Search results

For those that forget this aspect of the Empires, in the 1880s one of the Congresses of Berlin used abolishing slavery as an excuse to invade and occupy Africa. Now, the problem with this is abolishing slavery in a global context where Brazil's slavery will disappear before the Confederacy's...

For the purposes of the discussion the POD here is that Lee defeats McClellan in an open-field battle where McClellan actively tries to lead the Army of the Potomac, his inexperience leads him to make major mistakes, and Lee "wins" a gruesome bloodbath that only qualifies as a "victory" because...

The Battle of Marengo IOTL was a very narrow victory for Napoleon, so what happens if he actually is defeated here? I don't know enough about the Napoleonic Wars to be more specific, so this is the AHC: If Napoleon is defeated at Marengo by Austria, what does this mean for the French...

The Mediterranean theater of WWII saw several generals who served predominantly just in this theater. Guys like Montgomery, Eisenhower, Patton, Juin, and Truscott all left the theater to the broader Western Front. This one is to rate the generals who did not. But what about the Allied generals...

These three men represented the *other* Germany's military. At least part of the issues of the WWI Austro-Hungarian state in a military sense must be put on Benedek, but there's the other two who are more strictly speaking worth grading on quality as well. First, there's Radetsky, who was a...

How precisely does one rate Braxton Bragg as a general in terms of his OTL career and his AH potential? I mean the guy pretty much did resurrect the CS war in the West at Perryville, and had at least the potential to score the biggest CS victory in any semi-realistic scenario of the entire war...

Historically the IJN expected that it would self-destruct at Leyte Gulf but that it would also take out the US Navy forces with it. IOTL the US Navy came very near to giving them an opportunity to actually do this. What would be the consequences of an Axis naval victory in the fall of 1944 on...

How is it possible for Fascist Italy to wind up being one of the Allies in WWII? I mean it's not necessarily like Mussolini and Hitler had any love lost between them, Mussolini *was*, after all, the only man in pre-war Europe to successfully deter Hitler. Would having the Fascists in the Allies...

The companion thread to the one in the Pre-1900 forum. As in the other, my Top 15 follow. Who would you pick, O fellow Nerds of AH.com? 1) Vo Nyguen Giap. Defeated France by one of the all-time great maneuvers, also defeated the USA, a full-fledged superpower, spanked the Hell out of China...

A new thread in keeping with the new year and the newer members. My top 15 (with one dishonorable mention) list of Greatest Generals in the pre-1900 era follows. Who would you rate on this list? 1) Temujin of the Borjigin, aka Genghis Khan. This guy won every single battle in his career, and...

According to some accounts of the Gulf War Saddam Hussein would have had a better chance had he struck at the Coalition forces during their build-up before they had a great deal of airpower or heavy armor. If he somehow did this with purely conventional means would it have really changed...

Supposing WWII ends earlier, whether by a smashing earlier Soviet victory or the Germans having everything in their drive to the West go wrong for them, what happens with nuclear weapons, given they weren't invented until August of 1945 IOTL? IMHO the Soviets will develop them first due solely...

Exactly what it says on the tin. This guy was the last non-Ba'ath figure to rule Iraq and he by some evidence was not entirely unskilled as a politician as far as dictators go. Would he, if he had lasted longer in a position of power, have been much of an improvement over the Ba'ath Party's...

There was an instance right after the Battle of Belmont where Ulysses S. Grant relaxed on a couch for a bit but got up and when he got back a bullet had hit right where his head would have been. Suppose that he had rested just long enough that that bullet would have hit him. What would have been...

The month is April, 2001. Abu Amar, leader of the PLO, and the one who wishes to be the founder of a state ruling all of Palestine, from the River to the Sea, is alone in his Spartan Office. He has promised an address to Jerusalem now during this Intifada, for what he expects will be a gambit...

The scenario of this battle is as follows: Jefferson Davis, due to paying more attention to the East than the West decides to give Braxton Bragg clear authority over Edmund Kirby-Smith, Forrest, and Morgan. Bragg, making good use of his opportunities starts his campaign off with a Battle of...

In the last cultural/scientific WI for today, what if the Australopithecines had been discovered before the Piltdown Man hoax? For a long time palaeoanthropologists rejected the idea that humans might have arisen out of Africa. If the more "primitive" ape-men are known earlier on, how does this...

There were some small theropods IOTL which we know now were very bird-like and which had fossils discovered in the 19th Century though they were not fully identified then. Well, suppose a paleontologist gets lucky enough to discover say, a furcula in a dinosaur sometime in the 1880s, in time to...

The Jersey Shark Attacks in this year were a big part in how sharks became stock monsters in American pop culture, as well as changing some mistaken ideas of shark biology. Without these attacks, what does American science and pop culture do with sharks? Would say, crocodiles and alligators...

Supposing that some convenient, fatal accident kills the Mufti of Jerusalem during WWII, what happens to Palestinian leadership around the time of the Israeli War of Independence? Without that particular leader and his murderous incompetence could Palestinians do better in terms of trying to...