Stresa Revived - an Allied Mussolini TL

[thekingsguard]

I wonder if the Allies will take advantage of this to strike at the German underbelly?

Here's hoping this time WW2 won't end with half of Europe swapping Hitler for Stalin.

 

[Onkel Willie]

Here's the next chapter. Hope you like it .

Chapter X: Tipping the Balance, December 1941-April 1943.
​

By summer 1942, the Italian Campaign didn’t seem like it was going anywhere. During the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) meetings, constituted from the British Chiefs of Staff Committee and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, British and American officers had bitter arguments. The Americans wanted a landing in northern France in 1942 to complement the Red Army coming in from the east. They wanted to capture the ports of Cherbourg or Brest and hold the beachhead on the Cotentin Peninsula through the winter of 1942 and into 1943. It was a stratagem which British, Italian and French politicians and military commanders viewed as impractical and foolish for a number of reasons. In 1942, the Luftwaffe’s air superiority hadn’t been broken yet, amphibious warfare equipment wasn’t available in the necessary quantities, there weren’t enough troops, and adequate supplies were also absent. The British could have landed only six divisions at most, whereas the Germans had 25 divisions in Western Europe. Assuming it could be established in the first place, a beachhead on the Cotentin peninsula would be blocked off and attacked by land, sea and air. Cherbourg, the only suitable port would undoubtedly be mined, while aircraft and artillery would be expected to attack the town in strength, while German armoured forces were brought to bear.

During the First Washington Conference in December 1941/January 1942 – attended by Roosevelt, Churchill and the ambassadors of the USSR, Italy, and France – the US agreed to a “Europe first” policy to the relief of London, Moscow, Rome and Paris. They, however, disagreed about the approach. Western Allied commanders, other than the Americans, still espoused Churchill’s vision, which consisted of breaking out into the Po Valley and the Venetian-Friulian Plain. This would be followed by an assault on the Lubljana Gap and a breakout into the Slovenian Plateau, after which the Allies could move on to Vienna and Prague, cutting the Reich in half (as well as keeping the Soviets out of Central Europe). During the Second Washington Conference in June 1942, Churchill and Roosevelt made the Italian front the main priority. In August 1942, Churchill and US special envoy William Averell Harriman arrived in Moscow to motivate the choice of the Western Allies for a campaign via Italy to a frustrated Stalin. The paranoid Soviet tyrant wanted a front in northern France to relieve his beleaguered forces sooner rather than later. At this point, however, that just wasn’t an option.

To compensate for the absence of a new front in France, the British and Americans stepped up their strategic bombing campaign, using Corsica and Sardinia as large, unsinkable aircraft carriers. They allowed for bombing raids on southern Germany while raids on western Germany could continue from British airfields, forcing the Luftwaffe to disperse its defensive forces further. For example, the first raid launched from Sardinia took off on August 8th 1942 and targeted Ulm, devastating the city centre as well as some barracks, supply depots and the lorry factories of Magirus-Deutz and Kässbohrer (hampering the production of both trucks and the necessary spare parts that were desperately needed in the east). Secondly, some PBY Catalina maritime patrol seaplanes and B-24 Liberator medium bombers were allocated to Corsica and Sardinia and further diminished the already modest U-boat presence in the western Mediterranean (when compared to the Atlantic Ocean). The most important strategic aspect, however, was that southern France, the Italian Tyrrhenian, the Italian Adriatic and the Yugoslav coasts were completely open to invasion. German commanders had little clues as to where the anticipated Allied invasion would come, more so with Allied disinformation, and they had to spread out their forces.

German lines were heavily defended, including 75, 88 and a handful of 105 mm anti-tank guns dug in as casemates (which were very effective against Allied tanks). The Allies launched several offensives to capture the Futa and Il Giogo passes in early 1942 to break out into the Po Valley, but German defences proved to be too strong to breach with a simple frontal assault. They were designed with plenty of tank traps, obstacles, overlapping fields of fire etc. and were hard to hit by air attack, quickly reducing this to a war of attrition like the one the Italians had fought before in WW I. The Comando Supremo had no interest in a repeat of that demoralizing, exhausting slugging match and neither did other Western military leaders. Mussolini proposed the use of chemical weapons to force a breakthrough, but the other Western leaders didn’t want to open up that particular can of worms. Besides their fear of retaliation, they remembered how ineffective chemical weapons had been at breaking the stalemate in WW I. So the solution was to go around German defences in Italy rather than through them by landing an amphibious force behind them, which would also give the Allies a practice run for a future landing in France. It was as Kesselring feared, but Hitler chose to believe a trickle of false Allied intelligence – sizeable enough to be noticed, but not big enough to appear obviously false – concerning a landing at the Pas-de-Calais and waved away any evidence to the contrary.

The Allied offensive was codenamed Operation Sword Bearer and encompassed a landing at Rimini, on the extreme southern edge of the Po Valley, Rimini being the most suitable port in the province of Romagna, Mussolini’s home province (which, in turn, had been identified as a much more optimal landing area than the largely mountainous province of Liguria). It commenced at 5:00 AM on November 15th 1942 with the first major Allied airborne operation, conducted by the US 82nd Airborne Division. The 82nd had only been recalled to active service in March 1942 and was rushed to the Italian front in October 1942: it was therefore mostly composed of soldiers with no combat experience whatsoever, and commanding officer Major General Ridgway complained that he had been given insufficient time to prepare his men for this assignment (only seven months). The parachutists were dispersed by the wind and grossly overshot their landing zones, but they performed beyond expectations and maximized their opportunities, attacking patrols and creating confusion wherever possible.

