I’ve always been one to root for the underdog, and underdogs don’t come much more quixotic than the Poles at the start of World War II. I’ve always thought about doing a scenario where the Poles survive the German Blitz. I finally decided to do one.
Usually I restrict myself to one change. I tried that with this scenario and couldn’t make it credible. It takes at least three changes to give the Poles a fighting chance. (None of those changes are particularly unlikely, but I’ll admit that I prefer one-change scenarios.)
- A Polish secret weapon. Bazooka-type anti-tank weapons are invented in Poland in early 1937, about six years early and secretly, but widely deployed by 1939.
- A brilliant Polish aircraft designer does not die in a plane crash in the mid-1930s.
- Due to some sort of bureaucratic snafu, the German army is unable to completely reequip itself with a new version of its Enigma coding machines by September 1939.
Ironically, Polish survival might lead to Germany being first with the atomic bomb, and possibly to German world dominance.
What actually happened
The Poles exited the war early, within roughly a month of its beginning. They fought hard, but were overwhelmed. Most students of World War II look at the Poles as kind of a speed bump for the Germans, with absolutely no chance of surviving much longer than they did. I think that image is wrong. Before I talk about the what-if, I need to clear away some of the myths surrounding the campaign.
Debunking the myths of the Polish campaign
Poland has gotten a rather bad rap over the years for its army’s performance in 1939. Part of that rap is true. Poland between the wars was a poor, mainly rural country. Once Germany started seriously rearming, Poland could not possibly keep up, even if Germany had only rearmed at a sustainable level. Under Hitler, Germany rearmed at a rate which would have resulted in national bankruptcy if it hadn’t resulted in war. The Poles couldn’t possibly keep up. Their annual military spending was often as little as one-twentieth of German military spending.
At the same time, the gap between Poland and Germany in 1939 was not as huge as is often thought. This section will debunk some of the myths.
Cavalry charges
Most people have the image of Polish cavalry charging with lances against German Panzers. The reality is quite different. Poland had a large cavalry force, but those cavalry used their horses for mobility. They fought dismounted and used anti-tank guns against German tanks.
There was one incident where mounted Polish cavalry tangled with German tanks, but it was an accidental encounter that got blown out of proportion by Italian journalists.
Poland as a speed bump for the Germans
The Polish campaign was fast for the Germans, but it was by no means easy. The Germans lost 285 aircraft, and 279 more were badly enough damaged that they had to be written off. The Germans also had 674 tanks either destroyed or damaged badly enough that they had to be taken back to Germany to be repaired or rebuilt. In both categories, German losses were close to the total Polish inventory.
Polish tanks
The Poles were producing around fifty tanks per year, around 5 percent of the German rate. Most, if not all, of those tanks were a light/medium (10 tons, 37mm gun) tank called the 7TP. It was based on the British 6-ton tank and was roughly equivalent to the Russian T26.
The Poles had a tank force called the Broń pancerna with 150 to 200 reasonably modern tanks plus about five hundred tankettes. That doesn’t sound like very many, but it was reasonably comparable to what the United States or Britain had at the time.
The Poles were in process of receiving 100 French R35 tanks when the war broke out. They also had a couple of pretty good Christie suspension-type tanks called the 10TP and the 14TP in the design process at the start of the war. The 10TP was at the prototype stage in September 1939. It would have been roughly equivalent to a late model Russian BT7.
Polish air force
The Poles had a large and modern air force through the 1920s and early 30s. As late as 1936 or 1937 that air force had been pretty competitive performance-wise with anything in Europe. The Poles had a good design team, but not much depth. When they lost a key designer to a plane crash in the mid-1930s, new designs started to falter. They also put too much of their remaining design talent into designing a very nice modern bomber rather than the modern fighter planes that they desperately needed.
In the mid-1930s, the Polish and German air forces were reasonably comparable. The Germans used fighter biplanes while the Poles had high-winged fighter monoplanes with fixed undercarriages. Between 1937 and 1939, Germany reequipped its air force with low-wing fighter monoplanes like the Messerschmitt Bf 109. That upped fighter speeds substantially — from around 250 mph to over 320 mph.
The other great powers lagged behind somewhat, and Poland’s effort to produce a low-wing fighter monoplane were delayed to the extent that they had only one flyable prototype by September 1939. The Germans also dramatically expanded their air force. The Poles had ordered a hundred or two French Morane-Salner MS-406 monoplane fighters, but the French were desperately trying to reequip their own air force so none of those fighters made it to Poland before Poland was knocked out of the war. The French fighters weren’t all that great, but they would have made some difference.
The British had also pledged to send fighter planes to Poland if war broke out. Both the French and British had also promised to send bombers to fly from Polish bases. None of those planes made it before the war ended.
The Germans tried to knock the Polish air force out of the war with a strike at Polish airports at the beginning of the war, but the Poles had dispersed their planes to secondary airports and were able to keep flying until they ran out of planes and airports. Polish pilots were very well trained and they did a good job with the obsolete stuff they had. Polish fighter pilots claimed to have shot down 121 German planes. German records seem to indicate that the Polish fighter pilots actually shot down at least 160 German planes. A couple hundred modern Polish fighter planes could have made the Germans work much harder in the air.
Other Polish weapons
The Poles were license-building a very good Swedish 37mm anti-tank gun, and a reasonably modern 75mm anti-aircraft gun. They were also license-building various other artillery pieces, along with ammunition for that artillery. A 155mm long-range artillery piece had just started production when the war started. A Polish division had about two-thirds the artillery firepower that a German division did, and what artillery they did have was less effective due to poor communications. The Poles had reequipped most of their front line divisions with standard Polish-made rifles, but a few divisions still had older French stuff. The Poles were starting production of an automatic rifle, with just a few hundred produced when the war started.
