England Expects el-1

by Charles S. Jackson

  “That’s not the point,” Thorne growled, a little exasperated. “I’ll give you an example: Nick tells me the BEF lost ninety percent of its men at Dunkirk; either killed or captured on the beach by advancing German armour. That shouldn’t have happened.” After a moment’s silence, the enormity of the event caught up with him fully, as if a focus for parts of the world Thorne once knew that was now coming apart at the seams. “That shouldn’t have happened,” he repeated solemnly. “Hitler should’ve held the panzers back outside Dunkirk in spite of Guderian’s requests to advance. The Brits should’ve evacuated three hundred thousand men!”

  “Well perhaps that should have happened,” Trumbull snapped and stopped walking, angry now over a line of discussion that on the face of it appeared ludicrous to him. “The simple fact is that it didn’t happen and I still don’t understand what the hell you’re talking about!” He stood there with hands on hips, daring Thorne to explain himself.

  “The problem is it did happen!” The Australian shot back, halting also as that single statement left the pilot speechless. “That’s exactly what happened! History’s being changed and what I’ve told you about the course of the war — what should happen — is no longer stable or certain…” Thorne was feeling some slight disorientation himself now as a whole range of concepts and facts that were no longer reality whirled about in his mind, the thoughts muddied somewhat by the growing influence of the scotch. Despite all he’d been briefed to expect, some of the historical cornerstones of his world were being shattered before his eyes and that wasn’t an easy thing to deal with, sober or otherwise.

  “But…but what you’re talking about are things that haven’t happened yet…” Trumbull stammered, trying to grasp what Thorne was driving at. “The things you’re saying are events of the future!”

  There was silence as the two locked eyes, Thorne’s expression deadly serious. “Only the future for you…!” For a moment, Trumbull almost scoffed openly at what the man had said but the look on Thorne’s face stopped him cold. Reality or madness, this man believed what he’d just said.

  “You yourself said you didn’t believe the Lightning could exist,” Thorne ploughed on quickly now, the words coming in a rush. “It won’t… for about sixty-five years… None of those aircraft out there will…”

  “You… you’re saying that you’re…” Trumbull couldn’t finish the sentence. “This is impossible!” He decided instead. “I don’t know what you’re attempting to achieve here but this story is pure fantasy!” He stalked off in disgust, but Thorne could hear an undertone of uncertainty in the man’s voice now. Thorne took a large gulp of alcohol and drew a deep breath, knowing there was no way he could not stop now.

  Loudly, he called after Trumbull: “I was born on the Third of May, Nineteen Sixty-Five to Robert and Joan Thorne of Melbourne, Australia….” the words stopped the pilot in his tracks once more and for a few moments he stood stock still, continuing to face away from the other man. “I grew up in the inner Melbourne suburb of Collingwood before moving to the country in 1975 at ten years of age.” He ignored the pilot’s disbelief as the man turned again to face him from a few metres’ distance.

  “I attended state secondary school before beginning flight training with the Royal Australian Air Force at the age of eighteen. After graduation as a flight-lieutenant I served ten years with the RAAF including three years with Number 75 Squadron, flying F/A-18 fighter jets as squadron leader. Upon leaving the air force in ‘Ninety-Three, I travelled to England to work and continue my studies at Oxford. Halfway through my PhD in Modern History I was recruited by the Special Intelligence Service, and England has been my home ever since.” He took a deep breath.

  “I completed two university degrees during that time, including my PhD, which focussed on the rise of Nazi Germany and the Second World War. It was for this reason I was specifically assigned by the SIS to a special task force tracking a new and powerful Neo-Nazi movement spreading across Europe; a movement being backed by some high-level German businessmen and industrialists.” Thorne gave a thin smile as he spoke those words. “At that stage, we weren’t fully aware of what we were getting ourselves into.”

  He could see by the expression on Trumbull’s face that the man was teetering between belief and denial — that reason and logic were at odds with the things he’d seen in the last twelve hours that gave evidence to Thorne’s claims.

