Die Wacht Am Rhein
The events of late 1949 and early 1950 created pandemonium throughout the surviving members of the European Alliance. Germany, Scandinavia and Holland had fallen. Central Europe had had to be abandoned and Turkish forces had been unable to liberate Ankara, let alone launch an attack into Eastern Europe. The Soviets controlled the entire continental coastline from the tip of northern Norway to Amsterdam, and Soviet bombers were launching increasing attacks on European cities. The first air raid on Paris occured on December 19th, followed two weeks later by one on London. Italy was in chaos, troops defending the Rhine were under-equipped, and while the colonies and the United States continued to dispatch convoys of supplies, European commanders feared that the Red Army would launch fresh assaults before enough supplies and troops could arrive to bolster the Alliance. On January 3rd 1950, the European Council convened an intercontinental meeting at Sandringham House, London, to discuss the Alliance's position. Although the European Defence Agency was aware of the exhausted state of Russian forces, no amount of optimistic reports could conceal the fact that veteran Soviet armies were sweeping through Italy and the Low Countries, and were poised to assault France. After two days of debate, Grand Marshal Gunther von Esling, Chairman of the Council of Ministers, declared a State of General Emergency and enacted the Emergency Contingency Clause of the European Charter. With the support of political and military leaders from across the continent, Esling succeeded in carrying the clause through an emergency session of the European Parliament, which, with great controversy, granted Esling emergency executive powers to appoint a military junta for the duration of the emergency. The London Protocols, as they came to be known, grouped the economic, political, and military governances of the Alliance under the direct control of the European Council and the Chairman.
While the European Alliance rallied together in anticipation of the expected Soviet attack across the Rhine, the Russians faced increasing problems of their own. Intoxicated by the Red Army's spell of victories in Europe, Stalin demanded that his commanders continue their assault across the Rhine, denying the Europeans a chance to regroup. The state of the Red Army in late 1949, though, was far from ideal. The Soviets' rapid advance into Europe had created immense logistical difficulties, and fighting on several fronts had weakened front-line units across Europe. In addition to these difficulties, front-line units faced additional difficulties as troops were stripped from combat forces to provide garrisons and occupation forces across conquered regions. In contrast to Stalin's belief that the Europeans on the Rhine could easily be defeated as they had been in Eastern and Central Europe, leading Soviet generals, concerned at the exhausted and depleted state of their forces, feared that an assault across the Rhine could shatter the exhausted Russian armies resting in western Germany. Fearing that an attack into France would turn the tide of the war against the USSR, conspiratorial commanders accelerated their plots to remove Stalin. The NKVD, though, uncovered the plot for the "Generals' Coup", and on Christmas Day 1949, Stalin and Field Marshal Pyotr Gradenko authorised the execution of the plotters, depriving the Red Army of its best commanders. As the Europeans consolidated their military potential under the London Protocols and fortified the Maginot Line, the Soviets' potential began to rapidly dissipate as they prepared to cross the Rhine.
German artillery opens fire on Russian forces at Leipzig
The Maginot Line, an immense belt of fortifications built by France in the 1930's as insurance against a repetition of the First World War, formed the backbone of the Alliance's new defence lines in eastern France. As France and Germany had grown closer together during the 1930s and 1940s, the fortresses and defences of the Line had suffered from budget cuts and lack of maintenance, but the Line still constituted a formidable obstacle to invaders. Even before the Allied armies in Germany had begun their fighting retreat westwards in 1949, the Alliance had began to reinforce the Line, and as European troops rested and resupplied behind the cover of the Line's fortresses, European defences strengthened. Belgium, a potential "back door" for enemies to simply bypass the Line, was heavily defended by Belgian, Dutch, British, and Luxembourgundian armies. While Italy had been abandoned, the threat of a Soviet invasion of southern France was negated by the deployment of tens of thousands of soldiers from European territories in North and West Africa and the Caribbean. Along the Maginot Line itself, troops from across the free and the conquered members of the Alliance, from colonies and dominions across the world, along with the first units of General Dwight Eisenhower's American Expeditionary Force, garrisoned the fortresses of the Line. In Germany, the Red Army's new commanders faced a significant difficulty. Assaulting the Maginot Line itself would undoubtedly result in extremely high casualty rates and the attackers could not be guaranteed to break through. Trying to bypass the Line by attacking into Belgium, Switzerland (which had recently joined the Alliance) or southern France would strip the German front of troops and allow the Europeans to counter-attack into the Rhineland. The Red Air Force's strategic bombing campaign against London, Paris, and Brussels, while devastating, was failing in its attempt to frighten the Alliance's strongest members into sueing for peace. Stalin's repeated demands for a final push to eliminate Allied resistance in Europe, particularly before sufficient American and colonial soldiers arrived in Europe to pose a severe threat, placed immense pressure on Soviet commanders to attack. With few realistic options available, Marshal Georgy Khukov ordered, in February 1950, a full frontal assault directly at the Maginot Line.
