There are a bunch of jokes around 2003 revolving around the "Hey, it's been seventy years, you guys are due for another revolution right? One every seventy years or so, right? Wink wink, nudge nudge?" meme until every American on the Internet is thoroughly sick of talking to their friends in the FBU who think they're all so clever and original. Otherwise nothing serious comes up because revolution doesn't spring out of the aether, it requires that things are really bad for a lot of people, and the UASR is a high functioning democracy with excellent social protections.
The Great Crusade (Reds! Part 3)
- Thread starter Aelita
- Start date
There are a bunch of jokes around 2003 revolving around the "Hey, it's been seventy years, you guys are due for another revolution right? One every seventy years or so, right? Wink wink, nudge nudge?" meme until every American on the Internet is thoroughly sick of talking to their friends in the FBU who think they're all so clever and original. Otherwise nothing serious comes up because revolution doesn't spring out of the aether, it requires that things are really bad for a lot of people, and the UASR is a high functioning democracy with excellent social protections.
Half of the FBU is France. They should be used to regular upending of the state. The US constitution enduring forever OTL is a bit of a historical aberration.
Operation Hexenhammer (Spring/Summer 1945)
Operation Hexenhammer: Hitler’s Last Roll of the Dice in the West.
Background
By 1945, the Wehrmacht was a shadow of its former glory. Its efforts to try to pawn off the bulk of military operations onto its western alliance partners save for the Italienischkorps and the Westenkorps (formerly the Iberiakorps) had not paid the dividends initially hoped for. The final surrender of Falangist Spain to Allied forces preceded the collapse of Petain’s nationalist regime and the increasing erosion of Italian military capabilities from the Naples meat grinder.
Petain had once hoped to bottleneck in British Commonwealth forces in the Aquitaine, but this dream turned into a nightmare as follow up landings in the under-defended beaches of Normandy by primarily Indian, Canadian, and Irish divisions produced a mortal injury that the Nationalist French regime could not endure. The situation only held for a few months; by Fall 1944 Commonwealth forces were on their way to Paris, and the forces in the central highlands found themselves in an indefensible salient. Defections were widespread and many provinces and formations declared their loyalty to the FBU and the Allies outright without a fight.
Offers of amnesty to the formations that picked up the fight against their former masters further encouraged an uncontrollable stream of French defectors while the fascist hardliners tried their level best to hold the line with the aid of what forces Hitler and his remaining allies were willing to spare. These efforts were confused and complicated by the often chaotic nature of battle lines being afflicted by some units joining the enemy at the first opportunity, making it virtually impossible to gauge who was genuinely reliable.
This perhaps more than anything else contributed to the breath-taking pace of Allied gains in the French campaigns that soon reduced Petain’s regime to eastern France. And from there, the liberation of France would be largely completed within a matter of months as other axis forces withdrew to better defensive positions. While the fighting with the die hard units was fierce, the lack of guaranteed reliability among so many units proved to be irreparably compromising to any hopes of a coherent defensive line. In essence, individual battles may have been hard fought, but the campaign was never in doubt.
Though greater deployment of Italian and German units to France helped to stem the tide somewhat, it was clear that the efforts were very much too little, too late. By 1945 the militarisation of the Commonwealth was in full swing. War materiel and men from more than a quarter of the planet were flowing in like a tide and manpower was never a concern. Allied Generals and Field Marshals had all the soldiers they could ever want, and soldiers from former Axis nations such as Brazil and Spain were only too happy to add to the “tidal wave of Liberalism.”
The air forces of Germany and Italy were no longer able to properly contest Allied operations in Europe and the days of the Blitz and its regular bombing raids over Britain had long been replaced with the Vengeance weapon scourge in the increasingly vain hopes of drawing some sort of deal from the western Allies. Not simply targets in Britain, but also in liberated France, particularly against port cities deemed critical to the flow of Allied materiel.
The Allies had not waited for the end of winter to advance, and were already moving to clear out the remains of Axis forces in the rump nationalist state by the first snow falls. While German defenses set up before the war in the west as a shield against France were rather strong in the French-German border at the daunting Siegfried line; their hold over Belgium was less solid.
Forces under the command of the Indian General Chawandar Singh managed to break through the hastily set up fireline under the command of Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner and liberate most of occupied Belgium. Upon entering Antwerp his soldiers would be greeted as heroes by a population that had been sealed under German dominion since the Franco-German invasion of the low countries in 1942 to cut off possible avenues for British re-entry into the continent.
While the vengeance bombing of Antwerp would begin almost immediately after the last Axis forces withdrew, Hitler demanded some manner of retaliation. The calculus driving this demand was born out of a few sources of confidence. German leadership had stiffened its morale following the failure of Allied Operation Tipperary Flowers; a plan to seize the Netherlands with a paradrop assault followed by conventional ground force offensives. The debacle had lead to the depletion of three Allied airborne divisions, substantial losses among the supporting forces and ground the 2nd Army Group to a halt.
Furthermore, the Germans and their allies had convinced themselves that the Allies needed only the right push to either come to a peace with the Axis powers or even join them. Back-channel negotiations with the Allies had been made before hand and Hitler believed that if he could convince the Allies that continued operations against the Axis were a waste in the face of the true Bolshevik menace, then he could at least get a separate peace. One where hopefully the Allies could agree to negotiate an armistice with the Comintern so that they could lick their wounds or even better; join his cause outright against “Jewish Communism”.
The Nazi party was convinced that the Allies had been duped by a sinister coalition of degenerates masterminded by Jewish financiers acting on orders from their leftist counterparts in America and Russia. A harsh re-awakening to reality would surely be all that was needed to get them to realise the deception and cease struggling against their natural allies in the war for Volkisch supremacy in the face of Semitic Internationalism. Even outside of the Nazi party, there was a hope among anti-communists in Germany that the Allies would wake up to the greater threat of the Comintern and cease their assault on their natural ally.
Though certainly outlandish seeming to most outside of the circles of anti-semitic conspiracy theories; within the tortured logic of Nazism it was entirely coherent. Paired with their unrealistic expectations of Allied military strength, the Germans decided that the logical next step was an offensive. And from this logic, Hitler and the OKW drafted the plans for Operation Hexenhammer in the hopes of reclaiming the initiative in the west as the Allies began to push into the Netherlands, Norway, Piedmont, and Germany itself.
