Auroran War Part 2
Excerpts from The Secondary Fronts, by Veronika Gerasimov, Published by the Military Academy of the WPRA, 2012
The Scandinavian countries had, throughout the thirties, been experiencing an economic boom from rapid industrialisation of what had once been largely agrarian and otherwise pre-industrial economies thanks to heavy investment from the larger countries of Europe in the hopes of creating a buffer against the Comintern. However, these programs also came with the rise of labourist and outright communist movements which lead to significant worries from certain circles; with Sweden having the worst of this paranoia. The Swedish fascist movement was highly organised with heavy funding from Italy and Germany and was able to sap vitality and interest from the leftist movements in Sweden with its campaigns focused on nationalist "consciousness", brotherhood with Germany, fear of the Soviet and American Unions, and ill timed acts of violence from the Communist party of Sweden. Though the fascist movement was never able to form an outright majority in the face of liberal, communist, and social democratic opposition, they were popular enough that the King felt compelled to appoint one of them as Sweden's head of government. From there, a dictatorial Fascist government was established with far reaching powers being given to the state and quick suspensions of most civil liberties and the banning of most opposition parties in quick succession.
The Fascist government took credit for the continuing economic boom from foreign investment and rapid industrialisation; painting itself as the saviour of the nation and the bringer of prosperity as the rate of industrialisation approached its zenith. By 1940, Sweden had significant industrial assets for both military and civilian purposes and had significantly expanded its infrastructure network of roads and railways; many of which were connected to neighbouring Norway and Finland. Sweden's own capitalist class grew particularly fat from the lucrative trade with resource hungry Germany and the rest of the European fascist bloc. Germany had long been dependent on Swedish Iron to make military grade steel, and with Germany's armament and industrial modernisation programs at full swing Hitler's Third Reich would require vast and extensive trade with Birger Furegard's Sweden. This trade would also include significant cooperation in military affairs as the two nations' rapidly expanding militaries shared ideas, designs, training exercises and plans. German and Italian military thinkers in particular would inform what parts of Swedish doctrine were not being informed by their counterparts from France or Britain.
The Swedish Strv m/40 would be a fine example of this; a tank with heavy derivative influence from the Panzer III and the Piat 39. Though due to the terrain conditions of northern Europe, Swedish vehicles would tend to be somewhat taller than their counterparts from other countries in exchange for extreme amounts of gun depression; with few Swedish vehicles being unable to depress their weapons by less than twelve degrees. The intention being that these vehicles would "peek" out from hills to take shots against superior numbers of American and Soviet vehicles before moving towards the next hull down position after achieving local victory. The SAAB 17; Sweden's primary twin engine bomber, would be a clear child of the lineage of the Ju 88, though Sweden's primary fighter aircraft; the SAAB 20 would diverge from the international norm by being a pusher aircraft instead of a puller. What Sweden did not produce for itself would instead be purchased from abroad; particularly purpose built interceptor aircraft to alleviate Swedish fears of high altitude bombing attacks. To achieve logistical commonality with Germany, Sweden would ensure compatibility between Swedish and German weaponry, making sure to use the same calibres for their weapons and exchanging licenses for assorted marks of guns, shells, engines, and transmissions.
Finland's industrialisation and military expansion programs would be carried out under a bourgeois democratic government, with the country being able to resist the siren call of fascism and maintain their republican norms of statesmanship. However, Finland had significant worries; Finland had once been a part of the Russian Empire and there were significant voices within the Soviet Union that all former parts of the Russian empire should rejoin the USSR. The military cooperation with the Communist American Union only deepened fears of Soviet aggression, especially as Trotskyist doctrines of permanent and international revolution replaced Stalinist ideas of Socialism in one country. Finland would generally prefer to produce license built equipment or buy such equipment from abroad, with Sweden, Germany, and Britain being its primary partners in this regard; with France and Italy being distant fourth and fifth places and the Finns being generally unimpressed by most of the equipment offered by the Japanese with some minor exceptions. Within the Finnish military brass was the question of whether to adopt an offensive or a defensive strategy. Defensive strategies would suit Finnish strengths well, especially with the vast disparity in population with the enemy. However, offensive strategies would keep the fighting away from Finland proper and would be able to threaten enemy centres of production and perhaps even press some Finnish territorial claims. And of course, there was the advantage of having the initiative.
Coded transmissions and secret talks with Germany and Italy however, would determine Finland's path. Talks with the chiefs of Fascism in Europe made it clear that the forces of reaction would be on the attack, not on the defence. After some debate within the Finnish military, the decision to be on the offence was made final when the Finnish civilian government acquiesced to Soviet territorial demands for Karelia. Now not only was the doctrine decided, but the Causus Belli had been found as well. The war would be not only for Finland's safety, but also vengeance for yet another insult from the Russians and their allies in the new world.
