Hitler played it safe in the USSR (1941-1947)

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TL

ATL Europe 1942-43.

Real life boundaries.

OTL history shows that Germany was suicidal stupid for invading the USSR on mass and so deeply. Germany should have only liberated and held on to the anti-Soviet rebel zones like Galician-Ukraine and Estonia and formed a fortified line on the Dnieper River. it could have been a much better tactical plan.

Germany and the USSR were going to eventually clash any how since Germany’s alley, Romania, wanted to annex the ethnically Romanian Moldavia-Bessarabia region of the USSR [[1]] and the USSR did not like the Romanian fascist Iron Guard regime!

The German troops that would have gone to OTL Russia spent ATL 1941 crushing more of the French Resistance, Yugoslav Partisan’s and the Polish Resistance. The Atlantic Wall could have been made better with the saved guns, cement and concordat; so making D-Day even worse for the Anglo-American forces. The Luftwaffe could be repaired and helped to improve [[2]].

OTL Romania was not in a hurry for it and was willing to wait for German help. The USSR was still recovering from its purges, so they were willing to back off for a while. A Romanian /Soviet war in 1942? Germany could have helped defend Romania (after finishing off in Western Europe in 1941) along a shorter frontier in the Ukraine, along the Dnieper and the Baltics, without going deeply in to the USSR to events like the battle of Stalingrad, thus avoiding killing tens of thousands of Axis forces and destroying both hundreds of Axis tanks and aircraft as it did so.

The ATL German forces thought it was would be best stopping Dnieper River and turning it in to a fortified or heavily mined defective barrier. Missions could hit out from there, but only a short way (not the distant Moscow or Stalingrad stuff).

When Hitler played it safe in the USSR it let him hold out until the German's final surrender to the Anglo-American/Free French/Soviet forces after the Battle of Berlin in the March of 1947. Germany could never win, but the war could last longer and cause more damage.

October-December 1940

Field Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim of Finland.

Coventry city centre following 14/15 November 1940 raid.

• 31 October- Germany is defeated in the Battle of Britain.

• November 2- 5,000 incendiary and 10,000 high explosive bombs were dropped on the Bristol's old city.

• November 7- Romania's Conducător Ion Antonescu Antonescu, persuades Adolph Hitler to delay Operation Barbarossa by a year. He says that that the Soviets are still crippled by Stalin’s purges and Romania needed time to upgrade its brave, but ill equipped forces. The Vichy leader Philippe Pétain, Finnish leader Field Marshall Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim and Hungarian Regent Grand Admiral Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya convince Hitler that the defeat of the French and Polish resistance is a must. They tell him that if a war with the USSR dose come, it should be fought up to a good defensive position like the River Dnieper. Germany's leaders set about planning operations in North Africa, Poland and France.

• November 14- Operation Sea Lion is scrapped, but the defences on the French north coast are reinforced heavy and the Atlantic wall is planned out. The idea of the Deutsches Afrikakorps is mooted as Italy struggles to hold on in eastern Italy.

• November 14-15- Coventry city is blitzed by the Luftwaffe, killing several hundred.

• December 1-30- Germany begins a recruiting drive and calls up 200,000 men to join those who already serve in France, Norway and Poland. Some will be used to boost the planned Deutsches Afrikakorps North Africa. U-boat and tank production is slightly increased during this period.

• December 22- Manchester is blitzed, with the Piccadilly district is ablaze from Mosely street to Portland street.

• December 26- The Gloucester Gladiators of the Royal Australian Air Force shot down without loss 2, and crippled 6, of a number of Italian C.R. 42 fighters escorting a bomber formation in Libya. Hanukkah in the Warsaw ghetto parses peacefully.

• December 28- British Hawker Hurricanes shot down three Italian bombers and a fighter over Libya, again without loss. Italy's Dictator, Benito Mussolini, asks Germany for help in North Africa.

Year 1941

This page is not completed and is still being written!

Erwin Rommel and his aids make battle plans in Libya during April 1941.

• January 1-30 Romania begins a recruiting drive and calls up 200,000 men for training. The army is bolstered by 20 imported German Panzer III tanks.