Force Disposition
The OKH assembled twenty-five divisions from the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS (many of the latter consisting of non-German volunteers and conscripts), totalling 340,000 men, with an additional 90,000 soldiers gathered into eight divisions made of Osttruppen auxiliaries, and 50,000 Petainist French gathered into four divisions.
Supporting them would be more than two thousand tracked armored fighting vehicles, four thousand guns, and whatever aircraft the shriveled husk of the Luftwaffe could manage. Oil had been an issue since the fall of Libya, and was compounded by the fall of Rumania, but the oil fields in Austria and synthetic oil plants in well defended, hidden, or difficult to reach facilities had squeezed out just enough extra fuel for the operation.
Overall command would fall to Obergruppenführer Gustav Lombard who was tasked with the duty of pushing Chawandar Singh’s forces out of the Low Countries and throwing the fight back into France proper. It was hoped that fascist loyalists could be found amongst the Free French forces who would surely balk at the command of a non-white general to reinforce his position and possibly seize Calais if the opportunity presented itself. If successful, follow up operations to retake Paris were planned with the hope that this would convince the Allies that Germany could not be defeated; but could be an ally against the red tide in the east.
Singh himself was under the command of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery; the supreme mastermind of the Allied War effort in Europe. His Fourth Army was comprised of two hundred thousand men divided into two Indian corps, one Australasian corps, and one Canadian corps. Supporting him was Nigerian General Gbeismola’s Eleventh Army comprised of Two African, one Indian, and an Irish corps. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s own forces would be near enough to offer support, though his formation was considered to be resting and preparing for the assault into northern Germany.
Overall command of Allied forces in the west fell under Marshal of the Royal Air Force Arthur Tedder, 1st Baron Tedder, designated Supreme Commander of the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force. Tedder and his subordinates such as his deputy Lattre de Tassigny had been busy planning for the invasion of Germany proper. The Free French First Army and British Eighth Army would assault the Siegfried line at the French-German border and push through Swabia, Bavaria, and Austria. Meanwhile Commonwealth forces in the First Army were intended to launch a strike through the low countries, particularly the “Dutch Gap” to outflank the Siegfried line and encircle the German industrial and metropolitan heartland at the Rhine and Ruhr river valleys.
Elsewhere the war was going well for the Allies. The Italian sector seemed to be winding down as Allied forces began to push into Piedmont and the firelines in Naples broke down in the face of a building Comintern offensive aimed at the Isonzo. Far to the north, the landings in Norway were met with fierce but dwindling resistance hampered by the Swedish political crisis as a coalition of Social Democrats, Communists, Liberals, and Conservatives rallied against the Nazi party in the face of Finnish successes in the Lappland and growing encirclement from liberated portions of Norway.
As such, the Allies went into the summer of 1945 supremely confident of victory. The question was not whether they would be able to sweep aside the dwindling remainder of the Axis in Europe but how much of Europe they could secure with their forces.. Allied Supreme Command was looking to meet Comintern forces as far east as possible. While the British Unity Government and French Popular Front were in favour of a rapport with the Comintern, many were already preparing for renewed hostilities to the Americans and Soviets and indeed, believed them to be not only inevitable but necessary.
By 1945, the newest wave of Entente military technology was already being distributed. The “second generation” of British AFVs were now being supplemented by the brand new Cairo light tank, Camelot medium tank, and Chamberlain heavy tank. Artillery support was fully motorised or even outright mechanised and most soldiers could at least count on a truck if not a half-track, Jeep, or universal carrier to ferry them around, something made possible in no small part by American lend-lease
In the face of Axis hard assets, the PIAT was now a feature of virtually all squads, and many also had the benefit of access to “Chimney smoke” Rocket Mortars made in imitation of American Bazookas and German Panzerschrecks. Machine gun support, while not as overly plentiful as was demanded of in German doctrine, was always easily accessed through widespread distribution of both air and water cooled Vickers guns and the well loved Hotchkiss 13.2mm heavy machine gun.
Regular aerial sweeps by the ever growing thicket of Spitfires, Prosperos, and Mosquitos, joined by a wave of defecting French pilots and their planes had kept the skies firmly in Allied hands. Further compounding Allied air dominance was the program of having escort fighters detach from their bomber formations to chase down Axis pilots to their air fields and launch attacks, which had shredded the German and Italian air forces over the years. And while the strategic destruction focus of Allied airpower had disfavoured ground support, the Allies had grown quite accustomed to running tactical and support bombing missions as well.
In contrast to the relatively prepared state of the Allied Forces, German offensive preparations had been disorganized and repeatedly hamstrung by materiel shortages. The initial D-Day had to be pushed back a fortnight and then a full six weeks later, first due to rolling stock shortages bottlenecking synthetic oil plants, and then as six veteran divisions in the order-of-battle were swapped out for newly raised formations. Attempts to make use of the V-1 and V-2 rockets to soften up the Allies and disrupt supplies had produced somewhat encouraging results, but both paled in comparison to the tactical value of the V-3 mobile launch missile ferried atop converted Panzer 50s..
The full panoply of German wunderwaffe was on display, including superheavy formations of Panzer-100 Smilodon tanks totalling about thirty of the behemoths and a platoon of Mammuts lead by a vehicle named “Gevatter Tod”. Vehicles to surpass even the already excessive Panzer-75 Tiger Tanks whose newest marks had been funneled into the fire for months. The desperately deployed Panzer-50G mark of the Jaguar Tanks had also shown promising results in spite of logistical difficulties and mechanical teething issues, and as always the humble Panzer 25 Gepards and their lighter counterparts were deployed in force. Captured tanks from both the west and east were also pressed into service.
