California Dreaming (Timeline 10/27/62 - USA)

by James Philip

  One member of the team had asked Dempsey if ‘power tools’ were permitted in the ‘Interrogation Hall’.

  ‘Do what you have to do, son,” had been Dempsey’s dead pan reply.

  The boys back in Olympia could flay the bastards alive for all he cared.

  “Don’t we get one last smoke?” One of the animals in the line yelled in a quavering, shivering cackle. In the last few minutes the prisoners had been stripped naked and their rags thrown into the trench behind them. It was a bitterly cold morning.

  Colin Dempsey raised the bull horn to his lips.

  “My name is Colin Powell Dempsey. By the order of the Governor of the State of Washington, Commander-in-Chief of all National Guard and attached military forces.” He paused, contemplated spitting on the ground and continued: “Under the provisions of the emergency powers vested in me in an area under martial law, you have been sentenced to death for heinous crimes against humanity. May God have mercy upon your souls.” This last he barked angrily. “Because nobody else will!”

  The Governor had asked Dempsey if he proposed to detail firing squads for each prisoner.

  ‘No, sir. That will not be necessary.’

  Dempsey gathered his wind.

  “KILL THEM ALL!” He bellowed with cold fury.

  A storm of close range automatic weapon fire scythed down the prisoners like stalks of harvested summer wheat. Several bodies fell back into the newly excavated trench, while others writhed twitching on the ground, most just collapsed, or were blown apart and were dead before their bodies hit the mud. When the barrage of automatic fire stopped individual National Guardsmen walked up and down the line administering single head shots to complete their grisly task. The bulldozer’s engine coughed into life as a barrel of petrol was rolled close to the mass grave.

  United States Deputy Attorney General Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach had not batted so much as an eyelid as Dempsey had told him what was going to happen in the morning. Nor had he reacted when he had detailed the interrogation methods his men were employing with the eight prisoners, including the one woman, who were to be ‘spared’ immediate summary execution.

  ‘This,” he had told the messenger from DC, ‘is what happens when a Government fails to maintain the rule of law, and in abdicating its responsibilities fails in its primary duty, to protect is people.’

  Katzenbach had retorted that he was in Olympia on a ‘fact finding mission’ for the President. It was not his job to justify the actions of State Governors before Congress or the Supreme Court.

  Governor Rosellini had taken exception to that particular cheap shot.

  Katzenbach had apologised. The man was a serious player, not a flimflam man like his boss. Mark Hatfield, the Republican Governor of Oregon and the other West Coast Governor, Pat Brown of California had both rounded on the United States Deputy Attorney General. The general tenor of the debate – more a shouting match – had been ‘what the fuck do you guys in DC think you are playing at?’

  Katzenbach had stayed calm.

  No, the President was not asleep at the wheel.

  No, the peace dividend had not ‘neutered’ the Armed Forces.

  No, Chicago was not sucking in all of the available Federal disaster relief budget just because it was – or had been before 27th October 1962 – the Kennedy family’s personal political power base.

  No, the Administration had no plans to intervene in the internal affairs of the states of Washington, Oregon, or California.

  ‘Why the Hell not?’ The trio of West Coast Governors had protested.

  Nicholas Katzenbach had opted to pass on that question.

  The bulldozer came down the bloody execution line shovelling corpses into the mass grave. Petrol glugged and slopped over the bodies. Its grisly task accomplished the bulldozer backed away.

  Colin Dempsey accepted the loaded flare gun from an aide.

  “Everybody stand back!” He commanded.

  One final look around as the rain began to fall again.

  He aimed the gun into the middle of the trench.

  Pulled the trigger.

  With a series of whoofs the trench lit up like a tree line hit by a napalm strike by a pair of A-1 Skyraiders.

