tl;dr
An Interwar period alternate history on which I would welcome collaboration.
The Big Idea
I’m a big fan of hex-and-counter wargames. About two years ago, I also started playing Axis & Allies on a regular basis. With the advent of high-powered computer graphics suites about a decade ago and, more recently, 3D printing, I think it is now possible to serious contemplate designing a board wargame of my own. The purpose of such a game would be entertainment only; I do not intend any of the following as a commercial endeavor, not least for reasons of copyright.
I had toyed with the idea of a point-to-point matrix for movement but ultimately settled on an area movement mechanic, which is far easier. I started out by adapting the rules for the most recent edition of Axis & Allies, only to realize that block wargaming has some concepts that may usefully be borrowed. My game will use plastic pieces but cap the number of rounds of combat each turn, allowing for units to pin one another in place. I will also experiment with orders of precedence so that units like aircraft and artillery get to roll and impose casualties before, say, infantry. I figured on a d12 system to accommodate a range of unit types.
We are talking about creating a map approximately 4x8 in the style of Historical Board Gaming’s Global War 1936. While I think their production values were terrific, the sizing and placement of territories and sea zones doesn’t suit me. Given that I’m terrible with programs like Photoshop and Illustrator – and haven’t been able to turn up an interested collaborator who can make up the lack – I think the next step is to try to buy a commercial map of the right size and simply use Magic Marker and Tab Maker to create a mock up.
Figure on a game set during the Interwar Period, no later than 1935. The size of my local gaming group is such that it would be better to have about half again as many different nations in play as the current Axis & Allies Global 1940, 2nd edition game, which means we are looking for about 14-16 options. I’d also like to place them so as to bring South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Near East into play, since they are often ignored.
My approach combining multiple threads of alternate history to create playable minor nations. Portugal is the largest, retaining its Brazilian colony. Spain is close behind, with Cuba, the Philippines, Peru (always a Royalist stronghold), and Puerto Rico still on the books. Greece wins the Greco-Turkish War with the help of the former Entente powers, with predictable results both for its economy and regional stability. Sweden balloons into the Kalmar Union, absorbing the other Scandinavian nations along with the Baltic states during the chaos of the Russian Civil War.
I need three things to start out: (1) an alternate history, which I present below; (2) ideas about where to find a map of the right size; and (3) a good set of numbers on which to base the war production. The alternate history is immediately below. I welcome suggested additions, as well as any corrections that may be appropriate.
Dateline: December, 1936
A world on the brink.
The War to End All Wars did nothing of the sort. Even before all went quiet on the Western Front, the Russian Empire was beginning a long and bloody process of unwinding that would drag through 1922, involving every one of her neighbors. The Greco-Turkish War opened in May 1919 and is still being fought. Indeed, the victorious Entente itself soon dissolved in acrimony over how best to divide the nearly-spoiled German and fast-crumbling Ottoman pies.
Thinking to head off a prohibitively expensive arms race between themselves, five great powers – Great Britain, France, Italy, the United States, and Japan – convened in Washington to negotiate the fate of Germany’s High Seas Fleet, now interned at Scapa Flow. In June 1919, British inspectors narrowly averted a plot by Rear-Admiral Ludwig von Reuter to scuttle his storied command. The delegates also mulled restrictions on naval shipbuilding, thinking that swords might be better turned to ploughshares.
The negotiations did nothing to tamp down rising tensions and exposed for a myth the proposition that conference participants were very interested in perpetual peace. Indeed, the British Admiralty achieved its aim of preserving the Navy List by arranging for the lion’s share of the German prizes to be handed over to France, thus ensuring the lasting enmity of both Italy and Japan. In return for this enormous windfall, and to placate the Americans, Clemenceau agreed to immediately end his country’s occupation of the Rhineland, but the various commissioners could reach accord on nothing else.
