also something you could use as new mobile cavalry is modern samurai on motorbikes witch would look something like this i guess
 
Return of the Shinobo reminds me of anime called joker game its abut spys i think you could find ideas for japanis spy network from that anime
Watching and loving it right now. ;D

Clearly many ideas I can introduce here (especially with the different secret services of the government, army and navy of Japan and other Co-PS member states. ^^
 
Chapter 58: The Battle of the Atlantic and Mediterranean
Chapter 58: The Battle of the Atlantic and Mediterranean:
1024px-Allied_tanker_torpedoed.jpg

The Battle of the Atlantic was the longest continuous military campaign during the Second Great War beginning in 1939, announced the day after the declaration of war, and Germany's subsequent counter-blockade. It was at its height from mid-1940 through to the end of 1943. The Battle of the Atlantic pitted U-boats and other warships of the High Sea Fleet (German navy) and aircraft of the Imperial German air force against the Royal Canadian Navy, RoyalNavy and later United States Navy and Allied merchant shipping. The convoys, coming mainly from North America and predominantly going to the United Kingdom or the Soviet Union, or additionally coming from Grat Britain going to their forces in Africa and Asia were protected for the most part by the British and Canadian navies and air forces. These forces were aided by ships and aircraft of the United States beginning September 1941. The Germans were joined by submarines of the Austrian-Hungaryn Imperial Navy, the Italian Royal Navy (Regia Marina) and the Spanish Navy after their Axis Central Power allies entered the war in 1940. As an island nation, the United Kingdom was highly dependent on imported goods. Britain required more than a million tons of imported material per week in order to be able to survive and fight. In essence, the Battle of the Atlantic was a tonnage war: the Allied struggle to supply Britain and the Axis attempt to stem the flow of merchant shipping that enabled Britain to keep fighting. From 1942 onwards, the Axis Central Powers also sought to prevent the build-up of Allied supplies and equipment in the British Isles in preparation for the invasion of occupied Europe. The defeat of the U-boat threat was a pre-requisite for pushing back the Axis. The outcome of the battle was a strategic victory for the Allies—the German blockade failed—but at great cost: 4,000 merchant ships and 217 warships were sunk for the loss of 823 U-boats.

The name "Battle of the Atlantic" was coined by Winston Churchill in February 1941. It also has been called the "longest, largest and most complex" naval battle in history. The campaign started immediately after the European war began. It involved thousands of ships in more than 100 convoy battles and perhaps 1,000 single-ship encounters, in a theatre covering millions of square miles of ocean. The situation changed constantly, with one side or the other gaining advantage, as participating countries surrendered, joined and even changed sides in the war, and as new weapons, tactics, counter-measures and equipment were developed by both sides. On 5 March 1941, First Lord of the Admiralty A. V. Alexander asked Parliament for "many more ships and great numbers of men" to fight "the Battle of the Atlantic", which he compared to the Battle of Framce, fought the previous summer. The first meeting of the Cabinet's "Battle of the Atlantic Committee" was on March 19. Churchill later claimed to have coined the phrase "Battle of the Atlantic" shortly before Alexander's speech, but there are several examples of earlier usage.

Following the use of unrestricted submarine warfare by Germany in the First Great War, countries tried to limit, even abolish, submarines. The effort failed. Instead, the London Naval Treaty required submarines to abide by "cruiser rules", which demanded they surface, search and place ship crews in "a place of safety" (for which lifeboats did not qualify, except under particular circumstances) before sinking them, unless the ship in question showed "persistent refusal to stop...or active resistance to visit or search". These regulations did not prohibit arming merchantmen, but doing so, or having them report contact with submarines (or raiders), made them de facto naval auxiliaries and removed the protection of the cruiser rules. This made restrictions on submarines effectively moot.

In 1939, the Imperial German Navy still lacked the strength to challenge the combined British Royal Navy and French Nay (Marine Nationale) for command of the sea. Instead, German naval strategy relied on commerce raiding using capital ships, armed merchant cruisers, submarines and aircraft. Many German warships were already at sea when war was declared, including most of the available U-boats and the "pocket battleships" (Panzerschiffe) Deutschland and Admiral Graf Spee which had sortied into the Atlantic in August. These ships immediately attacked British and French shipping. U-30 sank the ocean liner SS Athenia within hours of the declaration of war—in breach of her orders not to sink passenger ships. The U-boat fleet, which was to dominate so much of the Battle of the Atlantic, was small at the beginning of the war; many of the 57 available U-boats were the small and short-range Type IIs useful primarily for minelaying and operations in British coastal waters. Much of the early German anti-shipping activity involved minelaying by destroyers, aircraft and U-boats off British ports.

With the outbreak of war, the British and French immediately began a blockade of Germany, although this had little immediate effect on German industry. The Royal Navy quickly introduced a convoy system for the protection of trade that gradually extended out from the British Isles, eventually reaching as far as Panama, Bomboy and Singapore. Convoys allowed the Royal Navy to concentrate its escorts near the one place the U-boats were guaranteed to be found, the convoys. Each convoy consisted of between 30 and 70 mostly unarmed merchant ships. Some British naval officials, particularly the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, sought a more 'offensive' strategy. The Royal Navy formed anti-submarine hunting groups based on aircraft carriers to patrol the shipping lanes in the Western Approaches and hunt for German U-boats. This strategy was deeply flawed because a U-boat, with its tiny silhouette, was always likely to spot the surface warships and submerge long before it was sighted. The carrier aircraft were little help; although they could spot submarines on the surface, at this stage of the war they had no adequate weapons to attack them, and any submarine found by an aircraft was long gone by the time surface warships arrived. The hunting group strategy proved a disaster within days. On 14 September 1939, Britain's most modern carrier, HMS Ark Royal, narrowly avoided being sunk when three torpedoes from U-39 exploded prematurely. U-39 was forced to surface and scuttle by the escorting destroyers, becoming the first U-boat loss of the war. The British failed to learn the lesson from this encounter: another carrier, HMS Courageous, was sunk three days later by U-29.

Escort destroyers hunting for U-boats continued to be a prominent, but misguided, technique of British anti-submarine strategy for the first year of the war. U-boats nearly always proved elusive, and the convoys, denuded of cover, were put at even greater risk. German success in sinking Courageous was surpassed a month later when Günther Prien in U-47 penetrated the British base at Scapa Flow and sank the old battleship HMS Royal Oak at anchor, immediately becoming a hero in Germany. In the South Atlantic, British forces were stretched by the cruise of Admiral Graf Spee, which sank nine merchant ships of 50,000 GRT in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean during the first three months of war. The British and French formed a series of hunting groups including three battlecruisers, three aircraft carriers, and 15 cruisers to seek the raider and her sister Deutschland, which was operating in the North Atlantic. These hunting groups had no success until Admiral Graf Spee was caught off the mouth of the River Plate between Argentina and Uruguay by an inferior British force. After suffering damage in the subsequent action, she took shelter in neutral Montevideo harbour and was scutted on 17 December 1939. After this initial burst of activity, the Atlantic campaign quieted down. Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander of the U-boat fleet, had planned a maximum submarine effort for the first month of the war, with almost all the available U-boats out on patrol in September. That level of deployment could not be sustained; the boats needed to return to harbour to refuel, re-arm, re-stock supplies, and refit. The harsh winter of 1939–40, which froze over many of the Baltic ports, seriously hampered the German offensive by trapping several new U-boats in the ice. The German plans to invade Norway and Denmark in the spring of 1940 led to the withdrawal of the fleet's surface warships and most of the ocean-going U-boats for fleet operations in the Scandinavian invasion. The resulting Scandinavian capaign revealed serious flaws in the magnetic influence pistol (firing mechanism) of the U-boats' principal weapon, the torpedo.

Although the narrow fjords gave U-boats little room for manoeuvre, the concentration of British warships, troopships and supply ships provided countless opportunities for the U-boats to attack. Time and again, U-boat captains tracked British targets and fired, only to watch the ships sail on unharmed as the torpedoes exploded prematurely (due to the influence pistol), or hit and failed to explode (because of a faulty contact pistol), or ran beneath the target without exploding (due to the influence feature or depth control not working correctly). Not a single British warship was sunk by a U-boat in more than 20 attacks. As the news spread through the U-boat fleet, it began to undermine morale. The director in charge of torpedo development continued to claim it was the crews' fault. In early 1941 the problems were determined to be due to differences in the earth's magnetic fields at high latitudes and a slow leakage of high-pressure air from the submarine into the torpedo's depth regulation gear. These problems were solved by about March 1941, making the torpedo a formidable weapon.

Early in the war, Dönitz submitted a memorandum to Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, the German navy's Commander-in-Chief, in which he estimated effective submarine warfare could bring Britain to its knees because of the country's dependence on overseas commerce. He advocated a system known as the Rudeltaktik (the so-called "wolf pack"), in which U-boats would spread out in a long line across the projected course of a convoy. Upon sighting a target, they would come together to attack en masse and overwhelm any escorting warships. While escorts chased individual submarines, the rest of the "pack" would be able to attack the merchant ships with impunity. Dönitz calculated 300 of the latest Atlantic Boats (the Type VII), would create enough havoc among Allied shipping that Britain would be knocked out of the war. This was in stark contrast to the traditional view of submarine deployment up until then, in which the submarine was seen as a lone ambusher, waiting outside an enemy port to attack ships entering and leaving. This had been a very successful tactic used by British submarines in the Baltic and Bosporus during the First Great War, but it could not be successful if port approaches were well patrolled. There had also been naval theorists who held submarines should be attached to a fleet and used like destroyers; this had been tried by the Germans at Jutland with poor results, since underwater communications were in their infancy. (Interwar exercises had proven the idea faulty.) The submarine by many was still looked upon by much of the naval world as "dishonourable", compared to the prestige attached to capital ships. This was true in Kriegsmarine as well; Raeder successfully lobbied for the money to be spent on capital ships instead that were also favored by the German Emperor Wilhelm.

