This post first appeared on Today in Alternate History.
However, the transition to the collective leadership group of Beria,
Malenkov, Viacheslav Molotov, and Kliment Voroshilov does not go
smoothly, and the quartet quickly becomes semi-paralyzed. While Soviet
forces in the field offer more resistance than the Germans had expected,
the situation behind the lines, from industrial and agricultural
production to the mobilization of new troops, slowly but unmistakably
begins to break down. Unable to sort out the lines of authority within
the party and government, a bold decision is ultimately made, one that
literally could only happen over Beria's dead body: to invite Leon
Trotsky, almost 62 and the hero behind the organization of the Red Army
during the Russian Civil War twenty years earlier, to return to the
Soviet Union and take charge of coordinating the Soviet war effort.
Trotsky also happened to be the survivor of at least two well-known
assassination attempts organized by Beria's espionage service, including
a machine gun attack by a famous Mexican muralist and his associates,
and an assault with an ice pick, of all things, by the "boyfriend" of
one of his American secretaries.
To make the offer to Trotsky, the Soviets transfer their Ambassador to
the United States of America, Konstantin Umansky, only 39 and not
directly implicated in the attempts on Trotsky's life, to Mexico City.
Escorted by Mexican police and officials, but only allowed into the Old
Man's presence with three aides and after being thoroughly searched,
Umansky lays out the shocking proposal to Trotsky, whose wife and
associates are incredulous. Nevertheless, Trotsky accepts the offer, as
long as he can bring a staff with him, the majority of whom will be
members of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, but he insists that Natalia
Sedova and his grandson remain in Mexico City. While preparing for the
trip home, Trotsky meets with both the outgoing Mexican President,
Lázaro Cárdenas, the man who had granted the exile and his family
sanctuary when the rest of the world's nations had closed their doors to
him, and his more conservative successor, Manuel Ávila Camacho, who is
frankly quite happy to see Trotsky go. Trotsky wants to recruit Mexican
volunteers to come to the Soviet Union to fight in its defense - an
idea which appalls the two former Mexican generals - but he assures the
devoutly Catholic Camacho that they may bring priests with them. He also offers him a piece of advice: if Mexico is drawn into the war, Camacho could use the possibility of sending
Mexican troops to the Soviet Union as a bargaining chip to get the US to
pay for not just industrial development in Mexico to support the
American war effort. A Mexican military build-up and the
participation in the war of Mexican troops on various fronts, which
would greatly benefit Mexico's standing in the international community, should result in profitable post-war connections for the
capital-strapped country.
To the Mexican and international press, Trotsky speaks effusively of
the Mexican people and asks for volunteers to join him in the USSR's
fight for survival. He also notes that if Mexico itself is forced to
join the anti-fascist fight, the geography of the country should allow
it to send expert fighters to deserts, jungles, and mountains alike, a
suggestion that is not particularly welcomed in Washington, D.C., and
positively infuriates Berlin. Trotsky also off-handedly (or so it
seems) remarks that, unlike those other terrains, Mexicans might have
trouble fighting in a Russian winter, a not-so-subtle challenge that has
the desired effects of immediately recruiting several hundred
volunteers and planting the seeds for a future Mexican Expeditionary
Force to join him on the Eastern Front.
Mexico is ultimately forced to declare war on the Axis Powers in May
1942 after the German sinking of two oil tankers, and Camacho plays the
United States like a fiddle, with Trotsky doing his bit by welcoming
Mexico to the fight in the press as if they are the feared Aztecs
warriors of old. Hundreds of American-owned manufacturing plants are
opened in northern Mexico, while dozens of camps are set up all over the
country, each and every one of them paid for by the USA, to train
Mexican soldiers to fight in the desert and mountains of North Africa,
on the jungle islands, sandy atolls and volcanic mountains of the
Pacific, and in the mountains, broad plains and cities of Europe. But
Trotsky also puts Camacho on the spot by formally and publicly
requesting a Mexican expeditionary force be dispatched to the USSR at
Mexico's earliest convenience. A half-million Mexican recruits and
conscripts will be outfitted, armed and offered basic training by the
United States before they are transported by sea across the Pacific on
Soviet freighters - safe from Japanese attack due to the peace between
the two countries, never mind the heated protests of the German
ambassador to Tokyo, but escorted by Mexican, American, and eventually
other Latin American navies to protect them from German U-boats of the
"Monsun Gruppe" operating out of Penang in Japanese-occupied British
Malaya - or by train through Alaska to Siberia, to join America's and
Mexico's Soviet ally, where most of them will get uniforms better suited
to the climate they'll be fighting in. Accompanying every transport of
Mexican troops to the Soviet Union, as with Trotsky on his own return,
will be shipments of foodstuffs from Mexico, Central and South America,
and the United States.
Mexico will eventually send roughly one million troops overseas, where they will fight in the following theaters:
• In the Western Mediterranean, approximately 20,000 Mexican troops
participate in Operation Torch, the liberation of French Morocco and
Algeria in November 1942. By March 1943, roughly 100,000 Mexicans are
involved in the Tunisian Campaign, and a year later, almost a quarter of
a million Mexicans are in Italy, before being pulled out to join the
August 1944 Operation Dragoon amphibious landings in Southern France.
But instead of continuing north with the French and Allied troops
speedily liberating the south of France, the Mexican army turns east and
successfully crosses the mountainous French/Italian border in early
September. Racing across Northern Italy, they are able to cut off the
retreat of the German forces on the Gothic ("Green") Line, which causes
the Germans to withdraw from the Po and Adige Lines all the way back to
their Alpine Line. The remaining, and encircled, German forces south of
the Alps surrender in early November 1944.
• In the Pacific, starting with 1943's Operation Cartwheel, roughly
50,000 Mexican troops will eventually participate in the "Island
Hopping" campaign that would bring the Allies almost to the shores of
Japan, itself, while another 100,000 troops will join in the liberation
of the Philippines (1944-45), much to the delight of their mostly Roman
Catholic co-religionists and fellow former subjects of Spain, and a bit
to the chagrin of the anti-clericalists still active in Mexican politics
and the Mexican military.
• On the Eastern Front, the first Mexican troops will take part in the
Battle of Stalingrad beginning in the summer of 1942, but the Mexicans
will gradually be moved north, gathering new arrivals and gaining
experience as they go. Under Supreme Allied Commander, Eastern Front,
General, and later Marshal, of the Soviet Union, Georgy Zhukov, and
fighting alongside Soviet and Polish troops - after nearly emptying out
the Gulag system, one of Trotsky's first initiatives upon his return to
the USSR was the reconstitution of Polish military forces from among the
Polish prisoners of war in the Soviet Union, whom he first fed with
some of the Mexican and American grain he'd brought with him - nearly a
half-a-million Mexicans will eventually assist in breaking the
German/Finn siege of Leningrad in January 1944, and then play a leading
role in the liberation of the Baltic States. The presence of such a
large body of non-Soviet Allied troops severely undermines German
efforts to recruit or conscript Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians
fearful of another Soviet occupation, as the Mexicans are seen as
liberating the Baltic peoples from both the Germans and the Russians
(and for the Lithuanians, from the Poles, for that matter). By April
1st, the Germans' "Narwa" front has collapsed, and German Army Group
North has been driven all the way back to East Prussia, in the process
compromising the northern flank of the already pressed Army Group
Centre.
Thanks to the breakthrough along the Baltic and the subsequent retreats
of both Army Groups North and Centre, the largest airborne assault in
history to that point will be launched on June 8, 1944, two days after
the D-Day landings on the beaches of Normandy. The operation was the
fruit of discussions begun almost 18 months earlier between Trotsky and
the military and religious leaders of the Mexican Expeditionary Force.
