WWII with Axis France, Allied Japan, and neutral USA

[eurofed]

I got an idea about a version of WWII with Allied Japan and Axis France. Not the usual AH scenario of the Vichy regime joining the Axis coalition after the Fall of France and Mers-el-Kabir, but a mostly intact France wholeheartedly joining the Axis coalition since the interwar period because of a Spanish Civil War-style conflict and pro-Axis fascists winning the civil war. To my knowledge, this WWII variant has got little or no coverage in the AH community. I decided to add an isolationist USA staying neutral to the TL since I disliked the overbearing industrial and military power of America spoiling an interesting pro-Axis PoD and deterministically forcing the scenario to the OTL outcome (apart from the different fate of Japan, of course). For similar reasons concerning Hitler's blunders, the scenario gets rid of him and most of the Nazi bigwigs early in the game thanks to Georg Elser getting very lucky and awards leadership of Germany to a practically-minded coalition of Goering, Heydrich, Speer, and the Heer. As a consequence, there is still an all-out war between the Axis and the USSR, but it does not occur the usual Barbarossa way and a co-belligerance phase precedes it. WWII evolves into a three-way fight between Axis Europe, the USSR, and the Anglo-Japanese Allies, with the USA clinging to strict neutrality. The Allies and the Soviets may or may not be able to put their past hostility aside and form an alliance of convenience, but any wartime cooperation shall necessarily be less efficient and more plagued by mutual suspicion than OTL.

ITTL the Great Depression hit Western Europe somewhat worse than OTL. This and the political polarization caused by the Popular Front government’s efforts to enact left-wing reforms and intervene in the Spanish Civil War to aid the Republicans ultimately plunged France in a civil war between fascists and far-leftists much similar to the Spanish one. Secondary effects included the Low Countries turning almost as politically instable as France and Germany, with far-right parties seizing pluralities in the Dutch and Belgian elections, and the governments of Weimar Germany and democratic Austria being able to organize a political union of their countries just before a Nazi or clerico-fascist takeover. Unfortunately, the socio-economic backlash of the Great Depression largely neutralized the positive political effects of the Anschluss and the Nazis took over in enlarged Germany, consolidated their regime, and started German rearmament more or less the usual way.

Growing French weakness, ideological affinities, Anglo-French opposition to Italian conquest of Ethiopia with toothless but annoying economic and diplomatic sanctions persuaded Mussolini that alignment with Britain and France was worthless and fascist Italy should form an alliance with resurgent Nazi Germany. Negotiations to form the Axis pact between Berlin and Rome proved fruitful after the two powers agreed to transfer the German-speaking population of South Tyrol to the Reich's and support each other's territorial ambitions in Eastern Europe. When the Spanish and French civil wars exploded, Germany and Italy took it as an excellent opportunity to enact their plans in Central Europe and the Balkans on one hand, and on the other hand strived to support far-rightists in Spain and France to the best of their abilities. On their own, the Soviets did their best to support the far-leftists in the civil wars. As a result, pro-Axis fascists and pro-Soviet Communists soon became the dominant factions in the respective fronts in both countries.

Collapse of France left Britain alone and largely powerless to influence events in Europe overmuch since its power was concentrated on imperial control and naval supremacy and traditionally ill-suited to project force deep into the continent without the support of another great power. The natural alternative would have been a strategic partnership with the USA, but this was easier said than done. The Great Depression brought President Roosevelt into power. Besides enacting his New Deal program of domestic reforms, he was an avowed interventionist and hostile to the Axis powers but American public opinion remained committed to isolationism since it turned to regard intervention in WWI as a costly mistake engineered by the Entente powers and arms dealers. The seemingly irresistible collapse of democracy and spread of totalitarianism across Europe only reinforced this mood since it left many Americans persuaded the Old World was a lost cause at least for this generation and best left alone unless it directly threatened the Western Hemisphere.

Over time, events only reinforced the grip of isolationism on America. A series of scandals during FDR’s second mandate consumed his political capital (his ill-advised attempt to ‘pack’ the Supreme Court with supporters of his reforms, revelation of his poor health and marital infidelity, discovery of Soviet espionage’s infiltration of his Administration) and allowed a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats to seize control of the Congress. The resulting stress caused FDR’s death in 1939 by stroke, sending the Democratic party in a nasty succession fight between supporters and opponents of New Deal. The internal conflict in the party got worse since Vice President Garner who succeeded him was hostile to many of his policies. These events enabled Robert Taft, a dedicated isolationist, to win the Republican nomination and then eke out a narrow victory in the 1940 presidential election.

