FEARFUL FIFTIES
Newly sworn in President Stassen's reaction to the list was nothing short of surprising shock.
<< What is more miraculous ? That we have a list of who our now enemy has or the fact they managed to get so many ? >>
The Director of Central Intelligence who had substituted Dulles after the fiascos in Guatemala and Iran, Charles Pearre Cabell, was cautiously proud of the list. Twenty agents died for this little information.
<< The information however >> noted Stassen << is of little use to us, except give us motivation to make Congress see we need a proper budget to bridge the gap ! >>
Everybody agreed on it and a draft was made to ask Congress for a billion dollars or slightly less to be given to the newborn American space program, as well as the Central Intelligence Agency, with Cabell being encouraged to draw plans for infiltration into the Soviet Union. He probably knew what those plans would be. “Hiring as contractors former Wehrmact and Schutzstaffel. As well as their Eastern European Quislings!” and he would be proven right later on.
Someone knocked on the door :
<< President Stassen ? >>
His secretary.
<< Yes ? >>
It was his secretary.
<< Attorney General Thomas Dewey is here to see you >>
<< Let him in >>
Dewey was visibly stressed and it looked he was containing an outburst as furious as righteous :
<< Mister President, remember when you and Eisenhower asked me, before the election, to look into Fidel Castro’s opponents here and there in Cuba ? >>
<< I do. What can you tell me ? >>
<< Simply put…it is an excrement show ! >>
Stassen remained silently puzzled :
<< President Stassen, many of them in question are connected with big corporations, organized crimes or even worse, both ! >>
<< Any examples ? >>
<< Meyer Lansky of the National Crime Syndicate; he is “upset” because the Cuban government coalition of Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement has nationalized not only his hotel-casinos but and can be operated only by Cuban with gambling’s going to the general and with the proof the Cuban president has given Eisenhower during his visit here a couple of months ago, I have enough evidence to jail him. It …infuriates me…that lobbyists, criminals and congressmen ask us to… “do something” to protect alleged American interests!>>
<< You may proceed as you wish with no strings attached Dewey. Many call to suspend them from Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance but I rather not, they are in our garden and neighbors and certainly do not wish to scare them into going into the Soviet’s arms because some gangster or crooked company lost their treasures. >>
<< Thanks Har…mister President >>
Asking him to become Attorney General was perhaps the best choice. He will clean up the streets, thought the now president.
But now he had more pressing matters : meeting with the new Italian and Polish ambassadors.
Soon as the Tadeusz Bielecki’s government had begun reprivatization, with all seized property whose owners did not collaborate with either Nazi Germany or the USSR and were alive going back to them such as candy company E.Wendel, who was returned to its pre-war owner Jan Wendel, followed by a program of reclamation of estates by the landed gentry, one of the first of this operation was the last private owner of Zywiec Polish brewery as well as his Zywiec estates , former archduke Karol Albert Habsbursko-Lotaryński , reclaimed by his son Karol Stefan Maksymilian Ferdynand Narcyz Maria Habsbursko – Lotaryński due to his father psycho-physical condition being abysmal since he had taken refuge in Sweden due to the torture by Nazi occupiers.
a program of total militarization which projected an estimate of 400 thousand active soldiers and it was speculated they wanted to achieve one million or more in a decade while at the same time they were planning for having a sizeable air force and a fleet (hopefully for them) to be able to carve out a seapath in case of war with the Comintern, because it bordered only two friendly neighbors : the restored Czechoslovak Republic and the Kingdom of Hungary, the latter who still had disputes over Őrvidék ( Burgenland ) with the Germans and Kárpátalja (Zakarpatska) with the Soviet Union and would be of little help if push come to shove; they were also in the talks to acquire Ambrosini Sagittario and the
Captain Stefan Kenneth Janson (born Kazimierz Stefan Januszewski) was a Polish-born British firearms designer who worked for RSAF Enfield. One of a number of Polish immigrants who worked for RSAF Enfiel
Kryptę
@USSEssex @RazNaRok @kekw3 @Matej I am writing an alternate history, part of this story is most of central Europe never being liberated by the Soviets and Poland freeing itself after a brutal repression. I tagged you guys because I have no insight or personal acquaintance that can help with speculating military projects of Central Europe. What do you guys so far ?
