Dominion (82 page)

There was a substantial minority in Britain who in 1939–40, for various reasons, opposed undertaking what would inevitably be total mobilization for a life-or-death struggle against Nazi
Germany. Many were pacifists; a few were Scottish Nationalists; the most important were anti-Semites and outright Nazis. Particularly helpful on these various individuals and groups were Thomas
Linehan’s
British Fascism 1918–39
(2000), and Richard Griffiths’
Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany 1933–39
(1993) together
with his
Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club and British Anti-Semitism 1939–40
(1998). This book tells the story of one of the leading pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic
figures, who ended up detained in prison along with Oswald Mosley and who, while there, was much exercised, like the Scottish National Party, by the question of Scottish women being sent to work in
England. (Ramsay was a Scottish Conservative MP.) The SNP’s opposition to Scots being conscripted to fight the war against Nazism can be verified in studies, such as Peter Lynch’s
The History of the Scottish National Party
(Cardiff, 2002).

On the history of British anti-Semitism, I found Anthony Julius’
Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England
(2010) to be very fair and informative in the sections
leading up to 1945, though the post-war sections are, in my view, neither. Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie’s biography
Beaverbrook: a Life
(1992) convinced me that if there was one
outstanding candidate to run a regime such as the one portrayed in this book it was Beaverbrook.

On the subject of mental hospitals in the 1950s – that decade must have been one of the worst in which to be mentally ill, with experimental and sometimes dangerous new treatments
introduced and before the radical reforms of the 1960s – I found Diana Gittins’
Madness in Its Place: Narratives of Severalls Hospital 1913–97
(1998) especially helpful,
along with Dilys Smith’s
Park Prewett Hospital: the History 1898–1984
(1986) and Derek McCarthy’s
Certified and Detained: A True Account
(2009). Interestingly all
three books describe an identical regime, though from widely different points of view. Bartley Green asylum is fictitious but, I think, representative.

The Great Smog of December 1952 was caused by unusual weather conditions over southern England, at a period when London was still belching out tons of coal smoke from homes and power stations
(the weather that week was unusually cold) as well as, increasingly, traffic fumes. It was the worst smog in the capital’s history. It is now estimated that 12,000 people died, mostly from
respiratory diseases. Atmospheric conditions and pollution levels would have been the same in my alternate universe. In the real world, the government covered up the number who died, but the smog
was instrumental in bringing about the Clean Air Act a few years later.

In looking at how a British Resistance Movement might have fought a collaborationist regime, the closest (though not exact) parallel has to be the French Resistance. I found John F.
Sweets’
Choices in Vichy France
(1994) and Matthew Cobb’s
The Resistance
(2009) especially helpful.

The United States in this novel is neutral and at peace with Japan, as I believe could have happened if Britain had fallen or surrendered in 1940. This would have strengthened the predominantly
Republican isolationist movement in America, which in turn could have led to Roosevelt losing the 1940 Presidential election. If, as in this book, a Democrat was at last again elected in 1952, the
most likely candidate would have been the man who lost to Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, Adlai Stevenson. Porter McKeever’s biography,
Adlai Stevenson
(1989), tells the story of one of
history’s narrow losers who, in this book, becomes a winner.

Inevitably,
Dominion
involved much reading about Nazi Germany. I think the best recent study of the regime is Richard Evans’ three-volume history:
The Coming of the Third
Reich
(2003),
The Third Reich in Power
(2005) and
The Third Reich at War
(2008). Toby Thacker’s
Joseph Goebbels; Life and Death
(2010) was very useful on the man who
in my book succeeds Hitler, and on the politics of the regime generally. Mark Mazower’s
Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe
is an excellent study, not least of the
various crazy and murderous Nazi plans for the future of Russia. James Taylor and Warren Shaw’s
Dictionary of the Third Reich
(1987) was indispensable. Warren Shaw’s son, my
friend William Shaw, was one of those who read the book in manuscript;
Dominion
therefore owes something to two generations of the same family.

