Given that I’ve already delved into Asian independence movements in previous chapters, the next chapter will shed some light on African independence movements. What I’ll say for now is that they definitely exist, but the fact that most of Africa’s been neutral throughout the Great War thus far has meant that armed rebellions aren’t as big of a deal as they were in OTL yet. As for the Empire-in-Exile, the fact that it’s both neutral and has a relatively effective military means that it’s actual pretty stable. The Kaiser’s obviously not in a great position, but what remains of his empire also isn’t on the brink of collapse.
Man-Made Hell: The History of the Great War and Beyond
- Thread starter ETGalaxy
- Start date
How long can the red hordes keep throwing themselves at the Germans. Aren't they already scraping the barrel for all the bodies they can find.
Both sides are gradually reaching that point where new manpower is becoming a rare resource, but in the case of the Third International in particular, there are a few things keeping them afloat. Both the French and Russians have adopted tactics similar to Blitzkrieg that has, at least for the time being, allowed for them to substantially reduce casualties on their own side. The Eastern Front is in a particularly good situation due to recently independent socialist states in South Asia now sending troops and resources to Europe.
While there hasn't been fighting in Africa, IIRC the colonial empires HAD been recruiting colonial troops and using the colonies' resources to fuel the war effort, so I'd guess the natives would still get rather riled up. Will the chapter delve a bit into what the exiled empires' relations with the natives are?
That's true. And yes, the next chapter will get into empires' relations with their colonies' natives.
I'm curious what sort of people will pop up- this is well before OTL's independence movements in the colonies, and you do have a talent for finding obscure figures to play significant roles.
I'll see who I can find. I remember writing a TL a few years ago where a handful of African countries became independent in the 1920s and 1930s, and it was definitely a bit of a challenge to dig up leaders for said countries.
Just caught up, and my first thought was: what a crazy world to live in! @ETGalaxy, I admire your ability to write long, information-dense chapters which are still a treat to read. The Man-Made Hell-verse is rather bloody and dystopian (at least IMO) but it's also got a lot of creativity and originality behind it. Colour me impressed; I eagerly await more.....
Thank you so much! I really do appreciate the kind words, and it's comments like this that absolutely make my day.
Hello everyone! I want to apologize for the long wait for the latest update, as I know it's definitely been awhile. I decided to wrap up all of Phase Two in this update, and suffice to say that means the next update is very lengthy. Hopefully Chapter XI will be well worth the wait, but in the meantime, here's the introduction to the chapter in order to give people a bit of a sneak peak into what's coming up:
“It is here in Berlin that the fate of our empire will be determined. It is here that we will defend the city or die in the attempt.”
-General Erich Ludendorff of the Deutches Heilsreich, circa March 1928.
The Brandenburg Gate prior to the Battle of Berlin, circa February 1928.
“...Your Majesty?”
“What is it Anton?”
“The Fuhrer has called the Palace and would like to-”
“Tell Mr Hugenberg that I am unavailable at the moment.”
“...Of course, your Majesty.”
And with that, Kaiser August Wilhelm was left alone once again.
It was this solitude that the Kaiser had become so accustomed to in recent months, ever since he and the Fuhrer had transitioned from a close friendship to a bitter political rivalry. Their conflicting approaches to the Western Front had infuriated Hugenberg, who had more or less ruled as Germany’s unquestioned autocrat since the Heilungscoup. August Wilhelm’s total war strategy had certainly stalled the Third International’s offensive into the Rhineland, however, thousands of German civilians had died at the hands of the Luftsreitkrafte in the process. For many within the DVP elite, this apparently crossed a line. For Hugenberg, the line was crossed when August Wilhelm had the audacity to turn members of the German high command against him.
Since October, Hugenberg had been scolding the man who was officially his emperor but was in reality, at least within the framework of the German Fatherland Party, his subordinate for stepping out of line. Time and time again, the Fuhrer would call the Royal Palace to belittle the decisions of August Wilhelm, lambasting the Kaiser as “volatile,” “brash,” and “ignorant” more times than he could count. Eventually, August simply started ignoring Hugenberg’s calls when he could, and everytime the Fuhrer did get an audience with his aristocratic counterpart, it was becoming more and more clear to August that Hugenberg was becoming increasingly desperate. The fact of the matter was that the Great War was being lost under Alfred Hugenberg’s watch, and the knives within the Reichstag were beginning to tilt towards the Fuhrer. Someone needed to take the blame for the losses in both the east and the west, and Hugenberg was running out of military officers that he could throw under the bus.
Kaiser August Wilhelm simply fueled the flames of the DVP’s gradual turn on their leader. After all, as the head of state of Germany, August was the one who stood to benefit the most from Hugenberg’s deposition. With his rival out of the way, Germany could return to absolute monarchism yet again (this time, of course, mixed with the ultra-totalitarian chauvinism of fascism), an age that had preceded the days of even Otto von Bismarck. August’s game of political intrigue with Hugenberg was not, however, exclusively motivated by ideological differences. To the Kaiser, this was all personal. Hugenberg had once been more than a mere political ally of August, for he had been a mentor and a close friend. When the then-Prince August Wilhelm found himself at odds with his fellow Hohenzollerns, Hugenberg became the sole man of power in all of Berlin who he could trust.
And now Hugenberg dared to betray that sacred trust? Dared to betray the will of his Kaiser?
Such treason simply would not stand. Alfred Hugenberg may have committed himself to the supremacy of the Fatherland, but as the German Emperor, August Wilhelm was the Fatherland. By the grace of God, all who proclaimed their loyalty to the German nation were to live in his service. The allure of securing tyrannical power the likes of which had not been seen in centuries had overcome August in recent years, and no longer would he stand idly by as Hugenberg sat in a throne that was rightfully his. The puppet strings had been broken and the pawn had turned against his king.
It was a sunny day in Berlin. As August Wilhelm peered out of the vast window that stood before him, one could be forgiven for forgetting that the Great War was raging just mere kilometers away. For the last few weeks, however, distant explosions could occasionally be heard ringing from the east. And each and every day, the explosions were getting louder. No one in Berlin, not even August and his fellow elites, wanted to admit it, but the Heilsreich was losing the Great War and Joseph Stalin was getting slowly but surely making his way towards Berlin. Soon, the quiet streets of the Athens of the Spree would become a battlefield, as had been the fate of countless other cities before it.
As Kaiser August Wilhelm reached for his half-empty glass of whiskey, a faint “boom” washed through the air. The Red Army had recently crossed the Oder River, and for a second, the fear that the banks of the Spree River would be next crept through August’s mind. Such worries soon faded away, just as they had continuously been doing ever since the war leapt from the pages of newspapers and became a sound echoing from a not-so-distant land. August completed the act of picking up his glass and bringing it to his lips and taking a faint sip, but just after he set down his glass, the hum of airplanes could be heard. Perhaps Dornier bombers returning from the Eastern Front to refuel? Strange that they would have to fly over Berlin to do so. Soon, however, the hum was accompanied by gunshots.
Boom.
A plane had been hit by German defenses. This was not an aircraft of the Heilsreich.
As the hum of the airplanes got closer, German fighters shot into the sky from the west. More gunfire plagued the air. More explosions came with it. Anton swung open the door to August’s quarters and frantically began to speak.
“Your Majesty, I believe it would be best for you to evacuate to the lower levels of the Palace. The Soviets have just-”
BOOM.
The ground rattled and August’s glass fell to the ground, shattering into numerous shards.
BOOM.
The ground rattled again, much more so than before.
A fleet of planes entered the otherwise empty sky in front of August and dots of steel grey rained down from one aircraft.
The dots fell into the cityscape just outside the window.
Several bright lights flashed.
BOOM.
Berlin was consumed in fire as a man-made earthquake continuously shook the Royal Palace.
“...Yes,” the Kaiser responded. “I think an evacuation would be a good idea.”
Welcome to the Battle of Berlin.
-General Erich Ludendorff of the Deutches Heilsreich, circa March 1928.
The Brandenburg Gate prior to the Battle of Berlin, circa February 1928.
“...Your Majesty?”
“What is it Anton?”
“The Fuhrer has called the Palace and would like to-”
“Tell Mr Hugenberg that I am unavailable at the moment.”
“...Of course, your Majesty.”
And with that, Kaiser August Wilhelm was left alone once again.
It was this solitude that the Kaiser had become so accustomed to in recent months, ever since he and the Fuhrer had transitioned from a close friendship to a bitter political rivalry. Their conflicting approaches to the Western Front had infuriated Hugenberg, who had more or less ruled as Germany’s unquestioned autocrat since the Heilungscoup. August Wilhelm’s total war strategy had certainly stalled the Third International’s offensive into the Rhineland, however, thousands of German civilians had died at the hands of the Luftsreitkrafte in the process. For many within the DVP elite, this apparently crossed a line. For Hugenberg, the line was crossed when August Wilhelm had the audacity to turn members of the German high command against him.
Since October, Hugenberg had been scolding the man who was officially his emperor but was in reality, at least within the framework of the German Fatherland Party, his subordinate for stepping out of line. Time and time again, the Fuhrer would call the Royal Palace to belittle the decisions of August Wilhelm, lambasting the Kaiser as “volatile,” “brash,” and “ignorant” more times than he could count. Eventually, August simply started ignoring Hugenberg’s calls when he could, and everytime the Fuhrer did get an audience with his aristocratic counterpart, it was becoming more and more clear to August that Hugenberg was becoming increasingly desperate. The fact of the matter was that the Great War was being lost under Alfred Hugenberg’s watch, and the knives within the Reichstag were beginning to tilt towards the Fuhrer. Someone needed to take the blame for the losses in both the east and the west, and Hugenberg was running out of military officers that he could throw under the bus.
Kaiser August Wilhelm simply fueled the flames of the DVP’s gradual turn on their leader. After all, as the head of state of Germany, August was the one who stood to benefit the most from Hugenberg’s deposition. With his rival out of the way, Germany could return to absolute monarchism yet again (this time, of course, mixed with the ultra-totalitarian chauvinism of fascism), an age that had preceded the days of even Otto von Bismarck. August’s game of political intrigue with Hugenberg was not, however, exclusively motivated by ideological differences. To the Kaiser, this was all personal. Hugenberg had once been more than a mere political ally of August, for he had been a mentor and a close friend. When the then-Prince August Wilhelm found himself at odds with his fellow Hohenzollerns, Hugenberg became the sole man of power in all of Berlin who he could trust.
And now Hugenberg dared to betray that sacred trust? Dared to betray the will of his Kaiser?
Such treason simply would not stand. Alfred Hugenberg may have committed himself to the supremacy of the Fatherland, but as the German Emperor, August Wilhelm was the Fatherland. By the grace of God, all who proclaimed their loyalty to the German nation were to live in his service. The allure of securing tyrannical power the likes of which had not been seen in centuries had overcome August in recent years, and no longer would he stand idly by as Hugenberg sat in a throne that was rightfully his. The puppet strings had been broken and the pawn had turned against his king.
It was a sunny day in Berlin. As August Wilhelm peered out of the vast window that stood before him, one could be forgiven for forgetting that the Great War was raging just mere kilometers away. For the last few weeks, however, distant explosions could occasionally be heard ringing from the east. And each and every day, the explosions were getting louder. No one in Berlin, not even August and his fellow elites, wanted to admit it, but the Heilsreich was losing the Great War and Joseph Stalin was getting slowly but surely making his way towards Berlin. Soon, the quiet streets of the Athens of the Spree would become a battlefield, as had been the fate of countless other cities before it.
As Kaiser August Wilhelm reached for his half-empty glass of whiskey, a faint “boom” washed through the air. The Red Army had recently crossed the Oder River, and for a second, the fear that the banks of the Spree River would be next crept through August’s mind. Such worries soon faded away, just as they had continuously been doing ever since the war leapt from the pages of newspapers and became a sound echoing from a not-so-distant land. August completed the act of picking up his glass and bringing it to his lips and taking a faint sip, but just after he set down his glass, the hum of airplanes could be heard. Perhaps Dornier bombers returning from the Eastern Front to refuel? Strange that they would have to fly over Berlin to do so. Soon, however, the hum was accompanied by gunshots.
Boom.
A plane had been hit by German defenses. This was not an aircraft of the Heilsreich.
As the hum of the airplanes got closer, German fighters shot into the sky from the west. More gunfire plagued the air. More explosions came with it. Anton swung open the door to August’s quarters and frantically began to speak.
“Your Majesty, I believe it would be best for you to evacuate to the lower levels of the Palace. The Soviets have just-”
BOOM.
The ground rattled and August’s glass fell to the ground, shattering into numerous shards.
BOOM.
The ground rattled again, much more so than before.
A fleet of planes entered the otherwise empty sky in front of August and dots of steel grey rained down from one aircraft.
The dots fell into the cityscape just outside the window.
Several bright lights flashed.
BOOM.
Berlin was consumed in fire as a man-made earthquake continuously shook the Royal Palace.
“...Yes,” the Kaiser responded. “I think an evacuation would be a good idea.”
Welcome to the Battle of Berlin.
I'm quite confident it will be worth the weight, if all of Phase Two can be wrapped up.
Interesting to see how the relationship between the Fuhrer and the Kaiser has developped over the past years, Methinks August Wilhelm is a bit late with getting rid of Hugenberg though It seems pretty obvious the Reich is doomed, so I am curious what plots you have in mind that will make this "self-coup" matter in the long run.
I also wonder, just how much damage have the fascists done to German society with their ruthless purges, by the time Germany falls?
Interesting to see how the relationship between the Fuhrer and the Kaiser has developped over the past years, Methinks August Wilhelm is a bit late with getting rid of Hugenberg though It seems pretty obvious the Reich is doomed, so I am curious what plots you have in mind that will make this "self-coup" matter in the long run.
I also wonder, just how much damage have the fascists done to German society with their ruthless purges, by the time Germany falls?
I'm not entirely sure the Europeans will ever be able to be able to dominate the world again with the two decades long perpetual warfare changing their demographics, I think the Arabs probably have the greatest potential given the fighting on their side has been a skirmish by comparison.
Still the war is over when it's over, as long as leaders are wiling to keep up the last child soldier it won't end and given the rules of wars have been decaying all the time, I suspect the losers will unleash whatever WMDs they have out of spite.
Still the war is over when it's over, as long as leaders are wiling to keep up the last child soldier it won't end and given the rules of wars have been decaying all the time, I suspect the losers will unleash whatever WMDs they have out of spite.
Chapter Eleven: Defend or Die - Part One
Chapter XI: Defend or Die - Part One
“It is here in Berlin that the fate of our empire will be determined. It is here that we will defend the city or die in the attempt.”
-General Erich Ludendorff of the Deutches Heilsreich, circa March 1928.
The Brandenburg Gate prior to the Battle of Berlin, circa February 1928.
“...Your Majesty?”
“What is it Anton?”
“The Fuhrer has called the Palace and would like to-”
“Tell Mr Hugenberg that I am unavailable at the moment.”
“...Of course, your Majesty.”
And with that, Kaiser August Wilhelm was left alone once again.
It was this solitude that the Kaiser had become so accustomed to in recent months, ever since he and the Fuhrer had transitioned from a close friendship to a bitter political rivalry. Their conflicting approaches to the Western Front had infuriated Hugenberg, who had more or less ruled as Germany’s unquestioned autocrat since the Heilungscoup. August Wilhelm’s total war strategy had certainly stalled the Third International’s offensive into the Rhineland, however, thousands of German civilians had died at the hands of the Luftsreitkrafte in the process. For many within the DVP elite, this apparently crossed a line. For Hugenberg, the line was crossed when August Wilhelm had the audacity to turn members of the German high command against him.
Since October, Hugenberg had been scolding the man who was officially his emperor but was in reality, at least within the framework of the German Fatherland Party, his subordinate for stepping out of line. Time and time again, the Fuhrer would call the Royal Palace to belittle the decisions of August Wilhelm, lambasting the Kaiser as “volatile,” “brash,” and “ignorant” more times than he could count. Eventually, August simply started ignoring Hugenberg’s calls when he could, and everytime the Fuhrer did get an audience with his aristocratic counterpart, it was becoming more and more clear to August that Hugenberg was becoming increasingly desperate. The fact of the matter was that the Great War was being lost under Alfred Hugenberg’s watch, and the knives within the Reichstag were beginning to tilt towards the Fuhrer. Someone needed to take the blame for the losses in both the east and the west, and Hugenberg was running out of military officers that he could throw under the bus.
Kaiser August Wilhelm simply fueled the flames of the DVP’s gradual turn on their leader. After all, as the head of state of Germany, August was the one who stood to benefit the most from Hugenberg’s deposition. With his rival out of the way, Germany could return to absolute monarchism yet again (this time, of course, mixed with the ultra-totalitarian chauvinism of fascism), an age that had preceded the days of even Otto von Bismarck. August’s game of political intrigue with Hugenberg was not, however, exclusively motivated by ideological differences. To the Kaiser, this was all personal. Hugenberg had once been more than a mere political ally of August, for he had been a mentor and a close friend. When the then-Prince August Wilhelm found himself at odds with his fellow Hohenzollerns, Hugenberg became the sole man of power in all of Berlin who he could trust.
And now Hugenberg dared to betray that sacred trust? Dared to betray the will of his Kaiser?
Such treason simply would not stand. Alfred Hugenberg may have committed himself to the supremacy of the Fatherland, but as the German Emperor, August Wilhelm was the Fatherland. By the grace of God, all who proclaimed their loyalty to the German nation were to live in his service. The allure of securing tyrannical power the likes of which had not been seen in centuries had overcome August in recent years, and no longer would he stand idly by as Hugenberg sat in a throne that was rightfully his. The puppet strings had been broken and the pawn had turned against his king.
It was a sunny day in Berlin. As August Wilhelm peered out of the vast window that stood before him, one could be forgiven for forgetting that the Great War was raging just mere kilometers away. For the last few weeks, however, distant explosions could occasionally be heard ringing from the east. And each and every day, the explosions were getting louder. No one in Berlin, not even August and his fellow elites, wanted to admit it, but the Heilsreich was losing the Great War and Joseph Stalin was getting slowly but surely making his way towards Berlin. Soon, the quiet streets of the Athens of the Spree would become a battlefield, as had been the fate of countless other cities before it.
As Kaiser August Wilhelm reached for his half-empty glass of whiskey, a faint “boom” washed through the air. The Red Army had recently crossed the Oder River, and for a second, the fear that the banks of the Spree River would be next crept through August’s mind. Such worries soon faded away, just as they had continuously been doing ever since the war leapt from the pages of newspapers and became a sound echoing from a not-so-distant land. August completed the act of picking up his glass and bringing it to his lips and taking a faint sip, but just after he set down his glass, the hum of airplanes could be heard. Perhaps Dornier bombers returning from the Eastern Front to refuel? Strange that they would have to fly over Berlin to do so. Soon, however, the hum was accompanied by gunshots.
Boom.
A plane had been hit by German defenses. This was not an aircraft of the Heilsreich.
As the hum of the airplanes got closer, German fighters shot into the sky from the west. More gunfire plagued the air. More explosions came with it. Anton swung open the door to August’s quarters and frantically began to speak.
“Your Majesty, I believe it would be best for you to evacuate to the lower levels of the Palace. The Soviets have just-”
BOOM.
The ground rattled and August’s glass fell to the ground, shattering into numerous shards.
BOOM.
The ground rattled again, much more so than before.
A fleet of planes entered the otherwise empty sky in front of August and dots of steel grey rained down from one aircraft.
The dots fell into the cityscape just outside the window.
Several bright lights flashed.
BOOM.
Berlin was consumed in fire as a man-made earthquake continuously shook the Royal Palace.
“...Yes,” the Kaiser responded. “I think an evacuation would be a good idea.”
Welcome to the Battle of Berlin.
Varchavianka
“Forward, Warsaw!
To the bloody fight,
Sacred and righteous!
March, march, Warsaw!”
-Refrain of Varchavianka.
Red Army soldiers fighting on the Eastern Front of the Great War, circa January 1928.
Out of all military officers in the Great War, perhaps General Joseph Stalin was the happiest upon the start of 1928. The previous year had been a slew of victories on the Eastern Front for the Russian Soviet Republic, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had finally succumbed to its internal instabilities, and the Third International had emerged victorious in Asia, which in turn meant that the already mobilized armies of India, Indochina, and Madras were to be deployed in Europe. Generals and politicians alike of the socialist world optimistically anticipated that the Great War would conclude by the end of the new year and a Europe bathed in the crimson of radical socialism would emerge from the rubble. The war wagering on Wall Street had arrived at the same conclusion, as had many officials within the Heilsreich, even if state-run media in the fascist world obviously didn’t make these fears of defeat public information.
Stalin’s push towards Berlin was far from pleasant, however, it was clear that Operation Poniatowski was going according to plan. Mikhail Frunze, a veteran of the Soviet war against the Ukranian State, led the invasion of Pomerania, where the defeat of Germany was more or less a foregone conclusion by this point. German naval forces in the Baltic Sea were directed to supply ground troops in Pomerania, but the aid provided was far from enough to save the region from the fate of numerous other territories in eastern Europe. A vast legion of Russian soldiers and tanks charged towards the coastal city Kolberg as a target for where the Baltics would be cut off from German supply lines, and through the utilization of foudreguerre not even the relentless bombing campaigns of the LK could turn back General Frunze. The Battle of Kolberg would occur on February 1st, 1928, starting with the Red Army sieging the outermost reaches of the city with a slew of gunfire as the sun rose over a cold Europe, and ended by noon with a decisive victory for the Russians.
With Germany proper now severed from East Prussia and its Baltic puppet states, the Russian Soviet Republic made preparations for the next stage of Operation Poniatowski. The Red Fleet was directed to extend its blockade of the Baltics down to the recently-captured Kolberg, which was quickly transformed into one of the Soviet Republic’s most pivotal naval bases. The time had come to starve the Baltics into submission, and surely enough, the collapse of Germany’s naval supply lines would slowly crush Estonia, Lithuania, and the United Baltic Duchy without any gun actually being fired into their territory. German naval forces still managed to occasionally break through the Russian blockade and distribute resources to holdouts in eastern Pomerania, however, the Soviet encirclement of the Baltics was tightened more and more every single day while General Frunze’s forces turned east following their victory at Kolberg to wipe out Germany’s remaining presence in the Baltic Sea.
All the while, the Red Napoleon directed Soviet aerial forces to begin a bombing campaign of Baltic territories, with aircraft deployed from both land and sea obliterating what remained of Germany’s prizes from the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Total war had effectively become routine in Europe by this point, so no one batted an eye when firebombing was deployed to obliterated Baltic cities. Konigsberg, which had been heavily fortified ever since the days of Kaiser Wilhelm I, was especially targeted by Soviet air campaigns. As a predominant target of Mikhail Frunze, Konigsberg was amongst the first major Baltic cities to fall into the hands of the Russian Soviet Republic, but this did not save it from the hellfire of the Soviet Air Force. Day and night, firebombing would decimate the last major concentration of German military forces in the Baltics. All the while, the Red Fleet cut off the substantial pocket of soldiers in East Prussia and General Frunze defeated units deployed in Pomerania. On February 14th, 1928, General Erich Ludendorff finally recognized that the forces defending East Prussia would soon be needed west of the Oder River, not to mention that the Soviet firebombing campaigns had made sure that there wasn’t much of an East Prussia to continue to defending anyway, and thus ordered an immediate withdrawal of German forces from the region.
German soldiers fleeing Konigsberg, circa February 1928.
Only two days later, Soviet soldiers arriving from Danzig reached the southern reaches of Konigsberg, therefore beginning the battle for the city. The evacuation of Konigsberg was far from complete at this point, and thousands of German soldiers were trapped in the city when Russian forces began to engage with the city's defenses. Demoralized and lacking sufficient supplies, there was no way that the forces of the Heilsreich would emerge victorious at the Battle of Konigsberg. As units were directed to fight in the southern reaches of the city, other units were evacuated to ships stationed in the Frisches Haff Bay. The Battle of Konigsberg was far from a cakewalk for the Red Army, however, the conflict was still won within the span of a day, and by the end of February 16th, the city was decisively in Soviet hands. The last great German holdout along the Baltic Sea had fallen.
While Mikhail Frunze led his campaign through Pomerania and East Prussia, other Soviet officers pushed into the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania, and the United Baltic Duchy. All three nations had been spared during the rest of Phase Two due to Operation Ascania miscalculating a rapid victory that would force the Central Powers to sue for peace before war would have to be waged in the Baltics. This immediate end to the Great War in 1923, of course, never came to be and the Russo-Baltic border had been transformed into a line of fortifications, obstacles, and weapon installations to ensure that the Germans wouldn’t dare to use their puppet states in northeastern as the launching point for an offensive into Russia. In 1928, the time had finally come to bring the Baltic states to their knees, an affair that would take only a few weeks due to bombing campaigns and the Red Fleet’s blockade already having devastated the fledgling puppet states.
The Kingdom of Lithuania was the first of the Baltic states to fall, as it was the only nation in the region to have lost substantial territory in the Great War at this point due to its southernmost reaches standing in the way of Russia’s push into Poland. Without any military aid from the German Heilsreich to keep it afloat following the Battle of Konigsberg, Lithuania went out with a whimper after years of combat against the Russian Soviet Republic. The Battle of Vilnius would result in a decisive victory for the Red Army on February 21st, 1928, thus bringing the Lithuanian capital city under the control of the Soviets. Despite Berlin demanding that Lithuania continue fighting in the Great War, King Friedrich Christian I called for a ceasefire two days after the fall of Vilnius and offered peace negotiations with the Russians on the condition that he and his family would be able to flee into exile. Premier Trotsky agreed to the defeated king’s offer, and on February 27th, 1928, the Treaty of Grodno was signed, which annexed Lithuania into the Russian Soviet Republic as the Lithuanian Autonomous Soviet Republic.
The Principality of Estonia was the next state to fall. A small coastal nation, the only thing that kept Estonia afloat for more than mere days was the collection of fortresses and obstacles constructed along the nation’s border with the Russian Soviet Republic to slow down any invasion. A year prior, and Russian offensive into Estonia would have likely been stalled long enough for the Germans to arrive, thus igniting yet another war of attrition between the two titans of eastern Europe. But the situation on the Eastern Front had, of course, now changed and Estonia was left to die a painful death. The capture of the nation’s capital of Tallinn on February 28th, 1928 marked the ultimate defeat of the Principality of Estonia, and the small monarchy completely fell under the military occupation of the Red Army.
The United Baltic Duchy was a far larger nation than Estonia and had not been forced to fight for years on its own homefront like Lithuania, and thus held out for the longest. Duke Adolf Friedrich of the UBD anxiously resided in Riga, knowing that he would soon be forced to flee into exile. By the time of the Battle of Tallinn, the bulk of the Duchy had already fallen into Soviet hands (the village of Rauna had been lost to the Red Army on the same day as Tallinn), and only the cities of the coastline remained in the hands of Adolf Friedrich. With the entirety of the RSR’s Baltic forces now concentrated on the UBD, it would take less than a week for the flag of the Soviet Republic to be hoisted over Riga, for the battle for the city already decimated by firebombing occurred on March 5th, 1928, and obviously ended with the Red Army finally defeating the United Baltic Duchy and forcing Duke Adolf Friedrich to run away into exile.
As the dust of the Baltic Offensive settled, Premier Leon Trotsky arrived in the ruined city of Jurmala to sign a peace treaty that would reorganize Estonia and the United Baltic Duchy into territories of the Russian Soviet Republic. Rather than become autonomous regions like Lithuania, however, Trotsk viewed decisive Soviet control over the coastal regions of the occupied countries to be vital for Russian naval interests in the Baltic Sea, thus meaning that the Treaty of Jurmala imposed direct rule from Moscow over the lands of Estonia and the UBD. In the aftermath of the Baltic Offensive, Trotsky would initiate a number of infrastructure development projects throughout the recently-annexed lands in order to not only rebuild the region from a brutal war but to turn the Baltics into a useful asset for the Soviet war effort. The reconstruction of destroyed harbors was prioritized, while new shipyards and factories sprouted up around these bases of Russian naval power. The Baltics had returned to Russia, and the Red Napoleon was keen on ensuring that his undoing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk would be well worth the effort.
On March 12th, 1928, General Joseph Stalin initiated the Battle of Frankfurt an der Oder, and had captured the segment of the city to the east of the Oder River by the end of the day. At long last, the Red Army had reached the banks of the Oder River and thus stood at the gateway into the heart of Germany. As ground forces clashed day after day for control over the entirety of Frankfurt, the Luftsreitkrafte and the Soviet Air Force endlessly fought in the sky above. As the battle continued, however, it became increasingly apparent that Stalin’s forces were poised to emerge victorious. The expeditionary forces of South Asia had long since arrived on the Eastern Front and the Third International army engaged at Frankfurt was therefore one of largest ever seen in the Great War up to that point. The Oder River served as a barrier to stall the Soviets, but sooner or later this barrier would be broken and General Stalin made his way into western Frankfurt on March 16th. Two days later, the German Heilsreich had been completely pushed out of Frankfurt an der Oder, and the Red Army stood poised to make its way to Berlin.
Two Red Army soldiers following the Battle of Frankfurt an der Oder, circa March 1928.
With the Red Army across the Oder River, Berlin was just a few kilometers away. Russian airplanes would break through German aerial defenses on March 20th, 1928 and drop the first bombs upon a city that would soon be drenched in bloodshed the likes of which had yet to be seen in the Great War. Three days later, Joseph Stalin would link up with Indian Expeditionary Force troops led by Jawaharlal Nehru at the Battle of Steinhofel, and as aerial combat over Berlin became more frequent, Alfred Hugenberg and Kaiser August Wilhelm I were evacuated to Hanover. The seemingly endless legions of German forces that Stalin and Nehru faced more and more of the closer and closer they got to Berlin were unprecedented in the Great War, however, Third International officers were already gathering in tents at night to develop their plan of attack on the German capital.
On March 25th, Erich Ludendorff was defeated at the Battle of Furstenwalde after two days of house-to-house combat. A day later, Ludendorff was forced to flee westwards yet again when he lost the Battle of Rauen. By this point, the streets of Berlin, many of which were already filled with the rubble of air raids, were eerily quiet and it was becoming increasingly apparent that the German government had no plan to evacuate the city’s civilians despite the looming battle. On March 28th, the Third International won the Battle of Spreenhagen and Premier Leon Trotsky arrived in Frankfurt an der Oder to closely monitor the coming conflict. On March 29th, General Jawaharlal Nehru emerged victorious at the Battle of Friedersdorf. Unbeknownst to the Third International, on the very same day reports were privately brought to Kaiser August Wilhelm’s attention that some members of the fuhrer’s cabinet were, at least according to rumors circulating amongst the DVP elite, discussing potential terms of surrender.
Finally, on March 31st, 1928, the time had come for the Battle of Berlin to truly begin. In accordance with the plans drafted by Joseph Stalin days prior, the bulk of the Red Army was to make a grand offensive towards Kopenick while Jawaharlal Nehru would lead the Indian Union’s expeditionary force to southern Berlin. From here, both Stalin and Nehru would launch a joint foudreguerre offensive into Berlin from the east and south, and if everything went according to plan, the Great War was anticipated to be over in a matter of weeks. The nightmare that had engulfed the world for the past fourteen years could finally come to an end, and the fascist terror would be condemned to the dustbin of history. Early into the morning of March 31st, Leon Trotsky gave General Joseph Stalin the go-ahead to engage with German forces defending Berlin after alerting allied governments in London, Lumiere, Calcutta and Saigon of the coming battle, and soon enough hundreds of tanks were unleashed to flank the German capital city from its eastern and southern borders.
By noon, Stalin had occupied Kopenick with relative ease as forces under the command of Erich Ludendorff retreated across the Dahme River. General Nehru managed to cross the Dahme around the same time but was bogged down by reinforcements led by Lieutenant General Friedrich Paulus at Eichwalde, where the All-Indian Liberation Army would hold out through the night. The first day of the Battle of Berlin came to an end with good results for the Third International. General Stalin had secured the foothold in eastern Berlin that he had desired, and while Nehru had yet to step foot into the city of Berlin itself, it had been anticipated that such an goal would take longer for the southern flank to achieve anyway. Nonetheless, the Heilsreich remained determined to win the battle for its capital city, and LK forces were directed to heavily bomb Third International positions stationed within and outside of Berlin. Just after the midnight of March 31st, the first of the firebombing campaigns on General Stalin’s forces began, and due to anti-aircraft guns being limited in Kopenick due to such equipment still being delivered from Spreenhagen, casualties were heavy. By the time the sun began to rise over Europe in the morning, reinforcements had arrived with more anti-aircraft weapons to deter the Luftsreitkrafte, but the damage had already been done. Nonetheless, Stalin simply had to lick his wounds and linger on.
German bomber flying above eastern Berlin, circa April 1st, 1928.
The next few days of the Battle of Berlin were mostly stagnant. Seeing that the conflict for the city would not end anytime soon, both sides scrambled to rush reinforcements into Berlin, with the Third International consolidating its control over its supply lines in eastern Germany while the Heilsreich transferred troops from other frontlines. Stalin continued to attempt to push across the Lange Brucke bridge to enter Grunau, however, Ludendorff eventually concluded that Kopenick wasn’t returning to German hands anytime soon, which made Lange Brucke a liability, and thus ordered the destruction of the bridge on April 2nd. Nehru seemed to be having better luck than Stalin throughout early April, and slowly but surely pushed Paulus out of Eichwalde. On April 7th, German forces had been completely uprooted from Eichwalde and General Nehru stepped foot into Berlin itself for the first time. Meanwhile, a joint army of AILA, FII, and Madras forces under the command of Indian General Ram Prasad Bismil initiated a westward push to the south of Berlin, with the intent of reaching Potsdam and cutting Berlin off from southern reinforcements.
The advances of Nehru from the south were slow, however, they did gradually diminish Ludendorff’s manpower fighting against both Nehru himself and Stalin. Nonetheless, German defenses showed no sign of crumbling anytime soon, and the Battle of Berlin soon became a war of attrition. Days turned into weeks, and gaining control over a mere street became a grand accomplishment. Urban terrain meant that the Third International could not conduct the foudreguerre tactics that had won it so much territory in such a short amount of time in order to win over Berlin, and close quarters combat left even the most feared tanks at the Red Army’s disposal vulnerable to infantry attacks.
The land surrounding Berlin, which had more open spaces and was also focused on less by German officers anyway, was a different story. General Bismil’s army covered swathes of land with relative ease on his way to Potsdam, conquering Dahlewitz on April 22nd, whereas the Battle of Berlin had more or less remained stagnant during the past few weeks. These campaigns to the south forced Erich Ludendorff to dilute soldiers to fight Bismil, thus reducing the total German military presence in Berlin and weakening the defenses of the city. This led Joseph Stalin to conclude that a similar offensive to the north of Berlin would make things easier for the campaigns of himself and Nehru, therefore resulting in the development of Operation Mehmed to accomplish just that. The officer put in command of the army that would conduct Operation Mehmed was none other than Mikhail Frunze, who had long since arrived at the Battle of Berlin following the success of his campaign in Pomerania and East Prussia.
On April 26th, Operation Mehmed would begin when General Frunze successfully invaded Woltersdorf, thus giving him a launching point for his conquest of the territory to the north of Berlin. Schoeneiche would be the next city to fall and landed into the hands of the Red Army on May 1st. Realizing that Stalin was attempting to pull off flanking his men from both the north and south, Erich Ludendorff ordered Hermann Erhardt to launch a counter-offensive against Frunze, something that clearly stalled Operation Mehmed. Nonetheless, Mikhail Frunze continuously made progress in the face of Erhardt, who was given substantially less men to command than he had hoped for due to Ludendorff directing the bulk of forces in the Battle of Berlin to continue fighting against Stalin and Nehru. On May 11th, Neuenhagen fell in the north while Stahnsdorf simultaneously fell in the south. The effects of Bismil’s southern offensive were already starting to be felt on German forces in Berlin, who were facing the arrival of less and less reinforcements and fresh supplies every single day.