Over the next decade-and-a-half, the tonnage of the world’s major navies grew by leaps and bounds. Virtually all of it was devoted to battlewagons. (Absent imperatives to reduce the weight of armor and guns, and without a surplus of hulls requiring conversion, few design bureaus saw any reason to commission aircraft carriers.) The sole exception was in Italy, where, following a state visit during which he observed British planes simulate an attack on an ex-German dreadnaught, Mussolini insisted that his navy would have one of its own. Interest in submarine technology suffered a similar decline: admiralties were loath to touch off a new scramble for the one weapon that might spell doom for the all-big-gun warship.
Fleets are expensive. When the global depression began in 1929, the pain was all the keener. Desperate for change, millions turned to the opiate of fascism. From Lisbon to Warsaw, military men promised to restore the dignity of the working man, often piping their message directly into kitchen and parlor via the wireless. First, they identified the enemies within; then, the enemies without. War was once again made to seem glorious. It worked too well.
Tensions first came to a head over the Abyssinia Crisis. When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, the League of Nations did nothing. Within less than a year, the Italians pacified the country and installed their viceroy. Feeling that Mussolini’s ambitions must soon lead to a test of wills between them, and urged on by critics in the fascist Mouvement Franciste, Albert LeBrun determined to act. With the backing of the British, who closed the Suez Canal, the Marine Nationale blockaded Italian Africa.
The French and British press uniformly predicted that Italy would take humiliation sitting down, but in a burst of martial ardor, Il Duce ordered Admiral Domenico Cavagnari, commander of the Home Fleet, to make steam for Tripoli. Fearing that a general melee would expose the weaknesses of the Regina Maria, Cavagnari opted to launch a surprise attack with the small air group borne by Italy’s lone carrier, Leonardo da Vinci. The admiral anticipated that his fighter-bombers would do only light damage, thereby salving Italian honor without either provoking a retaliatory invasion of Savoy or risking the loss of irreplaceable fleet assets. Instead, the Italians traded some two dozen aged biplanes for one battleship and the newest and largest cruiser of the French Navy. Stunned, both sides lurched backwards. Terrified of French retaliation, Mussolini sacked Cavagnari even as the Suez was hastily reopened.
The Tripoli Raid provoked a paradigm shift in thinking about the future of naval operations. Because huge investments had already been made in battleships and battlecruisers, only some of the major navies of the world were in position to exercise the full range of their options. One immediate solution, at least, was to refit every warship with anti-aircraft guns, which was done universally. The British, Japanese, and Italians chose to build more carriers. The United States, by contrast, expanded an existing programme of airship construction, increasing the size and carrying capacity of new models so that they could serve as launching platforms for fighters. The airships, setting out from coastal bases, would act as sheepdogs for their precious capital ships, supplemented by large numbers of land-based fighters and torpedo bombers. Meanwhile, the Dutch pushed an existing lead in fire-control technology.
Great Britain now strikes a conciliatory tone. Too many young men never came home after the last war. Whitehall, chastened by “that Roman Affair,” now says it will seek to accommodate the “reasonable” ambitions of certain continental powers. The Opposition charges that British government is craven. Yet, still mired in economic depression and anticipating Japanese aggression in Asia, the Empire can ill afford another general conflagration in Europe – all His Majesty’s resources must be diverted east, to Fortress Singapore.
The Admiralty is especially dismayed at the present disorder in the Spanish Philippines, where European authorities are embattled not only by native guerillas but also disloyal elements within their own garrison. And then there is the matter of the Japanese, who cannot help but notice that the pair of Spanish battleships at Corregidor will never sail again.
Across the Channel, the LeBrun government has barely survived the backlash from one-time political allies who charge that he has betrayed French honor by failing to punish the Italians more sternly. But French coffers are empty, and the air force antiquated. French generals vacillate between assertions that they can easily sweep aside the Italians and disturbing confessions that, should they fail to do so, Hitler would surely pounce. Realizing that he must fend off pressure from his political right but in no position to sort out his army’s crisis of confidence, LeBrun has reversed French policy on Spain, opening supply lines to the Republican cause while at the same time ordering the Armée d'Afrique to the Libyan border in a deliberate show of force.
