Brainstorming Exercise

Scenario Seeds--World War II

Let's see if we can still find some fresh perspectives on World War II

By: Dale R. Cozort



 

Alternate History Islands From A to Z.

Brainstorming ideas that range throughout history and across the planet.

Scenario Seeds=World War II 

Lots of mini-scenarios related to World War II.


Scenario Seeds- Other

Brainstorming ideas that may become scenarios in a couple of issues.


Best of the Comment Section


POD is an amateur press magazine and also a forum for discussing AH and AH-related ideas.  A lot of the comments don't make sense unless you've following the dialogue.  Here are some of my general-interest ones.  


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  1. What if Turkey had entered World War II in mid-August of 1944?  Turkey stayed neutral in World War II until late February 1945 when Germany was definitely beaten.  What if they had decided in mid-August 1944 that the German defenses had collapsed on both the eastern and western fronts and it was safe to jump in?  The Turkish Army wasn’t much of an offensive threat at that point, but the Germans were stretched so thin that having to deal with an active front against a regular army in the Balkans would have been quite a challenge.  Churchill would have loved to divert Allied efforts from France to the Balkans, but the US would not be enthusiastic about doing that.  It’s possible that Hitler would decide to withdraw German forces from part of the Balkans.  That might make sense partly because Turkish raw materials were a major motivation to hang on to the area and partly because getting out might suck the Allies in, hopefully embroiling them in a scramble for power and territory between various Balkan countries and factions.  On the other hand, until Romania switched sides on August 23 of 1944, pulling out of the Balkans would have exposed Romanian oil fields to air and eventually ground attack.  That brings up an interesting point.  If Turkey entered the war, what impact would that have on Romania?  If the Romanians thought that the Western Allies were going to advance through the Balkans, they might try to wait and negotiate with the British rather than the Soviets.  That might actually delay the Romanians switching sides and give the Germans access to Romanian oil for a few more weeks.  If Britain actually did accept a Romanian surrender, then things get really sticky, with Soviet and British troops ending up face-to-face at a point of traditional rivalry.  
  2. What if Mustafa Kemal Ataturk lives an extra five or ten years and leads Turkey through World War II?  Ataturk was in his fifties when he died in 1938.  If he had lived, what would Turkey have done in World War II?  Would his policy have been more or less effective than those of his successors? 
  3. What would it have taken to give helicopters a major role in World War II?  The first primitive helicopters were around during World War II, and played a minor role in it.  What if helicopter technology had advanced a bit more quickly?  There are a lot of possibilities here depending on which countries advanced most quickly.  German helicopters for the airborne assaults of 1940 or the 1941 assault on Crete?  Getting from our time-line’s technology levels to something operational for those battles would be quite a stretch.  US or British helicopters for the D-Day landings?  Somewhat more feasible, but it would take quite a bit to get them good enough to make a major difference.
  4. What if the Axis had captured and duplicated US proximity fuse technology early enough to get it to their forces by mid-1944?  Proximity fuses gave US anti-aircraft guns a major advantage because a shell didn’t actually have to hit a plane to damage it.  The shell just had to get close, detect that it was close and then explode.  The US took extraordinary care to avoid having proximity fuses fall into Axis hands, but let’s say a dud shell lodges in a Japanese or German plane or lands on a Japanese or German ship.  An alert ordinance-disposal person realizes that he has something out of the ordinary on his hands and the technology is looked at and reproduced, at least by the Germans.  I’m not sure if the Japanese would have the technology base to do that.  In any case, German anti-aircraft fire gets a lot more effective in mid-1944 and Allied bomber losses get heavier.  Ground combat gets more bloody also because proximity fuses can be used to in artillery shells to more easily create airbursts.
  5. What if the Japanese had captured a US ‘Purple’ code-breaking machine during the fall of Singapore?   The US had loaned the British one and the British didn’t get it out before the fall of Singapore, but Japanese apparently didn’t find it.  The machine duplicated one of the widely used Japanese coding machines and could have tipped off the Japanese to vulnerabilities in their codes.
  6. What if the Germans had captured documents or key personnel from the Polish or French code-breaking efforts?  The Poles had gone a long way toward breaking Enigma, and the French had extended that effort.  Getting a good look at either effort would have gone a long ways toward telling the Germans that their codes were vulnerable.
  7. What if the US effort to relieve the garrison at Wake Island shortly after World War II hadn’t turned back?  Would the navy have been able to fight their way through?  Would the cost have been worth it?
  8. What if the Soviets had attacked Japanese-held Manchuria in the spring of 1940?  In some ways that would have been a logical move.  The Soviets and Japanese had a major rivalry going and had fought a couple of medium-sized border wars in the area.  The Soviet nightmare was a two-front war with the Germans on the west and the Japanese on the east.  Why not try to neutralize the Japanese while the Germans were tied up against France and Germany?  That wasn’t really an option after the Winter War with Finland exposed Soviet military deficiencies, but if the Soviets focused on building up to settle with the Japanese once and for all in the fall and winter of 1939/40 they might decide to take a rain-check on invading Finland, which would mean that they would not find out about those deficiencies until they actually went after the Japanese.  The attack on the Japanese in Manchuria might actually go considerably better than the one on Finland did because Soviet officers in the Far East hadn’t been purged to the same extent that a lot of the rest of the army had.  At the same time, the Soviets would not be able to beat the Japanese anywhere near as quickly as the Germans beat the French and English.  They would have a major advantage in armor, but they would have a hard time gaining control of the air, given the quality or Japanese planes and pilots.  Probable result: Japan loses territory and battles but is not out of the war when Germany finishes off France.  What happens then?
  9. What if Kim Philby and his group of spies had been unmasked sometime between the summer of 1939 and the spring of 1940?  There would probably be an upsurge in anti-Soviet feeling in Britain and probably to some extent France and the US.  What else does that change in World War II?  In the Cold War?
  10. What if the Germans had feinted toward northern Norway in the spring of 1940, but then actually went after Iceland with the 3000 odd troops that landed at Narvik?  I’m guessing that they might have been able to take the island if they caught the British navy out of position badly enough, but then they would have been sorry they did.  The gap between Iceland and Norway would be too wide to be effectively controlled by land-based aircraft, and the German navy couldn’t fight through the British navy to land supplies.  On the other hand, the British wouldn’t have a lot of land-power to spare for a while if the battle of France went the way it did historically.  The US military and Congress would be very alarmed at the idea of German troops in Iceland, and the US military buildup would accelerate.  Britain would probably get less in the way of American arms aid than it did historically because the military would want that material at home.  The German troops would probably eventually wither on the vine, but how would their presence affect the rest of the war?
  11. What if the British ran out of hard currency before the US presidential election of 1940?  Historically when the British ran out of money to pay for US arms and raw materials Roosevelt was able to step up with Lend-Lease, essentially giving the material to Britain, though with some strings attached.  He might not have been able to do that with an election coming up.  If not, what then?   Would the British have to drastically cut back on their arms and raw materials imports at a time when Hitler was still very threatening?  What would happen to tanks and planes that the British had ordered but couldn’t pay for?  One problem with this scenario is how the British could have ended up that much worse off financially.  Maybe they spent more hard currency supporting an earlier build-up of their air force, ending up with several hundred additional obsolescent US-built fighters and bombers, but no way to pay for newer ones.  Maybe they waited a little longer before they stopped repaying World War I debts to the US.  Maybe the US congress required that some of those debts be paid back before arms deals would be allowed back before the war.

 

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Copyright 2006 By Dale R. Cozort

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