The Right Honourable Arnold Hiller Part 12

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The Right Honourable Arnold Hiller, M.P

By Chris Oakley

Part 12

Includes material previously posted at Othertimelines.com

Summary: In the previous eleven chapters of this series we examined Arnold Hiller’s rise to power as British prime minister and his crushing of all domestic foes; his 1936 occupation of Ireland; the establishment of his alliance with Italy’s Benito Mussolini; his invasion of France that touched off the Second World War and the subsequent British takeover of French colonial territories in the Middle East and North Africa; Ireland’s “Day of Broken Glass”; the entry of the United States into the Second World War and the first Anglo-American naval battles in the Atlantic; the fascist takeover of Spain at the end of the Spanish Civil War; Japanese preparations for war in the Pacific against the United States and its CANZUS allies; and the British occupation of Iceland in 1939. In this installment we’ll see the beginning of Operation Torch, the American campaign to retake Bermuda from the British.

As the days ticked down towards the start of Operation Torch, the skies and waters around Bermuda became more dangerous than they had ever been at any other time during the Second World War to date-- and they’d been very deadly in the first place. British and American warships traded gunfire on the open waves while the skies grew black with the smoke from RAF and USAAC aircraft going down in flames. The British occupation forces in Bermuda were kept busy around the clock between setting up beach obstacles to deter would-be invaders and watching the local population for any signs that a resistance movement against British rule might be coalescing. None was, but that hardly gave British commanders much reassurance; from past experience with Ireland they knew all too well a partisan band could be formed right
under one’s nose if those partisans were determined enough to do so.

And to be sure, the OSS was certainly looking for opportunities to create mischief for the Hiller regime wherever it could. To name just one example, OSS covert agents working in Scotland did a great deal to stir up pro-independence sentiments among the Scottish public and give the SS headaches trying to abolish illegal Scot nationalist movements. In a working class district of Edinburgh, right under the noses of the SS and MI-5, the OSS ran a printing shop which turned out a dozen anti-Hiller newspapers and magazines for dissemination among the Scottish masses. In Glasgow, an innocent-looking warehouse was in fact a front for a covert weapons storage facility that would be used to supply guns and munitions to partisan groups if an armed uprising against British authorities in Scotland broke out.

But it would take a long time for anything resembling a bona fide anti-Hiller insurgency to arise in Scotland. The regime’s internal security measures were highly effective in neutralizing dissent, and on top of that many Scots had all they could do just to handle the tasks of daily living-- never mind mustering any sort of concerted opposition to the fascist regime down in far- away London. Last but not least, some Scotsmen were actively in collaboration with the BNSP; a few of these collaborators had even gone so far as to organize their own BNSP-style fascist group, the Scottish People’s Defense Union(SPDU). Although it claimed to be a fully home-grown political organization, documents recovered from British government archives after the end of the Second World War would later prove that the SPDU had in fact been organized with a certain degree of covert assistance from the SS.

In any case, Washington hand its hands full simply making sure there were enough men and guns for Operation Torch, never mind inciting any kind of revolt in British-occupied Europe...

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...but that didn’t stop Hiller from obsessing over the specter of an anti-British revolt breaking out in Ireland, France, or any of the other European territories under his rule. He was positively manic on the subject, often fretting to MI5 deputy director Dr. Francis Sexton that he was convinced there were thousands of guerrillas in occupied Ireland just waiting for the chance to revolt against British authority.

Dr. Sexton was an ardent Hiller loyalist, having joined the BNSP in the late 1920s and becoming Henry Hamill’s chief counterinsurgency advisor at MI5 shortly after Hiller assumed the prime minister’s office in 1931. A former journalist, Dr. Sexton was a meticulous researcher and used that talent to put together an extensive index of suspected anti-Hiller agitators in Ireland-- an index that historians would later infamously
refer to as “the Black Book”. Many of Ireland’s most educated citizens were included in that index, as were nearly all of the country’s Catholic clergy. There were thirty thousand names in the Black Book altogether; with any index that large, factual errors are bound to crop up here and there, and sure enough it turned out that at least five hundred of the people mentioned in the Book’s pages had already died or fled to exile abroad at the time the Book was first compiled.

