You know, all this talk of nuclear warfare makes me wonder who would likely be the aftermath for Europe with a nuclear World War 3 in the late 50s/early 60s.
British forces in axis Cold War
- Thread starter BurkeanLibCon
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Messy.
But I doubt they’d hit America badly. Maybe a couple sub-launched strikes.
I'd think it would look like Hiroshima and Nagasaki on a much bigger scale but not totally MAD 1980s levels. Portions would be inhabitable for the decades to come but Europe won't be a total wasteland.
Losing New York, Boston, and Philly would still hurt America nonetheless.
It would also give the notion that America is no longer a fortress protected by two oceans. Limited Japanese attacks on the West Coast such as the submarine shelling, the firebombs, and that one incident where a Japanese pilot delivered the only known bombing of the U.S. mainland in 1942 were covered up and not only known until years later.
In fact, that notion disappeared in 1947 when the Soviets showed off their Tu-4s in an air show. For once, the U.S. knew it could come under attack from the North Pole.
See the example in Harry Turtledove's The Hot War series. The book Bombs Away has the Soviets using one-way flight Tu-4s to hit major American cities on both coasts and the Midwest. Even if the U.S. eventually wins at the end of the third book, it has already lost most of its major cities, namely San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, Boston, D.C., Chicago, and Detroit.
The October 1951 Colliers Magazine issue Preview of the War We Do Not Want also deals with limited Soviet nuclear attacks on the U.S. in the 1950s and how the country would be affected by it.
You know what I’ve just thought of? A British Foreign Legion. Yes, it’s unlikely to be massive - c.10,000 - 20,000 but it would serve British/Allied political goals well by having troops of many different nations/regions unified against the Nazis.
Thoughts?
Thoughts?
Since this happened almost similarly in OTL because Britain had people from its colonies serving in the armed forces. Not to mention, the British military allows citizens of Commonwealth nations to enlist.
I remember there was a Polish volunteer squadron in the RAF at the time of the Battle of Britain. Could this be fully separate detachment just like the Dutch Leopard 2 tank brigade in the Bundeswehr?
You just need to continue to support the various Free XXXXXXX Forces using refugees and eventually the children of the refugees, though for political reasons they may need renaming. There's also the precedent of the King's German Legion from the Napoleonic Wars.
German-occupied Europe or its client states would suddenly be a big Vietnam War.
As I said earlier in the thread the Germans will be facing a continental wide low level insurgency plus banditry and semi open warfare on their border with the Russians. Unlike the British they'll be unable to demobilise to an economically sustainable level, and their puppet states and allies will be increasingly unwilling to support them due to the cost in men and treasure.
Without nothing left to plunder and a rising insurgency throughout the continent, the German economy would collapse.
I wonder how long the Nazi empire would last in a situation like this? My own thoughts are around 1970 tops.
But then how do they go out? Do they fall internally to civil war? Do they restart war with the Anglo-Americans and get nuked into the sky? Do they just nuke the west anyway as a final “fuck you!”?
Europe will have to rebuild after the war, Germany will impose high
In most scenarios that I read, Germany falls into a civil war just like in Thousand Week Reich.
The Allies either sit it out ("let the Nazis eat themselves and we'll take the spoils") or wait until both sides are weakened from constant fighting then comes the liberation of Europe.
I think a Germany with nuclear weaponry will not hesitate to make examples out of resistance villages via mushroom clouds. There will be resistance but a lot more will stay out of the fighting unless it appears to have a real shot at success or the situation is desperate. Expect passive resistance and isolated acts of sabotage with cells in a few places and maybe even a covert network but one with limited reach and extreme disconnecte between cells and leadership.
I've seen a fair few Axis victory TLs, but I've never seen them get far enough to get to the Axis collapse part so far. It's one of those things that I think has to happen at some point, but I find hard to imagine how it would go.
But the way I see it, I think another hot war with the Allied Powers, around the end of the 20th century, is the most likely way it would go. Nazi Germany by that point has no mechanism for a mostly-peaceful dissolution like the OTL Soviet Union did.
After decades of genocide, it'd be ethnically homogenous, so it can't break into ethnic republics like the USSR did. Even in the short time they existed in OTL they were frighteningly good at indoctrinating their citizens; if still around after a couple of generations then the vast majority of its population will have been born into the system and have known nothing else. They would be fanatically loyal to an extent probably not seen anywhere in OTL. Nor is the political system hospitable to any reform-minded people; if anything it will get even harsher and more extreme with each successive leader. Like North Korea if it was a superpower but a hundred times worse, dependent on and having a long history of conquest, and genocidal on a continental scale.
