The Co-Prosperity Sphere

[CountofDooku]

Chapter 57: The Imperial Armored Samurai and Ashigaru:

The Chinese Civil war was as much a testing ground for new Japanese and Co-Prosperity Sphere tactics, strategies and weapons as the Spanish Civil War had been for Germany and Italy. The Standstill at the front of the Chinese Civil War led to different Japanese and Co-Prosperity Sphere tactics and approaches to enforce a solution in Wang Jingwei's favor and defeat Chang finally. They mostly tried to get the Xikang (also Sikang or Hsikang) Army, the Sichuan (formerly romanized Szechuan), the Hunan Clique and even the Guominjun (Kuominchun) Army on their and Wang's Government side by promising them political and military power in the new government, protection from the Communists and even immunity for any kind of war crimes. A more direct approach to force them and Chiang into submission was the invention of new strategies, tactics and troops, like flamethrowers and flamethrower tanks against the already technological and equipment inferior enemy. One of the biggest successes during this time was the invention of a new type of soldier and military armor; the Imperial Armored Samurai (IAS, often nicknamed the walking tank, human tank or tank walker by the Allies later during the war). The Imperial Armored Samurai used the modern armor used for regular infantry helmets and covered the whole infantryman in plate armor similar to that of the old samurai, that was mass produced in factories and not as colorful as the original. Armed with a Katana and Wakizashi, the Imperial Armored Samurai also used pistols, rifles and automatic/ early machine guns and had access to the most modern equipment and weapons of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy.

The armor of the Imperial Armored Samurai could be hermetical sealed and came with a gas mask to replace the face masks of the old samurai. Experimenting with new weapons and easily the best trained forces in the whole Japanese Empire soon, the Imperial Armored Samurai also had experimental or new weapons like flamethrower for infantry soldiers, and grenades that used biological or even more often chemical charges to quickly kill huge enemy numbers in trenches, foxholes, bunkers or even armored vehicles and tanks. This made the Imperial Armored Samurai one of the deadliest and most feared infantry troops in the Second Great War. The Imperial Armored Samurai also formed the Imperial Guard (Inperiarugādo) a special elite force like the recreated German Stormtroopers (or before that the SA, SD and SS troops under Hitler's regime) that served the Tenno Hirohito himself as fanatical Shintoist elite soldiers, ready to die for him. Many of them would later rather die then get into captive and many would serve as pilots for so called Kamikaze planes or serve as human bombs in land warfare or human torpedoes/sea mines in maritime warfare. While a single Imperial Armored Samurai was heavily armed and protected, the heavy armor robbed them of their stamina during long runs and fights, meaning they often were slower on their feet and easy to fight in close combat, assuming any enemy survived their bullet protecting armor and came close enough to do so. Once a a enemy came close enough however, the Imperial Armored Samurai had many weaknesses, one the ability to shoot up between the armor plates from a certain position once a enemy was close enough. This openings were necessary to prevent the armor from getting to heavy and unhandy, sometimes they even provided some form of ventilation for the Samurai, mostly in hot or jungle regions. The first variations also did not have the legs of the Imperial Armored Samurai covered, or only with smaller plates, to not limit their movements, this was later fixed with plates and chainmail armor waved and incorporated inside the trousers and boots.

Therefore the armor used for the the Imperial Armored Samurai elite forces came with a lighter, not so heavy variation that added only a torso plate to the normal infantry helmets used. This forces were known as Ashigaru (“light of foot”/ light foot soldiers) that had once been used and employed by the samurai class of feudal japan and were now, like the Samurai and Shinobi now reinvented and reused again. Japans new strategy was a combination of tradition and new ideas, combined to a mass army and a modern elite force to beat their enemies on every area and soon the Imperial Navy adapted the same concept for their new ship ideas, strategies and tactics. Because of the massice costs for the training, armor and equipment of the Imperial Armored Samurai, they remained a small elite force, often used as divisions a fire brigade division in the most troublesome parts of a front. Sometimes only a few battalions or corpses of the Imperial Armored Samurai were itnegrated into regulair divicions and armies to increase their overall fighting abilities. This elite forces would prove to be a pain for the Allies in places like India, Burma and the Pacific Islands later on.

The most primitive form of this idea would later see the Bamboo Spear infantry try to defend their homes and freedom against the enemies at all cost, often supporting regular troops in or near their home-region with a mass army (even including women and children) that simply overwhelmed the enemy in masses alongside regular forces to push them back.

 

[CountofDooku]

Chapter 58: The Battle of the Atlantic and Mediterranean:

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.

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 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.

 

[CountofDooku]

Chapter 59: The Empire of Yankoku (also called Yankukuo or Yanjiang State and Dynasty):

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

[CountofDooku]

Chapter 60: Ottoman Preparations:

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.

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.

 

[CountofDooku]

Chapter 61: The Triads and the Unequal Treaty's:

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.

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.

 

[CountofDooku]

Chapter 62: Emperor Otto and the new Austria-Hungary:

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.

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.

 

[CountofDooku]

Chapter 63: Recreation of the United Baltic Duchy, the Kingdom of White Ruthenia and the Kingdom of Ukrainia:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.

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.

 

[CountofDooku]

Chapter 64: The Kingdom of Finland:

The Kingdom of Finland (Finnish: Suomen kuningaskunta; Swedish: Konungariket Finland) was established monarchy in Finland, following Finland's independence from Russia. Had Germany prevailed, Prince Frederick Charles of Hesse would have been installed as the King of Finland. Finland had declared independence from what was the Russian Empire, at that time embroiled in the Russian Civil War, on 6 December 1917. At the time of the declaration of independence, monarchists were a minority in the Finnish Parliament, and Finland was declared a republic. A civil war followed, and afterwards, while the pro-republic Socialist Democratic Party was excluded from the Parliament and before a new constitution was adopted, Frederick was elected to the throne of Finland on 9 October 1918. Lithuania had already taken a similar step in July 1918, electing Wilhelm Karl, Duke of Urach and Count of Württe,berg, as King Mindaugas II of Lithuania. In Latvia and Estonia, a "General Provincial Assembly" consisting of Baltic-German aristocrats had called upon the German Emperor, Wilhelm II, to recognize the Baltic provinces as a joint monarchy and a German protectorate. Adolf Friedrich, Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, was nominated Duke of "the United Baltic Duchy" by the Germans.

At independence, Finland had, like the Baltic provinces, close ties with the German Empire. Germany was the only international power that had supported the preparations for independence, not least by training volunteers as Finnish Jäger troops. Germany had also intervened in the Finnish Civil War, despite its own precarious situation. Finland's position vis-a-vis Germany was already evolving towards that of a protectorate by Spring 1918, and the election of Prince Frederick, brother-in-law of Wilhelm II, was viewed as a confirmation of the close relations between the two nations. The strongly pro-German prime minister, Juhu Kusti Paasikivi, and his government offered the crown to Prince Frederick in October 1918. The adoption of a new monarchist constitution had been delayed because it did not get the required qualified majority (the legitimacy of the royal election was based upon the Instrument of Government of 1772, adopted under King Gustav III of Sweden, when Finland had been a part of the Kingdom of Sweden. The same constitutional document had also served as the basis for the rule of the Russian Emperors, as Grand Dukes of Finland, during the 19th century.

A member of the Finnish Parliament, Gustaf Arokallio, suggested the monarchical designation "Charles I, King of Finland and Karelia, Duke of Aland, Grand Duke of Lapland, Lord of Kaleva and the North" (Finnish: Kaarle I, Suomen ja Karjalan kuningas, Ahvenanmaan herttua, Lapinmaan suuriruhtinas, Kalevan ja Pohjolan isäntä; Swedish: Karl I, Kung av Finland och Karelen, hertig av Åland, storhertig av Lappland, herre över Kaleva och Pohjola). By 9 November 1918, Wilhelm II had abdicated and Germany was declared a republic. Two days later, on 11 November 1918, the armistice between the belligerents of First Great War was signed. Little is known of the Allied powers' view regarding the possibility of a German-born prince as the King of Finland. However, warnings received from the West convinced the Finnish government of Prime Minister Lauri Ingman – a monarchist himself– to ask Prince Frederick to give up the crown, which he had not yet come to wear in Finland. The king-elect Frederick renounced the throne on 14 December 1918. Mannerheim, the leader of the Whites during the Finnish Civil War, was appointed as Regent. Republican parties won three quarters of the parliament's seats in the election of 1919 and Finland adopted a republican constitution. In July 1919, Finland’s first president Kaarlo Juho Stahlberg replaced Mannerheim. Finland became a republic. Baron Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim himself was a Finnish military leader and statesman. Mannerheim served as the military leader of the Whites in the Finnish Civil War, Regent of Finland (1918–1919), commander-in-chief of Finland's defense forces during the Second Great War and Marshal of Finland.

Mannerheim who has had a hart time fighting the Soviet Union after their attack on Finland in the Winter War and relied heavily on the German and Axis Central Powers support for the defense of his country. Therefore he offered the son of Karl I. Philipp, Prince and Landgrave of Hesse, who was head of the Electoral House of Hesse since 1940 to become the next King of Finland, to tie the bounds between both nations and deepen Finland's membership in the Axis Central Powers.

Philipp himself had joined the Nazi Party in 1930, and, when they gained power with the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor in 1933, he became Governor of Hesse-Nassau He was a grandson of Frederick III, German Emperor and a great-grandson of Queen Victoria, as well as the son-in-law to Victor Emmanuel III of Italy. His relative Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh was named after him. Philipp was born at Schloss Rumpenheim in Offenbach, the third son of Prince Frederick Charles of Hesse and of his wife Princess Margaret of Prussia (sister of the German Emperor Wilhelm II). Philipp had a younger twin brother Wolfgang, as well as two older brothers and two other younger twin brothers. As a child, Philipp had an English governess. In 1910, he was sent to England to attend school in Bexhill-on-Sea. After returning to Germany, he attended a Musterschule in Frankfurth and then the Realgymnasium in Potsdam. He was the only one of the brothers who did not attend a military academy.

At the beginning of the First World War, Philipp enlisted in the Hessian Dragoon-Regiment Nr. 24 along with his older brother Maximilian. They served first in Belgium where Maximilian was killed in October. In 1915 and 1916, Philipp served on the Eastern Front in what is now Ukraine. He held the rank of lieutenant (an extremely low rank considering his princely background) and was mostly responsible for the procurement of munitions. In 1917, he served on the Siegfried Line, before returning to Ukraine where he experienced active combat and was wounded. In 1916, Philipp's oldest brother Friedrich Wilhelm died (in the First Great War) and Philipp became second in line to succeed his uncle as Head of the Electoral House of Hesse. In October 1918, Philipp's father was elected king of Finland. It was intended that Philipp would eventually succeed his father as Head of the House of Hesse, while his (younger) twin brother Wolfgang would be heir to the Finnish throne. The plans for a Finnish monarchy, however, soon came to an abrupt end with the defeat of Germany; Finland became a republic in July 1919.

After the war, Philipp enlisted in the Übergangsheer (the Transitional Army) which was successful in defending against communist and socialist action. From 1920 to 1922, he attended the Technical University in Darmstadt where he studied art history and architecture. He made several visits to Greece where his aunt Princess Sophie of Prussia was the wife of King Constantine I.. In 1922, he left university without completing a degree and took a job at the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin. The following year, he moved to Rome where he used his aristocratic connections to establish himself as a successful interior designer. (He had designed some furniture for the palace his father intended to occupy as King of Finland, that would later become his own palace plans.)

While in Italy, Philipp became impressed by Fascism, and he thought the Bolsheviks were a great threat. On his return to Germany in October 1930, he joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party. In 1932, he joined the Stormtroopers (SA, commonly referred to as the Brown Shirts), and, the following year, his younger brother Christoph joined the Schutzstaffel (SS). Later, his two other brothers, including Wolfgang, also joined the SA. Through his party membership, Philipp became a particularly close friend of Herman Göring, the future head of the Nazi German air force (Luftwaffe). In the Stormtroopers, he held the rank of Obergruppenführer. Following the appointment of Adolf Hitler as the German Chancellor on 30 January 1933, Philipp was appointed Oberpräsident (Governor) of Hesse-Nassau in June 1933.With the electoral success of Hitler's political party, he also became a member of the Reichstag and of the Staatsrat of Prussia. Philipp played an important role in the consolidation of National Socialist rule in Germany. He introduced other aristocrats to NSDAP officials and, as son-in-law of the king of Italy, was a frequent go-between for Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

After the End of Nazi Germany and the rebirth of the German Empire, Philipp stayed a important aristocrat member of the Reichstag and became a special ambassador to the Kingdom of Italy, where he had close ties to Victor Emmanuel III and Mussolini. With the Axis Central Powers victory in France and the Balkan, Philipp became a important spokesman for the German Empire and aristocracy against the evils of Bolshevism, the Soviet Union and the Comintern International. Because of that and his succession as the son of Karl I., the Marshal of Finland Baron Mannerheim himself, once again Regent of Finland and commander-in-chief of Finland's offered him the crown his father never had get himself. The offer was simple, he Mannerheim would remain in a similar leadership like Mussolini did in Italy, while Philipp would get a position similar to Victor Emmanuel III in Italy right now. The German Emperor Wilhelm III, the Italian Emperor Victor Emmanuel III and even the Austrian-Hungarian Emperor Otto (who honestly couldn't care less) agreed to this terms and Philipp became King Philipp, of the renewed Kingdom of Finland. As a part of the Axis Central Powers he was concerned with the Soviet Union forces occupying parts of his Kingdom and the general upcoming war between the Axis Central Powers and the Soviets. Never the less he nearly immediately ordered the palace he planned for his father to be build, with slight adjustments and even arranged for his fathers corpse to be brought to Finland, where he was official recognized as the King of Finland before him by Mannerheim. Thanks to the Arsitrocrats, Fascists and the war against the Russians, King Philipp could be assured that the Finish Parliament would support his early decisions and plans for now.

 

[CountofDooku]

Chapter 65: The possible Second Front, or the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance of 1373:

Ruled by Prime Minister António de Oliveira Salazar, a Portuguese economist and statesman from 1932 onward, Salazar founded and controlled the Estado Novo ("New State"), the corporatist authoritarian government that ruled all of Portugal and it's colonies. With the Axic Central Power Invasion of Gibralta and the siding of Spain as a active member of the German lead Axis Central Powers, British Premier Winston Churchill saw himself in a problematic position, but also with new opportunities. It seamed like it was time to call for help with the long lasting Anglo-Portuguese Alliance that remained intact since 1373. Before the British had feared that the call for Portugal might encourage Nationalist Spain to join the Axis Central Powers, but that fear had now already come true. Therefore there was no need to remain neutral for Portugal in the eyes of the British. Nearly standing alone right now the British could need any help they could get and while it looked like the Axis Central Powers and the Soviet Union might go to war, or the United States of America might join on the British side sometime, that moment were far in the future and who knew if Britain could hold out until then.

Portugal itself was not in a easy situation either, being pressured from both alliances, knowing that the Azores islands and some of their resources were vital for each side in this ongoing war. The Kingdom of Spain/ Nationalist Spain had even proposed a authoritarian Iberian Union of both states and Salazar was not entirely sure how well Franco would take his refusal of the idea. The threat of occupation by Spanish and German forces (coming from Valladolid, Cáceres and Sevillia across the border) was hanging in the air, as was the possibility of a British naval invasion over Oporto and Lisboa (maybe even including the National Spanish coast near La Coruna and Bilbao). Some in Portugal even hoped for a Francoist Reunion of Iberia, but even more feared such a union enforced upon them by enemy forces. The fact that Franco talked about a Iberian Union as the strong leg and arm at the side of the Axis Central Powers European body, made the danger seam all the more real and closer than it was in reality. The British and Allies on the other hand would have been happy with air bases on the Azores alone to scout for German submarines and ships further out on the Atlantic Ocean. They also knew that their own operation in Portugal would have to be secret, quick and fast to get their troops into Portugal and ready for defending the nation before the Axis Central Powers could counter their plans. Still the Allies as well as the Axis Central Powers and even some at the moment neutral states prepared for the attack on Portugal even if it was just for the chase to be faster then the enemy with similar plans (much like the Scandinavian Operation before).

Plans by the Axis Central Powers:

Operation Flamenco:
The Germans had planned that their attack on Gibraltar, codenamed “Operation Flamenco – a dance in Iberia” (Operation Matilda before under Hitler) by the Army, would included the potential invasion of Portugal if the British gained a foothold, and considered the occupation of Maderia and of the Azores.

Führer Directive No. 18:
On November 12, 1940 Hitler issued “Führer Directive No. 18”, which outlined the plan to invade Portugal if British forces were to gain a footing there. "I also request that the problem of occupying Maderia and the Azores should be considered, together with the advantages and disadvantages which this would entail for our sea and air warfare. The results of these investigations are to be submitted to me as soon as possible," Hitler added. The German Emperors Wilhelm II and Wilhelm the III later used parts of this plans (renamed “Operation Flamenco – a dance in Iberia” later on).

Operation Mundo:
In June 1941, Operation Mundo was a Imperial German plan to be put into effect after the collapse of the Soviet Union to secure bases in Spain and Portugal for the continuation of the strangulation of Great Britain. This concept was laid out by Emperor Wilhelm III, but only partly executed for now as the Nationalist Kingdom of Spain joined the Axis Central Powers.

