Alternative Military History

The year is 1992. The unthinkable has happened. East and West are on a crash course for war, and the battlefield will be Germany. Peace is no longer an option, and all bets are off as the Free World and the Communist Bloc descend into war.

The year is 1992. Over twenty years have passed since Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev was assassinated by a crazed gunman. Since that time, the Soviet Union has been put on a course toward economic success—and war. In the Balkans, Yugoslavia's collapse into ethnic violence draws NATO and the Warsaw Pact to the brink of Armageddon. Armies deploy and fleets maneuver. Political intrigue engulfs Moscow and Washington, and paranoia radiates from the Iron Curtain. In the zero-sum game of Cold War, neither side can afford to blink or back down.

The Soviet Blitzkrieg in Germany has been beaten to a bloody halt along the Rhine River. The Reds rush masses of teenage conscripts and rusty reservists to the front, while NATO scrambles to mount a killing blow against their reeling nemesis.

Over the last 2,000 years, ambitious men have dreamed of forging vast empires and attaining eternal glory in battle, but of all the conquerors who took steps toward such dreams, none were ever as successful as antiquity’s first great conqueror. Leaders of the 20th century hoped to rival Napoleon’s accomplishments, while Napoleon aimed to emulate the accomplishments of Julius Caesar. Caesar himself found inspiration in Alexander the Great (356 - 323 BCE), the Macedonian king who managed to stretch an empire from Greece to the Himalayas in Asia by the age of 30.

Continuing his exploration of the alternative paths that British history might so easily have taken, Timothy Venning turns his attention to the Hundred Years War between England and France. Could the English have won in the long term, or, conversely, have been decisively defeated sooner?

Resting on a convincing body of evidence that violence is not a necessary component of conflict among states and between states and non-state actors, World Beyond War asserts that war itself can be ended. We humans have lived without war for most of our existence and most people live without war most of the time. Warfare arose about 10,000 years ago (only five percent of our existence as Homo Sapiens) and spawned a vicious cycle as peoples, fearing attack by militarized states, found it necessary to imitate them.

The year is 1992. Europe is in flames. Scandinavia is under siege. Only Norway holds out against the Soviet war machine. And now the pride of the Soviet Navy, the Red Banner Northern Fleet, sallies out to finish the job.

The Domination of the Draka begins as a British possession in Africa, but soon becomes far more. Absorbing refugees after the American Revolution, and later the Civil War, the Draka become a people bred to rule with an iron fist. They permanently enslave the peoples of Africa, when they do not simply kill them. But this does not slake the Draka thirst for power. Sweeping across the world, the Draka empire engulfs nation after nation, shackling into servitude all who are not Draka.

Thomas Nelson has traveled back in time to help George Washington survive the beginning of the American Revolution and change the course of history for the better. And he accomplishes that mighty task. But he’s not finished. Instead of riding off into anonymity to live with the woman he’s fallen in love with in 1777, General Washington has a request for Thomas, the Pale Rider, one that would alter the outcome of the war for the better. The French, and their support of the colonists, is at stake.

It is July 10, 1863, and Baltimore is in the hands of the Army of Northern Virginia under the command of Robert E. Lee. Shattered remnants of the Army of the Potomac have fallen back into Washington, digging in, preparing to make a desperate stand. Six days earlier, General Ulysses S. Grant and his army of 60,000 had taken Vicksburg. The last telegram out of Washington before the rebels cut the line changed all that.

When Lieutenant Gerald Yamato of the Republic of California Air Force bailed out of his doomed fighter he had no idea he would land in a culture that would forever change his life. The Dene thought they had won their independence and the war was over. Suddenly they face an advancing Russian army from one direction, a merciless band of mercenaries from another, as well as the remnants of a defeated, angry, Russian army between the Dene and the rest of their people.

As the war heats up the Russian plant is producing significant quantities of Rhenium, a rare Earth element used to produce alloys for jet engines, filaments for mass spectrographs, and electrical contacts. And, according to a CIA agent named Cassandra, the Russians are going to move a large shipment of Rhenium out of the Kyshtym facility to Moscow in 24 days.