Post by eurofed on Feb 19, 2018 1:57:01 GMT
Thinking about the strategic implications of the Great War in my “different 1860s” TL gave me the inspiration to replicate much of the same circumstances (if with a switched role for Britain and Russia) in alt-WWII. In creating yet another alt-WWII scenario of mine, I cannot really resist my typical urge to give the Axis powers a good chance at getting a better outcome than OTL (and even be the ‘good guys’) if I can get away with it. This largely concerns my fondness for the pre-WWII shape of Germany, Italy, and Japan in geopolitical, strategic, and economic terms, my dislike of WWII-born national stereotypes, and a wish to reshuffle the OTL deck. Therefore, the main concept of this scenario is a NATO- or Western Allies-style coalition of Britain, the Dominions, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and various Eastern European states fighting a Communist alliance of the Franco-Iberian union, the USSR, the Balkan Federation, Turkey, China, and Indochina.
The Allied nations are liberal democracies or at most, right-wing authoritarian regimes that are sufficiently moderate in their practices (i.e. no Nazism or equivalent policies) their presence in the coalition creates no significant political cohesion problems. The TL privileges the former by default but for the sake of inclusive alt-historical variance, accepts the latter as an option. The only restraint about this is all of Germany, Italy, and Japan are either liberal democratic or moderate right-wing authoritarian at once. The USA by default is a friendly neutral to the Allies that provides them economic, political, and diplomatic support, but may join the war with a sufficient motive.
The scenario starts to unfold in the aftermath of WWI when the Soviets decisively defeat the Poles in the Polish-Soviet war and overrun all of Poland, annexing it. They exploit the strategic advantage thus gained to conquer Finland and the Baltic states as well. Success emboldens the Communists to step up their efforts to export their revolution by force and subversion across Europe. Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria fall to the Reds, and the Red Army invades Germany. The Germans rearm to counter the invasion, with the benevolent support of the British, Americans, and Italians that feel threatened by Soviet expansionism. Communist uprisings in Germany, Italy, and Britain fail, although they cement the anti-Communist attitude of their governments.
France feels equally threatened by the Germans and the Soviets, and this causes a fatal split in the French right-wingers. In comparison, the imperative to defend the Fatherland from aggression or the absence of foreign threats make the German and Italian anti-Communist forces much more effective at fighting foreign and domestic enemies. The French start a clumsy attempt to invade western Germany, angering the British and the Americans that retaliate with economic sanctions. War-weariness causes a new wave of mutinies in the French army, further throwing the invasion into disarray and allowing the Germans to contain it. Economic collapse, the mutinies, and the division between anti-German and anti-Soviet partisans plunge France into a confused sequence of coups, counter-coups, and uprisings that ensue in a civil war.
Logistic overextension of the Soviet forces and national mobilization allow the Germans to push back the Communist invasion and occupy western Poland and Bohemia-Moravia. However, concerns about their own war weariness and potential revolutionary instability as well as the French threat drive the Germans to accept a compromise peace with the USSR. Germany re-establishes its 1914 border and annexes Austria and the Sudetenland. The Czech Republic forms a confederation with the Reich. The USSR annexes Poland, Finland, the Baltic nations, and Slovakia as various SSRs.
The Reds win the civil war in France and are even able to expand the conflict to Belgium. However, Germany and Italy exploit the situation to occupy and annex Alsace-Lorraine, Nice, and Corsica. The French Communists and the Dutch intervene in the Belgian civil war, the latter with the support of the Brtiish and the Germans. The Low Countries conflict ends in a compromise peace that gives Wallonia to Red France and the Flanders to the Netherlands. Soon afterwards, political and economic tensions plunge Spain too into a civil war between right-wingers and radical left-wingers. Support pouring from France across the Pyrenees allows the Spanish Reds to win the civil war despite all the attempts of the British, Germans, and Italians to do the same for the right-wingers. The victorious Reds are also able to destabilize, invade, and overrun Portugal as well. Communist France, Spain, and Portugal merge into the Latin Popular Union (LPU).
