Hitler-Sternberg friendship and WW2
This is an attempt to recreate the possible outcome of a scenario where Nazi Germany and a Panslavic Fascist Russia - run with the same violence of the Soviet Union but more cleverly in economics - are allied.
Say the POD is in the late '10s, when the Bolsheviks and leftist forces crumble under their own infighting, and the worst kind of reaction prevails under the Mad Khan, Roman Ungern von Sternberg, who proclaims himself Czar in 1924, after another bloody civil war with the moderates and the last democrats. He then rules Russia with sadistic ferocity, enforcing cult of personality, mass slavery in gulags, slow-motion extermination or expulsion of Jews (3 million of Russian Jews: 1 killed, 2 put to flight to Poland, Palestine, Turkey and even China) etc. while at the same time enforcing a populist regime based on the values of tradition, orthodoxy, panslavism and many botched esoteric ideas. For evil it is, the regime is quite popular, especially among the peasantry.
The problem is: Adolf Hitler is conquered by Sternberg's regime and attitude, and, though he still regards Slavs as inherently inferior, he draws closer and closer to the Russian regime, to the point of renouncing his most savage dreams about Lebensraum (ITTL he does not even write down them in Mein Kampf)
let's try a TL
1919: Bolshevik Russia crumbles in civil war between the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries etc.
1920: The Whites win the civil war, as Poland advances up to Kiev and Minsk. Sonn the Whites are embroiled in vicious infighting, with several great rebellions in the provinces and bouts of civil war among warlords. Roman Ungern von Sternberg, from his base in Irkutsk, begins as a minor, underestimated competitor for power. Finland peacefully occupies and annexes all of Karelia and the Kola peninsula, with Murmanks.
1921: After a short war, the Lithuanian, backed by German veterans, preserve control over Vilnius.
1921-1924: the irresistible ascent to power of the Mad Khan, till his coronation as Roman I of All Russias after extermination of his rivals. Georgia and Armenia consolidate their independence as democracy, fighting a vicioous war against Turkey. Turkey, having war also against Greece, is in the end reduced: the Greeks keep the Smyrna region, Adrianople and the Dardanelles - but not Constantinople and the Bosphorus, while the Georgians keep Batumi and help the Armenians (helped with weapons and volunteers by the Western Allies) comeback up to Lake Van, Trabzon and Erzerum. The French wrench Cilicia form Turkey and add it to their colonial empire, the British favor the birth of Kurdistan around Mosul and in the former Tukish southeast. Despite being defeated - more at the peace table than on the battlefields - Mustafa Kemal holds the remains of Turkey with iron fist, and is still very popular.
1925: Mongolia, a theocratic Lamaist empire under Russian "protection", gets Chinese Inner Mongolia and Eastern Turkestan (Sinkiang) in exchange for Russian help to Chiang Kai-Shek in crushing the warlords in the north. Ruthenian insurrection in the eastern fringes of Poland. The Chinese civil war begins as Mao's socialists rebel against the increasingly tyrannical rule of the Guomindang.
1926-1927: Russo-Polish war: a bloodbath with almost a million casualties (half civilians), after which no peace is declared and a lasting truce ensues over the frontlines, some 50-1000 km due east of OTL Polish border of 1921-1939.
1929: Tuva annexed to Mongolia.
1931-1933 Second Russo-Japanese war: Russia gets Manchuria - divided between Russia itself and Mongolia; Japan gets Kamchatka and holds Liaodong and Korea, furthermore forbidding any Russian nay in the Pacific. A Pyrrhic victory for Russia, at great cost: a harsh lesson for Japan also.
1933: Adolf Hitler Reichskanzler in Germany
1934: Hitler sole Führer after Hindenburg's death.
April 1934: Fascist Italy prevents a German takeover of Austria: the fist Nazi coup there is quashed.
July 1934: Poland signs a military alliance with France – Britain declines, and so does Czechoslovakia.
August 1934: Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia join the Franco-Polish combine.
March 1935: Germany renegades the Versailles treaty and rearms, reenforcing conscription.
April 1935: The Saarland votes overwhelmingly to return to Germany.
Winter 1935-1936: Mao's rebels are hunted down and exterminated by joint Russo-Mongolian-Chinese forces in the Shaanxi. China begins to detach herself from Russia, no more useful.
March 1936: Hitler reoccupies Rhineland, France breaks diplomatic ties. Britain does not formally, but de facto follows the French
October 1935: Italy attacks Ethiopia, suffering expulsions from the Society of Nations and partial embargo. The Ethiopians will suffer much worse.
April 1936: Ethiopia falls, Italy proclaims the Empire.
July 1936: the Spanish Civil War begins between Franco's Nationalist reactionaries (nominally for the Royalist cause) and the Republican coalition (liberals, socialists of various flavors, anarchists etc.).
