What has happened so far: Two issues ago, I suggested a point of divergence where Operation Torch, the Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa is delayed by two or three weeks. That puts it after the Soviet offensive that cut off the Germans at Stalingrad. That immediately puts World War II on a different trajectory. When the Stalingrad offensive occurs, the Germans haven't sent 400-odd transport planes, 200-odd bombers from the Stalingrad front, and several hundred fighter planes to Italy to support the building of an Axis army in Tunis. They haven't sent on the order of a dozen divisions to build that army and/or to occupy Vichy France. More importantly, the timing of the Torch landings gives Hitler political cover to attempt to withdraw the trapped men from Stalingrad without as much loss of face. That in turn leads to a wild mobile battle on the southern part of the Eastern Front, and the rest of World War II is in some ways very different, though some things remain constant . 

This is going to be a very short segment. The perfectionist in me wanted to dig deep into the politics of who would replace Hitler after he was assassinated. The rest of me found digging through the dark personalities a chore to be avoided.

 I finally just decided to assume that Goering takes over the official reins of power. He actually exercises some degree of real but limited power by playing the army against Himmler and his SS. At the same time, Goering is not a person to be respected by the power-hungry personalities of the 1944 Germany. That will inevitably start to cause problems because Hitler set up the Nazi system as a collection of competing, almost warring, power centers, with himself as the sole arbitrator of disputes over resources between those centers. Goering doesn't have the authority to play that role, and the disputes between the power centers gradually become more bitter as the struggle to become the real successor to Hitler intensified. Until that leadership struggle is resolved, German policy will not be entirely driven by rational national interest considerations.

The German leadership looks at the world: When they take a timeout from their infighting and take a hard-headed, realistic view of what is going on, the German leadership is scared. They've only had a small set of tastes of U.S. land power, but each of those tastes has been a little more bitter than the last. The token U.S. forces that reluctantly participated in the invasion of Rhodes fought extremely well compared to the ones that fought briefly in Southern France a year earlier. The German leadership can also read production numbers, and while their intelligence on the US is not that good they know enough to realize that the flow of military equipment form the US is becoming an avalanche, threatening to bury them.

The reality of life in June 1944 is that Germany has too many enemies. The US or the Soviet Union would each, by themselves, be very close to enough to defeat the Germans. Put the two together and add in England along with the various exile forces, and the odds become overwhelming.  The German game plan is fairly straightforward. In order of priority, the Germans need to:

1. Break apart the coalition of forces arrayed against them.
2. If possible, deny the west the ability to deploy its forces in Europe (or failing that, minimize the German forces necessary to contain them.
3. Leapfrog the Allies technologically. Huge production numbers aren't as threatening if the tanks and planes produced are obsolete.
4. Cut off the flow of US made war material to Europe.

None of those tasks is going to be easy.

Splitting their opponents seems superficially easy to the Germans. After all, the three major allies have fundamentally different views of what the postwar world should look like.

The Soviets haven't fought most of the battles and taken most of the casualties over the last three years just to end up exhausted at their pre-1939 borders.

The British and French have not fought this war to see their empires liquidated and their pre-war Central and Eastern European allies replaced by Soviet client states.

The US has not made the huge sacrifices necessary to build a gigantic war machine in order to shore up faltering colonial empires and replace a Nazi dictatorship with a Communist one as the dominant power in Europe.

The Allies are united by hatred and fear of the Nazis. They will split at some point. Unfortunately for the new German leadership, the Allied split will probably come after Germany is defeated, and that doesn't help them.

The key to this part of the German strategy is to force the Allies to make decisions that put their differing goals in sharp conflict as soon as possible. The German leadership is making a concerted effort to get inside the heads of Allied leaders, to figure out what their hopes are, and their fears. Splitting the Allies is an absolute German priority—more important than all but the most vital territory and worth the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of troops if necessary. In June of 944, Germany will almost certainly lose the war is the Allied coalition holds together. It has a good shot at winning if that coalition cracks. The Germans have some ideas on how to crack the coalition. We'll see those ideas later.

Keeping the western Allies form deploying their forces on the continent is a real problem. If the Germans try to be strong everywhere along the entire Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of Europe, the Allies will have already tied down more divisions than Germany can spare without lifting a finger. At the same time, the Allies will be at their most vulnerable at landing. Also, given Allied air power there is no guarantee that troops in central reserve will get to the battle in time to do any good.

That 'strong crust' versus 'strong reserves' argument is still raging unresolved as the Allies land in Southern France. Southern France has its own problems for the Germans. They are reasonably sure that the southern invasion is just a preliminary move in an Allied master plan that also includes an invasion of Northern France across the English Channel. That happens to be true, but the northern invasion has fallen still further behind schedule. It won't happen until mid-July at the earliest.

