Deaths on the Nile

by Scott Palter

  Lieutenant Anwar Sadat was not one of those hypnotized by the tsunami of florid phrases. Reduced to action points, Gamal was proposing a Sarajevo. There was to be a victory parade by the Royal Egyptian and Royal Fascist Italian military to celebrate the liberation of Egypt from the yoke of British colonialism. Nasser would kill the notables participating.

  Sadat preferred facts to visions of glory. Upper Egypt was still firmly in British hands, as was Sinai. Large parts of Lower Egypt still had retreating British forces. The new Italian overlords were offering a worse situation for nominally independent Egypt than what the British had conceded in 1936. It would take a long and painful further struggle to drive out the Italians and marginalize the monarchy. A struggle whose time was in the future. For now, the republican elements were too weak and the oppressors too strong.

  Nasser conceded this in part but then proposed a blood deed. He would lead a team of assassins to kill both kings and the Italian dictator during the parade. Sadat thought Nasser more than somewhat credulous in believing the rumors that the two Italians would be present. Either way, killing the slothful, playboy Egyptian king risked the accession to the throne of some competent relative of his. The lines of succession were theoretical, and likely to be set aside in favor of the first aristocrat to seize the opportunity. All of this presuming that Nasser’s gun and bomb squad actually killed their intended victims. The history of the politics of such deeds were. many tries and few real successes. Even Sarajevo had been a ridiculously accidental success.

  Sadat didn’t know everyone here at the joint meeting. Too many factions – from Muslim Brotherhood, through the various political parties, to security-service men supposedly turned patriot. Supposedly. Sadat presumed the room had at least twenty paid informers and probably twice as many who sold information to the palace on a freelance basis. Sadat was tempted to do so himself. Nasser would fail. Probably die as well. Selling him out would give Sadat some cover for the years of plotting to come. Sadat thought long-term, unlike the overly emotional Nasser.

  0800 hours Eastern Standard Time; 1400 hours CET

  6 November 1940

  “Springwood”, FDR’s Hyde Park estate, Dutchess County, New York

  Harry Hopkins had let Franklin sleep as long as he dared. The man had looked like death slightly warmed over when he put in an appearance in the staff room for a drink, after arriving by motorcade from a very active day campaigning. Hopkins himself had been up all night, living on nerves, Italian espresso coffee, and five-minute catnaps. The election results had been as bad as he had feared. Hopkins had handled as much as he could. Now FDR had to be involved.

  Franklin could read the exhaustion in his number two’s face. “How bad?”

  “You’ve probably lost the popular vote. We have three states still out. California, New York, and New Jersey. You’ve got a six-thousand-vote edge in California with a bit over 90% of the vote counted. Truman’s out there at state party headquarters. The boys think it will hold, based on which precincts are still out. That there’s still enough old Bryan populists in the mountains and Okies in the Central Valley to make up for what’s still coming in from LA. Your problems are New York and New Jersey.”

  FDR was thinking fast. “How much is still out?”

  “Wrong question. We’ve been counting you in, but the number we have to beat keeps growing. Dewey’s directed the remaining Republican rural areas in both states to stop reporting until we finish. So we stopped. The fraud is getting too obvious. Jersey City and the Bronx already have more votes in than residents. If either campaign takes this to court, we are both looking at a disaster. The public could lose all faith in elections.” He saw Franklin’s face start to cloud. The man hated being pushed, and he had never in his life been pushed like this. “I’ve got Dewey and Willkie coming up here this afternoon. We are going to have to make a grand bargain with them, run a joint administration.”

  “How dare you! No one gave you that authority!”

  “Fine. I quit. I’ll get a message to them somehow that the deal’s off. Dewey will go into court to get an honest count in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Newark and the rest. You’ll lose both states.” Hopkins bent over, white as a ghost, clutching his middle. He grabbed for a trashcan and puked up near-pure bile. He staggered back into a chair, still clutching the trashcan. “Truman and I got you to the edge of a third term. Do what you want from here. I’m getting driven down to Manhattan and checking myself into Columbia Presbyterian. I was prepared to die for you, for the March of Progress. If that’s not good enough, let me die with some dignity and without all this round-the-clock stress.” Hopkins took a swig of water and spat into the trashcan to get some of the foul taste out of his mouth. He tried to stand up. He swayed and had to grab the desk but stayed on his feet. Swaying as if on a ship in a stormy sea, he lurched for the door.

