John Lawton - Riptide

‘You’ll be invaded at dawn on the 22 nd,’ he said. ‘If you don’t believe me, and the tanks don’t come, you can shoot me.’

Stalin did not wait for the tanks and had him shot at once.

On June 22 nd, the shortest night of the year, 2,700 planes, 3,600 tanks and three and a half million Axis troops poured into Russia.

Barbarossa.

What have I made up? Most of it-that’s what fiction’s for. But there is a brick foundation to this. Umpteen people tried to warn Stalin, and Churchill issued warnings on April 23 rdand June 10 th1941. I found out about the first from an English translation of A. Rossi’s Deux Ans d’Alliance Germano-Sovietique, published in 1949, the source for which was the collected papers of the Nuremberg trials. I’ve forgotten where I found the second noted, but it was at that point that I started to think of a story that would end with and ‘explain’ that second warning. Until fairly recently it had, I think, been assumed that the source of the British information on Barbarossa had been Rudolf Hess, but as Hess did not land until May 10 ththe warning given to Mr Vyshinsky by Sir Stafford Cripps on April 23 rdmust have been perplexing if not actually fatal to the theory. However, the role of Enigma has since become if not clear then somewhat clearer. It is the most likely source.

The battle plan of Barbarossa is taken from Alan Clark’s (1966) book of the same title (Penguin), the German scheme for the subjugation of the USSR from the essay ‘What If Nazi Germany Had Defeated The Soviet Union?’ by Michael Burleigh in Counter-factuals (ed. Niall Ferguson, Picador 1997).

The principal written sources for life in London at this time are The London Observer: The Wartime Diaries of General Raymond E. Lee, the London head of US Intelligence (Hutchinson 1971), and the Diaries of Sir John Colville, Churchill’s private secretary (Hodder & Stoughton 1985). Also fairly useful were Berlin Diary by William L. Shirer (Knopf 1941) and Hess by Peter Padfield (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1991). Backs to the Wall by Leonard Mosley (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1971) was indispensable.

I’ve bent a few bits of history. Clothes rationing was not introduced until June 2 nd, after the sinking of the Bismarck-Churchill thought a major victory might soften the blow of clothes rationing and held it off until he’d got one. Food rationing was more severe than I’ve suggested-I doubt any restaurant would have served Reggie with the meal he orders at the Dorchester as late as June 1 st1941. And to the best of my knowledge the US Embassy never supplied coffee beans for the exclusive use of its officers billeted in London hotels. I made that up too. Al Bowlly did die in a German air raid in the small hours of April 17 th1941, but the reciprocal raid on Berlin did not begin until after midnight and lasted nearly three hours (which wasn’t quite as useful for this fiction) and I’ve no idea whether the raid, targeted on the Alexanderplatz, hit any building in Kopernikusstrasse, a mile or so to the east-I just liked the name.

Lastly, Robert Churchill really existed and his life and work were recorded by MacDonald Hastings in The Other Mr Churchill (Harrap 1963). I’m grateful to my brother Frank, who knows more about guns and bullets and things that go whizz or bang than most people alive, for reminding me of Robert Churchill’s shop in Orange Street, and for a wealth of knowledge on the Smith and Wesson.35.