Altered States -Volume III. Hinge of Fate

Chapter 18

Hitler’s train pulled into the little railway station at Hendaye, the rain still pattering on the roof as it came to a halt. No one imagined that a rainy day in Spain was threatening to make an end of all these plans and devices; all these directives and negotiations. No one knew how it had been foiled. In fact, in the history Fedorov knew, the rain prevailed, just as it might have here if not for the diligence of one simple man the previous day.

He was not one of the negotiators. There were no medals on his chest or titles attached to his name. He was not one of the planners, scheming and brooding over maps. No. Juan Alfonso was just a simple janitor, last man on the shift the night before the meeting in Madrid. He was supposed to make all the final checks, working through the train car by car to see that all was in order, for this was no ordinary train.

The following morning the Caudillo himself, Francisco Franco, would be riding in this train, along with Foreign Affairs Minister Ramon Serrano Suner. They would travel to Hendaye on the Franco-Spanish border for a secret meeting with the Fuhrer of Germany, Adolf Hitler himself, and his own Foreign Affairs Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. There the two sides were set to negotiate the possible entry of Spain into the war on the side of the Axis powers, a stroke that would have grave implications for the entire course of the war.

It was raining that night in Madrid, and the forecast called for more rain the following day. Juan Alfonso was nearly done with his work that night. He checked the engine and coal cars to see that all was in readiness, then inspected the wheels and undercarriage of each car. Tired and cold, he ventured inside to dry off and eat a bit of cheese that he had in his tool kit.

Alfonso looked around as he sat in the main coach, listening to the sound of the rain on the roof and thinking that tomorrow would see all these important men here in that very car, perhaps sitting right there where he sat at that very moment. Then it happened, the tiny spill of water from above, just a few drops at first, falling on his pant leg, but then more until a steady drip had developed, slowly building a pool of water on the floor of the car.

He looked up, seeing the row of screws in the ceiling and wondering if something might be loose there. It was very late, and he was very tired, but the longer he sat there, the more he realized that he could not go home just yet-not until he stopped that leak. Who knows, perhaps Franco would be seated in that chair, and if it rained again tomorrow…

He opened his tool box, hearing the dry squeak that was, in fact, the hinge of fate at that moment. Juan Alfonso reached for his screwdriver, and slowly stood up, getting a nice fat drop of rainwater on his cheek for his trouble. We’ll see about that, he thought, testing each screw until he found two loose candidates. Yes, that was the problem. The cowling was loose there, and the water was slowly working its way through.

He paused a moment, thinking, then fished about in his tool box until he found a pocket knife and the old chamois cloth he used here and there in his work. He could spare just a little here, he thought as he carefully cut a strip away. Then he loosened the screws enough to allow him to work the chamois into the crevice there, poking and prodding with his pocket knife until the cloth was tucked away, completely unseen, before he retightened all the screws again. There… That was all it needed. The leak was stopped.

He sighed, put away his tools and slowly closed the box before starting away, off shift at long last and heading home. The sound of his footfalls on the coach floor would echo through time, though he could not know that then. For Juan Alfonso was going to set events in motion that few could see at that moment. Juan Alfonso, a leaky roof, a screwdriver, pocket knife and a bit of chamois-no, it was not supposed to happen that way at all.

Juan was supposed to simply leave work and go home that night, and not sit there listening to the sound of the rain on the roof of that train car. He was never supposed to see or feel the tiny fall of water drops he had just attended to. The leak in the roof was supposed to have gone unnoticed, in spite of his very careful inspection of everything else that night.

The following day the ministers would board the train. It would roll north for that decisive meeting with the Germans on the border, and it would be raining all that day. The Spanish minister would take the seat where Juan had enjoyed that brief moment of rest with his nibble of cheese. The nasty leak there would become a nuisance that would drive the minister to distraction, to the point where he was completely irate and out of sorts when he finally reached the meeting site several hours later.

His anger apparently carried over to the negotiations, and he was so adamant and testy that his demeanor, along with Franco’s persistent equivocation, convinced both Hitler and Ribbentrop that the Spanish could not be dealt with. No deal was signed in the history Fedorov knew, and Spain ended up joining the Allies instead. The leaky roof in that train car had worked its will on fate.

But not this time.

