In fact, there are controversial points here - in the GDR, the birth rate was higher than in FRG (at least in the 80s).
Last edited:
The Great Crusade (Reds! Part 3)
- Thread starter Aelita
- Start date
Operation Siegfried (Spring 1945)
Excerpts from Raisa Twerski, Forging Victory: The European Theatre in its Last Year (Metropolis: RUM Publishing, 1995)
The Soviet and American armies, joined at the hip as components of the Red Army of the Communist International, underwent their final wartime reorganization in the winter of 1944/45. As detailed in the 1945 edition of the FM-100 series, these reforms codified a doctrine that had been developed through five years of bloody experience.
Chiefly authored by General of the Army Georgii Samoilovich Isserman, the reforms addressed changes in the material reality faced by revolutionary forces. First, the question of manpower: the war effort had demanded immense sacrifices of life above and beyond the mass murder inflicted by Nazi occupation forces in the Soviet Union. It was imperative to accomplish more with fewer soldiers.
Of equal importance was the shift from defense to offense. The Red Army had spent the previous five years defending the territory and population of the Soviet Union, and liberating them from occupation. In the final phase of the war, the Red Army would be not only invading the territories of other nations that had been victims to the Nazis on a mission of liberation, it would also have to take the fight into Germany itself.
The shifting dispositions were not totally negative. The Red Army had endured its baptism by fire, and now had a veteran army led by experienced officers and NCOs. Earlier command and control kludges, such as the many “brigade bucket” tank and mechanised corps, could be rationalised now.
There had also been a major shift in the balance of material forces during 1944. The Southern Cone Theater had been closed. The German u-boat fleet had been neutralized, and the threat of an Italian or Fascist French naval breakout had been ended. The production of war materiel in both the Soviet Union and the UASR was reaching its absolute peak.
[...]
General Order No. 345 abolished the tank and mechanised corps. These non-standardised formations had provided the Red Army with important concentrations of mechanised firepower when the bulk of the army fighting had been foot-mobile Soviet rifle divisions. But as the Red Army became increasingly motorised they began fielding larger tank armies, muddling the doctrinal role of the tank/mechanised corps.
The smaller “brigade bucket” corps would be converted into new tank and motor rifle divisions. The larger corps, comprised of 2 to 4 division equivalents, would have one of two fates. The more veteran formations would be enlarged to full tank armies, reinforced with additional supporting units befitting their status. The remaining corps would be broken up, with their divisions moving to army-level reserve assets.
In tandem with this reorganization, the total number of division and brigade level tank and mechanised formations would be increased.
[...]
With the frontier dramatically shortened following the Byelorussian Offensive, many divisions were able to be rotated from the frontlines for rest, refit and reorganization. The 1st Byelorussian Front and the 4th Ukrainian Front were the first to begin a systematic reorganization.
The 2nd Guards Tank Army, the heroes of Moscow and Rostov, left the front at fifty percent effective strength in December 1944. Withdrawn to Smolensk to recuperate, this American formation had been in-country in some form since 1940, and were some of the most experienced units in the entire Red Army.
Originally deployed as elements of V and VII Corps, 2nd Guards TA had three tank divisions (3rd, 7th and 44th Guards) and one grenadier division (1st Guards) before reorganization. While the equipment had changed and men had come and gone, they were still organized under the 1940 table of organization. Each tank division consisted of three tank regiments, with each regiment mixing two battalions of tanks with a grenadier battalion. The 1940 grenadier division was made up of three regiments, each composed of three grenadier battalions. In addition to the usual self-propelled artillery and sustainment regiments and the pioneer and reconnaissance battalions common to all divisions, it was further strengthened with a tank and an anti-tank battalion.
In the offensives of the past year, the 1st Guards Grenadier Division had been largely relegated to a supporting role. Experience had taught that tank units required additional mechanized infantry to support attacks and cover the flanks, especially against the numerous anti-tank guns and panzerschrecks fielded by the German military. Like most of the other tank armies, detached grenadier/motor rifle regiments had been used to reinforce tank divisions in the advance.
And while the Zil-153 armored personnel carriers were rugged and reliable, mechanized infantry units without the support of tanks had struggled in combat. Without the use of army or front level anti-tank assets, mechanized infantry divisions would struggle to defend against a German panzer division.
[...]
Under the 1945 Table of Organization and Equipment, the standard tank battalion was reduced from 53 to 40 tanks. Each tank regiment would gain an additional tank battalion from the reorganization. Each grenadier/motor rifle regiment would be stiffened with the addition of a tank battalion.
Tank divisions would add an organic grenadier regiment. Grenadier divisions would expand their supporting tank battalion to a full regiment. These changes increased the authorized strength of tank divisions from 12,200 men and 319 tanks, to 14,400 men and 400 tanks; smaller than the pre-war tank divisions but significantly more flexible.
In addition to a new organizational scheme, guards divisions under the 1945 table were to be re-equipped with the most modern units available. Each of the guards tank armies would have one tank division upgraded to the new MBT-18 “Mikhail Frunze” tank, armed with a 100-mm rifle capable of engaging the Panzer 75 frontally at close range. The table also exchanged one grenadier regiment’s six-wheeled Zil-153 armored transporters with the better protected FV-35 tracked armored transporter.
[...]
The increase in mechanization did not apply solely to the elite tank armies. Throughout the middle period of the war, the three division rifle corps that made the backbone of the army had been sporadically reinforced with tank and SPG battalions. Throughout 1944 and into 1945, those battalions were expanded into brigades. The number of heavy tanks fielded for the summer 1945 offensives had almost tripled compared to the previous year, giving the Red Army the punch needed to break through the immense fortifications of the “Hitler Line”.
Additionally, front-line units on the corps, army and front level increased the number and variety of artillery units available. The application of detailed maps, sophisticated firing tables, and platoon-level radios ensured that fire missions could be carried out both quickly and accurately. The proximity VT fuze, now standard on any shell from heavy mortars on up, greatly improved the lethality of artillery against entrenched enemies.
---
/net/global/http:co.fbu/terreville/hexagone/barracks/1048/gilles_tank_emporium
Bonjour! Welcome to Gilles’ Tank Emporium, the homepage for all your militaria needs!
Pour yourself a drink, and make yourself at home. I am called Gilles, and I own a Games Workshop franchise in Camden Town, London. It’s the finest game and hobby store on the island, especially those with patrician tastes in miniature wargaming.
Please check out one of the many pages here, and don’t forget to sign your name in the guestbook! And as a warning for anyone with a slow connection, this site has a lot of images.
.../gilles_tank_emporium/totaler_krieg
Totaler Krieg is a popular 15mm scale miniature wargame which simulates ground combat in all major theaters of the Second World War.
I play TK extensively, and placed 3rd at the London Cup in 1993. The game has only gotten more exciting in the year since with the release of Core Rulebook III: Götterdämmerung, and new finecast miniature lines.
I have written some collecting guides and tactica for several armies, though I’m most familiar with the Wehrmacht.
The flavor text from the rulebook’s introduction is very metal. “The World War has entered its sixth year. Tens of millions of lives have been consumed in the conflict. The vast wealth of nations, representing centuries of toil, have been squandered. And still the war rages on.”
The first step to winning as Germany in the late war is to forget everything you think you know. So many new players try to build a detachment out of heavy tanks with little support, or try to fight the Red Army at its own game in mechanised mobile warfare.
