by James Philip
We know what happened. Or do we? We have causality, an approximate timeline, and half-a-century of intensive military-industrial and academic research with which to deconstruct the catastrophe. But do we really know what happened?
Several key questions remain unresolved. Partly this is because many of the key documents on the American side are still classified and likely to so remain for at least another fifty years. Partly, this is because America’s allies – or more correctly, unwilling co-belligerents – have, over the years, wearied of the hand-wringing and the self-justifying politicking in Washington and in effect, withdrawn from the debate. For the Europeans, who after all bore the main cost of the seemingly absolute American – later pyrrhic - victory, until the question of culpability and reparations is unequivocally resolved there is nothing to discuss. Partly, there can be no definitive history of the October War because it was the only war in the modern age when a continental enemy was not defeated, but annihilated.
Many in the United States of America blame what they interpret as societal ‘moral disintegration’ on the legacy of the war. Where, many ask, is the honour and the glory in celebrating, year after year, the extermination of an adversary that was so out-gunned? Would a super heavyweight boxer draw satisfaction from kneeling on a featherweight contender’s chest and pummelling him until his head was a red and grey pulp on the canvass and splintered fragments of skull were showering down upon the front rows of the crowd? What kind of big fight audience would applaud that kind of pure bloody murder to the rafters?
Yes, the Soviets did fire the first shot.
Yes, the Soviets (or the Cubans, nobody knows who) subsequently launched three medium range ballistic missiles at the continental United States because they probably believed they were under attack.
So what? That’s what the Europeans say and they have every right to ask it. Look at it from their perspective. A nuclear explosion in the sea north of Cuba destroys two American destroyers and badly damages a third. Let it not be forgotten that at the time those American destroyers were dropping depth charges – albeit practice ones – on a Soviet submarine in international waters.
In response to the sinking of their destroyers the American Navy and Air Force promptly scrambled scores of aircraft of all descriptions. It is unclear why they did this but panic and imbecility, rather than military calculation seem to have been the guiding martial principles invoked by senior US commanders on both land and at sea. Given that the Soviet and Cuban commanders, operating in a febrile operational climate that was even more paranoid than that of their American counterparts, suddenly saw their radar screens fill with enemy aircraft a reasonable person is bound to ask, what on the balance of probabilities were they likely to conclude? If you drive one’s quarry into a corner is it surprising that he should come out fighting?
This is exactly what the Soviets (or the Cubans, or perhaps, both of them) did. At least one missile blew up on the launch pad. Three were successfully launched. Each missile was armed with a warhead with a yield of at least 1 megaton. One missile detonated on the ground thirteen miles north of Tampa, Florida. One air burst at an altitude of approximately seven thousand feet above the Gulf of Mexico some forty-three miles south east of New Orleans. One weapon air burst almost exactly equidistant from Galveston Island and Texas City, Houston.
The Tampa strike resulted in less than a thousand documented deaths and damaged or destroyed some twelve thousand properties. There were no reported fatalities related to the strike south east of New Orleans although several hundred persons suffered minor flash burns and recent dives on wrecks in the area suggest a number of vessels may have been sunk by the detonation. Both Galveston Island and Texas City were completely devastated by the third strike. Subsequent analysis showed that 96 percent of the people (over 74,000 souls) in those towns were killed in the initial air burst. The blast severely impacted the southern suburbs of Houston, where some 63,000 fatalities occurred in the first moments of the strike. Total casualties in the Houston area in the first thirty days after the strike were later estimated as 213,000 to 224,000 dead, and 307,000 injured.
It is at this point that the role of General Curtis LeMay, the legendary master builder of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) whom the Kennedy White House had inherited as the Chief of Staff of the US Air Force, becomes murky. When, in 1976, LeMay asked to appear before the standing Congressional Committee on the Causes and the Conduct of the Cuban War, he directly contradicted former Secretary of Defence, Robert S. McNamara’s previously stated account of the counter strike against Cuba. In McNamara’s version the White House ordered a retaliatory strike ‘only against missile sites, air bases and major troop concentrations, avoiding where possible centres of population’. McNamara stated that the reasons for mandating a ‘limited retaliatory strike were twofold: first, it was not believed that Cuban military personnel were capable of operating the SS4 MRBMs which had targeted Tampa and Galveston and therefore the blood of tens of thousands of Americans was mostly on the hands of the Kremlin rather than on the hands of the Cuban civilian population; and second, that a comprehensive strike package directed against Cuba risked exposing large areas of the southern United States and, or the rest of the Caribbean to unacceptably high levels of radioactive fallout’.
General LeMay, by then in retirement and embittered by his failed bids for the Presidency in 1968 and 1972, contemptuously dismissed McNamara’s testimony, and that of other members of the Kennedy Administration. He was particularly scathing about remarks about his own part in the ‘elimination of the Cuban menace for all time’ and the concurrent decision to proceed with an all-out first strike against the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies consistent with the President’s statement of 22nd October 1962’, which had appeared in Robert Kennedy’s recent book ‘The Truth about the Cuban Crisis’. LeMay vociferously denied, not for the first time but for the first time unequivocally ‘on the record’ that his actions were driven by the receipt by coded protocol of the order to institute DEFCON 1. According to LeMay, President Kennedy had spoken to him by a secure telephone link and personally authorised him to execute Plan Alpha.
