Book picks similar to
Opening Moves by Colin Gee
alternate-history
fiction
alt-history
war
Amerikan Eagle
Alan Glenn - 2011
Roosevelt. Germany is at war with Russia and rules all of Europe --- including Great Britain --- and Japan is conquering China and East Asia. The United States is an isolationist nation, still struggling with the Great Depression, and is being governed by President Huey P. Long, former Louisiana governor and senator. In Portsmouth, N.H., Sam Miller is a cop supporting a family and trying to stay on the right side of his boss, the law, and his conscience. Then a murder victim is found by the railroad tracks, a number tattooed on the victim's wrist, something never seen before by the police. It's a case Sam could walk away from. It's a case he will be ordered to drop. And it is case that leads him into a lethal vortex of politics, espionage, rebellion, and international intrigue. As war rages in Europe, a new fascist power rises in America, overseen by President Long and his allies. And the people Sam thinks he knows best-his wife, his brother, his colleagues-reveal new identities. In a formerly close-knit city by the sea, where no one is above suspicion and no one is safe, a global summit is about to take place between President Long and Chancellor Adolf Hitler. On that day, history will be changed. And millions of people will live or die, all because Sam Miller has been a very good cop-faced with a very bad choice.
Weapons of Choice
John Birmingham - 2004
. . .
The impossible has spawned the unthinkable. A military experiment in the year 2021 has thrust an American-led multinational armada back to 1942, right into the middle of the U.S. naval task force speeding toward Midway Atoll—and what was to be the most spectacular U.S. triumph of the entire war. Thousands died in the chaos, but the ripples had only begun. For these veterans of Pearl Harbor—led by Admirals Nimitz, Halsey, and Spruance—have never seen a helicopter, or a satellite link, or a nuclear weapon. And they’ve never encountered an African American colonel or a British naval commander who was a woman and half-Pakistani. While they embrace the armada’s awesome firepower, they may find the twenty-first century sailors themselves far from acceptable.Initial jubilation at news the Allies would win the war is quickly doused by the chilling realization that the time travelers themselves—by their very presence—have rendered history null and void. Celebration turns to dread when the possibility arises that other elements of the twenty-first century task force may have also made the trip—and might now be aiding Yamamoto and the Japanese.What happens next is anybody’s guess—and everybody’s nightmare. . . .From the Trade Paperback edition.
United States of Japan
Peter Tieryas - 2016
Americans worship their infallible Emperor, and nobody believes that Japan’s conduct in the war was anything but exemplary. Nobody, that is, except the George Washingtons – a shadowy group of rebels fighting for freedom. Their latest subversive tactic is to distribute an illegal video game that asks players to imagine what the world might be like if the United States had won the war instead. Captain Beniko Ishimura's job is to censor video games, and he's working with Agent Akiko Tsukino of the secret police to get to the bottom of this disturbing new development. But Ishimura's hiding something... He's slowly been discovering that the case of the George Washingtons is more complicated than it seems, and the subversive videogame's origins are even more controversial and dangerous than either of them originally suspected. Part detective story, part brutal alternate history, United States of Japan is a stunning successor to Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. File under: Science Fiction [ Gamechanger | Area #11 | Robot Wars | Strike Back the Empire ]
Red Hammer 1994
Robert Ratcliffe - 2013
With a disintegrating infrastructure and wounded pride, the Russian president makes a bold move to confront the United States. Red Hammer 1994 is an exciting military thriller about nuclear war. This novel explores professionalism and extreme courage in impossible situations, while asking tough questions about how leaders can hope to function amid destruction and chaos. Action packed and thought provoking, this novel describes the complex nature of nuclear war. Expertly crafted in its details, Red Hammer 1994 is for anyone interested in geo-political issues.Inspired by a career spent working on Air Force strategic weapon systems and a nuclear engineering and nuclear power background, Robert Ratcliffe wrote this novel after gaining a deep understanding of nuclear weapon effects and the composition and capabilities of the United States and Soviet arsenals. With a desire to write a book that explored the complexities and issues of nuclear war, Red Hammer 1994 was designed to provide thought-provoking realism while captivating readers. Crafted with expert accuracy, this amazing novel sets a new standard for military thrillers.
