Look to the West Volume VIII: The Bear and the Basilisk
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
Kaiphranos
Donor
Hmm, I wonder if the "black" and "white" police and juries in the opening newscast are racial categories, or something weirder...
Sounds like they are, given that there appears to have been confusion over who should be responsible for investigating a crime with a Chinese victim.
The hell? Seriously, what the hell?
EDIT: I am also kinda surprised that there even *are* separate black and white races in Carolina, now that I think about it.
But it ended in the former's victory. I checked.
So the Duc is going to die now and all hell breaks loose. See you in 70 to 80 years, Spain. Maybe.
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Thande
Donor
Thanks for the comments everyone - will respond directly when I get the time.
In the meantime, some of you may already have seen this, but as a promotional offer to celebrate the release of Volume 5 of LTTW, Volume 1, "Diverge and Conquer", is available from Amazon as an ebook ABSOLUTELY FREE until Friday 18th June (this Friday!)
Check it out and take advantage of the offer! And if you're feeling so inclined, would appreciate an Amazon review
In the meantime, some of you may already have seen this, but as a promotional offer to celebrate the release of Volume 5 of LTTW, Volume 1, "Diverge and Conquer", is available from Amazon as an ebook ABSOLUTELY FREE until Friday 18th June (this Friday!)
Check it out and take advantage of the offer! And if you're feeling so inclined, would appreciate an Amazon review
Actually not that surprising given the baseline level of issues in the that part of the world (OTL and TTL) on top of the somehow even more racist than OTL enslaver government after the rise of Supremacism, and what sounds like decades of escalating tensions in Carolina under both the UPSA and ENA that was explored in a couple updates.
It may also just be an element of Diversitarianism, especially in a post-societist state like Carolina. In the updates that first gave a look at modern Diversitarian England, it was mentioned that minority and 'foreign' communities are kept deliberately separate in order to preserve diversity. Part of the over all (and of course deeply weird to our view) tendency of emphasizing difference in an effort to preserve it.
I'm not sure I view as quite as horrific and dystopian as you do however, presumably the idea is that the communities police themselves.
...given the information in this update, I wonder if the W in C-WNB doesn't stand for "Carolina - World News Broadcast" but for "Carolina - White News Broadcast."
Which, given there's racially segregated police forces and juries, means there may be a C-BNB.
Question, but why did Ireland not join Joshua Churchill England for the debt of his father helping Ireland during the famine?
Edit: While I am still reading the second thread, something that got me thinking is that they mention caroline thinking, which leads to there being more relax, if no rules of war at all. This makes me think that thanks to this idea, I can definitely see the rules of war in Europe, if not in the western world of LTTW, being laxer, if not straight up abolishing the rules of war compare to otl, which could lead to more brutal wars in Europe and the rest of the world. Don't be surprised if the LTTW geneva convention being laxer and fluid than otl, if there is even is an equivalent in LTTW.
Edit: What was the legacy of the Salem movement revolt in western south Massachusetts?
Edit: While I am still reading the second thread, something that got me thinking is that they mention caroline thinking, which leads to there being more relax, if no rules of war at all. This makes me think that thanks to this idea, I can definitely see the rules of war in Europe, if not in the western world of LTTW, being laxer, if not straight up abolishing the rules of war compare to otl, which could lead to more brutal wars in Europe and the rest of the world. Don't be surprised if the LTTW geneva convention being laxer and fluid than otl, if there is even is an equivalent in LTTW.
Edit: What was the legacy of the Salem movement revolt in western south Massachusetts?
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289.2
Thande
Donor
From: “Europe at War, 1896-1960” by Gianluca Ruocco (1988, authorised English translation of updated second edition 2002)—
Throughout the so-called ‘Two Years of Hell’, conflict in Europe and neighbouring Asia Minor was focused on four fronts. In the latter, the Russians’ Tarsus salient, seemingly overextended, remained paradoxically static as the Ottomans repeatedly failed to cut off or push back the Russian forces – now under the command of the dull but dutiful General Aleksandr Pazukhin. This was despite the fact that Pazukhin’s forces, like those on other fronts, became increasingly stripped of strength as the Russians focused everything on the meat grinder that was the Oder bridgehead in Germany.
The reasons behind the Ottomans’ difficulties were diverse. Firstly, the Russians had succeeded in their aim to cut the empire in half, severing its railways and ensuring that the only direct contact between the two halves of the Ottoman state was by sea. This naturally had a greatly disruptive effect, which the Ottomans were still struggling to cope with months and years later. Secondly, there was the plague. The general principle to bear in mind during the conflict was that while the plague hit both sides of each front equally (eventually), the overall result was generally to favour the defenders. It was easier for a sick and depleted army to man defensive fortifications than to lead an offensive. With the loss of many skilled warriors and support workers, the protgun- and aerodrome-based tactics of a modern war of manoeuvre became increasingly less possible to pull off, reducing fighting to infantry tactics using conscripts with basic training. As had already been seen as far back as the Great American War, cingular guns and trench defences ensured that such a form of warfare would always favour the defenders.[14] Lacking the manpower to consider an offensive, and utilising the mountainous terrain of Anatolia to his advantage, Pazhukhin successfully stood on the defensive against wave after wave of poorly-coordinated, plague-weakened Ottoman counter-attacks.
The division of the empire and the plague also served to trigger food shortages, and even famines, in some regions. As had happened before in history under both Ottomans and Byzantines, Constantinople became politically restless as the people demanded bread. The Ottoman Empire was far from unique in the 1920s in suffering under famine inflicted or worsened by the plague, but the Russian salient splitting it in two worsened the situation even beyond that seen elsewhere. By contrast, similar effects were seen in China as the plague ripped through her agricultural heartlands, but China was at peace and still had a functioning railway network, allowing her government to respond to individual plague outbreaks and food shortages by redirecting resources from elsewhere.