  Chapter 14

  Wednesday 27th November 1963

  Luke Air Force Base (De-commissioned), Glendale, Arizona

  The two cars took the corner as if in formation – the corner was hot dusty tarmac on the edge of the recently closed air base delineated, like the rest of the course only by old oil drums – with their engines roaring and their tyres screeching and squealing as they slide across the slick apron where, until three months ago a line of silvery North American F-100 Super Sabre jet interceptors belonging to the 4510th Combat Crew Training Wing had stood ready for action. There was only a small crowd today. This was a private race, one among several. It was a practice session ahead of the major event, the first ‘Glendale Two Hundred’ scheduled for the upcoming weekend. Enthusiasts, street and circuit racers had begun to arrive a few days ago, their adapted sports cars rumbling throatily down Main Street and burning up the miles of flat, straight roads around Phoenix. The local traffic cops had granted an unofficial moratorium on speeding violations on Interstate 10 and the other major arteries into and out of the city; mostly in recognition of the flock of eagerly awaited visitors anticipated to fill Phoenix’s hotels, motels, diners and otherwise down at heel malls over the next week.

  There was a scintillating moment when it seemed inevitable that the two cars would touch, perhaps collide as they skidded, rubber burning, neither driver lifting his right foot so much as a millimetre off the gas. Knowing that nobody was about to ask or give quarter at the last corner before the half-mile sprint to the chequered flag the organisers had left a huge run off area but these two cars were deliberately using every inch of extra road to avoid backing off. It looked inevitable that both racers would pile into the big oil drums marking the limit of the circuit until miraculously; the turn was suddenly behind them and they were hurtling down the finishing straight, wheel to wheel, smoking, billowing desert sand in their slipstreams like speedboats ripping up the surface of a shimmering lake. On race day there would be a commentator and a master of ceremonies yelling names, car numbers and calling the watchers to order; this afternoon there were but a handful of cheering enthusiasts and camp followers and a small group of uniformed, rather uncomfortable United States Air Force staff officers including one, with a sidearm strapped to his hip, carrying a metal attaché case whose handle was cuffed to his right wrist by a short, silvery chain.

  The President of the United States of America might have reserved to himself the ultimate decision on the ‘tactical use’ of nuclear weapons; but the Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee had prevailed upon him to ensure that in the event of a ‘sneak attack’ – nobody could actually envisage who would launch such a ‘sneak attack’ – which ‘decapitated the Administration’, both NORAD and the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force should have the ability to independently ‘strike back’.

  The officer carrying the Air Force’s ‘nuclear football’ had winced as the two red sports cars diced – literally with sudden death – on the recently abandoned airfield. Around him men were jumping up and down, heartily slapping each other’s backs.

  General Curtis Emerson LeMay, the fifty-seven year old Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force clambered out of his car and embraced the much younger man who had clambered from the other racer. LeMay threw his gloves back into his car which was steaming, sizzling in the arid baking Arizona sunshine, flexing and creaking as hot metal began to cool. The air stank of gas and oil, leather and scorched rubber. For once in his rollercoaster life LeMay did not care that he had lost – by a fender’s width – to his rival; the kid was a natural racer and an old man had no right expecting to beat a kid with a fighter jock’s highly tuned reflexes and his instinctive car control. On days like this the legendary bomber commander
who had been responsible for building Strategic Air Command into the great sword of democracy which had won the October War in a single night, yearned to embrace his scheduled retirement. Regardless of whether President Kennedy ran for a second term next year, it was unlikely that he or his successor would want Old Iron Pants in charge of his Air Force after the election. Not when half the country viewed LeMay as its saviour; and the other half as Lucifer’s chief lieutenant.

  LeMay planned to spend his retirement racing fast cars. He had always been a car nut; and lately racing fast cars was pretty much the only thing that took his mind off the madness of the World. His proudest possession was his Allard J2, and as long ago as 1954 the Sports Car Club of America had presented him with its highest honour, the Woolf Barnato Award. In the early 1950s as the culture of street racing died out in the post-1945 suburbanisation of the great American cities, LeMay had begun to loan out disused air bases, suddenly making available long, fast tracks for the new generation of super-charged racers. It was part of the enigma of the private man behind the legend that he was as proud of his role in boosting and promoting the American auto-racing boom as he was of bombing Japan out of the Pacific War or of saving America on the night of the October War.

