Warsaw concerto, p.42
Warsaw Concerto, page 42
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
Had ‘Old Iron Pants’ not had such a ruinous falling out with the President and practically every senior member of the Administration shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War, he might have been welcomed into the GOP’s broad fold; as it was he had found a niche at the conservative extremity of the Democrat Party, much in the fashion of a great Redwood swept downstream in a spring flood which has snagged on rocks just short of a precipitous waterfall.
LeMay was never less than excoriating in his attacks on the White House, although significantly, he reserved his ripest rhetoric for the ‘big circle of nobodies’ around the President, who, according to his version of recent history, had tied his hands throughout his stormy tenure as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and ‘salami sliced’ his beloved Air Force – against his advice, obviously - in such a way as to make defeat in Korea inevitable, and to render the country defenceless against the Kingdom of the End of Days.
He ignored the fact that the country had been so ‘defenceless’ that it had crushed the rebellion in a little over six months once it had put its shoulder to the wheel.
Politics was ever thus…
LeMay had, it seemed, railed vehemently against the Roanoke Treaty in the winter of 1964-65. His accounting for his part in the July 1964 disasters in the Middle East was less clear, positively muddy, and nobody really expected the story to be significantly clarified in his forthcoming much-trailed ghosted auto-biography - BOMBS AWAY! - due in all good book stores ‘near you’ in time for Easter.
Last week a group of Navy veterans had heckled the great man at a rally in Bossier City, Louisiana within sight of the Strategic Air Command base at Barksdale.
“REMEMBER THE KITTY HAWK!”
It was unlikely that future historians would view LeMay’s tenure as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs with anything other than qualified suspicion, noting the catalogue of missteps, accidents and blunders which took place on his watch, and the confused politico-military calculus within the US High Command which so typified the period. True, three Presidents – JFK, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon – had been responsible for sending out mixed messages, reacting too late to developing crises, and shying away from painful decisions. As irrefutably, LeMay and other high-ranking military men had failed to communicate threat ‘vectors’ adequately to their Commander-in-Chief, and shown an uncanny knack for picking the wrong fights about the wrong things with their political masters.
For example, Eight Army would have been lost, destroyed in detail, had it not been for the man on the spot, the late Colin Powell Dempsey, taking it upon himself to save it. Dempsey had taken his own life, thereby forestalling a scandal which would have dwarfed the White House’s current ‘little problem’ with the Warwick Hotel affair, and might easily have brought down a Presidency, and ended the careers of a raft of senior officers.
LeMay had simply been a passive observer. He had not actually been fiddling but Rome, metaphorically speaking, had been burning down all around him for most of his time as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
Washington insiders were curious to know how he was going to airbrush that reality out of the pages of his autobiography. Short of barefaced obfuscation, or bending the truth so far it splintered, nobody could really see how exactly, he was going to do that.
Understandably, the Democrats had no idea what to do with the rambunctious former bomber supremo. ‘he Big Cigar’ might have led his B-24s to Schweinfurt and Regensburg back in the day, sent his B-29s to fire-bomb the Japanese Home Islands, and built and prepared the B-52 Bomb Wings that won the October War but what, exactly, did he have to offer Mainstreet America at the start of 1967?
What was it they said about old generals?
They never die they just fade away?
Or was it that they were destined to carry on fighting old battles and old wars long after anybody gave a damn?
Problematically, the smart money was on LeMay taking a shot at the Presidency next year. Nobody seriously believed he had a shot at winning the ticket; unfortunately, whoever did get to run in 1968 was going to have to get past him and that was likely to be an acrimonious, dirty business which might have been designed to torpedo the winner before he even got to the starting post!
Luke Air Force Base, which had been de-commissioned at the height of the peace dividend cutbacks of 1963, thereafter becoming the Arizona nexus for sports car racing in the last three years, was scheduled to be re-activated next year as the home of the 136th Tactical Training Wing, and the Air National Guard Southern Air Navigation School.
