I had written about this
awhile ago, so long ago that the blog didn’t survive to the current platform,
Blogger. So I can revisit it without
repeating myself.
As most of us know, the
US Civil War lasted from 1861 to 1865, ending in a Union victory, which is why
there is no Confederate States of America today. Living in Northern Virginia, I have occasion
to travel to DC and Maryland and back fairly often, and never cross a border
doing so. Though the events of January 6
suggest that some people, a very militant but clueless minority, are
threatening to repeat the same idiocy a second time.
Naturally, some authors
have written fiction – alternate history – in which different things happen.
Newt Gingrich, the
infamous former Republican politician from Jawja, wrote a trilogy of books
which speculates what might have happened if Lee didn’t engage Union forces at
Gettysburg in July 1863 but simply continued further through Pennsylvania. This is Gettysburg, Grant Comes
East, and Never Call Retreat.
Worth reading once but not much more compelling than that.
A science fiction writer
who seems to specialize in alternate history, Harry Turtledove, has a
standalone book, Guns of the South. In this story, white supremacists from South
Africa somehow managed to develop time travel, return to the US Civil War, and
equip the Confederate forces with AK47s, which the Confederates refer to as
“repeaters”. Needless to say the Union
forces, using muzzle-loading black powder Colt 1861 rifles, can’t compete, and
the South wins the war and continues as a separate country. Later, the Confederates and the South
Africans bump ugly against each other, among other things Robert E. Lee takes
over as President from Jefferson Davis, the South Africans’ time machine is
destroyed, and the Confederates attempt to keep some of the technology brought
by the South Africans – including the nitroglycerine pills that treat Lee’s
heart condition. Anyhow. If time travel was ever invented, I doubt it
would be the South Africans who do it.
Turtledove followed this
fairly implausible scenario with a much better one not requiring time travel –
and which wound up being 11 books in total, referred to as the Southern Victory
or Timeline 191 series. In real life,
Britain and France sat out the Civil War and remained neutral. In 1862, McClellan managed to acquire Lee’s
battle plans, dropped on the ground by mistake by a Confederate courier, and
matched Lee to a draw at Antietam. This
battle persuaded Britain and France to remain neutral throughout the entire
war, and the US won.
In this timeline, the
courier retrieved the plans, Lee defeated McClellan decisively at Camp Hill,
and the British and French finally decided to actively support the
Confederates. Lincoln was forced to
agree to an armistice, and the Confederates won, surviving to be a separate
country. Fast forward to 1881, the US
President is James G. Blaine (actual secretary of state to James Garfield and
Chester Alan Arthur), the Confederate president is James Longstreet. The Confederates, having already acquired
Cuba and Haiti, now purchase Sonora and Chihuahua states from a cash-strapped
and desperate Mexican government These
are Mexico’s northernmost states, which border Texas, New Mexico and Arizona,
and have a Pacific coast port at Guaymas.
Blaine attacks in Kentucky, but that invasion from Ohio goes
nowhere. The British and French harass
the US, which only gets a minor victory in Montana. Most of the characters are historical: General Custer, Theodore Roosevelt, Samuel
Clemens, Longstreet & Stonewall Jackson, Frederick Douglass, Schlieffen
(the German architect of the famous WWI plan to attack France, a German advisor
to the US here) and Lincoln, who survived the Civil War and is now a Marxist,
succeeding at bleeding off enough Republicans to make the Socialist Party a
strong competitor to the Democrats, likewise dooming the Republicans to a
marginal third party. The Civil War is
called the War of Secession, whereas the 1881-82 war is called the Second
Mexican War. This first book, which sets
everything up, is How Few Remain.
There is a WWI
series: Great War: American Front,
Great War: Walk In Hell; and Great War: Breakthroughs. There is an interwar series: American Empire: Blood & Iron; American
Empire: The Center Cannot Hold; and American Empire: Victorious
Opposition. Finally, the WWII
series: Settling Accounts: Return
Engagement; Settling Accounts: The Grapple; Settling Accounts:
Drive to the East; and finally Settling Accounts: In At The Death.
