Miranda was asking herself which part of her Aunt Molly’s assertion that ‘things aren’t as bad as they could have been’ bore any relation to what she was actually hearing the President say?
“The great city of Seattle was hard hit, as was Chicago and Buffalo. Boston and other places were only saved from greater devastation by the vagaries of war. I do not yet know how many Americans have died; but our dead and injured in this cataclysm will be numbered in the millions. We should count our blessings. Much of our country remains untouched by the holocaust unleashed upon us. Sadly, in Germany, France and in Great Britain the destruction is widespread, most likely on a scale far beyond that which we have thus far experienced. Our thoughts and our prayers must go out to our brave allies in their hour of trial. We now know that Russia not only went to war with the free World but made war on its communist neighbour, China, raining a large number of bombs on the northern regions of that country. In the Far East, our ally Japan was attacked. Understandably, as you listen to this broadcast many of you will be worried for the safety of loved ones and friends in our wounded cities, or serving abroad with our gallant Armed Forces...”
Miranda had stopped listening.
“On the beach,” she whispered.
“What’s that, petal?”
“That book. On the Beach. You know, by Nevil Shute. They made a film of it a year or two back with Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire, and Anthony Perkins, I think. There’s a nuclear war in the northern half of the World and eventually the radioactive cloud travels south and kills everybody…”
Author’s Endnote
Thank you again for reading Timeline 10/27/62 — USA Book 1: Aftermath. I hope you enjoyed it — or if you didn’t, sorry — but either way, thank you for reading and helping to keep the printed word alive. Remember, civilisation depends on people like you.
California Dreaming, the sequel to Aftermath will pick up the story of the characters inhabiting Aftermath, walking with them through the changed reality of their worlds and the altered landscape of American political, economic, cultural and military lives in the wake of World War III.
As a rule I let my books speak for themselves. I hope it does not sound fuddy-duddy or old-fashioned, but broadly speaking I tend towards the view that a book should speak for itself.
However, with your indulgence I would like briefly — well, as briefly as is possible without being overly terse — to share a few personal thoughts with you, the reader about the Timeline 10/27/62 World.
I was not yet seven-and-a-half years old in October 1962 when I realised my parents were paying an awful lot of attention to the radio, devouring every line of print in their daily newspaper and were not quite themselves, a little distracted in fact, now that I think about it. I heard the word ‘Cuba’ bandied about but did not know until much later that the most dangerous moment of my life had come and gone without my ever, as a child, knowing it.
I was not yet eight-and-a-half years old when one day in November 1963 the World around me came, momentarily, to a juddering halt. I had heard the name of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and I even knew that he was the President of something called the United States of America. I did not know then that he was a womanising, drug dependent and deeply conflicted man who had lied to the American people about his chronic, periodically disabling illness which in any rational age ought to have disqualified him from the Presidency; but I did know that he was a charismatic, talismanic figure in whom even I, as a child more interested in soccer, model trains and riding my new bicycle, had invested a nameless hope for the future. And then one day he was gone and I shared my parents’ shock and horror. It was not as if a mortal man had been murdered; JFK had become a mythic figure long before then. It was as if the modern day analogue of King Menelaus of Sparta — hero of the Trojan Wars and the husband of Helen, she of the legendary face that launched a thousand ships — had been gunned down that day in Dallas.
The Cuban Missiles crisis and the death of a President taught a young boy in England in 1962 and 1963 that the World is a very dangerous place.
Many years later we learned how close we all came to the abyss in late October 1962. Often we look back on how deeply Jack Kennedy’s death scarred hearts and minds in the years after his assassination.
There is no certainty, no one profound insight into what ‘might have happened’ had the Cold War turned Hot in the fall of 1962, or if JFK had survived that day in Dallas. History is not a systematic, explicable march from one event to another that inevitably reaches some readily predictable outcome. History only works that way in hindsight; very little is obvious either to the major or the minor players at the time history is actually being made. Nor does one have to be a fully paid up chaos theoretician to know that apparently inconsequential events can have massive unforeseen and unforeseeable impacts in subsequent historical developments.
Consider the example of Adolf Hitler.
If Corporal Adolf Hitler had died in a gas attack on the Ypres salient in Belgium on 14th October 1918 — as he might well have died that day — it is possible that there would have been no Holocaust, no Nazi Party, and no death camps.
Notwithstanding, with or without Hitler it is also possible, more likely probable, that there would have been a second general European War two or three decades later, albeit not the one we actually had. Hitler’s war aims in 1939 were strikingly similar to the Kaiser’s in 1914, unsurprisingly because most of what we regard as being his war aims were in fact drafted by members of exactly the same military caste which had been so keen on war in 1914, and had been so embittered by Germany’s crushing defeat in 1918. While I readily concede that no senior officer of the German General Staff went so far as to write a book extolling the necessity for lebensraum — or ‘living space in the East’ — Hitler was by no means the only man in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s who publicly and unashamedly yearned to expand the Pax Germanica, the German Peace, into the Baltic States, Poland, White Russian and the Ukraine. Moreover, it was not Adolf Hitler who invented the ‘myth of the betrayal of Versailles’. That invention was the convenient fig leaf behind which the High Command of the vanquished German General Staff hid behind — all the better to gloss over its numerous egregious military and political war time blunders — to undermine and discredit the democratic legitimacy of the post-war Weimar Republic which to a man, its members detested.
Adolf Hitler was an undeniably horrible, bad, psychopathic despot who was very good at public speaking and without him German history between the World Wars would have been different in character but not necessarily in outcome. Basically, there is no way in which we can actually know that Corporal Hitler’s demise in the 14th October 1918 gas attack would have prevented World War II; or with or without the little corporal’s survival, that another even more catastrophic and tragic war was, sooner or later, inevitable.