For All Time Pt. 35

January 10, 1946

Tokyo Bay: - Lieutenant Commander Richard Nixon is in the back row of all the pictures of the various dignitaries aboard the USS Midway; the young naval staff officer will always remember his meetings with Douglas MacArthur and Georgi Zhukov (Nixon is on the staff of Admiral William Halsey) with pride; men like American Secretary of State Fish and British Foreign Minister Atlee will always come up short in his mind.

Nearly a million Japanese civilians are dead. President Taft has turned down Stalin's suggestion of a new conference to deal with the Far East; Korea and Hokkaido are in the Soviet zone, and that's all they're getting.

Berlin:- Albert Speer collapses into his bunk, exhausted as he has never been in his life. In a touch of humor, Stalin had decreed that the Soviet trials for Nazi war criminals will be held in a special auditorium built on the former site of the Brandenburg Gate...built by the labor of those same criminals. Robert Ley has already managed to bash his own brains out with a shovel, Speer, who has lost 100 pounds this winter, wonders if he should do the same...

London:- John Bagot Glubb, known as Glubba Pasha, is meeting personally with the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Ernest Bevin. Glubb was rather surprised by the invitation; the Arab Legion fought bravely and well for the Allies during the war; but what would Bevin want with him personally? Bevin tells him a very simple story: The Empire is nearly bankrupt, and Britain needs her troops in Palestine to defend home and the most vital parts of the Empire, not a mandate that will run out in a year or so anyway. Glubb's army, and by extension the Kingdom of Transjordan, can take the place of the British troops, control the mandate themselves.

Glubb, never one to turn down personal empire-building or a challenge, has only one question. "What about the Jews?" "What about the Jews?"

Paris:- Jean-Paul Sarte is awakened from a sound sleep by a knock at his door; he opens it to be shot three times in the chest; the mob bursts in and beats his companion Jeanine de Beauvior to death. Anti-collaborator killings have gotten more violent and more bloody-thirsty since V-E Day, on the 7th fashion designer Coco Chanel was dragged from her car, along with her Gernan lover, and lynched just outside the Swiss border.

Perhaps two thousand people have already been lynched or shot; the Darlan government continues to ride the proverbial whirlwind, doing nothing. Indeed, Darlan's "Tricolor Guards" are often the main culprits behind the civil disorder.

Princeton: - Professor George Kennan's book Caging the Bear , articulating his proposed policy of "containment" of Communism, has earned him nothing but scorn. "Apparantly Professor Kennan's service in the Wallace administration went to ill use; the same government officials who slaughtered sixty thousand American boys in a day in 1943 now want other nations to fight their proxy wars. Well, Professor Kennan, be advised that no more Americans will be killed fighting Democrat wars, and none of our allies, either." says one critic.

Washington: - Treasury Secretary and former President Herbert Hoover retires. While he enjoyed being an active part of government again, as he put it: "You can't go home again." President Taft turns his eye for a replacement on the Treasury Department itself, more specifically to a dashing young economist named Milton Fri
edman...

For All Time Pt. 36

February-April 1946

-Despite stories told later by American and European politicians, the American demobilization of the late winter and early spring of 1946 is not a cowardly retreat from global responsibilities. The United States, a nation unaccustomed to violent foreign wars, has lost over 500,000 soldiers and civilians over four years of bloody fighting. The soldiers want to go home, and President Bob Taft, who was elected to bring them home, is determined to do just that.

In the Philippines, for example, after signing treaties assuring a 99 year lease on the naval base at Subic Bay, the US pulls out its troops and ceded sovereignty to the government of Sergio Osmeña on February 7, 1946, though the new President will not declare formal independence until July 4. Osmeña, who had become President in exile after the death of Quezon in 1944, is an old man, though, and tired. People are already talking about the election of 1949.  

-For Germany, the situation is a bit more complicated. Taft has pledged to have all American occupation troops home by the end of 1947, but American efforts to negotiate either a British or French takeover of their sector fail, not that the US pressed too enthusastically for that anyway. Thus it is that while beginning deamage control work on the cities of northern Germany (clearing streets and repairing roads, there are lovely wide boulevards with no buildings at all for miles around) the US begins organizing a provisional government for "Westphalia", centered around Erich von Manstein, whose anti-Hitler and anti-Communist credentials are impeccable, and who has managed to parlay that into most of the world forgetting his pretty firmly Nazi roots.

There is an outcry among German nationalists, American Jewish groups angry at the US government's alleged favoritism towards Nazis (it's not entirely a fair charge, but it makes sense, Taft's bill to subsidize Jewish immigration to the US is slowly percolating through Congress, and he has vehemently rejected a proposal by American intelligence called Operation Paperclip.)

-Japan, meanwhile, has kept her Emperor (Douglas MacArthur has warned Washington of the risk of Communist subversion if Hirohito is deposed) and is working toward a new government under the leadership of civilian Japanese officials. As in Germany, the US has spurned war crimes trials, though they do hand over wanted criminals to their former Pacific. Fortunately, men like Tojo, Anami, and Ishii have already taken their own lives.

Friction growns between Taft and MacArthur in March; MacArthur doesn't like the US "abandoning Japan in her hour of greatest need", and doesn't hesitate to share that with the press. Fuming, Taft comes within a hair's breadth of asking for the General's retirement (as he has already quietly done with the US commader in France, George S. Patton.), but finally decides to let MacArthur stick it out in Japan until the end of cleanup and buildup (training the Japanese military and building American bases there.). He is even idly pondering the fellow Midwestern Republican for a Cabinet post.  

-On April 2, 1946, a disgruntled military officer throws a hand grenade that nearly kills Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, leader of Iran, before being shot to death himself. While the Shah lies near death at a closely guarded hospital in Tehran, a factional struggle breaks out in Iran between forces loyal to the monarchy and the landed gentry of Iran.

A week later, the first Soviet armored divisions cross the border. Citing the need to restore order in the civil-war wracked nation, Stalin promises to restore full and just order. Americans and Europeans are torn between relief and horror as Soviet troops manage to secure the large cities, at least...but there's not much they can do, outside of protest strongly. Western oil comes from Indonesia, the United States, and South America, not the Middle East, and many Americans haven't even heard of Iran.

If he had to go somewhere, better Iran than Germany, is the general consensus as the initial fighting slows to a stop. Besides, you can't trust those Pahlavis; the Shah's father was almost a Nazi!

For All Time Pt. 37

May-August 1946

-For a Stalinist-era production, the Soviet summer campaign in Iran is surprisingly bloodless. There is a distinction between conquest and annexation, after all, one of which Joseph Stalin, annexer of the Baltic States and conqueror of Poland, is acutely aware.

Only particularly vocal or reactionary members of rightist and centrist (and leftist, after all, the most dangerous traitors to the revolution are those that lurk within. Not to mention Trotskyites.) parties are deported to Siberia and remote regions of Central Asia; and the ostentatious respect shown for Iranian mosques (There are a fair number of Central Asian and Caucasian Muslims among the Soviets, that, of course, raises its own problems.) ensures that even the most anti-Communist clerics keep their discontent to a low murmur.

Indeed, in many areas, the Soviet troops are welcomed. The authority of the landed nobility is decidedly broken, as are many of the landed nobles, and they bring food, supplies with labels in German and Czech, and books with similiar authors. The most prominent members of the Iranian officer corps are quite to see forces of law and order restored. Many, those who were most anti-Communist before the invasion, are so glad that they volunteer to work for the Revolution in places with names like Kolyma.

Even Stalin is aware of the good fortune of the invasion, and the Red Army occupation force is gone by August. In its place is the Democratic Republic of Iran, complete with a compliant Tudehist government under Premier Soleiman Mohsen Eskandari, an abdicated Shah, and Soviet military bases. Lots and lots of Soviet military bases, to help keep the peace in the new Autonomous Regions of Azerbijian and Kurdistan.

And engineers; there are new ports being built along the south coast, in places like Chabahar near British India, Bandar Abbas on the Strait of Hormuz, and Bandar-e Taghi Arani near the Iraqi border. They will provide hundreds of new jobs in those cities and environs, and space for big ships.

-Despite their differences, Ernest Bevin and Pierre Darlan are acutely aware of what a perfect time this is to nearly panic. Both men spend the summer of 1946 flying from Paris to London and back again, meeting at Bevin's 10 Downing Street in London and Darlan's palatial estate south of Paris about the issue of the giant Russian bear eating parts of their sphere of influence and interest. (For all that British Oil company representantives have been unmolested by either Soviet or Tudehist government officials, the two men aren't stupid.)

After the initial condemnation of the Soviet invasion, the two men and their respective governments realize there's nothing they can actually do to the Soviets. Military action is out of the question given post-war demobilization fever and the need for soldiers elsewhere (plus the Soviet Union is rather a military powerhouse), and economic embargos from the moribund League of Nations are of dubious impact at this point.

Neither of their economies are in much shape to be embargoing anything; Great Britain is living on what it can get from its Dominions and on heavy rationing and wage/price controls, and France's overseas departments grow ever-more restive under massive taxations outside of metropolitan France. Areas under French military control, like war-torn Indochina and the "District of the Rhineland" in Germany are being quite shamelessly looted.

Finally, both Britain and France agree (in relatively secret negotiations) to supply aid to anti-Tudehist forces in Iran and not to recognize the new Eskandari government, and settle on a defense pact signed by Bevin and Darlan personally on August 1, 1946.

-In the United States, the nation shrugs its collective shoulders. President Taft makes a speech or two condemning imperialism and refuses to recognize the Tudehist government, but life goes on. The US is king in oil in the 1940s; Texan and Oklahoman Congressman lead the fight to not overly condemn the invasion of Iran at the same time their constitutes grow ever richer from the hike in world oil prices.

Most Americans are reading Mickey Spillane instead of the foreign news anyway. For all that the US has backed off from confronting Communism abroad, they've no hesitation in confronting subscribers to Serbian-language newspapers and other such obvious traitors.

Still, anti-Red fever is relatively low at this point. The sheer grey flannel radiance of the Taft administration keeps government corruption low, and Attorney General Jenner has managed to co-op anti-Communist sentiment against holdovers from the Roosevelt and Wallace administrations (there has been almost total turnover between those and Taft's)

The people not reading Spillane are reading Richard Matheson. The Bare-Faced Legends, an account of teenage soldiers in World War Two, has been influenced heavily by his partnership with his hospital mate Rod Serling, though both are new enough writers that they're not quite aware of it yet. (Matheson is 19, Serling is 20.)

"Neville drove the bayonet into the dirt an inch from the SS officer's jugular, just scraping the skin. 'You're about to enter a new dimension, my friend, not of sight and sound, but of pain'..."   -But, of course, the story of the summer of 1946 takes place in Baden, where a certain paraplegic takes the stand in his own defense on August 2, 1946. He's chosen to act in his own defense, spurning the efforts of his trialmates, men like von Papen, Sauckel, and Raeder, many of whom have blamed everything on him.

Though he seems utterly mad in his cell, ranting all night except when medicated, he has seemed sane to the many, many teams of psychiatrists who came to evaluate him over the long months since his capture and arrest. Before Prosecutor Bullingham can speak, the madman shouts to the cameras with all of the old fire

"Selbstverständlich bedeuteten wir, die Juden zu beenden!"

For All Time Pt. 38

September-November 1946

-September of 1946 sees a new Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. (CJ Harlan Stone died in April and was replaced in June in OTL; with a Republican in the White House he managed to last a little longer, hoping to live until a Democrat became President or they took back Congress, but to no luck.)

President Bob Taft ponders carefully over his replacement; coming within a hairsbreadth of picking former Attorney General Earl Warren, who'd accepted an appointment to the US Senate after California's junior Senator died a few months after taking office. Warren has a good solid reputation as a conservative and law and order man...but in the end, it's just not strong enough for Taft's taste. This is the same job Taft's father William Howard had, the right sort of man needs to hold it.

