Settling Accounts: The Grapple

The Grapple

Author	Harry Turtledove
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Alternate History
Publisher	Settling Accounts series
Publication date	July 2006
Media type	Print (Paperback & Hardback)
ISBN	ISBN 0-345-45725-0
Preceded by	Drive to the East'
Followed by	In at the Death (2007)'

Settling Accounts: The Grapple by Harry Turtledove is the third book in the Settling Accounts tetralogy, an alternate history setting of World War II in North America. It is part of the Timeline-191 series, which supposes that the Confederate States of America won the American Civil War.

The Grapple is the third book in the tetralogy, following 2005's Settling Accounts: Drive to the East and 2004's Settling Accounts: Return Engagement, and preceding the upcoming Settling Accounts: In at the Death, planned for release in 2007. It was released in the United States on July 25, 2006. The book was released in the United Kingdom on October 5, 2006.

Plot summary

Template:Spoiler The main plot of the book covers U.S. General Irving Morrell's campaign to drive Confederate forces out of Pennsylvania and Ohio, and then push them through Kentucky, Tennessee, and ultimately Georgia. The geography and strategy is clearly modeled on the campaigns of the actual American Civil War, giving Turtledove the chance to refight the Battle of Chattanooga with Second World War weapons — especially, having the Union forces land paratroopers on top of Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain, rather than fight their way to the top in hard-fought battles, as in our history's version of the battle.

Having gained Chattanooga — the "Gateway to the Lower South" in 1943 as in 1863 — Morell obviously seems bent on enacting the Atlanta Campaign and Sherman's March to the Sea eighty years later than in our history, using armour instead of cavalry and cutting the Confederate territory in two. General Patton, in this history a main Confederate commander, does far less well on the defence than he did in the attack on Ohio two years before, his pugnacious instincts making him squander irreplaceable resources on futile attempts at counter-attack.

A major subplot is the continued operation of Camp Determination in Texas, where blacks are being murdered in gas chambers by the hundreds of thousands, and U.S. General Abner Dowling's efforts to shut it down. The distance which his forces need to cross is trivial in comparison with that crossed in Morell's lightning campaign, but he has only marginal forces at his disposal, with most resources devoted to the main thrust aimed at breaking the Confederates. Dowling does send his air support to bomb the railways on which horribly crowded cattle cars full of blacks are brought in (an act which the United States failed to take in the actual Nazi extermination camps). However, the advance takes too long; the sound of distant U.S. artillery had aroused some hope among the condemned black inmates, but when the U.S. forces finally arrive they find nothing but enormous mass graves with not a single survivor, and with the murder operation transferred to an "impoved camp" in east Texas. Among the innumerable victims was Scipio, the viewpoint character whose life was followed in the series from its very inception.

Other aspects of the "Black Holocaust" is the uprising of the blacks in Richmond, the Confederate capital — seeking not to save their lives but to die with weapons in hand and exact a price from their murderers, like the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on which this episode seems to be modeled. Also covered extensively is the continuing struggle of black guerrilla bands in the Georgia countryside, the analogue of Jewish partisans in the East European forests.

Another subplot is the race between American and Confederate physicists to build a "uranium (i.e., atomic) bomb." The Confederates desperately try to recover from Featherston's strategic blunder of initially not taking the Bomb seriously and having held up research for over a year; they launch a daring air raid on the U.S. nuclear project in the state of Washington, to which the Americans reply in kind by bombing Washington University at Lexington, the center of Confederate nuclear research.

Meanwhile, Imperial Germany seems ahead of both the North American powers; since in this history there is no Nazi persecution of Jews and Hitler remained an obscure army NCO, Einstein and the other Jewish nuclear scientists remained in Germany and actively take part in its bomb research. Since Germany is the United States' ally, this is no short-term threat; but the Germans are a cold and distant ally, like the Soviet Union in our history's World War II, and this aspect of the book seems to open the possibility of a later Cold War between the nuclear-armed United States and Germany, once they dispose of their present respective foes.

Flora Hamburger Blackford is involved in both the black genocide and the nuclear development, and her position in the government is sensitive enough that a man named Dick (possibly a cameo by Richard Nixon) is brought in to sweep her office for hidden microphones.

Other fronts are addressed during the course of the novel.

