A 2016 World War, With a 'Lil Twist

Star Eater

Prologue

In the early morning hours of the ninth of September in 2016, a platoon of British soldiers were making their way along the coastline of eastern Kent, not far from Sandwich Bay. All they knew was that they’d been put on the highest of alerts, and with the first light coming up over the southern tip of the North Sea they had been able to spot the dark shapes of jet fighters speeding back and forth way up above. With no traffic at this time of day their up-armoured Land Rovers found no obstacles, but there were plenty of anxious faces peering at them from the windows they passed by. “Never had I felt so eerie,” commented one man later. As this small unit of the Royal Kent Regiment approached Sandwich Bay, they heard the first crackled shouts of alarm tear from the radios. The clock had just struck six. And then in the near-distance a sudden flash of orange light, before a fireball rose up to engulf an electricity pylon halfway to the horizon. The convoy shuddered to a halt and every man watched as the tower buckled, then toppled over onto the field it stood in. All at once they saw a wave of darkness wipe towards them as houselights went out. Meanwhile smoke rose up amongst the downed pylon. Further in the distance more flashes of light, followed by pillars of smoke, were emerging. The platoon’s commander, Lieutenant Daisy Mogg, broke the silence as she yelled into her radio for the convoy to keep going. Along the battered country road it continued, heading right for Sandwich Bay. The Home Guard would, hopefully, be ready when they arrived. The soldiers could swear the black silhouettes of incoming missiles were visible against the dark grey sky. Far more obvious were the shapes of aircraft heading out to sea. On the horizon, beyond the water, some could even see plumes of white smoke beginning to twist this way and that in a tell-tale sign of airborne fighting. All the while the radio kept screaming.

Keeping close to the Belgian coast, the squadron finally got the word it was waiting for. Operation Charlemagne had begun. The three leading destroyers turned hard starboard and, sirens blaring internally, the rest of the flotilla did the same. To the southwest, more destroyers would screen the Strait of Dover, but for now there was no sign of the Royal Navy. The group of 50,000 tonne amphibious assault ships followed in the wake of the destroyers, their iron bodies moaning with the exertion to turn so hard. Even now, with the sun only barely risen, the telltale signs of black smoke on the horizon told the assorted crewmen all they needed to know. The danger of attack from the air remained, but all hoped that the interdiction of their own aircrews had lessened the threat. This particular unit had the distinction of landing further south than any of their comrades, with Sandwich Bay in their sights. Now glory offered an outstretched hand for them all. As they waited, many looked towards the fluttering swastika. And they smiled.
 

Star Eater

Chapter One

For most in Britain, the war hardly came as a surprise. But as people were awoken by the wail of air raid sirens, and those in Canterbury, Ashford, Margate, and a dozen smaller towns looked to the sky to see the black silhouettes of Ju 770s and the hundreds of descending paratroopers, suddenly it all became very real indeed. For many, especially those not living in the militarised south of England, the threat across the Channel was a half-remembered one even if successive governments had trumpeted it.

Since the end of the last war, British military planning had envisaged dozens of possibilities for invasion. As the age of long-range missiles emerged a naval endeavour across the narrow English Channel appeared less and less likely and began to fade from the planning, though small-scale raids of the type regularly attempted in the 1950s and 1960s were widely expected, or even a concerted airborne assault. Other plans suggested an invasion via Ireland, to use the isle as a springboard to strike at the heart of Britain, as the French had attempted in 1796; it was a possibility taken seriously enough to give political justification to the occupation of Ireland until 1974. But increasingly the focus had centred on East Anglia, with counterattacks by the Royal Navy able to be limited by the narrow Straits of Dover on one side and the intervention of long-range aircraft from Norway and Denmark on the other, with Scandinavia “hanging over Britain like a scythe” in the words of former Prime Minister Catherine Webster.

In a country as paranoid and militarised as Britain, under constant siege mentality for decades, it had almost become a national tradition to ponder invasion. After all, in geographic terms Nazi Europe practically wrapped around Britain like a noose even in peacetime. The renowned military academy at Sandhurst published annual studies on the feasibility of various invasion strategies while the anti-aircraft guns on the roofs of hotels in places like Brighton and Margate were only removed to be replaced with missiles which regularly popped up on the Internet, often commented on by Americans with wide-eyed incredulity. Invasion, or more broadly Britain’s relationship with Europe, had become a central component of British identity, nationalism, and culture; invasion was explored in countless films ranging from the patriotic such as 1949’s Darling Britain, the satirical in 1971’s Milo, or the horrific as in 1997’s The Black Tower. With invasion would surely come destruction, repression, and extermination. The fate of whole ethnic groups like the Jews, Poles, or Ukrainians was widely known across the world. With the advent of nuclear proliferation the fear had often become less about invasion and more sheer obliteration before a single jackboot ever reached Britain’s shores. It was a fear hammered into the British national psyche; 31 million people watched the 2000 finale of the four-decade long soap opera Farm when its creator, Giles Hatch, had its Wolverhampton setting and every character wiped out in a worldwide nuclear exchange to gigantic controversy. The British Armed Forces were the perfect example of the deep fear across the isles. On the day war came, it included 1,125,000 regular personnel with a further 4.5 million reservists, meaning almost seven percent of the population were directly involved in the military. Widespread inclusion of women as early as the 1960s, even in a country resisting the countercultural movement sweeping the Americas, showed how willing to abandon tradition Britain was in the face of a threat that seemed eternal; when the war came the Chiefs of Staff Committee had just achieved gender parity with the appointment of Air Chief Marshal Dame Bridget Heath.

