Harry Kellogg III: The Red Sky: The Second Battle of Britain

I’ve lost another friend recently. He was one of many who inspired me to write. Nobody knew they were influencing me, but many were in their own way. Larry was a gentle man of enormous humor. He was an atheist yet when the time came to die he did it with courage and grace which leads me to believe he must have believed in some kind of afterlife despite his protests. I bet you a donut we will meet again Larry.

A few years ago I lost another friend who spent endless hours in college discussing Alternate History with me as we schooled each other and tried to outfox one another playing military simulations or war games. Chopper was a gentle soul with the heart of a lion who died of kidney failure while waiting for a donor.

This book is dedicated to Larry and Chopper.

To paraphrase:

Keep your friends close and your good friends closer.

Just a few words of clarification may be in order:

These books are not written in any traditional style. They are a combination of historical facts, oral histories, third person and first person fictional accounts. They read more like an oral history or an entertaining history book complete with footnotes.

There is no hero or character development to speak of. No central character on which the whole novel depends. The story is the story and not the characters. We hear from those who felt, saw, ran, lost, suffered and won. The story is told using the stories of everyday people, the techniques of reporters, oral historians, traditional historians, and politicians. Although told in short stories, vignettes and in an episodic manner, the novel builds on what has gone before.

I was inspired by “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War Two by Studs Terkel (1985 Pulitzer Prize for General Fiction) and Cornelius Ryan’s wonderful books “The Longest Day” and “A Bridge too Far”. I was especially captivated by Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. Where the author explores the history of everyday objects and tells stories that captivate and educate all of us on the history of… well everything. Hopefully I have used their techniques of storytelling competently enough to entertain you for a few days.

Book One — The Red Tide starts with the birth of Sergo Peshkova and ends with the Soviet Red Army in control of the majority of Western Europe and making slow but steady progress in breaking the NATO lines in the Pyrenees Mountains.

Our real departure from history is when Sergo is born in 1896. This is when the ribbons of time start to unravel; slowly at first and then faster and faster until the fateful day in 1943 when Sergo is bullied by Stalin at one of his infamous parties. It seems that Sergo has made himself an expert on all things’ aerospace from gliders to rockets. He has no formal training, but his native intellect and high IQ have enabled him to live through his encounter with the greatest mass murderer since Genghis Kahn and even flourish.

Sergo is what in modern terms would be classified as a social outcast. In another place and time he would have been the village idiot but as our story will show, in this alternate history, he is anything but. He has a genius to conceive of and run an industrial empire, much like a Henry Ford or a William Boeing.

For all his talents Sergo is a recluse that sends memos to Stalin putting his suggestions and ideas to paper, often unable to articulate them in person. Through Stalin, his ideas and dreams grow to fruition and the Soviet aerospace program starts producing weapons capable of defending the Soviet Union from the American B-29 Super Fortress.

Starting early in 1946 the Soviets have delayed the US production of atomic bombs by assignation and then the final solution for the Soviets is a release of the entire supply of US polonium by the spy DELMAR, killing and incapacitating virtually the whole American atomic bomb program brain trust and at the same time destroying the total supply of polonium in the world.

This systematic crippling of the US atomic program and Sergo’s missile defense systems convinced Stalin that the time might be right to fulfill his deepest ambitions and once and for all rid Western Europe of capitalism. Combined with the rapid demobilization of US, French and British forces, he is convinced that the time is right and strikes on May 2nd, 1946.

In a lightning and classic Soviet Deep Battle, the Soviet Armed forces quickly break through the weak and untrained US, British and French occupying forces and run a classic flanking maneuver designed to trap the remaining western forces against the English Channel.

By combining Germany secret weapons programs, stolen US and British inventions Sergo and his captured German scientists and a talented stable of prisoners, saved from the gulag, started to produce the first successful ground to air and air to air guided missiles. Based on the German Wasserfal and X4 programs married with a new guidance system of a stolen US design. The missiles soon proved lethal to America’s first attempts at strategic bombing against the USSR using the atomic bomb.

Unknown to the US and Britain the Soviet spy master Lavrentiy Beria had an extensive spy network throughout the British high command and the US nuclear program. In addition, there were many blue-collar workers in France, England and the US that were sympathetic to the Communist cause.

These maids, cooks and janitors passed on fleeting bits and pieces to the NKVD and by putting all these little snippets of knowledge together the Soviets spy masters could predict where the US major bombing raids would attempt to attack next.

By using this foreknowledge and the few missiles the Soviets had managed to manufacture, it could be made to look like they had thousands. By thwarting the first several USAAF raids with a combination of bluff, guided missiles, Yak, Lag and MiG fighters, they are able to halt the most effective weapon the US has… the strategic bomber.

In an ill thought-out attack, the US loses one of its remaining atomic bombs when it attempts to bomb Leningrad. Sergo’s missiles are waiting and the raid is intercepted by hundreds of fighters, air to air and ground to air missiles. The losses are heavy and the US suspends its bombing campaign until they find a possible solution. In addition, a heavily damaged but complete unexploded US Mark III atomic bomb is recovered from the water off the coast of Leningrad where it was to have been used to destroy the city.

In a unique use of sea power the newly named North Atlantic Treaty Organization lures the Soviet forces into range of the largest fleet of modern battleships ever assembled. As the immense Soviet armored columns race to crush the few remaining opposing forces in France, a steel curtain of hundreds of 14 and 16 inch shells rains death and destruction on a level only equaled by massive batteries of artillery or possibly an atomic bomb. Caught in the open the Soviet forces are slaughtered.

This only provides respite from the Soviet onslaught for a matter of weeks, however. As the Red Army juggernaut continues its march to the Mediterranean Sea, the forces of NATO desperately gather behind the imposing peaks of the Pyrenees Mountains on the border of France and Spain and dig in.

In a show of ill-advised nationalism Charles DeGaul breaks away from the French army and with a few divisions’ attempt to halt the Soviet forces on the Maginot Line. They are trapped and almost slaughter to a man. This, however, slows up the Red Army for another crucial few weeks. It is just enough time for the NATO forces to form a very weak defensive line in the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain.