by James Philip
It mattered not that the Iowa and the Wisconsin were mothballed, largely unmodified World War II vintage battlewagons with ten to twenty year old optics, radars and electronic suites, or that they were horribly labour intensive beasts to steam and maintain, and that without constant air cover and a dozen surface and undersea escorts to ward off air and submarine attack they were giant sitting ducks. None of that mattered because anybody taking the most casual of casual looks at the great, long, lean battleships with their upper works bristling with old-fashioned but very, very visible firepower and their nine massive sixteen-inch calibre naval rifles mounted in three suitably enormous turrets – two forward of the bridge, the third aft of the superstructure – intuitively knew with utter, unshakable certainty that nothing could withstand these ships if they were so foolish as to come within range of their guns. Such was the fallacy of the battleship myth; even twenty years after it had been blown asunder at places as far apart as Taranto in the Mediterranean, Pearl Harbour in the Hawaiian Islands, in the South China Sea, in the Sibuyan Gulf and the Pacific south of Kyushu, nobody was emotionally immune to the cast iron solidity and the unambiguously awesome power of a battleship.
Iowa and Wisconsin were among the last battlewagons built for the US Navy, coming into service in 1944, by then the age of the battleship was over and in the last year of the Pacific War they were relegated to the role of fast escorts for the American carrier task groups ranging across the vast eastern oceans, or employed as mobile artillery platforms capable of pouring screaming death and destruction upon enemy shores over twenty miles distant. In the months after the Iowas joined the Pacific Fleet the only bigger battleships ever built, the Japanese Yamato and Musashi, both twenty thousand tons heavier never came within range of their great sixteen-inch naval rifles; instead they were bombed and torpedoed into deep watery graves in attacks by hundreds of American carrier borne aircraft.
Before he disappeared out of sight into the towering castles of steel moored in the muddy waters of the Delaware River, Jack Kennedy turned and waved for the cameras. He was in no particular hurry, and invited his Vice-President to join him. The aura of their surroundings lent what they were trying to achieve credence out of all proportion to the highly questionable military utility of either the Wisconsin or the Iowa. The thirty-fifth President of the United States of America had tried to reason with his detractors, desperately attempted to woo at least some of his political enemies back onto the centre ground; and he had failed dismally, as eloquently witnessed by the fact that his Administration was at war with a sizable majority of the occupants of the House of Representatives. So be it; now he was appealing directly to the court of public opinion and he did not need to consult a public relations genius to know, that when the American people saw pictures of their President on the deck of an American battleship, they were going to feel a lot better about both him and themselves, and in all likelihood sleep a little more soundly in their beds.
Leastways, until the next disaster came along.
The Navy had spruced up the quayside flank and superstructure of the USS Wisconsin with a hurried coat of grey paint. The air stank of the freshly applied paint and Jack Kennedy breathed more easily as he followed Admiral David Lamar McDonald, the Chief of Naval Operations through the steel jungle to the gangway which linked the two battleships out of sight of the press corps. There were already men working on the decks of the USS Iowa, stringing cables high in her conning tower, anti-aircraft gun mounts were being dismantled, and two diesel generators thrummed in the lee of her forward main battery turrets. Unlike her sister ship, the Iowa was alive and in the coming days an army of workers would swarm over her like ants striving to turn the symbolic gestures of a few minutes ago into a reality that the whole World would recognise as an unmistakable signal of American resolve. When the Iowa steamed out into the North Atlantic again Jack Kennedy wanted the World to know that he was putting down a personal marker. He had not actually believed his new Chief of Naval Operations when David McDonald had told him that given Presidential priority and ‘a fair wind’, the old battlewagon could be taken out of mothballs and sent back to sea within twelve weeks and be in the Mediterranean in fifteen, without - and this was the crucial caveat – delaying the emergency reactivation of other more modern ships.
McDonald was, as Lyndon Johnson said, ‘a regular guy’, albeit ‘for an Admiral’. There was probably no higher praise in the Vice-President’s lexicon than an acknowledgement that a senior military man was ‘a regular guy’. At this very moment the US Navy’s Personnel Division was trawling Navy records for men who had served on the four mothballed Iowa class ships – the other two sisters, the USS New Jersey and the USS Missouri were laid up at the Bremerton Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility in Washington State – because the master plan was to, quite literally, crew the World War II battlewagon with ‘old hands’. Of the four ships the Iowa was in the best condition, and fortuitously, on the doorstep of the new headquarters of the national press and media corps. Although the Wisconsin had been the last of the class taken out of active service she had been extensively damaged by a big electrical fire after her mothballing and had never been repaired. Moreover, neither the New Jersey or the Missouri had been modernized since the Korean War. Given the basic soundness of the Iowa’s fabric and machinery, David McDonald had not seriously considered reactivating any of the other three ships of her class. Besides, while there were a lot of old battleship men on the Naval Reserve List it was highly unlikely that there would be enough, fit, willing and able ‘older hands’ with the necessary range of technical qualifications to enable him to magic out of thin air more than a single crew for one of the old ships.
