Post by eurofed on Jan 16, 2017 17:23:09 GMT
This TL combines and develops various AH ideas I’m fond of: a WWII with an Allied victory that does not really divide or mutilate the Axis powers; the same conflict ending with a major military confrontation between the democratic powers and the USSR that settles the score with all forms of totalitarianism and prevents the Cold War as we know it; the post-war world gradually evolving into a multi-polar system fairly similar to the post-Cold War one (although with a few inevitable difference, such as a stronger Western world). I’ve already used part of this scenario for my “A different Cold War” TL, although here events in the late phase of the war have a different course and lead to a wholly different outcome.
ITTL Roosevelt died by an early stroke in 1939, and after James Garner completed his term, one among James Farley, Cordell Hull, or Thomas Dewey was elected President in 1940. Although the new President followed an internationalist foreign policy broadly similar to FDR, he was much more suspicious of Stalin and much less prone to acknowledge any important difference between fascism and communism. He was also more willing to grant a lenient peace deal to defeated enemy powers, although he still aimed for their surrender and military occupation. The botched attempt of Britain and France to intervene in the Winter War and deny Germany access to Swedish iron supplies caused the German occupation of Sweden, the Anglo-French bombing of Baku, and a state of war between the USSR and the Entente powers.
Hitler reluctantly accepted Stalin as an ally - even if he planned to attack the Soviets once the British were defeated - and the Axis alliance was expanded to the USSR. The Soviets attacked and overrun Turkey, Persia, and Afghanistan, while Germany did the same to Western Europe and forced France to surrender. Because of the Soviet co-belligerence, Germany and Italy agreed to cooperate and pursue a Mediterranean strategy, while Spain and Vichy France joined the Axis. Charles de Gaulle died during the Fall of France, so no equivalent of Free France ever arose and France was deemed an enemy power by the Allies.
The Axis forces occupied Portugal, Gibraltar, and Malta, overrun North Africa, drove the British out of the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, and made inroads into western India and East Africa. The British Empire was in dire straits, despite the generous Lend-Lease support of the USA, when Hitler and the Japanese leaders changed the picture. Hitler deemed he had all but won the war against the British, so he decided to attack the USSR. This turned WWII into a three-way conflict, and the strategic equation further turned against the Axis when Japan brought America in the war with a pre-emptive attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbour.
They decided to seize the European colonies in Southeast Asia to secure a steady supply of resources against the American embargo of Axis countries that was strangling their economy. Trade with the USSR in the co-belligerence period considerably ameliorated the situation, but it turned bad again when Germany attacked the USSR. Unfortunately for the Axis, the Japanese did not trust their invasion of Southeast Asia to succeed without eliminating the potential threat of the Philippines and the US Pacific Fleet on their flank. Although the initial Japanese rampage swept everything up to New Guinea and eastern India, US intervention turned the tide of the war thanks to the mobilization of the vast manpower and industrial resources of America.
US build-up enabled the Allies to push Axis forces out of India, gradually roll back the Japanese in the Pacific, and conquer the Horn of Africa, Arabia, North Africa, the Levant, and Mesopotamia. American power also turned the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic and the air war in Europe. After these successes, the Americans made a strategic decision to give priority to conquest of Western Europe and defeat of the Euro-Axis rather than liberation of the Balkans and the Near East, despite the contrary wishes of the British. Allied landings in Iberia, Italy, France, and Scandinavia were successful. The war in the Eastern Front eventually turned bad for the Axis after an initial vast success because of its engagement in these other theatres. However the Soviets paid a terrible price in manpower and consumption of resources for their victories. The experiences of WWII and a minor stroke Stalin suffered during the war significantly altered his personality: he became mentally instable, rather more reckless, and even more paranoid and brutal.
Deeming the war lost, the military component of the German Resistance managed to overthrow the Nazi regime. The anti-Nazi faction was able to organize adequately and get sufficient support in the Wehrmacht for a successful coup because they were confident of getting a lenient deal from the Allies after Hitler was removed from power. After they took over, they made diplomatic feelers for peace negotiations with the Allied governments. Although their requests for anything less than surrender were quickly and decisively shot down, they were able to get Allied assent to a peace deal (nominally unconditional surrender, de facto a conditional one) that guaranteed Germany and its allies lenient terms.
They were ensured their national integrity (no forced political division of their countries), their internationally-recognized or ethnic borders (even if the Allies reserved the right to make a few adjustments for the sake of international security), their economic base (no forced deindustrialization or unsustainable reparations), a liberal-democratic political system, eventual return to political independence after a clearing out of fascist elements, and a free-market economy.