In The Hague, a long-standing policy of austerity is being hastily abandoned – and none too soon. Fear of German and Japanese aggression has yielded an impressive expansion of United Netherlands naval and air power, and in the East Indies, a credible fleet (anchored by fast battlecruisers) takes shape to delay any task force the Emperor might send until the British arrive. Still, the European crisis, when it comes, is sure to be a land war, meaning that the French and British commitment are of utmost importance.
In divided Spain, the Nationalists are on the offensive as the country convulses under the twin blows of Red and White Terrors. Rapidly consolidating his authority over the Moroccan Protectorate in early July, General Francisco Franco secured both Italian and German assistance – most critically, a commitment of 22 Junkers Ju52 aircraft to ferry his colonial troops to Seville. Now, with a string of victories behind them, these battle-hardened units drive toward Madrid, opposed only by a hastily-assembled and militarily ineffective Popular Front. Spain’s moribund empire has likewise fractured: Peru and Cuba have declared for the Nationalists while leftist officers have seized Puerto Rico and are rumored to be planning similar action in the Philippines.
To the west, in Portugal, António Salazar is coming to grips with the fact that his trans-Atlantic empire has seen better days. Ambitious rivals in Spain and Italy are accomplishing great things in the name of fascism, while Portugal can only leak at the seams. A recent naval mutiny has underlined the fact that not all Portuguese are reconciled to the Novo Estado – as if the Great Depression had not already badly damaged regime standing. Hundreds of thousands of Portuguese have departed Europe to try their luck in Africa and South America. As a result, Salazar's secret police report that constitutionalism, and with it, the cause of independence, is winning adherents both at home and throughout Brazil, the jewel in Portugal's colonial crown.
Distance from likely adversaries has preserved the peace in much of Portugal’s still-extensive overseas empire, but the stench of decay is everywhere. Urgent requests for reinforcement come in regularly from the Governor of Macau, while in Timor, practical authority for defense matters has been ceded to the Dutch. The royalist clique that recently seized power in Spanish Peru is now sanctioning intrusions into Portugal’s Amazonian hinterlands, while neighboring Argentina has embarked upon a program of naval expansion that Lisbon will be hard-pressed to match. Worse yet, war has broken out in the Chaco, pitting Portuguese client Bolivia against Argentine-backed Paraguay. Bolivia is by far the larger and wealthier of the two combatants, but Paraguayan successes have been virtually unmitigated, requiring Portugal to subsidize the Bolivian war effort.
German fortunes are once again at high ebb. Inch by inch, the Reich redeems the bloodlands of Mittel Europa, rejecting the conditions imposed at Versailles. Adoring crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands hail the Fuhrer who promises them one thousand years of glory. Successfully staring down her Great Power rivals, who did nothing to arrest her increasingly warlike behavior, Germany has risen as a phoenix from the ash heap of the Great War, leading the Continent in industrial output and completing a comprehensive remilitarization. Now, the noose tightens around the necks of the old arbiters of European power. In October, Germany and Italy signed the Rome-Berlin Axis, a dagger pointed at the heart of the Mediterranean, while in November, Germany concluded Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan, squeezing the Soviet Union between them.
For his part, Il Duce preens over the “imminent success” of the Nationalist cause in Spain. He speaks grandly of "eight million bayonets” that will punish French aggression, ignoring the acid remarks of a German minister who cautions that the Italians must remember to see that these are fixed to rifles. The attack against the French went very well indeed – so well that, after an initial fit of nerves, Mussolini sees no reason why fortune will not continue to bestow her favors. Like the Germans, the Italians have an axe to grind. From 1915 to 1918, they paid the butcher’s bill but gained very little for it. The Mediterranean is already a British lake. Italy has acquired a brace of new colonies in East Africa, along with the foothold of Adalia in Asia Minor, but it is clear to everyone, not least Mussolini himself, that even this is not enough. Noises from Rome suggest that Italy may soon make demands of Greece on behalf of the oppressed peoples of Albania, though it is in the Eastern Desert of Libya, against the Frenchman over the border, where the next great conflict will soon come to a head.
