I knew Gordon Ramsay was a time traveling alternate universe communist. The pieces just fit together so perfectly.
The Great Crusade (Reds! Part 3)
- Thread starter Aelita
- Start date
I knew Gordon Ramsay was a time traveling alternate universe communist. The pieces just fit together so perfectly.
I must of read that list half a dozen times and I only just noticed Plainview and Jones Senior after Sandman pointed out Stark and Ramsay. Doh!
I actually saw them as early as when I saw the update a few days back. I just never publicly pointed them out. Just want to lie low for a bit in my presence here I guess. I'm very curious of the unknown names for me so I googled them out and surprised by what I saw basically. 
Great job by the way.
Great job by the way.
Speaking of the Secretariats. What's the deal with the various Secretariat buildings? Does the Secretariat of Defense occupy a Pentagon-esque analogue? I'm interested where the others are housed as well.
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Alas Babylon: An Economic Anthology of the Second World War
Excerpts from Alas, Babylon: An Economic Anthology of the Second World War, eds. Timothy Mason and Paul Sweezy, (Detroit: DeLeon University Press, 1979)
Much recent scholarship has focused on the Allied rearmament programs prior to the outbreak of general war in Europe. For our purposes in developing a substantive analysis of the subject of war economy, it is vitally important to subject this work to serious scrutiny. In this effort, we divide the literature into various genres by their theme. In particular, we must pay careful attention to various nationalistic attempts at historical exoneration and/or whitewashing.
In the UASR, the trend as of late has been towards a revisionist effort, shaped by the pop-academic writings of Ambrose as well as the more rigorous efforts by Lewis, Kahn or Postel. Such histories focus on the efforts of Foster’s government to rearm, even when faced with the challenges of economic recovery and the transition to a socialist economy. The American military was significantly more capable on the eve of the Second World War than it had been under the old regime. In the seven years from the end of the revolution, the Workers’ and Farmers’ Revolutionary Army had undergone a complete transformation. The regular army had almost tripled in size to almost 700,000 men and women. The initial twelve infantry, two cavalry and one armored division had been expanded to four armored, seven mechanized, twenty motorized infantry, and two mountain divisions. Quality had been improved to a mostly uniform standard, with modern training and equipment.
On paper, the armed mass of the Social Service militia appeared quite formidable, and the two years of compulsory service had created a sizeable military reserve that could be called upon at the outbreak of conflict.
The Navy took the lion's share of defense spending in the 1930s, a staggering increase in ships and manpower. By 1940, thirteen new capital ships had been launched, and a further five were under construction. Orders for more were being contemplated. Six new fleet carriers, equal to anything fielded by Imperial Japan and superior to the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm, had been completed. Twelve more were under construction. Similar expansions had been made to the fleets of cruisers, destroyers, escorts, tenders, and other support ships.
The Army Air Forces benefited from innovations in mass production techniques for aircraft, and in this area it was unquestionable that it was second to none, matching all of its rivals in technical and doctrinal development in strategic bombing, close air support, and dogfighting.
It cannot be doubted that this was highly impressive. It was still, however, inadequate to the task at hand. While the standing army was well equipped and trained, it was still dwarfed by the nearly four million strong army that the Axis would field in the 1940 campaign against the Soviet Union. Coupled with the logistical difficulty of supporting forces in the Soviet Union, and the Navy’s relative unpreparedness for protecting the vital convoy lifelines (a difficulty that could only be adequately resolved well after Britain joined the Allied war effort), the UASR could only minimally affect the outcome of the Axis advances during 1940. The massed fleets of the Revolutionary Navy had been built to conquer the sea from the Royal Navy, and could do very little concretely to harm Germany in the first few years of the war.
American troops would not reach the front in significant force until the onset of winter, when the worst of the damage had already been done. The only notable successes for the war’s first year were the Army Corps of Engineers’ heroic efforts in improving Soviet port and rail facilities, the successful occupation of Iceland in response to election of a Nazi-led coalition government, and the American-led expedition to support the overthrow of the pro-Axis government of Iran.