For now, the food shortages were just a simmering powder keg.[15] Ferid Ibrahim Pasha typically stripped harvests from farmers in Balkan territories (including the recently-reconquered Greece) to try to keep Constantinopolitans at bay, though this created more problems elsewhere. Mehveş Sultan travelled back to her native Egypt for the first time in November 1924 to encourage further shipments from the land that had once been the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. Her effective displacement of the Wali (Governor) of Egypt, Suleyman Murad Pasha, sparked political tensions throughout the region. However, even though Mehveş Sultan was often coming to demand more grain, many Egyptians were more favourably disposed towards this glamorous daughter of their own land than the corrupt Suleyman Murad Pasha, a political appointee and ethnic Turk. In the short term, tensions were defused by an unofficial agreement that Suleyman Murad would continue to govern from Cairo, while Mehveş Sultan had a new palace built in Alexandria to direct her own efforts from. Throughout the war years, she would increasingly spend as much time there as in Constantinople, and Alexandria became treated as the unofficial capital of the Asian and African parts of the empire, cut off by the Russian salient from direct land contact with the European part.[16]
If the Tarsus salient remained static despite periodic fighting, the same could not be said of the Danube front. The brilliant general Ahmet Ismail Pasha continued to hold East Muntenia and run rings around the Russians’ attempts to push him back, with the Danube Delta being contested repeatedly (often in miserable and muddy fighting) throughout the conflict. Yet, though the Russians were again often stripped of strength thanks to the Oder bridgehead, the same was true of Ahmet Ismail’s army, Ottoman troops all going to fruitless attacks on the Tarsus salient. The result was that this masterful commander was frustrated by lacking the resources he needed to knock the weakened Russians decisively back into Moldavia, and perhaps even beyond. Though Ahmet Ismail was relatively uninterested in political affairs by the standards of an Ottoman general, as the war wore on he became increasingly resentful of this, and began attempting to assemble Constantinopolitan contacts to argue for more resources as a court faction. This would be a process over which he would, ultimately, lose control.
So much for the Russo-Ottoman fronts. Farther north came the main event, the aforementioned Oder bridgehead (and, by extension, the whole Polish-German front). While the front had become overextended by the allies taking Karaliaučius, the Russians focused almost all their efforts on trying to hold the Oder bridgehead rather than cutting off the German salient along the coast. To both sides, the bulge over the Oder had ascended to far greater symbolic importance than it ever had strategically. To the Russians, the message was always that one more heave, one last push, one big breakthrough would be sufficient to overrun Germany and knock her out of the war. To the Germans and their allies, conversely the message was that the Russians held a Sword of Damocles over Europe, and that hurling the bridgehead back into the Oder would blunt or break this weapon.
Both sides’ propaganda came with the, usually unspoken but implicit, assumption that the fate of the bridgehead would decide the war. Few seemed to consider the thought that it would not resolve anything long-term, save some Societist propaganda (especially from the Grey Societists in Danubia). Combine Societist propaganda tended to be less subtle; perhaps the most iconic piece is a cartoon depicting a human-sized, flea-ridden rat removing a skull-and-crossbones crown from his head and offering it to figures representing the leaders of the allied powers and the Russians. The message was that the meat grinder of the Oder bridgehead was the only place in the world where fighting was so bitter and brutal that men were dying from violence faster than they could die from the plague. The propaganda is typical of Combine Societism at that time, which typically placed most of the blame for the war on the ruling classes of the nations – in contrast to Sanchez’s own critiques, which had often (particularly for democratic nations) argued that all classes were as much to blame for conflict. But, of course, the latter-day Societists were not merely making abstract philosophical points; they wanted to divide and rule in a very real world.
It is true to say that the Oder bridgehead represented perhaps the greatest sacrifice of human life in history for the least reward. The front moved mere toises in response to thousands of deaths, men mown down by cingular guns or blasted by artillery. Periodically, either side would attempt to build up forces of aerodromes and protguns to break through the static lines – and would sometimes even succeed – but they would always run out of steam, weakened by the plague and earlier losses. Each new breakthrough was always contained and slowly, relentlessly, remorselessly pushed back to its start line. Losses were somewhat higher on the allied side as the Russians more often stood on the defensive, with the desperate Germans in particular launching three major offensives (Wotan, Siegfried and Johann Georg) through the months of hell. This is not to say the Russians did not attempt attacks as well, just as fruitless. Their chain of command was often weakened as generals, scarcely less than conscripts, were cut down by the plague. The loss of the brilliant Nesterov in July 1924 was one from which the Russians would never recover, reduced from innovative tactics to brutal slugging matches.
While the Germans remained politically united behind the war for now, feeling the existential threat of the bulge aimed at Berlin and ultimately Dresden, the French were more divided. The Changarnier Lectelgram affair and its aftermath would send tremors through the Triumvirate, and prominent former Foreign Minister Vincent Pichereau would cross the floor to the opposition Diamantine faction, demanding the government pursue a negotiated peace. Meanwhile, the Italians were quietly working on a weapon that would finally change the misery and stalemate on the Oder, but it would not be ready until November 1925.
So let us turn to an oft-forgotten front, the fourth front: Finland. The allied contribution to this front consisted almost entirely of forces from Scandinavia and England.[17] For the Scandinavians, this was an existential struggle, whereas for the English it was more a careful tightrope balance. President Charles Grey faced a similar quandary to the leaders of many countries, including – arguably – the French themselves. Belgium had been the immediate threat to England, a threat horribly evidenced by the failed attempt at a last-ditch death-luft attack from the air. But Belgium was now gone, conquered, occupied, and the only remaining foe was Russia. Some English propaganda did attempt to stir up popular will against the Matetwa empire in Africa, which was allied to Russia and encroaching on England’s last colony, Natal.[18] However, this had little cut-through with the English people, who cared little anymore for dreams of colonial glory and saw Natal purely as a money-making exercise for the wealthy.
For himself, as he made clear in his diaries, Grey lacked any enthusiasm for continuing the war and sending Englishmen to die on a foreign field. However, he was stuck between Scylla and Charybdis. The horrors of the Black Homecoming in Ireland – an epidemic which had washed ashore in England through Liverpool and Bristol – showed that a unilateral withdrawal and bringing the troops home could do more harm than good. Further, it would leave England diplomatically isolated and vulnerable; the Ottomans’ fate had shown the limitations of a unilateral foreign policy that did not attempt to court France’s favour. If the situation changed, Grey envisaged, perhaps England could pursue a neutral path like Danubia, but for now, in order for his men’s sacrifice to be meaningful and to obtain a seat at the eventual negotiation table, England’s participation must continue. It was the same dilemma that challenged leaders across the world, and fed neatly into Societist propaganda claims that the nations were trapped in an endless cycle of conflict from which they could not escape – not without ceasing to be nations altogether.
