raharris1973
Well-known member
In the absence of a Korean War, the major Communist powers may have been cooking up two other major fiestas for later in 1950 or 1951. The Chinese, planning an invasion of Taiwan, for which they were rapidly expanding their Navy and Air Force and massing troops in their southeastern Fujian province, and the Soviets, who, according to many reports were positioning to remove Tiitoist deviationism by an invasion of Yugoslavia, with a first wave consisting largely of Hungarian, Romanian, and Bulgarian troops with a leavening of Yugoslav exile forces loyal to Stalinism, and Soviet forces forming the decisive second echelon.
US intel and national security officials up to the highest level considered in OTL when South Korea was invaded that rather than merely being opportunistic, it was a Soviet test of western resolve to oppose local Soviet backed aggression. They at the time had been worried about possible Communist moves in places besides Korea as well, Iran, Yugoslavia, perhaps Berlin again, certainly Taiwan [though that they were willing accept with certain equanimity], Indochina. Yugoslavia was their number one area of concern for likely Soviet-led aggression just prior to the Korean War. After the US-UN intervention in Korea, and the gradual relaxation of military tension on the Yugoslav border, Americans who reflected back on the earlier theory speculated that the American and allied demonstration of resolve probably deterred Soviet/Communist action elsewhere, like in Yugoslavia, and obviously, with the explicit announcement of the "neutralization" of the Taiwan strait and beginning of 7th fleet patrols, the US could credit itself for having deterred Taiwan invasion.
Decades later, Hungarian Communist officials privy to plans and preparations related to Yugoslavia corroborated the high level of invasion preparations against Yugoslavia going into summer 1950, their being in high tension and suspense through the summer months as the Korean War began, and their wind down to psychological posturing over the next year.
If we accept this hypothesis of the North Korean invasion of the south, and then, the unexpected to Pyongyang, Moscow, and Beijing intervention of the USA, as an "interruption" to contemporary invasion plans of the PRC against Taiwan, and the USSR and European satellites against Yugoslavia, then we can find a relatively simple Point of Divergence to "interrupt the interruption".
That would be Kim Il-Sung being killed or maimed beyond ability to effectively work and lead in a train derailment accident while traveling to or from Moscow to meet Stalin in April 1950 to get approval for his invasion plan for South Korea. Kim Il-Sung always traveled by train, never by air, and Stalin gifted him a train, although I don't know if he rated this gift yet or would have ridden with other Soviet personnel and citizens. In any case, accidents, and I don't mean "accidents" can reasonably actually happen in the long Trans-Siberian journey, and can happen sufficiently quickly or far from rescue or recovery personnel that VIPs can die or get irreversible injuries. So let's say that happens, and, Stalin, working with his team for Far Eastern affairs and managing North Korean succession, judges the situation without Kim and with a new apex leadership of the DPRK will be too delicate for the next couple years to permit aggressive adventures from the north against the south.
That let's us proceed with the original proposed scenario.
What might either of these [a Yugoslavia or Taiwan invasion] result in, especially a Yugoslavia invasion, right in Europe, in August 1950.
Some have speculated that a Yugoslavia invasion, being in Europe, bringing Soviet power closer to western possessions and tempting western involvement, (and the west was already providing military aid to Tito's Yugoslavia by 1950) would have been hard, possibly impossible, to contain from spreading into WW3. A Yugoslav invasion/intervention crisis was the basis of a 1950s "Look" Magazine article titled "A Preview of the War We Do Not Want" which envisioned a US victory after a long, conventional WW3 where Europe is lost to the Soviets and then liberated from them.
I don't think a Soviet/East Bloc invasion would be impossible to keep localized/contained however. The superpowers managed it for Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Greece.
I think try as they might, the Yugoslavs would not be able to stop satellite and Soviet troops from occupying much, or most of their territory. But at the same time, since Tito and his ruling group would have his Army and militias behind him, capable of fighting both conventionally, and guerrilla style, this type of invasion would certainly be no Hungary 1956 nor a Czechoslovakia 1968 style walkover.
At the same time, it is not certain that Tito would be keeping control of a fully united partisan resistance, keeping the Soviets on the back foot the whole period of fighting and attempted occupation. The Soviets may well find both ideologically sincere, and opportunistic collaborators, and Soviet bloc forces may be able to saturate the country up to its western, southern, coastal borders to the point that western intel services and military forces have trouble infiltrating in support for Tito's Neo-Partisans from outside.
