Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (63 page)

However, when the Japanese launched their offensive into British Asia, sweeping into Singapore, Malaysia, Burma and India, he had to think again. ‘What if the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor?’ asked Churchill in his celebrated address to the American House of Commons (a reference to the principal Anglo-American naval base in the Pacific). Prophetically, Churchill warned of a ‘Bamboo Curtain’ across the Pacific if America did not bestir itself. He also pointed out that German military preparations, about which the Free English had some intelligence, implied a future naval and airborne attack on America.

The key to a victory over Germany in Europe, however, lay in Eastern Europe. On one key point, the radical right and the German conservatives agreed: in the belief that expansion into Eastern Europe and Russia was the essential precondition for a victory over Anglo-America. In fact, this proved surprisingly easy to achieve. The Russian aristocrats and generals who had forced the abdication of Nicholas II had found it extremely difficult to establish the kind of English-style monarchy they had originally envisaged. On the one hand, urban workers and many peasants continued to hanker after the kind of fundamentalist theocracy called for by the more radical religious sects. It was a major blow to the religious zealots when Ulyanov - one of the most prominent of their ‘prophets’ - was exposed as a German agent and executed in the summer of 1917. On the one hand, there was considerable centralist reluctance to adopt a devolved political system along Stuart or Habsburg lines. Not without reason, the Russians had reason to doubt their hold over such subject peoples as the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had left them. Indeed, the real problem for the government was the same problem which was threatening Anglo-American power in Asia: the growing hostility of the non-Russian peoples to the power of the imperial government.

The Germans had, of course, begun the process of breaking up the Tsarist empire in 1916 by giving nominal independence to Poland, the Baltic states and the Ukraine. During the 1930s, other territories - notably Belorussia, Georgia and Armenia - began to press for greater autonomy. Ironically, the strongest opponent of the government’s indecisive policy of half-measures and concessions to the minorities was himself a priest of Georgian origin. But Joseph Djugashvili’s apocalyptic warnings that a rump Muscovy would be consumed by demonic foreign saboteurs - thought by many to refer to a second German attack - went unheeded. In June 1941, the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa. Just as Djugashvili had feared - and the new Minister for the Occupied Territories, Alfred Rosenberg, had hoped - the non-Russian nationalities flocked to the German standard, seizing the opportunity for a final decisive victory over their traditional oppressors. A Belorussian protectorate was set up, along with a Caucasian federation and a new Crimean Muftiate. Cossack, Kalmyk and Tatar formations were integrated into the Wehrmacht. The Germans allowed considerable political latitude to peoples like the Chechens and the Karachai in the Northern Caucasus.

Admittedly, as Michael Burleigh argues, Rosenberg’s policies were not entirely to Hitler’s taste, and still less to those of the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler. But it was clear that their dreams of the ethnic transformation of Eastern Europe, involving massive population transfers, would have wasted precious economic resources which the Germans needed for their planned war against America. Only with respect to the European Jews, whom Hitler obsessively loathed, was a policy of forced resettlement and mass murder adopted. Of course, for many years it was denied by the German authorities that there had been a policy of genocide. Those who talked of ‘death camps’ during and after the war were simply not believed in the absence of tangible proof. Only the final defeat of Germany in 1952 allowed archaeologists to uncover the evidence of the existence of such camps at Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka. It is striking that the Germans were able to carry out this appalling slaughter without any perceptible opposition from local non-Jewish populations, and with little disruption to their war effort. Indeed, in some camps (notably Auschwitz), prisoners were used as slave labour by major industrial concerns like IG-Farben. Jewish prisoners (including eminent scientists) were also used in the work on the German atomic bomb, which Hitler had become convinced would make him the master of the world.

