The Precipice

DISCLAIMER: This fic contains moderately graphic references to the Japanese Empire and Nazi Germany, and their actions during World War II (particularly for the Nazis). Additionally, in a later passage, I refer to several groups exterminated by the Nazis in period-specific language; normally I would use more modern terminology, however for the sake of historical realism I have chosen the former.

Viewer discretion is advised. Thousand Week Reich as a timeline belongs to AP246, and to the Hoi4 modders who created the TWR mod.

Please enjoy.

A sprawling green covered the breadth of federal soil along the wide courtyard that flowed out from behind the White House. Washington had its own seven hills to match that of Rome's septem colles, and laden between the divots of earth there were tall oakwoods and birches, filled with nests of bluejays and herringbirds, even the occasional imports of eagles to scare off the roosting owls, and to prey on the earthworms and insects mewling about on the grass. The air was frigid on that November afternoon, but in a way that almost warms the soul amid reams of fabric and leather, a cozy frozenness, even as the frostbite so easily seeps in and the cheek skin begins to flay off at the seams from the frost. The scent of pine, bark, and lavender filled the nostrils of the groundskeepers milling about the hedges, taking the time to postulate their feelings about the nation's capital, and what it embodied for America as a whole.

History baked itself into the fibers of the scenery, an eminence of the past, in this new old world, breathing outward. Roman architects peered from the Fields of Elysium down onto the columns lining the Supreme Court and the Justinian dome covering up the Capitol Building from the masses. While proud of Republican tradition's predominance, they must've been uncertain about the direction it had taken in the twenty-five hundred years since the founding of the city; how long would it take for a Caesar to take the reins, they wondered, and for the power of the people to dilute itself into one man's hands?

So too did Lincoln stare off from his throne and inspect the inner workings of liberty in the new age of Americana, his stony eyes filled with the film of time's passing, lit with the gauze of his shiny historical fame. What went through his skull, tourists and passersby pondered along the streets leading up to his monument, to see his vision for America stronger and more omnipresent than ever—despite the lingering imprint of black flesh and Indian bones lying under the topsoil, thousands of corpses left in the unknown grave of the laborer, whose labors built America's Rome.

In the known graves of Arlington Cemetery, meanwhile, the dead chattered above and below, the dogtags grumbling about themselves about the present state of the world, adding to the cacophony of the lifeless that made up the pervading atmosphere of the capital; tethers to the past, keeping America rooted in all its triumphs and trials, tribulated by blood.

It was within this temporal dynamism—and the tenuousness it brought upon American culture—that Harry S. Truman found his political maturation. His humble, black-coated shoes crunched against the grass, his arms falling to his sides, still only for the shrill movements of a light stroll, the attenuation of his suit groomed but not immaculate, bits of dust and Oval Office speckle still invisibly present on the lapels. The Prussian blue of his tie blended in to the white of his undershirt, prim, a modest complementation. At the crown, besides the thin coif of snow overlaying his skull—as if his mind had to be exposed to the world, despite the enigmatic quality he embodied—his spectacles encased his eyes in a glossy film, forever veiling his true emotional inclinations, stratified behind the glass.

This was routine for Truman, who had never quite gotten used to the Ivory Tower stuffiness of White House politics, where the plush meeting rooms with their cushioned sofas and fine presidential paintings were set against a confining atmosphere. It was like Washington and Jackson were boring holes through Truman's head from atop their portraits. Indeed, he always carried the energy of a man forced into the presidency, sworn in by Roosevelt's passing to take the mantle of the free world for his country, thrust upon an arsenal of democracy that would set itself as a global power. He could still remember the un-halcyon days of failed clothing store ventures and Democratic party scheming during his judgeship in Jackson County, Missouri, where he found himself content to not rise the ranks, per se, but rather ascend them like a cresting tide, all the fate behind him driving his upward arc. Truman, that man most plucked from the unwashed masses like a grain of sand out of the beach of the earth, and placed at the precipice of world power; did the mass of the man change when put under such pressure, smoldering into igneous rock from his sedimentary form?

