Craig Neumier asked in the last issue of POD if it would be possible to find a divergence that led to France defeating Germany in 1940. I decided to treat that as a challenge. I chose a point of divergence in January 1940.

What actually happened: In our time-line in January 1940, a German officer with plans for the German invasion of Belgium and France crashed in Belgium. Belgium's army managed to capture most of the plans. In our time-line the capture of the plans actually ended up helping the Germans out. The Germans figured that their plans were probably blown and came up with their war-winning strategy of luring the French into Belgium, then cutting off the best of the French army with an offensive through the Ardennes.

In spite of the fact that the plans clearly showed that the Germans intended to violate Belgian neutrality, the Belgian government persisted in a policy of strict neutrality, though they briefly took down barriers between France and Belgium due to some crossed signals, and some fast response French divisions spent some cold hours on alert waiting to dash into Belgium as soon as they were invited. The invitation never came, and the border barriers soon went back up, as the Belgian government and especially it's king clung to the illusion that neutrality was possible.

Belgian neutrality was France's greatest strategic weakness. It gave Germany the strategic initiative-letting them choose when the war got serious. It forced the French to dash into Belgium in response to the German invasion-risking an encounter battle that the Germans were very good at and that the French really wanted to avoid.

What might have happened: Let's say German intelligence picks up the removal of the barriers between Belgium and France and French preparations to move into Belgium. Hitler puts those things together and gets a picture of a secret Belgian invitation and a French move into Belgium before the Germans move. As the Germans become aware of the crashed plane and the lost plans, that appears to seal it. Hitler is convinced that the French are going to move. If they do that successfully, the French will be able to dig in and they'll be much harder to defeat. They'll also be entirely too close to vital German industrial areas for Hitler's taste, and in an area without strong defenses.

Hitler decides to pre-empt that move. Unfortunately for the Germans, that isn't as simple as pressing a button. The German army command says that they can be ready to move in 7 days. With a French move apparently imminent, Hitler orders immediate airstrikes to knock out the Belgian airforce and key bridges that the French will need to move north. The Germans attack as best they can, but are starting out off-balance, in atrocious weather, and with their troops coming onto the battlefield piecemeal. The French are ready to go, and they are crossing friendly territory.

To make matters worse for the Germans, thick fog begins to blanket large parts of Belgium, making air support impossible, and making an already confused advance more difficult to coordinate. Columns of German and Belgian troops blunder into each other in the fog, and sudden firefights erupt. As French troops arrive in the battle zone, they add to the confused and deadly drama. Men fight and die in the fog and in the waist-deep snow, often lost and short on supplies.

Both sides are hampered by the weather, but the Germans are hurt much more. Their advantages in mobility and airpower are neutralized, leaving them to slug it out with the Belgians and with the French in a way much closer to the war the French expected and had prepared for that the one the Germans expected.

On the other hand, the Germans are well-trained and very capable of reacting fast in a fluid and confusing situation. Also, French commander Gamelin gambles, just as he did in our time-line. The relative weakness of the initial German attack encourages him to push deeper into Belgium than he had initially planned.

Belgium's defenses are anchored on a series of powerful fortresses and field fortifications along river lines. The Germans manage to break through the initial fortifications in a couple of places, then send the bulk of their available armor through the gaps in an attempt to cut off the Belgian forts.

One of the German columns runs head-on into an advancing French force of a light armored division (DLM) and two motorized infantry divisions. The Germans have an advantage in number of tanks, and would normally be more mobile, but the snow and fog make the first big tank battle of World War II a slogging match, and the French tanks have thicker armor and more firepower. Under those conditions, the French can and do win. They are helped by the fact that German logistics are falling apart.

The improvised nature of the German offensive, combined with extremely high fuel consumption needed in the extreme cold and heavy snow, quickly cause the German offensive to literally run out of gas. That puts them in a very vulnerable position, with long difficult to defend flanks. The French move up more divisions, and the Germans find themselves trying to defend two long thin fingers of territory with troops that are short of food, gas, and sometimes ammunition. The German high command wants to pull back, but Hitler issues the same kind of "hold fast" order that he was famous for in our time-line.

