About the Book
What if V-E Day didn’t end World War II in Europe? What if, instead,
the Allies had to face a potent, even fanatical, postwar Nazi
resistance? Such a movement, based in the fabled Alpine Redoubt, was in
fact a real threat, ultimately neutralized by Germany’s flagging
resources and squabbling officials. But had SS Obergruppenführer
Reinhard Heydrich, the notorious Man with the Iron Heart, not been
assassinated in 1942, fate might have taken a different turn. We might
likely have seen a German guerrilla war launched against the
conquerors, presaging by more than half a century the protracted
conflict with an unrelenting enemy that now engulfs the United States
and its allies in Iraq. How might today’s clash of troops versus
terrorists have played out in 1945?
In this imagined world, Nazi
forces resort to unconventional warfare, using the quick and dirty
tactics of terrorism – booby traps, time bombs, mortar and rocket strikes
in the night, assassinations, even kamikaze-style suicide attacks – to
overturn what seemed to be a decisive Allied victory. In November 1945,
a truck bomb blows up the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, where
high-ranking Nazi officials are about to stand trial for war crimes.
None of the accused are there when the bomb goes off, but their judges,
all of them present and accounted for, are annihilated. Worse acts of
terrorism follow all over Europe.
Suddenly the Allies – especially
the United States – must battle an invisible enemy and sacrifice
countless lives in a long, seemingly pointless, unwinnable conflict. On
the home front, patriotism corrodes, political fortunes are made and
lost in the face of an antiwar backlash, and a once-proud country
wonders how the righteous fight for freedom overseas has collapsed into
a hopeless quagmire. At once a novel of thrilling military suspense,
intriguing alternate history, and profound insight into contemporary
affairs, The Man with the Iron Heart is a tour de force by a
storyteller of exceptional imaginative power.