Harry could remember the weight in his voice when he took to the radio and announced his plans to finish the war raging in the East. The beads of sweat vanished from the tip of his head, and as he looked himself in the mirror, he could see a sentinel of democracy: stone-faced, iron-willed, ready to embark on a new campaign.

"Freedom in East Asia will ensure freedom across the world.

The people of the Empire of Japan," his slow, firm style of speech emanating through the airwaves, "must be shown the light of liberty. For the thousands of Americans who passed from this world to the next at Pearl Harbor, our men crusade from island to island, beach to beach, jungle to jungle, freeing nation after nation in our grand pursuit of democracy.

I ask you, not as the President, but as a fellow American, to pitch in everything you can—from the pots and pans in your kitchen that can be smelted down into metal, to the fruits and vegetables of your garden that can tumble into our soldiers' mouths, and the sweat and muscle poured into your work at the factories—to ensure that our men are well-equipped and prepared to take on the might of Japan."

He took a breath that day, steadying his tie, waiting as the nation gasped amid his speech.

"It will not be easy. Japan has armed her citizens with everything she has left; her schoolyards and taverns laden with bamboo pikes, its factories turned into war camps, her medieval castles reformed into full fortresses. The Japanese spirit will bludgeon many of our men," 'and I'm saddened to say that there will be more buried in the coming months,' he wanted to say, but instead concluded: "but soon they won't have many to bludgeon with."

Truman had already known the toll of 'freedom' by this point. How many thousands of American boys fell on the beachheads of Wake, and Iwo Jima, and Okinawa; how many American sailors were damned to rot under the gaze of Poseidon in the Pacific at Midway and Manila. He never asked for the photographs from his generals, wary of the effect it would have on his soul.

It allowed him to return to the microphone, time and again, keeping the country assured as to the nation's progress in the war against Japan. Presenting the air of unbreakable authority, even as his heart rattled from the bloodshed.

"The miles to total victory are dwindling. The hourglass sands are sinking for the Japanese Empire.

We will establish a new united front for freedom in the Pacific, and so never again will our boys across the seas ever face such unwarranted, vile, deranged attacks ever again."

He took another breath, putting back up his glasses, reading the charred lines of text that made up his speech.

"We fight, we struggle, we die, for the sake of a greater cause, to hold up that light of the American way.

It is by God's will that America shall win the day."

The radios turned off, and when he looked back in the Oval Office to his secretaries and aides, a round of applause rang through the gilded halls of Washington.

"Mr. President, what a display!"

"Give 'em hell, Harry!"

"For America!"

In a way oh so characteristic of himself, he only delivered back a light smile, as if he had secretly loathed the praise that he received in droves.

If only they knew.

That was six years ago. Harry's hair had only grown ever greyer, silver snippets of dead tissue flowing atop his head, and the creases and pores along his face had only deepened into troughs of flesh. The same suit he wore felt inundated with excessive tailorings and fittings, like a Frankenstein of fabric, aging just as he did.

He walked in a slow strut, not quite leisurely, but calm nevertheless: he was still on the Missouri family farm, wading through the wheatfields. From an outsider's perspective, it was like he was indulging in the harmonies of nature, sniffing in the scent of pine and honeysuckle along the National Promenade. How jubilant an image that was, for the outgoing president wishing to revel in his garden till the flower of his political career forever wilted.

But others ruminated on Truman's inner psyche.

"That old haberdasher's ready to finally get the hell out of here. He's had enough of Washington brass," an aide mused one night at the White House Mess, the lights low, making an orange dim across the room, his eyes seeping left and right to make sure the president wasn't around to hear.

"Think he'll ever run again, Joe? Or is this the end for Truman's political star, no office in the country palatable enough for his tastes." Drinks were exchanged across the table, as the spill of whiskey loosened lips and minds alike.

