Fascist-Communist WWII/Cold War

[eurofed]

The main idea of this scenario is a WWII or Cold War, as the case may be, between a non-Nazi Axis and a Franco-Soviet Communist bloc, with the English-speaking democratic powers staying opportunist neutrals.

The first PoD is the Soviet leadership and foreign policy becoming more aggressive and expansionist since the late 1920s. It might be the result of someone else, such as Zinoviev, becoming supreme leader after Lenin, or Stalin getting a more risk-taking mindset as the effect of his Polish-Soviet War experiences. The main effect is a wave of Communist uprisings that sweeps Europe during the Great Depression, and a more aggressive Soviet stance in Eastern Europe during the 1930s. The second PoD is the Nazi leadership being mostly wiped out during the failed 1923 coup. As a result, the NSDAP remains a marginal fringe in the German political spectrum and the DNVP takes its place as the main far-right party.

As a consequence of these changes, a wave of coups, uprisings, and civil wars occurred in various European nations during the early-mid 1930s, including France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Austria, and Portugal. A Communist uprising was attempted in Britain too in the midst of a general strike but failed. It left the British elites fearful and suspicious of Red destabilization at home and abroad, and largely inclined to regard fascism as the less dangerous aspect of totalitarianism/authoritarianism, its more ‘civilized’ and ‘reasonable’ face so to speak.

The conflict in Germany was fairly brief and not so destructive and led to a far-right victory. A nationalist-militarist authoritarian regime took over that was broadly inspired by, and similar to, Italian fascism. It had Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck or a surviving Manfred von Richthofen as its charismatic strongman and a restored Kaiser (William II’s son) as its figurehead. Its agenda included establishment of a fascist regime, economic stabilization and growth, annexation of German-speaking lands and territories lost after WWI, rearmament, recovery of Germany’s great-power status, and crushing Communism at home and abroad. Much like its Italian model, it persecuted political opponents, especially far-leftists, but its mistreatment of minorities got limited to legal discrimination and harassment of Roma and homosexuals. Jews got badmouthed in propaganda, but apart from ensuring they stayed out of the public sphere, the regime left them be.

Parallel conflict in Austria led to a far-right takeover in that nation too, and the German and Austrian governments soon agreed to terms for a political union of their nations. The Versailles Treaty was torn apart, with the rearmament of Germany, its remilitarization of the Rhineland, and its union with Austria. The British did not mind given the state of things in Europe, the French were busy dealing with their own domestic conflicts, and Mussolini supported it once the Germans agreed to back his foreign policy agenda.

The French civil war got more prolonged and damaging than the German one and ended in a Red victory, mostly because the Soviets provided generous support to the French far-leftists. The British were still fearful of instability at home if they had intervened too openly, and the Germans and Italians got sidetracked by their wish to exploit French weakness to implement their own ambitions, so they failed to provide enough support for the French right-wingers. The victorious French Communists purged the other left-wing factions, ruthlessly persecuted political opponents, and established a Leninist-Stalinist regime. Defeated French right-wingers established a ‘Free France’ government in Algeria, which got a considerable influx of anti-Communist refugees to boost its European population. Despite its name (left-wingers preferred to call it White France), it was an authoritarian right-wing regime that sought to draw support from Britain and the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy in equal amounts.

Fall of France to Communism and the Red Terror that followed sent Britain into a hurry to redraw its foreign policy and a Red Scare at home. The Germans and the Italians were accustomed to think of France as a potential enemy, so they just shifted gears to intensify their antagonism with ideological hostility. Italy exploited French weakness to annex Nice and Corsica, while Germany did the same for Alsace-Lorraine, with the excuse of protecting their ethnic kinsmen from the Red onslaught. The French Communists were busy stabilizing their regime, so they reluctantly let these territorial losses occur without a fight.

The French Reds got a considerable consolation prize when the Belgian Communists were able to unleash a civil war of their own with their help that gave them an excuse to intervene. Fearing for their own security, the Dutch intervened too with British and German support to protect the Flemish. No great power yet felt ready for a general conflict, so it was narrowly avoided with a compromise deal that gave Wallonia to France, the Flanders to the Netherlands, and Eupen-Malmedy and Luxemburg to Germany. Events in France and Germany gave the Soviets ample opportunity to implement their own expansionist agenda in Eastern Europe.

