Kindle, I've bought a few other books off Sealion Press and they've all had TOC's. Are any other readers of the book finding the same problem?
The Great Crusade (Reds! Part 3)
- Thread starter Aelita
- Start date
China in the Second World War Part IV (TRSR)
Excerpt from China in the Second world war by General (class AAAAA) Leang
The great betrayal and the escalation of the war
Following the rape of Nanjing, the Kuomintang was left bewildered. The American and Soviet supported leftist faction under the leadership of Wang Jingwei was quick to issue criticisms of Jiang Jieshi's leadership, with many going as far as to launch personally directed insults at him as they questioned his competence and his leadership. Adding only further stress to Jiang Jieshi's rightist faction was that the American and Soviet delegations he so desperately looked to for foreign supplies and aid both informed him that it was unlikely that the Comintern would go to war directly with Japan. The reasons for this were plainly stated, at the time Japan had close ties to the imperial powers of western Europe as well as the burgeoning fascist Axis in South America and Central Europe; war with Japan might be used as a pretext that would plunge the world into a general world war, one of an even greater scale than the last one. And the simple reality was that it was felt that the Comintern was not yet ready for the final conflict.
Preparations were made for what was seen as an inevitable second world war, a conflict many planners outright referred to as "Armageddon" due to the expected scale. The UASR and USSR and their allies would be facing the combined might of Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Japan and assorted allies such as the low countries, Portugal, Brazil and more. No continent would be spared and many casualty estimates peaked over one hundred million. Thus, war would be avoided until the Comintern was ready. America needed to do more than simply recover from the depression, it needed to build a fleet capable of combating the combined navies of all of its enemies at once across the entirety of the world's oceans, it needed an air force that could combat the planes of five other great powers simultaneously, and an army that could support revolutionary movements on every continent in the world. It also had to strengthen its allies; while the Comintern was very large; much of it was underindustrialized. Even the Soviet Union had perhaps a quarter of the per capita industrial output of the UASR, to say nothing of smaller allies such as Mexico.
Heavy industrialization programs were being undertaken to modernize the economic output of the Comintern and were not expected to be completed until well into the 1940s. Furthermore, a world war also demanded a network of bases and logistical chains that would girdle the entire globe. Having anticipated war with the Indo-Pacific fleets of France, Britain, Japan and the Netherlands from the very birth of the third American republic in an effort by the European Empires to distract from the primary expected front in the Atlantic, Comintern planners were in the midst of heavy militarily useful construction programs taking place in the Soviet far east, Alaska, Hawai'i and the string of pacific Islands the UASR hadn't yet lost to Japanese, British, French, or Dutch opportunism during the second revolutionary war. In a review of the progress of these programs done by a joint commission of American, Soviet, and Chilean military and civilian officials in 1936 it was deemed that it was unlikely that the pacific front would be acceptably ready for a general pacific war against the European Empires and Japan until at least 1943.
Development and military construction programs being done in Kamchatka and Transamur were proceeding according to pace, and the nucleus of a battle worthy Soviet pacific fleet were starting to take shape as plans to turn the undeveloped Soviet far east into a place at least comparable to the American pacific northwest in terms of development were underway, with pair of new cities; Alexovka and Tikhygrad having recently been founded with the intent of becoming new naval base towns. However the USSR feared attacks into the far east by Japan and the American navy felt its efforts would be better spent wresting control of the Atlantic away from its enemies as opposed to fighting a lone great power half the world away and the auxiliary fleets of three of its expected enemies. The intention of the build up in the pacific was not quite to create a military presence that could take over Japan as the paranoid cliques running Japan's fascist state believed, but rather to create something able to hold Japan off until the business with the great powers of Europe was dealt with. This is evidenced by the Atlantic and Arctic fleets of the American navy getting much more attention in the build up, while the bulk of Soviet naval expansion was being reserved for the Arctic, Baltic, and Black sea fleets with the Pacific Fleet only slated to have four capital ships (two carriers and two battleships), eight cruisers (four heavy, four light), sixteen destroyers, and thirty two frigates when expansion was complete.
All this lead to a decision to avoid official war with Japan over China but to extend credit, volunteers, advisers, and to allow for the discounted sale of weapons, industrial equipment, and vehicles to China. While the CPC and the Left Kuomintang were understanding of the decision if somewhat displeased by it Jiang Jieshi was not. The final straw however, proved to be the Comintern's silence on the question of allowing for referendums on the secession of Xinjiang, Manchuria, and a merger of Inner Mongolia to the Soviet friendly People's Republic of Mongolia and their lack of a decisive answer on the question of Tibet. These questions were still a subject of a great deal of debate within the Comintern itself as those who hoped to support their national liberation came to loggerheads with those who wanted to preserve the territorial integrity of China and thus the Comintern decided it would be best to avoid giving a definitive reply until they came to a decision themselves.
This lead to Jiang Jieshi losing faith in the Comintern, only further aggravated by the Comintern's delegates seeming to prefer to speak to Wang Jingwei and the CPC than himself or his own faction. Feeling snubbed by the reds, he turned to other means of help. His contacts with the courts of Europe found that he could count on little support against Japan which Europe hoped to retain as an ally by letting it sate its desire for a colonial empire with Chinese, Soviet, and American blood. Further frustrated by yet further reports of setbacks and defeats on the front; he did the unthinkable. By June of 1938 it was clear that Japan was marching from victory to victory, one of his advisers told him as much, but a message sent directly to him gave him reason to pause. The Japanese were looking for a "partner who can be trusted to restore order to China as a brother in our Co-prosperity sphere."
The Japanese offered many temptations, renewed relations with Western and Central Europe, aid with industrial development, training by Japanese officers, access to weapons from Europe and Japan, and help with rooting out all his enemies in the party and the communists. Furthermore, many of the warlords of China had also been extended offers to in essence, join the winning team and play their part in a new; re-organized China. Despite the nationalistic hatred many in China felt towards Japan due to the Empire's bitterly antagonistic history with China, many could be swayed by its anti-communism and others were swayed by Japan's offer to help China rise into an industrial power swiftly just as Japan once did following the Meiji restoration. Of course, in reality Japan was merely fishing for puppets who would provide an air of legitimacy for what would be Japan's vast new colony of China that would be the bedrock of Japan's ascension to the world's mightiest nation and the base with which it could build a war machine to forever keep its enemies cowering before the Empire of the Rising Sun. But the offer was tempting. Japan's spies within the KMT had informed them well of the divisions in the party, and they knew just which offers to make to sway their loyalty.
Following the link up of the Japanese southern and Northern fronts that in essence ceded the control of most of China's coast to Japan in fall of 1938 Jiang Jieshi made his decision. Driving to Japanese lines in a motorcade he asked to speak with the commanders of the Kwantung Army and began negotiations for the formation of this new government. Japan of course, negotiated from a position of strength, but Jiang Jieshi promised to mobilize the right wing of the KMT and those warlords loyal to him for the war effort, and also promised to make amends with the Chinese merchants alienated by prior reprisals against them by the Kuomintang and thus secure their support as well. With the approval of General Kenchiki Ueda and the blessing of the Japanese government, the newborn "re-organized Republic of China" was announced to the world on the twentieth of October, 1938.
Jiang Jieshi made an announcement to the Chinese people, asking them to rise up against the Anti-Chinese government that had been duped by the Red Imperialists of Moscow and Debs D.C and stand with him against the foreign tide. He made calls for pan-asian brotherhood against the ideals of westerners who sought to reduce China into a red puppet, castigating the Communist party and the left of the KMT as the slaves of foreign devils. He cited the Comintern's lack of a committed answer to the question of Chinese territorial integrity; claiming that they hoped to dismember China into weak client states. He also cited the Comintern's support for "immorality of the highest degree" by making a laundry list of allegations against Communist social values meant to rile up traditionalists in China against the left in China. He promised prosperity for those who worked hard, order and security for those who pledged their allegiance to China, a new dawn for a China that would soon industrialize into a great power as Japan had, and an end to the days when outsiders could bully China. He took every effort to paint his new allegiance as a simple alliance, making sure to stress that this would be an equal partnership rather than a dependency as the Communists would create.
This thirty minute long address was a prolonged diatribe of a paranoid man, but it and other speaking efforts by his allies in the KMT and in the Chinese bourgeoisie whom he mollified with promises of prosperity and the development of China into a wealthy nation and plentiful aid to develop themselves while offering a "solution to the question of labor that is sure to please everyone" made his intention clear. China would no longer be facing only a foreign invasion by the Japanese military but also a civil war as the tenuous peace formed by the Japanese invasion fell apart in dramatic fashion. The Warlords and cliques across China quickly pledged their allegiance and forces to one side or the other as Wang Jingwei made his own counter address condemning the "debased treason and shameless lying" of Jieshi, urging China to stand for equality, liberty, and solidarity against the "naked counter-revolution". His address made certain to remind listeners of Japan's atrocities, made promises of the establishment of democracy, of a shared common prosperity rather than a "a furious squabbling for power and wealth', land reform, and more. Prominent Chinese Communists such as Cheng Duxiu and Zhang Whetian also made their appeals, with some even making the call to Chinese Women to take up arms to defend their homelands from attack. All made sure to stress that the Comintern had only ever sought to help China with their "Generous aid in all material things" and that "even now they send their volunteers to fight alongside us as comrades."
The battle lines were drawn, with Japan and traitor forces basing themselves along the coast and along major waterways that they were able to take control of while loyalist forces sought to take control of the countryside and the hinterlands. Farmlands and cities that could be secured by the loyalists were identified by flying red banners and loyalist forces began the process of land reform immediately to try and win over the peasant masses of china. The border with Mongolia and the Soviet union would be the primary lifeline to the loyalist forces in China; far from the prying eyes of Japan would come volunteers, officers, equipment, money, and supplies. Many of these would include much needed heavy weaponry, vehicles, and aircraft. With Japan's air supremacy and the traitors' newfound access to the option to purchase aircraft from Japan and Europe, the loyalists had to constantly fear the skies and so gladly took any means of air defense they could. Many Chinese pilots would be trained in the Soviet Union by American and Soviet leaders who educated them in modern air combat tactics, and many of these were themselves trained to educate others to build a nucleus of a new air force.
Volunteer airmen from the Comintern were some of the first volunteers to help against Japanese aggression and traitor pilots, flying desperate missions against waves of Japanese bombers and attack planes that sought to both support Japanese troops on the ground and terrorize civilians into submission. As Japan identified the location of factories built or moved into loyalist territories; air raids against these territories commenced and had to be fought; with the first air victories by Volunteer fliers being by the American all female "Raptor" unit as Lea Sharett shot down a Ki-1 over a factory in Hunan.
Tanks were also of huge importance. On the vast fields of China, armoured support was invaluable and Japan had a crushing advantage in this field. Even seemingly obsolete vehicles such as the T-26 and the American T-1 were considered precious assets every time the loyalist government could acquire them; following the maxim of "an old tank is better than no tank". Though a far cry from the swirling melees of hundreds of armoured vehicles that would define the war with germany, these early tank engagements came as a surprise to Japan whose armoured corps had grown used to essential invulnerability on the battlefield with even their least capable vehicles. With most of their training being focused on infantry support due to the Kwantung army having little expectation of having to engaged in armoured warfare, these first elements of the National Revolutionary Army's armoured corps cut their teeth on the plains of inner china and accounted well for themselves. Many, such as the female tank ace Liu Han; even became celebrities of sorts.
However, this in turn spurred the traitor Chinese and Japan to take armoured warfare more seriously; developing more capable anti-tank weapons and tactics as well as either acquiring or developing more and better vehicles. Learning through the harsh teacher of experience further taught them to refine their anti-aircraft methods as the Chinese air force grew from virtually nonexistent to an oft cursed nuisance. Troops who once struggled to stay fed, let alone supplied on the field were now sporting more and more modern weaponry and ample rations. Furthermore, the partisan issue was a continually growing plague in China. Japanese and traitor patrols found themselves growing increasingly paranoid as more guns and explosives found their way into the hands of resistance movements against Japanese occupation. Guerilla warfare cells operated deep within enemy territory to attack supply caches, take out officers, cut communications, and inform other anti-Japanese forces of the movements and dispositions of enemy troops. Such was met with the infamous "three alls" policy; "kill all, loot all, burn all". Terror would be the primary reactionary weapon to try and keep partisans under control, if a village refused to give up the locations of partisans they could expect a bacchanalia of savage cruelty to fall upon them. Settlements were burned, women and girls found themselves forced into the comfort women battalions, men were either killed on the spot or forced into slave labor, and the production of food was swiftly placed under the authority of the Japanese Army and the traitor KMT. As a country perennially in need of Iron and other metallic resources, many of these slave laborers would be forced into mines to extract precious ores to acquire the steel Japan desperately needed for its fleet and its tanks and artillery.
Sporadic fighting carried on throughout the winter and intensified in the spring as Japan and the traitors convened for a strategy meant to deliver them a victory or at the very least expand their holdings dramatically. The generals convened agreed that the primary goal would have to be to close off the borders the Chinese Loyalists shared with Mongolia and the Soviet Union so as to cut off the flow of aid. Then it was also agreed that crucial to Japan's plans of victory would be the control of as much food production in China as possible. Guns may decide battles, but rice and salt decides wars. The theory was that once they were cut off from foreign aid and it became possible to starve out the resistance, victory would inevitably follow. The operation, codenamed Onikaze; or Demon wind, was planned to begin in the summer of 1939 as both sides prepared for renewed struggle.
