You wouldn’t by any chance be referring to the ‘Christie Cruiser’, would you? The Christie Crawler I know was a conversion for truck chassis to create a half-track, not at all the idea of using rubber-tired full-height roadwheels as idlers.
It does have to be said that if there had been no V2 it’s unlikely that Billy Borden would have had the insight that led to the idea of Rocket Pearl Harbors; the weapon you’re describing is not the atomic bomb but the hydrogen bomb that Sakharov would have independently achieved regardless of our (somewhat dead-ended) achievements with Mike, and of course Stalin pushed development of practical multistage ICBMs as an ‘effective straitjacket for that noisy little shopkeeper’. I honestly don’t know whether we’d have pushed MX-774 early had Uncle Adolf not been involved …
Penny Trains, that sounds more like The Outer Limits than Twilight Zone. OL was a bit more science fictioney, wheras TZ were more like morality plays but having said that, TZ had it’s share of science fiction too. “To Serve Man.” Man, The Simsons did a dead-on parody of that one!
I wonder, just how long would it have taken the world to pull out of the Great Depression had the war not started? It could just maybe might have been a chance of a possibility that FDR and Churchill did all they could to keep Hitler alive so the war could boost the economy. I love “alternative fiction.”
Just how did George get his money? I knew he was wealthy, I mean I saw “Patton.” Only the once, though. If I saw it three times like the 'ol Trickster, I mighta bombed Cambodia!
Most “alternative history” is little more than an amusing game since it often seems that the writer changes one item without considering the other factors that raised that issue in the first place. If a certain noncom did not survive WW1, the underlying situation of German nationalism and the “stab in the back” mentality that would have bred another similar personality is usually not considered. It would be like saying that the Russian Revolution would not have occurred if the Okhrana killed Ulyanov and Bronstein after 1905.
Remember “Uncle Duke” in the Doonesbury comic strip? He said many years ago, “This is why I don’t do drugs anymore. Who can tell the difference?” True then, even truer today.
Penny Trains, thanks for that. I didn’t know that there was a re-intro of Twilight Zone. But, that plot for the episode you describe sounds a bit like “The City on the Edge of Forever.” from the original Star Trek. Said ST episode was one of the best, written by Harlan Ellison.