The World Wars

War has changed...

"War will become rare, but more terrible. [...] That's my horoscope"

– Arthur Conan Doyle, 1883

"This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years"

– General Ferdinand Foch

During the Industrial Revolution, Europe was comparatively peaceful for the most part. The 19th century started with the Napoleonic Wars when industrialization was building up steam in England and afterwards there were a series of colonial conflicts and small to middling wars between the various industrial powers¹. The Civil War was on the upper end of conflicts in this era but was limited to the comparatively sparsely populated US, was still fought with muskets and saw about 600-750,000 people dead. The Franco Prussian war was won in six months (GOTT MIT UNS!), but in a chilling prelude to things to come killed some 180,000 combatants. Now you may say, "What the hell! The factory accidents and all other horrible abuses and war deaths were horrific!", but you ain't seen nothing yet. Things changed in 1914 when Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, starting the Great War, also known as the First World War. This would be followed up by the Second World War in 1939-45, which largely stemmed from the consequences of the Great War, to the point that some call the period a Second Thirty Years War (accounting for post World War 1 conflicts and World War 2 prelude wars in the Spanish Civil War and Japan invading China, this is technically correct). The World Wars would spread across the world and saw conflict and destruction beyond anything that was ever seen before or since.

There are two important factors in the World Wars: Technology and Nationalism. Technology is the easier of the two to understand. In the Napoleonic War the average soldier had a flintlock musket that could shoot 2-4 bullets a minute with an effective range of 100 meters, was supported by muzzle loading cannons that could shoot accurately to about 1km and was supplied by ox carts while steam engines were just beginning to propel boats and move loads of coal around mines in England. In 1914 the average soldier had a rifle that could shoot 15-30 bullets a minute (which could go through three men and still be deadly) at ranges of over a kilometer and was backed up by cannons that could fire shells six kilometers or more on ballistic courses which exploded in the air raining a spray of balls over a wide area and machine guns which could shoot 450 bullets a minute and airplanes. By the end of the Great War tanks, Submachine Guns and Poison Gas had been added to the arsenal. Tactics devised based on 19th century ideas of fighting were useless on this new battlefield and the book needed to be re-written from page one. Other technologies such as mass production, mechanized farming, railways and automobiles, mass education, telecommunications and modern bureaucracies meant that an Industrial Nation could turn more of its population into soldiers than any medieval nation could ever hope to do (Rome was hard pressed to keep up a standing army of about 1% of it's population, Germany mobilized nearly 20% during the Great War). Through bloody experience generals gradually put together some idea of how to operate in this new battlefield near the end of the Great War and between the wars they'd continue to build on it with experience in small scale wars. Even so people were still making it up as they went in WWII.

Nationalism is more abstract but just as important. In the Middle Ages, people generally identified themselves as being "a Christian Journeyman Blacksmith from London whose dad is English" or "a Jewish Master Cobbler from Munich whose mom is Sephardic" and so forth (their family, job, class, religion and hometown, things which they dealt with face to face day to day). If a civil war happened and ended up with a new noble house in charge while they and their family and friends got through unharmed, they would not care too much as long as the new lord upheld his feudal duties and was not a huge dick. There was a king and he ruled a bunch of land and tried to keep the peace, which was all good but the specifics of this was not a fact which defined them. This began to change with the Protestant Reformation and had a bit of build up through the Age of Enlightenment as propaganda for the masses took form, leading to the birth of nationalism with the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. People began to see their country as more than just where they lived and the guy in a funny hat who ruled them, but rather as a community of people united by common ideas, languages, beliefs, customs, ideals, and (often) ancestry, people who need to band together and set aside their differences to defend what's theirs against those stinking foreigners with their differences. Public education caught on during the Industrial Revolution, which made it possible to give these ideals to everyone from the richest businessman to the lowliest beggar. When you have two nations which have nationalistic populations and governments and other influential groups fond of egging nationalism on together it does not take much to get them at each others throats and keep them there.

Intertwined with Nationalism is the issue of "Balance of Power"; since the end of the Thirty Years War, the various European powers had been very conscious about preventing any one nation from becoming too powerful and exerting their authority over everyone else. This is one of the motivating factors behind such actions as the race to colonize Africa, the "Great Game" between Russia & Britain over India, the War of Spanish Succession where Britain and the Holy Roman Empre fought to prevent the union of France & Spain, or the clusterfuck that was the Crimean War where a dispute over Churches in the Ottoman Empire lead to Britain and France declaring war with Russia, only for neither side to gain anything and lose a lot of men and respect. And since Napoleon had gotten really close to completely dominating Europe, the alliance system played a major role in ensuring no one would get too sabre-rattly... up until Germany unified and changed the whole playing field, leaving politicians desperate and uncertain as to how far Kaiser Wilhem was willing to go to prove Germany's prestige as a rising power. The result was an arms race that helped build the powder keg, which would inevitably explode with the right spark.

¹The Taiping Rebellion (Not to be confused with the Boxer Rebellion.) in China killed some 20-30 million people, but neither side in it was industrialized beyond buying some foreign weapons to equip some of their troops.

The First World War

Over the Top Lads (sorry, no joke on this one)

Also known as the Great War and the War to End All Wars (SPOILER ALERT, It wasn't) .

To understand the beginning of the major, globe-shaking clusterfuck known as the First World War, we must first look at several key issues that preceded it.

The first and probably one of the biggest contributing factors was the race for Empire. During the preceding centuries, imperialism and expansionism became extremely popular among the industrializing and booming nations of western Europe. Entire swathes of Africa and Asia were carved out by global powerhouses such as Great Britain and France, in order to fuel their industry and economy back home, often at the expense of the natives (the treatment of which varied on which European power dominated that particular region, with those under Belgium's sway being the worst off; one could argue that at least that stopped chattel slavery that was endemic to the region until the colonization, but suffice to say the natives would likely think that the chattel slavery was preferable). For a while, the competition was 'merely' a case of rivalry, as each generally avoided the other's territories in order not to repeat disasters like the Seven Years' War or the Napoleonic Wars. Everything was going more or less splendidly (barring some wars of independence in the Balkans against the increasingly corrupt and stagnating Ottoman Empire), until one key event forever shattered the balance of power so carefully put into place by the Congress of Vienna: the unification of Germany by Otto von Bismark (a political genius so astute that he coined the modern term 'realpolitik').

