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

by Daniel S. Fletcher

  Snapping out of his flight of fancy, he yelled again, spouting more anti-fascist slogans from Spain as he stretched his gun around the side of the car, firing shots at the soldiers or police with whom he battled. It didn’t matter to him. They were fascists.

  A grenade landed on the pavement by the ginnel entrance; Jack was no more than eight or nine feet away, well within the range of its blast. He scrambled away, flinging himself from a crouched position around the side of the car and rolling away from the detonation, taking care to land behind the vehicle so that he wasn’t exposed to the Germans positioned in front. In the ensuing explosion, Jack’s brief feeling of relief was shattered as a bullet entered his left quadricep from behind, sending pain shooting through his system and spinning him out into the road.

  “Fucks sake!” He screamed, letting out an agonised wordless yell of rage.

  Bleeding heavily, Jack wriggled, trying to manouevre into position to fire back in the direction of the attackers to his rear, but just as he raised the gun in anger, another bullet passed through the sole of his left foot. The shot shattered nerves, and sent lightning bolts of terrible agony charging through his body with a vicious pulse. Stricken horribly, Jack rolled over and lay screaming in tortured pain, and then a mass of Germans swarmed upon him from both directions like terrible locusts in grey, dragging the shrieking, bloody partisan away to the nearest cross-marked car.

  Less than half a mile away, Maisie cradled the head of her lover in her bloodstained lap as he tried to speak.

  “I love you,” she sobbed, stroking his burning face.

  Through his pain, the young German forced his eyes to meet hers, one final exchange of pale blue between them, and then, gurgling as he attempted a final declaration of love, the bubbling blood frothed sickeningly in his mouth and throat, and in gasping agony, Hans choked through his last laboured breaths and finally died.

  They hate us because we do not have their thoughts in our heads; we do not think their thoughts. We do not spend every day thinking somebody else’s thoughts. We think thoughts, and read books; they burn books, and Goebbels screams at the world the thoughts that they should think. And the part of the world controlled by their army Black Angels, the part of the world enforced by the rule of their guns, their Gestapo, their viciousness, that part of the world has to listen.

  They began to think their thoughts, and then acquiesced when they killed and tortured those who did not think these thoughts.

  Conformity became patriotic spirit and racial duty; dissent became blasphemous against the Gods of their blood, and their devil held aloft; their Hitler held in place by the jackboots, the truncheons and the guns commanded by the Himmler’s and Heydrich’s in the shadows.

  Simon’s quill flashed across the pages of his diary for what he knew would be the last time. Oddly enough, he felt utterly at peace. The fear he had once expected was entirely absent; inevitability brought perspective, which brought calm.

  Immanuel Kant wrote regarding morality: ‘a means to an end is by definition an immoral approach to take with people, human beings should always be considered an end themselves.’ Germany was a nation of philosophers and scientists. These new, coldly logical Germans disagree with Kant; we are all a means to an end, the end always justifies the means, and when their “end” entails a Europe free of blood they deem tainted and ‘untermensch’ – lesser, inferior – the means with which they achieve it are correspondingly bloody. What of morals now?

  The new, cruel Germany took our island. Our whole world, everything we have ever known and loved, the places and people, have fallen under the control of a maniacal anti-Semite who preaches annihilation of his enemies – real and imagined –Europe suffers the bloody tyranny of his bloodthirsty SS private army, and its secret police. His SS chief Himmler, their pet ‘Blond Beast’ Heydrich and the historic German tasks they oversee that Goebbels tells the German speaking world over the radio is so necessary for the future survival of their people. The Europe they have created lines up dissidents, ‘racial enemies’ and political opposition against the wall, dressing up mass-murder as the ‘liquidation of partisans’ – crimes against humanity disguised as actions of war.