At 6:00 AM, 110.000 men landed which were spearheaded by 35.000 US troops commanded by General Patton, interspersed with three elite, veteran Italian assault brigades. A true baptism of fire it was not because the 15 kilometre long and 200 metre wide beach was only lightly defended by a handful of machine gun posts and 37 mm anti-tank guns protected by little more than sand bags. There were some 50 mm PaK 38 and some 75 mm PaK anti-tank guns, a few minefields and some bunkers around strategic locations, but there were huge undefended gaps in between. German defences were in fact planned to be completed in 1944, and even that was doubtful, which meant that in many cases Allied soldiers could just walk off the beach. The only trouble came at the port of Rimini because the Germans had built a number of pillboxes and casemates to protect it. But there was little that the mighty 381 mm (15 inch) guns of battleships Littorio and Vittorio Veneto couldn’t take care of. Indeed, the Regia Marina provided plentiful artillery support while aircraft carriers HMS Eagle and USS Ranger provided air cover.

When Hitler got out of his bedroom past noon at the Berghof after a serious migraine attack, the Allies had already established a beachhead that was 15 kilometres wide and two kilometres deep. Hitler ordered an immediate counterattack and the Allies got to deal with Tiger tanks for the first time. The Tigers scored some spectacular tactical victories against M4 Shermans, but they didn’t push the Allies back into the sea, not surprising since the Allies were backed up by devastating naval gunfire and major air support. German resistance was nonetheless much more fierce than expected and it took the Allies an entire week to take Cesena (a city about 30 kilometres from Rimini that was planned to have been captured within 36 hours). The Allies renewed their offensive against the Futa and Il Giogo passes and seized them from the Germans. The Germans had to withdraw to avoid being outflanked by the troops that had landed at Rimini and were advancing north-westward to Bologna. The decisive breakthrough had finally been achieved, but poor winter weather from December onward made armoured manoeuvres and the exploitation of air superiority impossible. Kesselring, who had replaced Von Manstein, withdrew in good order to a line that followed the Reno River and then the foothills of the Apennines before swinging south and ending just east of Genoa. Rimini, Ravenna, Faenza, Forli, Bologna and La Spezia had been liberated by late 1942.

In the meantime, in December 1942, the Soviets had recovered from the massive losses sustained in the summer in a way that only such a giant country could. They launched the massive Dnieper-Dniester Offensive Operation in Ukraine against a Wehrmacht weakened by a successful Soviet defensive campaign that had swamped the Germans with superior numbers. Over 1.5 million troops, 20.000 artillery guns, 2.000 armoured fighting vehicles and 2.750 aircraft of the Red Army stood opposite 1 million men, 12.000 guns, 1.500 AFVs and 1.800 aircraft. The German frontline was overwhelmed by parallel as well as successive attacks – in line with the Deep Battle doctrine – and the Germans were driven across the Dnieper in days with the Soviets hot behind them. After that Red Army troops skated across the river, which had frozen solid due to temperatures as low as -25 °C, and established beachheads north and south of Kiev. The counterattack ordered by Hitler failed to dislodge these beachheads, which continued to grow, and in February 1943 the Red Army finally liberated Kiev, the third largest city of the USSR. The Germans commanded by Von Manstein conducted a brilliant riposte at Zhytomir in late February, in part due to overextended Soviet supply lines. The reprieve was short and in another two months time, the Red Army advanced to the Dniester River, liberating an area bigger than France and reaching the doorstep of Romania. The balance had decisively been tipped in favour of the Allies, for a large part due to the massive efforts of the USSR, which almost put those of the Western Allies to shame.

 

[MapleTekh]

A alternate Operation Mincemeat? (obviously not called this ITTL)

 

[Onkel Willie]

A alternate Operation Mincemeat? (obviously not called this ITTL)

Pretty much.

 

[Onkel Willie]

Update!

Chapter XI: D-Day, April-August 1943.
​

By spring 1943, the Allies were pushing Germany and its allies into a corner and, unlike the Axis powers, the Allies actually coordinated their efforts. The Soviet winter offensive of 1942, for example, came within a month of the landings in Rimini. Hitler responded by diverting forces from Italy to the Eastern Front and later weakened garrison forces in France and Yugoslavia to cover his losses in the east.

The Western Allied bombing campaign also intensified and underwent specialization, diminishing the bombings of apartment blocks and the killings of civilians (though they never stopped, instead continuing until the end of the war since people like Bomber Harris defended them as a way to break civilian morale). They targeted chokepoints instead. The British started to target bridges, railway stations, shunting yards, supply depots and began to mine internal waterways during night time raids, heavily relying on De Havilland Mosquitos as tactical bombers. These attacks weren’t too accurate by modern standards, but they nevertheless hurt the German war effort. After the success of Operation Chastise – more commonly known as the British “Dam Busters raid” – the US Air Force chose to emulate it. They carried out daytime “precision” bombings against these dams which delayed their reconstruction by three months and caused electricity blackouts that lasted well into 1944. Beyond that, the USAAF started to bomb Germany’s electrical grid in general and also targeted coal mines, power plants, oil wells, oil refineries, factories producing synthetic oil, storage depots, pipelines and other POL infrastructure resources (POL meaning petroleum, oil and lubricants).

In January 1943 in the Tripoli Conference in Italian Libya, Churchill, Roosevelt, Reynaud, Mussolini and Chiang Kai-shek convened and announced their demand for the Axis powers’ unconditional surrender to convince the paranoid Stalin of their intentions and their commitment to the “Grand Alliance” as Churchill had dubbed the Allied powers (Stalin refused to show up out of anger about the absence of a new front in northern France and because he wouldn’t meet with Chiang Kai-shek since he supported Mao Zedong). It was also the first occasion US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and fascist leader Benito Mussolini met, with Mussolini making an impression by using battleship Littorio as his flagship for the occasion. Mussolini thought Roosevelt was intelligent as well as charming, sometimes to the point of being slick, a bourgeois trait that Il Duce didn’t appreciate. He also detected a faked politeness from the US President, which was caused by the fact that Roosevelt didn’t know what to make of Mussolini. His analysis of Il Duce was summed up by his statement that “the Duce is a man of many faces: intelligent, sometimes charming, other times loud, impetuous and bombastic, and later pensive and brooding.” In February 1943, the four Western leaders met with Stalin in the Damascus Conference in the office of the French High Commissioner there, unsurprising since Syria was a French mandate. The Soviet leader proved to be able to puzzle them all with his sometimes charming, other times aggressive behaviour and his macabre sense of humour. Mussolini and Stalin instantly disliked each other, and not only for ideological reasons, but they nonetheless respected each other as superb politicians and ideologues. It was the first time these five leaders met. The United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britain, Italy and France – collectively known as the “Big Five”, or “Old Alliance” because they had been allies in WW I too – planned their final strategy to defeat Germany. More specifically, under American and Soviet pressure, the Big Five agreed to landings in northern France that were to take place in August 1943. Mussolini and Churchill had consistently advocated Balkan landings, but came out as the losers because Reynaud sided with Roosevelt and Stalin.

