Post by eurofed on Oct 25, 2018 21:19:46 GMT
ITTL the Great Depression hit Western Europe somewhat worse than OTL. This and the political polarization caused by the Popular Front government’s efforts to enact left-wing reforms and intervene in the Spanish Civil War to aid the Republicans ultimately plunged France in a civil war between fascists and far-leftists much similar to the Spanish one. Secondary effects included the Low Countries turning almost as politically instable as France and Germany, with far-right parties seizing pluralities in the Dutch and Belgian elections, and the governments of Weimar Germany and democratic Austria being able to organize a political union of their countries just before a Nazi or clerico-fascist takeover. Unfortunately, the socio-economic backlash of the Great Depression largely neutralized the positive political effects of the Anschluss and the Nazis took over in enlarged Germany, consolidated their regime, and started German rearmament more or less the usual way.
Growing French weakness, ideological affinities, Anglo-French opposition to Italian conquest of Ethiopia with toothless but annoying economic and diplomatic sanctions persuaded Mussolini that alignment with Britain and France was worthless and fascist Italy should form an alliance with resurgent Nazi Germany. Negotiations to form the Axis pact between Berlin and Rome proved fruitful after the two powers agreed to transfer the German-speaking population of South Tyrol to the Reich's and support each other's territorial ambitions in Eastern Europe. When the Spanish and French civil wars exploded, Germany and Italy took it as an excellent opportunity to enact their expansionist plans in Central Europe and the Balkans. They otherwise strived to support far-rightists in Spain and France to the best of their abilities. On their own, the Soviets did their best to support the far-leftists in the civil wars. As a result, pro-Axis fascists and pro-Soviet Communists soon became the dominant factions in the respective fronts in both countries.
Collapse of France left Britain alone and largely powerless to influence events in Europe overmuch since its power was concentrated on imperial control and naval supremacy and traditionally ill-suited to project force deep into the continent without the support of another great power. The natural alternative would have been a strategic partnership with the USA, but this proved impossible in practice because of American isolationism. The Great Depression brought President Roosevelt into power. Besides enacting his New Deal program of domestic reforms, he was an avowed interventionist and hostile to the Axis powers but American public opinion remained committed to isolationism since it turned to regard intervention in WWI as a costly mistake engineered by the Entente powers and arms dealers. The seemingly irresistible collapse of democracy and spread of totalitarianism across Europe only reinforced this mood since it left many Americans persuaded the Old World was a lost cause and best left alone unless it directly threatened American security or US interests in the Western Hemisphere and the Far East.
Over time, events only reinforced the grip of isolationism on America. A series of scandals during FDR’s second mandate consumed his political capital (his ill-advised attempt to ‘pack’ the Supreme Court with supporters of his reforms, revelation of his poor health and marital infidelity, discovery of Soviet espionage’s infiltration of his Administration) and allowed a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats to seize control of the Congress. The resulting stress caused FDR’s death in 1939 by stroke, sending the Democratic party in a nasty succession fight between supporters and opponents of New Deal, and Vice President Garner who succeeded him was hostile to many of his policies. These events enabled Robert Taft, a dedicated isolationist, to win the Republican nomination and then eke out a narrow victory in the 1940 presidential election.
The only viable alternative for Britain was to align with either the USSR or the emergent Axis bloc, but the hard choice left British elites and public opinion largely unable to pick a side while the French and Spanish civil wars raged on. The resulting diplomatic fumbling left British foreign policy paralyzed and ineffective for a good while. After their end, geopolitical concerns and traditional care for the balance of power would drive the British into an alliance of convenience with the USSR, but this proved not scarcely feasible in the interwar period. Many opposed the move, arguing with good reason Soviet Russia was just as dangerous, untrustworthy, and aggressive in its own way as the Axis powers, and communism was as threatening and destructive as fascism. Clumsy and half-hearted alliance negotiations between the British and the Soviets failed to produce results.
In the end, a feasible alliance option came for Britain from an unexpected source. During the first part of the 1930s, Japan took over Manchuria from China as the client state of Manchukuo, supported an array of sympathetic Chinese proxies to expand its influence within China proper, engaged into growing strategic confrontation with the Soviets in the Far East, and backed the independence bid of Indochina during the French Civil War. For a while, it suffered serious political instability because of the influence and violent activism of the militarist ultra-nationalists. After the extremists staged their umpteenth failed coup attempt and assassination wave of moderate political leaders, the Emperor and the moderate factions in the Japanese ruling elites and armed forces closed ranks to stage a successful thorough repression of the radical nationalists and militarists.
Consequently, Japan experienced a moderate swing of its foreign policy. With the radicals purged, it avoided getting involved in a total war with China on its own initiative because its leaders judged it too costly and risky, especially with the growing Soviet military threat on the Manchurian border. After some wavering, the Japanese embraced the policy of seeking a détente with the Chinese Nationalists based on the post-Manchuria status quo and trying to expand their influence in China by supporting various pro-Japanese proxies inside and outside the KMT. They focused their military power on checking the Soviets.
