Great moments in alternate history: World War II

By David Daw

It's finally here — the biggest alternate timeline of all alternate timelines, the alternate history trope to top all alternate history tropes. Today we look at some alternate histories of the Second World War.
Let's start with one of the most respected works in science fiction, Philip K. Dick's Hugo Award-winning The Man in the High Castle. High Castle is a novel that's not just important in the annals of alternate history fiction but — as Josh Wimmer notes over at Blogging the Hugos — it's a watershed moment for the science fiction genre as a whole. I'd also argue that it marks the point where alternate history finally throws off its pulp adventure roots and becomes contemporary science fiction — the novel uses its alternate history trappings to explore important ideas rather than using them as window dressing.

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How Hitler Could Have Won World War II

Most of us rally around the glory of the Allies' victory over the Nazis in World War II. The story is often told of how the good fight was won by an astonishing array of manpower and stunning tactics. However, what is often overlooked is how the intersection between Adolf Hitler's influential personality and his military strategy was critical in causing Germany to lose the war.

With an acute eye for detail and his use of clear prose, acclaimed military historian Bevin Alexander goes beyond counterfactual "What if?" history and explores for the first time just how close the Allies were to losing the war. Using beautifully detailed, newly designed maps, How Hitler Could Have Won World War II   exquisitely illustrates the  important battles and how certain key movements and mistakes by Germany were crucial in determining the war's outcome. Alexander's harrowing study shows how only minor tactical changes in Hitler's military approach could have changed the world we live in today.

How Hitler Could Have Won World War II untangles some of the war's most confounding strategic questions, such as:

Why didn't the Nazis concentrate their enormous military power on the only three beaches upon which the Allies could launch their attack into Europe?

Why did the terrifying German panzers, on the brink of driving the British army into the sea in May 1940, halt their advance and allow the British to regroup and evacuate at Dunkirk?

With the chance to cut off the Soviet lifeline of oil, and therefore any hope of Allied victory from the east, why did Hitler insist on dividing and weakening his army, which ultimately led to the horrible battle of Stalingrad?

Ultimately, Alexander probes deeply into the crucial intersection between Hitler's psyche and military strategy and how his paranoia fatally overwhelmed his acute political shrewdness to answer the most terrifying question: Just how close were the Nazis to victory?

Why did Hitler insist on terror bombing London in the late summer of 1940, when the German air force was on the verge of destroying all of the RAF sector stations, England's last defense?

With the opportunity to drive the British out of Egypt and the Suez Canal and occupy all of the Middle East, therefore opening a Nazi door to the vast oil resources of the region, why did Hitler fail to move in just a few panzer divisions to handle such an easy but crucial maneuver?

On the verge of a last monumental effort and concentration of German power to seize Moscow and end Stalin's grip over the Eastern front, why did the Nazis divert their strength to bring about the far less important surrender of Kiev, thereby destroying any chance of ever conquering the Soviets?

OPERATION HERKULES (Malta Fulcrum Alternate History)

OPERATION HERKULES is a Novel of Alternate History work of fiction. It began with a question. Might WWII have gone differently had Hitler not made so many strategic blunders? Eventually I wondered what last, single blunder he might have avoided and still had a chance to win the war? From Dunkirk to Stalingrad I read all I could find on these mistakes and realized that of them all, the story of the siege of Malta and the blunder of omission, that of NOT seizing the island, was perhaps the least well known of Hitler’s gaffes, at least in the United States, and that as late as the spring or summer of 1942 he still had the chance to correct his error.

From this sprang the idea of this novel of alternate history. In it we’ll meet many well-known and some lesser known historical figures, but also purely fictional characters whose experiences reflect those whose ordinary lives were interrupted by extraordinary times. Kenneth Wiltshire, an American farm boy and volunteer pilot with the RAF, flies Spitfire fighters and fights for his life from Malta’s Ta Qali airfield. His English lover, the beautiful and mysterious Maggie Reed, toils in anonymity from Malta on Britain’s most vital wartime secret. Kuno

Schact, German Army officer, is drafted as a last minute replacement for the invasion. His dreams are haunted by fear that his two young sons will someday fight and die for the Third Reich. Roland Webster, Royal Navy gunnery officer; only combat gives him relief from remorse of his lost love Althea, killed in the London Blitz. Through their eyes and many others we’ll live the Axis invasion of Malta in June 1942 and follow their adventures in subsequent novels as WWII is refought from a new point of reality.