In June 1943, the Red Army launched a spring offensive, known as Operation Chichagov in propaganda. It was named after an early nineteenth century Russian general from the Napoleonic Wars and Governor-General of Moldavia and Wallachia in 1812. The name choice was a part of the propaganda campaign to drum up nationalistic rather than class based sentiments, with Stalin believing the former to be more effective. Knowing that the Allies were far removed from Berlin, the Soviets could leisurely allow themselves to let an advance on the German heartland wait and instead pursue traditional Russian Balkan interests. For a country that officially adhered to an internationalist, anti-imperialist ideology, it was being very nationalist and imperialist. It would also be much more brutal than anyone in the British Empire, the French Empire and even the Italian Empire could imagine. These were the same colonial empires that Roosevelt ironically distrusted while falling for the charms of a tyrant that would easily make Mussolini look like a pacifist, the same Italian leader that had crushed Libyan revolts in the 1920s and had used chemical weapons on the Ethiopians. After retaking Bessarabia, the NKVD would summarily execute tens of thousands and deport many more to Siberia to do slave labour in the gulag.

Operation Chichagov, known to Stavka as the Jassy-Kishinev Offensive during its planning stages, involved 1.7 million men, 4.500 tanks, 1.100 assault guns, 30.000 artillery guns and 3.500 aircraft. After the Dnieper-Dniester Offensive Operation, Army Group South had been further reduced from 1 million to 800.000 men; its armour and air forces were easily outnumbered 3:1. When it seemed ever more likely that Romania would be invaded, King Michael attempted a palace coup against the country’s leader, Ion Antonescu. This coup d’état failed and the Romanian King was placed under house arrest, while Antonescu and commander of Army Group South Friessner conducted Romania’s defence. Antonescu summoned all available reserves and greatly relaxed physical requirements that would get conscripts rejected: everyone who could point and shoot would do, and thusly Romania managed to rally an additional 300.000 men. Anticipating the Soviet offensive on Romania, Friessner also got reinforcements diverted from Army Groups North and Centre. In the meantime, the Germans and Romanians had managed to blow up pretty much every bridge across the Dniester. They fought a strong defence in the hills of Bessarabia and held the Red Army back at the river Prut and turned the Focșani Gap into a deadly bottleneck. To everyone’s surprise, the Germans and Romanians not only held but proved themselves superior on a tactical level and by July 1943 the Soviet offensive had petered out, sooner than expected by Stavka.

Despite bad weather, the Red Army renewed its offensive in September and finally subdued the tenacious Germans and Romanians in October. After that they proceeded to overwhelm the defenders, who were forced to withdraw to the northwest of Romania, behind the Carpathian Mountains. Ironically, by stopping King Michael’s coup, Antonescu was actually delaying the inevitable for the Hungarians that he hated so much. Knowing his army couldn’t operate without oil, Hitler ordered an ill-fated counteroffensive to retake Bucharest and the Ploiesti oilfields in December. It produced a long salient that the Germans had to withdraw from due to the inevitable Soviet counterattack, ultimately bringing about only negligible gains. Hitler now had to rely on small scale oil production at the Balaton Lake, some small sources in Austria, Poland, Moravia and Yugoslavia and synthetic oil. Only half of the Wehrmacht’s needs could be met.

Anticipating Stalin’s move to overrun the Balkans as early as the Damascus Conference – using their own intelligence as well as decrypted German Enigma messages – Mussolini and Churchill knew they had to act if they wanted any kind of influence on the Balkans after the war. Churchill practically begged Roosevelt to conduct an amphibious landing in Dalmatia, but Mussolini went a step further by boldly stating he would do it with or without American help. He forced Roosevelt’s hand: Roosevelt couldn’t allow inter-Allied rivalries to become public, never mind letting his British and Italian allies fail and get driven back into the sea ignominiously. The attack started on May 9th 1943, with the Regia Marina providing the bulk of the naval support.

Fully utilizing America’s phenomenal logistical capabilities, the US managed to support simultaneous airborne landings on the Croatian islands of Brac, Hvar, Vis and Solta, which controlled the waters around the Croatian port and shipbuilding centre of Split. The Yugoslav garrisons were small and many ethnically Croatian soldiers, Bosnian, Montenegrin and Slovene soldiers surrendered without putting up a fight. As a result of wartime policies, Yugoslavia’s Serb elites had further strengthened their power. That essentially turned the country into a “Greater Serbia” even more than before, alienating the country’s minorities. Just before the invasion, supply drops to the Croatian Ustashe increased dramatically and the Croats stepped up their partisan war against the Serbs and Germans. They attacked economic and military targets – such as power plants, factories, mines, bridges, communications facilities and command and control installations – all over Croatia and parts of Bosnia. The response by Serbian SS units was brutal, consisting of ethnic cleansing, to which the Ustashe responded with their own bloody massacres of ethnic Serbs, a fact to which the Allies turned a blind eye (Yugoslavia was the only place in the European theatre comparable to the Eastern Front in terms of atrocities). The climax was an attack by 3.000 Croat resistance fighters on an ammunitions and fuel depot right outside Split, to which the local German commander responded by sending in a German SS brigade that was defending the port.