The French cut-off one of those fingers near its base. That isolates the bulk of three panzer divisions and several motorized infantry divisions. The German commander inside the pocket ignores Hitler's orders and stages a breakout attempt before the French consolidate their hold on the area around the pocket. The Germans manage to get over half of their men out, but they have to leave most of their heavy equipment behind. The other German column also comes under heavy pressure, but manages to hold open a corridor against increasingly fierce French and Belgian counter-attacks long enough to get most of their units out, though they also have to leave much of their heavy equipment behind.

The French and Belgians take over 30,000 prisoners. The Germans have to leave a devastating amount of heavy equipment behind. The French and Belgians count nearly a thousand tanks, over fifteen thousand trucks, and well over 1500 artillery pieces, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns, among their loot. Much of the material is salvageable, abandoned after running out of gas or getting bogged down in the snow or mud. The tanks are of limited use without spare parts, but the Belgians and French are very happy to get their hands on the trucks and artillery, especially anti-aircraft guns like the famous German "88".

The defeat jars German confidence, and also leaves them materially much weaker in relation to the French. It opens already developing wounds in the German leadership, with Hitler and the army leadership blaming each other for the fiasco. Hitler's grip on power is nowhere near as strong as it had become in our time-line by the time he faced his first major defeat, and in this time-line that grip becomes much less secure after the defeat.

The horrendous weather forces a lull on the war front. The French are not offensive-minded enough to take advantage of German weakness, and the Germans have a lot of rebuilding to do. Small-scale clashes continue, especially in the Ardennes, where German troops have pushed forward as part of the general German offensive. They are harassed by French and Belgian light partially mechanized cavalry units and hampered by deep snow.

The balance of power has shifted sharply against Germany. They lost over eight months worth of tank production, over a year of truck production, and around fifteen percent of their artillery. What's worse is that captured German artillery goes to equip French divisions-though shortages of ammunition mean that they go primarily to "B" series infantry divisions on quiet sections of the front. In some cases like the "88" the French are impressed enough by the German weapons to start making ammunition for them. German trucks are used to motorize a couple of French divisions. The rest of the trucks are stored to be cannibalized for spare parts.

Captured German tanks are not issued to French units. There aren't enough spare parts to make that worthwhile. They are studied closely by French tank designers, and then are used to train French tank crews until they break down. Some of them lose their turrets, which are incorporated in French defensive works. Belgium actually does use a few dozen Panzer II's to equip a small armored unit.

Strategically, the Germans are much worse off than they were in our time-line. France's biggest strategic weakness in our time-line was that in order to keep the industrialized areas of northern France from becoming a battleground they had to rush forward into Belgium as soon as the Germans invaded that country. With front lines stabilized deep inside Belgium, the French have a lot more options. They can hold their motorized and mechanized forces in reserve.

The war settles down into a routine of raids and artillery duels in mid-February 1940. German general have long advocated an extensive period of training and re-organization prior to any offensive in the west. They now get their wish. The army is obviously not ready for any kind of offensive action.

As in our time-line, Germany faces a number of problems in early 1940. The railroad system has been pushed hard by the demands of war, and is starting to break down. The Soviets have been dragging their feet on supplying or transshipping promised raw materials, so the Germans are suffering severe shortages of rubber, steel, and oil. In both time-lines, the Germans have actually been losing ground in terms of motorizing their army. They are producing around 1000 trucks per month, not enough to replace worn-out vehicles among the 140,000 trucks they had prior to the January 1940 fighting. Losses in that fighting have cut into German mobility significantly.

The perception of German weakness after their defeats in January makes those problems worse. The Soviets quietly squeeze the Germans a bit more, demanding more finished goods that the Germans can ill afford to give them as the price for a continued trickle of raw material. With the end of the Winter War with Finland, the Soviets even begin suggesting that border adjustment between the German and Soviet parts of Poland may be necessary to insure continued deliveries. The Germans look at the units they have in the east versus what the Soviets have, and quietly shift 15 infantry divisions from the western part of Germany back to Poland. The Germans don't expect a Soviet attack, but they have no intention of leaving themselves open to one.

The fighting has actually strengthened France in a lot of ways in terms of material. The start of serious fighting spurs French production, especially of tanks and aircraft. In our time-line French production of several categories of tanks actually declined in early 1940 as the urgency seemed to evaporate. In this time-line production spikes in January and early February, then remains much higher than in our time-line throughout the spring. The French are especially impressed by the performance of the Somua S35 medium tank, and move to expand production of that tank.

