“Yes,” said Marshall, “but I’m inclined to agree with General Montgomery on this point. Now is the time to get after Italy, while the enemy is still disorganized after Tunisia, and before Hitler starts transferring units to the West. We can see how removing the German threat in Syria and Iraq is important to the British Empire, but removing Italy does a good deal more for clearing a way to Germany itself. Again, I must remind you all that the United States believes the principle attack to defeat Germany must originate from England, and cross the Channel. However, we do see some merit in collaring Mussolini, and the operation proposed against Sardinia and Corsica also opens up the possibility that those islands, or territory we take in Northern Italy, can be used to stage a subsidiary landing in southern France. That’s the way to Germany, not through the Balkans. You could take back Crete, or even land at Athens, but what if Old Man Turkey is not impressed? Take Rome, however, and that’s the end of the line for the Italians. Then we don’t sit here talking about fighting in Italy, we start getting serious about fighting in France.”
“Interesting,” said Tovey. “I’m not an Army man, but since we hold Spain, doesn’t that also permit the buildup of strong forces there, say at Barcelona? They might offer strong support for an invasion of Southern France, even if it were a secondary operation to the main attack across the channel. All the more reason to have Sardinia and Corsica in hand.”
“Firebrand and Brimstone,” said Eisenhower. “Those plans are looking fairly good to me.”
They were back to the Hot Potato that Sardinia had become, and Brooke thought it best to put off any decision on this until he could confer with Churchill. He also had one other item on his agenda that he needed to cover.
“Well gentlemen,” he said. “We’ve a good deal to chew on tonight. Hopefully, we can reach a consensus before this conference ends. We’ll be mopping things up in Tunisia soon, and there’s no time to waste. In that I’ll have to agree with General Marshall—time is money, and a currency we can ill afford to squander. There is one thing more I was advised to share with you all, and it could weigh heavily on all these plans….”
Brooke stood now, and Montgomery yielded the podium so he could address everyone directly. “Gentlemen,” he said. “This concerns something old, and something new, which both appeared over London on the night of February 1st. It looked to be nothing more than another air raid, only this time the Germans used a Zeppelin to make a high altitude bombing run over London. That might seem quaint, given the destruction they’ve achieved with simple bombers, but this airship delivered something quite unexpected. What I am to say now must be held at the highest level of secrecy, and no one outside this room is to hear a word of it. I trust to the integrity of every man here, and know that will be the case.”
Then he told them what British intelligence had surmised about the attack on London, and what it could mean for the future course of the war. “All that considered,” he finished, “this device was not of a very great explosive yield. Still, if it had struck a more populated area, casualties would have been a good deal higher. Now this whole thing presents two questions. The first is whether Germany has more of these weapons. We’ve seen nothing of this since February 1st, but that doesn’t necessarily mean their cupboard is empty. The second question is what this means for operations of the sort we have gathered here to discuss. Can you imagine such a bomb exploding directly over our invasion fleet, no matter which island we might choose in our deliberations?”
The silence in the room was ample testimony to the gravity of that prospect. Every man there was seeing some terrible bright flash in his mind, a force so strange and powerful that it could sweep pieces right off the chess board of battle. It was no longer a question of divisions, or naval squadrons maneuvering to overwhelm the enemy. Now they could simply be extinguished in one fell blow.
“My God,” said Patton. “Whoever dreamt this thing up must surely be in league with the devil himself. Where’s the honor in using a weapon like that? There’s no valor in this kind of war. It’s simple butchery.”
“Yes,” said Brooke, “It is, but I might also say that our own concept of strategic bombing as a means of breaking the enemy morale is quite callous. In fact, the policy calls for making the cities we target physically uninhabitable, and instilling in the population the constant fear of personal danger. The wording is quite plain in the directive laid out in September of 1941. Our strategic bombing campaign is to do two things, produce destruction, and fear of death. That’s certainly what Hitler was about when he started the Blitz, and we’re responding in kind. We started with Lubeck and Rostock in March of ’42, but those were small raids of two and three hundred planes. Now we’ve ramped it up to thousand plane raids, a continuous bomber stream to overwhelm the defenses of the target city. Operation Millennium did that over Cologne a year ago, and bomber command estimates we destroyed 60% of the town. In that light, this new weapon is no different in its aim. Last March, we put over 34,000 tons on the Ruhr. We estimate this weapon was not too much more than 1,500 tons of TNT equivalent.”
“But its use as a tactical weapon is something to consider,” said Montgomery. “A blast of that size, delivered at the right place and time, could completely unhinge an offensive.”
“Yes,” said Brooke. “Yet we have come to believe that this weapon was a prototype. We’ve no way of knowing whether they have more of these bombs ready, and we’ve teed up several countermeasures, both offensively and defensively. We’re going after their special weapons programs with much more fervor now, and we’re also going all out to get high altitude fighters. That was why they used something old to deliver this new terror to London, a high climbing Zeppelin, which was above our Spitfire ceiling when the attack was made. What this means for us now is obvious. We thought we had a decisive edge with our own conventional strategic bombing campaign, but, with this weapon, Germany is back in the game, and they don’t have to come with mass bombing raids as we do. This single Zeppelin delivered explosive tonnage that would have required us to use over 200 Lancasters. We also believe they can put this bomb on a single plane. It may even be light enough to be carried by a fighter-bomber, which means they could deliver it much more accurately if they chose to risk losing that plane. I’m also told by people in the know that the explosive yield of such a bomb can be dramatically increased. It’s just a question of how much uranium is used for fuel. A weapon could be made to yield ten times what we saw over London, or more. This is rather disturbing, to say the least.”
Admiral Tovey was sitting in dark silence, for deep within his mind, he saw the clear memory of that terrible mushroom cloud billowing up over the North Atlantic. That was the first he had seen of this weapon, though he could not trace his present life path back to that moment. There had also been another incident in the mid-Atlantic west of Gibraltar. He had been leading the fleet against the Germans, when Rodney met her fate, and a terrible explosion had gushed up from the sea, glowering over the scene for hours after that engagement. He had seen this weapon used twice, and never wished to see one again.
Patton was so very correct. There was no skill or valor in this kind of war—no strategy. The Bomb made talk of covering forces, strategic choke points, and all conventional operations of war, frivolous. The next war would simply be wanton destruction. The armed forces would exist simply to deliver their terrible weapons of destruction, and the world would burn. That Russian Captain Fedorov had told them of this. In his time, far in the future, this was the war they were facing when his ship had vanished… to appear here, where the fledgling infant demon that would one day devour his world was first given birth.