Brainstorming Exercise: Alternate Islands From A to G

Brainstorming Exercise: Alternate Islands From A to G

By: Dale R. Cozort

I love brainstorming, and I love alternate history.  I'm going to combine those two loves here by doing a brainstorming session for alternate history story ideas.  These are ideas, so they aren't copyrighted.  If you see something here that triggers an idea that you then write up into a best seller, then good for you.I

The exercise: I’m going to try to figure out an alternate history scenario involving an island for each letter of the alphabet. We'll just go through G this time, but I'll get to the rest of the letter later.  Why islands?  Why not?  A lot of key events have occurred in islands, and islands have often been natural laboratories for odd groupings of animals (Madagascar and New Zealand for example.)

The rules:

1. The island has to play a key role in the scenario.
2. Only the scenario name has to relate to the letter of the alphabet, not necessarily the island name (extra points if the island name does correspond to the letter I am trying for though
3. The scenario can involve any period from the era of the dinosaurs or before to the end of World War II.  (I don’t do modern AH because I think it inevitably becomes too political for my tastes.)
4. Extra points for Alliterations of the letter.  For example: “Cut-off Creodonts of California” is cool.
5. Extra points if the scenario title sounds like the title of a bad pulp story.  For example, “Subhuman Slave Soldiers of Sardinia” gets extra points as an alliteration and as a potential bad pulp story title.
6. A lot of extra points if I actually come up with a reasonable and developable scenario out of this.
7. Extra points for multiple scenario seeds for a letter.
8. Lots of extra points for you if you can come up with something for an island on one of the letters I had to punt on, or do a real stretch on.  Sound like fun?  Want to 

The Ideas:

• Japanese don’t attack the Aleutians during World War II. The Aleutians attack was a Japanese feint to draw US forces away from Midway.  It didn’t work in the short term because the US read Japanese codes and concentrated on Midway.  In the longer term, the Japanese did reap some benefit from occupying the Aleutians, because the US did a major buildup to take back a couple of island that the Japanese occupied.  What would have happened if the Japanese had the forces that they sent to the Aleutians at Midway?  What would have happened if the US had been able to deploy the resources they put into the Aleutians somewhere else?

• Andaman Islands larger.  The Andaman Islands are off the coast of India.  They are ‘oceanic’ islands, which among other things means that they don’t connect with any continent during ice ages.  There are fairly large areas of shallow water around the Andamans, and they could have been substantially larger given relatively minor changes in the sea level. The Andamans have been inhabited by humans for a long time—no one is quite sure how long, and Andaman Island natives are one of the last groups of humans to remain in a technologically primitive existence.  Making the islands larger would give the natives more room to develop their own distinctive cultures.  I can’t think of anything earth-shattering that would come of that to be honest.  Can you?

• Higher Bahamas.  If you look at a map of the ocean bottom around the Bahamas, you realize that during ice ages the Bahamas are probably one rather large island, around the size of Cuba.  Let’s say that the Bahamas get uplifted slightly toward the end of the last ice age.  Assuming that nothing else changes (a pretty major assumption), when the Spanish arrived in the West Indies they would find another large island to exploit, presumably after they conquered Cuba.  What effect would that have on the chronology of Spanish conquests? Would they conquer the Bahamas first and then go on to the Aztecs, or would they conquer the Aztecs first.  If they went after the Aztecs first, chances are that they would never establish firm control over the Bahamas, because compared to the riches of the mainland the West Indies quickly became a backwater.  If another European power (Holland, France, England) controlled this enlarged island, they could do a lot of damage to Spanish treasure fleets.  What are some other implications?  What kind of animal life would the enlarged island have?  Would it be a refuge for animals that became extinct in the mainland of North America? Creodonts?  The extinct North American primates?  Where would the Indians that settled there have come from?  Cuba? Florida? Both?

• Mussolini bargains for bases in the Balerics.  Italy played a major role in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).  Italian help was essential to the Spanish Nationalists, but the Italians really didn’t get much other than prestige for their efforts.  Let’s say that they bargain a little harder with the Spanish Nationalists and end up with air and naval bases in the Baleric Islands south of France.  What impact would that have on the course of World War II?  How would the Spanish react when Italy entered World War II?  Would the bases be used?  If yes, how would the British react?

