Harry Turtledove (Editor) - Alternate Generals II

"What the hell am I reading here?" The Reichsmarschall turned back to the cover page of the offensive manuscript. Twelve Legions of Angels the damned thing was titled. Small eyes glinted blue tracer rounds at the Oberstleutnant who had brought it. "What is this slop?"

The Oberstleutnant blanched. May have made a mistake coming here. Still, he had drawn the short straw. Nowhere to go but forward. "It is a work of-oh, what to call it? — speculative fiction, I suppose."

"It's sedition! Why did you bring this to me? Turn the swine over to the Gestapo!"

"The swine is one of ours."

The small eyes grew as wide as they could. "German?"

"No, Herr Reichsmarschall. Air man."

The flare of anger subsided to a troubled scowl. The Gestapo thugs were out of the question now. The Luftwaffe took care of its own problems. "English?"

The Oberstleutnant gave a brisk nod. "Former C in C of the RAF Fighter Command. Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding-retired. The RAF sacked him directly after Dunkirk."

The scowl deepened. Dunkirk. Not Hermann Goering's finest hour. He had let the British Expeditionary Force escape across the Channel-even with the lack of British air cover.

That lack got the RAF flyboys rightly spat upon in their own streets, while all of England exalted the miracle of the boats.

Always astonishing what the British will call a miracle. They had abandoned thousands of French allies on the beach, and though they had managed to ferry a quarter million British soldiers across the Channel, it was still a bloody retreat! Those quarter million soldiers had not been enough to turn away Goering's Eagle Attack! Nor that of the Sealion. Queer sort of miracle, that.

"Why was this Dowding relieved from command?" Goering demanded.

"The RAF forced him into retirement for refusing to send Spitfires to France."

"Do you mean he had Spitfires to send and he didn't? His best aircraft? Was he trying to help the Reich?"

"No, Herr Reichsmarschall. The opposite according to this." The Oberstleutnant gave the manuscript a gingerly tap. "It was part of his strategy."

"Oh, strategy was it."

"From what I could read. This seems to be a treatise on how Herr Dowding would have run the British air campaign."

"Another armchair expert." Goering sniffed.

"He flew in France," the Oberstleutnant advised quietly.

"Old enough to retire and he was still flying?"

"In the Great War, Herr Reichsmarschall."

"Ah." Had all of Hermann's attention now. A shared history there. The Blue Max gleamed under the Reichsmarschall's chins. He could sense an instant warmth toward this brother under the cowling. An addled, idiot brother on the wrong side, but a brother all the same, from a time when real men flew in open cockpits, the wind and prop wash bitter in their faces, grit clattering against goggles, when your kite could turn on a thought, and there were no parachutes.

The Fat One became magnanimous. Victors could afford to be. He looked forward to marshaling a combined force of Spitfires and Messerschmitts against the Bolshevik menace.

A clack of heels in the doorway demanded attention. An adjutant: "It's time, Herr Reichsmarschall." Further questions regarding angels, however many of them, must wait.

Out to the balcony festooned with red, white, and black buntings, to take up a place flanking the Fuhrer and the British king.

Crowds surged like the stormy ocean with thunderous sieg heils .

Down below, within the palace gates, a semicircle of VIPs stood up from their chairs.

Beyond that, the Mall stretched like a runway between fields of raised salutes. And here came the airplanes.

The procession extended twenty-five miles for the flyover at Buckingham Palace on this, the first anniversary of the end of the Kanalkampf , the conflict which the losing side had called the Battle of Britain.

You saw them first, a blot upon the sky. Then their roar shook the ground, the kind that throttled your throat, shook the heart in your chest.

Pride of place went to Hitler's bombers. The HE 111s' cut-out wing roots gave them a distinctive silhouette, unlike the JU 88s, looking from the ground unnervingly like British Blenheims. Their radial engines' clatter gave them their German accent.

Only then came the ME 109s, radiators whistling. Hard- lined, vicious shapes, in geschwader strength, they peppered the low cast sky for miles.

A lull, then, on the horizon with a signature purring you need only hear once to know immediately, advanced British Rolls Royce engines-a schwarm of Hurricanes in Nazi colors. Stable gun platforms, those. The Hurricanes had delivered a convincing punch to their erstwhile adversaries, and they could take a beating. Shooting them was like shooting a wicker basket. But the Hurri was not a nimble crate. With Spitfires cleared from the sky, the ME 109s had chewed them up.

Next came the Spitfires, emblazoned with swastikas. A single surviving vic of them liberated from the crushed RAF. The lead craft wore a Geshwadercommodore's stripes and a Micky Mouse emblem on his cowling. That one broke formation and rolled.

Unexpected. Hermann growled disapproval, but his eyes gleamed. Boys will be boys.

Elegant, agile crates. The Spitfire was the ME 109's graceful, Britannic twin.

"Pretty kites," someone said.

Apparently too pretty for Air Chief Marshal Dowding to use. The stingy man had only sent a handful of them to France to aid his allies. True, he had only a few Spitfires at any one time, but he hoarded all he had. For what? A rainy day? The storm had come!

And this the man who wrote a book on how the battle for Britain should have been run?

Nothing, thought Hermann Goering, nothing could have stopped his Luftwaffe.

Unnoticed in the crowds, near a bench in St. James's Park, a drab, forlorn gent watched Stukas advance in plague swarms. They were not diving today, so the crowds would not hear their screamer whistles. Not for terror this pass. Yet they terrified. The sky blackened with masses of crook-winged monsters.

Slow. They were slow. But once England spent her Spitfires and Hurricanes, there had been nothing to stop these slow monsters from lining up their attack runs from up high. And once they bunted over, nothing could hit a Stuka in a dive. The dive-bombers had picked off the ships of the proud British Navy at will, clearing the way for invasion.

All the fibres in his body quivered with pain as though he was burning alive at the utter horror of the sight. The Stukas blotted out the meagre sun.

Someone who had seen an American cinema said, "Run Toto, run!" The Stukas became flying monkeys in a little girl's nightmare. Yes, that was it. This was all unnatural. Not right. Not right .

Still trembling in the lull that followed the horrific Stukas, he had to acknowledge the logistical feat involved in this procession. There were airfields and assembly areas to organize, times aloft and varying speeds and ranges of aircraft to be calculated. Times required to reach altitude. All the difficulties of Big Wings.

Of course, these pilots knew exactly where they were going, and no one was even shooting at them.

Next, perhaps most hideous of all, came a lopsided vic-one Lancaster, one Hurricane, and one Spitfire-in red, white, and black.

The program called them the Fuhrer's Flight.

Vision blurred as he tried to watch them pass over the palace-blurred the swastikas from the heroic shapes, blurred the colours back to those they had worn in defense of Britain.

Bleary gaze dropped to the balcony.

He saw Union Jack buntings in place of Nazi flags. And instead of that evil man, a queen in a green dress. And in place of Reichsmarschall Goering, a very pretty princess.