CHAPTER 13 – A PRESIDENT GONE
17:07 (Washington D.C. Time)
Saturday, May 6, 1944
Cabinet conference room, the White House
Washington, D.C., United States of America
Harry Truman was in a near state of shock as his top military leaders finished briefing him on the war situation. This early morning, he had been only a little-used and ill-informed Vice-President of the United States who was not regularly briefed on military matters. All that had changed when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had suddenly died, struck down by a massive stroke which, according to his doctor, had been brought on by heavy and unrelenting amounts of stress caused by the ever worsening war situation. Now, Harry Truman was officially the new President of the United States, having been sworn in just before noon. Truman had thought then that the pressure on him couldn’t get worse, with all the responsibilities of the presidency now on his shoulders. However, since he had not been regularly briefed on many matters, the litany of bad news that his military top commanders had just delivered to him had come like a hammer strike to his head. And he was supposed to lead the nation through such a disastrous situation?
‘’Gentlemen, I…I never thought that things were so bad. How did we sink so low?’’
‘’How, Mister President?’’ answered Frank Knox, the Secretary of the Navy. ‘’Because of the continued assault on both our East and West Coasts by German submarines, which are strangling our maritime traffic on top of causing widespread destruction along our coasts with their shelling. Our navy did its best, but those new German submarines are simply too advanced and performing for our anti-submarine sensors and weapons. We also suspect but can’t prove that a few South American countries, notably Argentina and Chile are secretly supporting Germany by providing safe ports to these submarines, where they can refuel and rearm.’’
‘’Then, why didn’t we send warships to these countries to make them toe the line?’’ asked Truman. Knox hesitated and lowered his head before answering.
‘’We tried, Mister President. All the warships we sent down south were sunk while on their way by the same German submarines that are blocking our ports. We also tried to entice our allies down there, like Brazil, to intervene and pressure militarily both Argentina and Chile, but they refused to act, probably because they are sensing that we are losing this war.’’
‘’And are we really losing this war, Secretary Knox?’’
‘’I believe so, Mister President.’’ was the nearly whispered reply, shocking Truman. In contrast, the military leaders around the table didn’t protest on hearing that opinion, mostly keeping somber faces. Picking up again the sheets of printed statistics about the war given to him at the start of the meeting, Truman reread some of the numbers with growing bitterness: over 48,000 dead and wounded, most of them civilians working in war industries, victims of three months of German submarine shelling against coastal installations; most war-related manufacturing, transport or repair facilities situated within fourteen miles from the coast heavily damaged or completely destroyed by shelling; all the main ports either damaged or blocked by shelling or sea mines; maritime traffic cut by more than half; merchant ships and warships being sunk faster than they could be replaced and a growing difficulty in recruiting and training enough replacements to compensate for all these human losses. What was not said in the fact sheets Truman was reading but something he was well aware of was the growing wave of population exodus from the coastal areas, with citizens afraid of being shelled moving further into the interior of the country, thus creating even bigger shortages of manpower for the industries that were still intact along the coasts. Suddenly feeling very old, Truman looked up from the document and eyed the men around the table.
‘’What is your counsel, gentlemen? How could we redress this situation?’’
‘’We can’t, at least with conventional means, Mister President.’’ answered Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War. ‘’We do have however a last hope: Project Manhattan.’’
‘’Project Manhattan? What is that? I never heard of it before.’’
‘’That’s because it is our most secret national project by far and because the knowledge about it has been restricted to a very limited number of persons. I believe that President Roosevelt chose not to put you in the know about it, Mister President. As for what it is, the simple answer would be that it is a scientifically advanced project which is trying to develop a new kind of weapon, a bomb powerful enough to destroy a whole city by itself. This, by the way, is classified Top Secret, Mister President.’’
‘’And…that super bomb, when could it be ready for use?’’ asked Truman, feeling some hope coming back to him. However, Stimson then quickly doused cold water on his hopes by his answer.
‘’If all goes well, in about a year, maybe. Please understand that the technology involved in that project is revolutionary and still not well understood, Mister President. We are devoting enormous financial, scientific and industrial resources to make it advance as fast as possible, but we can’t possibly accelerate it further.’’
‘’So, you would be asking the American people to go through one more year of what it has been enduring already for three months, in order to complete a bomb that may or may not work by then. Is that it, Secretary Stimson?’’
