Worldwar: Striking the Balance

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Worldwar: Striking the Balance
Author Harry Turtledove
Country USA
Language English
Series Worldwar
Genre(s) Alternate history/Science fiction
Publisher Del Rey Books
Publication date 5 November 1996
Pages 465 (hardcover edition)
ISBN ISBN 0-345-40550-1
Preceded by Worldwar: Upsetting the Balance
Followed by Colonization: Second Contact

Worldwar: Striking the Balance is an alternate history and science fiction novel by Harry Turtledove. It is the fourth and final novel of the Worldwar series, as well as the fourth installment in the Tosev timeline.

Contents

[edit] Plot introduction

While the Race considers total annihilation or continuing hostilities, the humans make a stand for the sovereignty of the planet.

[edit] Plot summary

At the beginning of 1944, the Battle of Chicago has ended with the Race's forces decimated as a result of an American atomic bomb detonated in the heart of the city. German forces in Western Europe have successfully kept the Race from reaching the Rhine while managing to hurl back the Race's troops in Poland after a nuclear attack on Breslau. The Soviets have managed to stop the Race's assault on Moscow and accept the surrender of a band of disillusioned alien soldiers.

The United States attempts to reverse engineer captured Race technology in an effort to create ballistic missiles at a military base in Couch, Missouri. Sergeant Yeager attempts to help Robert Goddard and other scientists with this research by interrogating captured aliens. By this point Yeager has become an expert translator of the Race's language, making him an invaluable asset to Goddard. In the process of his work, Yeager has developed a friendship with two of the alien prisoners, Ristin and Ulhass. Both members of the Race show an alarming adaptability to American customs, learning to play baseball and adopting human slang, along with a surprising willingness to help their human captors.

The Race has apparently lost interest in Chicago and seeks instead to capture Denver. Captain Rance Auerbach is among the U.S. Army soldiers who are ordered to try and halt the new offensive. However, the Race's superior firepower and mobility manage to crush American resistance with relative ease. During the fighting, Rance is critically wounded and incapacitated. He awakens in a refugee hospital to find that the Race is advancing rapidly on Denver. General Omar Bradley prepares defenses around Denver which, as the site of America's nuclear weapons program, must be defended at all cost. Fortunately, Brigadier General Groves and the metallurgical laboratory manage to produce an atomic bomb which they use to halt the Race. Fleetlord Atvar considers a nuclear strike against Denver in retaliation, but decides against it since the nuclear fallout would harm the Race's forces. The sense of victory among Americans is offset by mourning over the recent death of President Roosevelt.

The U.S. Army, under the command of General George Patton, launches a counter-offensive down the Mississippi River, slowly liberating it from the Race. They manage to reach Quincy, Illinois but begin taking higher and higher casualties as they progress. The first American ballistic missiles are also launched against the Race, though they are so crude and unsophisticated that they do little damage against the invaders. Many of these missiles are easily destroyed by the Race's anti-missile systems. Still, the speed with which the Americans and Germans have developed such weapons stuns and frightens the Race.

In Poland, the Wehrmacht continues its advance eastward toward Lodz. However, as they get deeper and deeper into Polish territory, they encounter Jewish partisans whose sympathies lean toward the Race. Mordechai Anielewicz and his fellow Jews do not trust the Nazis and do not wish to see them in control of Poland. They don't wish to see the Race rule the world, either. This situation is exacerbated by the realization that Soviet forces in the Ukraine are slowly making their way toward Poland as well. No one is sure what will happen if and when the Wehrmacht and the Red Army meet on the battlefield.

Colonel Heinrich Jäger, a tank commander who has had experience with the partisans, manages to convince Anielewicz that the German forces will not repeat their previous persecution of the Jews. For a time, the Wehrmacht and the partisans manage to work together against the Race.

In the wake of recent setbacks, especially the Soviet nuclear attack on the Race's forces in Saratov, Fleetlord Atvar agrees to meet with human diplomats from the USSR, Britain, Germany, and the United States for the purpose of negotiating an armistice. Vyacheslav Molotov, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Anthony Eden, and George Marshall head to Cairo, the Race's capital, in order to negotiate with Atvar. However, the chances for peace are severely endangered when Hitler secretly plans to resume hostilities by launching a surprise attack against the Race in Poland.

