Alternate History Scenario: The European War of 1938:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Historically speaking World War II began in 1939 following a Nazi-Soviet Pact to partition Eastern Europe, and this led to six years of disastrous modern warfare that wrecked multiple continents. However there is a historical irony that if a general European war had come earlier in 1938, the Nazis would have been crushed in six months due to lacking anything of the resource base to sustain a multi-front war at that time. The cause of this is familiar from that 'Peace In Our Time' speech, namely Hitler's attempts to nab the Sudetenland. Hitler actually wanted a war at this point, but he was not able to secure it due to the conference, so he'd be all for the inauguration of a general war over Czechoslovakia.

Yet in this case he'd face Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, France, and the United Kingdom arrayed against him, as well as a potential other front in Spain. In this case Hitler's army had the practical ability to sustain a war for six months against an alliance too massive for it to be simply crushed. Hitler would no doubt have found like Saddam in 1979 that Sudeten Germans were less enthusiastic about Nazi invasion in reality than they were in the abstract, and given the willingness of the Anglo-French alliance to fight historically this might lead to the irony that the Czechoslovak/Nazi War would have ended in the biggest victory won by the Czechs since the Hussite Wars (a cynic might note their only victory won since then). All the same in a mere six months Nazi Germany would have been defeated and its military power destroyed, but in a process that only takes six months and would not produce the massive battles of the historical war, strategic bombing leveling most of Europe, or a Holocaust.

So what would happen in this alternate scenario starting seven months in? No Hitler, the Palestinian Revolt is still going on, Franco's rise may well be averted altogether by virtue of being lumped into WWII in this scenario, no Holocaust to make the Yishuv gain a legitimacy that was never its to claim to begin with but at the same token some cities like Salonika retaining Jewish majorities, and the only major European totalitarian left is dear old Uncle Joe who claims the prestige of 'victory.' Would the world have exchanged one set of problems for another, and if so what kinds of problems would these be?

Comments

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

India gains dominion status by '48, the British Empire, though essentially rubbish, doesn't start to disintegrate until the '60's (which never happen - no Beatles, no Stones) and with greater and greater atrocities being perpetrated by the Brits on Nationalist movements, until the Empire Nations send us all home in the '70's: one after another they kick us out.

China and Japan are still going to be duking it out through most of the '40's, though I can't see Japan really taking on the US if other theatres of war were not similarly engaged: but I'll happily be persuaded otherwise.

If Japan does take on the US, it will lose very heavily indeed.

French-dominated European Union. No de Gaulle. No Churchill. No Bretton Woods. As the UK ain't bankrupted by WWII, does the Dollar become the reserve currency? IMHO especially not if Keynes rises to his natural level in the UK establishment.


The US would be a lot friendlier to Germany than to the UK given Hitler hadn't quite had the time to render the German volk untouchable for their Furher inspired crimes against humanity. I can think of a number of scenarios wherein after the Armenian stuff and the Belgian Congo, the South Africans and the Brits would have been the next-in-the-list of criminally racist social pariahs. But then again, without WWII, what would be the condition of the Black Person in America? Civil rights perhaps delayed by a decade or two?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

If India gains independence as per schedule, would the Haganah and Irgun move at the same time, or would they wait until the 1950s? I would think that a decade or two would be the minimum and that at a more pessimistic look US Civil Rights wouldn't happen until the 1990s, on par with Apartheid.

[di-glossia.livejournal.com]

China and Japan are still going to be duking it out through most of the '40's, though I can't see Japan really taking on the US if other theatres of war were not similarly engaged

I'd be more inclined to say that Japan conquers much of northern mainland China, Chinese port cities, and Taiwan. The Japanese staged the Mukden Incident in 1931 and invaded Manchuria in the same year. The Sino-Japanese War began before and then blurred into WWII. Historically, the Japanese were largely successful because Chiang K'ai-shek was so focused on killing Communists in the south and the KMT was relatively ineffective against the Japanese army. Without Russian and American forces to engage the Japanese, China would have quickly fallen under Japanese control and the CCP would never begin the PRC or the Cultural Revolution.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

This is belied by the reality of the Second Sino-Japanese War before Japan invaded Vietnam, which is that Japan won battle after battle but had no political means to end the war, which is why the Chinese were ultimately going to eke out a 'victory' in the long term when Japan's economy shatters under the strain of a perpetual war it cannot win. The sole time Mao fought Japan was in 1942 and the Three Alls Campaign was his only time of so doing for a reason. Other Chinese Communists did fight Japan, but Mao in particular stayed out of the war.