The great betrayal and the escalation of the war
Following the rape of Nanjing, the Kuomintang was left bewildered. The American and Soviet supported leftist faction under the leadership of Wang Jingwei was quick to issue criticisms of Jiang Jieshi's leadership, with many going as far as to launch personally directed insults at him as they questioned his competence and his leadership. Adding only further stress to Jiang Jieshi's rightist faction was that the American and Soviet delegations he so desperately looked to for foreign supplies and aid both informed him that it was unlikely that the Comintern would go to war directly with Japan. The reasons for this were plainly stated, at the time Japan had close ties to the imperial powers of western Europe as well as the burgeoning fascist Axis in South America and Central Europe; war with Japan might be used as a pretext that would plunge the world into a general world war, one of an even greater scale than the last one. And the simple reality was that it was felt that the Comintern was not yet ready for the final conflict.
Preparations were made for what was seen as an inevitable second world war, a conflict many planners outright referred to as "Armageddon" due to the expected scale. The UASR and USSR and their allies would be facing the combined might of Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Japan and assorted allies such as the low countries, Portugal, Brazil and more. No continent would be spared and many casualty estimates peaked over one hundred million. Thus, war would be avoided until the Comintern was ready. America needed to do more than simply recover from the depression, it needed to build a fleet capable of combating the combined navies of all of its enemies at once across the entirety of the world's oceans, it needed an air force that could combat the planes of five other great powers simultaneously, and an army that could support revolutionary movements on every continent in the world. It also had to strengthen its allies; while the Comintern was very large; much of it was underindustrialized. Even the Soviet Union had perhaps a quarter of the per capita industrial output of the UASR, to say nothing of smaller allies such as Mexico.
Heavy industrialization programs were being undertaken to modernize the economic output of the Comintern and were not expected to be completed until well into the 1940s. Furthermore, a world war also demanded a network of bases and logistical chains that would girdle the entire globe. Having anticipated war with the Indo-Pacific fleets of France, Britain, Japan and the Netherlands from the very birth of the third American republic in an effort by the European Empires to distract from the primary expected front in the Atlantic, Comintern planners were in the midst of heavy militarily useful construction programs taking place in the Soviet far east, Alaska, Hawai'i and the string of pacific Islands the UASR hadn't yet lost to Japanese, British, French, or Dutch opportunism during the second revolutionary war. In a review of the progress of these programs done by a joint commission of American, Soviet, and Chilean military and civilian officials in 1936 it was deemed that it was unlikely that the pacific front would be acceptably ready for a general pacific war against the European Empires and Japan until at least 1943.
Development and military construction programs being done in Kamchatka and Transamur were proceeding according to pace, and the nucleus of a battle worthy Soviet pacific fleet were starting to take shape as plans to turn the undeveloped Soviet far east into a place at least comparable to the American pacific northwest in terms of development were underway, with pair of new cities; Alexovka and Tikhygrad having recently been founded with the intent of becoming new naval base towns. However the USSR feared attacks into the far east by Japan and the American navy felt its efforts would be better spent wresting control of the Atlantic away from its enemies as opposed to fighting a lone great power half the world away and the auxiliary fleets of three of its expected enemies. The intention of the build up in the pacific was not quite to create a military presence that could take over Japan as the paranoid cliques running Japan's fascist state believed, but rather to create something able to hold Japan off until the business with the great powers of Europe was dealt with. This is evidenced by the Atlantic and Arctic fleets of the American navy getting much more attention in the build up, while the bulk of Soviet naval expansion was being reserved for the Arctic, Baltic, and Black sea fleets with the Pacific Fleet only slated to have four capital ships (two carriers and two battleships), eight cruisers (four heavy, four light), sixteen destroyers, and thirty two frigates when expansion was complete.
All this lead to a decision to avoid official war with Japan over China but to extend credit, volunteers, advisers, and to allow for the discounted sale of weapons, industrial equipment, and vehicles to China. While the CPC and the Left Kuomintang were understanding of the decision if somewhat displeased by it Jiang Jieshi was not. The final straw however, proved to be the Comintern's silence on the question of allowing for referendums on the secession of Xinjiang, Manchuria, and a merger of Inner Mongolia to the Soviet friendly People's Republic of Mongolia and their lack of a decisive answer on the question of Tibet. These questions were still a subject of a great deal of debate within the Comintern itself as those who hoped to support their national liberation came to loggerheads with those who wanted to preserve the territorial integrity of China and thus the Comintern decided it would be best to avoid giving a definitive reply until they came to a decision themselves.
This lead to Jiang Jieshi losing faith in the Comintern, only further aggravated by the Comintern's delegates seeming to prefer to speak to Wang Jingwei and the CPC than himself or his own faction. Feeling snubbed by the reds, he turned to other means of help. His contacts with the courts of Europe found that he could count on little support against Japan which Europe hoped to retain as an ally by letting it sate its desire for a colonial empire with Chinese, Soviet, and American blood. Further frustrated by yet further reports of setbacks and defeats on the front; he did the unthinkable. By June of 1938 it was clear that Japan was marching from victory to victory, one of his advisers told him as much, but a message sent directly to him gave him reason to pause. The Japanese were looking for a "partner who can be trusted to restore order to China as a brother in our Co-prosperity sphere."
The Japanese offered many temptations, renewed relations with Western and Central Europe, aid with industrial development, training by Japanese officers, access to weapons from Europe and Japan, and help with rooting out all his enemies in the party and the communists. Furthermore, many of the warlords of China had also been extended offers to in essence, join the winning team and play their part in a new; re-organized China. Despite the nationalistic hatred many in China felt towards Japan due to the Empire's bitterly antagonistic history with China, many could be swayed by its anti-communism and others were swayed by Japan's offer to help China rise into an industrial power swiftly just as Japan once did following the Meiji restoration. Of course, in reality Japan was merely fishing for puppets who would provide an air of legitimacy for what would be Japan's vast new colony of China that would be the bedrock of Japan's ascension to the world's mightiest nation and the base with which it could build a war machine to forever keep its enemies cowering before the Empire of the Rising Sun. But the offer was tempting. Japan's spies within the KMT had informed them well of the divisions in the party, and they knew just which offers to make to sway their loyalty.
Following the link up of the Japanese southern and Northern fronts that in essence ceded the control of most of China's coast to Japan in fall of 1938 Jiang Jieshi made his decision. Driving to Japanese lines in a motorcade he asked to speak with the commanders of the Kwantung Army and began negotiations for the formation of this new government. Japan of course, negotiated from a position of strength, but Jiang Jieshi promised to mobilize the right wing of the KMT and those warlords loyal to him for the war effort, and also promised to make amends with the Chinese merchants alienated by prior reprisals against them by the Kuomintang and thus secure their support as well. With the approval of General Kenchiki Ueda and the blessing of the Japanese government, the newborn "re-organized Republic of China" was announced to the world on the twentieth of October, 1938.
Jiang Jieshi made an announcement to the Chinese people, asking them to rise up against the Anti-Chinese government that had been duped by the Red Imperialists of Moscow and Debs D.C and stand with him against the foreign tide. He made calls for pan-asian brotherhood against the ideals of westerners who sought to reduce China into a red puppet, castigating the Communist party and the left of the KMT as the slaves of foreign devils. He cited the Comintern's lack of a committed answer to the question of Chinese territorial integrity; claiming that they hoped to dismember China into weak client states. He also cited the Comintern's support for "immorality of the highest degree" by making a laundry list of allegations against Communist social values meant to rile up traditionalists in China against the left in China. He promised prosperity for those who worked hard, order and security for those who pledged their allegiance to China, a new dawn for a China that would soon industrialize into a great power as Japan had, and an end to the days when outsiders could bully China. He took every effort to paint his new allegiance as a simple alliance, making sure to stress that this would be an equal partnership rather than a dependency as the Communists would create.
This thirty minute long address was a prolonged diatribe of a paranoid man, but it and other speaking efforts by his allies in the KMT and in the Chinese bourgeoisie whom he mollified with promises of prosperity and the development of China into a wealthy nation and plentiful aid to develop themselves while offering a "solution to the question of labor that is sure to please everyone" made his intention clear. China would no longer be facing only a foreign invasion by the Japanese military but also a civil war as the tenuous peace formed by the Japanese invasion fell apart in dramatic fashion. The Warlords and cliques across China quickly pledged their allegiance and forces to one side or the other as Wang Jingwei made his own counter address condemning the "debased treason and shameless lying" of Jieshi, urging China to stand for equality, liberty, and solidarity against the "naked counter-revolution". His address made certain to remind listeners of Japan's atrocities, made promises of the establishment of democracy, of a shared common prosperity rather than a "a furious squabbling for power and wealth', land reform, and more. Prominent Chinese Communists such as Cheng Duxiu and Zhang Whetian also made their appeals, with some even making the call to Chinese Women to take up arms to defend their homelands from attack. All made sure to stress that the Comintern had only ever sought to help China with their "Generous aid in all material things" and that "even now they send their volunteers to fight alongside us as comrades."
The battle lines were drawn, with Japan and traitor forces basing themselves along the coast and along major waterways that they were able to take control of while loyalist forces sought to take control of the countryside and the hinterlands. Farmlands and cities that could be secured by the loyalists were identified by flying red banners and loyalist forces began the process of land reform immediately to try and win over the peasant masses of china. The border with Mongolia and the Soviet union would be the primary lifeline to the loyalist forces in China; far from the prying eyes of Japan would come volunteers, officers, equipment, money, and supplies. Many of these would include much needed heavy weaponry, vehicles, and aircraft. With Japan's air supremacy and the traitors' newfound access to the option to purchase aircraft from Japan and Europe, the loyalists had to constantly fear the skies and so gladly took any means of air defense they could. Many Chinese pilots would be trained in the Soviet Union by American and Soviet leaders who educated them in modern air combat tactics, and many of these were themselves trained to educate others to build a nucleus of a new air force.
Volunteer airmen from the Comintern were some of the first volunteers to help against Japanese aggression and traitor pilots, flying desperate missions against waves of Japanese bombers and attack planes that sought to both support Japanese troops on the ground and terrorize civilians into submission. As Japan identified the location of factories built or moved into loyalist territories; air raids against these territories commenced and had to be fought; with the first air victories by Volunteer fliers being by the American all female "Raptor" unit as Lea Sharett shot down a Ki-1 over a factory in Hunan.
Tanks were also of huge importance. On the vast fields of China, armoured support was invaluable and Japan had a crushing advantage in this field. Even seemingly obsolete vehicles such as the T-26 and the American T-1 were considered precious assets every time the loyalist government could acquire them; following the maxim of "an old tank is better than no tank". Though a far cry from the swirling melees of hundreds of armoured vehicles that would define the war with germany, these early tank engagements came as a surprise to Japan whose armoured corps had grown used to essential invulnerability on the battlefield with even their least capable vehicles. With most of their training being focused on infantry support due to the Kwantung army having little expectation of having to engaged in armoured warfare, these first elements of the National Revolutionary Army's armoured corps cut their teeth on the plains of inner china and accounted well for themselves. Many, such as the female tank ace Liu Han; even became celebrities of sorts.
However, this in turn spurred the traitor Chinese and Japan to take armoured warfare more seriously; developing more capable anti-tank weapons and tactics as well as either acquiring or developing more and better vehicles. Learning through the harsh teacher of experience further taught them to refine their anti-aircraft methods as the Chinese air force grew from virtually nonexistent to an oft cursed nuisance. Troops who once struggled to stay fed, let alone supplied on the field were now sporting more and more modern weaponry and ample rations. Furthermore, the partisan issue was a continually growing plague in China. Japanese and traitor patrols found themselves growing increasingly paranoid as more guns and explosives found their way into the hands of resistance movements against Japanese occupation. Guerilla warfare cells operated deep within enemy territory to attack supply caches, take out officers, cut communications, and inform other anti-Japanese forces of the movements and dispositions of enemy troops. Such was met with the infamous "three alls" policy; "kill all, loot all, burn all". Terror would be the primary reactionary weapon to try and keep partisans under control, if a village refused to give up the locations of partisans they could expect a bacchanalia of savage cruelty to fall upon them. Settlements were burned, women and girls found themselves forced into the comfort women battalions, men were either killed on the spot or forced into slave labor, and the production of food was swiftly placed under the authority of the Japanese Army and the traitor KMT. As a country perennially in need of Iron and other metallic resources, many of these slave laborers would be forced into mines to extract precious ores to acquire the steel Japan desperately needed for its fleet and its tanks and artillery.
Sporadic fighting carried on throughout the winter and intensified in the spring as Japan and the traitors convened for a strategy meant to deliver them a victory or at the very least expand their holdings dramatically. The generals convened agreed that the primary goal would have to be to close off the borders the Chinese Loyalists shared with Mongolia and the Soviet Union so as to cut off the flow of aid. Then it was also agreed that crucial to Japan's plans of victory would be the control of as much food production in China as possible. Guns may decide battles, but rice and salt decides wars. The theory was that once they were cut off from foreign aid and it became possible to starve out the resistance, victory would inevitably follow. The operation, codenamed Onikaze; or Demon wind, was planned to begin in the summer of 1939 as both sides prepared for renewed struggle.