Grey also had his Chinese wife, Amy, use her contacts at the court in Hanjing to attempt to encourage the Chinese government to mediate a peace. Just as the French themselves had in the Pandoric War, China was the only un-engaged nation powerful enough to enforce such a peace. This attempt naturally had to be highly surreptitious, as it was going behind the Tuilleries’ back – the fallout from the Changarnier Lectelgram and the ensuing chaos helped hide this. However, there were obvious problems with Grey’s strategy, which he had always seen as a forlorn hope. Firstly, the French were still extremely sore about what they saw as China’s betrayal in the early stage of the war. Secondly, while China had intervened earlier to help diplomatically protect Danubian neutrality, the idea of her intervening in European affairs was still controversial. There were also questions about just how much China could do; she was undoubtedly an economic and military powerhouse in her own neighbourhood, but she lacked the network of overseas colonies needed to project her power around the world, as France or Russia could. Finally, and most obviously, China’s attention had turned inwards once again as the troubled Huifu Emperor and his ministers focused on the challenge of the plague burning across the Middle Kingdom. China had the key advantage that she was at peace, and could devote more of her resources and attention to tackling the plague; asking her to risk this peace in order to demand it be instituted in other nations was not feasible. So, it seemed, for the foreseeable future, England would remain in the war.
However, Grey had no intention of being bullied into sending troops to the brutal Oder bridgehead, and England retained enough economic clout to stand up to French demands on this. Instead, his interventions played to England’s strengths, using her rebuilt naval power and forces of strike marines. Throughout 1924, English forces played a key role in taking Karaliaučius and then aided the Scandinavians and Germans in Baltic raids against the increasingly-outmatched Russian navy. A smaller number of English troops fought on land alongside the Scandinavians. In May 1924 the Scandinavians attempted to cut the Petrograd-Hammerfest railway, but their attempt was halted when the Russians launched their St. Peter Offensive. The level of conflict elsewhere meant this ‘offensive’ ended up being more of a vague, under-supplied push, but it was sufficient to halt the Scandinavians and English for the present.
While the Scandinavians settled in for a grim (but more mobile than elsewhere) land advance through Lapland, the English turned to other options. The Russian and Lithuanian Baltic fleets were reduced through successful actions at the Battles of Palanga (September 1924) and, decisively, Cape Domesness (February 1925). The latter represented a triumph of cunning, communication and science over raw numbers. The level to which the Baltic Sea freezes (and how far south) is highly dependent on an individual winter. The Russo-Lithuanian fleet, commanded by Lithuanian Admiral Jurgis Sierakauskas, was operating under the assumption that the seemingly harsh winter of 1924 had sufficiently iced up the northern strait between the island of Dagö and the mainland.[19] Sierakauskas was on guard against enemy ironsharks crossing under the ice, not least thanks to French spies dropping hints for the Russians that such an attack was underway. English and Scandinavian ironsharks indeed attacked the Russo-Lithuanians, and Sierakauskas pursued them north before they could escape under the ice.
However, it turned out that the English were using more advanced and accurate meterological predictions modelled by solution engines at the Royal Meterological Department in London. This meant that while the northern strait looked superficially frozen, in fact lineships could easily smash through the thin ice. To ensure success, the English had also brought along two icebreaker ships which had been built for Russian buyers in English shipyards before the outbreak of war. The result was that the Anglo-Scandinavian fleet, led by Admiral Hotham’s new protégé Lionel ‘Lionheart’ Thwaites, were able to ambush Sierakauskas’s pursuing fleet without warning. This caught the enemy offguard and inflicting a devastating defeat that temporarily ended Vitebsk Pact naval power in the Baltic. The victory was only possible thanks to the great Scandinavian invention of Photel; at the time, vessels required huge metallic aerial networks in order to use Photel, but the Scandinavians had invested in dedicated communications ships assigned to each fleet element – which could then use more traditional flags or heliographs to pass on messages to the lineships. Some naval historians consider the Battle of Cape Domesness to be the last true battle between lineships alone before aero power became crucial, though this is debated.
With the Russo-Lithuanians cleared from the Baltic for now (other than coastal patrols and their own ironsharks), the Anglo-Scandinavian objective now turned to coastal attacks. Mostly these took the form of hit-and-run raids, but, building on the success of Karaliaučius, the Scandinavian Government under Council President Carl Hällström began pushing for naval descents on Finnish cities. Hällström’s motivations have been subject to analysis by biographers, some might say excessively so. Hällström was the leader of the Liberals, also called the Iron Party (Järnparti), which had come to power after the Panic of 1917.[20] Though supporting the war as necessary to curb Russian expansion, he had always been keen on a short war before resuming free trade and building a new economic consensus. Like the leaders of many nations, he wanted a knockout blow that might help persuade Russia to seek peace. Also like many other leaders, he wanted peace so he could focus on the plague situation, but he also wanted to keep his soldiers and sailors in the field to avoid what had happened to Ireland. Finally, some argue that Hällström’s ancestry made him particularly keen to try to regain Finland; he was descended from an aristocratic Swedish family that had owned land there, only to be expelled by the Congress Sweden government for refusing to support the Stockholm Conspiracy.[21] This does seem tenuous, considering Hällström rarely brought up his family’s background and regaining Finland had been a generic cause célebre in Scandinavia for years.
