Didn’t the Pandoric War stories indicate that some of the resistance groups seeking to expel the Russians were Societists specifically the mention of Black Flags and the story mentioning them indicating the other factions seeking Russian removal were crushed, even with the benefit of hindsight in universe?
Look to the West Volume VIII: The Bear and the Basilisk
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
It sounds like our illustrious reviewer argues with people over Motext about Trafalgar. So there seem to be Internet forums/chat rooms.
It's nice to know that some things are basically the same over in Timeline L - though apparently it took longer for the hex grid to catch on over there.
You know, there's no reason both of these things can't be true. Verbeek-Black Flag alliance of convenience to kick out the Russians, and then the Verbeeks realize after the fact that this was a really, reaaaalllly bad idea and they've signed on with something a lot more dangerous
That actually matches a simplified summary of China resisting the Japanese in OTL
If this happens the Verbeeks might never look back. If my understanding of Societism is right, there's nothing intrisinically against the idea that the heads of megacorporations are a natural element of the human hierarchy. And even if it isn't quite in line with official policy Zon1Urb1 may still recognize "Societism with Yaponese characteristics" if it makes things run smoothly.
Thande
Donor
Part #280: Victories and Defeats
“We now go over to Jacob Sandwell with the financial news. Jake?”
“Uh, thank you, Miss Jackson – Ultima...” (mutual laughter) “I’m sorry, I’m still getting used to how you do things down here! Uh, anyway. The Randall Livingston has closed at thirty under, and analysts in New York are debating whether this is just a blip or a cause for concern. The respected Jack Ewings, writing in the Buttonwood Update, points to smaller but perceptible declines in the Asian markets, especially the Nanjing One-Oh-Eight and the increasingly influential Calcutta Register. But ‘Negociant’ in the Mount-Royal Tape pooh-poohs the idea that it’s a potential sign of a wider crash, pointing to his – or her, I suppose – own city’s resilience in the Café Exchange, as well as the Californian and European markets. Is it time to sell up or to hold our nerve? I’ll be speaking live to financial history expert Raymond Hatton in Ultima – that is, uh, I mean, uh the cit-”
*
From: “A History of the German-speaking Peoples” by Erich Fischer (1979, authorised English translation 1986)—
Though much of the lead-up to the wars of the Black Twenties was overshadowed by what came later, in Germany – and throughout much of Europe – an enduring part of the historical narrative concerns the uncertainty and dithering over whether Germany would fulfil her treaty obligations and join the war. Of course, framing the point in that way, fitting the popular narrative, itself makes a value judgement; those who would defend continued neutrality would point to the ambiguous wording of the so-called ‘Bouclier’ bilateral treaties which Germany had signed with France. It would certainly be possible to argue that Russia and France coming to blows outside Europe, as in the flashpoint in Khiva and elsewhere in Tartary, did not oblige Germany to declare war on Russia. Bavaria certainly interpreted its own treaty obligations (admittedly rather older and more lapsed) under the Marseilles Protocol in such a manner. Indeed, at the time the debate was largely framed in Dresden as being one over what lay in Germany’s best interests, not what represented a matter of honour.
From a purely self-interested, pragmatiste perspective, a war with Russia and her allies represented a substantial risk with a high potential reward. In a sense the two represented two sides of the same coin. The loss of Bohemia in the Pandoric War – to form the new state of Czechosilesia – represented a severe blow to the German state, and perhaps even more importantly, put Dresden all but under Russian guns. Russia’s alliance with Belgium following the Panic of 1917 only made matters worse. Germany was now surrounded on three frontiers by enemies (as Poland had also been subordinated to Russia as an ally). The situation was undeniably worse than it had been during the Pandoric War, with the only advantage being that France was an ally (albeit a rather self-interested one) and now so was Scandinavia. But that was itself a measure of how far Germany had fallen, that her government had been forced to accept the loss of Jutland in the treaties of alliance. (Ironically, though it made said government look weak to its people, it also had an impact on Jutes no longer seeing Germany as an existential threat and instead becoming dissatisfied with Copenhagen’s rule).
This was certainly how Bundeskaiser Anton viewed the situation. He saw the Pandoric War as the thing which had ultimately doomed his father Johann Georg, on both a personal and a political level. He regarded the German people as fickle children who were ready to blame their monarch and government at the drop of a hat for factors beyond their control. For this reason, he was quite certain that even if the people backed a war early on, they would turn on the Emperor who ordered it as soon as casualty reports started to come in. In this, his views reflected those of the late nineteenth century ‘Federalist Backlash’ against democracy which had influenced his father, likely not a coincidence.
