What has happened so far: In the July Newsletter I took this scenario to the beginning of November 1942. World War II has diverged a bit from the path it took in our history, but not too much, and not in a particularly unexpected direction. Japan faces almost the full force of the United States, and as a result has not been able to advance as far as it did in our time-line. Germany has been able to concentrate an even larger percentage of it’s power against the Soviet Union than it did in our time-line, and as a result has been able to advance somewhat further into the Soviet Union, but not decisively so.

Both the British and the Soviets are considerably weaker in this time-line’s November 1942 than they were in our time-line’s November 1942 due to much reduced Lend-Lease aid. The United States is giving its own armed forces priority access to shipping, and priority access to weapons that are in short supply. As a result, the British have far fewer tanks and planes in North Africa. The Soviets don’t have as many Lend-Lease planes or tanks as they did in our time-line either, but more importantly they don’t have reliable supplies of such mundane but vital things as trucks, radios, boots, and food.

November 1942-June 1943: US Home Front: November 1942 brings the US mid-term elections. Roosevelt will still be president until at least 1944, barring his death, but the 1942 elections will do a great deal toward determining the nature of that rule. The opposition party generally gains seats in the mid-term elections, but if the Republicans do better than expected it could reduce Roosevelt’s power substantially. Power is based to a large extent on the perception of power, and if Democratic losses are too large the perception of Roosevelt’s power could erode. In our time-line the Republicans gained 47 seats in the House of Representatives, cutting the Democratic majority from towering to marginal. The loss of 5 more seats would have cost the Democrats their majority and put control of the House in the hands of independent or minor party candidates. A shift of nine more seats would have given the Republicans a majority in the house for the first time since the 1932 elections.

In this time-line, the Republicans take an extra twelve seats in the House, for a total pickup of fifty-nine. That gives them a slim majority in the House, effective when the new House is seated in early 1943. They don’t take control of the Senate, though they reduce the gap considerably, to 4 seats. That’s close enough to give them effective control of the Senate on many issues because conservative Democrats vote with them on those issues.

The fall of Bataan peninsula in September 1942 played a role in swinging those extra twelve house seats. Some elements of the American public simply don’t understand why the US is sending any military aid to Britain and especially the Soviet Union at a time when US troops are trapped, starving and running out of ammunition in the Philippines. The Republicans benefit from that thinking and some but by no means all of the party’s leadership supports it.

The Republican Party is deeply split between a relatively liberal internationalist wing, and a more conservative wing with isolationist tendencies. The Democratic Party also has its divisions, with conservative southerners jostling with big-city northern liberals. The divisions within the parties mean that effective control of the House remains up in the air to some extent. On some issues, Roosevelt can split off enough relatively liberal Republicans to exercise some degree of control. On other issues he loses enough conservative Democrats that his administration is not just defeated but embarrassed. Overall though, Roosevelt has to contend with a Republican-led House determined to play a major role in shaping US policy in the next couple of years.

Republican control of the House makes it harder for Roosevelt to reverse the process that has focused more and more of US energies on the war in the Pacific. The new Republican majority supports the concept of Lend-Lease, but gives it far less priority than Roosevelt would like. The Republicans also tend to attach strings to Lend Lease, especially Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union. In early 1943 they push through several provisions requiring actions from the Soviet Union as a condition for continuing to receive Lend-Lease:

• That the Soviet Union account for and release all prisoners of war and other detainees originating from within the pre-September 1939 boundaries of Poland, and the three Baltic Republics.
• That it guarantee that pre-war borders will be restored at the end of the war.
• That it allow US supplies to flow through the Soviet Union to the Nationalist Chinese.
• That it release economic information to establish the need for aid asked for, and the inability to pay for that aid—bringing it in line with Britain.

Roosevelt opposes all of those provisions, but given the size and importance of the Polish-American vote he finds it difficult to do so too openly. The Soviet Union is adamantly opposed to all of those provisions, but in early 1943 is not in a good position to openly defy them, for reasons that will become apparent later. A fairly substantial number of additional Poles are repatriated to the Middle East, taking a round-about route through eastern Iran in order to avoid German-held areas. A trickle of US supplies reaches China through adjacent areas of the Soviet Union. The Soviets make ambiguous statements that may or may not mean that they accept the pre-war boundaries of Poland.

