500 Days

By Roger Hopkinson

How different could the world have been, then and now, if lead-ups and events surrounding the Second World War had occurred vastly differently? What if different alliances had been formed through dramatic circumstances and, subsequently, the tyrants had been unable to wield their evil powers?

In the latter half of the 1930s, Russia and Germany are going through the motions of getting on well with each other until a series of “events” occur. A spectacular explosion kills many fascists including Hitler and the Russians decide to seize the moment and invade. Britain and France declare war on Russia and become allied to a Germany under new leadership. There are more shocks when Stalin disappears just when the Russians seem on the brink of success.

Germany, however, has a great deal of support and there are great sea powers, especially Britain, who begin to demonstrate their vast reach. One of the smallest navies in existence also has a big say in subduing a mighty power.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jul 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781398476059

Roger Hopkinson

Although he passed up on an RMA Sandhurst education, he has always been a keen student of military history. He enjoyed his National Service during the 1950s, serving in Berlin, Spandau and latterly Hong Kong. He later completed studies at the London Royal Academy of Music and Drama. As a human resources manager in the UK for a Canadian company, he was transferred to Melbourne from whence he covered most corners of the world as a performance appraisal/interpersonal skills trainer. He is a highly motivated member of a local community in Sorrento, Victoria. He has lived the greater part of his life “Down Under” with wife, Jane, and three sons.

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About the Author

Although he passed up on an RMA Sandhurst education, he has always been a keen student of military history. He enjoyed his National Service during the 1950s, serving in Berlin, Spandau and latterly Hong Kong. He later completed studies at the London Royal Academy of Music and Drama. As a human resources manager in the UK for a Canadian company, he was transferred to Melbourne from whence he covered most corners of the world as a performance appraisal/interpersonal skills trainer. He is a highly motivated member of a local community in Sorrento, Victoria. He has lived the greater part of his life Down Under with wife, Jane, and three sons.

Dedication

Dedicated to Jason, Matt, and Ben

Copyright Information ©

Roger Hopkinson 2023

The right of Roger Hopkinson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398476042 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398476059 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

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E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

Apart from the above and latterly, I suspect, your good selves for your support in pulling things together.

There is no doubt that the Sorrento Writer’s Group achieves finished products with its objective based meetings critiques.

To my wife, Jane, also for tolerating my time at the computer keyboard in indulging my fantasies!

Behind This Story

There are just a few influences behind my writing this story. Although I was only a tot, the last year of the Second World War was to make a lasting impression on me. There were subsequent events that became part of the overall experience and remained with me through my life. Dad had been conscripted as an older recruit and with Mum very busy as a teacher and volunteer fire warden, my older sister, brother and myself were left very much to our own devices. We lived in a small coastal town in North West England and we roamed around doing our own things. During this time, I was to meet and talk with two different groups of men. It’s probably more accurate to say that they talked to me.

The first group used to gather in front of the Tudor cinema on a regular basis. Some wore uniform and the rest were dressed in hospital blues. Many had heavily bandaged heads, faces and arms but it was very apparent that all were terribly scarred and disfigured. They were all aircrew, mostly from the bomber squadrons. All of them, patients of the pioneering Kiwi plastic surgeon Archie McIndoe, were recuperating at the local RAF base and hospital. They called themselves the Guinea Pig Club. I would hang around and talk with them until they went in to watch the matinee and I have never forgotten those images.

I often used to wander down to the seafront promenade with its estuary sands and it was there I was to come into contact with a totally different collection of adults. They too had a uniform, a sort of blue grey and many wore Feldgrau caps. The outfit had a large circular yellow patch on the back of its top and the pant legs had yellow patches on the front. There were a small number whose patches were red rather than yellow. These were German prisoners of war engaged in clearing mines and removing barbed wire. They had occasional breaks to drink and eat and sit around in groups. I wandered up to them initially out of curiosity and the army guards didn’t seem to mind. The prisoners smiled and spoke to me and I can’t recall not being able to understand them. They were so friendly that I went to see them on a regular basis.

Two very different groups of men, seemingly prepared to leave grudges behind them and move on.

