Alternate histories that are useless ideological wankery;

[underlankers]

There are a very few alternate history points of divergence that literally need intervention by God or a sufficiently-minded alien from the Q Continuum to bring them about. Sure, anything is possible but for some things improbability is far too overwhelming to make a decent story about them.

The first of these is a Nazi invasion of England via

Comments

[underlankers]

Not really, unless you mean to imply that S.M. Stirling and Harry Turtledove are closet Nazis. The stories one writes need not reflect the views of someone in the real world.

No, for Sealion to be remotely possible Germany needs something like Higgins Boats and fighters that were able to maintain a long-range strategic campaign. It had a tactical air force, the Allies had a strategic one. That's why Bomber Harris did successfully what Marshal Goering failed abysmally to do.

The other part of it is that Germany needs to do the air battle as early as remotely possible before the British had a chance to recover. As it was they dithered for a few weeks and the British rightfully won one of the most epic victories of World War II.

The Germans had real chances to win the war against the Soviet Union, but by the same token the Soviets also had opportunities to win the war earlier and at much less cost to themselves, which would have huge impacts on any alternate Cold War. Several million more living Soviets would be akin to a shorter World War I, which might mean for instance that Wilfred Owen has a postwar career in poetry.

The South had a fairly limited definition of victory, simple independence. The North had to conquer a region the size of European Russia, something two successive German regimes failed at but the North succeeded at. The twisted irony is that the 1860 Confederacy was like 1914 Russia: its best hopes were a short offensive campaign and all its industrial centers were at the crust of the South, while it had a self-inflicted starvation crisis that won the war more than the other side's army did.

True, but if someone's going to make a series out of something there's plenty of popular histories that offer well-rounded looks at what they'd be writing about. Not everyone should be able to get away with Lucas-level chicanery about bad story-writing even if they have cool scenes. *Some* research is preferable.