The shortcomings of the American war mobilization, by contrast, are both considerable and easily noticeable. The Foster government had not yet corrected the major fault in the American military system, one that had been inherited from the old regime. The various American polities lacked a tradition of permanent arms industries, and after each conflict the nation had beat its swords into ploughshares. The arms industry of the soviet republic had been built economically under the auspices of a planned economy that emphasized national economic recovery and the expansion of productive forces over military capability. Consequently, it was nowhere near up to the task of supplying a full scale war.
This alone would not be a serious fault. However, the government and planning apparatus had focused its priorities too finely. Contingency planning for transitioning the civilian economy to a full war footing had not begun in earnest until Revolutionary Military Committee gained access to the intelligence collected by Richard Sorge on German intentions in Eastern Europe. Foreign Secretary Reed’s subsequent report, delivered to a secret meeting of the Revolutionary Military Committee on 2 November 1939, iconcluded that in spite of the numerous inducements and concessions that the American diplomatic missions to the United Kingdom and the French Third Republic were authorized to grant, any alliance to contain Nazi aggression was effectively impossible unless the Axis threatened Western Europe directly. This outcome was expressly ruled out by Sorge’s reports, as well as additional intelligence collected by an American mole in the Italian intelligence services.
After conferencing with Reed and Browder, Foster began making preparations for his departure. With as little fanfare as possible, Foster implemented executive orders and decrees based on emergency protocols in the Public Safety Act of 1934; offices to monitor (and upon the declaration of a state of emergency, censor) the content of print, broadcast and film media were established, plenipotentiary jurisdictional powers granted to Public Safety’s internal police forces, the military soviets in charge of recruitment of troops into active service and the mustering of reserves were granted additional authority to supervise the direction of war production and enforce any rationing schemes implemented by the government, and the government’s munitions arsenals were to move to a war-footing.
It was this latter directive that had the most immediate impact on the war. Based on the experience derived from the First World War, in which even the most prepared countries lacked the industrial capacity in their munitions industry to keep up with the pace of expenditures with the outbreak of major fighting, the munitions arsenals that the Reds had cobbled together during the Civil War were expanded and continually upgraded during peacetime. Dormant production lines were able to be brought online as fast as new workers could be hired and trained. Many of the new production lines were retooled to produce munitions for common Soviet artillery calibers. Orders for war materiel expanded dramatically, and state defense firms began building new plants as well as contracting, secretly, with civilian manufacturing cooperatives. This expense paid off immensely at the outbreak of the war, ensuring that provided the sea lanes remained available and logistics permitted their delivery to the front (a dicey proposition), the Comintern forces would have the means to continue resistance dark days of the fall and winter of 1940.
Regardless of the attempts at preparing, the UASR still had to transition to a war economy from a standing start. Foster’s short caretaker government spared absolutely no effort in the task, and at Browder’s behest the outgoing premier did wait for the approval of the two lesser parties.
On 8 May 1940, even before the war had begun, the Presidium promulgated the first “call-up” decree under the National Revolutionary Defense Act, directing the military soviets to establish a draft lottery, under which all citizens between the ages of 18 and 45 were eligible for conscription.(1) On 24 May, an omnibus act, often referred to as the War Mobilization Act, was passed without debate, as the junior partners of the revolutionary front found an increased role in the councils of government.
The omnibus, which had been drafting in the Party’s inner circle since December, granted the government broad emergency powers during states of war. New government departments were established to aid in the prosecution of the war effort. The Supply Commission was established within the Defense Secretariat, with broad directives to coordinate the supply of equipment to the armed forces. The Information Commission was formed to implement a national propaganda campaign. The Manufacturing Secretariat’s Armament Commission was given an intimate role in the planning and direction of the production of war materiel. Additional agencies responsible for food, and fuel rationing were established.
The Council of the National Economy was directed to form a War Production Committee, with a sweeping mandate to direct the planned economy for the prosecution of the war effort. The State Planning Commission was granted the authority to set prices by fiat for a broad range of commodities. Pursuant to the directive to develop sophisticated statistical methods to maximize war production, the planning apparatus swelled in size. Investment in telex and computational machines exploded.
