Tsunami-1

[Johnny1A.2]

News of the 'May Day Bomb', as it rapidly came to be called, threw Berlin into a panic. While there had been a German effort to create atomic weapons, it had never been fully staffed or funded, and it had been troubled by the fact that some of the people most useful for such a project had been of unacceptable ethnic, racial, or religious background. Attention had been divided between it and a dozen other projects, and most of Germany's efforts had been in their relatively successful conventional war effort in east and west.

Up until May of 1946, the better fortunes of Germany compared to Homeline had led to Hitler displaying the more rational, competent side of his nature. As on Homeline, when this side of his nature was ascendant, Hitler could be a competent leader. But the other side always lurked, waiting to be awakened, and the May Day Bomb did it.

The news and reports from the observers triggered one of Hitler's legendary rants, and valuable time was wasted as various factions in the German leadership argued back and forth about what to do. The British ultimatum came in in 3 May, demanding a conditional German surrender and giving 3 days to comply. Hitler screamed defiance back across the Channel, launching several relatively ineffectual missile attacks as well. Orders went out to the German air forces to prepare for a massive bombing operation against London and Britain with all deliberately haste.

Even among the German leadership who understood the terrible implications of the May Day Bomb, there was uncertainty. Did Britain have any more? How long would it take to make more? How many could the British make? Could they deliver such a device effectively?

The answer to this last question came on 7 May 1946, shortly past dawn local time, when a 16-kiloton bomb detonated in an airburst above the city of Hamburg.

Up until this point, Hamburg had fared better, on Tsunami-1, than it did on Homeline during the same period. The long cease-fire, and the absence of American resources, meant that far fewer bombs had fallen on German cities as compared to Homeline. Hamburg was battered but more-or-less intact and functional on the morning of 7 May...when its luck ran out.

Between the initial blast, the firestorm that followed, radioactive fallout, and subsequent chaos and disruption, over 200,000 people were killed, and at least that many again were seriously injured, often permanently crippled.
Many were struck blind by the initial flash. A tremendous amount of industrial capacity and transport capacity were instantly wiped out.

At noon on 7 May, the British ultimatum was repeated, with another 3 day grace period.

Hitler continued to rage, showing no sign of yielding...but on 9 May Hitler was assassinated by a German colonel, initiating a coup d'état in Berlin. A frantic message went out from Berlin to London, pleading for a cease fire and negotiation, and London promptly recognized the new military junta, and agreed to a cessation of hostilities for the purpose of negotiation, conditional on German restraint.

On 10 May 1946, a second cease-fire was declared, and less than a week later representatives from the new government in Berlin met with diplomats from London in a meeting hosted by neutral Spain, in Madrid. With remarkable haste, a peace treaty was hammered out, and formally signed on 1 June 1946, ending the Greater War.

Who won? Well...that was actually debatable.

Germany had sued for peace from Britain, but objectively, except for the British atomic monopoly, Germany was substantially the stronger power in 1946. Germany bestrode Europe and western Asia like a colossus, ruling an empire stretching from Paris to beyond Moscow. Germany retained alliances with Sweden, Finland and Italy, though Italy was undergoing its own internal coup at this time as well.

The peace conference made no attempt to undo Germany's eastern conquests, the embattled remnants of the Soviet state were not even represented at theh conference. Germany likewise retained fairly strong alliances with various Arab groups in the Mideast.

Germany retreated a little on the west, Paris was returned to French rule, but the new German border was only a few tens of miles distant. The ancient lands of Lotharingia had changed hands yet again. Belgium was liberated, the Germans grudgingly retreated from Belgian lands, but stripped much of her industrial capacity and resources as they did.

Germany agreed to a few limits on her naval power, esp. the U-boats, but nothing crippling, and they retained an enormous air force. Furthermore, Germany still had most of her industrial capacity and internal transport capacity intact and functional.

Britain retained her global empire, and in some ways that empire was more tightly bound to Britain than had been the case on Homeline in 1946. It was Germany who had sued Britain for peace. Yet it was widely recognized that Britain was exhausted, industrially, militarily, and economically. The atomic bomb had turned the prospect of a long, slow defeat around, but even armed with a nuclear monopoly, Britain was not strong enough to risk demanding an unconditional surrender from Germany.

Indeed, many observers wondered if there had ever been a stranger case of a stronger power asking a weaker one for peace.