The only viable alternative for Britain was to align with either the USSR or the emergent Axis bloc, but the hard choice left British elites and public opinion largely unable to pick a side while the French and Spanish civil wars raged on. The resulting diplomatic fumbling left British foreign policy paralyzed and ineffective for a good while. After their end, geopolitical concerns and traditional care for the balance of power would drive the British into an alliance of convenience with the USSR, but this proved not so feasible in the interwar period. Many opposed the move, arguing with good reason Soviet Russia was just as dangerous, untrustworthy, and aggressive in its own way as the Axis powers, and communism was politically as threatening and destructive as fascism. Clumsy and half-hearted alliance negotiations between the British and the Soviets failed to produce results for the time being.

In the end, a viable alliance option came for Britain from an unexpected source. During the first part of the 1930s, Japan took over Manchuria from China as the client state of Manchukuo, supported an array of sympathetic Chinese proxies to expand its influence within China proper, engaged into growing strategic confrontation with the Soviets in the Far East, and backed the independence bid of Indochina during the French Civil War. For a while, it suffered serious political instability because of the influence and violent activism of the militarist ultra-nationalists. After the extremists staged their umpteenth failed coup attempt and assassination wave of moderate political leaders, the Emperor and the moderate factions in the Japanese ruling elites and armed forces closed ranks to stage a successful thorough repression of the radical nationalists and militarists.

Consequently, Japan experienced a moderate swing of its foreign policy. With the radicals purged, it avoided getting involved in a total war with China on its own initiative because its leaders judged it too costly and risky, especially with the growing Soviet military threat on the Manchurian border. After some wavering, the Japanese embraced the policy of seeking a détente with the Chinese Nationalists based on the post-Manchuria status quo and trying to expand their influence in China by supporting various pro-Japanese proxies inside and outside the KMT. They focused their military power on checking the Soviets.

The Nationalist Chinese leaders were content for the time being to heed the status quo for their part, since it allowed them to avoid a confrontation with Japan and gave them room to focus on their efforts to eliminate the Chinese Communists, subdue the warlords, and build up the strength of their nation. They agreed to a de facto recognition of Manchukuo, suppressed anti-Japanese radicals, and went along with the Japanese bid to restore normal economic and diplomatic relations. For all their newfound moderation, however, the Japanese still decided an intervention to support the independence bid of Indochina during the French Civil War was still worth the risk, especially when they realized Britain and the USA did not regard the move with disfavor.

However, the Soviet threat still made Japan somewhat eager for allies. The Indochina issue ended up being too serious a wedge between the Axis powers and Japan, so the Japanese eventually turned to the British as potential allies. Loss of France made Britain open-minded to the perspective, and there was precedent, so the result was a restoration of the Anglo-Japanese alliance. It was an imperfect partnership since the two powers had limited capability to support each other because of distance and meant the alliance as mostly aimed against different potential enemies. However, it still allowed them to minimize a potential source of conflict in Asia, redirect the bulk of their forces elsewhere, and gain some indirect support.

Thanks to the eclipse of France during the civil war, the revisionist powers (Germany, Italy, and the USSR) more or less got a free hand to rewrite the map of Eastern Europe to their tastes. The Germans had already been able to remilitarize the Rhineland with impunity since France was already too politically instable to react with anything stronger than diplomatic protests. They strong-armed Czechoslovakia into accepting cession of the Sudetenland and subsequently enacted a partition of the country, with Germany annexing Bohemia-Moravia and Hungary getting Slovakia. Soon afterwards, the Germans started pressuring Poland to make territorial concessions about Danzig and the Corridor and accept joining the Axis. The collapse of France left Poland in a strategic bad place but its victory over the USSR a couple decades ago made the Poles confident they could resist Germany on their own, so they stubbornly resisted German demands. The Italians annexed Albania and collaborated with Hungary and Bulgaria to organize the destabilization of Yugoslavia by supporting the separatist activities of the Croats, Macedonian Bulgarians, and Kosovo Albanians. The Germans tired out of Polish defiance and started a conflict picking the status of Danzig as an excuse. The Wehrmacht quickly cut the Polish army to pieces and overrun most of the country. The Soviets picked the crisis as a good opportunity to occupy the Baltic nations and eastern Poland.

The Soviet intervention sealed the fate of the second Polish republic and briefly raised a threat of a German-Soviet military confrontation but it was ultimately avoided since neither side felt ready to fight the other and both powers shared an interest to divide the spoils of Poland. A hastily negotiated agreement established a new partition of the country: the USSR annexed the eastern territories and made them subject to brutal Sovietization like the Baltic states. Germany took the rest. It swiftly Germanized the western territories it had owned before 1914 with mass expulsion of their Polish and Jew inhabitants and their replacement by German settlers. A minority was able to stay at the price of forced cultural assimilation and the threat of death or deportation for noncompliance. The German leaders planned the same outcome for Bohemia-Moravia and the rest of Poland on a longer time schedule, by a mix of genocide, German settler colonization, and forced cultural assimilation.

