All Quiet on the Pennsylvania Front: A Strange and Strangely Familiar World of Alternate History

What if the Confederacy had won?

(PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY LES JORGENSEN)

A very high percentage of alternate-history novels are about different outcomes of America’s two costliest wars. This, I think, is not only because of the obvious drama of the Civil War and World War II, but because the writers—and their readers—sense that the world we live in is the product of those two events in a very specific way: In the West, liberalism is the dominant creed, and without those wars ending the way they did, our world would be much worse. The Civil War destroyed slavery (and, in the long run, other forms of oppression) in the most modern society, and World War II destroyed an attempt to reorganize civilization on a policy of racial hierarchy and domination.

What many nineteenth-century Americans thought was the essence of modernity—free markets and free men—is today so much the rule that it is easy to imagine this was an inevitable historical outcome. The best alternate histories explore the possibility that this comforting thought is false.

The most prolific writer of alternate histories, Harry Turtledove, has just produced Drive to the East (Del Rey, $26.95), his latest volume in a long series that combines those two most popular alternate history premises. In it, World War II is being fought on American soil.

Drive to the East is set in 1942—but a 1942 that has flowed from the Confederacy’s winning the Civil War in 1862 and gaining part of Northern Mexico through victory in a second war with the United States in 1881. Turtledove recounted all this in How Few Remain, published in 1997, and went on to produce an alternate World War I (American Front, Walk in Hell, and Breakthrough), followed by a trilogy about the interwar decades (Blood & Iron, The Center Cannot Hold, and The Victorious Opposition). Now he is two books into another series of sequels, having published Return Engagement before the current Drive to the East. So he is on the ninth volume of his big imaginative exercise. He cranks out about a book a year (while simultaneously producing various other series) and is far and away the most popular writer of alternate histories. He is also, to put it as kindly as possible, an undistinguished stylist. What then keep his readers coming?

After losing its two wars, what remains of Turtledove’s United States is different from ours in small but intriguing ways. The Republican Party was marginalized by the loss of the Civil War, but America still has two dominant parties, the Democrats and the Socialists. The latter, strongly supported by the Eastern European immigrants who keep arriving in both his history and ours, have absorbed some of the energies that produced populism in our real history. His Socialists are anti-militarist, just as their actual counterparts were. The Democrats are the party of big business, more aggressive in their foreign policy and more vengeful toward the Confederate States of America. There is a national holiday, Remembrance Day, when the flag is flown upside down and the two defeats by the Confederacy are memorialized. The Confederate States of America is a satisfied power, the United States a quietly furious one. The Confederacy won with the help of Great Britain; now the United States is the ally of a unified Germany.

When World War I erupts in Europe, it quickly involves North America and just as quickly bogs down in trench warfare. In Turtledove’s first trilogy, the United States fights on three fronts and two oceans. Opening the war with a surprise attack on the British stronghold at Pearl Harbor, in the Sandwich Islands, the United States thereafter has to stave off periodic British-Japanese attempts to retake what we call Hawaii while contesting the Atlantic with the Royal Navy. On land the United States attempts to advance simultaneously against the Confederacy and British Canada, and soon has to put down a vicious Mormon revolt in Utah. The Confederacy, which has the advantage of fighting on the defensive in an era where machine guns, modern artillery, and barbed wire protect entrenchments, is faced by a Communist-led revolt of its black population. Eventually a vainglorious, aggressive, lucky, old, and stupid George Armstrong Custer benefits from the wisdom of a subordinate who figures out how to mass the recently-invented barrel (in our world, the tank—both names invented to deceive the enemy), and the United States, led by Theodore Roosevelt, wins its war, as do its allies in the Old World.