Regardless of his reasons, Hällström began lobbying for the English to help take Finnish cities from the sea. Though privately dubious, Grey agreed. With the Vitebsk Pact Baltic fleet decimated, English forces first blockaded the Russian naval base of Khanko (Hanko), which had been directly annexed to Russia after Congress Sweden had been reformulated into the Grand Duchy of Finland. Cut off from resupply by land or sea, the Russian forces there surrendered in April 1925; it remains a Heritage Point of Controversy whether the English had deliberately contaminated an intercepted supply shipment with plague fleas to weaken the Russians from within and encourage this surrender. With the Russians eliminated, the Anglo-Scandinavians now turned to the key Finnish city of Turku, also known as Abo in Swedish. The second largest city in Finland, Turku was well defended and was only taken after a bloody struggle in May-June 1925.[22]
The conquest was nonetheless successful, and Hällström enthusiastically began calling for Helsingfors (Helsinki) to be next. The English, on the other hand, were less than inspired. Admiral Hotham and O-13 spies began feeding back to Charles Grey that the Scandinavians were getting a chilly reception from the Finns, and not only because of the Baltic weather. While Russian taxes and the Khanko naval base had never been popular in Finland, there was no denying that the Grand Duchy had allowed much more Finnish cultural and linguistic expression than had been possible under Swedish rule. Finnish had been given equal status to Swedish and Russian as a language, and the Finnish ‘national epic’, the Kalevala – actually a collection of mythological poetry from many sources – had been published in 1870.[23] Few Finns were actively willing to take up arms for Russia to resist the Anglo-Scandinavian attack, but the latter were scarcely welcomed as liberators, either. In practice, the best the invaders could expect was a surly sense of apathy, and at worst intentional sabotage. The rumours in circulation, that Hällström intended to confiscate lands that had been taken from families like his own and restore them, did not help.
Any grand scheme to push north and east from Turku therefore came to little. The Scandinavians were further undermined when conscription riots took off in Jutland (then treated as part of Denmark) in July 1925. The Jutish situation was then still little understood by the Scandinavian Government; only a few opposition members in the Imperial Folketing noted that the Jutes, after years under oppressive German Kulturkrieg rule, would scarcely welcome going to war as part of an alliance whose current driving impulse was to defend Germany. The Jutish national movement remained nascent, but the very fact it was a thorn in Scandinavia’s side at this point, as the previous former Scandinavian-ruled land ‘liberated’ from foreign occupation, did not bode well for any Scandinavian attempts to persuade the Finns to shift their allegiance from Russia.
After putting Hällström off repeatedly, the English did unenthusiastically participate in a raid on Helsinki in September 1925, but pulled out after reinforced Russian fortresses offered more resistance than anticipated. This put some strain on the alliance, but it would soon be forgotten when the nightmare of the Oder bridgehead finally came to an end thanks to Italian ingenuity.
For the first calendar year of the ‘Two Years of Hell’, both sides would conscientiously observe the taboo against the use of death-luft. Since the horrors of Belgium’s Parthian shot, and Russian propaganda emphasising the claim that the Belgians had acted alone, neither side had wanted to be the one to act first in adding this final layer of Stygian misery to the Oder front. The Russians did employ death-luft against the Ottomans, but the latter’s diplomatic isolation in their war against Greece had contributed considerably to the Russian argument that this did not count. The Ottomans, the Russians claimed, were not recognising the international order or the laws of war, pointing to their crimes de guerre against the Armenians. Though sceptical of this – and still drawing attention to it in their own propaganda – the allies did not use it as an excuse to open up their own death-luft arsenals against the Russians. Both sides did, however, issue their troops in the field with counterluft equipment such as masks and rubberised suits.
It would be in July 1925 that this last taboo would finally be broken. In an act of desperation, with the Germans’ ‘Johann Georg Offensive’ coming close to a breakthrough, the Russian commander in the Oder bridgehead – General Andrei Shuvalov – unleashed his death-luft arsenal to halt the Germans. In the heat of summer, the use of rubberised suits to protect against brimstone mustard hampered the troops considerably, and though the suits were rapidly provided, as many soldiers passed out from heat stroke as were felled by the luft. Shuvalov’s move met with widespread condemnation internationally, but Tsar Paul and the Soviet chose to back him, coming up with less than credible arguments that the allies had upped the ante first.
Both sides were now deploying death-luft, mostly focused on the German-Polish front, though the Americans also began to use it as they launched a new campaign in the far east. Many, and not just Societists, began to call ever more plaintively for an end to this war that was slaughtering thousands and worsening the global plague pandemic. Both sides focused on the symbolic importance of the Oder bridgehead, ignoring Pacifist and Societist propaganda that showed the Spree river running red with blood. This focus fed the notion that the side which got its way in the bridgehead – the Russians breaking out west or the Germans and their allies hurling them into the Oder – would decide, and presumably end, the war. Driven by wishful thinking though it was, it was this thinking which informed the Italians’ move towards what became known as Operazione Fulmine, or Operation Thunderbolt.
The French would not be informed of the full details of the project until August; originally planned for September, the operation was delayed until November so that death-luft, now available as a weapon, could be incorporated into the plan. Much to the Germans’ anger and dismay, they were not informed until mere weeks before the launch. The Italians’ argument was that the Germans had already been planning a fourth offensive, the Fritz Ziege Offensive (for which Bundeskaiser Anton, with his usual almost comically unlucky timing, had disowned and privately declared the war unwinnable). Thus if the Germans were already massing forces in the hope of a breakthrough, they did not need to be informed that a breakthrough would hopefully be obtained by other means. However, it was an open secret that the Italian intelligence services, the Ufficio Informazioni e Sicurezza (UIS) considered their German counterparts incompetent and riddled with enemy agents, and advised the government and armed forces that the full details of the plan would appear on the Tsar’s desk in Petrograd days after the German government was informed.
This contentious point created a soreness between the countries’ governments, which would not be mirrored by the perceptions of each others’ people; as far as the German people were concerned, Italy would turn out to be an unexpected saviour...
[14] This is slightly inaccurate in terms of terminology, as the weapons used in the Great American War were cycloguns not cingular guns (i.e. OTL Gatling guns not machine guns, approximately). However, the author is right that the bias to the defender in such circumstances was already visible.
[15] This is either a bad translation or this author is just prone to mixed metaphors.
[16] This is slightly misleadingly phrased, as ‘the European part’ also includes a large chunk of Asia Minor.
[17] As is not uncommon for continental European authors, this writer has essentially either forgotten Scotland exists or unconsciously always included it under England.
[18] Calling Natal England’s last colony is a bit debatable – England still has Gibraltar, for example, thanks to a French diplomatic decision after the Third Glorious Revolution that has not done anything for French popularity in Spain.