Soviet control of the North Sea permitted the USSR to conduct a lightning invasion of the United Kingdom
In other theatres of combat, the Allies faced severe threats. The Alliance's only victory to date was occuring in Turkey, where a joint European Army composed of Turkish, Greek, Albanian, Cypriot, and Egyptian units, reinforced by a Canadian-American Expeditionary Force, had succeeded in pushing Soviet forces out of Ankara and northwards through the Pontic Mountains, towards the Black Sea. Allied shipping had remained in control of the Dardanelles, and although a few Soviet submarines were able to slip through the Straits of Marmara and into the Mediterranean Sea, Allied naval forces were able to prevent Russian surface battleships from breaking out through Istanbul. The primary city of Turkey had suffered severe damage from Russian bombing runs, but as the situation in Western Europe escalated, Istanbul suffered fewer and fewer air raids as the Red Air Force redeployed bombers to target Western European cities, freeing Turkey from air raids by late 1949. Frequent attacks by Turkish guerillas on Russian supply lines forced the Soviet army in Turkey to retreat in disorder back to the coastal city of Samsun, and although a large number of Russian troops were evacuated from the city back across the Black Sea, the majority of the force became trapped in the city and were captured by Allied forces. While the liberation of Turkey gave the Alliance a significant propaganda victory and a great boost to morale, the worsening situation on other fronts marred the Turkish victory. On the Scandinavian front, the Allies' loss of Copenhagen had led to serious repercussions. The naval battle around the Danish capital had been disastrous for the Allied navy, with forty-three Alliance warships sunk or disabled by Soviet bombers, artillery, and submarines, a catastrophe which forced remaining Allied vessels to withdraw into the North Sea and allowed the Soviet Baltic Fleet to break out of the Baltic Sea, despite the Allies' placement of a submarine screen to guard the entrance to the Baltic. With surviving Allied vessels sheltering in harbour, the Red Navy gained a temporary dominance over the North Sea. As the Allied submarine screen engaged with a fleet of Soviet submersibles designed purely to distract Allied naval commanders, the Red Navy took advantage of the situation to shuttle an amphibious landing force across the North Sea as a prelude to an invasion of the United Kingdom. Transport vessels of the Red Navy, carrying nearly 23,000 men, 98 artillery pieces, and 424 tanks, departed from Oslo, Norway, and travelled across the North Sea on January 14th-16th. Under the cover of a bombardment by Soviet surface vessels, the expeditionary force landed at Sunderland, on the north-east coast of Great Britain, on January 17th. British defences in the region were rapidly overrun, and Soviet ground forces, resupplied by shipping convoys and supported by Russian strategic bombers based in Norway and Germany, quickly seized Newcastle and while a third of the invasion force struck across England towards the city of Carlisle, aiming to cut the country in two, the bulk of the army turned south towards a joint British, Irish, Canadian, and Nigerian force being hurriedly assembled outside Leeds.
