Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK!

by Daniel S. Fletcher

  The Colonel had nodded again, satisfied. “Good. Because personally, my lad, I don’t care what your politics are. I care about your passion to defend Britain against the enemy. Because this country, make no bones about it, is under the biggest threat to its survival it has ever encountered. Even the little French weasel Napoleon Bonaparte was child’s play, compared to this…”

  He gestured in a vaguely south-westerly direction, towards where they both knew the Germans were massing. No mercy in their grey eyes – the average Jerry, the commanders, and the four greyest and coolly bluest eyes of all, those of Hitler and Göring. No respite. They had France, and Britain’s army was taken. The U-boats were slaughtering at sea, targeting shipping and cleaving through Royal Navy patrol boats. Even if they didn’t get the French Navy – could we scuttle our Allies’ ships, kill their men – that still left the Italian Navy, and with Franco eyeing Gibraltar, Spain would soon join the Great Struggle Against The Jew Puppetmasters of London. Only the Royal Air Force held out, and with a massive Luftwaffe concentration expected to supplement an invasion force that had already captured the bulk of the army supposed to defend Britain’s shores, the situation looked doomed.

  “I’m a believer in unconventional warfare. The extent of that is, perhaps, unclear; but do you think for a moment that Germany is neglecting offensive bacteriological and chemical warfare? Do you think they will adhere to Geneva?”

  Scorn was etched into the colonel’s face; William could see his naked ambition to fight Germany using any and all means.

  “You may just be the fellow I’m looking for. You won’t know this, and in truth, even among the chaps like yourself I’m going to recruit we’ll be sparing with the details, in case they’re captured of course. But you, I know are dedicated to fighting these scum. And I served with your father, Lieutenant Lawler. It is ‘Lawler’ with an ‘e’, aye?”

  William was astonished, but recovered quickly.

  “Aye… uh, still Celtic but aye.”

  He tried to elaborate, but his lips mouthed wordlessly and he gave up, waiting for the Colonel to explain. The old veteran nodded slowly, gauging his young charge.

  “He was a good man. Fought at the Battle of Quentin, died 1st April 1918, as the Expeditionary Force halted the Germans. I myself was evacuated from the trench soon after.” He did not elaborate further, nor did he need to. His guest was dumbfounded, and this time made no effort to disguise it.

  The Colonel smiled. “You seem surprised?”

  “I daresay I am a little bit, aye,” he admitted, inclining his head. His host picked up the silver cigarette case that lay on the neatly ordered desk in front of him, by his left hand, and offered it to William. The younger man accepted a smoke gratefully, which the military officer lit for him with the lift-arm lighter that had been next to his right. He took one for himself and lit it, all in one smooth movement with the grace of a man who’d performed that manoeuvre several thousand times.

  Both sucked in their first drags of the cigarettes with gusto, nursing the smoke in their lungs before releasing it contentedly. Then, business-like once again; now the Colonel had his full attention, and he leaned in. This, they knew, was the crux of it.

  “You’re from good stock, and while you may not want to defend this country for the King, I’m certain that you and your mob – your comrades – will do it out of some different kind of patriotism; a kinship with democratic values, if you like, or at least with fairness, and a good old fashioned hatred of racist, tyrant scum. And regarding central London, you may just be the man I’m looking for.”

  William absorbed it all, nodding slowly. The invoking of democracy was amusing, given their ideals on the outset of war in Spain, but he wasn’t going to argue now. Left-wing extremism, they now knew, held as much malevolence for those who did not fit within its parametres as did fascism. But the colonel was a persuasive man. William was beginning to see where this was going, after being initially confused by the Whitehall office, and the mixed signals that this whole rather bizarre summons had sent out.

  The Colonel continued. “Against an enemy such as the Germans, less-than-conventional means of warfare and resistance have been considered. Are you aware of any such plans?”

  The young man shook his head.