The Royal Navy's main anti-submarine weapon before the war was the inshore patrol craft, which was fitted with hydrophones and armed with a small gun and depth charges. The Royal Navy, like most, had not considered anti-submarine warfare as a tactical subject during the 1920s and 1930s. Unrestricted submarine warfare had been outlawed by the London Naval Treaty; anti-submarine warfare was seen as 'defensive' rather than dashing; many naval officers believed anti-submarine work was drudgery similar to mine sweeping; and ASDIC was believed to have rendered submarines impotent. Although destroyers also carried depth charges, it was expected these ships would be used in fleet actions rather than coastal patrol, so they were not extensively trained in their use. The British, however, ignored the fact that arming merchantmen, as Britain did from the start of the war, removed them from the protection of the “cruiser rules”, and the fact that anti-submarine trials with ASDIC had been conducted in ideal conditions. The German occupation of Norway in April 1940, the rapid conquest of the Low Countries and France in May and June and the Italian entry into the war on the Axis side in June transformed the war at sea in general and the Atlantic campaign in particular in three main ways:

  • Britain lost its biggest ally. In 1940, the French Navy was the fourth largest in the world. Only a handful of French ships joined the Free French Forces and fought against Germany, though these were later joined by a few Canadian-built corvettes. With the French fleet removed from the campaign, the Royal Navy was stretched even further. Italy's declaration of war meant that Britain also had to reinforce the Mediterranean Fleet and establish a new group at Gibraltar, known as Force H, to replace the French fleet in the Western Mediterranean.
  • The U-boats gained direct access to the Atlantic. Since the English Channel was relatively shallow, and was partially blocked with minefields by mid-1940, U-boats were ordered not to negotiate it and instead travel around the British Isles to reach the most profitable hunting grounds. The German bases in France, at Brest, Lorient and La Pallice (near La Rochelle), were about 450 miles (720 km) closer to the Atlantic than the bases on the North Sea. This greatly improved the situation for U-boats in the Atlantic, enabling them to attack convoys further west and letting them spend longer time on patrol, doubling the effective size of the U-boat force. The Germans later built huge fortified concrete submarine pens for the U-boats in the French Atlantic bases, which were impervious to Allied bombing for now.
  • British destroyers were diverted from the Atlantic. The Scandinavian Campaign and the German invasion of the Low Countries and France imposed a heavy strain on the Royal Navy's destroyer flotillas. Many older destroyers were withdrawn from convoy routes to support the Norwegian campaign in April and May and then diverted to the English Channel to support the withdrawal from Dunkirk. By the summer of 1940, Britain faced a serious threat of invasion. Many destroyers were held in the Channel, ready to repel a German invasion. They suffered heavily under air attack by the Imperial German Air Force Fliegerführer Atlantik. Seven destroyers were lost in the Norwegian campaign, another six in the disastrous Battle of Dunkirk and a further10 in the Channel and North Sea between May and July, many to air attack because they lacked an adequate anti-aircraft armament. Dozens of others were damaged.
The completion of German's campaign in Western Europe meant U-boats withdrawn from the Atlantic for the Norwegian campaign now returned to the war on trade. So at the very time the number of U-boats on patrol in the Atlantic began to increase, the number of escorts available for the convoys was greatly reduced. The only consolation for the British was that the large merchant fleets of occupied countries like Norway and the Netherlands came under British control. After the German occupation of Denmark and Norway, Britain occupied Iceland and the Faroe Islands, establishing bases there and preventing a German takeover.

It was in these circumstances that Winston Churchill, who had become Prime Minister on 10 May 1940, first wrote to US President Franklin Roosevelt to request the loan of fifty obsolescent US Navy destroyers. This eventually led to the "Destroyers of Bases Agreement" (effectively a sale but portrayed as a loan for political reasons), which operated in exchange for 99-year leases on certain British bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda and the West Indies, a financially advantageous bargain for the United States but militarily beneficial for Britain, since it effectively freed up British military assets to return to Europe. A significant percentage of the U.S. population opposed entering the war, and some American politicians (including the US Ambassador to Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy) considered Britain and its allies might actually lose. The first of these destroyers were only taken over by their British and Canadian crews in September and all needed to be rearmed and fitted with ASDIC. It was to be many months before these ships contributed to the campaign.

The early U-boat operations from the French bases were spectacularly successful. This was the heyday of the great U-boat aces like Günter Proen of U-47, Otto Kretchmer (U-99), Joachim Schepke (U-100), Engelbert Endrass (U-46), Victor Oehern (U-37) and Heinrich Bleichrodt (U-48). U-boat crews became heroes in Germany. From June until October 1940, over 270 Allied ships were sunk: this period was referred to by U-boat crews as "the Happy Time" ("Die Glückliche Zeit"). Churchill would later write: "...the only thing that ever frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril".

The biggest challenge for the U-boats was to find the convoys in the vastness of the ocean. The Germans had a handful of very long-range Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor aircraft based at Bordeaux, Stavanger, La Coruna and Cádiz which were used for reconnaissance. The Condor being a converted civilian airliner, this was a stop-gap solution for Fliegerführer Atlantik. Due to ongoing friction between the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine, the primary source of convoy sightings was the U-boats themselves. Since a submarine's bridge was very close to the water, their range of visual detection was quite limited. The best source proved to be the codebreakers of B-Dienst. In response, the British applied the techniques of operations research to the problem and came up with some counter-intuitive solutions to the problem of protecting convoys. It was realised the area of a convoy increased by the square of its perimeter, meaning the same number of ships, using the same number of escorts, was better protected in one convoy than in two. A large convoy was as difficult to locate as a small one. Moreover, reduced frequency (fewer large convoys carry the same cargo, and large convoys take longer to assemble) also reduced the chances of detection. Therefore, a few large convoys with apparently few escorts were safer than many small convoys with a higher ratio of escorts to merchantmen.

Instead of attacking the Allied convoys singly, U-boats were directed to work in wolf packs (Rudel) coordinated by radio. German codebreaking efforts at B-Dienst had succeeded in deciphering the British Naval Cypher No. 3, allowing the Germans to estimate where and when convoys could be expected. The boats spread out into a long patrol line that bisected the path of the Allied convoy routes. Once in position, the crew studied the horizon through binoculars looking for masts or smoke, or used hydrophones to pick up propeller noises. When one boat sighted a convoy, it would report the sighting to U-boat headquarters, shadowing and continuing to report as needed until other boats arrived, typically at night. Instead of being faced by single submarines, the convoy escorts then had to cope with groups of up to half a dozen U-boats attacking simultaneously. The most daring commanders, such as Kretschmer, penetrated the escort screen and attacked from within the columns of merchantmen. The escort vessels, which were too few in number and often lacking in endurance, had no answer to multiple submarines attacking on the surface at night as their ASDIC only worked well against underwater targets. Early British marine radar, working in the metric bands, lacked target discrimination and range. Moreover, corvettes were too slow to catch a surfaced U-boat.

Pack tactics were first used successfully in September and October 1940, to devastating effect, in a series of convoy battles. On September 21, convoy HX 72 of 42 merchantmen was attacked by a pack of four U-boats, losing eleven ships sunk and two damaged over two nights. In October, the slow convoy SC 7, with an escort of two sloops and two corvettes, was overwhelmed, losing 59% of its ships. The battle for HX 79 in the following days was in many ways worse for the escorts than for SC 7. The loss of a quarter of the convoy without any loss to the U-boats, despite very strong escort (two destroyers, four corvettes, three trawlers, and a minesweeper) demonstrated the effectiveness of the German tactics against the inadequate British anti-submarine methods. On 1 December, seven German and three Italian submarines caught HX 90, sinking 10 ships and damaging three others. The success of pack tactics against these convoys encouraged Admiral Dönitz to adopt the wolf pack as his primary tactic. Nor were the U-boats the only threat. Following some early experience in support of the war at sea during the Scandinavian Invasion, Fliegerführer Atlantik contributed small numbers of aircraft to the Battle of the Atlantic from 1940 onwards. These were primarily Fw 200 Condors and (later) Junkers Ju 290s, used for long-range reconnaissance. The Condors also bombed convoys that were beyond land-based fighter cover and thus defenceless. Initially, the Condors were very successful, claiming 365,000 tons of shipping in early 1941. These aircraft were few in number, however, and directly under Luftwaffe control; in addition, the pilots had little specialized training for anti-shipping warfare, limiting their effectiveness.

The Germans received help from their allies. From August 1940, a flotilla of 27 Italian submarines operated from the BETASOM base in Bordeaux to attack Allied shipping in the Atlantic, initially under the command of Rear Admiral Angelo Parona, then of Rear Admiral Romolo Polacchini. The Italian submarines had been designed to operate in a different way than U-boats, and they had a number of flaws that needed to be corrected (for example huge conning towers, slow speed when surfaced, lack of modern torpedo fire control), which meant that they were ill-suited for convoy attacks, and performed better when hunting down isolated merchantmen on distant seas, taking advantage of their superior range and living standards. The newly found Austrian-Hungarian Navy as well as the former Turkish and now Ottoman Navy helped out the Axis Central Powers, but only operated mostly in the Mediterranean Sea.

While initial operation met with little success (only 65,343 GRT sunk between August and December 1940), the situation improved gradually over time, and up to August 1943 the 32 Italian submarines that operated there sank 109 ships of 593,864 tons, for 17 subs lost in return, giving them a subs-lost-to-tonnage sunk ratio similar to Germany's in the same period, and higher overall.The Italians were also successful with their use of "human torpedo" chariots, disabling several British ships in Gibraltar. Despite these successes, the Italian, Austrian-Hungarian and Ottoman intervention was not favourably regarded by Dönitz, who characterised the German allies as "inadequately disciplined" and "unable to remain calm in the face of the enemy". They were unable to cooperate in wolf pack tactics or even reliably report contacts or weather conditions and their area of operation was moved away from those of the Germans. Amongst the more successful Italian submarine commanders that operated in the Atlantic were Carlo Fecia di Cossato, commander of the submarine Enrico Tazzoli, and Gianfranco Gazzana-Prioggia, commander of Archimede and then of Leonardo da Vinci.

ASDIC (also known as SONAR) was a central feature of the Battle of the Atlantic. One crucial development was the integration of ASDIC with a plotting table and weapons (depth charges and later Hedgehog) to make an anti-submarine warfare system. ASDIC produced an accurate range and bearing to the target, but could be fooled by themoclines, currents or eddies, and schools of fish, so it needed experienced operators to be effective. ASDIC was effective only at low speeds. Above 15 knots (28 km/h) or so, the noise of the ship going through the water drowned out the echoes.

The early wartime Royal Navy procedure was to sweep the ASDIC in an arc from one side of the escort's course to the other, stopping the transducer every few degrees to send out a signal. Several ships searching together would be used in a line, 1–1.5 mi (1.6–2.4 km) apart. If an echo was detected, and if the operator identified it as a submarine, the escort would be pointed towards the target and would close at a moderate speed; the submarine's range and bearing would be plotted over time to determine course and speed as the attacker closed to within 1,000 yards (910 m). Once it was decided to attack, the escort would increase speed, using the target's course and speed data to adjust her own course. The intention was to pass over the submarine, rolling depth charges from chutes at the stern at even intervals, while throwers fired further charges some 40 yd (37 m) to either side. The intention was to lay a 'pattern' like an elongated diamond, hopefully with the submarine somewhere inside it. To effectively disable a submarine, a depth charge had to explode within about 20 ft (6.1 m). Since early ASDIC equipment was poor at determining depth, it was usual to vary the depth settings on part of the pattern.

