Moment of Destiny
Book Details
Author(s)Roger Branfill-Cook
PublisherRoger Branfill-Cook
ISBN / ASINB008ZSWSCM
ISBN-13978B008ZSWSC4
Sales Rank784,008
MarketplaceUnited States 🇺🇸
Description
A lavishly illustrated alternate history which springs from the possibility that the Royal Navy does not attack the French Fleet at Mers el-Kébir in July 1940.
Close Anglo-French naval and military cooperation was thrown away when Adolf Hitler stole a march on the western democracies, and started the Second World War before his opponents were ready.
Churchill panicked that the powerful modern French Fleet could join the Axis, and gave the order to neutralize French warships.
At Mers el-Kébir Admiral Somerville, blindly obeyed orders, fired on the French squadron tied up in port, knocked out three capital ships and killed 1,300 French sailors. Somerville realized he had committed the greatest error of his entire life.
This alternate history examines what might have happened if Somerville had followed a different course. After all, as the admiral on the spot, he was next only to God in his freedom of action.
Suddenly, events began to unfold in a very different manner. The narrative takes on a life of its own, each cause and effect following on naturally. The French based in North Africa wreak vengeance on the perfidious Italian Fascists who had stabbed them in the back, and the balance of power in the Mediterranean is dramatically altered.
There is no point in Hitler delaying his plans to attack Russia, to go to the aid of his friend Mussolini, locked up in Monte Grosso. So Operation Barbarossa begins much earlier, and Stalin’s Soviet Union is effectively knocked out of the war.
After waging undeclared war on the Germans in the western Atlantic, FDR embroils the USA in the European conflict through the presence of American “observersâ€, in much the same way as the Americans would do in Vietnam.
In the Far East, Japan’s expansion plans are totally upset by the arrival of a powerful French fleet. Here too everything turns out slightly differently, with surprising results.
Well-led and properly armed, the French soldier, airman and sailor could, and did, deal effectively with their Axis opponents, as in Norway, at Bir Hacheim and under Leclerc. In reality, most never got the chance.
Moment of Destiny introduces eye-witness accounts of alternate events, together with photo montages (with a “health warning†for future historians), includes an analysis of fact versus fiction, provides parallel time charts, and ends with a further frightening possibility.
.
Based on feedback from the First Edition, this enlarged Second Edition refines certain aspects of the story, and adds significant eye-witness accounts of the aerial combats over the Atlantic, and in the skies of Eastern France, where the dive bomber concept is finally vindicated.
Close Anglo-French naval and military cooperation was thrown away when Adolf Hitler stole a march on the western democracies, and started the Second World War before his opponents were ready.
Churchill panicked that the powerful modern French Fleet could join the Axis, and gave the order to neutralize French warships.
At Mers el-Kébir Admiral Somerville, blindly obeyed orders, fired on the French squadron tied up in port, knocked out three capital ships and killed 1,300 French sailors. Somerville realized he had committed the greatest error of his entire life.
This alternate history examines what might have happened if Somerville had followed a different course. After all, as the admiral on the spot, he was next only to God in his freedom of action.
Suddenly, events began to unfold in a very different manner. The narrative takes on a life of its own, each cause and effect following on naturally. The French based in North Africa wreak vengeance on the perfidious Italian Fascists who had stabbed them in the back, and the balance of power in the Mediterranean is dramatically altered.
There is no point in Hitler delaying his plans to attack Russia, to go to the aid of his friend Mussolini, locked up in Monte Grosso. So Operation Barbarossa begins much earlier, and Stalin’s Soviet Union is effectively knocked out of the war.
After waging undeclared war on the Germans in the western Atlantic, FDR embroils the USA in the European conflict through the presence of American “observersâ€, in much the same way as the Americans would do in Vietnam.
In the Far East, Japan’s expansion plans are totally upset by the arrival of a powerful French fleet. Here too everything turns out slightly differently, with surprising results.
Well-led and properly armed, the French soldier, airman and sailor could, and did, deal effectively with their Axis opponents, as in Norway, at Bir Hacheim and under Leclerc. In reality, most never got the chance.
Moment of Destiny introduces eye-witness accounts of alternate events, together with photo montages (with a “health warning†for future historians), includes an analysis of fact versus fiction, provides parallel time charts, and ends with a further frightening possibility.
.
Based on feedback from the First Edition, this enlarged Second Edition refines certain aspects of the story, and adds significant eye-witness accounts of the aerial combats over the Atlantic, and in the skies of Eastern France, where the dive bomber concept is finally vindicated.
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