This timeline only needs one improvement: somebody needs to assassinate uncle Joe
Don’t get me wrong: There is still a lot of misery, pain and death ITTL, but offing Stalin will make this paradise over OTL
I don't think it'll make things significantly better. Then again, as Stalin was only too well aware even paranoid people have enemies...
On the other hand, after Stalin's death you had the CPSU take a number of steps back from the counterproductive mass purges, and I dont think that would change with either Malenkov or Beria winning the power struggle that saw Khrushchev win.
One question I've been pondering for a while but don't think there is a good answer to: did the Soviets ever have an equivalent to Deng Xiaoping?
I saw past discussions of the story-only file being available to charitable donors, and how you were thinking of doing the same when 1941 is done. Is this one where you need to wait? It might be a while before you can find the time(which is totally understandable given your IRL commitments, of course), and new readers might want to "buy" it before then. I might have, if it'd been available. I understand if this is impractical, but wanted to mention it.
1940 is available on demand (PM me for details), 1941 will have to wait a while yet.
The pace of Allied advances seems a bit optimistic to me, at first glance. In OTL 1944, they captured Paris August 25, Antwerp September 4, and Aachen October 21, to give a sense of timeline. Per
this map on Wikipedia, the Allies seem to have had five armies north of Switzerland circa September, facing six German. In TTL April 1941, I count 12 Allied against 12 German(plus somewhere around one more from each of them at the Water Line, off-map). As a sanity check, Barbarossa involved 12 German armies and the Battle of France had nine French armies and about four from other allies, so that seems plausible enough. In OTL 1944, the Allies also had much stronger air superiority than they do in TTL 1941, from what I can tell, so that'd also help. Conversely, in OTL, allied logistics were strained by the lack of usable ports. I guess I'm just shocked at how rapidly the Germans are falling apart here. I'd expect them to be falling back, but they're losing every battle of substance. They seem like they have enough force that at least a few of their operations should succeed. I suspect I'm missing something here, because you've obviously done more research than I have, but I'm wondering what I'm missing.
Put simply, the German armies are hollow beasts with hardly any tanks, no fuel and desperately short of artillery - and they're manned by poorly trained replacements who get killed or captured before they can get up to speed. The Entente armies on the other hand by this stage are lavishly equipped, with crushing air and artillery superiority.
The thing to remember is that from 1940 onwards the German war economy was living on plunder: even at the time of the Battle of France in OTL they'd all but run out of copper, needed to provide driving bands for shells. Given time you can find a substitute, but here they don't have that time - nor do they have the plunder from France and the option to steal more from Eastern Europe, notably Romanian Oil. The other side of the coin applies too - in OTL the French war economy was lost to the Allied cause in summer 1940, while the UK war economy was thrown into turmoil by the invasion panic and the impact of the U-boats on shipping routes. Remove both and - very, very conservatively - you double the Entente war production while halving the German war production.
I believe you got the clue, just missed the chain of thought from it. The logistics/ports are the reason. After the Belgian offensive taking Brussels, it was all but impossible for a further advance along the Belgian axis to succeed, and it would have taken to 1942 to attack the Rhine/Ruhr that way. But - the Allies could reroute everything along the Rhine logistics chain and try again, thereby also sort of outflanking the Germans (just because the Allies couldn't do anything more in Belgium doesn't mean the Germans knew, or could redeploy a lot of stuff north).
More importantly, it turns on the supply taps from the UK and France - they can ship it directly to the Rhine and get it transshipped onto barges by the Dutch, more or less solving their supply problems. The Germans however are short of everything, so even fighting on home turf they're outgunned and worse supplied.
In addition to which, the Wehrmacht ITTL is a whole different animal from the Wehrmacht of OTL. They haven't expanded to anywhere near their OTL level of strength, nor do they have the level of training the OTL Wehrmacht was able to attain. By contrast, the Entente casualties are probably roughly equivalent to OTL at this point, but my guess is that the ratio of killed and wounded to prisoners is much less lopsided than it was OTL, given the fact that there wasn't a mass collapse of the French Army and no Dunkirk evacuation for the BEF.
Entente casualties will be a bit higher, but the shorter war will mean that overall they'll suffer less for the war as a whole. Germany also will suffer badly - however they were simply unable to expand as much as they did in OTL for Barbarossa, with neither the training time or the equipment needed so overall the casualties will be much lighter than OTL.
Think you are making the mistake of thinking all armies are equal. A lot of those German formations are much rawer, lacking in heavy equipment and under strength compared to the Allied ones they face. It was not unknown OTL for Armies to vary in strength so much that 4 to 1 could actually be a fair fight.
Remember also that you're matching firepower not rifle strength. Entente superiority in tanks and artillery is pretty overwhelming.
I'm not sure why this would be the case. They haven't suffered substantially more by TTL early 1941 than they had by OTL early 1941. Their economy will be somewhat more limited by the lack of wartime plunder, but even still I wouldn't expect such huge differences in quantity and quality. Some critical resource shortages were mentioned early in the thread, but were they that serious and that likely to cause massive knock-on effects?
Absolutely. There is also the manpower issue - in OTL they had a year of essentially peace to call up and train new troops before Barbarossa started, plus all the PoWs taken by the French (which included an awful lot of pilots) were released. Throw in the massive losses in the Paris Pocket (those were their spearhead and hence among the best troops) and the Germans lose very badly indeed compared to OTL.
Likewise, the generous Allied artillery support of OTL 1944 seems to be in evidence in TTL 1941, but that seems a bit ambitious. The armies in the field are even larger, and while the logistics are better, I expect the production facilities to be worse. It takes time to ramp your factories up to a wartime pace, and they haven't had as long a period to do that. Plus, the Americans aren't in combat, so they're probably not producing shells in mass quantities. The retention of the French factories would not be expected to make up for that. Are they burning off stockpiles form the "phony war" periods?
Remember the shock effects of 1940 - a hell of a lot of pre-existing plans got thrown out of the window in order to let them concentrate on replacement weapons as fast as possible. The French also had a huge artillery park before the war, and will have had fairly sizeable warstocks. The North African campaign (which consumed unbelievable quantities of stuff - a lot of which was lost on transit or blown up when supply dumps were captured) is gone, and no stocks were lost with the fall of France, Greece, etc.
Finally, in OTL the UK was heavily constrained by trade patterns: ton-miles were king when shipping stuff to the UK, which meant for instance they imported raw steel from the US rather than iron ore (having lost access to their prewar supplies from Sweden and Morocco: that doesn't happen here). With a far weaker U-boat threat, the tonnage problem is less severe so the knock-on effects to UK industry are much less severe. The net result is that the UK is probably at 1943 levels of supply overall, with a bigger fraction produced domestically and less from the US.
It took me a week but I've finally caught up and all I have to say is wow! Hell of a job PDF! I've often found the Battle of France to be one aspect of WWII that really gets ignored. This surprises me because if the Germans super risky, everything must go right plan doesn't go as perfectly as it did then the World starts to spin off in really surprising ways.
The postwar world is actually a lot more fun to write than the last few months of the war...
Well, apart from that massive encirclement at Paris.
That too!