There were disadvantages to the early versions of this system. Exercises in anti-submarine warfare had been restricted to one or two destroyers hunting a single submarine whose starting position was known, and working in daylight and calm weather. U-boats could dive far deeper than British or American submarines (over 700 feet (210 m)), well below the 350-foot (110 m) maximum depth charge setting of British depth charges. More importantly, early ASDIC sets could not look directly down, so the operator lost contact on the U-boat during the final stages of the attack, a time when the submarine would certainly be manoeuvring rapidly. The explosion of a depth charge also disturbed the water, so ASDIC contact was very difficult to regain if the first attack had failed. It enabled the U-boat to change position with impunity. The belief ASDIC had solved the submarine problem, the acute budgetary pressures of the Great Depression, and the pressing demands for many other types of rearmament meant little was spent on anti-submarine ships or weapons. Most British naval spending, and many of the best officers, went into the battlefleet. Critically, the British expected, as in the First Great War, German submarines would be coastal craft and only threaten harbour approaches. As a result, the Royal Navy entered the Second Great War in 1939 without enough long-range escorts to protect ocean-going shipping, and there were no officers with experience of long-range anti-submarine warfare. The situation in Royal Air Force Coastal Comman was even more dire: patrol aircraft lacked the range to cover the North Atlantic and could typically only machine-gun the spot where they saw a submarine dive.

Despite their success, U-boats were still not recognized as the foremost threat to the North Atlantic convoys. With the exception of men like Dönitz, most naval officers on both sides regarded surface warships as the ultimate commerce destroyers. For the first half of 1940, there were no German surface raiders in the Atlantic because the German Fleet had been concentrated for the invasion of Norway. The sole pocket battleship raider, Admiral Graf Spee, had been stopped at the Battle of the River Plate by an inferior and outgunned British squadron. From the summer of 1940 a small but steady stream of warships and armed merchant raiders set sail from Germany for the Atlantic. The power of a raider against a convoy was demonstrated by the fate of convoy HX 84 attacked by the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer on 5 November 1940. Admiral Scheer quickly sank five ships and damaged several others as the convoy scattered. Only the sacrifice of the escorting armed merchant cruiser HMS Jervis Bay and failing light allowed the other merchantmen to escape. The British now suspended North Atlantic convoys and the Home Fleet put to sea to try to intercept Admiral Scheer. The search failed and Admiral Scheer disappeared into the South Atlantic. She reappeared in the Indian Ocean the following month.

Other German surface raiders now began to make their presence felt. On Christmas Day 1940, the cruiser Admiral Hipper attacked the troop convoy WS 5A, but was driven off by the escorting cruisers. Admiral Hipper had more success two months later, on 12 February 1941, when she found the unescorted convoy SLS 64 of 19 ships and sank seven of them. In January 1941, the formidable (and fast) battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, which outgunned any Allied ship that could catch them, put to sea from Germany to raid the shipping lanes in Operation Berlin. With so many German raiders at large in the Atlantic, the British were forced to provide battleship escorts to as many convoys as possible. This twice saved convoys from slaughter by the German battleships. In February, the old battleship HMS Ramillies deterred an attack on HX 106. A month later, SL 67 was saved by the presence of HMS Malaya. In May, the Germans mounted the most ambitious raid of all: Operation Rheinübung. The new battleship Bismarck and the cruiser Prince Eugene put to sea to attack convoys. A British fleet intercepted the raiders off Iceland. In the Battle of the Denmark Strait, the battlecruiser HMS Hood was blown up and sunk, but Bismarck was damaged and had to run to France. Bismarck nearly reached her destination, but was disabled by an airstrike from the carrier HMS Ark Royal, and then sunk by the Home Fleet the next day. Her sinking marked the end of the warship raids. The advent of long-range search aircraft, notably the unglamorous but versatile PBY Catalina, largely neutralised surface raiders.

In February 1942, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen moved from Brest back to Germany in the "Channel Dash". While this was an embarrassment for the British, it was the end of the German surface threat in the Atlantic. The loss of Bismarck, Arctic convoys and the perceived invasion threat to Norway had persuaded the Emperor Wilhelm to withdraw. War had come too early for the German naval expansion project Kaiserflotte (Emperor Fleets). Battleships powerful enough to destroy any convoy escort, with escorts able to annihilate the convoy, were never achieved. Although the number of ships the raiders sank was relatively small compared with the losses to U-boats, mines, and aircraft, their raids severely disrupted the Allied convoy system, reduced British imports, and strained the Home Fleet.

The disastrous convoy battles of October 1940 forced a change in British tactics. The most important of these was the introduction of permanent escort groups to improve the co-ordination and effectiveness of ships and men in battle. British efforts were helped by a gradual increase in the number of escort vessels available as the old ex-American destroyers and the new British- and Canadian-built Flower-class corvettes were now coming into service in numbers. Many of these ships became part of the huge expansion of the Royal Canadian Navy, which grew from a handful of destroyers at the outbreak of war to take an increasing share of convoy escort duty. Others of the new ships were manned by Free French, Norwegian and Dutch crews, but these were a tiny minority of the total number, and directly under British command. By 1941 American public opinion had begun to swing against Germany, but the war was still essentially Great Britain and the Empire against Germany. Initially, the new escort groups consisted of two or three destroyers and half a dozen corvettes. Since two or three of the group would usually be in dock repairing weather or battle damage, the groups typically sailed with about six ships. The training of the escorts also improved as the realities of the battle became obvious. A new base was set up at Tabermory in the Hebrides to prepare the new escort ships and their crews for the demands of battle under the strict regime of Vice-Admiral Gilbert O. Stephenson.

In February 1941, the Admiralty moved the headquarters of Western Approaches Command from Plymouth to Liverpool, where much closer contact with, and control of, the Atlantic convoys was possible. Greater co-operation with supporting aircraft was also achieved. In April, the Admiralty took over operational control of Coastal Command aircraft. At a tactical level, new short-wave radar sets that could detect surfaced U-boats and were suitable for both small ships and aircraft began to arrive during 1941. The impact of these changes first began to be felt in the battles during the spring of 1941. In early March, Prien in U-47 failed to return from patrol. Two weeks later, in the battle of Convoy HX 112, the newly formed 3rd Escort Group of five destroyers and two corvettes held off the U-boat pack. U-100 was detected by the primitive radar on the destroyer HMS, rammed and sunk. Shortly afterwards U-99 was also caught and sunk, its crew captured. Dönitz had lost his three leading aces: Kretschmer, Prien, and Schepke. Dönitz now moved his wolf packs further west, in order to catch the convoys before the anti-submarine escort joined. This new strategy was rewarded at the beginning of April when the pack found Convoy SC 26 before its anti-submarine escort had joined. Ten ships were sunk, but another U-boat was lost.

In June 1941, the British decided to provide convoy escort for the full length of the North Atlantic crossing. To this end, the Admiralty asked the Royal Canadian Navy on May 23, to assume the responsibility for protecting convoys in the western zone and to establish the base for its escort force at St John's, Newfoundland. On June 13, 1941 Commodore Leonard Murray, Royal Canadian Navy, assumed his post as Commodore Commanding Newfoundland Escort Force, under the overall authority of the Commander-in-Chief, Western Approaches, at Liverpool. Six Canadian destroyers and 17 corvettes, reinforced by seven destroyers, three sloops, and five corvettes of the Royal Navy, were assembled for duty in the force, which escorted the convoys from Canadian ports to Newfoundland and then on to a meeting point south of Iceland, where the British escort groups took over.

By 1941, the United States was taking an increasing part in the war, despite its nominal neutrality. In April 1941 President Roosevelt extended the Pan-American Security Zone east almost as far as Iceland. British forces occupied Iceland when Denmark fell to the Germans in 1940; the US was persuaded to provide forces to relieve British troops on the island. American warships began escorting Allied convoys in the western Atlantic as far as Iceland, and had several hostile encounters with U-boats. A Mid-Ocean Escort Force of British, and Canadian, and American destroyers and corvettes was organized following the declaration of war by the United States. In June 1941, the US realized the tropical Atlantic had become dangerous for unescorted American as well as British ships. On May 21, SS Robin Moor, an American vessel carrying no military supplies, was stopped by U-69 750 nautical miles (1,390 km) west of Freetown, Sierra Leone. After its passengers and crew were allowed thirty minutes to board lifeboats, U-69 torpedoed, shelled, and sank the ship. The survivors then drifted without rescue or detection for up to eighteen days. When news of the sinking reached the US, few shipping companies felt truly safe anywhere. As Time magazine noted in June 1941, "if such sinkings continue, U.S. ships bound for other places remote from fighting fronts, will be in danger. Henceforth the U.S. would either have to recall its ships from the ocean or enforce its right to the free use of the seas."

At the same time, the British were working on a number of technical developments which would address the German submarine superiority. Though these were British inventions, the critical technologies were provided freely to the US, which then renamed and manufactured them. In many cases this has resulted in the misconception these were American developments. Likewise, the US provided the British with Catalina flying boats and Liberator bombers, that were important contributions to the war effort. Aircraft ranges were constantly improving, but the Atlantic was far too large to be covered completely by land-based types. A stop-gap measure was instituted by fitting ramps to the front of some of the cargo ships known as Catapult Aircraft Merchantmen (CAM ships), equipped with a lone expendable Hurricane fighter aircraft. When a German bomber approached, the fighter was fired off the end of the ramp with a large rocket to shoot down or drive off the German aircraft, the pilot then ditching in the water and (hopefully) being picked up by one of the escort ships if land was too far away. Nine combat launches were made, resulting in the destruction of eight Axis aircraft for the loss of one Allied pilot. Although the results gained by the CAM ships and their Hurricanes were not great in enemy aircraft shot down, the aircraft shot down were mostly Fw 200 Condors that would often shadow the convoy out of range of the convoy's guns, reporting back the convoy's course and position so that U-boats could then be directed on to the convoy. The CAM ships and their Hurricanes thus justified the cost in fewer ship losses overall.

One of the more important developments was ship-borne direction-finding radio equipment, known as HF/DF (high-frequency direction-finding, or Huff-Duff), which was gradually fitted to the larger escorts. HF/DF let an operator determine the direction of a radio signal, regardless of whether the content could be read. Since the wolf pack relied on U-boats reporting convoy positions by radio, there was a steady stream of messages to intercept. A destroyer could then run in the direction of the signal and attack the U-boat, or at least force it to submerge (causing it to lose contact), which might prevent an attack on the convoy. When two ships fitted with HF/DF accompanied a convoy, a fix on the transmitter's position, not just direction, could be determined. The British also made extensive use of shore HF/DF stations, to keep convoys updated with positions of U-boats.

