What has happened so far: The planned German invasion of France has turned into a fiasco. The ironic reason for that turn of events was a bit of extra efficiency on the part of German intelligence. In January of 1940 in both time-lines, a German light plane crashed in Belgium. On board were two German officers and a detailed set of plans for the German invasion of the west. The Belgians captured the documents essentially intact in both time-lines. In both time-lines Belgium passed those plans along to France and sent some signals that the British and French interpreted as meaning that the Belgium was about to invite French troops in to preempt the Germans. French mobile forces got ready to move on short notice, while the Belgian army removed barricades between the two countries.

At that point the two time-lines diverge. In our time-line, the flurry of activity went unnoticed by the Germans. The Belgian government foolishly decided to cling to the hope of remaining neutral, even though the captured German plans made it clear that the Germans did not intend to respect that neutrality.

In this time-line, the Germans registered the French preparations. They put that together with the loss of the plane and the copy of their plans and concluded that Belgium was about to invite the French in. From the German point of view, letting the French deploy in Belgium would be catastrophic. It would give French defenses a lot more depth and would allow the French to threaten vital and poorly defended German industrial areas. Hitler had been fearful of such a development since the war started, and now seemed that the French were only hours away from making it happen.

At Hitler's insistence the German air force hastily launched air strikes to take out the Belgian air force and key bridges that the French would use in their move north. The German army claimed that it would take a minimum of 7 days to move troops and supplies into position for a move into Belgium. They got 48 hours, and made an improvised invasion attempt that failed catastrophically as the snow and fog of the worst winter Western Europe had seen in many years stripped away their advantages of mobility and airpower.

The failure of that offensive put Germany in a downward spiral. A second offensive through the Ardennes failed. That failure was followed by an attempted coup by the German army that left Hitler in a wheelchair and a large number of German army officers dead or in exile. Failures led to additional failures as Stalin cut off supplies of vital raw materials to the Germans and demanded concessions in Poland and elsewhere in eastern and central Europe as the price for turning those supplies back on.

Stalin overplayed his hand. Hitler reacted to the supply cutoff and increasingly threatening Soviet behavior by launching a preemptive strike at the Soviet Union, grabbing the oil fields of eastern Galicia and grabbing parts of the Soviet Ukraine. By the end of 1940, the Soviets and Germans are locked in a bloody struggle for supremacy in Eastern and Central Europe, while England and France have launched tentative offensives in the west. Germany faces shortages of oil, trucks, tanks, manpower and a horde of raw materials necessary to keep a modern economy going.

As I pointed out last issue, all of the combatants are feeling the financial pinch of the war. The French and English are working hard to conserve hard currency, but if the war lasts much past the middle of 1941 they will face a crisis. One problem they face is that many of the measures they are taking to conserve dollars and gold are likely to alienate potential allies. The United States isn't happy about curbs on buying from US manufacturers. The Soviet government is bitter about having to pay premium prices in hard currency to the Allies for food and rubber, while Soviet troops take the brunt of the fighting against a common enemy. That Soviet hard currency is a major factor in keeping France and England afloat financially though.

Germany has been essentially out of hard currency for over a year, and has been relying on barter to bring in a trickle of raw material. They are trying desperately to become self-sufficient in key areas by developing synthetic fuels, synthetic rubber, and substitutes for scarce raw materials. Unfortunately for them, building synthetic materials industries takes scarce manpower and materials, so the buildup is slower than they need it to be.

The Soviets are closer to self-sufficient, but they do need to import some things like rubber and food as well as part of their supply of copper and aluminum. They are drawing down their large gold stocks at an alarming rate.

The winter of 1940/41 is a time of hunger and economic hardship for both Germany and the Soviet Union. Even in relatively good times starvation is never far away from the Soviet Union's peasants and especially people unlucky enough to be in the Soviet work camps. The winter of 1940/41 is a time of starvation for millions of Soviet citizens.

