Of lost monkeys and broken vehicles

[Serpent]

I can not see why would the Greeks spend money an manpower to fight in the Suez Crisis. It is not like UK and France need military help either way. They are 2 of the Great Powers with massive militaries so what would Greece offer? Also that crisis is one that both USSR and USA agreed against it so I can't see how that will help the case on Greece helping the declining Imperial powers.

Greece has both the logistical capacity and an ideal location to support the Franco-British in their Suez intervention. That being said, the more powers/forces involved in this affair, the harder it would be for the Franco-British to pull out, especially before fullfilling their stated objectives, which would happen much earlier with Greek (& quite possibly Spanish) military assistance.

Also what is this craze with Israel? Greece has it's own problems to fight in the Balkans or in the EEC to intergrade towards the lucrative western markets for better economic growth rather than a region which is truly unstable OTL. ITTL we could even see a united Arab kingdom which is even British related so we could see 2 possibilities:
1) The British push the Arabs to accept the Jews as an exchange for something the Arabs want. 2) The Arab front being united under 1 government it could throw the Jews out before they entrench themselves in 1947.
Personally I see 1 as more likely but ignoring a more stable Arab world ITTL and it's relation with Israel. Also I still can't see why would Greece entangle itself in that mess either way. I can see them trading with Israel of course even selling weapons but I can't see them sending troops or even embargo the Arabs as the more markets to trade the better and also the more stable situation the better.

Greece's interests would be disserviced, if the political leadership were to involve the nation in significant manner in a pointless bloody & prolonged conflict in Yugoslavia. Then you have Albania, which doesn't really need a large chunk of the Greek Armed forces to deal with. On the other hand, you have (Greater) Lebanon, Assyria & the Nile Delta+the middle Nile, where most of the Christians (5+ million) in the Middle East are located, including some 500.000 Greeks. It is more than apparent which region would take priority, both in the eyes of the Greek public, as well as the considerations of the Greek leadership.

About full Turkish occupation ITTL, I can't see why it would happen. Unlike the Asia Minor Campaign airpower is way more important here and can subdue Turkey way easier than occupying every part of the State. If one combines the breaking of all 3 fronts with a continuous air bombardment I see a very likely scenario where there is a riot against the government especially if the Allies give generous peace terms if minimal ground changes. I can see this happening in early 1944 so the Allies can free a lot of their troops towards the main enemy. Of course a full occupation might occur I just don't think it's the best on the Allies sides. Every division in Anatolia is not a division defeating Germany.

Your misguided premise is based on the notion that the Anatolian front will be wrapped up by early 1944, and/or that the Turkish leadership would be totally willing to surrender, (and lose their heads), rather than fight it out to the bitter end, alongside Hitler. Given Kemal's legacy, you should very well know that the answer would be the latter, the Turkish leadership will never accept defeat, not unless they're fully occupied.

 

[emperor joe]

Just recently in the town of belikova near Eskisehir the second largest deposit of rare earth minerals was found..it is highly unlikely that greece gets to keep this area but if the greek automotive industry is large is could one of the earliest customers of turkey

 

[X Oristos]

@Spatharios, while I very much agree, if a state wants revanche against a peer or near peer, it can do so within a generation. It would be a trade though: long-term development vs a military build up. Post-war Greece will have to keep a strong navy as it will be the bulwark against the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, not to mention commitments in East Mediterranean.

On the other hand, I doubt Turkey will develop serious naval capabilities other than fast attack crafts and submarines. They could develop a strong army and air force and then seek to shatter the post-1945 order.

But the post war order is in the future.

There are various other butterflies that are flapping their wings in 1942 and 1943.

As mentioned, the Royal Yugoslav Goverment retains a lot of its legitimacy along with a small field army. Mihailovic will have to attack the Belgrade-Thessaloniki railroad or he will be replaced. So the Chetniks will have more legitimacy and I expect them to receive the vast majority if not all of the Allied supplies. After all, the yugoslav government in TTL has a saying regarding who to arm. How would these conditions influence the development of the partisan movement?

As mentioned by the author, until Sicily is secured, it is difficult to see the commitment of an additional army in eastern Mediterranean. However, we may very well see the increase of Allied airpower, both in Tunisia and Greece/Levant. Four engined-bombers need significant logistics support, fighters not so much. So other than heavy bombers the Allied airpower can be significantly expanded.

 

[Tursiops Amicus]

On the other hand, you have (Greater) Lebanon, Assyria & the Nile Delta+the middle Nile, where most of the Christians (5+ million) in the Middle East are located, including some 500.000 Greeks. It is more than apparent which region would take priority, both in the eyes of the Greek public, as well as the considerations of the Greek leadership.

I don't know if you mean purely christians or arabs of greek orthodox religion or really greeks. I doubt very much the average Greek citizen will consider arabs of greek orthodox religion as really Greeks.

 

[Serpent]

Maybe greek forces will participate in the peacekeeping forces after the Anglo french leave

I don't know if you mean purely christians or arabs of greek orthodox religion or really greeks. I doubt very much the average Greek citizen will consider arabs of greek orthodox religion as really Greeks.

Nonetheless, there's still some considerable sympathy from the Greek public, even nowdays.

 

[goumaister]

Greece has both the logistical capacity and an ideal location to support the Franco-British in their Suez intervention. That being said, the more powers/forces involved in this affair, the harder it would be for the Franco-British to pull out, especially before fullfilling their stated objectives, which would happen much earlier with Greek (& quite possibly Spanish) military assistance.

Still you haven't answered why should Greece do it? Also Cyprus is British still so they have a great base quite close.

Greece's interests would be disserviced, if the political leadership were to involve the nation in significant manner in a pointless bloody & prolonged conflict in Yugoslavia. Then you have Albania, which doesn't really need a large chunk of the Greek Armed forces to deal with. On the other hand, you have (Greater) Lebanon, Assyria & the Nile Delta+the middle Nile, where most of the Christians (5+ million) in the Middle East are located, including some 500.000 Greeks. It is more than apparent which region would take priority, both in the eyes of the Greek public, as well as the considerations of the Greek leadership.

I am not advocating an involvement on the Balkan mess although I find it quite more possible due to proximity. Albania or Yugoslavia are not to be occupied either way. Albania just needs to be freed from the Axis and have its partizans defeated before they take power, if Greece is anticommunist, which could trigger a response from USSR and a whole more complications. Yugoslavia is not about sending men but only material just like Tito did OTL on the opposite side.
The fact that half a million Greeks live in Egypt is a reason not to attack Egypt as I see it simply due to retaliation of the vast majority of the population. You just put a target on their back without any good reason.
IMHO Greece after the war should focus on itself. Rebuilding, building more and better infrastructure, improve the life of its citizens, help business grow. And primarily take Cyprus from UK. No adventure in the Middle East is gonna be profitable as I see it.

Your misguided premise is based on the notion that the Anatolian front will be wrapped up by early 1944, and/or that the Turkish leadership would be totally willing to surrender, (and lose their heads), rather than fight it out to the bitter end, alongside Hitler. Given Kemal's legacy, you should very well know that the answer would be the latter, the Turkish leadership will never accept defeat, not unless they're fully occupied.

Well here is the whole point. Kemal surrender ITTL. So lesser men than him , current government, is able to surrender as well. So simple. Especially when they won't see their sons, husbands, fathers return from the front alive but on caskets or never found. Having Sivas bombed could have the effect it is needed for them to see they have no chance. But that of course it is my opinion. I could be wrong , only the author knows how things will go.

 

[Theodorecorvin]

Post war status for West Germany/Germany/etc is going to be interesting since the shortage of laborers won’t be filled by the Turkish. The surplus population of OTL Turkey won’t exist and the rest would be needed to rebuild Turkey.

 

[Lascaris]

Algiers, September 9th, 1942

Unifying the former Vichyite forces in North Africa and the fleet that had escaped from Toulon with the Free French had proven a delicate affair not least due to American meddling as president Roosevelt for some reason feared general Charles De Gaulle wanted to be the next dictator of France. But despite some bad blood between the two sides, fortunately no actual blood had been spilt between them, or at least not much of it, there had been some fighting at Dakar when it had been forced to join Free France back in 1940. Thus the Comité français de Libération nationale the French Committee of National Liberation had been formed back in June. Now the next step had taken place with Charles De Gaulle becoming chairman of the committee. Meanwhile in Metropolitan France, despite the entire country being occupied by the German and Italian armies Laval and Petain still maintained a German puppet government in Vichy and sunk every day into deeper subservience towards the occupier, after the proclamation of the CFNL in June the Service d'ordre légionnaire of Joseph Darnand had been transformed into the independent Milice Francaise with Laval officially at it's head and on September 4th Petain and Laval had signed into the creation of the Service du Traveil Obligatoire to provide forced labour to the Germans.

Tunisia, September 11th, 1942

Sfax fell to the British 8th army...

Stalingrad, September 13th, 1942

Vasily Chuikov took command of the city defences. The Germans, and their Italian, Romanian and Hungarian allies were on the Volga but they had failed so far to reduce Stalingrad as the Soviet defenders contested every single street and building and reinforcements poured into it from across the Volga. Increasingly more men from the German 6th army had to be committed in the fighting for the city.

