The Fall of Goering and Udet's Mediterranean Strategy of 1940-41 (yay another TL)

[Onkel Willie]

Yes, but ITTL, the Germans have a larger force to do it with and there are of course the immense butterflies which have had a year to flap their wings now . German forces are also stronger in general as there is only one front.

 

[Deckhand]

The Russians should be stronger as well if they were actually expecting the attack as opposed to sitting with hands over ears yelling "It's not happening". In such a case, it is inevitable that the Germans should have taken more casualties in 1941, and the Russians less, than OTL. So effectively the Russians should actually be in a better position than OTL by 1942, especially as you have had them withdrawing in the early stages. Their prisoner losses should be much less than OTL at the very least if the Luftwaffe is actually opposed in it's scouting operations.

But carry on with your german wank, i know you want to. I can't wait for the part where Manstein invokes his super powers of german awesomeness and STAVKA's average IQ drops 75 points.

 

[Onkel Willie]

LOL . I do have something special planned down the road although I'm not sure whether that would be fun or not. The USSR is likely to lose now. They suffered less losses but then again they have Hitler's undivided attention unfortunately.

 

[Onkel Willie]

*Bumping this*

No replies

 

[Onkel Willie]

Update time again .

EDIT: I have added a map of what Europe'll be like around 1943ish.

Chapter V: The Brilliant Von Manstein’s Blow, ‘Peace’ in Europe and No End in the Pacific, January – August 1943​

The battle of Stalingrad and the German army’s subsequent removal from the Caucasus had been a major blow to Hitler and it had, just as the Battle of Moscow before, shattered the myth of Nazi invincibility, this time even more thoroughly. The Sixth Army had been rescued, but had already suffered enormous losses and the Italian 8th Army, and the Third and Fourth Romanian Armies had practically ceased to exist, a major blow to the countries that were Germany’s largest allies on the eastern front and a cause for worry for the Romanians as the initiative now rested firmly in the hands of general Zhukov, or so it seemed. General Von Manstein had one more ace up his sleeve to save the German army out of this predicament which would be call his ‘Backhand Blow’ which would be devastating to Stalin’s hordes if only he received the go-ahead from Hitler who was also being offered another initiative known as Operation Citadel which was supported by a majority of the other generals. Operation Citadel was aimed at the bulge in the front at Kursk to eliminate it. Pinching this salient off would eliminate almost a fifth of the Red Army’s manpower and would recapture the useful railway city of Kursk that controlled the railway between Rostov and Moscow. The Ninth Army under Walther Model would attack south from Orel and the Fourth Panzer Army under Hermann Hoth north from Kharkov. The Soviets who anticipated this, had already begun to construct defences in the region and both Guderian and Von Manstein both argued against it as this was the most obvious place for an attack, something Stavka saw as well. Von Manstein knew very well that any defeat here would break the back of the Wehrmacht and that Hitler’s dreams wouldn’t be realized and he for one didn’t want to unleash the Stalinist terror on Germany and Europe.

He had a different proposition and he approached Hitler directly and used his sway with the dictator to convince him. His plan was very different and much less obvious than Operation Citadel was. His plan was to lure the Red Army after the now severely weakened and reforming Sixth Army into the Donets Basin in the eastern Ukraine. He would then turn south from Kharkov and march south on the eastern bank of the Don river and then press this entire wing of the Red Army against the Sea of Azov and crush them like the Red Army had attempted to crush Germany in the Battle of Stalingrad. Hitler himself had never been a major proponent of Operation Citadel even though he had allowed the commanders on the eastern front to develop their plans. Von Manstein, supported by Guderian and to a lesser extent Rommel, who was also in the eastern Ukraine, managed to convince Hitler quite easily as all three were among Hitler’s favourite commanders. The operation, under the name Unternehmen Donnerschlag (Operation Thunderbolt), was chosen over Citadel and scheduled for May while the latter was postponed to July and would eventually be cancelled.

Forces began to move even while an obvious Soviet troop concentration began to build around Kursk, completely the wrong area. The Soviets anticipated on an offensive aimed at the Kursk region and their plan was to build a set of defences and drown the German attack in this web of barbed wire, bunkers, fortifications, land mines and so on while Von Manstein, in reality, was preparing to thrust south. Soviet commanders in the south, in the meantime, noticed how the battered Sixth Army retreated behind the river Don to the Donets Basin and informed Stavka. Stavka, seeing a chance to crush an entire army and regain this valuable industrial area, followed to attack the rear of the seemingly chaotically retreating Germans. In reality, the Germans were only feigning, but German deception and the fact that the Soviets didn’t have German codes so they couldn’t read their messages, hampered their intelligence services who failed to see the forming threat in the southwest. As planned, Von Manstein began his march south on May 10th, a symbolic date when one remembers Germany’s lightning victory’s of only three years before. He met with little resistance as he crossed the Don and went south from Kharkov while local commanders made the error of misjudging this move as a diversion to save the Sixth Army which saw itself surrounded again at Donetsk and a ruse to divert attention from Kursk. On May 26th, Von Manstein’s forces reached Rostov and now they realized their mistake and tried to escape, leaving Donetsk in a hurry. Von Manstein’s ruse had worked and now over a million men and 60% of the Red Army’s total armoured forces were caught in a pocket. Zhukov responded by abandoning his effort at Kursk to launch a counteroffensive together with Konev. This would be it, the last epic clash between the two titans, a final gigantic struggle.

