The Unthinkable

January 26th, 1945- USS Quincy torpedoed and sunk in North Atlantic en route to Malta by one of the last surviving U-Boats in the Atlantic. President Roosevelt is aboard and killed when the one of the main boilers explodes, destroying his cabin.

January 27th, 1945- Vice President Truman is sworn into office as the 33rd President of the United States.

January 29th, 1945- President Truman is given a top secret briefing on a joint US-British research project known as "Project Manhattan"

February 11th, 1945- The Yalta Conference goes ahead a week later than originally planned. President Truman arrives just hours before the beginning of the conference, having slept just 3 hours in the previous 2 days. Upon arrival, he immediately confers with Prime Minister Churchill privately. Churchill's distrust of Stalin and Truman's irritation and tiredness produce a catastrophic first meeting, in which virtually all of Stalin's attempts to get Europe divided into spheres of interest are rebuffed.

February 13th, 1945- Stalin, via interpreter, levels an ultimatum at Truman and Churchill: the Western Allies will allow the Soviet Union free reign east of the Elbe River, or the Soviets will back the French Communist movement as the legitimate government of France. Truman storms out of the room in anger, leaving Churchill to berate Stalin.

February 17th, 1945- Truman and Churchill leave the Conference with no major agreements reached as to the appearance of the post-war world. Within hours, Patton and Montgomery receive new standing orders from General Eisenhower, who in turn received a joint communique from the two leaders: The US and British forces are to immediately move to a lightning offensive stance, seizing as much territory within Germany as is possible.

February 21st, 1945- Western Allied leaders in Greece receive a message from Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia. He believes the Soviets are planning to invade the country. In exchange for assistance in stopping Soviet troops from invading and setting up a puppet government, he will agree to negotiations with the monarchist government-in-exile. The offer is accepted within hours by both Truman and Churchill, who are anxious to erode Soviet power in any way possible.

February 22nd, 1945- A message from Churchill and Truman arrives in the Kremlin, asking what Stalin's intentions towards Yugoslavia are. He flies into a rage, demanding that his advisers tell him what business the British and Americans have interfering in Eastern Europe.

February 24th, 1945- Stalin commits 150,000 Red Army soldiers to the invasion of Yugoslavia. The plan had been on the books since late 1944, when it became clear that Tito wasn't as pliable as could be hoped. He'd had no intention of using it yet, but if the Allies are moving in on the country, he needed to beat them.

February 28th, 1945- Soviet troops cross the border into Yugoslavia. They are met by silence, at first. They make it almost a dozen miles inside the frontier with minimal resistance. Suddenly, coordinated strikes at their rear begin, while American and British planes based in Italy and Greece appear to fill the sky. Yugoslav and Greek partisans, as well as American and British special forces, begin harassing and delaying actions, convoys are hit, detachments destroyed. The Soviet frontline has few tanks, and the older Allied planes available are more than enough to massacre infantry.

March 2nd, 1945- The Yugoslav front has shifted another dozen miles back from the frontier, but Soviet casualties are beginning to mount. Stalin authorizes another 100,000 troops to reinforce the existing invaders. In the meantime, Allied garrisons throughout the Middle East, North Africa, Greece, Italy, and as far afield as India are being shipped in as quickly as possible.

March 3rd, 1945- Allied agents make contact with Field Marshal von Rundstedt, suggesting the possibility of a negotiated peace and alliance against the Soviet Union. Knowing Hitler and the Nazi High Command (aside from Goering) will never allow it, he tells the agents he is a loyal servant of the Fuhrer and would never consider such a thing... while slipping a note with a meeting time and location across the table.

March 10th, 1945- Hitler, Himmler, Dietrich, and Goebbels are all assassinated in a coordinated strike on the Nazi High Command. It is later discovered that Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt and a cabal of high-ranking Heer and Luftwaffe officers are responsible. However, this will be revealed only after they seize power in Germany.

March 11th, 1945- Von Rundstedt broadcasts a message across Germany decrying the assassination of the Fuhrer by "communist elements in the population" and calling for all Germans to remain loyal to the state as he attempts to stop the Soviet invasion. The Waffen-SS units considered most unreliable are disbanded and integrated into Heer units.

