Fair warning: This is the last installment of the Operation Torch scenario, at least until I get my Exchange novel in what I consider sellable form and get a couple of other short stories done. I love to write scenarios, but they tend to grow over my limited writing time like weeds, especially the World War II ones.

You will probably not be happy with where I leave this scenario. I usually end these scenarios for one of two reasons: Either the scenario has diverged so far from our time-line that it no longer says anything interesting about real history, or it has led to a situation that I think has significant potential as a setting for alternate history fiction. This one ends, or at least pauses, because I need to get other projects done, and I can't while putting in the research, thinking and writing time I would need to do the scenario justice.

What has happened so far: The Allied Torch landings were delayed by a few weeks. That set in train a series of events that has made the resulting World War II diverge more and more from our own. By late fall of 1944, the Germans have made peace with a Soviet Union that is increasingly frustrated by Western inaction and their own inability to push the Germans out. The Germans have pulled back to defensible positions in Northern France, after wrecking and mining the French ports. They are now pressuring the French to make peace, using their ability to devastate Paris and the industrial heart of France as a bargaining chip.

Hitler has been assassinated, with Goring as his nominal replacement, but with somewhat of a vacuum in terms of who wields real power. The Normandy landings never happened, but the Allies gained control of most of southern and central France after landing on the Mediterranean coast of France. The Italians are still in the Axis, though they are not doing much fighting now.

Roosevelt is dead, victim of a heart attack. His lame-duck Vice President, Henry Wallace is finding the job of president and head of a multi-national alliance way too big for him, especially since it is unlikely that he will hold that position for long. In the relative power vacuum, US power is being drawn into the Pacific War. That's not national policy, but the result of pressure by politically powerful and ambitious military leaders in that theater.

The French and English have overcome their mutual dislike and suspicion to some extent and are acting as an informal alliance within an alliance to protect their interests. That has manifested itself through an island-hopping campaign in the eastern Mediterranean, something bitterly opposed by the US.

Outlooks-France and England: As the Japanese weaken, and as German naval power becomes less threatening, the French and English are looking seriously at the possibility of trying to recover their lost colonies in the Far East. Neither are willing to send large numbers of men to that theatre, given the threatening situation in Europe, but both want to make sure they are in position to resume what they consider their rightful place in the postwar world. The US has cleared the way partially for that.

The Japanese surface fleet is no longer a major factor. The course of the war in the Pacific has followed the same approximate course that it did in our time-line, but accelerated by a growing number of months. This has not been an unmixed blessing for the US, because the faster advance has drawn Japanese divisions from the mainland of Asia out toward the belts of Japanese-held islands in the Pacific. However, the British are doing better in Burma than in our time-line, and the Nationalist Chinese have not had to face a Japanese offensive on the scale of the one they faced in the summer of 1944 in our time-line. On the other hand, thousands of additional US marines have become casualties, as the Japanese put more of their effort into the battles for key islands.

The French have sent a small contingent of troops from North Africa to the Burmese front, along with a small naval force, not enough to fight even a weakened Japan, but enough to quickly reassert the French claim to French Indo-China if the Japanese collapse, or possibly to intervene if the Japanese attack the French colonial forces that have remained in French Indo-China throughout the Japanese occupation.

The French leadership is torn. There are very few truly pro-German Frenchmen after the years of German occupation. On the other hand, Petain, and a lot of the men around him fear that France will never recover if it becomes a major battlefield yet again. The episode where the new Wallace administration tried to force changes to the French administration weighs heavily on French pride. A war-devastated France dependent on American charity is very close to the worst possible situation from a French point of view. On the other hand, agreeing to peace with Germany puts France at the mercy of the Nazis, and the French have had plenty of experience showing how little they can be trusted.

The French are absolutely vital to a continued Allied war effort against Germany, and they are using that position ruthlessly to gain aid from the weak Wallace administration. Their position will become much weaker as soon as major fighting resumes on their border with Germany. They play desperately for time to rebuild and rearm.

The French see the French/British campaign in the eastern Mediterranean, and French involvement in the Far East as a way of contributing to the war effort, while not provoking a German offensive in France. The second battle for Crete is still raging, with the Germans fighting as hard as their insecure supply lines allow them to.

