I mean, Italy had a preexisting bargain (that France and UK were ready to honor, if barely), spent a lot of men to achieve it, and during negotiations everybody was behind the Government (the failure to achieve as much that galvanized already present strife). They did give the US a middle finger by leaving the peace talks that wanted them to sign a bad deal. It didn't end well, and not because of money owed, desolation, or refugees. That had zero influence on the Conference. I don't see why giving the USA more influence, or Italy less time and a not necessarily collapsing enemy, would change that except in negative.
Plausibility check - late Italian entry into WWI, Entente victory, lower price for Italy
- Thread starter raharris1973
- Start date
raharris1973
Gone Fishin'
I will sketch out a possible timeline in general terms based on the above:
Italy remains under Giolitti and neutral through 1915 and 1916. Perhaps his hold over national politics will slip by the end of 1916.
The western front campaigns of 1915-1916 and the extra-European (African, Pacific, Mideast, submarine) campaigns of those years are nearly identical in their course or net results as OTL. The crushing of Serbia in late 1915 is a bit more thorough. Russia is a bit more on the back foot in the campaigns of 1915 and 1916, and Austria-Hungary is a bit stronger and less beat up, although just like OTL, it still had a terrible 1914. Gallipolli and Bulgaria joining the war go similar. The Ottoman-Russian Caucasus campaigns go about as OTL, disastrous for Ottomans at first, and then Russian-dominated. Perhaps by 1916 the Russians aren't quite as advanced in east Anatolia as OTL because Russia holds more troops in Russia opposite Austria.
Romania is not inspired to join the war in late 1916, because Austria-Hungary doesn't look as weak and the Brusilov offensive doesn't look as strong. That is convenient and helpful for the CPs, at least in the short term. But it helps Russia in a way too, since the Russians do not need to extend their front lines to cover Romania or southwest Ukraine.
Falkenhayn still gets fired in late 1916 (because of Verdun) and is replaced by Hindy & Ludy. They decide to launch USW in early 1917, & put in their munitions-centric economic plan that harms the economy. Russia has its historical Feb/Mar revolution over bread riots in Petrograd, overthrowing the Tsar and bringing in the Provisional Government. USW leads the US to declare war by April.
USW provides the excuse, and opportunism provides the motive, for Italy to declare war on the CP in June 1917, attacking headlong into the Austrian front. It is a bloody mess for the Italians, but a bloody shock for the Austrians too. Meanwhile, the French have to be passive after the Nivelle Offensive and mutinies of April 1917. Romania, inspired by the Italian example and opportunism, and possibly also using USW as an excuse, declares war on the CP and attacks Austria in July 1917. From July, the British start continuous attacks on the Flanders front.
Combined Italian, Romanian, and Russian pushes in July overwhelm Austria-Hungary's ability to resist and force the Austrians to steadily cede ground. The Germans can only send limited and tardy support, because the British are at their peak strength to date on the western front and attacking hard.
Local successes in their sectors and an increased prisoner take, especially of Austro-Hungarians, encourage the Entente powers to press on. In the meantime, the Salonica-based, multinational, French commanded Army of the Orient senses vulnerability as Austrian and German reinforcements and supplies for the Bulgarians are pulled back. They launch a breakout in October, with Greece finally declaring war, and all forces pushing north to liberate Serbia.
This sense of progress inspires French troops to resume attacks on the western front, and the still very limited #s of American troops on the line to seek action, by the end of October. By 1 November - Serbia and Belgrade are liberated, the Danube is crossed, the Romanians are at the Tisza river, and by 1 December the Italians have conquered Austria proper, including Vienna, while German troops are being pushed back in France and Belgium.
Unfortunately the Russian war effort, even though successful in the face of faltering Austro-Hungarian forces in places in the Ukrainian-Galician sector, is unsuccessful whenever facing German forces in northern sectors north of the Pripet marshes and Baltics. Further, the final offensive efforts of the Kerensky regime are straining Russian manpower, especially loyal Russian manpower, to the absolute limit, and leading to calls to send forward some troops from the Petrograd garrison to the thinning frontlines in Poland by the end of October, causing roiling discontent in the soldiers Soviets.
The Bolsheviks, advancing the slogan, "all power to the Soviets", launch a coup in Petrograd a few days into November and seize control of the city. Over the following two weeks, Bolshevik-led Soviets take over Moscow and the other major cities of European Russia and abolish the Provisional Government, supporting a plan of immediate peace, division of landed estates, and food distribution. With this revolution, the Russian army disintegrates into an armed mob whose members are variously wandering back to the cities and especially countryside of Russia, seeking to take part in the division of landed property there.
The military neutralization of Russians by the Bolshevik coup is happy news for the CPs, in theory at least, but, but the Russians Bolsheviks, while refusing to stand up and fight, are also refusing to make a clean and simple capitulation, instead communicating in terms of revolutionary propagandistic slogans about no annexations and indemnities, and peace with the German and Austrian peoples, instead of talking diplomatic specifics. This is because they are trying to encourage revolution to spread.
The effect of this tardy and inconclusive knock-out of Russia is a ‘double-knock-out’ on the eastern front, with the Russians becoming ineffective due to revolution, but the Austro-Hungarians becoming ineffective and not benefitting because the final Russian attacks, plus strong and continuing Italian, Romanian, and inter-Allied +neo-Serbian attacks from the south have crippled their ability to fight.
The Austrians and Bulgarians capitulate by 2 December, with the Ottomans following suit on 22 December, and the Germans on Jan 11, 1918.
The final German moves of the war through November and December were a series of desperate defensive and counter-offensive expedients. A stubborn defense in the west against British Empire forces, and revived French forces, gradually having to cede ground. The sudden detachment and dispatch of several divisions to shore up the Austrian front in a failed attempt to keep it from breaking, the dispatch of other divisions to Poland and the Baltics where they are more successful, and a landing in Finland to support Finnish Whites and to attempt to captured Allied supplies. This last move towards Finland had prompted a British counter-operation to land in Murmansk to defend the supplies from German capture.
The sudden entrance of Italy and Romania into the war in the spring/summer was the decisive turn overthrowing the Austrian and CP position in 1917.
Immediate Postwar effects:
Russia: Has a Bolshevik (Communist) government encouraging global replacement of the world war with a class war. It formally supports national self-determination, but seeks Communist party rule within the constituent nations of the Russian Empire and re-federation of those national party states into a new Communist Russian federation. The Communists seek to use international diplomatic venues to embarrass and lampoon bourgeois states and encourage revolutions, which they expect to be most likely the defeated CP powers before rolling into the Entente powers. The Communists publish Tsarist archives of secret treaties as part of this campaign of embarrassment. In various parts of Russia, other factions resist the Bolshevik dictatorship, including some frontline Russian units which had advanced into Galicia who feel the Bolsheviks betrayed the Russian national victory as part of the common Allied victory. Socialist Revolutionary, Menshevik, liberal, and monarchist politicians and Cossacks all oppose the Bolsheviks in varying degrees and in multiple places have armed resistance cells, resulting in a Civil War situation.
The Russian situation is complicated by foreign intervention - Thanks in part to late German intervention, in Finland, local Whites triumphed over Reds and got a good start. Some Germans still work as mercenaries for the Finns even after Germany’s general capitulation.
There is a British Imperial intervention force, backed by some American troops in the Murmansk area, guarding Allied supplies, whose relations with Bolsheviks are not at the breaking point, and who are demanding they leave.
Estonian White forces threw back Red Guards.
Poland, most of Latvia, and Lithuania remained behind German lines, and Polish groups formerly affiliated with the Austrians (under Pilsudski) and the Entente (under Haller) are moving to take up the power vacuum.
The Don and Kuban Cossacks have started anti-Bolshevik revolt. But the Bolsheviks possess the cities of the Ukraine.
Adding to Russian chaos is the loss of control over PoWs from Central Powers countries and infighting between them - for example, Czechoslovaks versus Germans and Hungarians.
Romania has taken Bessarabia
Romania: Achieves all territorial aims vis-a-vis the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires
Serbia: Restored and merged with Croatia and Slovenia
Austria-Hungary: dismantled into national states , much like OTL
Poland: is created, west of the Curzon line, with a corridor to the sea
Italy: gains all territorial irredenta, and wins all territorial disputes against Yugoslavia because of its more advantageous starting position (Fresh power in 1917, as opposed to a totally occupied power (Serbia), with a smaller army in exile. Italy wins a 'Vittoria Soddisfacente' a 'satisfactory victory' instead of 'Vittoria Mutilata'. As a result, it never becomes a Fascist dictatorship. Although, Italian governments may pursue repression against left-wing strikes and other Socialist and Communist non-parliamentary activities. Italy can also be prouder of its part in the war, it is linked more decisively in time and space to the final victory. Therefore, it is less likely to feel a compulsion to trifle with Ethiopia and conquer it in the coming decades. "We won the Great War, Ethiopia is so small time". Of course Italy will also be confident, so if Ethiopia offends or threatens Italy's colonies, Italy won't hesitate to defend them, counterattack, and punish Ethiopia to the point of wiping it off the map.
France: regains Alsace-Lorraine, gets to temporarily occupy the Saar, and Rhineland, with other western Allies. Other Allies like Britain, Italy, and the USA however oppose French ambitions for setting up separatist Rhineland state or annexing the Rhineland.
Ottomans dismantled - but never forced to sign something as harsh as Sevres.
Britain - gets a year shaved off their war.
America - Because of slowness to mobilize and speed with which the war ends, is only able to get about 925 of its men killed by desperately rushing them into random battles where they aren't really needed.
America ends the war with a case of wartime "blue balls" all dressed up for the main event, with nowhere to go. There will have been time for some wartime measures that were unpopular to have emerged, but not all of them. Millions would have been conscripted, but many fewer sent abroad, Only a tiny minority of those sent abroad have seen combat. And, as noted before, by WWI standards, hardly any of them died.
This leaves America with little anti-war and isolationist backlash, and almost a desire to go around proving itself. The USA willingly signs a postwar treaty committing itself, along with Britain, to the defense of France and Belgium for 25 years.
Germany - It gets hit with a settlement about as territorially harsh as OTL's Versailles.
....to be continued...
Italy remains under Giolitti and neutral through 1915 and 1916. Perhaps his hold over national politics will slip by the end of 1916.
The western front campaigns of 1915-1916 and the extra-European (African, Pacific, Mideast, submarine) campaigns of those years are nearly identical in their course or net results as OTL. The crushing of Serbia in late 1915 is a bit more thorough. Russia is a bit more on the back foot in the campaigns of 1915 and 1916, and Austria-Hungary is a bit stronger and less beat up, although just like OTL, it still had a terrible 1914. Gallipolli and Bulgaria joining the war go similar. The Ottoman-Russian Caucasus campaigns go about as OTL, disastrous for Ottomans at first, and then Russian-dominated. Perhaps by 1916 the Russians aren't quite as advanced in east Anatolia as OTL because Russia holds more troops in Russia opposite Austria.
Romania is not inspired to join the war in late 1916, because Austria-Hungary doesn't look as weak and the Brusilov offensive doesn't look as strong. That is convenient and helpful for the CPs, at least in the short term. But it helps Russia in a way too, since the Russians do not need to extend their front lines to cover Romania or southwest Ukraine.
