Alternate History
Posted by Stephen Green - Vodka Pundit
For a criminal psychopath, Adolf Hitler could sometimes be strangely legal-minded. Yeah, he started a bunch of wars, but in his warped brain, he always had a good reason.
Believe it or not, Hitler wanted war with Czechoslovakia. "Plan Grün" was Hitler's plan for the invasion of that country – and he would have gotten it, too, had Neville Chamberlain not intervened and handed the country over to Germany, gratis, at the Munich Conference. Privately, Hitler was furious that he didn't get his war. And why did he want war? For the "legalistic" reason that Czechoslovakia's Sudeten region was full of ethnic Germans, and thus ripe for the picking.
Poland's situation was near-identical to Czechoslovakia's. Germany had lost its Posen province, and bits of Silesia and Pomerania to Poland after the First World War. There was also the "Free City" of Danzig – historically Polish, but by 1939 mostly-ethnic German, and under de facto Polish control. So there were lots of German nationals living under "intolerable" Polish rule – thus making Poland ripe for the picking.
Truth is, Hitler never wanted war with Britain or France. Well – at least not with Britain. Hitler certainly wanted Alsace-Lorraine back from France, but he didn't expect the French to fight for it – much less to fight for Poland's sake. However, having gotten war with the Franco-British alliance, he wasn't shy about invading any countries he felt he needed to in order to beat them. The list included Norway (to protect his Swedish ore imports from the RAF and Royal Navy), Denmark (as a bridgehead to Norway), and Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg (as bridgeheads into France, north of France's defensive Maginot Line).
In each case, Hitler felt he had a legal justification for war, even when the justification was something as flimsy as his silly Master Race theories.
Russia was a special case.
Other than the Volga Germans and some old-time German communities in the Ukraine, Hitler didn't have any historic reason to invade the Soviet Union. But he certainly had a Master Race excuse. Germans, Hitler felt, needed lebensraum in order to take their rightful place as a great power. Lebensraum translates literally as "living space," but my high school German teacher, Doctor Albert Kalmar, always jokes that it meant "elbow room." Germany's natural frontiers simply couldn't hold the 300 million Germans that Hitler envisioned running the world – but tacking on the territory of European Russia would have done the trick.
NOTE: Some of you, I'm sure, are scratching your heads at the phrase, "Volga Germans." Fact is, before WWII, there were German farming communities all across Ukraine and southern Russia. The largest concentration was around the "Russian" cities, Saratov and Engels. So concentrated, that under the Soviet Union's ethnic republic formulation, there was a "Volga German" autonomous area, right up until 1941. When Germany invaded, Stalin either killed or deported all the native Germans of the region, even though the large majority of them never fought against Moscow.
And since Russia's Slavic peoples were untermenschen, that made the Soviet Union ripe for the picking, too.
Now then. Imagine for a moment it's the fall of 1940, and you are Adolf Hitler. Poland is gone from the map yet again, divided with Stalin in (what should be called) the Fourth Partition. Czechoslovakia is a dim memory. Norway, Denmark, and the Low Countries aren't digested, but they are still yours. France is beaten, and endearingly collaborationist. Great Britain stands defiant, since your air war failed to neutralize either their air force or their fleet. It's time to turn your direction east, to Russia.
You want a spring offensive, giving you six months to prepare. You need every advantage you can get. Finland is on your side, if only because they're already fighting their own war with Stalin. The choicest bits of Poland are yours, and Russia's other western border (as defined by Romania) has come to your side. You have 1,000 miles of contiguous front with the Soviet Union, and yet. . .
. . .and yet, the thing you need most, and the thing Russia has the most of, still lies over 1,500 miles from the frontier. That thing is oil. It's in the Soviet Caucasus, around the Azerbaijani city of Baku. You need it, they have it, and there's a whole lot of hostile territory between you and it.
But Baku, oil capital of your enemy, lies only a couple hundred miles from Turkey's eastern border. If you could deploy just one Panzer Corps in Turkey, you could seize Russia's oil fields in under a month.
Hitler must've sprung a little Füehrerwood, just thinking of what he could have done with a couple of bases and some stockpiled materiel in eastern Turkey.
In real life, Hitler never invaded Turkey. Instead, he launched his Spring, 1941 campaigns against Yugoslavia and Greece. Before invading Russia, he wagered, he'd better secure his Balkan flank against British adventurism out of Greece. Since the Yugos wouldn't allow Hitler to move through their territory on his way to smashing the Brits in Greece, he decided the Yugos were ripe for the picking, too.
Fact is, Britain could never have launched a great Balkan offensive from Greece. The logistical problems were near-insurmountable, and Britain didn't have the manpower or the logistics. So instead, let's pretend that Hitler invaded Turkey.
The going wouldn't have been easy. Sure, Istanbul would have fallen within a week, thanks to Germany's ability to launch the invasion from Bulgaria. After that, Hitler would have found it harder going. Turkey's Anatolian heartland consists of a lot of mountains, and river valleys all traveling in unhelpful directions. Getting supplies across the Black Sea, or even over the Dardanelles, would have been a major headache. The fighting would have been kind of war Hitler didn't like to fight – very un-lightning-like, and perhaps even protracted.
Nevertheless, Turkey probably wouldn't have held out for more than 3-6 months. Between Nazi Germany's military prowess, and Turkey's own Hitler-friendly Fifth Columnists, effective resistance probably would have ended in April or May of 1941, assuming a D-Day of January 1.
The assaulting divisions would have needed time to rest, recoup and retrain. Let's give them six weeks or so – which still gives us June 22, 1941 as D-Day for Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union. (For you non-history buffs, if you've read this far, that's the day Hitler invaded Russia in the real world.)
Let's assume that the rest of Operation Barbarossa was launched according to schedule – minus the 18-24 divisions (that's my best guess as to what Germany would have needed to defeat the Turks) now based in Turkey, rather than on the Nazi-Soviet border.
Maybe Hitler's spearheads into the western Soviet Union wouldn't have been quite as successful as they were in actuality – killing or capturing "only" a million Soviet soldiers, instead of two million. But what Hitler could have achieved, had he been able to open the war, from Day One, with a Caucasian Front. . .
Within six weeks of the start of the campaign – by August 3 – Stalin would have been cut off from his primary source of oil. Thanks to Russia's scorched-earth policy, Hitler probably wouldn't have been able to use any of those captured oil fields – but that wouldn't have mattered. Hitler never captured Baku, yet still almost beat the Soviets. Had Russia been denied her oil, she may well have been forced out of the war before the first winter.
With Baku captured, there would have been no Battle of Stalingrad to destroy the German 6th Army. Without Stalingrad, there would have been no Battle of Kursk, to cut the heart out of the German panzer corps. Without those two battles, there would have been no Russia to stop the German onslaught. And without Russia, there would never have been an allied victory in World War II.
So why didn't Hitler invade Turkey?
In Hitler's mind, he had no just cause. Turkey had no German minority to bring under his regime. Turkey offered Germany no lebensraum. And unlike Britain or France, Turkey was never "dumb" enough to declare war on Germany. Essentially, the psychopath who was bold enough to envision wiping 100 million Slavs and Jews from the face of the earth, lacked the imagination to come up with an excuse to invade the one country who could have guaranteed him success.
For that, we can all be thankful.
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