The Red White & Blue Read online

  The

  Red White & Blue

  A Giant Re-awakes

  Book Three of The

  World War Three 1946 Series

  First Edition

  By

  Harry Kellogg III

  Co-authored by Mary Margret Jotz

  Copyright © 2015 Harry Kellogg III

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13:

  978-1516845576

  ISBN-10:

  1516845579

  Disclaimer

  This is a work of fiction. Many characters in the novel are based on historical individuals.

  The characters' imagined thoughts, and actions are purely fictional.

  A Note of Introduction and a Thank You, Are in Order

  I wish to introduce Mary Margaret Jotz to my readers. She and her partner Henry showed up one day in a big, old, camper while I was staying in a marina in Central California. Normally I was the only one camping there. I was initially irritated when my view of my favorite willow tree was blocked by their RV. The more we all got to know each other the more I forgot about the tree.

  She has made me a better writer as well as a better story teller. I’m sure you will agree, that through her tireless efforts at massaging my tortured prose, she has vastly improved the recounting of a fictitious World War Three. Her editing and re-writing skills have improved the excitement and readability of our offerings.

  Yes I said “our”. Her many hours of excision and coaching have earned her the title of Co-Author. Thank you Mary Margaret for all your time and effort. Thank you for hiding your dismay when confronted by my un-edited script. And finally thank you for your mind opening stories of being a professional woman in a “man’s world” before the glass ceiling was even invented.

  (Mary Margaret did not edit this)

  Table of Contents

  A Note of Introduction and a Thank You, Are in Order

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  The Boy and the Porpoise

  Foreword

  Synopsis

  Timeline for Book One

  Synopsis

  Book 2 – Red Sky – The Second Battle of Britain

  Timeline for Book Two

  Chapter One:

  Gathering Storm

  Advice and Conscript

  The Turks

  The Ferry

  Chapter Two:

  In the Air

  Headquarters Mediterranean Command

  18 Ton Ballerinas

  15th Air Force - Moving Boxes

  General Twining

  Chapter Three:

  Onslaught Begins

  The First Hours

  Concussion Equals Confusion

  Border Patrol

  Not Enough and Too Late

  All That Gaz

  The Red Cross

  Chapter Four:

  Unsung Heroes

  Crenshaw Dying Thought

  Jim Crenshaw’s Epiphany

  B.F. Skinner, Ph.D.

  Young Crenshaw’s Mission

  Draft Dodger

  Confront and Convince

  Skinner Spotted

  Give and Take

  Skinner’s Turn

  Opportunity in Crisis

  Bird Brains

  Chapter Five:

  Life

  Patton Rides Again

  Turing

  The Extraordinary Gypsies

  Hervé’s Education

  Chapter Six:

  Death

  The Skinny

  Where the Fuck, Was He?

  General Green, POW

  Quiet in the Pyrenees

  Shades of Faith, Hope, and Charity

  Chapter Seven:

  Grand Scheme of Things

  Shorter is Better

  Silently, We Go Along

  December in Iraq

  Chapter Eight:

  Combat

  Marsh’s Marauders

  Lurking About

  Montgomery at the Fore

  Chapter Nine:

  Politics

  War Production Board

  Payback is a Bitch

  Strange Weather

  Chapter Ten:

  Other Fronts, Other Problems

  Marseilles Finest

  The War on Drugs

  Chapter Eleven:

  The Holy Land

  Cloak and Dagger

  Hulls and Hearts

  Halted Near Lake Hammar

  How Long?

  Chapter Twelve:

  One Man’s Tale

  Diary of Burt Post

  January 26th, 1947

  Diary of Burt Post

  January 27th, 1947

  Diary of Burt Post

  January 28th, 1947

  Diary of Burt Post

  January, 29th, 1947

  Chapter Thirteen:

  Best Laid Plans

  To the Point

  Inimitable Nimitz

  Line in the Sand

  Over the Hell Holes of Trieste

  99 Words per Minute

  Chapter Fourteen:

  The Commanders

  Bulldog Unleashed

  Forever the Quarterback

  Chapter Fifteen:

  Doctor B. F. Skinner

  Bingo

  Razzle Dazzle 1.1

  Plain and Simple

  End of Book Three

  Epilogue

  Index

  Prologue

  ***

  A film clip was found in a vault in Istanbul by Soviet forces.