I have attempted to hew to a reasonable and plausible alteration of history. Neither side will come to possess alian technology, nor suddenly stumble on the secrets of high energy lasers. But from June 21, 1942, the day Tobruk in North Africa fell to Rommel and his Afrika Korp a single, simple change could have reshaped our history. Herewith, what might have come, had Hitler decided to take Malta, rather than not.

PLANNED SEQUELS:
1) "The Gates of Victory"
With Malta in Axis hands Rommel and his combined German/Italian Afrika Korp receive the weapons, supplied and reinforcements needed to WIN the first Battle of El Alamein.
2) "Death on Frozen Seas" ( Tentative title )
With the fall of Malta and the Battle of El Alamein as backdrops, convoy PQ17 leaves Iceland bound for the North Russian ports or Murmansk and Archangelsk. DKM Tirpitz sails to confront them, but needing to prove German superiority over their Italian allies Tirpitz is brought to action by HMS King George V and USS Washington!
3) "HMS Ashanti" ( Tentative title )
One of the small 'back-stories' of the Malta Fulcrum WW2 Alternate History series, this book goes back to the sinking of the British Tribal Class destroyer in "OPERATION HERKULES" and follows her crews ordeal in the water and in Vichy French POW captivity in Algeria.
4) "Panzers Across the Volga" ( Tentative title )
Following the Battle of El Alamein Rommel is frustrated by Hitler's order to remain in a defensive posture. Rommel demands "A fighting command". Hitler obliges, ordering Rommel to exchange commands with Paulus at Stalingrad!
5) "Beautiful Maquis" ( Tentative title )
Follows the drama of Monique Covet, lovely French spy after she is released from Gestapo custody, turned as a double agent. Will she serve her new German masters or remain true to France?

On Desperate Ground

ON DESPERATE GROUND is the story of men and women caught up in the death throes of Nazi Germany, struggling to maintain those things precious to them-life, an end to killing, and even sanity itself. Colonel Johann Faust has lost everyone he ever loved and feels he is going inexorably insane. He hears the haunting voice of his dead fiancée and the demons that roar through his mind as he perfects a plan to save Nazi Germany from defeat and insure a greater and deadlier new world war. Captain Dieter Neukirk, once a protégé of Faust's, is more concerned with saving the lives of his remaining men than in sacrificing them in a fanatical last stand. Meanwhile, Elsa Klein, Dieter's lover and the chief social worker at a Berlin hospital, is engaged in her own dangerous work, providing medical care and identity papers to hidden Jews in the city. American Captain Mack Mackenzie, pulled from a military hospital before his wounds are healed, is assigned to investigate reports of a secret Nazi operation. Wanting only to make it home alive, Mack finds himself in a life and death struggle with unlikely allies and a ferociously determined opponent. Americans and Germans alike are drawn to a hilltop in the remote German countryside, where they find themselves between powerful armies and forced into a terrible decision that could end one war or begin a new one.

A tight-paced adventure, a multi-layered set of events, where...private rivalries are contained within the larger context of a 1945 large-scale German operation...the beat, the quick tempo never lets the reader down...this is a very good novel, and great reading entertainment. - Ben Pastor, author of THE WATER THIEF, LUMEN, and other novels

If you take as much delight in James Benn's Billy Boyle series as I do, you're going to adore this, his first standalone...if you're unfamiliar with Billy and his adventures, I suggest you get cracking...Benn is an author who's unbeatable when it comes to bringing WWII alive. 
-Leighton Cage, author of the Chief Inspector Mario Silva Series. 