Germany has good tanks, but they are too pricy in points to give you flexibility in all but the largest of games. Your real strength is infantry. Germany gets the best cannon fodder infantry, point per point, of any faction. Volkssturm are only slightly more expensive than Japanese emergency levies, and they come with Panzerfaust for free.
You want, at minimum, two full platoons of Volkssturm, four squads in each, with an attached Waffen-SS Führungsoffiziere detachment. This will give them a crucial bonus on morale rolls, and prevent your troops from breaking.
Painting that many dudes may be time consuming, but it will be well worth it. The more infantry you have on the field, the more you can have in reserve, the more ambush counters you can place. Litter the terrain, particularly anything that gives good cover saves, with a mix of infantry teams and ambush counters.
This will force the Red Army player to advance more cautiously, to avoid exposing the sides of his tanks to panzerfausts. It will give you additional chances to pop his APCs and kill the infantry before they can get in the fight or take objective points.
To boost your ambush rolls, you’ll want a headquarters detachment to have the Sturmtruppen trait. Any sturmtruppen you have can also be handy to hold key places. Volkssturm will melt against gvardiya, but the firepower from sturmtruppen’s MKb-42s can help even things out.
Be wary about sinking too many points into machine gun squads at this level. MG-42s are still good, but the Red Army has a lot of mortar teams they can use to neutralize them. Instead, go for something a bit more mobile and expensive, like a PzGren IV with the MG-151 15mm machine gun turret. It’s pretty proof against mortars and you can relocate easily to shore up weaker sectors.
Any time the points allow it, you should have tanks, but don’t spend more than 25 percent of your points total in tanks. Your tanks will be largely less mobile, but better armored than the Red Army’s. But don’t count on armor keeping you safe in a frontal engagement; the Red Army’s VL-3 heavy tanks and MBT-18 mediums can engage the Pzkfw 50 and 75 frontally at typical table top ranges. Use cover when possible
As anyone can tell you the Panzer 100 is a joke option useful only for burning points and the Mammut tank is quite literally noted as something to only pick for fun. The Smilodon is big with an even bigger gun and has armour plates thicker than your thighs. It also doesn’t really offer anything that the Tiger doesn’t and large artillery rounds can take it out of action all the same. The Mammut is an impressive showroom piece, but there is nothing that requires its twin cannons and it moves about as quickly as a bunker.
At this point, the 25 is now essentially a light tank, its high top speed allowing it to redeploy across large chunks of the map in a single turn. Much like the other early to mid-war medium tanks it cannot really take a punch, so don’t expect the Gepards to stay on the field for very long.
The Panzer 10 Katze is essentially an armoured car with tracks and will ride and die about as quickly as one. Though it suffers much less severe difficult terrain penalties than the German armoured cars, it can and will fall apart the second it gets targeted by anything heavier duty than an M2 heavy machine gun, and even those can breach the rear facing if you’re careless. They are handing out KPV machine guns on everything, so it's probably best not to waste your points here.
Late war German artillery is largely outclassed by its comintern counterparts in both bang for the buck and variety. Forget about how you don’t have anything in the same class as the 240mm super-heavy cannons, the old reliable 155mm howitzers are cheap as chips for heavy artillery and the firing tables special rules let them drop shells with accuracy your 15cm guns could only dream of.
All is not lost however, your anti-tank guns remain some of the best even this late in the war. The famous 8.8cm is getting somewhat long in the tooth, but the 10.5cm is useful against virtually every target in the game from Japanese superheavies to Commonwealth cover campers. Paired with your Panzerschrecks and Panzerfausts you can shred through any tank spammer who gets overconfident when they see you take to the field without a parking lot’s worth of tanks. Nevermind the lighter vehicles who can be ripped apart by the ever reliable 40mm bofors autocannon.
Speaking of; the Bofors is the unsung hero of the Axis armies. Yes it can’t penetrate tanks from the front like the big flak cannons but very few tanks can survive hits from the side and almost none of the lighter vehicles will survive. It also brutalises most infantry with frag rounds, and its flak rounds will neuter most air support thrown your way. You will learn to love the 40mm, and it’s low enough in points cost that you can field a half dozen twin cannon mounts in a standard game with room to spare for all the other options.
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Overview: Operation Siegfried
Operation Siegfried was the last German offensive operation. Planning for the operation began in January 1945 for counteroffensive efforts against an expected Comintern invasion beginning in March. The OKW had been successfully misled by enemy maskirovka, and began marshalling the bulk of the remaining panzertruppe in occupied Poland to counter the expected thrust to the jugular.
When it became apparent that the Comintern schwerpunkt was actually in Rumania, the OKW had intended to move forces south to support their beleaguered forces in the Balkans. This order was countermanded by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, with Hitler’s blessing. Göring assumed direct command of operations in the East with the full cooperation of the Waffen-SS, signalling a truce in the long power struggle between himself and Himmler.
Operation Siegfried was born on the 11 April 1945 meeting of OKW. With Göring as chairman, Volksmarschall Erich von Manstein and Generalfeldmarschall Franz Halder presented two contrasting outlines for the operation. Halder’s was more conservative, hoping to achieve rapid breakthroughs with minimal preparation time in order to destroy Communist operational tempo and buy more time to prepare defenses on the German border.
Von Manstein presented a more aggressive operation, one which would exhaust available fuel reserves to achieve deeper penetration and force the 3rd Byelorussian Front into a cauldron in the Baltics, and pin the powerful 2nd Byelorussian Front to the Pripet Marshes, and if possible complete its destruction.
Ultimately, Göring sided with von Manstein. This was not out of hopeful optimism. As his private diary entries note, he believed that Hitler was losing his grip with reality, and could not accept the possibility of defeat. Halder’s plan seemed to accept the inevitability of the invasion of Germany itself, and Hitler could not countenance such defeatism. Göring summed up the calculation: “If I side with Halder, it is certain defeat in nine months. If I side with Manstein, it is a gamble between defeat in six months or a small chance of a white peace.”
Göring was perhaps alone in the Nazi inner circle in his sober assessment. As Plenipotentiary of the Four Year Plan, Göring’s official responsibilities gave an insight to the state of the war economy from its commanding heights. Unlike Fritz Todt, Minister for Armaments and War Production, or Henry Ford, Chairman of the civil/military engineering concern Front Ford, Göring’s fanaticism for the cause had been worn thin by the war.
The military-economic statistics were damning. Even with the massive rationalisation of production that had been promoted by Front Ford in everything from industrial production to agriculture, the Reich was afflicted by a severe labor shortage beginning in late 1944 that intensified with every passing day. Production had been sustained by a massive forced labor program that had abducted nearly fifteen million people from occupied countries and certain allied states. This policy ranged variously from murderous to genocidal, depending upon ethnicity, and the appalling attrition made it unsustainable.
Now evicted from most occupied territories, and conscripting an every greater portion of the population, especially the youth into military service, every major industry in the Reich was afflicted by severe shortages in labor. Shortfalls in coal and steel production snowballed into major crunches in the production of everything from canned food to tanks. Shortages in many critical materials compounded these problems.