Determined to cut off one of the two flanks of Berlin, General Ludendorff finally gave into Erhardt’s requests for more soldiers in the north and placed hundreds of men under his command with the hope that Operation Mehmed could be brought to a swift end. This decision proved to be a crucial mistake on Ludendorff’s part, for defenses against Joseph Stalin were diminished in order to attack Mikhail Frunze. On May 17th, Stalin’s forces exploited an opening in Ludendorff’s defenses left by a diminished troop presence and slowly made their way across the Dahme River. Reinforcements would arrive by the afternoon to stall the Soviet offensive, however, these reinforcements were taken from Friedrich Paulus’ defenses in southern Berlin, which meant that Nehru was soon able to make advances of his own, and soon enough, Ludendorff’s position directly to the west of Kopenick was being flanked from both the south and east. Fighting over the Dahme River would carry out over the night, but as the sun began to rise on the subsequent day, the first Russian boots were beginning to step foot into Grunau, and hours later, as the Red Army was securing its position to the west of the Dahme, they were accompanied by Nehru’s AILA arriving from the south. Erich Ludendorff was forced to order a retreat to Johannisthal as the flag of the Russian Soviet Republic was raised over the position he had held for almost two months.
Of course, this retreat by the Germans could not last forever, and by the end of May 18th, the war of attrition for Berlin had resumed. Nonetheless, had concluded that the Battle of Berlin was not going to be won by the Heilsreich anytime soon unless substantial reinforcements arrived and the German strategy was altered. On May 20th, Alfred Hugenberg, August Wilhelm, Benito Mussolini, Oskar Potiorek, and Ivan Valkov arrived in Venice to discuss the allocation of aid from Central Power member states to Germany in order to win the Battle of Berlin. Prime Minister Valkov, who was not fighting on any of Bulgaria’s borders ever since Greece had been defeated, committed the most manpower and resources to the Eastern Front, followed by Mussolini, who was still concerned with the war in southeastern France and had already deployed substantial Italian expeditionary forces in the war over the Balkans and Austria but nonetheless was not currently facing an invasion by either the Entente or Third International, not to mention that Mussolini recognized that Italy could not hold out for long if Germany were to fall and the entire arsenal of both the Entente and Third International alike was concentrated on Rome.
Oskar Potiorek, whose Kingdom of Illyria was currently facing an invasion by the Federation of Transleithanian Council Republics, was less willing to provide aid to the Heilsreich. Despite this, pressure from the leadership of the Central Powers made sure that Potiorek sent some equipment to the Battle of Berlin, however, Illyria was notably the only member of the Central Powers to not deploy soldiers in the Battle of Berlin. After the Venice Conference, it would take a few days for reinforcements from the Central Powers to arrive in Berlin, and in the meantime Erich Ludendorff simply had to ensure that the city would not begin to rapidly fall into the hands of Third International forces. Mikhail Frunze’s offensive against Hermann Erhardt began to move in favor of the Russians yet again during this time period, with Honower Siedlung falling on May 23rd. Ludendorff continued to request the allocation of more aircraft to the skies of Berlin, however, even this advantage managed to be deterred by the Third International, which had installed anti-aircraft guns all throughout occupied Berlin.
Red Army soldiers manning an anti-aircraft gun during the Battle of Berlin, circa May 1928.
Bismil’s southern campaign, which had previously been the most successful front of the Battle of Berlin, was a different story. In late May 1928, Brigadier General Erwin Rommel arrived from the Eastern Front to partake in the defense of Potsdam from the Indian Expeditionary Force. A man who admired the potential of armored infantry, General Rommel would seek to defend Potsdam by mounting a stand at Babelsberg, where LT tanks were to face off against the German Heilsreich’s most advanced tanks, the most notable of which was the A7V-U4, which was a medium tank that had built upon the technology of prior A7V-U models and captured British tanks. The Battle of Babelsberg would occur on May 26th at the outskirts of its namesake city, where the more open space was preferential for tank combat, and after hours of combat, General Ram Prasad Bismil was forced to retreat for the first time in the conquest of Berlin due to Rommel’s tank defenses (something the Germans were not known for and therefore something that the Third International was prepared to combat) repelling Bismil’s advance towards Potsdam.
An A7V-U4 model tank stationed outside of Babelsberg, circa May 1928.
Shortly after the Battle of Babelsberg, the first reinforcements from the Central Powers began to arrive in Berlin. The Italian and Bulgarian expeditionary forces were dispersed throughout all frontlines of the battle, however, the bulk were deployed to defend against Stalin and Nehru’s joint offensive. These reinforcements managed to stop the Third International’s westward offensive, however, for the time being, the tides of the Battle of Berlin had yet to turn in favor of the Central Powers and a war of attrition emerged at Baumschulenweg circa early June 1928. The continued influx of soldiers from Italy and Bulgaria would also manage to hold back Mikhail Frunze’s offensive in the north by bringing the clash between the Red Army and Heinrich Erhardt to a standstill at Ahrensfelde on June 12th. In the south, where Erwin Rommel already seemed to be gaining the upper hand following his victory at Babelsberg, the arrival of the Italians and Bulgarians proved to be decisive in actually regaining ground from the Third International. The banner of the Heilsreich was hoisted above Guterfelde on June 9th, and over Ruhlsdorf a little over a week later on June 18th.
Eventually, however, Rommel would also be bogged down at Kleinbeeren on June 25th, and throughout the subsequent July the Battle of Berlin was more or less a stalemate on all fronts. Troops from the Central Powers and Third International alike continuously flowed into the German capital city, which became infamous throughout the world for its brutal and relentless combat. One American journalist visiting Soviet-occupied Berlin in mid-July 1928 would declare that the city had become “the Graveyard of All Eurasia” and made note of the fact that the Battle of Berlin was already by far the single bloodiest engagement in the entirety of the Great War. Whatever residents of Berlin either hadn’t fled the city or hadn’t been killed in the crossfire between the great powers found their lifestyles annihilated by the bombs of war, just as the lifestyles of millions before them had been destroyed throughout the world over the last fourteen years. Even in the parts of Berlin many kilometers away from the frontlines of the Great War, entire blocks had been replaced with piles of rubble and bombing campaigns had become so consistent that most parts of the city had simply given up on sounding air raid sirens.
Simply put, whoever was to win the Battle of Berlin would inherit smoldering ruins.
In early August, an increasingly desperate General Erich Ludendorff met with Hermann Goring to draft up plans for an air raid that the two men hoped would turn the tides of the Battle of Berlin in favor of the Deutches Heilsreich. Determined to emerge victorious, Ludendorff proposed that the Luftsreitkrafte would deploy countless bombs containing mustard gas over parts of Berlin held by the Third International in order to literally choke enemy forces out of the city. Civilians would inevitably suffer in the process, however, such cruelty was nothing fascists such as Ludendorff and Goring were unfamiliar with. Therefore, on August 8th, Red Army and AILA forces in eastern Berlin fell victim to a slew of mustard gas bombs raining from above, and soon enough the air of Berlin was filled with a poisonous yellow-brown mist, leaving many Third International soldiers incapacitated as German soldiers bearing gas masks made their way into enemy-occupied territory. In the fog of toxins, General Ludendorff retook Johannisthal, however, by this point the Third International’s forces had distributed gas masks throughout its ranks and the German Imperial Army was stopped between Johannisthal and Aldershof by the end of the day.
German “poisonbombing” continued well past August 8th and soon became a mainstay of the Battle of Berlin. It also opened Pandora’s Box by giving the Third International reason to utilize its own chemical weapons upon German positions, with both the Red Army and Soviet Air Force being directed by Joseph Stalin to launch mustard gas at the enemy. By the end of August 1928, the Athens of the Spree had become a city of poison. Civilians cowered in basements as the war above turned the air that swept through their homes into a lethal toxin while the boldest personalities of the Great War clashed on the surface, their faces hidden behind the ghastly gas masks that had been synonymous with the War to End All Wars for years.
In the nightmare that was the Battle of Berlin there was, however, a sliver of hope, at least amongst those fighting for the Third International. There was hope that, after all this time, all of this sacrifice, all of this bloodshed, all of this horror, the man-made hell would finally cease. There was hope that it would take only one last push for the Deutsches Heilsreich to surrender and for the Great War to come to an end. While those supportive of the Central Powers and the Entente hoped that the conflict would continue so that a decisive victory for their faction could emerge, the rest of the world, regardless of its allegiance to the ideals of socialism, was exhausted of the last fourteen years of endless industrialized warfare and simply wanted the endless barrage of suffering to end. Humanity was scarred by what was already the bloodiest war in its history, and while it would take decades to heal these wounds, a victory for the Third International was the key to a recovery within the coming years.
The question, therefore, was if the Heilsreich could snatch this key away.
Invading the Silent Continent
“The Great War Comes to Africa”
-New York Times headline, circa October 1928.
Warships of the French Fourth Republic during an engagement with Communard naval forces on the Mediterranean Sea, circa August 1928.
As the Russian Soviet Republic concentrated its war effort on the Battle of Berlin, the French Commune and its allies in western Europe remained engaged in a war that spanned multiple frontlines. To the east, the Central Powers fought on in the trenches as a coalition of the Third International forces poured into the Rhineland while airplanes bearing revolutionary symbols bombed Italian positions in southeastern France. To the south and west, the British, French, and Irish all faced the threat of the work over the past few years of breaking the chains of capitalism being undone via a naval invasion by the Entente. The House of Windsor continued to keenly watch the affairs of the Atlantic Front from Ottawa while the French Fourth Republic continued to hold the colonial empire constructed over the past century together, all under the jackboot of Ferdinand Foch.
At the center of all of these wars tied together by alliances and common enemies was the French Commune. Perhaps no nation was more scarred by the Great War than France, which had been engulfed in the flames of combat since the very beginning. Such gruesome and constant warfare had certainly taken its toll on France, with approximately 12.9% of the French population having perished in the Great War by the start of 1928. Combined with soldiers and civilians that had evacuated for the French Fourth Republic during the Communard victory in the nation’s civil war, metropolitan France’s population plummeted from 39.6 million in 1914 to 33 million in 1928. Out of France’s remaining population, only 8 million people were qualified for conscription by the time of the Battle of Berlin, and the majority were already fighting on behalf of the LGPF. Nonetheless, by little more than sheer luck, metropolitan France had evaded conquest by the Germans over the past fourteen years despite coming very close to the Kaiser’s men parading through Paris (and later Lumiere) on multiple occasions. Under the rule of the Commune, a combination of expanding conscription eligibility, banning emigration, the mechanization of infantry, and the deployment of forces from other Third International member states onto the Western Front, the French war machine just barely kept on churning.
As the first Russian bombs began to fall on Berlin, the main focus of the French Commune was the continued offensive into the Rhineland. The Burning of the Rhine had been a devastating blow for the Third International, but the tables of the Western Front were far from having been turned back in favor of the Central Powers. General Commander Boris Sourvarine simply continued his northward push, albeit at a much slower and more cautious pace as anti-aircraft guns were shipped en masse to the Rhineland while Albert Inkpin ordered the Workers’ Democratic Air Force to dramatically increase its presence on the European continent. Once the Battle of Berlin was in full swing, German defenses on the Western Front were weakened by their own government’s redistribution of manpower and equipment to the east, with the simple fact of the matter being that the defense of Berlin was far more tactically significant than the defense of the Rhineland.
Therefore, Third International soldiers on the ground slowly scaled along the Rhine River as their comrades clashed with German bombers in the sky. After Cologne fell on February 27th, 1928, the Third International pushed towards Grevenbroich, which was captured by the French on March 24th, thus making it the last German city to be conquered on the Western Front prior to the start of the Battle of Berlin. As the forces of Stalin and Nehru consumed the Heilsreich’s attention, officers in the west took advantage of the noticeable decline in German forces fighting for the Rhineland. The German presence in the west was large enough throughout April 1928 to keep the French, British, and Irish offensive at bay (bombing runs continued to exert a heavy toll on the Third International’s supply lines), however, there was nonetheless an accelerated fluidity in the frontlines of the Western Front in favor of the Third International during the first month of the Battle of Berlin. It should also be noted that the Indian Union and Madras both dispatched expeditionary forces on the Western Front circa mid-April 1928, which was crucial for adding new manpower in the west, not to mention that the arrival of said manpower resulted in a much-needed morale boost amongst the embittered British and French veterans of the Great War.
The Battle of Grevenbroich on April 17th resulted in a decisive French victory, leaving only the northernmost reaches of the Rhineland to be captured. Less than two weeks later, Mikahil Frunze’s offensive into the area north of Berlin was in full swing and Erich Ludendorff scrambled to reorganize German troop concentration, both amongst the forces already fighting in Berlin and on all frontlines of the Great War. Regiments fighting on the Western Front were called out east, which paved the way to a relatively quick Third International victory at the Battle of Viersen on May 7th. Eleven days later, Joseph Stalin stepped foot on the western banks of the Dahme River and Ludendorff reallocated the German presence on the Western Front to Berlin yet again. By this point, the once-fearsome German war machine that had terrorized western Europe for over a decade was on its last legs, and even the Burning of the Rhine had ceased in favor of a much more limited aerial bombing campaign in order to ensure that there were enough airplanes to wage constant total war over Berlin.
It was, therefore, not a surprise when the Rhenish Offensive concluded in early June 1928 with a decisive victory for the Third International. With only the northernmost reaches of the Rhineland left untouched by General Souvarine’s campaign following the Battle of Viersen, a foudreguerre offensive led by Armure Is would make quick work of what remained of Walther von Brauchitsch’s defenses of the region. The half of Dusseldorf to the west of the Rhine fell on May 20th, followed by the fall of Krefeld on May 24th, the fall of Moers on May 26th, and the fall of Xanten on June 2nd. The German Army made its final stand of the Rhenish Offensive at the Battle of Kalkar, which began on June 7th as LGPF tanks attacked the outskirts of the city. After three days of combat, the Germans were ultimately uprooted from the city and General Brauchitsch subsequently ordered a retreat of remaining German forces from the Rhineland in order to set up defenses on the eastern shoreline of the Rhine River.
The Third International’s decisive victory in the Rhenish Offensive was a shocking blow to the Heilsreich, however, for the time being, the forces of the revolution in the west would fail to progress any further east. Recognizing that the high command of the German government simply did not view the Western Front as their top priority while the Battle of Berlin was ongoing, Walther von Brauchitsch decided that his strategy could not depend on an influx of reinforcements going forward and instead opted to rapidly set up a collection of makeshift obstacles and fortifications along the Rhine in an attempt to deter any potential eastward offensive by the French Commune and her allies. This array of defenses was designed with the intent of preventing a foudreguerre offensive into central Germany, hence why obstacles intended to make tank movement extremely difficult and anti-tank guns were amongst the first installations put in place by General Brauchitsch. By the beginning of July 1928, what became known as the Brauchitsch Line had already proven its capability of stalling further Third International incursions into Germany, and as the Russians struggled to make their way through the ruins of Berlin in the east, the French found themselves stuck in yet another war of attrition in the west.
As the summer of 1928 dragged by, the Brauchitsch Line became more and more secure, thus resulting in a more or less completely stagnant Western Front for several months. The belligerent forces continued to deploy manpower and equipment along both sides of the Rhine, but the fact of the matter is that no progress was being made. But to the south of the Rhineland and the European mainland itself, General Commander Boris Souvarine was in reach of grasping another prize, one that was arguably even more valuable than the defeat of Germany, at least in the eyes of the French Commune. It was upon the waters of the western Mediterranean Sea where this prize began to appear on the horizon, for it was here that the navy of the French Fourth Republic was beginning to lose to its growing Communard counterpart. By the beginning of 1928, the French Navy was already clearly overshadowed by the socialist Navy of the French Proletariat (MPF). By the fall of the same year, the increasingly exposed Algerian was rife with vulnerabilities that could be exploited in the name of the Second French Revolution.
The time had finally come for the civil war that had engulfed the French people for over seven years to reach its end.
Still present on the Western Front for the time being, Souvarine began drafting plans for a naval operation to land in North Africa in late August 1928, eventually producing what would become known as Operation Delescluze. Under this plan, Algerian ports would be bombed by air raids in order to weaken Republican defenses prior to twin amphibious landings at Bougie in the east and Cherchell in the west, which would surround the Republican capital of Algiers. From that point, the LGPF was to conduct a campaign that would gradually bring the entirety of the French North African coastline under the control of the Communards and force the Fourth Republic to flee into the Sahara Desert, presumably never to see the waters of the Mediterranean ever again. After spending the latter half of September 1928 amassing naval and aerial forces for the French Commune to utilize in the coming conflict (many of which were forces from South Asia), General Commander Souvarine gave the go ahead to his subordinates to begin Operation Delescluze.
The campaign for North Africa began on October 9th, 1928 when a deluge of bombs rained down upon Algerian cities and naval defenses. A lack of domestic industry developed within France’s colonies had ultimately come back to haunt the imperialist rulers of the French Fourth Republic when their defenses of the Algerian coastline primarily consisted of weapons either evacuated from Europe years prior or exported from allies in the Entente, especially Brazil. Given its strategic importance, Field Marshal Philippe Petain concentrated French ground troops in Algiers with the expectation that the amphibious offensive that would follow the French Commune’s air raids would surely target the aforementioned city. Of course, Petain’s prediction proved to be wrong, and on October 13th LGPF forces simultaneously landed in both Bougie and Chernell, experiencing relatively little resistance due to Petain’s focus on Algiers. By the end of the day, Operation Delescluze had achieved the securing of two Communard beachheads in North Africa and Boris Souvarine stepped foot in Chernell, determined to end the civil war that he had presided over since it had begun all those years ago.
The tides of revolution had washed upon the shore of Africa.
LGPF soldiers landing in North Africa during the Battle of Bougie, circa October 1928.
Despite the best attempts of Philippe Petain to hold back the oncoming Communard onslaught, it was now only a matter of time until the LGPF would be marching through Algiers. The fact of the matter is that the Republicans were outnumbered, outgunned, and unprepared to fight one of the most mechanized armed forces in the Great War on their home turf. The arrival of Armure I model tanks on the North African Front occurred almost immediately after the landings at Chernell and Bougie, which meant that the French Commune would be able to employ foudreguerre, a tactic that the Fourth Republic had no experience with nor equipment to effectively counter against. It therefore goes without saying that the remainder of Operation Delescluze was a quick and decisive victory for the LGPF. Tipaza fell on October 16th, Azeffoun fell on October 18th, and Dellys fell on October 19th.
All the while, the Kingdom of Italy, which was engaged in combat against both the French Commune and the French Fourth Republic, launched an offensive into French Tunisia, which became increasingly poorly defended during Operation Delescluze. Italian soldiers would scale towards Tunis from colonial holdings in Libya while the Regia Marina would shell the Tunisian coastline from the sea. On October 21st, Italian forces secured a beach head at Kelibia and subsequently made an eastward push towards Tunis, and entered the outskirts of the city on October 26th. After no more than two days of fighting, the Battle of Tunis ended in a victory for the Kingdom of Italy and the government of the French protectorate had surrendered to the forces of Benito Mussolini. The Treaty of Bizerte was ratified four days later, and in an act of purely nationalistic fervor that was intended to harken back to the ancient days of Rome conquering Carthage, the French protectorate of Tunisia was annexed directly into the Kingdom of Italy, being afforded not even the limited degree of autonomy conceded to colonial regimes in Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia.
On October 20th, 1928 the Battle of Algiers would begin as General Commander Boris Souvarine started to siege the capital city from the west and the increasingly frail President Ferdinand Foch was evacuated to Dakar in anticipation of Petain’s inevitable defeat. Petain and his men put up a vicious fight, however, the fact of the matter was that the Republicans were in an unwinnable situation. By noontime on October 21st, Souvarine’s forces in the west had reached Baba Hassen while LGPF forces pushing from Bougie began their assault on Algiers from the east. A little over twenty-four hours later, Communard forces in both the east and west met up in the heart of Algiers, thus forcing Philippe Petain to the southern reaches of the city. Recognizing that he had lost the Battle of Algiers, Field Marshal Petain ordered a general retreat of the French Army from the battlefields of northern Algeria and fled into the Sahara Desert.
Operation Delescluze had succeeded, Boris Souvarine had won yet another decisive victory for the French Commune, and the former capital of the French Fourth Republic had finally been painted red. In order to celebrate this momentous victory for the Communard cause, the Central Revolutionary Congress went as far as to rename Algiers to Hilmi, in honor of the Turkish socialist journalist Huseyin Hilmi, in early November 1928. Of course, the North African Front was not over. The French Commune rapidly developed a line of defenses in eastern Algeria to deter any Italian offensive launched from Tunisia, however, this particular frontline was not a priority for either Lumiere or Rome. Boris Souvarine instead peered into the Sahara Desert, determined to make his way across the vast ocean of sand and finally vanquish the French Fourth Republic. Given that there were very few major settlements within the Sahara, the focus of the North African Front now shifted to securing control of regional supply lines.
Republican regiments therefore were scattered at points of importance throughout the seemingly endless sand dunes while Communard tanks were sent into the heart of the largest desert on Earth with the intent to hunt down these aforementioned regiments. Among the tanks deployed by the French Commune were the recently-developed Armure IIs, the successor to the less powerful but nonetheless prominent Armure I model tank, which had been a staple of French foudreguerre tactics for years. The Saharan Offensive was the first engagement that Armure IIs were deployed in, and they soon proved to be the deadliest light tank in the Communard arsenal, and the Sahara Desert proved to be an ideal location to wage foudreguerre due to its empty terrain making armored infantry incredibly effective. By the end of November 1928, El Golea had fallen into Communard hands. On January 4th, 1929, the new year was ushered in with Boris Souvarine emerging victorious at the Battle of In Salah, which put the French Commune in control of an oasis town vital to trans-Saharan commerce.
An LGPF convoy outside of In Salah, circa January 1929.
At this point, one would think that things couldn’t possibly get any worse for the French Fourth Republic. Petain’s forces were losing decisively in the Sahara, the bulk of Algeria had already fallen in a matter of months, and the Republicans had no hope of amassing either the manpower or equipment necessary to turn the tides. But, as the Great War had already proven time and time again, things can always get worse. Just beneath the surface of the Fourth Republic, internal instability was building up after over a decade of dormancy with regards to local revolts thanks to the Treaty of Bloemfontein. Now that French colonies were the frontline of the war between the Communards and the Republicans, Bloemfontein had effectively become null and void and as colonial governments diverted their attention to the North African Front, the tension between natives and imperialist regimes was about to reach a boiling point.
The African Spring was about to begin.
Springtime
“If there is one thing to be learned from the Great War, it is that no empire is immortal.”
-Winston Churchill, circa 1930.
African soldiers of the French Army, circa 1928.
The Great War killed the old empires of Europe. The exiled French and British imperialist regimes fought on throughout all of Phase Two, but in hindsight, the opportunity to restore the Victorian world order was lost when the flames of revolution engulfed Paris and London. The fact of the matter was that European colonialism had always been a tenuous house of cards whose foundation was dependent on the consistently effective suppression of local revolts. The Treaty of Bloemfontein, which had secured the neutrality for African colonies during the great War, had kept this foundation stable for a few years by allowing for colonial governments to concentrate their efforts on maintaining their grip on power, however, this foundation was shaken when the House of Windsor and French Republic were both forced into exile, with the latter ultimately setting up its base of operations in Africa. The Fourth Republic nonetheless maintained the Treaty of Bloemfontein (it should, however, be noted that said treaty still allowed for resources produced in African colonies to be used in the war effort), but as the French Commune gradually approached the coastline of North Africa, it was only a matter of time until previously neutral colonial possessions became a frontline of the Great War and the treaty that had narrowly guaranteed the survival of empires for so long would fail.
The foundation of France’s once-mighty colonial empire would finally be destroyed when, under blatant pressure from President Ferdinand Foch, the governments of French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa signed the Treaty of Dakar on March 6th, 1929, which stated that the two colonial federations would declare war on the French Commune and commit to conscripting men to fight on the North Afircan Front, including indigenous men. While Foch’s hope was that the additional manpower would allow for a quick retaliation against Boris Souvarine in the Sahara Desert, thus resulting in a Republican reconquest of Algeria or, at the very least, forcing the Communards to sue for a peace agreement that was favorable to the Fourth Republic, the ultimate consequence of the Treaty of Dakar would be the beginning of the end for the Entente war effort. This brings us to Kaocen Ag Geda, a Tuareg chief who resided in the northern reaches of the West African colony of Niger and was a member of the Senussi, a militant anti-colonial Muslim religious order that had fought against European incursions into the Sahara Desert for almost a century. Kaocen had participated in attacks on French forces since 1909, however, these clashes never escalated into a full-out revolt and the Treaty of Bloemfontein had made sure that French West Africa had enough manpower at its disposal to keep Kaocen down throughout the Great War.
The Treaty of Dakar finally presented Kaocen with the opportunity to wage the war of independence he had been striving for over the last twenty years. With many indigenous Africans more angry at their French rulers than ever before due to the introduction of conscription as well as a shift in French West Africa’s attention away from colonial revolts and towards the North African Front, the time for a Tuareg revolution had arrived. Therefore, on March 15th, 1929, Kaocen Ag Geda declared a jihad against the French Fourth Republic and led his forces in the conquest of Ingall, thus starting the Tuareg War of Independence. Just a day later, the Sultan of Agadez announced his support for Kaocen’s jihad, and soon the entirety of the Air Mountains were engulfed in guerrilla warfare between local Republican garrisons and Tuareg freedom fighters. The Fourth Republic anticipated that Kaocen could be quickly defeated, however, locals soon grew to overwhelmingly support the jihadists and the entirety of the Air Mountains were decisively under Kaocen’s control by the end of March 1929. Within the span of a few weeks, an empire that had endured for centuries began to unravel, and as news of the Tuareg War of Independence spread throughout French holdings in Africa and beyond, many indigenous groups became determined to follow the Tuareg example.
Kaocen Ag Geda had, therefore, not just sparked a war secluded to northern Niger but had instead ignited the fires of revolution throughout all of Africa. From Morocco to the Congo, millions of Africans decided to break the chains of colonialism that had shackled their homeland and set about forging independent nations while the exiled European regimes remained distracted by the Great War. On April 1st, 1929, the exiled Moroccan nationalist Abd el-Krim, who had led a rebellion against Spanish rule in northern Morocco in the early 1920s, published the “Manifesto for the Independence of Morocco,” which demanded that the Moroccan people stand in solidarity with the Tuaregs and declare their independence from French colonial rule. Despite its attempted censorship by French authorities, the Manifesto quickly proliferated and nationalist protests throughout Morocco became rampant in the aftermath.
Surely enough, the young Sultan Mohammed V of Morocco, who both sympathized with the sentiments for independence and also feared that continued loyalty to the French Fourth Republic would lead to his country’s invasion by the Communards, declared the end of the Sultanate of Morocco’s status as a French protectorate on April 14th, 1929. While Ferdinand Foch refused to recognize Moroccan independence, Philippe Petain, who had no interest in wasting manpower in a war against Morocco, ordered the withdrawal of the French Army from the country two days after the Mohammed V’s declaration of independence, which in effect meant that Morocco was the first nation to achieve its freedom in the African Spring. A day after Petain’s withdrawal, Abd el-Krim returned to his homeland and was greeted by a large crowd of supporters in Fez, and on the same day the Third International issued a declaration recognizing the independence of the Sultanate of Morocco as an independent state.
Sultan Mohammed V of the Sultanate of Morocco.
Back in Niger, the Tuareg War of Independence continued to go well for the jihadists, whose forces united into the Tuareg National Army (TNA) on April 5th as a coherent military force under the direct command of Kaocen Ag Geda. From the Air Mountains, the TNA launched an eastward campaign towards the town of Dirkou, however, by this point further expansion was little more than for the sake of legitimizing the TNA’s reign over the Sahara Desert. This eastern territory was far less populated and important than the Air Mountains, and the bulk of Tuareg confederations and local government had declared their support for Kaocen’s jihad by early April 1929. The French Army had long since recognized the TNA as a force that could be ignored, but by this point it was too late. The fact of the matter was that northern Niger was now the domain of Kaocen Ag Geda and Petain’s forces had little hope of reclaiming this territory.
More importantly in the context of the Great War, the Tuareg War of Independence had divided Republican attention between the TNA and LGPF, which in turn left General Commander Souvarine with less troops to face down. The already fluid North African Front thus accelerated as Armure II tanks pushed into the Hoggar Mountains, with the Communard victory at the Battle of Tamanrasset on April 12th, 1929 marking the fall of the mountain range under total occupation by the French Commune. The conquest of the Hoggar Mountains gave the Commune direct access to the TNA-held territory in Niger, and Souvarine, who had become intrigued with the concept of breaking the French Fourth Republic from within, subsequently decided to deliver guns, ammunition, and even a handful of tanks to Kaocen’s army. To make circumstances even better for the TNA, Senussi followers in Italian Libya made their way across the border into Niger to fight alongside their brethren as volunteer forces and Mussolini’s Kingdom of Italy, which was far from a supporter of the Senussi but nonetheless wanted to see the Republicans be defeated, simply turned a blind eye to the influx of Libyan volunteer regiments.
Just when things seemingly couldn’t get any worse for the French Fourth Republic, the time had come for man who had led the Republicans since December 1923 to die. On the night of April 19th, 1929, President Ferdinand Foch peacefully passed away in his sleep. Having never ended his dictatorial rule over the French Republic, Foch left a controversial legacy behind him, even amongst supporters of the cause of the Entente. To some, Foch was a dedicated patriot who had saved what remained of French liberalism from annihilation at the hands of the Commune. To others, he was a tyrant who had in fact butchered liberal democracy and had been a woefully incompetent leader in both the armed forces and in politics. Ferdinand Foch was, however, one of the most influential figures in the entire Great War and, regardless of one’s opinion on him, it was apparent that big shoes would have to be filled in his absence.
According to the 1924 constitution of the French Fourth Republic, the position of the presidency was to be assumed by the vice president of France (a position resurrected from the days of the French Second Republic) should the incumbent president die. Given that Ferdinand Foch had suspended the constitution back in 1924 for a ten year-long period, the line of succession at this point was somewhat dubious, however, Foch had never explicitly stated his desire for an alternative successor, therefore meaning that the constitutional line of succession stayed in place and Vice President Albert Lebrun assumed the presidency of the French Fourth Republic. A career politician whose tenure in the French legislature went back well before the outbreak of the Great War, Lebrun had been selected as Foch’s vice president due to his history of working in the French civilian government and ability to take on more bureaucratic functions of the executive branch that Ferdinand Foch was not equipped to take on himself. In other words, Albert Lebrun had been intended less as a replacement for Foch and more as a politician who could navigate the responsibilities of the presidency that the military officer Foch lacked the experience to do himself.
While Albert Lebrun had served as the Minister of the Colonies and therefore was seemingly fit for the job of managing a government exiled to those very colonies, why Lebrun had been chosen as the vice president was no secret amongst the governing elite of the French Fourth Republic, and many believed that the circumstances the Republic found itself in demanded rule by a military man like Foch. There wasn’t really any debate over who this alternative president would be; Field Marshal Philippe Petain had been fighting in the Great War since the very beginning, followed and understood the affairs of the North African Front and Tuareg War of Independence better than any politician in Dakar, and was arguably the most highly respected figure in the entirety of the Fourth Republic. Once Petain publicly endorsed the proposal of him assuming the presidency, it was therefore only a matter of time until Albert Lebrun sat down at the negotiation table to surrender the presidency. Thus, after Lebrun agreed to resign under the condition that he would become the vice president yet again, Philippe Petain was inaugurated as the president of the French Fourth Republic in Dakar on May 3rd, 1929.
President Philippe Petain of the French Fourth Republic.
As his first act as president, Petain reinstated himself as field marshal of the French Army, thus meaning he simultaneously reigned over the government and armed forces of the Fourth Republic. While many were certain that Philippe Petain, the man who had led the Republican war effort against the French Commune for years, could save the Fourth Republic from the jaws of defeat, the opposite proved to be true. Petain personally held notably reactionary views and believed that a militant, autocratic, and centralized regime was necessary if the Republicans were to even come close to undoing their continued losses at the hands of the LPGF. This led the new president to decree the National Unification Act on May 10th, 1929, which placed all French colonies under the control of the exiled metropolitan government, dissolved all internal colonial administrations, and effectively instituted a policy of direct rule from Dakar.
The National Unification Act was a slap in the face for many, including politicians who had hoped that the death of Ferdinand Foch meant that the restoration of the liberal democratic constitution of the Fourth Republic was in sight. Among these politicians was Governor Felix Eboue of the Ubangi-Shari, an internal colony of French Equatorial Africa. The grandson of slaves, Eboue, who had served as the governor of Ubangi-Shari since his appointment to the position in 1923, was a unique figure in the government of the French Fourth Republic. Eboue had spent much of his gubernatorial career pushing for a reduction in the exploitation of colonial residents through a number of programs, including support for traditional African leaders and cultural practices, the improvement of working conditions, the provision of admittedly limited welfare, and pushes towards Ubangi-Shari being democratized and given representation in the government of the French Republic.
Of course, Ferdinand Foch’s suspension of the constitution of the French Fourth Republic directly contradicted Felix Eboue’s goals, but the governor nonetheless continued his work of reform wherever he could while Foch and his lackeys focused their attention on combating the French Commune. After the death of Ferdinand Foch in 1929, Governor Eboue pushed for the end of the constitutional suspension and argued that the time had come for liberal democracy to be extended to all who were ruled over by the Fourth Republic, but this was obviously not a goal shared with President Philippe Petain. The passage of the National Unification Act not only put Eboue out of a job, but dissolved the colonial government of Ubangi-Shari as a whole, and by extension dissolved the numerous programs implemented by Eboue’s governorship. Infuriated by what he viewed as a violation of the rights of the people of Ubangi-Shari, Felix Eboue refused to recognize the dissolution of the colony and continued to reign as its de facto governor, a rule that was recognized and therefore legitimized by local leadership that Eboue had spent much of his career cultivating positive relationships with.
Petain would not tolerate Eboue’s act of rebellion and dispatched a brigade of the French Army to arrest the governor and place the Ubangi-Shari capital of Bangui under Dakar’s jackboot, however, this proved to be a critical mistake. Local regiments supportive of Felix Eboue would engage with Petain’s dispatch at N’Dele on May 17th, thus blocking the brigade from progressing any further south. Once news of the Battle of N’Dele arrived in Bangui, Eboue became convinced that the protection of the rights of Ubangi-Shari was only possible through the colony’s independence as a sovereign republic. Therefore, as makeshift militias and defected soldiers clashed with the forces of the French Fourth Republic, Governor Eboue hastily assembled a conference of both indigenous and loyal colonial leaders to write the Declaration of Independence of the Ubangi-Shari Republic, a document that essentially reiterated the Declaration of the Rights of Man, argued that the rights of the Ubangi-Shari people were being violated, and that the only solution was the immediate secession of the colonial government. Thus, with the declaration’s ratification on May 21st, 1929, the Ubangi-Shari Republic was born, with Felix Eboue being recognized as the president of the fledgling state’s provisional government.
President Felix Eboue of the Ubangi-Shari Republic.
While Eboue anticipated that he would have to fight a war of independence against the French Fourth Republic in a similar vein to the TNA and thus quickly formed the National Revolutionary Army (NRA), no such engagement would ever really arrive. The brigade that Philippe Petain had initially sent was decisively defeated at the Battle of Fort Archambault on May 30th, 1929, but more importantly, the Ubangi-Shari declaration of independence sent shockwaves throughout what had once been French Equatorial Africa. To the north of Ubangi-Shari, the streets of Fort Lamy erupted into protest in late May 1929 as the local Sara people demanded their freedom from French rule. Inhabitants of the southern reaches of the colony of Chad prior to the National Unification Act, the Sara had developed a common national identity ironically due to common treatment and oppression by France, and Eboue’s declaration of independence had encouraged locals to similarly rise up and demand their own free republic.