The Nationalist Chinese leaders were content for the time being to heed the status quo for their part, since it allowed them to avoid a confrontation with Japan and gave them room to focus on their efforts to eliminate the Chinese Communists, subdue the warlords, and build up the strength of their nation. They agreed to a de facto recognition of Manchukuo, suppressed anti-Japanese radicals, and went along with the Japanese bid to restore normal economic and diplomatic relations. For all their newfound moderation, however, the Japanese still decided an intervention to support the independence bid of Indochina during the French Civil War was still worth the risk, especially when they realized Britain and the USA did not regard the move with disfavor.
However, the Soviet threat still made Japan somewhat eager for allies. The Indochina issue ended up being too serious a wedge between the Axis powers and Japan, so the Japanese eventually turned to the British as potential allies. Loss of France made Britain open-minded to the perspective, and there was precedent, so the result was a restoration of the Anglo-Japanese alliance. It was an imperfect partnership since the two powers had limited capability to support each other because of distance and meant the alliance as mostly aimed against different potential enemies. However, it still allowed them to minimize a potential source of conflict in Asia, redirect the bulk of their forces elsewhere, and gain some indirect support.
Thanks to the eclipse of France during the civil war, the revisionist powers (Germany, Italy, and the USSR) more or less got a free hand to rewrite the map of Eastern Europe to their tastes. The Germans had already been able to remilitarize the Rhineland with impunity since France was already too politically instable to react with anything stronger than diplomatic protests. They strong-armed Czechoslovakia into accepting cession of the Sudetenland and subsequently enacted a partition of the country, with Germany annexing Bohemia-Moravia and Hungary getting Slovakia. Soon afterwards, the Germans started pressuring Poland to make territorial concessions about Danzig and the Corridor and accept joining the Axis. The collapse of France left Poland in a strategic bad place but its victory over the USSR a couple decades ago made the Poles confident they could resist Germany on their own, so they stubbornly resisted German demands. The Italians annexed Albania and collaborated with Hungary and Bulgaria to organize the destabilization of Yugoslavia by supporting the separatist activities of the Croats, Macedonian Bulgarians, and Kosovo Albanians. The Germans tired out of Polish defiance and started a conflict picking the status of Danzig as an excuse. The Wehrmacht quickly cut the Polish army to pieces and overrun most of the country. The Soviets picked the crisis as a good opportunity to occupy the Baltic nations and eastern Poland.
The Soviet intervention sealed the fate of the second Polish republic and briefly raised a threat of a German-Soviet military confrontation but it was ultimately avoided since neither side felt ready to fight the other and both powers shared an interest to divide the spoils of Poland. A hastily negotiated agreement established a new partition of the country: the USSR annexed the eastern territories and made them subject to brutal Sovietization like the Baltic states. Germany took the rest. It swiftly Germanized the western territories it had owned before 1914 with mass expulsion of their Polish and Jew inhabitants and their replacement by German settlers. A minority was able to stay at the price of forced cultural assimilation and the threat of death or deportation for noncompliance. The German leaders planned the same outcome for Bohemia-Moravia and the rest of Poland on a longer time schedule, by a mix of genocide, German settler colonization, and forced cultural assimilation.
When Yugoslavia exploded in civil war because of various separatist uprisings occurring concurrently, it gave Italy a perfect excuse to intervene with the support of Germany, Hungary, and Bulgaria. The Italians easily crushed a Yugoslav army weakened by civil war and multi-front invasion, and imposed a partition of the country. Italy got central Dalmatia, many Adriatic islands, most of Kosovo, northwestern Vardar Macedonia, Montenegro, and southern Slovenia. Germany took northern Slovenia and organized the Banat into an autonomous zone under the control of its ethnic German community. Hungary annexed Backa and Baranja. Bulgaria took most of Vardar Macedonia. Croatia became independent as a fascist client state of the Axis and got most of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Axis powers reorganized central Serbia with north Kosovo and eastern Bosnia into another client state of theirs. The Serbs in the rest of former Yugoslavia became subject to genocide or mass deportation into Serbia.
The French and Spanish civil wars raged for a while on both sides of the Pyrenees but the fascists eventually won them for various reasons, including better cohesion and organization, most of the professional military siding with them, and the Axis powers being more able to provide support to them than the Soviets could do with the Republicans. The far-right regimes that took over in France and Spain were naturally inclined to align with the Axis out of ideological affinity, gratitude for the support they received during the civil war, and perception of a common ground with the other fascist powers against communism and Western democracy.
The German and Italian leaders felt tempted during the French civil war to exploit the situation to annex a few border territories, but declined the option since they realized the genuine friendship of France would eventually yield them much greater strategic and economic benefits. The only price the Axis powers claimed for their aid was cession of a few colonies, which took place on relatively friendly terms and with a broad promise of future territorial compensations. Italy got Tunisia and Germany got its old colony of Cameroon. The deal included French Congo in the territory ceded to Germany to make up for the other former German colonies that remained under French or British rule. Britain refused German requests for the return of other former German colonies, especially Tanganyika.