Anton was also fundamentally unhappy with Germany’ subordinated position to France, a view that a large part of the electorate certainly shared with him. Germany had spent the early 1900s aiding the French in their failed intervention in South America, in part due to get rid of angry demobbed soldiers whom the von Brühl Treuliga government were worried about; when this had ended badly, the people had elected a Hochrad government under Fritz Ziege. Yet, though Ziege had been popular with the people (and had forced Anton to back down over a controversy involving naming a lineship after his unpopular father), he too would be forced into subordination to France following the Panic of 1917.[1] It seemed that no matter how the people voted, Germany ended up with a government that bowed to Paris. To Anton, joining the war now would be another act of subordination, turning Germany into a battlefield that would ruin her, and leave her even weaker before the France she shielded before that act. On the other hand, alliance with Russia was unthinkable to all but the fringes of German society, with most still furious about the Pandoric War and the treatment of German-speakers in Poland and Czechosilesia. Although some fictional accounts paint Anton as considering an approach to Petrograd, this is ahistorical and an example of the deliberate blackening of the monarchy’s name by many in modern Germany.
For those who advocated war entry – Chancellor Ruddel among them, though not without misgivings – the situation was flipped. Yes war had a chance to make things worse for Germany, but conversely, the status quo was untenable. Indefinite neutrality, as war technology improved (particularly aerodromes) would leave Germany effectively defenceless in the long run and ultimately surrounded and absorbed by the Vitebsk Pact. While alignment with France was concerning to this strand of opinion, it was a case of better the devil one knew. Germany must fight to escape irrelevance, and Germany could not fight everyone at once.
In some ways it is possible to partially sympathise with Anton’s contempt for the German people, given that in the lead-up to war they certainly seemed to display a weathervane-like tendency to change their minds based on the latest news. In reality, of course, it is unfair to generalise to an entire nation an impression received from specific newspaper editorials or protest marches. The general narrative presented in Germany today usually paints a picture of the people being keenly supportive of war and a tone-deaf Emperor ineffectually holding them back, but naturally the reality was rather more complex than that. One of the problems Anton faced was that those Germans who agreed with him on neutrality were usually the ones to also hate him most for other reasons, such as his refusal to condemn his father for matters such as the South American intervention. The opposition conservative Treuliga party, still regarded as close to Anton, did not help by failing to present a leader of the calibre that such a strand of opinion could rally around. Ruddel’s Hochrad government remained strong, still supported by the influential Ziege from retirement. Of course, one way in which neutrality and the Emperor was castigated – albeit more in hindsight – was the association of such a view with Pacifism and therefore Societism. This was not entirely a leap of imagination, as Societists were becoming more active in the government of Danubia and had already played a part in Archking Leopold’s decision to remain neutral. Still, in the early 1920s Societists were generally regarded as only vaguely suspicious, and South America seemed a long way away.
The ambiguity of Germany’s situation dragged on for weeks. Ironically, this may actually have helped France’s war effort, as Tsar Paul was hopeful the Emperor might get his way, and therefore avoided mobilising troops in Poland for a while to avoid helping the pro-war side – which was ultimately beneficial to the ‘Protocol’ position elsewhere. However, this was certainly not Anton’s intention, no matter how many revisionist biographers paint a picture of the wise monarch more far-sighted than his brutish, ungrateful subjects. Pro-war campaigners, including many prominently-displayed wounded veterans of the Pandoric War to rob the Pacifists of an argument, protested outside the Bundesdiet in Dresden while deputies fiercely debated within. It remains unclear if there was ever any truth to the rumour that Anton considered vetoing a bill calling for war, but certainly the rumour spread like wildfire and led to the mob throwing rotten fruit at Dresden Castle. The heavy-handed response, involving troops using wooden riot bullets to supplement the police, did not do anything for Anton’s popularity.
Nonetheless, Germany finally began to mobilise in late July (triggering Russia to do the same, making war inevitable). The declaration of war followed an assassination attempt on King John of Czechosilesia, after which the Czechosilesian government announced a crackdown on German-speakers (and Germanophone politician Roderich Kreuz fled the country) . The fact that Danubia stood up to the Tsar, and refused to hand over Kreuz when he sought asylum, emboldened many in Germany. But the Vitebsk Pact victory at the Battle of Ceylon also gave many in Germany a moment of pause (and Anton wrote confidently in his diary that his position would be vindicated). The ‘Shiraz Massacre’ in early August toughened German resolve while also making many fear about the potential for aero power over Germany.