Due to the role the German military played in ending the war, the Allies also gave the informal guarantee that their prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity would essentially target fascist leaders, people directly involved in atrocities, and high-ranking members of the fascist parties, paramilitary militias, and secret police. Military and civilian personnel otherwise involved with fascist regimes because of their jobs would be spared and there would not be any mass punishments or prosecutions for waging an aggressive war.
Germany, its allies, and the Anglo-Americans agreed to these terms. The Axis forces started a general pullout from the fronts (France, Iberia, Italy, and Scandinavia) where they were engaged with the Allies. They let the Allied forces advance without opposition across Europe, while they concentrated on the Eastern front to make a last stand. Their objective was to stalemate the Red Army as much as possible before the Anglo-American troops would reach Eastern Europe.
As soon as Stalin got notice of this deal, he ordered the Red Army to press on and advance as much as possible against the Axis and Allied forces, no matter the cost in men and material. He did not expect a decisive victory against the Allies, but he thought it was possible to win the USSR a favourable compromise peace and maximize Soviet war gains. He hoped to do so by grabbing as much land as possible before the Allies reached the Eastern front, and then exhausting the Anglo-Americans with an attrition war. The USSR itself had got dangerously close to complete exhaustion of its own manpower and economic resources in the struggle against the Axis, and the Americans had barely tapped their own potential in comparison. However Stalin was confident the will to fight and ability to bear sacrifices of the USSR under his leadership would turn out to be much greater than the one of the democratic powers.
To maximize the effects of his attrition strategy, he proposed an alliance of convenience to Japan. The Japanese had not joined the Euro-Axis in its treacherous attack against the USSR and leaped at the offer. The aid the Soviets could provide to Japan was fairly limited in practice, but the alliance stiffened Japan’s will to fight. Much like Stalin, the Japanese militarists hoped they could exhaust the Allies into a favourable compromise peace with a war of attrition.
WWII in Europe turned into a race to establish facts on the ground favourable to the Allies or the Soviets. The Axis forces bitterly resisted the Soviet offensives in a last stand sustained by the hope to avoid Soviet occupation of their countries. In the end, the Red Army was eventually able to clear the Wehrmacht out of Soviet territory and conquer Finland, the Baltic states, East Prussia, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania. The Soviets were also able to exploit their control of Turkey and the support of Yugoslav and Greek Communist partisans to seize Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, and Greece. However the offensive thrust of the Red Army gradually slowed down to a crawl close to the eastern borders of Germany, Italy, and Sweden. It was enough for the Allied troops to reach the Eastern front lines, disarm and disband the Axis forces, and deploy before the Soviet troops in a relatively ordered fashion.
Even so, the remaining offensive potential of the Red Army (relentlessly pushed forward by Stalin) and the redeployment issues of the Axis-Allies switch allowed the Soviets a few initial victories which turned into inroads in eastern Germany, Bohemia-Moravia, northern Italy, and eastern Sweden. Even in the Near East, the renewed Soviet offensive initially allowed the Red Army to advance into Syria and Iraq. However the Allies were fairly quickly able to stabilize the front and push the Soviets back to the pre-war borders of Sweden, Germany, Bohemia-Moravia, Slovenia, Italy, Turkey, and Iran.
Soviet aggressiveness and the Moscow-Tokyo alliance angered the Allied leaders and made them commit to a policy of liberating all the victims of Stalinist aggression and ending the Soviet threat. They adjusted their strategy and geared up their war machine for one last big effort to crush the Red Army and liberate Eastern Europe and the Near East. They were uncertain about their end goal for the USSR: a few advocated total victory and a march to Moscow to end the Communist threat for good; others feared the huge costs of conquest and occupation of Russia and thought to push the Soviets back in their pre-war borders and crush their military power would be enough; yet others advocated the middle ground of dismantling the Russian empire by means of a Brest-Litovsk-style peace. However they dropped abundant hints that they were willing to grant lenient peace terms to the Russian and Japanese peoples, similar to the ones the Germans had got, if they were to take a similar course by putting acceptable leaders in charge, laying down arms, and throwing themselves at the mercy of the Allies.
The Anglo-Americans decided to give strategic priority to the defeat of the USSR in Europe. So in the Pacific theatre, they would push back the Japanese in their homeland and cut off the strategic link between the Soviets and the Japanese. They would let Japan wither on the vine by blockade and air bombing until the USSR was dealt with or the Japanese were exhausted into surrender. A series of Allied offensives pushed the Japanese all the way back to Japan and Korea, which were made subject to a strict blockade and a bombing offensive with whatever resources the Allies could spare from the European theatre. The Americans landed in Outer Manchuria and seized control of the area and central-eastern Manchuria.
