I always though India was just going to be a left-leaning dominion in the FBU sphere, technically aligned, but largely neutral in the whole conflict
The Great Crusade (Reds! Part 3)
- Thread starter Aelita
- Start date
I always though India was just going to be a left-leaning dominion in the FBU sphere, technically aligned, but largely neutral in the whole conflict
I actually speculated on that and I pretty much endorsed that this should happen. I don't remember if Jello or IP said something about India's status as a powerful non-aligned country but I am getting the impression that India can become sort of a non-aligned movement leader ITTL. However, this might not happen in the beginning during the time that India is still industrializing. By the time it already did, then it might be the time that the country thinks more independently. I don't know.
Letting Communists return for spain and sandwhich the core constituencies of the FBU in exchange for a choice of political parties in the philipines seems like a fairly poor trade from a purely strategic standpoint given that it allows the FBU to potentially face a two front war in Europe. Can't imagine the FBU aligned part of spain or Portugal or France would be particularly happy about it. Though I suppose it would make good electioneering fodder for right wing parties in the FBU.
Speaking of Portugal, does Salazar's fascist government collapse at about the same time OTL or does it come to an end later or even earlier? The story of the last fascist government in the world is probably going to be a very interesting one. Especially with all the hand-wringing the FBU is likely to try in order to say "no, they're totally not fascist guys, honest."
Any thoughts on the restoration of the Brazilian Imperial Throne, the rise of Islamic radicalism, and the Yemenese civil war I put up earlier?
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I agree that the Philippines are a pretty poor prize for abandoning virtually of Spain. I don't think even a Labour-SFIO government would be ready to countenance it, although it partially depends on who is in charge. [By the same token, the people least likely to agree to giving up so much of Spain are probably also the ones most likely to be in power.] This is without considering whether or not Labour-SFIO are joined by the Conservatives and Liberals, who would look on it even more dimly. The most I could see the FBU (willingly) giving away is the city of Barcelona, before things go to hell in about 1947/8. I think the most plausible outcome would be a Red Spain that includes the city of Barcelona, most of the east coast and parts of Andalusia - a communist island in the capitalist sea of the western Mediterranean - but not a lot else. I also think it is likely that the FBU will take Sicily and Sardinia from Italy - they'll be a relatively easy target by the latter half of the war and if Piedmont doesn't reunify before the Cold War breaks out, then I don't see them being given back before things get bad.
I suspect Portugal gets bullied into 'reforming' by the FBU to keep up appearances but I might be wrong.
Islamic fundamentalism may be more diverse or even be a relatively left-wing ideology (or at least anti-imperialist, economically left ideology) depending on how much of the Middle East the FBU controls. I don't think we'll see the straight hard-right ideology we've had in OTL.
teg
E. Burke
Banned
Given the FBU political update a few pages back, I don't think we are going to see a Franco-British socialist revolution or even an Indian socialist state at the end of all of this. I think Jello is going to leave it up to the reader about what is going to happen in the upcoming FBU elections. It's an open ending.
Yeah, I don't want to be in the middle of a bad argument again, just like how I alienated Japhy months ago. It's my fault really.
Is that the political parties list?
OTL wise, Radical Islam, much like modern Extremist Christianity (or others who espouse Theocracy) can be roughly divided into two camps, Dictatorial and Democratic. The radicals who besieged mecca in the 70s and took over Iran were in the latter camp, believing that the truest form of an Islamic state would be a democratic one where all believers (male ones at least) would have a say, a version of this is espoused by the Muslim Brotherhood, though how much they soften it depends on the local version. Democratic Theocracies are generally authoritarian illiberal democracies like Iran. The radicalism in Da'esh, the Taliban, Al-Queada and so on is Dictatorial, rejecting democracy as ungodly, while not all agree on restoring the Caliphate, they do agree on what amounts to a dictatorship of the clergy, whether oligarchic or autocratic.
