Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! Read Online Free Page B

from Goeth summoned submachine gun fire, crackling through the air; a volley of shots that sent the small, sad figures crashing back into the ditch, with brief fountains of blood spraying into the morning mist and then disappearing just as quickly as they had appeared, like a vaporous apparition.
    The SD commando doused the bodies in petrol, and left them burning; a small convoy of cross-marked trucks rolling away into the distance, one long smoke plume at their back rising from the blackened ground, twirling and merging into the grey morning clouds.
     

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
    PART I
     

The sun rose weakly over northern France.
    James looked up through bleary eyes, as he stepped heavily into the pale light, blinking dumbly and yawning. “Fitting,” he said dryly, in the laconic Yorkshire style.
    “For what?” asked Tommy, similarly dishevelled as he shuffled out of the barrack huts and out to the asphalt parade ground, rubbing sleep from his gummy eyes. Neither cared much for keeping silence. They hardly felt bound by military discipline. The Yorkshireman glanced at him, and with furrowed brows, nodded towards the stony-faced SS officers stood silently watching their approach, clad in their sleek Hugo Boss uniforms.
    “For this new start. New dawn, new day,” James observed, deadpan. “And this is SS hospitality, which should be interesting.”
    Tommy followed his gaze, and scowled. The SS, standing out like sore thumbs in the backdrop of the characterless forested area and the ramshackle little camp it enclosed, looked every inch the merciless supermen they’d been propagandised as on both sides of the war; grim, imposing figures. Brian, limping along behind Tommy, noted with interest that while the Death’s Head skull and crossbones was visible on peaked caps, their SS jailors had the usual lightning runes on their collar tabs, like the Waffen-SS, and not the skull and bones of the infamous Totenkopf camp guards of Himmler’s notorious internment system. The uniforms were field grey, double-breasted both above and below the belt and seemed to be cut from the thick feldgrau wool of the army. They wore the same jackets as panzer commanders. Military dress . Some bore medals.
    “Look at them. They’re fucking robots,” Tommy whispered. Grumbling, James agreed with the sentiment.
    “Twats.”
    “ Look at this lot. They’re a bunch of dustbin lids! Fresh out of school, seven foot tall and carved out of stone. They don’t even look human.” Tommy shook his head in disgust, and loudly spat a green blob of phlegm into the dust at his feet. “I can’t believe I’m ’ere doing bird in a kraut prison camp, stuck with a Yorkshire bastard like you to boot.”
    James churlishly grinned at that. “What will I do without my whippet and wife to beat?”
    “Die, hopefully,” he snorted.
    Still fixated on the SS guards, James barely blinked. “You Artful Dodgers are all the same. Eighty years since Charles Dickens and cockneys are still a bunch of uncivilised thieves.”
    “What would you know about civilisation, you northern monkey?”
    “Quite a bit, you little chimney sweep. London; rats, syphilis, Fagin the Jew and the plague epidemic .”
    “That’s enough, Private Wilkinson. Silence in the ranks!” Sergeant Stanley called back to him. “Men, move out! Three ranks of eight! Step to, look lively!”
    His heart was in it – the Suffolk voice as stern as its refined tones could allow it to be – but the words were jumbled. Lieutenant Smith was dead; bombed in the anarchy following the collapse of the southern front and the BEF’s forced retreat along the River Senne to maintain a straight defensive line with the French, and as such, the leaderless platoon fell to the Sergeant. The ranks, though, had been decimated; Stanley’s boys numbered a mere twenty-four from the original sixty that had landed in France with the rest of the British Expeditionary Force.
    The entire company filed out, and Tommy