"I think it weighs on him." A deep-voiced aide broke the easy conversation, sober.

"All the watery graves he dug—I mean. You can't ignore it, gentlemen."

There was reason enough to suspect this. For a president who had overseen the most absolute victory in American history, and unprecedented economic development to become the world's global superpower rivaling Nazi Germany in Europe, this tremendous progress had come at a lethal cost.

With the Empire of Japan exhausted and outgunned by 1945, the military was divided on how to proceed. They knew an invasion would be the most painful America had ever pursued, and at the same time, they couldn't just sit idly by while Japan rebuilt itself and threatened American lives—or ambitions—in the Pacific once more. Screams and uproar roiled command headquarters in Hawaii, as bashed fists and wrinkled faces became the order of the day. When Japan refused to submit even after several tastes of nuclear hellfire, it was decided that unconditional surrender was the only way forward.

Truman made the play. They were his lives to bury. His souls to reap.

Questions roiled the country like never before on the extent of the American war machine, and whether all this bloodshed was truly worth it. From the dinner tables to the street corners, the rifle factories to the halls of Congress, people wondered at how an enemy that had been so severely beaten and battered would ever be a real threat to the States again; to kill a man down on his knees, they thought, while he bit at your flesh and kicked at your legs, was something beyond comprehension.

But these thoughts only remained just that—silent quandaries, washed away in the ocean of patriotism that swept the country. American soldiers finally reached the gates of the Imperial Palace at Tokyo in the middle of '46, scrounging through millennia of history—the woodblock paintings providing poor cover, and the palace gardens flattened by the press of their boots—till they forced Hirohito's final surrender.

In the years since, the U.S. became the icon of a triumphant democracy, leading the power of the free world against Germany's visegrip over Europe; the mantle of European 'civilization' had fallen into Uncle Sam's hands, and he wasn't about to drop it lightly.

But seven years after Roosevelt's timely heart attack landed Truman the presidency, he couldn't help but feel an inner dissatisfaction, a wanting glow in his heart that could never be fulfilled. While he desegregated the army, the pungent fumes of Jim Crow remained stalwart across the Deep South, as did the thickly-veiled lines of discrimination that buoyed Northern industry. His veto of the Taft-Harley bill signaled his undying crusade for the American worker against the travails of big business and excess, but the lion's share of his social programs failed to pass Congress, and so died like so many of his legislative dreams: his universal healthcare plan seen as a Bolshevik ideal, shot down into the ground like Lenin. Even the economic growth itself was perceived more as a natural appurtenance of the war than of Truman's own making, the president relegated to spectator of his own glory, and not the basker in it.

Truman, for all his successes, at this moment in time, as his days as president were slipping away from him, could only view himself as a failure. The ambitions of a Missouri go-getter dashed by the thought that his invigoration and energy had only come by fate's hand, that his greatness was a product of his conditions, not his character. The thanklessness of success, he thought, was the ideation that none of it was truly wrought by one's own hands.

But Truman wasn't alone in his thoughts that day. Thick winter boots crashed against the grass beside him, revealing the stature of a much taller figure, with broad chest muscles hidden underneath the sable veneer of his waistcoat, that same color fronted across his tie, and overlaying his broad shoulders. His mouth was slightly singed by the smoke of a tobacco pipe, his eyes large and his pupils driving a line down people's skin. While the flesh of his face had become somewhat of a drooped slough over time, winnowed by age, there was still something defiant about the turn of his eyes upward, and the sleek finish on his brown hair, with the tufts of grey scattered sparsely throughout the mane.

"Mr. President. Holding up well?"

A gruffer voice emanated out from the man's mouth, though given a formal tune since he moved from West Point careerism to Washington politicking.

"General MacArthur," Truman opted for his military rank, feeling like it was the title he responded best to, even after the people had singled him out to become their sole Commander-in-Chief.