• Cretans crush German conquest air convoy.  The battle for Crete in early 1941 was actually one of the closest run significant battles in World War II.  It genuinely could have gone either way based on the actions of battalion commanders and even small groups of individual civilians.  The civilians of Crete got out antique hunting rifles and went after the Germans in a big way in the early going of the battle, doing significant damage.  Let’s say they kill or capture just the right person and the German airborne invasion collapses early on.  The British and Greeks hold on to the island.  The Germans probably would not have the capability to try again in the immediate future.  That has surprisingly major implications for the rest of the war.  I’ll probably explore those implications later in this issue or possibly in the next issue.

• Spanish Republicans win in the Canary Islands.  Now this isn’t all that likely unless the Republicans import some loyal troops before the revolt starts, but let’s say they do.  They beat the Nationalists locally and hold on to power in the islands throughout the rest of the Spanish Civil War. 
  

In early 1939 the Spanish Republic collapses in mainland Spain, but die-hard Republicans flee to the Canary Islands, along with the fairly substantial Spanish Republican navy.  The Spanish Nationalists don’t have the sea power to take the islands by themselves.  They would need Italian or German help.  If the Germans or Italians started moving in that direction though, the British and French would get rather perturbed to say the least.

he Spanish Nationalists would not be willing to let the Republicans hold out on the Canaries indefinitely.  They would probably build up their fleet with German and Italian help with an eye toward eventually invading.  Let’s say that the issue festers until the fall of France in June 1940.  At that point Franco might be strongly tempted to take advantage of British weakness to launch and invasion, presumably with German and Italian help. 

The British would have to be extremely worried about German or Italian bases in the Canaries because of the strategic position of the islands.  Would they intervene knowing that intervening would probably bring Spain into the war as a full-fledged ally of the Germans?  What affect would that have on Gibraltar and the rest of British possessions in the Meditteranean?

