that Germany had abandoned early in the war.
Manning went west to supervise certain details in connection with
immobilizing the big planes, the trans-oceanic planes, which were to gather
near Fort Riley. We planned to spray them with oil, then dust from a low
altitude, as in crop dusting, with a low concentration of one-year dust.
Then we could turn our backs on them and forget them, while attending to
other matters.
But there were hazards. The dust must not be allowed to reach Kansas City,
Lincoln, Wichita?any of the nearby cities. The smaller towns roundabout had
been temporarily evacuated. Testing stations needed to be set up in all
directions in order that accurate tab on the dust might be kept. Manning
felt personally responsible to make sure that no bystander was poisoned.
We circled the receiving station before landing at Fort Riley. I could pick
out the three landing fields which had hurriedly been graded. Their runways
were white in the sun, the twenty-four-hour cement as yet undirtied. Around
each of the landing fields were crowded dozens of parking fields, less
perfectly graded. Tractors and bulldozers were still at work on some of
them. In the eastern-most fields, the German and British ships were already
in place, jammed wing to body as tightly as planes on the flight deck of a
carrier?save for a few that were still being towed into position, the tiny
tractors looking from the air like ants dragging pieces of leaf many times
larger than themselves.
Only three flying fortresses had arrived from the Eurasian Union. Their
representatives had asked for a short delay in order that a supply of
high-test aviation gasoline might be delivered to them. They claimed a
shortage of fuel necessary to make the long flight over the Arctic safe.
There was no way to check the claim and the delay was granted while a
shipment was routed from England.
We were about to leave, Manning having satisfied himself as to safety
precautions, when a dispatch came in announcing that a flight of E. U.
bombers might be expected before the day was out. Manning wanted to see
them arrive; we waited around for four hours. When it was finally reported
that our escort of fighters had picked them up at the Canadian border,
Manning appeared to have grown fidgety and stated that he would watch them
from the air. We took off, gained altitude and waited.
There were nine of them in the flight, cruising in column of echelons and
looking so huge that our little fighters were hardly noticeable. They
circled the field and I was admiring the stately dignity of them when
Manning's pilot, Lieutenant Rafferty, exclaimed, "What the devil! They are
preparing to land downwind!"
I still did not tumble, but Manning shouted to the copilot, "Get the
field!"
He fiddled with his instruments and announced, "Got 'em, sir!"
"General alarm! Armor!"
We could not hear the sirens, naturally, but I could see the white plumes
rise from the big steam whistle on the roof of the Administration
Building?three long blasts, then three short ones. It seemed almost at the
same time that the first cloud broke from the E. U. planes.
Instead of landing, they passed low over the receiving station, jam-packed
now with ships from all over the world. Each echelon picked one of three
groups centered around the three landing fields and streamers of heavy
brown smoke poured from the bellies of the E. U. ships. I saw a tiny black
figure jump from a tractor and run toward the nearest building. Then the
smoke screen obscured the field.
"Do you still have the field?" demanded Manning.
"Yes, sir."
"Cross connect to the chief safety technician. Hurry!"
The copilot cut in the amplifier so that Manning could talk directly.
"Saunders? This is Manning. How about it?"
"Radioactive, chief. Intensity seven point four."
They had paralleled the Karst-Obre research.
Manning cut him off and demanded that the communication office at the field
raise the Chief of Staff. There was nerve-stretching delay, for it had to
be routed over land?wire to Kansas City, and some chief operator had to be
convinced that she should commandeer a trunk line that was in commercial
use. But we got through at last and Manning made his report. "It stands to
reason," I heard him say, that other flights are approaching the border by
this time. New York, of course, and Washington. Probably Detroit and
Chicago as well. No way of knowing."
The Chief of Staff cut off abruptly, without comment. I knew that the U.S.
air fleets, in a state of alert for weeks past, would have their orders in
a few seconds and would be on their way to hunt out and down the attackers,
if possible before they could reach the cities.
I glanced back at the field. The formations were broken up. One of the E.
U. bombers was down, crashed, half a mile beyond the station. While I
watched, one of our midget dive-bombers screamed down on a behemoth E. U.
ship and unloaded his eggs. It was a center hit, but the American pilot had
cut it too fine, could not pull out, crashed before his victim.
There is no point in rehashing the newspaper stories of the Four-days War.
The point is that we should have lost it, and we would have, had it not
been for an unlikely combination of luck, foresight and good management.
Apparently the nuclear physicists of the Eurasian Union were almost as far
along as Ridpath's crew when the destruction of Berlin gave them the tip
they needed. But we had rushed them, forced them to move before they were
ready, because of the deadline for disarmament set forth in our Peace
Proclamation.
If the President had waited to fight it out with Congress before issuing
the proclamation, there would not be any United States.