In 1957, army service took me to the divided city of Berlin. The rail journey was through the Berlin Corridor, a distance of 160 kilometres, literally overnight. Our particular experience lasted two days with the Russians going out of their way to sabotage and delay. One quickly learned that everything they did was designed to antagonise, disrupt and cause tension. The experience was intensified during the handover of guard duties at the Spandau military prison for war criminals.

Off duty we would see the beautifully restored avenue Unter den Linden contrasted by its grim extension Stalinallee on the other side of the Brandenburg Gate. West Berlin had been almost totally restored when many streets in the East still lay in ruins as if the war had ended yesterday.

Such a stark contrast over the years between those for whom the fighting was over and needing to get on with life and those whose behaviour suggested they felt conflict should go on forever.

Winston Churchill has been recorded as having wanted to take on the Soviets in 1945/46—I wondered, as many have, what if. This is the motivation for my story.

Chapter I

Dark Alliances

They have similar agendas, designed to destabilise the order established following the First World War. In the eyes of the rest of the world, Soviet Russia and Germany are pariahs. In the early autumn of 1935, this is really the only thing the two countries have in common. Soviet exports into Germany are already small and in decline but the Nazis make up a massive 46% of their imports. Also slowing economic relations was the Soviet foreign trade process of combining all transactions into a single government buyer. They’d experienced unknown millions dead or incarcerated following a brutal civil war but now Stalin is firmly in control. This tenuous economic link seems convenient but it is inconvenient if there is scarcely room for mutual trust. Stalin needs breathing space to shift from a strategy of anti-fascist collective security to one of national security. The fascist Hitler simply seeks space and resources. They both have a large and growing military, a process they’d been collaborating in during the late 20s and early 30s.

The Germans seem more organised and efficient but Soviets have vast numbers in their armed forces. How capable are they however; it is rumoured that the Soviet regime is aching to find out. In pursuit of supremacy, they also have an appetite for maskirovka, a process directed at unsettling, deceiving and destabilising opposing powers; a dangerous game. So begins a programme of incidents where military units operate undercover causing death and destruction at significant points on or near to sensitive border areas.

There is conscription in Germany and also in German ethnic communities across their borders, invariably driven by instances of violence or a perceived threat. Die Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (VoMi), the Coordination Centre for ethnic Germans has been set up to protect the interests of peoples of German background living outside the borders of Nazi Germany.

It is Monday, 18 November 1935, and a VoMi delegation has concluded a stay in the small town of Cheb just over the Germany and Czechoslovakia border. The Nazis had long made known their programme of their idealistic demands to Europe and the world at large but the Czech authorities are fully aware of events and see no cause for alarm. The three days’ visit is over and Helmut Weiss, who leads the party of thirty, leans from his compartment, and waves, as their train departs, towards Dresden, into the gathering dusk. The weather has been relatively mild and he stays looking out of the window, across damp fields at the stark forest edge of bare winter trees, for several minutes as the engine picks up speed and leaves the suburbs of the town behind. ‘That was a very worthwhile exercise,’ he speaks as he closes the window and turns to return to his seat.

In an instance, he is hurled from his feet as the carriage twists and rises from its tracks. The screech of tortured metal and cracking of splintering timber as the train derails is suddenly punctuated by the rattle of gunfire from all around. Although the engine has scarcely reached full speed the scale of destruction is total, the crash momentum seems endless as the sounds roll on and on. Some carriages rise in crazy gyrations and remain pointing accusingly at the sky. There is fire and smoke but no sign of any perpetrator apart from muzzle flashes in the trees. For a few seconds, it seems, the scene falls almost silent but then come the cries and moans of the casualties. Shadowy figures come out from the trees and merge with the wreckage. There are several volleys of pistol shots and all human sounds are silenced. The assassins emerge from the train wreck and melt back into the trees once more. It would seem that no one is left to tell the tale. There are no immediate witnesses but a local farmer has heard the sounds of violence from some distance away and nears the scene, guided by plumes of smoke spiralling into the evening sky. Shaken by what he has seen, he climbs back onto his Lanz Bulldog tractor and drives as fast as he can towards the township, where the alarm will be raised. All the limited services available race back to the site but with inadequate lighting they struggle to locate any survivors, let alone begin to understand the reasons or the scale of this disaster. Only in the dawn’s light does it become evident that this was not track or mechanical failure. They fail to find any living person in the midst of the wreckage and the 200 metres of torn up rails but now they see the holes and scarring of bullets in shredded carriages and bodies. The outrage mounts but who will be blamed?

