Yes he would track down Philippe and pass on his observations about the strange behavior of the newest invader to strut over his homeland. They too would pass, just as the Germans had. He was confident of that.
***
Once again I’ve tied to stimulate a dry subject pertaining to the preparations that were happening within sight of the White Cliffs of Dover.
***
Dunkirk, Once Again
The frontend loader lifted the piece of paving stone along with hundreds of others and let it drop in an avalanche of dirt, dust and gravel onto what was to become another airfield for the VVS or Red Army Air Forces. All in all the Soviets had tripled the takeoff capacity of the areas used by the Germans in 1940 for their Battle of Britain. The Soviets had an immense advantage over the RAF’s previous opponent, the Luftwaffe. Their planes had the range to reach all of the British Isles along with a longer built-in loiter time. They could take off and reach their intended targets and loiter for hours in some cases. The typical Messerschmitt Bf-109E of 1940 only had a loiter time of ten minutes during the first Battle of Britain.
Our piece of paving stone landed near the top of the pile and when the bulldozer leveled the pile with its weathered side up, once again facing the French sun. This is the side that saw quite a bit of history before it became part of this runway near Dunkirk.
It was first laid down on the corner of Rue Clemenceau and Rue du President Poincare. Today it is near the Plaza Jean Bart within sight of the Bell Tower.
The Dunkirk area and its excellent harbor, has been much disputed over between Spain, the Netherlands, England and France, over the past few centuries. At the beginning of the Eighty Years' War Dunkirk was briefly in the hands of the Dutch rebels from 1577. Spanish forces under the Duke of Parma, re-established Spanish rule in 1583, and it became a base for the notorious Dunkirkers.
The Dunkirkers were legalized pirates for the Spanish, and for close to eighty years, were a thorn in the side of the British and Dutch. They captured hundreds of coastal vessels and even joined some to the great battles of the day. They are credited with designing the frigate in order to evade the blockading Dutch and English. A ship fast enough to elude a ship-of-the-line, yet strong enough to run down and destroy any other vessel of the time.
Our piece of paving stone saw the boots of many an invader from the Spanish, to the French, then back to the Spanish, and briefly, the Dutch, and so on. Not that it cared whose boots were gradually wearing it down. In 1658 even the British owned it, but they sold it to France in 1662 and, it had remained in French hands until 1940. Then the hobnailed jackboots of the Germans took a good millimeter off our stone.
A man of countless stories was arrested, while standing on our paving stone. In fact a drop of his blood still stains it. It is hardly traceable, but it is there. The man who was arrested was entered in the prison rolls as Eustache Dauger; better known to history as “The Man in the Iron Mask.” He is the man that Alexandre Dumas made famous, resulting in dozens of movies and novels about him.
It is interesting to note that much of what we know about the Man in the Iron Mask comes from his jailer of thirty-four years and his correspondence between his employer. Too bad no one but us, knows about that spot of blood that remains exceedingly well-preserved in a tiny crack in the stone. It was covered soon after it settled there by some pine pitch from a lumber wagon. Oh yes, it is there just waiting for DNA testing. It is just waiting to tell us who the Man in the Iron Mask truly was.
Within shouting distance of where our little piece of history used to lay, is a statue of Jean Bart, another name of historical interest. Many of Jean Bart’s fourteen children stumbled on the spot where our stone rested as it was slightly raised above its surroundings making it a natural stumbling block for many a child. Jean Bart is one of France's most revered naval commanders and heroes having no less than six major ships-of-the-line and a few battleships as well, named after him.
Jean Bart’s statue and the Bell Tower, are two of the very few buildings and monuments left standing, after the allies repeatedly bombed the small city. Before being leveled the city's beaches and harbor helped save Britain by becoming an embarkation point for forty-thousand fleeing Allied soldiers who would live to defend Britain once more. I’m sure you’ve all heard of the “Little Ships of Dunkirk” and “the Miracle of Dunkirk,” so I won’t bore you with that incredible story.
The city was again contested in 1944 and the Canadian 2nd Infantry Division attempted to liberate the city in September as Allied forces surged northeast after their victory in the Battle of Normandy. However, German forces refused to relinquish their control of the city, which had been converted into a fortress, and the garrison there was “masked” by Allied troops, most notably by the Czechoslovak 1st Armored Brigade. The fortress, under the command of German Admiral Friedrich Frisius, eventually surrendered unconditionally to the commander of the Czechoslovak forces, Brigade-General Alois Liška, on 9 May 1945.
Our little paving stone did pretty well until a 105-mm artillery shell finally landed twenty-one feet away and threw it into the air where it struck the right temple of a young lady, named Brigit. No one knows her last name but luckily it did not kill her, because Brigit was the last person to remember the culinary delight, Potjevleesch.
It’s a Flemish potted meat originally from Dunkerque. It is a terrine made of three meats: often veal, bacon and rabbit; or chicken, duck and rabbit. Calves' feet are sometimes added. The meat is cooked with onions, shallots, garlic, white wine and some herbs, lemon and tomatoes. If the paving stone had killed Brigit, Potjevleesch the recipe would have been lost forever to the sands of time.
