The last installment of this scenario covered the period between March 1943 and January 1944. This section will be considerably shorter. I’m going to try to keep it to under 2500 words. It will give an overall view of the war, then briefly look at the spring of 1944.

An overall view: Hitler’s armies have conquered most of the natural resources that he wanted to capture. Germany controls most of the oil fields of the Middle East. It controls most of the oil that formerly fueled the Soviet Union. Those victories have been achieved at a price. The United States appears to be approaching the end of the war in the Pacific. Powerful US naval forces have been or soon will be freed up for use in the Atlantic. Hitler fears that a huge, battle-tested US military will soon add its weight to the British and Soviet war efforts.

Already German armies are facing swarms of American-made planes and tanks in the hands of the Soviets and the British. The planes are very good, though the tanks are by no means a match for the latest German Panther and Tiger tanks.

Hitler feels, correctly, that the United States is the reason both the British and Soviets are able to remain in the field. In order to make the conquests permanent, Germany needs to either get the United States out of the war in some way, or knock out its British and Soviet Allies.

None of those courses of action seem particularly feasible at the moment. A political charm offensive is unlikely to sway the Roosevelt Administration. It might have some impact on Congress, but that can’t be counted on. Even the bulk of the old isolationists view Germany as an enemy that will have to be dealt with someday.

A knockout of Britain or the Soviet Union in the short term doesn’t seem likely either. The Soviet Union is simply too big to occupy completely, and as long as US aid can flow across Siberia, the Soviets will continue to be able to field large armies, even from remote and previously unindustrialized areas. Britain is protected by her fleet, and Hitler is pretty sure that if the Germans somehow managed to neutralize that fleet, the US would intervene to prevent a German takeover of England. German conquests in the Middle East cut Britain off from its main sources of oil, but the United States has been able to make up a large part of the British oil shortage after the first few months. The U-boat war could starve Britain out, but the US is building new shipping faster than the Germans can destroy existing ships.

At every turn the United States is turning what would be war winning German strategies into recipes for stalemate. Hitler is reasonably sure he’s eventually going to have to fight the United States. The only question is the timing. At the moment, Japan is still in the fight, though badly and probably hopelessly on the ropes. They will probably be out of the war for all practical purposes in six months. Hitler is tempted by the possibility of going after the United States while it is still tied up to some extent with Japan. The Roosevelt Administration has made that option more attractive by using the expanded US Atlantic fleet more and more aggressively as Japan weakens.

The US is escorting convoys, attempting to depth-charge U-boats on sight, and sending planes from escort carriers to spot German U-boats and radio their locations to British ships and planes. The German navy is seething about Hitler’s orders not to fire on US ships under those circumstances.

At the same time, Hitler now has the resources that he wanted when the war started. Allied war production is already at or close to its peak. As the German war economy integrates the resources and manpower of the conquered regions, German war production will expand. Hitler has already been pushing that expanding production in the direction of weapons aimed at Britain and the United States.

From Hitler’s standpoint, the first six to nine months of 1944 will be the most dangerous time for his new empire. The Allies have finally overcome their shipping shortages, and vast numbers of planes and tanks are flowing to both the Soviets and the British. By late 1944 the Germans intend to mobilize the resources of the areas they have conquered to the point where they can come close to matching Allied production. For the time being, the Germans are going to be overmatched in numbers of tanks and planes, though the British don’t have the manpower to match the Germans and the Soviets are also facing shortages of easily trainable and reliable manpower.

There doesn’t seem to be any huge advantage to taking on the US now from a German point of view. Hitler weighs a little more freedom for U-boat captains against the weight of the US army, and decides to endure what he sees as US provocations for now. Once the German naval expansion revs up, Hitler will reopen the issue.

