 Okay, I know I promised that we'd get to see Confederate Nazis get their teeth kicked in here, but that's going to take some time. First, we have to establish that these pricks do in fact exist, and that they do in fact deserve to get their teeth kicked in. A quick overview for the newcomers, though I'm not sure why the hell you'd be watching this if you hadn't seen Part 1 yet. This alternate history timeline, called Southern Victory, or Timeline 191, diverges from our own in 1862. During the American Civil War, a Confederate officer lost a copy of his orders, called Special Order 191, and it was picked up by the Union Army. This allowed the Union to predict their army's movements and halt their invasion of the North. In this timeline, the orders were never lost, and the CSA was able to successfully invade the North, forcing them to recognize their independence. After this, the CSA managed to annex Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua. This led to another war with the US, in which it was crushed by the CSA, France, and the United Kingdom. Over the next decades, the US cozyed up to the new German Empire, and so, when the Great War started, they joined on the same side. After several hard years of fighting, France, Great Britain, Russia, and the CSA, known as the Entente Powers, were brought down and the Central Powers were victorious. Because of this, Russia never fell to the Bolsheviks, the US took territory from the CSA as well as Canada, and Germany achieved hegemony over most of mainland Europe. In brief, the opposite side won World War I here. Overall, I found the timeline to be fairly consistent and realistic, despite a few issues. But I've only covered the first four books in this series so far. There are seven more to get to. As a reminder, I'm examining all the changes to history from our timeline and rating them as likely, plausible, unlikely, or impossible. I should note that a whole lot of shit happens in these last seven books, so some of the smaller developments will have to be glossed over or left out altogether. Also, these are just my interpretations and opinions, spoilers ahead, yada yada yada. With the occupation of Canada, the United States controlled territory from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of California, and they were now the uncontested greatest power of the Western Hemisphere. Some characters even begin to refer to the country as the American Empire. I kind of want to make a joke about how Americans give shitty names to things, but that one is kind of awesome. In the aftermath of the Great War, American veterans returned home to a country with very few economic opportunities. The socialists took advantage of this and were able to win a majority in the House of Representatives in 1918. Then in 1920, they managed to elect Upton Sinclair as president. Then they changed the American foreign policy to a more pacifist stance. It should be noted that the socialists were just a large minority in national politics until this point. The Democrats had won every election since 1882. The people of Canada started up an underground resistance movement before the war had even ended. The U.S. Army cracked down on them with extreme prejudice, going so far as to execute innocence to dissuade guerrillas. However, President Sinclair appointed a new governor after a few years and eased the occupation, which caused the entire resistance to die down. Meanwhile, in the CSA, politics in the economy had gone completely nuts. War reparations and the shock to the economy brought on by shutting down war production caused massive hyperinflation and unemployment. A bunch of reactionary political parties sprang up, fanning anti-American and anti-Black sentiment to gain support. The biggest of these was the Freedom Party, which gained popularity thanks to its chief speaker, a former Confederate soldier named Jake Featherston. He made a bunch of passionate speeches full of claims that the CSA had been stabbed in the back by its Black population. Featherston managed to become the leader of the party and steer it in an even more extreme direction. Pretty soon, members of the Freedom Party were elected to Congress and white-shirted assault squads called stalwarts, because Americans can't give things good names, attacked his political opponents. If you're at all familiar with the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, then this will sound like pretty much the same thing. And yeah, it is, but I want to go on a tangent about one important difference about the circumstances surrounding them. IRL, Adolf Hitler blamed Jews for Germany losing the war, being behind the rise of communism and the wrecked economy, all of which were completely false. German Jews actually fought on the front lines at a disproportionately high rate during the war, and the idea that a group of people who were supposedly all bankers would also all be communists is so stupid that I hopefully don't even need to explain it at all. But in the Southern Victory timeline, when Featherston blames the CSA's Black population for them losing the war, he kind of has a point. They did have a giant revolution, after all. Now, the CSA would probably have lost anyways due to their smaller population and industrial base, but the socialist uprisings undoubtedly sped things up. From the standpoint of an average citizen, the idea that they only lost because all the Black people were fighting for the other side would have made sense, and even been correct to a certain extent. Now, just so we are crystal fucking clear, I am not claiming that these books are portraying Featherston and the Freedom Party as the good guys or even as victims. The members of the Freedom Party are shown in no uncertain terms to be the genocidal madmen that they are. I just think that this