Chapter Fifteen: A Stunning Reversal (January 16th, 1940 to June 12th, 1940)
The Smaller Fronts
With every passing day, the British presence on the Yugoslav coast was becoming more frustrating as Yugoslav shipping diverted to safer ports and British planes buzzed even Belgrade despite the best efforts of air raid teams to deter them. But, before the end of January, the Allied forces operating in Dalmatia overreached and left a path clear for the Royal Army to liberate the city of Split from British control. Capturing Split choked off six British divisions from supplies, and divided them into two pockets of three divisions each. While a mixed force of Axis divisions from Yugoslavia, Germany, and Italy kept the British forces in Montenegro bottled up, the rest of the Yugoslav forces on the coast began the slow, unpleasant work of extracting the invaders from their homeland.
After the first pocket in Croatia was eliminated, the Allied forces around Zara were driven away from the city and began a long retreat towards Rijeka and the Italian border, but they were constantly harried by sustained attacks by a rotating force of Yugoslav attackers on the ground and in the air and were unable to resupply even with the temporary capture of the city. Their long-awaited surrender removed one of the blights upon the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Although a new invasion was threatened by a small Australian force, the Italian defenders traveling through Croatia to the Greek front managed to hinder their advance long enough for Yugoslav units to come to their aid and destroy the interlopers.
Throughout the early stages of the war the Royal Yugoslav Army had suffered from a deficiency of men by trying to maintain a presence on both the Greek and Romanian fronts while also responding to the threat of invasion from the Adriatic. Even with hastily raised divisions filling some of the gaps, the resulting shuffle of men and supplies had led to headaches and losses as they were ferried from one crisis to the next, with potential disasters such a Romanian offensive into the Serbian heartland only prevented by providence. However, with the stabilizing of the Axis lines against Romania, it was now believed to be safe enough to divert the men necessary to crush the British forces occupying Yugoslavia’s coastline. Twenty-four divisions of infantry were assembled under the Nedić protégé General Momcilo Ojdanić and given the simple mission to extricate the British from the country. With a massive local superiority in men and guns, Ojdanić worked with a brutal methodical efficiency motivated by his past failings to prevent British landings. The lost territory in Montenegro was carved in half and then the British were surrounded and mercilessly hammered until they surrendered. Losses were high, higher than anticipated or desired, but the general had accomplished his task and all of Yugoslavia was free from foreign invaders. His work completed, Ojdanić’s force was reduced to six divisions assigned to garrison the ports of Yugoslavia and Italian Albania. That was judged to be sufficient to bar any further Allied landings and to crush anyone unlucky enough to succeed.
Even as the Royal Yugoslav Army engaged in new attacks designed to drive out the British invaders from the country, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was undergoing a change in leadership. Despite his history of bungled intrigues in Bulgaria, friendly pre-war attitude towards the British, and his conflicts with the Nedić brothers, Dragoljub “Draža” Mihailović was elevated to the general staff. Such an appointment came over the objections of the Nedić’s, but with the support of Prince Paul and the Kingdom’s civilian leadership. While Mihailović’s Yugoslavist credentials were not well-established, his loyalty to the royal family and his popularity with the men serving under him was. It was hoped that raising his profile and responsibilities would help rein in the military by preventing an unimpeachable clique from forming around Milan and Milutin Nedić. In terms of doctrine, Mihailović looked towards the defense of the Yugoslav homeland, and planned for an orientation for the army and the territorial militias which would prevent any further British encroachments from the Adriatic coast. His appointment and conservative temperament contrasted sharply with the fast-paced developments in the war with the Allies in the coming spring.
On the last day of January 1940, the German foreign ministry announced that a state of war existed between the Swiss and German governments. Within hours, Switzerland had tendered membership in the British alliance and were moving against Axis positions in Germany, Italy, and occupied France. As promised, Yugoslavia declared war on Switzerland out of solidarity with her allies, but maintained all of her divisions on the Romanian, Greek, and Adriatic fronts.