Falkenhayn still gets fired in late 1916 (because of Verdun) and is replaced by Hindy & Ludy. They decide to launch USW in early 1917, & put in their munitions-centric economic plan that harms the economy. Russia has its historical Feb/Mar revolution over bread riots in Petrograd, overthrowing the Tsar and bringing in the Provisional Government. USW leads the US to declare war by April.
USW provides the excuse, and opportunism provides the motive, for Italy to declare war on the CP in June 1917, attacking headlong into the Austrian front. It is a bloody mess for the Italians, but a bloody shock for the Austrians too. Meanwhile, the French have to be passive after the Nivelle Offensive and mutinies of April 1917. Romania, inspired by the Italian example and opportunism, and possibly also using USW as an excuse, declares war on the CP and attacks Austria in July 1917. From July, the British start continuous attacks on the Flanders front.
Combined Italian, Romanian, and Russian pushes in July overwhelm Austria-Hungary's ability to resist and force the Austrians to steadily cede ground. The Germans can only send limited and tardy support, because the British are at their peak strength to date on the western front and attacking hard.
Local successes in their sectors and an increased prisoner take, especially of Austro-Hungarians, encourage the Entente powers to press on. In the meantime, the Salonica-based, multinational, French commanded Army of the Orient senses vulnerability as Austrian and German reinforcements and supplies for the Bulgarians are pulled back. They launch a breakout in October, with Greece finally declaring war, and all forces pushing north to liberate Serbia.
This sense of progress inspires French troops to resume attacks on the western front, and the still very limited #s of American troops on the line to seek action, by the end of October. By 1 November - Serbia and Belgrade are liberated, the Danube is crossed, the Romanians are at the Tisza river, and by 1 December the Italians have conquered Austria proper, including Vienna, while German troops are being pushed back in France and Belgium.
Unfortunately the Russian war effort, even though successful in the face of faltering Austro-Hungarian forces in places in the Ukrainian-Galician sector, is unsuccessful whenever facing German forces in northern sectors north of the Pripet marshes and Baltics. Further, the final offensive efforts of the Kerensky regime are straining Russian manpower, especially loyal Russian manpower, to the absolute limit, and leading to calls to send forward some troops from the Petrograd garrison to the thinning frontlines in Poland by the end of October, causing roiling discontent in the soldiers Soviets.
The Bolsheviks, advancing the slogan, "all power to the Soviets", launch a coup in Petrograd a few days into November and seize control of the city. Over the following two weeks, Bolshevik-led Soviets take over Moscow and the other major cities of European Russia and abolish the Provisional Government, supporting a plan of immediate peace, division of landed estates, and food distribution. With this revolution, the Russian army disintegrates into an armed mob whose members are variously wandering back to the cities and especially countryside of Russia, seeking to take part in the division of landed property there.
The military neutralization of Russians by the Bolshevik coup is happy news for the CPs, in theory at least, but, but the Russians Bolsheviks, while refusing to stand up and fight, are also refusing to make a clean and simple capitulation, instead communicating in terms of revolutionary propagandistic slogans about no annexations and indemnities, and peace with the German and Austrian peoples, instead of talking diplomatic specifics. This is because they are trying to encourage revolution to spread.
The effect of this tardy and inconclusive knock-out of Russia is a ‘double-knock-out’ on the eastern front, with the Russians becoming ineffective due to revolution, but the Austro-Hungarians becoming ineffective and not benefitting because the final Russian attacks, plus strong and continuing Italian, Romanian, and inter-Allied +neo-Serbian attacks from the south have crippled their ability to fight.
The Austrians and Bulgarians capitulate by 2 December, with the Ottomans following suit on 22 December, and the Germans on Jan 11, 1918.
The final German moves of the war through November and December were a series of desperate defensive and counter-offensive expedients. A stubborn defense in the west against British Empire forces, and revived French forces, gradually having to cede ground. The sudden detachment and dispatch of several divisions to shore up the Austrian front in a failed attempt to keep it from breaking, the dispatch of other divisions to Poland and the Baltics where they are more successful, and a landing in Finland to support Finnish Whites and to attempt to captured Allied supplies. This last move towards Finland had prompted a British counter-operation to land in Murmansk to defend the supplies from German capture.
The sudden entrance of Italy and Romania into the war in the spring/summer was the decisive turn overthrowing the Austrian and CP position in 1917.
Immediate Postwar effects:
Russia: Has a Bolshevik (Communist) government encouraging global replacement of the world war with a class war. It formally supports national self-determination, but seeks Communist party rule within the constituent nations of the Russian Empire and re-federation of those national party states into a new Communist Russian federation. The Communists seek to use international diplomatic venues to embarrass and lampoon bourgeois states and encourage revolutions, which they expect to be most likely the defeated CP powers before rolling into the Entente powers. The Communists publish Tsarist archives of secret treaties as part of this campaign of embarrassment. In various parts of Russia, other factions resist the Bolshevik dictatorship, including some frontline Russian units which had advanced into Galicia who feel the Bolsheviks betrayed the Russian national victory as part of the common Allied victory. Socialist Revolutionary, Menshevik, liberal, and monarchist politicians and Cossacks all oppose the Bolsheviks in varying degrees and in multiple places have armed resistance cells, resulting in a Civil War situation.
The Russian situation is complicated by foreign intervention - Thanks in part to late German intervention, in Finland, local Whites triumphed over Reds and got a good start. Some Germans still work as mercenaries for the Finns even after Germany’s general capitulation.
There is a British Imperial intervention force, backed by some American troops in the Murmansk area, guarding Allied supplies, whose relations with Bolsheviks are not at the breaking point, and who are demanding they leave.
Estonian White forces threw back Red Guards.
Poland, most of Latvia, and Lithuania remained behind German lines, and Polish groups formerly affiliated with the Austrians (under Pilsudski) and the Entente (under Haller) are moving to take up the power vacuum.
The Don and Kuban Cossacks have started anti-Bolshevik revolt. But the Bolsheviks possess the cities of the Ukraine.
Adding to Russian chaos is the loss of control over PoWs from Central Powers countries and infighting between them - for example, Czechoslovaks versus Germans and Hungarians.
Romania has taken Bessarabia
Romania: Achieves all territorial aims vis-a-vis the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires
Serbia: Restored and merged with Croatia and Slovenia
Austria-Hungary: dismantled into national states , much like OTL
Poland: is created, west of the Curzon line, with a corridor to the sea
Italy: gains all territorial irredenta, and wins all territorial disputes against Yugoslavia because of its more advantageous starting position (Fresh power in 1917, as opposed to a totally occupied power (Serbia), with a smaller army in exile. Italy wins a 'Vittoria Soddisfacente' a 'satisfactory victory' instead of 'Vittoria Mutilata'. As a result, it never becomes a Fascist dictatorship. Although, Italian governments may pursue repression against left-wing strikes and other Socialist and Communist non-parliamentary activities. Italy can also be prouder of its part in the war, it is linked more decisively in time and space to the final victory. Therefore, it is less likely to feel a compulsion to trifle with Ethiopia and conquer it in the coming decades. "We won the Great War, Ethiopia is so small time". Of course Italy will also be confident, so if Ethiopia offends or threatens Italy's colonies, Italy won't hesitate to defend them, counterattack, and punish Ethiopia to the point of wiping it off the map.
France: regains Alsace-Lorraine, gets to temporarily occupy the Saar, and Rhineland, with other western Allies. Other Allies like Britain, Italy, and the USA however oppose French ambitions for setting up separatist Rhineland state or annexing the Rhineland.
Ottomans dismantled - but never forced to sign something as harsh as Sevres.
Britain - gets a year shaved off their war.
America - Because of slowness to mobilize and speed with which the war ends, is only able to get about 925 of its men killed by desperately rushing them into random battles where they aren't really needed.
America ends the war with a case of wartime "blue balls" all dressed up for the main event, with nowhere to go. There will have been time for some wartime measures that were unpopular to have emerged, but not all of them. Millions would have been conscripted, but many fewer sent abroad, Only a tiny minority of those sent abroad have seen combat. And, as noted before, by WWI standards, hardly any of them died.
This leaves America with little anti-war and isolationist backlash, and almost a desire to go around proving itself. The USA willingly signs a postwar treaty committing itself, along with Britain, to the defense of France and Belgium for 25 years.
Germany - It gets hit with a settlement about as territorially harsh as OTL's Versailles.
....to be continued...
raharris1973
Gone Fishin'
...continuing...
The fizzling Russian Civil War, and stillborn, ephemeral foreign intervention:
The situation in Bolshevik Russia remains unstable in early 1918, with the Reds facing a variety of small scale local revolts, and dealing with the presence of some British troops in the far north.
However, since Germany capitulates to the west in January 1918, and can no longer support forward operations in Russia, the Bolsheviks (who still have some Left SRs in their governing coalition) never have to sign away such humiliating territorial terms in a peace, as opposed to armistice, of Brest-Litovsk. This removes much of the fuel that turned the anti-Bolshevik White revolts into a national movement. The defeat of Germany also means that when the Czech Legionnaires want to exit Russia to go to their Czechoslovakian homeland, the Bolshevik regime does not need to fear angry reactions from Germany in accommodating this request. In OTL, the Germans were strongly occupying deep into Russian Ukraine and capable of leaping to St. Petersburg and Moscow. The only way the Bolsheviks could even pretend to tell the Czechs they could exit the country in OTL was by going east through the Pacific, not west to restart the war with the Germans or be immediately executed as traitors by the Austro-Hungarians. In the ATL, with Germany defeated and Austria-Hungary disintegrated, the Bolsheviks have a real option to simply let the Czechs ride trains and walk roads west through Ukraine to Slovakia, Moravia, and Bohemia, undisturbed. In turn, undisturbed and un-harassed Czechs likely will exit Russian territory post-haste, and unlike OTL, not get involved with Russian factional fighting. This means they don't have their summer 1918 Siberian revolt that aids and supplies the Omsk White government so much and gains so much global publicity and sympathy to encourage a greater level of western, especially American, and also Japanese, intervention on the White side.
So, in this ATL, despite the end of the Great War being anti-climactic for the US, leaving it with the military equivalent of "blue-balls" Woodrow Wilson and his Cabinet just can't think of a viable excuse to meddle in Russia, and the other Allies don't have much hope and aspiration to intervene either. They leave local uprisings to their fate, grab, dump, or burn some munitions depots, and leave. Workers and soldiers show a distaste for any proposed schemes to intervene in a hostile manner against the Bolsheviks.
The Russian Civil War, or consolidation of Communist Party rule, ends and resolves sooner with less fighting, but the borders of Communist Russian influence end up in a wash, basically matching the frontiers of 1922-1938. There is enough local support, and western support, and German veteran support, for Finland and the Baltics to remain independent, for Romania to hold Bessarabia, for Poland to maintain independence and win control of the Kresy, and for local reactionaries and the Little Entente powers (Romania, Yugoslavia, the Czechs) to crush Bela Kun's Red Hungary. Certainly with a less intensive and extensive Civil War, Bolshevik Russia is taking less damage, which should allow, theoretically, for greater expansion o help to foreign revolutionaries. But they also forge fewer military skills, and remain undisciplined amateurs for longer, often losing frontier battles.