Not an hour later, one Italian assault division and one US infantry division overwhelmed the weakened garrison and seized control of several docks so reinforcements could be brought in. But the Allies weren’t out of the woods yet because enemy forces in the city resisted fiercely, turning a task that should have been completed in a few hours into one that would take almost two days. It was among the worst urban fighting the Western Allies had seen thus far. While the Allies were fighting from the inside to the edge of the city, the edge of the city was under attack from the outside by constant pinprick raids from the Ustashe. The Allies took Dalmatia in about one month, but didn’t progress further. Crucial was that the Luftwaffe could resupply German forces from the air despite Allied interdiction and later also Red Air Force attacks from Romania. Also, the railway network was so limited that most supplies had to get to the front by truck, which wasn’t easy because many roads weren’t solid and turned to mud whenever it rained. It took two divisions dedicated to logistics to support one frontline division. Eighteen divisions had been deployed to Dalmatia within one month, but only six of those were true combat divisions. The Americans would come to see the Dalmatian campaign as a useless sideshow, but despite its small size it was still a thorn in Germany’s side thanks to strong cooperation with the Ustashe.

August 1st 1943 then finally saw the opening of the second front that Stalin so desired. It was preceded by a short but intense phase of low altitude aerial bombing against German coastal defences, destroying German radar installations. The 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, numbering 13.000 men, landed to the west and southwest of Cherbourg at Octeville and Equeurdreville-Hainneville. The British 6th Airborne Division, numbering 11.000 men, landed east of Cherbourg near Tourlaville. Many of the paratroopers grossly overshot their landing zones due to the prevailing strong winds, but that had the positive effect of confusing the Germans and fragmenting their response. Additionally, the German Panzer reserves couldn’t be released without Hitler’s consent, but the insomniac Führer had been put to sleep by a teaspoon of barbiturates administered to him by his quack of a physician Theo Morell. To slow the enemy ability to launch counterattacks against the to-be-established beachhead, the airborne forces seized control of bridges, road crossings and terrain features, blocking many approaches to the landing area. Others, who were too far away from their objectives, maximized their opportunities, doing everything they could to create as much confusion as possible among the Germans.

The amphibious landings commenced at 7:00 AM on August 1st 1943, D-Day, under cover fire from a huge Allied fleet and with massive air cover, though the air wasn’t uncontested. The Luftwaffe posed a serious challenge and when Hitler unleashed the Panzer reserves the Allied beachhead around Cherbourg came under siege. The Allied position remained tenuous, but a continued Allied naval presence and vigorous aerial campaign allowed it to survive.

 

[SenatorChickpea]

Interesting update.

One quibble though: unless things have changed quite a bit, in 1943 Stalin was supporting Chiang, not Mao.

 

[LordKalvan]

Spalato population was around 40,000 people in the census of 1931, and there was no heavy industry in the city. I'm quite surprised that such a small city - practically a town - could be the theatre of a week of urban fight

 

[Iron Chancellor]

Someone mentioned this already, but...

Stalin supported the KMT and Chiang until the Communists looked like they were going to win.

 

[Avrorrange]

Italy's probably going to get Dalmatia for their 'troubles'.It's going to be a reverse of what happened in WWII with Italy ended up ceding land to Yugoslavia.

 

[Cregan]

Italy's probably going to get Dalmatia for their 'troubles'.It's going to be a reverse of what happened in WWII with Italy ended up ceding land to Yugoslavia.

Yugoslavia - or in this case, Axis Greater Serbia - will cease to exist after the war.

 

[Onkel Willie]

Spalato population was around 40,000 people in the census of 1931, and there was no heavy industry in the city. I'm quite surprised that such a small city - practically a town - could be the theatre of a week of urban fight

Changed it.

Stalin supported the KMT and Chiang until the Communists looked like they were going to win.

Support is a strong word. IOTL Stalin refused to meet Chiang at Teheran, which is why the separate Cairo Conference was organized.

 

[mlp]

Interesting update.

One quibble though: unless things have changed quite a bit, in 1943 Stalin was supporting Chiang, not Mao.

Communist support of the KMT stopped in the 1920s when Chiang purged Communist elements from the party.

Great update, by the way. I'm supposing this leads to Italy joining the Security Council of this TTL-UN?

 

[Nightingale]

Interesting addition to UNSC.

Please kill Mao and no Sino-Soviet split

The UNSC's really in favor of the West IOTL.

 

[SenatorChickpea]

Changed it.



Support is a strong word. IOTL Stalin refused to meet Chiang at Teheran, which is why the separate Cairo Conference was organized.

Really? Interesting, didn't know that.

Communist support of the KMT stopped in the 1920s when Chiang purged Communist elements from the party.

Well, it mainly stopped. You had things like Operation Zet afterwards. But while Stalin wasn't exactly Chiang's ally in the 1940s, I always understood that he believed the CCP was in no position to form a government after the war, so better to be able to make deals- at arm's length- with the KMT.


But like I said, it was a minor point, and I'm happy to be corrected on the conferences!

 

[RyuDrago]

I am wondering how the resistance in occupied TTL Italy would be... I guess would be incredible but not impossible (as it happened in China) a CNL where along with Socialists, Communists, and Catholics there will be part Fascists as well. But I guess it would be more a Socialist-Fascist effort, seems more difficult for the Italian Communists to have a greater role than OTL (also because Togliatti will remain in the USSR and the PCI will remain in clandestinity after the outcome of the war). The point will be if an alternate CNL would be in position to deal with Mussolini to relent the grip of the dictatorship through Anglo-American mediation, albeit I doubt about this.

Albeit I can recognize to prevent the USSR to take all the Balkans, an invasion was made, still I am still cozy with the idea the Allies should have focused in freeing the North first. Playing imperialist in this phase when a part of your country is still under occupation is not eventually a nice thing (and could favour a major support for antifascist forces there).

