the planning staff for Operation Downfall, the projected invasion of the Japanese home islands in 1946 but the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had ended the war first. After that war he had gone back to his family lumber business in Portland. He had missed the Korean conflict, the armistice having come a month before his battalion was due to ship out. Afterwards, he had stayed in the Army long enough to get his Lieutenant-Colonel’s oak leaf, joined the reserve list and in due course been awarded his Colonel’s eagle serving with the Washington State Army National Guard. Presently, he was a brevet Major General at the pleasure of the Commander-in-Chief of the Washington State National Guard, his friend Al Rosellini, the first Italian-American ever to be elected a state governor west of the Mississippi.
“No change of plan, sir,” he reported crisply. Now that the moment of decision was very near Dempsey’s weariness and sadness were fast evaporating. On one level he hated what he was about to do, on another, he recognised that it was both necessary and in the name of common decency, morally justified. “As soon as the air strikes go in the 303rd Cavalry will move up to the Bellingham city limits. The surrender demand will be broadcast. If we take fire from the town during or after that broadcast we will commence a further bombardment and subsequently advance to secure all objectives.”
The job would have been easier if the Navy had been willing to provide minimal off shore gunnery support. Two or three gunboats with anti-aircraft cannons or heavy machine guns would have sufficed. However, the United States Navy had brusquely dismissed calls for assistance. Law and order was a ‘local civil responsibility’; nothing to do with the Navy.
Never mind, you fought the war with the men and guns you had not the ones you wished you had!
Al Rosellini had wanted to come up to his CP; Dempsey had squelched this dead. Although the Governor had been less than gracious about the matter he had stayed in the command bunker beneath the State Capital Building in Olympia, sixty miles south of devastated Seattle.
“Good luck, General.”
Colin Dempsey handed the receiver back to the corpsman with the radio pack who was never more than six feet from his side.
“Fire in the hole!” Was the screamed warning.
Dempsey covered his ears and opened his mouth just as the four 90-millimetre rifles of the M48s opened fire on the defenders of the burning school buses and trucks blocking Interstate 5 three miles south of Bellingham. The trees lit up with flashes of red-orange boiling fire as the four high-explosive round crashed in. It was point blank range for the big guns, less than a thousand yards. The tanks’ fifty-calibre heavy machine guns began to hose across the roadblock. Overhead the thrumming of the helicopters skimming fast across the tree tops, clinging to the folds in the land almost but not quite drowned out the banshee roaring of the Washington Air National Guard F-100 Super Sabre interceptors flying top cover. The F-100s were there to make a lot of noise and to confuse Bellingham’s defenders, their demonstration at heights of down to three or four thousand feet over the town would also mask the approach of the six Marine Corps Douglas A-1 Skyraiders. The arrival of the Skyraiders would turn the once sleepy, idyllic north-western port of Bellingham into a living Hell in the minutes before the Hueys dropped the first echelon of the assault group right on top of the enemy’s western defence perimeter.
Each soldier involved in the ground operation had been given a small square card twenty-four hours ago.
The operation you are about to take part in is to free an American town from the tyranny of murderers and criminals who have broken every rule of civil and military law. You are authorised to use lethal force. You are expressly forbidden to take prisoners until all operational objectives have been secured. Signed C.P. Dempsey, M/Gen. Commanding Bellingham Combined Task Force.
Al Rosellini had wanted to sign the card. Dempsey had told him there was no time to reprint and re-issue the cards. Having finally encountered a politician whose innate decency shone through in everything he touched, the old soldier had no intention of allowing such a man to become a hostage to fortune. At some point in the future the Governor of Washington State might need to be able to claim he had clean hands and the purest of intentions when the subject of ‘that dirty business at Bellingham’ came up in Congress, or before the Supreme Court.
One in five Washingtonians had died in the October War – most of them as a result of the Sammamish strike which had destroyed Bellevue and central Seattle and wrecked the rest of the city – and as of this moment, approximately a third of the land area of the State remained outside the writ of State or Federal law. A new wave of disease; some kind of new and virulent strain of influenza, outbreaks of poliomyelitis, whooping cough and all manner of pestilences related to poor hygiene, bad water, malnutrition and the breakdown of state-wide health services, was sweeping the North-West. Things were rushing out of control and people had lost faith in the authorities to do anything about the ongoing disintegration of civil society.
Well, the time had come to do something about that!
Dempsey mounted the command Jeep, which backed further into the trees away from the gun line of M48s as the tanks poured high explosives and fifty-calibre machine gun fire into the enemy lines.
