Ironside Project
The Ironside Project was a ruse created by the Daleks. Kicking off the "Ironside Incident", it was designed to lure the Eleventh Doctor to them, trick him into delivering testimony to identify them as Daleks and enable them to activate the Progenitor. The Project was a complete success, and the New Dalek Paradigm was the outcome.
One account claimed the Daleks instead called themselves "Metaltrons", the name used by Henry van Statten to describe the Dalek drone in his personal collection (PROSE: A Brief History of the Daleks) in the 21st century. While, for humanity, the Van Statten Incident would not occur for many more decades, the Daleks had already experienced it as an earlier part of their time traveling history. (TV: Dalek)
Appearance
The Ironsides were a pair of 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 luminosity dischargers to better hide from opposing forces while undercover and had army utility belts housing useful battlefield accoutrements strapped to the weapons platform of their casings, obscuring their slats. (TV: Victory of the Daleks)
History
A day to come
Through the extrapolations of the Matrix, the Time War-era Time Lords became aware of the Ironside Project and the ultimately successful gambit which led to the establishment of the New Dalek Paradigm, as recorded in the Dalek Combat Training Manual. They dubbed the event the "Ironside Incident". (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)
Activity
A single Dalek Saucer and its crew of three Daleks survived the fall of the New Dalek Empire, (PROSE: The Dalek Handbook, Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) 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. The three decided to trick the Doctor into proving to the Progenitor that they were, indeed, Daleks.
They created Edwin Bracewell, an android that was programmed to think of itself as a British scientist who constructed a pair of robot war machines, and provided him with charts and testing results realistic enough to take to the British Army to use in their war with the Nazis. 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. When not used in battle, they did small tasks such as providing tea to keep up their ruse as just being advanced robots. 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, killed two soldiers, 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)
Legacy
Encountering the "Bronze God", Churchill recognised it as a Dalek through his experience with the Ironsides. Indeed, he initially referred to the "Bronze God" itself as "Ironside" (AUDIO: Living History).
Doctor RV Singh wrote about the Ironside Project in various essays. When his essays were rediscovered in the 1960s he disavowed them as a childish prank, however shortly before his death in 2010 Singh swore to a colleague of Maxwell Grey that they were actually true. (PROSE: The Mandela Effect, Or Monsters on the Streets of London)
Other records of the Ironside Project survived in declassified records of the war but no specific details could be found. (PROSE: A History of Humankind)
Alternate timeline
As the Eleventh Doctor recounted to Amy Pond, the Ironsides became fully operational in the history in which he never found them. 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, traveling 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' defenses and their speed and mobility meant that the Nazis had to retreat to Germany to prepare a final defense, 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 center 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 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.(PROSE: The Ironside Advance)
Behind the scenes
- In the real world, an Operation Ironside was planned and executed by the Allies from 1943 to 1944.
- The name "Ironsides" was the name of the members of Oliver Cromwell's cavalry of the New Model Army in the English Civil War.
- Action figures based on the Ironsides, including variants with and without covers over the luminosity dischargers, were released by Character Options. The variant with the covered luminosity dischargers has lighter coloured paint than the original.
- Ironsides are among the Dalek enemies used in the Doctor Who: Legacy mobile game.
- The Green Daleks that appear inThe Doctor and the Dalek bear resemblance to the Ironsides.
