The longer one hangs out in alternate history circles, the more one starts to hear a common lament: “Our genre is about so much more than World War II and the American Civil War! Why do our most popular stories always involve Confederates or Nazis?” My own showcases of the genre have not exactly helped with that. Today I will continue to not help with that by reviewing another yet scenario where the Nazis win the war—though by “win” I really mean “take longer to lose.” The book: Festung Europa: The Anglo-American/Nazi War, by Jon Kacer. The question: “What would have happened if World War II had dragged on until 1959?” The answer: “Absolutely nothing good.”
Festung Europa1 was released in 2015 by dedicated alternate history publisher Sea Lion Press, based off of a popular forum thread that the author originally posted to AlternateHistory.com. Kacer makes use of an unusual and somewhat dodgy conceit in conveying his version of World War II: you see, this is not a novel in the conventional sense, but a faux history book, recounting the events of another timeline as if they had actually happened. From the author’s point of view this makes a certain amount of sense, dispensing with character and scene in favor of the unadulterated delivery of facts. Mileage may vary for readers. If you never enjoyed any of your high school history textbooks, you will find little that appeals to you here. If you did, like yours truly, you will find all the rich, juicy details you could ever ask for.
Now, for the timeline itself. Our point of divergence—the moment where Festung Europa branches off from history as we know it—takes place in 1941, when Hitler declines to send German panzer formations to bail out the Italians in North Africa. Italy, the comic relief of World War II, quickly loses its colonies there; otherwise, nothing of value is lost. The forces that were spared from the Libyan deserts then prove decisive at Stalingrad the following year. From there, a series of sharp reverses—a failed counteroffensive, Stalin’s enraged execution of all his best generals, a civil war upon Comrade Stalin’s untimely death—all combine to ensure the collapse of Soviet resistance in the East, with a rump government in Siberia agreeing to a humiliating peace treaty. The Western Allies stand alone.
After covering the Soviet collapse, the first few chapters of the book set the stage for the main action in 1954. While the United States and Great Britain have no intention of making peace with Hitler, they’re not in any position to invade Fortress Europe, either, so for several years the two sides wage a “warm war”: naval skirmishes, mostly, with bombing on pause after an informal ceasefire in 1947. There’s stability, after a fashion. The Americans and the British steadily build up their arsenals. The Nazis impose their vision of a New Order on continental Europe, turning countries like Italy, France, and Norway into subordinate “allies” while implementing genocidal designs in the East. Rumors swirl of some kind of superweapon based on atomic energy, but the Reich’s top scientific minds have deemed such a thing impossible. The Allies, for their part, don’t say a word.
In 1954, after years of something like peace, the Nazis initiate hostilities again by sending a fleet of “Amerika Bombers” against New York City. Nobody knows what Hitler was thinking. Presumably he wanted to bring the Americans to their knees with a display of Aryan superiority. Unfortunately for the Nazis, the US has by this point developed technology appropriate for the mid-1950s; sophisticated radar tracking, supersonic interceptors, and even air-to-air nuclear2 missiles exact a deadly toll on the Luftwaffe, with only a handful of planes reaching their targets. By the time the dust settles, the Nazis have lost their entire long-range air arm with nothing but a few destroyed city blocks to show for it. Worse, they’ve galvanized the previously complacent American public, and reminded the leadership of the Western Allies why the Nazi regime must be destroyed once and for all.
The clash that follows is of titanic proportions, described lavishly by our author. If you thought D-Day was big, this is much bigger. From 1954 to 1959, from Norway to Odessa to the heart of Germany, we witness the pure lethality of Cold War weapons—B-52 bombers, F-104 Starfighters, chemical and biological warheads—that in our timeline scarcely saw use. I’ll spare you the exact course of the war itself; in a “story” like this, where the timeline is really all there is to it, there’s no sense summarizing everything. But I will say that Kacer achieves a surprising level of immersion with his faux history style. The timeline is meticulously detailed, solidly thought-out, and unsparing in its depiction of how horribly Europe would have suffered first from twenty years of Nazi occupation, then from a bitter, no-holds-barred struggle to liberate it.