Polish contributions
The Poles had one of the best codebreaking operations in the world. Up until summer 1939, they were reading German Enigma codes on a regular basis. Their work provided a large part of the basis for the Ultra codebreaking that the English and US did later in World War II.
They had also secretly developed one of the few anti-tank rifles that was still usable against 1939-era tanks. It used tungsten-cored ammunition and some physics tricks to get a high enough muzzle velocity to knock out most German tanks of the era.
So why did they go down so fast?
- Slow French and English reaction. The Germans were overwhelmingly powerful in the east as long as the French and English did nothing meaningful in the west. The Western Allies were able to get away with making only a token effort because the Polish campaign ended so quickly.
- Delayed Polish mobilization. The French and English convinced the Poles not to mobilize until long after the Germans had completed their mobilization. When the invasion started, only a quarter of the Polish army was armed and in position. Another quarter of it had been mobilized but hadn’t made it to the frontlines. About one-third of the Polish army never even formed before the war was over. The rest of it mobilized under German attack. On day one, the Germans faced a quarter of the men that the Poles theoretically could have faced them with.
- The Poles fought too far forward. They put too much of their manpower into a hopeless fight for the Polish Corridor and important industrial areas near the German border. The Germans were able to cut a lot of those troops off and win the war before time and distance started to wear on the Panzers.
- Polish weakness pushed the Soviets in. The Soviets probably intended to eventually go into eastern Poland to claim their share of the booty. That wasn’t carved in stone, though. The Soviets were fighting a major border war with Japan through September 15, 1939, and they were by no means ready to attack Poland in mid-September. They went in at that time because of Polish weakness. If the Poles had held off the Germans more effectively, the Soviets would have waited longer for their own attack, and depending on the way things went they might have held off entirely. Stalin was by no means incapable of double-crossing Hitler.
- The rainy season came late in 1939. The Poles expected fall rains to turn central Poland into a large swamp by mid- to late-September. Then German mechanized units would lose mobility while Polish cavalry units would still be mobile. At that point the Poles would come into their own.
- The Polish high command cut itself off from its own army on September 7. They were afraid of getting cut off in Warsaw, so they moved to another town. That town lacked the communication facilities necessary to deal with an army, so after the move the individual Polish armies were essentially on their own, without coordination. That was fatal against a fast moving opponent like the Germans.
- German command of the air, and the quick tempo of the Panzers‘ advance, forced the Poles to move at night and fight during the day. Infantry units tended to quickly exhaust themselves. Cavalry brigades had more resilience because of their greater mobility.
What might have happened
Bazooka-type weapons are invented early in Poland. The technology of shaped charges and short-range rockets had been around since before World War I. In our timeline, some Swiss inventors/con-artists figured out that shaped charges would be useful against armor. In 1938, they did a demonstration in front of an English military type, then demanded a slug of money for their invention. After a couple of demonstrations, the Englishman figured out what they were doing, realized that the idea couldn’t be patented, and started the line of development that with some twists and turns resulted in the bazooka.
In this timeline, move the Swiss aha back a few years, and possibly make the inventors Polish. They go to a Polish government desperate to find a way to counter the increasing number of German and Soviet tanks on Poland’s borders. The Polish government shifts some money from the prestige project of building a Polish destroyer-based navy to producing thousands of bazookas. They do this with very heavy security and are able to keep the weapon, or at least its purpose and capabilities, secret until September 1939.
The Poles also manage to deploy a monoplane fighter comparable to the ME109. They don’t make extremely large numbers of them, but they do crank out around 150 by September 1939. They have some foreign orders from the likes of Turkey and Romania, and quite a few more fighters on order.
The Germans attempt to make a major upgrade to their Enigma coding machines in summer 1939. Due to a foul-up of some sort, the army is unable to complete that reequipment in time for the start of the war.
Everything else goes as it did in our timeline until September 1939. Then Panzers run into bazookas. Those bazookas are massed at exactly the right places, because the Poles know where the Panzers are coming. The Polish air force is able to concentrate its efforts at the points the Germans consider critical too.
The Enigma intercepts have a couple of other impacts:
- The Poles have mobilized more forces, because they know an invasion is coming.
- They know the Germans are going after a knockout, rather than just trying to grab off some border territory. That means the Poles would probably not concentrate as much of their power in the Corridor or in frontline areas.
The material impact of bazookas is not ruinous to the Germans. Yeah, they lose a lot more tanks, but not enough to stop them. The main impact is psychological. Tank crews are facing a dangerous unknown. They slow down the tempo of their attacks and become less aggressive. Polish infantry becomes more aggressive against tanks. German commanders have never actually tried a Blitzkrieg against a real opponent, so they become more cautious — more worried about their flanks, more worried about attrition to their tanks.
Then there is the impact on the mind of Hitler.
Hitler was a gambler. As a gambler, he was lucky rather than good. From 1937 through mid-1941, he had a run of good luck in our timeline, winning on outrageous bluffs and losing his nerve at just the right time. As a former corporal with no further formal military training, he increasingly intervened in army affairs. In our timeline that usually worked out well through 1941, and caused disasters from then on.
In this timeline, initial tank losses have an impact on the mind of Hitler that far outweighs their physical significance. He looks at the heavy initial tank losses and recognizes that without the Panzer divisions, Germany cannot win the war. He pulls the Panzers back temporarily in order to give the army time to figure out what the new Polish weapon is and how to neutralize it.