 Author James Benn has become highly regarded for his Billy Boyle WW2 novels. Billy, a reluctant combatant who has the patronage of his aunt's husband (his aunt's maiden name is Doud, so you may be able to guess who the uncle is!) is the subject of five or six novels, with a new one issued yearly. All are very good and I'm looking forward to his newest novel, to be published in September. But James Benn has surprised his fans with a couple of new books - issued in paperback. The first one I've read is "On Desperate Ground", and is, in every way, an equal to his Billy Boyle series.

The main American character of "Desperate" is Captain "Mack" Mackenzie, another Irish-American smart-aleck, who also enjoys Ike's patronage. He's sent off to do "odd jobs" for the general and when the book opens, Mack is recovering in a British nursing home from minor physical injuries and more serious mental ones. It's early January, 1945, and the Allies have finally turned back the Germans in the Ardennes at the Battle of the Bulge. (Interesting fact that I learned from both this book and another one I recently read was that the allies were truly caught off-guard by the German advance in the Ardennes because the German commanders had not used radio messaging that had previously been picked up and decoded by the British/Americans, using the Enigma machines at Bletchley Park. Instead, the Germans relied on radio silence and talking by phone when planning the attack.) Allied armies are racing toward Germany from both the west - the Americans and Brits - and from the east - the Soviets. Ike and his aides think something's happening in Germany, but don't quite know what it is. He sends Mack to shadow one American army group to see if he can pick up any stray intel.

But Benn's story doesn't neglect the German side; in fact, the Germans in the last days of the Reich are the pivotal characters. One long-time army officer, Johann Faust, has gone mad from losing his family and fiance, murdered by the invading Russians in their east-Prussian homes. He concocts a plan - not a totally bad one - which involves pitting the invading Soviets against the invading western allies and turning their guns towards each other. The plot involves clothing some German and Russian-defector troops in American uniforms and others in Soviet uniforms and watching the ensuing "hi-jinks" as both sides think they've been betrayed. Faust has gathered some aides, with whom he's fought since the war began in 1939. There's a back story of how Johann Faust knew Mack Mackenzie from early in the war, so the enmity is already established between the two.

James Benn writes with a sure footing about the last six months of WW2, from both the German and Allied perspectives. There are no caricatures in the characters he brings to the reader in a very good - if slightly far-fetched - plot. I do think the book will interest WW2 affianados more than the average Benn-written Billy Boyle readers. There's more "history" in this book, more military tactics and political maneuvering than in most works of fiction. It's a great read for the right reader - who actually might be most of James Benn's "Billy Boyle" fans.

Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis

It's 1939. The Nazis have supermen, the British have demons, and one perfectly normal man gets caught in between.

Raybould Marsh is a British secret agent in the early days of the Second World War, haunted by something strange he saw on a mission during the Spanish Civil War: a German woman with wires going into her head who looked at him as if she knew him.

When the Nazis start running missions with people who have unnatural abilities--a woman who can turn invisible, a man who can walk through walls, and the woman Marsh saw in Spain who can use her knowledge of the future to twist the present--Marsh is the man who has to face them. He rallies the secret warlocks of Britain to hold the impending invasion at bay. But magic always exacts a price. Eventually, the sacrifice necessary to defeat the enemy will be as terrible as outright loss would be.

Alan Furst meets Alan Moore in the opening of an epic of supernatural alternate history, Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis is a tale of a twentieth century like ours and also profoundly different.

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Book: If the Allies Had Fallen: Sixty Alternate Scenarios of World War II

If the Allies Had Fallen. Sixty Alternate Scenarios of World War II by Dennis Showalter and Harold C. Deutsch. Frontline Books, 2010, hardback, 304 pp, £19.99, ISBN 9781848325661

The joint editors of this stimulating collection of explorations of alternative military strategies of the Second World War, Dennis Showalter and Harold Deutsch, have assembled a distinguished team of nineteen historians predominantly from the United States of America, but also including Peter Hoffmann from Canada and Richard Overy from the UK. Justifying the book's counterfactual approach, Harold Deutsch acknowledges that 'it is easy to argue persuasively the truism that the lessons of history are best derived from what actually happened, rather than from what nearly happened' but concludes that ‘what happened becomes more fully comprehensible in the light of the contending forces that existed at moments of decision'.  And so the authors contend that from Munich to Hiroshima the War might have turned out differently.

