The Walking Wonder Weapon: Looking Back at '1945A'

[Gary Oswald]

Discuss this review by @SpanishSpy here

 

[Coiler]

One of the things you have to note is that Allied (western and eastern) "wunderwaffe" are just familiar early Cold War weapons. For instance, the Centurion and T-54 tanks were WWII designs.

 

[Thande]

One of the things you have to note is that Allied (western and eastern) "wunderwaffe" are just familiar early Cold War weapons. For instance, the Centurion and T-54 tanks were WWII designs.

Partly it's an eye of the beholder thing, but Allied cases tended to be more mundane and effective, whereas your classic Nazi Luftwaffe '46 CGI wunderwaffe is of the type tvtropes memorably described as "Stupid Jetpack Hitler".

 

[The Red]

Great review. I like how the design manages to appear quintessentially German but also thrown together, as if the logic of the Emergency Fighter Program had been applied to super heavy tanks.

 

[Death's Companion]

I'd like to read a short story where the Battle of Bulge involves flying saucers, tripods, hamlet sized tanks and genetically modified commandos tearing the thinly stretched allies to pieces before the fuel runs out and the Americans come back with 101st Gundam Division atomic hand grenades and the F-80 Shooting Starfighters armed with heat and freeze rays guided by super computers and armed with atomic mortars.


Idk. I'm trying to think of a good fit for allied wonder weapons given a sci fi coating.

Obviously the Red Army would have like a hundred million clones mixed in with thousands of drones and stealth tech.

 

[SpanishSpy]

I'd like to read a short story where the Battle of Bulge involves flying saucers, tripods, hamlet sized tanks and genetically modified commandos tearing the thinly stretched allies to pieces before the fuel runs out and the Americans come back with 101st Gundam Division atomic hand grenades and the F-80 Shooting Starfighters armed with heat and freeze rays guided by super computers and armed with atomic mortars.


Idk. I'm trying to think of a good fit for allied wonder weapons given a sci fi coating.

Obviously the Red Army would have like a hundred million clones mixed in with thousands of drones and stealth tech.

The closest I can think of to this is John Birmingham's Axis of Time series (which I quite enjoy).

 

[Thande]

The closest I can think of to this is John Birmingham's Axis of Time series (which I quite enjoy).

The first book has a great deal of potential which I feel the other two don't live up to.

He used to post occasionally on the other place.

 

[SpanishSpy]

The first book has a great deal of potential which I feel the other two don't live up to.

He used to post occasionally on the other place.

I read the whole trilogy plus Stalin's Hammer back in November 2018 and enjoyed the whole thing, but felt like it needed a whole other book between the second and third installments.

 

[Thande]

I read the whole trilogy plus Stalin's Hammer back in November 2018 and enjoyed the whole thing, but felt like it needed a whole other book between the second and third installments.

Maybe we should make a thread for this in itself.

What I found interesting about it was that I think it was the first work of FH I read (in the sense of how it depicts the near future setting of where the fleet is from) where it was obvious to me that it was going to turn into paleofuture very quickly, how strongly it was themed on current events in the early 2000s and extrapolating from them. I don't know if that says more about the series or the age I was at when I read it.

 

[SpanishSpy]

Maybe we should make a thread for this in itself.

What I found interesting about it was that I think it was the first work of FH I read (in the sense of how it depicts the near future setting of where the fleet is from) where it was obvious to me that it was going to turn into paleofuture very quickly, how strongly it was themed on current events in the early 2000s and extrapolating from them. I don't know if that says more about the series or the age I was at when I read it.

Reading it in 2018 the bit that really stuck out to me was "famous wartime president Hillary Clinton."

 

[Arthur_Phuxache]

Partly it's an eye of the beholder thing, but Allied cases tended to be more mundane and effective, whereas your classic Nazi Luftwaffe '46 CGI wunderwaffe is of the type tvtropes memorably described as "Stupid Jetpack Hitler".

Great review. I like how the design manages to appear quintessentially German but also thrown together, as if the logic of the Emergency Fighter Program had been applied to super heavy tanks.

When I watch this film, I'm constantly reminded of the fact that the Wehrmacht shot down more Luftwaffe aircraft on 1st January 1945 than the allies due to excessive OPSEC, and that nearly all the Jagdtiger ever put into combat were either captured by the Americans or destroyed by their crews.

Great review, @SpanishSpy !

 

[Death's Companion]

The closest I can think of to this is John Birmingham's Axis of Time series (which I quite enjoy).

I generally found the first book fantastic everything after that kind of shit.


On a writing level characters going through some pretty significant development and life occurences off screen which we are told majorly changed them but for no reason at all was excluded from getting described.

For another the Germans get oddly good at compensating for their weaknesses despite having very limited access to up time tech or people with one glaring exception that means very little. Its never enough to make the later battles compelling as its an Allied Curbstomp but its just enough to make it clear the author realize that if they just rolled over and died the books would be over too quickly.

Finally the soviets seem just massively improbably good at literally everything they do and consistently roll sixes despite not really having any big role in the series in terms of POV characters or plot impact except to taint the win of the victors.

Like to me it read that John Birmingham really wanted to write a up teched Cold War series and wanted the Nazis and Japanese out of the way after some scares but never got around to actually writing the climax of the uh Cold War happening and so just left it as something that was obviously going to happen but not explored.