  “Liquidation”… “Historic tasks”… “Enemies of our blood”…

  How can there be racial enemies when underneath our flesh we are all the same people? How did the love of humanity and the horror we all felt at the suffering and destruction caused by the Great War transform into a Nordic blood fetish, into the machinations of sociopaths inciting a lost generation into bloodletting; violent language poisoning the souls of so many good men and setting Europe and our peoples at each other’s throats again, like rabid, feral dogs? How did an advanced, cultured nation and people such as the Germans come to view fellow human beings as an inferior sub-species and start to crush them underfoot? How did an entire society come to quietly accept the Gestapo arresting, torturing and murdering thousands of its own people; a few thousand men holding millions in a blood-stained grip of fear?

  How, how, how… even as my own probable end approaches, I will never understand…

  This is not for publication. I am not writing this to be distributed amongst the people, to stir people up to rebellion or revolt; Christ, I’ve done enough of that recently, even openly, and still people flock to join the Blackshirts. It is as though I am ranting nonsensically; where are all the people who mocked Hitler the raving anti-Semite, preaching his spiel and frothing at the mouth at every podium he screamed from; victim of the world, the perpetual victim of world Jewry and Karl Marx, despite unlimited power in central Europe? Now I am the undesirable. People are already pragmatically preparing for an endless fascist future, and adjusting their worldviews accordingly. Cynicism and adaptability reign. I am shunned; already the dissident, the one to upset the applecart. In the minds of my neighbours, who avert their eyes, they already see me being hauled away to the van kicking and screaming, handcuffed and black bagged; they already envision the questions that Gestapo men are asking them.

  Orwell was arrested last night, and now surely, it is my turn to face their undying hatred of conflicting views, of dissident opinion, of unalterable intellect. We read books, and think thoughts. We write things.

  They cannot let us live. They know it, as do we.

  If this is to be my final line, I ask nothing of no one. All humans think and act as they see fit. Apathy overwhelms me. Tomorrow belongs to the jackboot; today, my last, I am the king of my own mind, the master of my own realm.

  Simon raised his head, acknowledging sadly the lack of absolution and absence of satisfaction that he had expected from the conclusion of his final written entry. Just as he began to add a last line, a new conclusion, hoping to stoke his inner feelings with one final burst of prose, he heard a loud crash from downstairs as the door was kicked in. At that, he dropped a lit match into his calabash, and sat calmly behind the desk, trying to quell the overwhelming violence of his emotions and be calm in the face of the inevitable.

  The bedroom door exploded. Three men, in trench coats and fedoras marched in, gazing at him with unfriendly, hostile eyes. The writer took in their visage; noting that they were almost caricatures of the Gestapo of popular imagination. They were cardboard cut-out villains, worthy of a place in one of Britain’s great novels of the past century.

  “Welcome, brothers,” he said quietly.

  Simon smiled at them, adding to their bemusement. Before they could act, the writer had raised his father’s Great War pistol from his lap, almost triumphantly, and held it to his own temple, breathing heavily. He stared with growing contempt at the cold-faced men facing him, his would-be captors, who to his mind were just as trapped as he was by the unforgiving system.

  An old memory of a lakeside afternoon in summer came to mind, calming him, and the half-smile that split his boyish face widened.

  “Heil Hitler!”

  He clicked the trigger.

  Scornful laughter rang out from the Gestapo agen
ts, and the writer pulled the trigger once more, before the useless gun dropped from his grip, and shock seized him. Suddenly, another sensation crept up his spine; the very real, rising panic of fear.

  One of the intruders approached the stricken writer, an ugly grin now playing across his own angular features.

  “Heil Hitler,” he agreed; a sardonic, German-accented voice dripping with savage mockery.

  The first swing of the cosh broke Simon’s jaw. The second, delivered expertly to the solar plexus took his wind, and with it, removed him from consciousness. Sharp pain cut through the shock and fear, and as he slumped over where he sat, Simon tried to embrace the descending darkness as renewed laughter rang spitefully in his whistling ears.

  As though a daze had been lifted, Bill Wilson strolled the streets of his native London with more clear cognition than he had felt since that day, years ago, when the teenage boy had set out for France, thrilled with the prospect of battling the Jerries with his pals.

  With violent, striking vividity, a series of buried memories resurfaced and flashed through his mind’s eye; burned onto the surface of his vision, oddly calming.

