by James Philip
To Old Iron Pants ‘statistical analytical techniques’ were what you applied to automobile production lines, not combat. When later, LeMay had found out that McNamara had once described him in an interview as being ‘extraordinarily belligerent, many thought brutal’, he had ignored the subsequent caveat, offered freely by his then political boss that: ‘He [LeMay] was the finest combat commander of any service I came across in the war’.
The man’s cartoon character belligerence was only one side of a multi-faceted coin. Before the October War there had been a great deal of speculation about how men would perform in the thermonuclear battlespace.
For example, how many men would balk 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?
However, in the days, weeks and months after the October War, intensive interrogations and painstaking studies of operational records indicated that all the surviving crews had done their duty to the best of their capabilities. Although three B-52s had brought back bombs, in each case technical issues had prevented the unlocking of their weapons – all four bombs brought back were free fall Mark 39 bombs – with faulty, factory-sealed, defective fail safe mechanisms. Subsequently, 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 SAC bombers – three hundred and eighty-eight B-52s and forty-one B-47s – despatched on long-range, strategic 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.
In the aftermath of the October War scores of men at all levels in the Air Force – in excess of three to four times the pre-war rate - had committed suicide in 1963, 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, and approximately one in five men had specifically requested transfers to ground duties or to terminate their service early.
The most senior ranking suicide had been that of an old friend, with whom LeMay had flown B-24 missions 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 squeezed the trigger.
Curtis LeMay might not have admitted it in such bald terms; but he was not the same man he had been on the night of 27th/28th October 1962, that he was now.
The only thing which had not changed was that before the war, LeMay planned to spend his retirement racing fast cars. He had always been an unashamed car nut; and since 1962 the only thing that took his mind off the madness of the world around him was racing fast cars.
His proudest possession remained his Allard J2, rebuilt after crashes twice since late 1963. 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, one of the raft of societal changes resulting from the rapid 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 and parcel 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.
Had it not been for his unquenchable sense of duty, he would not have dabbled in politics. The idea of politics had never really fired him up, whereas, the opportunity to throw himself into the work of the Sports Car Club of America, and basically, race until he dropped, or crashed one too many times remained perennially seductive…
Unlike many of the cities of the South, Boston had been quiet that weekend; as had cities across the north and west of the continent. It felt a little like the lull before a storm when the atmosphere is pregnant with dark threats, oppressive and gloomy, and the atmosphere charged with electricity. It was as if the nation was gearing itself up for a paroxysm of outrage if the election went the wrong way…
“Thank you for agreeing to meet me, Ambassador,” LeMay said, stepping up to the slightly shorter man.
Both men were dressed in lounge suits, Homburgs on their heads, and apart from their deliberately reduced entourages of staffers and bodyguards, they we doing their best not to attract attention, meeting as they were on the footpath through the trees around Leverett Pond.
“It’s good to see you again, General,” Walter Brenckmann replied. “I heard you were wounded?”
The other man grunted his unconcern.
“Just a scratch. It needed a few stitches,” he remarked, glancing down to this left rib cage. “I got banged up worse the last time I crashed my Allard!”
The two men fell into step, one with the other, heading south away from the city centre.
“You’re here in Boston supporting your daughter-in-law’s campaign?” The former bomber supremo observed gruffly.
“Gretchen doesn’t really need my support,” the other man retorted, chuckling lowly. “No, Jo and I reckoned we wouldn’t get another chance to spend a little time with our grand-kids for a while after this week. The least we could do was come along to a few meet and greets while we were in town.”
“You have one heck of a family, Ambassador.”
Walter Brenckmann waited; he was not the one who had called this meeting.
“My people tell me I ought to haggle with you,” LeMay confessed. “Heck, things were a lot simpler that day you and I met the first time in DC. Remember that? On the South Lawn of the White House with all those crazies hosing down the White House with 50-calber rounds?”
This drew a wan smile.
“I’m not likely to forget it, General!”
They walked on; their stride unhurried.
“The last few months it seems to me like this country is fit to come apart at the seams, Ambassador. I can’t watch that happen. Just like I can’t do anything about my name still being on the ballot down in the South,” Curtis LeMay said, apologetically. “I won’t lie to you. If I really believed in everything that was on Wallace’s ticket, I’d stick it out. That’s what I do, I don’t surrender. But I didn’t sign up to all that poison, and I sure as Hell don’t want to be remembered as the man who split the Democrat vote and kept that bastard Nixon in the Oval Office!”
The two men carried on walking; their heads bowed in thought.
“So, what’s your plan, General?”
Curtis LeMay sighed.
