What if the Russians had invaded Daily Mail Island in 1979?

CiH

Live from the Daily Wail online..


What if the Russians HAD invaded us?

Declassified papers, released this week, show that 30 years ago, at the height of the Cold War, Britain's defence system was so woefully inadequate that, had Russia launched an assault, we would have been incapable of protecting ourselves. As Prime Minister Jim Callaghan remarked at the time: 'Heaven help us if there is a war.' If Russia had attacked us, here is how one leading historian imagines events might have unfolded.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1104459/What-Russians-HAD-invaded-us.html

Is this the worst attempt at an Alt history or what? What makes it worse is that the author is supposed to be some sort of serious published historian?! I hope he was writing this ironically, with a little side-bet that the majority of Daily Wail readers would take it straight and not pick up on the gentle piss-taking.

Feel free to pick off the obvious areas where this does not work, and any subtle nuances as well. Happy new year and have fun!
 

stodge

Laughable..

I've read it and it's laughable. It's written from a particular right-wing bias, eulogises Margaret Thatcher and demonises Arthur Scargill so it plays well with the perceived politics of the Mail's readership.

In this ASB world, NATO doesn't exist and neither does the British independent nuclear deterrent. For some reason, the USSR has decided to conquer Britain in isolation and not attack West Germany or Norway.

Even more incredibly, the USSR has survived thirty years on completely unchanged and so have the Soviet Republics of Britain - no perestroika in this ASB reality.

I look forward to someone on here constructing a timeline to fit all this.
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
Yes, that whole NATO thing does get in the way doesn't it?

The independent British nuclear deterrent is another minor issue.
 

Fellatio Nelson

I've seen this before, somewhere. I'm sure these have been PD for at least 2 years +.


Meh, by 1979 the UK was virtually bankrupt and the USA licking it's wounds post-Vietnam and in the economic mire too...

... but the Sovs weren't too hot and we both still had plenty a nukes to throw at them.

In fact it'd have been more dodgy for the Soviets to have attacked then, provided, of course, MAD worked and they didn't actually attack. Sort of. (Which does make sense, in a paradoxical sort of way.)
 

CiH

I have posted some comments on the article itself. They are pre-moderated, so let's see if anything makes it onto the page. :p
 

Wozza

Arthur Scargill is, actually, a Stalinist who believes the USSR represented the route to utopia.
Clearly Roberts is quite spectacularly taking the piss.
 

Fellatio Nelson

Wozza said:
Arthur Scargill is, actually, a Stalinist who believes the USSR represented the route to utopia.
Clearly Roberts is quite spectacularly taking the piss.
Click to expand...

Agreed. I just read the article - seen that report before, somewhere, it's certainly not new - and he was probably on his second bottle of red, thinking of Maggie's pants.
 

Leistungsfähiger Amerikan

Reminds me of Red Dawn, the British version! Anyway, it says;
"The massive aerial attack by MiGs from Russia's 12 aircraft carriers off the Norfolk and Suffolk coasts, coupled with the landing of 20 parachute brigades on key British aerodromes and a naval armada unloading 30 tank divisions into East Anglia, meant the JIC's stark assessment was put to the test only two months after it was made"

Did the USSR have the naval capacity to attack GB? Assuming they had the navy, that still means we see them coming from a good while away(Baltic/Arctic Oceans) so there should be time to prepare. And besides, being in an economic slump doesn't mean that a country can be overrun easiliy.
 

Wozza

037771 said:
According to a few critics he's not even a great historian.....in one of his books, a continuation of Churchill's sublime 'A History of the English Speaking People's', i remember reading in Culture that he had written of Kitchener as PM and Namibia being British at the turn of the 20th Century instead of German....i hope he corrected all that....:( Even his AH (in one book i have....i think he edited it, has a Nazi astonaut on the cover) is singularly unimaginative, excluding the above. Lev Harveich Oswalt assassinating Lenin? Oh for gods sake, think up a better name....better not write anymore, this is making me irate...
Click to expand...

