John Hacketts „The Third World War!“

freivolk

East Germany

In the early 1980th East-Germany went, like Poland, through a phase of growing dissatisfaction with the ruling regime. Still the german mentality kept this dissatisfaction silent even in a phase, were the Poles already started to lynch communist functionary. Still, December 1984 saw a first outbreak, as the growing war-scare in Europe, led to a large spontaneous peace demonstration in East-Berlin, which was merciless crushed by the Soviets. After this a massive wave of arrests swapped over East-Germany. Thousands Dissidents and other “hostile elements” were send to newly established GULAGS. Till August 1985 a deadly silent laid about East Germany. The SED-regime believed everything under control. Then at 17.August the Revolution came out of nowhere.

It was a typical german revolution, following a patter which already had showed in the Revolutions of 1848, 1919 and the East-German Uprising of 1953. Massive protest occurred in the country, spontaneous, decentralize, mostly peaceful and without a clear leadership. And like in the before mentioned events for a short time the state powers faltered without much resistance. Military units didn´t fired on the protesters, claiming unclear orders. Soviet forces were not available (in the moment they were mostly trying to get the hell out West-Germany). Protester, local party functionaries, academics and church officials formed provisional city councils, first in Dresden and Leipzig, then in all other cities and finally in East-Berlin. At 24. August the SED-politburo and the GDR-goverment left Berlin to Moscow, were they vanished in the following chaos. Representatives of the city councils formed a National Round Table, which practically became the government of the GDR. Negations were started with the NATO-powers. An agreement was reached, that NATO-forces would only occupy a corridor between West-Germany and West-Berlin, and that no Bundeswehr-units would be part of this occupation force.

At this time the revolutionary movement started to lose steam. Although the SED and the Stasi were formally disband, but the personal of this organsations still controlled the positions of power. An election for a new Volkskammer was held in November 1985.To early for the opposition to organize themselve. Winner was the socalled Freedom Party, a big tent organization, founded by several different groups. Church official Manfred Stolpe became the first new premier minister of the GDR, but the government stayed dominated by former SED-members. January 1986 the “Agency for National Security” was founded. Like 1848 and 1919 the Revolution of 1985 had failed to fully swep away the old regime.
 
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freivolk

Eastern 1987


Eastern 1987 the authors of “The Third World War!” ended the book. Although they knew, that possibles crises were looming, their general outlook in the future was positive. The USA would stay the dominant power of the West, Europe (including Britain) would grow together and Germany would stay divided (that was really important to the authors, they couldn´t stop talking about it.) They didn´t knew that already the next year would lead to massive change.

By chance there were in 1988 new elections in all of the four most important NATO-members (USA, UK, West Germany, France). As the year was over, only one of the Leaders of the West during the War had it managed to get reelected.
 

freivolk

1988 - USA

Shortly after the War, President Thompson´s approval rating reached over 90% and many people expected that his reelection in 1988 would just be a formality. But like other politicians before him, Thompson soon found out how fast a victory can fade.

The first reason for this was the economy. The crisis in the Middle East, which started in December 1984, had cast a new oil-price-shock, which resulted in a recession, which full impact was actually most strongly felt shortly after the War. Even after a fast recovery the unemployment rate stayed relative high.

Still it was also discussions about the War itself, that let to the decline of Thompson´s approval ratings.

There were the question of the losses. In the time of three weeks nearly as many Americans had been killed like during the entire Korea War. The Nation hadn´t expired loss rates like this since the Civil War and naturally there were some talks, if the government did enough to prevent this. Other said that the victory was actually less Thompsons and more Carters merit, because it was the Carter-build-up which brought the army back in shape. There was also the discussion, if the War was actually Thompsons fault. Like the book “the Third World War” shows, the western public got after the War some information about the internal discussions in the Kremlin. The talks in the Politburo about “Thompson”-retreats painted a picture of the President of a man, who had through his inexperience first provoked then encouraged the Soviets to escalate the crisis.

Also Thompsons post-war politics was disputed. Thompson came under the influence of Henry Kissinger, who he knew since his briefing after the election of 1984. Kissinger encouraged the president to keep the US-forces in Europe at least on a pre-war level and try to get the former WP-members and Soviet-Republics to join NATO as fast as possible, to contain and isolate Russia as a potential future threat. This politic included an intervention in the yugoslavian civil war, to weak Serbia (a likely russian allies) as much as possible and support for the right-wing regime, which took over in Italy after the War.

The Democratic party organized a counter-position to this politic, demanding that the US should free themselves from the entanglement in the european affairs and concentrate more on the Pacific, the area of the future. Spokesperson for this position was the former commander of the III. US-corps, General Schneider. In 1988 Schneider won the democratic nomination and finally the general election against President. Through his politic he managed to alienate the european allies, Iran, China and Japan and laid the ground for the coming crisis.

Like some democratic politician said years later about President Schneider: “We wanted an Eisenhower and got a MacArthur!”
 