By the time the war started in 1940, the Swedish military had gone from being a largely self defence oriented force to an expansive military machine meant to construct Birger's dreamed of "Nordarikki". Finland was similarly prepared for war.
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Following the cancellation of operation Valkyrie and Ragnar with Axis lines stopping at the gates of Moscow, the Swedo-Finnic coalition was now occupying large portions of Northern Europe. Swedish forces in tandem with their German counterparts now had Denmark and Norway under their control with puppets being established to give the illusion of choice to their "Nordic brethren". However, the three primary objectives of the far northern Axis forces; Murmansk, Leningrad, and Arkhangelsk, remained maddeningly out of reach of fascist forces.
Leningrad's defenses were just a little too stubborn for either Axis army group North to the south or the Finno-Swedish first army group to the north to overrun. Despite the brutality of the blockade over the city, just enough supplies managed to reach the city to keep the hope of resistance alive. Bombing raids were met with intercceptor sorties and frustratingly adequetely provisioned anti-aircraft batteries, naval shelling sorties were met with powerful coastal batteries at Leningrad proper and at Kronstadt island, naval bombing strikes, sea mines, and the still active Soviet Baltic fleet which ensured that German, Swedish, and Finnish ships still had to exercise caution. Artillery would be responded to in kind from land and air, and attempts to punch through the defence lines and finish the fight were continually repulsed.
Constant attempts to close the Murmansk supply route were just as constantly rebuffed by General Oliver Law who kept a more or less permanent guard over the Murmansk supply corridor. The American and Soviet navies made sure to keep watch over the arctic and even the bravest of military formations balked at the proposition of facing naval artillery and naval airpower that kept guard over the white sea and arctic ocean coast.
The efforts to reach Arkhangelsk were fraught with supply issues due to the great distances involved. At their closest, Arkhangelsk was close enough to be the target of a number of bombing raids; but the Comintern was well aware of the city's strategic importance and wily mobile defenses continually ensured the city remained just out of reach.
Fighting in these conditions was difficult. Winters were long and bitterly cold periods with the fighting on the Kola Peninsula being annually plunged into complete darkness and summers were almost completely lacking in a true "night." Such conditions required adjustments of many combat tactics to deal with either twenty four hour days or nights. Infiltration tactics were significantly more difficult to enact during the summer due to the midnight sun, while winter tactics had to be adjusted not only for extreme cold but also pervasive, all day long darkness. Formations raised from Alaska who were already acclimated to such conditions were thus highly useful to American commanders in the region, being used to functioning in such extreme environments.
Soviet forces in the area used the stalling of enemy attacks to learn from mistakes, retrain, regroup, and refresh themselves in preparation for the inevitable resumption of enemy offensives once the winter snows began to melt and the ground hardened following the spring thaw. Continual skirmishes were a proving ground to test theories of combat and important for keeping informed about enemy formations and movements on the other side of the lines in the deep snows.
These scouts would gain the first hints of something beastly occurring in Sweden however, as Sami refugees began to stumble their way through the snow in an attempt to flee the start of the final solution in Sweden. In a meeting between the heads of the Nazi parties of Germany and Sweden, it was agreed that the Sami were to be considered "untermensch" to be exterminated to clear their living spaces for Nordic settlement and resource exploitation. Though repression of the nomadic Sami people had begun as early as the assumption of absolute power by the Swedish Nazi party, extermination would only begin in winter 1941-1942 as these undesireables were being rounded up. The infirm were to be exterminated in specialised camps for the task, the healthy would instead be sent to factories to be worked until they were no longer as such;Comi upon which they would be transferred to extermination camps in northern Sweden.
The Jewish population of Scandinavia would also suffer the same fate, as would known leftist activists whether Communists, Anarchists, or Feminists, the disabled, those deemed to be "sexually deviant", and others not fitting the vision of a pure Scandinavia.
In a detestable act of "Aryan friendship", Sweden cooperated extensively with German officials in designing the final solution and ensuring that there would be no escape for those who were marked for slavery and extermination. Sweden's death camps would be designed with the aid of German Engineers and its factories were directly modeled after German fordist industries to be prisons as much as they were places of work.
The Sami; being the farthest from Swedish centers of power were perhaps the best able to flee. Some chose to flee to Finland, in the hopes that its still democratic government would be able to resist pressure from Sweden and Germany to give up its populations of "undesirables", while others braved the trip to the Soviet Union proper. Though most were not particularly aware of the magnitude of the final solution's efforts, the reports of atrocities they made were quickly publicised, though with liberating those camps a distant dream, direct evidence was difficult to acquire and reports were often disbelieved in the Liberal Democracies of Europe.