  One or two old friends had suggested he might try his hand at politics after he left the Air Force but that notion appealed to him a lot less than the opportunity of throwing himself into the work of the Sports Car Club of America, and basically, racing until he dropped.

  Or crashed one too many times...

  He had warned the President, and anybody else who would listen, that the ‘peace dividend’ was ‘stupid’ and ‘premature’. Specifically, he had gone over Secretary of Defence, McNamara’s head, and said that the peace dividend was the ‘most damned fool thing’ he had ever heard of ‘in his whole life’. The trouble was that getting the credit for winning a war that had left half the Northern Hemisphere – the industrialised hemisphere – of planet Earth in ruins counted for diddly squat in a post-war environment in which big business, and several hundred members of the House of Representatives suddenly saw a once in a generation opportunity to appropriate a huge slice of the defence budget to fund their own pet projects, personal ‘special interests’ and to pay off all their old debts. It did not help that the Kennedy brothers were transfixed by the chance to buy their own personal piece of immortality with their own voters. Once the Administration had started talking about the ‘peace dividend’ it had been like blowing a hole in the Hoover Dam; no power on earth could stop the flood.

  Without being able to prove it the Administration was happy to contend that the Soviet threat was, if not eliminated, then eradicated for decades to come and that therefore, ‘there was no significant extant hostile geopolitical strategic military threat to the North American continent’. Against this backdrop, Curtis LeMay had been powerless to prevent the President and his Congressional lap dogs clawing back an initial ‘peace dividend’ equivalent to over forty percent of the 1961-62 real dollar spend on defence. In budget years1964-65 to 1967-68 the planned real cut against the 1961-62 benchmark would rise by increments to sixty-five percent. Half the Navy had already gone into mothballs, the regular Army had been reduced to a skeleton of less than two hundred thousand men, and the front line war-fighting order of battle of his Air Force had now been reduced by war losses and Capitol Hill gerrymandering to less than a third of its pre-war roster. He had been forced to scrap or mothball the entire B-47 component of SAC, and to pare down the B-52 force to only 188 aircraft organised between five under-strength Bomb Groups. Four of every ten US Air Force Bases in North America had been decommissioned in the last five months, and by the spring one in three of the remaining bases would close.

  The clowns in Washington had absolutely no inkling how much trouble they were storing up for themselves; prematurely retiring and discarding hundreds of thousands of good and true, patriotic Americans to whom their uniform was an integral part of their personal identities, and the one thing that gave their lives purpose and meaning.

  Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won. That was what the Duke of Wellington had said after Waterloo and every real soldier understood as much.

  Curtis LeMay’s gaze flicked across the small group of Air Force Officers who accompanied him wherever he went, lingering momentarily on the stocky Captain chained to the nuclear football. A number of men at all levels in the Air Force – three to four times the pre-war rate - had committed suicide in the last thirteen months, unable or unwilling to come to terms with what had happened in October 1962. As many as one in ten of the surviving SAC aircrew who had participated in bombing missions in the war had later been officially deemed unfit for future operational deployment on medical – mainly psychological - grounds, others had requested transfers to ground duties or terminated their service early. There were over thirty documented cases of B-47 and B-52 airmen killing themselves; ‘psyche evaluation’ was the one growth operational area of Strategic Air Command activity.

  Before the October war there had been a great deal of speculation about how men would perform in the ultimate battlefield. How many men would baulk at carrying out their terrible duty? Might SAC crews refuse, en masse, to drop their bombs? Might SAC crews jettison their bombs uninitiated and therefore, harmlessly? Intensive interrogations and studies of operational records indicated that all the surviving crews had done their duty. Three B-52s had brought back bombs but in each case technical issues had prevented the unlocking of these weapons – all four bombs brought back were free fall Mark 39 bombs – with faulty, factory-sealed, fail safe mechanisms. Lemay had personally ensured that the crews concerned had been treated in the same way, and had received the same rewards for gallantry, as every other survivor. Of the four hundred and twenty-nine bombers – three hundred and eighty-eight B-52s and forty-one B-47s – despatched on war missions on the night of the October War, two hundred and sixty-eight had failed to return, a loss rate of over sixty-two percent.

