Turning Point

Author’s Note:

Dear Readers,

The chase is on, yet no one on the Allied side really knows what’s at stake. Tovey has another mystery on his hands in those strange photographs that have been delivered to Hut 4 at Bletchley Park, but Fedorov is too far afield to solve the riddle for him. So we’ll begin where we left off, as Kaiser Wilhelm and the Goeben attempt to slip by the Royal Navy with their hidden cargo.

The long awaited Soviet Winter Counteroffensive will be presented next, a real turning point in the war that is often overlooked by historians in Fedorov’s books. It wasn’t really the loss of 6th Army at Stalingrad, or the grinding attrition of Kursk that turned the war in the east. It was that desperate and stunning Russian counteroffensive in the winter of 1941-42.

After that we move to the Pacific again, where Churchill has a most difficult decision to make, and “the Rock of the East” gets a new assignment. Then, one of those moments I truly love in this process happened while I was wading into that segment of the story. Like the strange dream that took us to Admiral Knight in the Siberian Intervention, another of those moments occurred while I was staring at a map of the great barrier islands, Sumatra, Java, Bali and east to Timor, Japan’s final objective in their stunning opening offensive of the war.

What resulted from that muse will be much in keeping with the general premise that first bloomed in the opening novel, Kirov. Yet it creates a thorny problem for all those involved, and will weigh heavily in the outcome of the Pacific War. Sometimes a Turning Point lurks in some quiet, insignificant corner of unrecorded history, like the hidden Pushpoints Professor Dorland might expound upon from his Berkeley Arch facility. Other times it comes in the violence of thunder and lightning, and in a way no one, not even I, expected when I started writing the opening chapters of this volume.

By the end of this novel we will have reached April of 1942, with the Allies contemplating offensive operations for the very first time. Yet 1942 remains a year of precarious and quavering balance. The Axis powers reach their high water mark, but still find the Allies unbowed. Britain holds on in the Libyan desert, and now boldly contemplates the end of Rommel’s Afrika Korps in one final battle. The Soviets struggle to consolidate hard won gains from their Winter War, but the coming of warmer weather and good ground after the Spring thaw will see Germany renew its offensive, and with newly equipped divisions that are even more potent than before.

Each side will have real opportunities and also vulnerabilities, for while the Turning Point comes here in this novel, it is not fully appreciated or understood by those struggling in the thick of the fray. There are still two more volumes in this season, and a lot of war to cover in 1942. The conflict in the west will be much different, as the Allies must plan how to deal with the French colonies in Northwest Africa, and the issue of Spain and Gibraltar. Germany will not want those vital territories to fall uncontested, and OKW must find badly needed divisions to face the threat slowly blowing in from the Atlantic like a storm at sea. Yes, the Americans are in the war now, and they are coming to the story soon as Eisenhower makes his debut in the war in the west in Book 23.

You will forgive me as I leave our favorite battlecruiser for a time in this novel to focus on these many operations that need to be covered. But I assure you that we will soon be back with Karpov, Fedorov, Rodenko, Nikolin, Tasarov, Zolkin, Orlov, Dobrynin and all the rest. Things in the Pacific are about to get very complicated, but for now… the winds of war are swirling in listless currents, and find in some lone forsaken place, a turning point.

Enjoy.