In Asia a new conflict was about to begin. In 1955 Mao requested Stalin’s support for a war of conquest against the Republic of China. On February 19th 1955 the PRC declared war on the ROC to liberate it from the capitalist/fascist yoke and bring Socialism to the working classes of the South. Most see this as a continuation of the Chinese Civil War but Chiang Kai-Shek was prepared now and brought to bare advanced panzer VIIs, German produced artillery and brand new jet fighters. Korea and the PRJ also declared war, providing extra reinforcements for the North’s “Peoples’ Liberation Army or PLA for short. Chiang managed to mobilize in time to coordinate a response as Chinese Soviet-made T-55s, T-34s and IS-10s crashed over the border headed toward the Southern capital of Nanjing. The strategy was to take the South’s coastal regions and major ports to cut them off from foreign trade and outside help and then proceed to defeat the ROC’s army in a series of cauldron battles. The PLA relied on a doctrine of mobility, speed, good communications and quick annihilation battles or “cauldron battles” in which enemy forces would be quickly surrounded and then destroyed. This was to be conducted in the context of Deep Battle, the military doctrine of the Red Army which had been created to get the maximum potential out of the Soviet Union’s large army. It involved multiple operations, conducted either in parallel or in rapid succession, to punch through enemy lines had several points and overwhelm the enemy with sheer numbers and the large spread of such an offensive. This would be supported by strong artillery support, which the Red Army was known for, and air support which the enormous Red Air Force could provide. Stalin had been kind enough to provide his Maoist allies in North China with tanks, aircraft, weapons, trucks and “military advisors” for this purpose. As agreed earlier, America did not intervene. They preferred a united and strong China, even a China united under Mao, over a China tied to the Reich which could threaten US interests in the region which the rather independent minded Chiang might do. They had told him that China would be reunited in the future and that America would support this. He didn’t take their friendly relations with Stalin’s regime well as it ruined chances of uniting China under Nationalist rule and didn’t have the patience to wait until Stalin and Mao dropped dead. In fact, he had plans ready to attack the North with German support which had been postponed indefinitely after the first Soviet nuclear test, fearing that the Soviets might give the Bomb to Mao. Mao had strengthened his country a lot in a series of two Four Year Plans, the last of which was a shift to war production. In 1950 agriculture had been collectivized after the Soviet example, causing resistance but also breaking the power of the landowning elites. The land was redistributed to smaller peasants who saw an increase in living standards. Large numbers of medium-sized and large farmers were ruined and resisted heavily, leading to food shortages which didn’t completely end until a year later. Coal and steel production had tripled between 1947 and 1955 and North China for a time was the largest industrial power in Asia, producing much heavy machinery, weapons, coal, steel, iron ore and crude oil. The Stalinist model of industrialization by command economy was seemingly successfully supplied. In response to the war America voiced a weak protest. The Germans however reacted quite vociferously and sent a carrier group to the South China Sea and the US in turn upgraded to DEFCON 3. The group consisted of aircraft carrier Hermann Goering, H-class battleship Admiral Graf Spee (named in honour of the pocket battleship of the same name), the Gneisenau, three light cruisers, 20 destroyers and two Type XXI submarines.
This wouldn’t be the first Soviet attempt to gain more influence. In the Middle East they supported the Ba’ath party which advocated Arab nationalism and socialism. Their quasi-socialist leanings earned them Stalin’s attention. In 1963 the Ba’ath parties staged a coup in both Syria and Iraq, overthrowing the monarchies in those regions. The Germans supported rightwing militants against these new regimes. The Persian Shah remained on a friendly footing with the Nazis although he was smart enough not to provoke the USSR by entering an alliance. Saudi-Arabia was friendly to the Nazis as well because they feared the Socialist regimes multiplying on their border, especially when Arab Socialists took power in Kuwait too. In 1955 Stalin had invaded Afghanistan to help the local communist party take power over the nation (Stalin settled for nominal rule in the mountainous south as the tribes there were good fighters and the Soviets didn’t want a protracted guerrilla war in such an inhospitable region), giving him a puppet close to India with which Stalin maintained good relationships. In India Nehru held power and he advocated a socialist model for India, no taxes for farmers and nationalization of heavy industries such as steel, aviation, shipping, electricity and mining. An extensive public works and industrialization campaign resulted in the construction of major dams, irrigation canals, roads, thermal and hydroelectric power stations, modernizing India to a degree.Also education was made free and even women were enrolled into schools. Also caste discrimination became punishable by law with punishments ranging from fines to several weeks in prison. After Nehru more conservative, pro-US and religious parties would find that undoing his reforms was impossible due to their support among the populace. Thus India maintained good relations with the Soviet Union even though it remained staunchly non-aligned. In Africa the Soviets supported several communist movements throughout French, Italian and German colonies and in the 60s and 70s the USSR would support several proxy wars in places like Angola, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Rwanda and Sudan against German supported anti-communists, Arab militants and the like (even if they were unenthusiastic about supporting negroes, they’d rather not see Africa turn red). In South America the Soviets remained notably quiet to not anger the US who considered South America their backyard, in accordance with the Monroe Doctrine, although one socialist regime arose on its own accord in Cuba under Fidel Castro. The US tolerated this but nothing more and the USSR delivered minimal support as they considered the Americans allies against the Euro-fascist block which was growing stronger (both economically and militarily) by the day with its arsenal of ICBMs, nuclear weapons and an integrated market which got one single currency. The Reichsmark became the de facto currency of the EC as it was accepted everywhere next to the various national currencies. The economic power of Germany, strengthened by their monopoly on European trade, surpassed the Soviet industrial base but not the American one. In Soviet propaganda the US was a nation of capitalists and enemies of the workers but out of real politics this was toned down to the minimum and instead focused on Germany.