Within weeks our paving stone will have the tires of Soviet Tu-2 medium bombers rolling over it by the dozens. Along with millions of others it forms the base for the runways that will launch hundreds of planes at a time, all winging their way towards other flying machines like themselves and the pilots in them will try to kill each other, like all the men before them.
Whether by sword or arrow, bullet or bomb, flesh will be torn asunder. In the end, our paving stone will still be there patiently waiting to play its part in the newest wave of violence, near the city of Dunkirk, on the shores of the English Channel.
***
The RAF has quite a dilemma on its hands. How would you prepare to receive a force that was 4 to 5 times your size? Arthur William Tedder had some pretty good ideas on the subject. His advice was not listened to.
***
Tedder
Marshal of the RAF, 1st Baron Tedder of Glenguin, Arthur William Tedder, Chief of the RAF Air Staff, was the first to grasp the significance of what this General Kirkpatrick was trying to dance around. He immediately dismissed him as a messenger, and his real wrath would be directed at the parties responsible. As the others in the room browbeat Kirkpatrick, his mind was on the implications of the information that he had just heard. He ticked them off as if they were on a piece of paper in front of him…
There would be no additional assistance from the Americans in the form of additional squadrons. The three squadrons of P-80's were all that they were going to receive.
The Soviets had a million VT fuses, which they could fit to bombs so that they could explode overhead, with devastating effects on soft targets.
This would also mean that they could use those fuses against any British aircraft that attacked their infrastructure with their captured and Lend-Lease AAA guns.
The Soviets also had over one-hundred eighty Yank radio jammers. How they would use them, is up to conjecture. Some argued that they would have no idea what to do with them and would therefore be worthless, and quite possibly have been scrapped by now.
If anyone could weigh the odds and figure out a solution, it was Tedder. Tedder was the architect of “carpet-bombing.” He first proposed and then used, it during the Tunisian campaign where it preceded one of the final assaults. The press called it “The Tedder Carpet,” and it had caught on. Tedd
er was used to devising ways to defeat the enemy. This time was different though, and he realized this almost immediately.
The common British response was that the Soviets were unthinking barbarians who just won by throwing overwhelming numbers of cannon-fodder at their enemies. They seemed neither caring nor capable of reducing the slaughter. The history of their casualty rates were dismal to say the least, yet the way they had fought in this new war so far was impressive to him. They had out-thought and out-maneuvered the best military minds in the West for three months now. Clearly something had happened to the Golden Horde, and the Slav had changed his tactics and strategy. It was past time to throw out the obvious misconceptions about the new Red Army and all of the racist notions of the past. It was time for him to convince the powers in charge, that the Soviets had not only achieved parity with the West in the realm of aerospace, but in some instances, had even surpassed them.
He was going to have to make his case very quickly and forcefully, if the needed changes were going to take place at all. General Hastings Lionel Ismay seemed to have Atlee’s ear and was making all the wrong choices, for all the wrong reasons in his opinion. He was sure the Soviets had something up their sleeve and were not going to do the predictable thing. Ismay was trying to fight the second Battle of Britain like the first. Although he personally liked Ismay, he felt that he lacked imagination, and that lack of imagination could be the death of Britain.
This new information just presented to him put steel in his backbone and it was time. He needed to arrange an appointment with the Prime Minister today, even if it cost him his position.
Chapter Thirty-Three:
My Name Is of No Importance
Child Labor in the Appalachian Coal Mines before the War
***
The following are from diary entries of an un-named Soviet VVS pilot. It is offered to illuminate the pre-war lives of the protagonists that are about to give the last full measure for their respective countries. It illustrates the staggering twists and turns of a dictator gone mad and its effects on everyone under his control. Notice the extreme amounts of propaganda this child endures.
***
Un-Named Pilot
My name is not important, but what I will accomplish in twelve days just might be. I am but a small piece in the Soviet military machine. I may as well be just a nut or a bolt. I am a piece that will pilot one of the Lend-Lease B-25J Mitchell bombers filled with electronic equipment. How I got here might be of some interest to future historians.
I was born in Moscow, in October of 1923, and that makes me twenty-three years old today. I do not remember much of my childhood, especially before my fifth year. I do remember my father getting upset at someone, or something and yelling and cursing in a strange voice that I had never heard before. It was a garbled version of his usual manner of speaking, and he was staggering around our kitchen. I was watching from the doorway as he suddenly lost his balance and fell, hitting his head on the edge of the kitchen table and then hitting the floor with a sound that I will never forget. I can still hear it if I think back far enough, the sickening thud, as his head bounced off the floor and finally came to rest in an ever-expanding pool of blood. I remember being fascinated by that spreading pool walking over to touch it. My mother was screaming and crying, as she pulled me away and tended to my father.
My older sister took charge of me at that point, and the memory fades as to what happened next.