  “Take a look at the bloody planes, Alec!” Thorne insisted, his voice softening as he took a few steps forward to stand beside the man once more. “Where have you ever seen anything even remotely like them? You haven’t, and you know it! They’re so far beyond anything produced in this era by anyone that there’s really no other possible explanation.” He knew that statement was slight leap of logic but he also knew he was telling the truth and wasn’t really particular about how he got it across. “Tell me something then: from what I can gather, the RAF is just about done for, right?” Thorne decided that maybe he could take a different tack and skirt the subject a little for a while.

  “Close enough, much as I hate to say it,” Trumbull admitted, nodding slowly after a long, uncertain pause. “We’re sending up everything we’ve got and it’s still not enough. They attack the airfields by day and the cities by night. The raids are accurate — the night raids incredibly so, sometimes. There are relatively few civilian casualties for all that but the bombs never fail to destroy or damage something of importance: a munitions factory at Enfield Lock, an engine plant at Derby, the Supermarine production lines in Coventry. There just aren’t enough pilots or aircraft left.”

  “That’s what I figured…” Thorne nodded. “In July/August of 1940, Hitler issued Directive 17 which concerned what I believe became one of his greatest mistakes and eventually cost Germany victory in the Second World War. There was an operation planned called ‘Sealion’, ideally scheduled for sometime between July and September of 1940: this was to be the invasion of Great Britain. Before this operation could go ahead, Hitler demanded the total destruction of the Royal Air Force, enabling the Luftwaffe to be freed up to neutralise the Royal Navy. Göring promised that this could be done and on paper it certainly looked possible. At the beginning of the Battle of Britain the RAF had about six hundred and forty combat-ready fighters — a number that included 26 squadrons of Hurricanes and 19 of Spitfires. Against them, the Germans were fielding about twenty-four hundred fighters and bombers.

  “Four to one: that was what Air Chief Marshal Dowding told us,” Trumbull interjected.

  “Yeah, he said that where I came from, too…” The Australian added quickly, grinning. “Come on, mate…I know this is hard to cop in one load, but I’ve got a few things to show you that you might find interesting.” He clapped a hand on the man’s shoulder and started walking with him once more toward the concrete hardstands and the cargo aircraft.

  If the C-5M Galaxy seemed large from the outside, it was no less impressive to the RAF pilot from the inside. The cargo bay was gigantic, measuring more than four metres high by five and a half wide, and stretched for nearly thirty-seven metres from nose to tail not including the loading ramps. As they mounted the forward ramp, Trumbull walking rather tentatively beneath the huge, raised nose section, Thorne threw a nod at an armed guard in US greens who stood immobile near the cargo at the aircraft’s rear. Trumbull couldn’t clearly make out the type of rifle he held in his hands, but he could see well enough to know it was no Lee Enfield or American M1 Garand, and was unlike anything he’d ever seen.

  The sound of their boots on the metal floor literally rang and echoed in the darkened space, and in what light streamed in through the nose loading area, Trumbull could see quite a large load of cargo still stacked on pallets of various sizes, all tightly crammed in toward the centre of the bay from floor to roof with barely enough space for a man to squeeze down on one side and none at all on the other. A few metres inside, a retractable metal ladder connected an open hatch in the roof to the loading bay fl
oor and lead to another level above — Trumbull presumed it led to the cockpit high above that hinged nose.

  “Up we go,” Thorne said cheerfully, and without hesitation began clambering up the metal rungs. The Galaxy’s upper deck was smaller but still an eye opener for Trumbull. At the front there was an open hatchway through which could be seen instruments, cockpit glass and the pilots’ seats. Even in the small section of console he could see from that angle there were more gauges and dials and strange small screens than the pilot had ever seen on one aircraft. The area they stood in was filled with several rows of seats; enough for all the personnel he’d seen exit the aircraft the night before by Trumbull’s reckoning. Thorne led him down a central aisle between the seats to another hatch at the rear of the seated area.