“I plan to endorse you. Assuming you’ll accept it. Either way, if I carry any of those states down there – I don’t think I will, for what it’s worth – my delegates will vote for you when the electoral college goes into conference.”
Walter Brenckmann waited a moment, curious to discover what the quid pro quo was going to be. Then, belatedly, he realised that the other man was asking nothing for his concession.
He halted.
The two men eyed each other.
Walter Brenckmann stuck out his hand and they shook on the deal; a gentleman’s agreement was good enough between two officers.
“Jo will give me a hard time if you don’t come back to the house for lunch, General.”
Curtis LeMay thought about turning on his heel and leaving, and then reconsidered, nodded curtly.
They moved forward again.
“Nixon would have offered me a Cabinet post!” The former Air Force Chief of Staff guffawed.
“I guess you’d rather be President of the Sports Car Club of America than the Commander-in-Chief? Anyway, Larry O’Brien will be putting the Administration to
gether. Assuming we get to form one, that is.”
“I don’t want a job in DC,” Curtis LeMay continued.
“Are you sure about that. I’ll need a Presidential Special Advisor on Air Force affairs?”
“No, I’ve been a pain in the backside of too many Presidents already, Ambassador.”
“Fair enough. When you get angry and ring me up, I’d prefer us to be on first name terms. That would make the façade of ‘unofficial’ contacts plausible. Don’t you agree, Curtis?”
The man who had won the October War in a day contemplated this for some seconds. There was no quid pro quo; simply an acknowledgement that the man who might, soon be President, still valued his opinion; on Air Force matters, if not politics.
“Okay, Walter.” Almost as an afterthought: “Tell me it was Sorenson who came up with ‘We Won’t Get Fooled Again’.”
“No can do, sorry.”
“Okay, it was your boy, then. Sam?”
This too met with a shake of the head.
“No, it was Sam’s wife, I think; although she claims it was something that she and her friend in LA, Sabrina Henschal – the artist – came up with one night at the Troubadour Club on Sunset Boulevard. Sam says they are always coming up with one-liners for his songs. We won’t get fooled again has a nice ring about it, don’t you think? Gretchen ran the idea about a billboard campaign past me, I was ambivalent but Jo liked the idea.”
“You got outvoted by your daughter-in-law and your wife?”
“All the time!”
The two men laughed, prompting a curious exchange of looks between their bodyguards and minders.
Chapter 57
Wednesday 25th September, 1968
Ukrainka-Seryshevo Air Base, Siberia
Major General Vladimir Zakharov walked around the flying bomb. The beast was the size of a MiG fighter, streamlined for the lack of a cockpit, its tail plane and swept back wings stubby in comparison to a manned aircraft.
“We have restored the inertial guidance system,” Olga Petrovna reported stiffly. She and the base commander were invariably stiff, uncomfortable in each other’s company nowadays. “There’s no way I can test the remote linkages without loading this bird underneath the Amerikanskaya Mechta. The initial settings need to be physically established. Hard-wired and then switched to the designated range of channels and frequencies.”
“What about the engine?” Zakharov demanded.
“Short of moving the Kh-20 to a test range, again,” Olga shrugged, involuntarily throwing a glance towards where Dmitry Akimov and Andrei Kirov stood, “we find out how sound that is, when we fire it up in the air.”
“During the mission?”
Olga nodded.
“All the test rigs went back to the west with the fully assembled missiles. I told you at the beginning that we were going to be flying blind here, Comrade General. Just because I am, or was, a junior rocket scientist, it doesn’t mean I have magical powers!”
Zakharov treated this as a joke rather than a challenge.
“It is just that we all have such great faith in you Comrade Olga Yurievna.”
“The important thing,” Dmitry Akimov, the Amerikanskaya Mechta’s first pilot interjected, “is that the aircraft is now configured to operate the Rh-20…”
“Assuming the upgraded tracking radar works,” Olga qualified tersely.
Akimov nodded.
“There’s so much we can’t check properly, not on the ground.”
“Where are we with the warhead?” Andrei Kirov asked, abruptly.
Zakharov threw a baleful look at him.
“You don’t need to know any of the arrangements for that.”
“I do,” Olga reminded him. “Unless the plan’s changed.”
“The plan has not changed, Olga Yurievna.”
She had been respectful, almost prim; now she had her hands on her hips and was shaking her head.
“The plan was to install the bomb, configure the fail safes on the ground and set the initiation parameters in flight to avoid the possibility of an accident within the confines of the base, Comrade General.”
“That is still the plan.”