Both are generally broadly in favor of redistributionist systems (at least in rhetoric, in practice the redistribution tends to be "for us and our supporters" for the likes of the Taliban and Da'esh, not sure on Iran) as is proscribed in holy texts. You know, bans of usury, forgiving debts every seven years, letting the poor pick from your fields once a week and so on. This is generally what they try to use to win over popular support as well as appeals to faith and oppression from outsiders and their cronies. Obviously, it's basically paternalistic welfare, which while somewhat (in very broad terms) similar economically to what religious socialists would espouse, is immensely socially and politically restrictive otherwise and would thus fail to appeal to people who self-identify as religious socialists.
Of course American Dominionists tend to have all the above mixed with a side order of prosperity theology craziness so you get the worst possible package this side of Adolf Hitler.
I could see Islamic Socialism rising and curtailing a lot of the appeal of Radical Islamic groups much like how ITTL Christian Socialism largely strangled Dominionism in the crib in America. They'd probably still have their disagreements with secular pan-arabic socialist and communist groups but I'd see them as being willing to form a broad popular front against the Middle Eastern and North African Arabic monarchies.
Ideally, this would mean the religious extremism we're familiar with in the 21st century would be much less of a problem, but given the magnitude of differences here it's hard to tell. Ultimately it's a question of how optimistic you want the 21st century to be in this timeline. More hopeful renditions would have nasty things like Christian Fundamentalism, Islamic Radicalism, and Hindu Nationalism largely butterflied away. Less hopeful ones would have fundamentalist reactionaries rise to cause trouble like in our timeline, maybe with different names like "the Global Liberation Army" instead of Da'esh/ISIS. (Cookies if you got that reference)
I am really sorry guys but we are focusing too much on Europe's importance again, in my opinion. We are so hyping the fact that this perceived geographical communist encirclement despite the existence of significant buffer territories is going to tear the Franco-British society apart after the war.
Philippines, being located in one of the most resource rich parts of the world and a crucial part of the Grand Area strategy of the US State Department IOTL, is a far bigger prize for the FBU than a small part of Spain surrounded by a hostile territory that can be easily overrun by the FBU in a hypothetical wartime scenario. It's also a very good propaganda material for the Churchillite-Gaullists that's going to come to power, by aiming at the softness of the Labour-SFIO administration over the communists which have aims to destroy the Franco-British way of life, whatever that means, through giving in to a presence of Soviet Spain across the Pyrenees. It's a great strategy to bring themselves into power politically. It doesn't matter that there's Portugal, FBU controlled western Mediterranean, FBU North Africa and FBU sponsored Spanish Kingdom surrounding it. Just look at it, it's Soviet Spain that has more legitimate concerns of being surrounded than the FBU. I am sure that the UASR agrees to the restoration of the exiled Philippine liberal government, in return of allowing the Philippine socialist and communist movements a legitimate participation in the Philippine political process through some form of a postwar coalition government in the spirit of immediate postwar United Nations spirit and of course, an independence referendum for the country. I think it might also help that the UASR is going to be more preoccupied in other parts of the world including Japanese reconstruction in Asia, leaving the Philippines to a possible fate of remaining in the FBU, which is highly likely to happen. It doesn't matter though if the Comintern have a massive resource base at its disposal anyway. It's the Franco-British elite that has a greater need of foreign markets and resource extraction regions. The UASR troops in the Philippines will leave if FBU troops are going to leave southern Spain. It's actually the UASR that lost more in this, not the FBU. The UASR is risking the fact that the Philippine labor movement might turn away from it because of perceived betrayal after the FBU secured its control in the country, in the way that the Indian socialist movement might also thought of it during the 1940s because of the logistical demands of supporting the Soviet Union against the Axis invasion through invading Persia with the support of British India's colonial administrators. I am now totally realizing how complicated is the business of spreading the world revolution.