Plans by the Allies:

Operation Alacrity:
Operation Alacrity was the codename for a proposed Allied seizure of the Azores during the Second Great War. The islands were of enormous strategic value with regard to the defeat of the German U-boats. Portugal was too weak to defend the Azores, its large colonial empire, or its homeland, and tried to stay neutral in the war. Salazar was especially worried about a possible German invasion through Spain and did not want to provoke Wilhelm III; nor did he want to give Spain an excuse to take sides with the Axis Central Powers and invade Portugal due to the strategic importance of the Canary Islands. During this time Great Britain and the United States devised plans to set up air bases regardless of Portugal's disapproval. The plans were never put into operation. Instead Britain requested, that Portugal allow Britain to set up bases there. Operation Alacrity was later preceded by War Plan Gray.

War Plan Gray:
War Plan Gray was a plan for the United States to invade the Azores Islands in 1940–41. Gray is one of the many color-coded war plans created in the early 20th century. On 22 May 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt directed the U.S. Army and Navy to draft an official plan to occupy the Portuguese Azores. Approved by the Joint Board on 29 May, War Plan Gray called for a landing force of 28,000 troops, one half Marine and one half Army.

Portuguese Espionage:
Several American reports soon called Lisbon "The Capital of Espionage". However, the PIDE (Portuguese secret police) always maintained a neutral stance towards foreign espionage activity, as long as no one intervened in Portuguese internal policies. Writers such as Ian Fleming (the creator of James Bond) were based there, while other prominent people such as the Duke of Windsor and the Spanish royal family were exiled in Estoril. German spies attempted to buy information on trans-Atlantic shipping to help their submarines fight the Battle of the Atlantic. The Spaniard Juan Pujol García, better known as Codename Garbo, passed on misinformation to the Germans, hoping it would hasten the end of the Franco regime; he was recruited by the British as a double agent while in Lisbon. Conversely, William Colepaugh, an American traitor, was recruited as an agent by the Germans while his ship was in port in Lisbon – he was subsequently landed by U-boat U-1230 in Maine before being captured.

In 1941 John Beevor, the head of Special Operations Executicee (SOE) in Lisbon, established an underground network with the aim of carrying out sabotage task in case of a German invasion of Portugal. The targets for immediate destruction were oil refineries, rail roads, bridges and industrial and mining facilities. The Portuguese police found out that Beevor's network included several "anti-Salazar" Portuguese members, which irked the Portuguese authorities. Salazar suspected that British flirtation with his opponents could be hiding an attempt to install in Lisbon a "democratic" alternative to his regime, one willing to bring the country under British patronage. Salazar informed the British Ambassador that he wanted heads to roll and ended up requesting Beevor's withdrawal. Despite the incident Capt. Agostinho Lourenço, the founder and first head of Portugal's security and immigration police, earned a reputation with British observers, recorded in a confidential print generated at the British Embassy, which suggested a "pro-British" bias on his part. Lourenço always kept a good relationship with the MI6.

 

[CountofDooku]

Chapter 66: Fear in the Far East:

Despite the agreements, non-aggression pacts and border regulations between the Soviet Union and the Co-Prosperity Sphere there were still minor incidents and conflicts in the Far East of Russia. The Soviet Union as well as their vassal, the Mongolian People's Republic tried to readjust the border in smaller skirmishes or patrols across the established border. The Co-Prosperity Sphere member states of Manchukuo (claiming the Russian Far East) and Mengjiang (that propagated the so called Khalkha Campaign, the War of Mongolian Reunification against the Mongolian People's Republic in Outer Mongolia) did the same. Sadly the Kwantung Army encouraged both states and helped them build up their own forces against the Soviet Union. Now that Stalin was preoccupied in Europe the time seamed right for them to speed up their own plans.

Nikolay Dokalov a former Officer of the Russian Empire and later fighting for the Whites in the Civil War recently worked for the Manchurian branch of the Co-Prosperity Sphere Cultural Ministry (CPSCM). While the Caucasian European man stick out of any crowd from afar, he was so conspicuous that no one would easily suspect him to be a spy because of it. Right now he was on a important mission near Suifenho on the Manchurian Railway. He knew that the enemy spy they had caught and tortured a few days before had buried some top secret photographic there, that would give the Red Army a pretty good Intel about the current strength and abilities of the Manchurian and Kwantung Armies, as well as give them detailed plans for a invasion of the Russian Far Eastern provinces of Amur in the Soviet Union. Such information of coarse had to be prevented from falling into enemy hands and while the enemy Manchu agent had been convinced by mentioning that his family was secured and protected by the Imperial Military, it would be to obvious if he showed up again in Suifenho to get the photographic back right now. Therefore the CPSCM had decided that the best solution was to send Nikolay Dokaloy, one of their best and most loyal Manchurian Agents, who hated the Reds and the Soviets with a burning passion. While he would have loved to deal with some Soviet spies and agents himself, Nikolay understood that this matter would best be handled delicately, so that the enemy would not suspect a thing.

To accomplish this task Nikolay Dokalov traveled alone, disguised as the merchant Vladislav Pavlovsk and hoped that no one would get suspicious of him. He arrived undetected in Suifenho and to his luck, the Soviet spies had not yet picket up the small photographic as it looked like. Quickly he exchanged the originals with the fake ones and hid them in the exact same location, so that the Russian spies would pick them up later. The new photos showed faked maps and military texts that lied about the location of the true fortifications, the strength, numbers and offensive plans of the Co-Prosperity Sphere armies to give the Soviet Union a false sense of security and to surprise them later when they would realize that the information they would use to build their defenses and offenses on wrong assumptions and false maps. Nikolay knew he had done his part and he also knew that the captured Russian agent would soon be free to return to the Soviet Union. This way the enemy would assume the CPSCM had been to late to intercept the handover of the photographs. At the same time they would not have to worry about the captured spy right now, he was uncovered and of no use for the Soviets inside Manchuria anymore, since it was likely he would be recognized again easily and followed on every step in Manchuria from now on once he was released.

 

[CountofDooku]

Chapter 67: The German French Ausgleich in Belgium and the United Kingdom of the Netherlands:

Rattachism (French: Rattachisme) or Reunionism (Réunionisme) was a political ideology which called for the French-speaking Belgium or Wallonia to secede from the Belgian national-state and become part of France. Brussels, which is majority French-speaking but enclave in Flanders, was often included within this ideology as may the six Flemish municipalities with language facilities for French-speakers. It can be considered a French-speaking equivalent of Orangism or Grootneerlandisme in Flanders. The Rattachist ideology is associated with a faction of the Walloon Movement. The Southern Netherlands were invaded and annexed by the First French Republic in 1795, ending Habsburg rule. After Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the major victorious powers agreed at the Congress of Vienna on reuniting the former Austrian Netherlands and the former Dutch Republic, creating the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, which was to serve as a buffer state against any future French invasions. King William imposed Dutch as the main language, while French was the language of the bourgeosie in the Southern Netherlands. They were also significantly underrepresented in the Dutch Assembly. These and other reasons caused in 1830 the Belgian Revolution, supported by France. The Southern Netherlands declared independence, becoming the Kingdom of Belgium. However, some of the proponents of secession from the Netherlands, preferred union with France rather than an independent country, but the major European powers decided on an independent neutral Belgium in the Treaty of London. The Flemish of the new state of Belgium now became as oppressed by the francophones of Wallonia, leading to the tensions and movements for Flemish independence ever since. The "r" in "rattachism" (from "re-" and "attach"), indicating a re-unification, is in reference to a future unification being a repeat occurrence, after the previous "unity" which transpired during the "French period" (1794–1815) after the French Revolutionary Wars.

On the other hand there was the Greater Netherlands (Dutch: Groot-Nederland) or Dietsland ("Dutchland") Flemish movement formed by some of the Dutch-speaking citizens of Flanders and the Netherlands with the plan to merge both nations. The concept was originally developed by Pieter Geyl, who argued that the two only separated during the Eighty Years' War against Spain in the 16th century. Although Geyl was strongly anti-fascistic and argued from a historical and cultural perspective, the German fascists and the aristrocrats of the German Empire built upon the idea during the Second Great War with a focus on ethnic nationalism in a Monarchistic Europe. Despite the name, such a process was to be done via a merger of the two countries into a new entity rather than a Dutch annexation. The Greater Netherlands movement has long been divided on the political form the polity would take, considering among others a confederation, a federation or a unitary state. The potential country is also known as Dutchland (Dietsland), which uses the word Diets – an archaic term for Dutch. This label was popular until the Second Great War, but its associations with collaboration (especially in Flanders), mean that modern supporters generally avoid using it. "Greater Dutch Movement" or "Greater Netherlandism" (Grootneerlandisme) are other terms used while in literature it is also called the "Greater Dutch Thinking" (Grootnederlandse Gedachte). "Whole-Netherlands" or "Burgundism" (after the historical Burgundian Circle) are other terms that were used for the country, but these names are now used for a movement that aims to combine all of the Low Countries as a single multilingual entity, which would be similar to the former United Kingdom of the Netherlands, also including Wallonia, Luxembourg, and Northern France (Nord-Pas de Calais). The Movement used the Prince's Flag that was sometimes used by Greater Dutch groups, because in the Eighty Years' War it was used by supporters of William I of Orange, seen as the leader of the revolt. It was also used as the flag of the Dutch Republic and United Kingdom of the Netherlands but today is generally associated with the far-right in the Netherlands.

The Greater Dutch movement emerged at the end of the 19th century. In Belgium, some Dutch-speaking citizens opposed towards the privileged position of French-speaking bourgeoisie, and the corresponding subordination of the Dutch, in government and in public life which led to the formation of the Flemish Movement in which some called for the fusion of Flanders and the Netherlands, similar to that called for by the Orangists after the Belgian Revolution of 1830. Nationalist from both Flanders and Netherlands created the Dutch General Union in 1895. The First Great War further sharpened the conflict between Dutch and French speakers in Belgium. For instance, the Flamenpolitik of the Germans, involving the administrative separation of the Dutch and the French-speaking parts of Belgium, was influenced by the Flemish Movement, which they wanted to use as an ally. The Dutch General Union was joined, at the end of the First Great War, by a considerable number of people in the Netherlands and Flanders. It also enjoyed some popularity among students, leading to the creation of the Diets Student Association. During the Second Great War, both Belgium and the Netherlands were occupied by the German Empire. It was believed in nationalist circles that a Wallonian and a Greater Dutch state could be created through collaboration with the German occupiers.

(situation right now, French Empire Ambitions under Napoleon III, Pan-Germanist plans and the real outcome far right and below)

Some of the plans of the German Empire included the idea of two separate states, like Belgium and the Netherlands before that would continue as notionally independent German satellite states (other Pan-Germanists preferred their annexation -or at least of parts of them- as new German provinces for the German Empire). At the same time King Napoléon VI (and even more so french fascists, nationalists and aristrocrats in the government forcing him to go down this road or lose their support in the Senate) dreamed to ally themselves with the Rattachist and Wallonians movements. Their plan was to fulfill the dreams of French Emperor Napoleon III to annex Belgium to establish a french regional power to counter the German Hegemony over Europe and within the Axis Central Powers. According to their plans France should join the winning side of the Second Great War and get some gains out of the peace afterwards instead of just loosing territory in it. To do so the French King and his government encouraged the Wallonian Rattachist, while Germany focused on the Flemish National Union and the National Movement of the Netherlands. Agreeing to a border with the Kingdom of Italy and the Kingdom of Spain, the Fascist French Troops occupied Andorra and Monacco to fully integrate them into their new state as a first step. In a private meeting between King Napoléon VI and Emperor Wilhelm III they agreed on spheres of interest in Western Europe to be split between Germany and France in the Low Countries. The french would from now on annex Wallonia (as comparison for their loss of Alsace-Lorraine/ Elsas-Lothringen), while the rest of Belgium and the Netherlands would create the renewed United Kingdom of the Netherlands (the so called French-German "Ausgleich" - equalization, Belgium Ausgleich or Ausgleich in Belgium). The former Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld (later Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands) who had married Princess Juliana of the Netherlands in 1939 and fled with her to England after the German invasion would be succeeded by his brother Prince Aschwin of Lippe-Biesterfeld as the new King (King Aschwin) of this German puppet state. For their support for the German Empire with ships and airplanes as well as colonial troops against the British, the French hoped to gain British Colonies (Sudan, Canada, India or others) after the war as well as keep most of their own. Additionally King Napoléon VI was allowed to crown himself Emperor Napoléon VI, so that the French Monarchy would (at least on paper and in theory) once again be on pair with Germany, Austria-Hungary or the former Tsardom of Russia again.

British Premier Winston Churchill would later jeer about this Axis Central Power strategy of a old, undemocratic Monarchistic Europe: "If they (the Axis Central Powers/ Germans) would turn back the clock of time and the political map of Europe any further now, we wouldn't have to fight any longer, because the Huns would turn themselves back into the stone ages.”

 

[CountofDooku]

Chapter 68: Choices in Xinjiang, the Xinjiang State or the Guominjun/ Kuominchun Clique:

Sheng Shicai (Chinese: 盛世才; pinyin: Shèng Shìcái; Wade-Giles: Sheng Shih-ts'ai; born 3 December 1895) was a Chinese warlord who ruled Xinjiang from 1933 onward. Sheng's rise to power started with a coup d'état in 1933, when he was appointed the duban or Military Governor of Xinjiang. His rule over Xinjiang is marked by close cooperation with the Soviet Union, allowing the Soviets trade monopoly and exploitation of resources, which made Xinjiang a Soviet puppet. The Soviet era ended in 1941, when Sheng slowly approached the Central fovernment, but still retained much power over the province. Sheng Shicai was a Manchurian-born Han Chinese, educated in Tokio, Japan, where he studied political economy and later attended the Imperial Japanese Army Academy. Having become a Marxist in his youth, Sheng participated in the anti-imperialist ; May Fourth Movement in Qing China. He participated in the Northern Expediton, a military campaign of the Kuomintang against the Beiyang government. In winter of 1929 he was called into service of Governor Xinjiang, Jin Shuren, where he served as Chief of Staff of the Frontier Military and Chief Instructor at the Provincial Military College. With Kumul Rebellion ongoing, Jin was owerthrown in a coup on 12 April 1933, and Sheng was appointed duban or Military Governor of Xinjiang. Since then, he led a power struggle against his rivals, of whom Ma Zhongying and Zhang Peiyuan were most notable. The first to be removed were the coup leaders and by them appointed Civil Governor Lui Wenlong by September 1933. Ma and Zhang were defeated militarily by June 1934 with the help from the Soviet Union, whom Sheng invited to intervene, subordinating himself to the Soviet in return. As ruler of Xinjiang, Sheng implemented his Soviet-inspired policies through his political program of Six Great Policies, adopted in December 1934. His rule was marked by his nationality policy which promoted national and religious equality and identity of various nationalities of Xinjiang. The province saw a process of modernisation, but also the subordination of economic interests in Soviet favour. The Soviets had monopoly over Xinjiang trade and exploited its rare materials and oil. In 1937, in parallel with the Soviet Great Purge, Sheng conducted a purge on his own, eliminating political opponents, of whom majority were the Chinese communists. With the Soviets distracted by the upcoming war with the German Empire, Sheng slowly approached the Chinese Central Government in 1941, and expelled the Soviet military and technical personnel. However, he still maintained effective power over Xinjiang.

Sheng himself was an ethnic Han Chinese, was born in Kaiyuan, Manchurian in a well-to-do peasant family on 3 December 1895. At age of 17, Sheng enrolled at the Wusong Public School in Shanghai, where he studied political science and economy. There, he became friendly with students and teachers of "radical inclinations". He graduated in 1915. The same year, he enrolled at the Waseda University, Tokio. During that time, Sheng expressed nationalistic attitudes. In 1917 he was studying political economy at Meiji University in Tokyo, where he was exposed to the "ABC of Communism" (Chinese: 共产主义ABC) and other leftist publications. In 1919, Sheng returned to China to participate in the May Fourth Movement as a representative of the Liaoning students. During this period, he developed radical and anti-Japanese sentiments. By his own admission, Sheng became a Marxist the very same year and his political opponents claimed he became a communist during his second stay in Japan in 1920s. During that time, he realised the "futility of book learning", and decided to enter a military career. Accordingly, Sheng entered a military school in the Kwantung Leased Territory and later enrolled at the Northeastern Military Academy. He entered a military service under Guo Songling, Deputy of Zhang Zuolin, a Manchurian warlord. He rapidly rose to became Staff Officer with the rank of lieutenant colonel. In 1924 Guo sponsored his admission to the Imperial Japanese Army Academy for advanced military studies. In the mid 1920s, Sheng supported in a campaign against Zhang, briefly returning to the north east. Although he supported the anti-Zhang coup, he was able to return to Japan with the support of Feng Yuxiang and Chiang Kai-Shek, from whom he received financial help and considered him as his patron. Sheng returned from Japan in 1927 to participate in the Northern Expedition as a Staff Officer of the Chiang's field headquarters. He was a member of the Guominjun, a leftist nationalist faction that supported the Central government in China. However, Sheng didn't join the Kuomintang because of his belief in Marxism. After the Expedition was completed, he was made a chief of the war operations section of the general staff in Nanking, but resigned in 1929 over a disagreement with his superiors. After the apparent setback in his career, Sheng dedicated himself to the question of strengthening China's border defenses.

Not long after Sheng's resignation, a delegation from Xinjiang came to Nanking to ask for a financial aid. Governor of Xinjiang Jin Shuren asked one of the members of the delegation, Deputy General Secretary of Xinjiang Guang Lu, to find a competent officer to reorganise the provincial military. After discrete enquiries, Sheng was appointed to Jin's staff and arrived to Xinjiang via Soviet Union in winter 1929–30. Chiang Kai-Shek may have endorsed Sheng's decision to go to Xinjiang. Therefore, the appointment of Ma Zhongying, a Sheng's rival, as a commander of the 36th Division in Xinjiang embarrassed and frustrated Sheng. Sheng's welcome in Xinjiang was cold. Jin considered him a potential threat. Despite the doubts, Jin appointed him Chief of Staff of the Frontier Army and subsequently named him Chief Instructor at the Provincial Military College.