Leapfrogging the Allies technologically is an obvious priority, but easier said than done. Picking the right technologies is a problem, as is getting the promising technologies to the point where they are more dangerous the Allies than to their users. Germany is wasting an enormous amount of resources on ideas that are simply silly, but even technologies with potential require tough decisions. For example, V2 rockets are a marvelous leapfrog technology, but they may or may not be more militarily useful than the 20,000 or so additional fighter planes that Germany could build with the resources those V2's will take. The ME-262 jet fighter is a machine with marvelous potential to turn the war in the air over Germany around. With Hitler dead, the jet can actually be used as a fighter, but it isn't that simple. In June 1944, the ME-262 has an average engine life of ten hours, after which the engine has to be replaced. Pilots have to be retrained, special longer runways built, and glitches like the tendency of planes to crash when hard vacuums develop around their control surfaces and freeze them if the pilot tries too steep a dive have to be overcome.

New technology is absolutely necessary to keeping American war material out of Europe. Germany has lost the U-boat war decisively for now. New technology is coming in this area, but not for nine or ten months. When the new U-boats do arrive they will have a major problem. The US is fighting and winning naval wars against two major powers in two major oceans. By mid-June of 1944, the Japanese navy is being overwhelmed by the sheer number of ships and planes the US can throw at it. If Germany tries a revival of the U-boat threat, the US could switch a lot of naval power to the Atlantic, though at the cost of slowing down its advance in the Pacific.

Rationalizing new weapons research is essential, but almost impossible without a central authority to make the necessary decisions. The parts of the Nazi apparatus already were fierce competitors. With Goering nominally in charge, they become more like independent kingdoms within the Third Reich, negotiating with each other for scarce materials, and fighting serious and sometimes deadly inter-German feuds.

In mid-to-late June of 1944, it is difficult even to move army divisions from one front to another, as army commanders increasingly ignore the weak central authority. Goring (probably rightly) views appointing an overall commander of the German army a threat to his fragile authority, yet doesn't have the power to enforce his decisions against the wishes of the commanders of the various fronts. In a multi-front war, that leaves the Germans dangerously vulnerable.

Course of the war: The Allies storm ashore in southern France. The German response is sluggish and uncoordinated at the strategic level. The Germans haven't sorted out their leadership problems yet, and they have serious doubts about committing too much of their power to southern France. The huge Allied force sitting in England, and obviously poised for an invasion of northern France is a major deterrent to any massive move south.

German forces in southern France are a frail shadow of the force that pushed the Allies into the sea a year ago. Active divisions and armor have been stripped away by urgent needs elsewhere. Those divisions have been partially replaced by lower-grade divisions, some of them Italian, and others officially German but in reality mainly manned by ethnic Poles or Russians. As in our time-line, Germany is desperate for manpower and is getting it from whatever sources it can.

The Allies quickly consolidate their beachheads in southern France. Several Italian divisions simply disintegrate, leaving gaping holes in the Axis defenses. The Italians are tired of war, and with the Italian overseas empire gone they see little reason to remain in the war. They are also appalled at the sheer firepower the Allies throw against them.

With their defenses starting to fold, the Germans have a choice of stripping vital divisions from northern France, or pulling back. In the unsettled command environment after the assassination of Hitler, that decision remains unmade long enough that events start to make it for the Germans. Faced with a choice between being surrounded and withdrawing, local commanders withdraw. Crucially, the Allies are able to capture some of the port facilities of southern France relatively intact. The facilities are already in bad shape from the German invasion of southern France in 1943 though, so the Allies still find that they have a tough logistics situation on their hands.

The German withdrawal is handled with considerable tactical skill, but the Allies control the air, and they make it difficult for the Germans to reestablish a coherent defensive line. The French resistance movement also makes that difficult. Thousands of men from the Vichy army faded back into the hills and mountains of southern France after the Allies were pushed out in 1943. Those men added training and firepower to the resistance movement, and made German control of some areas very fragile. Now they are moving to take complete control of several mountainous parts of southern France.

Meanwhile, the Allies are very afraid that the Germans will be able to shift forces south, crush the southern invasion, then shift back north before the Allies can launch the invasion of northern France. In the two weeks after the landing in southern France, the Allies launch division-sized raids on the coasts of northern France and Norway, along with only slightly smaller ones against the German/Italian held island of Crete and against the Italian coast, perilously close to Rome itself.

The raids have major, but mixed, results. The raid on Norway provides cover for a Royal Air Force operation that succeeds in sinking a German pocket battleship that had been a thorn in the side of the British since early in the war. The raid on the coast of France is a disaster. It runs head-on into a sudden once-in-a-century storm, the same one that shut down the Allied buildup for a few days shortly after D-day in our time-line. An American division is essentially destroyed, as the storm capsizes fragile landing craft and leaves survivors stranded for days without air cover or hope of rescue and the Germans quickly move in to eliminate pockets of resistance.