Views from the top at the start of 1941:

Britain: While some people in the British government would like to see the war pushed more vigorously, there is a strong element within the British government that sees little to choose from between Germany's Nazis and the Soviet Union's Communists. Britain has not been a particularly eager participant in the war. Even after over a year of war, the British Expeditionary Force is only now becoming larger than Belgium's army.

The British army is reasonably well equipped and mobile, and the Royal Air Force is large and well-equipped. Neither is particularly well led.

The British government is haunted by memories of the futile offensives of World War I that destroyed most of a generation without accomplishing anything positive. The British would like to see the war come to an end without a repeat of that carnage, and at a minimum of expense. That attitude leads to a search for a "silver bullet"-something that will end the war without the need for a massive and costly offensive through Belgium and the Netherlands and into Germany. Even Churchill, who is pressing for more vigorous action in the war, wants that action to take place on the peripheries, not via a bloodbath on the western front.

The list of "silver bullets" is long, running from a projected massive bombing campaign through use of the increasing effective code-breaking operations to pinpoint and exploit German weaknesses. The Norwegian campaign plays a major role in British thinking. As the British and French close in on the remaining Germans in southern Norway, they threaten German ability to control the Baltic, which in turn threatens to cut off Swedish iron ore shipments completely and to leave the entire northern coast of German open to amphibious assault. Ultra intercepts have helped the Norway campaign a great deal, allowing the British to wreak havoc on German shipping of supplies and reinforcements. German ability to hang onto southern Norway appears to be a matter of months at most.

 

France: The French are even less enthusiastic about a major offensive on the continent than the British, at least partly because the French army is likely to take most of the casualties. The French army is willing to launch probing attacks, and have done so. They are not willing to launch a major offensive.

The French are also less enthusiastic than the British about the idea of a bomber offensive against Germany, partly because the French are still scrambling to put an air defense system together. The French finally have a decent supply of reasonably high quality fighter planes, and British-supplied radar stations are now on-line to supplement the less advanced French-designed system near Paris. The French are still working out the difficult problems of how to extract meaningful information from the raw radar data and use it to get defending fighters where they need to be.

French aircraft production is really hitting its stride now, with large quantities of reasonably modern fighters and bombers coming off assembly lines. The French alone have been out- producing the Germans for at least six months, though they don't know it yet, and the western Allies have become increasingly dominant in the air. France's main bottleneck is training enough pilots and ground crew to serve the new planes.

The Soviets: Stalin wants the war over quickly, or at least the Soviet part in it. He is also a strong believer in the power of the offensive. The Soviets just finished a very bloody, grinding offensive in November 1940, but by mid-January of 1941, the Soviets have gathered enough strength to try again. Stalin doesn't want to bleed the Red Army dry and then have England and France walk in and pick up the pieces. On the other hand, peace with Germany doesn't seem to be an option, and the Soviet Union has an ample supply of peasants to use a cannon fodder. Two or three million of them dead in exchange for Soviet dominance over eastern and central Europe would be a bargain in Stalin's eyes. Also, Stalin believes, probably correctly, that Soviet successes in the east will force France and Britain to go on the offensive to keep him from taking all of Germany if nothing else.

Germany: Hitler's best chance at victory is to somehow knock the Soviet Union out of the war, then exploit its mineral resources to build up strength and finish off the French and British. The relatively long front on the east gives the German army room to maneuver, whereas the western front simply doesn't. The Germans are also looking for a silver bullet. A Germany facing seemingly inevitable defeat is far more open to radical new ideas than the triumphant Germany of our time-line's 1940 and 41 was. That translates into more vigorous support for projects like developing jet-propelled combat aircraft, advanced submarines, and guided missiles. On the other hand, Germany has far fewer resources to throw at those projects, so they have to pick their bets carefully.