Because of the fall of Russia and France to Communism, Britain and America switch to give strong support to the other remaining capitalist great powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) in economic, political, and diplomatic terms, and by backing their reasonable territorial demands. Because of this, the Italians, after suppressing domestic instability at home, feel empowered to impose their preferred solution against Yugoslavia in the dispute about Fiume, Dalmatia, and Albania by force. The Italian-Yugoslav conflict sees Italy victorious and allows it to annex Fiume and coastal Dalmatia, and establish its protectorate on Slovenia and Albania. Defeat and ongoing Communist attempts to destabilize the Balkans plunge Yugoslavia into civil war, causing its breakup. The Communists take over Serbia and merge it with Bulgaria in the Balkan Federation, while Croatia goes independent. The Hungarians exploit the situation to annex Vojvodina.
Conflicting claims between Hungary and Romania about Transylvania cause a war between the two states, which the Soviets and the Balkan Communists soon exploit to intervene. Defeated Romania has to cede Northern Transylvania to Hungary, Bessarabia to the USSR, and Southern Dobruja to the BF. The capitalist great powers however pressure the Hungarians to switch sides and support Romania after their demands are satisfied, and this prevents a total Communist victory in Romania.
Foreign policy successes and reconciliation with the Anglosphere powers help Germany and Italy stabilize into functional liberal democracies, although the local Communists remain banned and persecuted by police. To pacify the right-wingers, Germany restores the Hohenzollern on the throne, as well the other most prestigious dynasties (the Welf, Wettin, Wittelsbach, and Habsburg) in various German states. Hungary too puts a different branch of the Habsburg back on the throne.
Defeated French and Iberian right-wingers set up White governments in Algeria and Morocco respectively with the support of anti-Communist refugees. They also keep the southern portion of the Cadiz region thanks to the military support of the British and the Italians, who are eager to keep strategic control of the Gibraltar Strait. However, the other great powers take over several of the most economically or strategically valuable colonial and island territories of the fallen states. Germany takes Cameroon, Congo, and Angola. Italy seizes the Balearic Islands, Tunisia, Chad, and French Somaliland, and conquers Ethiopia in a short colonial war. The Netherlands takes East Timor. Britain seizes the Azores, the Canaries, Mozambique, and various other European colonies. White France and White Iberia keep control of West African colonies in a condominium.
In Asia, pro-Soviet radicals seize the leadership of the nationalist movement in postwar Turkey thanks to Communist support and the sudden death of Ataturk. They defeat their rightwing opponents and Armenian nationalists as the British, French, and Italians pull out from Anatolia because of instability in Europe.
However, timely survival of King Alexander allows the Greeks to win the war with Turkey and keep control of Thrace, the Straits zone, and the western coast of Anatolia. Britain and Italy agree to cede Cyprus and Dodecanese to Greece in exchange for basing rights across the Greek territory. The British take over Syria and merge it with Iraq and Kuwait in the Hassamite-ruled kingdom of Greater Syria, a client state of theirs like Egypt. Communist attempts to spread revolutionary instability across the Arab lands ultimately fail for the time being because of Arab disorganization and factionalism, although their meddling helps the Rashids defeat the Saudis and unify the Arabian Peninsula as the state of Rashidi Arabia.
The British are also able to suppress revolutionary uprisings in India with some serious effort, although the Indian subcontinent remains a hotbed of nationalist agitation. In Indochina, local radical nationalists and Communists exploit instability on France to defeat local French garrisons and right-wingers. They set up the Indochinese Popular Union across former French Indochina.
In the Far East, Japan consolidates its control of Outer Manchuria and northern Sakhalin with the support of Britain and America that come to see it as a useful counterbalance to Soviet Russia. For similar reasons, the Western powers accept Japanese takeover of Inner Manchuria from China in the throes of warlord chaos. The Japanese expel most of the Russian and Han settlers and replace them with Japanese and Korean colonists. A Red Army busy in Europe fails to displace the Japanese and the reluctant Soviets accept the facts on the ground for the time being, redirecting their efforts to the revolutionary destabilization of China. The Japanese annex northern Sakhalin and set up greater Manchuria as a Far Eastern client state, although they later annex it as well once the region gets sufficiently pacified and colonized.