In terms of morale, the fact that real fighting has taken place and that the French won has given French morale a huge shot in the arm. That's especially true in the French officer corp. In both time-lines, too many French generals privately considered their army soft and under-trained-no match for the Germans. The victory in January doesn't entirely erase those attitudes, but it mutes them a bit.

The German training program is hampered by the fact that they are now facing Allied troops along a much longer front, with occasional raids and artillery duels along the front lines. Skirmishing continues, especially in the Ardennes, but the Germans have not pushed into that region vigorously because their emerging concept for a new offensive requires that high quality French troops not be pulled into the area.

In April the Germans launch the invasions of Denmark and Norway essentially on schedule, but the defeat in January has made the Germans much more cautious than in our time-line. The northern and central prongs of the offensive are rejected as too risky and the airborne component is scaled back. That cuts back German naval and airborne losses, but it give the Norwegian army time to get its act together, and for French and English forces to arrive. The campaign drags on as the Germans chew their way north against increasing opposition.

The Norwegian fighting gives the Allies a taste of what the German army can do without the handicaps imposed by fighting an improvised offensive in waist-deep snow with its airpower neutralized. The taste is sobering but instructive. The Germans have learned a lot in the Spanish Civil War and their invasion of Poland. They teach a subset of those lessons to the English and French. Both countries begin revising their fighter tactics. France quietly ups an already large order for US-built radios that they've had on the books since they registered the large number of radios among the captured German forces from the January battles. The French also have their vulnerability to German tactical airstrikes brought home very clearly to them, and work to improve their tactics to counter that vulnerability.

In our time-line the German army dragged its feet on doing an offensive against France. They are even more reluctant in this time-line. The excellent blitzkrieg weather around May 10-May 24 comes and goes without a German push on the western front. That push finally comes in mid-June.

The Germans do a somewhat modified version of the offensive that they implemented starting May 10, 1940 in our time-line. German forces surge into previously neutral Holland, with airdrops to unlock defense lines and choke points while armored forces roll across the border to link up with the airborne forces. Another offensive aims to push into Central Belgium. As in our time-line, the main push is in the Ardennes, with 6 of Germany's 10 panzer divisions and most of their motorized infantry concentrated there.

The Western Allies have planned for a German invasion of Holland. The bulk of the British Expeditionary force surges north and collides with German forces moving into Holland. The result is bloody but inconclusive. The Germans are much less mobile than they were in our time-line, and their panzer divisions are much less powerful, averaging around 60% of the number of tanks they had in our time-line.

The Luftwaffe does have an advantage in the air, but even that is considerably less than in our time-line. In our time-line, the German offensive caught the French in the middle of a major equipment change-over, with a substantial portion of their fighter wings not immediately available. In this time-line that re-equipment is considerably further along, and French fighters are much more competitive, with Dewoitine 520's replacing sluggish and under-armed Morane-Saulner 406's. The Royal Air Force is also stronger, with more Hurricanes and Spitfires available. German dive-bombers and transports prove very vulnerable to Allied fighters, just as they did in our time-line once they had to face serious opposition.

The Dutch fight very hard, just as they did in our time-line. In our time-line they held out less than a week, but inflicted heavy casualties on German airborne forces and transports. In this time-line the presence of the BEF, plus the weaker German forces give the Dutch just enough of an edge to let them eliminate most of the German airborne forces before the Panzers can link up with them. That leaves the Germans with a serious problem. Holland is horrible tank country, with swampy areas and water barriers creating a series of choke points that the airborne forces unlocked in our time-line, but fail to unlock in this one. The Dutch make matters worse by flooding strategic areas. The German offensive in Holland literally bogs down.

The German offensive in Central Belgium doesn't fare much better. Two panzer divisions run into some tough, dug-in French divisions and discover that the French way or making war is very effective when implemented by top-of-the-line units. French artillery dominates the battlefield, making it impossible for the Germans to move forward or back without extremely high casualties. In terms of manpower the French take more casualties, but the Germans lose over forty percent of their tanks in two days of fighting and barely manage to extract themselves from the area. The French army of 1940 had a lot of problems, but it was very good at slugging it out with an enemy, as opposed to out-maneuvering that enemy.

The northern two prongs of the German offensive were basically diversions, with the real action happening in the Ardennes, just as it did in our time-line. Unfortunately for the Germans, conditions for that southern offensive are much less favorable than in our time-line. French cavalry units moved forward into the Ardennes in January, and still control part of the area. They are prepared to stage a fighting retreat in the event of a major German offensive, but they have had time to set mine-fields and various engineering obstacles to slow down any German offensive.