....
With an earlier end to the war, minuscule casualties, shallower and shorter postwar recession, and quicker recovery, the Cox-Roosevelt ticket narrowly wins the 1920 election. This is despite Senate failure to ratify the treaty of Versailles or join the League of Nations, as much as because of Wilson’s refusal to compromise as irreconcilable, principled opposition.
internal politics and partisan division, and lack of a crisis demanding major intervention, are the major limiters on US intervention in the Cox administration, rather than disillusionment with the world.
the US does have a series of small ‘banana wars’ and occupations in the Caribbean and Central America.
italy has postwar labor unrest and increasingly heavy handed state Security and business tactics, but no Fascist takeover.
Germany has a welter of left and right wing extremist groups and disturbances, including the Munich Beer Hall putsch, which fails like OTL, in 1923.
the Washington naval treaties limit naval arms and restrain Great power competition in China and the pacific in 1922.
The Ruhr crisis unfolds similarly to OTL in 1923, with France eventually backing off, unsupported by Britain.
in 1924 under fire from the business community unhappy with some reform legislation, and a public thinking it is ‘time for change’ votes out the Cox- Roosevelt ticket and votes in the Republicans.
....
Franklin Roosevelt does not contract polio.
Calvin Coolidge is Republican nominee and winner in the 1924 election and reelected in 1928 (his son doesn’t die, causing him to spin into personal depression and withdrawal like in OTL). The Stock Market crashes in February 1929, and coincides with general bad trends and weaknesses in the economic and especially the banking sector that worsen throughout Coolidge’s term.
The Cox and Coolidge Administrations have the ‘Banana Wars’ in the Caribbean but avoid the temptation to intervene in revolutionary Mexico. Crises in warlord China and the rise of the Chinese Nationalist-Communist First United Front and associated anti-foreign strikes, demonstrations, and riots result increases in naval patrols and marine deployments in China in the late 1920s.
The US under both administrations continues to guide the Philippines along its slow path to self-government.
Japan seizes Manchuria in 1931, and turns it into the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932, while having a battle over Shanghai with Chinese forces in early 1932. This is arguably the biggest global military clash involving a great power since the armistice ending WWII, and a blatant violation of the recently signed Kellogg-Briand pact outlawing war.
Coolidge’s Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, refuses to recognize the results of the Japanese aggression. The League also investigates and finds Japan’s occupation unjustifiable.
However, American leaders, and soon British leaders, are too consumed with the crashing domestic and global economies and their falling political fortunes to do much.
The Republican nomination for 1932 is a poisoned chalice, handed to Charles Curtiss, the first Presidential candidate of partial native American ancestry.
The Democratic nominee for 1932 and general election victor is William Gibbs McAdoo.
His first term is spent focused on economic recovery and reform programs. With the business cycle hitting rock-bottom in 1932-33, he has a mandate and a huge congressional majority to attempt expedient measures. He also has good timing, as an upturn from the election, if not a recovery of pre-Depression conditions, is apparent by the midterms, and a recognizable recovery is underway by 1936.
McAdoo is a Wilsonian internationalist. Despite this, and despite Wilson’s habit of intervening in the Caribbean, early in his first administration, the USA largely draws back from those interventions, with them having run their course, plausible excuses to leave surfacing, and a desire to save funds and executive attention to focus on the domestic economy.
McAdoo still attempts to engage in international economic and arms control diplomacy.
One feature of this TL’s early to mid-1930s that is different from OTL is that Senator Burton K. Wheeler’s efforts to hold the nation’s attention with investigation into the financial origins of the first world war fail to gain much traction with the US media or public. Such inquiries by a few curious legislators, and publications describing the role of “merchants of death” in fomenting the last war, have some popularity in Britain and France, and in far left, Communist and Anarchist circles, but hardly get any relevant attention in broader American public opinion.
A knock-on result of this is neutrality laws and laws governing arms sales are left in their 1920s status quo, with no particular bar to lending to belligerents, or exporting arms, nor any bar to delivering arms on US ships. The differences in US opinion in this ATL compared to OTL are directly traceable to the differing WWI experience. The US faced far fewer casualties, under 1,000 in combat in Europe, and hundreds of thousands of men experienced the stresses of combat and being under fire. The war was 10 months shorter than OTL, and related domestic repressions were lesser and briefer. The world that emerged afterward didn’t match some expectations set by high-flown Presidential rhetoric, but with less loss, indeed less of a fight, than expected, disappointment in the outcome and disappointment in allies, who won the victory after all, was correspondingly less.
Therefore, despite the existence of a peace lobby and some people and groups making a “merchants of death” argument to crack down on arms manufacturers and financiers, those industries own lobbyists are able to outcompete peace lobbyists in the halls of Congress by pointing out their role as a natural part of a healthy manufacturing employment sector in additional to national security.
The US observes Japanese expansion in China with wary eyes, and its moves lead some to advocate renewed naval expansion. Japan’s departure from the League of Nations is particularly disturbing, despite the US’s own lack of membership.
Luckily for Pacific-watchers in the incoming McAdoo administration, the Japanese put a pause on major expansion in China with a truce in 1933
Nevertheless, largely as a geopolitical measure to constrain Japan, but also sold as an economic measure to increase export opportunities, the McAdoo administration diplomatically recognizes the USSR in 1933.
However, the rise of the militant Hitler regime in Germany in 1933, its withdrawal from the League of Nations, and its blaming of France for the failure of disarmament and announcement of its own rearmament in 1934 is unwelcome in the US, and obviously much closer to home.
Yes, Hitler and the Nazis still rose. The Weimar Republic through its life suffered a legitimacy deficit. Paramilitary groupings existed since demobilization in early 1918, and were encouraged to exist by the military after further forced demilitarization and to deal with real postwar Communist uprisings and labor strikes. Some of the German groups observed and admired the Italian blackshirts, but the latter’s lack of success in seizing power in Italy wasn’t the end of right-wing paramilitarism in Germany or Europe. Blackshirts still existed as a costumed bodyguard force for Fascist rallies in Italy, and the Fascist Party had a small but notorious contingent in the Italian parliament led by its rascally leader Mussolini.
n 1934, Austrian Nazis assassinated the Austrian leader, but German Nazis backed off from providing any aid when the Italian government made it clear it would tolerate no German intervention, and would step in to oppose it militarily.
In 1935, non-Fascist, but conservative, Italy, without having stewed over a ‘mutilated victory’ since WWI, and finding the pacification of Libya enough of a headache, has no interest in starting some campaign of conquest in Ethiopia.
Italians of different political stripes are paying attention to the somewhat volatile political situation in Spain however, with Italian Communists, Socialists, and anti-clericals sympathizing with ideological counterparts who have a share in power as part of the newly elected Popular Front in 1935, and the ruling Italian conservatives, monarchists, and pro-Catholic constituencies being vocally averse to the Spanish Popular Front or the election of any similar front in Italy.
In 1936, Spanish right-wing forces, massing in Spanish Morocco, with a German supported airlift, attempt a coup. However, the Republic in Madrid fends off the coup, so this instead leads to a Civil War.
Before 1936 is over, Germany is providing a steady stream of aid and volunteer pilots and aircraft to the Spanish right-wing rebels, called nationalists. Italy is providing a smaller amount of aid and financing to the Spanish Nationalists, and allowing militant Catholic zealots and Fascists to go fight there. And the USSR is selling arms to the Republic and organizing international volunteer brigades. Self-organized groups of left-wing Italian expats participate in the international brigades on the Spanish Republican side, along with some Germans.
The French Popular Front government is sympathetic to the embattled Spanish Republic, but parties and bureaucrats to its right are not, and threaten to be confrontational if Paris supports the Republic. This leads France to officially support Britain’s non-intervention policy.
However, the McAdoo administration, riding fairly high, still mainly focused on domestic issues, but enjoying a recognizable economic recovery and sailing toward reelection in 1936, opens the spigots of arms sales and credit to the Spanish Republic.
The US and Mexican governments coordinate arms sales and deliveries to Spanish Republican held ports, and the sale of some ships, and the Cuban government also participates. This is particularly helpful to the Republican areas holding out in the northern Basque Country, because the Nationalists control all the rest of western Spain. At times, some deliveries are made through France which ‘looks the other way’ or go through under the pretext of ‘going to Andorra’.
Rather than propounding a big pro-Spanish policy, McAdoo mainly works by portraying various governmental decisions as going ‘laissez-faire’ according to current interpretation of the law whenever that breaks in favor of the Spanish Republic. This angers some devout Catholic members of the Democratic coalition, but not to any electorally costly degree, at least not in 1936 or 1937.
American supplies for the Spanish Republic improves its material situation, and leaves it less isolated and vulnerable to rip-offs and bad bargains. This and a much scaled down Italian role tips the balance quite a bit against the Nationalists. While Guernica is still bombed to destruction by the Condor Legion, a pocket of Basque Country holds out, and the Nationalists fail to split Republican Barcelona-Catalonia from Republican Madrid/southeast Spain.
For the duration of 1934-1937, to the surprise of some, Hitler is actually finding the USSR and USA (in Spain) and Italy (in Austria, but not in Spain) a bigger pain in his ass than countries like France, Britain, and Poland. Poland signs a non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1934. Britain signs a naval treaty with Germany in 1935. France ultimately does not move against Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland.
Germany is getting the benefit of testing out aerial tactics and pilot skills in Spain, getting new ground warfare systems tested, and getting paid in minerals in real time. However part of its payment is to be rights to more supplies of Spanish minerals (mainly Wolfram/tungsten) post-Civil War. With Nationalist victory in prolonged, and increasing doubt, that, and any Condor Legion men and aircraft lost through attrition may soon start to look like a bad investment.
In the summer of 1937, Sino-Japanese conflict breaks out into full-scale warfare along the Great Wall and the areas of Beijing and Tianjin. By September, the fighting spreads to Shanghai, as Chiang Kai-shek fully engages his National Army against Japanese invaders.
The Japanese, preferring to clothe aggression in euphemistic terms, and having let the war escalate without central direction, call it the “China Incident”. The Chinese are more frank, and declare war on Japan. Since US neutrality law is not so tight about opposing arms sales to belligerents, in this ATL, the Chinese risk nothing by declaring this reality, and if the Japanese ultimately respond in kind, that alone does not endanger their imports from the US.
As in Spain, Soviet and American policies run along somewhat parallel lines. Both sympathize with China and provide aid. The Soviets first, with more, and more hands-on. But Britain and France also clearly favor Chiang Kai-shek’s China over Japan.
The U.S. begins a steep build-up of fleet strength, including major combatants taking years to built and supporting smaller fleet train craft, many of which will be available sooner, and can assist in tactical reinforcement of the Philippines, Wake Island, and Hawaii. The U.S. also builds up the Filipino Army and the Philippines garrison and number of aircraft in the archipelago, while enlarging the Army overall and ordering more aircraft.
Nothing quite as blatant as the Panay Incident happens, but American casualties in the crossfire of Shanghai fighting, and cases of abused Americans, and the backdrop of massacred and graphically abused Chinese, are enough to secure public and congressional support for aid to China, and the Pacific defense build-up by early 1938.
By late 1937, early 1938, the US is making arrangements to deliver weapons and supplies via the Philippines to unoccupied south China ports, via Hong Kong, and when this gets too dangerous, via French Indochinese ports.
