The Great Crusade (Reds! Part 3)
- Thread starter Aelita
- Start date
This has been explained rather often but the gist of it is that Fascist Italy is much richer from Libyan oil, Fascism is more popular in Italy therefore Mussolini feels safer in keeping around competent generals instead of just toadies, the army is better equipped, and they don't join a war they expect to be over by Christmas, they're prepared for the long haul this time.
Bulldoggus
Banned
You know, Pinochet would almost certainly end up being an apolitical communist. In one of those really sick ironies, Allende chose him as army boss because he was known for, unlike his colleagues, not being a hard-right ideologue.
Likley not. The Italians and Bulgarians did deport Jews in their own occupied parts of Europe. In addition Thessaloniki was known (along with Vilnus) as being one of the few cities in Europe where Jews formed anywhere near a plurality, thus I think Hitler would make a point of having cleansed in the final solution.
Yeah. On the other hand, there might be more impetus to bomb the railways to the camps than in OTL and there will certainly be a greater effort to help people who are fleeing the Nazis, at least from the Americans and Soviets.
teg
Bookmark1995
Banned
I ask because Italian Jews themselves avoided deportation until Germany directly occupied the country.
Yes because they were Italian Jews, Jews who happened to be Italians and sometimes supported the Facist Party. Same reason why the Bulgarian Jews avoided deportation.
China in the Second World War Part V (TRSR)
Excerpt from China in the Second world war by General (class AAAAA) Leang
Dragon dance
The commencement of operation Onikaze fell on 5:30 AM on the 13th of July 1939. Japan and the traitor Chinese objectives were to crush the spirit of the Chinese army and to drive the front lines as far west as possible. The City of Chonqing, the provisional capital of the Republic of China while Nanjing and Beijing lay occupied was to be the site of the greatest thrust of fascist forces. Northerly forces were meant to seize Xian while to the south Nanning was to be the target of Japanese occupation so as to cut off China's sea access entirely. Assisting the Japanese army and the army of Manchukuo would be the forces most loyal to Jiang Jieshi and his cronies. The ma families, fiercely anti-communist, directed their forces against the Wang Jingwei government, splitting the focus of Chinese forces while Tibet declared a pro-Japanese neutrality and dared to engage in a number of border skirmishes meant to expand its reach, further weakening the ability of China to resist. However, the leaders of Yunnan, Shanxi, Xinjiang, and Guangxi declared their support for Wang Jingwei; declaring Jiang Jieshi to be a feckless coward and a tyrant who would dare sell out his motherland to foreign invaders.
Though the war had essentially begun on accident, the Japanese sensed the ability to win and in doing so, build themselves a great empire to eclipse even the British. With Germany withdrawing support for China in favour of courting Japan and unofficial comments from Britain, France, and the Netherlands indicating recognition of Jiang Jieshi as the rightful leader of China and not American and Soviet supported Wang Jingwei, the Japanese felt emboldened to the point of feeling free to commit nearly two million soldiers in total to operation Onikaze, two armies for each of its offensives drawn from both its own military and the military of Manchukuo and the reorganized nationalist Chinese government and the Three Mas. Such a sledgehammer blow was felt to be sufficient to force the surrender of Wang Jingwei by the start of the new year and indeed at the start of the operation it was seemingly impossible to resist such a massive strike. Following the disasters of 1937 and 1938, the Chinese army was of low spirits. The battle of Shanghai had torn from it its gizzard and left a hollow carcass, and other defeats had eradicated the core of trained and equipped soldiers. The betrayal of Jiang Jieshi had left shock waves in the Chinese body politic and many had considered surrender then and there.