[di-glossia.livejournal.com]

You're ignoring that Japan was suffering from fighting Allied forces in WWII. Without that extra burden, Japan would be free to keep its holdings in Manchuria and other parts of mainland China. The expansion wasn't idle, either: Japan had reached yield per acre capacity in the 1920s and was unable to provide food for the population explosion. In 1938, Lieutenant Colonel Hashimoto Kingoro said that Japan was presented with three options to combat the population surplus and only one of them was possible: expansion. (http://personal.ashland.edu/~jmoser1/japan/hashimoto.htm) The Japanese were fervently of the opinion that they needed and deserved more land, if only to feed their population. It simply wasn't fair that other countries had so much land for (relatively) so few people. It was their manifest destiny to expand. Japan gained Manchuria with little effort and legally held the Shandong Penninsula under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. They then took the capital city, Nanjing, in 1937, before your definition of the beginning of WWII. They were doing pretty well for themselves before they decided a preemptive attack on the US was a good idea.

You're right in saying that Mao only fought the Japanese once. The CCP had been routinely exterminated by the KMT and the pretense of fighting the Japanese is widely considered the only reason the party became so strong. It very well might have died out if the Japanese hadn't invaded. (Or are you criticizing my use of CCP for the Leninist-Marxists that also fought but did not align with Mao? It's a slightly blurry line in the official history of the CCP so I tend to lump all the "Communists" together.)

China has historically been militarily weak. For example, at the beginning of WWII, it did not even have airfields. To assist the Allied forces, some were created but were of extremely poor quality, hence the battles over islands such as Midway to gain refueling stations and airfields. That is, Allied forces were actively capturing ready-made Japanese airfields because the Chinese did not have them available; the sheer difference in technological capability between the two armies was incredible. At its height, the Chinese army was made up of around six million CCP, KMT, and militia troops. And yet, between twenty and thirty-five million Chinese died in the Sino-Japanese War.

In January of 1941, almost a year before Pearl Harbor, the New Fourth Army Incident destroyed the shaky alliance between the CCP and the KMT. Without the Allies engaging and killing Japanese in the Pacific and then forcing the Japanese into surrender with the bombings, there would have been no one to force the Japanese out of their Chinese holdings. The civil war that erupted after the surrender between the CCP and the KMT would not have had a chance to happen as the two groups would, at best, resume an alliance engaged against the Japanese. At worst, the Japanese would have picked off the weakened groups as they attempted to fight each other. The KMT would not have been forced into Taiwan, making a PRC and the Cultural Revolution plans that would never come into fruition.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Not at all. The Japanese fought China single-handedly from 1937-41. All their many, many victories and incredible savagery did was to keep the war dragging on forever. They went to war with the Allies in no small part to gain better strategic positions for their war in China.

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

Here's a big one: with much of the Holocaust averted, Zionist factions lose their most powerful argument for a Jewish homeland, and Israel likely does not come into its modern existence.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure. Even with a six months' war the Palestinians would be crushed circa 1939, leaving most of the ingredients of Israel IOTL intact: a strong, effective leadership for the Yishuv, a self-destructive Palestinian leadership, and Arab state armies even more incompetent than they were IOTL. If anything a terrorist campaign like what succeeded WWII historically may see *The Mandate of Palestine* being one of those more brutal de-colonization wars.....

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

I think this just kicks the can down the road. A quick, relatively easy defeat of Hitler doesn't necessarily end the German ambition and grievance or cripple her industrial capacity in the same way a her annihilation in 1945 did. So, instead of a Hitler, some other demogouge would ramp up tensions. Also, the global economic crisis would still be in effect, perhaps even exasperated by the prolonged powder keg politics. Another downside could be that a further weakened post-Hitler Germany might fall to a Soviet expansion of the same type envisioned by the Austrian Corporal, a Lebensraum in reverse, so to speak. If Poland and Germany are swallowed up, how does a still timid West fare? Not well, I'm guessing. A rosier, more cheerful and optimistic take would see a defeated Germany turning to a more robust democracy, joining with a more secure and prosperous Central Europe in resisting Stalinist expansion and perhaps stunting the Soviet Union's power and growth. Baltic Tigers circa 1950? That would be rosy.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

OK, so assuming this is correct:

1) How does this demagogue do this after Germany has undergone two defeats in two generations?

2) Soviet expansionism was always extremely cautious and required loading the cards so far in their favor nothing could possibly go wrong (in theory. Finland illustrated twice what that could mean in practice). Initiating a major, sweeping war of the kind required for Soviet Lebensraum is not the typical MO of Stalin. His aggressive acts historically occurred when he expected Hitler to be tied down in a war in the West that lasted years, as opposed to six weeks.

3) Why are we assuming that the Soviets won't expand in a completely different way? Alone among the Great Powers of the 1930s and 1940s they were intent on exploiting and backing de-colonization. Guess who the alternate de-colonization movements are going to find is willing to give them a great deal of money? Why would they refuse a great amount of money and guns?