In summer of 1932, the fighting between Ma and Jin had significantly intensified. Ma's Hui (Mohammedan Chinese) forces were able to break the defence lines at Hami and enter Xinjiang through the Hexi Corridor. In December 1932, Ma's forces of started the siege of Ürümqi, but the White Russians and Sheng's troops successfully defended the city. In March 1933, the Manchurian Salvation Army, part of the National Revolutionary Army (NRA), came to their aid through the Soviet territory. During these events, Jin's prestige declined and correspondingly Sheng became increasingly popular. The culmination was the coup staged by the White Russians and a group of the provincial bureaucrats led by Chen Zhong, Tao Mingyue and Li Xiaotian on 12 April 1933, who overthrew Jin, who escaped to China proper via Siberia. Sheng, who was marshaling the provincial forces in eastern Xinjiang, returned to Ürümqi to seize power in the midst of the chaos. Without conferring the Central government, the coup leaders appointed Sheng the Commissioner of the Xinjiang Border Defence, i. e., Military Governor or duban on 14 April 1933, resurrecting the old title. Lui Wenlong, a powerless provincial bureaucrat was installed the Civil Governor.

However, Sheng's appointment as duban did not mean that his position was secured. Installment of Wenlong as governor meant that the bureaucrats had upper hand over Sheng, whom they considered their protege. His position was also challenged by Ma, as well as Zhang Peiyuan, Jin's old ally and a commander of the Yining region. The Central government, having learned that Zhang refused to cooperate with the new regime in Xinjiang, and that the Ma's forces represented the gravest threat to the new regime, tried to take the advantage of the situation and take the control over the province. Without clearly stating whether it recognises the changes in Xinjiang, the government appointed Huang Musong, then a Deputy Chief of General Staff, a "pacification commissioner" in May 1933. He arrived in Ürümqi on 10 June. The appointment of Huang as a pacification commissioner further strained the relations between Shang and the Central government. Sheng expected that the Central government would recognise him as duban, and that Huang's visit would affect that decision. Huang was ignorant of the frontier problems and his arrogant behavior offended some of the provincial leaders. The rumors spread that Huang was already named a new governor or that Chiang decided to split Xinjiang into several smaller provinces. However, the true Huang's task was to secure the cooperation between the coup leaders and establish a new provincial mechanism with pro-Nanking stance. Sheng exploited the rumors, and charged that Huang, an agent of Wang Jingwei had plotted with Liu, Zhang and Ma to overthrow the provincial government. On 26 June Huang was placed under house arrest, and the three coup leaders were also arrested and immediately executed. After the Central government apologised and promised Sheng the recognition of his position, Huang was allowed to return to Nanking three weeks after the arrest.

Shortly afterwards, in August Chiang sent Foreign Minister Luo Wengan, as a sign of good will, to preside over Sheng's inauguration ceremony as a Commissioner of the Xinjiang Border Defence. However, at the same time, the Central government used Luo's visit to contact the two of Sheng's rivals, Ma in Turpan and Zhang in Yining. They were encouraged to launch an attack against Sheng. As soon as Luo left the province, the war broke out between Sheng on one side, and Ma and Zhang on the other. Sheng accused Luo not only for plotting, but also for an assassination attempt. Luo's left Xinjiang in early October, and his departure marked the beginning of the era of deep alienation between Sheng and the Central government. In September 1933, Sheng accused Civil Governor Lui Wenlong of plotting with Ma and Zhang through Luo with Nanking in order to overthrow him. He was forced to resign and was replaced by Zhu Ruichi, a more controllable official. Sheng created a new bureaucratic hierarchy, nepotistically appointing new officials and replacing the one of his predecessors. Confronted by Ma's army outside of Ürümqi, Sheng sent a delegation to the Soviet Central Asia to request assistance. Sheng later claimed that the delegation was sent under the aegis of Jin's request for military equipment. However, Sheng made a more comprehensive deal with the Soviets. His delegation returned in December 1933, together with Garegin Apresov, who will be later appointed as the Soviet General Consul in Ürümqi. The Soviets provided substantive military assistance to Sheng, who in return gave the Soviets wide political, economic and military control over Xinjiang.

Ma sieged Ürümqi for the second time in January 1934. This time, the Soviets assisted Sheng with air support and two brigades of the Joint State Political Directorate. With their aid, Sheng again defeated Ma's forces, who retreated south from Tien Shan, in a region controlled by the East Turkestan Republic (ETR). The same month, Ma's forces arrived in Kashgar, extinguishing the ETR. Hija-Niyaz, president of the ETR escaped upon the arrival of Ma's troops to the Xinjiang-Soviet border, and in town Irkeshtam signed an agreement that abolished the East Turkest Republic and supported Sheng's regime. In early 1934, Zhu Ruichi died and was replaced by Li Rong as Civil Governor. In January, the Central government approved Huang Shaohong's plan for military operation in Xinjiang, in order to put the province under its effective control. Huang had in mind to act pragmatically, offering support either to Sheng or Ma, whoever was willing to cooperate with the Central government. The pretext for the operation was development of Xinjiang and adjacent provinces. For that purpose, the Xinjiang Construction Planning Office was established in Xinjiang with Huang in charge. With enthusiasm from Minister of Finance H. H. Kung, Huang purchased foreign-manufactured armored vehicles. By April, the preparations reached their final stage. However, the whole plan came to a halt in May because the Soviets have already entered Xinjiang and assisted Sheng against Ma.

Under pressure from Sheng's strengthened military forces, Ma's troops retreated from Kashgar in June-July 1934 to the southeast towards Hotan and Yarkand, where they remained until 1937. Ma himself retreated via Irkeshtam to the Soviet Central Asia, accompanied by several officers and a Soviet official. By this move, the Soviets intended to achieve dual benefit. First, by removing Ma from the Xinjiang's political arena, they wanted to increase Sheng's rule, which would give them higher control over the province; and second, they intended to use Ma as a leverage against Sheng in case he did not comply with their interests in the province. The armistice between the Hui forces and the Xinjiang government was agreed upon in September 1934. Zhang, after suffering defeat, committed suicide. Following the withdrawal of the Hui forces to Hotan in July 1934, Ma Hushan consolidated his power over the remote oases of the Tarim Basin, thus establishing a Hui satrapy, where Hui Muslims ruled as colonial masters over their Turkic Muslim subjects. The region was named Tunganistan by Walther Heissig. Tunganistan was bordering on two, eventually three sides with Xinjiang province, and on the fourth side it bordered with the Tibetan Plateu.

On anniversary of the April 12 coup in 1934, the Xinjiang provincial government published an administrative plan called the "Great Eight-Point Manfiesto" or "Eight Great Proclamations". These included: establishment of racial equality, guaranty of religious freedom, equitable distribution of agricultural and rural relief, reform of government finance, the cleaning up of government administration, the expansion of education, the promotion of self-government and the improvement of the judiciary. The program was practicable since each point represented a grievance that one nationality had against the previous government, which enabled Sheng to enact the reforms. The first two points which dealt with "the realisation of equality for all nationalities" and "the protection of the rights of believers" advanced the national and religious rights of the Xinjiang nationalities. Sheng sent a letter to Joseph Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov and Kliment Voroshilov in June 1934. In the letter, Sheng expressed his belief in victory of Communism and referred to himself as "convinced supporter of Communism". He called for the "fastest possible implementation of Communism in Xinjiang". Sheng also not only denounced the Central Government, but expressed his aim in overthrowing it, suggesting support for the Chinese Soviet Republic and joint offensive against the Central government. Sheng also expressed his wish to join the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In a letter sent to the Soviet General Consul Garegin Apresov in Ürümqi, Stalin commented that the Sheng's letter made a "depressing impression on our comrades". The content of Sheng's letter led Stalin to refer him as "a provocateur or an hopeless "leftist" having no idea about Marxism". In a reply to Sheng, Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov refused all of his proposals. In August 1934, Sheng affirmed that the nine duties of his government are to eradicate corruption, to develop economy and culture, to maintain peace by avoiding war, to mobilise all manpower for the cultivation of land, to improve communication facilities, to keep Xinjiang permanently a Chinese province, to fight against imperialism and Fascism and to sustain a close relationship with Soviet Russia, to reconstruct a "New Xinjiang", and to protect the positions and privileges of religious leaders.

The dependency of the Sheng regime on the Soviet Union was further highlighted with the publication of the "Six Great Policies" in December 1934. The Policies guaranteed his previously enacted "Great Eight-Point Manifesto" and included "anti-imperialism, friendship with the Soviet Union, racial and national equality, clean government, peace and reconstruction". Sheng referred to them as "a skillful, vital application of Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism in the conditions of the feudal society of economically and culturally backward Xinjiang". They served as the ideological basis of Sheng's rule. With proclamation of the Six Great Policies, Sheng adopted a new flag with a six-pointed star to represent these policies. In an agreement from 16 May 1935, ratified without consent from the Central government, the Soviet government provided substantial financial and material aid, including a five-year loan of five million "gold rubles" (Sheng actually received silver bullion). At about the same time, again without the consent from the Central government, Soviet geologists started a survey for Xinjiang's mineral resources. The result was Soviet oil drilling at Dushanbe. During Sheng's rule, Xinjiang's trade came under the Soviet control. The Soviet General Consul in Ürümqi was effectively in control of governing, with Sheng required to consult them for any decision he made. Alexander Barmine, the Soviet official responsible for supplying arms to Sheng, wrote that Xinjiang was "a Soviet colony in all but name".

On 1 August 1935, Sheng founded the People's Anti-Imperialist Association in Ürümqi. The propaganda of the League was the Anti-Imperialist War Front. The Xinjiang's Youth and the Xinjiang's Women served as the Association's youth and women's wing respectively. In 1935, the Association had 2,489 members, and in 1939, the Association's membership rose to 10,000. The membership was nationally diverse, and included Han, Hui and various Turkish peoples. The Soviet stranglehold around Xinjiang was further enhanced through a secret agreement signed on 1 January 1936. The agreement included Soviet guarantee to come to the aid of Xinjiang "politically, economically and by armed force... in case of some external attack upon the province". By mid 1936, significant number of Soviet specialists were active in Xinjiang involved in construction, education, health and military training. The Russian language replaced English as the foreign language taught in schools. A number of Muslim youths, including Muslim girls, were sent to the Soviet Central Asia for education. Sheng's government implemented atheistic propaganda, and Muslim women were encouraged to appear in public without a veil.

During the Xinjiang War (1937), Sheng launched his own purge in Xinjiang to coincide with Stalin's Great Purge. Sheng started the elimination of "traitors", "pan-Turkists", "enemies of the people", "nationalists" and "imperialist spies". His purges swept the entire Uyghur and Hui political elite. The NKVD provided the support during the purges. In the later stages of the purge, Sheng turned against the "Trotskyites", mostly a group of Han Chinese sent to him by Moscow. In the group were Soviet General Consul Garegin Apresov, General Ma Hushan, Ma Shaowu, Mahmud Sijan, the official leader of the Xinjiang province Huang Han-chang, and Hoja-Niyaz. Xinjiang came under virtual Soviet control. It is estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 people perished during the purge. In 1937, Sheng initiated a three-year plan for reconstruction, for which he received a Soviet loan of 15 million rubles. At Joseph Stalin's request, Sheng joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in August 1938 and received Party Card No.1859118 directly from Molotov during his secret visit to Moscow. However, Sheng didn't set up provincial branch of the CPSU in Xinjiang. Having eliminated many of his opponents, Sheng's administration found it self in staff shortage. For this reason, he turned to the Chinese Communists in Ya'an for help. In the circumstances of the united front against the Japanese, the Communists sent dozens of its cadres to Xinjiang. The Communists were mostly employed in high-level administrative, financial, educational and cultural ministerial posts in Urumqi, Kashgar, Khotan and elsewhere, helping to implement Sheng's policies. They also maintained the only open communication line between Ya'an and the Soviet Union. Among those sent by the Communist Party was Mao Zemin, a younger brother of Mao Zedong, who served as Deputy Finance Minister.

During Sheng's rule, the Han Chinese represented only a small minority in Xinjiang. F. Gilbert Chan claimed that they made only 6% of the population at the time, while Sheng himself during his visit in Moscow in 1938, told Kliment Voroshilov that the Han make around 10% (roughly 400,000 people) of the population of Xinjiang. In his relationship with the Xinjiang's non-Han populace, Sheng adopted the Soviet nationality policy. The non-Han nationalities were for the first time included in the provincial government. The first principle of his Declaration of Ten Guiding Principles stated that "all nationalities enjoy equal rights in politics, economy and education". He also reorganized Xinjiang Daily, the only regional newspaper at the time, to be issued in Mandarin, Uyghur and Kazakh language. The educational program encouraged the Han to learn Uyghur and Uyghurs to learn Mandarin. Sheng's nationality policy also entailed the establishment of the Turkic languages schools, the revival of madrassas (Islamic schools), publication of the Turkic languages newspapers and the formation of the Uyghur Progress Union. Sheng initiated the idea of 14 separate nationalities in Xinjiang, and these where Han Chinese, Uyghurs, Mongols, Kazakhs, Muslim or Dungan, Sibe, Solon, Manchu, Kyrgyz, White Russian, Taranchi, Tajiks and Uzbeks. To foster this idea, he encouraged the establishment of cultural societies for each nationality. The description of Xinjiang as a home of 14 nationalities, both in Xinjiang, as well as in proper China, brought Sheng popularity among some. However, Sheng's policy was criticized by the Pan-Turkic Jadidists and East Turkestan Independence acticist Muhammad Amin Bughra and Masud Sabri, who rejected the Sheng's imposition of the name "Uyghur people" upon the Turkic people of Xinjiang. They wanted instead the name "Turkic nationality" (Tujue zu in Chinese) to be applied to their people. Sabri also viewed the Hui people as Muslim Han Chinese and separate from his own people. Bughra accused Sheng for trying to sow disunion among the Turkic peoples. However, Sheng argued that such separation was necessary in order to guarantee success of the future union. Another agenda from the Soviet Union Sheng implemented in Xinjiang was secularization with purpose of undermining the religious influence. Moreover, many Uyghurs and non-Han people were sent for education abroad, most notably in Tashkent, Uzbek SSR to the Central Asia University or Central Asia Military Academy. With their return, these students would find employment as teachers or within the Xinjiang administration.

Between 1934 and 1941, there were no significant relations between the Sheng's government and the Central Government. However, with the German Empire and the Axis Central Powers and the Soviet Union preparing for war in Europe, Sheng saw an opportunity to strike down Soviet proxies, the Chinese Communists and to mend his relationship with the Central government now seated in Chongqing. Sheng had long prepared to purge the Chinese communists in Xinjiang. In 1939, his agents filled reports on clandestine meetings, the constant exchange of letters, and the unauthorized content of some of their propaganda. A month after the German invasion, in July 1941, the communist cadre had been demoted or cashiered. Chen Tanqui, the chief liaison of the Communist Party of China (CCP) reported in Yan'an that his relations with Sheng became "extremely cold". In the same month, the first sign of a thaw in the relationship between Xinjiang and the Central government occurred, a month after the German invasion, when Sheng allowed the Chinese diplomat in Moscow to visit Xinjiang for an official tour. Fearing that he might switch sides, the Soviets tried to overthrow him. The coup started with murder of his younger brother, a brigade commander Sheng Shiqi. He was murdered by his wife, convinced to do so by the Soviet agents. After his brother's death, Sheng continued crackdown on the Chinese communists. On 1 July 1942 he ordered their relocation in the Ürümqi outskirts for "protection".

In 1941, a major delegation of the Central government's officials arrived to Ürümqui upon Sheng's invitation. Chiang Kai-Sheck designated Zhu Shaoloang as a leader of the mission. The mission was initiated by Sheng's younger brother Sheng Shiji few months earlier. The reaction of the Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov followed soon after, as he presented Chiang the Sheng's ideas about the implementation of Communism in Xinjiang, his support for Chiang's arrest in Xi'an Incident and the offer to make Xinjiang a Soviet republic. However, the Central government disregarded Molotov's presentation. On 9 July, Chiang informed the Soviet ambassador that the Soviet authorities "must now deal with the central government of China" and are not permitted to "discuss anything with Sheng duban [i. e. military governor]". Chiang designated Zhu Shaoliang as a contact person for the Soviets. The later publication of Sheng's correspondence with the Soviet authorities, allowed the Central government to set up a special office in Ürümqi, from where they handled Xinjiang's foreign affairs, and to set up the Kuomintang roots throughout the province, replacing the People's Anti-Imperialist Association, which he disbanded in soon after Sheng was appointed head of the provincial Kuomintang. Both dubanship and civil governorship remained in Sheng's hands. The National Revolutionary Army troops weren't allowed to enter Xinjiang.

