Taking a Duce (A Benito Mussolini SI)

[Alenco98]

Excerpt from Sisu: Finland's Peril During the Second World War and Early Cold War
By Carl Gustav Mannerheim, 1957

The period of uneasy peace that followed the end of the Winter War in early 1940 was, to most Finns, never regarded as anything more than an intermission. Though the Moscow Peace Treaty had formally ended hostilities, the harsh territorial concessions imposed on Finland—chiefly the cession of Karelia—left a bitter taste, and the sudden appearance of Italian peacekeepers on Finnish soil brought more confusion than clarity. Peace may have been declared, but in the hearts of the Finnish people, war still lingered just beyond the pines.

In Helsinki, a flurry of diplomatic activity followed the armistice. The government of President Risto Ryti, led by a fragile coalition of centrist and conservative forces, worked feverishly to rebuild the economy and rearm the nation without provoking the Soviet bear. The loss of the Karelian Isthmus had displaced over 400,000 Finns and placed enormous strain on the already modest economy. Yet amid these hardships, Finland refused to kneel.

Italy's sudden emergence as a peacekeeping guarantor had, at first, been welcomed. Mussolini, ever the opportunist, presented Italy as a neutral arbiter—one who could shield Finland from German encroachment while simultaneously discouraging further Soviet aggression. Italian military engineers helped repair war-damaged railways and ports, and Italian trade credits flowed into Finnish industry, sparking a minor postwar recovery. A sense of wary optimism pervaded the political class. But the Finnish people, and more sober voices in the military, viewed this alliance with suspicion.

Germany, meanwhile, maintained a cold but watchful distance. Despite several back-channel overtures, including economic offers from German firms and political whispers from Berlin, Finland resisted entanglement. Italian pressure—discreet yet unyielding—was instrumental in this restraint. The Italian ambassador in Helsinki, Count Giulio Vivaldi, worked closely with Marshal Mannerheim to steer Finland along a neutral course. It was a marriage of convenience, but one that bought Finland time.

Yet beneath the surface, cracks were beginning to show. The National Coalition Party, rooted in staunch anti-communism, and the Agrarian League, driven by the desire to reclaim lost farmland, both began calling for a renewed war against the Soviet Union as early as late 1940. They were emboldened by the continued deterioration of German-Soviet relations, and when Operation Barbarossa began in May 1941, many in Parliament argued that the time had come to reclaim Karelia and strike back.

The pressure mounted, but Mannerheim and Vivaldi—once adversaries in temperament—united in purpose. Their joint lobbying, conducted with a mixture of dignity and realpolitik, slowly sapped the momentum of the pro-German factions. Finland would not join the Reich. Not now, not ever.

Time would prove them right. By December 1941, the German army was bleeding in the East. Though Kiev had fallen after a brutal campaign, the Wehrmacht stalled at the gates of Minsk and was mired in a bloodbath outside Leningrad. Then came the thunderbolt: on December 16, Pope Pius XII excommunicated both the Nazi Party and all Catholic members of the Wehrmacht. On December 17, news of Italian radio broadcasts condemning the Holocaust and Germany's war crimes spread like wildfire across Europe. German morale fractured. On the Finnish streets, newsboys shouted the impossible: "Duce Condemns Hitler!"—but it was too late to heal the cracks forming in Finnish-Italian relations.

Because on January 26, 1942, everything changed.

The Treaty of Yalta, announced in a flurry of cables and foreign ministry leaks, redrew the political map of Europe—and placed Finland squarely within the Soviet sphere of influence. It was a betrayal more bitter than the Moscow Peace. Italy, which had pledged to defend Finland's neutrality, had acquiesced. Mussolini's signature, fresh in ink, confirmed the worst fears of Helsinki's cabinet. Overnight, the Italian flag that had flown over peacekeeping barracks became a symbol of shame. Finnish civilians jeered and booed the Italian soldiers as they boarded trains out of Tampere and Vaasa. Young boys threw pebbles; old men turned their backs. "Traitors!" was scrawled in red on the walls of the Italian embassy.

With the specter of Soviet domination once again looming, Ryti ordered the immediate mobilization of the Finnish military. By February 1942, Finnish troops were redeployed along the eastern border in full wartime posture. Mannerheim, aging but resolute, oversaw the reorganization personally, ensuring that every available rifle and artillery piece was brought to bear.

Finland's next step came swiftly. Inspired by the Netherlands, which signed a defense pact with the United States and United Kingdom on February 1, followed by Norway on February 3 and Sweden on February 5, Finland cast aside its fears of Soviet reprisal and turned to the Atlantic powers. On February 7, 1942, Finland became the fourth northern nation to enter the now Atlantic pact officially allying with both Washington and London.

Less than ten days later, on February 15, the first British and American troops landed in Helsinki to cheering crowds. The mood had shifted. Flags waved. Bands played. The last vestiges of the Italian alliance were swept away in a tide of Western banners and English accents.

And thus began the Karelia Crisis, Finland's final reckoning with the traumas of the Winter War and the broken promises of continental Europe. It came not with a declaration of war, but with the quiet arrival of Allied boots on Nordic snow.

Finland, battered but unbroken, had found its place in the new world order.

-

February 14, 1942
Helsinki, Finland

They came through the station like ghosts—heads down, boots dragging, their olive-drab uniforms no longer crisp but weather-worn and soured with shame. I was only a few steps from the platform, near the black iron railing where a crowd had already gathered. Men, women, children. Not organized, not like a protest—just raw emotion spilling out onto the snow-caked cobblestones.

I wasn't even sure what brought me there at first. Maybe habit. Maybe anger. But when I saw them—those so-called peacekeepers, those Italian liars—I felt it boil up.

"You bastards sold us!" someone shouted.

A woman next to me, old enough to remember the Tsar, spat at the ground and muttered, "Better the Soviets than cowards who smile as they stab us in the back."

One of the soldiers, maybe twenty, met my eyes. He looked young. Too young to be carrying that rifle. He had a trembling cigarette in his mouth and eyes like wet glass. I wanted to feel sorry for him, but I couldn't. Not after Yalta. Not after Mussolini signed us over to Stalin like we were cattle.

So I raised my voice. "Menette kotiin, petturit!" Go home, traitors.

The words caught like fire. Others took it up. Some shouted in Finnish. Others in broken Italian. I heard "Viva Stalin" once—probably sarcastic. Maybe not.

Children started throwing snowballs. A few had small rocks tucked inside. One hit a soldier in the shoulder. He flinched but kept walking.

They didn't retaliate. Of course not. What could they do now? Their orders were to withdraw. To vanish. To wash their hands of us and disappear into the south like nothing ever happened.

I saw an officer, tall, mustached, trying to maintain dignity. He was mouthing something to himself—"Non ascoltarli... non ascoltarli…" Don't listen to them. I almost laughed. Imagine being the one betrayed and having to console the betrayer.

As the train pulled up, hissing and groaning, the soldiers began to board. Some looked relieved. Some looked ashamed. None looked proud.

And we kept yelling. Not because we thought it would change anything. Not because they deserved to suffer.

But because we had to. Because it was the only power we had left.

And as the train pulled away, one boy beside me, maybe sixteen, saluted mockingly and whispered, "Good riddance."

I didn't say a word after that. I just stood there, fists clenched in my coat pockets, listening to the whistle fade into the distance.

The Italians were gone. And we were alone again.

But this time, we were ready.

-

February 14, 1942
Helsinki Station, Finland
Private Vittorio Ferrante, 2nd Alpini Division

The snow was falling again—slow, steady, like ash. I watched it melt on the windowpane of the train as it waited at the platform. It was too quiet inside the cabin, except for the low murmur of boots scraping the floor and the occasional cough. Nobody wanted to speak. No one wanted to admit what we all knew.

We weren't peacekeepers anymore. We were ghosts.

Outside, the crowd was already swelling. At first, I thought maybe it was a farewell, some last polite gesture from the Finns. But then the shouting started. A woman's voice cracked like a whip through the air. Then came a snowball—then another, and another, each one harder than the last.

I turned to look. There must have been a hundred of them. Old men in coats too thin for the weather, young mothers with babies strapped to their chests, children glaring like we'd stolen their toys. I caught the eye of a boy—no older than my brother back home in Naples. He was yelling something in Finnish, his face twisted into something I didn't recognize. He threw a rock. It missed me, but I flinched anyway.

"Don't look at them," our sergeant said. "Just keep your head down. Get on the train."

But I couldn't help it.

This was not how it was supposed to go. When we arrived in 1940, they looked at us with suspicion, yes—but also with a kind of cautious hope. We helped rebuild bridges, cleared roads, brought in supplies. We drank with their officers, traded cigarettes with their boys. Hell, one of them taught me how to skate. He laughed when I fell on my ass and called me "Romeo" because I'd smiled at his sister.

And now?

Now they were calling me petturi. Traitor.

I wanted to shout back. We didn't know about Yalta! We weren't in the room with Mussolini and Stalin and the diplomats in their leather chairs. We were just soldiers. We were just following orders. Just like they were, two years ago, when the Soviets came.

But I didn't shout. I couldn't. My throat felt like it was wrapped in wire.

The train jerked forward, slow at first. Through the steam and smoke, I saw a group of schoolgirls turn their backs to us in perfect silence. Behind them, someone had painted over the Italian flag on the side of the station wall. Just a smear of white now.

I slumped into my seat. My rifle rattled on the rack above me. The man across from me, Corporal D'Angelo, was staring at his boots like they might fall apart any second. No one said a word for a long time.

I used to think this war would make me a man. That maybe I'd come home with a medal. A story. A legacy.

But I knew now—I'd only come home with silence.

-

February 16, 1942
Helsinki Docks, Finland
Corporal Arthur "Archie" Langley, Royal Marines

The cold hit like a punch in the lungs the moment the ramp dropped.

Even with the greatcoat wrapped tight and my gloves doubled up, I felt like the Baltic itself had reached up and grabbed my bones. God help anyone who tried to fight a war in this frozen hell. But still—Helsinki.

We'd heard stories on the ship from Stockholm. That the Finns were hostile. Bitter. That the Italians had slinked out only days before to the jeers of crowds and a few well-aimed bricks. My unit, forty-odd Royal Marines and a few lads from the Welsh Fusiliers, stood in parade formation anyway, like it was Portsmouth pier, not the edge of a political earthquake.

I looked around as we stepped off the landing craft. The port was busy, but it wasn't cheerful. No flags, no cheering crowds. Just workers in grey coats and knit hats unloading crates of American rifles, petrol drums, and canned beans like it was any other day. A few civilians had gathered behind the barriers. They didn't wave. They just watched. Cold-eyed. Guarded.

One little girl held a Finnish flag. She wasn't waving it. Just clutching it like a teddy bear.

As we marched up the quay, I caught the eye of an older man—civilian, stiff coat, fur hat. Might've been someone's grandfather. His eyes swept over us like he was weighing us. Not with hate. Not even resentment. Just… weariness. Like he'd seen too many boots land on his soil in too short a time.

"Think they like us?" Private Baines muttered next to me, breath fogging in the air.

I gave a half-smile. "I think they like us better than the last lot."

We passed the Italian barracks on the way to the staging ground—already half-abandoned, a few Red Cross crates still piled up. Some graffiti on the side in Finnish, scrawled in haste. One of the interpreters later told me it said "Better no friends than false ones."

We reached the staging point near the city square, where a few Finnish soldiers stood waiting, rifles slung casually, their faces as hard and unreadable as the ice. Their officer, young, with sharp cheekbones and a mouth set in stone, stepped forward and gave a crisp nod to our major.

No smiles. No handshakes.

Just nods and orders.

This wasn't Oslo. This wasn't liberation. It was something else.

A holding action. A warning.

By nightfall, we were billeted in a former schoolhouse. The radioman got the BBC signal for a few minutes. The news? Tokyo had struck Guam. American forces were being pushed in the Philippines. The world felt like it was cracking in half and freezing over.

I lay on my cot, staring at the frost gathering on the window. Somewhere outside, a church bell rang once, then stopped. No one spoke.

And I thought to myself—not for the first time—

We've arrived too late. Or just in time. And God only knows which.

 

[Alenco98]

An Excerpt from Peter H. Tveskov's Between the World War and the Cold War: Denmark in the 1940s

The morning of April 9, 1940, dawned without warning or preparation for Denmark. At approximately 5:00 AM, the Nazi war machine surged across the border in a coordinated blitzkrieg offensive that would reshape the course of Danish history for the next five years. The operation, Weserübung, was a broader German initiative to secure its control over Scandinavia, particularly Denmark and Norway, in order to maintain vital access to the resources of neutral Sweden, especially the iron ore that fueled Germany's war effort.

Denmark, a small kingdom sitting precariously between Germany and Sweden, had long prided itself on a foreign policy of neutrality. Throughout the interwar years, it had successfully navigated the shifting tides of European politics, avoiding entanglements that might bring it into conflict with the great powers. But with the rapid advance of Nazi expansion, it became painfully clear that Denmark's neutral stance would no longer suffice.

The invasion itself was swift, almost clinical. Denmark, with its relatively modest military forces, had little hope of resisting the onslaught. Copenhagen, Denmark's capital, fell within hours, and German forces quickly secured key infrastructure, including vital ports and airfields that would soon be used to launch operations in neighboring Norway. But what distinguished Denmark from other occupied countries was its government's decision to surrender almost immediately, avoiding unnecessary destruction of the country.

In stark contrast to the devastation in Poland, Denmark's political leadership—led by King Christian X and Prime Minister Thorvald Stauning—chose not to resist. The King famously rode through the streets of Copenhagen on horseback in the days following the invasion, projecting an image of calm and unity, despite the occupation. The Danish government, keen on maintaining some semblance of autonomy, negotiated with the Germans, agreeing to a policy of "cooperation" that would preserve Denmark's political independence while ensuring German control over key strategic sectors.

Unlike many other countries in Europe under Nazi rule, Denmark retained a functioning democratic system. While the country was technically under occupation, the Danish parliament (Folketing) continued to operate, and the government retained control over domestic affairs, with the exception of military and foreign policy. This was a pragmatic, if deeply compromised, arrangement, one that allowed Denmark to maintain some degree of sovereignty while avoiding direct confrontation with the Nazi regime.

In the months following the invasion, Denmark's position as a key strategic asset to Nazi Germany became clearer. Denmark's role was not merely as a passive collaborator; it was an active player in Germany's broader strategy in Scandinavia. The Danish government permitted the German military to establish airbases and naval ports along its coastline, facilitating German operations in Norway and ensuring a secure route for transporting Swedish iron ore through Danish-controlled waters. The collaboration was not one-sided—Denmark also benefited economically from its alliance with Germany. The Nazis made significant demands on Denmark's agricultural output, which was crucial to feeding the German population and military, and the Danes supplied large quantities of foodstuffs, notably bacon and butter.

This symbiotic relationship between Denmark and Germany was a delicate balancing act. Denmark's political leaders, particularly Stauning, sought to maintain the country's sovereignty as much as possible. However, the Germans were not content with a passive partner. In time, they began to pressure the Danish government to adopt more directly pro-German policies. Economic cooperation evolved into more intrusive forms of collaboration, and Denmark's political landscape began to shift in subtle ways. While Denmark was not formally aligned with the Axis powers, its economic and strategic contributions to the German war effort were undeniable.

By the summer of 1941, however, the Danish government found itself caught in a more difficult position. The nature of Nazi demands began to shift from strategic and economic cooperation to more direct control over social and cultural matters. One of the most pressing issues was the Nazi regime's "Jewish question." While Denmark's Jewish population was relatively small, around 7,000 individuals, it had been largely unscathed by Nazi anti-Semitic policies in the early years of the occupation. Jews in Denmark had enjoyed a degree of protection due to the country's comparatively mild occupation conditions. Danish Jews had been largely left alone, able to live relatively freely while other European Jews suffered under the boot of Nazi tyranny.

This leniency would not last.

In 1941, with the invasion of the Soviet Union and the escalating demands of the Nazi regime, Denmark found itself increasingly at odds with German policies, particularly regarding the Jews. Early in the year, the German authorities began to press Denmark to adopt the same measures that had been implemented in other occupied countries, including the forced relocation and deportation of Jews to concentration camps.

For the first time, Denmark's leadership found itself faced with an impossible choice. Cooperation with the Nazis had ensured the preservation of Danish sovereignty, but now it seemed that the Germans were demanding more than Denmark could give. Faced with growing German pressure, the Danish government began to prepare for the possibility of direct resistance, even as it continued to walk the fine line between collaboration and defiance.

By November 1941, Denmark's cooperative model was beginning to unravel. Despite initial successes in maintaining a relatively high degree of independence, it was clear that the balance was becoming unsustainable. Danish political leaders, while still largely aligned with Germany, were increasingly confronted with the ethical and moral dilemmas posed by the occupation. The pressure to conform to Nazi policies, particularly the persecution of Jews, was growing stronger, and the first cracks in the façade of cooperation were beginning to show.

Denmark's experience in the years of the occupation stands as a complex and often contradictory chapter in the history of World War II. On the one hand, Denmark's ability to maintain some form of sovereignty under occupation is a testament to the skillful diplomacy of its leaders. On the other hand, the ethical compromises that came with this cooperation—particularly the treatment of the Jewish population—would later become one of the most poignant and defining aspects of Denmark's wartime history.

The brittle scaffolding of Danish cooperation with Nazi Germany finally collapsed under the weight of conscience and catastrophe on December 16, 1941. That morning, the world awoke to a shattering broadcast from Vatican Radio: Pope Pius XII, in an unprecedented act of moral defiance, revealed detailed evidence of the ongoing mass extermination of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland and Ukraine. Drawing from secret communications delivered by Polish clergy and Italian intelligence, the Pope's address was unequivocal. The slaughter of the Jewish people, he declared in an enciclycal after his speech, was "an affront not merely to the dignity of mankind, but to the sanctity of life itself as ordained by God."

The Pope called for a crusade on Nazi Germany. Then subsequently threatened to excommunicate all members of the nazi party who didn't step down by the new year. The next day on the 17th this extended to the Werhmacht. That same day, Italy, which had remained neutral throughout the war, declared war on Nazi Germany, as Mussolini delivered his declaration on top of the Palazzo Venezia, Italian bombers raided the Ploesti oil fields.

In Denmark, the Pope's call struck like lightning. The Danish church, long passive under occupation, issued a bold and immediate response: a general strike across the nation, calling on workers, students, clergy, and civil servants to paralyze the country. Trains stopped running. Factories stood silent. Danish flags hung in shop windows. Copenhagen's streets were filled not with protestors, but with a solemn, disciplined stillness—a quiet defiance more powerful than violence.

That evening, King Christian X appeared in full military dress outside Amalienborg Palace, flanked by members of the cabinet and army officers. In a short but fiery address broadcast by Danish radio, the King declared:

"We are no longer bound to silence. The truth has burned away the fog. Our loyalty was bought with peace, but the cost has become the soul of our nation. I call now on all Danes—rise as one, and let the light of Denmark shine again."

The speech electrified the country. Resistance cells sprang to life overnight. Arms were smuggled in from Sweden, sabotage squads began targeting German communication lines, and German troops found themselves increasingly isolated in a land they had once controlled without a fight.

On Christmas morning, 1941, British troops from the 1st Airborne Division landed at Copenhagen Harbor, having coordinated secretly with the Danish government-in-place. The landings were largely unopposed, as the Danish Resistance had already secured key strongpoints throughout the city and German soldiers through Europe mostly laid down their arms or deserted their posts. By nightfall, Copenhagen was in Allied hands, and the Union Flag flew over Christiansborg Palace beside the Danish Dannebrog.

The British push did not stop there. In a bold move that defied the still-uncertain state of the Eastern Front, Allied command ordered an advance through Schleswig-Holstein, targeting the northern German port of Kiel. The German Wehrmacht, stunned by defections among occupied forces and the sudden southern betrayal by Italy, struggled to contain the assault. Within one week, British and Danish forces were entering northern Germany.

But as the guns thundered in the west, a quieter, colder chess game began to unfold in the east. On January 26, 1942, Italy and the Soviet Union signed the Treaty of Yalta—a landmark agreement that reshaped the postwar world even before the war itself had ended. The 1942 treaty was pivotal: the Soviet union and Italy divided Europe into their own spheres of influence.

This clause sent shockwaves through the Danish cabinet. Despite the shared hatred of Nazism, few Danes were eager to fall under Moscow's shadow. Memories of the Winter War and Soviet expansionism were still fresh, and whispers of communist infiltration within the Resistance were enough to alarm even the most left-leaning members of government.

A resolution came quickly. Following brief negotiations with London and Washington, and watching nervously as their neighbors aligned with the West, Denmark officially signed the Atlantic Pact on February 11, 1942. Already joined by the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, the nascent Atlantic Pact was emerging as a new defensive coalition—one rooted not only in anti-Nazi resolve, but in shared democratic values and a desire to chart an independent course between Italy and the Soviet union.

Denmark thus became the fifth nation to join what would later evolve into the Free Nation's alliance as the cold war went on. The signing was broadcast across the Atlantic and greeted with thunderous applause in Allied parliaments. In Copenhagen, tens of thousands took to the streets waving British and Danish flags side by side, cheering the end of occupation and the rebirth of the Danish nation.

The winter of 1941–42 marked Denmark's transformation from reluctant collaborator to proud liberator. The country that had surrendered in six hours in April 1940 now stood, arms in hand, beside the great powers of the world. It had endured the shame of passivity, the moral strain of compromise, and the terror of looming genocide—and had, at last, found its voice.

It would never be silenced again.

 

[Alenco98]

An excerpt from Jean-Michel Veranneman De Watervliet's 2014 novel, The Death of Belgium

By the end of May 1940, Belgium had ceased to exist as a sovereign nation. The Wehrmacht's lightning thrust through the Ardennes—blunt, brutal, and wholly unexpected—shattered not only the fragile Maginot illusions of the Allies but obliterated the thin membrane of Belgian neutrality that had clung desperately to the illusion of peace.

On May 10, 1940, Germany invaded Belgium for the second time in a generation. The plan was cold and efficient: bypass France's strongest defenses by driving through the Low Countries. Belgian soldiers, despite their bravery, were overwhelmed. Their commanders, constrained by decades of political indecision and underinvestment, found themselves outmaneuvered at every turn. Within three weeks, the collapse was total.

On May 28th, King Leopold III—without consulting his government, which had already fled to France—surrendered unconditionally to Adolf Hitler. To some, he was a tragic figure, a monarch isolated and abandoned, forced into capitulation to spare his people further suffering. To others, he was a traitor, placing the crown above the constitution, compromising the unity of the nation in its darkest hour. The government-in-exile would never forgive him. From London, Prime Minister Hubert Pierlot issued a damning condemnation. A rupture had occurred at the very heart of Belgium: between king and people, between home and exile.

The German occupation began under a heavy, silent fog. The military administration, headed by General Alexander von Falkenhausen and SS advisor Eggert Reeder, projected a thin illusion of pragmatism. Von Falkenhausen, an aristocrat and career soldier, was careful, even courtly in manner. But make no mistake: his purpose was exploitation. The Nazis had learned from the resentment of their 1914–1918 occupation. This time, they sought to cloak tyranny in procedure, to present brutality as bureaucratic inevitability.

They began by stripping Belgium's economy for parts. The Belgian franc was artificially pegged to the Reichsmark, making German purchases absurdly cheap and draining the country's resources. Factories were converted to produce for the Wehrmacht. Food was rationed, coal was seized, and entire industries were subordinated to German needs. As early as the summer of 1940, Belgians were already going hungry.

Censorship was swift and absolute. Newspapers were muzzled, radios confiscated or monitored. The press that remained was heavily controlled, peppered with collaborationist propaganda and bland communiqués from Berlin. Cultural life narrowed to a whisper. Curfews were imposed, movement restricted, public dissent stifled.

Social division became a central tool of control. The Nazis pursued a policy of Flamenpolitik—an effort to divide Belgium along linguistic lines. They granted administrative privileges to certain Flemish civil servants and supported elements of the Flemish nationalist movement, hoping to reshape Flanders into a satellite of a future Germanic empire. In contrast, Wallonia, perceived as more Latin and less "racially Germanic," was marginalized. The SS courted collaborators—offering positions of power to opportunists willing to serve. The most notorious among them was Léon Degrelle, the charismatic leader of the Rexist Party. Once a Catholic populist, Degrelle transformed himself into an eager fascist, pledging allegiance to Hitler and dispatching volunteers to fight on the Eastern Front in 1941 under the banner of the Walloon Legion.

But collaboration was never total. From the earliest days of the occupation, resistance began to take shape—not in bold declarations, but in gestures. Hidden newspapers were mimeographed in cellars and passed hand to hand. Teachers quietly refused to use Nazi textbooks. Rail workers sabotaged trains, subtly at first, then with increasing boldness. Catholic clergy offered comfort and coded warnings from their pulpits. And Jews—tens of thousands of whom had fled Germany and Eastern Europe in the 1930s—once again found themselves hunted. Though the Final Solution had not yet been formally announced, the Gestapo was already building its files. By the autumn of 1941, arrests had begun. Jewish men were seized in dawn raids. Synagogues were shuttered. The yellow star had not yet been imposed in Belgium, but the shadow had fallen.

By November, the first Belgian Jews were deported to forced labor camps in the East.

The resistance, fragmented but growing, consisted of monarchists, Communists, liberal democrats, and ordinary citizens. Their motives varied—some fought for patriotism, others for ideology, others simply for vengeance. Underground groups like the Front de l'Indépendance and the Groupe G began conducting acts of sabotage and intelligence gathering. They liaised with British SOE agents parachuted behind enemy lines, smuggled Allied airmen out through France and Spain, and maintained a steady current of defiance.

Still, the cost of resistance was high. Arrests, torture, and executions were commonplace. The Gestapo's Belgian section—ruthless and efficient—employed Belgian collaborators to infiltrate networks. Betrayals were inevitable. Entire families disappeared in the night.

