Re: Blood and Iron

The windows of the Oval Office were thrown open, but the summer breeze brought no comfort.

It smelled of wet pavement, distant smoke from freight yards, and that rank electric stink that rose from a city stewing under too many bodies, too many fears.

President Herbert Hoover sat behind his oak desk, sleeves rolled to his elbows, spectacles perched low on his nose as he reread the latest polling data.

It was grim, though not outright damning. A nation still half-starved by the ghosts of the Panic, but now shambling toward an awkward recovery.

Numbers on the page told one story; wages marginally up, breadlines shortening, factory doors reopening under new owners.

But the people’s eyes on the street? They whispered another.

A nation torn. Half of them were ready to crown Hoover as the man who had “pulled them back from the brink,” forgetting entirely that it wasn’t his stimulus packages that stabilized markets, but a sudden rush of foreign capital.

Capital from places whose names the common American couldn’t pronounce; or wouldn’t dare to if they understood who truly owned their factories now.

The other half? They spat at the name of Herbert Hoover as though it were a swear. For every mill that clattered back to life, there was a mother standing over a child’s grave dug shallow in dry Midwestern dirt.

For every broker smiling at new shipping orders, there was a miner coughing blood into a rag that cost more than his lunch.

It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. And the next election was only months away.

Across the radio waves, on every clattering newsstand, the voice and grin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt loomed.

FDR promised “new deals” broad, empty, populist promises that wrapped around themselves like snakes eating their own tails.

He railed against banks even as he courted them behind velvet doors. Spoke of the common man while thumbing through donor ledgers that read like a who’s who of New York’s remaining industrial barons, nervous that their fortunes might wither if they didn’t bet on both horses.

Hoover knew the sort. Slick. Bright. A patrician smile that hid teeth filed to needles.

In another timeline, he suspected he’d have liked Roosevelt. Maybe even worked with him.

But in this one, Roosevelt was worse than a rival. He was a man who had watched the German model unfold, who had seen how swiftly an entire people could be regimented under charismatic ambition and wanted it for himself.

Only with unions, patronage, and slush funds instead of discipline and dread.

And Hoover? He was too old, too dry, too honest in the wrong ways. Too proud to be loved, too moral to be feared.

The only comfort Hoover clung to was that the press was quiet. Eerily quiet.

The same media magnates who only four years ago would’ve torched his every statement, printed cartoon after cartoon of him chasing away breadlines with pitchforks… now simply reported the facts.

Dry, clinical. No heat. No favor.

Because for once, perhaps the first time since the start of the century, it seemed Bruno von Zehntner’s colossal media machine was distracted.

Berlin had bigger fish to fry. Missiles to build. Empires to disembowel.

Hoover snorted at the thought. He’d rather have a cold German devil scrutinizing him than an American demagogue with a golden tongue whispering sweet poison to voters.

Bruno was predictable. FDR? FDR was the sort who’d laugh over your grave and call it reconciliation.

The door swung open with practiced caution. Charles Curtis, his Vice President, stepped in, hat in hand. His face was drawn tighter than usual.

“Sir, the War Department has compiled the latest returns from Manila.”

Hoover rubbed his temples. The war. God, the damned war. The Philippines was supposed to have been a quick action. A demonstration that American will hadn’t atrophied alongside its investments.

Instead, it was turning into a slow bleed. Jungles swallowing boys from California to New York, many of which had never fired a rifle outside a county fair.

Filipino partisans slipping through lines like smoke. Another hundred bodies sent home this week. Another hundred telegrams. Another hundred mothers receiving visits from men with peaked caps and carefully rehearsed condolences.

“How bad is it?” Hoover asked.

Curtis didn’t answer directly. Just handed over the folder.

Hoover skimmed. 784 dead. 2,000 wounded. Half a dozen ambushes gone disastrously wrong. A note about “low morale in the coastal encampments.” Another about “increasing calls among local garrisons for relief rotations.”

Hoover set it aside, pinching the bridge of his nose. “The people will stomach it if it looks like we’re winning.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Then they’ll vote for the cripple in Hyde Park.”

Curtis flinched at the cruelty. Hoover didn’t apologize. He was beyond soft apologies.

It was then that the phone on his desk rang. Not the external line. The secure one, that ran through two layers of encryption, direct from Military Intelligence.

He picked it up. “Hoover.”

“Mr. President,” came the breathless voice of General MacArthur’s liaison in D.C. “We’ve just received a cable from our observers in Okinawa. Sir… the Germans have launched… Well I don’t quite know how to explain it…. it is what appears to have been missile strikes on Japan.”

Hoover’s chair creaked as he sat up straighter. “Define ‘strikes.'”

“Sir, three cities have been hit. Osaka. Kobe. Nagoya. Major industrial centers. Sir, these weren’t conventional raids. The payload estimates are… well, they’re larger than anything we’ve ever documented. Not chemical. Nor are they conventional explosives. We don’t know how they achieved it, but our scientists estimate the yield is the equivalent of between 30 and 50 tons of TnT…”

A beat of silence.

“Jesus Christ.”

“Yes, sir. They estimate forty to fifty thousand dead in each city conservatively. More to come from burns, collapses, starvation. There are reports of clouds in the shape of mushrooms visible from the straits. Our embassy in Tokyo is in complete chaos.”

Hoover’s mouth went dry. He had always known Germany was more advanced than the rest of the world. Hell, he had even guessed they were hiding weapons that were truly terrifying somewhere behind the velvet curtains they displayed to the world.

But to launch such a daring and devastating attack so brazenly and openly? It was as if the man was daring the world to object.

“Anything from the League?”

“They’re scrambling. Mostly condemnation. But without teeth, sir. The British and the French are still too busy with their own elections. The Italians are silent. Though we suspect they have been silently in league with the Germans and Russians for years.”

Hoover nodded absently. His eyes drifted to the map on his wall. The neat borders. The tiny, careful type labeling oceans and far-off islands.

It all looked so fragile. Like a child’s drawing.

When he finally hung up, Curtis was still there, fidgeting by the fireplace.

“What does it mean?” Curtis asked. “For us?”

Hoover’s eyes narrowed. “It means the world just watched Germany obliterate three cities; not with fleets of bombers that could be shot down, but with weapons launched from hundreds of miles away, with perfect accuracy.”

He pushed himself up, pacing, hands clasped behind his back.

“It means that the foreign capital flowing into the country from god knows where is as I always suspected, likely to be coming straight from Innsbruck. And if that’s the case, then our industry is beholden to the Reich and the whims of the man at the head of its military….”

Curtis shifted uncomfortably. “Then what do we do?”

Hoover looked at him flatly. “We keep smiling for the cameras. We keep telling the mothers that the boys in Manila are there to preserve freedom. We keep our factories humming with foreign cash buying back American steel.”

A cold breath.

“And we pray Roosevelt doesn’t win. Because if he does, and tries to play the populist strongman; tries to challenge Bruno with cheap slogans and half-baked New Deal fantasies…. Then he’ll learn what it means to taunt a man who can erase cities by the hour.”

Outside, the White House grounds looked as serene as ever. Tourists milled beyond the gates. A gardener trimmed hedges with calm precision. A pair of Secret Service men stood chatting by the drive.

Hoover watched them from the window, his face composed.

Only the hard set of his jaw betrayed that he was thinking not of voters or campaign stops, but of long-range missiles, of mushroom clouds, of young men dying in the jungles of Luzon for reasons that felt increasingly hollow.

A Republic. That was what this was supposed to be. A grand experiment in dignity and self-rule.

Now it was just another tile on a board owned by men in distant castles. Men with names that would never appear on a ballot.

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