Alternatively Arabs will also be in conflict with Turkish Revanchist on the question of Hatay if it changes hands after the war.
Of lost monkeys and broken vehicles
- Thread starter Lascaris
- Start date
I think the Arabs and Turks won't fight each other before they take their lands back first so even though there'll be noises the Turks and Arabs know that they need each other more then fighting over Hatay. Also that they'd most likely be united under the USSR umbrella.
If it comes to being TTL, in would be certainly causing interesting dynamics. Abdullah was an ambitious man OTL...
No idea, it is the OTL Assyrian flag till in the 1970s they switched to the current one. Which admittedly I don't like because it fails the basic test of "can it be easily drawn by a 6 year old?"
Well there is that, but it takes different skills, at least to an extend.
At this point, an interesting question from the German point of view is... what are we losing from bringing Iran to the war?
A hypothetical independent Assyria has some obvious strategic issues to deal will. The most basic one. It's landlocked and surrounded by potentially hostile powers. Iraq? It will want it, not least for the oil. Syria? More or less one of the same. Turkey? Here we get into hysterical laughter territory. An equally hypothetical Kurdistan? Maybe but it is highly likely that it is also landlocked even forgetting the bad blood for the Kurds participation in the genocide. So you have a landlocked Assyria, that has to rely to landlocked Kurdistan that has to rely on Iran for supply?
It was supposed to be the Arab federation in 1958, kingdom of Arabia would be a reasonable title. Of course Abdullah could try to become caliph in the place of caliph but a direct descendant of Muhammad as caliph? My Muslim theology is limited but that sounds to me as to close to Shia thus unlikely?
No idea what you may be meaning here.On another note, forgot to mention that it’s good to see Persia and Britain come to an agreement on oil. It’s funny how long term beneficial solutions to OTL issues are found ITTL by tweaking the Brits’ noses a bit
The Kurds, which Kurds? There is a relatively low level insurgency going on in Turkish and Iraqi Kurdistan. If the British push out of Iraqi Kurdistan the Turks and Germans there is potential for more. In the meantime there is also a question what happens to the Iraqi army, or what remains from it after the offensive.
Compared to being invaded and occupied, Iran is arguably better off so far TTL.
It is pretty much short-sighted for certain. Incredibly dumb? Lets see it from the German perspective and what the people in charge know about it. First Iran has just given the allies free use of its territory to move supplies to the Soviet Union. If Iran is technically neutral it is the kind of neutrality the United States are professing attacking German ships on sight and supplying the enemies of Germany. With Iranian hostility taken for granted after the Washington agreement, how much is Germany losing from Iran joining the war? The Iranian air force is negligible, the Iranian army 126,000 men mostly used for internal security and for the last several decades was being kicked around be everyone Germany included, in the previous war they and the Ottomans turned Iran into a battleground without real opposition. Against this "hey we bomb Abadan and destroy/hinder the Anglos oil supply!"
The deal has happened. US ships going to Greece isn't unlikely, after all even in OTL the Greeks were trying to buy USN cruisers after the war had begun.
Thanks a lot!
I would not say so. Dozens of German submarines were deployed to the Mediterranean in OTL, in addition to large numbers of Italian submarines, and in OTL also a dozen Turkish submarines. In addition to which convoys are also targeted by air attack. Destroyers are the warship of choice to cover the convoys against both threats. For that matter they are essential for offensive action as well.
We are talking about the same people who in OTL 1945 nearly came to open blows between France and Britiain in Syria...
For the time being he has three Indian divisions and addition to brigade level formations...
What's the last perception of Iran at war the Germans have? Arguably WW1...
"A big target of importance. And vulnerable just like the fuhrer fears about Ploesti!" What no?
Well what was the German perception of oil infrastructure vulnerability at this point in time, when operation Tidal Wave has not happened yet to give hard data? I could be wrong but my impression is they considered oil facilities pretty vulnerable, not unlike the Anglo-French in their planning against Baku. I won't mention the Italians trying to do serious damage on Bahrain with all of 3 bombers.
Germany has fewer than 250 aircraft in all of the near east as of October 1941...
In all likehood Greece will be firmly in the Western camp. With cold war underway...
Yugoslavia... is going to be interesting. On one hand you have a growing partisan movement. On the other hand you have a large royal army in Greece...