Like a lot of amateur historians his work has gone progressively downhill over the years.
 

Astrodragon

Leistungsfähiger Amerikan said:
Reminds me of Red Dawn, the British version! Anyway, it says;
"The massive aerial attack by MiGs from Russia's 12 aircraft carriers off the Norfolk and Suffolk coasts, coupled with the landing of 20 parachute brigades on key British aerodromes and a naval armada unloading 30 tank divisions into East Anglia, meant the JIC's stark assessment was put to the test only two months after it was made"

Did the USSR have the naval capacity to attack GB? Assuming they had the navy, that still means we see them coming from a good while away(Baltic/Arctic Oceans) so there should be time to prepare. And besides, being in an economic slump doesn't mean that a country can be overrun easiliy.
Click to expand...

Well, lets see...from memory, the Russians had 2 hybrid carriers....:confused:
Airlift to drop 60,000 airborne troops....er, no.:confused:
30 tank divisons is around 6 times the D-Day landings..starting from Murmansk...:eek::eek::eek:

Actually, I can see the RN sub commanders getting down and thanking lenin for the early Xmas presents...since at that time subs went to sea with war loads, and the RN sub commanders were probably the best in the world, and the subs werent exactly bad either.
And of course those US carrier groups hanging around the NA would be too busy smoking pot to notice the Russians sailing past...
 

Wolf

Wow that piece was horrible in many ways. And what about Britain's nukes? What about NATO and its nukes?
 

Sol Invictus

Nice to see some of my own thoughts echoed here, sure I have no problem believing that Britains military stockpiles were stupidly... its been that way since 1850. But we are/were protected by a nuclear umbrella!
 
Magniac

Magniac

Christopher Hitchens' once said of David Irving, "He's not only a fascist historian, but a great historian of fascism." (Dunno whether pisspot ever recanted those words.)

Anyway, Roberts' might have totally lost his mind ("The massive aerial attack by MiGs from Russia's 12 aircraft carriers") but at least Eminent Churchillians is a useful reminder that there was an anti-Winston tendency in the Rightwing of the Conservative Party, even after the early war years, and that it lasted throughout the era of British decline and eventually found a home in the Thatcher revolution.*

Andrew Roberts is not only a reactionary author, but he's also a great chronicler of reaction in the UK these last few generations. (Also, his book on Halifax is meant to be pretty good.)


*No, I'm not saying all Thatcherites are barking mad
 

Berra

But they sneak their armoured divisions on civilian ships. That's how the Russikes did it in the 80's Swedish paranoia.
 

Jukra

Berra said:
But they sneak their armoured divisions on civilian ships. That's how the Russikes did it in the 80's Swedish paranoia.
Click to expand...

Ah, the wonderful book "Operation Garbo" by pseudonym Harry Winter... It's Clancyesque in sense like "Debt of Honor". At first the bad guys succeed in everything but the next moment they're more like clay pigeons. :)
 

Eldorado Dingbatti

The Daily Mail has done a few "alternate history TLs" I seem to remember. There was one a couple of years ago for the Trafalgar anniversary asking what if Britain lost and basically it turned out that Napoleon conquered all of Europe and got halfway across America, and another one the other year when those papers came out saying that the UK and France were going to merge during the 1950s (Very logical ;)). In it, neither country argued or put up any resistance to the merger and everyone got along perfectly happily. I think the British royal family became France's...
God I love the Mail...
 

Wolf

I doubt the US would have let the UK be conquered. And the USAF did have bases in the UK and would have give the Sovs a Helluva a time. We also had a Navy that would have been able sink a lot of Sov shipping. And this forgets about Norway, who monitored the Barents Sea and Denmark which monitored the Baltic. I don't see how the Sovs could launch a surprise attack on the UK on West Germany yes, on Greece or Turkey, yes, on Norway or even Denmark yes. But the UK was just too away to take it by surprise.
 
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