by Scott Palter
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Oriana was helping the part-Jewish photographer who was taking the portrait photos of the departing group. Aunt Wanda had detailed her to help because she had the neatest handwriting for the notes to accompany each photo. The bar would get the best prints, for the wall to show off their brave fighters. The relatives of the departing warriors would get the other prints to remember their absent men by.
Oriana was also assisting the photographer in various technical aspects of setting up the shots. He had promised to start teaching her his craft. She found photography fascinating. She already had a little notebook and had started a journal. Aunt Wanda had been a wonderful teacher, but Oriana still saw herself as a more intellectual, creative person than the very salt-of-the-earth Wanda. Oriana’s world was expanding rapidly, and she was eagerly drinking in all the new vistas. She still wanted to experience war but Aunt Wanda had said she wasn’t ready yet. Let their lads fight one more battle, while Oriana matured a bit more. She’d go with a later contingent and be there for the fights in Palestine and Iraq. Oriana wanted to be there for Egypt. Right now her Italian friends were in Libya, but Egypt was where the next fight would be. Oriana was still too small to properly use a rifle, but she had learned pistol and shotgun. Maybe if she learned photography too, there would be a place for her. Wars had stories, and the stories needed pictures.
1400 hours CET
30 August 1940
Camp Palestine #6, near Cracow, Poland
Company Political Officer Menachem Begin stood at attention with his new unit. Given Betar’s favored status with the Nazi authorities, the movement had been swamped with volunteers. Original Revisionists were being used as political cadre in the Bolshevik Red Army manner, to instill proper values. Begin had been Betar national commander first in Czechoslovakia and then in Poland. As such he should have merited higher office. However, he and his mates had decamped from Warsaw to Vilna to avoid the Nazis in 1939. They had only come back to Poland in the tail end of the Baltic refugee tsunami, by which time the upper ranks had been filled by others.
Begin was still less than sure that working with the Nazis was the lesser evil to staying in Lithuania and dealing with the NKVD. The decision to leave had been collective. He’d been outvoted. He still thought that too much of it had been illogical, a human herd instinct. So many people left that everyone else just went with them, Jew and gentile both. The fiction was that the Reich Germans were evacuating the Baltic Germans. The Soviets were not fooled, but there had been orders from Moscow to allow this. Begin was sure that the NKVD and GRU had added their own agents to the migration. That was the Gestapo’s problem, not his.
What was important was that the Germans were in fact arming Jews to evict the British from Palestine. They didn’t bother telling lies that they would make Palestine independent. Their promise was that the Jews could go home and live in their lands in dignity. Could go home as conquerors with rifles in their hands. It was less than Zionism had hoped for, and far more than anyone else was offering. For now it would do. He was uniformed and armed, under the blue and white flag of Zion. He had a unit of recruits to indoctrinate. Others would teach them military skills. He would teach them to be Revisionists, and patriots of the Israel they would create.
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Adolph Eichmann kept a proper mask on his face as the new Governor General of Poland, Gestapo Müller, droned onwards. Week by week Eichmann found his job more disgusting. To be a National Socialist was to be an anti-Semite … or at least it had been, under the old Führer and Reichsführer. Now he was the mayor of a vast and ever-growing Jewish city. Berlin assured him he was doing vital work. In point of fact, the damned Yids near to ran themselves. They would form new camps with his office just rubber-stamping the forms. One of Speer’s minions would assign each new camp a German industrial partner, and work would begin. The fucking Yids were outproducing facilities in the Reich, much less what could be gotten from camps of lazy, hostile Poles.
Berlin had just ordered up a thousand of his Betar for service in Africa. Müller was here giving them a rousing speech as a sendoff. Enough of the Yids spoke enough German so they could sort-of follow. If not, their political officers would explain it in simple terms later. The thousand were Latvian and Lithuanian Hebrews who had come out of the resettlement as formed units. It made pragmatic sense to use these vermin to further Germany’s interests, but it still made Eichmann feel dirty. His usual remedy had involved Jewish virgins, but that was getting stale. He thought the next time he’d try a filthy, rebellious Pole instead. Maybe a convent girl. Fomenting incidents between the Yids and Polacks always amused him. Having his Jewish troops march into a convent and arrest two girls would maybe restore his humors. It was a pleasant daydream.