The Sara protests soon extended out beyond Fort Lamy and consumed much of southern Chad, with just about all major cities in the region eventually having constant rallies for liberation. The Sara independence movement proved to be essential in preventing the French Army from continuing its war against Ubangi-Shari due to many protesters opting to stand in solidarity with Felix Eboue’s fledgling republic via blockading roadways used by military forces and sabotaging local army installations. These confrontations with the Republican armed forces caused local forces loyal to Dakar to engage with protesters, thus turning many of the Sara protests into clashes between French Army troops and local freedom fighters, but the expressed solidarity towards the Ubangi-Shari Republic caused Felix Eboue, who was already supportive of the formation of liberal democratic regimes throughout all of French Equatorial Africa, to deploy the NRA into Chad with the intent of forming an independent Sara state. With the French overwhelmed by local opposition and increasingly cut off from supply lines into Chad due to the surrounding rebellions, the NRA faced very little resistance to its campaign, and once the Ubangi-Shari occupation of southern Chad was consolidated, Felix Eboue formed the Republic of Tchad out of the aforementioned occupied territory on June 9th, 1929.
To the south of Tchad and Ubangi-Shari, the African Spring spread to the French Congo, where the young socialist Jacques Opangault organized pro-independence protests akin to those of the Sara throughout May 1929. Unlike Ubangi-Chari and Chad, however, there was a local ruler in the Congo who stood opposed to this growing independence movement and, importantly, was popular amongst locals. This ruler was Queen Ngalifourou of the Mbe Kingdom, a political and spiritual leader who had collaborated with the French for decades, going back as far as the establishment of French colonial rule over the Middle Congo in 1880. In order to maintain her rule and good relations with the French imperialists, Ngalifourou mobilized local military forces to confront Opangault’s ceaseless protests in Brazzaville, however, the arrival of armed forces escalated into increased tensions between protesters and supporters of the colonial regime until a deployment of soldiers fired upon marching protesters on June 2nd, 1929. Within minutes, Brazzaville descended into disorganized violence as both sides clashed with each other in the streets.
By the end of the day, the French Army and paramilitaries loyal to Ngalifourou had quellled the Brazzaville Riots and had arrested a number of pro-independence sympathizers, however, Jacques Opangault had managed to evade capture, subsequently fleeing up north to Fort Rousset. It was here that Opangault quickly published a manifesto on June 7th, 1929 urging his supporters to rise up in armed resistance against the French Fourth Republic and her cronies in order to establish an independent Congolese state. Surely enough, much of the French Congo was consumed in the fires of an armed rebellion no more than a week after the publication of Opangault’s manifesto, with Fort Rousset serving as the de facto headquarters of this uprising. Knowing that Dakar was already overwhelmed with a number of military engagements to her north, Ngalifourou oversaw the formation of the Congolese Protection Army (CPA) on June 10th as a volunteer militia intended to combat Jacques Opangault’s followers, who organized into the African People’s Liberation Army (APLA) four days later.
As the French Congo descended into what was effectively a civil war between Ngalifourou and Opangault, the neighboring powers struggled to provide aid to their preferred sides. The French Fourth Republic continued to face problems regarding overextension, which meant that deploying forces on behalf of the CPA was barely even a priority, whereas the pro-APLA Ubangi-Shari was landlocked from providing aid to its allies due to the German Government-in-Exile standing in the way with control over the Neukamerun territory. Speaking of which, the Middle Congolese Civil War served as an opportunity for the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II to seize additional French territory that bordered the Congo River, with this swath of land surrounded by Neukamerun being annexed in mid-June 1929 with very little resistance. Nonetheless, both Dakar and Bangui managed to deploy some resources to their preferred factions in the Middle Congolese Civil War, which gradually became a messy guerrilla war where the CPA was uprooted from the APLA-dominant territory in the north.
Congolese Protection Army soldiers fighting in the Middle Congolese Civil War, circa July 1929.
Of course, during the entirety of the beginning of the African Spring, the French Fourth Republic was still fighting a war against the French Commune and losing. As the Republican grip over its colonies disintegrated and forces fighting on the North African Front were dispatched elsewhere, General Commander Boris Souvarine rushed through the Sahara Desert. All of French Algeria was under the control of the Communards by the conclusion of April 1929, and from here Souvarine pursued an offensive into French Sudan with the intent of reaching the Niger River. For all intents and purposes, Operation Delescluze had succeeded spectacularly by this point, and with the Republican control over its colonial subjects crumbling each and every single day, the final defeat of the French Fourth Republic seemed to be little more than a cakewalk to Timbuktu.
From southern Algeria, Souvarine led the LGPF towards the town of Kidal, which fell to the onslaught of Communard tanks on May 7th, 1929 and subsequently served as a base of operations for continued incursions into French West Africa. The ascendancy of Philippe Petain to the presidency of the French Fourth Republic soon resulted in an uptick in Republican conscription to fight on the North African Front, which did slow down the LGPF’s offensive out of the Sahara Desert, however, as the African Spring spread to French Equatorial Africa, large-scale conscription became increasingly unenforceable while the French Army found itself increasingly overextended between combating both the Communards and internal rebellions. Meanwhile, the TNA, which had managed to seize control of the entirety of northern Niger by mid-May 1929, pushed into northern Chad, thus laying the groundwork for a unified state in the eastern Sahara.
Surely enough, after the TNA emerged victorious at the Battle of Fada on June 11th, all Equatorial African territory to the north of the Republic of Tchad was under the de facto control of Kaocen Ag Geda. Following this victory, Kaocen returned to Agadez, where he convened with leaders loyal to the TNA’s cause with the intent of finally forming an independent Tuareg state. With the support of numerous Tuareg confederations and the leadership of the Senussi religious order, the Tuareg Sultanate was therefore proclaimed on June 18th, 1929 with Kaocen crowned as its first sultan. The French Fourth Republic continued to fight against the Tuareg Sultanate following its formation, but by this point the fate of Dakar’s control over the eastern Sahara had been sealed. The Third International, which had been aiding the TNA throughout the entirety of the Tuareg War of Independence, was quick to recognize the independence of Targa, followed by a cautious recognition by the Kingdom of Italy and later her fellow Central Powers.
This all brings us to the final days of the North African Front. From Kidal, the LGPF scaled down to Anefis, which fell on May 19th, then down to Tabrichat, which fell on June 1st, and then down to Tarkint, which fell on June 12th. Republican forces made sure to make the southward offensive of the Communards to be as painful as possible, but anyone could see the writing on the wall at this point. The French Fourth Republic had lost the Great War, and all it needed was one final defeat to be pushed into capitulation. This defeat came in late June 1929 when General Commander Boris Souvarine laid siege to the city of Gao. The Republicans took advantage of the fact that foudreguerre was impractical in an urban setting to hold back the LGPF for as long as possible, but a Communard was all but inevitable at this point. After five brutal days of combat, the French Army was expelled across the Niger River from Goa on June 30th, 1929.
LGPF soldiers marching through Gao, circa June 1929.
While President Philippe Petain had once hoped that he could hold out until the Entente powers could save the fate of his decaying junta, the decisive destruction of Republican forces at the Battle of Gao and subsequent expulsion of any Republican military presence from territory to the north of the Niger River indicated to the old general-turned-autocrat that Dakar would fall before the Brazilians were able to dispatch a large expeditionary force on the North African Front. Republican generals on the frontline were frantically sending telegrams to Dakar informing their president that the Fourth Republic simply did not have the capacity to continue fighting the Communards for much longer. Even when putting aside the slew of defeats in the Great War, the once-mighty French colonial empire was in ruins. Equatorial Africa was almost completely free of French rule, the Moroccans had left the sinking ship with little protest from Dakar, and more rebellions were bound to erupt from the African Spring. Therefore, in order to preserve what remained of the French Fourth Republic, Philippe Petain sent a telegraph to Boris Souvarine offering an armistice between the belligerent forces, which was subsequently agreed to and put into effect by the afternoon of July 3rd, 1929. By the end of the day, all combat on the North African Front had come to an end and soldiers of the LGPF emerged from their barricades in celebration of a victory over eight years in the making.
The French Fourth Republic had finally been vanquished in the Great War.
Celebrations over the July Ceasefire in the streets of Lumiere.
Following the surrender of the Republicans, representatives from both Dakar and Lumier arrived in Bamako to negotiate a peace treaty. Given that the French Republic had not unconditionally surrendered, the Treaty of Bamako would not result in the incorporation of all Republican territory into the French Commune, however, the Republicans would definitely receive the short end of the stick. The independence of Morocco, Targa, Ubangi-Shari, and Tchad would have to be recognized by Dakar, although no agreement could be reached over the Middle Congolese Civil War, which both sides were convinced they could win. With regards to territorial exchanges between the Republic and the Commune, northern Algeria was annexed directly into the French Commune while the Sahara Desert, which was almost completely under the occupation of the LGPF, was divided into two autonomous regions akin to Brittany, Flanders, and Luxembourg, with the Tamazight and Mauritanian autonomous republics being formed to administrate the region.
With neither side in a financially stable position after years of combat, the Treaty of Bamako included no reparations, thus making the vast majority of its contents purely territorial. The treaty did, however, mandate that no signatories of the treaty were allowed to go to war with each other within the next twenty years, thus securing peace between the two Frances for the time being. The Treaty of Dakar was ratified on July 22nd, 1929, and for many it marked the apparent beginning of the end for the Entente. After almost two decades of combat, the time was coming for the alliance as a whole to set down at the negotiation table with the Central Powers and Third International. After all, the African Spring was not yet over. The Loyalists and the Brazilians continued to fight on the Atlantic Front, but throughout British holdings in Africa, there were growing calls to imitate the revolutions that had swept through French Equatorial Africa. Of course, the Royalists had bigger concerns at the time than potential uprisings in colonial holdings.
It was time for the Atlantic Front to conclude.
“It is here in Berlin that the fate of our empire will be determined. It is here that we will defend the city or die in the attempt.”
-General Erich Ludendorff of the Deutches Heilsreich, circa March 1928.
The Brandenburg Gate prior to the Battle of Berlin, circa February 1928.
“...Your Majesty?”
“What is it Anton?”
“The Fuhrer has called the Palace and would like to-”
“Tell Mr Hugenberg that I am unavailable at the moment.”
“...Of course, your Majesty.”
And with that, Kaiser August Wilhelm was left alone once again.
It was this solitude that the Kaiser had become so accustomed to in recent months, ever since he and the Fuhrer had transitioned from a close friendship to a bitter political rivalry. Their conflicting approaches to the Western Front had infuriated Hugenberg, who had more or less ruled as Germany’s unquestioned autocrat since the Heilungscoup. August Wilhelm’s total war strategy had certainly stalled the Third International’s offensive into the Rhineland, however, thousands of German civilians had died at the hands of the Luftsreitkrafte in the process. For many within the DVP elite, this apparently crossed a line. For Hugenberg, the line was crossed when August Wilhelm had the audacity to turn members of the German high command against him.
Since October, Hugenberg had been scolding the man who was officially his emperor but was in reality, at least within the framework of the German Fatherland Party, his subordinate for stepping out of line. Time and time again, the Fuhrer would call the Royal Palace to belittle the decisions of August Wilhelm, lambasting the Kaiser as “volatile,” “brash,” and “ignorant” more times than he could count. Eventually, August simply started ignoring Hugenberg’s calls when he could, and everytime the Fuhrer did get an audience with his aristocratic counterpart, it was becoming more and more clear to August that Hugenberg was becoming increasingly desperate. The fact of the matter was that the Great War was being lost under Alfred Hugenberg’s watch, and the knives within the Reichstag were beginning to tilt towards the Fuhrer. Someone needed to take the blame for the losses in both the east and the west, and Hugenberg was running out of military officers that he could throw under the bus.
Kaiser August Wilhelm simply fueled the flames of the DVP’s gradual turn on their leader. After all, as the head of state of Germany, August was the one who stood to benefit the most from Hugenberg’s deposition. With his rival out of the way, Germany could return to absolute monarchism yet again (this time, of course, mixed with the ultra-totalitarian chauvinism of fascism), an age that had preceded the days of even Otto von Bismarck. August’s game of political intrigue with Hugenberg was not, however, exclusively motivated by ideological differences. To the Kaiser, this was all personal. Hugenberg had once been more than a mere political ally of August, for he had been a mentor and a close friend. When the then-Prince August Wilhelm found himself at odds with his fellow Hohenzollerns, Hugenberg became the sole man of power in all of Berlin who he could trust.
And now Hugenberg dared to betray that sacred trust? Dared to betray the will of his Kaiser?
Such treason simply would not stand. Alfred Hugenberg may have committed himself to the supremacy of the Fatherland, but as the German Emperor, August Wilhelm was the Fatherland. By the grace of God, all who proclaimed their loyalty to the German nation were to live in his service. The allure of securing tyrannical power the likes of which had not been seen in centuries had overcome August in recent years, and no longer would he stand idly by as Hugenberg sat in a throne that was rightfully his. The puppet strings had been broken and the pawn had turned against his king.
It was a sunny day in Berlin. As August Wilhelm peered out of the vast window that stood before him, one could be forgiven for forgetting that the Great War was raging just mere kilometers away. For the last few weeks, however, distant explosions could occasionally be heard ringing from the east. And each and every day, the explosions were getting louder. No one in Berlin, not even August and his fellow elites, wanted to admit it, but the Heilsreich was losing the Great War and Joseph Stalin was getting slowly but surely making his way towards Berlin. Soon, the quiet streets of the Athens of the Spree would become a battlefield, as had been the fate of countless other cities before it.
As Kaiser August Wilhelm reached for his half-empty glass of whiskey, a faint “boom” washed through the air. The Red Army had recently crossed the Oder River, and for a second, the fear that the banks of the Spree River would be next crept through August’s mind. Such worries soon faded away, just as they had continuously been doing ever since the war leapt from the pages of newspapers and became a sound echoing from a not-so-distant land. August completed the act of picking up his glass and bringing it to his lips and taking a faint sip, but just after he set down his glass, the hum of airplanes could be heard. Perhaps Dornier bombers returning from the Eastern Front to refuel? Strange that they would have to fly over Berlin to do so. Soon, however, the hum was accompanied by gunshots.
Boom.
A plane had been hit by German defenses. This was not an aircraft of the Heilsreich.
As the hum of the airplanes got closer, German fighters shot into the sky from the west. More gunfire plagued the air. More explosions came with it. Anton swung open the door to August’s quarters and frantically began to speak.
“Your Majesty, I believe it would be best for you to evacuate to the lower levels of the Palace. The Soviets have just-”
BOOM.
The ground rattled and August’s glass fell to the ground, shattering into numerous shards.
BOOM.
The ground rattled again, much more so than before.
A fleet of planes entered the otherwise empty sky in front of August and dots of steel grey rained down from one aircraft.
The dots fell into the cityscape just outside the window.
Several bright lights flashed.
BOOM.
Berlin was consumed in fire as a man-made earthquake continuously shook the Royal Palace.
“...Yes,” the Kaiser responded. “I think an evacuation would be a good idea.”
Welcome to the Battle of Berlin.
Varchavianka
“Forward, Warsaw!
To the bloody fight,
Sacred and righteous!
March, march, Warsaw!”
-Refrain of Varchavianka.
Red Army soldiers fighting on the Eastern Front of the Great War, circa January 1928.
Out of all military officers in the Great War, perhaps General Joseph Stalin was the happiest upon the start of 1928. The previous year had been a slew of victories on the Eastern Front for the Russian Soviet Republic, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had finally succumbed to its internal instabilities, and the Third International had emerged victorious in Asia, which in turn meant that the already mobilized armies of India, Indochina, and Madras were to be deployed in Europe. Generals and politicians alike of the socialist world optimistically anticipated that the Great War would conclude by the end of the new year and a Europe bathed in the crimson of radical socialism would emerge from the rubble. The war wagering on Wall Street had arrived at the same conclusion, as had many officials within the Heilsreich, even if state-run media in the fascist world obviously didn’t make these fears of defeat public information.
Stalin’s push towards Berlin was far from pleasant, however, it was clear that Operation Poniatowski was going according to plan. Mikhail Frunze, a veteran of the Soviet war against the Ukranian State, led the invasion of Pomerania, where the defeat of Germany was more or less a foregone conclusion by this point. German naval forces in the Baltic Sea were directed to supply ground troops in Pomerania, but the aid provided was far from enough to save the region from the fate of numerous other territories in eastern Europe. A vast legion of Russian soldiers and tanks charged towards the coastal city Kolberg as a target for where the Baltics would be cut off from German supply lines, and through the utilization of foudreguerre not even the relentless bombing campaigns of the LK could turn back General Frunze. The Battle of Kolberg would occur on February 1st, 1928, starting with the Red Army sieging the outermost reaches of the city with a slew of gunfire as the sun rose over a cold Europe, and ended by noon with a decisive victory for the Russians.
With Germany proper now severed from East Prussia and its Baltic puppet states, the Russian Soviet Republic made preparations for the next stage of Operation Poniatowski. The Red Fleet was directed to extend its blockade of the Baltics down to the recently-captured Kolberg, which was quickly transformed into one of the Soviet Republic’s most pivotal naval bases. The time had come to starve the Baltics into submission, and surely enough, the collapse of Germany’s naval supply lines would slowly crush Estonia, Lithuania, and the United Baltic Duchy without any gun actually being fired into their territory. German naval forces still managed to occasionally break through the Russian blockade and distribute resources to holdouts in eastern Pomerania, however, the Soviet encirclement of the Baltics was tightened more and more every single day while General Frunze’s forces turned east following their victory at Kolberg to wipe out Germany’s remaining presence in the Baltic Sea.
All the while, the Red Napoleon directed Soviet aerial forces to begin a bombing campaign of Baltic territories, with aircraft deployed from both land and sea obliterating what remained of Germany’s prizes from the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Total war had effectively become routine in Europe by this point, so no one batted an eye when firebombing was deployed to obliterated Baltic cities. Konigsberg, which had been heavily fortified ever since the days of Kaiser Wilhelm I, was especially targeted by Soviet air campaigns. As a predominant target of Mikhail Frunze, Konigsberg was amongst the first major Baltic cities to fall into the hands of the Russian Soviet Republic, but this did not save it from the hellfire of the Soviet Air Force. Day and night, firebombing would decimate the last major concentration of German military forces in the Baltics. All the while, the Red Fleet cut off the substantial pocket of soldiers in East Prussia and General Frunze defeated units deployed in Pomerania. On February 14th, 1928, General Erich Ludendorff finally recognized that the forces defending East Prussia would soon be needed west of the Oder River, not to mention that the Soviet firebombing campaigns had made sure that there wasn’t much of an East Prussia to continue to defending anyway, and thus ordered an immediate withdrawal of German forces from the region.
German soldiers fleeing Konigsberg, circa February 1928.
Only two days later, Soviet soldiers arriving from Danzig reached the southern reaches of Konigsberg, therefore beginning the battle for the city. The evacuation of Konigsberg was far from complete at this point, and thousands of German soldiers were trapped in the city when Russian forces began to engage with the city's defenses. Demoralized and lacking sufficient supplies, there was no way that the forces of the Heilsreich would emerge victorious at the Battle of Konigsberg. As units were directed to fight in the southern reaches of the city, other units were evacuated to ships stationed in the Frisches Haff Bay. The Battle of Konigsberg was far from a cakewalk for the Red Army, however, the conflict was still won within the span of a day, and by the end of February 16th, the city was decisively in Soviet hands. The last great German holdout along the Baltic Sea had fallen.
While Mikhail Frunze led his campaign through Pomerania and East Prussia, other Soviet officers pushed into the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania, and the United Baltic Duchy. All three nations had been spared during the rest of Phase Two due to Operation Ascania miscalculating a rapid victory that would force the Central Powers to sue for peace before war would have to be waged in the Baltics. This immediate end to the Great War in 1923, of course, never came to be and the Russo-Baltic border had been transformed into a line of fortifications, obstacles, and weapon installations to ensure that the Germans wouldn’t dare to use their puppet states in northeastern as the launching point for an offensive into Russia. In 1928, the time had finally come to bring the Baltic states to their knees, an affair that would take only a few weeks due to bombing campaigns and the Red Fleet’s blockade already having devastated the fledgling puppet states.
The Kingdom of Lithuania was the first of the Baltic states to fall, as it was the only nation in the region to have lost substantial territory in the Great War at this point due to its southernmost reaches standing in the way of Russia’s push into Poland. Without any military aid from the German Heilsreich to keep it afloat following the Battle of Konigsberg, Lithuania went out with a whimper after years of combat against the Russian Soviet Republic. The Battle of Vilnius would result in a decisive victory for the Red Army on February 21st, 1928, thus bringing the Lithuanian capital city under the control of the Soviets. Despite Berlin demanding that Lithuania continue fighting in the Great War, King Friedrich Christian I called for a ceasefire two days after the fall of Vilnius and offered peace negotiations with the Russians on the condition that he and his family would be able to flee into exile. Premier Trotsky agreed to the defeated king’s offer, and on February 27th, 1928, the Treaty of Grodno was signed, which annexed Lithuania into the Russian Soviet Republic as the Lithuanian Autonomous Soviet Republic.
The Principality of Estonia was the next state to fall. A small coastal nation, the only thing that kept Estonia afloat for more than mere days was the collection of fortresses and obstacles constructed along the nation’s border with the Russian Soviet Republic to slow down any invasion. A year prior, and Russian offensive into Estonia would have likely been stalled long enough for the Germans to arrive, thus igniting yet another war of attrition between the two titans of eastern Europe. But the situation on the Eastern Front had, of course, now changed and Estonia was left to die a painful death. The capture of the nation’s capital of Tallinn on February 28th, 1928 marked the ultimate defeat of the Principality of Estonia, and the small monarchy completely fell under the military occupation of the Red Army.
The United Baltic Duchy was a far larger nation than Estonia and had not been forced to fight for years on its own homefront like Lithuania, and thus held out for the longest. Duke Adolf Friedrich of the UBD anxiously resided in Riga, knowing that he would soon be forced to flee into exile. By the time of the Battle of Tallinn, the bulk of the Duchy had already fallen into Soviet hands (the village of Rauna had been lost to the Red Army on the same day as Tallinn), and only the cities of the coastline remained in the hands of Adolf Friedrich. With the entirety of the RSR’s Baltic forces now concentrated on the UBD, it would take less than a week for the flag of the Soviet Republic to be hoisted over Riga, for the battle for the city already decimated by firebombing occurred on March 5th, 1928, and obviously ended with the Red Army finally defeating the United Baltic Duchy and forcing Duke Adolf Friedrich to run away into exile.
As the dust of the Baltic Offensive settled, Premier Leon Trotsky arrived in the ruined city of Jurmala to sign a peace treaty that would reorganize Estonia and the United Baltic Duchy into territories of the Russian Soviet Republic. Rather than become autonomous regions like Lithuania, however, Trotsk viewed decisive Soviet control over the coastal regions of the occupied countries to be vital for Russian naval interests in the Baltic Sea, thus meaning that the Treaty of Jurmala imposed direct rule from Moscow over the lands of Estonia and the UBD. In the aftermath of the Baltic Offensive, Trotsky would initiate a number of infrastructure development projects throughout the recently-annexed lands in order to not only rebuild the region from a brutal war but to turn the Baltics into a useful asset for the Soviet war effort. The reconstruction of destroyed harbors was prioritized, while new shipyards and factories sprouted up around these bases of Russian naval power. The Baltics had returned to Russia, and the Red Napoleon was keen on ensuring that his undoing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk would be well worth the effort.
On March 12th, 1928, General Joseph Stalin initiated the Battle of Frankfurt an der Oder, and had captured the segment of the city to the east of the Oder River by the end of the day. At long last, the Red Army had reached the banks of the Oder River and thus stood at the gateway into the heart of Germany. As ground forces clashed day after day for control over the entirety of Frankfurt, the Luftsreitkrafte and the Soviet Air Force endlessly fought in the sky above. As the battle continued, however, it became increasingly apparent that Stalin’s forces were poised to emerge victorious. The expeditionary forces of South Asia had long since arrived on the Eastern Front and the Third International army engaged at Frankfurt was therefore one of largest ever seen in the Great War up to that point. The Oder River served as a barrier to stall the Soviets, but sooner or later this barrier would be broken and General Stalin made his way into western Frankfurt on March 16th. Two days later, the German Heilsreich had been completely pushed out of Frankfurt an der Oder, and the Red Army stood poised to make its way to Berlin.
Two Red Army soldiers following the Battle of Frankfurt an der Oder, circa March 1928.
With the Red Army across the Oder River, Berlin was just a few kilometers away. Russian airplanes would break through German aerial defenses on March 20th, 1928 and drop the first bombs upon a city that would soon be drenched in bloodshed the likes of which had yet to be seen in the Great War. Three days later, Joseph Stalin would link up with Indian Expeditionary Force troops led by Jawaharlal Nehru at the Battle of Steinhofel, and as aerial combat over Berlin became more frequent, Alfred Hugenberg and Kaiser August Wilhelm I were evacuated to Hanover. The seemingly endless legions of German forces that Stalin and Nehru faced more and more of the closer and closer they got to Berlin were unprecedented in the Great War, however, Third International officers were already gathering in tents at night to develop their plan of attack on the German capital.
On March 25th, Erich Ludendorff was defeated at the Battle of Furstenwalde after two days of house-to-house combat. A day later, Ludendorff was forced to flee westwards yet again when he lost the Battle of Rauen. By this point, the streets of Berlin, many of which were already filled with the rubble of air raids, were eerily quiet and it was becoming increasingly apparent that the German government had no plan to evacuate the city’s civilians despite the looming battle. On March 28th, the Third International won the Battle of Spreenhagen and Premier Leon Trotsky arrived in Frankfurt an der Oder to closely monitor the coming conflict. On March 29th, General Jawaharlal Nehru emerged victorious at the Battle of Friedersdorf. Unbeknownst to the Third International, on the very same day reports were privately brought to Kaiser August Wilhelm’s attention that some members of the fuhrer’s cabinet were, at least according to rumors circulating amongst the DVP elite, discussing potential terms of surrender.
Finally, on March 31st, 1928, the time had come for the Battle of Berlin to truly begin. In accordance with the plans drafted by Joseph Stalin days prior, the bulk of the Red Army was to make a grand offensive towards Kopenick while Jawaharlal Nehru would lead the Indian Union’s expeditionary force to southern Berlin. From here, both Stalin and Nehru would launch a joint foudreguerre offensive into Berlin from the east and south, and if everything went according to plan, the Great War was anticipated to be over in a matter of weeks. The nightmare that had engulfed the world for the past fourteen years could finally come to an end, and the fascist terror would be condemned to the dustbin of history. Early into the morning of March 31st, Leon Trotsky gave General Joseph Stalin the go-ahead to engage with German forces defending Berlin after alerting allied governments in London, Lumiere, Calcutta and Saigon of the coming battle, and soon enough hundreds of tanks were unleashed to flank the German capital city from its eastern and southern borders.
By noon, Stalin had occupied Kopenick with relative ease as forces under the command of Erich Ludendorff retreated across the Dahme River. General Nehru managed to cross the Dahme around the same time but was bogged down by reinforcements led by Lieutenant General Friedrich Paulus at Eichwalde, where the All-Indian Liberation Army would hold out through the night. The first day of the Battle of Berlin came to an end with good results for the Third International. General Stalin had secured the foothold in eastern Berlin that he had desired, and while Nehru had yet to step foot into the city of Berlin itself, it had been anticipated that such an goal would take longer for the southern flank to achieve anyway. Nonetheless, the Heilsreich remained determined to win the battle for its capital city, and LK forces were directed to heavily bomb Third International positions stationed within and outside of Berlin. Just after the midnight of March 31st, the first of the firebombing campaigns on General Stalin’s forces began, and due to anti-aircraft guns being limited in Kopenick due to such equipment still being delivered from Spreenhagen, casualties were heavy. By the time the sun began to rise over Europe in the morning, reinforcements had arrived with more anti-aircraft weapons to deter the Luftsreitkrafte, but the damage had already been done. Nonetheless, Stalin simply had to lick his wounds and linger on.
German bomber flying above eastern Berlin, circa April 1st, 1928.
The next few days of the Battle of Berlin were mostly stagnant. Seeing that the conflict for the city would not end anytime soon, both sides scrambled to rush reinforcements into Berlin, with the Third International consolidating its control over its supply lines in eastern Germany while the Heilsreich transferred troops from other frontlines. Stalin continued to attempt to push across the Lange Brucke bridge to enter Grunau, however, Ludendorff eventually concluded that Kopenick wasn’t returning to German hands anytime soon, which made Lange Brucke a liability, and thus ordered the destruction of the bridge on April 2nd. Nehru seemed to be having better luck than Stalin throughout early April, and slowly but surely pushed Paulus out of Eichwalde. On April 7th, German forces had been completely uprooted from Eichwalde and General Nehru stepped foot into Berlin itself for the first time. Meanwhile, a joint army of AILA, FII, and Madras forces under the command of Indian General Ram Prasad Bismil initiated a westward push to the south of Berlin, with the intent of reaching Potsdam and cutting Berlin off from southern reinforcements.
The advances of Nehru from the south were slow, however, they did gradually diminish Ludendorff’s manpower fighting against both Nehru himself and Stalin. Nonetheless, German defenses showed no sign of crumbling anytime soon, and the Battle of Berlin soon became a war of attrition. Days turned into weeks, and gaining control over a mere street became a grand accomplishment. Urban terrain meant that the Third International could not conduct the foudreguerre tactics that had won it so much territory in such a short amount of time in order to win over Berlin, and close quarters combat left even the most feared tanks at the Red Army’s disposal vulnerable to infantry attacks.
The land surrounding Berlin, which had more open spaces and was also focused on less by German officers anyway, was a different story. General Bismil’s army covered swathes of land with relative ease on his way to Potsdam, conquering Dahlewitz on April 22nd, whereas the Battle of Berlin had more or less remained stagnant during the past few weeks. These campaigns to the south forced Erich Ludendorff to dilute soldiers to fight Bismil, thus reducing the total German military presence in Berlin and weakening the defenses of the city. This led Joseph Stalin to conclude that a similar offensive to the north of Berlin would make things easier for the campaigns of himself and Nehru, therefore resulting in the development of Operation Mehmed to accomplish just that. The officer put in command of the army that would conduct Operation Mehmed was none other than Mikhail Frunze, who had long since arrived at the Battle of Berlin following the success of his campaign in Pomerania and East Prussia.
On April 26th, Operation Mehmed would begin when General Frunze successfully invaded Woltersdorf, thus giving him a launching point for his conquest of the territory to the north of Berlin. Schoeneiche would be the next city to fall and landed into the hands of the Red Army on May 1st. Realizing that Stalin was attempting to pull off flanking his men from both the north and south, Erich Ludendorff ordered Hermann Erhardt to launch a counter-offensive against Frunze, something that clearly stalled Operation Mehmed. Nonetheless, Mikhail Frunze continuously made progress in the face of Erhardt, who was given substantially less men to command than he had hoped for due to Ludendorff directing the bulk of forces in the Battle of Berlin to continue fighting against Stalin and Nehru. On May 11th, Neuenhagen fell in the north while Stahnsdorf simultaneously fell in the south. The effects of Bismil’s southern offensive were already starting to be felt on German forces in Berlin, who were facing the arrival of less and less reinforcements and fresh supplies every single day.
Determined to cut off one of the two flanks of Berlin, General Ludendorff finally gave into Erhardt’s requests for more soldiers in the north and placed hundreds of men under his command with the hope that Operation Mehmed could be brought to a swift end. This decision proved to be a crucial mistake on Ludendorff’s part, for defenses against Joseph Stalin were diminished in order to attack Mikhail Frunze. On May 17th, Stalin’s forces exploited an opening in Ludendorff’s defenses left by a diminished troop presence and slowly made their way across the Dahme River. Reinforcements would arrive by the afternoon to stall the Soviet offensive, however, these reinforcements were taken from Friedrich Paulus’ defenses in southern Berlin, which meant that Nehru was soon able to make advances of his own, and soon enough, Ludendorff’s position directly to the west of Kopenick was being flanked from both the south and east. Fighting over the Dahme River would carry out over the night, but as the sun began to rise on the subsequent day, the first Russian boots were beginning to step foot into Grunau, and hours later, as the Red Army was securing its position to the west of the Dahme, they were accompanied by Nehru’s AILA arriving from the south. Erich Ludendorff was forced to order a retreat to Johannisthal as the flag of the Russian Soviet Republic was raised over the position he had held for almost two months.
Of course, this retreat by the Germans could not last forever, and by the end of May 18th, the war of attrition for Berlin had resumed. Nonetheless, had concluded that the Battle of Berlin was not going to be won by the Heilsreich anytime soon unless substantial reinforcements arrived and the German strategy was altered. On May 20th, Alfred Hugenberg, August Wilhelm, Benito Mussolini, Oskar Potiorek, and Ivan Valkov arrived in Venice to discuss the allocation of aid from Central Power member states to Germany in order to win the Battle of Berlin. Prime Minister Valkov, who was not fighting on any of Bulgaria’s borders ever since Greece had been defeated, committed the most manpower and resources to the Eastern Front, followed by Mussolini, who was still concerned with the war in southeastern France and had already deployed substantial Italian expeditionary forces in the war over the Balkans and Austria but nonetheless was not currently facing an invasion by either the Entente or Third International, not to mention that Mussolini recognized that Italy could not hold out for long if Germany were to fall and the entire arsenal of both the Entente and Third International alike was concentrated on Rome.
Oskar Potiorek, whose Kingdom of Illyria was currently facing an invasion by the Federation of Transleithanian Council Republics, was less willing to provide aid to the Heilsreich. Despite this, pressure from the leadership of the Central Powers made sure that Potiorek sent some equipment to the Battle of Berlin, however, Illyria was notably the only member of the Central Powers to not deploy soldiers in the Battle of Berlin. After the Venice Conference, it would take a few days for reinforcements from the Central Powers to arrive in Berlin, and in the meantime Erich Ludendorff simply had to ensure that the city would not begin to rapidly fall into the hands of Third International forces. Mikhail Frunze’s offensive against Hermann Erhardt began to move in favor of the Russians yet again during this time period, with Honower Siedlung falling on May 23rd. Ludendorff continued to request the allocation of more aircraft to the skies of Berlin, however, even this advantage managed to be deterred by the Third International, which had installed anti-aircraft guns all throughout occupied Berlin.
Red Army soldiers manning an anti-aircraft gun during the Battle of Berlin, circa May 1928.
Bismil’s southern campaign, which had previously been the most successful front of the Battle of Berlin, was a different story. In late May 1928, Brigadier General Erwin Rommel arrived from the Eastern Front to partake in the defense of Potsdam from the Indian Expeditionary Force. A man who admired the potential of armored infantry, General Rommel would seek to defend Potsdam by mounting a stand at Babelsberg, where LT tanks were to face off against the German Heilsreich’s most advanced tanks, the most notable of which was the A7V-U4, which was a medium tank that had built upon the technology of prior A7V-U models and captured British tanks. The Battle of Babelsberg would occur on May 26th at the outskirts of its namesake city, where the more open space was preferential for tank combat, and after hours of combat, General Ram Prasad Bismil was forced to retreat for the first time in the conquest of Berlin due to Rommel’s tank defenses (something the Germans were not known for and therefore something that the Third International was prepared to combat) repelling Bismil’s advance towards Potsdam.
An A7V-U4 model tank stationed outside of Babelsberg, circa May 1928.
Shortly after the Battle of Babelsberg, the first reinforcements from the Central Powers began to arrive in Berlin. The Italian and Bulgarian expeditionary forces were dispersed throughout all frontlines of the battle, however, the bulk were deployed to defend against Stalin and Nehru’s joint offensive. These reinforcements managed to stop the Third International’s westward offensive, however, for the time being, the tides of the Battle of Berlin had yet to turn in favor of the Central Powers and a war of attrition emerged at Baumschulenweg circa early June 1928. The continued influx of soldiers from Italy and Bulgaria would also manage to hold back Mikhail Frunze’s offensive in the north by bringing the clash between the Red Army and Heinrich Erhardt to a standstill at Ahrensfelde on June 12th. In the south, where Erwin Rommel already seemed to be gaining the upper hand following his victory at Babelsberg, the arrival of the Italians and Bulgarians proved to be decisive in actually regaining ground from the Third International. The banner of the Heilsreich was hoisted above Guterfelde on June 9th, and over Ruhlsdorf a little over a week later on June 18th.