Also by early 1938, the clamor to cancel the US-Japanese trade treaty, and various other forms of embargo, is deafening, and in February, 1938, the US gives its six-months notice of termination of the treaty.
In OTL February-March 1938, German-Austrian relations reached a terminal crisis point that was resolved by a German ultimatum, unopposed occupation, and unification (Anschluss) with Germany. In this ATL, no such thing happens this month in this year, because Hitler does not feel the Italian government is of the right frame of mind to accept Anschluss without intervening and neither he nor the Wehrmacht is optimistic about prevailing over the Italian Army without further German rearmament. Italy is not judged to be in the right frame of mind because the Kingdom does not have an ideologically compatible leader - the Fascists are just one small party, and are not isolated and alienated from the western powers. While the Italian King and military have some common sympathies with the Germans in the Spanish situation, there is no comprehensive understanding, and certainly no acceptance of a common border.
In America and the Pacific, Japan goes on a panic purchasing spree of petroleum and scrap metal after the trade treaty announcement, that moves the US to take various measures to limit monthly exports of those commodities beyond certain recent monthly averages, and to delay Japanese banking transactions, and to significantly enlarge the national petroleum reserve to remove excess supply from the market.
US economic measures are expanded to multilateral economic measures with British, Soviet, French, Dutch, Mexican, and Romanian participation, by April 1938. This is also matched by limited French naval and troop reinforcement in Indochina, and substantial British fleet reinforcement at Singapore, and Soviet force build up in the Far East opposite Manchuria.
As a result of the global economic and military-naval squeeze on Japan, the Tokyo government refuses to support reinforcements for the China incident to support expanded war operations to occupy more Chinese ports or seize the Chinese capital in exile at Wuhan. The Emperor expresses his increased displeasure with the military, its promises, and the war through his Privy Councillors.
On September 1, 1938, the US-Japanese trade treaty is officially terminated and the US launches comprehensive embargoes on fuel and metals exports to Japan, and freezes Japan’s assets in the USA, on the demand for Japanese withdrawal from China. Other countries follow suit, to greater or lesser degrees.
US-Japanese talks are attempted, with the US positions being pretty unyielding about major withdrawals from occupied territory, at least everything occupied since summer of 1937. Japan is trying to get a maximum binding promise of economic relief for a minimum binding commitment to military restraint and territorial withdrawal and making multiple creative, but inadequate proposals, with varying degrees of actual concessions. The Americans, Chinese, and their international partners can be patient, because they know time is on their side.
The Chinese concern is that no deal let Japan off the hook too easily, and that in territorial terms, at a minimum, Japan withdraw back from China including all Manchuria it occupied in 1931. The Soviets, who have a long border with Manchuria and a lost railway there, echo this hardline Chinese position.
Some Japanese diplomats and parliamentarians accused of being too soft or offering too defeatist plans in negotiations are assassinated, but the Emperor jiu-jitsu’s some of this against the militarists by having imperial family members and select senior honored statesmen lead some elaborate state funerals honoring some of these ‘’national martyrs for peace”.
The China war on the ground continues in a stalemate once the Japanese halted attempts at major offensive operations. Chinese forces are unable to dislodge them from the coastal provinces and suffer high losses, although their quality is improving, or getting restored with new supplies and resources after the massive losses of the Shanghai campaign.
Things continue in this pattern even as Japan is forced to fight this war from stockpiles from Sept 1938 through April 1939 and slow down the rate of aircraft and naval sorties.
Over the same period, the Spanish Civil War has settled into a stalemate with the Republicans controlling eastern Spain and the northern Basque pocket, and the Nationalists controlling western Spain. But attrition is wearing down the Nationalists, with their less populous, more rural, recruiting base, more.
In April 1939, Hitler, having built up his ground and air arms a bit more, decides that the fate of Austria can be put off no more and increases pressure for unification. Backed into a corner, the Austrian regime sets up a plebiscite designed to show support for independence.
Hitler moves in, facing little resistance other than traffic jams, but within a few hours, Wehrmacht forces report clashing with Italian Alpini soldiers in Tyrol and the Salzburg-Carinthian border.
The Italo-German war is on. Italy raises a motion in the League of Nations condemning Germany for violating the sovereignty of Austria. France, Britain, and the Soviet Union and all neighbors of Germany except the committed neutrals vote in favor.
Italy immediately drops the flow of support to the Spanish Nationalists as Austria becomes the sole focus. Germany too ends shipments of aid to Nationalist Spain as the fight for Austria becomes the focus, and Condor Legion pilots, with or without their machines, try to make it back to Germany via circuitous routes.
Several thousand hardcore Austrian regime loyalists, and Jewish Austrians, within the initial Italian occupied zone, rally to the Italian side. However, most of the Austrian population is sullenly hostile, or actively hostile to the Italian invader/intervenors, with some who have a massive distaste for Nazis, like Socialists and Communists, being merely passive or out for themselves.
The Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica have some intense air battles, with the Luftwaffe usually coming out better. Within a couple days, Rome is actively seeking allies and allied support.
Rome is in the first instance going to France and reminding France that the fight for Austria is a fight for the safety of the French border too. Italy reaches out to the UK for financial support and for possibly purchasing aircraft or aircraft related parts. For this last category, it also looks to the US.
It calls on Hungary, an old friend, to intervene.
It finds the most receptive audience in Prague. Prague finds the idea that a German Austria is an existential threat to Bohemia convincing. Czechoslovakia declares its support for Austrian independence and war on Germany, mobilizing its border defenses with Germany, and sending forces south to Vienna, and into Austria north of the Danube to operate against German units there. Prague and Rome arrange to deconflict and support each other’s aircraft and pilots.
Over in Spain, with the patrons of the Nationalists fighting each other, Nationalists begin to look vulnerable, and the Republicans plan for offensives. The foreign patrons of the Republicans, while also fascinated by the Austrian war, and involved in the Pacific, are more capable of multi-tasking, and keeping an eye on Spain, decide to turn the aid taps to the Republicans to even higher volume, which ultimately leads to Republican victory by November 1939.
The Italian advances in Carinthia, into Salzburg and Central Austria are thrown back by German forces supported by the Luftwaffe with high losses on both sides. The Czechs suffer high losses establishing siege lines around Vienna. As spring turns into summer, Nazi Germany occupies most of Austria’s land area, of upper and lower Austria, Styria, Carinthia, Salzburg, and Voralburg, with the exceptions being an Italian-held section consisting of north Tyrol occupied by Alpini troops, and segments of lower Austria north of the Danube occupied by Czech troops.
The German Czech border has also been a hot front. Czech defenses have mostly held, with the Germans just advancing in a few northern and western border districts like Eger. The Luftwaffe is generally getting the better of the air war, but it is a two-sided affair, with Silesian factories getting bombed as well as Prague. Italian and Czech aircraft have hit Munich.
The attrition to ground, and especially air, forces is ruinous. To both sides but especially the Germans.
France begins a ‘precautionary mobilization’ and places major orders for US aircraft and motor vehicles.
Italian diplomacy also seeks to increase German difficulties by widening the front to include Polish action against Germany. Italy appeals to Catholic religious ties and raises the specter of German revisionism compared with long-term Italian partnership. While Poland has its “issues” with Czechoslovakia, Italy tries to turn that into an anti-German competition, saying it will support claims to Silesia by whomever among the two is more active against Germany.
Some Poles oppose leaving the comfort zone of the non-aggression pact with Germany, but taking the opportunity to get out from under Germany’s shadow is tempting, especially with anti-Germanism spreading in Europe.
Abwehr picks up these internal Polish discussions, and it doesn’t take secret intelligence to hear the audible cheers for ‘gallant Italy and Czechoslovakia’ in the British and French parliaments, the American Congress, and Supreme Soviet. This is in addition to all the secret talks about military cooperations between the Italians, French, and British.
The wasting Austrian, Alpine, Bohemian stalemate causes the Wehrmacht to coup out Hitler in late August, and seek the peace mediation of the neutral powers of Europe in Scandinavia and the Netherlands.
The Germans accept international demands for withdrawal from Austria and Germany and Austria are compelled to accept ‘the perpetual neutrality of Austria on the same basis as Switzerland’
The setback for the Nazi expansionist, and pan-German agenda is total.
Meanwhile, in the Far East, the Japanese begin a graduated withdrawal from occupied China to the occupied Nanjing-Shanghai corridor, the Tianjin-Beijing corridor, and the Qingdao-Jinan corridor in Shandong, seeking to gain relief from international sanctions and a slow-down of the building international military siege, possibly in return for withdrawing from “China proper” to “Manchukuo”. This is carried out over April to August 1939.
Encouraged to see its pressure policy having an impact, the western powers including the McAdoo and Chamberlain governments encourage Japan to believe this type of withdrawal would yield a restoration of economic ties, although they still fail to recognize Manchukuo.
This Japanese retreat raises Chinese morale, but causes trepidation that there may be a final settlement leaving Manchuria in Japan’s hands. The Soviets share that fear.
In August, freed from the fear of the Hitler regime, and for the moment, of German militarist adventurism, Soviet policy becomes much more active in the Far East, with massing of more Soviet ground and air forces there, and larger blocks of aid to the Chinese.
While the embers of the Sino-Japanese war stubbornly remain lit, and Japanese-western diplomacy is frustratingly slow, the Soviets prepare other solutions.
In November 1939, they launch a broad scale offensive on both all the borders of Japanese occupied Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, and Sakhalin island.
This causes the emergency evacuation of Japanese garrisons in the Nanjing-Shanghai, and Jinan-Qingdao corridors to deal with the Soviet threat, and consequently, the reoccupation of those territories by Chinese Nationalist troops.
It also relatively quickly seizes all of Sakhalin island with a heavily armed and air supported force that the Japanese consistently fail to dislodge.
The Soviet advance in Manchuria is rapid in the northern half, and slower and steadier in the southern half, but Soviet superiority in armor, artillery, and even numbers of all-metal monoplane aircraft, and all supporting logistic services is keenly felt.
The Soviet offensive encourages the Chinese Nationalists and Chinese Communists to go on the offensive against the Japanese. The Chinese forces join attacks in inner Mongolia and southern Manchuria, and mainly focus on Hebei province, the home of Beijing and Tianjin.
Primarily Soviet military successes, with the Chinese mainly playing a tag-along role, by spring 1940 have led to the liberation of Mukden/Shenyang, providing revenge for the war of 1905, and driven Japanese forces out of Manchuria and back into the Kwangtung peninsula bottleneck and Yalu river in Korea in most places.
By simply steamrolling and killing the Japanese forces on their Manchukuo puppet territory seized since 1931, and destroying any counterattacks with extreme prejudice, the Soviets simply help the Japanese avoid the need for any internal policy debates on withdrawal or not from Manchuria to pre-1931 borders.
By agreeing to armistice based on the status quo, which leaves Korea and Port Arthur in Japanese hands, same as the status quo ante bellum, defeated Japan, while not occupied, regime-changed, or reformed, is chastened to the satisfaction of western powers enough to be treated as a trading partner again, in particular after the recent remarkable demonstration of Soviet strength.
