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

by James Philip

  Not to say intriguing.

  Gretchen decided she needed to look at a map and remind herself where South Vietnam was; perhaps, that would give her some clue why it was so important to the Administration.

  Surely, the President had to have more important things to think about?

  Two or three weeks ago he had made that speech about putting an American on the Moon; and now she had learned about this Vietnam thing.

  Ought the President not to be worrying more about rebuilding Chicago, Seattle or Buffalo? Or doing something about the riots in Alabama and Mississippi?

  What was so important about putting an American on the Moon or the affairs of faraway South Vietnam?

  Chapter 36

  Saturday 7th December 1963

  The Pentagon, Arlington County, Virginia

  When General Earl Gilmore ‘Bus’ Wheeler, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had been called to the White House, the other ‘Chiefs’ had gone back to their own offices to catch up on the ‘latest news’, disasters in the main, before re-convening late in the afternoon.

  Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara sat down at the table when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs returned from the White House. It was McNamara, the former President of the Ford Motor Company, who quickly made it clear that this was his meeting.

  “Two British warships were attacked and seriously damaged last night off Cape Finisterre,” he announced. He glanced at Admiral Anderson, whose expression was that of an angry, very constipated man straining to maintain his dignity. “We have no information as to whether the British ships have sunk. You will know more about the prevailing weather conditions off Cape Finisterre than I, but I have been told there is a winter gale blowing through that area. The ships were attacked without warning by four A-4 Skyhawks. Since I was unaware that any A-4s had been supplied to the Spanish Air Force I am at a loss to understand how this could have happened. Is there anybody around this table who can enlighten me?”

  “You need to be addressing that question to the Air Force, Mr Secretary,” the Chief of Naval Operations growled.

  General John Paul McConnell’s composure was perfect, excepting a small muscle ticking under his right eye.

  “I have no explanation, sir.”

  “What about LeMay?” McNamara demanded, breathless in his ire.

  “General LeMay is on leave, sir. My people are looking into...”

  “Our aircraft have launched sneak attacks on the ships and bases of a friendly country!” The Secretary of Defence very nearly shouted. He never shouted. “Not just any country! The one country in the World with a large arsenal of deliverable nuclear weapons capable of laying much this country waste! Looking into this is not good enough! The President has to have answers! Now, gentlemen!” Not expecting this to happen ‘now’ or any time soon he turned his exasperation onto the Chief of Naval Operations. “Please don’t tell me that the Enterprise Battle group is still lying across the route of the first Operation Manna convoy, Admiral?”

  “The Battle Group has recently had to manuever to evade a submarine believed to be the British SSN HMS Dreadnought,” Anderson began but got no further.

  “Gentlemen,” McNamara said slowly, trembling with a rage nobody in the room had previously suspected he was capable, “I don’t care about what you think you are doing, or what stupid military games you think you are playing,” he paused, gathered his ragged breath, “I just want straight answers to straight questions and then I want you to get off your arses and get a grip of the men, ships and aircraft under your command! If you don’t feel you are up to the challenge say so now and the President will bring in officers who are! Do I make myself clear?”

  The Chief of Naval Operations rose slowly to his feet.

  “The Enterprise is operating in the Western Approaches south west of the British Isles. The USS Scorpion detected and ‘persuaded’ HMS Dreadnought to break off contact with the Battle Group several days ago. The USS Shark has since joined the Enterprise’s screen. In the event Dreadnought attempts to stalk the Enterprise a second time CINCLANT has requested permission to deter that submarine by more aggressive means, sir.”

  “Sink it, you mean?”

  “No, sir. Active sonar scanning, the deployment of practice depth charges and...”

  “NO! NO! NO!” McNamara was on his feet. “Are you idiots trying to start another war?”

  General William Childs Westmoreland, now attending the meeting as a non-contributing observer in his capacity as special military advisor to the Secretary of Defence, winced because he felt the lash of the former Ford Motor Company President’s tongue as keenly as any of his service colleagues.

