Horribly implausible alternate history

Cafe Society
41

Well, to be fair, there was a cryptic paragraph or two about tests in the desert and something about a god of destruction, but they zip by so fast you miss it. I suppose you could fanwank the whole secret thing as the government being very good at being tightlipped, but I can’t believe nobody picked up on the fact that they were preparing this bad-ass Magic Bomb either.

And another author did write a pretty interesting sequel of sorts to this story, speculating what might happen if everybody got their hands on this Magic Bomb technology. Very Mod-style spy thriller.

And man, don’t even get me started on Chinese history…

42

I once read this Civil War story (maybe it was by Turtledove) that was just ridiculous. It had Robert Lee, by all accounts a great general, deciding to invade the north. And rather than have him make his plans before the campaign or have him call all his generals together for a meeting, the author has Lee decide in the middle of the campaign to divide up his forces for no good reason and then write down his entire battle plan and send some lowly lieutenant off to deliver a copy of it to one of his generals. How plausible is that? And then not only are the plans lost but they immediately get found by a Union soldier who supposedly realizes the importance of this piece of paper in the mud and turns it over to one of his officers - who supposedly served under Lee before the war and recognizes his handwriting! And this guy is able to go to McClellan and convince him of everything. So now you’ve basically set up a Union army wankfest and handed them the entire Confederate army on a plate. But this writer decides to top himself - he has Lee win anyway!

43

The all-time top wankfest of all Alternative History Literature has to be Leo Frankowski’s Cross Time Engineer series.

You can almost sense the author masturbating as he writes it, imagining himself to be the hero.

44

And what’s with the love for the Irish on the big screen? Just thinking about that story about Julia Roberts husband fighting in a small rag tag army against the British, complete with a dreadfully cheesy “proclamation” about an Irish Republic which of course leads to the British getting kicked out and an Irish state in its place, whatever :rolleyes:

Of course, the anti-British sentiments don’t stop there, what about that Ghandi. How lovely, that meek little man, chucking out the Crown and its civil servants by sitting there and doing nothing :dubious:

45

“I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds”. C’mon, nobody talks like that.

46

Oh! I saw this one called the “Doolittle Raid”…so, right after Pearl Harbor, you take over a dozen B-25 medium bombers, load them—get this—on an aircraft carrier (one of those tiny old WWII Yorktown classes, too), sail it practically to the coast of Japan, and launch a bombing raid on Tokyo. Yeah, even assuming you DIDN’T get spotted on the trip over, you use planes you had to specially train crews for, and stripped-down to the wires to be light enough launch from a ship with just enough fuel to try and make a landing at a friendly base in occupied territory, to launch one bombing raid. And I doubt you could even carry anything LIKE a useful bombload.

So, assuming one or two of the planes even manage to not get shot down in Hirohito’s backyard, maybe they could get far enough to ditch in China, somewhere. Probably in the dark, too, by then. Assuming anyone even survived the crash landing, either they’re going to get turned over to the Japanese by the peasants, or the Imperial Army is going to slaughter so many people looking for the escaping aircrews that what’s left of the Kuomintang is going to be suing for peace before the blood even dries.

Add to that the military ineffectiveness of the raid itself (c’mon…how many hundreds of B-17s were used in even a single raid over the Ruhr Valley, and how many years did the Nazis hold out?), this whole thing is going to just be a public relations disaster, and a political nightmare. All it’ll do is convince the American people and the rest of the Allies that, with even our best efforts, we’re figuratively throwing spitballs at Japan while Yamamoto attacks our ships in harbor with impunity. Roosevelt is probably going to be wheeling his ass to impeachment proceedings within a month.

I mean, c’mon…total wargamer’s fantasy, at best. I doubt you could even pull it off in a simulator.

Well, at least that plan wasn’t as bad as the “Seeadler” scheme I heard of. At the height of WWI, you take a windjammer—a captured one, at that—arm it with camouflaged guns (!) and use it as a merchant raider, sailing all the friggin way to the Pacific in the service of the Kaiser (oh, yes, this is supposed to be a German idea, of course. Why not just throw in a U-boat and a Zeppelin to boot, I don’t know.). Only the skipper’s too chivalrous to just hit and run like any sane person, and he actually just wants to CAPTURE his targets without having to fire a shot! What the hell kind of crazy, Horatio Hornblower wannabe thought THIS one up?

47

Does anyone else remember that bit of semi-plausible fluff from a few years back, titled The Ship that Hunted Itself?

Going back to WWI, the author looked more closely at the list of merchant men that both the Allies and Germans had converted to Armed Merchant Cruisers. Now, while it’s obvious that taking a liner and sticking some guns on her might make a credible raider, it’s not going to be much of a warship. So the author decides to have the Allies make these things to patrol their shipping lanes, while the Germans used theirs for merchant raiders.

Not entirely implausible - the Germans didn’t have the far flung commercial concerns of the Brits, and wouldn’t be as vulnerable to merchant raiding as the Allies would have been.

But, well, I guess that the author decided that just wasn’t sexy enough. He did a bit of research and came up with two liners, the SMS Cap Trafalgar and the RMS Carmania, that were of similar shape and displacement. So, since Merchant raiders often camoflauge as enemy merchants, the author decided, wouldn’t it be neat if the Cap Trafalgar were disguised as the Carmania, and the Carmania were diguised at the Cap Trafalgar!

And, to make things even sexier, he had the two ships meet, and co-operate to have a final, ogasmic slug-fest battle, winner-take-all, just as if they were battleships!

What was he thinking?

48

Oh, there’s a whole subgenre of schlocky Chinese alt-history thrillers. There was one about an dictatorial Chinese leader in the 1930s named Shanghai Shreck ( :rolleyes: ) who refuses to fight an invading army because he’s too obsessed with chasing down a rag-tag band of rebels (apparently whose only claim to fame is a Steven King style “long walk”.)

Not all that bad so far, but it turns out the rebels convince a northern “warlord” to kidnap Shreck and not let him go until he agrees to stop chasing the rebels and fight the invaders instead. Which he does–totally against character, he keeps his word even after he’s released.

Oooh! And the best (read: worst) part–Shreck’s wife is the sister of a high-ranking rebel, and the widow of Shreck’s mentor. Total soap opera!

49

The entire story of Operation Mincemeat in Ewen Montague’s The Man Who Never Was doesn’t hold up to any serious scrutiny. The idea is clever: drop a corpse into German held territory and give it fake documents in order to fool German intelligence. But how could they be sure Germans would get it when they dropped it off the coast of Spain? And why would a secret courier be carrying ticket stubs? And didn’t the Germans suspect that this might be a fake?

It’s hard to believe German intelligence could be so stupid. It’d be like saying they created a super-secret unbreakable code machine, but that the British got a copy (without the Germans ever realizing it), cracked the “unbreakable” code, and were able to read all the German messages. It’s an enigma to me why that’s even remotely plausible.

50

I meant that Shreck’s sister is the rebel, and is also the widow of Shreck’s mentor.

Another wacky but minor sub-plot involves how once Shreck does decide to fight the invadors, he clears out the entire royal art collection–thousands of pieces, many of them thousands of years old, and carts them along all across China for nearly fifteen years, often with the enemy just moments behind. When the rebels finally prevail and force Shreck to flee to an island hide-out (another big :rolleyes: in itself), he takes the treasures along with him–and of course, in the entire time, not one piece has ever been damaged or lost.