It is difficult to say what might have happened if Hitler had lived long enough to see the work on the bomb completed. Very possibly there would have been an atomic strike against America. But thankfully it was not to be. The collapse of the Third Reich had for some time been predicted by exiled critics of Hitler’s ‘Behemoth’, who believed that it would ultimately collapse because of its own internal contradictions. Yet although there was certainly a chaotic quality to the Reich as it expanded eastwards, the radicalisation of policy on the Eastern Front was in no way a harbinger of self-destruction. On the contrary, the rise of Himmler and his effective takeover of occupation policy gave the conquered empire a unique and terrible energy. In fact, what really doomed the Third Reich was simply the death of Hitler on 20 July 1944 - killed by a bomb planted inside his Eastern Front headquarters by an aristocratic army officer named von Stauffenberg. The subsequent
coup d‘état
was resisted ferociously by Himmler’s SS and sections of the army which believed Goebbels’s claim that Hitler was still alive. But there was sufficient popular war-weariness for an apathetic acceptance of the new regime in most parts of the German Empire. Indeed, those who had remained faithful to their traditional religious faiths positively welcomed Helmuth von Moltke’s new ‘Kreisau’ constitution, named after the place where the ideas were first drafted, the most important clauses of which restored the old federal system of the pre-Hitler Reich. Moltke’s decision to seek a negotiated peace with Anglo-America was popular, despite the opposition of some of his older co-conspirators, notably von Hassell.

Von Hassell’s fear was of a Russian recovery - the traditional ‘threat from the East’. However, in 1944 such fears seemed exaggerated. The wave of religious fundamentalism which had overthrown the last Tsar the previous year looked more like the last phase of complete Russian collapse than the beginning of a military recovery. As recent research has shown, however, this was to be the beginning of a dramatic reversal in European politics. Once again, Churchill made the right decision in arguing for American recognition and financial support of the new theocratic regime. Once Djugashvili had been installed as patriarch and had consolidated his grip on Muscovy and Siberia, he and his advisers agreed on a policy of cooperation with the Anglo-Americans which promised exactly the division of the world into ‘spheres of influence’ - at Germany’s expense - which Churchill had always desired. And although it was not until 1950 that the Russians were willing to launch their offensive against the German Empire, it is hard to imagine troops of the old Tsarist regime fighting with the near-suicidal fervour with which the ‘Holy Army’ fought from then on.

Realising too late that von Hassell’s warnings had been justified, the German government turned to Hitler’s unused - but now completed - secret weapon. As the Holy Army advanced into Belorussia and Poland, the Germans issued a threat: if Djugashvili did not pull his men back, the city of Volgograd would be destroyed. But the Germans exaggerated the deterrent power of their new weapon. As far as Djugashvili was concerned, Jonathan Haslam has shown, the bomb was merely ‘designed to terrify those with weak nerves’. There had already been enough devastation in Eastern Europe to make the bomb seem like a bluff which could be called. The Patriarch ordered his troops to advance.

The explosion of the world’s first atomic bomb and the destruction of Volgograd was without doubt a historic turning-point ; for it not only revealed a new and unprecedented weapon of destruction, but also exposed its limitations in the face of numerous and highly motivated conventional forces. As Djugashvili saw, the Germans could drop at most two bombs on Russia; but they would not dare drop bombs on their own territory. When the first Russian troops crossed the Oder into Germany, the war was as good as over. Terrified civilians fled westwards in advance of what Goebbels had called, shortly before his suicide, the ‘Asiatic horde’.

Meanwhile, Churchill and Roosevelt had at last opened the agreed ‘second front’. The Anglo-American landings in Ireland and Scotland in 1945, and the subsequent campaign which drove the Germans south through England, had proved easier than pessimists (including the Commander-in-Chief Eisenhower) had feared. But the defending forces were known to be much stronger on the French coast. It was only the thought of Djugashvili claiming the credit for victory over Germany which finally prompted the Anglo-American invasion of Normandy in the summer of 1951.

The disastrous failure of the D-Day landings set the seal on the Russian victory. Arriving in Vienna while the Anglo-Americans were still picking up the pieces of the débâcle, the Holy Army found itself in effective control of Central Europe. The only question was whether the remaining German forces in the West, exhausted by their repulsion of the Anglo-American landings, would be willing to fight on. Once it was clear that the capital had fallen, they chose not to. Djugashvili lost no time in informing Churchill that he regarded their earlier agreement about ‘spheres of influence’ as having been overtaken by events. From now on all of Europe, with the exception of Paris (which he magnanimously divided into Eastern and Western zones) would be the Russian sphere of influence. This done, Djugashvili returned to Moscow and crowned himself Tsar Joseph I.

