This at least told the old soldier a little bit about his enemy.
Amateurs and crazies!
The bastards had got lucky at the beginning of the insurgency or whatever the Hell this monumental FUBAR was. Fucked Up beyond All Repair hardly did the situation justice! The insurgents, or rebels, turncoats or whoever the Hell they were had caught the Washington PD and his Marines guarding the Pentagon on sentry duty — mainly equipped for essentially ceremonial duties — before there had been any opportunity to concentrate and co-ordinate defensive action. The attackers had driven up to the north of the building virtually unopposed and exploded three trucks — one a gas tanker — and rushed the into the complex shooting automatic weapons, hurling grenades and Molotov cocktails, killing everybody who got in the way. Every window in the Mall Terrace Facade had been blown in and extensive blast damage incurred throughout the outer ring of offices; thereafter, a rabble — probably less than three hundred in number — had infiltrated that wing of the Pentagon, rapidly fanning out in groups of three or four men to secure a ragged perimeter which commanded the lower floors and in some areas the basement areas of approximately a third of the Pentagon complex. If the intruders had been reinforced, or the men they had left guarding the northern approaches to the Pentagon had participated in the initial assault, the entire building might now be in their hands. As it was it had taken over two hours of hard fighting to temporarily ‘stabilize’ a viable internal defensive perimeter; the trouble was that if another force of insurgents attacked the building from another flank things would get really dirty. He did not have enough ‘effectives’ to mount anything other than a picket to watch over the thus far largely undamaged western side of the Pentagon.
The old Marine would have worried about it if there had been anything he could do about it.
Events had moved at a terrifying swift and unpredictable pace in the last day and he was desperately trying to piece together the ‘big picture’.
Only hours ago the High Command of the United States armed forces had been wholly preoccupied with the spine-chilling intelligence that the chain of command had been comprehensively compromised; the US Air Force had been ordered to attack British ships and bases, the Atlantic Fleet had attempted to sink a Royal Navy nuclear submarine; and at least one Polaris boat had been tasked — in the event of war — to destroy Australian cities. The situation beggared belief and the whole investigative resources of the Pentagon, the FBI, the Secret Service and the National Security Agency had been in the process of descending on ‘the problem’ in the last forty-eight hours.
It had not been lost on Shoup, General Westmoreland — the Personal Military Assistant to the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara — or anybody else in the Flag Plot Room that the insurgents laying siege to the Pentagon had focused their assault on the quadrant of the building hosting the rapidly assembled two hundred-strong ‘task force’ charged with investigating the ‘Apparent Breaches of Command Protocols’. The offices of the APCP Task Force were currently well behind ‘enemy lines’ within an area where several large fires were known to be burning out of control.
Any old soldier will testify that there is nothing worse than fighting a foe who knows one’s strengths, weaknesses and dispositions in detail before the battle. It was blindingly obvious that the ‘insurgents’ attacking the Pentagon — if not elsewhere in the District of Columbia — were operating on the basis of sound intelligence and with the direction of a firm, if somewhat reckless, guiding hand. This made it all the more vital for the defenders of the Pentagon to hold their ground.
Everybody who could lay his, and in extremis her hands on a firearm was now hunkered down behind the hastily thrown up barricades within the Pentagon with orders to ‘contain and harass the insurgents’ but otherwise to hold their ground ‘at any cost’. A hastily formed under strength company of Marines reinforcements had been ferried down the Anacostia River and across the Potomac from the depot at the Washington Navy Yard in the last hour. However, other than deploying twenty sharpshooters on the roof to deny the rebels mobility in the open ground around the complex; Shoup had refused point blank to further dissipate the one available combat unit capable of undertaking offensive action.
The Navy and the Air Force wanted him to use his Marines to reinforce the barricades!
The Chief of Naval Operations, fifty-six year old Admiral George Whelan Anderson, had tried to pull rank on Shoup in the absence of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Earle ‘Bus’ Wheeler, whom it was assumed was still at the White House with the President.
Shoup had dug in his heels.
While small arms fire rattled — punctuated with the regular barking of BARs (Browning Automatic Rifles), a sound familiar to any GI who had fought in Hitler’s War or in Korea — and reverberated down the corridors of the floors above their heads the two men had squared up to each other in the US Navy Flag Plot Room. Shoup, who had come to Washington the previous week to make one final plea for the preservation of the 3rd Marine Division — due to be disbanded under the increasingly insane ‘peace dividend’ cuts program on 1st January 1964 — had been appalled to discover that the Administration had virtually no ‘grip’ on anything in particular. Pentagon insiders and most likely, rogue elements from the CIA, had been complicit in attacking British forces in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, almost certainly been instrumental in provoking a Spanish-British war over Gibraltar and in the bombing the key British Mediterranean stronghold of Malta. What had appalled him even more was that it had been immediately evident that not all the Chiefs of Staff actually thought that any or all of this was disastrous news or that it was a was a real problem. As for Admiral Anderson, whom many of his peers still universally regarded as probably the outstanding naval officer of his generation, Shoup very nearly despaired. Anderson had been at the helm when the Cuban Missiles Crisis had gone wrong; when all was said and done it had been his ‘Navy people’ who had driven a Soviet submarine captain to launch a nuclear tipper torpedo at the USS Beale and lit the blue touch paper to global nuclear war. Ever since then his authority had been leeching away, drip, drip, drip, day after humiliating day; what was going on in the Atlantic — the loss of the Scorpion and the brainlessly provocative posturing of the US Navy in the Western Approaches to the British Isles — was proof positive that he had lost control of the Navy and now, in this unprecedented crisis he was no more than a straw man at the heart of the Pentagon.
In his thirty-seven year career in the Marine Corps David Monroe Shoup had never disobeyed a direct order by a lawfully authorized superior officer; until approximately twenty minutes ago.
The Flag Plot Room had gone dreadfully quite.
Even the sporadic rattle of gunfire had seemed to pause.
Secretary of Defense McNamara had blinked myopically at the gladiators as he cleaned his glasses. Staffers and civilian aides had taken a step backward into the shadows.
It had been then that McNamara’s ‘personal military assistant’, three-star General William Childs Westmoreland had stepped forward and cleared his throat. Like Shoup he had witnessed the fate of the ad hoc column of National Guardsmen, Washington PD troopers, and unattached servicemen thrown together and prematurely sent to relieve the beleaguered Pentagon.
The fiery red trails of Bazooka rounds in the night, the tracers from half-a-dozen 50-calibre machine guns and close range enfilade fire from at least two anti-tank guns had decimated the ‘relief column’, scattering the survivors in less than five horribly bloody minutes. Shoup had previously demanded that the relief column ‘hang back’ until such time as his Marines were in position to ‘hit the bastards’ in a co-ordinated pincer attack; but some idiot outside the surviving Pentagon communications loop had ordered in the cavalry without first surveying the ground, without making any attempt to understand the dispositions and the weaponry of the defenders or any awareness of the timeless military imperative of concentration.