Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! (9 page)

Cigarette-holder clenched in the corner of his mouth, tasting its smoke on his breath, a pale sun setting through the glass panes to his back and even with something approaching hope; Simon began to write:

London attracted, with horrible suddenness, an array of leeches, parasites and social scavengers congregating in the symbolic site of national terminal erosion; sucking the spiritual lifeblood out of their injured host in the dying days of The World’s Great Empire. These vultures, skulking; buying knockoff goods sold in desperation; selling weapons and ‘essentials’ to a terrified middle class at extortionate prices; offering safe passage across the Atlantic to Canada or guaranteed escape to Gibraltar, fake American passports, cut-rate stimulant drugs which were so impure and diluted with everything from sodium bicarbonate to the as-yet unrationed salt that there was never enough to have much effect… slinking villains, who were viewed with a mixture of contempt, gratitude and indifference, depending on the constitution of those that observed their trench-coated, solicitous scurryings.

A tiny minority, no longer fearing the criminal charge of ‘defeatism’ in the wake of Dunkirk, had even sold pocket sized German language handbooks; utterly taboo, though even with a discerning approach to choosing potential buyers, most would still fall victim to particularly vindictive assaults from enraged patriots, and those with family and friends in France. Two died in Liverpool, with an astonishing
thirty-seven stab wounds
reported on a middle aged male found slashed to pieces in a market. Stabbed and slashed THIRTY-SEVEN times… evidently, Scousers hate Germany. To everyone’s shock; the practice soon migrated from working class areas…

Everything is in short supply for the average man; vegetables, meat and tempers. Queuing up for goods when the lads fought in France, and especially when the night raids happened, that was fine. All anger was directed outwards, frustration turned to humour.

‘Fat Göring should spend a month or two in England’, they’d say. ‘No wonder he wants us so badly. To be able to live in a country whose bread tastes like cardboard, milk like puddle-water with cheese curds or rat turds, and who only get a combined 480g per week of cheese and butter – it will do him the world of good… he’ll look normal again in no time!’

Or talking about some obvious sign of bomb damage on a building, asking how big the mice must have been to chew an ’ole that size! Or any number of other brilliant examples of the British sensibility in times of suffering. Had we been Latin, Mediterranean types, there would have been panic everywhere, every time a Jerry plane flew overhead. Here, people made jokes in the queue about how the pilot was off to find the sausage factory, to crash land, as the Berlin rationing was killing him. Truly astonishing humour, in the circumstances.

The British spirit warmed your heart. Now, all I hear is grumbling.

They’ve lost the incentive to stay cheery. Positivity has no meaning, only food and the continued survival of their families matter; all else is quixotic, abstract, antiquated. To some, astonishingly enough; creativity, positivity and even
love
seem to belong to some long lost time already. Shouldn’t times of suffering necessitate such contribution even more? Alas, countless husbands and sons in the army, dead or captured, or conscripted to factories – the warm women I knew are hard-faced, locked in private grief which they do not show, and have essentially become entirely self-serving survivalists. Atavistic urges reign. Collaborators are brazen. London is an isolated entity in its own right; most assume the north is lost, even those who disbelieve Haw Haw on the radio and the Goebbels Ministry broadcasts. Many of the unwashed, unfed people no longer care. I fear that many would indeed heed the call to ‘hail Hitler’ if he fed them better. The jokes have stopped, or they meet only with painful silence.

War has dehumanised even those who did not fight in it.

Simon paused, sitting back in thought, and absentmindedly flicking ash onto his smoking jacket. How to capture the madness adequately, with the written word? Those horrendous days, with opinion so massively divided, when all seemed lost but the refusal of surrender remained?

Churchill wanted to fight on. No army, 300,000 men captured in northern France and God knows how many more. Now we know he wanted to sink the French fleet, use mustard gas on the Jerries. They stopped him; everyone knew all was lost. He tried rallying the people with epic speeches of defiance, and ended up being deposed in a coup. Halifax enquired about an armistice, but by then the Germans had already set off. They seized their opportunity. Italy and Spain sent ships, and a six-figure number of men. Vichy-France contributed a volunteer infantry battalion, along with its navy. A fleet of landing barges assembled. Landed in three spots. The Kriegsmarine Wolfpacks, causing terror at sea and a quadri-national naval force to tie up the Royal Navy. The Luftwaffe, clinically depleting the Spitfire’s of Fighter Command with awful relentlessness…

He hesitated briefly, before adding,
it was all so fast.