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Ooooh. Damn, I'm guessing the China is going to have a distinct....well more distinct, Antipathy for everything Japanese in this history.
The invasion of Japan and the dismantling of the Imperial government followed by a large number of the architects of Japan's fascist state skipping town for Thailand does a lot to make Japan's reconciliation less of a...complicated issue than it is in our timeline. The Democratic Republic of Nippon has pretty close ties to the Worker's Republic of Korea and the Republic of China; forming what people in the Alliance sphere disparagingly call "the Red triad." This does a lot to help post-war China forgive what happened; especially as the Greater Indian Commonwealth and ANZAC become the new source of fear and worry for the red parts of east Asia.
....And it occurred to me that if the Emperor wasn't executed/his family obliterated, then he was either exiled or rendered into even more of a non-entity than modern japan. (Which interestingly enough, is technically a republic)
The Emperor actually abdicates and criticizes the Fascist government as he does so in an act of partial penance and partial blame dodging.
Interesting, and how many people bother listening to him on that?
We haven't decided on that yet but Hirohito and the house of Yamato has never really come up in our discussions.
It would be interesting to see a communist nation with a remnant of the old order still around. (Though I suspect the Emperor would stick even more to the religious side of things than OTL)
Bookmark1995
Banned
The fact that Red Japan isn't denying its crimes against the Chinese and the Japanese would also be a factor in better relations, I assume?
Panzer IV Nashorn
This was intended to be shorter than it is now but I kind of didn't stop writing.
Panzerkampfenwagen IV "Nashorn" (Or a brief history of the war in Europe with a focus on the Nashorn's service)
Type: Heavy Tank
Place of Origin: Germany
Used by: Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS, French State, Kingdom of Italy, Kingdom of Sweden, Kingdom of Romania, Kingdom of Hungary, Croatia, Switzerland, Reichswehr, Arabian Sultunate,Kingdom of Thailand, Empire of Vietnam, Republic of Rhodesia
In service: 1939-1954
Wars: Second World War
Designer: Henschel & Son, Ford-Werke GmbH
Designed: 1937-1938
Produced: 1939-1943
Number built: 4,100
Variants: Pz.Kpfw. IV H Ausf. H1 (Nashorn H1), Panzerkampfwagen Nashorn Ausf. E
Specifications
Mass: 54/57 Tons
Length: 6.316 meters
Width: 3.56 meters
Height: 3.0 meters
Crew: 5
Armor: Hull front 120 mm Flat (Glacis strip), 100mm Flat (On the rest of the glacis) , hull side 80 mm, rear 80 mm, top 25 mm, bottom 25 mm. 140mm glacis strip, 120mm frontal, hull side 80, rear 80mm for Ausf E.
Turret front 100mm flat, 100mm mantlet, turret side 80mm, 25mm turret roof. 120mm flat, 120mm mantlet for Ausf E.
Primary Armament: 8.8 cm KwK 36 L/56 gun
Secondary Armament: 1 x MG34 7.92 mm x 57 mm machine gun (Pintle), 1 x MG34 7.92 mm x 57 mm machine gun (Coaxial)
Engine: Ford-Maybach HL 215 TRM P45 (484.705 kW) or Ford-Maybach HL 220 TRM P45 (521.99 kW)
Power to mass: 8.976/9.157
Suspension: Torsion Bar
Operational Range: 195 km on roads, 110 km off road.
Speed: 45 km/h top speed, 40 km/h top sustained speed, 25 km/h cross country.
The Nashorn was the predominant heavy tank of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS in the early stages of the second world war, first seeing usage against Poland and Yugoslavia in the Prufung Krieg conflicts that lead to the second world war. The Tank is in many ways comparable to the KV-1 of the Soviet Union, the T-5 of the American Union, the Custodian of Britain, the Char B3 of France, the P38 of Italy, the Swedish Strv h/39, and the Japanese Type 5 Chi-Ho that were its contemporaries. Like most of these late inter-war heavy tanks, its gun only enjoyed modest superiority at best over its medium counterparts in terms of armour penetration but did have the advantage of substantially superior HE delivery capacity and like nearly all of the last generation of heavy tanks to be designed before the second world war's start; had roughly one hundred milimeters of effective frontal armor. Born out of essentially every country copying each other's designs, the last set of pre-war heavy tanks were not really differentiated by their firepower, armor, or speed but rather by their design philosophies, ergonomics, and other largely internal factors. The Nashorn was, by the standards of most other heavy tanks; very flat with almost no usage of armor sloping in order to allow for as much space for the crew as possible. The nashorn was also one of the tallest of the pre-war heavy tanks, only exceeded by its Japanese counterpart which was made deliberately tall to get as much gun depression as possible in Japan and Korea's hilly terrain. This lead to the nickname of "shoebox" due to its very rectangular shape and the vehicle perhaps epitomized every aspect of Pre-Eintwicklung series German tank design philosophies. Flat with a spacious interior and a quick to reload gun.
The development of the Panzerkorps started in secret during the days of the Weimar Republic when the Reichswehr secretly cooperated with the USSR on experimental test runs and tank design to get a feel for the usage and construction of tanks. Openly banned from tank development itself, Germany was lagging years behind the institutional experience built up in the entente while the Soviet Union; desperate for any sort of external trade that could help its modernization programs; was all too happy to provide for a fellow pariah state. With the ascension of Nazism to absolute control over Germany and the second American revolutionary war, the old restrictions from Versailles became worth less than the paper they were printed on. Not only was Hitler eager to flaunt them, western Europe, particularly Britain was all too happy to cease enforcing them. Out of a fear of Communism breaking its containment to the USSR and Mongolia to encompassing more than half of the New World the former entente nullified the majority of the restrictions on German weapons development. Indeed they were often outright eager to help Germany remilitarize to form a bulwark against the American supported Soviet Union and some extra industrial power to help out elsewhere in the world.
The Nazis, the Prussian military establishment, and the Junkers of Industry were all too happy to receive this blank cheque on remilitarization and began work on building a war machine to surpass even the Kaiserreich's almost immediately. Key to this was the need to develop tanks. Experience in the second American revolutionary war showed that the former British mode of thought; with Infantry and Cruiser tanks, was ill suited to the reality of mechanized warfare and so German tank development instead focused on the "Fullerist" school of thought. An armoured car, a dedicated carrier vehicle of some sort, a light tank, a medium tank, and a heavy tank whose chassis would be modified to fit whatever need was at hand. The Nashorn would be preceded by a number of prototype vehicles such as the D.W2 and a VK prototype before an acceptable design was selected from a number of entries in a contest meant to determine Germany's main line heavy tank. Porsche, Henschel, and Mercedez all submitted designs; the Porsche design placed the turret towards the front of the vehicle and had an impressive maximum thickness of more than two hundred milimeters of frontal armor across a strip across the glacis but was found to be far too front heavy a design to have acceptable cross country performance. The Mercedez design however, placed the turret at the rear and had 140 milimeters of front armor and 120 milimeters of side armor, with the intention being that the Tank would be able to use its turret placement and thick side armor to make good use of cover and only present a small portion of the tank at an extreme angle. This was rejected for the rear placement of the turret giving it poor gun depression which forced the vehicle to expose an unacceptable amount of its profile when cresting ridgelines in tests.
The Henschel design, being the most conservative of the three, thus became the chosen vehicle. Built to Ford's exacting standards for ease of replacement of parts and uniformity in manufacture, the vehicle was revealed in a military parade on Adolf Hitler's birthday in 1939 to a crowd of German citizens, military brass, and foreign observers. The vehicle would be produced in substantial numbers from a large array of factories to rival the Soviet KV-1 tank and the American T-5 in particular and was always intended to be the plated fist that would smash into the face of Communism in Europe while the Panzer III would be the spear tip. However it would not be against the Soviet Union that the Nashorn would see its first usage. Before he could start his war to destroy Slavic Socialism, Hitler and his cadres needed to complete some other steps first. First of course was the matter of getting a border with the Soviet Union so that the attack against it could begin immediately once the time came without having to first roll through a country. And of course, the Polish were but slavs; subhumans to be disposed of, displaced and enslaved in Hitler's scheme for German world domination. The Poles had been co-conspirators against the Czechoslovakians, but now they had outlived their usefulness.
As German high command already had word from France and Britain that the Allies would do nothing to help Poland the invasion was able to proceed with little more than limp wristed outrage from the rest of the world. Surrounded by German forces pouring out of East Prussia, Silesia, and occupied Czechoslovakia aided by fascist Hungary and Romania, the Polish armed forces were doomed. Outmatched, outnumbered, and outgunned by a German military gleefully helped in its reconstruction by the Imperialist countries of western Europe, the Polish gave a valiant struggle but one that could not last more than a few weeks. The Nashorn proved to be essentially invincible against the poor anti-tank armament of the Polish military, with nothing short of cumbersome heavy artillery guns being able to make any real impact against the Nashorn as it contemptuously brushed aside Poland's tankettes, multi-turreted heavy vehicles, field guns, and shattered its concrete fortifications. At the battle of Krakow, Nashorns seemed to almost ignore much of the opposition they faced, driving forward without stopping as they forced Polish lines wide open. Out of a company of nine of the heavy tanks, only one was disabled by an artillery strike at its tracks, while the other eight drove all the way from the Slovakian border to the outskirts of Krakow without any further loss. After the bombardment and fall of Warsaw, a parade formation of Nashorn tanks was lined up for a cinema operation where the disarmed and dejected Polish defenders were made to present their flags to German military officials while the country was being annexed around them.
With the fall of Poland there was one remaining obstacle to Germany and Italy's plans for eastern Europe; Yugoslavia. Having already invaded and annexed Albania earlier in the decade and freshly coming off from its conquest of Greece, Italy and Germany planned to have the invasion of Yugoslavia be a sort of "proving ground" for the Axis. Bulgaria sought Macedonia, Italy sought to dominate the adriatic via taking Montenegro and parts of Croatia s well as Serbia, Germany sought Slovenia, Hungary put in its claims for Vojvodina, and it was decided that a croatian puppet state would be put in place under the command of the fascist Ustase. Once again the Nashorn was driven into a foreign country following acts of "sabotage" at the border with Albania used as a pretext for war. Surrounded on all sides and standing against two of Europe's great powers and two of its neighbors, Yugoslavian resistance collapsed quickly. It was impossible to form a defensive frontline when they were being attacked from all angles and were under constant bombardment from air and sea, and once again the Nashorn found no worthy matches in Yugoslavia as the country quickly fell to the fascist jackboot and was partitioned out to its conquerors dreams of empire.
With Yugoslavia now out of the way, the Nashorn would have some months to cool its treads as teething issues were worked out, more crews were trained, and more tanks were built to either pad out the vehicle count of existing units or form new ones. When the order was given to launch operation Teutonic, the Nashorns were once again used as breakthrough vehicles. Charging forward in concentrated heavy tank formations, these heavy tanks found little threat from the T-26 and BT-7 tanks that still made up the bulk of the Soviet motor pool. However, the USSR had substantially better anti-tank guns than Poland and Yugoslavia, and a number of Nashorns were lost to fire from 57mm Zis-6 guns and 85mm anti-aircraft guns hurriedly pushed into service against incoming tanks. 76.2mm guns also proved to be a threat against Nashorns that exposed their flanks, and the heavy Nashorns often found it difficult to traverse the often tiny bridges in the less developed parts of the Soviet Union. The T-34 and KV-1 would prove to be the first matches of the Nashorn, with the T-34's 57mm gun able to penetrate the front of the Nashorn at a decent distance if it was unangled and able to deflect the Nashorn's shells if it angled properly from a good distance. The KV-1, fitted with an 85mm gun, was essentially the equal of the Nashorn in nearly every capacity with the advantage in turret armor and ability to handle cross country terrain, but poor coordination of Soviet armoured assets allowed the challenge offered by these tanks to be overcome as Germany pushed forwards.
However the tank's short comings started to become apparent across the enormous distances of the Soviet Union. its limited endurance and the tendency for parts to break down across prolonged travel meant that the vehicle frequently had to come to a stop and as the year dragged on the vehicle increasingly found itself stuck in the dreary autumn mud of the fields of eastern Europe. As German brutality became ever more well known among the Soviet populace, resistance only stiffened as those who might have even helped the Germans were turned aside as racial trash unworthy of breathing the same air as their German masters and those who might have normally surrendered instead chose to fight to the death against an enemy that had only slavery and death in mind for those it took as prisoners. This lead to near continuous partisan attacks that showed that even a heavy tank is by no means immune to a well placed bomb to throw off its tracks or a Sanjurjo cocktail thrown upon its engine deck or its crew being sniped by die hard freedom fighters. Facing a massive number of tanks also meant that the Soviets very quickly became masters at the art of anti-tank warfare as sheer darwinian selection demonstrated what did and did not work to them; and as Teutonic progressed at an ever slower rate more and more tank commanders became paranoid towards even the smallest of disturbances that could be the sign of an anti-tank gun or one of the soviet SU assault guns waiting for a flanking shot.