Forensically the picture develops and as the search widens, they find where the ambushers set up and eventually a few cartridge cases almost randomly placed. The evidence is minimal and the ammunition, identified as a mixture of Soviet, German and Czech issue, looks to have been planted and proves nothing. German citizens have been murdered and threats of reprisals have been hovering around for months when just as the days start to grow warmer, in early March 1936 another incident occurs.

The Czech hamlet of Celezna Ruda-Alzbetin lying on the Czech frontier has quietly existed for several centuries. It is here that the national border with runs through the centre of the railway station shared with Bayerisch Eisenstein on the German side. Czechs and Germans tended to get on with their own lives but with the rise of German nationalism the two populations have become more insular. The Czech government, concerned with events over the border had begun building a series of defensive systems, heavier in some areas than others. The constructions here were light but state defence guards made occasional patrols.

On the German side, there was a small Gemeindepolizei (Rural Police) post that had been out of commission for a few years.

It had been the first Friday in March 1936, when a police truck had arrived in the village square. Four police officers clambered out and strolled over to the Jäger Inn. They ordered lunch and just over an hour later drove out in the direction of the border. The men wore greatcoats and it was remarked upon that the uniform looked almost military ‘but they were police, weren’t they?’ Word got around that the post was back in operation and that border patrolling had resumed. Border activity had intensified more recently and there were some locals who reckoned that they had heard shots fired. In such a small village, everyone knew everything but now no one talked much about that place anymore and no one ever went near it. There were also stories of small groups of refugees passing through the area as they escaped from Germany. This had been happening since the passing of the Nuremberg Laws and subsequent regulations with crippling economic implications for Jewish people, in the September previous.

The town of Ceske Budejovice lies on the Czechoslovakian side of the border. Its southern suburbs are home to a tough mining community from the midst of which has emerged a VoMi party branch with a large group of members who regularly undertake military style training. They have no weapons obviously but their leadership has a recent inclusion, a seemingly disenfranchised union member, miner Daniel Kovar who is driven by an intense dislike for communists, especially of the new Czech variety.

Whilst initially he had been angrily proclaiming ‘those bastards need sorting out,’ he has suddenly become much more rational, urging his members to focus on their drills and exercises. He definitely likes being in charge and indeed his mates have nicknamed him Hauptmann. Some of his work colleagues, however, are more than a little surprised when he starts attending union meetings again.

A week or so prior, his youngest son had expressed approval for the Nazi way of doing things during an open class discussion at school. Andrej was just fifteen years old but that did not prevent the next course of events. It was quite natural that some or all of his classmates had talked about the discussion in the presence of families. Indeed the subject of the class discussions had struck a nerve with a parent, on the other side of the political divide, in the form of Gustav Tarnow, an ardent supporter of the Communist cause.

In the days that followed as Andrej walked homewards, he caught up with one of his classmates Lukas Tarnow. He’d previously rarely spoken with Lukas and was slightly surprised when the latter confided that he too felt very inspired by the Nazi parades he had seen on newsreels. It was something about Lukas’ manner that encouraged Andrej to open up to him. He told him he had been reading some material about Nazi aims and objectives, especially where young people were concerned. He said he thought that their regalia looked so good that he had started collecting it himself. He owned pendants, badges and even two ceremonial daggers. He’d deprived himself of all the usual treats and every zloty he saved had gone towards his collection. The young Kovar indicated this was very secret because he’d done all of this without the knowledge of any of his family and Lukas was the first person he had shared this with.

‘I’m quite excited about it, would you like to take a look?’

‘You bet I would, do you keep it at home?’

‘No, too risky, my dad would go berserk if he found it. I’ve got it stashed away, in the forest behind my grand-folks’ house. I go to see them a lot! I can’t do it today but we could give it a try in a couple of days, say Friday, early evening?’

‘Can’t wait to see your stuff but if it’s a secret, why tell me?’

‘Well, you asked lots of questions in class and—’Andrej