Union Of Fire

May 1940. The German Blitzkrieg is sweeping across Western Europe. Then, at Arras, history changes.

In our history, the British counterattack at Arras failed to halt the German advance. France fell, the British Army escaped through Dunkirk, and Europe entered the darkest years of the Second World War.

But what if Arras had succeeded?

A German armoured spearhead is cut off. The Wehrmacht hesitates. France remains in the war. And from one battlefield reversal emerges something that existed in our history for only a few desperate hours as a political proposal: a union between Britain and France.

The consequences spread far beyond Arras.

Mussolini must reconsider Italy's war. Stalin watches from the East. Hitler becomes increasingly obsessed with the Soviet threat while the war in the West refuses to follow his timetable. Across the Atlantic, the United States is gradually drawn towards a European conflict it desperately wants to avoid.

Told through strategic history, political deliberations, military operations and the later recollections of those who were there, Union of Fire follows an alternative Second World War shaped not by a single miraculous victory, but by the cascading consequences of one moment when history turned in a different direction.

The war that follows is recognizable.

But it is not the war we know.