What had once been swift and easy marches through cities became grinding nightmares of block by block combat where Soviet fighters could fire onto the more vulnerable roofs of tanks from just about any direction, while a number of traps meant to exploit the weak bottom armor only further served to add to the worries of its drivers. Some more inventive tactics even involved attempting to clog the exhaust of the tank with potatoes wrapped in damp clothes if grenades weren't available to shove down, which if left unchecked could foul up the engine and require the unit to have to wait for a mechanic team to do a check up and hope that they don't need to requisition spare parts. Worse news was to come however, as the American air force began to make its appearance over the skies of Eastern Europe. While the number of vehicles destroyed by Aircraft is often exaggerated, air attack is highly effective at disrupting the momentum of armoured movements, breaking up formations as evasion is attempted, hampering the morale of those under attack, and is highly dangerous to the more vulnerable supply vehicles and horse drawn carriages and the railway bound trains upon which tanks depend on to function.
The addittion of more Waffentrager and Flakpanzers as well as "Flak-tracks" as half tracks armed for anti-air duty came to be nicknamed to Axis armoured, mechanized, and motorized units to try and ward off American aircraft that slipped by the fighter and interceptor screens only exposed the reservist units that these self propelled anti-air units were moved away from to support the front liners and the supply convoys. The worry of American or Soviet air attack even lead to the widespread adoption of the 13.2mm Hotchkiss heavy machine gun as the pintle mounted gun of choice for German tanks with some even opting for the 15mm anti-materiel machine gun for that extra bit of air defense. Others started to refuse to peel away from self propelled anti-aircraft assets even at the height of Axis Air Supremacy while others still took to all manners of inventive camouflage to try and avoid being spotted from the sky; including one misguided attempt by a Hungarian Nashorn unit to disguise their vehicles as Soviet captured tanks which lead to being bombed by Italian attack aircraft on patrol.
The first American vehicles to enter the war also provided something of a bloody nose to the Nashorn brigades' conviction in its invincibility. Whereas the Soviet T-34 and KV-1 were; while extremely good vehicles by any fair metric; scattered about in an attempt to modernize as much of the Soviet military as possible as soon as possible and often suffered from poor inter-unit communication and coordination, the American T-4 and T-5 were very formidable machines themselves and possessed something that was a standard for seemingly all American vehicles; very good gun depression. With the T-4 able to manage an amazing twelve degrees and the T-5 having similar gun depression, Nashorns were often struck from long distances by tanks they could barely see that poked little more than their gun mantlets and extremely angled frontal glacis plates to fire back at. American "fast tank destroyers" were even specialized for this sort of combat, with turrets designed to expose as little as possible from a hull down position while still having the elevation capabilities to command large portions of a battlefield. American and Soviet light tanks and armoured cars also became a routine nuisance as Comintern tactics demanded picking off the screens of Armoured Cars and Light Tanks first in an armoured engagement to allow for the flanking of the medium and heavy vehicles once their screens and their "eyes and ears" were cut off. As German doctrine called for light and fast vehicles to range far from their heavier counterparts to probe for weaknesses, engage in flanking maneuvers, and scout the area before the other vehicles arrived; they were often all too easy to pick off before the Nashorns and Panzer IIIs could arrive, who would be dealt with accordingly once located.
The first battle of Luga which saw Guderian and Kuchler's Panzers squaring against Patton and Timoshenko's tanks who had come off of a stunning upset victory at Narva that had seen many of Germany's divisions cut off without support. Out of the one thousand Axis tanks deployed to the battle, roughly one hundred were Nashorns, the bulk from the 88th Heavy Tank Brigade. The clash of tanks was perhaps the most vicious of operation Teutonic and saw more than a score of the heavy tanks taken out by Patton's aggressive tactics in an ultimately indecisive clash. However figures for tank production would speak quite clearly of what would be the war's eventual result. The number of Nashorns would only increase by a few hundred throughout the remainder of the year, and even at peak production only two thousand were manufactured in a year. The Americans could produce much larger numbers of heavy tanks to not only supply their own troops but to furnish the motor pools of all of their allies while the Soviets were able to produce some 5,500 KV-1s despite the disruption to Soviet industry caused by having to move their factories eastward and the KV-1 being phased out earlier in favor of the Vladimir Lenin series than the Nashorn was removed from service.
In the second year of the war, the Nashorn was by now thoroughly adjusted to even as more of its specialized variants such as the STuG IV Nashorn and the Waffentrager IV Nashorn were being rolled out. The weak points of its armor (particularly the lower glacis) were by now common knowledge and both American and Soviet gunners were well versed in how to pierce its armor. Operation Valkyrie saw the vehicle push even deeper into the Soviet Union until it reached the gates of Moscow in some of the war's most ferocious fighting. Desperate defenses by the Comintern saw a total of more than two hundred of the expensive vehicles meeting an irrecoverable end, with the M1 Dynamic Reaction cannon proving to be a particular scourge as the shaped charge launcher allowed infantry to seriously threaten the vehicle whose flat armor was poorly suited to repelling HEAT rounds. The vehicle did see uses in other regions, including the invasion of Denmark and Norway. With Denmark being a largely flat country with weak border defenses, a small military, and lacking the means to contest the kriegsmarine securing its islands, the country fell within a few hours of the first tanks driving over its borders. Norway proved to be a somewhat harder nut to crack, but once again, the Small country had no real weapons capable of threatening the bulk of Germany's motor pool once the landings were complete.
Britain and France's decision to enter the war also came with the German push into France. With much of France's military siding with the Germans, the scattered and demoralized Free French forces proved incapable of halting the German Blitzkrieg as so many had before them. While the French Char G2 and B3 were capable adversaries, they lacked coordination and morale with the confusion that followed the Petainist betrayal. With the aid of the fascist traitors, Hitler was able to do in a few weeks what Kaiser Wilhelm could not in four years; bring about the defeat of the French. Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands fell in short order and Germany soon found itself master of the continent of Europe. To the west, only Portugal and the rump of Red Spain were left to oppose Germany, to the east the renewed offensives allowed by the movement of more than a million soldiers stationed on the French border and thousands of tanks allowed for a brutal hammer to fall upon Soviet and American forces. With total war production having been underway for more than a year at this point, thousands of new tanks could enter the fray; including more than one hundred Nashorns every month. With support for the Nazi regime at an all time high thanks to the swift victory over France and victory seeming to be just around the corner, the tanks pushed towards the Caucasian mountains. Others were shipped to the middle east and north africa as part of Waffen SS units intent on scourging Judaism out of Palestine itself, meeting Commonwealth forces in battle on occasion as well as large numbers of partisans trying to resist the march of Italy, Turkey, and Iraq while Hitler eagerly awaited for shipments of oil to start arriving from the middle east once the British mandates were subjugated.
However the vehicle was starting to show its age by this point as tactics began to be adjusted to face it. By now, T-34s began to be equipped with 85mm guns as standard and intelligence reported that the T-34 was due for a series of upgrades that would be labeled the T-43 and the T-44. The American T-4 itself received upgrades in the form of new marks of the vehicle with not only a series of under the hood improvements and better protection to counter increasing numbers of Asuf G Panzer IIIs and Ausf E Panzer IVs but also removed the 57mm in favor of a more overall capable 76mm gun. Further still was word that the KV-1 and T-5 were due to be replaced with new heavy tanks as well as the increasing deployment of more and more capable comintern tank destroyers and assault guns such as the Sabotcat, the Mother Jones, the Su-100 and 152 and more. Pakfront tactics were also now the standard of Comintern anti-tank units, something that was also spread to Allied forces fighting the Axis in the middle east and Africa where the Chimera and Custodian and even older vehicles such as the Matilda (particularly with a high velocity six pounder) were able to menace it and the famous British 17 pounder was found to be quite capable of perforating the tank at great range.
This lead to the decision to phase the tank out in favor of the Eintwicklung series of tanks that were destined to replace all other German fully tracked vehicles in production. The most direct replacement for the Nashorn in particular would be the Panzer 50 Jaguar, and the initial conceptualizaiton of the Nashorn's replacement; the Nashorn II, which featured a long 88mm 71 caliber gun, 160 degrees of sloped frontal armor, and a redesigned angular turret, was rejected by the military in favor of the monstrously large 90 ton Panzer 75 Tiger which initially fit a 105mm and then an astounding 128mm cannon. While not facing the kind of rejection the Maus, the Panther, the Lowe, and the Panzer VII Manticore would face, the Nashorn's time was clearly at an end. Production was quickly being readied to be switched over to the more modern Jaguar across most of the plants that the Nashorn was being built at. Many of the vehicles that were deemed superfluous to the German military were passed out to Germany's smaller allies such as Falangist spain, Finland, Turkey, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria or were steadily moved to reservist units while the frontliners were getting their new Jaguars and later Tigers and Smilodons. Some production would continue with the Nashorn's specialist variants such as the StuG, the Jagdnashorn, the Flaknashorn, the Waffentrager IV and the GW Nashorn as well as its recovery tank variant, but the main vehicle ceased production in its last plants in december of 1942 and its specialist variants ceasing production in 1943.
However the tank would continue to see service despite its obsolesence. In the second battle of Stalingrad a great many of the tanks would see service in second stringer German formations who were not yet equipped with Jaguars as well as in the rather ramshackle tankparks of the Axis minors who had a hodgepoge of vehicles from Germany, Italy, Sweden, France, and themselves. By 1943 however, combating the Nashorn was an old hat for most comintern gunners. The new marks of Soviet and American medium tanks could combat even the Ausf E on largely even grounds while tank crews from both the USSR and the UASR had become thoroughly experienced and well trained by this point while Germany and its allies were starting to cut their manpower pools to the bone. Worse still, the battle also saw some deployment of the Vladimir Lenin 1 and TD-12 Nikola Sacco heavy tank destroyers. Against these vehicles, the Nashorn was outright outclassed. The 122 and 100mm guns of these rival heavy tanks could penetrate through anything but the Mantlet and even then spalling was often enough to kill the crew in the event of a direct hit while the L/56 88mm gun was showing its age as a heavy tank gun; incapable of penetrating its opposition frontally even at extremely close range without striking weak points, not without utilizing APCR rounds which tankers were only allotted a limited supply of and even then these new vehicles were often proof against the Nashorn.
New air attack tactics used by both the Allies and the Comintern as well as continued refinement of artillery and field gun tactics only continued to add to the vehicle's grief, as did the continued spread of weapons like the M1 Dynamic reaction cannon and the PIAT. Attack aircraft now routinely carried powerful autocannons to punch through the armor of tanks as well as specially made PTAB bomblets that could blanket an area with HEAT rounds and devastate all vehicles in the way. With the Luftwaffe struggling to keep up with losses of both planes and pilots to the escalating air war at the front and over the skies of the Reich itself (and after the battle of Britain awarded the Axis with little but lost planes and air crews), air attack only became more and more common. Tankers who once enjoyed nearly complete freedom to operate as they pleased were now constrained by the constant risk of a wing of planes emerging over the horizon and destroying everything in sight and even the ramped up production of anti-air assets (including some rather questionable infantry portable anti-aircraft weapons such as modifications of the panzerfaust and panzershrek to fire flak rockets) was not enough to provide Nashorn drivers with peace of mind. While actually less vulnerable than the Jaguar to an autocannon strafing run thanks to its thicker side armor, the Nashorn was substantially more vulnerable to PTAB attack due to its thin roof armor and often whole companies were lost at a time to a single pass by a wing of air units.
In the west, things were little better. For the Spanish Nashorns in fact; it was quite a lot worse. Though the Allies only had rather limited numbers of Carnifex medium tanks, Cairn Heavy tanks, and Caliborn light tanks to field at Portugal; with the bulk of the tank park being made of the older Chimeras, Custodians, and Chameleons; they were still more than a match for the Spanish's park of often heavily obsolete vehicles with some late interwar tanks. Despite a heavy numerical advantage over the forces of the Entente, the Allied governments in exile, and the Portuguese military, the Spanish attempt to conquer Portugal soon became a debacle that only the assistance of the traitor French, Italians, and Germans could rescue. The British had perfected the technique of firing a shot to turn the attention of a tank to one direction and then having another gun fire into the rear once it was turned away as well as waiting for a column to approach before firing upon the lead and the rear tank to trap the formation in a killbox. Of Spain's fifty nashorns, slightly more than half were destroyed by the Allies in the battle of Portugal, and much of the remainder would be destroyed in the Allied breakout in the end of 1943 despite Rommel's attempts to preserve the Spanish army.
Throughout 1944 things would go from bad to worse for the Axis. Their attempt to take Leningrad out once and for all lead to a costly and stinging defeat that sapped Army Group North of much of its vitality and put further strain on their scandinavian allies. The Axis was largely driven out of the territory of the Russian SFSR proper as they had to pull back from the Caucasus and farther and farther away from Moscow and towards Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltics. Despite Germano-Italian attempts to prop them up, Turkey would start to fall after a devastating defeat delivered by Allied Comintern forces in a rather rare example of a ground battle where the two fought side by side, driving Axis forces to the coastline of Anatolia and thrace. Following the disastrous western mediterranean strategic offensive that saw most of the surface fleet strength of Italy and National France sank to easily survivable United nations losses the tanks that had been operating in North Africa suddenly faced the loss of most of their supplies. While Fuel could be provided from Libya and the colony had some militarily useful factories to provide for parts, these were parts meant for Italian vehicles, meaning that those operating the Nashorns in Africa found themselves with a vanishingly thin supply line of spare parts. Most of the remaining Panzer IVs in north Africa would be eliminated by June of 1944 as the Entente pushed the Italians out of Egypt and began moving into Libya proper with the intent to link up with the Comintern at Tunisia. With the eastern front having priority for new vehicles, many of the remaining Nashorns would be sent westward to try and reinforce the Axis position against the Allies.