Just as in other conflicts started by Berlin’s brashness, the Wehrmacht was not in a position to attack or defend against Switzerland when the war was declared. Italian forces were similarly tied up in trying to hold back the combined Anglo-French counterattack in France. As such, the Swiss were initially able to make a series of impressive gains, advancing to the northeast in order to try and link up with the French defenders and to the south towards the Mediterranean Sea with its promise of British supplies and reinforcements. If accomplished, this achievement would also leave the bulk of the Italian army cut off from Rome and could mean the annihilation of the most fearsome member of the Axis alliance.
Unfortunately for the Allied cause, the small Swiss army was unable to link up with any friendly reinforcements before the Axis answer came, and their advance fell short of the Mediterranean. Overstretched and far from home, Switzerland’s soldiers were beset by a hastily assembled coalition of Italian and German divisions which drove them back into Switzerland and then pushed further into the mountainous country.
Frustratingly, the frontline in France had settled into a renewed stalemate as the French forces were woefully short on men and material while the British preferred to concentrate on shoring up their position in the Mediterranean rather than assist the Pétain regime with recovering its country. Thus, despite a vast superiority to the Italians on paper, the Anglo-French coalition did not continue to press south, and Switzerland was left to find for itself.
The end result was hardly unanticipated. On April 11th, 1940, the Swiss Confederation had to surrender to the Axis forces and faced the prospect of an ethnolinguistic division of the country by the victorious Germans and Italians. The war suddenly seemed to be going in the Axis’ favor and flush with the taste of victory and the gold seized from Swiss banks, the Axis leadership paid fresh attention to knocking France out of the war.
While the Swiss were seeing their early gains evaporate in the face of mounting Axis resistance, Belgrade renewed the attack on Romania in order to lessen the alliance’s burgeoning list of threats. The order came on the feast day of St. Valentine with an attack on the valuable city of Galati enroute to Bessarabia and the border with the Soviet Union. General Depre was eager to take up the attack again after months of impasse in the region, and the presence of German divisions capable of holding the broader line against Romania allowed him to form a fist of six infantry divisions and punch through the Romanian’s defenses in the same flood of fire and steel which had characterized previous Yugoslav advances.
The Yugoslavs’ boldness was rewarded when they encircled four Romanian divisions on the coastline of the Black Sea. Learning from the mistakes of the opening of the fighting in Greece, Depre assigned only two divisions to eliminate the pocket, trusting in the Germans to keep the Romanian’s boxed in. The rest of his spearhead he drove onwards.
This display of initiative led to the elimination of the surrounded Romanians and the envelopment of four more divisions on Romania’s border with the Soviet Union. Communist observers were more than content to watch the reactionaries fight, and it was abundantly clear that the Romanians were outmatched. The Yugoslavs rode roughshod over the Romanian defenders and moved closer to eliminating their kingdom’s greatest rival to dominating the Balkans.
In a little under two month, the Valentine’s Day offensive launched by General Josef Depre’s section of the Royal Yugoslav Army had captured thirteen Romanian divisions and cut off Romania’s access to the Black Sea and its border with the Soviet Union. A lifeline still existed through Poland, but the noose was tightening around Romania’s neck and the Axis powers were only too happy to draw it tight.
During the bulk of the fighting, the Romanian government had evaluated Hungary as the more hostile force and dangerous threat to their territory and assigned defenders primarily to Transylvania. King Carol’s intransigence and the rapid Yugoslav advance in the rest of the country meant that the last holdouts of loyal Romanian forces were still fighting to keep the Hungarians out of the disputed region when the bell tolled for Romania’s war effort. Some divisions escaped to Poland, but much of the Romanian army dissolved into a disorganized rabble and blended in with the local population as the Axis armies advanced on Cluj from the west.
On April 20th, 1940, the Romanian government finally surrendered to the commander of the Yugoslav forces controlling the bulk of the country. King Carol fled abroad with his mistress, his ensemble, and as much wealth as they could carry with them, leaving a dejected Romanian government to submit itself to Belgrade’s mercies. The news was met in Yugoslavia with relief more than joy, although Radical Union-organized parades still took place in Belgrade, Zagreb, Ljubljana, and Sarajevo, to name a few. The Swiss surrender had been a boon, but a far-off one, whereas the surrender of Romania meant that Yugoslavs could dare to believe that the war might be closer to ending. The capture of the Romanian army’s remaining stockpiles as well as the earlier encirclements of entire divisions put an end to many of the Royal Yugoslav Army’s shortage of rifles and other necessities of modern industrialized war.