The signing of the Soviet-Finnish Co-Belligerency agreement had cut the Reich off from 95 percent of critical nickel production, required for everything from engines to machine tools. Reserves, initially calculated to be enough for two to three years of the war effort, ran dry faster than anticipated. Comintern attacks into the Balkans cut off oil and aluminum imports, forcing an increased reliance on labor intensive coal production and lower quality synthetic oils from coal liquefaction. The collapse of the Swedish Nazi government part way through May pushed things from bad to worse, and Germany found itself cut off from its precious iron ore.
These were but a few of the problems facing the war economy in the spring 1945. War production for the quarter had declined nearly one third from the high in Summer 1944. Wildcat strikes, work stoppages and slowdowns grew more frequent in the industrial cities. Nevertheless, the shattered remnants of Army Group North and Army Group Centre were reorganized into Army Group E, under the command of Volksmarschall Manstein. Forces were marshalled at a breakneck pace, quickened by the withdrawal of most veteran units from the Western Front.
Army Group E consisted of three full Panzer Armies (Third, Fifth, and Sixth), accompanied by the Second and Eighth field armies. In total, eighteen panzer divisions and thirty-one infantry divisions were to take part in the offensive, totalling just over 900,000 men.
Operation Siegfried would be further supported by the massed jet fighter and bomber aircraft of Luftflotte 2. And while the Me 262 Schwalbe gets most of the attention due to its psychological effect on Comintern fighter and bomber pilots, it is likely the Arado Ar 234C jet bombers that had the biggest impact on the operation. Able to cruise at nearly 800 km/hr, the Blitz was effectively immune to interception by front-line fighter units. Even the rare F-47 Thunderchild interceptor, with its beastly Wasp Major radial engine, could barely sustain that at war emergency power and the Arado could simply throttle to military power to escape.
Ar 234s flying in the reconnaissance role were crucial for the operation’s planning, particularly for finding targets of interest such as headquarters and supply dumps to be engaged by the large batteries of V-3 ballistic missiles assembled for the operation. The surprise bombardment by these mobile missile launchers contributed to much of the operational confusion in the opening days.
Thus just after midnight Central European Time, on 3 May 1945, six battalions of Panzerwerfer 50 Donar launchers moved into their final firing positions, thirty-five launchers in total. At 3 a.m., they erected their V-3 rockets into their pre-computed firing positions, and launched barrages aimed at major supply and command hubs for the 2nd Byelorussian Front. The supersonic missiles delivered 535 kg high-explosive fragmentation warheads or cluster sub-munitions out to a maximum range of 150 km.
The accuracy was less than optimal, but the results were impressive enough. Thanks to intensive drills in the weeks before, the warheads were delivered with a circular error probability of 500 metres. Many missed, but enough landed without warning to kill and wound much of the command staff of 2nd Byelorussian Front headquarters, and start major fires at several ammunition and fuel depots near the front’s railheads.
Barrages continued throughout the day. After first light, Arado jet bombers delivered ordnance to bridges, rail lines and enemy rear echelons as the tanks and infantry advanced.
The first prong of the attack broke out from East Prussia towards Kaunas, Lithuania, headed by the I SS Panzer Corps. They broke through the defense lines of the undermanned 18th Rifle Corps. The half strength American divisions lacked the heavy AT guns necessary to properly engage the Jaguar-G tanks effectively. Nonetheless, the troops maintained tenacious resistance as they regrouped. I SS Panzer Corps shattered the enemy’s combat effectiveness, but was unable to overrun the divisions, and took significant attrition from recoilless rifles.
Further south, the Wehrmacht’s III Panzer Corps spearheaded the breakthrough near Bialystok, where they clashed with the depleted Soviet 62nd Army. Like further north, resistance was tenacious even in the face of local superiority in artillery, armor and infantry. While the supporting artillery units reacted slowly under suppression from German counter-battery fire, the five rifle divisions were supported by the 78th Tank Brigade’s thirty-five remaining VL-2 heavy tanks.
The attacks continued for three days with relative success. Local numerical superiority was sustained, and the continued attacks by V-3 rockets, tactical airpower and artillery cover disrupted Comintern logistics. The offensives had pushed nearly one-hundred kilometres, and a breakthrough into the rear areas of the 3rd Byelorussian Front was threatened. But the problems began to mount. Frontal aviation was reinforced with the redeployment of an additional air army diverted from supporting forces in Hungary.
The aerial counteroffensive began in earnest on 7 May, as Soviet bombers began assaulting Luftwaffe forward air bases. The weakness of the Luftwaffe became apparent as the air war intensified. The highly effective Arado bombers could not sustain high tempo operations due to maintenance needs and spare parts shortages. Unfamiliarity with the Me 262 by the many novice pilots led to sharply increasing attrition rates. In addition to engine fires caused by throttling issues, many Schwalbe were lost when drawn in to dogfights with much more maneuverable prop fighters, or picked off during their long take off or landing approaches.
Comintern reserve units continued to move forward to reinforce the lines. The German offensive petered out on 12 May. Even with the capture of several important stocks of petrol in the initial offensive, fuel reserves were exhausted. Some forward tank units lacked even the fuel to retreat. The situation went from bad to dire when the 3rd Ukrainian Front began a counteroffensive the next morning. The reserve units manning the lines near Lubin in occupied Poland, many consisting of old men and boys fresh from the Hitler Youth, were quickly overrun, and the 5th Guards Tank Army broke into the German operational rear.
Three days later, the 1st Baltic Front began its assault on the fortifications of the Hitler Line in East Prussia one month earlier than planned. Aided with fire from the Soviet battleship Marat and 203-mm siege howitzers, the Soviet assault troops attacked a fortification line at seventy percent completion. German resistance was stiff, but heavy artillery and air attacks were able to cover infiltration. The fortress troops, undermanned and supplied to sustain Operation Siegfried faltered under the bloody assault.
The German army worked desperately to reinforce the neck of the eastern Polish salient to cover the withdrawal of the forward forces from Operation Siegfried. Owing perhaps only to hasty counter offensive preparations was this successful. On 21 May, a general armed uprising began in Warsaw, organized by the Polish Home Army and the Polish Communist Party. The uprising jammed rail traffic through the area, and tied down six Wehrmacht divisions moving to reinforce the pocket.
Amidst heavy casualties, the Polish partisans endured with logistical support from the Red Army Air Forces, until the first T-44s from the 5th Guards Tank Army reached the city’s outskirts. German forces continued to filter out of the pocket, travelling north of Warsaw, until 4 June. Elements of six German divisions were trapped in the pocket. The roads in eastern Poland were littered with abandoned tanks and trucks.
But it was not merely materiel shortages that defeated the Nazi military. The crack troops of the 3rd SS Panzer Division “Totenkopf” clashed with the rapidly advancing 16th Guards Tank Division near Tannenberg, East Prussia on 27 May. The Soviet tank troops, equipped with one regiment of MBT-18s and two regiments of T-44Bs, had broken through a critical Pakfront the previous day, spearheading the 1st Guards Tank Army’s advance towards Warsaw.
Totenkopf counterattacked at first light. In the dense woods and meadows south of Tannenberg, the two divisions clashed in a storm of steel. The morning fog prevented the utilization of air support and restricted visibility to less than five hundred metres. Both sides employed stalk-and-ambush tactics, like grandmasters maneuvering their chess pieces before the clash. As the fog thinned around noon, the fighting intensified.
