The Long Hard Road

Chapter Four: Tanking About War

Fort Powell

Nevada, USA

25^th March 1942

Fort Powell was new; one of the thousands of training camps that had sprung up over the United States of America. Ten miles of barracks, vehicle garages and training grounds, hidden under the burning sun. Built with the newly-released labour available to a nation at war, it had been named for a person who might not exist now… but had existed in an alternate future.

Captain Jackie Robinson, who would have been a baseball star in the shadowy other reality, and was a Captain in the 5^th American Armoured Division in the only reality he’d ever known, examined the new tank with considerable interest. While he knew enough about the new tanks to recognise that it was derived from a British Firefly, one of the easy to manufacture tanks that had equipped the first American tank forces – to say nothing of British Commonwealth forces around the globe – it wasn’t a Firefly. The determination to produce an indigenous tank design had finally created the Franks tank, named after yet another person who might never exist.

Jackie was unusual in one respect – he knew who General Franks had been – but the entire 5^th American Armoured Division was unusual in another; it was the first mixed-race tank force in America. There were a handful of black infantry regiments fighting in Norway – along with far more white divisions – but the brutal fighting there had chewed them up so badly that the survivors might end up being merged together.

He chuckled to himself as the crew of the tank came up to stand beside him. The 5^th American Armoured Division had been promised some of the latest equipment and a role in what everyone expected to be an invasion of Europe. That alone had done what appeals to human decency could not; brought black and white together in a combat unit. After four months of heavy training, they were working together reasonably well; the only friction had been a drunken brawl in the bar.

“Age before beauty,” his gunner said. Jackie glared at him – he was hardly a child, even if he did command part of the Division – and climbed up onto the tank, opening the turret and peeking inside.

“Smells fresh,” he said. “No traces of oil or anything.”

“It’s probably the first model and they’ve cleaned it for us,” the driver said. He’d been a member of Black Power, which still existed in case it was needed again, and had been known for being pessimistic.

Jackie chuckled and folded himself into the tank. Inside, it was very much like a Firefly, although there were a handful of minor changes. The periscope, allowing the commander to look around without distracting the driver, was new; British equipment had intended a greater merging of 2015 and 1942 technology. Again, there was enough room for even his lanky frame, and that was an improvement on the training vehicles.

“We seem to have more machine guns,” the gunner noted. He examined it thoughtfully; the press of a button put two machine guns out at both sides of the tank, and two more on each side of the turret. “What on Earth is the purpose of those?”

“The Germans have been deploying those little anti-tank rockets,” Jackie reminded him. He grinned suddenly. “How about we take her for a spin?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” the driver said. He examined the engine; that too was new, far from the engines he’d worked on as a mechanic. He pushed the start button; the tank refused to start. “What the hell?”

Jackie examined the manual that had been left on the seat. “I think you’re supposed to insert the key… here,” he said, finding a small key taped to the manual. “What blasted idiot thought of that?”

“Some nutter in a headquarters miles behind the lines,” the driver muttered. He inserted the key and the engine roared to life. “Ride them, cowboy!”

Jackie laughed aloud as the tank leapt forward, its engine rumbling as it moved out of the compound, heading onto the practice field. He’d spent hours working with the simulator, the British device that simulated driving a tank, but this was far better.

“Target ahead,” the driver said. Jackie peered through the periscope… to see the base commander’s office. General Stillwell peered out, waving at them as the tank drove on.

”I think not,” Jackie said, as the tank finally reached the practice field. “Now… crank it up… and lets see what this baby can really do.”

“Well, what do you think?” General Stillwell asked, hours later.

Jackie smiled at him. Stillwell had little time for racism; he’d spent years trying to help the Chinese to build a proper army. “I think we’ll do fine,” he said. “Is there any news on deployment?”

“Nothing as yet,” Stillwell said. “The betting pool says Iran, as the tanks aren’t that much good in Scandinavia.”

Jackie smiled. “I can’t wait,” he said truthfully. “These tanks can move faster than anything they have and they fire very quickly. All we need are a few hundred more and we’ll be ready.”

“They’ll be here next week,” Stillwell said. “The President promised that he would see to it personally.

The White House

Washington DC, USA

25^th March 1942

The White House was being rebuilt; a process that had begun just after the Wet Firecracker Rebellion had come to an end, and still smelt of new paint. The temptation to install some of the most modern security systems had been considerable – and indeed the Secret Service had hired British experts after the Hoover debacle – but Truman had ordered them to avoid tearing down the entire building. That, he was certain, would have to wait until the war was over – for now, America needed to see the centre of her government standing strong.

Rain lashed against the windows of the Oval Office, even though it was March. Truman had read papers prepared on the butterfly effect, which might well have altered the historical weather patterns in unpredictable ways, and – he was assured – had given them rain like he remembered from London. It suited his mood; there was work to be done, but he knew that he didn’t feel like taking a grip on it.

