Second Thoughts

Alternate Historian says, to ensure we fill the page and deliver something for everyone, we're taking a slightly different publishing route for 2008. By year-end, six stories a day will have been pre-written and we're already 35% there. This will include no more than 60% re-use from the previous years, selecting the best of reverse events and truncated story formats (2 or 3 parts at most) leaving out the longer stories and threads. Yes we've done Chappaquiddick slightly different .. again!

As we roll in to the new year, we're going to add up to 4 extra stories per day comprising "spontaneous" and contemporary items (from recent news feeds) plus .. reader's items.

Thats where we need your help to make 2008 a multi-author magazine with greater variety. Please email your stories to the Alternate Historian and do include the post date please. The key point is you can fire the idea over, and let us draft up the story, we're not insisting on final copy.

"The advocates of nuclear armament seem to believe that, if they could achieve their aim, mutually assured destruction would prevent future conflict. They would do well to ponder the fate of Dresden, where 135,000 people died as the result of an air attack with conventional weapons. On the night of March 9th, an air attack on Tokyo by American heavy bombers, using incendiary and high explosive bombs, caused the death of 83,793. 70,000 civilians were killed by the fire-bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, followed on August 9 by a similiar massacre a Nagasaki.

	We can only recoil in horror at estimations of the casaulties from the use of the doomsday weapons of the Manhattan Project. ~ General Ira C.Eaker, Lt General, USAF

Those who approved the bombings were neither wicked nor cruel, though it may well be that they were too remote from the harsh realities of war to understand fully the appalling power of air bombardment in the spring of 1945." As early as 1944, USAF leadership realised that atomic weapons would place military leadership in the hands of an Imperial Presidency. Continued use of conventional bombing was advocated, after all, what more could atomic weapons achieve in already defeated Japan?

In 1945, after demobilization, former high school teacher Edgar Derby was reunited with his family in Indianapolis. His son returned from the Pacific Theatre shortly afterwards. Derby was forty-four years old - he had pulled political wires into the army at his age. He had confidently expected to be promoted to Captain, in view of his age and experience. Instead, he had witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden. And the trial and execution of his friend, Kurt Vonnegut, for stealing a teapot from the ruins. That act of high irony would form the conclusion to his semi-biographical works Slaughterhouse-Five. SH5 was the reserviced abbatoir where Derby and Vonnegut were imprisoned in January 1945, shortly before the fire-bombing. And so it goes.

Ford Torino Cobra	In 1962, in his office in Detroit, Michigan President of the Ford Motor Company Robert Strange McNamara opened the design for the new Ford Torino Cobra, set to launch in the North American market in '68. Looking up, and signaling his approval, McNamara was startled to see the office had changed completely. Now sitting in the Oval Office, he had answered yes to the fiery looking Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force Curtis LeMay, but, oh dear God - What had been the question?.

In 1962, a U2 surveillance flight over San Cristobal in Pinar del Río Province, Western Cuba took photos of Manfred von Richthofen and other blood descendants capable of shape-shifting into airplane-sized bats that engaged in aerial combat. von Richthofen, , alias the Red Baron, was a flying ace of the German Luftstreitkräfte who had won his first aerial combat near Cambrai, France in 1916. His deployment in Cuba represented the start of an apocalyptic confrontation during the Cold War between Graf Von Dracula's Imperial Germany and the United States. The true story of how close the two aggressors came to war was masterfully described by Janet Title and Kim Newman in 1995 in the Bloody Red Baron.	Red Baron

Bush	In 1962, CIA Agent George HW conceived of the greatest conspiracy of the twentieth century. At this time shortly after the Bay of Pigs Fiasco, US President John F Kennedy was threatening to break-up the agency into a thousand pieces. Via George de Mohrenschildt Bush had discovered that former US marine Lee Harvey Oswald had returned from the Soviet Union to Dallas. Bush correctly suspected that Oswald had been substituted for a KGB agent. What if, mused Bush, he could arrange a CIA hit on the President, concealed as a KGB plot?

In 2007, Rat returns to his computer monitor in College Station. He has a plan for to end the war through his limitless control over the Mesh. However, he has no idea if it will work, if indeed he can put it in to action at all.	Robbie Taylor

Love and Hatred

Bombing	In 1945, BBC News reported: Thousands of bombs destroy Dresden: 'British and US bombers have dropped hundreds of thousands of explosives on the German city of Dresden. The city is reported to be a vital command centre for the German defence against Soviet forces approaching from the east. Last night, 800 RAF Bomber Command planes let loose 650,000 incendiaries and 8,000lb of high explosives and hundreds of 4,000lb bombs in two waves of attack. They faced very little anti-aircraft fire. As soon as one part of the city was alight, the bombers went for another until the whole of Dresden was ablaze.'
Dresden

Amongst the dead was a twenty-two year old American GI, Kurt Vonnegut. A man of German descent, he had been transferred to Slaughterhouse-Five, a nearby prisoner of war camp. Vonnegut and his colleagues had been hiding below ground, but were killed when the ceiling collapsed from the shock waves of the bombing. And so it goes.