France and Spain joined the Axis pact and signed an economic assistance treaty and a military alliance with Germany and Italy. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy adjusted their strategic stance, their ideology and propaganda, and their imperialist plans to account for a friendly France. Much the same way, the new French regime downplayed traditional hostility between France and Germany, celebrated solidarity with the other fascist Western European nations, and identified Communism and the democratic powers as the real enemies of France. After the loss of Indochina and the formation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance, fascist France added Japan to its list of enemies and intensified its hostility to Britain. During the civil war, Jose Sanjurjo gradually consolidated its leadership as the dictator of Spain, with Francisco Franco emerging as the other most important figure of the regime. In France, Marshal Petain became supreme leader, with Pierre Laval and Francois Darlan as its most influential collaborators in the civilian and military fields.
Much like it had previously happened in Germany and Italy, the new fascist regimes ruthlessly and efficiently purged political opposition by killing, imprisoning, or driving it into exile. The new French leaders were able to keep control of the French fleet and most French colonies without too much trouble. As a rule, the French professional military, colonial administrators, and the settler community mostly sympathized with the far-rightists and aligned with them during the civil war or at least stayed neutral during the conflict and recognized the fascist regime as legitimate after its victory. The French forces suppressed an all the attempts of Arab nationalists to stage an uprising in Syria. The French West Indies and Indochina were the main exceptions. The governor of Guadeloupe refused allegiance to the new regime and encouraged the British to occupy the French West Indies, which they did with the support of the USA.
An uneasy front of Indochinese nationalists and leftist revolutionaries tried to exploit the situation soon after the French civil war went into full swing to start an anti-colonial uprising. The French forces in the colony contained and to a large degree suppressed the rebellion, even if some residual unrest persisted. The monarchist and right-wing nationalist wing of the anticolonial movement decided to salvage their situation by making an appeal to Japan for intervention. The Japanese leaders initially hesitated, but became open-minded once they perceived the UK did not see a Japanese intervention with disfavor once it became clear the French civil war would likely ensue in a takeover by fascists or communists. Even the USA reluctantly accepted it. The Japanese forces landed in the colony and occupied it without excessive effort. They defeated the French and the leftist militants and set up Indochina as a nominally independent confederation of the Kingdoms of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. In practice, it was another client state of the Japanese Empire like Manchukuo.
Once the French fascists won the civil war and consolidated their regime, they bitterly resented and complained about the loss of their Caribbean and Indochinese colonies, especially the latter. In practice, the strategic situation made a French attempt to recovery the colony almost hopeless, given the effects of the civil war, distance, Japanese superiority in the theater, and the apparent Anglo-Japanese realignment. The Japanese intervention in Indochina and later the revival of the Anglo-Japanese alliance accelerated and intensified the pro-Axis and anti-British alliance swing of France and alienated the Axis bloc as a whole from Japan once France joined it.
After the end of the civil wars, the new fascist regimes of France and Spain of course focused on consolidation of their grip of power, bloody repression of defeated opponents, and healing of war damage. Spain mostly turned inward in this regard and passively followed the lead of its stronger allies. France did pursue the same objectives. However, since it had greater resources to begin with and suffered a bit less damage in the civil war because of shorter duration, its new leaders were anxious to reaffirm the prestige of their nation with some foreign-policy success. Given the ideological leanings and alliance ties of the new regime, this attitude soon translated in ambitions of territorial expansion concerning the French-speaking areas of Belgium and Switzerland. Therefore, the French leaders sent feelers to their German and Italian counterparts about plans for partition of the Low Countries and Switzerland.
The leaders of the other fascist powers were quite open-minded to the proposal since it would allow Germany and Italy to bind France even more closely to their side and make sizable territorial gains of their own in the process. Hitler’s main long-term ambition was large-scale conquest and colonization of the Russian lands, but he understood the strategic importance of having a friendly France on his side when Germany did engage Soviet Russia so he was willing to adjust his short-term plans to accomplish a complete partition of Western Europe between the fascist powers. Moreover, the move would allow the Third Reich to acquire the other Germanic-speaking areas of continental Europe, an objective that also had considerable value for Nazi ambitions.
The leaders of the fascist powers did realize such a large-scale redrawing of the map of Europe on top of their other recent actions might quite possibly cause a war with Britain or the USSR, but they were confident the combined power of Germany, France, and Italy would defeat either power w/o excessive trouble or scare them into passivity. If anything, the perspective of a general conflict did drive them to draft an expanded deal and contingency scheme that included division of Africa, Western Eurasia, and the European colonial empires at large between the spheres of influence of the fascist powers. Once it became aware of these plans, Spain did join the deal once it got guarantees about a few potential gains of its own.
Soon after the terms of their sphere of influence agreement were finalized, the Axis powers got busy translating its terms into fact. Germany and France focused on destabilization of the Low Countries. For several years, the legacy of the Great Depression and the successes of fascism in Germany and France gradually caused a remarkable swelling of popularity and support for far-right parties and movements in Belgium and the Netherlands that left these countries trapped into serious political instability. Once the fascist powers got engaged in fanning the flames of chaos in the region, instability further escalated to a sequence of riots, strikes, uprisings, and coup attempts that created pre-revolutionary situation. This gave the Germans and the French a pretext to send their forces across the border to ‘restore order’. Beset by internal instability and divided loyalties, the Dutch and Belgian governments and armies utterly failed to organize an effective resistance, and the Axis forces occupied the Low Countries with little effort.