Jäger is relieved that the fighting has stopped and hopes that it will achieve a lasting peace. However, Hitler sends SS agents into Poland under Otto Skorzeny and they immediately begin to cause friction between the local Poles, the Jewish partisans, and the Wehrmacht. To Jäger, Skorzeny privately makes comments alluding to the fact that Hitler has not by any means abandoned his plans for the Final Solution.

Jäger grows steadily distrustful of Skorzeny and seeks to prevent the SS and Nazis from turning against the Jewish partisans. He establishes a line of communication to the partisans through a Polish farmer named Sascha. When Jäger learns that Hitler is planning to use the negotiations in Cairo as a distraction to detonate an atomic bomb in Lodz, he is shocked and disgusted. Jäger gets word to Mordechai about the bomb through Saschsa. Mordechai and his fellow partisans manage to find and disable the weapon. The Wehrmact moves into position for the offensive. When Skorzeny activates the weapon's detonator, nothing happens. Furious, Skorzeny heads into Lodz to discern the problem.

In Cairo, a distraught Joachim von Ribbentrop announces his government's decision to continue the war to the confused delegates. Ribbentrop is relieved when Atvar tells him that no reports of an attack in Poland have been made.

When Jäger finds Sascha tortured to death with SS runes burned onto his chest and his wife and daughter brutally raped and murdered, he realizes that his cover is blown. Soon after returning to camp, he is detained by SS men and interrogated.

Somewhere in Poland, Ludmilla Gorbunova crash lands while trying to deliver supplies to partisans. She gets little or no help from the locals who are largely unable and unwilling to aid a Soviet pilot. A Jewish partisan named Ignacy does eventually manage to help her locate a working Fieseler Storch. She takes off with the intent of returning to the Soviet Union after her extended stay in Estonia.

By a shocking coincidence, Ludmilla arrives at an airfield in the same location where Jäger is being held captive. Jäger's tank crewmen recognize Ludmilla as the woman with whom he is involved. Fearing what will happen to their commander if he is interrogated by the SS, the tank crewmen inform Ludmilla about his fate and ask for her help. She readily offers her assistance. The Wehrmact soldiers kill the SS men guarding Jäger and then lead him to Ludmilla's plane. The two take off before anyone realizes Jäger has escaped.

Jäger explains Hitler's plan to Ludmilla and they make their way to Lodz. There they make contact with Mordechai and tell him about Skorzeny. All three head to the condemned building where the bomb is being guarded by partisans. They find the Jewish guard dead. Upon entering the building, Skorzeny attacks them with nerve gas and a submachine-gun. Jäger is carrying a medical kit with an antidote to the toxin and manages to inject himself, Ludmilla, and Mordechai with it. They manage to kill Skorzeny and avert the detonation of the bomb.

In Cairo, the Race reaches an accord with the human powers. The Race will completely withdraw from the territories under the control of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the Third Reich in 1942, with the exception of Poland, which the Race intends to hold as a buffer state between the Reich and the USSR. Atvar is willing to suspend hostilities with Germany, Russia, America, Britain, and Japan. Atvar has no intention of returning any part of the British Empire to England, except Canada which the Race considers unihabitable as a result of its weather. With that, the war ends. Nevertheless, fighting continues in those territories the Race still controls, especially China where a determined Communist insurgency under Mao Zedong seeks liberation.

It is clear that the peace is only temporary. The Race has not recognized the right of the human powers to their own independence and still officially intends to conquer the entire world at a later date. Nazi Germany is apparently still eager to use force in order to drive the race off earth completely, though perhaps not in the immediate future. In the Soviet Union, Stalin assures Molotov that war with the Race and the other human powers is inevitable, especially since a second wave of alien colonists is expected to reach earth by the 1960s. In the United States, an America in ruins begins the long process of reconstruction.

[edit] Characters in "Worldwar: Upsetting the Balance"

See list of Worldwar characters for fictional and historical characters.


[edit] Allusions to Other Works

The primary concept of the novel, an alien invasion of earth, is of course a plot made popular by the H.G. Wells story War of the Worlds and similar works.


