Home Page

Announcements 

Alternate Histories

International Edition

List of Updates

Want to join?

Join Writer Development Section

Writer Development Member Section

Join Club ChangerS

Editorial

Chris Comments

Book Reviews

Blog

Letters To The Editor

FAQ

Links Page

Terms and Conditions

Resources

Donations

Alternate Histories

International Edition

Alison Brooks

Fiction

Essays

Other Stuff

Authors

If Baseball Integrated Early

Counter-Factual.Net

Today in Alternate History

This Day in Alternate History Blog

*******

Late January and early February of 1940 saw Britain’s strategic position in Bermuda begin to deteriorate beyond repair. Hiller had presumed that British naval superiority in the Atlantic would enable his occupation forces in Bermuda to crush the U.S. invasion of that island, but things weren’t working out quite the way he had hoped they would. Far from buckling under British pressure, the American invasion forces were giving the island’s defenders everything they could handle and then some. Worse yet, some of Bermuda’s civilian population were beginning to show signs(if only faint ones) of mounting an uprising against the British occupation regime on the island. Some of the local dock workers had gone on strike against their British colonial bosses and an illegal anti-Hiller newspaper had started to secretly circulate among the poorer neighborhoods of Kingston. The SS did whatever they could to try and stamp out such dissidence, but their efforts were now backfiring on that score. Far from being intimidated by the threats and torture BNSP security forces could and did inflict on those they arrested for anti-Hiller activity, the nascent Bermudan resistance was emboldened to step up its defiance of the occupation forces. Although armed revolt was not yet an option, the anti-Hiller underground which was starting to jell in Bermuda used every other method available to it to undermine British control of the islands.

One such method, perhaps the riskiest the underground could have used short of actual armed resistance, was sabotage of vital British equipment and facilities on the island. The penalty for such sabotage could be and often was extremely harsh, especially when the saboteurs fell into SS hands. Nevertheless quite a few Bermudans were willing to risk their necks to hasten the day when Hiller’s grip on their island was finally broken once and for all; to the dismay of senior BNSP and SS leaders, these sabotage efforts were occasionally aided in secret by British nationals sympathetic to the Bermudans’ cause. At least two Royal Army junior officers were summarily court-martialed and shot for treason after they were caught helping suspected Canadian agents break out of a detention camp and make their escape to the U.S. mainland.

But no matter how many people the SS jailed or shot, they couldn’t prevent the deterioration of Britain’s position in Bermuda. Since the war ended, in fact, many British historians have suggested SS cruelty towards the island’s civilians may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back in the course of events leading to the final ejection of British occupation forces from Bermuda’s shores.

******

The RAF was having troubles of its own with the insurgency. When its aircraft weren’t being shot out of the sky by American planes and AA gunners, they were being sabotaged by Bermudan dissidents who were aiming to cut British air power on the island off at the knees. There seemed to be no end to the difficulties besieging squadron leaders on the island-- or the mechanics responsible for keeping the planes ready for combat. Even the weather seemed to be at war with the RAF at that point; official British defense archives made available to the public after the Second World War ended reveal that at least a dozen British fighter planes were destroyed in storm-induced collisions either with one another or with other aircraft.

One RAF pilot stationed in Bermuda around this time kept a diary of his experiences on the island; his name was Joseph Brill, and his logbooks constitute a rare and invaluable window into British military life during the final days of Bermuda’s occupation. (They also give an insight into Squadron Leader Brill’s legendary temper; as Brill later acknowledged himself in his postwar autobiography, he had a notorious reputation throughout the RAF of telling off his superiors whenever he disagreed with them, a habit which at least once had put him in danger of getting court-martialed.) His diary entry for January 27th, 1940 is a prime example of the unblinking eye with which he viewed the British Empire’s deteriorating situation in Bermuda: “Three planes grounded by sabotage....There are more and more empty seats in the mess hall with every passing day. The stubbornness of our senior commanders back home in London is costing us more and more good men, to say nothing of what it’s doing to our relations with the local population. My wingman has warned me of what may happen if the SS gets hold of this, but I don’t give a damn. The truth needs to be told regardless of how many toes I may step on.”

