The Man With The Iron Heart is one of Harry Turtledove’s latest ventures into the world of alternate World War II history. Here, we start with the premise that Reinhard Heydrich, one of Hitler’s most loyal deputies, survived the assassination attempt that killed him in Prague in 1943 and went on to spend the last two years of the war organizing a resistance that would continue the Third Reich’s fight after Germany herself had been defeated.

After a brief introduction, the story proceeds immediately to May 1945 and the aftermath of the Nazi Surrender. Soon after the war seems to end, though, American, British, French, and Russian forces come under attack from guerilla forces using techniques that would be very familiar to anyone who read the headlines out of Iraq from 2003 to today.

And that, I think, is where Turtledove fails.

It becomes rather obvious rather quickly that he has drawn inspiration for his story from the Iraq War and it’s aftermath and the techniques utilized by the various groups that were resisting the American occupation during that time. In fact, it becomes too obvious.

Everytime the story shifted to one of the characters in Germany, you just knew that the scene was going to end in an attack of one kind or another, no matter how implausible they might seem given the circumstances of the time. Yes, the Japanese engaged in Kamikaze attacks during the final months of World War II, but is it really reasonable to believe that Germans would do the same, and would utilize tactics invented by groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, after the nation they had fought for had been ground into the dust ?

Yea, I didn’t think so either.

The sign that Turtledove was taking his Iraq analogy way too far came when he felt it necessary to bring his own Cindy Sheehan-like character into the story. Early in the book, a young soldier is killed in post-war Germany, resulting in his mother turning into an anti-war “bring the boys home” activist who meets with Congressman, leads protests in D.C. and Indiana, and even meets Harry Truman in a totally implausible scene in front of the White House.

The biggest weakness of the book, though, is it’s predictability. As I noted above, it become very easy early on to figure out when a scene leading up to a terror attack — thus removing any sense of suspense or shock from the outcome, of course. This was confirmed when I decided last night that I couldn’t put the effort into finishing the last 250+ pages of the book and decided to skip ahead randomly. There were more attacks, of course, all predictable in the context of the story and all of them inspired by Middle Eastern terrorists rather than a realistic expectation of what a serious post-WW2 German partisan movement might have been like.

This was, without a doubt, the most disappointing of all the Turtledove novels I’ve read.

• Book Review: The Great War: Walk In Hell
• Book Review: The Great War: Walk In Hell
• American Empire: Blood & Iron
• American Empire: Blood & Iron
• Book Review: The Great War – American Front

It’s a world in which the Confederacy won the Civil War in 1862 thanks to a twist in history. In our world, just prior to the Battle of Antietam, a Union solider found a copy of General Robert E. Lee’s General Order 191, which revealed the deployment plans of the Army of Northern Virginia as it moved into Maryland and Pennsylvania. Though some historians would argue the point, the discovery of those plans allowed the Union, then commanded by (the generally incompetent) George McClellan to force the Confederates into a battle at Antietam Creek that they weren’t ready for. A battle which the Union won, and which became the military victory upon which Lincoln based the Emancipation Proclamation, which changed the entire character of the Civil War, especially in Europe, from an internal American dispute, to a war against slavery.

In Turtledove’s universe, that never happened. Instead, the Confederates scored decisive victories in Pennsylvania and, with the help of British diplomatic intervention, gained their independence.

Through ten novels, Turtledove has weaved the story of what a North America dominated by two powerful and antagonistic countries might be like. And it hasn’t been a pretty story. A Second Civil War in 1880, which led both countries to seek alliances in Europe. And, when those allies went to war in the early 20th Century, the USA and CSA fought each other in a brutal war that resulted in the CSA being ground down much in the way Germany was after World War I.

In what is apparently the final volume of the series, Turtledove lays bare the consequences of the choices that his characters have made. The destruction of the Confederacy that was anticipated in the last volume becomes inevitable long before the book is over. But that’s only part of the story.