United States: The US is getting ready to inaugurate a new president. Thomas Dewey, the 38-year-old District Attorney from New York has defeated Franklin Roosevelt's attempt at an unprecedented third term. We need to go back in time a little to explain that. In our time-line, Dewey didn't even receive the Republican nomination in 1940. In this time-line, the lack of any crisis in Europe during the Republican convention (June 1940) made Wendell Willkie's internationalism less appealing than in our time-line, and led to a victory for the original front-runner, Dewey.

With the war in Europe apparently stalemated, American voters saw little reason to violate the tradition of limiting presidents to two terms. A divisive Democratic convention and a successful Republican campaign to paint Roosevelt's vice-presidential candidate, Henry Wallace, as a dangerously radical man one heartbeat away from the presidency is enough to give Dewey the presidency. It also gives him a Republican majority in both houses of congress, which will turn out to be a mixed blessing, because most of the Republican Party is much more isolationist than Dewey and much more opposed to the New Deal.

With the Roosevelt administration winding down, England and France are very worried about the fate of millions of dollars worth of orders for arms placed with the United States. The Allies have ordered around nine thousand airplanes from the United States, along with close to fifteen thousand aircraft engines. Those planes and engines don't appear as crucial as they did six months ago, but they could tip the air battle decisively against Germany, so the Allies want to make sure they aren't held up by the new Administration.

The course of the war: The Soviet offensive starts out well, but the Germans are still very good defensive fighters, and their panzer divisions are very good at cutting off any Soviet formation that advances too aggressively. The Soviets are not particularly well trained, and they are short on mundane but vital items like tactical radios-a major force multiplier and something that Soviet industry has so far not been able to build in mass quantities or with much reliability. The Germans are smart enough to let the Soviets overextend themselves. The Germans then launch their own offensive in the south, trapping several hundred thousand Soviet troops, then exploiting that victory with a sickle-cut by massed panzer divisions to the Black Sea, cutting off the bulk of Soviet troops in the western Ukraine.

Hitler then almost throws the impact of that victory away by pushing exhausted panzer divisions into an attempt to grab the industrial areas of the Donets Basin before the spring muddy season makes campaigning more difficult. The panzers simply aren't logistically capable of making that bound, even against a weakened and disorganized enemy. The panzers exhaust themselves in the attempt, and come close to being cut off by a Soviet counter-offensive in early March.

The lines stabilize as the spring thaw turns the battlefields into seas of mud. The Soviet Union has lost over half of its Ukrainian breadbasket. It has lost an additional million-and-a-half men killed or captured-about half of them captured.

On the other hand, the Germans have lost nearly 200,000 killed on the eastern front since the beginning of the year, most of them in the futile last phases of the German offensive. They have also lost more tanks, trucks, and planes that they will have a great deal of trouble replacing, and drawn down irreplaceable oil stocks.

The advance into the Ukraine initially buoyed Hitler's stock in Germany, but the over-reaching and the heavy casualties in the east, along with increasingly frequent rages and mood shifts have made other Nazi leaders wary of Hitler's mental stability. In our time-line, Hitler's early victories consolidated his power, but in this time-line those victories haven't happened, and evidence of physical and mental weakness have the other Nazi leaders sharpening their knives. Hitler is staying in power partly because his potential replacements are deeply divided about who should replace him, and partly due to a series of temporary victories that give the Germans renewed hope. The action in the Ukraine is one such victory. Some temporary triumphs in Norway in February and March 1941also fall in that category. The Germans are still very good at warfare--man-for-man much better than any of their opponents. They understand combined arms warfare much better, and they use armored divisions much more effectively.

Those advantages are declining though, as both the Soviets and the western Allies learn-painfully slowly-from their defeats. In our time-line, it generally took opposing armies a year and a half to two years of hard knocks before they became reasonably capable of dealing with the Germans on a fluid battlefield, though the German superiority eroded gradually over that time. In this time-line German mobility and fighting power is always inhibited by shortages-shortages of tanks, trucks, fuel, rubber, spare parts, and often even ammunition. German forces on both the eastern front and in Norway have been living to a large extent off of captured supplies and equipment.