The radio technology behind direction finding was simple and well understood by both sides, but the technology commonly used before the war used a manually-rotated aerial to fix the direction of the transmitter. This was delicate work, took quite a time to accomplish to any degree of accuracy, and since it only revealed the line along which the transmission originated a single set could not determine if the transmission was from the true direction or its reciprocal 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Two sets were required to fix the position. Believing this to still be the case, German U-boat radio operators considered themselves fairly safe if they kept messages short. The British, however, developed an oscilloscope-based indicator which instantly fixed the direction and its reciprocal the moment a radio operator touched his Morse key. It worked simply with a crossed pair of conventional and fixed directional aerials, the oscilloscope display showing the relative received strength from each aerial as an elongated ellipse showing the line relative to the ship. The innovation was a 'sense' aerial which when switched in, suppressed the ellipse in the 'wrong' direction leaving only the correct bearing. With this there was hardly any need to triangulate—the escort could just run down the precise bearing provided and use radar for final positioning. Many U-boat attacks were suppressed and submarines sunk in this way—a good example of the great difference apparently minor aspects of technology could make to the battle.

The way Dönitz conducted the U-boat campaign required relatively large volumes of traffic between U-boats and headquarters. This was thought to be safe as the radio messages were encrypted using the Enigma cipher machine, which the Germans considered unbreakable. In addition, the Kriegsmarine used much more secure operating procedures than the Heer (army) or Luftwaffe (air force). The machine's three rotors were chosen from a set of eight (rather than the other services' five). The rotors were changed every other day using a system of key sheets and the message settings were different for every message and determined from bigram tables that were issued to operators. In 1939, it was generally believed at the British Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park that naval Enigma could not be broken. Only the head of the German Naval Section, Frank Birch, and the mathematician Alan Turing believed otherwise.

The British codebreakers needed to know the wiring of the special naval Enigma rotors, and the destruction of U-33 by HMS Gleaner in February 1940 provided this information. In early 1941, the Royal Navy made a concerted effort to assist the codebreakers, and on May 9 crew members of the destroyer Bulldog boarded U-110 and recovered her cryptologic material, including bigram tables and current Enigma keys. The captured material allowed all U-boat traffic to be read for several weeks, until the keys ran out; the familiarity codebreakers gained with the usual content of messages helped in breaking new keys. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1941, Enigma intercepts (combined with HF/DF) enabled the British to plot the positions of U-boat patrol lines and route convoys around them. Merchant ship losses dropped by over two-thirds in July 1941, and the losses remained low until November. This Allied advantage was offset by the growing numbers of U-boats coming into service. The Type VIIC began reaching the Atlantic in large numbers in 1941; by the end of 1945, 568 had been commissioned. Although the Allies could protect their convoys in late 1941, they were not sinking many U-boats. The Flower-class corvette escorts could detect and defend, but they were not fast enough to attack effectively.

In October 1941, Emperor Wilhelm ordered Dönitz to move U-boats into the Mediterranean to support German operations and their allies in that theatre. The goal was to cut off any supply for the Allied forces in Africa and the Middle East over the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The resulting concentration near Gibraltar resulted in a series of battles around the Gibraltar and Sierra Leone convoys. In December 1941, Convoy HG 76 sailed, escorted by the 36th Escort Group of two sloops and six corvettes under Captain Frederic John Walker, reinforced by the first of the new escort carriers, HMS Audacity, and three destroyers from Gibraltar. The convoy was immediately intercepted by the waiting U-boat pack, resulting in a brutal battle. Walker was a tactical innovator, his ships' crews were highly trained and the presence of an escort carrier meant U-boats were frequently sighted and forced to dive before they could get close to the convoy. Over the next five days, five U-boats were sunk (four by Walker's group), despite the loss of Audacity after two days. The British lost Audacity, a destroyer and only two merchant ships. The battle was the first clear Allied convoy victory. Through dogged effort, the Allies seamed to slowly gained the upper hand until the end of 1941. Although Allied warships failed to sink U-boats in large numbers, most convoys evaded attack completely. Shipping losses were high, but manageable.

Because of that the German Emperor Wilhelm III ordered his military to prepare Operation Marianne, the combined German, Spanish, French and Italian attack on the British base at Gibraltar and Malta. At first the Air Forces of all Axis Central Powers involved bombed the British positions there and simultaneously attacked the British bases in Malta too on December 12, 1941. During the second Phase German, Spanish (mostly Gibraltar), Italian (mostly Malta) and even French Ships bombarded the British troops on land heavily in preparations for the direct assaults. Specialized and well equipped German mountaineers managed to storm the Rock of Gibraltar supported by Spanish Troops who were supposed to hold, control and annex the region after it was taken. The British Defense at first stopped the German Tanks and Mechanized advance at the trenches and defences before the Port and the Bastion Nord. Firing down at the Germans from Chateau des Maure and the uphill positions at Hauteur, the German commander and General Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma was forced to stop the attack. The Axis Central Power Navy involved then supported the attack with even more heavy fire, as did their Fighters and Bombers to break the British defenses. At the same time the navy tried to land forces in the harbor of Gibraltar to attack the frontal British defense line from behind, but was quickly pinned down at the harbor and forced to even fight in close combat around the city itself. Still the Axis Central Powers had superior forces, surrounded the British at all sides and managed to quickly exhaust the defenders, who unlike them would not receive any supply and reinforcements. After 15 days of fighting the Axis Central Powers managed to capture St. Michael's High and the remaining British defenders capitulated (27. December). Luckily for the British their main Battleships and even most of the merchant and transport ships stationed in Gibraltar managed to escape, but managed to only evacuate a small amount of British Troops in the end.
gibraltar.jpg

The attack on Malta at the same time (December 12, 1941) was a whole different situation. While the Italians who supplied and supported most of the invading forces managed to quickly capture the northern island of Gozo and Comino without many resistance, things on Malta itself would not get as smooth. The German and Italian Air Forces fought the British one over Malta and their fighters and bombers attacked the allied troops stationed on the island as well as their ships. German Paratroopers tried to take Valetta, but most died during this last major German Paratrooper Operation of the Second Great War. While Valetta could not be captured easily, the landing of German and Italian troops in the north, west and south of Malta managed to gain ground quickly. Soon the British Air Forces on the island were forced to retread to North Africa if they could, together with the last convoys coming from Malta. The Battle for Valetta still lasted 17 days (till January 15, 1942), making the whole invasion of Malta last for over a month. During the battle the British tried to reinforce and later evacuate their troops from Malta, leading to two battles, where they as well as Italy lost a couple of ships in the Mediterranean.
The_British_Army_on_Malta_1942_GM946.jpg

The fall of Gibraltar and Malta forced the Allies to retread from the western and central Mediterranean. From now on the British Convoys for the Troops in Egypt had to take the longer route around south Africa to supply them. This victories also allowed the Axis Central Powers to directly support their own forces in Africa without enemy interference and faster then before, when their supply routes had to avoid the Allied bases at Gibraltar and Malta.
 
Last edited:
Chapter 59: The Empire of Yankoku (also called Yankukuo or Yanjiang State and Dynasty)
Chapter 59: The Empire of Yankoku (also called Yankukuo or Yanjiang State and Dynasty):
yankoku_by_sheldonoswaldlee-dc3jyqf.png

The newly established state of Yankoku (also Yankukuo or Yanjiang) was led by Yan Xishan (or Yen His-shan) a former Chinese warlord, who previously controlled the province of Shanxi ever since 1911. Just like back then Yan Xishan aimed to industrialist and modernize it's poor, remote provinces. He dreamed to establish his vision of a modern and heavenly China. With heavy support from the Empire of Japan and it's military, as well as other states of the Co-Prosperity Sphere later. Since these other states of the Co-Prosperity Sphere guaranteed this new state, Yan Xishan focused on creating a perfect state, using eastern values and traditions that he wished to protect, combined with modern Western and Japanese technology. To reform this new nation into a modern state, Yan Xishan knew that he had also undergo other changes, reforming older political, social and economic conditions in a way that paved the way for the radical changes that would occur under his rule.
Yan_Xishan.jpg

Knowing that he had coal, iron, cotton, and steel as natural resources at his disposal in the new state, as well as major rivers, the Great Chanel and various railroads that linked the parts of his states with each other, as well as Manchuria, Mengjiang and the Reformed Government of Nationalist China under Wang Jingwei, Yan Xishan was sure that he had the best tools at his hands to even outclass the muster state and Japanese Colonies of Manchuria and Chosen once. To do so, Yan Xishan combined the old name of the area with his own one family name and did everything to established a leadership and personal cult around him and his family that was inspired by that of Mussolini, Stalin or even Hitler in Europe. Soon Yan Xishan became known as the great modernizer, or as his people would call him “Father Yan”.

His new state boarders followed the Luan River and Great Wall towards Manchukuo in the Northeast, the Hai River and Great Wall in the north towards Mengjiang, as well as the Yellow River in the west and south with a expanded line towards the former Shantung Province border region towards Wang Jingwei's Nationalist Chinese Nanjing Government. Inside this area of the new state the majority of the Population was Han Chinese, with smaller minorities of Manchu and Hui (Mohammedans) in the area. But to support his new rule and state, Yan Xishan claimed that the people (mostly the Han Chinese majority) living in his state (84,950,000 in total) were descendants of the ancient Yan state itself. It was the plan to establish a new Yan nation in China. Therefore Yan Xishan, or Father Yan claimed the title of Emperor in the Empire of Yankokuo to stand on equal ground with the other Emperors (the Japanese, the Chosen, the Manchu and the Mengjiang) of the Co-Prosperity Sphere. Additinally up to 100,000 Japanese settlers (mostly farmers) each year increased the number of Japanese living in the are up to 316,450 with many working for the railways, as civil servants, as farmers, establish a small business, or worked in the industry.


yankoku_state_map_by_sheldonoswaldlee-dc3k2by.png

With the help of the Japanese Army and japanese Zaibatzu Father Yan managed to further modernise his state in exchange for ressources, as well as help of his new Army against Communist Rebels and Chinag's Nationalist Chinese Government with their United Front. In the beginning these communist rebels posed a great threat for Yankoku, but Yan Xishan reformed the former Chinese Provinces of Hebei, Shanxi, Shandong and northern Henan. The Time's soon called him “King of the Yan”, even before he himself claimed his state to be a Empire, with himself as the Emperor in a new family dynasty he started. Yan Xishan created the new provinces of Beijing, Tianshin, Tangshan, Changzhou, Langfang, Baoding, Hebei, Hengshui, Anyang, Puyang, Northern Dongying, Hengshui, Western Jinean, Dezhou and Chaoching out of Hebei. From former Shanxi he created the new provinces of Datong, Shuozhou, Lyuliang, Shanxi, Yangquan, Changzhi and Yucheng. Out of northern Henan he established Henan and Heze. Out of the Shandong Province he created the new provinces of Jining, Lingyi, Western Jinean, Southern Dongying, Weifang, Rizhao, Yantai, Quingdao and Weiheiwei.
Showa_Steel_Works.JPG

Parts of Father Yan's new nation state, it's government and military were formed out of former members of the Fengtian Clique, but also from White Russians, who had fled the Russian Empire after the Soviets won the Civil War. Eager to build a modern Yankokuo nation state, army and navy, Yan Xishan used foreign (Japanese and even White Russian) advisers, officers and commanders. The new government under him was establishing the Yankokuo Diet where each new province had one governor represented in support of the Yankokuo Imperial Ruling Council. Similar to the diet, the War Council would be created out of the Provincial Military Commanders, from them Yan Xishan would choose the wisest and best as his Army Generals and Navy Admirals. Their small army at first had only 24,000 well trained men, but were quickly increased to 48,000 due to a recruitment drive, organized into 22 regiments along with eight independent and training regiments. Local police forces numbered some 135,000 while local militia and warlord forces were around 200,000 at first. This would later expand to a modern Imperial Yan Army modelled after the Imerial Japanese Army of 1,260,000 soldiers.