With Germany now unified, it presented a major threat to the established powers of Europe. Not helping matters was the new Kaiser, Wilhelm II, looking at Britain with barely restrained jealousy (and a huge trove of mommy and daddy issues further complicated by a deformed arm being shorter than the other due to a difficult birth causing nerve damage) and thus deciding that Germany deserved its own overseas empire and place as top dog. Complicating matters further is the fact that the royalty and nobility of Europe were all largely related to one another. In some ways, this made the coming shitstorm seem more like the biggest family feud in centuries. The race for who controlled the biggest slice of the planet was kicked into overdrive, with factories pumping out new, relatively untested weapons such as the machine gun, the repeating rifle, and the howitzer, while shipyards around Europe churned out awe-inspiring steel battleships and cruisers, complete with the largest cannons mankind had ever seen up to that point.

To counterbalance each other, the great powers formed increasingly complex and entangling military alliances, which coalesced into two pacts- the Triple Entente (France, Britain (Kind Of), and Russia) and the Triple Alliance (Germany, Italy, and Austria), with the United States holding dominion over the Americas sans Canada and the Eastern Pacific and the Ottoman Empire desperately trying to stave off collapsing, while China was getting real tired of being plucked like a chicken and slowly descending into warlordism. Africa was fully colonized minus the land the Ottomans lost in a war against Italy and Ethiopia and Asia was either tenuously under China, under the rising Japanese Empire or colonized (by Japan as well, especially after Russia was curbstomped in the Russo-Japanese War) minus Thailand. The worst atrocities occurred in the Belgian Congo, the colonial rule killing something like 15 million people. Europe was at the height of its power.

Meanwhile, various nationalist and liberal revolutionary movements were sweeping the continent like a new disease from the Plaguefather. Some of their demands were met, particularly in Britain where the House of Commons gained more power. Other revolutions were violently crushed or flat-out ignored, while still others were successful in their goals through sheer force of arms (Like true comrades). The hardest hit, however, were not the more liberalized and industrious Western nations. Instead, the hardest hit by these successive waves of revolution was none other than the two oldest empires in Europe at that time- Austria and the Ottomans, both of whom were weary, tired states in dire need of reform. While some in both powers saw granting people increasing amounts of autonomy as the way to keep their state from collapsing (such as the formation of the dual monarchy and the recognition of Hungary as an equal partner, transforming the Austrian Empire into Austria-Hungary and the failed Tanzimat reforms of the Ottoman Empire and the Young Turks coup following the Tanzimat's abolition establishing what was intended to be a constitutional monarch but really was a military dictatorship under the delusionally idealistic and, as would be proven in a few years, seriously incompetent Enver and his fellows in high command), others insisted on a more hardline approach, trying to keep the state afloat by using terror. All of this bred resentment, particularly in the Balkans, which increasingly became a powder keg that was waiting for the right spark.

That spark came in the form of the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, at the hands of Gavrilo Princip, who was a member of the Young Bosnia movement which was itself under the influence of the infamous serbian nationalist organization, the Black Hand. Austria-Hungary gave an ultimatum to Serbia (biggest independent slavic country), which included some frankly ridiculous and cruel terms. When the Serbs rejected a few of these terms, the Austrians took it as a casus belli and declared war on Serbia. In response, Russia declared war on Austria, to which Germany declared war on Russia, to which France declared war on Germany. Germany would then invade the neutral Belgium in an attempt to avoid French fortifications on the border, bringing the British into the conflict...On paper. In reality after the fall of the Spanish Empire and weakening of France England had a almost monopoly on oversea trade and the undisputed control of the seas. After the whole dreadnought disaster suddenly Germany threatened England's complete naval domination. Belgium was just the perfect excuse, in reality Britain was chomping at the bit for a throw down.

The internationalization of the conflict and the various ethnics that the colonial empires of Europe press ganged into service had some downright comical results, like an Indian battalion fighting in East Africa against German-led Askari tribesmen, all because because a Serbian shot an Austrian in Bosnia.

Thus began a conflict that would last for four bloody long years, see eleven million deaths as the result of horrific industrial warfare in the trenches and bombed-out fields, diseases such as the Spanish flu, and the breakup of several empires to form new nations. Truly, an entire generation of Europe's men was destroyed as a result (and is commonly known as the Lost Generation today) and gave rise to later extremist philosophies, the proponents of whom were all too eager to amass power for themselves by blaming their nation's misfortunes on the subversive "other." And while the civilian losses were nowhere near that of the Second World War, they were significant on both fronts, especially in Belgium where the Imperial German Army exercised collective punishment against villages suspected of harboring partisans.

While the average citizen didn't give much of a damn about the alliance system and the bickering of a bunch of politicians over some dispute halfway across the continent, the government of each country knew they had to sell the "necessity" of the war to their citizens. Propaganda from both sides painted the enemy nations as barbaric, inhuman war criminals who had to be stopped to prevent the devastation that would follow if they were allowed to go unopposed. They also reassured the public that, with their obvious technological superiority/superior fighting spirit, the war would be quick and soldiers would return home by Christmas. While this illusion could be maintained with the civilians population, the soldiers sent to the front lines were quickly disillusioned by the horrors that they saw. Morale was so bad that the Russians overthrew Tsar Nicholas II and eventually came to be led by the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin, and the French nearly did the same as mass mutinies broke out in the French army. Had the Americans not joined on the Allies' side to swing the war in their favor, it's likely that even more revolutions could have taken place.

Terrifying new weapons of war earned their fearsome reputation in this conflict. Machine guns and air-burst artillery shells rendered the old tactics of Napoleonic warfare suicidal, while mustard gas and the like created a new age of massive destruction. Tanks made their first debut in this war, slowly rumbling forth like invincible metal monsters, shrugging off most resistance and dealing punishing firepower themselves, only to breakdown in the middle of the battle due to being rudimentary designs. The airplane, as well, saw use in a combat role, and it would swiftly become an invaluable strategic and tactical tool, for he who dominated the skies dominated the flow of battle.

The bloodiest war in human history up to that point ended with Germany's surrender at 11:00 A.M, on November 11th, 1918, after being exhausted, starving, and dangerously close to collapse in the face of a communist uprising. The irony is that despite the announced end of the conflict, soldiers continued to fight tooth and nail to the last minute, desperately hoping that whatever few yards they could seize would somehow bring the negotiations in their countries' favor, as in the fighting continued until literally seconds before 11 AM where an American soldier who was demoted made a suicide charge on a machine gun and a Canadian guy got sniped.