  Franklin was beside himself with anger … and with naked terror at facing this disaster alone. He knew deep down it was he who had driven the indispensable Farley away. He simply couldn’t make do without Harry as well. Eleanor’s clique had their heads in the clouds … and frequently up their asses. “Harry. Sit down. Your country needs you. So do I.” Roosevelt almost choked getting the next words out. “I’m sorry. I know you have done your best for me, for the country, for the ideals we share. What can we salvage?”

  Hopkins stopped, started to turn to answer, and lost his feet, followed by consciousness. Franklin called for help. Two Secret Service agents rushed in. They got Hopkins into a chair and then sent for a doctor. The President scarcely looked better than the half-dead, barely-breathing Hopkins.

  It took ten minutes to get Hopkins reasonably awake and functional. He was in a comfortable armchair with his feet on an ottoman. The doctor had given both men mild sedatives and cautioned them against further stress. Everyone knew the outline of the political situation and thus how silly such an injunction was.

  “How bad will the deal be?” Franklin simply couldn’t be left to face this on his own. If it remained Harry’s deal, then at some future point – when his position was better – he could ease out Harry, and escape the blame before the gods of history.

  “Dewey gets the Treasury Department. Willkie gets an expanded Commerce Department. Some Republican lawyer named Dulles gets Secretary of State. We keep on the two TR progressives we have at War and Navy. Dewey and Willkie get half the patronage appointments, and a veto on the legislative program. Lindy gets a new job as coordinator of aviation production. Secretary of the Air Force or some such. They break with Coughlin and the Chicago Tribune and endorse the election results, because in the current world crisis the country cannot afford taking a disputed election to the courts. If this blows up the Republican Party, we back them in the fight to own the name, the ballot line. It may be trench warfare state by state on this. The Trib and Taft’s people will shriek treason from the rafters. We all sign some statement agreeing to some bipartisan blue-ribbon commission to review our electoral system and study some unnamed reforms that neither party will support two years from now when they issue a 600-page report no one beyond some college professors will read. Truman gets to head some joint committee from both Houses on fraud, waste, and abuse of defense spending. He’s a stickler on this stuff. He’ll let patronage slide, but unapproved chiseling will be prosecuted. If you run for a fourth term, it’s to be a joint ticket with Dewey as VP. They have no clue of how sick you are.” Hopkins sank back into the chair, his head lolling to one side. He was barely conscious, and a spent force.

  Roosevelt let his man rest. The deal could have been worse. There was no rollback of the New Deal. At worst, it was a pause in Reform. He was still president, and no grand bargain had constitutional force. Let the Royalists overreach, and he could recover his political magic in the 1942 midterm elections. Intervention was dead as a serious possibility, but the Germans for some reason seemed uninterested in conquering Britain. After the Fall of France, the military had told FDR to expect the UK to f
all in six weeks. Instead, what followed was a colonial war that in many ways was not of great interest to the US. FDR worked at recovering his poise. He would need to project an aura of strength when his enemies arrived this afternoon. His destiny demanded it.

  Afterword

  This book is where our war veers away from World War Two as most readers know it. This section is where I explain why.

  Britain: The British memory of World War Two runs Dunkirk, Battle of Britain, Battle of the Atlantic, El Alamein, D-Day, Final Victory. Britain stands alone against the full might of Hitler and wins, ending the war as one of the three superpowers. This historical memory has stayed with the English through sixty years since 1945, and was on prominent display during the Brexit Campaign. (You will note I segued from ‘British’ to ‘English’, but that’s another discussion outside the purview of this book. The Celtic fringes have somewhat moved on, while much of English opinion is still rooted in historical memory of the last great victory of the British Empire).

  Swept away from this view are defeats, an endless parade of defeats. Norway, Dakar, Greece, Crete, multiple times against Rommel, Malaya, Hong Kong, Singapore, the South China Sea, the East Indies, Burma, in the Atlantic into 1943, the slaughter of Bomber Command over Central Europe’s skies, the Arctic convoys. And also, Britain ended the war bankrupt.

