by gerald hall
Itzak Metzembaum had just stepped off of the gangplank from the crowded freighter to what had been the Promised Land for Jews for nearly two thousand years. The old Greek freighter was one of five ships full of refugees from Nazi concentration camps that had docked at the Port of Haifa in the past three days.
When Itzak began to leave the ship, it seems eerily familiar with all of the armed British troops lined up along the dock. But these troops stood impassively by as the men, women and children that had managed to survive the death camps slowly shuffled their way onshore.
Itzak was an educated man, a young university professor, when the Nazis barged into Poland and began to round up all of the Jews for the camps. Itzak had prayed every day to God for deliverance after he had arrived at Dachau. Many of Itzak’s friends and relatives had died from starvation, disease or from being simply murdered by the Nazi camp guards. Just as he was about to give up after nearly two years of starvation and hard labor, the camp commander suddenly called together all of the prisoners and told them that the Jews were about to be taken to be resettled in Palestine.
Many of the surviving Jewish prisoners thought that this was a ruse. They believed that everyone was going to be removed from the camp and then murdered. The Jewish prisoners from the camp were shocked to find when they got off the railway cars. They were at a port near the Aegean Sea. They went into a newly constructed camp where the food was plentiful compared to what had been fed to them at Dachau. The prisoners also encountered people from other camps such as Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen and nearly a dozen others. They all told the same story.
Now, Itzak found himself in the Promised Land, where Abraham and Jacob had walked. But were these survivors welcome in this land?
Itzak and his fellow refugees, men, women and even children, walked slowly along between a pair of lines of British troops. The British seemed to be just as curious about what was going on as the refugees were. The march continued for more than a kilometer until they reached a series of tents. Each of the tents had a sign in front of it welcoming the refugees. Each sign was in a different language; French, German, Polish, Russian and half a dozen other languages. Itzak walked towards the tent with the sign in Polish in front of it. There he saw people waiting behind tables. Each of the tables had hundreds of forms stacked on them.
Itzak was was greeted in Polish by a man who appeared to be in his fifties.”
“Good afternoon, Brother. Welcome to your new home.” Stefan Klaczko said with a warm smile.
“It is very good to be here.” Itzak replied.
“We have some paperwork for you to fill out. Then we will arrange for you to meet with a sponsor here so that you can have a place to live. We are trying to match you with a sponsor who also speaks Polish. That will make the transition much easier. We are also looking for jobs for all of you as quickly as possible.”
Itzak filled out the form and handed it back to Stefan, who quickly reviewed it. He then talked quickly to a young man standing nearby who apparently served as a messenger. A few minutes later, the young man returned with a third man who appeared to be close to Itzak’s age.
“Hello, Itzak. I’m Adam. Come with me please.” The newcomer said with a smile.
“I am very pleased to meet you. We are going to my home where you will be staying for a few days.” Adam continued.
“Thank you. This has all been like an unbelievable dream. At first, the camps were a nightmare from hell. But now, I pray that the nightmare has finally ended. But what will the future for our people finally be? All we all coming here now? Are we all finally making Aliyah?” Itzak asked.
“There were half a million of us here in Judea and Samaria at the beginning of the war. Of course, between the British and the Arabs, we had no power at all. But now, our numbers are growing daily by the thousands as the ships come in bringing more refugees from the death camps.” Adam Shamir noted as he looked down upon the port of Haifa and the newly arrived ships there.
“What I don’t understand is that one day, the Nazis were murdering us. The next day, they were moving us south towards Palestine. What caused this?”
“According to the Germans, Hitler was murdered by his fellow Nazis. After the Nazi conspirators were arrested, convicted and executed by German courts, the leaders in Berlin decided that they should close the camps and expel us as undesirables rather than keeping us. In Russia and the other republics that formed the Soviet Union, many Jews there have decided to also come here as well. Many of their fellow countrymen enthusiastically assisted the Nazis in murdering so many Jews that our people simply did not want to stay there any longer.
The Germans seem to be eagerly helping every Jew who wants to come here. This is all very strange after all of the suffering that the Nazis have inflicted upon our people, but I am a Zionist at heart. So anything that helps us back to the Promised Land is a blessing from God.”
“Yes, this is all doubtlessly from God. We are returning to our ancestral home. The scholars are even beginning to teach everyone Hebrew so that we will have our own language back as a single people. This is all so hard to believe, yet it is happening before our very eyes.”
“We have heard while at sea that the leader of the Irgun had called for a revolt against the British here. They and other Jewish groups had been receiving modern guns from someone who is friendly to us, we have heard.” Itzak mentioned.
“I have heard this too. But with the Germans shipping so many of us in, I do not think that we will have to worry about fighting the British. Do you see all of those cameras out there? Those of news reporters. We will soon overwhelm the British presence here, my friend. We will need the guns eventually, I’m sure. But they will not be used against the British. We have the Arabs here who want to slaughter us, just like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem tried to do through his ties with Hitler.”
“I know. But what about the British? They are the ones in charge here now, aren’t they?”