Also, French forces on the main French line along the Meuse River are much stronger than they were in our time-line. In our time-line the French had to send their most mobile and best-trained forces into Belgium to meet the Germans. In this time-line the French are already where they want to be in Belgium, so they can keep their mobile forces in reserve. The French reserve in the area is over twice as large as it was in our time-line, and much more mobile.

The German southern offensive pushes the French back to the Meuse, but the power of that offensive is revealed to the French as the Germans push the French cavalry out of the Ardennes. The French are rushing reinforcements to the area before the Germans reach the river.

In our time-line, the French held the German main offensive along most of the line, but the Germans managed to get across the Meuse in a couple of places, gained some maneuvering room, then rolled up the French defenses, allowing their panzer divisions to gain maneuvering room and push all the way to the coast, trapping the best French armies and most of the British Expeditionary Force in Belgium. Poor morale among the poorly equipped and poorly trained reservists stationed on what was supposed to be a quiet front played a major role in our time-line's French defeat.

In our time-line the French figured that it would take the Germans at least a week to get heavy artillery across the Ardennes, and that without that artillery they wouldn't be able to break French defenses. In this time-line the Germans have already traveled more than half of the distance from their frontier to the Meuse. That has made the French nervous, and French units have gotten much stronger.

In spite of the stronger French defenses, the Germans do manage to get the bulk of a Panzer division across the Meuse. The French bring up reserves, including a light armored division (DLM), which actually has as many tanks, and more powerful ones than this time-line's reduced strength German panzer divisions.

This time-line's second major tank battle rages for two days. The German tanks have better layouts and divisions of crew responsibilities. The French tanks have better armor and more firepower. Tank experts will argue for at least the next 50 years about who actually wins the battle, but the key point is that the French are able to deny the Germans room to maneuver or bring more mobile forces across long enough for more French reinforcements to arrive, including a heavy armored division (DCR). A French DCR is a slow awkward beast, without a great deal of range, but the heavy B1bis tanks are very powerful for attacking specific targets like the German bridgehead across the Meuse. The Germans are forced back across the river. The excellent French artillery makes that a costly procedure. The Germans make several more attempts to cross the river, but the French have the advantage of excellent defensive terrain, and strengthening fortifications.

With the element of surprise lost, and with high quality French troops in the area, the Ardennes offensive becomes an artillery duel, and the French can win at that. Their artillery is at least as good as the Germans'-in some ways a little better.

Germany has to unlock the French defenses along the Meuse, and soon. They scrape together what's left of their airborne troops after the fiasco in Holland, and try an airborne landing behind the main French defenses, combined with very heavy and sustained air attacks and renewed attempts at a river crossing. By now the French airforce has a large part of its fighters in the area, and they challenge the Germans for control of the skies over the battlefield. German transports and dive-bombers find the area very unhealthy. The French Dewoitines are not quite a match for the latest model German Me-109 fighters, but they are more than a match for the Me-110, and they are quite capable of slashing in and destroying or scattering most of a flight of transports, which they do. The German airborne forces never really get together as a fighting force, though they do cause the French to divert a disproportionately large force to hunt them down.

The French line on the Meuse holds one more time, and the Germans have a problem. Their offensive is eating into already skimpy stocks of oil, rubber, and various stocks of ammunition at a prodigious and unsustainable rate. Germany is not prepared for a long war, especially in 1940, and the Germans were already feeling the pinch even before their latest series of offensives.

Hitler wants to continue the offensive, but the German generals have had enough and the offensive trails off. Hitler looks at his options in terms of fighting a long war. Germany desperately needs raw materials in order to function. Stalin has gotten ever more stingy with raw material shipments as Germany's perceived power fades. Shipments are well under ten percent of what Soviet/German economic agreements call for, and less than half of what they were in our time-line. The trickle of poor quality oil that the Soviets have been shipping to the Germans now dries up completely.

Germany has some synthetic fuel plants in operation, but they are producing far less fuel than they later did in our time-line-nowhere near enough to sustain a Great Power at war. They also require enormous amounts of coal, which Germany never seems to have enough of. Hitler would like to supply Italy with large amounts of coal, to keep France and England from using coal as a tool to make Italy dependent on them, but the supply simply isn't large enough to do everything. The Romanians are willing to sell Germany oil, but not in large quantities and only at very high prices.