The battlefields are relatively quiet through late March and April, as both sides digest lessons of the winter battles. The Allies have an overwhelming advantage in terms of material. The Germans have a continuing technical edge in many categories.

For example, the western Allies have started running into a few of Germany's new Panzer IIIs with a high velocity L/60 50mm gun and are scrambling to match its firepower. German development of that tank has accelerated several months by the need to combat early model Soviet KV tanks, as well as the first few early model T34s. The French have already been working to put a new higher-velocity 47 mm gun in their Somua S40s, as well as new B1s, D2s, and the new AMX-38 infantry tanks. The H35 and R35-series of tanks simply aren't capable of operating in the tank role anymore, and the French are trying to shift production on those assembly lines over to self-propelled guns, initially armed with high-velocity 47mm guns, but eventually to be armed with a medium velocity 75mm gun.

Unfortunately for the Allies, the Germans are also starting to produce Panzer 4s with a long barrel L/43 75 mm gun. The experiences in the war against the Soviet Union have also moved development of that tank forward several months. When the new Panzer 4 appears in quantity, even the new high velocity 47mm gun in French tanks will seem inadequate. The French do have tanks at the prototype stage that can match the new Panzer 4s--a B1 variant with a high-velocity 75mm gun and a new design based loosely on the Somua S40 with a medium velocity 75mm gun. Those tanks are still six months or so away from being ready to take the field though, and the Germans are already working on even more powerful tanks, one of them possibly using an 88mm main gun, though that tank probably won't be available until the spring of 1942.

The main German problem is producing those new tanks in large enough numbers to make a difference on the battlefield. Raw material and manpower shortages are forcing them to outfit more and more of their armored forces with improvised self-propelled guns-often mounting captured Soviet field guns on obsolete German or Czech light tank chassis, and filling out divisions with captured Soviet tanks. The captured vehicles are of limited use. They usually break down within a month or two, and spare parts are not available. The Soviets and the western Allies are far more likely to encounter an old Czech 38t with a Soviet cannon mounted in an open-top fighting compartment than they are a new Panzer 3 or 4.

Material and manpower shortages have limited German tank production in this time-line's 1940 to a little over two-thirds the figure in our time-line--around 1100 tanks versus over 1500. In 1941 they manage to get production up to 1500, but that's less than half their figure for 1941 in our time-line. It's also nowhere close to enough to replace losses.

Fighting heats up in mid-May, both in Norway and on the eastern front. Both the Soviets and the western Allies have learned a great deal more caution. They tailor their offensives to avoid giving the Germans a chance to exploit their superiority in fluid battles. Offensives on both fronts are methodical, grinding affairs aimed at pushing the Germans back a few miles by sheer weight of firepower and numbers while inflicting as many casualties as possible. That's not a kind of war that the Germans can ultimately win, though they are still able to make that kind of offensive very costly for their attackers. The Germans can only win if they can knock one of their sets of opponents out of the war. But their only chance of doing that is to rebuild their panzer divisions to the point where they can play the role they were originally designed for--lightning offensives that cut the heart and brain out of an enemy army. Material and manpower shortages restrict tank building. Ultimately more important, those shortages keep the number of new trucks produced well below the number destroyed or simply worn out each month. Without enough trucks, the panzer divisions may be able to make a breakthrough, but they can't exploit it. If they try, they run out of ammunition, fuel, and even food very quickly.

In July 1941, the inevitable happens: a French and British offensive finishes off the German army in southern Norway. Hitler makes that defeat much worse by refusing to allow an evacuation until it is too late to save more than a few thousand of the nearly 100,000 German troops in Norway.