Soviet support and the assassination of Chiang Kai-Shek allow the pro-Soviet, left-wing faction of the Kuomintang to seize the upper hand and form a united front with the Chinese Communists. The resulting far-left and radical nationalist coalition gradually defeats all the other warlord and rightwing forces in southern and central China, reunifies most of China proper under its control, and establishes the People’s Republic of China. Only in part of Northern China (Chahar, Suiyuan, Hebei, Shanxi, and Shandong) and Hainan, a coalition of pro-Japanese warlords and right-winger Nationalists is able to consolidate its rule with Japanese military support and form the Republic of China. The British support the secession of Tibet from China and its independence as a client state of theirs as a way to protect India. The USSR annexes Xinjiang and Mongolia as a compensation for its losses in the Far East.
Since the Sino-Soviet threat keeps the Japanese far-right nationalists and militarists busy and distracted, Japan achieved a largely satisfying postwar territorial settlement, and keeps friendly relations with the Western powers, the Japanese Empire finds favorable conditions to evolve into a stable liberal democracy that grants enfranchisement to and strives to assimilate the overseas territories. However, the Japanese military remains an autonomous and influential state within a state.
Postwar expansion of Communism scares the capitalist great powers into countering it by a policy mix that includes attempts to appease the masses through social reforms that create functional welfare systems, ruthless police and judicial repression of Communist movements, and formation of an international united front. The resulting economic cooperation prevents any equivalent of the Great Depression from occurring and largely stabilizes the Western economies in good conditions. Economic conditions of Italy and Japan further improve because of the discovery of vast oilfields in Libya and Manchuria, which the Italians and the Japanese promptly exploit thanks to British and American technical assistance. Economic prosperity and social reforms stabilize the political landscape in the Western nations, frustrating all Communist attempts at infiltration and destabilization.
Reconciliation between the great powers eventually leads to the creation of an anti-Communist military alliance between Britain, the Dominions, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, Romania, Croatia, Greece, and Japan. The alliance’s official name is the Atlantic-Pacific Defense Organization (APDO), although another common name is the Anti-Comintern Pact (ACP). Albeit remaining officially neutral because of its isolationist tradition, the USA pledges its generous economic, political, and diplomatic support to the alliance, and mostly works as an associate in non-military matters. Much the same way, Sweden too remains officially neutral but in practice cooperates with the APDO most of the time because of the Soviet threat in the Baltic.
On their own side, the members of the Communist bloc (the USSR, the LPU, the Balkan Federation, Turkey, Indochina, and the PRC) mostly work as a cohesive alliance in their own way, despite all the potential tensions from leadership rivalries, conflicting territorial claims, nationalist conflicts, and ideological variance. Reasons for this unity include ideological affinity, the perceived common threat from hostile capitalist powers, the economic and military benefits from cooperation in a world that hates and fears their ilk, and influence of the Comintern organization that works hard to ensure unity between the Communist states and movements. The only real danger of a serious split initially manifests in the form of potential rivalry between the leaders of the USSR and the LPU, but the strategic situation persuades the two sides to bury their difference and agree to a power-sharing deal within the Comintern leadership.
The world remains in an uneasy, tense Cold War-style peace for a couple decades as the ruling elites of the two emergent blocs consolidate their power in their respective domains after the upheavals of WWI and postwar revolutionary chaos. Stabilize and build up their economies, and pursue rearmament. As time goes on, however, the Comintern leaders feel more and more confident thanks to their power base built up through ruthless industrialization and aggressive rearmament, as well as ruthless repression of all domestic resistance to their rule. They grow more inclined to pursue their world revolution and global conquest ambitions through renewed revolutionary destabilization and military aggression.
