A Blunted Sickle - Thread II
- Thread starter pdf27
- Start date
In manpower terms, India and then Algeria. Canada is contributing rather fewer men than OTL, Poland's main role is as a victim, and the Dutch really aren't doing very much fighting.
Algeria is France, though. I suppose India makes sense as a big contributor though.
Seems to me there should be at least 4 Polish divisions on the line, with the French army ATL, after all that many had already been organised by June 1940. Also it's much easier to escape Poland through Romania ATL and the government in exile will be able to recruit from the Polish immigrant population in France.
Thank you for the update. I am sad to hear that the Char B40 was cancelled but considering the change in doctrine it makes sense
I am wondering have the German VK 30 heavy tanks been cancelled, will the Russians ever bother on working on an early IS tank and will we might see the possibility of an early Conqueror/ Caernarvon
Last edited:
Currently Algeria is an indissoluble part of France - the Indigenat codes are changing though (at least for servicemen and their immediate families), and the Pieds Noirs are not the ones doing most of the fighting and dying.
There are. The Indian contribution is still bigger - two Corps already, and rapidly expanding.
VK30 series is dead thanks to the fiasco of the Neubaufahrzeug - and having only really met Matildas and their French equivalents the desire for a heavy tank won't be nearly as strong. The Soviets will still be working on heavy tanks - essentially the next version of the KV-series - so you'll probably see something rather like the IS-series eventually, although without combat experience it won't be nearly as effective. Whether or not Entente heavy tanks ever exist is too much of a spoiler for the postwar world, so I don't want to go into it.
Ian_W
Banned
Is Ritchie's Third Army advancing at about the same pace as Alexander's Second ?
If they are, then Lindemann's now-much-lighter forces might have trouble getting to the Ruhr, because they will need to conduct a running fight with Ritchie's men to do this.
Doesn't the Matilda II have enough armour to make the Germans consider the VK30 project? Does the VK20 have the long 75mm, or was the long 50mm adequate for Matildas and Somuas?
In @ Poland provided IIRC the fourth largest military contribution to the Allies. In TTL since France did not fall the Free Polish Army will have stayed in France and will be under French command. The soldiers of 'Ander's Army' will remain in Soviet Gulags and we'll likely not ever hear from them again any time soon. We may also not hear about Katyn any time soon.
Maximum thickness on a Matilda II was 78mm - the PAK 38 would penetrate that out to 500m with AP and APC, or almost 1000m with APCR. It'll penetrate an S35 out to 1,500m with any of those shot types.
There is another issue here - tanks are horribly expensive compared to AT guns. The Panzers have been very badly mauled, and badly need the numbers of replacements - so they'll stick with existing designs and use AT guns to deal with the Matildas.
That isn't a denigration of the fighting the Poles are doing, but a recognition of just how much it sucks to live in Poland at the moment. Operation Reinhardt has started a year earlier than in OTL, while the Catholic Church has been rather more open in it's opposition to the Nazis. In OTL by 1945 the Germans had killed > 5 million Poles, slightly more than half of them Jewish. ITTL, because the Germans only really have occupied Poland and Czechoslovakia to ravage rather than most of the continent, they'll be a long way ahead of where they were in OTL. That means I'm anticipating total Polish casualties being more or less what they were in OTL: compared to that, the exploits of 4 divisions - no matter how hard they fight - will never be thought of as more than a footnote in history.
I certainly did not see it as such. Interestingly Poland was the only occupied country where the Nazis felt it necessary to make it a capital offence to hide Jews.
IITL Poland will be busily being ravaged by both the Germans and Soviets. The difference will be of deegrees of awfulness.
Post-war the biggest change to @ will be that the UK will not have a significant Polish community while France probably will. That will fit with Franco-Polish pre-war relations.
Depending on when or if the Soviets decide that they have a chance to move against the Nazis, the border will either be something like the Molotov-Ribbentrop line or possibly even on the Vistula...
teg
Personally, I think Germany will still end up divided, between some SSR in East Prussia, and the rest of Germany, minus some bits in the east and south Germany. Poland will also end up divided between the Polish SSR, and a small Rump Second Republic around Posen.
There was the Valkyrie Successful TL several years back, which had a rather...idealistic view of how a post-Hitler Nazi Germany would pan out (the old "surrender to the WAllies, screw the Soviets" move, with all the Germany-wank that that entails). I mapped it with a somewhat more cynical view as to how well West Poland would take being expected to get on well with a strong Germany which had been cheerfully genociding them within living memory.
I rather suspect that's too 19th century for any of the Allied nations to try to "save" Belgium from itself. They might not oppose a grassroots movement to split off but I don't see them trying to impose such a solution on Belgium (especially a Belgium that fought all the way through without capitulating).
Well, there is still this TL's equivalent of the Belgian Royal Question to be worked through. Which could of course go horribly wrong...