The far more interesting question, which many of the characters that we’ve come to know only start to deal with as the book ends, is what happens next. Will the United States be forced to occupy the former CSA for decades until it finally submits ? Will the people of the CSA ever really accept responsibility for the fact that they supported a man who murdered at least eight million people ? What ever happened to the Canadian rebels ? Or the Mormons for that matter ?

Even though the book stretches more than 600 pages,many of these questions are left unanswered, leading, of course, to the obvious conclusion that there might be at least one more book in the works.

It would be nice to see those loose ends wrapped up, but, in the end, this was a satisfying end to a series resulted from, and has created, more than a few interesting alternative history scenarios.

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I’m already at Chapter III.

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Settling Accounts: In at the Death is the last scheduled novel in Harry Turtledove’s massive series following the relations between the United States of America and the Confederate States of America after the South won its independence in 1862. Beginning with How Few Remain, Turtledove has chronicles more than sixty years of activity, with the current book covering the final years of the second Great War, 1944-1945.

It became quite clear during the course of the previous novel, The Grapple, that the United States would finally achieve a victory over the Confederacy, although how that victory would be achieved was left up in the air. Furthermore, with the two countries racing to develop nuclear weapons, the Confederacy could still pull off a coup if their research paid dividends before the US research did. When Turtledove does begin to have his characters use nuclear weapons, he does so in surprising ways.

The majority of the novel is focused on the closing months of the war, but Turtledove spends a considerable amount of time dealing with the aftermath, as some characters are released from the military and others find an unexpected future waiting for them. In some cases, Turtledove seems to be tying together loose ends he has left in the series, perhaps most notably when Cincinnatus Driver visits Covington or Flora Blackford discusses politics with her Democratic brother, David.

Perhaps most poignant is the fate that awaits Jefferson Pinkard, the commandant of the camps the Confederacy used to exterminate the Confederate Black population. While Pinkard was a reasonably likable character when he was first introduced in The Great War: American Front, by In at the Death, he may be the most changed character in the series. While he is clearly representative of the men and monsters who were tried at Nuremberg, the comparison between his character when doing duty at the Sloss Steel Works and his fate in In at the Death almost makes him a tragic figure.

(…)

In at the Death forms an excellent coda to this massive series of eleven novels. Turtledove provides suitable denouements for all of his characters and allows them to get just nostalgic enough for the lives they once led and the characters who did not make it through to the end of the book without getting maudlin. At the same time, Turtledove does not sugar coat the difficulties facing the characters, or North America, in the aftermath of the fourth major war in eighty years.

The book will be out on July 31st., and I’m definitely looking forward to it.

• Settling Accounts: The Grapple
• Settling Accounts: The Grapple
• Book Review: The Great War: Walk In Hell
• Book Review: The Great War: Walk In Hell
• Settling Accounts: Return Engagement

As has always been the case, it is in his depictions of battle that Turtledove is at his best. At the same time, though, he does a fabulous job of showing us the view of this Second Great War from a variety of viewpoint characters from each side of the conflict. Characters that have been with us since nearly the beginning of the series are senselessly murdered in the holocaust of the Confederacy’s black citizens while others, charged with guarding the camps where they are murdered, succumb to the immorality of what they’ve done and take matters into their own hands.

By the end of the novel, the fate of the war seems to be clear. The USA has advanced into Georgia and have finally succeeded in uncovering devastating evidence of the Negro Holocaust. Nearly nothing stands between the combined might of the United States and Atlanta, Georgia, the gateway between the eastern and western halves of the Confederacy. And, yet, in the background, there is the race for a new technology — nuclear weapons. Every nation in the world is on the fight, and the USA and CSA both know that the other is looking to unlock the secret first. Whoever does it will win the war. And, that, I think, is what we will see unfold when the final volume in the series comes out in July.
Previous Post:

Book Review: How Few Remain
Book Review: The Great War: American Front
Book Review: The Great War: Walk In Hell
Book Review: The Great War: Breakthroughs
American Empire: Blood & Iron
American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold
American Empire: The Victorious Opposition
Settling Accounts: Return Engagement
Settling Accounts: Drive To The East

• Settling Accounts: Return Engagement
• Settling Accounts: Return Engagement
• In At The Death: A Preview
• In At The Death: A Preview
• American Empire: The Victorious Opposition

Seeing a chance to knock the U.S.A. completely out of the war, the Confederates set their sights on Pittsburgh and its steel mills. In the meantime, the United States is trying to find a way to strike back and drive the CSA out of its territory. Thanks to the person of General Irving Morrell, they just might have the means to do that.