The German naval expansion lacks much direction. The on-again, off-again German aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin is on again, though objectively it appears to be of little use against the masses of aircraft carriers that the US and Britain can field even when it does finally get completed. The Germans are in the early stages of building a second aircraft carrier in the Graf Zeppelin class. They are also looking to convert four existing ships of various kinds to aircraft carriers, though so far that hasn’t gone beyond preliminary design studies. Even if they are eventually completed, the first two German aircraft carriers will be severely limited by design problems and the small number of aircraft they carry.

Hitler is not a great fan of large surface ships, especially after the early years of the war. He feels that a German battleship fleet would be a waste of resources. The lead time for building the ships is too long, and the Germans will never be able to match the Allies in numbers of battleships. He’s not enthusiastic about aircraft carriers either, but he sees them as having some utility once the enemy is worn down by other means. He also sees some utility in having destroyers, and the Germans build some. The new German naval emphasis is primarily a matter of expanding U-boat numbers and trying to build up a viable amount of naval air power. The Germans pour resources into expanding U-boat construction.

A decision that Hitler made at the end of 1942 is beginning to pay off in the naval air power department. In this time-line, in late 1942, Hitler pushed development of an alternative to the troubled Heinkel 177 heavy bomber program in response to the Luftwaffe’s efforts to bomb Soviet oil fields. That push is starting to pay off. A more conventional four-engine derivative of the Heinkel 177 is nearing production, and the Germans hope that its range will make it a powerful anti-shipping aircraft as well as a strategic bomber. Hitler pushes for a rapid ramp-up of strategic bomber production.

The Italians can’t help much in the naval department. They have a large surface fleet, but they need it in the Mediterranean to keep the British out of at least the eastern half of that sea. The Italians do have an almost operational aircraft carrier now. The Aquila, a former passenger liner that the Italians almost finished converting to an aircraft carrier by the time of the Italian surrender in September 1943 in our time-line, is getting some finishing touches before it becomes operational in January 1944 in this time-line. The Italians don’t have much else in the pipe-line for the immediate future in the way of aircraft carriers, though they do have a few new battleships and a rather large number of very fast, well designed light cruisers coming on line.

The Germans push the Italians to vastly expand their plans for new aircraft carriers, but at best any new Italian carriers will take several years to complete.

The course of the war—Pacific: The US invades the Japanese home islands in mid 1944 and meets fanatical, suicidal resistance. That resistance tapers off toward the end of the year, but US troops are still fighting pockets of Japanese resistance and suicide bombers for years after that. The effort results in several hundred thousand of US casualties and millions of dead Japanese.

In some parts of the Dutch East Indies, the Japanese holdouts team up with anti-Dutch Indonesian nationalists and fight a prolonged guerrilla war. That happens to a lesser extent in French Indochina too. In China and parts of Burma, Japanese troops continue to hold out well into 1945, and Japanese holdouts still fight on in remote jungles and islands until they get too old to fight.

It is an untidy end to the war in the Pacific, and one that leaves a bad taste in a lot of American mouths. In our time-line, the American public clamored for their sons to come home after victory in Europe, and a considerable amount of demobilization happened even before the war with Japan was over. In this time-line, there is a similar reaction in fall of 1944, though it is somewhat muted by the fact that there is no clear-cut end to the war.

Many US troops were originally drafted for a term of service that was supposed to end in October 1941, and three years later they are still in the army. Public pressure forces the Roosevelt administration to release those men. Some of them are replaced by recent draftees, but the army loses a considerable amount of manpower and effectiveness toward the end of 1944.

As Japan weakens, Chinese factions rush to fill any vacuum they can find. A Chinese Civil War seems inevitable. The US struggles to establish a reasonably stable China to help round up die-hard Japanese militants, especially in Manchuria and Korea. At the same time, the US doesn’t want to get too deeply involved in Chinese infighting. That’s a tough balance.

North Africa and the Middle East: The British continue their methodical advance from southern Egypt to the Mediterranean. Axis logistics in the area have always been fragile, and British air superiority makes that worse as the British pound port facilities, and attack ships approaching those facilities. They use Ultra to make sure they hit the most damaging targets. As Egyptian ports become less usable, the Axis is forced to supply their forces through Libya and Syria, or to some extent through Turkey or the Caucasus.

