Introduction and POD
Baldrick
Banned
So... I suppose this TL requires some introduction. My PoD is very simple- ITTL, Britain and France declare war on the Soviet Union as it invades Poland in 1939. This initially leads to some even darker defeats for the Allies, but it also gives the Nazis an inflated idea of their own strength, and things get better eventually... Please enjoy!
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
Circumstance has a way of forcing people and nations who are ostensibly very different together. Both can have their eye on a prize or share a common enemy, and then decide to collaborate- however unpalatable doing so might be- towards a shared end. There is probably no better example of this than the way that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union collaborated to divide the world between them during the Second World War.
On the surface, it’d be hard to find a more unlikely set of partners than the regimes led by Hitler and Stalin. From his darkest days as a Vienna tramp, the German Fuhrer had made no secret of his loathing for communism, associating it with Judaism to create a sort of mega-evil foe which threatened to destroy his beloved Fatherland. Many of his speeches condemned “Bolshevism”, and in his memoir Mein Kampf, he had written some passages which would’ve been truly chilling to any Russian who looked at them- namely, that “inferior” Slavs should be exterminated en masse and that their country should become colonised by Germans.
Similarly, from the Soviet perspective, Germany was an unlikely ally. World War I had seen Kaiser Wilhelm’s armies ravage the USSR’s Tsarist predecessor, killing almost four million Russians. The 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had seen huge swathes of Russian territory pass into a mercifully brief German occupation. Once the Russian Civil War had been brought to a close, Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik regime had called for the extermination of all class enemies and sought to revive Russian power through communism. Furthermore, neither Hitler or Stalin liked or trusted the other much, with both suspecting that the other’s plans for the future involved betraying him.
Nonetheless, if one looked below the surface, the seeds of a Nazi-Soviet alliance were there. First off, both countries were alienated by the Western Allies who had won the First World War. Despite some stumbling attempts to resurrect the prewar Franco-Russian Alliance, London and Paris both had rather frosty relations with Berlin and Moscow. While their greatest fear was, naturally, that Germany would rearm and cause a second war, no-one (barring the Soviet-sponsored Communist politicians, anyhow) was too keen on the Soviet doctrine of permanent world revolution. Furthermore, throughout Russian history, Great Britain had always been seen as more of a competitor than a friend. The Great Game of the nineteenth century had seen bloody border wars in Afghanistan and Anglo-French participation on the Turkish side in the Crimean War. Despite the setbacks caused by World War I and the subsequent Russian Civil War, many Soviet leaders dreamt of an ice-free port on the Indian Ocean and the wealth of India- things which could only be gained at British expense. Lastly, both Germany and the Soviets detested Poland. The country had been created from land taken from both nations in 1918 and then gone on to give the Soviets a bloody nose in the 1921 Polish-Soviet war. As German general Hans von Seeckt had said in 1922, “Poland’s existence is intolerable and incompatible with the essential conditions of Germany’s life. Poland must go and will go- as a result of her own internal weaknesses and of action by Russia- with our aid… The obliteration of Poland must be one of the fundamental drives of German policy… with the help of Russia.” (1) It is with Poland, then, that our story begins.
***
Years of German aggression had expanded the Treaty of Versailles-defined borders of the Reich to include the Rhineland, Austria, and the Sudetenland. Along with these blatant acts of defiance, Britain and France had also been forced to swallow the rearmament of the German Army as well as the construction of a submarine fleet and air force. Both Britain and France were determined, then, that no more aggression of Hitler’s would be tolerated. Thus, on September 3, 1939, two days after the German Army invaded Poland, Britain and France declared war, commencing the Second World War… not that that did the Poles much good. Their army was thirty divisions strong, by no means tiny, but was spread out inefficiently, attempting to defend all of their borders. This had the effect of stretching the nation’s defences out and making them taut, which in turn meant that once the German panzers achieved a breakthrough, there was little to stop them. Furthermore, the Polish army had been allowed to fall into a state of decay, with equipment from the 1930s and 1920s still very much the norm. The naivete of the Poles was shown when their beloved cavalry clashed with the German PzKw Is and Stukas. Britain and France, fearful of a German attack in the West, did almost nothing to help their beleaguered ally. Unit after unit, the Polish Army was carved up by the Panzers like a knife cutting through butter, unable to do much more than act as a lab rat upon which the Germans tested their blitzkrieg. By the fifteenth of September, Warsaw was surrounded.
This is where history took a turn.
Only days before the invasion of Poland, to the shock of the world, a new German-Soviet alliance, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (named after its signatories, the Soviet and German foreign ministers) had been signed. In it, Germany and the USSR had pledged not to attack each other and to partition Eastern Europe, with eastern Poland and the Baltic states agreed upon as Stalin’s turf. Now, with the Polish capital on the verge of falling, Stalin decided it was high time to cash in on his part of Poland.