The consequences of WW1 cannot be understated; this four-year-long international bloodletting completely destroyed the Eurocentric world order that has persisted since the 1500s, pushed all European powers except Russia from being superpowers in their own right to second-rank states and ended the age of (overt) Imperialism for good. The scale of the money spent for this war was enormous; Britain went from the biggest lender of the world to the biggest debtor, having spent the entire wealth accumulated over the course of 300 years of colonial British and English history in just four years. France saw its industrial and agricultural heartlands in the northeast reduced into nothing but poisonous wasteland that is to this day unusable and dangerous from all the unexploded ordinance. Germany had replaced its state form from the Prussian semi-feudal social order to a constitutional republic with nothing to fill the social void that was left when the old Imperial elites just fucked off elsewhere and left it to the Social Democrats and Liberals to clean up the mess they had created. (They failed.) Russia was transformed into the Soviet Union and could only compensate the extreme loss of people and infrastructure by installing a tyrannical regime and wasting away millions of its own people in forced labour camps and famines. And that's just in Europe. In the middle east, the haphazardly drawn borders (Sykes-Picot Agreement) created by Britain and France with no regard (or intentional disregard) to the cultural mixup of the lands they took from the Ottomans ended up creating some of the most vicious and long-lasting ethnic conflicts, most of which last to this very day, with the Iraq-Iran, Israeli-Palestinian and in general Sunni-Shi'a conflict and the Turkish-Kurdish war (of which the latter's first uprising explicitly aided by the British) being particularly noteworthy examples. The latter one in particular is only in the way out more than one hundred and ten years later when military crackdown and drones made terrorism unviable (and Turkish Kurds realizing that living in Turkey as opposed to an unviable independent state surrounded by hostile powers or worse Syria or Iraq wasn't so bad after all). And of course all of these people ended up nursing a profound grudge against the West that would only get worse when they found themselves relegated to being a mere prize for the Soviets and the Western bloc to compete over. This too would end up coming back to haunt everyone involved nearly a century later.

The Punitive Expedition

While the United States of America sat the early part of the war out, it was not without armed conflict of its own. In 1916 failed Mexican revolutionary Francisco "Pancho" Villa launched an unprovoked attack on US settlement of Columbus, New Mexico that killed 26 Americans. The actual reasons are unclear, but seizing supplies, and/or a ploy to get the US Government to involve themselves in the revolution and wreck everything are common guesses. In response, the US sent troops into Mexico to retaliate against Villa. While the conflict was small scale, it ensured the US didn't enter the Great War totally blind to modern warfare as everyone else had. In fact, it was in this conflict that future superstar General Patton got a taste of the new vehicle-based warfare that he would become famous for.

The Warlord Era

Around the same time, after the Boxer Rebellion failed to remove the Europeans from China, it became clear that Imperial China's days were over. After the forced abdication of the Qing Emperor, attempts to create a modern Chinese Republic quickly collapsed as regional Warlords split the country among themselves, intent on unifying China with themselves as its leader. Much like the Three Kingdoms period way back in Early China, much of the military and political conflict was characterized by long, drawn-out border skirmishes with the occasional big battle, massive conscript armies, backstabbing, and leaders who were able to hold onto power so long as they had their army's loyalty. Due to an arms embargo and limited domestic manufacturing, industrialized warfare played a very limited role in the early part of the Warlord era; cavalry and bayonet charges were still viable, as very few warlords could afford the artillery and machine guns needed to make them obsolete. However, the eventual intervention of the Japanese eventually shifted the conflict away from a domestic dispute over who ruled into a fight for China's survival against a technologically superior force, as covered in more detail below.

The Empire of the Rising Sun

Japan alongside the US began emerging as something of the world power a few years before the war. The Russo-Japanese war of 1905 shocked the dominant European powers as the Japanese managed to defeat the supposedly superior Russians (though the fact of the matter was that both sides were blundering hard and the weebs won because the other side was MUCH more incompetent - Russian navy sent from the Black Sea to Japan fired on a British fishing fleet thinking it was the Japanese thus almost starting a war with the UK). Japan was a member of the Triple Entente and as such seized some German islands in Asia, sent a small fleet into the Mediterranean to escort naval convoys and participated in an expedition alongside the US and European countries in Siberia after the revolution in Russia, but the main political activity was focused on exerting an ever increasing influence on China. After the war, Japan was awarded a permanent seat in the League of Nations and recognized as a 'great power', but their proposal to be recognized as equals race-wise was rejected. This caused alienation from the western powers, which in turn would partially contribute to increased nationalism and militarism down the line.

Side Note: The Shackleton Expedition and the End of the Age of Heroes

Ernest Shackleton's famous Antarctic voyage and the perils they faced ending with the miraculous survival of all but three members and the ships cat after incredible heroism occurred during the First World War in it's entirety, Shackleton thinking the war wouldn't last more than a few months after last hearing that Russia had mobilized and that there were some minor German victories. So what happened to the great hero and his crew of champions? They returned from the late 1914 expedition in the middle of 1916. When Shackleton asked the governor of South Georgia Island when the war was over, the reply was that millions were dying, that Europe was mad, and that the World was mad. Expecting a well deserved hero's welcome, Shackleton and his men found abject, mute horror instead. Most of them volunteered to serve in minesweepers or on the front, and several were killed action. Shackleton even demanded a frontline condition despite his severe heart condition exacerbated by the nightmare he went through, though they resisted until the Allied Intervention in the Arctic front of the Russian Civil War, where he worked until the Bolsheviks took that part and the war shifted to the Caucasus and when that was done through a deal with Turkish revolutionaries (more on that below) the chase to the Pacific across Asia. Shackleton himself passed away due to heart complications in 1922, perhaps the last larger than life hero before the world woke up to gritty reality.

The Interwar Period

"This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years."

– Ferdinand Foch, 1919

Knowing that the world could not endure another such war, US president Woodrow Wilson made it his mission to set the groundwork for long-term peace (between whites at least); he set forth what he called the Fourteen Points, a set of foreign policy doctrines that would address many of the underlying issues behind WWI and promote better diplomacy and cooperation between nations, with its biggest selling point being the League of Nations. The Germans thought that this was actually a pretty neat idea, and were hoping to agree to these terms during the upcoming peace conference. Unfortunately, none of Wilson's allies bought into his vague ideas, and slowly he was forced to compromise on all his policies just so he could get the League of Nations established (even shittier proto-United Nations, in that at least the UN specialist agencies do important global coordination work). Ironically, Wilson failed to convince the US to join the League of Nations, partly due to alienating his Republican opponents in Congress, as they weren't convinced that this League wasn't completely useless, or worse, just another military alliance that would suck them into another European War. Without the US to back it, and with little power to enforce peace resolutions, the League pretty quickly collapsed in the lead-up to WWII, as the pissed off Germans had been assigned full blame for the war and wanted revenge. Wilson was also a gigantic racist asshole, and got crippled by a stroke which precluded him from really doing anything mid-1919 onwards, killed his plans for reelection to a third term, then straight up killed him after term.