It wasn't long after that when the newly formed Imperial Yankokuo Army and the Imperial Yankokuo Navy argued with the Education and Industrialization Council as well as with the Trade and Transportation Council. The major argument was that the Yankokuo Army as well as it's sponsor the Imperial Japanese Army hoped to gain control of the Grand Channel and the Yellow River from the Imperial Yankokuo Navy and it's supporters of the Imperial Japanese Navy. The armies argued that they needed this water transportation for securing the state and modernizing it, while the navies argued that their boats kept the coasts and rivers of Yankokuo safe and were their responsibility. Since it was also a matter of economical income from this areas Yan Xishan was forced to order his Supreme Court in the capital Beijing to decide on the matter.

Yan Xishan's plans were supported by the Bank of Yankokuo (that was printing money with Yan Xishan's face on it), the Yankokuo Industrial Development Company as well as Japanese Zaibatsu and the Japanese military. Schools supported the theory and ideology of the Co-Prosperity Sphere (Co-Prosperity Sphere-ism also known as Coprospism) as well as Yan Xishan's claim that his nation was not Han Chinese, but the ancestors of the former Yan and even the Yankokuo Film Association produced propaganda movies that further supported the idea and helped to form a new, independent national identity. At the same time the Imperial Yankokuo Army concentrated at building up defenses at the northern border region, following the Luan River and Great Wall towards Manchukuo in the Northeast, the Hai River and Great Wall in the north towards Mengjiang. Here they expanded the old Great Wall with Bunkers, Trenches, machine gun, artillery and anti-aircraft positions in chase the Soviet Union would advance into Manchukuo and Mengjiang towards the border of Yankokuo.
 
Last edited:
Chapter 60: Ottoman Preparations
Chapter 60: Ottoman Preparations:
Map_of_Turkey_in_Asia%2C_Syria%2C_Palestine%2C_Hejaz_and_Arabia_by_Frank_Moore_Colby.png

In the Orient, the Neo-Ottoman Empire hoped to regain the territories lost to Great Britain and France during the First Great War. They also planned to regain their province and vassals in Hejaz with the holy city of Mecca that had become the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 by unifying the traitorous Arabic Kingdoms of Hejaz and Nejd. The Ottomans also dreamed of recapturing the Arab Peninsula, including Sinai, Palestine and the British Vassal of Iraq. Reclaiming Egypt and parts (maybe even all) of Persia was also part of their plan, together with uniting their Turkish Empire with the rest of the Mohammedan and Turkish people in Central Asia. The last and most ambitious plan was only established after their own military leadership had met with their German allies and were included in the upcoming attack on the Soviet Union.
W-TopSecret-1-HT-May12-1.jpg

Nuri Killigil, also known as Nuri Pasha was a general in the Ottoman Army. He was the half-brother of Ottoman Minister of War, Enver Pasha. Nuri Pasha was of Circassian descent and helped to gather a Ottoman force of Turkic, Caucasian, Cossack and later even Crimean allies. Nuri Killigil was tasked with the command of the southern front, where he would command the Syrian Army (German: Erste Orientarmee, First Orient Army) in retaken former french Syria and Lebanon. This Army would later be called the Palestina Army and then be split into the Hejaz and Egypt Army. Part of the troops under Nuri Pasha was also the Bagdad Army (German: Zweite Orientarmee, Second Orient Army) in the southeast of the Neo-Ottoman Empire that was tasked with retaking Iraq, Kuwait and the eastern part of the Arabian Peninsula all the way to Oman.

Halil Kut was an Ottoman-born Turkish regional governor and military commander. Also known as Halil Pasha he was the uncle of Enver Pasha, who was the War Minister during the First Great War. He was one of the main organizers of the Armenian and Assyrian genocides and oversaw the massacre of Armenian men, women and children in Bitlis, Mush and Beyazit. Many of the victims were buried alive in specially prepared ditches. He also crossed into neighboring Persia and massacred Armenians, Assyrians and Persians. Because of this he was tasked with commanding the so called Armenian Army (later Caucasus Army, German: Dritte Orientarmee, Third Orient Army) in the planned attack against the Turkish Soviet Republic. From there on he would continue pushing into the Soviet Union (since the Ottomans believed the Soviet Union would openly support their brother republic in a war) and into northern Persia, following the path of the first Ottoman Empire in the First Great War. To prepare for this Halil Pasha himself even traveled to the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic to show his support for the liberation and independence of the Mohammedan Azerbaijans under Turkish Protection instead of Soviet occupation and tyrannic rule. Like any faithful Mohammedan he hoped that the Neo-Ottoman Empire would retake Mekka and liberate all of their brothers and sisters from the foreign rule of the unholy communists and soviets, or the christian British and French.
 
Last edited:
Excellent updates, Count!

Maybe next, we learn about the inside of Wang Jingwei’s regime?
Thanks a lot.

Yes we could, but it's much like OTL regime, only with a more honest attempt of the Japanese and Wang to truely form a sovereign and strong allied nation.

I also planned to make such chapters about any TTL new state that had formed (or will form later on). ;D
 
if Germany does the same harm otl to Russia and treats people well since they are not Nazis they will very likely win the eastern front and it would be very difficult for the Americans and British to defeat them, since the Germans would only have to fight against them and not Russia.
 
if Germany does the same harm otl to Russia and treats people well since they are not Nazis they will very likely win the eastern front and it would be very difficult for the Americans and British to defeat them, since the Germans would only have to fight against them and not Russia.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Yeah, it's more likely the Germans will be chopping up the Soviet Union instead of annexing it and butchering everyone living in it. We might see either a Romanov restoration, or a pro-German White government in St. Petersburg.
 
Chapter 61: The Triads and the Unequal Treaty's
Chapter 61: The Triads and the Unequal Treaty's:
Shanghai+Triad+12.jpg

Shanghai was not a safe city anymore. While Wang Jingwei's police and military tried to keep the peace and enforce law and order. Wang had already enough problems inside his own Kuomintang faction, where some elements called the Kuomintang All Chinese Alliance (KACA, or ACA) wished to reunite all of former Qing China under their Nationalist Government in Nanjing. Another faction was the so called Cliques mostly former warlords and regional independence movements, who hoped that Japan and the other members of the Co-Prosperity Sphere would allow them to create even smaller Chinese states for all of them to rule independently. But the Japanese and the other members of the Co-Prosperity Sphere refused both parties, one out of fear that such a China could get too strong and dominate the rest as well as threat the independence of some of their member states like Manchuria and Mengkokuo, others because they feared that much smaller Chinese states and nations would be unable to protect themselves against the influence and military might of the European Colonial Powers or the Soviet Union and it's Asian vassals.

Another matter was the wish for many to finally end the so called Unequal Treaty's. The Unequal treaty is the name given by the Chinese to a series of treaties signed with Western powers during the 19th and early 20th centuries by Qing dynasty China and late Tokugawa Japan after suffering military defeat by the foreign powers or when there was a threat of military action by those powers. The term is also applied to treaties imposed during the same time period on late Joseon Korea by the post-Meji Restoration Empire of Japan. Starting with the rise of nationalism and anti-imperialism in the 1920s, the Kuomintang and Chinese Communist Party used these concepts to characterize the Chinese experience in losses of sovereignty between roughly 1839 to 1949. The term "unequal treaty" became associated with the concept of China's "Century of Humiliation", especially the forced opening of the treaty ports, the imposition of European extraterritoriality on foreigners living in China, and loss of tariff autonomy.
1937_World_War_II_Japanese_Map_of_Shanghai%2C_China_(w-photo_of_Bund)_-_Geographicus_-_Shanghai-uk-1932.jpg

The huge amount of Europeans living in the city further complicated things. While the Wang loyal Kuomintang got help from the Japanese Army and Navy as well as other forces of the Co-Prosperity Sphere, there were also some European backed guards, security services and police in the Foreigner part of the city. The Japanese and Wang's government planned to eliminate the Unequal Treaties and all remaining European Influence soon after the war would begin, but even now the Triads and other criminal organizations tried to bypass the strict laws and regulations by smuggling to get their own share. Opium trade was increasing in the city, some coming from far away Manchuria or even Bengal in British India. The situation only escalated when the renewed German Empire's Allgemeine Ostasien-Gesellschaft (AOG) (General East Asian Company, also known as AlgOstasien GmbH) that focused on increasing trade with the Chinese states and started to rival other European, American and Co-Prosperity Sphere trading companies in the region.

This worried the Commissioner of the Shanghai International Settlement within the City, as tensions between them, their trading companies, colonial offices and other major powers increased. In all of this chaos the different powers sided with the Red Lanterns (pro-Co-Prosperity Sphere), Tiendong Gang (pro-Chiang-Chinese), the Blue Turbans (Hui criminals) or others. As the tensions became higher and the triads, yakuza (backed by the Japanese) and other criminal gangs escalated their conflict the Shanghai Commissioner of the Shanghai International Settlement asked a local Officer Wung Chi Bao and the Japanese Army Officer Tomura Mutashita for help in the investigation on how to stop this violent mess inside his part of the city. What he did not know was that Tomura Mutashita was in reality Takuro Matakeshi, a agent of the secret established Co-Prosperity Sphere Cultural Ministry (CPSCM), a cover for their united intelligence, spy networks and secret agencies of the Co-Prosperity Sphere. Takuro was here to watch Wung operate and to maybe introduce him as a new member for the CPSCM as a new recruit. At the same time Takuro's other secret goal was to get the criminal organizations on their side to control all legal and illegal trade and transport in Shanghai.



“Mr. Mutashita, Mr.. Wung, it is quiet a problem that you have the nerve to bug into our business.” declared Tong Chao Jin, the leader of the Yellow Dragon Triade. Ever since Mr. Mutashita had arrived in Shanghai he had kept his nose, where it did not belong knew Tong Chao Jin. “Sadly that means that we will have to execute you two, since you saw how we operated at the docks.” said the Grand Dragon of the Yellow Dragon Triade.