August 1936: Italy and Germany begin helping Franco, the first openly, in a show of power, the second covertly.
November 1936: the socialist French government begins covert help to the Republican side, with the British following later in very small scale, despite thousands of volunteers flocking to Spain. Franco's offensive on Madrid turns the capital into an OTL Stalingrad.
Spring 1937: The Battle of Madrid is turned into a strategic defeat for the Nationalist front, thanks to French help to the Republic (relocated in Valencia). The Nationalist suffer another defeat in the Basuque Lands, where Bilbao successfully resists a three months long siege.
August-September1937
A Nationalist offensive with Italian land support and German air support from Aragon along the Ebro almost cuts in two the Republic before being stopped.
Winter 1937-1938 A Muslim rebellion helped by Britain and China frees Uyguristan (Sinkiang) from Russian-controlled Mongolia. China and Russia become mutually hostile, though China still is in good terms with Germany. In Japan the military retake power by intimidation and murders. In Spain the Republican free Andalusia in a grueling campaign, only to find their sympathizers have been massacred in the tens of thousands.
January 1938: Germany, Russia and Italy sign the Tripartite Pact, secretly dividing Eurasia and Africa into zones of influence.
Spring-Summer 1938: With the cooperation of the British navy the Spanish Nationalists, defeated in the mainland with consistent French intervention, are evacuated to the Canaries, where they set up a government in exile and are left to themselves to face the predictable wrath of the winners. The French army occupies the Spanish African colonies against hard resistance.
Winter 1938-1939: The Canaries are starved by the blockade of the Spanish Republican navy, despite some successes of the Italian subs in bringing supplies. Then the British intervene, forcing the Republican to break the naval siege. The Canaries continue as a nominal kingdom (the king actually lives in Italy) under Franco, protected – God knows why – by the conservative British government (think of a Spanish Taiwan). In France the Socialist front is replaced by conservatives.
February 1939: Republican Spain, now dominated by rabid anticolonial sentiments after being betrayed and invaded by the colonial army back in 1936, cedes all of its African colonies to France, keeping only the rights on mining and rubber.
June 1939: Civil war in Austria: after Italo-German intervention in favor of the Nazis, the country is annexed to Germany. Italy gets Eastern Tyrol (Lienz, upper Drava) pledging to respect her German-speaking subjects.
21st July, 1939: Japan attacks China over Qindao and the Shandong. A powerful expedition corps lands there, attracting the mass of the underequipped Chinese army, then the navy renders the entire Chinese coastline virtually undefensible.
7th August, 1939: The Non-Aggression treaty between Russia and Japan comes as a shock. In exchange for the permission to station modest naval forces in Vladivostok, Nahodka and Okhotsk, Japan divides China with Russia into spheres of influence.
14th August, 1939: The Russian and Mongolian armies invades Uyguristan (Sinkiang) and quickly overthorows the moderate Muslim regime, amidst heinous massacres. An undeclared second front is opened for China.
25th August, 1939: Hitler, in a masterpiece of diplomacy, drives a wedge in the Franco-Polish combine: when he sends an ultimatum to Lithuania to have Klaipeda/Memel back from them, so does Poland to have “back” Vilius/Wilno. The Western Allies, bewildered and divided, do not react.
27th August, 1939: Belgium abandons its former policy of neutrality and enters a military alliance with France and the United Kingdom.
1st September, 1939: German and Polish forces invade Lithuania. Actually it's some of a walkover to occupy the conquer the desired territories (Memel and Vilnius, respectively). The Lithuanians resist fiercely – but vainly - at Vilnius, not at all at Memel. The Lithuanian leadership accepts German “protection” (vassalage) as the lesser evil.
4th September: After heated debates the Western Allies do not delcare war upon Germany and its allies, deeming Lithuania “not worth another Great War”. Indeed the British parliament had approved a declaration of war, provided the French adopted it – but the French parliament backed down. The humiliation of the Western powers is total.
14th-28th September: Latvia and Estonia are forced into vassalage of Russia, allowing the Russian army and navy free stationing. Their national institutions are however respected by Sternberg, as Hitler does in Lithuania.
28th October, 1939: Italy attacks and swiftly occupies Albania, a walkover with little resistance given king Zogu's deeep unpopularity.
Autumn 1939: the Polish colonels' regime, now turned to outright anti-semitism, begins a slow process of forced expulsion of its 2 million Jews. They will be welcomed to Italy as colonists for Libya and Ethiopia; some will be accepted in Palestine, many others will find a home in Turkey aside the survivors of Sternberg's Zhid holocaust. The French conservative government is swept out of office by a near-revolution after the Baltic humiliation in front of the Fascist alliance. The new French government denounces the Polish regime as “a traitor to the cause of freedom”.In China the Japanese take Shanghai and Nanjing at great cost and make progresses inland thanks to their vastly superior tanks and planes. Their massacres in Nanjing shock the public opinion in the democratic countries. The Russians quietly invade northern China, conquering Tianjin and Beijing in matter of few days. Their forces conquer most of northern China up to the Huai He.