Roosevelt certifies that the Soviets have met the legal conditions set down by the new laws. That becomes politically embarrassing when the Germans find the mass graves of Polish officers at Katyrn forest. At that point, congressional leaders demand a real accounting of Polish prisoners of war, and Stalin withdraws from participation in the Lend-Lease program rather than provide that accounting. That withdrawal is less significant than it seems, at least in the short run. The Soviets can still buy key US goods, and they can still receive aid from Britain. To a certain extent, Roosevelt can simply increase Lend-Lease aid to Britain, which then uses those Lend-Lease goods to replace British-made items that are then given to the Soviet Union. At the same time, the Lend-Lease disputes make for a much cooler relationship between the Soviets and the US.

November 1942-mid 1943: Pacific theatre. In spite of their recent victories in Java and the successful landings in the northern part of Sumatra, US forces have a major problem. The Roosevelt administration simply can’t afford to lose any more ground in the Philippines from a political standpoint. The Bataan Peninsula has fallen, but the island fortress of Corregidor is still holding out, as are other smaller US and Philippine forces in the southern Philippines. The American public is deeply concerned about the fate of those men, far more concerned than they are about what happens to the British in North Africa or the Soviet Union in the Caucasus.

That public concern drives American policy far more than the Roosevelt administration would like for it to, and far more than the overall interests of the United States and the interests of the Allies as a whole would indicate. Continued US resistance in the Philippines has become both a symbol to the American people and an albatross to the US military.

By November 1942, the US is putting a major effort into sustaining and reinforcing the remaining US/Filipino forces. B17 bombers are being diverted from their normal missions to fly from Java across Japanese-held Borneo and airdrop vital supplies to the Corregidor garrison. They can also provide a small amount of air support to that garrison. A few dozen P40 fighters make perilous one-way flights to improvised airbases in US-held islands in the southern Philippines. Blockade-runners bring in military specialists and supplies to stiffen the US/Filipino forces in those areas.

The US faces a problem though. The Dutch East Indies are absolutely vital to the Japanese—ultimately more vital than China, and at least as vital as Manchuria. That means that the Japanese are in the long run going to be willing to bring in whatever amount of power from those other theatres that they feel is necessary to win in the Dutch East Indies.

In our time-line, the bulk of Japanese divisions—70 to 80 percent of them—stayed in the Chinese and Manchurian theatres until late in the war when the Japanese home islands appeared threatened. In this time-line, the US is already facing a somewhat higher percentage of Japanese power. It may be facing an even higher percentage soon. The Chinese Nationalists have been worn down enough by five years of fighting that they have little offensive capability, and the Soviet Union is not in a position to cause trouble in Manchuria in the near future. On the other hand, in our time-line the US typically had 10 to 15% percent of its divisions in the Pacific in 1942-43, so in this time-line the US percentage can also be much higher.

The main constraints on Japanese force levels in the Dutch East Indies theatre are internal Japanese military politics and shipping. Japan doesn’t have to transport supplies all the way across the Pacific Ocean, but the distances involved are not trivial, and the Japanese simply don’t have enough shipping to support even the divisions that they already have in the theatre, much less new ones. On the other hand, the Japanese are far more willing to put troops into a position where they will eventually starve to death or have to live off the land than most Western armies would be.

Sumatra has joined Java as a key battleground of the battle for the East Indies. As US forces build up in northern Sumatra, the Japanese rush forces to the southern part of that island, and reinforce their garrisons in southern Malaysia. Both sides are hampered by the fact that there isn’t a lot of infrastructure on the island. Roads, port facilities, and airports have to be built in order to support large numbers of troops. The US has a major advantage in the long term, because they are more capable of building that infrastructure. The Japanese have an advantage in the short-term in that they are willing to commit troops without that infrastructure.

The battles for Java, Sumatra, and the other islands of the East Indies rage through the winter of 1942/43. By March of 1943 it is becoming apparent that the Japanese are losing. The US has built up its air power in the area to the point where it dominates the skies. That means that the Japanese are forced to bring in supplies on destroyers under cover of darkness, like they did at Guadalcanal. They simply don’t have enough ships to bring in supplies to all of the island battles of this time-line. By March of 1943, Japanese troops in Java, Timor, and Bali are starving and running out of ammunition. That doesn’t mean that they stop being tough opponents. Rooting the survivors out of those islands is a tough, brutal, high casualty business for the United States.