The Germans did have one advantage, which was that fears about Belgium being the other jaw of a vise to squeeze the country did not pan out. While the Belgians launched desultory attacks into the Ruhr and the Germans responded, for the most part there was a careful, tactful, unspoken mutual armed neutrality along the Belgian-German border. The Belgians were focused on resisting the French (who invaded with an aggression born of fear of Paris being in range of Belgian bombers) while the Germans similarly wanted to use all their forces in the east. Both Brussels and Dresden faced constant demands from Petrograd and Paris, respectively, to be proper cobelligerents and fight one another, yet both quietly ignored them. While Belgium’s subordination to Russia was deeper than Germany’s to France, fundamentally both nations had no inclination to put their own folk at risk for the sake of a broader strategy for their stronger allies. Of course, this is a simplification and many Germans wanted revenge for Belgium’s ‘stab in the back’ at the end of the Pandoric War, and some Belgians were still disappointed by how little territory had changed hands as a result. But it was precisely this factor, and the fact that German and Belgian industry had once again come to rely on the assumption the Ruhr would remain divided, that ensured other fronts seemed more important.
With Belgium less of a factor than feared, the next question was where to focus in the east. The General Staff, under Marshal Julius von Prittwitz, presented two primary scenarios to the politicians (consisting of Ruddel and King Maurice of High Saxony, as Anton was still convinced the war would be a disaster and refused to become associated with it). Firstly, Germany’s primary war aim should be to reclaim Czechosilesia, and the German-speakers there were now in revolt following the assassination attempt on King John and the ensuing crackdown: an opportunity, and arguably a Malraux-style obligation. Furthermore, Dresden was only a short distance from the Ore Mountains if the Russians were able to mount a direct attack, and the reconquest of Czechosilesia would remove this threat.
The second scenario focused on the fear of ‘the Tsar’s Armart Legions’ sweeping across Poland and overrunning the flat North European Plain[2] to conquer most of Germany and link up with Belgium. This had become a widely-claimed doomsday scenario by military planners throughout the 1900s and 1910s, taking certain lessons from the Pandoric War in Poland.[3] Firefist weapons had only been deployed against protguns in the final phases of the war, and those weapons were not representative of the more refined ones which appeared in the 1910s. With the First Interbellum lacking much in the way of conflicts in which protguns would have been useful, it was therefore an entirely theoretical question over whether modern protguns could sweep across suitably flat nations in days, or whether Firefists and other modern weapons could stop them. Though it is easy for us to find these predictions far-fetched in hindsight, it is important to remember that there really was no way to be sure at the time. Even when Firefists used by Tartar rebels and Persians proved effective against the Tsar’s vaunted armarts, it was easy for these stories to be dismissed—the Russians were advancing regardless, even through Persia whose mountainous terrain was less amenable for protguns than the North European Plain.
Prittwitz’s second scenario, then, would see German forces take advantage of Russia’s slower mobilisation in Europe, and distraction with the Persian front, to strike first and drive to the east through Poland with her own Panzerkanone forces. The goal would not be to take Warsaw or conquer Poland, necessarily, but to create a sheer buffer of land to protect Germany’s cities from Russian aerial attack, and perhaps to slow down the inevitable counterattack.
Prittwitz came from a Silesian family himself, and some historians have criticised him on the basis that he might have wanted to present the Czechosilesian plan as preferable due to a desire to reclaim his homeland. This is a little far-fetched (and perhaps overly influenced by extreme Diversitarian views) as Prittwitz’s branch of his family had lived in Dresden for generations before the Pandoric War. Nonetheless, the view is more comprehensible in the knowledge of the plan that was eventually adopted. Unwilling to make a firm choice between the two, fearing that focusing on either would leave Germany (and Dresden specifically) vulnerable to the other, Ruddel and Maurice pushed for a compromise between the two—focusing in an attack on Silesia specifically. German forces would move to occupy the Silesian regional capital of Breslau/Vratislav and then strike south, seizing the Glatz/Kladsko Valley and its crucial passes of Kudowa and Mittelwalde to push into the interior of Bohemia.[4] By contrast, German forces around the Ore Mountains would remain on the defensive, except where local rebels might be aided; rather than bitter mountain fighting, the plan sought to essentially surround the Russian puppet regime in Prague from the south and crush it that way. The plan was named Fall Karl der Große (Case Charlemagne), a questionable name as Charlemagne had actually largely failed on his first attempt to conquer Bohemia in 805 AD. It may well have been chosen as a signifier to Germany’s French allies.