[19] This reflects an inconsistent usage common to scholars, who will typically use Lithuanian or other local names for mainland locations, but Swedish, German or Russian ones for islands and sea features. In OTL Cape Domesness is now known as Cape Kolka, and the island of Dagö is known by its Estonian name of Hiiumaa.
[20] The term ‘Iron Party’ here does not signify strength or militarism, but rather practicality. The other two parties, which had mostly governed Scandinavia before the Panic, are known as the Gold and Silver Parties, mostly supporting aristocratic and agrarian interests respectively, whereas the Iron Party claims to speak for the middle-class urban burghers and industry. The lack of more populist parties reflects the limited franchise at the Imperial level in Scandinavia, whereas Mentian groups are much more influential in the more democratic national parliaments.
[21] This is slightly confusing the terminology here, as the term Congress Sweden wasn’t in use in the immediate aftermath of the Stockholm Conspiracy.
[22] Turku declined considerably in OTL after the capital was shifted to Helsinki and then a great fire ripped through the city in 1827. While the former also happened in TTL (rather later on), the latter didn’t.
[23] The Kalevala was published in the 1830s in OTL as part of a Finnish literary revival. The order of events is quite different here, as the Russians propped up a claimant Swedish government for years before reformulating its territory as the Grand Duchy of Finland, so this revival was delayed. Importantly, whereas in OTL the Russians eventually imposed a policy of Russification in the late 19th century, this hasn’t happened in TTL and the Russians have continued to be tolerant of Finnish cultural expression (to an extent). This is largely because they have found this policy to be successful in Lithuania.
Throughout the so-called ‘Two Years of Hell’, conflict in Europe and neighbouring Asia Minor was focused on four fronts. In the latter, the Russians’ Tarsus salient, seemingly overextended, remained paradoxically static as the Ottomans repeatedly failed to cut off or push back the Russian forces – now under the command of the dull but dutiful General Aleksandr Pazukhin. This was despite the fact that Pazukhin’s forces, like those on other fronts, became increasingly stripped of strength as the Russians focused everything on the meat grinder that was the Oder bridgehead in Germany.
The reasons behind the Ottomans’ difficulties were diverse. Firstly, the Russians had succeeded in their aim to cut the empire in half, severing its railways and ensuring that the only direct contact between the two halves of the Ottoman state was by sea. This naturally had a greatly disruptive effect, which the Ottomans were still struggling to cope with months and years later. Secondly, there was the plague. The general principle to bear in mind during the conflict was that while the plague hit both sides of each front equally (eventually), the overall result was generally to favour the defenders. It was easier for a sick and depleted army to man defensive fortifications than to lead an offensive. With the loss of many skilled warriors and support workers, the protgun- and aerodrome-based tactics of a modern war of manoeuvre became increasingly less possible to pull off, reducing fighting to infantry tactics using conscripts with basic training. As had already been seen as far back as the Great American War, cingular guns and trench defences ensured that such a form of warfare would always favour the defenders.[14] Lacking the manpower to consider an offensive, and utilising the mountainous terrain of Anatolia to his advantage, Pazhukhin successfully stood on the defensive against wave after wave of poorly-coordinated, plague-weakened Ottoman counter-attacks.
The division of the empire and the plague also served to trigger food shortages, and even famines, in some regions. As had happened before in history under both Ottomans and Byzantines, Constantinople became politically restless as the people demanded bread. The Ottoman Empire was far from unique in the 1920s in suffering under famine inflicted or worsened by the plague, but the Russian salient splitting it in two worsened the situation even beyond that seen elsewhere. By contrast, similar effects were seen in China as the plague ripped through her agricultural heartlands, but China was at peace and still had a functioning railway network, allowing her government to respond to individual plague outbreaks and food shortages by redirecting resources from elsewhere.
For now, the food shortages were just a simmering powder keg.[15] Ferid Ibrahim Pasha typically stripped harvests from farmers in Balkan territories (including the recently-reconquered Greece) to try to keep Constantinopolitans at bay, though this created more problems elsewhere. Mehveş Sultan travelled back to her native Egypt for the first time in November 1924 to encourage further shipments from the land that had once been the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. Her effective displacement of the Wali (Governor) of Egypt, Suleyman Murad Pasha, sparked political tensions throughout the region. However, even though Mehveş Sultan was often coming to demand more grain, many Egyptians were more favourably disposed towards this glamorous daughter of their own land than the corrupt Suleyman Murad Pasha, a political appointee and ethnic Turk. In the short term, tensions were defused by an unofficial agreement that Suleyman Murad would continue to govern from Cairo, while Mehveş Sultan had a new palace built in Alexandria to direct her own efforts from. Throughout the war years, she would increasingly spend as much time there as in Constantinople, and Alexandria became treated as the unofficial capital of the Asian and African parts of the empire, cut off by the Russian salient from direct land contact with the European part.[16]
If the Tarsus salient remained static despite periodic fighting, the same could not be said of the Danube front. The brilliant general Ahmet Ismail Pasha continued to hold East Muntenia and run rings around the Russians’ attempts to push him back, with the Danube Delta being contested repeatedly (often in miserable and muddy fighting) throughout the conflict. Yet, though the Russians were again often stripped of strength thanks to the Oder bridgehead, the same was true of Ahmet Ismail’s army, Ottoman troops all going to fruitless attacks on the Tarsus salient. The result was that this masterful commander was frustrated by lacking the resources he needed to knock the weakened Russians decisively back into Moldavia, and perhaps even beyond. Though Ahmet Ismail was relatively uninterested in political affairs by the standards of an Ottoman general, as the war wore on he became increasingly resentful of this, and began attempting to assemble Constantinopolitan contacts to argue for more resources as a court faction. This would be a process over which he would, ultimately, lose control.
So much for the Russo-Ottoman fronts. Farther north came the main event, the aforementioned Oder bridgehead (and, by extension, the whole Polish-German front). While the front had become overextended by the allies taking Karaliaučius, the Russians focused almost all their efforts on trying to hold the Oder bridgehead rather than cutting off the German salient along the coast. To both sides, the bulge over the Oder had ascended to far greater symbolic importance than it ever had strategically. To the Russians, the message was always that one more heave, one last push, one big breakthrough would be sufficient to overrun Germany and knock her out of the war. To the Germans and their allies, conversely the message was that the Russians held a Sword of Damocles over Europe, and that hurling the bridgehead back into the Oder would blunt or break this weapon.
