The Great Crusade (Reds! Part 3)

I'm rather fond of 'The Slavers' Rebellion' myself.
I don't really like the use of rebellion, because I think that that word would be associated to the Revolution by synonymic association, so given a reactionary war a title even remotely similar to the heroic First and Second Revolutions doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
 
I don't really like the use of rebellion, because I think that that word would be associated to the Revolution by synonymic association, so given a reactionary war a title even remotely similar to the heroic First and Second Revolutions doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

The slavers' tantrum? Maybe a bit insensitive to the union soldiers who died though.
 
Operation Sherman & The Road to Nuremburg (Fall 1944)
Excerpts from Roan Clark*, The Road to Nuremburg: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, (London: Penguin, 1976)

On a cold, clear Autumn day, our triumph turned into a nightmare from which we could not awake.” ~ Sergeant Albin Wilcox*, 1/506th Parachute Infantry Regiment

Marshal Frunze had personally given the codename “Operation Sherman” to the Byelorussian Strategic Offensive. It would be the culmination of four years of awful, bloody struggle, and with the eviction of the Nazi occupier, it would be time to sound the death knell of the Third Reich itself. The code name had been chosen as an homage to the Union Army general and his March to the Sea that waged a revolutionary total war against the slave empire of the CSA, and as a tribute to the over one million American soldiers who had given their lives in defense of the Soviet Union.

Just before dawn on 30 September 1944, a prepared speech from General Eisenhower was read to the soldiers of the Central Theater:

Soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the Communist International! You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, towards which we have striven these many years. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes of all the peoples of the world march with you. In company with our brave Allies and comrades in other Theaters, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi-Fascist tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.​

The guns erupted in thunderous violence, ushering the start of the largest offensive operation in human history, involving nearly three million men in five Fronts. Twelve thousand tanks and assault guns, sixty thousand guns, mortars and rocket launchers, and ten thousand aircraft were arrayed under the theater command of General Zhukov.

Volksmarshal von Manstein would command Army Group Center during her swan song. Even if he’d been given every soldier the Reich could muster, he’d still have been outnumbered. But twenty division equivalents, some three hundred thousand men, were shifting from the OKH to Army Group South instead, protecting the vital Rumanian oil fields from the expected offensive. And Army Group Center began to lose some of its mobile reserves to staunch the bleeding in the south. The offensive, “straight to the jugular” as Reichsmaschall Göring had called it, had not come in summer, and now the diligence of Comintern maskirovka kept them blind to the threat until it was too late. Over a million men, millions of tons of supplies, and thousands of combat vehicles had been moved to the front in complete camouflage discipline.

In the early morning hours of 1 October 1944, four airborne divisions (Soviet 1st and 5th, American 17th and 101st) were dropped behind the German lines, tasked with seizing key crossings of the Dnepr and Pripyat Rivers. The general offensive would follow on three axes: Vitebsk-Orsha (“Luna”), Mogilev (“Venus”), and Bobruysk (“Mercury”).

With total air dominance and an army honed to a razor’s edge in four years of brutal conflict, Zhukov had all the tools necessary to showcase the mature form of deep battle’s operational art. The ever mounting intensity of the bomber offensives forced Germany to divert ever more men and war materiel to defending industry from attack. Oil reserves were dwindling fast, and synthetic production could not hope to match the deficit. Whether in victory or defeat, it would be von Manstein’s last opportunity to conduct a mobile defense or attempt to force a counterstroke.

In spite of Manstein’s well-deserved reputation for military acumen, and the still very good organizational disposition of both the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS, this was a campaign decided before the first shot was fired.

[...]

As we have seen, the speed of the offensive left von Manstein always half a step behind in the dance. In spite of the tenacious, even fanatical resistance offered by the Germans, Comintern commanders would utilize incredible local superiority in firepower and numbers to overwhelm their opposition.

All three axes achieved their initial objectives within the first week of the operation. With the front line shattered, Manstein attempted to extricate his forces from the cauldron, but with the capture or death of a significant fraction of division and army level commanders, Army Group Center was thrown into a state of chaos. This story has played out in the preceding chapters. But before continuing on to the death agonies of Army Group Center, we must make a historical aside here.

It is easy, in the context of a war that involved the mobilizations of tens of millions of people, and the construction of vast arsenals of war materiel the world has not seen before or since, to lose sight of the forest for the trees. The crucial question of why the Second World War was fought must be addressed.

Far more comprehensive works have been written on the Holocaust. But this author feels it necessary to situate the military offensive that is Operation Sherman within the context of the human-political goal of resistance to a genocidal regime.

Your average Ivan or Yank had witnessed Nazi atrocities before. The extended campaign of the past year, liberating Ukraine and Western Russia had found a country-side despoiled by Nazi occupation. Ghost towns littered the country, the once rich black earth now overworked by equally overworked people, subsisting on starvation rations thanks to Nazi looting. The forests were haunted by mass graves. The survivors told tales of deportations of the able-bodied, lured with a mixture of violent threats and the promise of increased rations to toil away in the mines and factories of the Reich.