However the overwhelming response from the still free people of China and from lower government officials as well as many opposition figures that China could not allow itself to become another Abyssinia convinced those who were still loyal to China and the global proletariat to fight on even if the prospects of the war seemed tremendously bleak. Equipment from the American Republics and the Soviet Union had been amassed over the course of almost two years of war, and in the relative safety of western China, divisions could be trained in safety by American and Soviet advisers and newly minted Chinese veterans to oppose the invaders and the traitors. The occupied areas of China were now crawling with Chinese guerrillas and freedom fighters struggling every day against the invaders. Japan's rapid advances brought it deep within China, but they found only ever growing resistance the farther inland they went. Frustrated by the constant attacks of resistance movements and the lack of compliance to Japanese rule, the fascists began to implement ever crueller policies against any hint of resistance. Despite attempts by Jiang Jieshi's collaborationist government to restrain the Japanese army's brutalities, the Japanese commanders began to order the routine annihilation of population centers in attempts to flush out any cells of resistance.
After the slaughter of a hundred thousand people throughout Central China in the "draining the marsh" campaign to flush out Chinese resistance, Jiang Jieshi sent a plea to the Japanese commander to please restrain his soldiers for the sake of making it easier for his government to administer the Chinese without having to engage in heavy handed censorship of information. The response from the Japanese general was simple, short, and utterly indicative of the nature of the relationship between Japan and Nationalist China.
"Last I was aware, you came to us for aid, not the other way around. Better that ten innocent Chinese die from our soldiers' over abundance of zeal in the pursuit of victory than one partisan cause trouble for the both of us." To this, Jiang Jieshi had no response.
However, Communist resistance forces reared their heads ever deeper within Japanese occupied territories, even installing themselves within the European concessions to monitor and report the transactions made between Jiang Jieshi's collaborators and the capitalists who dominated the concessions. Given that these were a common route for the collaborators and the Japanese to buy products from luxury goods to outright weapons of war such as tanks, being able to keep track of the purchase and sale of goods in these places was of crucial importance. Knowing if the collaborators would have the benefit of fresh cannonry or new air planes was deeply important. Japanese air superiority allowed for the free and unopposed bombing of Chinese forces at the commencement of offensive operations, while Japanese armored superiority allowed for breaches in defensive lines to be opened and exploited by the large masses of fascist divisions committed to the massive offensive. With the need to carefully ration out the resources either produced within China or acquired from the American Republics or Soviet Union evident, particularly in this dark period of the war, the National Revolutionary Army had to have the appropriate counters in place and know in advance if equipment such as anti-tank guns or anti-aircraft artillery was going to be needed in greater numbers.
Elsewhere, resistance forces sought to deny the enemy their use of their heavy equipment by sabotaging their supply lines. This was the widest front for a conflict in human history, and Japanese forces were operating at the end of a long supply line from Manchuria and the home islands. Thus any sort of delay in the shipment of supplies such as shells, replacement parts, and fuel was liable to drag any movement of fascist forces to a complete standstill. Well aware of this, the people's resistance movements ambushed supply caravans, cut railways, sabotaged collaborator factories, and even sometimes engaged in piracy on the river ways so as to make their use by supply convoys difficult. Important enemy military or collaborationist officials would be targeted for assassination, kidnapping, or simply tracked to allow their movements to be known by the NRA's military command. Needless to say, a thousand plans to assassinate Jiang Jieshi were hatched, but the great betrayer himself had the devil's luck when it came to avoiding attempts at assassination or kidnapping, and his legions of security made opportunities to reach for his throat rare indeed. The leaders of the hated Kwantung army also remained elusive at best. However, the constant campaign of resistance had its desired effect; Japanese and Collaborationist soldiers were reported to constantly be on edge and enemy movements were slower than the sort of blitzkrieg the enemy wanted, saving China from the sort of rapid crushing losses of territory suffered in the beginning of the war that saw nearly half of China's population under the enemy.
Northern Chinese provinces such as Shaanxi would see particularly brutal fighting. More than six hundred thousand fascists poured through the front lines in a massive assault across a front wider than any of those seen in the western front of the first world war. Yan Xishan's forces were pushed to the breaking point by a tidal wave of enemies; rapidly pushing them towards Xi'an as General Umezu sought to link fascist forces with the Three Mas. However the people of Shaanxi were ill inclined to surrender to the barbarian onslaught pouring through the Chinese hinterland. The Communist Eighth route army made itself immediately available for facing the fascist onslaught and joined forces with Yan Xishan's troops and those directly underneath Wang Jingwei to hold Japanese forces at important sites such as Ankang and deny them the ability to surround Xi'an. In the face of enemy air and armored superiority the Chinese were able to hold the south of Shanxi province against the overwhelming force of the enemy, forcing the Japanese to abandon the press into the south of Shaanxi after a three month siege; stopping both the Japanese from the east and the Ma forces to the west.