In keeping with Hungarian demands, administration of the whole of Transylvania was ceded to Budapest, albeit not without some grumbling from the more arrogant members of the Yugoslav General Staff. The region of the Banat, remained under Belgrade’s control until the status of that region, and the rest of Romania, could be decided. The Hungarians were loathe to press this particular issue at the time, and instead concentrated on reclaiming their prize of Slovakia from Poland.
The weeks leading up to Romania’s surrender had seen the fourth largest army in the Allied coalition destroyed outright and the jubilant Germans and Hungarians were free to move against the Polish Republic which had been the Allies’ anchor in the east by taking back Slovakia and even invading parts of Germany proper. Now, the Poles were on the defensive, as the Polish-Romanian frontier turned into a deadly additional front to maintain. Meanwhile, the divisions of the Royal Yugoslav Army which had broken Romania’s back were directed towards a different area of the war in hopes that they could repeat their performance in the Balkans.
The Fall of France
“Thank God for the French army.” – Winston Churchill
The build-up of Allied forces in northern France did not seem nearly as threatening once the state of the French army was revealed to Axis war planners. The French, having suffered a fighting retreat across much of their country, were running low on men and low on guns. The losses of the First Great War had not yet been overcome before the country had been thrown into another epochal conflict. The French leadership was still plodding and conservative compared to their continental foes, and had been particularly caught off-guard by the rapid Italian advance into the French heartland. Many of the generals held their positions owing to a combination of lingering reputation from the previous conflict and adept political maneuvering through their country’s political upheavals throughout the interwar period. When the Italians began a fresh drive to the north, the mood was one of despair rather than defiance.
Both the British and the Germans appeared to view the fate of France as a foregone conclusion, with both Saxon powers redeploying forces out of France to what was thought to be the next major battlefield in the war for Europe – the Low Countries. As such, the fighting in France became a contest between French experience and Italian energy. Ultimately, the adage proved true, and the Italians, being better supplied, had the final bullet in their chamber.
The Italians were not fighting alone, however. Fresh from securing the Adriatic coastline and forcing a Romanian surrender, fourteen infantry divisions of the Royal Yugoslav Army were ordered west under the command of the military’s rising star, General Josef Depre. As the men rode rails through Italy, Germany, and occupied France, it was sobering experience of what war could wrought, but also how far behind Yugoslavia was economically compared to the Great Powers. For many of the soldiers, it was their first time outside of the Balkans, and the Italians initially regarded them as useful auxiliaries at best, fit only for garrison and anti-partisan duties. This attitude did not last long.
In the battleplan which the Yugoslavs had devised with their Italian counterparts, the task of holding the general line against the French would fall on the former while the fresh Yugoslav units were to serve as a wedge designed to exert maximum pressure on the overstretched French defending Paris. The brutal math of local superiority and ample supplies of fresh guns and men granted the Royal Yugoslav Army the power to punch through the French lines and begin the first stages of what was soon to become a general rout.
The French army was in dire straits with many of its units hardly existing outside of paper (AN: as you can see from their low supply and manpower)
The spearhead of the Yugoslav infantry broke through the exhausted French defenders and swooped towards Paris and towards the English Channel. Frantic efforts to reinforce the French lines were stymied by the simple lack of men available. The near-total abandonment by Britain of her French ally had caused the Allied presence in the country to evaporate almost overnight. Increasingly, French soldiers surrendered
en masse, not only to the advancing Yugoslavs but also to the Italians who they had been alternatively fighting and staring down for months. The reputation of the Royal Yugoslav Army, already recovering from successful operations in the Balkans, climbed again in the view of foreign observers as the remains of the once-mighty French army were driven back again and again by Belgrade’s loyal soldiers.