In Europe, the Allies quickly seized complete superiority in the air and made the Soviet logistic network, industrial centres, resource-extracting areas, and troops concentrations subject to extensive and relentless bombing. This quickly and severely disrupted the Soviet war effort, after the Soviet people and economy had been already brought to the brink of utter exhaustion to defeat Germany. Only the factories and resources in Siberia and Central Asia were partially protected due to the vast size of the USSR, but the effects of Allied bombing on the Soviet logistic system pretty much nullified their contribution. The Allies also used their decisive air superiority to attack Soviet army concentrations and support their own offensive drive. A series of Allied offensives gradually pushed the Red Army out of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Romania, Anatolia, and western Iran.
The Allies used their naval supremacy to hit available military objectives in Soviet-held coastal areas and enact landings in the Baltic and the eastern Med that allowed them to liberate Finland, the Baltic states, and Greece. The landings helped clear the Soviets out of the Balkans and the Near East in combination with the land offensives. As a rule, important anti-Communist resistance movements developed across Central-Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and even certain Soviet lands (notably, parts of Ukraine and the Caucasus) that fought Soviet occupation and strived to cooperate with the Allies. In Western Europe, Communist activists attempted to emerge from the underground, re-organize, and disrupt the Allied war effort after the downfall of the Axis regimes. However, due to the role of the USSR in the war, the vast majority of Western European population perceived the Communists as just as bad as the fascists, and they had limited popular appeal beyond the far-left fringe. So the Allied occupation authorities were usually able to crush and suppress them without any real trouble with the cooperation of local anti-Communist forces.
The Allies only met some more substantial trouble in South-eastern Europe where the Communist partisans had some important popular support. Repression of their insurgency represented a significant chore for the Allied forces and significantly tasked their war effort in the Balkan theatre. However the Allies were eventually successful with the help of local anti-Communist militias. Pacification in the Balkan and Near East theatres also got more difficult for the Allies because of the chaotic mess of ethnic, religious, and factional conflicts the war had left behind. In the Allied countries, the course of the war made the USSR look just as dangerous and as much of an enemy power as the Axis powers. Much like the far-right supporters of the Axis powers, the Communists enjoyed limited support beyond the fringe of their hardcore sympathizers. So the Allied authorities were able to suppress the fifth column of ‘Commie-Nazi’ supporters, spies, and saboteurs without excessive trouble by means of police repression and internment.
ITTL Roosevelt died by an early stroke in 1939, and after James Garner completed his term, one among James Farley, Cordell Hull, or Thomas Dewey was elected President in 1940. Although the new President followed an internationalist foreign policy broadly similar to FDR, he was much more suspicious of Stalin and much less prone to acknowledge any important difference between fascism and communism. He was also more willing to grant a lenient peace deal to defeated enemy powers, although he still aimed for their surrender and military occupation. The botched attempt of Britain and France to intervene in the Winter War and deny Germany access to Swedish iron supplies caused the German occupation of Sweden, the Anglo-French bombing of Baku, and a state of war between the USSR and the Entente powers.
Hitler reluctantly accepted Stalin as an ally - even if he planned to attack the Soviets once the British were defeated - and the Axis alliance was expanded to the USSR. The Soviets attacked and overrun Turkey, Persia, and Afghanistan, while Germany did the same to Western Europe and forced France to surrender. Because of the Soviet co-belligerence, Germany and Italy agreed to cooperate and pursue a Mediterranean strategy, while Spain and Vichy France joined the Axis. Charles de Gaulle died during the Fall of France, so no equivalent of Free France ever arose and France was deemed an enemy power by the Allies.
The Axis forces occupied Portugal, Gibraltar, and Malta, overrun North Africa, drove the British out of the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, and made inroads into western India and East Africa. The British Empire was in dire straits, despite the generous Lend-Lease support of the USA, when Hitler and the Japanese leaders changed the picture. Hitler deemed he had all but won the war against the British, so he decided to attack the USSR. This turned WWII into a three-way conflict, and the strategic equation further turned against the Axis when Japan brought America in the war with a pre-emptive attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbour.
