Probably not. Russia have not too much of military force to invade mainland Alaska. Occupation of Aleutians is possible but hardly invasion of Alaska. And not even sure if Alaska is very high on Russian priorities. Of coourse that would tie Americans and possibility Canadians but Russian army is more important on Anatolian and Indian fronts. It has too some troops in China.
The Russian Century - a TL
- Thread starter Onkel Willie
- Start date
Probably not. Russia have not too much of military force to invade mainland Alaska. Occupation of Aleutians is possible but hardly invasion of Alaska. And not even sure if Alaska is very high on Russian priorities. Of coourse that would tie Americans and possibility Canadians but Russian army is more important on Anatolian and Indian fronts. It has too some troops in China.
Nukes might lead to stalemate instead of total victory hère, because Britain (the obvious target) would still be able to retaliate efficiently with chemical and bioweapons, and the USA would be out of reach.
Also, the timeline is called the Russian century, not the Quadruple Alliance century. If Japan and Germany get hammered by Allies bombings and colonial defeats, and Italy by a direct invasion, while Russia remains untouched because of distance and gets to expand towards Turkey and India, it's actually good for Russia, giving it a stronger position. Because then (1) in the peace talks, Germans, Japanese and Italians would have to rely on Russian support to get what they want and avoid colony losses, (2) post-war, they would need the Russian industry to rebuild themselves.
Also, the timeline is called the Russian century, not the Quadruple Alliance century. If Japan and Germany get hammered by Allies bombings and colonial defeats, and Italy by a direct invasion, while Russia remains untouched because of distance and gets to expand towards Turkey and India, it's actually good for Russia, giving it a stronger position. Because then (1) in the peace talks, Germans, Japanese and Italians would have to rely on Russian support to get what they want and avoid colony losses, (2) post-war, they would need the Russian industry to rebuild themselves.
Honestly, even if they don't get hammered, Japan and Germany would still end up dependent on Russia in the long-term. America would likely use economic warfare to try and bring them to their knees, leaving them dependent on economic ties to Russia. Not to mention Russia will always be outbuild both of them when it comes to military equipment, meaning if they want to compete with/deter the USA, they need Russia.
But yes, I suspect both Japan and Germany would still get hammered regardless, just not to the same extent as OTL. Germany, at least, will have much more effective air defense, as they'll not only be able to concentrate more of the Luftwaffe to defend their cities, but will have the help of the Russian Air Force, which presumably has better leadership, pilots, and equipment compared to its Soviet counterpart in OTL WWII. Less so for Japan, but unlike Germany, the USA has to fight their way to the Marianas and liberate the Philippines first before they can bring their bombers close enough to hit the Home Islands.
EDIT: At the very least, though, I can see shrill British demands for China to give them back Hong Kong and the New Territories to be a non-starter.
But yes, I suspect both Japan and Germany would still get hammered regardless, just not to the same extent as OTL. Germany, at least, will have much more effective air defense, as they'll not only be able to concentrate more of the Luftwaffe to defend their cities, but will have the help of the Russian Air Force, which presumably has better leadership, pilots, and equipment compared to its Soviet counterpart in OTL WWII. Less so for Japan, but unlike Germany, the USA has to fight their way to the Marianas and liberate the Philippines first before they can bring their bombers close enough to hit the Home Islands.
EDIT: At the very least, though, I can see shrill British demands for China to give them back Hong Kong and the New Territories to be a non-starter.
Those colonies probably the first thing to go went the peace conference happen, if the quadruple alliance lose, also i would suggest russia to let go of india, since the only India part they would get probably northern india, it’s better to trade that for turkey and tsargard
Indeed. Conquest of the Ottoman Empire is much more valuable, as it would mean having a large Med coast (in Anatolia, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine) + the Straits and Constantinople + control of the Iraqi and Arabian oil (and yes, once Russia conquers the OE, Saudi Arabia would likely be either vassalized or outright invaded as well), while Russia already has large oil reserves, controlling a bigger share of worldwide oil means a stronger bargaining position + a large buffer zone (the former Ottoman territories) protecting the oilfields of Baku, Batumi and Grozny from any aerial or missile attack in the future (it's not good to have the oilfields producing 80% of your oil so close to an hostile border) + a large coast on the Indian Ocean.