Though it contributed little to the Entente victory twenty years ago, Greece has been fighting a war of its own – first against the Ottomans, then against the Turks. Deft diplomacy by the Greek king, Alexander, secured critical European assistance long enough for Greek armies to secure Eastern Thrace, Ionia, and Constantinople before pushing as far as Trebizond on the Black Sea. The war resulted in virtually complete achievement of Greek irredentist aims (the Megali Idea) by 1923 — but at a catastrophic cost in lives and money. Since that time, Greek troops, always too few in number, have struggled to stamp out Turkish resistance for more than a decade-and-a-half. The Greek economy is in freefall, with predictable results for her military: the army has little, the navy nothing, and the air force even less. Many conscripts arrive at their units without boots or rifles. More than half are not Greeks at all, but Armenians, Georgians, Jews, Circassians, and White Russians. Ethnic massacres are still commonplace, and neither Smyrna or Constantinople, two of the three most important cities in the Greek-speaking world, have yet been rebuilt. Greece cannot go on in this manner for much longer. Either she must have the renewed assistance of Britain and France, preoccupied by their own troubles, or else accede to the demands of the Italians and the Soviets and hope that their hunger is sated before too much is lost.
Josef Stalin, having completed a years-long purge of the Soviet Union’s political, military, and intellectual establishment, is now minded toward expansion, both ideological and territorial. One day, Moscow arranges to sustain the Republicans in Spain; the next she plans an expedition into Sinkiang or sends the Black Sea Fleet to bombard Trebizond. Recently, the Kremlin began border negotiations with the Kalmar Union. Stalin’s pretext for demanding concessions on the Karelian Isthmus is fear of his neighbors’ aggression. This paranoia has already been borne out in the Soviet Far East, where, as winter snows begin to fall, the Red Army has clashed with the Kwantung Army two hundred kilometers outside Vladivostok.
The Kalmar Union, with its seat of government in Stockholm, is a modestly prosperous alliance centered on the Baltic Sea. Although merely an observer to the cataclysm of the Great War, Sweden profited handsomely: when the Russian government collapsed and the civil war spread to Finland, the Finns turned to Stockholm rather than become too familiar with Germans. “Volunteers” from the Swedish Royal Army led White forces to victory in Finland, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. The fledgling states that then emerged hardly required the instructive example of the Polish-Soviet War to encourage mutual participation in a compact aimed at preserving their hand-won independence. Since that time, ongoing border disputes with aggressive neighbors in both Warsaw and Moscow have predisposed the Union to the very cooperation with Germany that it had at one time hoped to avoid. Border skirmishes with the Poles tapered off following the death of Josef Pilsudski, but conscripts have been called up and military spending increased more than five-fold in the last year as the Soviets talk of revision. Recalled from holiday in India, Field Marshal Baron Carl Gustaf Mannerheim has been tasked with strengthening the line of fortifications that bears his name.
The Japanese are the great wild card of these halcyon days. In less than a half-century, they have risen to challenge European power in the Orient, defeating the Tsar in a short, sharp war and then thrusting deep into the rotten heart of China. Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist armies won him his first great victory of the war at Tai'erzhuang in April, where he marshaled more than a quarter-million troops, but it is far from clear that the Kuomintang can sustain this momentum.
The Japanese now have a choice to make. Do they take advantage of Russia’s distraction in northern Europe to redress the loss dealt them at Lake Khasan? Will they pivot west, finishing what they started in China? Or will they heed the encouragement of a growing clique of young officers and strike out for Manila, Batavia, and points south and east?
Amidst this disorder, the United States slumbers. President Roosevelt's has been unable to convince his countrymen that much is at stake beyond their two shores. Even as the number of "incidents" with Japan rises steadily, it appears that the U.S. will stand by as the world burns…
Credit: Mike Bennighoff; Cherry Trees Spared (ChangingtheTimes.net)
An Interwar period alternate history on which I would welcome collaboration.
