The Moscow Option
By David Downing
An Alternative Second World War
Copyright ©1980 by David Downing
ISBN 0-312-54891-5
Alternative Wars - An Introduction
Human history is often perceived as a vast and immutable web of events. Behind these events stretch infinite crisscrossing threads of causation, ahead of them infinite crisscrossing threads of consequence. An historian can choose his event, and trace those threads into the past and the future.
The Russian Revolution, for example. One causative factor was clearly the strain of three years’ mismanaged war. One consequence was clearly the crash industrialisation of Russia. Yet what if the Schlieffen Plan had worked in August 1914, and the Germans had won the war that year? Would there have been no Russian Revolution? And if not, would there still have been a crash industrialisation programme?
Of course the Revolution had other causes. But I think it is safe to assume that the strain of a long war helped in some way to shape the character of the upheaval. Without that strain the story would have been a different one, in detail if not in essence. And one of the details might well have been the speed of Russia’s industrialisation.
History is full of such ‘ifs’. What if Judas had not betrayed Jesus? What if Blucher had arrived too late on the field of Waterloo? What if the French Communist Party had not helped to crush the May 1968 rebellion? Such questions would have seemed worthy of the asking to those present at the time, but now they seem merely speculative, interesting but irrelevant. We reserve our speculation for our present. What if Israel recognises the existence of the Palestinians? What if the world’s energy supplies run out? Yet in twenty years’ time historians will only be analysing the consequences of such happenings if they have actually happened, for this is what we call history.
The Second World War has been dealt with accordingly. The crucial events and decisions have been pinpointed, placed in their contexts, their sources and consequences exhaustively analysed. Traditional historians mention the might-have-beens in passing. ‘It is futile to speculate’, they say, and then spend a guilty paragraph or two doing just that. They acknowledge the fascination, but like politicians acknowledging democracy, they prefer to keep it under control.
There is, it is true, a growing body of literature concerned with Second World Wars that never happened. These books can be divided into two basic categories: novelised war games and ‘speculative fiction’. The war-game books usually focus on the military aspects of a hypothetical war situation of short duration. A German invasion of England is one favourite topic. There is rarely sufficient scope - or, presumably, desire - for investigating the underlying processes which directed the war as a whole. This is, after all, why the emphasis in war games is usually on games.
In the realm of speculative fiction several brilliant works stand out, and I must acknowledge one of them, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle as an inspiration for this particular book. Dick’s novel is set in a world in which the Germans and Japanese have been victorious, and one of the characters has written a history of a war that never happened, in which the Axis powers were defeated! In the course of the novel Dick delivers his usual quota of insights into the human condition, and contrives in the process to say a great deal about contemporary America, Nazism and much else besides. But he is not basically interested in whether his might-have-been war is also a could-have-been war; he is only interested in what would have happened if it had been.
In this book I have tried to write a history of a Second World War that both might and could have occurred. The scope - thirteen months of global conflict - is too wide for a war game. It could perhaps be considered a ‘history game’; if so, I hope the emphasis is on history. It is not a work of speculative fiction in that it accepts the limits imposed by military, political and socio-economic possibility.
I have not provided the Germans with the long-range bombers they had neglected to provide for themselves. I have not widened the industrial base of the Japanese war-machine, nor blessed the invaders of Russia with an ideology of liberation. National Socialism would not have been true to its own distorted self had it desired the liberation of Slavs, even from Bolshevism. Nor is it conceivable that Hitler’s Germany could have adopted rational forward- planning with regard to anything other than the extermination of the Jews. States built around a ‘romantic’ solution to the stresses of advanced capitalism do not organize themselves in an unromantic manner. And if the Japanese had possessed a wider industrial base it is doubtful whether they would have needed to go to war at all. Such facts are ‘givens’, and have not been tampered with. On the contrary, the raison d’être of alternative history lies in the fresh light it throws on the underlying processes of real history by its shifting of the more familiar events taking place on the surface.
In this alternative war I have made only two basic changes to the normal run of events. One occurs in Chapter 1, the other in Chapter 5. The effect of these two basic changes is to give the Germans and Japanese significant military advantages without altering their fundamental historical situations. All the other changes, the entire alternative history, flow from these two. Nothing has been altered in the time prior to the first change, which occurs on the afternoon of 4 August 1941.
In the main body of the text there is no attempt to compare the ‘alternative’ with the ‘real’. The alternative war is written as if it really happened, in the manner of a barefaced lie 80,000 words long. For those interested in sorting out the fiction from the fact there is a Notes and References section at the end of the book, in which references are given for genuine quotations and the minor fictional characters listed. All the central characters are or were real people; they act as I believe it is reasonable to assume they would have acted in the fictional situations created.
I would like to thank Hugh Miller for his generous assistance with the medical details of Hitler’s illness, Martin Noble for his friendly help in the production of this and other artifacts, and record my appreciation to the late Roger Parkinson for the suggestions offered when the book was still germinating.
David Downing, June 1978
Prologue - 4 August 1941
‘Somebody got lucky, but it was an accident.’