Winter 1939-1940: Hitler begins now to demand Danzig from Poland, receiving a stern refusal. When he proposes the annexation of Lithuania to Poland, however, the Poles see sense, and even agree, in the infamous Potsdam Treaty, to take part in the planned carving of Czechoslovakia, where Russian and German agents fan German, Slovak, Ruthenian and Hungarian nationalism among the minorities. French, and soon after British, troops are stationed in Belgium.
1st February, 1940: Amidst a blinding blizzard, Polish troops invade Lithuania “to restore the Union of Lublin”. The Lithuanian government is quietly spirited to Germany by Nazi special ops, and the decapitated Lithuanian army does not react, apart from isolated skirmishes. Lithuania is no more. France and Britain break diplomatic ties with Poland.
14th February, 1940: The French and British governments explicitly guarantee the integrity of Czechoslovakia, isolated and surrounded by enemies.
February-April, 1940: The frightened Czechs, pressured by the Western Allies well mobilized, but still reluctant to fight, begin secret talks with Poland, offering Teschen and Moravian Silesia in exchange for another last minute about-face, but to no avail. A frantic Hitler devotes immense resources to the Siegfrid line. Italy tries desperately to mediate and gain time to rearm and gather supplies. Japan invades southern China by sea, conquering Hainan, isolating Hong Kong and taking Canton after a dreadful city battle. The US embargo both Japan and Russia, but not Germany.
25-28th March, 1940: The Conference of Basel between Hitler, Sternberg's foreign office minister count Jablinskij, Mussolini, Blum and the new British prime minister Churchill comes to nothing, as Mussolini's attempt to mediate is rejected by both parts. Armies are fully mobilized.
6th April, 1940: At 4,40 CET WW2 becomes reality when, without any formal declaration of war, the Luftwaffe begins its all-out attack on Czechoslovakia and the Wehrmacht begins to probe the Czech fortifications. In the same hours the German ethnics in the Sudetenland start a planned insurrection which cripples Czech strategic defence.
7th April, 1940: Both France and Britain declare war on Germany. Belgium, though a formal ally, does not, in hope of not being attacked for a while; but his territory already teems with 150,000 Franco-British soldiers, who are ordered not to attack the German border forces. Italy and Russia do not enter the war at the moment, being the Tripartite Pact not automatic as pre-WW1 alliances.
8th April, 1940: Air war rages over southern Germany as French and British planes dogfight their German counterparts and attack their airstrips to ease pressure on the besieged Czechs – who are however still fighting on a single front. The Allies frantically - and vainly - try to induce Yugoslavia and Romania into the war or at least into alliance, while Russia, Italy and Germany contact Bulgaria to the same aim, just in case.
9th April, 1940: Prague is hit by devastating German dive bombings all day long, with hundreds of civilians killed. Slovakia erupts into open rebellion, and the Slovakian soldiers refuse to fight on.
10th April, 1940: The Allies retaliate to the bombing of Prague with a heavy French air attack on Mainz. The Czech “Ring of Steel” along the borders is melting amid the chaos of the Sudeten and Slovakian rebellions. The Hungarian army enters southern Slovakia, where local patriots actively resist, to get the Hungarian share of the booty.
12nd April, 1940: The Russians suddenly break their long negotiations with Finland to get the use of Murmansk. Sternberg sends a harsh ultimatum to Mannerheim, asking all of Karelia and Kola or it will be war.
13th April, 1940: The Germans conquer Pilsen, where they are greeted by half the population as liberators (the other half doesn't know where to flee)
14th April, 1940: The French and British Parliaments narrowly reject a declaration of war against Hungary.
15th April, 1940: Russia declares war on Finland and heavily bombards Helsinki from air and sea. Three Russian armies attack along the Ingrian isthmus, across the Svir and further east along the railway to Murmansk
17th April, 1940: The Normandie, the great French transatlantic, is mistakenly sunk by the German U-47 amidst the Atlantic Ocean, killing 847.
18th April, 1940: British ships mine Norwegian territorial waters, provoking a major diplomatic crisis.
20th April, 1940: The French army begins cautiously probing into the Saarland in force. They taste the defences of the Siegfrid line and find them not of their liking. A stalemate ensues. Sweden declares armed neutrality, following the Swiss example. The German 7th armored division's spearhead, badly mauled in repeated duels against superior enemy tanks but better led, gets near Prague, where the Czechs are reconstructing a main line of resistance under constant air attacks.
21-24 April, 1940: Polish forces occupy Teschen and Ostrava against moderate Czech resistance. The Russians are badly defeated in the swamps north of St. Petersburg as they try to break the Mannerheim line. They instead advance fairly quickly in eastern Karelia along the railway.
