The Long Night Falls

[CalBear]

I think everyone needs to give this T/L a chance to develop a bit.

It has been stated that it is a "best case" scenario for the Axis from the onset. Several of the assumptions being made are at the far edge of possible, but the reason for them is to, if the OP is accurate, allow for an examination of the result of an total Axis victory.

I have a very strong belief in what would have happened in Europe, as is displayed in my current T/L. It is pretty close to the opposite of the OP's image of the result, but both T/L have something in common. To get to the point where the Axis prevailed over the USSR I had to use a couple far edge of possible events too, but you really have to dance out onto the edge of the ice to get any result except the one from OTL. It will be what happens from this point forward that will be the proof of the pudding.

It is possible that this T/L will turn out to be what some posters have said already. It is equally possible that it will serve as a nice counterpoint to my The Anglo/American-Nazi War. If it is the former, that will become clear in short order, and we can all point out the problems with everything AFTER the admittedly dicey set-up as well as the set-up itself. If it is the latter, it will be a worthwhile addition to the Forum in that it will allow discussion of what a overall victorious Nazi Party dominated Europe would be like.

Frankly the idea that discovering oil in Libya is suddenly going to solve all of Italy problems is laughable. Have you ever heard of the Dutch disease Eurofed?
Plenty of countries all over the world have massive oil ressources but that does not make them instant great powers with a strong industrial base as you seem to think. Corruption in fascist Italy was widespread and could actually even increase even further if suddenly oil money becomes available. This won't be of any help when in increasing Italy's industrial base and neither will the facists economic policies for that matter.

I am also rather puzzled at the idea that Vichy France is suddenly going turn its back on its forming allies and join the Axis with its fleet and other assets. Moreover the situation being different the destruction of the French fleet in Oran could easily be avoided as it could have in reality.

All in all a predictable TL on the line of Germany and Italy and hammers the nasty French and British hard like yours tend to be.

 

[I Blame Communism]

Oh, I absolutely agree. That's why I didn't want to get into any involved discussion about why I consider his far-edge probabilities to be, well, far-edge: it is as I said an "intellectual exercise".

My argument that it's easier to invade Britain than to actually starve it (of course your TL's scenario is more plausible than either) is based partly on what I consider to be the true facts, and partly on that rock of the British national existence, pig-headed stubborness. But to excuse myself: it's a subject which is very close to me emotionally as a Briton myself, and one who doesn't like people saying they "despise" his country for dubious reasons, which Eurofed has done several times. It annoys and offends me to see my country's history so severely misrepresented - and the idea of "food riots" isn't far-edge, it wasn't going to happen.

 

[Eurofed]

As I say, the idea that starvation conditions in the country are plausible is just bogus. That's one thing I'm going to hold to my guns on: in WW1, the whole merchant marine and some of the Admiralty were pretty much wilfully blind to the benefits of the convoy system, rationing was introduced too slowly, and the submarine was an unprecented weapon against which few effective counter-measures existed.

In WW2, we had convoys, rationing, and extensive anti-submarine efforts from the word go. Our food stocks never went as low as they had during WW1 - and we hadn't starved during that war.

And it's not like our country is 100% covered by Dark Satanic Mills, either. We actually have, you know, farms, and a diet of bread, cheese, and herring is all we had before the industrial revolution.

As a matter of fact, rationing meant that people in the east of London ate better than they had before the war. Hurrah for socialism!

Starvation just ain't plausible.

On second thoughts and after a review of your argument as it concerns the starvation issue, I agree that it may be plausible and I might have let myself led astray by faulty comparisons with the WWI situation and my taste for drama into hyperbole. Therefore, I'm going to strike all references to starvation in the TL and substitute with ones to economic collapse.

OTOH, I remain convinced that given TTL conditions, it was plausible that the Axis could win a decisive victory in the Battle of the Atlantic and such loss, in addition to all the other defeats and lack of American belligerance, could easily lead to a collapse of morale in 1942-43.

You've never produced any evidence against the view, which is supported by every action of the government (preparations were made for all the necessary evacuations, and the embassy in Washington discussed the arrangements for a government-in-exile with the White House). That's not to say that the Canadians would have carried on some kind of quixotic struggle rather than taking in the refugees and moving under the American umbrella: the point is that we were willing to carry on to the point of evacuating the island. We'd certainly be willing to carry on to the point of losing Gibraltar.

Oh, I have no doubts that such plans were sincere, in mid-1940 OTL conditions. I just note that historically a lot of governments that are facing a military catastrophe tend to make some preparations beforehand for some kind of heroic last stand or carrying on the fight from abroad, but more often than not, in the real thing, such attempts collapse or people change their mind. There is no guarantee that which was put on paper in 1940 would still be deemed appropriate and adequately executed two or three years later after an unrelenting string of setbacks that would wear out hope and patience. I also note that ITTL British morale collapses when they have lost rather more than Gibraltar and for rather more time, without getting no one of the OTL morale boosters, such as BoB, Compass, US belligerance, and so on.

The usual parliamentary criticism of Churchill was that he wasn't fighting the war efficiently enough.

Oh, sure let's assume that they kick out Churchill when the first or second row of ATL defeats occurs, and set up a new war government, expecting that with a new, hopefully more efficient leadership the war can turn for the better. But things continue to go bad, so they lose hope in the new leadership as well, rinse and repeat. At some point people are going to start wondering that perhaps the problem is not the leader, but the war.

As I say, the idea that Germany can somehow out-attrit the RAF (untrue IOTL) and create decently-sized surface squadrons already changes the basic dynamics of defending the country. It's more likely than starvation conditions by a long way.

OK, as I said I strike out the references to starvation.

But, terrible as it would be for anyone who is now adult, it would be far less deadly than the ‘compromise peace’ which a few rich men and their hired liars are hoping for. The final ruin of England could only be accomplished by an English government acting under orders from Berlin. But that cannot happen if England has awakened beforehand. For in that case the defeat would be unmistakable, the struggle would continue, theideawould survive... We may see German troops marching down Whitehall, but another process, ultimately deadly to the German power-dream, will have been started.

I think dear George here was exaggerating the importance of good old Britain in the struggle against a victorious totalitarian Eurasia more than a bit. Moral example has its importance, no doubt, but I don't think that a few hundred or thousand defiant British exiles are going to make a significant difference in the worldwide struggle against victorious fascism, even if they wrap themselves in the banner of a government in exile. For good or evil, that gets to be America's responsibility. We may certainly agree that conquered Nazified Britain would quite possibly become the WP Poland equivalent of the Nazifascist block, whileas ITTL it is written to become the Austria/Finland equivalent. Whether one or the other would make for an overall better outcome for all parts involved is debatable.

You don't seem to get how parliament works, though. The ammendment to the Septenniel Act meant that there would be no general election until the conclusion of the war, and the majority in parliament were in favour of continuing the war. The only way to get a peace through would be to wait for more than half of MPs to resign or physically die, or to present a peace-deal that more than half of MPs would find acceptable.

The MPs can change their mind, or be forced to do so by the pressure of public opinion. Maybe I didn't make it sufficiently clear, but I am aware that elections were suspended in wartime and I meant that elections are called after the armistice is signed.

Your treaty is unconditional surrender. That's what it ammounts to in practice: the end of our independence in foreign-policy making and the operation of our economy (and, on a side-note, a change in the laws of monarchical suggestion). Yours is a victors peace, so if you want to oppose it, you had better win a conclusive victory.

No, it is not really close to an unconditional surrender. Britain gets no change in its political system (the recalling of Edward VIII is a homegrown side effect of the political swing between interventionism and isolationism, not imposed by the Axis, although they are certainly pleased by it), no reparations or onerous economic burden, and it gets to keep India, the core of its empire. With this peace treaty Britain more or less concedes the territories that has already lost on the battlefield, plus a couple of colonies. It agrees to restart normal economic relationships with the Axis. What they really sign away is the ability to keep being a stronghold of political, strategic, and economic hostility to the Axis order, and that is indeed understandable for a country that has suffered what looks like a decisive defeat (and a successful blockade certainly is one, for an island).