Eager to scare European colonies out of the war, the USSR's Strategic Ballistic Missile Command, a recently-formed experimental unit within the Red Army, conceived a strategy to launch long-range missiles at foreign cities, in the hope of frightening British and French dominions into withdrawing their support for the European Alliance. Prior to the war, Soviet rocket technology had lagged behind ballistics research being conducted in Europe, where rocket theories and even prototypes were studied and constructed by the Berlin-based Society for Interplanetary Exploration, a creation of the 1920's. The Soviet capture of Berlin gave developers at Moscow University much-needed research and information on long-range ballistics, and by November 1949, the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the newly-formed Strategic Ballistic Missile Command were conducting successful tests from the Tyura-Tam facility in Kazakhstan. By February 1950, long-range testing had resulted in the construction of several dozen intercontinental-grade Semyorka missiles. Based along the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk at the eastern tip of the USSR, these missiles were launched on February 16th at Vancouver, Canada, and Seattle, USA. Some 46 rockets were launched, but only 32 reached North America, and of these, only 11 managed to land in urban areas, armed only with conventional high-explosive warheads. Despite this, though, the "February Scare" did have a significant impact upon Canada and the United States, but rather than frightening colonies and the United States into withdrawing from the war, the attack galvanised support for the European Alliance. Following the missile attack, Canada, the British Empire, and the United States co-ordinated a worldwide response from the temporary League of Nations headquarters in New York City, aligning several countries against the USSR. In addition, the United States manipulated the Monroe Doctrine to bring several South American countries onto the side of the Alliance, including Brazil, Chile, and Argentina.
"Ils ne passeront pas!"
London, de facto capital of the European Alliance and host city for conquered member states' governments-in-exile, at the height of the war
As events unfolded in Turkey, northern England, and the Pacific Northwest, the main theatre of conflict, at the Maginot Line, erupted in February 1950 as the Red Army launched a full frontal assault against European defence lines in eastern France. Initially, the Alliance was able to repel Soviet attacks, as the French fortresses had been heavily reinforced, but Russian commanders quickly adapted new tactics to overcome the fortifications. Using fast, lightly-armoured tank units followed closely by mechanized infantry, commanders were able to strike quickly at front-line defences and disable fortifications, while heavier tank units nearby prevented Allied troops from making meaningful counterattacks. Constant bombardments from heavy artillery and mobile rocket units - which the builders of the Maginot Line had never anticipated - reduced many fortresses to rubble and gradually began to push the Allies back. European counterattacks resulted in areas of the line being reduced to close-quarters fighting, with battles reminiscent of the First World War. With both sides desperate to control the Maginot Line, casualty rates soared and both armies attempted to break the deadlock by any means. The Soviet Iron Curtain project, used to great effect in the Copenhagen campaign, was again utilised on shock units of Mammoth tanks, which were able to smash through European defences and open funnels for Soviet troops to break through into the rear of Allied defences. European Bomber Command, an amalgamation of the British Royal Air Force, the French Armee de l'Air, and the surviving planes of Germany's recently-formed Luftwaffe, turned to battlefield carpet-bombing, including the use of aerial incendiaries, high explosives, and even non-lethal nerve gas, in an effort to hold Russian forces back while American and African reinforcements raced from French ports to the front lines. As fighting in the Vosges Mountains, eastern Belgium, and Luxembourg bogged down into conditions similar to 1916, and the Allied death toll mounted, commanders at European Defence Headquarters developed a strategy to engage in a false retreat, luring the Russians into making a rush for Paris, and exposing their weakened forces to Allied counterattacks on the plains of eastern France. General Nikos Stavros, Von Esling's Greek Second-in-Command, began evacuating units slowly westwards into the Champagne and Picardy regions, as the first stage of tempting the Russians into making a rapid and badly-planned assault.
Soviet commanders on the front lines were aware of the Allies' intentions, and had no intention of pursuing the Allies and stumbling into another line of fresh European defences until Russian units, already nearing breaking-point, had had a chance to rest and resupply in the Vosges Mountains. As was often the case with the Red Army, though, political considerations placed immense pressure on front-line commanders to continue the attack. Stalin would not accept a period of respite when Soviet soldiers were on the brink of seizing Paris, and many generals both on and behind the front lines urged for a final effort to sweep the equally exhausted Allies aside, seize Paris, and force the surviving members of the European Alliance to sue for peace before too many American troops arrived to bolster European ranks. By June 1950, weary Russian forces had captured Belgium and most of north-east France, but instead of being granted a much-needed respite, were directed to pursue the retreating Europeans. With fewer Allied units protecting the now-depleted Maginot Line, the pressure of a fresh Russian assault drove the remaining European defenders reeling westwards in panicked retreat, abandoning equipment and scattering as Russian tanks began to sweep the flat plains of Picardy. As European, American, Canadian, Australian, African, and Caribbean troops rallied to create improvised defence lines along the River Meuse, the Soviets turned to an airborne strategy to force a European surrender by obliterating British and French cities.