24th April, 1940: The Wehrmacht swiftly occupies Denmark, almost without resistance as the king orders not to spill blood. The Danish government is left in charge as harmless. The operation, conceived in a hurry and executed with largely insufficient forces, is a stunning success.
25 April, 1940: Transcarpathic Ruthenia proclaims independence from Czechoslovakia, with Sternberg's benediction.
27th April, 1940: The British Navy and Royal Marines occupy Narvik after a brief duel with Norwegian coastal artillery. Norway protests vehemently but does not declare war on the Allies.
28th April, 1940: the Czechs accept Hitler's conditions and surrender at 17.15 at Hradcany Castle in Prague. Only the officers and already captured soldiers (numbering more than 200,000) are to be interned as POWs (the others are set “free”), and a rump Czechia, deprived of the Sudeten and Slovakia, will survive as a German “protectorate”. Nazi promises of self-rule are however an illusion: the Reichsprotektor will prove the sole master of Czechia. The Czech government has already fled by plane to Yugoslavia, and thence to France, to set up a government in exile. Czech soldiers who sought refuge in Poland or Hungary are interned; only those who crossed into Romania are sent to France to recreate an army in exile.
30th April, 1940: Czechoslovakia is carved like a roast beef in the Budapest conference: Slovakia and Transcarpathic Ruthenia are recognized as independent, Hungary gets southern bits of Slovakia, Poland gets Teschen and , on her stiff insistence, the industrial area of Ostrava. Russian marines land around Murmansk, putting the city under siege. The Russian arctic fleet bombards the town and provides supplies for the soldiers. The 3rd Russian army is now 500 kms due south of the city along the railway, after a swift advance against light resistance. The railway is however completely demolished.
1st May, 1940: A British task force sinks two Russian destroyers in the Barents Sea after being torpedoed with the loss of the light cruiser HMS Newcastle. The Wehrmacht begins a redeployment towards the West front, where the French have advanced some kilometers into the Saarland, but nothing more.
2 May 1940: Russia declares war on Britain; a few hours later France declares war on Russia. A frantic Mussolini tries to keep Italy out of the war – for now – much to the irritation of Hitler and Sternberg.
3 May 1940: Russian naval assets (two battleships, three heavy and three light cruiser and a dozen destroyers - *note the Russian fleet is more powerful than the Soviet one of OTL) are moved from the Baltic to Denmark to bolster the German fleet.
4 May 1940: British naval night raid on Helgoland: the island suffers devastating damage, but at dawn German dive bombers attack the British Home Fleet task force and sink two cruisers and a destroyer, signalling the danger of air power for ships.
5 May, 1940: Churchill proposes to the French Plan R4 as drafted by the Imperial Staff: it would involve violation of Dutch neutrality and massive attack into the plains of northern Germany, a rapid crossing of the Rhine and capture of the Ruhr. The French reject the plan on diplomatic reasons and have their Plan Charlemagne adopted, which means enforcing Belgium's entry into the war and a duplex attack: the main one through the northern Ardennes on the Liege-Aachen route, the secondary, to be made beforehand, again in the Saarland. In the meantime, heavy pressure is exerted by secret channels on Poland, not to allow free passage of Russian troops on its soil.
7 May, 1940 A German U-boot sinks two Spanish Republican freighters in British waters, near the Scilly island.
9 May, 1940 The Republic of Spain declares war upon Germany, but not Russia. The socialist Republicans also hope to eventually recover the Canaries, still held by Nationalist forces under discreet British “protection”.
14 May, 1940 Generalissimos Gamelin, Lord Gort and Rojo meet at Niort, establishing there the Supreme Allied Headquarters in Europe (SAHE). A first division of Spanish troops heads into France to bolster the ally's defence. In the meantime, Hitler is hungrier than ever for attack: his Wehrmacht is ready, while Goering's Luftwaffe suffered a bit in the Czech and German skies (where a skirmishing air war rages) and the offensive has to be postponed for a couple weeks at least. It is agredd that britain will bolster its meager forces on the continent as soon as possibile (an invasion is imminent). The Netherlands have agreed in principle that Allied troops will be welcome as soon as Germans invade – and only in that case, not before as it was for Belgium, teetering on the brink of open war with the Nazi neighbor.
15 May, 1940 British troops disembark in the Fisher's Peninsula, Finnish territory. The Finns frantically try to improve their limited infrastructure in the area, already stretched to the limit for the defense of the strategic Oulu-Rovaniemi-Ivalo-Murmansk railway. Civilian death by repeated bombings in Helsinki top over 1,000, but Russian bombers meet a determined fighter arm and flak, as Swedenm despite its avowed neutrality, secretly sent a surplus stock of Bofors gun (plus some hundred volunteers and observers) across the Baltic.
