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.
Historical Note
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.1
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.2
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.