Yeah, people overlook that part often enough. Early rearmament means you are building your stock over plans, exercises, wishes, and dreams. Rearming later does get you caught with your pants down, probably, but you will rearm across the needs of the current war.
Yes, but a cowardly idiot. The one and only reason he jumped in is because he was convinced the war was done already. If that's not a given (even less than OTL, at least), then Mussolini will keep faffing.
Not that he couldn't end up in the war through other stumbles, but he won't just declare...
I think that, beyond the memes, this specific reply gives a lot of insight on that:
The Italian front was... well, awful. All the way through. There are countless memes about the 87658756th Battle of the Isonzo River, but the truth is that it was literally the best option. Italy had zero good...
I mean, even in these threads there are more maps that are significantly worse than OTL for Italy than the opposite, and OTL is already kind of an Italyscrew already, so.
I mean, Mussolini was 0% interested in actually fighting a real war against France or Britain - he only jumped in when he assumed there was no more fight to be had beyond the deeply theoretical. With France holding, he will default to his base position: that Italy is in no shape to fight up to...
Imperial Japan was in an unwinnable war because it was Imperial Japan, with a given ideology and tactics. A hypothetical not!Imperial Japan in the same situation could have forced the US to throw the towel à la Vietnam, but the same hypothetical not!Imperial Japan probably wouldn't have gone to...
While acknowledging that you did specify it is not meant to be overly realistic, this really requires no Tito, as the genocidal bastard really wanted to have all Italians out of his Yugoslavian Lebensraum and had got started long before the solution of the Trieste issue. At the same time it also...
Germany was never going to be happy with any treaty saying "you lost", but yet again, they didn't need to be happy about it. They needed to be able to get resigned about it. Just don't alienate Italy, hold the wheel straight and tight on reparations and other Versailles provisions, and give...
And how useful was that 35k tons battleship, compared to the carrier? I say this as an absolute fan of battleships who thinks that they were killed some 20 years too early by the poor showing of Japanese AA: if you need to wring the most use out of a capital ship, carriers were the way to go...
Italy is a mess, in the immediate - it's just bled dry by WW1, and OTL they had put all naval construction on hold before the treaty even existed. Up to 1925 nothing changes significantly, I expect - maybe the Caracciolo isn't actually scrapped, but it sure isn't getting completed.
Afterwards...
As the author said, this is OTL: it's just that the generic term for "sovereign" at different tiers is derived from non-European languages (as they said in the map, the Negus of France is locally called "Rwa", which is, Roi).
While stuff like the Black Book of Communism is hogwash, Stalinist Soviet Russia killed millions - even just the Holodomor killed up to five million people. In Kazakhstan, one and a half million people starved. Just as many died in gulags during the Stalin era. 700,000 dead is the lowballing for...
I can't see that, to be honest, as the Soviet Union was possibly one of the most regressive countries of the 20th century. Wiping out its existance - especially if while managing to preserve the results of the first revolution - would have done the world a great deal of good.