Alternative history...

As I composed my thoughts in the third installment of my review of William Shirer's "The Nightmare Years," I began to speculate how events might have unfolded had Adolf Hitler's massive gamble of 1936 in the Rhineland backfired...Originally writing this as a sidenote paragraph, I decided it could stand alone as its own subject...

The terms of the Treaty of Versailles which decreed the Rhineland as a demilitarized zone had been in effect 17 years when Hitler made his decision to enter it with German armed forces...The General Staff balked at such a plan as rearmament had barely gotten underway in the wake of a devastating war followed by a restrictive treaty...Hitler's Minister of Defense, Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, had already argued that the French Army vastly outnumbered the Reichswehr, and possessed far more effective armament...His contention was that Germany could not be ready for such an action before 1940...

Hitler's military operations lapdog, General Alfred Jodl, testified at the Nuremberg trials that France's divisional strength, in both infantry and artillery, could have allowed them to advance on German units with superior numbers from multiple points as soon as the first German boot came down in the Rhineland, and scattered them like a flock of chickens...Even as much outward confidence as Hitler showed to his doubtful advisors, the weekend incursion was a nailbiting, sleepless weekend for him...

Up to this point, the German march into the Rhineland for the purpose of military occupation was the biggest risk of Hitler's political career...Everything he had planned for his entire life hinged on the success or failure of this one military incursion, the failure of which would have forced his humiliating resignation as Chancellor of Germany before he had a chance to order the deaths of millions of people...