That mistake compounds itself. The German infantry divisions are desperate for tank support. They have been stripped of tanks in order to supply the Panzer divisions. There is always a crucial point where a few tanks could make an attack succeed or fail. The German command finds itself stripping away a few dozen tanks here and a few dozen tanks there from the Panzer division for infantry support roles.
More importantly, trucks from the Panzer divisions get “borrowed” by the various infantry divisions. The Panzer divisions are weakened as the Germans work frantically to figure out how to avoid a repeat of those initial very high tank losses. A strong element of the German army has always opposed the Panzer division concept. They claim that the heavy Panzer losses prove their point. The German tanks prove extremely useful, but not decisive in their infantry support role.
These changes don’t stall the German offensive, but they give the Poles more time. That’s the one thing they need most. The German attack to cut off the Polish Corridor succeeds, but not quickly enough to capture a significant part of the Polish army. The Germans find and exploit weaknesses in the overextended Polish lines, and advance at very credible rates by World War I standards, but without the Panzers the advance is just enough slower that the Poles can react to it — avoiding encirclement, moving up what reserves there are. The Polish mobilization is continuing, making the fight a little more even as time goes on.
In our timeline, by mid-September the Polish army had been reduced to pockets, at least in the western part of the country. They just couldn’t move quickly enough to escape and establish new lines. In this alternative, by September 15, the Germans have taken a substantial part of Poland, and they have bagged some Polish divisions. The bulk of the Polish army has escaped and established a new set of lines along the rivers in the interior of Poland.
France is under heavy and increasing pressure to launch the offensive that they have been promising the Poles that they will launch. The Germans are weak on the Western Front. Putting the bulk of their combat power against Poland only made sense if it won them a very quick victory. The French are not as intimidated by a quick, overwhelming German victory in the east either.
The French are also under more pressure to rush arms to the Poles than they were in our timeline. In this alternative, the Poles still appear to have a chance. The French R35 are deployed, and the Poles quickly discover the severe tactical disadvantages of their one man turrets. The French ship three or four hundred more of them to Poland anyway. Within a month, the French start work redesigning the H35/39 and S35/39 line of tanks to reflect the Polish experience. The new designs will take at least a year to become operational. The French also decide to ship a couple hundred sort-of modern fighter planes through Romania. They won’t arrive and become operational until at least mid- to late-October. The French don’t have many modern planes to spare, so they are stingy in that department. They do have quite a few mid-1930’s-era planes in stock, and they are quite willing to send those. With the Polish airforce dwindling toward extinction, anything that will fly is helpful, at least in a ground attack role. Both Britain and France have a few dozen bombers and pilots on the way to Poland. Those planes may be in operation by early October if absolutely everything goes as planned.
The French have ample supplies of artillery and ammunition, so they are more generous with that. The prospect of getting samples of the Polish “bazookas” makes them more generous than they would have been, as does the fact that they look bad for not launching the promised offensive. The French and British are very interested in looking over knocked out German tanks, especially ones in relatively good condition.
The Soviets are in no hurry to join in on the German side. From their point of view, they now have the “capitalist” powers fighting one another. Why not just sit back and let them destroy one another? The Soviets could also take this opportunity to make sure the Japanese have been taught enough of a lesson in the Soviet-Japanese border wars that they will never want to challenge the Soviets again. Hitler wants the Soviets in, but he has no leverage to make them hurry. He can’t cut the Poles off from French supplies without going into territory that he promised the Soviets. He doesn’t have much leverage over Romania as long as the bulk of his forces are tied down in Poland.
The Polish army is in some ways in a stronger position in mid-September than it was at the beginning of September. Their casualties and captured are more than made up for by newly mobilized forces. They have far less territory to cover on their frontlines. They are running short on ammunition, but as long as they don’t run out before the supplies in the pipeline arrive they’ll be okay. Their air force is dwindling, but Germans are losing more planes in terms of absolute numbers (that was true in our timeline, believe it or not, and would be far more true given modern Polish fighters), and most air combat is over Polish-held territory so more Polish pilots are in a position to fight again if they are shot down.
The Polish army has learned a lot about how to fight the Germans in the two weeks. The Polish commanders have begun to adapt to the tempo of modern warfare somewhat, though they have a long ways to go. Polish buying teams are scouring the world for communications equipment and anti-aircraft weapons.
The Germans are still in a strong position. They still outnumber and outclass the Poles in just about every category of manpower and weapon power. They are beginning to face some problems, though. They’ve lost far more tanks than they expected to, both because of the bazookas and because the infantry support role, tank crew caution and increased artillery preparation actually leaves them more vulnerable to other weapons than more aggressive action would. Most of the German army still marched on foot in 1939. That part of the army would have been marching and fighting continuously for two weeks.
The Germans were geared toward a short war, followed by a period in which they rebuilt their stocks. For example, in our timeline, the Luftwaffe apparently was running low on bombs by the end of September 1939. The German army never produced enough spare parts for its trucks and tanks. A simple mechanical failure often meant that a tank or a truck had to be shipped back to Germany for repair. That didn’t matter much in our timeline, because France and Poland lost so much of their armies so early. In this timeline it starts to make a difference. Not enough to even the odds, but enough to have an impact.