‘’Basically yes, Mister President. The only alternative to that would be to capitulate or negotiate a peace with Germany.’’
‘’Right now, I am not sure that the American people would vote to continue the fight for another year, at the rate our country is getting clobbered. Many would consider a negotiated peace with Germany as the lesser of two evils, in view of the growing destruction and casualty counts inside our country. I will have to think in depth about that. If you have any suggestions about how to either win or stop this war, write a plan about it and submit it to me as soon as possible. Right now, my head feels ready to explode. I propose that we adjourn now and sleep on it.’’
Not getting any objections to that, Truman then declared the meeting adjourned. With the other participants walking out of the conference room, a pensive Truman went to one of the large windows of the room to look outside, his mind boiling. He was now President, yes, but of a country on the verge of defeat.
04:06 (New York Time)
Sunday, May 7, 1944
U.S. Army mobile radar station, on coastline of Atlantic City
New Jersey, U.S.A.
Corporal Robert Hickman was fighting not to fall asleep in the semi-obscurity of his radar van as he scanned visually his radar scope. His mobile radar unit had been stationed on the coast near Atlantic City for a good three months now and little had happened in that period of time, except for one suspected submarine contact that had quickly disappeared and for a few false alerts caused by unscheduled friendly flights overhead. In case things got serious, he had a radio link with the army air controller in Dover Airfield but, apart from the raucous raised across the country by the death of President Roosevelt, his shift had been a quiet one up to now.
His junior partner on his shift, Private First Class John Milner, had just prepared some hot coffee for both of them and Robert was gratefully sipping on his cup when a cluster of dots suddenly appeared on the edge of his radar screen, coming from the East. Focusing his attention at once on the dots, he put down his cup of coffee and started plotting the unknown newcomers.
‘’Hey, John, I have a group of dots that just appeared on my radar, coming from the East.’’
‘’Oh? We were not told about flights coming from that direction. Let me just recheck our flight manifest.’’
After a minute spent sifting through the announced flights manifest for the day, Milner shook his head.
‘’Sorry, no flights are due from the East today. How many blips are there and how fast are they going and in what direction, Bob?’’
By now, Hickman had time to do a preliminary plot line on his scope and what he was seeing now was downright alarming.
‘’Uh, you better contact Dover Airfield, now! I have a total of eleven blips, coming from Heading 083 and heading straight for Washington at a speed of approximately 300 miles per hour.’’
‘’Holy shit! You don’t think that those could be German planes, do you?’’
‘’I don’t know but I am not ready to waste time on suppositions. Call Dover, NOW!’’
Milner sat back down in front of his radio set and put on his headset, then called the air control section at Dover Airfield. He had to repeat three times his call before getting an answer.
‘’Dover Air Control here!’’
‘’Dover, this is the Atlantic City coastal radar station. We have eleven fast blips coming from the East and heading towards Washington at a speed of 300 miles per hour. They are now 110 miles from the coast and are coming from Heading 083, over.’’
‘’Uh, Atlantic City radar station, you do realize that there is nothing to the East of your position for over 3,000 miles, except the Atlantic Ocean, over. You better check your radar set, out!’’
Milner was left stunned by the cavalier answer from the Dover air controller. When he told his comrade about that answer, Hickman had a hard time not to swear out loud in response. Calming down with difficulty, he grabbed the field telephone that linked his radar van to his company’s command post, which controlled four anti-aircraft guns deployed along the coast, and turned its handle. A voice answered him after a few seconds.
‘’Company Command Post! Staff Sergeant O’Malley speaking.’’
‘’Sarge, this is Corporal Hickman, at the radar van. I just picked up eleven unidentified blips coming from the East on my radar. They are heading towards Washington at a speed of 300 miles per hour. We called the Dover Airfield air controller, as per our standing directives, but he didn’t take us seriously and told us instead to check our radar set. What should I do?’’
‘’He ignored a warning about eleven unidentified blips from the East heading towards Washington? Alright, I will wake up the captain, so that he could talk with the Dover air controller. Keep plotting those blips in the meantime and don’t lose them.’’
‘’You can count on us, Sarge.’’ replied Hickman before putting down the telephone’s handset. Looking at his radar screen, he shook his head in discouragement.
