AHC: Soviets liberate France in ww2
- Thread starter peeter
- Start date
D Day landings fail badly enough that Dragoon is called off. The alternative is that one or the other still happen but are effectively contained enough that any break out attempts fail. The Germans are able to concentrate more resources on the Soviets and the war effectively ends when the Soviets push their way into France in 46 or so. The Western allies try to liberate as much territory as possible in the last days but most of France still ends up occupied by the Soviets and the Soviets install their own puppet communist government. The De Gaulle government holds onto the patches around OTL Overlord and or Dragoon as a ROC on Taiwan analog.
Soviets occupying France in such a way seems unlikely. Yalta might have gone differently, but the Soviets behaving like this would very likely lead to an Allied 'reaction', and Stalin would know it. He'd much prefer to get other concessions out of the Allies than occupy their core territory, though no doubt he would encourage French Communists.
If the Soviets prepared for Barbarossa and were somehow able to crush the German invasion as fast as Germany was able to crush the Soviets in Barbarossa in the beginning as on OTL (highly unlikely but this an alternate scenario/TL) and launched a massive counter attack why wouldn’t they occupy Vichy France temporarily and negotiate for a parts of France to be in the Soviet influence? What exactly would the allies be able to do about it?
Maybe Barbarossa is postponed until 1942 and goes absolutely horribly for the Germans.
I'm just spitballing here as I am very much not an expert on this topic.
I'm just spitballing here as I am very much not an expert on this topic.
Hmm, a PoD far enough back that the Soviets could 'crush' the German invasion, not just beat it faster, is further back than I was envisioning. Sure, if the Soviets are marching through Germany in 1942 then I guess I could see them march all the way to the Atlantic. Even then though, the Soviets aren't idiots and understand how massively provocative that is to Britain and the US (unlike the Nazis who were that stupid), and may avoid having too much control over France. In the scenario I was envisioning, that is, a failed D-Day combined with faster Soviet advance but nonetheless the war ending in late '44/early '45, they are going to be too exhausted to risk fighting the Americans, I would think.
Uhm.. So the nazis are going to keep fighting in France once Germany is gone?
The road to Paris unless you go south from Warsaw to Markov is through Berlin.
Sweeping South to Munich and Austria and west to hamburg and Frankfurt..
No Germany.. No nazis.. Someone will surrender in place.
So the idea of soviets liberating Paris is nil. If the Germans are being crushed the west is going to jump in to at least stop the soviets at the Rhine and low countries.
Germans are going to be more inclined to surrender to the west either way
Speed is irrelevant, since Germany and Berlin are on the land route from Russia to France, and if the Russians have overrun enough of Germany to be nearing the French border, the Germans have likely surrendered and the war is over anyway.
If the British feel that the manpower crisis of the Original Timeline is seriously biting, though, you could maybe see them accept some Russian divisions to help with OVERLORD or DRAGOON, if the Russians can get them to the starting off point in time. I think at one point when Stalin felt the western allies were dragging their feet over moving the second front across the Channel, he did offer to send a whole army to the UK to fight, if the British couldn't fight the Germans in France themselves.