The Big Idea
I’m a big fan of hex-and-counter wargames. About two years ago, I also started playing Axis & Allies on a regular basis. With the advent of high-powered computer graphics suites about a decade ago and, more recently, 3D printing, I think it is now possible to serious contemplate designing a board wargame of my own. The purpose of such a game would be entertainment only; I do not intend any of the following as a commercial endeavor, not least for reasons of copyright.
I had toyed with the idea of a point-to-point matrix for movement but ultimately settled on an area movement mechanic, which is far easier. I started out by adapting the rules for the most recent edition of Axis & Allies, only to realize that block wargaming has some concepts that may usefully be borrowed. My game will use plastic pieces but cap the number of rounds of combat each turn, allowing for units to pin one another in place. I will also experiment with orders of precedence so that units like aircraft and artillery get to roll and impose casualties before, say, infantry. I figured on a d12 system to accommodate a range of unit types.
We are talking about creating a map approximately 4x8 in the style of Historical Board Gaming’s Global War 1936. While I think their production values were terrific, the sizing and placement of territories and sea zones doesn’t suit me. Given that I’m terrible with programs like Photoshop and Illustrator – and haven’t been able to turn up an interested collaborator who can make up the lack – I think the next step is to try to buy a commercial map of the right size and simply use Magic Marker and Tab Maker to create a mock up.
Figure on a game set during the Interwar Period, no later than 1935. The size of my local gaming group is such that it would be better to have about half again as many different nations in play as the current Axis & Allies Global 1940, 2nd edition game, which means we are looking for about 14-16 options. I’d also like to place them so as to bring South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Near East into play, since they are often ignored.
My approach combining multiple threads of alternate history to create playable minor nations. Portugal is the largest, retaining its Brazilian colony. Spain is close behind, with Cuba, the Philippines, Peru (always a Royalist stronghold), and Puerto Rico still on the books. Greece wins the Greco-Turkish War with the help of the former Entente powers, with predictable results both for its economy and regional stability. Sweden balloons into the Kalmar Union, absorbing the other Scandinavian nations along with the Baltic states during the chaos of the Russian Civil War.
I need three things to start out: (1) an alternate history, which I present below; (2) ideas about where to find a map of the right size; and (3) a good set of numbers on which to base the war production. The alternate history is immediately below. I welcome suggested additions, as well as any corrections that may be appropriate.
Dateline: December, 1936
A world on the brink.
The War to End All Wars did nothing of the sort. Even before all went quiet on the Western Front, the Russian Empire was beginning a long and bloody process of unwinding that would drag through 1922, involving every one of her neighbors. The Greco-Turkish War opened in May 1919 and is still being fought. Indeed, the victorious Entente itself soon dissolved in acrimony over how best to divide the nearly-spoiled German and fast-crumbling Ottoman pies.
Thinking to head off a prohibitively expensive arms race between themselves, five great powers – Great Britain, France, Italy, the United States, and Japan – convened in Washington to negotiate the fate of Germany’s High Seas Fleet, now interned at Scapa Flow. In June 1919, British inspectors narrowly averted a plot by Rear-Admiral Ludwig von Reuter to scuttle his storied command. The delegates also mulled restrictions on naval shipbuilding, thinking that swords might be better turned to ploughshares.
The negotiations did nothing to tamp down rising tensions and exposed for a myth the proposition that conference participants were very interested in perpetual peace. Indeed, the British Admiralty achieved its aim of preserving the Navy List by arranging for the lion’s share of the German prizes to be handed over to France, thus ensuring the lasting enmity of both Italy and Japan. In return for this enormous windfall, and to placate the Americans, Clemenceau agreed to immediately end his country’s occupation of the Rhineland, but the various commissioners could reach accord on nothing else.
