by Daniel Wyatt
“You scoundrel. Can’t you wait till you get back to the hotel?”
“No. Yes. It’s just that I’ve never done it on a beach before.”
“Neither have I, now that you mention it.”
“Come on. Nobody’s around.”
She grinned; her eyes sparkled. “Come to think of it, the blanket might be wide enough to fit into.”
“Well, then, what are we waiting for?”
Giggling like school kids, they removed their swimsuits and rolled naked into the blanket.
“Is this what you call ... the American way?” she asked, smirking, kissing him on the neck.
He laughed. “Yeah, something like that.”
For the next twenty minutes, neither Annie Fannie nor the war mattered to the honeymooning Hollingers.
EPILOGUE
Nuremberg, Germany — November 1945
Twenty-one high-profile Nazi leaders faced an international tribunal formed by the Allied nations on charges of war crimes. The world was about to witness what would be the most sensational and the longest trial in global history.
The first day, Schubert remained calm, drowsy, detached from it all. The other prisoners — except for Goering who sat beside him — were tense. The surviving Nazi leaders were astonished at Goering’s attitude towards the Deputy Fuehrer. Apparently, the widely-known pre-1941 hatred between the two had vanished. Similarly to the other Nazi leaders on trial, the former Luftwaffe Commander-in-Chief was now only a shadow of his former self. Once obese, he was now ghostly pale and skinny, and his hands shook uncontrollably at times.
For the first two days, Felix Schubert continued in the erratic behaviour he had kept up since 1941. One evening, a tall, well-dressed Englishman entered his cell and told the German blankly that from then on, Schubert was to shut up and play along, or face terrible consequences. And he was promised a life sentence if he cooperated.
Guaranteed.
On the third day, Schubert brought a novel with him and read it while the tribunal proceedings were played out.
During a short pause, Goering turned to the prisoner, and whispered, “You are disgracing us.”
Schubert laughed. “What chance do we stand? We’re all guilty.”
“In that case, why don’t we tell the court our big secret?” Goering whispered back. “We’ve got nothing to lose. It might liven things up. Your amnesia act is terrible. I know you’re not the real Rudolf Hess.”
Schubert’s whole body turned to Goering. “And how do you know that, dare I ask?”
The former Luftwaffe leader laughed and slapped Schubert on the back. “Because ... maybe ... I’m not the real Hermann Goering.”
AFTERWORD
As was the case in The Fuehrermaster, many characters in this novel are fictional. They include Wesley Hollinger, Raymond Lampert, Roberta Langford, Max Preston, David Shean, Aris Palini, Smith, Lydia Harris, Denise, Kenneth Sims, Stephen Jordan, Hans Schmidt, Adam Eiser, Walter Buhle, Felix Schubert, Ernst Rodel, and Albert von Reiden. The organizations of Kerr, Chapman & Company, and I.S. Filberg are also fictionalized.
* * * *
Pearl Harbor
Following the attack, America flexed its muscles. They won their first major battle at Midway in June, 1942, compliments of the same carriers that the Japanese Task Force had failed to hit on December 7, 1941. After that, the Japanese fought a defensive war. America mobilized itself into a strong fighting force that combined with Britain and other Allies to crush Nazi Germany and Japan.
Today, the rumours still fly about the attack. Certain writers such as John Toland, in his 1982 book, Infamy, have stated that President Roosevelt and his top advisers knew beforehand where the Japanese were going to strike, but allowed it to happen so that America would be brought into the war with a fervour and a vengeance, backed by her people.
Hawaii’s Commanders, General Walter Short of the Army, and Admiral Husband Kimmel of the Navy, were not told of the Japanese Purple Code being broken by American Intelligence until well after they had been dismissed and had taken the fall for a government that was negligent in alerting them to the Japanese danger. To their deaths they had received the blame and the scorn of the American public, while Washington came out unscathed.
* * * *
Franklin Roosevelt
Visibly ill during his next presidential campaign in 1944, he was elected to an unprecedented fourth term in office. He died the following year, a few days short of Germany’s surrender.
He was the man behind the highly sensitive and secretive Manhattan Project — the building of the atomic bomb — that eventually defeated Japan in the summer of 1945.
* * * *
Enigma
The secrets were saved for when they would be really needed, as Winston Churchill had so vividly stated in this novel.
The meticulous code-breaking process kept the Allies informed of enemy concentrations during the Battle of the Atlantic; General Irwin Rommel’s movements in Africa; Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa; and Operation Overload, the invasion of Europe and what followed until Germany was defeated.
Enigma was instrumental in winning the European war. The Germans never suspected a thing.
* * * *
COI
By mid-1942, the Office of the Coordinator of Information became the OSS — the Office of Strategic Services. Wild Bill Donovan, Roosevelt’s close friend, remained its director, with the new rank of General. The OSS grew by leaps and bounds. Donovan masterminded covert operations and guerrilla warfare behind enemy territory. By war’s end, the OSS had offices in nearly every European country.
Two years later, in 1947, the organization changed its name again, this time to the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA. By then, Donovan had bowed out of official clandestine work and returned to his New York law practice. He died in 1959.
* * * *
Duke of Hamilton
Kept a low profile after the Rudolf Hess flight, pleading innocence and shying away from interviews until his death in 1972.