“The way I see it the problem lies more on your side.” declared Takuro very calm. “Every day more and more guards, policemen and military personal is pouring into the city, how long until every single boat, train and other vehicle will be controlled and you go out of business?” asked the Japanese spy the leader of the Yellow Dragons. The older Chinese man looked outraged that he had the nerve to speak in such a way before his family and man with him, but deep down he knew it was true. Controls and pressure was already rising and beside the official government the other criminal organizations began to be more ruthless themselves now.

“And what of it?” said Tong Chao Jin very angry at this disrespectful behavior. “We have done it this way before and we will continue to do so in the future.” he declared with a look on his face that showed how much he just wanted to kill the two man for this disrespect. “You will die and no one of the local will report anything out of fear, just like before.” smiled the Grand Dragon.

“Yeah just like before.” said Takuro mockingly. “Look how that has turned out for China the last century. If you only focus on the past in a changing world, you will one day be history too Mr. Tong.” declared the Japanese spy serious and just from the look of the old man he knew he once again had hit a nerve.

“What else could we do in times like these?” questioned Tong Chao Jin angrily, unwilling to show his true fear or worries of this modern-day problems in China.

“Why not simply side with us?” offered Takuro and Wung Chi Bao who was held captive right beside him on a second chair looked as equally shocked as Tong himself at this offer.

“I must have misheard myself. Why would you propose something like that?” asked the older Chinese Triad leader suspicious.

“Because it is unrealistic to believe that there one day will be no need of a black marked or organizations like yours.” declared Takuro realistically. “As long as there is needs the government can't provide or outlaws, organizations like yours will always be there.” knew the Japanese spy. “So a wise government should realize that we have to work together to fulfill all needs of the population and to keep things secure and stable.” announced Takuro that there could be ways for all of them to benefit from such a deal.

“So you are offering a alliance between us and the government and military?” asked Grand Dragon Tong not uninterested to say the least.

“More a alliance between you and the security organizations, the government has not to know about everything.” declared Takuro and Chi Bao was about to protest, but then realized that Tomura wasn't quiet wrong and he wanted to sea were this was going. “You will focus on the more legal businesses, or stick to these that we don't care about and we will look the other way.” announced the Japanese spy and saw in the face of the Grand Yellow Dragon that he was not disinterested in the idea.

“But that will clearly rob us of some of our profits.” feared one of the other Yellow Dragons, the son of Chao Jin; Tong Wu Song.

“Not if you use you contacts to the other Triads and criminal organizations in china and southeast Asia.” suggested Takuro with a friendly smile. “Just trade other goods, certain information for the matter with the Co-Prosperity Sphere governments about the European Powers colonies that you pick up across a your business and smuggling trip down there. Locations of fortifications, number of troops and such. I am certain that the Co-Prosperity Sphere governments, militarizes and secret services will pay you more than anything you may lose with this deal between us.” declared Takuro and the Leader of the Yellow Dragons agreed to this deal. After freeing the both of them and giving them a proper dinner at his table, Tong contacted with Takuro's superiors to agree on a deal. On the other hand Wung was not as pleased, but realized that the Japanese officer had brought them out of a problematic and maybe even deadly situation and that deals like this could also stop the major criminal problems in the city as well as a possible upcoming war between the criminal organizations. Takuro was pleased with most of what he had seen from Wung and started to get him on his side to work for the CPSCM. During the next years Wung Chi Bao would become a agent of the CPSCM himself and organizing much of their Central China and Wang Government affairs.
 
Last edited:
Chapter 62: Emperor Otto and the new Austria-Hungary
Chapter 62: Emperor Otto and the new Austria-Hungary:
1912%2520Otto-11.jpg

The United States of Greater Austria (German: Vereinigte Staaten von Groß-Österreich) was a proposal, conceived by a group of scholars surrounding Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, that never came to pass before the First Great War. This specific proposal was conceived by the lawyer and politician Aurel Popovici in 1906 and aimed at federalizing Austria-Hungary to help resolve widespread ethnic and nationalist tensions. The first program for the federalisation of the Habsburg Empire was developed by the Hungarian nobleman Wesselènyi Miklós. In his work titled "Szózat a magyar és a szláv nemzetiség ügyében" and published in Hungarian in 1843 and in German in 1844, he proposed not only social reforms but reforms of the state structure of the Empire its nationality policy. He aimed to replace the centralized empire with a federation of five states: a German state (containing the Slovene provinces as well), a state of Bohemia and Moravia, Galicia as a Polish state, and the state of historical Hungary (including Croatia). Another idea came from Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth: "True liberty is impossible without federalism". Kossuth proposed to transform the Habsburg Empire into a "Danubian State", a federal republic with autonomous regions.

The Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 established the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. The Compromise partially re-established the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Hungary, separate from, and no longer subject to the Austrian Empire. However, the favoritism shown to the Magyars, the second largest ethnic group in the dual monarchy after the Germans, caused discontent on the part of other ethnic groups like the Slovaks and Romanians. As the twentieth century started to unfold, the greatest problem facing the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary was that it consisted of about a dozen distinctly different ethnic groups, of which only two, the Germans and the Hungarians (who together accounted for about 44% of the total population), wielded any power or control. The other ethnic groups, which were not involved in the state affairs, included Slavic (Bosniak, Croats, Czechs, Poles, Ruthenians, Serbs, Slovaks, Slovenes and Ukrainians) and Romance peoples (Italians, Romanians). Among them, only Croats had limited autonomy in the Kingdom of Croatia and Slocenia. In the Kingdom of Hungary, several ethnic minorities faced increased pressures of Magyarization. The idea of the Dual Monarchy system of 1867 had been to transform the previous Austrian Empire into a constitutional union, one German-dominated and one Hungarian-dominated part, having also common institutions. However, after various demonstrations, uprisings and acts of terrorism, it became readily apparent that the notion of two ethnic groups dominating the other ten could not survive in perpetuum.

Franz Ferdinand therefore had planned to redraw the map of Austria-Hungary radically, creating a number of ethnically and linguistically dominated semi-autonomous "states" which would all be part of a larger confederation renamed the United States of Greater Austria. Under this plan, language and cultural identification was encouraged, and the disproportionate balance of power would be corrected. The idea was set to encounter heavy opposition from the Hungarian part of the Dual Monarchy, since a direct result of the reform would have been a significant territorial loss for Hungary. However, the Archduke was assassinated at Sarajevo in 1914, triggering the outbreak of the First Great War. After the war, Austria-Hungary was dismantled and several new nation-states were created, and various Austro-Hungarian territories were ceded to neighbouring countries by the victorious Entente powers. However, many of the new national borders drawn immediately after the First Great War or afterwards approximately follow the proposed borders of the various states of the proposed United States of Greater Austria.

1280px-Greater_austria_ethnic.svg.png

The following territories were to become states of the federation after the reform. The majority ethnic group within each territory is also listed. According to Popovici's plans, the following territories were to become states of the federation after the reform. The majority ethnic group within each territory is also listed.

  • Deutsch-Österreich: German-Austria (the later Austria with the Italian province of South Tyrol, the Bohemian Forest and South Moravia regions—the southern part of the later Sudetenland, as well as the Burgenland region in western Hungary including Sopron/Ödenburg, Mosonmagyaróvár/Wieselburg and Pressburg), ethnic German
  • Deutsch-Böhmen: German Bohemia (Sudetenland territory in northwestern Bohemia), ethnic German
  • Deutsch-Mähren: German Moravia (northeastern Sudetenland in Moravia and Austrian Silesia, later named Province of the Sudetenland), ethnic German
  • Böhmen: Bohemia proper (southern and central part of Bohemia and Moravia), ethnic Czech
  • Slowakenland: roughly present-day Slovakia, ethnic Slovak
  • West-Galizien: West Galicia (the western part of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria), ethnic Polish
  • Ost-Galizien: East Galicia (the eastern part of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria and the adjacent Bukovina lands), ethnic Ukrainian
  • Ungarn: Hungary (Hungary with parts of Transcarpathia and the northern Vojvodina region in present-day Serbia), ethnic Magyar
  • Seklerland: Székely Land (part of present-day Romania), ethnic Magyar
  • Siebenbürgen: Transylvania, most of the Banat and Bukovina, ethnic Romanian
  • Trento: Trentino, ethnic Italian
  • Triest: Trieste and Gorizia (western Istria, part of present-day Croatia and Slovenia), ethnic Italian and Slovenian
  • Krain: Carniola (roughly Slovenian territory), ethnic Slovene
  • Kroatien: Croatia (roughly the Croatian core region), ethnic Croatian and Serb
  • Woiwodina: Vojvodin, ethnic Serb and Croatian.
In addition, a number of mostly German-speaking enclaves in eastern Transylvania, the Banat and other parts of Hungary, southern Slovenia, large cities (such as Prague, Budapest, Lviv and others) and elsewhere were to have autonomy within the respective territory.

Now that Austria-Hungary was resurrected, Emperor Otto dreamed of fulfilling the dream of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria to an extend. The Austrian and Hungarian core lands together with the new protectorates that made up the new Australian-Hungarian Empire would be reformed to states in a new monarchistic confederation. The Austrian-Hungarian Reichstag (“Imperial Diet” in German, formerly only for the Austrian part of the Empire; Zislethanien) and the Reichsrat (“Imperial Council” in German, formerly only the Hungarian part of the Empire; Transleithanien), would from now on be reformed. Like in the old Austrian crown lands, this new states as well as the bigger cities would vote two representatives into the Reichstag, chosen from parties and individuals among their own regional parliaments. The new subdivision of this new states created a majority of German and Hungarian states that could outvote the Slavic once, unlike before. The Reichsrat meanwhile would be directly voted on by the people of Austria-Hungary in the elections. This new subdivision of Austria-Hungary created a more constitutional Monarchy.

Further more this eased the independence movements and the Austrian-Hungarian education and propaganda used the problems of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia in the interwar period to claim that these states and their creation were a Slavic conspiracy to enslave the other minorities. The bad reputation some of this states had by their minorities ever since 1918 and the internal problems they showed since then, helped to back up some of this new Austrian-Hungarian propaganda and ideology. This backed the new nation and the state reformation to a constitutional monarchic federate Empire showed that thinks would not go as they were before, Emperor Otto even encouraged the cultural differences in the individual states and vowed to protect them all in a strong united federation. In reality he was mostly driven by the realism of the growing nationalism in his multi-ethnically state and the fear that it might just break up into it's parts once again like in 1918 if he wasn't careful enough.
 