Kirov
John Schettler - 2012
Built from the bones of all four prior Kirov Class battlecruisers, she is updated with Russia’s most lethal weapons, given back her old name, and commissioned in the year 2020. A year later, with tensions rising to the breaking point between Russia and the West, Kirov is completing her final missile trials in the Arctic Sea when a strange accident transports her to another time. With power no ship in the world can match, much less comprehend, she must decide the fate of nations in the most titanic conflict the world has ever seen—WWII. The novel is an intensely focused naval saga, where the crew of the lost Russian battlecruiser must struggle to understand what has happened to them, and then make a choice that could be decisive in the outcome of the war—who’s side are they on? The course of all future history rides in the balance! At this crucial time, Kirov finds herself just days and miles away from a secret summit at sea between Churchill and Roosevelt. On August 9, 1941, the two great leaders meet to plan cooperation in the war and lay down the Atlantic Charter, which decides the framework of post war power in the world and becomes the basis for the new United Nations and NATO. With the hindsight of history as their guide, Kirov races south toward the secret meeting place at Argentia Bay in Newfoundland. Even as she cruises for the Denmark strait, both Roosevelt and Churchill prepare to embark for the sea journey as well. The Royal Navy soon discovers what they believe to be a fearsome new German raider in the Norwegian Sea, and they join with America’s Atlantic Fleet to bar the way and hunt down the most formidable surface action ship in the world.
A Prophet Without Honor: A Novel of Alternative History
Joseph Wurtenbaugh - 2017
Written in epistolary style and populated with interesting, fully-realized characters, the multi-general narrative is a seamless blend of authentic fact and sound speculation. The plot focuses on the one great, unrealized opportunity of the Twentieth Century. In the first months of 1936, Adolf Hitler risked everything by ordering his untrained military to reoccupy the Rhineland. It was a bluff. The Germans would have been forced to retreat if the French or British had offered the slightest opposition. But the bluff succeeded. History changed decisively. Hitler quieted the opposition at home, and marched the world relentlessly on, to the edge of destruction and beyond. The story examines that lost chance in detail. The result is a compelling story full of intrigue, danger, romance, and action, culminating in the reckoning that Hitler might have faced, had events taken a different course. It is a celebration of ordinary integrity and the enduring power of simple good will - even in times when honesty is the most dangerous virtue of all and the effects of good will seem lost in obscurity.
Black Squadron
Michael Stephen Fuchs - 2021
engagement from the invasion of Sicily to Black Hawk Down. The Rangers are upright, loyal, and never leave their brothers behind.But now the Rangers may be the only ones who can stop a rogue Black Squadron from leaving everyone bleeding out in the street – and also kicking off a shooting war between two nuclear powers.It’s Black Hawk Down meets Training Day in this explosive collision of two legendary special-operations units battling to survive and prevail in the most dangerous city on the planet.
Red Army
Ralph Peters - 1989
At command headquarters, a four-star general pursues a family tradition of military honor that reaches back centuries. They could be any two soldiers in the world. It could be any army - but it's not. The place is the East German border. The time is tomorrow - and the Soviet Army is about to attack. . .While western leaders debate the use of nuclear weapons, the Soviet Army and its Warsaw Pact Allies crash across West Germany, exploiting the NATO armies' deadly lack of preperation. In a matter of days, refugees clog the roads and the cities are in shambles. The Soviet Army wages a brutal battle for Europe - even as the hidden rivalries and divided loyalties within its ranks begon to emerge.In this extraordinary. controversial novel, author Ralph Peters a U.S. Army intelligence officer specializing in the Soviet military - takes us inside an army of dozens of languages and ethnic backgrounds, into the belly of an armored personnel carrier, the cockpit of a MIG, and onto the bloody battlefield where sophisticated tanks duel like ancient, flame-spewing dragons.From Chief of Staff Chibisov, fighting his ethnic heritage, to the daring tank commander Bezarin, locked in an unforgettable duel of wits with a British division, from bitter veterans of Afghanistan to raw recruits, a host of vivid characters are swept up in the chaos and drama. Some will be heroes. Some will die, and others will have their souls scarred forever.As the HATO armies make their last, desparate stands - divided by Soviet maneuvers and their own political squabbling - Red Army thunders to a truly frightening climax.Told entirely from a Russian point of view, Red Army is a riveting tour de force. More than a portrait of high-tech modern warfare, it is a fascingating novel of human strengths and weaknesses - a chilling look at the one army in the world that may have the power to defeat us.
Devil's Guard: The Real Story
Eric Meyer - 2010
It's the first in the series to describe their events in the bloodthirsty combat of Indochina. Following the myths and legends about Nazis recruited by the French Foreign Legion to fight in Indochina, Eric Meyer's new book is based on the real story of one such former Waffen-SS man who lived to tell the tale. The Legion recruited widely from soldiers left unemployed and homeless by the defeat of Germany in 1945. They offered a new identity and passport to men who could bring their fighting abilities to the jungles and rice paddies of what was to become Vietnam. These were ruthless, trained killers, brutalised by the war on the Eastern Front, their killing skills honed to a razor's edge. They found their true home in Indochina, where they fought and became a byword for brutal military efficiency.