‘’What we would need is an integrated network of fixed radar stations with direct landlines to a central air defense coordination center. This business of dispersed mobile radar vans is just not working. But who would listen to a simple corporal like me?’’
At Dover Airfield, the same NCO who had answered Hickman also argued with Hickman’s captain when he called by radio, but finally passed the call to his supervisor, a young lieutenant. A total of over five minutes was wasted before the decision was made by that lieutenant to alert the fighter unit based at Dover Airfield. However, the response he got then was that the unit was equipped with P-47 THUNDERBOLT day fighters and that the unit’s pilots were not trained nor equipped for night interceptions. In return, the lieutenant woke up his superior, a captain, to ask him permission to alert the nearest airfield with night fighters. The problem was that they soon realized that there were no night fighter units posted along the Northeast coast of the United States at this time, all the P-61 BLACK WIDOW units having been reserved for the Pacific theatre. The captain in Dover was still scratching his head about what to do when he heard the distant rumble of powerful engines passing overhead at high altitude to the south of the airfield.
04:37 (New York Time)
Lead German Messerschmitt Me 264 C heavy bomber
Heading towards Washington, D.C.
Major Kurt Lippish, helped by the light from a full moon, compared the features he could see below him on the ground with the ones on his map and, being in agreement with his navigator/bombardier, keyed his radio microphone, calling the ten other bombers of his squadron.
‘’Condor One to Condor call signs! We are now less than seventy kilometers from Washington. Follow me into a gentle dive down to the altitude of 3,000 meters, from where we will drop our bombs, and accelerate to a speed of 600 kilometers per hour.’’
Lippish then pushed forward a bit his control yoke, putting his heavy bomber in a gentle dive. His eleven Messerschmitt Me 264 C were actually all the production models that presently existed, the aircraft type having barely entered service after a frenetic last development phase directed and pushed by Generalfeldmarshal Kesselring in person, who had fired a number of RLM bureaucrats, managers and senior Luftwaffe officers for incompetence and for having wasted years while mishandling the ‘Amerika Bomber’ project. Now, the Me 264 C was making its first combat mission, filling the role it had been conceived to do: hit the American East Coast directly from Europe. The Me 264 C, while looking very much like the Me 264 V1 prototype that had first flown in December of 1942, however sported many significant differences with it. First, it had a longer fuselage and taller vertical rudders, to correct some original lack of longitudinal stability. Second, it had deeper wings with a much larger total surface, in order to lower the very high original wing loading ratio, which had made the Me 264 V1 a very slow climbing aircraft. Third, and most importantly, the four original radial engines, each rated at 1730 horsepower, had been replaced by six inverted V12 DB 603 G engines, which were each rated at 1900 horsepower. That extra engine power had done a world of a difference, with the new Me 264 C now being as nimble as any other heavy bomber around and also being very fast, being in fact as fast as the latest piston-engine fighter aircraft in service. However, what really put it in a class of its own was its combat range: a whopping 15,500 kilometers while loaded with four tons of bombs on its way out, making it easily able to reach targets as far as Chicago from its base in Bordeaux, France. Taking a lesson from the famous British MOSQUITO light bomber, which had no defensive turrets and relied on its high speed to evade interception, Kesselring had ordered that the Me 264 C’s armament be limited to one tail turret with two 20mm cannons and one 13mm heavy machine gun in the nose, to defend against frontal passes by enemy fighters. That had improved further the already good aerodynamics of the aircraft by cutting the drag typically caused by multiple turrets and gun positions, something that had in turn augmented further the range. Now, the Americans were about to meet with the latest Luftwaffe acquisition. That it would strike Washington only a day after the unexpected death of President Roosevelt could only magnify the psychological effect that the Führer was hoping from this raid.
Harry Truman was having an agitated sleep, the stress of his new position weighing on him, when a pair of Secret Service agents burst inside the bedroom occupied by Truman in the second floor of the Executive Residence building of the White House. One agent then shook Truman none too gently while speaking to him in a gradually rising volume of voice.
‘’Mister President! MISTER PRESIDENT! You have to quickly go down to the East Wing bunker with us: enemy bombers are about to overfly Washington.’’
‘’What? German bombers, here? But that’s impossible!’’
‘’I know that it is hard to believe, Mister President, but we can’t take any chances. Please follow us quickly down to the bunker.’’