Not after Juan Alfonso sat in that seat and saw those rain drops falling to soil his pant leg. Everything was going to be different now, because that bit of chamois and a couple well tightened screws were enough to stop the leak, which was enough to remove that annoying and persistent perturbation for Foreign Affairs Minister Ramon Serrano Suner. Instead he was in a fine mood when he arrived at Hendaye on the border, so agreeable that he even served to soothe Franco’s doubts and smooth over his objections, and the outcome of the meeting was quite different.

The meeting was held, and Hitler and Ribbentrop worked diligently to allay all Franco’s fears. They pledged that Germany would protect and defend Spanish interests against any reprisal, provide grain, sign lucrative trade agreements, even secure the telecom network owned by AT amp; T. So in spite of his many doubts, Franco and Spain would cast their fate to the wind and shake hands with Adolf Hitler that day, and everything would change. It was not supposed to happen that way, but a simple man named Juan Alfonso made it so.

The German Plan

“Operation Felix,” was now to become Germany’s next primary operation of war. Hitler emphasized all his key objectives in Fuehrer Directive #18:

“The most urgent duty of the French is to secure their African possessions (West and Equatorial Africa), offensively and defensively, against England and the de Gaulle movement. From this the full participation of France in the war against England may develop. Political measures to bring about the entry into the war of Spain in the near future have already been initiated. The aim of German intervention in the Iberian peninsula (cover-name 'Felix') will be to drive the English from the Western Mediterranean. To this end: Gibraltar is to be captured and the Straits closed. The English are to be prevented from gaining a footing at any other point on the Iberian peninsula or in the Atlantic Islands. The preparation and execution of this operation is planned as follows:

PHASE I

a. Reconnaissance parties (officers in plain clothes) will draw up the necessary plans for action against Gibraltar and for the capture of airfields. b. Formations detailed for the operation will be concentrated at a considerable distance from the Franco-Spanish frontier and without previous briefing of troops. Three weeks before troops are timed to cross the Spanish-French frontier, a warning order will be issued. In view of the low capacity of Spanish railways the Army will detail chiefly motorized formations for this operation, so that the railways are available for supplies.

PHASE II

a. Units of the Air Force will set out from French bases and make a well-timed air attack on English naval forces in Gibraltar harbor. After the attack they will land in Spanish airports. b. Shortly after this attack units detailed for operations in Spain will cross or fly over the Franco-Spanish frontier.

PHASE III

a. An attack will be made with German troops to seize Gibraltar. b. Forces will be made ready to invade Portugal should the English gain a footing there. Formations detailed for this purpose will enter Spain immediately behind the forces intended for Gibraltar.

PHASE IV

After the capture of the Rock, the Spaniards will be assisted to close the Straits; if necessary, from Spanish Morocco also.

General Ludwig Kubler's 49th Corps would lead the assault. The German mobile divisions would cross the northern passes of the Pyrenees and sweep south, straight through Madrid and on to Gibraltar. The assault forces for Gibraltar would be spearheaded by a company of the elite Brandenburger commandos, and a special fallshirmjager unit. These troops would soon be supported by a crack regiment of the Grossdeutschland Division and the 98th Regiment of the 1st Mountain Division, their initial assault elements to be air lifted by the Luftwaffe, and landing at Spanish airfields. 26 medium and heavy artillery battalions, and three engineer battalions would follow overland.

Their flank on the Iberian peninsula would be watched and guarded by the whole of the 39th Korps, the 16th Panzer Division, and the ‘greyhounds’ of the 16th Motorized Division. Further forces had been detailed to support the main overland operation, including a detachment of the 3rd SS Panzer Division, and two more infantry divisions would be detailed to cross the straits and occupy the shores of Spanish Morocco.

“I also request that the problem of occupying Madeira and the Azores should be considered,” said Hitler, “together with the advantages and disadvantages which this would entail for our sea and air warfare. The results of these investigations are to be submitted to me as soon as possible. As to the Vichy French, now let them prove their pledge of alliance with us and use the ships they sit on in Casablanca and Dakar to support such a move.”

This extended campaign would deny the British these valuable outposts as staging areas for counter-operations against Gibraltar and Spain, while at the same time affording Germany valuable refueling stations for its navy. They would also sit astride the convoy routes Britain used to move supplies and resources to and from Freetown and around the Cape of Good Hope.