The Poles would have an ace in the hole in this scenario. One of the little known aspects of 1930s-era politics is that Japan and Poland had a tacit alliance aimed at containing the Soviets throughout the mid- to late-1930s. The Poles shared intelligence and intelligence-gathering expertise with the Japanese. The Japanese allied themselves with Germany as an anti-Soviet move more than anything else. They still had ties to Poland, especially intelligence ties. The Japanese were fighting a border war with the Soviets in September 1939 and many Japanese regarded the German pact with the Soviets as a stab in the back.
Given that background, in this scenario the Japanese quietly leak what they know of upcoming German moves to the Poles in order to help preserve the Polish counterweight against the Soviets. That didn’t have time to happen in our timeline, but it probably would have given more effective Polish resistance. How much did the Japanese have to share at this point? I honestly don’t know.
At this point, one of two things could happen. First, the Germans could conclude that losses or no losses they have to unleash the Panzers. If that happens, and they push through with it, the Germans could take a couple of days to gather their scattered tanks, then break through the new Polish lines and cut the Polish army into pockets within a couple of weeks. The Russians would then come in for their slice, and nothing much would have changed. The war would end in mid-October rather than the end of September. The battle for France might go differently, but Poland would be knocked out of the war.
Second, the Germans could experiment with another smaller-scale Panzer attack, maybe involving two divisions, using massive artillery preparation to suppress the bazookas, then using the tanks to break through and cut off a section of the Polish army. If the Poles were still reading Enigma, that attack would turn out even worse than the initial ones did. The Poles would be able to concentrate their limited resources to blunt the attack. Given the power of the Panzer divisions, the Germans might manage to pull off a victory, but they would lose enough tanks to make them reluctant to try again.
Would it be possible for the Poles to keep their army and territory intact for another two weeks? Yes. The Poles were poorly equipped but very brave. The Germans would not have experienced the tempo that an armored attack is capable of. Given a Polish intelligence edge and the psychological and physical impact of bazookas, along with the handicap of Hitler’s wrong-headed orders a renewed German attack would provide gains but not breakthroughs. If the Germans fail to destroy the Polish army between September 16 and September 30, things start getting very ugly for them.
- France is smoked out. Either they launch a real offensive or it becomes very obvious that France is led by cowards. The French attack becomes heavier as September nears its end. The attack doesn’t have the full weight of the French army behind it, but Germans are very aware of their weakness in the west. Pressure mounts on Hitler to shift forces west.
- The English also feel pressure to do something. Winston Churchill pushes for an English move into Norway. He points out that a move there would cut off the vital Swedish iron ore imports to Germany. Of course Norway is a neutral country. Neville Chamberlain is still British prime minister, and he isn’t willing to invade Norway, but the British navy is making ominous moves in that area by mid- to late-September 1939. In our timeline, Hitler was very concerned about Norway throughout the war, diverting scarce resources there at every rumor of an Allied attack. In this timeline, the British moves rattle him. He pulls air resources and some army divisions from the Polish campaign and plans a lightning attack on Norway in mid-October 1939. The attack catches England unprepared, but the German attack is a throw of the dice, just like it was in our timeline. It involves three prongs. In the riskiest move, the Germans send a force by sea to Narvik in northern Norway. In our timeline, the Germans lucked out and landed, but were stranded when the Royal Navy destroyed the bulk of the ships that brought them. In our timeline, the Germans in the north were bailed out by the fall of France. In this timeline, the Royal Navy sinks the German destroyer screen, then most of the transports, killing two or three thousand German soldiers. The British and French rush forces to the area, and the remnants of the German force in northern Norway retreats to Sweden after a brief fight and is interned there. The other two prongs of the German invasion are somewhat more successful, but not completely so. The Royal Navy wreaks havoc on the shipborne components, and the British land hastily gathered forces at several points along the coast of Norway. The Norwegians fight as well as they can, given their manpower and equipment. After weeks of confused fighting, the Allies control the north. The Germans control the south. The central part of Norway is the site of bitter fighting. That fighting sucks men and equipment, and especially German air power, away from the battle for Poland. The Western Allies are getting a taste of Hitler’s air and land power, and they don’t like that taste at all, even though Norway is not good tank country. The Germans get a taste of British sea power, and that taste essentially finishes the German surface fleet. The British get a taste of what air power can do to a navy. They don’t like that taste either.
Meanwhile, back in Poland, as October wears on the Germans are still making progress, but it is beginning to look more like a World War I-type battle than the World War II battles of our timeline. Air superiority is an integral part of the power of the early Blitzkrieg. The Germans still have air superiority over Poland, but the remaining air force is spread thin with so much air power in the battle for Norway. The Poles are still flying a handful of their modern Polish-designed fighters, and they are even building small numbers of them. The first few dozen French monoplane fighters have arrived, along with a few French pilots to fly them and to train the Poles on how to fly them. The French planes are not a match for ME109s, but they come closer than the older Polish fighters did. French artillery and ammunition is arriving in large quantities, making the German task on the ground much more difficult. Presumably the rainy season arrives at some point, and Polish resistance gets a boost as the Germans bog down.
The Germans are running short of ammunition of all kinds. Tanks and trucks are breaking down in large enough quantities that the Panzer divisions are becoming demechanized. The Germans are also running low on oil. In our timeline, the Germans were very short of oil in the winter of 1939-40 until Stalin bailed them out. A longer battle for Poland, and a battle for Norway, would make that shortage worse. With no common border, Stalin couldn’t help even if he wanted to.
