So, Russia' basically done as a power for the time being, leaving the world to be divided between a European League, Japan and an increasingly rising United States. Some hints as to the tensions that are going to be felt over the next few decades, which should be... interesting. Is there a sort of rivalry between the leading members of the League, or are they all on board with each other for the time being?
Two Suns Shall Set: A 20th-Century TL Without Nazis
- Status
AeroTheZealousOne
Monthly Donor
This is absolutely correct. Europe is essentially split between an Anglo-French-German dominated alliance (the new Entente) and an Italian-dominated one (the Mediterranean Pact, with Serbia making the "Triumvirate" name obsolete). Not to spoil too much, but Russia's economy will be a very large basket case for the duration of the coming decade, and the nation will be dirt poor while trying to rebuild in the 1970s after whoever wins the war takes power. The earliest they can even be considered a regional power would be in the 1980s, that's how bad off the country is.
Yes and no. There are definitely differing interests and rivalries between the members of the Entente (which will adopt the "European League" name in the 1970s, thanks for the idea!), nothing that will split the alliance apart. What mainly keeps them together are their differences with the Mediterranean Pact that dominates Southern Europe.
Sorry it took me so long to respond to this, I didn't even realize this was here! The next updates should be out this weekend, and Part 1 should finally be wrapped up nicely. Part 2 won't have any conventional wars on the scale of alt-WWII, so it should be much easier for me to write about certain things. And in-between the two parts, I'll drop an interlude and quite a few hints on the state of the world at the turn of the millennium while I'm at it!
Has Germany retaken all of the Polish corridor and Memel, or do Poland and Lithuania still have their own ports in Gdynia and Klaipeda?
Will Poland's pre-war borders be re-established in the East? An independent Belarus and Ukraine would likely want parts of the Kresy populated by their respective linguistic groups, so this could be a source of future conflict or civil unrest in Poland. An authoritarian government in Warsaw may take "revenge" on real or alleged soviet collaboration by deporting Belarusians and Ukrainians "home" to the newly independent republics, but a more conciliatory Polish elite could come to an accommodation involving bilingual education or autonomous regions in Kresy.
Will Poland's pre-war borders be re-established in the East? An independent Belarus and Ukraine would likely want parts of the Kresy populated by their respective linguistic groups, so this could be a source of future conflict or civil unrest in Poland. An authoritarian government in Warsaw may take "revenge" on real or alleged soviet collaboration by deporting Belarusians and Ukrainians "home" to the newly independent republics, but a more conciliatory Polish elite could come to an accommodation involving bilingual education or autonomous regions in Kresy.
AeroTheZealousOne
Monthly Donor
The answer to this is "yes". Germany has taken the northern half of the Polish corridor, but Poland has port access by railroad and a lease on parts of the port of Danzig/Gdansk. Germany gets most of Memel but agrees (with heated debate in the Reichstag and by a narrow margin) to allow Lithuania to own the port city of Klaipeda, now mere kilometers from the German border. While not technically a "compromise", it works out for both sides in some way or another.
I thought it wouldn't hurt to mention that Poznan hasn't changed hands and that land is still very much Polish.
Poland's pre-war borders are restored, much to the to the chagrin of Byelorussia and Ukraine. This will be just one of multiple points of contention across Europe in the 1960s which may or may not get "resolved" in the methods you have mentioned.
That sounds pretty reasonable, if Germany took all of Memel and the Corridor it would also have to internationalize traffic on the Neman and Vistula rivers. All but the most insane or stubborn German revanchists would still be trying to get back Poznan province by the 1950s, that makes sense.
Danzig's history is an interesting example of the interaction of politics and economics. The city's population saw themselves as German, but they depended on Polish traffic down the Vistula for customers. In 1925 Poland began construction of a port called Gdynia in Polish territory that overtook Danzig in shipping tonnage by 1933 (source: pages 193, 194 of this PDF). Gdynia had gone from a small town of ~12,000 in the mid-twenties to a population of 120,000 by 1939. A collapse in shipping revenue might've exacerbated the Great Depression for the Free City's economy, increased support for extremists like the NSDAP.
Access to Danzig's port is certainly helpful, but if Poland had to it might have been able to redirect most its cargo through Gdynia to starve Danzigers of revenue or survive a boycott of Polish shipping through Danzig (either as a uncooperative city, or if Germany retook Danzig and tried pressuring Warsaw into ceding the rest of the corridor to Germany).
Image Source
AeroTheZealousOne
Monthly Donor
Pop Culture Update for the 1950s should be coming sometime this week, followed by the 1960 "where are we now" update.
Anything (or anyone) you folks want to see what they're up to and what exists (and doesn't) in the 1950s ITTL?
Anything (or anyone) you folks want to see what they're up to and what exists (and doesn't) in the 1950s ITTL?
So I've been quite silent in this thread, but I would like to make some recommendations for your next update.
1. What would the top dogs of the film industry be doing for the 50s?
2. How would the US develop during this time?
3. What about the companies in Japan since they're still authoritarian? Nintendo? Sega? Sony? Matsushita?
Oh, and for the where are they now:
Albert Einstein
Fidel Castro
Che Guevara
Elvis Presley
1. What would the top dogs of the film industry be doing for the 50s?
2. How would the US develop during this time?
3. What about the companies in Japan since they're still authoritarian? Nintendo? Sega? Sony? Matsushita?
Oh, and for the where are they now:
Albert Einstein
Fidel Castro
Che Guevara
Elvis Presley
For me, there's one person I'd like to see in a "where are they now?" Yoshiyuki Tomino
Chapter 10: Laughter and Tears
AeroTheZealousOne
Monthly Donor
Sorry it took so long to get this meager update out. Also sorry it’s not as big and delicious as some of my others, but hopefully it satisfies you, and I can answer more questions below and beyond that I forgot to answer here. Happy New Year, by the way!
Regardless, here's:
The 1950s, while a grim time for most peoples, still saw the continued development of popular culture, especially for those whose homelands were untouched by warfare. But for those who were, military music became popular once again, as well as new songs telling of heroic feats by various soldiers of every rank from every army in Central and Eastern Europe. War music saw a natural resurgence in the Soviet Union until the war itself ended in 1956. This phenomenon did not stop in Japan, however, and even after the war many songs and ballads were penned about the Imperial Japanese Army’s exploits in China and Siberia, the former more heroically and the latter with more dark and somber themes. Even with the themes of the glory of war, the portrayal of it as hellish was explored in an infamous Italian film released in early 1959 known as La Fabbrica Degli Incubi, or in English as The Factory of Nightmares. Set in the Carpathian Mountains of the former Romania, the movie takes place after the collapse of the Iron Guard, and where Bulgarian soldiers learn more about the atrocities committed by the Romanian government and various people alike. The movie was released and subtitled across the rest of Europe, even beyond the metaphorical “Alpine Wall”[1].
Meanwhile, Japan’s biggest hits from the 1950s included two major movies. The first one is called "Chikyū kara tsuki e" (地球から月へ; known in English as From Earth to Moon), a 1955 adaptation of Jules Verne’s 1865 book of a similar name reimagined and set in Meiji-era Japan. The film focuses upon a group of wealthy friends in Nagasaki, as well as a Dutch trader who has taken residence in the nation after the end of the Sakoku period. The movie is, aside from obvious major cultural alterations and a minor timeshift to the 1880s, surprisingly faithful to the book with deep analysis, and is an instant hit in the later years of the Second World War. The second big hit of the decade was the 1951 classic "Shanhai de shi-kakan" (上海で四日間; eng. Four Days in Shanghai), a film inspired by Hollywood’s big-budget crime movies, centering around the death of detective Satoru Yoshida from mysterious causes. His daughter, Hana, tasks herself with taking up the case and trying to find out who was responsible for her father's death while trying to shut down an illegal opium smuggling ring. Other major characters in the movie include Taro, a rogue man with the lineage of a samurai who Hana falls in love with and employs to help crack the case; and Echigoya, crime boss and smuggler looking to set up shop in one of the richest cities on the coast of China. The movie ends on a bittersweet note, with Echigoya and his hired mercenaries dead, but with the sacrifice of Hana’s childhood friend Kame in dispatching her father's killer, a noted figure in the yakuza and with links to Echigoya. The movie has many themes that were considered “questionable” by the Japanese authorities, including numerous suggestions of corruption of the bureaucracy and the army, as well as suggesting that China was a crime-filled cesspool (which, at the time, was not an unfair claim) but ultimately nothing was cut in the end, as the Japanese protagonists were shown with a moral high ground compared to the Chinese who were either viewed neutrally or negatively, depending on the scene and the context[2].