The 101st Guards Airborne entered the forests west of Byaroza on 13 October. Racing forward to cut the axis of retreat of the German Twelfth Army, the exhausted paratroopers stumbled into the Linova extermination camp.(1)

Linova was the easternmost extermination camp in the archipelago of death created by the Nazi regime. Constructed in 1942 to provide lumber, metal and chemical products for the Reich’s war machine, the camp would later host gas chambers and crematoria in service to the Final Solution, to a question no decent man would have ever asked.

Linova was one of the smaller extermination camps; most recent estimates conclude that approximately two hundred thousand Jews and other undesirables were murdered there. It is unique only in as much as the rapidity of the Comintern advanced prevented attempts at liquidation, demolition and the destruction of documentation. In the chaos of Operation Sherman, orders to move up this erasure of physical evidence of the Shoah did not arrive in time.

The panicked guards of the SS-Totenkopfverbände,(2) accustomed to brutalizing a population of starving prisoners, were no match for the scout elements of the 1/506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, and surrendered after a token resistance.

The soldiers would walk into a nightmare land. The barbed wire stockade encircled some two thousand emaciated men, ghosts of skin and bone. Housed in bare wood and sod huts, they were clothed only in threadbare striped pajamas, each adorned by a yellow Star of David. The shambling men waited at the barbed wire, too cautious to hope just yet, as the paratroopers cut open the gates.

A fine layer of pale ashes coated the main concourse. When the interpreters began asking the inmates about the camp, they would learn that they were standing in the cremated remains of the recently murdered.

This story would be repeated many times in the advance across occupied Poland. As for the men and women who bore witness to this atrocity, it is often what they did not or could not say was the most revealing.

Corporal Joshua Graves’* journals have been a treasure in enriching the war history of the 1/506th, filled with everything from his existential musings to details about the ration situation. The entry for 13 October is a single large black ‘X’ written with a trembling hand.

Lieutenant Ken Fuyutsuki*, presently serving as executive officer of B Company, would write:

I wanted to believe that however evil the Nazis were, there was still some shred of humanity left. I don’t know how I can believe that anymore. One of the inmates spoke some English...he said he was a professor of English literature in another life. He took us to a gray, foreboding building near the edge of the stockade. He said that when people went into this building, they never returned. Everywhere smelled of death and decay except in here. The overpowering smell of chemicals filled it. The chamber said it was a ‘shower’. The paint had been scratched down, gouges in the cinder blocks. Fingernails. I can’t sleep without imagining the desperating clawing on the walls.​

For the survivors, starving and wary of the other shoe dropping, liberation seemed like a dream. They had spent weeks not knowing whether they were to be force marched or liquidated, with new orders and countermands arriving every day. The sight of olive-green fatigues and pot helmets, all armed to the teeth, offered the promise of peace. Armed force, not against them, but for the first time in the pitiful years of Nazi occupation, allied to them.

The historian’s difficulty in discussing the Shoah, in spite of its historic recency, is that of the detective’s magnified million-fold. “Avengers of the innocent” in the mold of Hercule Poirot must give voice to the homicide victim. But the Shoah was not a murder committed in the heat of passion, nor was it the act of a small conspiracy killing in cold blood for the sake of treasure. It was a systematic, industrialized system of murder that involved millions of guilty hands all playing some role in the machinery of murder.

The historian must give voice to the twenty-five million murdered in wilful, deliberate malice by the Nazi regime, of which the Jews bore the heaviest burden.(3) And those Jews who survived are undeservingly burdened with the duty of speaking for the millions who did not. It would be obscene to discuss the liberation of Linova without the voices of the liberated.

Yakob Rivikin*, a survivor of Linova, would reflect on his liberation five years later, saying:

It was like waking from a fitful sleep. Each day had blended into the next, neither fully awake nor asleep. Indeed, neither alive nor dead, somewhere in between. When I saw the GI standing on the other side of the fence in his forest green, I began to stir. He seemed like a mountain of a man, a lantern jawed Gideon standing two meters tall. He looked at me, face twisted in a mixture of concern and unbelief. That such a man could be moved to tears...I realized the full weight of what the Germans had done to me, as my hands traced the contours of my bones. My own body was alien to me, the bones and skin I could not recognize as mine.​

There can be no better reminder of the barbarism of the Eastern Front that unlike Entente forces, who when they stumbled upon Nazi concentration camps often made the situation of the starvelings worse by overfeeding them, the Comintern forces had well developed protocols for preserving the health of the starving. After distributing the recommended small doses of acceptable foods and water from their own rations, the soldiers of 1/506th turned towards their SS-TV captives.