German forces had now surrounded the Soviets and pressed them toward the Sea of Azov as planned. They resisted valiantly and fought to the last man against the barbaric Nazis rather than surrendering after rumours of what the SS and Einzatzgruppen were doing behind enemy lines. They were not prepared for such a campaign however, and Zhukov’s armoured forces would fail to reach them in time. I would take weeks to move them from Kursk all the way south to the Donets Basin close to the Black Sea as it was such an enormous force which was a logistical headache as all those railcars needed to be gathered to begin with. A further (unauthorized) German offensive by Rommel cut the besieged forces in the Donets Pocket in two although they tried to link up vigorously, to no avail. With only a few weeks worth of supplies left, they were defeated by a combination of fierce panzer attacks, Luftwaffe punishment, artillery and superior German tactics and logistics. On June 18th 1943, these forces had been scattered and were no longer a coherent force. Zhukov was too late when German troops began cleanup operations to take out remaining pockets of resistance. This was a major loss for the Red Army. With three fifths of Stalin’s tanks gone and a million men lost in a matter of weeks, he was compelled to either wait until winter 1943/1944 and leave the Germans with the initiative until then or make peace and bide his time. Already the Germans were moving to retake Rostov and move south so on June 25th, he requested an armistice with Hitler with revenge already in the back of his mind of course. Hitler might have been insane (or just plain evil), but the German dictator realized that he had to take this chance or be sucked into Russia’s strategic depth and a never ending guerrilla war with the remains of the Red Army (which was still a daunting foe in spite of the losses suffered).

Stalin offered Hitler a Brest-Litovsk Version 2.0 peace, which Hitler had rejected a little more than a year before, but the leader of the exhausted Reich had no choice but to accept it this time. The Soviet and German delegations met in the city of Königsberg in East Prussia which, conveniently, was very close to Hitler’s headquarters in Rastenburg. They entered tough negotiations in which the Germans had the upper hand. With a lack of anything to threaten the Germans with besides continuing a defensive war (a prospect that didn’t impress Hitler much as it would keep Germany ‘alert’), they accepted the German demands. In the Treaty of Königsberg, several large territorial changes were postulated which would change eastern Europe lastingly. Besides Germany, several other countries also held claims; these were Romania and Finland. Bessarabia was to be returned to the Romanians and Transnistria was to be included while Karelia was to be given back to the Finns who had lost it after the Winter War. Germany received the bulk of the territorial awards with the Baltic states, the USSR’s zone in Poland, Belarus and the Ukraine (including the Rostov, Don and Kuban regions). This was a major blow for Stalin who would turn inward first to purge those who he blamed for this catastrophe. A new Five Year Plan was already in the making. With his organizational skill, he had managed to move half of the USSR’s industry to the Urals, but this didn’t change the fact that the other half now rested with Hitler. A ruthless campaign of resource exploitation, industrialization and mechanization would soon hit Central Asia and Siberia and the USSR would become one of the most militarized nations on Earth. This change would also herald the dawn of Stalin’s focus on Asia, the only place where he could expand without major resistance (except from the Japanese, but the tide had already turned on them). Hitler, in the meantime, celebrated. His empire stretched from the North Sea and the English Channel in the west to just shy of the Volga river in the east and included Germanic lands such as the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, the Sudetenland, Bohemia-Moravia, Austria and Alsace-Lorraine. He had won.

With the major powers of the Pacific turned against Japan, they couldn’t last for very long. At Midway, their fleet had suffered a devastating defeat at Midway, leaving the initiative in the hands of the American admirals. In the Southeast Asian theatre, they had failed to take Singapore which was a large thorn in their side as the Royal Navy raided frequently from there. With that defeat, a campaign to liberate Malay from there started while Commonwealth forces were also pushing steadily into Burma from Bengal. Both efforts were supported by the French. The Anglo-French bond was slightly strengthened again after a great deal of distrust after the French surrender in 1940. They further drove the Japanese out with combined naval operations. Their American allies had already liberated the Marshall Islands after a bloody battle at the end of 1942. The Americans had then first been confronted with the Japanese ‘fight-to-the-death’ stance. The garrison had fought determined and fiercely to the last man rather than surrendering. This was considered honourable and at the end they carried out their infamous Banzai charges. Needless to say, losses soared, but the Americans were well able to replenish them.

The campaign continued with the jungle battles in Southeast Asia, a struggle for life and death in China and a steady American advance in the Pacific. While Von Manstein was busy executing his last offensive in May, the US Navy launched a renewed offensive toward the Mariana Islands. These islands contained Japan’s important forward naval base of Saipan. Like on the Marshall Islands, the Japanese fought to the death (also as part of a strategy to wage a war of attrition against the US in the hope of a negotiated peace). It took American troops two weeks of intense combat to take the heavily defended island. The Japanese admiralty had anticipated this move and had built bunkers, mined the waters around the island and had created a total of three concentric defensive belts. They now recognized what the Americans wanted to do. Capturing the Philippines, Okinawa, Iwo Jima and then the Ryukyu Islands would put them in a position to invade Japan.

The war dragged on and became a true of war of attrition as the Japanese continued with their battles of attrition and a guerrilla campaign in the jungles of Burma against Anglo-French forces. They however couldn’t stop them from liberating Malay and linking up in Burma for an offensive into Japan’s puppet of Thailand. This was in early August and coincided with the American invasion of the Philippines and the subsequent battle of Leyte Gulf which was to be the standing execution of the Imperial Japanese Navy which would see its ability to mount any kind of resistance against the combined Anglo-American-French-Dutch navies disappear for good. Japan now felt the noose tightening around its neck and saw their conquests of only a year before evaporate before their eyes. With the empire in peril, the final decision was made to make this the most costly war ever for their enemies. All of Japan would be mobilized, but ultimately this valiant effort would prove to be in vain.

 

[Onkel Willie]

Come on, there must be somebody who's interested .

