OUR HISTORY HERE

By March 1, 1942, the war “back home” was a nightmare. Hitler was strangling Europe, and the Japanese were rampant in the Pacific. Most immediate from my perspective as a . . . mature Australian engineer stranded in Surabaya Java, the Japanese had seized Singapore and Malaysia, destroyed the American Pacific Fleet and neutralized their forces in the Philippines, conquered most of the Dutch East Indies, and were landing on Java. The one-sided Battle of the Java Sea had shredded ABDAFLOAT, a jumble of antiquated American, British, Dutch, and Australian warships united by the vicissitudes of war. Its destruction left the few surviving ships scrambling to slip past the tightening Japanese gauntlet. For most, it was too late.

With several other refugees, I managed to board an old American destroyer, USS Walker , commanded by Lieutenant Commander Matthew Reddy. Whether fate, providence, or mere luck intervened, Walker and her sister Mahan , their gallant destroyermen cruelly depleted by combat, were not fated for the same destruction that claimed their consorts in escape. Instead, at the height of a desperate action against the mighty Japanese battlecruiser Amagi , commanded by the relentless Hisashi Kurokawa, they were . . . engulfed by an anomalous force, manifested as a bizarre greenish squall—and their battered, leaking, war-torn hulks were somehow swept to another world entirely.

I say “another world” because, though geographically similar, there are few additional resemblances. It’s as if whatever cataclysmic event doomed the prehistoric life on “our” earth many millions of years ago never occurred, and those terrifying—fascinating—creatures endured, sometimes evolving down wildly different paths. We quickly discovered “people,” however, calling themselves Mi-Anakka, who are highly intelligent, social folk, with large eyes, fur, and expressive tails. In my ignorance and excitement, I promptly dubbed them Lemurians, based on their strong (if more feline) resemblance to the giant lemurs of Madagascar. (Growing evidence may confirm they sprang from a parallel line, with only the most distant ancestor connecting them to lemurs, but “Lemurians” has stuck.) We just as swiftly learned they were engaged in an existential struggle with a somewhat reptilian species commonly called Grik. Also bipedal, Grik display bristly crests and tail plumage, dreadful teeth and claws, and are clearly descended from the dromaeosaurids in our fossil record.

Aiding the first group against the second—Captain Reddy had no choice—we made fast, true friends who needed our technical expertise as badly as we needed their support. Conversely, we now also had an implacable enemy bent on devouring all competing life. Many bloody battles ensued while we struggled to help our friends against their far more numerous foes, and it is for this reason I sometimes think—when disposed to contemplate “destiny”—that we survived all our previous ordeals and somehow came to this place. I don’t know everything about anything, but I do know a little about a lot. The same was true of Captain Reddy and his US Asiatic Fleet sailors. We immediately commenced trying to even the odds, but militarizing the generally peaceful Lemurians was no simple task. Still, to paraphrase, the prospect of being eaten does focus one’s efforts amazingly, and dire necessity is the mother of industrialization. To this day, I remain amazed by what we accomplished so quickly with so little, especially considering how rapidly and tragically our “brain trust” was consumed by battle.

In the meantime, we discovered other humans—friends and enemies—who joined our cause, required our aid, or posed new threats. Even worse than the Grik (from a moral perspective, in my opinion) was the vile Dominion in South and Central America. A perverse mix of Incan/Aztecan blood-ritual tyranny with a dash of seventeeth-century Catholicism favoring technology brought by earlier travelers, the Dominion’s aims were similar to those of the Grik: conquest, of course, but founded on the principle “Convert or die.”

I now believe that if faced with only one of these enemies, we could’ve prevailed rather quickly despite the odds. Burdened by both, we could never concentrate our forces and the war lingered on. To make matters worse, the Grik were aided by the madman Kurokawa, who, after losing his Amagi at the Battle of Baalkpan, pursued a warped agenda all his own. And just as we came to the monumental conclusion that not all historical human timelines we encountered exactly mirrored ours, we began to feel the malevolent presence of yet another power, centered in the Mediterranean. This League of Tripoli was composed of fascist French, Italian, Spanish, and German factions from a different 1939 than we remembered, and hadn’t merely “crossed over” with a pair of battle-damaged destroyers but possessed a powerful task force originally intended to wrest Egypt—and the Suez Canal—from Great Britain.

We had few open conflicts with the League at first, though they seemed inexplicably intent on subversion. Eventually we discovered their ultimate aim was to aid Kurokawa, the Grik, even the Dominion, just enough to ensure our mutual annihilation, and simultaneously remove multiple threats to the hegemony they craved. But their schemes never reckoned on the valor of our allies or the resolve of Captain Matthew Reddy. Therefore, when their Contre-Amiral Laborde, humiliated by a confrontation, not only sank what was, essentially, a hospital ship with his monstrous dreadnaught Savoie , but also took hostages—including Captain Reddy’s pregnant wife—and turned them AND Savoie over to Kurokawa, we were caught horribly off guard. Tensions with the League escalated dramatically, though not enough to risk open hostilities that neither we—nor they—were ready for. (We later learned such had already occurred in the Caribbean, between USS Donaghey and a League DD, and that 2nd Fleet and General Shinya’s force had suffered a setback in the Americas at the hands of the Dominion.) But we had to deal definitively with Kurokawa at last, and do so at once. As powerful as he’d become, and with a battleship added to his fleet, we simply couldn’t risk our invasion of Grik Africa with him at our backs.

Captain Reddy conceived a brilliant plan to rescue our friends and destroy Kurokawa once and for all, and in a rare fit of cosmic justice, the operation actually proceeded better than planned, resulting in the removal of one long-standing threat forever, and the capture of Savoie herself. The battle was painfully costly, however, and the forces involved too exhausted and ill placed to respond when word came that the Grik were on the move. It became clear that all our hopes for victory depended on a heretofore reluctant ally; how quickly we (and Shinya) could repair, reorganize, and rearm; and the insanely, suicidally daring defiance of some very dear friends aboard the old Santa Catalina . . . .

Excerpt from the foreword to Courtney Bradford’s The Worlds I’ve Wondered University of New Glasgow Press, 1956