Over the next decade-and-a-half, the tonnage of the world’s major navies grew by leaps and bounds. Virtually all of it was devoted to battlewagons. (Absent imperatives to reduce the weight of armor and guns, and without a surplus of hulls requiring conversion, few design bureaus saw any reason to commission aircraft carriers.) The sole exception was in Italy, where, following a state visit during which he observed British planes simulate an attack on an ex-German dreadnaught, Mussolini insisted that his navy would have one of its own. Interest in submarine technology suffered a similar decline: admiralties were loath to touch off a new scramble for the one weapon that might spell doom for the all-big-gun warship.
Fleets are expensive. When the global depression began in 1929, the pain was all the keener. Desperate for change, millions turned to the opiate of fascism. From Lisbon to Warsaw, military men promised to restore the dignity of the working man, often piping their message directly into kitchen and parlor via the wireless. First, they identified the enemies within; then, the enemies without. War was once again made to seem glorious. It worked too well.
Tensions first came to a head over the Abyssinia Crisis. When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, the League of Nations did nothing. Within less than a year, the Italians pacified the country and installed their viceroy. Feeling that Mussolini’s ambitions must soon lead to a test of wills between them, and urged on by critics in the fascist Mouvement Franciste, Albert LeBrun determined to act. With the backing of the British, who closed the Suez Canal, the Marine Nationale blockaded Italian Africa.
The French and British press uniformly predicted that Italy would take humiliation sitting down, but in a burst of martial ardor, Il Duce ordered Admiral Domenico Cavagnari, commander of the Home Fleet, to make steam for Tripoli. Fearing that a general melee would expose the weaknesses of the Regina Maria, Cavagnari opted to launch a surprise attack with the small air group borne by Italy’s lone carrier, Leonardo da Vinci. The admiral anticipated that his fighter-bombers would do only light damage, thereby salving Italian honor without either provoking a retaliatory invasion of Savoy or risking the loss of irreplaceable fleet assets. Instead, the Italians traded some two dozen aged biplanes for one battleship and the newest and largest cruiser of the French Navy. Stunned, both sides lurched backwards. Terrified of French retaliation, Mussolini sacked Cavagnari even as the Suez was hastily reopened.
The Tripoli Raid provoked a paradigm shift in thinking about the future of naval operations. Because huge investments had already been made in battleships and battlecruisers, only some of the major navies of the world were in position to exercise the full range of their options. One immediate solution, at least, was to refit every warship with anti-aircraft guns, which was done universally. The British, Japanese, and Italians chose to build more carriers. The United States, by contrast, expanded an existing programme of airship construction, increasing the size and carrying capacity of new models so that they could serve as launching platforms for fighters. The airships, setting out from coastal bases, would act as sheepdogs for their precious capital ships, supplemented by large numbers of land-based fighters and torpedo bombers. Meanwhile, the Dutch pushed an existing lead in fire-control technology.
Great Britain now strikes a conciliatory tone. Too many young men never came home after the last war. Whitehall, chastened by “that Roman Affair,” now says it will seek to accommodate the “reasonable” ambitions of certain continental powers. The Opposition charges that British government is craven. Yet, still mired in economic depression and anticipating Japanese aggression in Asia, the Empire can ill afford another general conflagration in Europe – all His Majesty’s resources must be diverted east, to Fortress Singapore.
The Admiralty is especially dismayed at the present disorder in the Spanish Philippines, where European authorities are embattled not only by native guerillas but also disloyal elements within their own garrison. And then there is the matter of the Japanese, who cannot help but notice that the pair of Spanish battleships at Corregidor will never sail again.
Across the Channel, the LeBrun government has barely survived the backlash from one-time political allies who charge that he has betrayed French honor by failing to punish the Italians more sternly. But French coffers are empty, and the air force antiquated. French generals vacillate between assertions that they can easily sweep aside the Italians and disturbing confessions that, should they fail to do so, Hitler would surely pounce. Realizing that he must fend off pressure from his political right but in no position to sort out his army’s crisis of confidence, LeBrun has reversed French policy on Spain, opening supply lines to the Republican cause while at the same time ordering the Armée d'Afrique to the Libyan border in a deliberate show of force.