  The war effort was sustained by bottomless US money and production, and the willingness of the Soviets to bleed endlessly as long as they killed some Germans in the process. From mid-1943 onwards, the British were forced to disband roughly a division a month to provide enough replacements to keep the rest fighting. The fiction of Britain as a superpower collapsed once Lend-Lease ended. The world preserved the courtesy of British power in numerous summit meetings and the British permanent seat on the UN Security Council. In fact the world was bipolar till 1991, US vs Soviet. The US then got its unipolar decade, after which we quickly evolved to our current bipolar Sino-American world order. Even the emerging potential European superpower is a Franco-German construct. The British never seriously committed to it. Nostalgia for 1945 was too great.

  There is the one great exception. O’Connor’s Western Desert Force and its victories over the hapless Italians. Those were quite real, but the context got lost over the decades. Britain went to war in 1939 with one of the world’s great fleets, the beginnings of a world-class air force … and an army that had been starved of money and prestige since Haig’s Army Group had been demobilized in 1919. What ground strength Britain had, came back from Dunkirk with its tail between its legs and without its equipment. The machines could be recreated. By the autumn of 1940, the British were outproducing Germany in planes and tanks. By early 1941, those machines and a few brave men had beaten back the Blitz and begun to recreate a modern army. An Army that had victories in the Desert thanks to O’Connor’s mostly professional Western Desert Force. Left unspoken (and perhaps not fully understood by the British government) was that they had beaten an Italy whose half-assed Army in Libya lacked the trucks, tanks, and supplies to fight a modern mechanized war. The commanders had no faith in Il Duce’s grand schemes. They marched into the desert, entrenched, and sat there. O’Connor was able to pick off the strong points one by one. Churchill bullied the Cabinet to reinforce these victories with the only two functional armored divisions Britain had in the Home Islands, and a flood of planes, artillery, and the rest of the instruments of war.

  This reinforced British Army then got its head handed to it repeatedly by a small German Afrika Korps and a revived Italian Army. The British whisk this all away by making Rommel into superman. The story they sell openly was that Rommel was another Napoleon. He would have beaten anyone just as badly. He just happened to be fighting the British. False. Rommel was a good mobile division commander, in over his head at corps and then army-level command. He learned the craft of higher command, but it took Second Alamein to complete his schooling. Virtually any other Panzer general would have done at least 70% as well. The 70% was because one of Rommel’s great virtues was maxing out on the German pattern of fast operational tempo. The British never managed to get the hang of fighting war at the German pace. To use the observe, orient, decide, act maxim from fighter combat as a template, the Germans just ran rings around them. By the time the British reacted to anything, the Germans had moved a few cycles further; so the British were always responding to an outdated concept of the true situation.

  The British down to the end of the war never managed to really coordinate combined arms on a German level. They never even managed to reach the competences of Haig’s troops in the Hundred Days of 1918. When they won, it was by numbers and firepower. In this book they lack both. The necessary quantities of tanks, planes, artillery pieces are in Britain. The war is in Egypt. They simply have no way to win, or even to reinforce quickly enough. Churchill had the better part of a year between Dunkirk and Rommel to start a large enough sustained river of equipment and trained divisions. In this ATL Britain has 90 days. London does not see this, and vetoes running away from the huge concentration of strength that is the Italo-German Panzer Army and attached massive air fleet.

  Manchuria/China: I see Stalin as a Leninist True Believer at the Macro-Strategic level. World history is to him a living force dictated by class warfare, etc. It is at the operational level that I see him as essentially an opportunist. In OTL he stays fixated on Europe because Churchill fights Hitler to a draw in the Battle of Britain. So to Stalin, Germany seems weak enough to bully. Here, Germany goes from victory in France to victory in the South. In the meantime Zhukov and others have inflicted defeats on Japan in Mongolia and along the Manchurian frontiers. So the opportunity is to expand on these victories. This is also what is behind Stalin leaking key intelligence to the British. He wants to keep Britain in the war until after victory in China.