In Europe, we receive hints that German and Austrian forces are gradually pushing the French, British and Russian forces back. Irish and Serbian uprisings continue to operate, and Ukraine continues as a battleground for both sides. The Russians are unable to concentrate on their Alaskan possessions, but apparently the Klondike gold strike did not occur, and so the area is considered just "more Siberia."

In Virginia, ground fighting seems largely quiet, but both sides are able to launch air strikes against the other, although the Confederates are not able to launch attacks quite as often by the end of the book. In contrast to the timeline's Great War, the Roanoke, Virginia area seems ignored by both sides: in fact, the Confederate nuclear program operates covertly at Washington University in Lexington, Virginia, for two years before being attacked (despite being very close to the United States–Confederate States border.)

The Mormon rebellion in Utah is suppressed (for the third time) and the U.S. characters debate the morality of various ways of dealing with the problem again. It seems a plan of exiling the Mormons from Utah and deporting them to one of the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) are drawn up.

Meanwhile, the Canadian rebellion is fully active, prompting units which had been active in the Utah fighting to be transferred to Canada. The troops from the U.S.-backed Republic of Quebec are not numerous/motivated enough to hold off the Canadian guerrillas, and viewpoint character Armstrong Grimes is sent from Utah to Canada (specifically Rosenfeld, Manitoba.) He is wounded and sent to the fighting in Georgia after recovering. Fighting in Sequoyah (Oklahoma) appears to be back-and-forth, with both sides sabotaging the oil wells there. A general advance seems to be made in Arkansas, and U.S. forces are pressing the offensive in Sonora and Chihuahua.

During the course of the novel, two minority characters-the black butler/waiter/green rebel Scipio/Xerxes and Freedom Party Guard Hipolito Rodriguez are both killed, Scipio at Camp Determination by poison gas, and Rodriguez at Camp Determination by his own gun upon realization of what he was participating in. Coincidentally, Scipio is actually responsible for Rodriguez's demise, because his death forced Hipolito to lie to the deceased Negro's family until he reaches his breaking point. Their sons replace both of them as viewpoint characters: Scipio's son Cassius (who chose to stay home instead of go to church the day the rest of his family was rounded up) and Hipolito's son Jorge (who is fighting with the Confederates in Georgia by the end of the novel.)

Allegiances at the top of the Confederate government are beginning to show strain. There is a pronounced tension between Brig. Gen. Clarence Potter and President Jake Featherston, Camp Determination administrator Jefferson Pinkard and Confederate Attorney General Ferdinand Koenig, and between Koenig and Featherston. The similarities between Featherston and Adolf Hitler really start to come out in this book, with the maniacal drive to conquer his hated enemy while completing his task of racial purification at all costs. Featherston engages in shouting matches with his commanding officers over their tactics, and is at the point where he would sell what little is left of his blackened soul to the devil to make sure he gets done what he wants done. We also see Featherston's growing reliance on "wonder weapons" to win the war, but no indication that he is beginning to develop an addiction to drugs.

Most ominously, despite the increasingly desperate military situation, Featherston continues to consider the diversion of considerable resources to the extermination program as justified and necessary, since "The War Against the Negroes" is a most important goal which must be "fought" and "won" by total extermination and making the Confederate territory "Negro-free" — all of which mirrors Hitler's attitude to killing the Jews in the equivalent period.

In the South, Negro guerrillas fight a war of attrition against the Confederate soldiers, while Canadian guerrillas, using techniques copied by the Negroes, fight a similar war against U.S. occupying forces. One viewpoint character, Major Jonathan Moss, had escaped from the Andersonville prisoner-of-war camp and along with Nick Cantarella, a fellow escapee, attached themselves to a Negro guerrilla band led by a Great War veteran. Scipio's son Cassius finds another band to fight with, and shows aptitude for fighting guerrilla warfare. Confederate propaganda quickly backfires, as Moss and Cantarella read a newspaper article about Canadian guerrillas mounting a machine gun on a pickup truck and get their band (and others) to begin using it. The Confederates reply by conscripting more under and over-age men into policing duty and convincing the Empire of Mexico to send troops to help.

Famous barrel-driver non-com Michael Pound finally gets a long-deserved but even longer un-wanted promotion to officer's ranks, along with a command of a new type of barrel similar to the one he designed with then-Colonel Morrell in Kansas in the downtime between the Great War and the "Greater War," and actually gets assigned to participate in attack alongside his former commander.

