Musings on Axis Victory

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The armed forces in Axis victory timelines tend to go whole hog on the crazy wunderwaffen. I don't blame them, seeing the house-sized tanks is part of the appeal of having the Nazis win WWII. However, if you think about how the militaries of an Axis victory timeline would really be set up, what you'd get is the opposite. Assuming a geopolitical situation akin to The Man in the High Castle - that is, a world divided between Germany and Japan, both of whom are in a cold war - I suspect you would see something very different from the Games Workshop-esque Nazi war machines you see in fiction. 

  • Armor won't get heavier, in fact, it will get lighter and more generalized. I assume that even if the Germans win, their wartime approach to building bigger and better tanks that are specialized to deal with a particular threat is a logistical nightmare. I suspect they'd learn from the Allies that having one tank that can be modified to do many different tanks is better than engineering a tank/armored vehicle for every job. So, the main battle tank still comes around. 
  • The main battle tanks of both the Heer and the IJA won't be as heavy as anything IOTL. In fact, I suspect that OTL tanks would be monsters compared to what the Germans and Japanese field. This is because OTL tank design on both sides of the Iron Curtain was based around the idea of a massive Soviet armored push through Central Europe, and either stopping this while American reinforcements come in from across the sea (for NATO), or to ensure that the tanks are durable and can be produced in massive numbers (for the Warsaw Pact). Neither the Germans nor the Japanese will be planning for such a war. Assuming a division across Central Asia and the middle of North America, the expanses of the German-Japanese frontier are simply too vast for a massive investment in heavy armor to be worth it. Both sides would see tank battles in the middle of Siberia as a waste of resources, and both sides would expect only a few skirmishes in that frontier. North America would be similar, and given its distance, both sides would probably charge their American puppets to do most of the fighting (more on this later). 
  • The vast majority of military budgets will go into air and naval forces. This is simply a matter of necessity: the only way the Germans and Japanese can realistically strike at one another is through air or sea. Furthermore, the Germans and Japanese would both be interested in supporting insurgencies against the other, and both will be engaged in crushing insurgencies all over their vast empires. This requires the ability to quickly and efficiently deploy their military forces, and to be able to support them from the air and sea. 
  • The IJN would naturally be key to maintaining Japan's empire, given that it is an island nation, and assuming the Japanese are as wealthy as an OTL Cold War superpower, they may have more aircraft carriers than even the OTL United States. The Kriegsmarine, needing to compete, will be massively expanded. However, it won't be able to compete with the IJN. Given the German preference for u-boats, I expect that the Kriegsmarine will be the leader in nuclear submarines. The dynamic would be similar to the one between the USN and the Soviet Navy IOTL. 
    • The Italian Regia Marina will be charged with maintaining and defending the Mediterranean, and not much else. If Britain manages to get a favorable peace, then the Royal Navy will likely be a lackey to the Kriegsmarine in the Atlantic and Indian oceans. 
  • Given the historical political positioning of the Luftwaffe, and the need to deliver lots of bombs quickly to Japan, I suspect that the Luftwaffe would be larger than any air force IOTL, and it would get the lion's share of the Wehrmacht's funding. Here, I suspect the wunderwaffe tendencies are correct, although since we are assuming a sane German weapons industry, ultimately they develop weapons that would be familiar IOTL because they work. The Germans might stumble upon stealth earlier than OTL, but in any event, once they do they'll have large fleets of nuclear-capable stealth bombers. The combined arms of the Wehrmacht served them well during OTL's WWII, and I don't see TTL being any different, so I suspect that air support would become key to German doctrine. The Stukas will eventually evolve to be something akin to the OTL A-10 Warthog, and I'm sure the Germans would be the leaders in helicopter development. The latter would be particularly useful in crushing insurgencies, being used akin to the Hueys in Vietnam or the Mi-24 in Afghanistan. Only with no rules of engagement, so the pilots are free to slaughter anyone without consequence. 
  • Nuclear proliferation would be limited to Germany and Japan, but the nuclear arsenals the two have would be obscene. Neither the Germans nor Japanese would need to contend with an effective anti-nuclear movement, and both would be more than happy to "donate" several nuclear warheads to any state trying to develop them via expedited delivery. 
    • The Germans and Japanese might develop nuclear delivery differently. Given OTL developments, I suspect that the Germans would be the first to develop ICBMs, and will remain the leader in ICBM development. The Japanese, favoring long-range bombers at wartime, would certainly develop ICBMs of their own, but I suspect they will favor bombers and sub-launched nuclear missiles. The former could have extreme ranges and payloads, as they are not designed to return, with the best pilots given the honor of going on a nuclear kamikaze attack[1]. This also fits geography: the Japanese will not want to station too many ICBM silos on their home islands, while the Germans have vast expanses of cleansed Lebensraum to place theirs. 
  • The German and Japanese puppet governments will have antiquated hand-me-downs. Unlike America's NATO allies, or even the Soviet Union's allies, neither the Germans nor the Japanese will want their conquered puppets to have anything that could compete with modern tech. This is particularly true of their distant North American puppets, who are distant enough and closely related enough that a reunion and the formation of a very angry second United States is a real possibility. I suspect that German and Japanese allies/puppets will be allowed military hardware by tier: those closest to Germany/Japan and can be counted on to stay loyal may be granted tech that's only a few decades old, while the Americans can expect to be fighting each other with WWII vintage. 
[1] Unlike during WWII, this won't hurt the Japanese much. After all, in a nuclear war between Germany and Japan, everyone is dead anyway. 
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Madasajo92's avatar
Its a cool thought! A good "what-if", inspired by Man in the High Castle for sure. Of course we all know that this wasn't possible for the three main Axis Powers and definitely an impossibility for their own allies.