Using captured airfields in Holland, Germany, and Belgium, the Red Air Force began an immense strategic bombing campaign against British cities from Dover to Birmingham, focusing primarily on central London. Britain had been experiencing air raids from late 1949, but the intensity of airborne attacks in the summer of 1950 surpassed previous raids. General Rykov, Commander-in-Chief of the Red Air Force, redirected bombers from the siege of Istanbul (by now a lost cause for the Soviets) and assembled an air fleet of over two thousand bombers, with the ability to maintain twenty-four hour raids on British cities, and Paris, for weeks at a time. The bombing campaign included the use of chlorine gas and sarin, captured from German laboratories. At the height of the bombing campaign, Marshal Gradenko suggested the deployment of a force of the USSR's elite paratroopers - the VDV - over London to seize European Defence Headquarters and eliminate as many of the Alliance's commanders as possible. In late July 1950, the 106th VDV Guards was airdropped over London amidst high-explosive bombs and gas canisters. The paratroopers captured European Defence Headquarters in Westminster and succeeded in killing several key European military leaders, including the Commander-in-Chief of the European Navy, High Chief Admiral Karl Doenitz. Grand Marshal Von Esling, though, was in Paris co-ordinating Allied operations on France, and so escaped the assault. While British security forces combatted the paratroopers, the Red Air Force launched a sequence of heavy bombing raids on Manchester, which had become swollen with refugees escaping the fighting in Northumberland and Yorkshire and in an air raid on August 1st, a firestorm swept the crowded city, killing several thousand civilians. Fighting between the Soviet invasion force and the Allies in Yorkshire gradually turned against the Russians as the new Oceanic Fleet of the Alliance, based at Scapa Flow, sallied into the North Sea to strike against Russian supply convoys. In early August, the Allied army massed outside Leeds secured a decisive victory over the invasion force at the Battle of Harrogate, and within a week, the invasion force had retreated to Newcastle, where the Red Navy mounted an evacuation, freeing the United Kingdom of invaders by August 22nd.
As the Russians evacuated Northumberland, Soviet units in France continued their advance on Paris, breaking through the Meuse defence lines and reaching the outskirts of the city. By this point, though, Russian units had indeed over-stretched themselves, and the thinly-stretched ground forces came under immediate attack by Allied units. After prolonged negotiations, General Francisco Franco had brought Spain into the European Alliance as a full member, and dispatched two forces of Spanish troops; one to reinforce Allied troops pushing the Soviets back into Italy; and one consisting of a mechanized brigade which struck into Soviet supply lines near Rheims. Assailed by fresh units, the Russians retreated eastwards, first to Compiegne, then to Sedan. At the same time, the Europeans opened a new front as the Alliance Army in Turkey invaded Soviet-held Romania.
Armaggedon
Downtown Manhattan in flames following an air raid by Tupolev intercontinental bombers
As Moscow concentrated on events in Western and Southern Europe, the USSR itself became a theatre of conflict, as provincial disgruntlement and ethnic nationalism flared into armed rebellion against the Soviet government. In Kazakhstan, local resistance movements had recently begun to receive shipments of armaments from British India, and as the Kremlin scoured Kazakhstan for supplies and conscripts, resistance movements began a guerilla campaign against the small military garrison in the region. In Mongolia, local rebels enjoyed widespread support from a population unhappy at being ruled from Moscow, in addition to receiving international sympathy and support from the League of Nations, following Mongolia's annexation to the USSR years previously. The Red Army's never-ceasing demand for troops to fight the European Alliance, and to garrison conquered territories in the west, had left domestic security forces guarding discontented areas of the USSR at an all-time low. Conventional military forces were too thinly-spread and not properly equipped to fight a counter-guerrilla campaign, and while the rebellions in Kazakhstan and Mongolia were not in themselves serious threats to the USSR, the Kremlin feared that unless they were seen to be crushed swiftly and harshly, and an example made of them, their influence would spread to other areas of the overstretched Soviet empire - to the starving Ukrainians, the endlessly turbulent Chechnyan regions, and conquered European territories, where anti-occupation demonstrations in Helsinki, Nuremberg, and Warsaw had already had to be crushed with military force. Concerned that the Kazakhs and Mongolians had to be crushed swiftly, Stalin turned to the ongoing Soviet Atomic Bomb Project.
