Non-Parallellism in TL-191

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Mr.J

Since so much of the WWII-era books of TL-191 is extreme parallellism with the real WWII, I thought it would be interesting to have a thread about the bits of the series that avoid this parallellism. Here's what I've got:

1. There's no analog to Poland and the Baltic States in WWII, unless you consider Kentucky and Houston to be that. "Germany" and "The USSR" start out bordering each other.

2. There's really no "Western Front" for our Nazi-analog. It's interesting that Turtledove's alternate history ends up essentially giving us the Soviet perspective on WWII.

3. The Nazi-analog CSA focuses most of its genocidal atrocities on people inside its prewar borders, unlike in OTL, where most of Nazi Germany's victims were from Poland and the USSR. There's also little reference to anything like Generalplan Ost - the CSA doesn't seem to treat civillians in occupied US territories all that badly, I don't even remember a reference to them persecuting African-Americans in the occupied USA.

4. There's no analog to the expulsion of Germans from border areas after the war - the US doesn't kick all the Confederate loyalists out of Kentucky or northern Virginia. There is talk of sending the Mormons to Hawaii, but that's more like Stalin's wartime deporting of Volga Germans to Central Asia.

5. And of course, erzatz Hitler gets shot by a partisan instead of comitting suicide in his bunker.

Anything important that I've missed?
 

rvbomally

Since you mentioned Generalplan Ost, IIRC the Freedomite Confederacy didn't have plans to turn the USA into "living space." They also don't have a racial hatred against Yankees that is analogous to Nazi hatred of Slavs (although this can be easily explained as there being very little difference between white Yankees and white Confederates).

There seems to be no USA analogue, either: a somewhat isolated power that emerges from the war relatively unscathed (unless you count Japan).
 

Mr.J

Actually, Quebec as reverse-Vichy (or maybe Finland, post-1944?) makes some sense.

The Anglo-Canadians represent the OTL American South, I think: things are much better for them than in many other places, but they never ever shut up about how evil those Yankees are.
 

lord caedus

Some more for Hitler/Featherston:

1. In TL-191, Featherston's successor wasn't hand-picked by the dictator, possibly extra-legally; Partridge was simply elevated to the presidency after Featherston was killed, with no hints or cares about who Featherston would have wanted succeeding him.

2. Featherston did not win the CSA's equivalent to the Iron Cross

3. Featherston never tried to overthrow the CS government.

Other ways:

1. No Axis (?) collaborator governments in TL-191

2. No wide-spread suicide bombings in OTL WWII

3. Lack of lands occupied by ideologically opposed former allies in TL-191 (ex: post-WW2 Germany, Austria, Korea in OTL).
 

TR1

The only thing in common Al Smith and Charles La Follette have with Joseph Stalin is that they all call themselves Socialist. Their similarities begin and end there.

Smith doesn't even do anything as radical as the New Deal in 191 (which makes sense since Smith became an ardent critic of the New Deal in OTL). He and La Follette don't create gulags for the Democrats, don't slaughter their would-be enemies, and each stands for election.
 

Trotsky

The US-Confederate WWII has elements of a lot of different OTL fights in it. Eastern front with its Stalingrad-at-Pittsburgh, Western front 1940 with its Dunkirk-parallel at Lake Erie. Morrell's Crossing of the Ohio operation has lots of FORTITUDE-style deceptions, and since it opens the onset of the USA taking the fight into the CSA it reminds us of D-Day. Potter's raiders borrow heavily from Skorzeny's commandos. The Yankee parachutist-assault on the heights surrounding Chattanooga have the shock and surprise of both the Battle of Fort Eben-Emael and the Battle of Missionary Ridge. Patton's senseless counter-attacks around Atlanta are like John Bell Hood's. Martin's rampage through Georgia and South Carolina is obviously a more brutal Sherman's March. Featherston's flight from Richmond is almost just like the Jefferson Davis had, and ends in the same state.

So, lot's of little parallels in the details, but strewn about differently to give the story some measure of difference.
 

Polish Eagle

TR1 said:
The only thing in common Al Smith and Charles La Follette have with Joseph Stalin is that they all call themselves Socialist. Their similarities begin and end there.

Smith doesn't even do anything as radical as the New Deal in 191 (which makes sense since Smith became an ardent critic of the New Deal in OTL). He and La Follette don't create gulags for the Democrats, don't slaughter their would-be enemies, and each stands for election.
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Upton Sinclair is rather out-of-character, IMO, after he becomes POTUS.