Taft finally decides the right sort of man is strongly reminscent of the President himself, conservative, a former Senator, and reasonably well-liked by both major American political parties. Thus it is that New Hampshire Senator Styles Bridges becomes the 13th Chief Justice of the United States around September 3, 1946.

-1946 is an election year in the United States, and a surprising number of veterans are in the running. Politics is in something of a mess; a wave has begun to grow among young men who've come back home from fighting for American democracy and capitalism to find empty factories; or worse, jobs filled already by men who came home first.

The Democrats blame the Republicans, Speaker Martin, Treasury Secretary Friedman, and even President Taft himself. While public respect for the man who won the war remains high, confidence in the job he's doing as President has been declining since the first factories started closing. As Winston Churchill could have told him, it's an easy lesson to forget. The man is not the party, and the people know that.

Taft has surprised many, though; general strikes in the coal fields of western Pennsylvania and the steel industry have been met with condemnation from the White House, but no sort of preemptive or even postemptive attempts to stop the strikes from happening. The President's dry "The American worker has a right to strike." would have won a man less hated by labor more than grudging respect, as it is, many have decided to take the President at his word.

When the dust settles on Election Day of 1946, the Republicans have managed to retain both their Congressional and Senatorial majorities, though a closely divided Senate will have Vice-President Aiken using his tie-breaking power quite often in the first few months of the new Congress, in the next year. There are new faces in government, and some absent entire.

Richard Nixon remains a slightly frustrated lawyer in southern California; Jerry Voorhies was defeated soundly in the Republican landslide of 1944. Barry Goldwater is elected to the Arizona Senate in a surprise upset after his earlier primary victory; the aviator was elected while still in uniform. Hubert Humphrey came within a hairsbreadth of the Minneapolis mayorship, and Joseph Kennedy Jr. overcame lingering questions about his father to replace Leverett Saltonstall as Governor of Massachusetts. One younger brother is in the state legislature, another writes regular newspaper columns.

-October sees the creation of a new nation in Europe: "The Republic of Westphalia", governed from Dusseldorf and by President Erich von Manstein, has a Constitution similiar to the American (if with more powers for the executive in a crisis. The men who drew it up were leery of the example of Weimar, but, hey, the Reds are right over the border, not to mention the Frogs and Limeys.) and is a staunch ally, at least on paper, of its patron.

Manstein's first problem in office is, of course, the winter. Great Britain is tottering through on rations, African grain, and prayer, while France has seen another upsurge in political violence (it had been dying down) as Darlan manages, somewhat successfully, to pin the blame for the poor harvest and general poverty through most of France on the fascists and Communists, who clearly need to be lynched, or at least shot.

Without such a resource, Manstein's Treasury Secretary, Hjalmar Schacht, finds himself slowly burning off domestic capitol and even foreign exchange to help feed everyone and make sure the economy runs down on time. Slowly, it begins to look like Westphalia will get through the beginning of winter with head and heart intact.

Indeed, the nations of Europe are in no danger: Just the people; the millions still homeless who already are trying to make it across the border into Spain and Portugal, where it's warm and there was no war, or Italy, where...well, at least it's warm, only to be met by border guards, some reluctant, some not, who shoot to kill to keep out the foreign invader. There's nothing to do then but wander, as the cold winter begins.

-A lot of people wander to Baden; the British German zone is reasonably well supplied, and safer than the French Rhineland. Besides, there's a show: The Grimmest Show on Earth. The Americans and French held none, the Soviets were dull, and a foregone conclusion. (About the only verdict that surprised anyone was the sentence of Albert Speer to a lifetime of hard labor in Siberia. Heydrich, Friesler, Frank, Kaltenbrunner and all the rest go to their deaths on October 19, 1946, blaming Hitler for everything to the last.)

Not that there's any doubt of the fate of Adolf Hitler, of course, or of his principle subordinates on trial with him. But Hitler in the dock is Hitler in the dock; cheerfully describing Goering's efforts in Prussia (the former Luftwaffe head is in Westphalia, under the house arrest he's been in since his American capture), Funk's accepting human teeth at the Reichsbank, roaring at the incompetence of Sauckel and Rosenberg in the East, at the Jews that escaped...

Hitler's testimony actually helps spare Baldur von Schirach, he has so happily told the unvarnished, inescapable truth of so many others on trial that his rosy view of the young man who worshiped him as a King (and helped so many young Germans do the same) keeps von Schirach from conviction (along with former Foreign Minister von Papen) A few more defendants get a long stretch in prisons all over Germany, and Hitler himself is set to receive the noose on November 9, 1946. There will be no cameras as there were at the Berlin Trial hangings, the men who pull the handle won't receive commendations and be publicly lauded. It's just a hanging for Adolf Hitler.

For All Time Pt. 39

Winter of 1946-1947

Adolf Hitler dies on November 9, 1946 just as the dawn rose outside Baden. The gallows room was in a converted gymnasium, his death chair a converted student's desk, the rosy dawn was in his face for a moment as he spoke his last words, "Es ist heute morgen kalt, nicht ist es?" It is cold indeed, the winter of 1946-1947 will be one of the coldest since the 19th century, and the wind is coming from the Alps today. An instant later, the executioner pulled the final lever and the dictator dropped into eternity, unrepentant to the last.

Before the winter is over, Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann will join their spiritual leader; Mengele hanged by Polish partisans and Eichmann frozen to death in a work camp in the Ukraine. The winter is a dark time for former Nazis, more so than most refugees. Few have the money to flee to South America, and attempts to flee into Westphalia, the only state in Europe where former elements of the Third Reich still control the government, are met with a police force headed by Wilhelm Canaris, who remembers all the people who put him under arrest and killed his friends, and frankly isn't happy about it.

Otto Frank dies in a Displaced Person shelter in the French Rhineland on November 18. Hundreds of thousands will join him, there are few places indeed to go on this cold, cold winter. The Benelux countries can barely feed their own citizens, thousands join the fleeing mobs that clog nearly every frozen road through the winter. Darlanist France puts the DPs to work; it's incredibly hard work and hundreds more die in the job of repairing France and stripping Germany, but it's food and shelter, sometimes. (And the occasional nativist mob, full of people who don't have much themselves, except rope.) Great Britain is unaccessible, and the border guards in Spain and Italy shoot to kill. With Communist sentiments growing, both Darlan and Ciano decide that free elections must be postponed again for another few years.

On Christmas Day, 1946, Jimmy Stewart stares blankly into a nameless river in the Sierra Nevadas. Life has been bad for Stewart, two years in a POW camp has broken his health, and the disastrous failure of The Best Years of Our Lives has shattered his Hollywood capital. His wife has left him, but he and the bottle have gotten well-acquainted indeed. Maybe it'd be better to end it all, let the Stewart legacy go out with some class. He puts a foot over the rail-"Stop, son!" The other man is paternal, despite that he's short and could stand to lose some weight. "That's never the way." He extends a hand. "Let me help you." "Who are you?" "My name's Travers, Henry Travers."

Jack Kerouac faces an empty typewriter with grim determination in the early days of 1947. Greater economic disruption in the postwar US in general and rebuilding New York in particular broke up his group of friends a few months back. Ginsberg, the former welder, is writing patriotic pamphlets in Washington for the fund to rebuild the Statue of Liberty, Burroughs and Cassady moved back to Denver together, and Carr mostly drinks and talks about the weather. Not that Jack has a problem with drinking, no, but he has bills to pay, and The Town and the City won't write itself. At least he has a regular job these days, writing for his favorite radio program, and chicks dig it when you can turn to NBC at 6:30 and hear "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?"

Harold Stassen is America's first ambassador to independant Japan, the last US occupation troops (as opposed to troops stationed in dozens of military bases over the countryside) pull out by February 1, 1947. Despite Stassen's best efforts, relations with former occupation commander Douglas MacArthur slowly disintegrated as the general saw his personal empire collapsing, blaming a false and weak-willed defense policy under President Taft and Secretaries Fish and Donovan. MacArthur didn't hesitate to say as much, and once the Congressional elections of '46 were over, Taft didn't hesitate to fire the old general. "I am the commander in chief," commented the commander in cheif, "and General MacArthur forgot that."

For All Time Pt. 40

March-July 1947

-March 1, 1947 sees the formation of the Amsterdam Pact, a defensive and economic alliance between Belgium, France, Great Britain, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. The Benelux nations are desperately poor and a few thousand dollars from bankruptcy from month to month, especially after the terrible winter of 1947, and throwing in with the Anglo-French keeps them alive. The Pact is the brainchild of British Prime Minister Ernest Bevin, a unification of Western Europe against the Communist threat. Soon Belgian and Dutch troops are on the border with Westphalia, carefully watching the situation in Germany and eastward.

Significantly, Westphalia and Italy, the two things closest to successor states to the fascist wartime governments, are excluded from the Pact. Darlanist France and the Benelux countries will enter into no alliance with a de facto and de jure independant German state or a fascist one, despite the non-aggression of the Manstein and Ciano governments.

Bevin and Darlan hit on an inspiration, then: they'll make their own German state! The British and French governments begin working on cooperation between their occupation zones in Germany; first a common legal system, and then a common government by the middle of summer, with a theoretical capitol at Stuttgart. (Though, really, the new German "Pfalzrepublik" is governed from Paris and London.) Great Britain gets their German state as a first line of defense against the Germans, France gets more resources to keep the Darlanist regime afloat.

-In response to the formation of the Amsterdam Pact, Joseph Stalin declares during a grand May Day speech (as all of them are in the Soviet Union) that he will restore full and complete independence to the "People's Republic of Germany" by the summer of 1948, six months ahead of the Anglo-French schedule for the Pfalzrepublik. He makes a similiar pledge for the "Japanese People's Republic.", pledging full independence there by the end of 1947. (There is only the already independent South Japan to mock him with its Westernization there, not an existing competition with the European imperialists.) As the name suggests, the "JPR" is not entirely a pleasant place for non-Japanese, especially Koreans and Ainu, who obviously cause the weakening of the spirit of the Japanese proletariat and defensive spirit by not being Japanese. The fortunate ones manage to slip across the straits to democratic Japan, the really fortunate ones escape the Korea and Ainutowns that have sprung up in every major Japanese city to make it to the United States.

-The United States has taken quite a lot of immigrants in since the end of the war, both those displaced by it directly and those fleeing its consequences. Among these are several hundred thousand Jews, enough to give her an even more substantial Jewish population per OTL. (Very few American Jews have emigrated to the nearly openly anti-Semitic Palestinian Authority, where Britain will formally cede her control in August of 1947.) Gentleman's Agreement will prove even more successful than per OTL, the problems of American and Americanized Jews, as opposed to their European or Palestinian counterparts, are reasonably important to the American public.

Things are going pretty well in the US, they can afford those kinds of humanitarian worries. The recession of 1946 is comig to an end, and the economy is booming. The mass media is full of tales of the horrors of war and what a marvelous thing peace is: the pacifist science fiction stories of a young professor at Columbia named Isacc Asimov are the latest thing in the pulp community. Academic advocates of military interventionism have begun a lively if secretive correspondance, two former Undersecretaries of State named Dean Acheson and George Kennan are working on a magnum opus against isolationism, not that they expect it'll come to much good at the moment. Advertising middle manager Sloan Wilson, whose firm does limited publicity for the White House, has begun writing a biography of President Robert Taft, with the expected title.

-As summer begins, a weather balloon crashes into the central square of the small town of Roswell, New Mexico. Deeply embaressed at the public failure of the Army's attempt at high technology, Secretary of War Donovan and President Taft cut the budget for secret military research for the second year in a row.

-Meanwhile, India is independant! Hooray! Millions are dead in the partition, but that's less good.

For All Time Pt. 41

August-December 1947

-The main story of the latter part of 1947 is, of course, the outbreak of the Palestine War. What was first billed as a pan-Arab peacekeeping operation soon devolves into a pan-Arab conflict, and one where everyone is shooting at the Jews.