That defeat, along with the steady grinding the German army is receiving on the eastern front, finally helps precipitate a German political crisis. In spite of very tight security precautions, dissident German army officers manage to assassinate Hitler, placing a bomb on a plane that he is using. For a few weeks, Goering presides uneasily over an unstable German political scene. At that point, Himmler's Gestapo attempts a coup. In the next month and a half, Germany sees at least three more coups and counter-coups as conditions approach civil war. Goering ends up in exile in Switzerland, while Himmler is killed. A number of leading German generals are killed, or end up fleeing the country. The Nazi party is nearly decapitated in the fighting. Finally, a group of generals is able to impose a degree of stability.

Surprisingly, the chaos in Germany has not resulted in major battlefield defeats for the Germans. The French and British have finally become more aggressive on the western front, but neither ally has figured out how to pull off a German-style offensive against a tough opponent like the Germans yet, so their offensives tend to be methodical grinding affairs aimed at capturing limited objectives and inflicting heavy casualties on their enemy. The type of "methodical battle" that the French prepared for before the war works reasonably well as long as their opponents don't have the strategic mobility that the Germans demonstrated in 1940 in our time-line. The French are learning to make better use of their tanks too, though they simply don't have tank designs suited to German-style panzer offensives, and won't until late in 1941.

The Soviets have also tried to take advantage of the chaos in Germany, but with limited success. Without major supplies of mundane items like radios, trucks, boots and food from the allies, they don't have the mobility to take large amounts of ground back from the Germans. As they did in our time-line, to provide some measure of mobility after their large initial losses, the Soviets have been forced to form a large number of partially mechanized cavalry units built around a few dozen tanks and a large horsed cavalry component. Those forces are terribly vulnerable to the artillery and machine guns of a modern army. The Soviets are converting those forces to tank divisions as fast as they can, but without Lend-Lease, Soviet production faces significant bottlenecks, with shortages of aluminum, copper, good quality phone wire, rubber, and many other items. As a result, the Soviets in this time don't have the nearly miraculous recuperative ability that they did in our time-line. Their production is much higher than that of the Germans though, and is actually very impressive given their manufacturing capability.

World War II in the east has taken on somewhat of a World War I look, with decreasing mobility and increased use of horses on both sides. It is also taking on a World War I flavor in terms of number of casualties inflicted per mile of ground gained.

Once the political situation in Germany settles down a bit in August and September 1941, the new German leadership quickly begins to look for a way out of at least one of its wars. The Germans have seen appalling casualties, hunger, and a rapidly declining standard of living over the last two years, with little to show for it. Other than the conquest of Poland and the apparently transient victories against the Soviets in the east, the war has brought no significant German gains, while essentially bankrupting the country. At the same time, the Germans remember the Versailles treaty that ended World War I, and are determined to avoid a repeat of that fiasco.

In September 1941, the Germans begin quietly working through Mussolini to reach a peace settlement with the British and French. They also begin a parallel effort to reach some kind of settlement with the Soviets. The western Allies are interested but somewhat skeptical. Letting the Germans off the hook now could easily lead to another war in five or ten years-if not sooner. On the other hand, pursuing the war could easily bankrupt both countries. It would have already except for the flow of gold and hard currency from the Soviet Union. That flow is likely to start to drying up soon as the Soviets become more careful with their dwindling supply of gold and hard currency.

Then there is the issue of the Soviet Union. The Soviets aren't officially allies, and the British and French have been careful not to treat them as such. On the other hand, they are tying down most of the German army. The British and French have to be careful not to create a situation where the Germans can concentrate all of their forces in the east, win a decisive victory there, then ignore whatever treaty they have signed with the western powers. They also have to avoid giving Stalin a veto over any peace treaty. That's a tough balancing act, and one where not all of the western leaders see eye-to-eye.

Ending a full-scale war isn't an easy thing, even if both sides want to. Both sides have to be very careful not to let word of any negotiations leak out to their public because otherwise they face the very understandable reluctance of soldiers to be the last person to die in a war that is winding down.