Other non-parallelism: The European front in the Second Great War doesn't seem to have any OTL analogue. No nation is entirely overrun by anyone's forces (unless one considers the Dutch overrun), the fighting is relatively slow, and in fact there's hardly much difference between the Second and First Great War in Europe by the look of it.

There is no actual Communist (Marxist-Leninist-Lincolnist) state in TL-191. The ideology is never as 'discredited' as it was IOTL. Perhaps it'll eventually adopt Technocratic overtones, which Sinclair IOTL promoted, as a logical extension of a centrally planned economy. Marx-derived ideologies will be a lot more varied ITTL.
 

Trotsky

Also, there were lines here and there saying that the Confederates treated US citizens in their zones about as brutally as the US Army treated Confederate civilians. Hostage executions, lynching people who give them funny looks, things like that. And I recall a part in one of Cincinnatus Driver's scenes that mention Confederate Army soldiers acted worse around blacks in Kentucky and Ohio than Freedom Party members did (and then several more passages in Pinkard and Moss scenes claiming the Confederates never did anything to U.S. blacks in the USA. Huh.)

And while the Confederacy didn't outwardly show any signs to impose a Generalplan-Ost on the USA, it was made clear that Featherston was going to raise all sorts of hellacious horror on the USA if he had his way, including inspections armed to the teeth as well as additional wars for Jake's shits and giggles.
 

Trotsky

Polish Eagle said:
Other non-parallelism: The European front in the Second Great War doesn't seem to have any OTL analogue. No nation is entirely overrun by anyone's forces (unless one considers the Dutch overrun), the fighting is relatively slow, and in fact there's hardly much difference between the Second and First Great War in Europe by the look of it.
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There was that bloody nose the Allies got by invading Norway. Definitely a source of debacles for the British in both timelines.
 

Snake Featherston

Banned
Ironically Blackbeard itself is really the antithesis of OTL Barbarossa from a tactical, strategic, and operational concept. The Confederate army is fully mechanized, committed from the first enthusiastically to massed armor in combined arms offensives, the US Army is equally mechanized, but Blackbeard is a total strategic, operational, and tactical success, and accomplishes an obvious, visible goal of splitting the USA in two. At the same time Blackbeard is overrunning one US state while Barbarossa was much larger in scale, German victories, for all the deep strategic and operational flaws in them were far more dramatic and the Germans fumbled in the end stretch. Blackbeard was not that.

The second year of the war sees US versions of static Eastern Front warfare, but it sees suicide bombing, evidently very ineffective partisan warfare encouraged by the CSA (which the Nazis were very unwilling to do) and the CS strike at Pittsburgh is not quite OTL Stalingrad, which was another example of German tactical triumphs with barren strategic results that culminated in a massive gutting of German military power, and was concurrent with the beginning of a catastrophe in North Africa.

The ending phase of the war is directly analogous not at all to OTL WWII, nor does it really meet the OTL end of the US Civil War. The CSA attempts to derail the US strategic offensive and fails, but the CSA never goes for the Festungen tactic, Featherston realizes what the USA wants to do almost exactly (Hitler had an amazing tendency to grab the Idiot Ball when it came to Soviet offensives, to use one continual pattern), and the CSA collapses extremely rapidly in a process that indicates an Unreliable Narrator factor that shows the CSA's successes if covered as a timeline might be less dramatic than they appear. There's no Italian theater, Dodecanese campaign, Dieppe, renewed-Western-Front, no Soviet massive offensives in Ukraine, siege of and relief of Leningrad, or Operation Bagration. Morrell's March to the Sea and advances into Alabama and the Carolinas are also different from Sherman's in origin and nature: the CS Army was reduced in northern Tennessee *before* Atlanta without needing Thomas to fight and gut the Army of Tennessee or some equivalent, while the fall of Richmond resembles nothing in the OTL WWII battles of OTL in terms of city-fighting or impact on the war.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
The lack of an end-game is something that always bugged me about Jake Featherston. Hitler spent hours going on and on about his plan for what to do with all his winnings.

All Jake planned to do was "lick the damnyankees" and...

Yeah.
 

