Authors: Anthony G Williams
Spring 1935
Days became weeks which rolled into months.
Winter came and went.
The bare trees allowed a wider view of the countryside, but still no other buildings could be seen.
Don was occasionally taken out by his minders, as he thought of them, to visit a nearby pub or cinema, but was never let out alone.
He sometimes joked about the degree of custodial care, but Dunning was too serious about it to be amused.
‘You must realise that your safety is of vital importance – you’re probably the most valuable person in the country.’
Furthermore, Don added silently, no-one else must know of my existence.
Newspapers were his other contact with the world outside.
He found the old-fashioned sentiments and phrasing, the innocent adverts rather touching, but was amused to note unexpected portents of things to come.
He had not been aware that Scotland Yard had been experimenting with an autogyro for observing ‘traffic-congested areas’ and possibly tracking ‘car bandits’.
A report of a German aeroplane powered by a 2,500 horsepower ‘steam turbine’ and capable of travelling at 230–260 mph for sixty or seventy hours appeared more optimistic, although Don was again surprised to read a report that an American steam-powered craft had flown three times already.
He wondered if newspaper reporters in the 1930s were more or less gullible than those in the 2000s, or more willing to make things up.
It also occurred to him that Dunning need not worry about his spilling the beans to any reporters.
They would probably write up his story, but with zero impact on the public.
In the spring and early summer of 1935, Don began to notice a sharpening of interest and concern on the part of his team of interviewers.
The reasons were evident enough in the newspapers.
He had already been proved right in his prediction about the
On March 15th Hitler announced military conscription and an increase in the size of the German Army to thirty-six divisions; ‘The Times’ military correspondent stated that, with nearly 400 machine-guns, the German army was well-equipped defensively ‘but it is hardly to be expected that an army... long restricted in developing heavy artillery and tanks, should have anything like an equivalent power of taking the offensive.’
Don groaned.
The complacency was almost comical.
Clearly, however, someone in the government was becoming worried.
On the twenty-eighth of the month, Anthony Eden travelled to Moscow to discuss the European situation with M. Litvinoff (Soviet Commissar for foreign affairs) and spoke to Stalin.
He established that there was ‘no conflict of interest’ between the governments.
More accurate than they realise, Don
thought
; at least in the short term.
On April 7th, elections were held in Danzig – a predominantly German enclave within Poland and next to
The Nazis increased their vote by eight percent but despite intense propaganda, including visits by Hess and Goebbels, they failed to gain the two-thirds majority necessary to change the constitution in favour of Germany.
The Foreign Office stepped up its activities; between 11th and 14th April Britain, Italy and France met at Stresa for a conference on the European situation, which led to an expression of ‘complete agreement’.
‘All this diplomatic posturing will get them nowhere,’ grumbled Don, reading the morning papers in bed.
‘What do you expect?’ asked Mary.
‘They are politicians and diplomats.
Even if they know that their efforts are likely to prove fruitless – and I doubt they’ve been told – they’ll still try.
It’s what they’re there for.’
Don was never quite sure on whose initiative his relationship with Mary had begun.
In darker moments he suspected that she had been chosen for her good looks and her willingness to lie back and think of England.
At other times he was merely thankful that she was there.
Usually serious, quiet and attentive, with a core of sadness which was never far from the surface, her occasional smiles sparked a glow of warmth in him and their partnership gave a structure and dimension to his life that had been missing for a long time. In fact, as time went by it was his past life which took on the aspect of a dream, something less real than his fantastic present. He now felt at home in the 1930s, and he tried not to think too much about how he had arrived there. Whenever his thoughts drifted in that direction, he felt he was teetering on the edge of an abyss.
Mary’s voice wrenched him back to the present.
‘I wonder if Churchill’s been told about you,’ she mused, studying another paper.
‘He’s warning that if German air strength continues growing at its present rate it will overtake Britain’s within three or four years.’
‘True enough,’ said Don, ‘but I suspect that he’s not been included in the “inner circle” yet; he had a reputation for sounding off about the Nazi threat for years before the war.
Our lords and masters are anxious to avoid prejudicing the natural development of events – except in a few specific areas – so that my predictions remain valid for as long as possible.
I expect they’ll wait until he becomes Prime Minister before letting him in on the secret.’
‘Now there’s a paradox for you; Churchill is supposed to come to power because of the military defeats suffered by Chamberlain’s government.
If your advice is followed, the defeats shouldn’t happen, so how will Churchill become PM?’
‘Somehow,’ said Don grimly, ‘I have a feeling that it will be arranged.’
‘And there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask: what about the wider paradox? Suppose any one of your grandparents were to be killed as a result of the changes you’re causing? Or that your parents never meet? What will happen to you?’
‘Good question. I’ve given it some thought myself. Of course, I could just disappear in a puff of smoke, but that wouldn’t be the end of the problem; if I’d never existed, I couldn’t have returned here in the first place, so none of the last few months could have happened, so I couldn’t have changed events, so I would have lived to return here – and so on. The thinking becomes rather circular.’
‘So where does that leave you?’
‘There are just two possibilities:
either all of my forebears survive and
my parents meet up as before regardless of all the changes, or the parallel worlds theory is correct.’
‘The what?’
‘Parallel worlds.