The Third World War
Humphrey Hawksley - 2003
Hundreds die in the Indian parliament in Delhi, the president of Pakistan is assassinated, and a U.S. military base is hit by a North Korean missile. America and Britain discover chilling links between the attacks, but U.S. President Jim West wants to avoid another war. No one is yet aware that the war is already unstoppable. Detail by authentic detail, Humphrey Hawksley chillingly captures the unthinkable—a world speeding towards its own destruction.
2034: A Novel of the Next World War
Elliot Ackerman - 2021
On that same day, US Marine aviator Major Chris "Wedge" Mitchell is flying an F35E Lightning over the Strait of Hormuz, testing a new stealth technology as he flirts with Iranian airspace. By the end of that day, Wedge will be an Iranian prisoner, and Sarah Hunt's destroyer will lie at the bottom of the sea, sunk by the Chinese Navy. Iran and China have clearly coordinated their moves, which involve the use of powerful new forms of cyber weaponry that render US ships and planes defenseless. In a single day, America's faith in its military's strategic pre-eminence is in tatters. A new, terrifying era is at hand.So begins a disturbingly plausible work of speculative fiction, co-authored by an award-winning novelist and decorated Marine veteran and the former commander of NATO, a legendary admiral who has spent much of his career strategically out maneuvering America's most tenacious adversaries. Written with a powerful blend of geopolitical sophistication and literary, human empathy, 2034 takes us inside the minds of a global cast of characters--Americans, Chinese, Iranians, Russians, Indians--as a series of arrogant miscalculations on all sides leads the world into an intensifying international storm. In the end, China and the United States will have paid a staggering cost, one that forever alters the global balance of power.Everything in 2034 is an imaginative extrapolation from present-day facts on the ground combined with the authors' years working at the highest and most classified levels of national security. Sometimes it takes a brilliant work of fiction to illuminate the most dire of warnings: 2034 is all too close at hand, and this cautionary tale presents the reader a dark yet possible future that we must do all we can to avoid.
The Emperor's Men 1: Arrival
Dirk van den Boom - 2010
But near Portugal the old ship encounters a mysterious phenomenon, and the crew unexpectedly finds itself in the Mediterranean, 1500 years in the past, at a historical moment: It’s the year 378, the beginning of the end of the Western Roman Empire, the start of Völkerwanderung…the crew of the Saarbrücken decides that to survive they must make friends of the Romans. They had been the Kaiser’s men in the 20th century, and now, in the past, another emperor might need their services…
The Foot Soldier
Mark Rubinstein - 2013
The Foot Soldier brings you to the hell of jungle combat. Close your eyes and this novella takes you there. It conveys the terror and brutality of jungle warfare and their effect on the American riflemen--those who bore the greatest burden. It's every bit as compelling as The Things They Carried.
We Stand Alone
David Lee Corley - 2018
A deadly trap. Will Vietnamese rebels take the bait and attack French paratroopers in a winner-take-all battle? “A historical novel that reads like a modern political thriller, full of exciting action, larger-than-life characters, and unforgettable events.” —Kirkus Reviews Hanoi 1953. France struggles to retain control of its Indochina empire after World War II. Communist rebels under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh fight for freedom in Vietnam. With both sides determined, the war is developing into a stalemate until…A French general devises a plan to secure victory in one decisive battle. To achieve success the French must square off with the elusive rebels. Bait is needed. A brigade of elite paratroopers is sent into the Muong Thanh Valley far from French supply lines. A dilapidated airport is rebuilt into a fortified air bridge – the paratroopers’ lifeline and only means of escape.If Ho Chi Minh takes the bait, the French will use their artillery and aircraft to destroy the Viet Minh rebels as they attempt to overrun the garrison with their superior numbers.It seems like such a good plan…Events unfold from multiple points of view: the French General Cogny, who devises and executes the plan; the American pilot Tom Coyle, recruited by the CIA to fly for the French Air Force; the war correspondent Brigitte Friang, who jumps with the French paratroopers into the valley and Viet Minh Commanding General Giap, considered by military historians to be the most brilliant strategist of the 20th Century.We Stand Alone is the first book in the gripping Airmen historical military fiction series. If you like riveting action, accurate details, and larger-than-life characters, then you’ll love David Lee Corley’s unforgettable novel.
Pick up your copy of We Stand Alone today!
Bartley's Man (Ring of Fire)
Paula Goodlett - 2016
It is the journey of Johan Kipper, a reluctant soldier in illy's tercio as he collides with the fact of Grantville's existence. Johan decides he doesn't want to be a soldier anymore. So he becomes what he thinks is a swrvant to entrepreneur David Bartley and the Higgins family. They actually treat him like a person, in stark contrast to how he has been treated all his life by the royalty and nobility of his own time. Johan returns this genuine caring with love and loyalty as he watches David grow into manhood and he grows as a man.