Manning never got credit for it, but it is evident to me that he
anticipated the possibility of something like the Four-days War and
prepared for it in a dozen different devious ways. I don't mean military
preparation; the Army and the Navy saw to that. But it was no accident that
Congress was adjourned at the time. I had something to do with the
vote-swapping and compromising that led up to it, and I know.
But I put it to you?would he have maneuvered to get Congress out of
Washington at a time when he feared that Washington might be attacked if he
had had dictatorial ambitions?
Of course, it was the President who was back of the ten-day leaves that had
been granted to most of the civil-service personnel in Washington and he
himself must have made the decision to take a swing through the South at
that time, but it must have been Manning who put the idea in his head. It
is inconceivable that the President would have left Washington to escape
personal danger.
And then, there was the plague scare. I don't know how or when Manning
could have started that?it certainly did not go through my notebook?but I
simply do not believe that it was accidental that a completely unfounded
rumor or bubonic plaque caused New York City to be semi-deserted at the
time the E. U. bom
bers struck.
At that, we lost over eight hundred thousand people in Manhattan alone.
Of course, the government was blamed for the lives that were lost and the
papers were merciless in their criticism at the failure to anticipate and
force an evacuation of all the major cities.
If Manning anticipated trouble, why did he not ask for evacuation?
Well, as I see it, for this reason:
A big city will not, never has, evacuated in response to rational argument.
London never was evacuated on any major scale and we failed utterly in our
attempt to force the evacuation of Berlin. The people of New York City had
considered the danger of air raids since 1940 and were long since hardened
to the thought.
But the fear of a nonexistent epidemic of plague caused the most nearly
complete evacuation of a major city ever seen.
And don't forget what we did to Vladivostok and Irkutsk and Moscow?those
were innocent people, too. War isn't pretty.
I said luck played a part. It was bad navigation that caused one of our
ships to dust Ryazan instead of Moscow, but that mistake knocked out the
laboratory and plant which produced the only supply of military
radio-actives in the Erasian Union. Suppose the mistake had been the other
way around?suppose that one of the E. U. ships in attacking Washington,
D.C., by mistake, had included Ridpath's shop forty-five miles away in
Maryland?
Congress reconvened at the temporary capital in St. Louis, and the American
Pacification Expedition started the job of pulling the fangs of the
Eurasian Union. It was not a military occupation in the usual sense; there
were two simple objectives: to search out and dust all aircraft, aircraft
plants, and fields, and to locate and dust radiation laboratories, uranium
supplies, find lodes of carnotite and pitchblende. No attempt was made to
interfere with, or to replace, civil government.
We used a two-year dust, which gave a breathing spell in which to
consolidate our position. Liberal rewards were offered to informers, a
technique which worked remarkably well not only in the E. U., but in most
parts of the world.
The "weasel," an instrument to smell out radiation based on the
electroscope-discharge principle and refined by Ridpath's staff, greatly
facilitated the work of locating uranium and uranium ores. A grid of
weasels, properly spaced over a suspect area, could locate any important
mass of uranium almost as handily as a direction-finder can spot a radio
station.
But, notwithstanding the excellent work of General Bulfinch and the
Pacification Expedition as a whole, it was the original mistake of dusting
Ryazan that made the job possible of accomplishment.
Anyone interested in the details of the pacification work done in l945-6
should see the "Proceedings of the American Foundation for Social Research"
for a paper entitled, A Study of the Execution of the American Peace Policy
from February, 1945. The de facto solution of the problem of policing the
world against war left the United States with the much greater problem of
perfecting a policy that would insure that the deadly power of the dust
would never fall into unfit hands.
The problem is as easy to state as the problem of squaring the circle and
almost as impossible of accomplishment. Both Manning and the President
believed that the United States must of necessity keep the power for the
time being until some permanent institution could be developed fit to
retain it. The hazard was this: Foreign policy is lodged jointly in the
hands of the President and the Congress. We were fortunate at the time in
having a good President and an adequate Congress, but that was no guarantee
for the future. We have had unfit Presidents and power-hungry
Congresses?oh, yes! Read the history of the Mexican War.
We were about to hand over to future governments of the United States the
power to turn the entire globe into an empire, our empire, and it was the
sober opinion of the President that our characteristic and beloved
democratic culture would not stand up under the temptation. Imperialism
degrades both oppressor and oppressed.
The President was determined that our sudden power should be used for the
absolute minimum of maintaining peace in the world?the simple purpose of
outlawing war and nothing else. It must not be used to protect American
investments abroad, to coerce trade agreements, for any purpose but the
simple abolition of mass killing.