The Germans got much of the oil for their current offensive by selling Romania large amounts of captured Polish military equipment at below-market prices, but supplies of that equipment are running low. The Romanians have made it clear that they will thoroughly sabotage their oil fields if the Germans invade, and Hitler is very aware that they have the capacity to carry out that threat, so simply taking oil by force is not an option.

The Romanians keep a trickle of oil flowing, but now they are asking for and getting more sophisticated military equipment in exchange-Czech-built 38t tanks and German Me109 fighters that the Germans desperately need for their own armed forces. In an ironic twist, the Romanians actually resell spare parts for those tanks to the French, which allows the French to put some of their captured Czech tanks into service as stop-gap vehicles for a newly forming light armored division (DLM).

Stalin figures that he has the Germans pretty much where he wants them, and he starts turning the screws. The Soviets set up a communist-led Polish army in their portion of Poland, just as they did in the spring of 1941 in our time-line. The Soviets also become more aggressive in the Far East. They end a brief cutoff of military aid to the Nationalist Chinese and push the Chinese Communists to become more aggressive in fighting the Japanese. The Soviets also push their demands for a more favorable division of Poland more aggressively.

Hitler's relationship with the German military is extremely bad. Hitler blames what he considers cowardice on the army's part for the January defeat, and he also blames the army for not pushing the June offensive more vigorously. Generals increasingly blame Hitler's interference for the German defeats. Hitler's new strategy brings that deep division to a head. Hitler has decided that with a long war in the offing, Germany has to take the rich coal and iron mines of Alsace/Lorraine. Unfortunately, that means that the Germans have to take on part of the Maginot line.

In our time-line Hitler almost snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in June 1940 by ordering a similar offensive after Dunkirk. The rapid French collapse kept that offensive from happening in our time-line, but in this time-line Hitler pushes a bloodied and increasingly reluctant German army toward taking on the formidable French defenses. The defeat of the second German offensive in the west has loosened Hitler's grip on power, and mounting casualties from the Alsace offensive are the last straw for elements of the German military. In late July 1940, strong elements of the German military attempt a coup. The coup fails, but Hitler is severely wounded during an assassination attempt-paralyzed from the waist down. As the coup collapses, the Nazis take a bloody revenge on the German army. Several hundred German officers are killed. Hundreds more are thrown in prison and over five hundred flee the country, mainly to Switzerland. The German intelligence effort is disrupted as the head of the Abwehr and several dozen other top people in that organization flee to Switzerland one step ahead of the Gestapo.

The German purge doesn't disrupt the army as much as Stalin's purges disrupted the Soviet army, but they take a lot of the edge off of the Germans. Ideological commitment replaces competence as the primary value and the German tradition of initiative among junior offices for the most part goes away.

Hitler gets his offensive against Alsace/Lorraine. As predicted, it is bloody and produces only tactical victories at the cost of heavy casualties. By now the breakdown of the German economy is becoming very evident. The French have air superiority by August, simply because the Luftwaffe can't get enough planes in the air to challenge them due to lack of fuel.

Confined to a wheelchair, in constant pain, with his plans crumbling, Hitler is becoming less and less rational. He still has his gambler's instincts though, and he sees one desperate gamble that might put Germany back on track to victory. Germany desperately needs oil. There is one place within reach of Germany that has a substantial amount of oil-not enough to solve Germany's problems, but enough to keep the economy ticking over a while longer. The Soviet-held part of Poland has reasonably large oil fields. Of course getting that oil means adding another Great Power to Germany's already over-long list of enemies, but Hitler is sure that Stalin is just waiting for Germany to get weaker before the Soviets attack, so he views that as simply a matter of who gets off the first punch.

The Germans gather as much oil as they can by desperate expedients, including essentially disbanding a Panzer division and selling its Czech-built tanks to the Yugoslavs in exchange for hard currency which they use to buy oil from Romania. In late August 1940, Hitler hurls what is left of Germany's mobile forces in a surprise attack on the Soviets in the southern half of the Polish front. The offensive is even more of a surprise than the German attack on the Soviet Union in our time-line, and it catches the Soviets at a vulnerable time. In both this time-line and ours the Soviets broke up their large armored formations in late 1939, misinterpreting the lessons of their experiences in the Spanish Civil War. In our time-line the Soviets rebuilt their armored divisions after the German defeat of France showed what the Panzer divisions could do. In this time-line the fighting in France seems to confirm the wisdom of scattering tanks among the infantry, and the Soviets have continued to do so.