Near the end of the first World War, the world was thrown into yet another cataclysm. The Spanish Flu, named such because neutral Spain was the only place that paid much attention to it over the ongoing war/didn't actively suppress the news of the epidemic, spread rapidly and killed many thanks to the conditions caused by the war (overcrowding, especially in transport ships for returning soldiers, malnourishment, etc.). The death toll was horrendous, with the minimum estimate of 50 million being over double the entire war's death toll. After this, Europe needed decades to recover from the horrible destruction the war and flu had caused. Various post war conflicts continued in the regional level, most famously the Anatolian conflict between Greece, Armenia, French Colonial Forces, Islamists loyal to the Ottoman Government and the nationalist wings of the Ottoman military that revolted under Mustafa Kemal's regime. The latter won after deals with Armenia (which was not ratified as the Soviets nommed them, the new regime made another treaty which was officially ratified and guaranteed by the Soviets) and France, while Greece was rather soundly defeated. After another peace treaty with the Allies at Lausanne and the nationalist regime reforming into a Republic and abolishing the monarchy and the caliphate a year after the end of the monarchy and the Treaty of Lausanne, the local wars pretty much ended barring minor border disputes and posturing, with the only real big scare being the Bosphorus Straits affair with the Soviet's, that was resolved through the Montreaux Convention in the 30's. The rest of the world wasn't so lucky.

America, however, was having its best years ever. The Washington Naval Treaty had Britain officially cede the position of Earth’s mightiest navy, which the Royal Navy held for centuries, by recognizing the US Navy’s power as at least equal to it. The so called "Roaring Twenties" saw a rapid increase in the standard of living. President Harding managed to do the impossible and eliminate the deficit, though some of his appointees trying to sell some government owned rock in the middle of nowhere marred his legacy (looking back historians realize there's a lack of evidence suggesting he had any knowledge or involvement though that isn't really a compliment, you do need to pay attention when you are damn head of state). The American economy of the time was doing well; unlike the other powers of Europe, it had not been strained extensively by being in a war economy for four years that strained productivity, had prime farmland turned into no man's land like France, its economy pushed to the breaking point like Germany, broken up into squabbling states like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or had all of that happen and was taken over by communists after a civil war like Russia (with some like Turkey as aforementioned getting lucky and successfully reforming), while having basically everyone in Europe owe American bankers to pay for the war.

After Harding's death during the scandal, his Vice-President, Calvin Coolidge, took over. This was rather sudden and Coolidge was sworn in during the middle of the night by his father on the family Bible, with his first act was to pray to God to bless the American people and give him the strength to lead them. Unlike Harding, Coolidge proved wildly popular despite (or because of) his quiet nature. His economic policies really kicked off the Roaring Twenties and he was popular enough he was elected by a landslide in an election he didn't campaign for (this was common in American politics at the time, it was considered undignified to campaign for yourself). Coolidge continued Harding's deficit free budgets to the point the US was able to repay most of the national debt. Despite his wild popularity, Coolidge shocked the world with his announcement that "I do not choose to run" for reelection and, true to his nature, did not really explain why (he would later elaborate in his autobiography that he did not wish to break the (then unofficial) rule set by Washington of a max of two terms among other issues). He would be followed by Herbert Hoover, who largely rode on his success (justifiably though; Hoover had been Commerce Secretary for 8 years). This would change in October of 1929 when the stock market crashed and ushered in the Great Depression.

There had been a series of stock market crashes through the the 19th century in the US every decade or so, each with increasing severity and effects in the US as more people moved into cities and were more dependent on wages. The 1920s saw a rise in consumer culture, payment plans, investment becoming commonplace, loans for buying stock with, a lot of scams and the limits of the real economy which culminated in the biggest crash yet. Moreover, since the US was now linked to a bunch of other countries thanks to improved communications, trade, transportation, and so forth, the crash not only tanked the US economy, but that of basically every other developed country save for the USSR under Stalin (which had its own Stalin-related problems, and boy were they big problems), which further hindered recovery. It also didn't help that large swaths of Europe were still battle scarred wastelands useless for agriculture, an entire generation of young working men had been killed or crippled, and that the formerly super-productive Germany was now teetering with an ineffectual government and crippling reparations to pay (Take the claim of the Reparations being crippling with a huge grain of salt: Modern historians have come to the conclusion that the effect of the reparations was much lesser than the German governments and later Hitler liked to claim. They liked to overstate the burden to create a welcome excuse for their own failure to stabilize the deteriorating value of the Reichsmark for the vengeful German masses, which culminated in one of the worst hyperinflations of the 20th century and also the temporary occupation of the Ruhr Valley by French troops) Throw in a crushing multi-year drought in the United States that ruined harvests across wholes states and the stage is set for chaos.

The old ways of dealing with things did not work and people turned to new ideas. In the US, this was various public works projects and assistance programs, collectively called the New Deal, to get people back working and build confidence in the economy and financial regulations. Similar ideas were tried in England, Australia and the UK. It should be noted that afterwards there was no major economic setbacks until 2008 after New Deal era financial regulations were pulled. In Germany, the response was more severe and was seen as a failure of democracy, which contributed to the rise of authoritarian parties on the left like the Communist KPD, which in turn led to the Nazi (National Socialists German Workers Party) party to counter them (possibly with help from western powers seeking a wall against communism) with a newfound hate of the Allies thanks to the colossal reparations to the rest of Europe that Germany had been forced to pay in the Treaty of Versailles, except that the rise of the Nazis to power was far more complicated than just that. Much more important in that question was the fact that Germany was blamed for the war to create to legal and moral justification for said reparations (as elaborated above, the actual economic effects of the reparations were questionable) and the Stab-And-The-Back-Myth that was set into the world by Imperial German Marshals (and defacto military oligarchs from 1916 on) Ludendorff and Hindenburg in order to shift the blame for the Germany's defeat to the Social Democrats and the Jews. The concurrent deeply authoritarian political culture of many German institutions as well as reactionary and monarchist Industrialists like Krupp, who all backed Hitler and Nationalist and Antisemitic Parties similar to the NSDAP (like the DNVP) and the lack of people actually willing to give a damn about the Republic itself lead to the erosion of the few democratic principles left at this point. From 1930 onward, Hindenburg, who was elected as the candidate of a coalition of Nationalist and conservative parties to the office of President reigned Germany in a dictatorial manner and named Hitler as Chancellor and head of government in January 1933, after two governments under the centrist-conservative Party Zentrum and the Nationalist DNVP failed to stabilize the economy. Responding to the collapse gave the Nazis the political currency to get into power, stimulate the economy by gearing it up to war and made the UK less willing to intervene to stop them while they were rising due to nobody wanting to be the one to start another war. And ideals of peace and disarmament certainly somewhat popular in the UK and France.