As it turns out, Squadron Leader Brill’s wingman had just cause to be worried about his commander’s personal safety: top secret papers released by the RAF since the end of the war reveal that Brill was one of dozens of British military officers in Bermuda under SS observation on suspicion of insufficient loyalty to the Hiller regime. And in his testimony at the Manchester Trials in 1946, Herman Geary would tell an Allied prosecutor under oath that Brill had been among the first five names on an SS list of RAF personnel scheduled to be secretly executed if they proved too great a security risk for the BNSP to let survive. (When Brill learned this, he had to be physically restrained by Allied MPs from rushing the witness stand and attempting to throttle the ex- RAF commander-in-chief.)

******

As the British strategic situation in Bermuda disintegrated, so did the ability of British occupation forces on the island to suppress the anti-BNSP rebellion. Attacks on British personnel and bases grew in frequency as well as violence-- and to make matters worse in the Hiller regime’s eyes, many British civilians in Bermuda were now surreptitiously or even openly fighting alongside the anti- BNSP partisans. Even as the British Army and Royal Marines garrisons in Bermuda were fighting to push U.S. troops off the island, their rear flank was in constant danger of assault from guerrilla forces; some postwar historians suggest these guerrillas may have hastened the final defeat of the British military in Bermuda. Certainly these partisans made it easier for American and Canadian ground forces to encircle British troops in the latter stages of their drive to take the island’s capital, Hamilton.

On February 6th, 1940 U.S. artillery came within shelling range of Hamilton and immediately started bombarding the city’s main British military garrison. Scarcely forty-eight hours after the bombardment commenced American and Canadian infantry troops, backed up by Bermudan resistance fighters, were engaging the British Army and the SS in the streets of Hamilton’s downtown district. Furious that the Americans and their allies had succeeded in penetrating the Bermudan capital’s defenses, Hiller ordered the beleaguered British troops in Hamilton to hold fast at all costs. The commander-in-chief of the largest British Army unit stationed on Bermudan soil, General Frederick V. Powell of His Majesty’s 6th Infantry Corps, was dealt a grave psychological blow by this order: he’d been pleading with the British prime minister for days to let him withdraw his men from the island while they still had a chance to do, and now he and his surviving soldiers had essentially been condemned to death.

Early on the morning of February 10th, the fourth day of the battle for Hamilton, General Powell received a communiqué from his adjutant Colonel William Adams saying Hiller had granted Powell a battlefield promotion to field marshal. The implication of Hiller’s directive was all too clear-- Powell should sacrifice himself in a gallant last stand against the encroaching CANZUS forces. Instead he chose to surrender himself and his remaining men to the Americans in the hope of saving their lives. When Hiller received the news of the 6th Infantry Corps’ surrender he told Herman Geary he felt “betrayed” by Powell and said: “That’s the last field marshal I promote in this war!”

Although sporadic fighting between CANZUS forces and scattered small detachments of British Army and SS troops would continue for another three days, the fall of Hamilton effectively marked the end of the struggle for Bermuda. The island was lost to the British once again, this time for good. On February 14th, 1940 U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson held a press conference in Washington to announce the successful completion of Operation Torch-41. On February 16th the Canadian embassy in Mexico City hosted a reception for Mexican army officers who would shortly be deployed to Bermuda to assume command of the engineering and support contingents Mexico was stationing on the island to assist the Americans and Canadians in reconstructing the island’s badly damaged infrastructure and health care system.

For Hiller, the fall of Bermuda represented the worst strategic setback the British military had suffered in more than a century. In one fell swoop the British Empire had lost a vital naval outpost, an ideal staging area for bomber attacks on the U.S. East Coast, and a living symbol of the British Empire’s vast size and power. Much of his hope for eventually mounting a successful invasion of the continental United States had rested on keeping control of Bermuda-- when that was gone, so too was his best chance of establishing a British beachhead on U.S. soil. But while things may have been going badly for Hiller in the Atlantic, his vicious campaign to exterminate the Irish people was proceeding right on schedule...

Please Comment In The Discussion Forum