(Cut out for spoilers) ......................................
The Nashorn tank would continue to serve Nazi Germany until the end of the second world war in Europe. As Germany's allies fell one by one and its empire was picked apart, the old vehicle was increasingly outmatched but by the last months of the war the German situation was so desperate that they were sometimes throwing training vehicles into battle if it meant having some armoured support. While it may as well have been throwing rocks and harsh language at the likes of the TD-21 Spartacus, the Vladimir Lenin 3, the British Chamberlain and the Free French AMX-45 it was still better than not having a tank at all. The anti-fascist liberal and social democrat coup in Sweden was the last straw for Germany as its last ally abandoned it and Finland and helped drive it out of Norway and open a northern front in Denmark while also cutting Germany off from Iron Ore. Like Yugoslavia once was, Germany was surrounded on all sides and collapsed after a bitter final fight in the face of total exhaustion of all resources and mutinies on all fronts. Of the nashorns built, half were destroyed, more than a quarter were by now captured, and the last remaining thousand or so were surrendered to the United Nations.
After the war many would serve the new German governments set up after the war while others ended up finding their way to museums, tank collections, or were pawned off to armies in need of cheap armoured support around the world. Parts for the vehicles were still manufactured by various outlets for some time, with some even managing to find some service in Indochina; though they were poorly suited to the terrain there. The last were retired from active service in any country in nineteen sixty two when even colonial African governments couldn't justify their expense.
Panzerkampfenwagen IV "Nashorn" (Or a brief history of the war in Europe with a focus on the Nashorn's service)
Type: Heavy Tank
Place of Origin: Germany
Used by: Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS, French State, Kingdom of Italy, Kingdom of Sweden, Kingdom of Romania, Kingdom of Hungary, Croatia, Switzerland, Reichswehr, Arabian Sultunate,Kingdom of Thailand, Empire of Vietnam, Republic of Rhodesia
In service: 1939-1954
Wars: Second World War
Designer: Henschel & Son, Ford-Werke GmbH
Designed: 1937-1938
Produced: 1939-1943
Number built: 4,100
Variants: Pz.Kpfw. IV H Ausf. H1 (Nashorn H1), Panzerkampfwagen Nashorn Ausf. E
Specifications
Mass: 54/57 Tons
Length: 6.316 meters
Width: 3.56 meters
Height: 3.0 meters
Crew: 5
Armor: Hull front 120 mm Flat (Glacis strip), 100mm Flat (On the rest of the glacis) , hull side 80 mm, rear 80 mm, top 25 mm, bottom 25 mm. 140mm glacis strip, 120mm frontal, hull side 80, rear 80mm for Ausf E.
Turret front 100mm flat, 100mm mantlet, turret side 80mm, 25mm turret roof. 120mm flat, 120mm mantlet for Ausf E.
Primary Armament: 8.8 cm KwK 36 L/56 gun
Secondary Armament: 1 x MG34 7.92 mm x 57 mm machine gun (Pintle), 1 x MG34 7.92 mm x 57 mm machine gun (Coaxial)
Engine: Ford-Maybach HL 215 TRM P45 (484.705 kW) or Ford-Maybach HL 220 TRM P45 (521.99 kW)
Power to mass: 8.976/9.157
Suspension: Torsion Bar
Operational Range: 195 km on roads, 110 km off road.
Speed: 45 km/h top speed, 40 km/h top sustained speed, 25 km/h cross country.
The Nashorn was the predominant heavy tank of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS in the early stages of the second world war, first seeing usage against Poland and Yugoslavia in the Prufung Krieg conflicts that lead to the second world war. The Tank is in many ways comparable to the KV-1 of the Soviet Union, the T-5 of the American Union, the Custodian of Britain, the Char B3 of France, the P38 of Italy, the Swedish Strv h/39, and the Japanese Type 5 Chi-Ho that were its contemporaries. Like most of these late inter-war heavy tanks, its gun only enjoyed modest superiority at best over its medium counterparts in terms of armour penetration but did have the advantage of substantially superior HE delivery capacity and like nearly all of the last generation of heavy tanks to be designed before the second world war's start; had roughly one hundred milimeters of effective frontal armor. Born out of essentially every country copying each other's designs, the last set of pre-war heavy tanks were not really differentiated by their firepower, armor, or speed but rather by their design philosophies, ergonomics, and other largely internal factors. The Nashorn was, by the standards of most other heavy tanks; very flat with almost no usage of armor sloping in order to allow for as much space for the crew as possible. The nashorn was also one of the tallest of the pre-war heavy tanks, only exceeded by its Japanese counterpart which was made deliberately tall to get as much gun depression as possible in Japan and Korea's hilly terrain. This lead to the nickname of "shoebox" due to its very rectangular shape and the vehicle perhaps epitomized every aspect of Pre-Eintwicklung series German tank design philosophies. Flat with a spacious interior and a quick to reload gun.
The development of the Panzerkorps started in secret during the days of the Weimar Republic when the Reichswehr secretly cooperated with the USSR on experimental test runs and tank design to get a feel for the usage and construction of tanks. Openly banned from tank development itself, Germany was lagging years behind the institutional experience built up in the entente while the Soviet Union; desperate for any sort of external trade that could help its modernization programs; was all too happy to provide for a fellow pariah state. With the ascension of Nazism to absolute control over Germany and the second American revolutionary war, the old restrictions from Versailles became worth less than the paper they were printed on. Not only was Hitler eager to flaunt them, western Europe, particularly Britain was all too happy to cease enforcing them. Out of a fear of Communism breaking its containment to the USSR and Mongolia to encompassing more than half of the New World the former entente nullified the majority of the restrictions on German weapons development. Indeed they were often outright eager to help Germany remilitarize to form a bulwark against the American supported Soviet Union and some extra industrial power to help out elsewhere in the world.
The Nazis, the Prussian military establishment, and the Junkers of Industry were all too happy to receive this blank cheque on remilitarization and began work on building a war machine to surpass even the Kaiserreich's almost immediately. Key to this was the need to develop tanks. Experience in the second American revolutionary war showed that the former British mode of thought; with Infantry and Cruiser tanks, was ill suited to the reality of mechanized warfare and so German tank development instead focused on the "Fullerist" school of thought. An armoured car, a dedicated carrier vehicle of some sort, a light tank, a medium tank, and a heavy tank whose chassis would be modified to fit whatever need was at hand. The Nashorn would be preceded by a number of prototype vehicles such as the D.W2 and a VK prototype before an acceptable design was selected from a number of entries in a contest meant to determine Germany's main line heavy tank. Porsche, Henschel, and Mercedez all submitted designs; the Porsche design placed the turret towards the front of the vehicle and had an impressive maximum thickness of more than two hundred milimeters of frontal armor across a strip across the glacis but was found to be far too front heavy a design to have acceptable cross country performance. The Mercedez design however, placed the turret at the rear and had 140 milimeters of front armor and 120 milimeters of side armor, with the intention being that the Tank would be able to use its turret placement and thick side armor to make good use of cover and only present a small portion of the tank at an extreme angle. This was rejected for the rear placement of the turret giving it poor gun depression which forced the vehicle to expose an unacceptable amount of its profile when cresting ridgelines in tests.
The Henschel design, being the most conservative of the three, thus became the chosen vehicle. Built to Ford's exacting standards for ease of replacement of parts and uniformity in manufacture, the vehicle was revealed in a military parade on Adolf Hitler's birthday in 1939 to a crowd of German citizens, military brass, and foreign observers. The vehicle would be produced in substantial numbers from a large array of factories to rival the Soviet KV-1 tank and the American T-5 in particular and was always intended to be the plated fist that would smash into the face of Communism in Europe while the Panzer III would be the spear tip. However it would not be against the Soviet Union that the Nashorn would see its first usage. Before he could start his war to destroy Slavic Socialism, Hitler and his cadres needed to complete some other steps first. First of course was the matter of getting a border with the Soviet Union so that the attack against it could begin immediately once the time came without having to first roll through a country. And of course, the Polish were but slavs; subhumans to be disposed of, displaced and enslaved in Hitler's scheme for German world domination. The Poles had been co-conspirators against the Czechoslovakians, but now they had outlived their usefulness.
As German high command already had word from France and Britain that the Allies would do nothing to help Poland the invasion was able to proceed with little more than limp wristed outrage from the rest of the world. Surrounded by German forces pouring out of East Prussia, Silesia, and occupied Czechoslovakia aided by fascist Hungary and Romania, the Polish armed forces were doomed. Outmatched, outnumbered, and outgunned by a German military gleefully helped in its reconstruction by the Imperialist countries of western Europe, the Polish gave a valiant struggle but one that could not last more than a few weeks. The Nashorn proved to be essentially invincible against the poor anti-tank armament of the Polish military, with nothing short of cumbersome heavy artillery guns being able to make any real impact against the Nashorn as it contemptuously brushed aside Poland's tankettes, multi-turreted heavy vehicles, field guns, and shattered its concrete fortifications. At the battle of Krakow, Nashorns seemed to almost ignore much of the opposition they faced, driving forward without stopping as they forced Polish lines wide open. Out of a company of nine of the heavy tanks, only one was disabled by an artillery strike at its tracks, while the other eight drove all the way from the Slovakian border to the outskirts of Krakow without any further loss. After the bombardment and fall of Warsaw, a parade formation of Nashorn tanks was lined up for a cinema operation where the disarmed and dejected Polish defenders were made to present their flags to German military officials while the country was being annexed around them.
With the fall of Poland there was one remaining obstacle to Germany and Italy's plans for eastern Europe; Yugoslavia. Having already invaded and annexed Albania earlier in the decade and freshly coming off from its conquest of Greece, Italy and Germany planned to have the invasion of Yugoslavia be a sort of "proving ground" for the Axis. Bulgaria sought Macedonia, Italy sought to dominate the adriatic via taking Montenegro and parts of Croatia s well as Serbia, Germany sought Slovenia, Hungary put in its claims for Vojvodina, and it was decided that a croatian puppet state would be put in place under the command of the fascist Ustase. Once again the Nashorn was driven into a foreign country following acts of "sabotage" at the border with Albania used as a pretext for war. Surrounded on all sides and standing against two of Europe's great powers and two of its neighbors, Yugoslavian resistance collapsed quickly. It was impossible to form a defensive frontline when they were being attacked from all angles and were under constant bombardment from air and sea, and once again the Nashorn found no worthy matches in Yugoslavia as the country quickly fell to the fascist jackboot and was partitioned out to its conquerors dreams of empire.
With Yugoslavia now out of the way, the Nashorn would have some months to cool its treads as teething issues were worked out, more crews were trained, and more tanks were built to either pad out the vehicle count of existing units or form new ones. When the order was given to launch operation Teutonic, the Nashorns were once again used as breakthrough vehicles. Charging forward in concentrated heavy tank formations, these heavy tanks found little threat from the T-26 and BT-7 tanks that still made up the bulk of the Soviet motor pool. However, the USSR had substantially better anti-tank guns than Poland and Yugoslavia, and a number of Nashorns were lost to fire from 57mm Zis-6 guns and 85mm anti-aircraft guns hurriedly pushed into service against incoming tanks. 76.2mm guns also proved to be a threat against Nashorns that exposed their flanks, and the heavy Nashorns often found it difficult to traverse the often tiny bridges in the less developed parts of the Soviet Union. The T-34 and KV-1 would prove to be the first matches of the Nashorn, with the T-34's 57mm gun able to penetrate the front of the Nashorn at a decent distance if it was unangled and able to deflect the Nashorn's shells if it angled properly from a good distance. The KV-1, fitted with an 85mm gun, was essentially the equal of the Nashorn in nearly every capacity with the advantage in turret armor and ability to handle cross country terrain, but poor coordination of Soviet armoured assets allowed the challenge offered by these tanks to be overcome as Germany pushed forwards.
However the tank's short comings started to become apparent across the enormous distances of the Soviet Union. its limited endurance and the tendency for parts to break down across prolonged travel meant that the vehicle frequently had to come to a stop and as the year dragged on the vehicle increasingly found itself stuck in the dreary autumn mud of the fields of eastern Europe. As German brutality became ever more well known among the Soviet populace, resistance only stiffened as those who might have even helped the Germans were turned aside as racial trash unworthy of breathing the same air as their German masters and those who might have normally surrendered instead chose to fight to the death against an enemy that had only slavery and death in mind for those it took as prisoners. This lead to near continuous partisan attacks that showed that even a heavy tank is by no means immune to a well placed bomb to throw off its tracks or a Sanjurjo cocktail thrown upon its engine deck or its crew being sniped by die hard freedom fighters. Facing a massive number of tanks also meant that the Soviets very quickly became masters at the art of anti-tank warfare as sheer darwinian selection demonstrated what did and did not work to them; and as Teutonic progressed at an ever slower rate more and more tank commanders became paranoid towards even the smallest of disturbances that could be the sign of an anti-tank gun or one of the soviet SU assault guns waiting for a flanking shot.
