 | |
| Author | Fred Allhoff |
|---|---|
| Genre | Speculative fiction |
| Published | 1940, 1979 |
| Publisher | Prentice-Hall, Liberty Library Corp. |
| ISBN | 9780135365571 |
| OCLC | 4493849 |
| 813/.5/4 | |
| LC Class | 78023538 |
Lightning in the Night is a speculative fiction story about Nazi Germany invading the United States. First published in 13 installments in 1940, the story was a commission written by Fred Allhoff and published serially in the general interest magazine Liberty . The series was collected and republished in book form in 1979.
Lightning in the Night is described as a "sensational serial" about "Hitler's invasion of the United States". [1] The title is a fragment of a statement made by Adolf Hitler to the German Girl's League: "Unlike Mussolini, I would spring like lightning in the night and hurl myself on the enemy." [2] [3]
The work was commissioned, and came about, while Liberty magazine was "sponsoring a national contest" to find what became the official Air Force song. [4] Cultural historian H. Bruce Franklin commented on Lightning in the Night in his 1988 book War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination, noting that Liberty boasted that Allhoff had consulted with experts like Robert Lee Bullard, Yates Stirling Jr., and George Sokolsky on the piece. [5] Lightning in the Night appeared in 13 parts published between August 24, 1940, and November 16, 1940. [6] Accompanying illustrations depicted skyscraper towers collapsing in Manhattan, Wehrmacht troops capturing Independence Hall, and Hitler paying a visit to Abraham Lincoln inside the Lincoln Memorial. The first installment was released the same night that Edward R. Murrow began narrating "London After Dark" live from the Blitz. [7] As the series unfolded over the next several weeks, according to Terry Miller, "The impact was overwhelming...A fictional blitz of New York seemed more real in light of the bombing London. After [the U.S.] Navy's fate was published, its vulnerability to attack became clear. Allhoff's use of Hitler as a character was innovative and startling. Liberty sales reached an all-time high. Whether in praise or opposition, everyone had his own, strongly held opinion of the book. [7] The series was significant enough that the Nazis broadcast a five-minute commentary in response, calling the premise and plot an "outlandish exaggeration". [8]
The final product of Lightning in the Night almost entirely anticipated the then-forthcoming global air war of World War II, and attempt to beat the Nazis to the atomic bomb with the Manhattan Project, "Thus the millions of readers of Liberty in 1940 were confronted with a picture of the future that lies in wait for them if the United States does not build a separate air force capable of strategic bombardment and does not win a nuclear arms race with the Nazis. One wonders whether this effort to build popular support for financing the atomic weapons research that was already under way might have had some tacit semiofficial sponsorship." [5] The conclusion also presaged several aspects of the Cold War. [9] Lightning in the Night was republished in book form in 1979. [10] Terry Miller wrote the introduction to the 1979 printing, recapitulating America's isolationist politics of the 1930s and commending Allhoff for his "lamentably accurate long-range prophecies". [2] [9]
The main characters of Lightning in the Night are a young U.S. Navy intelligence officer, Lt. Douglas Norton, and his love interest, Peggy O'Liam. [11] In Allhoff's scenario, set five years in the future in an alternate 1945, the "Greater United German Reich which has consumed all Europe and its colonies and has established puppet governments in Latin America. Japan and Russia have split up the rest of the world, and the United States is desperately trying to develop adequate defenses for the attack which seems certain to come." The first attack on the U.S. comes at Pearl Harbor, anticipating by a year the day that would live in infamy in U.S. history. [12]
One 1979 reviewer said the magazine series "helped psychologically swing America away from a decade of pacifism that had unintentionally aided Hitler's war machine" but found the "flat characters, relentless plot and contrived denouement" tiresome. [13] Another found the romantic subplot "refreshingly typical 1940s vintage." [11]
Hermann Wilhelm Göring was a German politician, military leader, and convicted war criminal. He was one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi Party, which governed Germany from 1933 to 1945.
The 1940s was a decade that began on January 1, 1940, and ended on December 31, 1949.
Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi is an American animated propaganda short film produced by Walt Disney Productions and released on January 15, 1943, by RKO Radio Pictures, shown in theaters with Fighting Frontier. The film is directed by Clyde Geronimi and principally animated by Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball, Frank Thomas, and Bill Tytla. The short is based on the non-fiction book of the same name by American author Gregor Ziemer. The film features the story of Hans, a boy born and raised in Nazi Germany, his indoctrination in the Hitlerjugend, and his eventual march to war.
Berlin, the capital of Nazi Germany, was subject to 363 air raids during the Second World War. It was bombed by the RAF Bomber Command between 1940 and 1945, the United States Army Air Forces' Eighth Air Force between 1943 and 1945, and the French Air Force in 1940 and between 1944 and 1945 as part of the Allied campaign of strategic bombing of Germany. It was also attacked by aircraft of the Red Air Force in 1941 and particularly in 1945, as Soviet forces closed on the city. British bombers dropped 45,517 tons of bombs, while American aircraft dropped 22,090.3 tons. As the bombings continued, more and more people fled the city. By May 1945, 1.7 million people had fled.