Both the British and the French are very aware that they may soon be fighting the cream of the German army on the Western front. That's an ominous development. US leadership is erratic, and while the United States army has been successful against the Japanese, it has barely been tested against top-of-the-line German troops. Of course neither the French or the British have had much success against such troops, but US divisions make up much of the power of the Western allies and the other allies are concerned about how much they may have to depend on the untested quality of those divisions.

Both countries would like very much to avoid a head-on confrontation with the Germans. The British have long tried to push Allied policy toward fighting Germany on the periphery of Europe, in places where allied sea-power makes it difficult for the Germans to use their full power. The battle for Crete is one part of that plan.

Both the French and the British are pushing hard for a major attack on Italy. The Italians appear on the verge of collapse, and the Allies have bases on Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily from which to launch an attack at pretty much any point on the peninsula. The French have also pushed up to the prewar French/Italian border, and are probing Italian defenses. The British have even set up an alternate Italian government in Allied-controlled Sicily and Sardinia, and equipped six divisions of anti-Mussolini ex-POWs-primarily with captured Italian equipment.

Churchill wants to topple the Italian Fascists. He thinks that will decisively change the balance of power in Europe, tying down the German divisions freed up from the eastern front in keeping control of the Balkans and establishing a southern front to keep the Allies from pushing through northern Italy into Austria.

The last thing either country wants is a slugfest with the Germans in Northern France. The French even delay deployment of Allied bombers to France, though fighters are welcome. Supposedly the bomber delay is for various technical reasons, but actually it is because the French don't want to precipitate a German offensive.

The US Outlook: On the eve of the US presidential election, the US political scene is in chaos. Henry Wallace, Roosevelt's vice-president, is now president. However, in the Democratic convention, shortly before Roosevelt's first heart attack, Wallace was dumped from the Democratic ticket, replaced as Roosevelt's running mate by Harry Truman. In the aftermath of Roosevelt's death, a controversy rages in the Democratic party leadership. The Democratic National Committee asserts that it has the right to choose the new Democratic party nominee. They will almost certainly choose Truman. Wallace supporters say that the issue of a new presidential nominee is too important to be left to the party bosses. They demand that the Democratic convention be reconvened.

The fight becomes more and more bitter, with court challenges, and the eventual convening of a rump convention, which only Wallace supporters attend, and which nominates Wallace. We now have two Democratic presidential nominees, one of which is a sitting president.

Wallace genuinely sees Truman as the nominee of the big-city machines, and back-room deals. He runs as the true Democratic nominee for president. Court battles and political battles rage in almost every state, as the two Democratic candidates battle over who gets the Democratic spot on the ballot. Wallace loses most, but not all of those battles. A cynic might notice that Republican nominated state judges tend to decide in favor of Wallace, while judges nominated by the Democrats tend to decide in favor of Truman. In states where Wallace loses the battle to stay on the ballot, his supporters have been hastily organizing a third party where that is still possible, or write-in campaigns where it is too late to get on the ballot. (Henry Wallace actually ran as a third-party candidate in 1948 in our time-line and garnered over a million votes.)

The controversy over the true nominee tears the Democratic party apart. Wallace gets a respectable twenty percent of the vote, most of it in states where he is on the ballot as the Democratic nominee. He actually comes in first in a couple of states. Truman runs a surprisingly strong campaign. He comes in a strong second in the popular vote. Republican Thomas Dewey wins the popular vote, but the race is close enough that he does not take a majority of the Electoral College votes. Henry Wallace has theoretically won enough electoral votes to hold the balance of power when the electoral college meets. However, electors do not have to vote for the candidate they were elected to vote for. Given the split in the Democratic party, there is no guarantee that Wallace electors will follow his wishes, or for that matter that Truman electors will follow his wishes.

To make matters more complicated, Democrat electors from several southern states publicly state that their support of Truman is contingent on his promising to roll back moves that Wallace has made toward integrating blacks into the armed forces during his short time in office.

Whoever eventually becomes president will have to work with a Republican Congress. The Republicans gain a narrow majority in the Senate and House for the first time since 1933. Henry Wallace will be president a little more than two more months. After that, no one knows what will happen.

For the time being, US policy drifts. The Wallace administration is not strong enough to do much more than keep doing what the US has been doing and try to keep the remainder of the alliance together. The US is fighting a series of desperate and bloody battles with the Japanese, as MacArthur pushes his offensive into the Philippines, and the US pushes its island-hopping offensive closer to the Japanese home islands.