It was one thing to legislate, quite another to implement. The UASR had one notable strength which cannot be underestimated though. As Josef Stalin remarked, “Quantity has a quality all of its own,” and nowhere was this made more abundantly clear than in the American genius for mass production. Freed from class society’s animus towards uneconomic production, the American economy had recovered more quickly from the Great Depression than any other. Only Germany could claim similar recovery, and only through mass arms buildup and the plunder of its neighbors. The old United States had already been the most advanced industrial economy before its collapse, and the new soviet republic could claim, through the rational development of its planned economy, stable monetary policy and deficit spending supported investment, an economy second to none in productivity and the implementation of advanced technology. In 1940, the UASR produced more steel, aluminum, oil, and motor vehicles than all of the other major powers combined.
Directing this industrial might towards the war effort would be of paramount importance. And for all of the emergency powers the government laid claim to under the war effort, the relationship between the state, community, and individual changed surprisingly little during the war. While the American public was initially hesitant to be led into a foreign conflict, a very real, earnest patriotism developed within the polity. The revolutionary fervor which had begun to wane exploded into full force once more. While the Party and the state certainly massaged this revolutionary surge, the logic of democratic totalitarianism was in full force. The American people very quickly convinced itself that the show-down with fascist reaction truly would be the war to end all wars. It would be the “final conflict” that they sang about in “The Internationale” that would bring an end at last to man’s inhumanity to his fellow men, and sweep aside the last bulwarks of the old order.
Consequently, the state would rely as much on the enthusiastic democratic participation of American proletarians in all spheres of the war effort as it would on its new emergency powers. The eagerness of workers to do their part, to tackle the problems that would be faced with both ingenuity and hard work, would play a vital role in smoothing the transition to total economic mobilization. Nowhere was this more evident than the role of the Shipwright’s Federation in revolutionizing the production of ships. No task was more daunting than the task of supplying, not just the American military, but also the war effort of the Soviet Union, across ten thousand kilometers of mostly hostile ocean. And no triumph was greater than the mass produced Liberty Ship, the brainchild of ambitious shipbuilders like Clay Bedford. By the end of the war, merchant ships were being built in a tenth the time, with a quarter of the man-hours in labor, than the pre-war average.
For all of the genius of production, American workers still had a lot of catching up to do, and the logistical strain of fighting half a world away was a daunting task even with immense economic advantage America held. Even enemies convinced of the utter degeneracy of the American people, who had been “mongrelized” at the direction of “Judeo-Bolshevist” doctrines, could not ignore the 400 kg gorilla in the room. Hitler had initially been entirely dismissive of the threat posed by American communists across the Atlantic. America, under Nazi ideology, was a nation with a history of racial mongrelization and soft-headed moral degeneracy. Ruled at first by Jewish finance capitalists, and now under the thrall of Jewish communism, Americans were considered effeminate and weak. Their libertine challenging of old social mores, and commitment to the social advancement of women in a multi-ethnic society were considered laughable, and the deployment of American troops to the Soviet Union was not considered something that warranted a serious change to the invasion plans (Hitler had initially doubted that Americans would even have the stomach to stand beside their “brutish and bestial” Soviet allies).
The Nazis were correct in only the most trivial manner; by the standards of Fascist machismo, the value Americans placed on all human life made them soft. And indeed, many Americans might even agree, for they were much more reluctant to kill as a means to an end than their enemies or their Soviet allies. But they were soft in the same sense that water is soft; any sailor will testify just how harmless the ocean is when whipped into a great storm.(2)
1. The Act established exceptions based on health, mental or moral competency, and to mothers or sole legal guardians of a child. It also established deferments for holders of public office, workers in war industries as well as certain essential industries, and to students in certain fields considered to be vital to the war effort. Conscientious objection would allow for alternative service.
2. Many thanks to the late, great Iain M. Banks for this metaphor which I paraphrase here.
Much recent scholarship has focused on the Allied rearmament programs prior to the outbreak of general war in Europe. For our purposes in developing a substantive analysis of the subject of war economy, it is vitally important to subject this work to serious scrutiny. In this effort, we divide the literature into various genres by their theme. In particular, we must pay careful attention to various nationalistic attempts at historical exoneration and/or whitewashing.