Elsewhere in the war, the Confederate holocaust against its black population continues and the moral blindness of the men participating it — including characters we’ve known since The Great War series — becomes all the more appalling. Turtledove’s message here, I think, is to show that the Holocaust that we know was not necessarily unique to Germany or Europe and that, under the wrong circumstances, seemingly good man can be convinced to do something completely evil.

As the book ends, the possibility of a new day for the USA begins to emerge as the Confederate Army around Pittsburgh is defeated and the door is left open to a new offensive that will drive the CSA from American soil.

Previous Post:

Book Review: How Few Remain
Book Review: The Great War: American Front
Book Review: The Great War: Walk In Hell
Book Review: The Great War: Breakthroughs
American Empire: Blood & Iron
American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold
American Empire: The Victorious Opposition
Settling Accounts: Return Engagement

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In Return Engagement, the first volume in the four-volume Settling Accounts series, the action picks up right where the last volume left off. As the book opens, Confederate bombers are flying over Philadelphia, and Confederate barrels (tanks) and infantry are streaming across the Ohio River from Kentucky in a blitzkrieg-like attack that sets the United States back on its heels.

Through the eyes of Turtledove’s viewpoint characters, most of which are old friends by now, we can follow the action from the Ohio front to the battle at sea to daily life in the USA, CSA, and Occupied Canada. On the front, it quickly becomes clear that the US Army, hampered by a decade or more of neglect, is ill-equipped to stop the Confederate blitzkrieg and that the US will be cut in two. The question is whether that will knock the USA out of the war, or lead to a new resolve to fight and win. In the CSA, meanwhile, the true nature of the Freedom Party’s plans for the nation’s black population becomes apparent; camps established in the Deep South for political prisoners are turned into death camps, and blacks are dying by the tens of thousands, if not more. When word of this massacre reaches the USA, the reaction is muted to say the least, but its clear that this impending holocaust will play a major role in future volumes.

As the first volume of a series, there’s more set-up here than resolution, but this is a good continuation of a story that has spanned 60 years so far.

Previous Post:

Book Review: How Few Remain
Book Review: The Great War: American Front
Book Review: The Great War: Walk In Hell
Book Review: The Great War: Breakthroughs
American Empire: Blood & Iron
American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold
American Empire: The Victorious Opposition

• Settling Accounts: The Grapple
• Settling Accounts: The Grapple
• Book Review: The Great War: Walk In Hell
• Book Review: The Great War: Walk In Hell
• American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold

If anything, the brutality of the Japanese military that Turtledove focused on in the first volume is even more apparent here. POW’s are starved and worked to death — any honor they had as soldiers having been eliminated by the fact that they lost the battle. We also see the occupation of Oahu through the eyes of civilian characters — Japanese-American, Hawaiian, and white — trying to find a way to survive under a regime that obviously doesn’t care if they live or die.

Meanwhile, across the Pacific, the United States is rearming and preparing to take the islands back. Through the eyes of characters like Joe Crosetti, a new pilot training to fly off of carriers, and Les Dillon, an Marine veteran of the First World War, we see the preparations for and the execution of an invasion of Hawaii that makes the Japanese equivalent 18 months earlier pale by comparison.

Turtledove also does an excellent job of getting us inside the heads of several Japanese characters as they slowly come to realize that their country’s occupation of Hawaii cannot last.

