The Invasion of 1950

A Novel of Alternate History

Christopher G. Nuttall

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Cover Blurb

The year is 1950, but not the 1950 we know.  The Second World War ended in 1943.  Hitler never declared war on the United States and is currently master of an empire that stretches from the Atlantic coastline of France to the Ural Mountains in Russia.  Hundreds of millions are dead or enslaved as Hitler’s followers make his dreams real, but the Fuhrer is still not satisfied.  To the west, Britain remains independent – and, beyond it, the United States of America.

Since 1943, the world has enjoyed an uneasy peace.

That is about to change ...
Introduction

For those of us who are part of the Alternate History Community (and I certainly consider myself a member) Operation Sea Lion – the planned German invasion of Britain in 1940 – seems to hold a promise of a radical shift in the balance of European power.  Had Hitler invaded, had Britain fallen, the Nazis would seem to hold supreme power.  Hitler would have been able to go east in 1941 without having to worry about his rear, while Japan and Italy would rapidly have snapped up the remains of the British Empire.  It would be a total geopolitical disaster.

Fortunately, the Nazis would have faced formidable problems in carrying out the invasion, to the point where most members of the AH Community dismiss it as a pipe dream.  In my opinion, Sea Lion had about a one-in-six chance of success; Hitler, still a calculative gambler in 1940, decided that it was too big a risk to take.  

But what if the invasion had been launched later?  

It wasn't, of course.  Hitler’s forces bogged down in Russia, Hitler declared war on the United States in a fit of absentmindedness and Germany was crushed between the combined forces of America, Britain and Soviet Russia.  The war ended in 1945.

But what if Hitler had won in Russia?  What if America hadn't entered the war?  

Would they plan to invade Britain again?

Author’s Note

This book was written several years ago and has been heavily edited (no less than three people looked at it.)  However, it may not be up to the standards of my current projects.  As always, comments and editing notes are welcome.

In addition, I have tried to keep the use of German phrases down to the bare minimum, as they tend to annoy me when I see them in other books.  

CGN.
Prologue

England, 1943

“No,” Winston Churchill said.

“Winston, be reasonable,” Anthony Eden said. The Leader of the House of Commons stared down at the Prime Minister. “We have been fighting for four years.  The country is tired of fighting with no prospect of victory.”

Churchill felt a hot flash of anger. “Anthony, Hitler and his madmen must be stopped,” he said, remembering bitter disappointments when the Japanese had headed north into the Soviet Union and the United States had drifted back into isolation. “We’re the only people holding the line!”

“The Germans captured Stalingrad a month ago,” Lord Halifax said. Churchill nodded slowly, unsurprised that his old competitor had joined the delegation. “It won’t be long before they start to press into Iran, and as you know, we have had a most imprudent communication from the Shah. He said that unless we evacuate his country – the Russian forces having gone to die in the defence of Stalingrad already – his forces will turn on ours with German support.”

Churchill’s eyes drifted to the map he’d placed the wall. German forces, having taken Moscow back in 1941, had concentrated on securing their flanks before advancing down towards Stalingrad and the oil wells to the south of the city – and Iran. The Soviet Union – the remains of the Soviet Union, under Beria – wasn’t able to stop them. The Foreign Ministry was privately predicting that the remains of the USSR would fall apart all too soon. Churchill had met Beria, he’d dealt with the man and he had no illusions about his ally’s capabilities. Stalin’s death had taken the heart out of the Russian resistance.

He’d hoped that Wavell would produce victories in the Western Desert, but even that had turned sour in his mouth as Hitler sent more and more resources into the desert and then Rommel had taken them to create a new puppet state in Egypt, for the Italians. The British held the line at the Suez Canal, but both sides knew that it would only be a matter of time before Rommel tried to cross the waterway, or the Arab-Jewish fighting in Palestine rendered the British position untenable. They all knew, now, what fate Hitler had in mind for the Jews…and when the British position collapsed, the Jews would flee or try to fight.

“Beria has already declared his intention to attempt to reach a diplomatic solution with the Germans,” Halifax pressed. “If he settles for the status quo, he will surrender literally millions of souls, and unthinkable wealth in terms of land and resources. Hitler will be able to switch his forces back to the west, or he will be able to head into Iran and through Iran into Iraq or India.”

Churchill frowned at him. “The preservation of the Empire and the defeat of Adolph Hitler are my first priorities,” he said, coldly. “If Hitler wins in this war, the world will be plunged into barbarism.”

Clement Attlee, Leader of the Opposition and Deputy Prime Minister, coughed. “Winston, you have concentrated on winning, or at least fighting, the war, and we respect you for it,” he said. “However, our country is on the verge of internal collapse. The treasury is effectively bankrupt. The Empire is simply not supplying us with the resources we need to keep afloat. If it were not for the credit line the Americans have extended us, we would have been forced to seek terms before now.”

His voice darkened. “We sit here and talk about war on a global scale,” he continued. “Throughout England, the real victims of the war struggle to provide us with war materials and food, fearing only that their agonies will never end. As Germany brings the farmland in the Ukraine under their control, the German capability for continuing the war indefinitely will only expand, while our own ability to maintain even the current level of mobilisation will fall. I have heard of rumours of planned strikes, even riots, in protest at the recent cuts in rations. Frankly, Winston, Britain is on the verge of collapse.

“And even if we win, what have we gained? It will be a world without Hitler, but a world where we will have lost the Empire, a world where we cannot feed our children or even protect their interests,” he asked. “Can we, now, hope to defeat Germany on our own? The Soviet Union is a dead beast now and our armies are incapable of carrying the war to Germany. The war cannot be won. The best we can do is not lose.”

Churchill met his eyes. “When I became Prime Minister, there was no suggestion that we should seek a peace with that most untrustworthy little man,” he said, altering the facts slightly. There had been some secret discussions, which had come to nothing, between the Nazis and some of their British supporters. “If Hitler was a reasonable man, a man we could do business with, we could come to some arrangement. We cannot trust him to keep an agreement with us any longer than is convenient to him.”

“The war cannot be won,” Eden said flatly.

Churchill looked at him. “Is that the opinion of the House of Commons?”

“Yes,” Lord Halifax said.

“I will not seek a peace with Germany,” Churchill said. He allowed his voice to sharpen. This small delegation could only mean one thing. “Am I to assume that you intend to remove me if I refuse to seek a dishonourable peace?”

“The country is at stake,” Eden said, guilt written on his features. Churchill wasn't surprised. Eden was a competent Foreign Secretary, but he had no spine. “There is no choice left but to seek a peace agreement with Hitler, at least to find out what he will let us keep.”

Churchill rose ponderously to his feet. “In that case, gentlemen, I will see the King immediately and offer my resignation,” he said. “In fact, as the great and the good of England have refused to allow me to continue my policy, I see no choice, but to insist on my immediate resignation from the post of Prime Minister.” 

Oddly enough, for the first time in far too long, he felt free.

He smiled at their faces. “But mark my words, my friends,” he said. “We have not finished with Hitler, nor has he finished with us. This is not peace, but an armistice, to be broken when Herr Hitler decides that it is time to reopen the war.”
Chapter One

Near Felixstowe, England, 1950

“Here they come,” Captain Harry Jackson said, as the first noises could be heard down the road. He glanced once at his radio – noting the lack of a signal from the two men he'd deployed further down the road – and muttered a curse under his breath. The Germans had taken the two men out before they could get off a warning. “Prepare to engage the enemy.”

Jackson had deployed his company around the road, knowing that the enemy couldn’t get their tanks through the forest, but a smart enemy commander might try to slip infantry through the trees to catch Jackson’s unit before it could engage the target on their terms. The road leading down towards Felixstowe was wide enough to allow three tanks uninterrupted passage. Like many other roads in this part of the country, it had been renovated to allow for the swift passage of military vehicles. The Germans would prefer to take it, according to the briefing, in order to allow themselves time to get through the defenders. It was Jackson’s job to hold the road and slow the enemy as much as possible.

The tension rose as the sound of vehicles grew louder. The briefing had been clear. The enemy intended to push the better part of an armoured division through the area, and while Jackson didn’t have the firepower to stop it, he was expected to delay them for as long as possible. He’d deployed his antitank weapons – including, ironically, a direct copy of a German-made weapon – as best as he could, but he wasn't expecting the position to hold for long. He’d already prepared a series of fall-back positions.

We’re only going to get one free shot, he thought coldly, as he glanced around the company’s hiding places. The weekend warriors of the Home Guard force had certain problems with discipline, but there was no doubting either their local knowledge or even their training. The original Home Guardsmen had been barely capable of resisting an unarmed bandit, but as training and equipment improved, the Home Guard had grown into a respectable fighting force. 

He’d transferred from the regular army in order to share his experience with them, but stopping a German armoured division – a Panzer Division – was very different from counterinsurgency operations in India. The Indian insurgents had no tanks and rarely bothered to stand and fight.

He heard a whistle as the dark tank appeared at the end of the road, followed by two more, flanked by a group of motorcycles and patrolling infantry. Jackson bit down a curse as he took in their appearance and deployment; they were likely to trigger his mines before the main body of their force entered the range of his guns. He’d hoped to be able to hit their tanks while they were stalled, but…More tanks appeared, heading along the road at a respectable speed, and he forced himself to revise the plans quickly. If the Germans saw them, they would sweep his people from the road. They hadn’t been able to do much to block the road and prevent the Germans from using it. That hadn’t been in the briefing.

“Open fire as soon as the mines detonate,” he hissed. They’d been able to hide a small set of antitank mines down the road, at just the right location; the Germans would slow down at once and call for infantry to sweep the mines out the way.  He’d prepared it – he hoped – so that the Germans would be caught in a trap, but German soldiers were trained to take the initiative as fast as they could; if they decided to gamble, they could still break through his position.

The explosion wasn't very loud, but the puff of smoke under the tank was unmistakable. His men didn’t hesitate, or wait for orders; they fired as one, throwing a hail of antitank shells towards the enemy tank. Jackson winced as blinding white flashes of light covered the tanks, signalling that they were disabled or destroyed, and then cursed under his breath as a German truck appeared, infantry already spilling from the rear and advancing at the double. A German tank, attempting to get around the disabled tanks, ran into another mine and skidded to a halt, the crew cursing their misfortune as their part came to an end.

More shots rang out through the woods as the German infantry crashed into his men, with shouts and screams echoing out as the Germans attempted to dislodge the British from their position. Jackson lifted his own weapon as a German storm-trooper appeared, holding a grenade in one hand, and had the satisfaction of watching as the German fell to the ground, dead. He lifted his whistle to his lips and blew a single long blast, the signal for retreat. The remains of the company fled the battle, in seeming panic, right towards the next holding position. Jackson half-hoped that the Germans would pursue them directly – there was an infantry company dug in a short distance down the road – but they contented themselves with capturing the remains of the position and hunting for the mines.

“We caught them with their pants down,” Sergeant Henry Wilt said, as they reached the second position and stopped, puffing for breath.  It was just in front of a bridge and that presented its own problems; the Germans might try to take the bridge, but at the same time, they would be expecting to meet an ambush there.  It was the logical place to set a trap.   “How many do you think we got?”

Jackson thought about it, replaying the engagement in his head. “At least four tanks,” he said, thoughtfully. They wouldn’t know how many German infantrymen they’d killed for hours yet. “What about our air support?”

“It’s been denied,” Wilt said. He was a short stocky man, every part of him devoted to muscle and determination, and he was old enough to remember serving in France and Egypt as a young soldier. Jackson privately admired him; Wilt’s impressive skills had kept him from making too many embarrassing mistakes during his first tour of duty with the Home Guard. “It’s something to do with a major air offensive…”

His voice cut off as three aircraft flew low overhead, the noise of their passage echoing over the trees and the small village just beyond the bridge. The population had already been evacuated, removing them from the path of the German advance, and the village had been converted into a strong-point The German aircraft attacked without mercy, targeting buildings with their bombs and scattering flammable oil over the village; the Germans had been known to use it in their own counterinsurgency campaigns in Russia to great success.  

“So much for the village,” Wilt said, as the enemy aircraft retreated and the clamour of enemy tanks rose again. Jackson took up his binoculars as the German infantry advanced, heading towards the bridge, covered by their tanks. The antitank guns on the far side of the river opened fire, their shells falling wide of the targets, while the Germans returned fire with their own weapons. “Sir?”

“Destroy the bridge,” Jackson ordered sharply. The Germans had killed half of his company; he couldn’t hope to prevent them from taking the village, but if he could destroy the bridge, it would slow them down enough that the regulars, struggling to establish a defence line, could stop them dead in their tracks. The odds weren’t good; regular armies all around Europe had been trying to stop the Germans, and hadn’t even come close to succeeding. Jackson had been young when the German juggernaut had crashed into Poland, Norway, France, Russia…but even he remembered the dread days when everyone had known that a German invasion was imminent. Adolph hadn’t come to Britain, not then…

Wilt barked an order and a signalman pushed down hard on a plunger, just in time. The German infantry had reached the bridge. They would have tried to remove the explosive, but now, as the bridge blazed with white light, they knew that they had failed. Jackson had hoped that they would have tried to find another bridge, but instead, the lead German tank advanced slowly down to the river…and then into the water. Water splashed up all around it as it slowly ground across the river, before it came out of the river, firing it’s machine guns. Jackson shouted a command, calling forward the portable antitank gunners, before the tank’s weapons came right to point at him. He gave himself up to the inevitable and dropped down to the ground.

***
“Well, that was an interesting exercise,” Colonel Felton-Smith said an hour later. Jackson couldn’t really disagree; the ‘destroyed’ tanks and ‘killed’ men had been impressive, but the Germans – or, rather, the regular army units playing at being the Germans – had defeated the Home Guard and broken through the defence line. “Jackson, so you have any thoughts?”

Jackson, who would have preferred a hot bath and a good meal, closed his eyes to compose his thoughts. “We should have requested more portable antitank weapons,” he said, referring to the PIAT rocket launchers the Home Guard used against enemy tanks. “We moved up the field guns and used them as part of the ambush, but when we retreated, they forced us to abandon the weapons; they may even have used them against us.”

Colonel Felton-Smith shrugged. He was a career military officer, with a neatly trimmed moustache and a perfect uniform; Jackson privately wondered if he had ever actually seen any real combat in his life. The field guns had been equipped with flash-bang shells, rather than any real explosives; after all, the tanks and men advancing against them had been British. There had been some live-fire exercises, but no one sane would permit the soldiers to use real ammunition when they might kill their fellow soldiers. The fistfights were bad enough.

“A good thought,” Colonel Felton-Smith said, finally. “What about the mines?”

Jackson shook his head. “We need to block the roads properly,” he said, cursing the mixture of parsimony and efficiency that prevented the Home Guard from really sabotaging the enemy’s line of advance. They could have cut down a few trees and slowed the ‘Germans’ down for as long as it took them to clear the roads again; just think what they could have done with the confusion! He’d seen enough exercises to know that even a tiny delay could, under the right circumstances, mount up into a complete disaster as supply lines got snarled up and enemy commanders became confused. “It’s just not an accurate portrayal of real war.”

He tapped the location of the village on the map. “The aircraft bombed the village and destroyed it,” he continued, speaking with more firmness now. “Sir, that wouldn’t happen in real life; we could have continued to fight through the wreckage and held the Germans for a few hours, if they had been forced to clear the village step by step. We also would have shot back at the aircraft and maybe even forced them to keep their distance.”

Colonel Felton-Smith nodded. “That’s not something that we can reproduce in an exercise,” he said, shortly. “Captain, overall, how did your company perform?”

“They did much better than I think some expected,” Jackson said, pointedly. The regular army tended to look down on the Home Guard; Dad’s Army was one of the nicer nicknames for the service. “They don’t have the discipline of people who have served in the regulars for a few years, but they held the line here until well after I bit the dust.”

“True enough,” Colonel Felton-Smith said. He held out a sheet of paper. “You and your company are being ordered to return to Felixstowe, where I believe most of your men come from, and continue basic drills until this exercise is concluded.  Once it ends, I anticipate that there will be more drills, but most of your unit will return to inactive service.”

Jackson nodded once; he had expected no less. The Home Guard, by its very nature, couldn’t be permanently deployed anywhere – particularly not outside the United Kingdom. The conscription program kept most of the young men trained, but the regulars could be deployed anywhere, and often were. If the Germans landed tomorrow – and that was the nightmare, with the Reich on the other side of the Channel – the main burden of the early fighting would fall on the Home Guard. They would fight and die to buy the regular army time to mobilise and be deployed.

He threw a neat salute. “Yes, sir,” he said, as he stood to attention. “I’ll see to it at once.”

***

Night was falling as Gregory Davall slipped closer and closer to the barbed wire. Clad in dark clothes, his face blacked out like the Golliwog, he was almost invisible in the gloom. The sentry, whose cigarette light could be seen in the darkness, certainly never saw him. Davall smiled to himself as he crawled closer, keeping his belly firmly on the ground, just before he reached the wire and pulled out a pair of cutters. The sentry didn’t react at all, pacing slightly as he tried to keep himself awake; Davall silently cut a hole through the wire and slipped into the airbase.

Idiot, he thought coldly, as he continued to crawl towards the aircraft hangers. The RAF had built the airbase to handle some of their long-range bombers. His task was to penetrate it, slip inside the base, and slip out again, all without being seen. The Grey Wolves would be depending on him to recover some information from the airbase, and if he were caught, he would be in very real trouble. On this exercise, he would probably get a clout from the sentry or whoever caught him. On an actual mission he would have been shot out of hand. The Grey Wolves, like every other stay-behind unit, would be considered illegal combatants and, as such, were not protected by the Geneva Convention.

He slipped closer to his destination, avoiding a pair of patrolling guards with ease, and entered the hanger through an unsecured door. The sheer absence of real security made him grind his teeth together with rage. He was meant to be training for penetrating German bases, not exposing holes in British security. It had been seven years since the war had ended, but with the Reich across the Channel, anyone with a brain in their head knew that the resumption of hostilities was inevitable, sooner or later. Davall, a skilled toolmaker in a reserve occupation, had been exempted from conscription, but he had been recruited into the Grey Wolves. Unfortunately, ten years later, the secret soldiers were still maintaining their preparations. When Hitler came for them, they would be ready.

The interior of the hanger was dimly lit. He closed his eyes to force them to adjust to the change before glancing over at the aircraft, an experimental jet-propelled aircraft that was supposed to be able to fly as far as America. Davall’s son had fallen in love with the RAF and had announced his intention to join as soon as he was old enough, but before then, he had collected dozens of aircraft models, including the ones designed to show off what the RAF could do. Davall had helped James to assemble the aircraft and knew their statistics off by heart; it made him wonder what James would have made of how easy it had been to slip into the base. If Davall had come on a sabotage mission, which he would have to do if the Germans ever came, he could have destroyed the aircraft before anyone could have stopped him.