2300 hours local, 30 August [Manchuria]
1800 hours Moscow Time, 30 August [Moscow]
1600 hours, 30 August [CET]
The Kremlin, Moscow
Lavrentiy Beria was enjoying watching the Boss blast the army fools making their report on the first day of battle against the Japanese. The idiots had overpromised what they could accomplish, even with total surprise. He’d told Stalin that, while the invasion was still in the planning stage. The KV tanks had been fierce in battle but proved mechanically unreliable. Twice as many were down for technical problems as had been lost in combat. The cooperation between the army branches had also been suboptimal, and the coordination with the Air Force worse still. The Japanese Army had been overmatched, but even fiercer than the Finns. Their planes had run circles around the Red Air Force. Net, what the Soviet forces had were two fingers into Manchuria down the two branches of the Chinese Eastern Railroad. Twenty kilometers from the west and seven from the east on a line roughly 1800 kilometers long. This would be a long, slow campaign. The key was that it be victorious. It would need Red cavalry moved over the Amur. It would need a cavalry-mechanized thrust from Mongolia. Bringing in the pro-Soviet warlord of Sinkiang, Chiang’s Nationalists, and the often disobedient Chinese Bolsheviks in Yen’an would also be necessary. Relations at the moment were better with Chiang, but all things were possible given time and support by the Boss. The Nazis may have conquered Europe. The Soviets would conquer Asia, thereby sharpening the Red Army for its final battle to Sovietize Europe. Europe was the world’s industrial heartland. So far Soviet efforts there had been less than successful. Finland, eastern Poland, and the Romanian borderlands – all had been less than optimal campaigns. Spain had been a clear defeat. Hence the tactical alliance with Berlin. They would be comrades … for now. The ultimate goal remained the same: world conquest.
0500 hours local; 0400 hours CET
31 August 1940
El Alamein position west of Alexandria, Egypt
Dawn was still a few minutes away, but Colonel Garth Mason had been up for hours and already on his second cup of coffee. Wavell’s staff had greeted his arrival in Alexandria by immediately laying claim to him. They were forming three new divisions, and Coldstream Guards veteran colonels were not easy to come by. He’d been posted to command a brigade in the new 6th Commando Division. Brigade? Division? What a laugh. There had been eight nominal battalions of ‘special troops’ on Malta. Most had arrived in Egypt with strengths in the low hundreds of men, and no kit beyond some officers’ side-arms. Fleming’s battalion had come out overstrength from accumulated stragglers. Mason had been de facto part of it, arriving on the same armed merchant ship. The former Fleming battalion was now a new brigade. Mason’s brigade had gotten three units with a combined strength just short of nine hundred men. He was gifted with the southern third of 6th Division’s sector, while the Fleming Brothers’ Brigade got the northern part, and a third brigade lay between them. On paper Mason’s brigade should have totaled four thousand three hundred, plus another eighteen hundred missing brigade headquarters and support forces. The headquarters in fact was himself, three middle-aged temporary lieutenants, and a doze
n part-British servants.
The ever resourceful Money-Penny had somehow found Mason twelve hundred ‘recruits’. Warm bodies, was closer to reality. They were male, over puberty and under retirement age. Few were even nominally British. It didn’t matter. They mostly understood enough English to do general labor, and the rest understood a bit of French or Arabic. Command had gifted Mason with six newly-minted engineering officers. They ranged from a retired French engineering officer from the Great War, to a Coptic building contractor. All were captains now by temporary wartime commission.
