"Remember the Texas," Or WWII Starts In The Atlantic

Here's another fun alternate timeline from the public section of the alternate history forum: "Remember the Texas! The United States in WWII." It diverges from real history in June 1941 when a German U-Boat captain mistakes the American battleship USS Texas for a British battleship and sinks it. Although the U.S. and Germany had an undeclared naval war going at this point, this represents a truly massive escalation. The United States declares war on Germany (even the isolationists are not going to tolerate this), despite the U.S. military being absolutely nowhere near ready.

(If you read An Army at Dawn, you can see how horrendously unprepared the U.S. was for Operation Torch, and that was much later against a much less motivated and less competent opponent.)

Highlights of the timeline include:

*Different British generals commanding in different theaters, which almost certainly means a more competent defense of Singapore when the Japanese come south. The author argues that Japan will attack Western colonies in Asia due to the same issues that drove their attack in our world, and with the Pacific undermanned they might have an easier time. In this world, that war begins in the Far East and there's no Pearl Harbor, so American society as a whole is not going to be as vengeful. Hopefully no Japanese Internment in this history--even J. Edgar Hoover thought that was a bad idea and he wasn't exactly a champion of civil liberties.

*A lot of experienced personnel are pulled out of the Philippines for the European war, which will make the islands' almost-inevitable fall much less severe for the U.S. in terms of personnel and equipment losses.

*Per the above, Douglas MacArthur commands U.S. forces in China. Given his blunders in the Philippines (this paper makes a strong case that the Japanese conquest was largely due to his mistakes), this is going to be another improvement on real history, although one wonders how an ego the size of MacArthur's would coexist with an ego the size of Chiang Kai-Shek's. Hopefully they can keep each other's yes-men away--as someone points out in the thread, MacArthur when he didn't have cronies telling him what he wanted to hear could come up with pretty clever stuff like the Inchon Landings.

*Operation Chariot, in real history the St. Nazaire Raid, gets beefed up with U.S. aircraft carriers and battleships into a much larger operation intended to hash the German fleet based in French ports and eliminate (or at least greatly diminish) the U-Boat threat. Most of the timeline so far consists of this world's Operation Chariot and discussion about how plausible this would be.

What If Eisenhower (First) Fights the Japanese in the Pacific?

Awhile back I wrote a blog post about the alternate-history timeline "The Battle At Dawn," in which Pearl Harbor is better defended and the bloodied U.S. Pacific Fleet sails forth to duel the Japanese Combined near Midway Island. The AH.com user whose handle is Galveston Bay is writing a second story set in this same world entitled "The Shoestring Warriors of Luzon."

The point of divergence from our timeline is that Douglas MacArthur dies in a car accident when visiting the United States in 1937. MacArthur when he was good was very good (he was recommended for the Medal of Honor during the 1914 occupation of Veracruz, earned a lot of awards during World War I, and oversaw the Inch'on landings and subsequent campaign that would have destroyed North Korea were it not for China intervening), but when he was bad he was very, very bad.

The most relevant badness to this story is his failure to properly prepare the Philippines to face the Japanese during the lead-up to the Pacific War and his psychological paralysis that led to most of the U.S. aircraft in the Far East getting destroyed on the ground eight hours after Pearl Harbor when they had the opportunity to return the favor and attack Japanese airbases on Taiwan when weather had their aircraft grounded.

(Holy crap, how could someone who'd demonstrated that much talent on other occasions drop the bomb this absolutely badly? He should have gotten the Medal for some of the stuff he did when he was a lot younger--the Filipino farble should have ended his career, or at the very least not been rewarded.)

So with MacArthur out of the way, Eisenhower, who'd served under MacArthur, takes his position in the Philippines. His plans for the Filipino military are much less grandiose than MacArthur's, but they're implemented a lot more competently. Consequently, although the Filipino forces are smaller than those that faced the Japanese in our history, they're much better-trained, better-equipped, and better-organized. The Japanese, especially since they've taken worse lumps fighting a major naval battle soon after Pearl Harbor, are going to face a much tougher fight.

Right now we're almost to the Japanese attack on the Philippines, with the Japanese having already attacked Pearl Harbor. Galveston Bay has promised this is the first of three parts and there will be other stories detailing the various campaigns of this alternate Pacific War. I still intend to remain self-banned from the site to focus on other obligations, but I will definitely keep you all posted about his projects.