Swedish troops for their part, were widely reported to be just as savage as their German counterparts in their treatment of civilians. Mass rapes of women in occupied territories or of female POWs were widely recorded and almost never punished, looting was outright encouraged by the officers with a system being set up to sent stolen goods back home to their families, grotesque reprisals for Partisan activity were the norm, POWs would be sent to work to death or were simply executed if they were not fit for work, and outbreaks of violence such as the rape of Petrozavodotsk were rarely punished. Counterattacks made in the winter did drive back the Swedes and the Finns, but their expertise in winter warfare made them more difficult to dislodge than their German counterparts in the far north, with bitter fighting leading to the deaths or capture of about twenty thousand swedes and ten thousand finns for the loss of twenty thousand Americans and twenty five thousand Soviets. A further twenty thousand Americans and twenty thousand Soviets were wounded; to about ten thousand Finns and an equivalent number of Swedes. The operational art had yet to be fully developed, and the pressing need for armour to the south left a deficiency for the fighting in the north in these assets.
Once the rains started to clear, Marshal Eric af Edholm made his thrust towards Arkhangelsk in earnest, intending to try and take the city or at the very least cut off Murmansk once and for all. He amassed a force of some two hundred thousand Swedish soldiers and one hundred thousand Finnish troops for this task, amassing them into the "Rus" Army. Accompanying them would be two divisions of the Waffen SS from the Wiking corps, thirty thousand "volunteered" Norwegians, and fifty thousand "recruited" Danes. This scheme, labeled "operation Gustavus Adolphus" would be mirrored by offensives aimed at Murmansk with a smaller force of about fifty thousand swedes, fifty thousand finns, twenty thousand "volunteered" Norwegians, and a German and an Italian Alpine division, and attempts to tighten the noose around Leningrad with already present forces.
The first attacks of operation Gustavus would occur on June 17th, 1942 at roughly 5:00 AM with a series of bombardments from air and via artillery before the lead elements of the attack; namely those Nordic forces fortunate enough to be motorized, mechanized, or armored; pushed through. The entry of Petainist National France into the war on the side of the Axis was a coup for Axis intelligence; as data gathered from raids on Allied and Comintern embassies in Italy, France, and Sweden before their declarations of war on their respective combatants had given them access to large samples of diplomatic code and encipherment tables to work with. This intelligence had informed Eric of a weak point in the enemy lines at Kargopol; where Comintern forces were in the process of transferring towards Kholmogory.
The attack sought to exploit this as thoroughly as possible with a heavy and rapid thrust lead by the first Swedish armoured division into the weakened parts of the line with the intent of pushing towards Arkhangelsk as soon as possible and letting the rest of the enemy wither on the vine. It was in its own way, a form of deep battle, but the Comintern was quicker to rally than the Fascists anticipated. General Saren McConnell*, America's first female general, having transferred to the region; mobilized her assets in tandem with Soviet General Shaposhikov to form a quick defense against the onslaught of soldiery pouring through the Kargopol breach.
A tank commander first and foremost, Saren mobilised her armoured assets to try and draw out the armour of her enemies into engagements that would leave the infantry exposed to her assault guns to freely fire upon while a flight of Sturmoviks was mobilised to try and take on any formations that had been deprived of their self propelled anti-air support by heavy assault gun fire. She banked on her enemy underestimating her as a commander; based on intelligence reports that Eric considered her a "feeble minded fool" due to her sex and believed her troops to be demoralised due to having to take orders from a woman, thus encouraging his "hunters" to chase down her combat units and annihilate them so as to open the road to Arkhangelsk.
There was a certain logic to the Swedish plans; Sweden's greatest military glories in its past were won by a doctrine of extreme aggression and ruthlessly seeking out the enemy's strength to destroy it to ensure that nothing could be left to threaten the path to an objective. With a historical manpower disadvantage against most of its enemies, it could not afford to stretch itself to hold onto all possible territory, and had to instead build its power and its victories upon smashing the enemy's ability to win itself. America was an economic juggernaut to dwarf any other nation in the world, and the Soviet Union itself had vast industries, but the Americans were operating at the end of a supply chain stretching across the entirety of the arctic under constant threat by surface raiders, naval bombers, and submarines. Destroying these forces would represent a loss to the entirety of America's eastern European command.