Many of the units had also swapped out their traditional rifles and machine-pistols for the increasingly produced select fire weapons to provide a further edge in firepower. The SMG-40, LMG-39, and MG-41 that made up the bedrock of the German infantry formation through heavy, light, and general purpose machine gun support were joined by a relatively new curiosity. The RMG-44, a rotary machine gun derived from reverse engineered revolver cannons. Though bulky, in short supply, dependent on an external power source, and obscenely ammo hungry, the weapon had unmatched rate of fire, and provided the best source of anti-air cover available. And as it had always impressed beforehand, Operation Hexenhammer would see the deployment of more of the guns than ever before in the west.
To combat the mechanical maneuver superiority of the Allies through their virtually limitless access to fuel, the Germans had sought to pad out their anti-tank formations as much as possible. Infantry formations saw the Panzerfaust and Panzerschreck being handed out in borderline excessive numbers. Recoilless launchers based on Swedish designs were also handed out in substantial numbers. Joining the usual assortment of anti-tank guns were a number of attempts to get as many systems to serve in an anti-materiel role as possible.. Such as the “organ faust”, as the British nicknamed them, half tracks that carried batteries of anti-tank rocket launchers that would try to ambush vehicular formations and run away as quickly as possible.
In the skies wings of Jet fighters were expected to sweep the Allies out of the skies. With the Axis having a decided inferiority in the quantity of aircraft and the quality of pilots, the Luftwaffe was left with no choice but to lean entirely on jets to carry the day. Bombing support would be delivered in large part by Vengeance rockets, including the V-1 and V-2s as well as the more portable V-3 Panzerwerfer 50; the latter of which were codenamed “FROG” (Free Rocket Over Ground) by Allied intelligence. Such was a necessity due to the lack of planes and pilots capable of delivering the full weight of tactical bombing and support missions as well as the suicidal nature of deploying the Luftwaffe’s remaining heavy bombers on anything but the safest missions. At least part of this would need to be delivered via missile instead.
Battle of the Low Countries
At 0600 hours on 9 June 1945 Lombard launched his attack. Chawandar Singh had received reports of a likely attack on his position and had made the necessary preparations for a defense in depth. Reinforcing troops from nearby formations were provided to help absorb the initial hammer blow of the offensive while quickly established trench lines and fall back positions were sketched out. Supplies were generous and morale was high as soldiers expected to see the end of the war by the end of the year.
Commonwealth military doctrine heavily revolved around the establishment of carefully laid out plans and extensive contingencies. While the plans themselves may not always have been entirely useful, the process of planning and organising forces had always been a substantial asset to the Entente way of war. It allowed every unit to fall back on clear directions in case of confusion and chaos as often erupts once battle is joined and it made sure that lines of supply were always clearly laid out and the second army group began to shift their positions in accordance to their contingencies.
Despite OKH-West’s misgivings, the Fuhrer’s decrees were followed to their inevitable conclusion. With forces well below approved strength, short on food, fuel and munitions, the forces of Army Group F began their attack. The first strike would once again be delivered by a large wave of vengeance rockets after a lull in the bombardment of Singh’s positions. While terrifying to experience as many war journals attest to; the inaccuracy of such weapons substantially limited their tactical and operational effectiveness.
A handful of Fallschirmjager attacks would be carried out using the cover of inclement weather to provide advance support for German operations in the hopes that Allied interception would be too busy with the rockets to stop them. The Luftwaffe would sortie once again, seeking out Allied air fields in the hopes of damaging enemy air support as much as possible and give the remaining bombers a clearer shot in support of the ground forces.
The initial thrust by Sixth Panzer Army through the Ardennes Forest launched in sync with the V-rocket wave had not been anticipated by Allied intelligence. Though higher level planning had thoroughly been compromised by Enigma intercepts, lower-level communications traffic had not been decoded in time to create a more accurate picture of German dispositions.
A period of heavy storms and overcast weather had limited Allied aerial reconnaissance, resulting in a misreading of German operational positions. While the V-1s had were often intercepted and the rush to fire the V-2s lead to often less than desirable firing solutions, the V-3s fired from their mobile mounts had their targeted solutions pre-computed to a substantial degree of accuracy. Numerous command posts were silenced by the first waves of ballistic missiles, while supply depots exploded in brilliant conflagrations after being struck by the rockets.
Thus, the initial penetrations were able to cause some degree of shock within the Allied Fourth Army. The tanks of the 5th SS Panzer Division “Silberne Legion” struck the recovering Australasian 3rd Infantry and the Canadian 1st Armored Division at their garrisons, pushing the two divisions into a cauldron at Sedan. Other divisions of the Second Army Group were being pressed backwards, and cracks in the line were being probed by infiltration and exploitation units following the breakthrough troops.
German soldiers seized whatever supplies of food and fuel they could and demolished the rest. Thousands of prisoners were taken. Anti-partisan operations proceeded with murderous brutality. For a moment, it almost seemed as if the spirit of the old Blitzkrieg had returned. German high command had dared to hope that they could perhaps reach Paris as their offensive forces swept into Wallonia.
The successes of the first week could not last, however. A break in the foul weather on 14 June enabled intensive tactical air operations. As the German spearheads pushed further into Northern France, they encountered stiffening enemy resistance. Singh’s forces were well trained and experienced when it came to dealing with armoured offensives from years of hard fighting from the Middle East to France and had prepared their Pakfronts well. Crack rifle fire and disciplined machine gunnery proved to be deadly to German infantry, and every attacked grid was soon supported by thoroughly readied artillery.
Meanwhile, the narrow logistical points through the Ardennes were choked by Allied air power. The Luftwaffe forces attached to Operation Hexenhammer were thoroughly outnumbered and outclassed. Without experienced pilots, the He 162 and Me 262 jet fighters could not overcome the numerical disadvantage, and failed to significantly disrupt the tactical bombing campaign. By this point, Allied countermeasures to the V-1 were a finely tuned science, and the number of successful launches plummeted as soon as the RAF intensified interception missions.
The initial surprises and successes proved to be within the range of contingencies prepared by 2nd Army Group’s headquarters. This was not 1942, when inexperienced British divisions succumbed to panic at enemy infiltration techniques or tank shock. Encircled units continued to fight on and coordinate operations at the corps and army level. Allied mastery of the skies also offered additional avenues of supplies to arrive for encircled and cut off troops to allow them to continue to fight on through paradropped assets.
Besieged forces would thus prove to be extremely stubborn in the face of attempts to extinguish them. The Germans had not advanced far enough to prevent the possibility of these soldiers breaking out, and allowing them to threaten the rear of tenuous supply lines would be a disaster. As such substantial effort had to be put into trying to close these pockets of Allied resistance that would draw down the overall pace of the advance as soldiers who might have been able to punch through weak points in the Allied lines had to be posted to dealing with the encircled forces.
On 17 June, Ogrup. Lombard ordered a temporary halt to the advance to “secure lines of communication.” This temporary halt would be permanent. Allied forces redoubled their counterattacks almost immediately. Reinforced with tanks freed up from Field Marshal Montgomery’s 1st Army Group, the VIII Corps attacks north from vicinity of Verdun to relieve the Sedan cauldron.
As was the case in most battles in 1945, fanatical devotion from the highly indoctrinated Hitlerjugend graduates could not overcome major disparities in firepower. And like cast iron, such hard zealotry proved brittle on the defense. By 23 June, the lead tanks of the Indian 1st Armored Division had reached the lines of the beleaguered Australasian troops and more were on the way. With German armour depleted from generally costly breakthrough attacks, the Allied vehicles were significantly freer to maneuver. The Indian Tank ace Tanmai Dixit would rack up forty two vehicular and gun kills in the operation, including five tanks, wryly joking that the bigger the German tanks got the worse they became at driving them.
Isolated Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS divisions began surrendering, with surrender rates particularly high among the non-German conscripts, and attempts at tactical withdrawal quickly turned into a rout. With lines of retreat under constant harrying attack from the sky, self propelled artillery, and fast moving light tank, armoured car and jeep mobile cavalry units, attempts to regroup proved futile. Confusion and uncertainty would lead to the successful German units being overwhelmed and cut off from one another. Even the mighty Gevatter Tod would end up captured after being abandoned by its crew following a ferocious engagement with Allied heavy tank assets.
The impressive mass of German heavy armour belied the inexperience of the crews for their metallic titans and the declining quality of German materials. Even a number of much lauded German tank aces would find their flowers cut on the field of battle. Michael Whitmann would meet his end when in his overconfidence he sought to pursue a number of light tanks, only to panic when strafed by air attack and leaving him open to an anti-tank round plunging into his vehicle’s rear from Alfie Nicholls’ Camelot tank. .
Many soldiers had by this point decided that Endsieg was nothing more than a deranged fantasy, especially the foreign “Aryan” soldiers conscripted into the German army to make up for depleted manpower. While morale among Dutch, Belgian, Luxembourgian, Danish, and Norwegian conscripts was never particularly high, the rate of defection seen now was virtually unprecedented. Some units simply drove to the Allies with white flags and asked to either switch sides or surrender without fighting once it became clear that victory was not in the cards..
In a month of heavy fighting, General Singh had reclaimed all of the lost territory in the Low Countries and Northern France plus change. While the attack pushed back Allied offensive operations into Germany, it also left German Western Front forces on the backfoot. The twin disasters at Sedan in the West, and the Brandenburg Offensive in the East had begun the death rattle of the Third Reich.
Based on its stated objectives, Operation Hexenhammer was doomed from the start. It could not force a white peace with the Western Allies this late in the war. Even in terms of more limited objectives of drawing out the conflict, it proved to be useless. Its most immediate effect was encouraging Hitler’s inner circle to further isolate him from the real world, as day-to-day control of the war effort was usurped by Reichsmarschall Göring. The full extent of Hexenhammer’s failure would not be revealed to Hitler until well after the surrender.
Background
By 1945, the Wehrmacht was a shadow of its former glory. Its efforts to try to pawn off the bulk of military operations onto its western alliance partners save for the Italienischkorps and the Westenkorps (formerly the Iberiakorps) had not paid the dividends initially hoped for. The final surrender of Falangist Spain to Allied forces preceded the collapse of Petain’s nationalist regime and the increasing erosion of Italian military capabilities from the Naples meat grinder.
Petain had once hoped to bottleneck in British Commonwealth forces in the Aquitaine, but this dream turned into a nightmare as follow up landings in the under-defended beaches of Normandy by primarily Indian, Canadian, and Irish divisions produced a mortal injury that the Nationalist French regime could not endure. The situation only held for a few months; by Fall 1944 Commonwealth forces were on their way to Paris, and the forces in the central highlands found themselves in an indefensible salient. Defections were widespread and many provinces and formations declared their loyalty to the FBU and the Allies outright without a fight.
Offers of amnesty to the formations that picked up the fight against their former masters further encouraged an uncontrollable stream of French defectors while the fascist hardliners tried their level best to hold the line with the aid of what forces Hitler and his remaining allies were willing to spare. These efforts were confused and complicated by the often chaotic nature of battle lines being afflicted by some units joining the enemy at the first opportunity, making it virtually impossible to gauge who was genuinely reliable.
This perhaps more than anything else contributed to the breath-taking pace of Allied gains in the French campaigns that soon reduced Petain’s regime to eastern France. And from there, the liberation of France would be largely completed within a matter of months as other axis forces withdrew to better defensive positions. While the fighting with the die hard units was fierce, the lack of guaranteed reliability among so many units proved to be irreparably compromising to any hopes of a coherent defensive line. In essence, individual battles may have been hard fought, but the campaign was never in doubt.
Though greater deployment of Italian and German units to France helped to stem the tide somewhat, it was clear that the efforts were very much too little, too late. By 1945 the militarisation of the Commonwealth was in full swing. War materiel and men from more than a quarter of the planet were flowing in like a tide and manpower was never a concern. Allied Generals and Field Marshals had all the soldiers they could ever want, and soldiers from former Axis nations such as Brazil and Spain were only too happy to add to the “tidal wave of Liberalism.”
The air forces of Germany and Italy were no longer able to properly contest Allied operations in Europe and the days of the Blitz and its regular bombing raids over Britain had long been replaced with the Vengeance weapon scourge in the increasingly vain hopes of drawing some sort of deal from the western Allies. Not simply targets in Britain, but also in liberated France, particularly against port cities deemed critical to the flow of Allied materiel.