And yet, something had changed by December 1941. The world, so long silent, had begun to stir. On December 7th, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Four days later, Hitler declared war on the United States. What had once been a European war had become global.

In London, the exiled Belgian government seized the moment. For the first time in over a year, there was hope of liberation backed by overwhelming force. Radio Londres broadcast messages to the resistance. British and American agents began increased operations on Belgian soil. And among the people—starved, humiliated, divided, yet unbroken—a quiet resolve hardened into something deeper.

Belgium had not been erased. She had been silenced. She had been wounded. But she endured. Until it's death blow came.

History has its hinges—moments when the entire edifice of the world creaks, tilts, and begins to fall. December 16, 1941, was one such hinge. The smoke of Babi Yar, of Ponary, of incinerated villages and bulldozed mass graves had risen for months, unseen by most, ignored by others. But now the world could no longer look away. On that cold Roman morning, as the bells of St. Peter's rang through the fog, Pope Pius XII finally broke his long and agonized silence.

From the pulpit of a special consistory, the Pope condemned the Nazi regime in the most direct terms yet uttered by the Church. He read aloud testimonies—letters smuggled from Poland, photographs from the East, transcripts intercepted by Italian intelligence. He declared the Holocaust a "crime against the order of God," and demanded that all Catholic members of the Nazi Party recant their allegiance before the close of the year—or face excommunication. But he did not stop there. With voice trembling yet resolute, he called for cruciata, a Crusade—not merely in word, but in arms. "Let those who have sinned in silence now find their redemption in resistance," he said. "Let the sword of righteousness rise." He said in an enciclycal released that same day.

That same day, as his words echoed across the world, Italy moved.

Benito Mussolini—who had remained conspicuously neutral since the fall of France while he built his own empire in the Mediterranean—broadcast a declaration of war against Nazi Germany. Simultaneously, Italian bombers struck the Romanian oil fields at Ploiești, hammering at the very lifeline of the German war machine. The skies over Eastern Europe turned black with smoke as the silence of Mussolini's regime gave way to flames.

But Belgium was not ready for what came next.

The following morning, December 17, the papal threat extended beyond the SS and Nazi Party to include all members of the Wehrmacht, the Gestapo, and even civilian administrators in collaborationist regimes. The message was clear: neutrality was no longer tenable. One must choose between conscience and complicity.

Belgium responded first with silence—and then with fury.

A spontaneous general strike erupted in Liège, Charleroi, and Ghent, spreading like wildfire to Brussels and Antwerp. Factories ground to a halt. Trams stopped mid-track. Offices were abandoned. Workers flooded the streets, holding signs scrawled with ancient words: "Non serviam." Resistance networks fanned the flames, smuggling radios to towns and villages, urging mass defiance. Even many collaborators faltered. The Reich's grip on Belgium was suddenly no longer iron—but paper.

It was in the midst of this maelstrom that an astonishing figure emerged from the shadows of captivity: King Leopold III.

Appearing for the first time since his 1940 surrender, he stood before a microphone at Laeken Castle, flanked by the remnants of his royal guard. His voice was hoarse, but unmistakable: "My people, our hour has come. Belgium must rise. Not for the crown. Not for vengeance. But for life itself."

The words spread across the airwaves, emboldening a nation—until Italy made its next move.

That same afternoon, the Kingdom of Italy declared the formation of the Kingdom of France—a new, monarchist state born from the carcass of Vichy. Its Prime Minister, André François-Poncet, once ambassador to Rome, offered the crown to Prince Louis Napoleon, a descendant of Bonaparte. But it was not simply France that was envisioned—it was an empire. Italy announced that this new realm would incorporate not just France, but also Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Rhineland, as a "Latin-Gallic Renaissance" against the German Reich.

Belgium exploded in rage.

Protests flooded the streets of every major city, even as German troops tried to suppress them. Flags were burned, statues toppled. Cries of "Belgium is not a province!" rang through Leuven and Namur. That evening, Italian paratroopers dropped over Brussels in an operation codenamed The Ides of March.

It was a bloodbath.

Laeken Castle, still housing the King, was besieged. Italian Arditi fought a fierce, room-to-room battle with the Royal Guard. Dozens were killed. The King narrowly escaped through an underground tunnel with the help of loyal servants, vanishing into the city's storm drains as the last defenders fell. Italian bombers roared over the capital by nightfall, sowing panic and chaos. The siege of Laeken began.

Over the next two weeks, Italy reinforced its foothold. More paratroopers were dropped into Brussels, and elements of the Italian Blackshirt divisions pushed up through northern France. Vichy defectors—angered by Hitler's failures and tempted by the promise of a Bourbon restoration and pardons—opened the border to Mussolini's columns and marched into Belgium with them.

On January 2, 1942, Italian and French monarchist troops broke the siege of Laeken. Tanks rolled down the Avenue de la Reine. Leaflets were dropped from planes proclaiming Belgium's "liberation" and "return to civilization." In the south, the Rexist leader Léon Degrelle—dragged from the shadows by Italian agents—was declared Governor-General of Wallonia, his smiling face plastered across posters while his eyes betrayed the panic of a man trapped by his own ambition.

Degrelle gave a stammering address welcoming the Kingdom of France and thanking "Latin Europe" for Belgium's salvation. The crowds did not cheer.

Leopold III, wounded and demoralized, had fled to London. There, reunited with his exiled government, he addressed his people once more—this time via BBC broadcast: "This invasion, masked in Latin rhetoric, is an occupation. I did not flee from one tyrant to kneel before another. Belgium shall never be a pawn."

But the damage was done.

The country stood carved—its skies filled with foreign planes, its soil soaked in blood, its people split between false liberation and true defiance.

Belgium, once again, had become a battlefield. Not merely of arms, but of souls.

And winter had only just begun.

In Ghent, where the streets still stank of tear gas and burnt paper, the sound of church bells rang not for Mass, but for Parliament. The Flemish Council, an emergency body hastily assembled from municipal leaders, university rectors, and exiled ministers, convened beneath the battered ceilings of the old City Hall. Outside, crowds gathered under the gold lion of Flanders, black flags and orange sashes waving defiantly in the smoke-choked wind.

At 11:17 a.m., Pieter De Clercq—once a minor bureaucrat, now a lionized voice of Flemish nationalism—took the podium and read aloud a single, stunning declaration:

"The Belgian state is dead. Flanders will not die with it. We hereby proclaim the independence of the Flemish Republic and request immediate annexation to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, under the protection of Queen Wilhelmina."

The crowd outside erupted—not in universal cheer, but with a volatile mix of jubilation, confusion, and fear. Some cried tears of joy. Others shouted accusations of treason. But the die had been cast.

Within hours, Dutch radio confirmed receipt of the Flemish request. The Queen remained silent—for now—but Prime Minister Gerbrandy addressed the nation with a carefully worded statement: "The fate of our southern brothers is entwined with our own. The Kingdom of the Netherlands shall not ignore a cry for unity born of war and sorrow." The message, broadcast in both Dutch and Flemish, lit the low countries aflame.

That same night, Dutch armored cars crossed the border at Essen, driving southward to "protect Flemish civilians from foreign occupation." Italian forces in Antwerp were caught off guard. A tense standoff began between Blackshirts and Dutch marines along the Scheldt. Not a shot was fired—but both sides knew this was only the beginning.

In Brussels, the Italian-backed Provisional Regency of Belgium condemned the Flemish secession as "an unfortunate misunderstanding," a laughable irony to most. Mussolini, furious that his dream of a Latin-Gallic satellite was unraveling by the hour, ordered reinforcements airlifted to Charleroi and Louvain. "hold the north," he barked at Graziani. " We will not lose half of Belgium."

The Vatican, for its part, offered only silence. Pope Pius XII's bold stand had unleashed a moral revolution—but even he now found himself overwhelmed by its tidal force.

And then, as if fate were mocking the collapsing unity of the kingdom, the Walloons followed suit.

On January 5, a hastily assembled congress in Namur, backed by trade unions and elements of the underground resistance, declared the creation of the Walloon Free Republic. They offered allegiance not to Italy, nor to France, nor to the Netherlands—but to Free France. A delegation was dispatched to Brazzaville, where Charles de Gaulle had set up his government-in-exile.

Belgium, once a single patch of defiant neutrality, had shattered into three pieces within seventy-two hours.

King Leopold, pacing furiously through the corridors of his London exile, saw the kingdom he had once surrendered to save now dissolving in front of his eyes. His voice broke as he dictated a letter to Churchill:

"If Belgium is to live again, it must be reborn—not as a construct of kings, but as a nation of conscience. And if I must die to preserve her soul, I will not hesitate."

The British Prime Minister, grim-faced and sleepless, wrote only two words in the margin: "Too late."

The Walloon dream lived precisely forty-two hours.

On January 5, in Namur, firebrands and factory workers declared the Walloon Free Republic—a desperate bid for dignity in a collapsing world. There were no flags, only armbands hastily sewn from red cloth and hammer-emblazoned pamphlets printed in candle-lit basements. Their government was little more than a committee of mayors, priests, union men, and a disillusioned French academic with a pipe and a pistol.

But their declaration had barely reached Brazzaville before it was answered with steel.

January 6, 1942 — 04:22 a.m.: Italian Savoia-Marchetti SM.82 transport planes roared above the Ardennes, silhouetted by the moon. Paratroopers—units from the elite Folgore Division, fresh from operations in Bulgaria and experienced in anti-partisan tactics—began descending onto the outskirts of Namur, Charleroi, and Liège.

Resistance was spirited. Factory militias fought back with Molotovs and old hunting rifles. Church bells rang wildly in Dinant. A rail worker in Huy derailed a train carrying Italian supplies, sacrificing himself in the blast. For a moment, it seemed the Walloon spirit might become a movement.

It did not.

By January 9, Namur had fallen. The Walloon Committee for Liberation was dragged out of the Palais de Congrès and thrown into a military prison hastily converted from a hotel. Several were shot without trial. The rest would be flown to Paris to stand before Italian tribunals. Resistance flags were burned in public squares. The black-and-white fasces of Italy and the golden imperial eagle of Napoleon were hoisted in their place.

Then came the farce of "democracy."

On January 12, Italian authorities announced a referendum on the "Reunification of Wallonia with Greater France." There was no campaign, no debate, no international observers. Just soldiers at polling stations, ballots pre-printed with Oui, and a tally that claimed 97.3% approval.

On January 13, André François-Poncet—Mussolini's puppet Prime Minister of the newly minted Kingdom of France—proclaimed the Annexation of Wallonia into the "new French heartland." Italian troops marched through the streets of Liège beneath banners reading Bienvenue à la Maison—Welcome Home.

In London, the exiled Belgian cabinet wept as the news reached them. Paul-Henri Spaak reportedly smashed a wine glass and shouted, "They have carved us like meat!" The King, silent for nearly two days, finally emerged with a hoarse voice and hollow eyes. He read from a sheet of trembling paper:

> "Belgium is not dead. It is bleeding, yes, torn—yes—but not dead. We call on the world not to recognize these false crowns and false votes. We shall return."



The Allies—Britain, Free France, and the United States—refused to recognize the annexation. But recognition, as the king bitterly noted, was not liberation.

On January 14, Mussolini declared Belgium to be "a failed idea… an artificial contraption of English diplomacy and German indifference." He boasted that the Latin Axis had restored "order and civilization" to the heart of Europe. Posters in Rome showed maps with the new "Kingdom of France" stretching from Marseille to Maastricht. The Kingdom of Belgium, meanwhile, vanished from Italian maps entirely.

That week, a journalist in exile asked Churchill if Belgium could be saved.

He paused, lit a cigar, and muttered, "Only if God Himself has paratroopers."

-

December 17, 1941
Laeken District
Brussels, Belgium

A thin, icy mist clung to the rooftops as our SM.82 lumbered over the freezing outskirts of Brussels. I tightened the straps on my Modello 38 parachute pack, breath turning to frost behind my mask. Around me, my squadmates huddled in the open hatch, rifles slung, helmets low. Above the din of engines and distant gunfire, Sergeant Romano barked our final orders: "Laeken keystone—capture the king or hold the castle until relief arrives!"

When the hatch swung open, a gust of wind nearly blew me back into the fuselage. I launched myself into the void, chest pounding like a drum. For a heartbeat there was only sky—stars blurred by speed—then the canopy above me snapped taut. I floated down toward the château's shadowed turrets, the lamps lining the moat like watchful eyes. Below, searchlights crisscrossed the courtyard, and I could just make out the crenellated walls of Laeken Castle, our objective perched atop them like a crown.

Landing hard on the cobbles, I rolled to absorb the shock and sprang upright. My boots skidded on frozen moss. To my left, Corporal Vitale's chute snagged on an ornamental finial; he yanked himself free and sprinted toward the gatehouse. I followed, rifle raised. The courtyard lay between two snarling groups: our men advancing in wedge formation, and a line of Royal Guard survivors—steel helmets glinting—bullets already accentuating the night air.

A sudden crack split the darkness. A Guardsman fell. We closed in. I lunged forward, firing three short bursts; his rifle clattered to the ground. Another thrust of my bayonet, and the gate stood ajar. We flooded inside, heartbeats thundering in my ears. Somewhere in the echoing corridors beyond, I heard distant shouts in Flemish, the anguished barking of orders.

Then came the staggered clang of a hidden portcullis—our path blocked. Sergeant Romano cursed under his breath. "They're sealing us in!" he growled. We rushed up the spiral staircase toward the throne room, hoping to intercept the king before he slipped away. But when we burst through the carved oak doors, the chamber was empty: dust stirred in shafts of lantern-light, and the royal crown lay fallen on the marble floor, blood droplets darkening its velvet lining.

A muffled rumble drew us to a side passage. Through a narrow slit window, I saw a small group—a priest, two servants, and the king himself—slipping into a hidden tunnel entrance beneath a tapestry. Leopold's face was ashen but resolute. He lifted a trembling hand in farewell before disappearing into the dank stone corridor. A servant dropped a lantern deliberately, flames licking the drapes and setting off a cascade of sparks. In the confusion, they vanished.

Behind us, the gates slammed. Through the narrow slit windows, flaming barricades sprouted in the courtyard—Belgian militiamen, armed with shotguns and hastily cast Molotovs, had surrounded us. Their shouts echoed off the castle walls: "Vive la Belgique ! " They lobbed bottles that shattered against our paratrooper steel. Corporal Vitale dove for cover behind an overturned carriage; I threw myself flat beside him, returning fire blindly into the gloom.

We were trapped. The tunnels the Guards had sealed against us now cut off our advance, and our radio crackled only static. Overhead, the SM.82s retreated, their engines fading into the mist. In the courtyard below, torches glowed like angry eyes. Sergeant Romano scanned our dwindling ammo clips and spat, "Hold fast, Folgore. We fight until relief—or death."

As dawn's first gray light seeped through the arrow slits, I crouched beside Vitale, fingers numb around my rifle. All around, the castle's ancient stones seemed to press in, echoing the siege drums of a nation risen against us. The chase for a fugitive king had become our own desperate flight, and in that silent, frozen dawn, I realized that here—beneath Belgium's broken crown—we were the ones besieged.

Note: I retconned a few things.

Check out the chapter flipping the table for context

 

[Alenco98]

An excerpt from Nicolae Ceaușescu's 1970 novel, Betrayed on All Sides: Romania During the Great War

Romania, my beloved yet beleaguered homeland, entered the maelstrom of the Second World War not as a willing combatant, but as a nation gripped by fear, suffocated by internal rot, and betrayed by the very alliances it once held sacred. The period from the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939 to the dramatic turn of events in December 1941 was a time of humiliation, upheaval, and bitter lessons for our people—lessons forged in blood, cowardice, and opportunism.

In 1939, the Kingdom of Romania stood nominally sovereign under King Carol II, but its fate was already being bartered in foreign capitals. The country's foreign policy, for decades based on a tenuous alliance with France and Great Britain, crumbled overnight when Hitler and Stalin carved Eastern Europe between themselves. Romania, whose borders had been secured in the aftermath of the Great War through the blood of peasants and soldiers alike, now found itself a pawn on a vast chessboard, surrounded by predators.

The economy, despite attempts at modernization during the interwar years, remained heavily agrarian and underdeveloped. It was dependent on foreign capital, particularly British and French investments in the oil fields of Ploiești. The industrial sector was small and controlled by foreign interests. While Bucharest had become known as the "Paris of the East," this glittering veneer masked a deep rural poverty and growing social unrest. The Iron Guard—a fascist movement fueled by mystical nationalism and anti-Semitism—was rising, drawing the desperate and the dispossessed into its ranks.

When Poland was dismembered in September 1939, and the Western powers did nothing, the writing was on the wall. King Carol tried to maintain neutrality, but Romania's position was strategically untenable. In June 1940, the Soviet Union, emboldened by its pact with Hitler and engaged in the conquest of the Baltics, issued an ultimatum demanding the cession of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. There was no help from France, which had just fallen, nor from Britain, reeling from the evacuation of Dunkirk. Carol acquiesced—Romania surrendered its territory without firing a shot.

But the territorial rape did not end there. Sensing blood, Hungary and Bulgaria, with German and Italian blessing demanded Northern Transylvania and Drobuja, and Germany brokered the Second Vienna Award in August 1940, forcing Romania to cede them. In less than three months, Romania lost over a third of its territory and population. It was a national humiliation unprecedented in modern history, and it shattered what little confidence the Romanian people had in their monarchy.

King Carol's position became untenable. In September 1940, under pressure from the German-backed General Ion Antonescu and amidst mass demonstrations by the Iron Guard, he abdicated in favor of his 19-year-old son, Michael. Antonescu assumed the title of Conducător and formed a "National Legionary State" with the Iron Guard. It was a time of blood and steel. The Guard, intoxicated by its newfound power and hatred, launched pogroms and purges, targeting Jews, political opponents, and military officers. But their rule was short-lived.

By early 1941, Antonescu had tired of the Guard's fanaticism and chaos. With German support, he crushed them in the January Rebellion, consolidating power as a military dictator. Romania was now firmly in the Axis orbit. It had signed the Tripartite Pact in November 1940, granting Germany control over Romanian oil and resources. German troops flooded the country under the pretext of defending it against Soviet aggression, but in truth, Romania was an occupied satellite.

Antonescu, convinced that aligning with Hitler would restore Romania's lost provinces, prepared for war against the Soviet Union. On June 22, 1941, Romania joined Operation Barbarossa. The Army, numbering over 600,000 men, crossed the Prut River alongside the Wehrmacht, determined to reclaim Bessarabia and Bukovina. In the initial stages, Romanian forces achieved their objectives, but they were soon drawn deep into Ukraine, far beyond the goals of national interest.

By December 1941, Romanian troops were freezing outside Kiev and the shores of the black sea, having suffered horrific casualties. The economy had been completely militarized, and inflation soared. While Germany consumed our oil and food, Romanian civilians bore the brunt of shortages. Worse still, Antonescu's regime began the mass deportation and extermination of Jews in Bessarabia and Transnistria. Pogroms in Iași and other towns left tens of thousands dead, often at the hands of their neighbors. These crimes would stain our history forever.

Romania had become a prison with gilded bars—a nominal ally of the Reich, but in truth little more than a colony supplying cannon fodder, oil, and grain. Antonescu, always the soldier, had placed all hopes on a German victory. But the signs were already darkening. The Soviets had been prepared and Germany's planned lighting campaign stagnated. And by December 1941, the United States had entered the war.

Romania had bet everything—and as I would come to understand in the cold clarity of later years—it had done so not from strength or vision, but from fear, desperation, and the willful blindness of men who mistook Hitler's favor for salvation.

History rarely asks permission before changing course. It does not warn its victims. It does not coddle its heroes. It moves with the suddenness of lightning and the weight of avalanche. And on December 16, 1941, history moved.

First came the voice of the Pope—cracking through the Vatican airwaves like divine thunder—declaring not neutrality, nor peace, but a crusade. A holy war, no less, against the pagan horror of Hitler's Germany. The cardinals behind him wept. Radios across Europe shorted from shock. The Axis trembled. The Allies froze. And then came the unthinkable.

Mussolini, having used the war to carve an empire in the Mediterranean declared war on Germany. While he gave his speech, he had his aircraft bomb Ploiești. The Italians—Germany's supposed Axis ally—reduced the lifeblood of Romania's oil industry and Germany's war machine to a smoking ruin.

The government convulsed. Antonescu's cabinet turned pale. The phones rang endlessly in Bucharest. The Wehrmacht command demanded action. The streets filled with rumors—"The Duce has gone mad," "The Pope has declared war," "Italy and Bulgaria are attacking!"

King Michael, barely more than a boy, grasped the moment with a cunning none had expected. He summoned Antonescu to the royal palace the morning of December 17, as smoke from Ploiești still hung low over the countryside like a funeral shroud. "We will be next," the king said. "Do not be Hitler's fool. Declare war on Germany now. While there is still time." And against the instincts of his iron discipline, Antonescu did.

That same afternoon, Romania declared war on Nazi Germany.

The Iron Guard saw this as betrayal. They had always despised Antonescu's pragmatism and the king's feeble liberalism. On the night of December 18, the Guard struck. Armed with German money, weapons, and Blackshirt advisors, they stormed the royal palace. The king was arrested, his staff murdered. The tricolor was torn from the flagpoles, replaced with the Iron Guard's sigil of death and resurrection.

But even in death, the monarchy's shadow lingered.

Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria all formally joined the war against Germany and its collaborators by December 20. Italy and Hungary poured troops into Transylvania and Bessarabia. But Bulgaria, bogged down due to resistance in Serbia and Drobuja chose a different path: vengeance from above. Day and night, their bombers pounded what was left of Ploiești, flattening depots, roads, refineries, and leaving thousands dead. The air reeked of fuel and fire.

Then, on Christmas Day, Romania launched its first offensive since World War I—into Dobrudja.

With the Iron Guard consumed by paranoia and purges in Bucharest, the Romanian Army—fractured but burning with vengeance—stormed across the Danube. Bulgarian units, under-equipped and out of position due to ongoing Romanian resistance, reeled under the pressure. Romanian partisans rose in the countryside. For a moment, it looked as though Dobrudja might be liberated.

But Italy had not bombed Ploiești for pleasure. Their agents and advisors had embedded themselves across their Rome pact allies, preparing for precisely this scenario. Armed with modern weapons, poison gas, and ruthless doctrine, Italian advisors, bombers and Paratroopers arrived to reinforce the Bulgarians. The skies turned green and yellow with chemical clouds. Romanian battalions died choking in fields of mud and ash. The peasantry was not spared. Thousands of ethnic Romanians were expelled from Dobrudja to Romania, many into the freezing Danube waters. In a cynical echo of the Byzantines, Serbs were resettled to take their place, carving out a Slavic buffer zone where Romanians once lived.

As the south burned, the north broke.

On the Hungarian border, the German 4th Army—already weakened by desertion and poor morale—collapsed outright by New Year's Eve. German officers defected. SS units retreated toward the Carpathians. Into this vacuum stormed the Hungarian Honvédség. They swept into northern Transylvania and met little resistance.

But the true storm was within. On January 2, 1942, as Hungarian forces advanced toward Bucharest, a counter-coup erupted. It was not royalist. Not military. It was organized. The OVRA—Mussolini's secret police—had spent weeks coordinating with underground royalists, old officers, and liberal students. The Iron Guard was caught mid-purge. By dawn, their barracks were on fire. Key leaders were arrested in their beds. Hundreds were executed by firing squad without trial.

The Hungarian advance was greeted not with resistance—but with relief. Bucharest was liberated without a shot. The king was freed, emaciated but alive. He re-entered the capital flanked by Hungarian and Romanian officers, the crowds cheering wildly. Antonescu, found hiding in a monastery near Sinaia, was arrested but spared—for now.

With the Iron Guard dead, the road east opened. By mid-January, Hungarian and Romanian units pressed into Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia, re-occupying towns long since abandoned by the Wehrmacht. Romanian flags flew again in Chișinău and Cernăuți. Old men wept. Children saluted the king's portrait. The dream of Greater Romania wasn't dead.

But dreams demand payment.

In Moscow, there was fury. Stalin had hoped to annex Bessarabia after the war. Now Romanian troops were planting their boots back into Soviet-claimed soil. A confrontation seemed inevitable. But fate, for once, was merciful. In Yalta later that month, the issue was raised. Mussolini, ever the pragmatist, proposed a compromise: Romania would keep Bukovina and Bessarabia—but the regions would be demilitarized, under Soviet monitoring. Stalin, eyeing eastern Europe and asia, agreed. For now.

Thus, in six weeks, Romania had fallen, risen, and transformed. From Axis satellite to crusading monarchy. From Nazi collaborator to liberator. From a divided, dying state to a fractured but defiant nation reborn. The scars of betrayal still ached. The smell of burning oil lingered. The Iron Guard's ghosts would haunt the cellars of Bucharest for decades.

But we had survived. And for the first time in many years—we had chosen our side.

 

[DarthLurtz]

Amazing new chapter! Outstanding job my friend!!! Can we please have more???

 

[Solar Mechanis]

Finally caught up. I'll say it's interesting. Do you actually reply on QQ or just AH?

Curious to see how many scientists, engineers and technology they can steal from the corpse of Germany. Italian Panthers and Jets would be interesting. Also maybe Nuclear research. Seeing as SI knows what the Americans have, he should make his own bombs before the US does a funny and nukes Rome.

 

[0zymandias]

This is really good, I like the fact that people actually recognise him as the insane mad man he is. And not just accept him as sacrosanct. Also your prose is really skillful and poetic and ways

 

[wetwipefatass]

finally caught up with the story. The parts about Anne Frank and MC's descent into madness was masterful. You sir are a writing legend

 

[Alenco98]

An excerpt from Between the Devil and Rome (2003) by Jozef Karika

The Slovak State, proclaimed on March 14, 1939, had by September of that year become a grotesque pantomime of independence. President Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest turned politician, preached from his pulpit of "God's will" even as he signed treaties binding Slovakia to Hitler's Reich. The Munich Agreement had already shattered Czechoslovakia; now, Bratislava's cobblestone streets echoed with the jackboots of the Hlinka Guard, the paramilitary arm of Tiso's fascist Hlinka's Slovak People's Party. Their green uniforms and armbands, emblazoned with the double-barred cross, symbolized a nationalism steeped in fervor and fear. Behind closed doors, German advisors like the sly diplomat Manfred von Killinger and the ruthless SS attaché Josef Witiska pulled the strings, their presence a constant reminder that Slovakia's fate was mortgaged to Berlin.