The radio broadcast had been perhaps the most shocking moment of his life. Remembering it was like recalling a horrific, disorientating nightmare. He’d been at the office, in a crowded room of industrious journalists and drunken hacks alike. One of the older men had swigged from a whiskey flask, tears rolling down his face as the unspeakable words were uttered to the nation. He’d seen too many dead friends in the mud of Ypres and Flanders Field to fully comprehend what the broadcast said:

“To the people of Britain, I have the odious assignment of informing you that the government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is engaged in peace talks with the German High Command. I must express to the British public the dire military circumstances at present, with complete frankness. The capture of the British Expeditionary Force and allied French troops numbering almost 400,000 men, the loss of valuable equipment, heavy armour and artillery, tanks and supplies; the hostility of a French state and its willingness to ally their navy with the Kriegsmarine against ours, the Italians and the Spanish poised to join them in the assault upon our land, our men in captivity – most with the paramilitary SS – the loss of fighter planes over France, and regrettably, the continued German superiority in the air, creates what is
all in all
a hopelessly defenceless position from which to continue to wage war against Germany.

I have received assurances from the government of Herr Hitler that peace with Britain was most acceptable to him, and that he saw no merit in subjugating a great European nation and, as he put it, a racial brother. Herr Hitler stated the following; ‘England’s willingness to compromise is the best option available for all, and to end the lamentable state of war that was forced upon the Reich by the Chamberlain government ten months prior. The Reich’s only goal against England was driven by the necessity of eliminating Great Britain as a base from which a war against the German Reich could be, and was being, fought.’ Now, as ever, said Herr Hitler, with no malice towards the western nations of a shared Christian civilisation, his eyes turn only to the reclamation of land taken from Germany, and the German people lost in the reshaping of Europe from a criminal treaty and again, as he put it, the bastard children of Versailles.”

Simon had stood dumbfounded, the cigarette clenched between his teeth burning out in the holder, ash falling down his front. Several of the men present began yelling at the radio, as if that would help, and all were silenced again as Halifax’s tired voice resumed its cracked delivery:

“The German government wishes to extend the same message of friendship to England as it did two years ago. They reiterate that, regardless of pacts, and treaties signed by paper, that the English and German people are bound by blood, and that the two Christian nations and Aryan peoples of Saxon blood have a duty to their shared civilisation to look elsewhere, and see that while large tracts of land may come under the rule of an international conspiracy of… parasites and…
Jewish
leeches –
excuse me, I am reading verbatim
– that the Aryan peoples of Europe must
unite
to preserve the long continuity of our institutions, our Empires and our civilisation. We must brace ourselves to our duties, and bear ourselves so that history will record we behaved with
honour
, and in the defence of our people, our empire and western civilisation itself.”

In his bedroom now, back in the present, the contemplative Simon again took his pen to the notepad. Ruminating briefly, he tore up the terse notes he’d written, deciding to start over. Regardless of the ‘brotherhood’ shared with Germans, he thought bitterly, with any luck this notepad condemning their bestiality will survive all of us as a testament to the true spirit of democracy-loving people.

After Dunkirk, the Luftwaffe had turned its sights onto England. We’d seen the destructive force of German military might playing to universal horror across cinema screens up and down the country, and with our army gone, Hitler and Göring’s eyes turned west to the white cliffs of Dover. Warsaw, Rotterdam… was London next? Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh? They bombed us relentlessly for a fortnight, even before France signed her official surrender. Night-time bombing raids on London, now called “The Blitz”. Fires in the night sky, women and children screaming, the shriek of the bombers, the deathly silence that briefly, fatefully follows. And then dust, blood, sirens. Noise and smells and screeching yells, panic and terror. The rising panic of a people under fire, who knew they had no army left to defend them when the enemy came.

Hitler called off his air strikes on the cities, obviously fearing that continued indiscriminate slaughter would result in vastly increased resistance to even a
partial
occupation of Britain. He was right.

