Goering was chuckling, his fleshy baby-face wreathed in delight. "That is so right! Two years—it seemed so long. But what was that at the other end of the connection? It was nothing. We were worrying about nothing."
"With hindsight, you can say that," Goebbels told him. "But it required genius to retain that perspective at the time.
Even Bormann was nodding grudgingly. "Perhaps I was too pessimistic, but that can be a sign of prudence, too." He was about to say something more, but stopped when he saw that a puzzled expression had come over Hitler's face. The relieved banter that had broken out across the room ceased abruptly with the realization that everything was not quite right.
"What?" Hitler was saying into the telephone. "What do you mean, an object has appeared inside the gate? What kind of an object? . . . How big and round? . . . On wheels? . . . Hello. . . . Hello?" Hitler looked up with a perplexed scowl on his face and leaned across the table to jiggle the telephone rest. "Hello, hello . . . Herr Director, are you there?"
"Operator," another voice said on the line.
"What's happened? Hitler demanded. "I was talking to the director at Valhalla. Some fool has cut me off."
"Allow me to check, please." A few moments of silence went by. Then the operator came back again. "I'm sorry, my Führer, but all the lines to Valhalla have gone dead," he advised.
In an RAF photographic reconnaissance Mosquito flying at thirty-five thousand feet over the Leipzig area, the copilot-navigator's eyes widened above the top of his oxygen mask. "Bloody hell, Skip—look at that!" His voice crackled over the intercom through the roar of twin Merlin engines.
"Where?"
"Bank starboard—down there, two o'clock.
"Christ! What's going on?"
"Dunno. Looks like something's brewed up."
"God, I've never seen anything like that!"
"Not a bad show, what?"
"Where is it?"
"Just a minute—I'll have a look."
The pilot put the plane into a slow, banking turn to watch the rising cloud of smoke while the copilot consulted his maps.
"Has to be the chemicals and ammo place at Weissenberg, Skip. Someone must have dropped a match."
"It looks as if one whole end of it's gone up. . . . Strewth!"
They circled for a while longer, taking pictures. "Maybe Bomber Harris can cross this place off his target list for a while," the pilot said. "Oh, well, time to take the old bus home, I suppose. Pint of bitter at the Bull's tonight, George?"
"Not a bad idea at all, Skip. I don't mind if I do."
CHAPTER 52
WAS IT POSSIBLE TO pinpoint precisely what the Proteus team had done to bring about such a staggering change in the world's fortunes? Many factors contributed, but from the analysis that Arthur Bannering presented at the Florida resort where the team was sent to recuperate after visiting the White House, it all seemed to have hinged around two crucial developments that had not taken place in the Proteus world: Churchill's appointment as Britain's Prime Minister, and the reelection of Roosevelt for a third term as President of the United States. These events were connected, and Anna Kharkiovitch was suspicious that far more than had been revealed lay behind the circumstances that had precipitated them.
In April 1940, after the happenings at Gatehouse and Weissenberg, the Anglo-French expedition to Norway had sailed as planned. But following the postponement of Hitler's attack in the West the German expedition sailed at about the same time—not a month later in May, as had been expected. The two fleets blundered into each other, and a confused series of landings and engagements took place up and down the Norwegian coast, lasting into the following month.
The result was a fiasco for the Allies and bore out all of Major Warren's dire predictions about the amateurish state of Britain's military preparations. It was conceivable that the Allies had survived the early encounters only because the enemy's advisers had never fought a real, large-scale war.
The British troops sent to Norway had no skis, and hadn't been trained in their use, anyway; the crack French Chasseurs Alpins mountain brigade did have skis, but they were shipped without the straps to secure them. A field communications unit, sent with its personnel in one ship and its equipment in another, was rendered hors de combat without the Germans' firing a shot when one vessel was rerouted in mid-voyage to a new destination, and the other wasn't. Troops were continually being embarked, disembarked, and reembarked in Scottish ports, while across the sea their hitherto undefended objectives were being occupied by the Germans. And no antiaircraft guns were sent.
But the biggest error, despite all the warnings, was the British failure to appreciate the impact of air power on a world that had been ruled by navies for centuries. The Luftwaffe quickly gained the skies after occupying bases in Denmark and Norway, and the Allied position became untenable. Evacuation of the expedition had commenced by the end of the month, which made all the more unfortunate a confident assurance to the House by Prime Minister Chamberlain only weeks before that Hitler had "missed the bus."
"If this is an example of what foreknowledge of history can do for us," Churchill had grumbled to a distaught Arthur Bannering, left to take the brunt after Winslade and Anna's disappearance, "we'd be better off without it!"
But the outcome of all this confusion was not such a disaster, after all. After a passionate debate in the British Parliament early in May, in which the government was censured not only for the Norwegian debacle, but also for its entire conduct of the war, Chamberlain resigned. For a while, it seemed that Lord Halifax would succeed him—as indeed he had in the Proteus world; but in this world, Halifax's disposition wasn't in tune with the new mood of the nation; He was not a war leader, and he knew it. Accordingly, Halifax declined, and the King sent for Churchill to form a government instead.