Western support for Titoist Neo-Partisans against Soviet occupiers would be likely as long as feasible, presaging, about 30 years ahead of OTL's schedule, western support of the Afghan Mujhadeen and the Nicaraguan Contras, and the *ahem*, embarrassed cough, Khmer Rouge (and accomplices), in the 1980s. That would raise tensions with the eastern bloc. It would be interesting if that motivated Stalin and the satellite states to revive support for cross-border guerrilla warfare in Greece.
A further question: How would a Soviet and satellite invasion of Yugoslavia in say, August 1950, affect Sino-Soviet, Stalin-Mao relations?
The data we have from OTL is that despite commonalities between Tito and Mao, both rising to power largely on their own, using indigenous, rural, peasant-based, guerrilla armies, with some Soviet assistance on the margins, rather than being installed as a byproduct of their countries being overrun by the Soviet Red Army and exiled Party leaders flying in from Moscow as occurred in countries like Poland, Romania, and East Germany, Mao in 1949 while proclaiming the PRC announced his policy of "leaning to one side", the Soviet side in the world struggle against imperialism, and voiced support for the COMINFORM-Stalinist line against Titoism like all the rulers and Party bosses of Eastern Europe. In early 1950 he signed the Sino-Soviet alliance.
This was despite some contrary signals by some Chinese interlocutors to Americans and other westerners that the different and more independent path Mao and the CCP took to power made the Chinese Communists wary of excess Soviet control, and interested in continued economic and other links with the west. These people presented themselves as representatives or as in the camp of smooth talking Zhou Enlai, who had long been the CCP's relatively suave and diplomatic representative to the outside world, thought of as a "reasonable guy" and a pragmatist. [Yet ironically, also respected in Soviet bloc circles, and the only foreigner invited to be a pallbearer at Stalin's funeral in 1953].
Mao and the CCP's early pro-Soviet, anti-American leaning probably had something to do with the history of past US material support to the Guomindang that extended into the Chinese Civil War. Also, despite the Guomindang being driven into exile and the US apparently accepting this defeat without escalating and reacting more harshly, there was always the chance it could change its mind and attack the new regime CCP while it was in its vulnerable consolidation phase, so closer, publicized ties and an identification with the USSR might now be good and serve to help *deter* US-Guomindang aggression. The Chinese Communist Party had through its history generally consistently put a positive spin on Soviet actions and policies to its internal membership, even at times when Soviet actions appeared on the surface to not comport with Chinese national interests, so in most ways, a continued and deepened pro-Soviet line would be easier to explain to the Party cadre than shifting to a deviationist, anti-Soviet, but pro-Communist line.
Probably, most of all, a foreign policy of cleanly breaking with the west and siding with the Soviet Union and its bloc, at this time, despite some possible trade and economic opportunities costs for material reconstruction, comported best with the domestic transformation Mao and the CCP sought, to remake Chinese society in pro-peasant and pro-proletarian and statist ways, and marginalize and "other" those economic, political, and cultural elements most closely linked with the west.
Nevertheless, watching Stalin escalate his anti-Tito campaign from one of ideological ostracism and boycott, originally intended and assumed by Stalin to result in internal overthrow by Yugoslavs of Tito, to an actual conventional invasion by Socialist states against another Socialist state, would be difficult for Mao and other senior CCP leaders to watch and "process" mentally and ideologically. Socialist states are supposed to be more righteous than Capitalist Imperialist states. This contradiction/hypocrisy would only stand out more, the more a Soviet-Yugoslav war is protracted. Looking at OTL China's reaction to Soviet "auto-invasions" of its satellites might be instructive here. In 1956, at a height of positive Sino-Soviet relations, *after* the bonding experience of the Korean War, the Chinese supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary against "counter-revolutionaries" and helped echo Soviet justifications when discussing the matter with other Central and East European Communist Parties. But in 1968, admittedly after a horrible deterioration in Sino-Soviet relations across the board, China vigorously condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and claimed the Brezhnev Doctrine of a Soviet right to militarily protect the Socialist system was imperialist, despite the Dubcek regime having virtually nothing in common ideologically with Cultural Revolution China. And in the late 70s, China vigorously condemned the Communist Vietnamese invasion of Communist Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and the Soviet invasion of Communist Afghanistan.