Middle East is going to see a pan-Semitic, pan-Arab Baathist movement from the UASR supported parts of the country like in the Palestine and/or the Levant. Labor Zionism and Baathism going together basically. Islamic religious fundamentalism, as we might knew it, is going to be largely concentrated in capitalist Middle East and/or Muslim world by extension. Saudi Arabia might still be Saudi Arabia, though probably a bit more liberal. Left-wing? Well, the far-right parties in the entire Comintern are Georgist/social-democratic in economic orientation while committed to some form of Islamic social and/or cultural conservative values which is still very far from the standards of OTL Islamic fundamentalism. So, by OTL standards, that's kinda correct.
E. BURKE: Yes, I am talking about that political parties list. It's hinted that the Labour/Communist coalition might win the coming elections but Jello might leave it at that. It's up to us to imagine what might happen, which from my perspective, it's going to be terrifying if people didn't act rationally if the coalition won the elections and overthrow the establishment. There are nuclear weapons this time around.
Philippines, being located in one of the most resource rich parts of the world and a crucial part of the Grand Area strategy of the US State Department IOTL, is a far bigger prize for the FBU than a small part of Spain surrounded by a hostile territory that can be easily overrun by the FBU in a hypothetical wartime scenario. It's also a very good propaganda material for the Churchillite-Gaullists that's going to come to power, by aiming at the softness of the Labour-SFIO administration over the communists which have aims to destroy the Franco-British way of life, whatever that means, through giving in to a presence of Soviet Spain across the Pyrenees. It's a great strategy to bring themselves into power politically. It doesn't matter that there's Portugal, FBU controlled western Mediterranean, FBU North Africa and FBU sponsored Spanish Kingdom surrounding it. Just look at it, it's Soviet Spain that has more legitimate concerns of being surrounded than the FBU. I am sure that the UASR agrees to the restoration of the exiled Philippine liberal government, in return of allowing the Philippine socialist and communist movements a legitimate participation in the Philippine political process through some form of a postwar coalition government in the spirit of immediate postwar United Nations spirit and of course, an independence referendum for the country. I think it might also help that the UASR is going to be more preoccupied in other parts of the world including Japanese reconstruction in Asia, leaving the Philippines to a possible fate of remaining in the FBU, which is highly likely to happen. It doesn't matter though if the Comintern have a massive resource base at its disposal anyway. It's the Franco-British elite that has a greater need of foreign markets and resource extraction regions. The UASR troops in the Philippines will leave if FBU troops are going to leave southern Spain. It's actually the UASR that lost more in this, not the FBU. The UASR is risking the fact that the Philippine labor movement might turn away from it because of perceived betrayal after the FBU secured its control in the country, in the way that the Indian socialist movement might also thought of it during the 1940s because of the logistical demands of supporting the Soviet Union against the Axis invasion through invading Persia with the support of British India's colonial administrators. I am now totally realizing how complicated is the business of spreading the world revolution.
Middle East is going to see a pan-Semitic, pan-Arab Baathist movement from the UASR supported parts of the country like in the Palestine and/or the Levant. Labor Zionism and Baathism going together basically. Islamic religious fundamentalism, as we might knew it, is going to be largely concentrated in capitalist Middle East and/or Muslim world by extension. Saudi Arabia might still be Saudi Arabia, though probably a bit more liberal. Left-wing? Well, the far-right parties in the entire Comintern are Georgist/social-democratic in economic orientation while committed to some form of Islamic social and/or cultural conservative values which is still very far from the standards of OTL Islamic fundamentalism. So, by OTL standards, that's kinda correct.
E. BURKE: Yes, I am talking about that political parties list. It's hinted that the Labour/Communist coalition might win the coming elections but Jello might leave it at that. It's up to us to imagine what might happen, which from my perspective, it's going to be terrifying if people didn't act rationally if the coalition won the elections and overthrow the establishment. There are nuclear weapons this time around.
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Operation Teutonic: Summer/Fall 1940
1940 - Drang nach Osten
An Overview of Operation Teutonic
The postponing of revanchist ambitions towards France had been a bitter pill to swallow, especially for the Nazi's conservative collaborators. But Hitler and the Nazi inner circle had other thoughts. Both France and Britain, countries with a population of substantially Nordic stock, could be dealt with at a later date. Indeed, they might even resolve to save themselves from the scourge of Judeo-Bolshevism, and accept German leadership of a general Anti-Comintern Axis.