Yet the surrender to Russian dominance in Europe did not imply similar American pusillanimity in Asia. From an early stage, it had been clear to Churchill that the American states cared more about the Pacific theatre of war than about the European. The emergence after Roosevelt’s death of a new generation of politicians, more committed than he had been to purely American rather than Anglo-American interests, paved the way for an era of recurrent conflict with the Japanese-dominated Asian Co-Prosperity Zone.

Despite their success in sweeping aside the old European colonial regimes, the Japanese had never wholly extinguished local resistance to their rule in China and Indo-China. Peasant wars, often led by messianic figures like Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, tied down substantial numbers of Japanese troops. The costs of these wars also limited the extent to which the Japanese could build up their own naval defences. For any American government seeking to weaken the Japanese position still further, the temptation to intervene was obviously very great. Roosevelt began the process shortly before his death by publicly referring to China as a future great power. In 1948, his successor Dewey sent aid to Mao, who proceeded to drive the Japanese back to Shanghai. A similar strategy was adopted in Korea. This time, however, American troops were sent to assist the rebel North against the Japanese South.

No American Prime Minister did more to deepen American-Japanese confrontation than John F. Kennedy, the son of Roosevelt’s Anglophobe consul in London, Joseph Kennedy. By a huge margin - mainly owing to the Catholic vote in the North’s crowded cities - Kennedy won the 1960 election. The following year, he scored a minor triumph when a successful invasion reclaimed Cuba from the last remaining Nazi forces in Latin America. Emboldened, he began to examine the possibility of another military intervention, this time in support of Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnamese revolt against the Japanese-backed regime of Ngo Dinh Diem.

In many ways, JFK was a lucky prime minister. He was spared the difficulties of the black suffrage movement which plagued the political career of his Southern counterpart Lyndon Johnson. He survived an assassination attempt while visiting Johnson in Dallas in November 1963. His Centralist party smashed the states’ righters led by Barry Goldwater in the elections of 1964. But Kennedy’s good luck deserted him in Vietnam. True, the war was popular; but Kennedy could not win it. When he was forced to resign in 1967, following revelations that his brother, the Attorney-General Robert Kennedy, had authorised phone-tapping of political opponents, no fewer than half a million American troops were fighting alongside the North Vietnamese forces. But the Japanese-backed regime was better equipped than had been expected, not least because of the rapid development of Japanese electrical engineering. When Richard Nixon swept to victory in the 1968 election, it was with a mandate to end the war. In a television debate with Nixon before his impeachment, a haggard Kennedy made his bitterness clear. ‘If I had been shot dead back in 1963,’ he exclaimed, ‘I would be a saint today.’ Although, as Diane Kunz argues, Kennedy had a point, his remark was universally derided at the time.

Looking back on the events of the two decades after Kennedy’s fall from grace, it is tempting to see the subsequent break-up of the Anglo-American Empire as inevitable (there had already been considerable strains over the Vietnam War, which the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson opposed). However, as Mark Almond shows, the Russian economy was far from being in good health itself by the 1980s. Non-conformists had good cause to be critical of the policies of ‘stagnation’ which continued under Tsar Yuri, who succeeded his father Leonid in 1982. On the other hand, the policies of economic and political reform called for by reformers like Mikhail Gorbachev could very well have worsened the economic situation. If Gorbachev had succeeded in increasing the prices which Russia’s satellite states in Europe paid for Russian oil, there could have been serious instability. And, if his arguments for free elections in France, Germany and elsewhere had been accepted, there is no knowing what might have followed. Even without new policies, it was still necessary to send the tanks into Leipzig in 1989, just as had happened in Berlin in 1953, in Budapest in 1956 and in Prague and East Paris in 1968.

What if the Anglo-American states had reacted more firmly to the crushing of the Leipzig rising? If nothing else, they might have dissuaded the Russians from taking further aggressive action elsewhere. But the governments in Britain and America in the 1980s were incapable of such assertiveness. George Bush was a trimmer, compared with his predecessor. More importantly, the Foot government in Britain - elected in 1983 and again in 1987 following the Thatcher administration’s humiliating defeat by Argentina in the Falklands War - was widely accused of being sympathetic to Moscow. When the Sultan of Baghdad, Saddam Hussein, staged his long-anticipated attack against the Ottoman province of Kuwait, the West was caught unprepared. Already in the grip of a severe recession, the British and American economies were plunged into an acute and unprecedented slump as oil prices soared.