As Wu Shaoliang shuttled between Ürümqi and Chongqing, Sheng requested a permanent liaison to be appointed to handle his foreign affairs. The Central government appointed Wu Zexiang Minister of Foreign Affairs of Xinjiang. Ministerial position for a domestic post was unusual, but approved by Chiang due to "special conditions and circumstances" in Xinjiang. Minister Wu's post was of consultative nature, and the Central government acted as an arbiter in the case of a dispute between him and the provincial authorities. Sheng demanded that Wu assumes more responsibility in dealings with the Soviets. The final months of 1941 saw the most turbulent period in the Xinjiang-Soviet relations. In October 1941 Sheng demanded from the Soviet General Consul that all Soviet technical and military personnel be withdrawn from Xinjiang within three monthsl knowign that the Soviets were tied down in Europe with their struggle against the Axis Central Powers. To the Soviets, who were engaged in preparing for a greater fight against the Axis Central Powers and desperate to use as little troops as possible in Central and East Asia, this demand represented numerous logistical difficulties. On 3 November 1941 Sheng issued a directive prohibiting "organizations, groups, and private persons" to engage in "any trade activity involving foreign imports and exports." The aim of the directive was to end the Soviet trade monopoly in Xinjiang.

At the same time of the 1941 ultimatum, Sheng realized that the Kuomintang under Chiang was in a problematic situation when the Xikang Army, the Sichuan Clique and the Hunan Clique all rebelled against his Central Government. Immediately Sheng started to reach out to the Kuomintang under Wang Jing-Wei, in hopes to replace Chiang should things continue to go bad for Chiang. Because of his own fight to get rid of the Chinese Communists and their advance against the Ma Clique as well as growing control inside the Central Government, Shiang was no friend of the United Front and they did not like him as well anymore. This lead to Sheng reaching out for the Wang Kuomintang and the Co-Prosperity Sphere as potential allies too. At the same time he allies himself with the Guominjun (Kuominchun) Army, the the Northwest KMC Army and rebelled against the last Soviet Occupation and Communist Chinese Dominance of the western Chinese province of Xinjiang. The forced the Soviets to withdrew their military and civilian personnel before the planned day in March 1942. Knowing that his ultimatum had worked for now Sheng's hoped that Wang's Central government would help him as the Soviets and the United Front protested harshly that he and the Guominjun (Kuominchun) Army declared a independent Xinjiang State (also called the Guominjun or Kuominchun Clique) as it's own power in the Chinese Northwest.

 

[CountofDooku]

Chapter 69: Argentine Nacionalismo:

What was later known as the Infamous Decade in Argentina began on September 6, 1930 with the military coup led by the corporatist, catholic-nationalist General Jose Felix Uriburu. Uriburu overthrew President Hipólito Yrigoyen, a member of the Radical Civic Union party, who had been democratically elected in 1928 to serve his second term. On September 10, 1930, Uriburu was recognized as de facto president of the nation by the Supreme Court. This court order laid the foundation for the doctrine of de facto governments and would be used to legitimize all other military coups. The de facto government of Uriburu outlawed the Radical Civic Union.

The local elections of Buenos Aires on April 5, 1931, had an unexpected result for the government. The radical candidate, Honorio Pueyrredón, won the election despite the national party's confidence of their own victory and despite the radical party's lack of leadership. Although the radical party still lacked a few votes in the electoral college and the national party could still negotiate with the socialists to prevent the radicals from winning the governorship, the government began to panic. Uriburu reorganized the cabinet and appointed ministers from the “liberal” sector. He cancelled the local government elections for the provinces of Cordova and Santa Fe. On May 8, 1931 he cancelled the appeal to the provincial electoral college, and on May 12, he named Manuel Ramón Alvarado as de facto governor of Buenos Aires. A few weeks later, a revolt led by Lieutenant Colonel Gregorio Pomar, broke out in the province of Corrientes. Although the revolt was rapidly brought under control, it gave Uriburu the excuse he was looking for. He closed all the premises of the Radical Civic Union, arrested dozens of its leaders, and prohibited the electoral colleges from electing politicians that were directly or indirectly related with Yrigoyen. Because Pueyrredón had been a minister of Yrigoyen, this meant that he could not be elected. However, Uriburu also exiled Pueyrredón from the country with Alvear, a prominent leader of the radical party. In September he called for elections in November and shortly after, he annulled the elections in Buenos Aires. After the failure of the corporatist effort, Argentina was governed by the Concordancia, a political alliance formed between the conservative National Democratic Party, the Antipersonalist Radical Civic Union, and the Independent Socialist Party. The Concordancia governed Argentina during the for the next Decade. This period was characterized by the beginning of a new economic model known as Import substitution industrialization. At the time when the second world war began, Great Britain had a pervading economic influence in Argentina. On the other hand, the United States had obtained a hegemonic presence throughout the entire continent and was preparing to permanently replace Great Britain as a hegemonic power in Argentina.

Argentina had a long tradition of neutrality regarding European wars, which had been sustained and defended by every political party since the 19th century. The reasons for Argentinian neutrality are complex, but one of the most important is connected with its position of food supplier to Britain and to Europe in general. In both the first as well as the second world war, Great Britain needed to guarantee the provision of food (grain and meat) for its population and its troops, and this would have been impossible if Argentina had not maintained neutrality, since the cargo ships would have been the first to be attacked, thus interrupting the supply. At the same time, Argentina had traditionally maintained a skeptical stance toward the hegemonic vision of Pan-Americanism that had driven the United States since the 19th century. In December 1939 the Argentine government consulted with Britain on the possibility of abandoning neutrality and joining the Allies. The British government flatly rejected the proposition, reiterating the principle that the main contribution of Argentina was its supplies and in order to guarantee them it was necessary to maintain neutrality. At that time the United States also held a neutral position strengthened by the Neutrality Acts and its traditional Isolationism, although that would change radically when Japan attacked its military bases in the Pacific. During this time, the Argentine population divided into three groups: “pro-allies" ("aliadófilos"), “pro-neutral" ("neutralistas") and “pro-Germans/pro-Axis Central Powers” (germanófilos"). The first group was in favor of Argentina entering the war on the side of the allies, while the latter argued that the country should remain neutral. The third group argued that Argentinia should becoem the Hegemon of South America instead of Great Britain, the USA or even Brazil.

They were backed by the Axis Central Powers and the Nacionalismo. A far-right Argentine nationalist movement that around 1910 grew out of the "traditionalist" position, which was based on nostalgia for feudal economic relations and a more "organic" social order. It became a significant force in Argentine politics beginning in the 1930s. Nacionalismo was typically centered upon support of order, hierarchy, corporatism, militant Catholicism, support of the landed estates, combined with the hatred of liberalism, leftism, Freemasonry, feminism, Jews and foreigners in general. It denounced liberalism and democracy as the prelude to communism. Nacionalismo was strongly influenced by Maurrassism and Spanish clericalism as well as by Italian Fascism and Nazism. After the 1930 Argentine coup d'etat, Nacionalistas firmly supported the entrenchment of an authoritarian corporatist state led by a military leader. Nacionalistas often refused to take part in elections because of their opposition to elections as derivative of liberalism. Its advocates were writers, journalists, a few politicians and many colonels and other junior military officers; the latter supported the Nationalists largely because, for most of their existence, they saw in the military the only potential political savior of the country. The German Empire and the Nationalist Kingdom of Spain both tried to influence Argentina to join the Axis Central Powers and weaken Great Britain further, promising them the Falkland Islands and even South American Hegemony on the long run.

 

[CountofDooku]

Chapter 70: The Gobi Desert Conflict:

Meizhou Hua qiao ri bao/ China Daily News:

The so called Gobi Desert Conflict, or Gobi Desert War escalated over some nomadic mongol tribal clans that were constantly crossing of the Mengjiang-Mongol boarder. As mostly nomadic people the inhabitants of Mengjiang and Mongolia did mostly not live in urban settlements but camps and tent cities with changing locations. Therefore this nomadic farmers did not bother much about some border somewhere along the Gobi Desert and were quiet outraged when Mengjiang and Mongolia both tried to tax them and control their movements. The constant crossing of the border by the nomads was seen as problematic by both governments, as enemy spies and scouts could easily infiltrate this caravans and use them to cover their trace. Another matter was the taxes both governments tried to get from these nomadic tribes and the fact that the mongol nomads were not very pleased to pay two tributes at once. Some of them started to raid small towns and farms along the border region because of that and this incidents led to a fuhrer militarization and escalation of the problematic situation.

Demchugdongrub Khan, the leader of the growing Mengjiang Khanate used this incidents and border skirmishes to justify the so called Gobi Desert Campaign. The Khan proclaimed it as a part of the Khalkha Campaign (War of Reunification) to unite all Mengjiang (Mongols) under his banner. With the Soviet Union distracted in Europe the time seamed right for Mengjiang to strike against Mongolia, so a campaign was started at the southern Mongolian border across the Gobi Desert. Mengjiang (and Manchukuo) just before had taken parts of the Mongol People's Republic Aimags (Provinces), of Dornod and Sükhbaatar and now invaded the Aimages of Dornogovi and Ömnögovi, to occupy and control this regions.

At first it looked like the Mengjiang cavalry brigades and divisions of the 1st and 2nd Mengjiang Army could secure and take huge parts of the region, supported by their own air force and the Japanese air force as scouts and spotters. Demchugdongrub Khan already thought that a quick victory was close with most Soviet Forces out of Mongolia and in Europe at this time in fear of the coming war with the Axis Central Powers. But the harsh cold desert climate, with it's dunes, hills and mountains quickly proved difficult for the Mengjiang forces. Their armies lacked serious number sof modern transportation and the few they had malfunctioned because of sand, the lack of roads and other terrain problems. Their cavalry, the pride of Demchugdongrub Khan Khanate had similar problems, because in the southern Gobi Desert there were few oasis and the Mongol People's Republic quickly adapted a strategy where these few oasis were either dried out, buried in sand or even poisoned to stop the enemy advance.

The Mongolian People's Army quickly gathered troops from the eastern border to Mengjiang and Manchukuo and the Soviet Foreign Comissar in Ulaanbaatar declared that "the Soviet Union shall defend the frontiers of the Mongolian People's Republic just as resolutely as our own border."
While the Mongolian People's Republic had before signed agreements and even trade deals with the Co-Prosperity Sphere members of Manchukuo and Mengjiang and even be a signer of the Soviet-Co-Prosperity Sphere Neutrality Pact earlier, the state was outraged that one of the members of the Co-Prosperity Sphere ignored Mongolia's neutrality while Mongolia had respected theirs. Japan knew that this major border clash could easily escalate and denied any knowledge about any plans to invade Mongolia. They even referred to the whole Gobi Desert Conflict, or Gobi Desert War as the Gobi Desert or Mongolian Incident to downplay the growing conflict. Because the Mongolian People's Republic had kept around 10% of the population under arms, and the Soviet Military provided aid in exchange for Mongolian supply of raw materials to the Soviet military, the Mongolian People's Army was better trained and equipped as Demchugdongrub Khan had believed.

Quickly after the initial Mengjiang conquests of farms, towns, camps and tent cities in southern Mongolia across the Gobi Desert, the Mongolian 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th Mongolian Cavalry Divisions, the 7th Motorized Armored Brigade, the Armored Car Brigade, the 3rd Artillery Regiment and the Revolutionary Mongolian Tank Brigade (124th Tank Regiment (1st, 2nd, 3rd Tank Battalions, each with 32 T-26 tanks); 125th Tank Regiment (1st, 2nd, 3rd Tank Battalions, each with 32 T-26 tanks); 112th Motorized Regiment (1st, 2nd, 3rd Battalions);112th Motorized Howitzer Regiment (1st and 2nd Battalions); 112th Sapper Battalion and the 12th Antitank Battalion counter-attacked the 1st and 2nd Mengjiang Army.

Mengjiang and it's supporting Japanese officers and advisers quickly realized that the Mongolian People's Army had more armored cars, better tanks and even much more horses then them. The combined Soviet-Mongolian Mechanized Group then sealed the fate of the advance of the 1st and 2nd Mengjiang Army, dealing heavy causalities in men and material to them, despite the Mengjiang air superiority in fighters (60), bombers (20) and scout planes (40). The Mengjiang push into Mongolia's Gobi Desert region was quickly stopped after two months and nine days of fighting when the Soviet Union and Japan negotiated to stop both sides from fighting so that the conflict would not escalate any further. In this time the Mengjiang 1st and 2nd Army had managed to occupy parts of the Mongol People's Republic Aimags (Provinces), of Dornogovi (the Sums/ Districts of Delgerekh, Örgön, Erdene, Zamyn-Üüd, Ulaanbadrakh, Khövsgöl, Khatanbukag as well as parts of the Sums Altanshiree, Sainshand, Saikhandulaan and Mandakh) and Aimages (the Sums of Khanbogd, Bayan-Ovoo, Nomgon, Khürmen, Bayandalai, Noyon, Gurvantes as wel as parts of Manlai, Tsogttsetsii, Khankhongor and Sevrei). This holds and the establishing of Mengjiang outposts and military camps and airbases in the region enraged the Mongol's People's Republic, but Soviet Leader Joseph Stalin warned and ordered the Mongols not to further escalate the Situation by going to war over some useless desert with some nomadic tribes and no natural resources in it. While Stalin by now has had enough with the provocations of Japan and it's Co-Prosperity Sphere puppets of Mongolia and Mengjiang he couldn't effort to escalate the situation right now, when the conflict with the Axis Central Powers in Europe over Finland, the Baltic States, Poland, Romania and Turkei seamed to escalate into a full war anytime soon. Because of that, the last thing Stalin wanted right now seamed to be another conflict in the east over some desert dunes and barbaric nomads and caravans.

Demchugdongrub Khan, the leader of the growing Mengjiang Khanate meanwhile held a huge victory parade in his capital Kalgan and declared proud that the Khalkha Campaign (War of Reunification) was one victorious step closer to it's end. In reality the campaign showed the lack of the Mengjiang Army in modern equipment, weapons and transportation and proved that they desperately needed modern rifles, semi-automatic guns, machine guns, trucks and tanks from Japan and the other members of the Co-Prosperity Sphere as soon as possible. Mengjiang had gained nothing important during the Gobi Desert War, no significant ressources, population of even strategic or tactical regions of any kind. Instead the conflict had once again exhausted the critical Soviet-Co-Prosperity Sphere/ Japanese realations nearly to the brink of war. Beside the general military modernisation, the Khan himself ordered that new roads, supply depots, military bases, air bases and outposts were build all across the Mengjiang Khanate, to prevent that his army would perform soo poorly again in the future.

(Mengjiang Khanate gains in the Gobi Desert during the Gobi Desert Conflict)

 

[CountofDooku]

Chapter 71: The 1941 Iraqi coup d'état:

The 1941 Iraqi coup d'état (Arabic: ثورة رشيد عالي الكيلاني), also called the Rashid Ali Al-Gaylani coup or the Golden Square coup, was a nationalist and pro-German Coup d'état in Iraq on 1 April 1941 that overthrew the pro-British regime of Regent Abd al-Ilah and his Prime Minister Nuri al-Said and installed Rashid Ali al-Gaylani as Prime Minister. The coup was led by four Iraqi nationalist army generals, known as "the Golden Square", who intended to use the war to press for full Iraqi independence following the limited independence granted in 1932. To that end, they worked with German intelligence and accepted military assistance from Germany and Italy. The change in government led to a British invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation. From 1939 to 1941 a pro-British government headed by the Regent Abd al-Ilah and Prime Monister Nuri as-Said ruled Iraq. Iraq severed relations with Germany on 5 September 1939, following the outbreak of Second Great War in Europe. However, Nuri had to tread carefully between his close relationship with Britain and dependence on pro-German Army officers and cabinet members. By that time, Iraq became a refuge to Arab leaders who fled Mandatory Palestine as a result of the failed Palestine Arab revolt against the British. Among the key figures to arrive was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian Arab nationalist leader of the failed revolt.

The Golden Square coup was launched on 1 April 1941, overthrowing the Regent and installing Rashid Ali al-Gaylani as Prime Minister. Haj Amin al-Husseini was one of the orchestrators of Rashid Ali's coup d'état, with German support and funding. On 18 April, Britain reacted by landing the Indian 20th Infantry Brigade at Basra, the first elements of Iraqforce. Britain claimed it was entitled to do this under its defense treaty with Iraq. This treaty was essentially dictated by the British without negotiation or agreement before independence was granted to Iraq. It gave Britain unlimited rights to station and transit troops through Iraq without consulting the Iraqi government. In the following days, the new Iraqi government moved substantial ground forces, including an infantry brigade, an artillery brigade, and 12 armored cars as well as tanks to the plateau overlooking RAF Habbaniya, the large British Royal Air Force (RAF) base beside the River Euphrates 50 miles (80 km) west of Bagdad. Upon arrival, the Iraqis demanded that the British not move any troops nor aircraft in or out of the base. The British responded by first demanding that the Iraqis leave the area and then, following the expiry of an ultimatum given in the early hours of 2 May, launched an attack. The base had a force of 96 lightly-armed aircraft, most of which were either purpose-built trainers or obsolete combat aircraft converted to training use. They also had an understrength battalion from the King's Own Royal Regiment (Lancester), six companies of Assyrian Levies (troops raised by the British), 18 armored cars and a company of RAF personnel, giving a total strength of 2,200 troops to defend the base. The Royal Iraqi Air Force, despite having aircraft that included numerous modern British-, Italian- and US-built machines, failed to defeat the RAF. By the second day of fighting (3 May), four Blenheim fighter bombers arrived. With British forces having air superiority, the Iraqi army was forced back to Fallujah and the RAF attacked the Iraqi Air Force bases at Mosul and Rashid. Habbaniya had essentially lifted the siege with its own resources. Reinforcements, officially called "Iraqforce", came from two directions. British and Arab Legion forces arrived in two columns (Habforce and Kingcol) across the desert from Palestine and Transjordan. Additional Indian forces continued to arrive in Basra. The Iraqi army was driven out of Fallujah and pursued to Baghdad, which fell within a week. This cleared the way for the nominal restoration of the Regent and the pro-British government. British military occupation of Iraq continued until late 1947.

