Warsaw Concerto, page 2
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
Again, hindsight is a marvellous thing.
The thing is to see the world the way it was, back in the day, not through that magical, all-seeing prism of contemporary perspectives. We, as historians, have the advantage of knowing – or at least, believing that we know – how things actually turned out. The people alive at the time, living through those days and experiencing the rollercoaster ride of the 1960s, did not know how things were going to turn out.
All they could do was guess…
Nevertheless, a lot of people who ought to have known better were far too quick to compare the ‘victory’ of July 1966 with that of 1945. This was to profoundly misconstrue the ways in which the Second War had changed America forever; and the disasters of early 1966, had not.
True, if one looked hard enough there were parallels to be found between the 1941-45 and the 1966 experiences; that was not the point. Although in 1965 the United States had had significant – vast in terms of most other countries – under-utilised resources, of manpower, technology and natural resources at the outbreak of the rebellion, plans had already been implemented to employ in part at least, those under-employed assets. For example, the US Armed Forces were by then nearly two years into a massive re-equipping and re-manning programme which in December 1965, was just beginning to fully swing into gear. Further, US industry, which had suffered no little dislocation due to the October War and a period of widespread labour strife throughout 1963, 1964 and 1965 mainly due to stagnating or falling wages, and a shortage of skilled workers as the more educated and qualified members of communities impacted by the October War moved to the undamaged – and healthier regions of the country as various incarnations of post-war ‘plague’ struck mainly at the industrialised north-east and the cities of middle and upper New England - parts of the nation, notably the South West, the Carolinas, and Florida. Economically, these regions were now experiencing the first exhilarating stages of a decade-long runaway boom that was, counter intuitively, to be massively boosted continent-wide by further migration and the massive federal resources poured into the reconstruction of the Midwest.
Nevertheless, this author maintains that comparisons between 1941-45 and 1966 are very nearly wholly spurious.
A nation united by the initial shock of the war and then by the quest to restore the Union was to be riven anew by the dreadful revelations which soon emerged. Then, when the first War Crimes Tribunals began to sit in open session in 1968; Americans truly began to reel in horror. Until that moment the facts about the bombed cities had been disseminated in relatively broad, unnuanced brush strokes, and the holocaust which had hollowed-out the heart of the continent, had been, somehow, a distant thing. By the fall of 1966 the fighting was long over, and US Army and Air Force survey teams had begun the grim task of exhaustively quartering the re-conquered territories documenting the catastrophe in what soon became, excruciatingly horrific detail. It was at the first United States War Crimes Tribunal - USWCT - hearings that the survivors had begun to give their testimonies.
Nobody has ever really given Richard Nixon credit for holding the nation together long enough for the dust of war to literally, settle; or for wisely, allowing the American people a brief interregnum before the reality of the nightmare became indelibly imprinted upon the psyche of the Union, changing America forever.
Richard Nixon had declared that since he was the Commander-in-Chief, the man at the top, that the ‘buck stopped’ with him. That had earned him a lot of credit back in the darkest days of the rebellion and to a degree it had forestalled the immediate demands for an inquiry along the lines of the still ongoing Commission into the Causes and Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War (which resuming in the autumn of 1966, upon the publication of its first, preliminary findings, in January 1967, soon threatened to dissolve into a welter of poisonous recriminations in the newly re-constituted GOP-dominated House of Representatives).
Any respite was temporary because the one inalienable fact of the American political system, is that by the time a President reaches the second anniversary of his election the next election cycle is well under way. Moreover, it was soon the worst kept secret on Capitol Hill that the movers and shakers of the GOP had rowed in behind Nixon and saw no reason why, whatever his personal reservations or his previous prognostications on the subject, that it was a given – a ‘no-brainer’ - that he should stand for a second term in the White House.
Whatever had gone before, they argued, Richard Nixon had proved himself to be a successful war leader, a man of the people with, when the crunch came, ice in his veins. Nixon’s mea culpe before the American people in taking the totality of the blame for the Civil War and the disasters of January 1966 was at the time, and remains now, one of those unique, defining moments in the history of the Republic.
After the war was over there were countless ticker-tape and military parades in Washington DC and in states all over the country as units returned, triumphantly as liberators, euphorically to their home towns and bases; not unnaturally, there was a great communal sigh of relief and briefly, an understandable burgeoning of unreasonable hope before the realities of the post-October War World came back to bite the American people.
Undeniably, some things had changed.
Not least US-UK relations: after the shooting stopped and details quickly emerged into the public realm cataloguing the immense moral and not-inconsiderable military assistance delivered by the United States’ previously estranged British and Commonwealth allies, starting within days of the outset of hostilities in the Midwest, it was unsurprising that the re-imagining of the United Nations and the re-institution of the old North Atlantic Treaty Organisation framework was ratified by Congress, virtually on the nod.
Notwithstanding it was common knowledge that RAF Avro Vulcans and other British and Canadian aircraft had flown hundreds of conventional bombing missions in support of Operation Berlin, the final offensive of the war; remarkably, the true ‘facts’ about Margaret Thatcher’s unconditional offer to despatch RAF V-Bombers on ‘arc light’ – nuclear strike – operations against rebel targets, were not to become generally known until some years later and not formally acknowledged – by either side – until some forty-three years after the end of hostilities.
Years later, it became fashionable to downplay the contributions of non-American combatants but one has only to visit the ANZAC – Australian and New Zealand - war memorials in St Louis and Independence, Missouri, and at Minneapolis, and those to the memory of British and Canadian Special Services men who fell in Upper Michigan and in the last battle of the war around Berlin, Wisconsin to gain some notion of how integral those ‘foreign’ forces were in the struggle for the soul of America.
Perhaps, the longest-lasting, possibly most enduring overseas legacy of the Civil War, was that from the first days of 1966 the nations of the New Commonwealth ceased to be armed neutrals and became again, allied with the United States although never again as clients. Those days were gone forever. As for the British, they had joined the fight at the head of a co-ordinated New Commonwealth with its own, ‘hostilities only’ North American Command Group based in Ottawa attached to the Office of the Canadian Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Frank Miller, separate from the evolving command structures created by the Pentagon to manage the US military’s response to the rebellion.
While the re-formation of NATO is a visible monument to this period, of equal importance was the re-birth of the World War Two Five Eyes Intelligence sharing treaty between the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and the resurrection and massive expansion of the 1958 US-UK Mutual Defense Treaty which has underpinned nuclear co-operation and technology transfer between the two nations ever since.
Whatever one may think of the so-called ‘Special’ transatlantic relationship between the United States and the ‘old country’; while it would be fractious at times, and now and then positively ‘tense’, it has survived down to the present day despite – some say, because of – the periodic ‘tensions’ between Washington and Oxford. The unequivocal support of the British for its once and future ally in the hours and days after the catastrophe of the nuclear bombings of American cities, effectively, wiped the slate clean.
‘We stand shoulder to shoulder with you,’ Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had told Richard Nixon on the morning after the bombings; and despite everything, that has been the basis of a robust mutual relationship ever since. The ‘special relationship’ never again depended entirely on the personality and foibles of an American President, rather, upon the underlying moral principles, shared in common, between the surviving democracies of the Old and the New World, and to no little degree, those of the ever-broadening family of the New Commonwealth.
Nevertheless, much that now seems axiomatic was anything but at the time. The period after the end of the Civil War – let us call a thing by its real name – was one filled with frenzied ‘catch up’ diplomacy, the redefining of existing relations and now and then a traumatic test of old ones.
A sign of things to come was that there was genuine astonishment in Washington when it became apparent – even to DC insiders – that there would be no new United Nations in the image of the old one. While it might be possible to rebuild the old UN Building in Manhattan, as a permanent international forum it was unlikely to have any takers. If the UN was to be re-born then it was going to have to be in the form of that agreed by a majority of the parties to the abortive Manhattan Peace Process talks which had seemed to go precisely nowhere (so far as the State Department acknowledged) in 1964 and 1965.
Little understood at the time, was how deeply the American psyche had been scarred by the events of 1966 and oddly, how poorly appreciated this was by well, practically everybody in the Administration and Congress. It is in the American soul to take a punch and to instinctively jump straight back up; but sometimes the injury inflicted by that ‘knock down blow’ is so profound, so disabling that no amount of ‘get up and go’ can compensate for the damage done, and this reality was to underpin national life for many years to come.
Without doubt, the first and most staggering shock was the discovery of the true extent of the genocide in the Midwest, which in subsequent years was to over-shadow the abomination of the bombing of the cities either side of the turn of the year of 1965 to 1966.
The War Crimes Trials, which rumbled on into the 1970s like the echo of a funeral drum roll, drowned out the ongoing outcry over the Final Report of the Warren Commission into the Causes and the Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War published a fortnight after the Presidential Election of November 1968.
There was never to be a similar commission into the Civil War; it was as if Congress and the American people understood, intuitively, that there was no explaining away pure evil and that an exercise to try to apportion formal blame to those who had failed to snuff out the evil sooner, seemed profoundly ‘un-American’.
And besides, even by the spring of 1967 America honestly believed it was a different country to the one which had fought the October War, and survived the vicissitudes of a Civil War which had consumed the lives of so many millions of people. If the United States had ever been a country – in the words of John Quincy Adams - that ‘went abroad in search of monsters to slay’, it was not any longer.
Today, we take it for granted that no American President – other than in the nightmare of another nuclear war - would ever again go to war without carrying Congress and the people behind him; and the life of every American GI is regarded as a precious, sacred thing. However, in the aftermath of the Civil War, there was a brief period of bullishness, a new willingness to pick up burdens cast aside in the post-October War period.
Although, within a relatively short span of years Americans would recoil anew from being the World’s policeman, that military retrenchment, side-by-side with a new global corporatism still lay in an uncertain and in many ways, unknowable future. The notion that increasingly, the United States would finance, or straightforwardly ‘pay’ others to fight its wars in defence of its national interests, remained nascent. Likewise, concepts around how US ‘high’ technologies and know-how, the rapier of American science and the bludgeon of its wealth would, supposedly, become the Union’s shield, a proxy against all evil abroad while the great arsenal of democracy built up its impregnable home continental defences, truly the great, impregnable arsenal of democracy were still ‘works in progress’.