In the face of a resurgent and unfriendly Nationalist China, the US allowed Japan to rearm to a degree which caused a public outcry in both Chinas who denounced Japan as an imperialist, militarist aggressor that should be muzzled permanently. The North was quick to tone down its propaganda against Japan on Soviet insistence and they focused on South China instead, calling them fascist puppets. The South was driven further away from the United States and into the arms of Nazi Germany. In the revised peace treaty the Americans allowed the Japanese to constitute new armed forces which would become known as the Japanese Self-Defence Forces, or JSDF for short, which would consist of 225.000 soldiers. A navy was also included which would consist of one battleship, one aircraft carrier, eight cruisers and ten submarines. In addition to this the navy was sold several smaller American vessels to provide them with smaller ships including a flotilla of destroyers, frigates, corvettes and fast attack craft. This was a sizable force but the American Pacific fleet alone massively outgunned this navy so it wasn’t that much of a threat. The Japanese admiralty was of course well aware of this and divided its fleet into taskforces much like the Germans had done earlier. Each such taskforce would be centred around a battleship, an aircraft carrier or one of Japan’s heavy cruisers and would be accompanied by a submarine and an array of smaller vessels to protect the mother ship of the flotilla such as destroyers, frigates, corvettes, and fast attack craft and could do a lot of damage. They had a limited range but anything that came within range of 800 kilometres of the Home Islands was toast if it had hostile intentions. An amendment was made to the Japanese constitution that these forces would only be used to defend Japan and not wage any wars of aggression. These forces would remain on a high alert for the duration of the Chinese conflict which by now was known as the War of The Two Chinas. Within four weeks Northern troops had reached the Yangtze river and stood poised to attack Nanjing but Chiang, fearing that he might lose the capital, used mustard gas which punched a hole in Northern lines. A lot of Mao’s attacking infantry died and in the consternation Chiang broke through Mao’s lines in a major counteroffensive, surrounding several units and crushing them and forcing Mao to regroup some 100 kilometres to the north. To support Mao, Stalin sent more “military advisors” as by 1956 Chiang had managed to return the frontline roughly to the pre-war situation except in Tibet, large swaths of which were occupied by Northern troops. Chiang however didn’t care much for the cold, arid and mountainous region which only swallowed up troops. Mao had managed to retreat in good order from Nanjing as his tank army and his Soviet-built APCs had Atomic Biological and Chemical protection gear, commonly abbreviated to ABC-gear. In the summer of ’56 his army numbered in the millions and received some 500.000 Korean reinforcements, courtesy of Kim Il-Sung, some 100.000 Soviet troops and around 7.000 Japanese volunteers from Hokkaido, as it was referred to by almost everyone (officially it was called the PRJ), to aid in his cause. As a response the European Community sent an expeditionary force to aid Chiang whose situation was becoming increasingly precarious. It consisted of forces from Germany but also French, Hungarian, Italian and Turkish troops who were sent for the common goal of fighting communism, the enemy of the New Order. The French and the Italians included sizable naval contingents consisting of battleships Jean Bart, Vittorio Veneto and Italy’s first true carrier Aquila which would be joined by Sparviero in 1960 and Falco in 1965. This would make Italy the only continental European country with carries, besides Germany which had eight. In the summer offensive of ’56 Mao had made significant gains and had taken Nanjing. Soviet, Chinese and Korean troops had crossed the Yangtze river at several places in spite of a stubborn defence mounted by Chiang in pre-war defences. Mao had suffered heavy casualties against this defensive lines of trenches, bunkers, barbed wire, land mines, tanks and men but one million men more or less didn’t mean much to him. The arrival of the EC’s expeditionary force made these gains undone by winter of ’56/’57. The presence of Soviet and German forces was well known but both powers didn’t go to war and limited confrontation to avoid a nuclear war which was becoming an increasing threat to Europe and the USSR.
