if Napoleon Bonaparte had chosen to do several things differently? "If the Special Order 191 Hadn't Been Lost" by James M. McPherson What if Robert E. Lee hadn't lost Special Order 191 during the Maryland Campaign and had been able to march through the Union state of Pennsylvania and the border state of Maryland without fighting the Battle of Antietam? "A Confederate Cannae and Other Scenarios" by Stephen W. Sears What if the Civil War had not lasted as long as it did? (Five ways are presented here.) "The What Ifs of 1914" by Robert Cowley What if the United Kingdom had remained neutral in World War I? (This and four other possibilities are presented here.) "How Hitler Could Have Won the War" by John Keegan What if the Wehrmacht had turned toward the Middle East instead of the Soviet Union? "Our Midway Disaster" by Theodore F. Cook, Jr. What if the Japanese had won the Battle of Midway? "D Day Fails" by Stephen E. Ambrose What if the Allied invasion of Europe had failed in June 1944? "Funeral in Berlin" by David Clay Large What if American and not Soviet forces had taken Berlin in 1945? What if the Berlin airlift had failed? What if German reunification had occurred in 1952? Etc. "China Without Tears" by Arthur Waldron What if the Chinese Civil War had ended with Chiang Kai-shek not marching to retake Manchuria from Mao Zedong and the Communists? Reviews "Probably the most interesting nonfiction historical fiction was What If?: The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been (Putnam, 1999). Its editor, Robert Cowley, persuaded two dozen historians to write essays on how a slight turn of fate at a decisive moment could have changed the very annals of time." —The New York Times "The essays collected in What If? are sober extrapolations from historical fact. Even so, they're a lot of fun. They remind us of the slender threads on which our past hangs. One small break—at Poitiers or on Long Island, at Gettysburg or in Berlin—might have unraveled the entire tapestry of modern history." —CNN "Those and other provocative 'counterfactuals' are the topic of the intriguing What if?, a compilation of essays by 34 distinguished historians... Each essay testifies to the fact that history hangs by a thread." —Houston Chronicle See also What If? 2 What Ifs? of American History References 1999 non-fiction books