The next, and final, memory of my father is visiting him in what must have been a hospital. People in white clothes were rushing around here and there. To this day I can’t stand hospitals...it was something about the smell. My father never recovered from his fall and just sat in his chair in the shared kitchen, listening to the radio...always the radio and always the same station. He could speak, but he never did, and I never did find out why he fell or what circumstances caused him to get so drunk. My mother never said a word about it, and neither did he. He died the same day the radio station went off the air, two years later. The station went silent and so did he.
From what I understand I was pretty lucky to have grown up when I did. Before the Revolution children had a pretty hard life in Moscow. They were considered total dependents of their parents in all matters and were frequently put to work in all sorts of hazardous situations, such as in the mines and in factories. Child labor was normal for most families, and only the well-off went to any kind of school. Illiteracy rates were high. Children as young as ten were considered adults as far as the law is concerned and were tried as adults and were put in prison or labor camps with adults. Imagine going to prison for doing some of the more impetuous things you did, as a youth.
If you were a rebellious youth and did not respond to your parent’s corrective measures, they could have you arrested and put in prison until you changed your ways. You can imagine what would happen to a ten-year old in a work camp filled with hardened criminals and I’m sure many of those things you can imagine did in fact happen. It was pretty amazing considering such conditions, that anyone turned out to be even close to being a productive member of society but they did, including my mother and her parents.
A friend of mine had a large female teacher who liked to sit on the corner of his desk when she talked to the class. He was near the front of the class so she just used his desk when she got tired. This bothered him, as I’m sure it would bother anyone to have a large bottom covering what little space you had in your very controlled world. One day he acquired a straight pin and set it in a crack sticking straight up near the edge of the desktop. When the teacher sat down she was skewered by the pin and jumped up from his desk with a start running out of the room. He didn’t laugh or brag or even tell anyone but just played innocent.
Before the Revolution he would have been sent to prison but during my time he suffered no repercussions at all. She never sat on his desk again, and that was the end of the matter.
Before my father’s accident we were fairly well-off from what I am told. We had a two-bedroom apartment with only one other family living with us, more than enough food, and I grew up nice and healthy. My grandparents moved in with us when my father died and things got a little tougher but I never noticed. I had my friends and my boyhood interests to keep me busy. As long as I had food when I wanted and my mother and my friends, I was well-off. Besides the toys my grandfather would make, I had none and that was just fine with me. The toys he would make were wonderful and he traded them for extra food from time to time, as I got tired of them. He made sure I had a steady stream of wooden tractors, planes and boats. The most wonderful toys of all were the wooden soldiers he would carve. Each had a different face, and of course, in my mind, different personalities. My friend and I would play with the soldiers for hours on end when the weather was bad outside.
My mother cooked wonderful things but the best was the Pirogi. Pirogi were like ravioli, but filled with potatoes and sometimes cheese, but always with sauerkraut. We always had sauerkraut. First you boiled the pirogi and then you fried them in whatever oil you had but butter was the best. The rare smell of grandfather’s cigar and frying pirogi; will always mean home to me. Once I grew up, I found out that putting sauerkraut in pirogi was not normal but to me, a pirogi is not a pirogi without it.
Being just a child I was unaware that in 1926 the government declared that children in the Soviet Union enjoyed better conditions than anywhere else in the world, and that the criminal code provided us with more protections than any other children anywhere. The exceptional status of children in the Soviet Union was used a propaganda ploy for the nation and to increase international standing. The life of a Soviet child was often contrasted with the grim exploitation of other children abroad. Even the Americans' 'Time' and 'Life' magazines had pictures of poor children being forced to work in the mines in some horrible place in some mountainous area there.
There were pictures of their little faces, covered with dirt and grime, some with tracks of tears or sweat runni
ng down their faces that still haunt me to this day. What kind of life must they have had? How could you not know that we were much better off in the USSR than in such a capitalist hell hole? America this bastion of wealth and capitalist corruption, was exploiting their children, robbing them of their future; and for what; to make money for the capitalist pigs? Those pictures were all we needed to know that communism was the true path of mankind. Those little faces still haunt me to this day, and that is why we must fight the capitalist pigs wherever they are found.
My childhood ended in May, 1931, when my mother took me to join the Young Pioneers. I did not know this at the time of course but this was the outcome of that event. I was eight years old and they turned me into a miniature adult; millions of eight-year-old men willing to extol the virtues of Communism over capitalism...that was the end result of the Young Pioneers. Lenin had turned it into a substitute for religion. Being a child at the time, I knew nothing of this of course and was overjoyed to be able to belong to such a wonderful organization. The first time I saw the Pioneer Palace in our neighborhood, I was infatuated. There were rooms for clubs, crafts and sports. The sound of thousands of little voices singing the “Young Pioneer March” and shouting the motto “Always Ready,” still sends shivers up my spine. Indeed, their purpose was to take away our childhood and make us all eight year-old men and they succeeded at it moderately well.
World War Three 1946 Series Boxed Set: Stalin Strikes First Page 34