To their credit, in the mid 30's the Nazis did appear to be doing good things, even if there was a clear air of racial supremacy about the whole affair. Europe was collectively terrified of Marxism, and a nation that was forcefully rebuilding and modernizing itself without resorting to collectivization was tolerated by the French and British out of fear of the alternative. Between completing the Autobahn, hosting the Olympics, and achieving a number of engineering feats such as the first practical helicopter, Germany appeared to be getting shit done. When the communists tried to launch a revolution in Spain, Germany sent weapons and eventually troops to keep keep the nationalists in control, while Britain looked the other way and pretended not to notice that Germany suddenly had hundreds of tanks (and that France and the Soviets were providing aid to communist revolutionaries). So nobody was too concerned when Germany started making noises about reunifying some Germanic peoples in border regions they'd ceded in the Treaty...

The Second World War

The War in the West

See also Nazis

With Poland unwilling to roll over before the Nazis, the Nazis securing a ceasefire with Soviet Russia and with Britain and France finally stirred to the defense of Poland, it was clear that war was inevitable and so, on September 1st 1939, after creating a false-flag incident to offer the thinnest fig leaf of legality (and also dispose of a few dissenting Germans on the Nazis' hitlist) Germany struck at Poland. Two days later on September 3rd Britain and France declared war on Germany. Contrary to the popular imagination, Poland did not simply crumble before the German onslaught, and the myth of Polish cavalry trying to charge German tanks was yet another piece of propaganda. But after a month of hard fighting, with the Soviets entering the war on the German side and striking Poland in the rear, Poland finally gave in to the inevitable.

After that, the Germans sat around for a bit (literally, the monicker of German soldiers for the period between October 1939 and June 1940 was "sitting war"), causing the British and the French to fortify the hell out of the Northeast part of France in anticipation of an assault. However, the French ignored a large wooded area called the Ardennes. This region was thought to be not overly strategically important, as the mobility of German tanks was supposedly hampered by the thick forests. Needless to say, this was wrong, and the France fell at just an alarmingly fast rate as Poland did. The Italians jumped in at the last minute to steal some land and pretend they could help their ally Germany in warfare. It should be mentioned that in spite of the surrender memes everyone makes about France, they fought and inflicted casualties on the German Invaders at a rate far higher than should have been expected of them. In fact, the German High Command felt very uneasy about the whole operation throughout its entirety, in large part because (at least on paper) the French military was stronger than the Germans, and had ample reason to believe going in that this was a fight they could win. The key to success for the German forces was a combination of tactics the Allies were ill prepared to counter, a system of organized chaos where divisions were pushing far quicker ahead than they were supposed to and more often than not sheer dumb luck. The Battle of France ended with the conquest and surrender of Paris, and Germany annexed the North of the country, leaving the rest to the Vichy puppet government that would administer Southern France and her colonies. However, French general Charles de Gaulle rallied several of the colonies to continue their resistance against the Germans and many colonists would pledge their support to "Free France". They would eventually form a provisional government in Algiers and ultimately return to Paris in 1944.

The British spent the majority of 1940-1942 on the defensive from all sides and every angle, with Winston Churchill being made Prime Minister, a man with an iron will and indomitable resolve. He lead his country through the loss of the HMS Hood, the U-boat crisis (something that he made clear was his greatest fear throughout the war), the Battle of Britain. Canadians, South Africans, Indians, ANZACs, and all manner of soldier that could be acquired were pressed into service to defend the Empire all across the globe. Among the successes, such as the sinking of the Bismarck and the Taranto raid, were horrible failures like the Greek and Norwegian expeditionary forces, and the war for Africa was largely a stalemate until the Torch Landings.

During this period, the Soviets had been in a very similar position, being forced to hold back against a well trained army with a poorly equipped and poorly trained army. The infamous Russian winter forced the German Army to stay the winter just outside of Moscow, and the oil they wished to seize was either just out of reach or destroyed in scorched earth retreats.

American Rearmament

This whole time the American public had been watching the developing war, chief among these watchers was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR was not a fan of Adolf, mostly because FDR hated imperialism (he actively worked to release the Philippines from the US, and was pivotal in creating a post-war environment that would destroy the colonial regimes of Britain and France.) He convinced Congress to send increasingly generous aid to Britain, funded the military, and generally put the US into a state of readiness for war.

In spite of these changes, the American public was generally lukewarm on the idea of war in Europe; they'd rather let the Europeans kill each other and live away unbothered. FDR realized like Wilson that he could not go to war without changing the public's perception, so this explains the "slow" manner in which the US built up its military infrastructure. Instead, the Americans took notes and watched carefully from the sidelines, gradually taking a more pro-ally stance by escorting transports, allowing American Destroyers to "defend business interests" in convoys, and building up a tank force and air force. Everything was going fine until some weeaboo with a katanna stepped off the field and kicked them in the balls; Pearl Harbor.

Rather than being shocked into peace talks or ineffectiveness, the entire country became extraordinarily pissed and had war declared the next day. Recruitment offices swelled with men willing to fight, and promising officers such as Patton, Eisenhower, and Doolittle were given immediate assignments. "Remember Pearl Harbor" became a rallying cry among the US Navy, and General Douglas MacArthur was determined to regain his prestige after the Philippines were lost under his command.

Europe probably still would've been a tough sell, even with the American public ripshit pissed and out for revenge, but Hitler and the rest of the Axis neatly solved that problem by declaring war on the US right after the Pearl Harbor strike, and just like that, America was committed to the whole World War shebang.

Mid-War

The mid-war refers largely to the conclusion of the African Campaign and the Fall of Italy, and the conclusion of the Battle of Stalingrad. The Freeaboos first forayed into the world of dying hard on beaches during the Torch landings, where a combination of poor logistics planning, bad intel, and a bunch of pointless and stupid red tape from the somewhat uncooperative Vichy Colonial administration resulted in needless casualties. The results would be studied and come to fruition in future campaigns.

After Operation Torch, the Allies pushed with great difficulty into Tunisia, forcing the Axis to stay there. With the Americans on the West and Montgomery's army in the East, Tunisia was surrounded and captured with great difficulty, due to the mountainous and hilly terrain. The complete lack of useful military infrastructure that had not been left to rot by Petain made the logistics a nightmare.

While the allies were establishing a base for Free France and picking away at Italy, the Germans and Soviets clashed over Stalingrad. Intelligently, the Soviets realized the importance of the city to Germany (all about oil) and lured the Germans into the city. This deprived them of their tank advantage, and 5 months of siege functionally destroyed any value the city would have had along with the entirety of their supplies. The encirclement of Fredrich Paulus and the 8th army resulted in the surrender of the German army, only 5,000 of which would live to see home a decade later.