The Japanese are in very bad shape. Their surface fleet is no longer able to challenge the US. US submarines are rapidly finishing off the Japanese merchant marine. That process has actually been accelerated by the fact that the Japanese have had to try to supply larger garrisons on the Pacific islands. US bombers are already eating away at the hearts of Japanese cities with firebombing raids. The Japanese are running out of oil and industrial capacity. They also running out of food

The war in Europe is something else entirely. The Germans still appear strong, though the Allied air offensive is starting to bite hard. The Germans have tried to hold back their air force in an attempt to build up enough planes and trained pilots to challenge Allied control of the air. That has worked to some extent, but it has also backfired to some extent, as the Allies go after the infrastructure of the Luftwaffe, knocking out factories, strafing airfields and radar installations, and attacking oil refineries in an attempt to stop production of aviation fuel.

The Germans are not as badly hurt by those attacks as they were in our time-line, because they still control oil fields in Romanian, eastern Poland, and Hungary. Those oil fields provide about half of the oil the Germans need, but loss of production in the synthetic oil plants still hurts, especially in terms of high-octane aviation gas, which is in very short supply. The Germans have begun building new synthetic fuel plants in areas more difficult for the Allies to get at-in the coal-fields of the Ukraine and in Poland. Those plants will take quite some time to get on line. In the mean-time, the Germans try to keep existing plants patched together enough to maintain a trickle of production. They also emphasize production of jets, because the jets can burn lower quality fuel.

The US is hitting hard at the German rail network, and bridges and tunnels. The German economy is gradually becoming regionalized as it becomes difficult or impossible to get raw material or partially finished goods from one part of German to the other.

The air offensive is the Allies only major offensive action in Europe. The Allies are cleaning up the stay-behind German forces around ports along the Atlantic coast of France. US forces are probing warily along the Atlantic coast, still pushing north, but slowly.

US aid is pouring into France, slowing down the buildup of US troops on the continent. The US military is very unhappy about that, but President Wallace is very aware of how difficult it would be to defeat the Germans if the French drop out of the war. He does over-estimate the chances of a separate German-France peace treaty. The Petain government knows that such a treaty would almost certainly lead to either the rapid overthrow of the French government, or a civil war between Free French and ex-Vichy forces.

The German Outlook: The Germans have done fairly well under Goring's weak leadership. The Goring regime has survived mainly because more powerful forces in the German government are not ready for a test of strength. That situation won't last. Himmler wants to be Hitler's true successor. He is not going to wait forever. Himmler's ambitions have been kept in check so far by a wide coalition that includes conservative both army and political leaders, and Nazi officials wary of Himmler. Himmler has been working to undermine that coalition.

Goring is not stupid, nor does he lack ambition. In lucid moments he understands his position and works to turn theoretical power into real power. That's not an easy task. Many Germans both inside and outside of the government view Goring with contempt. His weight, love of gaudy uniforms, and drug addiction make him an unlikely candidate for real power. On the other hand, he is the most intelligent of the major Nazis.

Conservative German generals and political leaders would like to push Goring into a mainly ceremonial role, with real power falling into their hands. They would also like to follow up their success in negotiating a peace treaty with the Soviets by a peace with the western allies-preferably all of them, though France and England would be enough. In order to get that peace, they know that they will have to get rid of at least some of the Nazis, and install a leader more acceptable to the Allies. They would ideally like to install someone like Rommel as a respected and supposedly more humane leader of Germany, while getting rid of Himmler and his supporters. They can then negotiate with the west from a position of military power, and with a reasonably good chance of being viewed as having overthrown the Nazis.

In the meantime, the Germans have a window of opportunity. Given peace with the Soviets, the Germans have a temporary but large edge over the western allies on the ground. That edge won't last very long. Lend-Lease supplies and US and British divisions are pouring into France as port facilities are repaired and expanded. The Allies also retain the ability to do an amphibious landing in northern France if the Germans push south, cutting the Germans off in southern France.

So, what do the Germans plan to do with their temporary superiority? Actually, their plans are much more modest than the Allies fear. Government by committee doesn't lend itself to bold actions, and allied air superiority makes anything too ambitious very risky. The Germans plan a modest spoiling attack, aiming primarily at US divisions along the coast. If they can temporarily recapture and demolish a port or two, make the US look weak, and give the US a taste of the kind of casualties taking on top-of-the-line German divisions involves they'll be reasonably satisfied for now. When they are in a position to challenge allied air superiority, plans can become more ambitious.