I’ll also credit the author for avoiding some of the sillier tropes that often populate World War II alternate histories. There’s no portrayal of the Third Reich as some kind of technologically advanced, militarily unstoppable colossus, à la The Man in the High Castle or Wolfenstein. We do see some wonder-weapons here and there, such as advanced jets and bio-chemical weapons, but in all fields that matter the Allies have the edge. There’s no matching the industrial and scientific potential of the United States, which is far richer than Nazi Germany and has not written off whole fields of study as “Jewish science.”
Indeed, Festung Europa does an admirable job of portraying the Nazi leadership as it really was: sordid, bloodthirsty, prone to self-destructive bouts of delusion. The “hot war” only begins thanks to Hitler’s spectacular arrogance in sending obsolete aircraft unescorted across the Atlantic, provoking a final confrontation he cannot hope to win. Further lopsided defeats ensue from his willingness to override his own generals—though keep in mind, the Germans still get a few wins of their own—and when Heinrich Himmler eventually takes power as his successor, the hubris only intensifies, coupled with countless acts of unspeakable brutality as the dying Reich lashes out at everything in reach. Such behavior is believable because it really happened. The historical Hitler only admitted defeat when Soviet tanks were rolling through Berlin. Himmler, who had preoccupied himself with occult rituals in his SS wizard castle3, thought he could make a separate peace with the Western Allies and get off scot-free for the Holocaust. These were not men who saw the world rationally, and that is exactly how they are portrayed here.
Not everything here is plausible, though. Leaving aside the suspiciously easy collapse of the Soviet Union, which the author admitted was a necessary handwave for this timeline to take place, I find it very difficult to believe that the Allies would or could have kept the atomic bomb secret. While they use it to shoot down numerous Amerika Bombers, none of whose crews live to tell the tale, they otherwise sit on it for thirteen years before using it in combat. Even then it is only as a response to mass Nazi chemical attacks near the end of the war. They build thousands of the things, and don’t use them. The justification is that the Allies don’t want the Germans to learn that the A-bomb is possible, after all, and build their own, but by the mid-1950s it must be clear that the Nazis have neither the resources nor the time to catch up. At that point, holding off on the bomb is just asking for more Allied casualties in costly ground battles.
That brings me to my stylistic grievances. Festung Europa, devoid of characters, plot, or scenes as those things are conventionally understood, only holds appeal for history buffs, in particular the subset of history buffs who are drawn to detailed descriptions of equipment, tactics, and casualty statistics. There’s admittedly something indulgent in the way Kacer fixates on which regiments fought on X battlefield or how many F-86 Sabers flew support missions for Y operation, even if I eat that kind of thing up. It’s military porn, showing off sleek ’50s chrome and dramatic setpiece battles in an attempt (successful in my case) to awe the reader with sheer spectacle. The actual quality of the writing leaves something to be desired; Kacer’s prose stands in dire need of an editor, which surprised me since his publisher—Sea Lion Press—has such lofty ambitions of mainstreaming and professionalizing alternate history. This, unfortunately, is not a professional book.
Now we get to the part where I recommend that you either check this one out, or steer clear of it. In this case that depends entirely on personal taste. What Festung Europa promises, it generally delivers, despite a few oversights and implausibilities. But its promises are narrow. It is a product of internet forum culture, through and through, where the reckless but entertaining use of history as a sandbox assumes priority over artistic or aesthetic considerations. Are you itching for the alternate history equivalent of playing with toy fighter jets and making “woosh” sounds? If so, you’ve found your next read—check it out on Amazon here.
Rating: 7/10. Woosh! Kabam! I liked it, sue me.
- “Fortress Europe” in German. ↩︎
- But the secret of the atomic bomb is kept—where these are used, high over the North Atlantic, they leave no survivors. ↩︎
- Yes, he really had one. ↩︎
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