And yet, it was an empire dependent on slave labour and other spoils from its conquests. Generalplan Ost called for the extermination of nearly all Slavic people in the eastern conquests through being worked to death. They could keep the system running through further conquests for some time; conquering and absorbing the Soviet rump state in Siberia (by then likely too depopulated and demilitarized to resist much), a short victorious war against Italy (for various reasons I think Germany and Italy would likely come to blows a generation or so after an Axis victory), and eventually perhaps absorbing their Balkan puppets (a more extreme Nazi leadership could probably easily find a propaganda reason to exterminate the southern Slavs). But eventually, I would think by the end of the century or so, their slave labour and resources would again be running out, and by then they would have run out of easy conquests.
With a fanatical leadership dedicated to maintaining the ideology without compromise, and a loyal population that knows no other reality, they could easily think that they have no other choice but to start an all-out war against the Allied Powers themselves, and could easily delude themselves into thinking they could win.
The problem with butchering your labor source is that eventually someone else has to step up and so the work, which they're not going to line up to do. I expect there will be just enough improvement in conditions that instead of liquidating the entire Slavic (or most other) populations, pragmatism takes over and instead they begin to breed a true slave population. Menial work, truly hard labor, and other undesirable jobs are left to these folks, who might be lobotimized at birth and their cultures still eradicated. Please don't misunderstand, the Germans were sickeningly capable of mass extermination, but prudence and economics are likely to weigh in and *might* result in an even worse fate than death for millions of conquered Europeans...
People are far too optimistic about resistance stories or the inevitability of German collapse when the Nazis showed that they were quite flexible when it came to their own survival and went to great lengths (up until 1943) to shelter their population in a bubble out of fear of another stab in the back.
But this is a thread about Britain and I believe the UK will be a nation under siege mentality, constantly kept under the target of thousand of bombers and missiles across the channel with U-Boats being essentially sharks surrounding the island. They will be far more dependent on the US to mount an effective resistance as the Empire begins to fracture over the pressures that already began to show after WWI.
Either the US has to provide far more investments in Britain than they did in our world, as they would be likely glassed within the first days of a total war, or Britain would have to find a settlement with Germany somehow. There were some high ranking figures like Göring or Rudolf Hess who would be willing to make agreements with Britain out of sympathy or to seek a pragmatic Detente. Is it a likely end? Of course not, Britain was always hostile to a Continental power which becomes homogenous in Europe like Napoleon or Wilhelmine Germany, but Britain either would have to shackle itself economically and militarily to the US, double down on Imperialism and fight bloody and costly wars to keep extracting resources from Africa and Asia, try to form agreements with former colonies (not very likely, India and Nigeria are not like Canada or Australia), or make peace with Germany (which can only happen at least after Hitler's death).
But this is a thread about Britain and I believe the UK will be a nation under siege mentality, constantly kept under the target of thousand of bombers and missiles across the channel with U-Boats being essentially sharks surrounding the island. They will be far more dependent on the US to mount an effective resistance as the Empire begins to fracture over the pressures that already began to show after WWI.
Either the US has to provide far more investments in Britain than they did in our world, as they would be likely glassed within the first days of a total war, or Britain would have to find a settlement with Germany somehow. There were some high ranking figures like Göring or Rudolf Hess who would be willing to make agreements with Britain out of sympathy or to seek a pragmatic Detente. Is it a likely end? Of course not, Britain was always hostile to a Continental power which becomes homogenous in Europe like Napoleon or Wilhelmine Germany, but Britain either would have to shackle itself economically and militarily to the US, double down on Imperialism and fight bloody and costly wars to keep extracting resources from Africa and Asia, try to form agreements with former colonies (not very likely, India and Nigeria are not like Canada or Australia), or make peace with Germany (which can only happen at least after Hitler's death).