As the Japanese weaken, the US is also building up naval superiority. Both the US and Japanese navies were severely weakened in the battles of late 1942, but the US is able to rebuild more quickly. As the first half of 1943 wears on, the US navy becomes numerically stronger than the Japanese. It still isn’t quite up to the Japanese level in terms of night-fighting skills, but it has closed the gap considerable.

US production is the decisive factor. In 1942/43, the US builds 18 new aircraft carriers to 5 new Japanese carriers. That doesn’t even count the 39 new US escort carriers. In that same period, the US builds 212 new destroyers, compared to 20 new Japanese destroyers.

With the increasing naval power, the US is also becoming bolder in a strategic sense. The US is reinforcing bypassed US and Filipino forces in the southern Philippines. That threatens to totally cut off Japanese troops in Java, Sumatra and Borneo, not to mention the more remote islands where the Japanese and Americans are locked in battle.

The US is also using it’s airpower to go after Japanese held oil installations in the Dutch East Indies, along with tankers taking oil from those installations to the home islands. That’s a war-winning strategy. The Japanese started the war with an oil reserve that they thought would last them somewhat over a year and a half. War time oil consumption has been much higher than expected, and Japan’s prewar reserves have been used up by February 1943, though oil from the East Indies has added in a one or two month supply.

Oil production from the East Indies fields has been much lower than expected. The Japanese don’t control all of those fields and the ones they do control are close enough to Allied-held territory that the Allies can harass them with bombing raids. By April 1943, the Japanese are totally dependent on new oil production, and living hand-to-mouth on less than 20 percent of the oil their war-time economy needs. That’s disastrous militarily. Military production tumbles from levels that are already too low. The Japanese navy has to carefully build up oil stockpiles before every major operation.

The Japanese oil shortage gives the US navy more and more a free hand in isolating and picking off Japanese garrisons. It also makes it difficult for the Japanese to move troops around, or even escort the crucial oil tankers. By May of 1943, Japan’s power has slipped enough that the US pushes Japanese forces out of southern Sumatra, recapturing the oil wells there, and making the Japanese oil problems even more severe. The US also pushes the Japanese out of Bali, and compresses the remaining Japanese forces on Java into two die-hard pockets.

The US now controls the air over the southern Philippines, and is flying in specialists to build up US and Filipino forces there. The Japanese still hold Borneo and several other islands between Java and the Philippines, but US air power has been able to suppress Japanese naval and air power in the area enough that US aircraft and occasional fast ships can make a still-dangerous dash through to the Philippines.

The US now has B17s based in the southern Philippines, where they fly support missions against Japanese forces around Corregidor. The Corrigedor garrison is still in a desperate position, but the US can now get a much needed trickle of aid through to that garrison.

By June 1943, the Japanese appear to be on the ropes. Lack of oil cripples military production and renders its navy nearly useless. Taking capital ships out to battle requires an enormous amount of oil, so Japan has to carefully plan and stockpile oil for any major operation. That in turn makes it easier for the US to interfere with oil production and shipments, which leads to a downward spiral. The Japanese desperately try to expand their small coal-gasification program, and find substitutes for oil in their increasingly starving economy.

The US takes advantage of the Japanese weakness to launch a major amphibious landing on Halmahera Island between New Guinea and Celebes. At almost the same time, a joint British and American force from Sumatra lands on the Malaysian peninsula, cutting off Japanese troops in Singapore and in the lower peninsula.

The US forces quickly take Halmahera, opening the way to the southern Philippines. As the US builds airbases on the island, land-based US airpower dominates the oceans along the eastern edge of Borneo. The US quickly consolidates its hold on the southern Philippines, and uses airbases there to dominate the sea lanes north from Borneo. The Malaysian landing has a more difficult time because the Japanese can reinforce their troops over land rather than water, and the last Japanese troops aren’t cleared out of southern Malaysia and Singapore for several months.

With the shipment of oil becoming more and more difficult, the Japanese are in a desperate position. Barring outside help, their position appears hopeless. They do have some aces up their sleeves though. As the Allies prepare to close in on the Japanese home islands, the Japanese begin kamikaze attacks. Those attacks are mainly aimed at US shipping, but some are aimed at the garrison of Corregidor which has frustrated the Japanese for so long.