The Soviet Union after the war was in dire straits, and so too were the ministries that regulated and promoted the arts. Funding was drying up, but there was one film that managed to become the talk of the nation, as well as a cult classic once smuggled into the West a decade and a half later: Medvurok[3]. The 1958 film without any big-name actors (but with a small cameo made by one Nikolai Bulganin) is not a “success” per se, but it distracted people from the dreariness of daily life long enough for Nikolai Yezhov to realize how terribly screwed he was as General Secretary, enough so that right before the fighting broke out, he was relieved of his position and succeeded by someone arguably just as ruthless: Former NKVD Director Lavrentiy Beria.
In the world’s… well, world of literature, many great books were written during this decade: J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye[4], Harper Lee’s My Least Favorite Life[5], George Orwell’s Nineteen-Ninety Five[6], and Edward Murrow’s memoirs in journalism compiled in Red Warsaw[7]. One of the greatest films from the United States was, after months spent rewriting over four-fifths of the movie’s script, Rebels Without Causes[8]. Released in 1956 and starring young actors John Cash and Norma Jeane, as well as a “mentor figure” played by Ronald Reagan, the film was an instant hit and propelled the former two figures to stardom. Other notable films included the 1950 release of King Solomon’s Mines[9], Disney’s animated film Cinderella[10], The Conqueror of Asia[11] starring John Wayne, and The Captain's Wife[12] starring Nancy Gable.
In the world of music, a new turbulent form of it was developing in the mostly peaceful United States of America. Coined "rock and roll", or more commonly known as "rock music", this exciting fusion of rhythm and blues, country, jazz, and other popular genres of the time took off in the American South and even some cities in the north, but it wasn't until figures such as John Cash, Elvis Presley, and Chuck Berry, among quite a few others[13], would be propelled to stardom and everlasting fame. When these men die over the course of the next five to six decades, their music never will.
List of World Series Winning Teams, 1951-1960:
1951: Boston Red Sox
1952: Cincinnati Reds
1953: Boston Red Sox
1954: Cleveland Indians
1955: Cleveland Indians [14]
1956: Brooklyn Dodgers
1957: Detroit Tigers
1958: Chicago Cubs [15]
1959: Pittsburgh Pirates
1960: Brooklyn Dodgers [16]
List of FIFA World Cup Winning Countries, 1954-1962:
1954: Brazil
1958: Italy
1962: Germany
List of Olympic Games, 1960-1972:
1960 (Winter): Sapporo, Japan
1960 (Summer): Dublin, Ireland
1964 (Winter): Turin, Italy
1964 (Summer): Sydney, Australia
1968 (Winter): Toronto, Ontario, Canada
1968 (Summer): Paris, France
1972 (Winter): Bern, Switzerland
1972 (Summer): Tokyo, Japan
[1] This name is most analogous to the Iron Curtain as proclaimed by Churchill in our timeline. Like how there actually isn’t a hotline between Washington and Moscow, the only thing dividing France from Italy and Czechoslovakia from Hungary (besides geopolitics and a variance on authoritarianism) is a moderately-guarded chain-link fence that goes up over the years of 1958 and 1959, rather than a wall. Switzerland is, curiously enough, not fenced off by either side.
[2] The movie is essentially a loose “cross-timeline adaptation” and a slightly darker variant of the storyline of the Edo World in the video game Final Fantasy Legend II, one of the first video games I played growing up that wasn’t Tetris. FFL2 unfortunately does not exist ITTL, from a combination of decades of butterflies, not to mention the unfortunate situation Japan finds herself in down the road...
[3] A portmanteau of the Russian words for “marmot” and “bear”, this fictitious animal is this timeline’s Godzilla stand-in, wreaking havoc across Siberia and any poor soul that finds itself within the path of the large radioactive creature. A cheap set filled with toys, models, and toy models was used to represent the cities of Irkutsk (which was not bombed in World War II) and Vladivostok (which was heavily bombed with non-nuclear weapons and no longer owned by Russia). Medvurok is killed in an barrage of Katyusha rockets filled with biochemical weaponry, rather than an “oxygen destroyer”, but its own environmental impact begins mutating more creatures, and the war on the new “enemy of the people” begins.
[4] The contents of this book are similar to OTL, and while it only sells about four-fifths of the copies it sold IOTL between 1951 and 1971, it’s still considered a success and an important book in America.
[5] An ungodly yet actually darn good amalgamation of To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman, here published in early 1958. No details other than that it’s a lot closer to the former book, i.e. Atticus Finch is not a racist, and yes, there is a courtroom scene that is ingrained into the minds of millions of Americans alike. But it’s set in the 1950s and it’s the closest thing we get to a Red Scare allegory since said scare is somewhat smaller ITTL and Arthur Miller never writes The Crucible. I cannot confirm nor deny a movie adaptation starring Gregory Peck in the 1960s.
[6] This book is written in 1958, published in 1959, and shows the world polarized into three super-nations that are cosmetically different, each with the worst aspects of Soviet-style communism, Legionary repression, and Western complacency all rolled into one. The bulk of the book is fairly similar to its OTL incarnation, but the ending, while not a good or a bad one, leaves much room for interpretation and guessing as to the fate of its protagonist, Hugh Mason.
[7] He and his correspondents spend much of the war in Czechoslovakia, as an interesting misnomer. The Murrow Boys, are they are still called ITTL, covered many of the discoveries in Romania as they happened, the Siege of Berlin (where all made it out safely), the front lines in Czechoslovakia until 1954, Poland after 1954, and a distant shot of the destruction of Smolensk in the fall of 1956.
[8] Unlike a number of examples above, this media differs heavily from its OTL incarnation. Think some of the more notable scenes from this movie mixed with American Graffiti and the scenes of 1955 in Back To The Future, rather than the masterpiece from OTL starring James Dean, who never goes into acting here. Both of these movies are butterflied, in case you wanted to ask.
[9] As OTL.
[10] As OTL.
[11] Actually (sort of) about Alexander The Great, rather than Genghis Khan. Nobody ever sees the silly image of John Wayne in a fu manchu (though he does get to wear some ancient-looking armor replicas and instead looks silly in those), and the lack of radioactive fallout in the southwestern United States helps in not killing off most of its actors and producers. The film is a box office success and the highest-grossing movie of the decade, and saves CinemaScope from bankruptcy, something it was teetering on for the previous five years in TTL.
[12] A movie original to TTL set in the fictional town of Gruenburg, Germany, during World War II. Her husband is on the front lines, and when the Soviets invade and capture her hometown, she becomes a partisan fighter, instrumental to the resistance until her capture and imprisonment in a makeshift labor camp. She's liberated in 1954, coincidentally by the same regiment her husband is in. This story is loosely based on a true story ITTL about an army captain's wife who becomes an almost-fearless anti-Soviet partisan.
[13] Some more rock artists in the next update! The development of it in the 1950s, aside from small butterflies and minor changes to aesthetic, is essentially unchanged from our world.
[14] The Cleveland Indians are clearly a team that has benefited quite nicely from the changes to the world.
[15] This “curse” is broken sixty years ahead of schedule. On the other hand, actions that might or might not have superstitious origins prevent the Detroit Tigers from winning another baseball game for quite a long while.
[16] The Dodgers don’t get traded to Los Angeles ITTL. My knowledge on baseball is somewhat limited, and on other sports even more so, so I probably won’t detail too much on this. It’s something to keep in mind going forward, though, if you're into it. Other trades will occur ITTL, so I'll put those in footnotes where applicable.
Regardless, here's:
CHAPTER 10: Laughter and Tears
The 1950s, while a grim time for most peoples, still saw the continued development of popular culture, especially for those whose homelands were untouched by warfare. But for those who were, military music became popular once again, as well as new songs telling of heroic feats by various soldiers of every rank from every army in Central and Eastern Europe. War music saw a natural resurgence in the Soviet Union until the war itself ended in 1956. This phenomenon did not stop in Japan, however, and even after the war many songs and ballads were penned about the Imperial Japanese Army’s exploits in China and Siberia, the former more heroically and the latter with more dark and somber themes. Even with the themes of the glory of war, the portrayal of it as hellish was explored in an infamous Italian film released in early 1959 known as La Fabbrica Degli Incubi, or in English as The Factory of Nightmares. Set in the Carpathian Mountains of the former Romania, the movie takes place after the collapse of the Iron Guard, and where Bulgarian soldiers learn more about the atrocities committed by the Romanian government and various people alike. The movie was released and subtitled across the rest of Europe, even beyond the metaphorical “Alpine Wall”[1].