is an interesting distinction between this timeline and our own. With that out of the way, Jake Featherston ran for president in 1921 and lost, but only barely. Then in 1923, a Freedom Party stalwart assassinated the Confederate president at a political rally. Then the U.S. lifted war reparations. These things combined caused the Freedom Party to lose support and become more of a fringe political organization. Upton Sinclair, one reelection in the U.S. in 1924, and a civil war started in Mexico between monarchists and Republicans. Again, the Freedom Party sent a bunch of their stalwarts to fight on the part of the monarchists and the Confederate government sent them things like weapons and tanks. The U.S. sent some small support to the Republicans, but it wasn't nearly enough and so they lost the war. Okay, that's a lot, and it covers less than 10 years of history, so let's take a minute to look at how likely it all is. The idea of soldiers coming back for war and demanding better working conditions is very likely. After all the shit they went through on the front lines, coming back to an underpaid factory or farm job with shit working conditions would have been intolerable to them. And with their combat experience and ability to organize, they could easily stage strikes and beat back any thugs that came to get rid of them. When you consider that the Socialist Party had increased workers' rights as a big part of their platform, it makes sense that their support would spike. Even more than that, the Socialists were against the war from the beginning, claiming that it was a war for imperialism and the greed of industrialists. The soldiers and citizens who had witnessed the horrors of war firsthand would probably have wanted to prevent something like that ever happening again, just like in our timeline. When you combine those two things, it becomes likely that the Socialists would win the next two elections. The occupation of Canada after the war is likely too. The Americans wouldn't want to give back any territory that they'd fought for and controlling Canada would secure their northern border. The brutal reprisals against civilians also seems likely since the US army is supposed to take after the German army in this timeline and that's exactly how they acted in occupied areas. They just thought it was the best way to dissuade armed resistance. It's pretty plausible that the Sinclair administration would want to take a gentler approach there. For one, a military occupation of a large area with a hostile population is unsustainable in the long run. And for another, the Socialists were anti-war and anti-imperialism to begin with. The only way I can see this not happening is if the military command was able to convince the new president that their way of doing things was better. As for the goings on in the CSA, they're also pretty consistent. The war and the reparation payments would almost certainly have wrecked their economy and it definitely would have bred resentment towards the United States. Well, more resentment. Those filthy cousin fuckers have always been jealous of our success. The rise of reactionary right wing parties seems almost inevitable in this scenario. So this is likely. The only thing that's a little off is how fast the freedom party's rise is. I'm not saying it's impossible at all, rather that it's hard for me to believe that they would be able to get their message out to an entire country in only a couple of years with no internet or TV and with relatively few radios. Keep in mind that there were multiple reactionary parties saying very similar things to the freedom party that would have split the vote. It would have taken some wrangling before the supporters of those parties decided to throw their weight behind Featherston, so that change is plausible, borderline unlikely. The freedom party having stalwarts go around and beat the fuck out of their political opponents is likely. That's what fascists do. Mussolini did it, Hitler did it, that's just their MO. They can't win by the rules of democracy, so they just don't follow them. The assassination of the Confederate president seems plausible enough. It really only takes one crazy person with a gun to pull something like that off. There are too many variables to say though, so that's why this one is just plausible. The response to this, with support for the freedom party falling, is very likely. People generally don't like it when their democratically elected leaders are murdered. Freedom party members going to Mexico to participate in the Civil War is pretty plausible. It certainly wouldn't be the first time in history that foreigners volunteered to fight in one side or another of a civil war. It also makes sense that the Confederate government would declare for the monarchists, since they had been allies with them for decades at that point. The only part that doesn't make sense is the Confederate government sending so many supplies to the monarchists. The Mexican Civil War is supposed to be roughly analogous to the real-life Spanish Civil War, because Nazi Germany favored one side in that war as well. The difference is that the Spanish Civil War started in 1936, long after Adolf Hitler had come to power, and long after the German economy had recovered. The Mexican war happened in the mid-1920s, when the Confederate economy was still in the toilet. They wouldn't have had the money to support either side of the war very much, so this development is unlikely. So far it seems like everything after the Great War is pretty solid and realistic. Hang on. When radios started to become more common, Jake Featherston took advantage of them to spread his message to more and more of the country. This kept the freedom party relevant, but the recovering economy meant that they no longer had as much appeal to the masses. The war was seen as being in the past, and people just wanted to move on. Then in 1929, the stock markets crashed and the Great Depression began, just like in our timeline. The freedom party took full advantage of this, and Featherston was elected president of the CSA in 1933. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, the British Union of Fascists rose to power in a similar way, although while they did manage to affect British politics, they were never more than a minority in parliament. And in France, the fascist Action Française, I'm probably pronouncing that wrong, came to power. Then they established a new monarchy. I know that sounds weird, but it lines up with their real-life ideology at the time. In the former central powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary, the economy took a hit, but things stayed pretty stable politically speaking. Same with Russia. In the Pacific, Japan pressured France and the Netherlands into giving up their colonies. It also began to exert more and more influence over China, even carving out a few pieces of it. The US also suffered from the financial collapse. Millions became jobless, and the Canadian resistance experienced a resurgence. A Japanese ship was discovered smuggling weapons to them, and so the US went to war in 1932. The economy slowly recovered in North America, and the American-Japanese war came to an inconclusive finish in 1935. Congressmen from Kentucky and Houston began to demand referendums in their home states to allow the people to determine if they would rejoin the CSA or not. After Featherston's election, he was able to consolidate power pretty effectively. The Freedom Party controlled Congress and passed whatever laws he wanted without much fuss. He was even able to abolish the Supreme Court through some complex political maneuvers. Then some forced elections combined with the stalwarts attacking anyone who opposed them solidified the Freedom Party's hold on Congress as well as state legislatures. Then the police and military were packed full of stalwarts and other Featherston loyalists. Soon, with permission from the President's and Attorney General, the states began to set up holding camps for political dissidents. Featherston also built up the Confederate military in flagrant violation of post-war treaties. Did I mention that these guys were based on the Nazis yet? While all of this was happening, the Black population was being squeezed beyond any tolerance. Their homes and jobs were taken through various laws, and they became even more impoverished and downtrodden than before. Small rebellions began to pop up all over the country, inspired by the previous Red Revolutions. To deal with these rebellions, Featherston started searching out places for, quote, population reduction. Yeah. The rest of this video is going to be pretty dark, kids. So the US government eventually relented under pressure and allowed the former Confederate states to vote on whether or not they wanted to rejoin the CSA. Kentucky and Houston both voted to go back to their old country, but Sequoia stayed part of the United States. So let's go over the plausibility of all that. The stock market crashing seems plausible enough. It's hard to say for certain how the differences in the war would affect the economic development of various nations, but as long as things like market speculation, high levels of debt among consumers, and overproduction of agriculture still happened on the same scale as real life, then the economy would certainly feel the effects. It probably wouldn't happen on the same date, but it's plausible that it would happen. The rise of fascism outside of the CSA is more of a mixed bag, though. The British Union of Fascists was a real political movement that had 50,000 members at its peak, and with the collapsed economy and the UK's loss in the Great War, it makes sense that they would grow even bigger in this timeline. They were never a majority in parliament, either, so it's not like they completely took over the way the Fascists did in other places, so I'd say that their rise is pretty plausible. France turning into a monarchy again is impossible. Axion Francaise's platform can be boiled down to two basic ideas. To bring back the monarchy and to take an aggressive stance against Germany. That last one is doable with a large determined minority, but the first one would require overwhelming support from the populace. There's no way that most of France would agree to give up their democratic form of government when they'd spent their whole lives living under it. At the very least, this would require a civil war to happen. So yeah, impossible. Germany staying stable is plausible. It's impossible to say how the economic crash would have affected them, but the people would have had confidence in their governments after it brought them through the Great War in such good shape. Austria-Hungary and Russia staying stable is unlikely. Even before the Great War, both countries were starting to crumble. Austria in particular was being torn apart by various ethnicities that wanted independence, as well as mismanagement from their government. And Russia had an even more incompetent government, as well as a severely undeveloped economy and more impoverished population. When people can't afford enough to eat, they tend to rise up. That's exactly what caused the Bolshevik Revolution after all. Both countries should have been consumed by protests and riots, at the very least. Japan gaining more control over China makes sense. China was a crumbling country at this point in time, not even a country at all really, just a collection of pseudo-states run by warlords. And it was hardly industrialized at all. Without interference from the other Great Powers, Japan would definitely have