[edit] References to Actual History and Current Science

Turtledove is careful to avoid any elaborate technical details about the Race's technology. However, from the descriptions given in the novel it is possible to surmise that much of the technology used by the Race is not only feasible but is in fact in common use at the start of the twenty-first century.

The military equipment of the Race is almost entirely analgous to human technology. Their primary ground forces are composed of tanks and mechanized infantry with supporting self-propelled artillery and gunships. In one respect, at least, the Race's military equipment is actually inferior to human technology, that being naval warfare. Since the Race's homeworld has only a few large lakes and rivers, they never developed the sophisticated warships of the human forces. Battleships and aircraft carriers in particular strike the Race as literally unimagineable. In addition, the Race was caught completly off-guard by the use of chemical weapons such as mustard gas to the point of not having any countermeasures such as gas masks. As a result, it is possible that the Race either never used chemical weapons in their pre-unification wars, or that the use of such weapons (and the information that they ever existed) has been removed via censorship from the historical record at some point during the ~50,000 Earth years of unification.

Their air forces are not fundamentally different from human air forces in terms of tactics and doctrine, being based primarily on the concept of achieving air superiority through the use of fighters. From a technical standpoint, the Race's aircraft have a tremendous advantage over human planes in that they are powered by turbine engines whereas most human aircraft in mid-twentieth century were propeller-driven.

The Race apparently makes use of several theoretically feasible but not yet materially possible technologies, namely nuclear fusion power and interstellar travel. Turtledove describes the alien vessels making the journey from Tau Ceti to Earth in twenty years, implying that they can travel at one-half the speed of light. Vessels of the Race seems to create artificial gravity by means of rotation. During their long interstellar travels, part or all of a ship's crew is placed in suspended animation by some unexplained method of artificial metabolic arrest referred to simply as cold sleep.

Cold sleep may actually be reproduced with cryogenics technology. See article on World War II.

[edit] Release details

[edit] Translations

  • Russian: "Великий перелом" ("The Grand Turning Point"), 2004

[edit] Sources, references, external links, quotations

Page for this book in the Turtledove wiki

v • d • e
Works by Harry Turtledove
Videssos books Videssos Cycle The Misplaced Legion | An Emperor for the Legion | The Legion of Videssos | The Swords of the Legion
The Tale of Krispos Krispos Rising | Krispos of Videssos | Krispos the Emperor
Time of Troubles The Stolen Throne | Hammer and Anvil | The Thousand Cities | Videssos Besieged
The Bridge of the Separator
The Race or
Tosev timeline series		 Worldwar Tetralogy In the Balance | Tilting the Balance | Upsetting the Balance | Striking the Balance
Colonization Second Contact | Down to Earth | Aftershocks
Homeward Bound
Southern Victory
or
Timeline-191		 How Few Remain
Great War Trilogy American Front | Walk in Hell | Breakthroughs
American Empire Trilogy Blood and Iron | The Center Cannot Hold | The Victorious Opposition
Settling Accounts Tetralogy Return Engagement | Drive to the East | The Grapple | In at the Death
Darkness Into the Darkness | Darkness Descending | Through the Darkness | Rulers of the Darkness | Jaws of the Darkness | Out of the Darkness
War Between the Provinces Sentry Peak | Marching Through Peachtree | Advance and Retreat
Hellenic Traders Over the Wine Dark Sea | The Gryphon's Skull | The Sacred Land | Owls to Athens
Crosstime Traffic Gunpowder Empire | Curious Notions | In High Places | The Disunited States of America | The Gladiator | The Valley-Westside War
Pacific War Series Days of Infamy | End of the Beginning
Scepter of Mercy The Chernagor Pirates | The Bastard King | The Scepter's Return
Other, non-series books
Agent of Byzantium | A Different Flesh | Noninterference | Kaleidoscope | A World Of Difference | Earthgrip | The Guns of the South | The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump | Departures | Down in the Bottomlands | The Two Georges | Thessalonica | Between the Rivers | Justinian | Household Gods | Counting Up, Counting Down | Ruled Britannia | In the Presence of Mine Enemies | Conan of Venarium | Every Inch a King | Fort Pillow | Beyond the Gap | Opening Atlantis | The Battle of Teutoberg Forest