Russia’s War
(1997) by Richard Overy, the range of whose scholarship on the Second World War is matched only by his readability, is I think the best short account of Germany’s
militarily unwinnable war against the Soviet Union. Rodric Braithwaite’s
Moscow 1941: a City and Its People at War
(2006) is an enthralling account of Germany’s first defeat at
the Battle of Moscow. In my alternate universe German forces, are able – with Britain gone from the field – to begin their offensive against Russia earlier and with more troops, and
take Moscow, but then become, as I think they inevitably would, bogged down in Russia’s vastness. Lizzie Collingham’s
The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food
(2011) is an enthralling and important account of the role of food supplies in the winning and losing of the Second World War, again not least in Russia.

On the development of nuclear weapons and rocketry, Michael Neufeld’s
Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War
(2007) and James P. Delgado’s
Nuclear Dawn: the Atomic
Bomb from the Manhattan Project to the Cold War
(2009) were very helpful for a non-scientist. C.P. Snow’s
The New Men
(1954) is a fascinating novel by a wartime Civil Service
insider about Britain’s efforts to manufacture a nuclear bomb.

John Cornwell’s
Hitler’s Pope
(1999) is the best of all too many accounts of how the Vatican of Pope Pius XII collaborated with the Nazi regime and its puppets and did next to
nothing to stop the Holocaust in Catholic countries, despite the efforts of some courageous local Catholics. I found the story of the extent of the Catholic Church hierarchy’s
collaborationist attitude to Nazi and Fascist mass murder shocking enough in the context of the Spanish Civil War: in that of the Second World War it seems an almost indelible stain.

Which brings me, finally, to the tragic story of Slovakia and the Holocaust. The events that Natalia relates to David all happened in Slovakia in the real world, as in the alternate one. A
collaborationist, nationalist anti-Semitic regime led by a Catholic priest, Father Tiso, and his second in command, the murderous Fascist Vojtech Tuka, used its own party paramilitaries, the Hlinka
Guard, to load Slovak Jews onto the trains which were to carry them to the death camps in the first major deportations of the Holocaust, and also sent troops to fight in Russia. Some Slovak
Catholics approved the deportations, others protested so vigorously that the deportations were – though too late for most – suspended. There is a good literature on the subject. Karen
Henderson’s
Slovakia: the Escape from Invisibility
(2002) is a useful introduction to the country’s modern history. Mark W. Axworthy’s
Axis Slovakia: Hitler’s
Slavic Wedge 1938–45
(2002) tells the story of the Tiso regime. Kathryn Winter’s
Katarina
(1998), Gerta Vrbová’s
Trust and Deceit: a Tale of Survival in
Slovakia and Hungary 1939–1945
(2006) and her husband Rudolf Vrba’s
I Escaped from Auschwitz
(2006) tell the story from the point of view of Slovak Jews. Vrba’s story
is one of the most extraordinary memoirs of the Second World War. Finally the papers in
Racial Violence Past and Present
(Slovak National Museum and Museum of Jewish Culture, Bratislava
2003) are a warning from history to Europe today.

Finally, and more happily, I cannot end without mentioning Robert Harris’
Fatherland
(1992) – for me the best alternate history novel ever written.

I was born in 1952, the year in which
Dominion
is set. My parents met through the wartime naval posting of my father, an English Midlander, to Scotland, my
mother’s home. So I am, like many British people of my generation, a child of wartime population movements.

Winston Churchill was Prime Minister when I was born, and throughout my childhood he was a revered figure. By the time I came to political awareness at the start of the 1970s, and abandoned, to
their amusement and bemusement, my parents’ Conservatism for the left-wing sympathies I have retained ever since, I found a different view of Churchill in the new circles I moved in. He was,
many said, a warmonger, a fanatical imperialist who opposed any progress towards Indian independence, a ferocious anti-Socialist, hammer of the workers in the General Strike of 1926 and sender of
troops to shoot down miners at Tonypandy in 1910. All of these accusations are true except, oddly, the last, despite its persistence.
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There were, I think, several Churchills – not surprising for a man whose political career spanned sixty-four years and who spent his life promoting highly original ideas, some crazy, some
brilliant. First there was the radical Liberal, on the left of his party, of the years before 1914. Then during and after the Great War appeared the second Churchill, the ferocious anti-Socialist
and anti-Communist Conservative, unshakeable opponent of Indian political advancement, on that subject a reactionary even by the standards of his own party at the time. But from 1935 on there
emerged a third Churchill, the anti-Nazi who saw that Hitler meant war and that appeasement would end in disaster.