That, combined with strong influence over Persia, would be the most valuable gains from the war. On the other hand, any territory in India would soon become a costly quagmire.
Should the Quadruple Alliance (or at least Russia) win, it would be better to demand that India becomes fully neutral (no link with the Commonwealth, or membership in military alliances, anymore), and fully open for trade with Russia.
Except that the very name of the TL implies that QA or at least Russia will win. That is, if the Quadruple Alliance loses, the Allied Powers are not going to let Russia remain powerful enough to be "the Russian Century." Rather, they would focus all their efforts on keeping Russia down so she doesn't get revenge.
And how would the allies power try to beat russia, this isn’t the same russia as otl, this is fully industrial russia with both massive amounts of resources and manpower, if the allies try to invade russia proper there would massive amounts of casualties and the population of the allies nation which is a more democratic nation than russia, probably wouldn’t be happy to have their family member and other people dying for possibly years if an invasion of Russia happen
Chapter XVII: Shifting the Balance, 1943-1945.
Chapter XVII: Shifting the Balance, 1943-1945.
In May 1943, the advance up the Italian boot commenced in earnest. The Italian Campaign was a slow and bloody war of attrition. The Italians and their German allies made effective use of the excellent defensive properties of the mountainous peninsula, inflicting significantly more casualties than they incurred. The advance was slow but inexorable, prompting Russia to send reinforcements too, drawing them from mountain troops originally intended for use in the Caucasus Mountains. In the two years that followed the Allies nonetheless managed to reach Rome, causing serious concerns in Berlin and St. Petersburg that Italy might not live up to its commitment to stay in the war. Germany and Russia doubled their military presence to ensure Rome would not fall: Tsar Alexander III declared the Third Rome would not let the First Rome fall again.
The Pacific theatre of the war also wasn’t going to well ever since the Battle of Hawaii, in which the Imperial Japanese Navy had lost a significant portion of its carrier fleet. Germany had carriers, but considered sending them halfway across the globe to be a suicide mission. Meanwhile, the smaller Imperial Russian Navy’s operations were limited to the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea. Even after the fall of the Bosporus its options were limited to operating in the Aegean Sea, using air cover from bases in the Aegean Islands to ward off the massively superior Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet. Venturing further into the Mediterranean was not an option given that it was largely an Anglo-American lake, forcing the Regia Marina to stay in port as a “fleet in being”. Even if it could safely have done so, Gibraltar and the Suez Canal remained solidly under British control. Other than sending some submarines out into the Pacific, Russia wasn’t willing to send its Pacific Fleet because they correctly assumed the much larger US Navy would just destroy it. What Russia did do was to supply its Japanese ally with oil, coal and steel so its war industry could continue to produce at optimum efficiency. Other than that, however, Japan faced the tremendous industrial might of the United States alone.
After the Battle of Hawaii, the 1943-1945 period saw Japan’s defensive belts out in the Pacific Ocean succumb to the American island hopping campaign. Successive campaigns in the Gilbert Islands, the Marshall Islands, the Marianas and the Palau Islands. Japan’s naval commander Admiral Yamamoto tried to delay the Americans as much as possible, employing a new strategy: instead of trying to lure the US Navy into a decisive battle, the Japanese hoped to lure out, trap and destroy portions of it and whittle it down. This approach was implemented with varying degrees of success, the most successful example being the Battle of the Philippine Sea:
The Battle of the Philippine Sea from February 17th to 19th 1945 was the last time Japanese scored a naval victory in the war. A massive fleet of American ships of course supported their landings on Saipan, Tinian and Guam which took place in January and February 1945. Japan had been spreading false intelligence about the readiness of the remainder of its fleet, of its intentions and of its fuel and ammunitions reserves for weeks, correctly assuming where the next American amphibious landings would take place and that the Americans had breached Japanese naval codes. In early February a false message was leaked signed by Yamamoto that he couldn’t afford to send more than one fleet carrier, three light carriers, three battleships, six heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, fifteen destroyers and twelve submarines. The US planned to intercept with a fleet of three fleet carriers, five light carriers, five battleships, eight heavy cruisers, twelve light cruisers, 52 destroyers and sixteen submarines. US Admiral Spruance incorrectly believed he had a superior force, but in reality he was walking into an enemy trap. In reality Yamamoto brought to bear four fleet carriers, six light carriers, five battleships, eleven heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, 31 destroyers and 24 submarines. The Japanese lost just one fleet carrier while the Americans lost two fleet carriers, two battleships and one light carrier. It was a clear tactical victory for the Imperial Japanese Navy, but strategically it was inconclusive: America’s numerical superiority in capital ships remained intact.
