TL-191 Fridge Logic thread:
- Thread starter Snake Featherston
- Start date
Did you find that confusing? I had no trouble getting his point.
Jake's pretty much at the point -- well, he's always been at this point, but even more desperate now -- where he'd rather say "fuck you" in the grandest way he could just to score points, even if it means his country is worse off at the death than before he deployed the bomb, because he doesn't give a damn what happens because he doesn't plan on being there. Thus, West Philadelphia and not some U.S. army driving into the deepest South (there would have been several at this point).
Because then the first US nuclear bomb would be dropped on Atlanta.......(This means that had they used it the first US Bomb would have been dropped on Atlanta. Apologies for any miscommunications).
Atlanta had fallen like 6 months before the Confederates and Americans started using their atomic bombs.
Yes; the biggest on the Atlantic coast, in fact.
there's a prominent naval base in the area... but I think the main goal was to try to kill Jake
sometimes, it had its ok points that were at least handwaveable
The size of the USN is something else: OTL by 1941 the USN had the following carriers: Lexington, Saratoga, Ranger, Yorktown, Enterprise, and Wasp, with Hornet completing her fitting-out, and the first Essex-class ships being laid down. Turtledove's only got what, half that? There would be more heavy carriers, and not just limited to the Atlantic Fleet.
The United States is, what? A third-less populous than IOTL, and yet has the need to pour more of its resources into the Army and associated land defenses?
What gets me is, at what point did Jake start to lose it? He always seemed like he had a kind of level head on his shoulders to me... was it the moment he found out he'd never be promoted, or was it later during the Pennsylvania campaign? I mean, his army didn't really do that much to deserve such an inflated image. Hitler's army literally conqured Europe, so there was some justification for his pride in it, but what did Featherston's army do? take over Ohio? small potatoes.
perhaps he just swallowed too much of his own propaganda, which would make him pretty much a genocidal Mussolinni.
Snake Featherston
Banned
Actually, if you look at what he did after the Battle of Pittsburg he pretty much is not the drug-addicted raving maniac Hitler was in his last days IOTL. He refuses to allow the Confederate army to sacrifice itself in an urban battle of Atlanta the way Morrell hoped it would do, and it's (as Turtledove does always far too much and too repetitively and did I mention it was too much at one time) noted that he keeps the CSA fighting only in hope of a shitload of nukes, knowing that the war is lost conventionally without them.
That's very different than Hitler's ordering attacks in the Fuhrerbunker with units that had ceased to exist in late 1943. Not to mention that Featherston actually has the sense to reign in Patton's dilettantism and did not try to square the circle as Hitler's strategy often tried to do. And in another big difference from Hitler's way of waging war, Featherston did not really try to run every jot and tittle of the war on all his own with the experience of a top sergeant. He even retained Forrest and Patton both when in Nazi Germany they'dve been cashiered at best and hanging from piano wire at worst after the fall of Nashville.
Hitler swallowed a lot of his own propaganda, too; "Wunderwaffen will propel us to Final Victory."
I'm not sure if Jake ever really "lost it," as in going off the deep end if that's what you meant. He was definitely a changed man after his fateful interview in Potter's tent, and extremely pissed off at Armistice, but always carried himself pretty well.
Its easy to say that his behavior during the Pittsburgh campaign, especially as it turned from a war of "running the Yankees ragged" to a brutal war of attrition to a kesselschlacht was demented, and that it was downhill from there. But Pittsburgh was, apparently, the only time when he really insisted they not give up the ground; he allowed the Confederates to abandon Ohio, and never insisted that the all-vital hub city of Atlanta be turned into a festung. He even allowed Richmond-Petersburg to be evacuated if it meant saving the CSA; Hitler would not only have lost those cities, but spent resources trying to take them back.
As for the Confederate States Army's "inflated image" of its own abilities, well, they've always claimed that one Southerner could lick 100 Yankees since 1861. That's hardly a claim started by Saul Goldman propagandists.
Snake Featherston
Banned
I agree. He was evil once he took over the Confederacy, but he was never the kind of completely irrational evil that Hitler was. From an internal perspective there was an initial logic to staying in Pittsburg to fight the US Army once it ensured there was no other option, and Featherston learned very much from not allowing them to retreat in time. If the CSA had been directed with a Festungen mentality arguably the USA would have crushed it much faster, and before Fitzbelmont ever got his nukes in the first place.
Featherston would have been a far more dangerous man in charge of an OTL genocidal dictatorship than the kind of person Hitler was. Fortunately he's only fictional.
No I think you misunderstood me, or I misunderstand you. I just meant I didn't quote the entire passage because he's basically repeating himself. Funnily enough.
And equal-fucking-enough I'm drunk when I'm posting this, so fair-fucking-enough.
What do people think about that attempt on Featherston's life while he was in that motorcade? Gut feeling says Willy Knight really did plan that (and i think a lot of us went along with what was implied was the "official word"), but we got enough second-hand shit to suggest Vice President Knight was only victim of Featherston's opportunism.
I think this is one of the bits where we are meant to know about the real world analogues and work out what's happening from there, otherwise, based purely on the books, there is no real evidence either way; it could be Knight planned it, or it could be Knight didn't but Featherston uses the attempt as the excuse he needs to get rid of him. While Featherston probably wouldn't need an excuse to get rid of anyone, there is plenty of evidence to suggest he's walking on eggshells with Knight, like even after being arrested noone is quite sure what to do with him, for a while at least.
The Marching through Peachtree series got slated for that; analogues of real world, but if the reader doesn't know about those analogues the books don't make a lot of sense. I do know a bit the real acw, but that is still one series I gave up on, I think I read about two chapters of one book before I got sick.
The Marching through Peachtree series got slated for that; analogues of real world, but if the reader doesn't know about those analogues the books don't make a lot of sense. I do know a bit the real acw, but that is still one series I gave up on, I think I read about two chapters of one book before I got sick.
Last edited:
I thought it was once he had a bit of fridge logic of his own and realized that, once the term limits were removed, Jake would be re-elected until he died and Knight figured he would be an old man before Jake's inevitable death, and thus unable to do much of anything except be stuck in the do-nothing co-pilot's seat. He wanted Jake out of the way so that he would just inherit the seat without having to go through the trouble of elections and the like.
Did the assassination attempt happen after the constitutional change? I can't remember.
Yes, a few months afterward and about 11 months before the presidential election.
Some random bits I've read about that could lend support to either argument:
That Knight was innocent but framed by Featherston:
1) His telling Pinkard upon arrival at that political camp that "one of these days the son of a bitch [Jake] will turn against you, too." Meaning he was bitter that Jake just took advantage to get rid of a rival.
2) Sam's XO firmly stating that the Confederate press was lying about Knight's complicity, as its been firmly established even by the Freedom Party POVs that the Confederate press pretty much lies about everything since the Freedom takeover.
That Knight did have involvement:
1) His telling Pinkard upon arrival at that political camp that "one of these days the son of a bitch [Jake] will turn against you, too." Meaning he was bitter that Jake effectively fucked Knight's political career with the Seven Words Amendment.
2) Jake, in the privacy of his own mind that only we, the reader, can see into, remembering here and there for the rest of the series that Willy Knight had tried doing him in. No hint whatsoever that he had Knight set up.
3) Not sure why some three random, nameless and faceless low-level Party activists without orders or prompting from somewhere way up high would try to murder the Greatest President in Confederate History (tm).