With most German military forces focused on Case Charlemagne, advances into Poland from Pomerania and Brandenburg were largely half-hearted by comparison. The circumstances of the whole matter illustrate just why Emperor Anton thought it so reasonable to take a view that the war would inevitably be a disaster. On paper, this weak-willed, vaccilating compromise between two bold but risky plans, risking the downsides of both, should have failed badly. The fact it did not represents a very lucky moment for the German state, if not its monarchy, and one it was arguably due for after some of the reversals of the Pandoric War! It turned out that the General Staff had overestimated the forces the Russians could bring to bear in Europe at this point, as well as how much the Russians could rely on the Poles (who took a stance of being as unhelpful as they could get away with, including quietly sabotaging internal rail links). Paradoxically, the Germans’ aforementioned unenthusiastic pushes into Poland came across as a deliberate attempt to avoid antagonising the Poles, rather than the result of an inadequate compromise, and ensured such sabotage continued. The same was true of how the Luftkorps focused its aero attacks on the Charlemagne campaign and avoided attacking Polish military targets, focusing on Russian bases in Poland for reasons of limited resources rather than a deliberate policy. However, the advantages of this were quickly realised by Maurice and from 1923 it became an actual order to avoid unnecessary damage to the Poles.
Charlemagne had also been built on the wishful-thinking assumption (as Anton accurately put it) that the German-speakers in Czechosilesia would be sufficiently upset at their treatment by the Prague regime to rise up and join with the invading German forces. Some historians have defended his view by pointing to the fact that many German-speakers indeed kept their head down and did not get involved, especially in the Sudetenland in the early part of the war. However, many young Germans in Czechosilesia were outraged by the imprisonment of political leaders, and particularly when it was announced that Ulrich Mahler had died ‘of natural causes’ in a cell in Prague Castle. The ensuing rising came at a crucial time, in late October 1922 as the Panzerkanone-led German army pushed into Glatz after taking Breslau in a true ‘guerre d’éclair’. Without the uprising, it seems likely the cautious German General Staff would have paused to consolidate their gains, but with even the Ore Mountains now revolting against the Russian and Czech troops standing on the defensive there, Germany was able to attack from multiple sides at once. Even through the winter and beyond the usual campaign season, fighting raged and by February 1923, King John had fled to neutral Bavaria and all of Czechosilesia was in German hands. The exiled King Albert IV returned and the old Kingdom of Bohemia was proclaimed once again—naturally leading to counter-persecution of the Czechs once again, storing up more problems for the future.
Meanwhile, farther north, Russian attempts to respond to the invasion of Silesia largely fell flat. There were some high-profile aero raids on German targets, but these remained largely military at this point, with the Tsar cautious after the Shiraz incident. Fundamentally, the thing the planners had feared, the wave of armarts crossing the plain, proved to be a damp squib. Things might well have been different if the Russians had been able to commit more forces—the success of Charlemagne showed that protguns could certainly be effective as an armoured spearhead—but as things were, with the Russians focused on Persia, Tartary and India, the armoured forces they committed could be halted by German infantry armed with modern Firefists. Aero power also began to play more of a role in countering armour, though this would not be fully realised until the latter stages of the Black Twenties and ultimately the Sunrise War.
Thus, the stage was set for the great irony of twentieth-century German history. Johann Georg had bet on a glorious war and lost; his son had bet against one and, at least for a while, seemed to have lost as well. While the end result would be more nuanced, Germany’s successes in the opening stages of the conflict cemented an impression in the minds of her people; that Germany could be great when she was not held back by her royal family...
[1] See Part #270 in Volume VII.
[2] This term is being used anachronistically.
[3] See Part #275 in Volume VII.
[4] This gives the German and Czech names of the places in question; in OTL they are now known by Polish names, Wrocław and Kłodzko respectively. The spa town of Kudowa is still called that, but Mittelwalde has been Polonised into Międzylesie.
“We now go over to Jacob Sandwell with the financial news. Jake?”
“Uh, thank you, Miss Jackson – Ultima...” (mutual laughter) “I’m sorry, I’m still getting used to how you do things down here! Uh, anyway. The Randall Livingston has closed at thirty under, and analysts in New York are debating whether this is just a blip or a cause for concern. The respected Jack Ewings, writing in the Buttonwood Update, points to smaller but perceptible declines in the Asian markets, especially the Nanjing One-Oh-Eight and the increasingly influential Calcutta Register. But ‘Negociant’ in the Mount-Royal Tape pooh-poohs the idea that it’s a potential sign of a wider crash, pointing to his – or her, I suppose – own city’s resilience in the Café Exchange, as well as the Californian and European markets. Is it time to sell up or to hold our nerve? I’ll be speaking live to financial history expert Raymond Hatton in Ultima – that is, uh, I mean, uh the cit-”
– Transcription of a C-WNB News Motoscope broadcast,
recorded in Waccamaw Strand, Kingdom of Carolina, 19/03/2020
recorded in Waccamaw Strand, Kingdom of Carolina, 19/03/2020
*
From: “A History of the German-speaking Peoples” by Erich Fischer (1979, authorised English translation 1986)—
Though much of the lead-up to the wars of the Black Twenties was overshadowed by what came later, in Germany – and throughout much of Europe – an enduring part of the historical narrative concerns the uncertainty and dithering over whether Germany would fulfil her treaty obligations and join the war. Of course, framing the point in that way, fitting the popular narrative, itself makes a value judgement; those who would defend continued neutrality would point to the ambiguous wording of the so-called ‘Bouclier’ bilateral treaties which Germany had signed with France. It would certainly be possible to argue that Russia and France coming to blows outside Europe, as in the flashpoint in Khiva and elsewhere in Tartary, did not oblige Germany to declare war on Russia. Bavaria certainly interpreted its own treaty obligations (admittedly rather older and more lapsed) under the Marseilles Protocol in such a manner. Indeed, at the time the debate was largely framed in Dresden as being one over what lay in Germany’s best interests, not what represented a matter of honour.