By late December 1942, the Allies had been made aware of the essentials
of the Holocaust going on in German-occupied Europe. Trotsky, though
himself fully estranged from his Jewish heritage, and his staff of
American and international Trotskyists, believe that something should be
done about the genocidal campaigns against the Jews and the Romani, and
to expose the Nazi plans for the enslavement and extermination of the
Slavic and other populations of Eastern Europe, but he also argues that
these revelations would be easier for the rest of the world to accept if
the main source for them is not the Soviet Union. Via the MEF,
stories, documents, photos and film are gradually released to the
world's press representatives in Moscow, including photos of train
tracks to the six Nazi extermination camps bombed by Mexican fliers, the
so-called Aztec Eagles. Plans are also made for an operation that
could only take place if the lines on the Eastern Front have reached a
point where re-supply and, hopefully, timely relief are possible. The
collapse of the German "Narwa" front in early 1944 makes Operation
Monterrey - named for a Mexican city founded by Sephardic "Crypto-Jews" -
possible.
On the first sunny day Soviet weather forecasters thought Auschwitz
would see after D-Day, 20,000 Mexican, Soviet, and Polish troops are
airdropped by parachute and glider in and around the Auschwitz
concentration camp. Included are veterans of the Soviets' January 1942
attempted airdrop of 10,000 troops at Vyaz'ma (barely 20% made it to
their drop zones before the operation was called off). They seize the
camp and dig in for a siege. While the Soviets keep them supplied
mainly through airdrops, brief landings take place every day so that the
camp's liberators can send captured documents and evidence, and their
own photographs, film footage and reports, back to Moscow. As planned,
the photos and film shot by the Allied troops are distributed throughout
the world and have a tremendous impact on public opinion, especially
throughout the Americas and the Catholic world. A shot of a Mexican
chaplain, in full Catholic vestments, covering his eyes while reciting
the Shema, is the cover photo on an issue of Life Magazine sold
internationally, and his recitation of the beginning of the El Malei
Rachamim is transmitted by radio and seen in newsreels worldwide,
delivering a body blow to public expressions of anti-semitism,
especially Catholic anti-semitism. The Germans withdraw troops from the
front to lay siege to the camp, but within weeks, a Soviet, Mexican, and
Polish relief force fights its way through. By then, the gist and some
of the details of "Generalplan Ost" has been worked out from documents
captured in the seizure of the camp and the testimony of some of its
command staff and medical personnel, and the Nazi enslavement, expulsion
and extermination plans for the Slavic and non-Slavic populations of
Eastern Europe outlined in the world's press.
Warsaw is liberated in September 1944, and the Mexicans and Poles will
join the Soviets in the final campaigns to liberate Germany itself.
Increasing numbers of German troops are transferred from the Western and
Alpine fronts and the Balkans to the East, precipitating breakthroughs
on those fronts so that, by Christmas 1944, Nazism is largely confined
to Germany and Austria. As Hitler survives attempts to assassinate and
overthrow him, Germany does not surrender until he takes his own life on
January 30, 1945, during the coordinated multi-front Allied winter
offensives, and with Soviet, Mexican, and Polish troops fighting in the
streets above his bunker in Berlin. The presence of hundreds of
thousands of Mexican and Polish troops, and several extreme and widely
publicized examples made early in the campaign on the initiative of
Trotsky and his lieutenants, help to limit the incidence of mass rape during the campaign, though it of course cannot be fully
eradicated.
After the war, Mexico will become one of the occupying Allied powers in
Europe. Trotsky has convinced the rest of the Soviet leadership to
allow the restoration of independence to the Baltic states as a
trade-off for an agreement with the other Allies that Germany, Austria,
Bulgaria (due to its Black Sea shoreline) and every European state
bordering the Soviet Union, from Finland and the Baltic states to
Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, will be forced to adopt a
constitution that sets strict limits on the size of its military and
bars its use beyond their own borders. The United States would impose a
similar constitutional provision on occupied Japan. The Soviets also
get a corridor linking Soviet Byelorussia to the Baltic via the ports of
Königsberg and Pillau, which do not freeze over in the winter, carved
out of Lithuania and the former East Prussia. The Allies further agree
to the Soviet plan to forcibly relocate East Prussia's German population
to post-war Germany, while allowing the formation of an independent
Jewish state there for those Jews who can't or won't return to their
former homes. This satisfies those American anti-semites who don't want
the US to accept Jewish refugees and takes advantage of a divided
British establishment torn between those wishing to appease the Arabs in
Palestine on the one hand and those wanting to establish a Jewish
Belfast in the Middle East to serve imperial interests on the other.
Mexico agrees to serve as the occupying power in the now-four Baltic
states, and is able to convince the Soviets to allow the constitution of
the new Jewish state to include greater expenditures on its military
than its neighbors, though the ban on foreign deployment is retained.
The Mexican government also opens its own borders wide for Europe's
displaced Jews, with no restriction on the number welcomed, the idea
being that Mexico would benefit from the economic, intellectual,
technical, and agricultural skills of these migrants. And it will.
With Trotsky still able to exercise some influence in the post-war
USSR, Soviet troops gradually withdraw from the occupied Eastern
European states, but they leave many of their arms behind in the hands
of Communist partisans (the Polish armed forces on the Eastern Front are
especially divided between communists and loyalists of the Polish
government-in-exile). While the northern half of the region - the four
Baltic states occupied by Mexico, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary -
disappoints Moscow, ultimately putting bourgeois republics back into
power, the whole of the Balkans goes red by 1950, with Communist
governments set up after civil wars in Romania, Bulgaria, Greece,
Albania, and Yugoslavia. War crimes trials of the Nazis and their
collaborators are held across Europe, with judges appointed by the USA,
USSR, UK, France, and Mexico (at Trotsky's urging) on every panel,
supplemented by local or regional judges approved by the occupying
powers, though they slow down as the civil wars in the Balkans bring the
capitalist/communist conflict into the foreground.
Again on Trotsky's initiative, the USSR proposes and ultimately wins a
permanent place on the Security Council of the new United Nations for
Mexico, on which it hopes Mexico will serve as an independent actor, one
not beholden to, and even sometimes hostile to, its northern neighbor.
This streak of independence will be strengthened by the benefits Mexico
accrues from its close economic and diplomatic ties with the four
Baltic states, Poland, Italy, the Philippines, and the Soviet Union over
the subsequent decades, said ties also serving to moderate the tendency
of Mexico's presidents to move further and further, by Mexican
standards, to the right and into the orbit of the United States.
Italian and Soviet-owned manufacturing plants will replace some of the
American ones moved back to the United States after the war, and by the
1960's, variations on the Fiat 124 can be found in the millions across
the USSR, the Balkans, Mexico, Central America, and Cuba.
Author's Note:
In reality, Leon Trotsky succumbed to the assassination attempt
involving the ice pick; Stalin was not, somewhat to his surprise,
arrested and executed after the launch of Operation
Barbarossa; and Mexico's contributions to the Allied war effort were
mainly diplomatic (it
marshaled support for the Allies among the nations of Latin America,
whose navies protected the Panama Canal and Allied shipping, especially
in the Caribbean and the South Atlantic),
industrial (roughly as described above), and agricultural (the Bracero
program provided for Mexican farmworkers to temporarily take the place
of American farmworkers north of the
border). On the military front, the Aztec Eagles did take part in the
liberation of the Philippines, a Brazilian Expeditionary Force fought in
Italy and may have actually taken the final surrender of the German
forces in that country, and it is estimated that anywhere from 50,000 to
250,000 Mexican nationals served in the armed forces of the United
States in return for a promise of American citizenship.November 22, 1945,
the United Nations Security Council meets for the first time in Church
House, Westminster, London. Its six permanent members are the United
States of America, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Provisional
Government of the French Republic, the Republic of China, and the United
Mexican States.
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