Meanwhile, Japan’s biggest hits from the 1950s included two major movies. The first one is called "Chikyū kara tsuki e" (地球から月へ; known in English as From Earth to Moon), a 1955 adaptation of Jules Verne’s 1865 book of a similar name reimagined and set in Meiji-era Japan. The film focuses upon a group of wealthy friends in Nagasaki, as well as a Dutch trader who has taken residence in the nation after the end of the Sakoku period. The movie is, aside from obvious major cultural alterations and a minor timeshift to the 1880s, surprisingly faithful to the book with deep analysis, and is an instant hit in the later years of the Second World War. The second big hit of the decade was the 1951 classic "Shanhai de shi-kakan" (上海で四日間; eng. Four Days in Shanghai), a film inspired by Hollywood’s big-budget crime movies, centering around the death of detective Satoru Yoshida from mysterious causes. His daughter, Hana, tasks herself with taking up the case and trying to find out who was responsible for her father's death while trying to shut down an illegal opium smuggling ring. Other major characters in the movie include Taro, a rogue man with the lineage of a samurai who Hana falls in love with and employs to help crack the case; and Echigoya, crime boss and smuggler looking to set up shop in one of the richest cities on the coast of China. The movie ends on a bittersweet note, with Echigoya and his hired mercenaries dead, but with the sacrifice of Hana’s childhood friend Kame in dispatching her father's killer, a noted figure in the yakuza and with links to Echigoya. The movie has many themes that were considered “questionable” by the Japanese authorities, including numerous suggestions of corruption of the bureaucracy and the army, as well as suggesting that China was a crime-filled cesspool (which, at the time, was not an unfair claim) but ultimately nothing was cut in the end, as the Japanese protagonists were shown with a moral high ground compared to the Chinese who were either viewed neutrally or negatively, depending on the scene and the context[2].
The Soviet Union after the war was in dire straits, and so too were the ministries that regulated and promoted the arts. Funding was drying up, but there was one film that managed to become the talk of the nation, as well as a cult classic once smuggled into the West a decade and a half later: Medvurok[3]. The 1958 film without any big-name actors (but with a small cameo made by one Nikolai Bulganin) is not a “success” per se, but it distracted people from the dreariness of daily life long enough for Nikolai Yezhov to realize how terribly screwed he was as General Secretary, enough so that right before the fighting broke out, he was relieved of his position and succeeded by someone arguably just as ruthless: Former NKVD Director Lavrentiy Beria.
In the world’s… well, world of literature, many great books were written during this decade: J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye[4], Harper Lee’s My Least Favorite Life[5], George Orwell’s Nineteen-Ninety Five[6], and Edward Murrow’s memoirs in journalism compiled in Red Warsaw[7]. One of the greatest films from the United States was, after months spent rewriting over four-fifths of the movie’s script, Rebels Without Causes[8]. Released in 1956 and starring young actors John Cash and Norma Jeane, as well as a “mentor figure” played by Ronald Reagan, the film was an instant hit and propelled the former two figures to stardom. Other notable films included the 1950 release of King Solomon’s Mines[9], Disney’s animated film Cinderella[10], The Conqueror of Asia[11] starring John Wayne, and The Captain's Wife[12] starring Nancy Gable.
In the world of music, a new turbulent form of it was developing in the mostly peaceful United States of America. Coined "rock and roll", or more commonly known as "rock music", this exciting fusion of rhythm and blues, country, jazz, and other popular genres of the time took off in the American South and even some cities in the north, but it wasn't until figures such as John Cash, Elvis Presley, and Chuck Berry, among quite a few others[13], would be propelled to stardom and everlasting fame. When these men die over the course of the next five to six decades, their music never will.
List of World Series Winning Teams, 1951-1960:
1951: Boston Red Sox
1952: Cincinnati Reds
1953: Boston Red Sox
1954: Cleveland Indians
1955: Cleveland Indians [14]
1956: Brooklyn Dodgers
1957: Detroit Tigers
1958: Chicago Cubs [15]
1959: Pittsburgh Pirates
1960: Brooklyn Dodgers [16]
List of FIFA World Cup Winning Countries, 1954-1962:
1954: Brazil
1958: Italy
1962: Germany
List of Olympic Games, 1960-1972:
1960 (Winter): Sapporo, Japan
1960 (Summer): Dublin, Ireland
1964 (Winter): Turin, Italy
1964 (Summer): Sydney, Australia
1968 (Winter): Toronto, Ontario, Canada
1968 (Summer): Paris, France
1972 (Winter): Bern, Switzerland
1972 (Summer): Tokyo, Japan
[1] This name is most analogous to the Iron Curtain as proclaimed by Churchill in our timeline. Like how there actually isn’t a hotline between Washington and Moscow, the only thing dividing France from Italy and Czechoslovakia from Hungary (besides geopolitics and a variance on authoritarianism) is a moderately-guarded chain-link fence that goes up over the years of 1958 and 1959, rather than a wall. Switzerland is, curiously enough, not fenced off by either side.
[2] The movie is essentially a loose “cross-timeline adaptation” and a slightly darker variant of the storyline of the Edo World in the video game Final Fantasy Legend II, one of the first video games I played growing up that wasn’t Tetris. FFL2 unfortunately does not exist ITTL, from a combination of decades of butterflies, not to mention the unfortunate situation Japan finds herself in down the road...
[3] A portmanteau of the Russian words for “marmot” and “bear”, this fictitious animal is this timeline’s Godzilla stand-in, wreaking havoc across Siberia and any poor soul that finds itself within the path of the large radioactive creature. A cheap set filled with toys, models, and toy models was used to represent the cities of Irkutsk (which was not bombed in World War II) and Vladivostok (which was heavily bombed with non-nuclear weapons and no longer owned by Russia). Medvurok is killed in an barrage of Katyusha rockets filled with biochemical weaponry, rather than an “oxygen destroyer”, but its own environmental impact begins mutating more creatures, and the war on the new “enemy of the people” begins.
[4] The contents of this book are similar to OTL, and while it only sells about four-fifths of the copies it sold IOTL between 1951 and 1971, it’s still considered a success and an important book in America.
[5] An ungodly yet actually darn good amalgamation of To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman, here published in early 1958. No details other than that it’s a lot closer to the former book, i.e. Atticus Finch is not a racist, and yes, there is a courtroom scene that is ingrained into the minds of millions of Americans alike. But it’s set in the 1950s and it’s the closest thing we get to a Red Scare allegory since said scare is somewhat smaller ITTL and Arthur Miller never writes The Crucible. I cannot confirm nor deny a movie adaptation starring Gregory Peck in the 1960s.
[6] This book is written in 1958, published in 1959, and shows the world polarized into three super-nations that are cosmetically different, each with the worst aspects of Soviet-style communism, Legionary repression, and Western complacency all rolled into one. The bulk of the book is fairly similar to its OTL incarnation, but the ending, while not a good or a bad one, leaves much room for interpretation and guessing as to the fate of its protagonist, Hugh Mason.
[7] He and his correspondents spend much of the war in Czechoslovakia, as an interesting misnomer. The Murrow Boys, are they are still called ITTL, covered many of the discoveries in Romania as they happened, the Siege of Berlin (where all made it out safely), the front lines in Czechoslovakia until 1954, Poland after 1954, and a distant shot of the destruction of Smolensk in the fall of 1956.
[8] Unlike a number of examples above, this media differs heavily from its OTL incarnation. Think some of the more notable scenes from this movie mixed with American Graffiti and the scenes of 1955 in Back To The Future, rather than the masterpiece from OTL starring James Dean, who never goes into acting here. Both of these movies are butterflied, in case you wanted to ask.
[9] As OTL.
[10] As OTL.
[11] Actually (sort of) about Alexander The Great, rather than Genghis Khan. Nobody ever sees the silly image of John Wayne in a fu manchu (though he does get to wear some ancient-looking armor replicas and instead looks silly in those), and the lack of radioactive fallout in the southwestern United States helps in not killing off most of its actors and producers. The film is a box office success and the highest-grossing movie of the decade, and saves CinemaScope from bankruptcy, something it was teetering on for the previous five years in TTL.
[12] A movie original to TTL set in the fictional town of Gruenburg, Germany, during World War II. Her husband is on the front lines, and when the Soviets invade and capture her hometown, she becomes a partisan fighter, instrumental to the resistance until her capture and imprisonment in a makeshift labor camp. She's liberated in 1954, coincidentally by the same regiment her husband is in. This story is loosely based on a true story ITTL about an army captain's wife who becomes an almost-fearless anti-Soviet partisan.
[13] Some more rock artists in the next update! The development of it in the 1950s, aside from small butterflies and minor changes to aesthetic, is essentially unchanged from our world.
