Scenario Seeds #611 (Alternate History Brainstorming)

Scenario Seeds are brief ideas that may eventually develop into background for Alternate History  short stories or novels.  Right now they are just ideas.  Ideas can't be copyrighted so if you see something here that you write up into a best seller that's legally and morally your perogative.

Spanish Civil War Scenario Seeds:

1. What if the Spanish Civil War continued until the start of World War II.  Maybe the Soviets dedide to invest a bit more military hardware in supporting the Republic.  Assuming that World War II starts on schedule in September 1939, what happens in Spain?  How would the continued war in Spain affect the German/Soviet pact at the beginning of World War II?

2. Speaking of the Spanish Civil War, what if the Italian defeat at Guadalajara had been less humiliating?  That would certainly have been possible.  The weather essentially grounded Italian planes while allowing Republican planes to intervene heavily in the fighting.  The Italians might--probably would have--failed anyway, but the fighting would probably have had less impact on Italian military prestige.  That in turn could have meant less Italian commitment to a Nationalist victory, and a stronger Italy during the first part of World War II.  Of course there would be some question as to whether or not a stronger Italy would enter the war the same way or even on the same side.

World War II Italian-Centered Scenario Seeds

3, Continuing with the Italian theme, what if Mussolini managed to actually absorb one military principle: focussing on a single crucial objective at a time.  Historically, Italy never managed to focus all of its meagre military power on a single objective.  During the summer of 1940, Italy sent a substantial (by Italian standards) number of airplanes north to fight in the Battle or Britian, where they had little impact, rather than focussing on any discernible italian objective.  Then, as the summer wore on, Italy focussed much of it's efforts at building up in the Balkans, with the objective switching from Yugoslavia to Greece.  Much of Italy's meagre mechanized forces including quite a few of its relatively modern (again by Italian standards) M13/40 tanks went to the Balkans rather than to North Africa.  Once the Italian invasion of Greece started, much of Italian military effort focussed there.  That focus continued even after the Germans bailed the Italians out in the Balkans, because the Italians had to maintain occupation forces there.  The Italians then got involved in the German invasion of the Soviet Union, which forced them to support a couple of hundred thousand troops on yet another front irrelevant to Italy.  Focus all of the military assets frittered away in irrelevant sideshows, and Italy becomes a somewhat more respectable factor in the war.

4. Yet another italian scenario seed: In the fall of 1940, not long before the invasion of Greece, Italy demobilized 500,000 men, supposedly for the fall harvest.  Actually the Italian army was afraid that Mussolini would order them into some crazy adventure, like invading Greece with the fall rainy season and winter coming on.  The idea was to make that impossible.  The actual result was to make effective Italian military action impossible, but Mussolini went ahead and ordered that action anyway.  When the Greek invasion went sour, Italy had to rush troops into Albania to salvage the situation.  Remobilizing the troops involved was politically difficult and would have made Mussolini look stupid, so the Italians hastily mobilized new troops and sent them over in hastily organized groups.  The Italians would have done poorly in Greece anyway, but coherent units would have undoubtedly done somewhat better.  What if those 500,000 men had been available when they were needed in Greece and later in North Africa?

5. As poorly as the Italians did in World War II, they probably could have done worse, though I'm finding it surprising hard to find a way.  I suppose that the British could have finished pushing the Italians out of Libya in early 1941.  I doubt that the Greeks could have actually pushed them into the sea in Albania, simply because of the mass of bodies and firepower that the Italians could put on a relatively narrow front.  The Brits could have savaged the Italian navy a bit worse earlier in the war, but German airpower and the very skilled Italian frogmen would still be a major threat.  Maybe the early loss of North Africa would cause italian morale to collapse, resulting in an earlier italian exit from the war.  It would be interesting to figure out the consequences of an Italian collapse in say May of 1941, Actually the Italians might stay in the war until things started going badly for the Germans in the Soviet Union, simply because they would assume that the Germans were going to win.  If the Italians lost North Africa completely in early 1941, they might stay in the war until the Germans lost at Stalingrad, assuming that they still did.

The Colonies (or lack thereof)

6. What if the Ethiopians had fought a little more effectively against the Italians during the 1935-36 Italian invasion?  The Italians weren't all that effective, as the events of World War II showed, and the Ethiopians were brave.  If the Ethiopians adapted more effective tactics against the Italians--using guerilla style tactics and trying to prolong the war until the Italians ran out of patience or money, they might have weakened the Italians enough to loosen Mussolini's grip on power, or at least enough to make Italian intervention in the Spanish C ivil War less effective.

7.  No British India.  You've got to admit that a little island on the other side of the world taking over an entire subcontinent like India does seem a tad unlikely.  That's especially true when you figure that the locals had most of the same technology available to them that the British did during the period when much of the conquest was taking place.  What if the locals adopted or adapted to British tactics a bit quicker and maintained their independence?  What impact would that have on British financial power?  The industrial revolution?  The ability of the British to fight Napoleon for so many years?