In The Hague, a long-standing policy of austerity is being hastily abandoned – and none too soon. Fear of German and Japanese aggression has yielded an impressive expansion of United Netherlands naval and air power, and in the East Indies, a credible fleet (anchored by fast battlecruisers) takes shape to delay any task force the Emperor might send until the British arrive. Still, the European crisis, when it comes, is sure to be a land war, meaning that the French and British commitment are of utmost importance.
In divided Spain, the Nationalists are on the offensive as the country convulses under the twin blows of Red and White Terrors. Rapidly consolidating his authority over the Moroccan Protectorate in early July, General Francisco Franco secured both Italian and German assistance – most critically, a commitment of 22 Junkers Ju52 aircraft to ferry his colonial troops to Seville. Now, with a string of victories behind them, these battle-hardened units drive toward Madrid, opposed only by a hastily-assembled and militarily ineffective Popular Front. Spain’s moribund empire has likewise fractured: Peru and Cuba have declared for the Nationalists while leftist officers have seized Puerto Rico and are rumored to be planning similar action in the Philippines.
To the west, in Portugal, António Salazar is coming to grips with the fact that his trans-Atlantic empire has seen better days. Ambitious rivals in Spain and Italy are accomplishing great things in the name of fascism, while Portugal can only leak at the seams. A recent naval mutiny has underlined the fact that not all Portuguese are reconciled to the Novo Estado – as if the Great Depression had not already badly damaged regime standing. Hundreds of thousands of Portuguese have departed Europe to try their luck in Africa and South America. As a result, Salazar's secret police report that constitutionalism, and with it, the cause of independence, is winning adherents both at home and throughout Brazil, the jewel in Portugal's colonial crown.
Distance from likely adversaries has preserved the peace in much of Portugal’s still-extensive overseas empire, but the stench of decay is everywhere. Urgent requests for reinforcement come in regularly from the Governor of Macau, while in Timor, practical authority for defense matters has been ceded to the Dutch. The royalist clique that recently seized power in Spanish Peru is now sanctioning intrusions into Portugal’s Amazonian hinterlands, while neighboring Argentina has embarked upon a program of naval expansion that Lisbon will be hard-pressed to match. Worse yet, war has broken out in the Chaco, pitting Portuguese client Bolivia against Argentine-backed Paraguay. Bolivia is by far the larger and wealthier of the two combatants, but Paraguayan successes have been virtually unmitigated, requiring Portugal to subsidize the Bolivian war effort.
German fortunes are once again at high ebb. Inch by inch, the Reich redeems the bloodlands of Mittel Europa, rejecting the conditions imposed at Versailles. Adoring crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands hail the Fuhrer who promises them one thousand years of glory. Successfully staring down her Great Power rivals, who did nothing to arrest her increasingly warlike behavior, Germany has risen as a phoenix from the ash heap of the Great War, leading the Continent in industrial output and completing a comprehensive remilitarization. Now, the noose tightens around the necks of the old arbiters of European power. In October, Germany and Italy signed the Rome-Berlin Axis, a dagger pointed at the heart of the Mediterranean, while in November, Germany concluded Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan, squeezing the Soviet Union between them.
For his part, Il Duce preens over the “imminent success” of the Nationalist cause in Spain. He speaks grandly of "eight million bayonets” that will punish French aggression, ignoring the acid remarks of a German minister who cautions that the Italians must remember to see that these are fixed to rifles. The attack against the French went very well indeed – so well that, after an initial fit of nerves, Mussolini sees no reason why fortune will not continue to bestow her favors. Like the Germans, the Italians have an axe to grind. From 1915 to 1918, they paid the butcher’s bill but gained very little for it. The Mediterranean is already a British lake. Italy has acquired a brace of new colonies in East Africa, along with the foothold of Adalia in Asia Minor, but it is clear to everyone, not least Mussolini himself, that even this is not enough. Noises from Rome suggest that Italy may soon make demands of Greece on behalf of the oppressed peoples of Albania, though it is in the Eastern Desert of Libya, against the Frenchman over the border, where the next great conflict will soon come to a head.