If Turkey has gone communist or pro-Soviet it also turns the frontier of Greek Asia Minor into a frontline...
It's certainly... convenient.
I can see some potential changes here. Why? In OTL Egypt outright threatened to expel the Egyptiote Greeks, if Greece officially recognized Israel... and then Nasser went and expelled them. So my question would be how does the TTL Greek government and public in 1948 react if threatened? By Egypt? or 10 years later if faced with mass expulsions of the Greek community? A lot depends of what happens post October 1941 and the country's situation at the time of course but TTL Greece has never had the Asia Minor disaster but I think it is fair to say that it is way more confident of itself than OTL. This has of course advantages but it also means threats or outright hostile action like the expulsions would be taken... less than well and not exactly dispassionately? In turn hindering the options of any elected government?
That won't be a problem, the Sunnis still by and large consider a Quraysh descent a prerequisite for a caliph. The sharif Husein, who after WWI became King of the Hejaz, proclaimed himself caliph briefly after the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate IOTL.
Agreed, the response may be different, or rather, the means at the disposal of TTL's Greece to respond are different. But the threat from Turkey is at the same time much more acute than IOTL, sharing a much larger land border and with Turkey likely in a different camp altogether. It is also not a given that Egypt will go down the same road as OTL. Nasser's anti-foreigner policies were a result of the humiliation suffered in the Arab-Israeli wars, the Suez crisis, and the rabidly anti-colonialist tenor of the times. A more moderate regime, or leader, might behave differently, especially with a Greece that is more powerful and possibly a strong trading partner. In short I very much doubt that any Greek government would, say, threaten to bombard Alexandria on its own to protect the Egyptiot Greeks (not least because any such act would put them in much greater danger). There is however the possibility that a more (over)confident Greece might participate in TTL's Suez operation in support of her allies, the French and the British.
Re post war Turkey... Supposing that will be some kind of State continuity for Turkey. I would guess that whatever regime would succeed to the present one allied to the Axis, it would be only after of an undetermined occupation period and that even if it won't get divided as Germany; the future Turkey would get harsher political terms and/or that it wouldn't be allowed either to get, at least for a while, an independent foreign policy.
Part 86
Abadan, October 25th, 1941
The bombs start falling. There was some sporadic anti-aircraft fire but it was very little. The 60 German aircraft dropped their bombs almost unmolested and turned back north to their bases. A second raid was less lucky as the aircraft were intercepted by Hurricanes of RAF 261st squadron and further raids would have to wait for some time, the Luftwaffe had 220 aircraft in total in the Balkans and Anatolia and keeping a third tied down in a bombing campaign against Abadan was impractical. Still reconnaissance aircraft had reported fires and very heavy smoke over the refineries. It had been of course difficult to obtain reports from the ground, Brandenburgers and Abwehr agents had been infiltrated in Iran to contact the pro-German elements of the population and sabotage allied targets but contact was understandably difficult. The Lutwaffe reports back to Wever and Goering and by Goering to Hitler spoke of a major success, that surely should affect the British oil supply for some time.
Teheran, October 28th, 1941
President Teymourtash looked at the report of the Abadan raids. Most of the bombs had fallen everywhere but the refineries. The handful that had actually hit the targets had done negligible damage. The biggest damage was several families from refinery workers killed by the bombs. But he was not going to accept such blatant activity against Iran, he very much remembered the previous war when Ottoman, Russian and British troops had used Iran as a battleground with Iran unable to do anything about it. Besides this was giving him an opportunity, both to secure that the British would not try to renege on the recent deal, the Russians would not get ideas and the country unite behind him, after all the Turks had been for centuries the traditional enemy. Iran declared war against the Axis. How much that would matter in the actual war? This remained to be seen.
Kraljevo, October 31st, 1941
The last joint Partisan-Chetnik attempt to take the town from the defending Bulgarians failed to make any headway. After a month a fighting, the battle of Kraljevo, the largest so far in the uprising against the Axis in Serbia was petering out. Worse was to come, while both the Partisans ans the Chetniks also had to deal with a relative dearth of fighting men in Serbia proper. As chance had it the Yugoslav army in exile was overwhelmingly Serb in its composition, as it had been mostly Serb manned units that had managed to escape south. But this also meant that a large chunk of Serbia's population o fighting age was missing.