  Behind that second bulkhead was a small room with barely enough space for more than two or three people. On one side, there was a narrow bench surrounded by walls and panels of a type of cream-coloured plastic. The bench carried what looked like a typewriter keyboard made of similar material and a large, black screen similar — very broadly — to the type that were used in the few examples of prototype television Trumbull had seen, although quite a bit larger in size and screen area. Opposite that on the other side of the room were racks of black, anodised metal that carried all manner of inexplicable objects the pilot couldn’t identify from long, black, oblong boxes of plastic in wafer-thin cases to even thinner plastic containers with clear tops that protected what appeared to be small, shiny discs of an unknown material.

  “Give me a moment here…” Thorne requested briefly as he fiddled with some controls set into the bulkhead near the screen. Invisible mechanisms within the bulkhead beeped into whirring operation and within a few seconds, the screen before them came to life. To begin with, the information the screen displayed was no more than a cascade of unintelligible text and numbers, but that was quickly replaced by something that was to Trumbull an equally inexplicable image filled with coloured borders and strange, tiny pictograms.

  “You’re not going to recognise any of the equipment here, Alec, so do bear with me…” Thorne requested as he searched within the metal racks for something in particular. He eventually dragged out a DVD, lifted it from its case and slipped it into an appropriate slot in the PC’s casing. “I think what I’m putting on here might help a bit.” He gestured to the only seat in the room — a swivel-topped, padded stool at the bench. “Take a seat, mate — make yourself comfortable.”

  As Trumbull sat, the screen began to flicker into motion and immediately captured the entirety of his attention. Sound began to issue from speakers mounted beneath the screen.

  “Bloody hell…!” Trumbull exclaimed, stunned. “A colour television!”

  “Just watch,” Thorne grinned, turning up the volume control.

  The face of an old man appeared against the bright background of a huge airbase, dressed in denims and a thick, green parka as several jet aircraft stood in the background. Trumbull of course couldn’t recognise the aircraft but it was clear they were larger than the Lightning by a fair margin and all of them carried RAF insignia. The man on screen however did appear somehow familiar, although he couldn’t place the face. He appeared to be in his eighties, with silver hair cut short and thinning on top to the point of baldness. What appeared to be a rather cold wind was gusting past as he stood there before those aircraft, but despite the buffeting there was enough clarity in the image to show a strange intensity in the old man’s eyes that Trumbull found intriguing. He chose to ask no questions, instead waiting to hear what the fellow on screen had to say.

  “Hello, Alec…” The croaky voice was surprisingly clear through a small microphone clipped to the collar of his parka, and again Trumbull found something familiar in the tone that he couldn’t quite identify. “This short video’s been produced specifically for you — Max and I are hoping it’ll go a long way to convincing you of the truth of what he’s been telling you. I know you won’t recognise me just yet, but I suspect you’re wondering about it” The old man gave a wry smile that Thorne instantly recognised as an almost perfect reproduction of the same smile he’d seen on Trumbull’s face several times since they’d met. “I’m eighty-five years old now, Alec and as you watch this in Nineteen Forty, I’m barely fifteen, so I’ll take no offence if you don’t recognise me straight away. Perhaps it might help if I take this opportunity to again thank you for never telling mother or father it was me that backed your MG into mother’s Riley that day…”

  “Laurence…!” Trumbull breathed the name as if in sudden shock as Thorne used a small remote control he held in one hand to halt the video momentarily. “My God, that’s my brother! I never told anyone about that…!” Thorne watched with a good deal of empathy as the man seated beside him tried to assimilate what his eyes and ears were telling him. It was now quite obvious that it was his younger brother, Laurence Trumbull standing before him despite the ageing brought about by the intervening years. “He’s old…!” That blunt and rather obvious observation was all he could manage as he tried to come to terms with the ramifications of that information. There were faint tears welling in the corners of his eyes as he glanced up at Thorne. “‘Eighty-Five’, he said… and he’s fifteen now… that would make it…” he quickly made the mental calculation within his head “…the year Two Thousand and Ten…?” The revelation hit him like a brick. “…Two Thousand and Ten!” He repeated with incredulity. “That would make me…ninety-six?” The questions were coming with the speed of a machine gun now and were mostly rhetoric, which was fortunate for Thorne as there was no chance for him to actually provide an answer. “Am I still alive…?” The question the Australian had been dreading arrived, but again Trumbull answered it himself as his own excited logic carried him on. “Of course I’m not…why else would you have my little brother making this motion picture rather than myself? Who lives to ninety-six anyway… stands to reason!” Deciding it safer to continue the video rather than allow Trumbull any chance to dwell on those dangerous thoughts, Thorne activated the remote once more.

