Short Version - Just the Essentials In 1945 World War 2 ended, but not the one you learned about in history class. In this AU, around the same time that Nazi Germany began his rise to power, tensions between America and England escalated to the point of war - and this changed everything.
In Europe and Africa: With America taking almost all of England's attention, he found himself unable to do much about Germany's ambitions - in fact, he ultimately decided to form an alliance with him, just to be sure that he didn't need to worry about being stabbed in the back while his war with America continued (though he certainly wasn't happy about it). Without England to oppose him, Germany made short work of most of Europe, and then ended up in a one front war with Russia, which he was able to pull off. Italy was, of course, mostly useless, but he did manage to gain a little territory, if only because England wasn't in his way. Only countries that declared their neutrality remained untouched, if Germany paid attention, that is.
Asia and the Pacific: Japan happily conquered everything he wanted that wasn't already owned by an ally (meaning almost literally everything not owned by an ally). He didn't bother provoking America because he knew the nation was too busy warring with England to raise any fuss about his activities. Australia and New Zealand didn't try to stop him - in fact, they were on the same side because they sided with England. America's few islands in the area (not including Hawaii) were captured by either Japan or the British, as he couldn't spare the resources to defend them.
The Americas: America's main focus was to defeat Canada, who was on England's side. He ultimately managed to do so, but he found his navy to be too evenly matched with England's to effectively bring the fight across the Atlantic. Concerned about not just England but also Germany being able to get a foothold on his side of the Atlantic, he systematically captured all of the European colonies in the Americas - whether they belonged to England or the countries captured by Germany like France and the Netherlands. The other nations of the Americas either sided with him and helped as they could or remained neutral.
When Germany captured Russia and the fight between England and America ended in a stalemate, war was replaced by peace - if only because America and England were tired of not being able to defeat each other, Germany had reached his goal and wanted some time to consolidate everything he now owned while he figured out what he wanted to do next, Japan had run out of things to conquer, and Italy was tired and wanted a nap. And this is where our forum begins.
World Map
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Key:
American Empire
Spain & Colonies
British Empire
Portugal & Colonies
German Empire
Bulgaria
Italian Empire
Australia
Japanese Empire
New Zealand
Other Independent Nations
Note: If you'd like to be able to look at a particular region in more detail, let the head admin know. Also, the head admin is not a historian or military expert, so if you want to dispute who should own what, then feel free to do so.
Where did this idea come from? Once upon a time I watched a very interesting documentary. (Which I don't remember the name or origin of, unfortunately.) It explained that just under a hundred years ago, like today, there was a lot of tension going on between the most powerful countries in the world. Powerful countries tend to enjoy having power and influence and they want more of it, so they are at least somewhat in competition with each other, end up stepping on each other's toes, and someone apologizes but someone else wonders if that might have been on purpose.
At the time, the most powerful nations included the United Kingdom and the United States, who got along, but there was that tension there. What ended up happening is they got to be great trading partners, so whenever any problems arose the business people on both sides insisted that the politicians had to work everything out peacefully. This is why the two countries worked together during World War 2 and get along very well to this day.
However, it could have gone differently, and at the time everyone was prepared for it - the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada all had secret battle plans created just in case it all fell apart. (Canada is a part of this because, as you might recall, they were a part of the United Kingdom at the time, though they were independent enough to have their own battle plans.) And that happened so long ago and is so irrelevant now that all of these battle plans have become declassified, and in the documentary I saw they were analyzed by historians and military people who explained their best guess about what would have happened if things had gone down.
Now, Canada by itself was definitely too weak to hope to defeat the United States, so the basic idea of their battle plans was to give the United States as hard of a time as possible in order to give the United Kingdom plenty of time to gather their forces and come save them. They hoped to do a preemptive strike if possible, see if they couldn't hit the United States hard in the less populated middle part of the country, and then fight tooth and nail the entire time the United States military pushed them back into Canada and tried to take their main cities - destroying everything as they retreated.
The United States's plans were to try to go directly to Canada's major cities as quickly as possible, in hopes of taking Canada out as quickly as possible, and they didn't seem to expect that Canada would go for the center of the country so that would likely have taken them by surprise. Both sides were prepared to use chemical weapons. The people analyzing these plans concluded that the United States would definitely win this, but it would be an extremely messy fight because Canada's plans probably would have worked really well.
And what about the United Kingdom's plans? Well, here's where it gets really interesting. See, the United Kingdom didn't plan to save Canada, but they didn't let them know that. Instead they planned to allow the United States to capture Canada, in the hopes that the United States would exhaust itself while doing so, and instead decided to focus all of their attention into using their excellent navy to keep the United States on their own side of the ocean. They believed that trying to save Canada would be too taxing on their military and other resources and that they'd risk losing the entire war if they attempted to rescue it. And the experts analyzing all of this agreed with them - that the United Kingdom would be able to keep the United States from reaching Europe, and if they didn't use up any resources in trying to defend Canada then the war would end up in a stalemate on the Atlantic.
Of course, all of this gets that much more interesting when you realize that the war that didn't happen would have most likely occurred around the time of (and in fact be a part of) World War 2, and because the United States and the United Kingdom were fairly equally matched they wouldn't have much of an ability to both fight each other and worry about what was going on elsewhere in the world. And if both of those countries were unavailable to participate in the rest of World War 2, it would have all gone down very differently. In fact, from all appearances Hitler had been practically expecting this to happen, and that plus his arrogance in believing that Germany could pull off his plans even though it didn't happen may have played a factor into why he ended up in a war against most of the other powerful nations of the world. So in the last part of the documentary, the experts had speculated about how World War 2 would have gone down in this scenario. And I was like: Ooh, that sounds like an awesome idea for a Hetalia AU!
Long Version - So Much Timeline! Forthcoming.
Last Edit: Jan 23, 2017 0:25:56 GMT -7 by Avalikia