If you wish, I may certainly strike out the Eddy comback part (but George and his wife in all likelihood would have to go) and I may try and see if I can tone down a bit the conditions of the peace treaty, but frankly the foreign policy committment to be a good neighbor and trade partner of the Axis is not such an unreasonable burden, if they lose the Battle of the Atlantic.

That seems to me a consensus that reflects your views rather a lot. The left-wing was full of Stalin-fanciers in most democratic countries during the 1930s - and a left-winger who isn't a Stalin-fancier is someone like George Orwell, who actually understands the difference between the Nazis and the Soviets. If the Nazis, the Great Enemy, are constantly going on about how terrible and wicked the Soviets were whilst themselves being ten-to-the-twelve times worse, won't a comination of human sympathy and the non-existence of an actual communist country mean that more Americans hold to the sympathetic view of martyred Russia that prevailed during the war?

A sympathetic view of the martyred Russian and Chinese peoples, which indeed builds up into TTL America, does not necessarily translate into a sympathetic view of Communism, which always got relatively marginal support and a lot of distrust and antipathy in American society, apart from a termporary wartime alliance of convenience which never happened ITTL. America more or less fully committs to the anti-fascist Cold War when the downfall of the Soviet Union is close at hand, so there is little reason to feel posthumous sympathy for an ideology damned by a military failure as total as the OTL one of Nazifascism. Moreover, the awareness for crimes of Nazism and Communism in democratic countries is going to be partially reversed between TTL and OTL. It's not like the Nazifascists are going to let unsupervised tours of Eastern Europe and the Arab world happen, while plentiful and widely publicized evidence of Bolshevik misdeeds is going to be freely available to everyone that asks.

It is indeed quite likely that an anti-fascist Cold War is going to make the free world rather more sympathetic than OTL to democratic and liberal expressions of left-wing ideas, but it makes as little sense for them to develop a posthumous large-scale sympathy for communism as for OTL to develop it for fascism because of an anti-communist Cold War.

 

[Eurofed]

He likes the minimal possible number of states, so naturally he's in love with the "Imperial Federation" or "Greater Britain", the really rather implausible idea of a state for all the English-speaking peoples that would give Churchill a delighted heart-attack.

And since I deem the British political system as the outdated, buggy, and unsafe model (seriously, a political system where the collective sanity of 326 people is more or less everything that stands from writing castration for masturbators as the law of the land ???) and the American one, for all its flaws, as the new, improved, and safer model, I typically tend to resolve that situation in the sense of America absorbing as much of the English-speaking peoples as barely plausible.

However, despite his affinity for this trope of our jingoes, he admits a peculiar prejudice against the island of Great Britain.

Part of it is about the pivotal and stubborn geopolitical role that the British Empire played to frustrate something that I'm unshakably confident, in three cases out of four as major historical chances go, would have turned into a better outcome. Part of it, probably the most important one, is about the fact that English nationalism in the last few decades appears to have focused rather strongly on despising and slandering something that gets some of my strongest political allegiances and ideals.

When the Daily Mail & co. keeps harping so much on depicting continental Europhiles as a bunch of desplicable jackbooted thugs of a bureaucratic corrupt NaziCommuniBonapartist Evil Empire, and so many English, looking from abroad, seem to agree and cheer on, I'm going to take offence. I am aware of the all-important difference between the British people, the British state/Empire as an expression of its historical ruling class, the latter's obsession for the "balance of power", and English nationalist paranoias about continental unity, and focus my negative thoughts on the latter two, and the second one when it becomes an agent of theirs. But given that we are in a field based on history and politics, the distinction with the first one may become fuzzy in the heat of discussion.

Again, when the English attitude to European integration and those who ardently stand for it (including me) evolves to something more positive, either because they have a change of heart, or they find the resolve to separate from and leave the bloody thing alone, stopping to sabotage it from within and slander it because frankly we have much better things to do with our evolving continental polity than setting up devious ways to oppress and exploit that not so important and valuable island, my feelings towards the folks that inhabit (the southern portion of) it are going to turn MUCH to the better. Basically, assume that when someone in public discourse on that side of the Channel (not that Europhobes are limited there, far from it, but somehow Albion managed to turn itself into the poster child of it to an unmatched degree elsewhere) rants about "blah blah EU is the Empire of Evil blah blah", Eurofed notices and is not pleased.

As for Ireland, god knows. It's probably because the Irish notoriously don't like being ruled by foreigners no matter what you do.

Shrug. It's a peripheral island with little geopolitical importance outside of Britain that has no inclination whatsoever to mess in or little to hate/fear the aspirations of its continental neighbors to greater unity when it doesn't involve the questionable workings of its own political system. More or less, the only really negative thing I find in Ireland is their unhealthy attachment to a socially repressive expression of religion. I'm even a little Celtophilic, given that I'm a fantasy buff and much of the genre has some roots in that culture.

 

[Van555]

A respectfully eurofedian effort.

 

[Eurofed]

I have a very strong belief in what would have happened in Europe, as is displayed in my current T/L. It is pretty close to the opposite of the OP's image of the result, but both T/L have something in common.

Your TL and mine indeed radically diverge as the military and geopolitical situation with the Allies is concerned. But that's mainly an effect of the chosen PoD and butterflies. Yours lead the Nazi empire into a position where a later mega D-Day is feasible, mine the Axis bloc into a parallel of the OTL Cold War stalemate. Our vision of what would happen in Eastern Europe is basically the same, if anything my TL builds a more dystopic picture since Nazifascist genocide gets extended to the Arab world and the Japanese militarists get a free rein in East Asia.

There is probably the rather important difference that IMO not too late the Nazifascists would be driven to put some brake to mega-scale genocide for compelling sheer pragmatic reasons. While indeed the genocide of Jews/Roma was seen as inherently beneficial for its own loony reasons (basically they thought those peoples were the human equivalent of rabid dogs), the one of Slavs was driven by rational power lust taken to its immoral far extremes, remove them to grab fertile land and natural resources and put own settlers in their place. The loony part is that they overestimated their own resources by magnitudes. When they realize that they don't have anything close to the demographic and economic resources to make that kind of repopulation, it becomes necessary to switch to good old exploitation through slave labor. Since the greater genocide had wicked but rational motivations at its core, it is going to be affected by factual constraints.

Of course, this traps the Nazifascists into a conundrum all too familar to societies reliant on slave labor, only magnified by their drive to brutality: if they enforce the repression to the extent that they suffocate any resistance or crank the exploitation too much, they destroy so much that they wreck the economic reason for their empire to exist, if they apply a relatively lenient hand, they face massive growth of resistance or inefficiency, which mightly taxes their resources into the repression/policing task. And slave labor is not that efficient to begin with. It is a trap that in the long term I think would drive their system towards a Soviet-style collapse, as the European core of their policy tires out of imperial overextension and/or economic inefficiency. This is one reason why I think that the bulk of Soviet/Arab/African slave peoples would survive to see the end of the nightmare, no matter how terrible the blood bill. Of course, apart from the special cases (Jews/Roma), there is no real hope for those most unfortunate peoples whose lands the Nazifascist empire would have preferential geopolitical and economic motivation to absorb first, and which they would have enough demographic and economic resources to repopulate. For more or less the same reasons, it's probable that as time goes on, those GPO percentages of "natives" deemed suitable for "Aryanization" get increased by some digits (where it's plausible of course: some Slavs and North Africans may get such a means of escape, Blacks sadly not).