In the course of the Iraq war, minor reinforcements for the nationalists were received from first Germany and Italy and then partly from the Neo-Ottoman Empire. Arriving aircraft were crudely painted with Iraqi colours. Small numbers of Imperial German Air Force bombers and heavy fighters, followed a few days later by obsolescent Regia Aeronautica (Italian air force) biplane fighters, flew sorties from Mosul against both RAF Habbaniya and the relieving Empire forces moving across from Transjordan. This was done to little effect.

The Iraqi Golden Square coup d'etat failed despite the help they got over Syria and Lebanon occupied by the Neo-Ottoman Empire. Most of this help was Axis Central Powers air forces and the general coup failed, because the Neo-Ottoman Army did not directly support the Iraqi Arab rebels, because they wanted to conquer the region back for themselves, instead of allying with a Arab nationalist movement like the one that helped the British against them during the First Great War. Instead the Ottomans used the treat of the Turkish Soviet Republic to deny any direct support with their army across the Syrian border. The Neo-Ottomans hoped that the Iraqi coup would lead to the British to spread their forces thin south of their, so that their assault against Iraq and Palestine later on would be easier. It was also true that parts of the Neo-Ottoman army were afraid the Soviets could use a attack against the British in the south to strike into Anatolia, so they hoped to defeat the Turkish Soviet Republic before a push south, so that their Caucasus border would be secure until the Germans and they would together strike against the Soviet Union.

 

[CountofDooku]

Chapter 72: The East African Campaign:

The East African Campaign (also known as the Abyssinian Campaign) was fought in East Africa during the Second Great War by Allied forces, mainly from the British Empire, against Axis Central Power forces, primarily from Italy of Italian East AFrica (Africa Orientale Italiana, or AOI), between June 1940 and November 1941. Forces of the British Middle East Command, including units from the United Kingdom and the colonies of British East Africa, British Somalialand, Northern Rhodesia, Mandatory Palestine, South Rhodesia and Sudan participated in the campaign, while many more forces of British West Africa, South Africa and the Colonies were tied down in the Iraq rebellion and the war against the Axis Central Powers in North, West and Central africa. Ethopian irregulars, the Free French and even Belgian troops of the Force Publique also participated. The AOI was defended by Italian forces of the Comando Forze Armate dell'Africa Orientale Italiana (Italian East African Armed Forces Command), with units from the Regio Esercito (Italian army), Regia Aeronautica (air force) and Regia Marina (navy), about 200,000 Regio Corpo Truppe Coloniali from Italian-occupied Abyssinia (Ethiopia), Italia Eritriea and Italian Somaliland, led by Italian officers and NCOs, 70,000 Italian regulars and reservists. The Compagnia Autocarrata Tedesca (German Motorised Company) as well as some Sudanese and Kenyan natives and Axis Central Power supporters fought under Italian command.

Hostilities began on 13 June 1940, with an Italian air raid on the base of 1 Squadron Southern Rhodesian Air Force (237 (Rhodesia) Squadron RAF) at Wajir in the East African Protectorate (Kenya) and continued until Italian forces had been pushed back from Kenya and Sudan, through Somaliland Eritrea and Ethiopia in 1940 and early-1941. The remnants of the Italian forces in the AOI surrendered after the Battle of Gondar in November 1941, except for groups that fought the Italian guerillia war in Ethiopia against the British. The East African Campaign was the first Allied strategic victory in the war but was overshadowed by the British defeats in Greece, Crete and North Africa at the same time.

On 9 May 1936, Italian dictator Benito Missolini proclaimed the formation of Italian East Africa (Africa Orientale Italiana, AOI), formed from Ethiopia after the Second Italo-Abyssinian War with the colonies of Italian Eritriea and Italian Somaliland. On 10 June 1940, Mussolini declared war on Britain and France, which made Italian military forces in Libya a threat to Egypt and those in the AOI a danger to the British and French colonies in East Africa. Italian belligerence also closed the Mediterranean to Allied merchant ships and endangered British supply routes along the coast of East Africa, the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. (The Kingdom of Egypt remained neutral during the Second Great War for now, but the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 allowed the British to occupy Egypt and Anglo-Egyptian Sudan) Egypt, the Suez Canal, French Somaliland and British Somaliland were also vulnerable to invasion but Comando Supremo (Italian General Staff) had planned for a war after 1942. In the summer of 1940 Italy was far from ready for a long war or for the occupation of large areas of Africa.

Amedeo, Duke of Aosta, was appointed Viceroy and Governor-General of the AOI in November 1937, with a headquarters in Addis Ababa, the former Ethiopian capital. On 1 June 1940, as the commander in chief of Comando Forze Armate dell'Africa Orientale Italiana (Italian East African Armed Forces Command) and Generale d'Armata Aerea (General of the Air Force), Aosta had about 290,476 local and metropolitan troops (including naval and air force personnel). By 1 August, mobilisation had increased the number to 371,053 troops. On 10 June, the Italian army was organised in four commands:

• Northern Sector, vicinity of Asmara
  • Eritrea, Lieutenant-General Luigi Frusci
• Southern Sector, around Jimma
  • Ethiopia, General Piezro Gazzera
• Eastern Sector, General Guglielmo Nasi (borders of French and British Somaliland)
• Giuba Sector, Lieutenant-General Carlo De Simone, southern Somalia near Kismayo, Italian Somaliland

Aosta had two metropolitan divisions, the 4oth Infantry Division Cacciatori d'Africa and the 65th Infantry Division Grenatieri di Savoia, a battalion of Alpini (elite mountain troops), a Bersaglieri battalion of motorised infantry, several "Blackshirt" Milizia Coloniale battalions and smaller units. About 70 percent of Italian troops were locally recruited Askari. The regular Eritrean battalions and the Regio Corpo Truppe Coloniali (RCTC Royal Corps of Somalia Colonial Troops) were among the best Italian units in the AOI and included Eritrean cavalry Penne di Falco (Falcon Feathers). (On one occasion a squadron of horse charged British and Commonwealth troops, throwing small hand grenades from the saddle.) Most colonial troops were recruited, trained and equipped for colonial repression, although the Somali Dubats from the borderlands were useful light infantry and skirmishers. Irregular bandes were hardy and mobile, knew the country and were effective scouts and saboteurs, although sometimes confused with Shifta, undisciplined marauders who plundered and murdered at will. Once Italy entered the war, a 100-strong company formed out of German residents of East African and German sailors unable to leave East African ports. Italian forces in East Africa were equipped with about 3,313 heavy machine-guns, 5,313 machine-guns, 24 M11/39 medium tanks, 39 L3/35 tankettes, 126 armoured cars and 824 guns, twenty-four 20 mm anti-aircraft guns, seventy-one 81 mm mortars and 672,800 rifles. Due to the isolation of the AOI from the Mediterranean, the Italians had very little opportunity for reinforcements or supply, leading to severe shortages, especially of ammunition. On occasion, foreign merchant vessels captured by German merchant raiders in the Indian Ocean were brought to Somali ports but their cargoes were not always of much use to the Italian war effort. (For example, the Yugoslav steamer Durmitor, captured by the German auxiliary cruiser Atlantic, came to Warsheikh on 22 November 1940, with a cargo of salt and several hundred prisoners.)

The Comando Aeronautica Africa Orientale Italiana (CAAOI) of the Regia Aeronautica (General Pietro Pinna) based in Addis Ababa, had three sector commands corresponding to the land fronts,

• Comando Settore Aeronautico Nord (Air Sector Headquarters North)
• Comando Settore Aeronautico Ouest (Air Sector Headquarters West)
• Comando Settore Aeronautico Sud (Air Sector Headquarters South)

In June 1940, there were 323 aircraft in the AOI, in 23 bomber squadrons with 138 aircraft, comprising 14 squadrons with six aircraft each, six Caproni Ca.133 light bomber squadrons, seven Savoia-Marchetti SM.81 squadrons and two squadrons of Savoia-Marchetti SM.79s. Four fighter squadrons had 36 aircraft, comprising two nine-aircraft Fiat CR.32 squadrons and two nine-aircraft Fiat CR.42 squadrons; CAAOI had one reconnaissance squadron with nine IMAM Ro.37 aircraft. There were 183 first line aircraft and another 140 in reserve, of which 59 were operational and 81 were unserviceable. On the outbreak of war, the CAAOI had 10,700 t (10,500 long tons) of aviation fuel, 5,300 t (5,200 long tons) of bombs and 8,620,000 rounds of ammunition. Aircraft and engine maintenance was conducted at the main air bases and at the Caproni and Piaggio workshops, which could repair about fifteen seriously-damaged aircraft and engines each month, along with some moderately and lightly damaged aircraft and could also recycle scarce materials. The Italians had reserves for 75% of their front-line strength but lacked spare parts and many aircraft were cannibalised to keep others operational. The quality of the units varied. The SM.79 was the only modern bomber and the CR.32 fighter was obsolete but the Regia Aeronautica in East Africa had a cadre of highly experienced Spanish Civil War veterans. There was the nucleus of a transport fleet, with nine Savoia-Marchetti S.73, nine Ca.133, six Ca.148 (a lengthened version of the Ca.133) and a Fokker F.VII, which maintained internal communications and carried urgent items and personnel between sectors.

The Regia Marina (Italian Royal Navy) maintained the Red Sea Flotillia at Massawa in Eritrea on the Red Sea. The port was a link between Axis Central Powers-occupied Europe and the naval facilities in the Italian concession zone in Tientsin in China. There were also limited port facilities at Assab, in Eritrea and at Mogadishu in Italian Somaliland. The flotilla had seven fleet destroyers, Leone-class destroyers Pantera, Leone and Tigre in the 5th Destroyer Division and the Sauro-class destroyers Cesare Battisti, Francesco Nullo, Nazario Sauro and Daniele Manin in the 3rd Destroyer Division. The flotilla also had two local defence destroyers, the Orsini and Acerbi, a squadron of fiveMotoscafo Armato Silurante (MAS, motor torpedo boats) and eight submarines (Archimede, Ferraris, Galilei, Torricelli, Galvani, Guglielmotto, Macalle and Perla). When the Mediterranean route was closed to Allied merchant ships in April 1940, Allied convoys had to sail via the Cape and up the east coast of Africa, past the Italian naval bases to Suez. As Italian fuel supplies in Massawa dwindled, opportunities for the Red Sea Flotilla to attack Allied shipping declined.

The British had based forces in Egypt since 1882 but these were greatly reduced by the terms of the Anglo-Egyptian treaty of 1936. A small British and Commonwealth force garrisoned the Suez Canal and the Red Sea route, which was vital to British communications with its Indian Ocean and Far Eastern territories. In mid-1939, General Archibald Wavell was appointed General Officer Commanding-in-Chief (GOC-in-C) of the new Middle East Command, over the Mediterranean and Middle East theatres. Wavell was responsible for the defence of Egypt through the General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, British Troops Egypt, to train the Egyptian army and co-ordinate military operations with the Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean, Admiral Andrew Cunningham, the Commander-in-Chief East Indies Station, Vice-Admiral Ralph Leatham, the Commander-in-Chief India, General Robert Cassels, the Inspector General, African Colonial Forces, Major-General Douglas Dickinson and the Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief Middle East, Air Chief Marshal William Mitchell. In Libya, the Regio Esercito Italiana (Royal Italian Army) had about 215,000 men and in Egypt, the British had about 36,000 troops, with another 27,500 men training in Palestine. Wavell had about 86,000 troops at his disposal for Libya, Iraq, Syria, Iran and East Africa.

The command was established before the war to control land operations and co-ordinate with the naval and air commands in the Mediterranean and Middle East, although Wavell was only allowed five staff officers for plans and command of an area of 3,500,000 square miles (9,100,000 km2). From 1940–1941, operations took place in the Western Desert of Egypt, East Africa, Greece and the Middle East. In July 1939, Wavell devised a strategy to defend and then dominate the Mediterranean as a base to attack Germany, through eastern and south-east Europe. The conquest of Italian East Africa came second only to the defence of Egypt and the Suez Canal and in August Wavell ordered plans to be made quickly to gain control of the Red Sea. Wavell specified a concept of offensive operations from Djibouti to Harar and then Addis Ababa or Kassala to Asmara then Massawa, preferably on both lines simultaneously. Wavell reconnoitred East Africa in January 1940 and the theatre was formally added to his responsibilities; he expected that the Somalilands could be defended with minor reinforcement. If Italy joined the war Ethiopia would be invaded as soon as there were sufficient troops; Wavell also co-ordinated plans with South Africa in March. On 1 May 1940, Wavell ordered British Troops Egypt to discreetly mobilise for military operations in western Egypt but after the June débâcle in France, Wavell had no option but to follow a defensive strategy.

After Italian operations in Sudan at Kassala and Gallabat in June, Churchill blamed Wavell for a "static policy". Anthony Eden, the Secretary of State for War communicated to Wavell, that an Italian advance towards Khartoum should be destroyed. Wavell replied that the Italian attacks were not serious but went to Sudan and Kenya to see for himself and met the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie at Khartoum. Eden convened a conference in Khartoum at the end of October 1940, with Selassie, the South African General Jan Smuts (advisor to Winston Churchill), Wavell and Lieutenant-General William Platt and Lieutenant-General Alan Cunningham. A plan to attack Ethiopia, including Ethiopian irregular forces was agreed. In November 1940, the British gained an intelligence advantage when the Government Code and Cypher School (GC & CS) at Bletchley Park broke the high grade cypher of the Italian army in East Africa. Later that month, the replacement cypher for the Regia Aeronautica was broken by the Combined Bureau, Middle East (CBME). In September 1940, Wavell ordered the commanders in Sudan and Kenya to make limited attacks once the rainy season ended. On the northern front Lieutenant-General William Platt was to attack Gallabat and vicinity and on the southern front Lieutenant-General Alan Cunningham was to advance northwards from Kenya, through Italian Somaliland into Ethiopia. While Platt advanced from the north and Cunningham from the south; Wavell planned for a third force to be landed in British Somaliland by amphibious assault and then re-take the colony prior to advancing into Ethiopia. The three forces were to rendezvous at Addis Ababa. The conquest of the AOI would remove the land threat to supplies and reinforcements coming from Australia, New Zealand India, South Africa and British East Africa via the Suez Canal for the campaign in North Africa and would re-open the land route from Cape Town to Cairo.

In 1940, the East Africa Force (Major-General D. P. Dickinson) was established for North East Africa,East Africa and British Central Africa. In Sudan about 8,500 troops and 80 aircraft guarded a 1,200 mi (1,900 km) frontier with the AOI. Platt had 21 companies (4,500 men) of the Sudan Defence Forces (SDF), of which five (later six) were organized as motor machine-gun companies. There was no artillery but the Sudan Horse was converting to a 3.7-inch mountain howitzer battery. The 1st Battalion Worcestershire Regiment, 1st Battalion Essec Regiment and the 2nd Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment, which in mid-September were incorporated into the 29th Indian Infantry Brigade, 10th Indian Infantry Brigade and 9th Indian Infantry Brigade respectively of the 5th Indian Infantry Division (Major-General Lewis Heath) when it arrived. The 4th Indian Infantry Division (Major-General Noel Beresford-Peise) was transferred from Egypt in December. The British had an assortment of armoured cars and B Squadron 4th Royal Tank Regiment (4th RTR) with Matilda infantry tanks joined the 4th Indian Division in January 1941. On the outbreak of hostilities, Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Reginald Chater in British Somaliland had about 1,754 troops comprising the Somalian Camel Corps (SCC) and a battalion of the 1st Battalion Northern Rhodesia Regiment. By August, the 1/2nd Punjab and 3/5th Punjab regiments had been transferred from Aden and 2nd Battalion KAR with the 1st East African Light Battery (3.7-inch howitzers) came from Kenya, raising the total to 4,000 troops, in the first week of August. In the Aden Protectorate, British Forces Aden (Air Vice-Marshal G. R. M. Reid) had a garrison of the two Indian infantry battalions until they were transferred to British Somaliland in August.

In August 1939, Wavell had ordered a plan covertly to encourage the rebellion in the western Ethiopian province of Gojjam, that the Italians had never been able to repress. In September, Colonel D. A. Sandford arrived to run the project but until the Italian declaration of war, the conspiracy was held back by the policy of appeasement. Mission 101was formed to co-ordinate the activities of the Ethiopian resistance. In June 1940, Selassie arrived in Egypt and in July, went to Sudan to meet Platt and discuss plans to re-capture Ethiopia, despite Platt's reservations. In July, the British recognised Selassie as emperor and in August, Mission 101 entered Gojjam province to reconnoitre. Sandford requested that supply routes be established before the rains ended, to the area north of Lake Tana and that Selassie should return in October, as a catalyst for the uprising. Gaining control of Gojjam required the Italian garrisons to be isolated along the main road from Bahrdar Giorgis south of Lake Tana, to Dangila, Debra Markos and Addis Ababa to prevent them concentrating against the Arbegnoch. Italian reinforcements arrived in October and patrolled more frequently, just as dissensions among local potentates were reconciled by Sandford's diplomacy. The Frontier Battalion of the Sudan Defence Force, set up in May 1940, was joined at Khartoum by the 2nd Ethiopian and 4th Eritrean battalions, raised from émigré volunteers in Kenya. Operational Centres consisting of an officer, five NCOs and several picked Ethiopians were formed and trained in guerilla warfare to provide leadership cadres and £1 million was set aside to finance operations. Major Orde Wingate was sent to Khartoum with an assistant to join the HQ of the SDF. On 20 November, Wingate was flown to Sakhala to meet Sandford; the RAF managed to bomb Dangila, drop propaganda leaflets and supply Mission 101, which raised Ethiopian morale, having suffered much from Italian air power since the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. Mission 101 managed to persuade the Arbegnogh north of Lake Tana to spring several ambushes on the Metemma–Gondar road and the Italian garrison at Wolkait was withdrawn in February 1941.