A partition of the region swiftly ensued, with Germany annexing the Netherlands, the Flanders, Eupen-Malmedy, and Luxemburg, while France took Wallonia and the Brussels region. Franco-German conquest of the Low Countries sent Britain into strategic panic. For centuries, the British had treated any attempt by neighbor powers to seize control of the Low Countries as a casus belli and an existential threat, and they followed the pattern again. Once an ultimatum to withdraw Axis forces from the area went unheeded, the British government and parliament swiftly approved a declaration of war to Germany and France. Italy and Japan quickly heeded their alliance commitments by declaring war to Britain and the Axis powers respectively. Despite its post-civil war exhaustion, Spain too decided to align with its Axis partners.
Soon after the beginning of the war, the leadership of one of the main players suddenly experienced a major change once Hitler and several top-ranking Nazis (Bormann, Epp, Goebbels, Frick, Hess, Himmler, Ley, Rosenberg, Todt, Dietrich, Frank, Ribbentrop, and Streicher) fell victim to a bomb planted by a ‘lone wolf’ assassin. Despite the decapitation event and the resulting shock, however, Germany wobbled for a bit but avoided a serious leadership crisis in wartime since Goering took over as its new supreme leader. He was able to do so without excessive trouble since he was the designated successor of Hitler by decree and public statements and the most influential and popular surviving Nazi leader. Moreover, a few of the most important potential rivals for Hitler’s succession died in the bombing. The leadership of the army briefly considered seizing power with a coup, but eventually declined the idea, as Goering was able to win over their loyalty with a few concessions, such as marginalization of the SS. Heydrich, despite being present and getting wounded in the bombing, survived and recovered to become the new second-in-command in the Nazi hierarchy. Goering organized a new inner ruling circle of Germany, which besides Heydrich came to include Speer, Nebe, Neurath, Funk, Diels, and a few high-ranking or distinguished generals. Over time, a ruling triumvirate of Goering, Heydrich, and Speer with the Heer leadership as the silent partner became the new top leadership of Germany.
France, Germany, and Italy sent Switzerland an ultimatum whose acceptance would give the Axis powers complete control of its logistic and economic resources. When the Swiss government refused it to protect its country’s neutrality, the Axis forces invaded Switzerland from three sides and occupied most of its territory. The Swiss army enacted its defensive plan that called for withdrawal from the economic heartland and population centers to a well-stocked national redoubt in the mountain areas. Such resistance from a logistically advantageous position initially caused some serious trouble to Axis troops for a while, although they were able to seize and hold all the valuable portions of Switzerland. Over time, however, the Axis forces devised a quite effective countermeasure by setting up strict controls of the civilian population and cordoning of the redoubt areas that cut down any supplies inflow to the Swiss forces to a trickle. Once the partisans gradually exhausted their stored resources, starvation and utter lack of ammo and other supplies eventually brought Swiss resistance to its knees. The Axis powers partitioned Switzerland: France got Romandy, Italy took Ticino and Grisons, and Germany annexed the rest of the country.
Intervention in the war gave Spain a good opportunity to fulfil its own expansionistic ambitions with the assistance of its Axis partners. Its forces supported by Axis expeditionary corps besieged Gibraltar and occupied Portugal, picking the long-standing Anglo-Portuguese alliance as a pretext. The British and the Japanese retaliated to Axis successes in Europe by seizing various colonial territories of the Axis powers and the conquered countries, including the Canary Islands, the Azores, Belgian Congo, Angola, Mozambique, Portuguese India, East Timor, Macao, and the Dutch East Indies. The Japanese occupied most of the Dutch East Indies with East Timor and supported their reorganization as a nominally independent republic of Indonesia that was a Japanese client state. The British occupied Dutch Borneo and de facto merged it with their own colonies in Southeast Asia; much the same way, Australia took over West Papua.
British naval power and the military resources freed up from Southeast Asia thanks to alliance with Japan enabled Britain to keep a slight to moderate naval superiority vs. the Axis powers. Consequently, the British were able to dominate the Channel, keep the supply lines open for the British Isles and the other territories of the British Empire, and gain the upper hand in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. On the other hand, the combined air and naval assets of Germany, France, and Italy allowed the Axis coalition to gain the upper hand in the air war and fight the naval war from a reasonably strong position. They were able to fight the Battle of the Atlantic from a decent stance, get the upper hand in the submarine war and deal a serious amount of damage to British trade, and be reasonably close to parity in the North Sea, the Gulf of Biscay, and the Mediterranean. The RAF had to go on the defensive, with Britain becoming subject to a bombing offensive, while the British experienced very serious difficulties with their bombers achieving any in-depth and sustained penetration of Axis territory.