In the end, the state of the economies makes peace imperative for all sides. The Germans are out of hard currency. They are out of commodities that can be bartered for raw materials. In this time-line's 1941, their economy simply can't continue to run without the flow of imported raw materials. The last straw for the Germans is an allied bombing campaign that begins in October 1941 and targets German synthetic fuel plants. Allied fighter planes can reach a substantial percentage of Germany from French, Belgian, and Dutch bases, which makes that bombing very hard to stop. The vital industrial areas of the Ruhr are very vulnerable because of the short distances the Allies have to go to bomb them.

Allied political pressure, and supplies of military equipment to Romania lead the Romanians to gradually squeeze even the small quantities of oil they are selling the Germans. That adds to German economic and military problems.

The Germans are desperate for a political settlement. Britain and France are becoming more desperate to find a way to give them one. Both countries are really starting to feel the economic pinch themselves. Also, British and French measures to conserve hard currency are hurting US manufacturers. That, plus a more isolationist US congress is straining relations between the allies and the US.

At the same time, both allies want to make sure the Germans aren't in a position to restart the war in a year or two. As they sense German weakness and become more self-confident as a result of their victory in Norway, the allies become more aggressive on the western front. Probing attacks merge into a series of offensives that push the Germans out of the parts of Belgium and Holland that they occupy, and start nibbling at the edges of German territory. The Soviets also launch a series of fall 1941 offensives that leave the Germans hard-pressed to hang on to their gains on the eastern front.

The peace talks get serious. Mussolini sees a chance to regain the international spotlight, and works to get the warring leaders together. In December 1941, World War II officially ends. The French and English dominate the settlement process, but results are by no means as harsh as the terms that ended World War I. The Germans are required to withdraw from all of pre-war Poland. Peacekeeping forces from various neutral countries will be control the free city of Danzig until a plebiscite can be organized to determine whether or not it will remain part of Germany. Plebiscites will also occur in Austria, the Sudetenland, Ukraine-speaking areas of eastern Poland, and a few mixed-language areas of pre-war Germany. The Germans will regain one of their pre-World War I colonies-Cameroon. That's a fig leaf demanded by the Germans to conceal their collapse on most other issues.

Stalin is not a party to the treaty. The treaty does provide that the Germans will not move forces from the western to the eastern front without consultation with the western allies, that they will refrain from offensive action in the east, and that they will withdraw from all territories that were part of the Soviet Union prior to September 1939 within six months or when the Soviet Union finishes repatriating Polish citizens and prisoners of war.

The peace treaty does include restrictions on the size and composition of the German armed forces, but they are within the context of limits to armed forces of the major European powers rather than applying only to Germany. Overall, it isn't a bad solution from Germany's point of view, though die-hard Nazis call it another stab in the back. After the hardships of the last two years, that isn't a very popular viewpoint in late 1941 Germany.

The aftermath "A gray sort of peace": There is a peace treaty, but there isn't peace yet. The guns have stopped firing on the western front. The Germans are releasing Polish prisoners of war, and representatives of the Polish and Czech governments in exile arrive in their countries and take over civil administration. Token forces of Polish and Czech exiles also arrive to maintain order.

On the eastern front, Stalin refuses to declare the war over, but he doesn't push a major offensive. He doesn't see much point in fighting for what he will probably get back anyway. The Soviet Union desperately needs peace. The push for war production has simply worn out much of the infrastructure that the Soviets built up so painfully between the wars. Trucks and railroad engines are worn-out, and the Soviet railroad system is near collapse. The Soviets are running out of gold and hard currency, and most Soviet citizens are on starvation level rations. Diseases are starting to spread among the malnourished population, in spite of tough Soviet measures to localize any outbreaks. The Soviets are producing large quantities of tanks, airplanes, and artillery, but they seem unable to keep up with demand for more mundane items-clothing and boots for the troops, radios, trucks, and easily portable food. In our time-line, Lend-Lease filled those gaps, as the US supplied 14 million pairs of boots, fed much of the Soviet army on Spam, and sent hundreds of thousands of trucks and radios. In this time-line, Soviet troops simply have to make do with limited numbers of shoddy Soviet-made items.