In the UASR, the trend as of late has been towards a revisionist effort, shaped by the pop-academic writings of Ambrose as well as the more rigorous efforts by Lewis, Kahn or Postel. Such histories focus on the efforts of Foster’s government to rearm, even when faced with the challenges of economic recovery and the transition to a socialist economy. The American military was significantly more capable on the eve of the Second World War than it had been under the old regime. In the seven years from the end of the revolution, the Workers’ and Farmers’ Revolutionary Army had undergone a complete transformation. The regular army had almost tripled in size to almost 700,000 men and women. The initial twelve infantry, two cavalry and one armored division had been expanded to four armored, seven mechanized, twenty motorized infantry, and two mountain divisions. Quality had been improved to a mostly uniform standard, with modern training and equipment.
On paper, the armed mass of the Social Service militia appeared quite formidable, and the two years of compulsory service had created a sizeable military reserve that could be called upon at the outbreak of conflict.
The Navy took the lion's share of defense spending in the 1930s, a staggering increase in ships and manpower. By 1940, thirteen new capital ships had been launched, and a further five were under construction. Orders for more were being contemplated. Six new fleet carriers, equal to anything fielded by Imperial Japan and superior to the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm, had been completed. Twelve more were under construction. Similar expansions had been made to the fleets of cruisers, destroyers, escorts, tenders, and other support ships.
The Army Air Forces benefited from innovations in mass production techniques for aircraft, and in this area it was unquestionable that it was second to none, matching all of its rivals in technical and doctrinal development in strategic bombing, close air support, and dogfighting.
It cannot be doubted that this was highly impressive. It was still, however, inadequate to the task at hand. While the standing army was well equipped and trained, it was still dwarfed by the nearly four million strong army that the Axis would field in the 1940 campaign against the Soviet Union. Coupled with the logistical difficulty of supporting forces in the Soviet Union, and the Navy’s relative unpreparedness for protecting the vital convoy lifelines (a difficulty that could only be adequately resolved well after Britain joined the Allied war effort), the UASR could only minimally affect the outcome of the Axis advances during 1940. The massed fleets of the Revolutionary Navy had been built to conquer the sea from the Royal Navy, and could do very little concretely to harm Germany in the first few years of the war.
American troops would not reach the front in significant force until the onset of winter, when the worst of the damage had already been done. The only notable successes for the war’s first year were the Army Corps of Engineers’ heroic efforts in improving Soviet port and rail facilities, the successful occupation of Iceland in response to election of a Nazi-led coalition government, and the American-led expedition to support the overthrow of the pro-Axis government of Iran.
The shortcomings of the American war mobilization, by contrast, are both considerable and easily noticeable. The Foster government had not yet corrected the major fault in the American military system, one that had been inherited from the old regime. The various American polities lacked a tradition of permanent arms industries, and after each conflict the nation had beat its swords into ploughshares. The arms industry of the soviet republic had been built economically under the auspices of a planned economy that emphasized national economic recovery and the expansion of productive forces over military capability. Consequently, it was nowhere near up to the task of supplying a full scale war.
This alone would not be a serious fault. However, the government and planning apparatus had focused its priorities too finely. Contingency planning for transitioning the civilian economy to a full war footing had not begun in earnest until Revolutionary Military Committee gained access to the intelligence collected by Richard Sorge on German intentions in Eastern Europe. Foreign Secretary Reed’s subsequent report, delivered to a secret meeting of the Revolutionary Military Committee on 2 November 1939, iconcluded that in spite of the numerous inducements and concessions that the American diplomatic missions to the United Kingdom and the French Third Republic were authorized to grant, any alliance to contain Nazi aggression was effectively impossible unless the Axis threatened Western Europe directly. This outcome was expressly ruled out by Sorge’s reports, as well as additional intelligence collected by an American mole in the Italian intelligence services.
After conferencing with Reed and Browder, Foster began making preparations for his departure. With as little fanfare as possible, Foster implemented executive orders and decrees based on emergency protocols in the Public Safety Act of 1934; offices to monitor (and upon the declaration of a state of emergency, censor) the content of print, broadcast and film media were established, plenipotentiary jurisdictional powers granted to Public Safety’s internal police forces, the military soviets in charge of recruitment of troops into active service and the mustering of reserves were granted additional authority to supervise the direction of war production and enforce any rationing schemes implemented by the government, and the government’s munitions arsenals were to move to a war-footing.
