Homebrew alternate history

[SHARK]

Greetings!

Joshua! I think I have a solution for you!

In pre-war Japan in the mid-late 1930's there were various secret societies throughout Japan, most of them devoted to the Imperial Conquest. A few were devoted to supporting the various politicians in Japan that were moderate, and did not desire war with America. However, through a series of assassinations and terror-campaigns, the Imperialists got rid of key moderate opponents, and paved the way for the Imperialists to take complete control of the Japanese government. The Emperor, by the way, supported the Imperialists, but because of the way the Japanes government was organized, the Emperor didn't have many direct ways of controlling the government.

However, it *could* have happened that the moderate politicians found a leader or two, and some agents with a ruthless streak, and managed to knock off some of the key Imperialists *first*--thus, avoiding war with America, because Japan would have agreed to withdraw at least partially from China, and Japan wouldn't have been on a course of empire building, but would have been more conciliatory. This would mean that the current Japanese government would be friendly, or at least conciliatory towards America.

This always sets the stage though, for the Imperialists to finish what they failed to do in your *alternate* world a few years back in the 30's, and who knows what could happen?

What do you think?

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

 

[Agback]

Since the USA is not likely to get Alaska from Russia they'll need an oil source even more.

The point of departure for this world from real world history is 1941 (after teh Fall of France, but before the German invasion of the Soviet Union). That is SEVENTY-FOUR years after the USA purchased Alaska from Russia.

Regards,


Agback

 

[Desdichado]

Great solution! Thanks for providing a solution along with the problem you point out! Really, this is great stuff. I need little details like this to make the alternative history come alive and seem real instead of contrived.

 

[Agback]

Well, right off the bat one thing is the Middle East that would change is a lack of Israel. Israel was British land until 1948 when they tried to divide it up as a Jewish and Arabic homeland.

Well, Palestine was a British Protectorate under a mandate from the League of Nations (and had been since 1919), but there was already a Jewish majority in the part that became Israel, because immigration (and purchases of land by the Jewish National Fund) began in 1900, when the area was still part of the Ottoman Empire, and were not stopped bythe British until the '30s. The British Protectorate of Palestine originally included what is now the Kingdom of Jordan, but that was split off by the Poms before the point of divergence of this timeline from RW history.

In this alternative history, I would guess that the British would not have been able to divert Indian, British, Australian, and New Zealand troops to protect their protectorate of Palestine against the Vichy French who invaded from [the French protectorate of] the Lebanon and Syria (which is what happened IRL). So the Fascist bloc would have captured Palestine at about the same time as Rommel conquered Egypt. It is conceivable that the Germans might have deported the Jews from Europe to the Middle East rather than trying to kill them all, in which case there might be a stronger Israel than there is IRL. I can't guess whether the Germans might have backed the Arabs in their attempt to destroy Israel (the way Britain did).

Don't forget that in the case of a defeat of the Commonwealth the Italians would have recovered and expanded their Empire in North and East Africa, annexed Greece, Albanian, and parts of Yugoslavia.

As the Japanese have not been defeated by the Allies, they will still occupy Eastern China, and will probably be having as much trouble in Indochina as the French and the Americans had IRL.

Regards,

 

[Mik]

Add, of course, a little bit of occult threat to that: grays have been visiting/shot down providing some advanced technology, demons or whatnot have been summoned from dark worlds, and this could make for a really interesting setting.

Heh... combining the Bomb with occultism could give you a nice dark touch.

Berlin finishes their atomic program, demonstrates the bomb, perhaps in Siberia with help from the Soviets, but more likely not. By this time, Stalin and the National Socialists would be grating against one another. Still, the test would likely be as close to "public" as a secret test could be; the Nazis haven't got a convenient desert to hide it in.

The detonation of The Bomb also causes something other than America to stir to action... Deep under the Pacific Ocean, something has been waiting for "the stars (terrific nuclear reactions) to be right"... Cthulhu.

Now, old tentacle-face doesn't need to show up, but perhaps the detonation of The Bomb is a signal of Earthling development that the Lovecraftian things take as one demanding their increased action and attention.

By the 1970s, the countries with the greatest influence in the world are those who have both clapped the atomic genie in chains (solid weapons programs) and developed offensive and defensive uses of Mythos spells and creatures... Bruce Sterling had a short story in some anthology that used that as a conceit, but I can't recall the title.

The kinds of characters that could be put together into a covert ops team in this world would surely be memorable... for their short, very exiting lifespans.

Just throwing idea grenades, here.