From the research I made for this TL (and folks, how much depressing it feels to make realpolitick demographic extrapolations on genocide !!!) I got the tentative opinion that by the probable Soviet-style fall of the Nazifascist empire, given the above constraints, there would still be a Russia plus Ukraine and an Arab world, if wrecked into a continental North Korea, but Czechia, Poland, Baltic lands, Yugoslavia, the Maghreb, perhaps a varying chunk of Belarus and/or Ukraine and of east Africa and/or the Levant (depending on various factors) would be irrevocably destroyed and assimilated/colonized the way Hitler meant, short of a rather implausible reverse ethnic cleansing (at least in my TL, if nothing else because the post-Nazifascist powers would be nuclear). This is more or less the way that the Nazifascists could "win" in such a TL as mine.

And sure, that would leave behind an immense pool of hatred and mutual distrust. There is also the issue that in such a world, brutal power-lust has been proved to work to some degree and you can get away with (mega-)murder. While a Soviet-style collapse would indeed damn the legacy of Nazifascism even in an amoral perspective, there is only so (relatively little) grief you can inflict on nuclear great powers, no matter how deserved. Although the nightmare would likely eventually end somehow, there would be only so much, limited, or no real (depending on how the regime evolves) retribution or cloture for past crimes. Surely nothing remotely comparable to what OTL Germany got. The effects of these events on collective psyche deserve reflection.

As it concerns living conditions in "Aryan" Europe, I foresee it would roughly average to moderately better than the Warsaw Pact if they switch to rule their empire in a ruthless pragmatic way, for one reason: in my TL, the Axis bloc has a grip on such a big chunk of the world's resources, and MAD places such limits on the free world's open acts of hostility, that the Western bloc simply can't strangle their economy or harass it too much. They can outcompete it, apply pressure on its inefficiences, try to drive it to overextension collapse, but they can't do the things they do in Calbear's Warm War.

As it concerns the relationship between the regime and the people in Germany, Italy, France, Spain, I figure it would proabably evolve to be somewhat like the late Soviet Union, no real commitment to a decaying ideology, a lot of apolitical "imperial" patriotism, and the citizens being happy or angry with the regime according to how well or bad it manages the economy, the foreign policy, and their livelihood, the totalitarian control ever so slowly relaxing for loyal citizens as the regime slides into decay. Although a Cultural Revolution event is quite possible, social forces are otherwise bound to make the regime less harsh at home, as wild-eyed extremists and hardcore ideologues die out in the ruling class and get replaced by second-generation pragmatists willing to make compromises to preserve their comfy position.

 

[Paul Spring]

I guess this is possible, but everything has to go right for the Axis for this scenario to happen. You don't just need oil, you need the Axis leadership at multiple levels to be more intelligent, far-sighted, and willing to cooperate in the same sort of "partnership" style that the UK/Commonwealth and the USA cooperated in OTL. You also need to have the Italian and Japanese armies develop along different, more effective paths, and/or be willing to quickly change their weapons and doctrine to follow German models in some areas. The effectiveness of the submarine campaign implies that the Germans either built a lot more UBoats, or their Italian allies did, or they developed better technology earlier, because I don't think the loss of Enigma alone is going to make such a complete difference.

I can see the UK suing for peace if they are unable to feed a large portion of their population, and becoming a sort of Finland that is required to be neutral. I doubt that all the Dominions are going to sever their connections that quickly - a government in exile, possibly with a member of the royal family, seems more likely. I don't know why you think it's far-fetched for Britain to establish a government in exile in, say, Canada, when several continental European nations did the same thing in Britain, and France came close to doing it in Algeria and was only prevented from doing so because Petain got power (which was far from inevitable).

Actually, this scenario could almost be called "What if the Axis powers had most of the advantages that the Allies actually had in OTL?". Here, the Axis has plenty of oil, smarter leadership, and they cooperate and learn from each other in a way that they didn't do much of in OTL. Germany and Italy, with their very close partnership, are kind of equivalent to the USA and UK, while Japan plays a role somewhat similar to the Soviet Union - working together with its allies on a strategic rather than a tactical level.

I still don't understand what's so bad about balance of power. Britain/the UK was always opposed to one power coming to totally dominate the continent of Europe. As far as I can tell, for most of the past several centuries, this has been an unambiguously good thing, because the only way one power could come to dominate Europe was to conquer or vassalize everybody else. Britain aided the secondary powers of Europe to avoid being conquered by the biggest, whether that was Spain, France, or Germany. I can tell that you like the EU, but nothing like the EU was possible until Europe reached the point where the various nation states had given up on trying to conquer or dominate the continent. It was balance of power politics that achieved this. Ironically, nothing like the modern EU could have come into existence if a balance of power had not been maintained for centuries.

 

[Eurofed]

I guess this is possible, but everything has to go right for the Axis for this scenario to happen. You don't just need oil, you need the Axis leadership at multiple levels to be more intelligent, far-sighted, and willing to cooperate in the same sort of "partnership" style that the UK/Commonwealth and the USA cooperated in OTL.

As I stated beforehand, this is a best case scenario for the Axis. It is possible that a stronger Italy, in the presence of similar political systems, basically complementary expansionistic-imperialistic ambitions, amicable personal relationship between the supreme leaders, might lead to an earlier, closer version of the OTL German-Italian partnership, which would lead to greater success. And success breeds greater trust in cooperation.

As it concerns the Japanese, their part of the PoD would make their strategic outlook more aligned with the one of the Euro-Axis, so potential for greater (if always rather looser, for various reasons) cooperation, here, too.

Basically, I assume that in a best case scenario, the PoD may start a virtuous cycle of cooperation for the Axis.

You also need to have the Italian and Japanese armies develop along different, more effective paths, and/or be willing to quickly change their weapons and doctrine to follow German models in some areas.

The former is a consequence of the PoD (greater land mechanization, greater air-naval build-up are plausible consequences of greater oil availability), the latter is a consequence of a stronger partnership.

The effectiveness of the submarine campaign implies that the Germans either built a lot more UBoats, or their Italian allies did,

A mix of both, I assume.

I can see the UK suing for peace if they are unable to feed a large portion of their population, and becoming a sort of Finland that is required to be neutral.

Frankly, I don't think that a Britain that has been subject to a successful blockade would have the leverage to get something that even looked like an Amiens peace.

And about the levels of British wartime stubborness, IBC and me are probably bound to eternal disagreement. I think that only the Japanese are provenly entitled to that kind of extreme stubborness, the British have been shown to be rather more liable to morale loss like everyone else, ask George III.

I doubt that all the Dominions are going to sever their connections that quickly - a government in exile, possibly with a member of the royal family, seems more likely. I don't know why you think it's far-fetched for Britain to establish a government in exile in, say, Canada, when several continental European nations did the same thing in Britain, and France came close to doing it in Algeria and was only prevented from doing so because Petain got power (which was far from inevitable).

The more the Nazifascist victory expands, the more quixotic the whole GiE thing looks. Even more so if Britain is offered a deal that leaves its national sovregnty and political system into place. But if you wish, think of political butterflies being picked by the author to fulfill the transition of the Anglosphere from the British model to the American model. The Dominions thinking "hey this British Empire thing has not worked so well, to hell with a failure, we still need protection in such a scary new world, let's try something with the obvious alternative". A revolutionary development, sure, but that's the kind of thing that tends to happen when you lose a war. And this whole Elizabeth queen-in-exile thing just seems terribly anachronistic to me, the time for Bonnie Prince Charlie is gone.

Actually, this scenario could almost be called "What if the Axis powers had most of the advantages that the Allies actually had in OTL?". Here, the Axis has plenty of oil, smarter leadership, and they cooperate and learn from each other in a way that they didn't do much of in OTL. Germany and Italy, with their very close partnership, are kind of equivalent to the USA and UK, while Japan plays a role somewhat similar to the Soviet Union - working together with its allies on a strategic rather than a tactical level.

More or less. The PoD directly grants one of the advantages, and starts a virtuous cycle that provides the others. It's much like what happens in Blairwitch's TL, except I use an earlier PoD. Like him, I don't buy the idea that fascists and militarists were innately unable to learn cooperation, while liberal democracies and communists did, regardless of circumstances.