‘’At least, give me time to put my robe and slippers on and to retrieve my glasses.’’
‘’Alright, Mister President, but make it quick!’’
‘’What about the rest of the staff in the building?’’ asked Truman while putting on his robe.
‘’We are already collecting them and bringing them to the bunker, Mister President.’’
A bit reassured by that, Truman put on his slippers and glasses, then followed the two agents down the stairs to the ground floor of the Executive Residence. From there, they nearly ran down the main hallway of the East Colonnade, which linked the Executive Residence to the East Wing building. As they were about to go down the staircase leading to the underground bunker that had been built in 1942, along with the East Wing building, Truman started to hear a growing engine noise, like the buzz from angry bees, approach from the East. The senior agent also heard it and urged his charge to further hurry up.
‘’The enemy bombers are approaching fast, Mister President. Please hurry!’’
Truman obeyed, himself quite nervous by now. They found another Secret Service agent waiting at the opened steel door of the underground bunker, built of thick reinforced concrete, in which Truman could hear the worried or fearful voices of other White House occupants. As Truman was entering the bunker, with the agent at the entrance about to close the heavy steel door behind him and his escorts, a sinister whizz started to be heard.
‘’Oh shit!’’ exclaimed the agent at the door, who hurried to close it and secure it. He had just done that when a first muffled explosion made the whole White House shake violently. A second, third and fourth explosion, each one closer, shook again the building, making plaster fall from the ceiling of the bunker. Then, at least two bombs made direct hits against the White House complex, making even the bunker shake violently and sending its occupants scrambling for the protection of tables and beds. To add to the chaos, a water pipe running along the ceiling burst, turning into a giant sprinkler and soaking everything and everyone in a radius of three meters. Truman counted a total of eight bombs which exploded near or on the White House. Other, more distant explosions were felt as well but were obviously targeting some other buildings in Washington. After about five minute, the head of the presidential protection detail decided that it was time for him to go inspect the damage upstairs. He however opposed a firm ‘no’ to Truman’s wish to accompany him up and ordered him to stay under guard in the bunker for the time being. Frustrated but understanding the man’s point of view, Truman went to sit on a sofa beside a very scared White House assistant cook who was crying from a near nervous breakdown and gently patted her shoulder.
‘’Come now, Miss Denning, the bombing is already finished and we are all safe here. We should be able to go back upstairs soon.’’
‘’But how could those damn Germans fly all the way to here to bombard us, Mister President? What tells us that they won’t come back again to drop more bombs?’’
‘’They won’t! I will make sure of that, Miss Denning.’’ lied Truman, who then wondered how he was going to keep that promise.
Some twenty minutes later, the head of the security detail came back into the shelter and walked to Truman, his expression grim. Truman got up from his sofa and led the Secret Service man to a corner where they would be able to speak in privacy.
‘’So, how is the White House?’’ asked Truman anxiously.
‘’It’s bad, Mister President. A total of about eight large bombs either bracketed or hit directly the White House complex, blowing in all the windows in the process. One bomb hit the junction of the East Colonnade and of the Executive Residence and exploded, blowing up most of the Executive Residence and collapsing the North and South Porticos. What is left of the Executive Residence could collapse at any moment That bomb also destroyed half of the East Colonnade section. A second bomb directly hit the West Colonnade section, going through the Press Briefing Room and burying deep into the ground before exploding. It basically obliterated all of the West Colonnade section and more than half of the West Wing. The rest of the West Wing has mostly collapsed or is now structurally compromised because of the blast and shock from that bomb. I am afraid that the White House is presently finished as your residence and work place, Mister President.’’
‘’The bastards!’’ raged Truman while trying to restrain his volume of voice. The senior Secret Service agent was not finished, however.
‘’There is more, Mister President. From the flames I could see in the distance, I would say that both the Capitol Hill and the Pentagon were hit, hard. Today is going to be marked as a true dark day for the nation, Mister President.’’
‘’And that was my first day as President. Great! Thank God that my wife and daughter had not moved in yet.’’ said dejectedly Harry Truman, feeling discouragement fill him.
