AANW - Stalemate

CalBear

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Here is the start of the promised AANW prequel covering the Combined Bomber Offensive and the Warm War.

As always, comments are very welcome.

Forward




The period between the Fall of Stalingrad in late 1942 and the St. Patrick Day Raids of 1954 is, based on most available measures, from published “commercial” histories to doctoral dissertations to popular media like films and television programs, is one of the least popular in recent European history.




Part of this is understandable. The period prior to and following the twelve years that have come to be known as the “Warm War” lacks the surface drama of the Third Reich’s steamrolling of the entire European Peninsula north of the Pyrenees Range and the establishment of one of the largest empires in Human history based on continuous area controlled, while lacking the oft portrayed victory of “good” over “evil” of the Final Phase of the European War. The “Warm War” also has to compete with the wide raging war that resulted in the final defeat of the Japanese Empire and the dramatic changes in fortune of nations across Asia.




This reality being acknowledged, the relative lack of interest in the period remains unfortunate. It is in the eleven years of the Warm War (and the Pacific War) that the world of today’s 21st Century was formed. The decisions made, the international relations established and abandoned, combined with the subtle but progressively more pragmatic attitudes that have become the “normal” manner that today’s “A4” and India, along with nearly all other nations conduct themselves both internationally and internally swept the last traces of “colonial” era firmly onto the ash heap of history.




Hopefully this volume will shed some much-deserved light onto this remarkable era.




1




The Soviet disaster at Stalingrad, while a severe tactical setback, would in most circumstances have been survivable for the USSR. The Soviets had space to give, manpower still unharnessed, an increasingly lavish pipeline of supply coming from the Western Allies (initially the British Commonwealth and the United States, although the coalition expanded throughout the 1940s and 50s until it encompassed the majority of countries on the planet, henceforth the Alliance will be referred to as the WAllies for sake of brevity), and an enemy faced with massive overextension of logistical supply lines and with increasing manpower limitations. The situation went from damaging to near fatal when the Soviet Generalissimo Josef Stalin (a nom de guerre from his time as revolutionary in per-WW I Tsarist Russia which effectively replaced his actual Georgian given name of Ioseb Jughashvili for all, save his mother and some historians) went into one of his far too common violent fits of anger. Stalin’s mercurial nature, paranoia, and what can only be described as blood lust were well known across the senior leadership levels of the Soviet State, both civilian and military, and most of those who interacted with the leader lived in near constant fear of falling victim to one of his anger driven whims.




In the aftermath of the loss of Stalingrad, a battle that had reached a level of importance that far exceeded the tactical and strategic realities at stake in the engagement, Stalin lashed out as was his wont. In this case, however, his claws swept too far, resulting in the effective decapitation of the Red Army as his chosen Angel of Death, NKVD head Lavrentiy Beria oversaw the arrest of no less than three Red Army Marshals (Budyonny, Timoshenko, Zhukov), the Soviet Navy’s representative to the Supreme Command (Stavka) Admiral Nikolay Kuznetsov, along with a number of civilian commissars, including Stalin’s “man on the scene” Nikita Khrushchev. The actual commander of forces defending Stalingrad, General Vasily Chuikov, escaped the six-minute trial followed immediately by a bullet to the base of the skull that befell others who incurred Stalin’s wrath solely by being trapped in the city and winding up a Reich prisoner when his Headquarters was overrun in early December of 1942, long after all possible hope of victory had gone a glimmering (surviving Waffen SS records indicate that Chuikov died of pneumonia sometime in May of 1957). All told some twenty-five senior members of the Soviet military, mainly from the Southwest Front and a similar number of civilians, all of them involved in defense and/or armament efforts, died over a tumultuous four-day period in early November 1942.




When Staling followed the remarkably shortsighted executions of his best military planners and strategists by pressing on with a pair of offensives that had been designed while the Red Army still held Stalingrad (Operations Mars and Jupiter) it had the combined effect of destroying much of the freshly rearmed and retrained force that the valiant stand at Stalingrad had bought the time to create, eliminated much of the Red Army mobile reserve, and brought about Stalin’s death on March 23rd (the cause of his demise remains an open question, authorities at the time proclaimed it a heart attack, but reasonably believable sources indicate that he was, in fact, killed by a member of his rebuilt Stavka). Shortly after this funeral and cremation, at the end of a brief, but brutal, fight for leadership of the Soviet Union being won by Vyacheslav Molotov the Soviets sought terms from Nazi Germany. The result of those peace feelers was the Treaty of Moscow, in which the USSR acknowledged full responsibility for the war, just as a condition to being additional talks.