been able to exert influence over its much bigger neighbor. So this is likely. Taking over the Dutch East Indies from the Netherlands seems less likely, though. The Netherlands seemed to be relatively close to the German Empire and the US, which were the strongest military powers in the world at this point in the timeline. Japan may have been in a good position to invade the colony, but they still would have had to deal with a response from the rest of the world. Any threats they made would have been toothless, so it's unlikely that the Netherlands would have handed over a valuable territory to them. Taking Indochina from France is impossible without a nasty fight, though. If France was going through a period of extreme nationalism and was actively trying to get Alsace Lorraine back from Germany, they would have gone to war before letting go of any of their colonies. Whether this would have been successful or not is up in the air. All I'm saying is that there would have been a fight. Japan taking weapons to Canadian gorillas is rated as plausible, borderline likely. The United States would have been Japan's only real rival in the Pacific at this time, and they would have wanted to dampen their influence any way that they could. Supplying their domestic enemies is a cheap and low-risk way to do that. Now, as for Featherston creating a one-party state, that's kind of hard to judge too. It required a lot of things to go his way, careful planning and charisma on his part, and fanatical loyalty from his followers. I'll say that him getting elected president is likely given the circumstances, but him managing to become the furor is on the line between unlikely and plausible. I know it's supposed to parallel events in Germany from real life, but Weimar Germany's government was set up a lot differently than the CSA. Specifically, it was much more centralized, which means that once the Nazis had control of the Reichstag, they had far more power over the country as a whole. The freedom party still needed to take over all the state governments as well, which would require a huge majority of the population to be on board. Granted, assassinations, attacks on their opponents, and concentration camps for dissidents would give them a huge leg up. It's not impossible by any means, just less likely than you may think. The Black Rebellions are rated as plausible. The Black population was already feeling resentful of their position before the freedom party came to power, that's why the Red Revolution happened in the first place. If they lost what little they had, then they'd start to get angrier, and with the memories of the last revolution still fresh, they might start to think that they could win if they just did it right this time. Of course, at the same time, the freedom party governments kept a much tighter lid on the Black population than the previous regime would have. Any Whisper of Resistance should have been met with a brutal crackdown. The Rebellions seem pretty small and disorganized, though, at least at first, so it seems like they're just made up of those who managed to slip through the cracks. So this one is just plausible. Kentucky and Houston rejoining the CSA is likely. It's made clear that before the Great War, the CSA was intensely nationalistic and the people absolutely hated the United States. I have little doubt that the people there would have jumped at the chance to go back to their homeland, as it were. Even if a couple of them were happier in the U.S., or if American settlers moved there, it probably wouldn't have outweighed those that just wanted to go back to the way things used to be. On that note, Sequoia staying in the U.S. is unlikely. There was a significant population of Native Americans there who hated the U.S. government even more than other Confederates. And, to be honest, it's kind of hard to blame them. It's mentioned that a lot of American settlers moved there, and that's what caused the vote to swing the other way. The problem is that there would need to be a metric fuck-ton of settlers to swing the vote. However, one thing that isn't mentioned in the books that could have affected this is the right to vote for Native Americans. It's entirely possible that the U.S. government only allowed white people to vote in Sequoia, and white Confederates would have been a much smaller block of voters to overcome. This possibility is never mentioned in the books, though, so I still have to rate this change as unlikely. So after the Great War, this timeline is more of a mixed bag. Rather than following a logical progression of events, the series seems to be more concerned with making parallels to real history. It's not a total loss, though. Some aspects of it still make sense. And then came the Second Great War. In Europe in 1941, Kaiser Wilhelm II died. France's new king demanded the return of Alsace Lorraine, the new Kaiser refused, and almost immediately France, the UK, the CSA, and Russia all declared war on Germany. Featherston decided that the time to strike had come, so he launched an immediate attack. Bombing raids struck Philadelphia and Southern Ohio. Right after that, the rest of the Entente powers also declared war on the U.S., and the Second Great War began. The U.S. immediately responded. Unfortunately, they expected the main thrust to come from the east like in the last war. Instead, the Confederates launched a combined arms assault focused on Ohio and captured the whole state in two months. With Ohio in Confederate hands, the United States was cut in half. It was possible to move men and materials through Canada, it's just that that was the long way around, and the Canadian resistance harassed any shipping that they could, so it was slow going. Oh yeah, and the Mormons rebelled in Utah again. How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man? At