Meanwhile in North Africa: The Germans and Italians get a major morale boost in November 1942 when the British-held island of Malta finally surrenders after a prolonged Axis siege. The island stopped being effective militarily in the summer of 1942 due to lack of supplies, but it tied down Axis assets and could easily have become a threat again if the Allies had been able to get a convoy through. The fall of Malta makes it much easier for the Axis to supply its forces in North Africa, though poor and damaged port facilities still make getting food, ammunition and fuel to their forces iffy.

The Axis has another problem in North Africa. After the fall of much of Egypt in late summer of 1942, the US rushed several hundred Sherman tanks to British forces in the area. Those tanks are comparable to the best German armor available in North Africa in late 1942, and they make Italian tanks like the M14/41 totally obsolete. Even reasonably comparable Italian tanks won’t be available for at least six months, and then only in small numbers. That’s important because the Italians have supplied an important part of the Axis armor in North Africa, and when well-led have performed reasonably well. As Shermans become more common in North Africa, the Italian armored divisions will become less and less effective unless the Germans fill the gap, something that they are reluctant to do given the situation on the Eastern Front.

Hitler has mixed emotions about North Africa. He could certainly use the resources he is using there, especially the tanks and planes, on the eastern front. On the other hand it is possible that Rommel will take the shoestring of resources he has been given and produce a strategic victory for Germany. Pushing Britain out of the Middle East entirely would finish the British as an independent military power, possibly bring Turkey into the war on Germany’s side, and give Germany access to the oil that it has yet to seize in the Soviet Union.

Hitler reacts to his mixed emotions about North Africa the same way he has in the past, sending a trickle of new supplies, but never enough to secure victory. Part of the problem is that even without Malta the Axis has trouble getting supplies across the Mediterranean. Germany has little merchant shipping and Italy has lost much of its shipping in a year and a half of war.

The Axis has a realistic chance of pushing the British out of the Middle East in the early fall of 1942, but doesn’t have a lot of logistics support or time to pull that off. By the end of November 1942, the British will have finished integrating hundreds of new Sherman tanks into their army, and hundreds of new US-built fighter planes into their air force. Those tanks and planes were rushed to the Middle East after the German/Italian victories in the summer of 1942 that left this time-line’s Germans and Italians at the Suez Canal. If the British get a chance to integrate that new equipment, they will be difficult to beat.

Rommel does push across the Suez Canal in early November, and the British find themselves hard-pressed to stop him, especially when Arabs in Palestine and Syria stage a major revolt. Arab and Jewish irregulars fight a brutal little war within a war in November and December 1942, while the hard-pressed British have to concentrate on keeping supply lines open to their front lines in the Sinai. Rommel is at his best in early November 1942, slashing through British defenses and pushing them out of most of the Sinai. That success triggers another revolt in Iraq, where the British crushed an Iraqi nationalist revolt in early 1941.

With the British position in the Middle East wobbling badly, the US diverts still-scarce shipping to pour even more war material into the Middle East. That may make a difference in a few months, but the crisis is now. British forces that had retreated to upper Egypt launch an offensive to take the pressure off their forces in the Sinai. That helps some, but Germans are moving fast to reinforce success. German airborne forces that had been built up for an assault on Malta are shifted to German-held bases in Egypt, then fly into an Iraqi nationalist held airbase in Iraq.

The airborne forces secure the airport while the Germans quickly fly heavier forces into Iraq. The Germans and Italians then cut through southern Palestine and Transjordan to link up with the airborne forces, leaving only tenuous supply lines open to the British forces in Palestine.

British forces have been rushing toward the area from India, and the British still have substantial forces guarding oil fields and supply lines to the Soviet Union through Iran. On the other hand, Iranian nationalists are looking at the weakened British position and contemplating revolt. That revolt comes in early December as Axis forces reach the Iraq-Iran border.

The British simply don’t have enough troops to handle all of these crises. To make matters even more complicated, Kurdish areas in both Iraq and Iran revolt against both the Allies and the Arab nationalists. Churchill does something that would normally be unthinkable for a British prime minister. He asks Stalin for help in crushing the Iranian nationalist revolt and shoring up the defense of Iran. That would normally be unthinkable for the British because of a decades-old rivalry between Britain and Russia over influence in Iran, but the crisis is severe enough that Churchill is willing to invite the Soviets in and hope that he can get them back out later.