For the Nazis, Communism remained the bête noire. They had inoculated their own nation against the spread of this disease before it was too late. Those who hadn't successfully escaped or gone into hiding were steadily being exterminated at Dachau. But so long as the carrier for this disease remained, it would continue to spread. As far as Hitler was concerned, not only was war against the Russian and American racial mongrels inevitable, it as the Nazi's historic duty to excise this cancer.
The Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) had begun drawing up plans for an invasion of the Soviet Union before the ink had even dried on November 1938's Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Soviet non-aggression pact had given the Third Reich ample time to consolidate power in Poland and the Balkans. Ceding the sliver of Ukrainian speaking Poland to the Soviets, as well as the Baltics to the Soviet sphere of influence were a small price to pay. The Soviets were modernizing their forces, most certainly aware that any pact with the Nazis was guaranteed to be a temporary one. But Hitler was supremely confident that he could make better use of the time than Stalin.
The eighteen months between the non-aggression pact and the invasion gave the Wehrmacht plenty of time to apply the lessons it learned in its campaigns against Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Balkans. Combined with the experience gained from American expatriates, this ensured that the Wehrmacht would be far more attuned to the realities of modern mobile warfare than the Soviets.
While portrayed as a multi-national anti-communist alliance, the Axis forces deployed along the Soviet frontier were entirely under Nazi command, with even Italy taking a highly subordinate role. In the months of build-up to the outbreak of war, the Luftwaffe stepped up reconnaissance flights into the Soviet Union. For fear of provocation, Stalin forbade surveillance aircraft from leaving the territory of the Soviet Union, and prohibited the interception of German aircraft.
His own forces, now fortifying forward positions in what had been until eighteen months prior Ukrainian and Byelorussian speaking territories of Poland were thus kept largely blind to the forces amassing against them. The generals of the Byelorussian and Ukrainian military districts could only poke at phantoms nervously. Marshal Voroshilov repeatedly assured the commanders that "The boss knows all about it; it's all under control."
In truth, Stalin's government knew very well the extraordinary predicament it was in. When France and Britain failed to go to war with Germany over Poland, and instead continued to align closer to the Axis, it became clear that war with the Nazis was inevitable. Stalin had hoped he could induce Hitler to pre-emptively strike at France in the early months of 1939. But this possibility seemed more and more remote to everyone except Stalin in the upper echelon of the CPSU.
Molotov wrote in his memoirs that Stalin seemed to be afflicted with a "crisis of nerves" bordering on full mental breakdown. He had become increasingly withdrawn from even his closest of confidants, and increasingly in denial about the predicament he was in. In one of his few moments of lucidity, as he and Molotov sat by the fire drinking tea one night in November 1939, he confided that following the Soviet Union's suspension from the Comintern for "making pacts with the enemies of the workers' international," he did not believe that the Americans would fulfill their mutual defense duty should the Soviet Union be invaded by the Nazis. He needed time to prepare, and could not afford any provocation. He recalled his secret meetings with the now rehabilitated General Frunze, where he had asked the RKKA's leading expert on mobile warfare if the Soviet military could sustain a pre-emptive attack against the Germans and prevail.
Frunze's prognosis was grim. The army and air forces were not prepared for any such action until at least 1941 according to the modernization schedule. The mass of Soviet tanks and mobile units were entirely obsolete. The backbone of the tank force, the T-26 infantry tanks and the BT series fast tanks, had difficulty reliably penetrating the frontal armor of a German PzKpfw III(1) except at close range. Few were equipped with radios, and except for the BT-7s, they did not employ the three-man turret division of labor, with commander, gunner and loader. While new units had entered mass production, it would take time to build the inventory and train crews for them.
Much of the air force was similarly obsolete. Worse, the logistical backbone of the military was underdeveloped. There were critical shortages of trucks and Soviet industry wouldn't be able to overcome this in the near future. The only hope would be to import them from America, who Stalin had already did not believe he could rely on.