This is partially a spoiler, but it becomes evident quite early in the book that the United States will retake Hawaii (really, Oahu, since the Japanese never paid any real attention to the other islands). And it happens for the same reason that America’s victory in the Pacific happened in our universe. Japan was simply unable to compete with the industrial might of the United States. Where Japan committed three carriers to the Pearl Harbor attack, the United States committed six to the re-invasion of Hawaii. Turtledove’s point here clearly is that, while a hypothetical occupation of Hawaii might have bought the Japanese Empire time, it would really only have delayed the inevitable.

As the book closes, the occupation of Hawaii has ended, but the War in the Pacific has just begun. In the closing pages of the book, bombers are leaving Hawaii for strikes against the next target….Midway. Given the brutality of the Japanese occupation, one can only wonder what the rest of the war might be like. Unfortunately, at the moment, it appears unlikely that there will be another volume in this series.

Previous Posts:

Days Of Infamy: A Book Review

• Days Of Infamy: A Book Review
• Days Of Infamy: A Book Review
• The Man In The High Castle: A Book Review
• The Man In The High Castle: A Book Review
• Settling Accounts: Return Engagement

The point-of-departure for this book is fairly simple. Rather than merely attacking the American Pacific Fleet from the air on December 7, 1941, the Japanese follow up with a manned invasion of Oahu that, despite the valiant efforts of the American land forces on the island, ends up succeeding. As improbable as this might seen, it has its roots in history; Minoru Genda, who is credited as the primary tactician of the Pearl Harbor attack, orginally advocated that Japan follow up its aerial bombardment of the American Pacific Fleet with an invasion of the Hawaiian Islands. His plan was rejected in our world, but Turtledove writes about what might have happened if the Japanese had followed Genda’s original plan.

The immediate results are not good for the United States. The disasterous results of December 7, 1941 are magnified ten-fold when the Japanese Army lands on the beaches of Oahu’s North Coast and, slowly but surely, fights its way down the island and forces the remaining American forces to lay down their arms.

The consequences of Japanese control of Hawaii are quick and inevitable. Without the support of the U.S. mainland and with little hope that a Japanese Empire at war will bother to send supplies their way, civilians are forced to find a way to survive on their own. American POW’s are drafted into slave labor. And, over on the mainland, Americans try to prepare for the inevitable effort to evict the invaders from American soil.

As usual, Turtledove uses many characters to show us his vision of Hawaii under Japanese rule from different points of view. We meet a Japanese citizen living in Oahu who seems to be proud of his native country’s military success while he fights with his sons, who consider themseleves American. Providing some comic relief is a mainland-native living in Hawaii who finds himself in the middle of a war and dealing with a sometime-girlfriend who apparently finds successful employment in the new Hawaii. And, perhaps most of all, we spend teime with several Japanese characters who represent a different view of the conflict.

In reality, it seems unlikely that Turtledove’s scenario could have come about. The attack on Pearl Harbor was an incredibly daring move on Japan’s part to begin with. Their ability fo follow that attack with an invasion force seems, to me at least, questionable at best. Nonetheless, Turtledove spins an incredibly captivating tale of what might have happened if only that date which will live in infamy had turned out to have been even worse than it actually was.

• End Of The Beginning: A Book Review
• End Of The Beginning: A Book Review
• The Man In The High Castle: A Book Review
• The Man In The High Castle: A Book Review
• A Date Which Will Live In Infamy

Bainbridge makes one point about the alternate universe that Turtledove has created over the past ten books that I agree with completely:

The timeline Turtledove constructed on the basis of a CSA victory is a much darker and nastier place, but it is a very plausible and convincing counterfactual. If the South was able to justify slavery and Jim Crow, it’s not hard to imagine a CSA that loses World War I churning up a Hitler-clone with plans for a black Holocaust. Lincoln was right: The CSA had to be beaten to preserve the last best hope.

There is frequently a desire among some to romanticize the Confederacy, but there is no doubt that the history of North America would have been far worse had the Union not been preserved.

• Book Review: The Great War: Walk In Hell
• Book Review: The Great War: Walk In Hell
• In At The Death: A Preview
• In At The Death: A Preview
• Book Review: The Great War – American Front