They invaded and annexed the Baltic states without too much effort. Soon afterwards, they attacked Finland, Poland, and Romania. The flaws of the Red Army and the stubborn resistance of the Finns, Poles, and Romanians fuelled by British, German, and Italian support prevented the Soviets from accomplishing their maximum objective of overrunning Eastern Europe. However they were eventually able to accomplish enough military success by sheer brute force to earn a peace deal that got them Karelia, eastern Poland (up to the Curzon line border), Bessarabia, and Bukovina. The British, Germans, and Italians did not feel ready for an intervention to push the Soviets back due to the switch of France to Communism, German rearmament being incomplete, and Italy getting busy with its conquest of Ethiopia. In the chaotic European situation, Italian annexation of Ethiopia largely occurred without a fuss. The Germans annexed Memel during the collapse of Lithuania.

Soon afterwards, instability spread to the Iberian peninsula with another civil war between far-right nationalists and Communist-dominated far-leftists that engulfed Spain and spread to Portugal. The Soviets and the French strived to provide generous support to the left-wingers. However the British, Germans, and Italians, having learnt the lesson of the fall of France, did the same for the right-wingers and staged a naval blockade to prevent Soviet shipping from reaching Iberia. This allowed the Spanish nationalists to win the civil war and annex Portugal. The British accepted Iberian unification as a lesser evil than a Communist Portugal. Italy annexed the Balearic Islands as the price of its support to the Spanish nationalists.

A wish for mutual protection from the common Red threat and ideological affinity soon drove Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, Hungary, and Romania to form a fascist ‘Axis’ bloc with a military alliance and a trade pact. The Poles and the Germans were able to settle their issues with an agreement to return Danzig and a few border areas in West Prussia and Upper Silesia to Germany, create an extraterritorial railway and highway for the Germans through the Corridor, and provide free transit for Polish goods in German ports. The USSR, France, and Mongolia formed a Comintern-based military alliance of their own.

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Germany, Hungary, and Poland with the support of Italy and the acquiescence of Britain picked the pretext of the perceived pro-Soviet stance of Czechoslovakia and supposed mistreatment of its minorities to partition it. Germany got Bohemia-Moravia and Bratislava, Hungary annexed Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia, and Poland got Zaolzie. The Soviets and the French protested the partition but failed to intervene since they did not feel ready for a general conflict.

The British Empire and the USA stayed officially neutral in the growing antagonism between the Axis and the Comintern, condemning the spread of fascism and communism across Europe. In practice, however, the British showed a rather more friendly and cooperative stance towards the Axis most of the time. They regarded it as much less dangerous and a useful tool to contain Communism, even if they were afraid of either bloc getting hegemonic control of Europe. The USA had more of a true neutral stance during the 1930s, even if their attitude towards European affairs was essentially isolationist, due to the hostile stance of the Roosevelt Administration and progressive New Dealers towards fascism. American conservatives and centrists however basically shared the British attitude of regarding Communism as the most dangerous threat, and the Axis as not so bad in comparison. After FDR left the White House in 1941, the American government mostly came to adopt this mindset. Spread of totalitarianism across Europe and Soviet expansionism drove Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland to form a Nordic League, which included a customs union and a military alliance.

The Communists exploited political and ethnic instability in Greece, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria to drive these nations into civil war. The conflict quickly reawakened latent tensions between the Balkan nationalities, turning it into a complex multi-sided struggle. It became a proxy war between the Axis, mostly backed by Britain, and the Comintern. It ended with the breakup of Yugoslavia, a right-wing victory in Croatia and Greece thanks to British and German-Italian support, and a Communist success in Serbia and Bulgaria due to Franco-Soviet aid and traditional pro-Russian sympathies. The victorious Communists established a Balkan Federation of Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Macedonia, and most of Bosnia. Croatia became independent, joined the Axis, and got the Croat-majority areas of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Carniola was partitioned between Germany and Italy. Albania with most of Kosovo became an Italian protectorate. Hungary annexed Backa and Baranja. Italy got central Dalmatia and many Adriatic islands. The Serbian Banat got partitioned between Hungary, Romania, and the Balkan Federation.

Like Free France, Greece took an hostile stance to the Communist bloc but strived to keep friendly relations with Britain and the Axis bloc at the same time. Britain and Italy agreed to cede the Dodecanese and Cyprus to Greece to reinforce it against the Communist threat in exchange for basing rights across the Greek islands. The Balkan Federation joined the Communist military alliance.