He didn't quite smile, but there was an affable look to his face, the lines of his mouth tight but not stony, and he began to walk along the promenade with Truman, four shoes clamping upon the ground.

"I wanted to have a talk with you. Away from the establishment cronies; the secretaries and officials, too. A man-to-man discussion."

Truman looked back, a hand adjusting his glasses, making sure he could read the Big Chief correctly. He nodded.

"I wouldn't have it any other way, General."

MacArthur himself had a long way to the White House, though his prospects were far more star-studded than the country boy Truman. Born from a Civil War veteran and graduating at the top of his class at West Point, he served with honor in the Great War as a brigadier general, earning distinction for his battle-hardened stern-headedness—never one to be shy about charging headfirst into the fight, to smell the blood of his enemies. Never one to keep himself away from harm's way on the front lines, he was a man's officer, the quintessential American soldier, and he carved out a glorious reputation on the battlefields of the damned. Restless, hungry for victory and prestige at every moment, despite the austerity of his character, he put down veterans' demonstrations in Washington as Chief of Staff to punctuate his authoritative image before serving as military advisor in the Philippines, right as the Japanese attacked in 1941. Indeed, this time, he wouldn't be able to shoot first.

He could still recall the blaring of the air raid sirens at his headquarters in Manila, and the screams of the Filipino natives when the bombs came flying down: crash, bang, smash, the lights went out, bullets rang, and bodies sizzled. The American Empire in the East was tumbling before his eyes—he'd fought to keep Filipino independence at bay during his first military assignment some forty years prior—and a part of him wanted to die a soldier's death with his men. The auspices of fate ordained that this was his end, that he could finish off an illustrious career immortalized as a general in defeat, but not a general with dishonor. Standing over the Manila beachhead, he was requesting a quick end, all but for the tableau of his shades against the Sun to be written in the history books that day, perhaps not remembered widely but immortalized in the memory of his soldiers, a greater type of eternality that no fame could ever hope to achieve.

But, as with Truman, the world had other plans.

President Roosevelt sent him a telegram announcing these plans to MacArthur in no uncertain terms:

TOO INVALUABLE TO BE LOST TO CAPTURE. MUST ACCEPT EVACUATION PROCEDURES. EXECUTIVE MANDATE. STOP.

MacArthur took off his sunglasses, then, the outside noise seeming to fade amid the enveloping quandaries of the general's mind. He answered to no high authority but the Commander-in-Chief—and even then, he wasn't always insistent on keeping his words light to him—but moreover, MacArthur at once felt that he was about to abandon those he had sworn to die with.

Like Napoleon waving away to the grenadiers left at Alexandria, he thought himself a blood-traitor, and mulled the decision while shrapnel flew out across the city, and Japanese marines began taking hold of urban chokepoints. Nevertheless, he saw in this prerogative a chance not to betray his brothers-in-arms, but to avenge them over the long arc of the war. It was to be an even greater sacrifice for the blood they spilled; just as romantic a maneuver, even if craven-seen at the time.

"I shall return."

The Chief's words were emblazoned over New York Times and Washington Herald covers for the country to know his stern credo, to liberate the Filipino people and take revenge for the loss of the islands. (Was America to finally renounce its imperial ambitions, or was this just a more deceitful form of conquest, bandied in the rhetoric of freedom? No one could truly know until the end of the war, but in a stroke, MacArthur had come to represent the holy image of America, the bastion of self-determination.)

Throughout the war, as island by island, atoll by atoll, fell to American forces, MacArthur's sense of firm military genius prevailed across the Pacific. At his headquarters in Papua New Guinea, he cradled the large, sprawled map of the ocean in his grasp, memorizing every inch of water and earth, with the visions of the parapets and pillboxes emanating behind his eyes, the arrows representing naval invasions vivified forever. His obsession for victory drove American arms towards the Home Islands, dismantling the Japanese military machine with the wrenches and screwdrivers of American lives.

