The Battle for England - Softcover

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I guess it was it my father who first engendered my interest in military history. Walking the lanes and byways of the little country town where we lived, years after the war ended, he could still point out the tank traps and pillboxes still skulking there, festooned in weeds, waiting for the invader that never came. Even in a rural corner of Northern Ireland, hundreds of miles from the likely invasion beaches in England, they had prepared. After a long career in the technology industry, retirement brought the opportunity to do more; to visit many of the sites, sail the waters, even fly in old biplanes over one of the airbases, and to write. And somewhere along the way, a crazy idea told hold. As I continued my research, I became more and more intrigued. Finally, tucked away, and unremarked, in Churchill’s History of the Second World War, I discovered a sentence that showed that the idea was perhaps not so crazy after all. A single sentence from the pen of Winston Churchill took the story from the purely speculative to the “maybe, just maybe” category. As a genre, Alternative History can run the gamut from wild fantasy about goblins or death-ray machines to tight stories based on small quantum shifts in timing or outcomes; the assassin’s bullet that missed; the flap of the butterfly’s wings. My stories belongs in the latter category; they revolve around decisions that might easily have been taken by a man well-capable of such decisions. With that small quantum step made, many of the historical loose ends of the period suddenly begin to look very different. Why did Hitler stop his armies at the coast of France when Britain lay naked? How close did the British government come to seeking a deal with him? What was the relationship between the Duke of Windsor and the Nazis? Why did Hitler’s deputy fly to Scotlanda few months after the Battle of Britain ended? Why did Churchill’s confidante, Brendan Bracken, have all his papers burnt after his death? How much did Churchill know about Hitler’s strategic plans from Ultra? How much information was supplied to the British by the head of German Military Intelligence? Exactly when did Churchill find out about Hitler’s plan to invade Russia? Did he warn Stalin? Most intriguing of all, what dark secrets still exist about Britain in World War 2 that they remain embargoed by the British government?