Post by eurofed on Feb 3, 2019 14:36:44 GMT
I got an idea about a version of WWII with Allied Japan and Axis France. Not the usual AH scenario of the Vichy regime joining the Axis coalition after the Fall of France and Mers-el-Kabir, but a mostly intact France wholeheartedly joining the Axis coalition since the interwar period because of a Spanish Civil War-style conflict and pro-Axis fascists winning the civil war. To my knowledge, this WWII variant has got little or no coverage in the AH community. I decided to add an isolationist USA staying neutral to the TL since I disliked the overbearing industrial and military power of America spoiling an interesting pro-Axis PoD and deterministically forcing the scenario to the OTL outcome (apart from the different fate of Japan, of course). For similar reasons concerning Hitler's blunders, the scenario gets rid of him and most of the Nazi bigwigs early in the game thanks to Georg Elser getting very lucky and awards leadership of Germany to a practically-minded coalition of Goering, Heydrich, Speer, and the Heer. As a consequence, there is still an all-out war between the Axis and the USSR, but it does not occur the usual Barbarossa way and a co-belligerance phase precedes it. WWII evolves into a three-way fight between Axis Europe, the USSR, and the Anglo-Japanese Allies, with the USA clinging to strict neutrality. The Allies and the Soviets may or may not be able to put their past hostility aside and form an alliance of convenience, but any wartime cooperation shall necessarily be less efficient and more plagued by mutual suspicion than OTL.
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 plans in Central Europe and the Balkans on one hand, and on the other hand 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 was easier said than done. 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 at least for this generation and best left alone unless it directly threatened the Western Hemisphere.
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. The internal conflict in the party got worse since 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 so 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 politically as threatening and destructive as fascism. Clumsy and half-hearted alliance negotiations between the British and the Soviets failed to produce results for the time being.
In the end, a viable 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 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.
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 plans in Central Europe and the Balkans on one hand, and on the other hand 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 was easier said than done. 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 at least for this generation and best left alone unless it directly threatened the Western Hemisphere.
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. The internal conflict in the party got worse since 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 so 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 politically as threatening and destructive as fascism. Clumsy and half-hearted alliance negotiations between the British and the Soviets failed to produce results for the time being.
In the end, a viable 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 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.