The Soviets are cooperative for once, mainly because Stalin sees this as a historic opportunity to reach Soviet geopolitical goals. The Soviets reinforce their troops in northern Iran, in spite of the needs of their own offensive, then move south and suppress the Iranian nationalists with a considerable amount of brutality, even by Soviet standards.

The Germans are still pressing their advantage though. German airplanes are now in easy flying range of the huge oil refinery complex at Abadan in southern Iran. That refinery supplies the needs of British troops in the Middle East, and goes a long way toward supplying the rest of the British empire. It also provides the Soviets with high octane aviation gas that they can’t make on their own. German air-raids and a series of attacks by German sapper teams leave much of the refinery in flames. The damage can be repaired in fairly short order if the raids can be stopped, but stopping those raids is going to be very difficult as long as the Germans and Iraqi nationalists hold much of southern Iraq.

To add to Britain’s woes, Germany has been pressuring Turkey to intervene in northern Iraq to take back areas that Turkey had longed claimed. Turkish troops move into northern Iraq, though the Turks don’t declare war on the British and claim that they are just safeguarding their southeastern border. For the time being the British are too weak to do anything about the Turkish move beyond sending harshly worded diplomatic notes. Most of the area was held by rebel Kurds before the Turkish move anyway.

The Germans want the Turks to do a lot more, including allowing German troops and supplies to transit through Turkey to fight in Iraq, and joining the war against the Soviet Union on the German side. They’ve been trying to manipulate the Turks into that kind of an alliance since they invaded the Soviet Union, but the Turks want no part of it.

The Turks have been stringing the Germans along as best they can, hinting that the Turks might join the Axis under certain conditions, but stalling and trying to win concessions and if at all possible stay out of war altogether. In our time-line that worked, and the Turks were able to stay out of the war until it was clear that Germany was going to lose. In this time-line, the British defeats make the Turkish balancing act a lot harder to maintain. The Turks grudgingly make some concessions, increasing shipments of some vital raw materials to Germany, and allowing the Germans and Italians to ship some supplies, though no troops, through Turkey to Iraq. The Turks also turn a blind eye to Axis over-flights from Axis-held Crete and Rhodes to the Middle East.

By now most of the Middle East is in chaos, with British forces still precariously holding a large pocket of territory in northern and central Palestine, the western part of TransJordan, Lebanon, and part of Syria. Much of that territory is in chaos, with Arab nationalists fighting the British, Jewish settlers, and often trying to settle old scores between or within ethnic groups that leave outsiders bewildered. The British forces are cut off for the most part, though Axis forces are thin enough on the ground that well-armed, fast-moving convoys can fight their way through Iraqi territory and get a trickle of ammunition through to British-held territory. The British also supply their cut-off troops by air to some extent, and get a few vital supplies through by submarine across from Gibraltar to British-held Cyprus, and then to Lebanese ports.

In this desperate situation, Churchill actually pries hundreds of bombers out of the hands of the British bomber command and sends them to the Middle East to held airlift supplies to the trapped men. That’s a stopgap measure, designed to keep the cut-off British troops from losing too much combat power before the British can build up in southern Iran and southern Egypt and attempt to link back up.

While the British position looks precarious, the Germans and Italians also have their problems. Rommel has been winning his victories on a shoestring. He commands a little over a dozen divisions, most of them weak Italian ones. The advance to the Iranian border has weakened those forces considerably as tanks and trucks break down or are knocked out, and replacements fail to arrive in a timely manner.

The Axis units also have to fight on three fronts: keeping the British forces in southern Egypt in check, screening cut-off British forces in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, and trying to push into Iran. The Axis has only gotten as far as it has by moving fast enough to keep Allied decision-makers off balance, getting inside their decision-making loop. Objectively the Germans and Italians shouldn’t be able to hold on to what they’ve already grabbed, much less grab more. In late November 1942 through February of 1943 the Germans are not in a position to send much in the way of reinforcements, as we’ll see in the next section. The Italians can send infantry divisions and some planes, but their armor is simply not even close to competitive anymore. Germany’s Arab nationalist allies are simply not well enough trained or armed to play a major role in the conventional fighting, though they do tie down British forces to some extent.