The “terms” set forth by Berlin went far beyond harsh, starting with the annexation of European Russia and all European Soviet republics by the Reich, an act that quite literally changed the USSR from a European to Asian country, followed by nearly unreachable monthly quotas of materials from the rump USSR as “reparations” (for a war that the Reich had begun), with “materials” specifically including “guest workers who would help to repair the damage caused to Germany by Soviet aggression”, literally every gram of Soviet gold reserves, and the acceptance of Reich “truce monitors” to ensure that all elements of the Peace of Moscow were followed in every detail (especially the limitations on the size and equipment of Soviet military formations). By early 1945 there were nearly two divisions of Waffen SS “peace monitors” deployed within what was left of the USSR.




The Treaty of Moscow turned the Soviet Union into vast warehouse for the Third Reich, with some “reparations” scheduled to continue into the 21st Century (when, according to Reich experts, there would quite literally be nothing left for the Soviets to export). The Reich intended, as a matter of national policy and international treaty, to squeeze the vastness of Soviet Asia dry.




It was a peace worthy of Scripto Aemilianus.






**




The reaction to the incipient disaster in the East by Washington and London has, with considerable justification, be referred to as blind panic. The WAllied leadership had just begun earnest planning for the war to defeat Hitler’s Reich, with a key element being the continued resistance of the USSR forcing the Nazi regime to engage in a two-front war. While the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS), a leadership group comprised of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, a representative of President Roosevelt, and the British Joint Staff Mission to the U.S., had made rough contingency plans to attempt to aid the Soviets if collapse seems close, these plans were rudimentary at best, and suicidal at worst. The first Western response was something that had already been long established, Operation Torch, the invasion of North African France, with the goal to prevent the Reich from advancing into Africa using Vichy French cooperation as a cover for Axis domination of the Strait of Gibraltar. The operation went off as scheduled, with Vichy French forces offering only token resistance (which still resulted in over two hundred Allied fatalities); however, it also resulted in Berlin ordering the full occupation of nominally “independent” Vichy France by German forces, cutting the possibility of a landing into what was hoped to be a weakly defended French Mediterranean coast out of the still gestating Allied planning.




This expansion of the occupation force in France was achieved by Berlin without having to divert forces from the East as the WAllied leadership had both hoped and fully expected. Instead troops who had rotated back from the Eastern Front for rest and refit were sent to the French Riviera and the South of France, a posting that proved to be quite pleasant after a year or more fighting in the Soviet Union. These hardened combat veterans, their innocence having died in the Russian Winter of 1941-42 and their humanity firmly tucked away for the duration, reacted with such disproportional violence to a the few, relatively minor, acts of resistance to the expansion of the German Zone of Occupation that the protests out of Vichy died out as rapidly as the incipient Underground’s valiant, but doomed, membership.




Strategically the most important element of Torch was the Battle of Malta, where the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Squadron engaged the Italian fleet as it headed to sea in an attempt to interfere in the landings. Observed by a RN PBY, flying out of the island of Malta, the Italian force, centered on the battleships Vittotio Veneto and Littorio, backed by six heavy cruisers, two light cruisers and twelve destroyers, found itself ambushed by Admiral Cunningham’s squadron, centered on the battleships Nelson, Rodney and Warspite and the carrier Indomitable, escorted by six light cruisers and fifteen destroyers. The Italian fleet, which had a six-knot speed advantage, was engaged in a night action that was made possible by the use of radar on several British warships, allowing them to find and target their opponents before the Italian fleet realized that any RN units were present, much less three battleships. The resulting engagement lasted through six hours of darkness, with the Italian ships attempting to close with their far superior speed vs. the British vessels radar directed gunnery and periodic night time torpedo attacks by Albacore bombers flying from Indomitable. The Italian squadron, have suffered the loss of three heavy cruisers and damage to two others, and serious, but not fatal, damage to Littorio, attempted to disengage just before dawn, covering their exit with a mass torpedo attack from the escorting destroyers. This attack resulted in the loss of the light cruiser HMS Gloucester, a destroyer, and serious damage to HMS Nelson, which collected two torpedoes. As dawn broke Indomitable’s air group struck, using the rising Sun to conceal its approach. Fourteen torpedo bombers attack the battleships, eight attacking the undamaged Vittotio Veneto while the remainder struck at the Littorio, while eight Marlets Mark II (F4F-3) harassed the escorts with strafing and 100 pound bombs. Littorio suffered a single hit, dropping her top speed to 23 knots, but Vittotio Veneto was struck three times, all on the starboard side. At least one of these hits knocked out her boilers and she shuddered to a stop.