The Salzburg Conference of July 1940 marked Slovakia's formal subjugation. Tiso and his prime minister, Vojtech Tuka—a Nazi sympathizer whose loyalty to Berlin rivaled his disdain for Bratislava—were summoned to Hitler's Alpine retreat. There, the Führer demanded Slovakia's total alignment with Axis policies. Tuka, ever the opportunist, returned home emboldened, purging the government of moderates like Foreign Minister Ferdinand Ďurčanský. Tiso, though wary of German overreach, acquiesced, calculating that survival required complicity. "We are a small boat on a stormy sea," he confided to his diary. "To resist the waves is to drown."

Yet dissent simmered. Underground networks of communists, social democrats, and disaffected army officers began coalescing in the shadows. By 1941, leaflets condemning the regime appeared in Bratislava's alleys, while Slovak exiles in London and Moscow plotted to revive the dream of Czechoslovakia. The regime responded with brutality: arrests, show trials, and the concentration camp at Ilava, where political prisoners vanished into silence.

Slovakia's military, a force of 50,000 ill-equipped but eager soldiers, became a pawn in Hitler's eastern gambits. In September 1939, the Slovak Army joined the invasion of Poland, seizing territory in the Carpathians with a mix of nationalist pride and unease. "We are reclaiming what was stolen!" declared General Ferdinand Čatloš, though many soldiers privately questioned fighting a neighbor for Berlin's benefit.

By 1941, Slovakia's role expanded. Tuka, desperate to prove his worth to Hitler, pledged two divisions to Operation Barbarossa. Over 45,000 Slovak troops marched into Soviet Ukraine alongside the Wehrmacht, lured by promises of reclaiming "ancient Slovak lands" near the Dniester River. Reality proved bitter. Poorly supplied and demoralized, Slovak soldiers froze in the Russian winter, their German commanders relegating them to rear-guard duties—or worse, Einsatzgruppen atrocities. Letters home spoke of horror: villages burned, civilians shot, and a war that felt increasingly alien. "We are not liberators here," wrote one private in November 1941. "We are ghosts."

Slovakia's economy, once tethered to Prague's industrial might, now fed the Nazi war machine. The 1939 Treaty of Protection with Germany mandated that Slovak factories produce armaments, machinery, and textiles for the Reich. The Dubnica tank works and Považské strojárne munitions plant operated under German oversight, their outputs shipped west while Slovaks faced shortages. The Reichsmark's dominance distorted trade; farmers surrendered wheat and livestock at gunpoint, their barns emptied to feed German troops.

"Aryanization" laws, enacted in 1940, stripped Jewish Slovaks of businesses, homes, and dignity. Over 12,000 Jewish-owned enterprises—from Bratislava's textile mills to it's bakeries—were seized by Hlinka Party loyalists. Men like Ľudovít Laco, a party boss turned millionaire, grew fat on stolen wealth, while Jewish families crowded into squalid ghettos. By 1941, hyperinflation gnawed at wages; the Slovak koruna, pegged artificially to the Reichsmark, collapsed in value. Workers in Bratislava muttered, "Tiso eats ham, we eat hymns."

For Slovakia's Jews, the period was a crescendo of terror. The Jewish Code of September 1941 codified their exclusion: yellow stars, forced labor, and a ban on education. Synagogues stood empty, with some of their congregations deported to transit camps like Sereď, where Hlinka Guardsmen traded kicks for laughs. Rabbi Eliyahu Rosenbaum of Prešov wrote in a final letter: "The stones of our streets weep. God has turned His face away." But hope wasn't completely lost for the Jews of Slovakia. Though officially Hitler ended his policy of expelling Jews to Italy after December 1940. Italy, using the OVRA and aided by local resistance networks smuggled out hundreds of thousands of Jews out of occupied Europe. With Italy and its Rome pact allies still out of the war, those Jews not slated for deportation made for the southern border, escaping into Hungary then Italy where they were sent to North Africa and the Lehi run refugee camps.

Though mass deportations to Germany were prevented due to Italy and the Rome pact. The machinery of genocide was already humming all through Europe. SS Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny, Adolf Eichmann's deputy, arrived in Bratislava that autumn to "advise" on the "Jewish question." Tiso, ever the theologian, justified the persecution as "a cross we must bear for peace."

As winter tightened its grip, Slovakia's fragile sovereignty unraveled. On December 11, Hitler declared war on the United States. Five days later, under crushing German pressure, Tiso's government followed suit—a decision made not in Bratislava, but in Berlin. On December 16, 1941, Slovakia formally declared war on Britain and the United States, a hollow gesture that sealed its international isolation. The Reich's ambassador, Hanns Ludin, toasted Tuka with schnapps in the Carlton Hotel, while crowds outside, numb with cold and fear, whispered of betrayal.

The declaration was more than symbolic; it shackled Slovakia irrevocably to the Axis. No longer a reluctant collaborator, it stood condemned as a belligerent, its fate lashed to a sinking Reich.

But on December 16, 1941 the world shifted as well. The Vatican radio crackled across kitchens and cafés with a message so thunderous it eclipsed even the marching drums of war. Pope Pius XII, long accused of silence, finally spoke. In a voice both trembling and resolute, he laid bare what many suspected but few dared say aloud: the industrial extermination of Europe's Jews, orchestrated by the Reich, was no longer a hidden horror—it was the world's shame.

More stunning still was his ultimatum. All Nazi Party members had until the end of the year to renounce their allegiance, or face excommunication. To a continent whose cultural spine was still Catholic—even in defiant Slovakia—this was no empty threat. It was a spiritual severing, a sword swung by the Bishop of Rome. What came next, however, was even more unthinkable: that same night, Italy, until now precariously neutral under Mussolini's opportunistic regime, declared war on Nazi Germany and launched a sudden air assault on the Ploiești oil fields in Romania. The heart of Hitler's oil supply burned as Italian pilots screamed over the Carpathians, and across Europe, stunned collaborators felt the walls of certainty begin to crumble.

The next day, December 17, the Pope escalated his pronouncement. Not only Nazi Party members, but every soldier of the Wehrmacht and every member of collaborationist regimes now stood condemned unless they renounced their positions. It was a spiritual insurrection—a call to mass desertion, whispered in cathedrals and shouted from pulpits.

President Jozef Tiso, ever the priest before the politician, heard the call. That very afternoon, the Slovak Republic stunned Berlin by declaring war on Germany. It was an act born not from strategy, but from desperation and conviction. Many in his inner circle begged caution, but Tiso, his cassock beneath his uniform, insisted. "God is not with the Reich," he said softly. "And we will not share in its judgment."

But what followed was chaos.

By dawn on December 18, collaborationist factions within the Slovak government—those loyal to the Hlinka Guard, to Berlin, or simply to ambition—moved swiftly. Troops moved down the boulevards of Bratislava. Armed guards seized government buildings, and by midday, Tiso and his senior ministers were dead, gunned down in a firefight within the Presidential Palace. The bullet that struck Tiso passed through both lungs; he died whispering a prayer.

The killing of the clergy-president did not bring order. It unleashed paralysis.

Slovakia, a nation of devout Catholics, was thunderstruck. Word of the Pope's declaration and Tiso's martyrdom spread like wildfire. Students marched silently through the snow-covered streets with black crucifixes. Churches filled, factories emptied. A general strike swept through the cities. Entire regiments refused to obey orders. Mothers wept in church pews while factory workers laid down their tools, whispering only, "He died for us." The puppet regime that attempted to replace him found itself governing ghosts.

Then came the wolves.

On December 18, Hungary, which had been promised the reclamation of Upper Hungary—Slovakia's territory—by Mussolini in exchange for alignment with Italy, launched a full-scale invasion. The Slovak Army, already thinned and disoriented by the collapse of command not only at home but on the Eastern Front, could offer no real resistance. Town after town fell with barely a shot.

Hungarian troops were met at first with cheers. Many Slovaks, disillusioned with their dead regime and still paralyzed by grief and religious dread, welcomed the Magyars as liberators from both German tyranny and the ghost of fascist clericalism. The Hlinka Guard melted away, its members hunted or fleeing east. By Christmas Day, Hungary had occupied nearly all of Slovakia. On December 26, Bratislava fell.

But the joy did not last.

The Treaty of Yalta, signed in haste by Italy and the USSR on January 26, 1942 carved Europe, Asia and Africa between both superpowers. It formally recognized Hungary's annexation of Slovakia in return for Hungary entering into Italy's sphere of influence. The soviets meanwhile were on track to receive Poland, the Czech part of Czechoslovakia and northern Germany. While Mussolini was guaranteed control of most of southern Europe, and Africa under a "Catholic Euro-African Axis." Berlin fumed, impotent to respond while the Red and Italian Armies surged towards the heart of the Reich.

But the ink on the treaty turned to ash in the hearts of many Slovaks.

What had felt like liberation now reeked of conquest. Hungarian officials replaced Slovak ones overnight. The language of government shifted. Cultural associations were shuttered. Landowners reasserted ancient claims. OVRA agents along with VKF-6 began to infiltrate the country and round up potential dissenters. Italian and Hungarian civilians began entering the country and buying up businesses and factories. Even Catholic priests who had supported Tiso found themselves removed, reassigned to remote parishes outside of Slovakia. Resistance flickered to life in the Tatra Mountains. Former soldiers, factory workers, and even disillusioned Hlinka youth formed the first cells of what would later be called the "White Resistance"—so named for the white armbands they wore in memory of Tiso's cassock and the snow-covered earth in which he was buried.

The people had traded the devil for the fasces. And now they had been devoured by both.

The streets of Bratislava no longer cheered. Black flags, first waved in mourning, now hung in protest. The Slovak nation, once a fragile experiment in self-determination, now lay dead in the snow, its future uncertain, its people caught—once again—between history's blades.

Note: Apologies for the sudden hiatus, I recently went through a breakup and was feeling very depressed and unmotivated these last few weeks.

Next chapter we'll cover Germany and the end of the war. I might be a little slow though as honestly I'm still kinda feeling it.

 

[wetwipefatass]

Note: Apologies for the sudden hiatus, I recently went through a breakup and was feeling very depressed and unmotivated these last few weeks.

Click to shrink...

Jesus man, take your time. excelent as always

 

[Alenco98]

An excerpt from the 1987 novel by Patrick Süskind, The Fallen Eagle: Germany During the Second World War

Germany, September 1, 1939. The world seemed to hold its breath as the Wehrmacht surged across the Polish border at dawn, its Panzers slicing through the frontier like scalpels, inaugurating what would become a cataclysmic war that consumed continents and civilizations alike. The Blitzkrieg—lightning war—was not merely a military tactic; it was a statement of intent, a declaration that Germany would no longer be constrained by the diplomatic conventions or moral hesitations that had bound it since the Treaty of Versailles. In Berlin, the mood was neither somber nor jubilant, but something stranger—taut, electric, as if the nation itself was exhaling after two decades of humiliation. Crowds gathered in silence, listening to radios. The newspapers, filtered through the iron fist of Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry, declared a righteous campaign, a final settling of scores. Poland, they said, had defied reason, refused compromise. Now it would pay.

To the public, the war was a correction of history—a redrawing of borders, the restoration of pride. To the regime, it was the beginning of a reordering of the world.

The Nazi political structure, by 1939, had fully metastasized into a grotesque parody of governance. The Reichstag still existed, but only as a hollow theater, rubber-stamping Führer decrees with orchestrated unanimity. Power lay in the hands of competing satraps—Himmler, Goering, Bormann, Goebbels—each leading overlapping empires within the state, each vying for Hitler's favor. It was an intentional chaos, a system designed not to govern efficiently but to ensure that no one man could consolidate enough authority to threaten Hitler's supremacy. The Führer himself had transformed from politician to prophet, speaking less and being seen even less often, his pronouncements increasingly mystical, symbolic, and unchallengeable. His worldview—Manichaean, apocalyptic, eschatological—had become state policy.

The SS under Heinrich Himmler exemplified this evolution. Initially Hitler's personal guard, it had grown into an autonomous empire, its tendrils extending into police forces, intelligence networks, colonial administration, and economic enterprises. The SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt (SS Economic Office) oversaw a vast portfolio of slave labor camps, mining operations, and construction projects, providing the Reich with a warped solution to its chronic labor shortages and resource deficiencies. Himmler saw himself not merely as a security chief, but as the architect of a racially purified empire, and his vision of an Aryan utopia justified the mechanization of genocide and the commodification of human lives.

Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, meanwhile, embodied the grotesque inefficiencies of the regime. As head of the Luftwaffe and the Four-Year Plan, he controlled vast swathes of Germany's war economy, yet his incompetence, avarice, and detachment ensured that many projects faltered. He built industries that consumed more than they produced, stockpiled synthetic fuels that degraded quickly, and squandered resources on prestige projects like the Me 262 jet before it was ready. The Luftwaffe's early successes masked deep structural weaknesses: logistical disarray, overworked personnel, and a reliance on outdated doctrine.

Economically, Germany in 1939 was a colossus on crumbling stilts. The Nazi economic miracle of the 1930s was a carefully staged illusion, underwritten by rearmament, deficit spending, and massaged statistics. The Four-Year Plan had brought full employment, but at the cost of militarizing nearly every sector of the economy. By the outbreak of war, the Reich faced critical shortages in oil, rubber, tungsten, and nickel. Synthetic substitutes were unreliable and costly. The invasion of Poland brought some relief—agricultural land, coal, and a new population of forced laborers—but it also brought new burdens: a restive population, logistical nightmares, and the first full-scale implementation of the Nazi racial agenda.

The swift and brutal conquest of France in the summer of 1940, accomplished in just six weeks, stunned the world. The fall of the Third Republic handed Hitler control of the European continent from the Atlantic to the Vistula. Politically, it cemented his godlike status among his followers. Militarily, it provided raw materials, industry, and a collaborationist regime in Vichy. But the victory concealed deeper fault lines. The French campaign depleted German fuel reserves, overextended supply lines, and lulled the High Command into believing in its own invincibility.

It was in this context that Italy's unexpected neutrality delivered a strategic and political shock. Benito Mussolini, who had long postured as Hitler's ideological comrade, astonished the world by refusing to enter the war in 1939. Publicly, he cited Italy's lack of readiness; privately, he sought to maneuver for greater influence without committing prematurely to a losing cause. His generals, still traumatized by Italy's abyssal performance in Ethiopia and Spain, breathed a sigh of relief. Rome declared itself a "non-belligerent," a term invented to mask its true role: a shadow ally, a mercantile enabler, and eventually, a silent saboteur.

Italy's ports became the Axis backdoor. Under neutral flags and falsified manifests, Italian ships transported critical raw materials from neutral nations into the German war economy. Swedish iron ore traveled south, bypassing the British blockade. Spanish mercury, Turkish chromium, and Brazilian rubber—all vital for munitions and vehicles—flowed through Italian commercial networks. Italian diplomats liaised with both Axis and Allied intermediaries, their true loyalties cloaked in ambiguity. Vatican channels facilitated financial transactions. Swiss banks laundered funds. Mussolini played every side—blustering in public, wheeling and dealing in private.

But the true depth of Mussolini's deviation came in the Jewish question. While anti-Semitism was official policy in Fascist Italy, Mussolini lacked the visceral, exterminatory drive that animated Hitler. When offered the chance to "assist" in the deportation of German Jews, he saw not just a humanitarian opportunity, but a political one. Italian North Africa—Tripolitania and Cyrenaica—was transformed into a dumping ground for tens of thousands of Jewish deportees. But Rome quietly repurposed the camps. Rather than death or oblivion, they became training centers—hardened compounds where the Lehi, a radical Zionist underground inspired by Jabotinsky and fueled by vengeance, began organizing what would become the Falag: a Jewish fascist paramilitary party.

Between 1940 and December 1941, nearly one and a quarter million Jews were smuggled into Italy and sent off to Africa. There they received military training, political indoctrination, and logistical support. Italian officers, defected German Jewish veterans, and Lehi members oversaw their instruction. Thousands were subsequently smuggled into Palestine, swelling the ranks of the Lehi. British authorities, already strained by Arab unrest, faced a swelling insurgency that attacked both British and Arab targets with mounting ferocity. By 1941, Palestine had broken out into low grade civil war. The Jewish insurgency, fueled by Italian weapons and ideology, threatened to sever British control over the entire Near East.

For Hitler, the betrayal stung. But it was Mussolini's final act of subversion that proved the most consequential.

In December 1940, under the pretext of a trade mission, Mussolini visited Moscow. Officially, he came to negotiate oil and grain imports. Unofficially, he delivered a warning. Over dinner in a private Kremlin chamber, with only interpreters and secretaries present, Mussolini gave Stalin evidence that Germany was preparing to invade the Soviet Union in the spring of 1941. Stalin, cautious and deeply paranoid, refused to show alarm. But the message burrowed into his mind. Soviet rail traffic intensified. Troop movements, disguised as drills, increased. Industrial relocation plans were dusted off. Stalin ordered the expansion of spy networks in Berlin, Prague, and Bucharest.

Thus, by the time Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, the Soviet Union was not wholly unprepared. It was still reeling from the purges, still disorganized, still backward—but it was not asleep. The initial German advances were astonishing. But the Soviet counterblows came sooner, and harder, than expected. The Wehrmacht was not fighting an unsuspecting empire—it was fighting one that had seen the shadow coming.

And the shadow had an Italian name.

When Operation Barbarossa was launched on May 30, 1941, it did not unfold as the swift, surgical decapitation strike Hitler envisioned. It collided not with a sleeping colossus, but a Soviet Union that was alert, mobilizing, and increasingly suspicious of German intentions—thanks in no small part to Mussolini's whispered warning in Moscow months prior. What was supposed to be the greatest blitzkrieg in history—"a war of extermination," in Hitler's own words—was immediately strangled by conditions both natural and human.

The spring of 1941 was among the wettest in memory, with the rasputitsa—Russia's infamous season of mud—lingering deep into June. Roads became swamps. Forest paths dissolved into sucking bogs. Tanks, halftracks, and artillery were mired for days at a time, their crews forced to dig and drag them forward by hand and horse. German logistics, already fragile, began to collapse before the campaign had properly begun. Fuel tankers couldn't reach the front. Horses—the Wehrmacht's unglamorous but essential transport backbone—died en masse in the muck, their corpses left to rot beside wrecked supply convoys.

Militarily, the offensive faltered in phases. While Army Group North inched toward Leningrad, thanks to the joint Soviet and Italian guarantees of Finnish neutrality, Leningrad remained tenuously supplied and never came under full siege. Army Group South bogged down in the Pripet Marshes, its attempts to outflank Soviet forces thwarted by prepared defenses and flooded terrain. Worse, Soviet generals—no longer asleep at the wheel—employed elastic defense strategies, falling back only to regroup and counterattack. German progress was measured in blood-soaked kilometers.

Army Group Center, the spearhead of Barbarossa, did achieve significant advances, reaching Smolensk by late July. But unlike in France, there was no knockout blow. The Soviets, forewarned and now cautious, refused to be encircled en masse. They ceded ground slowly, bleeding German divisions as they fell back. The capture of Kiev, a city that Hitler fixated on as symbolic, took until early December—a victory so pyrrhic it crippled the offensive momentum. Entire Panzer divisions were reduced to shells, infantry battalions were forced to march without boots, and supply depots burned in endless partisan raids.

Meanwhile, the economic foundation of the Reich trembled under the weight of its ambitions. The Four-Year Plan had already stretched Germany's industrial base to the breaking point. Barbarossa demanded more: more oil, more rubber, more trains, more bullets. But the Romanian oil fields were overstressed, and its imports routed through Italy were unable to keep up with German demands. Even the iron lifeline from Sweden now faced scrutiny from British intelligence and submarine patrols. Factories in the Ruhr worked around the clock, but shortages of copper, manganese, and skilled labor forced compromises in quality. Aircraft were rolled off assembly lines with defects. Tanks arrived with no spare parts. The economic miracle of Nazi Germany began to rot from within.

Politically, Hitler's absolute control began to metastasize into paranoia. No longer the fiery orator of 1933, he had become a disembodied voice, broadcasting nightly addresses from the shadows of the Chancellery. He trusted fewer and fewer men. High Command, once a hive of strategy, now operated in fear of the Führer's wrath. Commanders who expressed doubt—like Halder, Guderian, and even Brauchitsch—were sidelined, ignored, or quietly threatened. The SS, meanwhile, surged in power. Himmler, emboldened by Hitler's withdrawal from day-to-day affairs, expanded his fiefdom from police force to totalitarian state within a state. The Einsatzgruppen, given vague orders to eliminate "enemies," interpreted this with genocidal zeal.

And here, the Holocaust underwent its metamorphosis.

Deprived of Italian cooperation in mass Jewish deportation—a plan once cynically dubbed "the Mediterranean Solution"—Hitler turned inward. The Italian ports, once envisioned as conduits for transporting Jews to North Africa, were now closed. Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, promised by Mussolini as staging grounds for "resettlement," had instead become training camps for the Falag—a Zionist-fascist militia that now numbered over 300,000 fighters. The Jews who were once to be expelled now returned as armed resisters, trained in desert warfare and ideological discipline, infiltrating the British Middle East with growing intensity.

Infuriated by this reversal and emboldened by desperation, Himmler activated Plan B. The Einsatzgruppen began large-scale massacres in Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltics—Babi Yar, Ponary, the forests of Rumbula—turning entire populations into mass graves. Ghettos were sealed, and railroads previously used for coal and munitions were diverted to Chełmno, Belzec, and Sobibor, now transformed from labor-processing centers into industrial sites of annihilation. The "Final Solution" ceased to be a bureaucratic euphemism. It became policy. It became architecture. It became ash.

The German public, though shielded by layers of propaganda, could not entirely avoid the truth. The smell of smoke, the disappearances, the rumors whispered in trams and taverns—these left psychic scars. Some justified. Most ignored. Almost none resisted. Fear had become cultural reflex.

By December 15, 1941, the illusion of invincibility had cracked. The Wehrmacht, spread thin across a thousand-kilometer front, could no longer sustain the illusion of triumph. The Red Army, bolstered by Lend-Lease shipments from the United States—jeeps, trucks, radios, boots—began counterattacks around Leningrad. German divisions, unprepared for the cold and exhausted from endless engagements, broke in places. The dreams of a short campaign, of the fall of Moscow by Christmas, were dead.

Diplomatically, the United States had frozen German assets and begun full-scale support to the Allies. While still officially neutral with Germany, Roosevelt's speech on December 9, following Pearl Harbor, made clear the trajectory. Hitler would declare war on America four days later, sealing Germany's fate. Italy, meanwhile, stood outside the storm. Mussolini, though still fascist, had become an enigma—flattering Hitler in public, courting the Allies in secret, and quietly supplying Balkan guerrillas with intelligence. German trust in their "Latin brother" collapsed. But Rome no longer cared.

Even within the Reich's inner circle, rifts widened. Goering's Luftwaffe was tarnished by the failure in the skies over Britain and now useless against Soviet winter storms. Goebbels could no longer spin disasters into destiny; his speeches turned bitter, shrill. Himmler, calculating and methodical, began to build networks of loyalty that would survive Hitler himself. The Führer, once surrounded by adoring ministers and generals, now sat alone, listening to Wagner and muttering of betrayal, destiny, and blood.

The eagle still soared, yes—but its wings were tattered. Its claws slick with the blood not just of enemies, but of its own illusions. And from its talons dripped not the crimson of triumph, but the slow, black ink of a fate long foretold and now in motion.

The world no longer held its breath. It had begun to exhale, and the air was heavy with the smoke of reckoning.

The world tilted on its axis on December 16, 1941—not with the thunder of bombs or the roar of tanks, but with the ancient, papery voice of Pope Pius XII. After months of cryptic silence, the Vatican published irrefutable evidence of the German Holocaust, including photographs smuggled out of Poland by Italian agents and Jewish partisans. The Pope condemned the Nazi regime not merely as criminal but as heretical. Most astonishingly, he issued a blunt ultimatum: all baptized Catholics who remained members of the Nazi Party past December 31 would be automatically excommunicated. It was a thunderclap. The Vatican had not merely spoken—it had declared war on evil, and implicitly blessed those who would take up arms against it.

Italy moved swiftly. That same day, Mussolini, the modern-day sphinx of Rome—his silence long mistaken for complicity—broadcast a declaration of war against the German Reich. The Italian Air Force launched a devastating raid on the Ploiești oil fields in Romania, stunning the Germans and crippling one of the few lifelines that kept their panzers moving across the Russian steppes. In the Vatican, bells rang. In Berlin, sirens wailed.

What followed was less a collapse than a disintegration. Catholic soldiers along the Eastern Front—Poles, Bavarians, Alsatians, Austrians—began deserting in droves. Morale, already brittle from the mud, the frostbite, and the endless Soviet artillery, simply evaporated. Priests in field hospitals refused to give last rites unless the dying renounced the Party. A young Bavarian lieutenant, Hans Riemenschneider, shot his own colonel in the back during a retreat, pinned a rosary to the man's uniform, and walked toward Soviet lines with his hands raised.

By Christmas Eve, momentum had shifted irreversibly. Dutch and Belgian militias, with British troops and logistical support, began to systematically liberate their country from their German occupiers. French Royalists and Vichy defectors in Lyon and Marseille proclaimed the rebirth of the Royaume de France, hailing Louis Napoleon who had been proclaimed as King by Italy. In Norway, the puppet government in Oslo swiftly collapsed. The Reichskommissariats—once symbols of total Nazi domination—were imploding. What was once a continent under the iron boot was now a mosaic of rebellion, mutiny, and religious reckoning.