He genuinely loathed the fanatic nationalism and anti-Semitism of the Nazis and their destruction of democracy. This Churchill appeared on anti-appeasement platforms with Labour and trade union
leaders like Ernest Bevin, and in 1940 allied with Labour against large parts of his own party in his determination to rally the nation to fight the war to the last, and his speeches, personality
and human skills inspired both politicians and people to do just that. In old age, during his second premiership of 1951–55, a fourth Churchill appeared, his politics turned centrist and
consensual, and who in 1949 admitted to Jawaharlal Nehru that he had done him great wrong.
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It is of course undeniable that throughout his days Churchill was an old-fashioned British imperialist, and that ideas of British exceptionalism were at the forefront of his
wartime speeches. So it may seem odd that in this book, whose overarching theme is the dangers and evils of politics based on nationalism and race, Churchill appears as a heroic figure. But it
should be remembered that Churchill was never a narrow nationalist, and in 1940–5 he always saw Britain in the context of the wider European and world struggle. This is shown in his June 1940
speech which I have chosen as the aphorism for this book; he saw with vivid clarity the darkness that Nazism and the Nazis had brought to Europe and which would continue to spread if they were not
stopped.

I have always been fascinated by the notion of alternate history – how the world might have changed had one seminal event turned out differently. And sometimes, as in May
1940, the history of the world does indeed seem to turn on a sixpence. Of course the story told here, of the events that followed Churchill failing to become Prime Minister, is only
an
alternate history, not
the
alternate history, for there can be no such thing. Every imagined change to history, every road not taken, opens up probabilities and likelihoods to the historian,
but never certainties. I think, however, that Churchill was right in believing that if Britain had accepted German peace overtures in 1940 it would inevitably have become dominated by Nazi Germany.
The world I have created is only one of the scenarios that might have followed, though I believe a likely one.

And so, to turn to that crucial moment in the history of the real world, when Churchill became Prime Minister instead of Lord Halifax. Between 1935, when Fascist aggression in
Europe began with Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, and March 1939, when Hitler finally destroyed Czechoslovakia, the policy of appeasement was supported by a majority within the ruling
British National Government, a coalition with a large majority which had been in power since 1931. It was overwhelmingly Conservative but included a small number of important Labour and Liberal
defectors.

Appeasement was not then a dirty word – it meant, broadly, to seek peace by negotiating peaceful solutions to international problems. People were appeasers from a number of often very
different motives. One should never underestimate the importance of the memory of the horrors of the Great War, and the perfectly reasonable dread that with advancing technology, especially in the
air, a second European war would be even more cataclysmic and involve the bombing of civilians with high explosives and, it was feared, poison gas. Stanley Baldwin was right when he said, in 1932,
that ‘the bomber will always get through.’

Then there were those who thought the Treaty of Versailles, severing German territories from the Reich in a treaty that otherwise idolized the principle of national self-determination, unfair.
And there were many, particularly Conservatives, who while they disliked the Nazi regime, and thought its leaders common and thuggish, felt it was not up to them to interfere in German domestic
affairs and saw the Nazis as a bulwark against the threat of communism. Lord Halifax, just before visiting Hitler as Foreign Secretary in 1937, wrote that ‘Nationalism and Racialism is a
powerful force but I can’t feel that it’s either unnatural or immoral!’, and added this comment shortly after: ‘I cannot myself doubt that these fellows are genuine haters
of communism.’
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