March 12th, 1945- Peace negotiations begin between the German Provisional Government and the Western Allies including Britain, the US, and France. Offered terms are this: Germany will immediately withdraw from all Western territory including Italy, Norway, and Denmark, and will ally with the Westerners to defeat the Soviet Union. In exchange, Allied bombing of Germany will stop and economic aid will be sent as soon as possible. Following the end of any conflict with the Soviet Union, Germany will withdraw from all occupied territories in the East, including Poland and the Sudetenland, while Austria and Danzig will be offered a plebiscite on their territorial status as soon as practical. Negotiations are concluded within 3 days, a record time for peace accords of any kind. Commentators in the US, Germany, and Britain all remark upon the irony of the term "peace accords", even as Allied and German forces rush across Germany to redeploy facing the Soviet Army in Eastern Germany.

March 14th, 1945- The Soviets hold the northern half of Yugoslavia and are attempting to push south. However, by now, Romania and Bulgaria are in open revolt, Ukraine is a hotbed of discontent, Turkey is contemplating joining the Allies, and well over one million Allied soldiers have concentrated in northern Greece, to add to 400,000 Yugoslavians and 200,000 Greeks. The Soviets, if they are to continue pressing into Germany against the newly combined German and Allied forces.

Germany elects to turn over research into what will later be called Fuel-Air explosives to the war effort. Testing of a coal-liquid oxygen weapon achieves devastating effect. They are difficult to produce and even more complicated to deliver, but these are minor obstacles given their demonstrated power.

March 29th, 1945- The US combat-tests an "ice bomb" (so named due to the temperature involved) on Okinawa in preparation for a landing there. They discover a heretofore unknown effect, which local forces quickly dub the tunnelf***er: the bomb burns the air out of the Japanese fortifications on the island. With a single blast they have rendered the entire Japanese fortification network irrelevant for the remainder of the war.

Need to fill this in. got lazy... to be taken care of soon...

July 16, 1945- In the New Mexico desert, a blinding light and massive fireball are seen by observers. The Manhattan Project is complete... Trinity is a success. It is estimated that, following the first three bombs, it will take 3 months to produce material for another. From then, scientists believe, the US can produce 2 bombs per month.

President Truman is informed of the success of the project, and asked if he will choose to employ the weapons in combat. Though the situation in Yugoslavia has been recovered, and the situation in Germany is good, he believes that the use of the weapons will hasten the end of the war. He authorizes the long-range strike against Leningrad, flying out of Stettin, in East Pomerania.

July 24th, 1945- A lone B-29 bomber and escort fighters appear over Leningrad. Believing that no single bomber can possibly harm the city, the commander of the anti-aircraft artillery elects not to fire immediately. The fighters peel off over the outskirts of the city, while the bomber flies a straight, high altitude path. Within seconds, Leningrad is gone. 450,000 people are killed immediately, with another 300,000 dying later of radiological effects or conventional burns.

July 25th, 1945- Stalin broadcasts a message denouncing Allied barbarism and vowing to continue the fight against the "Western imperialist aggressors."

July 29th, 1945- A small strike force of bombers is sighted over Kiev. Soviet authorities scramble every available fighter and open up with flak, but several bombers make it to the city center, dropping... hundreds of thousands of fliers. Each one reads, in Ukrainian and Russian: This could easily have been a superbomb, and your Russian masters would have been the death of you. Join the Allies now, rise up against your oppressors, and fight for your freedom. Propaganda strikes like this one are repeated in ethnic-minority cities throughout the Soviet Union over the next few days, encouraging revolt and rebellion. Ukrainian discontent with the Russian elite of the USSR increases, and armed bands rove the countryside killing Russian soldiers.

July 30th, 1945- Following the propaganda strike model, a flight of B-17's appears over the Soviet front lines in Western Poland. All but one peel off as they reach the Soviet Headquarters, and the world's second nuclear weapon detonates in an airburst directly over the center of the Soviet lines. 180,000 Soviet soldiers are killed instantly, while another 300,000 are incapacitated. Allied armored forces skirting the blast zone 3 hours later turn the flank of the remaining defenders and shatter the Soviet lines.

To be continued...


 * Look up "Operation Unthinkable" if you want to understand the name.