Chapter VI: Hitler Consolidates, Mussolini’s Ambitions Come True and Japan’s End, 1943-1945​

With Hitler having scored a tremendous victory and having taken down the communist giant in eastern Europe, Mussolini was sick with jealousy. Sure, he had Egypt, Tunisia and some bits of France, but none of those had been made by his armies and most of it was worthless desert. The Germans had awarded him with these territories and besides that, the Italian empire paled in comparison to that of Hitler. Hitler had decided long ago that it would be best to allow Mussolini to police the Balkans as he himself had no interest in the area nor in getting embroiled in an endless mess of guerrilla warfare, irredentism and ethnic cleansing when he himself was already occupied in the massive Reich that he now needed to consolidate for the inevitable rematch against Stalin who was by no means fully defeated which he would prove later on. In the past three years, Mussolini had seen the rapid conquests of Germany and he warily watched as German influence grew while Italian influence diminished by the day. During this period, he had taken the opportunity to reform his armed forces more along the German model. A new fighter had been designed known as the Macchi C.202 ‘Folgore’ which was arguably on par with whatever fighters the Germans had. With the new role of air power as ground support and its enormous importance in modern warfare, he stepped off the ‘Bomber always comes through’ doctrine. With German assistance, the Regia Aeronautica began acquiring radios for their aircraft and started training intensely for ground support roles and also started expanding. The army, largely an infantry force, had also seen a lot of reform in the period 1941-1943. With the importance of armour now crystal clear, Italian arms manufacturers had been ordered to design a new tank. With German designs available, the two main ones (Fiat and Breda) had both more or less intentionally copied the latest version of the Panzer IV. The tank had the advantage that it was mass-producible and a relatively simple and low maintenance design and well armed and mobile as well, unlike some of the newer designs the Germans were fielding (e.g. the Panther and the Tiger I).

The Hungarians and Bulgarians were also becoming unhappy in their position of German vassals, more so since the Soviet threat had been eliminated, and they realigned themselves with Italy to settle several irredentist claims with Yugoslavia which, surprisingly, had been left alone for the duration of the war. Hitler’s friendship with Mussolini slightly cooled as he considered Hungary to be in his sphere of influence. The three attacked Yugoslavia with tacit German consent. The Nazis had no interest in keeping the South Slav Kingdom around for much longer. In October 1943, Italian forces attacked from Albania and north-eastern Italy, Bulgaria from the east and Hungary from the north in the Third Balkan War. The Yugoslavs resisted bravely, but were quickly reduced to the Serb core as the Croats defected en masse. The reformed Regia Esercito broke through their lines in the Dinaric Alps while the Regia Marina’s battleships bombarded the coast and landed troops in Fiume. In the meantime, Hungarian forces advanced south, only halted by the Danube which spared Belgrade for a moment. But with Bulgarian, Italian and Hungarian forces all over the country, it would be over soon. The Croats had already declared independence and Hungarian troops crossed the Danube. When the Yugoslavs held up the Italian advance (the army’s reforms weren’t yet finished in reality) Mussolini simply ordered a one thousand plane raid which laid waste to Belgrade. Several more followed as the Serb rump refused to buckle under Italian threats. After three weeks of sustained combat, Yugoslavia surrendered. In the Treaty of Bucharest, the country was cut up. Vardar Macedonia was awarded to Bulgaria, Slavonia and Vojvodina to Hungary and Kosovo, Istria and Dalmatia to Italy while Croatia was set up as a vassal kingdom to Rome. Montenegro was restored to ‘independence’ as an Italian protectorate.

With Axis control over the eastern Mediterranean, Greece was also decidedly in Rome’s sphere of influence. The Greek leadership had seen the fate of Yugoslavia and caved in to Italo-Bulgarian demands. Southern Epirus was ceded to Italy and Thrace to Bulgaria and the Italian navy also gained basing rights in the Aegean Sea. This expansion of influence by Bulgaria and Italy unsettled the Turks. Knowing that the Italians and Bulgarians were allies of convenience and not friends, they wanted a slice of Thrace as well and some of Greek Macedonia and a few Aegean islands to restore some old, forgotten Ottoman glory. Greece was now an effective Italian protectorate and Mussolini couldn’t allow this encroachment. The Turks called Mussolini’s bluff over Greece as Bulgaria had gotten what it wanted as well. The Bulgarians began spewing rhetoric against the hated Turks while the Turks prepared for war. In the meantime, with the Italian empire now at a seeming zenith, King Victor Emmanuel III was now crowned Emperor of the West in a grand ceremony in the St. Peter Basilica in Rome. For the first time since the year 476 A.D, when Odoacer had removed the last Western Roman Emperor, the title Emperor of the West was being used again once more; after an interregnum of 1467 years, the Western Roman Empire had been restored once more with all of Mussolini’s grandeur as he was seen as the one who had made it possible. His propaganda machine was working overtime, needless to say. The Turks seized Bulgarian territory and the Italians declared war in support of Sofia in January 1944. With total control of the Aegean Sea (the Turkish navy was vastly outnumbered) and Italo-Greco-Bulgarian dominance on land, the Turks were dealt several crippling blows. They were evicted from Thrace and the Italians landed troops on the Dardanelles.

The British saw this warily and decided to support Turkey as their proxy while Hitler did the same for Italy as he saw this as a way to gain more direct control over the Straits which was a good thing in his opinion as Nazi Germany now had a substantial Black Sea coast. British weaponry, ‘advisors’ and some volunteers flowed to the Turks as the Italians invaded the bottleneck that was European Turkey headed for Istanbul. This thin strip of land was very defendable and would hold the advance down for two months before Mussolini ordered the use of mustard gas and a bombing campaign against Istanbul and several western Anatolian cities. A breakthrough in the Dardanelles occurred at Gallipoli where the British had failed so many years before. Italian tactics were much more brutal, however, than British WW I tactics. Use of chemical weapons and bombing of civilian targets was no issue for Mussolini. By March they reached the outskirts of Istanbul. Turkish troops fought street-to-street and turned every ruin into a bulwark. They hoped this battle of attrition would change Mussolini’s mind. It didn’t and on March 13th 1944, Italian forces raised the Italian tricolour over the Hagia Sophia after a hard-won bloody battle. Turkey surrendered and Mussolini was pleased that Italian prestige had been restored. In the following peace, all of Thrace was awarded to Bulgaria while Mussolini’s Greek vassal gained several ethnically Greek enclaves on Turkey’s Aegean coast as a compensation for earlier losses. Mussolini settled for Istanbul which he renamed Constantinople. In a grand mass, the Hagia Sophia was made a Church again and Emperor Victor Emmanuel III of the West was crowned Emperor of the East on June 1st 1944. The Roman Empire had been restored fully from its fall to the Turks in 1453 after almost five centuries.