They decided to seize the European colonies in Southeast Asia to secure a steady supply of resources against the American embargo of Axis countries that was strangling their economy. Trade with the USSR in the co-belligerence period considerably ameliorated the situation, but it turned bad again when Germany attacked the USSR. Unfortunately for the Axis, the Japanese did not trust their invasion of Southeast Asia to succeed without eliminating the potential threat of the Philippines and the US Pacific Fleet on their flank. Although the initial Japanese rampage swept everything up to New Guinea and eastern India, US intervention turned the tide of the war thanks to the mobilization of the vast manpower and industrial resources of America.
US build-up enabled the Allies to push Axis forces out of India, gradually roll back the Japanese in the Pacific, and conquer the Horn of Africa, Arabia, North Africa, the Levant, and Mesopotamia. American power also turned the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic and the air war in Europe. After these successes, the Americans made a strategic decision to give priority to conquest of Western Europe and defeat of the Euro-Axis rather than liberation of the Balkans and the Near East, despite the contrary wishes of the British. Allied landings in Iberia, Italy, France, and Scandinavia were successful. The war in the Eastern Front eventually turned bad for the Axis after an initial vast success because of its engagement in these other theatres. However the Soviets paid a terrible price in manpower and consumption of resources for their victories. The experiences of WWII and a minor stroke Stalin suffered during the war significantly altered his personality: he became mentally instable, rather more reckless, and even more paranoid and brutal.
Deeming the war lost, the military component of the German Resistance managed to overthrow the Nazi regime. The anti-Nazi faction was able to organize adequately and get sufficient support in the Wehrmacht for a successful coup because they were confident of getting a lenient deal from the Allies after Hitler was removed from power. After they took over, they made diplomatic feelers for peace negotiations with the Allied governments. Although their requests for anything less than surrender were quickly and decisively shot down, they were able to get Allied assent to a peace deal (nominally unconditional surrender, de facto a conditional one) that guaranteed Germany and its allies lenient terms.
They were ensured their national integrity (no forced political division of their countries), their internationally-recognized or ethnic borders (even if the Allies reserved the right to make a few adjustments for the sake of international security), their economic base (no forced deindustrialization or unsustainable reparations), a liberal-democratic political system, eventual return to political independence after a clearing out of fascist elements, and a free-market economy.
Due to the role the German military played in ending the war, the Allies also gave the informal guarantee that their prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity would essentially target fascist leaders, people directly involved in atrocities, and high-ranking members of the fascist parties, paramilitary militias, and secret police. Military and civilian personnel otherwise involved with fascist regimes because of their jobs would be spared and there would not be any mass punishments or prosecutions for waging an aggressive war.
Germany, its allies, and the Anglo-Americans agreed to these terms. The Axis forces started a general pullout from the fronts (France, Iberia, Italy, and Scandinavia) where they were engaged with the Allies. They let the Allied forces advance without opposition across Europe, while they concentrated on the Eastern front to make a last stand. Their objective was to stalemate the Red Army as much as possible before the Anglo-American troops would reach Eastern Europe.
As soon as Stalin got notice of this deal, he ordered the Red Army to press on and advance as much as possible against the Axis and Allied forces, no matter the cost in men and material. He did not expect a decisive victory against the Allies, but he thought it was possible to win the USSR a favourable compromise peace and maximize Soviet war gains. He hoped to do so by grabbing as much land as possible before the Allies reached the Eastern front, and then exhausting the Anglo-Americans with an attrition war. The USSR itself had got dangerously close to complete exhaustion of its own manpower and economic resources in the struggle against the Axis, and the Americans had barely tapped their own potential in comparison. However Stalin was confident the will to fight and ability to bear sacrifices of the USSR under his leadership would turn out to be much greater than the one of the democratic powers.
To maximize the effects of his attrition strategy, he proposed an alliance of convenience to Japan. The Japanese had not joined the Euro-Axis in its treacherous attack against the USSR and leaped at the offer. The aid the Soviets could provide to Japan was fairly limited in practice, but the alliance stiffened Japan’s will to fight. Much like Stalin, the Japanese militarists hoped they could exhaust the Allies into a favourable compromise peace with a war of attrition.
WWII in Europe turned into a race to establish facts on the ground favourable to the Allies or the Soviets. The Axis forces bitterly resisted the Soviet offensives in a last stand sustained by the hope to avoid Soviet occupation of their countries. In the end, the Red Army was eventually able to clear the Wehrmacht out of Soviet territory and conquer Finland, the Baltic states, East Prussia, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania. The Soviets were also able to exploit their control of Turkey and the support of Yugoslav and Greek Communist partisans to seize Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, and Greece. However the offensive thrust of the Red Army gradually slowed down to a crawl close to the eastern borders of Germany, Italy, and Sweden. It was enough for the Allied troops to reach the Eastern front lines, disarm and disband the Axis forces, and deploy before the Soviet troops in a relatively ordered fashion.