Eventually, however, Rommel would also be bogged down at Kleinbeeren on June 25th, and throughout the subsequent July the Battle of Berlin was more or less a stalemate on all fronts. Troops from the Central Powers and Third International alike continuously flowed into the German capital city, which became infamous throughout the world for its brutal and relentless combat. One American journalist visiting Soviet-occupied Berlin in mid-July 1928 would declare that the city had become “the Graveyard of All Eurasia” and made note of the fact that the Battle of Berlin was already by far the single bloodiest engagement in the entirety of the Great War. Whatever residents of Berlin either hadn’t fled the city or hadn’t been killed in the crossfire between the great powers found their lifestyles annihilated by the bombs of war, just as the lifestyles of millions before them had been destroyed throughout the world over the last fourteen years. Even in the parts of Berlin many kilometers away from the frontlines of the Great War, entire blocks had been replaced with piles of rubble and bombing campaigns had become so consistent that most parts of the city had simply given up on sounding air raid sirens.
Simply put, whoever was to win the Battle of Berlin would inherit smoldering ruins.
In early August, an increasingly desperate General Erich Ludendorff met with Hermann Goring to draft up plans for an air raid that the two men hoped would turn the tides of the Battle of Berlin in favor of the Deutches Heilsreich. Determined to emerge victorious, Ludendorff proposed that the Luftsreitkrafte would deploy countless bombs containing mustard gas over parts of Berlin held by the Third International in order to literally choke enemy forces out of the city. Civilians would inevitably suffer in the process, however, such cruelty was nothing fascists such as Ludendorff and Goring were unfamiliar with. Therefore, on August 8th, Red Army and AILA forces in eastern Berlin fell victim to a slew of mustard gas bombs raining from above, and soon enough the air of Berlin was filled with a poisonous yellow-brown mist, leaving many Third International soldiers incapacitated as German soldiers bearing gas masks made their way into enemy-occupied territory. In the fog of toxins, General Ludendorff retook Johannisthal, however, by this point the Third International’s forces had distributed gas masks throughout its ranks and the German Imperial Army was stopped between Johannisthal and Aldershof by the end of the day.
German “poisonbombing” continued well past August 8th and soon became a mainstay of the Battle of Berlin. It also opened Pandora’s Box by giving the Third International reason to utilize its own chemical weapons upon German positions, with both the Red Army and Soviet Air Force being directed by Joseph Stalin to launch mustard gas at the enemy. By the end of August 1928, the Athens of the Spree had become a city of poison. Civilians cowered in basements as the war above turned the air that swept through their homes into a lethal toxin while the boldest personalities of the Great War clashed on the surface, their faces hidden behind the ghastly gas masks that had been synonymous with the War to End All Wars for years.
In the nightmare that was the Battle of Berlin there was, however, a sliver of hope, at least amongst those fighting for the Third International. There was hope that, after all this time, all of this sacrifice, all of this bloodshed, all of this horror, the man-made hell would finally cease. There was hope that it would take only one last push for the Deutsches Heilsreich to surrender and for the Great War to come to an end. While those supportive of the Central Powers and the Entente hoped that the conflict would continue so that a decisive victory for their faction could emerge, the rest of the world, regardless of its allegiance to the ideals of socialism, was exhausted of the last fourteen years of endless industrialized warfare and simply wanted the endless barrage of suffering to end. Humanity was scarred by what was already the bloodiest war in its history, and while it would take decades to heal these wounds, a victory for the Third International was the key to a recovery within the coming years.
The question, therefore, was if the Heilsreich could snatch this key away.
Invading the Silent Continent
“The Great War Comes to Africa”
-New York Times headline, circa October 1928.
Warships of the French Fourth Republic during an engagement with Communard naval forces on the Mediterranean Sea, circa August 1928.
As the Russian Soviet Republic concentrated its war effort on the Battle of Berlin, the French Commune and its allies in western Europe remained engaged in a war that spanned multiple frontlines. To the east, the Central Powers fought on in the trenches as a coalition of the Third International forces poured into the Rhineland while airplanes bearing revolutionary symbols bombed Italian positions in southeastern France. To the south and west, the British, French, and Irish all faced the threat of the work over the past few years of breaking the chains of capitalism being undone via a naval invasion by the Entente. The House of Windsor continued to keenly watch the affairs of the Atlantic Front from Ottawa while the French Fourth Republic continued to hold the colonial empire constructed over the past century together, all under the jackboot of Ferdinand Foch.
At the center of all of these wars tied together by alliances and common enemies was the French Commune. Perhaps no nation was more scarred by the Great War than France, which had been engulfed in the flames of combat since the very beginning. Such gruesome and constant warfare had certainly taken its toll on France, with approximately 12.9% of the French population having perished in the Great War by the start of 1928. Combined with soldiers and civilians that had evacuated for the French Fourth Republic during the Communard victory in the nation’s civil war, metropolitan France’s population plummeted from 39.6 million in 1914 to 33 million in 1928. Out of France’s remaining population, only 8 million people were qualified for conscription by the time of the Battle of Berlin, and the majority were already fighting on behalf of the LGPF. Nonetheless, by little more than sheer luck, metropolitan France had evaded conquest by the Germans over the past fourteen years despite coming very close to the Kaiser’s men parading through Paris (and later Lumiere) on multiple occasions. Under the rule of the Commune, a combination of expanding conscription eligibility, banning emigration, the mechanization of infantry, and the deployment of forces from other Third International member states onto the Western Front, the French war machine just barely kept on churning.
As the first Russian bombs began to fall on Berlin, the main focus of the French Commune was the continued offensive into the Rhineland. The Burning of the Rhine had been a devastating blow for the Third International, but the tables of the Western Front were far from having been turned back in favor of the Central Powers. General Commander Boris Sourvarine simply continued his northward push, albeit at a much slower and more cautious pace as anti-aircraft guns were shipped en masse to the Rhineland while Albert Inkpin ordered the Workers’ Democratic Air Force to dramatically increase its presence on the European continent. Once the Battle of Berlin was in full swing, German defenses on the Western Front were weakened by their own government’s redistribution of manpower and equipment to the east, with the simple fact of the matter being that the defense of Berlin was far more tactically significant than the defense of the Rhineland.
Therefore, Third International soldiers on the ground slowly scaled along the Rhine River as their comrades clashed with German bombers in the sky. After Cologne fell on February 27th, 1928, the Third International pushed towards Grevenbroich, which was captured by the French on March 24th, thus making it the last German city to be conquered on the Western Front prior to the start of the Battle of Berlin. As the forces of Stalin and Nehru consumed the Heilsreich’s attention, officers in the west took advantage of the noticeable decline in German forces fighting for the Rhineland. The German presence in the west was large enough throughout April 1928 to keep the French, British, and Irish offensive at bay (bombing runs continued to exert a heavy toll on the Third International’s supply lines), however, there was nonetheless an accelerated fluidity in the frontlines of the Western Front in favor of the Third International during the first month of the Battle of Berlin. It should also be noted that the Indian Union and Madras both dispatched expeditionary forces on the Western Front circa mid-April 1928, which was crucial for adding new manpower in the west, not to mention that the arrival of said manpower resulted in a much-needed morale boost amongst the embittered British and French veterans of the Great War.
The Battle of Grevenbroich on April 17th resulted in a decisive French victory, leaving only the northernmost reaches of the Rhineland to be captured. Less than two weeks later, Mikahil Frunze’s offensive into the area north of Berlin was in full swing and Erich Ludendorff scrambled to reorganize German troop concentration, both amongst the forces already fighting in Berlin and on all frontlines of the Great War. Regiments fighting on the Western Front were called out east, which paved the way to a relatively quick Third International victory at the Battle of Viersen on May 7th. Eleven days later, Joseph Stalin stepped foot on the western banks of the Dahme River and Ludendorff reallocated the German presence on the Western Front to Berlin yet again. By this point, the once-fearsome German war machine that had terrorized western Europe for over a decade was on its last legs, and even the Burning of the Rhine had ceased in favor of a much more limited aerial bombing campaign in order to ensure that there were enough airplanes to wage constant total war over Berlin.
It was, therefore, not a surprise when the Rhenish Offensive concluded in early June 1928 with a decisive victory for the Third International. With only the northernmost reaches of the Rhineland left untouched by General Souvarine’s campaign following the Battle of Viersen, a foudreguerre offensive led by Armure Is would make quick work of what remained of Walther von Brauchitsch’s defenses of the region. The half of Dusseldorf to the west of the Rhine fell on May 20th, followed by the fall of Krefeld on May 24th, the fall of Moers on May 26th, and the fall of Xanten on June 2nd. The German Army made its final stand of the Rhenish Offensive at the Battle of Kalkar, which began on June 7th as LGPF tanks attacked the outskirts of the city. After three days of combat, the Germans were ultimately uprooted from the city and General Brauchitsch subsequently ordered a retreat of remaining German forces from the Rhineland in order to set up defenses on the eastern shoreline of the Rhine River.
The Third International’s decisive victory in the Rhenish Offensive was a shocking blow to the Heilsreich, however, for the time being, the forces of the revolution in the west would fail to progress any further east. Recognizing that the high command of the German government simply did not view the Western Front as their top priority while the Battle of Berlin was ongoing, Walther von Brauchitsch decided that his strategy could not depend on an influx of reinforcements going forward and instead opted to rapidly set up a collection of makeshift obstacles and fortifications along the Rhine in an attempt to deter any potential eastward offensive by the French Commune and her allies. This array of defenses was designed with the intent of preventing a foudreguerre offensive into central Germany, hence why obstacles intended to make tank movement extremely difficult and anti-tank guns were amongst the first installations put in place by General Brauchitsch. By the beginning of July 1928, what became known as the Brauchitsch Line had already proven its capability of stalling further Third International incursions into Germany, and as the Russians struggled to make their way through the ruins of Berlin in the east, the French found themselves stuck in yet another war of attrition in the west.
As the summer of 1928 dragged by, the Brauchitsch Line became more and more secure, thus resulting in a more or less completely stagnant Western Front for several months. The belligerent forces continued to deploy manpower and equipment along both sides of the Rhine, but the fact of the matter is that no progress was being made. But to the south of the Rhineland and the European mainland itself, General Commander Boris Souvarine was in reach of grasping another prize, one that was arguably even more valuable than the defeat of Germany, at least in the eyes of the French Commune. It was upon the waters of the western Mediterranean Sea where this prize began to appear on the horizon, for it was here that the navy of the French Fourth Republic was beginning to lose to its growing Communard counterpart. By the beginning of 1928, the French Navy was already clearly overshadowed by the socialist Navy of the French Proletariat (MPF). By the fall of the same year, the increasingly exposed Algerian was rife with vulnerabilities that could be exploited in the name of the Second French Revolution.
The time had finally come for the civil war that had engulfed the French people for over seven years to reach its end.
Still present on the Western Front for the time being, Souvarine began drafting plans for a naval operation to land in North Africa in late August 1928, eventually producing what would become known as Operation Delescluze. Under this plan, Algerian ports would be bombed by air raids in order to weaken Republican defenses prior to twin amphibious landings at Bougie in the east and Cherchell in the west, which would surround the Republican capital of Algiers. From that point, the LGPF was to conduct a campaign that would gradually bring the entirety of the French North African coastline under the control of the Communards and force the Fourth Republic to flee into the Sahara Desert, presumably never to see the waters of the Mediterranean ever again. After spending the latter half of September 1928 amassing naval and aerial forces for the French Commune to utilize in the coming conflict (many of which were forces from South Asia), General Commander Souvarine gave the go ahead to his subordinates to begin Operation Delescluze.
The campaign for North Africa began on October 9th, 1928 when a deluge of bombs rained down upon Algerian cities and naval defenses. A lack of domestic industry developed within France’s colonies had ultimately come back to haunt the imperialist rulers of the French Fourth Republic when their defenses of the Algerian coastline primarily consisted of weapons either evacuated from Europe years prior or exported from allies in the Entente, especially Brazil. Given its strategic importance, Field Marshal Philippe Petain concentrated French ground troops in Algiers with the expectation that the amphibious offensive that would follow the French Commune’s air raids would surely target the aforementioned city. Of course, Petain’s prediction proved to be wrong, and on October 13th LGPF forces simultaneously landed in both Bougie and Chernell, experiencing relatively little resistance due to Petain’s focus on Algiers. By the end of the day, Operation Delescluze had achieved the securing of two Communard beachheads in North Africa and Boris Souvarine stepped foot in Chernell, determined to end the civil war that he had presided over since it had begun all those years ago.
The tides of revolution had washed upon the shore of Africa.
LGPF soldiers landing in North Africa during the Battle of Bougie, circa October 1928.
Despite the best attempts of Philippe Petain to hold back the oncoming Communard onslaught, it was now only a matter of time until the LGPF would be marching through Algiers. The fact of the matter is that the Republicans were outnumbered, outgunned, and unprepared to fight one of the most mechanized armed forces in the Great War on their home turf. The arrival of Armure I model tanks on the North African Front occurred almost immediately after the landings at Chernell and Bougie, which meant that the French Commune would be able to employ foudreguerre, a tactic that the Fourth Republic had no experience with nor equipment to effectively counter against. It therefore goes without saying that the remainder of Operation Delescluze was a quick and decisive victory for the LGPF. Tipaza fell on October 16th, Azeffoun fell on October 18th, and Dellys fell on October 19th.
All the while, the Kingdom of Italy, which was engaged in combat against both the French Commune and the French Fourth Republic, launched an offensive into French Tunisia, which became increasingly poorly defended during Operation Delescluze. Italian soldiers would scale towards Tunis from colonial holdings in Libya while the Regia Marina would shell the Tunisian coastline from the sea. On October 21st, Italian forces secured a beach head at Kelibia and subsequently made an eastward push towards Tunis, and entered the outskirts of the city on October 26th. After no more than two days of fighting, the Battle of Tunis ended in a victory for the Kingdom of Italy and the government of the French protectorate had surrendered to the forces of Benito Mussolini. The Treaty of Bizerte was ratified four days later, and in an act of purely nationalistic fervor that was intended to harken back to the ancient days of Rome conquering Carthage, the French protectorate of Tunisia was annexed directly into the Kingdom of Italy, being afforded not even the limited degree of autonomy conceded to colonial regimes in Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia.
On October 20th, 1928 the Battle of Algiers would begin as General Commander Boris Souvarine started to siege the capital city from the west and the increasingly frail President Ferdinand Foch was evacuated to Dakar in anticipation of Petain’s inevitable defeat. Petain and his men put up a vicious fight, however, the fact of the matter was that the Republicans were in an unwinnable situation. By noontime on October 21st, Souvarine’s forces in the west had reached Baba Hassen while LGPF forces pushing from Bougie began their assault on Algiers from the east. A little over twenty-four hours later, Communard forces in both the east and west met up in the heart of Algiers, thus forcing Philippe Petain to the southern reaches of the city. Recognizing that he had lost the Battle of Algiers, Field Marshal Petain ordered a general retreat of the French Army from the battlefields of northern Algeria and fled into the Sahara Desert.
Operation Delescluze had succeeded, Boris Souvarine had won yet another decisive victory for the French Commune, and the former capital of the French Fourth Republic had finally been painted red. In order to celebrate this momentous victory for the Communard cause, the Central Revolutionary Congress went as far as to rename Algiers to Hilmi, in honor of the Turkish socialist journalist Huseyin Hilmi, in early November 1928. Of course, the North African Front was not over. The French Commune rapidly developed a line of defenses in eastern Algeria to deter any Italian offensive launched from Tunisia, however, this particular frontline was not a priority for either Lumiere or Rome. Boris Souvarine instead peered into the Sahara Desert, determined to make his way across the vast ocean of sand and finally vanquish the French Fourth Republic. Given that there were very few major settlements within the Sahara, the focus of the North African Front now shifted to securing control of regional supply lines.
Republican regiments therefore were scattered at points of importance throughout the seemingly endless sand dunes while Communard tanks were sent into the heart of the largest desert on Earth with the intent to hunt down these aforementioned regiments. Among the tanks deployed by the French Commune were the recently-developed Armure IIs, the successor to the less powerful but nonetheless prominent Armure I model tank, which had been a staple of French foudreguerre tactics for years. The Saharan Offensive was the first engagement that Armure IIs were deployed in, and they soon proved to be the deadliest light tank in the Communard arsenal, and the Sahara Desert proved to be an ideal location to wage foudreguerre due to its empty terrain making armored infantry incredibly effective. By the end of November 1928, El Golea had fallen into Communard hands. On January 4th, 1929, the new year was ushered in with Boris Souvarine emerging victorious at the Battle of In Salah, which put the French Commune in control of an oasis town vital to trans-Saharan commerce.
An LGPF convoy outside of In Salah, circa January 1929.
At this point, one would think that things couldn’t possibly get any worse for the French Fourth Republic. Petain’s forces were losing decisively in the Sahara, the bulk of Algeria had already fallen in a matter of months, and the Republicans had no hope of amassing either the manpower or equipment necessary to turn the tides. But, as the Great War had already proven time and time again, things can always get worse. Just beneath the surface of the Fourth Republic, internal instability was building up after over a decade of dormancy with regards to local revolts thanks to the Treaty of Bloemfontein. Now that French colonies were the frontline of the war between the Communards and the Republicans, Bloemfontein had effectively become null and void and as colonial governments diverted their attention to the North African Front, the tension between natives and imperialist regimes was about to reach a boiling point.
The African Spring was about to begin.
Springtime
“If there is one thing to be learned from the Great War, it is that no empire is immortal.”
-Winston Churchill, circa 1930.
African soldiers of the French Army, circa 1928.
The Great War killed the old empires of Europe. The exiled French and British imperialist regimes fought on throughout all of Phase Two, but in hindsight, the opportunity to restore the Victorian world order was lost when the flames of revolution engulfed Paris and London. The fact of the matter was that European colonialism had always been a tenuous house of cards whose foundation was dependent on the consistently effective suppression of local revolts. The Treaty of Bloemfontein, which had secured the neutrality for African colonies during the great War, had kept this foundation stable for a few years by allowing for colonial governments to concentrate their efforts on maintaining their grip on power, however, this foundation was shaken when the House of Windsor and French Republic were both forced into exile, with the latter ultimately setting up its base of operations in Africa. The Fourth Republic nonetheless maintained the Treaty of Bloemfontein (it should, however, be noted that said treaty still allowed for resources produced in African colonies to be used in the war effort), but as the French Commune gradually approached the coastline of North Africa, it was only a matter of time until previously neutral colonial possessions became a frontline of the Great War and the treaty that had narrowly guaranteed the survival of empires for so long would fail.
The foundation of France’s once-mighty colonial empire would finally be destroyed when, under blatant pressure from President Ferdinand Foch, the governments of French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa signed the Treaty of Dakar on March 6th, 1929, which stated that the two colonial federations would declare war on the French Commune and commit to conscripting men to fight on the North Afircan Front, including indigenous men. While Foch’s hope was that the additional manpower would allow for a quick retaliation against Boris Souvarine in the Sahara Desert, thus resulting in a Republican reconquest of Algeria or, at the very least, forcing the Communards to sue for a peace agreement that was favorable to the Fourth Republic, the ultimate consequence of the Treaty of Dakar would be the beginning of the end for the Entente war effort. This brings us to Kaocen Ag Geda, a Tuareg chief who resided in the northern reaches of the West African colony of Niger and was a member of the Senussi, a militant anti-colonial Muslim religious order that had fought against European incursions into the Sahara Desert for almost a century. Kaocen had participated in attacks on French forces since 1909, however, these clashes never escalated into a full-out revolt and the Treaty of Bloemfontein had made sure that French West Africa had enough manpower at its disposal to keep Kaocen down throughout the Great War.
The Treaty of Dakar finally presented Kaocen with the opportunity to wage the war of independence he had been striving for over the last twenty years. With many indigenous Africans more angry at their French rulers than ever before due to the introduction of conscription as well as a shift in French West Africa’s attention away from colonial revolts and towards the North African Front, the time for a Tuareg revolution had arrived. Therefore, on March 15th, 1929, Kaocen Ag Geda declared a jihad against the French Fourth Republic and led his forces in the conquest of Ingall, thus starting the Tuareg War of Independence. Just a day later, the Sultan of Agadez announced his support for Kaocen’s jihad, and soon the entirety of the Air Mountains were engulfed in guerrilla warfare between local Republican garrisons and Tuareg freedom fighters. The Fourth Republic anticipated that Kaocen could be quickly defeated, however, locals soon grew to overwhelmingly support the jihadists and the entirety of the Air Mountains were decisively under Kaocen’s control by the end of March 1929. Within the span of a few weeks, an empire that had endured for centuries began to unravel, and as news of the Tuareg War of Independence spread throughout French holdings in Africa and beyond, many indigenous groups became determined to follow the Tuareg example.
Kaocen Ag Geda had, therefore, not just sparked a war secluded to northern Niger but had instead ignited the fires of revolution throughout all of Africa. From Morocco to the Congo, millions of Africans decided to break the chains of colonialism that had shackled their homeland and set about forging independent nations while the exiled European regimes remained distracted by the Great War. On April 1st, 1929, the exiled Moroccan nationalist Abd el-Krim, who had led a rebellion against Spanish rule in northern Morocco in the early 1920s, published the “Manifesto for the Independence of Morocco,” which demanded that the Moroccan people stand in solidarity with the Tuaregs and declare their independence from French colonial rule. Despite its attempted censorship by French authorities, the Manifesto quickly proliferated and nationalist protests throughout Morocco became rampant in the aftermath.
Surely enough, the young Sultan Mohammed V of Morocco, who both sympathized with the sentiments for independence and also feared that continued loyalty to the French Fourth Republic would lead to his country’s invasion by the Communards, declared the end of the Sultanate of Morocco’s status as a French protectorate on April 14th, 1929. While Ferdinand Foch refused to recognize Moroccan independence, Philippe Petain, who had no interest in wasting manpower in a war against Morocco, ordered the withdrawal of the French Army from the country two days after the Mohammed V’s declaration of independence, which in effect meant that Morocco was the first nation to achieve its freedom in the African Spring. A day after Petain’s withdrawal, Abd el-Krim returned to his homeland and was greeted by a large crowd of supporters in Fez, and on the same day the Third International issued a declaration recognizing the independence of the Sultanate of Morocco as an independent state.
Sultan Mohammed V of the Sultanate of Morocco.
Back in Niger, the Tuareg War of Independence continued to go well for the jihadists, whose forces united into the Tuareg National Army (TNA) on April 5th as a coherent military force under the direct command of Kaocen Ag Geda. From the Air Mountains, the TNA launched an eastward campaign towards the town of Dirkou, however, by this point further expansion was little more than for the sake of legitimizing the TNA’s reign over the Sahara Desert. This eastern territory was far less populated and important than the Air Mountains, and the bulk of Tuareg confederations and local government had declared their support for Kaocen’s jihad by early April 1929. The French Army had long since recognized the TNA as a force that could be ignored, but by this point it was too late. The fact of the matter was that northern Niger was now the domain of Kaocen Ag Geda and Petain’s forces had little hope of reclaiming this territory.
More importantly in the context of the Great War, the Tuareg War of Independence had divided Republican attention between the TNA and LGPF, which in turn left General Commander Souvarine with less troops to face down. The already fluid North African Front thus accelerated as Armure II tanks pushed into the Hoggar Mountains, with the Communard victory at the Battle of Tamanrasset on April 12th, 1929 marking the fall of the mountain range under total occupation by the French Commune. The conquest of the Hoggar Mountains gave the Commune direct access to the TNA-held territory in Niger, and Souvarine, who had become intrigued with the concept of breaking the French Fourth Republic from within, subsequently decided to deliver guns, ammunition, and even a handful of tanks to Kaocen’s army. To make circumstances even better for the TNA, Senussi followers in Italian Libya made their way across the border into Niger to fight alongside their brethren as volunteer forces and Mussolini’s Kingdom of Italy, which was far from a supporter of the Senussi but nonetheless wanted to see the Republicans be defeated, simply turned a blind eye to the influx of Libyan volunteer regiments.
Just when things seemingly couldn’t get any worse for the French Fourth Republic, the time had come for man who had led the Republicans since December 1923 to die. On the night of April 19th, 1929, President Ferdinand Foch peacefully passed away in his sleep. Having never ended his dictatorial rule over the French Republic, Foch left a controversial legacy behind him, even amongst supporters of the cause of the Entente. To some, Foch was a dedicated patriot who had saved what remained of French liberalism from annihilation at the hands of the Commune. To others, he was a tyrant who had in fact butchered liberal democracy and had been a woefully incompetent leader in both the armed forces and in politics. Ferdinand Foch was, however, one of the most influential figures in the entire Great War and, regardless of one’s opinion on him, it was apparent that big shoes would have to be filled in his absence.
According to the 1924 constitution of the French Fourth Republic, the position of the presidency was to be assumed by the vice president of France (a position resurrected from the days of the French Second Republic) should the incumbent president die. Given that Ferdinand Foch had suspended the constitution back in 1924 for a ten year-long period, the line of succession at this point was somewhat dubious, however, Foch had never explicitly stated his desire for an alternative successor, therefore meaning that the constitutional line of succession stayed in place and Vice President Albert Lebrun assumed the presidency of the French Fourth Republic. A career politician whose tenure in the French legislature went back well before the outbreak of the Great War, Lebrun had been selected as Foch’s vice president due to his history of working in the French civilian government and ability to take on more bureaucratic functions of the executive branch that Ferdinand Foch was not equipped to take on himself. In other words, Albert Lebrun had been intended less as a replacement for Foch and more as a politician who could navigate the responsibilities of the presidency that the military officer Foch lacked the experience to do himself.
While Albert Lebrun had served as the Minister of the Colonies and therefore was seemingly fit for the job of managing a government exiled to those very colonies, why Lebrun had been chosen as the vice president was no secret amongst the governing elite of the French Fourth Republic, and many believed that the circumstances the Republic found itself in demanded rule by a military man like Foch. There wasn’t really any debate over who this alternative president would be; Field Marshal Philippe Petain had been fighting in the Great War since the very beginning, followed and understood the affairs of the North African Front and Tuareg War of Independence better than any politician in Dakar, and was arguably the most highly respected figure in the entirety of the Fourth Republic. Once Petain publicly endorsed the proposal of him assuming the presidency, it was therefore only a matter of time until Albert Lebrun sat down at the negotiation table to surrender the presidency. Thus, after Lebrun agreed to resign under the condition that he would become the vice president yet again, Philippe Petain was inaugurated as the president of the French Fourth Republic in Dakar on May 3rd, 1929.
President Philippe Petain of the French Fourth Republic.
As his first act as president, Petain reinstated himself as field marshal of the French Army, thus meaning he simultaneously reigned over the government and armed forces of the Fourth Republic. While many were certain that Philippe Petain, the man who had led the Republican war effort against the French Commune for years, could save the Fourth Republic from the jaws of defeat, the opposite proved to be true. Petain personally held notably reactionary views and believed that a militant, autocratic, and centralized regime was necessary if the Republicans were to even come close to undoing their continued losses at the hands of the LPGF. This led the new president to decree the National Unification Act on May 10th, 1929, which placed all French colonies under the control of the exiled metropolitan government, dissolved all internal colonial administrations, and effectively instituted a policy of direct rule from Dakar.
The National Unification Act was a slap in the face for many, including politicians who had hoped that the death of Ferdinand Foch meant that the restoration of the liberal democratic constitution of the Fourth Republic was in sight. Among these politicians was Governor Felix Eboue of the Ubangi-Shari, an internal colony of French Equatorial Africa. The grandson of slaves, Eboue, who had served as the governor of Ubangi-Shari since his appointment to the position in 1923, was a unique figure in the government of the French Fourth Republic. Eboue had spent much of his gubernatorial career pushing for a reduction in the exploitation of colonial residents through a number of programs, including support for traditional African leaders and cultural practices, the improvement of working conditions, the provision of admittedly limited welfare, and pushes towards Ubangi-Shari being democratized and given representation in the government of the French Republic.
Of course, Ferdinand Foch’s suspension of the constitution of the French Fourth Republic directly contradicted Felix Eboue’s goals, but the governor nonetheless continued his work of reform wherever he could while Foch and his lackeys focused their attention on combating the French Commune. After the death of Ferdinand Foch in 1929, Governor Eboue pushed for the end of the constitutional suspension and argued that the time had come for liberal democracy to be extended to all who were ruled over by the Fourth Republic, but this was obviously not a goal shared with President Philippe Petain. The passage of the National Unification Act not only put Eboue out of a job, but dissolved the colonial government of Ubangi-Shari as a whole, and by extension dissolved the numerous programs implemented by Eboue’s governorship. Infuriated by what he viewed as a violation of the rights of the people of Ubangi-Shari, Felix Eboue refused to recognize the dissolution of the colony and continued to reign as its de facto governor, a rule that was recognized and therefore legitimized by local leadership that Eboue had spent much of his career cultivating positive relationships with.
Petain would not tolerate Eboue’s act of rebellion and dispatched a brigade of the French Army to arrest the governor and place the Ubangi-Shari capital of Bangui under Dakar’s jackboot, however, this proved to be a critical mistake. Local regiments supportive of Felix Eboue would engage with Petain’s dispatch at N’Dele on May 17th, thus blocking the brigade from progressing any further south. Once news of the Battle of N’Dele arrived in Bangui, Eboue became convinced that the protection of the rights of Ubangi-Shari was only possible through the colony’s independence as a sovereign republic. Therefore, as makeshift militias and defected soldiers clashed with the forces of the French Fourth Republic, Governor Eboue hastily assembled a conference of both indigenous and loyal colonial leaders to write the Declaration of Independence of the Ubangi-Shari Republic, a document that essentially reiterated the Declaration of the Rights of Man, argued that the rights of the Ubangi-Shari people were being violated, and that the only solution was the immediate secession of the colonial government. Thus, with the declaration’s ratification on May 21st, 1929, the Ubangi-Shari Republic was born, with Felix Eboue being recognized as the president of the fledgling state’s provisional government.
President Felix Eboue of the Ubangi-Shari Republic.
While Eboue anticipated that he would have to fight a war of independence against the French Fourth Republic in a similar vein to the TNA and thus quickly formed the National Revolutionary Army (NRA), no such engagement would ever really arrive. The brigade that Philippe Petain had initially sent was decisively defeated at the Battle of Fort Archambault on May 30th, 1929, but more importantly, the Ubangi-Shari declaration of independence sent shockwaves throughout what had once been French Equatorial Africa. To the north of Ubangi-Shari, the streets of Fort Lamy erupted into protest in late May 1929 as the local Sara people demanded their freedom from French rule. Inhabitants of the southern reaches of the colony of Chad prior to the National Unification Act, the Sara had developed a common national identity ironically due to common treatment and oppression by France, and Eboue’s declaration of independence had encouraged locals to similarly rise up and demand their own free republic.
The Sara protests soon extended out beyond Fort Lamy and consumed much of southern Chad, with just about all major cities in the region eventually having constant rallies for liberation. The Sara independence movement proved to be essential in preventing the French Army from continuing its war against Ubangi-Shari due to many protesters opting to stand in solidarity with Felix Eboue’s fledgling republic via blockading roadways used by military forces and sabotaging local army installations. These confrontations with the Republican armed forces caused local forces loyal to Dakar to engage with protesters, thus turning many of the Sara protests into clashes between French Army troops and local freedom fighters, but the expressed solidarity towards the Ubangi-Shari Republic caused Felix Eboue, who was already supportive of the formation of liberal democratic regimes throughout all of French Equatorial Africa, to deploy the NRA into Chad with the intent of forming an independent Sara state. With the French overwhelmed by local opposition and increasingly cut off from supply lines into Chad due to the surrounding rebellions, the NRA faced very little resistance to its campaign, and once the Ubangi-Shari occupation of southern Chad was consolidated, Felix Eboue formed the Republic of Tchad out of the aforementioned occupied territory on June 9th, 1929.
To the south of Tchad and Ubangi-Shari, the African Spring spread to the French Congo, where the young socialist Jacques Opangault organized pro-independence protests akin to those of the Sara throughout May 1929. Unlike Ubangi-Chari and Chad, however, there was a local ruler in the Congo who stood opposed to this growing independence movement and, importantly, was popular amongst locals. This ruler was Queen Ngalifourou of the Mbe Kingdom, a political and spiritual leader who had collaborated with the French for decades, going back as far as the establishment of French colonial rule over the Middle Congo in 1880. In order to maintain her rule and good relations with the French imperialists, Ngalifourou mobilized local military forces to confront Opangault’s ceaseless protests in Brazzaville, however, the arrival of armed forces escalated into increased tensions between protesters and supporters of the colonial regime until a deployment of soldiers fired upon marching protesters on June 2nd, 1929. Within minutes, Brazzaville descended into disorganized violence as both sides clashed with each other in the streets.
By the end of the day, the French Army and paramilitaries loyal to Ngalifourou had quellled the Brazzaville Riots and had arrested a number of pro-independence sympathizers, however, Jacques Opangault had managed to evade capture, subsequently fleeing up north to Fort Rousset. It was here that Opangault quickly published a manifesto on June 7th, 1929 urging his supporters to rise up in armed resistance against the French Fourth Republic and her cronies in order to establish an independent Congolese state. Surely enough, much of the French Congo was consumed in the fires of an armed rebellion no more than a week after the publication of Opangault’s manifesto, with Fort Rousset serving as the de facto headquarters of this uprising. Knowing that Dakar was already overwhelmed with a number of military engagements to her north, Ngalifourou oversaw the formation of the Congolese Protection Army (CPA) on June 10th as a volunteer militia intended to combat Jacques Opangault’s followers, who organized into the African People’s Liberation Army (APLA) four days later.
As the French Congo descended into what was effectively a civil war between Ngalifourou and Opangault, the neighboring powers struggled to provide aid to their preferred sides. The French Fourth Republic continued to face problems regarding overextension, which meant that deploying forces on behalf of the CPA was barely even a priority, whereas the pro-APLA Ubangi-Shari was landlocked from providing aid to its allies due to the German Government-in-Exile standing in the way with control over the Neukamerun territory. Speaking of which, the Middle Congolese Civil War served as an opportunity for the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II to seize additional French territory that bordered the Congo River, with this swath of land surrounded by Neukamerun being annexed in mid-June 1929 with very little resistance. Nonetheless, both Dakar and Bangui managed to deploy some resources to their preferred factions in the Middle Congolese Civil War, which gradually became a messy guerrilla war where the CPA was uprooted from the APLA-dominant territory in the north.
Congolese Protection Army soldiers fighting in the Middle Congolese Civil War, circa July 1929.
Of course, during the entirety of the beginning of the African Spring, the French Fourth Republic was still fighting a war against the French Commune and losing. As the Republican grip over its colonies disintegrated and forces fighting on the North African Front were dispatched elsewhere, General Commander Boris Souvarine rushed through the Sahara Desert. All of French Algeria was under the control of the Communards by the conclusion of April 1929, and from here Souvarine pursued an offensive into French Sudan with the intent of reaching the Niger River. For all intents and purposes, Operation Delescluze had succeeded spectacularly by this point, and with the Republican control over its colonial subjects crumbling each and every single day, the final defeat of the French Fourth Republic seemed to be little more than a cakewalk to Timbuktu.
From southern Algeria, Souvarine led the LGPF towards the town of Kidal, which fell to the onslaught of Communard tanks on May 7th, 1929 and subsequently served as a base of operations for continued incursions into French West Africa. The ascendancy of Philippe Petain to the presidency of the French Fourth Republic soon resulted in an uptick in Republican conscription to fight on the North African Front, which did slow down the LGPF’s offensive out of the Sahara Desert, however, as the African Spring spread to French Equatorial Africa, large-scale conscription became increasingly unenforceable while the French Army found itself increasingly overextended between combating both the Communards and internal rebellions. Meanwhile, the TNA, which had managed to seize control of the entirety of northern Niger by mid-May 1929, pushed into northern Chad, thus laying the groundwork for a unified state in the eastern Sahara.
Surely enough, after the TNA emerged victorious at the Battle of Fada on June 11th, all Equatorial African territory to the north of the Republic of Tchad was under the de facto control of Kaocen Ag Geda. Following this victory, Kaocen returned to Agadez, where he convened with leaders loyal to the TNA’s cause with the intent of finally forming an independent Tuareg state. With the support of numerous Tuareg confederations and the leadership of the Senussi religious order, the Tuareg Sultanate was therefore proclaimed on June 18th, 1929 with Kaocen crowned as its first sultan. The French Fourth Republic continued to fight against the Tuareg Sultanate following its formation, but by this point the fate of Dakar’s control over the eastern Sahara had been sealed. The Third International, which had been aiding the TNA throughout the entirety of the Tuareg War of Independence, was quick to recognize the independence of Targa, followed by a cautious recognition by the Kingdom of Italy and later her fellow Central Powers.
