1945

The US stays out of World War II in Europe, and Germany fights Britain and the USSR to a standstill. Now, in 1945, Germany is going to have another try at Britain and to attack the US too.

• Military

• World War II

• First of all, I felt like the work needed some serious editing. I felt that there was way too much exposition by dialog, too much repetition, and I even noticed the spelling of a character's name changing part way through the story.
  
  
• Secondly, there were parts of the story that I was not convinced by - for example, Otto Skorzeny, scouts ahead for a Nazi commando raid on the US, but seems to do very little scouting or preparation, a dead trooper is washed-up on a beach in South Carolina and amazing deductive reasoning allows the hero to conclude he was an SS man, the bad guys are just plain evil, the good guys seem to me to be too good, and I also believe that the dialog was sometimes inappropriate for the period and context.
  
  
• Thirdly, in what appears to me to be intended to make a blatant contemporary political point about gun control and the Second Amendment, the crack Nazi commandos get routed by a bunch of locals using their own firearms.
  
  
• Fourthly, the ending: the main story ends, and then we get the beginning of a second story. This was interesting, but once again I felt there was too much dialog. The second story is clearly intended as a prologue to a planned sequel (which was to be called "Fortress Europa"), which has never yet been released - I'll return to that point at the end of this review.
  
  
• Finally, there's a lot of details that I'm extremely doubtful of. Some people have criticized the point of departure, for example by arguing that war between the US and Germany was inevitable even without Pearl Harbor, since the two countries' navies were shooting at each other in the Atlantic by late 1941 - but I think that's the point of departure while perhaps debatable, isn't impossible. I had bigger concerns with the timeline, including whether Britain would have accepted a compromise peace with Germany just because the US didn't immediately enter the war in Europe? Why is the US president, an apparently previously unknown figure named Andrew Harrison - if FDR didn't stand for a fourth term, what about Harry Truman, Wendell Wilkie or Thomas E. Dewey? How can it possibly be good (or even plausible) strategy for the Germans to start their invasion of the UK at Edinburgh, which is bound to be heavily guarded, is out of range of most of German aircraft, and vulnerable to artillery placed anywhere else on the Firth of Forth estuary.

1945 By Newt Gingrich Released: August 1st, 1995 Hardcover (400 pages) List Price: $24.00* Lowest New Price: $19.97* In Stock* *(As of 06:20 Pacific 10 Oct 2024 More Info) Click Here Description: 1945 Manufacturer: Baen Books ISBNs: 0671876767, 9780671876760 EAN: 9780671876760 Details: Hardcover Number of Pages: 400 Authors: Newt Gingrich, William R Forstchen Publication Date: August 1st, 1995 Release Date: August 1st, 1995 Physical Description: Size: 9.75 inches by 6.75 inches by 1.5 inches Weight: 1.56748668282 Pounds Click here for more information