Xi'an itself was targeted by an entire Japanese armoured division and its hangers on, bringing the press of steel into the fray that sorely tested Chinese anti-tank doctrine in the face of a massed enemy onslaught and ceaseless aerial assault by everything from dive bombers to heavy four engined craft. By this point in the war, a number of Chinese tank crews and fighter pilots had been sufficiently trained in the Soviet Union and in Xinjiang to be considered well qualified even by exacting American peacetime standards, and were quickly unleashed to the city's defense against the fascist hordes. With the help of a volunteer division formed out of American, Mongolian, Latino, and Soviet forces, the Japanese assault slammed into a wall of concrete and steel for more than a month of high intensity fighting before settling into a long siege. But despite the best efforts of Japan, Manchukuo, and the traitors; the city would not fall and Wang Jingwei's government had received perhaps its first major victory as the Japanese pulled back in bedraggled fashion to lick their wounds; withdrawing to a safe distance by year's end to fight the battle of a hundred regiments in an attempt to cleanse communist influences from their occupied territories.
The south offensive was aimed at crushing the highly anti-Jiang Jieshi Yunnan province and the highly loyalist Guangxi political group which was raising thousands of soldiers to fight for the cause of Chinese people's liberation. First spotted by Chinese aerial reconnaisance flier and eventuial air ace Yu Fang, the Japanese assault force bulldozed its way through much of the Chinese south under the slogan "no stops until Hainan". Advancing more than a dozen kilometers every day, the Japanese would overrun Liouzhou and the Japanese commander sent Chen Jitang a simple request. "Surrender Nanning unto our forces and your people shall be spared the sword, should fortune favour you; you may even find yourself awarded a place of power and comfort in the new governance of your people. Free of the insidious influences of the white devil in red cloaks from America and Russia, part of a nation of equals with Nippon so that you too may bask in the eternal sun." Jitang's response was a rather famously rude and extremely hostile Chinese insult. "肏你祖宗十八代". Certainly, the commander felt quite offended on the behalf of his eighteen generations of ancestors when his red faced traitor Chinese aide translated the insult for him and ordered the assault towards Nanning to proceed with all due haste.
Well trained artillery crews set up in strategic points rained fire down upon the Japanese advance as quickly as it began, while well arrayed nests of machine guns and pill boxes gave the Japanese a taste of assaulting fortified positions and repay them for the slaughter inflicted upon Chinese forces attempting to take out Japanese bunkers at Shanghai. Quad .50 caliber nests and 85mm guns gave Japanese aircraft something to think about while Japanese fighter pilots found themselves forced to duel an outnumbered but fanatically determined national revolutionary air force. Chinese traitor forces; considered somewhat expendable by their Japanese counterparts, were quickly forced into the fray ahead of the IJA while the IJN drove around the Chinese coast to lay the formidable power of its guns and the Japanese sentai upon the NRA. Though the Chinese shore batteries were heavily outmatched by Japanese naval artillery and carrier craft and were not able to stop the landing of the Sentai, they were able to buy enough time for reinforcements to arrive and for the people living in the coastal villages to flee inland towards Nanning even as everything from destroyer caliber guns to massive battleship shells rained down upon the coast. What was meant to be a quick advance slowed down over the course of months, with the north Yunnan offensive starting to stagnate for largely similar reasons while the fascist hordes sought some method of breakthrough. Eventually though, Japanese supplies began to run thin and the assault had to be put on pause to allow for its armies to rest.
The drive towards Chonqing would dwarf both of these engagements however. The bulk of the Japanese assault force was aimed squarely at driving Jingwei out of his capital, and this would be the first of a number of fascist assaults aimed at the heart of Chinese resistance itself.
