There is a previous thread talking about why Japan and Germany allied with eachother (sorry, don’t have the link) but that made me remember something. Years ago I saw a map of the world from WWII that (supposidly) showed the borders of the new world, and sphere of influence. If memory serves, Germany and Japan decided to split North America using the Rocky Mountains as the border. Has anyone else seen this just to prove to myself that I wasn’t dreaming it? And better, a link for an image on the net?
Yeah, it’s great fun for history buffs to play “What If.” One book of that genre was If the South had Won the Civil War by McKinley Kantor. Are there any “What If” novels for WWII?
There’s some really great “what if” books by Harry Turtledove. A lot of them use SciFi elements. His most famous is The Guns of the South, in which a group of pro-apartheid South Africans from the near future steal a time machine and use it to bring modern assault rifles to the Confederate army. My personal favorite is the World War series, where aliens invade the Earth in the middle of WWII, and everyone has to unite to fight them (sounds like a hopeless fight, but the way the author handles it actually makes it seem plausible). I’m currently reading The Great War: American Front. The basis of it is that early Confederate victories during the Civil War caused Britain and France to intervene on behalf of the South. This caused the war to end quickly and, and by 1914, the CSA is alligned with Britain and France while the USA is aligned with Germany. Quite interesting.
What i especially like about Turtledove’s works is that they’re told from all sides, and there are no “good guys” or “bad guys”. Even the invading aliens and the World War series are relatable.
ishmintingas, maybe not quite what you had in mind, but Fatherland by Robert Harris was a decent mystery set in 1964 in a “WWII German Victory” world. There was an interesting map of the New Europe, and some (not much) discussion of the various interactions between Nazi Europe, Britian, Neutral US, and Switzerland.
It would have been quite impossible for Germany and Japan to have invaded the US, and their strategy gambled entirely on the US being unwilling to seriously commit to the war.
However, once war with the US began in earnest, I can imagine the Axis carving the US up between them, but such plans can only be regarded and extremely naive and speculative.
Yes I remember seeing that or a similar map sometime in the '60s, but it was definitely from a “what if” type story or article. I have it in the back of my mind that it might have been in Look, Life or Saturday Evening post magazine.
Turtledove’s Civil War books do sound like otherwise good novels, but I’ve never read them because there’s just something about the premise that I’m hung up on, and can’t get over:
It’s 1864, and the South is facing certain defeat. Suddenly, a miracle happens! A hole opens in the air and out of it come strangers bearing invincible super-weapons that guarantee the South’s victory.
I mean, come on! You could imagine any people or culture that’s ever existed triumphing given that sort of advantage. It’s- well, it’s cheating, and it sours what otherwise is a fascinating concept. I don’t know if realisticly the South could have won, but I can imagine some far more realistic scenerios than that.
Maybe not novels and all the ones I can recall related to earlier 20C events, but Winston Churchill wrote a number of essays about European history if certain events had not occurred e.g. if Archduke Ferdinands had not been assasinated in Sarajevo, if the Irish 1916 Easter rebels hadn’t been shot etc. I’ll see if I can find a reference.
Dividing up the world was done by the Portuguese and Spanish in the 15th centurry. IIRC the dividing line was in the East Pacific e.g. Phillipines were under Spanish whilst Japan, China, SE Asia etc had Portuguese outposts e.g. Macau. The Americas were designated as Spanish. I can’t recall any Portuguese colonies in North or South America, nor Spanish colonies in Africa.
Setting aside alternative-history fiction for the moment, there may have been such a map dating from WWII.
I vaguely recall reading that a map turned up during WWII showing South America divided into just 2 or 3 administrative districts. It was supposedly part of the Nazi plan of what they were going to do after they achieved world domination. I’m pretty sure it was an Allied propaganda hoax intended to turn Latin Americans against the Axis. I’ve read dozens of books about WWII and I can’t begin to remember where I read about this.
It seems perfectly reasonable to me that a similar map of North America could have been produced as a propaganda device (perhaps by the British) before Pearl Harbor.
Propaganda hoaxes were not unusual in this era. There was a document that turned up in the late 1920s or early 1930s called the “Tanaka Memorial,” which supposedly outlined Japan’s plan for world conquest. It is now believed to be a hoax.
The South American map was a hoax by the British. It supposedly divided South America and part of Central America into 5 parts, not the 2 or 3 that I remembered. FDR publicized it in one of his radio addresses, less than two weeks before Pearl Harbor. See http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v06/v06p125_Weber.html
The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 put the dividing line 300 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, which gave Brazil to Portugal. Spain did eventually get colonies in Africa- Spanish Morocco, Spanish Sahara and Rio Muni, but that was at a much later time.
Harry Turtledove has admitted the premise of The Guns of the South is unrealistic. His intent was to have the Confederacy win the war when they were on the verge of collapse and show how a near-defeat would have affected their subsequent development as an independant nation.
His more recent Great War series is based on a much more plausible Confederate victory (achieved by winning the battle of Antietam in 1862) and is not connected to The Guns of the South.
I can’t remember who wrote it now (damn) but several years ago I read a book about the close of WWII, and the assassination of Stalin by his secretary (who, in the book, was Yuri Gagarin’s brother), which resulted in (or at least implied) an alliance between the US and the USSR.
No idea if Yuri Gagarin’s brother was actually Stalin’s secretary; I haven’t been able to find any documentation to either prove or disprove it. Of course, I haven’t looked too hard…
Equatorial Guinea used to be Spanish; admittedly, it was established long after the 15th century agreements carving up the world between Portugal and Spain. I believe the Spanish occupation of various parts of Morocco dates way back.
Um, bibliophage, about that source…
It would not shock me to learn that Roosevelt and/or the British may have fudged it a little on Axis war aims for propaganda purposes, and I doubt in fact that the Axis powers had any real plans for partitioning the Western Hemisphere. However, you should be aware that the source you linked to is from one of the more prominent Holocaust revisionist groups, and might be just a teensy bit unreliable. For example, I think this sentence might not be entirely correct:
Nah, Hitler never gave speeches loaded with brazen falsehoods…
McKinley Kantor’s book If the South Had Won the Civil War relied only on realistically plausible premises. IIRC, he had Ulysses S. Grant accidentally shot early on. The Union forces then had a string of bad luck, allowing the Confederacy to remain independent. A few years later, Kantor had Texas secede from the Confederacy! But further down the line, all 3 countries got over their differences and established good foreign relations with each other: the last page in the book has three soldiers “going over the top” of trenches in WWI with the Stars & Stripes, Confederate flag, & Lone Star flying side by side. Yeah, right. That part seemed kind of hokey.
Turtledove’s alliance of Britain with the Confederacy, driving the North into the arms of the Kaiser, is perhaps more plausible. But that’s the fun of this game: Who can really say??? Your guess is as good as mine!
You’re right. I only read the part of that page directly related to the map, and it squared with what I remembered reading in a more reliable source. I should have read that site more carefully before linking to it.