While the Germans get increasingly desperate for a quick win in Poland, Stalin sees an opportunity and seizes it. The border war with Japan started out with the Japanese as aggressors, but it became increasingly obvious that the Soviets outclassed the Japanese army in Manchuria. Stalin realizes that he doesn’t have to be in any hurry to grab his part of Poland. With world attention focused on the war in Europe, the Soviets stall on negotiations to end the border war with Japan, build up their forces and attempt an annihilating blow at the Japanese force in the disputed area. The Japanese army is for the most part tied down in China, and with Hitler embroiled in the west Stalin decides to make sure Japan understands the lesson of the border wars and grab some territory at the same time.
In the west, Stalin plays hardball with Hitler. It becomes more and more obvious that Hitler needs Stalin in the war, and Stalin makes it clear that he is in no hurry and that the price will be high — demanding widened spheres of influence in Romania as well as more territory in the Baltics. The Soviets also send out feelers to the Western Allies, looking for a better deal if they can find it.
In mid-November, the Germans go back on the offensive in Poland. The Germans play another card against the Poles. A large part of eastern Poland is Ukrainian-speaking. The Poles have had a great deal of trouble with a Ukrainian nationalist movement in that area. The Germans set up a Ukrainian nationalist government in the small sections of Ukrainian-speaking Poland that they have occupied. They also force Hungary to give up a Ukrainian-speaking part of Czechoslovakia that Hungary occupied in 1939. The Germans start training a Ukrainian army and try to foment a Ukrainian guerrilla movement inside Polish-held territory. That puts pressure on the Soviets too, because their share of Poland has a large Ukrainian population and the Soviet Union itself has a large Ukrainian minority.
The Germans themselves don’t go into territory that had been promised to the Soviets, but they help their Ukrainian allies take some of that territory. Helping the Ukrainian nationalists also threatens to cut the Poles off from their arms pipeline through Romania. In our timeline, Hitler considered using Ukrainian nationalists against Poland and later against the Soviets, but he didn’t think he needed them and felt that they would be an obstacle to his later plans for the area. They were also “Slavs” and fell victim to his racial theories. In this timeline, it would have been obvious that he needed them, so they would be promoted to “Cossacks” in his mind. The alliance is one of convenience and is just as cynical as the Hitler-Stalin pact. The Ukrainian nationalist leadership knows that, but they don’t have any better options.
With the concept of Panzer divisions discredited in the German army, armored warfare advocates find themselves with little room to advance in the German army. Several of the most vocal ones find themselves relegated to the role of training and advising the new Ukrainian army. They quietly scrounge Czech-built tanks for the new army and build up miniature versions of the Panzer divisions for the Ukrainian nationalists.
1940 opens with Poland still in the war, though shrunken. England and France are duking it out with Germany over Norway. The Germans are teaching the Western Allies how much they need to learn about modern warfare. The French are doing as little as they can get away with in terms of an offensive into Germany, but that has to be more and more as time goes on. The war in Norway takes some of the pressure off, as does arms shipments to Poland.
Short-term consequences
Well, we got Poland through until 1940 with at least some plausibility. The French and English and even the Germans are now building their own versions of the bazooka. The German Panzer divisions appear to be an important idea, but not a war-winning one given the appearance of bazookas. German infantry is howling for armored support and increasingly getting it at the expense of the Panzer divisions.
Germany is encountering increasing economic difficulty. In our timeline, their buildup would have bankrupted them if it hadn’t yielded quick dividends. In this timeline, it doesn’t yield those dividends. German generals know that Germany can’t win a long war. The anti-Hitler underground is strengthened by the lack of new easy victories for Hitler.
In our timeline, Hitler escaped repeated assassination attempts only by a series of incredibly lucky coincidences: bombs on his plane not going off, last-minute changes of plans that avoided assassins. The chances of those coincidences all occurring in any other timeline are slim. Hitler would have almost certainly been assassinated at some point in this scenario. At that point, negotiations to end the war become possible, especially if Chamberlain is still British prime minister.
Say Hitler is assassinated around March 1940 (beware the ides…). His successor, whoever it was, would be looking for a way out. So would the West.
Result? A ceasefire in place, followed by a negotiated settlement. The Germans keep Danzig and negotiate for the Polish Corridor. They offer to compensate the Poles with some minor territories elsewhere; maybe some little pieces of what was once Czechoslovakia. The Germans keep the Sudetenland, but agree to withdraw from the rest of what used to be Czechoslovakia, but not immediately. The Germans rush to train and equip a larger Ukrainian army in order to put pressure on the Poles.
The Ukrainian situation puts the Western Allies in an awkward position, because the Allies technically guaranteed Ukrainian minority rights in part of the area after World War I but let the Poles ignore those rights between the wars.
Stalin realizes that he has outsmarted himself. His armies have used this time to grab a big hunk of northern Manchuria and humiliate the Japanese army, but he has also grabbed more than a Japanese government can let him keep without a fight. The Japanese escalate by spreading the war beyond Manchuria.
Stalin also has waited almost too long to grab the hunks of Poland he could have had as part of his pact with Hitler. As he becomes aware of the negotiations, he rushes to put himself in a position to grab his share of the booty. The Germans don’t trust his offer to join in the war against Poland, but they use it to win concessions from the Western Allies and Poland. They also give him reason to believe that they might restart the war if he attacks Poland. The Soviets announce that unrest in eastern Poland threatens Soviet Ukraine, then launch an attack into eastern Poland. The Germans wait to see how good of an offer the West and the Poles are willing to give them, and how well the Poles do in the east.
As the Soviets advance, the Poles suddenly become very reasonable on their western borders. The Western Allies sweeten the deal by tossing in a few ex-German colonies in Africa.