The Allies had not waited for the end of winter to advance, and were already moving to clear out the remains of Axis forces in the rump nationalist state by the first snow falls. While German defenses set up before the war in the west as a shield against France were rather strong in the French-German border at the daunting Siegfried line; their hold over Belgium was less solid.
Forces under the command of the Indian General Chawandar Singh managed to break through the hastily set up fireline under the command of Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner and liberate most of occupied Belgium. Upon entering Antwerp his soldiers would be greeted as heroes by a population that had been sealed under German dominion since the Franco-German invasion of the low countries in 1942 to cut off possible avenues for British re-entry into the continent.
While the vengeance bombing of Antwerp would begin almost immediately after the last Axis forces withdrew, Hitler demanded some manner of retaliation. The calculus driving this demand was born out of a few sources of confidence. German leadership had stiffened its morale following the failure of Allied Operation Tipperary Flowers; a plan to seize the Netherlands with a paradrop assault followed by conventional ground force offensives. The debacle had lead to the depletion of three Allied airborne divisions, substantial losses among the supporting forces and ground the 2nd Army Group to a halt.
Furthermore, the Germans and their allies had convinced themselves that the Allies needed only the right push to either come to a peace with the Axis powers or even join them. Back-channel negotiations with the Allies had been made before hand and Hitler believed that if he could convince the Allies that continued operations against the Axis were a waste in the face of the true Bolshevik menace, then he could at least get a separate peace. One where hopefully the Allies could agree to negotiate an armistice with the Comintern so that they could lick their wounds or even better; join his cause outright against “Jewish Communism”.
The Nazi party was convinced that the Allies had been duped by a sinister coalition of degenerates masterminded by Jewish financiers acting on orders from their leftist counterparts in America and Russia. A harsh re-awakening to reality would surely be all that was needed to get them to realise the deception and cease struggling against their natural allies in the war for Volkisch supremacy in the face of Semitic Internationalism. Even outside of the Nazi party, there was a hope among anti-communists in Germany that the Allies would wake up to the greater threat of the Comintern and cease their assault on their natural ally.
Though certainly outlandish seeming to most outside of the circles of anti-semitic conspiracy theories; within the tortured logic of Nazism it was entirely coherent. Paired with their unrealistic expectations of Allied military strength, the Germans decided that the logical next step was an offensive. And from this logic, Hitler and the OKW drafted the plans for Operation Hexenhammer in the hopes of reclaiming the initiative in the west as the Allies began to push into the Netherlands, Norway, Piedmont, and Germany itself.
Force Disposition
The OKH assembled twenty-five divisions from the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS (many of the latter consisting of non-German volunteers and conscripts), totalling 340,000 men, with an additional 90,000 soldiers gathered into eight divisions made of Osttruppen auxiliaries, and 50,000 Petainist French gathered into four divisions.
Supporting them would be more than two thousand tracked armored fighting vehicles, four thousand guns, and whatever aircraft the shriveled husk of the Luftwaffe could manage. Oil had been an issue since the fall of Libya, and was compounded by the fall of Rumania, but the oil fields in Austria and synthetic oil plants in well defended, hidden, or difficult to reach facilities had squeezed out just enough extra fuel for the operation.
Overall command would fall to Obergruppenführer Gustav Lombard who was tasked with the duty of pushing Chawandar Singh’s forces out of the Low Countries and throwing the fight back into France proper. It was hoped that fascist loyalists could be found amongst the Free French forces who would surely balk at the command of a non-white general to reinforce his position and possibly seize Calais if the opportunity presented itself. If successful, follow up operations to retake Paris were planned with the hope that this would convince the Allies that Germany could not be defeated; but could be an ally against the red tide in the east.
Singh himself was under the command of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery; the supreme mastermind of the Allied War effort in Europe. His Fourth Army was comprised of two hundred thousand men divided into two Indian corps, one Australasian corps, and one Canadian corps. Supporting him was Nigerian General Gbeismola’s Eleventh Army comprised of Two African, one Indian, and an Irish corps. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s own forces would be near enough to offer support, though his formation was considered to be resting and preparing for the assault into northern Germany.
Overall command of Allied forces in the west fell under Marshal of the Royal Air Force Arthur Tedder, 1st Baron Tedder, designated Supreme Commander of the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force. Tedder and his subordinates such as his deputy Lattre de Tassigny had been busy planning for the invasion of Germany proper. The Free French First Army and British Eighth Army would assault the Siegfried line at the French-German border and push through Swabia, Bavaria, and Austria. Meanwhile Commonwealth forces in the First Army were intended to launch a strike through the low countries, particularly the “Dutch Gap” to outflank the Siegfried line and encircle the German industrial and metropolitan heartland at the Rhine and Ruhr river valleys.
Elsewhere the war was going well for the Allies. The Italian sector seemed to be winding down as Allied forces began to push into Piedmont and the firelines in Naples broke down in the face of a building Comintern offensive aimed at the Isonzo. Far to the north, the landings in Norway were met with fierce but dwindling resistance hampered by the Swedish political crisis as a coalition of Social Democrats, Communists, Liberals, and Conservatives rallied against the Nazi party in the face of Finnish successes in the Lappland and growing encirclement from liberated portions of Norway.
As such, the Allies went into the summer of 1945 supremely confident of victory. The question was not whether they would be able to sweep aside the dwindling remainder of the Axis in Europe but how much of Europe they could secure with their forces.. Allied Supreme Command was looking to meet Comintern forces as far east as possible. While the British Unity Government and French Popular Front were in favour of a rapport with the Comintern, many were already preparing for renewed hostilities to the Americans and Soviets and indeed, believed them to be not only inevitable but necessary.
By 1945, the newest wave of Entente military technology was already being distributed. The “second generation” of British AFVs were now being supplemented by the brand new Cairo light tank, Camelot medium tank, and Chamberlain heavy tank. Artillery support was fully motorised or even outright mechanised and most soldiers could at least count on a truck if not a half-track, Jeep, or universal carrier to ferry them around, something made possible in no small part by American lend-lease
In the face of Axis hard assets, the PIAT was now a feature of virtually all squads, and many also had the benefit of access to “Chimney smoke” Rocket Mortars made in imitation of American Bazookas and German Panzerschrecks. Machine gun support, while not as overly plentiful as was demanded of in German doctrine, was always easily accessed through widespread distribution of both air and water cooled Vickers guns and the well loved Hotchkiss 13.2mm heavy machine gun.