[14] The Cleveland Indians are clearly a team that has benefited quite nicely from the changes to the world.
[15] This “curse” is broken sixty years ahead of schedule. On the other hand, actions that might or might not have superstitious origins prevent the Detroit Tigers from winning another baseball game for quite a long while.
[16] The Dodgers don’t get traded to Los Angeles ITTL. My knowledge on baseball is somewhat limited, and on other sports even more so, so I probably won’t detail too much on this. It’s something to keep in mind going forward, though, if you're into it. Other trades will occur ITTL, so I'll put those in footnotes where applicable.
End of Part I
Last edited:
Bonus Update: Where Are They Now? (1960)
AeroTheZealousOne
Monthly Donor
Here's the long-awaited update listing what certain people are up to, as well as how may of the world's nations are faring!
NATIONS:
[1] You’re allowed one guess as to what this conflict will have indirect parallels to, aside from TTL’s low-level Palestinian Conflict in the 1940s. I foreshadowed this earlier and with a certain lack of subtlety in response.
[2] Tsar Boris III is dead as of 1958. Long Live The Tsar!
[3] Henry Wallace was never Vice-President, either. Or Ambassador to any nation in particular.
[4] A paraphrasing of an OTL quote in To Kill a Mockingbird.
[5] Japanese name for the city of Seoul, known during the occupation in Korea as Gyeongseong and known beforehand as Hanseong.
[6] Perhaps unrealistially young to go into space, but in Japan, they do certain things both good and bad For Science.
[7] This was obligatory. I have nothing to apologize for.
[8] Yes, Austria is finally integrated with Germany. "But what about Versailles?" What about Versailles?
NATIONS:
- The United States of America is doing well for itself. Not perfect, mind you, since there are plenty of those in the Deep South who are mad about this whole “civil rights” thing thanks to President Dirksen. The cries for maintaining the status quo are going to get worse before they gets better, though. The economy is doing well, the economic miracle of the forties and fifties slowly beginning to subside at this point. Their stuff is selling well overseas, though, so that’s a plus. Alaska and Hawaii are not states, but this may very well change by the decade’s end.
- The United Kingdom avoided much of the damage and bombings of its counterpart from our world. The Soviets did scare them a little bit on the east coast, but it was nothing the RAF couldn’t handle. Even though there’s still euphoria in the air after the war, all good things must come to an end, with Zionism on the rise in Eastern Europe and calls for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Low-level conflict has occurred since the forties in Palestine, cooled off during World War II, and if things don’t change, there might even be an independence war in the region.
- Britain’s Crown Jewel, India, has been dealing with considerable civil unrest and nonviolent protest over the past few decades, and in the fifties, less emphasis on “nonviolent” and more emphasis on “protest”, even sparking riots. Have the British learned anything at all from 1776?
- France didn’t get invaded at all. The Maginot Line is just sitting there, not heavily mobilized, and already there are politicians talking about having it converted into either a museum, or a line of fallout shelters. After all, the French and Germans, for all it’s worth, are closer than they ever have been before, and part of it might just get converted into a museum one day. Culture is booming in the postwar once again, and the social conservatism that swept the nation and Europe in the forties is coming once again in the sixties.
- Germany has a lot of work to do rebuilding. The damage done in the Civil War pales to the ruinous landscape caused by vicious fighting in World War II. In spite of this, the Kaiser is relatively popular, and while Austria’s recent integration with Germany had raised the eyebrows of older generations who fought in the First World War, there are not many people in power across the Rhine and the Channel who care to protest.
- Italy as of 1957 is now under the rule of Duce Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s successor. Ciano is much more moderate in his approach to fascism, and Italy’s future, and the future of the Mediterranean Alliance, might be one of semi-authoritarian democracy. Regardless, economic liberalization is on the table, but political freedom is not pushed as highly… yet.
- Iberia is doing well for itself, mostly. Aside from skepticism on their “freedom” by onlookers, the nation is one of the best places to be in the world, so long as you’re not anywhere further right than social conservatism. The biggest problems facing the country are some Portuguese loyalists and anti-communist agitators, but most others dissatisfied with Spanish-dominated Iberia have since fled to Brazil or have emigrated elsewhere. Iberian politics are now dominated by Syndicalist factions of government, and increased worker control and self-management will have a strong influence on other left-wing movements across the world with Marxism-Leninism seemingly discredited in the eyes of many.
- The Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg had no qualms about letting allied troops walk right on through to fight against the Russian Army, mere miles away from their territory. Aside from this, they avoided the horrors of war and their economies have remained stable through the decade. Overall, for the time being, life’s good. Will they join the European Entente? Maybe, especially when they consider all the delicious economic incentives there are for them to do so...
- Poland, like Germany, is in shambles and needs a lot of rebuilding. Fortunately for Poland, Germany is willing to help once they’re back on their feet. On the other hand, this means that to cover this, Germany is going to want a little bit of land, specifically, some areas west of Posen/Poznan, and Danzig/Gdansk.
- Hungary is going to pull a Germany for Czechoslovakia (Poland ITTL, not the Sudetenland IOTL) once Italy helps them out a bit by paying Czechoslovakia for land in the southern part of the country. It will be years before they reach their prewar economic status and standard of living, yet things could be worse. A lot worse. But they won’t be for the Hungarian people.
- Illyria, a federation of eastern Slovenia, Croatia, and much of Bosnia under the aging Marshal Josip Broz Tito is in need of reconstruction, like so many other places. A decade of conflict isn’t good for anyone, except maybe the military-industrial complex. Illyria doesn’t have one of those, but what they do have is a friend by the name of Iberia to help out. What Iberia won’t be helping with, though, are the numerous border disputes, not to mention religious sectarian conflict between Illyria and Greater Serbia that will later be euphemistically known as the “Teskoce” (pronounced Tesh-ko-che), or “The Difficulties”.[1]
- Greater Serbia is as new as Illyria, established from the aftermath of the drawn-out Balkan Conflict, beginning earlier and ending later than the main phase of the Second World War. Maintaining the monarchy of old Yugoslavia, Greater Serbia is a Balkan country controlling, on top of the obvious, Montenegro. Macedonia was ceded to Bulgaria and Vojvodina to Hungary in the final treaty, but at least the Triumvirate, now the Mediterranean Pact, was nice enough to consider reconciliation and allow them to join in exchange for internal help. The fact that Illyria even exists is an absolute disgrace, not to mention all of those oppressed Serbians in the border regions. The Teskoce is going to take a long time to reconcile and end at this rate.
- Bulgaria could be in worse condition after Romania’s Roaring Rampage in the late forties and early into 1950. They’ve recovered marginally since then, and much progress still needs to be made, but Tsar Simeon II[2] is ready to take on the challenges of the postwar world.
- Greece has actually been pretty quiet over the past couple of years. They still want Northern Epirus from the Italian puppet state of Albania, but barring a collapse of the Italian Empire, this won’t happen. The 4th of August Regime was butterflied away, and the monarchy is still in place. The people are apathetic to it, simply because life is good enough for the time being. Not great, but good.
- The Voivodeship of Wallachia, one of the three former territories of Romania, is in ruins, and is a proxy state part of the Mediterranean Pact. Those who are left behind are incredibly remorseful for their role they played in one of the cruelest dictatorships of the twentieth century and its permanent scarring of the eastern Balkans. Revanchism still exists, even though Legionarism is outright banned in the 1958 Constitution. The state is still under military occupation, but civilian rule is expected to return by 1962 at the absolute earliest.
- The Kingdom of Moldavia is now overseen by King Michael I, having lived in exile for nearly two decades of his brief lifetime. Signs of recovery are there, and many sections of the Moldavian Front will eventually become national historical sites and memorials to the war, the victims of the "Epoca Neagră", translated roughly into English as the "Black Years". Moldavia is the only one of the three former Romanian regions created after World War II that was not a puppet government of any other nation, but being a liberal constitutional monarchy with extensive powers to the parliamentary bodies. Moldavia’s aligned with the European Entente.
- The Transylvanian Republic, for the moment, has the most political freedom (read: though communists and Guardists are banned) of the three post-Romanian states. Essentially a republic under Hungarian oversight, this nation is known for the places where many were systematically wiped from the realm of the living by an ideology. Remaining underground diehard Legionaries carry out small attacks against occupying Hungarians forces. They don't do it more than once.
- Does the terrible situation that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics finds itself in as of the early 1960s need reiterated? If so, General Secretary Nikolai Yezhov’s hold on power is a tenuous one, and many power struggles boil beneath him. The defeat in World War II and the numerous reparations have driven the Soviet economy into the ground, and famine from drought and serious mismanagement is imminent. Lavrentiy Beria and Lazar Kaganovich, among others, are plotting their next moves...