  US Election: In our history, Willkie only turns to a rabid anti-intervention campaign in the last six weeks of the electoral struggle. This converted an easy FDR win into a harder-fought one. I am telescoping this via starting the America First Committee’s major push earlier. Its strength was quite real, but because it ran its main public campaign between elections, it never had the bite it could have. The US public was anti-Nazi, but even more against another army of millions sent to die on foreign soil. They felt they had been tricked into World War One and were determined not to be suckers again. Because of this change in timing, I have Willkie, Lindy, and Coughlin coordinating. This ATL has the necessary synchronicity.

  Brigade Strauss: Keep reminding yourself that this is a small force, not the main German war effort. Even in terms of the Afrika Korps, the NL Brigade is a minor add-on. Klaus just has the knack of being in the right place at the right time. On its surface, the fall of a major port intact is absurd. As absurd as the same thing happening at Singapore in 1942 and Antwerp in 1944. Antwerp is truly illuminating. A Germany being relentlessly hammered in the East, West, South, and over the skies of Germany does not destroy the occupied ports of Western Europe because it would look bad, would injure Germany’s prestige, would mean admitting that the days when Germany could threaten Britain with invasion were gone, never to return. In other words, for absurd reasons. Even when the Normandy front collapsed and the Anglo armies were racing across Western Europe, the German commander of Antwerp awaits a formal order from Berlin that never comes. Oops.

  What comes next: The next volume, Jerusalem of Gold, takes the war to Palestine and Sudan. To the merry band we now add Frauke, a lady on a mission of vengeance against everyone who never took her seriously.

  Historical Characters

  Dramatis Personae

  Historic (all death dates are OTL).

  Abetz, Otto (1903-1958): Early Nazi from Strasser/left wing of the Party. Ambassador to Vichy and an ardent Francophile. In OTL he lost power as his patron von Ribbentrop did so and as any real prospect of Vichy alliance with Nazi Germany receded. In this ATL his authority remains because Vichy and Germany do become de facto
allies, although never friends.

  Adenauer, Konrad (1876-1967): Catholic politician under Weimar. Anti-Nazi but geeked a bit to minimize his situation, regain his civil service pension. Jailed for a time by the Nazis, but every time he was in trouble some friend from the old days minimized his sufferings or got him off. The Nazis knew he was oppositional and part of an opposition circle, but these Catholic groups never went operational. They were content to be prepared for the inevitable defeat. Organized Germany’s post-war Catholic/conservative party the Christian Democrats / Christian Socials [in Bavaria]. He and Ludwig Erhard oversaw Germany’s rehabilitation as West Germany/German Federal Republic, and the postwar economic miracle. Always had a bit of a blind spot postwar for people who had served Hitler, as long as they did not espouse postwar Neo-Nazi politics.

  Atlee, Clement (1883-1967): Middle class reform type, who a generation earlier would have been a radical member of the Liberal Party. WW1 veteran with multiple war wounds. Rose slowly in the Labor leadership because he was hard-working, quite competent, and avoided the sort of ideological and factional fighting that characterized the party. As postwar prime minister he vastly expanded the British welfare state. Personally into simple living, he never understood how unpopular rationing and endless controls could be for the average voter.

  Auchinleck, Claude (1884-1981): Indian Army officer, one of the few who commanded British forces other than Indian Army troops. Next to Slim, the best operational field commander the British produced in WW2. Relieved from Middle East command after the Gazala-to-First-Alamein campaign, when he insisted that 8th Army needed rest, reorganization, and reinforcements before launching a counteroffensive. Replaced by Montgomery, who took more time and more reinforcements than Auchinleck had asked for. But Montgomery was from the British, not Indian, Army. Auchinleck was sacrificed because of institutional rivalry between the two. This in turn made him a convenient scapegoat for the institutional failures of the British Army - especially as regards combined arms, handling of armored troops, and the inability of British corps and divisional commanders to manage their subordinate units. They were forever too slow to respond, and never able to coordinate their actions. Both were fatal defects when fighting Germans. Was commander of the Indian Army through the postwar partition crisis. He was the only important British official not in the tank for Nehru and Congress. Nicknamed ‘the Auk’.