I haven’t written anything on Czechoslovakia because the point of divergence is in 1948 and imagining the story of a country when it’s that soon the “change” is rather difficult since I lack the context
THE SCORNFUL SIXTIES
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Anglo-French Empires had fallen into severe debt and supposedly weren’t able to manage to keep it. However, they were kept on life support thanks to the Eisenhower-Stassen administrations since both presidents were vehemently opposed to upset (yet)the balance of power and buffer the European hegemonies offered, but there were some issues which were delicate.
The first the two nations of the Low Countries , the Netherlands and Belgium, the first had seen its jewel of the empire, the Dutch East Indies, going independent and it sat in exile in the newborn “Kingdom of Suriname, Antilles and New Guinea” , basically a Dutch speaking Anglo-Franco-American co-dominium of sorts in all but name meanwhile the second was in a more precarious position with its “only” “territory” being the Belgian Congo, with discussions of an “union” with the BGIE (Belgian Government In Exile), which come into fruition after many concessions were made to minor independence leaders, the European settlers and exiles and the various Belgian companies, with the compromise of an United Nations supervision, with Baudoin as Sovereign King-Regent of Congo and Ruanda-Urundi, gaining the utter resentment of the Congolese population, who were dealt as swiftly as possible by Belgium's prime collaborateur, newly appointed Defence Minister Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, personally seeking to it and crushing with the help of foreign mercenaries and the Force Publique swelling with former German veterans, raising many concerns with neighboring Portugal and the United Kingdom for that. Stassen, again, wanted to keep the equilibrium but did so with grinned teeth and clenched fists as he would become more worried with the homefront due to the simple fact that the Lukewarm War had essentially become a sitting “tech” war where he and Mikoyan would menacingly stare at each other but except the Soviet First Secretary announcing support for Indonesia and supplying Jakarta with large amounts of modern and Great Patriotic War leftover weaponry, nothing was done , unless someone counts Rome’s 1960 Summer Olympics (Italian: Giochi Olimpici estivi del 1960) and the following Winter Olympics of the same year as geopolitical clashes between the two blocs, with the Soviet Union coming ahead of the United States, as it wasn’t enough boxer and gold medal winner Cassius Clay (later to be known as Muhammah Ali) used the occasion to spoke against the racial injustices occurring in his country, because there were still tensions arising between Black and White Americans, who were left head scratching with the Republican president due to his support for Civil Rights but at the same time supporting the (mainly) Anglo-French colonial territories around the world, just as when it backed British support for a secessionist movement in Natal after the former Union of South Africa had turned into a republic through referendum ; it didn’t make it easier Stassen had a serious problems when first the United States was technologically humiliated the next year with the first human orbital spaceflight in history of the Vostok 1 by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin on 12 April 1961 and then on May 14th 1961 Freedom Riders were burned alive at the outskirts of Anniston, Alabama and race riots broke out around the nation and the National Guard had to be deployed in several states but especially the Deep South as the widespread violence engulfed those areas, with massive retaliations on both sides and pushing “Stassenite'' Republicans further into the Civil Rights camp and making the Democrats furtherly reactionary for the time being, albeit with few notable exceptions such as John Fitzgerald Kennedy and (privately) George Armistead Smathers; it wouldn't be until November, just after the Ole Miss riots, that the situation would calm down, however another problem arose : the attempted invasion of Goa by Boseist India. Subhas Chandra Bose had made it clear since he had “liberated” most of India from the British but was still as zealous for a total ouster of European forces from the subcontinent and that included the Portuguese, who had stood idle in their neutrality in World War II; the Netaji thought the United States and the PACCATO alliance would dare intervene for the small Lusitanian enclaves, but when the Lisbon government invoked Article 5 it was a very short (mostly aero-naval) war where the USSR brokered a ceasefire by sheer nuclear menace, with the United States and Portugal meeting in Rome, Italy with Indian representatives, where a “peace” was strong armed to Bose in December 1962 who had to accept in perpetuity the Portuguese presence, in turn bringing India closer to the USSR, which was having problem of its own, because approximately twenty percent of the German population had fled (and similar figures were being reported in the Beneluxian puppet state) so the COMINTERN solution consisted in the building a 1143 kilometer series of border walls, officially with the justification of “defensive structuralization and construction against potential capitalist oppressive aggression”.