The Soviets, for the moment, accept the redemption of Sakhalin island (they lacked the naval assets/strength to claim the Kuriles) and the recovery of their position in the north Manchurian Chinese eastern railway as a sufficient war trophy from Japan and vengeance for the 1904-1905 humiliation. Removal of the the Japanese threat in southern Manchuria, north of the Yalu river and Korean Peninsula is a bonus, and that area’s permanent occupation by weaker Chinese forces is an improvement over its former occupation by Japanese.
So, this United States and Italy, both ‘later’ to ‘arrive’ for WWI in this timeline, end up less traumatized into particular psychoses of isolationism and fascism. As a result, Italy becomes a starring good guy instead of a bad guy in the next round, indeed, leader of Europe’s successful anti-Nazi coalition. And the US, instead of going through an excessive isolationist spell that did much to enable years of dictatorial rampage before springing back into action with massive brute force and atomic vengeance, instead plays a highly aggressive Cold War game of rearmament, sanctions, and proxy warfare to roll back and contain evil dictators and the aggression without a massive, all-encompassing global war.
The fizzling Russian Civil War, and stillborn, ephemeral foreign intervention:
The situation in Bolshevik Russia remains unstable in early 1918, with the Reds facing a variety of small scale local revolts, and dealing with the presence of some British troops in the far north.
However, since Germany capitulates to the west in January 1918, and can no longer support forward operations in Russia, the Bolsheviks (who still have some Left SRs in their governing coalition) never have to sign away such humiliating territorial terms in a peace, as opposed to armistice, of Brest-Litovsk. This removes much of the fuel that turned the anti-Bolshevik White revolts into a national movement. The defeat of Germany also means that when the Czech Legionnaires want to exit Russia to go to their Czechoslovakian homeland, the Bolshevik regime does not need to fear angry reactions from Germany in accommodating this request. In OTL, the Germans were strongly occupying deep into Russian Ukraine and capable of leaping to St. Petersburg and Moscow. The only way the Bolsheviks could even pretend to tell the Czechs they could exit the country in OTL was by going east through the Pacific, not west to restart the war with the Germans or be immediately executed as traitors by the Austro-Hungarians. In the ATL, with Germany defeated and Austria-Hungary disintegrated, the Bolsheviks have a real option to simply let the Czechs ride trains and walk roads west through Ukraine to Slovakia, Moravia, and Bohemia, undisturbed. In turn, undisturbed and un-harassed Czechs likely will exit Russian territory post-haste, and unlike OTL, not get involved with Russian factional fighting. This means they don't have their summer 1918 Siberian revolt that aids and supplies the Omsk White government so much and gains so much global publicity and sympathy to encourage a greater level of western, especially American, and also Japanese, intervention on the White side.
So, in this ATL, despite the end of the Great War being anti-climactic for the US, leaving it with the military equivalent of "blue-balls" Woodrow Wilson and his Cabinet just can't think of a viable excuse to meddle in Russia, and the other Allies don't have much hope and aspiration to intervene either. They leave local uprisings to their fate, grab, dump, or burn some munitions depots, and leave. Workers and soldiers show a distaste for any proposed schemes to intervene in a hostile manner against the Bolsheviks.
The Russian Civil War, or consolidation of Communist Party rule, ends and resolves sooner with less fighting, but the borders of Communist Russian influence end up in a wash, basically matching the frontiers of 1922-1938. There is enough local support, and western support, and German veteran support, for Finland and the Baltics to remain independent, for Romania to hold Bessarabia, for Poland to maintain independence and win control of the Kresy, and for local reactionaries and the Little Entente powers (Romania, Yugoslavia, the Czechs) to crush Bela Kun's Red Hungary. Certainly with a less intensive and extensive Civil War, Bolshevik Russia is taking less damage, which should allow, theoretically, for greater expansion o help to foreign revolutionaries. But they also forge fewer military skills, and remain undisciplined amateurs for longer, often losing frontier battles.
....
With an earlier end to the war, minuscule casualties, shallower and shorter postwar recession, and quicker recovery, the Cox-Roosevelt ticket narrowly wins the 1920 election. This is despite Senate failure to ratify the treaty of Versailles or join the League of Nations, as much as because of Wilson’s refusal to compromise as irreconcilable, principled opposition.
internal politics and partisan division, and lack of a crisis demanding major intervention, are the major limiters on US intervention in the Cox administration, rather than disillusionment with the world.
the US does have a series of small ‘banana wars’ and occupations in the Caribbean and Central America.
italy has postwar labor unrest and increasingly heavy handed state Security and business tactics, but no Fascist takeover.
Germany has a welter of left and right wing extremist groups and disturbances, including the Munich Beer Hall putsch, which fails like OTL, in 1923.
the Washington naval treaties limit naval arms and restrain Great power competition in China and the pacific in 1922.
The Ruhr crisis unfolds similarly to OTL in 1923, with France eventually backing off, unsupported by Britain.
in 1924 under fire from the business community unhappy with some reform legislation, and a public thinking it is ‘time for change’ votes out the Cox- Roosevelt ticket and votes in the Republicans.
....
Franklin Roosevelt does not contract polio.
Calvin Coolidge is Republican nominee and winner in the 1924 election and reelected in 1928 (his son doesn’t die, causing him to spin into personal depression and withdrawal like in OTL). The Stock Market crashes in February 1929, and coincides with general bad trends and weaknesses in the economic and especially the banking sector that worsen throughout Coolidge’s term.
The Cox and Coolidge Administrations have the ‘Banana Wars’ in the Caribbean but avoid the temptation to intervene in revolutionary Mexico. Crises in warlord China and the rise of the Chinese Nationalist-Communist First United Front and associated anti-foreign strikes, demonstrations, and riots result increases in naval patrols and marine deployments in China in the late 1920s.
The US under both administrations continues to guide the Philippines along its slow path to self-government.
Japan seizes Manchuria in 1931, and turns it into the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932, while having a battle over Shanghai with Chinese forces in early 1932. This is arguably the biggest global military clash involving a great power since the armistice ending WWII, and a blatant violation of the recently signed Kellogg-Briand pact outlawing war.
Coolidge’s Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, refuses to recognize the results of the Japanese aggression. The League also investigates and finds Japan’s occupation unjustifiable.
However, American leaders, and soon British leaders, are too consumed with the crashing domestic and global economies and their falling political fortunes to do much.
The Republican nomination for 1932 is a poisoned chalice, handed to Charles Curtiss, the first Presidential candidate of partial native American ancestry.
The Democratic nominee for 1932 and general election victor is William Gibbs McAdoo.
His first term is spent focused on economic recovery and reform programs. With the business cycle hitting rock-bottom in 1932-33, he has a mandate and a huge congressional majority to attempt expedient measures. He also has good timing, as an upturn from the election, if not a recovery of pre-Depression conditions, is apparent by the midterms, and a recognizable recovery is underway by 1936.
McAdoo is a Wilsonian internationalist. Despite this, and despite Wilson’s habit of intervening in the Caribbean, early in his first administration, the USA largely draws back from those interventions, with them having run their course, plausible excuses to leave surfacing, and a desire to save funds and executive attention to focus on the domestic economy.
McAdoo still attempts to engage in international economic and arms control diplomacy.
One feature of this TL’s early to mid-1930s that is different from OTL is that Senator Burton K. Wheeler’s efforts to hold the nation’s attention with investigation into the financial origins of the first world war fail to gain much traction with the US media or public. Such inquiries by a few curious legislators, and publications describing the role of “merchants of death” in fomenting the last war, have some popularity in Britain and France, and in far left, Communist and Anarchist circles, but hardly get any relevant attention in broader American public opinion.
A knock-on result of this is neutrality laws and laws governing arms sales are left in their 1920s status quo, with no particular bar to lending to belligerents, or exporting arms, nor any bar to delivering arms on US ships. The differences in US opinion in this ATL compared to OTL are directly traceable to the differing WWI experience. The US faced far fewer casualties, under 1,000 in combat in Europe, and hundreds of thousands of men experienced the stresses of combat and being under fire. The war was 10 months shorter than OTL, and related domestic repressions were lesser and briefer. The world that emerged afterward didn’t match some expectations set by high-flown Presidential rhetoric, but with less loss, indeed less of a fight, than expected, disappointment in the outcome and disappointment in allies, who won the victory after all, was correspondingly less.
Therefore, despite the existence of a peace lobby and some people and groups making a “merchants of death” argument to crack down on arms manufacturers and financiers, those industries own lobbyists are able to outcompete peace lobbyists in the halls of Congress by pointing out their role as a natural part of a healthy manufacturing employment sector in additional to national security.
The US observes Japanese expansion in China with wary eyes, and its moves lead some to advocate renewed naval expansion. Japan’s departure from the League of Nations is particularly disturbing, despite the US’s own lack of membership.
Luckily for Pacific-watchers in the incoming McAdoo administration, the Japanese put a pause on major expansion in China with a truce in 1933
Nevertheless, largely as a geopolitical measure to constrain Japan, but also sold as an economic measure to increase export opportunities, the McAdoo administration diplomatically recognizes the USSR in 1933.
However, the rise of the militant Hitler regime in Germany in 1933, its withdrawal from the League of Nations, and its blaming of France for the failure of disarmament and announcement of its own rearmament in 1934 is unwelcome in the US, and obviously much closer to home.
Yes, Hitler and the Nazis still rose. The Weimar Republic through its life suffered a legitimacy deficit. Paramilitary groupings existed since demobilization in early 1918, and were encouraged to exist by the military after further forced demilitarization and to deal with real postwar Communist uprisings and labor strikes. Some of the German groups observed and admired the Italian blackshirts, but the latter’s lack of success in seizing power in Italy wasn’t the end of right-wing paramilitarism in Germany or Europe. Blackshirts still existed as a costumed bodyguard force for Fascist rallies in Italy, and the Fascist Party had a small but notorious contingent in the Italian parliament led by its rascally leader Mussolini.
n 1934, Austrian Nazis assassinated the Austrian leader, but German Nazis backed off from providing any aid when the Italian government made it clear it would tolerate no German intervention, and would step in to oppose it militarily.
In 1935, non-Fascist, but conservative, Italy, without having stewed over a ‘mutilated victory’ since WWI, and finding the pacification of Libya enough of a headache, has no interest in starting some campaign of conquest in Ethiopia.
Italians of different political stripes are paying attention to the somewhat volatile political situation in Spain however, with Italian Communists, Socialists, and anti-clericals sympathizing with ideological counterparts who have a share in power as part of the newly elected Popular Front in 1935, and the ruling Italian conservatives, monarchists, and pro-Catholic constituencies being vocally averse to the Spanish Popular Front or the election of any similar front in Italy.
In 1936, Spanish right-wing forces, massing in Spanish Morocco, with a German supported airlift, attempt a coup. However, the Republic in Madrid fends off the coup, so this instead leads to a Civil War.
Before 1936 is over, Germany is providing a steady stream of aid and volunteer pilots and aircraft to the Spanish right-wing rebels, called nationalists. Italy is providing a smaller amount of aid and financing to the Spanish Nationalists, and allowing militant Catholic zealots and Fascists to go fight there. And the USSR is selling arms to the Republic and organizing international volunteer brigades. Self-organized groups of left-wing Italian expats participate in the international brigades on the Spanish Republican side, along with some Germans.