Uzice, November 2nd, 1941
Fighting broke out between the Chetniks and the Partisans, after a week earlier Draza Mihailovic had refused Tito's proposals to merge the two forces. Mihailovic was in something of a bind. The uprisings in Serbia and Montenegro had caused so far thousands of civilian casualties as the occupiers had reacted with mass reprisals and outright massacres of civilians, while he was also most suspicious of the communists and their partizans despite their cooperation during the Serbian uprising. Ideally he would had liked to cease all attacks and just prepare his forces for a future uprising, at a more opportunate moment. But the active front in Greece and the fact that it was mostly supplied through Yugoslavia was not something that could be ignored. Not if the Chetniks wanted to retain any credibility...
Berlin, November 3rd, 1941
Ernst Udet had been a stressed man. He had resorted to heavy drinking to deal with it but the pressure from Wever and Goring had kept coming, while Wever has also involved himself with his own work forcing through production of Do-19 and countermanding his decisions for the He-177 and Ju-88 bombers to be able to perform dive bombing. The mess that the Bf-110 replacement problem had proven itself to be, both aircraft produced had severe problems and a recent demand to quadruple aircraft production had proven too much. He commited suicide. Erhard Milch would replace him.
Ergani, Diyarbakir, November 8th, 1941
The first train carrying chromite ore left the mines for Germany. Laying down the 312km line from the railroad junction in Cettinkaya, south of Sivas to Diyarbakir, in a bit over 10 months had been a major engineering feat, including the opening of multiple tunnels, and bridging the Euphrates. It had also cost tens of thousands of lives, both allied prisoners of war and Greek, Armenian and Jewish civilians forcibly conscripted from Constantinople and the occupied territories...
Construction of the Euphrates river bridge, photograph courtesy of Trains of Turkey
East of Malta, November 8th/9th 1941
Convoy BETA, carrying nearly 52,000 tons of fuel and supplies for the Axis forces in Libya had left Italian waters the previous day and Supermarina had taken a risk sailing it east of Malta, on the assumption allied ships should not be able to attack it at night. It had been a serious miscalculation, one somewhat inexplicable in the aftermath of the battle of Cythera, as the convoy came under attack by Royal Navy cruisers and destroyers which sunk all 7 merchant ships in the convoy alongside one of the escorting destroyers. The period after June had not been very good for the Italian merchant marine and things were not looking to be improving, by the end of the month its losses to submarines, aircraft and surface raiders would reach 448,000 tons... [1]
Western Mediterranean, November 11th 1941
Salvatore Todaro had requested transfer from command of the submarine Commandante Cappellini, in the Atlantic to one of the MAS flotillas, of the Regia Marina, either the ones operating out of Lemnos, Kavala and Thessaloniki against the Greeks or the ones operating in the Black sea again the Soviets. Instead he had been given command of the recently commissioned Ammiraglio Caraciollo submarine. His first Mediterranean patrol had proven uneventful. In this one he was apparently luckier as he sighted what appeared to be a British carrier, heading west. Todaro attacked putting two torpedoes on the British ship, before Caraciollo being sunk by the British carrier's escorts. HMS Glorious, on its way back to Gibraltar after delivering one more complement of Hurricanes to Malta would sink the next day. Todaro would be posthumously awarded the Italian Medaglia d'Oro and have a submarine class named after him post-war...
West of Moscow, November 12th 1941
First it was snowing. Then it had begun snowing more. Then it wad continued to snow even more as German soldiers, often enough limited to winter gear they had looted from villages and prisoners of war start freezing. If their Soviet counterparts noted the cold, after all the snow was not partial to the German trenches over the Soviet trenches, they did not give much sign of it. Beyond putting it to good use as the first ski troops start engaging the invaders.
North Western Anatolia, November 14th 1941
The soldier turned his head at the sound of "Keeka rika" and the thunder of the hooves, as a machine gun opened up and screams of "Cherkez" went over the company of mostly green recruits that had been caught by surprise. He did recognise the Circassian war cry, his own grandmother had been Circassian. He had little to react as the former cavalryman, turned guerrilla cut him down with a smooth move of his shashka. The Grand National Assembly had not taken well to the Circassians that had defied it two decades ago siding first with the sultan and then remaining in Greek Ionia instead of facing its wrath. It had been pay-time when Turkish armies had marched all the way to the Aegean the previous March. But Circassians were not taking well to oppression. Just as their cousins the other side of the border fought for Turkey, Greek Circassians took to the hills to fight on. They were not the only ones. The Pontic Greeks, resettled to Ionia after the population exchange, had a grudge to hold and thousands of veterans of the guerrilla fighting in the Pontic mountains in the previous war. Then there were the tens of thousands from the mountain villages of central Greece and the Peloponnese who had settled in Ionia over the past two decades, often enough whole villages from Aetolia, Eurytania and Arcadia. That the mountains of old Greece were not exactly known for peaceful submission to authority might had not escaped the mind of Venizelos when he encouraged the movement...
