The Man With The Iron Heart: A Review

It's not often that I feel moved to review books on this emblogulation but in the case of Harry Turtledove's "The Man With The Iron Heart" I simply had to.
I've had a love/hate relationship with Turtledove's work for some years. I find his concepts good but his writing poor, and so while good sense should have prevented me from even picking up this book, I was intrigued by the idea of the Nazi resistance movement, the Werewolves, as a potent force.
I needn't have bothered. The book has almost nothing to do with WW2 and is simply an allegory for the current war in Iraq. In this respect it lends itself to an earlier short story by Turtledove exploring the ramifications of a hostile press to the US war effort in WW2. In that story, however, at least the details were correct. In TMWTIH a great many details, such as the anti-Nazi sentiment of the US population and the German population, are simply ignored.
Mr Turtledove presents us with a world in which the Germans hide in the Alpine Redoubt and strike at the occupiers with suicide bombers and other terrorist tactics. He should have done some reading. An Alpine Redoubt was extensively planned by the Nazis but work was begun too late in the war to complete it in time. This redoubt, however, was designed to house regiments, armament factories and Messerschmidt squadrons in order to continue conventional war.
My main problem with this book however is the author's treatment of the home front. He has congressmen and housewives begin an anti-occupation movement. His use of Congressmen and not Senators is very telling. In the real world, any opposition to State policy regarding the Nazis would have come to the attention of Senator McCarthy and his House Committee on Un-American Activities. While this body is more well known for the communist witch-hunts of the 50s and 60s, it was formed after the declaration of war in 1941 with the mandate of hunting down Nazi sympathisers within America, with the help of the FBI. The fact that Mr Turtledove used these elements in his earlier short story but chooses to omit them here makes TMWTIH a sham, a fake. One gets the impression that it's nothing but a pro-Iraq right-wing propaganda tool seeking to paint the US government and military in an angelic light whilst showing the short-sightedness and stupidity of all those who oppose it. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not what the book was marketed as and frankly, i'm not interested in it. I like my alternate history to be intelligent, plausible and not a political allegory. This book was less Turtledove and more Turkey.