This all brings us to the final days of the North African Front. From Kidal, the LGPF scaled down to Anefis, which fell on May 19th, then down to Tabrichat, which fell on June 1st, and then down to Tarkint, which fell on June 12th. Republican forces made sure to make the southward offensive of the Communards to be as painful as possible, but anyone could see the writing on the wall at this point. The French Fourth Republic had lost the Great War, and all it needed was one final defeat to be pushed into capitulation. This defeat came in late June 1929 when General Commander Boris Souvarine laid siege to the city of Gao. The Republicans took advantage of the fact that foudreguerre was impractical in an urban setting to hold back the LGPF for as long as possible, but a Communard was all but inevitable at this point. After five brutal days of combat, the French Army was expelled across the Niger River from Goa on June 30th, 1929.
LGPF soldiers marching through Gao, circa June 1929.
While President Philippe Petain had once hoped that he could hold out until the Entente powers could save the fate of his decaying junta, the decisive destruction of Republican forces at the Battle of Gao and subsequent expulsion of any Republican military presence from territory to the north of the Niger River indicated to the old general-turned-autocrat that Dakar would fall before the Brazilians were able to dispatch a large expeditionary force on the North African Front. Republican generals on the frontline were frantically sending telegrams to Dakar informing their president that the Fourth Republic simply did not have the capacity to continue fighting the Communards for much longer. Even when putting aside the slew of defeats in the Great War, the once-mighty French colonial empire was in ruins. Equatorial Africa was almost completely free of French rule, the Moroccans had left the sinking ship with little protest from Dakar, and more rebellions were bound to erupt from the African Spring. Therefore, in order to preserve what remained of the French Fourth Republic, Philippe Petain sent a telegraph to Boris Souvarine offering an armistice between the belligerent forces, which was subsequently agreed to and put into effect by the afternoon of July 3rd, 1929. By the end of the day, all combat on the North African Front had come to an end and soldiers of the LGPF emerged from their barricades in celebration of a victory over eight years in the making.
The French Fourth Republic had finally been vanquished in the Great War.
Celebrations over the July Ceasefire in the streets of Lumiere.
Following the surrender of the Republicans, representatives from both Dakar and Lumier arrived in Bamako to negotiate a peace treaty. Given that the French Republic had not unconditionally surrendered, the Treaty of Bamako would not result in the incorporation of all Republican territory into the French Commune, however, the Republicans would definitely receive the short end of the stick. The independence of Morocco, Targa, Ubangi-Shari, and Tchad would have to be recognized by Dakar, although no agreement could be reached over the Middle Congolese Civil War, which both sides were convinced they could win. With regards to territorial exchanges between the Republic and the Commune, northern Algeria was annexed directly into the French Commune while the Sahara Desert, which was almost completely under the occupation of the LGPF, was divided into two autonomous regions akin to Brittany, Flanders, and Luxembourg, with the Tamazight and Mauritanian autonomous republics being formed to administrate the region.
With neither side in a financially stable position after years of combat, the Treaty of Bamako included no reparations, thus making the vast majority of its contents purely territorial. The treaty did, however, mandate that no signatories of the treaty were allowed to go to war with each other within the next twenty years, thus securing peace between the two Frances for the time being. The Treaty of Dakar was ratified on July 22nd, 1929, and for many it marked the apparent beginning of the end for the Entente. After almost two decades of combat, the time was coming for the alliance as a whole to set down at the negotiation table with the Central Powers and Third International. After all, the African Spring was not yet over. The Loyalists and the Brazilians continued to fight on the Atlantic Front, but throughout British holdings in Africa, there were growing calls to imitate the revolutions that had swept through French Equatorial Africa. Of course, the Royalists had bigger concerns at the time than potential uprisings in colonial holdings.
It was time for the Atlantic Front to conclude.
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Hello everyone! After taking way too long to write, the latest update is finally here! As promised, this update will conclude all of Phase Two, however, you may have noticed that Chapter Eleven doesn't do that, and this because the chapter was so large that I had to split it up into two parts in order to make sure the whole thing fit into AH.com's word count. This means that Chapter Twelve will becoming out tomorrow and will wrap up all of Phase Two.
I can't you thank you all enough for your patience while I was working on this. Even if it gets a bit crazy at times, this has been a really fun update to write, so hopefully it's just as entertaining for y'all to read and is well worth the wait.
I can't you thank you all enough for your patience while I was working on this. Even if it gets a bit crazy at times, this has been a really fun update to write, so hopefully it's just as entertaining for y'all to read and is well worth the wait.
Yessss, so happy to see this updated. And a double-feature, no less! I'll save my more detailed reactions for after I read the back half, but goddamn the Heilsreich is hanging on to the bitter end, and it's so satisfying to see Africa blow up in the imperialists' faces. I'll also admit it I had completely forgotten Wilhelm II was hanging on in colonial exile, so seeing him pop up to snag a bit of French Congolese territory was amusing, if only to see how marginal one of the most powerful players in Phase I had become.
If peace soon comes in the world, I could confidently say that much of French West Africa would do better than they have did IOTL. Of course, you must have had something else in mind that would extend the war up until the 40's, so I'll not definitely draw conclusions from this. After all, the Syndie-Soviet split could still go hot, America could still have its troubles, and the remaining governments in the peripheries, the Global South, and Asia could duke the war for themselves. That's all saying nothing of the Third Internationale getting war-weary themselves and regions collapsing into anarchy not too dissimilar to what happened in Somalia IOTL, complete with pirates and brigands.
Pray tell though, with Germany getting Syria'd by both the Indo-Soviets and the Heilsreich, let alone doing this meatgrinder for more than fourteen years now (think of Afghanistan in 2005), I wonder if the Third Phase would not involve Northern Europe as much considering that the socialist agitation, let alone war-weariness and defeatism still supposedly suppressed by the secret police becomes too much to be ignorable. For one and all their casualties, the Third Internationale is poised to dominate Germany's airs especially after they manage to bomb the rest of Central Germany.
Simply put, there won't be much of Central and Western Europe to fight for, and if the Soviets do decide to invade the rest of the Peninsula, it will only turn the region pushed to the point of where Middle East had been IOTL into Afghanistan. France may have been broken in its back and its political gains undone, and its industries may have collapsed entirely, but you'll still had pissed off people, one dishing it out from the Ardennes and Alps, and the other from the Great European Plain wondering about the pointlessness of it all.
I could only resist so much commenting this piece from the Gamerwelt describing the situation in Germany and Europe considering where it has come right now.
Also, the OG Entente has definitely collapsed and must have been virtually unrecognisable at this point, what with the Brazilians and all. Even if His Majesty's government managed to convince the rest of the realms about the merits of conducting the war, I don't literally know how they could jump the shark furthermore and retake whatever they've lost, let alone doing offensives on other fronts which unlike the war-happy Brazillians, are lacking in both material and personnel. Maintaining their rule on Western India is a miracle enough thanks to Brazil's intervention, which - mind ya - has a fascist albeit opportunistic government.
Pray tell though, with Germany getting Syria'd by both the Indo-Soviets and the Heilsreich, let alone doing this meatgrinder for more than fourteen years now (think of Afghanistan in 2005), I wonder if the Third Phase would not involve Northern Europe as much considering that the socialist agitation, let alone war-weariness and defeatism still supposedly suppressed by the secret police becomes too much to be ignorable. For one and all their casualties, the Third Internationale is poised to dominate Germany's airs especially after they manage to bomb the rest of Central Germany.
Simply put, there won't be much of Central and Western Europe to fight for, and if the Soviets do decide to invade the rest of the Peninsula, it will only turn the region pushed to the point of where Middle East had been IOTL into Afghanistan. France may have been broken in its back and its political gains undone, and its industries may have collapsed entirely, but you'll still had pissed off people, one dishing it out from the Ardennes and Alps, and the other from the Great European Plain wondering about the pointlessness of it all.
I could only resist so much commenting this piece from the Gamerwelt describing the situation in Germany and Europe considering where it has come right now.
Also, the OG Entente has definitely collapsed and must have been virtually unrecognisable at this point, what with the Brazilians and all. Even if His Majesty's government managed to convince the rest of the realms about the merits of conducting the war, I don't literally know how they could jump the shark furthermore and retake whatever they've lost, let alone doing offensives on other fronts which unlike the war-happy Brazillians, are lacking in both material and personnel. Maintaining their rule on Western India is a miracle enough thanks to Brazil's intervention, which - mind ya - has a fascist albeit opportunistic government.
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Questions:
1. So have both sides standardized equipment and vehicles or is it a collection of various designs?
2. Are women serving in any of the militaries in a front line or logistical role? What about women in the industrial workforce?
3. Will both sides try to industrialize areas away from the frontlines out of bomber range?
1. So have both sides standardized equipment and vehicles or is it a collection of various designs?
2. Are women serving in any of the militaries in a front line or logistical role? What about women in the industrial workforce?
3. Will both sides try to industrialize areas away from the frontlines out of bomber range?
The battle of Berlin is truly a nightmare to rival OTL Stalingrad. The most intense fighting yet, with the fate of the war hinging on it. And it's not just Berlin- it seems the fighting has spread over a large chunk of Brandenburg. The genie of gas warfare has been let out of the bottle, and perhaps may not be returned there for the duration of the war. More than anything else, this is truly a man-made hell. It seems quite the stalemate though, and I would not be surprised if it was broken by the French showing off their mobile warfare power and pushing an armored spearhead to the rear of the German flanks.
I'm curious what happened to the Republican navy: Was any of it captured, or did what didn't sink flee through Gibraltar or Suez?
Oh wow, Félix Éboué seems a truly fascinating figure- a black man, grandson of slaves, who manages to become a colonial governor and show genuine benevolence in improving the native's conditions. I would like to know what sources you used for information about this lad, because wikipedia is very sparse as to what his administration of Ubangi Shari was like.
And on the other hand, we have Philippe Petain. Can't do shit without cocking things up can he? In a way, Eboue and Petain hold two opposite views on the relationship between European civilization and the black man: Eboue sees Europeans serving as a guiding hand to introduce infrastructure and the rights of man while preserving the essence of local customs, while Petain sees the blacks as eternally subjugated servants. Had all France held Felix Eboue's attitudes, perhaps the natives could have been rallied against the "godless communists". While we'll never know how open to cooperation Albert Lebrun would have been, we can say for sure that Petain's authoritarianism and racism is what doomed France. Heh, the whole "attempt direct rule over everything ->oh god everything is on fire" thing reminds me of the collapse of Mittelafrika in Kaiserreich.
I must say that overall this segment on Africa seems very well done, though I do have to question the logistics of the Communards getting their tanks over the Sahara Desert. And I am curious what the impact on Germany-In-Exile's land grab will be on relationships between them and the entente. And as a final note, I think it is possible that there will be conflict in the future between France and the newly independent states. A lot of them are rather traditionally-minded and will likely not be very open to the social changes the red Communards are likely to advocate.
So, the fratricidal war between the two Frances finally concludes. At this point, the Republic of France is more aptly called the Military Dictatorship of Senegal, Madagascar, and Polynesia. I imagine that the house of Windsor and Brazil will step in to make sure it does not collapse completely, but this is quite the humiliation. As for the Atlantic front, I am sure that will be hellish, but it will be a while before ground combat can begin in earnest. I'm sure that until then the Imperials and Brazilians will eagerly get their troops "practice" fighting the people of Africa. These initial uprisings started too fast to get too nasty, but once Winston "gas the uncivilized tribes" Churchill gets to unleash air power things will become very nasty. Much as the horrors of gas drift over Europe, so too will they terrorize the dark continent.
Now, a few possible typos:
Ah, indeed. Soldiers from the ex-colonies will go well to mitigating the internationale's manpower crisis, and it will allow a few more men to be kept back working the assembly lines- this is very much a war of material. It would have been cool if the soldiers sent to Algeria were from Indochina, to get revenge on their former colonial masters. But I guess they would not be well-suited to the Algerian terrain. Though, as things drag on this will grow the influence of India and Indochina, since they have most of the soldiers. Could cause tension later on.
I doubt infrastructure in the black see will play a huge roll immediately- naval infrastructures and large ships take a long time to build, and the war against Germany seems set to end soon. Russia has historically been land-focused and not a greatly competent naval power. But I do suppose that once Germany is defeated Russia will want to be prepared for hostilities coming from elsewhere, or a potential violent split with the French, so the navy won't be without reason.
I'm curious what happened to the Republican navy: Was any of it captured, or did what didn't sink flee through Gibraltar or Suez?
Oh wow, Félix Éboué seems a truly fascinating figure- a black man, grandson of slaves, who manages to become a colonial governor and show genuine benevolence in improving the native's conditions. I would like to know what sources you used for information about this lad, because wikipedia is very sparse as to what his administration of Ubangi Shari was like.
And on the other hand, we have Philippe Petain. Can't do shit without cocking things up can he? In a way, Eboue and Petain hold two opposite views on the relationship between European civilization and the black man: Eboue sees Europeans serving as a guiding hand to introduce infrastructure and the rights of man while preserving the essence of local customs, while Petain sees the blacks as eternally subjugated servants. Had all France held Felix Eboue's attitudes, perhaps the natives could have been rallied against the "godless communists". While we'll never know how open to cooperation Albert Lebrun would have been, we can say for sure that Petain's authoritarianism and racism is what doomed France. Heh, the whole "attempt direct rule over everything ->oh god everything is on fire" thing reminds me of the collapse of Mittelafrika in Kaiserreich.
I must say that overall this segment on Africa seems very well done, though I do have to question the logistics of the Communards getting their tanks over the Sahara Desert. And I am curious what the impact on Germany-In-Exile's land grab will be on relationships between them and the entente. And as a final note, I think it is possible that there will be conflict in the future between France and the newly independent states. A lot of them are rather traditionally-minded and will likely not be very open to the social changes the red Communards are likely to advocate.
So, the fratricidal war between the two Frances finally concludes. At this point, the Republic of France is more aptly called the Military Dictatorship of Senegal, Madagascar, and Polynesia. I imagine that the house of Windsor and Brazil will step in to make sure it does not collapse completely, but this is quite the humiliation. As for the Atlantic front, I am sure that will be hellish, but it will be a while before ground combat can begin in earnest. I'm sure that until then the Imperials and Brazilians will eagerly get their troops "practice" fighting the people of Africa. These initial uprisings started too fast to get too nasty, but once Winston "gas the uncivilized tribes" Churchill gets to unleash air power things will become very nasty. Much as the horrors of gas drift over Europe, so too will they terrorize the dark continent.
Ah, such optimism, to be so tragically dashed. Though, I do suspect that Phase 3 of the great war will give at least some respite to Europe, with much of the fighting breaking out elsewhere. Including the hinted-at implosion of the United States.
Now, a few possible typos:
Shouldn't this be "the restoration of the liberal democratic constitution"?
Shouldn't 1929 be the date?
I'm glad to see that you're happy for the update! And yeah, Wilhelm II's still around, but the German Empire is very much an irrelevant force at this point. My hope is that I'll be able to make sure they have some more appearances in chapters regarding neutral countries, however, there clearly isn't going to be a reclamation of Germany or anything.
I can't get into stuff regarding how the Great War's going to turn out for spoiler reasons, but what I will say is that the plan for now is that, at the very least, central Africa will do better than OTL, at least for the time being. Ubangi-Shari is in a particularly good spot at the moment and isn't on track to wind up like the CAR of OTL. The French Congo is definitely a bit more of a mess though.
Yeah, this is a pretty apt description of what the frontlines in Europe are like at the moment. Places like Belgium and Poland are particularly devastated due to the countries constantly being flipped back and forth between enemy combatants.
That's fair. The next chapter will focus pretty decently on the Entente and the Windsor realms in particular, but yeah, at this point the Entente in its current state is very different from the alliance that entered the Great War back in 1914. What was once the British Empire is also on very shaky grounds.
Yep, at least when it comes to the sheer amount of bloodshed, Berlin is very much the "Stalingrad" of the TL, just with chemical warfare thrown into the mix. As for how the stalemate is broken, that will be answered in Part Two.
My mindset with why the Indochinese didn't go to France was that a government that just won its independence from the French wouldn't be all that enthusiastic about fighting a war essentially on the behalf of a different French government (even if this one is their ally), but I do like the idea of Indochina finally getting its revenge on the colonial government. On the other hand, you're right to point out that an army most-well suited to guerrilla warfare in the jungle probably wouldn't perform all that well in a desert.
A good chunk of it was captured, however, what remained has fled down to West Africa. Given that the North African Front didn't really involve any naval combat, the French Navy has basically been patrolling around the colonies and shipping aid to the Congolese Protection Army.
He's definitely one of the cooler guys that I got to include in this chapter, and I was happy I stumbled across him. As for where I got the information on him, I just used Wikipedia and ran with the assumption that the policies he had in Chad during the 1940s would be similar in Ubangi-Shari at this point.
Yeah, Petain was more or less the straw who broke the camel's back here. He definitely inherited a burning mess from Foch and Lebrun, but they weren't the ones who abolished colonial autonomy and caused France to lose most of Equatorial Africa within a handful of months. With that being said, his reputation as the leader of the Republican war effort during the Great War means that he's still a relatively popular figure, at least amongst the Republican elite and its citizens who have immigrated from Europe.
Thanks, I'm glad that you liked the Africa segment! As for the tank logistics, I'm mostly basing stuff off of similar campaigns in North Africa during WWII, but you're right to point out that pushing that much mechanized infantry through the Sahara is a bit of a challenge, it just really helped that the Republicans were more or less done for by this point and just had to be uprooted from some outposts throughout the desert. German relations with the Entente are fine for the time being, given that both sides have bigger things to worry about. With regards to relations between the newly independent African states and the French Commune, you'll just have to wait and see, although I will say that Eboue is far from a socialist or anything.
Let's just say that the African Spring is far from over with. I won't be able to get too much into what it will look like outside of Equatorial Africa in Chapter Twelve, but it should get some attention in Phase Three and will definitely be a pretty chaotic situation in many places. There's a reason the name is a reference to the Arab Spring!
Thanks for pointing these out! I'll be sure to correct them ASAP.
It's a collection of various designs, but broadly speaking, Russian equipment is based off Soviet equipment from OTL, Communard equipment is based off of 1930s German equipment from OTL, and German equipment is loosely based off of a mix of British and German equipment from OTL. I haven't really developed much in the way of equipment and vehicles used by other nations yet, although much of the Third International generally just imports designs from Russia.
This will come up a bit in Chapter 12, but as of now, all Third International militaries let women serve in the same positions within militaries as men, and the French Commune has actually introduced conscription for women in order to respond to its manpower issues. The Central Powers and Entente are both more socially conservative and therefore have not yet permitted women to join the armed forces, however, women play a prominent role in the industrial workforce of all belligerent nations at this point, given that most young men are either off fighting in the Great War or have already been killed by it.
Hmm... that's a good question, and TBH not really one that I've put a lot of thought into. I'd imagine that there's an incentive to locate factories away from the frontlines for a number of reasons, but there have yet to be any projects specifically intended to build up industrial infrastructure away from bombers. It's worth keeping in mind that, at least in Great Britain, France, and Ireland, all of those nations were engaged until civil wars up until a few years ago, so there weren't really a lot of spaces that were safe from the Great War at that point. I do really like the idea of the Soviet Republic investing heavily in developing Siberia going forward and Italy trying to turn its African colonies into industrial areas secluded from the Great War, so this is definitely a topic I'll keep in mind going forward.
Chapter Twelve: Defend of Die - Part Two
Chapter XII: Defend or Die - Part Two
“On her dominions the sun never sets.”
-Excerpt from the Caledonian Mercury, circa 1821.
Warships of the Royal Navy patrolling the coastline of Newfoundland, circa March 1928.
If there was one member of the Third International that could say it was not winning the Great War by the end of Phase Two, it was the Workers’ Commonwealth. The Loyalist inheritance of the bulk of the Royal Navy following the House of Windsor's expulsion from Great Britain put the Empire of America at a clear advantage on the Atlantic Front, and the intervention of the rapidly Second Empire of Brazil on behalf of the Entente resulted in even more ships making their way to the maritime battles of the North Atlantic to clash with the Workers’ Revolutionary Navy. The Commonwealth actually had a population comparable to that of Brazil, however, much of the British population had been depleted by years of warfare, not to mention that the Commonwealth armed forces were fighting a two-front war, whereas the Brazilian war machine had only just awoken and essentially only had one frontline to focus on following the ratification of the Treaty of Karachi.
This was not, however, to say that the Workers’ Commonwealth was doomed. While it had a substantially smaller naval force than the Loyalists, Comrade Protector Albert Inkpin made sure to undertake a mass naval buildup program with the passage of the Maritime Production Act circa June 1927, which set quotas for industrial unions to produce naval wartime equipment and funded said unions to ensure that the Commonwealth’s manufacturing industry would be able to construct a navy that could rival the might of the Loyalists. While the Empire of America was more focused with sustaining the size of the Royal Navy than any large-scale naval production program, the Brazilians similarly funded corporations to produce a large navy through a process similar to the Great Leap Forward, where workers were allocated over to Brazil’s kleptocrats in order to meet production quotas in brutal working conditions. This arms race between the Workers’ Commonwealth and the Second Empire of Brazil was just as pivotal of an element of the Atlantic Front as the clashes fought on the waves, with these programs on the homefront determining who had the capacity to wage war upon the ocean to begin with.
Even with the passage of the Maritime Production Act, the Commonwealth struggled to catch up in quantity to the Entente, although for the time being it did maintain the defense of the British Isles from any potential invasion. Over time, the Entente was slowly but surely pushing east on the Atlantic Front, having completely uprooted the WRN from all waters west of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge by the dawn of 1929. By this point, the Atlantic Front spanned as far east as the outskirts of the Rockall Plateau, which laid to the northwest of Ireland, although this was admittedly an area where the Workers’ Commonwealth was dominant due to its proximity to Great Britain. Despite the fact that the Commonwealth was losing the Atlantic Front for the time being, there was a growing fear amongst Entente tacticians that the rapid output of naval equipment occurring as a consequence of the Maritime Production Act meant that the WRN’s size would soon overcome that of the Royal Navy, with some pessimistic predictions arguing that this would occur by 1931.
The speculation that the WRN would gradually eclipse the Royal Navy, as well as the apparent Third International victories on the Eastern and Western fronts of mainland Europe made the Entente’s push towards the British Isles a race against the clock. The need for a quick push towards Great Britain led the Entente to consider emphasizing new technologies and strategies for the Atlantic Front, with the Empire of America ramping up the production of planes and aircraft carriers to counter the dominance of the WDAF in the sky. The Brazilians were able to contribute to this emphasis on aerial warfare by transferring dispatches of the Imperial Brazilian Air Force previously fighting on the South Asian Front to the Atlantic, however, the Imperial Brazilian Navy also began pursuing the development of submarine technology with the hope that gaining the upper hand with such watercraft would be able to punch a hole in Commonwealth defenses above the Rockall Plateau. In order to development as many submarines as quickly as quickly as possible, the IBN opted to copy the designs of captured German U-boats as opposed to to creating their own new line of submarines, and Brazil’s submarine fleet was thus filled with Type UB IIIs, Type U 19s, and Type UE IIs by May 1929.
The S-7 Fonseca of the Imperial Brazilian Navy prior to leaving Belem, circa April 1929.
The change in strategy by the Entente proved to be crucial in ending the stagnation on the Atlantic Front. The bolstering in the Loyalist aerial capacity deterred WDAF bombardment campaigns, thus taking a knife to the biggest advantage held by the Commonwealth against her reactionary enemies. Meanwhile, the IBN’s submarine armament program gave the Entente dominance in subaquatic warfare, an area that the Workers’ Commonwealth had barely invested in at all. Throughout the spring of 19289 the Brazilians waged a brutal campaign against the WRN by picking apart naval defenses from below the waves while the Royal Air Force defended submarine campaigns from above. This allowed for the Entente to begin a rapid offensive towards Scotland as Commonwealth naval defenses collapsed. Both the Rockall Plateau and Rockall Basin were under the decisive control of Entente forces by the end of May 1929, which meant that combat moved to the area just to the north of Ireland and to the west of Scotland.
Now that the coastline of Great Britain was within reach, the biggest challenge for the Entente was how to accomplish an invasion of the island of Great Britain, something that had not successfully been done since 1066 at the hands of William the Conqueror. Well over eight hundred years had passed since William had cemented his place in history, and now the armed forces of the Empire of America and Second Empire of Brazil sought to conduct a conquest that few in human history had managed to pull off. Even with the superior naval forces, any operation to reclaim Great Britain would be incredibly difficult and was undeniably destined to become one of the most brutal engagements of the entire Great War, not to mention a war that the Entente was by no means guaranteed to win.
The leadership of the Loyalists and Brazilians would convene at the Kingston Conference in Jamaica circa late May 1929 to design a plan for how to go about invading Great Britain. A handful of Brazilian generals argued in favor of attacking the less well-armed Ireland first and subsequently launching an invasion along the western British coastline, however, this proposal was quickly shot down by Loyalist officers. To them, bringing the Workers’ Commonwealth to its knees before any other engagements in Europe was born less from any sort of tactical advantage and more from the deep desire to conquer Great Britain and restore the Union Jack to the skies of London. Therefore, the Brazilians were forced into pursuing a plan with more symbolic importance rather than strategic feasibility, which led the Kingston Conference to draft up plans for an amphibious assault of Scotland.
After days of planning and debate, the Kingston Conference ultimately crafted what became known as Operation Poseidon. The Royal Navy and Imperial Brazilian Navy were to first lay siege to the southern Hebrides to the west of the Scottish mainland, thus setting up a launching pad to invade Scotland via setting up a beachhead at Oban in what was to be the largest seaborne invasion in world history. With luck, Operation Poseidon would overwhelm Commonwealth defenses and the Union Jack would be flying over Glasgow by the end of June. Of course, the Workers’ Commonwealth could foresee that an attack on Scotland was on the horizon and therefore prepared for the coming storm. The Workers Revolutionary Navy was completely concentrated on the Atlantic Front, naval mines were deployed along the Scottish coastline, and divisions of the Workers’ Model Army were recalled from the Western Front to defend their homeland.
On June 12th, 1929, the time had finally come for Operation Poseidon to begin. Led by Admiral David Beatty, the Royal Navy and IBN approached the sparsely populated island of Colonsay, which was occupied by only a handful of WMA soldiers, and began to shell its limited defenses. Loyalist light bombers were launched from aircraft carriers to decimate the island’s defenses from above, although the WDAF soon rushed to the defense of its comrades on Colonsay. Despite this, however, the Loyalists gradually managed to push their way towards the island, and the Royal Navy eventually reached Kiloran Bay on Colonsay’s north, where landing craft were eventually deployed. The men of the Imperial American Army (IAA) that were to land at Kiloran Bay were put under the command of General Winston Churchill, who had craved a return to Great Britain for the last three years. On the night of June 12th, General Churchill would set foot on European land yet again as the IAA stormed Kiloran Bay. Within the next hour, the Entente had uprooted WMA forces from Colonsay altogether, which was to become the fortress from which the full might of the Loyalists and Brazilians would be unleashed upon the Workers’ Commonwealth.
Scotland would soon burn.
WMA soldiers manning coastal defenses on the Isle of Mull, circa June 1929.
For the next few days, the Entente focused on amassing its arsenal in the southern Hebrides in preparation for the oncoming naval landings at Oban. The small island of Oronsay to the south of Colonsay was captured on June 14th, but otherwise there were no offensives conducted by either side for the next few days. There was just a continuous influx of infantry to northern Scotland, and an eerie silence descended upon the city of Oban and the surrounding area as the regional inhabitants dreaded the inevitable bloodshed that would soak their homelands. Continuous gunfire and explosions upon the waves of the Atlantic Ocean continuously pierced this silence through both day and night. General John Maclean, the Crimson Clydesider himself, returned from the Western Front in France on June 15th to oversee Commonwealth defenses against the Entente, but the famed military officer recognized that he was doomed to fight an uphill battle. The Loyalists and Brazilians had amassed the single largest naval invasion fleet just off the shores of Scotland, and the silhouette of hundreds of warships could be seen from the coastline of Oban.
On the midnight of June 19th, 1929, a week after the Battle of Colonsay, General Winston Churchill gave the go-ahead to finally begin the much-anticipated invasion of Scotland. As the fateful day began, the residents of the Oban Commune were jolted awake by the terrifying sound of hundreds of RAF and IBAF light bombers pummeling WMA positions with a vicious air raid. The night sky was crystal clear, which meant that the Entente bombers had an especially good chance at effectively attacking enemy positions down on the ground. The WDAF quickly took to the sky in an attempt to repel the Entente’s bombardment, but there was no saving Oban from destruction. The Entente had done well at hiding the true size of its aerial fleet and the WDAF was gradually overwhelmed. As the sun began to rise over Scotland, the Oban Commune and its surrounding municipalities had been ruined and hundreds of civilians evacuated to Glasgow. Maclean’s forces had survived, however, it was undeniable that Commonwealth defenses had been weakened.
At the crack of dawn, Entente warships took off towards Oban for the amphibious assault to begin. General Churchill hopped aboard a fleet headed directly towards Gallanach, which laid to the southwest of the city of Oban itself while Brazilian General Augusto Tasso Fragoso set sail to land at Ellenabeich. Meanwhile, the lower-ranking Loyalist General Oswald Mosley was to land on the Isle of Mull in order to prevent the island from serving as a location for the WMA to counter Churchill while Brazilian General Getulio Vargas was to land on the island of Jura and do the same for Tasso Fragoso. As bombers continued to attack WMA positions from above, the aquatic horde of landing craft made its way through the wreckage of naval combat and towards the Scottish mainland. Being both closer to Colonsay and containing substantially less defenses than the other landing points, Ellenabeich was the first position where Entente forces broke through Commonwealth defenses, with soldiers of the Imperial Brazilian Army stepping foot onto the Ellenabeich shoreline at approximately 6:50 AM. A few minutes later, General Tasso Fragoso arrived once a beach head was secured and made preparations to seize the Ellenabeich village and subsequently push northwards towards Oban.
Brazilian soldiers landing at Ellenabeich, circa June 19th, 1929.
General Mosley was the second senior officer to secure a beach head, with his forces landing near the Carsaig Arches at approximately 7:37 AM. A man who had served as the commander of the far-right Organization for Domestic Security militia during the British Civil War, Mosley had firsthand experience with both fighting WMA tactics and using their own guerrilla warfare strategies against them. It was, therefore, no surprise that General Mosley’s offensive moved the fastest, with the peninsula lying to the south of the Loch Scridain falling under total Loyalist occupation within the span of an hour. After Mosley, General Vargas managed to make his way through the defenses of Jura, which had served as a predominant position for Commonwealth forces attempting to attack Colonsay, and the landing craft touched down in Shian Bay at approximately 7:58 AM. While Jura’s naval defenses had been surprisingly difficult to pierce through, the push from Shian Bay was far more easy, and much of the island’s northwestern coastline was under Brazilian occupation within a handful of minutes.
General Winston Churchill’s push towards Gallanach was the most difficult of the four landings due to the landing point’s distance from Colonsay and its strong defenses, however, after well over an hour of combat, Loyalist landing craft reached a shoreline already decimated by a combination of aerial bombardment and naval shelling, and Churchill’s army stepped foot onto the Scottish mainland at approximately 8:21 AM. From here, General Churchill was to march directly towards Oban while General Tasso Fragoso was supposed to race towards Churchill and link up with his offensive. This meant that Churchill and Tasso Fragoso were going to be moving into the bulk of Maclean’s defenses, which guaranteed high casualties. Surely enough, the next few hours were a brutal struggle, and both sides lost hundreds of men. The Workers’ Commonwealth defended the revolutionary state it had spent years building down to the last soldier while the Loyalist forces and their allies fought with a vicious desire for revenge over three years in the making.
All Entente forces in Operation Poseidon notably struggled against Commonwealth tanks, many of which were replicas of advanced French and Russian designs. The Entente naval landings had deployed numerous tanks, however, given that Entente forces on the Atlantic Front had not been engaged in a war on land for years, the tank models they deployed were much less advanced than those utilized by the WMA, with many being left over from Phase One. Nonetheless, the numerical superiority of the Entente invasion meant that Tasso Fragoso was able to link up with General Churchill’s army near Cleigh at approximately 11:45 AM. Now that Winston Churchill and Augusto Tasso Fragoso had consolidated a united front against John Maclean, it would only be a matter of time until Oban fell. To the north, Mosley had reached Salen by this point, and in order to make sure that he had as many troops defending Oban as possible (not to mention that Mull had been one of the bloodiest sites for the WMA during Operation Poseidon), General Maclean ordered a retreat of all Commonwealth forces from the Isle of Mull at noon.
This brought the entirety of the island under Loyalist occupation, and in turn meant that General Mosley could arrive at the joint offensive of Churchill and Tasso Fragoso. At this point, the vast majority of Entente ground forces participating in Operation Poseidon were pointing their guns towards Oban. There was no chance of victory for the WMA, no nearby reinforcements large enough to save John Maclean’s last stand. The struggle for Oban was lost, it was just a matter of when the WMA would retreat and concede to its defeat. Despite the inevitable defeat he faced, the Crimson Clydesider, a Scottish native who had dedicated years of his life to the liberation of all Britons, would not be uprooted so easily. By holding onto Oban until the bitter end, General John Maclean inflicted heavy casualties on his enemy, which he hoped would make future engagements in the struggle for Great Britain easier for the Workers’ Commonwealth to win. LT-7 tanks engaged at the frontline with the oncoming Entente coalition, and what was expected to be a decisive victory by dinnertime entered nighttime.
Once the Entente arrived at the gates of Oban, the fighting became even more brutal. The town was small, however, the buildup of Commonwealth forces in the area during Operation Poseidon meant that Churchill, Tasso Fragoso, and Mosley faced a gruesome night. The Workers’ Model Army had long since adopted the tactics of conventional warfare for combat on the Western Front, but the Crimson Clydesider had not forgotten the days of guerrilla warfare from the British Civil War and would use these tactics to devastate Entente infantry. Abandoned homes became perches from which WMA forces were attacked, each and every street was a chaotic battlefield, and territory behind enemy lines fell victim to insurgencies in the name of the Workers’ Commonwealth. The Battle of Oban would end shortly after 9:00 PM on June 19th once the Entente coalition had completely expelled WMA forces from the town, however, John Maclean left as a hero of the Third International and a bane of the Entente for his last stand where every inch of Oban was defended against the imperialist menace.
Nonetheless, Operation Poseidon had succeeded.
Taming the Lion
“We cannot reclaim this island with the conventional tactics through which we lost it in the first place. We must break the enemy’s supply lines, ensure that no Marxist traitor to His Majesty ever feels safe, and inspire such tremendous fear that a prolonged war effort cannot be justified. If we are to win, we must inflict terror upon Great Britain.”
-General Oswald Mosley during the Oban Conference, circa July 1929.
Soldiers of the Imperial American Army marching through Oban, circa June 1929.
Operation Poseidon had been a resounding success for the Entente. The French Fourth Republic was increasingly appearing to be a lost cause at this point, however, the reclamation of Great Britain in its entirety was becoming a more and more likely possibility now that Loyalist boots were on Scottish ground. In the days following the Battle of Oban, much of the surrounding area was occupied by Entente forces and turned into a fortress from which the collective might of the Second Empire of Brazil and the domains of the House of Windsor would descend upon the Workers’ Commonwealth. The bays of Scotland became makeshift naval harbors while local villages were transformed into de facto military bases.
Victory over the Commonwealth was not, however, a guarantee. The Workers’ Model Army had defeated the Loyalists before and it could do so again. Furthermore, the leadership of the Third International was realizing that a potential disaster for its war effort was emerging in Scotland and its high command began debating how much manpower should be diverted from the Western Front to fight back against the Entente beach head. The Socialist Republic of Ireland would dispatch an expeditionary force to Great Britain on June 26th, 1929, followed by the deployment of an expeditionary force by the Indian Union (which already had troops stationed in France) four days later. All the while, London was continuously calling back regiments of its own expeditionary force from the Western Front to defend Scotland and John Maclean’s army against the Entente coalition grew larger by the day.
