World War II - Battle of Baghdad to the Treaty of Constantinople
There are textbooks written about the fall of the Germans, the Japanese, and their minor allies. I will attempt to cover the Persian perspective here as best I can given the limitations, but do seek additional references if the material interests you. The situation at the end of summer 1943 was dire indeed, the German '
Himmelfarshtkommando' raids against British port facilities at Portsmouth and London was a total shock to the beleaguered island nation. Highly motivated SS officers were given basic commando and special operations training then released en masse by submarine at various designated points. Most often these units landed in groups of four at isolated shorelines then gathered together at places designated before the missions began, but in the case of the Portsmouth and Southampton raids three obsolete destroyers in each case were simply packed with explosives and flammable materials and run into the respective harbors. The infamous late 1941 raid on Dover after the siege of Moscow began that year already shook the populace, the failure of any portion of the Home Fleet to arrive for half an hour combined with the effectiveness of Otto Skorzeny's
Kommando forces in what later was deemed '
Fall Seelowe' to cause near-panic among the British populace. A second dramatic raid on the Isle of Wight was only broken apart with the arrival of two Royal Navy cruisers and a battleship, sending over a quarter of the
Zerstroyer surface force to the bottom of the ocean though taking one of the cruisers in exchange. British reluctance to divert naval forces from her home islands and the closure of the Suez canal made the material situation very difficult. Combined with ferocious American neutrality after the 'Willkie Gamble', where he let his own infidelity with Irita Van Doren be made public alongside the letters acknowledging the adherence of Vice President Henry Wallace to a Russian mystic by Wallace's own handwriting, the failure of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to win a third term resulted in much less American intervention or preparation than might have occurred otherwise. Willkie had three very influential and very isolationist members of his cabinet, the Attorney General Thomas Dewey, Vice President Robert Taft, and Secretary of War Arthur Vandenburg. This 'First Republican Triumvirate' had enough power in the party to override anything newcomer Willkie would try to do, although his initiatives into equality and championing of what became the landmark
Ossend v Board of Education ruling of 1942 that ended segregation in the school system and workplace alongside the abortive attempt to pass the then-highly-divisive Workers Equality Act that would have seen wages equalized and minimum wages standardized for all working men with payment in cash or check regardless of color. His own party reeled at the prospect, his endearment with the labor unions would have probably led to "impeachement as a Red sympathizer or at best an abortive one term tenure" per John Nance Garner who ironically supported many of Willkie's more original initatives. Had it not been for the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 28, 1941 plans for possible impeachment, ironically organized by an overly ambitious Taft.
With the conclusion of the Battle of Medina a near-defeat for the Bulgarians, Turks, and Germans only meant they would not advance down the Hejaz to walk into Mecca as originally planned. Their allies in the tribes of Al-Saud had already secured the central part of the Arabian peninsula, but the valuable coastal areas remained outside of Axis control. They might be stymied now, but the German general leading the forces, a ruthless pragmatist named Georg von Kuchler, nicknamed 'Cooking General' given the widespread mispronunciation by the Persians and the similarity to the English word 'cooker' and the fate of his troops in the western Iraqi desert after the battle. His soldiers exhausted from a solid three days transit through the desert, with reconnaissance forces reporting few nearby adversaries, and a desperation to rest by the edge of the Tigris River. With almost all of his forces across the Euphrates River, the very sudden onslaught of Persian forces under General Tukachevsky began a ten day fight that more often than not degenerated into hand-to-hand fighting. Stories of rape, in some cases for the very young and very old, were common and not without evidence. No quarter was expected - and virtually none was given. Turkish, Bulgarian, and German forces combined with quisling Italian, French, Czechloaustrian, and even Hungarian units to converge on the Persian 'Jewel of the Western Empire'. The Main Building of the reborn House of Wisdom was the city's beacon, its main minaret stood almost sixty stories tall and was modeled directly after the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh. From almost anywhere in the city, the polished golden roof was not only a compass but a symbol of the city's burgeoning wealth. Oil made it wealthy, farms kept it healthy, industry and academics kept it busy, while world-class nightlife kept it lively. With the approach of the German Fifth Panzer division along with the Bulgarian First and Second Armies alongside the bulk of the Turkish army, the Persian response rallied soldiers from across the Empire who swore to stop the invaders here or die trying. Medina itself had only just escaped a worse fate a month before,
Much of the city was damaged, perhaps a third of the buildings destroyed, though unlike Moscow the devastation was not total. Persian use of their trademark Qard bayonet knives, made from Burat steel with 11 inch blades, made a significant impact. The rivers were said to run red for a week after the fight, a lucky artillery shot from across the river would kill most of Kuchler's staff while sparing the Field Marshal himself as the first Persian mass tank attack of the war began. Bloodied and literally being crushed by tanks in the street, German panzerfausts were few in number and often unable to completely stop the Persian 'Lion of Babylon' tanks. It was in the ensuing retreat that the Axis would lose so many to drowning as the few bridges were quickly overcrowded on the tenth day as Hammer bombers, free to destroy German supply lines thanks to aerial dominance from Sickle fighters, began relentlessly destroying German trucks and caravans. Over half a million Axis forces entered Fallujah and Baghdad, altogether it is thought less than 100,000 were left alive after the battle. Those not drowned in the Euphrates found themselves without food or water in the Western Desert with a three-day trek to the nearest Turkish supply base.