Stassen watched in shock together with his PACCATO partner-collegue when it was being noticed when they were building walls in the Italian-German border and the Danish-German border as well and rapidly so. The Iron Curtain was going up and had enclosed the Low Countries and Germany into total isolation safe from COMINTERN allies.
Many newspapers both domestic and foreign domestic, safe for France, criticized the U.S. president for its inaction but as his supporters and public relations department pointed out to his critics : “do you rather be comfortable, fed and healthy or you do want to be the exact contrary in order to stop the construction of a Communist wall?” implying the theory of mutually assured destruction if they challenged Premier Mikoyan over the construction of the wall.
I will probably had bigger fish to fry.
He did in fact.
In March 1963, retired US Marine Lee Harvey Oswald used the alias "A. Hidell" to make a mail-order purchase of a secondhand 6.5 mm caliber Carcano rifle for $29.9 and had purchased a .38 Smith & Wesson Model 10 revolver with the same method, both of which were used to kill retired U.S. Major General Edwin Walker, on April 10, 1963 as Walker sat at a desk in his Dallas home.
The case felt like a tinderbox, because the John Birch Society immediately accused the US government of allowing the murder of a patriot to happen on American sovereign soil while on the other hand many organization Civil Rights activists tried to appease public opinion by divulging Walker’s reputation as an outspoken segregationist, who had been relieved of his command of the 24th Division of the U.S. Army in the Saar Protectorate for distributing right-wing literature to his troops and who was arrested on insurrection, seditious conspiracy, and other charges and temporarily held in a mental institution on orders of Attorney General Dewey.
Demonstrations and riots started almost immediately and Lee Harvey Oswald was postponed multiple times due to continuously growing tensions and if having internal instability wasn’t enough, the Lukewarm War was about to witness its first tumultuous period, with the homefront being rocked on September 15, 1963 when white supremacist terrorists bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church of Birmingham, Alabama, killing dozens and injuring hundreds
Sukarno’s Indonesia had started a campaign of infiltration against Malaysia, Singapore,Brunei and the Dutch exiles’ Territory of New Guinea with support from the People’s Republic of (North West) China, the Soviet Union and other COMINTERN countries in logistics, supplies and “volunteers”, with many Indonesian “battalions” were entirely made up of Norwegians, Baltics, Beneluxians, Germans, Soviets and Chinese. Stassen, despite his own and his government reservations, drafted many young boys into the Army and unfortunately, as he had predicted, did not ease tensions, but at least he showed he wasn’t “a pinko or a softie on Communism”
The Soviet Union, to support Sukarno and his Communist proxies and him initiated the month 1963 with the Moskalyov DSB-LK long-range supersonic strategic bomber over the Strait of Malacca just as they were sending tonnes both leftover and new weapons from the Democratic Republic of Germany and the People’s Republic of Benelux, consecutively Stassen followed this move
by authorizing the usage of
with more investment on research, defense and education to “one up” Moscow, unfortunately this included, due to the influence of both Republican and Democrat McCarthyites to send military advisors to Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei,Australia, New Zealand and Canada which in turn turned into also to send economic financial investment to those countries, as the drafted military “advisors” continued to exponentially increase as the months went by the liberal Republican president did not wish for an actual escalated intervention but at some point
While the liberal faction of the Republican faction was firmly cemented, the conservative side of Stassen’s party wasn’t totally satisfied and issued a veiled threat of siding with the Democrats in the last year if he wouldn’t concede on a Conservative Republican ticket in the upcoming 1964 election. While initially opposed to this threatening proposal, Harold Stassen the soon to be ex President agreed on supporting Goldwater with the compromise they would accept Rockfeller as VP.