What had once been swift and easy marches through cities became grinding nightmares of block by block combat where Soviet fighters could fire onto the more vulnerable roofs of tanks from just about any direction, while a number of traps meant to exploit the weak bottom armor only further served to add to the worries of its drivers. Some more inventive tactics even involved attempting to clog the exhaust of the tank with potatoes wrapped in damp clothes if grenades weren't available to shove down, which if left unchecked could foul up the engine and require the unit to have to wait for a mechanic team to do a check up and hope that they don't need to requisition spare parts. Worse news was to come however, as the American air force began to make its appearance over the skies of Eastern Europe. While the number of vehicles destroyed by Aircraft is often exaggerated, air attack is highly effective at disrupting the momentum of armoured movements, breaking up formations as evasion is attempted, hampering the morale of those under attack, and is highly dangerous to the more vulnerable supply vehicles and horse drawn carriages and the railway bound trains upon which tanks depend on to function.
The addittion of more Waffentrager and Flakpanzers as well as "Flak-tracks" as half tracks armed for anti-air duty came to be nicknamed to Axis armoured, mechanized, and motorized units to try and ward off American aircraft that slipped by the fighter and interceptor screens only exposed the reservist units that these self propelled anti-air units were moved away from to support the front liners and the supply convoys. The worry of American or Soviet air attack even lead to the widespread adoption of the 13.2mm Hotchkiss heavy machine gun as the pintle mounted gun of choice for German tanks with some even opting for the 15mm anti-materiel machine gun for that extra bit of air defense. Others started to refuse to peel away from self propelled anti-aircraft assets even at the height of Axis Air Supremacy while others still took to all manners of inventive camouflage to try and avoid being spotted from the sky; including one misguided attempt by a Hungarian Nashorn unit to disguise their vehicles as Soviet captured tanks which lead to being bombed by Italian attack aircraft on patrol.
The first American vehicles to enter the war also provided something of a bloody nose to the Nashorn brigades' conviction in its invincibility. Whereas the Soviet T-34 and KV-1 were; while extremely good vehicles by any fair metric; scattered about in an attempt to modernize as much of the Soviet military as possible as soon as possible and often suffered from poor inter-unit communication and coordination, the American T-4 and T-5 were very formidable machines themselves and possessed something that was a standard for seemingly all American vehicles; very good gun depression. With the T-4 able to manage an amazing twelve degrees and the T-5 having similar gun depression, Nashorns were often struck from long distances by tanks they could barely see that poked little more than their gun mantlets and extremely angled frontal glacis plates to fire back at. American "fast tank destroyers" were even specialized for this sort of combat, with turrets designed to expose as little as possible from a hull down position while still having the elevation capabilities to command large portions of a battlefield. American and Soviet light tanks and armoured cars also became a routine nuisance as Comintern tactics demanded picking off the screens of Armoured Cars and Light Tanks first in an armoured engagement to allow for the flanking of the medium and heavy vehicles once their screens and their "eyes and ears" were cut off. As German doctrine called for light and fast vehicles to range far from their heavier counterparts to probe for weaknesses, engage in flanking maneuvers, and scout the area before the other vehicles arrived; they were often all too easy to pick off before the Nashorns and Panzer IIIs could arrive, who would be dealt with accordingly once located.
The first battle of Luga which saw Guderian and Kuchler's Panzers squaring against Patton and Timoshenko's tanks who had come off of a stunning upset victory at Narva that had seen many of Germany's divisions cut off without support. Out of the one thousand Axis tanks deployed to the battle, roughly one hundred were Nashorns, the bulk from the 88th Heavy Tank Brigade. The clash of tanks was perhaps the most vicious of operation Teutonic and saw more than a score of the heavy tanks taken out by Patton's aggressive tactics in an ultimately indecisive clash. However figures for tank production would speak quite clearly of what would be the war's eventual result. The number of Nashorns would only increase by a few hundred throughout the remainder of the year, and even at peak production only two thousand were manufactured in a year. The Americans could produce much larger numbers of heavy tanks to not only supply their own troops but to furnish the motor pools of all of their allies while the Soviets were able to produce some 5,500 KV-1s despite the disruption to Soviet industry caused by having to move their factories eastward and the KV-1 being phased out earlier in favor of the Vladimir Lenin series than the Nashorn was removed from service.
In the second year of the war, the Nashorn was by now thoroughly adjusted to even as more of its specialized variants such as the STuG IV Nashorn and the Waffentrager IV Nashorn were being rolled out. The weak points of its armor (particularly the lower glacis) were by now common knowledge and both American and Soviet gunners were well versed in how to pierce its armor. Operation Valkyrie saw the vehicle push even deeper into the Soviet Union until it reached the gates of Moscow in some of the war's most ferocious fighting. Desperate defenses by the Comintern saw a total of more than two hundred of the expensive vehicles meeting an irrecoverable end, with the M1 Dynamic Reaction cannon proving to be a particular scourge as the shaped charge launcher allowed infantry to seriously threaten the vehicle whose flat armor was poorly suited to repelling HEAT rounds. The vehicle did see uses in other regions, including the invasion of Denmark and Norway. With Denmark being a largely flat country with weak border defenses, a small military, and lacking the means to contest the kriegsmarine securing its islands, the country fell within a few hours of the first tanks driving over its borders. Norway proved to be a somewhat harder nut to crack, but once again, the Small country had no real weapons capable of threatening the bulk of Germany's motor pool once the landings were complete.
Britain and France's decision to enter the war also came with the German push into France. With much of France's military siding with the Germans, the scattered and demoralized Free French forces proved incapable of halting the German Blitzkrieg as so many had before them. While the French Char G2 and B3 were capable adversaries, they lacked coordination and morale with the confusion that followed the Petainist betrayal. With the aid of the fascist traitors, Hitler was able to do in a few weeks what Kaiser Wilhelm could not in four years; bring about the defeat of the French. Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands fell in short order and Germany soon found itself master of the continent of Europe. To the west, only Portugal and the rump of Red Spain were left to oppose Germany, to the east the renewed offensives allowed by the movement of more than a million soldiers stationed on the French border and thousands of tanks allowed for a brutal hammer to fall upon Soviet and American forces. With total war production having been underway for more than a year at this point, thousands of new tanks could enter the fray; including more than one hundred Nashorns every month. With support for the Nazi regime at an all time high thanks to the swift victory over France and victory seeming to be just around the corner, the tanks pushed towards the Caucasian mountains. Others were shipped to the middle east and north africa as part of Waffen SS units intent on scourging Judaism out of Palestine itself, meeting Commonwealth forces in battle on occasion as well as large numbers of partisans trying to resist the march of Italy, Turkey, and Iraq while Hitler eagerly awaited for shipments of oil to start arriving from the middle east once the British mandates were subjugated.
However the vehicle was starting to show its age by this point as tactics began to be adjusted to face it. By now, T-34s began to be equipped with 85mm guns as standard and intelligence reported that the T-34 was due for a series of upgrades that would be labeled the T-43 and the T-44. The American T-4 itself received upgrades in the form of new marks of the vehicle with not only a series of under the hood improvements and better protection to counter increasing numbers of Asuf G Panzer IIIs and Ausf E Panzer IVs but also removed the 57mm in favor of a more overall capable 76mm gun. Further still was word that the KV-1 and T-5 were due to be replaced with new heavy tanks as well as the increasing deployment of more and more capable comintern tank destroyers and assault guns such as the Sabotcat, the Mother Jones, the Su-100 and 152 and more. Pakfront tactics were also now the standard of Comintern anti-tank units, something that was also spread to Allied forces fighting the Axis in the middle east and Africa where the Chimera and Custodian and even older vehicles such as the Matilda (particularly with a high velocity six pounder) were able to menace it and the famous British 17 pounder was found to be quite capable of perforating the tank at great range.
This lead to the decision to phase the tank out in favor of the Eintwicklung series of tanks that were destined to replace all other German fully tracked vehicles in production. The most direct replacement for the Nashorn in particular would be the Panzer 50 Jaguar, and the initial conceptualizaiton of the Nashorn's replacement; the Nashorn II, which featured a long 88mm 71 caliber gun, 160 degrees of sloped frontal armor, and a redesigned angular turret, was rejected by the military in favor of the monstrously large 90 ton Panzer 75 Tiger which initially fit a 105mm and then an astounding 128mm cannon. While not facing the kind of rejection the Maus, the Panther, the Lowe, and the Panzer VII Manticore would face, the Nashorn's time was clearly at an end. Production was quickly being readied to be switched over to the more modern Jaguar across most of the plants that the Nashorn was being built at. Many of the vehicles that were deemed superfluous to the German military were passed out to Germany's smaller allies such as Falangist spain, Finland, Turkey, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria or were steadily moved to reservist units while the frontliners were getting their new Jaguars and later Tigers and Smilodons. Some production would continue with the Nashorn's specialist variants such as the StuG, the Jagdnashorn, the Flaknashorn, the Waffentrager IV and the GW Nashorn as well as its recovery tank variant, but the main vehicle ceased production in its last plants in december of 1942 and its specialist variants ceasing production in 1943.
However the tank would continue to see service despite its obsolesence. In the second battle of Stalingrad a great many of the tanks would see service in second stringer German formations who were not yet equipped with Jaguars as well as in the rather ramshackle tankparks of the Axis minors who had a hodgepoge of vehicles from Germany, Italy, Sweden, France, and themselves. By 1943 however, combating the Nashorn was an old hat for most comintern gunners. The new marks of Soviet and American medium tanks could combat even the Ausf E on largely even grounds while tank crews from both the USSR and the UASR had become thoroughly experienced and well trained by this point while Germany and its allies were starting to cut their manpower pools to the bone. Worse still, the battle also saw some deployment of the Vladimir Lenin 1 and TD-12 Nikola Sacco heavy tank destroyers. Against these vehicles, the Nashorn was outright outclassed. The 122 and 100mm guns of these rival heavy tanks could penetrate through anything but the Mantlet and even then spalling was often enough to kill the crew in the event of a direct hit while the L/56 88mm gun was showing its age as a heavy tank gun; incapable of penetrating its opposition frontally even at extremely close range without striking weak points, not without utilizing APCR rounds which tankers were only allotted a limited supply of and even then these new vehicles were often proof against the Nashorn.
New air attack tactics used by both the Allies and the Comintern as well as continued refinement of artillery and field gun tactics only continued to add to the vehicle's grief, as did the continued spread of weapons like the M1 Dynamic reaction cannon and the PIAT. Attack aircraft now routinely carried powerful autocannons to punch through the armor of tanks as well as specially made PTAB bomblets that could blanket an area with HEAT rounds and devastate all vehicles in the way. With the Luftwaffe struggling to keep up with losses of both planes and pilots to the escalating air war at the front and over the skies of the Reich itself (and after the battle of Britain awarded the Axis with little but lost planes and air crews), air attack only became more and more common. Tankers who once enjoyed nearly complete freedom to operate as they pleased were now constrained by the constant risk of a wing of planes emerging over the horizon and destroying everything in sight and even the ramped up production of anti-air assets (including some rather questionable infantry portable anti-aircraft weapons such as modifications of the panzerfaust and panzershrek to fire flak rockets) was not enough to provide Nashorn drivers with peace of mind. While actually less vulnerable than the Jaguar to an autocannon strafing run thanks to its thicker side armor, the Nashorn was substantially more vulnerable to PTAB attack due to its thin roof armor and often whole companies were lost at a time to a single pass by a wing of air units.
In the west, things were little better. For the Spanish Nashorns in fact; it was quite a lot worse. Though the Allies only had rather limited numbers of Carnifex medium tanks, Cairn Heavy tanks, and Caliborn light tanks to field at Portugal; with the bulk of the tank park being made of the older Chimeras, Custodians, and Chameleons; they were still more than a match for the Spanish's park of often heavily obsolete vehicles with some late interwar tanks. Despite a heavy numerical advantage over the forces of the Entente, the Allied governments in exile, and the Portuguese military, the Spanish attempt to conquer Portugal soon became a debacle that only the assistance of the traitor French, Italians, and Germans could rescue. The British had perfected the technique of firing a shot to turn the attention of a tank to one direction and then having another gun fire into the rear once it was turned away as well as waiting for a column to approach before firing upon the lead and the rear tank to trap the formation in a killbox. Of Spain's fifty nashorns, slightly more than half were destroyed by the Allies in the battle of Portugal, and much of the remainder would be destroyed in the Allied breakout in the end of 1943 despite Rommel's attempts to preserve the Spanish army.