Despite the growing influx of Third International soldiers arriving to fight on the newly-formed British Front, the immediate aftermath of Operation Poseidon mostly consisted of a slew of victories for the Entente. The Battle of Stronmilchan on June 24th, 1929 was the first major engagement between the Entente and Workers' Commonwealth since Oban and was a decisive win for the former. Four days later, Inverarnan fell to a similar fate. All of these battles were part of a push by the Entente to reach Glasgow, which was to be the first major city to be conquered on the British Front. As more and more Third International troops arrived in Scotland to halt the Entente’s advance, however, engagements became increasingly difficult to win and progress became noticeably slower.
The Battle of Helensburgh proved to be an especially tedious conflict for the Entente, which only won the battle on July 14th after three days of combat and heavy casualties. To make matters worse for the Loyalists and Brazilians, the capitulation of the French Fourth Republic meant that the Entente had more forces to divert to the Western Front, which in turn meant that more WMA infantry fighting against Germany could be sent to the British Front. And what would happen if Berlin soon fell and the war on the European mainland ceased? The Entente was winning for the time being, but these gains would be for nothing if the entirety of the Third International army fighting the Central Powers was to be unleashed upon Churchill and Tasso Fragoso.
This leads us to the Oban Conference. Hosted in mid-July 1929 at the site of one of the greatest victories for the Entente, Winston Churchill, Augusto Tasso Fragoso, Oswald Mosley, and representatives of the governments of the Empire of America and her dominions, the Second Empire of Brazil, and Republic of Portugal congregated to formulate their plan for continued operations against the Workers’ Commonwealth. With fears of a large Third International coalition soon being deployed on the British Front looming over the entire conference, there was a clear desire to defeat the Commonwealth as quickly as possibly. Churchill, a man who was still haunted by his defeat at Gallipoli all those years ago, the commanding Loyalist officer was particularly insistent on ensuring a rapid victory, no matter the cost. The Loyalists would be fighting the people of their homeland and inflicting great damage upon countless Britons, however, the deep desire for victory outweighed any reluctance for waging a brutal campaign.
Enter General Oswald Mosley. A native of London, Mosley had been commissioned into the British Army upon the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, but had been sidelined from the battlefields of France after being transferred to the Royal Flying Corps as an observer and consequently getting injured in an airplane crash. Mosley never returned to the Western Front, however, as the General Strike of 1922 consumed southern England, he opted to join the Organization for Domestic Security and actively participated in anti-labor union violence. The far-right politics of the ODS had a significant influence on the young Mosley, who grew to be fond of the ideals of class collaborationism and British nationalism as the Second Glorious Revolution erupted around him. The uprising of the United Kingdom’s labor movement and subsequent civil war further pushed Mosley to the right, particularly with regards to economic views, with the young militiaman publishing essays in which he argued in favor of prohibiting unions altogether and ceding substantial political power to powerful corporations.
After Captain RBD Blakeney, the leader of the ODS, was killed by WMA artillery at the Battle of Deeside in May 1924, Oswald Mosley found himself being appointed to succeed Blakeney and would lead the ODS throughout the remainder of the British Civil War. A fervent opponent to the Workers’ Commonwealth who was ambitious as he was self-confident, Captain Mosley commanded the ODS during a number of raids on WMA positions that were regarded as brave by some and stupidly suicidal by others. The civilian militia structure of the ODS gave Mosley a unique advantage not held by the British Army in that he was able to conduct guerrilla warfare, with Mosley coordinating a number of insurgencies behind enemy lines during the British Civil War. While Oswald Mosley’s guerrilla warfare tactics were often supported by the high command of the Loyalist armed forces, the ODS gained a reputation for being exceptionally violent, and many of its regiments showed little regard for civilians (those who lived within the Commonwealth were often viewed as traitors to the Crown) while insurgencies in Commonwealth-occupied territory resorted to acts of terrorism on numerous occasions.
After the Loyalist withdrawal from Great Britain in 1925, the ODS continued to survive in Canada as a state-sponsored paramilitary that targeted “dissidents” (this usually translated to union-busting, including against labor movements that were not sympathetic with the Third International), however, Mosley was determined to continue fighting in the Great War and therefore left the militia behind to join the armed forces. Oswald Mosley briefly joined the Royal Navy, but he grew eventually bored of fighting on the high seas, which he claimed lacked “the grandiose honor of the battlefield” and joined the British Army to fight on the South Asian Front against the Indian Union in August 1925. Mosley didn’t play a very significant role in the war for India, however, he did prove to be a capable officer and quickly rose through the ranks and was a lieutenant general by 1928.
Given his experience in guerrilla warfare and fighting the WMA, General Winston Churchill selected Mosley to be one of the head officers for Operation Poseidon. The thirty-one year-old ex-militia leader was an unusual choice to play a leading role in one of the most pivotal military campaigns in the entire Great War, however, Lieutenant General Oswald Mosley soon proved his worth by being the most efficient commanders on June 19th and uprooting the Workers’ Model Army from the Isle of Mull with relative ease. After the Battle of Oban, Mosley became a celebrated war hero amongst the Entente and a feared villain amongst the Third International, and his impressive success was rewarded with a promotion to a four-star general, one who would lead Loyalist forces on the British Front alongside the most skilled commanders the Entente had to offer.
Now standing at the Oban Conference alongside revered military officers and ambassadors who were decades older than him, General Oswald Mosley finally had the power to influence the very course of action adopted by the entire Loyalist-Brazilian coalition. Mosley thus proposed a seemingly bizarre plan that, if put into effect, would cause the Entente to wage a brutal war against the Workers’ Commonwealth and her civilians. A proponent of total war, Mosley suggested that the Entente coalition bomb both military and civilian infrastructure to devastate the Commonwealth’s capabilities and terrify the people of the revolutionary state into capitulation in the process. More interestingly, Oswald Mosley argued that ground forces be moved behind enemy lines by aircraft and then proceed to fight behind the frontlines of the British Front with guerrilla tactics by being deployed with gliders and parachutes. In other words, General Mosley proposed to conduct the first large-scale air assault in military history. Once behind enemy lines, the Commonwealth’s supply lines would fall into disarray and the WMA’s forces would be scattered as they faced spontaneous attacks in all directions.
The Entente possessed the technology to theoretically conduct such an operation and had experimented with parachuting in soldiers in the past, but the campaign that Mosley proposed was unheard of and appeared to be too risky for such an important war effort to pursue. Nonetheless, the proposal had great potential and General Winston Churchill, who remained desperate for bringing a quick end to the British Front, ultimately endorsed Mosley’s plan, which in turn caused the Brazilian high command to concede their support. Therefore, Operation Icarus was born. The operation began on July 23rd, 1929 with a series of Entente air raids on Commonwealth settlements, followed by the deployment of paratroopers later into the day. Just as Oswald Mosley had anticipated, the air assault caught the enemy completely off guard and forced the WMA to divert its concentration to the pockets of makeshift guerrilla fighters emerging behind the frontlines. This gave the Entente coalition the opportunity to rapidly advance against a confused and disorganized enemy, which resulted in a collection of sudden victories.
Alexandria fell on July 24th.
Dumbarton fell on July 26th.
Clydebank fell on July 29th.
The Entente was now knocking on Glasgow’s door. John Maclean was determined to hold onto Scotland’s largest city, however, the fact of the matter was that Operation Icarus had thrown the WMA defenses into total disarray. The Battle of Glasgow began on July 30th, 1929 as air assaults landed Entente forces in the southern reaches of the city while a coalition of forces commanded by Winston Churchill pushed against the Commonwealth’s frontlines from the north. Within minutes, the Battle of Glasgow became a confused mess of urban warfare, with Entente and Third International soldiers scattered throughout the city and waging chaotic guerrilla warfare. The state of the battle’s frontlines was therefore difficult to calculate, however, over time it became clear that the Third International was being pushed out of the city. The River Clyde was utilized as a natural barrier to keep the Entente out of the southwestern sect of Glasgow, and this did deter General Churchill’s offensive overnight, however, General Mosley’s air assault could obviously cross over the River Clyde with natural ease. By the afternoon of July 31st, 1929, John Maclean had withdrawn his forces from the urban battlefield, and the Union Jack was hoisted above Glasgow for the first time in many years.
Loyalist paratroopers being deployed above Glasgow, circa July 1929.
With the largest Scottish city resting in the hands of the Entente, there was little hope for the Workers’ Commonwealth reclaiming the swath of land that it had lost. An emphasis on anti-aircraft weapons to combat air assaults was the best bet the WMA had at fending off against Operation Icarus, however, the amount of manpower and resources that the Entente was investing into airborne operations following their streak of success meant that a complete deterrence of Operation Icarus was impossible. Day after day, despite the valiant efforts of Commonwealth forces, ground was lost to the Loyalist-Brazilian coalition and much of Scotland was infected with the terror of Mosley’s guerrilla cells. Ironically enough, the gradual centralization of the armed forces of the Workers’ Commonwealth since the conclusion of the British Civil War and the consequential abandonment of guerrilla warfare tactics had left the WMA in a position similar to the British Army over three years prior. Now, it was the WMA that was struggling to fight a conventional defensive war against guerrilla forces.
This wasn’t to say that the WMA had completely abandoned the tactics of guerrilla warfare, and General Maclean conceded over more and more autonomy to his lower officers in order to allow for spontaneous responses to a spontaneous enemy, but it was the Entente that had mastered the fusion of guerrilla warfare with mechanized large-scale campaigns in the form of Operation Icarus. The eastward push towards Edinburgh, which was led by Augusto Tasso Fragoso, was yet another example of the Entente breaking WMA defenses through airborne invasions. The city of Edinburgh itself was actually encircled by Brazilian forces, and after the WMA suffered a particularly gruesome defeat at the Battle of Dalkeith on August 11th, it was decided that the defenses and civilian population of Edinburgh alike would be rapidly evacuated from a city that was doomed to fall. Thus, there would be no Second Battle of Edinburgh. Instead, the Scottish capital fell to the Imperial Brazilian Army on August 17th, 1929 with only minimal resistance from local guerrillas.
Brazilian soldiers occupying Edinburgh, circa August 1929.
The fall of Edinburgh was not only a devastating tactical and symbolic victory in that what was arguably the most important city (politically speaking) in all of Scotland had fallen, but that it effectively cut off the Scottish highlands from the rest of Great Britain. As a Scotsman himself, General Maclean did not want to abandon the last major holdout of the Workers’ Commonwealth in Scotland, but the fact of the matter was that the Scottish highlands were sparsely populated, lacked strategic significance, and would fall under Entente military occupation regardless of whether or not there were WMA regiments defending the region. With its largest cities already under Entente control, Scotland had more or less effectively been lost and Maclean needed as much manpower as he could get in the defense of England. Therefore, the Crimson Clydesider regretfully ordered a general evacuation of the Scottish Highlands on August 20th, 1929, and the chunk of Scotland to not be under Entente control fell in the aftermath. There was hope that the Scottish people could be liberated yet again, however, that was a battle that would have to be fought on another day.
While General John Maclean maintained popular support due to his reputation as a guardian of the Second Glorious Revolution who was staring down nearly impossible odds to overcome, the constant influx of reports of defeats from the British Front to England did tank the popularity of Comrade Protector Albert Inkpin and the ruling BWC-CSL coalition of the United People’s Congress. In contrast, Arthur MacManus of the Socialist Pacifist Party and his DWC coalition noticed an uptick in public approval throughout the summer of 1929. The people of the Workers’ Commonwealth were well aware that they were losing on the homefront and feared that a prolonged conflict would spell the death of their revolutionary government. Scotland had already fallen. Must England fall too? The general election of 1925 had increased the already-large majority held by the BWC-CSL, however, there were more and more grumblings within the coalition apparatus of expelling Albert Inkpin for fresh blood and a handful of minor coalition member parties discussed crossing the aisle to align with the increasingly popular DWC.
Inkpin ultimately faced a challenge for the leadership of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the form of Minister of Foreign Affairs Rose Cohen. An avid internationalist, Cohen opposed any withdrawal from the Great War, an action that she regarded as a “betrayal of the Permanent Revolution and the global proletariat,” and also was not enthusiastic about the notion of suing for peace with the Entente, however, she was critical of Inkpin’s leadership following Operation Poseidon (particularly with regards to an inability to respond to Entente air assaults) and had stated that she was open to conditional negotiations with the Entente should the terms be favorable for the Workers’ Commonwealth. In the eyes of many pragmatic members of the Communist Party, Cohen’s appeal wasn’t so much her political views but her popularity as the Minister of Foreign Affairs, which made her a viable replacement for Inkpin who could boost the popularity of the BWC-CSL without a fundamental change to the party platform. Therefore, Albert Inkpin was narrowly ousted by an election for party leadership on August 29th, which meant that Rose Cohen assumed the role as leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain, the BWC-CSL, and the Workers’ Commonwealth as a whole.
Comrade Protector Rose Cohen of the Workers’ Commonwealth.
Upon assuming power, Cohen made it very clear to the United People’s Congress that she did not intend to withdraw from the Western Front, however, she was supportive of reforms to the Commonwealth war effort on the British Front. The conscription of women, something that had already been enacted by the French Commune several years prior, was put into effect via the passage of the Universal Service Act on September 7th, 1929 and the passage of the Communal Defense Act three days later gave regional communes the ability to form their own militarized self-defense forces that would act independently of WMA high command and could request armament from the national government. It was too little too late to reclaim what had been lost to the Entente, however, Comrade Protector Cohen’s reforms did start having a noticeable impact as the manpower of Commonwealth defenses surged throughout September 1928.
The Entente was also beginning to detect a slowdown in progress. The Battle of Netherby on September 10th, 1929 marked the first time Entente forces conquered English territory, however, the subsequent offensive into England slowed down considerably from the rapid movements previously made in Scotland, especially once new conscripts arrived on the frontlines thanks to the Universal Suffrage Act. It is also worth pointing out that the Entente was now entering the far more densely populated region of Great Britain, which meant that large swathes of territory could not simply be occupied by regiments, not to mention that the emergence of self-defense militias in accordance with the Communal Defense Act meant that many municipalities, particularly more populated ones, posed their own threats to the Entente war effort.
To make matters worse for the Entente, the effects of the African Spring were starting to proliferate into Loyalist colonies around this time. The Sultanate of Darfur, which had managed to retain limited autonomy since its annexation into the British Empire, finally decided to break the chains of imperialism circa September 1929 after the Tuareg Sultanate had guaranteed its support for a Darfurian war of independence. Native authorities, particularly those who had a protectorate status, throughout British Africa were all considering taking advantage of the chaos of the Great War and finally seceding from their imperialist oppressors, not to mention that thousands of locals had taken to the streets to protest colonial rule. It was, therefore, seemingly inevitable that large scale insurrections against British colonialism were bound to arise throughout Africa, and while the reclamation of Great Britain was certainly the top priority of both the Empire of America and the exiled regime of the United Kingdom, the potential collapse of the British Empire could not be ignored, and tensions within the colonies would only get worse the longer the Loyalists remained involved in the Great War.
For the time being, the Entente remained committed to pushing towards London, and the gradual southward progress continued until the coalition reached Darlington. It was here that the Entente entered the heartland of England’s industrial and mining sectors, which were unsurprisingly very pro-Commonwealth. Many of the communes of northern England, including Darlington, had taken advantage of the Communal Defense Act to forge militias that were well-armed by the UPC, which recognized the importance that these forces would play on the British Front. The Battle of Darlington began on October 7th, 1929 when General Augusto Tasso Fragoso attacked the city from the north, expecting yet another decisive victory for the Entente. The general was soon, however, proven wrong as the Darlington Self-Defense Force (DSDF) played a pivotal role in waging harsh guerrilla warfare against the Brazilians. By the end of the day, the city was still in the hands of the Workers’ Commonwealth and the Battle of Darlington showed no signs of stopping. After three days of combat, the fight for Darlington would conclude, however, it was not Tasso Fragoso who had emerged victorious. Instead, the Commonwealth had secured its first major victory against the Entente in months, which forced the Imperial Brazilian Army to retreat to Newton Aycliffe.
Throughout northern England, the story of Darlington repeated itself. Local self-defense forces prevented Entente invaders from ever successfully consolidating their control over cities and towns while fresh recruits bolstered the WMA’s numbers to a degree where the Entente could be sufficiently held back. This collection of communes throughout northern England that the Entente could not seem to pierce through, which spanned from Stockton-on-Tees in the east to Kendal in the west, was eventually nicknamed the Red Wall, and it appeared as though that this wall was the barrier that finally halted the advance of the Entente coalition. A war of attrition set in along the Red Wall, and it became increasingly apparent to the high command of the Entente that London would not fall anytime soon. Meanwhile, the effects of the African Spring on the British Empire were starting to get worse. Darfur was winning its war for independence, and the success of the Sultanate had inspired similar rebellions in Buganda, northern Nigeria, and British East Africa.
It was becoming apparent to Robert Borden, the de facto ruler of the British Empire, that continued involvement in the Great War would spell doom for the colonial empire he had presided over since the exile of the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, despite the recent slew of victories along the Red Wall, Rose Cohen was well aware that the Workers’ Commonwealth was still losing the British Front and that Commonwealth defenses could collapse at any moment. Simply put, neither the Loyalists nor the Commonwealth were enthusiastic about continuing the Great War, a conflict that risked taking more from both belligerents than they stood to potentially gain. Seeing their moment to bring an end to the chaotic war on the British Front, the SPP proposed a bill to the United People’s Congress in late October 1928 that, if passed, would cause the Workers’ Commonwealth to call for an armistice with the Entente. Surprisingly enough, with many Britons tired of the Great War and realizing that they might as well sue for peace while the victories along the Red Wall gave them leverage at the negotiation table, the bill passed.
The Workers’ Commonwealth officially requested an armistice on October 27th, which the Brazilians were supportive of accepting. After all, the Second Empire of Brazil had no claimancy to Great Britain and the formation of a Loyalist-controlled North Britain was seen as a good enough victory in their eyes, not to mention a victory that would cost far less men and resources than a continued offensive into England. The Loyalists were of course, far more difficult to convince, and Oswald Mosley predictably advocated for prolonging the war on the British Front until the Workers’ Commonwealth unconditionally surrendered. In the end, however, Winston Churchill, who was ultimately the supreme authority of the Loyalist war effort against the Third International recognized that the Entente wasn’t marching into London anytime soon and any victory would likely sacrifice what remained of the British Empire. Prime Minister Borden similarly saw the necessity of maintaining the colonial empire, and would therefore give Churchill the go-ahead to accept the Commonwealth request for an armistice on October 30th, 1929.
The war for Great Britain had come to an end.
Soldiers of the Workers’ Model Army celebrating the October Armistice, circa 1929.
Given that the British Front was the last frontline that the Entente played a significant role on, the negotiations that followed the October Armistice grew into the ultimate peace treaty between the Entente and Third International alliances as a whole. The Treaty of Belfast served as the only time the heads of government from all belligerents of the two rival factions (with the notable exception of the French Fourth Republic, which had negotiated a separate peace treaty with the Third International back in July) met each other face to face, which was truly a sight to behold. The governments of the Entente, once the rulers of the world, now had to negotiate with the very revolutionary administrations that had started as minor rebellions all those years ago but had since brought upon the collapse of the Victorian international regime. After fourteen years of combat, the Entente had lost the Great War.
The first order of business at Belfast was the Entente’s collective recognition of the governments of the Third International as legitimate states. This was non-negotiable and easily accepted by the Entente, however, it was nonetheless humiliating for the alliance to effectively concede its defeat in a number of civil wars. It was also agreed upon that peace between all belligerents would be secured for at least twenty years, at which point it was hoped that the Great War as a whole would be a distant memory. The main focus of the Treaty of Belfast, however, was the fate of Great Britain. Neither the Loyalists or the Workers’ Commonwealth were willing to give up any territory they occupied, which meant that it was eventually decided that the island that was once the center of power of the largest empire the world had ever known was to be partitioned between a liberal north and a socialist south, with the Red Wall becoming the new border that would separate the two.
The northern Entente-occupied territory was organized into the Mandate of Scotland and Northumbria (colloquially referred to as North Britain), which fell under the joint military occupation of the Empire of America and Second Empire of Brazil. Of course, the Loyalist ambassadors made it clear that the intent of the Mandate was to rebuild North Britain into a rump United Kingdom, which meant that the actual governance of the entity was to fall under the administration of a military junta led by a governor-general jointly appointed by both the American and British prime minister. This governor-general was to purge North Britain of the revolution that clung onto England and Wales through what was in practice an autocratic authoritarian regime with little difference from the colonial dictatorships of the British Empire beyond the Mandate’s ultimate purpose. While not discussed at Belfast, the man selected by Robert Borden and John Simon to be the governor-general of North Britain was none other than Oswald Mosley, the young and ambitious military officer who was credited by many for leading the Entente to conquer the northern reaches of Great Britain in the first place.
Governor-General Oswald Mosley of the Mandate of Scotland and Northumbria being escorted by police in Glasgow, circa December 1929.
Once the fate of Great Britain was determined, the Treaty of Belfast was more or less complete and was therefore ratified by all present belligerents on November 11th, 1929. A few days later, the Entente would sign a separate peace treaty with the Central Powers (the Treaty of Hamburg) on November 16th, which simply declared that both sides would no longer clash with each other in naval engagements and brought an end to war that had for all intents and purposes already concluded many years prior. Nonetheless, the Hamburg peace agreement was significant in that it officially pulled the Entente out of war with the Central Powers and thus removed the alliance from the Great War altogether. The Entente alliance as an entity, however, was far from ending its existence. The rebellions throughout Africa were incentive enough to keep the organization afloat, but in the eyes of the Second Empire of Brazil, the Entente served as means for the nation to exert its newfound status as a great power throughout the world. It was clear to all that the age of the old superpowers of the 19th Century had passed and Brazil was well-poised to become a superpower of the 20th.
The dawn of the New Western Civilization was on the horizon.
The War That Refused to End
“Berlin has become a hellscape where only the harshest and strongest may survive.”
-Joseph Stalin, circa September 1928.
Red Army forces in eastern Berlin, circa August 1928.
As the Entente and Third International clashed to a decisive conclusion in the west, the Battle of Berlin ceaselessly raged on in the east. The city of Berlin, once one of the most prominent cities in the world, laid in ruins after months of combat, its remains serving as a harsh reminder to the Heilsreich of what the Great War had cost Germany. By the time the Treaty of Belfast was ratified, the Battle of Berlin was still raging on and had become a war of attrition since August 1928. The Germans continued utilizing poisonbombing as a means to suffocate their enemy while the Third International’s coalition had long since learned to adapt with fighting in a city where the air had become toxic. The Graveyard of Eurasia had thus become a graveyard of living ghosts, with the vast majority of soldiers walking through Berlin’s devastated wearing gas masks to survive the urban wasteland.
After months of combat, Joseph Stalin and Jawaharlal Nehru remained stuck at Johannisthal in a war of attrition against Erich Ludendorff. To the south of Berlin, Erwin Rommel and Ram Prasad Bismil had been fighting at Diedersdorf since mid-September and the relatively rapid progress Rommel had made earlier into the year had long since come to an end once the Third International started to pay more and more attention to these southern clashes. The only frontline of the Battle of Berlin that seemed to be making any advances during the fall of 1928 was the northern flank, where Mikhail Frunze was slowly but surely chipping away at Hermann Erhardt’s defenses. From the conquest of Honower Siedlung in late May, General Frunze pushed into northeastern Berlin circa early June, bringing Hellersdorf under total Red Army occupation by the beginning of July.
The poisonbombing of the Luftsreitkrafte deterred General Frunze, just as it deterred his comrades fighting all throughout Berlin, however, this was ultimately overcome once gas masks were widely distributed throughout Soviet ranks and the Russians began to deploy chemical weapons of their own. On August 17th, Mikhail Frunze had reached Marzan-Hellersdorf, and the entire northern half of Biersdorf was under his decisive control following a Red Army victory battle near the Otto-Nagel Gymnasium on September 1st. The rapid progress made by Mikhail Frunze did, of course, catch the attention of Erich Ludendorff, however, the war of attrition against Stalin, Nehru, and Bismil left very few soldiers to be spared to halt Frunze’s offensive in the north. Nonetheless, as General Frunze began entering Friedrichsfelde, Ludendorff was realizing that the advances in the northeast were beginning to pose the greatest threat to the German war effort and therefore made the call to divert manpower from Rommel to Erhardt. By mid-October, General Frunze advances had come to a standstill in central Friedrichsfelde.
It was this war of attrition on all three frontlines that remained the state of the Battle of Berlin by the start of November 1928. As the Entente alliance withdrew from the Great War, the flames of conflict continued to burn bright on the Eastern Front. Victory was in reach for the Third International, however, it laid behind the vast legions of Central Power forces defending western Berlin. With the formation of the Brautchistch Line in the west, the Heilsreich was able to concentrate the vast majority of its attention on the Battle of Berlin, especially as the Russian Soviet Republic diverted attention away from the invasion of Austria to ensure that the German capital city would soon fall. Despite being the main focus of both the Heilsreich and the Soviets, the frontlines of Berlin remained stagnant throughout more or less all of November. The snowfall of the subsequent December descended upon the very same barricades that had existed for the past month, with neither side showing any signs of breaking anytime soon.
German soldiers of Rommel’s flank to the south of Berlin, circa December 1928.
In order to bring more manpower to the Battle of Berlin, the Russian Soviet Republic followed the example of its British and French allies by implementing a conscription program for women on December 11th, 1928, and the German Heilsreich (despite its socially reactionary views on the rights of women as a whole) begrudgingly lifted its ban on female military service four days later in retaliation to the inevitable surge in Red Army numbers. The impact of this influx of new manpower was not seen until late December, at which point it gradually became clear that the conscription policy of the Soviet Republic, not to mention the fact that Russia had an inherent advantage over Germany with regards to manpower due to its larger population gave it a numerical advantage in Berlin.
Over time, the Third International’s numerical advantage gave way to an end to the war of attrition in Berlin as the frontlines progressed in favor of the revolutionary coalition. Baumschulenweg was under total Third International military occupation once the last German forces were removed from the area on January 14th, 1929. In the north, Mikhail Frunze, started the new year with similar progress, with Friedrichsfelde falling under total Red Army control in early January and Karlshorst succumbing to a similar fate only a few days later. This led General Frunze to the neighborhood of Rummelsburg, which was the only place standing between him and the Spree River. The push through Rummelsburg was a grueling process due to both Hermann Erhardt and Erich Ludendorff providing substantial resources to the neighborhood’s defense given its strategic importance, however, in the end there was never really any doubt who would ultimately emerge victorious. The simple fact of the matter was that the Red Army was the largest military in Berlin and the Heilsreich did not have the ability to win the defensive conflict for the city. After many weeks of fighting, Rummelsburg was completely occupied by the army of Mikhail Frunze on February 17th, and the victorious general watched what remained of his enemy forces retreat across the Spree in defeat.
After General Erhardt withdrew from Rummelsburg, he and Erich Ludendorff found themselves situated in Planterwald and being besieged by Third International forces to both their north and south. The sheer amount of German soldiers concentrated in Planterwald ensured that the neighborhood would not fall for the time being, however, the neighborhood would soon fall without a quick reversal in Germany’s fortunes. A stalemate emerged and Planterwald was gradually transformed into a fortress from which the German war effort was presided over, however, General Ludendorff could see the writing on the wall. The Heilsreich was unable to replenish its forces at the rate of the Russian Soviet Republic and the Indian Union, and once defenses in the south cracked, the German position was anticipated to be devastated by a rapid Third International offensive. It should also be noted that the extremely close quarters of Planterwald meant that both sides were increasingly reluctant to utilize poisonbombing for fear of harming their own armies, although the compact location of German forces proved to be an ideal target for the Soviet Air Force.
Day by day, the Heilsreich was losing more and more soldiers to the carnage of the Battle of Berlin. German media was keen on downplaying the true scale of the loss, however, not even this could prevent the people of the Fatherland from gathering what was going on in their nation’s capital. The German government was, of course, fully aware of the war effort in Berlin and was given daily updates on the situation on the ground. This included Kaiser August Wilhelm I, who watched the bloodiest battle in the Great War play out from afar in Hanover. Throughout the ranks of the DVP, there were growing discussions surrounding a potential armistice, which varied from waiting until the Battle of Berlin concluded to raise the white flag to surrendering as soon as possible in order to preserve what remained of German forces in Berlin and to give Germany more leverage at the negotiation table. The war had already ended for the Entente. Wasn’t it time for the Great War in its entirety to finally come to a close?
To August, these murmurs were tantamount to treason. In his eyes, surrender was as humiliating as it was unnecessary. Surely, the German nation, the rightful ruler of the world, could overcome the barbaric socialist horde? The Kaiser could not, however, ignore the fact that Germany was currently on a path to losing in Berlin. Determined to avoid capitulation, August Wilhelm entered into a private correspondence with General Ludendorff in late February 1929, a dialogue unbeknownst to even the Fuhrer. Through their letters between each other, August Wilhelm crafted a remarkably risky plan that he believed would turn the tides of the Battle of Berlin. The German armed forces were to retreat on all frontlines, thus giving the Third International temporary control over the heart of Berlin. This was, however, only temporary and would, in the words of August Wilhelm, “give our enemy the illusion of a decisive victory.” August had noticed that the Third International supply lines into Berlin but outside of the city were relatively poorly defended, and he proposed that the German forces retreat from the heart of the city to quickly cut off the aforementioned supply lines, thus encircling hundreds of thousands of enemy soldiers and trapping them in the ruins of Berlin.
It was a bold plan to be sure, and relied on the Third International not reacting to German attacks on supply lines on time. Should Stalin’s legion notice what his enemies were planning and move quickly, the Germans would effectively hand over the heart of their capital to the Russian Soviet Republic. If the plan succeeded, however, Berlin would become the tomb for the bulk of Red Army forces on the Eastern Front, thus not only winning the Battle of Berlin for the German Heilsreich but devastating the Third International war effort enough to pursue a counteroffensive towards the Oder River. Both Ludendorff and August recognized the potential risks and benefits of the plan, however, the former was desperate to turn the tables and the current strategy of attempting to hold back the Third International in central Berlin definitely was not working. Therefore, Erich Ludendorff accepted the proposal of his kaiser and set out organizing the Heilsreich’s last shot at a victory in the Battle of Berlin.
Operation Odoacer was born.
The German withdrawal from central Berlin began on March 5th as Ludendorff and Erhardt carefully retreated from Planterwald and made their way into the western reaches of the city. Meanwhile, Erwin Rommel made a much more gradual and subtle retreat in preparation for forming a southern flank in the attack on Third International supply lines. By the end of the day, Ludendorff had stationed the bulk of his men in Pankow despite dispatching a significant number of reinforcements to Rommel, while also maintaining very lackluster defenses against the bulk of the Third International offensive. This retreat gave off the impression to the Third International that the Germans were preparing for a total withdrawal from Berlin and that Ludendorff was planning to launch an offensive towards enemy forces from a different angle as a last-ditch strategy. In other words, the Third International did not pick up on Operation Odoacer, and for the time being, the world believed that the Red Army was on the brink of conquering Berlin in its entirety. After all, the German retreat had handed the Third International territory as far west as Museum Island, leaving the Brandenburg Gate in sight.
German prisoners of war being escorted through Berlin, circa March 1929.
As many Third International soldiers already began celebrating their seemingly inevitable victory in the Battle of Berlin, however, something strange began occurring at the fringes of the city. The anticipated attack by General Ludendorff on the forces Stalin, Nerhu, and Frunze from the northwest never took place. At around 4:00 AM on March 6th, Ludendorff’s forces began to depart out of Berlin altogether, and a few minutes later, Rommel’s forces similarly started to move to the south of Bismil’s army. General Joseph Stalin was alerted of these developments once the Red Army caught wind of what was going on a little after 5:00 AM, however, the commanding officer of the Red Army did not predict what was about to occur. Perhaps out of hubris more than anything, Stalin simply predicted that the two generals had accepted defeat and were initiating their withdrawal from the battlefield.
Mere minutes later, General Stalin realized just how devastatingly wrong he was. At 5:10 AM, General Ludendorff gave the order for all German forces fighting in the Battle of Berlin to begin their mad dash towards Furstenwalde. The army of the Heilsreich moved away from the frontlines of the Great War and therefore avoided being bogged down by the vast enemy forces that populated Berlin. The Soviet Air Force was the only military force standing in the way of the Germans and their push towards the underbelly of the Third International offensive, and the substantially larger and more technologically advanced Luftsreitkrafte made quick work of these aerial defenses. Stalin quickly came to the realization of what his enemy was doing, however, by this point it was too late. Erich Ludendorff besieged Strausburg at approximately 5:35 AM while Irwin Rommel attacked Storkow seven minutes later. General Bismil was ordered to deter the German attack to the east of Berlin, however, the time it would take for Bismil to make his way to this region meant that the Heilsreich was able to more or less complete its mission before reinforcements could arrive, not to mention that the sheer size of both Ludendorff and Rommel’s armies greatly exceded that of Bismil.
Within the span of a little over a half hour, Ludendorff and Rommel easily overwhelmed the Third International forces defending the vital supply line that linked the Oder River to berlin. Just as Operation Odoacer had anticipated, these supply lines were very poorly defended, thus handing the Germans a decisive victory. At 6:19 AM, Ludendorff and Rommel linked up at Furstenwalde, therefore completely severing the titanic Third International army in Berlin from aid. The Soviet Air Force attempted to provide aerial assistance, however, the much larger LK made sure to prevent a supply line from emerging in the sky. Red Army forces to the east of the Oder were quickly mobilized in an attempt to retake Furstenwalde, but it was too little too late. The fact of the matter was that the majority of Soviet forces fighting in Germany were concentrated in Berlin, which left very little manpower behind to fight Ludendorff’s sudden encirclement. Berlin was encircled and the city that the Russian Soviet Republic had dedicated almost a year to conquering had become its army’s prison. There would be no airlift, no reinforcements, and no escape from the doom that was to descend upon Stalin, Nehru, and their comrades.
The Third International was trapped.
Desperate to pry his way out of the tomb that Ludendorff had forged for him, General Stalin dedicated the remainder of March 6th diverting more and more forces to fighting in the east against Ludendorff and Rommel, however, these attempts proved to be futile. The bulk of the German armed forces present at the Battle of Berlin were now concentrated on this front, and the more troops were sent out east, the more other frontlines throughout Berlin were left vulnerable to smaller regiments throughout the city. By the end of the day, the Third International retreated from many of the gains it had seized from the German withdrawal no more than a day prior, and the forces of the workers’ revolution held on against an offensive in the west at Alt-Treptow while simultaneously gradually losing ground to an offensive in the east at Muggelheim.
Once the German foothold on territory to the east of Berlin was secured, Ludendorff dispersed his infantry more evenly around the entirety of the city on March 7th, meaning that the Third International had to engage on all fronts. Stalin and his fellow officers could not look away from one side of Berlin for a second, for doing so would surely give the enemy a victory. Meanwhile, with the Soviet Air Force devastated from the fight with the LK over eastern Germany, the latter aerial force achieved near-total air supremacy over Berlin and was capable of constant bombardments of Third International positions. Poisonbombing became all the more rampant, as did firebombing and more traditional aerial bombardment. By March 9th, the lack of access to supply lines was already proving to have a detrimental effect on Third International forces once the lifespans of numerous gas masks came to an end due to their filters’ exposure to relentless poisonbombing, and without an influx of new equipment from the east, several casualties suffocated due to resource shortages.
This campaign of annihilation carried on for three more days, with every single hour bringing with it a slew of casualties and a noticeable ground loss for the Third International. The commanders of the joint Russo-Indian offensive watched with horror as the victory they were so close to securing for the past year collapsed in front of them, bringing down their vast army in the process. By March 12th, the Third International occupation of Berlin was relegated to a patch of territory consisting of eastern Treptow-Kopenick, southern Lichtenburg, and western Neukolln. The German offensive, on the other hand, continued smoothly with relatively few casualties, as Ludendorff attacked from the east, Rommel attacked from the south, Paulus attacked from the west, and Erhardt attacked from the north. Stalin was determined to hold out until the bitter end, however, the more pragmatic Leon Trotsky saw that the Third international was not going to win the Battle of Berlin, and with approval from Subhas Chandra Bose, ordered the total withdrawal of all Third International forces from the city via an airlift scheduled for the afternoon of March 12th.