Hitler, in the meantime, consolidated his position as leader of the hegemonic power of the European continent. With his army now the most powerful one in Europe and the USSR eliminated for the short term at least, he became obsessively focused on his navy again, just like Emperor Wilhelm II had been before him. Just like the latter, he believed that a grand navy was important for Germany’s stature as a great power. Also, the navy was the least filled with the Nazi ideals and he aimed to change that. In the meantime, he was beginning to implement what was called Generalplan Ost, his grand horrific plan to ethnically cleanse eastern Europe and make it into an Aryan paradise. The SS had already conducted massive ethnic cleansings and had evicted millions of Jews from the Ukraine. Villages had been burnt to the ground, mass reprisals against resistance were common, as were rape pillage and murder as the Germans violently suppressed any manifestation of Ukrainian nationalism. Many tens of thousands had been deported to work as slaves in Germany and these deportations, brutal genocide, random destruction, random arrests and executions sparked a guerrilla insurgency beyond belief which only helped augment Hitler’s opinion. The plan had been developed and its early versions had since been refined under Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler. It was divided between a ‘small plan’ and a ‘big plan’. The first had been executed during the war while the latter would be implemented over a period of 25-30 years, or that was the plan.

The ‘big plan’ envisioned Germanisation of certain segments of the occupied peoples (for example 25% of the Byelorussians, 35% of the Ukrainian population and 50% of the Czechs in Bohemia-Moravia). Out of an occupied population of 68 million in the former western Soviet Union, 50 million were to expulsed through forced emigration beyond the Urals or exterminated, Hitler didn’t care either way. Their place was to be taken by 8 to 10 million German settlers for the total of the German population to reach 200 million around 1965, something which Hitler believed was possible with an affluent state based on the abundant harvests from the Ukraine and the industry and resources in the Donets Basin. Poland was also mentioned and was to be Germanised as well. This was to be achieved by murdering their intelligentsia, destroying every vestige of Polish culture down to even their language and withholding the Poles any education above the absolute necessary. German was to become the mandatory language in all the occupied areas, including the general-government of Poland. Many millions more Poles would be forced to emigrate east and they would be spread out into small enclaves all over the Reich. Those who then still refused to Germanise, would be forbidden to marry. It was envisioned that a new elite of German colonists would take over Poland and by 1952, the Polish population was supposed to be reduced to a mere 3-4 million docile peasants and eventually the entire Polish culture would simply cease to exist as the Poles died out as a people due to these forced assimilation and extermination practices. Implementation started almost immediately after the war ended with led to an enormous insurrection, one that Hitler ordered to be repressed brutally. Many hundreds of thousands were rounded up and locked up in concentration camps throughout the east where these people performed slave labour such as working in quarries to build Hitler’s magnanimous capital of Germania. Stalin attempted to support the ongoing guerrilla war with weapons and the like which hurt Hitler’s efforts. The first wave of (mostly SS) colonists arrived to lord over these lands and by use of force, the first harvests of Ukrainian grain arrived in Germany. The Donets Basin, in the meantime, was rebuilt as Hitler’s version of the Gulags. Many millions would toil in the coal mines, steel furnaces and factories for a subsistence wage. The message was clear: “your new overlords have come, this is the New Order”.

Hitler’s former Japanese ally, in the meantime was beginning to truly suffer. With their fleet removed as a viable threat, the US had managed to invade Iwo Jima in November 1943. Iwo Jima was even more heavily defended than Saipan had been; it was a veritable fortress and the massacre that ensued would last over a month with American casualties twice as high as those of the Japanese with over 60.000 dead and many wounded. The Japanese garrison was reduced to a few hundred men and by the end of the battle, Iwo Jima had been reduced to a smouldering ruin and hardly anything of its jungles was left as the island had been bombed and shelled so intensely with just about everything in the US Navy’s and US Air Force’s arsenals. This time, Japan truly lived up to the phrase ‘fighting till the last man standing’. It didn’t stop them. The Philippines, the Marianas and Iwo Jima were in American hands and they prepared for further campaigns.

Stalin, in the meantime, sensed an opportunity as the war in Asia drew to a close and it was time to betray his obsolete non-aggression pact with the Japanese which had been signed in 1940. His army and his country hadn’t recovered yet from the war which had been a major demographic and economic disaster to the Soviet Union, but the weak Japanese forces in Manchuria were in no position to oppose the Red Army. The Japanese army, even now, hadn’t learned from previous lessons and hardly had any modern armoured forces while the Soviets had thousands of T-34s, KV-1s left over from the war and a handful of new IS-1 tanks which outclassed any other tanks in the world at the time although not many hadn’t been produced yet. With their 122 mm guns and thick armour, these mechanical rhinoceroses outgunned all German tank designs which was their purpose. Of Stalin’s latest Five Year Plan, a year had almost passed and already the Soviet Union had achieved 1937 production levels again through sheer force of will and brutal repression of opposition. Large scale exploitation of Central Asia’s resources which turned out to be massive, was driving this latest industrialization program. Oil, natural, gas, coal, iron ore, chrome, copper, uranium, tungsten and even gold and silver could be found. An agricultural campaign to cultivate the steppes had also begun, with more success than the collectivization campaign of the early 1930s.