This is an attempt to recreate the possible outcome of a scenario where Nazi Germany and a Panslavic Fascist Russia - run with the same violence of the Soviet Union but more cleverly in economics - are allied.
Say the POD is in the late '10s, when the Bolsheviks and leftist forces crumble under their own infighting, and the worst kind of reaction prevails under the Mad Khan, Roman Ungern von Sternberg, who proclaims himself Czar in 1924, after another bloody civil war with the moderates and the last democrats. He then rules Russia with sadistic ferocity, enforcing cult of personality, mass slavery in gulags, slow-motion extermination or expulsion of Jews (3 million of Russian Jews: 1 killed, 2 put to flight to Poland, Palestine, Turkey and even China) etc. while at the same time enforcing a populist regime based on the values of tradition, orthodoxy, panslavism and many botched esoteric ideas. For evil it is, the regime is quite popular, especially among the peasantry.
The problem is: Adolf Hitler is conquered by Sternberg's regime and attitude, and, though he still regards Slavs as inherently inferior, he draws closer and closer to the Russian regime, to the point of renouncing his most savage dreams about Lebensraum (ITTL he does not even write down them in Mein Kampf)
let's try a TL
1919: Bolshevik Russia crumbles in civil war between the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries etc.
1920: The Whites win the civil war, as Poland advances up to Kiev and Minsk. Sonn the Whites are embroiled in vicious infighting, with several great rebellions in the provinces and bouts of civil war among warlords. Roman Ungern von Sternberg, from his base in Irkutsk, begins as a minor, underestimated competitor for power. Finland peacefully occupies and annexes all of Karelia and the Kola peninsula, with Murmanks.
1921: After a short war, the Lithuanian, backed by German veterans, preserve control over Vilnius.
1921-1924: the irresistible ascent to power of the Mad Khan, till his coronation as Roman I of All Russias after extermination of his rivals. Georgia and Armenia consolidate their independence as democracy, fighting a vicioous war against Turkey. Turkey, having war also against Greece, is in the end reduced: the Greeks keep the Smyrna region, Adrianople and the Dardanelles - but not Constantinople and the Bosphorus, while the Georgians keep Batumi and help the Armenians (helped with weapons and volunteers by the Western Allies) comeback up to Lake Van, Trabzon and Erzerum. The French wrench Cilicia form Turkey and add it to their colonial empire, the British favor the birth of Kurdistan around Mosul and in the former Tukish southeast. Despite being defeated - more at the peace table than on the battlefields - Mustafa Kemal holds the remains of Turkey with iron fist, and is still very popular.
1925: Mongolia, a theocratic Lamaist empire under Russian "protection", gets Chinese Inner Mongolia and Eastern Turkestan (Sinkiang) in exchange for Russian help to Chiang Kai-Shek in crushing the warlords in the north. Ruthenian insurrection in the eastern fringes of Poland. The Chinese civil war begins as Mao's socialists rebel against the increasingly tyrannical rule of the Guomindang.
1926-1927: Russo-Polish war: a bloodbath with almost a million casualties (half civilians), after which no peace is declared and a lasting truce ensues over the frontlines, some 50-1000 km due east of OTL Polish border of 1921-1939.
1929: Tuva annexed to Mongolia.
1931-1933 Second Russo-Japanese war: Russia gets Manchuria - divided between Russia itself and Mongolia; Japan gets Kamchatka and holds Liaodong and Korea, furthermore forbidding any Russian nay in the Pacific. A Pyrrhic victory for Russia, at great cost: a harsh lesson for Japan also.
1933: Adolf Hitler Reichskanzler in Germany
1934: Hitler sole Führer after Hindenburg's death.
April 1934: Fascist Italy prevents a German takeover of Austria: the fist Nazi coup there is quashed.
July 1934: Poland signs a military alliance with France – Britain declines, and so does Czechoslovakia.
August 1934: Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia join the Franco-Polish combine.
March 1935: Germany renegades the Versailles treaty and rearms, reenforcing conscription.
April 1935: The Saarland votes overwhelmingly to return to Germany.
Winter 1935-1936: Mao's rebels are hunted down and exterminated by joint Russo-Mongolian-Chinese forces in the Shaanxi. China begins to detach herself from Russia, no more useful.
March 1936: Hitler reoccupies Rhineland, France breaks diplomatic ties. Britain does not formally, but de facto follows the French
October 1935: Italy attacks Ethiopia, suffering expulsions from the Society of Nations and partial embargo. The Ethiopians will suffer much worse.
April 1936: Ethiopia falls, Italy proclaims the Empire.
July 1936: the Spanish Civil War begins between Franco's Nationalist reactionaries (nominally for the Royalist cause) and the Republican coalition (liberals, socialists of various flavors, anarchists etc.).