Himmler wants a more ambitious offensive, seeing an opportunity to knock the French, and maybe even the British out of the war. He quietly moves up plans to seize power as he sees the opportunity frittered away.

The Soviet Outlook: Stalin has a major problem. Mobilizing an entire people for a crusade against a hated enemy, then suddenly making peace with that enemy is not easy, even for someone with Stalin's iron grip on his country. Many Soviets at all levels absolutely hate the decision. By now, most of them have figured out that voicing that kind of discontent can be fatal. Some haven't, and Stalin takes the opportunity to restock Soviet labor camps. The purge is relatively small by Soviet standards-less than a million imprisoned and no more than a few tens of thousands shot.

Stalin isn't all that concerned about the people who speak out openly. He is concerned about quiet misgivings within the power structure of the Soviet Union. He has no qualms about purging people in high positions, and he almost certainly will again at some point. For the moment though, he needs a quick success to justify making peace with the Germans. Japanese weakness in Manchuria may give him an opportunity to get that success.

The Soviets began moving top-of-the-line troops to the Far East within days after reaching their agreement with the Germans. At that point Stalin had not yet decided whether or not to actually attack in Manchuria. Japanese weakness tempts him, and the weak Japanese response to Soviet provocations whets his appetite. The Japanese are frantically trying to prepare for a US invasion of the home islands. They have moved several divisions of veteran troops from Manchuria to help in that defense. The last thing they need is a Soviet invasion of Manchuria.

The Japanese still have a large number of troops in Manchuria and in Korea. There are probably the equivalent of close to 50 Japanese divisions. However, most of those divisions are formed from raw recruits, with less than a dozen veteran divisions. All of them are poorly equipped. They have few tanks-almost all obsolete, and no real defense against even a US Sherman tank, much less Soviet T34/85s and IS2's. In response to the Soviet probing, the Japanese move several divisions from China and Burma toward Manchuria.

Japanese outlook: Any rational Japanese government would have been trying to surrender by this time. There is almost nothing left of the Japanese navy. The Japanese merchant marine can no longer supply oil or much else to the home islands. The Japanese army has been beaten in the Pacific Island chains. It is cut off and close to being beaten in the Philippines. The US has seized Okinawa (considerably earlier than in our time-line). US bombers are burning Japanese cities, and the Japanese can't do a thing about it. The best of the Japanese army is spread over the territories Japan conquered in the first months of the war. With its fleet destroyed, Japan couldn't bring many ofthose troops home if it wanted to, and it can't supply them.

The Japanese haven't given up yet though. They are working frantically to shore up defenses in the home islands. They are working to make the cut-off troops in Southeast Asia as self-sufficient as possible. They are getting ready to make massive use of kamikazes to inflict as many casualties as possible on US troops. They are trying to make the industrial areas of Manchuria into self-sufficient sources of arms production.

If there is any strategy at all to the Japanese effort, it is to make a US victory so costly that the US will give in and accept something less than unconditional surrender.

The last months of 1944: US strategy remains paralyzed. No clear decision on the next president has been reached, and much of the congressional leadership will lose its leadership position in the next Congress. In the absence of strong direction from the elected leadership, the US generals and the civilian bureaucracy increasingly shape US policy.

In some cases, that drift isn't a bad thing in the short-term. The top army leadership is very competent, and the civilians in charge of war production keep things running smoothly. In other cases, the drift proves dangerous. Douglas MacArthur is increasingly running his own show in Asia. Hoover's FBI has long eyed Soviet espionage efforts in the US and wanted to crack down. Now that the Soviets are no longer allies, and there is no strong president to restrain him, Hoover moves strongly against Soviet spies and against US citizens suspected of communist leanings. The roundup is highly publicized, and begins a major Red Scare. In a country at war and with no strong leader to restrain it, that kind of hysteria can get very out of hand, and it does. It even starts to disrupt the Manhattan project as several scientists are arrested. Some of them are actually involved in spying for the Soviets, but many are not.

As real espionage is uncovered, and rumors of other espionage spreads, the scare becomes extremely disruptive. Old-line industrialists use the Red Scare as a weapon against unions. Southern racists use it as an excuse to harass or even kill black soldiers. Nazi propagandists use the excesses heavily in attempts to destroy the moral authority of the United States.