Throughout 1944 things would go from bad to worse for the Axis. Their attempt to take Leningrad out once and for all lead to a costly and stinging defeat that sapped Army Group North of much of its vitality and put further strain on their scandinavian allies. The Axis was largely driven out of the territory of the Russian SFSR proper as they had to pull back from the Caucasus and farther and farther away from Moscow and towards Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltics. Despite Germano-Italian attempts to prop them up, Turkey would start to fall after a devastating defeat delivered by Allied Comintern forces in a rather rare example of a ground battle where the two fought side by side, driving Axis forces to the coastline of Anatolia and thrace. Following the disastrous western mediterranean strategic offensive that saw most of the surface fleet strength of Italy and National France sank to easily survivable United nations losses the tanks that had been operating in North Africa suddenly faced the loss of most of their supplies. While Fuel could be provided from Libya and the colony had some militarily useful factories to provide for parts, these were parts meant for Italian vehicles, meaning that those operating the Nashorns in Africa found themselves with a vanishingly thin supply line of spare parts. Most of the remaining Panzer IVs in north Africa would be eliminated by June of 1944 as the Entente pushed the Italians out of Egypt and began moving into Libya proper with the intent to link up with the Comintern at Tunisia. With the eastern front having priority for new vehicles, many of the remaining Nashorns would be sent westward to try and reinforce the Axis position against the Allies.
(Cut out for spoilers) ......................................
The Nashorn tank would continue to serve Nazi Germany until the end of the second world war in Europe. As Germany's allies fell one by one and its empire was picked apart, the old vehicle was increasingly outmatched but by the last months of the war the German situation was so desperate that they were sometimes throwing training vehicles into battle if it meant having some armoured support. While it may as well have been throwing rocks and harsh language at the likes of the TD-21 Spartacus, the Vladimir Lenin 3, the British Chamberlain and the Free French AMX-45 it was still better than not having a tank at all. The anti-fascist liberal and social democrat coup in Sweden was the last straw for Germany as its last ally abandoned it and Finland and helped drive it out of Norway and open a northern front in Denmark while also cutting Germany off from Iron Ore. Like Yugoslavia once was, Germany was surrounded on all sides and collapsed after a bitter final fight in the face of total exhaustion of all resources and mutinies on all fronts. Of the nashorns built, half were destroyed, more than a quarter were by now captured, and the last remaining thousand or so were surrendered to the United Nations.
After the war many would serve the new German governments set up after the war while others ended up finding their way to museums, tank collections, or were pawned off to armies in need of cheap armoured support around the world. Parts for the vehicles were still manufactured by various outlets for some time, with some even managing to find some service in Indochina; though they were poorly suited to the terrain there. The last were retired from active service in any country in nineteen sixty two when even colonial African governments couldn't justify their expense.
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HOLY SMOKES! I knew that Germany's tanks got rather insane towards the end of the war, but this thing is a Pz. VI Tiger I in all but name!
It seems that heavy tanks in general are much more favored in TTL than OTL, since everyone is crazy about them! What percentage of the tanks involved in the European war would be heavy tanks or infantry tanks?
Didn't the last update mention that Japanese pre-war armor was pretty shitty? I'm guessing this thing saw a very limited production series, I can't imagine Japan producing many erzatz-Tigers.
I know they have Bulgarian help, but I have to wonder what made the Italians so competent in TTL. This and the Mediterranean strike...
LOL FAIL
I see even TTL's Germany isn't crazy enough to seriously use THAT monstrosity. And I can imagine them throwing out the Panther, if Germany has not-tigers at the start, than the panther would be outdated half-way through.
Unless this Turkey is stylizing itself as a reborn East Roman Empire, the Turks probably wouldn't use "Manzikert" to refer to a battle that they lost hard. I'm curious how the inter-unit coordination between Comintern and Entente forces was.
interesting....
Redshank Galloglass
Banned
The German Heavy Tanks here are already supply guzzling monstrosities, and they want to start using the Maus? That's a perfect example of Nazi hubris and idiocy.
The only reasonable tank in fiction that even comes close the the Maus is the Chamberlain from CalBear's AANW, and even then, that's a bit of a 50/50 depending on the general.
The only reasonable tank in fiction that even comes close the the Maus is the Chamberlain from CalBear's AANW, and even then, that's a bit of a 50/50 depending on the general.
For King and Country (The Red Star Rising)
Clips from For King and Country; World War Two in the West; Episode XI, We're off to see the wizard - Hosted by David Fletcher, EBC History, Broadcast March 27th, 2011 (Part 1)
A high budget television documentary series created by the EBC and the Royal War College to show a Franco-British perspective on the second world war, For King and Country aired two hour long episodes on both video streaming websites and on television throughout early 2011 and was praised for its high production values if criticized for its emphasis on the role played by the Allies in the war.
INT. LIBRARY
Mustachio'd War Historian David Fletcher is seen going over some books before he lifts his head up to the Camera and lights up as if he had just seen them. He removes his reading glasses and stands up; the focus changing to make it clear he was reading about Spanish history.
"Ah, welcome back. When we left off we had just covered the battle of Lusitania which saw Spanish attempts to occupy Portugal repulsed and the Axis forced to withdraw assets from the fighting in Russia to the west."
SCENE CHANGE.
The scene seems to shift as time seems to reverse and the Library seems to unconstruct itself, revealing that this was once a humble village. Allied soldiers can be seen lounging around as they wait for battle, a stopped Custodian III tank waiting for fresh ammunition. When a round is passed for loading he briefly pauses the scene to take the round and examine it.
"This is an armour piercing composite rigid round, also known as APCR. Thanks to its composition, it is able to exit the barrel at higher speeds and is better able to penetrate through armor at closer combat ranges. The secret is that this shell here is made of aluminium, but underneath is a core made of Tungsten Carbide, denser and harder than steel. Now why is this important you might ask? Not only was tungsten used for specialist shells, but also stronger, denser alloys of steel and so a stable supply of it was crucially important to mechanized warfare."
SCENE CHANGE
Fletcher is now seen in a Spanish Tungsten refining facility as molten hot materials are extracted from the ores to be used later. Fletcher at first watches the material's extraction process before turning back to the camera.
The Iberian Peninsula was one of the largest producers of Tungsten in the world, with most concentrated near Portugal. While the Mitterall mine and the Matzen Oil Field was discovered in 1938 by geologists under the employ of Adolf Hitler and facilities to process these resources were set up as part of his public works program and to arm his reich for war, the Iberian mining operations were much more developed than those set up by the Third Reich by the time the war had begun. The German and Italian war machines relied heavily on Tungsten bought from Spain and Portugal to supply high penetration ammunition to their tanks as well as the materials for high quality armor for their vehicles. Thus, we see the cessation of trade with Portugal already put a heavy supply problem on Germany, and we see one of the reasons why Allied high command sought to liberate Spain as quickly as possible.
SCENE CHANGE. INT, SPANISH CASTILLO
Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery is seen meeting with his French counterpart Georges Catroux and other allied commanders such as Charles DeGaulle, Philippe LeClerc, Miles Dempsey, José Vicente de Freitas, Charles Foulkes, George Edwin Brink, Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, Noel Beresford-Peirse, and Gbesmola who are discussing a plan of action on a map.
"The intelligence we have suggests that the Spanish are concentrating near the midpoint between Caceras and Toledo, probably expecting us to try and make an immediate sweep for Gibraltar. Intercepts of German communications suggest they suspect much the same. Now I'm going to want the Fifth army to do exactly that. Meanwhile the Eighth army is going to be making a push towards Madrid. Now I'll want the Portuguese army to make a push further south, if we play our cards right we can ensure that the Spanish are cut in two. We'll encircle them at Madrid and in the South. We'll snap them up and swipe Sanjurjo's entire army from beneath his feet before he knows it."
And what of the Petainist Tank division spotted near the river? They are likely to be a much tougher target than the Spanish to crack.
My troops can lure them away from the Spanish with some probing raids. They'll likely start to give chase once we drag them into a running battle. By the time they realize they've been had we should have pushed the Spanish line far enough away from the Petainists to finish the job.
Can my troops count on air and naval support while we drive across the coastline?
We have a squadron of battleships and carrier groups stationed at the Azores who will be able to provide and and gunnery support so long as you stay within a few dozen kilometers from the shore. Our air units will be making continuous sorties to ensure air superiority and close ground support. Heavy Bombers will come before you to reduce the heavier enemy defenses. Our reports also suggest that the enemy has numerous flak bunkers installed; we must ask of your troops to neutralize these as you locate them to make the skies safer for our pilots.
And what are we looking at at Madrid?
The bulk of the Spanish Army and two German divisions. If we make a breakout though, Rommel will likely pull back east. I've read about how he fights in the east, he's not going to stay in terrain like this if it goes against him.
EXT. SPANISH COUNTRY SIDE
Fletcher can be seen in the interior of a Carnifex tank as it rumbles across the countryside, the lean and mean tank's seventy seven milimeter gun remaining quite on target thanks to vertical stabilizers from America as the tank takes a shot at a Panzer III in Spanish colours; causing the tank to stop dead in its tracks as the Carnifex speeds on by, a shell missing it by a substantial distance as a Spanish soldier can be seen out the viewport; eyes widening before the tank impacts him at more than forty kilometers per hour. When the scene cuts back to the tank you can hear a faint "squish" sound. Two more Carnifexes soon join alongside the lead Carnifex as it comes to a stop at an elevated road and barely crests the ridge to lower the gun and take some high explosive shots at visible infantry while closed top universal carriers rumble on behind to unload troops.
INT. CARNIFEX TANK
As the loader informs the gunner that the shell is ready, the commander orders the vehicle to fire, making the barrel jump back from the force.
This is a Carnifex Tank, an evolution of the ideas behind the earlier Chimera Tank. Powering this lovely machine is a rolls royce engine that allows this vehicle to attain a top speed of over fifty kilometers per hour while the vehicle's design still allows for reasonable turning ability even at high speeds. The vehicle was renown throughout the second world war for its incredible mobility as well as its more than adequete armour protection and this powerful gun you see here. Now this gun here fires a seventy seven milimeter hell more than fast enough to punch straight through the hull of a Nashorn tank. In fact, there is at least one known case of a Carnifex's APCR round going through the front of a nashorn tank and then out the back of it; it's an incredible gun for its time.
EXT. SPANISH COUNTRY SIDE
An Indian soldier looking through his binoculars almost drops them when he sees a Panzer 50 Jaguar tank thundering towards their lines, prompting him to knock on the side of one of the Carnifex tanks and shout about the incoming Jaguar. This model clearly fits the long 88mm gun, and Gepards guard its flanks as it angles its front towards the British.
Now what we see here is a Jaguar. A fifty ton beast that acquired a fearsome reputation for being nearly invulnerable from the front against most weapons of the day. Until the Tigers arrived they were the pride of the Iberiakorps.
EXT SPANISH COUNTRY SIDE.
A crack is heard as one of the carriers brews up from a direct impact while one of the Carnifex tanks takes a shell to its mantlet and hurriedly drops back behind the ridgeline as the infantry accompanying the German vehicles start laying down long ranged machine gun fire; which is met with the rapid fire and disciplined volleys of rifle fire that the British are known for. The battle is soon interrupted however, by the sound of artillery crashing nearby as British artillery begins to crash all around the battle site, with a cut showing British Chimera gun carriages; modified to fit 5.5 inch guns, open fire on the area.
Heavy investment into self propelled artillery paid dividends in the Iberian campaign as Allied forces were able to practice "shoot and scoot" tactics where self propelled gun carriages would arrive at an area, lay down a few volleys of shells, then leave before the enemy's own artillery could prepare counter battery fire. This emphasis on mobile artillery also meant that swiftly moving mechanized forces would not need to constrain the pace of their advance to the speed at which towed guns could be moved into position. This allowed for a decisive edge in strategic mobility as well as for artillery support to be available virtually on demand for ground forces. The only real disadvantage of self propelled artillery, beyond cost, is that it reloads more slowly than a field gun of the same caliber.
EXT, SPANISH COUNTRY SIDE
Fletcher's point is demonstrated as the scene shows a Petainist artillery battery getting orders to fire and firing almost two shells for every one shell fired by the self propelled artillery; showering the Allied position with explosives as the French crews quickly shove shells into the breach and send them down range after covering their ears and giving the orders to fire.
However at this point in the war the skies were slipping from the grasp of the Axis. Thanks to the Axis' reluctance to rotate experienced crews of any sort from the field to train new recruits, the attrition they suffered was always harder to replace than those of the Allies and the Comintern. While the skill of their air forces degraded with time, our super flying fighters only got better as the war progressed and we disseminated our tactics from our very best to the rest.
EXT. SKIES
A Supermarine Spitfire banks to the left and rolls out from a formation of other spitfires; peeling away from a flight of Mosquitos armed with heavy autocannons for tank busting while the Spitfires chase a flight of Axis bombers heading for British lines. The lead plane climbs first while the other planes move to try and catch the flanks of the enemy formation. The lead plane and its wingmen fly to make sure that any enemy pilots looking for them would have to look into the sun before diving down into the formation; opening fire with its machine guns. Several planes start to burn while the other british planes fly in and make their own passes through the formation; opening fire before flying up into a climb to build energy before they make other passes.
At the same time, the Mosquitos start to dive towards the ground; the Pilots clicking the trigger and the heavy "thump-thump-thump" of large six pounder autocannons being audible as heavy shells slam into the ground repeatedly. A line of Spanish vehicles starts to explode while infantry are sent scattering by the blasts of the autocannons before a brace of rockets and a few bombs are dropped for good measure; annihilating large sections of the spanish line before an artillery bombardment is called to help mop up before Mechanized troops move in to cut them off.