Menachem Begin is a desperate man by the middle of August, 1947. British authority in the Palestinian Mandate is due to lapse (by governmental decree) on October 1, 1947, when it will be turned over to the Arab Legion in particular and the government of Transjordan in general. Glubb Pasha's troops have been the de facto government in Palestine for a long time, though: it was soldiers of the Arab Legion who arrested Avraham Stern the year before, and they who executed him publicly just before New Year's.

The more moderate Zionist leaders, men like David Ben-Gurion, have chosen to try cooperation with the new authorities, to persuade them to disgorge territories long since promised to a Jewish state and largely useless to the Arab authorities. (Britain's Bevin government has replied to every petition with stern warnings about the consequences of making trouble.)The Irgun Zvai Leumi has been formally outlawed by both the government and the moderate Jewish organizations, driving the members of that already desperate organization (of which Begin is the new leader) to even greater feats of bravery or terrorism, depending on your interpretation.

With word of a new crackdown on the Irgun planned for September, Begin makes his decision. If the weak-willed moderates won't make an Israel, he'll make his own, by God. On August 7, 1947, several hundred Irgun troops, the bulk of their Jerusalem fighting strength, seize control of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, with only a few casualties among the Arab police forces posted to the hotel. (OTL's bombing went elsewhere.) Speaking to a cheering crowd of his supporters, soldiers and those few Zionist civilians in the hotel in the first moments of the crisis, Begin announces the formation of the State of Israel, with himself as its first Prime Minister (and commander of the army at once.) As a sop to the moderates, David Ben-Gurion is named first President. Begin calls for revolution, for the Jewish population of Palestine to take to the streets and take out the hated Arab and (to a lesser extent) British occupiers.

Indeed, in the opening hours of the crisis, mobs consisting of perhaps five thousand in total do briefly roam the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, throwing rocks at passing Arab and British soldiers and demanding a Jewish state for Jewish people. The homes of moderates like Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol are picketed, with cries for them to lead the revolution personally; their attempts to reason with the crowd meet with lukewarm success at best. Still, in a calmer enviroment, the Palestine Crisis would probably have passed with few casualties among the civilian and military populations of Palestine.

But Glubb Pasha's Palestine is anything but calm. Within a few hours of the beginning of the civil disorder, Arab Legion troops have mobilized in every major city in the Mandate, with the reserves called out in cities like Jerusalem with a Jewish majority. (Even with the greatly decreased Jewish migration to Palestine, Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority since the mid-19th century.) Several thousand troops surround the King David Hotel, demanding the immediate surrender of the Irgun forces. Both Glubb and Begin are under siege in the hot sun, Glubb's subordinates want to storm the hotel and slaughter all who live within and worship the wrong god, and Begin's most fanatical subordinates like the idea of a second Masada a little too much.

With the two divided camps on the hot afternoon of August 8, (the siege has lasted a day) it's hard to say who throws the hand grenade that detonated near an open window of the hotel at 3 PM, killing two Arab soldiers, a British advisor, and wounding two Irgun fighters. Both sides return fire, and Glubb reluctantly gives the order to storm the hotel, or rather gives his seal of approval to the reserve troops who have already broken the firing line to storm the hotel, adding the well-disciplined Arab Legion troops to their numbers.

By nightfall, over three hundred of Begin's four hundred troops are dead, many shot after attempts to surrender, with 109 Arab Legion and reserve troops in a similiar state. Casualties are heaviest among the reserves, and soon the word sweeps across Palestine about the Jewish terrorists who have killed Arab soldiers, many of them locals, civilians on days they're not in uniform.  

Despite half-hearted efforts at peacekeeping by Legion and a smattering of British troops, the mob violence that sweeps Palestine in the next few weeks is mostly Arab on Jew. Both sides are armed and firing at each other; with the Transjordanian troops often openly joining in the fighting against the Zionist troops. Acting under orders from Amman (and possibly London, depending on what conspiracy theory you believe) and blaming the Zionists for the deaths of his men and the violence in Palestine, Glubb finally deploys his troops formally as peacekeepers, with orders to shoot rioters and looters to kill. He makes a distinction between "armed civilians acting in self-defense" and "alien rioters capitalizing on our disorder for their own gain.", with the results one might expect. (Lots of dead Jews, and lots more angry, armed Jews and Arabs on the streets the next day.)

-As August moves on, British Prime Minister Bevin pledges British (and by extension, Amsterdam Pact) neutrality in the "Palestinian Disorder", though he does make many veiled references to "alien trouble-makers stirring up trouble in a peaceful territory" and promises full European support and recognition for the legimate government of Palestine. He accelerates the timetable for a British pullout, and by the first of September, only embassy personnel and Arab liason troops are left.

Despite strong pressure from American Jewish groups, the Taft administration pledges full neutrality in the Palestinian problem; though Taft does echo his post-war promises that Jewish refugees displaced by World War II, even those who temporarily settled in Palestine, will receive succor and aid if they choose to emigrate to the United States.

Meanwhile, the Arab states are horrified at Jordan's weakness. There's a risk of a Jewish republic right there in Palestine (land they want, run by people they hate), and the Jordanian military is only shooting rioters and members of terrorist organizations! The pansy bastards! The Egyptian and Syrian governments begin exerting strong pressure on Jordan's to take real action against the Zionists, to drive them into the sea or slaughter them! (Iraq is distracted by the new Communist Iranian state, and Lebanon is besieged by tens of thousands of Arab refugees from Palestine.) Plus, they all want a piece of Palestine, for faith and for all that land. (Land! Sweet land!)

When Jordan refuses, the Egyptian and Syrian armies mobilize on the Palestinian border, giving Jordan a time limit of October 1 to begin a full crackdown on the Zionists and to hand over the land which they acquired through a back room deal with the British imperialists. (The ten thousand dead or arrested Jews in Palestine might say they already are under crackdown, but neither Egypt nor Syria care.) Jordan refuses without hesitation, it is their territory, to deal with as they please, and so, at high noon on October 1, just as British authority formally lapses in Palestine and the territory becomes de jure part of the Kingdom of Jordan, the first Egyptian and Syrian troops cross their respective borders.

Despite early rapid strides by the Egyptian and Syrian armies, the more professional and fully mobilized Arab Legion (though badly outnumbered) manages to stabilize the battlelines within a month of the invasion, with the lines still frozen there by the end of the year. The Egyptian forces have broken free from the Negev and have seized most of Beersheba in the south, while the Syrian forces have pushed south to lay seige to the city of Nazareth in the north.  

As the war's military body count passes 10,000 by the end of 1947, American, European, and Soviet observers notice that if the Jordanians, Egyptians, and Syrians fight each other with moderate ferocity at best, they fight the Irgun with a ferocity indeed. The Irgun cause isn't recognized by any party (even Stalin is in one of his more anti-Semitic moods, and is trying to cozy up to the Islamic world after the whole invasion thing.) in the conflict or world, so they're considered terrorists, and are treated as such.

For All Time Pt. 42

January-July 1948

-The biggest story of early 1948 in the United States, despite the ongoing Palestine War with its hundreds of thousands of arriving refugees, is the election of 1948. Despite moderately serious strikes in the coal and rail industries, the American economy has recovered well from the recession of 1946 and much of America's wartime prosperity has been revived and extended to most Americans, at least the white middle class ones. Thus, there really are no challengers for President Robert Taft for the Republican nomination, and his renomination at the June 21-25 convention in Philidelphia is something of a foregone conclusion.

The only real surprise is the nomination of New York Governor Thomas A. Dewey as Taft's Vice-Presidential candidate. Vice-President George Aiken, a firmly liberal Republican, is uncomfortable with the deep conservatism of the Taft administration, but not so much that he'll challenge a sitting President for the nomination. Dewey is liberal too, but far more willing to compromise, especially with an unspoken offer of support in 1952. (In a Lincoln-esque move, no one actually bothered to tell Taft about the deal, knowing he'd refuse on principle, but his staff knows he'll support a loyal confederate like Dewey, especially with somewhat Presidential seasoning.)

Democrats, meanwhile, fight hard through the winter, spring, and early summer. Presidential contestants include 1944 candidate Alben Barkley (who loses out as too old and too discredited), Georgia Senator Richard Russell (who is too conservative even for the newly rightist Democrats) and former President Henry Wallace, whose doomed attempt at the nomination only serves to demonstrate how out of touch he is with both the Democratic Party and the country at large. Not entirely blind, he refuses an offer to revive the '44 Progressive Party, he can see the '48 apparatus is full of Stalinists.

After a tumultous convention from July 12 to July 16, in which Russel and Barkley crush Wallace before turning on and destroying each other, the party settles on a moderate dark horse, but one with a history of leadership and organization in war and peace: former Secretary of the Navy and Indiana Governor Paul McNutt, selecting Nevada Senator Pat McCarran as his running mate.

-Meanwhile, in March, Lebanon declares war on Jordan and, allied to Syria, invades Palestine, its armies greatly enhanced by the thousands of refugees who'd temporarily fled there at the war's outbreak. With Lebanon fighting by their side and with a substantial fifth column of Palestinians already living in the former Mandate, the Syrian army pushes the Nazareth Line south, to the city of Hadera on the coast and including part of the West Bank of the Jordan River.

With the Arab Legion distracted and being slowly bled white, the Egyptian Army in the south manages to drive north to the city of Gaza, only to be stopped by an unwitting and unwilling combination of fanatical Jewish resistance and a successful Jordanian counter-offensive that drove the Egyptians back from the gates of Hebron.

The numbers of their professional military dwindling (the AL was never a large force) and partisan activity getting worse and worse, the government of Jordan sends out peace feelers in May of 1948 and Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, all of whom have suffered their own fair share of casualties, agree to negotiations on the first of June, and by the end of July, the Palestine War is over.

200,000 people are dead, mostly civilians, mostly Jews. (the deaths are concentrated in urban Jews, with refugees and the pogroms severe enough that Jerusalem has lost its Jewish majority, with much of Tel Aviv a virtual ghost town.) Delegates from all over the Arab world meet in semi-neutral Baghdad to settle the new boundaries of Palestine. There are, of course, no Jewish delegates, with the assasination of David Ben-Gurion by a former member of the Jordanian army, the surviving Jewish leadership has died in place or successfully fled to the United States.

-In the Philippines, ailing President Ozmena decides to bolster his equally ailing government by taking the even more ailing Manuel Roxas into his goverment. Roxas had been the favorite to win the Presidency in 1948, but his health makes it impossible to run this year. Roxas is the new Minister of Justice, and begins a crackdown on the Hukbalahap movement (the corruption and moderate attempts at a crackdown under Ozmena have served to make the Huks more powerful than per OTL.)

For All Time Pt. 43

August-December 1948

-With the victories of Chester Bowles in Connecticut, Adlai Stevenson in Illinois, and Herbert Lehman in New York, the Democratic Party takes back the Senate in early November of 1944; unfortunately, that's the only concrete Democratic victory of the election of 1948.

The House remains Republican by a half-dozen votes, with the Southern Democrats who have often voted the GOP's line since the Roosevelt administration ensuring a strong majority for the programs of the Taft administration.

The Presidential race is a dull one; Bob Taft's policies have only offended people who'd have voted Democratic anyway (labor and liberals), and while Paul McNutt is deeply interested in the increasingly rapid retreat of Chiang Kai-Shek in China, the beginning of leftist disturbances in the Philippines, the ongoing "culturelle révolution" in France, the end of the Palestine War, the new Red German and Japanese states and the new Anglo-French backed Palantine; America doesn't care very much, and so McNutt mutes his urge towards interventionism.

Thus, with the American economy in very good shape (on the surface at least) and foreign policy not particularly an issue, there's very little reason for people not to vote for Bob Taft, so they mostly do. The Taft-Dewey ticket is elected by over 100 electoral votes and five percent of the popular vote, proving that America is reasonably willing to accept his policies; he can be elected without electoral chicanry. Taft carried New York and most of the Midwest, only losing McNutt's Indiana.