When Yugoslavia exploded in civil war because of various separatist uprisings occurring concurrently, it gave Italy a perfect excuse to intervene with the support of Germany, Hungary, and Bulgaria. The Italians easily crushed a Yugoslav army weakened by civil war and multi-front invasion, and imposed a partition of the country. Italy got central Dalmatia, many Adriatic islands, most of Kosovo, northwestern Vardar Macedonia, Montenegro, and southern Slovenia. Germany took northern Slovenia and organized the Banat into an autonomous zone under the control of its ethnic German community. Hungary annexed Backa and Baranja. Bulgaria took most of Vardar Macedonia. Croatia became independent as a fascist client state of the Axis and got most of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Axis powers reorganized central Serbia with north Kosovo and eastern Bosnia into another client state of theirs. The Serbs in the rest of former Yugoslavia became subject to genocide or mass deportation into Serbia.

The French and Spanish civil wars raged for a while on both sides of the Pyrenees but the fascists eventually won them for various reasons, including better cohesion and organization, most of the professional military siding with them, and the Axis powers being more able to provide support to them than the Soviets could do with the Republicans. The far-right regimes that took over in France and Spain were naturally inclined to align with the Axis out of ideological affinity, gratitude for the support they received during the civil war, and perception of a common ground with the other fascist powers against communism and Western democracy.

The German and Italian leaders felt tempted during the French civil war to exploit the situation to annex a few border territories, but declined the option since they realized the genuine friendship of France would eventually yield them much greater strategic and economic benefits. The only price the Axis powers claimed for their aid was cession of a few colonies, which took place on relatively friendly terms and with a broad promise of future territorial compensations. Italy got Tunisia and Germany got its old colony of Cameroon. The deal included French Congo in the territory ceded to Germany to make up for the other former German colonies that remained under French or British rule. Britain refused German requests for the return of other former German colonies, especially Tanganyika.

France and Spain joined the Axis pact and signed an economic assistance treaty and a military alliance with Germany and Italy. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy adjusted their strategic stance, their ideology and propaganda, and their imperialist plans to account for a friendly France. Much the same way, the new French regime downplayed traditional hostility between France and Germany, celebrated solidarity with the other fascist Western European nations, and identified Communism and the democratic powers as the real enemies of France. After the loss of Indochina and the formation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance, fascist France added Japan to its list of enemies and intensified its hostility to Britain. During the civil war, Jose Sanjurjo gradually consolidated its leadership as the dictator of Spain, with Francisco Franco emerging as the other most important figure of the regime. In France, Marshal Petain became supreme leader, with Pierre Laval and Francois Darlan as its most influential collaborators in the civilian and military fields.

Much like it had previously happened in Germany and Italy, the new fascist regimes ruthlessly and efficiently purged political opposition by killing, imprisoning, or driving it into exile. The new French leaders were able to keep control of the French fleet and most French colonies without too much trouble. As a rule, the French professional military, colonial administrators, and the settler community mostly sympathized with the far-rightists and aligned with them during the civil war or at least stayed neutral during the conflict and recognized the fascist regime as legitimate after its victory. The French forces suppressed all the attempts of Arab nationalists to stage an uprising in Syria. The French West Indies and Indochina were the main exceptions. The governor of Guadeloupe refused allegiance to the new regime and encouraged the British to occupy the French West Indies, which they did with the support of the USA.

An uneasy front of Indochinese nationalists and leftist revolutionaries tried to exploit the situation soon after the French civil war went into full swing to start an anti-colonial uprising. The French forces in the colony contained and to a large degree suppressed the rebellion, even if some residual unrest persisted. The monarchist and right-wing nationalist wing of the anticolonial movement decided to salvage their situation by making an appeal to Japan for intervention. The Japanese leaders initially hesitated, but became open-minded once they perceived the UK did not see a Japanese intervention with disfavor once it became clear the French civil war would likely ensue in a takeover by fascists or communists. Even the USA reluctantly accepted it. The Japanese forces landed in the colony and occupied it without excessive effort. They defeated the French and the leftist militants and set up Indochina as a nominally independent confederation of the Kingdoms of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. In practice, it was another client state of the Japanese Empire like Manchukuo.