Still Mussolini will have various cards to play in the post-war to be quiet the public opinion.

1) Victory in the war will surely great a great boost to the national morale, considering also Italy will be recognized, albeit more for convenience than effective display of power, as a definitive great power.
2) In the end the Allies would prefer to keep presumibely the status quo (prosecution of the dictatorship) wanting an Italy as stable as possible. Still it could be probable a lingering "guerrilla war" in certain areas of the North between Italian regular forces and leftist bands.
3) TTL Italy will be more incensed in its role of bastion against Communism, especially if here will drag in the Western side what will remain of Yugoslavia (the country is surely dead at the end of the war, but it would be interesting to see who will manage to push deeper for first in the region. Also, surely a lot more of money will arrive from America, albeit the funds will be spent differently, as the country is less devastated than OTL.

Also I am wondering how Italian culture how will be affected. The first butterflies will be over Italian cinema and television, I am citing the latter because effectively the regime started the experimentation of it before the war - and I am wondering how a fascist television would have been...

 

[My Username is Inigo Montoya]

I am wondering how the resistance in occupied TTL Italy would be... I guess would be incredible but not impossible (as it happened in China) a CNL where along with Socialists, Communists, and Catholics there will be part Fascists as well. But I guess it would be more a Socialist-Fascist effort, seems more difficult for the Italian Communists to have a greater role than OTL (also because Togliatti will remain in the USSR and the PCI will remain in clandestinity after the outcome of the war). The point will be if an alternate CNL would be in position to deal with Mussolini to relent the grip of the dictatorship through Anglo-American mediation, albeit I doubt about this.

Also, with a much delayed Barbarossa, there was more opportunity for PCI collaboration with the Nazis while the M-R Pact still held. This was, after all, the instructions they were getting from Moscow.

 

[lukedalton]

Albeit I can recognize to prevent the USSR to take all the Balkans, an invasion was made, still I am still cozy with the idea the Allies should have focused in freeing the North first. Playing imperialist in this phase when a part of your country is still under occupation is not eventually a nice thing (and could favour a major support for antifascist forces there).

But is a move perfectely in tone with Benny character

1) Victory in the war will surely great a great boost to the national morale, considering also Italy will be recognized, albeit more for convenience than effective display of power, as a definitive great power

Well, no joke about italian military prowness or even cheese eating surrendering monkey

2) In the end the Allies would prefer to keep presumibely the status quo (prosecution of the dictatorship) wanting an Italy as stable as possible. Still it could be probable a lingering "guerrilla war" in certain areas of the North between Italian regular forces and leftist bands.

3) TTL Italy will be more incensed in its role of bastion against Communism, especially if here will drag in the Western side what will remain of Yugoslavia (the country is surely dead at the end of the war, but it would be interesting to see who will manage to push deeper for first in the region. Also, surely a lot more of money will arrive from America, albeit the funds will be spent differently, as the country is less devastated than OTL.

Well somekind of reform are basically obligatory, expecially with the army and general population having so much contact with the British and the Americans.
Not counting that bastion of the anti-communism or not, something will be done to make the italian regime a little more...ehm ready for the 'good society'.
Probably some opening for the Christian Democrats (the church is a needed ally) and part of the socialist (the part willing to work with Benny and co.)
Funny, ITTL there will be a 'Zio Benito' in the great family of the United Nation founders.
Joke aside, Benny days of ruling are numbered, more due to age and health (honestly years of directing a nation in war are not good for health) than any possibility of overthrowing (hell he will be considered the savior of the nation and on par with Cavour and Garibaldi on importance for the story of Italy)

Also I am wondering how Italian culture how will be affected. The first butterflies will be over Italian cinema and television, I am citing the latter because effectively the regime started the experimentation of it before the war - and I am wondering how a fascist television would have been

Television and general media will be strangely (and eerily) very similar to OTL post-war Italy; after all they were the same people that wrote and guide journals and other media production so the style remained that...except naturally for Neorealism and other masterwork of italian cinema that really risk to be butterflyed away (Ladri di bicicletta, Miracolo a Milano, etc. etc.).

The italian partecipation war will not be first put under the carpet and later treated as a joke even by ourself...as embracing the part of the incompetent and buffonish member of the Axis succeed in a 'self forving' of all the nasty things done in the conflict.
Here? It will be glorified as a great victory, as a moment of national rebirth and glory, the moment when the glorious italian legion (and friends) have repelled the barbarian invaders

 

[Onkel Willie]

And the war ends.

Chapter XII: Endgame, August 1943-February 1945.​

Allied troop strength quadrupled from 150.000 to 600.000 by mid September 1943, but continued German pressure brought the Anglo-American allies to appeal to Mussolini and Stalin for help. Stalin was about to launch an offensive anyway to retake Belarus and the Baltic States to reach the pre-1942 border, and it was wildly successful. Mussolini, on the other hand, was unpleasantly surprised because he’d been counting on the landings in northern France to take pressure off his burdened forces and allow them to sit back and recover for a while. Instead, however, the weary Regio Esercito, bolstered by British, American and French forces, was asked to attack and Mussolini reluctantly agreed. 350.000 Allied troops, two thirds of them Italian, went unto the breach once more and attacked the new German line along the Reno River on September 14th. The German defence under Kesselring proved tenacious and Allied progress was negligible, and there were a number of cases of mutiny among the Italians similar to the 1917 French mutinies: it wasn’t that they no longer wanted to fight, but they were tired of useless offensives. Disciplinary courts came down hard on the worst mutineers and handed out a few death sentences, but let most off with a slap on the wrist to avoid making things worse. The offensive was paused after two weeks with only a few snippets of territorial gains and heavy casualties to show for it.