Zhukov, who had thus far survived Stalin’s latest wave of purges, was ordered to plan Operation Mongol, the invasion of Manchuria and Korea in conjunction with Mao Zedong’s communist forces. Over 800.000 men were assembled in the Russian Far East for this operation to ‘liberate’ China which was scheduled to start on January 5th 1944. In the cold, harsh Manchurian winter this force of 800.000 men, 2000 tanks, 3000 aircraft and 10.000 guns, mortars and Katyusha rocket launchers crossed the border and attacked the Kwantung Army in Manchuria which led to a change in plans for the Americans as they now saw the need to invade Taiwan to possibly establish a beachhead in Southeast China. They postponed the invasion of Okinawa and the rest of the Ryukyu Islands for this purpose and by now the French and British had retaken French Indochina which could serve as a staging ground and from where southern China could be invaded if need be. On February 17th, the invasion started in the light of the recent Soviet intervention in the war as no one wanted to see a communist China and certainly not the Americans who had business interests and markets in China which all disappear if that happened. The Kwantung Army was squashed by the Red Army in Manchuria in a space of two months. The Soviets were only hampered by the winter and the rather mountainous terrain although, arguably, the Japanese suffered under the winter even more as the Siberian forces used were used to the cold and many were battle hardened veterans that went back to the Battle of Moscow. The battered Japanese retreated further south and into Korea where they formed a new line on the Yalu and Tumen rivers that separated Korea from Manchuria where the Red Army halted after having outrun their supply lines.

This attack further divided the already stretched thin Japanese forces which were stretched even further in a bloody defence as the Americans advanced further north along the Ryukyu island chain toward the Home Islands of the Empire. With the fall of these islands, Japan was utterly doomed and America began the preparations for the operation that would ultimately seal Japan’s doom as a major power. This was known as Operation Downfall which was scheduled to commence in October 1944 and Japan was now truly cornered as four nations were fighting little Japan which went all by itself. In preparation, the USAF began a massive bombing campaign against Japanese cities and with their fire bombings they unleashed true firestorms. The Japanese people suffered under these one thousand plane raids on an almost daily basis by spring of 1944 and almost all major cities were reduced to smouldering ruins and blackened cinders over a period of a few months and the Americans kept coming. With the American navy now reigning supreme, an effort started to starve the Home Islands into submission by simply cutting of Japanese shipping, hardly a challenge with the seas cleared of major Japanese surface units. Very soon fuel, food and other war materials stopped getting to Japan. The Home Islands were far from self-sufficient and food rations dropped to 200 grams per day at the height of this campaign. With the Home Island’s major cities and industrial centres being bombed and Japan being cut off from the rest of the world, major shortages erupted and millions became homeless while Japan’s war production dropped dramatically and moved from factories to small shops set up all over Japan which produced less than even the bare minimum. In a last-ditch effort, the Japanese started Operation Ten Go (Heaven One, 天号作戦). They used the last of their air forces in kamikaze attacks to cause as many Allied casualties as possible in the vain hope of a negotiated peace, but after their attack on Pearl Harbor and their treatment of prisoners of war, anything like that was impossible. In this operation, the last of Japan’s navy was destroyed, battleships Yamato and Musashi fought the world’s last battleship vs. battleship battle with USS Iowa, HMS Lion, Richelieu and Jean Bart. Japan was utterly ground into the dust, but the junta in charge refused to see this.

By October, two dozen battleships, two dozen carriers and 400 destroyers were gathered and the beginning of the end commenced on October 21st 1944 with the start of the first phase of Operation Downfall, Olympic. The Japanese had gathered thirteen divisions to defend the island of Kyushu where, they had successfully anticipated, the invasion would be. They put up a heroic effort, but were utterly outgunned, outnumbered and the US had air supremacy. The marines defeated them followed by tens of thousands of American soldiers. They advanced and occupied half of Kyushu which could function as a base for America’s medium range bombers to bomb Honshu (these bombers couldn’t strike from further away like Iwo Jima or the northern Marianas like the B-17s and B-29s could). The second phase, Coronet, was scheduled for March 1st 1945 and all the remnants of the Japanese armed forces were taken away from northern Kyushu, Honshu and Hokkaido while a guerrilla campaign erupted on Kyushu. Weapon stocks had been ready made and everyone who was able to hold a weapon, no matter what kind, had been mobilized. Even 18th century muskets were being pulled from museums to serve once more in a desperate defence of Japan. The invasion of Honshu went ahead in all its brutality as the Americans resorted to chemical shells to clear the beaches after the Japanese had utilized a nerve gas known as tabun. The Empire of Japan finally surrendered on April 9th 1945. The Pacific War was over.

Now peace had to be made and it was. Japan was to be fully demilitarized and occupied for at least ten years. The Kuril Islands were ceded to the USSR and the island of Sakhalin as well. The Ryukyu Islands were to be administered as a US Territory until further notice (with the thought of establishing bases against communist China in the back of the Americans’ heads) and Japan was to pay war reparations and trials for war crimes would be held against Japanese officers. Chiang Kai-Shek’s government on Taiwan, in the meantime, was recognised as the only China. Mainland China was were Mao had founded his Peoples’ Republic of China with massive popular support as the Allies had failed to seize anything of China before the Soviets attacked. Chiang was demonized as a western puppet while Mao removed any undue western influence from China and finally restored order by defeating the last warlords. The Kuomintang, in the meantime, had retreated to Taiwan (also known as Formosa) which was occupied by American and Anglo-French troops. The communist state that occupied Korea, the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea, wasn’t recognised as an official government either, but even with atomic weapons underway, the US hardly felt anything for another war. Public opinion was against it and they didn’t know of the atomic bombs which were still secret. And, in spite of the Red Scare, Stalin (‘Uncle Joe’) was seen as an ally against the hated and treacherous Japanese. Whatever the case, the war was over.