sea, neither the Americans or Confederates could gain a decisive advantage, and they mostly just sank cargo ships. In the Pacific, Japan attacked the American naval installation at Midway Island and then captured the whole island. They didn't make much progress after that, though. Later, the Americans began a counteroffensive against the CSA through Virginia, which made some progress but became bogged down. When winter started, both sides settled down to wait for spring. While all of this was happening, the genocide of Black Confederates began in earnest. Any Black person with a passbook that seemed out of sorts immediately got shipped out to a camp in Louisiana or Texas. In the cities, they were used as slave labor in munitions plants, and whenever the Reds committed any sort of attack, they suffered brutal reprisals. In the camps, the guards first tried to slaughter the prisoners using submachine guns. Men, women, and children were all lined up against walls and gunned down. They quickly found this to be ineffective, though, and the brutality of it caused more than one camp guard to swallow a bullet. So then they moved on to poison gas. They built a bunch of sealed trucks and then claimed that they were being used to transfer prisoners between camps. Instead, the occupants were gassed inside and then dumped in mass graves. I told you this video would get dark, kids. And to make things even more upsetting, the news of this all reached the American public, and most of them didn't really care. They were somewhat sympathetic, but they weren't exactly excited to help out foreign Black people. And the on-taunt powers just pointed to the way Americans acted in Utah and Canada in response. In 1942, the Confederates attacked the American Industrial Center of Pittsburgh. They managed to do some serious damage to the city, and the chief of staff recommended they retreat, their objective completed. Featherston refused to allow it, though. The Confederates had to fight for every street and building, not to mention that them southern boys weren't exactly used to snow, so a bunch of them froze to death. After months of this, an American army counterattacked, smashing through the screening force and surrounding the city. The Confederate army was not allowed to attempt a breakout and so eventually surrendered. Get it? It's Stalingrad! Did you figure out that this was a fictional version of Stalingrad? Because it was. It was a fictional version of Stalingrad. After this, the tide began to turn in the Americans' favor. The Confederates were pushed back into Ohio, the Mormon rebellion was crushed by mid-1943, they recaptured Midway, they started running weapons to resistance fighters in Cuba, and they besieged the remnants of the Canadian resistance in Winnipeg. The Confederates were also running short of manpower by that point and were forced to bring Mexican soldiers up to police their territory. They weren't very good at fighting off the Black partisans, though, so they began to launch bigger attacks. Pretty soon, American forces had advanced across the board and cut the CSA in half by capturing Georgia. In desperation, Featherston ordered an attack on Philadelphia using their newly developed weapon, an atomic bomb. The bomb detonated on the outskirts of the city, though, and so most of the government survived. In retaliation, the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Newport News, Virginia, and Charleston, South Carolina. I should note that people call them super bombs in this timeline. What an imaginative name, American scientists. The U.S. continued to press the CSA back in Texas and even liberated a couple of extermination camps. The governments of Texas declared independence from the CSA and allied itself with the Americans. The leaders of the extermination program were arrested, then tried and executed. The last major Confederate army surrendered in Alabama, but Featherston still refused to give up the fight. He hopped on a plane with some of his inner circle and flew off to what remained of unoccupied territory, hoping to continue the war with a guerrilla force. Unfortunately for him, his plane was shot down and upon crashing, he came face to face with a band of partisans. One of them recognized him and shot him dead immediately. The vice president took over just long enough to unconditionally surrender. With that, the Confederate states of America ceased to exist. The American military still had to deal with pockets of Confederate resistance fighters and terrorists. In retaliation for attacks, they would often execute dozens of Confederate civilians. Because that worked great with the Mormons and Canadians, didn't it? Speaking of Canadians, their resistance finally petered out when they realized that the full might of the US military could now be turned on them, and when the Americans threatened to hit them with an atomic bomb, well, the writing was on the wall. The black Confederate population was decimated and was now little more than a few shell-shocked camp survivors and bands of partisans. The US government expressed an interest in reabsorbing most of the CSA back into the Union, with the possible exceptions of Cuba, Chihuahua, Sonora, and Texas. The series ends with the ultimate fate of the former Confederacy unknown. But what was happening in Europe at the same time? The war started there, after all. Well, the Entente did really well at the beginning. The Russians invaded Ukraine and were greeted as liberators by most of the population, meaning they captured most of the country right away. However, the Russian army didn't have much tactical sense beyond just throwing their massive manpower at the German defenses, which means that they took heavy losses for very little gain. They were unable to take Poland. In the