He checked his watch: he’d been brooding some fifteen minutes.
It was time to get back to work.
Chapter 18
Over half the B-52s despatched on strike missions on the night of 27th-28th October 1962 had been lost. The 100th Bomb Group had been formed out of the remnants of units decimated during the October War. Reforming the ‘Bloody 100th’ had been the suggestion of one of General Curtis LeMay’s long-time staffers and in the febrile, jittery aftermath of the war he’d seen moral boosting possibilities in the idea. Like any idea to which Curtis LeMay took a shine he’d driven it forward with the zeal of an angry bull in a china shop.
Normally based at Arnold Air Force Base at Tullahoma, Tennessee, the seventeen operational B-52s of the 2nd and 3rd Bomb Wings of the 100th Bomb Group had been operating out of Barksdale on a routine two-week training rotation. The Chief of Staff of the US Air Force didn’t like his front line Strategic Air Command crews getting either too set in their ways, or too comfortable in their home bases. Complacency was the greatest enemy and the hardest to combat in peace time.
With the Soviet threat if not eliminated, then eradicated for a generation and no significant extant hostile strategic military threat to the North American continent, Curtis LeMay hadn’t been able to prevent the President and his Congressional lap dogs clawing back a massive so called ‘peace dividend’ equivalent to over forty percent of the 1961-62 real dollar spend on defence. Half the Navy had gone straight into mothballs, the regular Army had been reduced to a skeleton of less than two hundred thousand men, and the front line war-fighting order of battle of his Air Force had been reduced by war losses and Capitol Hill gerrymandering to less than a third of its pre-war roster. He’d been forced to scrap or mothball the entire B-47 component of SAC, and pare down the B-52 force to only 188 aircraft organised between five under strength Bomb Groups. Half of all US Air Force Bases in North America had been decommissioned in the last five months. The idiots in Washington didn’t have any inkling how much trouble they were storing up for themselves by prematurely retiring and discarding so many good and true, patriotic Americans. But that was a problem for the future and presently, the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force had a very big, and very immediate problem of his own that neither he, nor anybody else had seen coming and worse, neither he nor anybody else knew what to do about.
Somebody in the Air Force Department in Washington had raised and routed a request for B-52 strikes on Malta and Gibraltar, and somebody at the Pentagon had green-lighted the operations order.
Whoever it had been; it hadn’t been fifty-seven year old Ohio-born General Curtis Emerson LeMay, Chief of Staff since 1961 of the United States Air Force. Which was a problem because the hardcopy teleprinter operations order running to some forty-seven pages bore the imprimatur of his personal authentication code!
“What the fuck is going on here!” He growled at the base commander, whom LeMay had known since the bad old days in Europe. Major-General Phineas ‘Slim’ Babcock had also been with him in India, China and the Pacific, and for most of the last ten years he’d been his go to ‘operations guy’ whenever a SAC Air Wing failed to measure up to his exacting standards. LeMay had never seen his old friend so ashen-faced, so mortified; while Babcock, who’d seen the Chief of Staff blow his top too often to be easily impressed, had never seen him this coldly angry and this shaken. “Where’d this shit come from, Slim?”
Babcock stared at the sheaf of papers the other man was brandishing.
The base commander who owed the handle ‘Slim’ to his long ago West Point days when he’d been a ferociously bear-like linebacker. He’d been a big man in his youth and over the years he’d beefed up more than somewhat so that nowadays his huge frame was threatening to visibly sag beneath the accumulated layers of flesh and muscle.
“Jeez,” he protested. “Don’t you think I didn’t think it was screwiest thing I’d ever seen in my life? I was straight on the horn to the Air Force Department. They said this thing came from the top; the Commander-in-Chief wanted it done and anybody who didn’t like it could resign the Service. Then I talked to your new guy Seedorf…”
“Who the fuck is Seedorf?” General Curtis LeMay exploded, threatening to come across the desk to physically assault Babcock.
“Larry Seedorf. Colonel Larry Seedorf, the guy you brought onto the staff to re-draft the war plans…”
“I don’t know any Colonel Seedorf.” Curtis LeMay didn’t think his old buddy was lying to him. Why would he? Jesus H Christ! He and Slim had flown B-24s to Regensburg and most of the worst places on Earth a man could take a heavy bomber in 1943. Slim Babcock would put his hand in the fire if his President asked him. Shit, JFK wouldn’t have needed to ask him twice, either! “How many times have you talked to this Seedorf character?”
“Er, twice, sir. Once to confirm the rotation schedule when the two 2nd Bomb Group wings were rotated out to Arnold AFB a week ahead of program to test 100th Bomb Group’s readiness to relocate at short notice…”
Curtis LeMay slumped back into his chair.
The orders altering the rotation schedule hadn’t come across his desk either.
Or if it had he sure as Hell hadn’t authorised it.
The truly frightening thing about this situation was he had no idea how many people would have had to have been involved in this to make it work. Other than that number would have had to have run into scores. Dozens just at the Air Force Department and at the Pentagon, for sure. Granted, some of those involved would have gone along with it rather than make waves, but others had to have known it was a crock of shit. They’d have had to be persuaded to sit on their hands; or genuinely convinced that it was suddenly the policy of the United States Government to mount sneak attacks on its oldest surviving allies. Jesus, every way he looked at it this thing just got worse… A small core of conspirators — traitors — must have spent months planning… Even then, how the fuck had they got away with it?
Curtis LeMay badly needed to kick something or better, drop a bomb on somebody. The trouble was that neither of those things was going to do any good.
FUBAR!
Fucked Up Beyond All Repair!
Sometimes things were so screwed up it didn’t do any good shouting. Punching out somebody’s lights didn’t help. Neither did starting the witch hunt early. There would be plenty of time for that later.
“What went wrong in the Malta raid?” He asked suddenly, his tone gruffly sour but utterly without bluster.
“We don’t know. The Brits had fighters at altitude when our boys came onto the target. Beyond that, we’ve no idea what happened, sir.”
Curtis LeMay forced himself to take a very deep breath.
Every which way this gets worse!
He’d been wading through ever deeper shit ever since he’d arrived at Barksdale four hours ago. They’d be blaming him in DC by now. Assuming they hadn’t already sent out the lynch mob!
“Why didn’t the 3rd Bomb Wing press home the attack on Gibraltar?”
“The operations protocol was to abort the mission if the Spanish hadn’t suppressed the Brits’ carrier based air within a hundred mile radius of the designated IP for the bomb run…”