The buck stops here, he reminded himself. His alternate had placed that one his desk. He was President, and short of resigning – or doing something that would get him impeached – the buck did stop with him. It was just that his other self, or even Roosevelt, had never had to steer the country away from the brink of civil war.

“My apologies, General,” he said. Eisenhower, the commander of Allied Forces in Norway, was seated behind him, facing his back. In the other history, Eisenhower would have been supreme commander of the European theatre and later President, but in this history… the balance of power between Britain and America was lopsided, on the other side. The wrong side, as far as Truman was concerned; he wanted – needed – America to be strong.

He shuddered; the anti-Soviet riots had been brutal in the wake of New York. For a week, he had feared that it would plunge the country back into civil unrest, even civil war, but ironically most of the communists and ‘useful idiots’ in high places had been purged by Hoover’s men, during their one day in power.

And the British hadn’t stuck back at a Soviet city, he thought bitterly. Everyone knew that Britain had atomic weapons, and certainly atomic material had been used in the blast, but they hadn’t blasted a Soviet city. Intentionally or unintentionally, they’d weakened Truman’s position… and only one man could deliver what he wanted, and needed.

He realised he was wool-gathering again and pulled his mind back to the subject at him. “Please continue, general,” he said.

“The build-up of forces is continuing,” Eisenhower said. If he noticed the President’s distraction, he was too polite to mention it. “At the moment, we’re raising fifty new armoured divisions, most of them mixed-race, except for the handful of… other units.”

Truman scowled. It had been the compromise required to please the Southern senators that hadn’t been implicated by the coup attempt. Those white men who couldn’t stand the thought of fighting beside black men had been guaranteed Jim Crow units. He’d taken a small amount of revenge by ensuring that the Jim Crow units were last in line for new equipment.

“At the same time, of course, we’re also raising fifty infantry and several dozen other units,” Eisenhower continued. “Part of this is rotating people – experienced people – from Norway and using them to pass on their experiences to the new recruits. As we have nearly one hundred thousand soldiers in Norway, we have some ground for reinforcing them and rotating entire units out of that hellhole.”

Truman nodded slightly. Between the Germans in the south of Sweden, and the Russians in the north, life was difficult for the Americans in the centre. Even with Patton pressing their logistics as far forward as possible, Norway was hardly the country for armoured warfare. It was an infantry war, with a handful of tanks, and it chewed up entire regiments without a qualm.

“Is there anyway that we can force them out completely?” Truman asked finally. “We need to press the war forward as soon as possible.”

Eisenhower nodded. “As you know, one of George’s priorities was to construct airports that could take the new B-29’s, now we finally have a few hundred of them, and the new squadrons have been practicing tactical bombing.” Truman scowled; some of the early practice runs had been disasters. “He thinks that we can literally bomb the Russian lines out of existence.”

“Public opinion will more likely accept the quick end of Germany, with the war going on to Moscow, than they will the opposite,” Truman said. “Has he prepared plans for attacking the Germans?”

“He has,” Eisenhower said, somewhat to Truman’s surprise. Whatever George Patton’s merits as a general were, planning ahead wasn’t one of them. “It’s fairly simple; we launch diversionary attacks against the Soviet forces, and then strike down for Goteborg and Malmo, stopping for nothing. He’s fairly confident that the USAAF can hammer the Germans enough from the air to make brushing them aside on the ground easy.”

Truman shuddered. The Axis powers had made good use of the winter to dig in and fortify their positions. By now, some of them were dug so deep that even a JDAM couldn’t shift them, slaughtering infantry in hand-to-hand fighting.

Eisenhower coughed. “Personally, I think he’s being a bit too optimistic,” he said. “Still, if we did manage to cut their supply lines, we could stave Stockholm out without having to attack it.”

“The Swedish government-in-exile would love that,” Truman muttered. “It’s a shame that they can’t convince more of their countrymen to rise up against the enemy.”

“The Germans raze villages to the ground for that,” Eisenhower said. “They’re complete and total bastards… and the Russians are worse. Did you hear the report from the SAS team? The menfolk slaughtered; the women systematically raped and then slaughtered by the SS!”

“That’s what we’re fighting,” Truman said. The new televisions, both the British imports and the newly-made American designs, had run live footage. The results had created even more enthusiasm for the war.

“It makes organising a behind-the-lines movement hard,” Eisenhower said. “Longer-term, of course, we’ll have to move into Germany.”

“Something to discuss with the British,” Truman said. “We’ll have to be working with them at that point, and of course they have Japan to worry about.” He frowned. “General, I want you to start preparing the operation to evict the Germans from Sweden, then we can start supplying the Finns with weapons. They, at least, will fight.”

“Yes, Mr President,” Eisenhower said. “I’ll see you in a week.”

Truman nodded. “We’ll try and launch the operation in a month,” he said. “In the meantime, see what we can scrape up to send to Iran, to help out the British.”

“Yes, Mr President,” Eisenhower said. “I’ll get on with it at once.”

