Thu, Feb 4, 7:35 AM (4 days ago)

Mr. LaFond,

first of all, thank you very much for the PDF you sent me. I like that Harm City shit lots, yo.

Bob's story was awesome, and the poems framed the narration nicely. His words ring clear and true, and I could relate to him more than I thought I would.

The two settings really make quite the contrast though. Deer hunting in the Rockys sounds like paradise compared to the Harm City hellscape.

After I had read your recent WW II article, something unexpected happened. In broad daylight, the ghost of Andrey Vlassov appeared. He told me that you did not factor in possible German-Russian cooperation in your thought experiment. Had the German leadership been smarter, and actually trusted the slavic nationalist forces in the east, instead of alienating them, they might have kicked the evil wizards out of holy Russia by the end of 1941. This would have been easily justifiable, and not at odds with german goals at all.

When an industrialized nation finds the will to kill and goes to war, it can only be stopped by a larger industrialized nation. Do you think that the American war machine could have out-produced the combined efforts of Germany and a russian/ukranian satellite state, with a fully functioning forced labour force numbering in the millions? With swedish steel and the oil fields in the Kaukasus region, plus the arabian peninsula, eventually?

Stopping the war by nuke would have not been an option then. Nuking 1942 Berlin would have been a totally different affair than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, considering the state of german airforce technology, and them not being tied up in the eastern theatre.

Another important factor to consider: the german Enigma code sucked. It was cracked way to fast, which would have been an easily corrected mistake on the german side. All of this is highly speculative though.

Just playing the devil's advocate a little. The old russian spector blackmailed me, and threatened to haunt my sleep with dreams of blood and iron.

By the way, I recently saw a commercial ad for "The Myth of the 20th Century" in the memoir of teutonic war-chief "Must-not-be-named". Curious indeed.

-Brand the Rogue

Brand, you make very good points.

I would suggest you read Phillip Jose farmer's Two Hawks from Earth, a WWII science-fiction that is halfway between your very tempting scenario and mine. It was a good book and had two pilots, one Kraut and one Half-breed Yankee, go through a portal over the Polsti Oilfields and end up in an alternative dimension with lower tech Europe still mired in a WWI style conflict.

I am not the first to put the Germans and the Americans in a Cold War—I forgot what others did this in science-fiction, but recall two. My tactic is to make it as simple as possible and change as little as possible as I want recognizable historic characters in my story.

I have the Americans nuking Berlin in late 1945 and the Reich HQ relocating to Kiev, with the Med locked down by the Axis. Curtis Lemay would have sacrificed 1200 B-17s over Berlin just to exhaust air defense enough to enable a nuke strike. The fact that the U.S. High Command cared as little for American life as the other major combatants is not often discussed. The A-bombs are seen as a means to save American lives out of humanity, when it was really intended to keep the U.S. fresh to wage the phony Cold War. They wanted those men coming home to build the economic machine that was necessary to colonize the world and prop up and feed its cartoon enemy, the USSR.

One thing that you mention that I am placing at the key to Paton's tension with the "runt with the stash" he so dislikes but is allied with, is the question of the Soviet men who wanted to fight for the 3rd Reich, some 280,000, who Hitler did not trust. There is also the question of the Ukrainians specifically, 2-million of whom Von Paulis wanted to arm, but whom his master wanted exterminated or turned into slave labor. Patton's CSA task force, unable to draw replacements from the CSA, will be augmented by such men, placing Patton and the Fuhrer at odds, with Von Paulis stuck in the middle.

As far as production goes, beginning with gearing-up in 1939, by 1945, the U.S.A. would out produce in ships, planes and vehicles and all other war machines quantities greater than the rest of Planet Earth combined. Keep in mind that the U.S. never even adopted a war time economy by European standards. A Soviet style effort by the U.S. would have been truly like a science fiction planet from a Heinlein novel.

A direct science-fiction plot to give the Krauts a chance would have involved espionage concerning the enigma machine and the Jap ciphers as well.

Thanks for the input.