Off Guadalcanal, September 15th, 1942

I-19 let loose 6 torpedoes at the Allied warships escorting US 7th Marine regiment to Guadalcanal. One would damage USS North Carolina. Three more would hit HMS Victorious which had been attached to the US Pacific fleet the previous month to help cover up for the increasing carrier losses suffered by the USN over the past months. At the moment the USN was down to a single operational carrier, USS Ranger transferred from the Atlantic. USS Enterprise was under repair at Pearl Harbor after being damaged by Japanese carrier aircraft three weeks earlier while USS Saratoga had been torpedoed off Guadalcanal a week afterwards, it had survived but would be out of service for at least three months...

South-Eastern Anatolia, September 16th, 1942

General Slim ordered the allied offensive into a halt. The Allied armies had not been ready for a large offensive, they had still been forced to attack to keep the Turks and Germans from shifting forces to the Caucasus or Smyrna. Five weeks of largely desultory fighting had led to very little ground changing hands. At least casualties had not been particularly high and Turkish ones were probably higher, nearly 3,000 prisoners had been taken during the fighting.

Tunisia, September 17th, 1942

Kairouan fell to the allies. By now the British 8th army advancing from Tripoli had linked with the French Armee d' Afrique and the British and American forces attached to it. The allied advance towards Tunis and Bizerta continued...

Sivas, September 18th, 1942

"Great victory in the south! 2nd Army stops cold English offensive!" proclaimed the headlines of Tanin, and most other newspapers. Well marshal Fevzi Cakmak supposed the next copy of Aydinlik, the illegal newspaper of the equally illegal Turkish Communist party might have a different line but its influence like that of the party was miniscule. Great victory. It had been certainly a victory, after being pushed out of Syria and Iraq his armies had stabilized the southern front which was all to the good, back in 1918 it had been the British Syrian offensives that had broken the Ottoman empire's will to fight, this was something he never forgot and he had made certain to reinforce the south sufficiently to hold back the British. But with his army almost completely lacking tanks and also lacking anti-tank guns it had suffered nearly 22,000 casualties doing and had probably inflicted only a fraction as many, stopping tanks with satchel charges, petrol bombs and old field guns firing over open sights was costly business. And that could sum up Turkish experiences in this war so far. Great victories at great cost and not quite final ones. And the English, appeared to be getting stronger. The Germans had better wrap up the fighting in Russia this campaign season before things got more complicated.

National Theatre, Thessaloniki, September 20th, 1942

The National Theatre building had been completed to plans of Constantinos Doxiadis and opened just before the start of the war in the summer of 1940. When the city had been captured by the Germans it had been taken over by the Bulgarian occupation authorities, just like the university buildings and used for events organized by them. Today was going to by a significant day. King Boris was visiting Thessaloniki and would be making a speech in the theatre. None in Bulgaria was entirely happy at the constant news of casualties returning to Bulgaria or at half the Bulgarian army having to fight the Greeks in Thessaly, what was making it acceptable was Bulgaria achieving all her national aspirations thanks to the Germans and Italians. Thus Boris was visiting to show openly that Thessaloniki, Solun for the Bulgarians was and would remain Bulgarian.

Boris looked at the assembled crowd in the theatre. Bulgarian, German and Italian officers, Bulgarian civil servants, local Gestapo and organization Todt officers, collaborators of various stripes, he though of most as local Bulgarian patriots of course, some for the settlers imported from old Bulgaria after Macedonia had been incorporated into Bulgaria in 1941. "Back in 1912 I was honoured to lead my battalion to Solun. Now 30 years afterwards I'm happy to see the dream of the free Bulgarian Macedonia come to fruition. Long live Solun! Long live..."

Whatever was supposed to long live next was cut short when the quarter ton of explosives the Greek resistance had managed to put under the building were set off...

 

[Aristomenes]

So the Bulgarian King id dead or badly injured by the actions of the Greek resistance. A great success but we can expect a lot of attrocities by the enraged Bulgarians...
Concerning Turkey, we se that they are on their edge of a collapse of the war effort. I think that Turkey may pull out of the war in one year, until September 1943.

 

[pjmidd]

I-19 let loose 6 torpedoes at the Allied warships escorting US 7th Marine regiment to Guadalcanal. One would damage USS North Carolina. Three more would hit HMS Victorious

Battleship and a carrier in a single salvo? Given the spacing between ships in a normal formation, accuracy issues etc, that's not really passing the plausibility test.

 

[Lascaris]

Battleship and a carrier in a single salvo? Given the spacing between ships in a normal formation, accuracy issues etc, that's not really passing the plausibility test.

You mean the USS Wasp was not sunk by three torpedoes out of a salvo of 6 fired from... I-19 with a fourth torpedo damaging USS O'Brien and a fifth USS North Carolina in the same day in OTL?