It was this latter directive that had the most immediate impact on the war. Based on the experience derived from the First World War, in which even the most prepared countries lacked the industrial capacity in their munitions industry to keep up with the pace of expenditures with the outbreak of major fighting, the munitions arsenals that the Reds had cobbled together during the Civil War were expanded and continually upgraded during peacetime. Dormant production lines were able to be brought online as fast as new workers could be hired and trained. Many of the new production lines were retooled to produce munitions for common Soviet artillery calibers. Orders for war materiel expanded dramatically, and state defense firms began building new plants as well as contracting, secretly, with civilian manufacturing cooperatives. This expense paid off immensely at the outbreak of the war, ensuring that provided the sea lanes remained available and logistics permitted their delivery to the front (a dicey proposition), the Comintern forces would have the means to continue resistance dark days of the fall and winter of 1940.
Regardless of the attempts at preparing, the UASR still had to transition to a war economy from a standing start. Foster’s short caretaker government spared absolutely no effort in the task, and at Browder’s behest the outgoing premier did wait for the approval of the two lesser parties.
On 8 May 1940, even before the war had begun, the Presidium promulgated the first “call-up” decree under the National Revolutionary Defense Act, directing the military soviets to establish a draft lottery, under which all citizens between the ages of 18 and 45 were eligible for conscription.(1) On 24 May, an omnibus act, often referred to as the War Mobilization Act, was passed without debate, as the junior partners of the revolutionary front found an increased role in the councils of government.
The omnibus, which had been drafting in the Party’s inner circle since December, granted the government broad emergency powers during states of war. New government departments were established to aid in the prosecution of the war effort. The Supply Commission was established within the Defense Secretariat, with broad directives to coordinate the supply of equipment to the armed forces. The Information Commission was formed to implement a national propaganda campaign. The Manufacturing Secretariat’s Armament Commission was given an intimate role in the planning and direction of the production of war materiel. Additional agencies responsible for food, and fuel rationing were established.
The Council of the National Economy was directed to form a War Production Committee, with a sweeping mandate to direct the planned economy for the prosecution of the war effort. The State Planning Commission was granted the authority to set prices by fiat for a broad range of commodities. Pursuant to the directive to develop sophisticated statistical methods to maximize war production, the planning apparatus swelled in size. Investment in telex and computational machines exploded.
It was one thing to legislate, quite another to implement. The UASR had one notable strength which cannot be underestimated though. As Josef Stalin remarked, “Quantity has a quality all of its own,” and nowhere was this made more abundantly clear than in the American genius for mass production. Freed from class society’s animus towards uneconomic production, the American economy had recovered more quickly from the Great Depression than any other. Only Germany could claim similar recovery, and only through mass arms buildup and the plunder of its neighbors. The old United States had already been the most advanced industrial economy before its collapse, and the new soviet republic could claim, through the rational development of its planned economy, stable monetary policy and deficit spending supported investment, an economy second to none in productivity and the implementation of advanced technology. In 1940, the UASR produced more steel, aluminum, oil, and motor vehicles than all of the other major powers combined.
Directing this industrial might towards the war effort would be of paramount importance. And for all of the emergency powers the government laid claim to under the war effort, the relationship between the state, community, and individual changed surprisingly little during the war. While the American public was initially hesitant to be led into a foreign conflict, a very real, earnest patriotism developed within the polity. The revolutionary fervor which had begun to wane exploded into full force once more. While the Party and the state certainly massaged this revolutionary surge, the logic of democratic totalitarianism was in full force. The American people very quickly convinced itself that the show-down with fascist reaction truly would be the war to end all wars. It would be the “final conflict” that they sang about in “The Internationale” that would bring an end at last to man’s inhumanity to his fellow men, and sweep aside the last bulwarks of the old order.