MacArthur was there in Oahu with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Truman, planning for the final invasion of Japan. His voice was the most vociferous in favor of a full-scale 'liberation' of the Rising Sun, and while normally his brash ego made him a difficult man to deal with, Truman agreed with him: at this juncture MacArthur thought that only the annihilation of fascism in the Far East could restore peace to the region.

"These bastards will never stop killing American boys, until we destroy their empire. Until we arrive on the emperor's doorstep with our guns pointed to his head, and force peace down his throat!"

The room stood silent after a particularly heated moment, and MacArthur returned to his chair, his arms crossed, his eyes invisible below his shades, unreadable and undetectable. Each general knew what they were doing; the incalculable cost of life that they would be authorizing, putting to paper, and assembling the necessary dogtags.

They simply nodded and agreed to MacArthur's plan. For weeks, he put his bibliophilic mind to use, poring through book after book on Japanese history and culture while screening each city for potential obstructions and roadblocks; the photographs taken on air reconnaissance missions became his bible, his hands completely still as he held the views of schools with barricades and bamboo pikes, and of the factories turned into makeshift work camps and fortresses, with the Japanese using everything they had in their blood to ward off foreign invaders.

But the heavenly storm never came. Hundreds of thousands of marines descended upon Kyushu, and from there, the nation would never be the same:

Children massacred in unmarked graves during the firefights. Entire towns having fought to the death against the American advance, into the movie theaters, the taverns, the Shinto and Buddhist temples, the railway stations and subways. The kamikaze attacks became more frequent, and with the Japanese soldiers running out of ammo, their katanas were the only thing they had left to cut down Uncle Sam's march to Tokyo.

Urban bloodbaths and rural desolation scarred the country, and by the time the emperor surrendered, it was all too late. Japan was no more.

MacArthur was there, towering over Hirohito, when the surrender talks began. The emperor, having plunged his country into war and destruction for nine long years, was only barely saved from trial and execution by MacArthur's own initiative, feeling him the only force remaining to save the nation from radical destruction.

Japan was to be a state backed only by American force, filled with agitators on right and left, with the unions lambasting MacArthur's iron-fisted rule over the nation, cementing American dominance in the East, even as a newly-reunited Republic of China started to counterbalance the American sphere of influence.

The Far East was to be MacArthur's staging ground for political acumen, as he hungrily eyed power in his homeland, the Washingtonian throne beckoning for his arrival. He used the reconstruction of Japan to that effect, seeing the island as not only a military bulwark against the growing Chinese power but an exemplar of multi-party democratic capitalism, even if the kinks in the system still were left to be worked out. A project he enthusiastically devoted himself to, if it meant it'd bolster his fame back home.

He would return, all right. After the situation in Japan had harshly stabilized, his vigor for the country was more electrified than ever during the postwar boom, his wishes to instrumentalize American prosperity for the world's coming to bear.

He turned to Truman, now, and his face was filled with the gravity of world conflict.

"You know what's left, on the other side."

A darkness overtook his sable eyes, a high glint then looming in his corneae.

"We've yet to vanquish the Nazis, Mr. President. How long do you think America will wait?"

The Big Chief had capitalized on his popularity with the American public to begin a nationwide speaking tour on interventionism, thousands coming to his rallies from New York City to Chicago, from Nashville to Houston and Sacramento, to hear his unvarnished words taper out into the throngs of his followers.

"It is America's duty to safeguard the rights and freedoms of all the oppressed people in the world.

Remember, my fellow Americans: when the democracies in Europe appeased Hitler, their freedoms were strangled from them, their sovereignty stamped into extinction. It is only by the firm action and resolve of the arsenal of democracy that the free world may survive, and that the American way may persevere into a new age."

He raised his fist, and the intonation of the crowd's cheers rose with him.