I still don't understand what's so bad about balance of power. Britain/the UK was always opposed to one power coming to totally dominate the continent of Europe. As far as I can tell, for most of the past several centuries, this has been an unambiguously good thing, because the only way one power could come to dominate Europe was to conquer or vassalize everybody else. Britain aided the secondary powers of Europe to avoid being conquered by the biggest, whether that was Spain, France, or Germany. I can tell that you like the EU, but nothing like the EU was possible until Europe reached the point where the various nation states had given up on trying to conquer or dominate the continent. It was balance of power politics that achieved this. Ironically, nothing like the modern EU could have come into existence if a balance of power had not been maintained for centuries.

I really don't understand what's so good about nation states, and I wish for political unity to be spread to chunks as largest as possible of the human family, as soon as possible. As long as the political system doesn't make the citizens miserable in the long term, I absolutely don't mind the inevitable hardships of conquest, in a greater good sense, since in my vision this process in the long term typically breeds peace, cooperation, brotherhood, stability, progress, and efficiency to deal with large-scale problems. I value personal freedom and human rights, but I deem national sovreignty as a bad and harmful thing, a shameful relic of our tribal distant past. As I see it, Europe should have got unified long ago, with the success and expansion of the Roman Empire. I balk at the means that Nazis, Communists, and stuff used to set up and maintain their own empires, but I'm ready to sacrifice much else to fulfill this ideal of unity. Conquest ? Who cares, enduring particularist squabbles creates more grief in the long term. Cultural assimilation ? Who cares, globalization shows the human family doesn't really need thousands of languages.

Have you ever seen the Hero (2002) movie ? If so, you may better understand my PoV as I regard Broken Sword as the hero, and Flying Snow as the villain.

 

[Shogo]

I tend to lean towards the idea that the Axis could hold together and avoid a Soviet style collapse.

At least partially because they have access to a lot more resources than the Soviet Union.

They control enough I think they could do more harm to the economies of the non-Axis nations than they can do to the Axis.

Oil alone would be a factor with how much of the worlds supply they'd dominate.

 

[I Blame Communism]

On second thoughts and after a review of your argument as it concerns the starvation issue, I agree that it may be plausible and I might have let myself led astray by faulty comparisons with the WWI situation and my taste for drama into hyperbole. Therefore, I'm going to strike all references to starvation in the TL and substitute with ones to economic collapse.

Food, though, was the principle worry. We did import a large majority of our consumption in 1939 (although there was a huge effort of agrarian mobilisation during the war, which went far beyond patriotic old ladies digging turnips in their flower-gardens: we conscripted young women onto the land, actually); but we weren't short of, say, coal. There were plenty of supplies for which we depended on import, of course (oil, for one), but I struggle to imagine the economy just grinding to a halt.

OTOH, I remain convinced that given TTL conditions, it was plausible that the Axis could win a decisive victory in the Battle of the Atlantic and such loss, in addition to all the other defeats and lack of American belligerance, could easily lead to a collapse of morale in 1942-43.

Look, I'm not trying to argue that Britain wouldn't ever come to terms. With the Soviets cut off, several colonial defeats, and a poor show in the Atlantic, we'd have to grit our teeth and take the advice likely coming from Roosevelt to to make an Amiens peace. If it gives you any comfort, Churchill would likely be disgraced, too. This is more probable than either invasion or strangulation.

But Britain is not going to physically collapse and sign an agreement that amounts to surrender, Edward VIII is not getting the throne, pro-fascists are not winning a parliamentary election, and the Empire in Asia is not going to survive the war. In short, Britain is going to become what the Nazis least wanted: a socialist, American-allied, decolonialising aircraft carrier opposite Fortress Europe.

If that's too much of a looming presence for your vision of Nazi Europe - and I could certainly see why that might be the case and why, for the purposes of the exercise, you'd want to avoid it - then all I'm saying is that conquest is the only way to impose a conqueror's peace.

Oh, I have no doubts that such plans were sincere, in mid-1940 OTL conditions. I just note that historically a lot of governments that are facing a military catastrophe tend to make some preparations beforehand for some kind of heroic last stand or carrying on the fight from abroad, but more often than not, in the real thing, such attempts collapse or people change their mind.

I'm not seeing any examples. The only examples of "we shall go on to the end!" I can actually think of off the top of my head are from the Napoleonic Wars. The tsar he'd withdraw to Kamchatka... and didn't make peace after the destruction of his other capital. Napoleon swore never to give in... and managed to start a new European war with the help of 600 troops and ample gonads. And then there was the Franco-Prussian War, when the French tried to raise armies to relieve Paris and, ah, actually did raise armies to relieve Paris. They weren't very good, that was the problem.

There is no guarantee that which was put on paper in 1940 would still be deemed appropriate and adequately executed two or three years later after an unrelenting string of setbacks that would wear out hope and patience.

You'll note that I actually dismiss the idea of fighting on from Canada as dubious: the Canadians would do better to salvage what they can and move into the American sphere.

All I'm saying is that if the government seriously intended to fight on after losing Britain, then 1947 level rationing, more colonial defeats, and troubles in India would be shrugged off.

I also note that ITTL British morale collapses when they have lost rather more than Gibraltar and for rather more time, without getting no one of the OTL morale boosters, such as BoB, Compass, US belligerance, and so on.

I say again that a peace of mutual exhaustion - rather than what amounts to a British unconditional surrender - is plausible.

But the idea that you can wear us down to the point of surrendering is not. Churchill and Orwell never agreed on much, but they agreed that the British people have a curious sense of national masochism which makes them well-adapted to periods of hardship. And speaking of Churchill and Orwell, how did these two people completely differant in origin and opinions and nearly everything else both become archetypally British figures? Because they were both grumpy old men who'd fight the world on a point of principal, that's why.

Orwell said that what the war-party had to fear was not the clumsy propaganda that the Nazis tried, "We are strong and can crush you", which appealed to naked power-worship and therefore only gave pause to those who were already pro-Nazis, and the Stalin-fanciers; it was the possible alternate strategy of "fair match, mate, let's call it a draw", which comes back to what I was saying about an Amiens peace.

Oh, sure let's assume that they kick out Churchill when the first or second row of ATL defeats occurs, and set up a new war government, expecting that with a new, hopefully more efficient leadership the war can turn for the better. But things continue to go bad, so they lose hope in the new leadership as well, rinse and repeat. At some point people are going to start wondering that perhaps the problem is not the leader, but the war.

Standards of living did not fall in a significant way, and defeats in distant places didn't have a dire effect on home morale. The idea that people would accept total national humiliation just to get rid of the government is hardly plausible. As I say, I think that either a bitter peace would have been made or Britain would have been invaded before that would happen.

It's possible that a general election might be thought expedient and authorised. Labour would probably win, so a fat lot of good that does you.

I think dear George here was exaggerating the importance of good old Britain in the struggle against a victorious totalitarian Eurasia more than a bit. Moral example has its importance, no doubt, but I don't think that a few hundred or thousand defiant British exiles are going to make a significant difference in the worldwide struggle against victorious fascism, even if they wrap themselves in the banner of a government in exile.

He wasn't talking about a government in exile, but the moral ramifications. This was written a time when the Allied powers consisted of us. Had we been defeated at that point, America would never have been in the war; and if it looked like we, and the French, had followed Italy in meakly accepted Nazi domination, what would America have been going to do?

He probably was exaggerating in retrospect (it's easy to exaggerate when you're one of two countries fighting fascism, and the other one is getting the worst of it), but there's another bit of the same essay which adds weight to his argument: the British Empire, which was in the process of dissolution. Had Britain made a Vichy peace, then not only would the world be left with exactly one tragic example of heroic resistance to the rising forces of totalitarianism (China): those forces would have had a quarter of the world in their power. Orwell said that the real reason the Nazis had turned so bitterly against Britain in their rhetoric was that the Empire was dissolving. Give it two decades and the Indians are citizens of the Indian Union, flying aeroplanes and building machine-guns. What, then, of the "master-race"? But a spineless peace delivers the Indians and Africans into the hands of new masters, more ruthless by far.

