The Gods of Atlantis

by David Gibbons

  After the surrender, the Zoo tower was used as a hospital and a shelter for the homeless, but in 1947 it was demolished by the British Royal Engineers, a huge job requiring a staggering thirty-five tons of dynamite. The resulting mountain of rubble – 412,000 cubic metres of it – was ground up and used for road construction during the 1950s, and in 1969 the foundations of the tower were removed. Today the site is occupied by the hippopotamus enclosure of the Berlin Zoo. To get a sense of its appearance, you can visit the remains of another of the three huge towers, the Humboldthain flak tower, which still survives on one side to its original height and has been converted into a memorial and viewing tower. Since 2004, the Berliner Underwelten Association has offered tours inside the ruins, and their efforts have revealed much that was previously buried. Whether or not more remains to be discovered at the site of the Zoo tower is unknown, but the enormous effort that went into its construction in the heart of Berlin suggests that more secrets of the Nazi period and those apocalyptic final days may yet be revealed beneath the modern city.

  B-24 Liberator FK-856 is fictional, but is based on RAF Liberators that flew out of Nassau in the Bahamas as part of 111 Operational Training Unit until July 1945. The fictional pilot’s experiences with Bomber Command are inspired by the wartime career of my great-uncle, Flight Lieutenant William Norman Cook, DFC and Bar, RAF, a Lancaster pathfinder pilot who flew 59 operations over Nazi Europe. 111 OTU also carried out anti-submarine patrols, and their losses over the ‘Bermuda Triangle’ – no greater than the losses in any other training unit anywhere – included one Liberator that disappeared without trace on a training mission in 1945. Whether U-boats entered the Caribbean after the German surrender in May 1945 may never be known; the possibility is suggested by the extraordinary voyages of U-977 and U-530, whose captains refused to surrender and did not finally give up until 10 July and 17 August respectively, at Mar del Plata in Argentina.

  The Prologue invokes imagery from The Epic of Gilgamesh, the ancient Near Eastern poem also known in its Akkadian version by its first line, Shanaqbai-muru, ‘He who saw the deep’ (in the Prologue I have imagined a similar meaning for the name Uta-napishtim, in a lost language). The passage quoted at the beginning of the book is my own rendering, though the translation of words and phrases owes much to previous scholarly versions including those of Reginald Campbell Thompson (1928), N. K. Sandars (1960 Penguin edition) and Andrew George (1999 Penguin edition). The modern poems referred to in this novel are Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ (Chapter 7), Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ (Chapter 16) and Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Listeners’ (Epilogue). The cover image is based on the Nazi Sonnerod symbol in the floor of the SS Generals’ Hall at Wewelsburg Castle in Germany. Other images of sites and artefacts in this book are on my website www.davidgibbins.com