Maybe it's too much to hope for two excellent
Slovenia threads in a row, but I wanted to return to a classic WWII POD:
The Ljubljana Gap Strategy. For those not familiar, there was a significant debate among the Allied Command as to how the Invasion of Italy would end. The plan was to turn right at Venice and open a third path to Berlin. As a battle plan, it was iffy -- Slovenia's mountains offered the Germans some decent defensive positions, especially compared to the plains of France and Poland. But politically, the implications are stunning: Western forces would have rolled through Ljubljana, Vienna, Prague, and Dresden on their way to Berlin. It was probably too late to avoid the division of Germany, but you could end up with a Neutral Slovenia, a NATO Austria, and a Czechoslovakia divided into a capitalist Czechia and a communist Slovakia.
There are countless, globe-spanning implications to this POD. This thread is open to all of them...
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... but since I started this thread, I'll start off the discussion with one of the most obscure implications: Istria. The
western half was mostly Italian, but they
mass-migrated to Italy after Italy lost. Many "mainland" Croats migrated to Istria to replace them. Many "native" Istrians
act more like they are their own nationality than as if they truly see themselves as Croats, and speak
dialects that could just as easily be classified as "Slovene" after a couple decades of integrationist schooling. With Tito having much less bargaining power ITTL, I can see the Soviets being quite willing to hand this to Slovenia -- giving this remarkably lucky little nation a "frontier" to settle!
That's just something that caught my fancy, though, so if others feel like discussing "important" things like Prague Spring, I won't be put off.