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In 1968, astronomer Paul Oswald Ahnert deciphered an extraterrestrial broadcast indicating that our quadrant of the Galaxy was under quarantine from a lethal space leprosy. At first his warnings were ignored, however reconsideration was duly given when returning Lunar Module Pilot Colonel Buzz Eugene Aldrin lifted his visor at the splashdown point, east of Wake Island on July 24 1969.

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In 1779, during his third exploratory voyage in the Pacific Captain James Cook narrowly escaped death at the hand of natives of the Sandwich Islands. He had mistakenly returned to Hawaii in the season dedicated to Ku, god of war, inadvertently upset the equilibrium and fostered an atmosphere of resentment and aggression from the local population.

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In 1956, Malcolm Little received parole and was released from Massachusetts State Prison in Charlestown. A dangerous criminal, Little had avoided the draft by telling the examining officer that he could not wait to organize with other black soldiers so he could 'kill some crackers.' Incarcerated for a decade, there was a lot of catch-up to be done.

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In 1956, at the XX Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Moscow, Premier Nikita Khruschev revealed than Lenin was a shape-shifting Vampire. A number of strokes in the 1920s forced the undead nosferatu to possess the body of Comrade Stalin to permit him to continue his misrule. He had even maintained his corpse in a Kremlin mausoleum just in case a Dracula style exit was necessary.

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In 269, Emperor Claudius II outlawed marriage for young men, in order to make them a better pool to draft soldiers from. The Christian cleric Valentius was known for his defiance of Rome, and many young couples came to him in order to wed. Valentius performed the ceremonies gladly until the local centurion told him that he would be executed after the next one. Valentius relented, but the decree was rescinded in 271 after Claudius' death, anyway, so nothing ever really came of it.

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In, 47421 BCE, Telka the Speaker is wooed by and mated with the father of her first children, the man she names Komar. She learns to count the days in a year by the anniversary of this day each year that she was with him. His love for her led him to throw himself in front of a boar that was charging her; although he saved her and killed the boar, he died from injuries he received. Telka made sure that each of her descendants celebrated this day out of her love for him.

In 498, Pope Gelasius names this day the Feast of Saint Valentine. In his honor, prisoners across the land were given a meal of ox-hearts and red wine, to signify the blood that the saint had shed while a prisoner of the pagan Romans. The traditional feast of hearts and wine continues to this day across Christendom, although the practice has spread from the jailhouse to all those who might need a prayer for more freedom.

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In 2021, a rare form of cosmic radiation enters Earth's atmosphere, concentrated in and around Chicago. 99.9% of the city only feels a slight tingling, but one man, Eddie Valens, finds his reflexes and running speed amplified tenfold - plus, he is now able to evoke feelings of love and peace in nearly anyone with but a word. Putting these two together, and donning a pink costume, Eddie takes the name Saint Valentine and proceeds to fight crime in Chicago for nearly a decade as one of the only real superheroes in the 21st century.

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On February 14, 2003, a group of high ranking Iraqi generals, fearing the disastrous effects of U:S. invasion stage a coup. They know that Sadam as a sentimental guy would be distracted at big party for his family. The succeed in killing their President and his sons. The new junta is composed of Sunni Baathists, but they extend the hand of friendship to the world community and invite weapons inspectors. What would the last half of a decade have brought to Iraq ?

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In 1965, the Soviet States of America bans the unofficial Valentines Day holiday. Comrade Representative O'Hare of Chicago, in her statement calling for the ban, said, 'No other holiday so cheapens the idea of romantic love, or saps the will to fight of our comrades in the street, as this so-called Valentines Day.'

In 1167 AUC, the Lupercalia Festival is finally made a separate holiday from the festival celebrating the founding of Rome. This festival of ritual matchmaking, popular for hundreds of years, was certainly the highlight of the 2-day celebration at the ides of February, and most Romans felt that it deserved separation from the more staid founding ceremony.

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Alexander	In 1974, Soviet authorities executed Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Two days before, Mr Solzhenitsyn was arrested in his wife's Moscow flat and taken away for questioning by the Soviet secret police, the KGB. His charge, under Article 64 of the Russian Federation Criminal Code, was punishable with death by firing squad or a minimum of ten years in prison along with confiscation of property.
Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn had been under investigation for six weeks after his novel Gulag Archipelago depicting life in the labour camps was published in the West. He had already spent a total of ten years in prison under Stalin for his dissident writings.

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