Two days later, on May 9, the German heavy bombers returned, this time to carpet-bomb the giant General Motors car plant in Detroit, which was now producing tanks, armored vehicles and trucks for the U.S. Army. That bombing raid, contrary to that made against Washington, was conducted during daylight in order to attain maximum accuracy. The eleven Me 264 Cs of Major Lippish dropped a total of 176 250-kilo bombs on the plant, causing severe damages to it and also killing over 1,600 plant workers, who basically had no real shelters they could find nearby when the alert was given. The German bombers then turned around eastward and accelerated to their maximum speed, surprising and leaving behind the 34 American fighter aircraft that had scrambled from Army airfields around Detroit. The fact that none of the German bombers had been successfully intercepted during the raid triggered a storm of indignant protests, both from the public and from the Congress, asking for heads to roll, starting with General Arnold. Truman sided with the protesters and fired Arnold as head of the Army Air Corps the next day, then ordered his military chiefs to stop sending reinforcements and supplies to the Pacific and to concentrate the American war effort into fortifying the East and West Coasts and into improving the country’s air defenses. While the public saluted that presidential directive, it also left Australia basically isolated and without support against a Japanese empire that extended all the way to Indonesia and Papua-New Guinea, next door to the Australian continent. The only thing that then saved Australia from a Japanese invasion was the fact that the Japanese Army and Navy were already badly overextended. Australia and Japan were thus both secretly content to sign a mutual armistice in mid June, with Japan left in control of nearly the whole of the Pacific, save for Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand, and with the Japanese now in possession of all the natural resources they had been eyeing at the start of the war. All that meant basically that the United States was by itself against Germany and Japan, except for next door Canada and with the Soviet Union fighting for its life against the Germans on another, distant front. Many countries of Central and South America that had allied itself with the U.S.A. in 1941 then started to get cold feet and either limited themselves to lukewarm support or squarely declared their neutrality in the war. Even Brazil, which was seeing its vital maritime commerce pounded by German submarines, started vacillating in its active support to the United States, especially after most of the American warships that had been helping to protect its Atlantic coast were withdrawn all the way to the Caribbean Basin on orders from Washington. From there, things only got progressively worst for the United States.
On the Eastern Front, as more Me 264 Cs were being produced and put into service, the Luftwaffe found itself finally able to hit at the Soviet weapons factories in the distant Ural Mountains, which had been until now mostly immune to German air attacks. With Soviet war production volumes abruptly dropping and with the Anglo-American maritime supply convoys shut off, the mighty Soviet Army’s offensive, already stopped cold in early 1944 by the new German reinforcements from the Western Front, now turned into a slow, fighting withdrawal, then into a full blown retreat, with the Soviet soldiers lacking ammunition, fuel, spare parts and rations. The oil-rich fields of the Caucasus, around the Black Sea, which had been in danger of falling back into Soviet hands, became secure German-held territory, allowing the Germans to repair and rebuild the oil wells that had been sabotaged by the Soviets before their withdrawal from the Caucasus.
By August of 1944, President Truman and his military chiefs had all but abandoned any hopes of winning the war, short of getting a functional atomic bomb. However, the progress reports from New Mexico on that subject were not very encouraging and promised the need for many more months of waiting. Faced with the prospect of enduring at least another year of mounting civilian casualties, strangled maritime trade via German submarine blockade and systematic air bombardments, President Truman and the American Congress finally decided to open armistice talks with both Germany and Japan in October of 1944. On learning that the U.S.S.R. would soon be left alone to fight, disgruntled Communist Party leaders led a coup that resulted into the death of Joseph Stalin and the prompt signing of a peace accord between Germany and the Soviet Union.
13:50 (Paris Time)
Saturday, November 11, 1944
Upper open bridge of the U-900
Navigating on the surface of the Atlantic
330 nautical miles southwest of Lorient, France
Coming out of the forward underwater observation dome of his boat and stepping on the covered open bridge, Ulrich von Wittgenstein took with delight a deep breath of the cold but fresh Atlantic air. He then did a visual tour of the horizon with his binoculars, out of long habit. The only thing he saw was a pair of small fishing boats in the distance, hard at work catching fish. That was a most fitting scene in his mind that coincided with the radio message he had received from the BdU headquarters in Lorient a few minutes ago. On the same day of the year than the armistice that had put an end to the fighting in World War One, the United States, Canada and the other countries of the old British Commonwealth still fighting had signed an armistice with Germany, Japan and Italy, putting in theory a stop to this war, with the l