Once the situation in Wisconsin was ‘under control’ — any outcome which kept the contagion contained east of the Mississippi was probably the best that could be hoped for in the coming months — LeMay planned to tour overseas commands to convey his personal interpretation of the strictures of the Securing the Chain of Command and Integrating Command Decisions Directive to the men on the front line in the Far East, and in command of the Navy’s distant fleets in the Mediterranean and the Pacific. Hopefully, in the meantime he could get Rear Admiral Bringle’s — the commanding officer of Carrier Division Seven — orders ‘clarified’ before something went wrong in the Persian Gulf.
The Chief of Naval Operations had been lobbying for such a ‘clarification’ ever since he got back home from India.
The President had assigned a political-military mission to the Kitty Hawk Battle Group and that was just plain dumb. The Navy had protested, so had LeMay — until he was blue in the face — but the President had spoken.
But for the latest crisis on the First Army Front in the Midwest — the battle for Madison was developing into a nightmarish re-run of the fight for Bastogne in 1944 — the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs would have been the guest of the Kitty Hawk’s wardroom today or tomorrow. As it was the first scheduled stop on LeMay’s upcoming ‘World Tour’ was scheduled to be Malta, where the Sixth Fleet was keeping the peace with the British, just like old times.
The Malta ‘stop’ had been put back a fortnight. After Malta he planned to fly straight on to the Persian Gulf to ‘confer’ with Bringle. Assuming nothing went even more disastrously wrong in Wisconsin he hoped to be able to visit Malta around the 11th or 12th of next month, and to sit down with Bringle a couple of days after that.
This week the priority was shoring up the home front; the FUBAR in the Persian Gulf would have to wait a few more days!
LeMay had come to Nebraska and South Dakota to ‘cut through the shit’ threatening to completely tie the hands of his men. His staff had attempted to apply the new protocols — which had been hurriedly ‘gamed’ but introduced with trialing of any kind — to the drafting of the orders to the 100th and the 5136th Bombardment Wings and immediately discovered that in a battlefield situation the new system was unworkable. SAC did not have days and weeks to prepare the orders for what needed to be done today, tomorrow and thereafter on a dynamically developing battlefield.
Congressmen, Senators and all the President’s men wanted LeMay to tell them that everything would go as plan; that nobody would screw up, that only the ‘right’ targets would be hit and the ‘bad’ guys killed. The command protocols he was being asked — well, ordered — to implement did hardly anything to ensure the integrity of the chain of command, mostly they were just about covering the Administration’s collective fat ass!
If the politicians wanted guarantees about combat they were living in Wonderland, and while Curtis LeMay remained the professional head of the US Military he would lead it from the front. That was why today his boys needed to hear their orders in plain language from the man at the top.
“The fighting 5136th has been transferred to Ellsworth to take part in Operation Rolling Thunder,” LeMay boomed confidently. “I’ll level with you. The situation in Chicago and much of Wisconsin is bad; out of control. First Army is holding the line in South Chicago. 32nd Infantry Division is holding Madison. But that’s it. There’s nothing between the enemy and the Mississippi crossings.”
The veteran bomber commander let this sink in.
The men in the hall would have been fed a diet of ‘strategic retreat’, of ‘dynamic tactical readjustments to the line’, basically given the impression that whatever the rumors to the contrary, the situation east of the Mississippi was in some way ‘under control’.
“Things are looking bad. Madison is the Alamo. Bastogne all over again and we will not let it fall!”
Operation Rolling Thunder was the air component of the revised and expanded Operation Rectify plan: First Army would hold the front in the south, Madison would remain as a thorn across the enemy’s lines of communication blocking a vital road hub, all other available ground forces not already engaged would fortify and garrison the Mississippi crossings into Minnesota and Iowa, and the Air Force would systematically lay waste to the state of Wisconsin. Every road, bridge, town, village and farmstead, every reservoir, every pumping station, power station, fuel depot, individual gas stations, every piece of infrastructure above ground would be wiped off the face of the earth.
The great river barrier of the Mississippi in the west would halt the enemy advance; behind the rebels would be nothing but scorched earth. Thereafter, the rebels penned within the boundaries of northern Illinois and the state of Wisconsin, would be bombed and starved into submission. Not to be left out on Lake Michigan the Navy would obliterate anything that moved within fifteen miles of the coast.
The B-52s of the 5136th Bombardment Group had been transferred to Ellsworth because its four-and-a-half mile long runway would enable each aircraft to take off with over thirty tons of bombs in their cavernous bomb bays. Offutt AFB’s runway was a little shorter; but then the aircraft of the 100th ‘the Bloody Hundredth’ Bomb Group were to be employed, in the main, dropping big, bunker busting and precision munitions. Its mission was to methodically eradicate all the threads that held modern civilization together by the precision bombing of targets. The 5136th’s job was going to be to carpet bomb and lay waste huge tracts of ground around roads and in towns, to spread incendiaries to fire forests and fields, to rain anti-personnel cluster bombs into the wrecked towns. There would be nowhere in Wisconsin for the rebels to shelter or hide and then sooner or later, the icy blast of the Midwestern winter would crush the insurgency.
If swathes of the Midwest had to be turned into charnel houses, dreadful bone fields then that was what was going to happen. SAC’s B-52s would do the heavy lifting, squadrons of roaming A-1 Skyraiders, A-4 Skyhawks, and National Guard F-100 Super Sabres would ‘fill in the gaps’. Once Operation Rolling Thunder got started Air Cavalry would drop into the countryside east of the Mississippi to mount hit and run raids on enemy strong points and to sow terror and confusion in rear areas. Already Navy ships were maneuvering into position in Lake Michigan to shine invisible electronic navigation and targeting beacons across the ‘war zone’, and elite Army Ranger and Marine Corps special units were on the ground scouting.
In the early hours of the morning all Hell was going to break out over Wisconsin, kicking off with the saturation bombing on the positions of the enemy forces besieging Madison.
“What I am about to say comes straight from the President,” LeMay declaimed loudly, knowing that the statement cut a lot less ice now than it would have done even two or three months ago. Many of the men under his command felt bad, a little ashamed about the way the US was standing back in the Middle East and the South Atlantic. They had taken enormous pride in the US Navy’s decisive intervention in the Mediterranean in April; afterwards they had been confused, and later vaguely uneasy, now they were borderline guilty that the British had been left to stand against renewed Soviet aggression in Iran and Iraq, alone.
What had we been fighting for back in 1918 and 1945?
The Brits had fought with us in Korea…