* * * *
Adolf Hitler
Many leading German generals and industrialists questioned his leadership, and tried to assassinate him in a bomb blast in July 1944. He survived. His revenge was brutal, resulting in a purge of hundreds of officers and civilians.
Recent Russian KGB files indicate that the Fuehrer and his long-time mistress Eva Braun committed suicide in Hitler’s Chancellory bunker days before the war ended, and their bodies were taken back to Moscow.
* * * *
Heinrich Himmler
Carried out Hitler’s orders to exterminate the Jews by organizing the Final Solution death camps that will forever remain a dark stain in the annals of human history.
During the war, he sent out several peace feelers to the Americans through Switzerland. One of the plans was to kidnap Hitler and hand him to the Allies. In 1944, he had infiltrated the German conspirator movement prior to the Hitler bombing and waited to see if the group of discontented generals and industrialists were successful. When Hitler lived through the blast, Himmler moved swiftly to carry out his Fuehrer’s revenge and to cover his own tracks.
Unable to kidnap Hitler and sue the Allies for peace, Himmler committed suicide when American troops captured him in May 1945.
* * * *
Rudolf Hess
Whether he was the real Hess is still debatable. Rumours have persisted for years that the British had an impostor on their hands.
At the Nuremberg Trials, the prisoner was sentenced on October 1, 1946. He was found not guilty of War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity, but guilty of Conspiracy and Crimes against Peace. He was given life imprisonment at Spandau Prison, Berlin. He died there in 1987, in his nineties, an apparent suicide by hanging. Some historians believe he was murdered.
The truth of the Rudolf Hess flight to Scotland will become official when the 100-year secrets stamp on it is lifted in the year 2041.
* * * *
Winston Churchill
Despite his strong leadership through the war, the British voted him out of office in 1945, because they thought he was great in war but would be lousy in peace time. Six years later, the voters had a change of heart and voted him back into office at age 76.
To his dying day in 1965, he always carefully avoided discussing the Rudolf Hess incident. “I never attached any serious importance to the escapade,” he once wrote.
Certain gossip about Churchill has persisted to this day. Did the Prime Minister do everything he could to draw the Americans into World War II? If so, one must remember that his prime objective was to beat Hitler. Whether Hitler planned to rule the globe with his New World Order or merely control Europe side-by-side with the British was not the issue to Churchill. After Germany was overrun in 1945 by the Allies, and the Nazi death camps were revealed to a shocked world community, could anyone really blame Churchill for some of the bulldog-tough, no-holds-barred decisions he had to make earlier in the war?
* * * *
Wall Street
The Nazi-Wall Street connection in this novel is too close to the truth. The German business cartel of I.G. Farben — I.S. Filberg in the story — sought funds for Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s and as a result received generous cash loans from Wall Street firms such as Jewish-run Kuhn, Loeb & Company; two Rockefeller-owned banks, National City Bank, and Dillion, Read & Company; and others, including a J.P. Morgan bank. I.G. Farben also hired Ivy Lee, the New York public relations firm, to improve Hitler’s image to the American eye. This was the same Ivy Lee that the Rockefellers relied upon on occasion for their own PR work. Years earlier, the Ivy Lee firm had sold the new communist regime to the Americans following the October Revolution.
Also, Kuhn, Loeb & Company’s head, Jacob Schiff, personally financed the Communists in 1917 to the tune of $20 million dollars, this confirmed in 1949 by Schiff’s grandson, John, to the New York Journal American.
It’s interesting to note that no I.G. Farben factories were bombed during the war, this upon orders from the U.S. War Department. Why? Because two high officials, namely Secretary of War Robert Patterson, and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal had both been employed by Dillion, Read, & Company before the war, not to mention the fact that powerful Americans were on the Board of Directors.
Money talks, even in war. When there’s blood in the streets, there’s profit in the boardrooms.
Daniel Wyatt
Historical fiction author Daniel Wyatt is Canadian, born and raised on the prairies of Saskatchewan. He now resides with his wife and two children in Burlington, Ontario, thirty miles outside Toronto.
His first published work was a set of first-person stories from World War II allied air force veterans called Two Wings and a Prayer by Boston Mills Press, Erin, Ontario, Canada in 1984. This was followed up in 1986 by Maximum Effort with the same publisher. In 1990, Wyatt made the switch to historical fiction with The Last Flight of the Arrow, a techno-thriller set during the Cold War years of the late 1950s. Originally published by Random House of Canada, it sold 20,000 copies in paperback. The Mary Jane Mission came out two years later, also by Random House. “The Falcon File” series, consisting of The Fuehrermaster, The Filberg Consortium and Foo Fighters was published as an eBook original by Mushroom eBooks, and in paperback as The Falcon File by Bladud Books in 2007. Wyatt’s other published works include aviation magazine articles in Canada and the United States.
A big baseball fan, Wyatt enjoys collecting Detroit Tigers memorabilia.
Books by Daniel Wyatt
Two Wings and a Prayer
Maximum Effort
The Last Flight of the Arrow
The Mary Jane Mission
The Cotton Run
Pennant Man
Route 66
“The Falcon File” series:
The Fuehrermaster
The Filberg Consortium
Foo Fighters
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