  “Nor will others recruited in similar vein to you. You and your mob; I have the feeling somehow that you won’t be captured, and if so, that you won’t talk. So, for your benefit, I will tell you that a certain major – now colonel, back on active duty – explored such possibilities in a national security service section and in doing so, happened to set wheels in motion for what I am being commissioned to implement. Let’s call them ‘D’. And the justification was clear, let me read you an excerpt from ‘Colonel D’s’ closing report…”

  The Colonel cleared his throat, and turned the page of the notebook in front of him – neat and immaculately kept, much like the rest of his appearance – and found the correct page on the first attempt.

  “… ok here we are…” he cleared his throat, “’The section was motivated to total war tactics by Adolf Hitler, who harnessed to his war chariot the four horses of treacherous diplomacy, lying propaganda, racial persecution and economic blackmail’. Furthermore… ‘With the sudden drastic misfortunes suffered on the military front, the menace of enemy occupation in part of the British isles has increased exponentially. This section conceived and began implementing plans for a closely coordinated sabotage and intelligence network among the civilian population who would be left behind in any territories which the German armies might temporarily be able to occupy…”

  William smiled at that, despite himself. Temporary. The British spirit wouldn’t allow for permanence.

  “… as such, Section D completed several thousands of secret dumps throughout the country of incendiary materials. Our own additions are the D-Phone – a telephone capable of encoding and decoding the human voice, and the Duplex Transceiver; a wireless telephone with a wavelength too short to be picked up by any other known receiver…”

  The Colonel looked up briefly at William. “And this is where it gets interesting for you and I.”

  He continued reading. “In light of the present dangers faced and the need for coordinated action through a network of Operational Patrols and Special Duties officers, in sabotage, intelligence and all means of subversive activity, Section D’s Home Defence Organisation network of agents and the means and materials with which to conduct guerrilla war, sabotage and subversion in German occupied territory now passes to the unified single command of the GHQ Auxiliary Units’.”

  He looked up again. “That means us, my lad.”

  William was momentarily speechless. Neither the Czechs, nor the Scandinavians, Poles, Dutch, Belgians or French had had the foresight for this. It was a resistance organisation in the making before the krauts even landed! Jack, Alan and Mary would be ecstatic. So much for Auxiliary Firemen, perhaps picking up some Great War era pistol at the end to make some desperate and quite pointless last stand against an enemy of overwhelming power. This was more like it.

  He found his voice. “I understand fully and we are ready to do our part.”

  The shadow of a smile played at the corners of the Colonel’s mouth at that, noting the young Scot had not said ‘duty’. But the fervour for German resistance was no less because of it; in fact, he was glad that his new recruits were driven by ideological hatred of National Socialism. That, or the visceral fear and loathing felt by older men who’d fought ‘Jerry’ knee-deep in mud and blood in the Great War, were far more reliable motivational factors in fanatical resistance than loose, crude patriotism and some vague sense of duty to the King.

  “You readily accept that the life expectancy for this kind of work is not high.” It was rhetorical, not even qualifying as a question. They both knew it to be so.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. For now at least, I will not ask of you anything regarding weapons that are outlawed by the current conv
entions of war. But unconventional methods are needed. Sabotage, assassination, perhaps even direct combat.”

  William nodded, and the colonel’s eyes bore into his.

  “Elsewhere,” he continued with a low urgency, “you need not concern yourself; you are perfectly situated in Bloomsbury – your base, as it were, is central London. You will receive intelligence regarding German troop movements from other parts of the occupied zone. Radio operators are located all over. You will have access to one, and there is a weapons cache located in the following place; memorise this now…”

  As William listened rapt, his forehead bunched in concentration, the old Scot described directions to the hidden storage dump, outside the city limits in a field bunker.

  “And as for Bloomsbury… do you, perchance use The Royal Oak at all?”

  Another surprise, William wryly though. Old Arthur.

  “Sometimes. We mostly drink in The Portland Arms…”

  The trademark smile once more split the Colonel’s face, stretching his skin and alleviating some of the lines. “Try the Royal Oak. Arthur will keep you informed.”