• January 20- The German battle cruisers Gneisenau and Scharnhorst were sighted by an aircraft from H.M.S. Ark Royal during the evening 600 miles W.N.W. from Cape Einisterre, going northward. Subsequent shadowing by RAF aircraft was prevented by low visibility.

• January 20-30- Germany despatches the 200,000 men called up in the December of 1940 to extra postings in France, Poland, Italy and to the planned A5./leichte "Afrika" Panzer Regiment/Deutsches Afrikakorps.

• January 21-23- More than 20,000 Italians surrender at Tabruk to Anglo-Australian and S. African troops and are detained near the junction of the El Adem and Bardia. The fortified town falls to the allies on the 23rd. Germany takes note of what has happened.

• January 30- Hitler tells the Nazi party in his ‘New World Order’ Berlin speech "I do not want to miss pointing out what I pointed out on 3rd of September [1940] in the German Reichstag, that if Jewry were to plunge the world into war, the role of Jewry would be finished in Europe. They may laugh about it today, as they laughed before about my prophecies. The coming months and years will prove that I prophesied rightly in this case too."

• February 10– March 12- The German Africa Corps (German: Deutsches Afrikakorps (D.A.K.)) land in Vichy held Tunisia in order to help defend Italian held Libya.

• February 11-14- The Dutch pro-Nazi movement NSB and its militia, the WA (Weerbaarheidsafdeling - defence section), attacked Jewish neighbourhoods in Amsterdam culminated in a series of street battles between the WA and Jewish self-defence groups and their supporters

• February 14- Germany puts Field Marshal Erwin Rommel is put in charge of the Deutsches Afrikakorps. 2 extra U-boats built in the build-up in late 1940 are sold to Italy.

• February 19- 1941, 19 February, 1941, Swansea was blitz by the German Luftwaffe for 3 days and killed 230. 70 German aircraft dropped 35,000 incendiaries and 800 high explosive bombs over the period of the raid.

• February 24-25 The Communist Party of the Netherlands hold anti-Nazi open air meetings in Noordermarkt and organise a planned strike in Zaanstad, Kennemerland, Noordermarkt, Bussum, Hilversum and Utrecht.

• February 25-27- The Strike of February 1941, general strike was organized by workers in Netherlands against the anti-Jewish measures and activities of the Nazis. It's stronghold was in the port of Leiden.

• February 26-28- 10,000 German troops are transferred from northern France and Belgium, in to the Netherlands for the foreseeable future.

• March 13-14- Clydebank is largely destroyed and 528 people died in the Luftwaffe's attack. From the German point of view, March 1941 saw an improvement with 4,000 raids that month, but the Luftwaffe flew major inland missions only on moonlit nights. The UK's Ports like Clydebank and Hull were easier to find at night and thus made better nocturnal targets. To further confuse the British, Luftwaffe radio silence was to observed until the bombs fell on the target.

• March 31- Hull bombed by Germany again.

• March 23- Berlin is bombed by the R.A.F. The industrial centre at Kiel was also heavily as eighteen tons of H.E. being dropped on it. Hanover was also hit and set ablaze. The R.A.F. lose only 1 aircraft on this raid. Germany makes a serious effort to produce more flack cannons and fighter aircraft. Adolph Hitler meets the nation's military and Nazi party leaders in his Berghoff house and confirms that Operation Barbarossa is to be delayed for a year.

• March 24- Hitler warns the Nazi party in a Berlin confence speech that "eventually there will be war with the United States" after blaming it's Jews of hatching a long term plot to ruin Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

• March 25- The freighter, Canadian Pacific Railway Ship ‘Beaverbrae’ sunk in the North Atlantic by a German U-boat.

• March 27- A military coup d'état was launched by pro-Brittish Serbian military officers opposed to quazi-Fachist King Paul, and let the Regent King Peter II take over. Upon hearing news of the coup in Yugoslavia, Hitler called his military advisers to his Berlin HQ late on on 27 March. He took the coup as a personal insult, and was so angered that he was determined "without waiting for possible declarations of loyalty of the new government to destroy Yugoslavia militarily and as a nation."

• March 28-29 British and Italian warships clash at Matapan. 3 enemy cruisers, 2 large destroyers sunk and one battleship damaged, about 1,500 Italians and a few dozen British sailors perished in the clash.