Though it contributed little to the Entente victory twenty years ago, Greece has been fighting a war of its own – first against the Ottomans, then against the Turks. Deft diplomacy by the Greek king, Alexander, secured critical European assistance long enough for Greek armies to secure Eastern Thrace, Ionia, and Constantinople before pushing as far as Trebizond on the Black Sea. The war resulted in virtually complete achievement of Greek irredentist aims (the Megali Idea) by 1923 — but at a catastrophic cost in lives and money. Since that time, Greek troops, always too few in number, have struggled to stamp out Turkish resistance for more than a decade-and-a-half. The Greek economy is in freefall, with predictable results for her military: the army has little, the navy nothing, and the air force even less. Many conscripts arrive at their units without boots or rifles. More than half are not Greeks at all, but Armenians, Georgians, Jews, Circassians, and White Russians. Ethnic massacres are still commonplace, and neither Smyrna or Constantinople, two of the three most important cities in the Greek-speaking world, have yet been rebuilt. Greece cannot go on in this manner for much longer. Either she must have the renewed assistance of Britain and France, preoccupied by their own troubles, or else accede to the demands of the Italians and the Soviets and hope that their hunger is sated before too much is lost.
Josef Stalin, having completed a years-long purge of the Soviet Union’s political, military, and intellectual establishment, is now minded toward expansion, both ideological and territorial. One day, Moscow arranges to sustain the Republicans in Spain; the next she plans an expedition into Sinkiang or sends the Black Sea Fleet to bombard Trebizond. Recently, the Kremlin began border negotiations with the Kalmar Union. Stalin’s pretext for demanding concessions on the Karelian Isthmus is fear of his neighbors’ aggression. This paranoia has already been borne out in the Soviet Far East, where, as winter snows begin to fall, the Red Army has clashed with the Kwantung Army two hundred kilometers outside Vladivostok.
The Kalmar Union, with its seat of government in Stockholm, is a modestly prosperous alliance centered on the Baltic Sea. Although merely an observer to the cataclysm of the Great War, Sweden profited handsomely: when the Russian government collapsed and the civil war spread to Finland, the Finns turned to Stockholm rather than become too familiar with Germans. “Volunteers” from the Swedish Royal Army led White forces to victory in Finland, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. The fledgling states that then emerged hardly required the instructive example of the Polish-Soviet War to encourage mutual participation in a compact aimed at preserving their hand-won independence. Since that time, ongoing border disputes with aggressive neighbors in both Warsaw and Moscow have predisposed the Union to the very cooperation with Germany that it had at one time hoped to avoid. Border skirmishes with the Poles tapered off following the death of Josef Pilsudski, but conscripts have been called up and military spending increased more than five-fold in the last year as the Soviets talk of revision. Recalled from holiday in India, Field Marshal Baron Carl Gustaf Mannerheim has been tasked with strengthening the line of fortifications that bears his name.
The Japanese are the great wild card of these halcyon days. In less than a half-century, they have risen to challenge European power in the Orient, defeating the Tsar in a short, sharp war and then thrusting deep into the rotten heart of China. Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist armies won him his first great victory of the war at Tai'erzhuang in April, where he marshaled more than a quarter-million troops, but it is far from clear that the Kuomintang can sustain this momentum.
The Japanese now have a choice to make. Do they take advantage of Russia’s distraction in northern Europe to redress the loss dealt them at Lake Khasan? Will they pivot west, finishing what they started in China? Or will they heed the encouragement of a growing clique of young officers and strike out for Manila, Batavia, and points south and east?
Amidst this disorder, the United States slumbers. President Roosevelt's has been unable to convince his countrymen that much is at stake beyond their two shores. Even as the number of "incidents" with Japan rises steadily, it appears that the U.S. will stand by as the world burns…
Credit: Mike Bennighoff; Cherry Trees Spared (ChangingtheTimes.net)
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