There are a lot of unresolved issues across the map of Europe. Some of them may be settled by plebiscites. Many will ultimately be settled by violence. Ukrainian nationalist and Polish irregular forces are already fighting in the Ukrainian-speaking areas of eastern Poland.

Ukrainian nationalists are also cautiously raising their heads in the part of the Ukraine held by the Germans. As in our time-line, some elements of the German army and the more moderate parts of the Nazi hierarchy have treated Ukrainians as potential allies-though very much subordinate ones-for most of the months of the German occupation. The German army even released ethnic Ukrainian prisoners of war for a while in both time-lines. In our time-line, German attitudes toward the Ukraine hardened in the second and third years of the war. In this time-line, the Germans see Ukrainian nationalists as a way of maintaining some control over their eastern conquests while remaining within the letter of the peace treaty with the western powers.

Over the next six months, the Germans and the Western Allies slowly and cautiously disengage their forces and begin demobilizing. War production starts ramping down. The Allies start trying to get out of the huge orders of airplanes, aircraft engines, and other war materials that they have on the books with US companies.

The German economy is in terrible shape. They are out of hard currency, have little left to barter, and are nowhere near self-sufficient. The German economy is shrinking and confidence in German currency is fading fast. A black market fueled by dollars and pounds develops. The German government desperately needs to cut back arms spending, but they don't want to leave themselves helpless before the Soviets and the Western Allies. They find themselves in somewhat the same situation that the Soviets found themselves in the late 1980's-militarily undefeated, but economically incapable of maintaining their military power.

Over the next four years, the world returns to something surprisingly like conditions prior to Hitler's coming to power. England and France appear confirmed in their status as great powers. Germany's military power is constrained, this time by economic problems rather than treaty limitations. With economic chaos in Germany, Germans arms and military experts show up on battlefields throughout the world. Thousands of German soldiers remain in the east to train, advise and even fight for militaries of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, along with the army of a weak Ukrainian nationalist regime formed in the area of the Ukraine that the Germans conquered from the Soviets. Others show up in China to train and advise the Nationalist Chinese.

The Soviets also face economic problems, though theirs are more controllable than the German ones because the Soviets are more self-sufficient. Under normal circumstances, Stalin's regime would be in serious political trouble. The Soviets spent almost twenty years demanding huge sacrifices from the Soviet people to build up a military that could barely beat Finland and proved grossly inadequate against the Germans. Stalin's military leadership has been uninspired to say the least, with poor decisions causing huge losses by the Soviet military. Under the Soviet regime, none of the dissatisfaction that a great many Soviets undoubtedly feel can be openly expressed, but it is there and Stalin knows it. He responds the only way he really knows how: with a series of purges of any institution that might pose a threat.

The Soviets get a seemingly endless supply of scapegoats who are killed or sent to refill the labor camps that were emptied by starvation during the war. The military is purged once again, not quite as severely as they were in 1937, but badly. The Soviet internal problems keep them from being too aggressive in resolving the major unresolved issue of the war: who is going to control the part of the Ukraine that Germany seized during the war. That is bound up in the complicated issue of getting prisoners of war back to their home countries. The Soviets are using Polish prisoners of war, along with their relatively few German prisoners of war, as bargaining chips in an attempt to get back as many as they can of the nearly two million Soviet soldiers that the Germans took as prisoners of war. Many of those troops don't want to go back, and some of them have managed to make their way to France or England, while many are still interned in Germany or Poland.

The US falls back into isolationism, though the US army and air force get a windfall of new tanks, artillery and planes as the US government buys some of the production that would have gone to the Allies if the war had continued. The Nationalist Chinese also get a windfall, as the Dewey administration tries to keep the end of the war and the cancellation of Allied military orders from pushing the US back into a depression.