Admiral Nimitz decided to spring a trap of his own. Besides Russian deliveries of oil, Japan imported the rest of the oil it required from the Dutch East Indies as the Dutch had kept selling thanks to some minor German diplomatic pressure (German-Dutch relations were cordial). Great Britain and the United States applied pressure of their own to make them stop, to the point of threatening to impose a naval blockade or occupying the Dutch colony in Southeast Asia. Emboldened by the minor success in the Philippine Sea, the Japanese got overconfident and tried to regain the initiative by launching a pre-emptive invasion of the Dutch East Indies. The fleet escorting the troop transports, however, was ambushed and destroyed in the Battle of Palawan by a US carrier fleet.
The Allies kept the pressure on Japan as much as they did on Italy, which was part of their long term plan for fighting the war called the “four pillar strategy” envisioned it by Secretary of War Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower had graduated from West Point in 1915 just like American Expeditionary Force commander Stafford LeRoy Irwin, a full four star general by now. Eisenhower, a lieutenant colonel, became acting commander of US forces in the Philippines when his superior General Douglas McArthur was killed in a plane crash. He remained in that position until 1939, by which time he’d gotten a pilot’s license and had been promoted to the rank of general. Trying to win bipartisan support, Roosevelt had offered the Republican conservative Henry L. Stimson his old position of Secretary of War. Stimson would only help Roosevelt in return for the more prestigious post of Secretary of State and he recommended Eisenhower instead.
Eisenhower’s four pillar strategy was expressed by his statement that “the Quadruple Alliance is a temple held up by four pillars. The two outer pillars are weaker than the centre ones. With the outer two pillars gone, the entire thing becomes wobbly.” By the inner pillars he meant Russia and Germany, correctly implying that Japan and Italy were the weaker junior partners. Eisenhower was indeed right: whereas Russia and Germany were the world’s second and third economies respectively when the US entered the war in 1942, Japan and Italy trailed behind as fifth and sixth. The United States, Great Britain, the Ottoman Empire and Free France (France’s colonies) were the world’s first, fourth, seventh and eighth economies respectively.
Eisenhower assessed that Japan and Italy could be brought to heel by late 1945 or early 1946, after which the economic potential of the Anglo-Americans and its junior partners would outclass that of the Russo-German partnership. Indeed, the economies of the US, Britain, the Ottoman Empire, France’s colonies and the smaller Allied powers were larger than those of Russia and Germany combined. Stimson and Eisenhower both believed that with Japan and Italy knocked out of the war, the Russians and the Germans would acquiesce to a conditional surrender. After all, the alternative was fighting on in the increasingly faint hope of victory, which would more likely result in a worse defeat and a worse peace deal. The losses would be terrible, but Anglo-American commanders expected victory in such a war by 1948 in the most optimistic estimates and 1950 in the most pessimistic ones. The Russians and Germans wouldn’t want that either, Allied leaders believed.
By early 1945 it was believed Berlin and St. Petersburg would cut their losses and accept a face saving peace. As winter turned into spring and then summer, the US and the UK became increasingly confused when this scenario did not play out and their enemies stubbornly continued to resist. This way the war might well continue until 1947 or even ’48 and cost countless lives. Washington DC and London counted on their respective atomic bomb programs to break the enemy’s unexpected and unusual resolve, in addition to the conventional night bombing campaigns against German cities (and the German reprisal bombings against British cities). They hadn’t counted on the enemy getting the atomic bomb first.
