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Hitler's War
By Harry Turtledove
John Lukacs' historical study Five Days in London: May 1940 is not alluded to in the alternative history novel Hitler's War, but it is not too speculative to suggest that the novel's title is connected with this idea from the Lukacs book:
Had Hitler won at Moscow or Stalingrad or in Normandy, he would not have won his war. But he may have been unbeatable. These two things are not the same. His aim was to dominate Europe and most of European Russia – and to make or force Britain and Russia and the United States to accept such a [German] victory of the Second World War…Had Britain stopped fighting in May 1940, Hitler would have won his war. Thus he was never closer to victory than during those five days in May 1940. We leave aside the question whether Lukacs was right in arguing that the days from May 24 to May 28, 1940, around the time of the Dunkirk evacuation, were really decisive for the war as a whole. It is less controversial to observe that the war that actually broke out was not quite the war Hitler had intended to start, and that even when he was still winning it, the war soon developed in directions he had not intended to take. Well, the purpose of alternative history is to correct analytically unsatisfactory reality: hence this book, and no doubt another Turtledove series to follow. Hitler's War has a lucid premise that must be a delight for the book's marketers: suppose World War II in Europe had started at the time of the Munich Conference in 1938, instead of at the time of the Polish Crisis in 1939? Hitler had actually intended to settle the Sudeten controversy by force, trusting that Britain and France would do nothing or just make a gesture followed by further negotiations. A general war in 1938 would have occurred in a geopolitical situation that was substantially different from that of 1939. It was not just that Britain and France were less well prepared than they would be a year later. The USSR was not yet Hitler's ally, and it was not clear that Poland could not be. Stalin was likely to support Czechoslovakia, but Stalin was still purging the Red Army's officer corps. The Spanish Civil War was still underway. Though the combatants had their own goals, it's a good bet that conflict would have become a theater of the larger war, thereby putting the British base at Gibraltar in play. Meanwhile, the Japanese had not yet decided whether they would drive west into Siberia or south into China and Southeast Asia. The United States was in a condition of deepest isolation. Additionally, various technologies that would prove important for World War II either had not been invented yet or had not yet become usable hardware. One could go on, and the book does. Actually, the book's premise is so rich that the author can be criticized for making up more than he had to. Niall Ferguson has argued that there are solid, Rankean reasons for constructing alternative histories when we know that the decision makers in an important historical event tried to construct alternative futures based on the probable outcomes of the options before them. In such a case, if we do not know what did not happen, then we do not know what the decision makers were deciding. The point of departure from actual history for an alternative history constructed in this fashion, then, is a single decision that we know might have been different. We do get a bit of that in Hitler's War. Thus, General José Sanjurjo becomes the leader of the Spanish Nationalists because, in Turtledove's timeline, he is persuaded not to overload his small plane with uniforms on his way to the uprising. The story of the death of the fashonista fascist is one of the stock anecdotes of the beginning of the Civil War, but it raises no useful historiographical points. Even worse, the Munich Conference in this book collapses because an irate Czech assassinates the leader of the Sudeten Germans, thereby providing Hitler with a replay of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914. Surely the same effect might have been achieved with an alternative outcome to a single meeting of the British cabinet? To that, of course, the author might respond, “Write your own damn scenario if you don't like mine,” which is a fair enough point. In any case, once the story starts, it does proceed in a plausible and intriguing manner. As we have noted, an early war brings Spain into play. This has implications for Gibraltar, but also for the influence of the Communists on the Spanish Republic; the author suggests that the cut off of supplies from the USSR after the beginning of Stalin's own desultory war against Hitler would diminish that influence very quickly. More interesting still, we know that elements in the German military were seriously considering a coup if Hitler actually invaded Czechoslovakia. In this book, we learn the coup was attempted but failed, and Hitler begins that purge he often talked about in imitation of Stalin. As for the conduct of the war, the Germans do launch an invasion of the West after the extremely difficult conquest of Czechoslovakia, just as happened after the conquest of Poland in the real 1939. However, the Hitler's War campaign uses the strategy that the Germans were actually thinking about at the time, which was essentially the Schlieffen Plan augmented by tanks and air support. The Western Allies are beaten back but there is no panicked collapse. The major political leaders appear only rarely in this story. We see the alternative Munich Conference. Also, Hitler appears like Mad Baggins to a Panzer unit in Belgium to report that he had just foiled the poison-dwarf mutineers in Berlin and to ask the crewman please to keep the story to themselves for a while. Aside from those incidents, though, this is the history of the world as seen through the eyes of its non-commissioned officers. We are introduced to sergeants, corporals, and the occasional private and short-lived second lieutenant. They are in Manchuria, in the USSR's air force, in the British Expeditionary Force, in a resilient if antiquated French Army, in submarines, and in other contexts numerous enough to be hard to remember. Almost the only civilians are an immiserated academic Jewish family in Münster (who are preserved from the worst outrages of their status by the father's history as a war veteran) and a Mainline Philadelphia American woman trapped in Berlin by a bureaucracy that seems to have no other purpose in life than to prevent her from traveling to still-neutral Denmark. Very few of the soldiers we get to know are presented to us as really bad guys. That impression, perhaps, is an inevitable effect of one of the points the author emphasizes, which is that militaries run on their small-unit cohesion. Therefore, we mostly see the characters being helpful and reasonable to each other, if not to the enemy. We are told quite a lot about ordinance long obsolete, and everything you ever wanted to know about the next-to-last generation of turboprop fighters. There are also extensive discussions of battle-field sphincter control and other aspects of the military version of the human condition. Be warned, though: these people smoke. They smoke all the time. The French are particularly shameless in this regard. The author has made it his business to find out and report the name of every brand, ration-type, and combustible ersatz that military personnel anywhere in the world might have been smoking in 1938. Their users know that they are addicted to these substances. They even suspect that the practice may interfere with their respiratory systems. Still they smoke. The Russians (and Armenians) smoke a bit less. They drink instead, but then in Stalin's army they had reason to. So far, the scenario resembles nothing so much as what has become the greatest counterfactual account of a second world war, the one that H.G. Wells set out in his 1933 novel, Things to Come. In that book as in this one so far, the war was actually a set of wars that broke out in a haphazard fashion and never really coalesced into a single conflict with a coherent theme. Tanks and especially aircraft gave the conflict a different flavor from World War I, but did not produce decisive outcomes to great strategic battles. The difference from the first war that Wells wanted to emphasize, however, and we see just a bit of it in Hitler's War, was the marked lack of enthusiasm on the part of any of the combatants. To the extent that armies fought at all, they fought against causes rather than for them. Eventually, Wells describes the warring states signing an armistice of exhaustion, and then imploding. I think it very unlikely that Harry Turtledove plans any such thing for Hitler's war. This book ends in the spring of 1939, with the French and British starting what they hope will be a decisive counteroffensive. Maybe it will be. Let's see.
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