Their detailed text is enhanced by a series of illuminating maps illustrating graphically, for example, Soviet military dispositions at the end of July 1941 and reinforcements by the end of December 1941 and the Allied plan during the final stage of the war in Europe in 1945. The authors examine such questions as: What if the outbreak of war had occurred in 1938 one year earlier? What if Stalin had joined the Allies? What if the Allies had fallen and Hitler won the war? These are just some of the hypothetical questions which the book addresses stimulating in-depth analysis and debate into some key outcomes during this tumultuous seven-year period and thereby providing support for Harold C. Deutsch's contention that ‘understanding of the total historical setting is bound to contribute to a clearer view of the actual course of affairs', though perhaps not all readers will be entirely convinced of the value of the exercise.

The Battle of the Bulge: Hitler's Alternate Scenarios (Book Review)

Reviewed by John D. Burt

Edited by Peter Tsouras

Greenhill Books, London, 2004

I must start this review with a word of truth in advertising. The latest alternate history book from Greenhill, The Battle of the Bulge: Hitler's Alternate Scenarios, is not about Adolf Hitler's alternate scenarios for his 1944 Ardennes offensive. I would have expected chapters on the various German schemes put forth during the planning stages of the Bulge, or perhaps an expanded treatment of the Northwind offensive in Alsace in January. In addition, of the book's 10 chapters only one ends with a complete German victory. Thus 90 percent of the book certainly does not deal with anything Hitler might have found desirable.

Instead of what you might expect, the book looks at the significant campaigns of northwestern Europe in 1944 and, in fine alternate-history fashion, tweaks some aspect of the campaigns, leading to different resolutions. The first four chapters concern alternate scenarios stemming from D-Day to Operation Market-Garden. The next five concern alternate Bulge histories, and the final chapter postulates a completely successful Bulge. Unlike his previously edited books, Rising Sun Victorious, Third Reich Victorious and Dixie Victorious, editor Peter Tsouras' versions of these campaigns generally end with the Allies on top. This is a good departure from the previous books, since there was little chance for a German victory in Western Europe during this period.

In my opinion the best alternate history comes from identifying decisive moments within a campaign that had the potential to change things. Nearly all the chapters in this book follow that lead. For example, author Christopher Anderson presumes that the 101st Airborne Division moves to Werbomont, as its original orders specified, rather than being redirected to Bastogne by the First Army. In this version of the Bulge, therefore, Bastogne falls and the Allies withdraw behind the Meuse. Tsouras himself, in his chapter on an alternate Falaise Gap battle, has the 12th SS Panzer (Hitlerjugend) Division join in Hitler's mandated Mortain counteroffensive rather than defend against the Canadian Totalize operation. The Hitlerjugend was actually supposed to be part of the Mortain thrust but could not because of lack of fuel. In this Falaise battle, the Allies manage to close the gap.

There are other chapters whose historical tweaking is just a bit much to accept. David Isby posits that Bernard L. Montgomery's training for D-Day includes more postlanding combined arms work rather than concentrating–as all Allied commanders did–on just getting ashore. This struck me as too much of a change in Monty's outlook. Andrew Uffindell's version of Operation Market-Garden has the British 1st Airborne Division land close to the vital Arnhem bridges, rather than miles away. This, as with Isby's chapter, is pure 20-20 hindsight.

Regardless of the level of historical variation that went into the chapters, all are well written and plausible. James Arnold's "history" of a narrow thrust by George Patton through the Ardennes is probably the best chapter in the book–an outstanding blend of novel and history–even if Dwight D. Eisenhower's alternate decision to support Patton (rather than Montgomery's "narrow plan" or his own historical broad front approach) is hindsight as well.