This caused considerable consternation in London and Paris. To paraphrase the Polish national anthem, Poland was not yet lost. Despite the hopelessness of their cause, the Poles continued to fight on. Furthermore, the Anglo-French guarantee of Polish independence was not directed only at Germany. World public opinion, Chamberlain and Daladier were sure, would not stand for the Allies standing by and letting the Soviet Union stab Poland in the back. Lastly, the British and French PMs had to look in the mirror and examine their consciences. They had sworn to defend Poland and simply couldn’t abandon her now. Thus, after hours of back-and-forth talks between London and Paris, a telegram reached Sir William Seeds at one-thirty AM Moscow time, on September 17, 1939. The telegram stated that Great Britain and France would “consider any violation of Polish sovereign territory to be a violation of the recent guarantee of Poland by the said nations, a guarantee which current developments have not altered”, and that “HM Government might, in the event of a Soviet attack on Polish territory or Polish troops, be obligated to take similar measures concerning the Soviet Government as they had with Germany.”
A groggy Ambassador Seeds went back to bed, but couldn’t get a wink of sleep, tossing and turning as he thought about what all this might mean….
The next morning, he telephoned his French counterpart, Robert Couldondre, who had received a similar telegram from Paris in the night. The two agreed to present their government’s demands to Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov later in the day. After a simple, frugal lunch, the two arranged their meeting by telephone and climbed into their streetcars. The streets of Moscow were eerily quiet, as though people had no idea of what was coming.
When Seeds and Coulondre arrived at Molotov’s ornate office, the Soviet Foreign Minister was very much at his ease and was outwardly extremely polite to the Anglo-French ambassadors. Almost as an old grandfather might, he donned his reading glasses and examined the telegrams with a faint smile. Then, Molotov said that he would have to consult with Stalin, naturally, but that this was frankly none of Britain’s or France’s business, and that since the Western Allied countries were over nine hundred miles away, their threat of declaring war was quite empty. Dejected, the British and French ambassadors returned to their respective offices and began packing their suitcases.
A little after six PM that same day came the news which everyone had been expecting- namely, that the Soviets had crossed the Polish frontier. The telegrams declaring war arrived three days later, and by the twenty-second, both ambassadors were safely back in their home countries. Meanwhile, assailed from both west and east, Poland entered the final stages of collapse. By the end of the month, it was all over. Germany had conquered the lion’s share of the country, and the Soviets had taken a strip of territory in the east, all without the British or French doing much of anything to stop them. World War II was about to enter its next phase, a phase in which the British would pay dearly for their quixotic act of dragging the Soviets into the war…
Comments?
(1): William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, page 458
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
Circumstance has a way of forcing people and nations who are ostensibly very different together. Both can have their eye on a prize or share a common enemy, and then decide to collaborate- however unpalatable doing so might be- towards a shared end. There is probably no better example of this than the way that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union collaborated to divide the world between them during the Second World War.
On the surface, it’d be hard to find a more unlikely set of partners than the regimes led by Hitler and Stalin. From his darkest days as a Vienna tramp, the German Fuhrer had made no secret of his loathing for communism, associating it with Judaism to create a sort of mega-evil foe which threatened to destroy his beloved Fatherland. Many of his speeches condemned “Bolshevism”, and in his memoir Mein Kampf, he had written some passages which would’ve been truly chilling to any Russian who looked at them- namely, that “inferior” Slavs should be exterminated en masse and that their country should become colonised by Germans.
Similarly, from the Soviet perspective, Germany was an unlikely ally. World War I had seen Kaiser Wilhelm’s armies ravage the USSR’s Tsarist predecessor, killing almost four million Russians. The 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had seen huge swathes of Russian territory pass into a mercifully brief German occupation. Once the Russian Civil War had been brought to a close, Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik regime had called for the extermination of all class enemies and sought to revive Russian power through communism. Furthermore, neither Hitler or Stalin liked or trusted the other much, with both suspecting that the other’s plans for the future involved betraying him.
Nonetheless, if one looked below the surface, the seeds of a Nazi-Soviet alliance were there. First off, both countries were alienated by the Western Allies who had won the First World War. Despite some stumbling attempts to resurrect the prewar Franco-Russian Alliance, London and Paris both had rather frosty relations with Berlin and Moscow. While their greatest fear was, naturally, that Germany would rearm and cause a second war, no-one (barring the Soviet-sponsored Communist politicians, anyhow) was too keen on the Soviet doctrine of permanent world revolution. Furthermore, throughout Russian history, Great Britain had always been seen as more of a competitor than a friend. The Great Game of the nineteenth century had seen bloody border wars in Afghanistan and Anglo-French participation on the Turkish side in the Crimean War. Despite the setbacks caused by World War I and the subsequent Russian Civil War, many Soviet leaders dreamt of an ice-free port on the Indian Ocean and the wealth of India- things which could only be gained at British expense. Lastly, both Germany and the Soviets detested Poland. The country had been created from land taken from both nations in 1918 and then gone on to give the Soviets a bloody nose in the 1921 Polish-Soviet war. As German general Hans von Seeckt had said in 1922, “Poland’s existence is intolerable and incompatible with the essential conditions of Germany’s life. Poland must go and will go- as a result of her own internal weaknesses and of action by Russia- with our aid… The obliteration of Poland must be one of the fundamental drives of German policy… with the help of Russia.” (1) It is with Poland, then, that our story begins.