The Germans take the new concessions and quickly withdraw from most of the territory they have taken in the west. The Poles shift the bulk of their army to the east to meet the Soviet challenge. The Soviets quickly take a significant hunk of the territory, then become embroiled with the German-trained and -equipped Ukrainian army. The German army still occupies part of southeastern Poland. They provide arms and leadership for the Ukrainian army.
The Soviet army in Europe is not all that formidable at this time. Their best troops are still fighting in Manchuria. The divisions in the western Soviet Union were hit very hard by Stalin’s purges in the later 1930s. In our timeline, this was an army that had trouble beating Finland. It poured across the Polish border in September 1939 in a disorganized mess that even our timeline’s Poles would have given a hard time if they hadn’t been otherwise occupied.
In this timeline, it makes very good headway at first, because the bulk of the Polish army is in the west. As the Poles shift their forces to the east, the Soviet advance runs into trouble. The Ukrainians grab as much territory as they can in the Soviet rear, using Blitzkrieg tactics very effectively to cut off large hunks of the overextended Soviet army. A significant number of German “advisors” are fighting with that army. Ukrainian guerrillas take advantage of the Polish-Soviet fighting to grab weapons and key pieces of territory. The Poles hit the Soviets with a counteroffensive that cuts off the spearhead of their force and pushes the rest into making a hasty retreat, right into the teeth of the Ukrainians. Some of the army escapes, leaving behind their heavy weapons. Several hundred thousand Soviet troops are captured by the Poles or the Ukrainians.
The Soviet army in the west was well-equipped, but it was an amateur army at this point, with most of its officers killed in Stalin’s purges and with the few remaining ones terrified of taking any kind of initiative. The Soviet army facing Japan had escaped the worst of the purges, so it was still combat-worthy, but it was also tied up with the war against Japan. The Soviets scramble to reestablish a defensive line. They manage to do that just inside the pre-war Soviet border.
In the north, the Poles actually occupy a small part of pre-war Soviet Union. In the south, fighting breaks out between the Ukrainians and the Poles over Ukrainian-speaking areas of Poland. The Poles quickly discover that the Germans have trained a formidable army. The Ukrainians still manage to pursue the Soviets a short distance into the pre-war Soviet Union. Several Soviet generals discover that embarrassing Stalin is bad for their health. The Soviets start trying to push the Poles and Ukrainians back by sheer weight of men and equipment.
The Germans continue winding down their occupation of Poland and Norway. The bills for their arms buildup are coming due, and they don’t have the booty that they used to pay those bills in our timeline.
The Western Allies, especially England, are in the same boat. Both the Germans and the Western Allies demobilize as quickly as they safely can. The French do send large amounts of equipment to rebuild the Polish army. They have to negotiate with the Germans to do it, though. The Ukrainian nationalists have captured the parts of Poland adjoining Romania, so there is no way for arms to get through unless the Germans or the Ukrainians let them. The price of letting those arms through is a ceasefire in place between Poland and the Ukrainian nationalists, and a reduction of Polish forces near the cease fire line. By mid-1940, France sends Poland several hundred single-engine fighters. They also send large numbers of older tanks like R35s and H35s.
The Germans play an ambiguous role in the war between Poland and Russia. They continue sending arms to the Ukrainians, primarily Czech-designed stuff. That makes their role a little less obvious. If an independent Ukrainian state emerges in eastern Poland, allying with it could give the Germans access to a lot of natural resources, including oil. The Germans still occupy Slovakia and the Czech Republic, so they are in a position to make sure the arms flow to the Ukrainians continues. The Poles protest German support for the Ukrainians, but not too loudly. Right now the Ukrainians help the Poles to some extent by distracting the Russians. Also, the Poles want to make sure the German withdrawal from Poland continues, and they need to ship arms across German-held territory so they can’t afford to antagonize the Germans too much.
Is this getting weird or what?
Let’s see. Hitler is dead in 1940. World War II just kind of fizzled, because without a continuing supply of booty the Germans couldn’t continue paying for it, and the Western Allies were also running out of money. The Soviets are now at war with Poland and a German-trained and -advised Ukrainian nationalist army in the west and Japan in the east. The idea of large-scale armored attacks has been discredited, because they appear to have failed in Poland. The Ukrainian successes with armor are dismissed as the result of Soviet weakness and the impact of the Polish attack on Soviet frontlines.
In our timeline, the Soviets disbanded their armored divisions in November 1939 in spite of the evidence from Poland and their own successes in the Japanese-Russian border skirmishes. In this timeline, the Soviets use their huge tank force in an infantry support role. The tanks prove very valuable in that role, but they sustain heavy losses.
Medium-term consequences
The Poles, with French and English backing, are strong enough to keep the Soviets from overrunning all of Poland, especially with the Soviets distracted by war with Japan. The Poles are not strong enough to knock the Soviets out of the war or even to keep them from eventually chewing off Polish territory.
The Poles aren’t willing to give up that territory, though. Poles are a minority in the areas the Soviets overran. During the Soviet occupation, that minority was hit hard, with the Soviets pushing them out or deporting them to Siberia. The remnants of the Polish minority in this area are now fighting as guerrillas inside Ukrainian-held territory.
Both the Poles and the Ukrainians have hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war. The Ukrainians find that a large number of their prisoners are from the Ukrainian area of the Soviet Union. They are able to recruit tens of thousands of those men into their own army. They also recruit small “liberation armies” from other Soviet ethnic minorities. The Poles set up an anti-Stalin Russian army and establish an anti-Stalin government in the small area of Soviet territory they control.
