If you are following these posts, you probably noticed that they got sparse and sporadic the last half of 2023. I’ve been working on what I call “the four-book alternate history blitz.” My goal was to publish three alternate history novels and a book length alternate history collection of novellas in the last four months of 2023. I did it, technically, with the last book published on December 30.

I’m going to indulge in a brief bit of self-promotion, then get on with the subject in the title.

So, the four-book alternate history blitz:

I started out with a novel collection called: James T. Smoot’s Cross Time Petting Zoo . It’s a collection of novellas set in my Snapshot Universe. Sometimes a writer just wants to have fun and this is me having fun. The stories really are about a fly-by-night petting zoo that hops from one reality to another, often one step ahead of creditors, animal rights activists and other types that a fly-by-night zoo can run afoul of, including the spy services of various Snapshot powers. The best story, in my opinion, is the third one, which is set in Island South America, in a decaying British colony there that is being consumed by the jungle. If you like exploring recently abandoned places, you’ll find this one a treat. You also get to see two of the major characters in the main-line Snapshot novels, the mysterious Indian guide turned Reverend, Julius Butcher and Emma Smoot, the struggling entrepreneur from The Necklace of Time in action, which is always a treat.

Next up was The King’s Fifth, a novel set in the Snapshot universe. This is a prequel to the original Snapshot novel and especially The Necklace of Time. It gives a lot of clues about the mysterious quest that Reverend Butcher mentions in The Necklace of Time and sets up the next novel in the main Snapshot sequence. It also introduces a new Snapshot, one where Spanish Conquistadors established independent kingdoms in the ruins of the Aztec empire and were gradually absorbed by the Indian cultures around them, while remaining officially, adamantly Spanish. A version of the US and a Tsarist Russia Snapshot are competing for resources and influence in that Snapshot, while Apache raid both sides. Lots of fun.

Not long after that came Through the Wild Gate, which is sort of a cross between Harry Turtledove’s A Different Flesh and SM Stirling’s Conquistador. Here is the elevator pitch: “A Lawless Secret Playground For the Rich & Powerful. Ultra-wealthy families secretly use the Wild, an alternate reality inhabited by Neanderthal-like Mangi, as a lawless playground.

Years ago, a Gate family leader sent his half-Mangi daughter to Harvard where she passed as human and graduated, only to be kidnapped to the Wild, naked and unarmed, but determined to survive and punish her kidnappers.”

This one seems to really grab people. Read the first few pages and you’re probably hooked for the duration.

Finally, on December 30, There Will Always Be an England came out. This is the first of two novels in a new universe. And again with the elevator pitch: “World War II Britain Goes Back to the Stone Age. Ten days after the D-Day landings, 1944 Britain disappears, replaced by a version from the distant past, before modern humans made it to Europe. Allied soldiers in the Normandy bridgehead are suddenly in a desperate situation, cut off from British-based air support, reinforcements and supplies. Meanwhile, deep in the past, 1944 Britain is in its own fight for survival, isolated  and struggling to feed itself in a time when Neanderthals rule Europe and no humans have reached the Americas.

The Allies in Normandy struggle to hold out against increasingly powerful German attacks, while 1944 Britain struggles to feed itself, a modern nation in a Stone Age world.”

Here are the links if you are interested.

Okay, enough self-promotion. On to the main event:

What actually happened: For years, Chiang’s Nationalist Chinese avoided directly confronting the Japanese who were ever more blatantly nibbling away at Chinese sovereignty. They had some good reasons for that. The Japanese were mostly expanding in the north, into areas that the Nationalists didn’t really control, areas that were mostly controlled by warlords who were theoretically allied to the Nationalists, but who resisted any reforms that increased Central government power and clipped their wings.

Collectively, the warlords had far larger armies than the central government, though the central government managed a victory of sorts in the Central Plains War when most of the major warlords united to take it down in the very early 1930s.

 The warlords, especially in the north, acted more like independent countries than part of China. Japanese pressure on those warlords, up to a point, actually strengthened the Nationalist Central government.

There was also the problem of the Chinese Communists. The Nationalists were acutely aware that the Communists were a major long-term threat and gave ending that threat once and for all priority over fighting the Japanese, at least in the early 1930s.

Nationalist China’s long-term strategy was to build up their armed forces with German training and weapons, while doing a crash industrialization much like the one the Soviets did earlier, though on a much smaller scale due to having a lot less resources.