El Agheila, Libya, November 17th, 1941
The last British attack back in June had been broken in three days of fighting with the British losing more than twice as many tanks as the Germans and Italians, before even counting that many of the German and Italian tanks had been recovered and repaired. But this one, six British divisions backed by over 700 tanks and as many aircraft was a beast of a different nature. Never before since the beginning of the war, had the British army launched an offensive of that scale, with that many tanks and aircraft...
[1] And yes that means the Allies are roughly 8 months ahead of OTL here, though that includes the first 7 months of 1942 when the Italians lost less tonnage than they had lost just in November and December 1941.
The bombs start falling. There was some sporadic anti-aircraft fire but it was very little. The 60 German aircraft dropped their bombs almost unmolested and turned back north to their bases. A second raid was less lucky as the aircraft were intercepted by Hurricanes of RAF 261st squadron and further raids would have to wait for some time, the Luftwaffe had 220 aircraft in total in the Balkans and Anatolia and keeping a third tied down in a bombing campaign against Abadan was impractical. Still reconnaissance aircraft had reported fires and very heavy smoke over the refineries. It had been of course difficult to obtain reports from the ground, Brandenburgers and Abwehr agents had been infiltrated in Iran to contact the pro-German elements of the population and sabotage allied targets but contact was understandably difficult. The Lutwaffe reports back to Wever and Goering and by Goering to Hitler spoke of a major success, that surely should affect the British oil supply for some time.
Teheran, October 28th, 1941
President Teymourtash looked at the report of the Abadan raids. Most of the bombs had fallen everywhere but the refineries. The handful that had actually hit the targets had done negligible damage. The biggest damage was several families from refinery workers killed by the bombs. But he was not going to accept such blatant activity against Iran, he very much remembered the previous war when Ottoman, Russian and British troops had used Iran as a battleground with Iran unable to do anything about it. Besides this was giving him an opportunity, both to secure that the British would not try to renege on the recent deal, the Russians would not get ideas and the country unite behind him, after all the Turks had been for centuries the traditional enemy. Iran declared war against the Axis. How much that would matter in the actual war? This remained to be seen.
Kraljevo, October 31st, 1941
The last joint Partisan-Chetnik attempt to take the town from the defending Bulgarians failed to make any headway. After a month a fighting, the battle of Kraljevo, the largest so far in the uprising against the Axis in Serbia was petering out. Worse was to come, while both the Partisans ans the Chetniks also had to deal with a relative dearth of fighting men in Serbia proper. As chance had it the Yugoslav army in exile was overwhelmingly Serb in its composition, as it had been mostly Serb manned units that had managed to escape south. But this also meant that a large chunk of Serbia's population o fighting age was missing.
Uzice, November 2nd, 1941
Fighting broke out between the Chetniks and the Partisans, after a week earlier Draza Mihailovic had refused Tito's proposals to merge the two forces. Mihailovic was in something of a bind. The uprisings in Serbia and Montenegro had caused so far thousands of civilian casualties as the occupiers had reacted with mass reprisals and outright massacres of civilians, while he was also most suspicious of the communists and their partizans despite their cooperation during the Serbian uprising. Ideally he would had liked to cease all attacks and just prepare his forces for a future uprising, at a more opportunate moment. But the active front in Greece and the fact that it was mostly supplied through Yugoslavia was not something that could be ignored. Not if the Chetniks wanted to retain any credibility...
Berlin, November 3rd, 1941
Ernst Udet had been a stressed man. He had resorted to heavy drinking to deal with it but the pressure from Wever and Goring had kept coming, while Wever has also involved himself with his own work forcing through production of Do-19 and countermanding his decisions for the He-177 and Ju-88 bombers to be able to perform dive bombing. The mess that the Bf-110 replacement problem had proven itself to be, both aircraft produced had severe problems and a recent demand to quadruple aircraft production had proven too much. He commited suicide. Erhard Milch would replace him.
