Finally, the British have arrived in World of Tanks. In a conventional World War II game it would obviously be the work of a deranged madman to include non-existent French tanks before the sturdy tea-boilers of the good old UK, so World of Tanks is clearly an alternate history game. I reckon the point of divergence in the Tankiverse was that Britain and France didn’t declare war on Germany when it invaded Poland, so the Phoney War was the shaky preservation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact until May 1940, at which point Hitler strikes east instead of west, launching World of Tanks with its German and Soviet vehicles. Shortly after, the United States enters the war; this is where things get a bit tricky. Japan aren’t involved yet, presumably waiting until World of Warplanes and World of Warships to stage Pearl Harbor having ruled out the possibility of building a really, really long bridge to kick things off with tanks, so that’s not the catalyst. With elections being a bit topical and all, then: George S. Patton gets bored, secures the Republican nomination for the 1940 election, sweeps to victory, and decides to invade Russia. Via Alaska. Entirely plausible (for very small values of “entirely”). That gets us to the EU/US launch of World of Tanks, with added American tanks.

In this world the UK, rather than the US, adopts an isolationist stance. The French are biding their time, still miffed because they didn’t get Alsace-Lorraine back after World War I for terribly good reasons that I can’t be bothered to make up, eventually launching an invasion to reclaim their territory with a bunch of stupid prototype tanks in Operation: Patch 7.1 during January 2012 (or July 1941 by the Tankiverse calendar). Fighting a two-front war, the Germans formulate a cunning plan: elite Brandenburgers capture a French submarine and torpedo a convoy of Darjeeling bound for Liverpool in June 1942, a date that will live in leaf-infusion infamy. This is too much for the Brits, who kick out Chamberlain or Attlee or some bloke like that, elect Churchill, and storm onto the Normandy beaches. Voila! Germany vs the USSR vs America vs France vs the UK. Watch out for a Kickstarter campaign soon for the tie-in novel, “A Bunch Of Countries Fight Each Other For Some Reason But Only With Tanks And This And That”.