Christopher Nuttall - The Invasion of 1950

His voice grew in intensity.

“This is not the beginning of the end,” he said grimly. “There will be much more blood, toil, tears and sweat ahead, with reverses that will challenge our faith in ourselves and victories that will make this one look small. This is, rather, the end of the beginning; we took on a surprise attack and defeated it, proving to Hitler and his men that we cannot ever be beaten! In their newly-built cities, they tremble now, tremble at the thought of their empire coming to an end as we prove to the world that they can be beaten. We have much to be proud of, in our way, but most of all we should be proud of the lesson we have shown the world… that the Nazis can be beaten!

“Across Europe, in France, in Norway, in Denmark, in Russia… they know, now, that the Germans were beaten,” he proclaimed. “Hitler’s Knights of the Iron Cross… beaten. General Rommel, the man who never lost a battle, lost one today. In countless hearts, a new hope of freedom burns now, with the fuel that you have provided them. They now think of freedom as a goal, something they can reach, and we will be there for them. This war will not end until we have marched into Berlin and burned the core of Hitler’s evil regime out of existence, but today, we have proven that it can be done.”

He lifted one hand in a gesture. “Tremble, Hitler, in your lair. Tremble, Himmler; tremble Speer, Goring and so many others, all men of hatred and evil,” he said. “Tremble, for the world now knows that you can be beaten… and you will be beaten. There is no place where you can hide, nowhere where you will be safe from us, if it takes us a hundred years. We are coming for you!”

The crowd went wild. If Churchill had meant to say something else, it was completely drowned out by the cheering and then by singing. DeRiemer felt a tear in his eye as the song rose in intensity, the first time that God Save The King had been sung in Felixstowe for months. Tomorrow, the citizens of Felixstowe would discover that Free Britain wasn’t an easy place to live, with rationing and economic problems, but for tonight, they could dance and sing.

Churchill stepped down and the three men stood together for a long moment, watching the celebrations DeRiemer looked up at Churchill, seeing the famous cigar moving in the air as Churchill’s face seemed to lock permanently into a mischievous smile, almost like a little boy contemplating a prank. Churchill’s sense of humour was a little odd, but DeRiemer wondered, just for a moment, what he was thinking. Taking his courage into his hands, he asked as much…

“Hitler,” Churchill said, a wry smile covering his face. “I was just wishing that I could see Hitler’s face when he hears the news.”

DeRiemer nodded in understanding. The two men had been enemies for so long that they defined their respective sides. They were both warlords, both very aware of their limited time on the Earth, and both a mixture of brilliance and stubbornness. And they loathed one another; if the source in Berlin was to be believed, Hitler had been furious to learn that Churchill had escaped death twice. Churchill had tried to have Hitler killed, but by the time he had signed off on Hitler’s death, it had been too late. Hitler had never been in any real danger.

Churchill’s smile grew broader.

“I suspect that the person who told him is dead by now,” he said after a long moment. “Hitler was never good at dealing with bad news.”

Together, they watched until the bonfire finally burned itself out, and then headed back to London. There was work to be done.

Berlin, Germany

The face of Adolph Hitler was frozen in a mask of pain.

He’d been raving at the unfortunate officer who brought him the story, screaming at him that Rommel would never surrender, would sooner die than surrender, and then he’d just stopped. Before Himmler could summon medical aid for the Fuhrer or clear the room, Hitler had fallen backwards with a strangled cry and collapsed on the floor. The SS doctor had pronounced it a massive stroke, and confirmed that it had not been an assassination attempt. The very relieved officer had been allowed to depart. Within minutes, the others in the room had departed as well. Kesselring and Speer, Himmler knew, would be preparing their own plans. When they met again, they would be competing for the throne.

Himmler left the doctor to move Hitler to somewhere where he could lie in state, although that might not be such a good idea if the doctor couldn’t alter his face. The building was already aware of what had happened, and word would have spread across the Reich by now; it would complicate an already-complex situation still further. There would be little room for a private strike for the throne, not with the eyes of everyone who mattered in Germany watching them. It would have to be a triumvirate, of course. The pressures of the war would demand no less; there was no room for a power struggle when Germany was fighting for its life.

He prided himself on his ability to think rationally under almost all circumstances, and even the defeat and Rommel’s surrender didn’t faze him. If nothing else, it was something that could be used to force some of Hitler’s other favourites out and it hardly meant the end of the war. The Kriegsmarine had taken a beating, the Luftwaffe had taken a beating but while the Reich’s ability to invade Britain had been wiped out, the British could hardly launch an invasion of the continent. The Americans had moved to support their British cousins, but that too only opened up new fields for the Reich . It was time to put Italy and Iran firmly in their place, either as subordinates to Germany or as more occupied states. Hitler’s affection for Mussolini and the Shah had kept them in power way past their usefulness. Now, without the Fuhrer , they could be brought to heel. Himmler suspected that they would see reason.

He had a trump card. The file sat in the SS castle, a file regarding science that Hitler himself had banned, because it had the taint of Jewish science around it. Himmler had no such prejudices, no real belief in the inherent failure of Jewish researchers. Besides, it would be simplicity itself to have the project reclassified as the work of German researchers. The only people who would know any better would be himself and the researchers, and both had strong incentives to remain silent. The author of the file had promised that they could have, with unlimited resources, a working model in less than a year, perhaps much less. With such a weapon, the world would be at Germany’s feet… and Himmler would become the master of Germany.

The war was far from over.

What was the decisive battle of the Second World War?

That’s not actually an easy question to answer. I polled a handful of people with limited knowledge of history and got the usual suspects; Midway, Stalingrad, Britain, D-Day, Kursk and even the Bulge. Those certainly are the battles that resound down the ages, but I am not convinced that they were decisive in any real sense of the word.

Take Midway, for example, immortalised by Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya as ‘the battle that doomed Japan.’ It was certainly a spectacular and unexpected victory, with a result that looked astonishing, but how important was it in the long run? The American economic powerhouse was building up to grind Japan into powder; even if we reverse completely the outcome of the battle and postulate the complete destruction of the American fleet, the United States will still break even by 1943 and completely overwhelm Japan by 1944. Japan may survive into 1946, but under increasingly heavy bombardment; Japan will not win the war. Midway, in a broad historical sense, is meaningless.