Update time! Before anyone asks: Russia's wins are covered in the next chapter
Chapter XIX: The Post-War Order, 1945-1947.
After the United States had agreed to bow out of the war without any territorial concessions or war reparations, the entire Entente powers were at the tender mercies of the Quadruple Alliance. They could only plead for leniency and tried to play them apart: Britain did so by advising the Germans that they could be of great help against growing Russian power that had already eclipsed German power. Meanwhile, the French also predicted a Russo-German rivalry over influence in Central and Eastern Europe. At this time, however, what was to be gained from the losers would be enough to content the victors. There was enough to be had. In the Moscow Peace Conference held in the Kremlin, territorial changes were decided upon across Eurasia from the white cliffs of Dover to northern China and also in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
In Western Europe, Belgium was partitioned: the Dutch-speaking Flemish part was annexed by the Netherlands, giving them three major ports in total: next to Amsterdam and Rotterdam now also Antwerp. The francophone half Wallonia was annexed by Germany because of its significant coal reserves and steel industry. Belgium had ceased to exist after an existence of little over one hundred years.
France not only had to part with Alsace-Lorraine again after winning it back less than thirty years prior, but also had to cede the coal and steel producing Briey-Longwy region and that would reduce France to a medium economic power. France had to accept the loss of its great power status and that the best thing they could aspire to was to be some kind of junior partner role to Germany, competing for German favour with Italy. Italy clearly had the advantage and could annex Nice, Savoy and Corsica. France had to establish demilitarized zones 50 km deep on their borders with Germany and France and accept the establishment of German naval bases at Calais and Brest which Germany would lease for 99 years. Italy acquired a similar lease for a naval base at Toulon. France was not allowed to develop nuclear weapons.
Great Britain didn’t lose any territory in the British Isles, but had to restrict the size of its navy to 50% of the Imperial German Navy’s tonnage and had to keep England south of the Thames River demilitarized. Entanglement in foreign alliances had led Britain to this, imperilling the British Empire and so the new government would adopt a foreign policy of Splendid Isolation to make sure that didn’t happen again. Britain would maintain a large standing army as the navy could no longer be counted on to hold off an amphibious invasion, an army specializing in guerrilla warfare as conventional war was no option against an enemy that could tactically use nuclear weapons. The government nationalized coal, oil, steel, shipping and heavy industry and created the welfare state, which included the National Health Service. This government was led by Clement Attlee, the leader of Labour which won the first UK general election in 1945 in a landslide whereas the Tories were decimated. Labour had an absolute majority in the House of Commons.
In the Balkans, significant territorial changes took place too. Hungary, being one of the victors, took the entirety of Transylvania and made sure to completely “Magyarize” it by expelling the entire Romanian population, which amounted to 3.7 million people. The violent way in which this forced displacement took place was tantamount to genocide, with hundreds of thousands dying from violence, deprivation and illness. The Turks who’d settled Eastern Rumelia after the Bulgarian Genocide and the Serb minority in Vardar Macedonia were in similar bad luck: the victorious Bulgarians annexed Eastern Rumelia and Vardar Macedonia, exacting revenge by enacting systematic ethnic cleansing.
The settling of scores in the Balkans did not end there. Bosnia-Herzegovina and the majority Croat portions of Yugoslavia were broken off and formed into the independent Kingdom of Croatia, an Italian satellite state. King Victor Emmanuel III’s first cousin once removed Prince Amedeo, 3rd Duke of Aosta, became its king under the regnal name Tomislav II. Under Prime Minister Ante Pavelic, ethnic cleansing was carried out targeting the Serbian minority. The people of Serbia and Romania were left severely traumatized by the aftermath of the war. Greece, despite its neutrality, was forced to cede Western Thrace to Bulgaria.
The Ottoman Empire’s lingering influence in the Balkans had finally been removed and it was now subjected to partition. Russia annexed the Bosporus as well as Turkish Armenia and incorporated Anatolia’s Black Sea coast as well. This ensured a contiguous land link between Russia proper so that the Bosporus wasn’t an exclave that could be cut off from reinforcement by anyone with a superior navy. Constantinople was rechristened Tsargrad. Greece was rewarded with Smyrna and Cyprus to compensate the loss of Western Thrace. Italy established a naval base at Antalya, which became a de facto part of its sphere of influence. Greater Syria, defined as the territory between the Taurus Mountains and the Sinai, was awarded to Sharif Abdullah of Mecca who also took control in the Arab Peninsula. The Levant and the Arab Peninsula (minus Oman, Yemen and some Gulf states) formed a united Sunni Arab kingdom under the Hashemites. The Sharif of Mecca was proclaimed King Abdullah I of the Arabs and he assumed the title of Caliph, which the Ottoman Sultans had held for so long. Iran annexed the predominantly Shia Arab Baghdad and Basra vilayets; the Mosul vilayet became an independent Kurdish republic. What remained of the Ottoman Empire was a Turkish rump state in Anatolia with its capital in Ankara, where Sultan Ahmed IV ruled as a Russian puppet.
The African map was redrawn too. All of Germany’s lost colonies were returned: Cameroon, German Southwest Africa (Namibia) and Tanganyika. But given their nuclear monopoly, the Germans could take what they wanted and they did exactly that in their ambition to realize Mittelafrika: the name for an envisioned German geostrategic region in central and east Africa. French Guinea, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Upper Volta, Gold Coast, Dahomey, Nigeria, Ubangi-Chari, Gabon, Middle Congo, Belgian Congo and Rhodesia were all taken and merged into German Central Africa. Germany also assumed control of the French protectorate over Morocco.
The policies that had made Togoland into a “model economy” were implemented everywhere to make the African subjects into “Black Germans”. Now, with a colonial empire rich in diamonds, gold, rare metals, critical minerals and oil the German colonial venture did turn a profit. Probably the greatest advance would be the construction of the “Kaiser Wilhelm Hydroelectric Works”, a series of four dams on the Inga Falls (a group of cataracts in the Congo River downstream of Livingstone Falls and Stanley Pool). These dams were envisioned by a German engineer who calculated in a 1945 study that with the Congo River’s flood rate a series of dams could generate nearly 40.000 megawatts, enough to electrify the entire African continent at the time with capacity to spare. Construction would begin in 1947 and take a decade.
Meanwhile, Italy wanted to connect Libya and Italian East Africa with a contiguous land link, establishing a large colonial empire in the northeast of Africa that controlled the strategically important Suez Canal and the Red Sea. The virtual British protectorate over Egypt was supplanted by an Italian one, which was formalized by an Italo-Egyptian treaty, with an Italian resident in Cairo wielding most power. This treaty also determined that the co-dominium that Britain and Egypt had over Sudan – which in practice ensured British control even though in theory London and Cairo shared sovereignty and administration – switched to Italy now. The small remaining British colonial presence consisted of Gambia (a sliver in northwest Africa), Kenya, Uganda, Bechuanaland and the dominion of South Africa.
In Asia, some colonial holdings switched control as well. Imperial Japan got back all the islands in the Pacific the US had conquered. It gained French Indochina, Burma, Malaysia as colonies whilst establishing a protectorate over Thailand. Playing Britain and France apart to maintain independence would no longer work in this situation. Thailand could not resist Japanese pressure now that it was surrounded by Japanese territory. Japan, having been bombed heavily, also received war reparations to fund its recovery and had high hopes of becoming the leading power in East Asia again. Somebody else, however, was going to grab that title.