If the Allies Had Fallen

If the Allies Had Fallen: Sixty Alternate Scenarios of World War II
Dennis E. Showalter, Harold C. Deutsch, William R. Forstchen
Skyhorse, 2012, ISBN 978-1616085469

Scanned cover of If the Allies Had Fallen

I’ll be honest, I’ve never had a great interest in World War II, instead I view WW I as having had more effect on the shape of the modern world. Seeing Harold Deutsch as one of the authors of this book intrigued me, so I read it. Deutsch seems to be the historian who first noticed the importance of ULTRA, deciphering German Enigma ciphers, on the course of WWII.

This book has 19 authors, about 2 per chapter, Deutsch included, but he did a lot of the editing. The authors throw around names of a lot of places and battles, some of which I’d vaguely heard of, others new to me, but they assume familiarity. I guess this is how military historians write?

Deutsch’s chapters and sections:

  • 1938 potential coup against Hitler
  • Impact of ULTRA
  • What if Hitler hadn’t declared war on the US after Pearl Harbor?
  • What if Hitler had pursued an all-out Mediterranean strategy?
  • What if Hitler had won the war against the UK?

All of this lines up with the straight up history books and papers Deutsch wrote, and his role as head of research for the OSS during WW II.

At the end of chapter 17, What if Hitler had won the war?, Deutsch own endnotes reveal that he was apparently one of the interrogators of high ranking Nazis after the end of the war.

Chapter 12, The ULTRA Secret is entirely aligned with Deutsch’s own paper The Influence of ULTRA on World War II. This is interesting because it means that 20 more years of study had not changed his mind about ULTRA at all.

The title of the book seems ironic. Only one or two of the authors of the chapters or sections of this book think that Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan could have done much more than negotiate a better terms of surrender, or change the length of the war by more than 6 months. Some scenarios might have led to a different Cold War, with the potential of the US dropping an atomic bomb on a German city. Only one author, Robert W. Love Jr, in chapter 15, The War at Sea, seems to think that Imperial Japan could have survived mostly intact, if only they’d not attacked the US at Pearl Harbor, maybe keeping the US from declaring war at all. Deutsch clearly believed that neither Nazi Germany nor Imperial Japan had any chance of even surviving intact once they started their respective wars.

Some of the chapters or sections are dynamic and interesting, others are a slog, full of “divisions forming” and numbered armies moving from one obscure central European town to another. Over all, a middling enjoyable read.