The landings on Sicily and Italy were enough to force Mussolini out of power, and Italy promptly changed sides to fight for the Allies. However, the theorized soft underbelly of Italy was anything but, as the mountainous land proved difficult for the Allies to traverse. This resulted into Mussolini being established as a puppet governor in Northern Italy until he was killed by partisans. It also prevented the Allies from making any meaningful progress towards Germany through Italy.

Normandy

Yes, Normandy gets its own section. See, the Americans had long wanted to just land in France and bash the Nazis to death much like what Sherman had done to the CSA in the American Civil War. The British managed to convince the Americans that Africa would allow them to isolate a large number of Axis troops that could not be replaced from Europe, and if Stalin continued to bleed them dry, they could take Italy. The disastrous Dieppe landings also convinced Eisenhower to shelve the idea as untenable at the moment.

Flash forward to 1943 and Italy is a stalemate, though Russia is in a much better spot due to lend-lease. Stalin wants the Americans to open up another front to take pressure off of him, and the allies oblige by preparing one of the most complicated and carefully planned landings in human history: Normandy. Normandy had intelligence gathered from old time-life magazines, commandos, partisans, postcards, scientific reports, and anything they could get their hands on. Weather patterns were traced back decades to predict for an ideal time to land, swimming tanks were developed, and two mobile ports were developed to help unload equipment due to the lack of ports near the beaches. On top of all that, the Allies launched a massive counter-intelligence operation, mainly convincing the Germans that a massive army group (made up of balloons to fool observation craft) stationed in Kent and lead by General Patton would attack Calais.

In spite of these preparations, Eisenhower was not totally convinced they would succeed, and prior to the landings wrote a letter taking full responsibility for the failure of the landings. This never happened thankfully, but the rest of the Battle of Normandy was not just on the beaches. Paratroopers desperately held back reinforcements and seized or demolished important enemy infrastructure, attack aircraft strafed Germans for miles around, and the strategic bombers of the USAAF were diverted from pounding German industry to provide aid.

Victory in Europe

Liberating France, and Belgium, the western allies marched upon Germany while the Soviets bumrushed Berlin. Several desperate counter-attacks were launched, including the decisive Battle of the Bulge. It prevented the allies from pushing further than West Germany and insured the longevity of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe.

By this time, FDR was finally starting to realized the all the nasty things Churchill had been saying about Stalin were true; he was a liar, sociopath, and hell-bent on carving out territory to expand Communism and Soviet Influence. While FDR's ambitions to allow countries to have their own say in their governance would be realized in the 30 years after August 1945, many of the Eastern Bloc would remain under the hammer and sickle as "satellite states". Even a brief attempted rebellion by the Poles to reestablish their country was brutally put down by the Soviets.

In the Battle of Berlin, the Germans fought ferociously against the Soviets, but Hitler took his life in the hours preceding the Soviets occupying the Reichstag and declaring victory. The official cessation of hostilities occurred on May 8 1945. The day is known as VE day, though in Russia it is called Victory Day, in honor of the tremendous sacrifices the men of the Red Army made during the many battles in which they fought against the German Army.

The War in the East

Since at least 1853, when Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo Harbor, the Japanese feared the day when the powers of Europe would stomp all over them like they did China. In response they began building up their industrial base, importing guns, ships, factory machinery, engineers, textbooks, and professors. Some Japanese people came to the idea that the best way to fend off imperialism was to become imperialists themselves, and they began gobbling up their neighbors from the late 19th century onward (at first, in the name of liberating them and creating a "Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere", but with more brutality and for more obviously selfish reasons as time went on). They kept this going into the 20th century (when this sort of behavior was finally falling out of fashion among the Western powers, especially after WWI), by which time the military had become central to Japanese politics. In 1931, they invaded Manchuria, and invaded China in 1937, killing millions as they went(four times the death toll of the Holocaust to be precise, something that is largely ignored in light of Holocaust itself and Japan's contemporary PR effort). The rest of the world was outraged and cut Japan off from trade, which caused them to dig their heels in and keep it up, lest they be perceived as paper tigers. Tensions built until eventually the US threatened to cut off the oil Japan needed to keep their massive fleet running, and the overconfident Army managed to push the Imperial Japanese Navy into launching an attack on the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor (timed to hit approximately 30 minutes after delivering the declaration of war, thus effectively being a surprise attack without technically being a surprise attack).

The idea was that if everything went right, the fickle American public would be dismayed by the prospect of a hard fight over distant lands (especially while contemplating joining the war in Europe), the IJN could seize control of the Pacific while the crippled US fleet was out of action, and the US would be left with no choice but negotiation. However, while the Pearl Harbor attack did work pretty well and they did overrun a lot of Allied holdings around Asia, they missed all but one of the US carriers which only suffered minor damaged, enraged an American public that was previously tepid on war (especially since mistakes delayed even the planned token warning), and the fact was that the US had more than 10 times the Industry that Japan did as well as plenty of fuel. Another big failure of the Attack on Pearl Harbor was the lack of focus on the dockyards, drydocks, fuel depots, and the infrastructure that you need to target to prevent a navy from functioning or recovering after your ships take a ton of damage.

To top it all off they also aligned themselves with the Nazis, based on shared enemies and ultra-Imperialist/Nationalist ideologies, but thus reinforcing the narrative of them being a part of the barbaric Forces of Evil who needed to be completely defeated for the sake of the civilized world.

Despite the US' obvious industrial advantage, the US Navy was seriously lacking in experience and numbers compared to the IJN at the start of the war; with the Japanese carriers outnumbering Americans (who had to split their fleets to protect against German U-Boat attacks), there was a very real threat that the IJN would return to finish the job and start raiding the US Mainland before replacement ships could be built. The early stages of the War in the Pacific were very much touch-and-go, but that all changed after the Battle of Midway, when Admiral Nimitz intercepted the IJN's plans to attack Midway Island and lured them into a trap, destroying half of the IJN's total carrier capacity. This permanently halted Japanese aggression and put them on the defensive, buying the American war machine valuable time to rearm and retrain.

As time went on, and with some shaky starts, the Allies quickly learned how to rely on carriers instead of traditional battleship tactics, a lucky and devastating win at the Battle of Midway put the IJN on the back foot, now finding themselves as the proverbial one legged man in an ass kicking contest with the cream of Japanese carrier aviation at the bottom of the Pacific. Ferocious naval engagements gave way as the star of the show to even more brutal amphibious warfare as the Marines began their island hopping campaign across the Pacific, painfully prying each strategically important Japanese occupied island from their well dug in defenders — and crucially, skipping the islands that weren't important, leaving lots of Japanese units deployed in spots they could do fuck-all. The jungle, cave and amphibious warfare of this stage of the campaign was especially horrific even by World War 2 standards, not helped by racism against the Japanese on the part of Americans and the racism against everyone crossed with the suicidal fanaticism of the Japanese further exacerbating this. The IJN also set up various military units for holding prisoners and scientific experiments - best exemplified by Unit 731 - which gave Auschwitz a run for their money on crimes against humanity, the only difference being the lack of a genocidal goal. Well, that and the fact that the perpetrators were given immunity to prosecution in exchange for giving their data to the US government for it to use in its bioweapon program. Typical, really.

One often overlooked (at least in popular history from the western perspective) event in the war in China was the last big Japanese Offensive of 1944, named Operation Ichi-Go, where the Japanese threw their last reserves together to break through Republican Chinese lines under Chiang Kai-shek with astounding success. Although the Japanese were beaten back very quickly as were they in no position to hold their gains against the following allied counter-offensive, the Republican Chinese failure to stop it lead to the US taking control over the Nationalist forces after an ultimatum that greatly damaged the previously good relations between Kai-shek and the US government. It also lead to the disillusion of a lot of Nationalist Chinese officers and soldiers with their cause, prompting them to switch sides to the Communists under Mao Zedong. Mao on the other hand quickly utilized this momentum and influx of experienced soldiers (along with Soviet aid) to seize control of China from the Nationalists in the Second Phase of the Chinese Civil War (the Warlord Era got put on a semi-pause fighting against Japan, it was tenuous with constant skirmishing and the moment the Japanese forces got pulled out at the end of the World War it reignited), push them out of the main land off to Taiwan and found the Chinese Peoples Republic in 1949.

One major note from a wargaming perspective in this theater is Operation Ten-Go, the last sortie of the IJN against the US military forces invading Okinawa. The largest battleship made by human hands, the Yamato, and her support fleet, sortied... and were promptly destroyed by massed American air power. Thus proving the change in the IRL meta of naval warfare to carrier dominance, which has endured to this day.

The Manhattan Project

At the tail end of the 19th century, scientists began to work out some odd properties of matter, which eventually got them to realize that splitting atomic nuclei after processing Uranium in a cyclotron releases millions of times more energy than an equivalent mass of a chemical reaction. Naturally, instead of using it as cheap energy first, people thought "How can we weaponize this?" Such a weapon would be a game changer for warfare (less for the raw destruction it would cause, since firebombing cities was already horrifyingly effective, but because it would only take one bomber getting through air defenses to do the job instead of dozens or hundreds), and the Nazis getting it first would be an intolerable state of affairs. As such the Brits and the Americans pooled their scientific and industrial resources at Los Alamos to work out how to build a bomb. 20000 tons of silver wiring were built to enrich the Uranium into something that will recreate a small sun for a brief moment.

They were not ready in time to use it against the Nazis, but the first two were dropped on Japan to convince them that they wouldn't be able to fight to the stalemate they were now aiming for, thus ending the war quickly at the cost of a few hundred thousand Japanese civilians, rather than a long and costly slog that would potentially result in millions dead if the fanatical Japanese military forced it through to completion (including both the Japanese civilians who would be mobilized into militias and untold American service members). This view is controversial depending on who you ask, and some think it had more to do with revenge for the boats that got blown up, combined with racism and the desire to show off their new weapon to anyone else who might have threatened American dominance. Needless to say this is one of the war's most hotly debated decisions, and we will not be taking a stance. Regardless of the morality of using a small sun on a civilian target, it seemed to contribute to the surrender of the Japanese on 2 September 1945, though VJ day is observed on August 15th, when the Japanese announced their intention to surrender.

Whether or not intimidation was indeed a motive, the Russians ended up nicking the research data and so this just paved the way for the nuclear stalemate known as the Cold War. It is claimed by some that Stalin knew about the test before Truman did (Long story short: Truman was chosen as VP to get the Southern Democrats to support FDR's reelection bid. FDR didn't care for him much.) Some sources claim that Stalin merely suspected the Americans were working on nukes, and a cryptic statement by Truman allowed Stalin to confirm his suspicions.

After the war, the United Nations was organized in a significantly more effective manner than the League of Nations through the veto power and the binding requirements at the Security Council at least nominally giving the world a way to forcibly stop wars. The embarrassment that was the League of Nations formally dissolved itself and handed over all its assets to the UN in it's last meeting in 18 April 1946 (the Resolution went in to effect the next day on the 19th) with the sole exception of a 9-man committee transferring assets, records and administrations of specialist agencies to the UN. With the self-dissolution of the committee on 31 July 1947, legally ending the League of Nations as an entity. The Cold War technically started the day the Japanese surrendered, though the Berlin Blockade and the ending of the Chinese Civil War, reignited after Japan's defeat, were the public display.

Notes

• Radio! While Radio was used for communications and there were a few experimental broadcasts here and there since the beginning of the twentieth century, it really took off in the 1920s as a revolutionary new form of Mass Media. Radios meant that for the first time you could beam music, news and other such information directly into people's homes. Radio systems (both transmitters and especially receivers) were cheap to make and comparatively easy to use and maintain. Naturally everyone wanted in on this pie from radio companies to the Americans to the Brits to the Japanese to the Soviets to the Nazis. In particular the Nazis mass produced millions of cheap Volksempfanger radio sets to feed a steady stream of nazi propaganda to the german masses.
• During this time Science Fiction began to catch on to a wider audience. As new technologies increasingly transformed peoples lives there was interest in what the future might be like. At the same time, Radio and Pulp Magazines gave sci-fi writers a new means to get their message out in a way that was both cheap and offered exposure to writers to a wide audience. The downside of this was that there was also a lot of crap, since lowering the barrier of entry meant that a bunch of low end crud could be shoveled out onto the market and the editors of the magazines were often more interested in filling pages for next week's edition than putting out quality material. Even so, it did have a widespread impact. Astounding Stories magazine editor John W. Campbell got questioned by the FBI in 1944 about a story he had written about the possibility of Atomic Warfare and he worked out that the Manhattan Project was based at Los Alamos because of a sudden change in mailing addresses of a lot of his readers.
• Art Deco happened and is iconic of this period. Breaking with traditional European styles it's stylized forms, smooth lines and embellishments are iconic. In particular, Art Deco often tried to capture a sense of motion which in an era when Cars, Planes and Trains were seen as the main signs of technological triumph was important.
• Fordism and Taylorism! Henry Ford was a big pioneer in Assembly Line manufacturing, employing specialized machines to streamline production with every step tightly choreographed to shave seconds off the process. Ford himself was a disciple of Frederich Taylor, who focused on analysis and optimization (finding out how a worker did X, Y and Z and working out the best way to do the task). Fordism was the Gold Standard that everyone aspired to during this time period: American, British, Japanese, German and Soviet.
• The Superhero Genre was born on the eve of WWII with the publication of Superman and exploded during the war. If a lucky American kid in the 1940s found a shiny nickel, the latest edition of Superman or Captain America would be high up the list on what they'd spend it on. Thus a cultural legacy was born that would resound for decades to come.
• In dribs and drabs the elements of fantasy literature were beginning to come together. Conan the Barbarian was first written in 1932 and the The Hobbit was released in 1937. The Lord of the Rings was written from 1940-49, though it would be released in the 50s. Not really a cohesive whole yet, but the bits were coming there and coming together.