  The most senior ranking suicide was the case of a man he had flown B-24 missions with over Hitler’s Germany in 1943. He had seemed fine but one day he had driven out into the country, walked a short distance from the road, put the muzzle of his service pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  The Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force could never really be one hundred percent absent on ‘R and R’. Curtis LeMay wiped the pouring sweat off his brow with a grimy rag, and attempted to dry his palms on the dirty grey boiler suit he wore over his civilian clothes as he approached his coterie of staffers.

  “What’s the latest on the inquiry into Colonel Gunther’s death?” He demanded. He did not need the FBI snooping around Ent Air Force base; the Air Force’s Special Investigation Branch was in a far better position to investigate ‘suspicious suicides’ than a bunch of G-men working for that asshole Hoover.

  “SIB confirms that there was no suicide note, sir,” the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force was informed flatly. “Further inquiries indicate that Gunther’s home life was ‘settled’. There was ‘no other woman’ and he had not talked to anybody about taking his own life. His doctor says he had chronic, albeit mild, physical issues associated with shrapnel injuries he sustained in 1942 on Guadalcanal. Gunther would complain about occasional pains and stiffness but always in a ‘jocular’ fashion. Gunther had been the subject of complaints from both IBM and IBM’s sub-contractor at the NORAD Air Direction Centre at Ent Air Force Base. Gunther’s commanding officer had rejected these complaints out of hand and Gunther himself seems to have taken the complaints with a pinch of salt. He was Head of Security, one imagines he was used to putting people’s noses out of joint, sir.”

  Curtis LeMay scowled.

  “What about Bellingham?”

  “Major General Dempsey has that, er, situation, under control, sir.”

  “Explain to me what ‘under control’ means, son,” the Chief of Staff of the United States Air
Force demanded with menacing impatience.

  “The town of Bellingham has been successfully ‘pacified’ and returned to State control, sir. There was heavy fighting and the majority of the insurgents were killed in retaking Bellingham. There is a general embargo on news stories at State level, and the Pentagon has imposed an indefinite Federal news blackout until it has established a clearer understanding of the facts on the ground. US Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach visited the capital of Washington State, Olympia, to be briefed by and to confer with Governor Rosellini and the other two West Coast Governors about the situation in Bellingham, and generally, on the West Coast.”

  Curtis LeMay would have queried why the Secretary of the Interior, or his own political boss, Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara had not made the trip to Olympia, rather than a senior, but below Cabinet level, Administration member like Katzenbach. It stank of ‘arse covering’ and it was typical of the way the Republic had been governed in the last year. As for why McNamara had not gone to Washington State he suspected he already knew the answer to that question.

  To the American public the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force was a fearless, fire-eating, cigar-smoking, red-necked martinet who was always the first man over the top, laughing in the face of the enemy. He was Old Iron Pants LeMay, the man who’d been Bombs Away LeMay, the gung ho commander of one of the first B24 Groups in England in 1942, the Demon to anybody who got on his wrong side, or simply the Big Cigar to his airmen. But that was not the whole story; and LeMay, like any man was the sum of his many parts and hugely varied life experiences.

  Within days of the October War Robert McNamara had reminded him of his earlier prognostications that in some circumstances a pre-emptive nuclear war was ‘winnable’. LeMay had interpreted this ‘reminder’ as a warning that sooner or later the Administration would hang him out to dry; a conclusion he had already embraced and oddly, come to terms with because the concept that the man at the top ought to actually take responsibility for his actions was deeply ingrained in his psyche. However, the idea that ‘somebody, somewhere ought to take responsibility’ was, it seemed, alien and mortally distasteful to the psyches of his political overlords.