Harry Turtledove: Bombs Away

To the soldiers at the LMG, Curtis said, “Hang on here as long as you have to.”

“How long is that, Lieutenant?” Masters asked.

“Well-as long as you have to,” Cade answered. Till you make them kill you, he meant, and they knew it. He’d never had to give an order like that before. He hoped to Christ he never would again. With his rear guard set, he went after his retreating men. Behind him, the machine gun barked death at the Chinese.

–

Not quite so smoothly as Harry Truman might have liked, the Independence touched down at Hickam Field west of Honolulu and taxied to a stop. The DC-6’s four big props windmilled down to motionlessness. Truman had traded in FDR’s executive airplane, the Sacred Cow, for this more modern one in 1947. He’d named it for his own home town. The bald eagle on the nose warned the world of America’s strength.

Warm, moist, sweet-smelling air came in when they opened the door. Truman grumbled under his breath just the same. In spite of that fierce-beaked eagle, America wasn’t looking any too strong right this minute. The Red Chinese had cut off something like three divisions’ worth of troops between the Chosin Reservoir and Hungnam. In spite of air raids and naval gunfire and godawful casualties of their own, the Reds were chewing them up and spitting out the bloody bones.

People were calling it the worst American defeat since the Battling Bastards of Bataan went under in the dark, early days of World War II. It was a hell of a way to go into Christmas, only a week away now. And it was why Truman had come to Hawaii to confer with Douglas MacArthur. In October, MacArthur had flown to Wake Island to assure Truman Red China wouldn’t interfere in the Korean War. Which would have been nice if only it had turned out to be true.

And MacArthur had also been the architect of defeat in the Philippines. Yes, he’d had help, but he’d held command there. Truman hadn’t been able to stand him since well before that. MacArthur had led the troops who broke up the Bonus Army’s Hooverville in Washington when the Depression was at its worst. Didn’t a man have to be what they called a good German to go and do something like that?

Truman didn’t care for looking up at MacArthur, either. Not looking up to, because he didn’t. But looking up at. Truman was an ordinary, stocky five-nine. MacArthur stood at least six even. He seemed taller than that because of his lean build, his ramrod posture, and his high-crowned general’s cap. It wasn’t quite so raked as the ones the Nazi marshals had worn, but it came close.

Looking out a window in the airliner, Truman watched a Cadillac approach the Independence . “Your car is here, sir,” an aide said.

“I never would have guessed,” the President answered. The aide looked wounded. Somebody-George Kaufman? — had said satire was what closed on Saturday night. Well, sarcasm was what got a politician thrown out on his ear. Truman walked to the doorway, saying, “Sorry, Fred. I’ve come a long way, and I’m tired. The weather will be nicer outside. Maybe I will, too.”

By the look on Fred’s face, he didn’t believe it. Since Truman didn’t, either, he couldn’t get on his flunky. The weather was nicer. Washington didn’t have horrible winters. Honolulu didn’t have winter at all. It was in the upper seventies. It never got much hotter. It never got much colder. If this wasn’t paradise on earth, what would be?

The limousine took the President to Fort Kamehameha, just south and west of Hickam Field. The fort had guarded the channel that lead in to Pearl Harbor. It was obsolete now, of course; the Japs had proved as much at the end of 1941. Being obsolete didn’t mean it had got torn down. The military didn’t work that way. No, it had gone from fort to office complex.

A spruce young first lieutenant led Truman to the meeting room where MacArthur waited. The five-star general stood and saluted. “Mr. President,” he rasped. The air smelled of pipe tobacco.

“At ease,” Truman told him. He knew the military ropes. He’d been an artillery captain himself in the First World War. Knowing the ropes didn’t mean he felt any great affection for them. “Let’s do this without ceremony, as much as we can.”

“However you please, sir,” MacArthur said.

They did have a big map of Korea, Japan, and Manchuria taped to the conference table. That would help. Truman stabbed a finger at the terrain between the reservoir and the port, the terrain where the American troops were in the meat grinder. “What the devil went wrong here?”

“We got caught by surprise, sir,” Douglas MacArthur said. “No one expected the Chinese to swarm into North Korea in such numbers.”

“There were intelligence warnings,” Truman said. And there had been. MacArthur just chose not to believe them, and made Truman not believe them, either. The general was finishing up his own triumphal campaign. He’d defended the Pusan perimeter, at the southern end of the Korean peninsula. He’d landed at Inchon and got behind the North Koreans. He’d rolled them up from south to north, and he’d been on the verge of rolling them up for good…till the Chinese decided they didn’t want the USA or an American puppet on their border. MacArthur’d guessed they would sit still for it. Not for the first time, he’d found himself mistaken.

“Intelligence warns of everything under the sun,” he said now, with a not so faint sneer. “Most of what it comes up with is moonshine, not worth worrying about.”

“This wasn’t,” Truman said brusquely. MacArthur’s craggy features congealed into a scowl. The President went on, “The question now is, what can we do about it?”

“Under the current rules of engagement, sir, we can’t do anything about it till too late,” MacArthur said. “As long as American bombers aren’t allowed to strike on the other side of the Yalu, the Chinese will be able to assemble as they please and bring fresh troops into the fight in North Korea without our disrupting their preparations in any way.”

“How much good will bombing north of the river do, though?” Truman asked, holding on to his temper. North of the Yalu sat enormous, hostile Red China. Bomb Red China, and who knew what kind of excuse you were handing Joe Stalin? “Won’t they hit our B-29s hard? The Superforts were world-beaters in 1945, but they haven’t done so well against North Korean air defenses. The Chinese should be better yet on that score, don’t you think?”

“If we use ordinary munitions, we will slow them down to some degree but we won’t stop them. You’re absolutely right about that, sir.” MacArthur sounded amazed the President could be right about anything. That might have been Truman’s imagination, but he didn’t think so. His Far East commander went on, “But if we drop a few atomic bombs on cities in Manchuria, not only do we destroy their men and rail lines, we also send the message that we are sick and tired of playing around.”

“The trouble with that is, if we drop A-bombs on Stalin’s friends, what’s to keep him from dropping them on ours?” Truman returned.

“My considered opinion, your Excellency, is that he wouldn’t have the nerve,” Douglas MacArthur said. “He doesn’t have that many bombs. He can’t-he just dropped his first last year. And he must see we can hurt him far worse than he can hurt us.”

“Once the pipeline gets moving, they come pretty fast, though. And he has a hell of a lot of men and tanks in Eastern Europe, too,” the President said. “They could head west on very short notice.”

MacArthur shrugged. “We can destroy swarms of them before they get into West Germany. And how sad do you think the French and British will be if we have to use a few bombs on West German territory?”