On December 25, 1941, the three generals in charge of the eastern front—Fedor von Bock, Erich Hoepner, and Maximilian von Weichs—met in secret in a freezing villa outside Warsaw. The Soviet 16th Army was less than 50 kilometers from the 1939 Polish frontier. The generals knew the war was lost in the conventional sense. But they didn't wish to surrender to the Soviets. In desperation they drafted the Ostschild Agreement, a declaration of defection and redirection. Germany, they proclaimed, had been hijacked by a madman and a death cult. Their new formation—the Freie Deutsche Armee, or Free German Army—would no longer serve Berlin. Their objective was to hold the Eastern Front against the Soviets, not to preserve the Reich, but to salvage what remained of the German people. Their intended objective was to buy time for the Western Allies to liberate Europe, to forestall the Red flood, to ensure Germany did not become the next Poland—split between commissars and Fascist satraps.

On December 27, the Free German Army released its manifesto via Vatican Radio and the BBC. It was a stunning broadcast: Fedor von Bock, in full uniform but with the eagle-and-swastika ripped from his breast, spoke directly to German soldiers and civilians alike. He invoked not Hitler, but Clausewitz. Not Goebbels, but Goethe. He quoted the Pope. He swore no loyalty to Italy or Britain, only to Germany itself, and to the God that had not yet forsaken it. The world gasped. Hitler screamed. The SS went on a rampage through Silesia and Bavaria, trying to preempt a wider defection. But it was already too late.

The south exploded. The remaining Wehrmacht divisions returning from Slovakia and the east found their supply lines sabotaged, their officers assassinated by local resistance fighters or even their own troops. Operation Saturnus, the German invasion of northern Italy launched in mid December, had already stalled less than 30 kilometers into Italy due to ferocious Italian/Lehi resistance and partisan sabotage. Now it crumbled. Italian alpine divisions drove the Germans back into the Brenner Pass by mid January. In Munich and Augsburg, anti-Nazi student groups led by Catholic clergy took to the streets. The SS cracked down brutally, but it only spread the fire. The Reich was no longer at war with the world—it was now at war with itself.

On December 30, 1941, Britain launched an invasion from the newly liberated Netherlands. Capturing Bremen by January 15. The operation, codenamed Swan Feather, allowed the British to come in contact with Free German units in the northwest or Germany. Churchill recognizing the potential of Italy and the USSR carving up the Nazi corpse for themselves moved quickly. Supplies began to trickle in—radio sets, medicine, some light weaponry. No tanks, no planes. Just enough to encourage, not enough to empower. All this did was encourage further resistance by the SS and stall the British advance.

Mussolini said nothing. His Rome was silent, its palaces dark, its troops running ceaselessly north and east. He had declared war, but not intention. The pope, meanwhile, gave his New Year's address from St. Peter's Basilica, repeating the original excommunication decree and saying only that "those who act in defense of human dignity, even among former enemies, walk the path of grace." For those in the Free German Army, it was a benediction—quiet but unmistakable.

But grace could not stop the Soviet war machine. Isolated from the Reich and poorly supplied, the Free German Army soon found itself pushed back. The Wehrmacht's remnants either joined the Ostschild or were hunted down by SS units now led by Odilo Globocnik and Gottlob Berger—men without scruples, feeding off fanaticism and despair. But even they could not halt the Soviet juggernaut.

On January 15, 1942, Soviet forces under Marshal Zhukov entered the ruins of Warsaw. The city had become a grotesque palimpsest—half-burnt ghettos, shattered cathedrals, crumbling German outposts. The Free German Army did not fight to the death. Most units surrendered. Some retreated westward into the forests of Pomerania, others disappeared into the civilian population. A few, including remnants of Hoepner's command, fought delaying actions along the Vistula until Soviet artillery pulverized them.

Germany was dismembering itself. The Nazi command structure in Berlin still operated on paper, but communications had broken down. The southern provinces were in open rebellion. The Wehrmacht no longer obeyed the fuhrer, but its own officers, its chaplains, its consciences. In Königsberg and Danzig, gauleiters declared martial law. In Vienna, SS units seized power from the civilian administration and began preparing to make the city a fortress. And in Berlin, Hitler refused to speak. He remained in his bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery, staring at maps that bore no resemblance to reality, dictating orders to ghosts.

The Eastern Front was gone. Not merely collapsed—but repurposed, mutated, fragmented into a surreal tragedy of rebellion, betrayal, and strange hope. The Red Army would march to the Elbe. But it would not find only Nazis waiting—it would find Germans who had chosen a third path. One of desperation, certainly, but also of conscience. The war was no longer a simple struggle of good versus evil. It had become something far more tragic, and far more human.

The great storm broke with pen, not sword. In the snow-blanketed Crimean town of Yalta, cloaked in an icy fog, Mussolini and Stalin met in grim silence as they confirmed the carving up of Europe into their respective spheres. They signed the Treaty of Yalta the next day, a press conference announcing the treaty.

It was a cynical pact carved from the ruins of a dying empire.

The agreement split Germany along brutal lines. Everything south of the Elbe—from Bavaria to Saxony and Austria—would become a "neutralized" Italian-aligned Kingdom of Greater Austria under personal union with the House of Savoy. Everything north, from Berlin to Mecklenburg to East Prussia, would fall under Soviet occupation, later to become the German People's Republic, a communist buffer state.

To Churchill's horror, no British voice was present at Yalta. His foreign office was livid. His own diplomats in Rome had been left out of the loop entirely. When news of the treaty broke, Churchill's outrage echoed through Whitehall like a thunderclap.

"This is not peace," he muttered grimly in the War Room, puffing his cigar. "It is a carve-up of Christendom."

The treaty sent shockwaves through the dying Reich. Morale, already collapsing in the east, disintegrated into outright mutiny. Protestant clergy, long cowed into silence, rose from the pulpits in fury. Pastors in Wittenberg, Lübeck, and Kiel began delivering firebrand sermons denouncing the SS and the Nazi regime as heretical, even demonic. The once unshakable ideological glue of the Volksgemeinschaft cracked.

Meanwhile, the SS, cornered and feral, fought back with apocalyptic fury.

Himmler and Hitler vowed a final stand. The Waffen-SS, now largely detached from Wehrmacht command and fueled by a berserker fanaticism, turned German towns into fortress-cities. They hung mutineers from lampposts and burned villages suspected of sheltering deserters.

But it was too late.

The ancient capital of the Habsburgs fell to Italian and Lehi troops with minimal resistance in early February. The people, exhausted by war and demoralized by years of Nazi rule, raised white flags from shattered balconies. Vienna had once been a pearl of German culture; now it was ash and memory.

Mussolini himself flew to Vienna in triumph, dressed in a long black coat. From the balcony of Belvedere Palace where the second Vienna award was signed only a few years ago, he proclaimed the Kingdom of Greater Austria, placing King Victor Emmanuel as its constitutional monarch under Italian protection and turning south Italy into a client state.

The mood was grim rather than jubilant. The Austrian people accepted their new overlords with weariness. No one had the strength to resist anymore.

With Italian forces halting at Saxony only a few weeks later—keeping their Yalta promise—Stalin unleashed hell upon the north.

Zhukov's artillery began bombarding Berlin in early March. The once-proud capital of the Reich turned into a hellscape of concrete and flame. Soviet soldiers, hardened by years of blood and frostbite, pushed street by street through a city that refused to surrender. SS fanatics turned every school and hospital into a bunker. The air stank of death, of burning flesh and wet rubble.

Then came the radio broadcast heard around the world:

"Adolf Hitler is dead. Berlin is lost. But Germany is not defeated."

No one knew the full truth. Some whispered of an assassin's bullet—an Italian agent perhaps, or a disillusioned SS officer. Others said he took his own life in the Reich Chancellery bunker, cursing the world with his final breath.

Whatever the truth, the myth of Hitler collapsed with him.

Himmler, deluded to the end, retreated to Hamburg with remnants of the SS and attempted to mount a last stand. The British, finally landing in strength on the northern coast, pressed forward with Canadian and Polish troops under Montgomery's command.

On Easter morning, as the churches of Hamburg rang their bells for the first time in years, the SS raised the black flag in defiance. Street fighting raged for days. British artillery flattened entire districts.

On April 1st, Himmler was captured in the tunnels beneath the Altona railway station. He had shaved his mustache and attempted to pose as a railway worker. He was found carrying cyanide pills in his boots. The guards forced him to spit them out at gunpoint.

With Himmler's capture, the war in Europe ended.

Germany lay carved into three pieces:

The Kingdom of Greater Austria, an Italian-aligned Catholic monarchy stretching from Tyrol to Saxony, ruled by King Umberto II, guarded by Carabinieri and a new generation of Austrian nationalists loyal to Rome.

The German People's Republic, a Soviet satellite ruled from Berlin by a puppet Politburo, where former communist exiles returned to exact revenge and rebuild a nation in the USSR's image.

The North German State, a British-occupied Protestant rump stretching from Hamburg to the Rhine. It was neither free nor sovereign, a fragile zone of military rule and humanitarian crisis, administered by weary Allied governors. But it wouldn't last for long.

As spring thawed the blood-soaked fields of Europe, a new shadow settled over the continent. The once united front against Nazism fractured.

Italy and the USSR had won the war—but peace was already unraveling. All according to Mussolini's plan.

Churchill stared out his window in London one late April evening and muttered to his cabinet:

"We have strangled the snake, but the corpse is being divided by wolves."

The Cold War had begun before the blood had dried.

 

[Solar Mechanis]

Note: Apologies for the sudden hiatus, I recently went through a breakup and was feeling very depressed and unmotivated these last few weeks.

Next chapter we'll cover Germany and the end of the war. I might be a little slow though as honestly I'm still kinda feeling it.

Click to shrink...

Take care of yourself. Always sucks when it happens.

---

These interludes are interesting. Hopefully we see WW3 breaking the Soviets in multiple pieces. You engineered the death of Nazi Germany. Now you gotta do Soviet Russia.

Are we gonna get a Japan interlude? All this love of city pop and not one interlude with the Japanese. Nominal allies of Germany and Italy in the Axis.

And maybe an update on tech. See all the new toys Italy has scavenged.

 

[Alenco98]

March 1, 1942
Palazzo Venezia
Rome, Italy

Another meeting. Another grotesque theater of cigars, paper shuffling, and cheap cologne trying to mask cowardice. I sat there in the shadows of faux marble columns—columns I had installed because the originals weren't grand enough—while the Grand Council droned on about railroads and food rations like bureaucrats pretending to be conquerors. They really thought this was governance. But all I could think about was cassette tapes, neon signs reflecting in rainy glass, and that old Totto-chan track I used to loop on late nights in my little Foggy Bottom apartment. I missed the way DC tasted at 2 a.m. on a Saturday night—vending machine coffee, cigarette ash, loneliness and her.

It hadn't been long since I announced the formation of the Global Federation of Free Alliances—the final, blinding, operatic crescendo of my continental campaign of military and diplomatic shock and awe. The British ambassador had been begging for a meeting. He'd tried to be subtle, sending Ciano a dozen polite threats dressed as invitations. I refused. I wasn't in the mood for another whisky-slick diplomat trying to massage my ego while plotting my downfall. That was Ciano's headache now. Besides, Churchill and Roosevelt had apparently requested a summit. The way Ciano described it, they sounded perturbed, like I'd pissed in their scotch.

I chuckled. Out loud.

The room froze.

I waved them off. "Relax," I said, leaning back. "I just remembered a funny joke."

They didn't laugh. Of course they didn't. They weren't allowed to unless I signaled.

My mind drifted again—to Sofie, to my adpted daughter's baby laughter echoing through corridors of cold marble that never warmed no matter how many fireplaces I installed as Rachele carried her. Then I remembered the other Sofie, the woman I named my daughter after. The woman I loved, I saw her in a field of poppies once, or maybe it was a dream. I couldn't tell anymore. The past was a broken VHS tape I kept replaying in a Betamax world, the memories becoming distant, like the morning dew slowly coming off the grass as the rays of dawn degenerated into daytime.

Then the door burst open.

"Duce!" An aide, breathless. "Urgent news from Berlin—Hitler is dead."

That snapped me out of it.

Dead?

Already?

I knew the Soviets were steamrolling their way into Germany like a drunk punk band trashing a hotel suite, but I hadn't expected this. I figured Hitler would go down with a scorched-earth tantrum, screaming in a bunker, gun in his mouth only after Berlin was ash. This was... early. Sloppy. Weak.

"So…" I muttered, steepling my fingers. "He killed himself already?"

The aide hesitated. "No, Duce. Reports are... unclear. Some say one of our agents assassinated him. Others claim a mutiny among his own guards. Still others say he did kill himself. There's chaos."

I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling, ornate and useless.

I knew how it went in my timeline. A coward's bullet in a bunker, a burning corpse in a ditch while Eva lay beside him like a dead ballerina. But here—here things were different. Too different. Germany folded faster than it should've. Stalin was already bitching about Scandinavia, north Germany and British interference. Britain had slithered into Bremen and Scandinavia to try and cut the soviets off, and they'd been playing a bad game of chicken in Karelia for over a month, artillery, men, equipment. It was convenient though, the more men they funneled into Karelia the more German territory me and the Ruskies could carve out.

"Guidi," I called, without looking. "Send more OVRA teams into Germany. I want every corridor, every cellar, every scorched ruin searched. I want Hitler's corpse—his skull. I'm going to make it my official drinking cup."

Gasps.

The cabinet recoiled as if I'd just suggested eating a child.

I smiled slowly. "What? You're all shocked? Have none of you read Byzantine history? Or better yet, Bulgarian? Khan Krum did the same to Emperor Nikephoros. It's tradition. And frankly—fitting. A Germanic barbarian reduced to a chalice in the hands of a future Caesar. I want that in the memoirs. In the legends. Let the children of tomorrow drink that story like communion wine."

They looked at me again—fear in their eyes, suspicion too. That same delicious mix. Like the aroma of blood in a velvet-draped ballroom. God, it was intoxicating.

I was above them. I was them. I was the chorus, the villain, the lead. I was Homelander in a toga. A dictator with the aesthetic sensibilities of Momoko Kikuchi on mescaline.

"Next topic," I said, flipping through my notes lazily as I hummed Easy Lover under my breath. "Sapienza."

Ah yes, my little undead pet project. The thing that kept me up at night—partly with fear, mostly with arousal.

"Guidi," I said, yawning. "Update me. What's our haul from Grossdeutchland?"

Guidi stood, stiff and pale. "Duce, per your directive, our teams have extracted, secured, and in some cases, liberated key German scientific personnel. We've seized documents from universities, abandoned labs, bunkers, and SS vaults. We have V-2 schematics, jet propulsion blueprints, self flying planes,advanced submarines, helicopters, nuclear physics notes, early prototypes of guided missiles and night-vision optics."

I nodded. "Continue."

He swallowed. "Some of their weapons programs are years ahead of anything we currently have in production. There are plans for so-called, nuclear weapons. These weapons have t-"

I smiled and raised my hand

"The ability to wipe out a city in one shot?" I said.

He paused. "Yes, Duce."

Sapienza. The codename for the project. Italian for "wisdom," but also the name of a quiet Mediterranean town where I once died in a Hitman game on professional difficulty. Fitting. The Reich had poured billions into science and experimental weapons. And now their toys were mine.

Jet fighters. Nuclear death. Ballistic missiles. helicopters. I smiled.

"Imagine," I said, standing now, my voice rising. "These so called rockets, all filled with a bomb that can wipe out a city and millions of lives in one shot. We control the narrative now. We own the myth. The world is ours for the taking."

The council looked horrified. As they should.

"Your faces," I continued. "You all look like the Soviets just knocked on your door."

I gestured to the blueprints being passed around. "This is the future. What we do next will define the next thousand years. Not Roosevelt. Not Stalin. Us. This knowledge does not leave this room unless I say so. If any of you breathe a word of this—even to your wives—I'll have your families buried in the catacombs beneath the Capitoline Hill, nameless and devoured by rats."

Silence. A collective nod.

"Good," I said.

I clapped.

The doors opened a few minutes later.

"Gentlemen," I said. "Lets move on to other business. Allow me to introduce our new Minister of Cinema. Miss Leni Riefenstahl."

She entered like an aria. Regal. Broken. Dangerous.

"The woman behind Triumph of the Will is now unemployed, thanks to Germany's demise. But not for long. She will be our oracle. Our architect of myth. She will film everything. The coronation. The new senate. Me."

She sat without speaking.

"As you all know, once the war ends—and it will end in our favor—Italy will be no more. I intend to crown His Majesty Victor Emmanuel as Emperor of the Restored Roman Empire. And I," I said, placing my hand on my chest like an actor rehearsing a monologue, "shall be named Consul for Life. Eternal guardian. The new Augustus. The final Caesar."

A pause.

"And each of you shall be rewarded. You will be made senators of the New Rome. Your loyalty—your obedience—will be carved into the annals of eternity. Riefenstahl will record it all. Rome will rise again. Not with swords—but with cameras. With spectacle. With tech. Renascita, the name of our film. Our revolution, broadcast all over the world."

My voice dropped.

"This is not just politics. This is mythmaking."

And for a moment... I almost believed it would fill the void. The ache. The quiet ache that my manic monologues couldn't drown out. The ache of a man who once watched sunsets over a DC skyline, drinking canned coffee, all while laughing and chatting with the woman he still desperately loved despite the years and perhaps universes separating them. A ghost inside a man who now ruled most of Europe—and still couldn't sleep.

"Dismissed," I said.

And they left.

Like shadows fleeing a spotlight.

Like children before a angry schoolteacher.

--

An excerpt from Ian Flemings 1958 Novel: Sapienza, how Italy got the bomb

As the smoke settled over the ruins of the Reich, the guns of April fell silent, and the true nature of victory began to show itself—not in parades or proclamations, but in laboratories, interrogation rooms, and office buildings hastily converted into command centers. Italy, the surprise victor in the final act of the European war, moved with deliberate, quiet purpose.

Operation Sapienza, launched in the dying days of January 1942, had not been a military campaign but an intellectual and strategic one. Named for the University of Rome, the operation was overseen directly by Mussolini's inner circle, primarily by the secretary of the interior Guido Buffarini Guidi. While Soviet and British troops fought over ruined cities, Italy's OVRA agents and their collaborators in the German resistance moved through Germany with surgical precision.

Their mission was simple: harvest the mind of the Reich before the Soviets could.

OVRA agents in long leather coats appeared in villages, universities, and SS archives with their German collaborators. Armed with lists compiled from captured documents and interrogations, they sought out physicists, chemists, and engineers. No stone was left unturned, the OVRA looked through every nook and cranny from the shores of Peenemunde to the swiss alps. Most German personnel were taken without warning. Those who resisted had their familes threatened with execution or, more chillingly, "transfer to Soviet custody."

Men like Wernher von Braun, Walter Dornberger, Werner Heisenberg and even Kurt Diebner were rounded up and given a brutal choice: work for Italy or face Stalin's wrath. Under duress, they chose the former.

The OVRA transformed old Nazi research centers—especially those in Bavaria and Saxony—into Italian-administered facilities under heavy guard. Prototypes of the V-2 rocket, Heinkel jet fighters, early nuclear research papers and even helicopter prototypes were seized. Entire train convoys rolled south towards Rome carrying machinery, uranium samples, blueprints, and sometimes entire laboratories along with their staff and families.

To the world, Mussolini remained stoic, aloof, delivering vague proclamations about "peace through strength" and "the safeguarding of civilization." But behind closed doors, he was playing a dangerous game.

Italy, once a great power in name only, now stood as a third pillar in the emerging tripolar world—not equal in strength to the US or USSR, but indispensable to both.

And as the dust settled in Europe Italy began to reshape it's newest German Vassal state.

In contrast to the brutality of the SS and the cold purges of the NKVD in the north, Italy's occupation of southern Germany and Austria was surprisingly lenient—at least on the surface.

Former Nazi officials were quietly rehired. Mayors, police chiefs, judges—many with stained pasts—were restored to their posts so long as they publicly pledged loyalty to the new monarchy and underwent "moral rehabilitation" sessions led by OVRA censors. These were often farcical performances: a few days of confessions, loyalty oaths, and carefully staged town hall speeches swearing fealty to the House of Savoy and denouncing the "errors of fascism." The pope was even persuaded to rescind excommunication to any officials who publicly repented their actions. The only exceptions were the higher ups, generals and members of Hitler's cabinet. Goering, Speer, Doenitz, and their ilk were all rounded up, given summary trials then executed, their bodies thrown into the waters of the Danube or Rhine. Though they were also given the choice of renouncing Nazism and having their excommunication rescinded before being executed.

Mussolini understood what neither Churchill nor Stalin could admit aloud: the bureaucracy of Germany still worked, and he would not waste time rebuilding it from scratch. The Kingdom of Greater Austria was kept orderly, efficient, and authoritarian—but not terroristic.

The Soviet occupation mirrored much of what they did in Poland after 1939. Brutal, uncompromising, and drenched in paranoia. The NKVD purged former Nazi loyalists with mass arrests, deportations, and kangaroo courts. Entire towns saw their male populations disappear overnight. The German People's Republic, declared in late May 1942, became a gray, miserable place of banners, marches, and secret police.

Land was seized. Churches were shuttered. Newspapers were turned into socialist rags. A new German politburo—composed of old Communist exiles like Wilhelm Pieck and Walter Ulbricht—took power under Soviet tutelage, ruling with iron obedience to Moscow.

Churchill's forces, now confined to the Protestant northwest, attempted a more idealistic project—de-Nazification and democratic restoration. But their limited resources, weariness, and the sheer chaos of postwar Germany made progress slow.

The British occupation focused on rebuilding infrastructure and feeding starving civilians. Denazification tribunals were inconsistent—some strict, others lenient depending on region and political necessity. German Protestant clergy became central moral figures, preaching repentance and civic responsibility from the pulpit while quietly collaborating with British intelligence to keep tabs on local sentiment.

But Britain's rump state—a northern Germany of ports and Protestantism—was fragile. And after negotiations in Moscow in may it would cease to exist by June, the cynical price Britain and America paid to keep Scandinavia and the Netherlands.

By June 1942, though no formal hostilities existed, the atmosphere between the occupying powers had become tense. Italian convoys were monitored by Soviet patrols. British planes shadowed Italian rail lines. Propaganda leaflets fluttered across occupation zones like windblown ash.

Mussolini had won his war—and he ensured no true peace ever emerged.

A Cold War was now emerging. But it would not be a Cold War of two giants. It would be a triangle of shifting alliances, backroom deals, and ideological confusion. A three way Tango had begun.

In the ruins of Germany, the future had arrived—and it spoke in three tongues: English, Russian, and Italian.

 

[Alenco98]

March 1, 1942
Führerbunker
Berlin, Greater German Reich

The smell of wet concrete and coal smoke hung in the stale air like a funeral shroud. The map room buzzed with anxious murmurs, boots shifting on cold stone, voices clipped and tense. The walls seemed to sweat. I was back in my temple of ruin, among men too afraid to look me in the eye and too loyal—or cowardly—to admit what they already knew.

The war was lost.

The words didn't need to be said anymore. They hovered, invisible but loud, in the stale, static-laced air of the bunker. I stood over the Reich's last map like a priest over a desecrated altar. Berlin was encircled. The Soviets were moving like wolves with blood in their mouths. The Americans were in Bremen. And the Italians—the Italians—were in Munich, planting their black banners where my armies had once marched.

Betrayal. That word clung to me more intimately than my own name.

I turned to them—Himmler, Speer, Goebbels, Keitel, Bormann. Dead-eyed men pretending to be officers. Goebbels was the only one still talking, muttering something about propaganda operations in the East. I raised a hand. Silence fell like a guillotine.

"I will not flee Berlin," I said. My voice cracked on the last syllable. "This city is the cradle of our rebirth. I will die here... as a man, not a myth."

They said nothing. What could they say? Even the rats were leaving the bunker.

"I appoint Heinrich Himmler as my successor." The words tasted like ash. "You will continue the fight from underground. A guerrilla war. Let the Reich live on in the forests, in the mountains, in every loyal German heart. This is not the end—it is the beginning of a darker, purer war."

Himmler bowed, like a priest accepting a crown of thorns. There was something giddy in his eyes. He was already imagining himself as Caesar of the rubble.

Later – Chancellery Gardens, Berlin

The city above was fire and ruin. Columns of smoke reached into the March sky like the arms of sinners. Buildings stood cracked and skeletal, as if Berlin itself was ashamed of being seen like this.

I insisted on seeing the Hitler Youth.

Boys. Children. Some no older than twelve. Helmets too big, rifles too long. They tried to stand at attention, but their knees shook. One was weeping. Another tried to hide the trembling in his hand by gripping the Panzerfaust tighter. I looked into their faces and saw a nation on the brink of annihilation. And yet—they looked at me as if I were still divine.

I told them they were Germany's final hope. That they would go into legend. That their sacrifice would echo forever. Words. Beautiful, empty words.

Then—the sky cracked.

A Russian shell screamed from nowhere and tore through the edge of the square. Stone and steel and flame erupted. The world turned white.

I felt a blow, like being struck by God.

Then—nothing.

March 6, 1942
Unidentified Military Hospital
Somewhere in Germany

I awoke to whispers and light.

But I couldn't move.

A ceiling swam above me, yellowed and cracked. A bulb flickered. I tried to speak. Nothing came out. I tried to turn my head—nothing. I couldn't feel my hands. My legs. My mouth was dry. My tongue was heavy.

I heard voices—German. Soft. Female.

"Er ist wach," said one nurse.

"He blinked again. That's twice," said another.

I blinked once. Slowly. Deliberately.

A form leaned over me—a nurse in pale blue. She had soft eyes and a mouth curled in forced calm. She looked at me like one might look at a wounded dog.

"You've been unconscious for four days," she whispered. "You are safe. Please don't be afraid."

Safe? Safe from what?

I tried to speak. My lips didn't move. My breath rasped, shallow and hollow.

"You suffered massive trauma from artillery," she said. "Your spine is broken. You have full paralysis from the neck down. You cannot speak."

I tried again. Nothing. My body was no longer mine. I was in it, but not of it. A caged spirit. A Führer in a prison of flesh.

She reached forward and dabbed my forehead with a cloth. "Very few know you're here," she added softly. "Orders. Only a handful of doctors and nurses have access."

Ah. Of course. Himmler. Ever the spider, already spinning his web.

March 7 – Same Hospital

Each day now crawled like an insect over my soul.

I could see shadows moving on the walls. I could hear voices outside the door—sometimes laughing, sometimes crying. One night I heard a nurse playing a lullaby on a music box in the next room. It made me think of my mother.

Mother.

Her hands. Her voice. Her softness. The only person who ever truly loved me, maybe. She would have wept to see me like this. A breathing corpse.

I became obsessed with blinking. It was all I had left. One blink for yes. Two for no. The nurses were kind, in a distant, professional way. But I could feel their fear. And their disgust.

Was this the fate of a Titan?

Not martyrdom. Not death in battle. Not a last stand atop the Reichstag. But this. Bedsores. Sponge baths. My body limp and my mouth full of drool.

Sometimes I imagined it was all a dream. That I would wake up back in Linz as a boy, sketching buildings, dreaming of opera. Or in Vienna, starving and angry, still believing I could bend the world.

But I was awake.

I was still here.

No bullet. No cyanide. Just paralysis and decay.

March 10

I saw a figure in black enter the room. The nurses straightened. Fear returned.

Himmler.

He stood beside me like a priest beside a tomb.

"Mein Führer," he said, bowing slightly. "You have become... a symbol."

I blinked once.

"Good," he said. "You still understand."

He looked around the room, as if judging the wallpaper.

"The Reich is changing," he said softly. "I lead now. In your name, of course. To the world you are dead. Bavaria has fallen. Austria as well. But the fight continues."

He leaned close.

"You will be preserved. Your body—sacred. Your will—immortal. You will be taken care of Mein Fuhrer, for the service you have done to Germany."

He smiled.

"You will become more than a man. You will become a myth. A legend."

He turned and walked out.

And I—unable to scream, unable to die—lay there.

Trapped in my skin. A man who once ruled empires, now blinking in silence while the world moved on without me.

April 5, 1942
Unidentified Military Hospital
Somewhere in Germany

I awoke to unfamiliar voices. They were not the soft, sterile tones of the nurses, nor the clipped militarism of German officers. These voices were lilting, animated—Mediterranean. Italian.

Footsteps echoed like the deliberate steps of executioners. I couldn't see the door from my bed, only the pale green ceiling and the trembling lightbulb above. Shadows entered the frame—four figures, all in black, sharp silhouettes against the fluorescent wash of the ward. They moved with theatrical precision, as if on a stage.

One bent over me. A man in his forties, perhaps. He wore a black leather trench coat with the unmistakable red dagger insignia of the Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell'Antifascismo—the OVRA. Mussolini's secret police. His cologne reeked of tobacco, musk, and victory.

"Well, Dio mio," he said in Italian, switching to German with a grin. "You are uglier than we imagined."

The others laughed. One of them whistled mockingly. Another crossed himself and muttered, "Santissima Madonna, he still breathes."

I blinked once. I had no other weapon.

The man leaned closer. His eyes were bright with amusement. "Adolf Hitler," he said slowly, as if savoring the syllables. "The great Aryan lion, the Führer of Europe. Now a twitching sack of meat, drooling on his pillow."

He crouched beside the bed, elbows on his knees. "You must forgive our intrusion, Herr Hitler. We expected to find a corpse. But this... this is better."

I blinked again. A slow, deliberate blink. Rage. A yes to hatred. A yes to humiliation.

They laughed harder.

"Oh, he's aware! Bellissimo! That makes it perfect."

The leader motioned for the others to circle the bed. They loomed over me like crows on a fencepost.

"You should know," he continued, in that bright, conversational tone, "the war is over. Finished. Berlin fell shortly after your supposed death. The Soviet flag is flying over the Reichstag. Stalin, Churcholl and our Duce are carving up your Reich."

He gave me a pitying smile. "Your dream is ash. Your thousand-year Reich lasted barely 10."

Another agent spoke—this one younger, full of venom. "Himmler has been captured by the British. He cried like a child, I hear."

I blinked again.

"Oh yes," the leader said, "Himmler. Your spider. Your little spider is in a cage now. The British asked him where you were, and do you know what he said?"

He leaned close enough for me to smell wine and garlic on his breath.

"He said you were dead. That he buried your body in a secret grave and declared you a martyr."

He paused.

"But we know better, don't we? We've had agents embedded in Germany for years."

The man stood, pacing slowly. "We found the nurse. Sweet girl. Big eyes. She told us everything. The paralysis. The silence. The sponge baths."

He looked down at me again, as if inspecting a museum piece.

"Il Duce—Benito Mussolini—he had plans for your skull. A golden drinking cup. Engraved with the dates of your failure. He even had a jeweler picked out in Florence."

More laughter.

"But this?" He gestured to my body, limp and helpless. "This is more poetic. More Italian. You will rot slowly, trapped in that rotting flesh. No bullet. No gallows. No martyrdom. Just piss bags and silence. A Führer reduced to blinking."

He crouched again, face inches from mine.

"Tell me, Adolf. Is this what Valhalla looks like?"

I stared. I blinked once.

He smiled. "Good. You still have pride. That makes it sweeter."

The leader stepped back and motioned to one of the others. A camera appeared—an old Leica. A flashbulb. Click. They took several pictures. From the side. From above. A final one with the leader holding up a copy of Il Popolo d'Italia beside my head like a trophy.

"Duce said if we found you alive to keep it a secret," he said. "this is for keepsakes. It's not often you meet historical figures. I'll frame this picture over my living room, send a copy to Il Duce as well."

Then, he stepped close one final time.

"No legends for you, Adolf. No Götterdämmerung. You don't get to burn in your bunker like Nero. You don't get to vanish like Napoleon. You don't even get death."

He leaned close enough that I could feel the warmth of his breath.

"You will get taken to rome."

He stood. Snapped his fingers. The other agents followed as they grabbed me and strode toward the door.

One paused at the threshold, looked back at me.

"You'll outlive the Reich, mein Führer," he said with a smirk. "But you won't like what you see."

We left into the corridor.

The bulb flickered.

No myth.
No man.
Just a ruin.
Just a cage.

And still—I blinked.

One for yes.
Two for no.
Forever.

April 10, 1942
Palazzo Venezia
Rome, Italy

I descended into the bowels of the Palazzo Venezia, beneath the vaulted echoes of history and paranoia, into the converted air raid bunker—an austere concrete womb now serving as a makeshift prison. The air smelled of mildew and conquest.

There they were. My loyal OVRA agents, lined up like schoolchildren presenting finger paintings to a substitute teacher hopped up on espresso. Their black uniforms still faintly dusted with the Alpine wind of Bavaria. They stood stiff, puffed with pride, their chests practically begging for medals.

I smiled. I'm generous. Enlightened. Merciful, even.

"You have all done well," I said, voice rich and slow like pouring aged Chianti into the throat of destiny. "As a reward, each of you will be promoted and granted estates in Libya. Ten acres sound appropriate, doesn't it? And—why not—a ten million lire bonus apiece."

Their eyes lit up. Greed, lust, ambition—bellissimo! I could see the numbers flicker behind their irises like Wall Street brokers watching the Dow surge during a war.

But just as one of them opened his mouth to thank me, I raised a hand.

"Leave me," I said coolly. "I wish to speak to mein alter Freund alone."

They obeyed without hesitation. The door shut behind them with a hiss. Silence returned, heavy and intimate.

There he was. Adolf Hitler. The Führer. Der Gröfaz. The CEO of Racism. Propped upright in a hospital gurney like a sack of half-dead potatoes. Tubes, gauze, the faint smell of disinfectant and failure.

I approached him slowly, my boots tapping on the concrete like war drums in slow motion. I knelt beside him, eye-level with the most feared man of the last decade, now reduced to a twitching husk with the blinking capacity of a broken Roomba.

"I never expected to see you alive," I murmured, smiling slightly. "Originally, you blew your brains out like a coward just before the Soviets reached your doorstep. Then came the conspiracy theories—Antarctica, Argentina, secret Nazi moon bases—hell, one of them said you were reincarnated as a dog in Paraguay."

I chuckled. He blinked—not once, not twice, but several times. Probably confused. Good.

I leaned in, close enough for only him and God to hear.

"You won't speak again, so I might as well be honest."

Pause. Breath. Whisper.

"I'm not Mussolini. Not really. I haven't been since the war started. I'm... from the future. The year 2024. Your Reich collapsed. Mussolini, the real one, ended up dying after he entered the war in your side and lost it alongside you. Italy burned with you. But me? I was some nobody. I died in a traffic accident in Rwanda. I fell off a fucking truck, all because I was too busy smoking a cigarette before it hit a bump in the road and threw me off. Then. I woke up... in this body. In your timeline. In his body."

I stood up slowly, letting the words sink in like morphine through a needle.

"I used what I knew from school, movies and video games. The war, the betrayal, the economics, the tech. I weaponized it. I modernized Italy. Reformed its armies. Took Constantinople. Crushed the Balkans. Made Africa bend the knee. I've become what you could never be, Adolf—a winner."

He blinked. Faster now. Maybe fear. Maybe skepticism. Maybe he thought I was tripping.

"But the more I win, the more they fear me. The more they whisper behind their stupid little mouths. Ministers, generals, even my family. They think I'm mad. Which is fair. I talk to myself. I cry at night. I hum song by Tatsuro Yamashita and Maria Takeuchi when no one's watching. Japanese music artists from the 80s. I miss city pop on my Spotify account. I miss... McNuggets. Streaming services. Neon lights and video games."

I was pacing now, animated, like a Wall Street psychopath on his third line of coke.

"You know what I miss most? The mundanity. Sitting on a sofa watching Vice documentaries with my friends while high on edibles, wondering whether I should text my ex. The sound of a microwave. The existential void of scrolling through YouTube at 2AM, pretending I wasn't hollow inside."

I turned back to him, tears welling in my eyes now. Rage and longing fighting a duel across my face. And I hugged him, tightly, the only person that I'd vented to in all the time I was here.

"I.....am so lonely. My name isn't even Benito. That's just the skin I wear. My name—my real name—died on that road. I had a family. A lover. Friends. A dog who peed on everything I loved. And now? All I've got are medals, conquest, and a nation too scared to look me in the eyes."

I pulled back then stood up and clenched my fists, letting the tears flow down rather than wiping them away.

"I've built an empire, Adolf. A real empire. Not your coke-fueled fever dream with esoteric runes and incestuous Austrian hang-ups. I've built something lasting. But no matter how far I expand, no matter how many wars I win, I can't fill the hole. The hole left by my old life."

I crouched again, wiping my eyes, snot mixing with the scent of iron and chlorine.

"I cry in silence. Because I have to. I can't break down in front of them. Not in front of Ciano. Not in front of Rachele, Edda, Bruno, Vittorio, Benito, Anna Maria and Romano. They look up to me. But inside, I am broken. Hollow. Trapped. Just like you, mein Freund."

I leaned forward, inches from his cracked, crusted lips.

"This universe is indifferent. Uncaring. Unjust. I've learned that much. All we can do is perform. Play our roles. And maybe—maybe—when I die, I'll wake up again. Somewhere else. Maybe I'll find peace. Or maybe I'll just keep reincarnating as dictators in collapsing timelines and try to clean their shit up until the cosmos gets bored of me."

I stood tall, sniffling, steel-eyed once again.

"And as for you…"

I pointed at him like God on Judgment Day.

"I will put you on trial. In chains. In public. Before all of Rome. Then, after I crown Victor Emmanuel as Emperor of Rome and declare the rebirth of civilization, I will sentence you."

I smirked.

"And you, Adolf Hitler, will become my court jester. Your memory reduced to parody. A cautionary tale. You will wear bells and paint, and Jewish, African, Asian, and children of all whose names you could never pronounce properly will mock and jeer you. You will live to see your legacy—reduced, mocked, erased."

I knelt again, and for a moment, something raw flickered across my face.

I reached forward and caressed his cheek.

"See you soon... mein Freund. And don't worry—I'll sing some Anri for you before the trial. Maybe 'Remember Summer Days.' You remember those, don't you? Summer days while young."

I cleared my throat and hummed. Then I began to sing.

"Hitori aki no umi o mitsumete omoidasu."

"Ano natsu no kage o sagashite."

"Kokoro made mo sotto ubatte kieta hito."

"Ima wa mou oikake wa shinai."

I stopped, I looked at him. He kept blinking, his eyes wide open like a deer caught in headlights. And then I stood and walked away, footsteps echoing like fate through the chamber. Behind me, the Führer blinked—slow, uncertain.

One for yes.
Two for no.
Several for "what the actual hell just happened."

 

[Solar Mechanis]

At this point I expect Mussolini to get an aneurysm before 1945. Or maybe he'll reach some sort of inner peace. Both are interesting in their own ways.

Although I wonder how SI is dealing with the debilitating stomach pains that'll have him writhing on the floor. Side effects from the training accident in WWI.

 

[DarthLurtz]

As always amazing new chapter! I can't wait for the next one!! Outstanding job!!!

 

[wetwipefatass]

Waiting to see how this neofascism ideology co-develops alongside colonialist liberation/ multiculturalism. like what does fascist feminism look like?

also interested in the fate of japan and asia when a fully functional united states with warnings about pearl harbor can much more easily protect asia from the "red menace" and the japanese never get to invade half of east asia. will we get Chiang Kai-shek china, communist china or something different? Same with the fall of japan, without the string of early victories against the USA, and a much less debilitated USSR, does japan surrender to the USA or will it attempt to fight out the russian invasions from manchuria

 

[Solar Mechanis]

I'm rooting for Italy to go all in on nuclear power and space exploration. Mine those asteroids. Become the richest empire in history. WW3 will also be fought in space.

 

[Alenco98]

An excerpt from Jean Marie Le Pen's 1999 novel: La France Insoumise, France during the second world war:

The bitter tragedy that befell France in the spring of 1940 was neither inevitable nor swift. It was slow—a slow-motion collapse masked by delusion, ossified bureaucracy, and the crumbling remnants of 19th-century arrogance. From the moment German boots crossed into Poland on September 1, 1939, the French Republic was at war—not only with Hitler's Reich, but with itself. In those nine months leading to the Armistice of June 1940, France's soul was laid bare, stripped of its illusions, and left exposed to history's judgment.

And I was there. A child, yes, but already aware that something inside the very skin of our people had torn.

When war was declared on September 3, after the British ultimatum expired, France followed suit within hours. The declaration was delivered with trembling resolve, wrapped in the weighty, formal language of statesmen who feared what they were invoking. Yet in the salons of Paris, and the chambers of the Quai d'Orsay, the true terror was not German arms—it was French weakness.

It was a strange war. La Drôle de Guerre, they called it. The Phoney War. From the Maginot Line to the coasts of Brittany, French soldiers settled into their bunkers and barracks as if on an extended training exercise. Morale, initially buoyed by patriotic fervor, slowly ebbed into boredom and anxiety. There was little to fight, but much to fear.

The political situation was as stagnant as the front. Daladier, who had presided over the declaration of war, clung to power through inertia more than leadership. The Chamber of Deputies was riven by factionalism: Radicals, socialists, conservative republicans, all jostling for influence while pretending unity. Daladier was soon replaced by Paul Reynaud, a man of bold rhetoric but limited means. He surrounded himself with hawks—Mandel, de Gaulle, and others—but France's military establishment was firmly in the hands of the old guard: men like Gamelin, clinging to World War I doctrines as though the intervening decades had changed nothing.

Yet while the cannons of the Maginot Line remained silent, Europe moved. Norway fell. Denmark surrendered. The Wehrmacht devoured Poland and turned its eyes westward. And throughout this, Italy remained neutral.

That, in itself, was a geopolitical miracle.

In the first week of September 1939, while French troops marched into the Saarland with hesitant steps and British expeditionary forces began assembling across the Channel, a surprising message came from Rome. Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, was requesting a direct meeting with the French and British ambassadors. The Italian leader, still basking in the afterglow of his Ethiopian conquest, offered a bargain: he would remain neutral in the coming conflict—in return, France and Britain would lift the economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation imposed after the Abyssinian War.

It was a cynical offer. But cynicism had become the bloodstream of European diplomacy. The British, eager to prevent another Mediterranean front, agreed without public fanfare. The French followed. Sanctions ended. Trade resumed. And in the cafes of Rome, Italians toasted their Duce for sparing them another war—at least for now.

This agreement would echo loudly in the coming year. For while Italy kept its peace, France's military planners continued to assume—disastrously—that the Alpine front might erupt. Hundreds of thousands of men, material, and logistical resources were kept pinned to the southern frontier, guarding against an attack that would never come. A German invasion alone was one thing. A two-front war was unthinkable. And yet, that phantom threat lingered in every French general's mind, dulling their strategic judgment.

Economically, France suffered in silence. War production ramped up—slowly, painfully. The Third Republic's industrial bureaucracy was not built for emergency mobilization. Factory owners demanded contracts, subsidies, and assurances; workers, many of whom were still in the grip of union militancy from the Popular Front years, balked at extended hours and military discipline. The CGT issued contradictory statements—calling for national unity on one hand, striking over wages on the other.

There was never enough of anything: not enough tanks, not enough radios, not enough aircraft. What existed was scattered among competing commands, deployed based on the preferences of generals rather than the needs of the battlefield. France still manufactured tanks that could outperform their German counterparts—but dispersed, without doctrine, and with feeble air support, they might as well have been museum pieces.

The British sent their Expeditionary Force, under Lord Gort, who worked awkwardly alongside Gamelin's ponderous staff. Communications were poor. Language barriers persisted. Even the most basic coordination—tank support, air cover, shared intelligence—was riddled with duplication and confusion. The Anglo-French alliance had declared war together. They would lose it together as well.

The Germans struck in May 1940. Not through Belgium alone, as the French had expected—but through the Ardennes, that "impenetrable forest" that Gamelin had considered safe. It was a thunderclap. Entire French divisions were encircled before they fired a shot. The Wehrmacht's blitzkrieg was not just military—it was psychological. French units, cut off and leaderless, collapsed not from fear but from disbelief. "Ce n'est pas possible," one colonel reportedly muttered, as he watched a German panzer column roll through his sector unopposed.

By the time Paris was declared an open city, Paul Reynaud had already lost his grip. Pétain, the old marshal, was called into government. The Chamber, in despair, gave its blessing. And on June 22, at Rethondes, in the very same railway carriage where Foch had dictated the 1918 Armistice, the Germans took their revenge.

The Armistice of 1940 was cruel in its dignity. France was divided: the north occupied, the south left in the hands of Vichy. Germany dictated the terms. But there was no Italian delegation present, no Mussolini to preen for the cameras. Italy's neutrality, cynical as it had been, kept her outside this humiliation. Some in France viewed it as cowardice, others as proof that the Duce was wiser than they had imagined.

Yet there was no wisdom in that summer. Only shame.

In the weeks that followed, hundreds of thousands of French soldiers were taken prisoner. Others wandered aimlessly through the countryside. Cities emptied, refugees poured south. My family, like so many others, fled Paris with nothing but a satchel and our name. My father wept once—not for the defeat, but for the surrender.

He was a veteran of Verdun. He remembered what we once were.

As for me, I remember the silence. A silence so deep that even the crows seemed to fall quiet. It was the silence of a broken nation. Not yet conquered, but shattered—by its own failure to believe.

What followed the Armistice was not peace—it was partition. Not just of territory, but of pride, of memory, of the soul of France. We, who had once ruled from Dakar to Damascus, now watched from behind our prison walls as vultures picked apart our fallen glory.

In August of 1940, with Europe shivering beneath the boots of the Wehrmacht, Mussolini, still neutral, arrived in Vienna—not with armies, but with maps and ambitions. Hitler, flushed with his triumph, was in a magnanimous mood. The Duce, eyes gleaming like a Renaissance merchant-prince, spoke not of war but of "stability," of "Mediterranean order," of the "necessity" of preventing British encroachment upon the fallen possessions of Vichy. He promised to keep the Mediterranean quiet, promised to keep the waters safe from German exports, and, most crucially, offered Germany the illusion of benevolence: the image of allowing others to share in the bounty of conquest without bloodshed.

Germany agreed. The Second Vienna Award, remembered today as a formal adjustment of Europe's borders, became something darker—a secret congress of the new world order, held not in Versailles, but under its desecrated ghost.

The terms were brutal.

Hungary was rewarded for its loyalty with the full return of Northern Transylvania. A cruel reparation, for the Romanian army—humiliated and disarmed—was forced to stand by while entire towns were transferred to Budapest's writ, sometimes overnight. Bulgarian ambitions were likewise satisfied. The entirety of Dobruja, stretching from the Danube to the Black Sea, was handed over with German approval and Italian diplomacy. The borderlands groaned as old ethnic hatreds, barely concealed, exploded anew. Deportations, burnings, lynchings. And always, somewhere in the background, German officers smiled and said, "This is not our concern."

But it was the Western Mediterranean where the true crime unfolded.

Mussolini, that ghost of Caesar, pulled a map of France from his briefcase—not of the Republic, but of the Empire. He offered a vision. "Better French Syria in Rome's hands," he said, "than under British boots." Hitler, still dreaming of an eastern frontier, nodded. Why waste German troops securing North Africa when Italy, Spain, and the Arabs could be bought with ink?

Thus it was done.

Italy received what she had long coveted: Corsica, Nice, and Savoy were torn from the corpse of the Third Republic and absorbed into a resurgent Italy. Tunisia, too, became Italian—its people disarmed, its French elite imprisoned and expelled. French Syria and Lebanon, with its mosaic of religions and rivalries, was handed over with a smile. Somalialand, the neglected corner of the Horn, was added as a trinket.

In Morocco and Algeria, Mussolini's charm offensive was subtler but no less ruthless. Spain, newly awakened from its civil war and already under Italian influence was rewarded for it's newfound alignment. Franco was offered all of French Algeria and France's protectorates in Morocco, in exchange for quiet cooperation with Rome.

The new Maghreb would be a Francoist colony in all but name. A Duchy of the Maghreb, with the Moroccan Alaouite king as its figurehead, under Spanish influence. The Berbers, long suppressed by both colonial and Arab overlords, were empowered as auxiliaries and enforcers. French businesses were seized. French families—les pieds-noirs—were declared "undesirable elements." Their homes were stripped. Their lives, uprooted.

The insurgency came fast and bloody. French officers and civilians who refused to surrender were executed in front of their men and families. Bombs tore through market squares. Men, Women and children were rounded up, interned in desert camps that bore a terrible resemblance to the rumors whispered about German Poland. And the world watched, unsure whether to call this "ethnic cleansing" or "stability." Though the Spanish weren't without "mercy". Once they were all rounded up they were expelled to French west Africa.

The Free French—those who had fled south, those who had crossed into British Egypt, or waited in Dakar—seized the cause. In the wastelands of West Africa, tens of thousands of embittered pieds-noirs were recruited, formed into regiments loyal to the free french cause. They brought with them stories: of children dead in desert camps, of priests burned alive in Constantine, of entire towns razed by Berber militias trained by Spanish advisors.

De Gaulle, ever the dramatist, declared the Maghreb "a wound that bleeds France's honor." And for once, few disagreed. And soon they turned their wrath on the Vichy french in West Africa and across the colonies.

In Syria, Lebanon and Tunisia, the pattern repeated. French garrisons were overrun, disarmed by Italian Carabinieri or black-shirted militias, french civilians were interned then expelled. Resistance blossomed in the Levant. The British, ever eager to sabotage the Fascist beast without fully waking it, funneled weapons and advisors to Syrian partisans. But in Iraq, the storm was already gathering—the Golden Square was preparing its coup.

But Mussolini was shrewd.

When it's officers came to him for aid, rather than allow the coup to tie Italian fortunes to a distant and volatile Arab uprising, he offered a bargain to the English: Italy would turn in the leadership of the Golden Square to the British, and allow the British to secure their Iraqi oil routes and fields—in exchange for London's silent withdrawal from the Syrian theatre. A devil's deal. Churchill raged, but Britain complied. And the Free French resistance in Deir Ezzor and eastern Syria found their weapons drying up, their comrades dying in silence.

Then in Anatolia, France's blood would run again.

In the summer of 1941, with Turkey teetering and Greece now a fascist vassal under General Pangalos, the final blow was struck. Italy and Greece invaded eastern Thrace and the Anatolian coast. The Free French, bolstered by exiled units and North African veterans, were dispatched by Britain to aid Turkey's defense. They fought bravely in the hills around Tarsus, in the olive groves of Adana, alongside Turkish conscripts and Kurdish irregulars loyal to Turkey.

But they were no match for Italy.

The Italian air force, revamped and ruthless, rained incendiaries and mustard gas on rebel towns. Greek mountain troops, hardened by Balkan brutality, took no prisoners. Italian tanks—modernized and beggining to be mass-produced—plowed through Thracian and Adanan roads like beasts unleashed. Turkey and France held their ground, they made them pay for every kilometer. But alas they only had mostly men and rifles. And Italy had tanks, planes and gas on their side.

The free French withdrew through Kurdistan, into Iraq, wounded and hollow once the armistice was signed.

By October 1941, Turkey lay broken. Adana, Haytay and Tarsus was under the so-called kingdom of Greater Syria, an Italian puppet. Greece held Constantinople. The world had not merely changed—it had been dissected, rearranged by hands that cared little for flags and less for people.

And France? France was now two countries. One in chains, ruled by Vichy puppets. The other—Free France—was no longer French in empire or orientation. Her soldiers bore the names of Maghrebi villages lost, of mothers executed in Tunisian prisons, of comrades buried in Turkish soil. The Republic was dead. In its place was something older, something harder.

It would take a new kind of Frenchman to survive this world.

On December 16, the rebirth of France began. Not by words coming not from a government, nor a general, but from the marble silence of the Vatican. Pope Pius XII, who had walked a tightrope of neutrality and diplomacy, cast off the mask. The bells of St. Peter's rang as the Pope delivered a worldwide radio address, heard from Boston to Buenos Aires.

Pius denounced the Holocaust by name. Evidence—photos, testimonies, coded military transmissions decrypted by Italian intelligence and personally given to him by Mussolini was presented. He named the camps: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Chelmno. He named the dead. Jews. Poles. Roma. Priests. Children.

He declared Nazi Germany an instrument of Satan, called for a Christian crusade, and issued a bull of damnation excommunicating those who were members of the Nazi party. Every German who failed to rescind their allegience by January 1, 1942, was threatened with eternal damnation. Theological firepower—centuries dormant—was unleashed with precision. Millions of Catholic German citizens across Europe were thrown into spiritual turmoil overnight.

The same day, Italy declared war on Nazi Germany.

Mussolini—who until then had balanced on a knife-edge of neutrality while expanding his empire with surgical opportunism—struck like a dagger. Italian aircraft bombed Ploiești that day as Mussolini delivered his own speech declaring war on Germany. Then, fascist Italy's radio waves blared with a new slogan:
"Rome leads the Crusade—Europe shall be cleansed."

In Milan, crowds cheered under Fascist banners and crucifixes. In Paris, German troops entered a state of siege. In Spain, Franco convened an emergency cabinet meeting as Madrid's clergy praised Mussolini's defense of Christendom. He would soon declare war on Germany as well.

But Mussolini was not done.

That same evening, under heavy security, Mussolini met, André François-Poncet, the French ambassador to Italy. There, beneath frescoes of Caesar and Constantine, Mussolini laid out his vision for a restored France—a third way, a synthesis of monarchy and fascism under a Catholic sword.

France, he said, would rise again. But not as a republic, nor as a German puppet. It would be a kingdom, holy and reborn. The offer was astonishing:

Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, great-nephew of Napoleon III and descendant of the Corsican line, would be freed from Vichy custody and crowned King of the French.

André François-Poncet, would serve as the first Prime Minister—an olive branch to the republicans under the cross.

In compensation for France's loss of her African and Levantine empire, the new Kingdom of France would receive:

Belgium

The Rhineland

Luxembourg

The Belgian Congo

And Italian guarantees in helping reconquer it's former colonies.

Italy would even cede Savoy back to France "as a gesture of Latin brotherhood."

French identity, Mussolini said, would not die, but be reforged in royalist steel, papal gold, and crusader flame.

The stunned ambassador, reluctantly accepted.

The very next day, after another meeting with Mussolini, the Pope issued a second decree, stunning even hardened skeptics. It was a spiritual ultimatum.

"Any Catholic found collaborating or a part of the armed forces of National Socialist Germany shall be excommunicated unless they lay down their arms and present themselves to the mercy of God and of legitimate authority by January 1, 1942.

Bishops in Poland, France, Austria, and Germany were warned: neutrality was no longer acceptable. Churches across Europe read the Papal order aloud. Soldiers wept in confessionals. German chaplains burned their vestments. Faith had become treason—or salvation.

The Italian Army, seasoned from Turkey and bolstered by motorized divisions and recent reforms, crossed into southeastern France on December 18. They met stiff resistance from the SS and a few Vichy holdouts, but the Pope's decree had done it's intended effect. The Italian advance was swift.

On December 23, Italian marines landed in Toulon with support from Free French partisans.

By December 28, the 2nd Alpine Division took Marseilles, while local Catholic clergy blessed them.

Meanwhile, deep inside France, Mussolini's OVRA agents stormed the estate where Louis Napoleon had been imprisoned. They freed the prince, who, though frail and pale, greeted them with prayers.

By January 1, 1942, in the cathedral of Vichy itself, surrounded by French and Italian soldiers, Italian generals including Mussolini's firstborn son Benito Albino, and local priests, Louis Napoleon was crowned "Louis XX, King of the French", a crown was placed on his head by Benito Albino, it was the beggining of a friendship between the two men.

That same day, thousands of German Catholic soldiers deserted, seeking refuge with French and Italian forces. Those who didn't were soon being killed in pitched battles across France.

But Mussolini knew symbolism mattered.

Thus, on January 27, 1942, Louis XX was crowned a second time—this time in Reims Cathedral, the traditional seat of French coronations since Clovis, as the bells of Notre-Dame rang in unison. The cathedral, still damaged from the First World War, was hastily restored with Italian funds. The crown was placed on Louis' head with incense rising and chant echoing in Latin and Old French.

French generals—monarchists, republicans, and Catholic nationalists alike—knelt before him. The flag of France, now bearing the Napoleonic bee alongside the white cross of Clovis, was raised across liberated territories.

The people wept. Radio broadcasts sent it across the world. In Quebec, crowds gathered in candlelight. In Dakar, free french soldiers sat in stunned silence and rage. Even in London, where Churchill hated Mussolini, was forced to accept the situation.

The Kingdom of France, as restored by Mussolini, would become a strange hybrid—monarchist, fascist-leaning, Catholic revivalist, and deeply traumatized.

Mussolini, who had once been an atheist, now posed as a defender of Christendom, casting Hitler as a "new Herod" and himself as a Constantine.

But it was the Pope's words that echoed most in history books.

"France is not dead. She was crucified. And on January First, in Vichy, she rose again."

But as France free itself with Italy's help. Italy began to carve up Europe. Flush with the triumph of its December declaration of war against Germany and buoyed by the moral weight of Papal endorsement, Italy acted with ruthless precision to fulfill its new imperial design. The promise of a reborn France—crowned, monarchic, resplendent in Latin glory—demanded tangible compensation for the territories Mussolini had no intention of returning: North Africa, Syria, Corsica. France, humiliated and divided since 1940, would now be rebuilt not from Paris but from Vichy, its new sovereign crowned in exile and returned in triumph by Roman steel.

It began in Belgium.

December 17, 1941 — Italian paratroopers descended into the twilight over Brussels. Their objective: the royal palace, still a symbol of Belgian sovereignty despite the occupation. They seized it with surgical force—but King Leopold III had vanished, spirited away by loyalists into the forests of Wallonia. Still, the symbolism was potent. The fasces flew over the palace spire by dusk. But they found themselves under siege by the angry citizens of Brussels.

Italy didn't let this setback phase it, instead, they extended blanket amnesties to Vichy defectors. A flood of disillusioned officers, petty bureaucrats, and embittered nationalists—many drawn from Action Française and other monarchist circles—saw the Italian advance not as invasion, but deliverance. They became the shock troops of the Latin Restoration.

On January 2, 1942, the siege of the palace was lifted. Italian Paratroopers backed by Vichy defectors stormed into brussels, they were greeted fierce resistance, though Italian air support and arms quickly repressed it. That day, the Italian tricolour flew beside the Imperial Eagle of the House of Bonaparte atop the city hall. The Italian message was clear: the Latin order would return, and it would wear the crown of Louis-Napoléon.

Yet not all bowed.

In Namur, a different flame was kindled. On January 5, a ragged congress convened—teachers, miners, parish priests, and battered union men. With no official insignia, only red armbands and carbon-smeared pamphlets, they proclaimed the Walloon Free Republic. Their allegiance was not to Mussolini's puppet France, nor to the crumbling Vichy order—but to Free France, to de Gaulle, exiled in Brazzaville. A delegation was dispatched to the Congo that very hour.

The "Republic" lasted four days.

January 6, 1942 – 04:22 a.m.: Engines roared overhead as Savoia-Marchetti bombers droned over the misty Ardennes. Italian paratroopers—veterans of Thrace, hardened by the anti-partisan war in Bulgaria—descended on Namur, Charleroi, Liège. What followed was not war but liquidation. In Dinant, factory militias fought with kitchen knives and petrol bombs. In Huy, a railway worker named Georges Duvivier derailed an Italian supply train by manually releasing the brake—he died in the explosion. Bells rang across the Meuse not for liberation but for mourning.

By January 9, it was over. The Walloon Committee for Liberation was disbanded by rifle. Leaders were bound, blindfolded, and flown to Paris. Those not executed were made to kneel before Italian judges in kangaroo courts, humiliated and forgotten.

Then came the charade.

January 12: The "Reunification Referendum" was announced. There were no observers. The ballots were printed in Rome. Voters were herded to polling stations flanked by Blackshirts and foreign legionnaires. The result—97.3% approval—was not believed even by those who cast the ballots.

January 13: André François-Poncet, Mussolini's hand-picked Prime Minister of the new Kingdom of France, announced the annexation of Wallonia. Italian troops marched through the soot-choked streets of Liège beneath banners declaring "Bienvenue à la Maison." The illusion of unity was complete.

But in the north, rebellion brewed.

In Ghent, the ground still reeked of burnt pamphlets and tear gas. As the wallon republic was announced, the old city hall under broken windows and bullet-pocked frescoes came alive, a group calling itself the Flemish Council convened. It was a motley parliament: mayors, university chancellors, a few exiled ministers from the Belgian Congo, and Pieter De Clercq—a once-ignored civil servant, now thrust into history's blinding glare.

At 11:17 a.m., De Clercq, clad in black with the golden lion of Flanders stitched across his chest, read aloud:

"The Belgian State is dead. Flanders will not die with it. We hereby proclaim the independence of the Flemish Republic and request immediate annexation to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, under the protection of Queen Wilhelmina."

Outside, cries rang out—"Lang Leve Vlaanderen!" The proclamation tore through the occupied north like wildfire.

Dutch radio picked it up that night. Though Queen Wilhelmina remained silent, her Prime Minister, Pieter Gerbrandy, spoke directly to the low countries:

"The fate of our southern brothers is entwined with our own. The Kingdom shall not ignore a cry for unity born of war and sorrow."

That same night, Dutch and British armored columns crossed the border at Essen, sweeping southward toward Ghent and Antwerp to "protect Flemish civilians from foreign occupation." They encountered stunned Italian troops in the port district—neither side opened fire. The war had become a game of inches.

In Brussels, the Italian-backed Provisional Regency of Belgium condemned the Flemish declaration as a "temporary disorder." Mussolini raged in the Palazzo Venezia. Reinforcements were dispatched to Louvain, but it was too late. The north was gone.

But that wasn't the only place Italy had turned to.

On December 19, 1941, Italian paratroopers descended upon Luxembourg. The Grand Duchy fell in a matter of hours. On Christmas Day, a referendum was held by candlelight. 99.1% voted for annexation—under duress.

Then came the Saarland. On December 21, the Folgore Division crossed into Germany proper. By December 30, Italy controlled everything west of the Rhine river up to the Dutch frontier. Vichy defectors in Wehrmacht uniforms served as guides through the shattered industrial zones. Italian engineers began erecting French flags atop mines and radio towers.

On January 15, 1942, Mussolini's France held yet another referendum. Again, the result was predictable: the Rhineland was formally annexed to France. Streets were renamed. German books were burned. French flags were pinned onto every civil servant's lapel.

The British, meanwhile, marched in from the west. Dutch and British marched into Germany towards Bremen. The Italians allowed them passage under close watch. Mussolini had no intention of occupying Germany beyond the Rhine. Let the Anglo-Saxons mop up Hitler's ruin. Italy had carved its empire. Now it meant to crown it.

By month's end, the European order was shattered. France, once broken and humbled, stood once more—kingdom restored, crown re-forged, banner raised. But it was not the France of 1789, nor that of the Third Republic.

It was a Latin kingdom, born in exile, returned by foreign sword, and clad in imperial garb.

And in that smoke-wreathed twilight, where red armbands fell to ash and black banners rose again, the people of Belgium and Luxembourg realized one brutal truth:

They were not liberated.

They had been rearranged.

But the storm that had shattered Europe was now rolling southward across the vast, trembling continent of Africa. In the vacuum left by the collapse of the Third Republic and the fragmentation of Belgium, new powers clashed over old colonial frontiers, and ancient grievances boiled to the surface.

On the humid banks of the Congo River, under the red-and-gold banner of the french Tricolor, General Charles de Gaulle stood before a modest but defiant assembly of soldiers, administrators, and exiled intellectuals. In a speech broadcast via crackling shortwave transmitters to embattled outposts across the French-speaking world, de Gaulle proclaimed the founding of the French Fourth Republic. The ceremony took place in Brazzaville, the heart of Free France in Africa, and de Gaulle—clad in a simple khaki uniform, his voice dry but resolute—was named President of the Republic in Exile by acclamation.

By that day, February 4, 1942, the vast patchwork of French colonies stretching from The Caribbean to Vietnam had declared for the Free French cause. French West Africa, Equatorial Africa, Madagascar, and Indochina had all rallied under de Gaulle's banner. Most remarkably, the Belgian Congo too was placed under Free French "protection," with King Leopold III—now a guest of the British Crown—granting limited authority to de Gaulle to ensure its security and prevent Italian encroachment. Belgian colonial officers in Léopoldville reluctantly cooperated, fearing fascist advance more than Gaullist ambition.

But even as de Gaulle basked in his triumph, the ground was shifting beneath him.

In a grand spectacle staged at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, Benito Mussolini unveiled what would become the warning shot of the coming cold war. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Spanish Caudillo Francisco Franco and the newly frowned Bonapartist pretender Louis Napoléon. Il Duce addressed a crowd of diplomats, soldiers, and journalists under a banner that read: Per un'Africa Libera, per un Mondo Nuovo—"For a Free Africa, for a New World."

In a thundering oration, Mussolini announced the creation of the Global Federation of Free Alliances (GFFA). It was to be a revival of the league of nations, one with more teeth, backed by Italian institutions, banks, and peacekeeping forces.

More shockingly, Mussolini proclaimed the founding of a new body: the Organization of African Unity and Liberation (OAUL), headquartered in Addis Ababa, to oversee the "orderly transition" of Italian and Spanish colonies toward nominal self-rule. It was, as the Duce put it, "a gift of Latin civilization to the African soul."

In the background however, the three powers intended to divide and rule Africa via "emancipated countries," rooted in a "third way" philosophy: de jure European monarchs, de facto African governments on the ground, European economic control, racial equality, all under paternalistic modernization, and pan-African collaboration on fascist terms.

Franco gave a few terse words about the "glory of Iberia in Africa," in an interview once the speech ended. While Louis Napoléon proclaimed that "its time for a new type of empire, not of tyranny, but of fraternity." The carefully orchestrated show concluded with African delegates—some legitimate chiefs, others collaborators in tailored uniforms—pledging loyalty to the OAUL. It was theater, yes—but deadly theater, and it played to full houses in Dakar, Algiers, and Bamako.

The reaction from Brazzaville was immediate and incandescent. De Gaulle took to the radio that same evening, his voice cutting and cold:

"This proclamation is not liberation—it is seduction in the service of servitude. The fascist powers seek to steal the language of freedom to enslave those who have bled for it."

He denounced the OAUL as a puppet organization and branded the GFFA "a conspiracy of empire against humanity." He accused Mussolini of trying to destroy France's colonial birthright and condemned Spain and the Bonapartist faction as "parasites gnawing at the root of French civilization."

In London and Washington, reactions were cautious. Roosevelt, already skeptical of de Gaulle's pretensions and wary of colonial commitments, offered no immediate response. Churchill, juggling his own imperial dilemmas, limited himself to a private note: "This will not help."

But the speech did not stop the wave now gathering force across the continent.

In Dakar, pro-Italian youth began marching under banners of "African Brotherhood." In Bamako, disgruntled colonial troops rioted after being denied the backpay promised by Free French officials. Pamphlets printed in Casablanca and distributed covertly by Italian OVRA operatives urged young African men to "trust Rome, not Brazzaville." OVRA operatives began circulating in Abdijan, Libreville, Nairobi, and across British Africa, offering food, guns, money, radios, and a vision of "Latinate emancipation."

What followed was not a single war, but a patchwork of revolts, intrigues, and shifting front lines that would later be known collectively as the African Wars of Independence.

Over the next few years in French West Africa, Italian and French trained insurgents launched coordinated uprisings in Senegal and Upper Volta, triggering a brutal crackdown by Gaullist forces. In Madagascar, OAUL-backed rebels proclaimed a Malagasy Republic, resulting in a three-week siege of Tananarive that ended in a massacre. In Mauritania, Bonspartist agents helped stir up anti-Gaullist Berber factions, promising them freedom and independence under a french banner like Italy did with greater Syria.

In response, Free French counterintelligence—led by André Dewavrin—launched Operation Vigilance, a ruthless campaign of arrests, deportations, and assassinations targeting suspected OAUL sympathizers. Cities like Dakar and Brazzaville saw mass raids and curfews. Torture chambers operated quietly in colonial barracks. The ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité gave way to the logic of martial law.

The conflict marked the quiet burial of the Atlantic Charter—the postwar dream co-authored by Roosevelt and Churchill, promising decolonization, democracy, and global cooperation. In the deserts of Mauritania and the forests of Cameroon, those words rang hollow. The allure of direct Italian arms and money proving more tempting than British and American gestures.

Washington, watching the Franco-African War unfold with alarm, quietly shelved its proposed United Nations Organization, having been outmanoeuvred both morally and diplomatically by Italy and beginning the process to join the GFFA.

And so began the longest war of France's 20th century—not against Germany, not against fascism, but against its own ghosts in the mirror of Africa.

 

[DarthLurtz]

Holy Hell, the SI really fucked up every one else plan if he can keep his madness together for a while longer...he could become the Aizen meme for the 20th century "Just as planned"

 

[Wolffils]

My god. France really was ravaged and forcibly remade wasn't it?

No United Nations? The Fascist bloc and its new paternalistic ideologies are rampant now.

 

[Chaoswind]

It took a while but I am invested, not a fan of christo fascist winning this hard, but at least is plausible enough for my SOD to not die in a ditch.

 

[Shaedy Hoe]

Mussolini be like: "Stay mad, hoe! "

 

[Alenco98]

Excerpt from Britannia Alone: A Memoir of the Second World War by Winston S. Churchill (1955)

The autumn of 1939 found the British Empire once more cast into a crucible of global conflict. The German blitzkrieg had shredded the map of Eastern Europe, and the Polish state—brave, doomed, and betrayed by time—had vanished beneath the steel tracks of Panzers. Bound by honor, treaty, and the bitter memory of 1914, we declared war upon Hitler's Reich. Yet unlike the apocalyptic maelstrom of the Great War, the early days of this new struggle were marked by a strange and uneasy stillness. The expected upheaval in the Mediterranean did not come. There was no torpedoing of convoys off Malta, no clash of navies in the Aegean, no advance from Tripoli. The Italian boot, poised and ominous, chose instead to remain planted.

Benito Mussolini, that operatic architect of modern fascism, declared Italy's non-belligerency only a few days after the war started. A flurry of diplomatic feelers followed, culminating in an unprecedented offer: in exchange for diplomatic normalization and the lifting of sanctions imposed after the Abyssinian crisis, Italy would remain neutral. British policy circles, still reeling from the shock of war, split between those who smelled duplicity and those who saw necessity. In the end, pragmatism prevailed.

The Shadow Peace, as it came to be known, was an act of mutual strategic expedience. For Britain, the cost of war in the Mediterranean would have been catastrophic. Our empire's very arteries flowed through Suez; a hostile Italy could sever them at will. The vital lifelines from India, Australia, and the Far East would have been redirected around the Cape—a journey both perilous and slow. Fuel costs would have tripled; convoy vulnerability would have soared. With no American aid yet in sight, and our own rearmament barely begun, we accepted Mussolini's offer.

The immediate economic consequences were substantial. British shipping would traverse calm seas in the Mediterranean. Our convoys from the East arrived faster, with fewer losses, and with fewer escort vessels required. The Admiralty calculated that by mid-1940, we had saved over 1.2 million tons of fuel and over 800,000 man-hours in convoy operations. Crucially, the Royal Navy was now free to shift destroyers and cruisers to the Atlantic theatre, where the Kriegsmarine's U-boats had begun their deadly harvest.

Maltese resupply missions were cut in half. Gibraltar, no longer under constant threat, became a staging ground for Atlantic patrols. Alexandria and Port Said received reinforcements rather than replacements. In economic terms, Britain was gifted a vital breathing space.

And we used it. Aircraft production was redoubled. New factories in Coventry, Birmingham, and Glasgow poured out Hurricanes, Spitfires, and Beaufighters. A network of radar installations grew like a metallic web along the Channel coast. Steel allocations were prioritized for tanks and artillery, not for ships sunk in a second Mediterranean front. Armaments minister Lord Beaverbrook declared that "Every moment not spent fighting Mussolini is a moment gained against Hitler."

But neutrality had its price.

The Rome Pact, a new alignment of "non-aligned" states under Italian hegemony, swiftly emerged. Spain, Hungary, Bulgaria, and later Greece found themselves orbiting Rome rather than Berlin. Officially outside the Axis, the Rome Pact nonetheless served as an economic pressure valve for the Reich. Through a vast web of commercial exchanges, Italy funneled German coal, steel, and arms to peripheral markets in exchange for foodstuffs, chromium, bauxite, and oil from the Balkans and North Africa.

The Bank of England warned of a "shadow network of fascist capital," laundering German trade through Rome, Madrid, and Budapest. Economic warfare became a silent front. The so-called Alpine Drain siphoned German goods south, allowing Hitler to maintain production levels longer than expected. Still, the War Cabinet judged the trade-off acceptable—for now. Our Mediterranean dominions remained secure. India and Burma could still feed the metropole. Australia could still send wheat and wool.

Militarily, we gained critical time. The Royal Navy's reassignment of capital ships allowed the formation of three Atlantic hunter-killer groups by early 1940. These squadrons—backed by radar-equipped destroyers and long-range flying boats—proved devastating. U-boat sinkings increased by nearly a quarter. By the time of France's collapse, the Home Fleet was leaner, faster, and more deadly.

Then, in June 1940, France fell—and the world held its breath.

Surely now, Mussolini would strike.

But he did not. The Italian war machine stood silent. The Alpine passes remained unbloodied. At Dunkirk, Italian observers watched the British flotilla embark 330,000 souls to safety—yet offered no fire, no threat. Their silence was chilling.

And while they stayed their hand in war, they moved swiftly in diplomacy.

In the vacuum left by France, Mussolini set about remaking the Mediterranean. His emissaries struck deals with the Germans for the partition of Vichy territories. Under the cover of the Second Vienna Award, Italy and Spain claimed the lion's share of France's imperial corpse. Spain annexed Algiers, Oran, and the Rif; Italy took Corsica, Nice, Tunisia, and French Syria. The French colonials, stunned and outnumbered, fought valiantly—but fell to combined Spanish-Italian force and ferocious native insurgency fueled by anti-colonial propaganda and fascist subversion.

Over one million French settlers were forcibly relocated to French West Africa—where they formed the nucleus of Charles de Gaulle's Free French. British covert arms, radio support, and training sustained their resistance, but the blow to French prestige and Britain's regional influence was severe.

Simultaneously, Mussolini negotiated shrewdly. In exchange for continued neutrality, we ceded Socotra and British Somaliland. Our backs against the wall, with America still an ocean of promises away, we acquiesced.

The Italian army, long derided in British circles for its pomp and poor performance in Ethiopia, underwent a quiet transformation. New motorized divisions were trained under German advisers. Air force squadrons adopted modern Italian-German hybrid doctrine. The Regia Marina constructed new destroyers with German sonar. Reports from Turkey indicated that Italian tactical efficiency had improved markedly.

Mussolini's long game was most evident in Palestine. Having taken in Jewish refugees from Germany. Italy allied the Lehi, a radical Zionist faction to train and indoctrinate Jewish settlers across Italian refugee camps. Italy then funneled arms and began to snuggle the Lehi into Palestine. British Mandate forces soon faced low-intensity warfare: bombings in Haifa, assassinations in Tel Aviv, sabotage of rail lines in the Negev. After ceding Socotra and Somaliland, Italy promised to cease all aid—but support continued through shadowy intermediaries.

To bleed Mussolini back, we turned Syria into a cauldron. Free French forces, supplied by Britain, waged guerrilla war in Aleppo and Homs. In retaliation, Mussolini withdrew support for the Golden Square coup in Iraq—handing the conspirators to us in exchange for Free French withdrawal from Syria. A grim arithmetic of empire: Iraq's oil fields in return for Lebanon and Damascus.

The most brazen Italian action came in 1941, with Operation Nikephoros: the joint Greek-Italian invasion of Turkey. Greece, under the fascist General Pangalos after a Mussolini-backed coup, struck east with promises of restoring Byzantium. The Turks resisted fiercely. British arms flowed into Anatolia. Free French units fought in Hatay. But the invaders prevailed. By winter, Constantinople was Greek once more; Antioch, Adana, and Cilicia became part of Italy's grotesque puppet state of Greater Syria.

For Britain, the implications were dire. A newly energized, ideologically committed, and militarily modernized Italy now dominated the Mediterranean basin—from Casablanca to the Levant. Even neutral, Mussolini hemmed us in.

Then came December 16, 1941—a day historians would long debate.

That morning, Pope Pius XII issued a thunderous encyclical: a denunciation of Nazism, the Holocaust, and the Nazi regime as a diabolic cult. Excommunication was declared for party members. The Holy See had spoken.

That evening, Italian bombers struck Ploiești, Romania's vital oil fields. Italy had declared war on Germany.

The world shifted.

Italian alpine divisions surged into Bavaria and Austria. Wehrmacht units, stretched on the Russian front and bleeding in the Balkans, could not withstand the blow. Mutinies erupted in Trieste and Vienna. German morale collapsed in Alsace and Provence. Italian-backed Lehi forces turned their fury against German agents and Arab collaborators. In one stroke, Mussolini reinvented himself as the champion of European redemption.

Even more astonishing was his crowning of Louis XX—a Bonapartist pretender—as "King of the French" in liberated Reims, with Catholic monarchists and former Vichy officials hailing the rebirth of a Gallic throne.

By early 1942, the Mediterranean was no longer a British lake—it was Mussolini's Mare Nostrum in all but name. Our empire still stood, but the corridors through which it moved now twisted through Italian-dominated skies and waters. Our reliance on American aid became absolute. The Indian Congress grew restive; whispers of Italian support for Hindu nationalists reached our ears. The global web of British influence frayed.

Yet we had survived. Britain, battered but unbeaten, stood alone—and then not alone.

The cost of Italian neutrality had been high. But had they entered the war against us in 1939, the Empire may well have perished.

And Mussolini? That strange Caesar of the South had played the greatest game of all. First a neutral, then a parasite, then a liberator. He had built a Third Way empire from the bones of France and the dreams of empire.

But we had endured. And history, I was certain, would judge endurance above all.


Note: alt hist is down wtf??????!!!!

 

[Intothekillzone]

Yeah tried to get on it and it kept crashing!

 

[wetwipefatass]

Apparently it never went down, they just have a messed up certificate, so you can still visit the site on https://alternatehistory.com

 

[Alenco98]

An Excerpt from Alexander Solynctyhn's 1960 Book The Motherland: The Fight for Russia


In the autumn of 1939, as the world plunged into war over Poland, the Soviet Union stood paradoxically aloof and alert. Stalin had signed his pact with Hitler, that strange dance of devils, and reclaimed eastern Poland, Bessarabia, and the Baltic states. But within the chambers of the Kremlin, a deep unease persisted. The purges had thinned the officer corps; the factories still crawled with informants; and the workers, hungry and stooped, chanted slogans they did not believe.


The Winter War with Finland was supposed to be a three-week campaign. It lasted over three months. Soviet troops bogged down in the snow and forest, harassed by Finnish ski patrols and destroyed by invisible snipers. Stalin had gutted his generals—Tukhachevsky was long gone—and the Red Army, bloated with political officers and short on competence, suffered grievous losses.

But when the Italians intervened—an unexpected, theatrical gesture—everything changed.

The Duce's son, Benito Albino Mussolini, was captured and displayed like some Roman antique in Soviet custody. He became a propaganda jewel for Mussolini after his stunning refusal to release him in return for ending Italian intervention. Stalin's hand was forced, and the Soviets grudgingly allowed the Italians to negotiate a peace, permitting Stalin to save face and claim Karelia. The islands of the Gulf of Finland were leased, but it was a moral retreat. Stalin ordered reforms in secret: he brought back sidelined officers, streamlined production chains, and reorganized front-line command structures into combined-arms units. The Red Army was learning.


When Mussolini visited Moscow in December 1940, ostensibly to discuss a trade deal, the Soviet politburo watched him like a curious leopard. He spoke with exaggerated courtesy. But what he actually bought was information—German troop movements, factory orders, tank brigades massing along the border, that and a chilling prediction: "You are next"—shook Stalin. But what came next was even more stunning, a new Molotov Ribbentrop, one that spanned 3 continents rather than Europe.


That week, Russia began to reinforce the western frontier. Five tank armies were quietly repositioned. Airfields near Minsk, Vitebsk, and Kiev began to expand. Soviet spies in Berlin were told to watch the Wehrmacht's fuel shipments. And by January 1941, the Soviets had issued a new field manual—one that prioritized mobility, anti-tank tactics, and layered defense.


Stalin, though, did not trust anyone. He suspected Hitler but distrusted Mussolini more. He increased gulag quotas for "defeatists" and "foreign sympathizers." Meanwhile, in the factories, the Soviet war economy, accelerated by five-year plans and the fear of invasion, began churning out tanks—KV-1s, T-34s—and the new Yak-1 fighter. Women worked day and night; children scrounged scrap metal; prisoners mined Siberian mountains. The Motherland was arming herself.


On May 30, 1941, German armor surged across the Soviet frontier. Hitler had grown impatient and mistrustful of Mussolini's maneuverings in the Balkans and Middle East. But the Red Army was not caught sleeping.


The Luftwaffe found hardened airfields and dispersed fighters. The Panzer divisions were slowed by scorched earth tactics and well-placed minefields. Kiev did not fall until December. Leningrad was encircled but not taken. Minsk and Smolensk became a warzone. Stalin, unflinching, refused to flee Moscow and ordered the NKVD to execute any commander who retreated without authorization.


The Soviet Union did not collapse. It bled—and bled its enemy in turn.


Then came December 16, 1941.


The Pope, an unlikely savior, spoke. Evidence of the Holocaust reached the Vatican through Italian channels. He issued a bull declaring Nazism a heresy and excommunicated the German army. Riots began in Prague. Railroads exploded in Poland. French collaborators in Algiers defected. The German war machine, already stretched thin from the Atlantic to Kiev, began to shudder.


The Soviets had heard rumors. When it came, Stalin did not celebrate. He stood over his war map, puffing his pipe, and muttered: "So. The jackal bleeds from a thousand cuts."


He knew this moment would change everything. Italy had entered the war. The Allies would follow. But Stalin—calculating, cold, brutal—was already thinking about that conversation he had with Mussolini back in 1940 about the postwar order, about Warsaw, Berlin, and Tehran.

The Motherland had endured its fire. Now came its iron march forward.

By the end of December 1941, the Soviet Union had gotten past the worst Germany bought to bear upon it: it had pushed the Wehrmacht back, reclaiming much of the ground lost during the catastrophic months of Operation Barbarossa. The Soviet winter offensive was a ruthless display of military might—a testament to the resilience of the Motherland. Soviet forces, hardened by years of purges and the crushing weight of history, advanced at a pace not seen since the tsarist days of imperial conquest. For the first time since the invasion, the Germans were on the back foot.

The Red Army surged forward in a well-coordinated attack, exploiting the now demoralized German lines. Infantry units, followed closely by mechanized corps and elite shock divisions, advanced relentlessly, driving westward through the snow-clad wastelands of Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland. By Christmas Eve, the Red Army was only fifty kilometers from its pre-Barbarossa borders, marking a stunning reversal of fortune. The Soviets had recaptured vital territory in the north and the south, and the German invasion was officially in retreat.


The harsh winter, with its icy winds and unrelenting snowstorms, favored the Soviet soldiers—battle-hardened, equipped with winter clothing, and supported by a home-front economy that churned out weapons at an ever-accelerating pace. The Wehrmacht, already devastated by the Soviet counteroffensive, had no such advantage. Their supply lines were fractured, their winter gear inadequate, and their morale shattered.


It was during this period of desperate collapse that a break within the German military ranks began. The commanders of the three German army groups, disillusioned by Hitler's interference, horrified by the atrocities committed by the SS, and wanting to stall the Soviet advance in light of papal and protestant condemnation of its army began to fracture from the Reich. These officers, who had once fought loyally under the banner of the Nazi regime reorganized themselves. They formed the Free German Army.


But even as they broke away from the Reich, the Free German Army found itself besieged on all sides. Their supplies were minimal, their communications spotty at best, and they had no real strategic advantage. Cut off from the industrial heart of Nazi Germany, these soldiers were forced to retreat into the wilderness of Eastern Europe, with only the barest of resources to sustain them. The Soviet juggernaut pressed onward, its inexorable march unstoppable.


The Wehrmacht remnants, which had either failed to join the Free German Army or had remained loyal to Hitler's regime, now found themselves caught between two nightmares: the Soviet assault and the unrelenting hunt of the SS. These men led a relentless and pointless campaign of terror, herding whatever remnants of the Wehrmacht they could find into mass graves like the einzatsgruppen did to their victims.

Yet even the SS, with its relentless brutality, could not halt the Soviet juggernaut.

By January 15, 1942, the Soviet offensive had reached a key objective—the ruins of Warsaw. The city, once a proud symbol of Polish culture and resilience, had been reduced to a grotesque palimpsest of destruction. Burnt-out ghettos, bombed-out cathedrals, and shattered German outposts stood as monuments to the madness that had gripped Europe.


Marshal Zhukov's forces entered the city with a mixture of exhaustion and grim determination. The streets were lined with the shattered remnants of both the German and Polish peoples. In the aftermath of the German occupation, the city had become a battlefield, and the ghettos were places of unimaginable suffering. The Free German Army, having retreated to Warsaw from its positions along the Vistula River, made one final stand. But the remnants of their ranks, demoralized and poorly equipped, could not withstand the might of the Soviet assault. They did not fight to the death.


Instead, most of the Free German Army units surrendered, giving up their weapons and surrendering to the advancing Soviet forces. Some retreated westward into the dense forests of Pomerania, hoping to regroup and perhaps continue the struggle against both the Soviets and their former Nazi overlords. Others disappeared into the civilian population, hoping to escape the wrath of both the Red Army and the SS.


A few, including remnants of General Erich Hoepner's command, fought brief and futile delaying actions along the Vistula River. They knew the end was near, but pride and duty to their soldiers forced them to engage in futile resistance. Soviet artillery, however, soon pulverized them, erasing any hope of a final, heroic defense.


By the time the last German units surrendered in Warsaw, the city had become a symbol of Europe's profound disillusionment. The Germans, who had come to Poland as conquerors, now left it a hollow shell. Their vaunted "new order" had turned to ash, and the Free German Army—broken, fragmented, and leaderless—had no future.


The defeat in Warsaw marked a turning point in the war. The Soviet Union had reclaimed much of the ground lost in 1941, and with it, had gained the momentum. The Nazis, now facing internal disarray, were caught in a vice between the Soviets to the east, the growing unrest within their own ranks, the Italians from the south and the British from the west.


Stalin, in a speech to the people, declared: "The Motherland is free again. The enemy will never return." And while the Germans would continue to fight, the Soviet Union's victory was undeniable.


As the Free German Army dissipated into the forests and the SS rampaged through the streets, it was clear that the world was shifting. The fight for Europe was no longer a question of who would rule—it was now a question of survival. The Germans, unable to stop the Soviets, were on the brink of collapse.


In the coming months, the Red Army would push deeper into Europe, reclaiming what was lost, and with every mile, the Reich's stranglehold on the continent weakened further. The Motherland was not just surviving—she was becoming the hammer that would shatter the Nazi regime forever.


January 25, 1942, marked a moment of profound political recalibration in the crumbling ruins of the old world order. In the snow-blanketed Crimean town of Yalta, beneath an eerie fog that seemed to cloak both the landscape and the gravity of the meeting, Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin came face to face and formally announced the agreement they came to back in December 1940.


The following day, on January 26, 1942, the Treaty of Yalta was signed, a pact that carved Europe, Asia, and Africa into brutal new divisions, drawn both along ideological lines, and along the lines of power and survival. The treaty formalized the division of Europe, Africa and Asia between two power blocs, both determined to impose their own vision of the future.


According to the treaty, everything south of Saxony, extending down to Austria, would become the Kingdom of Greater Austria, a state under Mussolini's influence. The House of Savoy would be placed in a personal union with the Kingdom of Italy, solidifying the Duce's control over the southern half of the continent. With this pact, Mussolini began to lay the groundwork for a New Roman Empire, centered not in Rome but in a far broader, more expansive vision that stretched from the Adriatic to the edges of the Mediterranean and beyond. The middle east, save for turkey and Iran would go to Italy, as would all of Africa.


Soviet Union would be awarded the entire north of Europe. Everything from Berlin, through Mecklenburg, and down to the Dutch border, would be transformed into the German People's Republic—a brutal communist buffer state. The political heart of Germany would now be under Soviet control, its infrastructure and resources exploited for the benefit of the expanding Soviet machine. This was not merely a victory over Nazism; this was a conquest of the very German soul, reshaped in the image of Stalinist socialism.


The Netherlands, Czech Republic, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark would fall under Soviet influence, as would all of Asia, including India, Japan, and China. The Red Army would stand as the bulwark against Western imperialism, and Stalin's dreams of a worldwide communist revolution took a step toward becoming reality.


This new order, drawn in the icy halls of Yalta, was a perverse marriage of Stalinist collectivism and Fascist authoritarianism, forged not in the pursuit of human freedom but in the preservation of the very systems of oppression that had torn Europe apart.


For Winston Churchill, the absence of the British voice at the Yalta table was a humiliation beyond measure. Britain, having long played the role of a global hegemon, now found itself excluded from the carving of the continent. The Foreign Office in London was livid at the betrayal. The diplomats stationed in Rome, long considered allies of Mussolini's regime, were blindsided. They had been kept in the dark, never warned of the secret negotiations taking place between the Soviet Union and Italy.


When news of the Treaty of Yalta broke, it sent shockwaves through Whitehall. Churchill's outrage reverberated across the British government like a thunderclap. The man who had once stood as the steadfast leader of a united front against fascism found himself relegated to the role of an impotent spectator in a world now divided by powers he could neither control nor confront. The British public, once resolute in its resolve, now found itself questioning the future of their empire and its place in a Europe controlled by two totalitarian giants.


Churchill's voice, a rallying cry for the free world, now rang hollow as he faced the dual threats of Mussolini's Italy and Stalin's Soviet Union—powers that were far more ruthless in their calculations than the Nazi regime had ever been. His warnings, once heeded by the world, were now viewed as the rantings of a man who had lost his grasp on the direction of history.


The Treaty of Yalta had sealed the fate of Europe, Africa and Asia. Carving it between the spheres of Stalinist Russia and Fascist Italy. The continent, already shattered by years of war, found itself further divided—not by lines of national sovereignty, but by a cynical balance of power that favored the most ruthless of the two totalitarian behemoths. Yet as Stalin consolidated his control over the eastern half of Europe, Mussolini sought to build his own empire to the south, pushing further into North Africa and the Mediterranean.


But Winston Churchill, ever the tactician, could not afford to sit idly by as Europe descended into a new era of oppression. The shifting winds of war were upon him, and his understanding of the global balance of power had become clearer than ever. A long-feared consequence of the Yalta Treaty was taking shape, and Churchill, realizing the importance of the Atlantic powers—the United Kingdom, the United States, and their potential allies—took immediate action.


Having already liberated Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands; the united kingdom began to reach out to their newly restored governments as well as Sweden and Finland which now stood in danger of being absorbed into the Soviet sphere after Yalta.


These immediate diplomatic maneuvers began to bear fruit when the Netherlands on February 1, 1942 formally signed a defense pact with the UK and the United States. The Netherlands would stand with the Atlantic powers in the fight against the growing threat of Soviet communism and Fascist imperialism.


Norway, following close behind, signed its pact with Britain and the United States on February 3, and just two days later, Sweden, long a neutral power in Europe, agreed to join the alliance on February 5. This marked a historic shift in Scandinavian politics, as Sweden, driven by both fear of the Soviet expansion to the east and admiration for the resilience of Britain and the United States, began to align itself with the Atlantic powers.


But the most dramatic shift occurred in Finland, a nation that had been deeply scarred by the Winter War with the Soviet Union in 1939 and the betrayal it had felt from the collapse of Continental Europe. Finland, too, had reluctantly fallen under the influence of the Italian-aligned Axis powers in the wake of the Yalta agreement. But by February 7, 1942, the Finnish government, led by Marshal Mannerheim, cast aside its fear of Soviet reprisal and officially turned to the United States and United Kingdom. Finland joined the Atlantic Pact, marking the fourth nation to formally ally with the West. It was a symbolic and strategic victory, showing that even the most bitter of former enemies could seek common cause in the face of the shared threat from the Soviet Union and the Fascist states. Shortly after Finland joined the nascent Atlantic alliance did Denmark join in as well. In less than a month after the Yalta treaty was signed, the soviets were hemmed in the Baltic sea.


Less than two weeks after Finland's formal entry into the Atlantic Pact, British and American troops landed in Helsinki. On February 15, the city erupted into cheers as the first foreign boots touched the snow-covered streets. Finnish citizens lined the streets, waving flags and singing national songs. The very streets that had once been the site of bitter conflict during the Winter War were now filled with Allied forces that had arrived not as conquerors but as liberators.


The mood in Helsinki was one of exuberance, but it was also a mood of reckoning. For the first time in years, Finland was free from the shadow of the Axis powers, but also free from the looming threat of Soviet control. The Allied soldiers mingled with Finnish civilians, their voices drowned out by the cheers of the crowd. Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish officials greeted the arrival of the troops with visible relief, as the West was seen as their last hope to stave off Soviet aggression.

The Finnish government's decision to align itself with the Atlantic powers in the final months of the Second World War was not without profound consequences. In a move that upended decades of precarious neutrality and regional diplomacy, Helsinki openly sided with the Allies, drawing the ire of the Soviet Union. Stalin, enraged by what he perceived as a betrayal and a direct threat to his northern sphere of influence, began rapidly deploying Red Army units to the Finnish border. Thus began what would come to be known as the Karelia Crisis—a tense and uncertain chapter in Finnish history, marked not by dramatic declarations of war, but by the quiet, ominous advance of Allied troops across the snow-blanketed fields of Karelia.


Throughout the bitter weeks that followed, from late February into May 1941, a dangerous standoff unfolded along the frontier. On one side stood Soviet divisions, hardened by years of brutal warfare against Nazi Germany. On the other, an unlikely coalition of Finnish, British, and American troops entrenched themselves in hastily fortified positions. Both sides were unyielding, unwilling to cede ground or influence. Tensions ran high, with the specter of a wider conflict looming large over Scandinavia.


Yet even as this crisis simmered in the north, Soviet forces continued to surge deeper into the crumbling heart of the Third Reich. Exploiting the collapse of German resistance, Red Army units pushed forward, seizing swathes of territory with alarming speed. What had begun as a regional flashpoint in Karelia soon rippled outward, culminating in open confrontations in central Europe. In early April, mere days after the official declaration of victory in Europe, British and Soviet troops found themselves in a tense standoff on the outskirts of Hamburg. Meanwhile, Danish units supplemented by British and American Troops found themselves standing against advancing Soviet forces just outside Flensburg.


Amid this mounting crisis, a surprising voice once again emerged as a mediator: Benito Mussolini. Having been the architect of the treaty of Yalta now sought to recast Fascist Italy as a stabilizing force in postwar Europe, Mussolini proposed a new round of peace talks. Recognizing the Soviet Union's immense sacrifices and territorial gains, he suggested that negotiations be held in Moscow—both as a gesture of respect and as a strategic move to ensure Soviet cooperation.


On May 1, 1941, for the second time during the war, Mussolini traveled to the Soviet capital, accompanied by a delegation of Italian diplomats and military advisers. There, in the halls of the Kremlin, the leaders of the great powers—Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Mussolini himself—convened to address the escalating tensions. The talks would prove critical in shaping the fragile peace that was to follow, marking not just the resolution of the Karelia Crisis, but also the beginning of a new, uncertain order in postwar Europe.

 

[Alenco98]

Excerpt from "The Eagle Hesitates No More: A Political, Economic, and Military History of the United States, 1939–1942" by Harry S Truman (1955)

The United States of America entered the Second World War not with a thunderclap, but with the whisper of preparation. Between the fall of Poland in 1939 and the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the American republic transitioned from weary isolationism to strategic assertiveness. This transformation, accelerated and sharpened by the unprecedented intervention of Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini in early 1941, would define not just the course of the war, but the American century that followed.

In the immediate aftermath of Germany's invasion of Poland, the United States reaffirmed its neutrality. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, sensitive to the prevailing mood of the public and to the political strength of the isolationist bloc in Congress, steered a cautious course. The Neutrality Acts of the 1930s were amended in late 1939 to permit "Cash and Carry" arms sales to Britain and France, but no American lives were yet risked.

Economically, the U.S. was climbing out of the Depression, aided now by the war in Europe. Defense spending picked up, factories hummed again, and unemployment, though still significant, began to decline. The South saw a modest boom as military bases expanded; Detroit retooled for war. But politically, Roosevelt was constrained. The America First Committee surged in popularity, and figures like Charles Lindbergh and Senator Gerald Nye warned against "foreign entanglements."

Yet Roosevelt, increasingly aware of Nazi ambitions and concerned with global instability, quietly laid the foundations of rearmament. By 1940, the Selective Training and Service Act instituted the first peacetime draft. Roosevelt's re-election to an unprecedented third term in November 1940, with Henry Wallace as his vice president, signaled public trust in his leadership—but also left him with a delicate mandate: arm, but do not yet fight.

The early months of 1941 marked a sharp turn in global and American history. While Germany had stunned Europe with victories over France and the Low Countries, Italy under Mussolini had defied expectations—not by joining Hitler's conquests, but by carving out a Third Path. Italy remained technically neutral but had expanded aggressively across North Africa, the Balkans, and the Levant under the auspices of the Rome Pact. More provocatively, Mussolini began resettling European Jews in Italian territory and quietly funneled arms to Jewish Zionist paramilitaries in Palestine.

Then came April 12, 1941—the day Mussolini arrived in Washington, D.C., under heavy secrecy.

The meeting between Mussolini, Roosevelt, and Wallace was one of the most closely guarded events in American diplomatic history. On the surface, he was there to negotiate a grain deal. But according to now-declassified OSS records and the Roosevelt Diaries, Mussolini presented:

Intercepted German orders for Operation Barbarossa, the planned invasion of the Soviet Union.

Japanese naval codes and detailed strike plans for an attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, obtained through Italian spies in Tokyo.

Early photographs and testimonies proving the existence of German death squads and concentration camps in Poland and Ukraine, painting a chilling picture of what Mussolini called "a war against the Jewish people."

Mussolini's offer was startling: Italy would join the war against Germany and Japan if the United States recognized Italian conquests in North Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East. Italy would serve as a Mediterranean bulwark against Nazi expansionism and fascist Japan, and would recognize an eventual Allied order in Europe, including a sovereign Jewish state under Italian protection in Palestine.

Roosevelt and Wallace, stunned by both the intelligence and the opportunity, agreed to the Atlantic Understanding, a secret accord to coordinate joint entry into the war. The U.S. would begin preparing for total war. In exchange, the U.S. would de facto recognize Italian hegemony over its newly formed "Mediterranean Community."

After the Mussolini-Roosevelt summit, American rearmament accelerated dramatically. Though still not officially at war, the following actions took place:

Pearl Harbor and Pacific bases received high-priority reinforcements. Admiral Kimmel was replaced by Admiral Nimitz. Radar installations were installed. The USS Enterprise and Lexington were kept at sea.

The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) began intense monitoring of japanese activity in the pacific and German activity in Europe.

Lend-Lease was extended to the Soviet union and was intensified to Britain.

By the fall, American industrial output surged. The War Production Board began quietly seizing civilian production capacities. Aircraft production doubled. Steel mills in Pittsburgh and the Midwest ran non-stop. Roosevelt addressed the nation weekly, increasingly warning of the fascist danger without yet naming Japan or Germany as targets.

December 7, 1941—the day Japan struck Pearl Harbor—unfolded very differently to what the Japanese were planning.

The Japanese attack did come—but American preparations ensured disaster for the attackers. On the morning of December 7, American radar stations detected incoming squadrons. Anti-aircraft gunners were at the ready. Aircraft were dispersed across airfields. Key battleships were out at sea conducting exercises. When the first bombs fell, the U.S. Navy responded with practiced efficiency.

Only the USS Nevada and Ogala were damaged. Four Japanese carriers were sunk by counterattacks from U.S. torpedo bombers and land-based squadrons. Japan lost nearly 200 planes and thousands of trained pilots. The Battle of Pearl Harbor—as it came to be called—was the first major Allied victory of the Pacific War.

Roosevelt, now with the full support of Congress and the American people, declared war on Japan on December 8, 1941, and on Nazi Germany and its allies on December 9, invoking both the attack and the Holocaust evidence as causes for intervention. Mussolini declared war on Germany less than 10 days later, the same day the pope exposed the holocaust. The global alliance—Britain, Italy, the U.S., and their growing partners—was now at war with the Axis.

By December 17, 1941, the United States stood armed, mobilized, and allied with both old enemies and new friends in a global war unlike any in human history. The pivot had been rapid, but not haphazard. It had required extraordinary foresight, unlikely diplomacy, and the willingness of leaders on both sides of the Atlantic to abandon old paradigms.

The America of 1939, proud and cautious, had become by 1941 the arsenal of democracy—and, paradoxically, the shield of a strange but functional Mediterranean Empire.

History, as ever, unfolded not as it must, but as it might.


----------------

Excerpt from "Steel Beneath the Waves: The Recollections of Admiral Chester W. Nimitz"
Published posthumously in 1963 by the Naval Institute Press

"We did not win by luck. We won because, for the first time in a long while, we listened to the warning of silence. The silence of Italian couriers. The silence of encrypted Japanese orders. The silence before the storm."

— Adm. Chester W. Nimitz

I was not yet Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet on that December morning, though my orders were in motion. Admiral Husband Kimmel had been relieved quietly on November 17 after a tense consultation in Washington. We had known the Japanese were planning something. President Roosevelt had been informed by Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini—of all men—that a strike in the Pacific was imminent. The name Pearl was mentioned directly in the documents Mussolini turned over.

Thanks to that warning, by December 1, the Pacific Fleet was at a heightened state of readiness. We implemented what would later be known as Operation Kamehameha, a layered defense of the Hawaiian Islands:

All battleships were placed on ready steam rotation: at least four would be at sea or under power at all times.

Fighters and patrol aircraft were rotated across inland fields to avoid clustering.

Mobile radar stations had been installed across Oahu and trained crews were ordered to report any activity.

Anti-aircraft gunners were given live-fire drills daily. Live ammunition was stored ready at the guns, against prior peacetime regulation.

Even so, I did not expect them to come when they did. And I certainly did not expect what happened next.

At 03:42 HST on December 7, a pair of Army radar operators at Opana Point detected an unusual radar signature—more than a hundred contacts inbound from the north. The USS Ward had already reported and engaged a midget submarine near the harbor entrance around 03:30.

Thanks to recent changes in doctrine, the report from Opana was not dismissed. It reached CINCPAC HQ within four minutes. I was roused from sleep at 04:10 by Captain Jasper Holmes and immediately ordered:

All ships to battle stations.

CAP (Combat Air Patrol) launched from Hickam and Wheeler Fields.

Anti-aircraft positions manned and ammunition unlocked.

Harbor anti-torpedo nets deployed, and destroyers positioned at the mouth of the harbor.

At 06:12, the first wave of Japanese aircraft descended upon Pearl. But this was not the surprise they had planned.

The first group, composed of 43 Nakajima B5N torpedo bombers, met heavy resistance before reaching the harbor mouth. Two were downed before they released. Our torpedo nets and patrolling destroyers—particularly the USS Helm and Ward—intercepted several others. Of the 40 that survived to attack, only eight successfully released their torpedoes, and only one made contact—damaging the USS Ogala (a minelayer). She would be raised and repaired months later.

The second group of dive bombers aimed for Battleship Row. But our ships were not anchored like a sitting duck. They were at sea, running a decoy exercise south of Oahu. In their place was the USS Nevada, under tow for refitting—barely armed.

The Nevada took two bomb hits but her crew fought fires swiftly and kept her afloat. Damage was minimal.

Our fighter squadrons—scrambled at 05:20—intercepted the third wave. Led by pilots like Lt. John Thach, they downed 29 planes in the sky. Our airmen, many trained under expanded Italian-American exchange programs started earlier that year, outperformed their Japanese counterparts, who had expected no aerial opposition.

By 08:30, the Japanese had lost the element of surprise, more than 70 aircraft, and two destroyers sunk by torpedo from our submarines and PBY Catalinas.

But it was at 09:03 that the counterstroke came.

The Enterprise, warned of the attack, launched every available aircraft within minutes of first contact. Dive bombers located the Japanese carriers Akagi, Kaga, Sōryū, and Hiryū roughly 170 miles north of Oahu.

A joint strike force from Enterprise and Lexington, supported by Marine dive bombers, struck the Japanese task force in successive waves between 10:30 and 13:00.

The Akagi and Sōryū were ablaze by noon.

The Kaga was hit in her magazines by a bomb dropped by Ensign George Gay.

The Hiryū launched a retaliatory strike that crippled the USS Salt Lake City, but she would survive.

By 14:15, three of the four Japanese carriers were sunk. Hiryū was scuttled by her crew at 16:47 to avoid capture.

The Japanese fleet withdrew in chaos.

We called it The Battle of Pearl Harbor, but it was no massacre. It was a stand. The first American naval victory in World War II. We lost 74 dead. One battleship damaged. One light cruiser scuttled to avoid fire spread. The Japanese lost over 3,100 men, four carriers, nearly 200 planes, and the myth of invincibility.

In the days that followed, Congress declared war, not only on Japan but on Nazi Germany and its allies. And in that declaration, we included evidence—photographs, intercepts, survivor testimony—of Germany's mass extermination of Jews in Poland and Ukraine. Evidence given to us, improbably, by Mussolini.

The Battle of Pearl Harbor was not the end of the beginning. It was the beginning of the end for fascism.

And I was honored to be there—steel beneath the waves, standing ready.

---------------------

Excerpt from "The Eagle Hesitates No More: A Political, Economic, and Military History of the United States, 1939–1941" by Harry S Truman (1955)

"We had planned for a long war. What we got was a revolution—a geopolitical collapse unlike any since the fall of Rome. And somehow, the man who started it all—Benito Mussolini—ended it with a treaty, a federation, and a crown for someone else."
— Secretary of State Cordell Hull, memoirs, 1952

Just ten days after the failed Japanese strike at Pearl Harbor, the Vatican issued the most consequential papal bull of the 20th century: Crux Iustitiae. Pope Pius XII, under pressure from documents provided by Italian intelligence and growing public knowledge of the Holocaust, excommunicated en masse the entirety of the German military, Nazi leadership, and their collaborators.

The result was instantaneous and cataclysmic.

Within 48 hours:

Riots erupted in Paris, Vienna, and Prague.

Desertions among Catholic Wehrmacht units skyrocketed.

Polish and French resistance surged, receiving arms from Italy via Corsica and Marseilles.

Anti-Nazi uprisings broke out in Alsace, Bavaria, and Slovakia.

The Vatican's declaration shattered any remaining myth of moral legitimacy in Hitler's regime. Mussolini had gambled that the Church's moral authority would break the dam of German control. He was right.

By December 22, chaos reigned in occupied France. With the Vichy regime evaporating, the Germans tried to hold Paris but lacked the manpower. Into this vacuum stepped a surprising figure: Ambassador André François-Poncet, once the French representative to Rome, now proclaimed Prime Minister of a "Free Kingdom of France."

Backed by Italian paratroopers, defecting Vichy officers, and Catholic resistance militias, de Roux declared the restoration of the monarchy. On January 27, 1942, in a lavish ceremony at Reims Cathedral attended by Mussolini and Pope Pius XII, Louis Napoléon VI—a distant Bonaparte—was crowned King of the French.

France was not restored to its old borders, however. In a shocking reordering of Europe, France ceded Syria, Corsica, nice and Algeria to Italy in return for:

Belgium (excluding Flanders which was occupied by the Netherlands)

Luxembourg

The Rhineland up to the Rhine

The Belgian Congo

Savoy was quietly reintegrated into France, as was Wallonia following a sham referendum.


While the Americans prepared for a Pacific island-hopping campaign, Europe fell like dominoes.

Soon after, the diplomatic world was rocked again.

The Treaty of Yalta, signed January 27, 1942 between Mussolini and Stalin, divided the globe into two spheres:

Italian Sphere: Africa, the Middle East, southern Germany, Italy, the Balkans, Iberia.

Soviet Sphere: Eastern Europe (except Austria), Central Asia, China, Korea, Japan, India.

Stalin agreed in exchange for Mussolini's support in post-war reconstruction and tacit permission to "Sovietize" Asia. The Americans and British were not consulted—nor were they in a position to stop it.

In the dying weeks of the Reich, Italy launched Operation Sapienza, a daring plan to seize Nazi technological assets before the Allies or Soviets.

Heisenberg was taken from a train bound for Königsberg by Italian commandos. Entire SS experimental teams surrendered in Bavaria to Italian alpine troops, who promised clemency and pensions.

Italian trains hauled out:

V-2 and A-9 rocket components.

Early jet aircraft prototypes.

Uranium stockpiles.

Nuclear research from the Peenemünde complex.

Rome and Turin became the new capitals of theoretical physics.

On December 17, 1941, elite Italian paratroopers seized the Belgian royal palace in Brussels. King Leopold III narrowly escaped to Amsterdam. Wallonia fell within 72 hours as Vichy defectors rallied to Italian command.

A referendum was held under Italian supervision—Wallonia "voted" overwhelmingly in favor of annexation to France. Luxembourg followed two days later. The Rhineland was placed under French-Italian "joint administration."

Flanders, sensing its doom, declared independence and begged for Dutch protection. It would soon be occupied then annexed by the Netherlands.

By mid-January, British-led forces liberated:

The Netherlands (including Amsterdam).

Denmark and Norway.

North Germany up to Saxony.

The Karelia Crisis began on February 15, 1942, when British troops landed in Finland and made their way to Karelia. A tense standoff that would last until may.

Winston Churchill diverted troops from the German front, weakening the western buffer and allowing Soviet expansion deeper into Germany. An Anglo-Soviet standoff at Hamburg nearly sparked war.

On February 8, 1942, Mussolini stood before a banner reading "Unione per la Libertà" and declared the formation of the Global Federation of Free Alliances, a rebranded League of Nations.

He invited Spain, and France to the innaguration of their organization. Then invaded the US, UK and USSR to join, and declared his support for:

An end to racism and antisemitism.

A gradual decolonization of Africa.

Self-determination under "cultural stewardship."

In practice, however, this was little more than colonization with a Roman accent. The newly created Organization of African Unity and Liberation (OAUL) promised African independence—with Italian advisors, banks, troops, and influence at every level.

The Free French, led by de Gaulle, remained exiled in Brazzaville and Dakar, refusing to recognize King Louis Napoléon. Tensions simmered.

In less than three months, the world had shattered and reformed:

Germany was gone.

France was a monarchy again.

Mussolini was hailed as a peacemaker in some quarters—and as a manipulative imperialist in others.

Africa became the next great battleground—not of war, but of influence.

The United States, stunned, watched the pieces fall—somewhere between a victory and a trap.

 

[Shaedy Hoe]

I love you, babes, but I feel like the contents of these past few chapters
coulda been condensed into one big chapter. Like, the information's been hella repetitive, yeah feel me?

 

[Alenco98]

May 1, 1942
The Kremlin
Moscow, USSR

The beef stroganoff on my plate looked like it had been scooped straight from the boots of a Red Army conscript—lukewarm, grayish, and suspiciously gelatinous. Still, I forced it down like a good guest, chewing resentfully under the flickering chandelier of Stalin's ice palace. Somewhere between bites, my mind wandered back to an old buddy from my Peace Corps days—Jim. His dad worked State, a real American cowboy, and he used to tell me stories about his time in Moscow. "The city sucks," Jim said once, half-drunk off cheap beer and puffing a cigarette. "The people are colder than the weather, the food tastes like wet cardboard, and the sky? It's a slab of concrete that never ends."

He wasn't wrong. Not even slightly. Spring had technically arrived in Moscow, but the air still smelled like misery and metal. My allergies were acting up like a Soviet factory whistle—constant, nasal, and oppressive. My nose itched, my throat burned, and the pollen here felt like it had been engineered by the NKVD. Goddammit, I hated Moscow. Every brick of this city radiated a kind of gray, joyless authoritarian despair.

And yet, there I was—seated at a grand table with Joseph Motherfucking Stalin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Sir Winston Boozehound Churchill himself. The Titans of the Second World War. Three men who looked like they had just stepped out of different genres: Stalin a noir villain in a military frock, FDR a patrician ghost gliding on wheels and political gravity, Churchill a puffy bulldog with a cigar that smelled like colonialism and regret.

Each of them had their translators lined up behind them like backup dancers at a YMO concert. Stalin's interpreter looked particularly anxious, sweating bullets like he was about to do karaoke with a gun to his head. Stalin didn't speak English. What a tragedy. Maybe if he'd paid attention in school instead of writing moody Marxist poetry, he wouldn't be so reliant on some trembling nerd with a notebook.

Meanwhile, Roosevelt and Churchill were chatting amiably, murmuring between bites, probably scheming about how to screw me over in the postwar order. I didn't blame them. I would've hated me too. After all, I'd just pulled the geopolitical rug out from under their feet in Europe and Asia. Bold moves. Dumb ones, maybe. But bold. Roosevelt gave me a look like I'd just murdered a puppy in front of Eleanor. Churchill scowled like I'd poured tea into a urinal. I grinned and shrugged. I had Africa by Toto playing in my head like a looped mantra.

"I bless the rains down in Africa…" I thought, tapping my fingers on the table as if the Soviet-made silverware could carry the beat. No, scratch that. I wasn't blessing the rains—I was blessing the goddamn beef stroganoff. The only good thing I'd tasted in this frozen gulag of a capital. It was mushy, yes. But in that moment, it was salvation.

Across the table, Stalin sipped his tea like it contained the blood of Trotsky. The air was thick with smoke and mistrust. I caught Churchill whispering something to Roosevelt, probably something like "He's mad, that one," to which Roosevelt might have replied, "Yes, but maybe madmen are the only ones who can survive this century."

In my head, the soundtrack shifted—Mariya Takeuchi's Plastic Love. I imagined myself in a neon-lit Moscow club that didn't exist, dancing with a ghost in shoulder pads and leg warmers, as KGB agents watched from the shadows, confused and aroused.

Back in reality, I stabbed another forkful of stroganoff, stared into Stalin's dead shark eyes, and smiled. I didn't belong here. Not in this timeline. Not in this century. But I'd be damned if I didn't steal the spotlight and soundtrack it with every synth beat from 1983 to 1989.

If the Cold War was going to happen, I was going to make it weird.

The stroganoff sat in my stomach like a Soviet tank—heavy, unpleasant, and likely to start a conflict if it moved again. The dinner plates had just been cleared, and the cigars came out. FDR lit his with a flick of statecraft and passive aggression. Churchill had already begun puffing on his second, eyes narrowed like a bulldog eyeing a suspicious mailman. Stalin, stone-faced and silent, toyed with his glass of Georgian brandy like it was a pistol.

Me? I was humming L'aventurier by Indochine in my head, eyes half-lidded, brain soaked in synth waves and 80s static. I missed my apartment. My PC. My girlfriend. The way she used to sing City pop songs in poor Japanese in the kitchen. Now I was here. At Yalta II: Electric Boogaloo, watching history split the world like a banana sundae—and I was the maraschino cherry in the middle.

It was painfully, hilariously obvious that Roosevelt and Churchill were furious—absolutely livid—at what Stalin and I had done. And honestly? I couldn't blame them. If I were in their shoes, watching history slip through my fingers while two lunatics from the East redrew the map with greasy fingers and trembling laughter, I'd be pissed too. But Stalin—oh, dear Stalin—was turning into a twitchy bundle of nerves and vodka-soaked paranoia. His eyes darted like rats in a sinking ship, and I could feel the old Bolshevik suspicion creeping back into his bloodstream. I had to reel him back in, remind him that we were brothers in mayhem, united not by ideology or morality, but by sheer opportunistic lunacy.

"Apes, together, strong," I whispered to myself. Time to be a bastard.

I pulled out a cigarette and lit it, menthols baby, the only good kind, all like I was about to accept a Nobel Prize for War Crimes and Melodrama. "I'd like to thank you, Mr. Churchill," I began, my voice lacquered in false politeness and barely restrained mockery. "Your unyielding commitment to fighting Germany, even after your army was driven into the sea at Dunkirk, was truly inspiring. In fact, it gave me and Comrade Stalin here the perfect window to carve Europe, asia and Africa into a new, improved, balance of power arrangement—just for us. And as for my beloved Italy? Why, you gifted us the chance to reclaim our mare nostrum under your nose—our blue, sunlit empire of waves and blood."

I paused for effect and smiled. No, grinned. A smug, radioactive grin that made everyone uncomfortable. Then, with deliberate slowness, I began smoking my ciggie.

Then I blew the smoke directly toward Roosevelt's direction, just to see if anyone would flinch.

The translator relayed my little speech to Stalin. For one brief, fleeting moment, I swear to God, the bastard smiled. Or maybe it was just the tremor of his vodka glass. Either way, I took it as a win.

FDR cleared his throat like a man who'd just swallowed a mouthful of barbed wire. "I think we need to discuss the... situation in northern Europe."

Ah yes. The situation. What a lovely euphemism for "the Soviets want to ice-skate across Scandinavia while the Yanks and Brits try not to piss themselves in the snow."

Churchill, ever the bulldog in tweed, leaned forward with that tired imperial gravitas of his. "We cannot, under any circumstances, permit Stalin to swallow Finland, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands. These are sovereign nations. Some of them, I dare say, are still civilised."

Stalin, calm as a corpse but with eyes like boiling tar, just lit another cigarette and stared through him. "These territories are in our agreed sphere. The Red Army bled itself dry taking Berlin, and yet the Western Allies prance about Bremen and Copenhagen as if they planted their flags there."

He wasn't wrong. We had agreed—just the two of us that the USSR could have the North, and I'd take the warm, blood-soaked, sun-kissed South. Stalin wanted the North Sea. I wanted the Mediterranean. The Americans could have whatever was left after history finished choking on itself.

Roosevelt smiled the way a man does when he knows a bomb is ticking under the table but hopes everyone will keep talking long enough to pretend it isn't.

"This isn't just a matter of zones," he said, his voice measured, presidential, already thinking about future headlines and legacy-defining memoirs. "It's about people's right to choose. Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands—they have governments-in-exile. We liberated them."

"Liberated?" Stalin snorted. "You dropped bombs from safe planes and marched into cities after we did the dying."

And then all eyes turned to me.

Because of course they did.

Because I was the lunatic wildcard in the room. The allegedly rehabilitated Duce. The Italian Phoenix risen from his fascist ashes with a smirk, a new haircut, and a head full of 1980s synth and emotional damage.

I took another menthol drag. "Gentlemen," I began, leaning back like I was hosting a late-night radio show in Tokyo, "you're both right and wrong. Churchill, you're defending countries whose kings fled at the first hint of jackboots. Roosevelt, you're selling freedom like it's a goddamn Ford while black people in your country get lynched for trying to vote and looking at a white person the wrong way. And Stalin, buddy, I love you, but you've got the bedside manner of a haunted sawmill."

Silence, the translator relayed everything to Stalin and he glared.

God, I missed the modern world. I missed bluetooth. I missed my phone. I missed my brothers, my girlfriend, my parent's, my Spotify playlist. I missed Akina Nakamori, damn it. I missed Toto—Africa, on repeat. I missed city pop playing through car speakers at 2 AM on empty highways lit by sodium lights and the soft ache of existential dread.

But here I was, wearing Mussolini's skin, faking it until I made it. And weirdly... I'd started to care. About Edda. About Romano. Even about that pompous bastard Ciano. We had dinners now. We laughed. Sometimes Anna Maria would cry, and I'd just hold her hand, like a father should.

Back in the room, Stalin was staring at me like I was a hallucination.

Roosevelt coughed again, likely trying not to say what everyone was thinking: Why is Mussolini suddenly the sanest man here?

I flicked my ash into an empty teacup.

"Let's be real. None of us are going to get everything we want. So here's my proposal," I said, grinning like a blackjack dealer at the end of the world. "Give Stalin Finland and northern Germany up to the dutch boder. Let him have his Baltic fetish. But Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands? They stay neutral. Buffer states. No Red Army, no NATO. Just IKEA, ABBA, and miserable winters. Agreed?"

Churchill looked like he'd swallowed a lemon whole. Stalin exhaled a long plume of smoke and muttered something to his aide. Roosevelt simply nodded—because this was politics. Ugly. Improvised. And very, very human.

History was being rewritten on the back of a napkin. Again.

I missed the modern world. An ordinary world, god that was a good song, I missed Duran Duran now.

May 7, 1942
The Kremlin
Moscow, USSR

The room grew heavy as the days passed and we negotiated—thick with smoke, screaming, pride, and the faint scent of rot from Europe's freshly severed limbs. Stalin drummed his fingers on the armrest like a man contemplating which parts of the map to eat next. Churchill sipped his whisky in slow, deliberate defiance. Roosevelt had his hands folded, eyes narrowing like he could will the Soviet Union back behind the Urals by squinting hard enough.

And I? I sat there feeling like I was watching a rerun of a bad Cold War sitcom, only this time, I was in the writer's room, and I'd run out of lithium three days ago. Now it was time for the finishing touches.

"I must insist," Stalin said in that flat, undentable voice of his, "that the islands in the Gulf of Finland be handed over. They are strategic necessities. A matter of national security."

Translation: I want to strangle the Baltic like a drunk uncle at a family reunion.

Churchill bristled. "You mean to isolate Helsinki entirely."

Stalin didn't blink. "Finland and Scandinavia has chosen your little Anglo-American alliance. This secures it for them."

Roosevelt gave a soft sigh, the kind that implied a thousand telegrams, dead sons, and re-election fatigue. "We can't hold those islands. Not without a war. And I'm not dragging America into another while we're busy with Japan."

"And north Germany?" I asked, stirring the pot like a good little gremlin.

"North Germany must be under our control," Stalin said.

Churchill shot him a look that could melt glaciers. "We'll never abandon our zone!"

"Churchill," Roosevelt said flatly, "you're bankrupt. You don't have a zone."

Damn.

The old bulldog deflated a little, whisky trembling in his hand. He knew it. Everyone did. Britain was on life support, and the IV drip was American credit. I laughed a little.

Stalin leaned forward. "Then it is decided. The German occupation zones will be dissolved. All territory north of Bavaria and Saxony, including Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein, will be administered by the Soviet Union. Under a people's republic of Germany. You will keep Scandinavia under your little alliance."

He paused, savoring it.

"And with Germany—we have the Kiel Canal."

There it was. That was the real prize. Not Berlin. Not Prague. The damn canal. The wet, salty throat of European naval power.

Churchill opened his mouth—then closed it. Roosevelt nodded once. A big, slow, reluctant nod. Like he was signing over his daughter to a debt collector.

I lit another menthol and exhaled like I was in a music video that never got made. I imagined Bobby Caldwell playing softly in the background—What You Won't Do for Love—as Stalin calmly rearranged history's bones on the table like dominoes.

"And the Danish Straits?" Roosevelt asked, one last, desperate flicker of resistance.

"Free navigation," Stalin said. "For all. Including Soviet vessels. We are not pirates. And we will declare war on Japan."

I nearly choked on my cigarette. You're literally a pirate with a hammer and sickle on your sails, Joseph.

But I said nothing. I just smiled. The kind of smile you give when the world starts slipping off its axis and you're the only one enjoying the spin.

Churchill stood up. "This is madness."

"No," I said, standing beside him, cigarette dangling from my fingers. "Vae Victus. Learn some latin old sport you'll get what it means."

He looked at me like I was Satan wearing a Roman tunic. But he sat down again. Because there was nowhere left to stand.

And so, like that, it was done.

The Soviet Union annexed every rock and ice-covered isle in the Gulf of Finland. The Kiel Canal, gleaming like a knife across northern Germany, fell into their hands as well as all of northern Germany. The Red Navy gained free passage through the Danish Straits. Europe had been redrawn not with treaties—but with teeth.

I wandered the halls afterward, alone. I missed Spotify. I missed eating sushi in bed at 2 AM while watching reruns of Neon Genesis Evangelion and crying like a man who knows what angels really look like.

But in 1942, I was the only man in Rome who remembered what the Internet felt like.

I hummed Voyage Voyage under my breath as I walked past a painting of Ivan the terrible and wondered what he'd think of this circus.

He'd probably laugh.

I did.

-

Excerpt from Britannia Alone: A Memoir of the Second World War by Winston S. Churchill (1955)

It is difficult to convey, even to the most attentive reader of these memoirs, the sheer cold fury I felt in that chandeliered mausoleum of Stalinist grotesquery, as I sat across the table from two men who had just—before my very eyes—rewritten the postwar world with a kind of juvenile glee and monstrous ambition that defied all decency. The dinner in the Kremlin on May 1st, 1942, intended as a show of Allied unity, was in truth a prelude to betrayal. A betrayal not merely of Britain's wartime sacrifices, but of the very principles for which this long and bitter war had been fought.

Italy had gotten everything it wanted.

Let me make myself clear: this was no accident of diplomacy, no minor sleight of hand. What occurred that night was a deliberate coup—a geopolitical knifing delivered with vodka on one side and menthol cigarettes on the other. I sat there, cigar clenched, stomach churning with stroganoff and rage, as the so-called Duce of Italy—this grinning, charlatan who had somehow reinvented himself as Europe's most irreverent powerbroker—boasted of the Mediterranean as his own private lake.

He had done what I had fought my entire life to prevent.

Africa, the Balkans, the Aegean, the Levant—whole swathes of the world now danced to Rome's tune, not because of Italian bravery, which history will recall was in short supply, but because we—Britain and her Empire—had been exhausted, isolated, and too slow to see the knife until it was already in our side.

The implications for Great Britain were catastrophic. I speak not in hyperbole, but in historical certainty.

Politically, we had been outmaneuvered. The grand illusion of Allied unity, of the "Big Three" steering the world together toward peace, had been shattered. Stalin and the Italian Duce—an unstable, erratic figure whose speeches sounded more like jazz-fueled hallucinations than policy—had carved the globe between them in brutal clarity. They spoke of "balance," of "regional stability," of "spheres of influence," but I saw it for what it was: a new Molotov-Ribbebtrop pact, one that stretched not only across Europe, but through the very heart of the British Empire. The Soviet Bear would dominate the North. The Italian Hydra would feast upon the South. We, the lion, wounded and alone, were left to lick our imperial pride as the sun began to set on the Pax Britannica.

Economically, Britain stood on a precipice. Our coffers had been drained to support the war effort; our industries had been bombed and strained; our colonies had been stretched thin in both manpower and morale. And now, with Italy dominating key Mediterranean trade routes, including the Suez and the oil-rich Levant, we faced a maritime stranglehold unlike any before. British shipping would be in danger. Supplies from India, Australia, and the African territories would be vulnerable to Italian naval interdiction or diplomatic leverage. The Empire, once bound together by the Royal Navy and the assurance of British control of the seas, now found itself economically encircled by a brash and expansionist Rome.

Militarily, the picture was even bleaker. We had fought valiantly—at Dunkirk, in the skies over Britain, in the North Atlantic—but the toll had been tremendous. Our army was still rebuilding, our fleet aging, our air force weary. And what did we face now? An Italian military that had learned from its early failures, retrained, rearmed, and emboldened by unholy success in Turkey, the Levant, and North Africa. Worse still, they had begun training others—the so-called "Scuole della Guerra Moderna," producing a generation of ideologically hardened, modernized officers. Italian troops had now fought side-by-side with fascist Greeks and Syrian auxiliaries, and had emerged from the crucible with the discipline of Romans and the zeal of crusaders. We were not prepared for a future war against this new Italy.

At the table that night, I felt as if I were staring into the mouth of a wolf disguised in the skin of a jester.

The Duce—madman though he was—possessed a terrifying clarity. He mocked, insulted, and postured, but beneath the bravado was a design—a vision. One of a multipolar world in which the Anglo-American order would be merely another alliance in a madman's world. He grinned and spoke of a mare nostrum, a sea soaked in blood and empire. And Stalin, with his predator's stillness, nodded and drank as if to say, Yes, let the West rot in its self-delusions.

Roosevelt, to his credit, attempted to maintain composure. But even he saw the gravity of what had occurred. Our unity was a fiction. The postwar peace had already been broken before it began.

And thus, as I returned to my quarters that night, frostbitten by the winds of Moscow and by the betrayal I had just witnessed, I realized that Britain stood alone once more. Not as in 1940, when German bombers crossed the Channel, but in a deeper, more insidious sense.

We had become irrelevant. Outflanked.

And now, we would have to fight again—not with bullets, perhaps, but with cunning, diplomacy, and endurance. Against Italy, against the USSR, against the passage of history itself.

God help us.

Note: retconned a few things about Germany. Check out the chapter ohh Scheisse and Welcome to my Ted talk for that