  He stood up, a proud stance with chest stuck out, and William joined him. It was as though some unbreakable bond of kinship had been fostered between them; two Scots, more than two decades apart in age and who’d not laid eyes on each other more than twenty minutes before.

  “The Germans are coming, William, and they’re a bloody ruthless lot I tell you. And with their army will come the SS, and with the SS will come secret police. I’m sure you’re as aware as I am of what ‘police work’ entails to these people.”

  William nodded. They’d helped set up Franco’s own round-up gangs, and they’d been active enough in their own country for long enough. Concentration camps, emaciated internees in dirty pyjamas, dying of typhus and maltreatment in squalid pits of their own stinking waste. Floating corpses turning up in the canals, rivers and foetid becks of the cities; autopsies bypassed when the penis attached to the dead body in question was found to be circumcised; the criminal police, which had been seized in a Heydrich-Himmler coup to consolidate all Reich police forces, ordered by Heydrich to look the other way when their sister forces created fresh crime scenes whose victims were undesirables in the Reich. SD sabotage and intrigues on foreign soil. Protective custody, and other such sinister euphemisms. Ghettos being set up in Polish cities, Jews displaced from their homes in Germany itself, persecution having almost become ad hoc law.

  Yes, William knew what police work entailed. They all had their reasons to fight the Nazis. And in his case, and his friends’, they had more reason than he hoped most ever would.

  He shook hands with the colonel, who, as the door swung shut behind William, was already leafing intently through the sheaf of papers on his desk, head filled with schemes and machinations, working in quiet intensity as though William had never been there at all.

  ~

  Jack’s eyes had widened with the exciting news. He suddenly seemed to enliven; re-energised, galvanised, not a trace of any fear or concern for the personal danger that would be an all-engulfing feature of their chosen life. William had been surprised; his own stomach had churned knots since his slightly dizzy exit back into the windy gales of London, which thankfully had slowed to a manageable breeze as he passed the great square once more, Nelson’s Column overhead, the great admiral standing proud above Whitehall.

  The flickering fire-light that lit the pub played shadows across their faces, three quiet figures hunched in the corner table. Great patriotic symbols were hung variously around the dark walls; other marks of the great detective of Arthur Conan Doyle were visible, in homage to an institution of the land. Such ostentation was apparent everywhere, driven by the fear of change and the inevitability of further war, and likely defeat.

  William spoke quickly and calmly, in a low, urgent tone not unlike the colonel’s own as he laid out the grim task to his friends.

  “This goes beyond anything we did, including village attacks,” Jack noted.

  Mary nodded, glumly. “I prefer to meet the enemy.”

  “This is meeting the enemy,” William hissed, suddenly animated. “But it’s intelligent. We can’t just charge a whole army of fascists. Krauts, Iti’s, Franco cunts, probably frogs…” his voice trailed off wearily, numbed by the enormity of their duty.

  “Alan would,” Mary smiled.

  Jack and William both caught her eye, in disgruntled surprise, but then let the ghost of a chuckle play over their lips, realising the intent.

  They’d all faced danger before. Fighting in uncertain trench warfare, the blood-curdling terror of village battles, the uneasy treachery of the Barcelona May Days and its palpable ceasefires that none dared to trust; the three young men had learned to grow accustomed to the strains and fear of conflict situations, and with the maleficience of civil war, Mary had accepted the modus vivendi of a life in combat, conflicting as it did with her humanist upbringing. But as partisans? They were civilians engaged in acts of war.

  And with a racial subversive in their midst, and the notorious barbarity of the Gestapo, William’s fears were completely justified.

  But Jack’s eyes lit up wide.

  “This is it,” he hissed suddenly, lightly tapping the wooden tabletop they sat at in his great excitement. The enormity of it sank in; Jack had been contemplating a somewhat redundant resistance, as they all had – this task, sanctioned from the shadows of the system, gave them the platform and the means to make a difference before any end.

