It would be many months before the six new divisions, three armored and three infantry currently reforming in the continental United States would be ready for deployment; until then Decker and Shoup had to work with what they had got. More important, they needed to get a grip on the Midwest battlefield before the full story about the debacle in Illinois and Wisconsin got out.
In an attempt to keep the blinkers on the great American public a few days more the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Curtis LeMay had gone to New Mexico to race sports cars, ostensibly to drag a large section of the Philadelphia Press Corps away from the temporary capital and to stop too many inquisitive eyes and ears poking around northern Illinois for the next few days. If Old Iron Pants was on vacation in Arizona the stories coming out of the Midwest had to be baloney, right?
Thus far the rigidly enforced news blackout had kept the true scale of the catastrophe off the front pages and off the main bulletins of the big TV and radio networks. Incredibly, the national media was still only speculating about how bad things might be on the Chicago Front; and right now that was exactly the way the Chiefs of Staff wanted it to stay. Fortuitously, the rebels were their biggest allies in this; since they tended to shoot newsmen who strayed into their path on sight. The majority of the people the networks and the big papers had stationed in the area were, understandably, somewhat disinclined to ‘freelance’ too close to ‘the action’ and were therefore almost wholly reliant on the Army Information Service for their copy.
Basically, Curtis LeMay’s sports car racing circus down in Phoenix was a better story than that from the trenches of Illinois.
The Chief of Staff of the US Army ruminated a little longer.
The World was going to Hell in a hand basket and sometimes, well most of the time if he was being honest about it, he wondered if there was a great deal anybody could do about it.
Before LeMay had flown down to Arizona the Chiefs of Staff had convened in secret onboard the cruiser USS Fargo (CL-106) — the flagship of the Great Lakes Shore Bombardment Squadron — at South Haven, Michigan yesterday morning where the Defense Department’s Special Military Advisor to the Secretary of Defense, three star general William Childs Westmoreland, had briefed the Chiefs on the Administration’s intention to seek a peace, specifically a ‘non-aggression’ treaty with the government of the ‘new’ USSR.
Although those talks, or more accurately, ‘contacts’ were at an early stage it had been communicated to the assembled Chiefs that other than the naval and air units already earmarked for ‘peace keeping duties’ in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, no further military resources other than those already in theatre would be ‘expended’ in the coming six-month period outside the North American continent.
Westmoreland had stressed that this assumption was for planning purposes alone since if the United States was suddenly the subject to a new external threat the whole strategic calculus would inevitably alter over night. Notwithstanding, all Army and Marine Corps units reforming in the US, and all air and naval ‘assets’ being returned to service would be available for exclusively continental deployment. In other words the aircraft, men and materiel that the Chiefs of Staff had been husbanding and holding back in anticipation of an imminent transfer to Arabia and the Persian Gulf, would heretofore be available for employment at home.
Since presently some two hundred aircraft, three hundred tanks self-propelled guns, and approximately twenty-four thousand men were encamped awaiting embarkation on fast transports at half-a-dozen East Coast ports this had come as something of a shock to the Chiefs. Up until that moment the Chiefs of Staff had been operating on the prudent assumption that the US would implement long standing arrangements — commitments enshrined in treaties both acknowledged and unacknowledged — to build up a powerful ‘blocking’ force in Saudi Arabia to frustrate any Soviet attempt to seize the oilfields of that Kingdom. Consistent with this the Chiefs had interpreted the Administration’s anti-British pronouncements as a public screen behind which it fully intended to honor — albeit it selectively, in the spirit if not to the letter — the majority of the promises it had made to Premier Thatcher back in January and acted accordingly.
‘Westy’ Westmoreland’s unequivocal confirmation that ‘America First’ actually meant ‘America Alone’; that it was not just a political slogan but a statement of the future foreign policy of the country had, in effect, kicked over the existing geopolitical chess board.
Contagion…
If Decker had had those twenty-four thousand men available for deployment in the Midwest a month ago Milwaukee would not be a disaster zone now. With the equivalent of three fully-equipped mechanized infantry brigades he could still probably contain the revolt short of Minneapolis, albeit at incalculable cost in men, materiel and human suffering.
But then what?
How many hundreds of thousands of men on the ground was he going to need to retake and make safe the territory which would have been lost by then? When law and order breaks down, when anything goes, when criminals, shysters, people whose politics were so far to the right or left that in normal times they were disregarded as cranks, and crazed religious zealots took over what happened next?
Contagion…
Something similar had almost happened in Seattle; but Governor Rosellini had had that hard arse Colin Dempsey running the show in the critical weeks after the war. Here in north eastern Illinois Mayor Daley and his people had had the political clout to ensure that their people got looked after first while everybody else was left to their own devices. It was hardly surprising the crazies had moved in and Chicago had become a magnet for anybody with a grudge against anything in the Midwest. Nobody had fed the starving or cared for the sick and the dying, the threads that bind modern civil society had frayed and a new order had arisen from the ashes of the great city. This was like the Bellingham scenario but writ on a truly Biblical scale; it ought to have been crushed at birth, not left to fester and breed, let alone permitted to spread its malignant spores north and west into virgin undefended and indefensible territory where countless good people still lived.
Decker straightened.
The President had ordered the Joint Chiefs to ‘put an end to the Chicago uprising by any means’ but stipulated that ‘I don’t want another Bellingham’. Like most two-bit politicians the President wanted it both ways; consequently, the other Chiefs half-expected expected their Chairman, Curtis LeMay — despite his strident strictures to his colleagues — to resign when he got back from racing his favorite Allard sports car in New Mexico.
In the meantime the war-fighting muscle needed to delay the advance of the horde which had broken out of Chicago sweeping all the way north to the Canadian border, and or, west to Minneapolis had had to be taken from the southern suburbs of the city.
“We ought to have finished this in April when we had the chance,” Decker said grimly. He had the equivalent of two under strength, relatively immobile infantry brigades padded out with lines of communications troops dug in on a roughly east-west line; Hyde Park — the University of Chicago campus — Midway Airport — La Grange — Naperville — Aurora. The line was porous in places, especially out towards the exposed flank beyond Aurora but two M-60 equipped cavalry regiments were held in reserve north of Joliet, and another further forward at Blue Island. Until a couple of months ago he could have held the south of the city indefinitely but then the rebels had started shelling the districts south of the line. After that the roads had been clogged with refugees needing to be fed and watered, and by Presidential edict ‘cared for’ by the US Army. Most of the troops deployed on ‘humanitarian duties’ had still not rejoined their units, and nobody on his staff cared to hazard a guess how many men had simply deserted and gone home once they escaped the trenches of Chicago. “But we didn’t.”