And if his risky gamble had not paid off; if the German Army battalions had been forced to turn tail and run for the border; what might have happened?...What effects would this turn have had on events and people, not only in Europe, but in the rest of the world?...

~~~

Hitler, feeling the heat from those who had been prepared to march with him in unearned victory, might have retired to his birthplace in Austria, which would have still existed as a sovereign state...He would then have had time to write the third volume of his masterwork of madness, Mein Kampf, unread copies of which would become paperweights for boxes of old letters in the attics of his surviving relatives who received them as birthday gifts from him...

Some cronies such as the sycophantic Rudolf Hess would have stayed with him, others like the sinister Reinhard Heydrich might have contracted for his death for having interrupted his brilliant criminal career...Some Reichswehr generals would have fallen on their swords, others would have persevered...

Desperately needing the adulation of crowds, and wanting to provide gainful employment to his loyal toadlings in order to keep them close, the former Fuehrer might have emigrated together with his following to Argentina where he could have established the Institute of Modern Totalitarianism...Fledgling dictators such as Juan Peron and Augusto Pinochet could have learned their craft at the feet of the master with accredited courses in monolithic principles...Goebbels, Goring and Himmler would have gained full tenure as professors...

Jewish business people and their families would have returned to Germany, but hesitantly, and with a new-found militancy against future outrages...Krystallnacht had not yet occurred at this time, but other atrocities abounded, brought on and encouraged by the Nazi regime...Their own nationalist urges might have been rekindled with the craving to end their rootless wanderings, and establish a centralized defense against persecution...

Zionists would not have received the massive US support in their establishment of Israel, but would have had millions more Jews alive to fight the battle...The dust might have even settled on a more peaceful and stable mideast as the militant factions would not have received the backing of outside powers...Grand Mufti al Banna would have remained a seething would-be caliph, but would never have received Nazi support...Haj Amin al-Husseini would not have been dubbed the Islamic Fuehrer...

Winston Churchill would not have become PM, but would have been re-elected to Parliament, and written a series of mostly obscure history books known only to academics...A complacent Neville Chamberlain and his successors would allow Stalin's Red Army to invade Poland and occupy the Baltic and Balkan lands...Western allies would eventually re-arm and enlist the aid of a democratically governed Germany to protect Scandinavian countries from Soviet expansion...

William Shirer might have returned to the US and become a sportswriter and novelist, although his enthusiasm for winter sports may have become somewhat diminished...He and Ed Murrow might have invented teletype-based horse race betting together instead of the network radio news teams for which they became famous...

France would have continued to change governments every few months until another Napoleon surfaced...Charles DeGaulle would have retired from politics and established a chain of "tall-and-arrogant" men's stores based in Paris...Jerry Lewis films would still have been inexplicably popular throughout France...

King Leopold III of Belgium may have found other dictators to admire, perhaps in South America, but likely would have lived out his days in comfort at Laeken, and been remembered more favorably in his obituary...Fort Eben Emael might have become an underground tennis and swimming resort with a luxury hotel and casino built over it...Or it might have become a world-class observatory used for astronomical research...

The Japanese would still have attacked Pearl Harbor, but would have fought a two-front war against the US and Russia...The Soviet Union would have waited until America reduced the Japanese threat considerably before entering the war as an ally of the Anglo-American coalition...The war would only have ended after massive loss of lives, and after Japan's emperor-god sought sanctuary with the Americans to prevent capture by the Russians...Japan would eventually become a Soviet outpost awaiting war with China, while Hirohito would live out his days in exile in San Francisco writing his memoirs and contributing free-verse poetry to The New Yorker...

The newly formed United Nations would have divided influence over Pacific assets with the USA taking control over the Philippines and the islands of Micronesia and Polynesia...America would have ceded controlling influence over Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean to the British, who would have thrown the whining French a bone by allowing them to form their colony in Vietnam, eventually causing the Vietnam War exactly as it happened...

The best nuclear scientists would not have fled Europe and gathered in America to produce the atomic bomb...The bomb would have eventually been built, but not in time to end WWII at the cost of millions more lives...The Thyssen and Krupp families would have merged efforts earlier and developed efficient methods of delivering nuclear power, and would today be an industrial and engineering giant along the lines of Halliburton/KBR...Albert Speer might have gained fame as an architect with the firm...

Mussolini would have had his butt handed to him in Greece, and the Italian monarchy would have been restored after Mussolini's forced resignation, only to fall to Communism...Observant Marxists would have noticed that although Italians are weak in both military and political arenas, it would make more sense to take the country bloodlessly...A Molotovian mind would have created a scenario allowing communist takeover while the Italians, like their French counterparts, would have been content to have focused their attention on whoever promised the most wine and sex...

Franco's bid for power in Spain would have been doomed by the lack of support from Germany and Italy...Democratic Socialism would have been the prevailing political entity with the royal Spanish family still enthroned as figureheads, just as in England...The nation would become known as a center for tourism and banking... 

Franklin Roosevelt would have stayed in office until his death, but the extended Pacific war would have cost Truman an elected term...President Dewey would not have sought a second term after bringing WWII to an end, preferring instead a new and beckoning career in Hollywood as an actor where he would not have been urged to shave his mustache, a move which would have puzzled actor, Ronald Reagan...

Dewey would have endorsed the candidacy of his Vice President, Dwight Eisenhower, who had been forced to retire from his Army career as a Colonel after leaking General Douglas MacArthur's plans to run for Emperor of the United States...Eisenhower's administration would have been marked by the successful construction of the interstate highway system, and the establishment of golf as the national sport...

~~~

Second-guessing the belligerents in a war already concluded is a time-honored and favorite pastime for those of us among the armchair generals and amateur historians, but it also offers value in mapping out strategies for future wars...And yes, there will always be a future war on the horizon, the victors in which will be those who paid attention to the lessons of history...

All it would have taken to alter the annals of the human journey through time was a Frenchman with possession of a backbone in a leadership role to direct France's already standing army to rout the Germans back over the Rhine...Alas, anthropologists have been unable to produce evidence of the existence of a French vertebrate with the capacity to maintain command since William the Conqueror had the gaul [misspelling and pun intentional] to establish the Papist kingdom of England by force...

But then latter-day retired gun dealers would have had to find something else to write of in their unnoticed blogs..."For the want of a nail"...

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