As the Yugoslavs advanced on Paris, the Pétain government declared the capital to be an “open city” and ordered it opened to the advancing Axis forces while the Marshal’s loyalists fled to Calais, either to wait for renewed British aid or to prepare for peace terms if such help did not materialize. The declaration spared Paris from aerial or artillery bombardment, and the Yugoslav forces entered the city in awe of their surroundings. Although they had advanced under the auspices of Italian command, and the city was hurriedly handed over to Italian control, it was still an impressive feather in the cap for the Royal Yugoslav Army. The social and military reforms undergone by the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in only a few short years seemed to have paid off handsomely, and the reception of the news in Belgrade was ecstatic among all but the most bitter opponents to Prince Paul and his government.
Still, Benito Mussolini was eager to claim the triumph for Italy, and, given the sacrifices and heroism of the Italian forces who had brought France to her knees, there was no opposition to letting the Duce have the glory. The Italian leader flew to an airfield just outside of Paris and entered the city on a white horse in a display far more grandiose than anything enjoyed by Alexander II and the other conquerors of Napoleon. Italy had succeeded where Germany had failed in the last war, but fortunately for relations between the two countries, Mussolini did not dwell on that point. Instead, swept away by his own ego and the moment, he delivered a bombastic address under the
Arc de Triomphe in which he proclaimed that Italy was destined for even greater victories than this one.
While the Italians celebrated, drank, and outdid themselves in trying to impress the local women, the Yugoslavs continued to advance, chasing north after the French government in order to bring the fighting to an end.
When London had coolly responded to French entreaties, Pétain’s advisors had bent to the inevitable and opened negotiations for their country’s surrender to the Axis forces. While isolated fighting still occurred, primarily with the few British units unlucky enough to still be stationed in northern France, the path to Calais was left open for the advancing Yugoslavs, and they were met not with gunfire but with the flag of truce. While the official surrender was to the Italian commander in the area, the leadership in Belgrade was satisfied with the knowledge that Yugoslavs had once again helped to bring this horrible war closer to an end.
Negotiations for an armistice began as soon as Italian and German plenipotentiaries arrived, and the world would be changed once again.
With the fall of France, Belgium and the Netherlands came under renewed pressure as the Germans deployed to push the Dutch invaders out of the rich industrial centers of the northwest while the fourteen divisions of the Yugoslav Royal Army which had secured the French surrender worked on mopping up stranded British units in the area before redeploying to protect the still-reeling French State from any counterattack from Belgium. The bulk of the Belgian and Dutch armies had been concentrated against the German threat, and the rapid exit of France from the war left the west woefully undefended. A few reinforcements from the British Empire helped to shore up defenses in the region, but Brussels and Amsterdam had the unenviable choice between leaving the west vulnerable to invasion by the Italians and Yugoslavs or weakening defenses in the east just as Germany was preparing to reclaim the losses of late 1939.
The Soviet Factor
With the exit of France from the picture, British war planners were left scrambling to try and make up the deficit in their alliance. Although the war against the Axis, much like that against the Central Powers, had been sold to the British public as being in the defense of small powers, it was obvious to London that an alliance which placed its hopes on the shoulders of Greece and Lithuania was not long for this world. Accordingly, Winston Churchill’s plans for pressuring the governments of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark to declare for the allied side continued. The pressure caused those countries’ governments to lean more heavily on the Soviet Union for support, which in turn increased British anxieties about the region and led to more cajoling and threats from Whitehall.
One salve for the Allied generals in the west was the continued diversion in German attentions posed by the fighting against Poland in the east, but the war was rapidly turning against Warsaw. The loss of Romania as an ally and the shifting of Hungarian divisions to southern Poland had seen the initial Polish successes rolled back and soon the Poles had not only been pushed out of Slovakia but also were ceding ground in Galicia and Silesia. Some assistance was forthcoming from Estonia and Latvia, but the Lithuanians were proving frustratingly reluctant to contribute forces to the defense of Poland owing to lingering hostility and territorial claims between the two countries. For the time being, the Poles still held onto Danzig and its valuable access to the sea, but the wages of war were coming due, and another threat loomed on the horizon.