-With his President safely re-elected, Secretary of War William Donovan resigns. The old commander of the 69th New York cannot countenance the dismantling of much of the American military under his watch, despite his personal loyalty to President Taft.

Taft's pick as his replacement is North Dakota Senator Gerald Nye, whose loyalty to the administration (Taft's campaigning and popularity helped save him in 1946) is nearly as fervent as his isolationism and commitment to disarmament. Neither man is willing to touch America's fission program (outside of post-wartime cuts), but as for all the other waste...

September 15, 1948: Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria sign the Treaty of Baghdad, formally ending the Palestine War. Lebanon receives the northern half of the Hula valley, but they don't particularly mind, the government didn't enter the war for territory. Druze and Maronite Christians will receive special rights in the Muslim-controlled Holy Cities, while newly-vacant land in Palestine will be awarded to Muslim refugees in Lebanon; thus getting them out of Lebanon.

Syria receives everything north of the city of Jenin, outside of the Lebanese concession. Many native Palestinians (well, the non-Jewish ones) emigrate north to the Syrian territories, with whom they have a strong ethnic bond. Toward the Jewish population of the area, Syria pursues a similiar policy to the Egyptian government (which has everything south of the city of Gaza, east to the Jordanian border.) Formal discrimination, with strong encouragement for those who fled to not come back, and for those already there to go. By the end of the year, only the poorest or most fanatical Zionists remain in the new Syrian or Egyptian territories, the poorest assimilate or keep their heads down, the fanatical simply die.

Things are a bit better in the Jordanian territories (the remainder of the Mandate), discrimination is less severe and members of the armed mobs that still roam city and country, killing "uppity" Jews and burning out their homes and businesses are occasionally prosecuted, and even occasionally convicted. Still, the war saw heavy guerilla fighting between the Arab Legion and Irgun troops in the major cities, and most of the urban Jewish population has fled to the countryside or fled the country altogether. Jerusalem has lost its Jewish majority, and the ghost town of Tel Aviv is soon filled up with Palestinian returnees.

For All Time Pt. 44

Spring, 1949

-On March 1, 1949, one of the longest civil wars of the 20th century shifts into an entirely new phase, when Chiang Kai-shek himself steps off the boat at Taipei, well and truly gone from Mainland China. (For the moment, at least, or so he hopes.) Both Chiang himself and Taiwan the island are in bad shape; the Nationalist forces received substantially less aid from the United States during World War II and after, while Taiwan itself was fought over heavily during the American invasion of 1945. With the Kuomintang weakened badly and the Taiwanese population more radicalized (and armed) by the war, the logical solution is clearly to purge the native intellectual and educated classes; if they're not Communists, they're probably Japanese collaborators, which is nearly as bad to Chiang.

-With the independence of the Pfalzrepublik (the former French and British occupation zones in Germany) at the end of 1948 comes people who hate the whole idea of the place. Members of the Volkstag in Düsseldorf blast the Amsterdam Pact for carving up Germany and making them a puppet state, crowds in the street express their agreement by pelting passing Anglo-French troops with rocks and eggs.

The Volkstag delegates can be silenced by impeachment or political pressure, but the Dusseldorf mobs can't be; so the Blumentritt government calls on the Amsterdam Pact for help. Recognizing the propaganda problems that using their own troops would open up, both in their countries and in the Pfalzrepublik, Ernest Bevin and Pierre Darlan pressure the Benelux governments into sending in their military as peacekeepers, so it's young men from Amsterdam and Brussels who tear gas and billy club the anti-government mobs into submission through the spring of 1949.

While the Benelux peacekeepers are largely successful in restoring order, (after the Nazis, the horrors of war, and the occupation, there isn't exactly much spirit left in the German mindset), it is clear now to the world that the Pfalzrepublik government and even the state itself are a creation of and maintained by the Amsterdam Pact nations. Walter Ulbricht and Erich von Manstein condemn both mob violence and the "repression of democratic ideals of the German people", Ulbricht has his orders from Moscow and von Manstein has his basic views about how nifty a large, powerful Germany would be. (Plus he's worried about the elections of 1950, Konrad Adenauer's party looks powerful indeed, the Mayor of Bonn may be the next President. The Constitution does contain clauses about suspending the elections in event of civil disorder, though...)

The repression also serves to finally alienate the Taft administration from any attempts at military cooperation with Europe.

-Influenced by the pleas of the Quirino government in April, President Taft increases the size of the naval and Marine garrison at Subic Bay. The Hukbalahap Rebellion has been growing gradually worse since independence, and the attempts at first cooperation and then repression by the vacillating Ozmena government served mostly to stimulate the growth of the forces of Luis Turac, a former member of Congress. Quirino hopes that a show of force will show the rebels that the United States will defend one of her few remaining formal allies.

Unfortunately, influenced by his own deep reluctance to get involved in the Far East and by the less than reliable reports of Secretary of State Fish and Secretary of War Nye, Taft sends only a token increase in forces, a squadron of destroyer escorts coupled with an extra 400 Marines. The troop increase, which had been trumpeted by the Philipino government as proof of the utility and power of their ally, demonstrates to much of the populace that the government doesn't know what it's talking about and the Americans have gotten far more...spineless than they remember.

-As May dawns, a bitter, angry John Ronald Reuel Tolkien packs his bags, wondering what the University of Bloemfontein will look like. The lawsuit from his publishers nearly impoverished him from the legal fees alone, much less the damages he had to pay, and Oxford decided it didn't need to keep employing such a controversial Rawlingson Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Fellow of Pembroke College.

Fortunately, an administrator at Bloemfontein was a fan of both Tolkein's fictional tales and his academic papers and lectures, and the job offer had come in just when he and Edith were contemplating the humilation of moving in with John Jr. or C.S. Lewis while he hunted for work as a lecturer.

Still, even after all the heartache and personal disasters, Tolkein is sure he was in the right with his publishers. The books didn't need editing! A bad economy doesn't mean the populace won't buy a deep series, and it doesn't mean they want unrealistic fantastic stories to distract them. The Hobbit was published in 1936, when the economy was not the strongest, and it didn't exactly fail.

If only he hadn't lost the rights along with the suit...well, there will be more books.

Map of Europe, 1949

Flags of the post-war world

Westphalia

Pfalzrepublik

Japanese People's Republic

For All Time Pt. 45

Summer to Fall, 1949

-By June of 1949, George S. Patton and Douglas MacArthur have begun a lively correspondance, bridging the gap from Paris to Manila, the distance and the medium of the written word keeping the horns of their gigantic egos from locking too often. Time and the vicissitudes of the post-war American military have driven both men out of the Army they'd devoted their adult lives to, loyalties established during the war have let them both wind up in another army, though.

Patton's France is more stable than MacArthur's Philippines, the isolated Communist guerillas in the Massif Central are far less of a threat to national stability than the Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon, and Patton advocates a slightly more consistent course of action than MacArthur's: Just shooting the partisans. On most days, MacArthur advocates a far more moderate course, cooperation and co-option (and shooting those who resist after that ), but his flashes of both bloodthirstiness and sheer pessimism have attracted the attention of the government, enough that he doesn't quite have the policy influence of Patton, not the kind his reputation might suggest.

-On July 4, 1949, ground is broken on newly-renamed "Liberty Island" to build the new Statue of Liberty. The project is a cooperation of the city government of New York, the state government, and truly heroic donations from all across the United States. (A young former welder named Allen Ginsburg wrote most of the advertising posters.)

The Statue herself will be rebuilt as close to the original as possible (even a great deal of the original copper will be recycled), but the Island itself will be totally remodeled, with a museum dedicated to the German raid on New York City and to American warfare and patriotism in general.

Commissioned to design and the museum complex is Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, whose bitter feud with Darlanist France over the rebuilding of French cities has driven his genius from European shores back across the Atlantic to the United States.

-Clark Gable's starring role in Twelve O'Clock High is keeping the actor's reputation high indeed. Gable spent the war organizing war bond drives and making rousing, patriotic speeches alongside his wife Carole Lombard; and with celebrities in uniform like Jimmy Stewart relatively few and far between, to many, Clark Gable simply was the face of patriotic Hollywood at war.

Gable's fame is such that elements of the California Democratic Party have suggested he run for office; that he challenge Governor Frederick Houser in 1950, or even Senator Earl Warren in that same year. Gable is cool to the idea, politics isn't quite his scene, but the always politically active Carole has been urging him on for quite a while: plus he really doesn't like the Taft administration...

-Former Vice-President George Aiken is Robert Taft's latest Supreme Court appointee, replacing the late Frank Murphy, an FDR appointee. Aiken is a liberal Republican, much more so than Taft or any other of the President's judicial appointees, but Taft feels no small loyalty to his former #2 and a healthy respect for the man who stood against the tide of conservatism in his administration for four solid years. (Taft is really familiar with the idea of standing against the tide of history.)

-One of the few men willing to talk publicly (and getting a reasonably good reception at it) about interventionism abroad is a former OSS officer named John Birch, who'd been removed from his post in China after a too-public feud with the local Communists in the Wallace administration.

Birch, a lifelong and deeply commited Southern Baptist, has begun working with former army chaplain Billy Graham, preaching a gospel of godly purity at home and unashamed confrontation with the forces of Hell abroad. Birch and Graham attract only moderate attention, this is before the mobilization of religion in American politics, but a speech in California does appeal to a troubled young teenager named Charles Manson, who rapidly organizes his local Young Republican chapter...

For All Time Pt. 46

Fall to Winter 1949

- Ismet Inönü is a worried man in September of 1949. As per the "requests" of Foreign Minister Molotov: The Soviet Union wants the Dardanelles (Not to keep, mind you, just a major Soviet naval base there and Soviet say over which ships enter the Black Sea and which don't.) It wants Kars, too, and much of the east to be attached to Soviet Georgia, and more still to be attached to the Kurdish autonomous region they carved from their puppet state of Iran. And those, those they want to keep.

Inönü is fully aware of the consequences of resistance: the recent internal coup d'etat and harsh crackdowns in the new "People's Republic of Iran" have sent thousands of Iranians fleeing into Persia with horror stories to tell of just what it is the Soviets mean. Too, caving in will ensure the defeat of his party in the elections of 1950, not to mention national humiliation and even the risk of a military coup d'etat. As he has so often in the past few years, he wishes Kemal hadn't been so ungracious as to simply die eleven years earlier, and leave him to run the show when the monsters began running loose upon the world.

Turkey never entered World War II, Germany's greater apparent strength kept them out in 1945 and its abrupt collapse of strength in 1946 happened too fast for them to act. With no real ties with Europe, (Inönü's efforts at neutrality have succeeded well indeed.) Turkey can depend on no support from the Amsterdam Pact. Support from the United States is so unlikely as to remain unnoticed. The rest of the Muslim world doesn't care overmuch about Turkey, except for Iraq (who mostly cares for Iran) who won't do anything anyway.

Finally, as October slowly dawns, the old soldier and statesman makes his decision. If the choice is between Turkey's life and Turkey's (and his) honor, there's not really a decision to make, anyway. On October 2, 1949, Ismet Inönü signs the Treaty of Istanbul, granting the Soviet Union control of the Dardanelles and the rights to build a naval base and other complexes there, as well as awarding them roughly 90% of the disputed territory in the east of Asia Minor. The Turkish military goes mad (at least in angry barracks discussions), Europe and the US consider Turkey a Soviet satellite (unfairly), but there will be no war in Asia Minor, for now.

-In November, after an unsuccessful Huk attack in Manila wounds President Quirino and kills the Minister of Agriculture, President Bob Taft agrees to step up the American military presence in the Philippines. A full regiment of Marines will be added to the garrison already at Subic Bay, and a US carrier task force will take up permanent station at the various harbors on the major islands, starting in January of 1950.

First to be dispatched will be the modern carrier U.S.S. *David Farragut, completed just before the end of World War II and one of the survivors of the Taft administration's military budget cutbacks, complete with her very own task forces of escort ships and combat aircraft.