Both formations had gone into battle at roughly equal strength; Totenkopf had 147 operational Jaguar-Gs, 42 Gepard-Ds, and 31 Jagdpanzer 50s, while 16th Guards had 78 MBT-18s and 151 T-44Bs. At the typical engagement ranges at Tannenberg, advantages in firepower and armor were largely nullified. Crew skill and unit flexibility ultimately mattered more. Forty percent of the tanks lost on both sides had been knocked out with side shots.
While kill ratios are not in themselves important to determining the outcome of an operation, at the Battle of Tannenberg, the tank loss ratio favored the Soviet tankers 1.8 to 1. They proved more adept at structuring favorable engagements and outmaneuvering their adversaries. Totenkopf lost nearly half of its available armored fighting vehicles, and suffered similar losses to infantry carriers.
The dynamic of the war had changed. Even the best German formations, shielded from manpower and equipment shortages, could not beat their opponents on a level playing field. The majority of German formations deployed in 1945 could not boast of the full equipment inventories and veteran troops that the first ten SS divisions could. The rest were at well below authorized strength, filled with a large number of inexperienced and demoralized troops, and endured shortages of food and even clothing.
Five years of total war had exhausted German morale and resources. The failure of Operation Siegfried had hollowed out the German military. The Red Army’s ongoing Vistula-Oder Offensive pushed the German military out of Poland and liberated the death camp archipelago in Poland.
Troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front would liberate the largest of the death camps, the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, on 1 June 1945, in the midst of attempts at death-marching the remaining inmates away from the rapidly advancing troops. In operation since May 1941, at least 1.1 million inmates had been murdered at Auschwitz, mostly Jews.
Primo Levi, a Jewish inmate, had been assigned to burial duty that morning, and witnessed the arrival of a Soviet PT-76 light tank. Levi watched as they observed, peering out the top of their tanks, overwhelmed by the scene:
For the people crushed under the Nazi regime, the dawn was finally coming. By mid June, the advance forces of the Red Army were pushing into Silesia and Pomeriania. In spite of the best efforts of the regime, the word was spreading. Foreign troops were occupying German soil. Cells of factory workers in the Ruhr, Brandenburg, and Schleswig-Holstein were gathering in secret. Liberation was coming, they whispered. It was time to seize it with their own hands.
1. Primo Levi, The Truce (Published in the US as The Reawakening), Simon & Schuster 1995, pp. 16.
The Soviet and American armies, joined at the hip as components of the Red Army of the Communist International, underwent their final wartime reorganization in the winter of 1944/45. As detailed in the 1945 edition of the FM-100 series, these reforms codified a doctrine that had been developed through five years of bloody experience.
Chiefly authored by General of the Army Georgii Samoilovich Isserman, the reforms addressed changes in the material reality faced by revolutionary forces. First, the question of manpower: the war effort had demanded immense sacrifices of life above and beyond the mass murder inflicted by Nazi occupation forces in the Soviet Union. It was imperative to accomplish more with fewer soldiers.
Of equal importance was the shift from defense to offense. The Red Army had spent the previous five years defending the territory and population of the Soviet Union, and liberating them from occupation. In the final phase of the war, the Red Army would be not only invading the territories of other nations that had been victims to the Nazis on a mission of liberation, it would also have to take the fight into Germany itself.
The shifting dispositions were not totally negative. The Red Army had endured its baptism by fire, and now had a veteran army led by experienced officers and NCOs. Earlier command and control kludges, such as the many “brigade bucket” tank and mechanised corps, could be rationalised now.
There had also been a major shift in the balance of material forces during 1944. The Southern Cone Theater had been closed. The German u-boat fleet had been neutralized, and the threat of an Italian or Fascist French naval breakout had been ended. The production of war materiel in both the Soviet Union and the UASR was reaching its absolute peak.
[...]
General Order No. 345 abolished the tank and mechanised corps. These non-standardised formations had provided the Red Army with important concentrations of mechanised firepower when the bulk of the army fighting had been foot-mobile Soviet rifle divisions. But as the Red Army became increasingly motorised they began fielding larger tank armies, muddling the doctrinal role of the tank/mechanised corps.
The smaller “brigade bucket” corps would be converted into new tank and motor rifle divisions. The larger corps, comprised of 2 to 4 division equivalents, would have one of two fates. The more veteran formations would be enlarged to full tank armies, reinforced with additional supporting units befitting their status. The remaining corps would be broken up, with their divisions moving to army-level reserve assets.
In tandem with this reorganization, the total number of division and brigade level tank and mechanised formations would be increased.
[...]
With the frontier dramatically shortened following the Byelorussian Offensive, many divisions were able to be rotated from the frontlines for rest, refit and reorganization. The 1st Byelorussian Front and the 4th Ukrainian Front were the first to begin a systematic reorganization.
The 2nd Guards Tank Army, the heroes of Moscow and Rostov, left the front at fifty percent effective strength in December 1944. Withdrawn to Smolensk to recuperate, this American formation had been in-country in some form since 1940, and were some of the most experienced units in the entire Red Army.
Originally deployed as elements of V and VII Corps, 2nd Guards TA had three tank divisions (3rd, 7th and 44th Guards) and one grenadier division (1st Guards) before reorganization. While the equipment had changed and men had come and gone, they were still organized under the 1940 table of organization. Each tank division consisted of three tank regiments, with each regiment mixing two battalions of tanks with a grenadier battalion. The 1940 grenadier division was made up of three regiments, each composed of three grenadier battalions. In addition to the usual self-propelled artillery and sustainment regiments and the pioneer and reconnaissance battalions common to all divisions, it was further strengthened with a tank and an anti-tank battalion.
In the offensives of the past year, the 1st Guards Grenadier Division had been largely relegated to a supporting role. Experience had taught that tank units required additional mechanized infantry to support attacks and cover the flanks, especially against the numerous anti-tank guns and panzerschrecks fielded by the German military. Like most of the other tank armies, detached grenadier/motor rifle regiments had been used to reinforce tank divisions in the advance.
And while the Zil-153 armored personnel carriers were rugged and reliable, mechanized infantry units without the support of tanks had struggled in combat. Without the use of army or front level anti-tank assets, mechanized infantry divisions would struggle to defend against a German panzer division.
[...]
Under the 1945 Table of Organization and Equipment, the standard tank battalion was reduced from 53 to 40 tanks. Each tank regiment would gain an additional tank battalion from the reorganization. Each grenadier/motor rifle regiment would be stiffened with the addition of a tank battalion.
Tank divisions would add an organic grenadier regiment. Grenadier divisions would expand their supporting tank battalion to a full regiment. These changes increased the authorized strength of tank divisions from 12,200 men and 319 tanks, to 14,400 men and 400 tanks; smaller than the pre-war tank divisions but significantly more flexible.
In addition to a new organizational scheme, guards divisions under the 1945 table were to be re-equipped with the most modern units available. Each of the guards tank armies would have one tank division upgraded to the new MBT-18 “Mikhail Frunze” tank, armed with a 100-mm rifle capable of engaging the Panzer 75 frontally at close range. The table also exchanged one grenadier regiment’s six-wheeled Zil-153 armored transporters with the better protected FV-35 tracked armored transporter.
[...]