"Claud and Arthur set it up!" Anna insisted as she sat debating the affair with the others on the white sands of a Florida beach. "They engineered the whole thing. They knew the Norwegian campaign would be a disaster and that the government would never survive it.
"But how could anyone have known that Churchill would take over?" Selby objected.
"Who else was there?" Scholder asked.
"It was obvious that Norway couldn't succeed," Warren said. "And it did result in a god-awful shakeup of the whole British high command. But I don't know—would Claud really have risked something like that?"
"What about the other Claud?" Cassidy said. "Look how much he risked. It's the same guy, isn't it?"
"They knew it would happen, I tell you," Anna insisted again. "They set it up. Claud and Arthur brought down the entire British government."
A few yards away, Arthur Bannering sat nonchalantly reading a newspaper at a table underneath a sunshade, while Winslade, sphinxlike, smiled to himself as he gazed out at the ocean. Neither of them said anything.
Churchill took office officially as Prime Minister to the Crown on May 10, 1940. And that, as chance would have it, was the day that Hitler unleashed his blitzkrieg in the West.
"I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat," Churchill told the House in his inaugural address. There could be no thought of making terms with the enemy; he knew where the road of capitulation would lead. "You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. . . ."
By then the whole European situation had acquired a momentum that was causing it to diverge from the history of the Proteus world much faster than anybody realized. As agreed, the British force in northern France advanced into Belgium to meet the anticipated German thrust, but Hitler had changed his plans. The main weight of the German attack fell not upon the Lowlands but farther south, in the Ardennes, and in days the Panzers had broken through the lightly held French line and were racing for the coast at Abbeville. The northern armies were trapp
ed, and by the end of the month more troops were being evacuated in addition to those still coining back from Norway—this time over 300,000 of them, from Dunkirk.
Hitler didn't yet understand the change that Churchill's appointment signified. Taking the rapid collapse as evidence of the Allies' desire for a speedy end to their involvement, he signaled his adherence to the "understanding" that he still thought he had by holding the Panzers back for three crucial days while the Dunkirk evacuations went ahead. He publicly expressed absolute confidence that the British and French would then sue for peace, posing as the magnanimous conquerors by offering them generous-sounding terms.
Britain's reply came over the airwaves in Churchill's defiant, rasping tones: Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. . . . We shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may he. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing-grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. . . .
But it was too late to save France. Paris fell on June 14, and an armistice was signed a week later. Britain was left alone to face a Nazi-dominated Europe, just twenty miles away across the Channel. Invasion, surely, would be the next step. To oppose it, the Royal Navy was left with sixty-eight serviceable destroyers; there were just three hundred fifty tanks in all of the British Isles.
If the invasion had come, it would have been everybody's war. While farmers and factory hands drilled with iron railings and shotguns, the King had a shooting range constructed in Buckingham Palace grounds, where he, other members of the Royal Family, and the palace staff practiced assiduously with Tommy guns and pistols. He professed a distinct feeling of relief to Churchill that England was now on its own and disencumbered of foreigners that it was necessary to be polite to. The young Princess Elizabeth, heir to the throne, trained as an Army truck driver.
In the Mediterranean theater, meanwhile, the French battleships at Oran hadn't fallen into Hitler's hands as they had in the Proteus world; Churchill sent the Royal Navy there and sank them. A more cautious Franco kept Spain out of the Axis this time, and Gibraltar and Malta didn't fall. Churchill quashed requests for the Mediterranean Fleet to withdraw when Mussolini joined in the war, and instead, the Navy's torpedo bombers crippled the Italian capital ships in an audacious attack at Taranto.
These were the events that inspired Roosevelt, across the Atlantic, to run for a third term, and he was nominated as his party's candidate without any real opposition. "If we do win this war," Winslade told Anna as they settled down after boarding the train that would take the team back north to Washington, "it will have been won in July 1940, at the Democratic Convention in Chicago."
Even before then, Roosevelt's policies had shown the effects of the Proteus mission's intervention. After Dunkirk, prevailing over the U.S. service chiefs who had written Britain off, he sent Churchill shiploads of arms and ammunition, subverting the Neutrality Laws by selling the materiel to a steel company, which resold it to the British government. In July, he signed an act expanding the U.S. Navy to include thirty-five battleships, twenty carriers, and fifteen thousand Navy planes, and in September shepherded a bill through Congress to supply Britain with fifty vintage American destroyers in exchange for leasing rights to West Indian bases. In October, the military draft bill became law, and Roosevelt's successful reelection made inevitable the eventual mobilization of America's stupendous industrial might to the British cause.