Across the Channel, things were rather different. Nazi Europe was a vast goliath stretching from Cabo da Roca to the Lena River. A handful of puppet governments were surrounded by the enormous Germany, known by various names; Germania, the Third Reich or simply the Reich, the World Capital in some Nazi parlance. It represented intense political extremism yet to a great degree was actually less paranoid than Britain. A sense of total invincibility existed owing to its apparent invulnerability to invasion, a belief in immortality which encouraged recklessness including where nuclear weapons were concerned; this caused plenty of anxiety both inside and outside Europe. Compared to Britain and the United States, with which a rivalry existed rather than enmity, German-dominated Europe was a polar opposite. Politically it was totalitarian, having abandoned even the notion that the non-German states had independent governments. All citizens, everywhere, swore loyalty to the Fuhrur who for the last two years had been Maximilian Hitler, grandson of Adolf Hitler, embodiment of the dynastic rule which held sway over the continent. And on an economic front the guiding principle remained autarky, which allowed it to practice a self-sufficient planned economy beyond the influence of the highly liberalised British and American economies. Legalised plunder was a major source of income, with citizens of France or Italy paying taxes into German coffers as well as their own governments while the non-German states had their militaries deliberately underfunded and understaffed to prevent any threat of rebellion. France and Italy maintained their African colonial empires (Portugal having ceded hers to Britain just before succumbing to Nazi domination) but these too were ultimately German territory. However it is very notable that Italy had for decades become the “problem” of the Axis, owing to grievances from much of its “Mediterranean” populace being placed on a lower racial classification as the Aryans in Germany and northern France as well as the crackdown on Christianity which nearly triggered all-out rebellion in Italy under Heinrich Himmler’s rule. As for Britain, it was looked upon as “a pimple” in the words of Hitler, and there was certainly no anxiety about a threat it might pose. Most Germans were far more interested in friendship with Britain, still clinging to Adolf Hitler’s belief that she could prove a valuable seafaring partner.

The real enemy to most committed Nazis was the United States, which in the Axis propaganda was a hive of Jewish conspiracy; the last holdout of the worldwide Judeo-Bolshevist order which the Reich had so gallantly smashed in the 1940s. It served the German government very well to keep having an enemy to direct anger to; the United States quickly took the blame for the 1978 nuclear incident which rendered much of Winniza uninhabitable. This all happened while most in the United States saw Japan, not Germany, as their greatest antagonist. But for decades German education had taught that the United States represented the greatest threat and, a couple of generations of Nazi hegemony later, it had a nation of fanatics who would direct that hatred to America. Yet a paradox emerges. While the rhetoric of the Third Reich demonised the United States, it was in fact perhaps its closest friend. By 2016 half a trillion dollars worth of trade passed between the two, with Britain seen by many Americans as ridiculously paranoid; President Cooke went as far as to claim Britain was “merely jealous” of Germany’s success in his State of the Union address. But as black African slavery by the Reich picked up, any mainstream fondness for the Axis quickly fell away, yet the neutrality which America had maintained in the war remained as rock solid as ever; the lesson of George Washington to avoid foreign entanglement had become almost holy despite the gradual moves in the Pacific to counter Japan, the real enemy for most Americans. For most of the Nazi era the United States was regarded as a mongrel of a nation but one which could be safely kept at arm’s length across the Atlantic, and so the rhetoric was usually toned down in public. This changed when Maximilian Hitler came to power; a fanatic even beyond the measurements of his father and grandfather, it seems he had come to believe that if the only true path for humanity was Nazism, and if the rest of the world wouldn’t embrace it independently, then it would have to be exported with the sword. It was a sentiment encapsulated by his first address to the Volkshalle in which he told the adoring masses that “it’s time to stop reaching out. Only the Reich is the vanguard of the truth.”

But it had been recognised early on that no attack on the United States could even be contemplated until Great Britain had fallen. Britain represented an obstacle which would harass any effort at conquest. And conquest was the word in use. Maximilian Hitler, on the eve of war, made clear his intentions in a final meeting of the Supreme Command. Recorded by the secretary present, for Hitler was keen to have his deliberations maintained in the historical record, he told the assorted military leaders; “none of us should be contented until every corner of the Earth is the Reich, where all tongues only know German. And when this Earth is ours, we will look up. Let no Aryan be satisfied until we have touched every star in the sky. This is our universe. It’s time to take it.”