All of those routes involve long overland hauls to get to the North African front, and British aircraft are increasingly able to shoot the supply lines to pieces. Axis logistics in the area has always been on the verge of failure, with Axis successes mainly due to British weakness, as Axis armies lived hand-to-mouth on captured British supplies. Now as the British get their act together and go onto the offensive, Axis logistics fall apart. By March 1944, British forces reach the Mediterranean coast of Egypt at two points, cutting off nearly 100,000 Axis troops, most of them Italian, but with a substantial number of Germans.

The British aren’t anywhere near as successful on the Iran/Iraq front, though they are able to stabilize the lines and begin building for an offensive. British airpower also hits the big oil refinery complex at Abadan, slowing German efforts to get it back into operation. Oil fields and facilities captured by the Germans have become major Allied air targets. The British understand where the oil facilities are vulnerable, having run them for many years, and they hit key facilities over and over.

The Eastern Front: The Eastern Front is actually rather quiet in early 1944. The Germans have most of what they really need in the Soviet Union. They would like to knock out the Soviet industrial areas in the Urals, but that can wait until they’ve been able to digest what they already have taken. The Germans do finally take the remnants of Moscow in April 1944. They also launch an offensive to take the Soviet ports in the north. The Soviets content themselves with token offensives and propaganda while they rebuild.

There has been a subtle shift in the Soviet-held areas of the old Soviet Union. A Soviet government exiled from Moscow doesn’t have quite the clout that one firmly entrenched there had. The Soviet system of controls is still reasonably intact, but the central government has to rely more and more on non-Russian soldiers, and bases more and more of its power on areas occupied by minority groups and ethnic Russians who have long had somewhat more autonomy than Russians in the central areas, simply because of their distance from the centers of power.

The Germans are also running into problems. Every square mile of the Soviet Union that they conquer has to be administered and policed somehow. Partisan are an increasing problem, partly because the Germans are spread so thin and partly because their administration is so brutal. The Germans need agricultural products and workers for their factories. They simply seize both workers and produce. When faced with a choice between life in German work camps and life as a partisan, many people who would have rather sat the war out rather than fight for either Stalin or Hitler end up as partisans.

The Soviets try very hard to maintain their control of the partisan movement, but that effort isn’t always successful. Stalin considers partisans who are not part of the Soviet structure a potential threat for postwar period, and works hard to co-opt or destroy such groups.

One problem the Soviets are having is that it is hard to visualize how a Soviet victory would come about, especially one gained primarily by Soviet means. The Soviets try to downplay the role of US aid to their war effort, but that is much more difficult than it was in our time-line because the aid now makes up a much larger percentage of weapons available to the Soviets.

Soviet manpower is not a bottomless pit. Soviet morale is not unbreakable. Stalin has been able to get a stalemate out of a very poor hand. He is reluctant to risk that situation by major offensive action. At the same time, too obvious lack of offensive action can sap morale too.

Hitler has decided that the Soviet zones of scorched earth are actually a good idea. He tries to widen the belt that Stalin has created and use it as the basis for a defensive line across large parts of the Soviet Union.

What happens next? There doesn’t seem to be any way out of this version of World War II. The British and what’s left of the Soviet Union are not strong enough to defeat the Germans on their own. Hitler isn’t dumb enough to bring the US into the war now. Roosevelt can only go so far in goading him toward war without losing the support of an increasingly war-weary US public. The Germans can’t defeat either the Soviets or the British as long as the US is willing to back them with Lend-Lease.

This could go on for quite a while, with the US and Germans building for an eventual direct confrontation. The timing of that confrontation is important. The US is going to have nuclear weapons before the war gets over. The Germans are working hard to develop chemical and biological weapons. The combination of German technical ability and a drive toward biological weapons is a very dangerous development.