=Mik

 

[Desdichado]

Eh, call me weird, but classic Cthulhu-esque stuff was always too weird to really scare me. I'd do more classic occult -- vampires, demons, ghosts, aliens and the like. More X-files and Dark*Matter, less Cthulhu.

I think that'd be real fun -- set up all these conflicts between these superpowers, and then pull the rug out from under everyone and have those conflicts be nothing compared to demonic manipulations that are centuries old, or something like that.

 

[MaxKaladin]

First -- Stalin planned to betray Hitler and launch a sneak attack. Hitler just beat Stalin to the punch. You'll probably have a German-Russian war in your timeline. The main difference might be that the extra year or so it would have taken for Russia to be ready _might_ have allowed Germany to mop up in North Africa and force a peace with England.

Second -- The only reason the US went to war with Germany was because Germany declared war on us. If they hadn't, we would have been fighting Japan alone and Roosevelt would have had to find another pretext to go to war with Germany. That he was trying to find one is a given, Hitler just bailed him out with a handy declaration of war.

In fact, the Axis treaty only required allies to declare war in the event another member was attacked. Since Japan launched hostilities, Germany was under no obligation to declare war. Hitler's general staff, who knew quite well what a disaster fighting the US would eventually be, were breathing a sigh of relief that they could avoid war with the US -- until Hitler declared war.

Of course, the fact that we were supplying their enemies with war material would probably have eventually caused a war.

 

[Bob Mackenzie]

Great Thread

Random thoughts...


There is no way Germany and the USSR will be allies - the Molotov Ribbentroff pact (ie the non agression treaty) was of mutual short term benefit but the two political systems are dimetrically opposed.

Its open to debate wether Stalin actually intended to strike Germany - certainly plans existed to do so, but remeber that in 41 the Russian economy was significantly weaker than Germany's and Stalin knew it.

However both sides were making allies (Germany) or annexing land (USSR) in Eastern Europe. For example The Russians took Bessarbarabia from Romania in 1940, this was the main reason that Romania took part in Barbarossa campaign.

I can see a series of surrogate wars and gurilla campaigns in Eastern Europe - with Germany sponsoring guerillas fighting Soviet occupation in Besserbarabia, the Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania and maybe in occupied Poland. The Soviets trting to destabilise Germany's allies: Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Finland and sponsoring Tito's Partisans in Yugoslavia and the Communist Partisans in Greece (While the Brits sposor the Monarchist Chetnik Partisans in Yugoslavia and ELAS in Greece)

An intersting point - although both allied to the Germans Hungary and Romania hate each other and contest the sovreingty of Transylvania. The Hungarians also took territory off Slovakia in 1939. So Germany will have difficulty keeping the peace between her allies.

So the Warsaw Pact is a GERMAN creation and would contain Bulgaria (may be though Bulgaria is historically Pro Russian), Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Germany and probably Finland. It may also inculde Denmark as the Germans let Denmark keep a small army until 1943 and many Danes volunteered to serve in the SS. It may also have included Franco in Spain. He was loathe to ally with Germany in WW2 but in an alternate history where Germany has basically won that may change

I wonder if Germany would have annexed Vichy France in 43?

What about Italy?

Cheers

Bob

 

[Desdichado]

First -- Stalin planned to betray Hitler and launch a sneak attack. Hitler just beat Stalin to the punch. You'll probably have a German-Russian war in your timeline. The main difference might be that the extra year or so it would have taken for Russia to be ready _might_ have allowed Germany to mop up in North Africa and force a peace with England.

True -- Hitler hated the communists with a passion, and used the "threat" of a communist takeover as one of his key springboards into power himself. The alliance between the two of them was bound to failure, as I see it. It could never last.

Second -- The only reason the US went to war with Germany was because Germany declared war on us. If they hadn't, we would have been fighting Japan alone and Roosevelt would have had to find another pretext to go to war with Germany. That he was trying to find one is a given, Hitler just bailed him out with a handy declaration of war.

It seems to me increasingly obvious that it was intolerable to the Roosevelt administration that the UK fall to the Nazis. I find it impossible to believe that the US could fight Japan and ignore the Germans.