In 1955 the Germans and Soviets had both tested strong boosted fission weapons to provide some kind of means of retaliation in the event of a thermonuclear war with the United States. Each weapon had had a yield of some 350-400 kilotons, enough destructive force to level a city and take out hardened military facilities except for missile silos and nuclear bomb shelters. In 1956 the Germans tested their first fusion device which was somewhat smaller than the American Ivy Mike shot. The German device had been designed on 3.3 megatons but was scaled down to 1.1 megatons for the live test as the test was merely needed to confirm German theories regarding nuclear fusion. The bomb was notably lighter than Ivy Mike as it lacked the cryogenic device. As a propaganda stunt the Soviets let their bomb explode at the full force of 5 megatons at their new Semipalatinsk test site which would remain the testing ground for Soviet nuclear devices. The Germans had selected the same test ground in the western Ukraine and, according to rumours, chained groups of captured rebels to the bomb to find out the effects of a thermonuclear blast. The ascension of the Reich and the USSR to thermonuclear powers had some effects on the Chinese War. Both Stalin and Heydrich considered using nuclear weapons to break the stalemate which had ensued after the joint South Chinese-German-Italian-French-Italian-Hungarian-Turkish counteroffensive had driven Mao back to pre-war positions once again. In 1957 Stalin proposed an armistice because for every minute that the war was extended, the risk of someone employing nuclear weapons (be it tactical or strategic) increased. Heydrich accepted and in the Hebei Treaty North and South recognised each other’s sovereignty even if enmity between the two remained. A demilitarized zone was created between the two as well and Soviet and Korean and German and EC forces were stationed there permanently. On the North side Mao militarized and industrialized his country even further. In the Seven Year Plan that followed, heavy industry was emphasized even more and an army of some 13 million men was created, three quarters of which was deployed on the Chinese DMZ. This had the effect of tying North and South more to their effective patrons (i.e. the Soviets and the Reich). With support from Germany Chiang started to actively pursue a nuclear weapons program. German scientists were sent to the recently built Nanjing University and constructed a Zippe centrifuge and a heavy water reactor so China could get U-235 and plutonium quickly. The Chinese chose for the plutonium design which was easier to create. In 1960 the Germans provided the Chinese with a test warhead (not functioning model of course) for them to take apart. In 1966 the South would test a 50 kiloton device, the strongest first test ever. A year later, in 1967, the South would test a 2.2 megaton thermonuclear device and so South China rose to the position of a fourth power block in its own right. Stalin didn’t allow Mao to have nukes. Mao was quite disappointed and instead increased stockpiles of nerve gas for use against the South’s cities. Stalin aided him by stationing a fleet of Tupolev Tu-95 strategic bombers near Beijing. In the aftermath of the conflict the Americans founded the Pacific Treaty Organizations or PTO which included the US, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines, Japan, Mexico, Peru, several Central American countries, Australia and New Zealand. This organization would ward off fascism and Nazism and their first police action came in 1965 when Suharto tried to overthrow Sukarno’s quasi-socialist Maerhenist regime. The Soviets didn’t join and instead formalized their alliance with the PRC, the DPRK and the PRJ in the Omsk Pact which Ba’athist Iraq, Syria, Kuwait and communist Afghanistan would later join. An Arab Socialist take over in Egypt was sadly crushed by neighbouring Italian troops from Libya and Nasser was killed.
