“They are on the verge of moving into Iraq,” he said finally, foregoing the fact that they had been on the verge of moving ever since the war began. It wasn’t really a coincidence that most of their army units were kept in the north of Iran. “They are waiting for the British to be soundly defeated before they advance.”
“Then they will only have to wait two weeks,” Hitler said thoughtfully. “And so, how can we strike at Churchill himself?”
“My reports from London suggest that Churchill is a very isolated figure,” Himmler said smiling. “If he were to be removed, then the British Government would be in disarray, maybe even willing to consider a compromise peace.”
Hitler looked thoughtful. His whims reshaped the face of Europe. He had had Stalin crawling on the ground in front of him and kept Mussolini in power, rather than having him replaced with a more competent pro-German Italian, and there were thousands of those. He tolerated Franco rather than sending in the Panzers to avenge the occasional insult; he encouraged the French to settle in North Africa, just to alter the demographics of France. Deep inside, Himmler wondered if Hitler respected Churchill, at least on some level, or maybe it was just the desire to have Churchill grovelling in front of him as well. Atlee wouldn’t really have made a good substitute.
“He may have to be removed,” Hitler agreed finally. “How do you intend to accomplish this miracle?”
“I think that had best be kept between you and me,” Himmler said after a long moment. Someone had been passing on information to Britain, and when that person was caught, his fate would serve as a warning for a thousand years. “Churchill will die, and his successor will make peace with us.”
Chapter Forty-Three
London, England
“We have won a great victory,” Winston Churchill proclaimed, as he took his seat at the head of the table. Like the other aides and assistants, Alex DeRiemer sat at the back of the room, listening, but not allowed to speak unless called upon by one of the principles. His former boss had once remarked that aides were there to be seen but never heard in public, lest they embarrass their boss. DeRiemer suspected that very little embarrassed Churchill; he certainly hadn’t been shy about asking for DeRiemer’s opinion when he had wanted it.
He watched as Churchill spoke to the room, uniting them once again under his sway. Monty had told him that Churchill was a very clever man, but had a problem with understanding that the world was changing around him; it wasn’t so much that he was stupid — he wasn’t — but that he was often too stubborn to realise the facts of life and respond quickly. It was both an advantage and a disadvantage; an advantage because he kept his nerve when others would have lost it, and a disadvantage because he either underestimated or overestimated the forces at his command. Churchill had learnt — finally — to leave command to the Generals and Admirals, but he still had the urge to stick his nose in and offer advice and suggestions that were almost orders. It would be a brave commanding officer who defied them.
“The German assault on our cities and the very core of our existence has been broken,” Churchill said, his voice rising as he spoke. “We must now take advantage of this opportunity to crush the Hun and drive him out of our green and pleasant land before he tries to regain control of the situation.”
He paused. “Field Marshal Alexander, how long will it be until our forces can go on the offensive?”
Alexander, at least, had no problems telling Churchill when he was wrong. Monty had commented, bitterly, that if Wavell hadn’t had that problem, the British Empire would have taken Libya before the Germans could have gotten involved, securing North Africa, maybe bringing France back into the war, and preventing the fall of Egypt. DeRiemer suspected that Monty was wrong — there would have been major logistics issues — but even so, the defence of Greece had been a waste of time. Churchill’s books had proclaimed it a just and necessary attempt to save at least one of Hitler’s victims, but between the Italians and the Germans, Greece had been almost impossible to defend. It was further irony that the Greeks had beaten the Italians with ease; the Italian-occupied sections of Greece had the most violent and determined resistance group in Europe.
“At least two weeks,” Alexander said after a long moment. Churchill glowered at him, clearly expecting the army to advance at once, but waited to allow him to finish. “As you know, Prime Minister, the advance elements of the Canadian and Australian contributions to our defence are only a week away, along with a handful of units from the Indian Army, and we now have a torrent of supplies from the Americans. It will require time to integrate the newcomers with our own soldiers, arrange a joint command structure, and prepare for the advance.”
He paused. “What we don’t have is a guaranteed supply line from the Americans; our allies over there are merely getting American war stocks sent to us, rather than expanding American production lines,” he continued. “This means that there will be a finite limit on what the Americans can send unless they agree to expand, and it is uncertain what President Taft will be able to do, even assuming that he jumps in completely on our side. Ambassador Truman and our other friends over there have been doing a grand job, but the Americans don’t have a sense of urgency. That will change — that may change — if we lose the next series of battles and fall to German occupation, but by then it will be too late.”
Churchill’s face darkened. “I will have no talk of defeatism here,” he ordered. “We beat the Germans.”
“We beat them in an environment that we had designed to minimise their advantages and maximise our advantages,” Alexander said. He stood up and strode over to the massive wall map of the war zone. It was large enough to give a real sense of the scale of the battlefield. “The German Panzers, for example, were able to punch through our defence lines, but we were, in most cases, able to harass their advancing infantry and even force them to burn off fuel and ammunition fighting to prevent us from sealing the hole again. They managed to tear open several major gaps in our line regardless, but by that point we had our own reserves moving to seal up the hole and intercept their advance forces.
“In the meantime, we withdrew into the towns and cities, Colchester in particular, and dug in,” Alexander continued. “We had evacuated most of the civilian population over the last few weeks and were able, therefore, to defend the city without regard for the feelings of its inhabitants, of whom several thousand stayed behind to aid in the defence. The Germans have some experience at taking stoutly-held towns, but we were able to force them back out of the cities and then handle them roughly whenever they sought to break back in while using the cities as a permanent threat to their flanks. They were allowed to discover that we had tanks in the cities and therefore… we maintained the ever-present threat of an armoured thrust coming out of the city and forced them to tie down their forces to prevent us from breaking out…”
“And Monty mounted his armoured counter-attack right into their teeth,” Churchill said. “Why can’t he push onwards at once?”
“We didn’t retake all of the ground we lost,” Alexander said calmly. “We planned it so that we would maul the German forces and crush them on grounds of our choosing. The plan didn’t work perfectly, but we broke one of their major Panzer Divisions and smashed a second force that would otherwise have broken through and imperilled London itself. However, the Germans mounted a series of counter-attacks of their own” — his hand traced out lines on the map — “with the net result that the siege of Colchester was not lifted and indeed there is a giant area that belongs to neither side, but is being torn apart by constant fighting.