The lack of provocation, however, did absolutely nothing to deflect the course that Hitler had charted. After repeated battles over operational plans with the more conservative and aristocratic military establishment, a final battle plan was prepared in February of 1940. Axis forces on Soviet frontier would be organized into three army groups.
Army Group North, based in East Prussia, would strike through the Baltics towards Leningrad. Its two Panzer Groups (2nd and 4th, commanded by Generaloberst Hoth and General Guderian respectively) would isolate Leningrad, and bisect the major rail lines and industrial complexes linking the city to the capital. The 3rd and 18th Armies would follow and take Leningrad and its port facilities, to open up new lines of communication to support further offensive operations into Russia.
Army Group Center would invade from Poland into Byelorussia, to encircle and annihilate the core of the Soviet army, and occupy Smolensk. Its two Panzer Groups, the 1st and 5th, would be equipped with the newest model tanks. At Hitler's insistence, the OKW's urge to drive straight to Moscow would be tempered. Army Group Center would hold and reorganize, with the tentative plan to begin driving towards Moscow after Army Group North had seized Leningrad (expected to take no later than January 1941). The rising star of the Wehrmacht, and the hero of the Czechoslovak War, General Erich von Manstein, would lead the 1st Panzer Group, while overall command of Army Group Center would be entrusted to an older, more orthodox officer, Feldmarschall Adolf Strauss.
Army Group South under Feldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt, would invade the Ukraine, driving a wedge between the powerful Soviet Southern Front, which had some of the Soviet's most potent mobile forces, and the larger but less mobile South-Western Front, which would now be pinned between Army Group Center and Army Group South. The less reliable Axis would round out its forces, including an entire Italian field army, the 2nd, under General Vittorio Ambrosio.
The first Axis aircraft crossed the Soviet frontier at 3:15 A.M., 19 May 1940. The invasion force amounted to:
· 4.1 million personnel
· 4,050 tanks
· 2,670 aircraft
· 8,000+ artillery pieces
The 147 divisions of the Wehrmacht Heer (21 Panzer, 18 Panzergrenadier, 96 infantry, and assorted security and rear echelon reserve units) crashed into the disorganized Soviet frontier forces like a tidal wave. Panzer spearheads broke through half-finished defense works. Efforts by the Soviet Army to rally were frustrated almost completely; the Luftwaffe had achieved near total air supremacy along the frontier. Whole regiments of Soviet fighters and attack aircraft were destroyed on their airfields. Supply dumps were hit, and troop concentrations found themselves under near constant aerial harassment.
Stalin was reported to be near catatonic at the news. As report after report of disaster at the frontier streamed in, he locked himself in his study, unavailable to all but his closest of confidants.
The first good news arrived in the afternoon of Tuesday, 21 May. Foreign Affairs Commissar Molotov brought a diplomatic cable straight to Stalin. The American Congress of Soviets had unanimously voted for a declaration of war on Germany and its cobelligerents (even the counter-revolutionaries of the True Democrats abstained rather than express disloyalty in a time of war). They pledged unconditional support and assistance, and an end to the Soviet Union's suspension from the Comintern.
The WFRN had, under Stavka directive, already begun combat operations against the Kriegsmarine even before the declaration of war had been delivered. It was a tacit acknowledgment that the Foster caretaker government considered its ultimatum to be a mere "bourgeois nicety." When the time period had passed with not even so much as a German acknowledgment, Foreign Secretary Reed delivered a stern rebuke to the British and French governments, criticizing them for not even condemning a blatant act of Nazi aggression.
For the Soviets, though, the disaster on the frontier was just beginning. By the end of Operation Teutonic's first phase, close to three thousand Soviet aircraft were lost. Army Group Center had encircled the Soviet Western Front. Attempts at relief or breakout failed, and the Heer engaged in battles of annihilation against the encircled Soviet pockets. The Western Front was shattered utterly, losing two thirds of its operational strength captured or KIA.
