“The Commander-in-Chief has supported the recommendation of the Chiefs of Staff to adopt a strategy designed not to contain but to smash the rebellion in the Midwest. Crushing the rebellion and restoring the Federal writ to all states of the Union is the primary objective of the all the forces available to the United States. Those responsible for the atrocities which have occurred in Chicago and Wisconsin are deemed traitors, enemies of the state, criminals. Traitors and criminals, gentlemen. Be in no doubt that a state of war now exists between the United States and the traitors in our midst. The rebellion must be eradicated.”
The 5136th had been based at Barksdale in Louisiana for over a year and the wives and children of its men were safely distant from the war their husbands and fathers were about to fight.
“The enemy possesses few air defense weapons. We face an enemy with no aircraft. We own the skies and we will use our absolute air superiority to harry and to destroy the enemy.” He paused while his gaze roamed the hall. “This will be hard for you. No man joins the service to make war on his brother. But I know you will stand to your duty. Your country has never needed you more. America is nothing if it is not united. Without the union we are physically and morally the poorer, and immeasurably weaker. We are all sworn to preserve the Union, to salute the flag and to obey the orders of our Commander-in-Chief!”
Not for the first time LeMay found himself wondering if his Commander-in-Chief deserved the loyalty of such fine men as these in the hall.
“That is all!” He growled. “Hail to the Chief!”
Chapter 40
Near the end of the bombing at least two B-52s had overshot their aiming points and obliterated several hundred yards of the 32nd Infantry’s eastern perimeter beyond the Yahara River line.
During the attack the men high in the dome gallery of the State Capitol Building had felt like they were inside some infernal inner circle of Hades; the ground had rocked and trembled, the deafening drumbeat of one and two thousand pound bombs and the continual flash of multiple detonations around all points of the compass had shocked and awed the exhausted men manning the M2 50-caliber machine guns commanding the approaches to the Redoubt.
Major Norman Schwarzkopf had sent half his men, four platoons and two machine gun squads, each with three M2s — to bolster the ad hoc force plugging the line east of the Yahara. Messages were beginning to come back from the bombed earthworks and gun positions. Nothing was left; most of the men in those trenches were just… gone. Over two hundred and fifty men no longer existed, a dozen or so lucky survivors had been pulled alive — mostly half-dead — from the wreckage, otherwise it was simply a matter of trawling through body parts, and attempting to salvage weapons.
Had the enemy not been pulverized, literally swept from the fact of the land for a mile or more on every flank, the ‘blue on blue’ disaster might have seen the city fall in hours. However, that morning the enemy was in no state to do anything except reel back in horror and presumably… terror.
As down broke the distant, rumbling thunder of more B-52 strikes reverberated across the devastated Wisconsin countryside from the north and the south. The great bombers had struck at a little before midnight; turned around for the sixty to ninety minute ‘hop’ back to their bases in South Dakota and Nebraska, loaded up again with fresh bomb loads and — as each aircraft was declared fit for operations — returned to the skies over Wisconsin to strike again. In World War II the old timers had called it ‘shuttle bombing’; but that had been with B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators carrying two to three ton bomb loads at between two and three hundred miles an hour, not B-52s loaded with thirty tons of ordnance flying at over five hundred miles an hour.
Rolling Thunder summed it up nicely, Schwarzkopf reflected as he trained his glasses on the northern horizon, straining to pick up the flash of bombs striking ground somewhere along Highway 94.
The country around Madison was turning into a moonscape, another night like last night and that moonscape would extend miles and miles in every direction. Dust and smoke hung in the atmosphere like a death pall limiting sight to one, perhaps, two miles to the east and south of the city.
Schwarzkopf had heard the tales of high altitude B-25 Superfortress strikes halting ‘unstoppable’ North Korean and Chinese advances in minutes, and understood in some peripheral, purely theoretical sense what a might happen when a Bombardment Wing of B-52s dropped hundreds of tons of conventional munitions on an enemy. However, he had never contemplated such total, complete, annihilating devastation. Overnight, the 5136th and the 100th Bomb Groups had lifted, at least for the next few days, the siege of Madison. The Wisconsin state capital had become an island of life, survival, defiance in a sea of death and destruction that stretched miles and miles out across the once fertile, idyllic surrounding Midwest.
Of Sun Prairie where Company ‘A’ had held out for two days before the insurgents outflanked it in overwhelming force, nothing remained. It was as if the township had never existed, reduced to a muddy crater field.
The radio had been crackling behind him as Schwarzkopf studied the scene in the brightening morning light.
“Sorry, sir,” a corpsman prefaced. “Top Dog respectfully requests your attendance in the situation room, sir.”
Okay…
Getting down to ground level was going to hurt.
Not as much as climbing up to the dome; but it was still going to hurt.
The other man, the Red Cross armband around his right bicep grubby and flecked with blood like the battledress tunic beneath was holding out a pill in the palm of his right hand.
“You ought to take this, sir.”
Schwarzkopf’s right thigh — already throbbing painfully — was aflame just with the prospect of negotiating those steps down to ground level. He swallowed the pill, washed it down with a mouthful of metallic, brackish water from his canteen.
Half-an-hour later Schwarzkopf, white faced with pain and sweating badly was in the basement of the State Capitol listening to the latest SITREP.
Harvey Grabowski, now promoted brevet Brigadier in command of the 32nd Infantry Division was unshaven, grey with exhaustion and yet perversely, cheerful.
“The eastern perimeter has been re-established,” he began, quickly moving on past the self-inflicted disaster which had killed so many of their friends and comrades only hours ago. “Events overnight probably advance plans to shorten our lines in that sector by pulling back to the Yahara River line. The timing of that is under advisement; we will continue to maintain our current defense posture at this time. If and when we draw in our horns will depend on how quickly to enemy responds to last night’s beating.”
Grabowski turned to Schwarzkopf.
“Little Bear,” he grinned. “I need you to talk to Captain Mundy.”
Carl Mundy was the hard-bitten Marine who had taken command of Schwarzkopf’s Company ‘A’ after he was wounded decamping from Sun Prairie. The Company had been reinforced by men from the 2nd Marines and held in reserve for ‘mobile operations’ within the Madison lines.
“We need to know where the enemy is and what he’s doing. Talk to Mundy about sending scouting parties east. I want to know what else the enemy has got left to throw at us from the Chicago-Waukesha- Milwaukee sector. More prisoners would be good, too. Send out the first raiding party tonight.”