The Romanians have a treaty commitment to fight alongside the Poles if the Poles are attacked by Russia. They are reluctant to honor that treaty for obvious reasons, but they do help as much as they can. They send what few weapons they can spare and help the Poles out financially as Poland tries to buy weapons for its fight.
Benito Mussolini makes a lot of noise about helping out the Poles in their fight against the Bolsheviks. He sends a few tens of thousands of “volunteers” to fight with the Poles. They don’t prove particularly useful. He also sends a hundred or so reasonably modern fighter planes. They help quite a bit.
France and England are in an awkward position. Their wartime ally is still at war. At the same time, they are financially weakened by the months of war, and they really don’t want to get involved in another war. They send large quantities of war material, and help out financially as much as they can, but try to delay or avoid actual involvement in the ground war.
The Western Allies may or may not declare war on the Soviets immediately, but both Britain and France declare a blockade of the Soviet Union.
In France, authorities uncover evidence of widespread sabotage of the French war effort by Communists. (That happened in our timeline as Stalin sided with the Germans due to the pact with Hitler, but it was overshadowed by the fall of France.) In this timeline, the French government reacts to what they consider treason by trying to suppress the French Communist Party and get rid of its control of any unions that it controls. The French Communists fight back with strikes and violent demonstrations. Stalin pushes the French Communists to do everything in their power to disrupt French arms shipments to the Poles. The result is a virtual civil war, but the French Communists are nowhere near strong enough to seize power, and the strong evidence of sabotage during the war discredits them with enough of the rank-and file workers that the French government is able to suppress them.
As an outgrowth of that conflict, the French look for ways to distract the Soviet Union from Poland without getting involved in the ground war there. They build up an air force in French-controlled Syria for a strike at the Soviet oilfields in the Caucasus.
The French riots and the Soviet-Polish War inflame tensions between the left and the right throughout the world. In the United States, the large Polish ethnic group fights for aid to Poland while leftists oppose it. Both sides recruit for volunteer brigades to fight in the war, with volunteers coming from all over the world.
By August 1940, Stalin fears that the old Bolshevik nightmare of all of the capitalist countries uniting to fight the Soviet Union is coming true. That isn’t quite what is going on. England and France are supporting Poland, but they deliberately distance themselves from Japan. The Roosevelt Administration in the US is torn. Some members of the administration lean toward the Soviet Union, and the Democrats can’t go too heavily against the Soviets without losing some left-leaning voters. On the other hand, the Democratic Party needs Polish voters in the next election. They won’t get them if they show any sign of leaning toward the Soviets.
Another factor: many Americans hate Japan for what it has done in China. The Soviets are fighting Japan, which keeps the Japanese from making further inroads into China. Franklin Roosevelt shows that he is a master politician. He offers to mediate between the Poles and the Soviets while pushing for massive increases in aid to the Chinese Nationalists. That indirectly helps the Soviets by weakening Japan, which appeases the left. He offers humanitarian and economic aid to Poland, which appeases the ethnic Poles in the US.
Stalin realizes that he cannot take too much Polish territory without provoking a real war with the Western Allies. He is also getting clear signals that the Japanese are fair game. He goes on the defensive against Poland while organizing major pushes to kick the Japanese out of the rest of Manchuria in August through October 1940, and to destroy the Ukrainian nationalists.
The Japanese are in no position to hold all of their gains in China plus Manchuria. They pull back to more defensible positions in China and put most of their energy into fighting the Soviets.
The Nationalist and Communist Chinese race to control the vacated territory. The Soviets push the Chinese Communists to concentrate on distracting the Japanese. The ChiComs put more effort into that than they want to, but they still put part of their energy into the scramble to fill the vacuum left by the Japanese. The Nationalists fill as much of the vacuum as they can.
Then, as more and more Japanese power is sucked into Manchuria, the Nationalists actually win some small victories over the weakened Japanese. The Soviets look ready to grab all of Manchuria by late September 1940. The Japanese scour China for any available unit with combat power. The Soviets spill out into Japanese-occupied provinces of Northern China. They set up a Soviet puppet government to control Manchuria, which quickly sours relations with the Chinese Communists. The Japanese maintain a toehold in Manchuria, but they strip so much of their power out of China to do it that they leave the remaining garrisons vulnerable. The Nationalists take back huge stretches of territory, leaving Japanese garrisons isolated in a few major cities.
The Soviets don’t do so well in the west. Germans are excited by what they see as Soviet weakness and scheme to establish a series of German-allied small countries in Soviet Ukraine and possibly other areas. They pour arms, equipment and large numbers of “advisors” and “volunteers” into the Ukrainian nationalist-held area. The Ukrainian nationalists are very well equipped and as well trained as the Germans can get them, but they are grossly outnumbered by the Soviets.
The Poles are still theoretically at war with both the Soviets and the Ukrainian nationalists. In reality, they are building up their forces to take on whichever side wins in the war between the Soviets and the Ukrainian nationalists.
The Soviets do somewhat less well against the Ukrainians than they did in the early stages of the war against Finland in our timeline. They try to use sheer numbers and firepower to overcome inexperience. The Ukrainian nationalists fight that offensive the way the Germans would have in our timeline, with slashing counteroffensives that cut the Soviet force into pockets, then destroy those pockets. By the time the fall mud bogs both sides down, the Ukrainian nationalists hold a large slice of Soviet Ukraine. They have been reinforced by large numbers of captured Soviet Ukrainian troops, who switch sides.
Long-term consequences
This probably leads to a German-led attempt to partition the Soviet Union, with Soviet minorities providing a fig leaf for the west to allow that to happen.