...
(To be continued)
Dragon dance
The commencement of operation Onikaze fell on 5:30 AM on the 13th of July 1939. Japan and the traitor Chinese objectives were to crush the spirit of the Chinese army and to drive the front lines as far west as possible. The City of Chonqing, the provisional capital of the Republic of China while Nanjing and Beijing lay occupied was to be the site of the greatest thrust of fascist forces. Northerly forces were meant to seize Xian while to the south Nanning was to be the target of Japanese occupation so as to cut off China's sea access entirely. Assisting the Japanese army and the army of Manchukuo would be the forces most loyal to Jiang Jieshi and his cronies. The ma families, fiercely anti-communist, directed their forces against the Wang Jingwei government, splitting the focus of Chinese forces while Tibet declared a pro-Japanese neutrality and dared to engage in a number of border skirmishes meant to expand its reach, further weakening the ability of China to resist. However, the leaders of Yunnan, Shanxi, Xinjiang, and Guangxi declared their support for Wang Jingwei; declaring Jiang Jieshi to be a feckless coward and a tyrant who would dare sell out his motherland to foreign invaders.
Though the war had essentially begun on accident, the Japanese sensed the ability to win and in doing so, build themselves a great empire to eclipse even the British. With Germany withdrawing support for China in favour of courting Japan and unofficial comments from Britain, France, and the Netherlands indicating recognition of Jiang Jieshi as the rightful leader of China and not American and Soviet supported Wang Jingwei, the Japanese felt emboldened to the point of feeling free to commit nearly two million soldiers in total to operation Onikaze, two armies for each of its offensives drawn from both its own military and the military of Manchukuo and the reorganized nationalist Chinese government and the Three Mas. Such a sledgehammer blow was felt to be sufficient to force the surrender of Wang Jingwei by the start of the new year and indeed at the start of the operation it was seemingly impossible to resist such a massive strike. Following the disasters of 1937 and 1938, the Chinese army was of low spirits. The battle of Shanghai had torn from it its gizzard and left a hollow carcass, and other defeats had eradicated the core of trained and equipped soldiers. The betrayal of Jiang Jieshi had left shock waves in the Chinese body politic and many had considered surrender then and there.
However the overwhelming response from the still free people of China and from lower government officials as well as many opposition figures that China could not allow itself to become another Abyssinia convinced those who were still loyal to China and the global proletariat to fight on even if the prospects of the war seemed tremendously bleak. Equipment from the American Republics and the Soviet Union had been amassed over the course of almost two years of war, and in the relative safety of western China, divisions could be trained in safety by American and Soviet advisers and newly minted Chinese veterans to oppose the invaders and the traitors. The occupied areas of China were now crawling with Chinese guerrillas and freedom fighters struggling every day against the invaders. Japan's rapid advances brought it deep within China, but they found only ever growing resistance the farther inland they went. Frustrated by the constant attacks of resistance movements and the lack of compliance to Japanese rule, the fascists began to implement ever crueller policies against any hint of resistance. Despite attempts by Jiang Jieshi's collaborationist government to restrain the Japanese army's brutalities, the Japanese commanders began to order the routine annihilation of population centers in attempts to flush out any cells of resistance.
After the slaughter of a hundred thousand people throughout Central China in the "draining the marsh" campaign to flush out Chinese resistance, Jiang Jieshi sent a plea to the Japanese commander to please restrain his soldiers for the sake of making it easier for his government to administer the Chinese without having to engage in heavy handed censorship of information. The response from the Japanese general was simple, short, and utterly indicative of the nature of the relationship between Japan and Nationalist China.
"Last I was aware, you came to us for aid, not the other way around. Better that ten innocent Chinese die from our soldiers' over abundance of zeal in the pursuit of victory than one partisan cause trouble for the both of us." To this, Jiang Jieshi had no response.