For good or evil, that gets to be America's responsibility. We may certainly agree that conquered Nazified Britain would quite possibly become the WP Poland equivalent of the Nazifascist block, whileas ITTL it is written to become the Austria/Finland equivalent. Whether one or the other would make for an overall better outcome for all parts involved is debatable.

If Britain refuses to surrender and makes a bitter peace, the anti-Nazi forces have a vast aircraft carrier, landing stage, and radio transmitter: a military and a spiritual threat to totalitarianism. They also have the third world, the "semi-apes" of Hitlerian rhetoric, asserting their independent destiny and arming themselves in their millions.

If Britain meakly gives in, there is no aircraft carrier, no landing stage, and no BBC. Nobody is broacasting messages of defiance and if they were nobody could take them seriously because there's nowhere to muster any military threat to Nazism. Most Indians and Africans are slaves. Nazism, in fact, stands vindicated: western democracy went out with a submissive whimper, the Slavs are defeated, and the "semi-apes" are incapabable of ruling themselves.

I'd much rather see my own country go down fighting than witness the latter scenario.

The MPs can change their mind, or be forced to do so by the pressure of public opinion. Maybe I didn't make it sufficiently clear, but I am aware that elections were suspended in wartime and I meant that elections are called after the armistice is signed.

Actually, they can't be forced. Parliamentary supremacy: once you've elected the bugger, there's nothing you can do until election time. If MPs couldn't act on their own conscience, we'd never have abolished the death penalty and there'd be an EU referendum.

I sugggest you do a bit of reading about our constitution before you topple it.

As for elections: we'd already well started on the road that led to the Beveridge Report. Any fair election was going to elect far too many Labour men for the Nazis to be comfortable with. You have Tory and Liberal Nazi-fanciers winning by excoriating a war that's already over: their platform is a peace that's already happened. This is as against Labour, who offer war against squalor, ignorance, want, idleness, and disease. If I were the British public...

No, it is not really close to an unconditional surrender. Britain gets no change in its political system (the recalling of Edward VIII is a homegrown side effect of the political swing between interventionism and isolationism, not imposed by the Axis, although they are certainly pleased by it),

Bring him back? Bastard married an American!

Seriously, Ed was a spent force, and George VI was very popular. He had been a figure of calm and resolution, but didn't bear any responsibility for our defeats.

No change in our political system means a Labour government, and I can't seem them taking too long to try and get under the American umbrella. How are you going to prevent that? Invade? Yeah, unconditional surrender.

no reparations or onerous economic burden,

Except loss of economic independence and surrender of all the weapons we'd invented to the people we'd invented them to defeat.

and it gets to keep India, the core of its empire.

Cripps' mission was in March 1942. Keeping India was neither plausible nor something that the mass of ordinary people cared about that much.

ith this peace treaty Britain more or less concedes the territories that has already lost on the battlefield, plus a couple of colonies.

As in, "Africa".

It agrees to restart normal economic relationships with the Axis.

Compulsory free trade is normal?

What they really sign away is the ability to keep being a stronghold of political, strategic, and economic hostility to the Axis order, and that is indeed understandable for a country that has suffered what looks like a decisive defeat (and a successful blockade certainly is one, for an island).

How does it look like one to the man in the street if he eats better than before and the bombing is slacking? Is he really going to surrender the independence of the country so that it can try to keep repressing the independence of another country?

If you wish, I may certainly strike out the Eddy comback part (but George and his wife in all likelihood would have to go) and I may try and see if I can tone down a bit the conditions of the peace treaty, but frankly the foreign policy committment to be a good neighbor and trade partner of the Axis is not such an unreasonable burden, if they lose the Battle of the Atlantic.

As I say, the idea that Britain could actually be starved is outright wrong, and I haven't seen these "circumstances" which make us lose the Atlantic so direly explained.

A peace which I see as plausible is that we withdraw from SEA and North Africa and the Middle East and keep the rest (which is beyond practical Axis reach), the fleet, and national independence.

A sympathetic view of the martyred Russian and Chinese peoples, which indeed builds up into TTL America, does not necessarily translate into a sympathetic view of Communism, which always got relatively marginal support and a lot of distrust and antipathy in American society, apart from a termporary wartime alliance of convenience which never happened ITTL. America more or less fully committs to the anti-fascist Cold War when the downfall of the Soviet Union is close at hand, so there is little reason to feel posthumous sympathy for an ideology damned by a military failure as total as the OTL one of Nazifascism. Moreover, the awareness for crimes of Nazism and Communism in democratic countries is going to be partially reversed between TTL and OTL. It's not like the Nazifascists are going to let unsupervised tours of Eastern Europe and the Arab world happen, while plentiful and widely publicized evidence of Bolshevik misdeeds is going to be freely available to everyone that asks.

That's my point. "Evidence" for rather more misdeeds than the Bolsheviks ever committed was widely available at the time. Have I told you the story about "desecration of churches in the Novgorod district"? "Desecration" is Mail-ese for "restoration work on the iconostasis".

In this America, the principle sources of anti-Bolshevik propaganda - fascists and the Anglo-French right-wing press - are both thoroughly discredited. There are no Bolsheviks around to commit any actual misdeeds. Why, then, the old trope of "it's not that I don't like the Russian people, I have a deep sympathy for them, it's just that I make unflattering distortions of their history".

When Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus are all being exterminated, I doubt whether people are going to make a point of how the Ukrainians were fighting exclusively for survival and for Ukraine - an imaginary Ukraine that was differant from the Soviet Ukraine they grew up in - and not, heaven forbid, for the Soviet Union.

It is indeed quite likely that an anti-fascist Cold War is going to make the free world rather more sympathetic than OTL to democratic and liberal expressions of left-wing ideas, but it makes as little sense for them to develop a posthumous large-scale sympathy for communism as for OTL to develop it for fascism because of an anti-communist Cold War.

And guess what, we did. Self-effacing accounts from Nazi generals got taken at face value and plenty of right-wing pundits in the English-speaking world think we should have just left the Nazis to their business. It's not much, but I'm not suggesting there will be that much outright Stalin-fancying.

 

[Astrodragon]

I think I'm going to agree with CalBear here.

While the timeline has more than a few holes in it, its better than most of at least producing something that is, on a surface reading, believable.
Since the aim seems to be to see what happens after an Axis victory, I think it would be unfair to shoot too many holes in the preface to (I hope!) the real story.

There is one point that really does have to be addressed, though, because its central to what happens next, which is the UK peace deal.
There really is no way given the scenario to assume the abject surrender that takes place. Some sort of peace deal, especially if the US is pressing it, I can believe (although in this case the US is certainly NOT going to go for the sort of supine surrender envisaged here). After all, Hitler was happy for the UK to stay pretty much as it was as long as it kept its nose out of Europe.

The question that follows, of course, it what happens to Tube Alloys? Even in a supine surrender, this is going to quietly end up in Canada. With a more believable peace, its going to do the same with a lot more backing. Even if the US is ignoring nuclear research (very unlikely), Tube Alloys was estimated to have a bomb in around 1947 (maybe slightly earlier, it depends on some of the Plute research stuff). Now unless Axis nuclear research has changed drastically, 1948 is going to be interesting....

 

[I Blame Communism]

And since I deem the British political system as the outdated, buggy, and unsafe model (seriously, a political system where the collective sanity of 326 people is more or less everything that stands from writing castration for masturbators as the law of the land ???) and the American one, for all its flaws, as the new, improved, and safer model, I typically tend to resolve that situation in the sense of America absorbing as much of the English-speaking peoples as barely plausible.

I'd be cheeky and point out that modern America, unlike modern Britain, is a society where a political candidate can actually condemn masturbation and be taken pseudo-seriously, but that wouldn't be British.