  “If you look about this area, Alec…” Laurence Trumbull continued on screen, regaining his brother’s attention in an instant, “…you’ll probably not recognise this airbase either, although you were stationed here for a little while.” The camera panned around to show large buildings, even larger hangars, and more aircraft which Trumbull again had never seen before. The scene cut in an instant to a pair of aircraft the pilot did recognise. On either side of a set of blue-painted iron gates, a Supermarine Spitfire and Hawker Hurricane each sat atop a thick metal pole no more than a metre or two high, suspended as if in flight. Beyond the gates, a short drive ran past low hedges to a building Trumbull also recognised.

  “Biggin Hill…” he whispered softly to himself in awe, allowing the narrative to continue.

  “A Spitfire and a Hurricane — I’ve no doubt you recognise them well enough. These replicas were originally erected here in 1989 as the Gate Guardians of St George’s Chapel of Remembrance at Biggin Hill. They’re here in recognition of the sacrifice of all who served and were stationed here between 1939 and 1945. As I speak these words, the war has been over now for sixty-five years.” The scene cut back again to the old man, this time standing side by side with Max Thorne dressed in identical clothes to those he wore beside Alec Trumbull now. “If you’ll bear with us now, I’ll hand you over to someone far more knowledgeable to give you a short history lesson and try to explain to you what’s going on.”

  “Thanks, Laurence,” Thorne began on screen, the camera panning slightly to bring him into the centre of frame. “No doubt we’ve already met, Alec, if you’re watching this…” He grinned both on screen and off, almost in unison as he stood beside Trumbull in that small room and recalled exactly what he was about to say on the video. “I’m hoping I haven’t come across as a complete mental case as yet, and that if you’re still watching this you’re still keeping an open mind…” He paused for a bre
ath. “First I’ll tell you about one of the greatest strategic mistakes of the twentieth century…” The picture froze momentarily as Thorne paused the video once more.

  “We already talked about this bit — Operation Sealion and stuff — so I’ll zip forward a little…” With the press of a few more buttons on the remote control he held, the video image was replaced by the black and white scenes of British archival film: film of the Battle of Britain itself. It was footage Trumbull found familiar and somewhat eerie at the same time.

  “For a while the RAF was in real trouble…the Luftwaffe was hitting British airfields close to the coast and forcing fighter squadrons to use bases further inland, thereby reducing the amount of fuel they had available to engage oncoming bombers. During August of 1940, the loss of RAF fighters, although high wasn’t so bad, as aircraft were being replaced as quickly as they were shot down. The real problem was pilots: by that stage nearly twenty-five percent of Dowding’s fliers had been put out of action — either killed or wounded — and nearly a third of the RAF’s fighter pilots were members of inexperienced Category ‘C’ squadrons commanded by a nucleus of experienced but exhausted ‘old hands’.”

  Trumbull nodded as he heard these words, knowing the truth of it: so far, this story sounded identical to his perceptions of recent history. He found he couldn’t drag his eyes from the images on the screen as they held him completely in their power.

  The narrative continued: “The Germans on the other hand had no such problems. Their flying schools were quite happily meeting the needs of any losses inflicted, and by the end of August, the RAF was just about done for. A few more weeks perhaps and it would be all over, with nothing standing in the way of Operation Sealion. That was the idea, you see: for the Wehrmacht to send its invasion forces across the Channel, it needed the RAF out of the picture first. Any naval operations would elicit a response from the Royal Navy and without RAF protection, they’d be sitting ducks for the Luftwaffe.”