Faced with an impossible operation choice the Italian squadron commander detached the undamaged heavy cruiser Bolzano to take the crippled battleship under tow and left three of his remaining destroyers (all of which had expended their torpedoes covering the fleets disengagement) to provide escort. It was not enough. Two hours after the initial air attack the Albacores returned, the twelve remaining undamaged aircraft arriving just as the crew of Bolzano had secured the tow cables and begun to drag its 45,000 tons charge toward safety. Moving at the speed to a target sled the crippled behemoth was helpless, despite the best efforts of her protectors. The strike commander sent his torpedo planes in three at a time, allowing his pilots mainly undisturbed runs into the target while still splitting the defending anti-aircraft fire (which was further distracted by a quartet of strafing Sea Hurricanes). Four additional torpedoes struck the damaged battleship, with the final four Albacores diverted to striking the Bolazno as it frantically tried to slip the tow cable and escape the fate of the rapidly listing Vittotio Veneto. It was a vain effort as two weapons struck the cruiser just as it accelerated past 12 knots, the first torpedo took away 35 feet of the cruiser’s bow, with the mostly detached portion swinging around on its remaining attachment points to slam into the cruisers port side abaft her “A” turret, with the second missing anything vital, but opening three compartments and one fuel tank to the sea. Unsurprisingly the cruiser ground to a halt. An attempt by four C.200 Saetta to interfere in the attack was met by a dozen FAA fighters (five Sea Hurricanes and the balance Martlets), with three Italian and two FAA fighters falling from the skies without having any impact on the drama below.




Just before 1000 hrs (local) the Vittotio Veneto rolled over and exploded. Forty minutes later, as lookouts reported the smoke of the approaching British squadron, the captain of the Bolazno ordered her crew off and the ship’s seacocks to be opened. Along with his head gunnery officer the captain set an explosive timer in the forward 8” powder magazine and took the last boat off the cruiser moving to one of the escorting destroyers. The Italian destroyers were still rescuing survivors when the first 15” salvo from Warspite landed 500 yards short. Fishing aboard the few men still currently on the nets, the Italian destroyers set course for home and ran at 34 knots. The British let them go. As the lead destroyers of Cunningham’s force reach the scene, Bolazno exploded in a most spectacular fashion, showing the two British ships with debris, resulting in three fatalites on the ships and killing an estimated 100 survivors of the Vittotio Veneto who were unfortunate enough to be caught in the compression wave generated by the scuttling charges.




British destroyers collected some 780 survivors, nearly as many as those who made it onto the vastly overcrowded trio of fleeing Italian ships. The Torch landings were saved at the cost of five torpedo planes, six fighters, one light cruiser, a destroyer, and HMS Nelson in the yard for 18 months. The Italian Navy had just lost control of the Mediterranean, something that she was never to reclaim.
 
Excellent chapter. The part about Soviet reparations being planned to continue into the 21st century until the USSR was drained completely dry is especially chilling (and accurate).

My question is why did the Reich bother to keep Chuikov alive after they captured him when they executed so many other Soviet officers after their victory in 1943?
 
Yay, a prequel!

Excellent chapter. The part about Soviet reparations being planned to continue into the 21st century until the USSR was drained completely dry is especially chilling (and accurate).

Carthage got off lightly, compared to TTL USSR.

My question is why did the Reich bother to keep Chuikov alive after they captured him when they executed so many other Soviet officers after their victory in 1943?

Maybe to try him for war crimes.
 

SsgtC

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Excellent! Beyond happy to see this. Question, using radar to direct their gunfire, shouldn't the British Battleships have done more damage during the night? Especially as the British, like the Japanese, emphasised night fighting.
 
Were the Japanese a party to the Treaty of Moscow or were they not a party to the treaty due to the Japanese not joining the invasion of the USSR? Also, did any prominent Soviet generals commit suicide to avoid either being purged or handed over to the Nazis?
 
shouldn't the British Battleships have done more damage during the night?
Considering they managed to destroy or damage 25% of the Italian fleet in 6 hours before dawn, I think they did as good as they could have.
Were the Japanese a party to the Treaty of Moscow or were they not a party to the treaty due to the Japanese not joining the invasion of the USSR?
According to CalBear the Japanese got to administer Vladivostok as a treaty port where they shipped the Reich resources from the Pacific through the Trans-Siberian Railway and in return the Reich shipped them 88mm artillery, Panther/Tiger tanks and captured Soviet gear (including T-34s).
Carthage got off lightly, compared to TTL USSR.
Generalplan Ost would have made even Scipio (who razed Carthage) sick to his stomach. He razed one city while the Reich razed hundreds of them in Eastern Europe and forced the residents to do it by hand until they died as a part of Extermination Through Labor.