He scooped up a small set of papers from a desk, slipped them into his pocket, and withdrew the way he’d come. The sentry should have kept an eye on the wire, perhaps even patrolled it to find the gap, but Davall was able to retreat without any problems. It was only when he'd made it out and was walking back towards his operations base that he heard the outraged shouts behind him and pounding feet as guards were aroused to search for the intruder. It was too late, he knew, as he walked away through the forest; if they had wanted to catch him, they would have to improve the security. He’d take the papers to the coordinating officer tomorrow and hand them in, as well as making a report on the exact state of security on the base. If Davall had anything to say about it, heads would roll…

The forest was warm and welcoming, although someone who was unfamiliar with the forest would have found it creepy; Davall found his way to the operations base with ease. Major General Colin Gubbins had hammered security into their heads; the Grey Wolves were the only people who knew where the base actually was in the forest. Even their coordinating officer, who knew all of them by name, didn’t know. He also didn’t know that the Grey Wolves had orders to assassinate him if the Germans landed.

It was the work of a moment to clean himself, to change his dark clothes for something more fitting, and then to start the long walk back to his house. There was no longer any curfew over Suffolk, but he kept off the roads and streets anyway; tonight, the security forces would be out in force, hunting for the spy who’d broken into the airbase. He hoped, as he walked, that when the Germans came, it would be that easy to break into one of their compounds, but he knew, somehow, that it wouldn’t be anything like as easy. The Germans were very good soldiers and they had lots of experience in defeating stay-behind units. He knew his duty…

But, deep inside, he was scared for the future.
Chapter Two

Berlin, Germany

“Heil Hitler!” The cry burst out from a thousand throats. “Heil Hitler!”

Standing on the balcony, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler watched as thousands of black-clad soldiers marched past, their faces all perfectly blank and disciplined. The massive parade had been going on for nearly an hour, with overflights by the latest and greatest aircraft of the Reich, and Himmler was more than a little tired of it. It was also something that even he, the second-most powerful man in Germany, couldn’t escape; it was Victory Day. The holiday that Adolph Hitler himself had decreed sacred, the day that Moscow had fallen to a combined assault from German forces, the day that marked the triumph of the Greater German Reich…Victory Day would be celebrated by Hitler’s people, body and soul. They had placed their faith in the Fuhrer and the Fuhrer had delivered; Germany was master of Europe, ruler of an empire that stretched as far as the Urals and the Iranian border.

Himmler glanced over at the Fuhrer, careful not to move too much; Hitler didn’t seem to notice. His health had been growing poorer for years, ever since the British agent – or at least Himmler had accused him of being a British agent - Theodor Morell had began poisoning him with experimental medical treatments. Himmler, loyal to Hitler personally, had finally worked with Goring to have the quack removed and quietly assassinated, but the damage had been done. The Fuehrer’s condition had been degenerating for years.

A roar split the streets as the first Panzers appeared, advancing along the road and passing below the Führer’s balcony. The Panthers were the latest and greatest tanks created by Germany, each one built incorporating lessons from the war. Hitler truly believed that a division of Panthers could have defeated the entire Soviet Union without any further support. He might have been right, in a sense; the Panther was technically superior to anything the Soviets had deployed, but they had sheer numbers. If Moscow hadn’t fallen back in 1941…Himmler didn’t want to think about the possible outcome of the war.

He composed himself as best as he could, watching as the latest Luftwaffe aircraft flew overhead; Goring cheering in delight and pointing out the latest types to Hitler, as if he hadn’t been removed from his position as head of the Luftwaffe years ago. As director of the resettlement project in the east, Goring was harmless, but not smart enough to realise that he was harmless. Himmler knew that Goring didn’t rate as a threat these days and ignored him. Apart from Hitler himself, there were only three men of any importance in Germany.

As if the thought reminded him, he peered down and saw Field Marshal Albert Kesselring and Albert Speer standing and saluting as more Panzer units and infantry marched across the square. Speer – one of Hitler’s favourites – had become director of Germany’s industries…and even Himmler had to admit that he had worked wonders in preparing the Reich for war. His control over the economy was absolute, strong enough to bend all of Germany’s industrialists to his will, and his creation had given Germany the ability to finally reshape the continent to its will. Kesselring, growing older and perhaps stouter, was a more unusual candidate for high office, but as another of the Führer’s favourites, Kesselring had become the highest-ranking military officer in Germany…and, under Hitler, warlord. The old inter-service rivalries had been cut back, sharply under Kesselring. The only completely independent service was the Waffen-SS. The thought of what might happen if Kesselring decided to turn disloyal kept Himmler up at night…

He had wondered if Hitler would give a speech, but as the final lines of the parade died away, it became obvious that the Fuhrer was in no condition to speak; his orderly slowly helped him off the balcony and down towards the conference room. Speer had designed the rebuilt Reichstag himself, but instead of giving it back to elected delegates, it had become Hitler’s headquarters and the centre of control over Germany. Himmler watched as the Führer’s back receded into the distance, and then he stepped down himself, just slowly enough to remind everyone that no business in the Third Reich could be conducted without his presence. He knew what Hitler was going to announce; he also knew that Speer and Kesselring knew as well. Who else knew what was coming?

The conference room had been designed by Hitler personally, and it suited him. There was a single large chair, almost a throne, for Hitler himself and smaller chairs for his subordinates; their subordinates, in turn, would have to stand. One wall was completely covered by a map and Himmler paused long enough to take a look at it, reminding himself of just how far the Third Reich had come and just how far it had to go. Maps covering the pre-Hitler period were officially banned, but Himmler remembered a time when there had been many more states in Europe, before Hitler’s legions had wiped them all out of existence. In German classrooms, these days, students knew nothing about Poland, or Belgium, or Estonia; they had been wiped from history and wiped out on the ground. Himmler had overseen the population transfers personally.

“There is one final piece of business to take care of before the end of this meeting,” Hitler said, his voice weaker than Himmler remembered, back in the glory days. He wasn't like Goring, who remembered the days of beer and fighting with the Communists as a paradise, but now…it was sometimes hard to remember what they’d been. “It has been years since I rose to the this position of destiny and created the living space in the east for the Reich and the Volk.”

He paused for breath. “We stand supreme everywhere, but only one country in Europe has defied us and held on to a refusal to recognise the mastery of the Volk,” he said, his voice growing louder. “When I offered the British peace on equal terms, they spurned me; they defied me and they defied the Volk! They betrayed their Aryan origins by siding with the Jewish-Bolshevik movement and sending them the weapons and equipment to continue the struggle! Even now, they refuse to bow their heads to Berlin and recognise that their destiny is to become part of the Reich and…”

The ranting grew louder as Hitler continued. At one point, Himmler was worried; Hitler had always been an opportunist, taking advantage of his opponent’s weaknesses rather than having a master plan of his own, but he had always possessed the ability to judge clearly. His only real error had been in failing to anticipate that the British and the French would actually declare war after his forces invaded Poland; even after that, all of his gambles had come off and he was now the undisputed master of the continent. In all of Europe, there were only a handful of countries with any real independence, and all of them knew that their internal autonomy depended on Hitler’s goodwill, rather than any ability to defend themselves from attack. A man who was perfectly capable of launching two hundred divisions at any target wasn’t a man to irritate.

“It is time to settle the account with Britain, once and for all,” Hitler thundered, and immediately sagged. “I have given orders to prepare for the launch of Operation Sunset at once, to be executed as soon as possible, with the goal of conquering Britain within a month. Once Britain has been defeated, we will be finally secure, ready to make preparations for the inevitable final struggle to determine the fate of the world.”

There was a long pause. Finally, Kesselring nodded to Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, who stood up and picked up a pointer, indicating positions on the map. Manstein was another of the Führer’s favourites, a man whose planning had brought down France, Greece and Russia, as well as one of the most skilled strategists in the Reich. Manstein’s position was unchallengeable, as long as he continued to deliver victories.

Manstein’s voice was both firmer and drier than the Führer’s voice. “The original plan for invading Britain was badly flawed,” he said, without particular irritation. Himmler remembered the days when Hitler had dithered over invading Britain and nodded; the plan had been improvised and almost certain to fail spectacularly. “The Wehrmacht and the other services have been working on a plan to invade Britain since 1943, but it wasn't until recently that we had the fire-power and transport ability to carry it out with a reasonable chance of success. The plan, codenamed Operation Sunset, was first devised in 1947 and has been updated since then until today.”

His pointer indicated Britain. “The British have three elements to their defence; the Royal Air Force, the Royal Navy, and their own Army,” he said. “They have smaller specialised units, like we do, but their military value is questionable. In order to land a major assault force on the British island, we have to get it through the first two enemy forces and then defeat the third on their soil. That is not going to be easy, but it can be done; in particular, we can secure control of the seas for long enough to ship a major army group over to Britain.

“The British Navy, while larger than our own, has many more commitments than we have, including a major deployment into the Mediterranean and a second major deployment into the Far East watching our Japanese friends,” he continued. “That leaves them with their Home Fleet, deployed at Scapa Flow, and various smaller units scattered around the coast. The British battle fleet is composed of mainly older vessels, but if it came down to a direct battleship duel, they would have a serious advantage. We know that their plans call for immediately engaging the invasion convoys, so ours is to hit the Home Fleet first, from the air.”

He grinned. “The British themselves launched an attack on our friends the Italians from the air,” he said. “A handful of elderly aircraft hit the Italian fleet hard enough to make them reluctant to risk combat in the future – not that that’s hard, of course.” There were some chuckles; the Italians had proven themselves such bad fighters that Himmler had wanted to declare them all subhuman, and only Hitler’s fondness for Mussolini had prevented the invasion and subjection of Italy. “The Luftwaffe deploys many more aircraft and has been armed with the latest in anti-ship weapons, providing us with a unique chance to destroy or damage as many of their ships as possible. If necessary, our five carriers will add to the chaos by sending in their own torpedo-bombers, but I hope that we will have crushed most of the enemy fleet in the opening strike.”

“A point,” Generaladmiral Erich Raeder said, his voice darkening. He had birthed the Kriegsmarine and knew full well the odds it would face in a pitched battle. “How can you determine that the British will not detect the attacking bombers on their way?”

“The flight will be flying low for most of the journey,” Manstein said. “We anticipate that they will have some warning, but by our most pessimistic estimate, they will only have enough time to get the antiaircraft defences manned and ready, rather than getting the fleet out of the port and out onto the open sea. Building steam takes time, after all.  We will also have deployed a large force of submarines to the area; when the command is given, those submarines will engage every British ship they can find. The bombers will also be heavily escorted, although we anticipate that the RAF will have more pressing concerns.

“At the same time, we will launch major air strikes against every British RAF base and radar station,” Manstein continued. “The British will have to get into the air as quickly as they can, just to drive our aircraft away, while in the meantime we will be hitting their bases as hard as we can. That particular wave of attacks will have a secondary objective; dummy parachutes will be unloaded over the Dover region, ensuring that the British will be wasting their time looking for the parachutists. In the confusion, we will launch the first part of the invasion plan itself.”

He nodded over to Admiral Wilhelm Franz Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, the military intelligence department. Himmler detested Canaris, whose loyalty to Hitler was suspect, but there was no denying the fact that he knew his job very well. Canaris was charged with gathering intelligence from Britain, particularly on British military deployments, but Himmler knew how hard that could be…unless, of course, there was an ace in the hole. His particular ace, something he had even concealed from Hitler, gave him a private, but very advantageous, look into British politics. It was an advantage he had used ruthlessly.

“The British have been preparing for an invasion ever since the first rumours of war,” Canaris said. He’d been in his post for over ten years; Himmler had watched him almost as long. “They spent most of 1940 scrambling to prepare a basic defence, and then they just kept preparing, with the net result that the Dover region is the most heavily defended area in Britain. As the obvious place for us to land, they have fortified the area beyond reason, backed up by ten divisions of their army and heavy armoured units. We were able to get a look at their latest tank during the insurgency in Iraq” – Himmler smiled; the Shah of Iran had supplied that insurgency, with a little push from his German friends – “and while we believe that it’s a good design, they have massed most of them in the Dover region. If we were to attack Dover, the invasion would fail.”

He paused. “So, naturally, we’re not going to attack Dover.”

Manstein nodded. “The British defences there would make an attack far too costly for us to sustain,” he said. “Accordingly, we intend to target the assault on Felixstowe, a British port that has actually been taking some ships from the continent over the last few years. Felixstowe has been built up recently by the British, moving from a small base for motor torpedo boats to housing a small group of destroyers and also some civilian ships. It’s not the largest harbour in the world, or even in Britain, but it’s one that we believe we can take intact. Once we have secured it, the first of the main invasion transports will land and start unloading before we form the units up and advance towards London.”

He drew a line on the map. “The British will have to destroy our forces on the ground,” he said. “We anticipate that they will be able to move the equivalent of one armoured division and five infantry divisions into the area within a few days, although we will be hammering their rail and road communications as much as we can. Once that force is ready, they will advance to attack us – they will have no choice. If they allow us to continue to reinforce at will, eventually we will be able to defeat them on the ground. The destruction of that force, will allow us a chance to expand our grip and advance towards London, burning the heart out of Britain as we move.”

Himmler coughed. “What do you think the British will do with their other fleet units?”

Manstein tapped the map. “I expect that they will concentrate their forces and advance towards us, attempting to cut the sea lanes,” he said. “If they succeed too soon, they will defeat the invasion force, but once we have enough supplies in place, we will still have a chance at victory. The Italians and Japanese may take advantage of their absence to strike; the only problem remains the reaction of the Americans.”

Hitler erupted. “The Americans couldn’t prevent us from doing anything,” he barked sharply. “They have their own problems with their mongrel races and won’t be concerned with our actions!”

Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Reich’s Foreign Minister, looked nervous. The man was believed to be a fool by everyone, including Hitler.  “The American President has been focused on internal problems and the Japanese threat,” he said. “I do not feel that the Americans would get involved unless we offered them some huge provocation.”

Himmler smiled. The power play was obvious now; if Kesselring and Speer won the invasion of Britain between them, they would have a chance to oust him from the centre of power in the Reich. It was what he would have done; indeed, he had done it to Goring, among others. When Hitler died, and that wouldn’t be long now, the next Fuhrer would be one of the three most prominent Nazis…

“There is a way of preventing the British from asking for help,” he said, and outlined it. The idea was simple and he even had a unit on hand that could handle it. “The British might not even be able to issue orders for a while if the plan succeeds.”

Hitler loved it. “A splendid idea,” he said, his face growing flushed. “See that it is carried out perfectly.”

“Of course, Mein Fuhrer,” Himmler said.

“I want to have Britain as part of the Reich within two months from today,” Hitler said. His sight faded for a long moment. “Go now…and bring Britain into the Reich.”

The assembled senior commanders and cabinet members left quickly, but Himmler lingered just long enough to meet Hitler’s eyes. His body was shaking slightly, breaking apart, and failing him; it wouldn’t be long before he died. Hitler knew that he had, at best, only a few more years to live. The longer he lasted, the more his body would degrade and humiliate him still further. Himmler couldn’t bear it any longer and fled the room…

Trapped in a dying shell, Adolph Hitler was in hell.
Chapter Three

Wewelsburg Castle, Germany

“Heil Hitler!”

Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler returned the salute as he clambered out of his car, looking up at the towering heights of Wewelsburg Castle, a building that he had purchased and developed for the exclusive use of the SS. His elaborate plans had been impeded by the demands of war, but he resumed construction once the Soviet Union had collapsed and no serious enemies remained to threaten the Reich. Himmler had personally organised the establishment of Niederhagen concentration camp, near the Castle, and the thousands of slaves from the east had been used ruthlessly to build Himmler’s dream. Seven years later, it had become one of the most impressive sites in Germany, a fitting tribute to the New Order.

He shook his head as he proceeded up towards his private office. The existence of the Castle, as well as the secrets and rituals at the heart of the SS, had been kept from the remainder of the German people, many of whom would never approve what was being done in their name. Himmler remembered with a flush of embarrassment the German women who had demanded the return of their Jewish husbands; ever since then, he had become determined to keep many secrets to himself, safe from the interfering gaze of many Germans who didn’t want to know what was being done in their name. The Church was a particular problem for Himmler; his program to establish massive SS families and legitimise bastard children faced massive opposition, even though the Pope had been pressured into providing reluctant support. The final battle between Church and State hadn’t been fought yet, Himmler knew; one day, the Waffen-SS would march into the Vatican and put the Pope and his Cardinals to the sword. One day…and, if Himmler became Fuhrer, that day would be very soon.

“Herr Reichsfuhrer,” one of his secretaries called. “I have the latest figures on the use of Untermensch workers for your perusal.”

“Please hold them for the moment,” Himmler said. He made a point to be polite to all of his subordinates, knowing that if they were scared of him, they would start lying to him, rather than face his displeasure. “I will study them later.”

He walked into his private office and smiled to himself. There were literally millions of Untermensch – sub-humans – within the vast territories that the Reich had occupied, and they were all at the disposal of their German masters. The SS had spent the last seven years registering the Untermensch and using them for whatever purpose suited them, from slave labour to working on massive concentrated farms to feed the German people. The East was dotted by plantations now, each one run by the SS to grow food; in time, the serfs would all die, to be replaced by men of good German stock and tractors of good German manufacture. 

The East was also rife with insurgency, but as the SS systematically restricted the movements of the population, even the insurgency was dying down. It would be years before it was all gone – Himmler suspected that Beria was supplying them despite the terms of the treaty – but there was no way that the insurgents could defeat the Reich.

There was a single knock on the door and Himmler barked a command, without looking up, until Skorzeny had reported. “Heil Hitler,” he said, and saluted. It made him envious, in a way; no matter how many blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryans he surrounded himself with, it wouldn’t change his own appearance one iota. Himmler wasn't a perfect SS man and never would be, but the man facing him lived up to the legends.

“Heil Hitler,” Gruppenfuhrer Otto Skorzeny said. “You wanted to see me, Herr Reichsfuhrer?”

Himmler took a moment to study Skorzeny. At forty-two years old, the famous commando, who had been involved in raids and attacks on the Soviet Union and the insurgents that had replaced them, still looked like a young man. He had planned and executed a daring raid on the Soviets just before the end of the war, and Hitler had been impressed enough to order Skorzeny promoted and given his own unique unit of soldiers. Skorzeny hadn’t wasted his time, either; the unit of commandos had proven themselves in covert operations against a dozen sensitive targets. 

“I need a readiness report on your unit,” Himmler said, allowing Skorzeny to draw his own conclusions. The Reichsfuhrer wouldn’t have summoned him for a report unless there had been a failing so great as to justify him being thrown out of the SS – or if there was a prospect of action. “How ready are you for immediate deployment?”

Skorzeny’s eyes gleamed at the prospect of action. “The unit is in peak condition at the moment,” he said. Himmler had given him a thousand men back at the start; now, with reserves, new recruits, and even hundreds of SS men clamouring to join, Skorzeny could have tens of thousands of men under him. Instead, he had his core group and several thousand reserve soldiers, just in case they were needed. “The men are ready as they’ll ever be to launch an operation against any enemy.”

