 First edition | |
| Author | William Overgard |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Alternate history |
| Publisher | Jove Books |
Publication date | 1980 |
The Divide is a 1980 alternate history novel by William Overgard. It concerns resistance in the United States to a Nazi occupation. [1]
The point of divergence occurs in 1940 when Nazi Germany forces France and the United Kingdom to surrender and takes control over their former empires. After Germany soon overruns all of the Soviet Union in 1941, both it and Japan attack and invade the United States later that year. President Burton K. Wheeler (who defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940) surrenders the United States to the Axis after a devastating bombardment of missiles from occupied Canada. The surrender takes place on April 20, 1946, Adolf Hitler's fifty seventh birthday. President Wheeler, Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall, and other government officials are executed by garrote in a meat packing plant outside of Washington, D.C., on July 24 of the same year (by using the method that was used for the 20 July plot conspirators in our timeline) after being found guilty of war crimes. In the former US government's place is a puppet government akin to what happened in our timeline to the Czech part of Czechoslovakia during the German occupation.
Thirty years later in 1976, Hideki Tojo and Adolf Hitler are preparing to board trains that will carry them to their historic meeting marking the 30th anniversary of their victory over the United States. The celebration is to be held at The Divide, a small town that is exactly equidistant between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, at the somewhat uneasy boundary the two empires.
The division is both geographical and cultural. Germany has integrated the eastern part of defeated America into the Greater German Reich while the western part is occupied by Japan, as part of the Greater Co-prosperity Sphere and more a colony than anything else. In both cases, the subjugation is almost complete.
The story commences with the assassination of the Japanese general who conquered the area by using methods like those of Tomoyuki Yamashita in Malaya and Masaharu Homma in the Philippines. The story then moves back and forth between the two areas of occupation, but the emphasis is heavily on the German side.
The plot centers on the efforts of an anti-partisan officer of the SS who tries to find the perpetrators of the assassination and to determine if it is a harbinger of actions at the Tojo-Hitler meeting.
As the action moves forward, information appears on the details of the new German-American synthesis. It is a land of Europeans; the end result of a "Final Solution," which encompassed most other minorities, including Native Americans and blacks. What occurred in the Japanese sector is never completely addressed but it is hinted that the ethnic cleansing took place, though in a less industrialized manner, like the Rape of Nanjing instead of death camps. After 30 years, the American people more or less accept or perhaps put up with the occupation.
The resistance movement has elements scattered around the country in both occupied zones and have some inter-group communication. However, the groups are rarely not engaged in partisan activity. That is especially the case for the official component, a stay-behind military and scientific group that was charged by President Wheeler, just before the surrender in 1946, with a secret project that could, if successful, reverse the country's fortunes. Its task to develop a new weapon became, as the war ended and the new regimes take over, so important the group feared that any action would cause them to be discovered. Thus, doing nothing and remaining in what was more or less a prison, albeit a comfortable one, evolved into its mission long after the weapon was perfected. It falls, therefore, to newcomers, those who had carried out no act of rebellion in years, perhaps decades, to agitate its use. They, along with the surviving scientist, set out to ambush the trains.
The outsiders and misanthropes even by the standards of the "survival-at-any-cost" members of the stay-behind head out with their device to try to change the course of history.
The narrative occasionally contains third-person comments, which create a sense of the story being told after the fact. That is at odds with the rest of the narrative and is almost as if the author is acting as a Greek chorus of sorts and is puzzling, as it implies associated events outside the storyline but related to it.
The puzzlement dissipates as the book comes to an end. The malcontents and disaffected and the disenfranchised and threatened unite in an act of rebellion that needed little more than a "hero" to act as the catalyst. What will happen remains unclear, but it is possible that the events are ongoing.
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a global conflict that lasted from 1939 to 1945. The vast majority of the world's countries, including all of the great powers, fought as part of two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. Many participants threw their economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind this total war, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. Aircraft played a major role, enabling the strategic bombing of population centres and the delivery of the only two nuclear weapons ever used in war. World War II was by far the deadliest conflict in history, resulting in an estimated 70 to 85 million fatalities, mostly among civilians. Tens of millions died due to genocides, starvation, massacres, and disease. In the wake of the Axis defeat, Germany and Japan were occupied, and war crimes tribunals were conducted against German and Japanese leaders.
The Axis powers, originally called the Rome–Berlin Axis, was a military coalition that initiated World War II and fought against the Allies. Its principal members were Nazi Germany, the Kingdom of Italy, and the Empire of Japan. The Axis were united in their opposition to the Allies, but otherwise lacked comparable coordination and ideological cohesion.
Werwolf was a Nazi plan which began development in 1944, to create a resistance force which would operate behind enemy lines as the Allies advanced through Germany, in parallel with the Wehrmacht fighting in front of the lines. It is widely misconstrued as having been intended to be a guerrilla force to harass Allied forces after the defeat of Germany, a misconception created by Joseph Goebbels through propaganda disseminated in the waning weeks of the war through his "Radio Werwolf,” which was not actually connected in any way with the military unit.