(Hypocrisy and self-contradiction are British, though. )

I will say only this:

- All countries are differant (a fact that gives you endless irritation, I'm sure), and Britain is not America. The two countries have, or should have, constitutions adapted to the needs of their people.

- Given that, well, if Americans really think they need a bizarre and incomprehensible prison system, a country awash in guns, religion intruding in the public sphere, and no public healthcare... their choice. I prefer the British system for Britain.

(Sorry, America, but talking about the war makes us patriotic and defiant.)

- That's to assume that both systems are somehow eternal and immutable. For how much the "British system" can change within and without the 1688 Settlement, check out Fight and be Right, my absolute fave timeline evah.

Part of it is about the pivotal and stubborn geopolitical role that the British Empire played to frustrate something that I'm unshakably confident, in three cases out of four as major historical chances go, would have turned into a better outcome.

Unshakeable confidence in unforseeable outcomes is what I call "fanaticism". Anyway, how is what happened during the Napoleonic Wars my fault, exactly?

Part of it, probably the most important one, is about the fact that English nationalism in the last few decades appears to have focused rather strongly on despising and slandering something that gets some of my strongest political allegiances and ideals.

Well, you've focused rather strongly on "despising" (your word, guv) and slandering something that gets some of my strongest political allegiance, namely, the British nation.

When the Daily Mail & co. keeps harping so much on depicting continental Europhiles as a bunch of desplicable jackbooted thugs of a bureaucratic corrupt NaziCommuniBonapartist Evil Empire, and so many English, looking from abroad, seem to agree and cheer on, I'm going to take offence.

The Welsh are alright, though, of course.

The Daily Mail is an object of ridicule for many of us. Our whole press is more right-wing and conservative than the general public. The general public is a long way from being Europhile, but the idea that "Europe is NAZIS!" is a Mail trope. Many of the rest of us are just suspicious of the EU, having a preconception of its advocates as very wide-eyed idealistic continental types with a silent prejudice against our country that you're really going out of your way to vanquish.

I am aware of the all-important difference between the British people, the British state/Empire as an expression of its historical ruling class, the latter's obsession for the "balance of power", and English nationalist paranoias about continental unity, and focus my negative thoughts on the latter two, and the second one when it becomes an agent of theirs. But given that we are in a field based on history and politics, the distinction with the first one may become fuzzy in the heat of discussion.

Hey, I hate the historical British ruling class, too! Imperialist money-grubbing fat-cat bastards who sent our lads off to die for cynical ends and watched us starve for the sake of their dividends, same as pretty well every single historical ruling class in the whole history of the world.

By the way, the balance of power is a natural mechanism, and lots of country's besides Britain have based their policy off it. Some of them include Revolution-era France and Imperial Germany.

Again, when the English attitude to European integration and those who ardently stand for it (including me) evolves to something more positive, either because they have a change of heart, or they find the resolve to separate from and leave the bloody thing alone, stopping to sabotage it from within and slander it because frankly we have much better things to do with our evolving continental polity than setting up devious ways to oppress and exploit that not so important and valuable island, my feelings towards the folks that inhabit (the southern portion of) it are going to turn MUCH to the better.

If you're trying to appeal to me as a Scotsman, it's not working. Nothing suppresses the contrarian instinct like the immanent threat of Europeans! In any case, I don't get what distances us from England. Our present rulers are pro-Europe. The present ruling coalition of Britain contains one party which is pro-Europe. The least pro-European party is a damp squib up here, of course, but the reasons have nothing much to do with Europe; we aren't any more enamoured of the EU on average than the English, who are not some sort of Europe-hating hive-mind.

But the whole idea of hating a country because some political opinion you don't like is slightly more prevalent their is silly. I don't hate America because they're all supposedly libertarians, or Russia because they all supposedly fancy Stalin.

Basically, assume that when someone in public discourse on that side of the Channel (not that Europhobes are limited there, far from it, but somehow Albion managed to turn itself into the poster child of it to an unmatched degree elsewhere) rants about "blah blah EU is the Empire of Evil blah blah", Eurofed notices and is not pleased.

Someone somewhere in the world says he "despises" IBC's country. IBC notices and is not pleased.

Shrug. It's a peripheral island with little geopolitical importance outside of Britain that has no inclination whatsoever to mess in or little to hate/fear the aspirations of its continental neighbors to greater unity when it doesn't involve the questionable workings of its own political system. I'm even a little Celtophilic, given that I'm a fantasy buff and much of the genre has some roots in that culture.

My comment about Ireland was in the nature of a quip. Personally, though, I love the place for a whole variety of reasons, one of which is that it's story is the story of a nation of ordinary, downtrodden people who are quite indomitable!

Speaking as a Celt, though, I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "that culture".

 

[Eurofed]

Ok folks, I've revised the TL with a focus on the situation of Britain during and immediately after the war. The defeat of Britain is now described in terms that don't make reference to the food situation, it is now delayed to 1943, the peace treaty and the post-war diplomatic situation now depict Britain as a defeated but not conquered country which seeks its way between reluctant neutrality to appease the victors and cautious sympathy for the American bloc, there is more coverage for the American political landscape during the war.

I hope this feels good enough to lay most of the concerns to rest that have been expressed about the TL's plausibility. Please check the revised version and give me your opinion, so I can have a firm basis to puzzle out the future of this dark world. In the meanwhile, I can try and make a map.

 

[Eurofed]

Plenty of countries all over the world have massive oil ressources but that does not make them instant great powers with a strong industrial base as you seem to think. Corruption in fascist Italy was widespread and could actually even increase even further if suddenly oil money becomes available. This won't be of any help when in increasing Italy's industrial base and neither will the facists economic policies for that matter.

Italy underwent a massive industrialization after the war, and the petrochemical and chemical industry was a key part of it, while European economic integration was its backbone. It is only natural to assume that the oilfields and later economic integration with Germany would cause at least something of what IOTL happened in the '50s and 60s, to transpire in the '30s and '40s instead. Certainly the domestic potential for greater industrialization was already into place. As for corruption, this has been a chronic and widespread problem of Italy, before, during, and after fascism, yet this did not stop it from becoming one of main industrial powers of the world, in the right conditions.

I am also rather puzzled at the idea that Vichy France is suddenly going turn its back on its forming allies and join the Axis with its fleet and other assets. Moreover the situation being different the destruction of the French fleet in Oran could easily be avoided as it could have in reality.

People often seem to genuinely ignore how much backing Vichy France got during the war. It was a homegrown fascist regime with a solid following base, like in Germany, Italy, and Spain. Free France and the Resistance didn't get any real mass following till 1943-44. The idea that 1940-42 France was crawling with Resistance members and Free France sympathizers is a post-war fabrication to justify France as a member of the victor powers. Vichy France leaders were either opportunistic collaborationists (Petain) or real believers in the cause (Laval) that expected Germany would win the war, and to the degree this got to look ever more likely, would strive to win France a cozy place in the new Nazifascist European order by closer and closer cooperation with the Axis. When TTL France joins the Axis, Germany and Italy have pounded it and Britain harder than OTL (only a minority of UK troops escaped at Dunkerque, Italy made a decent performace in the Alps) and are apparently kicking British butt in the Med.

 

[Eurofed]

Look, I'm not trying to argue that Britain wouldn't ever come to terms. With the Soviets cut off, several colonial defeats, and a poor show in the Atlantic, we'd have to grit our teeth and take the advice likely coming from Roosevel to make an Amiens peace. If it gives you any comfort, Churchill would likely be disgraced, too. This is more probable than either invasion or strangulation.

I think you may then find the revision more to your liking, although I think that in comparison, Britain would be forced to sign something less favorable, and moreover be much more cautious about renewed military confrontation with the Axis, than with Napoleon at Amiens.

But Britain is not going to physically collapse and sign an agreement that amounts to surrender, Edward VIII is not getting the throne, pro-fascists are not winning a parliamentary election, and the Empire in Asia is not going to survive the war. In short, Britain is going to become what the Nazis least wanted: a socialist, American-allied, decolonialising aircraft carrier opposite Fortress Europe.