4) This, I repeat, is not to deny Soviet expansionism in itself, just noting that it'd be more cloak and dagger than massive parades of giant armies down the Unter den Linden.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

1) I'd expect the same way Hitler did. I'm assuming here that the proposed second defeat was not as debilitating to the German economy or population as WWI or WWII. So, a demagogue would be able to fob off Adolf's failure as a "too much, too soon" scenario, not a category error.

2) That is true, but he was facing a much stronger Germany than he might be facing post mini-WWII. And I'm not saying that it would necessarily be military aggression of the Winter War or Operation Barbarossa variety. Good old fomenting insurgency and revolution would be enough. The spirit of Lebensraum, if not the trappings.

3) No reason. When you start talking alternative history there are way more possibilities than there is time to write them up.

4) Fair enough.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

1) Except that Hitler had the advantage of secret arms deals with the Soviet Union when it was inclined to accept them. When Stalin has no real reason to accept them and the prestige of 'working together for victory' on his side, where's his angle with Neo-Hitler?

2) He didn't engage in a great deal of brinksmanship when he was the only guy in Europe with a large mechanized war infrastructure, so he'd be no more likely to do so later if that same situation kept up. I'm not disagreeing that the USSR wouldn't be expanding but the military invasion in finest style thing is more Hitler's thing than Stalin's.

3) Fair point, but alternate history doesn't mean that personality transplants come with it. The Command and Conquer option wasn't realistic under Stalin or his successors. In all its history the USSR invaded only two countries in this fashion: Poland in 1920 and Afghanistan. That the first backfired would not incline Stalin to do so, that his successors see a chance to gain global power by arms dealing would incline them also against mass armies invading their neighbors. The Soviet military would be a global cipher in terms of modern warfare in some ways much as the US Army is nowadays. No WWII, however, puts off the collapse of the Soviet Union by at least two or three decades....and presents the USA with a multi-polar, not bi-polar, world where its economy is still going to be inefficient for much longer relative to its rivals.

[luzribeiro.livejournal.com]

Oh. We're talking about Nazis, aren't we?

And Hitler too.

Didn't see that coming. :)

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

But not whether or not the Axis win, rather what happens if Nazism self-destructs early on and leaves the rest of the human race laughing about what idiots the men in brown were. :)

[luzribeiro.livejournal.com]

Point is, we've come to a point where any mention of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and the Nazi has... become part of the very fabric of you.

If there was a Godwin Society somewhere, you'd be its chairman. :P

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

All I'm seeing is a massive conventional war between the Soviets and a NATO-equivilent somehwere down the line that makes our version of WWII look positively cuddly in comparison.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That was never the Soviet MO. They used cloak and dagger methods, not sending massive armies into their neighbors' territory. They did that only twice in their history and lost both times, the other times they fought big wars outsiders jumped them first and found that they regretted the whole thing.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

It's hard for the soviets to regret a war that hasn't happened yet.

The conflict that became the Cold War still exists in your timeline and may very well end up being worse. Without the threat of nuclear annihilation what stops one side or the other from finding a pretext to have a go at each other?

I suppose you could write the US out of the equation by saying that without the economic recovery brought on by war-time industrialization the US suffers a Communist and/or Fascist coup of it's own in the 40s but the logical extensions of that scenario makes Orwell look like an optimist.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

1) It is even harder to assume a modus operandi for Stalin that he didn't follow when he did have a massive fleet of bombers and an enormous tank park and the German amount of both was 0.

2) I never denied it did exist.

3) Orwell wrote satires, and his works would still be around due to being influenced by the Spanish Civil War. They might even be published earlier without WWII-era censorship.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

I think the US would have gone fascist with a strong communist underground. Civil war II stuff...

Although that would then mean the hot war with the USSR I'm talking about below doesn't happen. Which gets back to the when do the nukes come?

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

This makes me think; what of nuclear weapons?

No militaristic Germany means they don't start working on them. No influx of German brain power combined with the resources and need to defeat Japan means the US don't either. No need to catch up to the US means the USSR doesn't build them either.

I mean, they're going to happen eventually but I think it's reasonable to assume they're pushed back a decade or two. This means that your conventional war seems pretty likely to me and that winds up being the big conflict of the 20th century. That's when the nukes would be developed. I wonder how that one ends? I guess it depends who gets there first...

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

On the contrary, the Soviets would have been attracted to the concept by virtue of Stalin's Gigantomania, had the ability to construct massive infrastructure in the ass end of nowhere and perfect concealment of their mistakes. The Soviets probably develop some oversized gun-fission design that can't be used except by a giant wheeled device transporting it and herald it and propaganda-designed footage to show that 'Soviet Communism splits the very atoms themselves'. Reality would, as with everything else Soviet, be less impressive than the propaganda and the fear instilled would outweigh the practical results.

It would be the USA playing catch-up to the Soviets and reacting far more defensively than reality would warrant. Of course in five years the Soviet nuclear program would be as unimpressive as it was in real life and the USA would have hundreds of bombs, as in real life......