In spite of the drift and the disruptions, US arms production continues to be high. The Manhattan Project is disrupted about as badly as anything, and even there progress has only been set back a few weeks, or possibly a month at the most. Weapons production as a whole is off a little-less than five percent in most categories. The momentum of the war effort keeps weapons pouring out of factories.

In Europe, the French and English finally succeed in pushing the last remaining German and Italian defenders out of Crete. Churchill is pushing hard for an attack on the mainland of Italy, though not until the Allied buildup in France is more complete. The US military absolutely hates that idea, seeing it as a distraction from the main effort, which should be through northern France and Belgium into Germany.

The Germans do their planned spoiling offensive as soon as bad weather gives them a window of time when Allied air superiority is neutralized. Ultra intercepts give the US ample warning, but without air superiority the US army is not quite up to taking on the very best German divisions. The Germans break through US lines. They manage to destroy several US divisions and trap five more with their backs to the Atlantic coast. The Americans learn quickly though. The trapped divisions fight hard, supported by naval gunfire.

The Germans desperately want to overrun those divisions, but they are running out of time. The weather clears, and Allied air-power begins pounding the Germans. The US rushes more divisions from England to France and begins a rescue operation. Goring hesitates, then throws the Luftwaffe forces he has so painfully built up into the struggle. The Germans make an all-out effort, throwing elite troops, including several panzer divisions at the trapped Americans.

The Luftwaffe effort probably tips the balance. After extremely hard fighting, the American perimeter cracks. Allied ships rescue thousands of troops, but the Germans capture nearly fifty thousand Americans, and a rich haul of US weapons. The cost to the Germans is very high though. They lose over six hundred planes, including many jets and almost that many half-trained pilots. The elite divisions used in the attack are mauled, with thousands of men dead, more wounded and several hundred tanks knocked out beyond repair.

Militarily, the German victory is costly and not particularly significant. US forces quickly push north and regain the lost territory. Politically, the victory gives the Germans an important boost. Italy and the various minor Axis allies are encouraged to stay in the fight a bit longer. The French and English are confirmed in their low opinion of US fighting ability, though unfairly.

The scale of the US defeat is relatively minor compared to what the Soviets have encountered so far in the war, and even small in comparison with French and British defeats earlier in the war. On the other hand, it is arguably among the worst defeats in US history in terms of the number of men killed or captured in a single battle. Coming at a time where there is no strong leadership, it is a major blow to US self-confidence. On the other hand, it forces the US to re-emphasize the European theatre, make some much-needed changes to training and tactics, and increase production of Pershing tanks to counter the German heavy tanks.

 

Meanwhile, Stalin is moving forces east as quickly as possible. He wants to eliminate Japanese forces in Manchuria before the worst of the near-Siberian winter strikes. That doesn't give him a lot of time. He has been moving forces east since making peace with the Germans, but it is still almost the end of November before the Soviets are ready. The Japanese are aware of the Soviet buildup, and they have been moving forces north from China in an attempt to match it. That's futile. When the Soviets attack, they quickly cut through Japanese lines and head south. A "Manchurian People's Republic" is set up, with its government drawn from the more pro-Soviet ranks of the Chinese Communist party. Mao is not invited to participate. The Soviet offensive quickly takes the northern third of Manchuria, then begins to slow down, more for logistic reasons than because of increased Japanese resistance.

The Japanese have contingency plans to withdraw to a more defensible position in southern Manchuria and Korea if attacked by the Soviets. They put those plans into motion, though shortage of oil and transport make any movement difficult. As the Japanese retreat, Manchurians take advantage of Japanese weakness to revolt. Those revolts include units of the Manchukou puppet army. Thousands of Japanese civilians try to flee south with their army, getting in the way, and often being killed, robbed or brutalized by Manchurians-payback for over ten years of Japanese occupation.

The US military is not at all happy about the Soviet offensive, though they are glad to see the specter of having to fight the huge Japanese army in Manchuria lifted. The US has not fought a long and bloody war against the Japanese in order to see Stalin walk away with most of the fruits of victory, especially after his betrayal of the Allies in the European theatre. The US moves up the time-table for an invasion of the Japanese home islands, and looks at the possibility of landings on the Chinese mainland to deter the Soviets from occupying part or all of China.

