Invasion: California

Preface

Invasion: California is a story about disastrous events. It postulates a world teetering on the brink of starvation due to glacial cooling.

It is a “what if” story. What if the farmable land in the world shrank dramatically, and what if American earth became one of the most precious commodities left? What if other countries—led by Greater China and its Pan-Asian Alliance—decided it was going to conquer U.S. soil? Lastly, what if America no longer dominated world affairs due to a sovereign debt depression and other, mostly self-inflicted, wounds?

Interestingly, there is a historical precedent for continental-sized conquest fought with the latest technology. The Third Reich made the attempt a little over seventy years ago in World War II.

At the start of Operation Barbarossa in 1941, Germany set out to conquer European Russian. In terms of depth, the final objectives were just short of the Ural Mountains. In America, that would be the distance from the East Coast to Kansas City, Missouri.

The Germans’ gigantic conquest began along a 1,720-mile front stretching from the Barents Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. Again, in American terms, that would be from the northern border of Maine all the way down to the southern tip of Florida.

The Germans invaded with approximately three million soldiers, while the Russians defended in the theater with slightly fewer. By 1943, Germany fielded almost four million troops there, while Russia had put over 6.7 million soldiers in place. Incredible as it may seem, by war’s end, the Russians had lost 14.7 million military dead. Some people estimate that their total dead and missing—military and civilian—was 35 million. Those are horrifying numbers, beginning to sound like nuclear war casualties.

What does any of that have to do with Invasion: California? In attempting to envision foreign powers invading North America, I used as one of my guides the titanic conflict of World War II, particularly between Germany and Soviet Russia. I suspect that in a future war of such scale, millions of soldiers would march to battle once again.

Invasion: California is fiction about a future I hope none of us ever has to face. Nevertheless, if present trends continue…who knows what will happen by 2039.