• March 30- The Scharnhorst and Gneisenau are bombed at Brest harbour and badly damaged.

• March 31- Hull bombed by Germany yet again.

• April 6-10 (Palm Sunday) Operation Punishment starts with German bombing of Belgrade during the invasion of Yugoslavia. The Luftwaffe bombed the city on without a declaration of war, from April 6th to 10th. More than 550 air raids were flown against Belgrade in three waves coming from Romania where German forces were assembled for the now deayed attack on the Soviet Union. In the following few days Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Italy joined Nazi Germany in partitioning Kingdom of Yugoslavia, also giving support of the newly established fascist puppet state Independent State of Croatia.

• April 4 The naval incident Action of 4 April 1941 was a battle in the Atlantic Campaign. A German commerce raider encountered a British auxiliary cruiser and sank her with heavy losses after an hour's fighting.

• April 7-June 7- A mass recruiting drive drive begins, but these Nazis wont go to the East as in reality, but south in to the Balkans to crush Serbia and Greece even harder than in real life! A few hundred more aircraft, guns and tanks are made along with a few more extra U-boats in an industrial drive over the same period of time.

• April 21- A British dawn navy bombardment of Italian held Tripoli is a success some 530 tons of shells having been fired for 20 minutes. Air spotting was rendered difficult by smoke and dust from the air attack, but 3 to 4 ships were destroyed or ablaze in the navy dockyards and 3 more damage (1 being a major Italian destroyer). Both the harbour facilities and various shore establishments were also seriously damaged. There are no UK losses in the raid.

• April 22-23- Plymouth bombed again.
• April 25-28- Kiel is targeted by Britain's Bomber Command and heavily attacked on three nights. Over 150 tons of H.E.bombs and 20,000 incendiary devices were dropped on the port. The docks aren’t hit but fires rage in the town and in vicinity of Krupp’s local steel works.
• April 26-The last of the Greek defensive lines fail and the Allied troops start to flee to the Island of Crete. German parachutists land on mass on the Allies in their enclaves on the Greek mainland and pre-emptily in parts of Crete, and becomes quite evident that nothing was going to stop them!

• April 27- Hinericht Himmler visits Mauthausen and amuses himself as inmates, who work 12 hour days of hard physical labour on a starvation, collapse and die on evil "The Stairs of death", which involved the prisoners carrying a 50kg granite block up the stairway. Any one who collapsed fell on the person following them in a human domino effect that killed or injured many farther down the line.
• April 28- UK, NZ and Australian forces Last ditch stand at Kalamata (Greek: Καλαμάτα Kalamáta, formerly Καλάμαι Kalámai), the second-largest city of the Peloponnese in southern Greece. The capital and chief port of the Messenia regional unit, it lies along the Nedon River at the head of the Messenian Gulf.

• April 29- Plymouth is bombed yet again. There are a few more fighter planes than the RAF exspected in the German bombers' fighter escort wing.

• May 13-The Vichy donkey court trial against French resistance fighter Comte d'Estienne d'Orves begins. The French dislike the donkey court regardless of their view on the Vichy regime.

• May 16 - The Italian army under the Count of Aosta surrenders to Britain at Amba Alagi Ethiopia and the last foreseeable great German air raid on UK hits Birmingham, but Hitler and Goering hope to have a few more going soon.

• May22-30- British troops attack anti-colonial/pro-German rebels in Baghdad and quickly crush them.

• May 24-The Battle of the Denmark Strait sees the German battleship Bismarck and cruiser Prinz Eugen clash with the British heavy cruisers Suffolk, Norfolk, the Royal Navy's battle cruiser Hood and battleship Prince of Wales. The Hood sinks after a shell from the Bismarck starts a fire in the Hood’s ammunition magazine, leading to a catastrophic on-board explosion.

• May 28- Allied and Greek forces fleet to Crete on mass.
• May 30-31- Germany attacks Crete with paratroopers and quickly conquers it.
• May 31st– Germany forbids Jews access to beach & swimming pools in occupied lands (they were banned in Germany a few years earlier). he Luftwaffe launches an air raid in Dublin, killing 38 people.