The idea is that there is an infinite number of worlds existing in parallel in some undetectable dimension, each different in some small way from the next. They are connected by an equally infinite number of branching points; occasions when something different happened and changed history. So my return to the past would have kicked me onto an entirely different branch; what happens here can’t affect the world I came from, that just continues as before on a parallel track.’
Mary snuggled up to him. ‘Well, just make sure that you stay on this track from now on!’
Summer 1935
Time seemed to pass with ever-increasing speed.
Intensive consultations with his military interviewers were interspersed by anxious scanning of the news as the European tragedy began to unfold.
The celebrations in early May to mark the Silver Jubilee of the King and Queen included reviews of Britain’s military and naval forces.
Shortly afterwards Lord Londonderry, Secretary of State for War, announced a trebling of the strength of the Royal Air Force based at home to 1,500 machines by March 31 1937; the existing thirty-four airfields were to be increased to sixty-five and in addition, seventy-one new squadrons were to be formed.
Charles Dunning was naturally reticent but could occasionally be prompted into revealing progress.
‘The Defence Requirements Committee has been considering how to act on your advice,’ he said, ‘although we did of course have to disguise it
as the strongly-held views of the best military minds.
They have agreed that the Army should be restructured to concentrate on armoured warfare including capacity for amphibious landings and the development of close co-operation with the RAF.
An experimental paratroop brigade is to be formed and secret trials of the rectangular wing-parachute you sketched are due soon.
The Fleet Air Arm is to be handed over to the Navy within the next few months; Coastal Command will remain with the RAF but under
Naval
operational control – that took a hell of a lot of haggling and a number of premature retirements to achieve.
The discussions over the Naval Treaty are working out as you suggested and the Royal Marines are being strengthened, with their amphibious role being more clearly defined.
Radar is coming along fine; Tizard sends his best wishes, by the way.’
‘What about the basic education and training side?
We will need far more electrical engineers and factory capacity in order to keep up with the demands for radio and radar systems.’
Dunning grinned sardonically.
‘Much more difficult – did you ever see the educational establishment move quickly?
We’ve made a start, though, in offering generous bursaries to able students in these areas, and will be identifying electronics shadow factories as well as those for weapons production.’
The military contacts were more forthcoming.
Geoffrey Taylor, despite his cautious and deliberate manner, had obviously warmed to his task.
The Army’s biggest deficiency – the development of competitive, reliable tanks – was being tackled with vigour.
Tank design was assigned to a planning body including Vickers, the only private firm with substantial tank-building experience, car firms to provide mass-production expertise, military officers and the Ministry.
An integrated family of armoured fighting vehicles was being developed with reliability, ease of use and maintenance and the ability to be upgraded as top priorities.
New artillery, mortars, anti-tank weapons and small arms were being designed.
News on the aircraft front was also encouraging.
Morgan reported the selection of the Rolls-Royce PV12 Merlin and the sleeve-valve Bristol Hercules (still some months away from running) as the RAF’s future front-line piston engines.
Napier had been assigned to develop Whittle’s centrifugal fan gas turbine, and advanced project teams at Rolls-Royce and Bristol were working with the Royal Aircraft Establishment to develop Griffith’s axial flow turbines for jet and turboprop engines respectively.
Fighter guns were a priority; as well as developing the 0.303 inch, a slightly larger version of the Browning (the ‘Vickers-Browning’) was being designed to take the Vickers 0.5 inch cartridge, somewhat smaller than the American equivalent. Hispano-Suiza in France were being pursued for a licence for their new 20 mm HS-404 cannon which was still in the process of being designed, and the development of a belt-feed mechanism for it was being given a high priority to ensure that both could enter service by the end of the 1930s.
Meanwhile, development of the Spitfire and Hurricane had been given top priority with arrangements already underway for their mass production.
Don was acutely conscious of the fact that as soon as war was imminent, the War Ministry would be inclined to freeze current designs in the interests of achieving mass production.
Accordingly, he discussed with Morgan the types of aircraft which would have a long service life to ensure that they would be in production by 1938.
Among other proposals, de Havilland was to be strongly encouraged to design a wooden, twin-engined high-speed unarmed bomber as soon as possible.
Helmsford was equally encouraging about the Navy’s plans.
The fifteen-inch
gun battleship design was proceeding well, as were the new aircraft carriers with their angled decks to enable planes to land without crashing into the ones waiting to take off (‘steam catapults were considered, but would have taken too long to develop’).
Don had advised against the armoured decks used by most RN war-built carriers because of the loss of hangar space and aircraft capacity.
Just as important were the aircraft for them; Bristol had been given the contract to develop Hercules-powered fighters and multi-role torpedo/dive bomber/reconnaissance planes, with as much commonality as possible.
Otherwise, concentration in the naval field was on enhanced anti-aircraft and anti-submarine capabilities, with advanced fire-control systems, the commissioning of Bofors to speed up their development of 57 mm as well as 40 mm automatic guns and the development of ahead-throwing anti-submarine mortars (Don’s mention of the ‘Squid’ promptly led to the name being adopted) with their associated pencil-beam Asdic sets. Don had been surprised to discover that ahead-throwing weapons had already been built and tested, but development was just about to be abandoned when his arrival led to a re-think.