The Berlin Airlift was a daring maneuver that guaranteed, at best, limited success, but it was nonetheless hoped that whatever remained of the Third International could be salvaged from the ruins of Berlin. Very few Soviet airplanes made their way through German defenses, with the first aircraft landing in the rubble of Baumschulenweg at 1:54 PM. Ram Prasad Bismil was the first of the four major Third International military officers to be evacuated out of Berlin alongside hundreds of weary soldiers, however, Bismil, along with many of the comrades he had fought alongside for the past year, never made it to the rendezvous point nearby Seelow, for the man who had fought valiantly in the Battle of Berlin from the very beginning was shot down by LK fighter planes around the outskirts of eastern Berlin. Mikhail Frunze, the Red Army commander who had conquered the Baltic states and brought East Prussia to its knees, succumbed to the very same fate a few minutes later.
Out of the over 500,000 soldiers stranded in Berlin as of March 12th, 1929, less than ten percent were evacuated by the Berlin Airlift, with the remaining forces either being killed whilst defending the Third International holdout-turned-runway, being shot down by the Germans during the evacuation, or being captured as prisoners of war as the Heilsreich reclaimed its capital. Among the soldiers who did manage to escape was Jawaharlal Nehru, the commanding officer of the All-Indian Liberation Army, who arrived in Seelow as a hero of not just the Indian Union, but all nations loyal to the Third International. Perhaps predictably given his commitment to the battle since the very beginning, General Joseph Stalin was the last military officer to evacuate from the Battle of Berlin. He would leave behind the greatest failure of his military career with the very last Third International soldiers just after 3:00 PM, but his plane would never land at Seelow. The airplane carrying Stalin was shot down around Rehfelde and made a crash landing that killed its crew in the process.
Miraculously, however, Joseph Stalin survived the downing of his plane alongside a handful of Red Army soldiers, who managed to crawl their way out of the burning wreckage whilst covered in scars. As German soldiers in the distance approached the airplane, Stalin led his comrades towards Soviet-occupied Germany and, despite all odds, survived to tell the tale once arriving at the Red Army-held town of Muncheberg. The field marshal of the Red Army and heir to the Red Napoleon was left with permanent scars across his body, not to mention the fact that he was mentally scarred by his devastating defeat. Joseph Stalin would remain in charge of the Red Army for the time being, however, his leadership skills were thrown into considerable doubt by his peers, especially as the general grew increasingly bitter, aggressive, and brutal in the aftermath of the Battle of Berlin.
Back in Berlin, the withdrawal of Stalin and the last Red Army forces left in the city meant that what remained unoccupied by the Heilsreich quickly fell under the control of Ludendorff once his troops managed to make their way through barricades left behind by the retreating Soviets. At 3:05 PM, General Erich Ludendorff finally declared victory in the Battle of Berlin and alerted the exiled German government in Hanover of his conquest. After ceaseless days of fighting, the single longest and bloodiest battle in the Great War had concluded. Against the odds, the Heilsreich had not only crawled back from the grips of defeat, but had annihilated the Third International forces of the Eastern Front in the process. Red Army forces in Poland were in disarray following the destruction of so many regiments in Berlin, which prevented the Soviet Republic from conducting another offensive towards the German capital. On the contrary, the Heilsreich went on the offensive for the first time in a year, and managed to push the Russians back across the Oder River by the end of March 1929.
German soldiers parading through Berlin a week after their victory at the city, circa March 1929.
Of course, the Great War was far from over. The Heilsreich’s victory at Berlin had simply prolonged the conflict that was already easily the bloodiest war in human history as a war of attrition raged on in the west while the gruesome slog between Germany and Russia carried on in the east. It was, however, apparent that the Great War had entered yet another distinct era, just as it had back in 1923. Gone were the days of revolutions and coups plaguing a war-torn world. The three-sided clash between the Entente, Central Powers, and Third International had concluded the year prior, thus leaving the traditional European government that had fought in the Great War from the very beginning out of the picture. In their place emerged a war between the forces of fascism and socialism that would define Europe for the next decade, with no clear end in sight as both factions were determined to secure a decisive victory over their mortal enemies. And with the reserves of the two factions drying up, the Great War was sure to expand yet again. Phase Two, the war of ideology, had concluded, however, Phase Three, the war of resources, had only just begun.
A Dinner in Berlin
“Hail to thee in the Victor’s wreath,
Ruler of the fatherland!
Hail to thee emperor!
Feel by the splendor of the throne
The greatest joy fully
To be the favorite of the people!
Hail to thee, emperor!”
-Beginning of “Heil dir im Siegerkranz,” the national anthem of the German Empire and first national anthem of the Deutsches Heilsreich (lyrics written circa 1790).
The Brandenburg Gate following the Battle of Berlin, circa March 1929.
Two months had passed since General Ludendorff’s victory. The city of Berlin remained scarred from a year of combat and would most certainly remain in such a sad state for a long time, however, for all intents and purposes, a life that vaguely resembled what was destroyed by Stalin’s campaign had begun to return to the residents of the Athens of the Spree. Many of the people who had been turned into refugees were returning to the city and set out to rebuild their homes. These Berliners had returned to the recovering capital alongside the government officials and aristocracy of Germany, who sought to administrate from the rubble of Berlin in a sort of propaganda display to indicate that not even the worst the Great War had to offer could break the Heilsreich.
Amongst those who had returned was none other than Kaiser August Wilhelm I, who had grown increasingly popular amongst both the masses and the elite of the German Fatherland Party once Erich Ludendorff revealed that the successful Operation Odoacer had been conceived by the emperor himself. One man who continued to be wary of August was none other than Fuhrer Alfred Hugenberg. Both individuals continued to view each other as dangerous rivals, and even as the tendrils of the Great War reached Berlin, the two rulers of the Heilsreich continued to draw lines in the sand that had partitioned the DVP into factionalism. Now that August was credited with saving Berlin from the clutches of the Red Napoleon’s empire, however, it seemed as though a victor in the struggle for control over Germany’s one-party apparatus of state was emerging.
Today, August had sought to invite his rival over for dinner at the Royal Palace.
“I recommend that we put aside our differences for one night and simply celebrate our nation’s incredible victory,” the Kaiser had stated in a telephone call to the Fuhrer. “Surely the inevitable triumph of Germany over her barbaric enemies is something both of us can toast to.” August had organized the dinner to occur in a room near the center of the Palace, which was far away from its bullet-ridden exterior walls and, notably, without any windows for the outside world to peer into.
The Fuhrer was now set to arrive at any minute. August sat at one end of a finely-crafted table and gazed at the two glasses of wine that he had personally prepared for himself and his guest, both of which were already situated at each other’s predetermined seat. Elegant paintings dating back to the days of Frederick the Great populated the walls of this room, with the portraits of many of August’s ancestors staring down upon the ambitious monarch. Hugenberg was supposed to be here at any moment, and soon the Kaiser’s plan could be put into motion. Surely enough, after a few minutes of patiently waiting, a servant entered the dining room to announce the arrival of August’s guest.
“Your majesty, Fuhrer Alfred Hugenberg.”
The moustached statesman then entered the room to introduce himself, notably without any of the formalities that were to be conducted when meeting with the Kaiser.
“Good day, old friend,” Hugenberg said. “I see that you have already prepared wine for us?”
“Indeed,” responded August, who merely shrugged off the lack of any traditional address. “The meal itself will be here soon.”
“Excellent.”
Before Hugenberg could sit down, August stood up with his glass of wine in hand.
“To the victory of the German Heilseich,” he declared.
Hugenberg emitted a faint smile and joined the Kaiser in his toast.
“To the victory of the German Heilsreich.”
Both men took a sip of their wine before sitting down.
“I must admit,” began the Fuhrer in order to initiate some discussion. “I did not expect your little gambit you persuaded Ludendorff to play along with to work. When he presented Odoacer to me, my impression was that the man was truly desperate. I was personally shocked when the plan actually succeeded, and I was even more surprised to find out you were its architect. You must forgive me, but I never considered you to be much of a military man, let alone the man who would craft the strategy that would win us back Berlin.”
“No,” replied August. “You’re right, I lack any military background beyond my involvement in the Heilungscoup. Nonetheless, I like to think of myself as someone who knows how to save my nation.”
A handful of minutes passed as the two most powerful men in all of Germany discussed a number of topics, all without any food being presented before them.
“Your chefs seem to be taking a while,” Alfred Hugenberg finally said with a hint of suspicion. “I thought you said the meal was supposed to be here soon.”
“I do not know what is happening,” August retorted. “I’m sure the wait will not be much longer.”
It was at this point that the Kaiser noticed that his guest appeared as though he was ill.
“Are you alright? You look sick”
“...I think so,” Hugenberg answered. “A headache has come over me for a few minutes, but I don’t think it’s anything to worry about.”
“If you say so.”
“Anyway, I have heard rumors from the embassy in Sofia that the Bulgarians are contemplating invading Romania for its-”
Alfred Hugenberg never finished his sentence, for it was at this moment that he gripped his chest and collapsed over into unconsciousness.
Rather than rush over to assist his guest, August waited exactly thirty minutes in a cold silence before he approached the body of the Fuhrer and reached his palm out over a pale and still body to check for a pulse.
Nothing.
August couldn’t help it when a sinister smile crept across his face. The cyanide had worked like a charm and had executed the last man that stood in the way of his absolute rule over Germany. August knew that he had the votes in the Reichstag to be approved as Alfred Hugenberg’s successor, thus transforming the Kaiser into the unrivaled totalitarian autocrat of the Deutches Heilsreich.
The Fuhrer was dead, long live the Kaiser-Fuhrer.
End of Phase Two
Map of the World circa November 1929.
“On her dominions the sun never sets.”
-Excerpt from the Caledonian Mercury, circa 1821.
Warships of the Royal Navy patrolling the coastline of Newfoundland, circa March 1928.
If there was one member of the Third International that could say it was not winning the Great War by the end of Phase Two, it was the Workers’ Commonwealth. The Loyalist inheritance of the bulk of the Royal Navy following the House of Windsor's expulsion from Great Britain put the Empire of America at a clear advantage on the Atlantic Front, and the intervention of the rapidly Second Empire of Brazil on behalf of the Entente resulted in even more ships making their way to the maritime battles of the North Atlantic to clash with the Workers’ Revolutionary Navy. The Commonwealth actually had a population comparable to that of Brazil, however, much of the British population had been depleted by years of warfare, not to mention that the Commonwealth armed forces were fighting a two-front war, whereas the Brazilian war machine had only just awoken and essentially only had one frontline to focus on following the ratification of the Treaty of Karachi.
This was not, however, to say that the Workers’ Commonwealth was doomed. While it had a substantially smaller naval force than the Loyalists, Comrade Protector Albert Inkpin made sure to undertake a mass naval buildup program with the passage of the Maritime Production Act circa June 1927, which set quotas for industrial unions to produce naval wartime equipment and funded said unions to ensure that the Commonwealth’s manufacturing industry would be able to construct a navy that could rival the might of the Loyalists. While the Empire of America was more focused with sustaining the size of the Royal Navy than any large-scale naval production program, the Brazilians similarly funded corporations to produce a large navy through a process similar to the Great Leap Forward, where workers were allocated over to Brazil’s kleptocrats in order to meet production quotas in brutal working conditions. This arms race between the Workers’ Commonwealth and the Second Empire of Brazil was just as pivotal of an element of the Atlantic Front as the clashes fought on the waves, with these programs on the homefront determining who had the capacity to wage war upon the ocean to begin with.
Even with the passage of the Maritime Production Act, the Commonwealth struggled to catch up in quantity to the Entente, although for the time being it did maintain the defense of the British Isles from any potential invasion. Over time, the Entente was slowly but surely pushing east on the Atlantic Front, having completely uprooted the WRN from all waters west of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge by the dawn of 1929. By this point, the Atlantic Front spanned as far east as the outskirts of the Rockall Plateau, which laid to the northwest of Ireland, although this was admittedly an area where the Workers’ Commonwealth was dominant due to its proximity to Great Britain. Despite the fact that the Commonwealth was losing the Atlantic Front for the time being, there was a growing fear amongst Entente tacticians that the rapid output of naval equipment occurring as a consequence of the Maritime Production Act meant that the WRN’s size would soon overcome that of the Royal Navy, with some pessimistic predictions arguing that this would occur by 1931.
The speculation that the WRN would gradually eclipse the Royal Navy, as well as the apparent Third International victories on the Eastern and Western fronts of mainland Europe made the Entente’s push towards the British Isles a race against the clock. The need for a quick push towards Great Britain led the Entente to consider emphasizing new technologies and strategies for the Atlantic Front, with the Empire of America ramping up the production of planes and aircraft carriers to counter the dominance of the WDAF in the sky. The Brazilians were able to contribute to this emphasis on aerial warfare by transferring dispatches of the Imperial Brazilian Air Force previously fighting on the South Asian Front to the Atlantic, however, the Imperial Brazilian Navy also began pursuing the development of submarine technology with the hope that gaining the upper hand with such watercraft would be able to punch a hole in Commonwealth defenses above the Rockall Plateau. In order to development as many submarines as quickly as quickly as possible, the IBN opted to copy the designs of captured German U-boats as opposed to to creating their own new line of submarines, and Brazil’s submarine fleet was thus filled with Type UB IIIs, Type U 19s, and Type UE IIs by May 1929.
The S-7 Fonseca of the Imperial Brazilian Navy prior to leaving Belem, circa April 1929.
The change in strategy by the Entente proved to be crucial in ending the stagnation on the Atlantic Front. The bolstering in the Loyalist aerial capacity deterred WDAF bombardment campaigns, thus taking a knife to the biggest advantage held by the Commonwealth against her reactionary enemies. Meanwhile, the IBN’s submarine armament program gave the Entente dominance in subaquatic warfare, an area that the Workers’ Commonwealth had barely invested in at all. Throughout the spring of 19289 the Brazilians waged a brutal campaign against the WRN by picking apart naval defenses from below the waves while the Royal Air Force defended submarine campaigns from above. This allowed for the Entente to begin a rapid offensive towards Scotland as Commonwealth naval defenses collapsed. Both the Rockall Plateau and Rockall Basin were under the decisive control of Entente forces by the end of May 1929, which meant that combat moved to the area just to the north of Ireland and to the west of Scotland.
Now that the coastline of Great Britain was within reach, the biggest challenge for the Entente was how to accomplish an invasion of the island of Great Britain, something that had not successfully been done since 1066 at the hands of William the Conqueror. Well over eight hundred years had passed since William had cemented his place in history, and now the armed forces of the Empire of America and Second Empire of Brazil sought to conduct a conquest that few in human history had managed to pull off. Even with the superior naval forces, any operation to reclaim Great Britain would be incredibly difficult and was undeniably destined to become one of the most brutal engagements of the entire Great War, not to mention a war that the Entente was by no means guaranteed to win.
The leadership of the Loyalists and Brazilians would convene at the Kingston Conference in Jamaica circa late May 1929 to design a plan for how to go about invading Great Britain. A handful of Brazilian generals argued in favor of attacking the less well-armed Ireland first and subsequently launching an invasion along the western British coastline, however, this proposal was quickly shot down by Loyalist officers. To them, bringing the Workers’ Commonwealth to its knees before any other engagements in Europe was born less from any sort of tactical advantage and more from the deep desire to conquer Great Britain and restore the Union Jack to the skies of London. Therefore, the Brazilians were forced into pursuing a plan with more symbolic importance rather than strategic feasibility, which led the Kingston Conference to draft up plans for an amphibious assault of Scotland.
After days of planning and debate, the Kingston Conference ultimately crafted what became known as Operation Poseidon. The Royal Navy and Imperial Brazilian Navy were to first lay siege to the southern Hebrides to the west of the Scottish mainland, thus setting up a launching pad to invade Scotland via setting up a beachhead at Oban in what was to be the largest seaborne invasion in world history. With luck, Operation Poseidon would overwhelm Commonwealth defenses and the Union Jack would be flying over Glasgow by the end of June. Of course, the Workers’ Commonwealth could foresee that an attack on Scotland was on the horizon and therefore prepared for the coming storm. The Workers Revolutionary Navy was completely concentrated on the Atlantic Front, naval mines were deployed along the Scottish coastline, and divisions of the Workers’ Model Army were recalled from the Western Front to defend their homeland.
On June 12th, 1929, the time had finally come for Operation Poseidon to begin. Led by Admiral David Beatty, the Royal Navy and IBN approached the sparsely populated island of Colonsay, which was occupied by only a handful of WMA soldiers, and began to shell its limited defenses. Loyalist light bombers were launched from aircraft carriers to decimate the island’s defenses from above, although the WDAF soon rushed to the defense of its comrades on Colonsay. Despite this, however, the Loyalists gradually managed to push their way towards the island, and the Royal Navy eventually reached Kiloran Bay on Colonsay’s north, where landing craft were eventually deployed. The men of the Imperial American Army (IAA) that were to land at Kiloran Bay were put under the command of General Winston Churchill, who had craved a return to Great Britain for the last three years. On the night of June 12th, General Churchill would set foot on European land yet again as the IAA stormed Kiloran Bay. Within the next hour, the Entente had uprooted WMA forces from Colonsay altogether, which was to become the fortress from which the full might of the Loyalists and Brazilians would be unleashed upon the Workers’ Commonwealth.
Scotland would soon burn.
WMA soldiers manning coastal defenses on the Isle of Mull, circa June 1929.
For the next few days, the Entente focused on amassing its arsenal in the southern Hebrides in preparation for the oncoming naval landings at Oban. The small island of Oronsay to the south of Colonsay was captured on June 14th, but otherwise there were no offensives conducted by either side for the next few days. There was just a continuous influx of infantry to northern Scotland, and an eerie silence descended upon the city of Oban and the surrounding area as the regional inhabitants dreaded the inevitable bloodshed that would soak their homelands. Continuous gunfire and explosions upon the waves of the Atlantic Ocean continuously pierced this silence through both day and night. General John Maclean, the Crimson Clydesider himself, returned from the Western Front in France on June 15th to oversee Commonwealth defenses against the Entente, but the famed military officer recognized that he was doomed to fight an uphill battle. The Loyalists and Brazilians had amassed the single largest naval invasion fleet just off the shores of Scotland, and the silhouette of hundreds of warships could be seen from the coastline of Oban.
On the midnight of June 19th, 1929, a week after the Battle of Colonsay, General Winston Churchill gave the go-ahead to finally begin the much-anticipated invasion of Scotland. As the fateful day began, the residents of the Oban Commune were jolted awake by the terrifying sound of hundreds of RAF and IBAF light bombers pummeling WMA positions with a vicious air raid. The night sky was crystal clear, which meant that the Entente bombers had an especially good chance at effectively attacking enemy positions down on the ground. The WDAF quickly took to the sky in an attempt to repel the Entente’s bombardment, but there was no saving Oban from destruction. The Entente had done well at hiding the true size of its aerial fleet and the WDAF was gradually overwhelmed. As the sun began to rise over Scotland, the Oban Commune and its surrounding municipalities had been ruined and hundreds of civilians evacuated to Glasgow. Maclean’s forces had survived, however, it was undeniable that Commonwealth defenses had been weakened.
At the crack of dawn, Entente warships took off towards Oban for the amphibious assault to begin. General Churchill hopped aboard a fleet headed directly towards Gallanach, which laid to the southwest of the city of Oban itself while Brazilian General Augusto Tasso Fragoso set sail to land at Ellenabeich. Meanwhile, the lower-ranking Loyalist General Oswald Mosley was to land on the Isle of Mull in order to prevent the island from serving as a location for the WMA to counter Churchill while Brazilian General Getulio Vargas was to land on the island of Jura and do the same for Tasso Fragoso. As bombers continued to attack WMA positions from above, the aquatic horde of landing craft made its way through the wreckage of naval combat and towards the Scottish mainland. Being both closer to Colonsay and containing substantially less defenses than the other landing points, Ellenabeich was the first position where Entente forces broke through Commonwealth defenses, with soldiers of the Imperial Brazilian Army stepping foot onto the Ellenabeich shoreline at approximately 6:50 AM. A few minutes later, General Tasso Fragoso arrived once a beach head was secured and made preparations to seize the Ellenabeich village and subsequently push northwards towards Oban.
Brazilian soldiers landing at Ellenabeich, circa June 19th, 1929.
General Mosley was the second senior officer to secure a beach head, with his forces landing near the Carsaig Arches at approximately 7:37 AM. A man who had served as the commander of the far-right Organization for Domestic Security militia during the British Civil War, Mosley had firsthand experience with both fighting WMA tactics and using their own guerrilla warfare strategies against them. It was, therefore, no surprise that General Mosley’s offensive moved the fastest, with the peninsula lying to the south of the Loch Scridain falling under total Loyalist occupation within the span of an hour. After Mosley, General Vargas managed to make his way through the defenses of Jura, which had served as a predominant position for Commonwealth forces attempting to attack Colonsay, and the landing craft touched down in Shian Bay at approximately 7:58 AM. While Jura’s naval defenses had been surprisingly difficult to pierce through, the push from Shian Bay was far more easy, and much of the island’s northwestern coastline was under Brazilian occupation within a handful of minutes.
General Winston Churchill’s push towards Gallanach was the most difficult of the four landings due to the landing point’s distance from Colonsay and its strong defenses, however, after well over an hour of combat, Loyalist landing craft reached a shoreline already decimated by a combination of aerial bombardment and naval shelling, and Churchill’s army stepped foot onto the Scottish mainland at approximately 8:21 AM. From here, General Churchill was to march directly towards Oban while General Tasso Fragoso was supposed to race towards Churchill and link up with his offensive. This meant that Churchill and Tasso Fragoso were going to be moving into the bulk of Maclean’s defenses, which guaranteed high casualties. Surely enough, the next few hours were a brutal struggle, and both sides lost hundreds of men. The Workers’ Commonwealth defended the revolutionary state it had spent years building down to the last soldier while the Loyalist forces and their allies fought with a vicious desire for revenge over three years in the making.
All Entente forces in Operation Poseidon notably struggled against Commonwealth tanks, many of which were replicas of advanced French and Russian designs. The Entente naval landings had deployed numerous tanks, however, given that Entente forces on the Atlantic Front had not been engaged in a war on land for years, the tank models they deployed were much less advanced than those utilized by the WMA, with many being left over from Phase One. Nonetheless, the numerical superiority of the Entente invasion meant that Tasso Fragoso was able to link up with General Churchill’s army near Cleigh at approximately 11:45 AM. Now that Winston Churchill and Augusto Tasso Fragoso had consolidated a united front against John Maclean, it would only be a matter of time until Oban fell. To the north, Mosley had reached Salen by this point, and in order to make sure that he had as many troops defending Oban as possible (not to mention that Mull had been one of the bloodiest sites for the WMA during Operation Poseidon), General Maclean ordered a retreat of all Commonwealth forces from the Isle of Mull at noon.
This brought the entirety of the island under Loyalist occupation, and in turn meant that General Mosley could arrive at the joint offensive of Churchill and Tasso Fragoso. At this point, the vast majority of Entente ground forces participating in Operation Poseidon were pointing their guns towards Oban. There was no chance of victory for the WMA, no nearby reinforcements large enough to save John Maclean’s last stand. The struggle for Oban was lost, it was just a matter of when the WMA would retreat and concede to its defeat. Despite the inevitable defeat he faced, the Crimson Clydesider, a Scottish native who had dedicated years of his life to the liberation of all Britons, would not be uprooted so easily. By holding onto Oban until the bitter end, General John Maclean inflicted heavy casualties on his enemy, which he hoped would make future engagements in the struggle for Great Britain easier for the Workers’ Commonwealth to win. LT-7 tanks engaged at the frontline with the oncoming Entente coalition, and what was expected to be a decisive victory by dinnertime entered nighttime.
Once the Entente arrived at the gates of Oban, the fighting became even more brutal. The town was small, however, the buildup of Commonwealth forces in the area during Operation Poseidon meant that Churchill, Tasso Fragoso, and Mosley faced a gruesome night. The Workers’ Model Army had long since adopted the tactics of conventional warfare for combat on the Western Front, but the Crimson Clydesider had not forgotten the days of guerrilla warfare from the British Civil War and would use these tactics to devastate Entente infantry. Abandoned homes became perches from which WMA forces were attacked, each and every street was a chaotic battlefield, and territory behind enemy lines fell victim to insurgencies in the name of the Workers’ Commonwealth. The Battle of Oban would end shortly after 9:00 PM on June 19th once the Entente coalition had completely expelled WMA forces from the town, however, John Maclean left as a hero of the Third International and a bane of the Entente for his last stand where every inch of Oban was defended against the imperialist menace.
Nonetheless, Operation Poseidon had succeeded.
Taming the Lion
“We cannot reclaim this island with the conventional tactics through which we lost it in the first place. We must break the enemy’s supply lines, ensure that no Marxist traitor to His Majesty ever feels safe, and inspire such tremendous fear that a prolonged war effort cannot be justified. If we are to win, we must inflict terror upon Great Britain.”
-General Oswald Mosley during the Oban Conference, circa July 1929.
Soldiers of the Imperial American Army marching through Oban, circa June 1929.
Operation Poseidon had been a resounding success for the Entente. The French Fourth Republic was increasingly appearing to be a lost cause at this point, however, the reclamation of Great Britain in its entirety was becoming a more and more likely possibility now that Loyalist boots were on Scottish ground. In the days following the Battle of Oban, much of the surrounding area was occupied by Entente forces and turned into a fortress from which the collective might of the Second Empire of Brazil and the domains of the House of Windsor would descend upon the Workers’ Commonwealth. The bays of Scotland became makeshift naval harbors while local villages were transformed into de facto military bases.
Victory over the Commonwealth was not, however, a guarantee. The Workers’ Model Army had defeated the Loyalists before and it could do so again. Furthermore, the leadership of the Third International was realizing that a potential disaster for its war effort was emerging in Scotland and its high command began debating how much manpower should be diverted from the Western Front to fight back against the Entente beach head. The Socialist Republic of Ireland would dispatch an expeditionary force to Great Britain on June 26th, 1929, followed by the deployment of an expeditionary force by the Indian Union (which already had troops stationed in France) four days later. All the while, London was continuously calling back regiments of its own expeditionary force from the Western Front to defend Scotland and John Maclean’s army against the Entente coalition grew larger by the day.
Despite the growing influx of Third International soldiers arriving to fight on the newly-formed British Front, the immediate aftermath of Operation Poseidon mostly consisted of a slew of victories for the Entente. The Battle of Stronmilchan on June 24th, 1929 was the first major engagement between the Entente and Workers' Commonwealth since Oban and was a decisive win for the former. Four days later, Inverarnan fell to a similar fate. All of these battles were part of a push by the Entente to reach Glasgow, which was to be the first major city to be conquered on the British Front. As more and more Third International troops arrived in Scotland to halt the Entente’s advance, however, engagements became increasingly difficult to win and progress became noticeably slower.
The Battle of Helensburgh proved to be an especially tedious conflict for the Entente, which only won the battle on July 14th after three days of combat and heavy casualties. To make matters worse for the Loyalists and Brazilians, the capitulation of the French Fourth Republic meant that the Entente had more forces to divert to the Western Front, which in turn meant that more WMA infantry fighting against Germany could be sent to the British Front. And what would happen if Berlin soon fell and the war on the European mainland ceased? The Entente was winning for the time being, but these gains would be for nothing if the entirety of the Third International army fighting the Central Powers was to be unleashed upon Churchill and Tasso Fragoso.
This leads us to the Oban Conference. Hosted in mid-July 1929 at the site of one of the greatest victories for the Entente, Winston Churchill, Augusto Tasso Fragoso, Oswald Mosley, and representatives of the governments of the Empire of America and her dominions, the Second Empire of Brazil, and Republic of Portugal congregated to formulate their plan for continued operations against the Workers’ Commonwealth. With fears of a large Third International coalition soon being deployed on the British Front looming over the entire conference, there was a clear desire to defeat the Commonwealth as quickly as possibly. Churchill, a man who was still haunted by his defeat at Gallipoli all those years ago, the commanding Loyalist officer was particularly insistent on ensuring a rapid victory, no matter the cost. The Loyalists would be fighting the people of their homeland and inflicting great damage upon countless Britons, however, the deep desire for victory outweighed any reluctance for waging a brutal campaign.
Enter General Oswald Mosley. A native of London, Mosley had been commissioned into the British Army upon the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, but had been sidelined from the battlefields of France after being transferred to the Royal Flying Corps as an observer and consequently getting injured in an airplane crash. Mosley never returned to the Western Front, however, as the General Strike of 1922 consumed southern England, he opted to join the Organization for Domestic Security and actively participated in anti-labor union violence. The far-right politics of the ODS had a significant influence on the young Mosley, who grew to be fond of the ideals of class collaborationism and British nationalism as the Second Glorious Revolution erupted around him. The uprising of the United Kingdom’s labor movement and subsequent civil war further pushed Mosley to the right, particularly with regards to economic views, with the young militiaman publishing essays in which he argued in favor of prohibiting unions altogether and ceding substantial political power to powerful corporations.
After Captain RBD Blakeney, the leader of the ODS, was killed by WMA artillery at the Battle of Deeside in May 1924, Oswald Mosley found himself being appointed to succeed Blakeney and would lead the ODS throughout the remainder of the British Civil War. A fervent opponent to the Workers’ Commonwealth who was ambitious as he was self-confident, Captain Mosley commanded the ODS during a number of raids on WMA positions that were regarded as brave by some and stupidly suicidal by others. The civilian militia structure of the ODS gave Mosley a unique advantage not held by the British Army in that he was able to conduct guerrilla warfare, with Mosley coordinating a number of insurgencies behind enemy lines during the British Civil War. While Oswald Mosley’s guerrilla warfare tactics were often supported by the high command of the Loyalist armed forces, the ODS gained a reputation for being exceptionally violent, and many of its regiments showed little regard for civilians (those who lived within the Commonwealth were often viewed as traitors to the Crown) while insurgencies in Commonwealth-occupied territory resorted to acts of terrorism on numerous occasions.
After the Loyalist withdrawal from Great Britain in 1925, the ODS continued to survive in Canada as a state-sponsored paramilitary that targeted “dissidents” (this usually translated to union-busting, including against labor movements that were not sympathetic with the Third International), however, Mosley was determined to continue fighting in the Great War and therefore left the militia behind to join the armed forces. Oswald Mosley briefly joined the Royal Navy, but he grew eventually bored of fighting on the high seas, which he claimed lacked “the grandiose honor of the battlefield” and joined the British Army to fight on the South Asian Front against the Indian Union in August 1925. Mosley didn’t play a very significant role in the war for India, however, he did prove to be a capable officer and quickly rose through the ranks and was a lieutenant general by 1928.
Given his experience in guerrilla warfare and fighting the WMA, General Winston Churchill selected Mosley to be one of the head officers for Operation Poseidon. The thirty-one year-old ex-militia leader was an unusual choice to play a leading role in one of the most pivotal military campaigns in the entire Great War, however, Lieutenant General Oswald Mosley soon proved his worth by being the most efficient commanders on June 19th and uprooting the Workers’ Model Army from the Isle of Mull with relative ease. After the Battle of Oban, Mosley became a celebrated war hero amongst the Entente and a feared villain amongst the Third International, and his impressive success was rewarded with a promotion to a four-star general, one who would lead Loyalist forces on the British Front alongside the most skilled commanders the Entente had to offer.
Now standing at the Oban Conference alongside revered military officers and ambassadors who were decades older than him, General Oswald Mosley finally had the power to influence the very course of action adopted by the entire Loyalist-Brazilian coalition. Mosley thus proposed a seemingly bizarre plan that, if put into effect, would cause the Entente to wage a brutal war against the Workers’ Commonwealth and her civilians. A proponent of total war, Mosley suggested that the Entente coalition bomb both military and civilian infrastructure to devastate the Commonwealth’s capabilities and terrify the people of the revolutionary state into capitulation in the process. More interestingly, Oswald Mosley argued that ground forces be moved behind enemy lines by aircraft and then proceed to fight behind the frontlines of the British Front with guerrilla tactics by being deployed with gliders and parachutes. In other words, General Mosley proposed to conduct the first large-scale air assault in military history. Once behind enemy lines, the Commonwealth’s supply lines would fall into disarray and the WMA’s forces would be scattered as they faced spontaneous attacks in all directions.
The Entente possessed the technology to theoretically conduct such an operation and had experimented with parachuting in soldiers in the past, but the campaign that Mosley proposed was unheard of and appeared to be too risky for such an important war effort to pursue. Nonetheless, the proposal had great potential and General Winston Churchill, who remained desperate for bringing a quick end to the British Front, ultimately endorsed Mosley’s plan, which in turn caused the Brazilian high command to concede their support. Therefore, Operation Icarus was born. The operation began on July 23rd, 1929 with a series of Entente air raids on Commonwealth settlements, followed by the deployment of paratroopers later into the day. Just as Oswald Mosley had anticipated, the air assault caught the enemy completely off guard and forced the WMA to divert its concentration to the pockets of makeshift guerrilla fighters emerging behind the frontlines. This gave the Entente coalition the opportunity to rapidly advance against a confused and disorganized enemy, which resulted in a collection of sudden victories.
Alexandria fell on July 24th.
Dumbarton fell on July 26th.
Clydebank fell on July 29th.
The Entente was now knocking on Glasgow’s door. John Maclean was determined to hold onto Scotland’s largest city, however, the fact of the matter was that Operation Icarus had thrown the WMA defenses into total disarray. The Battle of Glasgow began on July 30th, 1929 as air assaults landed Entente forces in the southern reaches of the city while a coalition of forces commanded by Winston Churchill pushed against the Commonwealth’s frontlines from the north. Within minutes, the Battle of Glasgow became a confused mess of urban warfare, with Entente and Third International soldiers scattered throughout the city and waging chaotic guerrilla warfare. The state of the battle’s frontlines was therefore difficult to calculate, however, over time it became clear that the Third International was being pushed out of the city. The River Clyde was utilized as a natural barrier to keep the Entente out of the southwestern sect of Glasgow, and this did deter General Churchill’s offensive overnight, however, General Mosley’s air assault could obviously cross over the River Clyde with natural ease. By the afternoon of July 31st, 1929, John Maclean had withdrawn his forces from the urban battlefield, and the Union Jack was hoisted above Glasgow for the first time in many years.
Loyalist paratroopers being deployed above Glasgow, circa July 1929.
With the largest Scottish city resting in the hands of the Entente, there was little hope for the Workers’ Commonwealth reclaiming the swath of land that it had lost. An emphasis on anti-aircraft weapons to combat air assaults was the best bet the WMA had at fending off against Operation Icarus, however, the amount of manpower and resources that the Entente was investing into airborne operations following their streak of success meant that a complete deterrence of Operation Icarus was impossible. Day after day, despite the valiant efforts of Commonwealth forces, ground was lost to the Loyalist-Brazilian coalition and much of Scotland was infected with the terror of Mosley’s guerrilla cells. Ironically enough, the gradual centralization of the armed forces of the Workers’ Commonwealth since the conclusion of the British Civil War and the consequential abandonment of guerrilla warfare tactics had left the WMA in a position similar to the British Army over three years prior. Now, it was the WMA that was struggling to fight a conventional defensive war against guerrilla forces.
This wasn’t to say that the WMA had completely abandoned the tactics of guerrilla warfare, and General Maclean conceded over more and more autonomy to his lower officers in order to allow for spontaneous responses to a spontaneous enemy, but it was the Entente that had mastered the fusion of guerrilla warfare with mechanized large-scale campaigns in the form of Operation Icarus. The eastward push towards Edinburgh, which was led by Augusto Tasso Fragoso, was yet another example of the Entente breaking WMA defenses through airborne invasions. The city of Edinburgh itself was actually encircled by Brazilian forces, and after the WMA suffered a particularly gruesome defeat at the Battle of Dalkeith on August 11th, it was decided that the defenses and civilian population of Edinburgh alike would be rapidly evacuated from a city that was doomed to fall. Thus, there would be no Second Battle of Edinburgh. Instead, the Scottish capital fell to the Imperial Brazilian Army on August 17th, 1929 with only minimal resistance from local guerrillas.
