John Schettler - Turning Point

Another long corridor lay before the visitor, his footsteps echoing loudly, and seeming to carry the sense of anticipation he felt as they quickened. The corridor bent in a wide curve to the left, until a high stone arch opened on a vast underground chamber. There, swathed in a plain white canvass cover, something lay hidden in the depths of the earth, attended by more guards and several technicians in long white lab coats. At the visitor’s approach, the technicians slowly worked off the canvass to reveal a long, needle nosed rocket, some 40 feet long, lying on its side and cradled within a low wheeled dolly. The thicker end mounted stubby fins, shaped like truncated pyramids, with a wingspan of nearly 8 feet, and to the visitor’s careful and well educated eye, there were all of three separate stages in this rocket design.

The amazing rocket before the man could range out 135 miles, achieve an altitude of 250 miles, and a speed of Mach 14.5 on its final descent. As he looked at it he took a deep breath, astounded at what he was seeing, for he was no ordinary visitor, and his mind was already viewing the rocket as if it were on drafted engineering paper, the labor of endless hours work.

There, in that deep stony cavern, one Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun was now looking at a weapon that would threaten to change the entire course of the war, though he did not yet know what lay hidden within that long pointed third stage. His eyes glittered, and he rubbed his hands together, not because of the cold, but with eager anticipation. He could not wait to get his tooling delivered and see what he had in hand.

“That bulbous feature at the tip,” he said to one of the other technicians. “It must be a warhead. I’ll want to remove it first and give it a very close inspection.”

The strange events that brought USS Norton Sound into the clutches of Kapitan Heinrich aboard battlecruiser Kaiser Wilhelm , and JS Takami into the crucible of the Pacific War continue, and the fate of the original Russian ship Kirov begins to be revealed. As the Germans struggle to comprehend what they have found in that derelict ship, the Allies now plan their first joint US/British offensive of the war. It begins with a Great Raid against the vital French Atlantic Port of Saint Nazaire, in an effort to eliminate that base as a threat to a much grander invasion plan now sitting in the lap of a most remarkable man—General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In the Pacific, the mysterious arrival of DDG-180 and crew casts a whole new light on the growing struggle. Yamamoto is keen to advance his next offensive into the Solomons, but he must also deal with the threat to Japan’s northern flank from the Siberians. To do so, he dispatches Captain Harada and Takami at the heart of a strong task force assembling to lead a bold counterattack, and the next evolution of Karpov’s Plan 7 soon meets a most unexpected challenge. Has the Steel Reign of Kirov’s long undisputed control of the seas finally come to an end?

Action abounds on land and sea as Season three careens into its closing two volumes in the amazing Kirov Series!

As fans of John Schettler’s Kirov Series already know, the author is presenting a detailed alternate history of WWII, with the course of events strongly influenced by the presence of the battlecruiser Kirov , and other war fighting forces from the year 2021, which have been displaced to the cauldron of WWII.

Now, in response to reader requests, we are presenting a series of “Battle Books” for all the major campaigns featured in Kirov Series. Often times the action depicting these battles is spread over four, five or more volumes of the series. Here we will extract all that exciting battle action from the many volumes, gathering all the disparate story threads pertaining just to that campaign, and presenting it as one continuous file, reviewed and edited by the series author. In effect, it’s just the battles please, nothing more.

This first volume will present the great action presented for the Western Theater, starting with the dramatic and unexpected German attack on Gibraltar in Operation Felix . The alternate history ‘point of departure’ is presented in a brief prelude. The story then moves to the Western Desert for O’Connor’s Raid and the battle of Beda Fomm , followed immediately by the coming of Erwin Rommel and his stunning first counteroffensive launched from Mersa Brega, Operation Sonnenblume. The fall of Malta is covered and, as the arrival of Brigadier Kinlan’s 7th Brigade is so vital to the understanding of the story that follows, segments of that are presented as a prelude to Rommel’s fateful alternate history encounter at the Battle of Bir El Khamsa. Soon the Desert Fox begins to rethink his tactics while awaiting strong reserves promised by Hitler.

Yes, we loved Kirov , the characters, and all the intrigue surrounding Ilanskiy and time travel, but the battle books are presented for the hard core WWII aficionado who is primarily interested in the history, and how it is changed and altered over the course of the war. As such, they will focus mainly on the historical characters and the campaigns and battles they waged in this ongoing alternate history of WWII.

Battle Book II will present the action in the Middle East, with the British Operation Scimitar , German Operation Anvil , and the intervention in Iraq that led Fedorov and his Marines to the famous ruins of Palmyra. Then it is back to the desert again, as Rommel faces down the British Operation Crusader . After that we will present this ongoing desert campaign through 1942 and beyond, (after John writes all that!), but for now, Battle Book I, War in the West , covers all the exciting battles from June of 1940 through June of 1941, the first year when Britain faced the might of Germany alone. It’s all here, extracted from scenes presented over seven Kirov Series novels, and concentrated in one continuous, uninterrupted narrative.

The Battle Books Series will do the same thing for all the fighting on the Eastern Front, covering all the material for Operation Barbaross a, the Battle at Mtsensk , Operation Typhoon , the fighting at Tula and Serpukhov , the dramatic Fall of Moscow and the desperate Russian Winter Counteroffensive . Later, after the series takes us deeper into the Pacific, we’ll create a battle book for all that action too. If you are a WWII history buff, you will find here the concentrated juice of all the great WWII action presented in the amazing Kirov Series.

Kirov Series: Battle Book I

War in the West

Gibraltar, Malta & the War in North Africa

Jun 1940 ~ Jun 1941

The Kirov Series is a long chain of linked novels by John Schettler in the Military Alternate History / Time Travel Genre. Like the popular movie “The Final Countdown” which saw the US Carrier Nimitz sent back in time to the eve of Pearl Harbor in 1941, in the opening volume, the powerful Russian battlecruiser Kirov is sent back to the 1940s in the Norwegian Sea where it subsequently becomes embroiled in the war.