[eurofed]

Once the French fascists won the civil war and consolidated their regime, they bitterly resented and complained about the loss of their Caribbean and Indochinese colonies, especially the latter. In practice, the strategic situation made a French attempt to recovery the colony almost hopeless, given the effects of the civil war, distance, Japanese superiority in the theater, and the apparent Anglo-Japanese realignment. The Japanese intervention in Indochina and later the revival of the Anglo-Japanese alliance accelerated and intensified the pro-Axis and anti-British alliance swing of France and alienated the Axis bloc as a whole from Japan once France joined it.

After the end of the civil wars, the new fascist regimes of France and Spain of course focused on consolidation of their grip of power, bloody repression of defeated opponents, and healing of war damage. Spain mostly turned inward in this regard and passively followed the lead of its stronger allies. France did pursue the same objectives. However, since it had greater resources to begin with and suffered a bit less damage in the civil war because of shorter duration, its new leaders were anxious to reaffirm the prestige of their nation with some foreign-policy success. Given the ideological leanings and alliance ties of the new regime, this attitude soon translated in ambitions of territorial expansion concerning the French-speaking areas of Belgium and Switzerland. Therefore, the French leaders sent feelers to their German and Italian counterparts about plans for partition of the Low Countries and Switzerland.

The leaders of the other fascist powers were quite open-minded to the proposal since it would allow Germany and Italy to bind France even more closely to their side and make sizable territorial gains of their own in the process. Hitler’s main long-term ambition was large-scale conquest and colonization of the Russian lands, but he understood the strategic importance of having a friendly France on his side when Germany did engage Soviet Russia so he was willing to adjust his short-term plans to accomplish a complete partition of Western Europe between the fascist powers. Moreover, the move would allow the Third Reich to acquire the other Germanic-speaking areas of continental Europe, an objective that also had considerable value for Nazi ambitions.

The leaders of the fascist powers did realize such a large-scale redrawing of the map of Europe on top of their other recent actions might quite possibly cause a war with Britain or the USSR, but they were confident the combined power of Germany, France, and Italy would defeat either power w/o excessive trouble or scare them into passivity. If anything, the perspective of a general conflict did drive them to draft an expanded deal and contingency scheme that included division of Africa, Western Eurasia, and the European colonial empires at large between the spheres of influence of the fascist powers. Once it became aware of these plans, Spain did join the deal once it got a guarantee about a few potential gains of its own.

Being mindful of the experiences of the Napoleonic Wars and WWI, the fascist leaders were only concerned to avoid if possible a two-front war with Britain and the USSR at once, if possible, and much preferred to deal with either power in sequence on their own terms. Britain appeared increasingly hostile to ongoing expansion of the fascist bloc and there was no good reason to assume it would stay neutral when the Axis bloc enacted its expansionist plans for the rest of Western Europe or got in a conflict with the USSR. On the other hand, the Stalinist leadership of the USSR seemed potentially willing to make an opportunist short-term deal with the fascist powers if they proved amenable.

The USSR took this attitude since, even after seizure of the Baltic states and eastern Poland, it still had important expansionist ambitions of its own to fulfill in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia and it wished to delay its involvement in a general war until it felt ready to intervene on its own terms. Optimally, Stalin hoped to goad the Axis powers and the Anglo-Japanese alliance in a conflict and exploit the situation to reap as many gains for Soviet Russia as possible, until Soviet military build-up and distraction or exhaustion of the warring powers enabled the Soviets to backstab and overwhelm everyone else in Eurasia.

Mutual ideological hostility did make fascism and communism vicious natural enemies since the power struggles that brought the former in power in the Axis powers. Moreover, in the long term the Axis leaders did plan a grand Pan-European crusade to destroy the USSR once they felt ready. However, circumstances made them willing to make a short-term deal of convenience with the Soviets to secure their neutrality or even better active cooperation as long as they were busy accomplishing their other imperialist plans for the Old World.

The politically odd but very real result of these attitudes was the Vienna Pact between the Axis powers and the USSR. The public section of the deal involved a non-aggression and economic cooperation pact. The secret clauses established a large-scale partition scheme to divide Eurasia between the spheres of influence of the Axis powers and the USSR, and an agreement to enact friendly neutrality, economic collaboration, or even co-belligerence as the case might be, if either side took military action to enforce the terms of the deal against third powers.

The deal was not so easy to finalize and risked to fail for a while because of mutual distrust, and since the Soviets initially made certain claims the Axis powers found too dangerous or onerous. In the end, however, it became possible because the Soviets toned down certain requests and the Axis powers agreed about other concessions as compensation. Both sides secretly planned to backstab and overwhelm the other one in the long term, so they regarded all concessions that did not seem too onerous in the short term as strictly temporary and recoverable in the end.

