PC: Allied Bulgaria and WAllied Campaign in the Balkans in 1943

Nestor

Banned
If Bulgaria had resisted German pressure to declare war on the WAllies after Pearl Harbor and maintained diplomatic relations with the US like they did with the Soviet Union, could they have convinced the WAllies to launch an invasion of the Balkans instead of Sicily in 1943 and joined them, in exchange getting to keep the territories they took from Yugoslavia and Greece? And if they did, how successful would this Balkan campaign be? Would it be possible for the WAllies to liberate Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and maybe even Poland?
 
The thing is that at the end of 1941 and the first half of 1942 the government and the high ranking military officers thought that the war was all but won by the Germans and the main concern in Sofia was that the peace would come with us not contributing much. Heck, for that reason we have even sent Stuka pilots to the combat school in Piacenza with the idea to send them afterwards to Southern Italy, where they would bomb Allied convoys, together with the Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica. Of course by the end of the year things went south a d those plans never materialised, but before that the mood was optimistic - that this time we're on the winning side. Yes, the government was pressed by Berlin to declare war on the US and UK, but the Bulgarian politicians thought it to be a calculated risk.
 
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