Even so, the remaining offensive potential of the Red Army (relentlessly pushed forward by Stalin) and the redeployment issues of the Axis-Allies switch allowed the Soviets a few initial victories which turned into inroads in eastern Germany, Bohemia-Moravia, northern Italy, and eastern Sweden. Even in the Near East, the renewed Soviet offensive initially allowed the Red Army to advance into Syria and Iraq. However the Allies were fairly quickly able to stabilize the front and push the Soviets back to the pre-war borders of Sweden, Germany, Bohemia-Moravia, Slovenia, Italy, Turkey, and Iran.
Soviet aggressiveness and the Moscow-Tokyo alliance angered the Allied leaders and made them commit to a policy of liberating all the victims of Stalinist aggression and ending the Soviet threat. They adjusted their strategy and geared up their war machine for one last big effort to crush the Red Army and liberate Eastern Europe and the Near East. They were uncertain about their end goal for the USSR: a few advocated total victory and a march to Moscow to end the Communist threat for good; others feared the huge costs of conquest and occupation of Russia and thought to push the Soviets back in their pre-war borders and crush their military power would be enough; yet others advocated the middle ground of dismantling the Russian empire by means of a Brest-Litovsk-style peace. However they dropped abundant hints that they were willing to grant lenient peace terms to the Russian and Japanese peoples, similar to the ones the Germans had got, if they were to take a similar course by putting acceptable leaders in charge, laying down arms, and throwing themselves at the mercy of the Allies.
The Anglo-Americans decided to give strategic priority to the defeat of the USSR in Europe. So in the Pacific theatre, they would push back the Japanese in their homeland and cut off the strategic link between the Soviets and the Japanese. They would let Japan wither on the vine by blockade and air bombing until the USSR was dealt with or the Japanese were exhausted into surrender. A series of Allied offensives pushed the Japanese all the way back to Japan and Korea, which were made subject to a strict blockade and a bombing offensive with whatever resources the Allies could spare from the European theatre. The Americans landed in Outer Manchuria and seized control of the area and central-eastern Manchuria.
In Europe, the Allies quickly seized complete superiority in the air and made the Soviet logistic network, industrial centres, resource-extracting areas, and troops concentrations subject to extensive and relentless bombing. This quickly and severely disrupted the Soviet war effort, after the Soviet people and economy had been already brought to the brink of utter exhaustion to defeat Germany. Only the factories and resources in Siberia and Central Asia were partially protected due to the vast size of the USSR, but the effects of Allied bombing on the Soviet logistic system pretty much nullified their contribution. The Allies also used their decisive air superiority to attack Soviet army concentrations and support their own offensive drive. A series of Allied offensives gradually pushed the Red Army out of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Romania, Anatolia, and western Iran.
The Allies used their naval supremacy to hit available military objectives in Soviet-held coastal areas and enact landings in the Baltic and the eastern Med that allowed them to liberate Finland, the Baltic states, and Greece. The landings helped clear the Soviets out of the Balkans and the Near East in combination with the land offensives. As a rule, important anti-Communist resistance movements developed across Central-Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and even certain Soviet lands (notably, parts of Ukraine and the Caucasus) that fought Soviet occupation and strived to cooperate with the Allies. In Western Europe, Communist activists attempted to emerge from the underground, re-organize, and disrupt the Allied war effort after the downfall of the Axis regimes. However, due to the role of the USSR in the war, the vast majority of Western European population perceived the Communists as just as bad as the fascists, and they had limited popular appeal beyond the far-left fringe. So the Allied occupation authorities were usually able to crush and suppress them without any real trouble with the cooperation of local anti-Communist forces.
The Allies only met some more substantial trouble in South-eastern Europe where the Communist partisans had some important popular support. Repression of their insurgency represented a significant chore for the Allied forces and significantly tasked their war effort in the Balkan theatre. However the Allies were eventually successful with the help of local anti-Communist militias. Pacification in the Balkan and Near East theatres also got more difficult for the Allies because of the chaotic mess of ethnic, religious, and factional conflicts the war had left behind. In the Allied countries, the course of the war made the USSR look just as dangerous and as much of an enemy power as the Axis powers. Much like the far-right supporters of the Axis powers, the Communists enjoyed limited support beyond the fringe of their hardcore sympathizers. So the Allied authorities were able to suppress the fifth column of ‘Commie-Nazi’ supporters, spies, and saboteurs without excessive trouble by means of police repression and internment.