December 1, 1949: Freshman Congressman Adam Clayton Powell storms angrily out of the office of House Minority Leader Sam Rayburn. Times aren't very good for blacks in the United States; either politically or economically.

While the wartime social programs of the Wallace administration were successful in raising the economic and political standing of America's African-American population, especially in government-related occupations, the budget cutbacks and economic austerity of Bob Taft and Treasury Secretary Milton Friedman have fallen heavily indeed on America's black population, mostly unintentionally.

A second wave of the Great Migration has begun in the post-war United States, it was newly-emigrated voters recently from Alabama and Mississippi who pushed Powell narrowly into office, after his embaressing defeat in 1944. Elected on a platform of more rights and economic aid to poor blacks, Powell expected help from his seniors in the Democratic Party.

Rayburn is sympathetic, but it's just not a priority for him: He's worried about rebuilding the Democratic Party as a cohesive institution in the South, one that can help elect a President in 1952, and worrying about civil rights and the status of blacks will just hurt that effort.

No little black resentment is beginning to turn against America's newly-growing Jewish population: the government is obviously pro-refugee, and the aid to the new arrivals smacks of blatant racism, helping out the Jewish migrants to court the Jewish vote while ignoring America's black population...

For All Time Pt. 47

January 2, 1950: Benito Mussolini breathes his last on an isolated island in the Adriatic, one of the few in Italian hands. Mussolini had been under house arrest since 1945, when the Ciano regime came to power in Italy. Mussolini's fall was not nearly so hard as per OTL, and he never became a German puppet. Thus, the loyalty of a son-in-law to his father-in-law kept Mussolini alive, despite his bugaboo status as a touchstone for Italian ultra-fascists.

With his death, though, the movement falls apart: Its leaders were "Rosenbergs and Goebbels", able to lead a movement about restoring an exiled il Duce, still popular with some, but with no real ability to lead a movement about themselves. Ciano moves quickly to co-opt them, and by the end of the month, the only former Mussolini backers not in the government camp or out of politics altogether are gangsters who wrap themselves in political clothing, and are recognized as such.

With his right wing well-shored up, Galeazzo Ciano now has a choice to make. While no democrat, he is no Hitler or Mussolini either, and the harsh measures he has had to adopt in the past five years have made him uncomfortable, sometimes. Too, even limited democracy would help him get into the Amsterdam Pact: to get military aid with the border incursions of Austria and Yugoslavia, to get economic aid (though the influx of Jewish refugees has largely solved the labor crisis), and to help get credibility with states abroad, many of whom still don't like the idea of a fascist-descended state.

February 20, 1950:  After extensive consulations with King Victor Emmanuel (to make sure both their positions will be well-protected in the new state), Ciano makes the surprise announcement that Italy will hold her first free elections (well, for the legislature at any rate), on September 20, 1950. The Amsterdam Pact is pleased to have a possible new ally who is strong without challenging Britain and France for supremacy, Italian liberals are pleased to have some pretence of democracy, while Josef Stalin is non-plussed. There are ways of dealing with this sort of thing, after all.

March 9, 1950: Hermann Goering is shot to death while walking around his small house-prison. Goering has been under house arrest in various parts of first the American occupation zone and then Westphalia since the end of the war, a victim of his own success.

Goering was liberated from a concentration camp by American troops just before V-E Day, imprisoned for his failure to stop the use of nuclear weapons on German cities, as well as an alleged plot against the Heydrich government. Having lost weight and drugs and gained his political acumen back in prison, the old Field Marshal managed to sell certain gullible or jaded American soldiers on how anti-Nazi he always was, even before the war, reminding them of the half-dozen or so Jews he helped save. He couldn't go free, though, not with his record, and the Americans reluctantly opted against extraditing him, despite the pleas of the other allied powers.

No group claims responsiblity, not formally, but Westphalian intelligence does find an apparant link to a maimed veteran of the British military, who lost an eye in the invasion of Vichy Syria during the war. Moshe Dayan disappears shortly thereafterwards, though, just ahead of Wilhelm Canaris' efficient internal police force.

He's not quite done with Westphalia and Europe, though. From late March through April, a former Polish Jew named Shimon Peres runs a crew of carpenters working on a major refurbishing of the largest hall in Oldenburg. This is Erich von Manstein's planned site for the Solidarität convention of 1950; where he and Dr. Eugen Gerstenmaier will be nominated for a second term, in theory.

Erich von Manstein has a plan, whose only flaw at the moment is that it's not as secret as he imagines....

April 19, 1950: Governor Joseph Kennedy Jr. of Massachusetts addresses a class of political science students at Harvard University, expostulating a theory of government that wasn't entirely ghost-written. His most rewarding contact, though, is with a young physics lecturer who worked on the Manhattan Project named Theodore Hall...

For All Time Pt. 48

May 7, 1950: Canada has its first non-Mackenzie King Prime Minister since 1935: John George Diefenbaker, leader of the Progressive Conservatives. Louis St.Laurent's Liberals ran a good game, but the party had been growing weaker for a while, seen as too arrogant after so many years in power, and too close to a US that remains more unpopular than OTL, with strained relations during the war and after.

Diefenbaker is in something of a dilemma: he badly wants stronger relations with Great Britain and the rest of the Dominions, but their Liberal governments just strike him the wrong way. Ernest Bevin in particular troubles him; whatever the faults of J.G. Diefenbaker, he is neither a bigot nor "an odious little reptile of a man", and Bevin and his Liberals strike him as both.

Well, if Canada can't trust the US and it can't trust Great Britain (Yet, anyway. In his first days in office, the Chief meets often with former British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, and the two become fast friends. Eden even helps suggest a medication for Diefenbaker's back, one that has helped Eden himself many times over the years.), she'll just have to go her own way, in more ways than one.

One of the few non-government members Diefenbaker meets in his first week as Prime Minister is a professor of nuclear physics at the University of Toronto named Walter Zinn. He has a mission for his fellow Canadian; a mission to build a shield to protect the nation, and then to help shield others. After all, he has to do something to get Canadian industry up and running again...

May 12, 1950: Corporal Charles Abrell, USMC, is guarding a side entrance, just outside an enlisted barracks, of the major US naval and marine base at Subic Bay in the Philippines at 08:00 hours. Just before his assigned watch period ends, a large civilian truck pulls up, like many that pass by his post every day, three came by on his current watch alone.

But something makes the young Hoosier suspicious, he stops the truck and orders the driver to open the back, and thus just has time to level his M-1 before the truck driver pulls a jury-rigged lever near the steering wheel, detonating the truck's contents. Abrell's thinking saves several hundred people in the barracks, but kills thirty nearby Marines and a dozen Philippinos.

(The suicide bombing was, of course, not solicited or endorsed by Thorez, Taruc, or any of the other leaders of the Hukbalahap Rebellion. They are soldiers and revolutionaries, not fanatic madmen. (Or, at least, not that fanatically mad.)

Ill luck intervenes, however, with most of the Huk major commanders in the field this day, so the first message sent in response to the bombing doesn't actually bother to declaim responsibility for the attack, merely condemning cowardly attacks on those not involved in fighting, while at the same time praising a blow struck against the imperialists. A perhaps deliberate mistranslation by a government translator renders a clumsy, offensive document into something even worse, and the Huk statement runs next to a picture of the giant crater at Subic Bay in every American newspaper on the 13th. The Huk restatement makes page 3, accompanied with editorials about the hypocritical Communists.

No American is more horrified than Bob Taft. He is the commander and chief, he's the one who chose to deploy those Marines, he's the one who got them killed in a foreign land. His temptation is to simply withdraw, let the eforeignrs settle their own problems: but he can't abandon an ally, not with Quirino rushing aid to the wounded Marines at Subic, and more, he can't let those men die for nothing, not with all those bodies burnt into his mind's eye.

News from the Far East had been bad enough before; Red Chinese "volunteers" are turning the tide in Indochina, Massu's troops are slowly falling back toward the south, fighting hard in the jungle, using some of the same Lewisite the British are using on the Mau Mau, to the same limited effect.

But now it's American boys coming home in body bags, American women made widows, American children left fatherless. If he can't make them alive again, he can at least make sure as few as possible die in the future, by wreaking revenge against the men who attacked America, however indirectly.

May 14, 1950: Robert Taft addresses a packed Congress in what will become the famous "Bitter Duty" speech, easily winning approval for immediate airstrikes against Huk positions in Luzon, with possible use of ground troops alongside the Filipino army. Gerald Nye resigns almost immediately, and Taft retires to the sancity of the White House. (A personally modest man, he can live with the problems in the White House, though he's encouraged the First Lady and his children to move to Blair House while he looks for a good architect. The former Martha Bowers is as tough as her husband, but they're devoted parents, his son's jukebox nearly broke through the floor.)

As the USS David Farragut and her battle group turns toward Luzon, already drawing up plans for airstrikes against the Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon, some using the new combat version of the FJ-Fury, Robert Taft begins visiting Blair House almost constantly, even moving his office there. On his short list for the new Secretary of War are New York corporate attorney John Foster Dulles, Ohio Governor John Bricker, and even Harold Stassen; some of the few prominent interventionists in American politics.

May 20, 1950: Taft invites Thomas Dewey over to Blair House; he wants his Vice-President's advice on the next Secretary of War.

For All Time Pt. 49

May 20, 1950: In many ways, the events outside of Blair House were almost anticlimactic. In many ways, however, they most assuredly were not. The island of Puerto Rico had been largely neglected by the last two administrations; though through no malice on either part. Puerto Rican development projects had been on President Henry Wallace's agenda, but he did not submit the relevant bills to Congress until after a solid anti-Wallace majority would block nearly anything with his name on it, and those projects, a new naval base, a national museum that he managed to pass under his authority as President of the United States were largely dismantled by the Taft administration in a spirit of removing governmental interference.

To Albizu Campos and his black-shirted army of liberation, however, the neglect was yet another sign of mainland American racism. Campos had earned his distrust of the Americans as a veteran of WWI, exposed to the casual bigotry of the United States army, many of his followers were motivated by the infamous Rhoads letter, or a simple desire for national independence; like what they'd seen much of the rest of the Caribbean achieve in the past few decades.

Oscar Collazo is motivated by the first, Griselio Torresola by a family history of revolution, together with a long, angry time on relief and a chance to be really useful, since of the two, he's the gun expert. (Collazo has never fired a pistol in his life.) Neither of them are terribly competent, though: they've not bothered to determine President Robert Taft's schedule, nor even his general pattern of movements. Their plan is a rather bold one; Collazo will strike the front door, while Torresola, the skilled gunman, will attack the weakly defended basement door.

Even that plan they abandon in a rush of delight at exactly 16:37, when they walk up together to find, of all things, President Taft greeting Vice-President Dewey at his door. Now is the opportunity to strike, to bring about a revolution in the United States that will let the motherland break free and be independent! The two New Yorkers burst from their car ten yards up the road, Torresola firing with the cool of a professional, Collazo with the mad grace of a fanatic, shouting "¡Puerto Rico Para Siempre!" and slogans of the revolution-

As he picks himself up off the ground a moment later, Thomas Dewey feels rather embarrassed. (Through the not-unreasonable residual terror, that is.) Old mob fighter that he was, he hit the dirt the moment armed men burst from a car; but within a minute or two it was all over; Torresola catching Birdzell's volley in the chest, Collazo actually getting within 15 feet or so before being cut down by the massed fire of five Secret Service agents.

The embarrassment fades, however, when he sees the blood-stained, silent corpse at his side.

-Thomas Dewey knows how to deal with gangsters, though. Showing a verve and drive that shocks a nation that remembers him as the other boring guy from 1948 but is less than surprising to a New York that remembers its governor and an city that remembers its district attorney, the new President takes only time to be sworn in by Chief Justice Bridges and to change into a clean suit before addressing Congress and the nation, live at 5:30 PM. His speech is one of the first major broadcasts of the infant medium of television.