However, Communist resistance forces reared their heads ever deeper within Japanese occupied territories, even installing themselves within the European concessions to monitor and report the transactions made between Jiang Jieshi's collaborators and the capitalists who dominated the concessions. Given that these were a common route for the collaborators and the Japanese to buy products from luxury goods to outright weapons of war such as tanks, being able to keep track of the purchase and sale of goods in these places was of crucial importance. Knowing if the collaborators would have the benefit of fresh cannonry or new air planes was deeply important. Japanese air superiority allowed for the free and unopposed bombing of Chinese forces at the commencement of offensive operations, while Japanese armored superiority allowed for breaches in defensive lines to be opened and exploited by the large masses of fascist divisions committed to the massive offensive. With the need to carefully ration out the resources either produced within China or acquired from the American Republics or Soviet Union evident, particularly in this dark period of the war, the National Revolutionary Army had to have the appropriate counters in place and know in advance if equipment such as anti-tank guns or anti-aircraft artillery was going to be needed in greater numbers.
Elsewhere, resistance forces sought to deny the enemy their use of their heavy equipment by sabotaging their supply lines. This was the widest front for a conflict in human history, and Japanese forces were operating at the end of a long supply line from Manchuria and the home islands. Thus any sort of delay in the shipment of supplies such as shells, replacement parts, and fuel was liable to drag any movement of fascist forces to a complete standstill. Well aware of this, the people's resistance movements ambushed supply caravans, cut railways, sabotaged collaborator factories, and even sometimes engaged in piracy on the river ways so as to make their use by supply convoys difficult. Important enemy military or collaborationist officials would be targeted for assassination, kidnapping, or simply tracked to allow their movements to be known by the NRA's military command. Needless to say, a thousand plans to assassinate Jiang Jieshi were hatched, but the great betrayer himself had the devil's luck when it came to avoiding attempts at assassination or kidnapping, and his legions of security made opportunities to reach for his throat rare indeed. The leaders of the hated Kwantung army also remained elusive at best. However, the constant campaign of resistance had its desired effect; Japanese and Collaborationist soldiers were reported to constantly be on edge and enemy movements were slower than the sort of blitzkrieg the enemy wanted, saving China from the sort of rapid crushing losses of territory suffered in the beginning of the war that saw nearly half of China's population under the enemy.
Northern Chinese provinces such as Shaanxi would see particularly brutal fighting. More than six hundred thousand fascists poured through the front lines in a massive assault across a front wider than any of those seen in the western front of the first world war. Yan Xishan's forces were pushed to the breaking point by a tidal wave of enemies; rapidly pushing them towards Xi'an as General Umezu sought to link fascist forces with the Three Mas. However the people of Shaanxi were ill inclined to surrender to the barbarian onslaught pouring through the Chinese hinterland. The Communist Eighth route army made itself immediately available for facing the fascist onslaught and joined forces with Yan Xishan's troops and those directly underneath Wang Jingwei to hold Japanese forces at important sites such as Ankang and deny them the ability to surround Xi'an. In the face of enemy air and armored superiority the Chinese were able to hold the south of Shanxi province against the overwhelming force of the enemy, forcing the Japanese to abandon the press into the south of Shaanxi after a three month siege; stopping both the Japanese from the east and the Ma forces to the west.
Xi'an itself was targeted by an entire Japanese armoured division and its hangers on, bringing the press of steel into the fray that sorely tested Chinese anti-tank doctrine in the face of a massed enemy onslaught and ceaseless aerial assault by everything from dive bombers to heavy four engined craft. By this point in the war, a number of Chinese tank crews and fighter pilots had been sufficiently trained in the Soviet Union and in Xinjiang to be considered well qualified even by exacting American peacetime standards, and were quickly unleashed to the city's defense against the fascist hordes. With the help of a volunteer division formed out of American, Mongolian, Latino, and Soviet forces, the Japanese assault slammed into a wall of concrete and steel for more than a month of high intensity fighting before settling into a long siege. But despite the best efforts of Japan, Manchukuo, and the traitors; the city would not fall and Wang Jingwei's government had received perhaps its first major victory as the Japanese pulled back in bedraggled fashion to lick their wounds; withdrawing to a safe distance by year's end to fight the battle of a hundred regiments in an attempt to cleanse communist influences from their occupied territories.