The first A-1 Skyraider tracked down the forest edge where the defenders had established a sniping picket line that afternoon. Momentarily, a quarter mile long wall of igniting napalm lit up the evening gloom as if it was high noon on a sunny day in Hell.
“BIG STICK TO FIREBIRD ONE! BULLSEYE! REPEAT! BULLSEYE!”
Dempsey heard the pilot’s lazy Californian drawl acknowledge the excited ground controller’s report.
“FIREBIRD ONE TO BIG STICK! I COPY THAT! ALL FIREBIRDS PRESENT AND CORRECT! WHAT ARE YOUR
ORDERS?”
Dempsey patted the controller on the shoulder.
“Hit the enemy with everything you’ve got!”
“BIG STICK TO FIREBIRD ONE! I COPY THAT! HIT THE ENEMY WITH EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT AS PER ATTACK PLAN ALPHA. OVER!”
Thirty seconds later another great blooming avenue of expanding napalm strikes burned down the road towards Bellingham.
The M48s’s Continental AVSI-1790 seven hundred and fifty horse power V12 air-cooled twin-turbo diesel engines roared and the stink of their exhausts filled the air. No plan survived first contact with the enemy but at this moment twenty main battle tanks, fifty armoured personnel carriers, and two dozen Bell UH-1 Iroquois – ‘Huey’ – helicopters carrying over two hundred heavily armed assault troops were closing in on the besieged town. Backing up the assault wave was a mixed force of over three thousand National Guardsmen, their ranks stiffened with regulars and veterans of America’s past foreign wars.
Bellingham was invisible in the falling dusk beyond the great stands of trees which carpeted this part of Washington State; but in the distance the sky was beginning to flash and glitter with fire and tracer, and the low clouds were painted blood red by each new series of huge detonations. At a range of over three miles the continual clatter of the Skyraiders’ cannons set the air itself trembling.
Some small part of Major General Colin Dempsey reviled at what he was doing. He was making war on fellow Americans; citizens whom he had sworn to protect all those years ago at West Point, and in whose name he had fought through North Africa, Sicily and France all the way to the Ardennes.
Is this what we have come to?
Whatever those people in Bellingham had done, whatever atrocities they had committed in the last year; they were still Americans like him. It was as if some terrible, final line had been crossed. He had paid the ferryman and now he must cross the Rubicon.
There was no turning back.
From this point onwards there was only war.
Chapter 6
Sunday 24th November 1963
Geary Boulevard, Fillmore District, San Francisco
Terry Francois had been elected President of the San Francisco chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People – the NAACP – in 1959. Louisiana-born Francois had served in the Marine Corps in the Second War, returning home to study at Xavier University in New Orleans. Later he had received a master’s degree in Business Administration at Atlanta, then, after leaving the Deep South he had qualified as an attorney in San Francisco in 1949. In the years since he had immersed himself in the civil rights movement. His service in the Marines had taught him self-reliance and given him the confidence to stand on his own two feet, and his post-war education had equipped him to fight the pernicious dead hand of racism, segregation and discrimination that still seemed to be the immutable bedrock of American society.
For much of his time in San Francisco - even after the October War - he had been somewhat out of step with many of his fellow NAACP members; where he saw the absolute necessity for a more activist approach many others preferred either quiet protest, or no protest at all. Whereas, he saw in the partial ruination of the old World by the abomination of the October War a once in a generation opportunity to advance the cause of the civil rights movement in America; many of his peers saw only the pitfalls, the dangers of pressing too hard, of leaving themselves vulnerable to the accusation that they lacked patriotism and civil responsibility and were deliberately making a bad situation worse. While Terry Francois understood the feelings of his people – he knew as well as any man that members of the NAACP were no less patriotic and to his mind, a lot less irresponsible, than the majority of their fellow Americans – he often felt like he was wading through knee-deep mud. Nonetheless, he consoled himself with the thought that in recent years real progress had been made and was continuing to be made, albeit in baby steps.
