world war 2

As the title suggests - early in WW2 - some STEN gun drawings sank on their voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. Then the two sample STENS were burned in a train wreck. The courier delivers them to Long Branch Arsenal but his nerves are so badly rattled that he stays drunk for the rest of the...

ATL As the title suggests, only an incomplete set of Valentine light tank drawings arrives at Montreal Locomotive Works early in WW2. They got complete drive train and lower hull drawings, but are missing some of the turret and upper hull drawings. OTL MLW was already planing a cast glacis plate...

In September 1942 Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma was transferred to the Afrika Korps to take part in the Second Battle of El Alamein in October 1942. As a result of Rommel losing the first and second battles, Thoma was captured on 4 November 1942 and put in a POW camp in the United Kingdom. Whilst...

What the title says. If the Nazis had never come to power in Germany, would it have been possible for WWII to happen?

How do you make Operation Sealion have a 1% chance of succeeding, instead of a 0% chance?

October 11, 1937 Ahmed Hussayn just stood their in the room. He was eating some Hummus with Pita. Naturally, he was always scheming. Ever since leading the Young Egypt Party, he vied for power. He smiled to a group of party cadres. "You all have suplies to seize power. Retake the motherland...

Austrian Cover German Cover

In OTL Japan's Empire stretched from the South Pacific to the islands of Alaska, and from China to Hawaii. This height couldn't have been achieved without sewing the seeds of its own destruction in the form of declaring war on the US. But suppose that Japan recognizes its inability to fight a...

I was reading the excellent "Our Struggle" thread by The Red, when I pondered about how a conflict between a Communist Germany and Fascist Russia would have gone down. I also admitted that it was an idea I've always been interested in, and perhaps it could also be interesting if we assume that...

Just an odd thought that occurred to me the other day: A Prussian born in the 1850s would have been ~20 years old during the Franco-Prussian War. In 1940s that same man would be in his 90s. Similarly, a Russian man born in the early 1860s would be in his late teens during the Russo-Turkish War...

In 1940 Germany managed to conquer Denmark in just 6 hours, but what if things had being different. This is a idea for a timeline I made where officers in the danish army after seeing Germany’s conquests of Austria and Czechoslovakia come to the conclusion that they are next. They know that they...

In OTL, Franklin Roosevelt planned on stepping down in 1940 in favor of his preferred successor, Harry Hopkins. However, Hopkins' health collapsed and WWII broke out, prompting FDR to run for an unprecedented third term. The POD is that German Conservatives forge a coalition to block the Nazis...

Who would be the belligerents and on which side? Would Argentina be the Axis and Chile allied?

OTL immediately post-WW2 a few airframes were converted from piston to jet power. The Russians simply hung (Junkers Jumo 004) jet engines under the noses of existing Yak 3 tail-dragging fighters. Yak 15 was unique in being a jet-powered tail-dragger. Sweden re-engined a batch of SAAB 21...

How did the Nazis view/treat the Sorbian-speaking minorities in Upper Saxony? I don't seem to recall ever reading about them being targeted for persecution or assimilation, and they're still there today, so whatever policies the Nazi government had toward them must have been much milder than...

IOTL, there was a Soviet offensive aimed at Estonia launched at the end stages of WW2, in february 1944. The Soviets hoped to gain a beachhead to the Baltic sea, to supplant their operations aimed at the Baltic states and Finland. However, the Axis forces in the area presented stiffer...

So we all know how FDR died almost as soon as his 4th term began, but what if he lived to see his 4th term all the way through (or at least, most of the way). Because I have heard that FDR was sympathetic towards the Viet Minh in Indochina and was a staunch Anti-Colonialist, which made things...

Greetings I'm new here and my apologies for opening a topic that has been gone over multiple times. The reason I'm asking this is that, while the topic has been broached multiple times, most of the responses focused on the Japanese side of the ledger: basically, it made little or no sense for...

What if the French generals had been competent and had realized the weakness of the Maginot line and the unprotected Ardennes? What if they had protected or mined the Ardennes? What if the Maginot Line was extended?

What if the crew of the USS William D. Porter accidentally manage to kill FDR with a torpedo that was misfired in 1943?