Nice chapter, the war is dragging on with an end of hostilities far away. I wonder which country got the bomb first, I believe it was Germany with a lot of assistance from Russia (materials and testing areas). With Russia and Germany being lead by pragmatic and sensible leaders, the war and the aftermath are going to be interesting. If there is a Cold War like OTL, I expect it to be more long lasting and fluid. I wonder what France will like in the aftermath, could we see a radical government get in charge?
Since nazis not take power, Einstein has not reason to flee the country. Oppenheimer probably is still owrking for Americans. Fermi too probably is serving Italians if then has not moved to Germany for helping Germans on their nuclear bom and helping liberate his country.
I'd think that with no China front and support from Russia the IJA would be able to repel any American invasion. Like I said before, I'm really surprised there isn't more political opposition to this war- though maybe we just haven't heard of it and the atomic bombs will push it over the edge
Too many logistic problems for a secondary or tertiary theatre of war. Only as a distraction but probably no one cares enough even for this.
This is probably due to the excellent work of the OSS and the FBI in exercising press censorship and anything that might make people think that the war is anything other than the most just cause in which entry was obviously justified.
As I mentioned earlier, I think it's the general idea that the only way to force the United States to withdraw from a war is to send an expeditionary force to land in Chesapeake Bay. To then have the Special Forces parachute into the White House to arrest the President and force him to sign a peace treaty at gunpoint...
...except that we've seen several times when the United States has withdrawn from a war without the other side having to resort to something similar.
Huh...that's an interesting twist. Usually, it's the guys opposite the Anglo-Americans who count on a quick victory/victory by X year. This time, it's the Anglo-Americans who expected to win by 1945, only to find themselves unpleasantly surprised that despite all their losses, neither Japan nor Italy have any inclination to surrender.
EDIT: I'm guessing Rome is TTL's Leningrad, a city besieged for years but refused to surrender and held out despite overwhelming enemy pressure to break the defenders' will to resist.
EDIT: I'm guessing Rome is TTL's Leningrad, a city besieged for years but refused to surrender and held out despite overwhelming enemy pressure to break the defenders' will to resist.
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Did Italy take Ethiopia ITTL? In that case wouldn't the allies liberate it like they did in OTL?
Chapter XVIII: Birth of the Atomic Age, 1945.
Chapter XVIII: Birth of the Atomic Age, 1945.
On Sunday May 6th at 01:00 AM the fruit of the labour of the Uranverein Program was loaded onto a heavily secured armoured train at the secret installation in southern Bavaria near Berchtesgaden. It was transported to a test site in Thuringia near the town of Ohrdruf, which had already been completely evacuated with the locals receiving generous subsidies for their relocation. At 05:00 AM local time the weapon codenamed Thor was detonated, generating a 22 kiloton blast and a flash that illuminated the northern slope of the Thuringian Forest brighter than day while base camp was as hot as an oven. The resulting crater was 1.3 metres deep and 75 metres wide and the abandoned town had been destroyed. The blast was noticed as far as 150 km away as were the lights, but a press release prepared weeks in advance explained it to the civilian population as an explosion in an ammunitions factory. Chancellor Franz von Papen and Emperor Wilhelm III, who had succeeded his father in 1941, were informed that it was “a healthy baby boy.” The weapon was an implosion-type plutonium based design, as the bomb designers had decided against the less efficient though easier to build gunshot-type uranium based fission bomb.
The Kaiserliche Deutsche Luftwaffe (Imperial German Air Force) had primarily been designed to win a war in Europe and to provide tactical air support, so its largest aircraft up until the war had been medium bombers and dive bombers. Luftwaffe officers such as Erhard Milch and Minister of Aviation Manfred von Richthofen, however, realized that the United States might be drawn into a future war either through an escalation of the U-boat war (which had caused tensions between Germany and the US in the previous war) or through conflict with Japan in the Pacific. Their foresight meant that by 1945 Germany had a strategic bomber capable of carrying first-generation nuclear weapons, which weighed 4.5 tonnes. The Messerschmitt Me 264 still had a range of 8.600 km with a six tonne payload.
