The blunder had probably been the culmination of a lot of woolly and very wishful thinking by people who ought to have known better. In the hours before President Kennedy had made his state of the union address — in retrospect firing the starting gun for the uprising — the higher echelons of the White House and Pentagon staffs had been buzzing with what Shoup considered to be ‘dammed fool’ conspiracy theories. There was loose talk about the chain of command having been compromised by stay behind Soviet sleeper agents, that some kind of highly implausible ‘Armageddon-ready’ movement called Red Dawn — Krasnaya Zarya in Russian — was responsible for subverting American airmen and submariners to mount ‘sneak’ attacks on the British off Cape Finisterre in the Atlantic and at Malta in the Mediterranean. Suddenly, the whole disastrous FUBAR of post-October War American history was nothing to do with the traumatised paralysis of an Administration that refused to come to terms with the aftermath of that war, but some kind of bizarre tragedy of worthy good intentions — more like a criminal comedy of errors — waylaid by a dastardly communistic Red Dawn ‘enemy within’. Paranoia had reached such a pitch in the hours before the rebellion, or coup d’état — Shoup did not know or care which it was at the moment, it did not matter right now — that every armoured vehicle in the District of Columbia, scores of uniformed Washington PD officers and every off duty Secret Service agent had been bussed to the White House because certain idiots, senior members of the Administration mainly, had convinced themselves that General Curtis LeMay was about to launch a coup d’état. The level of paranoia had reached such a fever pitch that the great and good of the United States of America had somehow convinced themselves that LeMay was personally responsible for the disasters in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, was Hell-bent on stirring up war with the British and was heading back to Washington planning to march up Pennsylvania Avenue to be crowned king of the castle!
If General David Monroe Shoup’s life had taught him anything it was that a wise man never, ever underestimated the latent stupidity and cupidity of the people who attached themselves to even the best Presidents.
Enough was enough!
‘My Marines will be employed as a mobile tactical reserve within the Pentagon to mop up any further breach in our internal perimeters. If the opportunity arises this tactical reserve will be deployed aggressively to exploit any error the enemy makes, Admiral.’ Shoup had been implacable. ‘The existence of this tactical reserve, at this time less than a hundred men whom I hope will be reinforced as the night goes on, is too small to hope to successfully defend the western side of the building in the event the enemy mounts a second major assault against that flank. Until such time as we are in a position to counter-attack, my men will not be split into penny parcels; and we will not surrender the tactical advantage of retaining the ability to concentrate at the key moment!’
It had been at this juncture that Westmoreland had stepped into the fray.
For all that he was known in Washington as a ‘political general’, something of a ‘corporate executive in uniform’, William Childs Westmoreland had learned his soldiering the hard way. Ten years Shoup’s junior he had been an artilleryman in Tunisia, Sicily, France and Germany and finished Hitler’s War as chief of staff of the 9th US Infantry Division. Although he and Shoup had previously enjoyed prickly, somewhat distant relations Westmoreland had never made any bones about his immense respect for the older man’s combat record and the way he had re-organized the Marine Corps in the years leading up to the October War.
Shoup was a man who had had his fate thrust upon him and emerged as a legend within the Marine Corps. Transferred to the staff of the 2nd Marine Division in 1943 he had been responsible for planning the assault on Betio, part of the heavily defended Tarawa Atoll. On Guadalcanal the previous year he had given notice of his pugnaciously aggressive style of combat leadership, and had impressed his superiors with the élan with which he had conducted rehearsals for the forthcoming Tarawa operation. When shortly before D-Day the commander of the 2nd Marines succumbed to a nervous breakdown; Shoup had found himself parachuted into what was to be the bloodiest battle yet in the Pacific War.
Shoup’s landing craft had been sunk under him; then as he came ashore he was hit in the legs by shrapnel and suffered a flesh wound to his neck. Finally reaching the beach he was greeted by a scene of unmitigated carnage. Notwithstanding the dire situation and his wounds he had rallied the survivors, led them off the beaches and pushed inland before the Japanese defenders could mount a co-ordinated counter attack. Throughout the first night on Betio and during the next day as the 2nd Marines continued to take heavy casualties, Shoup had organised and led further assaults, driving the Japanese back before being relieved of command on the second night of the battle. Later Shoup had stoically observed of the battle for Tarawa that ‘there was never a doubt in the minds of those ashore what the final outcome of the battle for Tarawa would be. There was for some seventy-six hours, however, considerable haggling with the enemy over the exact price we would have to pay’. He had subsequently been awarded the Medal of Honour for his part in that ‘haggling’.
Westmoreland had cleared his throat.
‘I entirely concur with General Shoup’s thinking, sir,’ he had said quietly to Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense. The former President of the Ford Motor Company, brought into the Kennedy Administration to re-form and streamline the American military juggernaut in 1961, had looked him in the eye and nodded, wordlessly.
Shoup had asked Westmoreland to remain in the Flag Plot Room while he paid another visit to the roof to assess the ‘tactical situation’ in the vicinity of the Pentagon. He knew the younger man well enough to know that while he was in the room he would prevent the Admirals and the Air Force people from bending McNamara’s ear.
The situation was bad enough already without people who ought to know better actively attempting to make it worse!
Chapter 5
“There’s a guy on the line who claims to be General Westmoreland, chief!”
Practically everybody in the Washington Bureau of Newsweek Magazine who had been listening to the President’s state of the union address earlier that evening was hunkered down under tables and behind filing cabinets hurriedly dragged out into the building’s central, windowless corridors. Every window in the building — probably every window in every building along Pennsylvania Avenue — had been blown in and at least two shells, or mortars, had hit the block in the last quarter-of-an-hour. Stray bullets zinged and pinged off the outer walls at a rate of several every minute even though there did not seem to be any fighting going on locally.
Bureau Chief Ben Bradlee was crawling towards the voice before he had time to think about what he was doing. Inside the main office the teleprinters were still chattering but he had told his people to forget about them; the phones were different. While the lines were up somebody would always be ‘minding’ the phones. That was what being a journalist was all about, a thing in the blood; the thing which had set him moving before he stopped to worry about ricochets and snipers.