What If? (essays)

First edition

What If?, subtitled The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, is a collection of twenty essays and thirteen sidebars dealing with counterfactual history. It was published by G.P. Putnam's Sons in 1999, ISBN 0-399-14576-1, and this book as well as its two sequels, What If? 2 and What Ifs? of American History, were edited by Robert Cowley. It was later combined with What If? 2 to form The Collected What If?.

Cowley decided to create the book after several "What if?" articles were published in the Military History Quarterly, which he edits, and received a lot of attention.^[1]

Essays

• "Infectious Alternatives" by William H. McNeill
  • What if a plague had not forced the Assyrians to withdraw from their siege of Jerusalem in 701 BC?
• "No Glory That Was Greece" by Victor Davis Hanson
  • What if the Persians had won the Battle of Salamis?
• "Conquest Denied" by Josiah Ober
  • What if Alexander the Great had died at the Battle of the Granicus River?
• "Furor Teutonicus: The Teutoburg Forest, A.D. 9" by Lewis H. Lapham
  • What if Varus had defeated Arminius at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest?
• "The Dark Ages Made Lighter" by Barry S. Strauss
  • What if the battles of Adrianople in 378 and Poitiers in 732 had been won by the Romans and the Muslims, respectively?
• "The Death That Saved Europe" by Cecelia Holland
  • What if Ogadai Khan had not died in 1241 on the eve of the Mongol siege of Vienna?
• "If Only It Had Not Been Such a Wet Summer" by Theodore K. Rabb
  • What if Suleiman the Magnificent had begun his 1529 siege of Vienna earlier in the year?
• "The Immolation of Hernán Cortés" by Ross Hassig
  • What if Cortés had been killed or his expedition into Aztec-dominated Mexico had failed? (The essay discusses La Noche Triste, the near-destruction of Cortés' force in 1520, as a key possibility of a point of divergence.)
• "The Repulse of the English Fireships" by Geoffrey Parker
  • What if the Spanish Armada had successfully landed in England?
• "Unlikely Victory" by Thomas Fleming
  • What if the Americans lost the Revolutionary War? (Thirteen ways are presented here.)
• "What the Fog Wrought" by David McCullough
  • What if George Washington and his forces had not escaped after losing the Battle of Long Island?
• "Ruler of the World" by Alistair Horne
  • What if Napoleon Bonaparte had chosen to do several things differently?
• "If the Lost Order Hadn't Been Lost" by James M. McPherson
  • What if Robert E. Lee had been able to march through Pennsylvania and Maryland without fighting the Battle of Antietam?
• "A Confederate Cannae and Other Scenarios" by Stephen W. Sears
  • What if the Civil War had not lasted as long as it did? (Five ways are presented here.)
• "The What Ifs of 1914" by Robert Cowley
  • What if Great Britain had remained neutral in World War I? (This and four other possibilities are presented here.)
• "How Hitler Could Have Won The War" by John Keegan
  • What if the Wehrmacht had turned toward the Middle East instead of the Soviet Union?
• "Our Midway Disaster" by Theodore F. Cook, Jr.
  • What if the Japanese had won the Battle of Midway?
• "D Day Fails" by Stephen E. Ambrose
  • What if the Allied invasion of Europe had failed in June 1944?
• "Funeral in Berlin" by David Clay Large
  • What if American and not Soviet forces had taken Berlin in 1945?
• "China Without Tears" by Arthur Waldron
  • What if the Chinese Civil War had ended with Chiang Kai-shek not marching to retake Manchuria from Mao Zedong and the Communists?

Reviews

• "Probably the most interesting nonfiction historical fiction was What If?: The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been (Putnam, 1999). Its editor, Robert Cowley, persuaded two dozen historians to write essays on how a slight turn of fate at a decisive moment could have changed the very annals of time." --New York Times^[2]
• "The essays collected in "What If?" are sober extrapolations from historical fact. Even so, they're a lot of fun. They remind us of the slender threads on which our past hangs. One small break -- at Poitiers or on Long Island, at Gettysburg or in Berlin -- might have unraveled the entire tapestry of modern history." --CNN^[3]
• "Those and other provocative "counterfactuals" are the topic of the intriguing "What if?", a compilation of essays by 34 distinguished historians... Each essay testifies to the fact that history hangs by a thread." --Houston Chronicle^[4]

References

1. ↑ "What If?". NPR. March 9, 1998. Retrieved 23 June 2012. 
2. ↑ Arnold, Martin (December 21, 2000). "Making Books: The 'What Ifs' That Fascinate". New York Times. Retrieved 23 June 2012. 
3. ↑ Meagher, L. D. (February 7, 2000). "Book asks what might have been". CNN.com. Retrieved 23 June 2012. 
4. ↑ Cearnal, Lee (November 7, 1999). "'Counterfactuals' are topic of 'What if?'". Houston Chronicle. Retrieved 23 June 2012. 

See also

• What If? 2
• What Ifs? of American History