Admiral McDonald waited until his guests had settled in the admiral’s day cabin in the comfortable chairs arranged around the big table he had had brought in from City Hall, then he moved to the briefing board at the forward end of the compartment.
“In the event of an alarm sounding,” earlier that morning the Alert Status of the US military had been downgraded from DEFCON TWO to DEFCON THREE but that was more because of the inherent dangers of indefinitely maintaining the higher level of readiness, than any lessoning of the perceived international tensions or the actual risk of attack, “the Secret Service will lead all persons in this compartment below to a secure area within the most heavily armoured part of the ship. The area I have identified for this purpose is shielded by six inches of cemented steel deck armour and up to sixteen inches of side armour. In the event the ship is holed and sinks to the bottom of the Delaware River,” he added, affecting a fleeting smile, “rest assured that the ship will settle on the bottom and the designated ‘safe area’ will remain several feet above water.”
Jack Kennedy chuckled.
“That’s very reassuring, Admiral.”
“We are currently at a reduced state of alert; DEFCON THREE,” McDonald went on. Cabinet members and senior military officers knew this but not all of their aides and assistants. “This is a lower state of alert than that immediately subsequent to the initial nuclear strikes in the Mediterranean. However, B-52s are airborne at this time and they are still flying to their fail safe points; and three of our Polaris missile boats commanded by officers for whose loyalty I can personally vouch, have put to sea in the last forty-eight hours.”
The President waited for the low whisper of voices to subside, looking around the compartment with a sober eye. Two key men were absent; The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Curtis LeMay, and murdered Dean Rusk’s successor at the State Department, the immensely able and sagacious fifty-eight year old Missourian James William ‘Bill’ Fulbright, who was currently engaged on a madcap round of shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East. Bill Fulbright – who was still technically the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and was likely to remain so for the foreseeable future if the House’s foot-dragging and obfuscation continued – viewed Red Dawn’s stunningly badly executed nuclear strikes of th
ree days ago as a ‘once in a generation opportunity to knock heads together in the region’. Jack Kennedy had given him a free hand to ‘do whatever has to be done’ to exploit the situation. The way things were going they were unlikely to get too many lucky breaks like the ones Cairo and Malta had had last Friday.
God, had all that happened only three days ago!
Jack Kennedy looked to his Chief of Naval Operations. David McDonald had offered him his resignation forty-eight hours ago.
‘I knew we were sending the Enterprise and the Long Beach into harm’s way, sir. The reality is that there will be people in Congress demanding somebody’s head on a platter.’
‘You were obeying my direct orders, Admiral,’ his Commander-in-Chief had reminded him, ending further discussion. ‘A lot of people who ought to know better haven’t got used to the idea that we are at war. In war bad things happen. When they do we mourn the dead and we move on.’
Now on a grey morning closeted in the steel cocoon of a dinosaur from another, simpler age, the President of the United States of America paused a moment to make eye contacts around the table.
Lyndon Baines Johnson sat sombrely at his right hand, his Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara at his left. Bob McNamara had brought along his ‘point man’ with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, forty-nine year old three-star army General William Childs Westmoreland. Westmoreland’s was a name already being bandied around as a future candidate as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, ‘Westy’ as he was known to insiders in the Army and the Defence Department, had a reputation as a ‘corporation executive in uniform’, making him exactly the sort of man that the former President of the Ford Motor Company, Bob McNamara, needed at his side in his fiendishly complex ongoing mission to unpick the chaos left by the Battle of Washington, and to reorganise and to place on a sound long-term footing the presently much diminished military might of the nation. The other members of the ‘conference group’ had come aboard the USS Iowa without fanfare, ferried across the Delaware in Navy launches from the New Jersey side of the river well out of sight of the media pack corralled on the Pennsylvania shore.
Robert Francis ‘Bobby’ Kennedy, the President’s younger brother who held the post of Attorney General in the Administration had shed several years off his careworn good looks in recent weeks. He had suffered a minor gunshot wound in the tragic assassination of British Prime Minister Edward Heath in the Oval Office at the end of the Battle of Washington; recovered fast and been, with his elder brother, the barnstorming, proselytizing, unapologetic face and voice of the Administration in the weeks since. While the President had wowed the crowds – essentially he had been on the campaign trail – Bobby had mixed ‘campaigning’ with reconnecting with Middle America and the downtrodden, dispossessed whom both brothers now regarded as the key elements of their natural constituency. Until the last couple of months Bobby and Lyndon Johnson had been at odds, mistrusting and misunderstanding each other at every turn. Latterly, Bobby had realised that beneath the tall Texan’s frowning disdain for ‘gesture politics’ and his career reputation for ‘playing hardball, fixing and dealing in DC’, that LBJ and he shared a broadly similar vision of a better, fairer, more equitable and fundamentally juster society. However, before they created that better new World they both recognised that they had to preserve the one they were living in first.