Hitler pushes Rommel to keep going, pushing into Iran. Rommel doesn’t need much urging, though he knows that his forces are exhausted and logistically in no shape to continue the offensive. The main problem for Rommel is that he has to get his forces across the Shatt-al-Arab waterway. British gunboats dominate that area, and while the Germans can slip small forces across for sabotage missions, getting larger forces across and keeping them supplied will be difficult as long as those gunboats can operate freely.

German and British planes fight to control the air over southern Iran. If the Germans can control the air, they can force British naval forces out of the area and have a shot at getting troops across. The British know that, and pour air power into the area as quickly as they can. The battle for southern Iran is almost as crucial for the British as the Battle of Britain was.

The British empire desperately needs the oil from Abadan and the surrounding oil fields, and for the moment the flow of oil from the area has been reduced to a precarious trickle by German air raids and sabotage efforts. That puts the entire British war effort in jeopardy. Without Middle East oil, the British simply can’t operate as an independent great power.

Roosevelt gears up to help out by shipping more US oil to Britain and starting shipments to the Middle East. It will take a while to gear up for that. The US also sends oil experts to the area to put out oil fires and help repair the refinery at Abadan. In early January 1943 Roosevelt also diverts a division of US troops from the Pacific to Iran, where they take over protection of Lend-Lease routes through Iran to the Soviet Union. That frees up British troops to face the Germans and Italians. It also sours Roosevelt’s relationship with the incoming Republican-led House of Representatives, though he makes the move before they take office.

The German and Italian oil situation is still precarious too. The speed of the Axis advance into Iraq allowed the Germans to seize some of the Iraqi oil facilities reasonably intact. That lets them keep their forces in the Middle East reasonably well supplied, but it doesn’t help the German or Italian economies very much. The problem is getting the oil back to Italy and Germany without using up most of it in transport. Some Iraqi oil does make it back to Italy and to Italian and German forces in Greece and Yugoslavia, but the Axis simply doesn’t have the infrastructure to make really major use of the oil outside of the Middle East.

Meanwhile on the Eastern Front: As noted last issue, the Soviets have spent much of 1942 training and equipping an enormous strategic reserve that Stalin hopes will be able to inflict a decisive defeat on the Germans late in 1942. As in our time-line, the Soviets have been ruthless about maintaining that reserve, allowing Soviet armies to be defeated and Soviet cities to be seized rather than prematurely committing the reserve. In this time-line, the Soviet reserve is not really ready to strike a decisive blow in November 1942. Promised Lend-Lease trucks haven’t arrived due to the shipping shortage and the crisis in the Middle East.

The Soviet air force is not ready to contest the skies with the Germans for several reasons. They have fewer planes because of reduced Lend-Lease, and reduced shipments of Lend-Lease aluminum for Soviet aircraft production. They have fewer trained pilots because of shortages of aviation gas. They are facing more German aircraft because the Operation Torch landings in North Africa haven’t occurred, and haven’t siphoned off German airpower. Promised Lend-Lease boots, locomotives, radios, and food have also been slow in arriving. The Soviets are also facing oil and rubber shortages, which have reduced their ability to produce new equipment, and their ability to train their new armored units.

The Soviet army of this time-line’s November 1942 can’t move as fast or as far as it did in our time-line’s November 1942. It can’t coordinate attacks as well. It is far more vulnerable to German air power. It has thousands fewer tanks. On the other hand, this is still a powerful army. The masses of T34 tanks are formidable for the Germans and almost unstoppable for the likes of the Romanians and Italians. The Soviet troops are tough and their commanders are innovative. Some of those commanders, including Zhukov, have become increasingly skeptical about the Red Army’s ability to carry out the sweeping set of offensives that are being planned given the logistics situation. They would prefer that the Red Army concentrate on a more limited set of objectives, but Stalin insists that the Germans are over-extended enough that the Soviets can win a strategic victory

The Soviet offensive begins in late November with an attempt to break through to Soviet forces trapped with their backs to the Caspian Sea. That’s a reasonably powerful attack, but it is also primarily a diversion, intended to suck more German mobile forces south away from the main Soviet target: the recapture of Stalingrad, followed by an offensive intended to break through to the Black Sea, cutting off the bulk of the German mobile divisions on the Southern part of the eastern front in the Caucasus. The Soviets also have major offensives planned against German Army Group Center and around Leningrad.

The diversionary offensive toward the Caspian doesn’t make much headway. That isn’t unexpected. The Germans are strong in the area near the Caspian. The Soviet offensive also fails to force the Germans to shift forces south though, which makes part two of the Soviet plan more difficult.