The master plan called for a defense line running some thirty-four miles from the Mediterranean Sea to the Quattara Depression, a geological feature supposedly impassible to vehicles. The 7th Division, being formed out of the evacuated remains of the Malta garrison, was digging the first stretch anchored to the coast. The 8th Division, being formed out of two brigades of Palestinian Jewish militia, had the southern end that fronted the Depression. The 6th Commando Division had the center of the line in the vicinity of Ruweisat Ridge, a low stone formation that offered good observation for miles to the west across the flatlands. Mason’s brigade was digging out perpendicular to the ridge, and from there south to the linkup with the Jews.
The master plan was, to say the very least, lacking in fine detail. Everyone was working with maps from the land-registry offices. That was where the engineer ‘captains’ came in. The aged Frenchman provided the details of where to place trenches, bunkers, wire, minefields, firing positions for the guns they didn’t have yet. The other five supervised work gangs doing the actual digging.
The supply situation was strange. There seemed to be an endless supply of barbed wire, tools, cement, telephone line, and rifles. There were ample machine-guns – but only if you counted obsolete models back to Maxim guns. Artillery was in such short supply that ancient muzzle-loaders were allocated as giant shotguns. Timber had always been a shortage item in Egypt back to Pharaoh’s day, and the Alamein line lacked priority on what little there was. Autos were plentiful, trucks were scarce, and armored fighting vehicles nonexistent.
Mason saw the entire process as the forlorn hope it was. He still regarded it as worlds more realistic than the epic cock-up that had been Malta. O’Connor, with the Western Desert force, would fall back on Alamein in good time, even if he got a bit banged up in the process. This would give Wavell seven divisions to hold thirty-four miles of trench. A British army should be able to give a good account of itself in that kind of fight, more so if the five reserve divisions in Palestine were brought forward in support. They would be outnumbered and badly outgunned, but British troops on the defensive were hard to pry out of fixed positions. Such had been Mason’s experience in the First War.
0930 hours CET
31 August 1940
Himmler’s old office, SS Headquarters, Prinz-Albrecht-Straße, Berlin, Germany
Swedish Foreign Minister Christian Gunter had flown to Berlin last night, in response to a German diplomatic note demanding a meeting about an unnamed ‘emergency situation’. The Swedish military had quietly been placed on alert against the possible German ultimatum. So far it had all been introductions and pleasantries by Reichsführer-SS Heydrich and his aide, Oberführer Schellenberg. Now lesser minions were putting up a map of the eastern Baltic, centered on Sweden and Finland. Gunter was a realist. Germany was about to make demands.
Heydrich was quite expert at reading faces. “Be at ease. We have demands, but none will quite violate your precious neutrality. Neutrality against the British Empire, to be precise. You are at peace with them, and at peace you remain. Your merchant ships outside the Baltic will continue to serve the British. We seek no bases and don’t desire to place large numbers of troops on Swedish soil. Our demands relate to Finland.”
“Finland?” Gunter was not prepared for this issue. He also hadn’t missed the caveat of ‘large numbers’. Even tiny numbers would enrage the British and be quite unwelcome to Swedish opinion, especially on the left among the Social Democrats.
“We have reached certain agreements with Moscow as regards Finland and Sweden. Both are now regarded as within the German sphere of influence. Stalin will retain his Finnish base guarding Leningrad, nominally from the British but in fact from us. You will provide nine divisions, including two corps headquarters, to occupy Finland. Nominally you will be defending Finnish neutrality. In fact, you will be there to aid the Finns should the Soviets attack again.”
Gunter thought fast. His nation had been dealt away to Germany like the door prize at a bar. “We lack the strength to guarantee Finland from the Russians.”
“Germany and Italy will stand as guarantors to both of your nations. We will send a combined military mission of fifteen thousand men to Finland, and two thousand to Sweden. Think of these as a mixture of liaison expeditors and technical experts. Four of your nine divisions will be active forces. So will one corps headquarters. The balance will be cadre units, but with full equipment sets. Easier to ferry men on mobilization that way. Finnish Marshal Mannerheim will be theater commander, but with a German deputy and a German chief of staff.”