Now, please don't be offended, I'm not calling you out or anything, I'm just commenting and putting my two cents here for the sake of discussion based on the points you made. You can ignore them.

A lot of factors are at play concerning Germany's tank designs and production during the war and the economic and logistical factors cannot be ignored here. The Tiger I may have been an impressive design, but it was an expensive and mechanically complicated one too. Yes, it would have been a very good idea to mass produce effective tank designs, but certain factors would need to change. Chief among them would have to be a switch in the mentality of how Germany would wage the war, going from a mindset of waging small scale war to total war. Germany would have to mobilize the entire country for a long war early on, choosing companies to produce tank designs with a mind for efficiency and cost effectiveness rather than choosing companies based on political loyalty. There is also the issue of labor and resources as well, something Germany did not have an abundance of and was not adequately addressed during the war, especially since they were fighting a war on many fronts at once. Slave and volunteer labor and a switch to more cost effective tank designs may have been adopted during the war, but there was still the issue of sabotage and a lack of training when it came to new workers from other allied countries.

Germany would also need to mobilize its female population properly, which means a significant social shift in the way women were viewed in Nazi Germany. They'd have to do something on the scale of what America or other western allied countries did, actively allowing employment of women in the arms industry on a much larger scale to what Germany actually did during the war. I'm not saying it would be easy, in fact would be extremely hard given the circumstances, but they would need to do this early on and realize the urgent need for bodies in the factories as well as on the front lines in a long war.

Japan, Italy, and all the other smaller allies of the Axis Powers may need to do the same as well, none of it being easy. During the war, there was a severe lack of cooperation on the strategic level between Germany, Italy, and their other smaller allies. Yes, sure, there were volunteers  from many European countries that joined many SS units and yes, there were Italians and Romanians on the Eastern Front, but you need to look at how how they were used, trained, and equipped. And I'm talking strategy here too, there needed to be a united goal for them to achieve than their own separate expansionist goals.

Italy had a sizable army and navy on paper, sure, but it was woefully unprepared for a world war, with its economy never being mobilized and pitifully under-developed, being only effective in colonial style wars against even more poorly equipped native forces. Japan too had an industrial base that was not mobilized properly and one that was disturbingly underdeveloped, which hindered capacity to produce tanks, ships, and planes on a mass scale. Sure, they had been fighting in China for a very long time, but this was against a force that was divided deeply amongst itself and had a industrial base even worse than its own, fighting and taking chunks of China over the course of years, which ate away at its resources and manpower. Not only that, but the two most prominent branches of her armed forces, the IJA and IJN, were bitter rivals that developed their own separate sub-branches, proving detrimental in some cases when it came to agreeing on new courses of strategy. Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary were also woefully unprepared for a war, lacking many things that they had all requested from Germany and Italy to provide them time and again. Resource wise Japan and Italy were some of the worse off, incredibly dependent on imports to support their industries. Yes, they could develop the technology we see in Man in the High Castle, but were assuming A LOT of things fall into place conveniently for them that would actually be, in all likelihood, an incredible challenge. They would need a lot of time and lot of breathing space between their conquests.

Simply put, an Axis Victory would have to overcome some incredibly difficult odds and fix things for themselves very early on in order to get to Man in the High Castle.