The National Guard is going to Puerto Rico (well, not the Puerto Rican National Guard, but of other states) to act as the new police force, obviously the local cops just aren't doing a good job. To Dewey, Campos and his "band of armed hooligans in an all-too-familiar uniform" must be slapped down and slapped down hard. Rapid deployment of the National Guard means the closest units, and the closest units are from the Southern states, units already radicalized on a basis of race, now with a martyred President to hold up, with the g******s now below the n*****s, at least for the moment. Racism is disgusting and pointless to Thomas Dewey, but if putting racists in Puerto Rico prevents any more assasinations, well, he's willing to do that for law and order, and if he alienates the voters in the South...well, they weren't going to vote for him anyway.

The obvious problem there is numbers; the regular army is relatively small, and with much of the National Guard posted to Puerto Rico, there are a paucity of forces available for operations in the Philippines. (Dewey vows to carry out President Taft's plans there to the last, the "fall of a hero" will not stop America standing up for democracy.) Thus, in an act of supreme irony: the memory of Robert Taft, who bulled through World War II like a horrifed crusader and greeted the return of new conflict with disgust, is used to re-introduce the draft.

It is billed as an emergency measure (even in shock and with a groundswell of popular support, THIS America and THIS Congress will give no President that big a stick), lasting only until 1952, but with an option to renew it later. Thomas Dewey has his strong arm to lay down the American law, for good or ill, and a strong wave of popular support, for the moment. (He picks fellow New Yorker John Foster Dulles as his Secretary of War.)

But he's in a bigger fishbowl now than Albany or Manhattan; the nation is watching him, Congressional Democrats are watching him (if World War II was partisan, why should the "police action" in the Philippines be any different?), Europe is watching him, and, of course, a fellow mustachioed world leader is paying close attention indeed.

-Celâl Bayar is running for President of Turkey and hoping to crush Ismet Inönü, appeaser that he is, like an ant, and all of his military party too. Bayar is a Democrat, hoping to reduce the autocracy of the government and promote free enterprise rather than state-owned governments.

He's delighted when one of the smaller left-of-center party chooses to merge with his, and gladly takes a fair share of the massive amounts of funding they offer, from private backers, and takes lots of pictures with the party leaders. (Bayar's not stupid, of course, he knows the "private backers" are foreigners. As his party is strongly in favor of engagement with the Amsterdam Pact, it's obvious they're interested in electing a candidate friendly to their interests. He has no interest in being their toady, but no objection to taking their money.)

June 6, 1950: At noon exactly, Erich von Manstein ascends the podium in Oldenburg Hall. In his hand is a speech suspending the election and declaring martial law in Westphalia, with harsh crackdowns to follow on suspected terrorists. Manstein will be as hard as he can; the Americans will balk at too much, but he can do much indeed with them distracted in the Pacific.

At 12:13, the clockwork assembly underneath the podium finishes counting down. The subsequent blast kills Manstein, the Vice-President, Head Police Chief Canaris, two Justices of the Supreme Court, and the leaders of Manstein's party in the legislature.

The new President is Attorney-General Reinhard Gehlen.

For All Time Pt. 50

September 20, 1950

Madison, Wisconsin: "And when I looked down into that bottle three years ago today, do you know who I saw staring up at me? Do you?" Joseph Raymond McCarthy stepped back from the podium for a moment to wipe his brow, looking from face to face. Thirty seedy-looking men were here tonight, more than he'd had come to see him speak in a long, long time. Life was going pretty well. "I saw SATAN staring up at me from that bottle, my friends! The Red Devil from his bottle of Red Commie Vodka!" He hefted the bottle of Smirnoff by his side on the podium and smashed it to the ground. "And that's what you have to do with it, my friends! Smash Red Commie Vodka, smash Comrade Whiskey and Comrade Gin, smash the champagne and fancy liquors the refined leftist pinko loves to drink, until we've cleansed America of the curse of Commie booze! Protect our precious bodily fluids!", he shouted in his best preacher-style voice, saying a silent prayer of thanks he'd spent his last dime on watching John Birch speak. His suit wasn't seedy at all. "Drink American drinks! Like beer!"

Manila, Philippines: Major-General Walton Walker has assumed command of Operation COPPER, a wry pun from the Dewey administration and the planned anti-Huk peacekeeping operation in Luzon. Walker himself is not familiar with the Far East, having served in Europe during World War II and in the US after, but he has a strong right arm in his cheif of staff, William Westmoreland, who served with distinction in Formosa and the Philippines during the war, and commanded several offices charged with fighting partisans in that time.

Some say Walker overextends himself in moving his command to Manila before his strong left arm (which is to say, his invasion force of veterans mingled with draftees and volunteers) is assembled in the United States and brought over to the Far East, but Walker is never one to worry about that. He and his boys will move forward, ever forward.

Airstrikes, now in their fifth month, have killed several hundred Huk fighters, several hundred civilians, and 25 American pilots.

New York City, USA: Pierre Boulle sighs irritably as he looks over his income for this month. Emigrating to the States was a good idea; Darlan is no Hitler or Petain, but it's a bit uncomfortable to be an author who's at all political in France these days. Besides, watching the government lose the land in Indochina he endured years in a Japanese POW camp for turned his stomach.

But Hollywood is well-entrenched, and anti-French sentiment combined with his own really bad English drove him back east again: to New York, America's Eternal City, to write plays. Well, outlines for plays anyway; neither M. Hammerstein or M. Rodgers would much like it if he started to write their musical for them. Still, even the idea will pay rent for this week, and food for a month...

Rome, Italy: Palmiro Togliatti has won a narrow majority in the new Italian Senato, making the Italian Communist leader one of the most powerful men in Italy. Togliatti is not in the Moscow camp, of course, very few Euro-Communists of his era are, at least in Western Europe. They saw what happened to their ideological brethern in the East when Stalin cut them loose, after all. To be fair, though, there are a number of Stalinist parties allied to his.

To Galezzo Ciano, however, his experiment in democracy has failed, and failed badly. God, the Communists are this close to taking over the government entirely! He'll stop them, though, and stop them personally, the decorated veteran of Spain is not one to flinch from personal danger. There is a gathering of former Resistance fighters (bunch of Reds) n October 1, Togliatti is scheduled to be the keynote speaker. Ciano will see about introducing something much more interesting.

Istanbul, Turkey: Gaik Ovakimyan is sitting in a cafe, drinking that odd Turkish tea and musing idly that Istanbul is no New York, but hey, what is? Life has been pretty good for him in the past few years, he got a lot of America, and not just huge amounts of military intelligence. He actually got to meet President Henry Wallace in 1944, and if he can just manage to meet Pierre Darlan, his list will be complete.

Once operations here are complete, he'll be behind only Sudoplatov, who is behind only Beria, who is behind only...well, the Great Stalin can't live forever.

For All Time Pt. 51

Fall to Winter, 1950

-Anglo-American military cooperation, something dead and gone since the death of Franklin Roosevelt, begins to flower again in the Philippines. Thomas Dewey hasn't the Anglophobia of Henry Wallace or the ingrained isolationism of Robert Taft, and is acutely conscious that if he must fight the war well and quickly, he daren't simply repeat the mistakes made by the French and British in their colonial, anti-Communist wars, and so he asks Ambassador Wilson for British assistance; for the loan of British advisors, veterans of Malaysia and Burma, to teach Americans how to fight Communist partisans in the Far East.

Whatever his vague amusement at the Americans, so arrogant in their isolationism, having to fight essentially the same war he's been fighting, Ernest Bevin isn't one to flinch from helping another democracy fight Communists, and soon, as one wit puts it, "Americans teach Filipinos how to use the Pershing in the city, while the British teach the Americans how to use their rifles in the jungle."

The Americans are doing more than relearning jungle operations; the British have met the hardness of the Malaysian guerillas with their own (more after the successful Indonesian secession from the Netherlands and the quasi-Communist government established there.), and they teach the tactics of the Emergency to the Americans, an even mix of peacetime soldiers and veterans of the last war.

Most, surprisingly, are not draftees; John Foster Dulles' War Department, now fully settled, has concluded there's not actually a need for a vast number of soldiers to fight the alleged Communist hordes, and it has been applied weakly at best, mostly to ensure the few American military bases in Westphalia, South Japan, and the Panama Canal Zone, now largely emptied as regulars are deployed to the Philippines, remain at full strength. Still, they remain an vague spectre of worry to American men of the right age, though that ground remains largely untapped. After all, despite the presence of 2,000 draftees in the Philippines, none have seen combat, yet.

-President Reinhard Gehlen can't do what he really wants to do in Westphalia; purge the undesirable elements and drive them out into countries with more tolerance for such things. He wasn't the mad anti-Semite of so many of his comrades in Intelligence during the war, but they've certainly not demonstrated their trustworthiness! (While neither Moshe Dayan nor Yitzhak Rabin has been caught, evidence of their organization has been found and linked to the assasination of Manstein and Goering.)

Pondering that Moshe Dayan's organization might not represent all Jews, or that even Dayan's people might have had a legitimate grievance against a former Nazi suspending elections is profitless, so Gehlen, pragmatist that he is, does no such thing. Instead, he acts in a way even Manstein couldn't have.

The election of 1950 is postponed until 1952; and the "Internal Police" begin monitoring Konrad Adenauer and other leaders of the opposition party. Furthermore, several hundred of the most prominent radicals, leaders of the small Communist Party and Jewish activist groups among others, are rounded up and exiled, or else kept in "protective custody", under house arrest, forbidden from politics. Some are involved in Dayan's movement, some in other plots, most are not.

The crackdown plays as well as can be expected; Westphalia does apparantly have a terrorist problem, after all, and the United States, the only nation with a major, politicized Jewish population, has for the moment little sympathy for the assassins of a President, or for Communists. Still, Westphalia slowly slides outside of the mainstream of European society even more, slight odds of joining the Amsterdam Pact pass well away.

-On October 1, Galeazzo Ciano acts. Moving with decisive speed and authority, he makes a multi-part declaration from his palace in Rome that outlaws the Italian Communist Party and "their allies, political and not", fires and arrests all such from the Senato, and declares the Uomo Qualunqu and its official leader, Pietro Badoglio, as head of the legislative branch.

Galezzo Ciano is bold, honest, and decisive, but such qualities in a leader do not necessarily filter down to the rest of the government and military; Italian Intelligence is a leaky sieve during the weeks of preperation, and even Togliatti's cat knows the troops are coming by the first of October. When squads arrive to arrest the canny Stalinist, he and cat are long gone, as are virtually all Communist leaders.

Warnings to the Christian Democrats are less efficient, those Senators and their political allies who join Togliatti in his refuge in and around Turin have many friends in government hands, and perhaps it is this that prompts them to join Togliatti in his "Turin Declaration" of October 5. He and his new-found allies declare the executive, monarchial, and judicial branches of government dissolved, Alcide de Gasperi (one of the Christian Democrats in government hands) and Pietro Togliatti are joint leaders of the "Repubblica Sociale di Italia" and the Army is called on to remove the "Fascists, now revealed in their true colors."

First to join the RSI are the new Jewish migrants, politicized as they are by the horrors of war they've fled and the knowledge of what fascist governments (like Gehlen's, and perhaps like Ciano's) might do to active Jews in wartime; they are joined shortly thereafter by those thousands of Italian officers and men who are tired of fighting for those who, whatever their heroism might have been in past wars, force them to keep the government's boot on the neck of their fellow Italians.

Within a week, low-level fighting, rapidly escalating in intensity, has begun in nearly every major city in the north of Italy, and more than a few in the south...

-In Puerto Rico, conditions slowly simmer. Virtually every officer above the rank of lieutenant in the Puerto Rican National Guard has resigned in anger at their disarmament and deliberate demoblization (all those in uniform at the time of declaration of martial law have been demobilized, and no more have been called), and discontent is high among the civilian population as well. Luis Muñoz Marín, elected governor of the island, has sent repeated petitions to President Dewey, only to be met with polite, even friendly refusal. Marin has made up his mind, he'll just go see the President himself.