Adolf Hitler, dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945, has been represented in popular culture ever since he became a well-known politician in Germany. His distinctive image was often parodied by his opponents. Parodies became much more prominent outside Germany during his period in power. Since the end of World War II representations of Hitler, both serious and satirical, have continued to be prominent in popular culture, sometimes generating significant controversy. In many periodicals, books, and movies, Hitler and Nazism fulfill the role of archetypal evil. This treatment is not confined to fiction but is widespread amongst nonfiction writers who have discussed him in this vein. Hitler has retained a fascination from other perspectives; among many comparable examples is an exhibition at the German Historical Museum which was widely attended.
Howard Bruce Franklin was an American cultural historian and scholar. He was notable for receiving top awards for his lifetime scholarship in fields as diverse as American studies, science fiction, prison literature and marine ecology. He wrote or edited twenty books and three hundred professional articles and participated in making four films. His main areas of academic focus were science fiction, prison literature, environmentalism, the Vietnam War and its aftermath, and American cultural history. He was instrumental in helping to debunk false public speculation that Vietnam was continuing to hold prisoners of war. He helped to establish science fiction writing as a genre worthy of serious academic study. In 2008, the American Studies Association awarded him the Pearson-Bode Prize for Lifetime Achievement in American Studies.
Samuel Miller Breckinridge Long was an American diplomat and politician who served in the administrations of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. An extreme nativist, Long is largely remembered by Holocaust historians for making it difficult for European Jews to enter the United States during the 1930s and 1940s.
1945 is an alternate history written by Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen in 1995 that described the period immediately after World War II in which the United States had fought only against Japan, which allowed Nazi Germany to force a truce with the Soviet Union, and the two victors confront each other in a Cold War, which swiftly turns hot.
The following events occurred in August 1940:
The following events occurred in January 1941:
The following events occurred in November 1940:
Die Glocke was a purported top-secret scientific technological device, wonder weapon, or Wunderwaffe developed in the 1940s in Nazi Germany. First described by Polish journalist and author Igor Witkowski in Prawda o Wunderwaffe (2000), it was later popularized by military journalist and author Nick Cook, who associated it with Nazi occultism, antigravity, and free energy suppression research. Mainstream reviewers have criticized claims about Die Glocke as being pseudoscientific, recycled rumors, and a hoax. Die Glocke and other alleged Nazi "miracle weapons" have been dramatized in video games, television shows, and novels.
The Allied oil campaign of World War II pitted the RAF and the USAAF against facilities supplying Nazi Germany with petroleum, oil, and lubrication (POL) products. It formed part of the immense Allied strategic bombing effort during the war. The targets in Germany and in Axis-controlled Europe included refineries, synthetic-fuel factories, storage depots and other POL-infrastructure.
A hypothetical military victory of the Axis powers over the Allies of World War II (1939–1945) is a common topic in speculative literature. Works of alternative history (fiction) and of counterfactual history (non-fiction) include stories, novels, performances, and mixed media that often explore speculative public and private life in lands conquered by the coalition, whose principal powers were Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy.
Vatican City pursued a policy of neutrality during World War II, under the leadership of Pope Pius XII. Although the city of Rome was occupied by Germany from September 1943 and the Allies from June 1944, Vatican City itself was not occupied. The Vatican organised extensive humanitarian aid throughout the duration of the conflict.
The following events occurred in February 1940:
The following events occurred in July 1940:
"The Lid Off Los Angeles" was a 1939 six-part series of newsmagazine articles that ran in Liberty, an American general interest magazine. The series, written by Dwight F. McKinney and Fred Allhoff, asserted that the Los Angeles Police Department, in cooperation with officials in municipal government, had partnered with organized crime figures in the city for mutual financial benefit but to the detriment of the body politic. The article alleged police protection of gambling, alcohol smuggling, and bordello prostitution in exchange for payoffs by crime bosses, as well bribery, intimidation, spying, dirty tricks, ratfucking, and ultimately violence on the part of the corrupt LAPD to protect gambling-prostitute-bootlegging revenue for crime bosses over a 20-year period, ending under the administrations of Chief of Police James E. Davis and Los Angeles mayor Frank L. Shaw. Frank L. Shaw, who had been removed from Los Angeles City Hall and replaced with Fletcher Bowron by the 1938 Los Angeles mayoral recall election, sued the authors for libel, sued again for a different article in another magazine, and was later countersued by civic reformer Clifford Clinton for making false allegations. A jury in the first lawsuit was unable to reach a verdict. After lengthy court proceedings over several years, all parties settled out of court in 1943. The articles are considered very influential in the history of Los Angeles, and the title has been continuously reused in reference to crime and problems generally in Los Angeles. The title of the series comes from a statement made by Clinton in the wake of the car bomb that almost killed private investigator Harry J. Raymond; he announced he had information about the involvement of elected officials that would "blow the lid off of Los Angeles".
Fred Allhoff was an American magazine writer best known for his Liberty pieces in the 1930s and 1940s. The corruption exposé "The Lid Off Los Angeles" (1939) is considered influential in the history of that city, another crime series was adapted into an Edward G. Robinson film, and his speculative fiction serial Lightning in the Night (1940) is considered a significant and early example of the hypothetical Axis victory in World War II subgenre.