It's been an unusual game in a few ways. Probably the first oddity was that when Germany declared the Anschluss, Austria decided to fight back as Hungary had guaranteed Austria's independence. The Germans won, but this set the precedent of anti-appeasement. Six months later when Germany demanded the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, all three of the Czech guarantors stood by their ally - France, Britain, and Romania (whom I was playing). Italy, meanwhile, sided with Germany earlier than they did historically.
So it was that France and Italy fought border battles, while the RAF reinforced Czech and Romanian airspace. The Czechs held firm for the most part, while Romania liberated Hungary and most of Austria. By this point, the Germans had penetrated the northeasternmost parts of the Sudentenland, and the Romanian advance stalled. For a month or so, it looked like perhaps Allied momentum had stalled out.
But all was not as it seemed, and a group of Wehrmacht officers attempted a coup against the Nazi leadership and their unsuccessful war, which had already resulted in Vienna falling to Romania. This coup did take out the highest leadership, but resulted in a civil war in Germany, with Hermann Goring as the new leader of the Reich. Still, it proved instrumental in speeding up an Allied victory, and in less than a year the war was over, with Konrad Adenauer as the Chancellor of a new German Republic, and Italy forced to institute a republic, hand over their colonies to France, Romania, and Ethiopia, and let the Romanians occupy their southern lands until stability could be fully demonstrated.
In the east, meanwhile, Japan managed to bungle into fighting a war with both the Soviet Union and China. China caved after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, giving Japan the lands around Beijing. Japan thus remained at peace with Nationalist China, but decided to declare war on Communist China. Whether as a partial compensation to the Nationalists, or purely out of spite, this resulted in the Soviet Union declaring war on Japan as they soon admitted Communist China to the Comintern.
At first, Japan seemed to be winning in the east, but Imperial leadership was not satisfied with northeastern China, and believed they could still conquer all of China. Thus they declared war on China as well. This quickly proved to be a mistake, with China advancing almost immediately, and the full force of the Red Army arriving in the eastern provinces within a month of the start of the Sino-Japanese war. The Kwantung Army was utterly destroyed, and Korea became Soviet; if it weren't for the Imperial Japanese Navy, the home islands would have been invaded, too. But the Japanese had at least occupied Vladivostok and destroyed the Soviet Eastern Fleet before they got overwhelmed.
So, flush with victory, the Soviets turned west, forging claims on Poland and Romania; the latter was in the Allies, and the Poles in alliance with the Baltic states. The Soviets decided to strike at Poland first, declaring war on June 22, 1940. Romania knew, of course, that the Poles would inevitably be conquered, but Polish and Romanian leadership decided to play coy, and while privately invoking their treaty of mutual support, publicly did not invoke the treaty and instead stated Romania would remain a neutral bridgehead. This was a ruse, however, meant to buy time for the Romanian Army to finish mobilization.
The Soviets bit, moving their troops on the Romanian border to help in Poland, and for four weeks, the Soviets and Poles fought, with the Poles losing some ground in the south but not collapsing. Then, the Romanians announced a declaration of war on the Soviet Union, in support of Poland, and bringing in Germany, France, Czechoslovakia, and the United Kingdom as allies. Without waiting for the western allies to show up, Romania sprung across the Soviet border, taking the Russian border forts without resistance, and advancing to the Southern Bug River before the Soviets could react.
The Soviets would react, but could never fully stop the Western momentum. Soviet T-26 tanks proved outdated against Romanian and Polish models, and the Red Army, while impressive against an overwhelmed Japan, had not fully recovered from Stalin's purges. The Romanian Army pushed forward into November, occupying critical steel production facilities in Orel, Kursk, Belgorod, and Kharkov before the winter set in. This would prove to be a critical blow over time, as without these sources of steel, the Soviets could not adequately resupply their armies over the long term.
Over the next six months, the Poles and the Latvians increasingly made progress in the north. Latvia captured Leningrad, and a few months later Poland conquered Moscow. Germany had launched a successful amphibious invasion of Crimea, and France followed up with a successful landing near Abkhazia.
However, all was not well in the west, as Italy, still on probation, showed that a democratic system did not guarantee the peace by declaring war on Albania. King Zog defied Italian demands to step down, and the UK and Germany honored their guarantees of Albania. This would draw many troops away from the Soviet front, granting the increasingly undersupplied Red Army a temporary reprieve, especially from French, German, and British advances. Italian would occupy the territories Romania controlled in southern Italy, and even take Vienna while Western forces were in Soviet lands, but the Czechs would rebuff them at the border, and soon the Italians would be in retreat.
The Eastern front would not remain quiet, however. Poland and Latvia continued to occupy the north, and Romania secured lend-lease aid from Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey, allowing the Romanian army to return to fully-equipped status while the Soviets slipped to not much greater than half strength. Combined with an increasingly large Romanian motorized infantry corps - and copious amounts of Allied oil - this allowed the southern Allied front to resume as well, taking Tambov, the Stalingrad, and the Astrakhan.
By late summer of 1941, Italy had surrendered for a second time, and it was increasingly clear the Soviets could not put up an effective resistance, even against Latvia, and that in the east Japan was once more on the move, having retaken Korea. So it was that on October 7, 1941, the Soviet Union, operating from their temporary capital of Murmansk, surrendered to Poland, creating the map seen at the beginning of this post.
The game isn't over yet; Nationalist China continues the Comintern struggle against the rest of the Old World. How long it will take for them to be defeated is unknown, as is how much of the Polish Army will march all the way to China. And of course, a great question is what the world will look like after the eventual peace treaty. I'm rooting for Latvia to keep a presence on the White Sea, and the Poles to establish a Pacific base, but less drastic changes are more likely to carry the day.
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