In the end, Britain was not invaded. Instead, Hitler, vowing revenge for having been let down on the "deal," decided to demonstrate the might of his Luftwaffe. Through the scorching days of August and September 1940, Goering's air fleets came in waves over England—and were decimated by the Hurricanes and Spitfires that Churchill, mindful of Bannering's warnings of what had happened in the Proteus world, had kept back from the forlorn fight in France. At night, the RAF bombers smashed the invasion craft being assembled in the Channel ports.
By September, the Luftwaffe's daylight attacks had been defeated. Incensed by the experience of his first defeat, the Führer switched his air force to a night-bombing offensive against London that lasted into the following year. Over seventeen thousand Luftwaffe bombers attacked the city between the middle of August and the end of October. In September alone, London was raided 268 times; the blitzkrieg continued through almost ninety consecutive nights of the cold winter months. But history didn't repeat itself. This time, Britain held out.
A convoy carrying most of the precious tanks was forced through to reinforce General Wavell in Egypt, and by the end of the year, the Italians had been hurled back and were in full flight across Libya.
In the Proteus world, Halifax had signed the formal British surrender on January 1, 1941. It was a very different New Year that the British, battered and weary though they were, could look forward to this time.
Since Overlord's whole purpose had been to eliminate the Soviets, the Russo-German pact of 1939 was plainly nothing more than a temporary expedient to be observed until Hitler was ready to attack. In the Proteus world, he had attacked in May 1941. Through diplomatic and other channels, Churchill and Roosevelt attempted to warn Stalin of what their secret information led them to expect. But Stalin remained—outwardly, at least—unimpressed. In April and May, Hitler secured his southern flank by gobbling up Yugoslavia and the Balkans, evicting a hastily improvised British force sent to defend Greece, and taking Crete by airborne assault.
Then, on June 22, three German Army groups consisting of 3,000,000 men, 7,100 guns, and 3,300 tanks, stormed eastward in a gesture of totalitarian good-neighborliness, and were halted at the very edge of Moscow and in the Crimea only by the coming of winter. At last, the beleaguered British had acquired a fighting ally—a strange bedfellow for somebody of Churchill's breeding and disposition, to be sure, but an ally nevertheless. And after more than a year of facing Hitler alone, that wasn't something to be sneered at.
"But in another sense it was the worst news," Selby told Scholder as the train clattered northward. "We took it to mean that Hitler would be getting the A-bombs, and therefore Ampersand had failed. That was when the British decided to merge their fission work with the U.S. program, and I moved back over here. FDR told everyone to stop fooling with the gate at that point and get moving on the bomb."
The biggest surprise of all had been in the Pacific.
In the Proteus universe, Overlord's agents had established relationships with the militant elements in Japan, who succeeded in bringing to power the former War Minister, Tojo. The Japanese contributed to the common cause by attacking the Soviets in the east from Manchuria in September 1941, a few months after the opening of the German onslaught on the western side. At the same time, they commenced amphibious landings in Malaya and the East Indies to further their own designs upon the former British and Dutch eastern colonies.
Intelligence reports came in early December of the Japanese troop transports sailing from their bases in China and Indochina. By December 6, as the Russians were launching a major counter-offensive along a 500 mile front before Moscow with the forces they had risked transferring from Siberia, the inner staff groups around Churchill and Roosevelt were convinced that the Japanese attack from Manchuria would come at any moment.
Then, on December 7, American cryptanalysts in Washington intercepted a message to the Japanese embassy instructing that diplomatic relations were to be broken off. The embassy was told to deliver the message to the State Department at 1300 hours. The Americans were puzzled. Why did the message talk about breaking off relations with the U.S. when Japan was going to attack the U.S.S.R.? Roosevelt hadn't learned yet, as Churchill had when France fell, that foreknowledge of events from another universe could be a mixed blessing. The U.S. remained blissfully off
guard.
The Japanese embassy hadn't been notified of the urgency of the message; decoding was leisurely, and the diplomats didn't learn of the deadline until after the American code-breakers had. It was Sunday, and a further delay ensued in obtaining an appointment to deliver the translation to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. This was eventually accomplished at 1430 hours, not 1300 hours as had been stipulated.
1300 hours in Washington would have corresponded to dawn in Hawaii. When the message was finally delivered, Hull had just received the first reports from Pearl Harbor.
By then it was too late. Japan had jumped the wrong way!
But that was a year in the past by the time the team returned from 2025; and 1942 had seen a turning of the tide. In the carrier battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, the Americans had stopped the Japanese in the Pacific, and the Marines had gone ashore at Guadalcanal. In North Africa, the British under Montgomery had stopped Rommel at El Alamein and then gone over to the offensive, while to the west, the Americans landed in Morocco and Algeria. The Russians had stopped von Paulus at Stalingrad. The RAF were flying a thousand bomber raids over Germany, and the first wings of Flying Fortresses and Liberators had begun operating from England.
The Proteus Operation Page 45