 

[Neroon]

I am still interested, but actually missed your previous update. Sorry, but meant TWO chapters for me to read.
So keep writing! If that's it, then i'll be awaiting your next TL.

 

[Onkel Willie]

You'll be happy to know this isn't it. I will continue if there's interest (and as long as I feel like it).

 

[thales]

It would be interesting to see were this TL leads now that Hitler controlls most of Europe...

Keep up the good work!

 

[Neroon]

It would be interesting to see were this TL leads now.

Agreed. The world as it is at the current stage of your TL, is one of the best "setups" for a Nazi vs West Cold War TL.

 

[Ace Venom]

I'm interested in this timeline. I'm sure the interest is there for others.

 

[Eurofed]

Very interesting and the usual high quality of your TLs. I liked how you used the incremental effect of several pro-Axis butterflies to make an Axis victory plausible. The Italian-Turkish war was a nice touch.

I only have some quibbles with the map.

First, Finland ought to get *all* of Karelia, not just the bits it lost in 1939, as well as the Murmansk Oblast. Shutting the Russians off Murmansk considerably strengthens the security of the Axis in the Atlantic.

Second, Italy ought to be restored the full amount of the Nice and Savoy provinces that it ceded in 1860, which is considerably more than what it is shown in the map. Anything less than the totality of Nice, Savoy, Corscia, and Tunisia is irrealistic, esp. since ITTL fascist Italy made a rather more valuable contribute to Axis' fortunes than IOTL.

Third, the map does not show Greek and Bulgarian gains in Thrace and the coast of Anatolia.

Fourth, why are Hitler, Mussolini, and Petain resettling European Jews in such a valuable and close to Europe piece of land like Algeria ? It does not make much sense, I expect them to earmark that region for "Aryan" settlers, and at the time, Algeria was deemed a part of French mainland. If Madagascar has not enough space and resources to settle all European Jews, there are other pieces of the French colonial empire, that are more suitably remote and worthless, such as French West Africa. I suggest you to substitute Algaria with Mauritania, Senegal, and/or Mali.

Apart from this, well done. You have laid the basis of a nifty three-way Cold War, between the Anglosphere liberal democracies, the Sino-Soviet Communist bloc, and fascist continental Europe. As expected, an early Nazi victory counterintuitively saves the Jews, but dooms the Slavs.

 

[Jotun]

It is interesting how you managed to exchange one Holocaust for another, if you don't mind this rather crass way of putting it. At least this is no half-assed way of wriggling out of the results of German National Socialist genocidal leanings that were, as we all know, a mainstay of German thought and policy at that time.

I am interested to see where you are heading, too. I can also see a triangle cold war with the "Reds" more or less between a rock and a hard place. Provided the US-led bloc does not suffer a radical socialist turnaround, that is.

 

[Eurofed]

It is interesting how you managed to exchange one Holocaust for another, if you don't mind this rather crass way of putting it. At least this is no half-assed way of wriggling out of the results of German National Socialist genocidal leanings that were, as we all know, a mainstay of German thought and policy at that time.

Well, if one looks to the Nazi's original plans, without the constraints created by war with UK and America, the genocide against the Slavs was planned all along, to open up their lands to German colonization, whileas the Final Solution grew out of the lack of a suitable place to dump all the European Jews in. So what OW wrote makes a lot of sense. Basically, Nazi victory counterintuitively sends the Jews through a crucible much like the ones they faced in the Middle Ages, but most of them ultimately survive, whereas most of the Slavs take their place in the mass graves. Only the latter ones that are deemed suitable for Germanization (and don't compromise themselves with the resistance to Nazi rule) may be saved.

About the Rom, I honestly dunno whether the Nazi would bother to deport them en masse, and where they could dump them if they do. Perhaps they can make Britain accept them back in their ancestral home, India, or perhaps they dump them with part of the Jews in French West Africa.

Alas, no foreseeable plausible reprieve for the homosexuals and the severely disabled, they would just keep being killed alongside the political opponents and most of the Slavs.

I am interested to see where you are heading, too. I can also see a triangle cold war with the "Reds" more or less between a rock and a hard place. Provided the US-led bloc does not suffer a radical socialist turnaround, that is.

Such a radical turnaround would be deeply unlikely, I'd say. The Communist bloc would still be a significant force in international politics, so the survival of the fascist bloc would not push the Anglosphere radically leftward. Quite likely the US get pushed by that a bit more leftward, say to resemble OTL Canada's political spectrum, but no more.

 

[Onkel Willie]

Very interesting and the usual high quality of your TLs. I liked how you used the incremental effect of several pro-Axis butterflies to make an Axis victory plausible. The Italian-Turkish war was a nice touch.

I only have some quibbles with the map.

First, Finland ought to get *all* of Karelia, not just the bits it lost in 1939, as well as the Murmansk Oblast. Shutting the Russians off Murmansk considerably strengthens the security of the Axis in the Atlantic.

Second, Italy ought to be restored the full amount of the Nice and Savoy provinces that it ceded in 1860, which is considerably more than what it is shown in the map. Anything less than the totality of Nice, Savoy, Corscia, and Tunisia is irrealistic, esp. since ITTL fascist Italy made a rather more valuable contribute to Axis' fortunes than IOTL.

Third, the map does not show Greek and Bulgarian gains in Thrace and the coast of Anatolia.

Fourth, why are Hitler, Mussolini, and Petain resettling European Jews in such a valuable and close to Europe piece of land like Algeria ? It does not make much sense, I expect them to earmark that region for "Aryan" settlers, and at the time, Algeria was deemed a part of French mainland. If Madagascar has not enough space and resources to settle all European Jews, there are other pieces of the French colonial empire, that are more suitably remote and worthless, such as French West Africa. I suggest you to substitute Algaria with Mauritania, Senegal, and/or Mali.

