July Books 25) What Ifs?™ of American History

[nwhyte]

25) What Ifs?™ of American History, edited by Robert Cowley

I'd read the two previous volumes in this series, which are more global and less American in scope; loved the first one, less impressed by the second. This one concentrates on US history, and is generally pretty good - the one real dud is an essay on "What if Pearl Harbour hadn't happened

Comments

[matgb]

Interesting; I've got the first, and never got around to picking up the second; I did like McPherson's essay in the first book, might have to look into it when I've the time.

Counterfactual WWII History

[applez]

1. Hard to imagine a lack of a Pearl Harbor attack when it was carried out in a wider context of invading the Philippines and Singapore in the same season. I have an even harder time imagining an Imperial Navy letting an American threat persist as they carried out their anti-British plans, all the while suffering from a US fuel embargo to Japan.

2. Eisenhower in Berlin ... did it imagine a flood of surrendering Nazis instead of murderous Nazi/Sov destruction that we witnessed in actual history? Because if the US had to face Nazi resistance equal to that given to the Soviets, the US forces would have been incapable of being anything like the post-war anti-Communist bulwark that it became (it might even have ceased to exist as a cohesive fighting force). Frankly, only the Soviets could sustain those sort of losses, and still pose a threat to post-war Europe.

Also, did it envision Eisenhower in Berlin as an intentional task agreed upon in Yalta, or an opportunistic grab in the style of Patton in the Czechoslovakia?

Re: Counterfactual WWII History

[nwhyte]

1) Yes, you're right; and the scenario envisaged is that Pearl Harbour is cancelled due to a diplomatic fix, but the other Japanese attacks go ahead a little later anyway, and the war then proceeds as in our time-line. So not very interesting really.

2) The scenario was an opportunistic grab, facilitated by the fact that the Germans were much happier to surrender to Americans than Russians. The post-war occupation of Germany then goes back to our time-line - the zones and the division of Berlin were already agreed - but the impact is that the uranium stored in Berlin are then not available to the Russians who therefore don't develop their atomic bomb as quickly. Again, I'm not convinced it makes for a very interesting difference. As you rightly say, the Russians' strength in the late 1940s and early 1950s was in their conventional forces, and they built their bomb due to spying on the Americans; would it have made a lot of difference if they had taken until, say 1953 rather than 1949 to build their own?