The Axis-Soviet pact also involved a secret agreement to transfer the vast majority of the European Jewish population to the USSR. Since their takeover, the Nazis had been busy imposing a harsher and harsher treatment of their Jew minority and ultimately determined to remove it from the Jews from their empire one way or another. Since the Axis alliance formed, their influence gradually drove the other fascist powers to adopt a similar attitude and policies. Up to the beginning of WWII, prevalent interpretation of this goal meant forced population transfer schemes, initially through mass immigration of European Jews outside the fascist bloc, but this failed because of international unwillingness to take large numbers of Jewish immigrants. Then it switched to tentative plans for mass deportation to some far-off and low-value corner of the European colonial empires, but although seen with much favor in principle these plans failed to make much progress in practice. Reasons for this delay included economic and logistic constraints, lack of time, and distraction by more pressing concerns such as the limited conflicts, civil wars, and the rearmament and reconstruction programs the Axis powers found themselves engaged in.

Nonetheless, expansion of the Axis bloc to an ever-greater swath of Europe, expectation that a general war was getting behind the corner, and most importantly inclusion of Poland (especially) and Hungary with their sizable Jewish minorities added urgency to the Nazi-fascist wish to get Europe rid of the Jews. During the Axis-Soviet negotiations, an imaginative member of the Axis delegation got a leap of insight about the ‘Jewish problem’ and was able to spread the idea all the way across the chain of command to Hitler who gave his seal of approval. They realized to use the USSR as a dumping ground for the European Jews was a quicker, cheaper, and simpler solution than getting them carted off to Madagascar or the like.

Even if one gave credence to the Nazi racist conspiracy theory that the Soviet regime was a front for a secret cabal of Jewish overlords controlling the masses of Slav ‘untermenschen’, this viewpoint argued, it would not make a real difference. In a few years at most, the fascist powers expected being able to crush the Soviets after they completed their preparations and they dealt with Britain. A few millions more displaced Jews sent to Russia to join with their fellows for a few years would not be enough to change the equation. The Axis diplomats added the request for mass deportation of Jews to the USSR to their shopping list.

On his part, Stalin did not really like the Jews either, he deemed most of them potential spies and traitors and had been harboring tentative plans to add them to the target list for his recurring cycle of mass purges sooner or later once they were done with higher-priority groups. On the other hand, he reasoned, it would cost him little to humor the fascists on this since the Soviet state could always find use for the Jew deportees. The few he trusted enough would help colonize and develop some underpopulated but potentially valuable corner of the vast Soviet empire. About the others, well, the gulag system had a seemingly insatiable appetite for more warm bodies being ruthlessly exploited and worked to death for the power and profit of the Socialist Motherland. A few large-scale infrastructure projects could progress faster by throwing more enslaved ‘enemies of the people’ at them. He greenlighted the Jew deportation scheme.

Soon after the ink on the Vienna Pact dried, the Axis powers and the USSR got busy translating its terms into fact. The Soviets sent Finland an ultimatum demanding the cession of various border territories and other concessions. When the Finnish government refused it, the Red Army attacked Finland. Despite what the Soviets themselves and neutral observers expected, the Finnish army performed a surprisingly effective resistance and the Red Army an embarrassingly poor performance, causing a strategic stalemate of the conflict on the border. On their part, Germany and France focused on destabilization of the Low Countries. For several years, the legacy of the Great Depression and the successes of fascism in Germany and France gradually caused a remarkable swelling of popularity and support for far-right parties and movements in Belgium and the Netherlands that left these countries trapped into serious political instability. Once the fascist powers got engaged in fanning the flames of chaos in the region, instability further escalated to a sequence of riots, strikes, uprisings, and coup attempts that created pre-revolutionary situation. This gave the Germans and the French a pretext to send their forces across the border to ‘restore order’. Beset by internal instability and divided loyalties, the Dutch and Belgian governments and armies utterly failed to organize an effective resistance, and the Axis forces occupied the Low Countries with little effort.

A partition of the region swiftly ensued, with Germany annexing the Netherlands, the Flanders, Eupen-Malmedy, and Luxemburg, while France took Wallonia and the Brussels region. Franco-German conquest of the Low Countries sent Britain into strategic panic. For centuries, the British had treated any attempt by neighbor powers to seize control of the Low Countries as a casus belli and an existential threat, and they followed the pattern again. Once an ultimatum to withdraw Axis forces from the area went unheeded, the British government and parliament swiftly approved a declaration of war to Germany and France. Italy and Japan quickly heeded their alliance commitments by declaring war to Britain and the Axis powers respectively. Despite its post-civil war exhaustion, Spain too decided to align with its Axis partners.