He stopped and waited. “Within a month, perhaps less, we will launch an attack against Britain,” Himmler said, calmly. Skorzeny looked delighted. “Your unit has a vital role to play in the assault.”

Skorzeny considered it. “The Tommy is a good soldier, but often unprepared for surprise,” he said, after a moment. “There is no one better at holding a piece of ground, but they don’t always react well when they are hit really hard. The best of their commanding officers match our own, but they don’t often have the same grasp of tactics that we do.” His grin grew wider. “And they have a unit to match ours; this should be fun.”

Himmler stood up and paced over to the map. It didn’t show unit positions; instead, it showed SS locations and personnel throughout Europe. He also knew that there was plenty it didn’t show, such as the fatality rates from Skorzeny’s unit; the parachute-testing program had claimed over a hundred lives since Skorzeny had demanded that a new parachute design be put into production. It also didn’t show the exact details of their target…

He turned back to face Skorzeny. Skorzeny was Hitler’s man, through and through; he didn’t have much time for the mystique that Himmler was trying to create around the SS, his Knights of the Black Cross. Where Himmler was fussy and precise, Skorzeny was impetuous and random. Skorzeny might be an excellent soldier – he was an excellent soldier – but he wouldn’t fit into the Order of the SS, or at least as Himmler envisioned it.

“You launched an attack on General Zhukov’s headquarters,” Himmler said, remembering that incident with some private amusement. The USSR had never really recovered from the loss of Moscow; by the time Beria had succeeded in bringing the Red Army back into a fighting force, their long-term advantages had been reduced sharply and, whatever else he was, Beria was no Stalin. He had no choice but to trust Zhukov to hold together the Red Army and the defence line…and, one day, Skorzeny and a hundred of his men had landed in a Red Army aircraft, slaughtered the General’s defenders, and kidnapped the General himself. It had been the turning point in the 1942 campaign against the remaining body of the Red Army and Stalingrad itself.

Skorzeny smiled lazily. “I remember,” he said. “Do we know where the commanding officer of the British Army is currently based?”

“Your target is a little higher up the scale than that,” Himmler said. “Your orders are to land in London, seize or kill the Prime Minister of Britain and his Cabinet - and then escape.”

Skorzeny shook his head.  “London isn’t an isolated airbase in the middle of nowhere,” he said, remembering his mission against Zhukov. “It’s a colossal city.  Unless there is a gaping hole in the British defences, we won’t be able to land aircraft and hold the area long enough to snatch the targets and escape. The minute there’s a threat, they’ll bring up reinforcements and trap us.”

Himmler frowned. “What does that mean for your mission?”

“We can’t take them alive,” Skorzeny said, with as much dispassion as if he were ordering dinner. “They will have to be killed, and then we will have to extract ourselves from the scene as quickly as possible.” He paused. “What sort of information do you have on the British defences?”

“Not as much as I would like,” Himmler admitted, wondering if he should let Skorzeny in on the secret. “I have been working to collect information, but there are…limits to what my source can gather and transmit to us without giving away his existence, and the minute the British suspect that they have a leak, they will start tearing their departments apart to find it.”

He watched as Skorzeny went through the information that one of his secretaries had prepared. The big man’s face twitched and twisted as he studied line after line, peering down at the map of London and mentally comparing it to the maps that he had studied, back in 1940. Skorzeny had been one of the finest soldiers in the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler back then, and he would have seen plans of Britain, but the information that Himmler had gathered was updated to 1950.

He looked up finally. “What sort of assets do we have on the ground?”

“A handful of agents, several of whom may be under surveillance,” Himmler said. “They still have Sillitoe in command of their counter-espionage service and he’d a determined man, always pushing the limits of what he can do with his people. We have some links with the British fascists, but they’re definitely being watched and have almost no military capability…”

“That wasn't what I was thinking about,” Skorzeny said. “They have three barracks in London, four counting the one for the Palace Guards; that gives them, at most, several thousand soldiers who could react to us landing. They’re going to react, which means…”

He broke off. “I have been training people for possible operations against Britain,” he said. “If we had some support from the air, we might be able to hit the barracks first, just enough to confuse them and let us land, launch the attack, and then beat it before the British catch us.”

Himmler nodded. “So it can be done?”

“The cost will be very heavy,” Skorzeny said, flatly. He didn’t flinch, but Himmler did; he rarely visited the camps where the slaves were held, just because he hated the sight of blood. “We can get around five hundred commandos into the area, but the British will still have time to react and counter-attack; I estimate that we will have twenty minutes before they start organising a response. Once we have completed the mission, we can fall back and escape, but it won’t be easy.”

Himmler looked at him. “Could your people go to ground until our soldiers get there?”

“Possibility,” Skorzeny said. “We would need some contacts on the far side and…we’ll need British uniforms. The British would shoot us at once if they caught us like that, but it might just allow us a chance to escape in the confusion. Once that’s completed, we will have a chance to escape, particularly in the wake of an invasion. They’re going to be moving units around like crazy and we’ll just blend in with the crowd.”

Himmler nodded. “I take it that I can trust you to handle the mission and brief a commander?”

“I’m going myself,” Skorzeny said, shortly. Himmler lifted an eyebrow. “I said I wouldn’t send anyone on a mission I refused to do myself, so I have to go, and I have the best training and grasp of the situation. The information will have to be shared around the team – if my aircraft gets shot down, Hans or Johan will have to take over – but I think they can be trusted to keep it to themselves.”

He paused. “What is the source of this information?”

Himmler’s lips wanted to twitch into a smile. “Classified,” he said, flatly. “The information is, however, totally reliable.”

Skorzeny held his gaze. “I need to know how to verify it,” he said. “Who is supplying us with information?”

Himmler answered, reluctantly. “A very strange Englishman,” he said, wishing that he could tell Skorzeny the full story. They’d only stumbled upon the connection by accident and – as far as the SS knew – their target knew nothing of who was reading his reports. He thought that he was still filing reports to Beria and his agents. “His name is Philby, Kim Philby.”

***

SS Standartenfuhrer Ludwig Stahl marched into the room, snapped a perfect Hitler salute, and waited for the Reichsführer-SS to give him leave to relax – slightly. Stahl had been surprised by the urgent summons back to the Castle from his previous post as SS Commander in what remained of Norway but he expected that the Reichsführer-SS had a task for him personally. He had committed no major blunders and, indeed, had been commended for his work in Norway, separating out the Aryans from the undesirables that had infested the ancient homeland. His command was charged with hunting down resistance fighters in the mountains, although, as he ruefully acknowledged, it was likely to take years to kill them all.

“Herr Reichsfuhrer,” he barked, as Himmler acknowledged him finally. “SS Standartenfuhrer Ludwig Stahl, reporting as ordered!”

“Heil Hitler,” Himmler said, shortly. “Your successes in Norway have been noted.”

Stahl allowed himself a slight smile. His force had worked hard to ensure that Aryan Norwegians were brought up to believe in their own supremacy over everyone else, which meant – naturally – separating them from their inferiors. The large number of German servicemen stationed in Norway had actually resulted in hundreds of marriages, which would strengthen the quality of blood in the area and ensure that Norway would be permanently bound to the Reich. He’d also used thousands of slave labourers to build new ports, roads, and facilities in the country; the Reich intended to use the country as a permanent naval base.

“Thank you, Herr Reichsfuhrer,” he said. “I believe that my men, also, deserve some credit.”

Himmler nodded. “We have a new task for you,” he said, simply. “The Fuhrer has commanded that Great Britain be brought into the Reich, which represents a new opportunity for us and particularly for you. We have four priorities; we must secure the country, prevent any insurgency, eliminate all the undesirables from the country, and bring the British into the Reich as Aryans.”

Stahl nodded. The Reich regarded France and Italy as degenerate and their inhabitants as subhumans, but Norway, Denmark and other ‘Aryans’ were regarded as potential equals. The Führer’s ruling would mean that the British wouldn’t be enslaved as a nation, unlike the Slavs, but they would have to be broken to the concept of being part of a greater Aryan community. Their independence would come to an end, they would be expected to inter-marry with the Germans who would settle in their land and they would be expected to fight for the Fuhrer. First, however, they would have to be cleared of Jews; Stahl remembered hunting down Jews in Norway and felt nothing but loathing for them.

“The day-to-day occupation of the country will be in your hands,” Himmler said, and Stahl felt a moment of pure excitement. “The Fuhrer will select a Governor-General, but under the right circumstances, you will be able to act without referring to him, all towards the overall aim of winning the peace and ensuring that Britain becomes part of the Greater German Reich. Your men – an experienced unit from Denmark or France is being prepared for you – will have the task of carrying out your orders.”

Stahl nodded. The Reich had created the world’s largest and most precise bureaucracy to ensure that the Führer’s orders were carried out, one that included a list of everyone within the Reich, from the youngest child to the oldest and most useless slave worker. The citizens of Britain would all be registered as well, the first part of a well practised scheme that would bring them all into the Reich as obedient servants, and eventually willing allies for the long-term task of controlling the world. The English had an Empire; that Empire, too, would become part of the Reich.

“I will not fail you, Herr Reichsfuhrer,” he said, standing up in salute.

“I trust that you won’t,” Himmler said, in his maddeningly calm voice. Stahl remembered some of the acts that Himmler had ordered carried out, including the near-complete destruction of several Soviet cities to prevent them from being used to foster the insurgency, and shuddered inside. Himmler had offered him a chance to prove himself on a much larger scale, something that would catapult him to higher rank, but if he failed…the blame would be his and his alone. “The British have had ample opportunity to create a stay-behind movement, so remember; rooting that force out and destroying it, will be the first priority.”

“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer,” Stahl said. He had had experience in hunting down the handful of insurgency-supporting networks in Norway; without those networks, the insurgents might as well be bandits, robbing their own people as much as they raided German outpost. “They won’t last long enough to be a problem.”

“Good,” Himmler said. His eyes narrowed slightly in warning. “Remember, you represent the SS and we will all be judged by your performance. Heil Hitler!”

“Heil Hitler,” Stahl echoed. 

He snapped to attention and marched out of the room.
Chapter Four

Near Bergen, Occupied Norway

Gruppenkommandeur Albrecht Schmidt, Jagdgeschwader 2 Richthofen, stood to attention with the remainder of the senior officers as General Adolf Galland entered the room. Galland had been one of the heroes of the service, flying against England and Russia before being promoted and given command of Luftwaffe 2, one of the Luftwaffe’s main air groups. Luftwaffe 2 had been deployed to the massive base in Norway, built through slave labour, weeks ago; now, it seemed that the senior officers were about to find out why they had been exiled to Norway. The Norwegians weren’t very friendly, and while there were brothels and some girlfriends, the main body of the air group had been confined to the base.

Schmidt watched as Galland waved them to their seats. His assistant had hung a map on the wall, but had covered it up; with a smooth motion, Galland pulled the cover away, to reveal a set of islands and harbours. Schmidt recognised it from his basic briefings; the British naval base at Scapa Flow, due west of Norway. It was perfectly positioned for intercepting any sortie from the Baltic Sea and larger than the massive bases the Kriegsmarine had been building in Norway. It had been discussed as a possible target for years now.

“The British have been causing us problems recently,” Galland said, giving what every man there knew was the official line. Schmidt knew, as did the other pilots and commanders, that asking questions at the wrong time could be fatal to their careers, if not their health. He knew, unlike many civilians, the true cost of German expansion. “The Fuhrer has decided that it is time to settle accounts with them permanently, before they launch an invasion of Europe and attempt to overthrow the regime.”

He paused, expecting no comments. Schmidt said nothing; the idea of the British overthrowing the Fuhrer and his government on their own was ridiculous. They might have been able to do it if they had developed their empire like the Reich had developed and exploited its empire, but, instead, they were on the verge of granting independence to chunks of the empire, even the jewel in the crown itself. They weren’t a threat to the Reich; they even couldn’t get at the Reich.

“This unit has been marked down for the most important part of Operation Sunset,” Galland continued, his voice calm and firmly in control. “The British Home Fleet at Scapa Flow has to be destroyed, or at the very least severely crippled, and that task has fallen on your heads. Failure to take out the fleet will almost certainly result in a disaster for the invasion force, so we must take out the fleet…we will take out the fleet.”

Schmidt ran through it in his head. The force was a mixed one, consisting of the latest aircraft in the German Luftwaffe; it prided itself on being the most powerful unit in the world. The British had nothing to match it in the air, but attacking a stationary target like a harbour was very different from fighting it out in the air with British jets.

Schmidt had seen enough of the Gloster Meteor to know that it might not be as good as the German aircraft, but in the hands of a skilled pilot, that wouldn’t matter so much. It could come down to being an even fight…

He had only seen limited service during the war itself, but he’d seen the briefings and assimilated as much as his older fellows could teach him, particularly what had happened during the last air campaign against Britain. The Luftwaffe hadn’t been properly prepared for the war, with the result that they hadn’t been able to force the British to surrender.  Richthofen – the unit had been named for the pilot from the Great War – had been training under the belief that they would go to war with Britain again, maybe against the Americans as well. The Americans were a huge question mark as far as the Reich was concerned. Although the official line was that Americans were a mongrel race of mixed blood, Schmidt didn’t have much time for the SS’s version of eugenics.

“The entire unit will be used in the assault, deploying a mass wave of the newer weapons,” Galland continued. Schmidt thought about some of the weapons that had been tested over the past two years and felt his teeth moving into a grimace; the British would never know what had hit them. “When the Fuhrer issues the order, the unit will go into lock-down and prepare for immediate launch; when the second order is issued, Richthofen will take off and proceed with the attack, regardless of what else happens. The wing will engage the British ships while the fighters keep the British fighters off their backs; once the bombs are launched, we will fall back and leave the British to clean up the mess.”

There were some chuckles from the pilots. The bombers – the crews of the Junkers Ju 290 jet bomber – looked relieved. They would know that while an old British fighter couldn’t touch them, one of the British jets would have no problems engaging them and bringing them down. Fighter escort always made the bomber crews happy. Very few of them had any faith in the weapons mounted on the bomber’s hull. 

“We may have to launch a second strike once we have refuelled and rearmed the aircraft,” Galland said. The surviving aircraft, Schmidt reminded himself; Richthofen was going to get hurt badly in the strike. “It is hoped that we will have inflicted enough damage to ensure that we don’t have to return there, and in that case we will be assigned to supporting the assault against Britain itself, but we know better than to always hope for success.”

He paused. “We have a small team of agents near Scapa Flow itself,” he said. “The British Home Fleet currently consists of nine battleships, six carriers and forty smaller ships; the main targets are the battleships and the carriers. To add to our problems, there are actually three older carriers that date back to the last war as well as the three modern carriers; they have to be sunk as well. The British are currently going through an exercise of their own, so we will strike once they have returned to port and are digesting the results of their exercise and thinking about what it means for the future.”

Schmidt nodded again. Luftwaffe exercises tended to work out the same way; there would be a period of frenetic activity, then a second period of rest as exhausted crewmen staggered to their beds and sleep. Meanwhile, equally tired senior officers struggled to work out the lessons of the exercise and decide how to present them to their men. His pilots had as much training and exercises as anyone else in the Luftwaffe, but even they got tired after a few weeks of all-out effort. The old hands from the war swore blind that wartime was worse, but the younger pilots found it hard to grasp; they had never flown against a serious enemy that wanted to kill them.

“The British have three squadrons of Meteors and several other aircraft on the island itself and can probably request support from RAF bases in Scotland if they have to call for help,” Galland continued. “We will fly low towards the target, but we don’t expect actual surprise, so we will have to be prepared to sweep enemy fighters out of the sky. Accordingly, the first wave of fighters will be leading the way, followed by the bombers and the remaining fighters; the first wave will have to scatter the British and keep them scattered.”

Schmidt felt a flicker of pure excitement. His Messerschmitt Me 270 jet fighter was the hottest plane in the air, and he wanted to finally test himself against a real enemy. The British pilots were spoken of with respect by the older hands, unlike the Russians, who were regarded with scorn and hatred. The Russian pilots might have been brave men, but during the later years of the war, they had been more dangerous to their own men than to their Nazi opponents. Untrained, flying inferior aircraft, they had been flung into the fray…and butchered.

“I expect that each and every one of you will give his all to get Richthofen in perfect condition before the operation begins,” Galland concluded. “I have organised a massive series of training runs and operations, to be conducted by everything from smaller sections of Richthofen to mass exercises consisting of every aircraft in the force. This is going to put a strain on us, but I believe that we can handle it…and I will personally break anyone who slacks off, even slightly.”

His gaze passed around the room. Schmidt straightened up under his eyes. “We’re the best unit in the Luftwaffe and now it’s time to prove it,” Galland said. “Your training schedules will be posted on the main board; the first exercise will begin in one hour. Heil Hitler!”

“Heil Hitler,” the pilots echoed.

It was a dismissal. Schmidt stood up with the other senior officers and headed back to the workroom, intending to check the main board before too long. His unit was a fighter unit and he hoped – prayed – that they would have the point in the coming attack. They hadn’t really proven themselves, even though Richthofen had a long and distinguished history, and now was their chance. They would do or die.

***
Oberst Frank-Michael Baeck lifted an eyebrow as he saw an older man ahead of him, clearly heading towards the same office; the older man saw him at the same time and blinked at him. Baeck wasn’t fooled; he saw real intelligence and a certain wry sense of humour in the older man’s eyes, and wondered what he made of him. The older Germans certainly were keen on the army, but Baeck’s uniform was very rare; there were only a handful of amphibious units in the Wehrmacht.

“Kapitän zur See Christian Wulff,” the older man introduced himself. His uniform was that of a Kriegsmarine reservist, rather than a serving officer; he looked as if he hadn’t worn the uniform for a long time. “You were called here along with me?”

Baeck nodded as they reached a door, tapped on it, and waited for the barked command. When it came, he opened the door and allowed Wulff to precede him, before following him into the room and straightening to attention as he recognised the man sitting on the other side of the desk. He was tall, almost unnaturally thin, with sharp penetrating eyes and a haze of brown hair on his head. Baeck would have come to attention for any senior officer, but he knew this one by reputation and meant the salute from the heart; Field Marshal Erwin Rommel himself.

“Heil Hitler,” he said, almost overcome with awe. His orders had said that he would meet a senior officer, but not Rommel himself. He would have sooner expected the Fuhrer than a man the lower ranks of the Wehrmacht idolised. “Oberst Frank-Michael Baeck of the Hans Bader reporting as ordered, Herr Feldmarschall.”

Rommel nodded. “You have been selected for a dangerous mission,” he said, and ran through the background to Operation Sunset quickly. “Your unit…how is the training level at the moment?”

“Excellent,” Baeck said, silently thanking God that he kept all of the records in his own head. He could have given Rommel a man-by-man description if he had had to, but instead, Rommel just wanted an overview. “The unit has been training hard and is at the peak of perfection.”

“Good,” Rommel said. “Kapitän zur See Wulff, how about your ship?”

Wulff hesitated. “The ship is in fine condition,” he said, puzzled. Baeck was equally puzzled; he could see how his unit might be involved with the Kriegsmarine, but he didn’t understand how it all fitted together, not yet. “We just returned from the Felixstowe run and unloaded the British goods; we’re not due to make the run again for three weeks.”