  Maureen’s tears as she waved him goodbye; retreating away up the gangplank, turning, running back to give her one last hug, squeezing tight, squeezing so tightly…

  Laughter on the ferry; John dancing in a sort of modified two-step into a tapdance…

  Andrew, his brother, wrapping his arm around Bill and saying don’t worry kid, we’ll be home by Christmas, after we’ve given Jerry what for.

  Crouched in No Man’s Land; bullets whizzing overhead, John lying next to him in the shellhole, his intestines hanging out and innards spilling with the torrents of blood, arterial spray covering Bill’s face as he tried in vain to help his friend, frantic, before putting him out of his misery with the bayonet, his first kill, John’s eyes dimming, his hand resting on Bill’s face, crying, bawling, dying, Bill collapsing against his warm, dead flesh; crying, bawling…

  The Battle of the Somme; told to walk slowly, not to run, thousands cut down by Boche machine guns, thousands, twisted and flailing and screaming into the mud, to be eaten by swollen rats the size of small cats…

  Looking over to his right; finally breaking into a run as everyone else was cut to ribbons by the monstrous, roaring guns; Andrew to his right trying to cut through the wire that artillery had failed to cut; riddled with bullets, twisting on the wire, trying to reach him and falling into a shellhole, trapped there.

  All day, more parts of Andrew’s body shot off the wire, until he had no head, no arms, just a bloody stump, a neckhole spurting blood, a lump of torn flesh, stuck in the shellhole watching his brother’s body shot to pieces, until the last chunks of it fell from the cruel wire, not enough spattered fragments of gore left to be held up.

  The German, pleading for his life, a scared kid of twenty, hesitation, then the memory of their boys being strafed by the machine guns, Andrew’s body, his mother’s son, the German pleading, begging for his life, Andrew’s body in the wire, begging Bill in English, rushing forwards, thrusting the bayonet through his abdomen, the strangled cry, thrusting again, again, again…

  Walking down the gangplank in the middle of a trench; sleeping soldiers, some with rats crawling over them, half-dead from exhaustion and stress. How can life continue after this, he thought, how can life continue after this, how can we go on after this, how can we…

  A sniper’s bullet, slamming into David’s temple at the point where a slight step up raised the tall man’s head to a point slightly higher than the parapet. He fell sideways into the mud, oozing blood from a neat hole in his skull. Death came to him faster than anything possible.

  Announcement; the Germans surrender. As of 11 o’clock, the 11th of the 11th month, November 1918, the guns will fall silent, and the war will be over. Congratulations, men, we have won. Silence.

  Christmas, back home. Maureen stricken. I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles, he sang. Pretty Bubbles In The Air. Silence.

  The first day of 1920; his father John, reedy voice crackling with the strain of age, weakened by consumption. Where’s your pal John, and Maureen? Why isn’t Andrew here? How come you never bring your mates around anymore, Billy? Where’s your mother?

  His father, dead; a yellow, waxy skeleton.

  The memories of those terrible years resurfaced, and Bill smiled to think of them, remembering those faces for the first time without the pain of absence, the sting of regret. He imagined an imminent reunion. Would it happen? Hope so, he thought. Bloody well hope so.

  Time had passed slowly, like a slug crawling across a razor blade for eternity. Sisyphus. A Heraklean labour. Today, the sun was shining. There was joy in his heart.

  Bill made his way through the streets of Bloomsbury, weaving through the Russell Square, attracting curious glances from the handful of people strolling through with their dogs. His chest was puffed out, and he marched proudly, swollen with intent and the glory of mortality.

  It occurred to him that while he had survived the Great War, all that followed subsequent had been a proxy life. Now, he was emancipated. Death held no fear for him. The knowledge that all will soon end adds a brightness to each image, a beauty in each visage and a sweetness to each scent.

  Exiting the square, he passed the British Museum, glancing almost scornfully at it as he did so, and reaching the alleyway with its quiet, slumbering pub, a more brisk walk took him out onto the Tottenham Court Road.

  Bill turned left, and headed south.