To deal with the situation of a war weary army Mussolini knew he needed a serious victory to sell the idea of continuing the fight. He definitely wanted that, for the last thing he wanted was to sign a separate peace and be seen as a cowardly traitor. The fascist dictator, against the wishes of his fellow Allied leaders, chose for decisive action and took off the gloves by authorizing the use of chemical weapons. Based purely on written orders, to avoid Germany finding out, gas masks were distributed among the troops and mustard gas shells arrived at the front by mid October. On October 18th the Italian offensive was resumed just west of Lake Comacchio during an Indian summer style spell of good weather (average daytime temperatures were 17 °C). It started out with an artillery bombardment with mustard gas, completely catching the Germans by surprise. Chemical weapons had so far not been used during the war in Europe and German forces in Italy had stored their gas masks outside immediate reach. Besides that, the cautious fascist resistance operating in northern Italy was ordered to engage in a full-blown partisan war against the occupying forces regardless of German reprisals. Those indeed occurred but they only further increased the numbers and the resolve of the partisan movement.

In the meantime, thousands and thousands of German soldiers were incapacitated by the effects of mustard gas: blistered skin; sore, sticky, stuck together and blind eyes; vomiting; and internal bleeding and external bleeding. While trying to run from the gas and get gas masks, German troops were cut up by shrapnel shells and strafing by C.205 fighters (equipped with two 12.7 mm machine guns in the nose and two 20 mm wing cannons). Italian Bersaglieri spearheaded the attack and liberated Ferrara on October 21st 1943, after which Modena, Parma and Piacenza soon fell. After enduring three years of German occupation, Mussolini was received by wildly enthusiastic crowds in Ferrara, where his speech was interrupted several times by cheering. The Italians broke out into the Po Valley and pushed the Germans to a new, much longer frontline following the river Po. Mussolini hoped to break out northeast and reach the Ljubljana Gap, but that was too ambitious a goal. German lines held, but Milan was only 40 kilometres away and Venice about 60 kilometres. Italian morale was restored, but German retaliation followed: Hitler authorized the use of tabun nerve gas. The existence of Germany’s nerve gas stockpile was unknown and it caused heavy casualties, even after the Allies figured out what was going on and used gas masks (tabun can also be absorbed through the skin, though many who ingested it that way eventually recovered).

After the horrors wrought by these gas attacks, both Axis and Allied leaders agreed to return to the tacit agreement between them not to use chemical weapons. As far as the Allies were concerned they didn’t really need any further use of such trump cards because the desired effect had been achieved. Hitler had diverted troops to the Italian front, where the Germans now had to defend a much longer defensive line along the river Po. This allowed the beleaguered Anglo-Americans in the Cherbourg beachhead to consolidate and break out into northern France, and rather spectacularly at that. The breakout began on September 3rd and within one week Eisenhower’s forces had liberated the Cotentin Peninsula as well as Brittany and had pushed to within 50 kilometres west of Paris. Hitler, in the meantime, agreed to de-escalate because he feared the prospect that Churchill would make true on threats to bomb German cities with mustard gas or, God forbid, anthrax. Chemical warfare was the only thing that the Führer was reluctant to engage in.

As Stalin’s hordes surged forward across the pre-war border and into Nazi occupied Poland during autumn and winter 1943, Hitler started to increasingly denude his defences in the west and on the Italian front. By the end of September Western Allied forces were on the Belgian border and Hitler had been forced to abandon southern France in order to prevent his forces from being cut off. One of the most deplorable episodes of this entire phase of the war was when Hitler ordered the SS to put down the popular uprising of the Parisians and destroy their city. SS leader Heinrich Himmler and his subordinates ruthlessly carried out this task, killing several thousand French civilians, before the Allied advance forced them to stop. The winter of 1943-’44 saw the situation stabilize with the Soviets on the Vistula and the Western Allies in Brussels, while the Italian front remained stable. Mussolini bided his time and waited as German forces weakened. An assassination attempt on Hitler in December 1943 failed and the SS rounded up several thousand people and sent them to concentration camps, if they weren’t executed outright.

March 1944 saw spring weather set in and the Allied push to crush Nazi Germany recommenced in full force. A tremendous Anglo-American offensive pushed north into the Netherlands toward the river Rhine, and toward bridges at Eindhoven and Arnhem in particular. Simultaneously, the Red Army thrust across the Vistula toward the river Oder and delivered a crushing defeat to German Army Group Centre, reducing it to half its original strength. With German troop strength in northern Italy at an all time low, Allied forces in Italy launched an offensive too and finally broke enemy lines on the Po, reaching the Austrian and Slovenian borders. In the meantime, they encountered emaciated inmates at the “Bolzano Transit Camp” which mostly housed political opponents, but also Jews and Gypsies. Allied forces in Dalmatia, in the meantime, broke out and liberated large parts of Croatia, reaching the ethnically Italian city of Fiume that had chafed under four years of German-Yugoslav occupation. The Regio Esercito was greeted by jubilant crowds.

By May 1944 Western Allied forces had crossed the Rhine, Soviet troops were on the river Oder and a mere 65 kilometres from Berlin, Italian forces had pushed to the Ljubljana Gap and Allied forces in Dalmatia had finally broken out into Croatia and were advancing north. June 1944 saw the final collapse of Nazi Germany with the Soviets taking Berlin and meeting the Western Allies on the river Elbe. In the meantime, Allied forces spearheaded by Italy liberated Vienna and Prague and met with the American Third Army under Patton that had advanced through Bavaria into Bohemia. During this final advance, Allied forces spearheaded by the Italians discovered the horrors of Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp where the inmates had been forced to perform slave labour under horrific circumstances and cruel, sadistic treatment (more than 100.000 people died at Mauthausen-Gusen, one of the largest forced labour camps in German occupied Europe).