Both sides’ propaganda came with the, usually unspoken but implicit, assumption that the fate of the bridgehead would decide the war. Few seemed to consider the thought that it would not resolve anything long-term, save some Societist propaganda (especially from the Grey Societists in Danubia). Combine Societist propaganda tended to be less subtle; perhaps the most iconic piece is a cartoon depicting a human-sized, flea-ridden rat removing a skull-and-crossbones crown from his head and offering it to figures representing the leaders of the allied powers and the Russians. The message was that the meat grinder of the Oder bridgehead was the only place in the world where fighting was so bitter and brutal that men were dying from violence faster than they could die from the plague. The propaganda is typical of Combine Societism at that time, which typically placed most of the blame for the war on the ruling classes of the nations – in contrast to Sanchez’s own critiques, which had often (particularly for democratic nations) argued that all classes were as much to blame for conflict. But, of course, the latter-day Societists were not merely making abstract philosophical points; they wanted to divide and rule in a very real world.
It is true to say that the Oder bridgehead represented perhaps the greatest sacrifice of human life in history for the least reward. The front moved mere toises in response to thousands of deaths, men mown down by cingular guns or blasted by artillery. Periodically, either side would attempt to build up forces of aerodromes and protguns to break through the static lines – and would sometimes even succeed – but they would always run out of steam, weakened by the plague and earlier losses. Each new breakthrough was always contained and slowly, relentlessly, remorselessly pushed back to its start line. Losses were somewhat higher on the allied side as the Russians more often stood on the defensive, with the desperate Germans in particular launching three major offensives (Wotan, Siegfried and Johann Georg) through the months of hell. This is not to say the Russians did not attempt attacks as well, just as fruitless. Their chain of command was often weakened as generals, scarcely less than conscripts, were cut down by the plague. The loss of the brilliant Nesterov in July 1924 was one from which the Russians would never recover, reduced from innovative tactics to brutal slugging matches.
While the Germans remained politically united behind the war for now, feeling the existential threat of the bulge aimed at Berlin and ultimately Dresden, the French were more divided. The Changarnier Lectelgram affair and its aftermath would send tremors through the Triumvirate, and prominent former Foreign Minister Vincent Pichereau would cross the floor to the opposition Diamantine faction, demanding the government pursue a negotiated peace. Meanwhile, the Italians were quietly working on a weapon that would finally change the misery and stalemate on the Oder, but it would not be ready until November 1925.
So let us turn to an oft-forgotten front, the fourth front: Finland. The allied contribution to this front consisted almost entirely of forces from Scandinavia and England.[17] For the Scandinavians, this was an existential struggle, whereas for the English it was more a careful tightrope balance. President Charles Grey faced a similar quandary to the leaders of many countries, including – arguably – the French themselves. Belgium had been the immediate threat to England, a threat horribly evidenced by the failed attempt at a last-ditch death-luft attack from the air. But Belgium was now gone, conquered, occupied, and the only remaining foe was Russia. Some English propaganda did attempt to stir up popular will against the Matetwa empire in Africa, which was allied to Russia and encroaching on England’s last colony, Natal.[18] However, this had little cut-through with the English people, who cared little anymore for dreams of colonial glory and saw Natal purely as a money-making exercise for the wealthy.
For himself, as he made clear in his diaries, Grey lacked any enthusiasm for continuing the war and sending Englishmen to die on a foreign field. However, he was stuck between Scylla and Charybdis. The horrors of the Black Homecoming in Ireland – an epidemic which had washed ashore in England through Liverpool and Bristol – showed that a unilateral withdrawal and bringing the troops home could do more harm than good. Further, it would leave England diplomatically isolated and vulnerable; the Ottomans’ fate had shown the limitations of a unilateral foreign policy that did not attempt to court France’s favour. If the situation changed, Grey envisaged, perhaps England could pursue a neutral path like Danubia, but for now, in order for his men’s sacrifice to be meaningful and to obtain a seat at the eventual negotiation table, England’s participation must continue. It was the same dilemma that challenged leaders across the world, and fed neatly into Societist propaganda claims that the nations were trapped in an endless cycle of conflict from which they could not escape – not without ceasing to be nations altogether.
Grey also had his Chinese wife, Amy, use her contacts at the court in Hanjing to attempt to encourage the Chinese government to mediate a peace. Just as the French themselves had in the Pandoric War, China was the only un-engaged nation powerful enough to enforce such a peace. This attempt naturally had to be highly surreptitious, as it was going behind the Tuilleries’ back – the fallout from the Changarnier Lectelgram and the ensuing chaos helped hide this. However, there were obvious problems with Grey’s strategy, which he had always seen as a forlorn hope. Firstly, the French were still extremely sore about what they saw as China’s betrayal in the early stage of the war. Secondly, while China had intervened earlier to help diplomatically protect Danubian neutrality, the idea of her intervening in European affairs was still controversial. There were also questions about just how much China could do; she was undoubtedly an economic and military powerhouse in her own neighbourhood, but she lacked the network of overseas colonies needed to project her power around the world, as France or Russia could. Finally, and most obviously, China’s attention had turned inwards once again as the troubled Huifu Emperor and his ministers focused on the challenge of the plague burning across the Middle Kingdom. China had the key advantage that she was at peace, and could devote more of her resources and attention to tackling the plague; asking her to risk this peace in order to demand it be instituted in other nations was not feasible. So, it seemed, for the foreseeable future, England would remain in the war.
However, Grey had no intention of being bullied into sending troops to the brutal Oder bridgehead, and England retained enough economic clout to stand up to French demands on this. Instead, his interventions played to England’s strengths, using her rebuilt naval power and forces of strike marines. Throughout 1924, English forces played a key role in taking Karaliaučius and then aided the Scandinavians and Germans in Baltic raids against the increasingly-outmatched Russian navy. A smaller number of English troops fought on land alongside the Scandinavians. In May 1924 the Scandinavians attempted to cut the Petrograd-Hammerfest railway, but their attempt was halted when the Russians launched their St. Peter Offensive. The level of conflict elsewhere meant this ‘offensive’ ended up being more of a vague, under-supplied push, but it was sufficient to halt the Scandinavians and English for the present.
