In the ensuing silence LeMay seized the initiative.
“Every tin pot politician who has ever worn a uniform, and some that have dodged every draft there’s ever been, wants to get their hands on a little piece of the action on the Michigan Front. It’s not going to happen under my watch. You people have done enough damage already!”
He had gone too far and he knew it.
Nevertheless, he had no intention of backtracking a single inch.
“I told you something this bad could happen but you ignored me, sir,” he told his Commander-in-Chief. “We could have strangled this thing at birth; like Colin Dempsey and the West Coast Governors did up in Bellingham and around Seattle last year. It wouldn’t have been pretty and you’d have looked bad but we’d have avoided this God-awful FUBAR!”
Fucked Up Beyond All Repair hardly began to do justice to the magnitude of the disaster unfolding between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River west of Chicago.
Jack Kennedy held up his right hand.
“I didn’t ask you to come to Camp David to exchange recriminations, General LeMay,” he drawled irritably. “I asked you to come here to formally notify you of the changed military and foreign policy agenda of the United States to enable you to plan forthcoming military operations. We discussed the Middle East and the Midwest Front a few days ago. Directives I issued then as general guidance have now been hardened up.”
LeMay tried without success to stop his eyes narrowing with suspicion.
When a politician talked about ‘hardening up’ what he usually meant was that he had made a fuller assessment of how he reckoned this or that cockamamie brainstorm was likely to play with his constituency. Specifically, either he wanted to look strong or to be putting one over on somebody else; neither of which were good motivations, and certainly not sound grounds, on which to base military deployments and actions.
Jack Kennedy nodded to Robert McNamara.
“The Administration has determined that its priority is to make peace with the Soviet Union. If possible the Administration will make a peace with honor; but it is imperative that steps are taken to ensure that there is no repeat of the events of October 1962.”
Curtis LeMay listened with the deadly intensity of a volcano building up to a an explosive eruption; dangerously silent as if he sensed in his old soldier’s bones that nothing good was going to come out of this exercise.
“At this time nothing which is said in this room,” McNamara went on, “may be repeated or documented outside the circle of the Chiefs of Staff and specific officers in the field. This is because certain ‘trust building’ operations will be necessary if the Soviets are to be brought to the peace table.”
LeMay waited, knowing it got worse.
Much worse…
The President leaned forward in his chair.
“Making peace with our former enemies is the paramount objective of the Administration and all other considerations are, at this time, secondary to it. At this time the single impediment to our goal is the ongoing war in the Middle East. In this connection the intervention of Strategic Air Command and the Navy — Carrier Division Seven — may be required to separate the warring parties in the Persian Gulf.”
LeMay resisted the urge to ask how exactly ‘separating’ the ‘warring parties’ was conducive to making peace with either of them? To him it sounded more like a sure-fire recipe for starting a war with both of them!
“What will the Sixth Fleet and its air assets be doing in the Mediterranean while all this ‘peacemaking’ is going on in the Gulf, sir?” He asked, biting down on his exasperation.
On paper the Sixth Fleet — the US Navy’s massive presence in the Mediterranean — was a larger, better balanced and even more impressive fighting force than Admiral Bringle’s Carrier Division Seven. Built around the USS Independence, it included the majority of the Navy’s newest and most advanced warships. Based at Malta it massively outnumbered and hugely outgunned the depleted and exhausted British Mediterranean Fleet.
“Sixth Fleet will sit this one out,” McNamara declared.
“Sixth Fleet,” Jack Kennedy interjected, “has been working hand in glove with the British and the Fleet Commander, Admiral Clarey and his staff enjoy friendly and collegiate relations with their British counterparts. Employing the Sixth Fleet to gain stay British operations in the Mediterranean would likely result in the outbreak of general hostilities.”
LeMay scowled.
“And ‘separating the warring parties’ in the Persian Gulf won’t?” He asked bluntly.
“No,” his President retorted, ignoring LeMay’s jibe. “Sixth Fleet will not be involved in any of the ‘peacemaking and peacekeeping operations envisaged in the Persian Gulf.”
Notwithstanding that Curtis LeMay was beginning to feel like the asylum had been taken over by its inmates, he tried to insert a modicum of military pragmatism into the debate.
“What you are describing, Mr President,” he observed, “flies in the face of accepted doctrine. Failure to co-ordinate the operations of Sixth Fleet and Carrier Division Seven, regardless of other considerations, is a mistake. My professional opinion, which I am sure will be seconded by the other Chiefs, is that any attempt to intervene by our forces in one theatre without simultaneously supporting that action in all other theatres of operations is a recipe for disaster.”
Jack Kennedy had thrashed this out with his National Security Advisor McGeorge ‘Mac’ Bundy, Robert McNamara, Bill Fulbright and the heads of the CIA and the National Security Agency.
He had his answers lined up in advance.
“It will be our position that Carrier Division Seven will be supported by at least one Strategic Air Command Bombardment Wing operating in a non-nuclear configuration. Given the range at which your B-52s will be operating from friendly bases, runways on Soviet territory and corridors through Soviet airspace will be made available to SAC. Should, that is, the involvement of SAC aircraft be necessary. A more likely scenario is one in which the British will have no option but to accept, as a fait accompli, the imposition of Carrier Division Seven’s immensely superior firepower between their naval forces in the Persian Gulf and the Soviets. Admiral Bringle’s ships ought to be more than sufficient to ‘bully’ the Brits into accepting the inevitable.”
LeMay was momentarily stunned into silence.
“Axiomatically, the British and their Commonwealth allies will have to be prised out of the Persian Gulf if there is to be a lasting peace with the Soviets,” Jack Kennedy continued. “The Red Army is going to roll straight over them; heck, if things work out we’ll be doing the British a favor, softening the blow, allowing them to walk away with honor. One school of State Department analysts have believed all along that the British would pull out anyway when they realized ‘the game was up’.”
LeMay almost choked on what he was being told as he contemplated all the things that could go disastrously, monstrously wrong.
Inserting Carrier Division Seven into the Gulf; initially to gather theatre intelligence, to land reconnaissance and fire support teams in southern Iran and the Faw Peninsula of Iraq would enable the US Navy to salt the battlefield in the event, highly unlikely, that it would be obliged to enforce a separation between the Soviet and British forces. However, these operations like those preparatory to facilitating the operation of US aircraft — specifically SAC B-52s — over Soviet airspace, needed to be set in train now if the Russians were going to take the Administration’s peace overtures seriously.
Rightly, the Soviets were preoccupied with the very real threat of RAF V-Bombers ranging at will over their surviving cities. While the war in Iraq raged and Red Army tanks rolled ever closer to Abadan Island, the men in the Chelyabinsk Kremlin constantly looked to the skies and it was this, and only this, which had probably opened the window of opportunity in which a peace treaty might — might being the operative word — be achievable.