Authors: Lance Parkin,Lars Pearson
Hitler had risen to power, doubly aided by the War Lords and the Timewyrm nestled within his mind. The War Lords hoped to build a “War Lord universe” by giving the Nazis space travel, whereas the Timewyrm wanted to divert the course of history. The Doctor exposed the War Lords’ plans to betray the Nazis, and the forces of Reichsmarshal Goering slaughtered them. The War Lords’ influence ended with the destruction of their base, Drachensberg Castle.
As the Second World War started, a few people in England felt that their country should fight alongside the Nazis. Ratcliffe was one such person, and he was imprisoned for his belief.
[1549]
The British government wanted the Sontaran Brak to create weapons for use in World War II. Brak synthesised Kobalt Blue, a malleable substance that could power projectile and energy weapons - and hoped that it would either spur humanity into becoming foes worthy of the Sontarans, or push Earth’s governments into destroying one another. However, the government’s development of Kobalt Blue never got past the testing stage.
[1550]
UNIT in the Forties
Lethbridge-Stewart would later attend Holborough with Teddy “Pooh” Fitzoliver. Lethbridge-Stewart’s Granny McDougal died when he was 13
[1551]
, and he later won the Public Schools Middleweight Cup during his last year at Fettes.
[1552]
Lethbridge-Stewart and John Sudbury went to the same school.
[1553]
When a young Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart told his father that he was going to join the army, the senior Lethbridge-Stewart said, “In life, as on the field of battle, there are old soldiers and there are bold soldiers, but there are very few old, bold soldiers.”
[1554]
u - Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart began his military service. Shortly afterwards, he attended Sandhurst with Billy Rutlidge. Once his training was complete, Lethbridge-Stewart grew his moustache, joined the Scots’ Guards and was stationed for a time at Aldgate.
[1555]
1940
Radar equipment on Lanyon Moor was subject to mysterious interference, and the men stationed there suffered from mental illnesses.
[1556]
(=) On the Earth of the Dark Matrix, Britain had to use its army to fight civil disorder, not Hitler. The Americans intervened, and took control of the United Kingdom before defeating Hitler.
[1557]
The Nazis occupied Jersey. Colonel Schott found a dormant Cyberman army in the Le Mur engineering factory.
[1558]
The British military sealed off a mineshaft just outside Cardiff in the 1940s, and in future used it to store nuclear weapons.
[1559]
1940 (26th May) - The Nemonite Invasion
[1560]
Aliens terraformed the homeworld of the leech-like Nemonites and culled them. One Nemonite fled into space in a crystalline sphere, and sought to initiate a breeding cycle that would create millions of offspring - enough to possess the population of an entire planet.
The tenth Doctor and Donna were in hot pursuit of the rogue and arrived at Dover Castle, the tunnels of which contained a British navy centre under the command of Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay. The Nemonite spawned thousands of offspring that were contained aboard a British submarine. A Naval rating named Fossbrook - whom Donna had become enamoured with - sacrificed himself to blow up the vessel.
British forces were trapped at Dunkirk, but Ramsay was reluctant to initiate Operation Dynamo (a strategy for saving the troops using civilian vessels) for fear of the blow to morale if the civilians involved were killed. At the Doctor’s recommendation, Ramsay initiated the operation.
1940 (May) - Timewyrm: Exodus
[1561]
Hitler, still emboldened by the Timewyrm within him, became jubilant as his armies scored many successes. German forces had reached Abbeville in France. At Hitler’s command post of Felsennest, the seventh Doctor and Ace exorcised the Timewyrm from Hitler’s mind. This left Hitler weakened, and the Doctor persuaded him to halt the German advance on Dunkirk. This enabled the Miracle of Dunkirk - the rescue of hundreds of thousands of British and French soldiers in a makeshift fleet of civilian boats - to occur and mark a turning point of the war.
The seventh Doctor remembered being at Dunkirk during the evacuation.
[1562]
In early June, Donna visited Fossbook’s mother, and delivered a letter that he’d written to her.
[1563]
Polly Wright’s oldest brother was born in the summer of 1940.
[1564]
@ The eighth Doctor visited Lancashire in the forties and met aliens from Antares 5.
[1565]
He failed to join the RAF, unable to prove he was a British subject. He left England, spending two years in South America and Africa.
[1566]
1940 - Illegal Alien
[1567]
A time-travelling Cyberman, injured by a Luftwaffe bomb in London, instinctively sought blood plasma to heal its damaged components. It began a murder campaign and gained a reputation as “the Limehouse Lurker”. The seventh Doctor and Ace destroyed it.
The time travellers discovered that George Limb, a former Foreign Office secretary, had given Cyber-technology to both the Allies and the Nazis as a means of sparking a technology race. Limb escaped using a Cybermen time machine, but the Doctor’s intervention eradicated much of the errant Cyber-technology, plus destroyed the Nazi Cyber-conversion base in Jersey. However, a pump house containing hundreds of Cybermen cocoons survived, and was discovered by private detective Cody McBride.
The “original” Jack Harkness - an American pilot whose name would be adopted by a Time Agent in 1941 - killed twenty-six opponents during the Battle of Britain.
[1568]
At 8:47 pm on 12th October, 1940, a bomb destroyed a hotel next to the New Regency Theatre, which as a consequence was torn down. Elliot Payne linked his location in the Victorian Era to the very minute that the bomb fell, destroying a group of Time Eaters (and evidently himself) when it detonated.
[1569]
The seventh Doctor and Bernice arrived in Guernsey in December 1940. Bernice went undercover as Celia Doras, the daughter of a local landlady.