  It was almost indecent, William thought, happily anticipating a coming enemy with the martial zeal of a Viking. Saxon blood, he thought wryly. Hitler would approve.

  “It’s not a cause for bloody champagne, now is it?” the Scot snapped, berating his friend. “Pack it in man.”

  Jack shrugged, grinning and unrepentent. “We can make a difference. We’re not lying down for the scum.”

  William made no response, and instead turned to glance at Mary. His dark-haired lover did not meet his eyes. Strange, he mused, the excitement of his dear friend in the face of almost certain death, compared to perhaps the most dedicated anti-fascist in their midst; his beautiful, vivacious, feisty girl, whose wooden expression betrayed nothing. It unnerved him; his creature of passion, silent and portentous.

  Simon lit up a Woodbine, his eighth of the evening, and set himself down at the desk in agitation. Fidgeting compulsively, he tried to write as quickly as he could, putting little thought to the torrent of simple words. To flow.

  “Dear Diary.

  I’ve been invited to cover a soiree of the well-to-do types at the Savoy. They made me sign an official secrets act of sorts to be involved, but only thirty journalists or so are to be involved. By all accounts, indeed judging from their behaviour alone, this is a big one.

  He paused. How could he properly convey the dread and apprehension? No words could do justice to the low sensation at the pit of his stomach. So, then, he decided for honest description. If anyone ever reads this, Simon thought, and they think I’m too expository and bland, to hell with them. He dipped his quill in the vat of ink, attached the Woodbine to his little gold cigarette holder, and continued writing.

  I cannot capably describe the awful sensation of waiting in dull dread for some bizarre or ugly occurrence, the next drastic change that further advances the fascist system and makes democracy, its idiosyncrasies and silly failings and charming ideals, seem yet more distant.

  They’re hush-hush about all this caper. Cannot really say any more, nor dramatise this entry as yet. No doubt it will be some self-gratifying little SS thug promoting victory in some internecine power struggle; an SS viceroy in England for Hitler, the Wehrmacht side-lined, Brauchitsch an insignificant desk jockey. Won’t that be quite wonderful? The only way I can look them in the eye and smile is in knowing that there will be an alternate version of this news printed outside the conventional press soon enough. I have my pride. I’m no gunman or soldier, but I’m
helping to build the resistance in my own way.

  He paused. Too self-glorifying. Simon rose, and stared himself in the great mirror self-critically. Lethargy had put weight on his belly and face before the war, but while he knew he could avoid the constraints of rationing with the best of them, his conscience didn’t allow it, and as a result he had slimmed back down. His cheeks though, looked pale and gaunt. His eyes were lined, and small purple bags puffed under them. At 22, the young journalist had been baby-faced, leapfrogging older and wiser heads through a mixture of family connections and his own considerable talents of the quill, quietly resented by his peers. But at 27, he looked like man well into his thirties. Flecks of grey streaked his sleek hair.

  He dressed, wearily donning his best, and only, three piece suit; an ostentatious combination of formal black morning coat, matching waistcoat fitted in the tighter, snug style that the Americans still favoured, and some cashmere striped trousers of charcoal grey; bought in a fit of youthful exuberance, with money from his first three wages when finally earning serious, adult pay at the paper, aged 23. Completing the ensemble was a grey tie and white dress shirt, black felt top hat, and a wrist watch that had been his father’s. His mother appeared at the open bedroom door, rapping it lightly.

  “Simon dear? There’s a man here for you. It’s time you went to your thing.”

  Her son, viewing his new appearance sombrely, turned to her. “It is,” he agreed sombrely. “Tempus fugit.”

  ~

  No equipment was necessary, the invite – or was it a summons – had said. Only his presence was required. Transport had been provided for; Simon surmised – correctly – that the German agency responsible for this (whoever it is, he wondered) had allocated the petrol and the cars. He rode in a large, sleek Bentley.