Inspired by the sudden reversal of the war in Europe, Stalin and his subordinates moved quickly to turn their diplomatic attentions to the west, even as a large portion of the Soviet military remained bogged down in Siberia and China. The fall of France meant that the British were hungry for allies, and Stalin was prepared to offer his assistance, for the right price. Moscow’s ambitions in the Baltic region were well-known, but with Romania’s surrender to the Axis powers, the Soviet diplomatic corps upped the ante. In exchange for the Soviets pulling British chestnuts out of the fire, it would be necessary for Romania to forfeit the Bessarabia region which had been seized from the convulsing Russian Empire during its dissolution and civil war. Bucharest would object, certainly, but with Hungarian and Yugoslav troops occupying the country they were in no position to veto British policy.
Desperate for an ally capable of bringing the Axis to heel, the British government was prepared to make a deal with the devil himself. Proposals were floated for British assistance in the Pacific against the Japanese Empire and for hefty supplies of financial and military aid, most of which would have to be obtained in turn from the Americans. Such desperation only encouraged Stalin to broaden his demands.
The Polish Republic, once the great hope in the east for the Anglo-French alliance had suffered the most from the fall of France and Romania, as British supplies and divisions were unable, or unwilling, to travel through the dangerous waters of the North and Baltic Seas to aid Warsaw. As Hungarian and German forces made rapid advances over the Polish plain, the threat of Yugoslav reinforcements for the Axis onslaught seemed to spell Poland’s doom. For fear of being deprived a theater in the east, the British were prepared to sell out their ally of convenience in favor of the Soviet Union. Stalin had already made his intentions in eastern Poland known, a reversion back to the post-war Curzon Line drawn itself by His Majesty’s government. With London’s acquiescence, Moscow prepared an ultimatum to be delivered to the teetering Polish state: hand over the contested territories and receive Soviet assistance, or refuse and be destroyed.
The only question was whether the cogs in the Soviet system, ever fearful of offending the Red Tsar in the Kremlin, would act in time for there to be a Polish government left to receive the missive.
The Armistice at Calais
The French army had fought valiantly as it had in the First Great War, but the first half of 1940 had seen the countries of the Axis powers claw their way back from the edge of defeat. Efforts to relieve Switzerland and support Swiss forays into German and Italian territory had proven foolhardy and divided the attention of the French army even as Mussolini’s legionaries were rallying. Exhausted, underfed, and undersupplied Pétain soon found his loyal armies in the same position that the Italians had been, retreating over familiar ground and passing the graves of fallen comrades in a headlong general retreat. It was a devastating turn of events, and the promise of more hardship to come colored the French government’s thinking.
Still, even the fall of Paris did not prompt the French surrender that many observers had expected. The French army had kept her bearings and held out just long enough for Pétain’s envoys to reach Mussolini’s ear. When an advance scout of Yugoslav infantrymen arrived in Calais, they had found the tired old general, the lion of Verdun, ready to surrender.
The British, naturally, were outraged at the negotiation of a separate peace with Axis forces, but with nearly all of France under Italian occupation and the British bogged down in the Adriatic and Greek theaters, relief from London did not strike Pétain’s inner circle as particularly likely. Furthermore, any British rescue would have not only been humiliating but would likely have forced a new government on the French people, with the generals and nationalists driving French policy beforehand denounced and shamed at best. Rome, on the other hand, was offering surprisingly lenient terms for a conquering power with delusions of grandeur.
Despite the lackluster performance of the Wehrmacht against France and Luxembourg, Benito Mussolini consented to Berlin’s annexation of Elsass-Lothringen and Luxembourg as a sop to German pride. Rome had been happy to tweak her ally’s nose in response to a reckless foreign policy and poor war-fighting, but the Italian government had no desire to create long-lasting enmity with the Teutons over French territory. For their part, the Germans begrudgingly accepted the gift and Mussolini managed to keep most of his crowing to private channels.
For Italy herself, Mussolini’s negotiators, led by the omnipresent Count Ciano, took Corsica and adjusted the Franco-Italian border further west so that the Alps no longer provided the French with an easy bulwark against invasion. Italian military planners knew that it was only the fear of German arms which had allowed for their initial penetration of France’s southern frontier, and it was important to keep the road to Paris an easy one. There were hopes for reconciliation and cooperation between the two Latin powers, but in the event that such a rapprochement failed, Rome would keep her options open. For this reason, while Savoy and the Alps were brought fully under Italian administration the fate of Provence with its rich port of Marseilles was kept in a legal limbo as a further incentive for French cooperation with Italian wishes. Despite his speech in Paris, it seemed as though the man who had long blustered about recreating Rome had learned a lesson or two about prudence.