On 3 August 1940, the Italians invaded with two colonial brigades, four cavalry squadrons, 24 M11/39 medium tanks and L3/35 tankettes, several armoured cars, 21 howitzer batteries, pack artillery and air support. The British had a garrison of two companies of the Sudan Defence Force, two motor machine-gun companies and a mounted infantry company. Kassala was bombed and then attacked, the British retiring slowly. On 4 August, the Italians advanced with a western column towards Zeila, a central column (Lieutenant-General Carlo De Simone) towards Hargeisa and an eastern column towards Odweina in the south. The SCC skirmished with the advancing Italians as the main British force slowly retired. On 5 August, the towns of Zeila and Hargeisa were captured, cutting off the British from French Somaliland. Odweina fell the following day and the Italian central and eastern columns joined. On 11 August, Major-General Alfred Reade Godwin-Austen was diverted to Berbera, en route to Kenya to take command as reinforcements increased the British garrison to five battalions. (From 5–19 August, RAF squadrons at Aden flew 184 sorties, dropped 60 long tons (61 t) of bombs, lost seven aircraft destroyed and ten damaged.) On 11 August, the Italians began an attack at Tug Argan (tug, a dry sandy river-bed), where the road from Hargeisa crosses the Assa range and by 14 August, the British risked defeat in detail by the larger Italian force and its greater quantity of artillery. Close to being cut off and with only one battalion left in reserve, Godwin-Austen contacted Henry Maitland Wilson the General Officer Commander-in-Chief of the British Troops in Egypt in Cairo (Wavell was in London) and next day, received permission to withdraw from the colony. The 2nd battalion Black Watch, supported by two companies of the 2nd King's African Rifles and parties of the 1st/2nd Punjab Regiment covered the retreat of the British contingent to Berbera. By 2:00 p.m. on 18 August, most of the contingent had been evacuated to Aden but HMAS Hobart and the HQ stayed behind until morning before sailing and the Italians entered Berbera on the evening of 19 August. In the final four days, the RAF flew twelve reconnaissance and 19 reconnaissance-bombing sorties, with 72 attacks on Italian transport and troop columns; 36 fighter sorties were flown over Berbera. British casualties were 38 killed and 222 wounded; the Italians had 2,052 casualties and consumed irreplaceable resources. (Churchill criticised Wavell for abandoning the colony without enough fighting but Wavell called it a textbook withdrawal in the face of superior numbers.) Anglo-Egyptian Sudan shared a 1,000 mi (1,600 km) border with the AOI and on 4 July 1940, was invaded by an Italian force of about 6,500 men from Eritrea, which advanced on a railway junction at Kassala and forced the British garrison of 320 men of the SDF and some local police to retire after inflicting casualties of 43 killed and 114 wounded for ten casualties of their own. The Italians also drove a platoon of No 3 Company, Eastern Arab Corps (EAC) of the SDF, from the small fort at Gallabat, just over the border from Metemma, about 200 mi (320 km) south of Kassala and took the villages of Qaysan, Kurmuk and Dumbode on the Blue Nile. From there the Italians ventured no further into Sudan owing to a lack of fuel and fortified Kassala with anti-tank defences, machine-gun posts and strongpoints, later establishing a brigade-strong garrison. The Italians were disappointed to find little anti-British sentiment among the Sudanese population, but still tried to get the locals to openly rebel against the British Empire.

The 5th Indian Division began to arrive in Sudan in early September 1940. The 29th Indian Infantry Brigade were placed on the Red Sea coast to protect Port Sudan, the 9th Indian Infantry Brigade was based south-west of Kassala and the 10th Indian Infantry Brigade (William Slim) were sent to Gedaref, with the divisional headquarters, to block an Italian attack on Khartoum from Goz Regeb to Gallabat, on a front of 200 mi (320 km). Gazelle Force (Colonel Frank Messervy) was formed on 16 October, as a mobile unit to raid Italian territory and delay an Italian advance. Gallabat fort lay in Sudan and Metemma a short way across the Ethiopian border, beyond the Boundary Khor, a dry river bed with steep banks covered by long grass. Both places were surrounded by field fortifications and Gallabat was held by a colonial infantry battalion. Metemma had two colonial battalions and a banda formation, all under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Castagnuola. The 10th Indian Infantry Brigade, a field artillery regiment, B Squadron, 4th RTR with six Infantry and six light tanks, attacked Gallabat on 6 November at 5:30 a.m. An RAF contingent of six Wellesley bombers and nine GlosterGladiator fighters, were thought sufficient to overcome the 17 Italian fighters and 32 bombers believed to be in range. The infantry assembled 1–2 mi (1.6–3.2 km) from Gallabat, whose garrison was unaware that an attack was coming, until the RAF bombed the fort and put the wireless out of action. The field artillery began a simultaneous bombardment; after an hour the gunners changed targets and bombarded Metemma. The previous night, the 4th Battalion 10th Baluch Regiment occupied a hill overlooking the fort as a flank guard. The troops on the hill covered the advance at 6:40 a.m. of the 3rd Royal Garwhal Rifles followed by the tanks. The Indians reached Gallabat and fought hand-to-hand with the 65th Infantry Division Grenateri di Savoia and some Eritrean troops in the fort. At 8:00 a.m. the 25th and 77th Colonial battalions counter-attacked and were repulsed but three British tanks were knocked out by mines and six by mechanical failure caused by the rocky ground.

The defenders at Boundary Khor were dug in behind fields of barbed wire and Castagnuola had contacted Gondar for air support. Italian bombers and fighters attacked all day, shot down seven Gladiators for a loss of five Fiat CR-42s and destroyed the lorry carrying spare parts for the tanks. The ground was so hard and rocky that there were no trenches and when Italian bombers made their biggest attack, the infantry had no cover. An ammunition lorry was set on fire by burning grass and the sound was taken to be an Italian counter-attack from behind. When a platoon advanced towards the sound with fixed bayonets, some troops thought that they were retreating. Part of the 1st Battalion, Essex Regiment at the fort broke and ran, taking some of the Gahrwalis with them. Many of the British fugitives mounted their transport and drove off, spreading the panic and some of the runaways reached Doka before being stopped. The Italian bombers returned next morning and Slim ordered a withdrawal from Gallabat Ridge 3 mi (4.8 km) west to less exposed ground that evening. Sappers from the 21st Field Company remained behind to demolish the remaining buildings and stores in the fort. The artillery bombarded Gallabat and Metemma and set off Italian ammunition dumps full of pyrotechnics. British casualties since 6 November were 42 men killed and 125 wounded. The brigade patrolled to deny the fort to the Italians and on 9 November, two Baluch companies attacked and held the fort during the day and retired in the evening. During the night an Italian counter-attack was repulsed by artillery-fire and next morning the British re-occupied the fort unopposed. Ambushes were laid and prevented Italian reinforcements from occupying the fort or the hills on the flanks, despite frequent bombing by the Regia Aeronautica.

On the Italian declaration of war on 10 June 1940, Dickinson had a force of two East African brigades of the King's African Rifles (KAR) organized as a Northern Brigade and a Southern Brigade comprising a reconnaissance regiment, a light artillery battery and the 22nd Mountain Battery Royal Indian Artillery (RIA). By March 1940, the KAR strength had reached 883 officers, 1,374 non-commissioned officers and 20,026 African other ranks. Wavell ordered Dickinson to defend Kenya and to pin down as many Italian troops as possible. Dickinson planned to defend Mombasa with the 1st East African Infantry Brigade and to deny a crossing of the Tana River and the fresh water at Wajir, with the 2nd East African Infantry Brigade. Detachments were to be placed at Matsabit, Moyale and at Turkana near Lake Rudolf, an arc of 850 mi (1,370 km). The Italians were thought to have troops at Kismayu, Mogadishu, Dolo, Moyale and Yavello, which turned out to be colonial troops and bande, with two brigades at Jimma, ready to reinforce Moyale or attack Lake Rudolf and then invade Uganda. By the end of July, the 3rd East African Infantry Brigade and the 6th East African Infantry Brigade had been formed. A Coastal Division and a Northern Frontier District Division had been planned but then the 11th (African) Division and the 12th (African) Division were created instead. On 1 June, the first South African unit arrived in Mombasa, Kenya and by the end of July, the 1st South African Infantry Brigade Group had arrived. On 13 August, the 1st South African Division was formed and by the end of 1940, about 27,000 South Africans were in East Africa, in the 1st South African Division, the 11th (African) Division and the 12th (African) Division. Each South African brigade group consisted of three rifle battalions, an armored car company and signal, engineer and medical units.

At dawn on 17 June, the Rhodesians supported a raid by the SDF on the Italian desert outpost of El Wak in Italian Somaliland about 90 mi (140 km) north-east of Wajir. The Rhodesians bombed and burnt down thatched mud huts and generally harassed the enemy troops. Since the main fighting at that time was against Italian advances towards Moyale in Kenya, the Rhodesians concentrated there. On 1 July, an Italian attack on the border town of Moyale, on the edge of the Ethiopian escarpment, where the tracks towards Wajir and Marsabit meet, was repulsed by a company of the 1st KAR and reinforcements were moved up. The Italians carried out a larger attack by about four battalions on 10 July, after a considerable artillery bombardment and after three days the British withdrew unopposed. The Italians eventually advanced to water holes at Dabel and Buna, nearly 62 miles (100 km) inside Kenya but lack of supplies prevented a further advance. The Italiansy tried to recruit local Kenians and start a rebellion against the British Colony, but failed to do so in bigger numbers.

After the conquest of British Somaliland the Italians adopted a more defensive posture. In late 1940, Italian forces suffered defeats in the Mediterranean, the Western Desert, the Battle of Britain and in the Greco-Italy War.. This prompted General Ugo Cavallero, the new Italian Chief of the General Staff in Rome, to adopt a new strategy in East Africa. In December 1940, Cavallero thought that Italian forces in East Africa should abandon offensive actions against the Sudan and the Suez Canal and concentrate on the defence of the AOI. In response to Cavallero and Aosta, who had requested permission to withdraw from the Sudanese frontier, Comando Supremo ordered Italian forces in East Africa to withdraw to better defensive positions. Frusci was ordered to withdraw from Kassala and Metemma in the lowlands along the Sudan–Eritrea border and hold the more easily defended mountain passes on the Kassala–Agordat and Metemma–Gondar roads. Frusci chose not to withdraw from the lowlands, because withdrawal would involve too great a loss of prestige and because Kassala was an important railway junction; holding it prevented the British from using the railway to carry supplies from Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast to the base at Gedaref. Information on the Italian withdrawal was quickly decrypted by the British and Platt was able to begin his offensive into Eritrea on 18 January 1941, three weeks ahead of schedule.

In Sudan, the Royal Air Force (RAF) Air Headquarters Sudan (Headquarters 203 Group from 17 August, Air Headquarters East Africa from 19 October), subordinate to the Air Officer Commanding-in-CHief (AOC-in-C) Middle East, had 14 Squadron, 47 Squadron and 223 Squadron (Wellesley bombers). A flight of Vickers Vincent biplanes from 47 Squadron performed Army Co-operation duties and were later reinforced from Egypt by 45 squadron (Bristol Blenheims). Six Gladiator biplane fighters were based in Port Sudan for trade protection and anti-submarine patrols over the Red Sea, the air defence of Port Sudan, Atbara and Khartoum and army support. In May, 1 (Fighter) Squadron South African Air Force (SAAF) arrived, was transferred to Egypt to convert to Gladiators and returned to Khartoum in August. The SAAF in Kenya had 12 Squadron SAAF, 11 Squadron SAAF, 40 Squadron SAAF, 2 Squadron SAAF and 237 (Rhodesia) Squadron). Better aircraft became available later but the first aircraft were old and slow, the South Africans even pressing an old Vickers Vaentia biplane into service as a bomber.

The South Africans faced experienced Italian pilots, including a cadre of Spanish Civil War veterans. Despite its lack of experience, 1 SAAF claimed 48 enemy aircraft destroyed and 57 damaged in the skies over East Africa. A further 57 were claimed destroyed on the ground; all for the loss of six pilots—it is thought the unit was guilty of severe over-claiming. From November 1940 to early January 1941, Platt continued to apply constant pressure on the Italians along the Sudan–Ethiopia border with patrols and raids by ground troops and aircraft. Hawker Hurricanes and more Gloster Gladiators began to replace some of the older models. On 6 December, a large concentration of Italian motor transport was bombed and strafed by Commonwealth aircraft a few miles north of Kassala. The same aircraft then proceeded to machine-gun from low level the nearby positions of the Italian Blackshirts and colonial infantry. A few days later, the same aircraft bombed the Italian base at Keru, fifty miles east of Kassala. The Commonwealth pilots had the satisfaction of seeing supply dumps, stores and transport enveloped in flame and smoke as they flew away. One morning in mid-December, a force of Italian fighters strafed a Rhodesian landing-strip at Wajir near Kassala, where two Hawker Hardys were caught on the ground and destroyed and 5,000 US gal (19,000 l) of fuel were set alight, four Africans were killed and eleven injured fighting the fire.

The approaches to the Red Sea through the Gulf of Aden, the 15 nmi (17 mi; 28 km) wide Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb (Gate of Tears) and the 1,200 nmi (1,400 mi; 2,200 km) passage to Suez, became the main sea route to the Middle East when hostilities began with Italy. South of Suez the British held Port Sudan on the west coast of the Red Sea (about halfway down) and Aden, 100 nmi (120 mi; 190 km) east of Bab-el-Mandeb. About 350 nmi (400 mi; 650 km) north of the Strait, on the west side of the Red Sea, was an Italian naval base of Massawa (Rear-Admiral Mario Bonetti), well-placed for attacks by submarines and destroyers on convoys. The Red Sea was closed to merchant ships on 24 May, until convoys could be organised. The anti-aircraft cruiser HMS Carlisle, three sloops and a destroyer division of HMS Khartoum, HMS Kimberley, HMS Kingston and HMS Kandaha were sent through the Suez Canal to the Red Sea Force (Senior Naval Officer Red Sea, Rear-Admiral Murray, based at Aden) that had been established in April by Vice-Admiral R. Leatham, the Commander-in-Chief East Indies Station.

On 15 June, the submarine Macalle ran aground and was captured. Next day, the submarine Galileo Galilei sank a Norwegian tanker in British servise, the James Stove about 12 mi (19 km) south of Aden. On 18 June, Galileo Galilei captured the Yugoslav steamship Dravo and then released it; next day off Aden, Galileo Galilei engaged the armed trawler HMS Moonstone and the commander was killed; the submarine was captured and used by the British as HMS X2. On 23 June, in the Gulf of Aden off French Somaliland the Brin class submarine Evangelista Torricelli was sunk by Kandahar, Kingston and the sloop Shoreham. Several hours afterwards, Khartoum suffered an internal explosion following a fire and sank in shallow water off Perim Island. On 23 June, the submarine Luigi Galvani sank the sloop HMIS Pathan in the Indian Ocean and then on 23 June, Luigi Galvani was sunk by the sloop HMS Falmouth in the Gulf of Oman. On 13 August, Galileo Ferraris made a failed attempt to intercept the battleship HMS Royal Sovereign in the Red Sea, en route from Suez to Aden. On 6 September, the submarine Guglielmo Marconi patrolled south of the Farasan Islands but sank only the oil tanker Atlas. On 20 October, the Italians attacked Convoy BN 7 (31 merchantmen), escorted by the cruiser HMNZS Leander, the destroyer HMS Kimberlay, five sloops and air cover from Aden. The submarines Guglielmo Marconi and Galileo Ferraris failed to intercept the convoy but next day it was attacked by four destroyers including Pantera, Leone, Francesco Nullo, 150 nmi (170 mi; 280 km) east of Massawa, which were driven off. At dawn, Leander and Kimberley forced Francesco Nullo ashore by gunfire onto an island near Massawa, where it was destroyed on 21 October, by three 45 Squadron Blenheims. Kimberley was hit in the engine room by a shore battery and had to be towed to Port Sudan. As British land reinforcements arrived in East Africa, naval forces supported land operations and blockaded the last vessels of the Red Sea Flotilla at Massawa. By the end of 1940, the British had gained control of East African coastal routes and the Red Sea and Italian forces in the AOI declined as spare parts and supplies from Italy ran out. There were six air attacks on convoys in October and none after 4 November.

The governor of Fashist French Somaliland, Brigadier-General Paul Legentilhomme had a garrison of seven battalions of Senegalese and Somali infantry, three batteries of field guns, four batteries of anti-aircraft guns, a company of light tanks, four companies of militia and irregulars, two platoons of the camel corps and an assortment of aircraft. In June, an Italian force was assembled to secure the port city of Djibouti, the main military base. After the fall of France in June, the neutralisation of Fashist French colonies allowed the Italians to concentrate on the more lightly defended British Somaliland. On 23 July, Legentilhomme and the British Forces were ousted by the pro-Vichy naval officer Pierre Nouailhetas and left on 5 August for Aden, to join the Free French. In March 1941, the British enforcement of a strict contraband regime to prevent supplies being passed on to the Italians, lost its point after the conquest of the AOI. The British changed policy, with encouragement from the Free French, to "rally French Somaliland to the Allied cause without bloodshed". The Free French were to arrange a voluntary ralliement by propaganda (Operation Marie) and the British were to blockade the colony.