The increase in mechanization did not apply solely to the elite tank armies. Throughout the middle period of the war, the three division rifle corps that made the backbone of the army had been sporadically reinforced with tank and SPG battalions. Throughout 1944 and into 1945, those battalions were expanded into brigades. The number of heavy tanks fielded for the summer 1945 offensives had almost tripled compared to the previous year, giving the Red Army the punch needed to break through the immense fortifications of the “Hitler Line”.
Additionally, front-line units on the corps, army and front level increased the number and variety of artillery units available. The application of detailed maps, sophisticated firing tables, and platoon-level radios ensured that fire missions could be carried out both quickly and accurately. The proximity VT fuze, now standard on any shell from heavy mortars on up, greatly improved the lethality of artillery against entrenched enemies.
---
/net/global/http:co.fbu/terreville/hexagone/barracks/1048/gilles_tank_emporium
Bonjour! Welcome to Gilles’ Tank Emporium, the homepage for all your militaria needs!
Pour yourself a drink, and make yourself at home. I am called Gilles, and I own a Games Workshop franchise in Camden Town, London. It’s the finest game and hobby store on the island, especially those with patrician tastes in miniature wargaming.
Please check out one of the many pages here, and don’t forget to sign your name in the guestbook! And as a warning for anyone with a slow connection, this site has a lot of images.
- Store: (UNDER CONSTRUCTION )
- Antiquity: My thoughts on ancient wargaming
- Napoleonic: My old pride and joy, but I don’t play so much anymore
- Totaler Krieg: WW2 wargaming; accessible with open gaming license
- Warhammer: 40,000: I’ve just started collecting so most of it is unpainted
- RPGs: Ye Olde Twenty-Sided Die
.../gilles_tank_emporium/totaler_krieg
Totaler Krieg is a popular 15mm scale miniature wargame which simulates ground combat in all major theaters of the Second World War.
I play TK extensively, and placed 3rd at the London Cup in 1993. The game has only gotten more exciting in the year since with the release of Core Rulebook III: Götterdämmerung, and new finecast miniature lines.
I have written some collecting guides and tactica for several armies, though I’m most familiar with the Wehrmacht.
- Unlimited: Only plebs play unlimited competitively. Point counts are insane, unless you like having to swarm Panzer 75s with hordes of BT-7s, or vice-versa.
- Early War: Good overall balance, limited options unless you only want to collect Axis vs. Comintern
- Mid War: The balance is très terrible, IMO, but the model lines are good
- Late War: You may have to use 3rd party models, but it’s OGL.
The flavor text from the rulebook’s introduction is very metal. “The World War has entered its sixth year. Tens of millions of lives have been consumed in the conflict. The vast wealth of nations, representing centuries of toil, have been squandered. And still the war rages on.”
- Tactica
- Ostfront
- Westfront
- Ostfront
- Painting
- Recommended Reading
The first step to winning as Germany in the late war is to forget everything you think you know. So many new players try to build a detachment out of heavy tanks with little support, or try to fight the Red Army at its own game in mechanised mobile warfare.
Germany has good tanks, but they are too pricy in points to give you flexibility in all but the largest of games. Your real strength is infantry. Germany gets the best cannon fodder infantry, point per point, of any faction. Volkssturm are only slightly more expensive than Japanese emergency levies, and they come with Panzerfaust for free.
You want, at minimum, two full platoons of Volkssturm, four squads in each, with an attached Waffen-SS Führungsoffiziere detachment. This will give them a crucial bonus on morale rolls, and prevent your troops from breaking.
Painting that many dudes may be time consuming, but it will be well worth it. The more infantry you have on the field, the more you can have in reserve, the more ambush counters you can place. Litter the terrain, particularly anything that gives good cover saves, with a mix of infantry teams and ambush counters.
This will force the Red Army player to advance more cautiously, to avoid exposing the sides of his tanks to panzerfausts. It will give you additional chances to pop his APCs and kill the infantry before they can get in the fight or take objective points.
To boost your ambush rolls, you’ll want a headquarters detachment to have the Sturmtruppen trait. Any sturmtruppen you have can also be handy to hold key places. Volkssturm will melt against gvardiya, but the firepower from sturmtruppen’s MKb-42s can help even things out.
Be wary about sinking too many points into machine gun squads at this level. MG-42s are still good, but the Red Army has a lot of mortar teams they can use to neutralize them. Instead, go for something a bit more mobile and expensive, like a PzGren IV with the MG-151 15mm machine gun turret. It’s pretty proof against mortars and you can relocate easily to shore up weaker sectors.
Any time the points allow it, you should have tanks, but don’t spend more than 25 percent of your points total in tanks. Your tanks will be largely less mobile, but better armored than the Red Army’s. But don’t count on armor keeping you safe in a frontal engagement; the Red Army’s VL-3 heavy tanks and MBT-18 mediums can engage the Pzkfw 50 and 75 frontally at typical table top ranges. Use cover when possible
As anyone can tell you the Panzer 100 is a joke option useful only for burning points and the Mammut tank is quite literally noted as something to only pick for fun. The Smilodon is big with an even bigger gun and has armour plates thicker than your thighs. It also doesn’t really offer anything that the Tiger doesn’t and large artillery rounds can take it out of action all the same. The Mammut is an impressive showroom piece, but there is nothing that requires its twin cannons and it moves about as quickly as a bunker.
At this point, the 25 is now essentially a light tank, its high top speed allowing it to redeploy across large chunks of the map in a single turn. Much like the other early to mid-war medium tanks it cannot really take a punch, so don’t expect the Gepards to stay on the field for very long.
The Panzer 10 Katze is essentially an armoured car with tracks and will ride and die about as quickly as one. Though it suffers much less severe difficult terrain penalties than the German armoured cars, it can and will fall apart the second it gets targeted by anything heavier duty than an M2 heavy machine gun, and even those can breach the rear facing if you’re careless. They are handing out KPV machine guns on everything, so it's probably best not to waste your points here.
Late war German artillery is largely outclassed by its comintern counterparts in both bang for the buck and variety. Forget about how you don’t have anything in the same class as the 240mm super-heavy cannons, the old reliable 155mm howitzers are cheap as chips for heavy artillery and the firing tables special rules let them drop shells with accuracy your 15cm guns could only dream of.
All is not lost however, your anti-tank guns remain some of the best even this late in the war. The famous 8.8cm is getting somewhat long in the tooth, but the 10.5cm is useful against virtually every target in the game from Japanese superheavies to Commonwealth cover campers. Paired with your Panzerschrecks and Panzerfausts you can shred through any tank spammer who gets overconfident when they see you take to the field without a parking lot’s worth of tanks. Nevermind the lighter vehicles who can be ripped apart by the ever reliable 40mm bofors autocannon.
Speaking of; the Bofors is the unsung hero of the Axis armies. Yes it can’t penetrate tanks from the front like the big flak cannons but very few tanks can survive hits from the side and almost none of the lighter vehicles will survive. It also brutalises most infantry with frag rounds, and its flak rounds will neuter most air support thrown your way. You will learn to love the 40mm, and it’s low enough in points cost that you can field a half dozen twin cannon mounts in a standard game with room to spare for all the other options.
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Overview: Operation Siegfried
Operation Siegfried was the last German offensive operation. Planning for the operation began in January 1945 for counteroffensive efforts against an expected Comintern invasion beginning in March. The OKW had been successfully misled by enemy maskirovka, and began marshalling the bulk of the remaining panzertruppe in occupied Poland to counter the expected thrust to the jugular.