 

[Death's Companion]

When I watch this film, I'm constantly reminded of the fact that the Wehrmacht shot down more Luftwaffe aircraft on 1st January 1945 than the allies due to excessive OPSEC, and that nearly all the Jagdtiger ever put into combat were either captured by the Americans or destroyed by their crews.

Great review, @SpanishSpy !

Is it really excessive if every disaster of the previous two years came down in large part to the Allies reading their mail and the major successes usually coincided with for whatever reason the Allies losing this insight into German strategic and even tactical thinking?

Plenty of blue on blue happening on all sides throughout the war in the air as well.

Like not saying Bodenplatte wasn't a disaster (though the extent and relative losses vary widely in every book I read that mentions it) but tbh it was never going to go well given the odds and its probably not a fault that it at least was taking the idea of OPSEC seriously for a change.

 

[Arthur_Phuxache]

Is it really excessive if every disaster of the previous two years came down in large part to the Allies reading their mail and the major successes usually coincided with for whatever reason the Allies losing this insight into German strategic and even tactical thinking?

Bodenplatte was one of those events when the Allies hadn't read the Nazis mail, or like Market Garden, where they had the information and disregarded it. Göring was hoping for a Pearl Harbor and got nothing, except losing more experienced men. The Allied losses were mostly replaced the same day.

 

[Death's Companion]

Bodenplatte was one of those events when the Allies hadn't read the Nazis mail, Göring was hoping for a Pearl Harbor and got nothing, except losing more experienced men. The Allied losses were mostly replaced the same day.

Yeah but that's the point I was making. It would never have had a hope of working if they had read them it seems an odd point of criticism given well...all the numerous times the intel advantage gave the Allies a free win.

And it did result in surprise and Allied losses, just like they would need to be super human to inflict any losses that the Allies could not almost immediately recover from.

 

[Arthur_Phuxache]

Yeah but that's the point I was making.

Yes, I wasn't disagreeing with you. The Luftwaffe was perhaps the first part of the Wehrmacht to realise the war was irretrievably lost, with the SS possibly second. The Kriegsmarine under Doenitz and the Heer (Keitel/Hitler) still expected and predicted an Endsieg.

 

[Death's Companion]

Yes, I wasn't disagreeing with you. The Luftwaffe was perhaps the first part of the Wehrmacht to realise the war was irretrievably lost, with the SS possibly second. The Kriegsmarine under Doenitz and the Heer (Keitel/Hitler) still expected and predicted an Endsieg.

In fairness if I was embarking on a war against the entire world and my Boss was Herming Goering I would have certain doubts as well.

Though the odd thing was that the Luftwaffe was basically the home of the fanatical nazis who didn't end up in the SS and was the branch of the armed services most subordinated to political control thanks to well one of the top Nazis also being the head of the service. But I suppose they also tasted failure earlier than most and had a front row seat to massive and growing Allied superiority turning supremacy from relatively early days.

If you are fighting for your lives over your own airfields then you probably have a better notion things are going badly than the groundpounders still occupying thousands of miles of enemy territory and inflicting disproportionate losses tactically throughout.

 

[Charles EP M.]

I do like that up until the death ray, the wunderwaffen just seems to be a bunch of tanks slammed together and stuck on cumbersome legs & the commander seems quite worried if he's bogged down too long, conventional weapons are going to knock him out.

 

[Arthur_Phuxache]

Though the odd thing was that the Luftwaffe was basically the home of the fanatical nazis who didn't end up in the SS and was the branch of the armed services most subordinated to political control thanks to well one of the top Nazis also being the head of the service.

The two most supposedly fanatical Nazis - Himmler and Göring - were the first to put out peace feelers to the Allies, and the first to be removed from office and anathematized by Hitler.

I suspect neither of them had any misplaced faith in wunderwaffe, in Göring's case out of bitter experience. Himmler had already "got genocide done"

 

[Jared]

I generally found the first book fantastic everything after that kind of shit.


On a writing level characters going through some pretty significant development and life occurences off screen which we are told majorly changed them but for no reason at all was excluded from getting described.

For another the Germans get oddly good at compensating for their weaknesses despite having very limited access to up time tech or people with one glaring exception that means very little. Its never enough to make the later battles compelling as its an Allied Curbstomp but its just enough to make it clear the author realize that if they just rolled over and died the books would be over too quickly.

Finally the soviets seem just massively improbably good at literally everything they do and consistently roll sixes despite not really having any big role in the series in terms of POV characters or plot impact except to taint the win of the victors.

Like to me it read that John Birmingham really wanted to write a up teched Cold War series and wanted the Nazis and Japanese out of the way after some scares but never got around to actually writing the climax of the uh Cold War happening and so just left it as something that was obviously going to happen but not explored.

Axis of Time drifted after the first book because Birmingham had originally planned to have Books 2 and 3 be a Nazi-Soviet alliance, with how things would play out from there. That's why Book 1 ended with that proposal of Nazi-Soviet alliance.

Birmingham was persuaded on soc.history.what-if (he used to post there too, not just T'Other Place) that such an alliance would be utterly impossible since Stalin would never trust Hitler again after 22 June 1941. So he turned it into a ceasefire only, which made more historical sense, but meant that his planned villains of the trilogy didn't work in the same way, so he had to rewrite it on the fly.

Of course, the original plan for Axis of Time was for the fleet to be dropped into a world where the Axis won, but he dropped that idea fairly quickly.