Marching Through Georgia (novel)

Plot

The story starts with Centurion Eric von Shrakenberg in a cargo airplane with his airborne unit and the embedded American correspondent William Dreiser, on their way to their drop point, where they will jump and parasail into Nazi-controlled Georgia. The Nazis have been much more successful than in our history, since the Soviets had to divert resources to defend their southern border against the Domination of the Draka. As a result, the Nazis managed to overrun European Russia. The Soviet Union has been pushed back and only controls territories east of the Ural Mountains. However, the Germans are seriously overstretched, and vulnerable to a strong attack. During the travel to their drop zone, Eric thinks back on his past and his relationship with his father, and his most recent visit home to see his family. This was the first visit in several years, his exile was due to his arranging the escape of his serf daughter to America. Eric's bravery in the earlier Draka conquest of Italy led to his former "mistake" being forgiven.

Eric's "Century" (a term derived from the Roman Empire's army) ends up being seriously under-supplied because the gliders with the artillery went into a canyon. The engineers are frantically building a rubble ramp, but the heavy weapons won't be available for the battle. The story details how Eric's single infantry company takes and holds a small village strategically located on the crucial Ossetian Military Highway over the Caucasus Mountains. The balance of the First Airborne Legion is the plug which is holding four German divisions from escaping the trap they are in on the south side of the mountains. Eric's unit is tasked with holding the highway and village against repeated attacks by Felix Hoth's Waffen-SS armored regiment, which is fighting to clear the highway so the German divisions can escape. Eric's company manages to hold out long enough for the Draka to crush the four divisions, cross the mountains, and relieve his unit. Holding this highway and village is the critical act of the invasion of Russia. This lets the Draka's essentially undamaged and superior armored and mechanized units to penetrate into the plains of Southern Russia, where they can bring to battle and destroy the overstretched and exhausted German forces. It also leads to Eric being awarded the Domination's highest medal of valor, the aurora, "for saving 10,000 Citizen lives," and which makes him immune to Security Directorate reprisals for his "treasonous utterances" or for his earlier "indiscretion." The action of Century A is the pivotal event at the beginning of the invasion of Russia that allows the Domination to eventually win the Eurasian War.

Main characters

Reception

Algis Budrys reported that Marching Through Georgia "is not, in other words, a novel at all, and will be a disappointment if you read it with the wrong expectation"; he noted that while it was "interesting," it presented "real battles in an unreal world."

The book's title is derived from the well-known American Civil War song Marching Through Georgia. Caroline Housmans wrote in her review:"To a reader coming to this book and unexpectedly encountering the highly unpleasant Draka society dreamed up by Mr. Stirling, the title creates a double confusion. First, the Georgia of this book is the Caucasian country rather than the US State of the same name. More fundamentally, the song celebrates troops who fought to emancipate slaves, while the book's Draka troops are fighting to spread and extend slavery, to enslave everybody who is not a Draka. If this is Stirling's idea of a joke, in this commentator's view it is a poor one."