By Blbpaws
07/11/06
Following the successful release of Command and Conquer in 1995, Command and Conquer: Red Alert was Westwood Studios’ next Real Time Strategy game. Enjoying tremendous success, it placed the player in an alternate history war between the Allied powers and the Soviet Union. Here, we’ll look at just where the game came from, and its numerous connections to real life.
Einstein, Tesla, and the Philadelphia Experiment
The premise of Red Alert hinges on Albert Einstein’s secret belief that World War II could be prevented, and many the many lives lost could be saved. While working with Nikola Tesla on a Navy Project to achieve invisibility in naval warfare an event known as the Philadelphia Experiment occurred. In Red Alert, this event is caused by an attempt gone horribly wrong to make the USS Eldridge utterly invisible to light and radar, by bending the space-time continuum around it. In the game, the ship vanishes for seven to ten minutes, and, when it reappears, the results are terrible; crew members suffer numerous ailments, and some are supposedly embedded in the hull.
In actuality, this part of the backstory is almost certainly based off the real Philadelphia Experiment conspiracy. The conspiracy is based off a similar event that supposedly happened to the USS Eldridge, an actual ship, in 1943, where, in an attempt to induce invisibility, the ship disappeared, and, according to various versions of the story, crew members suffered severe injuries, including some regarding contact with or embedding in the hull. There has been much speculation about the event, including some that Einstein and perhaps Tesla (whose death date is not known for certain, but is believed to be in 1943), were involved in it somehow. The official Navy record denies the event entirely, and many other sources discredit it. It was recounted in the book Invisible Mysteries, and a segment was run about it on the History Channel’s series History’s Mysteries. Morris Jessup, an astronomer and researcher, published The Case for the UFO in 1955, and received contact from an alleged eyewitness of the Philadelphia Experiment. In 1957, an anonymously sent—believed to have been sent by the eyewitness who contacted Jessup—but heavily annotated copy of the book was sent to Official of Naval Research, and Jessup was summoned there. After being seriously injured in a car crash, Morris Jessup committed suicide in 1959.
There is no doubt there is some connection between Red Alert’s Philadelphia Experiment, and the event that supposedly occurred in 1943. Louis Castle has said that a lot of the basis for Red Alert came from research Westwood was doing for Command and Conquer, and it’s certainly quite likely that the tales of the USS Eldridge came up in the research and heavily influenced the creation of the storyline.
Unified Field Theory and the Temporal Paradox
In Red Alert, Einstein learns from the Philadelphia Experiment, and uses it to significantly advance his understanding of the space-time continuum, eventually leading to his work with “chronoshifting”--travel through space and time, such as is seen in some versions of the legends surrounding the USS Eldridge. In Red Alert, Einstein pursues his own secret agenda of preventing World War II, and travels back in time to 1924 to shake the hand of Adolf Hitler, believing that doing so will erase him completely from time, preventing the war. He is successful in doing this.
Einstein’s belief in Red Alert stems from his real-life advocacy of the Unified Field Theory, a supposed theory of everything that attempts to reconcile the four principle forces of the universe: the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity. Einstein’s quest for this theory ended with his death in 1955, and humans have still not yet managed to work the theory out. One facet of the theory is known as the Temporal Paradox, which states, in essence, that should a being from the future be able to interact with a being of the past, as Einstein did with Hitler, the ensuing paradox would result in the being of the future being thrown into flux, and into the future again, and the being from the past erased from time. While different variations of theoretical physics today give different opinions on this paradox, thought has been given to it, and it’s an issue addressed often in theoretical physics. Perhaps most compelling is physicist Stephen Hawking’s belief in a Chronology Protection Conjecture, a conjecture which states that time travel is barred by the laws of physics on a large scale. Different versions of physical theory and this conjecture make exceptions to that, stating that such time travel would be acceptable in cases of a parallel universe—such as the one expressed by Westwood in Red Alert. Also interesting is the fact that much work on the conjecture was published in the early to mid 1990s, as Westwood Studios conducted its research for the Command and Conquer games.
Elements of War
Many units in Red Alert take their basis from real life, generally World War II, weapons. The V2, wielded by the Soviets in Red Alert, was actually a German weapon in use during World War II—the V stands for the German word Vergeltungswaffe, meaning “reprisal weapon.” The Soviet Missile Sub seen in Red Alert expansions may also be based off the sub-based V2 rocket system that was tested, but never extensively used, in WWII.
The Tesla weapons (seen in various forms across the series, including as base defense and as tank-mounted) are extensions of the real life Tesla Coil, an electric device set up by Nikola Tesla. They may also be based on Tesla’s research into a “death ray” based off ball lightning—very similar to what is seen as the Tesla Coil in Red Alert and Red Alert 2. After Tesla’s death, his work in this area was quickly taken by the FBI, and declared “most secret” by J. Edgar Hoover (according to FBI files). Some of these files have been released to the Nikola Tesla museum in Belgrade, Serbia, but many remain classified.
The basis for the name of the Soviet Iron Curtain weapon—a weapon that grants invincibility for a short period of time—is almost certainly from a line from a March 5, 1946 speech by Winston Churchill warning of the grave and growing Soviet threat: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an ‘iron curtain’ has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.” Churchill did not invent the term—it was first used in 1820—but its use is now almost exclusively related to the period of Soviet conquest and aggression.
Itself an Origin
Red Alert itself was indeed the prequel to the rest of the Command and Conquer series, and many characters, such as Kane and Tanya, are developed much more fully later on. The success of Red Alert has led many to believe that eventually there will be a Red Alert 3 fully uniting and explaining the connection between the Red Alert 2—the sequel to Red Alert that appears much more disjointed in terms of story premise—storyline and the rest of the Command and Conquer series. In the end, we should look at Red Alert as an integral part of the Command and Conquer story; Westwood certainly did, and the level of thought, imagination, and research put into developing the game and its story clearly reflects this.
