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Originally Posted by Patchwork
...Lindbergh really wasn't the level of evil I was going for, but he makes a good transitional (I fully expect him to step down in '48, he backed a loser and will catch the blame for the new depression). I think I've found our guy though: David Curtiss Stephenson. Never goes to prison here, wins election in '48, takes credit for the US nuclear program (there's enough uranium in Arizona and New Mexico that it can't really be prevented), and stays in office until his death in '66, at which point the sons he didn't have IRL take over.
Would there be a Paperclip with a longer war without American leadership? I fully expect von Braun and his colleagues to be in an unmarked grave in Germany.
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Lindbergh wasn't chosen for his level of evil but because a) he was a popular figure who promoted isolationism (and liked most of what he saw of Germany's development) and b) because you can easily find the names of Dear Leader's descendants down to today (and he actually
has descendants today) online. Still, picking someone else is no big.
Thinking about it, Lindbergh might not be too crazy about J. Edgar Hoover as Director of the FBI. President Lindbergh might have pushed for Hoover's removal early on. An FBI with Melvin Purvis as Director and Elliot Ness as Assistant Director, or vice versa?
In the 1950s, the US will probably make the effort to locate uranium in Arizona and New Mexico. Before then, the only uranium available amounts to about 180 tons, a little more than half the quantity the Manhattan Project used. Unless someone remembers the big, lovely pile of uranium oxide purchased from the Belgian Congo in 1939 that's still sitting on the docks at Staten Island.
It probably won't be called Operation Paperclip but the Commonwealth are almost certainly going to want von Braun and company alive and working for them. Especially since an extended war will likely see the deployment of the V-3 and maybe even a V-4. The space race is going to start off with boosted tech in all likelihood.
Militarily, the US is going to look rather different. Never having entered the war, the US doesn't feel a need to create a commando force (the U.S. Rangers), Underwater Demolition Teams (UDTs, forerunners of SEALs), never has a combined US-Canadian Special Forces unit which develops a counter-insurgency mission in occupied Germany vs. a possible Soviet occupation (leading to the Green Berets and indirectly to Delta Force). It doesn't develop paratroopers after seeing some disastrous deployments (Crete, in particular). The US Marine Corps is the US'
only elite fighting force.
The US hasn't experienced the disastrous in-fighting among the service intelligence agencies yet, so it doesn't see a need for a CIA to co-ordinate. 'Wild Bill' Donovan gravitates to the counter-intelligence desk at the FBI instead.
Radar was a closely guarded secret throughout WWII. Most US technical information on the subject comes from Germany which convinces the US that "radar shorter than 10 cm is an impossibility."
William Stephenson sets up a spy ring in the US which successfully steals the secrets of ENIAC and UNIAC from IBM.
The US remains comfortable in its own little bubble during the war. Chaffee and his friends play with their armoured cars, but as Patton bully-rags Congress, "Soldiers, real soldiers, ride into battle on horses, damn it! Our problem right now is that people aren't taking the current shortage of horses seriously. Within the next five years, if this Congress fails to act, we'll be like the damn Soviets. Trotting along, slapping our backsides, with a 2x4 marked 'horse' between our legs."
Meanwhile, Soviet, Axis and Commonwealth military equipment begin to converge in terms of design. Everyone adopts the Nazi J- and P-barrel extensions that let rifles shoot around corners. Assault rifles and SMGs become the norm for personal weapons, though officers continue to use pistols. The Commonwealth abandons the revolver for the automatic pistol. Everyone has a 'potato masher'-style grenade.
Liz Taylor, Roddy McDowell and Angela Lansbury never come to the US becoming 'Home Children' in Canada during the war. Liz Taylor's breakthrough role was in 1944's Beautiful Joe.
The US is much longer adopting TV after the 1932 decision to only issue experimental, non-commercial licenses. The CBC adopts 560i/PAL as its broadcast system while the US adopts NCTS, resulting in mutually unwatchable programming. The CBC supplements its own broadcasting with imports from Europe, reducing the similarities in culture.
Disney invests no money in the UK during the war and therefore doesn't get caught in the currency restrictions of the postwar years which prevented him from bringing the money home IRL. Disney doesn't branch out into live action films and doesn't bring Sean Connery (Darby O'Gill and the Little People], Julie Andrews [Mary Poppins], David Tomlinson [Mary Poppins; Bedknobs and Broomsticks] or Patrick McGoohan [Doctor Syn] to American attention.
When US TV does take off, it runs very heavily to westerns. Lon Chaney, Jr. plays Tonto to Clayton Moore's Lone Ranger.
Jay Silverheels appears as Chingach**** [the filter has a problem with Wikipedia's spelling of the name] with Lorne Greene as Hawkeye in The Pathfinder a TV series adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper's novel, produced in Ontario from 1957-1960.