In the Summer and Fall of 1944, in our timeline, Operation Tempest was a large-scale, planned, and executed attempt by the Polish Home Army, Polish Underground, and Polish Government-In-Exile to create a legitimate and renewed Polish free state in the wake of the weakening Germany army and advancing Red Army. Due to
A Rally in Warsaw to commemorate the Treaty of Warsaw.
several factors, such as being betrayed by the "Ally of our Allies" or the Red Army, failure to mobilize in certain cities as planned, and lack of Western support post-uprising, the short-lived Polish free state was crushed before its recognition, and it became one of the many states under the rule of the Soviet Union for the duration of the Cold War. However, what if the Poles were successful? What if Operation Tempest succeeded in establishing a legitimate Polish state that wasn't trampled by the Red Army, and instead supported by the Western Allies? What would this do to the Cold War and all Post-World War II history? This timeline seeks to explore those extensive changes to history.
Point of Divergence[]
The alignment of states within the world of Tempest Flare in the present day. Red are aligned with the Soviet Union, and Blue are aligned with the United States.
On January 2nd, 1944, Operation Tempest commenced to coincide with the crossing of the 2nd Belarusian Front past the pre-war Polish border. The Polish forces contacted commanders of the Red Army and began successful joint operations with them against the Wehrmacht. Together they retook Kowel (April 6) and Włodzimierz.
Stanisław Mikołajczyk, first Prime Minister of the Polish People's Republic.
Seeing the control of Polish territory to the Polish Home Army, the Government-In-Exile took its chances and began a mission across all diplomatic channels to get Western Allied support. With German defeat nigh, the Japanese considering defeat, and the lack of fear of a loss of support of Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference , the Western Allies chose to support the now legitimate Polish state, first by recognizing its rule over the territories it controlled by May 1st, 1944, but also by airlifting Allied trained Polish soldiers, supplies, and actual allied soldiers in an invasion of German occupied Poland, called Operation: Allied Storm. Due to this type of support, the Soviet forces were more or less forced to cooperate with the Polish Home Army, rather than fight against them for total control of Poland. This variety of factors, elaborated on in other pages, leads to the creation of a new world, one not entirely drastically different from our own, but nonetheless alien to ourselves. This Tempest Flare, this sudden burst of violent windstorm, changes the course of modern history and the Cold War, forever.