Soon after the beginning of the war, the leadership of one of the main players suddenly experienced a major change once Hitler and several top-ranking Nazis (Bormann, Epp, Goebbels, Frick, Hess, Himmler, Ley, Rosenberg, Todt, Dietrich, Frank, Ribbentrop, and Streicher) fell victim to a bomb planted by a ‘lone wolf’ assassin. Despite the decapitation event and the resulting shock, however, Germany wobbled for a bit but avoided a serious leadership crisis in wartime since Goering took over as its new supreme leader. He was able to do so without excessive trouble since he was the designated successor of Hitler by decree and public statements and the most influential and popular surviving Nazi leader. Moreover, a few of the most important potential rivals for Hitler’s succession died in the bombing. The leadership of the army briefly considered seizing power with a coup, but eventually declined the idea, as Goering was able to win over their loyalty with a few concessions, such as marginalization of the SS. Heydrich, despite being present and wounded in the bombing, survived and recovered to become the new second-in-command in the Nazi hierarchy. Goering organized a new inner ruling circle of Germany, which besides Heydrich came to include Speer, Nebe, Neurath, Funk, Diels, and a few high-ranking or distinguished generals.

The war soon expanded since various powers treated it as a good opportunity to settle scores or satisfy their ambitions. France, Germany, and Italy sent Switzerland an ultimatum whose acceptance would give the Axis powers complete control of its logistic and economic resources. When the Swiss government refused it to protect its country’s neutrality, the Axis forces invaded Switzerland from three sides and occupied most of its territory. The Swiss army enacted its defensive plan that called for withdrawal from the economic heartland and population centers to a well-stocked national redoubt in the mountain areas. Such resistance from a logistically advantageous position initially caused some serious trouble to Axis troops for a while, although they were able to seize and hold all the valuable portions of Switzerland. Over time, however, the Axis forces devised a quite effective countermeasure by setting up strict controls of the civilian population and cordoning of the redoubt areas that cut down any supplies inflow to the Swiss forces to a trickle. Once the partisans gradually exhausted their stored resources, starvation and utter lack of ammo and other supplies eventually brought Swiss resistance to its knees. The Axis powers partitioned Switzerland: France got Romandy, Italy took Ticino and Grisons, and Germany annexed the rest of the country.

Intervention in the war gave Spain a good opportunity to fulfil its own expansionistic ambitions with the assistance of its Axis partners. Its forces supported by Axis expeditionary corps besieged Gibraltar and occupied Portugal, picking the long-standing Anglo-Portuguese alliance as a pretext. The British and the Japanese retaliated to Axis successes in Europe by seizing various colonial territories of the Axis powers and the conquered countries, including the Canary Islands, the Azores, Belgian Congo, Angola, Mozambique, Portuguese India, East Timor, Macao, and the Dutch East Indies. The Japanese occupied most of the Dutch East Indies with East Timor and supported their reorganization as a nominally independent republic of Indonesia that was a Japanese client state. The British occupied Dutch Borneo and de facto merged it with their own colonies in Southeast Asia; much the same way, Australia took over West Papua.

[eurofed]

British naval power and the military resources freed up from Southeast Asia thanks to alliance with Japan enabled Britain to keep a slight to moderate naval superiority vs. the Axis powers. Consequently, the British were able to dominate the Channel, keep the supply lines open for the British Isles and the other territories of the British Empire, and gain the upper hand in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. On the other hand, the combined air and naval assets of Germany, France, and Italy allowed the Axis coalition to gain the upper hand in the air war and fight the naval war from a reasonably strong position. They were able to fight the Battle of the Atlantic from a decent stance, get the upper hand in the submarine war and deal a serious amount of damage to British trade, and be reasonably close to parity in the North Sea, the Gulf of Biscay, and the Mediterranean. The RAF had to go on the defensive, with Britain becoming subject to a bombing offensive, while the British experienced very serious difficulties with their bombers achieving any in-depth and sustained penetration of Axis territory.

With a lot of effort, the British were able to exploit their theater advantage to conquer the Axis colonies in Central Africa and Syria. They cooperated with the Japanese to occupy Madagascar. On the other hand, they proved unable to make any serious inroads in North Africa, French West Africa, and Italian East Africa. With some serious effort and losses, the Axis forces conquered Gibraltar and Malta, turning the Western and Central Mediterranean into an Axis lake and forcing the British on the defensive in the Eastern Med. The logistic chain of the Axis forces in North Africa and West Africa considerably improved, allowing them to retake the Canary Islands and make some serious inroads into Egypt.