- Imperial Japan is a land where the sun has reached high noon, seizing land in southeastern Russia, adding disputed land to Manshukoku, and tightening its grip on the occupied Chinese coast. It looks like the Japanese Juggernaut cannot be stopped at this point, but what few know or have figured out at this point is that it’s all downhill from here, starting with a stirring in Southeast Asia...
- Nationalist China has decided that it’s going to sue for peace with Japan soon, in order to combat the Communist forces that just won’t die already. Sure, the loss of numerous treaty ports, major coastal cities, and Manchuria as a whole is something that is unforgivable, but better a sitting duck than a red, am I right?
- Communist China has made gains, and is suffering losses. Nothing is pouring through Mongolia anymore, and the war effort might just simply collapse if nothing is done. Perhaps a truce with the reactionaries to the south is in order, right?
- Sweden… actually hasn’t changed too much from OTL, aside from the whole "trading with fascists" business, which they simply don’t do a whole lot of, not even to Italy. There are different politicians with different roles coming in sooner or later, but life hasn’t changed too drastically for the average Swede, except that this strange thing the Americans call “eugenics” is sort of becoming popular again after falling from the mainstream in the 1940s...
- Finland has a lot more land than OTL, seizing Karelia and areas north, and south all the way to the northern border of Petrozavodsk. The guerilla fighting in the Second World War helped Finland stay independent, and perhaps peace can set in after hundreds of thousands of patriotic Finns are now dead and martyred.
- Norway avoided World War II, and hosted the 1952 Summer Olympics. With the mess that Europe was in, the Olympics were almost cancelled, but they went on with less participation than usual. This means that the United States won an overwhelming majority of gold medals, and since Japan did not involve itself with Russia until early 1953, they won second place overall, followed by the home heroes of Norway, then Spain, then Switzerland. Norway is, aside from language, in a similar situation to Sweden on neutrality and “science”, though they do have their leanings towards Western Europe...
- Denmark watched from the sidelines as the Soviet Union invaded their southern neighbor. It’s a miracle that they were spared from the fighting, but the German city of Kiel did a nice job making any possible establishment of the “Danish Socialist Republic” all but a pipe dream.
- Ireland is yet another country that ate popcorn while blood was spilled across Europe en masse for the second time in a century. Sure, nothing’s perfect, as the British still control Ulster and relations could be worse, but the Catholic Church still has its ever-present influence on Irish politics, and they’re no longer part of the Commonwealth as of 1952. If the cards of everyone are played correctly, Ulster might have a solution in less than ten years’ time with very little paramilitary fighting, and maybe a deal could be struck up with the Unionists, conditions permitting.
- Iran is a quiet place. If it weren’t for taking on Europe, the Soviets might have targeted the small nation. This was not the case, and the Pahlavi Dynasty is still in power, no coup required.
- Turkey is as quiet as Iran. Hasan Saka, Inonu's successor, will be out of office by the end of this year, and Adnan Menderes will succeed him, beginning another quiet era in Turkish history. Or so it is hoped.
- Siam, soon to be better known as Thailand, is a nation that is part of Japan’s Co-Prosperity Sphere, one of the three major sides in the new “Shadow War” that is taking place. They’re still a backwater nation that somehow avoided falling into the grubby hands of European imperialists, but out of necessity, Siam has aligned with Japan, and their role in an upcoming proxy conflict next door will be a most vital one.
- Brazil is still under the government of Getulio Vargas, now in his late seventies. He plans on stepping down soon, and whoever will lead the only Portuguese-speaking nation in South America next is anyone’s guess. Perhaps there might even be a restoration of democracy...or not.
- Argentina is doing nothing to protect Romanian, Soviet, or Allied war criminals, seeing as most are dead, underground, imprisoned, or dead and underground while imprisoned. The current President of the country is none other than Carlos Humberto Perette, not necessarily on good terms with the United States but at least the Argentine economy has made a full recovery since the early 1940s. Also helping is the lack of asylum-seekers from Germany.
- Mexico, under Adolfo Lopez Mateos, is doing just fine on its own, and for the moment, not too much has changed from OTL, aside from the fact that the Bracero Program does not happen ITTL. Increased U.S. focus towards Central and South America going forward here does, however, mean that the butterflies will soon flap their wings much faster.
- Canada gets tens of thousands of roses from Czechoslovakia every year for their major role in the Liberation of Plzen. Being part of the Commonwealth meant that they fought in the war too, but otherwise, Canada’s just Canada. What else needs said aboot it, eh?
- Robert Alphonso Taft, a former Senator from Ohio, served as the 36th President of the United States from 1949 until 1953, stepping down His legacy as of the present day is a mixed one, with some lauding him as one of the better Presidents of the 20th century by keeping the U.S. out of one of the most destructive wars in history, and others criticizing him from for his staunch anti-labor stances and his fiscal policies both directly and indirectly leading to global economic disaster roughly two decades after he left office. He did not survive his bout with pancreatic cancer, dying not long after he left office in 1953.
- Adlai Ewing Stevenson II is a former governor of Illinois and is currently a Congressman, but his term is halfway over and he's not going to run again. He ran on the Democratic ticket against Dirksen in 1956 but lost resoundingly against a relatively popular peacetime President.
- Everett McKinley Dirksen is the 38th and incumbent President of the United States, first elected in 1953. He'll be the last Republican in office for some time, but that's not to say that he was a terrible President. It's said that if it weren't for him, civil rights wouldn't have been as large of an issue as they were in the 1960s. He wasn't truly a crusader for them, but a speech given not long after the Supreme Court declared 6-3 that segregation was unconstitutional ensured that nobody in the Deep South that could vote would be voting for him. Outside of civil rights issues, his legacy is considerably less divisive.
- Henry Agard Wallace has retired to his farm in Iowa after his last term in the U.S. Senate ended on January 3, 1957. Until his death a few years down the line, his life will be a low-profile and a quiet one, and there’s little reason for anyone to accuse him of being a Communist, besides his own progressive leanings. If anything, he’s never even been to the Soviet Union![3]
- Glen Hearst Taylor, an ally of President Stevenson, a friend of Henry Wallace, and an opponent of George Wallace, is a left-leaning Democratic Senator from Iowa who tried unsuccessfully to organize a Farmer-Labor party in Nevada, Montana, and his home state of Idaho. He was elected to fill out the term of the late Senator William Borah back in 1940, and has since made for himself a successful career in politics. He’s considering his own retirement soon, depending on how badly his feuding gets with whoever will be President next year. But he'll still be around, that's for sure.
- George Corley Wallace will be President-elect in November, and 38th U.S. President in 1961. The Governor of Alabama, Wallace is a staunch proponent of segregation, infamously declaring “segregation forever” at a campaign rally in late 1959. To balance out the ticket in favor of those who hold more liberal positions on social issues, one Joe Kennedy Jr. will be reluctantly selected as his running mate at the Democratic National Convention in Baltimore to appeal to Northerners who wouldn't vote for Wallace in the first place.
- Lyndon Baines Johnson is a Democratic Senator from Texas who supports the ideas of the mostly-defunct Fair Deal, and will be a strong voice in the coming years to revitalize it in some way or another. His calls will ring upon deaf ears until they're found to ultimately be necessary to save America in the seventies, by which time he'll have passed away.
- Joseph Patrick Kennedy Sr. will, by the year’s end, step down as U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom, managing to avoid gaffes that could have spelled the end of his political career many years ago. As one of President Willkie’s first appointees, he has held this position for over sixteen years, and with his slowly declining health and the winds of change blowing once again, his time in politics is coming to a close. On the other hand...
- George Wilcken Romney is a wealthy man from his time on the board of the Ford Motor Company, and his success will remain steady for years to come. His future as one of the top guys in the automobile industry is a most secure one.
- Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr. is the Democratic Governor of Massachusetts, and in May will, with considerable reluctance across the board, become George Wallace’s running mate and accept the nomination for Vice-President of the United States of America.
- John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected to the Massachusetts Senate in 1958 as a Democrat, the only gain for the Democrats in the midterms as a result of the continuing dip in popularity of President Dirksen.
- George Herbert Walker Bush is soon to inherit his father’s oil fortune. Perhaps going into politics couldn’t hurt, but he doesn’t have the motivation or the time for it as of 1960.
- Barbara Pierce never meets anyone by the name of George Bush, nor does she marry them. She’s living a quiet life on Long Island, visiting her parents often and working in upper Manhattan at a clothing store.