If that's too much of a looming presence for your vision of Nazi Europe - and I could certainly see why that might be the case and why, for the purposes of the exercise, you'd want to avoid it - then all I'm saying is that conquest is the only way to impose a conqueror's peace.

Not a conqueror's peace, but I think a victor's peace is inevitable. Nonetheless, in the new peace deal, Britain more or less cedes what it has already lost on the battlefield, plus bits in Southern Africa (what really kicks the British Empire out of Africa for good is the pro-Axis swing of South Africa, which I think is wholly plausible given the circumstances and that the Apartheid was only five years in OTL future) and agrees to keep its nose out of Axis Eurasia and to resume normal neutrality relations.

A socialist Britain that gradually slides from neutrality into alliance with the American bloc and decolonializes India is no real obstacle to the purpose of the exercise, and neither is its eventual becoming a military and political outpost of the Free World in a Cold War bipolar/tripolar setup (is an Euro-Japanese split of the Axis bloc going to happen ?? I welcome suggestions, since puzzling out the evoution of a victorious Japan in some broad detail is rather difficult). What was really contrary to the purpose of the exercise was America and Britain getting in the position to pull a mega Overlord/Downfall or "nuke them all" on the Axis bloc a few years after the war.

I'm not seeing any examples. The only examples of "we shall go on to the end!" I can actually think of off the top of my head are from the Napoleonic Wars. The tsar he'd withdraw to Kamchatka... and didn't make peace after the destruction of his other capital. Napoleon swore never to give in... and managed to start a new European war with the help of 600 troops and ample gonads. And then there was the Franco-Prussian War, when the French tried to raise armies to relieve Paris and, ah, actually did raise armies to relieve Paris. They weren't very good, that was the problem.

Napoleon was forced to abdicate both in 1814 and in 1815, and France was forced to make peace in 1871. In neither case, they did abandon France to military occupation and set up quixotic governments in exile outside Europe.

You'll note that I actually dismiss the idea of fighting on from Canada as dubious: the Canadians would do better to salvage what they can and move into the American sphere.

I'm thankful for this nod to realism.

Orwell said that what the war-party had to fear was not the clumsy propaganda that the Nazis tried, "We are strong and can crush you", which appealed to naked power-worship and therefore only gave pause to those who were already pro-Nazis, and the Stalin-fanciers; it was the possible alternate strategy of "fair match, mate, let's call it a draw", which comes back to what I was saying about an Amiens peace.

Oh, but Britain shifting to the position of Western Europe during the Cold War, an avampost of the Free World that provides a different example within the MAD constraints of the Cold War, is not a problem for the TL, nor was, I think, a dishonorable choice for Britain in the face of TTL Axis military success. It would just take the realistic admission that given the circumstances, naked power-worship had got its point in that its squared-out playground could not be undone by military force.

Give it two decades and the Indians are citizens of the Indian union, flying aeroplanes and building machine-guns. What, then, of the "master-race"? But a spineless peace delivers the Indians and Africans into the hands of new masters, more ruthless by far.

This peace does deliver the Africans in the hands of their new slavemasters, with the help of the Apartheid folk, which are bound to get drooling at the ideas of victorious fascist block about the proper place of the Blacks. Given the degree of Britsh military defeat and the betrayal of a South Africa predictably lured astray by racist dreams, it is more or less the path of least resistance. Given the circumstances, I don't think it is realistic that a defeated Britain haggles too much about the African colonies, or deems Sealion a better option than consigning Africa (half of which has been already lost on the battlefied) to the Nazi bloc. This is still the racist 1940s, even in Britain. As it concerns India, you are quite right. It remains to be seen whether left on their own, they choose to follow in the footsteps of America or of Japan, or a winding path between.

If Britain refuses to surrender and makes a bitter peace, the anti-Nazi forces have a vast aircraft carrier, landing stage, and radio transmitter: a military and a spiritual threat to totalitarianism. They also have the third world, the "semi-apes" of Hitlerian rhetoric, asserting their independent destiny and arming themselves in their millions.

This is what may well happen in the future, except substitute third world with Indian subcontinent, and landing stage shall never be a realistic option, except for Cold War military maneuvers.

As for elections: we'd already well started on the road that led to the Beveridge Report. Any fair election was going to elect far too many Labour men for the Nazis to be comfortable with. You have Tory and Liberal Nazi-fanciers winning by excoriating a war that's already over: their platform is a peace that's already happened. This is as against Labour, who offer war against squalor, ignorance, want, idleness, and disease. If I were the British public...

Point taken for the revision. OTOH, I think it is a realistic scenario for Britain to have a lively post-war political debate between those who argue for being the aircraft carrier and radio trasmitter of the united Anglosphere, and those who argue for genuine neutrality. They have just lost a major war rather badly and the Axis bloc can only look stronger in the immediate future.

Seriously, Ed was a spent force, and George VI was very popular. He had been a figure of calm and resolution, but didn't bear any responsibility for our defeats.

Nonetheless, I still left George's abdication in, out of shame for defeat (and stress-worsening health) if nothing else. I think it is a nice touch of closure.

No change in our political system means a Labour government, and I can't seem them taking too long to try and get under the American umbrella.

As things stand, I think it would likely require the comfort of a nuclear deterrent.

Except loss of economic independence and surrender of all the weapons we'd invented to the people we'd invented them to defeat.

Ok, but I don't think they would be in the position to refuse resumption of free trade. They have lost the naval war.

A peace which I see as plausible is that we withdraw from SEA and North Africa and the Middle East and keep the rest (which is beyond practical Axis reach), the fleet, and national independence.

Largely done, except the Axis gets all of Africa (with the help of the Apartheid folk). Axis victory in the naval war and in East Africa and French-Spanish membership already put the northern half of Africa within Axis' grasp, so haggling over central Africa and northern southern Africa doesn't make too much of a point.

When Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus are all being exterminated, I doubt whether people are going to make a point of how the Ukrainians were fighting exclusively for survival and for Ukraine - an imaginary Ukraine that was differant from the Soviet Ukraine they grew up in - and not, heaven forbid, for the Soviet Union.

I shall try and see how to frame TTL *Cold War opinion of defunct Communism in appropriate language, if remarks are due for, but I have little doubt that it is going to be more or less as negative as the one of fascism IOTL, a brutal, ham-fisted ideology that shamefully failed in its time of trial and left a sizable body count behind. I can't see how Axis atrocities in and enslavement of Russia, Africa, China, and the Arab world could plausibly turn into a positive opinion of Lenin and Stalin (Mao is going to be an minor footnote). Social democracy, of course, is another matter entirely.

OTOH, I can't decide if American intervention or a better Soviet performance is going to become the most popular *AH.com subject of *WWII. Quite likely a lot of people fantasyzing on how a Cold War between the American bloc and Communist Europe would have turn out, with very few people expecting the division of the continent.

OTOOH, in the light of the ATL fact that defeat caused the Soviet regime to fall, I don't think it is so farfetched for a later perspective to make a side remark that Russian wartime (and later) resistance to nazism was mainly driven by Motherland patriotism.

 

[I Blame Communism]

The new version does sit much better with my instincts. I'll shut up and stop cluttering your thread.

I think you may then find the revision more to your liking, although I think that in comparison, Britain would be forced to sign something less favorable, and moreover be much more cautious about renewed military confrontation with the Axis, than with Napoleon at Amiens.

Oh, definately. It's the Amiens sentiment I refer to: "We still don't think your gains are the natural order of things".

What was really contrary to the purpose of the exercise was America and Britain getting in the position to pull a mega Overlord/Downfall or "nuke them all" on the Axis bloc a few years after the war.

Oh, I don't think that's plausible for a moment in a world where Britain exits the war before America enters it.

nor was, I think, a dishonorable choice for Britain in the face of TTL Axis military success.