The main offensive comes about three weeks later than it did in our time-line. The Soviet railroad system is in very bad shape, and it simply can’t shift supplies and troops around as quickly as it did in our time-line. As I mentioned earlier, some troops meant for the offensive are shifted to Iran at the last minute—less than ten percent of the Soviet total, but still unwelcome to the Soviets commanders trying to put their offensive together.

As in our time-line, the offensive aimed at Stalingrad initially focuses on Romanian troops holding the front lines and slices through them. The Romanians just aren’t equipped to handle masses of T34s. Most of the German mobile forces on the southern front are deep in the Caucasus, but the German forces in the area swing into action to seal off the holes. The Luftwaffe swings into action against Soviet armor, along with Soviet logistics and communications targets.

The Soviet offensive is intended to cut off Axis troops with a relatively shallow set of pincers around Stalingrad itself, and a deeper set of pincers to slice deeply into German lines, hopefully cutting off enough Germans troops to significantly weaken the Germans and set up a push to the Black Sea. The shallow pincer closes. The deeper one doesn’t, due to inadequate Soviet logistics and German air superiority. The Soviets discover that it is very difficult to do a blitzkrieg when the other side has air superiority, and lose a considerable number of men and tanks as they figure that out.

The Soviet offensive does destroy several Romanian divisions and a couple of German ones. It also traps a little over thirty thousand Axis troops in Stalingrad—the relatively small garrison that remained there after the Germans took the city, plus forces pushed back into the city by the Soviet offensive. About half of the trapped forces are German, the rest mainly Croatian with a few Romanians mixed in.

The Soviets aren’t done in the south. They attack Italian-held portions of the Axis line, and slice through the Italians even more easily than they did the Romanians. They aren’t able to turn that breakthrough into a strategic victory either, and the Germans show that they still have an edge in mobile warfare by cutting off and destroying a substantial part of the Soviet mobile divisions. The battles around Stalingrad also show that the German edge is much smaller than it was a year earlier. The Germans take heavy casualties and find that most Soviet soldiers will fight to the death rather become German prisoners.

The Germans are ultimately able to link back up with the Axis forces in Stalingrad and restore essentially the same line they started with. Soviet offensives against Army Group Center and around Leningrad have similar results. The Soviet army of this time-line simply isn’t capable of producing a strategic victory on the scale of our time-line’s Stalingrad in November/December 1942. It doesn’t have enough aircraft. It doesn’t have enough trucks. It is starting to run out of oil. It does have a lot of brave men, and it uses up over a million of them in the futile offensives. Over a hundred thousand additional Soviet troops are killed or captured in late February 1943 when the Soviet pocket by the Caspian Sea collapses. The Germans and especially their minor allies also take heavy casualties, though nowhere near the Soviet casualty rate.

Fighting dies down in March 1943 as the spring mud makes movement difficult for both sides. The front lines are very close to what they were in November of 1942. Both sides are exhausted and trying desperately to rebuild for renewed fighting in the summer.

The Soviets and Germans have had tentative and indirect contacts throughout the war. Those contacts become a little more substantial in spring of 1943. Both sides would like to end the war, but only on their term, and those terms are far apart. The Germans want everything they have captured so far, plus the rest of the Caucasus oil fields. The Soviets want at least the boundaries of September 1939, and hopefully the territory they seized between September 1939 and the German invasion.

The Germans would like peace on the Eastern Front, and soon because Japanese power is visibly fading. Hitler doesn’t want to be tied down in the Soviet Union at a time when the US can shift the bulk of its power to the Atlantic. True, the countries aren’t officially at war, but Roosevelt has made it obvious that defeating Germany remains a high priority for the US. On the other hand, Germany does not want a peace treaty with the Soviets that leaves Germany dependant on the Soviets for raw materials. They’ve already tried that and discovered that they can’t trust Stalin to deliver if he doesn’t think he has to.

The Soviets want peace badly. They’ve taken the brunt of the war so far, and while they would obviously like to win the war, Stalin would prefer a draw to a victory that left the Soviet Union drained and vulnerable. Also, the Soviet war effort is in serious trouble. War production has dropped sharply in the first months of 1943. The heavily stressed Soviet transportation system is falling apart. The Soviets drove their railroads and truck fleet far beyond their sustainable capabilities during the emergencies of 1941 and 1942, just as they did in our time-line. In this time-line though, US lend-lease trucks and locomotives haven’t arrived to replace the worn-out Soviet equipment.