Still, despite allegations of brutality from private soldiers and non-commissioned officers, the National Guard administration of the island has been an efficient one. Members of Puerto Rican nationalist organizations have been arrested, most held in prisons off the island, in some of the more isolated Florida Keys.

-In this troubled world atmosphere, Celâl Bayar becomes President and Adnan Menderes Prime Minister of Turkey near the end of the year.

For All Time Pt. 52

January-April 1951

-On January 18, 1951, General Jacques Massu hands his broken sword to General Vo Nguyen Giap in a formal ceremony outside the city of Phnom Penh in southwestern Indochina. The long, grueling Indochinese War is finally over. The war has been marked with atrocities on both sides; Massu's artillery bombardment of Hanoi with Lewisite (an incredibly destructive poison gas bought from the British) will remain a textbook case for humanitarian societies after the war, while Giap never hesitated to turn French POWs over to the Chinese (after they entered on the Vietminh side), or to use terroristic tactics of sabotage and bombing of French civilians in Saigon.

When Massu and the tattered remnants of his command arrive back in Paris in February, Francois Darlan's rage is apocalyptic. He has lost face, a colony, and suffered a terrible military defeat. Acting in his capacity as commander in chief of the French armed forces, Darlan instantly cashiers Massu and imprisons him for treason and incompetence. No more French colonies will be lost, he vows, no more humilations before the world. He orders General Raoul Salan and General Paul Aussaresses, commanders-in-chief in Algeria and French West Africa respectively, to "crush all who lie before you; if you must kill every man in the departments to ensure their loyalty, then do not hesitate. There is nothing more cleansing than the blood of traitors."

Darlan also takes the precaution of cashiering some members of the officer corps suspected of disloyalty as well as a few members of his civilian government, along with throwing more money and resources at the Anglo-French atomic bomb project, which finally reaches fruition on April 9, 1951, when "William the Conqueror" is detonated in an isolated region of the Sudan near the French colonial border.

-By that time, though, Great Britain has a new government. A combination of ill health, a shaky economy, and a bit of wartime nostalgia have swept Ernest Bevin's Labour Party from power, leaving it with a significant 40-seat minority before the newly-resurgent Conservatives.

Leading the Conservatives to victory and to a second round as Prime Minister is none other than Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill himself; the lion of wartime Britain is now the champion of her peace. Darlan is delighted; for all that he remembers the occasional feud with his old wartime partner, he respects Churchill as an honourable man and a good anti-Communist, something he never really felt about the old trade unionist Ernest Bevin.

In a fit of Anglo-French cooperation, Darlan offers military aid to the British forces fighting in Burma and East Africa. While the offer is more than legal under terms of the Amsterdam Pact, and the British forces there, despite their slow successes against the local Communists/nationalists, certainly could use some help, Churchill is understandably leery of either looking like the United Kingdom needs France to keep her empire, or of relying on the same troops that failed in Indochina. Still, he's never one to turn down aid, and a total of about a division of French troops begin fighting in Burma and Kenya by the end of spring.

-Both governments in Great Britain and the one in France stand staunchly behind the Ciano government in Italy. While neither the British nor French publics will countenance sending in combat troops in a European war in support of a quasi-Fascist government; they have no objection at all to selling war material, especially given the economic boost that provides to both of their industrial sectors.

While this helps the UK and France, it doesn't help Westphalia at all, and despite his strong sympathies with Ciano, Reinhard Gehlen winds up only able to supply large numbers of advisors from the Westphalian military, men very experienced in hunting down Communist partisans.

Speaking of which, Josip Broz Tito recognizes the Togliatti government a few hours before even Moscow, and soon Austrian, Yugoslavian and Soviet "volunteers" in Soviet-made Mig-15s are testing their mettle in aerial combat with Loyalist Italian pilots in surplus Spitfires, and western Europe (and Ciano) are learning a grim lesson indeed in the important lesson of modernization.

Josip Tito is all loyalty to Moscow in these efforts (and he is, after all, acting on Stalin's orders), but the canny old soldier has his own agenda. Markos in Greece remembers it was Yugoslavia who put him on his chair, however shaky it might be, and if he can ensure a similiar grateful Italian government, well, things will get interesting. If only if it weren't for the ever-so-helpful Austrians!

-In February, the first wave of American troops land in northern Luzon and begin the slow march south to Quezon City. This is the British-trained wave (and indeed, a hundred or so advisors land with them) and the patriotic fervour stirred up by the bombing of Subic Bay and the (admittedly unrelated, but dark-skinned Latins blend together in the American mindset of the era) has been focused into a hard, cold professionalism.

Persons and groups suspected of sympathy with the Huk are resettled elsewhere, those who resist are driven out, those who resist violently are simply shot. Battles with Huk forces are common at first and take a relatively heavy toll on both sides; for all that the Americans are well-trained, most have never fought a battle, and those who have haven't in many years.

While control over the media is strict, and the nation hears only of the victories, not so much the body counts that accompany them, a drafted reporter from Indiana vows to find out just what is going in in those classified areas just behind the American lines...

For All Time Pt. 53

May-July 1951

-Along with much of the rest of the world, Scandinavia quietly seethes through 1951. (though a bit more quietly than most.) The ruling Social Democratic parties have well and thoroughly expelled their Communist members; they're neutral in the Italian Civil War, but it has sent a grim message to them about cooperation with the Communist parties. Not to mention, of course, the even grimmer message sent by the fairly large Soviet armies to the south of Denmark and the east of Finland, respectively.

Finland is slightly better off than OTL, the various Soviet offensives against them were weaker with the greater resources devoted to Europe, and the border is correspondingly further east. Finland is still bound to the USSR by treaty, but the bonds are weaker and less secure than OTL. Too, Finland can boast with reasonable honesty (though quietly) that they've now beat back the Reds three times, though each time it's been less and less pleasant for them.

Denmark, meanwhile, has the not inconsiderable worry of the Red Army. Unknown at the time, of course, is an abortive Soviet plan to offer Schleswig-Holstein as a trust territory to the Danes; but in the end, priorities went the other way, and a reliable naval base on the North Sea, located in a reliably impuissant Soviet puppet state was deemed more important than keeping Scandinavia sweet. Denmark's attempts to organize a Scandinavian Defense League have foundered on the rock of Norwegian independence and Finnish obligations, and she continues to lean more and more towards the Amsterdam Pact.

-Speaking of secure naval bases: in May of 1951, long-simmering discontent in the Turkish military finally bubbles over and explodes when "anonymous sources" in the government of Celal Bayar's Democrats reveal that Bayar accepted massive campaign contributions not only from foreigners, but from Red foreigners at that!

The Turkish generals, especially one General Cemal Gürsel, nearly foam at the mouth with rage, even as they follow government orders and close the presses. The heir to Ataturk was a spineless pantywaist when it came to dealing with the Reds, and now the civilians are actually taking money from them! Democracy was a worthy experiment, but it obviously can't be trusted for the nonce.

May 14, 1951: Gürsel issues a list of...well, they're somewhere between requests and demands made of the Democratic Party and the Bayar government. The President, Prime Minister, and all of their ministers must step down and a coalition of the various rightist parties will govern until "genuine" free elections can be held. If the DP remains stubborn, the consequences will be on their head. Bayar, who is not actually a Communist himself, angrily refuses, and issues a warrant for the general's arrest.

The Soviet agents carefully worked into the Bayar government remain deliberately silent until just before the cadets from the Ankara and Istanbul arrive on June 7, giving Bayar only time to mobilize the Presidential Guard and attempt to flee Ankara with his government before the shooting starts. It's never quite proved who fires first, some overeager cadet with his head stuffed full of visions of Ataturk or a member of Bayar's bodyguard trying to protect his President, but when it's all over, Bayar, Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, and their families and staff are dead, along with a score of bodyguards and a dozen cadets.

Even as a horrified Gürsel (he wanted Bayar gone, but not like that!) moves to assume office on May 16 , the governments of the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Hungary, and Albania issue a joint condemnation of the military coup in Turkey. Each give Gürsel two months to resign from office along with his government, disarm all elements of the Turkish military except those needed for internal peacekeeping duties, and prepare Turkey for "international occupation and reconstruction as a democracy." A few days later, the People's Republic of China, Iran, Vietnam, and Indonesia chime in agreement.

The oh-so-solid front is the only major mistake in one of the Soviet Union's better intelligence operations.

-The Amsterdam Pact is understandably shocked at the rapidity and violence of the coup. as well as the Soviet response, but a variety of factors paralyze them from acting. Winston Churchill, for all that he has maintained his old fire as an orator, is in worse health than OTL's 1951, his mind wanders easily, he can no longer work his war-era titanic schedule, and his predilection for grandiose schemes (especially retention of the Empire) has multiplied.

The man some call the shadow Prime Minister is Foreign Minister Anthony Eden. Eden, who stood by Churchill's side in the war, feels no strain at all in sheltering his old leader, in keeping the golden lion of wartime from being tarnished by the ravages of old age and growing senility. Eden, unfortunately, has his own problems: methamphetamines, to be precise. While the two respond well to events they have some warning of, the rapidity of events in Turkey paralyzes both, and the British government hesitates at a critical moment.

Admiral Francois Darlan, meanwhile, is in one of his more irritable moods, and has bigger fish to fry; stamping out the Communists in Brittany, Marseilles, and Normandy who dare, dare, DARE to speak their language above French, the mother of all languages. They must be Communists, to be such traitors, and a stay in prison should cure the Red out of them. Turkey? Bah, he hardly cares.

With Britain and France hesitating or uncaring, the Amsterdam Pact does little more than condemn any form of imperialism before the Soviet deadline passes. The United States, of course, takes no notice, busy at it is in the Pacific, Caribbean, and with being very apathetic.

-Spain and Portugal, however, are not apathetic at all. Francisco Franco and António Salazar were upset enough by the civil war in Italy. (Only their own lack of much of anything have kept them from supplying Ciano.) And now, with the demise of another militaristic government looming, well, they both start remembering what they did to their enemies when they came to power, and the shadow of the firing squad or noose looms large.

There's no other choice; for all that they'd resisted falling under the Anglo-French spell, Franco and Salazar both would rather have military help to stay in power and win their various colonial conflicts (along with a bit of economic aid, now and again) than let their foreign policies largely be determined by London and Paris.

Neither Churchill nor Darlan are the type to miss out on a chance for more influence, and so they act quickly indeed on their request, and on June 10, 1951, Spain and Portugal become full-fledged members of the Amsterdam Pact. Spain and Portugal would likely not have been eligible for the Pact before, but with the Italian disaster keen on everyone's mind, pragmatist Churchill and authoritarian Darlan are more than willing to accept the pretense of some sort of governmental change in the indefinite future.

-The admittance of pretty well openly fascist Spain and Portugal sours President Thomas Dewey on the Amsterdam Pact, even more so than before. He'll keep his under the table deal with the British, economic aid for the advisors in Luzon; he is, after all, a practical man. But he watched the coffins from D-Day come home through New York harbor, and he was Governor when the Great Raid hit New York and the Statue of Liberty.

Dewey made deals with gangsters, sure, you have to do that to get by. But if Britain and France are going to betray the hundreds of thousands of Americans who died fighting for their freedom by making more deals with gangsters writ large, well, they're no friends of his, for all that he'll cooperate with them when he must. One man a bit less comfortable with the necessities of the struggle against Communism is Hamilton Fish. Not the Secretary of State, but his son and personal assistant.

Fish was a Harvard freshman when that campus was rioting against Henry Wallace (and had the natural freshman's reaction of hiding), a sophomore when Bob Taft spoke there on the importance of principle in politics. While he remains an Ivy League aristocrat, even resembling his father strongly physically, he has a slight streak of Anglophobia not really present in OTL, and, more, a rather naive view in principle above all else.