The French Popular Front government is sympathetic to the embattled Spanish Republic, but parties and bureaucrats to its right are not, and threaten to be confrontational if Paris supports the Republic. This leads France to officially support Britain’s non-intervention policy.
However, the McAdoo administration, riding fairly high, still mainly focused on domestic issues, but enjoying a recognizable economic recovery and sailing toward reelection in 1936, opens the spigots of arms sales and credit to the Spanish Republic.
The US and Mexican governments coordinate arms sales and deliveries to Spanish Republican held ports, and the sale of some ships, and the Cuban government also participates. This is particularly helpful to the Republican areas holding out in the northern Basque Country, because the Nationalists control all the rest of western Spain. At times, some deliveries are made through France which ‘looks the other way’ or go through under the pretext of ‘going to Andorra’.
Rather than propounding a big pro-Spanish policy, McAdoo mainly works by portraying various governmental decisions as going ‘laissez-faire’ according to current interpretation of the law whenever that breaks in favor of the Spanish Republic. This angers some devout Catholic members of the Democratic coalition, but not to any electorally costly degree, at least not in 1936 or 1937.
American supplies for the Spanish Republic improves its material situation, and leaves it less isolated and vulnerable to rip-offs and bad bargains. This and a much scaled down Italian role tips the balance quite a bit against the Nationalists. While Guernica is still bombed to destruction by the Condor Legion, a pocket of Basque Country holds out, and the Nationalists fail to split Republican Barcelona-Catalonia from Republican Madrid/southeast Spain.
For the duration of 1934-1937, to the surprise of some, Hitler is actually finding the USSR and USA (in Spain) and Italy (in Austria, but not in Spain) a bigger pain in his ass than countries like France, Britain, and Poland. Poland signs a non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1934. Britain signs a naval treaty with Germany in 1935. France ultimately does not move against Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland.
Germany is getting the benefit of testing out aerial tactics and pilot skills in Spain, getting new ground warfare systems tested, and getting paid in minerals in real time. However part of its payment is to be rights to more supplies of Spanish minerals (mainly Wolfram/tungsten) post-Civil War. With Nationalist victory in prolonged, and increasing doubt, that, and any Condor Legion men and aircraft lost through attrition may soon start to look like a bad investment.
In the summer of 1937, Sino-Japanese conflict breaks out into full-scale warfare along the Great Wall and the areas of Beijing and Tianjin. By September, the fighting spreads to Shanghai, as Chiang Kai-shek fully engages his National Army against Japanese invaders.
The Japanese, preferring to clothe aggression in euphemistic terms, and having let the war escalate without central direction, call it the “China Incident”. The Chinese are more frank, and declare war on Japan. Since US neutrality law is not so tight about opposing arms sales to belligerents, in this ATL, the Chinese risk nothing by declaring this reality, and if the Japanese ultimately respond in kind, that alone does not endanger their imports from the US.
As in Spain, Soviet and American policies run along somewhat parallel lines. Both sympathize with China and provide aid. The Soviets first, with more, and more hands-on. But Britain and France also clearly favor Chiang Kai-shek’s China over Japan.
The U.S. begins a steep build-up of fleet strength, including major combatants taking years to built and supporting smaller fleet train craft, many of which will be available sooner, and can assist in tactical reinforcement of the Philippines, Wake Island, and Hawaii. The U.S. also builds up the Filipino Army and the Philippines garrison and number of aircraft in the archipelago, while enlarging the Army overall and ordering more aircraft.
Nothing quite as blatant as the Panay Incident happens, but American casualties in the crossfire of Shanghai fighting, and cases of abused Americans, and the backdrop of massacred and graphically abused Chinese, are enough to secure public and congressional support for aid to China, and the Pacific defense build-up by early 1938.
By late 1937, early 1938, the US is making arrangements to deliver weapons and supplies via the Philippines to unoccupied south China ports, via Hong Kong, and when this gets too dangerous, via French Indochinese ports.
Also by early 1938, the clamor to cancel the US-Japanese trade treaty, and various other forms of embargo, is deafening, and in February, 1938, the US gives its six-months notice of termination of the treaty.
In OTL February-March 1938, German-Austrian relations reached a terminal crisis point that was resolved by a German ultimatum, unopposed occupation, and unification (Anschluss) with Germany. In this ATL, no such thing happens this month in this year, because Hitler does not feel the Italian government is of the right frame of mind to accept Anschluss without intervening and neither he nor the Wehrmacht is optimistic about prevailing over the Italian Army without further German rearmament. Italy is not judged to be in the right frame of mind because the Kingdom does not have an ideologically compatible leader - the Fascists are just one small party, and are not isolated and alienated from the western powers. While the Italian King and military have some common sympathies with the Germans in the Spanish situation, there is no comprehensive understanding, and certainly no acceptance of a common border.
In America and the Pacific, Japan goes on a panic purchasing spree of petroleum and scrap metal after the trade treaty announcement, that moves the US to take various measures to limit monthly exports of those commodities beyond certain recent monthly averages, and to delay Japanese banking transactions, and to significantly enlarge the national petroleum reserve to remove excess supply from the market.
US economic measures are expanded to multilateral economic measures with British, Soviet, French, Dutch, Mexican, and Romanian participation, by April 1938. This is also matched by limited French naval and troop reinforcement in Indochina, and substantial British fleet reinforcement at Singapore, and Soviet force build up in the Far East opposite Manchuria.
As a result of the global economic and military-naval squeeze on Japan, the Tokyo government refuses to support reinforcements for the China incident to support expanded war operations to occupy more Chinese ports or seize the Chinese capital in exile at Wuhan. The Emperor expresses his increased displeasure with the military, its promises, and the war through his Privy Councillors.
On September 1, 1938, the US-Japanese trade treaty is officially terminated and the US launches comprehensive embargoes on fuel and metals exports to Japan, and freezes Japan’s assets in the USA, on the demand for Japanese withdrawal from China. Other countries follow suit, to greater or lesser degrees.
US-Japanese talks are attempted, with the US positions being pretty unyielding about major withdrawals from occupied territory, at least everything occupied since summer of 1937. Japan is trying to get a maximum binding promise of economic relief for a minimum binding commitment to military restraint and territorial withdrawal and making multiple creative, but inadequate proposals, with varying degrees of actual concessions. The Americans, Chinese, and their international partners can be patient, because they know time is on their side.
The Chinese concern is that no deal let Japan off the hook too easily, and that in territorial terms, at a minimum, Japan withdraw back from China including all Manchuria it occupied in 1931. The Soviets, who have a long border with Manchuria and a lost railway there, echo this hardline Chinese position.
Some Japanese diplomats and parliamentarians accused of being too soft or offering too defeatist plans in negotiations are assassinated, but the Emperor jiu-jitsu’s some of this against the militarists by having imperial family members and select senior honored statesmen lead some elaborate state funerals honoring some of these ‘’national martyrs for peace”.
The China war on the ground continues in a stalemate once the Japanese halted attempts at major offensive operations. Chinese forces are unable to dislodge them from the coastal provinces and suffer high losses, although their quality is improving, or getting restored with new supplies and resources after the massive losses of the Shanghai campaign.
Things continue in this pattern even as Japan is forced to fight this war from stockpiles from Sept 1938 through April 1939 and slow down the rate of aircraft and naval sorties.
Over the same period, the Spanish Civil War has settled into a stalemate with the Republicans controlling eastern Spain and the northern Basque pocket, and the Nationalists controlling western Spain. But attrition is wearing down the Nationalists, with their less populous, more rural, recruiting base, more.
In April 1939, Hitler, having built up his ground and air arms a bit more, decides that the fate of Austria can be put off no more and increases pressure for unification. Backed into a corner, the Austrian regime sets up a plebiscite designed to show support for independence.
Hitler moves in, facing little resistance other than traffic jams, but within a few hours, Wehrmacht forces report clashing with Italian Alpini soldiers in Tyrol and the Salzburg-Carinthian border.
The Italo-German war is on. Italy raises a motion in the League of Nations condemning Germany for violating the sovereignty of Austria. France, Britain, and the Soviet Union and all neighbors of Germany except the committed neutrals vote in favor.
Italy immediately drops the flow of support to the Spanish Nationalists as Austria becomes the sole focus. Germany too ends shipments of aid to Nationalist Spain as the fight for Austria becomes the focus, and Condor Legion pilots, with or without their machines, try to make it back to Germany via circuitous routes.
Several thousand hardcore Austrian regime loyalists, and Jewish Austrians, within the initial Italian occupied zone, rally to the Italian side. However, most of the Austrian population is sullenly hostile, or actively hostile to the Italian invader/intervenors, with some who have a massive distaste for Nazis, like Socialists and Communists, being merely passive or out for themselves.
The Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica have some intense air battles, with the Luftwaffe usually coming out better. Within a couple days, Rome is actively seeking allies and allied support.
Rome is in the first instance going to France and reminding France that the fight for Austria is a fight for the safety of the French border too. Italy reaches out to the UK for financial support and for possibly purchasing aircraft or aircraft related parts. For this last category, it also looks to the US.
It calls on Hungary, an old friend, to intervene.
It finds the most receptive audience in Prague. Prague finds the idea that a German Austria is an existential threat to Bohemia convincing. Czechoslovakia declares its support for Austrian independence and war on Germany, mobilizing its border defenses with Germany, and sending forces south to Vienna, and into Austria north of the Danube to operate against German units there. Prague and Rome arrange to deconflict and support each other’s aircraft and pilots.
Over in Spain, with the patrons of the Nationalists fighting each other, Nationalists begin to look vulnerable, and the Republicans plan for offensives. The foreign patrons of the Republicans, while also fascinated by the Austrian war, and involved in the Pacific, are more capable of multi-tasking, and keeping an eye on Spain, decide to turn the aid taps to the Republicans to even higher volume, which ultimately leads to Republican victory by November 1939.
The Italian advances in Carinthia, into Salzburg and Central Austria are thrown back by German forces supported by the Luftwaffe with high losses on both sides. The Czechs suffer high losses establishing siege lines around Vienna. As spring turns into summer, Nazi Germany occupies most of Austria’s land area, of upper and lower Austria, Styria, Carinthia, Salzburg, and Voralburg, with the exceptions being an Italian-held section consisting of north Tyrol occupied by Alpini troops, and segments of lower Austria north of the Danube occupied by Czech troops.
The German Czech border has also been a hot front. Czech defenses have mostly held, with the Germans just advancing in a few northern and western border districts like Eger. The Luftwaffe is generally getting the better of the air war, but it is a two-sided affair, with Silesian factories getting bombed as well as Prague. Italian and Czech aircraft have hit Munich.
The attrition to ground, and especially air, forces is ruinous. To both sides but especially the Germans.
France begins a ‘precautionary mobilization’ and places major orders for US aircraft and motor vehicles.
Italian diplomacy also seeks to increase German difficulties by widening the front to include Polish action against Germany. Italy appeals to Catholic religious ties and raises the specter of German revisionism compared with long-term Italian partnership. While Poland has its “issues” with Czechoslovakia, Italy tries to turn that into an anti-German competition, saying it will support claims to Silesia by whomever among the two is more active against Germany.