Bob Dylan
I
Churchill reached the report’s conclusion. ‘In our view the manufacture of atomic weapons is definitely feasible, and should be pursued on a large scale.’ So far, so good. He put the sheaf of papers down on the seat beside him and stared out of the window at the awesome Scottish scenery. The western slopes of the Cairngorms were still deep in shadow, a huge black slab beneath the brightening sky. Atomic bombs and morning glory! The British Prime Minister leant back in his seat and dozed.
The train rumbled on northwards. It had departed from London’s Marylebone Station the previous evening, stopping only at the small country station of Chequers to pick up Churchill. It was now 7.30 in the morning of 4 August 1941.
Also aboard the train, in varying stages of wakefulness and breakfast, were the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, the First Sea Lord, the Vice-Chief of the Air Staff and fifty other people central to the British war effort. All were en route to Scapa Flow, the naval base in the Orkney Islands. That evening they were to set sail in the Prince of Wales, Britain’s newest battleship, for a meeting with the American President in one of Newfoundland’s myriad bays.
Britain’s warlords were carrying with them plans, schemes and dreams for the continued prosecution of the war against Germany and Italy. In his personal baggage Churchill also carried a copy of Captain Hornblower R.N. by C. S. Forester. He intended to read it during the voyage. A week later he would cable Oliver
Lyttleton, the Minister of State in Cairo, that he found Hornblower ‘admirable’. A number of staff officers spent several anxious hours wondering which military operation he was referring to.
The British public, ignorant of Churchill’s odyssey, were busy enjoying a warm August Bank Holiday. Trains to the coast and the country were jammed as city-dwellers hurried either to enjoy the sun and the sea or visit their evacuated children. 15,000 turned up at Lords to see a combined Middlesex-Essex XI score 412-6 against Surrey and Kent. W. J. Edrich hit 102 of them and proved himself, in the words of The Times cricket correspondent, ‘a squadron leader in the noblest sense of the word’.
The war was more than just a source of similes, however, as the newspaper’s usual broad coverage demonstrated. On that morning of 4 August the daily communique from Cairo GHQ announced that it was ‘all quiet about Tobruk and in the Libyan frontier area’. On the back page there was a picture of the new Crusader tank; this, it was hoped, would disrupt the desert calm to the British advantage. It was, The Times proudly stated, ‘the fastest of its kind in the world’. The Crusader’s chronic tendency to mechanical failure had not yet become apparent.
The campaign in Russia took up half a page. Smolensk, the Moscow correspondent reported, was still in Russian hands. As evidence he cited the theatre company which had left the capital the previous Saturday to perform for the city’s defenders. It seems unlikely that they received a hearty welcome - the town had fallen to the Germans two weeks earlier.
No evidence at all was put forward for the assertion that ‘scepticism is spreading through the Reich’, but, perhaps in recognition of this oversight, the following day it was reported that ‘in cities where the RAF raids have been most frequent an increase in the suicide rate is recorded’.
In the Far East more nations were following the United States’ lead in freezing Japanese assets. The western powers were still four months away from a direct military clash with the Rising Sun, but The Times noted with satisfaction that ‘the whole British Empire is now lined up with the United States in economic warfare against Japan’.
Roosevelt’s departure from the public eye had been considerably less discreet than Churchill’s. He had sailed from the New London submarine base the previous evening in the Presidential yacht Potomac. The need for a complete rest was the official reason given for his voyage.
The American newspapers, like their British counterparts, carried the usual mixture of war communiques and expert military analysis. The less reputable ones were also, on 4 August, full of a noticeable side-effect of the war - the ‘stocking riots’ of the previous Saturday. Apparently Roosevelt’s edict forbidding the processing of raw silk for non-military purposes - silk imports had plummeted with the deterioration of trade relations with Japan - had given rise to fears of a stocking famine among the women of America, and had led to full-scale battles in department stores across the country. Even the London Daily Mirror picked up the story, gleefully recounting the use of ‘strong- arm methods’ by ‘husky Chicago housewives’.
Meanwhile the President, beyond the range of prying eyes or Chicago housewives, was abandoning the Potomac in favour of a US Navy cruiser for the journey north to Newfoundland. His staff also carried with them plans for the prosecution of the war, in their case one not yet declared. But time was growing short. Roosevelt had an interesting piece of paper to show Churchill. It was a copy of a coded Japanese message intercepted and deciphered the previous Thursday. ‘To save its own life’, a part of the message read, the Japanese Empire ‘must take measures to secure the raw materials of the South Seas. It must take immediate steps to break asunder this ever-strengthening chain of encirclement which is being woven under the guidance of and with the participation of England and the United States, acting like a cunning dragon seemingly asleep.’
Roosevelt knew what this implied. So did Cordell Hull, his Secretary of State, who returned to work that day after six weeks’ absence through illness. Some had thought his malady more diplomatic than real, evidence that Hull’s hard-line approach to foreign policy was out of favour with the rest of the Administration. He quickly sought to disabuse them. The events of the past few weeks, he told the press, had offered further confirmation of ‘a world movement of conquest by force, accompanied by methods of governing the conquered peoples that are rooted mainly in savagery and barbarism.’ The American response must be an ever-increasing production of military supplies, ‘both for ourselves and for those who are resisting . .’