On their part, the capitalist powers feel more and more threatened by growing Communist power, ambitions, and aggressiveness. They become more and more inclined to suppress them by force thanks to economic and political stabilization at home, fading of post-WWI war weariness, their own ambitious rearmament and united front, and a feeling decisive action would give better chances of survival than tarrying too long. Sometime between the late 1930s and the early-mid 1940s, one flashpoint or another in Europe or Asia, or quite possibly several ones activating concurrently or in quick succession, lead to one crisis too many between the blocs. Tensions escalate, lines in the sand are drawn, alliances activate, and another world war occurs.
The Allied nations are liberal democracies or at most, right-wing authoritarian regimes that are sufficiently moderate in their practices (i.e. no Nazism or equivalent policies) their presence in the coalition creates no significant political cohesion problems. The TL privileges the former by default but for the sake of inclusive alt-historical variance, accepts the latter as an option. The only restraint about this is all of Germany, Italy, and Japan are either liberal democratic or moderate right-wing authoritarian at once. The USA by default is a friendly neutral to the Allies that provides them economic, political, and diplomatic support, but may join the war with a sufficient motive.
The scenario starts to unfold in the aftermath of WWI when the Soviets decisively defeat the Poles in the Polish-Soviet war and overrun all of Poland, annexing it. They exploit the strategic advantage thus gained to conquer Finland and the Baltic states as well. Success emboldens the Communists to step up their efforts to export their revolution by force and subversion across Europe. Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria fall to the Reds, and the Red Army invades Germany. The Germans rearm to counter the invasion, with the benevolent support of the British, Americans, and Italians that feel threatened by Soviet expansionism. Communist uprisings in Germany, Italy, and Britain fail, although they cement the anti-Communist attitude of their governments.
France feels equally threatened by the Germans and the Soviets, and this causes a fatal split in the French right-wingers. In comparison, the imperative to defend the Fatherland from aggression or the absence of foreign threats make the German and Italian anti-Communist forces much more effective at fighting foreign and domestic enemies. The French start a clumsy attempt to invade western Germany, angering the British and the Americans that retaliate with economic sanctions. War-weariness causes a new wave of mutinies in the French army, further throwing the invasion into disarray and allowing the Germans to contain it. Economic collapse, the mutinies, and the division between anti-German and anti-Soviet partisans plunge France into a confused sequence of coups, counter-coups, and uprisings that ensue in a civil war.
Logistic overextension of the Soviet forces and national mobilization allow the Germans to push back the Communist invasion and occupy western Poland and Bohemia-Moravia. However, concerns about their own war weariness and potential revolutionary instability as well as the French threat drive the Germans to accept a compromise peace with the USSR. Germany re-establishes its 1914 border and annexes Austria and the Sudetenland. The Czech Republic forms a confederation with the Reich. The USSR annexes Poland, Finland, the Baltic nations, and Slovakia as various SSRs.
The Reds win the civil war in France and are even able to expand the conflict to Belgium. However, Germany and Italy exploit the situation to occupy and annex Alsace-Lorraine, Nice, and Corsica. The French Communists and the Dutch intervene in the Belgian civil war, the latter with the support of the Brtiish and the Germans. The Low Countries conflict ends in a compromise peace that gives Wallonia to Red France and the Flanders to the Netherlands. Soon afterwards, political and economic tensions plunge Spain too into a civil war between right-wingers and radical left-wingers. Support pouring from France across the Pyrenees allows the Spanish Reds to win the civil war despite all the attempts of the British, Germans, and Italians to do the same for the right-wingers. The victorious Reds are also able to destabilize, invade, and overrun Portugal as well. Communist France, Spain, and Portugal merge into the Latin Popular Union (LPU).
Because of the fall of Russia and France to Communism, Britain and America switch to give strong support to the other remaining capitalist great powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) in economic, political, and diplomatic terms, and by backing their reasonable territorial demands. Because of this, the Italians, after suppressing domestic instability at home, feel empowered to impose their preferred solution against Yugoslavia in the dispute about Fiume, Dalmatia, and Albania by force. The Italian-Yugoslav conflict sees Italy victorious and allows it to annex Fiume and coastal Dalmatia, and establish its protectorate on Slovenia and Albania. Defeat and ongoing Communist attempts to destabilize the Balkans plunge Yugoslavia into civil war, causing its breakup. The Communists take over Serbia and merge it with Bulgaria in the Balkan Federation, while Croatia goes independent. The Hungarians exploit the situation to annex Vojvodina.