***
Years of German aggression had expanded the Treaty of Versailles-defined borders of the Reich to include the Rhineland, Austria, and the Sudetenland. Along with these blatant acts of defiance, Britain and France had also been forced to swallow the rearmament of the German Army as well as the construction of a submarine fleet and air force. Both Britain and France were determined, then, that no more aggression of Hitler’s would be tolerated. Thus, on September 3, 1939, two days after the German Army invaded Poland, Britain and France declared war, commencing the Second World War… not that that did the Poles much good. Their army was thirty divisions strong, by no means tiny, but was spread out inefficiently, attempting to defend all of their borders. This had the effect of stretching the nation’s defences out and making them taut, which in turn meant that once the German panzers achieved a breakthrough, there was little to stop them. Furthermore, the Polish army had been allowed to fall into a state of decay, with equipment from the 1930s and 1920s still very much the norm. The naivete of the Poles was shown when their beloved cavalry clashed with the German PzKw Is and Stukas. Britain and France, fearful of a German attack in the West, did almost nothing to help their beleaguered ally. Unit after unit, the Polish Army was carved up by the Panzers like a knife cutting through butter, unable to do much more than act as a lab rat upon which the Germans tested their blitzkrieg. By the fifteenth of September, Warsaw was surrounded.
This is where history took a turn.
Only days before the invasion of Poland, to the shock of the world, a new German-Soviet alliance, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (named after its signatories, the Soviet and German foreign ministers) had been signed. In it, Germany and the USSR had pledged not to attack each other and to partition Eastern Europe, with eastern Poland and the Baltic states agreed upon as Stalin’s turf. Now, with the Polish capital on the verge of falling, Stalin decided it was high time to cash in on his part of Poland.
This caused considerable consternation in London and Paris. To paraphrase the Polish national anthem, Poland was not yet lost. Despite the hopelessness of their cause, the Poles continued to fight on. Furthermore, the Anglo-French guarantee of Polish independence was not directed only at Germany. World public opinion, Chamberlain and Daladier were sure, would not stand for the Allies standing by and letting the Soviet Union stab Poland in the back. Lastly, the British and French PMs had to look in the mirror and examine their consciences. They had sworn to defend Poland and simply couldn’t abandon her now. Thus, after hours of back-and-forth talks between London and Paris, a telegram reached Sir William Seeds at one-thirty AM Moscow time, on September 17, 1939. The telegram stated that Great Britain and France would “consider any violation of Polish sovereign territory to be a violation of the recent guarantee of Poland by the said nations, a guarantee which current developments have not altered”, and that “HM Government might, in the event of a Soviet attack on Polish territory or Polish troops, be obligated to take similar measures concerning the Soviet Government as they had with Germany.”
A groggy Ambassador Seeds went back to bed, but couldn’t get a wink of sleep, tossing and turning as he thought about what all this might mean….
The next morning, he telephoned his French counterpart, Robert Couldondre, who had received a similar telegram from Paris in the night. The two agreed to present their government’s demands to Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov later in the day. After a simple, frugal lunch, the two arranged their meeting by telephone and climbed into their streetcars. The streets of Moscow were eerily quiet, as though people had no idea of what was coming.
When Seeds and Coulondre arrived at Molotov’s ornate office, the Soviet Foreign Minister was very much at his ease and was outwardly extremely polite to the Anglo-French ambassadors. Almost as an old grandfather might, he donned his reading glasses and examined the telegrams with a faint smile. Then, Molotov said that he would have to consult with Stalin, naturally, but that this was frankly none of Britain’s or France’s business, and that since the Western Allied countries were over nine hundred miles away, their threat of declaring war was quite empty. Dejected, the British and French ambassadors returned to their respective offices and began packing their suitcases.
A little after six PM that same day came the news which everyone had been expecting- namely, that the Soviets had crossed the Polish frontier. The telegrams declaring war arrived three days later, and by the twenty-second, both ambassadors were safely back in their home countries. Meanwhile, assailed from both west and east, Poland entered the final stages of collapse. By the end of the month, it was all over. Germany had conquered the lion’s share of the country, and the Soviets had taken a strip of territory in the east, all without the British or French doing much of anything to stop them. World War II was about to enter its next phase, a phase in which the British would pay dearly for their quixotic act of dragging the Soviets into the war…
Comments?
(1): William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, page 458
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