Operation Blackbeard
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Presidents of the United States of America
1933-1942:
Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democratic)
1932 (with John N. Garner) def. Herbert Hoover (Republican)
1936 (with John N. Garner) def. Alf Landon (Republican)
1940 (with Henry A. Wallace) def. Wendell Willkie (Republican)
1942-1942:
Henry A. Wallace (Democratic)
1942-1945:
Douglas MacArthur (War Government)
1944 suspended
1945-1949:
Douglas MacArthur (National Reconstruction)
1949-1953:
Irving Goff (Popular Front)
1948 (with James J. Braddock) def. Douglas MacArthur (National Reconstruction), Strom Thurmond ('Continuity' Democratic), numerous independent candidates
Reichskommissars of the Nordamerika Rassenstaat
1941-1941:
Walther von Brauchitsch (Wehrmacht)
1941-1943:
Fritz Kuhn (German American Bund)
1943-1945:
Karl-Siegmund Litzmann (National Socialist German Workers')
In this world, Germany never breaks the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Due to a POD some time in the 20s, arguments within the Nazi movement over priorities in the path to world conquest, a different decision is made in 1941.
Britain falls to a version of Sealion, and the Empire partially fragments, the beginning of the so-called Warlord Period. Jan Smuts heads an Imperial War Cabinet that continues the fight in Africa and Asia. Canada declares neutrality and becomes a republic under Mackenzie King. The Germans are still tied up fighting the Resistance, but by and large the war is over in Europe. At this point, Hitler turns his eyes on America.
The objective in invading America was never about annexing it directly to the Reich, but was instead motivated by racial theory. According to Nazi racial doctrine, America was a mongrel state that had been dominated by a superior Germanic-Anglo-Saxon people who had been muddied and corrupted by interbreeding with lesser races. The Nazis objective in conquering the United States was to bind North America to her in a relatiosnhip supposedly similar to that of Britain and her former Dominions, and purge the country of those lesser races, allowing Americans to truly unlock their racial potential. With America at her side, and with access to her manpower and industry, Germany could then launch her invasion of the Soviet Union and win with ease.
The invasion went well at first, and by 1942 had occupied almost everything up to the Mississippi. Roosevelt dies from stress during the move to the emergency capital of Omaha and after a brief period under Henry Wallace, he is shuffled out and General MacArthur shunted into the top spot, with a mandate endorsed by both parties to achieve victory. A colossal population transfer is made from the East to the West and with it comes industry. Friction between the new arrivals and the original population of the West exists but the radical emergency is enough to force them to get along.
In the east, after a brief period of military rule, the 'North American Race-State' is established under the leadership of the German American Bund. The Race-State is composed of roughly three 'Gaue'. Almost immediately the Nazis begin the implementation of their racial theory. Jews, African-Americans, and other threats to racial purity are gradually stripped of their rights (what few they may have had) and are, ultimately, put on the path to extermination. An American Resistance is almost immediately established, which encompasses a wide range of political opinions from Communists on one end to even fascist sympathisers who don't like their country being invaded.
In 1941, the war takes a dramatic turn as the Japanese restart their border wars with the Soviet Union which soon grows into a much larger and more serious conflict. The Soviet Union swings into the war on the side of the Allies and while holding back the Japanese in the East launch an attack on German occupied Europe. This goes poorly at first, the Soviet military still suffering from the purges and the vozhd's own questionable qualities as a military commander. But Germany is tied up in North America and slowly but surely is pushed back. The British begin their own fightback in Africa and Southern Europe and MacArthur bloodily begins to retake North America. What they find as they march back toward Washington horrifies a generation. Not only the blackened buildings and rubble strewn streets but also the ramshackle camps filled with starving men, women and children and the chimneys belching human ash. Reprisals against collaborators are harsh and bloody but seem justified in the face of such horrors. When a census was held post war, it was calculated that approximately an eighth of the pre-war population had been killed, either in the fighting or in the exterminations. While some of the population displaced westwards would return, the East would never truly recover from what had happened.
By 1944, the Nazis had been pushed back to holdfasts on the Atlantic Coast and they were becoming desperate. Kuhn and any pretense of American independence had been kicked out and the news Reichskommissar adopted a new brutal attitude to the occupation. The Soviets had pushed into Germany proper, the Japanese were falling back to the Home Islands as American and British naval forces advanced, and Italy had practically collapsed. The presidential election of 1944 was suspended, in a similar fashion to the British, not without controversy. And in 1945 came peace. Not one that everyone in America was happy with. The British Empire finally gave out only a few years after the war, with Smuts humiliated by the victory of National Party in South Africa. The Soviet Union had practically conquered all of Nazi occupied Europe, aside from Italy and France and both those countries elected Communist governments in short order. And in America came the question of what to do next, with some calling for an immediate election. The decision not to do so would haunt MacArthur in the years to come as he elected instead to transform his War Cabinet into one of National Reconstruction.
The following years would be hard ones as America recovered from the travails of occupation. Similar measures to those used against former Confederates were implemented against collaborators, the worst criminals were put to death and the hard work of restructuring the East's infrastructure for a substantially lower population, and the West's for a much larger one began. Wartime austerity continued long after the end of the bloodletting and indeed became rather more strict as the wartime alliance fell apart. The ascendant Soviet Union did offer aid, but this was denied by MacArthur who took America into a new isolation. What popularity he had began to wear thin as the date for the next election approached.
The 1948 election was fought mostly on America's place in the world as MacArthur stood for keeping the United States free of foreign entanglements, especially with the Soviet Union. Other called for the establishment of an anti-communist alliance, while yet more called for engagement with the USSR. Chinks in the superpower's armour had appeared, as while Communist states had established themselves in France and Italy, the socialist government of Britain, where the Red Army's tanks could not reach, had not succumbed in such a way.
MacArthur's National Reconstruction stood again, continuing the ostensible Democratic-Republican coalition. There were breakaways of those who could no longer stomach coalition, generally more iconoclastic figures like Strom Thurmond who ran on a Democratic ticket and didn't agree with MacArthur's demolition of pre-war racial policies in the South. But the largest opposition grouping was the Popular Front, which like National Reconstruction was composed of multiple parties. The Popular Front presented itself as the party of anti-fascist resistance and the largest component of its support was the Communist Party which had enjoyed the benefits of economic dislocation and the ascension of the Comintern over much of the planet. At its head was Irving Goff, the veteran of war in Spain, and then an intelligence agent connecting the Resistance to the government in Omaha. The Popular Front's popularity soon became clear, but few expected the 'American Cincinnatus' to be thrashed. A close result was expected and many 'favourite' son candidates entered the race, hoping for a hung electoral college and a position as kingmaker.
As it was, that was unneeded. National Reconstruction acquitted themselves well but the Popular Front won a comfortable majority of electoral college votes. President Goff has opened the door to the Soviet Union, time will tell what this will mean for America and the world.