Since Albert Speer was never mentioned during in the Hot War, I'd like to see him and the various architecture projects Hitler wanted built to be included in this TL.
 
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CalBear

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Yay, a prequel!



Carthage got off lightly, compared to TTL USSR.



Maybe to try him for war crimes.
Oh ya, one thing the Nazis learned from WW I was to be sure that you don't let the other guy get back up. They actually had some of the best economists they had to determine exactly what would be enough to suck the rump USSR dry as a husk.
 

CalBear

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Excellent! Beyond happy to see this. Question, using radar to direct their gunfire, shouldn't the British Battleships have done more damage during the night? Especially as the British, like the Japanese, emphasised night fighting.

Well, the Italians entered the fight with eight heavies (2 BB & 6 CA) and returned to port with three (2 CA with shattered upper works and a BB with its "B" turret jammed 35 degrees to port and 450 casualties aboard).

One thing that the relatively rare BB v BB engagements of WW II demonstrated was just how difficult it was to sink a battleship purely with gunfire. Even Kirishima, which was raked by USS Washington at a range of under three miles took the better part of a day to sink, and Kirishima was a jumped up per WW I battlecruiser pretending to be a fast battleship. Bismarck too an almost unbelievable amount of damage (better than 400 total hits from two BB and two CA), the detonation of her scuttling charges, two aerial torpedo hits, and possibly one hit by a torpedo fired from HMS Rodney. Despite all that, including the fact that her own crew was trying to scuttle her, the British still had to put two ship launched torpedoes into her hull to finish the job.
Were the Japanese a party to the Treaty of Moscow or were they not a party to the treaty due to the Japanese not joining the invasion of the USSR? Also, did any prominent Soviet generals commit suicide to avoid either being purged or handed over to the Nazis?

The Japanese were not a formal party to the Treaty since they had never declared war on the USSR. The Japanese did obtain "concessions" from the Soviets that were "entirely separate" from the Treaty of Moscow. It was a pure coincidence that the agreements were part of the Rome Treaty establishing eternal friendship between the USSR and Japan.
 
calbear will this story cover just the European warm war or would it provide details on this timeline's pacific war
 

CalBear

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calbear will this story cover just the European warm war or would it provide details on this timeline's pacific war
ETO only, except for the odd comment or two.

A Pacific War treatment might follow (I do have two other Pacific War T/L hanging fire, so...)
 

Hey, thanks for writing this! Can't wait to see how it goes.

What will happen in Iran, the Caucasus, and Azerbaijan will be interesting. Since the Nazis are occupying Azerbaijan for its oil and the British are present in Iran and the Soviets presumably can't maintain their zone of occupation there, at some point the two will run into each other. I would expect the British to try and occupy the Soviet zone to the maximum extent possible to try to get as much buffer zone as they can, engaging Soviet troops if necessary (similar to the action at Mers El Kebir). Honestly I never understood how the war died down there; it's very hard for me to imagine their being peace or at least non-hostilities in any place where the WAllies and the Reich share a land border.
 
Hey, thanks for writing this! Can't wait to see how it goes.

What will happen in Iran, the Caucasus, and Azerbaijan will be interesting. Since the Nazis are occupying Azerbaijan for its oil and the British are present in Iran and the Soviets presumably can't maintain their zone of occupation there, at some point the two will run into each other. I would expect the British to try and occupy the Soviet zone to the maximum extent possible to try to get as much buffer zone as they can, engaging Soviet troops if necessary (similar to the action at Mers El Kebir). Honestly I never understood how the war died down there; it's very hard for me to imagine their being peace or at least non-hostilities in any place where the WAllies and the Reich share a land border.

Calbear mentions the 8th army blunted a German advance with masses of heavy bombers and Indian units IIRC after Stalingrad
 
Calbear mentions the 8th army blunted a German advance with masses of heavy bombers and Indian units IIRC after Stalingrad

But then they just...stop? It seems like they'd make that their major new theater. I dunno, just my read on the personalities involved.
 
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