A brief détente between the US and the Reich occurred with the election of Joseph P. Kennedy as President as he was decidedly more anti-communist leaning and for a while the Red Scare returned due to his government’s propaganda even if it wasn’t as severe as in the 1940s. He was more friendly to the Reich but this stance led to quite some unpopularity among Democrat circles and he was forced to draw more support from the Republicans. He would be the first American President to visit the Reich and meet the Nazi leaders face to face. He also met with the new Duce. Alessandro Pavolini who had succeeded Benito Mussolini after the latter’s death of a heart attack in 1959 at the age of 75. The Italian regime had elected the popular Pavolini who had previously occupied several other posts, including minister of culture, and was notorious for his cruelty against opponents of the fascist regime. He was elected by the Grand Council of Fascism who favoured him over the older Count Ciano who had become somewhat disenfranchised with Hitler and the Nazis and he didn’t hide these sentiments and sought a more pro-American independent course and splitting of certain Balkan countries to form a “Mediterranean League”. These sentiments had arisen as early as 1939 and became stronger as Italy became a German puppet dependent on Germany for military aid as the war progressed and became worse for the Italians. This was deemed unacceptable and Mussolini’s latest favourite Pavolini, Ciano’s rival, became the new Duce. Under his leadership Italy would become a great power in its own right although he maintained friendly relations with the Nazis who remained in superpower status indisputably and would remain the dominant European country. The first step had been set with the discovery of oil in Libya in 1959. The colony subsequently received more and more settles as the Libyan economy grew. By 1970 Italians and smaller numbers of Greeks and Albanians would outnumber the indigenous Arabs and Bedouins 3:1, more so since the last revolt in 1957 had decimated the Libyans as Mussolini had ordered the use of disproportional retaliation for every dead Italian in the shape of napalm, chemical weapons and fire bombings. Pavolini met with Kennedy in Rome and tried to impress him with military parades as a show of Italian strength. Kennedy then continued his journey to Paris and Berlin. He also visited London to reassure the British of strong Anglo-American ties and reluctantly went to Omsk as well as Stalin was asking questions about his overtures toward Heydrich.
This wouldn’t be the first Soviet attempt to gain more influence. In the Middle East they supported the Ba’ath party which advocated Arab nationalism and socialism. Their quasi-socialist leanings earned them Stalin’s attention. In 1963 the Ba’ath parties staged a coup in both Syria and Iraq, overthrowing the monarchies in those regions. The Germans supported rightwing militants against these new regimes. The Persian Shah remained on a friendly footing with the Nazis although he was smart enough not to provoke the USSR by entering an alliance. Saudi-Arabia was friendly to the Nazis as well because they feared the Socialist regimes multiplying on their border, especially when Arab Socialists took power in Kuwait too. In 1955 Stalin had invaded Afghanistan to help the local communist party take power over the nation (Stalin settled for nominal rule in the mountainous south as the tribes there were good fighters and the Soviets didn’t want a protracted guerrilla war in such an inhospitable region), giving him a puppet close to India with which Stalin maintained good relationships. In India Nehru held power and he advocated a socialist model for India, no taxes for farmers and nationalization of heavy industries such as steel, aviation, shipping, electricity and mining. An extensive public works and industrialization campaign resulted in the construction of major dams, irrigation canals, roads, thermal and hydroelectric power stations, modernizing India to a degree.Also education was made free and even women were enrolled into schools. Also caste discrimination became punishable by law with punishments ranging from fines to several weeks in prison. After Nehru more conservative, pro-US and religious parties would find that undoing his reforms was impossible due to their support among the populace. Thus India maintained good relations with the Soviet Union even though it remained staunchly non-aligned. In Africa the Soviets supported several communist movements throughout French, Italian and German colonies and in the 60s and 70s the USSR would support several proxy wars in places like Angola, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Rwanda and Sudan against German supported anti-communists, Arab militants and the like (even if they were unenthusiastic about supporting negroes, they’d rather not see Africa turn red). In South America the Soviets remained notably quiet to not anger the US who considered South America their backyard, in accordance with the Monroe Doctrine, although one socialist regime arose on its own accord in Cuba under Fidel Castro. The US tolerated this but nothing more and the USSR delivered minimal support as they considered the Americans allies against the Euro-fascist block which was growing stronger (both economically and militarily) by the day with its arsenal of ICBMs, nuclear weapons and an integrated market which got one single currency. The Reichsmark became the de facto currency of the EC as it was accepted everywhere next to the various national currencies. The economic power of Germany, strengthened by their monopoly on European trade, surpassed the Soviet industrial base but not the American one. In Soviet propaganda the US was a nation of capitalists and enemies of the workers but out of real politics this was toned down to the minimum and instead focused on Germany.