Under the terms agreed to between Rome and Paris, Marshall Phillipe Pétain’s government would remain in place, although its foreign policy and military would be subject to Axis oversight until such a time as it was believed that France was ready to stand on her own two feet again. The other chief change to the French government included in the terms negotiated by Count Ciano was the requirement that Petain hand over his duties as the French head of state to a legitimate French king. The negotiators bandied about a few names, but there was little doubt that they would settle upon the infirm Prince Jean, Duke of Guise, as monarch with his son, the Count of Paris serving as regent for his ailing father. It was held by both sides that the institution of a monarchy, while initially divisive, would provide the French with a unifying institution which would survive Marshal Pétain, who was himself undergoing health issues. Other issues abounded, and many were put off until the negotiation of a final peace treaty, including the size of the bill of reparations which France would have to pay her conquerors.
Owing to the presence of Yugoslavs in Calais, there were actually more representatives from Belgrade than from Berlin at the armistice negotiations, and none from Budapest. The Germans in general felt as though they were not consulted by Mussolini in his egotism and desire for a peace which he could claim almost wholly as his own. The Italians were unsympathetic and responded to the effect that the Germans should have performed better on the battlefield if they wanted more seats at the table.
In Northern Africa, the Italians were happy to add the long-desired Tunisia to their colonial empire. Surprising many observers, however, Mussolini was content to leave Paris in control of Algeria and French Morocco. Algeria in particular was seen as integral to the French sense of self-worth as a nation, being considered closer to the metropole than any mere colony. Letting the French maintain control over Morocco gave Mussolini a valuable buffer between British machinations in the Atlantic and also was believed to give the French another reason to be grateful for Rome’s lenient peace. Besides, Count Ciano argued in a letter to his father-in-law, the Duce, Britain’s inevitable surrender would mean Gibraltar and the Suez Canal falling under Rome’s control. Mastery of the Mediterranean did not need to mean owning every last grain of sand on its beaches, but rather the chokepoints upon which the region’s destiny depended.
Further evidence of Mussolini’s restraint could be seen in the way in which French territory in Africa was assigned. Italy took the Red Sea port of Djibouti for herself as well as most of France’s colonies which lie between the Sahara and the Atlantic Ocean. The former German colony of Togoland was included in Rome’s gains in exchange for a much-enlarged German East African colony centered on the restored German colony of Kamerun. France was afforded Senegal and promised the Gambia as well once the British accepted peace terms as well.
Ultimately, the acquisition of territory in Africa served two purposes. The first was prestige, but the second was as a supply of assets which could be used in horse-trading over the final peace. Hardly any of the territory divided between Germany, Italy, and France was economically self-sufficient, but they still had value insofar as they could be offered up during the negotiation of the final peace settlement at the end of the war.
As a further incentive for keeping France bound to her new Axis patrons, Paris was permitted to maintain its hold on Indochina with its rich bounty of rubber, its extensive missionary community, and its restless population of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians. Besides serving as a salve to French pride, the failure of the Germans or Italians to occupy the region owed to the long distance between Europe and Indochina, traversing which would mean navigating hostile British-controlled waters. Furthermore, even as the war in Europe had turned against Paris, a sizable garrison and administrative network had been maintained in Hanoi to keep order and deter a Japanese attack on the colony. As long as Japan and Siam continued to threaten the region for its valuable rubber plantations and proximity to the relocated Chinese capital of Nanning, it was believed that France would be more than willing to placate Rome and Berlin so that they might serve as a shield against Japanese ambitions.
Tokyo’s ambassadors in Europe argued that this was a violation of the terms of the Tripartite Pact between their country, Italy, and Germany. Rome responded that, since no territory was changing hands in East Asia, there was nothing for the three revisionist powers to discuss. The move solidified the new alliance between Japan and Siam - anti-French ambitions had brought them together, and their alliance grew stronger due to the "theft at Calais".