An Me 264 took off from a military airfield near Berlin on Monday June 18th 1945 and crossed the North Sea, reaching the intended target: Newcastle upon Tyne, selected for being a centre of coal production and for the role of its heavy industry in the production of ships and armaments. The bomber reached the target at 07:45 AM and released the weapon, which detonated with a yield of 20 kilotons and produced a second sun in the sky. Out of a population of roughly 335.000 about 75.000 people, almost all of whom were civilians, were killed and the body count would double within six months due to injury and radiation sickness. The radius of total destruction was about 1.6 kilometres and 80% of the city’s buildings were either destroyed or severely damaged.
After the atomic bombing of Newcastle, Germany threatened “prompt and utter annihilation” if Britain refused to surrender unconditionally, prompting a cabinet crisis. The aging Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin didn’t want to see more cities destroyed and was in favour of trying to negotiate to get the unconditional element of the surrender off the table. He thought returning Germany’s colonies lost in 1916 would go a long way. The Germans indeed were planning to demand their old colonies back and a few French ones for good measure, so Baldwin’s assumption was correct. Foreign Minister and Defence Minister Winston Churchill, however, argued that Britain hadn’t surrendered when other cities had been bombed and shouldn’t surrender now either. In his persuasive style he argued that peace meant a Russo-German continental hegemony dominating Eurasia. This would constitute the demise of the balance of power that Great Britain had striven to maintain for centuries. This would make the British Empire vulnerable. The Russo-German bloc could impose a successful version of Napoleon’s Continental System, i.e. an embargo that could force Britain to accept demands from Berlin and St. Petersburg. In his view Britain would then be susceptible to the whims of a continental tyranny. He accused Baldwin of being a weak, spineless old man who wasn’t up to the job anymore.
After an intense debate, the majority of the cabinet sided with Winston Churchill and Baldwin resigned citing health reasons (he was 77 years old at the time). Up until 1945 Winston Churchill had been the only person besides John Simon who had served as Home Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer as well as Foreign Minister (without obtaining the office of Prime Minister). Besides these offices he had also served as President of the Board of Trade, First Lord of the Admiralty, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Secretary of State for War, Secretary of State for Air, Secretary of State for the Colonies and Minister of Defence. Churchill became Baldwin’s successor on June 20th.
The prize of Prime Minister was now added to this impressive list, but views on the legacy of his short premiership vary widely. Defenders of the British Empire cast him as a tragic hero who had valiantly tried to prevent Britain’s decline to second-tier power status vis-à-vis an authoritarian Russo-German bloc and had failed due to circumstances. His opponents paint him as a fool who tried to delay the inevitable or as an ambitious, careerist, power hungry politician determined to add the title of PM to his impressive curriculum vitae. Modern views of him are somewhere in between.
On June 23rd, Germany’s wartime leadership resolved to carry out a second nuclear strike and selected Scapa Flow as the next target, which served as Britain’s main naval base primarily because of its great distance from German airfields. The British realized that the new Me 264 bomber might well be able to strike as far north as Scapa Flow. Despite Churchill’s order to redeploy all ships still in Scapa Flow to Nova Scotia 48 hours prior, several major capital ships remained at Scapa Flow as their crews embarked and stocks were replenished before their evacuation to Canada. Battleships HMS Saint Andrew and USS Washington, battlecruiser HMS Invincible, aircraft carriers HMS Victorious and USS Wasp and heavy cruiser USS Wichita were still in port. The German bomb dropped on June 23rd at 10:00 PM produced an estimated yield of 22 kilotons, damaging the ships still in port beyond repair. There were 10.000 fatalities, about 80% of which were naval crews; the 2.000 civilian casualties amounted to one tenth of the population of the Orkney Islands. Though less fatal than the Newcastle strike, it gutted a community.
More strikes took place after that as German scientists cast plutonium cores as fast as they could to put in the pits of new bombs. British attempts to make a nuclear bombing campaign less effective didn’t work. Britain initially stubbornly refused to surrender and instead tried to deal with nuclear war by evacuating all but non-essential personnel to the countryside and dispersing essential industries to hastily built underground sites. One more nuclear strike took place in June a week after Scapa Flow was hit: Colchester, significant for its infantry and light-anti-aircraft training units and the large proportion of engines provided for British submarines and landing craft by the Paxman factory. Three new plutonium cores were put into bombs that were dropped on Dover, Folkestone and Hastings in July, resulting in tens of thousands of civilian casualties. A British counterstrike with mustard gas and phosgene against Hamburg led to a retaliatory nuclear strike on Manchester on August 1st, chosen for the Dunlop rubber works and several factories producing aircraft engines.