Some Poles oppose leaving the comfort zone of the non-aggression pact with Germany, but taking the opportunity to get out from under Germany’s shadow is tempting, especially with anti-Germanism spreading in Europe.
Abwehr picks up these internal Polish discussions, and it doesn’t take secret intelligence to hear the audible cheers for ‘gallant Italy and Czechoslovakia’ in the British and French parliaments, the American Congress, and Supreme Soviet. This is in addition to all the secret talks about military cooperations between the Italians, French, and British.
The wasting Austrian, Alpine, Bohemian stalemate causes the Wehrmacht to coup out Hitler in late August, and seek the peace mediation of the neutral powers of Europe in Scandinavia and the Netherlands.
The Germans accept international demands for withdrawal from Austria and Germany and Austria are compelled to accept ‘the perpetual neutrality of Austria on the same basis as Switzerland’
The setback for the Nazi expansionist, and pan-German agenda is total.
Meanwhile, in the Far East, the Japanese begin a graduated withdrawal from occupied China to the occupied Nanjing-Shanghai corridor, the Tianjin-Beijing corridor, and the Qingdao-Jinan corridor in Shandong, seeking to gain relief from international sanctions and a slow-down of the building international military siege, possibly in return for withdrawing from “China proper” to “Manchukuo”. This is carried out over April to August 1939.
Encouraged to see its pressure policy having an impact, the western powers including the McAdoo and Chamberlain governments encourage Japan to believe this type of withdrawal would yield a restoration of economic ties, although they still fail to recognize Manchukuo.
This Japanese retreat raises Chinese morale, but causes trepidation that there may be a final settlement leaving Manchuria in Japan’s hands. The Soviets share that fear.
In August, freed from the fear of the Hitler regime, and for the moment, of German militarist adventurism, Soviet policy becomes much more active in the Far East, with massing of more Soviet ground and air forces there, and larger blocks of aid to the Chinese.
While the embers of the Sino-Japanese war stubbornly remain lit, and Japanese-western diplomacy is frustratingly slow, the Soviets prepare other solutions.
In November 1939, they launch a broad scale offensive on both all the borders of Japanese occupied Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, and Sakhalin island.
This causes the emergency evacuation of Japanese garrisons in the Nanjing-Shanghai, and Jinan-Qingdao corridors to deal with the Soviet threat, and consequently, the reoccupation of those territories by Chinese Nationalist troops.
It also relatively quickly seizes all of Sakhalin island with a heavily armed and air supported force that the Japanese consistently fail to dislodge.
The Soviet advance in Manchuria is rapid in the northern half, and slower and steadier in the southern half, but Soviet superiority in armor, artillery, and even numbers of all-metal monoplane aircraft, and all supporting logistic services is keenly felt.
The Soviet offensive encourages the Chinese Nationalists and Chinese Communists to go on the offensive against the Japanese. The Chinese forces join attacks in inner Mongolia and southern Manchuria, and mainly focus on Hebei province, the home of Beijing and Tianjin.
Primarily Soviet military successes, with the Chinese mainly playing a tag-along role, by spring 1940 have led to the liberation of Mukden/Shenyang, providing revenge for the war of 1905, and driven Japanese forces out of Manchuria and back into the Kwangtung peninsula bottleneck and Yalu river in Korea in most places.
By simply steamrolling and killing the Japanese forces on their Manchukuo puppet territory seized since 1931, and destroying any counterattacks with extreme prejudice, the Soviets simply help the Japanese avoid the need for any internal policy debates on withdrawal or not from Manchuria to pre-1931 borders.
By agreeing to armistice based on the status quo, which leaves Korea and Port Arthur in Japanese hands, same as the status quo ante bellum, defeated Japan, while not occupied, regime-changed, or reformed, is chastened to the satisfaction of western powers enough to be treated as a trading partner again, in particular after the recent remarkable demonstration of Soviet strength.
The Soviets, for the moment, accept the redemption of Sakhalin island (they lacked the naval assets/strength to claim the Kuriles) and the recovery of their position in the north Manchurian Chinese eastern railway as a sufficient war trophy from Japan and vengeance for the 1904-1905 humiliation. Removal of the the Japanese threat in southern Manchuria, north of the Yalu river and Korean Peninsula is a bonus, and that area’s permanent occupation by weaker Chinese forces is an improvement over its former occupation by Japanese.
So, this United States and Italy, both ‘later’ to ‘arrive’ for WWI in this timeline, end up less traumatized into particular psychoses of isolationism and fascism. As a result, Italy becomes a starring good guy instead of a bad guy in the next round, indeed, leader of Europe’s successful anti-Nazi coalition. And the US, instead of going through an excessive isolationist spell that did much to enable years of dictatorial rampage before springing back into action with massive brute force and atomic vengeance, instead plays a highly aggressive Cold War game of rearmament, sanctions, and proxy warfare to roll back and contain evil dictators and the aggression without a massive, all-encompassing global war.
Can someone tell my why Giolitti quitted the job IOTL at all ?
It's said due to (relative) losses at the general election in Oktober and November 1913. Losses IMHO surely predictable due to the new electorial law reform Giolitti himself had initiated.
It is also said that the Radical Party of Ettore Sacchi caused his resignation on 7th March 1914 by announcing their withdrawel from the coalition with Giolitti after having voted for the goverment on 4th March 1914 in defense of the goverments actions regarding the war in Libya.
However, Giolittis party alone - the Liberal Union - still had an absolute majority in parliament of 16 seats many polticians of today (not only in Italy) would enthusiastically rejoice about not to forget the other four parties of the coalition.
So, why did he quit?
Will the Italians give a reason for entering the war? Maybe something about Montenegro or Albania? Though I suppose protecting them would be something that was very much in the past, and Montenegro May have been doomed as an independent entity since they went along with the Serbs. Might the Italians still invade/occupy parts of Albania? Though looking it up, it seems that Albania was in a state of anarchy (their German ruler was apparently related ruler’s and consorts of the Netherlands, Sweden, Romania, and Prussia. Small world) , and both Greece and Italy took small areas of importance to them, meaning that whenever this war comes Italy still will have the port of Vlöre. Come to think of it, an earlier POD where Italy moves into more of Albania might actually help the Austrians, if it means less areas they themselves need to occupy.
Sorry to say, but your first part, WWI on the outset makes little sense to me.
So Italy stays out. All well and good. But that has compounding results for both Entnete and Central Powers. Both good and bad. Maybe a better explanation as to why the results would be as near as OTL as you describe would be helpful. And why a stronger CP seems to crumble then...
But lets say the changes for 1915 are less serve and go into 1916 and Verdun and on. The first massive change I see is that the somewhat weakend Russia may not be able to muster the OTL Brusilov Offensive. Add that the Austrians thined the lines in the East for their Italian Offensive and you get a massive Butterfly. Add that Brusilov used up aprox 20 German Divisions (from Wiki so...) and you could see a shift in Verdun and maybe even the Somme. Probably to degrees but still.
But a major thing is Imo it would not allow Hindenburg and Ludendorf to shine in the same way as OTL while maybe also keeping Falkenhayn from his Romania blunder is keeping them out for the time. That is as you say a major plus for Russia in terms of frontage, but could also help the CP as they do not need troops either and could keep trading with a nation at peace.
So why would Falkenhayn, who survived Verdun and Brusilow historicaly, loose his job here? And then it goes on that you kept the TL of OTL very much on track with the major change going back a year and more.
Other things coming to mind while writing this are, would Britian be able and willing to keep Italian coal purchases going? If not would that be a point for or against joining the war? And would the reduced coal supply be a factor in how the population sees things, that was OTL very much not for entering? Would there be a feedback into the Italo-American comunity? And what would be the results of that?
Or would Italy, that sees itself as a Great Power afaik, allow itself to be "bullied" by the British blockade practice? Would there be shifts in trade between Italy and Entente and or CP nations?
So to close this, I think that keeping Italy out for more then a year, here it would be about two, would need a major rewrite of the war as it would change massively for both the Entente and CP. And going by OTL could be seen as weak writing with "everyone drinks lead paint and does nothing" to keep the timeline intact and also get the result you desire.
raharris1973
Gone Fishin'
Well I see you believe the timeline I spelled out is hopelessly convergent. @naraic’s post on Romania gives me an idea to justify things being more convergent.
When I tossed up the idea of Italy waiting until 1917 to enter, and Romania also waiting, until shortly after, I kept that, mainly to maximize sudden shock value against Austria-Hungary, which so far ITTL is having a better war.
But @naraic put forward some good arguments on why Romania could not have afforded to stay out of the war any longer than it did historically in 1916, it wasn’t perceived Russian military success, but CP nonpayment for exports that was the decisive issue.
So, if Romania still gets in, Falky still gets fired, Hindy and Ludy still do their economic and submarine follies, the US still gets in. Austria is still better off in spring 1917 than OTL and it took Bucharest in ‘16, but big muscle movements are still mostly on track, Russia avoids revolution till Feb 1917.
But then Italian entry in spring 1917 comes in as a big shock and disruption to A-H. Can that work?
The problem is that is not what you wrote in your outline.
Also the problem is, at least for me, that a "Grand Strategic Timeline" that focuses more on the macro scale should be more careful of the results of changes. Becasue as I see it, the Great War was a balanced thing until roughly 1917 in OTL both sides had ups and downs. But you propose to shift the balance in 1915 towards the CP. All well and good, the war will continue for a time.
But as time goes on, one should account for the changes and differences. Such as how would Italy influence the world trade relations overall. Would the CP be able to get some things more then OTL? Would the added problems for the Entente be noticeble? Here I think of the ease of access to the Med for the KuK Navy against the more problematic blockage for the RN and MN.
Or what differences does it make that AH has one front less? Would the Russians be as able to do Brusilow? How much German help would AH need? Would Greece be as forthcomming to the Entente as OTL for Salonika?
Conversely how much less resources has the Entente to push into Italy? How do the Italians abroad react to percived slights against Italy, here I think about the American comunity, if Britain tries to bully the Italiens with the Blockade.
So it is not impossible that a late Italien entry pushes the CP over, but you Imo put too much stock on the OTL TL to "do the work".
What do we think about the Senussi? Wikipedia suggested they had decent relations with the British in Egypt, though there were factions supporting the Turks. Do we believe they would stay focused in the British here, or still try to get Italians out of Libya? I was going to suggest that there might be some diplomatic issues with the border, but I recall that so many maps have the areas south of Cyrenaica in our historical maps had it as empty desert with light British claims. Presumably some of this still ends up being offered to the Italians in this world. Of course they were offered a lot more IOTL in the forms of Turkish, Dalmatian and German African land, but... Hmmmm, actually, now that I think of it a lot of those maps suggested the Aouzou Strip was British, with the French only claiming it after the British gave up the claim in favor of the Italians. Well, been a while since I have seen those basemaps, and they have been wrong before. Anyways, do we think things change in North Africa? Not like Muslims rose up like the Turks, Germans, and Entente thought when it came to a jihad. The Turks gave up some borderlands to Bulgaria to butter them up to Central Side. Maybe they also sign away some of the islands the Italians were occupying (to avoid the Greeks taking them in a previous war) or would that be giving up strategic an area?
I don't think that's how it works. Any Italian or Romanian movement against Austria-Hungary would quickly become plainly obvious, and given the circumstances of TTL, Austria-Hungary would be more than capable of answering to those threats.
