Unfortunately, Bellingham had been a lost cause from the outset.
Bellingham, ninety miles north of Seattle on Interstate 5 and less than an hour’s drive from the Canadian border had been a magnet for the survivors from the city’s northern districts; and for every other loser, anarchist, defeatist, criminal and crazy in the North West. Decent people had got out of Bellingham if they could but thousands had been trapped in the wet, rainy wintery port as the dispossessed, the damaged and the dregs of humanity crowded into the cursed town. Gangs had started fighting for territories almost immediately; local law enforcement had been overwhelmed within days. If such a thing existed, Bellingham had become a Mafia enclave, although the smugglers, racketeers, pimps and killers who had called the shots in the town since this time last year probably would not have called themselves ‘the Mafia’. The Mafia had omertà, a code of silence, and some albeit distorted medieval concept of honour among thieves. The people running Bellingham were the scum of the earth, animals to whom all standards of human decency had long ago been consigned to the dustbin. The old and the young had been forced out into the depths of mid-winter and their bones littered the hills around the town and lined the verges of Interstate 5 north and south. Some of the local men had been recruited into the ranks of the conquerors. The women — and girls as young as nine or ten — of Bellingham had all become sex slaves to be raped and tortured at will. Within a month of the war the whole town had been transformed into a murderous bordello.
“I hate to say it, Al,” the soldier reminded the fifty-three year old Governor of Washington dryly, “but if you recollect our conversation when we first talked about this I said this was going to be messy.”
“Yes, you did!” Governor Rosellini conceded without real venom. He respected and trusted the unflappable veteran old soldier who had become his right hand man; and he knew better than to try to interfere with anything that was going on in and around Bellingham that evening. Reinforced with units from the Oregon and California State National Guards the operation would continue however messy things got in the next few hours. Bellingham was a weeping sore on the face of American democracy, a scandalous affront upon the very notion of the rule of law. Notwithstanding the spreading pall of disorder and the near complete collapse of respect for the pillars of the old, pre-war status quo — police, politicians, the law, and the inalienable right to free speech — in large areas of the bomb-damaged northern states, Rosellini and his fellow West Coast Governors, Republican Mark Odom Hatfield of Oregon, and Democrat Pat Brown of California, had determined that in the absence of Federal intervention, they would together ‘wage total war’ on the lawless enclaves within their own West Coast states. Together they had determined that Bellingham, the biggest and most poisonous of these ‘cancers’ in their midst, would be placed back under the ‘rule of law’ even if they had to raise it to the ground to do it!
The example of Bellingham would, hopefully serve as an object lesson to the gangsters and crazies infesting parts of several bomb-damaged big cities elsewhere and holed out in the Cascade, Rocky and the Sierra Madre mountains preying on the surrounding countryside up and down the whole Western seaboard.
“What is your plan, General?”
The question was entirely rhetorical and both men; friends and brothers in arms now, understood as much. The Governor had given the old soldier a free hand and he was not about to meddle at the last minute.
Major General Colin Dempsey looked to the darkening, rain pregnant skies and imagined he heard the first whispers of the approaching aerial storm. In the Second World War he had been with Patton in North Africa, Sicily and France before he was wounded at Bastogne in the Ardennes, and called back to work at the Pentagon. He had been slated to join the planning staff for Operation Downfall, the projected invasion of the Japanese home islands in 1946 but the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had ended the war first. After that war he had gone back to his family lumber business in Portland. He had missed the Korean conflict, the armistice having come a month before his battalion was due to ship out. Afterwards, he had stayed in the Army long enough to get his Lieutenant-Colonel’s oak leaf, joined the reserve list and in due course been awarded his Colonel’s eagle serving with the Washington State Army National Guard. Presently, he was a brevet Major General at the pleasure of the Commander-in-Chief of the Washington State National Guard, his friend Al Rosellini, the first Italian-American ever to be elected a state governor west of the Mississippi.
“No change of plan, sir,” he reported crisply. Now that the moment of decision was very near Dempsey’s weariness and sadness were fast evaporating. On one level he hated what he was about to do, on another, he recognised that it was both necessary and in the name of common decency, morally justified. “As soon as the air strikes go in the 303rd Cavalry will move up to the Bellingham city limits. The surrender demand will be broadcast. If we take fire from the town during or after that broadcast we will commence a further bombardment and subsequently advance to secure all objectives.”
The job would have been easier if the Navy had been willing to provide minimal off shore gunnery support. Two or three gunboats with anti-aircraft cannons or heavy machine guns would have sufficed. However, the United States Navy had brusquely dismissed calls for assistance. Law and order was a ‘local civil responsibility’; nothing to do with the Navy.
Never mind, you fought the war with the men and guns you had not the ones you wished you had!
Al Rosellini had wanted to come up to his CP; Dempsey had squelched this dead. Although the Governor had been less than gracious about the matter he had stayed in the command bunker beneath the State Capital Building in Olympia, sixty miles south of devastated Seattle.
“Good luck, General.”
Colin Dempsey handed the receiver back to the corpsman with the radio pack who was never more than six feet from his side.
“Fire in the hole!” Was the screamed warning.
Dempsey covered his ears and opened his mouth just as the four 90-millimetre rifles of the M48s opened fire on the defenders of the burning school buses and trucks blocking Interstate 5 three miles south of Bellingham. The trees lit up with flashes of red-orange boiling fire as the four high-explosive round crashed in. It was point blank range for the big guns, less than a thousand yards. The tanks’ fifty-calibre heavy machine guns began to hose across the roadblock. Overhead the thrumming of the helicopters skimming fast across the tree tops, clinging to the folds in the land almost but not quite drowned out the banshee roaring of the Washington Air National Guard F-100 Super Sabre interceptors flying top cover. The F-100s were there to make a lot of noise and to confuse Bellingham’s defenders, their demonstration at heights of down to three or four thousand feet over the town would also mask the approach of the six Marine Corps Douglas A-1 Skyraiders. The arrival of the Skyraiders would turn the once sleepy, idyllic north-western port of Bellingham into a living Hell in the minutes before the Hueys dropped the first echelon of the assault group right on top of the enemy’s western defence perimeter.
Each soldier involved in the ground operation had been given a small square card twenty-four hours ago.
The operation you are about to take part in is to free an American town from the tyranny of murderers and criminals who have broken every rule of civil and military law. You are authorised to use lethal force. You are expressly forbidden to take prisoners until all operational objectives have been secured. Signed C.P. Dempsey, M/Gen. Commanding Bellingham Combined Task Force.