Interestingly in this timeline while Nazi Germany was defeated, fascism itself was not. Some countries might still up with openly fascist political parties being active.
Like, oh, Italy?
This is indeed the point, India leaving does not change any of that. OTL post-war India stayed in the Sterling Area for a good few years after independence and it was US pressure/Bretton Woods/wartime debts that caused them to finally leave. Those thing don't apply here so I can see India staying in even longer, particularly if they leave on slightly better terms.
Informal Empire, Sterling Area, whatever you want to call it I think it is an much stronger position than OTL and remains un-fallen-apart.
We may be talking at cross-purposes here. What I'm defining "British Empire" as in my head as countries with a British Governor appointed by the Colonial Office in Whitehall and accountable only to them. I absolutely do not see the "Informal Empire" falling apart at all - indeed I think it will have been strengthened by the war, particularly in South America.
What I'm anticipating is that a large number of colonies will transition from the formal to the informal empire, that India will support this, and that because of the very large Indian diaspora we will start to see India setting itself up as a second nexus (after Britain) within this informal empire.
I gather that this sentence is primarily focused on British TTL history.
So in TTL, did France build the Savannah heavy-manufacturing complex, and build additional heavy industrial capacity in Quebec? (Intended in OTL, but events intervened.)
I've not written about Savannah, partially because this is a UK-focussed timeline (I'm British - write about what you know!) but also partly because finding sources on it is really hard. What there is available isn't promising - in summer 1940 it reads like essentially a green-field site a long way from the rest of American heavy industry. Realistically, given the length of the war (we're currently 18 months on at this point) it's never going to make a significant contribution
Did France still force the reorganization of the Metropolitan aircraft industry by geographical manufacturing location?
Assume no changes are initiated after May 1940 - you really don't want to do that in the middle of an emergency. Post-war something of this sort is probable.
Did significant elements of the French industrial labor force remain influenced by COMINTERN direction, to the detriment of production rates?
I've not seen this anywhere. What I have seen - at least during the phony war - is stories of known communists being called up to keep them from spreading trouble in the factories, and then demobilised to keep them from spreading trouble in the army. Repeatedly.
Realistically once France is invaded and Paris captured (and subsequently liberated) I don't see this being an issue. There will only be a very small number who prioritise the USSR over their own country in the circumstances - it's much easier in a phony war.
The pre-May-1940 activities of the French side of the French British Purchasing Commission had established a pattern, involving French purchase of large quantities of aircraft and transport-vehicles. (That also involved negotiations for land around Savannah for the aforementioned industrial complex, and discussions with infrastructure suppliers and potential materials- and subcomponent-suppliers.) Does that pattern remain unchanged in TTL, or is it somehow radically reversed?
The big French purchases - much like the later British ones when they also took over the French orders - were heavily driven by panic. It was a case of buy whatever you can, NOW. By autumn 1940 that will have eased off somewhat - they've beaten back a huge German attack, recaptured Paris and most of an Army with it, and the British are on the continent in force. I think it's unlikely that we will see the cancellation of existing orders, but quite probable that what they're actually ordering will radically change.
Without talking for pdf27, the creation of production lines for French equipment in the US would probably have happened and acquisition of machine tooling would have continued, but orders of American equipment itself would probably have dried up in 1941 as the local industry or Franco-US lines ramped up, while orders up to June 1940 are completed. Especially because the French and British have dollar reserves until the second quarter of 1941 only and would want to avoid actual Lend-Lease.
Dollar reserves is something you can work on, particularly as the US really doesn't have any other potential export customers apart from possibly Japan. With the Germans clearly on the back food, I think the US sensitivity to loans dragging them into a war will ease and at least to some extent they'll be able to finance what they really need.
One important point however is that non-Dollar production (in France, Britain, their various empires and the Franc/Sterling zone) will be rapidly ramping up at this point, and a lot of it will be good stuff. For instance the Ford factory at Poissy was tooling up to make Merlin engines in 1940, and was one of the biggest and most modern plants of it's type in France at the time. That's ~1,000 Allison engines you don't need to import per year, and there are endless instances of this sort of thing.
Another is commonality between Britain and France. We've already seen it with steel helmets where both are adopting a common design, but you'll be seeing it elsewhere as well. The two economies are shackled together at the hip (the Bank of England has underwritten all the French loans at a fixed exchange rate -> essentially the two countries now have a single currency), and that means they can play a lot of games with supplies.
The only question that I have is whether Slovakia shipped its Jews to the campus or not.
I don't intend to write about it, but assume they didn't - the Germans will concentrate on stuff under their own control first, and by the time they've got the spare capacity to be bothering the Slovaks it's late 1941. No matter what Tiso wants, by that point nobody with half a brain is going to go out of their way to help the Germans, and so the Jews of Slovakia will be saved by bureaucratic inertia.