When it became apparent that the Comintern schwerpunkt was actually in Rumania, the OKW had intended to move forces south to support their beleaguered forces in the Balkans. This order was countermanded by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, with Hitler’s blessing. Göring assumed direct command of operations in the East with the full cooperation of the Waffen-SS, signalling a truce in the long power struggle between himself and Himmler.
Operation Siegfried was born on the 11 April 1945 meeting of OKW. With Göring as chairman, Volksmarschall Erich von Manstein and Generalfeldmarschall Franz Halder presented two contrasting outlines for the operation. Halder’s was more conservative, hoping to achieve rapid breakthroughs with minimal preparation time in order to destroy Communist operational tempo and buy more time to prepare defenses on the German border.
Von Manstein presented a more aggressive operation, one which would exhaust available fuel reserves to achieve deeper penetration and force the 3rd Byelorussian Front into a cauldron in the Baltics, and pin the powerful 2nd Byelorussian Front to the Pripet Marshes, and if possible complete its destruction.
Ultimately, Göring sided with von Manstein. This was not out of hopeful optimism. As his private diary entries note, he believed that Hitler was losing his grip with reality, and could not accept the possibility of defeat. Halder’s plan seemed to accept the inevitability of the invasion of Germany itself, and Hitler could not countenance such defeatism. Göring summed up the calculation: “If I side with Halder, it is certain defeat in nine months. If I side with Manstein, it is a gamble between defeat in six months or a small chance of a white peace.”
Göring was perhaps alone in the Nazi inner circle in his sober assessment. As Plenipotentiary of the Four Year Plan, Göring’s official responsibilities gave an insight to the state of the war economy from its commanding heights. Unlike Fritz Todt, Minister for Armaments and War Production, or Henry Ford, Chairman of the civil/military engineering concern Front Ford, Göring’s fanaticism for the cause had been worn thin by the war.
The military-economic statistics were damning. Even with the massive rationalisation of production that had been promoted by Front Ford in everything from industrial production to agriculture, the Reich was afflicted by a severe labor shortage beginning in late 1944 that intensified with every passing day. Production had been sustained by a massive forced labor program that had abducted nearly fifteen million people from occupied countries and certain allied states. This policy ranged variously from murderous to genocidal, depending upon ethnicity, and the appalling attrition made it unsustainable.
Now evicted from most occupied territories, and conscripting an every greater portion of the population, especially the youth into military service, every major industry in the Reich was afflicted by severe shortages in labor. Shortfalls in coal and steel production snowballed into major crunches in the production of everything from canned food to tanks. Shortages in many critical materials compounded these problems.
The signing of the Soviet-Finnish Co-Belligerency agreement had cut the Reich off from 95 percent of critical nickel production, required for everything from engines to machine tools. Reserves, initially calculated to be enough for two to three years of the war effort, ran dry faster than anticipated. Comintern attacks into the Balkans cut off oil and aluminum imports, forcing an increased reliance on labor intensive coal production and lower quality synthetic oils from coal liquefaction. The collapse of the Swedish Nazi government part way through May pushed things from bad to worse, and Germany found itself cut off from its precious iron ore.
These were but a few of the problems facing the war economy in the spring 1945. War production for the quarter had declined nearly one third from the high in Summer 1944. Wildcat strikes, work stoppages and slowdowns grew more frequent in the industrial cities. Nevertheless, the shattered remnants of Army Group North and Army Group Centre were reorganized into Army Group E, under the command of Volksmarschall Manstein. Forces were marshalled at a breakneck pace, quickened by the withdrawal of most veteran units from the Western Front.
Army Group E consisted of three full Panzer Armies (Third, Fifth, and Sixth), accompanied by the Second and Eighth field armies. In total, eighteen panzer divisions and thirty-one infantry divisions were to take part in the offensive, totalling just over 900,000 men.
Operation Siegfried would be further supported by the massed jet fighter and bomber aircraft of Luftflotte 2. And while the Me 262 Schwalbe gets most of the attention due to its psychological effect on Comintern fighter and bomber pilots, it is likely the Arado Ar 234C jet bombers that had the biggest impact on the operation. Able to cruise at nearly 800 km/hr, the Blitz was effectively immune to interception by front-line fighter units. Even the rare F-47 Thunderchild interceptor, with its beastly Wasp Major radial engine, could barely sustain that at war emergency power and the Arado could simply throttle to military power to escape.
Ar 234s flying in the reconnaissance role were crucial for the operation’s planning, particularly for finding targets of interest such as headquarters and supply dumps to be engaged by the large batteries of V-3 ballistic missiles assembled for the operation. The surprise bombardment by these mobile missile launchers contributed to much of the operational confusion in the opening days.
Thus just after midnight Central European Time, on 3 May 1945, six battalions of Panzerwerfer 50 Donar launchers moved into their final firing positions, thirty-five launchers in total. At 3 a.m., they erected their V-3 rockets into their pre-computed firing positions, and launched barrages aimed at major supply and command hubs for the 2nd Byelorussian Front. The supersonic missiles delivered 535 kg high-explosive fragmentation warheads or cluster sub-munitions out to a maximum range of 150 km.
The accuracy was less than optimal, but the results were impressive enough. Thanks to intensive drills in the weeks before, the warheads were delivered with a circular error probability of 500 metres. Many missed, but enough landed without warning to kill and wound much of the command staff of 2nd Byelorussian Front headquarters, and start major fires at several ammunition and fuel depots near the front’s railheads.
Barrages continued throughout the day. After first light, Arado jet bombers delivered ordnance to bridges, rail lines and enemy rear echelons as the tanks and infantry advanced.
The first prong of the attack broke out from East Prussia towards Kaunas, Lithuania, headed by the I SS Panzer Corps. They broke through the defense lines of the undermanned 18th Rifle Corps. The half strength American divisions lacked the heavy AT guns necessary to properly engage the Jaguar-G tanks effectively. Nonetheless, the troops maintained tenacious resistance as they regrouped. I SS Panzer Corps shattered the enemy’s combat effectiveness, but was unable to overrun the divisions, and took significant attrition from recoilless rifles.
Further south, the Wehrmacht’s III Panzer Corps spearheaded the breakthrough near Bialystok, where they clashed with the depleted Soviet 62nd Army. Like further north, resistance was tenacious even in the face of local superiority in artillery, armor and infantry. While the supporting artillery units reacted slowly under suppression from German counter-battery fire, the five rifle divisions were supported by the 78th Tank Brigade’s thirty-five remaining VL-2 heavy tanks.
The attacks continued for three days with relative success. Local numerical superiority was sustained, and the continued attacks by V-3 rockets, tactical airpower and artillery cover disrupted Comintern logistics. The offensives had pushed nearly one-hundred kilometres, and a breakthrough into the rear areas of the 3rd Byelorussian Front was threatened. But the problems began to mount. Frontal aviation was reinforced with the redeployment of an additional air army diverted from supporting forces in Hungary.
The aerial counteroffensive began in earnest on 7 May, as Soviet bombers began assaulting Luftwaffe forward air bases. The weakness of the Luftwaffe became apparent as the air war intensified. The highly effective Arado bombers could not sustain high tempo operations due to maintenance needs and spare parts shortages. Unfamiliarity with the Me 262 by the many novice pilots led to sharply increasing attrition rates. In addition to engine fires caused by throttling issues, many Schwalbe were lost when drawn in to dogfights with much more maneuverable prop fighters, or picked off during their long take off or landing approaches.