EXT. OUTSKIRTS OF MADRID
Spanish Soldiers are seen shouting over the din of combat before the scene shows the French perspective as French troops drop down into prone positions before firing with Einfeld Self-loaders while Bren machine guns chatter away. A Bren carrier fitted with a mortar rolls into position and the crew makes its own shout before opening fire; light artillery peppering the Spanish position while an officer shouts to his men to get moving. German soldiers try to slow down the British with MG42 fire, the distinct ripping like sound of the gun forcing some French soldiers into cover, but the loud and heavy boom of a five inch cannon announces the presence of a Cairn heavy tank; the high explosive shell exploding in the machine gun nest and taking out most of the structure the gunners were in to boot. A Spanish soldier who tries to pop out and fire a Panzershrek at the tank is quickly spotted and shot by an African soldier, the Spaniard making a wet gurgle before falling over from the impact while British troops with submachine guns move in to secure the urban area. An attempted attack by Spanish soldiers taking cover in the streets is quickly ripped apart by a passing Mosquito dropping a load of incendiery bombs on them, burning Spanish soldiers running away in a panic while the Allies march calmly forward.
While the Germans were highly practiced at air defense tactics, the Spanish were not so fortunate, with the experience of the Spansih civil war now being years behind them and the capabilities of attack planes having grown immensely since then. Constant attack from the air and continual harassment by fast moving mechanized and motorized troops prevented the Spanish army from re-organizing from the shock of the initial offensives and having made the bulk of Axis soldiers in the area, made them a large weak link for the aggressive offensives of the Allies to punch through towards their objectives. While commanders such as Rommel thought highly of their bravery, their lack of material capability to fight the army of a modern superpower made them a favourite for allied commanders to attack.
A high budget television documentary series created by the EBC and the Royal War College to show a Franco-British perspective on the second world war, For King and Country aired two hour long episodes on both video streaming websites and on television throughout early 2011 and was praised for its high production values if criticized for its emphasis on the role played by the Allies in the war.
INT. LIBRARY
Mustachio'd War Historian David Fletcher is seen going over some books before he lifts his head up to the Camera and lights up as if he had just seen them. He removes his reading glasses and stands up; the focus changing to make it clear he was reading about Spanish history.
Fletcher
"Ah, welcome back. When we left off we had just covered the battle of Lusitania which saw Spanish attempts to occupy Portugal repulsed and the Axis forced to withdraw assets from the fighting in Russia to the west."
SCENE CHANGE.
The scene seems to shift as time seems to reverse and the Library seems to unconstruct itself, revealing that this was once a humble village. Allied soldiers can be seen lounging around as they wait for battle, a stopped Custodian III tank waiting for fresh ammunition. When a round is passed for loading he briefly pauses the scene to take the round and examine it.
Fletcher
"This is an armour piercing composite rigid round, also known as APCR. Thanks to its composition, it is able to exit the barrel at higher speeds and is better able to penetrate through armor at closer combat ranges. The secret is that this shell here is made of aluminium, but underneath is a core made of Tungsten Carbide, denser and harder than steel. Now why is this important you might ask? Not only was tungsten used for specialist shells, but also stronger, denser alloys of steel and so a stable supply of it was crucially important to mechanized warfare."
SCENE CHANGE
Fletcher is now seen in a Spanish Tungsten refining facility as molten hot materials are extracted from the ores to be used later. Fletcher at first watches the material's extraction process before turning back to the camera.
Fletcher
The Iberian Peninsula was one of the largest producers of Tungsten in the world, with most concentrated near Portugal. While the Mitterall mine and the Matzen Oil Field was discovered in 1938 by geologists under the employ of Adolf Hitler and facilities to process these resources were set up as part of his public works program and to arm his reich for war, the Iberian mining operations were much more developed than those set up by the Third Reich by the time the war had begun. The German and Italian war machines relied heavily on Tungsten bought from Spain and Portugal to supply high penetration ammunition to their tanks as well as the materials for high quality armor for their vehicles. Thus, we see the cessation of trade with Portugal already put a heavy supply problem on Germany, and we see one of the reasons why Allied high command sought to liberate Spain as quickly as possible.
SCENE CHANGE. INT, SPANISH CASTILLO
Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery is seen meeting with his French counterpart Georges Catroux and other allied commanders such as Charles DeGaulle, Philippe LeClerc, Miles Dempsey, José Vicente de Freitas, Charles Foulkes, George Edwin Brink, Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, Noel Beresford-Peirse, and Gbesmola who are discussing a plan of action on a map.
Montgomery
"The intelligence we have suggests that the Spanish are concentrating near the midpoint between Caceras and Toledo, probably expecting us to try and make an immediate sweep for Gibraltar. Intercepts of German communications suggest they suspect much the same. Now I'm going to want the Fifth army to do exactly that. Meanwhile the Eighth army is going to be making a push towards Madrid. Now I'll want the Portuguese army to make a push further south, if we play our cards right we can ensure that the Spanish are cut in two. We'll encircle them at Madrid and in the South. We'll snap them up and swipe Sanjurjo's entire army from beneath his feet before he knows it."
DeGaulle
And what of the Petainist Tank division spotted near the river? They are likely to be a much tougher target than the Spanish to crack.
Foulkes
My troops can lure them away from the Spanish with some probing raids. They'll likely start to give chase once we drag them into a running battle. By the time they realize they've been had we should have pushed the Spanish line far enough away from the Petainists to finish the job.
Freitas
Can my troops count on air and naval support while we drive across the coastline?
Catroux
We have a squadron of battleships and carrier groups stationed at the Azores who will be able to provide and and gunnery support so long as you stay within a few dozen kilometers from the shore. Our air units will be making continuous sorties to ensure air superiority and close ground support. Heavy Bombers will come before you to reduce the heavier enemy defenses. Our reports also suggest that the enemy has numerous flak bunkers installed; we must ask of your troops to neutralize these as you locate them to make the skies safer for our pilots.
Brink
And what are we looking at at Madrid?
Gbesmola
The bulk of the Spanish Army and two German divisions. If we make a breakout though, Rommel will likely pull back east. I've read about how he fights in the east, he's not going to stay in terrain like this if it goes against him.
EXT. SPANISH COUNTRY SIDE
Fletcher can be seen in the interior of a Carnifex tank as it rumbles across the countryside, the lean and mean tank's seventy seven milimeter gun remaining quite on target thanks to vertical stabilizers from America as the tank takes a shot at a Panzer III in Spanish colours; causing the tank to stop dead in its tracks as the Carnifex speeds on by, a shell missing it by a substantial distance as a Spanish soldier can be seen out the viewport; eyes widening before the tank impacts him at more than forty kilometers per hour. When the scene cuts back to the tank you can hear a faint "squish" sound. Two more Carnifexes soon join alongside the lead Carnifex as it comes to a stop at an elevated road and barely crests the ridge to lower the gun and take some high explosive shots at visible infantry while closed top universal carriers rumble on behind to unload troops.
INT. CARNIFEX TANK
As the loader informs the gunner that the shell is ready, the commander orders the vehicle to fire, making the barrel jump back from the force.
Fletcher
This is a Carnifex Tank, an evolution of the ideas behind the earlier Chimera Tank. Powering this lovely machine is a rolls royce engine that allows this vehicle to attain a top speed of over fifty kilometers per hour while the vehicle's design still allows for reasonable turning ability even at high speeds. The vehicle was renown throughout the second world war for its incredible mobility as well as its more than adequete armour protection and this powerful gun you see here. Now this gun here fires a seventy seven milimeter hell more than fast enough to punch straight through the hull of a Nashorn tank. In fact, there is at least one known case of a Carnifex's APCR round going through the front of a nashorn tank and then out the back of it; it's an incredible gun for its time.
EXT. SPANISH COUNTRY SIDE
An Indian soldier looking through his binoculars almost drops them when he sees a Panzer 50 Jaguar tank thundering towards their lines, prompting him to knock on the side of one of the Carnifex tanks and shout about the incoming Jaguar. This model clearly fits the long 88mm gun, and Gepards guard its flanks as it angles its front towards the British.
Fletcher
Now what we see here is a Jaguar. A fifty ton beast that acquired a fearsome reputation for being nearly invulnerable from the front against most weapons of the day. Until the Tigers arrived they were the pride of the Iberiakorps.
EXT SPANISH COUNTRY SIDE.
A crack is heard as one of the carriers brews up from a direct impact while one of the Carnifex tanks takes a shell to its mantlet and hurriedly drops back behind the ridgeline as the infantry accompanying the German vehicles start laying down long ranged machine gun fire; which is met with the rapid fire and disciplined volleys of rifle fire that the British are known for. The battle is soon interrupted however, by the sound of artillery crashing nearby as British artillery begins to crash all around the battle site, with a cut showing British Chimera gun carriages; modified to fit 5.5 inch guns, open fire on the area.
Fletcher
Heavy investment into self propelled artillery paid dividends in the Iberian campaign as Allied forces were able to practice "shoot and scoot" tactics where self propelled gun carriages would arrive at an area, lay down a few volleys of shells, then leave before the enemy's own artillery could prepare counter battery fire. This emphasis on mobile artillery also meant that swiftly moving mechanized forces would not need to constrain the pace of their advance to the speed at which towed guns could be moved into position. This allowed for a decisive edge in strategic mobility as well as for artillery support to be available virtually on demand for ground forces. The only real disadvantage of self propelled artillery, beyond cost, is that it reloads more slowly than a field gun of the same caliber.
EXT, SPANISH COUNTRY SIDE
Fletcher's point is demonstrated as the scene shows a Petainist artillery battery getting orders to fire and firing almost two shells for every one shell fired by the self propelled artillery; showering the Allied position with explosives as the French crews quickly shove shells into the breach and send them down range after covering their ears and giving the orders to fire.
Fletcher
However at this point in the war the skies were slipping from the grasp of the Axis. Thanks to the Axis' reluctance to rotate experienced crews of any sort from the field to train new recruits, the attrition they suffered was always harder to replace than those of the Allies and the Comintern. While the skill of their air forces degraded with time, our super flying fighters only got better as the war progressed and we disseminated our tactics from our very best to the rest.
EXT. SKIES
A Supermarine Spitfire banks to the left and rolls out from a formation of other spitfires; peeling away from a flight of Mosquitos armed with heavy autocannons for tank busting while the Spitfires chase a flight of Axis bombers heading for British lines. The lead plane climbs first while the other planes move to try and catch the flanks of the enemy formation. The lead plane and its wingmen fly to make sure that any enemy pilots looking for them would have to look into the sun before diving down into the formation; opening fire with its machine guns. Several planes start to burn while the other british planes fly in and make their own passes through the formation; opening fire before flying up into a climb to build energy before they make other passes.
At the same time, the Mosquitos start to dive towards the ground; the Pilots clicking the trigger and the heavy "thump-thump-thump" of large six pounder autocannons being audible as heavy shells slam into the ground repeatedly. A line of Spanish vehicles starts to explode while infantry are sent scattering by the blasts of the autocannons before a brace of rockets and a few bombs are dropped for good measure; annihilating large sections of the spanish line before an artillery bombardment is called to help mop up before Mechanized troops move in to cut them off.
EXT. OUTSKIRTS OF MADRID
Spanish Soldiers are seen shouting over the din of combat before the scene shows the French perspective as French troops drop down into prone positions before firing with Einfeld Self-loaders while Bren machine guns chatter away. A Bren carrier fitted with a mortar rolls into position and the crew makes its own shout before opening fire; light artillery peppering the Spanish position while an officer shouts to his men to get moving. German soldiers try to slow down the British with MG42 fire, the distinct ripping like sound of the gun forcing some French soldiers into cover, but the loud and heavy boom of a five inch cannon announces the presence of a Cairn heavy tank; the high explosive shell exploding in the machine gun nest and taking out most of the structure the gunners were in to boot. A Spanish soldier who tries to pop out and fire a Panzershrek at the tank is quickly spotted and shot by an African soldier, the Spaniard making a wet gurgle before falling over from the impact while British troops with submachine guns move in to secure the urban area. An attempted attack by Spanish soldiers taking cover in the streets is quickly ripped apart by a passing Mosquito dropping a load of incendiery bombs on them, burning Spanish soldiers running away in a panic while the Allies march calmly forward.
Fletcher
While the Germans were highly practiced at air defense tactics, the Spanish were not so fortunate, with the experience of the Spansih civil war now being years behind them and the capabilities of attack planes having grown immensely since then. Constant attack from the air and continual harassment by fast moving mechanized and motorized troops prevented the Spanish army from re-organizing from the shock of the initial offensives and having made the bulk of Axis soldiers in the area, made them a large weak link for the aggressive offensives of the Allies to punch through towards their objectives. While commanders such as Rommel thought highly of their bravery, their lack of material capability to fight the army of a modern superpower made them a favourite for allied commanders to attack.
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Now complete with 75% more whitewashing of Allied support of Germany!
I read ALL OF THAT in a stereotypical "british military documentary presenter" voice.
Good to see that the importance of resources such as tungsten is not forgotten in this TL!
Good to see that the importance of resources such as tungsten is not forgotten in this TL!
HOLY CRAP! 57mm autocannons on CAS planes? Yeah that'll be hell for German "hard" targets.