Ergani, Diyarbakir, November 8th, 1941
The first train carrying chromite ore left the mines for Germany. Laying down the 312km line from the railroad junction in Cettinkaya, south of Sivas to Diyarbakir, in a bit over 10 months had been a major engineering feat, including the opening of multiple tunnels, and bridging the Euphrates. It had also cost tens of thousands of lives, both allied prisoners of war and Greek, Armenian and Jewish civilians forcibly conscripted from Constantinople and the occupied territories...
Construction of the Euphrates river bridge, photograph courtesy of Trains of Turkey
East of Malta, November 8th/9th 1941
Convoy BETA, carrying nearly 52,000 tons of fuel and supplies for the Axis forces in Libya had left Italian waters the previous day and Supermarina had taken a risk sailing it east of Malta, on the assumption allied ships should not be able to attack it at night. It had been a serious miscalculation, one somewhat inexplicable in the aftermath of the battle of Cythera, as the convoy came under attack by Royal Navy cruisers and destroyers which sunk all 7 merchant ships in the convoy alongside one of the escorting destroyers. The period after June had not been very good for the Italian merchant marine and things were not looking to be improving, by the end of the month its losses to submarines, aircraft and surface raiders would reach 448,000 tons... [1]
Western Mediterranean, November 11th 1941
Salvatore Todaro had requested transfer from command of the submarine Commandante Cappellini, in the Atlantic to one of the MAS flotillas, of the Regia Marina, either the ones operating out of Lemnos, Kavala and Thessaloniki against the Greeks or the ones operating in the Black sea again the Soviets. Instead he had been given command of the recently commissioned Ammiraglio Caraciollo submarine. His first Mediterranean patrol had proven uneventful. In this one he was apparently luckier as he sighted what appeared to be a British carrier, heading west. Todaro attacked putting two torpedoes on the British ship, before Caraciollo being sunk by the British carrier's escorts. HMS Glorious, on its way back to Gibraltar after delivering one more complement of Hurricanes to Malta would sink the next day. Todaro would be posthumously awarded the Italian Medaglia d'Oro and have a submarine class named after him post-war...
West of Moscow, November 12th 1941
First it was snowing. Then it had begun snowing more. Then it wad continued to snow even more as German soldiers, often enough limited to winter gear they had looted from villages and prisoners of war start freezing. If their Soviet counterparts noted the cold, after all the snow was not partial to the German trenches over the Soviet trenches, they did not give much sign of it. Beyond putting it to good use as the first ski troops start engaging the invaders.
North Western Anatolia, November 14th 1941
The soldier turned his head at the sound of "Keeka rika" and the thunder of the hooves, as a machine gun opened up and screams of "Cherkez" went over the company of mostly green recruits that had been caught by surprise. He did recognise the Circassian war cry, his own grandmother had been Circassian. He had little to react as the former cavalryman, turned guerrilla cut him down with a smooth move of his shashka. The Grand National Assembly had not taken well to the Circassians that had defied it two decades ago siding first with the sultan and then remaining in Greek Ionia instead of facing its wrath. It had been pay-time when Turkish armies had marched all the way to the Aegean the previous March. But Circassians were not taking well to oppression. Just as their cousins the other side of the border fought for Turkey, Greek Circassians took to the hills to fight on. They were not the only ones. The Pontic Greeks, resettled to Ionia after the population exchange, had a grudge to hold and thousands of veterans of the guerrilla fighting in the Pontic mountains in the previous war. Then there were the tens of thousands from the mountain villages of central Greece and the Peloponnese who had settled in Ionia over the past two decades, often enough whole villages from Aetolia, Eurytania and Arcadia. That the mountains of old Greece were not exactly known for peaceful submission to authority might had not escaped the mind of Venizelos when he encouraged the movement...
El Agheila, Libya, November 17th, 1941
The last British attack back in June had been broken in three days of fighting with the British losing more than twice as many tanks as the Germans and Italians, before even counting that many of the German and Italian tanks had been recovered and repaired. But this one, six British divisions backed by over 700 tanks and as many aircraft was a beast of a different nature. Never before since the beginning of the war, had the British army launched an offensive of that scale, with that many tanks and aircraft...