The south offensive was aimed at crushing the highly anti-Jiang Jieshi Yunnan province and the highly loyalist Guangxi political group which was raising thousands of soldiers to fight for the cause of Chinese people's liberation. First spotted by Chinese aerial reconnaisance flier and eventuial air ace Yu Fang, the Japanese assault force bulldozed its way through much of the Chinese south under the slogan "no stops until Hainan". Advancing more than a dozen kilometers every day, the Japanese would overrun Liouzhou and the Japanese commander sent Chen Jitang a simple request. "Surrender Nanning unto our forces and your people shall be spared the sword, should fortune favour you; you may even find yourself awarded a place of power and comfort in the new governance of your people. Free of the insidious influences of the white devil in red cloaks from America and Russia, part of a nation of equals with Nippon so that you too may bask in the eternal sun." Jitang's response was a rather famously rude and extremely hostile Chinese insult. "肏你祖宗十八代". Certainly, the commander felt quite offended on the behalf of his eighteen generations of ancestors when his red faced traitor Chinese aide translated the insult for him and ordered the assault towards Nanning to proceed with all due haste.
Well trained artillery crews set up in strategic points rained fire down upon the Japanese advance as quickly as it began, while well arrayed nests of machine guns and pill boxes gave the Japanese a taste of assaulting fortified positions and repay them for the slaughter inflicted upon Chinese forces attempting to take out Japanese bunkers at Shanghai. Quad .50 caliber nests and 85mm guns gave Japanese aircraft something to think about while Japanese fighter pilots found themselves forced to duel an outnumbered but fanatically determined national revolutionary air force. Chinese traitor forces; considered somewhat expendable by their Japanese counterparts, were quickly forced into the fray ahead of the IJA while the IJN drove around the Chinese coast to lay the formidable power of its guns and the Japanese sentai upon the NRA. Though the Chinese shore batteries were heavily outmatched by Japanese naval artillery and carrier craft and were not able to stop the landing of the Sentai, they were able to buy enough time for reinforcements to arrive and for the people living in the coastal villages to flee inland towards Nanning even as everything from destroyer caliber guns to massive battleship shells rained down upon the coast. What was meant to be a quick advance slowed down over the course of months, with the north Yunnan offensive starting to stagnate for largely similar reasons while the fascist hordes sought some method of breakthrough. Eventually though, Japanese supplies began to run thin and the assault had to be put on pause to allow for its armies to rest.
The drive towards Chonqing would dwarf both of these engagements however. The bulk of the Japanese assault force was aimed squarely at driving Jingwei out of his capital, and this would be the first of a number of fascist assaults aimed at the heart of Chinese resistance itself.
...
(To be continued)
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And because I've been playing HOI4 recently, I even know who these Chinese groups are!
But seriously, this is good, really making the war in Asia feel alive.
(Though may I ask why the somewhat upper class and distinctly non-communist Guangxi clique and Yunnan are siding with the Internationale aligned Chinese?) (Besides the obvious reason of, "We hate Japan")
But seriously, this is good, really making the war in Asia feel alive.
(Though may I ask why the somewhat upper class and distinctly non-communist Guangxi clique and Yunnan are siding with the Internationale aligned Chinese?) (Besides the obvious reason of, "We hate Japan")
They didn't like Chiang Kai Shek very much to begin with.
I'm not particularly sure, though here Chaing is mostly asking the Japanese to please consider how much trouble they're making for him with their lackadaisical attitude to the misbehaviour of their troops. It's hard to present yourself as legitimate when your patron throws babies into the air to catch on the business end of a bayonet for their amusement.
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Bookmark1995
Banned
Goes to show, making a deal with the imperial Japanese or with the Nazis was is the closest thing in history to making a deal with the devil (as Miklos Horthy would learn the hard way). Hell, this paragraph alone makes the Japanese look almost Satanic.
That is an Faustian offer of power that both Lucifer and Darth Vader would envy.
Well, the response the commander got is probably not suitable for a star wars film.