August 1936: Italy and Germany begin helping Franco, the first openly, in a show of power, the second covertly.
November 1936: the socialist French government begins covert help to the Republican side, with the British following later in very small scale, despite thousands of volunteers flocking to Spain. Franco's offensive on Madrid turns the capital into an OTL Stalingrad.
Spring 1937: The Battle of Madrid is turned into a strategic defeat for the Nationalist front, thanks to French help to the Republic (relocated in Valencia). The Nationalist suffer another defeat in the Basuque Lands, where Bilbao successfully resists a three months long siege.
August-September1937
A Nationalist offensive with Italian land support and German air support from Aragon along the Ebro almost cuts in two the Republic before being stopped.
Winter 1937-1938 A Muslim rebellion helped by Britain and China frees Uyguristan (Sinkiang) from Russian-controlled Mongolia. China and Russia become mutually hostile, though China still is in good terms with Germany. In Japan the military retake power by intimidation and murders. In Spain the Republican free Andalusia in a grueling campaign, only to find their sympathizers have been massacred in the tens of thousands.
January 1938: Germany, Russia and Italy sign the Tripartite Pact, secretly dividing Eurasia and Africa into zones of influence.
Spring-Summer 1938: With the cooperation of the British navy the Spanish Nationalists, defeated in the mainland with consistent French intervention, are evacuated to the Canaries, where they set up a government in exile and are left to themselves to face the predictable wrath of the winners. The French army occupies the Spanish African colonies against hard resistance.
Winter 1938-1939: The Canaries are starved by the blockade of the Spanish Republican navy, despite some successes of the Italian subs in bringing supplies. Then the British intervene, forcing the Republican to break the naval siege. The Canaries continue as a nominal kingdom (the king actually lives in Italy) under Franco, protected – God knows why – by the conservative British government (think of a Spanish Taiwan). In France the Socialist front is replaced by conservatives.
February 1939: Republican Spain, now dominated by rabid anticolonial sentiments after being betrayed and invaded by the colonial army back in 1936, cedes all of its African colonies to France, keeping only the rights on mining and rubber.
June 1939: Civil war in Austria: after Italo-German intervention in favor of the Nazis, the country is annexed to Germany. Italy gets Eastern Tyrol (Lienz, upper Drava) pledging to respect her German-speaking subjects.
21st July, 1939: Japan attacks China over Qindao and the Shandong. A powerful expedition corps lands there, attracting the mass of the underequipped Chinese army, then the navy renders the entire Chinese coastline virtually undefensible.
7th August, 1939: The Non-Aggression treaty between Russia and Japan comes as a shock. In exchange for the permission to station modest naval forces in Vladivostok, Nahodka and Okhotsk, Japan divides China with Russia into spheres of influence.
14th August, 1939: The Russian and Mongolian armies invades Uyguristan (Sinkiang) and quickly overthorows the moderate Muslim regime, amidst heinous massacres. An undeclared second front is opened for China.
25th August, 1939: Hitler, in a masterpiece of diplomacy, drives a wedge in the Franco-Polish combine: when he sends an ultimatum to Lithuania to have Klaipeda/Memel back from them, so does Poland to have “back” Vilius/Wilno. The Western Allies, bewildered and divided, do not react.
27th August, 1939: Belgium abandons its former policy of neutrality and enters a military alliance with France and the United Kingdom.
1st September, 1939: German and Polish forces invade Lithuania. Actually it's some of a walkover to occupy the conquer the desired territories (Memel and Vilnius, respectively). The Lithuanians resist fiercely – but vainly - at Vilnius, not at all at Memel. The Lithuanian leadership accepts German “protection” (vassalage) as the lesser evil.
4th September: After heated debates the Western Allies do not delcare war upon Germany and its allies, deeming Lithuania “not worth another Great War”. Indeed the British parliament had approved a declaration of war, provided the French adopted it – but the French parliament backed down. The humiliation of the Western powers is total.
14th-28th September: Latvia and Estonia are forced into vassalage of Russia, allowing the Russian army and navy free stationing. Their national institutions are however respected by Sternberg, as Hitler does in Lithuania.
28th October, 1939: Italy attacks and swiftly occupies Albania, a walkover with little resistance given king Zogu's deeep unpopularity.
Autumn 1939: the Polish colonels' regime, now turned to outright anti-semitism, begins a slow process of forced expulsion of its 2 million Jews. They will be welcomed to Italy as colonists for Libya and Ethiopia; some will be accepted in Palestine, many others will find a home in Turkey aside the survivors of Sternberg's Zhid holocaust. The French conservative government is swept out of office by a near-revolution after the Baltic humiliation in front of the Fascist alliance. The new French government denounces the Polish regime as “a traitor to the cause of freedom”.In China the Japanese take Shanghai and Nanjing at great cost and make progresses inland thanks to their vastly superior tanks and planes. Their massacres in Nanjing shock the public opinion in the democratic countries. The Russians quietly invade northern China, conquering Tianjin and Beijing in matter of few days. Their forces conquer most of northern China up to the Huai He.