  ***

  The Boy and the Porpoise

  The initial scene is a beautiful day on the Sea of Marma. You can see a number of unmistakable landmarks in the distance. The exact bay or inlet we are looking at is impossible to tell. The first couple of shots are just the sun and water so it must have been in the afternoon. The cameraman is obviously hiding from something that is across the water. He zooms in on one of the tanks the Soviets have moved up in the night.

  All of a sudden the camera jolts to the left as if the cameraman hears something and is trying to find it while looking through his viewfinder. Then we see it. At first it’s just a ripple of something just under the water, but very near the surface, like a fish gently feeding on a bug and sucking it into its mouth.

  It starts to move fairly fast and we see the dorsal fin of a harbor porpoise with something trailing behind. That something turns out to be a very small boy holding on to the fin and being dragged along by the porpoise. The child is so small that the porpoise easily carries him. If you had to guess you would say the boy is about four years old at the most.

  You can see the boy take a breath of air but it is not a breath of desperation but one of normal activity. Then, he turns his face towards the camera just as the photographer zooms in. You see a look of utter joy on the boy’s face. He obviously is having the time of his young life. He is enjoying himself like no one else ever has. The porpoise is willingly giving him a ride and they both are enjoying it.

  For a second he lets go, his playmate disappears and then suddenly leaps out of the water over the boy’s elated face. The porpoise leaps once more as the boy reaches up and touches his playmate’s belly as it soars over him. It happens a third time. The boy does not swim well, the porpoise comes along side and lets him catch his breath by holding on.

  It is a mesmerizing sight to behold and a wonder. Who is this boy? How had he and the porpoise become friendly? How long had they been doing swimming together? Were they both still alive?

  The porpoise nuzzles the boy who in turn pats its head and gives it a kiss that the animal seems to like. The porpoise sweeps around again and comes up under the boy, letting him hold on once more as they s
peed off. The porpoise is in front with the boy almost flying behind.

  Then, they dive. The camera searches for them, following the path that they would have been on. After a few moments, the operator zooms out and starts to pan first right and then left. He searches for the pair. Nothing...it goes on like this for a couple of minutes.

  Such a small boy couldn’t have held his breath that long. Where was he? Had he drowned? The care the porpoise had shown for the boy led one to believe that it would never let him come to harm. But, where did they go? It is a film clip full of the joy and wonder of life, yet also full of questions. Questions that have never been answered.

  After spending a few more seconds looking for the pair, the cameraman pans back to the Soviet units moving in along the western shoreline. The final scene is of the enemy lining up for an assault.

  No one knows where the clip came from. No one knows who the filmmaker was. But anyone who sees the clip, doesn't seem to care.

  Foreword

  Synopsis

  Book One - The Red Tide starts with the birth of Sergo Peshkova and ends with the Soviet Red Army in control of the majority of Western Europe. The Red Army is making slow, but steady, progress in breaking the NATO lines in the Pyrenees Mountains.

  Our real departure from history begins with Sergo’s birth in 1896. The ribbons of time start unraveling, slowly at first and then faster and faster until the fateful day in 1943. Sergo is bullied by Stalin at one of his infamous parties and a new future begins. It seems that Sergo has made himself an expert on all things aerospace, from gliders to rockets.

  Starting early in 1946 the Soviets had delayed the US production of atomic bombs by assassination. Stalin decides to fulfill his deepest ambition, once and for all ridding the world of Capitalism. He attacks Western Europe in May, 1946.

  In a lightning and classic Soviet Deep Battle, the Soviet Armed forces quickly break through the weak and untrained US, British and French occupying forces.

  The Red Army juggernaut continues its march to the Mediterranean Sea. The forces of NATO desperately gather behind the imposing peaks of the Pyrenees Mountains on the border of France and Spain and dig in.