Soviet forces in the Ukraine avoided disastrous encirclement, but were forced to yield ground in rapid retreat after repeated mauling by the 3rd Panzer Group.
Soviet forces, under Stalin's orders, began counteroffensive operations in early June. In Byelorussia, they bled the Southwestern Front white in unfocused attempts at relieving the beleaguered Western Front. The Northwestern Front fared slightly better: the 3rd and 12th Mechanized Corps, with close to 400 T-34s and 120 KV-1s between them, struck headlong into Guderian's Panzers in the Baltics. Their troops were better led and organized than the Germans had been used to, and their tanks were superior in nearly every respect to the German tanks. But their numbers were too few, and after the initial shock wore off, the German mastery of the skies ensured that the counterattack would be short-lived and costly.
In late June, after the infantry troops had caught up, Hitler ordered additional offensives. By this time though, the Soviets had moved in operational reserves from the Moscow military district. Before Army Group Center could continue its drive to Smolensk, the Soviets began a massive counteroffensive.
While the officer corps had been devastated by purges, the logistical backbone of the Soviet state had advanced by leaps and bounds in the past five years.(2) Reinforcements arrived quicker than anticipated, much of it new T-34s fresh off the assembly lines. While the Smolensk Front (formed from the remnants of the Western Front plus the Moscow reserve) did not achieve its goal of pushing Army Group Center out of Soviet territory by a longshot, it inflicted considerable damage on Army Group Center.
General Frunze knew when to quit while he was ahead. With Zhukov's help, he convinced Stalin to abandon a "not a step back" policy in favor of an attritional struggle.(3) The counteroffensive could only buy time; time to put the economy on a war footing, raise new troops, and pull reinforcements from Central Asia.
But while Frunze stymied Strauss's plans to continue the drive forward, Army Group North steadily pushed towards Leningrad, while Army Group South struck towards Kiev. By July, the whole frontier was in danger of collapsing. Frunze was forced to pull back and fortify Smolensk. Kiev had held, but the continued advance of Army Group South had placed it in a precarious salient. By August, most of the Ukraine west of the Dneiper had been occupied. In the North, the battered troops of the North and North-West fronts narrowly avoided encirclment at Novgorod. Stalin reluctantly agreed to refocus efforts for a defense of Leningrad.
The Soviet Union proved not to be a rotten structure, waiting to collapse the moment someone kicked in the door. And in August, the first American army units began arriving at the front. The opportunity for a short, decisive war had closed, and even Hitler in all his hubris had recognized it. Trade with France and Britain and the looting of Eastern Europe had put Germany in its present position of strength. The old craft production system had been gradually phased out for more modern mass production techniques. But it would not be enough. With casualties mounting at the front, Hitler was finally convinced by his advisors to move the economy to a war footing.
The Comintern had made the decision to move to total economic mobilization the moment the war had begun. In spite of triumphal declarations of world revolution, the war's prospects were quite grim throughout 1940. There had been few victories for the Reds. The Iranian route would not be opened until after the December putsch against the Shah by a cadre of progressive military officers. Meanwhile, German u-boats harassed arctic convoys, the shortest and most direct route to supply the front. It proved difficult to provide adequate convoy protection. The Trans-Siberian Railroad was still being expanded, limiting the utility of supply through Vladivostok. If Japan, who had remained neutral thus far, joined in the war then Vladivostok would be effectively closed.
Soviets were still in desperate straits. Manpower had already been cut to the bone. Much of the motor pool had been destroyed or captured, and the Air Force was decimated. Large portions of the industrial apparatus had been disrupted or destroyed to prevent capture. More of it still was on rails being evacuated out of the path of the Nazi invasion. The Soviet economy faced severe disruption of important raw materials. American troops and equipment attempted to plug the gaps.
On 3 August, the pincers closed around Kiev. 3rd Panzer Group crossed the Dneiper, driving north. 5th Panzer Group drove southward. They met west of Lubny, trapping four Soviet armies from the South-West Front (5th, 6th, 12th and 26th, plus elements from several Front asset corps). Frunze could only watch helplessly in Smolensk, as the recon planes of his Front aviation assets brought him detailed reports of the battle of annihilation the Nazis wrought. Stalin demanded a counterattack.