Still, Germany had been the power to sue for peace. To many that meant Germany had lost the war...but it was a loss that left Germany vastly stronger in 1946 than she had been in 1939. Britain had entered the war over Poland, and Poland was now a conquered state under the German empire. Germany had more soldiers under arms in 1947, the first year of the 'peace' than she had had in 1940.

Something else everyone with any sense recognized: the British atomic monopoly was unlikely to be eternal.

[Johnny1A.2]

Britain had created the May Day Bomb against the odds. Project TUBE ALLOY had never been discontinued, and America's absence from the war prevented the joint effort of the Manhattan Project. Strictly speaking, Britain could not afford to build an atom bomb...but they could not afford not to, either.

They achieved it through a combination of factors. On Tsunami-1, several of the scientists and technical people who escaped the Nazis ended up in Britain. This helped. They also did the project more cheaply than America did it on Homeline, America had money and resources to spare, and spared them. Britain had no margin to spare...and spared it. This had a cost. More than a few British soldiers and airmen and sailors perished for lock of supplies and support that went into the nuclear project.

The British, driven by desperate necessity, found cheaper ways to do certain things, shortcuts that worked, though often dangerously. Much of the research work was done in an isolated island on the west side of Scotland, and because of the corner-cutting and haste, that island was left heavily contaminated. Radiations leaks happened, and both project personnel and civilians were affected. It took longer for Britain to do this on Tsunami-1 than it did for the USA on Homeline, but they did it. "You never know for sure what you can do until you have a gun to your head."

But successfully designing a bomb was only part of the challenge. The May Day Bomb and the Hamburg bomb were uranium-gun designs, and the uranium came from Canada. By May of 1946, Britain had all of four working bombs, one of which they used for their diplomatic demonstration on 1 May. The second was dropped on Hamburg.

The delivery of the bombs was a story in itself. The plane that dropped the bomb on Hamburg was a prop-driven four engine machine. It caught German intelligence by surprise, because as far as they had been able to discern, the British had no such planes available or in the design pipeline. British counter-intel was good, but it was still a puzzle to Berlin.

OTOH, German intelligence knew that the United States, as part of its general mid-forties military buildup, did have such a plane. It was the Tsunami-1 version of the B-29, only slightly different from the B-29 of Homeline, though it was not called that. From what Germany could learn after the Madrid Conference, the plane at Hamburg had been almost identical to the American plane. The immediate German suspicion was that America had supplied the plane.

The U.S. Government vociferously denied that. Congress asked questions, and President Shelby vigorously denied involvement. Yes, he was a British sympathizer with regards to the European war, and made no secret of it, but he firmly insisted that he would not violate security regulations and Congressional laws forbidding such direct aid.

Many, both in and out of America, remained skeptical. The British insisted that their plane, which they called an 'Imperial Avenger', was home-grown. The Germans certainly had their doubts.

In fact, President Shelby was telling the truth. In a very successful instance of war espionage, the British intelligence establishment had managed to steal not only the plans for the American superbomber, but actually managed to get several entire engines surreptitiously purchased and delivered. When this was finally ferreted out, it caused an enormous shakeup in the American intelligence and military world, and chilled Anglo-American relations for some time.

Still, Britain had the Bomb, and planes able to deliver it, and had demonstrated this. If Germany had kept fighting, it would have taken months to create even a few more warheads, but Germany was years away from duplicating them, and the British could have slowly, agonizingly annihilated Germany, one or two cities at a time.

In the late 1940s, as the new 'peace' settled after the Madrid Conference, there were four approximate peer powers dominating the international scene: the British Empire, America, Germany, and the Japanese Empire. Pundits and academics came to speak of 'the four primary powers' when referring to these four states. Each one could make a plausible claim to being in fact the most powerful in the world, none was so strong that they could afford to disregard any of the others.

Britain, in one sense, could be said to be the strongest because of their atom bombs. Certainly London controlled more raw destructive power than anyone else. Counting the Dominions, London still controlled, directly or indirectly, more of the world's land area than any other power.

Both the United States and Germany substantially surpassed Britain's industrial capacity, however, and both had contiguous territories. Both were wealthier in absolute terms than Britain. Japan was the weakest of the Big Four in absolute terms, but was a very rapidly rising power, in control of much of eastern Asia.

Spain was a rising second-tier power as well. Neutral during the war, Franco had played both sides with some skill, and the Spanish economy had done well out of the war trading with both sides. A military buildup had left Spain strong enough that invasion by Germany would have been painful and expensive.

France was semi-broken. Much of her industrial capacity was now behind the new German border, along with some of her most resource-rich regions. Paris remained the formal, official capital of what remained of France, but it was too close to the new German border for comfort, and though ceremonial functions were performed there, the real day-to-day government was moved to Vichy permanently.

Vichy, however, was no longer a German puppet. Franco was never as much of a fascist as his enemies accused him, his actual attitude was more that of a monarchist traditionalist. As on Homeline, Petain shaped the French government after Paris fell, and impressed a not-entirely-dissimilar attitude onto that government.

In the aftermath of the Greater War, a Franco-Spanish alliance emerged and grew close. Spain liked having the smaller France as a buffer state between them and Germany, the new France enjoyed the protection from Germany of implied Spanish support. Both powers leaned heavily toward Britain, though neither become full satellites. Between the threat of the British atomic bombs and Spanish support, the remains of France threw off German oversight, becoming a genuine junior partner of Spain.

[Tomsdad]

Cool stuff!

What's the deal with Japan though I may have missed something but I thought they were left a bit broken and a bit inward looking after the wave?

(I'm assuming by the Japanese empire the Chinese civil war kept going enough to weaken them?)

[Michele]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

The delivery of the bombs was a story in itself. The plane that dropped the bomb on Hamburg was a prop-driven four engine machine. It caught German intelligence by surprise, because as far as they had been able to discern, the British had no such planes available or in the design pipeline. British counter-intel was good, but it was still a puzzle to Berlin.

Huh, the German-British cease-fire was back at the end of 1942. In our timeline, Germans saw in broad daylight, in 1941, the four-engined Stirlings defying them in the Circus operations. During 1942, the Germans in OTL saw the Lancasters in daylight, too, and I think they downed more than one.

The Lancaster is entirely able to drop a nuke. Especially if one waits until 1945 or later, when in OTL the British were flying the Lincoln, a Lancaster spin-off that had the same ceiling as a B-29.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Michele

Huh, the German-British cease-fire was back at the end of 1942. In our timeline, Germans saw in broad daylight, in 1941, the four-engined Stirlings defying them in the Circus operations. During 1942, the Germans in OTL saw the Lancasters in daylight, too, and I think they downed more than one.

The Lancaster is entirely able to drop a nuke. Especially if one waits until 1945 or later, when in OTL the British were flying the Lincoln, a Lancaster spin-off that had the same ceiling as a B-29.

Yeah, but a B-29 (albeit a slightly different one) can do it better, and farther into German territory. I should have said that the British were thought to have no such 4-engine planes like the B-29 available.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Tomsdad

Cool stuff!

What's the deal with Japan though I may have missed something but I thought they were left a bit broken and a bit inward looking after the wave?

(I'm assuming by the Japanese empire the Chinese civil war kept going enough to weaken them?)

More or less. I mentioned upthread that a relative of Hirohito, named Akihito, gained the throne and turned the ceremonial monarchy into something real, Japan mostly sat out the European War and rebuilt during it, emerging as a major power ruling big chunks of a disunited China, and parts of the Dutch East Indies and other bits of Asia, and looking with interest as some mostly undefended theoretically Soviet territory.

Japan was significantly changed by the Wave, though. I'm hoping to get to that soon.

[Tomsdad]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

More or less. I mentioned upthread that a relative of Hirohito, named Akihito, gained the throne and turned the ceremonial monarchy into something real, Japan mostly sat out the European War and rebuilt during it, emerging as a major power ruling big chunks of a disunited China, and parts of the Dutch East Indies and other bits of Asia, and looking with interest as some mostly undefended theoretically Soviet territory.

Japan was significantly changed by the Wave, though. I'm hoping to get to that soon.

Cool stuff

cheers

TD

[Johnny1A.2]

Germany was at best only a semi-stable state in the late 1940s on Tsunami-1, for several reasons.

The death of Hitler, on Tsunami-1, was brought about as a result of a conspiracy among the senior Wehrmacht command, in tandem with some Nazi Party officials and some civilians in the civil bureaucracy. It had been coming together for months before the May Day Bomb brought everything to a premature head.

The conspirators had planned well, and their motives had been a mixture of power hunger, worry that Hitler's personal instability would prove catastrophic, and in some cases genuine moral revulsion at the ongoing horrors. The Holocaust and the associated industrial-scale murder had been occurring on Tsunami-1 as they did on Homeline. However, ironically, the effort of pacifying the new eastern empire had diverted resources, slowing the pace somewhat. Still, it was happening.

The conspirators had planned to strike at least two months later than they did. The British display of the May Day Bomb, and Hitler's hysterical, defiant reaction, had produced a panic of confusion and cross-purposes in Berlin. When Hamburg was destroyed, and Hitler still showed no sign of recognizing that everything had changed, the conspirators accelerated their plans, and perhaps somewhat to their own surprise, carried off the assassination and ceased power in Berlin fairly effectively, for all the haste.

The first priority of the new governing junta in Berlin, which was made up of officers from the army and navy, a few senior Gestapo personnel, and some civil officials, was to keep the British from erasing any more German cities. This was accomplished by means of a frantic appeal for a negotiated peace, to which the British consented.

Even as the Madrid Treaty was being hammered out, the junta was racing to secure their position, and quite a bit of blood was spilt in the process. It was late in 1948 before the new government was in full control of Greater Germany, and even then their hold was shaky. Internal struggles for control between the members of the junta led to the deaths of several, as well.

One of the most audacious gambits of the new government was how they dealt with the extermination camps and associated activities. Instead of trying to conceal them from the world, which would have been futile over time, they instead made a show of the military 'discovering' and liberating them, naturally to their profound shock and horror.

(In fact, in some cases, the horror was not pretended, even if the surprise was, some of the junta were horrified at what had been happening.)

Show trials followed, and much of the former Nazi leadership were either imprisoned or executed. Hitler was explained to have been the victim of an insidious neurological disorder that had twisted the former political mastermind into a monster late in life, his assassination made necessary by his madness in a critical moment.

Was all this believed? Some people did, in and out of Germany, many did not, but nobody was in a position to do much about it in the short term, either way.

The ruling junta claimed to be intending to restore democratic control, and elections for a new Reichstag were scheduled for 1950. In the meantime, the junta made no pretense of planning to give up any of the conquered territory, and made no apologies for exercising the 'right of conquest'.

That empire directly included most of the territory from a line just a few miles outside Paris eastward to a line well past Moscow. Greece was under German occupation, as were most of the Balkans. Germany controlled land from the Caspian to the Arctic Sea on her easternmost frontier, and what remained of the USSR to the further east was embroiled in a multi-factional civil war that rendered the USSR more a theoretical concept than a functional state.

Germany was firmly allied to Italy, Sweden, and Finland, though the Finns were cooler on the alliance in the absence of a Soviet threat. Germany had slightly less formal but still strong ties to Turkey and several Arab groups in what was nominally British and French territory in the Middle East. Between them, Italy and Germany controlled most of the north African coast except for Egypt and Morocco, both under direct or indirect British control in 1948.

The Madrid Treaty had imposed a few limits on German action. The Treaty forbade Berlin to station combat aircraft within one hundred miles of the English Channel, and Germany likewise was not permitted to bring naval warships on Scotland's north or out past Dover. In effect, much of what surface naval power Germany held was bottled up in the North Sea. Britain had heavily fortified both the Straits of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, leaving Italo-German naval power bottled up on the south, as well.

Germany, of course, immediately sought ways around these restrictions. The alliance with Sweden was strong enough that the Germans could construct naval bases on Swedish soil, constructing the ships in Swedish yards from Swedish components and metal. The gave the German navy access to the Atlantic and thus the world, over the protests of London and Washington.

To deal with the aircraft limitation, the Germans poured money and resources into a successor to the V-2 missile. They also argued that the new missiles did not constitute military 'aircraft' under the terms of the Madrid Treaty, and so could be stationed in the near-Channel region.

The British did not agree with the German interpretation, and their nuclear monopoly was still sufficient, in 1948, to keep the Germans from pressing the issue. It did not entirely matter, because it was clear that Germany would soon have reliable missiles able to strike at the British Isles from much further back in German territory.

The former colonial empires of several European powers were in flux in the aftermath of the Greater War. It was painfully evident in Vichy that a reduced France, dependent on Spanish alliance and implied British protection, and stripped of much of her former industrial power, simply was not in a position to hold on to much if any of her former territories overseas. While there were still Romantics and hot-heads in France who imagined otherwise, calmer heads in Vichy knew that France's days as an imperial power were done for the foreseeable future.

At the Madrid Conference, the French relinquished most of their imperial claims, and specifically ceded all claims in Morocco to Britain. The Spanish had sold some of their territory in Morocco to Britain as well during the War, giving Britain formal, official control over both sides of the Straits of Gibraltar. (Spain did not officially waive their claim on Gibraltar, but somehow it was rarely brought up during this period.)

The British had wanted control of Morocco because of the Straits. They sought, and received, control of another African region for a different but equally pressing reason.

Even more so than France, Belgium was in no position to even pretend to imperial status. Though formally liberated, Belgium had been stripped of much of her industrial capacity, had lost huge numbers of young men drafted into the German forces, and had been under occupation through the Greater War. They were now formally independent and neutral, and though there were no official limits on their sovereignty, they were all too aware of the nearness of the German colossus that now ruled Europe. There was no will to take any action that might even potentially provoke Berlin.

Thus, at the Madrid Conference, London had less trouble than one might expect in convincing the Belgians to cede control of the Congo to Britain. From 1947 onward, people spoke of the British Congo.

Why was Britain so intent on control of this particular colony? Well, the Congo was a source of several valuable resources, such as rubber. The main reason, though, was that the Congo was a significant uranium source.

To be continued...

[Johnny1A.2]

Tsunami-1 continued...

For nuclear weaponry, uranium is of course the critical element. One can make a bomb from plutonium, but you need uranium to breed the plutonium. Thorium can be converted into bomb-viable uranium, but that too requires a breeding process. Uranium is not a super-common element, but neither is it exceedingly rare.

In the late 1940s on Tsunami-1, in the immediate aftermath of the Greater War, the emergence of Atomic Britain, and the Madrid Treaty, though, only a few practical sources of uranium were solidly known. Britain already indirectly controlled one such, in the Dominion of Canada. It was Canadian uranium that had fueled the May Day Bomb and Hamburg Bomb.

Another established source at the time was in the United States, and there were geologists who argued that Australia was a promising source. The USA was not precisely a British ally on Tsunami-1 in the late 1940s, but of the four great powers, America was certainly the most 'comfortable' to Britain, and vice versa. As for Australia, it, like Canada, was a British Dominion.

The thinking in London was that the more uranium sources that Britain could control, directly, indirectly, by hook, or by crook, the harder Germany's task of mastering nuclear weaponry would be, and the longer it would take. Thus the interest in relieving a humbled Belgium of its African possession. The British were also on the lookout for other possible uranium sources around the world, esp. those convenient for Germany.

The junta in Germany, for their part, were well aware of this policy, and were of course scouring the world for every possible source of uranium they might possibly lay their hands upon.

In the meantime, the nature of the relationship between Britain and the Dominions was going in a different direction on Tsunami-1 than had been thhe case on Homeline.

The Greater War had actually brought about closer ties between the mother country and both Canada and Australia. Canadian and Australian units had actually been integrated into the nucleus of a true Imperial military, and thaht process continued after the War ended. In 1950, a new Imperial Directory Cabinet was established. It had semi-formally operated since the end of the Greater War, now it was made official. It consisted of the prime minister or equivalent of each major Dominion, along with a few other officials, and they elected a PM of the Empire from among their number, subject in theory to royal confirmation. In practice, this position was always held by the PM of the UK for a very long time, though.

The status of India quickly became complicated.

In Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, South Africa, the Falkland Islands, and other locales throughout Britain's far-flung empire, heavily fortified air bases were established, with fleets of imperial avenger bombers on site, kept fueled and ready to fly. It was an open secret that each of these bases had atomic warheads on site as well. These scattered and well-defended bases, together with the relatively long range and carrying power of the Imperial Avenger 2 (the model designation for what was basically a modified B-29) put huge swaths of the world within relatively easy theoretical striking range of the British nuclear arsenal.

As on Homeline, there was tension and a substantial independence movement in India. However, Japan complicated the equation. By 1950, Japan had conquered huge chunks of a disunited and chaotic China, and had picked off substantial bits and pieces of the former French and Dutch empires in the region as well. Japan was brutally efficient in their conquests, if not always in their subsequent rule, and stories of brutality and harsh treatment of subject peoples circulated widely.

It was no great secret that Japan had their eyes on British India, and if the Indians did not necessarily love their British overlords, there was also considerable fear of Japanese intentions. Japan in 1950 was very strong, economically and militarily, far stronger than an independent India could hope to be for many decades.

Furthermore, much of the Middle East was now in orbit around Greater Germany. With Japan on the east and German allies (and large German military bases and presences) not so far to the west, India felt herself in a somewhat precarious position.

Under those conditions the protection of the British Royal Navy and the British nuclear umbrella was not without its appeal, even for otherwise independence-minded Indians. The British were far from ideal overlords, but the Germans and the Japanese looked rather worse.

To be continued...