  Meanwhile, the US is apparently having difficulties convincing its citizens and corporations to make the necessary sacrifices to once again fight for the liberation their European cousins. From Finland to Toulouse in France, the iron curtain of Communism has fallen on all of Western Europe as the NATO allies desperately try to counter the military might of the USSR.

  Timeline for Book One[i]

  Figure 1- Territory of the USSR September, 1946

  Synopsis

  Book 2 – Red Sky – The Second Battle of Britain

  The Soviets are making progress in their quest for world domination. The Second Battle of Britain is unlike the first. With almost real-time intelligence-gathering abilities, the VVS has overcome all the constraints that plagued the German Luftwaffe in the initial battle. Within weeks, the RAF is virtually destroyed by a combination of an attack on their “bone yards”, the Soviet use of captured US jammers, and sheer overwhelming numbers on the order of five to one.

  Only an attack by the US SAC using atomic bombs saves the RAF. The attack on the USSR oil fields diverts the Stavka’s attention from the British Isles and the conquest of Iberia.

  At the end of Book 2, Stalin is poised to invade Turkey, the Levant and Iraq with two objectives in mind. First, and foremost, was to prevent future NATO attacks on his oil production facilities. He wants the protection of geography that the United States had experienced over the last century. His second goal is close the Suez Canal making the Mediterranean a Soviet lake by wrestling Gibraltar from the British.

  Timeline for Book Two[ii]

  Figure 2- Locations of SAC atomic bomb attacks

  Chapter One:

  Gathering Storm

  Figure 3- View of the Bosporus 1946

  Advice and Conscript

  Gunnery Sergeant Mankowitz looked over the defensive lines of his...well their outfit. He couldn’t pronounce what they called it, but it was similar to a US Army platoon. He had been with these men for a good 80 days. He was one of the first to be assigned as an advisor to the Turkish Army and to this purgatory of a country. The local food was horrible and burned his insides up something terrible. He never would have thought that he would crave K-Rations but he did. They didn’t serve them here or even let them in country because they contained pork. He dreamt about pulled pork sandwiches at night, and don’t even get him going about pork chops.

  What most bothered him was the smells. They were just different. It was amazing to him how much smell affected him. He could not get out of his memory, stepping out of that plane, and being hit with the many unfamiliar smells. It really shook him up. If he thought about it too much, it made him miss the smells of Milwaukee more. Beer, brats and sauerkraut were ingrained in his mind as home. Maybe that’s why he felt so at home in Germany despite shooting everything in sight.

  Every soldier it seemed had a story about killing a Hitler Youth or some deluded youngster pointing a rifle at him. He had the unfortunate experience of doing it three times within a two-day period. There was something about the kids in Wittlich Land that made them perfect Nazi robots. Must have been a really good Nazi Scoutmaster or whatever they called them.

  He had gunned down two of them when they fired at him at close range in a blown-out munitions plant. He came around a corner and from out of the dark recesses had come shots. He fired at where the muzzle blasts had come from with his BAR and that silenced them quickly. When he went to look see what he had hit he came across two of the cutest towheads you would ever want to see, twins by the look of them and all of 9 years old to boot. They had to prop the guns up on some rubble in order to negate the kickback and to hold them steady from the looks of the setup they were behind. They must have started running and had stood up just when his burst of .30 cal had reached them. Their guts were lying all around, but their beautiful angelic faces were spared just so he could see what he had done.

  He knows he did no wrong and is not to blame, but he still can’t get their faces out of his thoughts. A few days later, he was covering his squad when a sniper shot his buddy Hal from a window right over where Mankowitz was standing. He lobbed a grenade up and into the window. After the explosion he charged up the stairs and God Damn if it wasn’t a little kid again. Same situation with the face perfectly preserved and angelic in death. This one sent him to the shrink which of course ended his military career until this little dust up started.

  They were crying for vets, so he signed up and was sent here...God forsaken...here. Here he was training these Turks and Muslims how to kill the godless commies. The twists and turns of life are almost comical if you add them up and can look at them from a distance. He was training heathens to kill godless monsters.