Wavell considered that if British pressure was applied, a rally would appear to have been coerced. Wavell preferred to let the propaganda continue and provided a small amount of supplies under strict control. When the policy had no effect, Wavell suggested negotiations with the Vichy governor Louis Nouailhetas, to use the port and railway. The suggestion was accepted by the British government but because of the concessions granted to the Vichy regime in Syria, proposals were made to invade the colony instead. In June, Nouailhetas was given an ultimatum, the blockade was tightened and the Italian garrison at Assab was defeated by an operation from Aden. For six months, Nouailhetas remained willing to grant concessions over the port and railway but would not tolerate Free French interference. In October the blockade was reviewed but the beginning of the war with Japan in December, led to all but two blockade ships being withdrawn. On 2 January 1942, the Vichy government offered the use of the port and railway, subject to the lifting of the blockade but the British refused and ended the blockade unilaterally in March.

Operation Camilla was a deception concocted by Lieutenant-Colonel Dudley Clarke, intended to make the Italians believe that the British intended to re-conquer British Somaliland with the 4th and 5th Indian divisions, transferred from Egypt to Gedaref and Port Sudan. In December 1940, Clarke constructed a model operation for Italian military intelligence to discover and set up administration offices at Aden. Clarke arranged for the Italian defences around Berbera to be softened up by air and sea raids from Aden and distributed maps and pamphlets on the climate, geography and population of British Somaliland. "Sibs" (sibilare, hisses or whistles), were circulated among civilians in Egypt. Bogus information was planted on the Japanese consul at Port Said and indiscreet wireless messages were transmitted. The operation began on 19 December 1940, intended to mature early in January 1941 and succeeded. The plot backfired when the Italians began to evacuate British Somaliland instead of sending reinforcements. Troops were sent north into Eritrea, where the real attack was coming, instead of to the east. Part of the deception with misleading wireless transmissions, did convince the Italians that two Australian divisions were in Kenya, this time leading the Italians to reinforce the wrong area.

In November 1940, Gazelle Force operated from the Gash river delta against Italian advanced posts around Kassala on the Ethiopian plateau, where hill ranges from 2,000–3,000 ft (610–910 m) bound wide valleys and the rainfall makes the area malarial from July to October. On 11 December, Wavell ordered the 4th Indian Division to withdraw from Operation Compass in the Western Desert and move to Sudan. The transfer took until early January 1941 and Platt intended to begin the offensive on the northern front on 8 February, with a pincer attack on Kassala, by the 4th and 5th Indian divisions, less a brigade each. News of the harassment by Gazelle Force and the activities of Mission 101 in Ethiopia, led to the Italians withdrawing their northern flank to Keru and Wachai and then on 18 January to retreat hurriedly from Kassala and Tessenei, the triangle of Keru, Biscia and Aicota. Wavell had ordered Platt to advance the offensive from March to 9 February and then to 19 January, when it seemed that Italian morale was crumbling. The withdrawal led Wavell to order a pursuit and the troops arriving at Port Sudan to attack at Karora and advance parallel to the coast, to meet the forces coming from the west. Two roads from Kassala ran to Agordat, a track to the north through Keru and Biscia, where the road was better and the Via Imperiale, a tarmac road through Tessenei, Aicota and Barentu. The roads joined at Agordat and went through Keren, the only route to Asmara. The 4th Indian Division was sent 40 mi (64 km) along the road to Sabderat and Wachai, thence as far towards Keru as supplies allowed, with the Matilda Infantry tanks of B Squadron, 4th RTR to join from Egypt. The 5th Indian Division was to capture Aicota, ready to move east to Barentu or north-east to Biscia. Apart from air attacks the pursuit was not opposed until Keru Gorge, held by a rearguard of the 41st Colonial Brigade. The brigade retreated on the night of 22/23 January, leaving General Ugo Fongoli, his staff and 800 men behind as prisoners. By 27 January, most of the two Indian divisions were close to Agordat and a brigade turned south to move across country towards Barentu. Agordat was defended by the 4th Colonial Division (General Orlando Lorenzini), with 76 guns and a company each of medium and light tanks.

On the evening of 28 January, the 3/14th Punjab Regiment made a flanking move into the Cochen hills to the south and next day, they were joined by the 1/6th Rajputan Rifles but were unable to find a way forward. On 30 January, five Italian colonial battalions with mountain artillery in support, attacked. The Indian battalions were forced back but counter-attacked on the morning of 31 January and advanced towards the main road. The 5th Indian Brigade on the plain below, attacked with the four Matildas. The armoured vehicles overran the Italian defences, knocking out several Italian tanks and cut the road to Keren. By 1 February, the 4th Colonial Division retreated up a track further north, having lost the equivalent of two battalions of infantry taken prisoner; 28 field-guns and several medium and light tanks. The 5th Indian Division attacked Barentu, held by nine battalions of the 2nd Colonial Division (about 8,000 men), 32 guns and about thirty-six dug in M11/39 tanks and armoured cars. The 10th Indian Infantry Brigade attacked from the north against a determined Italian defence, as the 29th Indian Infantry Brigade advanced as fast as possible from the west, slowed by demolitions and rearguards. On the night of 31 January/1 February, the Italians retreated along a track towards Tole and Arresa, pursued by a motor machine-gun group, which found on 8 February that the Italians had abandoned their vehicles and taken to the hills. The retreat left the motorable Tessenei–Agordat road open for British supply convoys.

On 12 January, Aosta had sent a regiment of the 65th Infantry Division Granatieri di Savoia (General Amedeo Liberati) and three colonial brigades to Keren. The 4th and 5th Indian Infantry divisions advanced eastwards from Agordat into the rolling countryside, which gradually increased in elevation towards the Keren Plateau, through the Ascidira Valley. There was an escarpment on the left and a spur rising to 6,000 ft (1,800 m) on the right of the road and the Italians were dug in on heights which dominated the massifs, ravines and mountains. The defensive positions had been surveyed before the war and chosen as the main defensive position to guard Asmara and the Eritrean highlands from an invasion from Sudan. On 15 March, after several days of bombing, the 4th Indian Division attacked on the north and west side of the road to capture ground on the left flank, ready for the 5th Indian Division to attack on the east side. The Indians met a determined defense and made limited progress but during the night the 5th Indian Division captured Fort Dologorodoc, 1,475 ft (450 m) above the valley. The Granatieri di Savoia and Alpini counter-attacked Dologorodoc seven times from 18 to 22 March but the attacks were costly failures. Wavell flew to Keren to assess the situation and on 15 March, watched with Platt as the Indiuans made a frontal attack up the road, ignoring the high ground on either side and broke through. Early on 27 March, Keren was captured after a battle lasting 53 days, for a British and Commonwealth loss of 536 men killed and 3,229 wounded; Italian losses were 3,000 Italian and 9,000 Ascari killed and about 21,000 wounded. The Italians conducted a fighting withdrawal under air attack to Ad Teclesan, in a narrow valley on the Keren–Asmara road, the last defensible position before Asmara. The defeat at Keren had shattered the morale of the Italian forces and when the British attacked early on 31 March, the position fell and 460 Italian prisoners and 67 guns were taken; Asmara was declared an open town next day and the British entered unopposed.

Bonetti, the commander of the Italian Red Sea Flotilla and the garrison at Massawa, had 10,000 troops and about 100 tanks to defend the port. During the evening of 31 March, three of the last six destroyers at Massawa put to sea, to raid the Gulf of Suez and then scuttle themselves but Leone ran aground, sank the next morning and the sortie was cancelled. On 2 April the last five destroyers left to attack Port Sudan and then sink themselves. Heath telephoned Bonetti with an ultimatum to surrender and not block the harbour by scuttling ships. If this was refused, the British would leave Italian citizens in Eritrea and Ethiopia to fend for themselves. The 7th Indian Infantry Brigade Group sent small forces towards Adowa and Adigrat and the rest advanced down the Massawa road, which declined by 7,000 ft (2,100 m) in 50 mi (80 km) and the Indians rendezvoused with Briggs Force, which had cut across country, at Massawa by 5 April. Bonetti was called upon to surrender but refused again and on 8 April, an attack by the 7th Indian Infantry Brigade Group was repulsed. A simultaneous attack by the 10th Indian Infantry Brigade and the tanks of B Squadron 4th RTR broke through the defences on the west side. The Free French overran the defenses in the south-west, as the RAF bombed Italian artillery positions. In the afternoon, Bonetti surrendered and the Allied force took 9,590 prisoners and 127 guns. The harbour was found to have been blocked by the scutting of two large floating dry docks, 16 large ships and a floating crane in the mouths of the north Naval Harbour, the central Commercial Harbour and the main South Harbour. The Italians had also dumped as much of their equipment as possible in the water. The British re-opened the Massawa–Asmara railway on 27 April and by 1 May, the port came into use to supply the 5th Indian Division. The Italian surrender ended organised resistance in Eritrea and fulfilled the strategic objective of ending the threat to shipping in the Red Sea. On 11 April, President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the USA rescinded the status of the Red Sea as a combat zone under the Neutrality Acts, freeing US ships to use the route to carry supplies to the Middle East.

Gideon Force was a small British and African special forces unit, which acted as a Corps d'Elite amongst the Sudan Defence Force, Ethiopian regular forces and Arbegnoch (Patriots). At its peak, Orde Wingate led fifty officers, twenty British NCOs, 800 trained Sudanese troops and 800 partially trained Ethiopian regulars. He had a few mortars, no artillery and no air support, only intermittent bombing sorties. The force operated in the difficult country of Gojjam Province at the end of a long and tenuous supply-line, on which nearly all of its 15,000 camels perished. Gideon Force and the Arbegnoch (Ethiopian Patriots) ejected the Italian forces under General Guglielmo Nasi, the conqueror of British Somaliland in six weeks and captured 1,100 Italian and 14,500 Ethiopian troops, twelve guns, many machine-guns, rifles and ammunition and over 200 pack animals. Gideon Force was disbanded on 1 June 1941, Wingate was returned to his substantive rank of Major and returned to Egypt, as did many of the troops of Gideon Force, who joined the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) of the Eight Army. While Debre Markos and Addis Derra were being captured, other Ethiopian Patriots under Ras Abebe Aregai consolidated themselves around Addis Ababa in preparation for Emperor Selassie's return. In response to the rapidly advancing British and Commonwealth forces and to the general uprising of Ethiopian Patriots, the Italians in Ethiopia retreated to the mountain fortresses of Gondar, Amba Alagi, Dessie and Gimma. After negotiations prompted by Wavell, Aosta ordered the governor, Agenore Frangipani, to surrender the city to forestall a massacre of Italian civilians, as had occurred in Dire Dawa. On 6 April 1941, Addis Ababa was occupied by Wetherall, Pienaar and Fowkes escorted by East African armoured cars, who received the surrender of the city. The Polizia dell'Africa Italiana (Police of Italian Africa) stayed in the city to maintain order. Selassie made a formal entry to the city on 5 May. On 13 April, Cunningham sent a force under Brigadier Dan Pienaar comprising 1st South African Brigade and Campbell's Scouts (Ethiopian irregulars led by a British officer), to continue the northward advance and link up with Platt's forces advancing south.

On 20 April, the South Africans captured Dessie on the main road north from Addis Ababa to Asmara, about 200 mi (320 km) south of Amba Alagi. In eight weeks the British had advanced 1,700 mi (2,700 km) from Tana to Mogadishu at a cost of 501 casualties and eight aircraft and had destroyed the bulk of the Italian air and land forces. From Debra Marqos, Wingate pursued the Italians and undertook a series of harrying actions. (In early May most of Gideon Force had to break off to provide a suitable escort for Hailie Selassie's formal entry into Addis Ababa.) By 18 May, Maraventano was dug in at Agibor, against a force of about 2,000 men, including only 160 trained soldiers (100 from the Frontier Battalion and 60 of the re-formed 2nd Ethiopian Battalion).nBoth sides were short of food, ammunition, water and medical supplies and Wingate attempted a ruse by sending a message to Maraventano telling of reinforcements due to arrive and that the imminent withdrawal of British troops would leave the Italian column at the mercy of the Patriots. Maraventano discussed the situation with the Italian headquarters in Gondar on 21 May and was given discretion to surrender, which took place on 23 May by 1,100 Italian and 5,000 local troops, 2,000 women and children and 1,000 mule men and camp followers. Gideon Force was down to 36 regular soldiers to make the formal guard of honour at the surrender, the rest being Patriots.

 

[CountofDooku]

Chapter 73: The Empire of Vietnam (Đế quốc Việt Nam):

The Empire of Vietnam was one of the newest members of the Co-Prosperity Sphere formed out of former French Indochina. The former colony was split up between the Empire of Siam who regained some before lost border regions and the liberated states and new Co-Prosperity Sphere members that were the Empire of Vietnam, the Kingdom of Cambodia (Preăh Réachéanachâk Kâmpŭchéa) and the Kingdom of Laos (Phra Ratxa A-na-chak Lao). Out of the three states the Empire of Vietnam had one of the best starting positions. From the overall 24,568,000 people that lived inside French Indochina Vietnam gained 20,268,000 (7,784,000 in Tonkin, 8,000,000 in Annam and 4,484,000 Cochinchina), while Cambodia only had a population of 1,803,000 and Laos even only 1,300,000 while the port of Guangzhouwan in the Guangdong Province was annexed by the Co-Prosperity Sphere state of Taikoku. Out of the former 65,000 men, the locally recruited Trailleurs indochinous under French officers numbering 48,500 were used to create a new Vietnamese police force, militia and imperial army with the help of Japanese officers and instructors. The separated indigenous gardes indochinois (gendarmerie) numbering 27,000 was used to watch over that the locals followed the rule of the new government and to suppress the communist rebels together with the Imperial Vietnamese Army and support of the Imperial Japanese Army that was present with 140,000 troops in former Indochina to secure the stability of the new governments. This Japanese forces helped out their Vietnamese allies only lightly and with their modern equipment, tactics and strategies if needed, since the Japanese wished to keep the fight Vietnamese mostly, to remove the legitimate claim of the Viet Cong to fight another imperial colonial system in the Japanese after the French one was beaten. The Imperial Vietnamese Navy was formed out of the three light cruisers (one was later given to the Kingdom of Cambodia to form the Royal Cambodian Navy) captured during the liberation of Indochina, as well as some cruisers and destroyers leased by the Japanese from their older models, or newly build in Japan the same way other members of the Co-Prosperity Sphere like Siam preferred it. Most of this ships while escorting the Vietnamese trade ships in the South Chinese Sea and securing the coasts and rivers, maintained a mostly Japanese crew and later after training Vietnamese crewman still had Japanese officers and captains.

Many of the 34,000 French civilians that had lived in French Indochina before worked for the administration of the colony or were wealthy land and plantation owners. Most of them continued to work for the new government either willingly, because their families lived there for generations ever since the colonies began in 1887, they were Fascist and Authoritarian collaborationist, or they were forces to do so because their loved ones and family were in Vietnamese and Japanese prisons and camps. This modern administration helped Vietnam greatly to become a independent and stronger state. Thanks to important resources in Cochinchina, Annam and Tonkin Vietnam became a source of tea, rice, coffee, pepper, coal, zinc, tin and hardwood. The former French colonial government established monopoly on the trade of opium, salt and rice alcohol was lifted, allowing Vietnam to engage in a lucrative export and “free-trade” towards the other members of the Co-Prosperity Sphere, Europe, Australia and America. As a leading producer of rubber through that became prized in the industrialized world, Vietnam could afford to put 30% of it's budget in the creation of a modern Army, Navy and Air Force with the help of Japan. The local rubber plantations were still administered by the Europeans who once owned them and had now to work for their new Vietnamese and Japanese masters. What began under the French with a growing number of investments in the colony's mines and rubber, tea and coffee plantations, when French Indochina began to industrialize as factories opened in the colony continued with the support of the Japanese Zaibatsu. These new created factories produced textiles, cigarettes, beer and cement which were then exported throughout the Co-Prosperity Sphere. Because the Imperial Japanese Navy build and crewed the Imperial Vietnamese ships and secured parts of the land, including the rivers like the Mekong while the Imperial Japanese Army helped the Imperial Vietnamese Army fight of the communist rebels the Vietnamese send many resources to Japan in exchange to pay for this costs. With the Japanese Zaibatsu that helped with the industrialization by building new factories, roads and railroads this debt increased party. In exchange the Empire of Vietnam allowed the free travel and settlement of all other citizens of member states of the Co-Prosperity Sphere, leading to a increasing Japanese colony of 100,000 Japanese in only the first year. Most of these worked as instructors for the Vietnamese Army, Navy and Government, others were highly skilled foreman and instructors, helping to modernize the farming and labor in Vietnam. Judaical and land rights reforms helped to make the new government of Vietnam populate and beloved, while it revoked the means of the Viet Cong that used to preach against this former mostly colonial and anti-Vietnamese systems before the reforms.