The coming weekend’s race meeting would be the last event organised at Luke under the auspices of the Sports Car Club of America, of which LeMay was President. People close to the former Commander of SAC liked to quip that their man had agonised for several weeks before accepting the SCCA ‘job’ because it was going to disqualify him from racing his beloved Allard J2 for the duration of his tenure.
That the man his crews had called ‘Old Iron Pants’ or ‘The Big Cigar’, was on the stomp ahead of next year’s Presidential race was beyond doubt. None of the likely Democrat contenders had yet stepped forward but the rest of the field knew that come Hell or high water, they were going to have to get past pro-segregationist, ‘make America great again’ Curtis Emerson LeMay if they wanted a shot at Richard Nixon.
Given that the Democrat pool of viable candidates was shrinkingly small, this was just one more disincentive for likely contenders to ponder. No politician worth his salt minded getting down and dirty if he thought he had half-a-chance, a real shot at the top job. However, when one was confronted with a bare-knuckle fight just to get to the start line well, that was a whole other can of beans.
Thus far, the LeMay caravan had restricted its wanderings mainly to the old Confederate Deep South but later that month it was scheduled to picket the inaugural gathering of the new United Nations in California. LeMay’s critics accused him – rather than his advisors, because everybody knew that anybody who gave him the sort of advice he did not want to hear soon learned the error of their ways, or were fired on the spot – of rabble-rousing, declaring that his forthcoming trip to the West Coast was intended to stir up the sort of ‘dog whistle’ publicity which always played well among his supporters in the South.
Kurt Mikkelsen was not one of Curtis LeMay’s supporters.
He had been passing through and he was curious. Although, not about anything the mass-murdering bastard on the stage near the control tower had to say. No, his interest was purely professional.
How close could an ordinary, honest Joe get to the great man?
He had been astonished by how little obvious security was in place around the future candidate, and by the general laxness of the wider security environment around the man who was, let it not be forgotten, a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had identified a couple of – probably - plain clothes cops, locals from Phoenix, chumps with a bare minimum of close protection experience, moving in the crowd with the unobtrusiveness of two Great Plains Bisons. LeMay also had a couple of his own bodyguards, they looked like ex-Air Force guys who knew what they were doing. Otherwise, the Phoenix PD uniformed presence, a straggling cordon of less than a dozen officers was disorganised, and in the main more interested listening to the speechifying than watching the crowd.
At the end of his barely coherent tirade, LeMay – as befitted a hard-arsed bomber pilot - had recklessly dived into the crowd, shaking hands and slapping back, picking out old Air Force and Sports Car Club of America buddies.
Mikkelsen could have gutted LeMay and evaporated into the crowd. At one point he had been within arm’s length of the great man…
Another day, perhaps.
He had already left his calling card, in nearby Glendale last night and he was filling time before he revisited the scene of the crime to check that his pursuers were on their game.
Some things never changed.
For example, the best place to hide was in a crowd, in plain sight, acting the same as everybody else around one acted. He had shaken LeMay’s hand. Most of the people around him were racing nuts, as enthusiastic about politics as any other American, which was not very.
“Sorry you’re not racing today, sir,” Mikkelsen had parroted.
“Maybe, I will again, someday, son,” the greying, bear of a man with a proudly military bearing, had retorted with gruff affability.
Then the hero had been swallowed in the crowd.
Did history change in that moment?
What would have happened if Roosevelt had been killed in that failed assassination a couple of weeks before his first inauguration in February 1933?
Giuseppe Zangara, his would-be killer, had fired five shots at FDR as he gave a speech from the back of his car in Bayfront Park in Miami. Roosevelt had survived unharmed but Chicago Mayor, Anton Cermak, had supposedly died in the future President’s arms.
‘I'm glad it was me instead of you,’ the dying man had said. Allegedly, because reality was hardly ever what people wanted, or expected it to be and fairy tales never, ever came true.
Mikkelsen doubted if shooting FDR would have earned Giuseppe ‘Joe’ Zangara immortality. Who remembered the name of the slayer of William McKinley – the 25th President – in September 1901?