Apart from this, well done. You have laid the basis of a nifty three-way Cold War, between the Anglosphere liberal democracies, the Sino-Soviet Communist bloc, and fascist continental Europe. As expected, an early Nazi victory counterintuitively saves the Jews, but dooms the Slavs.

Like I said before, I'm rather poor at map making. Maybe you can edit it. And about Murmansk, the Nazis have no way to enforce it and its full with Russians. As for Algeria, I'll edit that to the Belgian Congo which should fall into Germany's lap as there is no more Belgium right? I might look at Mali and Mauritania too.

EDIT: Generalplan Ost existed for real btw.

 

[Jotun]

Now that I read about it again, there is somtehing unearthed in the deeper recesses of my memory. Yep...you're absolutely right.

 

[Eurofed]

And about Murmansk, the Nazis have no way to enforce it and its full with Russians.

The latter would not be a problem, but I can see the point about the former, given that the Nazis failed to conquer Leningrad ITTL.

As for Algeria, I'll edit that to the Belgian Congo which should fall into Germany's lap as there is no more Belgium right? I might look at Mali and Mauritania too.

Argh, no, Belgian Congo is another wrong place. Far too precious, it's chock-full of valuable natural resources, no way that Nazi planners would earmark it as the homeland for the "useless" Jews they are graciously letting survive and gifting with a remote "reservation" to get themselves forgotten. They would totally keep Belgian Congo or French Congo for themselves and/or their allies. You need to think of lands that look suitably resource-poor, empty, and of limited value. Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, in the French colonial Empire. Hypothetically speaking, New Guinea or Tanzania in the British Empire.

 

[Onkel Willie]

I alread edited it to Madagascar and Mauritania. Better? Btw, I'm working on the new update.

 

[Eurofed]

I've edited the map to make it more accurate as it concerns the Franco-Italian border (of course it is drawn by hand, so it may not be wholly accurate), and the territorial changes for Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey (of course, the size and shape of the zone is tentative, which Italy and their Greek puppets would claim in Anatolia).

 

[Onkel Willie]

Nice map. Update time btw. I divided this chapter in two because of its length.

Chapter VII: Africa Reich, Plan Z Revisited, The Resurgent Communist Bloc, The Atomic Age and Cold War, 1945-1960​

Germany was now clearly the dominant power in Europe and had ostracized great powers such as the Soviet Union and even France lay at Germany’s feet prostrate. The Jews had been removed from the Reich to Madagascar and Mauritania where they had been let in by the French on German request and where they had to scrape together a meagre living although the very large American Jewish community attempted to change that as relations with the conqueror of communism slowly took a downturn even though the new American president wasn’t much of a friend to the Soviet Union either. The new President was Harry S. Truman who had become President after the death of Roosevelt in 1945 of a cerebral haemorrhage and he was very unfriendly toward communism, but the large Jewish lobby in the American government forced his hand and a policy change was in order and so he began to approach London which had already been an ally in the Pacific War against Japan. The Cold War’s future blocks were already forming with the Anglo sphere liberal democracies, the fascist controlled Europe and the Sino-Soviet bloc’s dividing the world into their own spheres of influences. Stalin himself had turned inward for now and didn’t care much for the American policy change yet as the liberal capitalist powers were among his main ideological opponents. America was perhaps the strongest power in the world and would attempt to support the Jews both financially and materially. American advisors flowed into the autonomous Jewish regions of Mauritania and Madagascar to assist them in their plight and they attempted to cultivate what little was there, such as the iron ore layers in Mauritania and also tried to cultivate the deserts in enormous projects to make these lands fertile again. Hitler didn’t care much for the Jews and had initially hoped they would starve in these barren deserts and now saw American encroachment in Africa as a threat. The American Jewish community had also provided the US with a number of the world’s most renowned nuclear physicists.

In 1941, the Manhattan Project had begun after a letter from Albert Einstein to President Roosevelt in which he maintained that the Nazis had their own atomic bomb project as well which in reality was far from true. The Germans had two separate underfunded civilian projects as Hitler despised what he called ‘Jewish science’. The Americans, on the other hand, had set up an industrial scale effort with enormous research facilities, centrifuges to create the necessary amount of highly enriched uranium and reactors to create a sustained nuclear reaction. Great names like Oppenheimer, Szilard, Teller and Fermi worked on America’s atomic bomb and finally, on July 17th 1945, the Americans tested their Trinity device in the Nevada desert at Los Alamos and achieved a yield of 19 kilotons which made the test an enormous success. This was the largest explosion in the history of mankind so far. The bomb was of the implosion type design which was the most powerful of the two alternatives. It functioned by placing a piece of fissile material (either uranium or plutonium) in a sphere of explosives which would explode simultaneously and compress the fissile material to the critical level, causing atoms to split and the resulting particles to split, all within the space of 30 nanoseconds. The other was the gunshot type design which achieved critical mass by shooting one piece of fissile material into another which was less efficient but simple if crude. Fission had been achieved and through networks of spies and other sources, Hitler and Stalin knew of the American success in nuclear physics almost immediately and the Americans didn’t try to keep it secret as they wanted to impress the two totalitarian blocks and make them submissive, something which neither Hitler nor Stalin were planning on doing. Stalin’s project had begun in 1944 and a lot of theoretical work had been done independently of the US effort under the jurisdiction of Beria, leader of the NKVD, Stalin’s dreaded secret police. The German projects were merged and put under the jurisdiction of Himmler and Heydrich. Hitler ordered this project paramount above all other projects, even the missile program which had led to a successful test launch in 1944 already of an A4 ballistic missile.