“Yes,” Rommel agreed. He stood up and unfolded a map. “This map was created by an intelligence officer who sailed with your ship, and examined the port and its surrounding environs carefully. The British have been building up the port over the last few years, allowing greater and greater trade with the Reich…”

Baeck spoke before realising that he had opened his mouth. “The British trade with us?”

“They send us some raw materials we cannot get for ourselves, we send them some machine tools and manufactured goods,” Rommel said, dryly. “It is not something that is widely discussed, but it forms a small, but important part of the Reich’s long term plan for dominance. This time, the Hans Bader will not be carrying machine tools, but an entire unit of German infantry, trained for operations in a port.”

“My unit,” Baeck said, understanding. He glanced over at Wulff. “How many of my men could I fit into your ship?”

“If they don’t mind being uncomfortable for a few hours, we could fit in several thousand,” Wulff said after a moment’s thought. Baeck silently took that down a few hundred; they’d have to bring in equipment and weapons as well as just the men. “The question will be when the British would want to inspect the ship.”

Baeck frowned. “When do they inspect the ship normally?”

“They normally send in a team of inspectors as soon as the ship docks,” Wulff said. His finger pointed to a docking slip on the map. “We’re a heavy ship, so we dock here for quick access and unloading, before being moved to another slip, where we are loaded up again. Once we dock here, the ship is inspected before anyone is allowed to leave, but once the ship is inspected and unloading is under way, some of the crew are allowed a brief period of shore leave.”

“It won’t matter,” Baeck said, thinking carefully. “We’ll have to move as soon as we dock and take the docks before anyone can react. What about defences?”

Wulff skimmed through the briefing notes. “They have a Home Guard barracks nearby, perhaps with at least a small regular army detachment as well, and a regular set of barracks outside the city,” he said, after a moment. “What about reinforcements Sir?”

“They’ll be on their way,” Rommel said, shortly. “At most, you’ll have to hold the port for two hours before the reinforcements arrive and start to unload.”

Baeck’s father had served with Rommel and had spoken highly of him in the past. If Rommel said that something could be done, then it could be done, but Baeck knew that it was going to be tricky; street fighting was dreaded by all soldiers just because it could cut down the advantages of training and weaponry to the bare minimum. The British Home Guard wasn't regarded highly by German observers, but if they counter-attacked swiftly enough to keep most of his force penned up in the ship, they would be defeated rapidly enough to ensure that the British would meet the reinforcements from a position of strength. If that happened, then the invasion would almost certainly fail.

“We’re going to have to run drills,” he said, thoughtfully. “We’ll need a second ship like the Hans Bader, one with the same design, but maybe altered inside to allow for quick unloading under fire, and then run more drills on it. It’s going to be tricky, but it can be done…”

He paused. “Are you going to be coming on the mission?”

“The British will expect to see me,” Kapitän zur See Wulff said, and Baeck saw the naval officer he had once been in his stance. Hell, technically, he was still a naval officer; how long had the invasion plans been maturing? “If there was someone else in command of the ship, they might want to go through more careful checks, just in case. They know me and I bring them some smuggled goods from the continent.”

Baeck lifted an eyebrow. “French wines, mostly,” Wulff admitted. “They sell for a great deal of money in Britain and the customs inspectors have a little business going on the side.”

“Which lets you get into their confidence,” Baeck agreed, smiling. Humans, British or German, were all the same; they were always watching out for the main chance to better themselves. “Are there any other issues that we should be aware of before we start planning?”

“The timing issue,” Rommel said, shortly. “There are other operations being planned, some of them much more drastic, and if you’re not in position by the correct time, the British may refuse to allow you to dock. If that happens, the first part of the invasion plan will fall apart and we’ll have to make a landing onto a beach instead.”

Baeck shuddered. He’d taken part in a drill on several Baltic islands and discovered that landing a large force without a port was very difficult, much harder than anyone had made it seem before they had actually tried it. The results of the first drill had been disastrous, with seventeen fatal accidents in the test, even without live ammunition being issued. The idea of a forced landing under enemy fire chilled his blood; if the British had a unit dug in on the beach, they’d tear his force to ribbons.

“I understand,” Baeck said, seriously. He glanced over at Wulff; they were going to have to work together just to ensure that they got across the Channel without arousing the slightest amount of suspicion. They might have to tear the Hans Bader apart to ensure that the soldiers could disembark quickly and efficiently, but if that weren’t done perfectly, the ship would never sail again. “We won’t fail you, Herr Feldmarschall.”

Chapter Five

London, England

Alex DeRiemer found himself distracted the moment he walked into Ten Downing Street, recognising at once that he was standing in a monument to British history. Ten Downing Street wasn't as impressive as some of the world’s governing centres, not the White House, or the Reichstag, or the Kremlin before Hitler’s bulldozers had moved in and ground it to dust. However it was still the centre of an empire upon which the sun was supposed never to set. 

But that sun was setting, DeRiemer knew. The men he was supposed to be briefing were the men who were presiding over the dissolution of the British Empire. 

The pressure of having the Reich on the other side of the Channel and the growing independence movement in India had had their effects on the Prime Minister. India, in particular, would be independent in five years, maybe less.

“It strikes everyone that way,” Major-General Sir Stewart Menzies said, as they walked up the stairs and into the Cabinet Room. Menzies had asked DeRiemer to come in person to brief the Cabinet, but DeRiemer suspected that they weren't going to listen to him; he was too junior for any of them to take seriously. “This building has never been replaced by anything else, not even abandoned for a few weeks after a bombing attack; this place is history.”

“Good luck,” he said, as the door opened, revealing the Cabinet and a handful of other advisors. DeRiemer felt his heart beating faster as he entered the room and took up position near one end of the table. The man at the other end of the table gave him a reassuring smile. The Prime Minister was surprisingly popular with the rank and file, but not always popular with his own people; he presided over a coalition government with the Conservatives, who held nearly half the important seats on the Cabinet. Neither side had been able to win a decisive victory in the recent election, and Atlee had decided to continue with the coalition rather than accept a lame duck government or, worse, a permanent stalemate.

His gaze flickered around the room, seeing some familiar faces and others who were hardly known outside the government. Anthony Eden, Leader of the Conservative Party and Deputy Prime Minister. Hugh Dalton, Chancellor of the Exchequer; Lord Halifax, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs – he’d never win an election, not without a more popular patron and everyone else in the race dying. His betrayal of Churchill meant that without Atlee, he was nothing. No one really trusted him. James Chuter Ede, the Home Secretary, Stafford Cripps, Secretary of State for India and Burma; he was the man who had worked out the agreement that would make India independent…

And, finally, Sir Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty. Churchill looked older now, but his eyes were as bright as ever. Those eyes met DeRiemer’s own long enough to judge him, nod in approval, and turn away to watch Atlee like a hooded snake waiting to strike. The tension in the room was a malignant presence. DeRiemer had been warned several times to stay out of the power struggle at the heart of the British government. Churchill had never forgiven his own party for conspiring against him back in 1943 when they’d forced through a peace with Germany, a peace that DeRiemer suspected was about to shatter.

“This meeting of the Cabinet is called to order,” Atlee said, shortly. He nodded over at a secretary who would record the minutes. “Sir Stewart, I believe that you insisted on holding this meeting.”

Major-General Sir Stewart Menzies stood up. “Yes, Prime Minister,” he said. He nodded to DeRiemer. “This young man was charged with collecting information regarding the various German units that were displayed at their recent Victory Day parade in Germany and the smaller parades that took place in various other cities in the Reich including Paris and Moscow. He has uncovered an interesting amount of information.”

Atlee’s gaze swung around to meet DeRiemer’s eyes. “Very well,” he said, sounding tired. The Cabinet was forever divided on the subject of Nazi Germany with Churchill calling for increased preparations for a war he saw as inevitable and Lord Halifax calling for peace at any price. “You may begin.”

DeRiemer tapped the map on the wall. “My department was charged with monitoring the development, growth, and operations of the Germany military machine,” he said, carefully. “We suspected from the end of the war that Hitler would eventually decide to turn his attention back to Britain and attempt an invasion. With this in mind, we created an intelligence web running through the Reich and the Reich’s allies to monitor the German preparations.”

He paused. “At the end of the war in Russia, Hitler continued to expand his army, but with an increased focus on counterinsurgency,” he continued. “Although Beria’s forces were defeated and he was forced into submission to the Reich – with his government effectively a caretaker government until the Reich took over – the Russian partisans refused to give up the fight and continued to fight the Germans. They, in return, deployed upwards of one hundred and fifty infantry divisions into the area and hunted the partisans down through brute force and developing their own intelligence networks.”

He wondered how he could explain it to them. The forced relocations, the enslavement of entire cities and villages, the use of forced labour everywhere across the Reich. The massive autobahns the Reich was so proud of, stretching all the way to Iran, or Japanese-held territory in the Far East, had been built with slave labour and millions of deaths. The average German family had more than enough to eat, but much of that food came from plantations in the east, each one working its slaves to death to grow the food. It made him wonder, late at night; did the Germans know what was being done in their name?

“The remaining fifty divisions – Hitler was determined on two hundred divisions as a permanent force – remained as armoured and motorized infantry, with a handful of specialist units,” DeRiemer continued. “The Germans shook their fists at Switzerland a few times, and threatened Turkey when the Turks started providing sanctuary to Jews and other refugees from the German war machine, but the main area of concern for those units was the remains of Russia. Hitler didn’t trust Beria and…well, he wanted to take over the remaining Russian landscape once he had finished absorbing the territory he took in the last war. This ensured that the Nazis would be supreme on the continent and would maintain a viable fighting force if we ever tried a landing in France.

“But, now, the Germans are making a series of odd military moves,” he said. “They have moved four entire Luftwaffe wings from the east to Norway and France. Units that they don’t seem to have any need for in France. They always maintained ten divisions in France itself, but now they have reinforced them with another ten divisions, four of them armoured with their latest tanks and other equipment. 

“Overall, there seems to be a massive attempt to bring the German military machine back up to standard as quickly as possible; this effort seems to be spreading everywhere. There are units on counterinsurgency operations in Russia that have been ordered to prepare themselves for action and report on their readiness.”

He tapped the map for a moment. “This puzzled me, and so I dug deeper into the intelligence that we were receiving and found much more,” he continued. “The Germans have been carrying out a vastly increased series of drills in the Baltic Sea, each of them involving their warships…and landing craft. The Luftwaffe has also been running drills, including parachute drills and at least some precision bombing drills. They were recently rearmed with newer aircraft and now they’re drilling endlessly.”

He met Atlee’s eyes, hoping to convince him through sheer force of personality. “There seems to be no need for a mobilisation, sir, and that is what we’re seeing; a covert mobilisation. The Germans don’t need so many units to advance east and finish off the Russians. I don’t believe that they would want to do that at the moment, not with the counterinsurgency operations they’re still running. Even an operation against any of the other continental powers wouldn’t require so much fire-power or a joint services operation; there has to be another reason for the operation.”

His finger traced out the German positions on the map. “I believe that they intend to attack Britain,” he said. “That is the only explanation that fits the facts.”

There was a long pause. “An interesting idea,” Lord Halifax said finally. His voice was clipped, an upper-class accent, but DeRiemer could hear a trace of bitterness underlying his words. Lord Halifax would never be a great man in his own right. “Do we have any reason to believe that it’s not an exercise?”

DeRiemer nodded. “The Germans last conducted a major exercise in 1948,” he said. “At that time, the Germans provided us with a month’s warning of the planned exercise and we raised our own readiness to compensate, just in case. The exercise went off without a hitch – we learned a great deal from watching them – and the Germans declared it a success. This time, they haven’t sent us any warning, and they don’t seem to have told their own people much about the exercise either.”

He paused. “The Germans, like us, run exercises on a regular basis for individual units,” he continued. “As far as we have been able to determine, they have never run more than three exercises for army units simultaneously, let alone all four of their services, apart from the big one in 1948. It’s a weird coincidence, if indeed it is a coincidence. I think the Germans are trying to prepare for an invasion of Britain.”

There was a brief babble of conversation. “We have several trade deals going with the Germans at the moment,” Lord Halifax said, finally. “Why would they want to break up those deals by starting a war?”

“We had trade deals with them back in 1938,” Churchill rumbled, his bass voice silencing everyone else. “How long do you think we have?”

“It’s impossible to estimate,” DeRiemer admitted. “They could start bombing us at once and then attempt to drive the Royal Navy out of the Channel. Or they could be making sure that they have everything in readiness before they start the offensive.”

Churchill looked over at Atlee. “Clement, you will remember the days when the Germans bombed us before they considered an invasion,” he said, grimly. “We cannot let them have another chance.”

“That’s true enough,” Atlee agreed. “If we were to launch a low-level preparation campaign of our own…”

“The deals we have with Germany are vitally important,” Lord Halifax snapped. “We cannot risk losing their goodwill by implying that we don’t trust them!”

Churchill’s eyes flickered with anger. “Are you prepared to risk the safety of this country on your trade deals?”

“Winston, please,” the Home Secretary said. “You know that we are still in a precarious position because of the expenditures from the last war.” DeRiemer noted that he carefully did not point out that that had been Churchill’s war. “We have a major debt to our American cousins that we need to service, we have endless problems with extracting anything from the empire these days, and we have a very shaky manufacturing sector. We must, if you will pardon the expression, cut our coat to suit our cloth…and we have very poor cloth indeed.”

He paused, dramatically. “In effect, we have a constantly declining economy…”

“I am aware of the details,” Churchill interrupted. “I ask you if you are aware of the kind of man Herr Hitler actually is?”

“No,” Eden said. “I have never met him. What I have met are tables and charts and industrial statistics that prove that Britain is on the verge of collapse. We require everything we can get in the way of hard cash and we have very few sources. We cannot export much to America because…frankly, the Americans make it better than we do. We can only export some items to the empire and as those bonds fray, so do the rest of the economy. If we didn’t have the bargains with Germany, we would be in a much worse state.”

Churchill looked over at Atlee. “I fail to see any reasonable grounds for refusing to ensure that we get our own forces ready, maybe even conduct a few exercises of our own,” he said. “If Hitler does intend us ill, we could be ready for him when he comes and catch his forces before they catch us on the ground. If he doesn’t intend to strike us and his forces stand down and return to their normal levels, then we can claim that it was all a drill as well and say nothing more.”

Eden leaned forward. “Winston, I believe that you are running an exercise with Home Fleet at the moment?”

Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, nodded. “Admiral Fraser is running an exercise and the Germans have taken a surprising amount of interest in it,” he said. “The exercise was intended, at least in part, to see how quickly Home Fleet could react if the Germans did send their fleet out into the North Sea, as they did years ago with the Bismarck. That is not, however, a complete exercise; we should, at least, ensure that all of our units are warned that there might be a state of hostilities between us and the Reich.”

Lord Halifax coughed. “Would we not have ample warning if the Germans launched an attack against us?”

It took DeRiemer a moment to realise that the question was aimed at him. “We have fairly good radar coverage over Britain and even over parts of France,” he said, carefully. “The Germans now have much faster aircraft than they did during the last war, so we would have a correspondingly shorter time to react and get our own aircraft into the air. If we failed to get the aircraft into the air in time to meet them, the Germans would have ample time to hurt us before we could react.”

He paused. “The Germans also have vastly more aircraft than we have,” he admitted. “We concentrated on fighters, rather than bombers, but they have built at least seven hundred jet bombers and well over two thousand fighters. Not all of them are up to current standards, but they have no shortage of aircraft to deploy against us. It may also give them a chance to hurt Home Fleet before it comes into contact with the German Navy.”

Atlee exchanged looks with Churchill, and then tapped once on the table. “It is true,” he said, nodding to Lord Halifax, “that our relationship with Germany is of vital importance and we should not jeopardise it lightly. We need German supplies to remain a functioning nation, particularly now given the fact we do not have such access to American markets. We also have to worry about the past performance of Hitler’s regime when it comes to attacking nations without warning. Are there any signs of increased German forces in Egypt?”

“Yes, Prime Minister,” DeRiemer confirmed. “The Italians formally hold Egypt, but the Germans maintain very large forces within the nation, despite the opinion of the natives. That force could be attacking the Suez Canal Zone and punch its way into Palestine and Iraq within a day if Hitler gave the orders. They reinforced it quite heavily over the last couple of weeks.”

“And if they go into Palestine, there’ll be a bloodbath,” Atlee said. A fundamentally decent man at heart, he had been shocked when the first reports of the fate of European Jews had begun to sink into his mind. He had even given asylum, despite German protests, to a Jewish family that had somehow escaped the Netherlands and reached Britain. “I want to ensure that every unit gets a warning that there might be some trouble coming and readiness is to be increased accordingly.”

“It’s not strong enough,” Churchill said. “We should be flying regular combat air patrols over Britain and preparing the defences.”

“It’s all we can do,” Atlee said, tiredly. “Winston, I understand your concern, but there are other issues involved here.”

He looked over at DeRiemer. “Thank you for your report,” he said. “Please remain available outside the room for the remainder of the meeting.”

DeRiemer nodded once and withdrew back into the waiting room. He hadn’t realised just how much poison there was between the senior members of the government, not until he'd seen them at first-hand and realised what was going on. Eden wanted to be Prime Minister, Lord Halifax wanted to be a man of influence…but the former knew that his position was weak and the latter knew that no one trusted him since he had betrayed Churchill. Atlee’s own position was weak because of the weakening economy; Churchill’s position was weak because he was associated with the last government, which he’d headed. He, at least, had taken the warnings seriously…

But he wasn't heeded. DeRiemer remembered Churchill’s speech in Parliament about an Iron Curtain descending over Europe and knew that far too few people believed him. DeRiemer believed him, knowing what he did about the fate of people under German rule, but who else believed him? Most people preferred not to think about the monster crouching on the other side of the Channel, preparing to pounce on Britain…

DeRiemer hoped and prayed that he was wrong.
Chapter Six

Felixstowe, England

“You’ll be pleased to know that heads are rolling back at the RAF base,” Constable Toby Johnston said, as he sipped a cup of tea that Kate had prepared for him. Gregory Davall smiled at the memory; he’d made it back to the house and crawled into bed beside Kate without coming close to being caught. “The security level has been increased and a number of guards are wishing that they had been more alert, rather than earning shit duties for the next month.”

“Thank you,” Davall said, as he sipped his own tea. It was far too easy to like the Constable, who had been a policeman ever since leaving the army at the age of forty-seven. It was chilling to remember that he would have to kill him if the Germans ever invaded. “What were the papers anyway? I couldn’t make heads or tails of them.”

“Maintenance information, I believe,” Johnston said, without particular concern. “The RAF had copies, so losing them wouldn’t have been a problem, but if they had been the plans for the latest aircraft or maybe the base commander’s collection of secret papers…well, even more heads would have rolled. I think that the base commander has been given a week to get the base’s security back into line or else he’ll get the sack, but after that, someone else will be trying to penetrate the base.”