The core of the Nationalist strategy was building well-trained, well-armed divisions out of what were called “the Generalissimo’s own,” the central government-controlled army. German advisors trained several of those divisions and supplied a few of them. By 1937, something on the order of ten Chinese divisions had at least some German training and some of them were German-equipped. One elite Chinese division was designated to train the rest of the Chinese army.

The German-trained divisions were quite good, as they proved, but they were maybe a third of the central army, if that. The rest were a cut above the warlord armies, but rarely a match for the Japanese except at very high odds in the Chinese favor or if the Japanese left themselves vulnerable, which they often did due to overconfidence.

The German general in charge of training the Chinese, thought the central forces would be ready to take on the Japanese by 1940, with the training and with domestic arms production coming online.

Unfortunately, they didn’t have that long. Part of the issue was rising Chinese nationalism. Chiang was briefly kidnapped by otherwise loyal warlords who felt that fighting the Communists while the Japanese kept encroaching was fundamentally wrong. Chiang agreed to head a broad coalition to oppose the Japanese, was released and might have reneged on the agreement except that the Japanese encroachment reached Beijing. No regime that claimed to represent China could let Beijing fall to the Japanese without a fight.

So, ready or not, the Chinese fought. This was a broad coalition, with the Communists actually playing it straight for roughly the first year of the war, before starting to play games that expanded their power more than helping fight the Japanese.

The Nationalist central army put its best into the fighting around Shanghai, including the elite division that was slated to train the rest of the Chinese army. They made the Battle of Shanghai a hard-fought one. It last nearly three and a half months and was the largest and hardest fought battle since World War I.

In late November 1937, it became apparent that the Japanese were going to win and that the Chinese army needed to retreat before they were crushed. Chiang waited too long to order the retreat, fearing that a Chinese retreat on the eve of a major international conference would make it difficult for Chines to get international aid.

As a result of the delay, the Chinese troops had to flee in disorder, losing a lot of their equipment and trained troops. As a result of the rout, they couldn’t stop the Japanese from quickly taking the Nationalist capitol at Nanjing in early December 1937 and the Chinese Nationalists were weakened for the rest of the war.

What might have happened: A lot of things could have kept the retreat from being a disaster. If the fighting had progressed a little slower, Chiang could have had his moment at the conference and still gotten the bulk of the troops out. He could have recognized how dire his army’s position was and gotten it out and to heck with the conference.

Either way, the Chinese get pushed out of Shanghai, with its army badly bloodied but still intact. How does that play out? Japan’s government, to the limited extent it still controlled foreign policy, didn’t want an unlimited conflict with China, not with the Soviets still threatening Manchuria.

Historically, they tried to stop Japanese troops from pushing on to Nanking after the victory at Shanghai, mainly because they wanted a Chinese government to negotiate with. Local commanders historically ignored the government and launched an uncoordinated, unsanctioned race to Nanjing.

An intact Chinese army would have probably made that kind of headlong rush very costly and maybe given the Japanese government a bit more control of its commanders for the future.

There are a couple ways this this could go from here, some of them not particularly good. With the Chinese central army still reasonably intact, Japan would have difficulty penetrating rather formidable German designed fortifications around Nanjing if they tried to take the city. I suspect that it’s more likely that they would lick their own considerable wounds and try for a ceasefire of sorts, maybe an unwritten one. They had taken enough territory in Northern China that they would have difficult absorbing it anyway and the Nationalists had lost enough that they drastically needed to rebuild. Chiang couldn’t recognize the Japanese advances, but he and his army had taken on more than their share of the fighting, so an informal truce while the Nationalist rebuilt and the Japanese consolidated their gains was possible.

This would not necessarily be a good thing for anybody except maybe Nationalist Chinese. The war in China aborted Japanese plans to do a Soviet-style heavy industrialization that might have made them much more formidable in the future.

The Nationalists were bartering for weapons from the Germans in exchange for key raw materials, especially tungsten, until Germany stopped weapons sales to seal an alliance with Japan. If the Germans continued training and arming the Chinese, they would be stronger in some ways in the leadup to World War II.

Even Italy got in on the act of arming and training the Chinese Nationalists, which helped their strained national budget. Staying involved with China might have made them somewhat further from bankrupt with World War II looming and might have avoided some of the early Italian humiliations. On the other hand, Mussolini was such a comprehensively bad war leader that I doubt much would change.

The bottom line, though, is that ironically a less decisive Japanese victory here could well leave the Axis more powerful.