He slowly assembles a file of evidence detailing the secret deal of the Dewey administration; pressure on Irish-American groups to cease pressure on the British government to give Ulster to the Free State or supplying Irish groups in Ulster with resources along with hundreds of millions of dollars carefully diverted to needy British industries and tariffs friendly to them. In return, the British will supply the Americans with unlimited training to do...something. He's not sure what.

-That piece of the puzzle is in the hands of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a reporter recently out of his one-year draft enlistment and promptly assigned to cover a rather major story in Puerto Rico, even bigger than Willie Mays signed to play for the Indians next year. Horrified at what he found in the fifth of five Huk-friendly settlements in Luzon, the young Hoosier has written a detailed account, both in a book form and one publishable in major magazines. He's even got pictures.

The situation had been growing grimmer and grimmer in Puerto Rico; the Dewey administration has firmly refused any offers of Puerto Rican self-government or an elected government. He's sympathetic to the arguments of those for it, and is certainly familiar with the notion of plea-bargaining. But he just won't do it; he won't give the assassins of a President what they wanted, even in death.

It begins outside Arecibo on July 1, when a unit of the Georgia National Guard moves to arrest the leader of a cell of Puerto Rican nationalists. Colonel Lester Maddox, a restaurant owner in civilian life, has become one of the more infamous figures on the island, and when "Coronel Hacha" is recognized, the fifty adult members of "Comuna De la Liberación" decide they simply will not surrender.

The shot that takes off Maddox's neatly-ordered officer's cap was aimed to miss, but the volley at the three jeeps he sends tearing across the sugar fields a moment later are not, and the CDL have been training for the day of liberation for a while. (Too, several of their newer members are ex-Puerto Rican National Guard...and they didn't return their weapons.)

When the first day's fighting is over, a dozen of Maddox's men are dead and a half-dozen of the CDL members are, including two women and one small child. As both radio reports of the massacre (though who was massacring who remains to be seen), the Arecibo Siege ends its first day...

For All Time Pt. 54 "Scenes"

((Something a bit different.))

1973, Los Angeles.

"This is going to change everything, you know." said Richard Dreyfuss, playing Kurt Vonnegut in Kubrick's latest. "Dewey, the Philippines...it's all going to be different. We're not just bringing down a President, we're bringing down interventionism, the Republicans...everything." In the premeire audience, Vonnegut watched his onscreen doppleganger turn to Paul Newman. The kid was good, but had he ever been that young? Or so sweaty? "We owe it all to you, Phil."

Newman stared into his whisky glass before looking up with those flashing blue eyes that had made him a heartthrob years before. "Yeah. I stab my President and party in the back for honor...what is honor, anyway? It's..." He twirled the glass. "Bob Taft had honor. And he's dead. Maybe that says something." It was all very magnificent and all a load of crap, Hamilton Fish Jr. had been stone sober from the first minute Vonnegut had seen him walking through the ruins of the CDL compound to the last time; and Newman was decades older than Fish had been in 1951, even older than Fish would be today. Still, he'd kept his description of "Philip of Macedon" deliberately vague for a reason, not even telling Kubrick.

"It's about doing what's right, Philip.", said Robert Redford with determination and a questionable Boston accent. Oh, here we go, thought Vonnegut irritably. Kubrick had got the red-hot, boiling summer, the terrors of the CDL disaster (Robert Duvall had been a terrifying Lester Maddox), he'd even gotten the Luis Riveria, the bar that had been the centerpiece of the conspiracy....but God, had he f***** up Hamilton Fish Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. "And that's what we're doing. If it puts Joe in the White House, that's fine, but it doesn't matter. We have to expose Dewey, Fish, Dulles, and that whole crowd. We need to clean up Washington, so there aren't any more Settlement #5 massacres, Kurt, and there aren't any more under the table deals by American Presidents."

The Robert Kennedy that he remembered, thought Kurt Vonnegut irritably, had been the drinker of the bunch; the Boston Globe reporter had been bemoaning the way his father had shut him out of his brother's administration, pushing him off into journalism. As if his life's work was a sentence of death. Just today some punk kid from the Washington Post had been leaving messages on his machine, asking for advice.

But it didn't do to criticize a Kennedy, or at least that's what Kubrick thought. Whether or not that was true, Kurt wasn't going to speculate. It had been a while, after all. At least the Barrio Riots promised to be interesting; Kubrick had claimed to have hired both actual rioters from back in the day and even old New York policemen. Not to mention Warren Beatty as President Dewey. The humor alone...

For All Time Pt. 55

July, 1951

-Fortunately, the Dewey administration is an efficient one, especially when it comes to potential disasters, and Undersecretary of State Hamilton Fish Jr. arrives along with a direct Presidential order to Colonel Lester Maddox ordering him to not deploy the armored brigade he'd brought up from San Juan, on the second of July, 1951. While the Hispanic vote is nowhere near as important in 1951 as it is today, it is a factor, and President Dewey has no desire to promote a massacre.

Over the next few days, more State Department bureaucrats arrive, along with FBI negotiators personally selected by Director Melvin Purvis, and a horde of reporters, much to the horror of the Georgia National Guard. American public opinion is much divided, a fair majority, while not exactly sympathetic to Gestapo tactics, is all for the arrest at nearly any cost of the same kind of people who murdered President Taft, while a fierce minority, mostly Puerto Ricans or strong leftists, points out that all the CDL actually did was harbor two fugitives from justice for a few weeks, as well as taking possession of proscribed ex-military hardware.

Among the many problems of the initial weeks of the siege is that Melvin Purvis doesn't actually know how to pick hostage negotiators, so said negotiations lead everywhere but to success, and with the Army's counter-espionage units busy on Luzon, efforts to jam the CDL's repeated transmissions proclaiming their innocence and the guilt of "Coronel Hacha" go to naught. As sporadic disturbances erupt in the major cities of Puerto Rico, President Dewey deploys National Guard units from New York City, many of them drawn from the moderate Puerto Rican population in the city itself, hoping they will work better in policing their coethnics.

-In New York City herself, tensions have been building for a long time. The feuding between her black and Jewish populations, burning since the Great Raid drove so many thousands out of Harlem, and burned hot in the years since the arrival of the first waves of refugees from Europe and Palestine has even moved to the realm of organized crime.

If any man can be said to run organized crime in New York, it is Meyer Lansky. Operating in the South and Cuba during the Ness and most of the Purvis years as Director of the FBI, he managed to escape the informers that caught Barbara, Vito Genovese, Bonventre, Frank Costello, Bonnano, and Garofalo, and the subsequent bitter infighting that killed Anastasia, Carlo Gambino, and Sam Giacana. Arriving just in time to subsume Joseph Biondo into his numbers, Lansky has enforced a tough peace on the surviving factions.

The brief mob wars of the late '40s brought public attention on organized crime like no time since the 1920s, and Lansky is acutely concious of what that means. No more open conflicts, nothing more that attracts the eye of Thomas Dewey, for God's sake. And for the most part, Lansky has succeeded; and has even begun approaching his compatriots in neighboring cities about a pact between them as well. They're in business to make money, after all, not go to prison or die.

But the generation of mobsters still in command in the early 1950s is understandably paranoid, and if Lansky's going to start talking about a treaty between everyone, he'd better make **** sure his own house is in order. And he'd done that; relations had been pushed right to the breaking point with the influx of blacks into the South Bronx after the destruction of much of Harlem, but he'd been able to smooth things over with diplomacy that would have been admirable in a cause less, well..criminal.

Until, of course, the sudden arrival of thousands of young, angry Jewish teenagers who've learned both a streak of amorality and an appreciation for a good spot of violence against one's enemies. While Lansky moved quickly to hire most, some literally right off the docks, these are not people to obey orders, and moving into the South Bronx as they do, they soon disentigrate relations between Lansky and Ellsworth Johnson all over again.

There have been several public incidents between young black men angry at the loss of their homes and young Jewish men angry at the loss of theirs; with both of them moving into the same territory. Perhaps a dozen people have died over the years, with the government of Mayor Robert Moses slowly moving to intervene, mostly on the side of Lansky. Moses has no sympathy for any sort of mobster, of course, but the monolithic intolerance that marked his building career has been carried over.

-But New York City's real problem lies in her Puerto Rican community. Like most immigrant communities to countries dissimilar to their own, their relationship with the government has always been rather shaky. With the assasination of President Taft, the declaration of martial law in and the occupation of their homeland, and the subsequent close observation indeed of virtually any Puerto Rican political or social groups by the police and FBI, things have gotten worse yet.

The fact that it's summer never helps, and the mood of the Puerto Rican areas of the South Bronx slowly heats up, along with the mood of those members of New York's Finest patrolling the neighborhoods. The Arecibo Siege only heightens the mood of impending doom. Finally, on July 13, it all comes to a head with the attempted arrest of Arturo Ruiz, late of San Juan. The 17-year-old, in the United States for two years, was wanted for questioning about his friendship with a CDL member from New York who'd been caught in the compound when everything went wrong.

Ruiz runs from the several burly Irish cops who attempt to corral him while leaving high school, and manages to give them a merry chase before being cornered in an alley behind a church, where services have just ended. Someone then fires three shots; sources vary on who. The official word of first the police and then the Moses government is that Ruiz pulled a .22 pistol and fired a shot at Officer Lenny Briscoe, who replied with two shots from his .38, one of which proves fatal.

Two Puerto Rican eyewitnesses, a 14 year old boy and the 9 year old sister he was watching, say that Briscoe fired first and last, planting the .22 on Ruiz after he was dead. As the Puerto Rican communities explode in marches and protest meetings, Robert Moses makes the not unreasonable decision of sending in the police to talk to the young witnesses the next day.

Their families aren't about to give them up, and when the detectives try to force the issue, a crowd of a dozen locals chases them out via stone and stick. A while later, riot troopers arrive, and the first Barrio Riot has begun. (They're not actually IN a Barrio, really, but the name will stick.)

-As the United States convulses in a wave of race riots, as Latinos all over the country join the fun, (The Mexicans and native Hispanics living in the Southwest are not, in fact, Puerto Rican, but their local governments have not bothered to make such a distinction; it is suppertime in Washington D.C, on the second day of major rioting, July 16.

It is nearly midnight, though, for American Ambassador Nelson Rockefeller in Istanbul. The Turkish coup and Red demarche has made his life understandably difficult, helping thousands of Americans get out of Turkey in a hurry. He's only too glad to have his one day of vacation; Istanbul is indeed a beautiful city. Rockefeller is just falling asleep over a copy of Time when he's awakened by a wave of explosions. The "Intervention" has begun.

Istanbul is recieving a visit from virtually the entire Greek Air Force, in an attack coming exactly one minute after the Greek government transmitted the breaking of diplomatic relations. The Turkish fleet is caught at anchor, and while the Greek pilots aren't that well trained in torpedo and dive bombing, they certainly have a salutary effect by weight of numbers and fervor. Within an hour of the attack (which commenced at 11:51 PM Istanbul time), the Turkish fleet is broken; every battleship, even the old Yavuz, is sunk or irreparably damaged, and most of the medium-sized capital ships have similar problems. The Turkish navy has more ports, of course, and its army is undamaged.

Until, that is, the Bulgarian army crosses the border into Turkish Thrace, just in time for the Soviets and Iranians to move west into Anatolia, all before the sun rises over a suddenly-terrifed Ankara. As Greece organizes an amphibious landing force in the Aegean Islands (using landing craft given to the Soviets in World War Two by the Americans and then sold by the Soviets to the Greeks), the Communist bloc broadcasts their intention to "return democracy to Turkey."

For All Time Pt. 56

August-September 1951

-By August 1 of 1951, Colonel Lester Maddox has had enough. While FBI negotiations have won the release of several wounded or ill CDL members, they've not won a surrender of the compound itself. An arrogant man, he can't deal with the idea of being humiliated by the "greasers" he holds in contempt nearly as low as black Americans. For that matter, he has political ambitions in Georgia, and if he lets himself be so publicly frustrated for so long, well, that just won't work.

He is still commander of the several thousand Georgia National Guard (virtually the entire Georgia contingent on the island) gathered around the CDL compound