  The calmest man in the room was General David Monroe Shoup, the man who had gone ashore with the 2nd Marine Regiment at Tarawa in 1943. He slowly took off his glasses and placed them on the table.

  “Mr Secretary,” he said quietly. Everybody looked to him. “I seriously doubt that anybody in this room is trying to start another war. None of us want that.” He leaned forward, rested his elbows on the table. “But it looks very much to me as if somebody is trying to start another war.”

  Chapter 37

  Saturday 7th December 1963

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  “What’s wrong with Dan?” Walter Brenckmann asked his mother, taking the next plate to be dried and setting to work with the dish towel with his customary attention to detail until the plate was spotlessly dry. By then his mother had rinsed the next plate.

  Joanne Brenckmann handed her eldest son the plate and paused, removing her hands from the soapy water and wiping the suds on her apron. Each of her sons was completely unique in her eyes – as are all sons and daughters of all mothers – but of the three Junior was the least dreamy, most focused by a country mile. And yet even Junior had his enormous blind spots.

  Walter met his mother’s arched eyebrows with a quizzical grimace.

  “What?” He inquired, not knowing whether to be amused. It was one of life’s oddities that while he could stand a watch on a ballistic missile submarine responsible for the safety of the hundred and ten men on the boat, and not to put too fine a point on it, literally hold the fate of nations in his hands with almost total equanimity, nobody cut through his defences like his mother.

  “Gretchen?”

  “What about Gretchen?”

  “Dan is stupid about her.”

  “Oh, right.” Walter’s brow furrowed. Belatedly, he understood why they were talking in such low, conspiratorial tones. Dan, having returned from Washington that morning had been politely uncommunicative all afternoon and as soon as dinner was over had gone for a walk. A walk which he now realised was likely to take in at least one bar. “I wondered about that. Dan isn’t very, well, obvious about these things and Gretchen...”

  “Gretchen goes doe-eyed every time you walk into the room,” Joanne sighed. Life was intrinsically unfair.

  “Look, I haven’t given Gretchen any encouragement,” Walter protested, feeling like a naughty twelve year old not a highly trained and qualified submariner killing time before he went on the United States Navy’s make or break ‘Nuclear Submarine Service Command Course’.

  “I know you haven’t, sweetheart,” Joanne assured him instantly.

  It was Walter’s turn to give his mother a very sharp look.

  Which she in turn parried with an indulgent smile.

  “I almost got married twice before I met your father,” she confessed. “Your grandparents gave me a hard time. They were terrified I’d die a sad, wizened old spinster. Both my ‘near misses’ were nice men, good steady types,” she recollected of her failed suitors, “but neither of them had any spark. I couldn’t imagine what we’d talk about when we were old and for some reason that mattered. I don’t know why, I suppose I was a little flighty in those days.”

  “You, flighty?”

  “Yes. Then I met your father and I knew we’d always be equals.” Joanne Brenckmann stuck her hands back into th
e basin, feeling for the next bowl beneath the soap suds. “And I decided – after our second date - that whatever happened he wasn’t going to get away.”

  Walter nodded, carried on drying crockery.

  “Gretchen treats Dan like a jerk,” he observed.

  “I know. It is so sad. Dan’s perfect for her but she doesn’t see it.”

  “I told Gretchen that I didn’t have time for involvements. Marriage, that sort of thing,” Walter informed his mother.

  “Was that why she went back early to Washington?”

  “I guess,” the son shrugged.

  Joanne changed the subject.

  “What on earth is going on in Spain?”