The disaster is a major blow to US self-confidence, especially when contrasted with the success of the mainly Anglo-French invasion of southern France, and the two mainly Anglo-French raids in the Mediterranean. The French/English raid on the Italian coast routs demoralized Italian troops and humiliates Mussolini as it spends several days systematically destroying Italian coastal installations before going home. The raid on Crete is less of a walk-over, but the raiders win a hard-earned foothold that Churchill is reluctant to withdraw from as scheduled.

The English and French are growing somewhat closer together, not out of mutual respect or liking, but out of a desire to keep from being totally dominated by their giant partner, the US. The French bring a reasonably large navy, a considerable merchant marine and a growing army to that tacit alliance. Their role in the alliance is enhanced by the US disaster on the coast of France.

As the Germans struggle to cope with the growing Allied threat to southern France, their already shaky command structure is under attack from within. Himmler has been trying to use his investigation of the death of Hitler as a vehicle to intimidate the army leadership so that it will stand aside as he positions himself to replace Goering as Hitler's successor. Dozens of German officers are arrested. Some of them were actually involved in the plot. Most weren't

Himmler's investigation is heading in the direction of Field Marshall Rommel, the man in charge of German defenses along the Atlantic Coast of France. Rommel's superior, von Rundstedt, sees where things are headed. He's not a great friend of Rommel, but he needs the man's abilities. After the failure of the US raid, he gambles that any major invasion of northern France will be delayed by that fiasco, and appoints Rommel to lead a force to restore the situation in southern France. Part of the idea is that leading that force will get Rommel out of the way of Himmler's witch hunt.

Himmler then overreaches himself, detaining and interrogating Rommel. In this time-line, Rommel did have some contact with the conspirators, but he had an ambiguous and at most marginal role in the plot to kill Hitler. His arrest while commanding an active front in a crucial moment in the war is the last straw for many German officers. They make it clear that if Goering doesn't stop Himmler, they will. After several tense days where it looks as though a civil war might break out, Himmler backs down and releases Rommel, but not the bulk of the other arrested officers. The Field Marshall is able to take command of southern France after a crucial delay of nearly five days.

The German army in southern France has been disrupted but not completely paralyzed by the fiasco. Tactically it has been handled competently, managing to retreat relatively intact from a situation where it could easily have been overwhelmed. At the same time, even with a trickle of reinforcements the Germans are grossly outnumbered, and their forces are totally inadequate to establish a coherent line anywhere in southern France. Opposing them, the relatively small US contingent is led by Patton, and he is aggressively exploiting any German weakness to destroy successive German defense lines before they can really be established. The French and British are not quite as aggressive, but they are advancing quickly, and are limited more by logistics than by German opposition.

Patton is attempting to turn the sideshow to which he was relegated after stepping on too many toes (different set of circumstances in this time-line but similar results) into the main event. Giving Patton nearly 5 days to operate without an effective strategic-level response can be disastrous. When Rommel returns, the Germans are well on their way to losing the southern half of France.

Rommel moves quickly to salvage what he can from the situation. He is allowed to pull two panzer divisions and half a dozen or so fairly well-equipped infantry divisions out of the reserves for northern France. He isn't allowed to call on German forces from the east, because the Soviets are back on the offensive, this time on a more ambitious scale than anything they've tried since Stalingrad.

After a year-and-a-half of grinding attacks aimed at wearing down the German forces, the Soviets launch an ambitious attack against German army group Center. Stalin scents weakness in the German political turmoil. The initial results of the attack tend to reinforce that impression. A section of the German line that has held almost in place since mid-1942 suddenly collapses, and the Soviets push easily, almost suspiciously easily, tens of miles into formerly German-held territory.

And that's when I ran out of time. I have to cut this short to get it in this issue of POD. So, what happens next? How do the political battles inside Germany play out? What if anything are the Germans up to on the eastern front? Will the Germans get their jets into service in numbers large enough to threaten Allied air superiority? How will the budding Anglo-French alliance within an alliance fare? Will the loss of a US division due to the 'storm of the century' significantly delay the D-Day landings? How will that disaster play politically during a US election year?

It appears that a classic tank battle is brewing somewhere in central France. If Patton keeps driving north, and Rommel counters with his panzers, two strong-willed commanders will clash on something very close to equal terms. Both will be running on logistic shoe-strings, as usual. Patton will have outrun most of his air cover, and Rommel won't have much to begin with. The German tanks will be more heavily armored, but not as mechanically reliable as the American ones. In this time-line the US has up-gunned its tanks since getting pushed out of southern France in mid-1943, so the German edge there is much smaller than in our time-line. If it happens, this clash will come down to the quality of the generals and the quality of their men, with the fate of France in the balance. Any thoughts on who will win? 

Actually, I may be really mean and turn that clash into a story, which would mean that POD people would see it but not people reading this on the web. We'll see. In any case, this will be continued, and hopefully completed, next issue.

 

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: Starting next issue I'm planning to start an 'e-mail to the editor' section.  If you do e-mail me, please indicate whether or not I can use your e-mail in that section.