Davall blinked. “It won’t be me?”

“Not this time,” Johnston said. He looked over at Kate for a long moment, before turning his attention back to Davall. Kate was the only other one in the household who knew about the Grey Wolves. Davall had told her, right from the start, just so he could rely on her help if he needed it. She was braver than he was. The Germans wouldn’t hesitate to drag her off in chains if they suspected his role. “There is a more important issue at hand.”

He put down the tea and leaned forward. “I got a message from the Major-General yesterday,” he said, grimly. Davall frowned; there was only one Major-General who would have an interest in talking to a lowly police constable – Gubbins himself. “We’re on alert status, as of yesterday, but a covert alert status.”

Davall felt his blood run cold. “Is this it?”

“I don’t know,” Johnston admitted. “The message wasn't particularly clear – it was meant to avoid attracting attention from people in the police station who aren’t meant to know about the Grey Wolves or my role in them – but it included code phases indicating that it is believed possible that the Germans might launch their invasion. It didn’t say anything about where the Germans will land – and as far as I know, from the last major briefing, that was expected in Dover – or when, but there is a good chance that they will try something within the next few weeks.”

“I understand,” Davall said. “Do they have any specific orders for us?”

“There weren’t any included on the message, although I suspect that there may be a courier within the next few days to remind you that you have some duties,” Johnston said. “If the Germans invade outside your area of operations, your orders are the same as they always were; stay inactive unless summoned to the colours.  If the Germans occupy the area, harass them as seems appropriate and, until then, remain under cover.”

Davall remembered the last courier he’d met personally and silently thanked God that he’d had the sense to meet him far away from Kate and anything else that could be used to identify him. The man had been too excited at the thought of meeting one of the auxiliary units to believe that he would keep it quiet. 

“Of course,” he said, dryly. The Grey Wolves had always been a secret from every other serviceman around their operations area; they’d only been used rarely and never as a group. They didn’t dare risk allowing themselves to be identified too soon. “What sort of orders do you have for a landing?”

Johnston shrugged. “The orders haven’t changed much,” he said. “I’m to remain at my post, try and keep people calm, and try to avoid collaborating too much with them.”

Davall nodded. They’d been briefed on how the Germans had acted in the different countries they’d conquered. In the western countries, they’d been almost civilised, at least at first. They'd kept the police around, but they’d insisted that some of the policemen help them hunt for Jews and resistance fighters. As far as Davall could remember, the partisans in France had only scored minor successes, at best.

He had been briefed on how vicious the Germans had been to the inhabitants of the Eastern countries. He’d seen some grainy movies, filmed by Germans and sent to Britain, that had given him nightmares for a week, where every one of the bodies or slaves bore Kate’s face. If the Germans treated the British population like that, the Grey Wolves would extract what revenge they could, but he feared that it would be a terrible test of strength. One day, they would find him and punish him with a bullet in the back of his head.

He kept that thought from showing on his face. “You poor bastard,” he said, as Johnston got up to leave. “Do you have anything else for us to do?”

“Not at this time.” Johnston said. “Check your weapons and equipment when you have a moment, but remember; you can’t trust anyone. If you fail to keep your own security, you will be broken quickly by the Germans and then treated as an illegal combatant.”

“I know the risks,” Davall assured him, feeling sorry for the policeman. When – if – the German army reached Suffolk, it would have punched out most of the British army and probably taken London, leaving the Grey Wolves and the other underground movements as the only source of resistance. Johnston would be watching the Germans, knowing, perhaps, that they would know what he knew about the underground units…and what they might do to make him talk. “I’ll take care of everything.”

He watched as Johnston left his house and headed on to his next destination. Without his uniform, the burly policeman still looked like a soldier even though he hadn’t been in the army for years. Riding a bicycle, he still looked remarkably normal out in the near-countryside, but like so many others of his age, he had a military bearing. The conscription program had been going on for so long that hundreds of young men had gone through the army…and, soon enough, it would be James’s turn as a soldier. Only six years…

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Kate asked, softly. They’d been married for twelve years and he had no secrets from her now. “You could just abandon it all…”

“I was a young man back when I agreed,” Davall said. “Even so…”

The Germans hadn’t come, not back then. He’d had a child with Kate and known that the war would cost him more than just his own life. The treaty had seemed to bring peace for a time, but Gubbins had kept the underground units up to date just in case of war breaking out again…and now it seemed the war might be on the verge of re-igniting. If it did come to his home…

“I have no choice,” he said, softly, and took his wife in his arms. “I knew the job was dangerous when I took it.”

That afternoon, he slipped back into the woods and walked down a path that was hardly ever used, even by walkers and young couples out for some privacy in the woods. The Grey Wolves all lived – with one exception – away from the main body of the city itself, spurning contact with the suburbs and living near the forest, where they could take refuge if they had to escape in a hurry. It wasn't a perfect place to hide, but a man who knew the area well could escape while his hunters were still looking for him…and hide anything in the forests.

They'd cached the arms and supplies near an old house, one that made a convenient navigation post for the team, and it was fairly easy to find the location of the cache from it. He checked around the entire position first, just in case, before finding the hidden sheet of wood they’d buried just under a layer of dirt. It took a moment to find the edges and then pull it up, revealing a hidden pit stuffed with weapons and explosives, as well as a handful of other tools and some money. The Germans, it was generally expected, would want the British to use their money – that was what they had done in their other conquests – and so money had been provided. The weapons were all in good condition; they’d all been put through a course in handling them and treating them with respect, and they’d wrapped all the weapons up in covering.

It’s all there, he reassured himself, and carefully hid the cache again. If Hitler came to Britain, Davall would be able to hit a few of the Nazis before the Grey Wolves were hunted down like dogs. He strode away from the cache, found a path leading back down towards the village, and became an ordinary walker again. There was nothing to show that he had just been looking at enough weapons to fight a small war.

He checked his watch as he moved. He would have time to eat dinner with Kate and James before meeting the other Grey Wolves and discussing plans for the future. Somehow, deep inside, he was sure that this was the time – or else all of their preparations would be for naught.

***

“I never liked the sea,” Captain Harry Jackson confessed, as he stood next to Sergeant Henry Wilt, staring out to sea. He’d been born inland and had only seen the sea as a child on a visit to relatives in Poole, where he’d visited a beach and almost drowned. “What’s the point of us being here?”

Wilt gave him a mischievous look. “Because the Home Guard is supposed to be a countrywide organisation and Felixstowe cannot be left out of any preparations for defence,” he said, carefully. “If something should happen here, the army will expect us to serve as the first respondents to the crisis and deal with it.”

Jackson looked at him sharply. “And just what might happen here?”

“There was a major riot two years ago,” Wilt said, as they walked back towards the barracks. “There was a strike protesting something, and a boss sent in a group of hired thugs and…well, dockyard workers are tough, so they beat hell out of the thugs and then rioted. I think it required an army battalion to put an end to the rioting and a lot of people got hurt.”

Jackson looked around the dockyard complex. It was massive, with several large slips for massive freighters and a small MTB and destroyer base down the coast, providing a small base for the Royal Navy. Inland of the slips there were hundreds of warehouses and an entire rail line dedicated to moving cargo out of the dockyards and into Britain; behind that, he could see the town of Felixstowe, shimmering slightly in the early morning mist.  But the workers themselves looked thin and scrawny, the result of rations that were somehow never enough to keep themselves going.  And, as they were in a protected occupation, they couldn't even find work elsewhere.

“I can see why they rioted,” he said, as they passed by a massive freighter which was unloading a massive pile of crates, dockyard workers coming up to transport them away from the ship and towards the railway station. A set of trucks drove past and they moved out of the way, heading towards the gate; the entire dockyard was surrounded by a fence and a guarded gatepost. “Are there any security problems here?”

Wilt nodded towards a line of pubs, inside the fence. “We get German crewmen coming here and sometimes they get into fights,” he said. “There’s quite a lot of Polish workers here, people whose families fled Poland before the Germans invaded, and they don’t get on too well with the Germans. More seriously, we have had some spying incidents out here, although the Home Guard hasn’t actually done much apart from providing manpower if it’s needed.”

They passed through the gates and began walking towards the Home Guard barracks. They were smaller than a regular army barracks; according to Home Guard regulations, one Company was supposed to be ready for anything, and a second Company was supposed to be in reserve, but the other part-time soldiers were permitted to get on with their lives in-between serving their time on guard duty. There was a great deal to guard at the barracks: apart from providing sleeping space and offices for the senior officers of the unit, it also stored the unit’s weapons and equipment.

He grimaced. Junior officers in the Home Guard had been pressing for the soldiers to be allowed to take their weapons home with them so that they could be ready at any moment, if there was a problem. It hadn’t been considered politically possible, not with so much economic turmoil sweeping over the country, and it meant that the Home Guard had to report to their barracks before getting their weapons. If something did happen, they should have plenty of time to respond, but it worried him.

“Ah, Captain Jackson,” Colonel Felton-Smith said, as Jackson entered his office. “What did you make of the docks?”

“I think we really need more patrols round there,” Jackson said, honestly. “If there are security issues we need to tighten security and ensure that no one comes in or out of the docks unless we know who they are.”

“You think that the Germans will slip some spies into Britain,” Colonel Felton-Smith said, thoughtfully. “I have just received this information from the War Office; a message from General Slim himself.”

Jackson nodded as he read through the note. General Slim, an expert in fighting in the Far East and the Middle East, had recently been appointed the commanding officer of the Home Guard, second only to the Minister of Defence and the Prime Minister. It was a role he was suited for. He was tasked with organising the Home Guard around the issues that plagued part-time soldiers who also needed to work or take in the harvest when they were wanted to serve in the Home Guard. It was one of the reasons why only two companies of the Home Guard were serving at the barracks; the other soldiers had regular jobs and employment.

“He thinks that we should come to full readiness.” he said, puzzled. “Does that mean we should declare a full mobilisation and bring the Guard up to alert?”

“No,” Colonel Felton-Smith said. There was a bitter tone in his voice, one that surprised Jackson. “For reasons they haven’t bothered to explain to me, they want us to merely come to alert, but not to mobilise the full force.”

“I don’t understand,” Jackson said. He could understand reluctance to mobilise – it would cost a lot of money and cause considerable inconvenience to everyone involved – but if there was some reason to be worried, why not start the mobilisation anyway? “What do they mean by that?”

“Off the record, I got some whispers down the chain that suggested that there are some reasons to be worried about the Germans,” Colonel Felton-Smith said. He sounded irritated and Jackson didn’t blame him; the warning was so vague as to be almost useless. “They want us to take what precautions we can to make sure that if someone does declare a full mobilisation, the Home Guard can be raised to its full complement as soon as possible.”

Jackson ran through it in his head. There were, in theory, two thousand Home Guardsmen in the area. He privately suspected that it would take at least a week to get all of them concentrated, particularly if they weren't allowed to inform them ahead of time that they might be called up to serve. That sort of delay could be disastrous. They might manage to get a quarter of their established force up quickly, but even that would be tricky…

“It’s not going to be easy,” he said, thinking about the other units. Half of them were still out on exercise; they’d all have to be recalled, quickly. The others had returned to their civilian lives and it wouldn’t be easy to recall them all. “There’s no way that we can call them all up quietly?”

“No, it’s not going to be easy,” Colonel Felton-Smith said. Jackson remembered, suddenly, that the Colonel had fought in France during the Battle of France and left the country at Dunkirk. “Still, we’d better get on with it, hadn’t we? There’s no way of knowing how long we have before the balloon goes up.”
Chapter Seven

Berlin, Germany

Hitler was in a good mood, Himmler noted, as he entered the Führer’s war room. His leader’s face was split into a smile. The Fuehrer hadn’t been in such a good mood since the first reports had come back from the Russian Front, when his nerves about launching Operation Barbarossa had been swept away by the awesome successes of his army. Now, instead of a massive and inaccurate map of Russia, a scale map of Britain was hung prominently on the wall. A second set of maps was placed on the table. Himmler was no skilled map reader, but even he could tell how the massive fighting force that Hitler’s generals had assembled was straining at the leash, preparing to jump forward and attack the British.

“This is a day that will live for a thousand years,” Hitler said, as soon as the doors were closed. “On this day, the glorious forces of our Thousand Year Reich will finally put an end to the nation of shopkeepers and Jews that remains the one thorn in our side. Today…”

Himmler tuned him out. Hitler was capable of speaking for hours on a subject that interested him or one that he knew a great deal about, but he often ended up repeating himself. He might not be shouting at anyone, but if there was a defeat, even a tiny one, he would explode into a fury that would only be ended by his body failing. 

It didn’t seem fair, somehow; Hitler was the most important person in the Reich, and still he was fading under their eyes. There had been hundreds of experiments conducted on concentration camp victims to try to find a way of prolonging the Führer’s life, and even with some of the new techniques, Hitler’s lifespan was likely to be no longer than a handful of years, degenerating all the way. That particular secret had been kept from the German people, but what would happen when Hitler died? Who would become Fuhrer then?

His gaze met the gaze of Speer, and then Kesselring. Only one person could wield absolute power within Germany, and only Himmler himself could ensure that the Reich gave birth to the Aryan society that would dominate the world for the rest of time. He knew that he must win the power struggle that was sure to follow Hitler’s death or collapse. Britain would be a battleground in more ways than one; Himmler’s agents would have to ensure that the SS came out of the affair looking as if they’d borne sole responsibility for keeping the peace. There was a Waffen-SS unit earmarked for duty in the invasion, but only one of them; there could only be one reason for that. Kesselring didn’t want the SS to be able to claim credit for the early victories.

“That leaves us with one question,” the Fuhrer concluded, after nearly half an hour. “Do we still have the advantage of surprise?”

All eyes turned to Canaris. “The British have been engaged in a low-level alert for the past week,” he said, after a moment. “I do not believe that they are aware of the full scope of our plans, but they are certainly suspicious that we are up to something, even to the point of trying to send recon planes over France. We shot two of them down and refrained from making a formal protest; we don’t want them to think that we have something to hide.”

Hitler laughed and, after a moment, the others joined in. “Overall, however, the British seem not to have declared a full mobilisation,” Canaris continued. “We don’t know what they’re thinking, but without a complete alert, they are likely to be caught by surprise, at least on a tactical level.”

Himmler interjected a comment. “Through certain sources, I have established that there are elements within the British Government that suspect that we are planning something,” he said, revelling in his position of power. The military intelligence machine had been demanding to know about his sources for years, but Himmler had no intention of admitting that the SS was using socialists as a source of intelligence; that would have been seen as a sign of ideological weakness. “Churchill, Admiral Cunningham and others have been pressing for an increased alert status…”

“That dog,” Hitler burst out, furiously. Himmler nodded in agreement; Churchill was the one national leader who had defied the Fuhrer and gotten away with it. Stalin had crawled on his belly before the Fuhrer, after which he had been taken away and executed; Tito had killed himself the night before he had been scheduled to meet with the SS death squad. “The British should have exiled him from the country!”

“It is quite likely that the operation directed against London itself will succeed in killing him as well,” Himmler said. The SS’s Black Book on British citizens who were to be rounded up included much of the former British government and almost all of the British aristocracy. As natural leaders – or so Hitler saw them – they would end their days working in one of the slave camps or simply receiving a bullet in the back of the head. 

Himmler pushed his advantage. “Regardless, if Churchill is unable to convince the British that they need to come to alert, then there is no need to worry,” he said. “Even if the British come to their senses now, they will have almost no time to bring their forces up to readiness and strike at us first.”

Hitler calmed himself with obvious effort. “Yes, you’re right,” he said, absently boosting Himmler’s position in the coming power struggle. “What is their state of readiness?”

Canaris touched the map. “Their main units have been running through drills, but we believe that around a third of their soldiers are not on station, even in the Dover region,” he said. “If they had a day’s warning, they could recall their soldiers and airmen and prepare to engage the leading assault forces, but in the event they will only have hours and the confusion cannot help but benefit us. Their Home Fleet, in particular, just finished a set of drills and the crewmen will be exhausted; an ideal time to hit them.”

“Good,” Hitler said, reassured. “And now…our status?”

Kesselring, by common agreement, spoke first. “The airborne units are prepared for their missions,” he said. “The leading assault units for Scapa Flow are already running through their final checks and will be taking off within hours. Units with targets of importance will be take off in a coordinated effort so that they all enter British radar coverage at the same time. Those units have been given specific targets, although only a few of them are of vital importance.”

His fingers touched the map. “Luftwaffe 3 will be handling the most important section of the mission,” he continued. “They will launch a series of precision strikes against road and rail communications between the Dover region and the landing site, in Felixstowe. In addition, they will also drop two thousand parachutists into the area, with orders to carry out attacks against British troop formations, roads, rail lines, and other means of communication. Once the night comes to an end, the troops will withdraw back towards Felixstowe, where they will be reassigned and given other tasks as part of a general personnel pool.

“Luftwaffe 1 will launch heavy strikes against the ports, army units, airbases, and heavy fortifications of the Dover region.” he said. “They will also be dropping fake parachutists into the area, hopefully confusing the British defenders and convincing them that the main assault will be landing in Dover. Army units on the far side of the Channel will be simulating preparations for a landing for the first week of the campaign, whereupon they will be moved to join the invasion or held back, as the situation warrants.”

He nodded at the Fuhrer. “Overall, the Luftwaffe is prepared for its mission.” he concluded. “We should have no difficulty in making a mark on the British and winning air supremacy.”

The Fuhrer, remembering Goring’s failure in 1940 – and his later failure with the flying wing project – looked doubtful, but clearly decided not to push the issue. He looked over at Manstein, who straightened to attention and faced the Fuhrer with a firm gaze. Manstein knew just how much he could get away with, Himmler reflected. He was someone who it was best to keep a careful eye on just in case he developed ambitions of his own. The General Staff were supposed to be free of ambition, or at least political ambition, but Himmler didn’t believe it.  Everyone, in his experience, wanted power.

“The army stands ready to do its part,” he said, after a moment. “We have the Hans Bader already on its way towards Felixstowe; it will land just at twilight, whereupon it should hopefully avoid inspection long enough for the troops to deploy. If not, the commandos will assault anyway and take the port as quickly as possible, capturing the docking slips and the port’s supplies – as well as putting the Royal Navy units there out of action – and then they will hold it until the first heavy transport arrives.”

His bearing tightened slightly. “We were able to load enough supplies for the commandos to hold the port for hours, if there is a major delay, but we anticipate getting the first heavy transport into the dock within an hour, maybe less, as they will have sailed only an hour ago. Admiral?”

Generaladmiral Erich Raeder looked over at the Fuhrer. “The main invasion convoys are already being loaded and will be escorted by the vast majority of our warships,” he said. “The flotilla will make a high-speed run to Felixstowe, whereupon they will unload and return at once for additional units. French and Dutch ports have already been prepared for rapidly reloading the ships. Other ships, including smaller freighters and barges, have already been marked for seizure and deployment into a transport force. As long as we can keep the sea lanes open, we can keep reinforcing the beachhead.

