What do you guys think of these books?

I have a read a selection of these alternate history/military strategy books on WW2 and was wondering what guys think of them? Would you consider them factual or more fantasy? I know alternate history is fantasy but there has to be some realism in alternate history considering the different decisions that could have been made.

-How Hitler could have won World War 2: The fatal errors that led to Nazi Defeat: Bevin Alexander
-Hitler Triumphant: Alternate Histories of World War 2: Peter G. Tsouras
-If the Allies had fallen: Sixty Alternate scenarios of World War 2
-Third Reich Victorious: Alternate Decisions of World War 2

 

I have 2 and 4 in my collection, but have yet to get to them. As with all books who it is who writes them, that being said I have generally liked Tsouras's work.

 

Bevin must be very popular in Dixie - he wrote a book : How the South Could Have Won the Civil War: The Fatal Errors That Led to Confederate Defeat (2007).

 

I have read 1 and 4 on your list. Like any book, how much research and thought the author puts into it will determine somewhat how good it is. A lot of people just start writing about things they think they know, but actually no little about.

The books are good 'What If' type of thinking. They do make you think that if this or that had been done differently or happened differently what might have been.

 

I guess it depends on how you are defining words like history, reality, reporting, extrapolation, truth. Traditional definitions would say that WWll really happened and history records the events so that we can have some idea as to what happened in the past on this earth. That particular past was a reality at the time it was happening but is now part of history. Alternate history is the fictional presentation of historical events with the author alternating in fictional behaviors and characters who never existed in reality but are presented as actors at the real, historical event. It is untrue because it never happened. It is entertaining because it could have happened. What if Napoleon had had a B-52 bomber at the Battle of Waterloo?

 

Just imagine a screenplay for »Back to the Future IV«, Marty travels back into 1939 to warn the Fuhrer that his »brilliant« ideas are disastrous. He would have ended in hands of Gestapo and would have been send to the extermination camp as a Jewish provocateur.

The past has happened in the best possible way, so let’s not mess with it.

 

To each his own, but books on alternate history are a tough sell for me. So much non-fiction to learn from.