Ready for the Fatherland
From Turtledove
"Ready for the Fatherland" is a short story of alternate history by Harry Turtledove. It was published in What Might Have Been? Volume 3: Alternate Wars (eds. Gregory Benford and Martin H. Greenberg), q.v.; and Counting Up, Counting Down, Ballantine/Del Rey 2002 (0345442261).
The story's point of departure comes in 1943, when Erich von Manstein kills Adolf Hitler in response to an insult. In short order, Hitler's successors make a separate peace with the Soviet Union, and are able to keep the Western Allies from gaining a toe-hold in Italy and France. The Cold War becomes a three-way conflict, with the United States and Britain jostling against Germany and the Soviet Union.
The action of the story picks up in 1979 as two British agents travel to fascist Croatia to meet with a Serbian partisan, seeking British arms. In truth, the Brits are there to set the Serbian up, and arrange for his capture and arrest by Croatian authorities, in exchange for their country having access to oil in German territory.
[edit] Literary Critique
Structurally, "Ready for the Fatherland" is similar to Turtledove's story "Must and Shall". Each has a lengthy prologue establishing the POD, and the central characters in each are government agents, performing jobs that are ethically questionable. "Ready for the Fatherland" further is rather similar to the writings of John LeCarre, telling a story about the ugly pragmatism that shapes international politics, particularly the politics of the Cold War. Turtledove adds the wrinkle of a Nazi Germany continuing after World War II, and how that gives the ostensible "good guys" merely another set of evils to chose from.