While the Scandinavians settled in for a grim (but more mobile than elsewhere) land advance through Lapland, the English turned to other options. The Russian and Lithuanian Baltic fleets were reduced through successful actions at the Battles of Palanga (September 1924) and, decisively, Cape Domesness (February 1925). The latter represented a triumph of cunning, communication and science over raw numbers. The level to which the Baltic Sea freezes (and how far south) is highly dependent on an individual winter. The Russo-Lithuanian fleet, commanded by Lithuanian Admiral Jurgis Sierakauskas, was operating under the assumption that the seemingly harsh winter of 1924 had sufficiently iced up the northern strait between the island of Dagö and the mainland.[19] Sierakauskas was on guard against enemy ironsharks crossing under the ice, not least thanks to French spies dropping hints for the Russians that such an attack was underway. English and Scandinavian ironsharks indeed attacked the Russo-Lithuanians, and Sierakauskas pursued them north before they could escape under the ice.
However, it turned out that the English were using more advanced and accurate meterological predictions modelled by solution engines at the Royal Meterological Department in London. This meant that while the northern strait looked superficially frozen, in fact lineships could easily smash through the thin ice. To ensure success, the English had also brought along two icebreaker ships which had been built for Russian buyers in English shipyards before the outbreak of war. The result was that the Anglo-Scandinavian fleet, led by Admiral Hotham’s new protégé Lionel ‘Lionheart’ Thwaites, were able to ambush Sierakauskas’s pursuing fleet without warning. This caught the enemy offguard and inflicting a devastating defeat that temporarily ended Vitebsk Pact naval power in the Baltic. The victory was only possible thanks to the great Scandinavian invention of Photel; at the time, vessels required huge metallic aerial networks in order to use Photel, but the Scandinavians had invested in dedicated communications ships assigned to each fleet element – which could then use more traditional flags or heliographs to pass on messages to the lineships. Some naval historians consider the Battle of Cape Domesness to be the last true battle between lineships alone before aero power became crucial, though this is debated.
With the Russo-Lithuanians cleared from the Baltic for now (other than coastal patrols and their own ironsharks), the Anglo-Scandinavian objective now turned to coastal attacks. Mostly these took the form of hit-and-run raids, but, building on the success of Karaliaučius, the Scandinavian Government under Council President Carl Hällström began pushing for naval descents on Finnish cities. Hällström’s motivations have been subject to analysis by biographers, some might say excessively so. Hällström was the leader of the Liberals, also called the Iron Party (Järnparti), which had come to power after the Panic of 1917.[20] Though supporting the war as necessary to curb Russian expansion, he had always been keen on a short war before resuming free trade and building a new economic consensus. Like the leaders of many nations, he wanted a knockout blow that might help persuade Russia to seek peace. Also like many other leaders, he wanted peace so he could focus on the plague situation, but he also wanted to keep his soldiers and sailors in the field to avoid what had happened to Ireland. Finally, some argue that Hällström’s ancestry made him particularly keen to try to regain Finland; he was descended from an aristocratic Swedish family that had owned land there, only to be expelled by the Congress Sweden government for refusing to support the Stockholm Conspiracy.[21] This does seem tenuous, considering Hällström rarely brought up his family’s background and regaining Finland had been a generic cause célebre in Scandinavia for years.
Regardless of his reasons, Hällström began lobbying for the English to help take Finnish cities from the sea. Though privately dubious, Grey agreed. With the Vitebsk Pact Baltic fleet decimated, English forces first blockaded the Russian naval base of Khanko (Hanko), which had been directly annexed to Russia after Congress Sweden had been reformulated into the Grand Duchy of Finland. Cut off from resupply by land or sea, the Russian forces there surrendered in April 1925; it remains a Heritage Point of Controversy whether the English had deliberately contaminated an intercepted supply shipment with plague fleas to weaken the Russians from within and encourage this surrender. With the Russians eliminated, the Anglo-Scandinavians now turned to the key Finnish city of Turku, also known as Abo in Swedish. The second largest city in Finland, Turku was well defended and was only taken after a bloody struggle in May-June 1925.[22]
The conquest was nonetheless successful, and Hällström enthusiastically began calling for Helsingfors (Helsinki) to be next. The English, on the other hand, were less than inspired. Admiral Hotham and O-13 spies began feeding back to Charles Grey that the Scandinavians were getting a chilly reception from the Finns, and not only because of the Baltic weather. While Russian taxes and the Khanko naval base had never been popular in Finland, there was no denying that the Grand Duchy had allowed much more Finnish cultural and linguistic expression than had been possible under Swedish rule. Finnish had been given equal status to Swedish and Russian as a language, and the Finnish ‘national epic’, the Kalevala – actually a collection of mythological poetry from many sources – had been published in 1870.[23] Few Finns were actively willing to take up arms for Russia to resist the Anglo-Scandinavian attack, but the latter were scarcely welcomed as liberators, either. In practice, the best the invaders could expect was a surly sense of apathy, and at worst intentional sabotage. The rumours in circulation, that Hällström intended to confiscate lands that had been taken from families like his own and restore them, did not help.
Any grand scheme to push north and east from Turku therefore came to little. The Scandinavians were further undermined when conscription riots took off in Jutland (then treated as part of Denmark) in July 1925. The Jutish situation was then still little understood by the Scandinavian Government; only a few opposition members in the Imperial Folketing noted that the Jutes, after years under oppressive German Kulturkrieg rule, would scarcely welcome going to war as part of an alliance whose current driving impulse was to defend Germany. The Jutish national movement remained nascent, but the very fact it was a thorn in Scandinavia’s side at this point, as the previous former Scandinavian-ruled land ‘liberated’ from foreign occupation, did not bode well for any Scandinavian attempts to persuade the Finns to shift their allegiance from Russia.