Comments please
 
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juanml82

juanml82

More!

But wouldn't the UK retort to nuclear weapons if they can't dislodge the German bridgeheads?

OTOH, can your TL armed forces replace looses if they engage in the kind of total war WW2 was? In other words, it takes too long to make an Eurofighter or a Typhoon to even consider battle looses can be replaced, as they were in WW2.

But, IITL, if the major powers are considering a long conventional war, maybe they either disregard such complex weapons systems because they wouldn't last long in war, or they keep it, but they also have large number of simpler systems which can be manufactured fast enough, assuming the factories remain open. Sort of a mix between our Eurofighters and advanced jet trainers, for instance.
 

Star Eater

juanml82 said:
More!

But wouldn't the UK retort to nuclear weapons if they can't dislodge the German bridgeheads?

OTOH, can your TL armed forces replace looses if they engage in the kind of total war WW2 was? In other words, it takes too long to make an Eurofighter or a Typhoon to even consider battle looses can be replaced, as they were in WW2.

But, IITL, if the major powers are considering a long conventional war, maybe they either disregard such complex weapons systems because they wouldn't last long in war, or they keep it, but they also have large number of simpler systems which can be manufactured fast enough, assuming the factories remain open. Sort of a mix between our Eurofighters and advanced jet trainers, for instance.
Click to expand...

The UK wasn't in possession of nuclear weapons until 1960, by which time the conflict was long over and their use politically unacceptable and potentially suicidal.

Britain has about 60 days worth of military stores for total combat; after these are exhausted it is assumed in British doctrine that invasion will have been repulsed or nuclear weapons will be used as a last resort. UK planners are under few illusions that war would include a counter-invasion of Europe, unless the United States were involved which is thought unlikely at best.
 

Berkeley2017

So if Britain has a nuclear deterrent, what exactly is Germany trying to get out of this invasion? Or did its leaders catch a bad case of the stupid?
 

Star Eater

Berkeley2017 said:
So if Britain has a nuclear deterrent, what exactly is Germany trying to get out of this invasion? Or did its leaders catch a bad case of the stupid?
Click to expand...

It's the nature of Nazism to keep conquering for the sake of conquering; it's the geopolitical equivalent of a virus. Maximilian's predecessor was able to slow the drift towards all-out conquest but those days are over. Consider also the megalomania of a Fuhrur, from a dynastic line, worshipped as a demi-God and effectively the subject of a state religion, ruling over an entire continent and you begin to understand the personal insult that a still-independent Britain thirty miles off the coast might represent.
 

Deckhand

I am guessing that since Britain has spent the last 7 decades in paranoia mode, that the listed 6 million active/reserve personnel only represent the current rolls?

That in fact there is no one on the islands over the age of 18, 16? that has not been or is not now in the military. Basically Britain is Sparta ITTL?
 

Star Eater

Deckhand said:
I am guessing that since Britain has spent the last 7 decades in paranoia mode, that the listed 6 million active/reserve personnel only represent the current rolls?

That in fact there is no one on the islands over the age of 18, 16? that has not been or is not now in the military. Basically Britain is Sparta ITTL?
Click to expand...

Think of Britain as OTL Israel but more like a frightened animal
 
Logan2879

Logan2879

So world war 3 starts in September 2016, 71 years after after world war 2 ends. Nazi Germany verse the world? Interesting keep going...
 
DrakonFin

DrakonFin

Star Eater said:
It's the nature of Nazism to keep conquering for the sake of conquering; it's the geopolitical equivalent of a virus. Maximilian's predecessor was able to slow the drift towards all-out conquest but those days are over. Consider also the megalomania of a Fuhrur, from a dynastic line, worshipped as a demi-God and effectively the subject of a state religion, ruling over an entire continent and you begin to understand the personal insult that a still-independent Britain thirty miles off the coast might represent.
Click to expand...

You really seem to like to make this general argument of Nazi Super Evil, looking at some of your past threads. ITTL, the Nazi empire has managed to not only conquer Europe but also keep it going and make it fanatically loyal, de facto unified superstate for seven decades. Given how fast Nazism self-destructed IOTL, how it is different ITTL so that it manages to be this successful? Realistically, someone might expect such a "purist" Nazi empire to implode of its own impossibility in a few decades at the most, not keep going and get internally even stronger and more cohesive in a way that no unified European system has managed to do so far.

On the face of it, if someone wrote about any other nation or system being as successful in Europe, both physically and spiritually, as it were, one might even suggest that they like wanking that nation or system, instead of hating it and seeing it as a horrible, inhuman abomination which the Nazi system definitely was.
 
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