Winter 1939-1940: Hitler begins now to demand Danzig from Poland, receiving a stern refusal. When he proposes the annexation of Lithuania to Poland, however, the Poles see sense, and even agree, in the infamous Potsdam Treaty, to take part in the planned carving of Czechoslovakia, where Russian and German agents fan German, Slovak, Ruthenian and Hungarian nationalism among the minorities. French, and soon after British, troops are stationed in Belgium.
1st February, 1940: Amidst a blinding blizzard, Polish troops invade Lithuania “to restore the Union of Lublin”. The Lithuanian government is quietly spirited to Germany by Nazi special ops, and the decapitated Lithuanian army does not react, apart from isolated skirmishes. Lithuania is no more. France and Britain break diplomatic ties with Poland.
14th February, 1940: The French and British governments explicitly guarantee the integrity of Czechoslovakia, isolated and surrounded by enemies.
February-April, 1940: The frightened Czechs, pressured by the Western Allies well mobilized, but still reluctant to fight, begin secret talks with Poland, offering Teschen and Moravian Silesia in exchange for another last minute about-face, but to no avail. A frantic Hitler devotes immense resources to the Siegfrid line. Italy tries desperately to mediate and gain time to rearm and gather supplies. Japan invades southern China by sea, conquering Hainan, isolating Hong Kong and taking Canton after a dreadful city battle. The US embargo both Japan and Russia, but not Germany.
25-28th March, 1940: The Conference of Basel between Hitler, Sternberg's foreign office minister count Jablinskij, Mussolini, Blum and the new British prime minister Churchill comes to nothing, as Mussolini's attempt to mediate is rejected by both parts. Armies are fully mobilized.
6th April, 1940: At 4,40 CET WW2 becomes reality when, without any formal declaration of war, the Luftwaffe begins its all-out attack on Czechoslovakia and the Wehrmacht begins to probe the Czech fortifications. In the same hours the German ethnics in the Sudetenland start a planned insurrection which cripples Czech strategic defence.
7th April, 1940: Both France and Britain declare war on Germany. Belgium, though a formal ally, does not, in hope of not being attacked for a while; but his territory already teems with 150,000 Franco-British soldiers, who are ordered not to attack the German border forces. Italy and Russia do not enter the war at the moment, being the Tripartite Pact not automatic as pre-WW1 alliances.
8th April, 1940: Air war rages over southern Germany as French and British planes dogfight their German counterparts and attack their airstrips to ease pressure on the besieged Czechs – who are however still fighting on a single front. The Allies frantically - and vainly - try to induce Yugoslavia and Romania into the war or at least into alliance, while Russia, Italy and Germany contact Bulgaria to the same aim, just in case.
9th April, 1940: Prague is hit by devastating German dive bombings all day long, with hundreds of civilians killed. Slovakia erupts into open rebellion, and the Slovakian soldiers refuse to fight on.
10th April, 1940: The Allies retaliate to the bombing of Prague with a heavy French air attack on Mainz. The Czech “Ring of Steel” along the borders is melting amid the chaos of the Sudeten and Slovakian rebellions. The Hungarian army enters southern Slovakia, where local patriots actively resist, to get the Hungarian share of the booty.
12nd April, 1940: The Russians suddenly break their long negotiations with Finland to get the use of Murmansk. Sternberg sends a harsh ultimatum to Mannerheim, asking all of Karelia and Kola or it will be war.
13th April, 1940: The Germans conquer Pilsen, where they are greeted by half the population as liberators (the other half doesn't know where to flee)
14th April, 1940: The French and British Parliaments narrowly reject a declaration of war against Hungary.
15th April, 1940: Russia declares war on Finland and heavily bombards Helsinki from air and sea. Three Russian armies attack along the Ingrian isthmus, across the Svir and further east along the railway to Murmansk
17th April, 1940: The Normandie, the great French transatlantic, is mistakenly sunk by the German U-47 amidst the Atlantic Ocean, killing 847.
18th April, 1940: British ships mine Norwegian territorial waters, provoking a major diplomatic crisis.
20th April, 1940: The French army begins cautiously probing into the Saarland in force. They taste the defences of the Siegfrid line and find them not of their liking. A stalemate ensues. Sweden declares armed neutrality, following the Swiss example. The German 7th armored division's spearhead, badly mauled in repeated duels against superior enemy tanks but better led, gets near Prague, where the Czechs are reconstructing a main line of resistance under constant air attacks.
21-24 April, 1940: Polish forces occupy Teschen and Ostrava against moderate Czech resistance. The Russians are badly defeated in the swamps north of St. Petersburg as they try to break the Mannerheim line. They instead advance fairly quickly in eastern Karelia along the railway.
