The Fall of Britain
While the French Empire had been celebrating their victory in Oxfordshire, the German Empire had decided to make its move.
It had become clear beyond a doubt that the Union of Britain was doomed and, unwilling to see the entire British Isles fall into South French hands, the Germans took advantage of the collapse of the British military to launch an invasion of Scotland in March which succeeded in taking much of the Scottish central belt, and the cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow in just a few days.
By the time the forces of the French Empire realised that a German invasion had taken place, it was already too late to do anything about it - with aerial reconnaissance showing the Republican Army retreating from Dumfrieshire it was clear that the Germans would take all of the Scottish lowlands before the French could get there.
Instead, the French responded by launching an offensive out of the now defunct Northern Zone into Cumbria and towards Carlisle. Despite the rocky fells and narrow valleys of the Lake District offering ideal terrain for the defenders, the French offensive proved a success with French troops reaching Carlisle and the border between England and Scotland in just four days.
With the Germans reaching the border at almost exactly the same time as the French did, the armies of the two rival imperial powers unofficially agreed to hold fast along the border, trapping thousands of British soldiers between their lines and forcing their surrender while ensuring that the post war peace would see Scotland in German, and England in French, hands.
The British-held positions in northern England had now been reduced solely to an area roughly contiguous with Northumbria and Sunderland, and these soon came under a fresh assault by the French before the Germans could beat them to it with the result that within a week the last British soldiers would have surrendered and French soldiers walked on the shore at the mouth of the Tyne.
Meanwhile, in the south, the French had followed their victories in Oxfordshire with an offensive into East Anglia which had succeeded in capturing RAF headquarters at Northalt and in completing the encirclement of the British capital - marking the official beginning of the Siege of London.
With London surrounded and effectively neutralised, French forces launched a major push on the western front into the idyllic rolling hills of the Cotswolds and the Chilterns as well as the industrially scarred landscape of the Black Country (named after the soot, smoke and spoilheaps which had quite literally turned the land black).
The offensive was a major success, rolling back the exhausted, undersupplied and starving British troops from Birmingham and Derby, the last of Britain’s industrial heartland, while also capturing the port of Bristol and the famous spa town of Bath.
With the British lines divided yet again by the French victories, it became a relatively simple, though time consuming matter, for the French to continue their advance into Wales and the west country, with Cardiff falling on the 27th of March and French troops reaching Plymouth on the 30th.
All that remained of the Union of Britain now was London itself where 400,000 British soldiers were dug in behind the outer London defensive line to fight to the death for the city when the Battle of London began on the 1st of April with the French advancing into London on two principal routes - from the north towards Edgware and from the south through the boroughs of Croydon and Bromley.
The Battle for London was, and remains, the bloodiest battle in human history both in military and civilian casualties. London had a pre-Second Weltkrieg population of over 8 million people. Despite starvation over the winter of 1946/47, this population had been swollen to an estimated 9 million by refugees - not counting the soldiers defending the city.
But by the time French troops entered the Square Mile at the heart of the city, an estimated 500,000 been killed along with 300,000 British soldiers. Starvation, disease and exposure to the elements following the French victory would claim another 100,000 civilian casualties. Furthermore, thousands of priceless works of art and architecture had been reduced to rubble and ash along with two million homes. Amongst the national treasures destroyed were the National Art Gallery and Nelson’s Column, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace (the latter actually being destroyed by the British themselves rather than let a potential royalist symbol survive).
Death and destruction on this scale was far beyond what might have been expected during the two week long battle and this is a source of many revisionist claims today, however, the simple truth as determined by historians is that the indiscriminate use of artillery and aerial bombardment by the French Empire, coupled with British military’s deliberate flooding of the London Underground, denying civilians shelter at the same time as closing off a way to bypass British defences, resulted in London’s civilian population being caught between two armies engaged in a fight to the death with tragic consequences on an almost unimaginable scale.
Further incidents during the Battle of London also caused many civilian casualties in particular - such as the French decision to deliberately start a firestorm in the east end to avoid having to clear out the defenders with house to house fighting and the British decision to pour oil onto the Thames and set it alight in a futile attempt to prevent the French crossing the river which nevertheless cost many thousands of civilians their lives through the starting of fires and the incineration of hundreds of unfortunates trying to cross the river on boats when the fire was started.
Nevertheless, despite the immense human cost, when the French imperial flag was raised over the damaged but miraculously surviving St Paul’s Cathedral, it marked the fall of the Union of Britain and the end of the Second Weltkrieg. Peace, at last, reigned in Europe and throughout the world.