Nonetheless, the Black Book is a remarkably accurate gauge of the sheer terror that permeated the BNSP senior hierarchy at the prospect of a revolt in occupied Europe. It also reflects the paranoia that shaped Hiller’s attitudes toward the Catholic Church in Ireland. Hiller was convinced the Catholic clergy in Ireland was secretly plotting to incite the Irish general population to commit acts of violence against the British occupation forces, therefore Catholicism had to be crushed at all costs. Even before he was elected British prime minister, Hiller had vehemently advocated the arrest and incarceration(and in some cases execution) of every Catholic clergyman in Ireland above the level of deacon; now that he was in power, he was determined to use every means at his disposal to destroy the Catholic Church in Ireland once and for all. The “Day of Broken Glass”, hideous as it had been, was simply the prelude for a systematic campaign aimed at purging every last trace of Catholic influence from Irish society. The so-called “final solution to the Irish question” which had first been discussed at Leamington Spa three years earlier would soon be put into effect, with horrific consequences for Ireland-- and for Britain as well.

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The moment British occupation forces in Bermuda had been waiting for, and dreading, finally came on January 18th, 1940 as the US armed forces launched Operation Torch. The fact that the U.S. campaign to recapture Bermuda was given the same code name as the British North Africa offensive of the previous year galled Hiller and his generals no end, and the desire to avenge this perceived slight gave British
occupation forces in Bermuda extra motivation to fight to repel the invaders.

The assault began with one of the most ferocious naval battles the Atlantic has ever seen; both sides had known for years that in the event of a future war between the United States and Britain, one of the keys to victory would lie with the ability(or lack thereof) to secure control of the waters around Bermuda, and accordingly the Royal Navy and the U.S. Atlantic fleet were committing their surface forces to the fight en masse. While sheer numbers might have seemed to give the British naval contingent a decided advantage over its American opposite number, the Americans had a counterweight to that bulk: the hundreds of land-based combat aircraft in Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas which the Air Corps had put on standby to supplement the U.S. Atlantic Fleet’s carrier aviation strength.

Casualties were heavy on both sides during the first twelve hours of the battle; the American aircraft carrier USS Ranger and British battlecruiser HMS Hood, to name just two particularly prominent cases, were sunk with all hands on board and dozens of planes were shot down as the Americans and British fought for control of the skies over the island. “There were so many planes knocked off,” a U.S. Marine veteran of the invasion later quipped, “a guy could’ve walked all the way to Cuba and kept his feet dry.” That is, if the walker hadn’t tracked his feet through the blood of the American and British servicemen who were being cut down in the struggle for possession of Bermuda’s shores.

There is considerable argument among modern military historians about when the Battle of Bermuda started to turn against the British, but it is generally agreed that the loss of Hood was a serious blow to Hiller’s efforts to keep American forces off the island. If Hood had survived the first day of the assault on Bermuda, Britain might have scored a decisive victory against the American invasion force; as it was, after three and a half days’ fighting the two sides were only able to manage a gory stalemate. Attackers and defenders alike were obliged to pull back to reassess their strategies and gauge the strength of their remaining forces.

While both sides lost a considerable number of planes in the early days of Torch-41, the Americans had a somewhat easier time than the British did in replacing planes and pilots that were shot down in the heat of battle. Since Bermuda was closer to the U.S. than to Great Britain in geographic terms, U.S. replacement planes and crews had a shorter distance to get to the battlefront; furthermore, with American aviation manufacturing capacity starting to surge ahead of its British counterpart, there were two new aircraft rolling out of U.S. factories for every one that came off a British assembly line.

After a three-day lull, the British and Americans resumed their struggle for Bermuda on January 25th. To the dismay of Hiller’s most senior admirals, the U.S. Atlantic fleet hadn’t broken underneath the weight of Royal Navy firepower as Hiller had hoped that it would. If anything the American warships and planes were eating through British defenses like termites chewing away at a fallen log; U.S. warplanes in particular kept giving the RAF a hard time in Bermuda’s skies. Despite Joseph Gable’s boasting that “Bermuda will be British forever!”, there was an undercurrent of fear among some of Hiller’s field commanders in Bermuda that the Stars & Stripes might soon replace the Union Jack on the streets of Bermuda’s capital Hamilton....

To Be Continued

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