Galba Otho Vitelius

That Germany should not be reunited was another English right wing nutty fixation. IIRC Thatcher actually tried to prevent reunification and had to be told to back off by the Americans.
 

freivolk

Galba Otho Vitelius said:
That Germany should not be reunited was another English right wing nutty fixation. IIRC Thatcher actually tried to prevent reunification and had to be told to back off by the Americans.
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By reading the book you could really feel how much Hackett disliked the idea of a german reunification. I think a united Germany would for him nearly as bad as a soviet victory.This gave me the problem how to prevent a reunification of Germany at least till 1987. After all we know today what a house of cards the GDR was. I hope the scenario I created is believable.
 

freivolk

Maggie Thatcher never really got a popularity-boost through war. The successfully defense of Europe and the important role british forces played it, was for the general public in the UK totally overshadowed by the catastrophe in Birmingham.

Nearly 400.000 Britons had died through the nuclear attack, means more then in the entire second World War. It caused a great national trauma and let many people in the UK wonder, if the traditional defense politic was really in the best interest of the british nation.

Being a NATO-member and a nuclear power didn´t protected Britain from a nuclear attack. It even could be argued, that it had provoked such a attack. So post-war Britain saw the rise of a powerful anti-nuke movement, which soon started to dominate the Trade Unions and the Labor Party and against which Thatcher and the Conservatives took the rather unpopular counter-position. Thatcher

had also the problem, that her opponents claimed that she lacked empathy for the victims and survivors of Birmingham. True or false, a growing number of the voters started to believe it.

Under pressure, Thatcher decided to counter-attack. It was her opinion, that after the victory against the “external enemy” (the Soviet Union), it was time to take on the “internal enemy” (the trade unions). 1987 saw a massive strike swapping the country in answer to harsh structural reforms by the government. It soon reach a level, were public unrest plagued the country. The strikes went on till the election of 1988. It ended with a landslide for Labor. It had been the third time in the last two decades, that a confrontation between the government and the trade unions ended with the electoral defeat of the government. As a result for the next quarter of century, no government, Labor or Conservatives, would really challenge the powers of the unions anymore.

The new Labor government went on to fulfill their campaign promise to denuclearize Britain. The Trident-agreement with the USA was canceled and it was planned to retire the Polaris-fleet and the other nukes till 1992. A special problem were the american nukes stationed in Britain. At least the moderate wing of Labor wanted to keep the UK in NATO and avoid a break-off with the Americans. So the british government started negations with the USA of reducing the american nuclear presence in the UK. But President Schneider used it as an excuse to retreat all american forces from Britain, declaring at the same time, that a denuclearize UK was not an important ally anymore. This was a slap in the face for pro-NATO supporters in Britain. The US-government had alienate her traditional ally in a time were it support would have been usefull.
 

arrowiv

Did Hackett also write an alternate chapter telling about a Soviet victory? How did that one play out?
 

freivolk

arrowiv said:
Did Hackett also write an alternate chapter telling about a Soviet victory? How did that one play out?
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I never read it, it wasn´t in the German edition. After all I know it ended ith the Red Flag waving about Buckingham Palace.
 

Nebogipfel

Monthly Donor
freivolk said:
I never read it, it wasn´t in the German edition. After all I know it ended ith the Red Flag waving about Buckingham Palace.
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IIRC, no red flag on Buckingham Palace (the Royal Family escapes to Canada as does most of the Navy), but the UK is throughly finlandized.
 

New Yorker

Actually in the alternate ending didn't the Queen remain behind but her children went to Canada, Australia, New Zealand to assume the position of heads of state in those countries if necessary?
 

Marky Bunny

It is called "World War Three-The Untold Story" it retrcons some of the events of the first book, and it does include an alternate ending in which NATO loses the war.
 

Deleted member 2186

freivolk said:
But the most important change is, that there is no soviet Invasion in Afghanistan. With a stable, pro-western, well-armed Iran around the corner, the Politburo consider a Invasion to risky.
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So is Afghanistan still a monarchy in this universe.
 

galveston bay

Marky Bunny said:
It is called "World War Three-The Untold Story" it retrcons some of the events of the first book, and it does include an alternate ending in which NATO loses the war.
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I read (and still have) both... the 2nd book (English version) does not have NATO losing the war, but it does use a lot of the information provided by this guy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Suvorov

and it takes into account that the Shah fell, which required some major retconning indeed

Basically both are examples of "Invasion Fiction" and are in that tradition and thus designed to 'wake up' the West to the dangers of a war.

No doubt the German version was designed to scare the piss out of the Germans. Thus a different ending it seems.
 

lukedalton

galveston bay said:
Hackett almost certainly based his assessment of what happens in Italy on this election result

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_general_election,_1976

fair or not, he couldn't help but notice that the Communists and Socialists had a significant majority of the votes

So he certainly made some assumptions based on that
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Yeah, the problem is that the PCI and the PSI at the moment are not that friendly with Moscow, on the contrary as the two are on barely speaking terms (even if Moscow still financial support them); Berlinguer was one of the leaders of the Eurocommunism movement trying to distance themselfs to the URSS.
And the PSI under Bettino Craxi was openly hostile to the Communist both foreign and internal
 
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