“They won’t be for much longer. I have learned that the British are heavily in debt because of expenses from the war. They cannot maintain their empire for much longer. They will have to give up the Palestinian Mandate soon.
However, if we are going to reclaim our Promised Land, then we must be ready to fight the Arabs for it. It is a waste of time and effort to attack the British, regardless of what those hotheads in the Irgun say.
We should focus on only one enemy, the one that was aligned with the Nazis and wanted to also exterminate us.” Adam explained.
Chapter Twenty-One:
Cavill Aviation Experimental Hangar
Derby, Western Australia
November 21, 1943
Harold had been home for about a week after the first series of meetings with the German negotiators. The negotiations had been long, detailed and very challenging. Harold had to walk a very fine line sometimes in order to avoid revealing just how much he knew about German weapons programs from the computer data base. Finally, they agreed to a mutual suspension of the negotiations. But Harold felt that things were very promising, especially upon learning just how much of the Nazi hierarchy had been purged by the German military.
Harold then flew back to London to brief Churchill on the negotiations. He and the British Prime Minister spent hours going over every detail. After nearly a week, Harold took another long flight back home. He needed to get caught back up on what was happening at home and with his businesses.
Harold went to visit the underground hangar where most of the new aircraft prototypes were being assembled. Harold had been kept so busy traveling, business meetings and dealing with the bureaucrats that he had not had a chance to check out the new work there for more than two months now. When Harold arrived in his usual Ford truck, the aeronautics program manager and chief engineer Theodore Rosewood met him at the hangar’s concealed personnel entrance.
“Good Afternoon, Ted. I thought that I would come by to see how far have you gotten with our latest special projects?” Harold a
sked.
“We have several of them almost ready for flight tests now. The jet-powered version of the Dragonfly is the one closest to its first test flight. Her engines have proven themselves in ground tests very well already. The aircraft itself is a wonder. I never would have guessed that the basic Dragonfly airframe would be so easily modified for this. The work that we did for an enhanced version of the original Dragonfly proved to almost perfectly suited for this new aircraft.
The jet engines that we are using are quite remarkable. They each weigh less than four hundred kilograms. But we have measured them at producing close to a thousand kilograms of thrust. I know that the engineers that designed the high pressure steam turbines for our ships played a major role in designing these engines as well.”
Like with any other technological idea that Harold wanted advanced, he had simply talked to his engineers about the basic design and made a few ‘suggestions’ to enhance its performance or to nudge the designers into a particular direction. After that, Harold would then just ‘let nature take its course’. This was why the engine was particularly powerful for its weight. The performance was not totally out of line with other developments of the era. In fact, it almost perfectly matched the Westinghouse J30 jet engine that also first ran in the year 1943.
In essence, Harold was now putting the technological timeline back into where it should have been. Without the pressure of the war, the engineers at Westinghouse might not have built the original J30 engine at all. Now, something technologically very similar is being built in the West, just not by the Americans this time. This was also the case with other American wartime technological developments. Harold worked to find a way to still introduce them at the appropriate time. In his quest to stop the Final War, Harold did not want to eliminate all technology advances, only certain select ones like the fission bomb.
“I’m not an aeronautical engineer, but you did have to do some changes to the airframe besides the engines, Ted.”
“We added strake extensions to the wings like you suggested. That gave us more fuel capacity. However, wind tunnel tests showed that we had to modify them slightly to ensure sufficient airflow to the engines at high angles of attack. We also stretched the upgraded Dragonfly fuselage by half a meter more and modified the canard foreplane. The modifications to the rear fuselage to replace the Wright Cyclone radial engine with a pair of the new turbojet engines were actually pretty straight-forward. The twin engines together were not much heavier than the single radial. But we expect, based on what we saw in the wind tunnel, for this new aircraft to be at least one hundred and fifty knots faster than the original Dragonfly.”
“What about her armament, Ted? I understand that my Ordnance people have cooked up some interesting items for this aircraft.”
“Yes, they have. It has the normal two hardpoints under the wings for bombs, drop tanks or special weapons. This jet also has another pair of upgraded hardpoints under the wing strakes. The inner hardpoints can carry up to five hundred kilograms of payload each. The outer hardpoints can only carry three hundred kilograms like with the original Dragonfly. Under the belly, we have a three-barrel version of our 25mm Gatling gun. It doesn’t fire quite as fast as the six-barrel version but is much lighter.”
“Will she be able to operate from an aircraft carrier still?”
“Of course, she will. This new aircraft is a little heavier than the original Dragonfly, but with the added wing root strakes, her wing-loading is about the same. The rear wings were already sweptback for stability purposes. They will be just fine for higher speed flight. I think that the biggest change was that we changed the canards so that the entire canard moved instead of just the trailing edge. This has made the canard even more effective, though it requires more power to its controls for the pilot to handle the added loads. We have also strengthened the Dragonfly’s entire structure to handle the heavier takeoff and landing stresses of carrier operations.”