Regular aerial sweeps by the ever growing thicket of Spitfires, Prosperos, and Mosquitos, joined by a wave of defecting French pilots and their planes had kept the skies firmly in Allied hands. Further compounding Allied air dominance was the program of having escort fighters detach from their bomber formations to chase down Axis pilots to their air fields and launch attacks, which had shredded the German and Italian air forces over the years. And while the strategic destruction focus of Allied airpower had disfavoured ground support, the Allies had grown quite accustomed to running tactical and support bombing missions as well.
In contrast to the relatively prepared state of the Allied Forces, German offensive preparations had been disorganized and repeatedly hamstrung by materiel shortages. The initial D-Day had to be pushed back a fortnight and then a full six weeks later, first due to rolling stock shortages bottlenecking synthetic oil plants, and then as six veteran divisions in the order-of-battle were swapped out for newly raised formations. Attempts to make use of the V-1 and V-2 rockets to soften up the Allies and disrupt supplies had produced somewhat encouraging results, but both paled in comparison to the tactical value of the V-3 mobile launch missile ferried atop converted Panzer 50s..
The full panoply of German wunderwaffe was on display, including superheavy formations of Panzer-100 Smilodon tanks totalling about thirty of the behemoths and a platoon of Mammuts lead by a vehicle named “Gevatter Tod”. Vehicles to surpass even the already excessive Panzer-75 Tiger Tanks whose newest marks had been funneled into the fire for months. The desperately deployed Panzer-50G mark of the Jaguar Tanks had also shown promising results in spite of logistical difficulties and mechanical teething issues, and as always the humble Panzer 25 Gepards and their lighter counterparts were deployed in force. Captured tanks from both the west and east were also pressed into service.
Many of the units had also swapped out their traditional rifles and machine-pistols for the increasingly produced select fire weapons to provide a further edge in firepower. The SMG-40, LMG-39, and MG-41 that made up the bedrock of the German infantry formation through heavy, light, and general purpose machine gun support were joined by a relatively new curiosity. The RMG-44, a rotary machine gun derived from reverse engineered revolver cannons. Though bulky, in short supply, dependent on an external power source, and obscenely ammo hungry, the weapon had unmatched rate of fire, and provided the best source of anti-air cover available. And as it had always impressed beforehand, Operation Hexenhammer would see the deployment of more of the guns than ever before in the west.
To combat the mechanical maneuver superiority of the Allies through their virtually limitless access to fuel, the Germans had sought to pad out their anti-tank formations as much as possible. Infantry formations saw the Panzerfaust and Panzerschreck being handed out in borderline excessive numbers. Recoilless launchers based on Swedish designs were also handed out in substantial numbers. Joining the usual assortment of anti-tank guns were a number of attempts to get as many systems to serve in an anti-materiel role as possible.. Such as the “organ faust”, as the British nicknamed them, half tracks that carried batteries of anti-tank rocket launchers that would try to ambush vehicular formations and run away as quickly as possible.
In the skies wings of Jet fighters were expected to sweep the Allies out of the skies. With the Axis having a decided inferiority in the quantity of aircraft and the quality of pilots, the Luftwaffe was left with no choice but to lean entirely on jets to carry the day. Bombing support would be delivered in large part by Vengeance rockets, including the V-1 and V-2s as well as the more portable V-3 Panzerwerfer 50; the latter of which were codenamed “FROG” (Free Rocket Over Ground) by Allied intelligence. Such was a necessity due to the lack of planes and pilots capable of delivering the full weight of tactical bombing and support missions as well as the suicidal nature of deploying the Luftwaffe’s remaining heavy bombers on anything but the safest missions. At least part of this would need to be delivered via missile instead.
Battle of the Low Countries
At 0600 hours on 9 June 1945 Lombard launched his attack. Chawandar Singh had received reports of a likely attack on his position and had made the necessary preparations for a defense in depth. Reinforcing troops from nearby formations were provided to help absorb the initial hammer blow of the offensive while quickly established trench lines and fall back positions were sketched out. Supplies were generous and morale was high as soldiers expected to see the end of the war by the end of the year.
Commonwealth military doctrine heavily revolved around the establishment of carefully laid out plans and extensive contingencies. While the plans themselves may not always have been entirely useful, the process of planning and organising forces had always been a substantial asset to the Entente way of war. It allowed every unit to fall back on clear directions in case of confusion and chaos as often erupts once battle is joined and it made sure that lines of supply were always clearly laid out and the second army group began to shift their positions in accordance to their contingencies.
Despite OKH-West’s misgivings, the Fuhrer’s decrees were followed to their inevitable conclusion. With forces well below approved strength, short on food, fuel and munitions, the forces of Army Group F began their attack. The first strike would once again be delivered by a large wave of vengeance rockets after a lull in the bombardment of Singh’s positions. While terrifying to experience as many war journals attest to; the inaccuracy of such weapons substantially limited their tactical and operational effectiveness.
A handful of Fallschirmjager attacks would be carried out using the cover of inclement weather to provide advance support for German operations in the hopes that Allied interception would be too busy with the rockets to stop them. The Luftwaffe would sortie once again, seeking out Allied air fields in the hopes of damaging enemy air support as much as possible and give the remaining bombers a clearer shot in support of the ground forces.
The initial thrust by Sixth Panzer Army through the Ardennes Forest launched in sync with the V-rocket wave had not been anticipated by Allied intelligence. Though higher level planning had thoroughly been compromised by Enigma intercepts, lower-level communications traffic had not been decoded in time to create a more accurate picture of German dispositions.
A period of heavy storms and overcast weather had limited Allied aerial reconnaissance, resulting in a misreading of German operational positions. While the V-1s had were often intercepted and the rush to fire the V-2s lead to often less than desirable firing solutions, the V-3s fired from their mobile mounts had their targeted solutions pre-computed to a substantial degree of accuracy. Numerous command posts were silenced by the first waves of ballistic missiles, while supply depots exploded in brilliant conflagrations after being struck by the rockets.