Lastly of course, there was the simple condition of victory disease. In 1942 the Axis' ambitions were at their peak. The French had joined the cause, in South America the Integralists were at the high tide of their successes with Columbia having all but fallen and the other comintern members pushed to the edge, the Japanese were rampaging seemingly unstoppably across the Indian and Pacific oceans with the Socialist Chinese in full retreat and their forces menacing Vladivostok to the point of closing supply routes, Germany and its thralls had penetrated deep into the Soviet Union's south and were pouring into the Caucasus while Italy chased Britain out of the Mediterranean and aided Falangist spain in crushing the red remnant. Victory was, to the Axis powers; so close they could taste it. One final effort would win them the war and see all of the old world and South America under their control to prepare for the final conflict with America.
Though this belief was founded upon fallacy and a misreading of the fortunes of the war, the Comintern forces in the Arkhangelsk oblast were under no illusions about what was at stake. While naval firepower kept the Swedes and Finns from getting too close to the coast and left a corridor open from Murmansk to Arkhangeslk, the seizure of either would represent a devastating blow to Comintern logistics. With Vladivostok closed to shipping due to the hostilities with Japan, the loss of the arctic route would mean all supplies to the soviet union would have to go through Iran, which would have required an immensely long Atlantic and Indian ocean voyage under continual threat by Axis submarines and raiders.
With this in mind, the Comintern structured their tactics to focus on the SPAA assets of the enemy were themselves advised by the lethality of enemy anti-aircraft having taught many pilots a hard lesson in previous years of fighting. The German 20mm flak cannons were supplemented not only by heavier 88 and 105mm guns or even 128mms carried by the "Waffentraggerized" Strv H/39s but by the lethal Swedish 40mm bofors autocannon that had repeatedly shredded those aircraft who sought to set up strafing runs against Axis troops. In this period of the war where air superiority was not guaranteed in the face of the Axis air fleets, any extra safety for the airmen and women of the Red armies was welcomed.
The first tank engagements of this counteroffensive would take place outside of Khargopol as units of the 33rd "Scylla's teeth" All women's Tank battallion encountered the lead elements of the first bepansrade corps. The light tanks and armoured cars from the two formations would engage in an initial skirmish before the T-4 and StrV m/40s of the opposing armoured formations joined in the conflict. Right on cue as the Strv H/39s started to arrive, the Americans feigned a retreat towards the south, drawing away Swedish armoured support determined to destroy the American vehicles wherever possible.
Shaposhikov had a number of tank destroyers in waiting alongside more visible T-34s and KV-1s, and the Swedes were met with the shock of Soviet anti-armour fire striking them as they attempted to catch up to the Americans who shifted into flanking positions to entrap their nordic enemies.
Infantry forces would be "demotorised" by heavy usage of "bazooka" and anti-materiel rifle fire to force enemy soldiers to dismount off of whatever trucks or Half-tracks they were using while the assault guns rolled into position under the cover of self-propelled artillery fire. The "Stalin's organ" roar of "Katyushas" would join the "song" of artillery cannons firing as shells rained down upon the Swedes and finns before mobile infantry assets would dismount and engage their enemies.
The Swedes' most politically loyal units were filled with contempt for the largely female forces of General Saren and the Slavic and Central asian troops under Shaposhikov, filled with a sense of Aryan and Male chauvinist invincibility in the face of their enemies. Such arrogance would not avail them well as their anti-air assets were worn down and the go ahead was given to tactical bombers and ground attack planes to start their attack runs on their enemies. While fighters peeled off to ward off interceptors, bombs and cannon fire would stitch the ground, quickly defusing much of the momentum of the Swedish offensive.
However the Nordic forces were managing gains farther north; securing bridgeheads across the river and were confirmed to be moving in to try and catch the rear of Shaposhikov and Saren's soldiers. Rocket and cannon fire from enemy troops was a general estimate of their position as they moved under the cover of a creeping barrage, but the sight of almost a hundred tanks moving to try and assail Saren's command position directly would be the rallying call for the heavy tankers of the 39th Medusae and the 77th Heavy tank guard's battalion to form a rapid line. The heavy armour of the T-5s and the KV-1s would resist shot after shot, giving lie to Axis myths of Comintern inferiority of armour while the enemy's own heavy tanks would be met with heavy suppressive fire from rocket artillery forces to prevent them from finding their equals on the comintern formation.
Despite being outnumbered by almost two to one, the defending Comintern tanks saw off the assault and pushed the Swedish forces northwards. However further victory was not in the cards as the enemy's reinforcements began to arrive, forcing the counter-offensive to come to a halt and the lines to be drawn at the river. Recognising that her objective was to simply make sure that Arkhangelsk's supply lines would remain open, Saren and her Soldiers' Soviets came to the agreement that pressing further would not be advised, and settled into a gradual back and forth meatgrinder as the good campaigning weather started to give way to the arctic cold once again. However, the forces of far northern command would use this time to train, amass reinforcements, and prepare for the coming battles of 1943.
*Fictional person