NOTE : This a very SPECULATIVE part of mine due to time constraints, university schedules and lack of monetary resources as well as access to sources that are either in the four languages I know.
1968 :
Many people asked how the Soviet Union had managed to reach the moon before the United States, the allegedly greatest country of the world ; many would point out of the almost complete success of Operation Osoaviakhim over two decades which resulted in the USSR acquiring many German experts that did marginally accelerate the progress in many fields of science
Aleksandr Ignatyevich Shargey (1) was a Soviet Ukranian engineer,theoretician, mathematician, Great Patrioc War veteran and visionary pioneer of astronautics and spaceflight in the early 20th century, who developed the first known lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR).
Initially he was just an advisor on the Sputnik 1 program but several sources credit his wise insight to having contributed to making the satellite a reality much earlier than it was predicted initially. It is speculated he would have been involved in the VOSTOK 1 program as well but it is unclear why he wasn’t ; however a year later he was called for a secret meeting between him and Mikoyan who wanted him to report on the space programs of the USSR and when informed of them, Shargey replied :
<< Comrade Premier Mikoyan, why do we have space programs and not a space program ? >>
<< What do you mean, comrade Shargey? >>
<< It seems at first glance from you are referring to me of a situation where’s the lack of coordination and waste of resources, but I should verify in person before making any definitive conclusion >>
In his personal diaries Shargey reported he expected a Stalinist response from Mikoyan and that he would end up in a gulag (again) at best or shot in the head for pointing out an obvious flaw in the Soviet system, but “luckily for me, Mikoyan wasn’t as intransigent as his predecessor and wanted results, as long as said result didn’t compromised him publicly, in front of the Party or both.”
<< I want you to make a report on our space programs… if your conclusion does coincide with what you just said, we might have more to discuss >>
Aleksandr Ignatyevich Shargey was put to work immediately the next day and secretly “toured” the various programs with Artyom Ivanovich Mikoyan, the brother of the premier, who believed the space programs could also give contributions to his “sector” as well.
When he returned to the Premier’s office, not only he had proof of what he had said previously but also that uselessly competing and bickering against one another and that “no amount of help, money or German experts would get us further… the capitalist United States will humiliate us in less than a decade unless something is done”. Mikoyan had Valentin Glushko, Mikhail Yangel, Vladimir Chelomei and Sergei Korolev convened in his office and they were submissively scolded into collaborating rather “wrecking” each other and they would be under Shargey’s supervision. The Osvobozhdeniye program, the unified space program, would be started immediately.
Aleksandr Ignatyevich Shargey correctly predicted they could tail the United States’ program and successfully precede them in the “liberation of space” if the program was well funded and the resources located where they needed to be; Shargey, despite being Jewish, was also more of a pragmatist and realist compared to the colleagues who were subordinated to him and noticed there were some gaps in the Soviet research and with “heavy heart” recruited a former member of the Nazi Party and Allgemeine SS aerospace engineer and space architect Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun as an “assistant collaborator on the Osvobozhdeniye program”; later, when the moon landing successfully went through and the cosmonaut team safely re-entered Earth, the German ex-Nazi was awarded both in the Soviet Union and his home country and used as a propaganda tool for the COMINTERN to prove that Communism could redeem the humanity of a former despicable individual.
The display of scientific advancement shocked and demoralized the United States and its allies, dooming Goldwater’s chances of re-election who would resign a week after the launch, leaving his office to Rockefeller.
- OTL Yuri Vasilyevich Kondratyuk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Kondratyuk in our world he died/disappeared in 1942 during WW2