• Corsica conquered by the Italians in 1940.  Mussolini wanted Corsica, and actually did briefly take it over in late 1942 after the Germans occupied Vichy France.  The Italians held Corsica until late 1943, when the Italians left the war and French troops from North Africa helped a revolt against German occupying forces.  Let’s say that Italy does a quick and sneaky grab for Corsica in June 1940, just before the French bow out of the war.  The Italians get some troops ashore and they are still holding out there when the armistice is ready to be signed, though they are cut off by superior French/British naval forces.  The Italians demand the island, and the French are really not in any position to say no.  Does Hitler twist French arms on Italy’s behalf?  Do the French go along and give up the birthplace of Napoleon?  Is this one humiliation too many—a deal-killer that pushes the French to fight on from their colonies?
• Dogger  banks as an island or islands.  The Dogger banks are an extensive area of very shallow water north of England.  What if major sections of them were just enough higher that they formed the Dogger islands rather than the Dogger banks?  To be honest, I suspect that all of human history would diverge in a major way due to various butterfly affects, but I can’t think of any specific scenario.  There was a major World War I sea battle near the Dogger banks.  The British had a good shot at bagging most or all of the German battle-cruiser fleet, but blew it due to communication problems.  Assuming that there still was an England and a Germany, I wonder how a Dogger Island would affect that battle.
• Extra-large Easter Island.  Easter Island is a fascinating place, with the remnants of a very strange culture.  The most spectacular of those remnants are the huge statues that the islanders built and then toppled.  The island itself is a flea-speck on the maps, ecologically extremely fragile due to that small size, and not really large enough to sustain the kind of culture that once existed there.  Let’s say that the island was a little bit bigger—just enough larger that the Polynesians who settled there don’t have enough time to totally destroy the ecology before European contact.  Somewhere along the line, Spanish, Portuguese, or Dutch sailors discover a still-flourishing Easter Island culture and describe it, shortly before they spread European diseases that pretty much destroy it.  What impact does that have, if any?  Just one less phony mystery for the guy that wrote ‘Chariots of the Gods”?  An earlier European exploration and conquest of the Pacific islands sparked by popular fascination with the Easter Islanders?
• Fort Sumter not an issue at the beginning of the Civil War.  Okay, I know this is stretching the whole island theme, but Fort Sumter was on an island, and I did want to get in at least one US Civil War scenario.  There are several ways that we could go with this one.  South Carolina actually built Fort Sumter and the other forts near Charleston, but later gave them to the Federal government.  What if the state government kept the forts, or never built them, or leased them?  Or what if South Carolina’s militia caught the federal troops while they were attempting to move from a vulnerable fort on the mainland to Fort Sumter in late 1860?  If you remove Fort Sumter as a flashpoint you might delay the Civil War by a month or two, though there were enough other flashpoints that it would be difficult to avoid war altogether, especially since the leadership of both the confederate states and the union felt that compromise was unthinkable.
• Flinders island humans survive.  Okay, this is an odd one.  Flinders Island is between Australia and Tasmania.  During ice ages it is part of a peninsula connecting Australia and Tasmania.  When sea levels rose after the last ice age, a small group of people were apparently trapped on the island.  They and their descendants survived there for several thousand years, then died out several thousand years before Europeans reached the area.  This is a small enough island that it would have supported no more than around 300 people at the technological level of the time and area.  That small of a population is very vulnerable to a host of problems, among them inbreeding and the impact of just one bad year climate-wise.  It’s not surprising that the population died out, but it was kind of a luck of the draw thing.  If they had been extremely lucky, the population might have survived long enough for the Europeans to find and exterminate them in the 1600s or slightly thereafter.  That doesn’t really do much for us, but if accounts of their life-style and culture survived or even some genetic material it would be scientifically fascinating.  We don’t know what happens when you isolate that small of a population for that long and it would be interesting to find out.
• Flores ‘hobbits’ survive.  To be honest I think that this is unlikely, though they did apparently get wiped out or nearly so by a volcanic eruption around 12,000 years ago.  If they hadn’t been destroyed then I suspect that they would have been destroyed by one of the waves of human conquerors that have flowed through the area of Indonesia over the last several thousand years.  If some little pocket of them did manage to survive on Flores long enough to be discovered by Europeans, what impact would that have on the way Europeans looked at the world?  I suppose that really depends on when the Europeans discovered them.  In the 1600s?  In the mid-1800s?  Later?  What if the fossil remains of the hobbits had been discovered earlier—maybe in the early 1900s?  What would scientists then have thought of them?  Missing link?  Side-branch?  How would that have influenced the development of the study of human ancestors.  
• Greater Galapagos.  Let’s say that the Galapagos Islands were somewhat bigger than they actually are—maybe twice their actual size.  What impact would that have?  Do the native animals develop even more spectacular forms?  Do the islands attract human colonists?  If so, the bulk of the native animals would almost certainly be wiped out, with the potential for a huge impact on western thought.  Would Darwin still come up with the theory of evolution if the animals of the Galapagos were already for the most part wiped out?  Where would the first settlers come from? Polynesia?  South America?  Both?  Would the two cultures (Polynesians and South American Indians swap technology and ideas?  What would the impact of that be?
• Battle of Guadalcanal goes differently.  There a lot of ways we can go with this one.  If the Japanese had moved a little quicker they could have built up enough that the US couldn’t have gotten onto the island without a bigger fight than we were ready for at the time.  They could also have hit us harder in the early going with naval power.  At one point two Japanese battleships absolutely devastated US airpower on the island.  A bigger, nastier bombardment might have allowed the Japanese to actually take the island in the early going.  What impact would those possibilities have on the rest of the war?  They could have had some significant ripple affects.  The US effort in Guadalcanal did have some impact on the US buildup for the invasion of North Africa.  If Guadalcanal went differently, we might see that invasion happen earlier or later, which would have some impact as far away as the area around Stalingrad.  The German response to the allied invasion of North Africa stripped away reserves, and especially air power and air transports from the eastern front.   Change the timing of that and things could go very differently on the Eastern front.
  

Well, that’s that.  We're to G and so far we haven't missed a letter, though there have been a few real stretches.   Are there any great original ideas in there?  Well there are a couple that I‘ll probably develop a little further to check for story potential.  Are there any that I held my nose and put in there because I couldn’t think of anything better for that letter?  Oh yeah.  Overall, was this worth doing?  It was for me.  I hope it gave you some worthwhile ideas too.  That’s the whole point of brainstorming—stimulating creativity and building on ideas.