West, the British captured Ireland without too much trouble. The French retook Alsace-Lorraine, while a combined British-French assault took Belgium and the Netherlands. The Belgians were grateful to the Entente. The Dutch, not so much, they were more in favor of the Central Powers, but they were still brushed aside rather quickly. Soon, the Entente were on the banks of the Rhine River. By late 1942, the tide had turned in favor of the Central Powers. The Entente were still stuck in Western Germany and dealing with a giant Irish uprising, while at sea, the German and British navies clashed in a battle where they both claimed victory. In Austria-Hungary, there were approximately 35,000 different uprisings at once. Serbs, Bosnians, and other ethnic groups all started bombing and attacking Austrian military installations, meaning that the Empire had trouble even keeping itself together. Russia was in a sort of similar position with some of its own minorities like Jews and Chechens. Let this be a lesson to you, dear viewers. If you're ever the absolute monarch of a continent-sized empire and you allow your citizens to pogrom some of your other citizens, you'll eventually have to deal with an uprising or two. I wish I could give more information about that, but these books are pretty sparse on the details outside of North America. Not to mention that some of the characters get their information from state propaganda, which makes it hard to determine how accurate it is. Sorry if this segment feels a little light. Around this time, Japan abandoned its war on the United States and prepared to attack the British colonies of Malaya and Singapore. They stayed pretty quiet for the rest of the war. Multiple countries all had atomic weapons programs going on at this time. Germany was in the lead since Albert Einstein and other prominent Jewish scientists still lived there. In late 1943, the German army was able to push the Entente over the Dutch border, then they kept going. Outside of Kiev, they dealt a massive blow to the Russians and retook Ukraine. With their southern flank secure, they began to march on Petrograd and the Russian army was helpless to stop them. Sometime later, Germany wiped out Petrograd with a super bomb. This was actually before the Confederate bomb hit Philadelphia, so the shock to the world was enormous. Then they dropped another bomb on Paris. The British made their own super bomb and dropped it on Hamburg, and the Germans responded by wiping out Norwich, Brighton, and London. Due to all these attacks, France, the UK, and Russia all experienced a change in government and all requested an armistice. This was around the same time that Texas seceded from the CSA, meaning that the war in Europe came to a close only a few weeks before the war in North America. The series ends with the US and Germany declaring intentions for a long-term partnership to police the world and prevent their enemies from getting a hold of super bomb technology, but a lot of people think that this partnership won't last. Oh boy, that's a lot of changes and developments to rate. Let's get on it. So, France demanding all-sauce Lorraine right after the Kaiser dies. This is likely. Even before the new regime took power, they were chomping at the bit to take back what they considered their rightful territory and punish Germany for perceived wrongs. And with a new German Kaiser coming to power, they would have wanted to make demands while he was still getting his feet under him. And his refusal to cave to their demands would have given them an excuse for declaring more, too. The UK deciding to pile on is likely, too. Russia, I'll say, is on the line between plausible and likely. They would certainly have wanted revenge, but they would still have been trying to get their shit together after the last war, the Bolshevik Revolution, and their own economic collapse. Maybe the Tsar thought war was a good idea, but if he was smart he would have stayed out of it. Back to North America. The CSA declaring war on the US is likely, too, since all of their allies were distracted. It is kind of odd that they waited so long, though. I know that the date of the invasion falls on the same day as Operation Barbarossa in our timeline, but that feels more like an intentional reference than a logical progression of the setting. If France was chomping at the bit to attack Germany, then the CSA was absolutely foaming at the mouth to attack their most hated enemy. Jake Featherston in particular seems like an absolute madman who would want to strike as soon as possible rather than wait for the most opportune moment. It's also impossible that George Patton would have commanded the Confederate army that invades Ohio. Even if we accept that events from before he was born still resulted in him being born in the exact same way he would have been born in California. And if we assume that his family stayed in Virginia after the War of Secession, then the circumstances of his birth would have resulted in a different person. But whatever, let's focus on the bigger stuff. The main thrust of the attack going into Ohio is pretty sound strategy. Its success is more dubious, though. The commanders of that front were pretty competent, and they only failed in their defense because they didn't have enough manpower or resources to stop Patton. And the War Department only wouldn't give them what they needed because they thought the main attack would come from the east. I think this is a reference to the Maginot Line from World War II, but it's not a very good one. The Maginot Line wasn't supposed to stop the Germans, it was supposed to force them to invade through Belgium so that the French would be in an advantageous defensive position. It only didn't work because the Germans punched through a weak point in their lines. The