  A light breeze pleasantly wafted over his face, blowing the newly neatened hair back behind his head as he strolled downwind, nearing the tobacconists, where he sometimes bought cigarettes. The girl there was nice; Maisie, her name was. She was always kind, and spoke warmly and intelligently to him. To his regret, Bill realised that the great majority of the time he had entered to chat to her, alcohol had rendered him somewhat senseless, and he imagined the ordeal for her, dealing with his acrid stench and, quite possibly, drunken rambling; whatever unintelligible, nonsensical gibberish escaped his lips. It simply wouldn’t do. Today was a day of change.

  Bill decided to go speak to her today, but to his regret, the shop was closed.

  Her brother drank in his pub, he remembered suddenly. Obviously the Londoner was the one called Jack, as the fiery one was a Geordie and the one with the pretty girlfriend was Scottish. Don’t call them Scotch, he noted, they don’t like it. The Jack lad was a nice enough chap. Bill regretted that he had not made more of an effort to speak to him. They had spoken only a few times, but Jack seemed intelligent, and earnest.

  As he passed the shop, Bill realised that what he’d done would be relayed to Jack, so Maisie would in all likelihood hear about it. That was something, at least. He couldn’t understand how he had let himself become such a shell of a man.

  Sunlight, hidden behind the clouds suddenly burst anew over the London streets, and Bill smiled to feel its rays gently dusting the skin of his face.

  It feels good to be trimmed. To feel sunlight on my cheeks. How did I lose the plot?

  It doesn’t matter, he decided. Today was a great day. A new chapter.

  Tottenham Court Road ended with the junction at Oxford Street, ringed on all sides by lumpy buildings scarred by polluted air. Grey, of a dirtier shade than charcoal, surrounded them on all sides, assailing the visual sense. This was where Bloomsbury merged southwards into the heart of London; only a mile to the south stood Westminster Palace and its Houses of Parliament, Big Ben and the hallmarks of England and the British Empire. Welcoming the sound, sight and smell of the London traffic, Bill unhesitantly went south, towards the river and Westminster.

  It was not long before he saw the first German patrols.

  A click of the pistol’s cocking mechanism and Bill fired over; two rapid shots that took the Wehrmacht soldiers by surprise. One was caught straight through the throat and collapsed, gurgling a choking death rattle before bleeding out on the cobbles, while t
he other bullet punched through his comrade’s chest. Covert in his strike, Bill had slipped around the corner into the parallel street, and the confused shouts of the other German troops who’d been caught unawares receded as he continued south to where the Wehrmacht checkpoints would undoubtedly be.

  Weaving across the lanes that led towards Trafalgar Square, Bill continued to veer away from the increasing volume of audible German activity nearby, and he slipped through grey streets in the silent slumber of occupation, cutting through a blind spot between Picadilly Circus and Leicester Square. Eventually, back on the wide street and walking southwards, Bill neared the square, passing the statue of Great War nurse Edith Cavell at St Martin’s Place, which had been marked off. Evidently, the rumour that either Hitler or Heydrich demanded its removal was true, he thought.

  In reflective mood, Bill paused by it, reading the inscription: “Patriotism is not enough. I must have no bitterness or hatred for anyone.”

  Fighting back tears, Bill nodded up to her, smiling. He now knew her peace.

  Down the road, the German checkpoint at the edge of Trafalgar Square. It was little more than a roadblock manned by three bored looking soldiers, haphazardly checking the identification of the few stragglers passing through. Bill approached them.

  “Papers,” a bored Wehrmacht soldier intoned. He had a coarse, pockmarked face. Bill surmised him to be thirty-five or so, not much younger than he was. Old enough.

  “By all means,” the Londoner smiled pleasantly, and withdrew his pistol, firing into the chest of the startled soldier, who died quickly.

  Bill was quicker to react than the dying man’s kameraden; he let off two quick shots that felled the fascist soldiers and sidestepped the roadblock, clinging to the shadows as he stealthily darted into Trafalgar Square. Distant shouts grew louder, and German guns were concentrated towards the area of unrest, but despite three bullets being fired towards the massacred roadblock and the source of their danger, the square’s guards were neither close nor quick enough to shoot the exposed British soldier, who reached the centre of the square in the style he had traversed No Man’s Land in all those years ago.