Chapter 27
Buoyant from his victory over Spain, Lindsey Stoker signed off on Drakian intervention into the Great Patriotic War.
Fortunately for him the Empire’s armed forces had been building up in the Near East for a while by that point- just in case- and its naval and air forces were well-positioned in North Africa and Sardinia for a fight over the Mediterranean. The tricky bit was going to be Rhomania, which hosted a small Drakian military presence but that presence would need to be substantially reinforced if the Empire was going to keep the Pan-Europeans from occupying the smaller Societist country, let alone use it as a springboard to invade Central Europe. Bringing in reinforcements however, risked tipping off Berlin that Drakia was about to make its move, and could result in the Pact striking first.
Drakia did what it could to quietly beef-up its presence in Rhomania (with the knowledge and co-operation of the Rhomanian government)…
… while the Pan-European kept a weather eye out in case of the Societist bloc, despite being distracted in Russia…
…and caught what was going on only after two full legions of the Noble Race with over 30,000 men had been disembarked from their ships and were moving into position. The Pan-Europeans had maintained second-line forces in the west that they calculated were sufficient to hold defensive positions if Drakia attacked, but not enough to spearhead an invasion. Instead the Pact diverted every plane it could from the Eastern Front for a massive chemical and biological attack against Rhomania and Drakia. If they could just delay the Societists long enough to muster the forces needed for a real offensive, then the liberation of the Balkans might be at hand. Drakia replied with incendiary, chemical, and biological attacks of its own, flying planes out of Sardinia, the Balearic Islands, Spain, Rhomania, and North Africa, as conventional forces confronted each other along the Rhomanian frontier.
It was the first mass use of biological weapons in the Great Patriotic War. The Russian bioweapons program was crude, and the Pan-Europeans hadn’t wanted to use biological warfare in areas where their goal was to cultivate friendly civilian populations. But Drakia led the world in creating biological weapons and Germany’s own arsenal was nothing to dismiss. Both countries had good public health systems and extensive programs in place to protect their populations in case of outbreaks.
Drakian soldiers in the Balkans prepare to deploy for combat in protective gear.
The Battle of the Mediterranean was a massive fight for control over the water and air of the Mediterranean Sea. Most of the Pan-European Pact was within range of Drakian bombers, while the Drakian Near East and the northern third of Africa was within range of European ones. Dozens of new agents were released on cities, on water sources, on agricultural lands, and on military and civilian populations.
It was a battle for supremacy that would last for over a year.
In the meantime, the conventional war continued. The Drakian Army forced the German army group that had broken into Georgia to retreat back to the Greater Caucasus Mountains where the two armies fought each other tooth and nail over control of the mountain passes. In Russia the city of Perm fell to the Pan-Europeans, but the Pact’s offensive largely ground to a halt otherwise as it redistributed its forces to the fight against Drakia and Rhomania. The new Russian Empire focused on a war of raids and skirmishes, little battles that bled men and resources from the Rex invaders, while also fighting to put down rebels in Central Asia. The Pan-Europeans crossed into the Balkans as reinforcements trickled in from the east, but Societist reinforcements trickled in as well to help Byzantium Reborn hold the line. Slavic civilians in Bulgaria, Serbia, and Croatia welcomed the Pan-Europeans as liberators, but their homelands were now the front line for a devastating modern war.
In Great Britain Lancelot Susan and the British Societists completed an auto-coup in early 1940 that removed the remaining non-Societist figures from government and ended the last checks on their power. King Edward VII was forced to flee to the Bahamas when the conventionally conservative monarch opposed the Societist dictator, Susan left the throne empty and dropped the title of “Prime Minister” in favor of “High Chancellor”. The United Kingdom of Great Britain entered the Great Patriotic War, opening another front for the confrontation at sea, and making the fight for the air that much bloodier.
In Italy Arthur Klein penned his “Cassandra Letter” to the President of Italy.
British military police secure political dissidents in Scotland during Susan's autocoup.
Meanwhile, the Great Pacific War ground on.
South America was now fully involved in prosecuting the war for the Grand Alliance- particularly La Plata and Brazil who had begun the decade with respectable navies to build off of. On the other hand India shifted from being the junior partner in the Asia-Pacific League of Friendship to carrying much of the burden of the war in place of a Japan that suffered increasingly at the hands of America biological and chemical attacks. It was the massive Indian Army that smashed its way through Persian defensive lines, and as the Americans redirected their resources to the Pacific, it was the Indian Navy that opened the way for the final occupation and annexation of Sri Lanka and the Maldives. In September of 1940 Persian resistance began to collapse and the Shah sued for peace, dropping out of the Grand Alliance and submitting to Indian occupation.
At that point Japan had finished occupying Insulindia and was going ahead with its landings in northern Australia and New Guinea.
The attacks were meant as bait- Japanese intelligence had an asset in the US Navy, a Korean-American junior officer alienated by TTL’s higher degree of anti-Asian racism in the United States, who was able to feed them information about American fleet locations when a joint US-Australian-Platinean force sailed in to crush the Japanese landing at Stokes (OTL Darwin). The Grand Alliance fleet found far more in the way of Japanese forces awaiting them than they had expected, including a large chunk of the IJN diverted from the Central Pacific. The ensuing Battle of the Arafura Sea came as a shockingly one-sided Japanese victory and ended with Japan capturing both the city of Stokes (the only part of Australia proper to be occupied during the war) and the Bird’s Head Peninsula. While the Battle of the Arafura Sea was far from the last naval battle of the war it was the last truly major battle with its outcome in question, battles fought with long-range airpower would predominate for the rest of the Great Pacific War, with land and naval forces moving to engage enemy units that had been devastated by aerial attacks.
Jets dogfighting during the Battle of the Arafura Sea.
Instead the rest of 1940 and the start of 1941 was characterized by larger and larger air battles, waged from the Australian Outback to the Hawaiian Islands, to the Japanese Home Islands, to the Alaskan Panhandle and the Golden Gate Bay. Often the fight for control of the air occurred over nothing more than a random bit of ocean, scattering the Pacific with broken flying machines and the dead bodies of brave Japanese and American young men and women (really it was just America putting female pilots in combat positions, Japan permitted women in non-combat flying roles but kept the “mothers of the next generation” out of harm’s way when possible). Both sides dumped different types of poisons on each other’s soldiers, both conducted general strategic bombings whenever they could.
There were no breakthroughs in the Pacific, no sudden shifts in the balance of power. Just America trying to overcome Japan with superior industry and Japan and India trying to beat America with superior numbers. No one held a technological advantage, no one had noticeably better commanders.
The USA had already begun interning Japanese-Americans at the start of the war, the revelation at the end of 1940 that a handful of non-Japanese Asian-Americans had been working for Kyoto prompted mass internment of Asian-Americans from other ethnicities. In Central America Federal policies towards Centroamérican resistance grew harsher in face of wartime exigency.
At least the Grand Alliance could claim a few victories- in Stokes (OTL Darwin) was liberated in December- and an attempt by the Japanese to expand their control of New Guinea from the Bird’s Head to the rest of the island was bloodily repulsed.
The war remained a stalemate, but surely thought President Vincent Connolly newly elected on a platform of prosecuting the war until victory was won, surely if they just held on long enough then American industry would turn the tide.
An apartment block burning during the firebombing of Honolulu.