He hesitated. “The danger remains that the British Home Fleet may be able to come out to engage our force,” he concluded. “If Home Fleet remains at its current strength, we will probably lose, despite the more modern nature of our battleships and the carrier tactics we practised with our yellow friends. If Home Fleet is crippled, we should be able to dominate the Channel until the battle on the land is concluded.”

Himmler kept his face blank with extreme care. The Japanese had taught the Reich much about carriers and carrier operations – three of the Reich’s carriers were based on Japanese designs – but it wasn't something that could be acknowledged in public. Officially, the designs had all been invented by the Kriegsmarine, which had developed them on its own. The truth was not something that could be shared with the world – it threw the ‘master race’ theory into doubt.

Manstein nodded his thanks. “To a certain degree, Field Marshal Rommel will have to improvise during the first few weeks of the war,” he admitted. “The reinforcement situation is the most critical part of the invasion; as long as the supply lines remain open, the British will lose in the end. We have better training, better equipment, and better soldiers. As long as we can keep the supplies flowing, we will win.”

“There does remain the question of the American angle,” Canaris said. Himmler felt the ripples of opinion running around the room and glowered inwardly. Canaris, he felt, overestimated the Americans, even if they were the only power left that could give the Reich a run for its money. “Churchill is surprisingly popular on the other side of the Atlantic and might well be trying to convince the Americans that we represent a danger to them as well. Do we have any way of defeating them if they decide to get involved?”

Himmler smiled. “The current mode in America is isolationist,” he said, recalling what one of his other unknowing spies had reported. “Certainly, they do have pressure groups, mainly Jews and a few others, pushing for a more vigorous response to the Reich.”

He shrugged. Hitler’s plans had grown larger and larger as his victories grew larger; he’d spoken before of one day carrying the war to the American continent. His delusions about the rest of the world were strange – he literally believed that New Zealanders lived in trees and had tails – but when matched with his mind, skilled at finding an opponent’s weaknesses, he was a formidable opponent. One day, Himmler was certain, the Americans would discover just what sort of nation Nazi Germany was, the day when the Reich would crush the American republic like a bug.

“It doesn’t matter,” Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel said. He was known as ‘lackey’ within the General Staff; Hitler used him as a mouthpiece, rather than as a serious officer. “If the Americans send everything they have now to Britain it will not alter the balance of power significantly, even assuming that their navy makes it across the Atlantic without being sunk by the horde of U-boats we have been launching into the waters. Upon a signal, they will all attack the American fleet and the Americans will be completely unprepared for their existence.”

Himmler understood; Keitel was speaking the Fuehrer’s own words. The Americans had been worried about the Japanese back in 1941, but when the Japanese had gone north into Soviet-held Russia, the American public had slipped back into apathy and the American Navy rebuilding program had been allowed to slip to a halt. The Americans barely had an army, nothing like the millions of men Hitler could send into battle, and in the time it would take for them to build one, the battle for Britain would have been decided, one way or the other.

“And so the American interest in the war will fade to an end,” the Fuhrer said. The confidence in his voice made Himmler smile. “Heinrich, what about Skorzeny and his commandos?”

Himmler smiled at Kesselring in triumph. Skorzeny was an SS man…and if his stunt worked, he would have ensured that the SS got a fair share of the credit for the invasion and its success. Himmler had read all the reports about the exercises carefully as the paratroopers went through their preparations, jumping out of planes at what seemed to be a ridiculously low altitude, then attacking the dummy target that had been prepared for them. The rate of training injuries shocked Himmler, who didn’t even like the sight of blood, but Skorzeny's men were ready for their operation.

“The unit went into lockdown after being transported to an airbase in northern France,” Himmler said, and enjoyed the look on his opponents' faces. “In” – he glanced at his watch – “less than an hour, they will take off and fly directly to London.”

“I have faith that Skorzeny will pull the operation off and succeed in decapitating the British,” Hitler said, his voice rising again. “Without their head of government, they will be unable to react in time to our advance, and we will rip the heart out of their island if they are so foolish as not to come to terms with us and take their place in the New Order.”

“Of course, Mein Fuhrer,” Himmler agreed. It was easy to praise the Fuhrer.  It was much harder to talk him out of anything. “The operation is a master-work”

Hitler looked up, around the war room, before finally looking down at Goebbels. “You have prepared the news?”

“Yes, Mein Fuhrer,” Goebbels said. His eager gaze met Himmler’s for a moment, and then he flinched away. He wasn't a candidate for true power in the Reich despite being one of the more intelligent of Hitler’s sycophants, and he knew it. It had made him bitter. “I have prepared the news release for the people, informing them that the British have been attacking us and finally we took pre-emptive measures to prevent a catastrophe.”

Himmler smiled at some of the reactions. Keitel and Speer looked as if they believed every word of it, although he doubted that Speer would accept such obvious nonsense. Manstein looked as if he didn’t care what excuse Hitler used to justify the invasion. Canaris, Kesselring and Joachim von Ribbentrop – who would have to present the news of the invasion to the remainder of the world – looked slightly disgusted, although Himmler wouldn’t have bet good money on Ribbentrop doing anything successfully for the Fuhrer. The man was an incompetent jumped-up wine salesman; his only real successes had come when he was dictating terms or when the other side had been eager for a deal.

Hitler straightened up, the Iron Cross he wore on his jacket flashing in the light. “I approve this operation,” he said, formally. Himmler felt the tension in the room rising as the Reich prepared another gamble, this one on dangerously uncertain territory. If the operation failed, it would shatter the one thing the Reich had in abundance; a reputation for being invincible. “Inform all of the troops; the operation is to commence immediately.”
Chapter Eight

Scapa Flow, Orkneys

As the sun slipped below the horizon, Benjamin Matthews glanced down once at his compass and then up at the darkening sky. It was only an hour to complete darkness. The little fishing boat was well away from the islands where Matthews and his wife lived, but they were used to fishing far to the east of the Orkney Islands. The little community had more fish than they knew what to do with, but fishermen could earn more money through catching extra, salting it, and shipping it to the mainland. So, Matthews had found himself and his small crew heading out to sea on a regular basis.

The war had never touched his community, apart from a handful of German bombing raids, one of which had killed a rabbit, and a German submarine that had sneaked into one of the Royal Navy slips and sunk a battleship. 

Matthews himself was too old and too important to be drafted into the Royal Navy or one of the other services, but his three sons had all been sent south to join the army. Matthews regretted that, somewhat. He might make some money by selling to the Royal Navy, but what did the quarrel with Germany have to do with the islanders? By and large, they ignored the mainlanders, asking only that the mainlanders ignored them in return.

“Start hauling the netting in now,” he called over to Morag, his daughter and first mate. He had never had any time for the suggestion that a woman shouldn’t be sailing with a man, particularly when his sons had been taken away from him. Besides, it kept Morag away from the sailors. He knew what sailors were like; he’d been one himself. “Let’s see what we’ve caught.”

It was the quiet that awed him more than anything else about sailing. They hadn’t seen a single ship or aircraft since they’d passed the destroyer that had been patrolling around the islands, well away from the main fleet base. He’d seen the great ships before, massive ugly brutes on the surface of the sea, but he preferred sailing ships to boats with engines. His fishing boat might have been primitive, but it was reliable and he could fix every part of the boat without needing to take it to a mechanic. His sons might change their minds and place their faith in massive fishing boats, but Matthews knew where he belonged, and what he gained from fishing alone.

“Yes, dad,” Morag said. At fourteen, she was lovely; she looked so much like his wife that it chilled him. He’d have to see about introducing her to some of the young men from the other island settlements before too long; that would ensure that she married a good man who would take care of her. Matthews was already feeling older and older each day and knew that one day, not too far away, he wouldn’t be able to get out of bed. He was just looking at her when he saw her head start up. “Dad, what’s that?”

Matthews blinked. Her hearing was sharper than his, but he could hear it too, now, a dull thrumming, echoing through the air. He looked around, wondering what could be causing such a noise…and then he saw them, moving through the air like a swarm of angry wasps. They took on shape and form rapidly as they flew west; aircraft, a massive flight of aircraft. Matthews tried to count them, even to estimate their numbers, but it seemed as if the sky was filled by thousands of black aircraft. He stared at them, trying to understand, and then it all made sense.

“Get the radio,” he cried, as he raced into the small cabin. He’d had a government-issue radio, like every other fisherman, just on the off-chance that they might spot something worth reporting to the military. He’d kept it charged because some of the fishermen used them to communicate between themselves, but he’d never used it himself to call the Royal Navy.

Morag didn’t understand, but he ignored her questions, struck suddenly by a sense of imminent doom.  There seemed to be no end to the stream of aircraft flying overhead, but he knew where they were going; they were making a direct beeline for the Royal Navy harbour. He picked up the radio, flicked switches until the radio was warming up, and then tried to make a broadcast.”

“This is Matthews, ID ORK3473,” he called. He’d been given a crash course on how to use the radio, but he’d forgotten most of it. “There’s a massive flight of German aircraft heading west, I repeat…”

“Dad,” Morag said. Matthews looked up to see a smaller black aircraft flying lower than any other, heading right towards the fishing boat. He knew exactly what it’s pilot had in mind; he’d heard from sailors who had been strafed by German planes, down towards the south. “Dad, I think…”

“I know,” Matthews said. He reached out and took his daughter in his arms. “I love you…”

The German plane opened fire, strafing the water and shattering the boat with explosive shells.  Moments later, the fishing boat blew apart and left nothing but wreckage drifting on the surface of the sea.

***
Admiral Fraser settled down in his bunk for the night, closing his eyes and trying to relax; it had been a long two weeks. His appointment as the commanding officer of Home Fleet – and hence the senior British Admiral actually on active duty – had been a pleasant surprise, but after nearly a year of commanding the fleet, he was starting to wish that he’d been left in command of the Gibraltar or Singapore fleet bases. He’d had up-to-date experience, or at least as much experience as anyone else in the Royal Navy, of modern battleship combat. He’d served on-board King George V as a Vice Admiral during the short but bloody combat with Italian battleships during 1943. They’d sunk two Italian ships there, losing no British battleships in exchange, although Nelson and Queen Elizabeth had been badly mauled by the Italians.

Fraser firmly believed that new technology would determine the shape of future war. In that, he was in full agreement with the Germans, who were pouring more and more resources into their Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe. The Home Fleet had sunk the Bismarck nine years ago, but it had been a close-run thing. The Bismarck had been stopped by a fluke, a lucky hit, more than anything else – and once that hit had disabled the ship, the Germans had been doomed. If the ship had broken out into the Atlantic, it would have had a disastrous effect on the Royal Navy’s attempts to keep the convoy system going. The Germans had actually risked the Tirpitz in 1943, but in that case Hitler’s fears had prevented the German battleship from being more than a worrying problem for the Royal Navy. Fraser didn’t want to think about what would have happened if the ship had been given to an aggressive commander – a German Nelson – who had the guts to ignore the bleating of the Fuhrer and move in for the kill.

And now, he fretted, the Fuhrer might have bad intentions towards Britain. Fraser had read the message from the War Office with a mixture of incredulity and disbelief before turning to the one from the Admiralty, which had been a bit clearer. Fraser was experienced enough to read between the lines and guess that someone expected the Germans to make trouble. But they didn’t want to make a major fuss in case it was a false alarm. Fraser had wanted clarification. However, Churchill had been direct but unhelpful and the War Office had dithered. Scapa Flow was not a popular place among the crewmen, even though the Royal Navy had done its best to provide facilities for the crews; Fraser’s orders to keep some of the fleet in readiness might keep some crewmen busy, but it wouldn’t be popular. He’d strengthened the defences as best as he could…

It felt like only moments before there was a banging at his cabin door. “Come in,” he called, pulling himself to his feet. His orderly should have prevented any disturbance unless it was urgent; he grabbed his jacket and pulled it on before the inner door opened, revealing a nervous-looking Midshipman. “Yes?”

The Midshipman looked as if he was going to faint at the mere thought of addressing an Admiral. “Sir, there has been a disturbing radio transmission, and Captain Abernathy would like to see you in the CIC at once,” he gasped out. “Sir…”

“Very good,” Fraser said, wryly certain that the young man expected to be thrown to the dogs at any moment for daring to address an Admiral. “I’ll be there directly.”

It was only a minute later when he entered the CIC of the battleship. His quarters had been placed right next to the CIC. He’d spent weeks of training ensuring that everyone knew how to use the systems they had developed for coordinating the fleet and using it in a battleship duel; he honestly felt that if they had had the system back in 1943, the Italian fleet would have been wiped out. Captain Abernathy straightened up at once and saluted; Fraser returned it without much irritation. He’d served with Captain Abernathy long enough to know that he never panicked over nothing.

“Sir,” Captain Abernathy said. His face looked grim in the red light of the radar screens. “Ten minutes ago, we picked up a radio transmission from one of the fishing boats, a transmission warning of enemy aircraft. We lost contact almost immediately afterwards and have been unable to raise them since.”

They’ve been sunk, Fraser thought, and felt his blood run cold.

“I ordered the radar stations to be turned on and…well, there’s a lot of vague contacts in the air,” Captain Abernathy continued. Fraser glanced down at the nearest radar screen and flinched; the contacts were resolving themselves even as he watched. “I think that…”

“Enemy aircraft rising up now,” a radar operator stated, his voice cutting through the babble. Fraser remembered a classified briefing on the performance of some of the newer German aircraft and cursed under his breath. “I have at least five hundred contacts!”

“Sound the air raid alarm,” Fraser ordered. Klaxons started to wail at once; he knew that they would be louder on the outside, echoing over the still waters of the loch and waking soldiers and sailors who had been trying to rest after the exercise. They had equipped and rearmed the anti-aircraft batteries, but he wasn’t confident that any of them would be able to take down a German aircraft, even slaved to British radar stations. “Launch the ready fighters and order the crews of the carrier-borne aircraft to get in the air as quickly as possible.”

He found himself grinding his teeth in rage as he realised he’d made a dreadful mistake. The carriers held nearly sixty aircraft each, but they had been flown off to the local airbases, just to limit the potential for disaster. If there had been an accident on the landing deck of a carrier, the entire ship could have been destroyed, but now…there would be a great deal of confusion as the pilots strove to get into the air. They’d be lucky to have more than half of their fighters in the air when the Germans commenced their attack…

“Send a signal to the Ministry of Defence,” he ordered, feeling his heart clenching in his breast. “Inform them…that we are under attack. Great Britain is, once again, at war with Germany.”

***
There were pilots who claimed to have broken the sound barrier in one of the Messerschmitt Me 270 aircraft, although Gruppenkommandeur Albrecht Schmidt didn’t believe them. He’d taken the aircraft through an entire series of fast dives towards the ground, an exercise that the pilots disliked as the engines sometimes staggered under the sudden changes in pressure, and hadn’t come close to actually breaking the sound barrier. It didn’t really matter; for the moment, the flight was the fastest thing in the air, and Schmidt was its point man.

He reached down and toggled his on-board radar. The Luftwaffe had developed smaller and smaller radars – ironically, they were based on an Italian design – but he’d been warned not to use it until they were making their final approach. It bothered him – if the British had been alert, they would have a chance to bounce his wing out of the sky – but he knew that radar signals travelled much further than they seemed. The British might be lurking just outside his range, but they would know he was there by detecting his own radar signals. The radar pulses raced ahead of his fighter, testing the boundaries of his reach, and bounced off a dozen British fighters, settling into a combat air patrol formation. Other fighters were rising into the air – too late. They wouldn’t have a chance to alter the outcome of the engagement.

“Richthofen, attack,” Schmidt ordered, and gunned his own engine forward. The aircraft lunged and raced towards a British fighter that turned to face Schmidt with a speed and agility that almost matched his own; the vaunted British Meteor was truly a worthy foe. He snapped off a quick burst of explosive cannon shells – if he hit the enemy fuel tanks, he would destroy the aircraft – and had the satisfaction of watching the Meteor explode in a flash of fire. A second British aircraft fired at him but narrowly missed and then evaded his return fire with a flip of his aircraft’s wings. He spun through the air, focused his nose on the enemy’s tail, and fired again. This time, the British plane spun down towards the ground.

White light flashed into existence as the first of the flares lit up. This was rapidly followed by explosions in the air as the British air defence guns opened fire, sending shells bursting in the air. The briefing had warned that the British had developed their own version of the proximity shell and Schmidt kept his aircraft evading, trying to avoid the ground fire even as he hunted down British targets. The white light of the flares cast an eerie glow over the entire horizon, illuminating the cold metallic shapes of the British fleet and the fires blazing up from where the aircraft had hit the ground. He cursed as a streak of tracer flew past, then threw the aircraft into a crash dive, levelling out barely above the ground and firing his cannon down towards a British aircraft on the ground. A line of explosions ripped through the airbase; he powered away from it before the defences could chase him away.

The entire battle was becoming a dreadful dogfight, with planes choosing their targets and trying to destroy the remaining British aircraft before it was too late. The Meteors were holding their own, but there were older aircraft now staggering up to join them. Schmidt guessed that they were carrier-borne torpedo-bombers or fighters, rather than land-based aircraft. The Reich had been experimenting with a carrier-borne jet fighter, but hadn’t managed to make one work properly. The British, as far as he knew, hadn’t had any success either. He fired down at one of them and smiled upon seeing it falling out of the sky before the radar screen flickered. The bombers had arrived. The white light grew brighter as the observers dropped more flares, allowing the bombers a chance to actually see their targets. Immediately after that, they launched their heavy weapons from their bomb bays. The bombs were the largest and most powerful ones that Germany had built. They were designed to punch through battleship armour and the armoured decks on carriers, and then explode within the vulnerable interior of the ships.

Schmidt tore his attention away from the rapidly growing inferno as more enemy fighters pounced on the bombers. He gave chase as the enemy aircraft attempted to engage the bombers, shooting down one of them before the enemy pilot knew that he was behind him. A hail of fire from the bomber reminded him of one of the very real dangers of the war, being shot down by his own side. He jerked away from the bombers, looking for more targets, knowing that it wouldn’t be too long before more enemy fighters appeared. He knew better than to hope for success even though raids had been scheduled on Scotland’s airbases just to ensure that the fighters based there had other problems than a major raid on the fleet base. The jet jerked as the heavy bombs started to explode down below. A fuel depot exploded on the island itself and lit up the area in red-yellow fires before spreading out of control.

The defenders on the ground were firing desperately towards the bombers, and one of them fell out of the air, falling towards the water, but it was too late. One of the bombs hit a carrier, another hit…

And then HMS Invincible exploded in a ball of flame.
Chapter Nine

Felixstowe, England

“I think that we’ll be in harbour within an hour,” Kapitän zur See Christian Wulff said, as the Hans Bader started to inch towards the green hills of the British homeland. Oberst Frank-Michael Baeck nodded as he studied the darkening hills with his binoculars, silently wondering if he would ever see Bavaria again; Britain had proven to be the graveyard of many reputations. “If we are lucky, they won’t want to inspect until the morning.”