Consequently, the state would rely as much on the enthusiastic democratic participation of American proletarians in all spheres of the war effort as it would on its new emergency powers. The eagerness of workers to do their part, to tackle the problems that would be faced with both ingenuity and hard work, would play a vital role in smoothing the transition to total economic mobilization. Nowhere was this more evident than the role of the Shipwright’s Federation in revolutionizing the production of ships. No task was more daunting than the task of supplying, not just the American military, but also the war effort of the Soviet Union, across ten thousand kilometers of mostly hostile ocean. And no triumph was greater than the mass produced Liberty Ship, the brainchild of ambitious shipbuilders like Clay Bedford. By the end of the war, merchant ships were being built in a tenth the time, with a quarter of the man-hours in labor, than the pre-war average.
For all of the genius of production, American workers still had a lot of catching up to do, and the logistical strain of fighting half a world away was a daunting task even with immense economic advantage America held. Even enemies convinced of the utter degeneracy of the American people, who had been “mongrelized” at the direction of “Judeo-Bolshevist” doctrines, could not ignore the 400 kg gorilla in the room. Hitler had initially been entirely dismissive of the threat posed by American communists across the Atlantic. America, under Nazi ideology, was a nation with a history of racial mongrelization and soft-headed moral degeneracy. Ruled at first by Jewish finance capitalists, and now under the thrall of Jewish communism, Americans were considered effeminate and weak. Their libertine challenging of old social mores, and commitment to the social advancement of women in a multi-ethnic society were considered laughable, and the deployment of American troops to the Soviet Union was not considered something that warranted a serious change to the invasion plans (Hitler had initially doubted that Americans would even have the stomach to stand beside their “brutish and bestial” Soviet allies).
The Nazis were correct in only the most trivial manner; by the standards of Fascist machismo, the value Americans placed on all human life made them soft. And indeed, many Americans might even agree, for they were much more reluctant to kill as a means to an end than their enemies or their Soviet allies. But they were soft in the same sense that water is soft; any sailor will testify just how harmless the ocean is when whipped into a great storm.(2)
1. The Act established exceptions based on health, mental or moral competency, and to mothers or sole legal guardians of a child. It also established deferments for holders of public office, workers in war industries as well as certain essential industries, and to students in certain fields considered to be vital to the war effort. Conscientious objection would allow for alternative service.
2. Many thanks to the late, great Iain M. Banks for this metaphor which I paraphrase here.
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The Sandman
Banned
I assume the first, most critical bit of the war effort would be clearing the Kurils and the Japanese-held parts of Sakhalin, along with any other bits the Japanese might take? Along with a major engineering effort to double-track the Trans-Siberian railroad, and possibly to expand the port facilities at Vladivostok and/or Nikolayevsk-na-Amur?
Even with Iceland under UASR control, shipping to Murmansk and Archangelsk is likely to be hellish, especially since the Germans can concentrate their entire navy on blocking that convoy route for the first two or three years of the war (and with at least some degree of support from the British and Norwegians). The Far Eastern route, if it can be held open, will be vital.
Although once Iran is taken, there would probably be an effort to improve the port and rail facilities there, thus allowing significant quantities of troops and material to be shipped to the Caspian or railed directly into the Caucasian SSRs.
Even with Iceland under UASR control, shipping to Murmansk and Archangelsk is likely to be hellish, especially since the Germans can concentrate their entire navy on blocking that convoy route for the first two or three years of the war (and with at least some degree of support from the British and Norwegians). The Far Eastern route, if it can be held open, will be vital.
Although once Iran is taken, there would probably be an effort to improve the port and rail facilities there, thus allowing significant quantities of troops and material to be shipped to the Caspian or railed directly into the Caucasian SSRs.
The Japanese are still officially neutral in 1940, so Vladivostok is still an open supply point for some time. However, the immense size of the Kwantung Army, which is well equipped and battle hardened, still plays a dramatic role in shaping military policy. It essentially means that a large number of units are tied down in the Far East even before Japan enters the war.
I think CalBear has repeatedly said this. The Far Eastern armies of the USSR were not stripped in 1941, it was the forces from Central Asia who moved in to save Moscow.
If you want to seriously cut the Soviet Army down to size in 1940, my advice would be have to have the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact go through as it was intended to in OTL. Basically, originally the Soviets were supposed to get central Poland while Germany got Lithuania. Given that the Germans are probably only intending to sign the pact because it puts the Soviets in an easier position to destroy, I suspect they would find the idea of a massive Soviet salient in central Poland to be irresistible. So the initial German attack isn't just a masssive thrust east but is a huge pincer which cuts off a massive chunk of the Red Army. That only should secure a defeat far worse than anything the Red Army suffered in 1940 and would allow the Germans to push far further into the USSR than in OTL. It also means Hitler still gets the huge ego boost that ultimately sends him off the deep end. [and presumably leads to his decision to strike west in 1942 while the Soviets and Americans aren't beaten].
