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Page 80.

V-1 buzz bombs hit London within days, starting June 12, and killed thousands. For the first time since the Blitz and the Battle of Britain years earlier, sirens sounded regularly across London. The V stood for Vergeltung, Revenge, for the horrific firebombing of German cities, which was in turn a result of Goering and Hitler’s vicious assaults during the Battle of Britain and so many other atrocities. The V-1 carried a one-ton warhead and was powered by a pulsejet motor. It cruised at 350mph at 4,000 ft with a range of 150 miles (240km). It was a small plane 25 feet long with a 20-foot wingspan. Germany launched over 9,500 V-1’s against England in late 1944, causing over a million people to flee London in panic, though most residents showed great bravery and stayed put in their homes and jobs. Half of the buzz bombs were destroyed by anti-aircraft fire or by RAF fighters including the new Gloster Meteor turbojet fighter. Some 6,184 people were killed in the attacks. By late 1944, fewer and fewer of the buzz bombs were getting through to their targets.

Tim’s room had a skylight overlooking a little rampart. At one lucky moment—or unlucky, depending on one’s point of view—he lay on his bed resting, glanced out, the window, and saw a buzz bomb or V-1 go cruising by. This diabolical German invention was a kind of super bomb or unmanned aircraft that came sailing in with a loud buzzing noise. Often the RAF sent up a Spit or two to knock one down. The scary part, the thing people stopped and listened to with bated breath, was the silence. When the V-1 was ready to do its dirty work, its engine would cut out. The V-1 would come buzzing in like a hornet, sputter once or twice, and go silent. Then it would heel over and drop like a stone, and seconds later one would hear a loud explosion. Sometimes it would land in a field and kill a sheep or two; at other times it would destroy some thousand year old church with lovely stained glass windows that might have survived the great fire of 1666.

It was all part of wartime life in London. American GIs crowded the streets and defined the new nightlife. British girls, like their American counterparts, made do with scarcity and painted mascara lines down the middle of the backs of their legs to fake the seams of good silk or nylon stockings. People made new clothing out of old. A smart new Eisenhower jacket on a pretty woman might be grandpa’s moth-eaten army blanket from the ironically named War To End All Wars. Here and there, one saw an automobile whose front half had been sawed off, to be replaced by a horse in harness as if the centuries were rolling backwards.

On July 21, the Democrats announced that FDR would seek an unprecedented fourth term, with Harry S. Truman as his running mate.

In the Pacific, the Japanese continued opposing U.S. advances. On Europe’s Eastern Front, the Soviets were advancing broadly across the Ukraine and into Poland, bombing Warsaw. Hitler razed Warsaw to the ground, but the Russians took the city. Tim imagined poor Erek shifting from Nazi hands to Soviet hands, and thought about what that might mean for Anna in so many different ways.

To further indicate the shaky position of Hitler, a bomb plot by some of his top generals just barely failed on July 20th. The Allies were beginning to plan for the world after the war. At Bretton Woods in New Hampshire, representatives of 44 nations met to hammer out future world monetary policy, establishing the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and creating agencies for reconstruction. On August 25, General Charles deGaulle marched into Paris at the head of a Free French Army, signaling the effective liberation of France. Right behind him were many Allied units, including elements of a special O.S.S. team scouting out German atomic bomb sites, with an eye toward measuring Nazi progress toward the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.

In September, the first U.S. forces pushed into western Germany. By late 1944, the V-1’s had ceased to buzz across the sky and drop silently. Instead, a devastating new weapon started dropping silently from the edge of space. Sometimes there was a whistle or a contrail, but most often nothing because the V-2 rockets reached the outer limits of the atmosphere and dropped back in at enormous speeds. Like the V-1, it carried a one-ton warhead. Where the V-1 had essentially been an unmanned bomber whose engine would sputter out so it dropped and exploded, the V-2 was an actual rocket that shot to the edge of space, and arced down to strike its target. Hundreds of V-2s were reaching England by the time Tim boarded a B-29 for a new posting in San Francisco. The dreaded new V-2 rockets were causing new panic and thousands more deaths. The Royal Air Force had been able to intercept and shoot down some V-1s, but the V-2 came in too high and too fast to be visible. For a moment, Allied commanders feared there could be atomic warheads coming across the Channel atop those V-2s. But the V-2s were simply faster, higher carriers of the same high explosives payload as the V-1. The new rockets would kill 7,000 souls in Britain, ironically for some 5,200 V-2s launched, and 20,000 slave laborers would die at the secret Peenemünde plant making the rockets.

In October, MacArthur liberated the Philippines, clearly signaling that Japanese power was on the wane.

Also in October, the Soviets entered the eastern German province of Prussia, home of the modern Germanic military heritage of the Junkers and the Kaisers.

At Christmas, when the Allies thought they had it wrapped up, Hitler threw forth a tremendous offensive in the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge. For several weeks, Eisenhower’s forces were shaken, until they destroyed the German counter-attack and punched back into Germany with renewed fury under the leadership of men like Patton.

Meanwhile, at Yalta in the Crimea, representatives of four great nations met to plan how the world would be divided after the war. An ailing FDR, a struggling Churchill who was about to be thrown out of office by thankless voters in Britain, an ineffectual and corrupt Chinese warlord named Chiang Kai Shek, and a wily Joseph Stalin sat down together. It was one of those moments of history when, as with the almost casual British division of the Near East after World War I, a few pencil marks on a map, or an offhand dinnertime phone call, would spell the division of millions of people, the lives and deaths of future generations in the resulting civil wars, and the fate of the world.