In the face of a resurgent and unfriendly Nationalist China, the US allowed Japan to rearm to a degree which caused a public outcry in both Chinas who denounced Japan as an imperialist, militarist aggressor that should be muzzled permanently. The North was quick to tone down its propaganda against Japan on Soviet insistence and they focused on South China instead, calling them fascist puppets. The South was driven further away from the United States and into the arms of Nazi Germany. In the revised peace treaty the Americans allowed the Japanese to constitute new armed forces which would become known as the Japanese Self-Defence Forces, or JSDF for short, which would consist of 225.000 soldiers. A navy was also included which would consist of one battleship, one aircraft carrier, eight cruisers and ten submarines. In addition to this the navy was sold several smaller American vessels to provide them with smaller ships including a flotilla of destroyers, frigates, corvettes and fast attack craft. This was a sizable force but the American Pacific fleet alone massively outgunned this navy so it wasn’t that much of a threat. The Japanese admiralty was of course well aware of this and divided its fleet into taskforces much like the Germans had done earlier. Each such taskforce would be centred around a battleship, an aircraft carrier or one of Japan’s heavy cruisers and would be accompanied by a submarine and an array of smaller vessels to protect the mother ship of the flotilla such as destroyers, frigates, corvettes, and fast attack craft and could do a lot of damage. They had a limited range but anything that came within range of 800 kilometres of the Home Islands was toast if it had hostile intentions. An amendment was made to the Japanese constitution that these forces would only be used to defend Japan and not wage any wars of aggression. These forces would remain on a high alert for the duration of the Chinese conflict which by now was known as the War of The Two Chinas. Within four weeks Northern troops had reached the Yangtze river and stood poised to attack Nanjing but Chiang, fearing that he might lose the capital, used mustard gas which punched a hole in Northern lines. A lot of Mao’s attacking infantry died and in the consternation Chiang broke through Mao’s lines in a major counteroffensive, surrounding several units and crushing them and forcing Mao to regroup some 100 kilometres to the north. To support Mao, Stalin sent more “military advisors” as by 1956 Chiang had managed to return the frontline roughly to the pre-war situation except in Tibet, large swaths of which were occupied by Northern troops. Chiang however didn’t care much for the cold, arid and mountainous region which only swallowed up troops. Mao had managed to retreat in good order from Nanjing as his tank army and his Soviet-built APCs had Atomic Biological and Chemical protection gear, commonly abbreviated to ABC-gear. In the summer of ’56 his army numbered in the millions and received some 500.000 Korean reinforcements, courtesy of Kim Il-Sung, some 100.000 Soviet troops and around 7.000 Japanese volunteers from Hokkaido, as it was referred to by almost everyone (officially it was called the PRJ), to aid in his cause. As a response the European Community sent an expeditionary force to aid Chiang whose situation was becoming increasingly precarious. It consisted of forces from Germany but also French, Hungarian, Italian and Turkish troops who were sent for the common goal of fighting communism, the enemy of the New Order. The French and the Italians included sizable naval contingents consisting of battleships Jean Bart, Vittorio Veneto and Italy’s first true carrier Aquila which would be joined by Sparviero in 1960 and Falco in 1965. This would make Italy the only continental European country with carries, besides Germany which had eight. In the summer offensive of ’56 Mao had made significant gains and had taken Nanjing. Soviet, Chinese and Korean troops had crossed the Yangtze river at several places in spite of a stubborn defence mounted by Chiang in pre-war defences. Mao had suffered heavy casualties against this defensive lines of trenches, bunkers, barbed wire, land mines, tanks and men but one million men more or less didn’t mean much to him. The arrival of the EC’s expeditionary force made these gains undone by winter of ’56/’57. The presence of Soviet and German forces was well known but both powers didn’t go to war and limited confrontation to avoid a nuclear war which was becoming an increasing threat to Europe and the USSR.