Baeck said nothing. The short voyage had been hard on his men, even though they had trained endlessly for the mission; they all knew that if the British smelled a rat, a single destroyer would end their mission abruptly. A hail of shellfire would be more than enough to sink the Hans Bader, even though it had been covertly designed to be harder to sink than the average freighter.

“You seem quiet,” Wulff said, after a moment. “You’ve done everything you can, so why worry?”

Baeck glanced down at his watch. Rommel had said that there were other operations being planned against the British, but Baeck hadn't understood the sheer scale of the overall plan until a day before when the Hans Bader had set sail from Kiel. The timing had to be precise. If they got it wrong, even slightly, the British would catch on to their plan and unceremoniously sink the Hans Bader. Baeck wasn't given to reflection, but now, facing the British port and defences up ahead, he half-wished that he had turned down Rommel when he had offered him the mission. He had trained for the mission along with the others of his unit, but now…now they would finally put their training into practice.

“I’m a born worrier,” he said, as he lit a cigarette. “Why don’t they inspect our ships well away from anywhere that might be a target?”

Wulff shrugged. “The British Government doesn’t like having to deal with us, or at least having to deal with us openly,” he said, as they passed an MTB heading out to sea. Baeck tracked it with uneasy eyes, knowing that it too could sink their ship if it suspected what they really were. “For some reason their people don’t like us very much, and so we’re officially a German commercial ship rather than anything to do with the Reich itself.”

Baeck laughed. The Hans Bader would never have passed muster as a proper military ship, but it was well fitted to carry troops into a safe harbour, even while disguised as a commercial ship. They had replaced the cargo bays and cargo access points in the interior of the ship with a new structure that would allow his troops to leave the ship quickly and efficiently. If they took the port and its cranes intact, they could get most of the battle group out without any problems, and then secure the port and hold it against anything short of an armoured division. In the British place, he would have had an infantry division dug in at any possible landing place, but they had refused to spread out their forces that way. There was a Home Guard force near, he knew; how long would it take for the British to organise and mount a counter-attack?

“I’m going to check with the men,” he said, and headed down the ladder into the first of the infantry decks. He acknowledged the salutes of his men as he passed, waving some of them back down when they rose to stand at attention, others even tried to sleep. The soldiers enjoyed a relaxed atmosphere on ship; it was when they would be hitting their target that they would have to obey orders and fight as one. The Sergeants had been working overtime, preventing fights from breaking out in the confined quarters of the ship, while others had been studying the maps of their targets again, individual groups planning their actions as part of the overall plan.

He passed soldiers preparing their weapons and nodded in approval as the soldiers went through all of the steps. They’d all had weapons care and safety drummed into them from the first day at the training centre; now, they should all be able to field-strip an automatic weapon blindfolded and under enemy fire. Others held rocket launchers, antitank weapons and smaller grenade launchers and mortars. They were prepared to meet an armoured counter attack if one was mounted. They had practised endlessly; now, finally, they would have a chance to see if it worked as well in practice as it had when they were training.

He whistled once and waited until all of the section leaders had come up to surround him. There was no room on the Hans Bader for a proper conference room, although he would have refused one if it had been offered; he preferred to work with his men in the field. He spread out a chart of the docks and went through all of the objectives one by one.

“When I blow the whistle, you will all send your units towards your targets,” he said, at the end. The first few moments of the assault would be organised chaos, for them as much as for their British opponents; everything would depend upon the courage and experience of the German NCOs and the handful of officers in charge of the separate units. “Remember, we want prisoners, not dead dockyard workers, understand?”

“Jawohl, Herr Oberst,” they said, one by one. 

Baeck nodded as they all confirmed that they understood; if they could press British dockyard workers into service, it would speed up the unloading phase and maybe even earn them some friends, if the workers were paid well.

“Good,” he said. “Have your units prepared in ten minutes.”

Night was falling as he climbed out of the hold and up towards the bridge, slipping past the hidden bulges that normally held lifeboats, and now held small naval guns that could be used to provide fire support if the assault force required it. The dockyard rose up before them as they sailed closer. They headed in through a set of concrete posts and approached a large docking slip. He glanced down again at his watch as the ship slowed down, water spraying around as it turned and started to mosey into the docking slip.

“Good,” Wulff said, almost to himself. Baeck, scanning the harbour with his binoculars, taking in the details of the dockyard, didn’t reply. “They’re allowing us to dock tail-end, as if we were going to unload cars.  And they’ve spared us the tugs.”

Baeck’s lips twitched. “We are going to unload cars,” he said, as a small group of British inspectors appeared at the side of the docking slip. The crewmen worked rapidly to secure the ship to the quayside, extending a long plank for the British to walk up, all the while watching the entrances to the interior of the ship nervously. “Is that your friend there?”

“Yes,” Wulff said, tersely. “Remember, we need them alive, if possible”

Baeck signalled to a small group of his men, hidden inside the bridge, as the four inspectors started to walk up the gangplank, heading towards the bridge, and entered as if they owned the ship. Wulff had spoken of them with scorn and disdain; the inspectors had never sailed on a ship in their lives, he’d said, but held themselves competent to judge a real seafarer. He nodded to his men as the bridge door closed behind them and inspectors found themselves seized by the storm-troopers

“You are now prisoners of the Greater German Reich,” Wulff said, to one of them. The expression on his face made Baeck smile. “Heil Hitler!”

Baeck didn’t wait to see what the Englishmen would do; he reached for his whistle and blew it as loudly as he could, drawing his side-arm at the same moment and heading out of the bridge. The side of the ship burst outwards, as if someone was trying to break out of the hull, revealing German commandos carrying ropes and heavy weapons. One group raced down the gangplank, shouting out commands for the dockyard workers to get down on the ground and stay there. Others leapt off the side of the ship, using their ropes to get down to the ground as fast as possible and run towards their targets. A brief burst of automatic fire echoed out, followed by several singe shots from handguns; someone, up head, was resisting as best as they could. The commandos kept charging, leaving the stunned workers on the ground and left them there for their fellows to round up; Baeck barked an order to his secondary groups and watched grimly as the prisoners were herded into a warehouse. It was normally used for goods from the Hans Bader; now it would hold the prisoners until they could be convinced of their duty to serve the Reich.

“I want that rear-hatch open now,” Wulff shouted. The inspectors were hauled off. One of them shouted insults at Wulff, the others looking as if they’d been hit in the head several times. One of them was muttering under his breath about his wife and family, wondering if he would ever see them again. Baeck didn’t reassure him as explosive charges echoed through the ship and released the rear of the ship.

He heard the roar of engines as the first armoured car charged out of the ship and out onto the dockyards, advancing to support the unit that was attacking the gate. The Home Guard had clearly had a number of guards at the gate, and they were on the verge of breaking. Other forces were offering resistance as well, but his commandos dealt with unarmed dockworkers with ease and rounded them all up, expanding the prison warehouse into several more warehouses.

The armoured car opened fire with its heavy machine gun and the Home Guard position disintegrated. A man in a brown uniform was seen fleeing towards Felixstowe itself, probably to summon help, but a commando shot him in the back and he crashed to the ground with a thud that was far louder than normal. Baeck checked his watch as more firing broke out from the further regions of the docks. One of the ships had had an armed crew and was trying to fight back. The Hans Bader crewmen unfurled their own guns; a moment later, they fired a single shot towards the enemy position and resistance came to an abrupt halt.

“Report,” Baeck ordered, as Hauptmann Johannes Dempfle ran up to him. “What about the Royal Navy?”

“We have them penned into their compound and are preparing an assault now,” Dempfle reported. “The main body of the dockyards is in our hands and we can commence the unloading as soon as Kapitan Wulff is ready. Resistance within the dockyards itself has been light, but several people definitely escaped down towards the city itself and they’ll have spread the word.”

“Understood,” Baeck said. Behind him, the heavy guns on the Hans Bader pounded the British position. The British hadn’t had their ships ready to move, or else they would have attempted to get the destroyers out and pour fire on them from a safe distance; instead, the destroyer was being shelled to pieces by the converted civilian craft. “And the exterior of the docks?”

“The fence remains largely intact and we have parties moving up to secure the gates and prepare to hold them against a counter-attack,” Dempfle assured him. “We have taken several hundred prisoners, mostly workers with a handful of policemen and government inspectors, only one of them is a Home Guard soldier and he’s badly wounded.”

“See to it that he gets the best medical care possible,” Baeck ordered. He lifted his small radio to his lips. “Wulff, this is Baeck; I want you to start the main unloading process now, and signal back to the transports that we’ve taken most of the docks.”

He followed Dempfle down onto the docks and around the stern of the freighter, where a torrent of supplies were being unloaded onto the grounds and rapidly distributed around to the soldiers as they switched around, rounded up prisoners, and spread out to secure and hold the dockyard gates and exterior. The British had left them plenty of material to secure the docks and the soldiers worked rapidly. Meanwhile sailors from the Hans Bader inspected the other ships in the dockyard, preparing to sail them back to a port where they could be loaded up with soldiers. The scene lit up as one of the soldiers discovered the controls for the searchlights, turning night into day and allowing the soldiers to see what they were doing, even as other soldiers unloaded night-vision gear and headed over to the gates, preparing the defences for their inevitable test.

A young Leutnant ran up behind him. “Herr Oberst, we have heard from the transport command,” he said. “The first transport is only an hour away and the main convoy is altering course now; it’ll be here in three hours at most.”

Unless the British intercept it, Baeck thought coldly, careful to keep that particular doubt off his face. He’d gone through all of the logic behind the invasion as best as he could, but he knew that the main battle group, heavily escorted by almost every ship in the Kriegsmarine, would be a target that the British could hardly fail to miss. He’d been briefed on the strike on Scapa Flow and the air strikes that were, even now, being deployed against targets further to the west, but they would only delay the British at best. If the main transport convoy failed to arrive, the invasion was doomed.

“Good,” he said, shortly. “My compliments to Hauptmann Dempfle and inform him that I want the defensive perimeter pushed out as far as it will go without reducing our ability to concentrate our fire. In fact…”

His voice broke off as the noise of aircraft engines echoed overhead, dark shapes moving against the sky, barely visible in the mixed darkness and brilliant lights of the searchlights. He found himself praying, just for a moment, that they were German aircraft, rather than British pilots looking for targets; if the British had reacted in time to send in bombers, a single lucky hit could take out the entire invasion force. The noise faded slowly towards the west, and then, moments later, he heard bombs falling and saw explosions lighting up the skies.

“German aircraft,” he said to the young Leutnant. The young man had never seen combat before, not even the harshest training available to the Reich could match the sheer intensity of real combat. “Inform the Hauptmann at once, if you please.”

A second set of explosions, much closer, signalled the fall of the Royal Navy enclave. He watched grimly as the handful of prisoners were marched unceremoniously from their enclave to another of the warehouses, while assessment teams of his own people went to work, looking for anything that the force could use to hold the docks against the impending counter-attack. He stepped aside as smaller teams unloaded the small artillery guns and started to position them around the docks. Others scrambled up the cranes and took up positions where they could attempt to direct their fire. The longer the British waited, the harder it would be to recover their docks, but at the same time, they would be able to bring substantially more forces to bear on his position. He recalled the map he'd memorised of the surrounding area, running through the maths again; assuming a competent enemy commander, and he dared assume nothing else, they could have had a counter-attack on the way by now.

He walked quickly back to the command post. He glanced down at the handful of radio operators, each one trying to coordinate the defences, and studied the map one of them had set up. A German commander would have made a contingency plan as a matter of course; the British commander either didn’t have a plan or didn’t have the ability to execute it. It was tempting to believe that they'd already killed the commander, but he knew better than to believe that that was what had happened; they couldn’t have been that lucky.

“We recovered some ammunition and weapons from the Home Guard building,” Hauptmann Dempfle informed him. “I have had them distributed back to the sailors to put them out of the way unless we need them.”

Baeck nodded, trying to understand; the noise of aircraft high overhead was rising and falling as the Luftwaffe pounded British targets. His watch was suddenly a heavy weight on his wrist; he checked it absently and found that there were forty minutes until the first transport arrived, bringing reinforcements and the fighting power he would need to hold the docks long enough for Rommel himself to land.

“Herr Oberst,” one of the operators said, suddenly. His voice caught Baeck’s attention at once; junior officers would never interrupt their seniors unless there was an urgent reason. “Gate Three is reporting that there is movement on the main road, approaching the docks.”

Baeck, oddly, felt relieved. “Inform all posts,” he said, “the counter-attack is about to begin.”
Chapter Ten

Scapa Flow, Orkneys

The battleship rang like a bell.

“Direct hit to our stern,” someone shouted. Admiral Fraser barely heard him over the noise as the battleship shook again. The Germans were deploying remote-controlled weapons, glide bombs he’d only seen vague reports about, and the British Home Fleet was taking a beating. If there were still any British fighters in the air, they were making no apparent impact on the bombers. “Captain, the rear turrets have been disabled.”

The battleship’s guns yammered out again, seeking targets somewhere up in the sky, trying to hit the German planes through sheer luck. They were meant to be slaved to radars, but under all the confusion, the fire control system had broken down; they were effectively shooting at random. If the hit was as bad as it seemed, the King George V had just had her fighting power cut in half.

“Take us out into the channel,” he ordered the Captain through the intercom, hoping that the system still worked. The fleet had been at anchor, making them sitting ducks for the Germans. If they could start the ships moving, the Germans would have problems hitting the remainder of the fleet. The nightmare just raged on and on, with more bombs coming down. He heard the shouts from his men, reporting damaged or sunken ships, and felt cold.

The pounding noise of the engines echoed through the ship as he felt the battleship lurch into motion. The King George V was supposed to be one of the fastest battleships in the world – although both the Germans and Japanese claimed to have built faster ships – but it felt as if the battleship was having real problems moving at only a slow rate. The damage might have been worse than he had feared, even though the anti-aircraft guns were still firing endlessly into the dark. If the stern had been damaged, the ship might not be able to make it to another dock before it was too late. How badly had the Germans pounded the facilities on the islands?

“HMS Victorious has been sunk,” someone said, his voice an expression of doom. Fraser winced. Victorious had been one of the newer carriers in the fleet.  She had the finest record for launching her fleet of fighter aircraft and torpedo bombers, but now the carrier had been blown apart. 

The Germans had known about the British armoured flight decks. It was something that had given the carriers their chance of survival in the last war. So they had prepared their weapons to compensate. The glide bombs punched through the armour before detonating right next to the aviation fuel and the torpedoes the carrier crew would load onto the aircraft, blowing the ship apart. “Admiral, the destroyers are clearing the anchorage now.”

But they’re not here for the destroyers, Fraser thought, grimly. The Germans intended to wreck the fleet; it was the only thing that they could want, even though British destroyers were nothing to laugh at. If the Germans took out enough of them, there wouldn’t even be a chance for raiding the German supply lines at night.

“We need to get the battleships and cruisers out of the anchorage,” he told himself, wondering if the German admiral on the Bismarck had felt so helpless. The battle was being fought and the outcome was being determined…and he was powerless to affect either. He had to preserve Home Fleet as a viable weapon of war, but his capability to do that was limited, almost non-existent. Once the Germans stopped bombing, all he could do was pick up the remainder of his fleet and start repairing the damage.

The ship shook again, and he cursed under his breath.

***
“Keep firing,” Brian Timpson ordered, as the massive anti-aircraft gun fired a shell into the air, aiming at a German bomber that was trying to fly down towards the anchorage, bombs falling and gliding down towards the ships with an eerie precision that sent chills falling down his spine.

His crew worked like an assembly line, loading, firing, reloading and then firing again, trying to shoot a German aircraft out of the sky. The sky itself was lit up by the strange white light of the German flares and the flames licking up from the dockyards. One massive column of fire thrust into the air from one of the fuel dumps. Timpson silently prayed for the safety of the firemen who would be trying desperately to put the fire out before it spread into one of the ammunition dumps. If it reached the explosives, the area would look like hell on earth.

His gaze tracked a German aircraft as it flew high overhead launching a bomb, and his crew fired a shell at it. The radar screen was completely fuzzed out, but they knew they had to keep filling the skies with explosions and flying shrapnel. One of the proximity fuses detonated and sent a German aircraft spiralling down in flames. It crashed into the ground and exploded with a noise that he could hear through his earmuffs, over the deafening noise of the battle. His gun’s bark sounded again and again, the noise of the other anti-aircraft guns, the heavy guns on the battleships, the roaring of German aircraft high overhead…all of them were merging into one single terrible noise, as if it were the end of the world.

“Got him,” he shouted, suspecting that none of his unit would hear him. They might not have been the people who’d hit the aircraft either. There was no way to know with all the shells detonating up there, most of them hitting nothing, or maybe even fired at the wrong side. The RAF was supposed to be up there as well – he saw a second German aircraft falling out of the sky before exploding in mid-dive – but there was no way to tell the difference between brave British pilots and underhand German pilots; they’d just have to shoot at what looked like bombers and hope.

Another flare burst in the sky and he covered his eyes, gazing out over the anchorage, and feeling awe…and terror. He’d admired the big ships when he’d been a child. His lame leg had prevented him from becoming a crewman, and it had only been through sheer luck that he’d been given command of a battery. Now, however, half of the big warships were burning, and several of them had been sunk. He watched as flames spread over a small cruiser. Moments later, the magazine exploded and the cruiser shattered.

The sight held him. He nearly forgot about the need to keep firing at the Germans. A German aircraft went down into the water, narrowly missing crashing into a destroyer as it was steaming out of the harbour. The plane sent a massive fountain of water into the air upon impact. The noise kept growing louder as the German planes came lower, but fewer were plummeting from the air. He could see crewmen abandoning burning ships, trusting to the waters below to break their fall, but the waters themselves were ablaze as fuel oil drifted across the waves. The entire harbour looked as if it were on fire. He saw the dockyards and a battle-cruiser that had been in the docks for servicing, burning with the dull flames of ignited fuel. Just for a moment, as an earth shattering roar echoed out over the harbour. One of the battleships lifted out of the water, before flying apart and crashing down in ruins. The remains wouldn’t stay afloat for long. 

He screamed curses into the air, shouting at the Germans who had ruined the fleet, but all he could effectively do was keep firing into the sky as German aircraft continued their destruction of the harbour…and of his beloved navy.

***
The sight held Gruppenkommandeur Albrecht Schmidt’s eyes as he took in the scale of the devastation. He’d been warned by some of the older hands in the Luftwaffe that the scale of the damage was sometimes inversely proportional to how impressive it looked, but he was sure that the damage was vast and beyond easy repair. The British fighters had faded from the skies. He allowed himself a moment to relax, and consider the use of the rocket pods mounted under his wings. He hadn’t done much damage on the ground yet, and he wanted to wreak havoc before the order came to withdraw in a body. Some of the bombers had already started to retreat, having run out of bombs to drop on the British. It wouldn’t be long before he got the order to leave.

