England Expects (Empires Lost)

by Jackson, Charles S.

  “The Graf Zeppelin…?”

  “Going through final sea trials now, and Raeder assures me she’ll be ready for combat duty by the end of August. The attack squadrons are already operational and there’s just the helicopter groups still to go through carrier conversion training. Seydlitz, Hindenburg and ‘Strasser are also ahead of schedule and should be operational by mid-September, which would be an added bonus. The battleships Rheinland and Westfalen are also nearing completion, and Von der Tann and Derrflinger should be finishing sea trials and joining Bismarck and Tirpitz in service shortly.”

  He sifted through some of the loose papers before him on the table. “There are also another three ‘Type-Tens’ coming off the slipways at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven this month, making twenty-two launched to date and fourteen actually in service. Not anywhere near as many as I or Dönitz would like, but we may not need the U-boat service all that desperately now, and we must have our capital ships if we want to project any power into the Atlantic…”

  Reuters raised a finger as a thought occurred to him. “Oh, and as a matter of interest I’ve kicked your recommendation for Kohl’s Ritterkreuz ‘upstairs’…” meaning he’d forwarded the application for a decoration to the Führer for approval.

  “U-1004 wasn’t it – the ‘boat that torpedoed Rodney?” Schiller nodded in agreement. “…Why not, indeed…? Prien got one for sinking Royal Oak, so why not hand one out for any Tommi battleship?” The younger man paused for a moment, his eyes suddenly alight with a rare intensity as the reality of it all momentarily took his breath away. “We’re really going to do it, aren’t we, Kurt! No matter how many times I tell myself, it’s still just so incredible!” Normally a pessimistic and cynical man beneath the façade of his caustic wit, Albert Schiller couldn’t help but be caught up by the older man’s zeal and drive when in the presence of a commander he looked up to almost as a father figure for more than two decades.

  “I spoke with the Führer personally again today on that subject…” Reuters informed softly, nodding at Schiller’s remarks. “He’s going to officially issue ‘Directive-17’ this week. Although he’s still loathe to invade Britain, I’ve convinced him ‘Sealion’ is vital: the Reich must be secure in the west and there’ll be no backing away from that this time!”

  “‘We shall fight them on the beaches…’!” Schiller almost laughed at the thought. “I can’t believe the old bastard still made that bloody speech after the thrashing we gave them at Dunkirk! The whole of the BEF stranded and encircled by Guderian’s panzers, and we sent Furious and two cruisers to the bottom of the Channel as well!”

  “We shan’t need to worry about the Royal Air Force this time, either,” Reuters murmured, his eyes glazing slightly as he cast his mind back over his own life. Five years of pre-planning and another seven years of preparation in the field were now coming to fruition, and with that would come the erasure of decades of national humiliation – humiliation that would now not only be redressed: it would in fact never have existed. “With the surprises and the overwhelming numbers we’ll be meeting the RAF with over the next few months, they won’t know what’s hit them!”

  “I assume Herr Göring will keep his kampfgruppen hitting factories and airfields…”

  “…Oh, you can be certain of that!” Reuters answered, his voice becoming ice-cold at the mention of the Oberbefehlshaber der Luftwaffe. “I’ve already had to have a few words ‘upstairs’ about our ‘friend’, Hermann. He’s been a little too obviously unwilling to ‘play’ lately and I’ve had to ask the Führer to ‘lay down the law’.

  “The new tactical bombers are already coming into service with the kampfgruppen as planned and the strategic heavies are almost ready too, but Göring and his cronies are screwing us about too bloody much on the fighters and the attack aircraft. The new Shrikes and Lions would’ve been coming out in unit strength weeks ago if it weren’t for he and Milch bickering endlessly over factory modifications and experimental variants that are a waste of bloody time! Müller and Udet have had a shit of a job getting anything done. The carriers have their full complements allocated at least, but we’re finding it an uphill battle to equip even enough for one land-based geschwader of each. Thank Christ at least the instructional squadrons are ready to take on conversion training – I just hope we have some planes to give the pilots when they’re trained!”

  “I should think the Tommis will crap themselves when they come across the new Focke-Wulfs…” Schiller chuckled with an evil glee “…not to mention our Skyraiders– !” He caught himself quickly in mid-sentence and repeated with correction “…not to mention our ‘Löwe’ attack aircraft, I should say.”

  “We could’ve done it with the old equipment, though…” Reuters shrugged, “we’ve always known that. It was only Göring’s decision to switch attacks from the airfields to British cities and begin The Blitz that took the pressure off the RAF…” Reuters relented somewhat and grudgingly added “…at the Führer’s ‘request’ as it was… The RAF was never beaten and ‘Sealion’ was subsequently cancelled…we won’t make that mistake this time!” He smiled thinly. “How d’you think the Americans would fare trying to land on the Normandy beaches if they had to bring an invasion force across a five thousand kilometres of Atlantic Ocean?” Reuters’ eyes were truly alight now as his personal demons rose and drove his thoughts. “…No, my friend…that won’t happen this time. We’ll not have the damned Americans and their endless streams of bombers to ruin us this time. No humiliation! No destruction of our homeland! No fucking Bolsheviks to tear the heart out of our country!”

  The Reichsmarschall almost bellowed the last sentence as every fibre of his being raged against childhood memories of growing up in the ruins of a shattered and divided nation under the ever-present and deadly threat of nuclear war. He checked himself and regained his composure in a moment, remembering where and when he was. “No, my friend…they’ll not get the same opportunities they were given the first time around…” he repeated softly, his chest heaving faintly as if he were out of breath from all the adrenaline coursing through his system. He smiled grimly again as a fine irony occurred to him; “…and as for Churchill; let the man make all the speeches he wants. They’ll ‘fight us on the beaches’ all right, and in the fields and towns and cities as well – and all too soon he’ll be making another speech…one that ends with ‘too many, too much, and too few!”

  No. 610 (County of Chester) Squadron, RAF

  Sussex, England

  Fighter Command had managed to provide early warning against the oncoming air raid on this occasion, and Trumbull and his seven remaining subordinates had an almost leisurely time of strapping themselves into their fighters and warming their engines. They’d moved a few kilometres south to another suitable makeshift location and had almost been ready to call it a night when the alert had come through.

  It was unusual for the Luftwaffe to mount a raid so close to dusk as it’d probably mean returning fighters and bombers would be forced to land in the dark – something no pilot would be particularly pleased about. Unusual it may have been, but unfortunately not completely out of the question, and radar – what little was operable – had picked up a fairly large group of what appeared to be bombers, probably heading for Ventnor radar station itself on the Isle of Wight.

  So Fighter Command sends my sorry lot back up again… Trumbull mused silently, watching his instruments and awaiting the radio call from headquarters to scramble. ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more…’ He quoted to himself from Shakespeare. Of course, Henry V was in France at the time, he observed. Wouldn’t mind so much if it wasn’t England that was in danger…longbows at Agincourt wouldn’t be too bad by comparison.

  He turned his head to starboard to catch sight of the signals NCO rising to jog across from a radio table that had been hastily set up under some trees.

  “About bloody time, I should say,” Trumbull muttered, a little peeved. “Bloody engine’ll be cooked if
we keep this up much longer.” He leaned out of the open cockpit as the sergeant approached as an aid to hearing, something that was difficult at best with the racket of aircraft engines all around. “Got the ‘green light’, Bates?” Trumbull called out with more cheer than he honestly felt.

  “Yes sir…” the non-com replied “…but also special orders from Fighter Command. You’re to stand down as CO and head back to headquarters immediately. They’ve instructed Flight-Lieutenant James is to take command while you’re gone. They also said that you weren’t to take part in any more flight operations…they were quite particular about that bit.”

  “What…?” Trumbull almost roared, seriously in danger of losing his temper. “What the bloody hell are they playing at? Can’t they see there’s a war on? If I’m out of it, that only leaves us seven aircraft! What the hell use are seven bloody fighters going to be?” His angry mind ignored the obvious point that eight aircraft, under the circumstances, weren’t likely to accomplish much more.

  “They were very specific, sir…” Sergeant Bates observed, recognising his commander’s rage was a release of pent up frustration and not directed at him personally, “…but you know what radio transmissions can be like…” Trumbull understood what the man was getting at immediately.

  “Sergeant, please inform Fighter Command on my behalf that I was airborne already when you received that transmission and that I’m therefore unable to comply due to the imminent threat of air combat!”

  “Yes sir!” Bates agreed with a conspiratorial smile, turning and running back toward his radio and generator as Trumbull waved his hand above his head outside the cockpit, signalling to his pilots to follow his lead. The flight of eight ragtag fighters was airborne within minutes and heading south toward an as yet invisible enemy.

  North East of Scotland

  North Atlantic

  The air was thin and short on oxygen at an altitude of fifteen thousand metres. No birds winged their way past that high above the surface of the earth, and even on a warm summer day with not a cloud in the sky, it was terribly, bitterly cold. In July of 1940 there were only a handful of aircraft in the world that might reach close to that altitude and at that moment not one of them was within hundreds of kilometres. There was therefore not a living soul present who might’ve witnessed the cause of the ‘flash’. One moment the sky was empty and the next there was a shattering report like a huge thunderclap. For a moment a dazzling burst of light eclipsed even the sun’s brilliance – a huge flare so bright it was noted momentarily by several units of the Royal Observer Corps on the Scottish mainland a good sixty or so kilometres away.

  It took a few moments before Max Thorne was able to think clearly again. They’d warned him there’d probably be some disorientation following displacement, but actually experiencing it proved – as he’d feared – to be another matter entirely. As he took a few moments to orient his mind and body and make sure he wasn’t going to throw up, the automatic pilot held him on a steady course due west into the setting sun, oblivious to the difficulties its human commander was experiencing.

  A little groggy, he shook his head to clear his thoughts and raised the tinted visor of his flight helmet to rub at his eyes. As he opened them fully he winced in discomfort, direct sunlight painfully bright so far from surface the earth. Lines showed about the man’s eyes to compliment the peppering of grey through his hair beneath the helmet. He lowered the helmet’s tinted faceplate once more and took serious note for the first time of the information flashing in pale green across his vision, projected onto special lenses behind the visor of his Helmet Mounted Display System (HDMS): airspeed and altitude were steady, as was the preset heading on his navigational systems.

  “Sensors: passive scan…” he spoke clearly into the microphone set into his oxygen mask, his Australian accent still sharp and clear despite fifteen years of living in England.

  “No threats detected,” a computerised but clearly feminine voice replied through his headset as the aircraft’s systems performed the requested checks immediately. He resisted a natural impulse to carry out an active sweep of the area with his APG-81 radar, not willing to risk the possibility of his emissions being detected, as unlikely as that might’ve actually been.

  Instead he glanced down at the cockpit before him, ignoring the single, ‘widescreen’ panoramic cockpit display screen that dominated the scene and instead turning his eyes to one side. Mounted to the actual canopy frame itself (there’d literally been no space available on the instrument panel itself), a spherical object approximately the size of a softball was fixed to a small, makeshift hinged mount.

  The unit itself was a dull grey overall, with broad, angular serrations that ran longitudinally around its entire circumference. The top and bottom were flattened, and a set of small push-button controls and LED readouts were recessed into its upper face. A single black ‘figure-8’ electrical cable ran along the canopy frame from somewhere ahead of the main cockpit binnacle and ended in a gold-plated, 6.4mm jack that plugged directly into the centre of the object’s base.