In the Far East, a series of serious border incidents between the Soviets and the Japanese escalated into an undeclared border war. Emboldened by the alliance with Britain and the mediocre performance of the Red Army in the Finnish War, the Japanese decided to expand the conflict into all-out war with the USSR. The logistic constraints the Soviets faced in the area and the serious flaws created by the Stalinist purges more or less balanced out the weapons and organizational inferiority of the IJA, leading to a strategic stalemate on the western and northern Manchurian border. The Japanese were still able to exploit their decisive air-naval superiority to conquer North Sakhalin and with some more effort, Outer Manchuria as well.

Despite their cautious stance before the war, the leaders of Nationalist China decided this situation represented a good opportunity to settle their own grievances against Japan, also because their campaign to crush the CCP had been a decisive success. The KMT army, assisted by the Soviets, wiped out all the pro-Japanese proxies (warlords and Nationalist dissidents) across Northern China and took full control of the region. The Sino-Soviets cooperated to invade and occupy Mengjiang and the Manchurian portion of Inner Mongolia. After a while, however, the Japanese reorganized, went into full mobilization mode, and struck back at the Chinese. The KMT army suffered a decisive inferiority gap to the IJA that no amount of prewar assistance by the Axis powers and the USSR had been able to remedy.

The Chinese intervention had caught the Japanese on the wrong foot, but once the IJA reorganized, a reversal of fortunes was inevitable. The Japanese strategic counteroffensive soon sent the Chinese army in a rout, and the gaps this created in the front forced the Soviets to withdraw as well. The Japanese gradually recovered western Manchuria and Mengjiang, invaded eastern Mongolia, and overrun Northern China up to the Huai River. They also landed to occupy Hainan. The IJA avoided further in-depth penetration into Chinese territory since it deemed the Soviet front of much greater strategic importance and wished to avoid an excessive extension of its forces. They deemed the Chinese weak enough they could dispose of them at leisure once they had neutralized the Soviet threat and made Manchuria secure.

Expansion of the conflict to the USSR and China was much less than welcome to Britain because they did not want such a major distraction. More importantly, in the end, the British based their grand strategy and realistic hopes for victory on the gamble that either America would shake off its isolationism and join their side, or the unnatural partnership between fascists and communists would collapse into armed fighting. Beyond all the nationalist braggadocio and posturing, even many British acknowledged in their level-headed moments that the British Empire alone could never realistically hope to defeat the Pan-European Axis and Japan was too distant and peripheral and too busy fighting the Sino-Soviets to lend an hand in Europe. Nevertheless, Britain also acknowledged they could not let down their only major ally, so they reluctantly declared war to the USSR and China, sent the Indian army to occupy Tibet and cooperated with the Japanese to invade Yunnan.

As awareness of Chinese weakness and poor Soviet performance against Finland and Japan crept into the British collective mind, a more confident stance developed that saw China as a military nonentity and the USSR as a paper tiger whose only significant role in the conflict was to provide resources to the Axis powers. This translated into the development of a ‘peripheral’ economic warfare strategy that aimed to starve the Axis-Soviet coalition of valuable resources within the strategic reach of the British Empire. The two main prongs of this strategy were a bombing offensive against the Baku oilfields and invasion of northern Scandinavia (using the ostensible purpose of providing military assistance to Finland) to deny the iron ore of northern Sweden to the Axis war machine. This was less than optimal to starve the Axis-Soviet war economy of oil and iron since the totalitarian powers could still tap other sources of these supplies from different areas of their territory (e.g. iron ore in Lorraine, the other Soviet oilfields), but the British planners still assumed it would deal a serious blow to their enemies’ economy.

The British did enact these plans, but their ultimate outcome went rather against their optimistic expectations. Bombing of Baku did some significant damage, but utterly failed to cripple the oilfields’ production. Invasion of Scandinavia did take off with a successful landing in northern Norway but it deployed far less swiftly and effectively than needed. The Germans and the French had realized the danger of a British offensive action in Scandinavia since the beginning of the war and made preparations of their own. Once they got aware it was underway, they swiftly retaliated with a large-scale invasion of Scandinavia of their own that overrun and occupied Denmark, Norway, and Sweden well before the British could consolidate and expand their bridgehead enough to make a serious threat to the Swedish minefields. Combined Allied and Axis invasion of their countries, not to mention intensification of the Finnish-Soviet war, threw the reaction capability of the Nordic nations into chaos and in the end they utterly failed to resist Axis occupation effectively. The British got bottled and trapped into a strategically valueless salient that the Axis forces cordoned and walled off without excessive effort.