  Walter had no idea what was ‘going on in Spain’. He had heard the same newscasts as his mother, and the garbled reports of ‘battles’. Somebody had ‘bombed Malta’ and the networks had helpfully dug out old World War II footage to illustrate what Malta being bombed looked like. Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State had held a press conference that afternoon which ABC had broadcast live to the nation. Rusk had seemed as baffled as everybody else which was par for the course for the Administration lately. His mother and father were of the radio generation and the family TV was a small, cranky contraption. The roof top aerial needed repositioning, perhaps, he and Dan would get the ladders out and do something about that tomorrow. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Brenckmann’s remained essentially a radio age family.

  Their kitchen chores completed mother and son retired to the lounge and the big, walnut-encased radiogram was turned on.

  “...White House insiders have been unable to clarify the situation in the Mediterranean. When asked about the alleged involvement of American jet fighter-bombers in the attack on two Royal Navy destroyers off the north-west coast of Spain, a Pentagon spokesman characterised the suggestion as being quote ‘reckless speculation’. The British Ambassador, Sir James Sykes, visited the White House today but refused to make any comment on arrival, or when he left after meeting the President. White House Chief of Staff Kenny O’Donnell has promised that as soon as the situation has been ‘clarified’ that the President will speak to the press...”

  The program went back to dance music.

  On returning to Cambridge, Walter had phoned his ‘security contact number’ at Groton, Connecticut. The Navy needed to know where he was at any one time, and required advance warning if he planned to be somewhere else in the near future. He was a ‘key member’ of the Polaris Program and the Navy owned him. Listening to the newscasts he wondered how soon he would be called back to duty.

  “You must have been angry being pulled off the Scorpion at such short notice, Junior?” His mother prompted, making conversation.

  This time Walter had blamed his unexpected presence at the family home on the ineptitude of the US Navy’s Personnel Division. There had been some kind of foul up with officer assignments; he was slated for a spell ashore training new recruits on the ‘simulators’ at Groton and the paperwork had not caught up with him until just before his boat sailed.

  “Exigencies of the service, Ma,” he murmured, his thoughts twisting around the fragmentary pieces of gossip and possibly, misinformation the networks and the papers had got hold of about what was really going on across the other side of the Atlantic. Operation Manna, the Brits’ ‘winter supply convoys’ were passing west of Spain about now. And British ships had been attacked...

  Joanne Brenckmann gave up trying to squeeze further information out of her son. His father had been similarly tight-lipped about his time in the Navy in the beginning. Other than that Junior had, at some time, been on the nuclear submarine USS Scorpion she knew absolutely nothing of his life in the Navy. True, he admitted to being a ‘torpedo officer’ but as his father had remarked, ‘that could mean anything’.

  “Never mind,” she thought out aloud. “With so much trouble in the World I’m just glad you are here, Junior!”

  Chapter 38

  Sunday 8th December 1963

  US Navy Flag Plot Room,

  The Pentagon, Arlington County, Virginia

  Nobody had slept overnight because all through the night more information had trickled, and then, in a sudden tsunami-like torrent swept into the Pentagon. The only game in town was the blame game; the Administration, the CIA, Navy, Army and Air Force Intelligence communities had comprehensively failed and with every passing minute it was terrifyingly apparent that the command and control system of the US military machine was broken.

  Overnight the President had authorised moving from DEFCON 4 to DEFCON 3; normal readiness to increased readiness for all forces, including the reinstatement of Strategic Air Command failsafe operations, and had authorised all operational Bomb Groups to have at least two ‘bombed up’ B-52s at fifteen minutes notice to scramble. The US Navy was effectively already at war stations, the Army had cancelled all leave and recalled personnel on leave to barracks and muster depots. Steps had also been taken to scale up the security of key military and governmental sites but that would take several days to put into effect.

  The Chiefs of Staff had advised the President to step up readiness to DEFCOM 2; he had categorically refused to countenance it.

  ‘Don’t you people think the situation is dangerous enough already?’

  Admiral George Whelan Anderson, the straight-talking fighting sailor who as Chief of Naval Operations had watched in horror as the blockade of Cuba had sparked nuclear war, was grim faced as he contemplated another, possibly worse disaster developing on the battle boards around him while the President’s exasperated rhetorical question still rang in his ears.

  “CINCLANT reports that communications with the Enterprise Task Group are subject to delays and interruptions. It is not known if this is due to external factors, jamming for example, or technical issues exposed by operating at a heightened alert status.”

  After yesterday’s public recriminations and back biting, the participants at that afternoon’s ‘flag table situation review’ were superficially calm as they considered their options. Heads would roll whether or not they got out of this fiasco without another global nuclear war, but that was for another day. The first thing to do was to stop the bleeding, and then to do whatever had to be done to try and get a handle on what was actually going on. This was easier said than done because what seemed to be going on was so incredible and so outlandish that nobody in the Flag Plot Room really believed any of it.

  Secretary of Defence, Robert Strange McNamara’s ordered and methodical intellect rebelled against the insanity and chaos of the situation. He had come to the Pentagon direct from a conference at the State Department with the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, and his deputy, George Ball. The British, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and for reasons that were unclear, the Canadian, and several South American Ambassadors had also beaten a path to the Main State Building in the last twenty-four hours. Overnight the Spanish Ambassador had literally camped out in Dean Rusk’s ante room; the poor fellow was frantic with terror and was afraid he was going to discover that the ‘bloody British’ had ‘nuked’ Madrid at any minute.

  McNamara raised a hand.

  “Forgive me, Admiral Anderson,” he interjected, forcing an ashen smile. Everything was madness. That was a given. Nevertheless, right now he needed everybody to be on the same page. Everybody had to have their eyes firmly on the ball and that was not going to happen if they were all looking over their shoulder worrying about who was going to stab them in the back first. It was up to him, as the civilian ‘executive’ in the room to set the tone for how they were going to conduct this day’s business. “Yesterday, I was intolerably rude to you and several of the other officers in this room. I apologise unreservedly. My outburst was unprofessional and inappropriate. Now is a time when we must set aside personal differences and address the situation facing us all.”

  The Secretary of Defence, the Chief of Naval Operations, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Wheeler, the Marine Corps Commandant David Monro
e Shoup, Lieutenant-General William Westmoreland, and the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General John McConnell stood around the Flag Plot Table, and a host of staff officers hovered at their respective masters’ backs.

  “With the Chairman’s permission,” McNamara continued, glancing at General Earl Gilmore ‘Bus’ Wheeler, “I will bring the conference up to date with the latest diplomatic developments. I cannot promise that this will clarify matters but it may cast light on some of the thornier military issues.”

  Diplomatic developments!

  “This will sound completely out of left field,” he prefaced, trying not to sound overly sardonic, ‘but the Spanish Ambassador swears blind that the mining of Algeciras Bay at Gibraltar was carried out at the behest, and with the explicit knowledge of, our Embassy in Madrid. He further claims that Generalissimo Franco’s people have been in discussions with ‘representatives of the US Government’ for several weeks about quote ‘removing the British from the sacred sovereign Spanish territory of Gibraltar’. Moreover, it is his contention that staff at the State Department and at Defence, had ‘green-lighted’ the recent offensive operations of the Spanish Navy over a fortnight ago. In this connection he cited a secret ‘mutual assistance pact’ of which neither Secretary of State Rusk, Deputy Secretary Ball or I, has any knowledge.”

  The silence in the bunker was of the kind that had a pin dropped on the carpeted floor every man would have jumped out of his skin.

  It got worse.

  “The two British destroyers bombed in retaliation for the bombardment of Santander – HMS Devonshire and HMS Talavera – were attacked by four US Air Force A-4 Skyhawks operating out of Torrejón Air Base, near Madrid. The aircraft were flown by American personnel operating within the US Air Force chain of command. The airmen involved understood that they were participating in an authorised ‘war mission’. They were ‘ordered’ to attack those ships by their commanding officer who was in receipt of orders transmitted from this building under cover of appropriate and verified command codes.”