Lack of oil is also hurting Soviet war production. The Soviets lost most of their coal producing areas to the Germans in 1941. That made oil even more vital than it had been before the war. The Germans have only seized a small part of Soviet oil production, but they’ve made it difficult to get the rest of that oil where it is needed. The Germans have cut off oil pipelines and river traffic up the Volga River, along with all land-based routes from the oil fields directly to the rest of the Soviet Union. The Soviets can still transport oil across the Caspian Sea to avoid the Germans, and they can transport the oil through Iran and back to the Soviet Union on the other side of the Caspian Sea, but they don’t have the infrastructure in place to do either of those things on a large enough scale to meet their needs. Also, both the oil fields and tankers trying to transport oil across the Caspian Sea are in easy range of the Luftwaffe, which has concentrated on interdicting the oil flow.

Overall, Soviet war production in early 1943 is at roughly half the level it was during the equivalent period in our time, and those levels are falling as oil stockpiles dry up. Even that level of war production comes at a huge human cost, as Soviet civilians shiver and sometimes freeze to death in the cold and dark of a Russian winter and spring.

The germ and chemical wars are still going on. The Germans are using chemical agents with devastating effectiveness against Soviet partisans and the civilians that support them. The Germans are also starting to use germ agents in small quantities, though they haven’t ramped up production enough to make large quantities of biological agents yet. The Germans are also racing to build up large quantities of nerve gas. They haven’t used nerve gas on the eastern front yet, but Hitler has something special in mind for that gas, as well as for the stockpile of biological agents that the Germans are building.

The Soviets are facing a rising tide of epidemic disease even without germ warfare. Their population is vulnerable. Soviet civilians are increasingly malnourished, cold, and physically exhausted by the long hours of war production work. The Soviets try to keep those diseases in check with movement restrictions that are draconian even by Soviet standards, but they can’t entirely control them. An influenza strain that would normally have only been a serious problem for the very old kills several hundred thousand malnourished and exhausted Soviet citizens in January of 1943 and sets off panic in some areas as people remember the killer wartime flu epidemic at the end of World War I. A strain of pneumonia also takes its toll, hitting the besieged city of Leningrad especially hard.

And that’s about it for this time: Where does it go from here? The Soviets are exhausted. The Germans are over-extended, even more than they were in our time-line. The Japanese are almost certainly beaten, but they don’t know how to surrender, and the US doesn't know how to make them. Without Stalingrad as a wake-up call, the Germans are still dangerously overconfident, and Hitler is still playing at being a general, something he is by no means qualified to do.

The German army of this time-line’s spring 1943 is not man-for-man or General-for-General as good as the German army of June 1941 was.  Many of the highly trained cadres that Hitler inherited from the Weimar Republic are casualties now, as are many of the best German lower-level officers and NCOs. The German style of war put officers closer to the front than most armies—something that made the army more effective in the short run, but robbed it of bright aggressive young leaders in the longer term. The demands of the eastern front have forced the Germans to bring in manpower of lower quality than they would really like to use, including a growing number of ethnic Poles who are good fighting men but have no desire to fight for Germany.

German war production in early 1943 is at approximately the same level it was in our time-line. The Germans control more raw materials and manpower in this time-line, but without a disaster at Stalingrad some of the urgency that went into war production in our time-line is not there. The mix of war production is also somewhat different, with weapons useful on the eastern front taking higher priority than in our time-line while air defense, fortifying the Atlantic Coast, and to some extent building U-boats gets less emphasis, at least for now. Also, within categories of weapons a much larger percentage of German war production goes to the eastern front. For example, many German 88 mm guns that were sited around German cities in our time-line are picking off Soviet tanks in this time-line.

What happens next? Does Germany manage to carve out a long-term empire in the east in spite of these problems? Does the US enter the war against Germany after Japan is disposed of? Can Britain hang on to the vital oil-fields in southern Iran and get them back in production? If they don’t Britain will not be able to sustain an independent war effort, though the US may be able to prop them up and keep them in the war. Will the Soviets be able to break the German strangle-hold on 85% of Soviet oil? Who ends up in control of the vital oil fields of the Caucasus?