The German panzer divisions break through, cut off a large number of Soviet troops, and seize the oil fields essentially intact. At that point the Germans simply don't have the logistics capability to take advantage of that victory. The Soviets launch a hastily organized counter-attack to rescue their trapped armies in the pockets, and launch their own offensives in northern Poland and through Lithuania into Eastern Prussia. The Romanians look at the possibility of a German collapse, and get much more forthcoming with oil. That puts the panzer divisions back in business, and the Germans stop the Soviet offensive, inflicting extremely high casualties but taking heavy casualties themselves.

The Soviets demand to be treated as allies by Britain and France. They also demand an immediate French offensive against Germany. The allies are cool to both ideas. They don't consider the Soviets reliable or particularly useful as allies, and a strong element of both governments would prefer to sit on the side-lines and let the two dictators fight it out. The allies demand that the Soviets release Polish prisoners of war and give back areas of Finland seized in the Winter War, among other things as the price of any aid.

The Soviets aren't interested in doing anything along those lines, at least until September, when the Panzers cut off the bulk of the Soviet forces in the north, leaving Leningrad very vulnerable. At about the same time, Soviet resistance in the remaining pockets in southern Poland collapses, freeing up German forces for a pincer movement that bags more Soviet troops in Central Poland. At that point, the Soviets allow around 60,000 of their 300,000 Polish prisoners of war to leave for Romania with their families. The allies don't have much in the way of material to reciprocate with, but the French do pass along some data on the capabilities of German tanks and aircraft.

The Germans grab the rest of the Soviet slice of Poland, and even take a small slice of the Soviet Ukraine. They also head north through the Baltics toward Leningrad. The Germans quickly run out of steam. Their army has been losing mobility all through 1940 as trucks break down, are captured, or are lost in battle. They simply don't have the capacity for large-scale deep offensives that they did in our time-line, and campaigning on the primitive roads of eastern Poland accelerates the wastage.

The Soviets have lost over 700,000 men killed so far, and over 800,000 captured-a small number compared to what they suffered in the early going in our time-line, but still a very large portion of their trained manpower. The Germans have also lost heavily-with nearly 300,000 dead on the eastern front alone.

Meanwhile, the Western Allies have been relatively quiet. The balance in the air has swung heavily against the Germans in the west. The French alone are out-producing the Germans by a substantial margin in both tanks and planes. When you add in British production and substantial numbers of American-built planes flowing to France, the odds against the Germans on the western front are becoming overwhelming. Pressure on the French and English for a major offensive is growing.

The French communist party has become extremely pro-war, and in some factories where communist influence is strong, the quantity and quality of war production has suddenly picked up. The French government isn't particularly impressed by the sudden change of heart, and even some French communists finally give up on the party after this latest evidence that it considers Soviet interests ahead of French interests.

The Allies have gone over to the offensive in Norway and to some extent in the Ardennes and southern Holland. The Allies are ponderous on the offensive, gaining ground a few miles at a time on a battlefield dominated by heavy artillery. It isn't really World War I-style fighting. The tactics are much more sophisticated, and the growing number of Allied tanks and planes make the battle considerably more fluid, even though they are usually deployed in an infantry-support role. The French heavy armored divisions weigh in from time-to-time, using their heavy B1bis tanks to club their way forward toward a key objective.

The main action between Germany and the Western Allies is in Norway. It plays a role somewhat like that of North Africa in our time-line-an important but subsidiary theatre of war where the Germans hold off numerically superior and better equipped opponents by superior tactics, at least for a time, while inadvertently teaching those opponents how to deal with German tactics. Through the summer and fall of 1940, the Germans have taught the French and English a series of bloody lessons in Norway, but the Germans have been too busy elsewhere to take advantage of their victories. Now, as winter approaches, the Germans in Norway are being compressed into the southern tip of that country. Resupply is becoming more and more difficult. The Allies control the air, and that has allowed them to harass German convoys from Denmark to Norway, both from the air and to a lesser extent with surface vessels.

The Soviet Union in this time-line doesn't have the huge recuperative powers that it did later in our time-line. In our time-line, the Soviets spent the year between the fall of France and the German invasion of the Soviet Union preparing frantically for war. They trained officers to replace the ones killed off in the purge. They trained millions of reservists. They expanded their active army. They built masses of weapons in every category. They built new factories, many of them using German machine tools sent in exchange for raw materials.

In this time-line none of that build-up has happened. On the other hand, this time-line's Germans are nowhere near as capable or well led as the ones in our time-line, and the Soviets still have a lot of divisions that they can bring in from other parts of the country given time. The Soviets recover enough to go on the offensive by early October. The fall muddy season quickly turns the battle zone into a giant swamp, and the two sides fight a series of bloody battles with little mobility on either side. The Soviet horsed cavalry divisions actually are more mobile than the panzer divisions in this phase of the war, though they prove terribly vulnerable to modern firepower.

The Soviets are poorly trained and led for the most part. While the Germans are nowhere near as well led as they were in our time-line, they still inflict appalling casualties on the Soviets-over a million dead in two months. The Germans kill four Soviets for every German that dies, but the Germans have still lost over half a million dead on the eastern front alone by now, and even more wounded. They started the war with a chronic manpower shortage. Now they are having a great deal of difficulty keeping an army in the field without gutting their armaments production. The Soviet prisoners of war ease that shortage somewhat, as do Polish forced laborers, but the Germans have nowhere near the manpower resources that their many conquests gave them in our time-line. The German army is shrinking as well as becoming less mobile as the war goes on.

The Soviets also have their problems. Soviet collectivization of agriculture has made their agricultural industry the most mechanized in Eastern Europe. The backbone of that mechanization is a large number of trucks and tractors that were designed with emergency military use in mind. A huge number of those trucks and tractors have been requisitioned by the military, and in many cases destroyed in the fighting. Even the ones that still exist are not available for the harvest. At the best of times, the Soviet Union has little food to spare. Now with much of the harvest spoiling in the fields, the Soviets face a long, hungry winter. They can buy food on the world market, and the Allies are even willing to extend credit on a small scale in exchange for Soviet concessions like the release of more Polish prisoners of war, but getting large quantities of food to the Soviet Union is difficult. German U-boats are active, and neither England nor France has a great deal of shipping to spare.

Prisoners in Soviet work camps are already starving by mid-November, and almost everyone in the Soviet Union is on very short rations. It's going to be a very long, hungry winter. Germany is also having a cold, hungry fall, and is looking toward a truly nasty winter.

Making matters worse, the French and English are getting more self-confident and aggressive. The Germans are running out of options in Norway as the Allies use their growing superiority in airpower and every category of war material to methodically grind the Germans down and push them back toward the sea. The Allies have also gone on the offensive in Belgium, and they are learning. The French now have six light armored divisions (DLMs) and five heavy armored divisions (DCRs), while the English add another armored division. The Germans have two very under-strength armored divisions on the entire western front, and only a few motorized infantry divisions.

In November, the French concentrate two heavy armored divisions on a narrow front in Belgium and simply swamp the defenders with the heavy armor and firepower of those divisions. That portion of the German line collapses and the Germans are hard pressed to re-establish it. The French are not aggressive enough in following up on their initial success, and the Germans manage to retrieve the situation, but the attack brings home to the more rational elements of the German leadership how precarious Germany's situation is.

Hitler is becoming less and less rational. His injuries and the stresses of war have brought him to the point where even some of the most diehard of the Nazis no longer believe he is capable of leading. Goering is moving aggressively to control more and more of the economy and day-to-day operations of government. He is also beginning to show the beginnings of the corruption of power that in our time-line led to his loss of real power inside the German power structure. There is still a great deal of quiet discontent in the German military, but that opposition is leaderless and not well organized. If anyone is going to overthrow Hitler, it will probably be someone in the Nazi hierarchy.

One thing Germany has going for it is that strong elements of both the French and British governments would rather see a German victory than a Soviet one on the eastern front. That is true in the United States as well, though mainly in Congress rather than in the Roosevelt administration. Elements of the Chamberlain government (which is still in power in this time-line's Britain-though Chamberlain himself is nearing death from cancer) have sent out feelers to see if the Germans would buy into a peace treaty that restored prewar Poland in exchange for an armistice. The British don't want a victory that brings Soviet power over central and Eastern Europe.

The Western Allies are making extensive use of Polish exile manpower. Polish pilots make up a substantial portion of the French airforce, and nearly 200,000 Polish exiles are now serving in several of their own divisions under the French army. The French army also has a couple of Czech exile divisions.

Czech-built 38t tanks are in a great deal of demand in the French light armored divisions-enough so that the French are actually seriously looking into producing their own copy of it. The French have had enough experience at war by now to realized that their tanks' one-man turrets put them at severe tactical disadvantage. They have several projects underway to produce more efficiently laid out tanks. Those projects won't bear fruit until at least mid-1941. In the meantime, the French are beginning to take deliveries of the new Somua S40 medium tanks, a couple of self-propelled guns based on a modified S40-type chassis, a new heavily armed and armored 16 ton infantry tank called the AMX38, a new self-propelled gun based on the B1 chassis, and some very powerful and innovative armored cars, including one with a 47mm gun in an oscillating turret.

The Germans have begun encountering a few KV-1 and KV-2 tanks, as well as a very few early model T34's with a short-barrel 76mm gun on the eastern front. They have begun up-gunning the Panzer-III with a 50mm gun to meet those threats. The French are also trying to up-gun their tanks. A higher velocity 75mm gun is under development for the B1 series tanks. A replacement for the B1 with a 75mm gun in the turret rather than the front hull is almost ready for production. The French are phasing out production of tanks armed with 37mm guns as quickly as they can in favor of more powerful tanks. The British are working toward replacing the 2-pounder (40mm) guns on its tanks with 6-pounders (57mm).

All of the combatants are feeling the financial pinch of the war. The French and English are trying hard to conserve hard currency, but if the war lasts much past the middle of 1941 they will face a crisis. Germany is very close to out of hard currency, and is relying on barter arrangements to bring in a trickle of raw material. The Soviets are somewhat better off, but they have to pay a risk premium for food shipments and shipments of things like rubber that they can't produce themselves. They have a great deal of gold that they received in exchange for shipping arms to the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War, and a number of other sources of gold or hard currency, but that can't last forever, and when it runs out their war effort will develop significant gaps.

The Italians have stayed out of the war so far. They aren't ready to take on an intact Great Power and they know it. A few thousand Italian "volunteers" are fighting with the Germans on the eastern front, but the Italians are also selling aircraft engines to Britain and France, just as they did during the "phony war" in our time-line. The Italians are desperately short of oil, and are competing with the Germans for the limited supplies available from Romania. The western Allies have kept much oil from flowing to Italy because they are afraid it will be transshipped to Germany. The Italians don't have much hard currency to pay for oil anyway.

 

The war continues into winter, and as 1940 ends both Germany and the Soviet Union are facing bleak days as the lack of vital raw materials starts to shut down parts of their economies. The Soviet Union is far more self-sufficient than Germany, but it still finds itself short of food, rubber, aluminum, and some types of specialty petroleum products.

In the Far East, Japan is facing the prospect of another year of war with China with no clear way out. Soviet aid to the Nationalists has slowed to a trickle as the Soviets try to rebuild their armies, but the Western Allies and the United States have stepped up arms shipments to the Chinese as the crisis in Europe seems to ease.

And that's about it for this issue. What do you think? I know it's hard for most people to visualize the French stopping the Germans in 1940, but that was by no means an impossible outcome. The French put a lot of money into their army in the years immediately before World War II. A lot of it was wasted, but not all of it. The French had a lot of tanks, a lot of artillery, and a lot of manpower. The French army fought rather unevenly in our time-line. In the south it panicked and fell apart in places, especially the poorly equipped, poorly trained "B-series" divisions. In the north it fought much more effectively, even the "B-Series" divisions.

The author of the book Strange Victory says that he had someone feed information on the two armies into a very sophisticated simulator. They found it almost impossible to come up with a German victory. In our time-line the Germans struck at the perfect time. The French premier had just resigned in a dispute over who would command the French army. The Chamberlain government had just fallen in England. Close to a third of the French fighter airforce was in the process of re-equipping, and wasn't immediately available for the battle. The Germans had spent the last four months intensely training for the offensive, and had studied every aspect of its logistics-and they got lucky.

So where does this time-line go from here? It looks like the Germans are going to go down hard in 1941, and the French/British on the one hand and the Soviets on the other are going to partition Germany, or impose a government on it. Of course appearances can be deceiving.