With a lot of effort, the British were able to exploit their theater advantage to conquer the Axis colonies in Central Africa, East Africa, and Syria. They cooperated with the Japanese to occupy Madagascar. On the other hand, they proved unable to make any serious inroads in North Africa and West Africa. With some serious effort and losses, the Axis forces conquered Gibraltar and Malta, turning the Western and Central Mediterranean into an Axis lake and forcing the British on the defensive in the Eastern Med. The logistic chain of the Axis forces in North Africa and West Africa considerably improved, allowing them to retake the Canary Islands and make some serious inroads into Egypt.
Growing French weakness, ideological affinities, Anglo-French opposition to Italian conquest of Ethiopia with toothless but annoying economic and diplomatic sanctions persuaded Mussolini that alignment with Britain and France was worthless and fascist Italy should form an alliance with resurgent Nazi Germany. Negotiations to form the Axis pact between Berlin and Rome proved fruitful after the two powers agreed to transfer the German-speaking population of South Tyrol to the Reich's and support each other's territorial ambitions in Eastern Europe. When the Spanish and French civil wars exploded, Germany and Italy took it as an excellent opportunity to enact their expansionist plans in Central Europe and the Balkans. They otherwise strived to support far-rightists in Spain and France to the best of their abilities. On their own, the Soviets did their best to support the far-leftists in the civil wars. As a result, pro-Axis fascists and pro-Soviet Communists soon became the dominant factions in the respective fronts in both countries.
Collapse of France left Britain alone and largely powerless to influence events in Europe overmuch since its power was concentrated on imperial control and naval supremacy and traditionally ill-suited to project force deep into the continent without the support of another great power. The natural alternative would have been a strategic partnership with the USA, but this proved impossible in practice because of American isolationism. The Great Depression brought President Roosevelt into power. Besides enacting his New Deal program of domestic reforms, he was an avowed interventionist and hostile to the Axis powers but American public opinion remained committed to isolationism since it turned to regard intervention in WWI as a costly mistake engineered by the Entente powers and arms dealers. The seemingly irresistible collapse of democracy and spread of totalitarianism across Europe only reinforced this mood since it left many Americans persuaded the Old World was a lost cause and best left alone unless it directly threatened American security or US interests in the Western Hemisphere and the Far East.
Over time, events only reinforced the grip of isolationism on America. A series of scandals during FDR’s second mandate consumed his political capital (his ill-advised attempt to ‘pack’ the Supreme Court with supporters of his reforms, revelation of his poor health and marital infidelity, discovery of Soviet espionage’s infiltration of his Administration) and allowed a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats to seize control of the Congress. The resulting stress caused FDR’s death in 1939 by stroke, sending the Democratic party in a nasty succession fight between supporters and opponents of New Deal, and Vice President Garner who succeeded him was hostile to many of his policies. These events enabled Robert Taft, a dedicated isolationist, to win the Republican nomination and then eke out a narrow victory in the 1940 presidential election.
The only viable alternative for Britain was to align with either the USSR or the emergent Axis bloc, but the hard choice left British elites and public opinion largely unable to pick a side while the French and Spanish civil wars raged on. The resulting diplomatic fumbling left British foreign policy paralyzed and ineffective for a good while. After their end, geopolitical concerns and traditional care for the balance of power would drive the British into an alliance of convenience with the USSR, but this proved not scarcely feasible in the interwar period. Many opposed the move, arguing with good reason Soviet Russia was just as dangerous, untrustworthy, and aggressive in its own way as the Axis powers, and communism was as threatening and destructive as fascism. Clumsy and half-hearted alliance negotiations between the British and the Soviets failed to produce results.
In the end, a feasible alliance option came for Britain from an unexpected source. During the first part of the 1930s, Japan took over Manchuria from China as the client state of Manchukuo, supported an array of sympathetic Chinese proxies to expand its influence within China proper, engaged into growing strategic confrontation with the Soviets in the Far East, and backed the independence bid of Indochina during the French Civil War. For a while, it suffered serious political instability because of the influence and violent activism of the militarist ultra-nationalists. After the extremists staged their umpteenth failed coup attempt and assassination wave of moderate political leaders, the Emperor and the moderate factions in the Japanese ruling elites and armed forces closed ranks to stage a successful thorough repression of the radical nationalists and militarists.
Consequently, Japan experienced a moderate swing of its foreign policy. With the radicals purged, it avoided getting involved in a total war with China on its own initiative because its leaders judged it too costly and risky, especially with the growing Soviet military threat on the Manchurian border. After some wavering, the Japanese embraced the policy of seeking a détente with the Chinese Nationalists based on the post-Manchuria status quo and trying to expand their influence in China by supporting various pro-Japanese proxies inside and outside the KMT. They focused their military power on checking the Soviets.
The Nationalist Chinese leaders were content for the time being to heed the status quo for their part, since it allowed them to avoid a confrontation with Japan and gave them room to focus on their efforts to eliminate the Chinese Communists, subdue the warlords, and build up the strength of their nation. They agreed to a de facto recognition of Manchukuo, suppressed anti-Japanese radicals, and went along with the Japanese bid to restore normal economic and diplomatic relations. For all their newfound moderation, however, the Japanese still decided an intervention to support the independence bid of Indochina during the French Civil War was still worth the risk, especially when they realized Britain and the USA did not regard the move with disfavor.