It all goes to show, one might conclude, one should be careful what one wishes for. And never, ever underestimate the extent to which events have an uncanny knack of conspiring, in the immortal words of the eighteenth-century Scottish rake, raconteur and Lothario, the great poet Robert Burns: ‘The best laid schemes of mice and men’ started to well and truly ‘gang aft a-gley.’
Extract from the ‘Epilogue to Times That Try Men’s Souls: The Second Civil War’, by Professor E.M. Calleja-Christopher, published by the University of California, Berkeley Memorial Press on 27th October 2017.
Chapter 2
Tuesday 29th November 1966
South Clinton Street, Baltimore, Maryland
It was good to be home; it was just a pity that he was not returning to the same country he had left nearly five years ago. The Port Authority Cops on the dock gate had registered his Yankee drawl, and barely glanced at his papers. Why would they do more than glance? He was one of them, not just another spic or dago off the beaten-up old Panamanian-registered scow that had tied up overnight at the seaward end of Pier 4 in the muddy waters of the East Channel of the Patapsco River.
‘What the heck were you doing on that spic barge, buddy?’ One of the cops had asked him, like he was a down-at-heel prodigal belatedly seeing the light.
‘I needed to get out of Pernambuco in a hurry,’ he had quipped sourly. ‘Woman trouble, a misunderstanding with her husband. So, I skedaddled out of town and jumped on board the Mariana at Recife. Heck, I didn’t even know she was bound stateside at the time! Lucky break, or what?’
The cops had happily agreed it was a very ‘lucky break’ and now that he was on the landward side of the customs gate, he was as free as a bird. He was not going to miss the Santa Mariana de Bilbao, an eight-thousand-ton refrigerator ship built for the South American meat trade during the Second War. In her long-lost prime she had been the Samuel T. Greaves, nowadays, the old steamer tramped along the east coasts of the Americas, only very occasionally visiting New England. Anybody looking at the exhausted old ship might easily mistake her for a derelict in the cold light of tomorrow morning.
The pay had been bad, too.
However, he had enough greenbacks in his pocket to pay for a slop house room for a few days while he made some calls, renewed contact, checked out what had changed and what, inevitably had remained the same, while he had been away. He was in no hurry; it was likely the wealthy bozos who had brought him out of retirement did not need him to travel to the West Coast for several weeks yet. And, as with so many of his previous assignments, he was taking nothing for granted until he actually got his final marching orders.
Finding out more – a lot more – about the people who were paying him so handsomely to escape his South American purgatory, was a thing high on his agenda. He suspected that if they had worked that much out for themselves; they would never have hired him.
But that was going to be their problem, not his.
Hefting his rucksack over his shoulder he headed north up Clinton Street, not remotely bothered that it was eleven at night and that the docks were a bad place for a man with money in his pocket to be alone. The thought brought a quirk of amusement to his lips. Yeah, like Marlon Brando and his Hollywood friends were going to jump him!
On the Water Front…
They said the Pentagon and the FBI had lost half its archives in the Battle of Washington, and that the New York office where he had once – a very long time ago - worked was ashes now. Many of the people who had known him back in the day would be dead. In fact, a lot of the people who had known him, who could identify him, were probably dead.
He hated lazy assumptions.
He was not like Rachel, she could be whatever she wanted to be, everything and anything except dowdy, ordinary, and implausibly deadly. No, his trick was fading into the background, an agelessness and a cultivated dullness of eye which somehow, enabled him to be anonymous, utterly unmemorable. He was of average height, about five feet nine, lean, a little round shouldered unless he made the effort to stand up straight, his complexion a shade darker than it ought to be as if he had more Hispanic blood than most other white Americans.
Rachel had liked working with him because he was ‘nobody’ in a crowd, the perfect man to watch her back, or to walk unrecognised up to a mark while she distracted him.
Of all the natural born killers he had worked with she was the best. He had heard she had been involved in whatever happened on Malta in April 1964, and again at the siege of Wister Park. But all he knew was what he had read in the papers, to risk being seen to take too much interest would have been dangerous. They said she had retired; he did not believe that for a minute. Nobody ‘retired’ in this business.
The Malta thing, followed so soon afterwards by the killings in Philadelphia, had confirmed what he had always suspected, that she had been working for the British all along. Arkady Pavlovich must have suspected that too, although never really known it for sure until it was too late. That was a lesson: never allow a Cobra to get close enough to strike…
He carried on walking north.
He would find somewhere in Highlandtown for the next couple of days, make the calls he had to make and then re-locate. Get out of Baltimore. He had a lot of catching up to do before he headed to the West Coast.
Although he would have preferred to have known the target by now; what you wanted and what you usually got were rarely the same thing. It paid to be philosophical and he was a patient man. The deal was that he returned home, travelled to San Francisco arriving not later than the second week of 1967…and all would be explained.