Last edited:
Chapter 63: Recreation of the United Baltic Duchy, the Kingdom of White Ruthenia and the Kingdom of Ukrainia
Chapter 63: Recreation of the United Baltic Duchy, the Kingdom of White Ruthenia and the Kingdom of Ukrainia:
1024px-United_Baltic_Duchy_flag.svg.png

The proposed United Baltic Duchy, (German: Vereinigtes Baltisches Herzogtum, Estonian: Balti Hertsogiriik, Latvian: Apvienotā Baltijas hercogiste) also known as the Grand Duchy of Livonia, was a state originally proposed by the Baltic German nobility and exiled Russian nobility after the Russian Revolution and German occupation of the Courland, Livonian and Estonian governorates of the Russian Empire. The original idea comprised the lands in Estonia and Latvia and included the creation of a Duchy of Courland and Semigillia and a Duchy of Estonia and Livonia that would be in personal union with the Crown of Prussia under the German Empire's occupied territory Ober Ost before the end of the First Great War covering the territories of the Medieval Livonia in what are now Latvia and Estonia. During World War I the German Imperial Army had occupied the Courland Governorate of the Russian Empire by the autumn of 1915. The front stabilized along the line Riga-Daugavpils-Baranovichi. Following the February Revolution of 1917 in Russia, the Russian Provisorial Gouvernment declared the establishment of the Autonomous Governorate of Estonia on 12 April [O.S. 30 March]1917, amalgamating the former Russian Governorate Estonia and the northern portion of the Governorate of Livonia. After the October Revolution later in the same year, the elected Estonian Provincial Assembly declared itself the sovereign power in Estonia on 28 November 1917. On 24 February 1918, a day before the arrival of German troops, the Estonian Salvation Committee of the Provincial Assembly issued the Estonian Declaration of Independence. The Western Allies recognized the Republic of Estonia de facto in May 1918.

The Latvian Provisional National Council was constituted on the basis of the law of self-government which the Russian Provisional Government granted to Latvia on 5 July 1917. The Latvian Provisional National Council first met on 16 November 1917 in Valka. On 30 November 1917, the Council declared an autonomous Latvian province within ethnographic boundaries, and a formal independent Latvian republic was declared on 15 January 1918. After the Russian Revolution, German troops had started advancing from Courland, and by the end of February 1918 the German military administered the territories of Estonia that had declared the independence of the Russian Governorate of Livonia. With the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918, Bolshevist Russia accepted the loss of the Courland Governorate, and by agreements concluded in Berlin on 27 August 1918, the loss of the Autonomous Governorate of Estonia and the Governorate of Livonia.

As a parallel political movement under the German military administration, Baltic Germans began forming provincial councils between September 1917 and March 1918. On 12 April 1918, a Provincial Assembly composed of 35 Baltic Germans, 13 Estonians, and 11 Latvians passed a resolution calling upon the German Emperor to recognize the Baltic provinces as a monarchy and make them a German protectorate. On 8 March and 12 April 1918, the local Baltic German-dominated Kurländische Landesrat and the Vereinigter Landesrat of Livland, Estland, Riga and Ösel had declared themselves independent states, known as the Duchy of Courland (Herzogtum Kurland) and the Baltic State duchy (Baltischer Staat), respectively. Both states proclaimed themselves to be in personal union with the Kingdom of Prussia, although the German government never responded to acknowledge that claim.

The Baltic lands were nominally recognized as a sovereign state by emperor Wilhelm II only on 22 September 1918, half a year after Soviet Russia had formally relinquished all authority over former Russian Imperial Baltic governorates to Germany in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. On 5 November 1918, a temporary Regency Council (Regentschaftsrat) for the new state led by Baron Adolf Pilar of Pilchau was formed on a joint basis from the two local Land Councils. The capital of the new state was to be Riga. It was to be a confederation of seven cantons: Kurland (Courland), Riga, Lettgallen (Latgale), Südlivland (South Livonia), Nordlivland (North Livonia), Ösel (Saaremaa), and Estland (Estonia), the four first cantons thus covering the territory corresponding to later Latvia and the latter three corresponding to later Estonia.

The first head of state of the United Baltic Duchy was to be Duke Adolf Friedrich of Mecklenburg, not as a sovereign monarch, but as a subordinate to the German Kaiser, similar to other princes of the German Empire. But Adolf Friedrich never assumed office. The appointed Regency Council consisting of four Baltic Germans, three Estonians and three Latvians functioned until 28 November 1918, without any international recognition, except from Germany. In October 1918, the Chancellor of Germany Prince Maximilian of Baden proposed to have the military administration in the Baltic replaced by civilian authority. The new policy was stated in a telegram from the German Foreign Office to the military administration of the Baltic: "The government of the Reich is unanimous in respect of the fundamental change in our policy towards the Baltic countries namely that in the first instance policy is to be made with the Baltic peoples." On 18 November 1918, Latvia proclaimed independence. August Winnig, the last representative of the German government, signed an agreement with representatives of the Estonian Provicional Government about handing over power on Estonian territory on 19 November. In Latvia, the Germans formally handed over authority to the Latvian national government headed by Karlis Ulmanis on 7 December 1918.

The Baltische Landeswehr was formed by the government of the United Baltic Duchy as its national defense force. Upon taking command of the Baltische Landeswehr, Major Alfred Fletcher, with the backing of the Baltic German land barons, began dismissing native Latvian elements and replacing them with Baltic Germans and Reichsdeutsche troops. Concurrently, German officers assumed most of the command positions. In his book Vanguard of Nazism: The Free Corps Movement in Postwar Germany, 1918–1923, author Robert G. L. Waite notes: "By mid-February 1919, Latvians composed less than one fifth of their own army". Britain backed down after recognizing the gravity of the military situation, and the White Russian units and the Freikorps moved on and captured Riga on 22 May 1919.

After the capture of Riga, the Freikorps were accused of killing 300 Latvians in Jelava, 200 in Tukums, 125 in Daugavgriva, and over 3,000 in Riga. After taking part in the capture of Riga, in June 1919 General von der Goltz ordered his troops not to advance east against the Red Army, as the Allies had been expecting, but north, against the Estonians. On 19 June 1919, the Iron Division and Landeswehr units launched an attack to capture areas around Cesis (Wenden), the Baltische Landeswehr continued its advance towards the Estonian coast preparatory for a push on Petrograd. However, the Baltische Landeswehr was defeated by the 3rd Estonian Division (led by Ernst Podder) and North Latvian Brigade in the Battle of Cesiss, 19–23 June 1919.

On the morning of 23 June 1919, the Germans began a general retreat toward Riga. The Allies again insisted that the Germans withdraw their remaining troops from Latvia, and intervened to impose a ceasefire between the Estonians and the Freikorps when the Estonians were about to march into Riga. Meanwhile, an Allied mission composed of British troops under General Sir Hubert de la Poer Gough had arrived in the Baltic to clear the Germans from the region and organize native armies for the Baltic states. The defeat of Germany in World War I in November 1918, followed by the defeat in 1919 of the Baltische Landeswehr and German Freikorps units of General Rüdiger von der Goltz in Latvia by the 3rd Estonian Division and North Latvian Brigade, rendered the United Baltic Duchy irrelevant. To ensure its return to Latvian control, the Baltische Landeswehr was placed under British authority. After taking command of the Baltische Landeswehr in mid-July 1919, Lt. Col. Harold Alexander (the future Alexander of Tunis), gradually dismissed the Baltic German elements. The Baltic nations of Estonia and Latvia were established as republics.
Guido_Maydell_Balti_Landeswehris_Guido_Maydell_in_the_Baltic_Landeswehr.jpg

Unreleased with the proxy-war against the Axis Central Powers in Finland and unhappy at the outcome of the now also Axis Central Power allied Neo-Ottoman Empire, Stalin had ordered the Soviet Union to concentrate a huge amount of troops at the borders of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as Poland and Romania (who had recently refused to give up their border region to the Soviet Union). This time Stalin planned to force them to agree to his demands and to sign a "Pact of defense and mutual assistance" with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which would permitted the Soviet Union to station troops in these state, de facto making them Soviet Republics and parts of the Soviet Union. The Baltic Nations feared for their independence and with the example of Finland surviving a Soviet Invasion thanks to Axis Central Power help asked the German Empire for the same protection. Nearly immediately Emperor Wilhelm III ordered German officers to train the Baltic troops and to move a reinforcement army (the Baltic Army) to East Prussia so that they could support the Baltic Nations in their defense should Stalin attack them. This plan however backfired, as Stalin showed no sign of backing down again this time and massed even more troops along the border, combined with the thread of a immediate invasion, should the Baltic Nations not comply to his demands.
Adolf_Friedrich_zu_Mecklenburg_1905_Heuschkel.jpg

The German Generals and Aristocracy saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and declared the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania that they would protect them at any costs (themselves underestimating the Soviet Union since their bad performance in Finland), but that they could not do so in the current state of their countries when they were so weakened and small. They proposed that the United Baltic Duchy should be recreated in it's old form and without much choice Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania agreed to this German demands, heavily supported by aristocratic, authoritarian and fascist elements in this Baltic States. To get Duke Adolf Friedrich of Mecklenburg to agree to once again become the monarch of this Baltic federation was the easiest part of the plan. The Baltic Nations merged and declared that once again the Cantons of Kurland (Courland), Riga, Lettgallen (Latgale), Südlivland (SouthLivonia), Nordlivland (North Livonia), Ösel (Saaremaa), and Estland (Estonia) would be their internal provinces, shortly before the Ultimatum of Stalin expired. Beside the regional parliament of this Cantons, Adolf Friedrich was supported by the reestablished Regency Council consisting of four Baltic Germans, three Estonians, three Latvians and three Lithuanians. The Soviet Union protested harshly, demanding that Germany and Austria-Hungary stopped every support for Finland, the Baltic Nations, Poland, Romania and Turkey immediately.
latest

Wilhelm III was so outraged at this demands and the tone they were written in that he responded accurately (as he put it) and included the renewed Polish Monarchy and the Kingdom of Poland into his Monarchic European Block. He then proclamation the EU (Economic Union) consisting of this block and the Axis Central Power alliance, before speaking harshly against the Soviet Union that posed a threat to all monarchies and aristocracies in Europe as it had shown in the former Russian Empire. To further enrage Stalin and as a direct answer to the demands of the Soviet dictator the German and Austrian-Hungarian Emperor then forced the new Kingdom of Poland to give up their eastern non-polish part of the country. Here the Germans formed the the Kingdom of White Ruthenia (White Russia/ Belaruss) once again as a depending state and vassal of the German Empire.
220px-Eitelprussia1883-3.jpg

Emperor Wilhelm III's younger brother Prince Eitel Friedrich of Prussia (Wilhelm Eitel Friedrich Christian Karl) was quickly announced King (later followed by Prince Oskar Karl Gustav Adolf of Prussia) of the new land and held a speach in the provisorial capital Vilna, claiming that he saw his new state as the sucessor of the former Belarusian People's Republic. His speach also included the wish to reunite all of White Ruthenia and to once again rule from the true capital Minsk.
Vyshyvanyi_01.jpg