Research into atomic technology had been progressing in Europe and the USSR since the early 1930's, but due to the constraints of available technology, funding, and concerns over whether atomic physics could ever be more than a purely theoretical science, practical applications had not been pursued. Increasing research into nuclear fission in the late 1930's, though, had paved the way for physicists to pursue atomic technology as a possibly viable area of applied science. Pioneered by Yakov Frenkel and Georgii Flerov, the Soviet Academy of Sciences began serious research into the possibilities of harnessing atomic power for military purposes. In Europe, at the same time, public research by the leading minds of the day - German Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg, the Italian particle theorist Enrico Fermi, Nobel Prize-winning British researcher George Paget Thomson, the celebrated quantum specialist Albert Einstein, and the world's leading nuclear theorist, Danish professor Niels Bohr - worked to advance the science of atomic theory. Correspondence, publications in scienctific journals, and increasing numbers of academic papers published across Europe in the early 1940's, greatly increased the scientific community's understanding of fusion and fission nuclear theory, and the possibility of constructing atomic devices for peaceful or military purposes gradually became recognised as an inevitable reality. As Europe and the USSR drew into increasingly hostile blocs in the mid 1940's, though, public correspondence and publication on nuclear theory came under increasing suppression as the European Defence Agency censored such publications, fearful that the Soviet Union could be working to develop nuclear technology and could utilise European publications to advance their work. When war broke out in 1946, both the European Alliance and the Soviet Union grew increasingly suspicious of each others' nuclear intentions. The Soviet advance through Europe pressured the Alliance to develop atomic weaponry, and under the auspices of the EDA, the Alliance established the MAUD Committee, an ultra-secret project based in the United Kingdom and drawing on the work of Europe's leading physicists to develop an atomic bomb. Simultaneously in the USSR, the NKVD had established a project involving the country's top theoretical physicists to develop a Russian bomb. Following NKVD reports that from 1949, no papers on atomic theory had been published in European journals, and that many of Europe's leading scientists were mysteriously not publishing any work at all, it became apparent that the European Alliance was working on a bomb, and so research on a Russian counterpart accelerated. Co-ordinated by Igor Kurchatov, the USSR's leading physicist and Professor of Physics at the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute, who had built the Soviet Union's first particle accelerator and was already co-ordinating work on the ultra-secret Iron Curtain and Mammoth tank armour projects, the Soviet atomic bomb project advanced rapidly and was aided by the efforts of NKVD spies and informants who had managed to infiltrate the European Alliance's MAUD project and passed top-secret research work back to the USSR. At the same time, the United States, also suspicious at the lack of published work in Europe, established its own bomb project under Robert Oppenheimer, which lagged considerably behind development work in Europe and Russia but gradually brought the United States closer to developing a nuclear weapon. By 1950, both the Soviet Union and the European Alliance were close to developing a working atomic bomb. The MAUD Committee, though, hesitated to begin construction on such a device, as some members raised concerns that a weapon of such power could potentially have the power to crack the planet's crust or even ignite the atmosphere, and even as the Red Army rolled across Europe, MAUD adopted a stance of not developing an atomic bomb based on a principle which would dominate European nuclear strategy for decades to come - "Better Red than Dead".
Stalin's destruction of Ashkhabad and Ulaanbaatar propelled the world into the atomic age and signalled the beginning of the downfall of the Soviet Union
Kurchatov's team, though, faced immense political and personal pressure to develop a weapon. While Stalin was surprisingly generous to the scientists, encouraging Kurchatov to ask for whatever he wanted and repeatedly ordering the NKVD to leave the scientists in peace to continue their work, Nadia's operatives were always on hand to threaten scientists and their families with imprisonment and torture as incentives to continue research and development on the bomb. By March 1950, the project had managed to construct a small working device, and on March 16th 1950, the world entered a new era as the USSR detonated mankind's first atomic bomb, "First Lightning", at Semipalatinsk. With the rebellions in Kazakhstan and Mongolia gradually growing, and as the League of Nations increased global support for the Mongolian people, Stalin determined to deploy atomic weaponry to crush the rebels. On September 19th 1950, the Red Air Force dropped the 22-kiloton atomic bomb RDS-2 on the Kazakh city Ashkhabad. Two days later, a bomber dropped a similar device, RDS-3 on the Mongolian capital city Ulaanbaatar.
Stalin publicly announced the atomic bombings of Ashkhabad and Ulaanbaatar a few hours after the bomb was dropped on Ulaanbaatar. His announcement, accompanied with photographs intended to frighten rebels and the Europeans into surrender, was confirmed by EDA and CIA operatives within a few days. The bombings, far from succeeding in cowing opposition in the USSR, immensely damaged the Soviet Union's position. Rebel guerilla attacks in fact grew more widespread as local freedom fighters sought vengeance. The European Alliance accelerated the work of the MAUD Committee and shared research with the United States' Manhattan Project as both Europe and America raced to close the "atomic gap" with Russia. At a summit meeting of the League of Nations in its new headquarters in New York City, international outrage at Stalin's methods prompted many neutral nations to formally side with the European-American alliance. The Empire of Japan, which had previously remained neutral and concentrated on developing its Manchurian conquests, declared war upon the Soviet Union and opened a second front by invading Soviet Mongolia from Manchuria.
In the days following Ulaanbataar, the European Alliance stepped up its own atomic project, which had previously stalled due to humanitarian concerns. Fears that Stalin would deploy atomic weapons against Allied forces in Europe and Japan encouraged the Maud Committee in Europe to accelerate development on their own bomb. Despite the NKVD's best efforts, the sheer scale of the Soviet Atomic Project prevented Nadia's security services from implementing the necessary security in all areas, and a trickle of information flowed from test sites to European intelligence operatives working in the USSR. Access to this information convinced the members of Maud that the Soviet Union was in possession of no more than one or two atomic bombs following Ulaanbataar, and encouraged European scientists to hurry their efforts and close the "atomic gap" before the Soviets could build more bombs. Simultaneously, Soviet spies at Maud's development sites in Birmingham and Cambridge relayed information back to the USSR, encouraging the NKVD to pressure Kurchatov's team into building more bombs to maintain the Soviet Union's lead in atomic weaponry. The "Atomic Race" soon spread to the United States, where theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer was heading an elite team working on the "Manhattan Project", the United States' own atomic project. The Soviet Union had already deployed atomic weapons and the European Union was fast catching up, and although the United States began lagging far behing in atomic research, the superior resources and technology available to the USA - and suspected CIA espionage on the work of the Maud Committee - allowed Oppenheimer's team to rapidly catch up. On December 2nd 1950, the European Alliance detonated its first atomic bomb, "Phoenix", in southern Algeria. Three months later, the Manhattan Project test-fired the "Trinity" device in New Mexico. Within only seven months of the attacks on Ashkhabad and Ulaanbaatar, three world powers had succeeded in splitting the atom.
Stalin's atomic attacks bombings ultimately failed to achieve their desired effect of frightening the European Alliance into surrender. While the atomic attacks had greatly unsettled the Alliance, the Red Army in Europe continued to face strong resistance as increasing numbers of fresh American troops, with their inexhaustible supplies of weapons, vehicles, and war materials, arrived to reinforce and resupply the European armies. Exhausted from years of campaigning across Europe, far from supply depots and with overstretched supply lines under constant attack by partisans, Soviet forces began an eastwards withdrawal into Germany in October 1950. Reinforced with fresh American troops, American equipment, and funded by American loans, the armies of the European Alliance pursued Soviet forces across the Vosges mountains and the River Rhine, freeing Western Europe of Russian forces.
Although the three major combatants in the war had all developed atomic weapons, both the Allies and the Soviets were afraid to use them. Neither side had sufficient reliable information on the state of their enemy's atomic arsenal, and feared that the enemy could reply with far more A-bombs than them. The European Alliance refused absolutely to consider using atomic bombs on European territory, while Oppenheimer and his team vehemently opposed the use of such devices by the United States. Humanitarian principles and the fear of enemy atomic superiority discouraged the three nations from deploying their atomic devices, forcing their armies to continue the struggle on the ground.
July 15th, 2008, 09:47 PM
Anyway, I personally think that you should start with the organizations after you do the last bit, or whatever's the most extensive. Oh, and some pictures aren't appearing, anything you can do about that?
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