Hitler had also seen the Anglo-American encroachment in Africa to support the Jews which, in his view, confirmed his ideas of a plutocratic Jewish plot centred in Washington which ruled the degenerated US from behind the screens. Hitler’s opinion on the US wavered between either admiration for their industrial power, imagination, the American dream and innovation or contempt as he saw it as a degenerated racial mix of inferior blacks, Latinos and Jews with only a few true Aryans left, a state which was poor with its ghettos filled with the mob and poor African-Americans and on the brink of racial war. Nevertheless, this spreading of the influence of the Anglo-Americans worried him and this gave support to the faction that wanted an African empire as well with their major proponent a Goering who was now tied to a wheelchair. The Belgian Congo was now effectively German as Belgium didn’t exist and the British had even recognised this fait accompli in 1941. As the Belgian King was in German hands and because he more or less reluctantly cooperated as the Germans made threats to him, the Congo was turned over. Some Germans also wanted Germany’s pre-1914 colonies. Their Asian colonies were out of the question and Britain wouldn’t give anything back. Cameroon and Togoland, however, were returned by France to Germany and they bought the Middle Congo and Gabon to connect Cameroon with the Congo. Here too, Nazi racial policies would be implemented. A Generalplan Afrika foresaw in the extermination of half the local population. Their place would be taken by German colonists while the remainder would be enslaved to farm on the lands of the new elites and work in the mines to dig up the Congo’s abundant precious metals such as gold and other materials like oil which would feed the German economy.

Stalin, naturally, condemned these actions as imperialism and attempted to support insurrections even though communism was quite alien to these people. The Nazis brutally squashed these uprisings by aerial bombardment, rape, pillage, murder, mass reprisals, unwarranted arrests and the use of chemical weapons in one of the greatest genocides in African history. Many hundreds of thousands were marched off to concentration camps over dirt roads through the jungle in which tens of thousands had already died building them, leading to rumours that their bones were buried under the roads’ surface. Very soon, gold, zinc, cobalt, copper, diamonds, timber, uranium, coffee, palm oil rubber, sugar, cocoa and oil flowed from Africa to Germany to feed the growing industry which also spread out to the east to exploit the Ukraine, Germany’s bread basket.

The Soviet Union, in the meantime, had somewhat recovered from the loss of so many economically important areas with the completion of their latest Five Year Plan in 1948 which had seen the building of new factories, steel furnaces, power plants, hydroelectric works, canals, roads and railroads, ordered by Stalin who now de facto ruled from Sverdlovsk as his de jure capital of Moscow was far too close to the German border for his comfort although the 7th of November parade and other festivities and official events still took place in Moscow to keep up appearances. By now, the USSR had superseded pre-war production in vital sectors like coal, steel, oil and electricity and the Central Asian republics had become the new economic hubs of the Soviet Union as they held the bulk of the natural resources such as gold, silver, coal, natural gas, iron ore, oil and uranium which were being dug up in massive new mining complexes and by Gulag prisoners in long workdays. These prisoners were used as forced labour as usual and this massive new infrastructure was mostly built by their hands. This was known as the Third Five Year Plan or the Plan for National Recovery. The Soviet Union had restored itself to superpower status through Stalin’s usual brutality and mass forced industrialization and agricultural campaigns and the sheer willpower that the Nazi victory had brought as many republics hadn’t tried to break away from Moscow when they had the chance to do so out of fear that the nearby Reich would domineer the broken up Soviet states like they were using Tatars, Estonians Latvians and ethnic Germans to dominate the occupied areas. The Fourth Five Year Plan would see more increases in production and would focus on the resources above the arctic circle and in Siberia where the Soviets held about 30% of the world’s nickel reserves among other things. The Leningrad-Moscow industrial regions were rebuilt and new complexes such as the Astana automotive works, the Turkmen industrial area and the Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk and Omsk ones were built to extract and process the mineral wealth of Russia. Massive amounts of precious metals would be uncovered and a new wave of industrialization would hit east of Urals as the western and Central Asian regions had already seen one. The atomic bomb program under Lavrenti Beria was part of these efforts. With spies like Klaus Fuchs, the Soviet scientists had learned a lot from the Manhattan Project and had confirmed many of their own ideas. Lead scientists Sakharov and Kurchatov had made a centrifuge design which successfully separated U-235 (which they needed) from U-238. A test reactor successfully sustained a nuclear reaction in 1947 while the Nazis were very busy as well.

The Nazis had to work quickly if they wanted to undo the head start the Soviet Union had on them. Unfortunately for the German effort, many of the most brilliant nuclear physicists were Jews and just about all of them had left Europe before the war. Heydrich, who was Himmler’s second in command, began to thoroughly reorganize the project in a way similar to that of his counterpart Beria in the USSR. Heydrich was similarly ruthless, pragmatic, intelligent and efficient and was probably the ideal head for the Nazi atomic bomb effort. He had already merged the two existing civilian efforts to achieve nuclear energy into one coherent effort under the SS and Gestapo while his SD started up an intelligence operation to infiltrate both the Soviet and American projects although the Germans were more worried about the former, but since there were so many opponents of the communist regime spread out all over Europe after the White Diaspora, it was hardly a challenge to find volunteers and although the NKVD would uproot many of them, some of them would remain to funnel data from the Soviet project to the Germans whose new research facilities arose in an underground bunker complex close to Mittelbau Dora where the Nazi ballistic missile program was housed. The heavy water installations in Norway were moved to this new facility and were greatly expanded upon in the period 1945-1947 along with an innovative centrifuge design known as the Zippe centrifuge which outclassed existing designs. Its unique construction (it spun around in a vacuum) allowed it to spin faster, so U-235 was separated much more efficiently and faster from U-238. Convection currents caused by heating the bottom, led to U-235 coming to the top of the apparatus where scoops collected it with ease. This led to the German team catching up a little. Several leadership changes took place as well. For instance, Werner Heisenberg was fired as project leader for incompetence. He had often grossly neglected laboratory procedure and it turned out that his calculations were way off. He was replaced by Otto Hahn with Carl Weiszäcker as his assistant. Heydrich threatened their families if they didn’t cooperate and kept them under close surveillance. Each one had a Gestapo agent assigned to him and their apartments were bugged.