From a purely self-interested, pragmatiste perspective, a war with Russia and her allies represented a substantial risk with a high potential reward. In a sense the two represented two sides of the same coin. The loss of Bohemia in the Pandoric War – to form the new state of Czechosilesia – represented a severe blow to the German state, and perhaps even more importantly, put Dresden all but under Russian guns. Russia’s alliance with Belgium following the Panic of 1917 only made matters worse. Germany was now surrounded on three frontiers by enemies (as Poland had also been subordinated to Russia as an ally). The situation was undeniably worse than it had been during the Pandoric War, with the only advantage being that France was an ally (albeit a rather self-interested one) and now so was Scandinavia. But that was itself a measure of how far Germany had fallen, that her government had been forced to accept the loss of Jutland in the treaties of alliance. (Ironically, though it made said government look weak to its people, it also had an impact on Jutes no longer seeing Germany as an existential threat and instead becoming dissatisfied with Copenhagen’s rule).
This was certainly how Bundeskaiser Anton viewed the situation. He saw the Pandoric War as the thing which had ultimately doomed his father Johann Georg, on both a personal and a political level. He regarded the German people as fickle children who were ready to blame their monarch and government at the drop of a hat for factors beyond their control. For this reason, he was quite certain that even if the people backed a war early on, they would turn on the Emperor who ordered it as soon as casualty reports started to come in. In this, his views reflected those of the late nineteenth century ‘Federalist Backlash’ against democracy which had influenced his father, likely not a coincidence.
Anton was also fundamentally unhappy with Germany’ subordinated position to France, a view that a large part of the electorate certainly shared with him. Germany had spent the early 1900s aiding the French in their failed intervention in South America, in part due to get rid of angry demobbed soldiers whom the von Brühl Treuliga government were worried about; when this had ended badly, the people had elected a Hochrad government under Fritz Ziege. Yet, though Ziege had been popular with the people (and had forced Anton to back down over a controversy involving naming a lineship after his unpopular father), he too would be forced into subordination to France following the Panic of 1917.[1] It seemed that no matter how the people voted, Germany ended up with a government that bowed to Paris. To Anton, joining the war now would be another act of subordination, turning Germany into a battlefield that would ruin her, and leave her even weaker before the France she shielded before that act. On the other hand, alliance with Russia was unthinkable to all but the fringes of German society, with most still furious about the Pandoric War and the treatment of German-speakers in Poland and Czechosilesia. Although some fictional accounts paint Anton as considering an approach to Petrograd, this is ahistorical and an example of the deliberate blackening of the monarchy’s name by many in modern Germany.
For those who advocated war entry – Chancellor Ruddel among them, though not without misgivings – the situation was flipped. Yes war had a chance to make things worse for Germany, but conversely, the status quo was untenable. Indefinite neutrality, as war technology improved (particularly aerodromes) would leave Germany effectively defenceless in the long run and ultimately surrounded and absorbed by the Vitebsk Pact. While alignment with France was concerning to this strand of opinion, it was a case of better the devil one knew. Germany must fight to escape irrelevance, and Germany could not fight everyone at once.
In some ways it is possible to partially sympathise with Anton’s contempt for the German people, given that in the lead-up to war they certainly seemed to display a weathervane-like tendency to change their minds based on the latest news. In reality, of course, it is unfair to generalise to an entire nation an impression received from specific newspaper editorials or protest marches. The general narrative presented in Germany today usually paints a picture of the people being keenly supportive of war and a tone-deaf Emperor ineffectually holding them back, but naturally the reality was rather more complex than that. One of the problems Anton faced was that those Germans who agreed with him on neutrality were usually the ones to also hate him most for other reasons, such as his refusal to condemn his father for matters such as the South American intervention. The opposition conservative Treuliga party, still regarded as close to Anton, did not help by failing to present a leader of the calibre that such a strand of opinion could rally around. Ruddel’s Hochrad government remained strong, still supported by the influential Ziege from retirement. Of course, one way in which neutrality and the Emperor was castigated – albeit more in hindsight – was the association of such a view with Pacifism and therefore Societism. This was not entirely a leap of imagination, as Societists were becoming more active in the government of Danubia and had already played a part in Archking Leopold’s decision to remain neutral. Still, in the early 1920s Societists were generally regarded as only vaguely suspicious, and South America seemed a long way away.