  Pulling the unit out toward him, away from the canopy frame, Thorne tilted it slightly to get a clear view of the LED readouts. Both were simple black characters set against a grey background, but were backlit by a faint illumination to aid viewing. The larger of the two simply read – 16:45 – while the smaller but longer readout below it showed – 07:29:1940 –. Both displays were bracketed by tiny black rocker switches that were barely large enough for a set of gloved fingers to manipulate, should the need arise, and both currently displayed a faint greenish tinge in their backlighting to match the colour of the large, blinking square pushbutton that was the only other variation on the otherwise dull grey face of the unit.

  After another second or two the unit gave out a long, high-pitched beep that was too soft for Thorne to hear over the sound of the aircraft, although he was expecting it nevertheless. The pair of LED readouts flashed three times as the tone sounded, went blank for a second, then reappeared with both simply showing all zeros across the screens: all time and date information had been erased.

  “None of this would’ve been necessary if you little fuckers had a better memory,” he growled softly, glaring at the little device for a few seconds before deciding that issues of ‘spilt milk’ were best put behind him under the circumstances. Thorne took a deep breath to clear his mind and returned his thoughts to the matter at hand.

  “Okay…” he pleaded softly to no one in particular, pushing the unit back against the side of the canopy frame on its mounting and placing his hands firmly on the aircraft’s controls for the first time. “Please be there, mate…please be there…” he breathed softly, desperation sneaking into his tone for a moment before he steadied his voice and issued another voice command to his flight systems: “Comms: radio preset Zero-Zero-One.”

  As the radio automatically adjusted to the appropriate frequency, he keyed the transmit button on his stick-mounted controls and fervently hoped there’d be someone out there who could hear him.

  “Icebreaker, this is Harbinger: do you read? I repeat – Icebreaker, this is Harbinger: do you read? Over…” There was a moment’s silence that was almost an eternity before a loud reply burst in his ears through the emptiness of soft static.

  “Harbinger, this is Icebreaker receiving you loud and clear. Destination is as planned. Please come to preset bearings and execute flight plan ‘Alpha’. Over…”

  “Thank Christ!” Thorne breathed, more than a little relieved to say the least. He keyed his transmitter once more. “Thank you, Icebreaker: you don’t know how glad I am to hear your voice! Executing flight plan ‘Alpha’ now: I should see you in about fifteen minutes. Over and out…” Releasing the transmit button, he added for the aircraft’s benefit: “Navigation: preset flight plan Alpha.”

  His flight computer retrieved the appropriate information in an instant, and Thorne watched the directional caret on his HDMS visor screen alter to indicate the corr
ect heading. With a single positive movement on the joystick, he took full manual control, pushed his throttle forward and pulled the aircraft into a tight bank to starboard that took him almost 180 degrees around to a heading of east-north-east.

  The Lockheed Martin F-35E Lighting II strike fighter lurched and dove headlong for the ocean, almost breaking the sound barrier as it levelled out just two hundred metres above the surface of the Atlantic. Holding the aircraft steady, Thorne reset the automatic pilot and kept his eyes scanning the view ahead for any potential threat as he hurtled past above the darkening Atlantic at high subsonic speed.

  They were at 5,000 metres, heading south toward the Channel coast, as Alec Trumbull held the Spitfire at an uncomfortably lower-than-normal cruising speed that was the fastest the Gladiators could manage. It wasn’t safe to fly that way – dangerous to be caught at such a speed disadvantage by an enemy – but leaving the b on their own would’ve been fatal…there was simply nothing to be done about it.

  There were fifteen of them now – 610 Sqn had met and formed up with 601 Sqn a few kilometres back, the seven aircraft of that unit as much of a mixed bunch as his own. Fighter Command controllers had informed them that at least three times their number of aircraft were approaching in what was suspected to be an attack on Ventnor radar station. Trumbull ignored the estimate as it mattered little: no matter what number of enemy they came up against, they were the only opposition in the area the RAF could field. All they could do was get on with it and try to shoot down as many as they could.