Historical
Characters: Abraham Lincoln, Frederick
Douglass, Count von Schlieffen, George Custer, Longstreet & Jackson,
Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Al Smith, Herbert Hoover, Calvin Coolidge,
General Patton (CSA), Franklin Roosevelt, Eugene Debs, Upton Sinclair, Huey
Long (Governor of Louisiana), Guderian;
US (Fictional) Characters. Flora Hamburger, Socialist US representative
from New York City; Hosea Blackford, Socialist US Senator from Dakota; Sam
Carsten, US Navy seaman; Chester Martin, Toledo steelworker and US private;
Irving Morrell, US tank officer; Jonathan Moss, US pilot; George Enos, US Navy
seaman (WWI), Sylvia Enos, his wife, and George Enos, Jr, also US Navy seaman
(WWII); Abner Dowling, US officer, adjutant to General Custer; Cincinnatus,
black truck driver in Covington; Leonard O’Doull, US medical officer (WWII);
Nellie & Edna Semproch, coffee house owners in Washington, DC; Armstrong
Grimes, US private (WWII), son of Edna Semproch.
Confederate (Fictional) Characters. Jake Featherston, Confederate artillery
sergeant; Clarence Potter, Confederate intelligence officer; Anne Colleton,
South Carolina plantation owner, plus brothers Jacob and Tom, both Confederate
officers; Roger Kimball, Confederate submarine captain (WWI); Scipio, Anne
Colleton’s black butler; Jefferson Pinkard, Birmingham steelworker and
Confederate soldier; Hipolito Rodriguez, Confederate soldier from Sonora state,
and his son Jorge Rodriguez, also a Confederate soldier; Professor Fitzbelmont,
Confederate nuclear physicist; Cassius, black rebel and son of Scipio (WWII)
and many more.
Canadian Characters: the
McGregor family in Manitoba, Canada; the Galtier family in Quebec.
Some of the WWI
characters continue through to WWII, other WWII characters are the children of
WWI characters. Many characters die off
in WWI, between the wars, and of course in WWII. However, it’s not a GRRM narrative: most characters survive, and with few exceptions
most deaths are not all that surprising.
Throughout the series,
events in Europe are mentioned, but none of the narrative takes place there.
WWI. Having been on the receiving end of an
embarrassing loss in the Second Mexican War, the US finally decides to balance
out the CSA’s alliance with Britain and France, with its own alliance with
Imperial Germany. The country introduces
conscription, and lines up for an upcoming rematch with the Confederates. Sure enough, in 1914, the Archduke is
assassinated, but this time around Woodrow Wilson is the CSA President,
Theodore Roosevelt is the US President, and the US is involved from the
beginning, aligned with Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. The CSA aligns itself with the historical
Entente powers.
The main battle fronts
are along the Roanoke Valley between West Virginia and Virginia; in northern
Kentucky at Covington (across from Cincinnati); up in Canada; and some other
fighting in Texas and on the oceans. By
now most of the characters are fictional, with some historical characters like
Custer, Roosevelt and Wilson thrown in.
After bloody stalemate
and trench warfare, the US finally
develops not only tanks – called “barrels” throughout the series – but also the
proper doctrine of using them, thanks to General Custer. A Mormon rebellion in Utah is suppressed,
British and Canadian forces are worn down, and eventually the US slugs the
Confederates to an armistice. Overall,
the Central Powers are victorious, thus Germany remains Imperial and the Nazi
Party never materializes. Red rebellions
among Marxist-inclined blacks erupt throughout the south, drawing off
Confederate forces. Moreover, blacks who
had been performing manual labor for the Confederate Army, also join the
rebellion, embarrassing Jeb Stuart III, who had vouched for his own servant and
protected him from scrutiny, despite suspicions of Stuart’s artillery sergeant,
Jake Featherston, as articulated to intelligence officer Clarence Potter. This
prevents Featherston from being promoted and upsets him big time.
The Japanese fight US
naval forces in the Pacific, though no strategic impact is made, except for
taking the Sandwich Islands (aka Hawaii) away from the British and getting
Pearl Harbor in the bargain. As part of
the peace terms, the US takes Kentucky away from the CSA, as well as Virginia
north of the Rappahannock (river north of Fredericksburg).