The ambiguity of Germany’s situation dragged on for weeks. Ironically, this may actually have helped France’s war effort, as Tsar Paul was hopeful the Emperor might get his way, and therefore avoided mobilising troops in Poland for a while to avoid helping the pro-war side – which was ultimately beneficial to the ‘Protocol’ position elsewhere. However, this was certainly not Anton’s intention, no matter how many revisionist biographers paint a picture of the wise monarch more far-sighted than his brutish, ungrateful subjects. Pro-war campaigners, including many prominently-displayed wounded veterans of the Pandoric War to rob the Pacifists of an argument, protested outside the Bundesdiet in Dresden while deputies fiercely debated within. It remains unclear if there was ever any truth to the rumour that Anton considered vetoing a bill calling for war, but certainly the rumour spread like wildfire and led to the mob throwing rotten fruit at Dresden Castle. The heavy-handed response, involving troops using wooden riot bullets to supplement the police, did not do anything for Anton’s popularity.
Nonetheless, Germany finally began to mobilise in late July (triggering Russia to do the same, making war inevitable). The declaration of war followed an assassination attempt on King John of Czechosilesia, after which the Czechosilesian government announced a crackdown on German-speakers (and Germanophone politician Roderich Kreuz fled the country) . The fact that Danubia stood up to the Tsar, and refused to hand over Kreuz when he sought asylum, emboldened many in Germany. But the Vitebsk Pact victory at the Battle of Ceylon also gave many in Germany a moment of pause (and Anton wrote confidently in his diary that his position would be vindicated). The ‘Shiraz Massacre’ in early August toughened German resolve while also making many fear about the potential for aero power over Germany.
The Germans did have one advantage, which was that fears about Belgium being the other jaw of a vise to squeeze the country did not pan out. While the Belgians launched desultory attacks into the Ruhr and the Germans responded, for the most part there was a careful, tactful, unspoken mutual armed neutrality along the Belgian-German border. The Belgians were focused on resisting the French (who invaded with an aggression born of fear of Paris being in range of Belgian bombers) while the Germans similarly wanted to use all their forces in the east. Both Brussels and Dresden faced constant demands from Petrograd and Paris, respectively, to be proper cobelligerents and fight one another, yet both quietly ignored them. While Belgium’s subordination to Russia was deeper than Germany’s to France, fundamentally both nations had no inclination to put their own folk at risk for the sake of a broader strategy for their stronger allies. Of course, this is a simplification and many Germans wanted revenge for Belgium’s ‘stab in the back’ at the end of the Pandoric War, and some Belgians were still disappointed by how little territory had changed hands as a result. But it was precisely this factor, and the fact that German and Belgian industry had once again come to rely on the assumption the Ruhr would remain divided, that ensured other fronts seemed more important.
With Belgium less of a factor than feared, the next question was where to focus in the east. The General Staff, under Marshal Julius von Prittwitz, presented two primary scenarios to the politicians (consisting of Ruddel and King Maurice of High Saxony, as Anton was still convinced the war would be a disaster and refused to become associated with it). Firstly, Germany’s primary war aim should be to reclaim Czechosilesia, and the German-speakers there were now in revolt following the assassination attempt on King John and the ensuing crackdown: an opportunity, and arguably a Malraux-style obligation. Furthermore, Dresden was only a short distance from the Ore Mountains if the Russians were able to mount a direct attack, and the reconquest of Czechosilesia would remove this threat.
The second scenario focused on the fear of ‘the Tsar’s Armart Legions’ sweeping across Poland and overrunning the flat North European Plain[2] to conquer most of Germany and link up with Belgium. This had become a widely-claimed doomsday scenario by military planners throughout the 1900s and 1910s, taking certain lessons from the Pandoric War in Poland.[3] Firefist weapons had only been deployed against protguns in the final phases of the war, and those weapons were not representative of the more refined ones which appeared in the 1910s. With the First Interbellum lacking much in the way of conflicts in which protguns would have been useful, it was therefore an entirely theoretical question over whether modern protguns could sweep across suitably flat nations in days, or whether Firefists and other modern weapons could stop them. Though it is easy for us to find these predictions far-fetched in hindsight, it is important to remember that there really was no way to be sure at the time. Even when Firefists used by Tartar rebels and Persians proved effective against the Tsar’s vaunted armarts, it was easy for these stories to be dismissed—the Russians were advancing regardless, even through Persia whose mountainous terrain was less amenable for protguns than the North European Plain.