Although this was one of the largest assemblies of military force in the Middle East by that point in the war, ultimately the counterattacks proved relentless thought painfully slow. While a moderate-sized Persian detachment worked with the local forces of Yemeni, Omani, and Pearl Bay provinces focused their efforts on the rogue House of Saud and their Wahabi allies, the main Persian force split into two armies. One pushed west to Damascus and Latakia, reclaiming those cities and then heading south first to retake and reopen the Suez canal before moving farther west to greet the German Afrika Corps as it was literally breaking the British fortifications at Abu Qir and Kafr El-Dawar just east of Alexandria. Together the Persian Sixth Armored Division (there were in fact only three and they were numbered evenly, but the Shah figured Axis forces had no way of knowing otherwise) and British Eighth Army, whose commander Lieutenant General William Gott would soon be relieved and replaced by Claude Aulinchek, pushed German general Hans Spiedel back slowly all the way to Tunisia just as fresh American troops landed in Morocco and Algeria. The final German surrender in North Africa in early 1944 was later found to have been led more by disgust with German racial policies than the actual military situation. Spiedel would later work with the Allies as a translator and intelligence officer, recruiting many who worked on '
Fall Riesigermorder' which would play a pivotal part in the end of the war.
With the additional victories over Axis forces by the Russians at Yambirno (permitting Moscow the first consistent rail-based shipments of food, fresh soldiers, and material in almost two years and preventing the city's surrender in a mere four days), the Americans at Johnson Island (where Japanese carriers tried to secure the island and cut off supply lines to New Zealand and Australia to try to force them out of the war), and the British at Benghazi before the end of 1943, morale for the Allied Powers got a much-needed boost. Although an offensive into Europe was not yet viable, American and British operatives were given the task of preparing one. Their decision was to capture as many of the islands of the central and western Mediterranean as possible while plotting for the opportunity to actually invade via the south of France, bypassing the vaunted Atlantic Wall entirely. While thousands of soldiers would land at Normandy, they would only do so after the beaches were secured form the other direction in spring of 1945.
In the Occidental theater, Persian forces formed one side of the largest military engagement in history at the Battle of Aksaray. The city itself became a wasteland as over four million soldiers drawn from in excess of a dozen nations reduced it to ash and rubble over most of late 1944 and early 1945. As it formed the backbone of the Ataturk Line through mountains, a central desert, and coastal plateaus defended by artillery pillboxes and machine gun fortifications, the city had to be take nto open the road first to Ankara then to Istanbul itself. Greek forces had landed in the Peloponnesus in mid-1944 to begin a partisan campaign followed by liberation via the Combined Greek National Army (of Monarchists, Republicans, and Communists). Their push into Thessaloniki in late 1944 heralded the beginnings of the modern Greek nation and led to the decision that the final treaty should be signed in the same location once deemed the City of Men's Dreams - as the Allies (reportedly) all dreamt of a lasting peace. With its fall in early 1945 to Greek forces as they pushed into Greater Bulgaria, Persian forces forced the surrender of the first Axis nation with the capture of Sofia on April 21, 1945. Bulgaria would ultimately be split into three pieces, one to Greece, one to Romania, and one that of its own accord decided it would be ground into poverty and joined Greece under the most favorable terms it could muster as an 'autonomous area' with some self-government.