- Ronald Wilson Reagan, still married to Jane Wyman, is still the head of the Screen Actors Guild. He’s a regular actor on Rodman Serling’s breakout science fiction television show that started this year’s fall called The Time Element.
- Nancy Davis Gable is married to one of the most popular actors in Hollywood. Her husband Clark’s health is getting worse at a snail’s pace and he’ll drop dead from a heart attack in 1966. Mrs. Gable, however, is still running on the success of her latest cinema success: The Captain’s Wife.
- Richard Milhous Nixon is still working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the one thing that stands between him and directorship of the bureau is one John Edgar Hoover, who can’t possibly live, let alone continue with shady activities in the U.S. Government, forever.
- Gerald Rudolff Ford attended the University of Michigan way back in the 1930s, but what matters more is that with the different paths his life could have taken. He is now the Mayor of Detroit, one of America’s finest cities producing most of America’s finest automobiles. His name, while himself unrelated to the largest car company in America, is one that is synonymous with success and efficiency.
- There is no car named after one Edsel Bryant Ford (at least not yet), who is both alive and well here, and will, sometime in this coming decade, retire with his considerable wealth and take it easy in his mansion just outside of Grand Rapids. His father has been long gone since a fatal stroke back in 1942, but the legacy of his old man still hangs over him, and while not as much of an anti-Semite as his father (who, in this world, made a later infamous visit to Romania in 1940 and praised the late Corneliu Codreanu as a strong and effective leader), has made a few racist remarks here and there, something not at all out of place in the America of 1960.
- Martin David Robinson still has a fascination with the Old West, and has learned to play the guitar on his own time in the late ‘40s. On the other hand, he’s not much of a racer nor an actor, but soon he’ll have some fine music that can be bought on vinyl.
- Charles Eugene Boone has gained plenty of traction over the past decade, and his rhythm and blues covers have topped the charts many times. Later in 1960 however, he will be involved in a fatal car accident just south of Nashville, Tennessee, adding him to an incomprehensive list of popular music singers who had passed away relatively young. This list, however, does not include the names of Charles Hardin Holley, Richard Steven Valenzuela, or Jiles Perry Richardson, all of whom are still popular musicians and fellow pioneers of the popular musical genre known as “rock and roll".
- Albert James Freed, still very much interested in radio, is a popular host in the American city of Pittsburgh. He helped bring rock and roll to the forefront of American music and pop culture, and he avoided getting caught up in certain scandals. He’s still dabbling with payola and various other conflicts of interest, but this never comes up until after his death in the early 1970s. For now, however, his legacy is assured.
- J. R. Cash volunteered in peacetime activities for the United States Army during the early 1950s, and went on to country music success throughout the decade. He also gets around to signin those gospel songs he's wanted to do after the death of his brother in the 1940s. His car, a 1952 Chevy Bel Air, never causes a good-sized chunk of the Los Padres National Forest to burn down, but he’s landed in jail a few times for misdemeanors and the like across the nation, including for public drunkenness. This may come to bite him in the coming years, but he walks the line in more ways than one.
- James Byron Dean is an attorney-at-law in Indianapolis, Indiana, living a low-profile life and having cause not to rebel against anyone. He's not seeking to become famous, or even a politician, but people
- Elvis Aaron Presley still has a rockin' career going for him in this world! And it's not just rock, the blues are his forte as well. Listen to the songs, and find yourself unable to help falling in love with them. Unfortunately, his eventual death in a 1962 plane accident on his way to perform in Omaha in a concert will prevent him from forwarding his career, yet it won't prevent him from becoming a cherished musical pioneer. Some people refuse to believe that he's dead and gone, even by the turn of the millennium.
- Eldred Gregory Peck is still the famous and well-liked actor we all know. In a film adaptation of a certain literary classic down the line, he’ll say: “You can never really understand someone unless you spend some time viewing the world from their perspective - You must walk in their shoes, and look upon the world with their eyes.”[4]
- A young man by the name of Philip David Ochs will, over the course of the sixties, make a name for himself as a comedian, a singer, and most notably a critic of the U.S. Government and of President George Wallace, not to mention a personal friend of Mr. Cash.
- Jerome Silberman is a limousine driver and stand-up comedian in New York City, one of the greatest places in the world to live and get rich in. Will he get into acting? Probably not. Will he make it big in the world of comedy? That’s to be written in the history books. If he does get into comedy, will he be sharing the stage in any capacity with Ochs? Maybe, it’s hard to say.
- 17-year old Robert Norman Ross will be heading over to Florida State University after his tenure of high school is finished. He aspires to become a veterinarian, and he will care for many animals and save plenty of their lives. Unfortunately, he will never experience the joy of painting for a multitude of reasons, the first being that he never learns the technique of oil painting used by Wilhelm Alexander, another one of the many unfortunate victims of the German Civil War; and the second being that his veterinary work is quite successful, and he’s bound to open his own practice in the years to come.
- Marion Robert Morrison has been acting in westerns since the late thirties. His career in Hollywood and the lack of a major war in the 1940s doesn’t see him become a super-patriot or regretful over not serving in the army, nor does he star in any modern-day war movies. He still picked up that terrible smoking habit, and his lung cancer might get him soon. His recent largest big hit (besides The Conqueror of Asia) was also not a western, but it was 1958’s South Mountain, where he played George McClellan (wearing a false beard, of course) in this original film set in the lead-up to, and during, the titular U.S. Civil War battle.
- Albert Einstein immigrated to America in 1933 to avoid the horrors of civil war in his home country. For numerous reasons, he opposed the development of nuclear weapons, something the United States was perfectly content to not build during the 1950s. Einstein passed away at the age of 77 in November of 1956.
- Dwight David Eisenhower has long retired from work in the U.S. Army, and is not known for any heroic wartime deeds. He's never even considered running for President in this world, and from what can be seen, he never will.
- Retired Major General Douglas MacArthur is best known for his brutal suppression of the Bonus Army back in 1932, and for doing some administrative stuff in the Philippines in the late ‘30s. He has since retired from active service in the late 1940s, and is now living in his birth state of Arkansas.
- Harry S. Truman lost his Senate seat in Missouri back in 1946 to Republican James Preston Kem, but won it back after a narrow race in 1952, and lost for the last time in 1958 as part of national backlash towards the social liberalism of President Stevenson.
- The White Death himself Simo Häyhä managed to make it out of World War II alive as one of the most decorated heroes of Finland. He was wounded a few times during the war and knocked out of commission when his left was shot later on, but he managed to fight the Russians after being discharged from a military hospital.
- Aarne Edward Juutilainen, once known as "The Terror of Morocco" was another one of Finland's great heroes. He sadly didn't survive the war, succumbing to his wounds on July 19, 1953, but his legacy lives on in a number of ballads penned about his exploits after his death.
- Syngman Rhee, a noted Japanese collaborator, was the unfortunate victim of a successful assassination attempt by Korean freedom fighters sometime in the late forties.
- Kim Gu is in his eighties, a miracle that he survived this long, especially when you consider that he is operating in Japanese-occupied Korea. Unfortunately, his homeland will never be freed during the rest of his short time remaining on Earth, yet this will not stop him from partaking in one last uprising against the Japanese oppressors at the cost of his own life...
- Kim Il-sung and his family are all Soviet citizens doing whatever they can to survive in the disastrous postwar situation the Soviet Union has found itself in. They'll find it easier to weather the storm since they're in unaligned and mostly uninvolved Siberia, but that's not saying much with shortages and refugees abound. He's only back in the land of his birth as a result of a dating escape from prison in Japanese Korea after some guerilla activities during the war. Ten of his colleagues weren't as lucky, finding themselves executed by means of firing squad just north of Keijo.[5]
- Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, still lives and reigns in Tibet. While still technically a Marxist, he has remained neutral in the ongoing Warlord Era in China (and has not implemented any policies considered "leftist"... yet), having grown disillusioned by whatever mess the Soviets have gotten themselves into, and hopes to keep his homeland in the Himalayas out of any future conflict. The independent mountainous nation, not annexed by the not-declared PRC, is somewhat better off than IOTL, and will remain in a similar position throughout the rest of the century and possibly beyond.
- Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev could be in a much worse position right now. He’s out of University with the slow collapse of authority across the nation, and there’s not a chance in the world that he’ll be rising through the ranks of whatever remains of the Communist Party in the near future, seeing as the whole nation is on the verge of a civil war that will make Germany’s look like a minor and pointless dispute (which, ironically enough, is one of the lesser known causes of the Soviet Civil War). The best thing he can do now is probably remain at his home in Privolnoye and hope that the fighting doesn’t come to him or his family. His future will then lie on whatever (or whomever) prevails from the ashes that will cover Mother Russia.