Some of the faces around the table were hardly known to the President. Not so that of fifty-three year old Virginian, Henry Hammill Fowler, since the assassination of his predecessor, C. Douglas Dillon on the first day of the Battle of Washington, promoted from Under Secretary for the Treasury to oversee the financial reconstruction that Jack Kennedy now realised he ought to have authorised immediately after the October War. Fowler was another man ideally qualified to discharge his new responsibilities. A lawyer by training, in the 1945 war he had been counsel to the Office of Production Management and to the War Production Board, during the Korean War he had returned to government with the National Production Authority, serving initially as Director of the Office of Defence Mobilization and later drafted onto the National Security Council. A lifelong Democrat he had left government during the Eisenhower years but not retired from public service; serving on the Commission on Money and Credit between 1958 and 1961, working for the Democratic Advisory Council, and sitting on the Brookings Institute’s National Committee on Government Finance before joining the Administration in 1962. Henry Fowler was closer to LBJ than either of the Kennedy brothers, gifted with a distinctly southern charm and politically, conservative without ever having fully embraced the traditional segregationist ‘Southern Democratic’ agenda.
Beyond the ruddy-faced Treasury Secretary sat the Secretaries of the Navy, the Air Force and the Army, several loyal senior Democrats, the Secretary of Labour, the Surgeon General, and two representatives of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom; the British Ambassador, Lord Franks, elegantly attired in civilian garb, and beside him Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s personal ‘Military Legate to the President’, the former Chief of the British Air Staff, Air Marshal Sir Charles Elworthy. Margaret Thatcher had made it clear to Jack Kennedy that these two men, in her absence, ‘spoke for the United Kingdom’ and when the Angry Widow said a thing like that a man was a fool not to take it to heart. Senior staffers circled around their principals. This ‘packing’ of the conference presented an intrinsic security issue but not one that was outweighed by the crying need for everybody to be on the same page, and to be wholly conversant with the same message.
The President of the United States of America cleared his throat.
“Admiral McDonald has prepared a for our ears only situation briefing,” he prefaced, deadly serious. “This conference was called at this time and place for four reasons. One, the setting,” he quirked an unfunny half-smile, “because appearances do matter, my friends, and I make no apology for using these magnificent old ships as publicity props. Any assurance we can give our fellow Americans in these times is to be welcomed.”
There were murmurs of agreement around the table.
“Two, despite recent events in the Mediterranean, and the news we are receiving all the time – some good, some bad, some very bad – nothing that has happened in the last few days has altered the declared policy of my Administration. The United States of America will re-mobilize to fight a one continent war by the earliest date. Thereafter, we will restore and if necessary, build up, our forces to be capable of simultaneously fighting a two continent war against any likely foe. For the present we will offer and provide, without reserve, on a ‘war grant’ basis,” he threw a glance at his new Secretary to the US Treasury, “similar to the Second World War lend lease arrangements’ all assistance that it is within out power to give to the United Kingdom. Several ships carrying war supplies and other essential goods are already at sea en route to the United Kingdom and to the Mediterranean. Presently, this lifeline is a trickle, heads will roll if that lifeline does not quickly turn into a mighty river of foodstuffs, industrial and technical materials, fuels and every imaginable sinew of war.”
Jack Kennedy exchanged looks with his younger brother, whose understated nod confirmed he was hitting the right buttons. Thus fortified, he continued.
“Three, while re-affirming that it is still this Administration’s position that an attack on the soil of an Ally as defined by the Articles of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, shall be automatically be regarded as a direct attack on the United States of America; I have been persuaded by Premier Thatcher that despite the clear intention of aggressors based on Romanian sovereign territory, and the soil of one, perhaps two of the republics of the former Soviet Union, to target British territories and warships in the Mediterranean with nuclear weapons,” he paused, made eye contacts around the table, “a decision to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike has been deferred indefinitely at this time pending future developments. Those responsible for the recent nuclear and conventional war crimes and atrocities comm
itted in the Central and Eastern Mediterranean Regions are hereby under notice from the civilized World that their crimes will never be forgotten, and that one day they will face the justice they so richly deserve.”
The sound of hammering and machinery filtered into the compartment from far, far away as if to remind all those present that this ship, and the country at large was stirring from its post-cataclysm stupor.
“Four,” Jack Kennedy said, his tone brightening and yet filling with iron resolve. “Tomorrow evening in a speech to the Faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology I will announce my decision to run for a second term as your President.”
Chapter 6
Monday 10th February 1964
Parlatorio Wharf, Grand Harbour, Malta
Admiral Sir Julian Christopher, Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations, could not but be aware of the peculiarly festive atmosphere around him on the dockside as the gangway was heaved into place and secured to the gouged, dented, fire-blackened main deck of the battered Weapon class destroyer HMS Scorpion. He had given ‘the ladies’ – Marija Calleja and her chaperone, Margo Seiffert – leave to detach themselves from the official welcoming party. For himself, no matter how much he wanted to shake his son’s hand again, protocol demanded that he welcome Captain ‘D’ of the 7th Destroyer Flotilla ashore first.
Striding magisterially up the gangway he caught a glimpse of Marija and Margo smoothing down their skirts while they awaited the securing of HMS Talavera’s gangway. He chuckled to himself and shook his head before forcing himself to focus on the matter in hand.
“Permission to come aboard, Captain!”