However, the Soviet threat still made Japan somewhat eager for allies. The Indochina issue ended up being too serious a wedge between the Axis powers and Japan, so the Japanese eventually turned to the British as potential allies. Loss of France made Britain open-minded to the perspective, and there was precedent, so the result was a restoration of the Anglo-Japanese alliance. It was an imperfect partnership since the two powers had limited capability to support each other because of distance and meant the alliance as mostly aimed against different potential enemies. However, it still allowed them to minimize a potential source of conflict in Asia, redirect the bulk of their forces elsewhere, and gain some indirect support.
Thanks to the eclipse of France during the civil war, the revisionist powers (Germany, Italy, and the USSR) more or less got a free hand to rewrite the map of Eastern Europe to their tastes. The Germans had already been able to remilitarize the Rhineland with impunity since France was already too politically instable to react with anything stronger than diplomatic protests. They strong-armed Czechoslovakia into accepting cession of the Sudetenland and subsequently enacted a partition of the country, with Germany annexing Bohemia-Moravia and Hungary getting Slovakia. Soon afterwards, the Germans started pressuring Poland to make territorial concessions about Danzig and the Corridor and accept joining the Axis. The collapse of France left Poland in a strategic bad place but its victory over the USSR a couple decades ago made the Poles confident they could resist Germany on their own, so they stubbornly resisted German demands. The Italians annexed Albania and collaborated with Hungary and Bulgaria to organize the destabilization of Yugoslavia by supporting the separatist activities of the Croats, Macedonian Bulgarians, and Kosovo Albanians. The Germans tired out of Polish defiance and started a conflict picking the status of Danzig as an excuse. The Wehrmacht quickly cut the Polish army to pieces and overrun most of the country. The Soviets picked the crisis as a good opportunity to occupy the Baltic nations and eastern Poland.
The Soviet intervention sealed the fate of the second Polish republic and briefly raised a threat of a German-Soviet military confrontation but it was ultimately avoided since neither side felt ready to fight the other and both powers shared an interest to divide the spoils of Poland. A hastily negotiated agreement established a new partition of the country: the USSR annexed the eastern territories and made them subject to brutal Sovietization like the Baltic states. Germany took the rest. It swiftly Germanized the western territories it had owned before 1914 with mass expulsion of their Polish and Jew inhabitants and their replacement by German settlers. A minority was able to stay at the price of forced cultural assimilation and the threat of death or deportation for noncompliance. The German leaders planned the same outcome for Bohemia-Moravia and the rest of Poland on a longer time schedule, by a mix of genocide, German settler colonization, and forced cultural assimilation.
When Yugoslavia exploded in civil war because of various separatist uprisings occurring concurrently, it gave Italy a perfect excuse to intervene with the support of Germany, Hungary, and Bulgaria. The Italians easily crushed a Yugoslav army weakened by civil war and multi-front invasion, and imposed a partition of the country. Italy got central Dalmatia, many Adriatic islands, most of Kosovo, northwestern Vardar Macedonia, Montenegro, and southern Slovenia. Germany took northern Slovenia and organized the Banat into an autonomous zone under the control of its ethnic German community. Hungary annexed Backa and Baranja. Bulgaria took most of Vardar Macedonia. Croatia became independent as a fascist client state of the Axis and got most of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Axis powers reorganized central Serbia with north Kosovo and eastern Bosnia into another client state of theirs. The Serbs in the rest of former Yugoslavia became subject to genocide or mass deportation into Serbia.
The French and Spanish civil wars raged for a while on both sides of the Pyrenees but the fascists eventually won them for various reasons, including better cohesion and organization, most of the professional military siding with them, and the Axis powers being more able to provide support to them than the Soviets could do with the Republicans. The far-right regimes that took over in France and Spain were naturally inclined to align with the Axis out of ideological affinity, gratitude for the support they received during the civil war, and perception of a common ground with the other fascist powers against communism and Western democracy.
The German and Italian leaders felt tempted during the French civil war to exploit the situation to annex a few border territories, but declined the option since they realized the genuine friendship of France would eventually yield them much greater strategic and economic benefits. The only price the Axis powers claimed for their aid was cession of a few colonies, which took place on relatively friendly terms and with a broad promise of future territorial compensations. Italy got Tunisia and Germany got its old colony of Cameroon. The deal included French Congo in the territory ceded to Germany to make up for the other former German colonies that remained under French or British rule. Britain refused German requests for the return of other former German colonies, especially Tanganyika.
France and Spain joined the Axis pact and signed an economic assistance treaty and a military alliance with Germany and Italy. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy adjusted their strategic stance, their ideology and propaganda, and their imperialist plans to account for a friendly France. Much the same way, the new French regime downplayed traditional hostility between France and Germany, celebrated solidarity with the other fascist Western European nations, and identified Communism and the democratic powers as the real enemies of France. After the loss of Indochina and the formation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance, fascist France added Japan to its list of enemies and intensified its hostility to Britain. During the civil war, Jose Sanjurjo gradually consolidated its leadership as the dictator of Spain, with Francisco Franco emerging as the other most important figure of the regime. In France, Marshal Petain became supreme leader, with Pierre Laval and Francois Darlan as its most influential collaborators in the civilian and military fields.