Italy under Benito Mussolini's Government-in-exile found itself wanting as it had to make peace with the 'broken' Mafia clans to permit landings in Sicily in early 1944. With only some concessions due to the thorough and brutal purge of 'competing or unfavorable influences of a cultural, political, or commercial nature' during German occupation under Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Italian forces rapidly moved into Sicily and later Calabria. They formed a line north of Naples to permit the expansive bases at Foggia and Taranto to serve the Allied cause, Bari becoming an important smuggling port into the beleaguered Balkan peninsula during the final year of the war. Movement into Rome on June 4, 1945 celebrated yet another free nation's return to power, the running joke for decades afterwards was that 'France fell hard and rose slowly, Italy fell softly and rose stronger than before' is somewhat true as Italian forces were given Allied and Persian weaponry with officer training to create a formidable fighting force. Their own jet testing early in the war and covert development of the Macchi C.207 using the Tornado engine and the Reggiane Re.2007 and Re.2015 using the British Nene turbojet engine and Persian 'Jack of Clubs' piston engine respectively proved equal if not slightly superior competitors in the skies, the Piaggio P. 108 and later P.133 and P.135 bombers also proved rather useful in the latter days of the war.
With Persian forces moving into the occupied Russian territories the Soviet leadership, focused on liberating Moscow and allowing Stalin a means of communicating and receiving supplies/material/etc. that did not involve the secret underground railway to Ryazan and later Saransk. Stalin's 'miraculous' ability to survive was no miracle at all, he stayed in Moscow to ensure that the city did not fall but could easily have left at any time and secretly did so at least twice to conference with this commanders near the Ural Mountains. With the liberation of Moscow in early summer of 1944 came the Great Summer Offensive under Field Marshal Chuikov who bitterly fought against the best the Axis could throw at him for two years. Russian developments in tanks, semi-automatic weapons, and the effectiveness of their espionage networks were offset only by the surprising declaration of Ukraine and area south of the Don and Dnieper rivers in favor of joining Persia. While the Provisional Republic of Siberia was distant, this threat was literally at their doorstep, but Stalin played coy until his own lands could be 'liberated' later on. For now the Ukrainian border as well as the old Polish Congress borders served as demarcation points for the advance between the Persian forces and Russian ones.
By early 1946 the map below illustrates the progress of both sides. American involvement in the 'Manhattan Project' as well as their own rocketry program under Robert Goddard proved decisive with the atomic bombing of Dresden in early 1946. Bombings of Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Kokura, Nuremberg, Hamburg, and Budapest made it clear that the war would be over shortly. German determination to fight on withered with each additional bomb, the enhanced tritium device detonated over Budapest had a yield of over 65 kilo-ton equivalent of TNT, this forced the surrender of the remaining Axis governments as more and more cities found themselves memories. On June 17, 1946, the final surrender of the German government under the leadership of Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk following the failed suicide of Adolf Hitler (merely four hours after the Japanese surrender), the Allied powers divided Germany into occupational zones. White indicates French occupational territory, Pink indicates British occupational territory, Sea Foam indicates Persian occupational territory (which was in accordance with what they actually occupied at the time), light grey is American territory, and orange is Soviet occupied territory. Dark grey indicates the lines of German occupation at war's end, the brown indicates the newly formed Kingdom of Scandinavia based out of self-liberated Stockholm formed merely weeks before the German surrender. Its new southern border would include not only the whole of old Holstein but be made to push south to the Danemark earthen wall itself. Purple indicates the Provisional Republic of Siberia borders at war's end with claimed territory in lighter purple. Dark orange represents the 'core holdings' and 'official annexations' with lighter orange representing those areas still under its control when the surrender was announced by the Empire of Japan. While the Thai government (in dark brown for pre-war territories and lighter brown for wartime 'purchases' of mostly British controlled territory that it would keep after the war) stayed neutral, never asking nor expecting anything from either side despite being offered plenty by both. Persian provinces, including the Arabian Tribal Domains, are also outlined (blue for tribal boundaries, black for Provincial boundaries). I will cover the technological marvels developed in Germany and Japan that were acquired by the Allied powers as part of the next chapter, including the Wasserfall SAM system, the A9 'Extended Range' IRBM, and Type XXI 'Elektroboot' and XXX 'Schnellboot' submarines among other developments. At Constantinople the world powers met in late June 1946 to decide the fate and tempo of the post-war world.