 

[Desdichado]

OK, I think this will be how I'll do it:

• Japan was the first WWII nation to develop the atomic bomb. Their plan was to put it on submarines that would run suicide missions into US harbors. However, the first one developed cracked a leak and detonated in Yokohama harbor, where it was berthed, preparing for the first nuclear attack in the history of the war.
• After the launch of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler died in 1943. The new leader of Germany – General Erich von Manstein, a military man and fervent party member, pulled back from the war with Russia and didn’t expend nearly as much resources in the Holocaust as Hitler did in real life. Von Manstein was a shrewd politician with an eye for the long-term survival of the Nazi party, and his decisions, while often criticized by war hawks within Germany, have stood the test of time as decisions that put and kept Germany at the forefront of the world geopolitical map throughout the 20th century.
• Following the pullback from Russia, Germany concentrated on the invasion of Great Britain, but found that their blitzkrieg stalled under much stiffer resistance from the Brits (bolstered by Americans) than they had in France. When the Germans had access to the Bomb, they fired one on a V2 which exploded near London in an effort to move forward their stalled blitzkrieg.
• By this time, the Americans, with the help of defectors from Germany and their own scientists had successfully tested nuclear bombs and had developed a different delivery method: B1 bombers. Dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn’t have quite the same effect, since Japan had already shown that they had bomb capability, and Germany had also already used them. However, the devastation caused by these bombs was so immensely shocking even to those that developed them, that the state of open war came to a de facto end, and treaties limiting the use of atomic weapons (called the Stockholm Accords, because they were signed in neutral Sweden) were drafted by Germany, the US and Japan.
• Shortly thereafter, the Soviets were able to develop nuclear technology and became the fourth atomic superpower. Because the Soviets had not signed the Stockholm Accords, this precipitated the arms race which was not terribly different from that which actually happened in our world – each of the four superpowers continuously raised the ante on atomic weapons for the sake of deterrence.
• During the late 40s and early 50s, somewhat “hot” action occurred in the Middle East, which became the “Vietnam” styled debacle of Germany, the US and the Soviets as guerrilla warriors kept any superpower from controlling the oil reserves. Finally, Ahmed Al Rahid, an Arab king, was able to unite many of the Arab tribes under his banner. In a political move, both the US and Japan recognized him as the legitimate ruler of the “Arab Empire,” and Germany and Russia pulled back after seeing the favorable trading agreements that they were able to maintain because of this recognition. The Arab Empire has thus maintained the status quo for nearly sixty years due to their economic shrewdness and dominance of the largest oil reserves on the planet.
• With Russian pressure in the west and north and Japanese occupation of much of eastern China, Mao Tse-tung is not able to unite all of China under his banner. In fact, two Chinas eventually form, the Peoples’ Democratic Republic of China in the northeast and Nationalist China. Tibet and Xinjiang remain separate entities unconnected with China in this scenario.
• Some other features of the cold war include prolonged tension between Germany and the West over South Africa, German and Russian conflict over Scandinavia, Japanese and Western conflict in Singapore and many South Pacific islands, and Russian and Japanese conflict over Communist China. Despite several attempts by many, especially the Germans, to weaken their position, the US retains tight control over the politics of Latin America.
• Both the Germans and the Japanese lead the charge on eugenics programs which leads to the development of – among other things – the moreaus.
• Following the incident at Roswell in 1947, the US becomes aware of the gray aliens and that the Germans have been experimenting with extra-terrestrial technology for a few years. Germany is the first to launch satellites in the early 50s, although Japan, Russia and the US all have satellites up before the end of the decade.
• In the early sixties, communist Cuba is overthrown after the assassination of Fidel Castro. Although the CIA is suspected, it is never proven. This prompts a crisis with the Soviet Union that very nearly leads to the launch of atomic strikes.
• In the 1967 the Germans launch the first successful manned flight to the moon. Oddly, though, none of the superpowers make any attempt to do much of anything with the moon, although US astronauts also land there.
• In the very late sixties, the Soviets develop the first psychic agents for the KGB. The Germans also develop occult agents.
• In the early years of the 21st century, intelligence suggests that the state of the world is as follows: the Soviets are stretched financially tighter than they can afford, the Japanese are also stretched too thin over overtly hostile territory in the Philippines, Korea and Manchuria. The US is facing restlessness from much of Latin America and the Germans are facing increasing opposition from non-Nazis. There is also some kind of occult threat – the details of which are not known at the present, which seems to be occupying the Germans and threatening to spill out over the rest of the world.
• A security agency that is jointly chaired and operated by the CIA, the FBI and the NSA is formed in the 70s called the Paranormal Defense Agency (PDA) specifically to deal with occult and psychic threats. The PCs are all members of this agency having come from law enforcement, intelligence or military backgrounds of some sort, although they may have been analysts, programmers, or any number of more mundane “career paths” and still come under the auspices of the PDA.