Japan finds its Chinese possessions much more difficult to hang on to as time goes on. The Nationalist Chinese are not the world's most efficient military, but they have plenty of manpower reserves and now they have a good continuing supply of reasonably modern arms. The Japanese made conquest pay for itself in the early 1930's but the war in China has become a major economic strain for them. By 1945, the Japanese have had to pull back from some of their more exposed positions in China. Nationalist and Communist guerillas compete for control of substantial parts of the countryside, while in much of Japanese-held China the Japanese control only the major cities, along with railroads and key roads. The Nationalists have actually started to win a few conventional battles against the Japanese, and have fought the Japanese to a draw several times.

The Nationalists and the Japanese have talked peace a number of times between 1941 and 1945, but the Japanese are not willing to give up their conquests. Every Japanese casualty makes that emotionally and politically more difficult. Until Japan is willing to give up substantial territory, the Nationalists have no incentive to make peace.

The economic chaos in Germany limits its foreign policy. The Germans actually do follow through on their treaty commitments to withdraw from the bulk of Poland and Czechoslovakia, though they retain control of the Polish Corridor, Sudetenland and some other disputed areas. German troops also remain in the Ukrainian-speaking areas of eastern Poland. Promised plebiscites in those areas still haven't happened by August 1945. German enthusiasm for plebiscites fades quickly after a reasonably fair Austrian plebiscite, which returns a solid majority for an independent Austria. Poland refuses to allow Germany to supply its troops to the east through Poland, so the Germans are forced to ship goods through captured Black Sea ports.

Military spending goes into a postwar slump in most countries. New tank and aircraft designs reach the prototype stage, and the powers continue to produce small numbers of late model World War II tanks, but in late 1945, production tanks are still the models of late 1941 for the most part, as are most planes in the various air forces. The Germans have standardized on the Panzer 4 with a high velocity 75 mm gun and are slowly phasing out earlier tank models. In 1944, the Germans produce less than 100 tanks of all kinds for their army, and a few dozen more for export. The US is still using variants of the M3 light tank for most armored tasks, supplemented by several hundred Lee/Grants, and few dozen Shermans. The US is also producing a light medium tank for export. It is a twenty-odd ton tank based on the M3 light tank, but with heavier armor and a 57 mm gun. (roughly equivalent to the prototype T7/M7 line of light/medium tanks of our time-line).

Unfortunately for military modelers, this time-line has yet to produce the equivalent of the Pershing, the Tiger, the Panther, the ME-262, or any of the other late World War II war machines. European armies have a lot of fairly modern tanks and planes. They have little money to buy anything new. Most armies have all they can do to keep their industrial and technical bases together by producing a trickle of their most modern types and a few prototypes.

The level of military and aerospace technology in general is much lower in this time-line for the time being. There are no masses of V2 rockets to stimulate a race into space, although the Germans do continue limited research into rocketry. The development of computers lags behind our time-line as well. Even television gets off to a slower start, especially in the United States. Radar technicians trained during the war provided a built-in pool of electronics expertise in our time-line. That pool is much smaller in this time-line. None of the major economies experience the postwar boom that the US did in our time-line, which also limits the market for new electronics products.

There are too many unresolved issues left over from this abbreviated World War II for the "gray kind of peace" to last very long. The Soviets are not going to tolerate continued German presence in a substantial part of the Ukraine forever. The Poles are also very unhappy about the continued German occupation of parts of what they consider Poland. Neither the Soviets nor the Poles are ready to openly take on the Germans at the moment. That doesn't keep them from fueling nasty, brutal and fairly large-scale guerrilla wars in the German occupied territories. The Germans and Ukrainian nationalists respond in kind, sending Ukrainian nationalist raiders across the informal ceasefire lines and trying to infiltrate partisans into Soviet-held areas. The Germans recruit anti-communist individuals from their prisoner of war camps for that very dangerous work. The Ukraine is a cauldron constantly threatening to overflow and trigger a general war. Only the exhaustion and internal problems of the two powers involved have kept it from overflowing so far. As 1945 draws to a close, that may be about to change.