[IW] Patton-2

[Michele]

PATTON-2, 1978

Current Affairs
The Western civilization and way of life has won over most of the world, but not all that glitters is gold.

Divergence Point
1940; the Manhattan Project is hastened, the atomic bombs are used against Nazi Germany and then against the Soviet Union.

Major Civilizations
Western (empire with rivals).

Great Powers
USA (representative democracy, CR4, CR5 for minorities), British Commonwealth and Empire (oligarchy, CR4 for full citizens, CR6 for subjects), China (oligarchy, CR4), Brazil (representative democracy, CR3).

Worldline Data
TL: 7 Mana level: low
Quantum: 6 Infinity Class: P3 Centrum Zone: orange


PATTON-2
THE DIVERGENCE
In 1940, a neutral cargo ship left Lobito, a Portuguese port in Angola, headed for the USA. It carried several hundred tons of uranium ore from Belgian Congo, the main source of fissile material in the world. On Homeline, that and subsequent shipments reached Staten Island and came to be used in the first nuclear bombs. On Patton-2, that first ship just disappeared.
Its disappearance did not go unnoticed to the US authorities who were considering whether the risk mentioned in the Einstein-Szilard letter to the President required serious action. Until then, not much funding had been granted for atomic research. With that ship's disappearance (and the fear it had been sunk, or, worse, captured by a German U-Boat), the USA began spending more dollars, and more quickly, on what would become the Manhattan Project. The US decision makers feared they were in an undeclared race with the German scientists. Their decisions more than made up for that first lost batch of uranium.
The result: the first nuclear bombs were ready by March 1945.

THE WAR CONTINUES
The first bomb was dropped on Paderborn, Germany, on March 12, 1945. The second hit Mainz. The targets, minor cities but significant logistical junctions in Western Germany, had been chosen in order to cripple the already agonizing logistics of the German units facing West. The Western Allies also hoped the Germans would surrender. When this did not happen, the third bomb was dropped on Munich, a fortnight later.
This broke the dam. A half-baked coup by a few generals managed to kill Hitler, even though those same generals were put to death by the SS. German units in the West began surrendering on their own. Goering, no longer bound by his oath to Hitler, finally took control, but made a mess of it. In the end, the US and British vanguards advanced virtually unopposed, while the Soviets were still launching their spring offensive against tough resistance. It was a US flag to be unfurled over the ruins of the Reichstag at the end of April, 1945.
The Western forces should have fallen back, out of the areas of Germany assigned to the Soviet Union on the basis of the freshly undertaken Yalta agreements. But the knowledge that exceptionally powerful weapons were now available apparently influenced the judgement of the commander of the 3rd US Army: General George S. Patton. He postponed the withdrawal for the units at his command.
The incident took place West of Pilsen. It's unclear who fired on the US troops there. Possibly, mistaken Soviet units who had not been informed the Westerners had not withdrawn yet. Or maybe German units that had not laid down their weapons. Patton's orders, famously, were to "defend aggressively" whenever attacked. By the time when Eisenhower weighed his options, the whole front was ablaze.
At first, the Soviets could exploit their superiority in armor and numbers, and made inroads into Western-held territory. But the bombers took off again, first with conventional bombs, then with nuclear ones, hitting their supply lines. The T-34s stopped, with no fuel left. The Soviets fell back in disarray.

THE ENEMY WITHIN
By mid-June, 1945, with the Westerners advancing in Poland, Stalin, the Soviet leader, was ready to make a deal. He was also desperately trying to reach an agreement with the Japanese.
What nobody had expected was that the war against Communism wasn't necessarily popular in all of the West. On June 18, 1945, the French Communist Party attempted its revolution, managing to take control of some city halls and prefectures. The Italian and Greek Communists followed suit. The British Labourists went on strike in the factories, the ports and the mines. Even in Washington, there were anti-war protests.
This couldn't be tolerated, with the war still raging and the danger of a Japanese-Soviet alliance. Martial law was proclaimed, the revolutions were choked in blood, and the police cracked down on protesters. Eventually, nuclear attacks were made on Minsk, Dnepropetrovsk, Kokura, Hiroshima, and other Soviet and Japanese cities. The Soviets counterattacked with chemical weapons, but to no avail.
By September 1945, the Japanese surrendered. The Soviet Union crumbled without surrendering, hit by the Western advance, an attempted military coup, and local nationalist insurrections. Stalin had a stroke and was replaced by a string of nameless and ineffective party officials, who eventually withdrew the Soviet Union to the East of Kazan. In China, the Nationalists, strongly supported by the West, continued fighting the Communists.

ALL IS NOT WELL IN THE WEST
Victory was proclaimed notwithstanding the fact that no armistice had been signed with the rump Soviet Union or the Chinese Communist redoubt in Sinkiang. But that victory was marred by the feeling that the Communist infection had spread to the victors themselves. The only solution was constant, severe vigilance.
The 1952 presidential elections were won by nobody else but Patton. His frontline leadership not just against the Germans but also against the Soviets, and his hard-line stance as to "seditious chatter on the home front", made him the most popular runner. Together with the FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, and the most representative figure in the US Senate, Senator Joseph McCarthy, they shaped the USA over a crucial decade. The USA of Patton-2 thus remained very conservative and strongly anti-Communist. In 1956, when a formal ceasefire with the shambolic Soviet Union and the hard-pressed Communist China seemed possible, a small nuke went off in Calais, France. The evidence apparently pointed to a truck-bomb that the Soviets were trying to carry to London. This prompted the nuking of Sverdlovsk, the new Soviet capital. And, what's more, that event and the sporadic terrorist attacks throughout the West made strict laws and strong police forces still a necessity.
Given that the recent history of the power balance on Patton-2 has been based on atomic weapons, it's no surprise that all the great powers listed above (and no other country) have nuclear weaponry. The US conventional forces could still defeat any other army or fleet single-handedly. But, much to the US general chagrin, the nuclear upstarts, China and Brazil, have or seem to have nuclear reprisal capability.