Christopher Nuttall: Second Chance

“As for the issue of a Board of Inquiry, the battle will be analysed to death by the Navy and any such decisions will remain in their hands,” he concluded. “Under the circumstances, facing a completely-unexpected foe, I believe that Admiral Turtledove did well – and so do the Australians.”

“Well, I’m glad that’s over,” Hanover said, three hours later. Many MPs supported the nuclear strike, but a handful of backbenchers were furious about it, pressing for criminal charges.

“The Americans are quite impressed,” McLachlan said. They’d been informed as a courtesy. “The President is using it to wave in front of Congress, convincing them to support the war more. Some of them are asking why we don’t just threaten Berlin with them.”

“Hitler would call our bluff,” Hanover said. “And the public?”

“Some minor protests,” McLachlan said. “One demonstration, in Edinburgh, made the mistake of marching past the local shipyards in the Forth; they’re very hot on the war there as it’s bringing in shipping contracts. The ensuring riot saw the demonstrators in full retreat. The BBC is being supportive; some of the other news stations have adopted a cautious support policy.”

“Barton may have to leave us,” Hanover predicted. “There are a lot of MPs out there who want to move against nuclear war.”

“We’ve used one warhead,” McLachlan said. “One warhead, against an isolated target in Romania.”

“The first official nuclear strike since 1945,” Hanover said. “Which is kind of weird, when you think about it.”

McLachlan smiled. “I suppose that now we have the Americans, and we’ve sunk the Japanese Navy, we can start making plans to bring the war to a close.”

“War is peace,” Hanover said. “Don’t forget that.”

Undisclosed Location

Berlin, Germany

5 thOctober 1940

The images of dead and dying Romanian children made Stewart want to retch. She staggered from the room, followed by Roth, and threw up in the toilet. Himmler felt sink himself; the pictures had been carefully faked from the images of Hiroshima, but they were all-too-real.

He waited while Roth took Stewart back to her room, and then returned to Himmler’s office. The tall SS officer didn’t look flustered; he seemed to understand the power of the weapon he was helping to build. Himmler knew that he hadn’t mentioned that to his girlfriend; even a trusted SS officer would disappear if he did that.

“I trust that she is convinced?” Himmler asked. “It would be a shame to waste all that effort.”

Roth nodded grimly. One particularly clever Einsatzgruppen , under the personal command of Reinhard Heydrich, had faked the scene. An entire village had been slaughtered for the effect; the images were being sent all over the world.

“I believe so,” he said finally. Himmler nodded; Heydrich might well have had traces of Jewish blood, but he was too useful to discard or send to the death camps. “If she sends those images back to Britain, it was have an effect on their public.”

Himmler shrugged. It struck him as stupid; even Churchill would not have been deterred by such effects. If he’d possessed the super-bomb, he would have used it; Berlin and Moscow would have vanished in balls of fire.

“I suppose that there is no doubt that it was a kern bomb,” he said finally. “The professors are convinced?”

“I have refused to allow them to visit the site,” Roth said. “Secrecy is all the more important now; the British will not hesitate to use a second bomb on the nuclear project if they suspect its location. For the moment, teams of Jews and Poles are working on clearing the site, according to the instructions in the Encyclopaedia Britannica .”

Himmler chuckled. Even Professor Horton had been unable to explain why the long-unborn Encyclopaedia Britannica authors had seen fit to include such information, even if the CDs did hold thousands of gigabytes of data. The same amount of data, focused on the war, could have forced German development forward faster than the British would have found comfortable.

“Some of them are suffering,” Roth admitted. “Still, there are plenty more where they came from. For the moment, we’ve blamed the entire blast on a lucky missile hit on a tank full of fuel.”

Himmler shrugged. “I have to make suggestions to the Fuhrer ,” he said. “I suspect that we’re going to have to tighten our belts a bit.”

“They must be punished for this attack on our soil,” Hitler thundered, ignoring the fact that Ploesti was on Romanian soil. “We need to make them regret the use of the hell-weapons!”

Speer coughed. “Before it was… destroyed, Ploesti supplied nearly forty percent of our oil supplies,” he said. “For the foreseeable future, we will be dependent upon supplies from Soviet Russia, which leaves us with something of a problem.”

Hitler swore violently. “ Gott in Himmel ,” he bellowed. “Stalin will be at our throats!”

“That is quite possible,” Speer acknowledged, as soon as Hitler had calmed down. “For the moment, they are engaged in the Middle East, but they are quite capable of fighting both us and the British at the same time.”

Himmler coughed. “Then we need to take the resources from them,” he said calmly.

“At the moment,” General der Infanterie Hoth said, “our armies are not prepared for such a campaign.”

“Then we will play for time,” Hitler said. Adversity, as always, forced his mind to work harder. “How long will it take to prepare the armies?”

“Around six months, if we’re lucky,” Hoth said. “ Mein Fuhrer , we will be gambling everything on success.”

“Then we will continue to support the Russians in the Middle East, for the moment,” Hitler said. “Gaining control of the oil wells near Turkey would certainly help our problems… and we certainly don’t want Stalin to get to them first.”

The argument ran long into the night, discussing the war, the future, and the American declaration of war. Finally, Hitler was convinced to agree to a particular war plan, reluctantly. The council agreed to the plan – knowing that they had no choice.

HIMS Yamato

Japan

5 thOctober 1940

Admiral Yamamoto looked up at the sword, hanging from the wall, and knew that he didn’t dare use it. Minoru Genda and Takeo Kurita had already taken their own lives; the humiliation of knowing that only the British Admiral’s reluctance to slaughter thousands more Japanese had saved some of the fleet had led both of them to their deaths.

Damn you both for dying when I needed you , Yamamoto thought angrily. He wanted to die himself, knowing that if he did end his own life, he would be handing the government over to the militarists. The defeat, and the loss of thousands of lives, had cost the Navy a great deal of its influence, even with the conquest of the Dutch East Indies nearly completed. Talking the Army out of attacking the Philippines, in response to Hitler’s demand that they join the war against America, had been a very near failure; he’d finally refused to transport the army units across the sea.

“The battle was lost, then?” Ambassador Yurina said. Yamamoto glared at her, feeling a complex mixture of hatred and affection. “They destroyed the fleet.”

“The battle was a strategic victory,” Yamamoto lied, and heard her chuckle. It was a deep throaty sound, nothing like the quiet giggles of court girls. “Yes, we took a pounding, as you put it, and…”

“How many carriers were sunk?” Yurina asked. “How many battleships?”