Olga was not satisfied: “It will take up to twenty-four hours to load and configure the Kh-20, and to check that all aircraft-missile systems are fully operable. What if we don’t have twenty-four hours.”
Zakharov was coldly unruffled.
“That is my concern, Olga Yurievna.”
The woman opened her mouth to object, thought better of it and with a shake of her head, gave up.
“Nobody said this would be easy,” Zakharov remarked. “That is why,” he made eye contacts with the other three members of the group, “I do not wish to prematurely curtail discussions between ourselves, unless there is no alternative. We cannot plan for everything and from now on, we must be ready to go at, as Olga has reminded us, twenty-four hours, or less, notice.”
“Respectfully, Comrade General,” Dmitry Akimov commented, “that is problematic. We need to regularly test fly the aircraft…”
“Twenty four hours preparation time becomes thirty-six if the aircraft has to be checked out, shut down and recovered to the flight line for loading,” Olga added cautiously.
“That is why,” Zakharov half-smiled grimly, stepped over to the nose of the fifteen-metre long flying bomb and patting the cold aluminium casing with the palm of his right hand, “from now on the Amerikanskaya Mechta will operate with this missile slung under her belly!”
Andrei Kirov assumed the big bomber could land with a Kh-20 attached but he did not know it for a fact, and from the expression on Dmitry Akimov’s face he did not get the impression that it was a particularly good idea.
The aircraft stood high off the tarmac with its talon-like, heavy-wight undercarriage, and the upper fuselage of the flying bomb partially disappeared into a long, curved revetment in the underside of the giant bomber’s hull. But even so, he imagined that they could be very little clearance beneath the underside of an RH-20 and the ground during take-off, and critically, landing.
“Cheer up, old friend,” Zakharov guffawed. “I’m not asking you to fly test missions and exercises with the mothership and this bloody thing fully fuelled up!”
The veteran pilot relaxed by a degree.
“But obviously,” the base commander went on, “we’re going to have to fly with the warhead installed.”
After the two older men had departed, Andrei Kirov and Olga Petrovna walked out into the night, oblivious to the patter of warm rain on their faces and shoulders. The meeting just gone would have aroused suspicion, and no little gossip in the days when Seryshevo had been on the front line of the pre-October 1962 Cold War. In those times, the place would have been a hive of activity twenty-four hours a day, with bombers taking off and landing at all hours and Special Weapons Store Number Two manned by a full shift seven days a week, year in and year out, with its own dedicated security team. Nowadays, the vista of the wide open spaces of the air base were eerily deserted and the only sound was the rising southerly wind gusting across the expanses of runways.
“Did you see that coming,” the man asked the slighter, unusually subdued figure by his side.
“Yes,” she confessed.
“And there was a reason you didn’t warn me?”
“No, not really. We were already screwed. I knew the bastard had to have somebody under his thumb at the Number One Store; I just didn’t expect him to be so fucking brazen about it.”
Special Weapons Store Number One was in the forest, where row upon row of concrete ‘hutches’ were arranged, each designed to accommodate the separate fissile elements of Uranium and Plutonium warheads, or individual pre-assembled bombs.
Andrei Kirov wondered if he ought to be getting scared.
Well, even more than he already was most of the time.
“In future, because we’ll be flying with a live bomb you will have to fly every mission.”
The man was sta
rting to get anxious now.
“Oh, shit. Does that mean I get a say in arming the bloody thing?”
“No. This won’t be one of these deals where you, the aircraft captain and me, the weapons officer, get a veto, or have to take a vote on dropping the fucking thing.”
The KGB Political officer’s relief was momentary.
“On the final mission,” Olga explained wearily, resignedly, “the weapon will be pre-armed, pre-set to initiate. Most likely with a time delay so that, after, say, an hour after it reaches a certain altitude it goes off the next time its altimeter reads less than a thousand metres. Or a variation on that theme.”
“But we can re-set it?” Kirov asked hopefully. “When we’re in the air?”
“No,” she shook her head. “Not without the right codes and I doubt Comrade General Zakharov is going to share them with us.”
The man was ticking off possibilities.
“Okay, we take off, fly over the sea and drop the bloody thing before it has a chance to activate?”
“We probably won’t be able to get far enough out to sea, or anywhere remote enough not to risk killing thousands of innocent people,” she objected gently. “A three-megaton mother like that will kill everything within a ten mile radius, people twenty miles away will suffer terrible burns to exposed flesh, or be blinded for life if they look at the fireball.”
“What if we took off, climbed to ten thousand metres and dropped it before it could arm itself? Say, into the sea or a big lake? Would the impact destroy the warhead?”
“It might not.”
“Okay…”