Conflicting claims between Hungary and Romania about Transylvania cause a war between the two states, which the Soviets and the Balkan Communists soon exploit to intervene. Defeated Romania has to cede Northern Transylvania to Hungary, Bessarabia to the USSR, and Southern Dobruja to the BF. The capitalist great powers however pressure the Hungarians to switch sides and support Romania after their demands are satisfied, and this prevents a total Communist victory in Romania.
Foreign policy successes and reconciliation with the Anglosphere powers help Germany and Italy stabilize into functional liberal democracies, although the local Communists remain banned and persecuted by police. To pacify the right-wingers, Germany restores the Hohenzollern on the throne, as well the other most prestigious dynasties (the Welf, Wettin, Wittelsbach, and Habsburg) in various German states. Hungary too puts a different branch of the Habsburg back on the throne.
Defeated French and Iberian right-wingers set up White governments in Algeria and Morocco respectively with the support of anti-Communist refugees. They also keep the southern portion of the Cadiz region thanks to the military support of the British and the Italians, who are eager to keep strategic control of the Gibraltar Strait. However, the other great powers take over several of the most economically or strategically valuable colonial and island territories of the fallen states. Germany takes Cameroon, Congo, and Angola. Italy seizes the Balearic Islands, Tunisia, Chad, and French Somaliland, and conquers Ethiopia in a short colonial war. The Netherlands takes East Timor. Britain seizes the Azores, the Canaries, Mozambique, and various other European colonies. White France and White Iberia keep control of West African colonies in a condominium.
In Asia, pro-Soviet radicals seize the leadership of the nationalist movement in postwar Turkey thanks to Communist support and the sudden death of Ataturk. They defeat their rightwing opponents and Armenian nationalists as the British, French, and Italians pull out from Anatolia because of instability in Europe.
However, timely survival of King Alexander allows the Greeks to win the war with Turkey and keep control of Thrace, the Straits zone, and the western coast of Anatolia. Britain and Italy agree to cede Cyprus and Dodecanese to Greece in exchange for basing rights across the Greek territory. The British take over Syria and merge it with Iraq and Kuwait in the Hassamite-ruled kingdom of Greater Syria, a client state of theirs like Egypt. Communist attempts to spread revolutionary instability across the Arab lands ultimately fail for the time being because of Arab disorganization and factionalism, although their meddling helps the Rashids defeat the Saudis and unify the Arabian Peninsula as the state of Rashidi Arabia.
The British are also able to suppress revolutionary uprisings in India with some serious effort, although the Indian subcontinent remains a hotbed of nationalist agitation. In Indochina, local radical nationalists and Communists exploit instability on France to defeat local French garrisons and right-wingers. They set up the Indochinese Popular Union across former French Indochina.
In the Far East, Japan consolidates its control of Outer Manchuria and northern Sakhalin with the support of Britain and America that come to see it as a useful counterbalance to Soviet Russia. For similar reasons, the Western powers accept Japanese takeover of Inner Manchuria from China in the throes of warlord chaos. The Japanese expel most of the Russian and Han settlers and replace them with Japanese and Korean colonists. A Red Army busy in Europe fails to displace the Japanese and the reluctant Soviets accept the facts on the ground for the time being, redirecting their efforts to the revolutionary destabilization of China. The Japanese annex northern Sakhalin and set up greater Manchuria as a Far Eastern client state, although they later annex it as well once the region gets sufficiently pacified and colonized.
