Chapter Three – The Great Balkan War
Russia in the mid 19th Century was a backwards country. When Alexander II came to the throne in 1855, he tried to change that by liberating the serfs, instituting conscription and simplifying the penal code. However, after the disastrous Bulgarian War in 1880, he was shot in the streets of St Petersburg by an angered Nationalist.
His son, Tsar Nicholas II [1] came to power at a crucial time. He managed to calm the rabid crowds baying for Turkish blood, and shifted the blame to Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevich, the Commander of the Russian Army, and Nicholas's uncle. The Grand Duke was forced to resign and the mobs were placated for now.
However, the tensions in the Balkans would not go away, and the Great Balkans War erupted in 1898. Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina on April 9th, which was still under nominal Ottoman suzerainty. Russia and Serbia protested this, and did not back down despite British, French, Italian and Prussian [2] attempts at diplomacy to solve what is known as the April Crisis. This lead to a war with Russia and Serbia declaring war on May 2nd the Ottomans caught awkwardly in between.
Greece and Romania wished to take Macedonia from the Ottomans and achieve full independence respectively, so declared war on the Ottomans on May 9th and 11th. The Bulgarians also rose in rebellion once more. The Ottomans and Austria were forced to ally against Russia and her allies. The Great Balkan War had begun.
In May 1898 Alaska, although officially Russian, was much more Canadian, American and even Welsh. The only signs of Russian governance were the Governor in Nova Archangelsk and the occasional Orthodox missionary among the Natives. The Russians had no response to the gold rushes, which massively increased Alaska's population. However, when war was declared, the Tsar and the Army under General Kuropatkin, expected Alaska to play its part.
Governor Ferdinand von Wrangel put out a call for volunteers to serve Russia. As barely any Alaskans were Russian citizens, he could not conscript them. As the gold rushes wound down, an impressive number of ex-prospectors answered the call, with 6000 signing up. An Alaskan Division was signed up, which included the Wladfa Battalion [sic].
The soldiers of the division were gathered in Trelew, where the steamship SS Grand Duke Alexander took them to Vladivostok. The 6000 men were packed very tight on the voyage, which lasted almost 9 months. Almost 500 died of disease on the way. They then travelled by train for another month on the Trans-Siberian Express [3]. By this point, the war was going quite badly for Russia, as Austria, after much ineptness on both sides, Austria had decisively beaten Russia at the Battle of Opoczno and were nearing Warsaw. Serbia had successfully defended themselves against Austrian attacks, while Greece had seized Macedonia and most of Thrace from the Ottomans, only to lose disastrously at Adrianople in February 1899, in a harsh battle fought in freezing conditions. Albania had successfully won independence from the Ottomans, at the price of becoming a Greek client state, while the Russians and Romanians got bogged down in Bulgaria due to stretched supply lines and the winter. In April 1899, the war was anyone’s game.
The Alaskan Division spent two weeks training in Moscow, before being assigned to the Second Army, on the Polish Front. They were thrust into the thick of combat quite quickly, as the Battle of Warsaw began with an Austrian offensive in early June 1899. It was the largest battle on European soil since Leipzig, as 400,000 Austrians attacked 500,000 Russians. The result was a massacre.
The Austrian's battle plan called for the encirclement of the city to prevent reinforcement. Their Third and Fourth Armies were assigned to this job, while the First Army was to attack the city itself. The Russian First and Second Army were protecting the flanks, while the Sixth Army defended the city itself. A Ninth Army was partially trained and held in reserve in Bialystok, around 110 miles away. The Alaskan Division had their first taste of battle at the Battle of Okuniew, a subsidiary of the main battle. The Austrian X Corps tried to pass though the forest there, so the Russian 9th Army Corps, which the Alaskan Division was part of were sent to stop them.
The battle waged between June 17th and 19th was an intense introduction to combat for the Alaskans. The forest was difficult terrain to fight in, with co-ordination made more difficult by the lack of vision. June 18th was a day that would go down in both Welsh and Alaskan history. C Company of the Welsh Battalion bore the brunt of a large Austrian attack at midday. Under the command of Lieutenant Colonel William Richards, they held out for as long as possible, delaying the Austrians until they were overwhelmed and perished to the last man. The Austrians did capture a Welsh flag there, which is now in the Military Museum of Austria in Vienna. An Austrian officer said that the Welsh fought more ferociously than the Dragon on their flag. Insoured by this statement, the Welsh Alaskans adopted a new flag – a white dragon (to represent their difference to the Welsh from Wales and the weather if their home) on a red background (to represent the bloodshed of Okuniew). Richards was posthumously given the Order of St. George and many other members of the company were decorated too. C Company’s last stand was immortalised by Okuniew, a song by Lithuanian power metal band Gauntlet. June 18th is Okuniew Day, a public holiday in Alaska.
