Toward Ecosophy

My take is that Fortune's project did in fact play a very significant role in the course of the Second World War -- a narrowly defined role but a necessary one. Beginning in 1938, with the Nazi takeover of Austria, each of the countries Hitler had wanted to take over had suffered a catastrophic collapse of morale right at the critical moment. Armies that should have been able to put up an effective resistance crumpled and fled, political leaders panicked or simply surrendered, populations stared blankly as German tanks rolled past. Read Marc Bloch's Strange Defeat -- Bloch was a French officer in 1940, and chronicled the bizarre way that France's huge and competent army came totally unglued when faced with a numerically inferior German invasion -- and it's very clear that something realkly weird was going on.

Fortune's belief, and I think she was right, was that this was being engineered by magical means -- that the Nazi hierarchy had a well-staffed team of occultists working for them who set out to cause that specific effect. (The team was almost certainly part of the SS, working under Heinrich Himmler's direct supervision.) What Fortune set out to do, in turn, was to keep that from happening to Britain...and she succeeded. British morale didn't collapse; it held firm, and that's why Hitler couldn't afford to concentrate all his forces on the invasion of Russia -- he had to keep France full of soldiers and Luftwaffe squadrons to prevent Britain from invading France once his back was turned. Had Britain fallen, Hitler would have had a sufficiently large force on the eastern front in the first few months of the invasion that they very likely would have reached the Baku oilflelds...and we'd all probably be speaking German today.

Of course Fortune and her network didn't win the war by themselves. It took more than ten million Russian soldiers on the eastern front, four and a half million Allied soldiers on the western and southern fronts, the largest land battles and the largest amphibious invasion in all of history, and a few other little details like that, to crush the Nazi regime. If Britain had fallen, though, the Allied victory would have been much harder to achieve -- and the sudden solidifying of British morale in the late spring and summer of 1940 was a crucial factor in Britain's survival. To the extent that Fortune and her network contributed to that, and I believe their contribution was a significant one, they played a role in winning the war.