Because Giolitti was a sly fox. He had a knack for anticipating when trouble was ready to blow up, fabricate a pretext to resign, hand the reins to a fellow Liberal or Conservative, let them break on the worst of challenges while he took notes, promoted his political goals from the safety of the oppositiom, then maneuver to come back as needed and required. He did so in 1905, letting Fortis and Sonnino weather a round of popular agitations, and again in 1909 as the question of universal suffrage became hot. Everything points to him handing over the reins to Salandra in hopes he'd have to cut his teeth on the growing influence of Radicals and Socialists, and Salandra raising the stakes with his interventism instead.
Giolitti actually was called in at the last minute, with plenty of support, but Salandra had done a perfect imitation of his signature play; raising interventionist heat, signing the Pact of London, then resigning and daring others to reverse course. But it was pretty clear that reneging on the Pact would isolate Italy, and not at a time in which the horrendous cost of the Great War was apparent and could be used to weasel out. To have him stop Salandra you need a leak on the Entente negotiations that allows the large Liberal contingent, mostly non-interventionist, to summon back the old master a bit sooner.
raharris1973
Gone Fishin'
@lukedalton @AndreaConti - Do you agree with @matzeskatze and @Fehérvári's critique of my lengthier projected timeline (see post #23 and #24 as unrealistic, or do you think it leads to a plausible ending of WWI (and maybe some of the later stuff, although that's harder to predict)?
For Austria yes no Italian front is a big big plus as it not waste men and material and can mean Russia is a worse position; but on the other hand Italy is a better position with more time to prepare the army (if Cadorna receive enough financial support) and the nation and while it's very probable that A-h will not be caught by surprise (as it was not OTL due to having broken our code and know perfectely that we will have soon launched an offensive) but it's not a given that will be capable to create an efficient defense and transport men as what was enough in OTL 1915 will probably be insufficient ITTL 1917.
Romania is more complicated, there were an agreement between Rome and Bucharest regarding neutrality and that each side will have communicated to the other if he was intentioned to enter the conflict and Italy keep her neutrality will probably make the Romanians being more carefull to enter the conflict...this can be a plus for the entente because IRC without controlling the Romanian grain reserve the CP are in trouble and also the russian thought that the troops sent on Romania were a waste of soldiers.
Basically if a coordinated offensive is planned by the entente that involve Italy and Romania entering the war at the same time, well A-H is not in a good place and can give Russia a lot of breath
Romania is more complicated, there were an agreement between Rome and Bucharest regarding neutrality and that each side will have communicated to the other if he was intentioned to enter the conflict and Italy keep her neutrality will probably make the Romanians being more carefull to enter the conflict...this can be a plus for the entente because IRC without controlling the Romanian grain reserve the CP are in trouble and also the russian thought that the troops sent on Romania were a waste of soldiers.
Basically if a coordinated offensive is planned by the entente that involve Italy and Romania entering the war at the same time, well A-H is not in a good place and can give Russia a lot of breath
raharris1973
Gone Fishin'
Alright then, let's slow down the projections and predictions, and look at this a little bit more like one year at a time.
What if, because of a change limited to only Italian internal politics, like Giolitti holding on, Italy stays out of the war in May 1915.
Let's say that the war goes on, without Italy, from May 1915 to May 1916. But by May 1916, Italian internal politics have changed enough that Italy is ready to declare on Austria-Hungary then (if the CP is doing better than OTL, making this appear a little dumber, maybe this is counter-balanced by the Italians feeling their army is a bit more ready, or the Entente offering bigger bribes, or information on the progress of the Entente vs. CP being ambiguous and open to interpretation - anyway, it happens).
How much will the war have changed from OTL's war, probably in the CP's favor, between May 1915 and May 1916? [of course it is important to remember, people living in this timeline, do not have OTL to compare with.)
Taking the war situation as you would predict it would be in May 1916, and the likely state of the Italian nation and military at that point, how will it perform in the war from then on as a member of the Entente, and how will that influence the rest of the war?
----Here I would add my opinion that I do not think that British blockade pressures would have to lead to irreversible harm to British-Italian relations, even if it irritates Italians and costs some business opportunities. Beyond that, I think that Italo-British relations will *not* have much critical effect on US attitudes and policy towards the war via the influence of the Italian-American community, although I know you put emphasis on these factors:
The reason why I don't think Italo-British relations have to be damaged irreversibly, is that 1) Britain might not be as bossy with Italy about blockade enforcement and limiting trade as with the weaker Dutch and Scandinavians, because the Italians are a stronger power, who could swing either way, 2) If Britain reduces coal supplies based on its own wartime needs or allied wartime needs and this irritates Italy, well, promises of resuming or increasing coal still could be part of the Entente package for later bribing Italy into the war later.
I also think it is important to *not* over-estimate the political influence of the Italian-American population in America generally and with the Wilson Administration specifically.
Despite mass migration of millions, many, many Italian migrants were not naturalized or were unsure of intending to permanently stay.
Wilson stuck to a pro-Entente, pro-British policy, despite the opposition of the Irish-American community that was far more integrated and influential within American politics and his own Democratic party.
Wilson's own stances at Versailles, favoring Yugoslav over Italian positions on Adriatic disputes, illustrate he was pretty immune to pressures from any Italian lobby. If he was counting ethnic votes in America, supporting the Italian side of any dispute would have been a clear no-brainer over supporting any Serb, Croat, or Slovene side.
raharris1973
Gone Fishin'
Although @naraic was saying stuff that goes against the idea of the participation of Romania, even with its conquest being a good thing for CP.
Because he said basically before Romania went to war, it was exporting it's grain and oil to CP, and not getting paid! Sounds cheaper than fight and occupation of Romania.
Plus Romania entering (& Verdun) got Hindy and Ludy in charge, which brought in their economic mismanagement and submarine warfare, and the USA in the war.
So Romania is a tricky factor.
On the other hand now that they control Romania they can take everything that's not attached in a very strong manner to the terrain (more or less like they have done in Veneto after Caporetto)
Hallo @raharris1973,
first things first. I do not belive an Italian entry is impossible after 1916. Only that the whole of the TL has to be able to allow for the changes that occure between the PoD and DoW to work out.
Second, the examples like the reaction of the Italo-American comunity are only an example of what could / might happen. Because you know, Granny in Italy needs the coal to stay warm in winter and complains in a letter later on...
Third, you now shortend the time that Italy is keeping out. So I assume you think that the state of the war would be too far gone by then to enter for them or that the predictions go into... well a lot can happen... territory.
My predictions / thoughts for the time,
- the Med will probably be a more active theater of war with the Austrian Navy not bottled up as effective
- Salonika might not happen because of this, as the danger to the LoC could be seen as too much (depends with the previous one if something happens naval battle wise)
- the CP in general and AH in particular will be "better of" from OTL but precisly how much again depends on the TL in question
- Italy may have found that trading for the CP is very lucrative for certain persons, that then have influence into politics
- Italy may be a channel to generate information flow from the CP to the wider world and back, how much and what impact again depends
- Italy might be able to increase the potency of their army, but would it be enough to balance the knowlage of how bloody and expensive a modern war would be?
- Britain might "overplay" its cards with how it behaves towards Italy and how much it promisies, coulds be seen as unrealistic and in conflict with other goals
- Militarily in general I think Serbia is done for and Russia is even worse then OTL
- depending on how you want the TL to go, it could be a compelling reason to keep some presure on the east over OTL levels
- Falkenhayn will Imo still go for Verdun, but originally you had Italy out till '17, and that could be very different in how it plays out with a weaker Russia keeping less danger on the CP
- there is certainly more here to keep an eye on...
So there is Imo enough room for you to create a convincing TL on how Italy enters in '16 or '17 and has an impact and gains its spoils. I personaly do not think it likely to happen but unlikely things have happen in our own time. So wird things can (sometimes) happen.
But the problem for any post 1900 TL imo is that enough is known to us today and everyone has their opinions that the creator has a hard time to convince the (partial) knowlage of the other that his TL is possible.
first things first. I do not belive an Italian entry is impossible after 1916. Only that the whole of the TL has to be able to allow for the changes that occure between the PoD and DoW to work out.
Second, the examples like the reaction of the Italo-American comunity are only an example of what could / might happen. Because you know, Granny in Italy needs the coal to stay warm in winter and complains in a letter later on...
Third, you now shortend the time that Italy is keeping out. So I assume you think that the state of the war would be too far gone by then to enter for them or that the predictions go into... well a lot can happen... territory.
My predictions / thoughts for the time,
- the Med will probably be a more active theater of war with the Austrian Navy not bottled up as effective
- Salonika might not happen because of this, as the danger to the LoC could be seen as too much (depends with the previous one if something happens naval battle wise)
- the CP in general and AH in particular will be "better of" from OTL but precisly how much again depends on the TL in question
- Italy may have found that trading for the CP is very lucrative for certain persons, that then have influence into politics
- Italy may be a channel to generate information flow from the CP to the wider world and back, how much and what impact again depends
- Italy might be able to increase the potency of their army, but would it be enough to balance the knowlage of how bloody and expensive a modern war would be?
- Britain might "overplay" its cards with how it behaves towards Italy and how much it promisies, coulds be seen as unrealistic and in conflict with other goals
- Militarily in general I think Serbia is done for and Russia is even worse then OTL
- depending on how you want the TL to go, it could be a compelling reason to keep some presure on the east over OTL levels
- Falkenhayn will Imo still go for Verdun, but originally you had Italy out till '17, and that could be very different in how it plays out with a weaker Russia keeping less danger on the CP
- there is certainly more here to keep an eye on...
So there is Imo enough room for you to create a convincing TL on how Italy enters in '16 or '17 and has an impact and gains its spoils. I personaly do not think it likely to happen but unlikely things have happen in our own time. So wird things can (sometimes) happen.
But the problem for any post 1900 TL imo is that enough is known to us today and everyone has their opinions that the creator has a hard time to convince the (partial) knowlage of the other that his TL is possible.
I suspect 1916 is the latest chance for Italy to join the war on the Entente side because by 1917 the Central Powers will appear to be winning the war outright and joining becomes increasingly unattractive.
Late 1916 and Early 1917 looked very good for the Entente. The Somme and Verdun had been hard fought but were seen (to some degree correctly) as victories that had dealt severe body blows to the German Army. American entry into the war in early 1917 assured the Entente was the better resourced of the two alliances and that large reinforcements were possible (becoming more assured as the year went on).
So an entry by Italy in the Winter of 1916-1917 seems pretty plausible. Even into spring and early summer 1917. it was only in the latter half of the year when Nivelle’s and Haig’s attempts at breakthrough had failed after a terrible campaign season (many areas in Northern France received twice their normal rainfall) and Russia dropped out that people started to wonder if the war couldn’t be won. Even then, they generally envisaged stalemate, not CP victory. Which is probably enough to disincentivize Italy to join, but still.
However, neutrality would have its own difficulties for Italy. Italy was dependent on British coal and, to a lesser extent, British credit. The British maintained strict control of supply and prioritized domestic and French needs, which had grown considerably. This caused serious problems in Italy prior to their entry. Possibly, though not definitely, enough to make longer term neutrality unsustainable.