Comintern reserve units continued to move forward to reinforce the lines. The German offensive petered out on 12 May. Even with the capture of several important stocks of petrol in the initial offensive, fuel reserves were exhausted. Some forward tank units lacked even the fuel to retreat. The situation went from bad to dire when the 3rd Ukrainian Front began a counteroffensive the next morning. The reserve units manning the lines near Lubin in occupied Poland, many consisting of old men and boys fresh from the Hitler Youth, were quickly overrun, and the 5th Guards Tank Army broke into the German operational rear.
Three days later, the 1st Baltic Front began its assault on the fortifications of the Hitler Line in East Prussia one month earlier than planned. Aided with fire from the Soviet battleship Marat and 203-mm siege howitzers, the Soviet assault troops attacked a fortification line at seventy percent completion. German resistance was stiff, but heavy artillery and air attacks were able to cover infiltration. The fortress troops, undermanned and supplied to sustain Operation Siegfried faltered under the bloody assault.
The German army worked desperately to reinforce the neck of the eastern Polish salient to cover the withdrawal of the forward forces from Operation Siegfried. Owing perhaps only to hasty counter offensive preparations was this successful. On 21 May, a general armed uprising began in Warsaw, organized by the Polish Home Army and the Polish Communist Party. The uprising jammed rail traffic through the area, and tied down six Wehrmacht divisions moving to reinforce the pocket.
Amidst heavy casualties, the Polish partisans endured with logistical support from the Red Army Air Forces, until the first T-44s from the 5th Guards Tank Army reached the city’s outskirts. German forces continued to filter out of the pocket, travelling north of Warsaw, until 4 June. Elements of six German divisions were trapped in the pocket. The roads in eastern Poland were littered with abandoned tanks and trucks.
But it was not merely materiel shortages that defeated the Nazi military. The crack troops of the 3rd SS Panzer Division “Totenkopf” clashed with the rapidly advancing 16th Guards Tank Division near Tannenberg, East Prussia on 27 May. The Soviet tank troops, equipped with one regiment of MBT-18s and two regiments of T-44Bs, had broken through a critical Pakfront the previous day, spearheading the 1st Guards Tank Army’s advance towards Warsaw.
Totenkopf counterattacked at first light. In the dense woods and meadows south of Tannenberg, the two divisions clashed in a storm of steel. The morning fog prevented the utilization of air support and restricted visibility to less than five hundred metres. Both sides employed stalk-and-ambush tactics, like grandmasters maneuvering their chess pieces before the clash. As the fog thinned around noon, the fighting intensified.
Both formations had gone into battle at roughly equal strength; Totenkopf had 147 operational Jaguar-Gs, 42 Gepard-Ds, and 31 Jagdpanzer 50s, while 16th Guards had 78 MBT-18s and 151 T-44Bs. At the typical engagement ranges at Tannenberg, advantages in firepower and armor were largely nullified. Crew skill and unit flexibility ultimately mattered more. Forty percent of the tanks lost on both sides had been knocked out with side shots.
While kill ratios are not in themselves important to determining the outcome of an operation, at the Battle of Tannenberg, the tank loss ratio favored the Soviet tankers 1.8 to 1. They proved more adept at structuring favorable engagements and outmaneuvering their adversaries. Totenkopf lost nearly half of its available armored fighting vehicles, and suffered similar losses to infantry carriers.
The dynamic of the war had changed. Even the best German formations, shielded from manpower and equipment shortages, could not beat their opponents on a level playing field. The majority of German formations deployed in 1945 could not boast of the full equipment inventories and veteran troops that the first ten SS divisions could. The rest were at well below authorized strength, filled with a large number of inexperienced and demoralized troops, and endured shortages of food and even clothing.
Five years of total war had exhausted German morale and resources. The failure of Operation Siegfried had hollowed out the German military. The Red Army’s ongoing Vistula-Oder Offensive pushed the German military out of Poland and liberated the death camp archipelago in Poland.
Troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front would liberate the largest of the death camps, the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, on 1 June 1945, in the midst of attempts at death-marching the remaining inmates away from the rapidly advancing troops. In operation since May 1941, at least 1.1 million inmates had been murdered at Auschwitz, mostly Jews.
Primo Levi, a Jewish inmate, had been assigned to burial duty that morning, and witnessed the arrival of a Soviet PT-76 light tank. Levi watched as they observed, peering out the top of their tanks, overwhelmed by the scene:
They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funereal scene. It was that shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections, and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man experiences at another man's crime; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defence.(1)
For the people crushed under the Nazi regime, the dawn was finally coming. By mid June, the advance forces of the Red Army were pushing into Silesia and Pomeriania. In spite of the best efforts of the regime, the word was spreading. Foreign troops were occupying German soil. Cells of factory workers in the Ruhr, Brandenburg, and Schleswig-Holstein were gathering in secret. Liberation was coming, they whispered. It was time to seize it with their own hands.
1. Primo Levi, The Truce (Published in the US as The Reawakening), Simon & Schuster 1995, pp. 16.
Collaborate with the Italians and get executed for treason once they were ousted.
Nasser and his clique within the Egyptian military and intelligentsia were heavily influenced by Fascism IOTL. Egyptian nationalist groups wished to align with the Axis to end Egypt's status as a protectorate in the British Empire.
Nasser was a member of the Young Egypt Party in the 1930s, an openly pro-German fascist party.
IT'S ALIVE! It's been ages since the last update her or SV.
Jeez, if it's half-way through 1945 and most of the German core territory isn't under occupation yet, and the death camps are only now being liberated. TTL's world war two certainly scars Europe more than OTL.
How far have the Anglo-French advanced in the West at this point?
Jeez, if it's half-way through 1945 and most of the German core territory isn't under occupation yet, and the death camps are only now being liberated. TTL's world war two certainly scars Europe more than OTL.
How far have the Anglo-French advanced in the West at this point?
Who holy crap the Japanese actually put super-heavy tanks into service? How did they even find the steel for that, given the IJN is even bigger than OTL?
Bookmark1995
Banned
The issue is that the Anglo-French gave aid to the Germans during the opening years of the war that they didn't have OTL. This is why, despite America and Russia united TTL, the Germans are still hard to beat.
Mercifully, the slower pace of German advance, better economic conditions and some prewar escape routes help ensure that the total death toll is pretty similar for civilians. The intensive annihilation methods begin later.
Just because it's on table top doesn't mean it was ever meaningfully fielded
The war starts a year later than OTL, so TTL 1945 is similar to OTL 1944 in conditions, i would assume.
So, it's bacc. Looks like the Germans were trying an ambitious offensive that had no posibility of working and it failed...again. If my memory doesn't fail, I think the USA and the USSR have some kind of ideological rift that explains why they don't just overpower (economically and poltiically, doesn't have to be a war) the Allies to achieve the Revolution. I think they even had some kind of "missile crisis"? If thats the case, Communism vs Communism could be an interesting scenario
The last part is an old iteration of the TL, has been retconned. Technically this TL are on it's fourth soft-reboot over at SV.
