AANW - Stalemate

[Archangel]

Good update, although it's very unpleasant to think about the Nazi's disgusting behaviors in Poland and the USSR.

 

[John Dusk]

I would have believed the Pabst plan would be enacted, enabling Frank to have a suitable capital for his General Government.

It never said in the update that the Reich intended to raze Warsaw and leave it barren. They still could be following their plans to rebuild German cities where Slavic cities once were (using expendable slave labor of course).

 

[Asp]

Great update Calbear. Made my skin crawl to read it knowing what's going to happen but still.

How much did Molotov know about what the Nazis were planning to do to the Soviet Union when he agreed to surrender?

 

[sloreck]

Molotov was concerned with keeping Communism/USSR going in what remained after the Nazis took their slice. What happened in the occupied areas, or even to those citizens sent west was basically irrelevant. Eggs and omelettes... As long as communism could be maintained, its inevitable success was scientifically guaranteed by history, but you had to keep it going. I'm sure it did not take long for Molotov to be clued in to what was happening. No doubt he recalled a line from his late boss, Stalin: "the death of a man is a tragedy, the death of a million men is a statistic."

 

[stirlingdraka]

Great and very dark update Calbear.

 

[John Dusk]

This worked, for a while, until senior Party and SS officials intervened, insisting that all Soviet troops had to enter captivity “since there was much for them to do”.

The quote in bold reminds me of when Pinhead said "We have such sights to show you" in Hellraiser. It sounds innocuous until you realize who's saying it.

 

[generalurist]

YAY MORE CALIFORNIAN URSINE!

Watched, definitely. This is gonna be brutal.

 

[Alex1guy]

I almost can't read this, fucking savage. Well written but hard to endure in a requiem for a dream kinda way

 

[John Dusk]

I almost can't read this, fucking savage. Well written but hard to endure in a requiem for a dream kinda way

It's only going to get worse as the Reich kicks Generalplan Ost and their colonization of the East into high gear.

 

[George Carty]

I wonder how long before CalBear gives us the next update?

 

[CalBear]

I wonder how long before CalBear gives us the next update?

Hopefully by the weekend. I had one ready to go, but decided it wasn't quite right.

 

[Grimbald]

A great read

 

[Captain Homicide]

Heer, later Waffen SS/National Force, casualties averaged 10,000 Killed in Action annually during the 1943-1959 occupation.

10,000 annual KIA seems excessive given the circumstances (no outside support, no ongoing war and German willingness to target civilians) plus the fact that German forces only suffered 15-20,000 casualties due to Soviet partisans over 3 years IOTL when they were busy dealing with the Red Army and the WAllies.

That would mean Soviet partisans inflicted more losses on Axis forces in a year than the Viet Cong and the Mujahideen ever managed to do against the US and the USSR IOTL (countries that weren’t explicitly and ideologically genocidal).

 

[Lautréamont]

4




In the last decade, there have been a series of releases of previously classified technological breakthroughs that greatly aided the WAllied cause in the long war against the Reich, perhaps none of these was more vital than the breaking of the Enigma coding machine by a mostly British team (based on earlier work by Polish cryptographers and some remarkable field work by Polish intelligence agents) that allowed the WAllies to be able to read much of the Reich’s communication in near real time. It was, however, not the wizards at Bletchley Park who, with a single decrypted message, altered WAllied strategic direction in the Spring of 1943. While it is, as has been claimed by several authors, an overstatement to claim that the April 26, 1943 interception and decryption by U.S. Army Arlington Hall code-breakers saved the Western Alliance from defeat, it was nevertheless perhaps the most critical piece of signal intelligence ever achieved.




Why General Hiroshi Oshima, Imperial Japanese Ambassador to the Third Reich considered it to be a sound decision to send a detailed message regarding Hitler’s immediate action plan to be undertaken following the defeat of the USSR has puzzled historians for decades. The true answer almost certainly died with the General when he committed seppuku following the surrender of Japan, but that has not dimmed the hunt for answers. The debate over the “may have beens” had the message either never been sent or not decrypted have fueled a small, but devoted community dedicated to “counter factual” considerations of history since the advent of the “Grid”.

Nitpick: From my understanding, Enigma has nothing to do with this; Oshima would have used the Angōki B-gata aka "Purple", which the US had deciphered even before Pearl Harbor.

Decryption is not an exact science, even in the best of circumstances parts of a message can be garbled or defy decoding. The same can be said for translation, especially from Japanese to English, when there were limited numbers of experts with the necessary skills to pick up the nuances of each word and phrase. Somewhere in the conversion process, the exact meaning of what was on offer was lost. This may have been confirmation bias, since the message had also discussed the way that the Reich and Japan would divide British India, but had not included any timetable (surviving Reich documents seem to indicate that the discussion of the division was more a “after we have won” then a “how we will win” while the WAllied analysts interpreted the information as being a immediate operational goal).

It's not really decryption as such which is an inexact science; generally, if you can decrypt something, you can decrypt everything. There's going to be garbling, but it comes from garbling of the transmission itself and from operator error.

As for translation, I'd guess that the biggest translation issue is that Oshira wasn't encrypting kanjis as those are a bit unwieldy for signal transmission in a pre-Unicode age; the decrypted message is in Hepburn romanization, which introduces a lot of ambiguity and is simply not the best way to represent the Japanese language.

 

[naraht]

As for translation, I'd guess that the biggest translation issue is that Oshira wasn't encrypting kanjis as those are a bit unwieldy for signal transmission in a pre-Unicode age; the decrypted message is in Hepburn romanization, which introduces a lot of ambiguity and is simply not the best way to represent the Japanese language.

In the pre-Unicode age, is there a great way to encrypt any of the ideographic languages?

 

[Lautréamont]

In the pre-Unicode age, is there a great way to encrypt any of the ideographic languages?

No, it's necessarily going to be unwieldy. You'd probably try something like encoding radicals and strokes separately, but both sets are still rather big (there are 214 Chinese Kangxi radicals, for instance).

The Imperial Japanese probably knew what they were doing when they rejected such an approach in favour of encrypting kana or rōmaji and hoping for the best. The WW2-era Chinese did not even have that option, having no kana, no romanization standard at the time, and not even a common spoken language; hànzì (Chinese characters) are expected to be understood by Mandarin and non-Mandarin Sinic speakers alike, something any romanization fails at. Also, the relation between pinyin and hànzì seems to be even more ambiguous than the one between kana/rōmaji and kanji: While the modern Japanese type kanji simply by typing kana or rōmaji and selecting the right kanji from a drop-down menu, the modern Chinese seem to have largely given up on that and created elaborate schemes to type hànzì directly.

(Or at least that's the impression I'm getting from Wikipedia. I'm not really an expert in East Asian languages.)