[1] And yes that means the Allies are roughly 8 months ahead of OTL here, though that includes the first 7 months of 1942 when the Italians lost less tonnage than they had lost just in November and December 1941.
So we get a much less unified Yugoslavian partisan response. I think it's a good thing for the WAllies as you can get the good PR of having the Yugoslavian army take back Yugoslavia. Also that the left and right can be more easily divided and conquered post WWII. If we get a good king Yugoslavia is set on a good path.
Iran/Persia goes for war against the Axis, which is something I didn't expect. It's mainly going to be token gestures but I hope Iran gets to be in the WAllies side at the end.
PS: Teymourtash can change the name back to Persia as it's a relic of the last Shah of Persia.
Partisan movements in Ionia is a refreshing look at how different this war is compared to otl. The Turks are not allies of the WAllies ittl and considering Ionia isn't pacified in any way I think the Turks and their axis allies may not hold for long, although the Greek counterattack may still be on the drawing boards.
Finally considering the English in El Aghelia don't need to reinforce the Greeks over there will they have a better chance to stop Rommel?
Iran/Persia goes for war against the Axis, which is something I didn't expect. It's mainly going to be token gestures but I hope Iran gets to be in the WAllies side at the end.
PS: Teymourtash can change the name back to Persia as it's a relic of the last Shah of Persia.
Partisan movements in Ionia is a refreshing look at how different this war is compared to otl. The Turks are not allies of the WAllies ittl and considering Ionia isn't pacified in any way I think the Turks and their axis allies may not hold for long, although the Greek counterattack may still be on the drawing boards.
Finally considering the English in El Aghelia don't need to reinforce the Greeks over there will they have a better chance to stop Rommel?
Huzzah! An update, and a juicy one as well!
I worry how merciful the Greeks might feel when they start marching back out if this is how Turkey is acting...
It strikes me that Iran/Persia and Greece are actually on the same side of a war for once now... and the Greeks are fighting at Thermopylae... There's a joke somewhere in there but damned if I can find it.
Seems that 'German intelligence' continues to be as cunningly insightful as ever. I'd guessed Iran would probably join the allies a ways back, and I'm happy to see them do so! I wonder what the post-war ramifications would be? Maybe some shifted borders? At any rate they should be considerably better off, hopefully they can dodge their cold-war instability here.
Oof the 'Bridge over the River Euphrates' seems like the kind of thing that would be remembered post-war. Would be shame were anything to happen to it... Nice picture though. What is it with Axis powers and bridges?
Seems they didn't quite get there before winter did they? Shame. Surely now German High Command will take a step back, reevaluate, and.... nah...
I was wondering why we hadn't heard much out of Occupied Anatolia and there we go! Ties more Turkish troops down there, the Siege of Smyrna gets that much harder.
I worry how merciful the Greeks might feel when they start marching back out if this is how Turkey is acting...
It strikes me that Iran/Persia and Greece are actually on the same side of a war for once now... and the Greeks are fighting at Thermopylae... There's a joke somewhere in there but damned if I can find it.
Like the River Kwai ?
Tough luck...
Are German diplomats being kicked down into a pit yet ?
Diminishing Italian shipping capacity combined with increasing British forces in Libya does not bode well for Rommel. I'm curious to see how the Eastern Mediterranean is going to look soon. Looks like the butterflies have caught up to the Battle of Moscow and the Eastern Front. That bridge along the Euphrates seems like a natural choke-point, be a shame if anything happened to it. I wonder how that Soviet offensive in Turkey is going and what's going on in Syria right now. Can't wait to see what's next!
I think 'not very' is a very real possibility as the Turks are acting like the Germans but no one wants to keep them as a strongish country. I'd think the Greeks would ethnically cleanse the Turks out of areas they control and the USSR will put Russians and people they don't want in Turkey. One stupid possibility is to send Jews there.
Well this time it's the Huns who are coming for the civilised Greeks? Aren't the Persians just as barbaric? /S
Considering the amount of Circassians in Ionia, would the Islamic Circassians convert to Christianity? I could see the Circassians forming a minority population in Western Anatolia, so they'd speak Circassian but be Christian/Orthodox.
They weren't IOTL (unless you count as an ally a state that declared war to Germany in February 1945 when the nearest major German army was somewhere around Budapest).
Just read this entire timeline and was very impressed with the detail and close look at the war.
I already knew you were well informed Lascaris, from your comments in Earl Marshal's timeline, but I had no idea you had your own story. It really is very good, and I can't wait to see how it develops.
Iran clearly being on the Allied side might set them up for success later in the Middle East, rather than their current isolated status, though their Shia population will always lead to some division. Turkey is going to suffer so, so much for this war. It's hard to imagine Greece not pulling a Kaliningrad on them, and just absolutely cleansing them from the strategic territory they want.
I predict that the Northwest of Anatolia, around Izmit and bursa will be taken as compensation, along with the Italian bits. This would Give Greece complete control of both the Aegan, the Sea of Marmara, and a solid position into the Black Sea. They will probably adjust the borders in Bulgaria too, and keep the land that Yugoslavia gave them to join the war.
bigger impact than just land though will be the development of industry over the war. lend lease from the US will allow factories and material to be set up in greece, leading to a much stronger post war situation, especially compared to OTL when they were simply occupied and exploited. The fact that this development is centered in 'old greece' will keep that part of the country relevant when the center of weight shifts north to Constantinople.
I already knew you were well informed Lascaris, from your comments in Earl Marshal's timeline, but I had no idea you had your own story. It really is very good, and I can't wait to see how it develops.
Iran clearly being on the Allied side might set them up for success later in the Middle East, rather than their current isolated status, though their Shia population will always lead to some division. Turkey is going to suffer so, so much for this war. It's hard to imagine Greece not pulling a Kaliningrad on them, and just absolutely cleansing them from the strategic territory they want.
I predict that the Northwest of Anatolia, around Izmit and bursa will be taken as compensation, along with the Italian bits. This would Give Greece complete control of both the Aegan, the Sea of Marmara, and a solid position into the Black Sea. They will probably adjust the borders in Bulgaria too, and keep the land that Yugoslavia gave them to join the war.
bigger impact than just land though will be the development of industry over the war. lend lease from the US will allow factories and material to be set up in greece, leading to a much stronger post war situation, especially compared to OTL when they were simply occupied and exploited. The fact that this development is centered in 'old greece' will keep that part of the country relevant when the center of weight shifts north to Constantinople.
What influence does Iran have in Iraq at this point? I'm wondering specifically what does this entail for the Shia population in Iraq, whether or not it can get them to support more proactively the Allies in Iraq against King Ghazi.
Iran basically takes Turkey's role in otl as the premier Islamic power. One thing I hope that would happen is that a secular sect mutates with western ideas into a sect of Islam that wants to be moderate and stuff.
Turkey will not get sympathy from anyone and every greatish power will have a reason to fuck with Turkey. Greece has the Megali plan to dominate the Aegean and take the coastal bits. The USSR frankly wants to spread Russian influence into Turkey and use Turkey as a way to fuck with NATO. Idk how Turkey and Greece's borders would be but at least there were Greeks in the regions you mentioned before the Turks forced the Greeks to move, so you can't feel too sympathetic to the Turks having a taste of their own medicine. Kalinigrad is a travesty that shouldn't have happened but ittl looks like the same thing's going to happen again.
I'd think they'd go inland for a bigger buffer (like from Ekisehir to Antalya) for Greece's maximalist gains. Your claim is much more conservative and likely. Idk if they take the Rhodope mountains too (maximalist position again, minor adjustments are more likely).
I think Constantinople will be Greece's economic and administrative capital since the Greeks would've moved there if they could. Ittl they could so they would do that. I'd think 'old Greece' and Smyrna would be the other main industrial regions of Greece along with Constantinople and East Thrace.
The only question is whether such an area would be part of the RSFSR or the Georgian and Armenian SSRs are expanded (with energetic efforts to "persuade" the Laz and Hemshin that they are just Muslim Georgians/Armenians who need to be reminded of their roots, as after all, language is more important than some superstitions in determining nationality in the Soviet Union).
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I think greater Armenia carved out from eastern Turkey is bound to happen ittl post WWII, with the Pontus given to Georgia. I think in the long term those nations would be majority Georgian/Armenian. Kurdistan is also going to happen ittl and Assyria's a maybe.
I think even with Constantinople under greek control wouldn't be the capital due to the fact it is exposed to the soviet black fleet