Interwar period. Carston
attends officer candidate school, many of the military characters return to
civilian life, but most importantly, disgruntled Jake Featherston starts a
reactionary party, the Freedom Party, to work towards rebuilding the CSA. By the end of the second book, after the
1929 market crash, Featherston wins the election, consolidating power
throughout the third book. He gets the
Confederate constitution amended to allow him to run for President again, and
he succeeds at bludgeoning the courts into accepting his dictatorial powers,
which allow to throw his Whig and Radical Liberal political opponents into
prison camps. Using black Marxist
rebellions throughout the country as a pretext, he persuades US President
Herbert Hoover to acquiesce in allowing the CSA to re-institute conscription
and rearm overall. The Confederate Air
Force flies unarmed fighter planes of new designs labeled “Confederate Citrus
Company”, while tractor factories expand, the same factories producing the
barrels (tanks) otherwise prohibited. In
other words, the US is asleep at the switch as the Confederacy rearms. The Socialists manage to elect several
Presidents in the US: Upton Sinclair,
Hosea Blackford, and Al Smith, and elect significant numbers in Congress. The Democrats act as the conservative,
pro-capitalist party, and the Republicans are marginalized in between the
two.
WWII. Having persuaded US Socialist President Al
Smith to agree to a plebiscite in 1940, Featherston manages to get Kentucky
back to the CSA. On June 22, 1941,
Confederate forces attack Ohio, taking the US by surprise – although a handful
of US characters can sense a war on the horizon. Featherston had set up prison camps to handle
the white political opponents and blacks taken in Marxist rebellion, but
eventually expands the camp system, led by Jefferson Pinkard, to begin taking
in as much of the black population as it can – and permanently disposing of
them, first by firing squads, then carbon monoxide trucks, and finally cyanide
gas chambers. Its major camp, analogous
to Auschwitz, is Camp Determination, located in western Texas. Both sides also begin atomic weapons
programs, the US helped by Germany and the CSA helped by Britain. Rebellions break out in Utah – again – and
Canada, whereas CSA forces are tied down in the prison camp system.
The initial Confederate
drive reaches Cleveland and Lake Erie, cutting the US in two. Featherston proposes a lopsided peace
agreement to Al Smith, who tells him to shove it. The CSA attacks east into Pennsylvania, with
a huge city battle in Pittsburgh consuming troops on both sides. When winter hits, the US slams into Mexican
troops guarding the perimeter, then surrounding the city: Pittsburgh becomes Stalingrad for the
Confederates trapped inside. Predictably,
attempts to break through fail, and the Confederate army in Pittsburgh is lost,
which lets the US begin taking the strategic initiative.
The US then drives the
Confederates out of Ohio into Kentucky and fights its way southeast through
Tennessee, then into Georgia and further on.
As the war continues going downhill for the Confederates, their atomic
bomb program winds up being their only hope to even the odds. Poison gas remains in use during WWII.
There’s a fair amount of….intimate
activity between husbands and wives and unmarried soldiers and sailors and the
women who do this for a living (fortunately, same-sex activity is merely hinted
at and not described, and there are no gay characters). As the books progress Turtledove thankfully
turns down the detail considerably; I consider it to be more embarrassing than
provocative.
Accents are a constant
source of discussion. Everyone smokes –
Confederate tobacco consistently agreed to be superior to US versions - but cannabis
is nonexistent; Cuba figures briefly, Jamaica not at all. The fictional characters are well fleshed
out, and even the ostensible villains, mainly Jake Featherston and Jefferson
Pinkard, are still remarkably sympathetic, though the mass genocide of the
Confederacy’s blacks is by no means sanctioned. The astute reader can acknowledge some
callouts thrown in: Carl and Bob sweep
Flora’s office for CSA bugs, and tell their assistant “Dick” to shut up; a
Confederate navy officer in Plains, Georgia, defends his town against black
guerillas; Morrell meets Guderian, a German officer, whose own adjutant, a
surly corporal, doesn’t like Morrell’s own Jewish adjutant; and many more. Franklin Roosevelt is Assistant Secretary of
the Navy, a substantial character but nowhere near President, which Flora
Hamburger speculates he might have been had he not had polio.