"I stand before you not as a general, but as someone who loves liberty and self-determination more than anyone! I will not sit back and watch while so many millions suffer under the keel of German rule! We will not stand for this! We will not wait!"

MacArthur wasn't wrong about one thing: the Germans under their aging Fuhrer had built an empire of persecution and oppression that stretched from Amsterdam to Moscow. Precious little information now spilled out of the European continent, so heavy-handed were Nazi attempts to stifle reports of the malignance of their policies. But what little rang out and trickled across the pond was horrifying.

Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, the disabled, all wiped out from almost the entire continent. Their bodies were burned en masse, as Europe became the great zone of smoke, with the souls of the fallen rising to heaven under the soot that clouded out the sun. Members of Hitler's inner circle were given free reign over the conquered populations, with the East becoming the personal fiefdom of Hitler's sycophants, the droves of Germans that arrived with them treating the locals like vermin. The entire map was cleansed, embittered with the scent of human frailty.

The world was irrevocably split in two. Not just two opposing political systems or worldviews, but of two moral strata, two psychological visions of humanity: one writ with the blood of the persecuted, and the other merely speckled with the entrenchment of discrimination and racist bile veiled as the undercoat to worldwide freedom. Opposing the 'New Order' of Nazi-aligned states, the U.S. had ordained the Toronto Accord as the counterbalance of democratic power in the West, from the shores of Honolulu and Okinawa to the frigid plains of Montreal and the hills of Lancaster.

Thus began the great game between the two powers, propping up their own proxy nations and picking off sinkholes in each other's alliances—the French mainland remained in the Nazi sphere of influence, even as Denmark and Norway chafed under Nazi rule, with significant Accord contact established in the regions as the entrypoint for American intervention. Closer to home, Cuba and the Dominican Republic faced fascist coups and American counter-coups, a dictatorial war of attrition between two falsely buoyant narratives of people's will, willed at the end of a gun.

Nevertheless, the American public wondered at the viability of such a global sweep of freedom, with so many still reeling from the clashes across the Pacific. And so, while the sleeping giant had never awoken, it remained sort of midway between slumber and eternal ascendance.

But MacArthur found a way to galvanize the American soul to his liberation crusade. Harkening back to the Sons of Liberty and the heroes of the Union, he saw America's duty in a righteous mission to rid the world of the fascist menace, while spreading the glow of the States' civilization all over.

"Are we going to sit back while Hitler's iron fist strangles the European continent? When so many of our brethren lie in chains even now, begging for freedom?"

The applause at the rallies was deafening, the crowd itself awakened to MacArthur's brand of interventionism that hadn't been seen since the wreckage at Pearl Harbor. California to Texas, the Carolinas to the Mid-Atlantic Coast, and the land of West Point men and Boston patriots—MacArthur captured the national spirit in a landslide. The country was set down the path of liberation, and there was no going back.

* * *

"Mr. President," he repeated, his hands shoveled into his pockets, his broad face towering over Truman's physique.

"You have served us well," he admitted. Through all their bickering and brazen arguments, it was in the Truman-Macarthur doctrine that American foreign policy had been, and was to be, molded forever; the concordat of the interventionist spirit.

"America will enter a new chapter, as will the globe."

Truman adjusted his glasses, and offered a meek nod in return.

"We're in the point of no return now, General.

More lives will be lost. All—to pay the price of liberty."

Perhaps this was the quintessential question all along: how long would man continue to bludgeon himself, to beat, strangle, burn, bruise, and serrate himself, all under the auspices of a freedom that in all cases was of his own fantasy? How long would he keep sending his fellow man to the battlefields, united under the abstract notion of the service of a greater cause, the vagueness of the command philosophy they were sent to die for.

What more was worth it than the lives that could've been lived, and the stories that were never told in turn?

MacArthur looked back. He nodded himself.

"…There's no greater price to pay for freedom."