Much like it had previously happened in Germany and Italy, the new fascist regimes ruthlessly and efficiently purged political opposition by killing, imprisoning, or driving it into exile. The new French leaders were able to keep control of the French fleet and most French colonies without too much trouble. As a rule, the French professional military, colonial administrators, and the settler community mostly sympathized with the far-rightists and aligned with them during the civil war or at least stayed neutral during the conflict and recognized the fascist regime as legitimate after its victory. The French forces suppressed an all the attempts of Arab nationalists to stage an uprising in Syria. The French West Indies and Indochina were the main exceptions. The governor of Guadeloupe refused allegiance to the new regime and encouraged the British to occupy the French West Indies, which they did with the support of the USA.
An uneasy front of Indochinese nationalists and leftist revolutionaries tried to exploit the situation soon after the French civil war went into full swing to start an anti-colonial uprising. The French forces in the colony contained and to a large degree suppressed the rebellion, even if some residual unrest persisted. The monarchist and right-wing nationalist wing of the anticolonial movement decided to salvage their situation by making an appeal to Japan for intervention. The Japanese leaders initially hesitated, but became open-minded once they perceived the UK did not see a Japanese intervention with disfavor once it became clear the French civil war would likely ensue in a takeover by fascists or communists. Even the USA reluctantly accepted it. The Japanese forces landed in the colony and occupied it without excessive effort. They defeated the French and the leftist militants and set up Indochina as a nominally independent confederation of the Kingdoms of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. In practice, it was another client state of the Japanese Empire like Manchukuo.
Once the French fascists won the civil war and consolidated their regime, they bitterly resented and complained about the loss of their Caribbean and Indochinese colonies, especially the latter. In practice, the strategic situation made a French attempt to recovery the colony almost hopeless, given the effects of the civil war, distance, Japanese superiority in the theater, and the apparent Anglo-Japanese realignment. The Japanese intervention in Indochina and later the revival of the Anglo-Japanese alliance accelerated and intensified the pro-Axis and anti-British alliance swing of France and alienated the Axis bloc as a whole from Japan once France joined it.
After the end of the civil wars, the new fascist regimes of France and Spain of course focused on consolidation of their grip of power, bloody repression of defeated opponents, and healing of war damage. Spain mostly turned inward in this regard and passively followed the lead of its stronger allies. France did pursue the same objectives. However, since it had greater resources to begin with and suffered a bit less damage in the civil war because of shorter duration, its new leaders were anxious to reaffirm the prestige of their nation with some foreign-policy success. Given the ideological leanings and alliance ties of the new regime, this attitude soon translated in ambitions of territorial expansion concerning the French-speaking areas of Belgium and Switzerland. Therefore, the French leaders sent feelers to their German and Italian counterparts about plans for partition of the Low Countries and Switzerland.
The leaders of the other fascist powers were quite open-minded to the proposal since it would allow Germany and Italy to bind France even more closely to their side and make sizable territorial gains of their own in the process. Hitler’s main long-term ambition was large-scale conquest and colonization of the Russian lands, but he understood the strategic importance of having a friendly France on his side when Germany did engage Soviet Russia so he was willing to adjust his short-term plans to accomplish a complete partition of Western Europe between the fascist powers. Moreover, the move would allow the Third Reich to acquire the other Germanic-speaking areas of continental Europe, an objective that also had considerable value for Nazi ambitions.
The leaders of the fascist powers did realize such a large-scale redrawing of the map of Europe on top of their other recent actions might quite possibly cause a war with Britain or the USSR, but they were confident the combined power of Germany, France, and Italy would defeat either power w/o excessive trouble or scare them into passivity. If anything, the perspective of a general conflict did drive them to draft an expanded deal and contingency scheme that included division of Africa, Western Eurasia, and the European colonial empires at large between the spheres of influence of the fascist powers. Once it became aware of these plans, Spain did join the deal once it got guarantees about a few potential gains of its own.
Soon after the terms of their sphere of influence agreement were finalized, the Axis powers got busy translating its terms into fact. Germany and France focused on destabilization of the Low Countries. For several years, the legacy of the Great Depression and the successes of fascism in Germany and France gradually caused a remarkable swelling of popularity and support for far-right parties and movements in Belgium and the Netherlands that left these countries trapped into serious political instability. Once the fascist powers got engaged in fanning the flames of chaos in the region, instability further escalated to a sequence of riots, strikes, uprisings, and coup attempts that created pre-revolutionary situation. This gave the Germans and the French a pretext to send their forces across the border to ‘restore order’. Beset by internal instability and divided loyalties, the Dutch and Belgian governments and armies utterly failed to organize an effective resistance, and the Axis forces occupied the Low Countries with little effort.