The capital of the soon powerful Co-Prosperity Sphere state of Vietnam, was Hué the former seat of the Nguyen Dynasty emperors from 1802 onward and the capital of the protectorate of Anam. The Vietnamese Emperor Bảo Đại resided in Hué's Imperial Palace, governing the Empire of Vietnam from there. He was supported by the Imperial Japanese Navy in the South as well as the East Coast, where the Japanese Navy expanded the naval ports of Haiphong and Cam Ranh. The Imperial Japanese Army meanwhile guarded most of inner Vietnam in the center and north, were it was supported by the Taikoku Expedition Army (in fear of a spread of communist rebels across the border of both states). Inspired by the Japanese Army and Navy, the Vietnamese ones chosen the same headquarters for Vietnam, leading to the Imperial Vietnamese Army HQ being stationed in Hanaoi and the Imperial Vietnamese Navy HQ being stationed in Saigon. Both were connected by the Indochinese railroad that also connected the Empire of Vietnam from Hanoi to Yunnan in Yikoku and to Langson at the border towards Taikoku in the north as well as the Cambodian capital Phnom-Penh and further towards the border town of Mengkoblerey between Cambodia and Siam. Here the Japanese worked with Vietnamese, Cambodian and Siamese laborer to expand the railway towards Bangkok and Korat to connect it with the Siamese ones. The Japanese further helped to increase this decentralisation of the Royal Capital Hué, the Army Capital Hanaoi and the Navy Capital Saigon, to prevent the Empire of Vietnam from becoming too efficient, powerfull and independent to soon.

 

[CountofDooku]

Chapter 74: The African Campaign – Part 2, the Siege of Accra and the Battles of Ashantee and C. Coast Castle:

The involvement of the British Gold Coast in the Second Great War began with the declaration of war between the renewed German Empire and the British Empire. With the Fall of France, Germany regained Togo from the Fascist French Government and quickly sends troops there to support the Fascist French Colonial Forces against the nearby British colonies. The goal of the German Emperor was to prolong the war and open a Second Front against Great Britain in Africa. The German Togoarmee (Togo Army) under General Hans-Karl Freiherr von Esebeck that arrived with mostly light equipment in Lome and Yendi quickly attacked British outposts and took that part of Togo that was split after the First Great War to become a part the British Colony nearby. Because oft this the Gold Coast came to have an direct involvement in the war. The German forces of the Togo Army accompanied by their Fascist French allies invaded the British Gold Coast colony from all sides, but were slowed down by Allied aircrafts stationed in the colonial capital Accra, from where they flew between the United States, Europe and the Pacific Ocean, supplying the Allied troops there even when Accra was surrounded and besieged. While some British Colonial Troops from East and South Africa managed to defeat the Italians in Italian East Africa, these Troops in the Gold Coast and the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria were pinned down and needed against the German Togo Army.

With the start of the German and French invasion many natives left their regions to find protection from the enemy armies in the large towns and cities. This led to a housing shortage among these refugees since an earthquake in 1939 had already badly damaged the infrastructure in many cities and towns and the British colonial government tried to counter the problem, by building new houses with local building material. The simultaneous effort to plan the Gold Coast's cities from scratch never came past the blueprints for the future layout and development of Accra, Kumasi and Sekondi since the German and French troops soon came closer, despite the Allied's air superority and harassment with their fighters and bomber. The Germans had already planned to add the Gold Coast to their planned Mittelafrika Kolonie, since it produced gold and cocoa. During the war, German U-boats and British ships attacked each others trade routes from the Gold, Ivory and Slave coast. The plan to further develop the local tile, brick and ceramic industry in Ghana and cotton textiles in Togo was quickly adopted by the British and Germans, but the war forced them to focus all free resources on their troops in the area. The construction of new buildings in Gold Coast cities was planned to benefited the lumber industry, which would once be able to export a few million cubic feet of timber later on.

The Fascist French Troops fought the British Forces at the Battles of Ashantee and C. Coast Castle, winning in the first battle, but forced to retread in the second one. In the meantime, the German Togo Army under General Hans-Karl Freiherr von Esebeck besieged Accra in a attempt to conquer the British Colony. Despite their first victorious, the Allied Air superiority quickly interrupted the supplies for the Togo Army coming in mostly from Air over northern Africa. This meant the Togo Army was even heavier depending on capturing British supplies and equipment. The Siege of Accra meanwhile was turning into a dirty trench war like the whole Western Front had been during the First Great War with heavy British and German fortifications on both sides facing each other. Thanks to the Allied Defenses and Air Superiority, the British managed to prevent the city from a full surrounding and held a road open towards C. Coast Castle in the west as well as the harbor of Accra, from where the most supplies for their troops came during the Siege besides the air port of Accra. The German Togo Army under General Hans-Karl Freiherr von Esebeck tried two assaults to take the city, before they were forced to retread under heavy enemy fighter and bomber fire into Togoland again.

 

[CountofDooku]

Chapter 75: The Kingdom of Cambodia (Preăh Réachéanachâk Kâmpŭchéa):

Cambodia was not the weakest and unorganized new member states of the Co-Prosperity Sphere that emerged from French Indochina, but much to it's own anger one of the smallest. The 1940-41 Franco-Thai War had left the French Indochinese colonial leaders in a weak position and Fascist France had signed a agreement that allowed the Empire of Japan to station up to 25,000 soldier in Northern Vietnam. This weak position quickly lead to ambitions under the new Siamese government, lead by the pro-Japanese leadership of Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram that had recently strengthened its trade with Japan and even led parts of his own navy ships build in Japan. The Siamese took advantage of the weakened position of France, and invaded Cambodia's western provinces to which it had historic claims in a attempt to reconquer them. Following this invasion, Tokyo hosted the signature of a treaty in March 1941 that formally compelled the French to relinquish the provinces of Battambang, Siem Reap, Koh Kong and a narrow extension of land between the 15th parallel and the Dangrek Mountaind in Stung Treng Province.

In August 1941, the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy entered the French protectorate of Cambodia and established a garrison that numbered 8,000 troops, most of these soldiers came from the navy. But even with their presence and the declaration of the independence of the Kingdom of Cambodia, the Japanese and new Cambodian authorities allowed Fascist French colonial officials to remain at their administrative posts to govern the new nation in the best way. At the same time Siam had openly joined the Co-Prosperity Sphere as a member state and in exchange gained some new territory across the Cambodian and Laotian border region, that had once been stolen from him by France. As a result of this territorial exchange, Cambodia had lost almost half a million citizens and one-third of its former surface area to Siam. While the Cambodians had hoped that the Independence from French Indochina with it's 24,568,000 inhabitants would give them a position of economic and territorial power, they were quickly disappointed. While the Cambodians had known that Laos with it's 1,300,000 citizens would not be a part of their nation, they feared that the Siamese might annex it right away as a fellow Tai nation. Luckily for Cambodia, Japan prevented this move and ambitions, by strengthening the independent Kingdom of Laos to prevent a southern Siamese hegemony in the Co-Prosperity Sphere. The great disappointment continued when the Cambodians realized that the new Empire of Vietnam would not only control Tonkin with it's 7,784,000 and Annam with it's 8,000,000 citizens, but also Cochinchina with it's 4,484,000 people, a region that had been Cambodian during the fifteen hundreds. Cochinshina with it's resources, railways (connecting Siam and Vietnam) and the city and harbor of Saigon would have given the Kingdom of Cambodia more influence, power and therefore independence. But the Vietnamese and Japanese knew that by now the Vietnamese were the majority of the population in the area and that Khmer was only spoken n a few border regions between the former Protectorate of Cochinchina and Cambodia, therefore the region became a part of the Empire of Vietnam.

While this arguing on itself would be fine, the Kingdom of Cambodia was enraged that at the same time the Siamese Empire gained a few more parts of the border then it already had, leading to the loss of nearly 1,000,000 Cambodian citizens to Siam from 2,803,000 in total. The outrage was great, but Japan knew this border adjustments were the only way to prevent Siam from annexing Laos directly and becoming the major influential Co-Prosperity Sphere member in the region that would then even had a land bridge to the Tai people of Taikoku. The possibility off all three majority Tai nations (Siam, Laos and Taikoku) merging to a powerful national state in the southern Co-Prosperity Sphere was seen as a great danger for the Japanese guidance and enlightenment of the area and so the Tai just like the Han Chinese were split up into smaller, independent states. In exchange for accepting this, the Siamese got parts of Cambodia. The Cambodian Khmer Nationalist were outraged by this, feeling cramped in a Cambodia that made up only 1/3 of it's potential region between a powerful Empire of Vietnam and the also powerful Empire of Siam. Strangely enough this decision to split up French Indochina across recent ethnic and linguistic lines, drove the Cambodians closer to the Empire of Japan over time as a powerful ally.

As a important center for rice and pepper crops, Cambodia was supported by the Imperial Japanese Navy and Japanese Zaibatsu who started to build a railway from the capital Phnom Penh over Takev towards Krong Keb and Kampóng Saom where the main trade harbors and yards for Cambodia were build and expanded by them. During this first year up to 100,000 Japanese came as colonists, farmers, workers for the Army, Navy and Zaibatsu as well as advisers for the new Royal Cambodian state. Their support was deeply welcomed in a nation that had recently lost so many of it's own citizens to the neighboring member states of the Co-Prosperity Sphere and quickly Japanese became the new language beside Khmer spoken in public documents and laws to show the deep connection between the Khmer and Yamato people. The Imperial Japanese Army meanwhile had only a small influence in Cambodia, mostly because the Communist rebels and anti-government rebellions were not as common in the Kingdom of Cambodia as they were in Vietnam and Laos. Therefore the Imperial Japanese Navy supported the Royal Cambodian Navy by giving them one former light cruiser from the French Indochina Colony that was captured as well as building new cruisers and destroyers for Cambodia. The Royal Cambodian Army trained under Japanese officers and commanders, focusing mostly on helping the Royal Cambodian Police Guard with securing the bigger cities, towns, ports and border regions. Despite this Cambodia much like Vietnam and Lao was supported by the Japanese to establish their own Royal Cambodian Air Force out of older Japanese machines and even create a Cambodian Tank Regiment (later Division) just like Vietnam, Laos and other members of the Co-Prosperity Sphere. The main reason for this more modern tank and air forces with fighters and bombers were mostly not the small and poorly equipped Communist rebels as the Japanese and the Co-Prosperity Sphere claimed, but to prepare the former regions of French Indochina to defend their Independence, should the French Europeans or Americans ever return to colonize their lands again.

 

[CountofDooku]

Chapter 76: American Isolationism and internal politics:

The United States presidential election of 1940 was the 39th quadrennial presidential election and overshadowed by the Second Great War in Europe as well as the emerging from the Great Depression inside the United States themselves. The outcome of the election vote was close, but Franklin D. Roosevelt, acutely aware of strong isolationist and non-interventionism sentiment, promised there would be no involvement in foreign wars if he were re-elected. Wendell Willkie, who had not previously run for public office, conducted an energetic campaign and managed to revive Republican strength in areas of the Midwest and Northeast. He criticized perceived incompetence and waste in the New Deal, warned of the dangers of breaking the two-term tradition, and accused Roosevelt of secretly planning to take the country into the Second Great War. While the outcome of the election was close, Willkie was damaged by his association with big business, as many working class voters blamed business leaders for the onset of the Great Depression.

While the major partied remained the Democrats and the Republicans, the Progressive, Socialist, Social Labor, Prohibition, and even Fascist, Communists and Monarchic Parties had tried their luck. It was undeniable that the recent events in Europe and Asia also had a great impact in the American vote, it's outcome and the mindset of many Americans at that time. Even the great Parties of the Democrats and the Republicans were divided into social-conservatices, liberal Democrats and liberal Republicans. The War in Europe had left a negative impression of religion and it's connections in politics in the minds of most republicans, while the south still being a major player in the Democratic party along was very religious. On the other hand the authoritarian and militaristic ideology of this religious and aristocratic leaders that had managed to take over Europe was unpopular by most Americans. In 1919 Europe had nearly be all parliamentarian-democratic in some way with the exception of Hungary and the Soviet Union, now only twenty years later all this hard earned fruits of the First Great War were already gone and most of Europe was monarchistic and authoritarian once again. This victories of the Axis Central Powers and their fulfilling of the goals of the former Central Powers further divided the United States into interventionists and isolationist.

While the Democrats stayed strong in the south, the north east of New England became strongly Republican with the exception of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. It looked like New York,Texas, and Illinois would be the new swing states in the upcoming United States Senate elections of 1942. The Democrats formed the New Deal Coalition, that wished to use a big Government to help eliminate the problems of the society with a heavy religious emphasis behind many of them. The more Libertarian Republicans on the other hand feared what had happened to the Democracies in Europe and devoted their goal to a small government in all regards, from economics to social matters. Their plan would work like a charm and see the Senate change from majority Democratic to a Republican majority. Before the Democrats hold 65 of the 96 seats and the Republicans 29, after the United States Senate elections of 1942 the new vote for 33 seats saw 20 seats won by the Republicans, giving them the needed majority of 49 seats thanks to Progressive Party that had formerly split from the Republicans, but would win 1 seat and side with the Republicans over the Democrats. It would be a foretaste of the United States presidential election of 1944, when Thomas E. Dewey, despite the ongoing war, became the new president. In the end it would be it's close to fascist and authoritarian decisions during the Great Depression and his broken promise to go not go to war that would let Roosevelt/Truman to lose to Dewey/Bricker in 1944.

Then again another society group was rising inside of the United States, the German American Bund, or German American Federation (German: Amerikadeutscher Bund), was a German American pro-Fascist, later pro-Emperor organization established in 1936 to succeed Friends of New Germany (FONG), the new name being chosen to emphasize the group's American credentials after press criticism that the organization was unpatriotic. The Bund was to consist only of Amercian citizens of German descent. Its main goal was to promote a favorable view of Nazi Germany and later the German Empire.

In March 1936, the German American Bund was established as a follow-up organization for the Friends of New Germany in Buffalo, New York. The Bund elected a German-born American citizen Fritz Julius Kuhn as its leader (Bundesführer). Kuhn was a veteran of the Bavarian infantry during the First World War and a Alter Kämpfer (old fighter) of the Nazi Party who, in 1934, was granted American citizenship. Kuhn was initially effective as a leader and was able to unite the organization and expand its membership but came to be seen simply as an incompetent swindler and liar. The administrative structure of the Bund mimicked the regional administrative subdivision of the Nazi Party and later the structure and subdivision of the new German Empire. The United States was divided into three Gaue (later county): Gau Ost (East), Gau West and Gau Midwest. Together the three Gaue comprised 69 Ortsgruppen (local groups): 40 in Gau Ost (17 in New York), 10 in Gau West and 19 in Gau Midwest. Each Gau had its own Gauleiter (later Count to empathise their monarchistic loyalty) and staff to direct the Bund operations in the region in accordance with the Führerprinzip and later Imperial leadership of the German Emperor. The Bund's national headquarters was located at 178 East 85th Street in New York City borough of Manhattan.

The Bund established a number of training camps, including Camp Nordland in Sussex County, New Jerseay. Camp Siegfried in Yaphank, New York, Camp Hindenburg in Grafton, Wisconsin, Deutschhorst Country Club in Sellesville, Pennsylvania, Camp Wilhelm in Bloomingdale, New Jersey and Camp Highland in New York state. The Bund held rallies with Nazi and later Imperial German insignia and procedures such as the and attacked the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jewish groups, Anti-Monarchists, Communism, "Moscow-directed" trade unions and American boycotts of German goods. The organization claimed to show its loyalty to America by displaying the flag of the United States at Bund meetings, and declared that George Washington was "the first fascist monarchist" who did not believe democracy would work. Some Bund members even went so far to declare Washington had wished to crown himself Washington I of a constitutional American kingdom, but was betrayed by jewish-communist-freemansons.

Kuhn and a few other Bundmen traveled to Berlin to attend the 1936 Summer Olympics. During the trip, he visited the Reich Chancellery, where his picture was taken with Hitler. This act did not constitute an official Nazi approval for Kuhn's organization: German Ambassador to the United States Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff expressed his disapproval and concern over the group to Berlin, causing distrust between the Bund and the Nazi regime. The organization received no financial or verbal support from Germany. In response to the outrage of Jewish war veterans, Congress in 1938 passed the Foreign Agents Registration Act requiring foreign agents to register with the State Department. On March 1, 1938, the Nazi government decreed that no Reichsdeutsche (German nationals) could be a member of the Bund, and that no Nazi emblems were to be used by the organization. This was done both to appease the U.S. and to distance Germany from the Bund, which was increasingly a cause of embarrassment with its rhetoric and actions.

Arguably, the zenith of the Bund's activities was the rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City on February 20, 1939. Some 20,000 people attended and heard Kuhn criticize President Roosevelt by repeatedly referring to him as "Frank D. Rosenfeld", calling his New Deal the "Jew Deal" and denouncing what he believed to be Bolshevik-Jewish American leadership. Most shocking to American sensibilities was the outbreak of violence between protesters and Bund storm troopers. The rally, which attracted 20,000 Fascist-Monarchist supporters, was the topic of some local and national-wide in ten major american newspapers.

In 1939, a New York tax investigation determined that Kuhn had embezzled $14,000 from the Bund. The Bund did not seek to have Kuhn prosecuted, operating on the principle (Führerprinzip) that the leader had absolute power. However, New York City's district attorney prosecuted him in an attempt to cripple the Bund. On December 5, 1939, Kuhn was sentenced to two and a half to five years in prison for tax evasion and embezzlement. New Bund leaders replaced Kuhn, most notably Gerhard Kunze, but only for brief periods. A year after the outbreak of the Second Great War, Congress enacted a peacetime military draft in September 1940. The Bund counseled members of draft age to evade conscription, a criminal offense punishable by up to five years in jail and a $10,000 fine. Gerhard Kunze fled to Mexico in November 1941. This allowed the Bund to be reformed as the Monarchistic German American Bund (MGAB), or Monarchistic German American Federation (MGAF). The new leaders of the Bund were from now on elected out of these 25,000 people that became paying members only from these with noble blood in their families. This new monarchism, together with the Alien Registration Act of 1940, when 300,000 German-born resident aliens who had German citizenship were required to register with the Federal government and restricted their travel and property ownership rights crippled the influence and attraction of the Monarchistic German American Bund so that it became negligible.