An anarchist called Leon Czolgosz…
As Kurt Mikkelsen made his way back through the throng, he loosened his tie and pulled his worker’s cap down over his eyes, keen to avoid eye contacts now that he was robbed of the anonymity of the press of the surrounding bodies. He had left the old Buick he had hot-wired in Scottsdale that morning among the hundreds of other cars in the lot on the Peoria side of the base. Now he needed a new ride, something old, beaten up that nobody would look twice at as he headed south towards the border.
That day the wind was blowing coolly out of the north west, there was dust in the air, and dark clouds scudding high overhead.
Leon Czolgosz, Joe Zangara, John Wilkes Booth had all died for the great service they had meant to do their countrymen. Only Booth’s name was familiar to all school kids.
Kurt Mikkelsen did not plan to leave anything to chance in California; everybody would always remember Billy the Kid when he was done.
Chapter 37
Thursday 12th January 1967
Battleship Jean Bart, Villefranche-sur-Mer
First Captain Dmitry Alexandrovich ‘Lucky’ Kolokoltsev and Contra Amiral René Leguay, had got along famously once the Russian he had confirmed that he had no intention of telling ‘the maniacs’ back in the Auvergne that what remained of the French Mediterranean Fleet was a rusting heap of floating garbage.
Together, the two men had crafted a disingenuous ‘holding report’ to be sent ashore for transmission to Clermont-Ferrand by landline that night.
My inspection would be accomplished with greater urgency had I been permitted to bring an appropriate technical team to Villefranche…
Kolokoltsev knew that whatever happened he was not going back to the Massif Central. Therefore, he was free to voice such implied criticisms as he pleased with relative impunity. It was a privilege he had yearned to utilise for many years.
However, my impression thus far, of the small number of vessels I have toured, is that given that munitions re-loads and bunker oil is provided to them that they can be made ready for normal operations in a matter of weeks rather than months.
In conclusion.
Given that the aircraft carrier Clemenceau is in a similar condition to that which I have observed thus far on the three vessels I have surveyed, and assuming that her aircraft can be expeditiously re-activated then the fleet in being at Villefranche has the potential to comprise an effective carrier battle group the equal of any the British can put together in the Western Mediterranean. I estimate that I will be in a position to report more fully within the next seven days.
“Do you think they’ll buy it?” René Leguay asked casually as the two men watched the barge taking the sealed report to the courier waiting on the dockside, ready to drive it to Toulon for onward transmission.
“I don’t know.” Kolokoltsev’s French was improving. He still spoke it as if he had rocks in his mouth but his ear was getting better all the time.
“Won’t the people in Toulon smell a rat?” Asked the third person on the bridge wing high above the darkened bay. Aurélie Faure was wrapped in two over-sized sea coats against the bitingly cold wind sliding down from the distant Alps. “They must know exactly what state we’re in?”
“Not many people in Toulon will see the signal,” Leguay told his ‘secretary’. “Most of those who will see it are already in on the joke. The Fleet is their one card left in the game. The trouble is that the Arsenal is still part-controlled by Maxim Machenaud’s Krasnaya Zarya followers. As for bunker oil, well somebody in Toulon or Marseilles needs to send us enough gold to bribe the Genovese pirates we’ve done business with before.”
The commander of the ghost fleet shrugged.
“If the worst comes to the worst, we can pump the Jean Bart’s midships bunkers dry: that ought to enable most of the ships capable of lighting off a boiler to get out to sea. Those that can’t steam, we can tow…”
“That would be desperate…stuff,” Kolokoltsev remarked, struggling for the right words.
Both men were smoking cigarettes rolled from the vile, North African mix that traders hawked all along the old Riviera coast.
“That tobacco,” the woman sniffed, disapprovingly, “will kill you both, long before the radiation gets you!”
The Russian still had not got used to the familiarity with which Leguay’s ‘secretary’ spoke and acted when there were no witnesses within earshot. He had not fathomed it because whatever else the woman was, she was not the Fleet Commander’s mistress.