Prittwitz’s second scenario, then, would see German forces take advantage of Russia’s slower mobilisation in Europe, and distraction with the Persian front, to strike first and drive to the east through Poland with her own Panzerkanone forces. The goal would not be to take Warsaw or conquer Poland, necessarily, but to create a sheer buffer of land to protect Germany’s cities from Russian aerial attack, and perhaps to slow down the inevitable counterattack.
Prittwitz came from a Silesian family himself, and some historians have criticised him on the basis that he might have wanted to present the Czechosilesian plan as preferable due to a desire to reclaim his homeland. This is a little far-fetched (and perhaps overly influenced by extreme Diversitarian views) as Prittwitz’s branch of his family had lived in Dresden for generations before the Pandoric War. Nonetheless, the view is more comprehensible in the knowledge of the plan that was eventually adopted. Unwilling to make a firm choice between the two, fearing that focusing on either would leave Germany (and Dresden specifically) vulnerable to the other, Ruddel and Maurice pushed for a compromise between the two—focusing in an attack on Silesia specifically. German forces would move to occupy the Silesian regional capital of Breslau/Vratislav and then strike south, seizing the Glatz/Kladsko Valley and its crucial passes of Kudowa and Mittelwalde to push into the interior of Bohemia.[4] By contrast, German forces around the Ore Mountains would remain on the defensive, except where local rebels might be aided; rather than bitter mountain fighting, the plan sought to essentially surround the Russian puppet regime in Prague from the south and crush it that way. The plan was named Fall Karl der Große (Case Charlemagne), a questionable name as Charlemagne had actually largely failed on his first attempt to conquer Bohemia in 805 AD. It may well have been chosen as a signifier to Germany’s French allies.
With most German military forces focused on Case Charlemagne, advances into Poland from Pomerania and Brandenburg were largely half-hearted by comparison. The circumstances of the whole matter illustrate just why Emperor Anton thought it so reasonable to take a view that the war would inevitably be a disaster. On paper, this weak-willed, vaccilating compromise between two bold but risky plans, risking the downsides of both, should have failed badly. The fact it did not represents a very lucky moment for the German state, if not its monarchy, and one it was arguably due for after some of the reversals of the Pandoric War! It turned out that the General Staff had overestimated the forces the Russians could bring to bear in Europe at this point, as well as how much the Russians could rely on the Poles (who took a stance of being as unhelpful as they could get away with, including quietly sabotaging internal rail links). Paradoxically, the Germans’ aforementioned unenthusiastic pushes into Poland came across as a deliberate attempt to avoid antagonising the Poles, rather than the result of an inadequate compromise, and ensured such sabotage continued. The same was true of how the Luftkorps focused its aero attacks on the Charlemagne campaign and avoided attacking Polish military targets, focusing on Russian bases in Poland for reasons of limited resources rather than a deliberate policy. However, the advantages of this were quickly realised by Maurice and from 1923 it became an actual order to avoid unnecessary damage to the Poles.
Charlemagne had also been built on the wishful-thinking assumption (as Anton accurately put it) that the German-speakers in Czechosilesia would be sufficiently upset at their treatment by the Prague regime to rise up and join with the invading German forces. Some historians have defended his view by pointing to the fact that many German-speakers indeed kept their head down and did not get involved, especially in the Sudetenland in the early part of the war. However, many young Germans in Czechosilesia were outraged by the imprisonment of political leaders, and particularly when it was announced that Ulrich Mahler had died ‘of natural causes’ in a cell in Prague Castle. The ensuing rising came at a crucial time, in late October 1922 as the Panzerkanone-led German army pushed into Glatz after taking Breslau in a true ‘guerre d’éclair’. Without the uprising, it seems likely the cautious German General Staff would have paused to consolidate their gains, but with even the Ore Mountains now revolting against the Russian and Czech troops standing on the defensive there, Germany was able to attack from multiple sides at once. Even through the winter and beyond the usual campaign season, fighting raged and by February 1923, King John had fled to neutral Bavaria and all of Czechosilesia was in German hands. The exiled King Albert IV returned and the old Kingdom of Bohemia was proclaimed once again—naturally leading to counter-persecution of the Czechs once again, storing up more problems for the future.