The Germans are also unhappy about the Soviet move, but they see some advantages to it also. The Soviets are unlikely to resume the war in the west while they are involved with the Japanese. That means that the Germans don't necessarily have to withdraw from the areas they promised to. The Germans suspend their withdrawal from areas that were to be given back to the Soviets, and demand that the Soviets withdraw to the pre-attack border of Manchuria. They also allow Vlasov to build up his forces further, and to set up an administration to govern some of the slices of Russia that the peace agreement has eventually going back to the Soviets.

The French are building up forces in Burma as tensions rise between French troops in Indo-China and the weakened Japanese forces in the area. The French have played a delicate balancing game in Indo-China, just as they did in our time-line. They are useful to the Japanese as a counter to Vietnamese nationalists and communists. On the other hand, they are becoming a threat as Japanese forces weaken and the British push east through Burma, with the support of small but growing French forces.

The Japanese decide to strike the French in Indo-China while they still can. As in our time-line, they try to separate the French officers from their men, then kill the officers and imprison the men. They are only partially successful, and a confused but bitter struggle erupts in Indo-China between the French and the Japanese. Neither force is particularly modern or strong. French equipment dates from 1940 or earlier, while the Japanese have sent any troops with significant military potential north to fight the Soviets. The Allies try to organize air support and airdrops to the French from Burma, but distance make that difficult.

Meanwhile, in Germany Himmler is finally set to make his move for total power. SS men fan out, getting ready to assassinate those who have opposed him, starting with Goring.

 

 

And That's Where The Story Goes: What do you think? As 1944 draws to a close, this is a very different World War II. We have a constitutional crisis in the US. We have the Soviets running wild in Asia. We have a coup in progress in Germany. We have Germany apparently in a position to keep the war going almost indefinitely, unless US atom bombs are enough to stop them, when they eventually appear. We have a Red Scare tearing the US apart and diminishing its moral stature abroad. Vietnam even rears its ugly head.

Where could this time-line go from here? Well, there are a lot of possibilities. I'm not going to tip my hand too much, but here are some basic principles:

1) If the war ends with no strong, threatening power in Europe, the US will revert to isolationism, keeping it's navy and airforce strong but allowing the army to go back almost to pre-war levels.

2) France and England would not be able to resume their pre-war role of policing the world, and will eventually lose their colonies. Their temporarily inflated militaries would allow them to appear strong for a while, but declining economic power would doom the attempt in the long run.

3) Unless the Soviet Union gains significant territory at the end of the war, it will not become a superpower. Now that will be controversial, but I firmly believe it. The Soviets simply lost too much manpower and too much industry in the war and in Stalin's purges.

4) Unless Germany becomes the divided pawn of a superpower confrontation like it did in our time-line, Germany will rise again as an independent military power in the late 1950's or early 1960's at the latest, no matter if they are forced into unconditional surrender and disarmed or not.

5) The major European powers will all go nuclear sometime in the 1950's in the absence of a superpower confrontation. And those nukes would be used at some point. In our time-line, the Soviets exploded their one nuclear weapon, based on a stolen American design, in 1949. They became a real nuclear power in the early 50's. From very old and possibly unreliable memory, the English exploded their first nuke in 1953, and the French followed in 1957. They would have both probably been able to do so sooner if they had been in panicked national emergency mode. German science would certainly have been capable of such a feat in the early 1950's if the politics of the time had allowed it. It is much harder to keep any kind of equilibrium in a nuclear arms race in a multi-polar world.

6) Unless the area is taken over by either the Germans or the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the Balkans would be disaster areas, with civil wars in more than half the countries. The ones that didn't have civil wars would probably be involved in at least one and often several border wars. Look for a Serbia/Croatia war, a Poland/Ukraine war, and a lot of others.

7) Stalin would continue his purges until he died, with each purge weakening the Soviet Union. The initial purges and the forced industrialization arguably made the Soviets militarily stronger. That strategy wouldn't continue to add strength. Working millions of people to death creating heavy industry that makes no economic sense and often no military sense is not in the long run a way to build up a country's power. In this time-line, Stalin could die of his stroke in late 1945, or live on another five to seven years past his time of death in our time-line. The longer he lives, the more distorted the Soviet economy becomes.

If you are enjoying this scenario, or if you are disappointed with it, please let me know. I always read and enjoy any feedback I can get.  

Note: I'm still planning to start an 'e-mail to the editor' section soon if I get enough responses.  Please feel free to e-mail me.  I'll only use your comments in the 'e-mail' section if you specify that it is okay to do so.