The Russians managed to stop the Austrian advance at Okuniew, which prevented them from completing the encirclement and led to the battle to devolve into bloody trench warfare, a taste of what was to come later. Eventually, the Austrians were forced to withdraw due to suffering too many losses.
Although the battle was won by Russia, it was a pyrrhic victory. They had lost 200,000 men, compared to the Austrians' 170,000. The catastrophic losses caused by the battle resulted in operations on the Polish Front grinding to a halt as the two sides recovered their losses. 1899 was hardly better for Russia and her allies on other fronts. The Austrians managed to take Belgrade but couldn’t penetrate any further into Serbia, while Bulgaria was still a mess, with various rebel factions fighting each other, the Turks and the Russians/Romanians, while the Greeks and Turks reached a stalemate in Thrace.
The Welsh Battalion suffered 327 casualties, almost half its entire strength, at Okuniew. As the Welsh community in Alaska was only small, it was particularly hard on it. Many there were pacifist, due to their Methodist beliefs and never supported the war in the first place. However, the Welsh Alaskans became one of the first groups to oppose the war in its entirety. As Russia doubled down on conscription in late 1899 and early 1900, they tried to conscript some prospectors which led to the Alaskan Conscription Crisis. They refused to be drafted, and Russia couldn’t spare the troops to send to Alaska, so they dropped the matter. In mainland Russia, the war was getting less and less popular.
The Alaskan Division, which suffered around 2000 casualties at Okuniew, was reinforced by non-Alaskans in the winter of 1899-1900 and sent to Bulgaria, where Kuropatkin was planning a big offensive in the spring. In mid March, around 175,000 Russians, 40,000 Romanians and 25,000 Bulgarian rebels attacked. The plan was a big wheeling movement that would trap most of the Ottoman Army around Varna, which would be destroyed, before pushing on to Constantinople.
However, the attack was doomed to fail. Britain, who had a vested interest in keeping the Ottomans and Austrians around as a counterweight to Russia, intercepted Russian radio traffic, some of which wasn’t even coded [4]. The Ottomans knew about the offensive beforehand and were prepared. The attack met suspiciously little resistance as it advanced, but then the Ottomans struck at Shumen. Cutting the Russian advance right in half, it interrupted the lines of communication and led to the collapse of the Russian offensive. The Greeks, on the other hand, took advantage of the Russian distraction by taking Adrianople and pushing ever closer to Constantinople, which worried the Turkish government immensely, so they promptly fled to Ankara and sent out peace feelers to Greece and Russia via Italy.
By the summer of 1900, it was clear that no one was close to winning the war, and all the nations involved had suffered horrendous losses, with casualties topping one million. In August, all the involved parties were invited to a conference in Naples by Italy and a ceasefire was declared. The negotiations lasted two months but eventually a peace deal was hammered out. The Treaty of Naples stipulated that the Russia-Austria border was to remain the same, Austria would gain Bosnia in exchange for giving Transylvania to Romania, a semi-independent Bulgarian state, tied economically and politically to Russia would be created, with Albania having a similar relationship with Greece. Romania would become fully sovereign, while Macedonia and all of Thrace would be given to Greece. Austria would pay reparations to Serbia.
After over two years of war and a million deaths, the Balkans were at peace. But how long would it last?
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[1] Tsarverich Nicholas Alexandrovich survived his illness here.
[2] Frederick III gave up smoking after a health scare and was also saved from his illness here, ruling as a smarter and more intelligent Kaiser than his son. He is less militaristic and gung-ho, so does not back Austria here.
[3] Russia keeping Alaska means that the route to Vladivostok is completed earlier than OTL, where it was completed in 1916.
[4] IOTL, the Russians sent transmissions that weren’t coded at the beginning of World War I.
It lives! Not much Alaska in this chapter I know, but this and Chapter 4 were originally supposed to be one chapter, but I had to split them because it got too big. Hopefully the wait next time won't be so long.