Two more things, that coup in Persia probably needs at least the neutrality of the British colonies in the Middle East/India to suceed. Perhaps the Viceroy of India agrees to turn a blind eye in return for a zone of influence and a promise not to cause trouble during the home? Secondly, Britain is due for an election in 1940 (which will probably be held whenever Chamberlain decides to resign due to ill health). I think the US occupation of Iceland and the coup in Persia will probably mean the pro-German Conservatives win the election but they may not have a majority due to defections to the pro-American Conservatives and Labour gains. Don't know how the BUF could do...
teg
I am well aware of that. It's still means that half a million men, many of them in some of the best units, that are tied down and can't affect the outcome of the war, at least initially.
It honestly probably wouldn't have made that great of a difference, because the Soviet Army's preparation for defensive operations was woefully inadequate IOTL, and Soviet military doctrine utterly emphasized taking the offensive.
The Soviets are still busy occupying the Baltics, and bullying around Finland, and that's left their military vulnerable. Their units are in forward positions in Byelorussia and Ukraine, preparing for offensive operations against the Axis when the opportunity arises. This is all stuff that I will be covering in the next update, but the brief of it is that the while the situation is not identical to OTL, the weaknesses in doctrine, position, training, and equipment are analagous.
The Soviets also have little reason to expand their territory into Poland, since much of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian territory they seized IOTL has been under their control since the Civil War. But if you think that seizing the territory they were guaranteed under OTL's Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is that essential, I will amend that in.
Agreed. My reading is that Viceroy of India is more Anti-Nazi than he is Anti-Communist, and the under the table dealing is that the Comintern cuts its funding support for left-wing militant entryists in the Indian National Congress, and to diplomatically endorse the Churchillite-Labour compromise on the Indian question, which is to basically elevate India to full dominion status in the British Empire, something which will be implemented by Attlee's war government to mobilize Indian support for the war effort.
Which is not to say he'll exactly be happy when the Democratic Republic of Iran nationalizes the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
UK elections means a reduced majority for the National Government, led by Pro-German Tories with the participation of the Liberals, and the National Labour splinter. The BUF is at its zenith, and while they aren't part of the National Government, they continue to exert influence through Conservative allies. Anti-fascist Conservatives stood in the election as Unionists, and while the Labour vote expanded due to the cooling of hysteria towards the American revolution compared to 1935, they're hampered by the party's internal division over the platform and the "soul" of the Party.
I'm curious about both the American and Soviet's various armed forces both being referred to as the Red Army, e.c... I can see that getting highly confusing. Or are they commonly referred to as the American Red Army and the Russian Red Army(Soviet Red Army) or what... Regardless spectacular update Jello
Well that confusion is natural. The basic gist is that American sources typically refer to their own forces as the Red Army, Red Air Force, etc., and refer to their Soviet counterparts either by their Russian acronym (Raboche-krest'yanskaya Krasnaya Armiya) or as the Soviet Army, Navy, etc. The inverse would be true for Soviet sources.I'm curious about both the American and Soviet's various armed forces both being referred to as the Red Army, e.c... I can see that getting highly confusing. Or are they commonly referred to as the American Red Army and the Russian Red Army(Soviet Red Army) or what... Regardless spectacular update Jello
The real sticky question would be third party sources, and there's no uniform pattern. But that confusion will be lessened because for much of the war (1942-46), the two forces are united, at least on paper, into a Comintern Defense Force, with a "United Red Army," "United Red Navy," etc.
Ok that makes sense. I figured it would be something along those lines but I was curious. I like the idea of the United Red Army etc. Thank you. If you wouldn't mind do you have an answer to my previous questions before your update about the various Secretariats headquarters?