- Eduard Ambrosiyevich Shevardnadze is a leading Communist politician in the Republic of Georgia, which gained its independence after the Treaty of Copenhagen in 1956. His future in national politics is uncertain, and his chances for any prominence in Georgian politics are slim to none, depending on how the coming Soviet Civil War plays out.
- Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov is one of the best-known physicists behind the defunct Soviet atomic weapons program, which would have been much more successful if it weren’t for the defunding and shuttering of the facility after the humiliating defeat of the Soviet Union in 1956, as well as the subsequent shuttering of the other facilities he and his comrades used that same year. Fortunately, however, development in secret, as well as foreign espionage within Japan and the UK has yielded the motherland three weapons of its own. He’ll be one of the first casualties of the upcoming Soviet Civil War once fighting begins on the streets of desolate Samara, being an innocent bystander waiting in one of the incredibly long lines of food. To put it simply, he avoided a most ironic fate, and somehow, most of Russia did too.
- Mao Zedong is remembered as a hero in Northern China. Mao is also dead after the Battle of Taiyuan, now a martyr for the cause of working people's freedom in Asia; his victories never to be forgotten by his followers and loyal comrades. Zhu De has succeeded him, and other figures including Zhou Enlai, Lin Biao and Peng Dehuai live and remain committed to the people’s struggle, now entering yet another long decade. Will they ever beat the Nationalists? And will the Japanese be forced off of the mainland once and for all?
- Zhang Xueliang has found himself high in the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party, in spite of his own (notably decreasing) indifference to the ideology as a whole. In the unlikely event he finds himself in any real power, he might just take his more moderate stances to move towards a truce with the Nationalists, and maneuver towards social democracy. If he can outmaneuver Chairman Zhu and more orthodox Marxist-Leninist Comrade Wang Ming, perhaps he'll get somewhere...
- Jiang Jieshi died in 1958 in battle with the Japanese. Wang Jingwei is now in charge of the Republic of China, and strategies are about to change. Perhaps it's time for a truce with Japan so that other unwanted enemies can be wiped out...
- Du Yuesheng passed away in his sleep in late 1956. He’s done a lot of smuggling for the Chinese (both sides) to the frustration of Japan, and “business” has slowed down a lot without him. The Civil War in China won’t heavily change because of the death of one man, but he is fondly remembered by Shanghai locals for his underground fight against Japanese imperialism.
- Yoshiyuki Tomino is currently serving his stint in Japan’s National Guard and attending Tokyo Imperial University, most intrigued with its art program. He’s hit it off with another fellow student by the name of Hayao Miyazaki, and the two will follow the path of cooperation. Just what they’ll work on together as of now is unknown, but future researchers to the time will figure out that this friendship was necessary if any genre where large mechanical robots piloted by humans was going to exist, let alone one with some of the greatest animation techniques utilized in the twentieth century.
- Toyohiro Akiyama has no interest in going into journalism. That being said, one of his favorite childhood movies, a certain film adaptation of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon set during the Meiji Restoration, is what sparked his interest in space, and ultimately will lead him to joining Imperial Japan’s experimental space program.[6]
- Yoshio Nishina is Japan’s leading physicist, and is currently best known for his instrumental role in bringing the atomic bomb to an explosive fruition over Siberia. His liver cancer was surgically removed in 1949, but he has since relapsed, and won’t have long to live. He’ll pass away in December of 1961.
- Hideo Itokawa is the pioneer of Japan’s rocketry program, and it is his goal to launch Japan from the confines of Planet Earth. Fortunately, this effort will ultimately lead to the development of one of the world's most advanced and developed space programs, albeit one that's only a smidgen ahead of Europe's joint program.
- The bodies of various figures killed under the Guardist regime in Romania, including Nicolae Ceausescu, Elena Petrescu, and Gheorghe Tatarescu, among thousands of others, were never found, and probably never will be.
- In this increasingly strange, different, and world of pain, it might come as a surprise to you to find out that one Thomas Edward Lawrence barely avoided a potentially fatal motorcycle crash in 1935, and completed his memoirs of his time in the Royal Air Force, known as The Mint. Nobody really knows where his politics lie, yet there are still those who think he should run for office in the coming years...
- Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun is a German scientist and aerospace engineer, and a massive help to Germany's space program. The program isn't (as of now) a joint effort, but all he cares about are that the rockets go up, and not at all where they come down. That's not his department.[7]
- Hugh Gaitskell was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1951 to late 1956, on the right-wing of the Labour Party. His deputy PM, Aneurin Bevan, was (and still is) opposed to him not pushing for nationalization of utilities, but 'ol Nye Bevan still has his own chance to become leader of this Party one day.
- Maurice Harold Macmillan is, as of 1960, the current Leader of the Opposition in the United Kingdom. John Dennis Profumo never has any relations, let alone interest, in Christine Margaret Keeler, and as such there will be no scandals rocking him or his time as a politician.
- Ian Lancaster Fleming volunteered in the British Army during World War II, working on various manuscripts while not on the front lines. His experiences during the war, including getting shot in the left arm and recovering, would become the basis for various novels set during the Second World War and beyond. During the war, he would create one of the most famous fictional characters of the twentieth century: Gerald Flynn.
- Eric Arthur Blair, while still writing a blacklist to the British government of suspected and open Communists alike (getting one Rajani Palme Dutt some prison time during World War II), has been working on other things. Just this past year, one of his most famous works about a dystopian society with elements of Italian fascism, Romanian Legionarism, and Soviet communism with a main protagonist named Hugh Baker was published, and will shortly become an instant bestseller and a literary classic for the ages. The name of the book? Nineteen-Ninety Five.
- Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill’s habits of heavy smoking, especially considering his advanced age, proved fatal when he suffered a heart attack and died on September 17, 1953. Aside from being Lord of the Admiralty multiple times during his life, there isn’t a whole lot to note about him, except maybe for subtle plagiarism of an Irish dockworker in regards to fighting the Soviets on the beaches, or something. Nobody really knows what that drunken rant was really about, anyway.
- Arthur Neville Chamberlain is an obscure former British Prime Minister that served from 1937 until his resignation due to health issues in 1940, dying later the same year. His time in office most certainly did not appease the parliamentary Opposition (Labour), and his foreign policy was nothing to write home about, but there was nobody to make him look weak in this regard, and he should be fortunate.
- Robert Gascoyne-Cecil was the Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1944 until his assassination in 1948 by a member of Irgun, a Jewish terrorist group based in British Palestine that seeks independence from the Empire. This organization will continue to be a pain in the neck for Britain for decades to come, and Zionism as it exists in this universe will soon be known as one of many major causes of political and religious arguments.
- Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley has a small but loyal following in the United Kingdom, having struck up a personal friendship with Benito Mussolini despite finding himself on one of the wrong sides of the Cold War. He’s past his prime, and he’s bound to retire in the next few years anyway.
- Léopold Sédar Senghor will one day be the elder statesman and first President of an independent Senegal, but he just doesn't know it yet. It's a long road ahead before this happens, though, and France is doing well enough that independence won't be on the minds of most people until at least the 1970s.
- Joachim von Ribbentrop was a civilian killed in a skirmish on the streets of Frankfurt during the German Civil War, a loyalist to the exiled Kaiser and a person kept his head down only for the innocent man to lose his life in a barrage of friendly fire.
- Arthur Seyss-Inquart is a retired Austrian fascist politician. His tenure was boring, and the silly fad known as "Austrofascism" sort or fizzled out over the course of the 1940s when things appeared to be getting better for Europe without the need for a strong guiding hand. He now lives a low-profile retired life in Klagenfurt, Germany.[8]
- Karl Dönitz is a retired Admiral who fought alongside the monarchists and was part of the DNVP during the German Civil War. He's now living out the rest of his days in Rostock.
- Franz von Papen has been retired from German politics since 1941. He’s living a quiet life near the Dutch border, physically untouched by the horrors of war. He’ll pass away from old age in eight years' time.
- The shock of hearing about the breakout of the German Civil War killed Paul von Hindenburg, another old German man long since retired, soon after it started in late 1933.
- Martin Bormann, a former member of the DNVP, fought in the German Civil War to restore the monarchy that had been abolished in the aftermath of the First World War. A veteran of the conflict, he was awarded many prestigious honors and went into retirement with a decent pension. His upper-middle-class house in Erfurt was burned down by the retreating Russians in World War II after it was used for various purposes, but fortunately for him, he wasn’t in it. He’s still alive and has since moved to Berlin, with enough money to live a low-profile life thanks to his insurance covering arson (but not artillery bombardment, naturally).