Ambassador King smiled to himself as he entered the Oval Office, nodding politely to Captain Robinson as he entered. The black marine had been appointed the new head of the Presidential Protective Service, a task that allowed him to protect Truman from all threats, and kept him out of the public eye. Dozens of investigative reporters hadn’t figured out who was behind Black Power, and the longer it stayed that way, the better.

My memoirs are going to be bestsellers one day, King thought to himself, as he shook hands with President Truman. The President looked tired – which alarmed him because Roosevelt had often been tired before his heart attack in the midst of the coup – but he smiled back at King.

“Good morning to you,” Truman said, letting go of his hand. “How are you?”

“It’s not a good morning,” King said wryly, waving a hand at the rain-streaked window. “Still, I suppose it could be worse.”

“Hailstones on a farm,” Truman said, waving King to a seat. “Tell me, what exactly caused this odd weather?”

King hesitated. “It’s called, we think, the Butterfly effect,” he said. “A great deal of a very different system was dumped into the air, and then two nuclear blasts probably didn’t help matters. Finally, its started to have an effect. The Ministry of Space is delighted; they’re selling time on the space station to researchers interested in studying the effects.”

“Yes, the British space program,” Truman said. “Tell me, what are the British doing up in space?”

King snorted. How should he know? “They’re building a space station,” he said. “In fact, given how much they’re hoisting into orbit, they’re building an entire space city.”

Truman frowned. “Why?” He asked. “Why expand so much effort in building such a base?”

“For the future,” King said, who’d given the matter some thought. “Hanover is… well, one of those who wants Britain to have a new empire. With the war on – and the need to avoid ruining our economy – he can build a serious presence in space before anyone starts wondering about better places to spend the cash.”

“One of our own people went up a day ago,” Truman said. “We got an email from him saying that his presence was resented.”

King shrugged. “It’s not a luxury liner,” he said. “Him going up meant that someone trained to help the British didn’t go up. Anyway, how is our own space program coming along?”

“We’re still working on it,” Truman said. “We also have to get nuclear weapons ready for use as well, but the earliest we can have one moving is late 1942, perhaps even the year after that. The British aren’t keen on helping us with that and that’s starting to annoy some congressmen.”

“It’s a long story,” King said. “A lot of people in Britain have moral qualms about using nuclear weapons, whatever the reason. They would have fought tooth and nail to prevent them being used even if Britain was about to fall to Nazi invasion. They’re… just not rational on the subject.”

He sighed. “Anyway, one of their backbenchers started a bill prohibiting the sharing of nuclear technology – except for desalination and hydrogen-cracking plants – and it passed. The net result was that they were unable to share any more than they had already.”

“And… sorry,” Truman said. “In the long run… we have to defeat Germany and Russia first.”

“And take care of the internal enemy,” King said. “Has there been any sign of him?”

Truman shook his head. The FBI had been guttered by the involvement of a handful of agents in the coup plot, and was nearly moribund. The new OSS – Office of Strategic Services – wasn’t geared up to provide internal security… and the state police didn’t have anything like their resources. Nine months after the attempted coup, J Edgar Hoover, former director of the FBI, remained at large.

“Nothing at all, which is worrying,” Truman said. “You know how much money is on his head; he might well have been lynched and stuffed in a bog. It’s only because people like him don’t die so easily that I’m still worried about it, and because of the missing files.”

King scowled. Hoover’s famous blackmail files had vanished along with him. That alone was distressing; they’d been supposed to contain dirt on thousands of prominent people… and not all of them might have fled to South Africa.

“He might still be somewhere out there, causing trouble,” King said. “Damn it, where the hell has he gone?”

“I’ve no idea,” Truman said. “Onto different matters, you will be pleased to hear that the 5^th American Armoured Division, which I understand you’ve taken some interest in, will be fully equipped with tanks next week – the new improved Franks tank.”

“The American-designed tank,” King said wryly. General Palter had sworn blind that it wasn’t that different to a Firefly. “Still… how are they getting along?”

“Apparently, they’re pretty good,” Truman said. He picked a map of the Middle East off the table and waved it under King’s nose. “Now… we have to decide if its worth deploying some to Iran.”

“The British will be planning to force the Soviets out too this year,” King said. “The question is; do we want post-war influence there?”

“Yes,” Truman said. “The oil companies got hold of the information about oil deposits there. Even if the United States does go onto Hydrogen, or that mix and match car, oil will still be important, and the British will certainly try to add Iran to their… Republic of Arabia.”

“Trust me, it’s better than the alternative,” King said. “Frankly, I think we don’t have much chance of securing influence, no matter what we do there. We’d be better off investing in the Republic of Arabia, which needs American investment.”

Truman scowled. “They’re far more advanced than us,” he said. “They’re moving into our economy. They’re taking over a large portion of the most important region in the Middle East. Tell me… can the future British be trusted?”

King nodded. “Hanover is a long-term thinker,” he said. “A genuine statesman, in his way. He knows that the only hope for long-term success is peace and democracy. He’s moving to do it now, because, quite frankly, democracies are crap at it in peacetime.”

He chuckled. “Not, of course, that we have to accept permanent subordination.”