Admiral Anderson, the Chief of Naval Operations brooded impatiently.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs settled in his chair.
Bus Wheeler was an infantryman who, like the Commandant of the Marine Corps, had served in China before the Second World War. By the end of that war he was second-in-command of the 63rd Infantry Division in Germany. He had been Deputy Chief of Staff of the US Army since 1962 and the safest available pair of hands to attempt to fill Maxwell Taylor’s boots.
“What’s gone wrong now, Bus?” David Shoup demanded, trying, but not very hard, to keep an ‘I told you so’ inflexion out of his question.
“The Brits and the Spanish have declared war on each other,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff retorted, his calm of the forced, grinding one’s teeth variety that warned the other men in the room — those who did not already know the dimensions of the gathering crisis — that there was worse, much worse to come.
This gave the Commandant of the Marine Corps pause for thought.
The Brits and the Spanish!
No, he hadn’t seen that coming!
“The Spanish Navy may have mined Algeciras Bay,” Admiral George Anderson, the Chief of Naval Operations growled. “A British light carrier, the HMS Albion was badly damaged and a destroyer sunk. Our Consul at Gibraltar reports the Royal Navy may have suffered over two hundred fatal casualties.”
It was Westmoreland who was the first to ask the blindingly obvious question.
“Why would the Spanish risk provoking the British? General Franco isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer but he’d be insane to attack the British now. With the Operation Manna convoys currently transiting the North Atlantic off the coast of Western Europe the whole of the Royal Navy must be at sea just off the Spanish coast!”
Bus Wheeler’s tone was stony.
He ignored Westmoreland’s question.
“The British have already mounted retaliatory strikes against Spanish naval, coastal and inland targets. They bombarded the town and port of Santander in northern Spain and targeted shipping in Cadiz in southern Spain. They also mounted V-Bomber strikes against several air bases in the Spanish interior, including airfields where US Air Force assets are based.”
Shoup realised belatedly that he and Westmoreland were the only men in the room who had not had prior warning of the reason for the emergency convening of the Joint Chiefs. The heat rose in his face.
“The Brits attacked our bases?” He asked coldly.
“Yes. Initial reports indicate that they concentrated their bombing on cratering runways and taking out Spanish assets. We have no reports of American casualties to either men or materiel.”
General Westmoreland had decided that he was not going to let his comparatively junior rank — he was only a relatively newly minted three-star general — stop him demanding an answer to his earlier question.
“Why are the Spanish doing this, sir?” He directed at the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
“We don’t know yet.”
Westmoreland blanched. How could the United States not know why one of its last ‘loyal’ allies — undamaged by the October War — was making war on America’s oldest European ally?
“We don’t know?” He echoed.
“No.”
“Tell Shoup and Westy the other news, Bus,” suggested John McConnell, Curtis LeMay’s deputy.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs hesitated.
“The base of the British Mediterranean Fleet was heavily attacked at Malta last night,” he said with the reluctance of a man having to force out every word between clenched teeth. “Early indications are that the attack was mounted by the Italian Air Force, the Regia Aeronautica, using US-supplied Skyhawks, and,” he very nearly choked on what he was about to say, “several B-52s.”
It was some moments before either the Commandant of the Marine Corps or ‘Westy’ Westmoreland realised that their respective lower jaws were hanging slack beneath gaping mouths.
Shoup devoutly hoped he had just misheard what had been said.
He really, really hoped he had misheard because otherwise the consequences hardly bore thinking about.
“Did you just say SAC bombed the Brits’ main base in the Mediterranean, Bus?” The Marine checked, still doggedly unwilling to believe what he had just heard.
“Yes.”
There was a horrible silence around the table.
And then Westmoreland sighed.
“Oh, fuck!” He muttered.
Chapter 33
Ben Bradlee, the Washington Bureau Chief of Newsweek magazine was now regretting his earlier fit of pique when his assistant had refused to spontaneously divulge the contents of the ‘red hot stuff’ coming in over ‘the wires’ on the telephone that morning. Every serious journalist in DC assumed that the FBI routinely tapped their office and home phone lines, lived with the knowledge, and in most circumstances got on with their jobs without stopping to worry over much about how this, or that conversation would read — or look — when the transcript arrived on J. Edgar Hoover’s desk.
‘You need to be here, boss,’ had been the stoic put down that told him the word ‘scoop’ and the phrase ‘you have to see this to believe it’ were involved in the ‘red hot stuff’ coming over the ‘wires’ and he did not really want to be discussing it — any of it — over telephone lines that were routinely monitored by the Federal Government.
Within half-a-minute of his arrival at the Pennsylvania Avenue offices of Newsweek, the Bureau Chief was tingling with shock and, if he was being honest about it, was briefly at least, incapable of getting his head around the enormity of what was going on several thousand miles away across the other side of the wintery North Atlantic.
He was still trying to come to terms with the implications when he was informed that the White House Chief of Staff, Kenny O’Donnell wanted to talk to him.
NOW!
“When did we declare war on the British?” Ben Bradlee asked the harassed mouthpiece of the Kennedy Administration. His tone was caustic because he was well on the way to feeling that he had been cynically used — betrayed basically — by men whom he had, until that moment, regarded as friends and whom he had believed, despite what most people said, genuinely had the best interests of the country and the American people at the root of everything they attempted to do.
It was now apparent that he had been sorely mistaken.
In fact, he had been taken for a ride.
Real friends did not do that sort of thing to their real friends; and he felt betrayed and well, let down…
Kenny O’Donnell was one of the men who had taken him for a patsy.
“That’s not what this is at all!” The other man protested angrily.
“The Italians and the Spanish have attacked Royal Navy ships with US-supplied A-4 Skyhawks, Kenny?”
“We’re trying to…”
“Oh, shit,” Ben Bradlee grunted in disbelief as new wires — burning with news of even more heinous atrocities and disasters — were pushed onto his desk by an increasingly white-faced junior stringer. “Jesus, that can’t be right… According to the BBC the Brits are saying the death toll on Malta will exceed a thousand. They say two of their ships, the HMS Agincourt and the HMS Torquay were destroyed in the raid…”