So there is a chance that a Soviet-Yugoslav war is too much of a strain on Mao and China's sense of what intra-Socialist relations should be, and that it leads to an early Sino-Soviet split. The Truman Administration in OTL and its SecState Acheson, and the Clement Attlee Ministry in Britain were actually on the lookout for any possibility of a national interest based Sino-Soviet rift, any sign of a "Mao Tse-Tito", over-optimistically, and rather clumsily, as it turned out in OTL's circumstances, but a Soviet-Yugoslav war, especially one that was protracted, with Titoist resistance surviving, could open the door to this becoming a reality.
US intel and national security officials up to the highest level considered in OTL when South Korea was invaded that rather than merely being opportunistic, it was a Soviet test of western resolve to oppose local Soviet backed aggression. They at the time had been worried about possible Communist moves in places besides Korea as well, Iran, Yugoslavia, perhaps Berlin again, certainly Taiwan [though that they were willing accept with certain equanimity], Indochina. Yugoslavia was their number one area of concern for likely Soviet-led aggression just prior to the Korean War. After the US-UN intervention in Korea, and the gradual relaxation of military tension on the Yugoslav border, Americans who reflected back on the earlier theory speculated that the American and allied demonstration of resolve probably deterred Soviet/Communist action elsewhere, like in Yugoslavia, and obviously, with the explicit announcement of the "neutralization" of the Taiwan strait and beginning of 7th fleet patrols, the US could credit itself for having deterred Taiwan invasion.
Decades later, Hungarian Communist officials privy to plans and preparations related to Yugoslavia corroborated the high level of invasion preparations against Yugoslavia going into summer 1950, their being in high tension and suspense through the summer months as the Korean War began, and their wind down to psychological posturing over the next year.
If we accept this hypothesis of the North Korean invasion of the south, and then, the unexpected to Pyongyang, Moscow, and Beijing intervention of the USA, as an "interruption" to contemporary invasion plans of the PRC against Taiwan, and the USSR and European satellites against Yugoslavia, then we can find a relatively simple Point of Divergence to "interrupt the interruption".
That would be Kim Il-Sung being killed or maimed beyond ability to effectively work and lead in a train derailment accident while traveling to or from Moscow to meet Stalin in April 1950 to get approval for his invasion plan for South Korea. Kim Il-Sung always traveled by train, never by air, and Stalin gifted him a train, although I don't know if he rated this gift yet or would have ridden with other Soviet personnel and citizens. In any case, accidents, and I don't mean "accidents" can reasonably actually happen in the long Trans-Siberian journey, and can happen sufficiently quickly or far from rescue or recovery personnel that VIPs can die or get irreversible injuries. So let's say that happens, and, Stalin, working with his team for Far Eastern affairs and managing North Korean succession, judges the situation without Kim and with a new apex leadership of the DPRK will be too delicate for the next couple years to permit aggressive adventures from the north against the south.
That let's us proceed with the original proposed scenario.
What might either of these [a Yugoslavia or Taiwan invasion] result in, especially a Yugoslavia invasion, right in Europe, in August 1950.
Some have speculated that a Yugoslavia invasion, being in Europe, bringing Soviet power closer to western possessions and tempting western involvement, (and the west was already providing military aid to Tito's Yugoslavia by 1950) would have been hard, possibly impossible, to contain from spreading into WW3. A Yugoslav invasion/intervention crisis was the basis of a 1950s "Look" Magazine article titled "A Preview of the War We Do Not Want" which envisioned a US victory after a long, conventional WW3 where Europe is lost to the Soviets and then liberated from them.
I don't think a Soviet/East Bloc invasion would be impossible to keep localized/contained however. The superpowers managed it for Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Greece.
I think try as they might, the Yugoslavs would not be able to stop satellite and Soviet troops from occupying much, or most of their territory. But at the same time, since Tito and his ruling group would have his Army and militias behind him, capable of fighting both conventionally, and guerrilla style, this type of invasion would certainly be no Hungary 1956 nor a Czechoslovakia 1968 style walkover.
At the same time, it is not certain that Tito would be keeping control of a fully united partisan resistance, keeping the Soviets on the back foot the whole period of fighting and attempted occupation. The Soviets may well find both ideologically sincere, and opportunistic collaborators, and Soviet bloc forces may be able to saturate the country up to its western, southern, coastal borders to the point that western intel services and military forces have trouble infiltrating in support for Tito's Neo-Partisans from outside.
Western support for Titoist Neo-Partisans against Soviet occupiers would be likely as long as feasible, presaging, about 30 years ahead of OTL's schedule, western support of the Afghan Mujhadeen and the Nicaraguan Contras, and the *ahem*, embarrassed cough, Khmer Rouge (and accomplices), in the 1980s. That would raise tensions with the eastern bloc. It would be interesting if that motivated Stalin and the satellite states to revive support for cross-border guerrilla warfare in Greece.
A further question: How would a Soviet and satellite invasion of Yugoslavia in say, August 1950, affect Sino-Soviet, Stalin-Mao relations?
The data we have from OTL is that despite commonalities between Tito and Mao, both rising to power largely on their own, using indigenous, rural, peasant-based, guerrilla armies, with some Soviet assistance on the margins, rather than being installed as a byproduct of their countries being overrun by the Soviet Red Army and exiled Party leaders flying in from Moscow as occurred in countries like Poland, Romania, and East Germany, Mao in 1949 while proclaiming the PRC announced his policy of "leaning to one side", the Soviet side in the world struggle against imperialism, and voiced support for the COMINFORM-Stalinist line against Titoism like all the rulers and Party bosses of Eastern Europe. In early 1950 he signed the Sino-Soviet alliance.
This was despite some contrary signals by some Chinese interlocutors to Americans and other westerners that the different and more independent path Mao and the CCP took to power made the Chinese Communists wary of excess Soviet control, and interested in continued economic and other links with the west. These people presented themselves as representatives or as in the camp of smooth talking Zhou Enlai, who had long been the CCP's relatively suave and diplomatic representative to the outside world, thought of as a "reasonable guy" and a pragmatist. [Yet ironically, also respected in Soviet bloc circles, and the only foreigner invited to be a pallbearer at Stalin's funeral in 1953].
Mao and the CCP's early pro-Soviet, anti-American leaning probably had something to do with the history of past US material support to the Guomindang that extended into the Chinese Civil War. Also, despite the Guomindang being driven into exile and the US apparently accepting this defeat without escalating and reacting more harshly, there was always the chance it could change its mind and attack the new regime CCP while it was in its vulnerable consolidation phase, so closer, publicized ties and an identification with the USSR might now be good and serve to help *deter* US-Guomindang aggression. The Chinese Communist Party had through its history generally consistently put a positive spin on Soviet actions and policies to its internal membership, even at times when Soviet actions appeared on the surface to not comport with Chinese national interests, so in most ways, a continued and deepened pro-Soviet line would be easier to explain to the Party cadre than shifting to a deviationist, anti-Soviet, but pro-Communist line.
Probably, most of all, a foreign policy of cleanly breaking with the west and siding with the Soviet Union and its bloc, at this time, despite some possible trade and economic opportunities costs for material reconstruction, comported best with the domestic transformation Mao and the CCP sought, to remake Chinese society in pro-peasant and pro-proletarian and statist ways, and marginalize and "other" those economic, political, and cultural elements most closely linked with the west.
Nevertheless, watching Stalin escalate his anti-Tito campaign from one of ideological ostracism and boycott, originally intended and assumed by Stalin to result in internal overthrow by Yugoslavs of Tito, to an actual conventional invasion by Socialist states against another Socialist state, would be difficult for Mao and other senior CCP leaders to watch and "process" mentally and ideologically. Socialist states are supposed to be more righteous than Capitalist Imperialist states. This contradiction/hypocrisy would only stand out more, the more a Soviet-Yugoslav war is protracted. Looking at OTL China's reaction to Soviet "auto-invasions" of its satellites might be instructive here. In 1956, at a height of positive Sino-Soviet relations, *after* the bonding experience of the Korean War, the Chinese supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary against "counter-revolutionaries" and helped echo Soviet justifications when discussing the matter with other Central and East European Communist Parties. But in 1968, admittedly after a horrible deterioration in Sino-Soviet relations across the board, China vigorously condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and claimed the Brezhnev Doctrine of a Soviet right to militarily protect the Socialist system was imperialist, despite the Dubcek regime having virtually nothing in common ideologically with Cultural Revolution China. And in the late 70s, China vigorously condemned the Communist Vietnamese invasion of Communist Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and the Soviet invasion of Communist Afghanistan.
So there is a chance that a Soviet-Yugoslav war is too much of a strain on Mao and China's sense of what intra-Socialist relations should be, and that it leads to an early Sino-Soviet split. The Truman Administration in OTL and its SecState Acheson, and the Clement Attlee Ministry in Britain were actually on the lookout for any possibility of a national interest based Sino-Soviet rift, any sign of a "Mao Tse-Tito", over-optimistically, and rather clumsily, as it turned out in OTL's circumstances, but a Soviet-Yugoslav war, especially one that was protracted, with Titoist resistance surviving, could open the door to this becoming a reality.