[1570]
As a child, Richard Lazarus was caught up in the Blitz and became obsessed with immortality
.
[1571]
Barbara Wright, a companion of the first Doctor, was born in 1940 and lived in Bedfordshire for a time.
[1572]
= c 1940 - FP: Warlords of Utopia
[1573]
While exploring parallel Romes, Scriptor crossed a great Divide between universes. He arrived in a new order of realities, ones where Hitler was winning World War II. On one of these worlds, Germania V, he met and slept with a parallel version of his wife Angela, and helped the British army fight SS officers parachuting in to kidnap the British royal family.
Returning across the Divide, Scriptor developed a plan to liberate all these Nazi Earths. Few differences existed between these realities (the point of divergence came in 1918, at the end of World War I), and the Romans quickly alighted on winning strategies. The plan failed for the first time on Germania LXI; Scriptor soon met Abschrift - one of the Cwejen - and realised that the Nazi worlds were co-ordinating with one another.
There was also a “Hitler wins” Earth - the one perfect iteration of the idea. The Hitler of that world had set up a Council of Hitlers from other parallels. These Nazis were using atomic weapons to devastate Britain. The tide was turning across the Nazi worlds, and Scriptor was captured.
A single Dalek ship had fallen back in time following the Reality Bomb gambit in 2009. The few Daleks aboard needed to draw the Doctor out of hiding, and fashioned an independent-thinking android: Professor Edwin Bracewell. He presented the Daleks to Churchill as his own inventions: the “Ironsides”, war machines powerful enough to change the course of the war.
[1574]
Churchill had concerns about the Ironsides and telephoned the Doctor, requesting his presence.
[1575]
Park Vale barracks was hit by a German bomb in December 1940, burying the Berserker pendant there.
[1576]
1940 (end of December) - Victory of the Daleks
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The eleventh Doctor and Amy arrived in the Cabinet War Rooms in response to a summons from the Doctor’s old friend Winston Churchill. It was a month since Churchill phoned the Doctor, and in that time he’d come to see the advantages of Bracewell’s machine soldiers: the Ironsides. The Doctor was horrified to learn that the Ironsides were actually Daleks - they had obtained the final remaining Dalek Progenitor, but were not genetically pure enough to activate it. The Doctor’s identification of his foes as Daleks triggered the Progenitor, and it spawned “a new Dalek paradigm”: five new, genetically pure Daleks with the designated functions of Scientist, Strategist, Drone, Eternal and Supreme. These Daleks exterminated the impure Daleks, and threatened to destroy the Earth with an Oblivion Continuum planted in Bracewell. The Doctor deactivated the Continuum, but the Daleks escaped.
Bracewell’s knowledge temporarily enabled a few British airplanes to become space-worthy and fight the Daleks. The Doctor later took the aircraft through time to help rescue Amy from Demon’s Run.
[1578]
1941
In 1941, the Doctor was present when a group of Alpha Centauri were stranded in Shanghai and panicked.
[1579]
Lydia Childs of Torchwood died in 1941.
[1580]
Dr Charles Quinn of Torchwood was killed during an air raid in World War II.
[1581]
The Lone Centurion dragged the Pandorica free from a warehouse hit by incendiary devices during the Blitz. This was his last recorded appearance.
[1582]
1941 (2nd January) - TW: Trace Memory
[1583]
The time-jumping Michael Bellini visited the day a German bomb destroyed his childhood home, killing his mother.
1941 - The Pandorica Opens
[1584]
The painting
The Pandorica Opens
was found in an attic in France. Professor Bracewell showed Churchill the painting, and Churchill telephoned the Doctor about it. The TARDIS redirected the call so that Churchill spoke to River Song, who was at Stormcage prison in the future.
1941 (Saturday, 20th January) - TW: Captain Jack Harkness
[1585]
Captain Jack and Toshiko Sato arrived from the twenty-first century, having entered a temporal shift in the Ritz, a Cardiff dance hall. They met an American pilot named Captain Jack Harkness - the man whose identity “our” Jack stole while operating as a conman - and who was due to die the following day. Jack befriended his namesake before the Rift re-opened, and he and Tosh returned home.
The original Jack Harkness died on 21st January. His squadron was out on a training mission, and two formations of Messerschmitts surprised them. The Captain destroyed three of the enemy, but was hit and couldn’t bail out because his plane was on fire.
… and, earlier in “our” Jack’s timeline, he arrived in 1941 to perpetrate a con job.
[1586]
He had never met the original Jack Harkness, but adopted his name after falsifying the records.
[1587]
1941 - The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances
[1588]
Captain Jack Harkness, a con-artist and former Time Agent from the fiftieth century, attempted to scam the ninth Doctor and Rose by crashing a Chula ambulance capsule into London. The capsule dispatched sub-atomic nanogenes that attempted to heal a gas-masked boy who’d been killed by a German bomb. The nanogenes were unfamiliar with human physiology and concluded that the masked, torn-up child was indicative of the human race. The child revived as a hollow, gas mask-wearing individual who was looking for his mummy.
The Doctor and Rose arrived “a few weeks, maybe a month” afterwards. The nanogenes had become airborne and started restructuring people into gas mask-wearing figures
en masse
. Jack admitted his con job to the Doctor and Rose, and the three of them deduced that a young woman named Nancy was the child’s mother. The nanogenes recognised Nancy as such and examined her, creating a more suitable template of the human form. The affected humans were restored, and the Doctor programmed the nanogenes to deactivate. Jack took up travel with the Doctor and Rose.