There is no science of sociology. Perhaps there will be, some day, when a
rigorous physics gives a finished science of colloidal chemistry and that
leads in turn to a complete knowledge of biology, and from there to a
definitive psychology. After that we may begin to know something about
sociology and politics. Something around the year 5,000 A.D., maybe?if the
human race does not commit suicide before then.
Until then, there is only horse sense and rule of thumb and observational
knowledge of probabilities. Manning and the President played by ear.
The treaties with Great Britain, Germany and the Eurasian Union, whereby we
assumed the responsibility for world peace and at the same time guaranteed
the contracting nations against our own misuse of power were rushed through
in the period of relief and goodwill that immediately followed the
termination of the Four-days War. We followed the precedents established by
the Panama Canal treaties, the Suez Canal agreements, and the Philippine
Independence policy.
But the purpose underneath was to commit future governments of the United
States to an irrevocable benevolent policy.
The act to implement the treaties by creating the Commission of World
Safety followed soon after, and Colonel Manning became Mr. Commissioner
Manning. Commissioners had a life tenure and the intention was to create a
body with the integrity, permanence and freedom from outside pressure
possessed by the supreme court of the United States. Since the treaties
contemplated an eventual joint trust, commissioners need not be American
citizens?and the oath they took was to preserve the peace of the world.
There was trouble getting that clause past the Congress! Every other
similar oath had been to the Constitution of the United States.
Nevertheless the Commission was formed. It took charge of world aircraft,
assumed jurisdiction over radio-actives, natural and artificial, and
commenced the long slow task of building up the Peace Patrol.
Manning envisioned a corps of world policemen, an aristocracy which through
selection and indoctrination, could be trusted with unlimited power over
the life of every man, every woman, every child on the face of the globe.
For the power would be unlimited, the precautions necessary to insure the
unbeatable weapon from getting loose in the world again made it axiomatic
that its custodians would wield power that is safe only in the hands of
Deity. There would be no one to guard those self same guardians. Their own
characters and the watch they kept on each other would be all that stood
betwe
en the race and disaster.
For the first time in history, supreme political power was to be exerted
with no possibility of checks and balances from the outside. Manning took
up the task of perfecting it was a dragging subconscious conviction that it
was too much for human nature.
The rest of the Commission was appointed slowly, the names being sent to
the Senate after long joint consideration by the President and Manning. The
director of the Red Cross, an obscure little professor of history from
Switzerland, Dr. Igor Rimski who had developed the Karst-Obre technique
independently and whom the A. P. F. had discovered in prison after the
dusting of Moscow?those three were the only foreigners. The rest of the
list is well known.
Ridpath and his staff were of necessity the original technical crew of the
Commission; United States Army and Navy pilots its first patrolmen. Not all
of the pilots available were needed; their records were searched, their
habits and associates investigated, their mental processes and emotional
attitudes examined by the best psychological research methods
available?which weren't good enough. Their final acceptance for the Patrol
depended on two personal interviews, one with Manning, one with the
President.
Manning told me that he depended more on the President's feeling for
character than he did on all the association and reaction tests the
psychologists could think up. "It's like the nose of a bloodhound," he
said. "In his forty years of practical politics he has seen more phonies
than you and I will ever see and each one was trying to sell him something.
He can tell one in the dark."
The long-distance plan included the schools for the indoctrination of cadet
patrolmen, schools that were to be open to youths of any race, color, or
nationality, and from which they would go forth to guard the peace of every
country but their own. To that country a man would never return during his
service. They were to be a deliberately expatriated band of Janizaries,
with an obligation only to the Commission and to the race, and welded
together with a carefully nurtured esprit de corps.
It stood a chance of working. Had Manning been allowed twenty years without
interruption, the original plan might have worked.
The President's running mate for re-election was the result of a political
compromise. The candidate for Vice President was a confirmed isolationist
who had opposed the Peace Commission from the first, but it was he or a
party split in a year when the opposition was strong. The President sneaked
back in but with a greatly weakened Congress; only his power of veto twice
prevented the repeal of the Peace Act. The Vice President did nothing to
help him, although he did not publicly lead the insurrection. Manning
revised his plans to complete the essential program by the end of 1952,
there being no way to predict the temper of the next administration.
We were both over worked and I was beginning to realize that my health was
gone. The cause was not far to seek; R photographic film strapped next to
my skin would cloud in twenty minutes. I was suffering from cumulative
minimal radioactive poisoning. No well defined cancer that could be
operated on, but a systemic deterioration of function and tissue. There was
no help for it, and there was work to be done. I've always attributed it
mainly to the week I spent sitting on those canisters before the raid on
Berlin.
February 17, 1951. I missed the televue flash about the plane crash that
killed the President because I was lying down in my apartment. Manning, by
that time, was requiring me to rest every afternoon after lunch, though I