Faith in Churchill’s as a wartime PM sank to an all-time low in the cabinet and the high public support he had enjoyed in the beginning had melted away like snow in the sun. At this point it became clear to Britain’s leadership that Germany had the means and the will to continue producing atomic bombs with which it could continue to devastate British cities. The only question was which city would be next: would it be Liverpool, Edinburgh or maybe merry old London herself? After the atomic bombing of Manchester, motion of no-confidence against Churchill was presented in the commons by one of his fellow Tories: John Lees-Jones, Member of Parliament for Manchester Blackley, presented the motion and represented the desperation of his hard hit constituency. Churchill saw which way the wind was blowing and tendered his resignation to King Edward VIII after only three months in office, upon which Anthony Eden became the new PM.
Eden’s first order of business was to request a formal armistice from Germany, though at first trying to obtain a partial surrender only to Germany and Russia and not against Japan and Italy. German Chancellor Von Papen, Russian Prime Minister Stravinsky, Japanese Prime Minister Tojo and Italian Prime Minister Orlando responded with a communique that the war against Britain would continue until it signed an armistice agreement with the four of them. Eden had no choice and signed an armistice agreement containing the following terms: cessation of hostilities on all fronts, withdrawal of forces back to British territory, demilitarization south of the Thames, the surrender of military material and the Royal Navy in particular, the release of German prisoners of war and interned civilians, no release of British prisoners, and eventual war reparations. German troops occupied British territory south of the Thames to enforce the terms of the armistice and a German military governor was installed in the historically important city of Canterbury.
The surrender of Great Britain was a watershed event in the history of the British Empire. The dominions each concluded separate peace agreements quite easily as they had nothing Russia, Germany, Japan, Italy and their minor allies would want. Canada even seceded from the Empire, becoming a republic with a foreign policy oriented much more toward its southern neighbour. Meanwhile, India was now the most powerful remaining country in the British Commonwealth, with a standing army of ten million that took over the positions that British soldiers withdrew from under the terms of Britain’s armistice with the victors. The term “British Empire” would increasingly be phased out in favour of “Anglo-Indian Empire” as the dynamic shifted, with India now being the strongest economic and military power of the realm. The title Emperor of India eclipsed that of King of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as Connaught Place in New Delhi did the City of London.
The United States, however, were still in the war and still willing to win a partial victory by knocking Japan out of the war. It withdrew its naval and army assets from Europe and the Middle East to deploy them against Japan, which they planned to invade in 1946. Japan had been fighting a losing war, despite Russian deliveries of coal, oil and steel, because its partners couldn’t provide naval support against the overwhelming might of the US Navy. The Germans weren’t planning on sending the High Seas Fleet all the way to the Pacific and the Russian Navy was too small to matter anyway. German U-boats had some successes in the Atlantic and Russian subs in the Pacific, but not enough to matter.
The United States would feel the effects of this new weapon now too. With Britain out of the war, the German Navy might force the US Navy to redeploy forces to the Atlantic, but with nuclear weapons the Germans didn’t feel the need to use their fleet). Instead an Me 264 strategic bomber took off from an airfield in occupied France and dropped a 22 kiloton that devastated much of lower Manhattan. After Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington DC were hit too, the United States reluctantly agreed to a separate peace that amounted to a to status quo ante bellum. This left the Quadruple Alliance in a position to redraw the world map.
Nice chapter, the war is over with nuclear weapons being used by the Germans. The nuclear strikes are going to be devastating to the Allies, possibly millions killed with the locations used. I expect the USA to go straight back to isolation after the war is over. Many will rage about how the war was for nothing, only seeming to benefit the imperialist European powers. Britain is over as a superpower, I wonder if we could see the complete breakup of the British Isles with both Ireland and Scotland completely free from England. The new Russo-German dominance of Europe won't last IMO, both sides will want to push the other out. France is screwed. If Japan is still around after the war, they will be in major debt to Russia and Germany. Keep up the good work.
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