8. The Ottoman Empire partitioned--maybe in the late 1700s, or during the Napoleonic era.  I could see Napoleon, the Austrians, and the Russians getting together and carving big hunks off of the empire--probably most of the Balkans.  Probably the only thing that kept that from happening historiically is that the Russians wanted more of the spoils than the others were willing to let them have.  What would the implications of a partition be?  Probably the partitioners would fight over the spoils--almost inevitably.  Would the Balkans be absorbed into the three major empires or would they become a bunch of small squabbling client states of the great powers like they did historically?

9. What if Spain and Portugal held onto their Latin American empires into at least the 1880s.  It would probably take Spain staying out of the Napoleonic wars, but given the fact that the empires had held together for over 250 years, it's not too unlikely that they could have made it another sixty or seventy years.

10. On the other hand, what if the Spanish New World emprie fell apart when Spain tried to end the Encomienda system in the 1540s.  Historically that resulted in a revolt of the conquistadores in Peru, but the Viceroy of New Spain was smart enough not to try to implement the changes. I'm visualizing a series of conquistador-led independent states.  Would those states survive?  What impact would their existence have on Europe?  

11. What if Britain bankrupted itself in a protracted war to maintain control of the American colonies?  A more successful southern strategy could leave the Brits with control of the major populations centers of the south, but with an ongoing flickering rebellion that drained resources and with most of the rest of the colonies still outside British control.  The French and the Spanish would probably run out of money before the British did, and they might be forced to accept a seperate peace, maybe even accepting minor gains in other parts of the world in exchange for giving the British a free hand against the colonies.  That would free up resources and let the British make an all-out effort against the colonies, which ends with both sides exhausted.  I doubt that things would get bad enough for an English equivalent of the French revolution, but that would be an interesting scenario.  Certainly an Irish revolt would be possible if England seemed weak, and that could be the final straw that leads to a British financial and military collapse.  A bankrupt and possibly politically wobbly England at the time of the French Revolution would make for interesting times.  Is that scenario feasible?  How would it play out?

12. What if Benedict Arnold had succeeded in betraying his key garrison to the British?

13. Challenge: Come up with a scenario where the British succeed in turning Afghanistan into a stable British colony.

14. What if the Italians were able to conquer Ethiopia on their first attempt in the late 1800s?

15. A few parts of the world like Ethiopia and Afghanistan actually managed to maintain their independence from European conquerers and colonizers.  Challenge: figure out a scenario where each of the following groups remains independent without major changes to the course of European development through 1914:
 - The Ashanti
 - Dahomey
 - A Cherokee state of some kind (not necessarily on their original territory)
 - Morocco or a significant part of Morocco
 - One or more Maya groups in the Yucatan
 - One or more states or groups in what is now Indonesia
 - One or more parts of India
 - One or more Boer Republics
 - A Zulu state
 - A Mormon-ruled state
 - A fugitive slave state somewhere outside of South America
 - Egypt
 - One or more parts of French IndoChina
 - One or more parts of Russia proper (as independent states)
 - An independent Russian-speaking Alaska
 - Several independent English-speaking mini-states in Australia
 - Kurdistan
 - Poland or part of Poland independent
 - An independent of semi-independent Ukrainian state in part or all of the Ukrainian-speaking area of Europe prior to 1914
 - A Dutch-speaking Taiwan
 - An independent Rhode Island
 - An independent nation of Kentucky more or less within its current boundaries
 - An independent French-speaking nation in North America
 - A substantial French-speaking colony or country in Brazil
 - A Spanish-speaking country or colony inhabited mainly by Christianized Indians and led by a Spanish missionary order
 - An independent Hawaii
 - Florida as a British Commonwealth inhabited mainly by descendants of Loyalist ex-slaves
 - Independent Ireland prior to 1880
 - One or more of the smaller West Indies Islands controlled by Carib Indians
 - Independent Yaqui Indian nation
 - Independent Madagascar
 - Arabs become independent from the Ottomans prior to World War I
 - Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Phillipines become independent at about the same time the rest of the Spanish empire was falling apart
 
16. Okay.  We've done the anti-colonial thing.  Now lets take it the other way.  What would it take for each of the following to become full-fledged European colonies?  Who would colonize them?  What impact would that have on the rest of history?

 - part or all of Japan
 - part or all of China (prior to World War I)  
 - Thialand
 - Persia
 - Saudi Arabia
 - The Balkans (as colonies of the major powers rather than client states)
 - France maintains control of Haiti
 - Spain maintains control of te northern fringes of Mexico--Texas, California, maybe New Mexico, while the rest of Mexico becomes independent

17. What if one or more of the European colonial powers had made a serious and concerted effort to drive the Moslem religion out of their colonies and replace it with secularism or Christianity?

Note: These scenario seeds were originally published in the October 2006 edition of my Alternate History Newsletter.