History has never been one of my strong points. In fact, I'm highly ambivalent about it. There's too much war in history.

Leon Trotsky has a quote that applies to this: "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."

On the other hand, I'm fascinated by figures like Napoleon and Leonides. In novels and history books I cheer on the British navy at the Nile. I root for the doomed Spartans at Thermopylae. I watch the History Channel late into the night, and I can hum the major themes of Victory at Sea.

This is an ambivalence about war and history that I share with many people.

War taken by itself, out of its historical context, is mankind ruled by his reptile brain. Behaving like so many dinosaurs, we use the age's best technology to swarm each other's nests. Tell me there's a redeeming virtue in this. At the same time, over 2,500 years of history, there have been moments when military events changed, or failed to change, everything. Things went one way. They might have gone the other.

A new book of essays published this month has got me thinking about these historical might-have-beens, or "counterfactuals" as the historians say. The book is titled What If? as in "What if a mysterious plague had NOT smitten the Assyrian besiegers of Jerusalem in 701 B.C.? Would there have been a Jewish religion? Or Christianity?"

Historian and editor Robert Cowley wonders in his introduction, "Talk about split-second outcomes: What if the upswing of a battle-ax had not been interrupted and a twenty-one year-old Alexander had been killed before he became 'The Great'? Or if Cortes had been captured (as he nearly was) at the siege of Tenochtitlan, today's Mexico City? It's very likely that a young United States would have had to deal with a major Native American empire on its southern border."

Editor Cowley observes, "For historians, as the maxim goes, the dominos fall backward. In What If we will attempt to make them fall forward."

This book is absolutely great reading. It's easy to browse, easy to read straight through. It makes you think, and it makes you want to read more books. All the contributors, no matter how erudite, strive for clarity and simplicity. Unfortunately, in aiming at a popular readership the publisher chose to omit a bibliography, index and chapter notes, and all these would have been useful.

But it's pretty good as is. The writers in What If? are history's heavyweights -- Stephen Ambrose, John Keegan, James M. McPherson, and others. There also are chapters by historical novelist Cecelia Holland, historian and biographer David McCullough and journalist Tom Wicker, plus brief sidebars from other writers. The idea for this book was hatched in a quarterly military history journal. Still, even haters of war can learn a lot from this book.

In each What If scenario the writer tells what actually happened, and speculates on what could have happened differently, and what the long-term consequences might have been.

Cecelia Holland asks, "What if the Mongols had managed to conquer Europe in 1242?" The Mongol army was unstoppable. These nomadic horse warriors were in sight of Vienna when they suddenly turned back towards Asia. They already had destroyed two Christian armies, one in Poland and another in Hungary. There was nothing much to stop them from reaching the Atlantic and "leaving a killing field detritus behind them." What stopped them? Blind luck, it turned out.

What if Chiang Kai-shek had managed to destroy the Chinese communist forces in Manchuria in 1946? Would there be two Chinas after World War II? There might have been no Korean War, no Viet Nam War, no Cambodia, no crises in the Formosa Strait, no Red Scare in America.

What if Annie Oakley had killed Germany's Kaiser at her Wild West Show in Berlin in 1889? What if a nuclear war had started in 1983 because the Russians panicked over a US military exercise?

Leon Trotsky was right. War IS interested in you.

Aired Friday September 17, 1999 at 8:35 am and Sunday September 19, 1999 at 10:55 am