For the fact why the Comintern didn't simply roll over the Allies i think it's important to note that the British Empire isn't as bloodied as OTL and are kind of investing more to their colonies.
I see, however is important to notice that even with the Empire in good shape and with the support of France (Franco-British is probably still canon) the economic power of the Soviets and the Americans is too big and it's not going to be hard to find Asian/African Nationalists willing to destabilize their colonial rulers. I think I could see very easily UK and France falling through an even bigger "Second Red Scare" with so many communists countries around them. Pretty hard for the British to face two communist superpowers at the same time, even with France, the Commonwealth and other anti-Communists Allies (things could change if we add a powerful Nationalist China to the mix tho). If I have to gamble, the Americans and the Soviets don't have a split Soviet-China style and remain nominal Allies, but they could develop some kind of rivalry over ideologic differences and territorial spheres of influence (fomented by the UK very likely) that could reduce the effectiveness of their superiority. Or the UK just loses the Cold War and this is the story of a communist world. That would pretty interesting lol. But again, it's has been a while since I read Reds for the last time so I could be wrong about the details
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Bookmark1995
Banned
The other issue is mutually assured destruction. The Reds would love to "liberate" the Blues from their "capitalist chains", but nuclear devastation makes it too costly.
It is speculated that nuclear weapons are the only thing preventing the final triumph of communism.
The British Empire in aggregate had double the USSR's GDP in 1946 and Britain was much more willing to let it disintegrate when America was there to fill in the void and prevent Soviet or Chinese supported movements from sparking revolution there. Also liberal nationalists had America to align with if they wanted to break from western Europe but didn't want to invite in the Soviets or the Chinese.
Here liberal nationalists don't really have an alternative to the Franco-British Union, which combined controls whether directly or indirectly; half of the European continent's population and nearly the entirety of Africa and Southern Asia and has alignment from significant stretches of the Americas.
It also has fortress Australasia securely under lock and key as essentially a free resource dispenser and under the populate or perish governments as well as ex-right KMT (and some Imperial Japanese) who took the first boats out of Hong Kong as well as substantial southern Asian migration has considerably more manpower to extract those resources out of.
TTL Australia is like one third of an America by the 2010s while Greater India is more like the OTL PRC than the actual TTL Socialist Chinese.
The modern world has considerably more influence from the global south via countries like Australasia, India, Congo, Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, Arabia, Iran et al and it's primarily in the global south where cold war geopolitics swing as opposed to the much more static north where obviously any significant shifts in map colouration most likely entail thermonuclear war.
It's also worth noting that the Soviets cannot really afford to split with the Americans because the 30s and second world war have left them institutionally dependent on American support and integrated into American dominated institutions such as the Communist International. At their most willful they have about France levels of latitude from America but Moscow knows that they need D.C far more than D.C needs them and it will be years before they and China have any chance to catch up to America.
There's also the small matter of the RKKA and the Soviet left being deeply Americanophilic and the Bolshevik party lacks the clout to override the Red Army's veto after Stalin's death and Beria's liquidation and Molotov really cannot afford to alienate his American allies by purging the rebuilding Soviet left fraction in the midst of war and reconstruction. Nor does he really even have the pull to do so.
Though an interesting sidenote is that because this is essentially and American-British (France being a fair deal poorer and less influential than Imperial era Britain. It didn't catch up OTL until the 60s.) cold war; English really is the International language of the world and is far and away the most spoken language on the planet when you count second language speakers.
Here liberal nationalists don't really have an alternative to the Franco-British Union, which combined controls whether directly or indirectly; half of the European continent's population and nearly the entirety of Africa and Southern Asia and has alignment from significant stretches of the Americas.
It also has fortress Australasia securely under lock and key as essentially a free resource dispenser and under the populate or perish governments as well as ex-right KMT (and some Imperial Japanese) who took the first boats out of Hong Kong as well as substantial southern Asian migration has considerably more manpower to extract those resources out of.
TTL Australia is like one third of an America by the 2010s while Greater India is more like the OTL PRC than the actual TTL Socialist Chinese.
The modern world has considerably more influence from the global south via countries like Australasia, India, Congo, Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, Arabia, Iran et al and it's primarily in the global south where cold war geopolitics swing as opposed to the much more static north where obviously any significant shifts in map colouration most likely entail thermonuclear war.
It's also worth noting that the Soviets cannot really afford to split with the Americans because the 30s and second world war have left them institutionally dependent on American support and integrated into American dominated institutions such as the Communist International. At their most willful they have about France levels of latitude from America but Moscow knows that they need D.C far more than D.C needs them and it will be years before they and China have any chance to catch up to America.
There's also the small matter of the RKKA and the Soviet left being deeply Americanophilic and the Bolshevik party lacks the clout to override the Red Army's veto after Stalin's death and Beria's liquidation and Molotov really cannot afford to alienate his American allies by purging the rebuilding Soviet left fraction in the midst of war and reconstruction. Nor does he really even have the pull to do so.
Though an interesting sidenote is that because this is essentially and American-British (France being a fair deal poorer and less influential than Imperial era Britain. It didn't catch up OTL until the 60s.) cold war; English really is the International language of the world and is far and away the most spoken language on the planet when you count second language speakers.
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I agree that the Soviets are in a position that is too close to America so a split is out of the question. However, I don't think Britain and allies are enough to overcome too many fronts in the Cold War. Since there is no America trying to pressure Britain for decolonization, the UK is going to hold into his colonies for much longer and with the USA and the USSR promoting African and Asiatic nationalism that's gonna be hard. Unless the UK takes the pragmatic route and gives their colonies independence/autonomy on their own terms. The UK would also have to finance and organize the anti-communist armies in a single coherent unit, like the US did with the OTAN in Europe and the Commonwealth would also have to put their part. And of course, the anti-communists Allies on Africa and Asia are going to need money and weapons to control their own countries of being overrun by Communists guerrillas. And the democratic anti-communists parties would also need support and money to get in power. In the military front, is not only the European front they have to defend, but also Canada from the Americans.
They also need to mantain a regular Navy to patrol the seas from American interference, instead of just wrecking most of their vessels like they did on OTL; that would imply having to spend a lot of money and resources in the Navy. Not counting also having to finance the space and nuclear programs to surpass their Communist counterparts. Post-war is gonna be a really dificult task for Britain even with a situation better than OTL. Every one of their territories is a possible gunpowder since the USA and the USSR with their strength combined have more chances of helping Communism abroad. Africa, South Asia, even France: there could some people that are not so fond of the Uk and France forming a single country!
I dunno if they could achieve what the US did on OTL. Stalin's agressive policy was enough for sociald-democrats to align with the USA. With the USA being a relatively functional socialist democracy, the stick of "democracy" is not going to work that well. Besides, the UK is not an economic/industrial powerhouse to the level of the OTL USA to do all of the things I just mentioned. I don't think even the Commonwealth at full power could mantain the capitalist sphere without a lot of unrest. To be honest, I'm kind of excited for a communist victory in the Cold War and the implications of a post-capitalist world like Marx envisioned are a very interesting idea. And I like the vision of the UK doing their best to stay afloat the liberal capitalist system in a brave last attempt. I think the outcome that is more likely is that they just gave up at the end, and just accept Communist supremacy in order to mantain their our own system.
Nuclear weapons aren't the only mean to win a indrect confrontation, my friend. The CIA and the KGB know a lot about that
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