24th April, 1940: The Wehrmacht swiftly occupies Denmark, almost without resistance as the king orders not to spill blood. The Danish government is left in charge as harmless. The operation, conceived in a hurry and executed with largely insufficient forces, is a stunning success.
25 April, 1940: Transcarpathic Ruthenia proclaims independence from Czechoslovakia, with Sternberg's benediction.
27th April, 1940: The British Navy and Royal Marines occupy Narvik after a brief duel with Norwegian coastal artillery. Norway protests vehemently but does not declare war on the Allies.
28th April, 1940: the Czechs accept Hitler's conditions and surrender at 17.15 at Hradcany Castle in Prague. Only the officers and already captured soldiers (numbering more than 200,000) are to be interned as POWs (the others are set “free”), and a rump Czechia, deprived of the Sudeten and Slovakia, will survive as a German “protectorate”. Nazi promises of self-rule are however an illusion: the Reichsprotektor will prove the sole master of Czechia. The Czech government has already fled by plane to Yugoslavia, and thence to France, to set up a government in exile. Czech soldiers who sought refuge in Poland or Hungary are interned; only those who crossed into Romania are sent to France to recreate an army in exile.
30th April, 1940: Czechoslovakia is carved like a roast beef in the Budapest conference: Slovakia and Transcarpathic Ruthenia are recognized as independent, Hungary gets southern bits of Slovakia, Poland gets Teschen and , on her stiff insistence, the industrial area of Ostrava. Russian marines land around Murmansk, putting the city under siege. The Russian arctic fleet bombards the town and provides supplies for the soldiers. The 3rd Russian army is now 500 kms due south of the city along the railway, after a swift advance against light resistance. The railway is however completely demolished.
1st May, 1940: A British task force sinks two Russian destroyers in the Barents Sea after being torpedoed with the loss of the light cruiser HMS Newcastle. The Wehrmacht begins a redeployment towards the West front, where the French have advanced some kilometers into the Saarland, but nothing more.
2 May 1940: Russia declares war on Britain; a few hours later France declares war on Russia. A frantic Mussolini tries to keep Italy out of the war – for now – much to the irritation of Hitler and Sternberg.
3 May 1940: Russian naval assets (two battleships, three heavy and three light cruiser and a dozen destroyers - *note the Russian fleet is more powerful than the Soviet one of OTL) are moved from the Baltic to Denmark to bolster the German fleet.
4 May 1940: British naval night raid on Helgoland: the island suffers devastating damage, but at dawn German dive bombers attack the British Home Fleet task force and sink two cruisers and a destroyer, signalling the danger of air power for ships.
5 May, 1940: Churchill proposes to the French Plan R4 as drafted by the Imperial Staff: it would involve violation of Dutch neutrality and massive attack into the plains of northern Germany, a rapid crossing of the Rhine and capture of the Ruhr. The French reject the plan on diplomatic reasons and have their Plan Charlemagne adopted, which means enforcing Belgium's entry into the war and a duplex attack: the main one through the northern Ardennes on the Liege-Aachen route, the secondary, to be made beforehand, again in the Saarland. In the meantime, heavy pressure is exerted by secret channels on Poland, not to allow free passage of Russian troops on its soil.
7 May, 1940 A German U-boot sinks two Spanish Republican freighters in British waters, near the Scilly island.
9 May, 1940 The Republic of Spain declares war upon Germany, but not Russia. The socialist Republicans also hope to eventually recover the Canaries, still held by Nationalist forces under discreet British “protection”.
14 May, 1940 Generalissimos Gamelin, Lord Gort and Rojo meet at Niort, establishing there the Supreme Allied Headquarters in Europe (SAHE). A first division of Spanish troops heads into France to bolster the ally's defence. In the meantime, Hitler is hungrier than ever for attack: his Wehrmacht is ready, while Goering's Luftwaffe suffered a bit in the Czech and German skies (where a skirmishing air war rages) and the offensive has to be postponed for a couple weeks at least. It is agredd that britain will bolster its meager forces on the continent as soon as possibile (an invasion is imminent). The Netherlands have agreed in principle that Allied troops will be welcome as soon as Germans invade – and only in that case, not before as it was for Belgium, teetering on the brink of open war with the Nazi neighbor.
15 May, 1940 British troops disembark in the Fisher's Peninsula, Finnish territory. The Finns frantically try to improve their limited infrastructure in the area, already stretched to the limit for the defense of the strategic Oulu-Rovaniemi-Ivalo-Murmansk railway. Civilian death by repeated bombings in Helsinki top over 1,000, but Russian bombers meet a determined fighter arm and flak, as Swedenm despite its avowed neutrality, secretly sent a surplus stock of Bofors gun (plus some hundred volunteers and observers) across the Baltic.
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