The European theater of World War II was one of the two main theaters of combat during World War II. It saw heavy fighting across Europe for almost six years, starting with Germany's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 and ending with the Western Allies conquering most of Western Europe, the Soviet Union conquering most of Eastern Europe including the German capital Berlin and Germany's unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945 although fighting continued elsewhere in Europe until 25 May. On 5 June 1945, the Berlin Declaration proclaiming the unconditional surrender of Germany to the four victorious powers was signed. The Allied powers fought the Axis powers on two major fronts but there were other fronts varying in scale from the Italian campaign the 3rd largest campaign in Europe to the Polish Campaign as well as in a strategic bombing offensive and in the adjoining Mediterranean and Middle East theater.
The final battles of the European theatre of World War II continued after the definitive surrender of Nazi Germany to the Allies, signed by Field marshal Wilhelm Keitel on 8 May 1945 in Karlshorst, Berlin. After German dictator Adolf Hitler's suicide and handing over of power to grand admiral Karl Dönitz in May 1945, Soviet troops conquered Berlin and accepted surrender of the Dönitz-led government. The last battles were fought on the Eastern Front which ended in the total surrender of all of Nazi Germany’s remaining armed forces such as in the Courland Pocket in western Latvia from Army Group Courland in the Baltics surrendering on 10 May 1945 and in Czechoslovakia during the Prague offensive on 11 May 1945.
The Balkans campaign of World War II began with the Italian invasion of Greece on 28 October 1940. In the early months of 1941, Italy's offensive had stalled and a Greek counter-offensive pushed into Albania. Germany sought to aid Italy by deploying troops to Romania and Bulgaria and attacking Greece from the east. Meanwhile, the British landed troops and aircraft to shore up Greek defences. A coup d'état in Yugoslavia on 27 March caused Adolf Hitler to order the conquest of that country.
The German Instrument of Surrender was a legal document effecting the unconditional surrender of the remaining German armed forces to the Allies, and ended World War II in Europe; the signing took place at 22:43 CET on 8 May 1945 and the surrender took effect at 23:01 CET on the same day.
Almost every country in the world participated in World War II. Most were neutral at the beginning, but only a relatively few nations remained neutral to the end. The Second World War pitted two alliances against each other, the Axis powers and the Allied powers; the Soviet Union served 34 million men and women, Germany 18 million, the U.S 16 million, Japan 9 million, and Great Britain 6 million. It is estimated that in total, 127 million people were mobilised during the war. It is generally estimated that a total of 72 million people died, with the lowest estimate being 40 million dead and the highest estimate being 90 million dead. The leading Axis powers were Nazi Germany, the Empire of Japan and the Kingdom of Italy; while the British Empire, the United States, the Soviet Union and the Republic of China were the "Big Four" Allied powers.
This timeline of events preceding World War II covers the events of the interwar period (1918–1939) after World War I that affected or led to World War II.
The Allies, formally referred to as the United Nations from 1942, were an international military coalition formed during the Second World War (1939–1945) to oppose the Axis powers, led by Nazi Germany, the Empire of Japan, and the Kingdom of Italy. Its principal members by the end of 1941 were the United Kingdom, United States, Soviet Union, and China.
Resistance movements during World War II occurred in every occupied country by a variety of means, ranging from non-cooperation to propaganda, hiding crashed pilots and even to outright warfare and the recapturing of towns. In many countries, resistance movements were sometimes also referred to as The Underground.
Adolf Hitler made many hundreds of directives, orders and decrees while Führer of Nazi Germany, many of them related to military policy, and the treatment of civilians in occupied countries. Many of them are direct evidence of the commission of war crimes such as the notorious Commando Order. Other orders provide evidence of crimes against humanity, such as the Hitler order establishing forced euthanasia of disabled people in 1939 under Action T4, and the Nacht und Nebel order for eliminating civilian resisters in occupied countries.
The following events occurred in September 1943:
The Axis leaders of World War II were important political and military figures during World War II. The Axis was established with the signing of the Tripartite Pact in 1940 and pursued a strongly militarist and nationalist ideology; with a policy of anti-communism. During the early phase of the war, puppet governments were established in their occupied nations. When the war ended, many of them faced trial for war crimes. The chief leaders were Adolf Hitler of Nazi Germany, Benito Mussolini of Fascist Italy, and Hirohito of Imperial Japan. Unlike what happened with the Allies, there was never a joint meeting of the main Axis heads of government, although Mussolini and Hitler met on a regular basis.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to World War II:
This is a timeline of events that stretched over the period of World War II in 1941, marked also by the beginning of Operation Barbarossa on the Eastern Front.
This is a timeline of the events that stretched over the period of late World War II, its conclusion and legal aftermath, from January 1945 to 1991.
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.
The following events occurred in June 1942:
Dramatic portrayals of Reinhard Heydrich number among the more numerous of any Second World War figure, comparable to Adolf Hitler as well as war films depicting Erwin Rommel. Reinhard Heydrich has been portrayed in both television and film, and was one of the few high ranking Nazis to be depicted in a dramatic film while the Second World War was still ongoing.
