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The Man in the High Castle: Alternative History, but Realistic?

 
 
 
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SLD

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I just finished watching two seasons of the Man in the High Castle, which for those of you who haven't seen it, is a dystopian sci-fi series where the Germans and Japanese win WWII and conquer Germany. There are however strange connections to the real world via parallel world jumps. The movie is set in the early 60's.

In the alternative universe, Roosevelt is assassinated while in Florida shortly after his inauguration. This is based on a real event that didn't injure FDR. But as a result of no FDR, the US is left in a weakened state and unable to cope with war against both Germany and Japan. Germany beats Russia and then in 1947 develops the A-Bomb, bombs WDC, and then invades the east coast while Japan takes the West coast. They divide the US into two spheres with a neutral ground in the middle where the Rockies are.

Then of course the US is thoroughly Nazified with a strong hierarchy centered in New York. But there's a resistance.

It's an interesting concept that makes for some interesting discussions as to whether it is at all realistic. The question that I have is whether Germany really had enough manpower, even assuming it could use lots of allies, to conquer both Russia and the US. Occupying that much ground takes a lot of people - even if you co-opt a lot on to your side, which is sort of implied in the movie since so many Americans seemed to readily adopt fascism. Which is another issue. The main protagonist is a SS Gruppenfuhrer who used to be a US Army officer and veteran of the Solomon's Campaign. But I suppose they could have a change of heart. But so many? It seems hard that could be done so easily.

Thoughts?

SLD
 
The idea that Germany could defeat the USSR is a pipe dream. While the latter benefited from the Lend Lease act, there is no reason to think they couldn't have won without it.

In 1941, the Germans succeeded in capturing Kiev and Sevastople, but failed to take Moscow and Leningrad. In 1942, they only tried to take Stalingrad, and failed. In 1943, they couldn't even take Kursk. In 1944, they couldn't stop the Russians.

The idea that it all came down to one man, FDR, is pretty fatuous. While I don't know much about the specifics of the politics of the day, the idea that he was uniquely strong and capable seems to be without merit. The whole point of a democracy is that it doesn't depend on only one person. The idea that the country wouldn't have rallied around Wallace or Garner is silly. There's this myth that FDR went about looking for a fight. He didn't. He was convinced against his inclinations that war was inevitable and it would be better to prepare for it. Anyone else would have also seen the evidence, and even if they resisted, the Army and so forth would have gone ahead and prepared anyway.

The idea that Japan could have defeated the United States is even more ludicrous. Japan had an industrial base which was small compared to the USA. They produced something like 1/10th the number of aircraft we did during the war, for example. They started the war with a very strong armed forces, but completely lacked the means to replace it as quickly as they lost it. Even without the United States, it is likely they would have lost the war in China, eventually, due to attrition.

The only hope the axis had was blown when Japan invaded China. If Japan had stayed out of China, and both Japan and Germany had jumped the USSR together, they could have conceivably defeated it and then turned on the British Empire. Once they had defeated them, only then would it have been practical for the two to go against the USA.
 
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I watched that, but don't remember the part about FDR assassination. I think the story is they won because they got nukes first. DC was nuked.
 
In real life they lost long before 1947.

It is possible that the assassination of FDR would have slowed our nuclear program. I don't know how other politicians thought about it. However, I think the military would have pushed it, anyway. And of course, the axis lost without the atom bomb being a factor. All the atom bomb did in the end was speed up the end of the war. The axis had already been defeated.
 
Going by my alternative scenerio, could you imagine the German and Japanese Empires, along with a nationalist, axis China and a fascist India led by Bose, and of course Italy, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, all trying to invade the USA, maybe in the fifties? That would be interesting and more plausible. If Japan could have redirected its aggression against the USSR, and Germany prevailed on Chiang Kai-shek to join the anti-commintern pact, that might have been a winning combination.
 
I think that a German occupation of the Soviet Union, had they defeated them in 1941/2 would be impossible; But then, I don't think that was the plan.

Had Moscow and Leningrad fallen in '41, it seems plausible that the Germans could have eventually occupied the USSR west of the Urals, leaving Stalin's mob in charge of a lot of not very much in Siberia. Once a defensive line was established at the Urals, the Germans didn't plan to try to control the occupied people, as they had in western Europe; Rather the plan was to round them up, slaughter them, and replace them with German farmers.

Whether that was any more achievable than occupation, we will never know; But if it was, it would free up a HUGE army for other tasks - such as an invasion of Britain, for example; And it would have bought German scientists potentially several years to develop nuclear bombs and intercontinental delivery systems for those bombs. I doubt the Germans could have had an A-bomb before 1947 at the very earliest, so to defeat the US, something would have had to stall the Manhattan Project until the German bomb was operational - whoever got it first was always going to be able to force their opponents to surrender, in just the way the US forced the Japanese to surrender in real history.

In 20-20 hindsight, the war was always going to be won by whichever side was first to get the bomb; or by the Allies, if neither side managed to make one before the end of the war. The Axis don't really have a path to victory that doesn't include their clinging on until they develop a nuke, and then using it to force an allied surrender. Of course, nobody knew that this was the case (and likely it wasn't really understood even by those most directly involved in atomic weapons research) until VJ Day. Secret super weapons were two a penny in the 1940s, and most of them were fizzers.

A transoceanic invasion of a hostile power would have been almost impossible to achieve without first forcing a surrender via nuclear weapons; The US could have managed to do it against Japan in 1945/6, but it would have been very bloody on both sides, and could have been a close run thing even with the massive US materiel superiority. I simply can't imagine the Axis powers having the wherewithal to invade the continental US without nuclear weapons; The logistics just don't add up.
 
SLD said:
It's an interesting concept that makes for some interesting discussions as to whether it is at all realistic. The question that I have is whether Germany really had enough manpower, even assuming it could use lots of allies, to conquer both Russia and the US. Occupying that much ground takes a lot of people - even if you co-opt a lot on to your side, which is sort of implied in the movie since so many Americans seemed to readily adopt fascism. Which is another issue. The main protagonist is a SS Gruppenfuhrer who used to be a US Army officer and veteran of the Solomon's Campaign. But I suppose they could have a change of heart. But so many? It seems hard that could be done so easily.
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I presume the next season may go into this, how they were able to turn so many. Smith said he kept the medal because it reminded him of the failure in the chain of command, probably referring to the death of FDR (of which I wasn't aware of).

It may have been as simple as the Nazis telling US soldiers, work for us or be executed. The Swede and Smith had a history which seemed to be with the Nazis, so it was post DC nuking. So likely, you had to join up or be killed... with your family, which would explain how the Nazis could do so much without having a massive army heading over seas.
 
FDR's assassination is casually mentioned by the antiquities dealer who claims to have a piece of memorabilia from it.

SLD
 
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