War Department in Timeline 191 just seemed like a bunch of dumbasses. Even after seeing the attack on Ohio, they don't figure out what's happening, so the Confederates actually taking Ohio is an unlikely development. As for Mormon Rebellion Number 4, sure, it's plausible. After all the reprisals they've faced, they'd be glad to try and gain independence again. The only part that seems odd is that Utah was already under close military watch, so any attempts to organize resistance should have been caught before anything could happen. But still, plausible. The Canadian resistance is in very much the same boat, only I'd say it's slightly more likely since it's a bigger area and you can't effectively watch the whole thing. Japan taking Midway Island seems a little bit less likely, since Midway was a very fortified base both IRL and in this timeline. What's weirder is that they would attack the US and then just sort of stop their war, then switch sides and attack British colonies. I guess they just wanted to stay in their own part of the world and decided that the US wasn't a threat? I don't know. But it's unlikely that they'd act this way, they'd either commit to the war on one side or stay out of it. The extermination of Black Confederates is very unlikely. The Freedom Party came to power specifically to take care of them, that was always Featherston's goal. This is supposed to parallel the Holocaust after all, the government wanting to kill them makes sense. However, the Holocaust was committed primarily on Jews which made up only 0.75% of the German population. And even when you include all the other groups that were targeted like Roma and the Disabled, it would have only been a tiny part of the total population. In this timeline, Black people made up around a third of the CSA's population. Not only that, they depended on them for manual labor. If you kill off that much of your workforce, it'll completely collapse your economy. And setting that aside, if a segment of your population is that large, you'll never be able to actually move them or build big enough camps for all of them, especially with most of your manpower going towards a giant war. Not to sound callous of course, there are a hell of a lot more problems with genocide than just the logistics of it. Getting back to the war in Ohio, if the CSA was able to actually take the state, then attacking Pittsburgh next is likely. It was a seat of industry and destroying it would do major damage. Actually capturing it is plausible since they had a giant army and the Americans were focusing on other fronts. But the commanders were already experienced with their methods of fighting, so it's not likely. The brutal house-to-house fighting seems to check out too, that's how most battles in cities go in the modern era. And as someone who spent time in the South, I can tell you that those folks can't handle the cold. They'd be plenty weakened by the winter fighting and since they weren't allowed to retreat, the Americans would most likely be able to either surround them or destroy them completely. The CSA should have lost most of its fighting capability in that campaign, Like I already said, they were way smaller than the US and had a way smaller industrial base and were actively genociding a third of their population. They couldn't bring the same level of military might as their opponent. They gambled their whole war effort on the Pittsburgh campaign and they blew it. Even if the Freedom Party refused to surrender, they would be reduced down to bands of guerrillas almost right away. There wouldn't be any way to maintain or build up the big armies that they still had until the very end of the war. So the war continuing for another year and a half after the Battle of Pittsburgh is extremely unlikely. The Americans crushing the Canadian resistance is likely since they were pretty small. Same with the Mormons. As for the atomic bombs, that's hard to say. In fact, given how much scientific advancement would have changed if different people were born, it's impossible to say. So I'll just rate the development as plausible and leave it at that. Featherston using one is very likely and the Americans trying it in response is also likely. The Black Partisans waging a guerrilla campaign against the CSA is pretty likely too, but I feel like it would be bigger. During the First Great War, the Reds would only really appeal to part of the Black population since they were, you know, communists. In this war, they were fighting for their very survival, though, and they were still a huge part of the CSA. They should have not only been forming bands of guerrillas, they should have been completely taking over chunks of territory. But whatever, still likely. The CSA only surrendering long after they had lost the ability to fight is unlikely. Remember how it took years for Featherston to consolidate power because there was a lot of resistance to him? Not all of those people were killed. There would have been plenty that kept their heads down. And if they deserted from the military or gave aid to the Americans, the war would have been over much faster. Texas's seceding is rated unlikely too. Even before the war, Texas was one of the states that most supported the Freedom Party. Featherston won the vote there in every election. It would make more sense for a state like Cuba or Sonorita secede since they were farther from the seat of power and were less supportive of Featherston to begin with. And finally, we get to the American reaction to the extermination camps. Actually seeing the photos and hearing the first-hand accounts would be horrifying to just about everyone. And if the US government wanted their propaganda to work at all, they would have had to try and execute the ring leaders. So all of this is plausible, borderline