Gibraltar, however, was the real prize. Once the German Army had hold of the fabled “Pillars of Hercules,” the British would be denied this vital base, and it would soon serve German/Italian needs while they continued the fight to destroy what remained of the British outposts in the Mediterranean. Then the Axis Powers could finally voice the old Roman claim when they once referred to the Mediterranean as Mare Nostrum, our sea. Malta would be completely isolated and fall within a month. The British position in Egypt would be in grave danger, as the Germans could move forces to North Africa easily by sea, while the British would have to rely on supply lines thousands of miles long, around the Cape of Good Hope. The British Army in North Africa would be effectively cut off.

The Kriegsmarine had returned to friendly ports after the abortive sortie to harass the British convoy shipping in June of 1940. They began the operation with a game of shadow boxing, aiming to draw the attention of British heavy ships, but encountered a mysterious adversary that seemed to foil their every move, sinking the tanker Altmark and forcing them to backtrack north to refuel with an alternate supply ship. A strong battlegroup of the German fleet had then sortied, Bismarck and Tirpitz leading the way beneath the heavy grey overcast, intending to strike south for the Atlantic. There they met the Royal Navy on equal terms for the first time at sea since the big sea duels of WWI. They learned, much to their great surprise, that new and powerful weapons of war were now threatening to upset the careful balance that would decide naval supremacy in the Atlantic, and by so doing, decide the war.

Suddenly Raeder’s plans were all thrown to the wind. The development of rocketry had received passing attention in Germany before the war, but now it was given the highest possible priority. If the British could field these weapons, or the Russians as it was later learned, then so could Germany. Seeing that the application of the weaponry was apparently limited, and observed on no other Russian ship, the Germans concluded it must have been a new prototype, deployed in battle for the very first time.

There had not been a hint or whisper of these weapons in the Mediterranean, and no British ships seemed to have them. Yet the impact they had in German war planning was nonetheless significant. What if Soviet Russia had these weapons ready for use as a land based system? This, among other reasons, prompted Hitler to postpone the immediate invasion of Soviet Russia until intelligence could be developed on the scale of deployment for these new weapons.

In the short run Doenitz argued that no rocket cruiser could in any way harm his U-boats, and was glad to see that his budget for new construction was dramatically increased, while that of Raeder diminished. The Germans would finish the fitting out of only one more major capital ship, the Oldenburg. The third big battleship Hitler had ordered long ago, the Brandenburg, was summarily cancelled, and the steel allotted for the project was diverted to the production of small screening ships like destroyers, and more U-Boats, and the completion of the large fleet carrier the Germans had captured from the French in Saint Nazaire. The name itself would also transfer to that ship, and carrier Joffre would soon be christened CV Brandenburg.

As for the fast AA cruiser De Grasse, Raeder managed to preserve enough of his resources to convert this ship to a hybrid escort cruiser/carrier, the Hannover, named after the old pre-dreadnought battleship from an earlier day. These two ships, would join Peter Strasser in the shipyards and were expected to reach completion by mid-1941 to bring Germany’s carrier fleet to a respectable four ships.

Yet Raeder had much more planned, just as he had explained it to Doenitz earlier. His navy would play an important role inOperation Felix, and that attack would be supported by the core of his new battle fleet in a gamble to break the back of the Royal Navy by seizing Gibraltar. Raeder would send out his gladiators once again, hoping to draw the Royal Navy into another pursuit and battle at sea. He would fling his newest battle squadron down through the Faeroes Gap and into the heat of the action. And they would be led by the greatest champion the German Navy had ever put to sea-battleship Hindenburg.

Raeder could see the ships moving in his mind’s eye, even as he visualized them on his battle map in the operations center at Wilhelmshaven. If his Admirals and Kapitans kept good heads on their shoulders, then he could guarantee Hitler that his segment of the plan would be accomplished-disrupt the Royal Navy so badly that any hope of reinforcing Gibraltar or landing forces in Portugal or Morocco would be impossible. This he could do, rockets or no rockets. Every variable and factor in the equation of his thinking told him that his fleet was ready for the task as Germany prepared to strike at another hinge of fate-Gibraltar.