The final chapter is the most intriguing. Tsouras presumes that the Bulge offensive was successful–reaching Antwerp and cutting off a million Allied soldiers in what is termed the Holland Pocket. Franklin D. Roosevelt dies from an early stroke, and many Allied heads roll as well: Eisenhower, Montgomery and Winston Churchill. Tsouras then weaves a tale that could be the outline of the next military- political thriller, with Patton and Douglas MacArthur trying not only to relieve the Holland Pocket and defeat Germany but also to save the United States from a Communist takeover. While it is a bit more than might be expected in a book subtitled Hitler's Alternate Scenarios, the chapter was fun to read.

Overall, Battle of the Bulge delivers the goods in the alternate history genre, complete with maps and fictitious endnotes (my favorite: George Mangano's Patton and Napoleon: Who Was the Better General?). If you get it for what it is, rather than what the title implies, you won't be disappointed with what you find inside.

The Best Alternative Histories in Literature - Abe Books

The Plot Against America: A Novel

 

Philip Roth

"What if" scenarios are often suspect. They are sometimes thinly veiled tales of the gospel according to the author, taking on the claustrophobic air of a personal fantasia that can't be shared. Such is not the case with Philip Roth's tour de force, The Plot Against America. It is a credible, fully-realized picture of what could happen anywhere, at any time, if the right people and circumstances come together.

The Plot Against America explores a wholly imagined thesis and sees it through to the end: Charles A. Lindbergh defeats FDR for the Presidency in 1940. Lindbergh, the "Lone Eagle," captured the country's imagination by his solo Atlantic crossing in 1927 in the monoplane, Spirit of St. Louis, then had the country's sympathy upon the kidnapping and murder of his young son. He was a true American hero: brave ...

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Featured Book: The Burning Mountain

The Burning Mountain
Alfred Coppel

America’s first atom bomb test fails and the US is forced to invade Japan in 1946.

Most Americans are familiar with the end of World War II, that the war ended after the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan. What many, if not most, Americans do not know is that a detailed plan for the invasion of Japan had been mapped out and would have been put into place if the atomic bombs did not work or were not ready.

The plan consisted of two parts. Operation Olympic would have been the invasion of Kyushu, the southernmost major island in Japan. American forces, with minimal involvement of other allied nations, would have invaded the island and taken over enough of the island to build numerous air bases. The second part of the plan was Operation Coronet, which was to be the invasion of the Tokyo basin area. It would have been an effort that would have dwarfed the operations in Normandy.

There was also a sort of sub-plan, based on use of the atomic bombs. Nine would have been scheduled for use, three of them to bomb the beaches that the American troops would land on, and three more behind the beach area. This was supposed to have reduced enemy resistance and allowed a relatively easy foothold to have been obtained. Three other bombs were to be held in reserve, to be used if the Japanese tried to move reinforcements in.

This fiction book is based on the premise that the initial testing of the atomic bomb did not occur as planned. There was going to be a delay, and so Operation Coronet was put into effect. (In the book Operation Olympic has already happened, and the Americans control around half the island.)

The book features a variety of characters, quite well done, and a very realistic, and very brutal, description of the war conditions and what happens to soldiers when they are killed. It's very graphic and could upset some readers.

The description of the attack itself is very well done (and is based on the actual plans for the invasion), and the description of the Japanese resistance is also well done. The book goes along with the idea that the Japanese civilians would have willingly participated in resisting the Americans, and would have used bamboo poles and anything else they could have to kill Americans. The civilian casualty rate, under such conditions, would have been tremendous (and the political pressure back in the states from the newspapers carrying articles about the “massacres” would also have been tremendous.)

The book also does a good job showing what can go right in such an invasion, and what can go wrong, and what the cost in when things go wrong.

The book deals a lot with the Japanese suicide efforts, including the kamikaze planes, but also including small boats, men underwater with bombs attached to them, and even civilians carrying explosives that they would detonate when Americans came near. 

There's a lot of what we would call treachery on the part of the Japanese in this novel, although from their viewpoint it was just them defending their homeland.

This is a really, really good book covering what very probably would have happened during any such Operation Coronet.