likely. Now onto Europe. As I said before, there's not a whole lot of info on the war there, so some of it is hard to judge. I already said that Russia entering the war is a tad unlikely, but setting that aside, the way they wage war is just stupid. The idea that they used human-wave tactics isn't a complete myth. They did do things like charge into machine gun nests during World War I, but so did everyone else. They learned their lesson pretty quickly and found other ways to attack, though. That's not to say they didn't still launch attacks that could be considered suicidal, just that they didn't launch them all the time. If Russia had gone through the First Great War and a lengthy Civil War, then their officer corps would definitely have learned a thing or two about how to conduct a modern war. If they hadn't, then they wouldn't have won the Civil War at all. So their incompetence is impossible. Not only that, but there's no way they'd make any progress whatsoever with those sorts of tactics. They didn't work very well against repeating rifles and machine guns during the First Great War, and they would work way fucking less against tanks. So Russia making any progress at all is impossible. Most Ukrainians switching to side with the invading Russians seems unlikely. Even in our timeline, there was a pretty big nationalist movement there. They weren't big fans of the Tsar at all. Of course, there's not much detail about how their status as a German puppet state worked out for them. It could have been even worse. That's the only reason this is rated unlikely and not impossible. The Germans marching on Petrograd as a counterattack is rated likely. It was the Russian seat of governments, it was relatively close to Germany, and it was a railroad hub. It was a perfect target, and capturing it would have been a serious blow. But then the Germans dropped a super bomb on the city instead, even though they would have been able to take it without much trouble. I guess this is plausible? High command may have wanted to scare the Russians into surrendering quickly, or send a message to the rest of the Entente. It's also almost guaranteed that Russia would surrender after that. As for the war in the West, that's a different story. Okay, not really, but that's fun to say. France retaking Alsace-Lorraine without any trouble is unlikely. There were a ton of fortifications there on both sides that would have slowed any attacks significantly. By the 1940s, static defenses were much less useful than they had been in earlier eras, but that doesn't mean they were totally useless. The French-British offensive taking the Low Countries right away is likely though. Both of those countries are pretty flat for the most part, making them ideal for tanks to drive through. And since Belgium was generally not a fan of being occupied by Germany, it's likely that they would have assisted the Entente invasion, further deteriorating whatever defenses were set up. The German forces managing to halt the Entente at the river Rhine seems plausible enough, since it's a natural obstacle. The Germans being able to push back against the Entente is difficult to judge. I feel like they'd be outnumbered by a pretty big margin though, so I'm gonna rate this unlikely. Them dropping a super bomb on Paris is excessive, but plausible, since, well, they'd already wiped out one city, what's one more? The brief back and forth super bomb battle between Germany and the UK is unlikely. After they had one or two cities incinerated, the British would have surrendered. They weren't run by madmen like the CSA, pragmatism would almost certainly have one out sooner. The Entente surrendering after all those nukes is extremely likely, though. Ireland's being taken over right away is plausible. The invasion started in the loyalist stronghold of the north, and with Ireland's allies busy elsewhere, it's not impossible to think that a large military power could take over the island. It's just, they were able to fight them off using irregular militias during the First Great War. They should have been able to do that here, or at least defend themselves better. Austria-Hungary being torn apart by ethnic tensions is very likely. They were barely holding together before the First Great War, and if you look at how the empire fell apart in our timeline, it wasn't a whole lot different. All the bombings and assassinations should have been the opening shots of a civil war, and the whole empire staying together is very unlikely in this scenario. And that's where the story ends. Look, I get that the point of the last seven books in this series are meant to parallel the real-life rise of fascism, World War II, and the Holocaust. The issue is that the world was so different from our own at the end of the Great War trilogy that many of the events that come afterwards feel forced. A fictional version of the Battle of Stalingrad in Pittsburgh makes for thrilling reading, and actually getting into the mind of someone like Jake Featherston is absolutely fascinating, so don't mistake my criticisms for me saying that these books are bad. They're still a hell of a lot of fun, and I definitely recommend them as an example of what the alternate history genre is capable of. It's just that everything after breakthroughs is more like a dramaticized history book than a fictional story. That's about all there is to say about that, though. I just want to take a quick second to thank everyone who's discovered my channel in the past month and a half. This growth rate has been insane. I'm still kind of reeling from it, to be honest. If you haven't subscribed yet, please do so now. And also, you've probably noticed that I have upgraded my sound equipment, but I'm still tweaking it, so hopefully the next one will sound even better than this. See you next time.