Harold found it curious just how closely the aircraft resembled a jet-powered version of the Long-Eze homebuilt sport plane that a friend of his kept in his garage as an antique just before the Final War. Of course, this was nearly one hundred years in the future and the Long-Eze didn’t have jet engines or a slightly wasp-waisted fuselage to deal with compressibility either. Harold wanted to plan ahead because he knew that the Germans would not be standing still technologically either.
“Very good. I am also very interested in seeing our new rotary wing project as well. I thought that the tandem rotor concept was very promising when I purchased the license for it from Drago Jovanovich. We have enough spare production capacity for Twin-Wasp engines to be able to build a very capable aircraft based in his technology.”
“I remember you mentioning that when you brought me the blueprint drawings and described what you wanted. We’ve had a team working on this for the past nine months now. Here’s what they have come up with.” Ted said as he walked down with Harold another fifty meters further into the underground hangar.
Harold then saw the familiar ‘banana’ shape of a tandem rotor helicopter appearing in front of him as he walked forward. The nose was heavily glazed to provide excellent visibility for the pilot. A tall stalky nose gear held the forward fuselage higher than the short main gear.. The rest of the fuselage was of a traditional cantilever aluminum construction. The unusual looking aircraft was already painted in a light grey camouflage pattern.
“How soon before she can fly?” Harold asked with a smile of delight on his face.
“We’ve already done engine tests and run up her rotors to ensure that they are fully synchronized. She will be ready for tethered flight tests in a few days. Of course, Mrs. Cavill automatically wanted to fly it as soon as she saw it.”
“Dorothy’s already seen it?” A suddenly dismayed Harold asked.
“Yes, Sir. She’s been visiting us and looking over our prototypes about every couple of weeks for the past year or so. She’s even flown the prototype Cassowary with its new photo reconnaissance package. It is very impressive combined with the search radar and the external drop tanks. We can probably fly it all the way to Japan and back without refueling.”
“Well, please tell my wife to let the professional test pilots do the flight testing of our new aircraft. She will get her turn to fly them soon enough.” Harold said with a chuckle that hid his discomfort over Dorothy’s risky behavior.
“Did you know that Pappy actually tested one of the new three-barrel Gatling guns on one of the new Australian-built Mosquitos? He substituted the Gatling for the Mosquito’s normal four twenty-millimeter automatic cannons. I don’t think that I ever saw anyone so delighted as Pappy after he took that Mosquito and did a couple of strafing runs on some wrecked Jap ships. Now, he wants to put that cannon into all of the Mosquitos.” Ted then explained with a smile.
“That doesn’t surprise me at all. Somehow, I don’t think that we could make enough of those Gatlings to satisfy what Pappy wants to do with them. “
“No, Sir. I don’t think so either. Pappy’s already taking half of all of the six barrel Gatling production to convert Coalition and American medium bombers into strafers. I’m afraid that you are going to have to look into building another ammunition factory just to keep Pappy’s planes stocked with shells.”
“I will have to look at the possibility of having our satellite plants in Indochina and China begin production of the Gatlings. They have been producing small arms like the CR-1, some support weapons and significant amounts of ammunition for the Chinese Nationalists for over a year now. That has worked out well with the large quantities that the Chinese need for their troops. In fact, we had to divert some of their ammunition production to replenish our own stocks at Derby after the Japanese invasion attempt. I suppose that we can have the Chinese factories making cannon shells for the Gatlings too.”
“Didn’t we just license the Chinese to produce our light tank designs recently, Sir?”
“Yes, they are producing t
he light tank chassis. However, I have been hesitant to license any more of our armor designs because of the internal turmoil occurring within Chinese politics. Even with the external threat of the occupying Japanese army, things are not looking good for a cohesive China. The various warlords are still vying for power. Chiang Kai Shek has the largest single armed force in China, but he has not been able to bring the warlords to heel while at the same time fighting to drive the Japanese out.
Unfortunately, what I see happening is China breaking apart into half a dozen or more competing states that will be fighting for power even before the Japanese leave. That will cause tremendous instability in the region.” Harold explained.
In a way, Harold actually welcomed the Balkanization of China. This would not only prevent Mao Tse Tung from taking control of all of China, but would prevent one single power from assembling enough resources to be able to afford to build nuclear weapons, or at least not very many of them.
In 2040, Chinese and Russian nuclear weapons caused much of the devastation during the Final War. Harold hoped that the same Balkanization would occur with dismantling of the Soviet Union as well. This would significantly reduce the number of nuclear powers in the twenty-first century even if someone decides to develop nuclear weapons after the end of the Second World War.
But the elimination of so many of the regional superpowers would still mean dozens of small brush wars potentially occurring in Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. The latter continent would probably be abandoned by Europe’s great powers after the war. The conflict will have bankrupted all of the European powers that had colonies in Africa by then. Not even America would be able or willing to intercede in Africa afterwards.
It still bothered Harold very much that he was so willing to see tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people dying each year in these small brush wars worldwide. But preventing the Final War that would doom humanity continued to be Harold’s primary goal, regardless of the potential short term price in lives lost each year.