Meanwhile, farther north, Russian attempts to respond to the invasion of Silesia largely fell flat. There were some high-profile aero raids on German targets, but these remained largely military at this point, with the Tsar cautious after the Shiraz incident. Fundamentally, the thing the planners had feared, the wave of armarts crossing the plain, proved to be a damp squib. Things might well have been different if the Russians had been able to commit more forces—the success of Charlemagne showed that protguns could certainly be effective as an armoured spearhead—but as things were, with the Russians focused on Persia, Tartary and India, the armoured forces they committed could be halted by German infantry armed with modern Firefists. Aero power also began to play more of a role in countering armour, though this would not be fully realised until the latter stages of the Black Twenties and ultimately the Sunrise War.
Thus, the stage was set for the great irony of twentieth-century German history. Johann Georg had bet on a glorious war and lost; his son had bet against one and, at least for a while, seemed to have lost as well. While the end result would be more nuanced, Germany’s successes in the opening stages of the conflict cemented an impression in the minds of her people; that Germany could be great when she was not held back by her royal family...
[1] See Part #270 in Volume VII.
[2] This term is being used anachronistically.
[3] See Part #275 in Volume VII.
[4] This gives the German and Czech names of the places in question; in OTL they are now known by Polish names, Wrocław and Kłodzko respectively. The spa town of Kudowa is still called that, but Mittelwalde has been Polonised into Międzylesie.
Thande
Donor
Thanks for the comments everyone.
Also, of course, people often ask about things that would be direct spoilers to reply to - and the only people I drop LTTW spoilers to are my students in online tutorials who have no idea what the heck I'm talking about
To be clear, I do appreciate all the repliesand am not above stealing ideas from them and pretending that's what I had in mind all along
Incidentally, Look to the West Volume V has now gone off to the proofreaders!
I do read them all, but the reason why I don't comment that much or even press like as much (I think the latter might be seen as agreeing with someone's guess) is that I've learned that authors who do this too much tend to forget what they've actually said in the text of their works and what they've just told a random person in a comment / at a book signing / etc. (Brandon Sanderson, I'm looking at you). The danger is you can write chapters like "as you know, the Irish invented the steam-powered tricycle, in this chapter I will show them conquering Singapore" and then people say "wait what when did you say that" and you're like "oh hang on, that's actually just something I dropped a hint to a guy in Michigan about in 2008".
Also, of course, people often ask about things that would be direct spoilers to reply to - and the only people I drop LTTW spoilers to are my students in online tutorials who have no idea what the heck I'm talking about
To be clear, I do appreciate all the replies
Incidentally, Look to the West Volume V has now gone off to the proofreaders!
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I hope Anton has a back up plan in case a revolution breaks out. I fear he's going to need one very soon.
The Bundeskaiser is dead, long live the Interrex!
Well, not yet, but you get the point
Y'know, one point to make here is that it seems like Bohemia and Poland have had their fates reversed. Bohemia is the battleground of eastern Europe, while Poland is the headquarters of the RLPC and a semi-independent country in its own right albeit very firmly within the Russian sphere of influence courtesy of personal unions. Depending on how the upcoming RLPC attempt to break off from Russia goes, this might change really quickly, but for the moment it looks like Poland really isn't getting as raw a deal as it got in OTL
Well, not yet, but you get the point
Y'know, one point to make here is that it seems like Bohemia and Poland have had their fates reversed. Bohemia is the battleground of eastern Europe, while Poland is the headquarters of the RLPC and a semi-independent country in its own right albeit very firmly within the Russian sphere of influence courtesy of personal unions. Depending on how the upcoming RLPC attempt to break off from Russia goes, this might change really quickly, but for the moment it looks like Poland really isn't getting as raw a deal as it got in OTL
Anachronistic use of a name for a plain? Poland will become part of the Danubian Societist state, won't it?
Just as when you didn't tell us that Hainan has been returned to Chinese control.
the only people I drop LTTW spoilers to are my students in online tutorials who have no idea what the heck I'm talking about
Cool, how do I get those tutorials?
Poland is in personal union with Russia?
xsampa
Banned
That’s LithuaniaAnachronistic use of a name for a plain? Poland will become part of the Danubian Societist state, won't it?
Just as when you didn't tell us that Hainan has been returned to Chinese control.
Cool, how do I get those tutorials?
Poland is in personal union with Russia?
Lithuania was in personal union with Russia, until the Daftest Succession War Ever* happened.
*in which the two claimants insisted that the other one was the rightful ruler
Just noticed that it’s less than a decade until LTTW shall have surpassed the time period of the final update of Decades of Darkness.
And we still have two nuclear wars before we hit the present
Thande
Donor
I should point out that I carefully avoided reading about 19th century European history while writing that period in LTTW because I didn't want to subconsciously recreate OTL. Then afterwards Lord Roem told me that that "Russian succession dispute but neither side wants the throne" thing actually happened in the same era in OTL. Can't win.