After putting Hällström off repeatedly, the English did unenthusiastically participate in a raid on Helsinki in September 1925, but pulled out after reinforced Russian fortresses offered more resistance than anticipated. This put some strain on the alliance, but it would soon be forgotten when the nightmare of the Oder bridgehead finally came to an end thanks to Italian ingenuity.
For the first calendar year of the ‘Two Years of Hell’, both sides would conscientiously observe the taboo against the use of death-luft. Since the horrors of Belgium’s Parthian shot, and Russian propaganda emphasising the claim that the Belgians had acted alone, neither side had wanted to be the one to act first in adding this final layer of Stygian misery to the Oder front. The Russians did employ death-luft against the Ottomans, but the latter’s diplomatic isolation in their war against Greece had contributed considerably to the Russian argument that this did not count. The Ottomans, the Russians claimed, were not recognising the international order or the laws of war, pointing to their crimes de guerre against the Armenians. Though sceptical of this – and still drawing attention to it in their own propaganda – the allies did not use it as an excuse to open up their own death-luft arsenals against the Russians. Both sides did, however, issue their troops in the field with counterluft equipment such as masks and rubberised suits.
It would be in July 1925 that this last taboo would finally be broken. In an act of desperation, with the Germans’ ‘Johann Georg Offensive’ coming close to a breakthrough, the Russian commander in the Oder bridgehead – General Andrei Shuvalov – unleashed his death-luft arsenal to halt the Germans. In the heat of summer, the use of rubberised suits to protect against brimstone mustard hampered the troops considerably, and though the suits were rapidly provided, as many soldiers passed out from heat stroke as were felled by the luft. Shuvalov’s move met with widespread condemnation internationally, but Tsar Paul and the Soviet chose to back him, coming up with less than credible arguments that the allies had upped the ante first.
Both sides were now deploying death-luft, mostly focused on the German-Polish front, though the Americans also began to use it as they launched a new campaign in the far east. Many, and not just Societists, began to call ever more plaintively for an end to this war that was slaughtering thousands and worsening the global plague pandemic. Both sides focused on the symbolic importance of the Oder bridgehead, ignoring Pacifist and Societist propaganda that showed the Spree river running red with blood. This focus fed the notion that the side which got its way in the bridgehead – the Russians breaking out west or the Germans and their allies hurling them into the Oder – would decide, and presumably end, the war. Driven by wishful thinking though it was, it was this thinking which informed the Italians’ move towards what became known as Operazione Fulmine, or Operation Thunderbolt.
The French would not be informed of the full details of the project until August; originally planned for September, the operation was delayed until November so that death-luft, now available as a weapon, could be incorporated into the plan. Much to the Germans’ anger and dismay, they were not informed until mere weeks before the launch. The Italians’ argument was that the Germans had already been planning a fourth offensive, the Fritz Ziege Offensive (for which Bundeskaiser Anton, with his usual almost comically unlucky timing, had disowned and privately declared the war unwinnable). Thus if the Germans were already massing forces in the hope of a breakthrough, they did not need to be informed that a breakthrough would hopefully be obtained by other means. However, it was an open secret that the Italian intelligence services, the Ufficio Informazioni e Sicurezza (UIS) considered their German counterparts incompetent and riddled with enemy agents, and advised the government and armed forces that the full details of the plan would appear on the Tsar’s desk in Petrograd days after the German government was informed.
This contentious point created a soreness between the countries’ governments, which would not be mirrored by the perceptions of each others’ people; as far as the German people were concerned, Italy would turn out to be an unexpected saviour...
[14] This is slightly inaccurate in terms of terminology, as the weapons used in the Great American War were cycloguns not cingular guns (i.e. OTL Gatling guns not machine guns, approximately). However, the author is right that the bias to the defender in such circumstances was already visible.
[15] This is either a bad translation or this author is just prone to mixed metaphors.
[16] This is slightly misleadingly phrased, as ‘the European part’ also includes a large chunk of Asia Minor.
[17] As is not uncommon for continental European authors, this writer has essentially either forgotten Scotland exists or unconsciously always included it under England.
[18] Calling Natal England’s last colony is a bit debatable – England still has Gibraltar, for example, thanks to a French diplomatic decision after the Third Glorious Revolution that has not done anything for French popularity in Spain.
[19] This reflects an inconsistent usage common to scholars, who will typically use Lithuanian or other local names for mainland locations, but Swedish, German or Russian ones for islands and sea features. In OTL Cape Domesness is now known as Cape Kolka, and the island of Dagö is known by its Estonian name of Hiiumaa.
[20] The term ‘Iron Party’ here does not signify strength or militarism, but rather practicality. The other two parties, which had mostly governed Scandinavia before the Panic, are known as the Gold and Silver Parties, mostly supporting aristocratic and agrarian interests respectively, whereas the Iron Party claims to speak for the middle-class urban burghers and industry. The lack of more populist parties reflects the limited franchise at the Imperial level in Scandinavia, whereas Mentian groups are much more influential in the more democratic national parliaments.
[21] This is slightly confusing the terminology here, as the term Congress Sweden wasn’t in use in the immediate aftermath of the Stockholm Conspiracy.
[22] Turku declined considerably in OTL after the capital was shifted to Helsinki and then a great fire ripped through the city in 1827. While the former also happened in TTL (rather later on), the latter didn’t.
[23] The Kalevala was published in the 1830s in OTL as part of a Finnish literary revival. The order of events is quite different here, as the Russians propped up a claimant Swedish government for years before reformulating its territory as the Grand Duchy of Finland, so this revival was delayed. Importantly, whereas in OTL the Russians eventually imposed a policy of Russification in the late 19th century, this hasn’t happened in TTL and the Russians have continued to be tolerant of Finnish cultural expression (to an extent). This is largely because they have found this policy to be successful in Lithuania.
So the world is being hit so badly that countries are no longer able to operate on the same technical level as at the beginning of the war, but all sides continue fighting nonetheless. The 1920s are black indeed. I can definitely understand why so many will find Societism with its promise of ending the cycle of violence to be so appealing.
This level of interest must mean that plenty of copies are being bought. It's nice to hear that you seem to be getting a lot more than just likes for entertaining us for so long. I just realized it's been 10 years since I started following LTTW (in the early phase of the Popular Wars) and we're still some distance from the end!