After Hitler committed suicide in his bunker underneath the ruins of Berlin on June 6th 1944, his designated successor Hermann Goering agreed to sign an unconditional surrender. Heinrich Himmler – leader of the SS, the Gestapo and all of Germany’s other police services, commander of the Reserve Army as well as Minister of the Interior – disagreed with this move. Himmler used his power, which was not to be trifled with in the areas still under German control, to try and stage a coup d’état and continue the war. His idea was to continue the war as an SS led guerrilla insurgency against an Allied occupation, but the Wehrmacht put down the SS and Himmler was sentenced to death by guillotine for high treason by a kangaroo court (as non-military personnel, though ex-military, he wasn’t given the courtesy of a court martial and an execution by firing squad despite requesting it). He still got an easy death compared to what many concentration camp inmates had gone through.

That left one remaining Axis power to deal with: the Empire of Japan. Japan’s invasion of Southeast Asia and its war on the US had proven more costly than anticipated and hadn’t led to an early decisive victory. Southeast Asia had largely fallen, but at serious casualties, and the British held their ground on the Thai-Burmese border. In the meantime, the Imperial Japanese Navy had suffered some sensitive losses in the early stages of the war that limited their ability to maintain the initiative: at Pearl Harbor aircraft carrier Kaga had been sunk while Zuikaku had been damaged, requiring weeks in dry dock; the Naval Battle of Kota Bharu had seen the loss of one light cruiser and two destroyers; the Battle of the Java Sea had seen the loss of a light cruiser and damage to a heavy cruiser; and at Wake the Japanese lost one patrol boat, two destroyers, one light cruiser and saw aircraft carrier Soryu out of commission for six months at a time when Japan needed her for its offensives.

In early 1942, the Japanese admiralty prioritized the Pacific over the Indian Ocean, which probably contributed to the failure of Japan’s Indian Ocean Raid (Zuikaku was reassigned from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific after her repairs were completed in January). Force Z alone numbered two aircraft carriers, two battleships, one battlecruiser, one heavy cruiser, five light cruisers and fifteen destroyers for a total of 26 ships. At Ceylon it was merged with the Eastern Fleet, which contributed aircraft carriers HMS Formidable and HMS Hermes as well as battleships HMS Revenge, Resolution, Ramillies and Royal Sovereign. By March 1943 the Eastern Fleet was composed of four aircraft carriers, six battleships, one battlecruiser, three heavy cruisers, ten light cruisers, 29 destroyers, thirty smaller war ships and fifty merchants for a total of 133 ships.

The attacking Japanese strike force consisted of forty ships: five carriers, four battleships, seven heavy cruisers, nineteen destroyers and five submarines. On March 26th 1942 Vice Admiral Sir James Somerville learnt about a Japanese sortie from Borneo from signal decrypts and decided to ambush it. Aircraft carrier Indomitable, battlecruiser Repulse, heavy cruiser HMS Dorsetshire, four light cruisers and eight destroyers were set up as a lure. They briefly engaged the superior Japanese force in the evening of April 2nd, losing destroyers HMS Fortune and HMS Griffin, and fled westward under the cover of darkness. At dawn, April 3rd 1942, the pursuing Japanese fleet commanded by Nagumo ran into the main body of the Eastern Fleet 300 km east of Ceylon, which was also supported by land based aircraft of the RAF. The British lost HMS Hermes, HMS Dorsetshire and destroyers HMS Panther and HMAS Vampire, but the Japanese lost carriers Akagi and Shokaku, fast battleship Kirishima and heavy cruiser Chikuma. The latter two were sunk in a fight in which they were pitted against HMS Barham and heavy cruiser Cornwall. That fight was among the last confrontations between battleships, although Kirishima’s classification of “fast battleship” rather than battlecruiser proved unjustified: against actual battleships she proved insufficient, with 15 inch (381 mm) shells inflicting major damage while her opponent could survive hits by the enemy’s 14 (356 mm) inch shells.

With the loss of four carriers at Midway in June 1942, Japan’s last attempt to regain the initiative in this war, its carrier force was down by seven since the start of the war, while the Americans commissioned USS Essex in July 1942, replacing USS Yorktown (she was lost at Midway). This allowed the Americans to take the initiative in the Pacific and start an island hopping campaign toward Japan, with HMS Warspite being involved all the while, mostly performing coastal bombardment duties with her mighty 15 inch guns. By the end of 1943 Saipan, Tinian and Guam had fallen due to Japan’s inability to match the Allied navies after the losses sustained in 1942. Iwo Jima fell in summer 1944.

By autumn 1944 the US was in a position to invade Japan and on September 21st 1944 the greatest armada in history – American, British, Australian, Dutch and French ships – assembled off the coast of Kyushu for Operation Olympic. With fuel supplies low, the Japanese couldn’t do much to resist except for kamikaze attacks that scored a few spectacular but not war winning successes. The invaders encountered fanatical resistance from eighteen Imperial Japanese Army divisions, not to mention fanatical civilians that were equipped with cooking knives, awls, bamboo spears, eighteenth century muskets and bomb vests to commit suicide attacks with. Losses were appalling and even the US Army was brought to commit a few atrocities in order to maintain order, this in the context of mutual distrust and hatred between GIs and the locals. The US Army conquered the southern third of the island and used it to fire bomb Japanese cities even more and as a staging area for the invasion of Honshu. January 1945 saw the second part of the operation that was to bring the Empire of Japan to its knees: Operation Coronet, in other words the invasion of Honshu. This prompted Japanese generals to use chemical and biological weapons, causing massive enemy losses, but not enough to drive them back into the sea.