As if that wasn't enough, the southern part of East Poland fell into the hands of Austria-Hungary once again, who quickly managed Archduke Wilhelm Franz of Austria to become the King in the new Kingdom of Ukraine. Archduke Wilhelm Franz of Austria, later Wilhelm Franz von Habsburg-Lothringen, also known as Basil the Embroidered (Ukrainian: Василь Вишиваний, translit. Vasyl Vyshyvani, known as King E.K.S. Vasyl I. Vyshyvanyi von Habsburg ), was an Austrian archduke, colonel of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen and poet. Archduke Wilhelm was the youngest son of Archduke Karl Stephan and Archduchess Maria Theresia, Princess of Tuscany.. He was born in a family estate on the Losinj island, Austrian Littoral. Accommodating the 19th-century rise of nationalism, Archduke Karl Stephan decided that his branch of the Habsburg family would adopt a Polish identity and would combine a loyalty to their Habsburg family with a loyalty to Poland. Accordingly, he had his children learn Polish from an early age and tried to instill in them a sense of Polish patriotism. His oldest son, Karl-Albrecht, would become a Polish officer. Karl Stefan's two younger daughters would marry into the Polish noble families of Radziwill and Czartoryski. Wilhelm, the youngest child, rebelled, and came to identify with the Poles' rivals, the Ukrainians. He developed a fascination with Ukrainian culture, and as a youth escaped from his family's estate, travelling incognito to Hutsul villages in the nearby Carpathian mountains and Bukovyna. This interest in the relatively impoverished Ukrainian people earned him the nickname of the "Red Prince". Eventually the Habsburgs came to accept and encourage this interest, and he was groomed by them to take a leadership role amongst the Ukrainian people in a manner similar to the one in which his father and older brother were to take amongst the Habsburgs' Polish subjects.
1000

Eventually approved by his father, his as well as his father's ambition became for Wilhelm to become the king of Ukraine. Despite his youth, he played an important historical role. As a member of the Habsburg imperial house he came to work closely with Ukrainian deputies to the parliament of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in an effort to gain more rights for the Ukrainian minority, serving as a liaison between the Ukrainian community leaders and Austria's emperor Charles I. (Kalr I.) During the First Great War he commanded a detachment of Ukrainians from Halychyna, serving as a Lieutenant with the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen. During the German and Austrian occupation of Ukraine in 1918, he commanded a Ukrainian Sich Riflemen regiment that fought against Bolsheviks in Southern Ukraine During the time of his stay in Southern Ukraine, Wilhelm became the focal point of a quiet struggle between the two allies, Austria-Hungary and the German Empire, for the future of Ukraine which they both occupied. The Habsburgs hoped for Ukraine to be a politically self-sufficient ally in order to counter German power. Accordingly, they planned for Wilhelm to eventually become Ukraine's king and supported his efforts to gain popularity among Ukraine's people as well as to promote Ukrainian patriotism. The Germans, on the other hand, were primarily concerned with obtaining grain, and supported Pavlo Skoropadskyi's rule.

Promoted to the rank of captain, Wilhelm was made commander of "Battle Group Archduke Wilhelm," created by the Emperor Karl I., and provided with approximately 4,000 Ukrainian soldiers and officers under his command. His troops occupied a small area near the site of the old Zaporozhian Sich, and were tasked with supporting the Ukrainian national cause in any way possible. This was done by screening officials by ethnicity, creating a newspaper, and engaging in cultural work with local peasants. Wilhelm mixed easily with the local peasants, who admired his ability to live simply like his soldiers. Within Wilhelm's personal occupation zone, peasants were allowed to keep the lands that they had taken from the landlords in 1917, and Wilhelm prevented the Habsburg armed forces from requisitioning grain. Ukrainians who had resisted requisitioning elsewhere - including those who had killed German or Austrian soldiers - were given refuge within Wilhelm's territory. These actions outraged Germany and Austrian officials in Kiev, but increased his popularity among local Ukrainians, who referred to him as affectionately as "Prince Vasyl." The Germans feared that Wilhelm would create a coup and overthrow the Hetmanate (Ukrainian State). Indeed, several attempts by Ukrainians were made to make Archduke Wilhelm a sovereign of Ukraine, transforming the country into a monarchy. Each time he deferred to the opinion of the Austrian Emperor, who at the time denied Wilhelm's requests for diplomatic reasons. Nevertheless, Charles I resisted German pressure to have Wilhelm removed from Ukraine. Wilhelm and his soldiers were finally ordered out of Ukraine in October 1918 due to the revolutionary conditions there, moving to Bukovnia. Through his intervention, in October 1918 two regiments of mostly Ukrainian troops were garrisoned in Lemberg. This would set the stage for the declaration of the West Ukrainian National Republic on November 1.
1018px-Europe_map_1919.jpg

Following Austria's dissolution, Wilhelm ordered his men to travel from Bukovina to Lviv to fight for the Ukrainian cause. He himself fled to that city after Romanian forces captured Bukovina, but was told by the president of the West Ukrainian National Republic that his services were not needed, and retired to a nearby monastery. As a Habsburg, he had become a liability to the Ukrainian cause, which was being portrayed to the Allies by its Polish enemies as an Austrian plot. After pledging loyalty to the Ukrainian People's Republic, in 1919 he was made a colonel of its army and worked for the Ministry of Defense of the country. In protest at Petlura's peace treaty with Poland in 1920, which he considered to be a betrayal of Western Ukraine, he resigned and lived in exile in Vienna and Paris. In an interview in a Viennese newspaper in January 1921, Wilhelm publicly rebuked Poland, condemning the pogroms in Lwow as something that would never happen in a civilized country, and referring to Poland and Poles as dishonorable. This caused a permanent, public estrangement between Wilhelm and his father Stephan. In 1921 Wilhelm published a book of poetry in Ukrainian, Mynayut Dni (Минають дні - The days pass).

That same year, he became involved in various plots by monarchists and other wishing to overthrow the new order following the first world war. He founded a Ukrainian veterans' organization in Vienna, briefly reconciled with his one-time rival Pavlo Skoropadskyi, and established contact with German counter-revolutionaries and monarchists such as Max Bauer and Erich Ludendorff, who helped fund a Ukrainian paramilitary organization in Vienna known as the Free Cossacks (estimated by Austrian police as numbering 40,000). Wilhelm's uncompromising attitude towards Poland made him popular among Ukrainian exiles, and he spent much of 1921 recruiting an invasion army of Ukraine. At this time, he was viewed by French and Polish intelligence as the Ukrainians' unquestioned leader and a viable candidate for the Ukrainian throne, respectively. Such plans aroused the anger of the exiled Ukrainian People's Republic, which had been discredited by its alliance with Poland (and continued to receive subsidies from the Polish government) and saw in Wilhelm a rival for Ukrainian allegiance. Seeking to upstage Wilhelm's planned invasion, the Ukrainian People's Republic invaded Soviet Ukraine on its own in November 1921 with several thousand soldiers. Its quick defeat discredited the idea of an invasion of Ukraine, and caused Wilhelm's German financial supporters to cease their subsidization of his project, which then collapsed. Under his Ukrainian name Vasyl Vyshyvani, he left Austria for Spain in 1922 from which he hoped in vain to obtain financial support for his Ukrainian adventure from his cousin, King Alfonso XIII.

When all of his attempts to gain power in Ukraine failed to produce results, Wilhelm moved to Paris where he led a hedonistic lifestyle. An informant for the French police claimed that Wilhelm carried on a sexual relationship with two of his assistants. In 1935 he became enmeshed in a legal situation caused by his lover Paulette Couyba, who had used Wilhelm without his knowledge to swindle investors of hundreds of thousands of Francs. During the sensationalistic and well-publicized trial, Wilhelm fled Paris for Vienna. In the mid- to late 1930s, Wilhelm resumed his nationalistic Ukrainian activities. He established contact with old comrades-in-arms from the Galician Sich Rifles Yevhen Konovalets and Andriy Melnyk, who now headed the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.

Wilhelm persuaded the new German and Austrian-Hungarian Emperors after the recreation of the United Baltic Duchy to also recreate the Ukrainian State with himself once again as the head of a Ukrainian Kingdom. Wilhelm III and Otto II agreed to the idea to oppose Stalin and along the new Baltic Duchy and the recreated Kingdom of White Ruthenia they later created the Kingdom of Ukrainians too. Wilhelm was then crowned King of Ukraine with the name of Vasyl I Vyshyvanyi in a vassal state/ puppet loyal to Austria-Hungary on paper. In reality Vasyl I was only loyal to his Ukrainian people and struggled to improve the conditions of his countrymen whenever he could. He also tried not to rely to heavily on any help from Germany and Austria-Hungary, so that they could spare resources and his new Ukrainian Kingdom would be more independent.
1024px-Ukrainian_State_1918.5-11.png

(claims of the Kingdom of the Kingdom of Ukrainia under Vasyl I)

Vasyl I was till then still remembered as a important figure in parts of this new Ukrainian Kingdom and even inside the Soviet Union's Ukrainians People's Republic. Because of this Stalin was more then outraged that after the recreation of the United Baltic Duchy and even angrier when the Kingdom of White Ruthenia and the Kingdom of Ukrainia were proclamed by the Axis Central Powers. Stalin knew how dangerous this movements and ideals could be for his power over the Soviet Union minorities and especially his iron grip over the White Russian and Ukrainian Soviet Republics. Once again Stalin proposed a ultimatum to the Axis Central Powers to back down on their support of this states and to agree to the Soviet Demands, otherwise their two powers would stop all diplomatic relations. The Axis Central Powers, already planning a attack on the Soviet Union recognized that the Soviets gathered more and more forces across their border region and realized that a War in the East might break out immediately. Therefore the German and Austrian-Hungarian High Command gathered their own and allied troops in the east for a preemptive strike against the Soviet Union before Stalin could attack on the whole frontline from Finland to Turkey.
united_baltic_duchy_the_kingdom_of_white_ruthenia_by_sheldonoswaldlee-dc3p1dt.png

The Italian Empire and Nationalist Spain were both quiet surprised by this events, because they had been occupied with their own little ambitions, to create a powerful block inside the Axis Central Powers against the growing German and Austrian-Hungarian dominance. They called this new block the Latin Union and celebrated their connected history, heritage and (so they wished) future as brotherly nations with a strongly connected language, history and culture in Southern Europe and the Mediterranean region.

US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was alarmed by the recent events in Europe and Asia, so he demonized the powers that endangered the freedom and liberty in both continents; Europe and Asia. Unknowingly he thereby caused the statements that these monarchic powers would work closer together for the New Order they invisioned in Europe and Asia. Further more the member states of the Axis Central Powers and the member states of the Co-Prosperity Sphere declared to guarantee each others independence in chase that any other power should declare war on any of them.
 
Last edited:
Top