I am not quite sure yet. At one point in time, I had a half-joking idea that the SecDef would be headquartered in a pentagram shaped building
It's interesting to see that despite the authoritarian nature of prewar and wartime American society that the Council of National Economy is still there to plan the economy. At least it's still semi-participatory. It seems that the party apparatus is the one that creates the centralization along with what Murray Bookchin will say as the authoritarian features of industrial society and the city itself. Am I right to guess that the Solidarity Federation (are they called Wobblies here ITTL?) was transformed into the CNE by the post-revolutionary era?
Which of these bodies are more decentralizating? The CNE or the COS? I'm guessing that it should be the COS thanks to its revolutionary free soviets based on organization of free communities.
May I also ask what features of the Spanish Revolution of 1936 can be seen within UASR?
I saw the way that the American Revolution started with an "anarchic" phase and the Convocation of Soviets (an equivalent ITTL of the Aragon Regional Federation of Collectives or something?) seemingly a product of federalist tendencies; and most likely composed of delegates from Solidarity's industrial unions and revolutionary soviets organized by the Spartacus League (is this a left-wing communist political body/militia of sort?) But then the Convocation decided to form a provisional government? Maybe as something of an administrative committee responsible to the Convocation I'm sure. Is the concept of Friedrich Engels on the radical transformation of the state and its functions in the stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat itself (so the workers' state is not exactly the state as we knew it) the most accepted idea by the American Communist Party here? (I'm not sure of the views of OTL Haim Kantorovitch but it sure differs ITTL). We all know of the complicated mixture of Marxist-Leninist, left-wing communist and anarcho-syndicalist tendencies within TTL DeLeonism and the American labor movement.
What are the contributions of what IP mentioned here before as TTL's libertarian organizations during the Revolution? Did they have significant numbers within the Convocation to push Emma Goldman to the Provisional Government, of course if this is still the plan? (if they or Emma thought that joining the "government" can stop the American Revolution from degenerating as it was in the first version?)
I'm also curious of the transformation towards forming a standing legislative body that surely came from the insistence of the parliamentary wing of the party, like those supposedly should sit in the incoming Congress that was never seated and were not chosen in the Convocation? Is this part of reaching out to the other political groups that opposed the military junta like the bourgeois political parties? I'm sure that somehow at the local level they are being included in the system. So this is the national manifestation of it?
Maybe my anarchism just made me think of how did you incorporate the ideology within the structure of infant UASR.
Which of these bodies are more decentralizating? The CNE or the COS? I'm guessing that it should be the COS thanks to its revolutionary free soviets based on organization of free communities.
May I also ask what features of the Spanish Revolution of 1936 can be seen within UASR?
I saw the way that the American Revolution started with an "anarchic" phase and the Convocation of Soviets (an equivalent ITTL of the Aragon Regional Federation of Collectives or something?) seemingly a product of federalist tendencies; and most likely composed of delegates from Solidarity's industrial unions and revolutionary soviets organized by the Spartacus League (is this a left-wing communist political body/militia of sort?) But then the Convocation decided to form a provisional government? Maybe as something of an administrative committee responsible to the Convocation I'm sure. Is the concept of Friedrich Engels on the radical transformation of the state and its functions in the stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat itself (so the workers' state is not exactly the state as we knew it) the most accepted idea by the American Communist Party here? (I'm not sure of the views of OTL Haim Kantorovitch but it sure differs ITTL). We all know of the complicated mixture of Marxist-Leninist, left-wing communist and anarcho-syndicalist tendencies within TTL DeLeonism and the American labor movement.
What are the contributions of what IP mentioned here before as TTL's libertarian organizations during the Revolution? Did they have significant numbers within the Convocation to push Emma Goldman to the Provisional Government, of course if this is still the plan? (if they or Emma thought that joining the "government" can stop the American Revolution from degenerating as it was in the first version?)
I'm also curious of the transformation towards forming a standing legislative body that surely came from the insistence of the parliamentary wing of the party, like those supposedly should sit in the incoming Congress that was never seated and were not chosen in the Convocation? Is this part of reaching out to the other political groups that opposed the military junta like the bourgeois political parties? I'm sure that somehow at the local level they are being included in the system. So this is the national manifestation of it?
Maybe my anarchism just made me think of how did you incorporate the ideology within the structure of infant UASR.