Other holdings of the French Empire which were far from Axis control and had ties to neighboring powers did not remain under Paris’ control nor pass into the grasping hands of the Axis powers. Instead, French India was seized by the British Raj while the Guangzhouwan region of China and French legations elsewhere in China were snapped up by Li Zongren’s Chinese government. Along similar lines, the United States took over French colonies in the Caribbean while Australia occupied French islands in the South Pacific. The civil servants and French nationals in those regions did not put up a fight, but instead sought merely to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives as best they could.
With France, Czechoslovakia’s great protector, suing for peace and the Romanian government in a similar state of collapse, Germany and Hungary formally moved to divide up the conglomerated state. Bohemia and Moravia became a nominally self-administering protectorate of the German Reich while the German-majority areas of Czechia such as the Sudetenland were annexed outright. Hungary regained control over Slovakia and Ruthenia which had been under Budapest’s control during the days of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. The decision by Slovak nationalists led by Father Jozef Tiso to petition Poland for aid left Adolf Hitler cold to their pleas for independence. Instead, Slovaks, Ruthenians, and Rusyns found themselves under Hungarian rule and the promise of renewed Magyarization loomed on the horizon. Some maintained hope in a Polish victory, but such an outcome seemed more and more remote with every passing day.
While Mussolini and his advisers were largely able to dictate the terms of peace outside of Central Europe to the other parties, the situation in the Middle East took Rome by surprise. An indigenous group of Arab nationalists, taking partial inspiration from German National Socialism, had risen up and declared an independent Arab state in Syria. The French had put down revolts in the area before, but after a brief resistance, accepted their eviction from Syria and Lebanon. Mussolini was frustrated that his plans to establish an Italian foothold in the Middle East were thwarted, but his hand was stayed by Berlin. The Syrian Social Nationalist Party found a willing sponsor in the German National Socialists not only for ideological reasons but also because building such a relationship was seen as a way to counteract Italian influence and build German influence in the pivotal region. Indeed, while Mussolini and his loyal French government were keeping Arab subjects under their heels, Hitler promised support for Arab nationalism, fulfilling the promises of the First World War. All that Antun Saddeh and his Syrian National State had to do was to bring the fight against the British in the Middle East.
Saddeh himself was not entirely sold on hitching the star of Syrian independence to Germany, but he was pragmatic enough to accept the help that was offered. With a country already encompassing Syria and Lebanon, Saddeh and his supporters had grandiose plans for linking up with nationalists in Iraq and freeing the Fertile Crescent from foreign domination.
The republican form of the fledgling Syrian government continued a trend in which the Fascist states which were aligned more closely with Berlin had a more republican character while those who leaned towards Rome were nominally ruled by a king.
With the Armistice at Calais bringing France into the alliance as a ward of Italy, the Axis was in control of an impressive amount of territory, including much of Europe and African and Middle Eastern holdings which further challenged Britain’s mastery of the Mediterranean. The Low Countries, Poland, and the Baltics still held out in the north, and Greece and Egypt in the south, but the trends seemed to be favoring the Berlin-Rome alliance, and desperate measures would be needed to reverse the trend in the Allies’ fortunes.
And what of Yugoslavia? By the middle of 1940, Yugoslavia was occupying much of Romania and parts of the Greek coastline, but against the defeated French Belgrade took nothing for herself. This restraint stood even in the face of Rome’s halfhearted offer of a protectorate in one of the African colonies which Italy had seized from Paris’s control. Yugoslavia, Ivo Andrić claimed, would be a sated power once all of her people were united in one nation. She had no desires for overseas colonies or bases, not when there was still so much work to do digesting the gains which she had already made. Such alleged disinterest, Prince Paul dared to hope in his diary, would allow Yugoslavia to serve as an honest broker between members of the alliance when disputes inevitably arose. The prince, however, seems to have forgotten that the man who popularized the phrase, Otto von Bismarck, was hardly regarded as an honest broker by anyone with whom he dealt.
[AN: Well, there you have it, the end of the French faction. I like to think that I portrayed a rather reasonable division of the spoils, but if anyone has any questions, objections or wishes to argue their case, we have the power to make changes. After all, in story terms, this is only an armistice, not the finalized treaty
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