Since the late 1920s, the Soviets strongly supported the CCP in its civil war with the KMT. This allowed the Chinese Communists and pro-Soviet warlords to entrench their control of large portions of northern and western China despite the best efforts of the Nationalists to eradicate them. Soviet encroachment in China persuaded the capitalist powers to accept Japan’s seizure of Manchuria and its establishment of the client state of Manchukuo. The Chinese Nationalists adopted a policy of nation-building, trying to avoid a direct conflict with Japan or the USSR, focusing on getting control of China proper by crushing the CCP and subduing the warlords, and treating the outer frontier territories as acceptable losses. They tried to enhance their economic and military cooperation with Britain, the USA, and Germany to strengthen themselves.

Border tensions and clashing ambitions in China between the USSR and Japan peaked into an undeclared war. Its inconclusive outcome left the Soviet-Japanese land border mostly unchanged, but allowed Japan to gain control of northern Sakhalin. It drove the USSR to annex Xinjiang and seize Inner Mongolia for their Mongolian clients. The conflict and lingering antagonism with the USSR forced the Japanese to drop any plans to directly dominate China by military conquest. They had to focus their resources on containing Soviet power and their efforts to spread their influence in China largely turned into a mix of supporting pro-Japanese warlords in northern China and trying to woo the KMT to their side. The Soviet-Japanese conflict indirectly entrenched the Chinese Civil War as a three-sided proxy war between the USSR, Japan, and the KMT. Nationalist Chinese public opinion mostly turned equally hostile towards the Soviets and the Japanese.

Japan became an unofficial member of the Axis alliance to try and contain the Soviets in the Far East. This drove the Germans into a complex balancing act to keep the Japanese and the Chinese both aligned to their side. The British and more so the Americans stayed suspicious of Japanese ambitions in China and the Pacific, but they found Japan useful as a tool to contain Communism in Asia. They showed they did not mind a Japanese sphere of influence in Manchuria, Mongolia, and the Russian Far East.

By the early 1940s, the democratic, fascist, and communist powers were all rather busy with extensive rearmament plans and ambitious dual-purpose infrastructure- and industry-building programs that helped world economy dispel the lingering effects of the Great Depression and the 1930s conflicts. The world stood at a crossroads, with growing antagonism between the fascist and communist blocs having the potential of escalating into the spasm of another World War or settling down into an extended Cold War.

The French civil war and the downfall of Belgium and Portugal led to a relatively extensive realignment of the European colonial empires. As a rule, most French colonies stayed loyal to White France. The main exceptions were French Equatorial Africa, which switched its loyalties to Red France, as well as French Indochina and Syria, which were swept by radical-nationalist uprisings backed by the Comintern. The capitalist European powers perceived these events as a serious threat to their own interests, so they took steps to suppress them. A multinational European effort supported the Free French into re-conquering French Equatorial Africa, while the British occupied Syria and French Indochina. The Kingdom of Iraq, a British client state, got administration of Syria, and Indochina got autonomy under joint Anglo-Free French control with a government of conservative nationalists.

Since the fall of France to Communism, Germany had claimed restitution of the colonies it had lost after WWI, while Italy had eyed an opportunity to fulfill its own expansionist ambitions. Eventually all of these issues became part of a general settlement. Germany agreed to drop all its other claims in exchange for annexation of Gabon, Middle Congo, Belgian Congo, and Angola. Italy got Tunisia, French Somaliland, and Mozambique. Spain and Free France swapped French Morocco for Portuguese Guinea and Spanish Guinea.

Despite these interventions, however, 1930s events in Europe and Asia and the relentless destabilization activities of the Comintern helped fuel a wave of anti-colonial nationalism and instability in the European colonial empires. It was essentially centered in India, the Arab world, and Southeast Asia, while Sub-Saharan Africa mostly remained unaffected. The British faced increasing difficulties at denying the claims for independence of India, Egypt, and Syria-Iraq, while the Spanish, French Whites, and Italians brutally suppressed any Arab dissent in their own colonies. The Soviets and the French supported Communist and radical nationalist rebels in Asia as much as possible, which increased tensions between the Communist bloc and the capitalist European powers.