At sea, the Japanese threat to the Sandwich Islands is ended with a naval victory at Midway, and American forces retake Midway Island. Neither side has any real desire to pursue the war further, and there are strong hints that the Japanese might attack British possessions in Malaya and India. This is good news to the Americans, at least on the short term — since two of its foes, Japan and Britain, are set to fight each other. On the longer term, however, the increased power of Japan might constitute a greater threat later on — one more glimpse of the possible tensions and conflicts in the post-war world.

Viewpoint character George Enos, Jr., has his ship sunk in minor action off the Mexican Pacific coast and is transferred to Sam Carsten's ship (a destroyer escort) that is policing the Canadian Atlantic coast. Carsten's ship, however, had smuggled arms to a nascent rebellion in Cuba, in which a teenage Fidel Castro plays a cameo role. The United States are able to recapture Bermuda in a costly action and is threatening to move to the South Atlantic, to cut off Argentine shipments of food to the United Kingdom (as was done during the Great War.)

The outcome of the war remains in doubt, however. Both the United States and Confederate States had their nuclear programs attacked; while little damage was done to the uranium, several irreplaceable figures were killed in the C.S. effort. At least Germany, the UK, France, Russia and Japan are also launching nuclear weapons programs, with Germany (due to nuclear physicists all staying in Germany) apparently in the worldwide lead. At the end of the novel, U.S. President Charles La Follette asked the Confederate States for unconditional surrender. Featherston replied with a defiant speech and launched two long-range rockets from bases in Virginia onto Philadelphia. As with the V-2 bombs, the damage was light but the psychological damage was much heavier.

In contrast with the first two books of the series, which presented a fairly close parallel of World War II on the Eastern Front transposed to North America, this book to a large extent concentrates on strategy and weaponry as though the American Civil War was being fought with the materials of World War II.

The war depicted in this book seems the most brutal of any book in the series. It includes all the elements of brutality present in our history's World War II — highly destructive weapons on the battlefield, mass bombings of cities and civilian areas, fast development of nuclear arms which could destroy whole cities, and of course the wholesale genocide of an entire ethnic group. On top of this are several brutalities not present in our World War II: the use of poison gas in the battlefield (which was widely practiced in the First World War but avoided in the Second by a tacit agreement between both sides; the widespread use of suicide bombings (here called "people bombs"), which in our history appeared only in the 1990s; the deliberate targeting and assassination of individual, specially capable officers by the opposing army.

In addition, there is an intensive activity of "francs-tireurs" (armed civilians) in the Confederate areas occupied by the United States — far more than in the parts of Germany occupied in our timeline. American forces resort to draconian retaliations, such as public hangings of such armed civilians, leaving the bodies to rot, and the taking and execution of hostages. (In our history such acts are specifically forbidden by the Fourth Geneva Convention — but it was signed only in 1949, and might not get signed at all in the Timeline-191 universe). The extra savagery might be due to having a far lesser number of smaller states than in Europe, where they serve as a kind of buffer between the bigger contestants; in the Timeline-191 there are essentially only the two large nation states, hereditary enemies determined indeed to "settle accounts" with each other.

The brutality clearly infects also the more humane and decent of the characters. Flora Blackford, whose first appearance in the series was as a radical agitator hotly advocating international working class solidarity, is in the present book callously approving the bombing of the Confederate industrial cities, since "bombing the homes of those who work in the factories would damage the Confederate war effort". And the trade union organiser turned first sergeant Chester Martin personally takes the initiative of taking twenty random hostages in a Tennessee town and overseeing their execution, in retaliation for the killing of a fellow soldier.

Given all the above seems to indicate that, while Featherston and his Freedom Party clearly seem headed for the ignominious end of Hitler and the Nazi Party, further developments on this timeline might be quite different from the creation of stable democracy in our timeline's 1950s West Germany. Characters talk of abolishing the Confederacy altogether and "readmitting" its states to the Union — which would obviously be nothing more than a thin veneer over a brutal military occupation.

The United States in this World War II does not stand for the United States of our timeline but more for the Soviet Union of our World War II (the Confederate attack was in June 1941, the same date as the German attack on the Soviet Union; the battle of Pittsburgh was obviously modeled on Stalingrad; this United States, unlike the one in our timeline, did not have the luxury of dithering over whether or not to intervene in an overseas war, but had a massive land invasion of its heartland). Given that, the post-war occupation of the Confederate territory might resemble the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe more than our timeline's American presence in West Germany — with overtones of the post-Civil War Reconstruction added.