More importantly, British aggressiveness and the Axis success in Scandinavia persuaded Stalin that the USSR should take a much more decisive action to conclude the Finnish conflict successfully, affirm all the Soviet claims and war goals in Europe and the Middle East in one fell sweep, and eliminate the British strategic threat to Soviet territory. The Red Army stepped up its level of mobilization, took a defensive stance in the Far East theater, renewed its strategic offensive against the Finns, engaged in a large-scale invasion of the Middle East, and deployed for action against Romania. Much expanded deployment and brute force of numbers combined with some hasty military reforms that toned down the worst flaws of the Red Army gradually allowed the Soviets to break the strategic stalemate on the Finnish front and engage in large-scale invasion of Finland. Despite the valiant and desperate Finnish resistance, the Soviets grimly pressed on ignoring their losses and they gradually overrun Finland, which they annexed as a SSR.

The USSR sent an ultimatum to Romania, demanding the cession of Bessarabia and Bukovina. The Romanians refused, trusting British aid and underestimating Soviet military power at the time, so the Red Army attacked Romania. Much like the Finns before them, the Romanians were able to deal considerable losses to the Soviets and stalemate their advance for a while, although over time their resistance became increasingly difficult to sustain.

In the Middle East, the Red Army easily overwhelmed the inferior Iranian army, and occupied most of Iran with little effort. The only real obstacle they met was the British hasty effort to occupy southwestern Iran to seize its valuable resources. Turkey staged a somewhat more effective resistance for a while but in the end, they could not save themselves since their army was still inferior in quality to the Soviet one and they suffered a two-front invasion once the Axis powers decided to intervene in the theater from the Balkans. Bulgaria had more or less aligned with the Axis since its intervention in Yugoslavia, although it was careful to avoid any manifestation of hostility to Soviet Russia. Faced with an ultimatum to side with the Axis or suffer invasion, Greece decided the best course was to align with the likely victors and gave safe passage to Axis forces across its territory. Ongoing Soviet offensive in Eastern Anatolia eventually broke through Turkish resistance and overrun Western Anatolia, while the Axis forces occupied the Straits area and the Western Anatolian coast with the assistance of the Greeks and the Bulgarians.

Axis-Soviet intervention in the Balkans and the Near East was an unquestionable strategic success since it allowed the uneasy de facto allies to expel the British from the Middle East theater without excessive trouble. The Red Army pressed on its offensive and occupied Iraq and Syria, while the Axis forces overrun Egypt, Sudan, Palestine, established a connection with the Italian forces in the Horn of Africa, and expelled the British from British Somaliland, Uganda, and Kenya. Axis and Soviet forces occupied the Arabian Peninsula, with the Axis powers getting control of Hejaz and Yemen, while the Red Army occupied Najd, Eastern Arabia, and Oman. The British forces had to pull out from the Middle Eastern and Horn of Arica theaters entirely, and retreat to India and Tanganyika, while the Royal Navy had to pull out to the Indian Ocean, where it enjoyed the support of its IJN allies. Cyprus soon fell to an Axis landing.

As much as it was a clear military success, however, Axis-Soviet occupation of the Eastern Mediterranean region spelled serious trouble for the Axis-Soviet coalition since it caused a serious deterioration of relations between the Axis powers and the USSR. Both sides came to resent the encroachment of the other in the region, accuse the other side of breaking their sphere of influence agreements, and suspect them of planning further violations of their own strategic and economic interests, if not outright backstabbing, and stated making covert defensive preparations. This mutual resentment and suspicion mindset had dire consequences in the ongoing Romanian crisis.

Under the unrelenting offensive pressure of the Soviets, the Romanians started to give way, but being unwilling to capitulate and suffer the fate of Turkey, they decided joining the Axis and getting its protection was the lesser evil once British military collapse in the Middle East made clear Britain was not a viable option. The Romanian government sent the Axis powers an alliance offer with very favorable terms for the use of their oilfields, which Germany, Italy, and France accepted. The Axis powers started sending covert military support to the Romanians, causing a noticeable stiffening of their resistance. The Soviets reacted by escalating their offensive to an all-out effort to occupy all of Romania. The Axis powers reacted in turn by openly deploying their own troops into Romania. The situation soon led to several military clashes between Axis and Soviet forces in the Romanian theater. Given the atmosphere of mutual resentment and suspicion between the two sides, the incidents made local commanders and their supreme leaderships assume the worst and escalate use of force. The conflict soon expanded to sweep the entire Romanian theater, then to engulf the entire Axis-Soviet border in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and ultimately caused a state of war between the Axis and the USSR.