René Leguay chuckled in the gloom.
“It is good of you to worry on our account, Mademoiselle Faure, but…”
“Men!” The woman sighed.
Kolokoltsev could tell that whatever else was going on that the woman genuinely cared about the tall, hawk-nosed Frenchman who had single-handedly taken it upon himself to save his raggle-taggle rust-bucket fleet and the people on board its ships.
“What will you do if those people in the north order you to fight the British?” Aurélie Faure asked.
There was a lengthening silence.
It lasted some ten, then fifteen or more seconds.
“Sorry, it is not my place,” the woman murmured.
“No, no,” Leguay ruminated, thinking aloud. There was no offence, nor irritation in his voice. “I think about it a lot,” he went on, his roll-up burning down to his fingers. “Honestly, I do not know what I would do if that order came down to us.”
Now the bay was dark except for the dim lights at each ship’s mastheads. The ships themselves were just black shapes in the night, otherwise invisible, locked down, portholes shut and blacked out. The masthead running lights would have been dispensed with also, had it not been for the risk of ship’s dragging their anchors in the southerly swell piling up against the gale trying to blow down into the anchorage from the mountains.
“While we have hope we shall carry on as best we can,” Leguay chuckled wryly. “Dmitry,” he prompted, turning to the Russian. “Perhaps, you should tell Aurélie why they call you ‘Lucky’?”
The two men had got drunker than they had planned last night. Kolokoltsev, a man who thought himself condemned, had partially opened up his heart to his captor.
Captor…
No, that was wrong, too.
But were they yet allies?
“I was with the fleet that attacked Malta a couple of years back. I was Political Officer aboard the battlecruiser Yavuz. The ship was still two-thirds crewed by the Turkish, it was a miracle I lasted three months on her without somebody putting a knife between my shoulder blades. Before that I survived the bombing of Sevastopol because I was interrogating a man in a bunker at the nearby submarine base. So far as I know there were no survivors from the Yavuz. She was torpedoed by a British destroyer, crippled so badly she could only steam in circles and was blown to bits by an American battleship. I’d have gone down with her if I hadn’t transferred to a Red Navy destroyer with another couple of guys, KGB like me, just before the battle and then, with Admiral Gorshkov and his staff, transferred again to a submarine when Yankee aircraft attacked that destroyer and left her dead in the water. Afterwards, Gorshkov ordered the captain of the submarine to sink the destroyer – to sink one of our ships and kill all her people – to stop her falling into enemy hands. So, now, I’m ‘lucky’ Dmitry Kolokoltsev wherever I go.”
The woman was smiling in the darkness.
“Well, we’d best keep you safe then,” she retorted, gently. “We need all the luck we can get around here!”
Two small fishing boats had come alongside the flagship that afternoon, before moving on to dole out what was left of their catches to other ships. Both vessels were presently tied up alongside the battleship, protected by her bulk and the threat of her long-dormant great naval rifles. Apparently, other fishing boats came and went, reliant on the ghost fleet for diesel for their engines, and to shelter and safeguard their crewmen’s families.
René Leguay groaned, stretched, tried to shake of the cloying weariness.
“I need to do my evening rounds,” he announced.
Actually, he only walked the ship every two or three days because each tour-inspection took several hours. A man in his peculiar position could either be a martinet or a friendly, father figure. He had elected to be the latter – once he had thrown a few selected undesirables over the side in the days after he took command, just so nobody ran away with the idea that he was a soft touch - and this involved being seen, and being one of his crew.
Everybody had to understand that he expected his orders to be obeyed and that there would be consequences if they were not. But he was no monster, they were all in this together and the key part of the deal, the unspoken contract he had reached with his most senior officers and his most lowly rating, was that he was an approachable human being whose job it was to keep them all alive, and as fit and well, as possible. That would not work if he ever became a stranger to his people. Hence, his regular walks – his ‘rounds’ – of the ship, and now and then, visits to the other rusting hulks of the ghost fleet.