In the meantime, in December 1944, the Soviet Union and Italy, which had officially been at peace with Japan until now, declared war (Ethiopia, which was a de facto Italian protectorate at the time, also symbolically declared war). The Soviet contribution was by far the largest and they massed 800.000 men on the borders of Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state controlling Manchuria. The Red Army invaded Manchuria (as well as Southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands) on December 20th 1944 in what was a classical double pincer movement and confounded the Japanese analysis of Soviet logistics by moving through the Gobi Desert. The Kwantung Army resisted fanatically, but the Red Army was superior in logistics as well as firepower: the Soviet T-34 medium tank was nearly ten tonnes heavier, more heavily armed and with better armour than Japan’s “medium” Type 97 Chi-Ha tank. The 57 mm gun on the Chi-Ha could only harm the T-34 at point blank range while the 85 mm gun on the newer variants of the T-34 easily cut through the 8-28 mm armour on the enemy tank at any distance. The Japanese A6M Zero also wasn’t the trump card it used to be, finding the Yakovlev Yak-3 to be a serious adversary. While the T-34 bloodied enemy tank forces and the Red Air Force proved more of a challenge than expected, colossal quantities of Soviet artillery compensated for whatever deficiencies the Red Army still had. Despite being outnumbered nearly 2:1, the Red Army overran all of Manchukuo in two months time (and they would have done even better if Stalin hadn’t kept so many forces in Eastern Europe out of the paranoid fear that the Western Allies would stab the USSR in the back). The Imperial Japanese Navy was having increasing difficulty in meeting its fuel demands and Stalin ordered plans to be drawn up for an invasion of Hokkaido.

The British transferred much of their forces from Europe to Burma and got support from Italian and French contingents, although those were of limited use initially due to their inexperience in jungle warfare. The Italian navy also based submarines at British bases to help in the fight against the Japanese navy and heavy cruisers Pola and Gorizia deployed their 203 mm (8 inch) guns in coastal bombardment duties (Italian battleships were considered for deployment to the Indian Ocean, but they had never been designed to operate outside the Mediterranean Sea and the Regia Marina ultimately decided against it for fear of losing them against Japanese “super battleships” Yamato and Musashi or enemy carriers). The French navy sent battleship Richelieu to operate in the Indian Ocean with the Royal Navy. The British of course also sent naval reinforcements of her own: among others they sent battleships HMS King George V and Howe to serve with the Americans in the Pacific while HMS Duke of York and Anson would serve in the Indian Ocean.

British and British Indian forces waited until September 1944, the end of the monsoon season, to launch an offensive into Thailand. Bolstered by 300 additional aircraft, the Royal Air Force gained air superiority over Thailand, bombing Bangkok and other Thai cities on several occasions. They focused on enemy defences, command and communication installations, training areas and airfields, both Thai and Japanese, as well as bridges, railways, rail yards, power plants, oil refineries and other petroleum infrastructure. The result was that the ability of the Imperial Japanese Army and the Royal Thai Army to effectively operate was seriously impaired due to bad logistics. In October engineers constructed pontoon bridges across the Salween River, which was the border between Burma and Thailand. Japanese attempts to stop them were met with devastating aerial and artillery bombardment and the British were able to establish and consolidate beachheads on the Thai side of the river. By the end of the year the British had occupied much of the west and north of the country and were only 75 kilometres from Bangkok.

On December 16th 1944, the 19 year-old King Rama VIII took control with support from the army and sacked his regent, Pridi Banomyong, placing him under house arrest. Thailand promptly switched sides and declared war on Japan. All of a sudden the Imperial Japanese Army found itself under attack from its former ally and its forces in Malaya were now cut off. Allied forces, in the meantime, crossed the Mekong River and liberated Vientiane and between December 1944 and February 1945 liberated French Indochina. With the Burma Road secure and other roads also opening up on China’s southern flank, aid to the Kuomintang was stepped up (to Stalin’s annoyance since he supported the Communist Party of China, which was excluded from Lend-Lease Aid). Chiang Kai-shek had already gotten more than a billion dollar’s worth of aid since 1941, but in 1945 alone it would receive another 1.2 billion dollars worth (China received 2.2 billion in Lend Lease in the war in total, or about 29 billion dollars in today’s money). China received tanks, rifles, machine guns, modern aircraft, jeeps, trucks, locomotives, food, petroleum products and construction materials. The National Revolutionary Army went on the offensive in March 1945 and attacked toward Nanjing and Shanghai, hoping to cut off Japanese forces operating in Anhui and parts of Zhejiang, Hubei and Jiangxi (in response Stalin radically stepped up support for Mao, supplying copious amounts of modern weapons). Though not reaching Shanghai, which was admittedly an ambitious goal, the Chinese did remarkably well and liberated Nanjing.

By late 1944 the Japanese were withdrawing all their forces to defend the Home Islands. On January 16th 1945, the Soviets managed to surprise the world by launching an invasion of Hokkaido, using the ships it had managed to scrounge together: some modern destroyers supplied by the British, some Soviet built heavy cruisers and a few old Tsarist era battleships. At this point, the Japanese tried to use the prospect of Japan falling to communism in order to negotiate a separate peace with the west, but it fell on deaf ears with the Allies. An even more outlandish idea to negotiate “an anti-imperialist Soviet-Japanese pact” was simply met by a Soviet demand for an unconditional surrender to all the Allied powers. Attempts to negotiate a conditional surrender via Fascist Italy – which was probably the least unsympathetic Allied power since its interests hadn’t been threatened by Japan – produced no results either.

With Allied forces converging on Tokyo, the Emperor intervened. In February 1945 Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signed the “Japanese Instrument of Surrender” in Tokyo Bay on the deck of USS Missouri with HMS Warspite nearby. While pointing at Warspite he said “so that’s the old monster that gave us so much trouble” and became one of the early adepts of the idea that, had it not been for British intervention, Pearl Harbor would have been Japan’s decisive victory. Despite economic, demographic and military realities there are still some fringe archconservative nationalist elements that believe Japan lost due to bad luck in the war’s initial stages, nowadays congregating on a few small internet forums. The truth is that in attacking the USA Japan had doomed itself, although it was perhaps lucky chance that they didn’t last longer than they did. The USA never did get to use the wonder weapon they’d been building: the atomic bomb.

 

[MapleTekh]

That was a pretty short TL. Are you going into the Cold War era?

 

[Colonel Levnekov]

Oh. Oh my.

With chemical weapons usage and no nuclear taboo established yet, this may prove to be devastating.