Ironside Project
The Ironside Project was a ruse created by the three surviving Daleks of the New Dalek Empire. It was designed to lure the Eleventh Doctor to them, trick him into delivering testimony to identify him as Daleks, and enable them to activate the Progenitor. The Project was a complete success, and the New Dalek Paradigm was the outcome.
Appearance
The Ironsides were standard Dalek drones. They had themselves painted khaki-green with the Union Flag in place of their recognition code as part of their plot. They sometimes had covers put over their blinkers to better hide themselves from opposing forces while undercover.(TV: Victory of the Daleks)
History
A single Dalek Saucer and its crew of three Daleks survived the War in the Medusa Cascade through unknown means and fell through time to 1941. They acquired an original Progenitor device, which could create new Daleks, but the device did not respond to them because it did not recognise them as Daleks (they had been generated from the cells of Davros, not another Progenitor). The three decided to trick the Doctor into proving to the Progenitor that they were, indeed, Daleks.
They created Edwin Bracewell and provided him with charts and testing results realistic enough to take to the British Army. Two of the three Daleks posed as Ironside prototypes. Bracewell rolled out a war-designed variant of the Dalek and put them into key points within the Allied Forces. Winston Churchill informed the Eleventh Doctor of the Ironsides.
When the Doctor arrived a month later, he was furious to discover that the Ironsides were Daleks. When his attempts to convince Churchill of the truth failed, the Doctor confronted the Ironsides directly and declared that he was the Doctor and they, the Daleks, were his enemies. This was recorded by the Ironsides and sent to the Progenitor, which accepted the identification and the Daleks' command to create the new Daleks.
The Ironsides immediately dropped their ruse, revealed Bracewell as an android by blasting off his hand and returned to their ship in orbit. They were followed by the Doctor in the TARDIS. The Doctor confronted them and held the Daleks at bay with a "TARDIS destruct mechanism", actually a Jammy Dodger. The Daleks revealed their intentions and created five new Daleks. The new Supreme Dalek decided that the trio of older Daleks were "impure". The three Daleks accepted this and allowed themselves to be disintegrated by the new Progenitor Daleks, who went on to establish the New Dalek Paradigm. (TV: Victory of the Daleks)
Alternative timeline
In an alternate history in which the Doctor never found the Ironsides, they became fully operational. The Battle of Britain lasted only one more week before the German Luftwaffe suffered crippling casualties, forcing them to retreat and turn their forces against the Soviet Union. Their underestimation of the strategic possibilities of the Ironsides cost them dearly. Whilst their efforts were diverted elsewhere, the Ironsides landed on the Normandy beaches, travelling along the seabed of the English Channel to avoid detection. The first two Ironsides were joined by the third Dalek from the ship.
The conflict was brief. Soon the three Ironsides were marching across France, clearing a path for the liberation of the towns along their way by British soldiers. The enemy's guns could not penetrate the Ironsides' defences and their speed and mobility meant that the Nazis had to retreat to Germany to prepare a final defence, allowing the Russians to spread across Eastern Europe at the other end of the Allied pincer movement. Until this point, the United States of America had remained silent, unwilling to commit forces to a war that seemed impossible to win, instead steadily stockpiling their weapons, awaiting a tactically advantageous moment. However, when the Japanese attempted to come to Germany's aid with a pre-emptive attack on Pearl Harbor, the Ironsides stepped in, taking on the enemy bombers in a vicious dogfight lasting two days. The American Navy was saved and President Harry S Truman bestowed the Medal of Honor on the Ironsides, finally agreeing to aid the British in the war effort. Two months later, the Allied forces marched on Berlin, and the Nazi stranglehold was broken.
In summer 1942, the Allies met in a secret bunker underneath Washington, D.C.. With no common enemy to fight, relations between the Soviets, Americans and British were breaking down and the centre of the debate was the Ironsides. Neither Stalin or Truman were keen to allow such powerful weapons to be the property of the British Army alone, but the Ironsides' insistence that under no circumstances would they relocate from the United Kingdom (as this was the most likely location the Doctor would appear in) meant that Churchill had no choice but to agree to their destruction.
It took the United States nearly a year to refine the nuclear technology needed to destroy Professor Bracewell's creations and, in an operation broadcast live across the globe, the first test of the atom-bomb took place on 7 February 1943 on the Isle of Man, the blast vapourising the Ironsides. It was an ironic fate for the Daleks, permanently ending their race and their terror.(DWAN: Doctor Who The Official Annual 2011)