The Germans need booty to bail themselves out of their economic mess. The Soviets look weak. Poland finds itself forced to become a minor German ally, like Romania and Hungary were in our timeline. The Italians make a lot of noise about helping and send a few division of “volunteers”. A war between a German-created coalition of Soviet minorities, the Poles and the Japanese on the one hand, and the Soviets on the other, would probably tie up both sides for years. Without all of the resources of Western Europe behind it, and without early use of Blitzkrieg, the Germans and their allies would probably not be able to easily knock the Soviets out of the war.
On the other hand, with a British blockade, a war on two fronts, hopefully no stupid Nazi atrocities to unite the Russian people and no horde of American Lend-Lease trucks, the Soviets would not be anywhere near as formidable toward the end of the war as they were in our timeline. Look for the Soviets to get pushed back a looong ways over a period of several years, eventually further than in our timeline. The Germans might even be able to buy trucks and oil from the French and the Brits after a decent interval.
The Germans would, if they had any sense at all, set up a series of puppet states based on the Soviet minorities. Those states would be weak and unstable for the most part, but they would at least be able to handle anti-partisan operations. I would guess that the Soviets would end up like a somewhat larger and more powerful version of Nationalist China in our timeline — still able to resist and tie up large numbers of troops, but not able to retake territory. There is a chance that the loss of Moscow and Leningrad could cause the Communist regime to fall, in which case it would probably be replaced by one or several Nationalist Russian regimes, which would eventually go back to fighting the Germans and their allies.
The Soviet minorities like the Ukrainians would become more and more restless in their allegiance with the Germans as the Soviets or any successor state weakens. The Germans would be desperate for economic resources to pay for this war while the puppet states would be desperately trying to rebuild their economies after Stalinism. Look for fighting of some sort to go on for anywhere from five to seven years.
Germany gains a very large lead in military technology, with jets, rockets and, by 1947 or so, A-bombs. They probably also have crude helicopters by this time, and they have become good at inserting and extracting commandos behind enemy lines.
The Germans build up a very large bomber force to attack Soviet industry in the Urals by this time. They eventually reinvent armored divisions. They then use their bombers and the new atom bombs to force the surrender of the remnants of Soviet or Nationalist Russian opposition.
Up until the atom bombs start falling, the West spends several years happily watching the Germans exhaust themselves trying to destroy the Soviets. Once the Soviet threat to Poland goes away, and once the war became a matter of Germans and Japanese against the Soviets, France and England find themselves in a positions to sell “non-lethal” stuff like trucks, oil, radios, etc. to both sides. The leftists in both countries don’t like that, but rank-and-file workers love the resulting economic boom and aren’t willing to rock the boat.
The United States and Italy both participate in the “non-lethal” trade, and their economies boom. Italy prospers more than the others, because Mussolini is quite willing to build up his arms industry at German expense and send a big hunk of the production to the Germans.
Poland prospers for the war years too. The Polish army is in charge of a hunk of conquered Soviet territory. The Poles are also tied into the German arms supply network. The Poles try to maintain their independence of action, but that is difficult with German troops all around them. The Ukrainians and other German-backed ex-Soviet states are increasingly restless. They are being forced to bear most of the cost of the war, and as the memories of Stalin’s rule fade the mood in those countries becomes increasingly anti-German.
Atom bombs start dropping on Russia. Every other major power in the world kicks their atom bomb programs into high gear. All of the major powers have done quite a bit of research, but they are still years away from a bomb. As Germany shifts troops home from Russia, Britian and France frantically shore up their anti-aircraft defenses and build bomb shelters. Even the United States does the same things. Pro-German and appeasement groups spring up in the West. So does fear and hatred of Germany. The German leadership is aware that they are riding a tiger. They have a massive temporary advantage in any war with the West, but in a few years their own cities will be threatened.
The Germans demand that France, England and the United States stop their nuclear weapons research and open up sites to German inspection. The United States refuses immediately. The French and British stall. Giving in means domination by Germany for the foreseeable future. Both countries start slipping scientists and equipment out to the United States and Canada.
The Germans figure out that the most important part of the English and French programs is slipping away from them. They launch air attacks on the facilities of both countries — using conventional weapons. Those strikes are combined with commando raids. They make it clear that nukes will follow if necessary. They also demand that nuclear scientists be turned over to Germany for internment. France and England are in an impossible position. Many of the scientists are already in the United States or Canada, so they couldn’t be reached even if the countries wanted to turn them over. The public in both countries is in a volatile mood, with some groups calling for appeasement and others calling for an immediate war with Germany.
And that’s where I’d put the story
It wouldn’t be a bad story either. I might write it if I can figure out a way to get to this situation with a little more plausibility.
I suspect that the Western Europeans would fight at some point. They would lose, even if the Germans didn’t use nukes. The French and British would not have had the shock of the 1940 defeats to wake them up.
The German army would be partly tied down in Russia, but it would be battle-hardened and it would have years to hone the strategy and tactics of rapid battle. The French and British would learn some lessons, but nowhere near enough. French army exercises were designed to let France’s 70+ year old generals demonstrate lessons to the troops, not to let the troops discover new things. When the conflict between Germany and the West came, it would probably be over in less time than the Fall of France took in our timeline. The Panzer divisions would roll over France, eliminating the bulk of the British army at the same time.
That would be followed by a cold war between Germany and the US, with the US providing arms and assistance to what was left of the Russians, trying to pry Germany’s Eastern Front allies away from it, and aiding the Nationalist Chinese on a large scale.
And that’s about as far as I dare take this one.
This story was originally published on Dale’s website in February 1998.
