A Man and a Plane: An Alternate Germany
Page 69
"Baron von Richthofen himself was full of praise for the mission. . ." I have taken the liberty of inserting Manfred into Tarzan at the Earth's Core. Since von Harben is described as being a very hot pilot in the Luftstreitkräfte, it's not that unrealistic that he would have been in JG1, and Burroughs's readers would certainly have been aware of "the Red Baron". Since Burroughs put Stalin in a Tarzan novel, it's not all that unreasonable.
Chapter Fourteen
Wels himself really did not say this. He may not have in either world, though there is a story of a meeting of exiled Social Democrats in Prague toasting the Kaiser. Hillenbrand quotes this poem on Page 68. The translation, he says, is rather free; the original was:
Lieber ein Kaiser von Gottes Gnaden
als einen Hitler aus Berchtesgaden.
Interlude
"Indeed, My grandson, being an obedient grandchild, asked Me for permission to assume the throne . . ." Insead of speaking of themselves in the third person, the Kaisers capitalized their first-person pronouns. Thus Wilhelm's congratulatory message to Manfred after his fiftieth victory begins, "Es wird Mir soeben gemeldet . . ." or "It has just been reported to Me . . ." (The Illustrated Red Baron, Page 57).
Chapter Fifteen
"[It] was actually thought up by someone else, Brüning in this case . . ." The Nemesis of Power, Pages 230-231
"All-Highest Supreme Warlord of Germany" In the original, Allhöchste Oberstekriegsherr von Deutschland.
A picture of Udet's plane with the proud pilot and his boast is to be found as Plate 14 in Ace of the Iron Cross.
The picture of Manfred's face pasted into a nun's coif actually existed, and is reprinted on Page 91 of Peter Kilduff's The Illustrated Red Baron: The Life and Times of Manfred von Richthofen.
Chapter Sixteen
"What Germany needs today is a strong man." The Nemesis of Power, Pages 237-238 footnote.
Noel Pemberton-Billing, the founder of the Supermarine Company that would later build the Spitfire, was involved in what would be one of the biggest legal circuses in the history of British jurisprudence, the Pemberton-Billing libel case. During the [First] World War, he published a magazine called Vigilance, in which a report was printed claiming that the German Secret Service (i.e., the Nachrichtendienst) had a book that listed 47,000 British homosexuals. The subsequent legal suit having to do with another shocking revelation of his related to a performance of "Salome" was quite indecisive and most peculiar; see Oscar Wilde's Last Stand by Philip Hoare (1998) for an interesting portrayal from the theatrical side, and Her Majesty's Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community by Christopher Andrew (1987) for the security side.
Mr Pemberton-Billing will not let one whose hands touched the Black Book touch the controls of his aeroplanes.
". . . the Battle of the Skaggerak . . ." Or "Battle of Jutland" in English parlance.
The biographies of the aerial victories are from Under the Guns of the Red Baron.
It is ingratitude that Hugenberg should denounce Richthofen, Udet, and the aces for recreating the dance scene from Metropolis where Futura/Maria the robot performs for the men. (Now Earhart might have liked being the center of so much attention.) If UFA had not spent so much money on Lang's film, it wouldn't have got into financial trouble, and he wouldn't have been able to get control.
Interlude
Hauptmann had the speaking and writing tic that "he would add 'e' to the end of words where it did not belong, e.g., 'iche' for 'ich' and 'menschene' for 'menschen'" (report of Dr. James H. Huddleson; quoted in Jim Fisher, The Ghosts of Hopewell (1999)). That tic must have failed to impress Herr von Papene.
Chapter Eighteen
The Putnams' "open marriage" is discussed in Amelia: A Life of the Aviation Leader (1997), Page 79.
Without support from the Fatherland, the Teutonia Society has not had the implacable will to rename itself the German-American Bund.
Chapter Nineteen
Woollcott did indeed claim that Bruno Richard Hauptmann hated Lindbergh because he had eclipsed the reputation of Richthofen; see "The Hauptmann Case", published in Look Magazine in 1940 and reprinted in his Long, Long Ago (1943), Pages 117-120.
Chapter Twenty-One
The Olympic descriptions come from Hitler's Games by Duff Hart-Davis.
Should Manfred wear a white suit for these comments on architecture? See From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe (1981) for similar observations.
"Do you really think that I will allow myself to be photographed shaking hands with a Negro?" When Hitler said this, he wasn't planning to (Hitler's Games, Page 177).
Chapter Twenty-Two
"And tomorrow I'll be sober . . ." Randolph is lucky he can steal his father's lines.
Indra L. Roy, D.F.C., Second Lieutenant, Royal Flying Corps, was one of only five Indian pilots in the R.F.C., and is regarded as one of the inspirers of today's Indian Air Force. His ten victories occured in only two weeks in July 1918 and included three Fokker D.VII.
Chapter Twenty-Four
"JEWS MAKE WAR ON THE REICH!!!" Any resemblence to comments about the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center is not coincidental.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Oberth's comments about rocket planes and about carrying a thousand pounds of dynamite (presumably the German "metric pound [pfund]" of 500 grams) are taken from "V-2 -- Rocket Cargo Ship" by Willy Ley, published in Astounding Science Fiction, republished in Adventures in Time and Space (1946).
Fritz Lang's technical advisors for Frau in Mond (Woman on the Moon, or Girl on the Moon) included the spaceflight theoretician Hermann Oberth and the science writer Willy Ley.
The "Society for Space Travel" is more commonly referred to as the Verein für Raumschiffart ("Society for Spaceship Travel") but then they are speaking German.
Manfred quit reading G-8 and His Battle Aces with the April 1935 issue, featuring "The Cave-Man Patrol". You would have think he would have binned it a year previously, April 1934's "Squadron of Corpses", where Herr Doktor Krüger sends a squadron of dead German aces up against G-8, Bull, Nippy, and the rest of the spies. Perhaps he felt that Boelcke, Immelmann, Frankl, and the like, even as zombies, would have polished off the whole bunch on both sides.
The author of the G-8 stories was Robert J. Hogan. This was a single writer, not a house name for a team of writers. Whether or not Bernard Fein and Albert Ruddy knew about this when they named the leader of their espionage team "Robert F. Hogan" in Hogan's Heroes, now, well . . .
Any resemblance between Goebbels's novel and The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad is, well . . .
Manfred is thinking of H. G. Wells's The Autocracy of Mr Parham (1930)
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Manfred did indeed arrest a policeman in Luxembourg; see The Red Air-Fighter (Der Rote Kampffleiger), Chapter One, in the section "To France".
"Thank you, Herr von Rabe," In our world all Rabe got for his pains was an investigation by the Gestapo and then a prolonged limbo before he was denazified during the occupation. Small wonder his family sat on his diary until Iris Chang came along (The Rape of Nanking, Pages 187-197).
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The "F" word that Manfred is glad the Duke of Kent did not use is Führer. What did you think it would be?
". . . they were, those people, a kind of solution . . ." Cavafy's "Waiting for the Barbarians" evokes the hollowness of German politics and views in the 1932-33 period very well.
"The people around you are only people . . ." See Talking With the Red Baron, Page 102, for this observation. The man who said that these were "True words worth remembering."would hardly be the overbearing authoritarian that some have painted him as being.
"I will oppose with all my energy any attempt to introduce the Russian system into Germany." See 1919: The Year Our World Began, Page 584 for when Noske said this.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
"President Leuchkäfer, on behalf of the women of Angreifer, I have taken i
t upon myself to make one final effort to prevent war." The bit where President Firefly (Groucho) plagues Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont) over the pronunciation of "either" doesn't perhaps work as well in German: as you can guess, this is based very closely on the scene from "Duck Soup" where Ambassador Trentino (Louis Calhern) gets slapped.
"Bavarian Aircraft" = Bayerische Flugzugwerke, which in other worlds would before too long take on the name of its chief designer, Willi Messerschmidt. One part of this exercise will test out the Bf-109 against the He-112.
Chapter Thirty
"[Some] American named Kinnison." E. E. Smith's novel Galactic Patrol, the first adventure of the intergalactic hero Kimball Kinnison, was serialized in Astounding Stories from September 1937 to February 1938.
"Möwe, Wolf, Seeadler" The German merchant raiders Möwe, Wolf, and Seeadler were commanded by Nerger, Dohna, and Luckner respectively. Given their comparative success rate as opposed to that of the High Seas Fleet's, Noske's sarcastic proposal for a battleship named SMS Scapa Flow (where the surrendered High Seas Fleet scuttled itself in 1919) is understandable. [The design is for the German H-Class follow-up to the Bismarck of our world.] Manfred wants to keep up the nautical theme for horses bred from Man o'War.
"'By Joe! By Joe!'" According to Lowell Thomas's colorful and dubious biographies of Felix Graf von Luckner, Count Luckner The Sea Devil (1927) and The Sea Devil's Fo'c'sle (1929), Luckner had trained himself out of saying obscenities by saying this instead.
Chapter Thirty-One
"I was expecting to meet Captain Jindra." Hauptmann Otto Jindra was the highest-scoring Czech air ace, with nine victories Julius Arigi (32 victories -- and in a red plane!) was a Sudeten. Josef Kiss (19 victories) from Slovakia and Ernst Strohschneider (15 victories) from the Sudetenland died during the War
"I may have called the wrong man 'the Boneless Wonder.'" In one of his famous descriptions, Churchill called the Labour prime minister J. Ramsay Macdonald "the Boneless Wonder".
"[This] army of Good Soldier Schweiks." The Good Soldier Schweik (Der Brave Soldat Schwejk in German, or in the original Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války) by Jaroslav Hašek (1923) is considered the archetypical tale of a foul-ball yardbird. Not the sort to impress Noske.
Chapter Thirty-Two
"Who can tell what machine we shall employ a year hence in order to perforate the atmosphere?" The Red Air-Fighter (Der Rote Kampffleiger), Chapter Six, "The German Flying Machines".
Chapter Thirty-Three
"Chkalow" Valery Pavlovich Chkalov flew a Tupolev ANT-25 long-range aircraft from Shchelkovo, north of Moscow, over the North Pole to Vancouver on June 18-20, 1937, setting a record for non-stop flight. A slightly different Spanish war has saved him the need to test the Polikarpov I-180 in which, in other worlds, he crashed and died in 1938.
Chapter Thirty-Four
"Nothing happens without God's will." The Red Air-Fighter (Der Rote Kampffleiger), Chapter Four, "Boelcke's Death"
Chapter Thirty-Five
"Russia possesses the strongest army in the world . . ." Achtung -- Panzer!, Page 154. Guderian had seen a Russian tank factory in 1934 and had few illusions about conquering the country, Slavic subhumans or no slavic subhumans.
"'The Myth of Germany's Military Power'" See The Myth of America's Military Power by John J. Chodes (1972) which makes profoundly implausible claims.
"Last month this new fellow had made some comments about utopians and labor problems he had repeated to Noske, and now he was talking about espionage, which surely would interest Papen . . ." "The Roads Must Roll" (Astounding Science Fiction, June 1940) and "Coventry" (Astounding Science Fiction, July 1940), both by Robert A. Heinlein, respectively. It takes time for the magazine to get across the Atlantic.
Chapter Thirty-Six
"Seroff, his name is." Ivan Alexandrovich Serov had a long and bloody career repressing enemies of the Soviet Union before his ascent to the top of the organs of State Security. Alex is using the French transliteration; Guderian would spell it "Serow".
"It was the first laugh we had had since Moscow. " Any resemblance of this scene to one in the movie Patton is . . . .
"Over a dozen high-ranking Ogpu officials" At that time the Soviet organs of security were known as Chief Directorate of State Security of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (Glavnoye Upravleniye Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti; Narodny Kommissariat Vnutrenikh Del), better known by their initials of GUGB and NKVD. Before 1934, the organs of security were known as the United State Political Administration (Obyedinennoye Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravleniye), better known by its initials of OGPU, or as Noske says, "Ogpu" (See In Stalin's Secret Service (1940) by Walter G. Krivitsky and Isaac Don Levine for such usage, where the co-writer stuck to common parlance.). Whatever they were called the Soviet secret police were nasty baggage.
"An American journalist named Duranty" Walter Duranty reported in his book I Write as I Please on the Baltic wars in 1920, including praise of the remarkable British Colonel Alexander. Later on, he reported as glowingly of Soviet accomplishments, winning a Pulitzer Prize. It is reported that he was blackmailed not to report on the terror famine.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
In our world Theodor "Daddy" Osterkamp shot down six planes during the Battle of Britain. The Luftwaffe of our Second World War considered one Westerner the equivalent of three Russians; thus Erich Hartmann with 352 victories, all but five against the Russians, considered Hans-Joachim Marseille, with 158 victories over British and Americans, his superior as a Jagdfleiger.
"Herr Hauptmann Collishaw" Young Manfred makes the common but understandable mistake of confusing Collishaw's former Royal Air Force rank of "Group Captain" with the Army (and Luftstreitkräfte) rank of "Captain" -- "Hauptmann". He should properly have addressed Collie as "Herr Oberst" before the promotion or "Herr Air Commodore" or perhaps translate it as "Luftkommodore" by words or "Generalmajor" by rank.
Rommel's book (in both worlds) is titled Infanterie Grieft An (1937). Literally translated it means "Infantry Attacks" but "attacks" in the title is a verb. Rendering it "The Infantry Attacks!" makes it clear what is meant. And yes, one Rommel brother was a pilot and another an opera singer; unfortunately there was no gay "Desert Peach" Rommel (the witty, gay-themed comic book The Desert Peach features a fictional gay Rommel brother, Manfred Pfrisch ["peach"] Marie Rommel, given a command of foul-balls, yard-birds, screw-ups, losers, and the like under his brother: incidentally, the oldest Rommel brother was named Manfred, but he died in infancy).
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Nitpick. As the wife of a knight, Margaret Rose Bingham Alexander is "Lady Alexander". As the daughter of an earl she is "Lady Margaret". She was descended from Lord Lucan of Charge of the Light Brigade notoriety. Therefore, Doris made a common mistake but it worked out.
This is the Summer 1940 issue of Planet Stories. The young woman on the cover is wearing a bubble helmet, a skin-tight long-sleeved blouse, gloves, calf-length boots -- and shorts. ? At least it wasn't the Winter 1939 issue with "The Golden Amazons of Venus" wearing short red skirts and, yes, brass bras.
"'Is the Zar coming back?'" This being the German transliteration of "Tsar", and pronounced the same.
". . . if not Czar yourself" And the transliteration through Polish.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
". . . alphabetically, by English spelling . . ." As opposed to Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, Österreich, Tschechoslowakei, Frankreich, Deutschland (or Deutsches Reich), Lettland, Litauen, Polen, Vereinigten Königreich von Grossbrittanien und Irland, and Sowjetunion.
"They should shut their mouths . . ." An adaptation of an indiscretion by Papen he had made during the War, about Americans. Admittedly it was in a private letter but he should have been aware it might be found and used. Even now, when his comment is justified.
Chapter Forty-One
"I have erected me a memorial --" Mother of Eagles, Page 191.
Chapter For
ty-Two
"Race: human. But if, as I imagine is the case . . ." Advancing by a few years Randolph's assault on Apartheid sensibilities coming into South Africa; see His Father's Son: The Life of Randolph Churchill by Winston S. Churchill II, Page 382
". . . the Negro should be declared the brother of the white man, constituted his legal equal, armed with political rights . . ." And Randolph is again quoting his father, in London to Ladysmith, Winston described how he outraged a Boer captor by saying that "kaffirs" were only people and all of them had basic human characteristics.
"The Everglades Suite" Rickenbacker probably didn't appreciate that his customary suite at the Biltmore Hotel was also known as the "Al Capone Suite".
Interlude
The battleships mentioned here are all described in Sigfried Breyer's Battleships and Battlecruisers 1905-1970 (1970, 1973). The Dutch ships are the canceled Large Cruisers proposed in 1939, for example (the names being my own idea). The "six battleships" are in effect the H Class battleships of our time line's Z Plan, the Gross Deutschland being the bloated H-44 proposal.
Chapter Forty-Three