He glanced down at his chronometer and blinked; had it really only been fifteen minutes since they’d started the attack? He found it impossible to believe; it felt as if he’d been drifting above the burning wonderland for hours, watching like a god from on high as the British base burned and their proud fleet was reduced to ruin. Some of the ships were clearly still moving, heading out towards the North Sea and the U-boats that awaited them out there. Some of the subs crept closer to the harbour, well aware that any ship they encountered would be British. The British fleet wouldn’t know what had hit them…

His lips twitched. Actually, they’d know for certain what had hit them; they just wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

A flak burst only a few meters from his aircraft, reminded him that he was still in danger and he took the jet into a crash-dive, only levelling out bare metres above the water and flying low towards the burning ships. The water was full of British sailors, some of them panicking, others trying to salvage as much as they could, and he was tempted to machine gun them before remembering himself and the rules of war. The British weren’t monsters and would treat captured Germans decently, as long as the Germans treated British prisoners decently…and machine gunning helpless men wouldn’t improve the Reich’s reputation. Instead, he lifted the aircraft up, flew over a burning cruiser, and zoomed towards a small airfield on one of the islands.

He grew tense as he selected his targets. The British had had a perfect harbour and anchorage for their fleet in the Orkneys, and they’d been working on it for years, developing it into their main fleet base. It hadn’t been defended very well, but if the British had had a proper warning, or a radar plane in the air, the battle might have gone the other way. He saw the hangers and fired his rockets. They had been designed for antitank operations, but instead, they would suffice for use on a hanger that might hold important aircraft. A series of explosions rewarded his efforts, and he yanked back on the stick, screaming back into the air as the hanger disintegrated below him. They must have stuck several armed bombers or submarine-hunting aircraft in the hangers. The British had an entire line of such aircraft, all of which would be useless in a dogfight. However, the U-boat crews would be glad to know that many of them had been destroyed.

“Attention, we have enemy fighters coming in from the south,” the operator called. “All fighters, move to engage.”

Schmidt checked his ammunition – he’d fired off nearly two-thirds of his cannon shells – and turned the aircraft around, taking a quick glance at his on-board radar as he raced towards the British aircraft. They were probably more Meteors, coming towards them with fresh pilots and full ammunition, and that meant that they would have an advantage. He did a quick roll call and discovered that his flight had lost seven aircraft, either to the British aircraft or their guns on the ground; it would have been worse if they hadn’t been trying to stop the bombers.

“It’s time to take our leave,” the raid commander ordered, from the command aircraft. Schmidt had never liked that precaution, even though it ensured that the raid commander knew exactly what was going on. If the British had shot him down, there would have been a certain amount of confusion in the ranks. “Richthofen, engage the enemy fighters until the bombers have reached a safe distance.”

“Jawohl,” Schmidt said, and threw his fighter forward. He felt tired, as if every part of him had been in a massive struggle, but at the same time, he felt elated at his success. The lead British plane snapped a burst of tracer off at him and he dodged it with ease before firing back himself and swinging into a full-on dogfight with the Meteor. Losses would be roughly even now, but the British had even less experience than his own people. Both sides would be learning on the job. 

The British pilot was good, he noted ruefully, flipping over himself and turning to engage him through a crazy series of loop-the-loops. He also had more ammunition. Every time he looked as if he might be able to hit Schmidt, he fired off a burst long enough to make Schmidt curse and dodge his fire, while Schmidt couldn’t fire back with such abandon because he had only limited ammunition of his own. Several of his pilots were retreating now, their ammunition drums empty; they’d be nothing less than sitting ducks for the British pilots. Finally, his opponent made one tiny mistake, and Schmidt stitched his cockpit with explosive bullets. The British aircraft exploded in mid-air

“All fighters, break off and return to the rendezvous point,” the raid commander ordered. Schmidt glanced down at his displays automatically, taking in the limited fuel and knowing that if they didn’t reach the tankers, they’d be going down in the cold North Sea. “Leave the remaining British and retreat.”

Schmidt didn’t bother to answer. He fired one last burst at a British aircraft, turned, and shot away. His aircraft was supposed to have a better acceleration rate than the British Meteor, and now he put it to the test as the remaining Richthofen fliers broke off and ran. The British gave chase over the burning dockyards, but eventually they broke off as they passed over the harbour limits and headed back towards their base. Schmidt allowed himself a sigh of relief; if the British had pushed after them and forced them into a dogfight, they would have burnt off too much of their fuel.

He glanced back in the mirror as they settled into their course. Scapa Flow was burning behind them, explosions still showing up as flames reached ammunition dumps and unexpended ammunition down on the ground, wrecking the harbour still further. The British would be able to put out the fires quickly – they had the entire North Sea for water – but repairing all the damage would take years.

It had been a good night’s work.

***
An hour later, Admiral Fraser stood up in a small motorboat, watching grimly as the crewman conning the boat took him on a long path around damaged ships and still-burning facilities on the shore, allowing him to make an inspection. Searchlights glared out, illuminating the scene, but he would have been happier not seeing anything at all. Here and there, the wreckage of a once-proud ship broke the waves, or the underside of a ship was clear to the eye, signalling a ship that had capsized and somehow failed to sink. Years ago, when Fraser had been a younger man, the Germans had scuttled their fleet in Scapa Flow; now, they’d wrecked a large chunk of the British Navy.

He felt a tear in his eye as he stared at the wreckage of an aircraft carrier. It had been one of the older ones, serving valiantly during the last war, and perhaps the Germans had targeted it out of spite. A single bomb had blown it open and the wreckage was now scattered over the water. Another battleship had been run aground by her captain to prevent her from sinking, a precaution that Fraser couldn’t disagree with, even with the need to get as many of the ships out as possible.

It was unbelievable; forty ships destroyed or seriously damaged, nine of them capital ships. Home Fleet no longer existed as an organised fighting force, and it would take weeks to organise the fleet into something that might be able to sail in the same direction without causing vast confusion. He had only one carrier and two battleships left, and that wasn’t enough to defeat the German fleet, particularly as most of the carrier’s aircraft had been destroyed on the ground. They could summon up reinforcements from the Fleet Air Arm base at Southampton, assuming that that base hadn’t been hit as well.

He closed his eyes. He had just presided over the greatest naval defeat in British history…and he had a nasty feeling that worse was to come. The Germans wouldn’t have launched such an attack without intending to follow up on it, and that meant an invasion of Britain. The invasion might already be under-way…and his ability to do anything about it had been almost completely wiped out. The German invasion fleet might already be on its way…

And, if they landed in Britain, they might be impossible to dislodge.
Chapter Eleven

Felixstowe, England

Captain Harry Jackson was asleep when the alert started, but the noise of explosions and gunfire brought him out of his bunk faster than a cat chasing a mouse, one hand grasping the pistol he kept by his bed and the other snatching up his torch. The clamour grew louder and somehow more disturbing. It took him a moment to realise that he was hearing German weapons, not British.

Invasion, he thought, snapping awake. It couldn’t have been a drill, not under such circumstances; he yanked on his jacket – he’d slept in his uniform, a habit he’d picked up from the regular army – and ran down the stairs into the barracks, where the Sergeants were working to restore some order. He barked a quick order at Sergeant Wilt as he passed and ran outside, onto the small parade ground, to peer in the direction of the harbour. There were flames rising up from the Royal Navy base and the chatter of gunfire was getting louder.

He spun around and ran back inside the building. “Have weapons and ammunition issued at once,” he barked to the Sergeants. “Send the staff officers down to the town to round up the others, now!”

“Yes, sir,” Wilt said, passing him a rifle and a set of ammunition.

Jackson took it and walked quickly into his own office. The din of fighting was becoming louder. He was required to carry out his duty step by step and that meant informing higher authority of the attack. He dialled the first number, a direct link to the local GHQ, and cursed as the line failed moments later. He went through the second number, then the third, and there was still no reply. The War Office was silent – or, he dared to allow himself to hope, the lines had been cut somewhere by German spies. He dialled a local number and sighed in relief when it was answered.

“Father, I need you to sound the church bells at once,” he said, when the sleepy priest answered the telephone. He’d met the man before, when he’d taken up the command; he had seemed surprised at even the vaguest possibility of German invasion. The churches represented a vital part of the warning network. Once the church bells started to chime at night, the men on leave would know that they needed to report to the barracks. “Don’t argue; just do it!”

He heard the aircraft overhead and was on the floor under the table before his mind quite caught up with his body. The aircraft had come in from the east, which made them German aircraft, and they might intend to bomb the barracks. The panic alone would kill hundreds; it had been seven years since British cities had been bombed from the air.

The sound of aircraft faded slightly, to be replaced by the sound of explosions in the west. He abandoned the phone and ran down the stairs, back out onto the parade grounds. There were fires in the west now, spreading out, at a guess, near the railway lines. The Germans were aware that the British would use them to move their forces. They would have targeted them deliberately and that suggested to Jackson that the invasion force at the docks was the main invasion force, one that intended to hold the docks long enough for reinforcements to arrive. It was obvious how the trick had been done. The Germans had done the same when they’d invaded Norway.

The scene was chaotic but showed signs of order as the Home Guardsmen attempted to line up, receive ammunition, and get into something reassembling order. Jackson felt a moment of despair, which he squashed ruthlessly under his duty and caught on to Sergeant Wilt as the sergeant worked to assemble the armoured cars. Other guardsmen were running in as they were awakened by the explosions and the church bells. It wouldn’t be long before civilians caught on and realised that they were at the heart of a war zone.

“Get the first platoons out there and seal off the port,” he ordered. The port was isolated from Felixstowe itself by the fence, but he doubted that it would take the Germans more than a moment to break it down and attack the town itself. He would have preferred to dig into the town and hold it for as long as possible, but that would give the Germans a chance to reinforce and then expand out and surround the town. He raised his voice for a moment. “I want motorcycle riders, now!”

Three of them, all younger soldiers, stepped forward. They looked achingly young to Jackson’s eyes. They had joined the Home Guard in lieu of being conscripted into the regular army, or had some problems that had prevented them from serving in the army. He saw fear in their eyes, but also a kind of grim determination; they wouldn’t break and run from the struggle. It was almost a shame that he needed them for something other than fighting.

“I need the three of you to take your bikes and get to GHQ,” he said, thinking as fast as he could. “Inform the General that we have a German invasion on our hands and I intend to attack them as soon as possible.”

“Yes, sir,” the senior soldier said. “Are there any other messages?”

Jackson glanced over towards the glow surrounding the port. “Inform him that we need reinforcements as quickly as possible,” he said. “Take different routes, just in case of trouble; once you have delivered the message, attach yourself to his command and wait for orders. Dismissed!”

He watched as they ran towards their bikes, recovering them and saluting before they roared off into the distance. Jackson hoped that one of them, at least, would reach the General; without regular army support, the Home Guard might be badly out-gunned He took a final look into the west, seeing the fires still burning, and walked quickly over to the gathered collection of soldiers. He knew most of them personally, others didn’t come from his Company; there was no sign of the Colonel.

“I am assuming command as the Colonel hasn’t come to the barracks,” he said, remembering that his commanding officer had been intending to inspect the docks. He might be dead already. “Our task is to recover the port before the enemy can ship in reinforcements.”

The soldiers spread out as they advanced towards the docks, the armoured cars taking point and heading towards the main gate, which were burning. There were no signs of enemy soldiers, but Jackson was sure that that would change quickly; if the Germans behaved as he had been briefed, they would have dug in and prepared to halt any counter-attack. Tanks were of limited use against such a dug-in position, but he would have sold his soul to get a few, and some heavier guns as well. The follow-up units would be bringing their heavy weapons, but he wanted some heavy artillery, maybe even air support.

The first shots caught him by surprise and he fell to the ground quickly, hoping to avoid being shot as German fire crackled through the night. They were firing single shots, he realised, and they were being depressingly accurate; even in the semi-darkness, they’d hit several of his men. He’d heard of night-vision equipment, but the Germans seemed to have eyes like cats. Was their kit much better than the equipment that the Home Guard had been issued? The Guardsmen returned fire; after a moment, the armoured cars fired as well, hosing down the remains of the gates with machine gun fire.

The infantry followed, using the armoured cars to shield themselves from enemy fire as the armoured cars ground up to the gates…and then the lead car exploded. Jackson saw men falling backwards under enemy fire as a second mine detonated, and then a third…and then a streak of light destroyed a fourth armoured car. The Germans had antitank rockets, he realised grimly, as his men scattered, aiming frantically at the location of the enemy holding the rocket-launcher. Sparks in the distance and a shout in German, barely audible under the noise of the firing, suggested that someone had killed the German soldier, but there would be hundreds more. How many could the Germans fit into one freighter?

“Call up the heavy guns,” he ordered, as the first mortar round arced over the gates and fell down near his men, luckily missing them all. The Germans didn’t seem to notice. Their mortar teams kept firing the little shells over the gates, even as his own men threw grenades back into the German positions. Sergeant Wilt mounted a grenade on the end of his rifle and fired it over the gates, hitting something that exploded with disproportionate violence…and then the first German armoured car made its appearance.

“Shit,” Jackson muttered, as it appeared through the smoke and darkness, launching a flare into the night. For a long moment, everyone was blinking tears out of their eyes and the firing paused before it resumed, stronger than ever. The Germans charged forwards under the cover of the armoured car, crashing into his men and struggling with them for the position as the fighting got really out of control. It was becoming a melee and he knew just how dangerous those could be; Wilt hit the armoured car with a grenade and disabled it, but the Germans didn’t seem to be losing their enthusiasm for the fight.

“Coming, sir,” Sergeant Boothroyd called, as the roar of a bulldozer appeared and the massive machine pushed into the rubble. Jackson smiled as the sergeant gunned the engine and started to push through the wreckage, before a German soldier came forward and attempted to throw a grenade right into the cab. He was gunned down before he could swing and the grenade exploded moments later, blowing whatever remained of his body to bloody ruin. A second later, a German antitank rocket, designed to burn through armour, struck the bulldozer and sent it up in flames, trapping the sergeant and killing him before he could escape.

Jackson heard the noise of heavy guns behind him as the follow-up units established their positions and began firing into the docks, but they were effectively firing blind. They’d hit something, but what? The Germans didn’t seem to be alarmed at first, and then they changed their minds…and launched a sweeping counter-attack of their own against the guns. The Home Guard knew about the German proficiency at mounting such attacks on the spur of the moment, but how could they handle it in the semi-darkness? One of the gun crewmen fell and died as a sniper put a bullet through his chest; a second was hit moments after he fired a final shell on his own into the docks. The Germans were still coming towards them…

“Sir, we have to fall back,” Sergeant Wilt barked, firing towards the Germans with his own rifle. The counter-attack was falling to pieces right in front of Jackson; without tanks and armoured support, taking the docks back was going to be impossible. “We have to fall back and establish a defence line in the town itself or further back!”

“If we don’t hold them here, we won’t be able to hold them later,” Jackson shouted back, just before the sergeant tackled him and a burst of German machine gun fire shot through where his head had been a second before. “We can’t retreat!”

“Sir, we don’t have a choice,” Wilt said. Jackson could hear the bitterness in his tone at the thought of retreat, but there was no other choice and then an aircraft swooped overhead, dumping an entire series of flaming bombs on the Home Guard position. Panic started to settle in onto the soldiers; some fled at once, others slipped back while still firing. “Sir…”

Jackson blew a whistle and watched as his men fell back, those who had held the line. In front of them, German infantrymen and a handful of other armoured cars were slowly pushing forward, while mortar fire poured down on the retreating British. The hastily organised counter-attack had failed completely.

***
Thank God for that, Oberst Frank-Michael Baeck thought, as the rate of British fire slacked and began to fade. The British didn’t know– couldn’t know– but they’d come very close to hitting the Hans Bader itself and taking out the remaining supplies on the ship. They’d almost punched through the defence line as well; even now, there were still bursts of firing as individual British soldiers or platoons launched attacks against the fence, testing the defences. They’d have to expand now, just to keep the British on the run, but they didn’t have the manpower, not yet.

He looked into the gloom and smiled as a massive dark freighter came in to dock. They’d had words with the prisoners, those who worked on the docks, and convinced them to help the unloading effort, or else they would simply be sent back to slavery in Europe. They would have to be watched carefully, just in case one of them had decided to try to sabotage the unloading process, but it wouldn’t be easy to do that in any meaningful way. The handful of remaining prisoners had been bound and put out of the way on the Hans Bader; for them, at least, the war was over.

“I have the first strike reports from the parachutists,” the communications officer said. He’d been trying desperately to make some overall sense out of the confused fighting and the babbling on the radio that characterised the first moments of any invasion. Baeck looked over at him and checked his watch; it had been just over an hour since the fighting had begun, but it wasn't until now that he felt even part-way secure from attack. “They’re claiming to have overrun their main targets and have secured their positions for observation purposes.”

“Good,” Baeck said, although it wasn't really his concern. His job now was to complete the unloading of the freighters, unload the main convoy when it arrived, and secure as much control over the local area as possible. “Have the armoured cars and their supporting units move to controlling positions around the civilian populations and have all of the soldiers warned to make sure that any civilians they encounter are warned to remain home and stay off the streets.”

“Yes, sir,” the officer said. Baeck glanced down at the chart he’d been updating; resistance in most places had been light, disorganised, although one parachute unit that had been intended to land on an army base hadn’t reported back. That suggested that they’d been wiped out or captured by angry British soldiers; the odds were that they’d been killed. “Field Marshal Rommel is asking for an update; his unit should be unloading within the next two hours.”

Baeck stepped back as the first unit of Panzers were driven out of the new freighter and down to the gates, their commanders shouting orders at each other as they prepared to expand the area of German control. The plan called for over ten divisions to be supplied in the end, but that would take weeks; they couldn’t afford to waste too much of their fire-power in the early days of the invasion. The British would organise an armoured counter-attack of their own very soon.

“Inform the Field Marshal that we have secured the first objectives, beaten off a counter attack, and are currently preparing to seize the second set of objectives,” Baeck said shortly. The noise of firing burst up again in the distance, and then faded as one of the Home Guard units was defeated. How long would it be before the British mounted a second counter-attack?

“Jawohl, Herr Oberst,” the officer said. Baeck nodded and headed out to inspect the unloading operations, watching as a line of field guns was unloaded and rapidly moved towards their position in the defence line; they’d be needed if the British brought up some of their heavy tanks. The Panzerfausts might not be effective against the latest tanks in the British arsenal.

Another group of tanks was carefully moved out as supervising crewmen barked orders, watching as the press-ganged British workers assisted them to unload. They looked shocked and terrified, a look that Baeck remembered from his service in the remains of Russia; they had never really expected it to happen to them. They didn’t know it, but they were luckier than the Russians; they weren’t going to be handed over to Goring’s men to serve as slave labourers or sent to one of the concentration camps for being the wrong religion.

Baeck checked the remaining defence posts quickly and then watched as German forces began flowing down into the city itself, taking as much territory as possible before the British could counter-attack The Home Guard had either retreated from the city or some of its members had tried to blend in with the civilian population; they would have to be found quickly before they could organise trouble. It wouldn’t matter, in the long run, but in the short run it could prove disastrous.

One misstep now and the entire invasion plan might fall apart.