Snake Featherston

Banned
Trotsky said:
The US-Confederate WWII has elements of a lot of different OTL fights in it. Eastern front with its Stalingrad-at-Pittsburgh, Western front 1940 with its Dunkirk-parallel at Lake Erie. Morrell's Crossing of the Ohio operation has lots of FORTITUDE-style deceptions, and since it opens the onset of the USA taking the fight into the CSA it reminds us of D-Day. Potter's raiders borrow heavily from Skorzeny's commandos. The Yankee parachutist-assault on the heights surrounding Chattanooga have the shock and surprise of both the Battle of Fort Eben-Emael and the Battle of Missionary Ridge. Patton's senseless counter-attacks around Atlanta are like John Bell Hood's. Martin's rampage through Georgia and South Carolina is obviously a more brutal Sherman's March. Featherston's flight from Richmond is almost just like the Jefferson Davis had, and ends in the same state.

So, lot's of little parallels in the details, but strewn about differently to give the story some measure of difference.
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Patton's attacks aren't quite that bad. After all his major attack at Pikeville is noted by Morrell himself as derailing the first attempt to capture Chattanooga though ultimately barren of any real results. That's more Chickamauga than Hood. The March to the Sea of OTL was the result of Sherman's failure to capture or reduce the Army of Tennessee and part of a two-part gamble, the offensive IOTL is the result of an ambitious attempt to completely annihilate the offensive, meaning this is the *plan*, not the result of circumstances, which the OTL one was.
 

Snake Featherston

Banned
Wolfpaw said:
The lack of an end-game is something that always bugged me about Jake Featherston. Hitler spent hours going on and on about his plan for what to do with all his winnings.

All Jake planned to do was "lick the damnyankees" and...

Yeah.
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Well, there are indications Featherston was planning some rather nasty things overall, primarily in the first of the WWII books. His plans get upended by reality, which to an extent reflects what happened IOTL when the Germans realized they were in it for the long haul against the USSR and still had no means to knock the UK out of the war. The Germans were forced to start altering their plans somewhat by using Slavs as slave labor in Germany instead of simply starving major Soviet cities to death. Ironically this actually is a parallelism that's more accurate than most of Turtledove's attempts to shoehorn Confederates into the Nazis.

The other obvious no-parallels is the relative absence of Freedom Party uniforms.
 

Trotsky

Wolfpaw said:
The lack of an end-game is something that always bugged me about Jake Featherston. Hitler spent hours going on and on about his plan for what to do with all his winnings.

All Jake planned to do was "lick the damnyankees" and...

Yeah.
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Everything was personal with Featherston. Hitler wanted global domination. Featherston...wanted the USA to feel exactly how he felt at the end of the last war. I guess.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
I dunno about the lack of a "Second Front" in TL-191.

Dowling arguably leads a "second front" from New Mexico as the war progresses, eventually making enough gains to resurrect Houston, force the Texans to call it quits, and effectively end the War west of the Sabine.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
Trotsky said:
Wait, what? There are numerous references to Freedom Party uniforms, usually in some shade of gray.
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Butternut trousers and white shirts are the de facto Stalwart uniforms, but little mention is made of that otherwise, especially after the Stalwarts fell out of favor.

I suppose the overlapping between military butternut and Party butternut solved that particular issue.

All of the gray uniforms are explicitly Freedom Party Guard or some other auxiliary force.

Other than that, no official "uniform" or even armband or salute are specified. Apart from shouting, "Freedom!" which if anything is a sorta 1984 parallel.

Again, Turtledove mangles the chance at sketching out an authentic American fascism through simple silence...
 

Trotsky

Wolfpaw said:
Butternut trousers and white shirts are the de facto Stalwart uniforms, but little mention is made of that otherwise, especially after the Stalwarts fell out of favor.

I suppose the overlapping between military butternut and Party butternut solved that particular issue.

All of the gray uniforms are explicitly Freedom Party Guard or some other auxiliary force.
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The boys in the State Department and the diplomatic corps wear uniforms. The Justice Department has them. The Customs office has them -- Anne Colleton commented on how more sharp they looked than they had when she departed for France right after Featherston took over.

Other than that, no official "uniform" or even armband or salute are specified. Apart from shouting, "Freedom!" which if anything is a sorta 1984 parallel.
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There was that one scene of Dowling's where a captured Party guardsman folds his fist over his chest when he shouts "Freedom!" And I guess the one with Dover's wife doing a now-illegal "Freedom Party salute" but beyond those two vague references I don't know anything about it.
 
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