- Oskar Dirlewanger died a most gruesome and unspeakable death with the brutality of a 1940s Romanian pogrom during the German Civil War at the hands of particularly zealous communist soldiers. It should be noted that he in particular was not specifically targeted, these “counter-revolutionary purges” just happened to be a little indiscriminate.
- Christopher John Reuel Tolkien, the son of one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century, fought in World War II as part of the Royal Air Force. He shot down over twenty Russian fighter planes before being gunned down over Latvia. His remains were transferred and buried in Leeds, the town of his birth.
- Dr. Ernesto Guevara was radicalized by the widespread disease and poverty he was exposed to growing up in Argentina. He became a Communist and traveled to Iberia to learn more about their revolution and its path, as well as to continue his medical studies. Seeing this success made him no moderate, but it gave him a lingering sense of hope that socialism could be achieved by battle in his homeland. And depending on how hard the government actually enforces various anti-union and anti-communist laws, he might just choose to take up arms.
- Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz actually applies himself to the sport of baseball in this world. He's good enough that he signs with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1953, and helps to bring them a World Series win just three years later, even though he's far from being their most valued player. A sizeable amount of the money he earns goes to charitable causes, none of which go towards fermenting communist revolution in Cuba But plenty of cash to help other people in New York as well as his family back home in a land run by a rather repressive Fulgencio Batista y Saldivar. Castro's brother Raúl, on the other hand, was a hardcore Marxist with Iberian syndicalist influences. He's still alive and arguably well in Cuba, just imprisoned for treason against the government.
- António de Oliveira Salazar is rotting underground after the 1949-50 uprising that ousted him from power and placed him right in the firing line of Portuguese youth waving red flags and armed with rebranded Thompson guns.
- Francisco Franco Bahamonde has had a restful decade in Spain, and it is expected that he will spend the 1960s in Iberia just like Salazar did in Portugal, watching underground movies.
[1] You’re allowed one guess as to what this conflict will have indirect parallels to, aside from TTL’s low-level Palestinian Conflict in the 1940s. I foreshadowed this earlier and with a certain lack of subtlety in response.
[2] Tsar Boris III is dead as of 1958. Long Live The Tsar!
[3] Henry Wallace was never Vice-President, either. Or Ambassador to any nation in particular.
[4] A paraphrasing of an OTL quote in To Kill a Mockingbird.
[5] Japanese name for the city of Seoul, known during the occupation in Korea as Gyeongseong and known beforehand as Hanseong.
[6] Perhaps unrealistially young to go into space, but in Japan, they do certain things both good and bad For Science.
[7] This was obligatory. I have nothing to apologize for.
[8] Yes, Austria is finally integrated with Germany. "But what about Versailles?" What about Versailles?
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Don't forget Gunpei Yokoi, Satoru Iwata, Howard Lincoln, and Reggie Fils-Amie.
AeroTheZealousOne
Monthly Donor
I won't spoil what happens just yet...!
Shigeru Miyamoto, Satoru Iwata, and Reggie Fils-Aimé are never born ITTL.
That would be a safe assessment to make, yes.
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Interlude
AeroTheZealousOne
Monthly Donor
INTERLUDE
(Below is another excerpt from the transcript of the interview between journalist and television personality Tim Regan, and Harvard professor and speculative fiction author Dr. Anthony Canada, which first aired the morning of October 28, 2000 on the Global News Network.)
REGAN: Welcome back, it is a beautiful morning here in New York City, and before we get to our election coverage, we will go back to our interview with Anthony Canada, a professor from Harvard University who has a book that will be on shelves next week called A Third German Reich. Before the break, you talked about a number of ways history could have changed and culminated with an ultranationalist and revenge-driven Germany, as well as a way the Soviet Union could have remained a world-class power after this Germany is destroyed, would you care to tell us more about the latter?
CANADA: Absolutely. As most people know, the Soviet Union after its devastating defeat in World War II never found its footing again. Nikolai Yezhov was deposed in the 1961 coup that brought Lavrentiy Beria to power in Moscow, and it was in 1962 that their Civil War began after Zhukov's counter-coup.
REGAN: And how many sides were in this war?
CANADA: I get asked this question a lot, simply because of the numerous multi-sided civil wars that we’ve seen in the twentieth century. Well, the most prominent were the pro-Beria loyalist forces, the Soviet Red Army Junta led by war hero Georgy Zhukov, Andropov's NKVD, the reformists in Leningrad, and then you had all of the separatists in Central Asia and Siberia. Most got away with simply calling the Union quits around the time this mess began, others weren’t as lucky and ended up having to fight just to protect their independence, most notably Kazakhstan. There were also other forces, including a new Black Army inspired by the lesser-known Makhnovists[1] fifty years prior, the rebel forces who seized various gulags and established those as bases, and I could go on, as this was a complex situation at the time.
REGAN: The Soviet Civil War was almost the second war in human history where nuclear weapons were used against another participating party, and even though there was no such exchange, biochemical warfare was indeed employed, one instance of which wiped out two entire divisions in Kursk and killed thousands of noncombatants. [2]
CANADA: That’s correct, and when applied to the experimental intermediate-range missiles of the time, it essentially knocked out the leadership of Beria's clique in Kazan and the NKVD late into the war, but you originally wanted to ask me about the Soviet Union as it existed in my book?
REGAN: That’s correct, forgive me for digressing.
CANADA: No, no, that’s fine, we all know how it turned out in the end and frankly, it could have been much worse.[3] Anyway, in my counterfactual account of events in an alternate universe as presented in the, the defeat of Hitler’s Germany by both the Allied powers and the Comintern splits Europe into two spheres of influence, developing a situation analogous to our world’s Shadow War between Western Europe, the Soviet Union, and a militarist Japan that split from the Allies in a similar way as to how it left the Entente after World War One. [4]
REGAN: I just have a quick question for you since we’re running out of time, Is there any way, in your eyes, the United States could have gotten involved in World War II, this one occurring ten years early?
CANADA: A strange question to ask, but a valid one nonetheless. I don’t see any way the United States could have joined World War II without undergoing a communist revolution or a nationalist takeover, the country was so isolationist back then that even had Roosevelt survived or simply not been shot, I don’t see any way the American people would have accepted going to war and seeing hundreds of thousands of their sons and fathers brought home in coffins draped with the flag, barring Japan making a mistake and underestimating America’s resolve. [5]
REGAN: Thank you for your time.
CANADA: Thank you once again for having me on here.
REGAN: Professor Canada’s new book on shelves this coming Thursday. In just a moment, we’ll have political columnist and attorney Howard Lincoln on our show to talk about the upcoming Presidential election rolling our way in a little less than two weeks, but first, we’ll take you over to the weather report for the metropolitan area. I must say that it's a perfect fall morning, wouldn't you agree, Matt?
[1] Ukraine doesn’t take part in this civil war under penalty of the European Entente installing a military junta. Also, this “anarchist” faction in the Civil War takes more inspiration from the relatively successful revolutionaries in Iberia and Illyria than they do the original forces of Nestor Makhno, but platformism is still very much a thing for supporters of this side. Needless to say, they’re not a major faction in the war, and their fate goes a little something like [REDACTED].
[2] This is a poor example set that essentially sees biological and chemical warfare being utilized throughout most of the other major conflicts that occur during the rest of this decade. There are no Geneva Conventions to outlaw these, and seeing as the League of Nations failed in its purpose, nobody wants to create a new one in any form whatsoever.
[3] Yeah, not spoiling this particular detail until the actual update on the Soviet Civil War. Sorry not sorry.
[4] This clarifies that Professor Canada’s book is not a word-for-word writing of OTL under any stretch of the imagination. If this timeline was The Man in the High Castle, this book would be The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.
[5] This is also another common conclusion drawn by historians and alternate historical fiction writers alike in the world of Two Suns Shall Set. The plan named after a specific type of aquatic creature that shouldn’t be mentioned is never conceived in this universe, but there’s enough threads on this world’s counterfactual ahistorical theorization web servers that a glossary is needed for all of them debating the plausibility of the United States joining World War II, or even pulling itself out of undisturbed isolation before the 1960s. (Most here agree that an America doing so would be ASB in and of itself.)
Part II (1960-19XX) coming soon, same thread!
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AeroTheZealousOne
Monthly Donor
Welcome aboard! No update schedule for February but my goal is to get this timeline finished by the end of May, and between now and whenever I feel like starting on Chapter 11 (probably March) there will be another bonus update or two or three, depending on what the readership wants to see and what I feel like writing.
I know this might come off as a silly question to be asking considering the butterflies of TTL, but are Elvis, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles still a thing ITTL? If not musicians, are they still born?
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