Four thousand miles away, in the north Italian town of Mantua, Benito Mussolini was delivering a farewell speech to the Russia-bound Blackshirt Division, and echoing Hull’s manichean vision of the world. ‘The alignment is complete,’ the Duce argued. ‘On the one side Rome, Berlin and Tokyo; on the other London, Washington and Moscow. We have not the slightest doubt about the issue of this great battle. We shall triumph because history teaches that people who represent the ideas of the past must give way before the peoples who represent the ideas of the future.’
In Russia, meanwhile, the bitter struggle raged on, leaving little time for such oratory. The Soviet leaders, who would have agreed wholeheartedly with Mussolini’s last sentence, were for the moment more concerned with such mundane matters as the desperate battle taking place in the Yelna salient east of Smolensk; the need to halt the German panzers that were now only eighty miles from Leningrad; and the disaster looming in the steppe south of Kiev.
But in Moscow itself, the only warring capital under threat of imminent seizure, spirits were higher than they had been two weeks before. Roosevelt’s envoy Harry Hopkins had only recently departed - he was now waiting for Churchill aboard Prince of Wales - and it had been widely assumed that he had offered bountiful American aid. More important perhaps, the good news from the central front compensated the Muscovites for the continuing flow of bad news from the more distant northern and southern fronts. The enemy was being held at Yelna! A fortnight before he had been only two hundred miles from Moscow. And he still was! Perhaps, the optimists wondered out loud, the tide had turned. Perhaps the worst was over.
Perhaps not. That night there would be a meeting of the Stavka, the supreme military-political command. The summonses would go out by telephone, and soon the long black cars would speed through Moscow’s empty and blacked-out streets, through the checkpoints and the fortress walls of Stalin’s Kremlin. The leaders of Soviet Communism and the Red Army would climb from their cars and walk swiftly up to the conference chamber from which the Soviet war effort was directed.
In that room, on that August night, there would be little talk of American aid; all present knew that in the months remaining before winter only the Red Army could save the Soviet Union. The discussion would be of divisions overrun, armies encircled, bridges fallen to the enemy, of days rather than years, of the struggle to survive.
In China too the war went on, but its instigators in Tokyo were now absorbed in the planning of more ambitious military projects. The American freezing of Japanese assets and a virtually complete oil embargo were proving more of a spur than a deterrent. The Times that day reported an article by the Japanese Finance Minister in the newspaper Asahi. In it he argued that Japan should go on with the construction of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Withdrawal from China would invite a catastrophe; victory and success would make ‘all costs appear as nothing’. Another article, this time by the Vice-Director of the Cabinet Planning Board, urged the Japanese people to be content with the ‘lowest standard of living’, and to ‘abolish all liberalistic individualism for the sake of the race and the nation’.
These were more than empty words. The unfortunate inhabitants of Kagoshima in southern Kyushu could, had they but known it, have confirmed as much. For their city and its bay were being used, unknown to them and most of the participants, as a training ground for Operation ‘Z’, the planned attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor. Torpedo planes flew over the mountain behind the city, zoomed down across
the railway station, between smokestacks and telephone poles before launching imaginary torpedoes at a breakwater in the harbour. The locals, unaware that the breakwater was standing in for Pearl Harbor’s Battleship Row, complained bitterly at the nerve-wracking antics of these hot-headed pilots.
II
At 11am Churchill’s train was puffing along the banks of the Dornoch Firth, a hundred miles short of its destination. In Novy Borrisov, three time-zones to the east, it was 2pm, and Field-Marshal Fedor von Bock was escorting Adolf Hitler from the Army Group Centre HQ to the car waiting to take him to the airstrip nearby. The Führer, having conferred with Bock and his panzer group commanders as to the military situation on Army Group Centre’s front, was returning home to the Wolfsschanze, his personal headquarters in the East Prussian forests near Rastenburg.
Watching the party make their way across the yellowed grass towards the waiting car were the two panzer group commanders, Generals Hoth and Guderian. They were enjoying a cup of the decent coffee available at Army Group HQ before returning to their own less exalted headquarters. They were also extremely confused. Why had the Führer not sanctioned a continuation of the march on Moscow? All his commanders thought it the correct course of action. If Hitler had come to argue for a different course then it would have been understandable. Mistaken, but understandable. Instead he had just listened, and then talked airily of Leningrad, the Ukraine, even Moscow itself. He had not committed himself to any one of them. He was clearly undecided. Why was he refusing to see the obvious?
While Hoth and Guderian were savouring their cups of coffee and sharing their misgivings, the Führer’s party reached the Borrisov airstrip and the four-engined FW200 reconnaissance plane that was to carry it back to Rastenburg. Bock bid his superiors farewell with a characteristically unconvincing ‘Heil Hitler’, and the Führer, Field-Marshal Keitel and their SS bodyguard climbed aboard the plane. Within minutes the FW200 was rolling down the dirt runway and into the sky.
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