Then as now DEFCON 1 is that state of military readiness which assumes that nuclear war is imminent or that the continental United States is already under nuclear attack and requires all military forces to respond accordingly. Then as now Plan Alpha describes massive thermonuclear retaliation against whomsoever has, or is about to attack the USA.
To his dying day General LeMay was unwavering in his insistence that on that fateful evening of Saturday 27th October 1962 he was obeying orders personally enunciated to him by his Commander-in-Chief.
No member of the Kennedy family attended LeMay’s State Funeral in Washington. The feud over who actually pressed the ‘Armageddon button’ has raged for fifty years and neither the American people, or the citizens of the post-October War world know for sure what actually happened in Washington in the hours after the sinking of the USS Beale north of Cuba.
Nobody really knows if JFK’s death bed last words really were: ‘The mad sonofabitch killed eight hundred million people and tried to blame me!’ The only thing we can know for certain is that none of the players on Capitol Hill that day foresaw any of the consequences of their machinations, consequences that would be the bane of their children, and the children of their children.
It matters little at this remove who said what to whom for when all is said and done that is a thing best left to historians. Cuba’s nightmare fate was sealed. Within three hours of the Houston strike every city, town and area of settlement with a population of over five thousand, every suspected missile site, every port, every troop concentration on the island of Cuba had been targeted by at least two nuclear warheads. No inch of Cuban soil was not overlapped by simultaneous strikes. It is estimated that over 90 percent of the population of the island, over six million men, women and children died that day. When the first survey teams from the US Marine Corps arrived on Cu
ba forty days later, they discovered no living humans. Large areas of the island where ground bursts targeted suspected missile and air assets remain uninhabitable due to persistently high levels of irradiation to this day.
Cuba was but the sickening overture to what followed.
Once appraised of the motive to retaliate the genie – or in this case the great monster of retribution - was let out of its cage. That terrible monster ran wild for fourteen hours, fifty-seven minutes and approximately thirty-four seconds and in that time committed an atrocity unparalleled in human history.
While a rational case can be made for a relatively limited retaliation against specific objectives in Cuba, had it been conducted in such as way so as to not annihilate all sentient life on that island, this author, in common with the majority of historians who have addressed these dreadful matters in the last half-century, can find no good – or sane – justification for the massive and inevitably overwhelming assault on the military, economic and social fabric of the Soviet Union and its allies.
The unimaginable human cost of this attack and the totally unnecessary catastrophe it inflicted on the European allies of the United States of America ought, long before now, to have made of this country an international pariah for all time. This may yet come to pass and for this reason I make no apology for restating the cold, hard facts behind Armageddon.
Had the Kennedy Administration held its nerve Nikita Khrushchev would have had no alternative but to back down; in fact there is evidence that it was in the process of doing exactly that as the first ICBMs ignited over Moscow and the as the first wave of B-52s pulverised Murmansk, Leningrad, Vladivostok Riga and Kiev. Had the Kennedy Administration offered Khrushchev so much as a crumb of comfort – say an undertaking that at some unspecified future date the removal of the obsolete Thor medium range missiles stationed in Turkey – to soften the pill, the Cuban Missile Crisis would have been just that. A crisis like most crises; resolved by realpolitik diplomacy. This was not a situation analogous to the comedy of errors played out by that imbecilic rag tag bunch of in bred, megalomaniac European princelings and their lap dog retainers in the summer of 1914. Nuclear war was not inevitable in October 1962 and crucially, neither of the main protagonists was under any real illusion as to the likely outcome of such a war.
The Kennedy Administration possessed intelligence that US forces alone – that is, without taking into account the 150 plus strong British V-Bomber Force – had a strategic intercontinental first strike capability that was between six and eight times that of the Soviets. This CIA assessment was broadly correct other than in terms of the actual scale of the American advantage. On paper we now know that US Forces alone actually enjoyed a capability advantage of approximately seventeen to one over their enemy.
In the Kremlin, Khrushchev knew that the Strategic Missile forces under his command had virtually no viable first strike capability against any target located in the continental United States. That was, after all, why the Politburo had so badly wanted to base a hundred SS-4 medium range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) with a range of 1,300 miles on Cuba in the first place in an foolhardy attempt to level the playing field and forestall the day when the perfidious Americans would wake up, smell the coffee, and exploit their overwhelming strategic power. Seen through the prism of the paranoia of those Cold War years, had the Soviets been able to base SS-4s on Cuba in the same way the USA had already based Thor MRBMs in Turkey and the United Kingdom, from the point of view of the Kremlin the world might, conceivably, have seemed a much safer place.
After all, it was only because it believed this that the fateful decision to mount Operation Anadyr – the Cuban Option – had been taken in the first place.