 

[pjmidd]

You mean the USS Wasp was not sunk by three torpedoes out of a salvo of 6 fired from... I-19 with a fourth torpedo damaging USS O'Brien and a fifth USS North Carolina in the same day in OTL?

Wow , ran out of ideas so just did deliberate parallelism of what was the golden BB of golden BB's? Sorry I thought you were a better writer, it was one of those things that was so statistically unlikely it would be classed as implausible by anyone crunching the numbers before it happened. Happening again in a timeline with so major differences to OTL is plain lazy.

 

[Ramontxo]

Wow , ran out of ideas so just did deliberate parallelism of what was the golden BB of golden BB's? Sorry I thought you were a better writer, it was one of those things that was so statistically unlikely it would be classed as implausible by anyone crunching the numbers before it happened. Happening again in a timeline with so major differences to OTL is plain lazy.

Sorry but when asked for proof of a chance happening the Author has provided you with one. Yes it was a, quite difficult, happening. But in any other timeline another chance situation would have been recorded in history . And the Slot in Guadalcanal was a knife fighting in the dark by people that were learning the rules as they went along. In any case if you don't like this TL you dont have to follow it. And discussing the author capabilities as a writer is not nice


Edited to add that IMHO this is a wonderful TL

 

[emperor joe]

Post war status for West Germany/Germany/etc is going to be interesting since the shortage of laborers won’t be filled by the Turkish. The surplus population of OTL Turkey won’t exist and the rest would be needed to rebuild Turkey.

There's is always spanish labor for gastarbater

 

[Ramontxo]

From a film of my youth.

 

[emperor joe]

Well tsar boris is most likely dead...at least ittl they won't suspect that he was assassinated.. they will be sure of it

 

[CalBear]

Wow , ran out of ideas so just did deliberate parallelism of what was the golden BB of golden BB's? Sorry I thought you were a better writer, it was one of those things that was so statistically unlikely it would be classed as implausible by anyone crunching the numbers before it happened. Happening again in a timeline with so major differences to OTL is plain lazy.

Implausible is NOT impossible.

BTW: I wouldn't even call that attack the biggest Golden BB of WW II. Might not even be the biggest on of the Pacific War.

 

[Khan Doomy]

I feel I need to correct a misconception of demographics. While the huge Greek losses in the Asia Minor Catastrophe and World War II played their role, the main reason why the Turkish population outpaced the Greek, is that because Anatolian Turks entered the population bulge phase later. i.e the point were people are still procreating according to pre-modernist logic but have access to medicine that depresses child mortality and death in pregnant women. The Greeks in the late 19th-early 20th century had a huge population explosion exactly because they had access to this at that time. It took about 50 years for Turkish medicine to catch up, and Kurds only caught up in the 90s-2000s. Within a generation or two of this happening, people stop having many children.

Thus I would not bet on Turkey having a small population growth. Even without the Kurdish areas, I expect Anatolian Turks to still reach 40-50 million.

 

[MUC]

I feel I need to correct a misconception of demographics. While the huge Greek losses in the Asia Minor Catastrophe and World War II played their role, the main reason why the Turkish population outpaced the Greek, is that because Anatolian Turks entered the population bulge phase later. i.e the point were people are still procreating according to pre-modernist logic but have access to medicine that depresses child mortality and death in pregnant women. The Greeks in the late 19th-early 20th century had a huge population explosion exactly because they had access to this at that time. It took about 50 years for Turkish medicine to catch up, and Kurds only caught up in the 90s-2000s. Within a generation or two of this happening, people stop having many children.

Thus I would not bet on Turkey having a small population growth. Even without the Kurdish areas, I expect Anatolian Turks to still reach 40-50 million.

On the other hand, wealth is also an issue. The Turkish state (and the average turkish citizen) appear less wealthy in this ATL, compared to OTL.

 

[Serpent]

I feel I need to correct a misconception of demographics. While the huge Greek losses in the Asia Minor Catastrophe and World War II played their role, the main reason why the Turkish population outpaced the Greek, is that because Anatolian Turks entered the population bulge phase later. i.e the point were people are still procreating according to pre-modernist logic but have access to medicine that depresses child mortality and death in pregnant women. The Greeks in the late 19th-early 20th century had a huge population explosion exactly because they had access to this at that time. It took about 50 years for Turkish medicine to catch up, and Kurds only caught up in the 90s-2000s. Within a generation or two of this happening, people stop having many children.

Thus I would not bet on Turkey having a small population growth. Even without the Kurdish areas, I expect Anatolian Turks to still reach 40-50 million.

Arable land matters a lot in this era, if these parents can hardly sustain themselves, then they will be really reluctant to have children, especially a lot of them.