“Does this commit us to marching at your side against the Soviets?”
“Yes and no. If you are not attacked, no. Even if we are, you preserve your neutrality. However, if Stalin moves west, both of you will be targets. At least that’s our best guess. In that case, you are allied to us for the duration, not just till the Soviets are repulsed from Finland.”
Gunter had been prepared for worse. He hoped he could justify all of this to the British ambassador. “Are you asking for National Socialists in Sweden’s government?”
Heydrich smiled. “No. I’m stuck with Quisling in Norway. As long as you are sensible, Germany is content to let Sweden preserve its domestic independence. Our demands regarding Swedish National Socialists are simple, and should be relatively painless for you. Unless the Swedish Party violates the domestic peace in your nation, you don’t ban the party. We’ll provide a few subsidies so they can maintain a newspaper and do a few rallies. We may also use them to recruit a few Swedes for our SS. I doubt many will choose to enlist, but a token Swedish legion fits our racial ideology. That’s a public thing. In private, I accept that Swedish opinion runs far more to social democracy than national socialism. You are still fellow Aryans. That’s enough for me. The other three rulers won’t notice you either way.”
Gunter felt he had to point out certain realities. “We barely have five divisions now. So I can announce your numbers, but it will take the better part of a year to fully realize this program. And two thousand Italo-Germans will end our neutrality as far as the British are concerned.”
Heydrich took his time replying, letting the silence hang to discomfort the Swede. “You are acting as if this is a negotiation. It isn’t. I said I wanted to avoid another Norway. However, at the end of things, that is the other alternative. You can blow up the iron mines. I can repair them in a year and can make up the shortfall from Stalin. It will cost Germany other concessions, but, with the Soviets tied up in an Asian War, we’ve got at least a two-year respite from any serious threat by them. So, I’m not changing this demand. You will take the two thousand. Explain it domestically, and in London, as you choose. Plead force majeure. Whatever. The smartest move is to not make a big deal out of it. We aren’t sending all of them at once. We aren’t sending formed units. It will be a few dozens of our men here and there, mostly on military bases and at ministries. I can instruct them to be on best behavior, but this is going to happen. If done quietly, your public won’t grasp the full numbers. As for you needing a year, the first hundred German Army staff officers will arrive in a week. Convince them. I don’t involve myself in such details. However, you will move a brigade in the next two weeks. You will send a divisional general and a corps commander. Our Führer, Italian Air Marshal Balbo, your two generals, and Mannerheim, will review the brigade in a march-by in Helsinki. It will get a full propaganda workup throughout
Europe. Nod that you have heard me.” Heydrich waited for the reluctant nod. “See. That wasn’t so difficult. You Swedes are adults and fellow Aryans. Let us do this with at least a modicum of civility. It is better for everyone.”
Gunter nodded. So far this was better than he had any right to hope for. There had to be a catch. Heydrich let him absorb all this, and then raised the difficult issue. Sweden had some fifty thousand Norwegian refugees, mostly young men of military age. Germany wanted these refugees, and any refugee Danes of military age, shipped to Finland and mobilized. At first these were to be labor units, but over time some would transition to Norwegian or Danish battalions under Swedish command. Gunter argued, for form’s sake, but again eventually gave Germany what it wished. The final German demands were trivial. Germany wanted to set up a Swedish-language radio station as part of their new Europa network. They also had demands as regards making German a mandatory second language for Swedish secondary education. Both nations had bureaucrats that could quibble over the details. The final point passed almost unnoticed: Germany would be paying for Swedish iron ore and other goods in dollars, starting in a few months. It seemed the Germans were accumulating dollars via the Hoover Agency activities. Gunter saw no difficulty in taking US currency. After the war, it could easily be redeemed for gold. Dollars were the safest currency in the world. The US was rich and at peace.