Ah, honour. To give a fair warning, one of my favourite bits of cinema is in The life and death of Colonel Blimp (BFI's 45th greatest British film): the Honourable Prussian Officer, an emigrant from Nazi Germany, explains to his erstwhile foe the Honourable British Officer that if the new Germany wins then the honour they knew about and fought their duels over won't exist. Sometimes, you've got to fight dirty.

(Not terribly relevant, but everybody should watch TladoCB. )

As things stand, I think it would likely require the comfort of a nuclear deterrent.

Ironically enough, I agree - but IOTL, when we were poorer and the situation was differant, it was one of the few things I disagree with Clem Attlee on.

I shall try and see how to frame TTL *Cold War opinion of defunct Communism in appropriate language, if remarks are due for, but I have little doubt that it is going to be more or less as negative as the one of fascism IOTL, a brutal, ham-fisted ideology that shamefully failed in its time of trial and left a sizable body count behind. I can't see how Axis atrocities in and enslavement of Russia, Africa, China, and the Arab world could plausibly turn into a positive opinion of Lenin and Stalin (Mao is going to be an minor footnote). Social democracy, of course, is another matter entirely.

Stalin, though, might also bear the blame for what happened (as he in considerable part did).

I think the attitude to the whole business would be the one Frank Capra so tactfully took in his Battle of Russia. "Russians are tragically heroic, heroically tragic people. 'Communism?' Bless you. So, yes, the Russians, who hold no particularly strong political opinions one way or the other and who's leaders are surprisingly anonymous, are a heroically tragic, tragically heroic people..."

OTOOH, in the light of the ATL fact that defeat caused the Soviet regime to fall, I don't think it is so farfetched for a later perspective to make a side remark that Russian wartime (and later) resistance to nazism was mainly driven by Motherland patriotism.

Oh, I think it was. The socialist motherland is in danger! I'm just saying the two things aren't mutually exclusive.

 

[Eurofed]

This is the map of the world in 1944, done in "old UCS" colors (I'm agnostic about the late debate/feud over the revision, as long as a consensus hopefully emerges in the end).

Despite all of them are supranational confederal polities, the CFN, the NEO, and the GEACPS get different map treatments for the sake of geopolitical recognizability and simplicity: respectively, American green, various member nations' colors with an EU blue contour for external borders, and a mix of Japanese gold and lighter "Manchukuo" puppet shade.

Given that the Japanese had a taste for setting up most of their empire as various puppet states, it was quite difficult to decide which color each GEACPS area get, but eventually I decided that for the post-war map, I'd give the puppet shade to those states that got some OTL international recognition: Manchukuo, Mongolia, and Siam.

 

[Eurofed]

The new version does sit much better with my instincts. I'll shut up and stop cluttering your thread.

Oh, as much as noisely we may cross our swords, there was some valuable advice in the clutter. I may not typically give up a point without a fight, and there are some issues where you and I are not going to agree ever, but I do listen.

Oh, definately. It's the Amiens sentiment I refer to: "We still don't think your gains are the natural order of things".

No doubt, no doubt. Moreover, it's also an eminently Cold War feeling, after all.

Ah, honour. To give a fair warning, one of my favourite bits of cinema is in The life and death of Colonel Blimp (BFI's 45th greatest British film): the Honourable Prussian Officer, an emigrant from Nazi Germany, explains to his erstwhile foe the Honourable British Officer that if the new Germany wins then the honour they knew about and fought their duels over won't exist. Sometimes, you've got to fight dirty.

Well, indeed even our WWII and Cold War held very very little old-school honor, for all that they definitely were "good fights" for the Western side. They were terribly dirty issues, and I don't think that the attitudes of victorious fascists are going to improve the *Cold War one bit on this.

(Not terribly relevant, but everybody should watch TladoCB. )

I'll keep the good advice in mind if and when I stumble upon an Italian version of it.

Ironically enough, I agree - but IOTL, when we were poorer and the situation was differant, it was one of the few things I disagree with Clem Attlee on.

I'm perplexed : why do you assume that TTL post-war Britain is going to be any bit weathier than OTL ?? I assume we can copy and paste here. Although the war was a couple years shorter, Britain bore a much greater share of the burden, and suffered much more economic displacement during it.

As it concerns the UK nuclear deterrent, I reasoned out that it would be achieved at the same pace as IOTL, so we can likely expect Britain and America running in each other' arms in the '50s.

About this, I plead for a little advice: in the near future, I envision the US-led Free World to be structured as a two-tier system: the CFN "inner core" of America, Canada, Anzus, Cuba, and the Philippines, which is a (con)federal EU (well, NAU) equivalent and in all likelihood is going to evolve into US statehood in the very long term, and an "outer ring" with Britain, Latin America (apart from the occasional fascist Castro case), perhaps Ireland too and eventually India, which is going to be an EEC-NATO hybrid equivalent. I'm uncertain how to name the outer ring: Atlantic (Treaty) League ? Global Democracy Organization ? I already used the "free nations" label for the inner core. I really don't want to use "United Nations", for various reasons, despite what Roosevelt and his wife fancied.

Stalin, though, might also bear the blame for what happened (as he in considerable part did).

Especially among Russians.

I think the attitude to the whole business would be the one Frank Capra so tactfully took in his Battle of Russia. "Russians are tragically heroic, heroically tragic people. 'Communism?' Bless you. So, yes, the Russians, who hold no particularly strong political opinions one way or the other and who's leaders are surprisingly anonymous, are a heroically tragic, tragically heroic people..."

Oh, we can be in fine agreement about that attitude. In the long term, Communism may easily become largely forgotten in popular culture, and vaguely remembered as a part of the interwar screw-ups that paved the way to the rise of fascism, or understood as fascism's failed cousin.

Oh, I think it was. The socialist motherland is in danger! I'm just saying the two things aren't mutually exclusive.

I can be in fine agreement about that, too, especially as long as we define what "socialist" means. I agree that the average Russian in all likelihood didn't mind to fight also to defend those factual social improvements that Soviet rule had brought in comparison to Tsarism, but I think precious few had a big urge to do so to live in a kolkohz or be ruled by the local Party boss. OTOH, admittedly totalitarianism of all stripes tends to attract more "true believers" than you or I may find confortable, and there are always the idiots that think "If Only Hitler/Stalin/Mussolini/Mao Knew".

Map-making made me aware of a couple minor issues which I seek advice upon:

- How likely is it that in 1942-43, Argentina may exploit the Royal Navy's direst hour and make a move for the Falkland/Malvinas ? It seems fairly plausible to me, especially since with a crippled RN, South Atlantic is effectively outside Britain's reach and Roosevelt may not mind defending the fait accompli as a way to appease Argentina in not siding with the Axis.

- How likely is it that in the same time frame, Ireland may make some move to grab Northern Ireland ? Especially in the sense of Dublin blackmailing London to cede NI in exchange for Ireland's continued neutrality and/or British access to Irish ports. I'm rather more dubious on this, since I dunno if De Valera would have the spine and political inclination to pull a stunt like this and Britain would be weakened enough to make it realistic, but NI is always going to be a mighty temptation for Dublin.

And a not so minor issue: given the circumstances, whom do you see more likely as India's first Premier, Nehru or Chandra Bose ? For various reasons, I assume that the Partition shall be butterflied out (e.g. Baluchistan and Pashtunistan are gone to Persia, for the very little good that it shall do to them and their German-Italian overlords).

 

[Van555]

Persia did well!

 

[Eurofed]

Persia did well!

On a map, yes, although they had to trade some of their most valuable provinces for lands of dubious value. But given the circumstances, better than nothing. Of course, their real overwhelming luck is that like Turkey, they got Aryan status and a NEO seat as members in good standing (a bit funny geographically, but Hitler and Mussolini are not sticklers for detail) instead of being classified subhumans fit for enslavement and elimination like their Slav and Arab neighbors.