Major Russel Murtagh*, commanding officer of the 1/506th, ordered the captured officers and men of the camp’s guard detail, some two hundred in total, to draw lots, on the pretense that they would be separated into groups for labor detail. The first group, which included the camp deputy commandant Obersturmfuhrer Franz Reichleitner, were to be marched for POW processing by 18th Army. The second two groups were ordered to bury the remaining dead who littered the camp, or who had perished while abandoned in railcars. While the SS men dug mass graves for their victims, units of the 18th Army moved forward to cut off German escape, and to secure the camp against German counterattack after intercepting Wehrmacht orders to retake it and liquidate the population and physical evidence of its existence.

The following day, just as the grave digging was completed, orders arrived from the divisional soviet, signed by the divisional commissar Brigadier Bernard Ades, for the liquidation of the camp guards. Captured orders as well as testimony from the inmates had attested to the camp’s role in the extermination of American and Soviet soldiers of Jewish descent. Thus, under General Order No. 165, reprisal against the offending unit was ordered. At noon, in the sight of the inmates, the SS camp detail was liquidated in front of the ditch they had been digging since the previous afternoon, sparing only the non-German Osttruppen.

[...]

On 12 December 1944, advance elements of the 62nd Army reached the shores of the Curoland Lagoon near the outlet of the Memel River. The 1st Baltic Front drove an armored wedge between Army Group North and Army Group Center. After four years, six months, and twenty-four days of war, the first Soviet troops set foot on the soil of the Greater German Reich. Troops of the 1st Byelorussian Front reached the gates of Warsaw the following morning.

An exploitation operation, dubbed “Operation Suvorov”, pressed into the Baltic cauldron. Numerous troop ships evacuating soldiers were sunk by submarine and naval aviation. The physical destruction of Army Group North was completed by February 1945, along with it the dissolution of Reichkommissariat Baltenland.

In the aftermath of Operation Sherman, the Nazi regime began its last ditch mobilization effort, recalling nearly all of its forces from the Western Theater for a defense of the Fatherland, leaving Petain’s fragile Franco-Italian coalition to contain Entente forces threatening to break out of the Aquitaine and Occitane departments. The Reich began emergency conscription of the youth and old men into Volksturm units to serve as an auxiliary to the Waffen-SS.

But even amidst a regime proclaiming Totaler Krieg with ever greater ferocity, the morale situation plummeted on the home front. The Combined Bomber Offensive was raining bombs on German industrial centers and marshalling yards around the clock. Food rations, even for Aryans, began falling, sustained at comfortable levels only by the deliberate starvation of forced labourers.

And everywhere, Hitler’s allies were deserting him. Finland had become a co-belligerent against Sweden. The resulting domestic unrest in Germany’s greatest source of iron ore exploded, threatening crucial exports. Turkey sued for peace in October, as Soviet troops prepared to break out of Turkish Armenia.

Only the Italian Social Republic stood resolute, committing forces to secure the Balkans against Yugoslav partisans, and shoring up Iron Guard Rumania against an expected Comintern offensive.

(1) No such camp existed IOTL.
(2) Often called the “Deaths Head Unit”, they were, as IOTL, the branch of the SS assigned to administer the system of concentration camps. Not to be confused with the 3rd SS-Panzer Division “Totenkopf”.
(3) Encompassing all victims of the Nazi’s deliberate campaigns of genocide, politicide and mass murder, such as the millions killed by the Hunger Plan in Nazi occupied Poland, the Baltics and the Soviet Union, the Final Solution targeting Jews, Roma, and Sinti, as well as campaigns of extermination of religious groups, political groups, and the disabled.
 
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Still, despite the low manpower, and despite fighting against two commie superpowers, they were able to unleash quite a bit of death and destruction.

A lot of that was enabled by support Britain and France as well as flight capital from America putting the Axis in a much stronger position than OTL plus having more nations join up out of fear of the Comintern helped too.
 
Spandex - The Fiber That Changed Fashion
When it was first synthesized at the Waynesboro Chemical Laboratory in 1944, nobody in the world could have predicted the sea change that Spandex would bring to American fashion. Created as a replacement for ballistic nylon, it’s elastic properties were quickly discovered, and the new material was considered as an alternative to the scarce rubber that had been difficult to procure since the revolution. However, it wasn’t until the United Textile Collective successfully managed to blend spandex with cotton that it’s true value became known.

With a blend of 95% cotton and 5% spandex, fabric became much harder to tear, and garmets would last far longer , and the spandex blends allowed for tighter, more comfortable fits for undergarments. Spandex’s distinctive sheen became an image of postwar UASR fashion.

Postwar fashion began to integrate the new material whenever they could. Skintight leggings in a variety of colors and patterns became a common fashion trend for women in the ComIntern.

So avant-garde space age disco fashion is mainstream now?
 
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