Impossible Histories annotations on WWII

Footnotes from chapter 8

These are annotations for the eighth chapter of the book Impossible Histories. I’m not saying you need to keep a copy of IH open next to you as you read, but it might make some things clearer?

p. 139
•epigraph:

…it is a question whether war and anarchy and confusion be not preferable to the deceptive peace and apparent prosperity of despotism, that, like the death-dealing vampire, soothes while it destroys.
§Mayne Reid, The Boy Hunters (1853).

p. 140
•a parody of the popular nineteenth-century German children’s book Shock-Headed Peter: A frequently parodied book, both in Germany and England. WWII saw the publication of Strewwelhitler, which is quite good (read it here in pdf). An excerpt:

Piecrust never could be brittler
Than the word of Adolf Hitler

Both Strewwelhitler and Swollen-Headed William is funnier if you’re familiar with the original.

[Robert & Philip Spence, Struwwelhitler: A Nazi Storybook by Doktor Schrecklichkeit (Daily Sketch, 1941) p. 3.]

•helpfully labeled “indemnity”:

p. 143
•They would give Hitler everything he wanted: Hilaire Belloc, who always knew what to say, summarized Chamberlain’s policy with this nice triptych:

Dear Czecho-Slovakia
I don’t think they’ll attack yer
But I’m not going to back yer.

[Quoted in William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill vol. II (Dell, 1989) p. 295.]

p. 144
•Having betrayed his allies to a madman: I had originally quoted here Wordsworth’s lines concerning the pusillanimity of England’s traditional rival in a crisis:

                                       France, ’tis strange,
Has brought forth no such souls as we had then

with the addendum that England in 1938 was no better. But that got cut.

[William Wordsworth, The Complete Poetical Works (Houghton Mifflin, 1904) pp. 287–88.]

•That wasn’t part of the deal!:

•two MPs literally vomited: Can this possibly be true? I got it from Manchester, but I haven’t had the nerve to check where he got it from.

p. 145
•They went around it: Everyone makes fun of the Maginot Line, and I’m no exception, but I guess I should mention that the Maginot Line did, in fact, do what it was supposed to so. It prevented the Germans from attacking anywhere along the Maginot Line. It forced them to attack in one particular place, a place at which, if the French had planned things better, they could have concentrated their forces. If Constantinople had impregnable walls for the part of its perimeter that faced land, and so Crusaders entered the city by sea…is that the land wall’ws fault? You might as well blame the Maginot Line for not preventing D-Day.

•epigraph: I’d originally planned to have two epigraphs for this section. I got greedy!

For I have never yet heard a story of anyone whose good fortune was complete who did not end up in complete ruin.
§Herodotus III.40 (440 BC).

&

They are tried in Nuremberg, I believe…
§Eric P. Kelly, The Trumpeter of Krakow (1928).

p. 152
•Harry S Truman: Purists traditionally insist on no period after the S, Truman’s middle name actually being S. Hyperpurists can counter that Truman himself often dotted the S. Between purity and hyperpurity who am I to decide?