Civil rights abuses tended to be less gratuitously self-evident, less visibly egregious and often, relatively subtle on the West Coast. The planter’s mansions of the old antebellum South did not dot the California landscape like signposts to an enslaved past. Here in San Francisco or Los Angeles or San Diego one took for granted the presence of Chinamen and Hispanics as well as blacks, the big cities were international melting pots with cultures infused and enhanced by influences that had either never, or rarely travelled to Atlanta, or Memphis, Birmingham, the Carolinas or into the murky backwaters of the Louisiana bayous. Here on the West Coast prejudices were less violently held, emotions were less visceral and there was a different status quo; the whites were on top, the Latinos and Chinese somehow lesser citizens, the blacks were a singular grouping often dispersed in neighbourhoods with people of many other races, creeds and histories. In many places the sense of a ‘black identity’ was peculiarly hard to pin down. For example, White San Franciscans might, at a pinch, classify the Fillmore District as a ‘black district’ but although a stranger passing through would have see a lot of black faces he or she would not necessarily agree with or care to recognise the ‘black district’ proposition. Put crudely, the whites did not fear the blacks in the West Coast, even if they were in many ways as eager to keep the black man – and the Hispanic and the Chinaman - under their thumbs as their more openly bigoted Southern cousins in Atlanta and Birmingham, Selma and Montgomery. The truth of the matter was that because the – still very real and callous – underlying discrimination was less savagely applied and that overt violence was rarely its preferred instrument, it was that much harder for Terry Francois to motivate his people to protest. While there were regular bloody riots in the Deep South, here in San Francisco the NAACP mainly organised peaceful sit ins, boycotted selected stores and hotels, politely campaigned for equal access to social and low rent housing, and generally focused on small, peaceful ways of improving the lot of the black worker.
None of which meant that the Federal Bureau of Investigation took any less interest in the President of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP than in his counterparts in Georgia and Alabama. Hence the stupid rigmarole of having to walk up one side of Geary Boulevard, cross the road and walk down the other for a couple of hundred yards, ostentatiously halting, turning around and making absolutely certain that it was obvious – even to an FBI man - that he was checking to make sure that nobody was following him. Terry Francois hated the cloak and dagger nonsense. He was a respectable citizen who tried his best – and his best was in this respect demonstrably much better than most whites in his country – to respect the Constitution while campaigning to be treated exactly the same way as any other law-abiding American. Moreover, he was not working for a subversive organisation bent on harming his country; he was as American as any other man. Damn it! He had served in the Marines!
The NAACP was an historic organization with impeccable democratic credentials run by and for honourable men and women; which was a great deal more than could be claimed by the FBI! Or, for that matter the San Francisco Police Department!
It said a great deal about the state of the Union that a little more than a year on from the most catastrophic war in human history, members of the Administration which had unleashed a rain of thermonuclear fire on the nation’s enemies without – it seemed – the least compunction, clearly lacked the moral fibre to deal openly with the leaders of the outrageously racist, segregationist elements of their own natural constituency.
“I thought they might send you, brother,” Terry Francois half-smiled, eyeing the huge man blocking the pavement two paces in front of him. There was something about Dwayne John that always reminded him of a giant redwood tree. The man was six feet and three or four inches tall and on a day like today when the cold wind blew in from the Pacific and he was wearing an oversized raincoat over a suit and waist coat, he seemed almost as broad as he was tall. It was an illusion of course, the man was built like a heavyweight at the top of his fighting game and moved like an Olympic sprinter stepping up to his blocks with a langui
d, lithe grace.
The two men shook hands.
“I have letters for you from Dr King.”
Terry Francois smiled broadly and shook his head.
The two men had fallen into step, turning left off Geary Boulevard onto Gough Street walking in the direction of distant Lafayette Park. It was approaching mid-day, soon congregations would be spilling out of the churches and chapels. If families were looking forward to a walk in the park they were going to be disappointed for the weather was closing in and there was already a spit of cold rain in the air.
“How are things in Atlanta?” Terry Francois asked.
“Calm.” Dwayne John grunted. “There’s bad shit happening in Alabama and Mississippi all the time, they say. Never thought I’d say it but Dr King says there are actually white men in Georgia who see the way things are going. But Alabama,” he shrugged. “Them old boys are beyond reason. Maybe it’s because Sherman didn’t march through Alabama!”
The younger man spoke with low exasperation.
“The SFPD pulled me in and asked me about you the other day,” Terry Francois reported. The men had stopped briefly outside a closed ironmongery shop, each eyeing the street over and around the other’s shoulder. “Two of the Commissioner’s guys. The way things are at the moment the Mayor doesn’t want any trouble with the NAACP. The FBI thinks we’re all Communist stooges,” he did not attempt to hide his scorn. “Anyway, the Mayor has enough trouble with weirdoes and peaceniks trying to block the gates of the Navy Docks at Hunter’s Point and going out in sailboats to harass the nuclear submarines at Alameda. The SFPD is having to run twenty-four hour patrols in the Bay to stop protestors approaching the nuclear submarines moored over there. Some idiot tried to drop half-a-dozen rocks on a Polaris submarine as it sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge a couple of weeks ago.” The older man sighed. “People don’t go out so much lately after dark. Stuff always used to be going on in this city, Dwayne, but now,” he added with a wistful shrug of remembrance for the days before the war, “you hear gun shots every night. Nobody feels safe anymore.”