In 1955 the Germans and Soviets had both tested strong boosted fission weapons to provide some kind of means of retaliation in the event of a thermonuclear war with the United States. Each weapon had had a yield of some 350-400 kilotons, enough destructive force to level a city and take out hardened military facilities except for missile silos and nuclear bomb shelters. In 1956 the Germans tested their first fusion device which was somewhat smaller than the American Ivy Mike shot. The German device had been designed on 3.3 megatons but was scaled down to 1.1 megatons for the live test as the test was merely needed to confirm German theories regarding nuclear fusion. The bomb was notably lighter than Ivy Mike as it lacked the cryogenic device. As a propaganda stunt the Soviets let their bomb explode at the full force of 5 megatons at their new Semipalatinsk test site which would remain the testing ground for Soviet nuclear devices. The Germans had selected the same test ground in the western Ukraine and, according to rumours, chained groups of captured rebels to the bomb to find out the effects of a thermonuclear blast. The ascension of the Reich and the USSR to thermonuclear powers had some effects on the Chinese War. Both Stalin and Heydrich considered using nuclear weapons to break the stalemate which had ensued after the joint South Chinese-German-Italian-French-Italian-Hungarian-Turkish counteroffensive had driven Mao back to pre-war positions once again. In 1957 Stalin proposed an armistice because for every minute that the war was extended, the risk of someone employing nuclear weapons (be it tactical or strategic) increased. Heydrich accepted and in the Hebei Treaty North and South recognised each other’s sovereignty even if enmity between the two remained. A demilitarized zone was created between the two as well and Soviet and Korean and German and EC forces were stationed there permanently. On the North side Mao militarized and industrialized his country even further. In the Seven Year Plan that followed, heavy industry was emphasized even more and an army of some 13 million men was created, three quarters of which was deployed on the Chinese DMZ. This had the effect of tying North and South more to their effective patrons (i.e. the Soviets and the Reich). With support from Germany Chiang started to actively pursue a nuclear weapons program. German scientists were sent to the recently built Nanjing University and constructed a Zippe centrifuge and a heavy water reactor so China could get U-235 and plutonium quickly. The Chinese chose for the plutonium design which was easier to create. In 1960 the Germans provided the Chinese with a test warhead (not functioning model of course) for them to take apart. In 1966 the South would test a 50 kiloton device, the strongest first test ever. A year later, in 1967, the South would test a 2.2 megaton thermonuclear device and so South China rose to the position of a fourth power block in its own right. Stalin didn’t allow Mao to have nukes. Mao was quite disappointed and instead increased stockpiles of nerve gas for use against the South’s cities. Stalin aided him by stationing a fleet of Tupolev Tu-95 strategic bombers near Beijing. In the aftermath of the conflict the Americans founded the Pacific Treaty Organizations or PTO which included the US, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines, Japan, Mexico, Peru, several Central American countries, Australia and New Zealand. This organization would ward off fascism and Nazism and their first police action came in 1965 when Suharto tried to overthrow Sukarno’s quasi-socialist Maerhenist regime. The Soviets didn’t join and instead formalized their alliance with the PRC, the DPRK and the PRJ in the Omsk Pact which Ba’athist Iraq, Syria, Kuwait and communist Afghanistan would later join. An Arab Socialist take over in Egypt was sadly crushed by neighbouring Italian troops from Libya and Nasser was killed.
A brief détente between the US and the Reich occurred with the election of Joseph P. Kennedy as President as he was decidedly more anti-communist leaning and for a while the Red Scare returned due to his government’s propaganda even if it wasn’t as severe as in the 1940s. He was more friendly to the Reich but this stance led to quite some unpopularity among Democrat circles and he was forced to draw more support from the Republicans. He would be the first American President to visit the Reich and meet the Nazi leaders face to face. He also met with the new Duce. Alessandro Pavolini who had succeeded Benito Mussolini after the latter’s death of a heart attack in 1959 at the age of 75. The Italian regime had elected the popular Pavolini who had previously occupied several other posts, including minister of culture, and was notorious for his cruelty against opponents of the fascist regime. He was elected by the Grand Council of Fascism who favoured him over the older Count Ciano who had become somewhat disenfranchised with Hitler and the Nazis and he didn’t hide these sentiments and sought a more pro-American independent course and splitting of certain Balkan countries to form a “Mediterranean League”. These sentiments had arisen as early as 1939 and became stronger as Italy became a German puppet dependent on Germany for military aid as the war progressed and became worse for the Italians. This was deemed unacceptable and Mussolini’s latest favourite Pavolini, Ciano’s rival, became the new Duce. Under his leadership Italy would become a great power in its own right although he maintained friendly relations with the Nazis who remained in superpower status indisputably and would remain the dominant European country. The first step had been set with the discovery of oil in Libya in 1959. The colony subsequently received more and more settles as the Libyan economy grew. By 1970 Italians and smaller numbers of Greeks and Albanians would outnumber the indigenous Arabs and Bedouins 3:1, more so since the last revolt in 1957 had decimated the Libyans as Mussolini had ordered the use of disproportional retaliation for every dead Italian in the shape of napalm, chemical weapons and fire bombings. Pavolini met with Kennedy in Rome and tried to impress him with military parades as a show of Italian strength. Kennedy then continued his journey to Paris and Berlin. He also visited London to reassure the British of strong Anglo-American ties and reluctantly went to Omsk as well as Stalin was asking questions about his overtures toward Heydrich.
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