“Excuse me,” she asked. “Do you know what’s going on, sir?”
“I ain’t no ‘sir’, love,” the man chuckled, stepping closer. Like so many of the men posted to Malta this man had a very British gruff affability, as if he knew he was mostly among friends even if lately, there had been rumblings and outbreaks of hostility. It was unusual even for those Maltese who most fervently wanted the British to go home to harbour any real personal animosity towards individual soldiers, sailors or airmen. “As for ‘what’s going on’, your guess is as good as mine.”
“Why all the guns, Tommy?” Joe Calleja inquired, without the mocking edge he’d have injected if he’d been at a Maltese Labour Party rally, or on the picket line outside the gates of Senglea Dockyard.”
“Tommy?” The soldier guffawed.
“My brother has no manners,” Marija apologised in a tone of voice that let the other man know that she was scowling ferociously at her sibling.
“No offence taken, love,” the soldier assured her. He leaned his rifle, a black metalled FN L1A1 SLR on the sea wall next to the woman. He positioned himself with several feet between him and the siblings, and sucked on his cigarette as he stared at HMS Broadsword slowly creeping past. “No offence,” he repeated. “Don’t ask me what I’m doing here. All I know is that this is a better billet than Mönchengladbach on a winter’s night like this.”
“Mönchengladbach?” Marija asked, a smile quirking her lips and brightening her voice in the night.
“Second Battalion got posted to Mönchengladbach in Germany. My lot got sent to the Med. My company to here, the other two to Akrotiri. That’s Cyprus. Most of my lot are either knee deep in snow in Germany right now, or dodging petrol bombs from terrorists in Cyprus. Me, I’m here in what ought to be a little piece of paradise. Once in a while somebody gets a bit snotty, like your young man, here. But me and my mates know even the snotty ones don’t really mean anything by it.”
“He is my little brother,” Marija confessed.
“No accounting for family,” the man sympathised, taking another drag on his cigarette.
“You really don’t know what’s going on then?”
“I know it ain’t no exercise.”
“My name is Marija,” she volunteered spontaneously.
“I’m Jim Siddall,” the soldier replied, touching his brow with the back of a hand shielding his cigarette.
Marija saw for the first time that the man was in his thirties with sergeant’s stripes on his arm. She waved into the gloom in her brother’s direction.
“This is my brother Joe.”
“Yes, I know.” Another chuckle, utterly lacking in malice. “We’ll arrest him another night, perhaps.” Marija was about to morph into wounded tigress defending her brood mode when the sergeant went on. “Just make sure you keep him out of harm’s way tonight. People are a bit trigger happy tonight. So, you take care, Miss Calleja.”
Marija looked up at him as he got to his feet.
“What is going on, Sergeant Siddall?”
“I don’t know, love,” she said, his face illuminated by the red glow of his cigarette. “For all I know it’s the end of the world.”
Chapter 7
While it would be wrong to blame the catastrophe on a cabal of senior American military officers — gathered around General Curtis Lemay — who believed that the Cuban crisis was a dangerous symptom of growing Soviet nuclear bravura, there was an awareness in the Pentagon, and elsewhere in the Washington intelligentsia that the atomic dominance enjoyed by the USA since 1945 was coming to an end. Whether we can extrapolate this ‘feeling’ among the decision making caucus in and around the Kennedy White House, into a pre-disposition that if there was to be a war then it was better to have that war while America still held the advantage — or a belief that such a war might still be in some meaningful way ‘winnable’ — is unclear, and inevitably much of the byzantine politicking beneath the surface will remain opaque forever.
Oh, to have been a fly on the wall at JKF or his brother, Robert’s confessionals! Rumours of secret journals and memoirs penned by key member of the Kennedy Administration have tormented historians for decades; they may exist but are unlikely to see the light of day while any of the key players or their close family relatives is still alive. Without them we must work with the sources that we have, and these are limited. Remember, the Cuban Missile Crisis that spawned the October War and unleashed so much grief down the years since happened in an age before ubiquitous email and SMS traffic, when paper trails were exactly that — paper trails — relatively easily edited, amended or in extremis, burned or shredded as dictated by political circumstances.
It may be significant that thus far nobody has managed to get their hands on a ‘smoking gun’. There may not be a ‘smoking gun’. In the absence of a ‘smoking gun’ we cannot, at this remove, prove that JFK, or any of the other key decision makers fully realised the massive strategic nuclear strike superiority of Western forces over their Soviet counterparts. Likewise, because the paper trail is so scratchy — whether by design or accident — we cannot say for certain that if they had fully understood their position of overwhelming strategic superiority, it would have changed anything.
Whilst this author has always been sceptical about the more Machiavellian manoeuvrings of Curtis Lemay that fateful weekend in October 1962; this author wishes to make it crystal clear that she does not subscribe to the simple-minded, neo-determinist view that John F. Kennedy deliberately went to war because he believed it was the last best chance of destroying the Red Menace once and for all time. JFK was no angel. He was the womanising, playboy, drug addicted son of a ruthless and immensely wealthy former bootlegger. Years after his death we discovered JFK suffered from Addison’s disease. Throughout his Presidency he was wracked with agonising back and joint pain, he was often virtually incontinent, high on pain killers. Nevertheless, the verdict of history is that he was plainly not, per se, a bad man. For all that he came from a family legendary for its mendacity, he was — not more than Curtis LeMay — Machiavelli reincarnated. Both before and after the war JFK’s Presidency was punctuated with charismatic leadership, real moral courage, and a deeply held commitment to the rights of all Americans. He wanted his children to grow up in a better, fairer, more peaceful world. There might have been men around him advocating a devastating first strike but John Fitzgerald Kennedy would never, under any circumstances, have authorised it just because he could.
We shall come back to exactly why JFK unleashed the hounds of Hell later. First let us examine the actual balance of terror in October 1962. In this examination the author asks American readers to remember one thing, and one thing only. JFK and his inner circle might not have fully comprehended the true threat posed to the USA and its allies by Soviet nuclear forces, but he and his advisors knew — to within a few tens of megatons — the true capability of his own forces.
Strategic Nuclear Capability
To avoid confusion this author defines Strategic Nuclear Capability as being one side’s ability to strike at the other’s continental mass.