The peace that follows is modeled on the Versailles Treaty, and at the beginning of Turtledove’s next trilogy, the Confederacy has been stripped of Kentucky and a portion of Texas, and disarmed. The United States annexes most of Canada and sets up a satellite state in Quebec. During the 1920s, while the Socialists, led by Upton Sinclair, win the Presidency in the United States, the Freedom Party, which holds views very close to those of the Nazis, rises in the Confederacy. With the older, more pacific Confederate leaders discredited by military defeat, Jake Featherstone, a former Confederate artilleryman, follows Hitler’s path, a politics of revenge and racism, brilliant demagoguery, a failed coup, an electoral victory after the Great Depression hits, and, once power has been seized, the murder of opponents and rivals, most conspicuously Huey Long. There is one ironic difference: Featherstone is not an anti-Semite, and his Goebbels is Jewish. Meanwhile, in the United States, a Socialist party demoralized by the Great Depression engages in a systematic policy of appeasement, and the Confederacy rearms, regains Kentucky and West Texas, and on June 22, 1941, launches a surprise attack on the United States.

At the start of the current series, Featherstone’s armies have developed both the mechanized warfare the United States had invented and then forgotten and combined-arms doctrine. Featherstone’s air force has the “Mule,” an equivalent of the Stuka that can give close air support to the Confederate infantry. Though outnumbered, his soldiers are equipped with assault rifles—the U.S. troops still carry Springfields—and a better tank than any the United States can field. By the end of the first volume, Featherstone’s armies have driven from Kentucky through Ohio to the shores of Lake Erie and cut the Untied States in two. Clumsy American counterattacks in Northern Virginia have bogged down, and Featherstone has offered the United States an armistice. By the end of Return Engagement, Featherstone has what he wants, intends to impose a Versailles treaty in reverse, and cannot imagine that the United States will continue a hopeless war.

But President Al Smith, who had done his best to appease Featherstone in the final volume of the previous trilogy, rejects the armistice. Over the course of the new book, Featherstone, baffled by his enemies’ refusal to give up, orders a decisive drive from his Ohio corridor east into Pittsburgh, the greatest American steel town. The Confederates take Cleveland and fight their way into Pittsburgh. There the U.S. forces fight for every block, indeed for every house. Maneuver warfare, the Confederate specialty, is of little use in urban combat, and while the Pittsburgh fighting pins down the best Confederate units, the United States masses its armor and launches counterattacks. The Confederate army is encircled, Featherstone refuses to order a breakout, tries to supply his troops by air, fails, and the Confederate units eventually surrender.

As may be clear from the above, when Turtledove writes alternate history he often recycles the history of our actual world, sometimes pretty mechanically. In the current volume, a reader with any knowledge of modern history knows that this story is recreating the Stalingrad campaign on American soil. Why does the reader enjoy this? After all, everyone knows how Stalingrad came out the first time. Turtledove’s departures from actual history are almost always more interesting than his often plodding transpositions of it, for the chief fascination of alternate history is its dramatization of plausible otherness. Nonetheless when the author makes his transpositions seem inevitable, they have a power of their own, because they illuminate the sometimes terrible logic of events. Certain things, Turtledove is saying, have to come out the same way, no matter what future you’re living in.

For example, the United States of these books is a curious compound of Great Britain and the Soviet Union: the U.S. appeasement of Featherstone’s Confederacy is modeled closely on Britain’s appeasement of Hitler, while Featherstone’s surprise attack is based on Hitler’s great assault on Russia. It even starts on the same day. That coincidence is merely annoying—it feels like a nudge and a wink—but Featherstone’s blunder in assuming that a beaten enemy will make peace, a repetition modeled on Hitler’s assumption that Great Britain would make peace after Dunkirk, is much more interesting.

Neither Hitler nor his generals had a Plan B. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union, there was again no Plan B; the sole strategy was to encircle and destroy the Soviet armies on the frontier. When that failed Germany had almost certainly lost the war, although that would not be clear for another year. So Turtledove has a chilling argument concealed in his thinly disguised repetition of events: Despite ample evidence to the contrary, people who start wars generally assume that their enemies will behave as predicted. When I read Drive to the East, I found myself thinking about Iraq as much as about World War II, which is to say that despite being a pedestrian stylist, Turtledove can make you think about history in ways that are both disconcerting and illuminating. That is why I keep reading him. His series is never particularly suspenseful, his writing is flat, and so are some of his characters, yet his enormous experiment in alternate history remains absorbing.

—Fredric Smoler teaches literature at Sarah Lawrence College and is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine.