What has happened so far: The Allied Torch landings were delayed by a few weeks. That set in train a series of events that has made the resulting World War II diverge more and more from our own. By late summer of 1944, the Germans are still deep inside the Soviet Union. The Normandy landings themselves have not happened yet, but the Allies have gained control of most of southern and part of central France after landing on the Mediterranean coast of France. The Italians are still in the Axis, though wobbly. Hitler is dead, victim of a successful assassination attempt. The Germans have just lured a Soviet army over something capable of producing an enormous explosion--in the thousands of tons range. The Allies are fairly sure that the explosion was conventional in nature, but they cannot totally rule out the possibility of a nuclear weapon or something else capable of putting enormous explosive power into a small package.

At the end of last issue, the Germans were using the fact that they still occupy a great deal of France and the Soviet Union to try to detach those countries from the Allied cause. They graphically demonstrated that they have the power to reduce either country to postwar poverty, even if Germany loses the war. If either country can be pried out of the anti-Axis alliance and into neutrality, it would become very difficult for the alliance to defeat the Nazis.

Prying either country out of the alliance is not a trivial task. They both have a lot of reasons to hate the Germans, and both countries are to some degree dependent on US Lend-Lease to keep their war economies functioning--the French more than the Germans. Quiet negotiations lead nowhere, but the Germans have another card up their sleeves. While it would be better to actually come to an agreement with the French or Soviets, creating the impression that they have done so can also disrupt the alliance against them.

The Germans have long had contingency plans for a withdrawal from the long, thin area that they hold on the southern Atlantic Coast of France, and from the central region of France--pulling troops back to a more defensible line in Northern France. In August 1944, they implement those plans. Ports are systematically wrecked and mined, and several thousand fanatical and well-armed German troops remain in heavily fortified positions around the best of the southern Atlantic Coast ports--just as they did in our time-line after the Normandy landings. Outside of the ports, almost nothing is damaged during the withdrawal. Trucks and trains are confiscated and taken north, but factories and bridges are left intact. The Germans even release a few thousand French prisoners of war who after four years of captivity are now 45 or older, and give them the task of maintaining order until French government forces arrive.

The withdrawal does not go entirely smoothly. French resistance forces allied with the Free French or communists go all out to disrupt it, as do Allied airforces. For the most part it does come off though. The Germans establish new lines in northern France, just north of Paris.

The French government now has both cause for joy and significant problems. Millions of Frenchmen have been liberated without a great deal of destruction. Paris is back in French hands. Thousands of French prisoners are back with their families. On the other hand, well over ten million French civilians have been set up for starvation if something isn't done fast. Food stocks in the newly liberated territories are minimal, as are fuel stocks. Bulk transportation is simply not available. Also, the new German positions dominate Paris, and appear designed to threaten its destruction if fighting resumes. The problem is made worse by the fact that the Germans dumped over two hundred thousand starving refugees in the area with no food or shelter shortly before the evacuation. The refugees are mainly elderly, sick, or very young--some of them Russian Jews, but most of them from the areas of Western Poland seized by the Soviet Union in 1939.

France urgently requires food and transport. The French government demands that those needs be given priority over more Allied troops given the port bottlenecks. The German leadership figures that destroying the ports and handing the French the burden of food and transport will buy them at least 3 months where no serious Allied offensive in the West is possible. They also figure that it will cause serious rifts between the Allies, as the British and Americans push to get more forces ashore and the French resist having more demands put on their already overburdened transportation and logistics system.

The Allies have an ace up their sleeves that reduces the impact of that strategy. The Mulberries--artificial harbors--can be towed into position to ease some of the logistical burden. The US also has a considerable ability to supply troops across the beach, as they demonstrated in our time-line. There are still bottlenecks, and the French insistence that feeding their people get priority causes some suspicion that they are less than enthusiastic about fighting the war.

Fortunately for them, both the Americans and British are reading the French diplomatic codes, so the Allied top leadership knows that no deal has been struck with the Germans. Stalin doesn't know that, and is very suspicious that some sort of deal has been struck to give the Germans a free hand in the east in exchange for the German withdrawal. People in Britain and the US without access to the decodes are also suspicious of French motives, especially when the French demand that the Allies re-equip one French division for every British or US division that lands in French territory. That makes sense from a French point of view. It increases Allied combat power while minimizing the number of mouths that need to be fed. The Allies do agree to re-equip six more French divisions, including one armored one, and give priority to capturing and repairing French ports before trying to go on the offensive in Northern France.

The French have restarted their own arms production to a limited extent. They are making small arms and ammunition, a few artillery pieces, and light armored utility vehicles. They are also scavenging worn out Sherman tanks from North Africa and repairing them, adding a French made turret with a French main gun.

The ground war in the west is still a sideshow compared to the massive battles in the east. There, the greatest tank battle the world has ever seen rages as the Germans try to turn a breakthrough into a strategic victory that they hope will turn the war mobile and again, and ultimately knock the Soviets out of the war. It is at least a year-and-a-half too late for that though. Man-for-man and tank-for-tank the Soviets are still not quite as good as the Germans, but they are good enough that superior numbers take their toll. So does Soviet air superiority. The German advance is blunted, then the Soviets launch their own offensive, which pushes the Germans back almost to their start-line. A second offensive pushes the Germans away from Leningrad and threatens to cut off Germans forces in the Baltics. The Germans barely manage to stabilize their lines, helped by fall rains and by switching reserves from the western front.

The continued German ability to bring in fresh forces from the west infuriates Stalin. He pushes the Allies to launch a simultaneous massive attack to tie down German reserves, something that they are simply not logistically able to do in August or early September of 1944. Patton does go on the offensive, trying to cut off a corner of the German line and seize an intact port, (which one?) but the Germans are able to demolish the port facilities before he gets there.

By late September, the logistics crunch eases a bit as the Allies bring in trucks and trains to reestablish French rail and road networks, and manage to get some of the ports cleared out and partially working again. The delay has put a great deal of strain on the alliance. Even the Soviets don't have a limitless pool of manpower, and they are feeling the strain of the years of war. Stalin feels that the west has stood by and deliberately let the Soviets bleed themselves to death, while avoiding major casualties of there own.

The absence of a major offensive in France is starting to have political consequences in the United States. In an election year, the Dewey campaign is very careful not to criticize the conduct of the war directly, but they do talk about the need for new ideas in the White House, and emphasize that after three terms, the Roosevelt Administration is tired. Without the boost from Normandy, the campaign begins to tighten up.

Roosevelt is forced to wage a more vigorous campaign, in spite of his failing health. In August 1944, what in our time-line was severe angina attack that left Roosevelt weak and shaken becomes a full-fledged heart attack. He survives, and recovers to a certain extent, then in early September 1944, he suffers a fatal heart attack, dying roughly six months earlier than he did in our time-line. That leaves the US political situation in chaos. The presidency is now in the erratic hands of former vice president Henry Wallace, and will be for several months. The Democrats are without a presidential nominee very late in the political season.

Meanwhile, the tacit alliance within an alliance of Britain and France is getting stronger. They turn a diversionary raid on Crete into a battle for that island, something that the US military considers a waste of scarce resources in an attempt to reestablish French and British colonial power.

Germans propaganda efforts are working very hard to split the Allies. The Germans use renegade Frenchmen in an elaborate effort to increase friction between the Soviets and western Allies. The renegade French establish contact with anti-Stalin Soviet groups, especially Ukrainian nationalists, and set up a small-scale arms pipe-line, supposedly from the French government, but actually from stocks captured by the Germans in 1940. The renegade French claim that their government is afraid that Stalin will make a deal with the Germans and that it wants to make sure the Germans can't shift all of it's forces west if that happens. They also point out that it is not at all in the interests of the west that Stalin continue to rule the Soviet Union after the war is over.

The German disinformation campaign even targets Soviet partisan groups, pushing them to set up ties with the west and prepare to fight both Stalin and the Germans using Western weapons. That leads to murky but deadly games of double and triple cross as the Germans and renegade Soviets match wits with the Soviets over control of partisan groups.

Stalin is not stupid, but this kind of thing plays to his paranoia rather well. The disinformation is helped along by the fact that some elements of the German army are trying to turn the war in the east into an anti-Bolshevik crusade. In the uncertain political situation, they are working to turn renegade Soviet General Vlasov into a significant factor in the war.

Vlasov’s forces are officially restricted in size, but his German benefactors are able to gradually expand their real size to the equivalent of around 6 divisions, with the structure and training to quickly triple that if the political situation becomes favorable. Vlasov is also quietly building his own independent intelligence network on both sides of the front and attempting to infiltrate partisan units with the idea of shaping them to his purposes. That puts him in a vicious, shadowy war with the powerful and cagey Soviet intelligence agencies. German intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies are also players in that war, sometimes helping Vlasov and sometimes working at cross-purposes to him.

In the air, the Germans are playing for time. The summer of 1944 is a very bad time for them. American P51 fighters are escorting ever-larger swarms of B17 bombers in devastating raids over Germany. The Germans are producing thousands of planes every month to contest control of the air, but German pilot casualties in early 1944 have been high enough that Germany simply doesn't have enough competent, experienced pilots to fly those planes. The Germans are ramping up pilot training, but that takes planes, fuel, and especially time.

The new German Me262 jet fighter offers a lot of promise as a potential shortcut, and the Germans are going all out to get the plane into large-scale production. If they can do that, the jet's speed advantage can do a lot to keep inexperienced German pilots alive long enough for them to learn, while still allowing them to put up resistance against the US bombers. In August 1944, the ME262 is in production, and in service, but it isn't really ready, especially not to be put in the hands of inexperienced pilots. The engine life is too short--on average ten hours of flying time before an engine has to be replaced. The plane's control surfaces freeze in even relatively shallow dives, because those dives increase the Me-262's already high speed to the point where poorly understood air flow effects can create pockets of vacuum around them.

The infrastructure for the Me262 isn't ready either. It requires special extra-long runways, and those are still being built. The jet requires pilot retraining and development of new tactics too. The most optimistic estimates of when the plane can play a significant role say mid-October at the earliest.

In the mean-time, Goering has been angering almost everybody outside the Luftwaffe by playing things smart for once. Reserves of new fighter planes and pilots to defend German industry are being carefully, even ruthlessly built up at the expense of the needs of the front lines. Keeping that reserve is politically very difficult. At times it proves impossible, and a few dozen planes and pilots are fed into the grinder of the fronts. For the most part though, Goering plays it smart, keeping enough fighters up to maintain some threat against the bombers, while avoiding prematurely deploying inexperienced pilots.

The US makes that strategy increasingly difficult. As the bombers face less opposition, the under-employed escort fighters increasingly harass German transport with opportunistic strafing runs. They also swarm after ME262's when those show up. Shooting down a jet becomes the ultimate in prestige achievements for US fighter pilots.

The raids become more devastating as the summer wears on. The Allies are aware of the German strategy of building up fighter reserves, and they work hard to force the Germans to deploy planes and pilots before they are ready. British Bomber Command, which had been forced almost exclusively into night bombing by heavy losses to German fighter planes, switches back to daytime bombing for some missions. The British don't have a long-range escort fighter like the P51, at least not in large numbers, and their bombers are a tempting target for the Luftwaffe. Some of the British runs are really unaccompanied. Others are essentially bait to draw the Germans up into ambushes by swarms of US fighters.

The air war is crucial. German armor simply can't play the role it was designed for when Allied fighter-bombers can roam at will over the lines and deep behind them. German industry is cranking out larger and larger amounts of arms and ammunition in spite of the bombing, but the bombing is slowing that growth,. Also, over a million Germans (not all of them of military age, but all of them capable of helping the war effort in some way) are tied down manning the enormous number of flak guns that the Germans have deployed to protect important industry.

Goering has made what many inside Germany consider a major mistake in the air war. He is pushing development and mass production of an inexpensive "people's fighter", just as he did in our time-line. Most airmen consider the project a waste of resources better used to ramp up Me-262 production.

As the fall rains create a lull in the fighting on the eastern front, Stalin looks at an increasingly gloomy picture of the future. His forces are still deep inside of the pre-war Soviet border. Even the Soviets can't spend lives like water forever. Casualties have been much higher than in our time-line, and the Soviets have not recaptured much of the territory that they lost in 1941 and 1942. The Germans still hold territories that had nearly 35 percent of the Soviet population before the war, and the fact that they still hold that territory makes the Soviet manpower shortage more acute.

Soviet morale is also a factor. During 1942 and 1943, the Soviet people had faced enormous hardship and worked furiously for the promise of victory over a hated enemy. The rescue of Leningrad had raised expectations of a series of great victories that would push the Nazis out of the Soviet Union. Those victories still haven't materialized, and Stalin senses a subtle change in the Soviet political landscape. Whether or not they are actually more prevalent, Stalin focuses more on reports of desertions, malingering, and suspected sabotage. He is well aware of what years of indecisive war did to the rule of the Tsars, and while he rejects any similarity to his regime, he becomes increasingly concerned about the affect of continued stalemate on his grip on power.

Stalin's nightmare is that the Western Allies will reach some kind of a temporary understanding with the Germans that will give them a free hand against Japan in exchange for giving the Germans a free hand against the Soviets. It is the sort of thing he would have done in their place, and he sees the continuing delays in a major offensive in France and the German withdrawals as evidence that such a deal has already been tacitly struck.

The death of Roosevelt indirectly helps further that impression. It is also a blow to Stalin. Henry Wallace is friendly to the Soviet Union, but he is politically weak--a lame duck with little political support. Congress is taking advantage of that weakness to reassert some of the power that they had ceded to Roosevelt. The Democrat coalition that Roosevelt had held together seemingly effortlessly begins to splinter as Wallace alienates Southern Democrats and big city machine Democrats by trying to leave a legacy during his brief term in office with policies that are much more liberal than Roosevelt's and presented without Roosevelt's political skill.

In the relative power vacuum of Roosevelt's illness and then his death, US policy begins to drift. Politically powerful forces in and out of the military have long pushed to shift the main thrust of US power away from Germany and toward finishing off Japan. With a weak President, that shift subtly occurs, confirming Stalin's suspicions.

The war against Japan is already somewhat further along than it was in our time-line, as assets used less in North Africa and not at all in Italy have been pulled into the Pacific theatre. The change has not been too terribly drastic. The Pacific War has followed essentially the same pattern as in our time-line, but accelerated by a growing number of months. Douglas MacArthur is gearing up to retake the Philippines, with landings planned by August 1944, and by August the US fire-bombing campaign against Japanese cities is almost ready to be launched. The Pacific theatre has an insatiable appetite for military resources, as MacArthur and various admirals pursue differing visions of how to take Japan out of the war. The shift from Europe to the Pacific is not huge, but it is noticeable, and Stalin notices it.

 

Wars are always about more than just the reality of the battlefield. They also play out in the heads of the battlefield commanders and the heads of national leaders. Stalin's ideal war would have been one where the Germans and the west exhausted each other, then the Soviets came in on one side or the other and took the lion's share of the spoils. His worst nightmare was a war where the Soviets exhausted themselves and the west reestablished the pre-1939 boundaries, or maybe even tried to grab off peripheral areas of the pre-1939 Soviet Union. The current war is shaping up to be uncomfortably close to his nightmare scenario, and a betrayal like the one he thinks he sees in the latest moves by the Germans and the Western Allies would seal that.

Stalin has set his intelligence apparatus urgently on the task of finding out as much as they can about the attitudes of the possible successors to Roosevelt toward the Soviet Union. Harry Truman, the Democrat Vice-Presidential nominee, is an early favorite to be the eventual successor. In 1941, Truman publicly stated that he felt that the US policy in a German/Soviet war should be to stand by and let the two sides exhaust one another. Stalin knows that, and he suspects that if that isn't already US policy it soon will be.

US Lend-Lease has always been a factor in Stalin's calculations. The Soviets have always produced the bulk of their own weapons, but the American imports are helpful. The US is sending enough tanks every year to equip 8 to 10 armored divisions, while US trucks, jeeps, and radios give the red army the ability to move fast while maintaining control of formations.

In the power vacuum of post-Roosevelt Washington, two events cause the positive of Lend-Lease to become a negative to Stalin. First, the German withdrawals in France have suddenly made the issue of who rules France much more difficult to ignore. The ex-Vichy French have asserted their authority over the new territory, with Petain retaining or appointing officials loyal to his government. The Free French and French Communists have launched a noisy campaign denouncing many of these officials as collaborators and/or fascists. In some cases they are.

President Wallace, along with some elements of Congress, looks at collaborationist elements in the French government, French resistance to more US troops, and French demands for material that would help rebuild the French economy for the postwar world. He decides to use Lend-Lease as a means of forcing the French to get rid of questionable elements and put their main emphasis on the war effort.

Done quietly and with Roosevelt's political touch, that would have still been difficult given French pride. Wallace botches it, and manages to unite all but the most dedicated Free French elements against what the French see as an American attempt to dictate who rules France. The very public disagreement shakes allied unity. Worse from Stalin's point of view, elements in Congress begin seeking to use Lend-Lease as a lever to change Soviet behavior. There are calls for the US to make Lend Lease to the Soviets contingent on Soviet acceptance of pre-war boundaries for Poland. The move is quashed for the time being, but Stalin sees it as a foretaste of things to come.

Stalin isn't in this war to end up on an American leash based on dependence on US aid. He has always maintained channels by which he can communicate with the Germans if need be. He quietly sends signals that he might be interested in a political settlement. If someone is going to be betrayed to the full force of the Germans, it doesn't necessarily have to be him, unless a deal has already been struck between the Germans and Allies. Even if one has, the Germans might be persuaded to reconsider, given the right offer.

In late October 1944, just weeks before the US presidential elections, the Germans and the Soviets announce a cease-fire. The war on the Eastern Front is over, at least for now. The Western Allies quietly look at a new and terrifying reality: war against the full power of Nazi Germany. They also see a new face of the Soviet Union, as Allied citizens in the Soviet Union are rounded up to put pressure on the West to return Soviet POWs rescued from the Germans, and Lend-Lease vessels are seized along with their cargos.

The Soviets move quickly to take advantage of their new freedom from the constraints of war with Germany. Soviet troops occupying northern Iran set up a Soviet-style government there. Soviet troops become aggressive in long-disputed areas between the Japanese puppet state in Manchuria and Soviet-held territory, deliberately challenging the Japanese. Soviet armored divisions brought in from the European front bully Japanese divisions, grabbing territory long held by the Japanese, provoking and humiliating them, but stopping just short of starting a full-scale war.

The Germans move quickly to push France into a peace agreement. They offer an immediate withdrawal from most of the rest of France, the release of remaining French prisoners of war, and no curbs on the size of the French army. In exchange, they want all British and US troops out of France, and a French declaration of neutrality. They also want access to raw materials from France and French colonies at market prices.

There is an implied or-else in the German proposal. It says, accept or northern France becomes a battleground for the next several years. The French government’s nightmare sees the bulk of the German army fighting the US and the British in the ruins of Paris and the ruins of the rest of the industrial heart of France. That’s something the French want to avoid at all cost.

The French have a dilemma. If they accept the German proposal, France is at the mercy of the Germans for the foreseeable future. France is nowhere near strong enough to resist the bulk of the German army. They need the Allies. On the other hand, the US has just proven itself willing to use its aid as a “Lend Leash” as one British cartoonist puts it. Also, in this time-line the Americans have yet to prove their combat power against first-line German troops. True, Rommel versus Patton was a draw, but the US has done very little fighting in Europe so far. France would have to count on its allies to hold a line against the best the Germans can throw against them. Can they do that?

There is also the matter of the possible German super-bomb. If they have something new and deadly, the French don’t want to be on the receiving end of it, especially with the Germans only 5 miles away from Paris.

The French attempt to stall the Germans, while pressuring the US to radically increase military aid to France. The French demand that all of their divisions, including the newly raised ones, be re-equipped with modern weapons. The French plan calls for at least 42 French divisions armed with modern weapons, including 3 more armored ones, to be ready by the end of the year. The French also demand massive numbers of trucks, locomotives, and machine tools to rebuild their industries, along with advanced aircraft, including jets. The French even ask for missile technology and access to any English or US progress on nuclear weapons.

Henry Wallace is still unnerved by the sudden defection of the Soviet Union. He agrees to the bulk of the French demands. The US military establishment is not so agreeable, nor is Congress. The US fulfills the letter of the agreements, quickly in the case of equipping the new divisions. The defection of the Soviet Union has freed up enough Lend-Lease weaponry to re-equip most of the divisions anyway. The French also get a quick infusion of reasonably modern aircraft from stocks that had been destined for the Soviet Union. Most of the infra-structure items come more slowly, and the promised jets end up amounting to one prototype British Meteor. The US is still nearly a year away from producing a useable jet fighter anyway. The US doesn’t give up any substantial nuclear information, and the British have been frozen out of the program since a fairly early stage. They are somewhat more forthcoming, and British and French scientists quietly begin sharing some information, but the French are still a long way from having the information needed for a serious nuclear program.

Through the last months of October, and early November 1944, the Allies frantically rush to meet a German offensive that they anticipate within a very short time-as soon as the Germans can shift mobile divisions from the east to the west. They anticipate that the Germans will pull a ‘final offensive’ to push the Allies into the sea for the third time. The US even has contingency plans to concentrate US troops in defensive positions defending key ports if the Germans break through the front lines. The Allies fear that the Germans are just waiting for bad weather to ground Allied air power before they make their move.

The American presidential election of 1944 takes place under that cloud. I’ll get into that next issue.

 

And That’s It For This Issue: I intend to wrap this up next issue. I’ll cover the US presidential election, the end of World War II, and talk a little bit about the world after that war.

Objections and Problems: As usual, I let this segment cool, then went back and reread it with a critical eye. I saw three possible problems with the course of events:

1) Is Roosevelt’s death a second and more important point of divergence? Maybe. On the other hand, the man had a bad heart. He had a mild heart attack in spring of 1940. He could have died at any point from that time on. By August 1944, he would have been dealing with a different set of stresses and problems than the ones in our time-line for nearly two years. It is almost certain that would have changed the exact date of his death. Would it push that death forward six months? That’s impossible to say. I decided to go this route for two reasons. First, there seemed to be a kind of symmetry here. Germany loses Hitler - the US loses Roosevelt. Second, frankly the war converges more and more with our time-line in late 1944 and 1945 unless something dramatic happens. Allied manpower and production overwhelms Germany and Japan. End of story. An August death for Roosevelt may not be the most likely course of events, but it is more interesting and informative than the more straight-forward course.

2) Would Wallace really have been that inept as a war leader? Actually, it isn’t so much a matter of him being inept as it is a matter of Roosevelt making a very difficult task look easy. Dealing with a resurgent France, and a suspicious Stalin, not to mention a domestic coalition that included northern blacks, racist southerners, and a large Polish vote (very concerned about the fate of Poland) in key cities was a very difficult task. Roosevelt managed it in our time-line. I’m not sure that even he could have in this time-line, and certainly Henry Wallace did not have Roosevelt’s political skills.

3) Would Stalin bolt the alliance? In a second if he thought it was in the interests of the Soviet Union to do so. Would he see it that way in this case? That’s hard to say. I think that it would certainly be a significant possibility, and as you will see in next segment it does make for an interesting ending to World War II.

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

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