Thus, the initial penetrations were able to cause some degree of shock within the Allied Fourth Army. The tanks of the 5th SS Panzer Division “Silberne Legion” struck the recovering Australasian 3rd Infantry and the Canadian 1st Armored Division at their garrisons, pushing the two divisions into a cauldron at Sedan. Other divisions of the Second Army Group were being pressed backwards, and cracks in the line were being probed by infiltration and exploitation units following the breakthrough troops.
German soldiers seized whatever supplies of food and fuel they could and demolished the rest. Thousands of prisoners were taken. Anti-partisan operations proceeded with murderous brutality. For a moment, it almost seemed as if the spirit of the old Blitzkrieg had returned. German high command had dared to hope that they could perhaps reach Paris as their offensive forces swept into Wallonia.
The successes of the first week could not last, however. A break in the foul weather on 14 June enabled intensive tactical air operations. As the German spearheads pushed further into Northern France, they encountered stiffening enemy resistance. Singh’s forces were well trained and experienced when it came to dealing with armoured offensives from years of hard fighting from the Middle East to France and had prepared their Pakfronts well. Crack rifle fire and disciplined machine gunnery proved to be deadly to German infantry, and every attacked grid was soon supported by thoroughly readied artillery.
Meanwhile, the narrow logistical points through the Ardennes were choked by Allied air power. The Luftwaffe forces attached to Operation Hexenhammer were thoroughly outnumbered and outclassed. Without experienced pilots, the He 162 and Me 262 jet fighters could not overcome the numerical disadvantage, and failed to significantly disrupt the tactical bombing campaign. By this point, Allied countermeasures to the V-1 were a finely tuned science, and the number of successful launches plummeted as soon as the RAF intensified interception missions.
The initial surprises and successes proved to be within the range of contingencies prepared by 2nd Army Group’s headquarters. This was not 1942, when inexperienced British divisions succumbed to panic at enemy infiltration techniques or tank shock. Encircled units continued to fight on and coordinate operations at the corps and army level. Allied mastery of the skies also offered additional avenues of supplies to arrive for encircled and cut off troops to allow them to continue to fight on through paradropped assets.
Besieged forces would thus prove to be extremely stubborn in the face of attempts to extinguish them. The Germans had not advanced far enough to prevent the possibility of these soldiers breaking out, and allowing them to threaten the rear of tenuous supply lines would be a disaster. As such substantial effort had to be put into trying to close these pockets of Allied resistance that would draw down the overall pace of the advance as soldiers who might have been able to punch through weak points in the Allied lines had to be posted to dealing with the encircled forces.
On 17 June, Ogrup. Lombard ordered a temporary halt to the advance to “secure lines of communication.” This temporary halt would be permanent. Allied forces redoubled their counterattacks almost immediately. Reinforced with tanks freed up from Field Marshal Montgomery’s 1st Army Group, the VIII Corps attacks north from vicinity of Verdun to relieve the Sedan cauldron.
As was the case in most battles in 1945, fanatical devotion from the highly indoctrinated Hitlerjugend graduates could not overcome major disparities in firepower. And like cast iron, such hard zealotry proved brittle on the defense. By 23 June, the lead tanks of the Indian 1st Armored Division had reached the lines of the beleaguered Australasian troops and more were on the way. With German armour depleted from generally costly breakthrough attacks, the Allied vehicles were significantly freer to maneuver. The Indian Tank ace Tanmai Dixit would rack up forty two vehicular and gun kills in the operation, including five tanks, wryly joking that the bigger the German tanks got the worse they became at driving them.
Isolated Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS divisions began surrendering, with surrender rates particularly high among the non-German conscripts, and attempts at tactical withdrawal quickly turned into a rout. With lines of retreat under constant harrying attack from the sky, self propelled artillery, and fast moving light tank, armoured car and jeep mobile cavalry units, attempts to regroup proved futile. Confusion and uncertainty would lead to the successful German units being overwhelmed and cut off from one another. Even the mighty Gevatter Tod would end up captured after being abandoned by its crew following a ferocious engagement with Allied heavy tank assets.
The impressive mass of German heavy armour belied the inexperience of the crews for their metallic titans and the declining quality of German materials. Even a number of much lauded German tank aces would find their flowers cut on the field of battle. Michael Whitmann would meet his end when in his overconfidence he sought to pursue a number of light tanks, only to panic when strafed by air attack and leaving him open to an anti-tank round plunging into his vehicle’s rear from Alfie Nicholls’ Camelot tank. .
Many soldiers had by this point decided that Endsieg was nothing more than a deranged fantasy, especially the foreign “Aryan” soldiers conscripted into the German army to make up for depleted manpower. While morale among Dutch, Belgian, Luxembourgian, Danish, and Norwegian conscripts was never particularly high, the rate of defection seen now was virtually unprecedented. Some units simply drove to the Allies with white flags and asked to either switch sides or surrender without fighting once it became clear that victory was not in the cards..
In a month of heavy fighting, General Singh had reclaimed all of the lost territory in the Low Countries and Northern France plus change. While the attack pushed back Allied offensive operations into Germany, it also left German Western Front forces on the backfoot. The twin disasters at Sedan in the West, and the Brandenburg Offensive in the East had begun the death rattle of the Third Reich.
Based on its stated objectives, Operation Hexenhammer was doomed from the start. It could not force a white peace with the Western Allies this late in the war. Even in terms of more limited objectives of drawing out the conflict, it proved to be useless. Its most immediate effect was encouraging Hitler’s inner circle to further isolate him from the real world, as day-to-day control of the war effort was usurped by Reichsmarschall Göring. The full extent of Hexenhammer’s failure would not be revealed to Hitler until well after the surrender.
Wowza, TTL's battle of the bulge is certainly more brutal than OTL.
Crew attrition and conscription will do that to you, yes. I'm reminded of a story (don't know how valid) from OTK: That when the Ferdinand tank destroyer was rolled out, half were given to former Stug crews who used them well, and the other half was given to former crews of AT guns that had no idea how to use an AFV and got badly mauled).