It’s tempting to dismiss
the series, as Turtledove mainly blended the US Civil War, WWI, and WWII,
having an abundant supply of source material.
We all know what happened.
Featherston’s fate is probably the most significant example of an
original outcome in the series. I would
say that Turtledove does a good job of making characters we care about. This is my fourth time reading the full
series; sometimes I read the dialogue out loud.
With Turtledove’s inclination to focus on accents – e.g. Potter speaks
with a Yankee accent despite being a Confederate officer – I’m sometimes
inclined to read out with the wrong accents deliberately. Or even give Featherston that affected voice
that men who like men seem to use (!); he never does get an Eva Braun or a male
lover, his hard-on is for revenge (!!!).
The #1 plot hole
concerns the Confederacy’s atomic program based in Lexington, Virginia,
surrounded by West Virginia to the west and US forces already on the
Rappahannock when the war begins and already in Richmond by the time the CSA
manages to get a working weapon, meaning the location is surrounded on three
side by US held territory. For the US
to take Lexington and destroy the Confederate nuclear program would have been
too simple and easy to not have happened – here all they do is bomb it with
conventional weapons. I suppose
Turtledove made this exception because Featherston’s hope for the atomic bomb
was the only thing keeping him going after the US continued on the strategic
offensive and the Confederate situation gets even more hopeless. A lesser plot hole is Camp Determination’s
location in west Texas, not far away from the US border with New Mexico, an
area sparsely populated and defended on both sides of the border. This makes it particularly vulnerable once
the US decides to go after the camp. But
neither of these significantly compromise the overall appeal of the
stories. As noted, I enjoyed reading the
full 11 book series no less than 4 times, the most recent time just
recently. I can easily recommend this to
anyone else with an interest in history and a tolerance for multiple books without
pictures.
Speaking of pictures,
the only diagrams are the maps, everything else having to rely on written
descriptions. Both sides start WWI
wearing service caps (analogous to Civil War kepis), though by now the US has
switched from dark blue to green-grey, and the Confederates have switched from
grey to butternut, aka khaki. As head
wounds prove the cloth headgear to be unsatisfactory, both sides switch to
steel helmets. The US version is like
the German WWI pattern helmet, the Confederate equivalent similar to the
British/US Brodie helmet from WWI. No
mention is made whether the US switches to the 1935 German equivalent for WWII,
but the Confederates switch to a rounded version most likely analogous to the
US M1 helmet from WWII. US troops carry
bolt action Springfields in both wars, whereas the Confederates switch from
bolt action Tredegars (supposedly a copy of the Lee Enfield rifle) to
semiautomatic rifles in WWII. Both sides
use submachine guns in WWII and machine guns in both wars.
One of the weirder elements
is simply the alliance of the US with Imperial Germany, which puts it at odds
with Britain and Canada. US forces
fighting British and Canadians, our biggest and best friends in real life? Kind of strange. Most activity in Europe is only mentioned in
passing, and actual cooperation and interaction with Germany in both wars is de
minimis.
Movie/TV. The next Turtledove book which makes it into
a movie or miniseries will be the first, at least to my knowledge. This series would be best served making How
Few Remain a movie, and each book in the series as a miniseries, which would
add up to 10 seasons in all. I won’t
hold my breath. In the event it did
happen, here would be my casting suggestions.
Roger Kimball (Tom Berenger); Anne Colleton (Nicole Kidman); Scipio
(Morgan Freeman); Cincinnatus (Denzel Washington); Sam Carsten (Daniel Craig);
Jake Featherston (Edward Norton); Irving Morrell (Brad Pitt, in Fury mode);
Chester Martin (Seth Rogen); Jonathan Moss (Paull Rudd); Hipolito Rodriguez
(Cheech Marin); Jefferson Pinkard (Dennis Quaid); but that about extinguishes
my imagination. Will it happen? We’ll see.
