Decker was feeling every one of his sixty years.
The Chief of Staff of the United States Army had thought he was done with soldiering two years ago, having retired on 30th September 1962. He had served his country for the best part of four decades — joining the Army straight out of college back in 1924 — in peace and war and he was tired. Nevertheless, when General Harold ‘Johnny’ Johnson was killed in a terrorist atrocity in England in April his President had asked him to dust off his old uniform and step up to the plate. Notwithstanding that there were younger, possibly abler men in the service, when his commander-in-chief spoke Decker had returned, somewhat wearily, to the colors.
Unfortunately, from what he had seen and heard lately that was the last time the President had made up his mind about anything to do with practically anything. Despite Decker’s strident calls to reinforce the ‘Chicago Front’ in early May the Administration had been bleeding First Army dry right up until the last week when the lid had finally blown off the pot. Once Operation Rectify had been indefinitely postponed units assigned to it had been drawn off for firefighting duties in the Deep South, to reinforce the police in the northern big cities, and bizarrely, given its America First prognostications, ahead of a planned effort to re-enforce the post-October War skeleton US garrisons on Okinawa, in the Marianas and in the Philippines.
Colin Dempsey had had ninety thousand combat troops under his command in late March, currently there were less than thirty thousand ‘effectives’ in First Army’s sector of operations extending from southern Illinois to the western borders of Iowa and Wisconsin.
Decker had attempted to veto each and every dilution of First Army’s strength in the Midwest. He would have resigned his commission had not Curtis LeMay told him — face to face in no uncertain terms, as was Old Iron Pants’s way — that: ‘George, if you think we’re in the shit now; what do you think is going to happen if we start passing the ball before we get tackled?’
LeMay was a ball-breaker but he was right.
Any incoming Chief of Staff would face exactly the same problems he and the others were confronting, and the way things were shaping up at the moment the first Chief to break ranks would be ritually scape-goated by the Administration. Because that was exactly what an Administration which had lost its moral compass; and with it its legitimate right to govern always did. President Kennedy led a morally bankrupt regime.
The only real question was whether the Union would survive long enough to anoint his successor. From where George Decker stood November’s general election was so far distant as to belong to some almost inconceivable future epoch.
Contagion.
When Decker had retired less than two years ago the US Army was, on paper at least, sixteen divisions strong. Substantial elements of three of those divisions remained in Korea but forces elsewhere in the Pacific had been pared to the bone by the nonsensical Peace Dividend cuts of the previous year; leaving the Marine Corps to hold the line in Japan, Okinawa, Guam, Saipan and the Philippines. The argument was — or had been until the Red Army poured over the border in Iran two months ago — that the Soviets had bombed half of China back into the Stone Age and SAC had handed out the same medicine to the Russian Far East, so North Korea apart, the ‘threat vector’ to Japan and the US’s other ‘island aircraft carriers’ in the region was minimal. In Europe the Army had lost the equivalent of six fully equipped divisions, not to mention numerous other assets then and since in Turkey, the Balkans, Italy and of course, the United Kingdom.
The previous year’s slicing and dicing of the Army’s budget appropriation had at one point reduced its North American-based manpower to approximately sixty-one thousand effectives, excluding National Guard units. In practice the 2nd and 3rd Marine Divisions, both based ‘at home’ had added twenty-three thousand men to the Army’s roster. In ‘normal times’ this would hardly have been any cause for concern but in a scenario in which the US Army was suddenly the Federal Government’s police force and constantly fighting fires — including pacifying the area around Washington DC and ‘containing’ Chicago, for example — every staff exercise which had ever been conducted talked about troop requirements in the hundreds of thousands, not tens.
Decker had watched the TV reports of the suppression of the Bellingham insurrection by the combined National Guards of California, Oregon and Washington State rather than the regular Army, with unmitigated horror. The Governors of Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana had initially wanted to act in similar concert to restore order in and around Chicago a year ago; the Administration had vetoed it after pressure from among others, Mayor Daley and an unholy coalition of senior Democrats who presumably, were afraid some kind of scorched earth military solution would destroy what remained of their local power bases.
The West Coast Governors had bitten the bullet, recognized that if Bellingham had to be razed to the ground to restore their writ across the rest of their lands, so be it. Mayor Daley and his confederates had not had the stomach for that, and unlike the West Coast leaders the President was, it seemed, in Daley’s pocket.
Perhaps, it was true after all that Daley’s people in Illinois — where Kennedy had carried the state by a mere eight thousand votes — had ‘stuffed’ ballot boxes in an attempt to rig the result in the 1960 election?
Chicago, a Democrat fortress before the October War, was not any kind of Kennedy family electoral citadel now.
In any event, it was academic because the genie of revolt and secession was if not completely out of the bottle, then half-way out waving its arms around inciting outright revolution in two states in the heart of the Midwest. Thus far the contagion was still relatively limited, spreading out to the west and north of Chicago but if something was not done about it in a hurry in a month Minneapolis might be under threat, or worse, it and other cities in the path of the rebellion might simply surrender, allow themselves to be subsumed rather than destroyed in a battle that the Philadelphia elite lacked the guts to fight.
“You know LeMay’s right,” sighed the bespectacled, inscrutable Marine standing by Decker’s left shoulder.
The fifty-nine year old Commandant of the Marine Corps, General David Monroe Shoup had been wounded twice leading ashore the 2nd Marines at Tarawa in 1943. After the Battle of Washington, in which he had personally taken command of the defense of the Pentagon, he had been drafted onto the Chiefs of Staff Committee as a permanent member. Among his other duties he was the Military Governor of the District of Columbia; in which post he had been the man responsible for pacifying the country around the capital, and for ruthlessly hunting down the hundreds of rebels who had escaped the city after the December coup d’état.
“We’ve let this thing go too far,” Shoup added.
The two men were alone having sent their respective staffers out of the room. The fact that the two senior soldiers in the US Armed Services had agreed to scrap their existing schedules and meet here, so close to the front spoke eloquently to the gravity of the mounting crisis. The US Army was at full stretch, struggling to undo the eradication of fifty percent of its ‘professional core’ in the October War and the demoralization of the Peace Dividend cutbacks that had, at the time, arbitrarily abbreviated countless previously peerless careers of many of the same men who were now crucial to the success of the re-mobilization of recent months. An army once so comprehensively betrayed by its political masters was not easily restored to its former state and anybody who pretended otherwise was a fool, a charlatan or a senior member of the Kennedy Administration.