I'm rather doubful that the Entente would promote a black African general this early on. India I can understand since the Raj had it's own forces, but Nigeria was just another british colony at this point OTL and I would imagine with the red menace the Entente was not in a big rush to enfranchise them. Even if the administration was changed during WW2, would there be enough time for someone to rise to being a general?
Yeah, it's often misunderstood how important human and institutional factors are in military doctrine, because weapons are tangible and institutions aren't. There's an old proverb in England, "To train a good longbowman, start with his grandfather". In Germany's case both ITTL and OTL, the crews of the important combat arms were being killed or maimed faster than they could fully transmit skills to new generations, resulting in compounding loss of skill.
Some of this stuff is contaminated with the work we're doing in reposting the TL to SV, which since I'm an insufferable perfectionist provoked yet another round of rewrites/revisions. Part of that is an earlier push towards Dominionization in other colonies, Nigeria being one of the more strategically important ones.
Ah yes, that issue. I imagine the logistics of essentially running two versions of the timeline at once are pretty chaotic. Is the SV version planned to be the 'definitive' version eventually?
So the Nigerian general is an error in this version?
Basically.
It's not so much an error, because I'm trying to make things simple by making all new work internally consistent with itself. that just means there might be some discrepancies on this one that will be ultimately rectified.
Basically, once we reach Part IV post WW2, both versions will be fully in-sync between AH and SV
Bookmark1995
Banned
Well, it was interesting to see the TTL version of Hitler's last swipe.
Can't wait for the next post.
Can't wait for the next post.
I guess this means that he survives the war. This raises the question of whether he stayed in Berlin, or if he fled and was intercepted.
The SV version is the current one.
forums.sufficientvelocity.com
Reds! A Revolutionary Timeline Timeline - Post-1900 - Users' Choice!
Introduction Hi, I'm the writer formerly known as "Jello_Biafra" from alternatehistory.com, and this the definitive version of the timeline I began working on almost ten years ago. It's grown a lot since then. It underwent a major rewrite with the help of Illuminatus_Primus, who has since...
forums.sufficientvelocity.com
I feel like Integralist Brazil might actually use a lot of British and French equipment. Given the fact they relied a lot on British investment for their five year plans (ironically modeled after stalins apparently) Britain may initially hope they are a bulwark against American influence in the Americas and force against Socialism, after all, it is not like Integralism could exactly be described as akin to National Socialism or even Fascism.
Granted, yes, Fascist aesthetics were adopted, yet that was more as Salgado saw the Fascist street gangs as an effective way to intimidate and gain power. Though having anti semites like Gustavo Barroso in, Salgado himself condemned anti semitism. Additionally, Britain and America are both not initially realizing the threat of Nazi Germany, their main intent is prepare to fight the other. Britain may initially have hoped to gain Integralist Brazil as a potential anti American ally.
Naturally, Salgado isn't exactly a sane man as shown in this series, having strangled his own aid and his forces committing brutalities in South America. Yet Britain for one won't realize that until later, and more cynically, probably won't care about Socialist South American nations. I think when Salgado is irrational they will support the coup, but pre war, I can see a lot of British gear in Brazilian hands which may see use in the war, however embarrassing that will be for Britain post war.
Interestingly, Brazil sort of gets away scot free in this timeline practically, despite their atrocities due to the monarchist coup and America not wanting to face a protracted struggle. On the brighter side, despite Brazilian and German revisionism (with most accounts in the fandom showing neo integralists being rather active in modern brazil ttl) Japan apparently has a pretty effective removal of fascist influence.
Actually, given Salgado's breakneck industrialization program as well as pretty extreme british investment as well as probably a strong revival after the monarchist coup and a likely turn to a mixed economy, is Brazil's economy TTL going to be fairly more powerful than OTL?
Granted, yes, Fascist aesthetics were adopted, yet that was more as Salgado saw the Fascist street gangs as an effective way to intimidate and gain power. Though having anti semites like Gustavo Barroso in, Salgado himself condemned anti semitism. Additionally, Britain and America are both not initially realizing the threat of Nazi Germany, their main intent is prepare to fight the other. Britain may initially have hoped to gain Integralist Brazil as a potential anti American ally.
Naturally, Salgado isn't exactly a sane man as shown in this series, having strangled his own aid and his forces committing brutalities in South America. Yet Britain for one won't realize that until later, and more cynically, probably won't care about Socialist South American nations. I think when Salgado is irrational they will support the coup, but pre war, I can see a lot of British gear in Brazilian hands which may see use in the war, however embarrassing that will be for Britain post war.
Interestingly, Brazil sort of gets away scot free in this timeline practically, despite their atrocities due to the monarchist coup and America not wanting to face a protracted struggle. On the brighter side, despite Brazilian and German revisionism (with most accounts in the fandom showing neo integralists being rather active in modern brazil ttl) Japan apparently has a pretty effective removal of fascist influence.
Actually, given Salgado's breakneck industrialization program as well as pretty extreme british investment as well as probably a strong revival after the monarchist coup and a likely turn to a mixed economy, is Brazil's economy TTL going to be fairly more powerful than OTL?
Something I can't answer well. Looking into the Sufficient Velocity thread may provide you some answers while reading.
Short answer is a big YES. Brazil is one of this timeline's world powers by present day.
Oh, I was wondering what that massive bang was a moment ago. Must have been Churchill blowing a gasket across time and timeline over that name...
Great update, can't wait to see what the end game for all this is.
xsampa
Banned
How would the UASR interact with non-economic ideologies, say Societism from Look to the West?
The Republics’ ideologies include a cultural component in favor of polyculturism, and they certainly despise the Combine’s Vocacinuum, but would they somehow be able to work with it on the shared ground of a future World State while trying to outfox it in other domains?
The Republics’ ideologies include a cultural component in favor of polyculturism, and they certainly despise the Combine’s Vocacinuum, but would they somehow be able to work with it on the shared ground of a future World State while trying to outfox it in other domains?
Excited to see how the downfall of Germany plays out. There's been hints with the secret workers organizations in Hamburg and Kiel and also with the lore on Post-War Germany, but I can't wait to see how they go about overthrowing the Nazis from the inside.