The appeal of the World Wars

These are the biggest armed conflicts of world history, rolling across continents using modern weapons, from tanks to planes to automatic weapons. Modern War was born in the trenches of the Somme, in the skies above London and over the fields of Poland during the Blitzkrieg, the flanking in France, the naval bombardment and air bombing in the Pacific, the hell in the Eastern front cities, in the bombing of Europe from the air, in the atomic fire of Hiroshima and Japan. We entered the century and went 14 years thinking everything was right and as great as it could be. Thirty years, a war, a pandemic, an economic crash, another war and several genocides later the man who was born into the first large scale factories witnessed the power of the atom burn the hopes and dreams of two cities. Ernest Shackleton is perhaps the perfect example. He journeyed believing the war was over, then returned to find that it had become a nightmare with no end in sight, a unique perspective.

Of the two wars, World War One gets relatively little media attention and what little it does get is somber. Part of that is because it's hard to craft a heroic action-packed adventure out of the hopeless horror of trench warfare, the other part is that the morality of the war is very, very grey. There was no clear right side, with both the Central and Allied powers equally chomping at the bit for a fight (at least to start with), and ready to start shooting for any convenient reason. When some angry Illyrians in the Balkans finally set everything off, the only motivation the common people had (besides being drafted and having no choice anyway) to go fight was the extensive propaganda campaigns telling them how totally awful for realsies the enemy was, and anyone asking questions or doubting was shut down hard. As a result, it's hard to make easily dehumanized rank-and file villains for a narrative when the soldiers of neither side actually want to be fighting at all.

When it was all over the country blamed and punished for the whole mess wasn't even the one that started it (in fact, the country that actually started it made bank off the entire thing. Germany was still the one to go to war with Belgium and get the British involved, so they could certainly take some blame.) All told, the First World War is largely seen as a great tragedy, and is widely considered a wasteful war as winnings were slim on the Allied side. If Russia didn't get involved or if the Axis didn't go for Belgium or if Italy either started under the allies or stayed in the axis or if Italy was the cause of WW1 as it likely would have been depending on how things would have continued in AH if the either the Duke dying didn't result in a war or if the Duke was never assassinated a war with one side getting a much greater victory could have transpired.

Probably one of the only noble (and almost certainly the cleanest) aspects of WW1 was the war in the air, where fighter pilots were effectively chivalric knights of the sky. One famous example was Manfred von Richthofen (the Red Baron), easily the most famous Ace fighter of the war, with 80 victories to his name in his distinctive red tri-plane (which only accounted for his last 17). He was so well respected among his adversaries that when he was finally shot down, the Allied officers who recovered his body buried him with full honors, including an honor guard and gun salute. This didn't stop the ruthless pragmatism, a few pilots even publicly boasted of shooting down parachuting airmen to prevent them from returning to the fight.

Another event stands out known as the Christmas Truce; early on in the war, troops on the Western Front pretty quickly realized that the guys they were shooting at didn’t want to be there any more than they did, and agreed to a ceasefire to celebrate Christmas. When the truce looked like it was going to last, commanders put a kibosh on the whole thing and told them to start fighting again and even cracked down on small mutinies arising. Another such truce would never happen as the fighting became more destructive, as poison gas attacks and tank assaults made each side far more wary of the other. Sometimes temporary truces were declared for around kilometer wide sectors to clear corpses, but that was about it.

The Second World War is a much more palatable conflict of more or less Good vs. Evil, with both the Nazis and Imperial Japan going out to conquer their respective hemispheres of the world and exterminating millions as key objectives and Italy playing the incompetent sidekick/comic relief which isn't too far off the truth in a series of spectacular displays of military incompetence on the part of Mussolini and his generals. The Axis Powers provided a clear and easy villain for the rest of the world to rally against (as well as providing easy media villains for the rest of the century and into the next millennium). The far more mobile and urban warfare of WW2 also allowed for more personal initiative and heroism, and stories of the extraordinary accomplishments of individual squads, or even individual soldiers, are far more commonplace here than they were back in WW1, when individual men or units had no real hope of making a difference, no matter what they did (mind, it was still industrial weight and technology that won the war, but it is far easier to remember Simo Häyhä than say, Alvin York (They both have Sabaton songs though!)).

As a result, a solid majority of Alternate History fiction is set in WWII one way or another. Even if WWI (or any of the many, many 19th Century to 1913 events and trends that lead to it) is the point of divergence, the story is likely to be in the late interwar to WWII periods.

World War inspired Games, Factions and Settings

• A lot of stuff from the Imperium of Man, especially the Death Korps of Krieg.
• Dieselpunk is the WWII equivalent of Steampunk. If you like the general aesthetics and mood of the time period but don’t want to be limited by the period’s technology, or perhaps want to see what would happen if the Nazi “Wunderwaffen” had been fully realized, this is the setting for you.
• Bolt Action, Flames of War, and other similar military tabletop games are set in WWII.
• Star Wars takes a great deal of inspiration from this time period, and in regards to the prequels, it especially takes a lot of inspiration from the transformation of the democratic-but-ineffectual Weimar Republic into the nightmarishly totalitarian Third Reich (though it was also influenced by the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire).
• Indiana Jones. Do we need to explain this?
• The 1920+ universe, inspired by the art of Jakub Rozalski, envisions an alternate Europe where Nikola Tesla’s super science lead to the development of Mechs as the dominant war machine. Best known for the RTS game “Iron Harvest” that pits Imperial Germany, Imperial Russia, and Poland in a version of WWI with WWII elements mixed in. Even Rasputin makes an appearance as the leader of a shadowy cabal looking to seize power by fomenting revolution in all three factions and take over Tesla’s super-advanced city-state.

Historical Time Periods
Deep Time:	Prehistory
Premodern:	Stone Age - Bronze Age - Classical Period - Dark Age - High Middle Ages - Renaissance
Modern:	Age of Enlightenment - Industrial Revolution - The World Wars - The Cold War - Post-Cold War