A partition of the region swiftly ensued, with Germany annexing the Netherlands, the Flanders, Eupen-Malmedy, and Luxemburg, while France took Wallonia and the Brussels region. Franco-German conquest of the Low Countries sent Britain into strategic panic. For centuries, the British had treated any attempt by neighbor powers to seize control of the Low Countries as a casus belli and an existential threat, and they followed the pattern again. Once an ultimatum to withdraw Axis forces from the area went unheeded, the British government and parliament swiftly approved a declaration of war to Germany and France. Italy and Japan quickly heeded their alliance commitments by declaring war to Britain and the Axis powers respectively. Despite its post-civil war exhaustion, Spain too decided to align with its Axis partners.
Soon after the beginning of the war, the leadership of one of the main players suddenly experienced a major change once Hitler and several top-ranking Nazis (Bormann, Epp, Goebbels, Frick, Hess, Himmler, Ley, Rosenberg, Todt, Dietrich, Frank, Ribbentrop, and Streicher) fell victim to a bomb planted by a ‘lone wolf’ assassin. Despite the decapitation event and the resulting shock, however, Germany wobbled for a bit but avoided a serious leadership crisis in wartime since Goering took over as its new supreme leader. He was able to do so without excessive trouble since he was the designated successor of Hitler by decree and public statements and the most influential and popular surviving Nazi leader. Moreover, a few of the most important potential rivals for Hitler’s succession died in the bombing. The leadership of the army briefly considered seizing power with a coup, but eventually declined the idea, as Goering was able to win over their loyalty with a few concessions, such as marginalization of the SS. Heydrich, despite being present and getting wounded in the bombing, survived and recovered to become the new second-in-command in the Nazi hierarchy. Goering organized a new inner ruling circle of Germany, which besides Heydrich came to include Speer, Nebe, Neurath, Funk, Diels, and a few high-ranking or distinguished generals. Over time, a ruling triumvirate of Goering, Heydrich, and Speer with the Heer leadership as the silent partner became the new top leadership of Germany.
France, Germany, and Italy sent Switzerland an ultimatum whose acceptance would give the Axis powers complete control of its logistic and economic resources. When the Swiss government refused it to protect its country’s neutrality, the Axis forces invaded Switzerland from three sides and occupied most of its territory. The Swiss army enacted its defensive plan that called for withdrawal from the economic heartland and population centers to a well-stocked national redoubt in the mountain areas. Such resistance from a logistically advantageous position initially caused some serious trouble to Axis troops for a while, although they were able to seize and hold all the valuable portions of Switzerland. Over time, however, the Axis forces devised a quite effective countermeasure by setting up strict controls of the civilian population and cordoning of the redoubt areas that cut down any supplies inflow to the Swiss forces to a trickle. Once the partisans gradually exhausted their stored resources, starvation and utter lack of ammo and other supplies eventually brought Swiss resistance to its knees. The Axis powers partitioned Switzerland: France got Romandy, Italy took Ticino and Grisons, and Germany annexed the rest of the country.
Intervention in the war gave Spain a good opportunity to fulfil its own expansionistic ambitions with the assistance of its Axis partners. Its forces supported by Axis expeditionary corps besieged Gibraltar and occupied Portugal, picking the long-standing Anglo-Portuguese alliance as a pretext. The British and the Japanese retaliated to Axis successes in Europe by seizing various colonial territories of the Axis powers and the conquered countries, including the Canary Islands, the Azores, Belgian Congo, Angola, Mozambique, Portuguese India, East Timor, Macao, and the Dutch East Indies. The Japanese occupied most of the Dutch East Indies with East Timor and supported their reorganization as a nominally independent republic of Indonesia that was a Japanese client state. The British occupied Dutch Borneo and de facto merged it with their own colonies in Southeast Asia; much the same way, Australia took over West Papua.
British naval power and the military resources freed up from Southeast Asia thanks to alliance with Japan enabled Britain to keep a slight to moderate naval superiority vs. the Axis powers. Consequently, the British were able to dominate the Channel, keep the supply lines open for the British Isles and the other territories of the British Empire, and gain the upper hand in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. On the other hand, the combined air and naval assets of Germany, France, and Italy allowed the Axis coalition to gain the upper hand in the air war and fight the naval war from a reasonably strong position. They were able to fight the Battle of the Atlantic from a decent stance, get the upper hand in the submarine war and deal a serious amount of damage to British trade, and be reasonably close to parity in the North Sea, the Gulf of Biscay, and the Mediterranean. The RAF had to go on the defensive, with Britain becoming subject to a bombing offensive, while the British experienced very serious difficulties with their bombers achieving any in-depth and sustained penetration of Axis territory.
With a lot of effort, the British were able to exploit their theater advantage to conquer the Axis colonies in Central Africa, East Africa, and Syria. They cooperated with the Japanese to occupy Madagascar. On the other hand, they proved unable to make any serious inroads in North Africa and West Africa. With some serious effort and losses, the Axis forces conquered Gibraltar and Malta, turning the Western and Central Mediterranean into an Axis lake and forcing the British on the defensive in the Eastern Med. The logistic chain of the Axis forces in North Africa and West Africa considerably improved, allowing them to retake the Canary Islands and make some serious inroads into Egypt.