Soviet support and the assassination of Chiang Kai-Shek allow the pro-Soviet, left-wing faction of the Kuomintang to seize the upper hand and form a united front with the Chinese Communists. The resulting far-left and radical nationalist coalition gradually defeats all the other warlord and rightwing forces in southern and central China, reunifies most of China proper under its control, and establishes the People’s Republic of China. Only in part of Northern China (Chahar, Suiyuan, Hebei, Shanxi, and Shandong) and Hainan, a coalition of pro-Japanese warlords and right-winger Nationalists is able to consolidate its rule with Japanese military support and form the Republic of China. The British support the secession of Tibet from China and its independence as a client state of theirs as a way to protect India. The USSR annexes Xinjiang and Mongolia as a compensation for its losses in the Far East.
Since the Sino-Soviet threat keeps the Japanese far-right nationalists and militarists busy and distracted, Japan achieved a largely satisfying postwar territorial settlement, and keeps friendly relations with the Western powers, the Japanese Empire finds favorable conditions to evolve into a stable liberal democracy that grants enfranchisement to and strives to assimilate the overseas territories. However, the Japanese military remains an autonomous and influential state within a state.
Postwar expansion of Communism scares the capitalist great powers into countering it by a policy mix that includes attempts to appease the masses through social reforms that create functional welfare systems, ruthless police and judicial repression of Communist movements, and formation of an international united front. The resulting economic cooperation prevents any equivalent of the Great Depression from occurring and largely stabilizes the Western economies in good conditions. Economic conditions of Italy and Japan further improve because of the discovery of vast oilfields in Libya and Manchuria, which the Italians and the Japanese promptly exploit thanks to British and American technical assistance. Economic prosperity and social reforms stabilize the political landscape in the Western nations, frustrating all Communist attempts at infiltration and destabilization.
Reconciliation between the great powers eventually leads to the creation of an anti-Communist military alliance between Britain, the Dominions, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, Romania, Croatia, Greece, and Japan. The alliance’s official name is the Atlantic-Pacific Defense Organization (APDO), although another common name is the Anti-Comintern Pact (ACP). Albeit remaining officially neutral because of its isolationist tradition, the USA pledges its generous economic, political, and diplomatic support to the alliance, and mostly works as an associate in non-military matters. Much the same way, Sweden too remains officially neutral but in practice cooperates with the APDO most of the time because of the Soviet threat in the Baltic.
On their own side, the members of the Communist bloc (the USSR, the LPU, the Balkan Federation, Turkey, Indochina, and the PRC) mostly work as a cohesive alliance in their own way, despite all the potential tensions from leadership rivalries, conflicting territorial claims, nationalist conflicts, and ideological variance. Reasons for this unity include ideological affinity, the perceived common threat from hostile capitalist powers, the economic and military benefits from cooperation in a world that hates and fears their ilk, and influence of the Comintern organization that works hard to ensure unity between the Communist states and movements. The only real danger of a serious split initially manifests in the form of potential rivalry between the leaders of the USSR and the LPU, but the strategic situation persuades the two sides to bury their difference and agree to a power-sharing deal within the Comintern leadership.
The world remains in an uneasy, tense Cold War-style peace for a couple decades as the ruling elites of the two emergent blocs consolidate their power in their respective domains after the upheavals of WWI and postwar revolutionary chaos. Stabilize and build up their economies, and pursue rearmament. As time goes on, however, the Comintern leaders feel more and more confident thanks to their power base built up through ruthless industrialization and aggressive rearmament, as well as ruthless repression of all domestic resistance to their rule. They grow more inclined to pursue their world revolution and global conquest ambitions through renewed revolutionary destabilization and military aggression.
On their part, the capitalist powers feel more and more threatened by growing Communist power, ambitions, and aggressiveness. They become more and more inclined to suppress them by force thanks to economic and political stabilization at home, fading of post-WWI war weariness, their own ambitious rearmament and united front, and a feeling decisive action would give better chances of survival than tarrying too long. Sometime between the late 1930s and the early-mid 1940s, one flashpoint or another in Europe or Asia, or quite possibly several ones activating concurrently or in quick succession, lead to one crisis too many between the blocs. Tensions escalate, lines in the sand are drawn, alliances activate, and another world war occurs.
