Erin Go Boom:

The Making Of It (Almost)Happened Here

When I first started contributing to Changing the Times back in 2005, I opted to go with an idea that surprisingly hasn’t gotten as much exploration in AH as you might think-- the notion of the Germans invading Ireland in 1940. Why so few AH writers have tried to tackle this premise is a mystery for greater minds than mine to solve, but you can count on your hands the number of AH works dealing with the theme of a Nazi invasion of Ireland and still have at least two or three fingers left over. Therefore, I thought that for my debut as a CTT contributor I should try to shrink the void a little.

That was just one of my motivations in producing It (Almost) Happened Here. Another was to illustrate the historical truth that, like it or not, Ireland’s destiny is tied to Britain’s and vice versa. A third was that I wanted to see how well I could do in creating a scenario for the United States entering World War II before December of 1941. To paraphrase a line from one of the early episodes of IAHH, having the Wehrmacht attack a neutral country to which millions of American citizens trace their ancestry is a pretty effective way of getting the US into the war in 1940.

I was also looking for a change of pace from the usual "Sealion succeeds/Sealion is tried and fails" routine. Hey, I like a good Nazi landing-in-Britain scenario as much as the next guy, but that particular concept is in danger of becoming the Lindsay Lohan of alternate timelines: absurdly if not dangerously overexposed. I mean, you’d almost think there was some kind of federal law¹ requiring AH writers to have an idea for a timeline about Sealion. If I were to round up ten AH buffs, hand them a pen², and tell them to write out at least 500 words about a Sealion scenario, odds are at least eight of them would have one ready within fifteen minutes or less and the other two would be putting the finishing touches on one.

Last but not least, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the nuts & bolts of how a German campaign in Ireland or an Allied counteroffensive against same might have been executed. In geographic terms, the terrain of Ireland is well-suited to the kind of mechanized combat the opposing armies might have waged in my ATL, and the Germans undoubtedly would have applied a great deal of what they learned from their French and Polish campaigns to Case Purple.³ Conversely by the same token, the Allied armies would have sought to learn from their mistakes in the French campaign when mapping out their plans to intervene against a German invasion of southern Ireland in late 1940; last but not least, the Irish would have undoubtedly taken some of the fighting techniques they developed in their 1918-21 war for independence from Britain and used them to throw a wrench into Hitler’s plans for southern Ireland.

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The original concept for IAHH first came to me in January of 2005 when I was reading a chapter of Third Reich Victorious which focused on the topic of-- you guessed it --a successful execution of Operation Sealion. That chapter, and an excerpt from the late Kenneth Macksey’s The Hitler Options, inspired me to ponder what might have happened if Hitler had disregarded Admiral Erich Raeder’s warnings not to attack Ireland in 1940. In OTL, Raeder successfully argued to Hitler that an assault on southern Ireland would be a dicey proposition at best and a recipe for disaster at worst. But suppose, I asked myself, the Führer had overruled Admiral Raeder’s objections and ordered the invasion to go forward anyhow?

That question was the springboard for my first draft of the opening chapter of IAHH; when I sent it off to David Atwell, he was quick to point out a number of potential flaws in the storyline I had mapped out at that time. After further research at Wikipedia and a number of websites devoted to the Second World War, I realized his instincts were right and revised the first chapter accordingly. As I was working on subsequent episodes of the series, I turned to books like Martin Marix Evans’ Invasion! as a guideline for my accounts of German attacks and Allied counteroffensives during Case Purple.

Another influence on my narrative was Hector C. Bywater’s classic naval warfare novel The Great Pacific War. Bywater described in great detail how the United States and Japan deployed their respective naval forces in his hypothetical conflict; I tried to incorporate the same level of detail into my accounts of German attacks in southern Ireland and the Allied counterassaults.

Last but least I took a few cues from-- believe it or not --U2’s hit "Sunday Bloody Sunday". The visceral imagery of Bono’s lyrics was a considerable inspiration for my narrative; although "Sunday" was actually written in response to the 1972 Derry massacre, I found that the song was a perfect metaphor for the turbulent events that unfold during the IAHH timeline. Those lyrics have also, incidentally, helped to shape certain elements of the back story for my follow-up series, Call To Arms.

Originally I had intended to make IAHH a one-shot article, but by the time I got to the third or fourth draft of what would turn out to be the first chapter of a ten-part series it was crystal clear that I wasn’t going to be able to squeeze everything I wanted to do with my Ireland invasion scenario into a single manuscript.⁴ So I chose instead to make IAHH a multi-episode timeline...which ultimately turned out to be the right call, because it allowed more room for speculating on the ripple effects a German invasion of Ireland might have had on the rest of the war. One of my favorite moments of doing the series, in fact, came when I started laying out the exploits of the fictional Waffen SS detachment Einsatzgruppen O’Duffy on the Eastern Front.

By the time I got to Part 8 in the series, I was pretty sure that I wanted to do a follow-up article exploring the postwar consequences of the German invasion but I didn’t know which way I wanted to go. It was right about this point I happened to hear "Sunday Bloody Sunday" on a friend’s car radio one afternoon-- and the seeds were planted for what later became Call To Arms, my story of postwar Ulster in the IAHH timeline.

Where I’m going to go with my alternate history of Ireland once the Call To Arms series is finished I haven’t figured out yet, but when I do it will definitely build on what’s happened before in that series and in IAHH. It’s even possible I might recapitulate some of the events I previously chronicled in IAHH and CTA. In any case, I’ll do everything I can to make a third IAHH-related story worth reading, and to those of you who’ve already read It(Almost) Happened Here or Call To Arms, a million thanks.

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Finally, before I ring down the curtain on this article, I’d like to answer the obvious question of how I came up with the title for IAHH. It’s a pun on the 1966 Kevin Brownlow-Andrew Mollo World War II AH movie saga "It Happened Here". When I was coming up with the original story concept for the IAHH series, one of the tools I used to map out the main storyline was a game in which I imagined the kind of movie Brownlow and Mollo might have produced if it had been Ireland rather than Great Britain that was the target for Hitler’s invasion plans. Once I had the title figured out, the rest of the pieces for the basic premise of IAHH just fell into place. If only the specifics for the story had been that easy...

All kidding aside, I’ve enjoyed writing the IAHH and CTA series and look forward to doing further explorations of the IAHH timeline. For that matter, I’d like to see some of my fellow AH writers putting their own spin on the concept of a Nazi invasion of Ireland.