Focusing solely on the battered RAF, Whitehall was apparently – so I hear, anyway – threatened with the mass-execution of tens of thousands of the captured troops. Hard to tell if it’s truthful or one of the other ludicrous yarns being spun on the rumour mill; perhaps even an expedient Parliament lie to excuse the cataclysmic collapse. But, as it goes, apparently the SS have custody of large numbers of enlisted men, not the Wehrmacht. The pressure was too much.

The entreaties to America to send quarter of a million troops ‘for training purposes’ to England was rejected. Did they see it as an ill-disguised attempt to unofficially bring the US into an armed defence of Great Britain? Did Lindbergh and that awful Kennedy chap sway opinion in the States? Either way, we were done. No army, Parliament in uproar, numerical disadvantage in the air, thousands of soldier hostages with SS guns pointed at their heads… the worst start to summer in recorded British history.

Simon thought to himself. How could we have defended, he wondered? Who’s to say the RAF couldn’t have beaten Göring’s boys? We have the best navy in the world? What if we’d called Hitler’s bluff with the POWs?

The grim reality was that with French, Spanish and Italian ships joining Germany’s, even that naval invulnerability
would
have, and was in the process
of
, been broken. And we could not risk the lives of our men abroad. Sentimentality; the Achilles heel of our democracy.

The French Navy stood firm against British threats to scuttle their fleet entire – weeks before, our allies, and now pledging their ships to the Hun. Spain promised naval and air support against us, in return for Gibraltar. And after Dunkirk, there was not a single shred of hope left for a ground resistance. The families of the captured soldiers begged for peace. Whitehall turned against the war faction. Churchill was finished. The tide had turned.

Simon realised his cigarette had burned out. He opened a great carved wooden box on the felt desktop, selected one of the loose fags within – a Chesterfield, it looked like – and inserted it into his silver holder, lighting it with a quick snap of the tin. Satisfied by several deep intakes of smoke, he resumed writing.

The air of capitulation hung heavy. Halifax headed up the new cabinet, with Winston and Neville out of the picture, but confusion still reigned. Many still wanted to fight on. Half the civilians said they’d fight regardless of any pact with Hitler. By the time they decided to reach out it was too late; they’d already launched the attack, barely five weeks after French surrender. Thereafter, on-land resistance came down to the fury of civilians, not official policy.

The horrors of the Blitz had enveloped Victoria Embankment, Bloomsbury and the East End of London in its misery. Simon had set off for the East End the morning after a particularly vicious blasting, after spending an interesting night before in the Savoy hotel where a gang of hysterical East Enders led by a Stepney councillor had commandeered the hotel’s shelter.

“If this shelter is good enough for the bloody Savoy parasites, it’s good enough for the decent people of Stepney under German bombs!” the man had screamed.

Simon had felt fortunate indeed to have been dining in the hotel restaurant that night, with a well-to-do businessman he’d interviewed several weeks prior. As darkness fell, the tired journalist had considered booking a room upstairs, until hearing the scream of a Stuka bomber. With the screeching sirens and sinister sound of the bomber planes combining to eerie effect, Simon decided he was better off staying in the shelter with the group of victorious cockneys, whose ‘invasion’ of sorts had met with token opposition from a management staff who knew that to deny shelter would be a public relations disaster; unsurprisingly, in the face of bad press, the Savoy had quickly relented.

Elated, the cockneys sang most of the night.
I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles
and Vera Lynn. It was really quite fun, come to think.

“Pretty bubbles in the air!” Sat perched together on the makeshift bench, a thick woollen jumper-clad cockney happily yelled into Simon’s ear, while reaching to wrap his short arm around the significantly more suave, svelte scribe. From the initial conversations, Simon had gleaned that the group was of a distinctly socialist persuasion, but the heated talk of class war had soon morphed peaceably into song. As he leaned across, draping his arm over the journalist’s shoulder, the cockney simultaneously offered Simon a flask with his free hand. Gratified, he unhesitantly accepted the small metal decanter, drinking without so much as an inquisitive sniff, wary of the tinge of guilt from the slight surprise he felt, as was sometimes experienced by the upper class upon encountering proletarian generosity. He soon regretted it, as the flask was filled with gin; taken by surprise, the journalist coughed and spluttered as his cockney companion cheerily continued the singalong: