New Reality Seeds

[Anders]

How about this. There was an assassination attempt on Roosevelt's life 17 days before his inauguration in 1933. The assassin fired five bullets and missed with all of them. What if he had killed Roosevelt? I understand that his running mate, John Nance Garner, disagreed with Roosevelt on a lot of issues.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by PTTG

Hmm... suppose that an imaginative Nazi manages to convince Hitler of the power of atomic weapons circa 1939. The crazed dictator falls immediately in love with the idea of such a powerful weapon and it becomes his obsession.

That's tricky. Several German physicists realised that fission might lead to a chain reaction, and hence large-scale energy release. The first seems to have been Georg Joos, who informed the Ministry of Education that there were potential military applications, leading to the first "Uranium Club." The relevant Minister, Bernhard Rust, seems to have been fairly nutty by Nazi standards, and very much opposed to modern physics. You need someone to intercept the issue and take it to Hitler before Rust can kill it.

The nuclear weapons used by the Axis might be almost exclusively Nazi-built, depending on if Japan can get u-boat deliveries of a few nukes to be used to weaken US involvement in the war (or just sow "revenge.")

They might get one or two. 1940s nuclear weapons were fragile things, not "weaponised" in the modern sense, so they'd be shipped dissembled with experts to assemble them.

The UK, even with London destroyed (which requires the Luftwaffe to be unusually successful), remains the major world power unless there's overwhelming resentment from all the colonies. Does India manage to rebel? Or could the nation conceivably be forced to concede major ground to anyone else simply because of the destruction of its capital?

If the basic course of the war remains unchanged up to 1943 or so, the UK is out of spendable money. The UK is also pretty centralised in London; the problem is more losing the leadership and the plausible alternative leadership than losing the place and the buildings.

[fchase8]

Originally Posted by Anders

How about this. There was an assassination attempt on Roosevelt's life 17 days before his inauguration in 1933. The assassin fired five bullets and missed with all of them. What if he had killed Roosevelt? I understand that his running mate, John Nance Garner, disagreed with Roosevelt on a lot of issues.

That's the divergence point in GURPS Alternate Earths' Reich-5, as well as Philip K. Dick's The Man In the High Castle (and the Amazon TV series based on it).

It might be the most common, most used WWII divergence point ever, at least for Americans.

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by PTTG

So who's unusual, yet plausible among the minor combattants?

I've got it- the low countries!

A fantastical victory will probably rely on some hidden Dutch technology or magic, whereas a more practical one would probably depend on a different closing to the war in the diplomatic field.

One fantastic variant is that one or more of the Low Countries from the Far Future Year of 2001 gets ISOT'd back to 1941 (or similar), possibly due to a banestorm swapping them (which in both worldlines would look like time travel if we assume historical echoes before that point). This would certainly not be easy for the Low Countries, but the Third Reich will have just lost the forces that were occupying that territory, and will be facing some very surprised by very angry people who can make terrifying and highly damaging precision strikes at both short range and long range (and that's without asking the US forces stationed in the Netherlands to use the nuclear devices that they have in their possession).

After the war, the Low Countries are effectively an economic powerhouse, for while they will need to import a lot of food and such, they have the technology and knowledge that everybody wants.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

. . . Third Reich will have just lost the forces that were occupying that territory, and will be facing some very surprised but very angry people who can make terrifying and highly damaging precision strikes at both short range and long range . . .

The Netherlands also has a large and modern uranium enrichment plant, and quite enough physicists to start building simple nuclear weapons. They have decided not to be a nuclear weapons state, rather than being unable to do it.

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by johndallman

The Netherlands also has a large and modern uranium enrichment plant, and quite enough physicists to start building simple nuclear weapons. They have decided not to be a nuclear weapons state, rather than being unable to do it.

I kind of figured, the point was that they've got a decent shot and taking Nazi Germany out of the war without letting the nuclear cat out of the bag.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

I kind of figured, the point was that they've got a decent shot at taking Nazi Germany out of the war without letting the nuclear cat out of the bag.

Not sure about that. Their bombers are almost unstoppable, yes, but they don't have very many. They may well run out of precision-guidance kits, spares for F-16s, or something else quite quickly. Meanwhile the Nazis will be re-invading. A 1980s Netherlands will have a lot more weaponry and trained troops.

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Not sure about that. Their bombers are almost unstoppable, yes, but they don't have very many. They may well run out of precision-guidance kits, spares for F-16s, or something else quite quickly. Meanwhile the Nazis will be re-invading. A 1980s Netherlands will have a lot more weaponry and trained troops.

One very large advantage of precision bombing is the ability to severely limit transportation, and related infrastructure.

[Astromancer]

In the latter half of 1940 Stalin decided he wanted to join the Axis. That's not Alternate history, Stalin really wanted to join. He, Stalin, still planned to betray Hitler later, but he saw benefits to joining the Axis before the betrayal.

Hitler refused the offer because he had by that time chosen to invade Russia next spring. But suppose that Hitler had decided that trying to keep America out of the war was doomed to failure, and that keeping Russia on side was the way to keep America out of the war. Russia's joining the Axis would be a massive stress on the European Left and Right. If we assume that Germany, Japan, and Italy, still end up trashed, and Russia still takes large areas of Europe, the politics of the Cold War could be radically different.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Hitler refused the offer because he had by that time chosen to invade Russia next spring. But suppose that Hitler had decided that trying to keep America out of the war was doomed to failure, and that keeping Russia on side was the way to keep America out of the war.

This doesn't work. The whole point of Hitler's policy was to invade and depopulate Russia, so that it could be colonised by Germans.

He wasn't that concerned about America, because the mad (but internally consistent) reasoning that led him to the necessity of invading Russia had also led him to the conclusion that America wasn't a serious problem.