History (and related interesting facts)

AK-74? M1911? STOP.

STOP, MY BEATING HEART. YOU'RE GOING TO BURST.

...!
You're short an HK416 if you want to kill me!

BF1 is actually tempting me. My nieces husband is a military history phd candidate and he is all about WW1.

I know a bit about it. More than most, less than some.

The lack of the French and/or Russians in favor of the Americans is already a big strike against it.

About M1 Garand Rifle Grenades and grenade launching, which was used in both WW2 and Korea.

I figured that'd be Austria. I forgot who said it.. "We're shackled to a corpse." It was either Wilhelm or one of the generals.

Russia was pretty ambitious at first... they had their eyes on old Orthodox claims, after the dwindling of the Ottomans. It didn't go well, of course.

Of course it didn't go well.

They encountered serious resistance in 1916 that saw them bogged down and failing to advance. I'm in the opposite camp of most. I consider Brusilov to ultimately be a Central Powers victory. Sure they forced deployments and diversions across the line but that's it. This basically was just Germany focusing more on East then West which led to the mobilization of veteran Bulgarian soldiers which saw the entire situation reversed in Romania months later.

Of course then the February revolution.

:/

Yeah Russian highlight of war? Momentarily diverted German attention and that promptly got our shit kicked in.

Given this thread's attention to history and such I figured I could bring up a book I am currently reading.



Conroy is half decent at exploring alternative histories and this premise caught my eye, I knew a little of this plan and I do believe that it have resulted in a truly differing end of the war in Europe.

Set in the waning days of the Ardennes top officials Hitler government retreat to a complex designed by Albert Speer in the Alpines, capable of holding a quarter million comfortably and nestled some of the most treacherous and difficult to navigate chains of mountains in Western Europe, they plan to ride out the Soviet assault on Berlin, and the American crossing of the Rhine, and force a conditional surrender that leaves the Nazi state intact.

Here is the official blurb from the website.

GERMANICA, ÜBER ALLES!

Deep in the heart of Europe's Alps in the redoubt called Germanica, Nazi propaganda master Josef Goebbels and a battalion of Nazi zealots hold out against a frantic final Allied push to end World War II. With Churchill losing his election, De Gaulle consolidating his rule over a newly liberated France, and Stalin asserting his own nefarious land-grab in Eastern Germany, only America, led by its untried new president Harry Truman, remains to face the toughest of Nazi warriors as they hunker down for a bitter fight to the last man.

Goebbels knows that if he can hold out just a bit longer, the war weary of the Western nations will back away from unconditional surrender for Germany, and he and his zealots can remain in power never to answer for their war crimes, and able to prepare for the moment when their hateful Nazi ideology is ready once again to rise from its alpine grave and strike at the heart of humanity!

But there are Americans and a few stalwart Europeans just as determined to put a final stake in the Nazi heart. It is now up to heroes in the making such as newly minted O.S.S. operative Ernie Janek, commando Captain Scott Tanner, and formerly enslaved Czech "Jew" Lena Bobek, to bring down the dark Nazi menace growing like a cancer in the mountainous heart of the continent.

The truly compelling bit of this is that Speer actually did propose a few plans for this compound in the Alpines, but Hitler refused them until it was far too late in the game to do so, plus by the time of this novel a bunch of the higher ups were content to fall the state into the grave, but overall the premise is pretty nifty for an alternative history novel.

Movie scenes about 18th century.

I read a couple of Conroy's books (1901 and 1862) some time back and don't remember being particularly impressed by him either as a writer or a historian, but it's an interesting concept, and he was definitely not the worst author I've come across so I might check it out sometime.

I must say though, in general, there is a real dearth of decent published alternative history books out there. There's some obvious gems like Fatherland, though they tend to be more about telling good stories than actually creating good counterfactuals, and the vast majority have neither believable divergences from history nor good storytelling. I suppose it's somewhat understandable in that if you're a good enough author to write an interesting book, there's a fair bet you're not an expert on the history side of things, and overall, I do lean more towards being interested in the latter. I should probably mention Turtledove as he's probably the most high profile AH writer, but I'd really rather not get started on his crap, so....

Fortunately the internet does seem to have come to the rescue here, as I've come across some excellent timelines people have written, mainly on AH.com. To stick with the WW2 theme, here's a couple I'd recommend (both are more "history" than "story"):
A Blunted Sickle - What if the French realise how utterly stupid the Dyle plan is? Ongoing and with a huge amount of discussion to go along with the story but it's well written and researched, and make a nice change from the typical WW2 AH concept of "what if the Germans did better?"
The Anglo-American / Nazi War - Germans beat the Soviet Union. America and Britain keep fighting. The results are....not pretty.

History from the 1870s to the 1930s interest me most. Yes, that does include World War I.

My favorite part in World War I was when the ice briefly melted. It might seem silly when on the topic of war, but I believe the world needs a bit more love in it. Being from a different country does not automatically make someone bad... At least, that is my belief.