Chapter 6
22:28 Hours EST (03:48 Hours GMT)
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Walter Brenckmann discovered later that the 1.2 megaton warhead of the Soviet ICBM – probably targeted on central Boston – had overshot its target by as many as ten miles to air burst at one thousand five hundred feet above the town of Quincy. Quincy was the birthplace of two former American Presidents, John Adams and John Quincy Adams, a city in its own right but for over half-a-century a feeder commuter suburb of the Boston metropolitan area to its north along the curve of Quincy Bay where it merged into Boston Bay. Ninety-nine percent of its population of over seventy thousand souls died in the first second after the explosion, the few survivors who’d got down to their basements and cellars in time, died in the next few seconds, burned and crushed in the ruins. Momentarily the annihilating fifty million degree bloom of the airburst consumed Weymouth to the south, its thermal pulse flashing across and firing the southern suburbs of the great city to the north like the blowtorch of the gods. The firestorm scoured the surface of the Bay of all life for several miles out to sea before the tsunami shockwave of blast overpressure smashed into the southern suburbs and the port of Boston.
The flash turned night to day eleven-and-a-half nautical miles away in Cambridge as Walter Brenckmann bundled his complaining wife, Joanne, through the basement door and followed her down the flight of steps into the concrete sanctuary beneath the old house. The room had been the kids’ playground in the New England winters of their childhood; latterly it had become the family utility room. Washing machine, tumble dryer, a big Westinghouse larder fridge stood against one wall. Against another wall was a work bench with tools lying untidily on its top, a chair Walter had been attempting to repair perched atop it amid wood scrapings. The old, threadbare living room sofa they’d replaced upstairs three years ago sat in the middle of the cold room. It was bitterly cold because they didn’t bother turning on the heating now the kids were gone.
“What was that?” Joanne asked as the lights flickered.
Her husband didn’t reply as he calmly searched his toolbox for a torch.
The lights flickered again and then all was dark.
“Walter?”
“The electro-magnetic pulse of a big bomb trips the nearest transformers, after that the local grid shorts out,” her husband explained, gently, patiently. He switched on the torch, pointed it at Joanne’s feet, then towards the sofa. “We ought to sit down and wait.”
“Wait for what, Walter?”
The end of the world.
What he actually said was: “To see if the power comes back on, sweetheart.”
Together they settled on the sofa and drew the blankets they’d snatched from the airing cupboard on their way down to the bottom of the house around themselves.
Joanne leaned against her husband.
“Are you as scared as I am, honey?”
I’m so scared I’m surprised I haven’t evacuated my bowels!
“Naw,” Walter Brenckmann drawled, “we’ve done what we can do, sweetheart. The rest is in God’s hands.”
They were both Sunday Baptists. Neither of them were true believers. Their chapel, St Mark’s, had been the centre of their social orbit for some years and the congregation largely comprised couples like themselves, with kids in common, schools in common, jobs in the nearby city in common, with Democratic politics in common, and so on...
The house seemed to shudder, sway.
The sound of breaking, falling glass on bare boards seemed deafening.
For a moment they held their breath, expecting the whole building to crash down on top of them.
“I love you, Jo,” Walter said.
His wife snuggled closer.
“I’ve always loved you, Walt. Always and forever.”
“Always and forever,” her husband repeated, kissing the top of her head.
04:50 Hours (03:50 Hours GMT)
Sliema, Malta
What was going on?
Marija Calleja peered across the wide neck of Sliema Creek into the blackness of Marsamxett Harbour towards the looming bastion walls of the fortress city of Valetta. Only the bow and stern lights of the warships and the waving fingers of light from hand held lamps illuminated the dark waters. Her eyes had
quickly adjusted to the night. Launches and whalers plied between the big ships as they raised steam. In their anxiety to get out to sea their boilers were burning unusually noxious, acrid plumes of smoke into the clear Mediterranean air.
Panic.
No, not panic, but the next best thing.
What was going one?”
The air raid sirens wailed in the distance but nobody knew where they were supposed to go. The war had been over for seventeen years and the old shelters had been barred and locked years ago. After the war people had lived in some of the caves beneath the citadel of Valetta and the ruins of the Three Cities - Vittoriosa, Senglea and Cospicua - for years until, finally, the ruins were demolished, new housing built and where possible, wrecked buildings repaired. Under a cool, cloudless, star-filled sky the ships of the 7th Destroyer Squadron were desperately lighting off their boilers.
HMS Scorpion must have been the squadron duty ship with at least one, possibly two of her boilers primed or minimally fired and ready for movement at less than two hours notice otherwise she’d never have had sufficient steam to have cleared the anchorage so swiftly. Scorpion was already out of sight beyond Tigne Point. The next destroyer, HMS Aisne was only now starting to move. This vessel was an earlier sister ship of Peter Christopher’s Talavera, in silhouette he said a perfect mirror image of her pen friend’s ship. Pen friend? That sounded so inadequate it was ridiculous, Marija chided her girlish other self. But how was she to think of Peter, a man of approximately her own age with whom she’d corresponded since she was eleven years old? No man would ever know her as well as Peter Christopher knew her; and she hoped that no woman would ever know him as she knew him. So how should she think, speak or dream of him on a night like this when something so strange and frightening was happening all around her?