Brazilian soldiers occupying Edinburgh, circa August 1929.
The fall of Edinburgh was not only a devastating tactical and symbolic victory in that what was arguably the most important city (politically speaking) in all of Scotland had fallen, but that it effectively cut off the Scottish highlands from the rest of Great Britain. As a Scotsman himself, General Maclean did not want to abandon the last major holdout of the Workers’ Commonwealth in Scotland, but the fact of the matter was that the Scottish highlands were sparsely populated, lacked strategic significance, and would fall under Entente military occupation regardless of whether or not there were WMA regiments defending the region. With its largest cities already under Entente control, Scotland had more or less effectively been lost and Maclean needed as much manpower as he could get in the defense of England. Therefore, the Crimson Clydesider regretfully ordered a general evacuation of the Scottish Highlands on August 20th, 1929, and the chunk of Scotland to not be under Entente control fell in the aftermath. There was hope that the Scottish people could be liberated yet again, however, that was a battle that would have to be fought on another day.
While General John Maclean maintained popular support due to his reputation as a guardian of the Second Glorious Revolution who was staring down nearly impossible odds to overcome, the constant influx of reports of defeats from the British Front to England did tank the popularity of Comrade Protector Albert Inkpin and the ruling BWC-CSL coalition of the United People’s Congress. In contrast, Arthur MacManus of the Socialist Pacifist Party and his DWC coalition noticed an uptick in public approval throughout the summer of 1929. The people of the Workers’ Commonwealth were well aware that they were losing on the homefront and feared that a prolonged conflict would spell the death of their revolutionary government. Scotland had already fallen. Must England fall too? The general election of 1925 had increased the already-large majority held by the BWC-CSL, however, there were more and more grumblings within the coalition apparatus of expelling Albert Inkpin for fresh blood and a handful of minor coalition member parties discussed crossing the aisle to align with the increasingly popular DWC.
Inkpin ultimately faced a challenge for the leadership of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the form of Minister of Foreign Affairs Rose Cohen. An avid internationalist, Cohen opposed any withdrawal from the Great War, an action that she regarded as a “betrayal of the Permanent Revolution and the global proletariat,” and also was not enthusiastic about the notion of suing for peace with the Entente, however, she was critical of Inkpin’s leadership following Operation Poseidon (particularly with regards to an inability to respond to Entente air assaults) and had stated that she was open to conditional negotiations with the Entente should the terms be favorable for the Workers’ Commonwealth. In the eyes of many pragmatic members of the Communist Party, Cohen’s appeal wasn’t so much her political views but her popularity as the Minister of Foreign Affairs, which made her a viable replacement for Inkpin who could boost the popularity of the BWC-CSL without a fundamental change to the party platform. Therefore, Albert Inkpin was narrowly ousted by an election for party leadership on August 29th, which meant that Rose Cohen assumed the role as leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain, the BWC-CSL, and the Workers’ Commonwealth as a whole.
Comrade Protector Rose Cohen of the Workers’ Commonwealth.
Upon assuming power, Cohen made it very clear to the United People’s Congress that she did not intend to withdraw from the Western Front, however, she was supportive of reforms to the Commonwealth war effort on the British Front. The conscription of women, something that had already been enacted by the French Commune several years prior, was put into effect via the passage of the Universal Service Act on September 7th, 1929 and the passage of the Communal Defense Act three days later gave regional communes the ability to form their own militarized self-defense forces that would act independently of WMA high command and could request armament from the national government. It was too little too late to reclaim what had been lost to the Entente, however, Comrade Protector Cohen’s reforms did start having a noticeable impact as the manpower of Commonwealth defenses surged throughout September 1928.
The Entente was also beginning to detect a slowdown in progress. The Battle of Netherby on September 10th, 1929 marked the first time Entente forces conquered English territory, however, the subsequent offensive into England slowed down considerably from the rapid movements previously made in Scotland, especially once new conscripts arrived on the frontlines thanks to the Universal Suffrage Act. It is also worth pointing out that the Entente was now entering the far more densely populated region of Great Britain, which meant that large swathes of territory could not simply be occupied by regiments, not to mention that the emergence of self-defense militias in accordance with the Communal Defense Act meant that many municipalities, particularly more populated ones, posed their own threats to the Entente war effort.
To make matters worse for the Entente, the effects of the African Spring were starting to proliferate into Loyalist colonies around this time. The Sultanate of Darfur, which had managed to retain limited autonomy since its annexation into the British Empire, finally decided to break the chains of imperialism circa September 1929 after the Tuareg Sultanate had guaranteed its support for a Darfurian war of independence. Native authorities, particularly those who had a protectorate status, throughout British Africa were all considering taking advantage of the chaos of the Great War and finally seceding from their imperialist oppressors, not to mention that thousands of locals had taken to the streets to protest colonial rule. It was, therefore, seemingly inevitable that large scale insurrections against British colonialism were bound to arise throughout Africa, and while the reclamation of Great Britain was certainly the top priority of both the Empire of America and the exiled regime of the United Kingdom, the potential collapse of the British Empire could not be ignored, and tensions within the colonies would only get worse the longer the Loyalists remained involved in the Great War.
For the time being, the Entente remained committed to pushing towards London, and the gradual southward progress continued until the coalition reached Darlington. It was here that the Entente entered the heartland of England’s industrial and mining sectors, which were unsurprisingly very pro-Commonwealth. Many of the communes of northern England, including Darlington, had taken advantage of the Communal Defense Act to forge militias that were well-armed by the UPC, which recognized the importance that these forces would play on the British Front. The Battle of Darlington began on October 7th, 1929 when General Augusto Tasso Fragoso attacked the city from the north, expecting yet another decisive victory for the Entente. The general was soon, however, proven wrong as the Darlington Self-Defense Force (DSDF) played a pivotal role in waging harsh guerrilla warfare against the Brazilians. By the end of the day, the city was still in the hands of the Workers’ Commonwealth and the Battle of Darlington showed no signs of stopping. After three days of combat, the fight for Darlington would conclude, however, it was not Tasso Fragoso who had emerged victorious. Instead, the Commonwealth had secured its first major victory against the Entente in months, which forced the Imperial Brazilian Army to retreat to Newton Aycliffe.
Throughout northern England, the story of Darlington repeated itself. Local self-defense forces prevented Entente invaders from ever successfully consolidating their control over cities and towns while fresh recruits bolstered the WMA’s numbers to a degree where the Entente could be sufficiently held back. This collection of communes throughout northern England that the Entente could not seem to pierce through, which spanned from Stockton-on-Tees in the east to Kendal in the west, was eventually nicknamed the Red Wall, and it appeared as though that this wall was the barrier that finally halted the advance of the Entente coalition. A war of attrition set in along the Red Wall, and it became increasingly apparent to the high command of the Entente that London would not fall anytime soon. Meanwhile, the effects of the African Spring on the British Empire were starting to get worse. Darfur was winning its war for independence, and the success of the Sultanate had inspired similar rebellions in Buganda, northern Nigeria, and British East Africa.
It was becoming apparent to Robert Borden, the de facto ruler of the British Empire, that continued involvement in the Great War would spell doom for the colonial empire he had presided over since the exile of the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, despite the recent slew of victories along the Red Wall, Rose Cohen was well aware that the Workers’ Commonwealth was still losing the British Front and that Commonwealth defenses could collapse at any moment. Simply put, neither the Loyalists nor the Commonwealth were enthusiastic about continuing the Great War, a conflict that risked taking more from both belligerents than they stood to potentially gain. Seeing their moment to bring an end to the chaotic war on the British Front, the SPP proposed a bill to the United People’s Congress in late October 1928 that, if passed, would cause the Workers’ Commonwealth to call for an armistice with the Entente. Surprisingly enough, with many Britons tired of the Great War and realizing that they might as well sue for peace while the victories along the Red Wall gave them leverage at the negotiation table, the bill passed.
The Workers’ Commonwealth officially requested an armistice on October 27th, which the Brazilians were supportive of accepting. After all, the Second Empire of Brazil had no claimancy to Great Britain and the formation of a Loyalist-controlled North Britain was seen as a good enough victory in their eyes, not to mention a victory that would cost far less men and resources than a continued offensive into England. The Loyalists were of course, far more difficult to convince, and Oswald Mosley predictably advocated for prolonging the war on the British Front until the Workers’ Commonwealth unconditionally surrendered. In the end, however, Winston Churchill, who was ultimately the supreme authority of the Loyalist war effort against the Third International recognized that the Entente wasn’t marching into London anytime soon and any victory would likely sacrifice what remained of the British Empire. Prime Minister Borden similarly saw the necessity of maintaining the colonial empire, and would therefore give Churchill the go-ahead to accept the Commonwealth request for an armistice on October 30th, 1929.
The war for Great Britain had come to an end.
Soldiers of the Workers’ Model Army celebrating the October Armistice, circa 1929.
Given that the British Front was the last frontline that the Entente played a significant role on, the negotiations that followed the October Armistice grew into the ultimate peace treaty between the Entente and Third International alliances as a whole. The Treaty of Belfast served as the only time the heads of government from all belligerents of the two rival factions (with the notable exception of the French Fourth Republic, which had negotiated a separate peace treaty with the Third International back in July) met each other face to face, which was truly a sight to behold. The governments of the Entente, once the rulers of the world, now had to negotiate with the very revolutionary administrations that had started as minor rebellions all those years ago but had since brought upon the collapse of the Victorian international regime. After fourteen years of combat, the Entente had lost the Great War.
The first order of business at Belfast was the Entente’s collective recognition of the governments of the Third International as legitimate states. This was non-negotiable and easily accepted by the Entente, however, it was nonetheless humiliating for the alliance to effectively concede its defeat in a number of civil wars. It was also agreed upon that peace between all belligerents would be secured for at least twenty years, at which point it was hoped that the Great War as a whole would be a distant memory. The main focus of the Treaty of Belfast, however, was the fate of Great Britain. Neither the Loyalists or the Workers’ Commonwealth were willing to give up any territory they occupied, which meant that it was eventually decided that the island that was once the center of power of the largest empire the world had ever known was to be partitioned between a liberal north and a socialist south, with the Red Wall becoming the new border that would separate the two.
The northern Entente-occupied territory was organized into the Mandate of Scotland and Northumbria (colloquially referred to as North Britain), which fell under the joint military occupation of the Empire of America and Second Empire of Brazil. Of course, the Loyalist ambassadors made it clear that the intent of the Mandate was to rebuild North Britain into a rump United Kingdom, which meant that the actual governance of the entity was to fall under the administration of a military junta led by a governor-general jointly appointed by both the American and British prime minister. This governor-general was to purge North Britain of the revolution that clung onto England and Wales through what was in practice an autocratic authoritarian regime with little difference from the colonial dictatorships of the British Empire beyond the Mandate’s ultimate purpose. While not discussed at Belfast, the man selected by Robert Borden and John Simon to be the governor-general of North Britain was none other than Oswald Mosley, the young and ambitious military officer who was credited by many for leading the Entente to conquer the northern reaches of Great Britain in the first place.
Governor-General Oswald Mosley of the Mandate of Scotland and Northumbria being escorted by police in Glasgow, circa December 1929.
Once the fate of Great Britain was determined, the Treaty of Belfast was more or less complete and was therefore ratified by all present belligerents on November 11th, 1929. A few days later, the Entente would sign a separate peace treaty with the Central Powers (the Treaty of Hamburg) on November 16th, which simply declared that both sides would no longer clash with each other in naval engagements and brought an end to war that had for all intents and purposes already concluded many years prior. Nonetheless, the Hamburg peace agreement was significant in that it officially pulled the Entente out of war with the Central Powers and thus removed the alliance from the Great War altogether. The Entente alliance as an entity, however, was far from ending its existence. The rebellions throughout Africa were incentive enough to keep the organization afloat, but in the eyes of the Second Empire of Brazil, the Entente served as means for the nation to exert its newfound status as a great power throughout the world. It was clear to all that the age of the old superpowers of the 19th Century had passed and Brazil was well-poised to become a superpower of the 20th.
The dawn of the New Western Civilization was on the horizon.
The War That Refused to End
“Berlin has become a hellscape where only the harshest and strongest may survive.”
-Joseph Stalin, circa September 1928.
Red Army forces in eastern Berlin, circa August 1928.
As the Entente and Third International clashed to a decisive conclusion in the west, the Battle of Berlin ceaselessly raged on in the east. The city of Berlin, once one of the most prominent cities in the world, laid in ruins after months of combat, its remains serving as a harsh reminder to the Heilsreich of what the Great War had cost Germany. By the time the Treaty of Belfast was ratified, the Battle of Berlin was still raging on and had become a war of attrition since August 1928. The Germans continued utilizing poisonbombing as a means to suffocate their enemy while the Third International’s coalition had long since learned to adapt with fighting in a city where the air had become toxic. The Graveyard of Eurasia had thus become a graveyard of living ghosts, with the vast majority of soldiers walking through Berlin’s devastated wearing gas masks to survive the urban wasteland.
After months of combat, Joseph Stalin and Jawaharlal Nehru remained stuck at Johannisthal in a war of attrition against Erich Ludendorff. To the south of Berlin, Erwin Rommel and Ram Prasad Bismil had been fighting at Diedersdorf since mid-September and the relatively rapid progress Rommel had made earlier into the year had long since come to an end once the Third International started to pay more and more attention to these southern clashes. The only frontline of the Battle of Berlin that seemed to be making any advances during the fall of 1928 was the northern flank, where Mikhail Frunze was slowly but surely chipping away at Hermann Erhardt’s defenses. From the conquest of Honower Siedlung in late May, General Frunze pushed into northeastern Berlin circa early June, bringing Hellersdorf under total Red Army occupation by the beginning of July.
The poisonbombing of the Luftsreitkrafte deterred General Frunze, just as it deterred his comrades fighting all throughout Berlin, however, this was ultimately overcome once gas masks were widely distributed throughout Soviet ranks and the Russians began to deploy chemical weapons of their own. On August 17th, Mikhail Frunze had reached Marzan-Hellersdorf, and the entire northern half of Biersdorf was under his decisive control following a Red Army victory battle near the Otto-Nagel Gymnasium on September 1st. The rapid progress made by Mikhail Frunze did, of course, catch the attention of Erich Ludendorff, however, the war of attrition against Stalin, Nehru, and Bismil left very few soldiers to be spared to halt Frunze’s offensive in the north. Nonetheless, as General Frunze began entering Friedrichsfelde, Ludendorff was realizing that the advances in the northeast were beginning to pose the greatest threat to the German war effort and therefore made the call to divert manpower from Rommel to Erhardt. By mid-October, General Frunze advances had come to a standstill in central Friedrichsfelde.
It was this war of attrition on all three frontlines that remained the state of the Battle of Berlin by the start of November 1928. As the Entente alliance withdrew from the Great War, the flames of conflict continued to burn bright on the Eastern Front. Victory was in reach for the Third International, however, it laid behind the vast legions of Central Power forces defending western Berlin. With the formation of the Brautchistch Line in the west, the Heilsreich was able to concentrate the vast majority of its attention on the Battle of Berlin, especially as the Russian Soviet Republic diverted attention away from the invasion of Austria to ensure that the German capital city would soon fall. Despite being the main focus of both the Heilsreich and the Soviets, the frontlines of Berlin remained stagnant throughout more or less all of November. The snowfall of the subsequent December descended upon the very same barricades that had existed for the past month, with neither side showing any signs of breaking anytime soon.
German soldiers of Rommel’s flank to the south of Berlin, circa December 1928.
In order to bring more manpower to the Battle of Berlin, the Russian Soviet Republic followed the example of its British and French allies by implementing a conscription program for women on December 11th, 1928, and the German Heilsreich (despite its socially reactionary views on the rights of women as a whole) begrudgingly lifted its ban on female military service four days later in retaliation to the inevitable surge in Red Army numbers. The impact of this influx of new manpower was not seen until late December, at which point it gradually became clear that the conscription policy of the Soviet Republic, not to mention the fact that Russia had an inherent advantage over Germany with regards to manpower due to its larger population gave it a numerical advantage in Berlin.
Over time, the Third International’s numerical advantage gave way to an end to the war of attrition in Berlin as the frontlines progressed in favor of the revolutionary coalition. Baumschulenweg was under total Third International military occupation once the last German forces were removed from the area on January 14th, 1929. In the north, Mikhail Frunze, started the new year with similar progress, with Friedrichsfelde falling under total Red Army control in early January and Karlshorst succumbing to a similar fate only a few days later. This led General Frunze to the neighborhood of Rummelsburg, which was the only place standing between him and the Spree River. The push through Rummelsburg was a grueling process due to both Hermann Erhardt and Erich Ludendorff providing substantial resources to the neighborhood’s defense given its strategic importance, however, in the end there was never really any doubt who would ultimately emerge victorious. The simple fact of the matter was that the Red Army was the largest military in Berlin and the Heilsreich did not have the ability to win the defensive conflict for the city. After many weeks of fighting, Rummelsburg was completely occupied by the army of Mikhail Frunze on February 17th, and the victorious general watched what remained of his enemy forces retreat across the Spree in defeat.
After General Erhardt withdrew from Rummelsburg, he and Erich Ludendorff found themselves situated in Planterwald and being besieged by Third International forces to both their north and south. The sheer amount of German soldiers concentrated in Planterwald ensured that the neighborhood would not fall for the time being, however, the neighborhood would soon fall without a quick reversal in Germany’s fortunes. A stalemate emerged and Planterwald was gradually transformed into a fortress from which the German war effort was presided over, however, General Ludendorff could see the writing on the wall. The Heilsreich was unable to replenish its forces at the rate of the Russian Soviet Republic and the Indian Union, and once defenses in the south cracked, the German position was anticipated to be devastated by a rapid Third International offensive. It should also be noted that the extremely close quarters of Planterwald meant that both sides were increasingly reluctant to utilize poisonbombing for fear of harming their own armies, although the compact location of German forces proved to be an ideal target for the Soviet Air Force.
Day by day, the Heilsreich was losing more and more soldiers to the carnage of the Battle of Berlin. German media was keen on downplaying the true scale of the loss, however, not even this could prevent the people of the Fatherland from gathering what was going on in their nation’s capital. The German government was, of course, fully aware of the war effort in Berlin and was given daily updates on the situation on the ground. This included Kaiser August Wilhelm I, who watched the bloodiest battle in the Great War play out from afar in Hanover. Throughout the ranks of the DVP, there were growing discussions surrounding a potential armistice, which varied from waiting until the Battle of Berlin concluded to raise the white flag to surrendering as soon as possible in order to preserve what remained of German forces in Berlin and to give Germany more leverage at the negotiation table. The war had already ended for the Entente. Wasn’t it time for the Great War in its entirety to finally come to a close?
To August, these murmurs were tantamount to treason. In his eyes, surrender was as humiliating as it was unnecessary. Surely, the German nation, the rightful ruler of the world, could overcome the barbaric socialist horde? The Kaiser could not, however, ignore the fact that Germany was currently on a path to losing in Berlin. Determined to avoid capitulation, August Wilhelm entered into a private correspondence with General Ludendorff in late February 1929, a dialogue unbeknownst to even the Fuhrer. Through their letters between each other, August Wilhelm crafted a remarkably risky plan that he believed would turn the tides of the Battle of Berlin. The German armed forces were to retreat on all frontlines, thus giving the Third International temporary control over the heart of Berlin. This was, however, only temporary and would, in the words of August Wilhelm, “give our enemy the illusion of a decisive victory.” August had noticed that the Third International supply lines into Berlin but outside of the city were relatively poorly defended, and he proposed that the German forces retreat from the heart of the city to quickly cut off the aforementioned supply lines, thus encircling hundreds of thousands of enemy soldiers and trapping them in the ruins of Berlin.
It was a bold plan to be sure, and relied on the Third International not reacting to German attacks on supply lines on time. Should Stalin’s legion notice what his enemies were planning and move quickly, the Germans would effectively hand over the heart of their capital to the Russian Soviet Republic. If the plan succeeded, however, Berlin would become the tomb for the bulk of Red Army forces on the Eastern Front, thus not only winning the Battle of Berlin for the German Heilsreich but devastating the Third International war effort enough to pursue a counteroffensive towards the Oder River. Both Ludendorff and August recognized the potential risks and benefits of the plan, however, the former was desperate to turn the tables and the current strategy of attempting to hold back the Third International in central Berlin definitely was not working. Therefore, Erich Ludendorff accepted the proposal of his kaiser and set out organizing the Heilsreich’s last shot at a victory in the Battle of Berlin.
Operation Odoacer was born.
The German withdrawal from central Berlin began on March 5th as Ludendorff and Erhardt carefully retreated from Planterwald and made their way into the western reaches of the city. Meanwhile, Erwin Rommel made a much more gradual and subtle retreat in preparation for forming a southern flank in the attack on Third International supply lines. By the end of the day, Ludendorff had stationed the bulk of his men in Pankow despite dispatching a significant number of reinforcements to Rommel, while also maintaining very lackluster defenses against the bulk of the Third International offensive. This retreat gave off the impression to the Third International that the Germans were preparing for a total withdrawal from Berlin and that Ludendorff was planning to launch an offensive towards enemy forces from a different angle as a last-ditch strategy. In other words, the Third International did not pick up on Operation Odoacer, and for the time being, the world believed that the Red Army was on the brink of conquering Berlin in its entirety. After all, the German retreat had handed the Third International territory as far west as Museum Island, leaving the Brandenburg Gate in sight.
German prisoners of war being escorted through Berlin, circa March 1929.
As many Third International soldiers already began celebrating their seemingly inevitable victory in the Battle of Berlin, however, something strange began occurring at the fringes of the city. The anticipated attack by General Ludendorff on the forces Stalin, Nerhu, and Frunze from the northwest never took place. At around 4:00 AM on March 6th, Ludendorff’s forces began to depart out of Berlin altogether, and a few minutes later, Rommel’s forces similarly started to move to the south of Bismil’s army. General Joseph Stalin was alerted of these developments once the Red Army caught wind of what was going on a little after 5:00 AM, however, the commanding officer of the Red Army did not predict what was about to occur. Perhaps out of hubris more than anything, Stalin simply predicted that the two generals had accepted defeat and were initiating their withdrawal from the battlefield.
Mere minutes later, General Stalin realized just how devastatingly wrong he was. At 5:10 AM, General Ludendorff gave the order for all German forces fighting in the Battle of Berlin to begin their mad dash towards Furstenwalde. The army of the Heilsreich moved away from the frontlines of the Great War and therefore avoided being bogged down by the vast enemy forces that populated Berlin. The Soviet Air Force was the only military force standing in the way of the Germans and their push towards the underbelly of the Third International offensive, and the substantially larger and more technologically advanced Luftsreitkrafte made quick work of these aerial defenses. Stalin quickly came to the realization of what his enemy was doing, however, by this point it was too late. Erich Ludendorff besieged Strausburg at approximately 5:35 AM while Irwin Rommel attacked Storkow seven minutes later. General Bismil was ordered to deter the German attack to the east of Berlin, however, the time it would take for Bismil to make his way to this region meant that the Heilsreich was able to more or less complete its mission before reinforcements could arrive, not to mention that the sheer size of both Ludendorff and Rommel’s armies greatly exceded that of Bismil.
Within the span of a little over a half hour, Ludendorff and Rommel easily overwhelmed the Third International forces defending the vital supply line that linked the Oder River to berlin. Just as Operation Odoacer had anticipated, these supply lines were very poorly defended, thus handing the Germans a decisive victory. At 6:19 AM, Ludendorff and Rommel linked up at Furstenwalde, therefore completely severing the titanic Third International army in Berlin from aid. The Soviet Air Force attempted to provide aerial assistance, however, the much larger LK made sure to prevent a supply line from emerging in the sky. Red Army forces to the east of the Oder were quickly mobilized in an attempt to retake Furstenwalde, but it was too little too late. The fact of the matter was that the majority of Soviet forces fighting in Germany were concentrated in Berlin, which left very little manpower behind to fight Ludendorff’s sudden encirclement. Berlin was encircled and the city that the Russian Soviet Republic had dedicated almost a year to conquering had become its army’s prison. There would be no airlift, no reinforcements, and no escape from the doom that was to descend upon Stalin, Nehru, and their comrades.
The Third International was trapped.
Desperate to pry his way out of the tomb that Ludendorff had forged for him, General Stalin dedicated the remainder of March 6th diverting more and more forces to fighting in the east against Ludendorff and Rommel, however, these attempts proved to be futile. The bulk of the German armed forces present at the Battle of Berlin were now concentrated on this front, and the more troops were sent out east, the more other frontlines throughout Berlin were left vulnerable to smaller regiments throughout the city. By the end of the day, the Third International retreated from many of the gains it had seized from the German withdrawal no more than a day prior, and the forces of the workers’ revolution held on against an offensive in the west at Alt-Treptow while simultaneously gradually losing ground to an offensive in the east at Muggelheim.
Once the German foothold on territory to the east of Berlin was secured, Ludendorff dispersed his infantry more evenly around the entirety of the city on March 7th, meaning that the Third International had to engage on all fronts. Stalin and his fellow officers could not look away from one side of Berlin for a second, for doing so would surely give the enemy a victory. Meanwhile, with the Soviet Air Force devastated from the fight with the LK over eastern Germany, the latter aerial force achieved near-total air supremacy over Berlin and was capable of constant bombardments of Third International positions. Poisonbombing became all the more rampant, as did firebombing and more traditional aerial bombardment. By March 9th, the lack of access to supply lines was already proving to have a detrimental effect on Third International forces once the lifespans of numerous gas masks came to an end due to their filters’ exposure to relentless poisonbombing, and without an influx of new equipment from the east, several casualties suffocated due to resource shortages.
This campaign of annihilation carried on for three more days, with every single hour bringing with it a slew of casualties and a noticeable ground loss for the Third International. The commanders of the joint Russo-Indian offensive watched with horror as the victory they were so close to securing for the past year collapsed in front of them, bringing down their vast army in the process. By March 12th, the Third International occupation of Berlin was relegated to a patch of territory consisting of eastern Treptow-Kopenick, southern Lichtenburg, and western Neukolln. The German offensive, on the other hand, continued smoothly with relatively few casualties, as Ludendorff attacked from the east, Rommel attacked from the south, Paulus attacked from the west, and Erhardt attacked from the north. Stalin was determined to hold out until the bitter end, however, the more pragmatic Leon Trotsky saw that the Third international was not going to win the Battle of Berlin, and with approval from Subhas Chandra Bose, ordered the total withdrawal of all Third International forces from the city via an airlift scheduled for the afternoon of March 12th.
The Berlin Airlift was a daring maneuver that guaranteed, at best, limited success, but it was nonetheless hoped that whatever remained of the Third International could be salvaged from the ruins of Berlin. Very few Soviet airplanes made their way through German defenses, with the first aircraft landing in the rubble of Baumschulenweg at 1:54 PM. Ram Prasad Bismil was the first of the four major Third International military officers to be evacuated out of Berlin alongside hundreds of weary soldiers, however, Bismil, along with many of the comrades he had fought alongside for the past year, never made it to the rendezvous point nearby Seelow, for the man who had fought valiantly in the Battle of Berlin from the very beginning was shot down by LK fighter planes around the outskirts of eastern Berlin. Mikhail Frunze, the Red Army commander who had conquered the Baltic states and brought East Prussia to its knees, succumbed to the very same fate a few minutes later.
Out of the over 500,000 soldiers stranded in Berlin as of March 12th, 1929, less than ten percent were evacuated by the Berlin Airlift, with the remaining forces either being killed whilst defending the Third International holdout-turned-runway, being shot down by the Germans during the evacuation, or being captured as prisoners of war as the Heilsreich reclaimed its capital. Among the soldiers who did manage to escape was Jawaharlal Nehru, the commanding officer of the All-Indian Liberation Army, who arrived in Seelow as a hero of not just the Indian Union, but all nations loyal to the Third International. Perhaps predictably given his commitment to the battle since the very beginning, General Joseph Stalin was the last military officer to evacuate from the Battle of Berlin. He would leave behind the greatest failure of his military career with the very last Third International soldiers just after 3:00 PM, but his plane would never land at Seelow. The airplane carrying Stalin was shot down around Rehfelde and made a crash landing that killed its crew in the process.
Miraculously, however, Joseph Stalin survived the downing of his plane alongside a handful of Red Army soldiers, who managed to crawl their way out of the burning wreckage whilst covered in scars. As German soldiers in the distance approached the airplane, Stalin led his comrades towards Soviet-occupied Germany and, despite all odds, survived to tell the tale once arriving at the Red Army-held town of Muncheberg. The field marshal of the Red Army and heir to the Red Napoleon was left with permanent scars across his body, not to mention the fact that he was mentally scarred by his devastating defeat. Joseph Stalin would remain in charge of the Red Army for the time being, however, his leadership skills were thrown into considerable doubt by his peers, especially as the general grew increasingly bitter, aggressive, and brutal in the aftermath of the Battle of Berlin.
Back in Berlin, the withdrawal of Stalin and the last Red Army forces left in the city meant that what remained unoccupied by the Heilsreich quickly fell under the control of Ludendorff once his troops managed to make their way through barricades left behind by the retreating Soviets. At 3:05 PM, General Erich Ludendorff finally declared victory in the Battle of Berlin and alerted the exiled German government in Hanover of his conquest. After ceaseless days of fighting, the single longest and bloodiest battle in the Great War had concluded. Against the odds, the Heilsreich had not only crawled back from the grips of defeat, but had annihilated the Third International forces of the Eastern Front in the process. Red Army forces in Poland were in disarray following the destruction of so many regiments in Berlin, which prevented the Soviet Republic from conducting another offensive towards the German capital. On the contrary, the Heilsreich went on the offensive for the first time in a year, and managed to push the Russians back across the Oder River by the end of March 1929.
German soldiers parading through Berlin a week after their victory at the city, circa March 1929.
Of course, the Great War was far from over. The Heilsreich’s victory at Berlin had simply prolonged the conflict that was already easily the bloodiest war in human history as a war of attrition raged on in the west while the gruesome slog between Germany and Russia carried on in the east. It was, however, apparent that the Great War had entered yet another distinct era, just as it had back in 1923. Gone were the days of revolutions and coups plaguing a war-torn world. The three-sided clash between the Entente, Central Powers, and Third International had concluded the year prior, thus leaving the traditional European government that had fought in the Great War from the very beginning out of the picture. In their place emerged a war between the forces of fascism and socialism that would define Europe for the next decade, with no clear end in sight as both factions were determined to secure a decisive victory over their mortal enemies. And with the reserves of the two factions drying up, the Great War was sure to expand yet again. Phase Two, the war of ideology, had concluded, however, Phase Three, the war of resources, had only just begun.
A Dinner in Berlin
“Hail to thee in the Victor’s wreath,
Ruler of the fatherland!
Hail to thee emperor!
Feel by the splendor of the throne
The greatest joy fully
To be the favorite of the people!
Hail to thee, emperor!”
-Beginning of “Heil dir im Siegerkranz,” the national anthem of the German Empire and first national anthem of the Deutsches Heilsreich (lyrics written circa 1790).
The Brandenburg Gate following the Battle of Berlin, circa March 1929.
Two months had passed since General Ludendorff’s victory. The city of Berlin remained scarred from a year of combat and would most certainly remain in such a sad state for a long time, however, for all intents and purposes, a life that vaguely resembled what was destroyed by Stalin’s campaign had begun to return to the residents of the Athens of the Spree. Many of the people who had been turned into refugees were returning to the city and set out to rebuild their homes. These Berliners had returned to the recovering capital alongside the government officials and aristocracy of Germany, who sought to administrate from the rubble of Berlin in a sort of propaganda display to indicate that not even the worst the Great War had to offer could break the Heilsreich.
Amongst those who had returned was none other than Kaiser August Wilhelm I, who had grown increasingly popular amongst both the masses and the elite of the German Fatherland Party once Erich Ludendorff revealed that the successful Operation Odoacer had been conceived by the emperor himself. One man who continued to be wary of August was none other than Fuhrer Alfred Hugenberg. Both individuals continued to view each other as dangerous rivals, and even as the tendrils of the Great War reached Berlin, the two rulers of the Heilsreich continued to draw lines in the sand that had partitioned the DVP into factionalism. Now that August was credited with saving Berlin from the clutches of the Red Napoleon’s empire, however, it seemed as though a victor in the struggle for control over Germany’s one-party apparatus of state was emerging.
Today, August had sought to invite his rival over for dinner at the Royal Palace.
“I recommend that we put aside our differences for one night and simply celebrate our nation’s incredible victory,” the Kaiser had stated in a telephone call to the Fuhrer. “Surely the inevitable triumph of Germany over her barbaric enemies is something both of us can toast to.” August had organized the dinner to occur in a room near the center of the Palace, which was far away from its bullet-ridden exterior walls and, notably, without any windows for the outside world to peer into.
The Fuhrer was now set to arrive at any minute. August sat at one end of a finely-crafted table and gazed at the two glasses of wine that he had personally prepared for himself and his guest, both of which were already situated at each other’s predetermined seat. Elegant paintings dating back to the days of Frederick the Great populated the walls of this room, with the portraits of many of August’s ancestors staring down upon the ambitious monarch. Hugenberg was supposed to be here at any moment, and soon the Kaiser’s plan could be put into motion. Surely enough, after a few minutes of patiently waiting, a servant entered the dining room to announce the arrival of August’s guest.
“Your majesty, Fuhrer Alfred Hugenberg.”
The moustached statesman then entered the room to introduce himself, notably without any of the formalities that were to be conducted when meeting with the Kaiser.
“Good day, old friend,” Hugenberg said. “I see that you have already prepared wine for us?”
“Indeed,” responded August, who merely shrugged off the lack of any traditional address. “The meal itself will be here soon.”
“Excellent.”
Before Hugenberg could sit down, August stood up with his glass of wine in hand.
“To the victory of the German Heilseich,” he declared.
Hugenberg emitted a faint smile and joined the Kaiser in his toast.
“To the victory of the German Heilsreich.”
Both men took a sip of their wine before sitting down.
“I must admit,” began the Fuhrer in order to initiate some discussion. “I did not expect your little gambit you persuaded Ludendorff to play along with to work. When he presented Odoacer to me, my impression was that the man was truly desperate. I was personally shocked when the plan actually succeeded, and I was even more surprised to find out you were its architect. You must forgive me, but I never considered you to be much of a military man, let alone the man who would craft the strategy that would win us back Berlin.”
“No,” replied August. “You’re right, I lack any military background beyond my involvement in the Heilungscoup. Nonetheless, I like to think of myself as someone who knows how to save my nation.”
A handful of minutes passed as the two most powerful men in all of Germany discussed a number of topics, all without any food being presented before them.
“Your chefs seem to be taking a while,” Alfred Hugenberg finally said with a hint of suspicion. “I thought you said the meal was supposed to be here soon.”
“I do not know what is happening,” August retorted. “I’m sure the wait will not be much longer.”
It was at this point that the Kaiser noticed that his guest appeared as though he was ill.
“Are you alright? You look sick”
“...I think so,” Hugenberg answered. “A headache has come over me for a few minutes, but I don’t think it’s anything to worry about.”
“If you say so.”
“Anyway, I have heard rumors from the embassy in Sofia that the Bulgarians are contemplating invading Romania for its-”
Alfred Hugenberg never finished his sentence, for it was at this moment that he gripped his chest and collapsed over into unconsciousness.
Rather than rush over to assist his guest, August waited exactly thirty minutes in a cold silence before he approached the body of the Fuhrer and reached his palm out over a pale and still body to check for a pulse.
Nothing.
August couldn’t help it when a sinister smile crept across his face. The cyanide had worked like a charm and had executed the last man that stood in the way of his absolute rule over Germany. August knew that he had the votes in the Reichstag to be approved as Alfred Hugenberg’s successor, thus transforming the Kaiser into the unrivaled totalitarian autocrat of the Deutches Heilsreich.
The Fuhrer was dead, long live the Kaiser-Fuhrer.
End of Phase Two
Map of the World circa November 1929.
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