Oh, I definitely think they would make at least some effort to get the slave population a bit more stable once they realize that it's a finite resource. But I don't think they're likely to be successful, at least well enough to do anything more than delay the inevitable. Improving conditions (perhaps by giving them non-starvation rations) would have run counter to how they treated all racial "inferiors" to this point, and I doubt they could train it out of the system before any reformist leaders orchestrating it get ousted in the cycle of purges that tend to follow leadership changes in fascist states. Besides that their attempts to make the "inferior" slaves reproduce would definitely use extremely unethical methods, so they'd still be treated badly, and be resistant to bringing kids into the hell they're living. Reformist figures wanting to improve conditions out of pragmatism would be fighting a losing battle against increasingly extreme hardliners wanting to toe the line of Nazi ideology. Even in their short OTL history, they had through their existence a prevailing habit of choosing ideology over economics or rationality. It's a system where the pragmatists tend to get sidelined and the hardliners tend to win out, even if they'll take the whole country down with them. We saw that in OTL, and I think it'd just get worse in a victorious Germany.
Before they start having issues with the genocide-induced population decline, the opportunity for more conquests would have come up (Siberia, Italy, the Balkans). At that point I'd sooner believe they'd revert to their tried-and-true, ideologically consistent, method of sustaining the "master race" than try to change themselves.
I would think that once Chamberlain is out, a formal peace is likely off the table. The Allied demand for peace was unconditional surrender, and they have no reason to back down from that (they don't have or need an economic relationship with the countries they're actively at war with). I think Britain would sooner shackle itself to the US economic and military world order, since that's what they did in OTL both during and after the war, with the less pressing threat of the Soviet Union rather than a victorious Nazi Germany.
Pragmatically, they likely know that they can never trust Germany as long as it's governed by the Nazi Party. This is the country that went back on the Munich Agreement, broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and betrayed the Soviet Union, and otherwise has a long history of breaking or ignoring international norms or agreements whenever it sees fit for any or no reason. Any peace treaty that isn't unconditional surrender wouldn't be worth the paper it's signed on.
Meanwhile, the Empire is probably if anything falling faster than OTL, at least the African and Asian bits. It would be harder to justify maintaining an empire when your ideological enemy is fascism instead of communism, but on the other hand, they could be cleaner breaks than in OTL, with the newly independent countries for the most part having continued friendly relations with the Allies. Racial-supremacist fascism won't appeal to any of them like communism could (besides maybe South Africa, Rhodesia, and Portuguese Angola and Mozambique), so the Germans won't be making a lot of friends outside Europe like the OTL Soviets could. As such an independent Nigeria or India may break away from Britain, but they will stay in the Allied camp. A world with a rogue state as one of its global superpowers is a world where any country would find it very hard to stay neutral.
Britain was already dependent on American military and economic aid during the war. So it would be more just a continuation of the status quo, and a quicker than OTL acceptance that there's no way to return to the way things were before the war.
The fanfic timeline of Fatherland by @Onkel Willie has Germany actually avoiding the collapse. In fact, it survives all the way to the present day 21st Century. It is forever locked in a 70+ year Cold War against the Anglo-American bloc.
The Fatherland - a Nazi victory TL
As the title clearly references it, it must be clear this won't just be a Nazi victory scenario but one that aims to plausibly achieve a world similar to the one depicted in arguably the most well known alternate history novel: Robert Harris's Fatherland, which I do not own or claim to own the...
www.alternatehistory.com
Going back to the discussion, I agree that Germany's fanaticism and obsession with being the master race would lead to its eventual downfall. Especially once the sane-minded leaders die and a fanatical one takes over, a war with the Anglo-American bloc (which by then would have included all of the Western Hemisphere and the free world) would quickly wear the Germans out. Even the German superweapons would eventually be destroyed as these were expensive to make, hence why many were mere prototypes in OTL.
Ooh, thanks for that! I'll have to check it out.
By the 1990s/2000s (my rough prediction for when things come to a head) the Allied powers that Nazi Germany would be facing off against when they decide it's time for the Endsieg would certainly be as prepared as one can be for that eventuality. Nearly all of them would likely be more militarized than OTL, in both conventional weapons and WMDs, and with a large and heavily militarized presence in space (no bilateral arms agreements or Outer Space Treaty in this world; Germany had shown with its behaviour that it can't be trusted to uphold anything). They've likely gone all-in on the SDI idea. Britain and Ireland, being right on the frontline, probably have extensive systems of fallout shelters and an Iron Dome-like antimissile system (looking like a combination of Israel and Switzerland).
But even so, there's only so much you can do to prepare for an all-out war with WMDs, and none of it can guarantee survival or is immune to being countered. Nazi Germany certainly can't win a war they start at this time (even if they can easily make themselves believe they can), but both sides can certainly lose.