Frunze was furious. He telegrammed Stalin personally, informing him that his demands would turn one disaster into two. Not only would the Smolensk and Bryansk Fronts have to attack through the bulk of Army Group Center, they were critically short on fuel and ammunition (and food, but Frunze considered this a secondary priority. His men could forage, or eat their boots if need be, but without ammunition, and fuel to bring the ammunition to the front lines, they would be helpless before the Germans.)
Molotov began to show some backbone, giving the General Secretary of the CPSU frank and sober counsel. He informed Stalin that, as his friend and confidant, he would not allow Stalin to act rashly out of anger or grief. Stalin had wanted to respond viciously to what he saw as incompetence and disloyalty at the front. Molotov stated flatly that he would refuse, as Chairman of Sovnarkom, to countersign any arrest or execution orders. Incompetents would be removed from command, but only after investigation, and only demonstrable act of gross negligence or disloyalty would be resolved by courts-martial.
After a heated argument, Stalin finally relented. General Frunze, he reluctantly admitted, was correct in his assessment. He was a talented strategist and gifted leader of men, and he had already managed to pull victory from the jaws of defeat. Expecting a second miracle from him in such short order would be unwise.
Meanwhile in Kiev, von Rundstedt was in for a nasty surprise. Rather than surrender, as the Western Front's encircled echelons had, General-Colonel Mikhail Kirponos resolved to fight on even against impossible odds. He organized a breakout attempt; thought it was thwarted, the unexpected counterattack had pushed the Germans off-balance, buying time for General-Major Rokossovsky's 9th Mechanized Corps to organize a relief attack on the encircling German forces. The 9th Mechanized Corps, undermanned and supplied with largely obsolete tanks still proved to be a considerable thorn in Army Group South's side. Thanks to its commander's tireless efforts in the previous year to train and organize the unit for intensive mobile warfare, it did not attack as a disorganized mass as other tank formations had. The coordination between infantry, tanks, artillery and air ensured that the exhausted XXXIX. Panzer Corps would have considerable difficulty repulsing its attack.
Nevertheless, Rokossovky's attack petered out by 12 August, still 60km from the city of Kiev. The 9th Mech. made a tactical withdrawal the following day. The Stavka reserve's 24th Army (two rifle corps of three rifle divisions each, an aviation division, and an independent tank brigade) arrived just in time to fend off German counterattacks.
With the threat of relief gone, the noose tightened around Kiev. Against Hitler's order's, von Rundstedt offered terms of surrender to Kirponos. He refused them, rallying his troops and the local militia to fight on in a patriotic defense of their revolutionary fatherland. Rations were cut to 2,000 kJ per day. Special units were organized to recover weapons, munitions, and if possible, raid German supplies under the cover of darkness.
This would only serve to delay the inevitable. Even as starvation set in, the soldiers of the South-Western Front fought on, forcing the Germans to advance block by block. Rumors of the activities of Waffen-SS Einsatzgruppen spurred on the defenders. Kirponos himself was killed in action on 21 August. On 25 August, von Rundstedt telegrammed Hitler, informing him that the city of Kiev had been taken. In truth, sporadic pockets were still held by Soviet soldiers, and many thousands more were able to slip through gaps in the German lines to engage in partisan resistance.
With the collapse of the Kiev pocket, focus shifted once again to Leningrad. The summer rains had given a sufficient reprieve for Army Group North, enabling the long logistical tail of the Panzer Groups, now redesignated Panzer Armies, to begin to address the damage inflicted on roads and rail, both as a consequence of fighting as well as due to deliberate sabotage by retreating Soviet forces. In late August, American units started clashing with the Germans. Luftwaffe pilots, used to dealing with obsolete I-16s and I-153s of the frontline aviation units, had their air superiority tested.
The veteran 7th Aviation Division of the Revolutionary Army Air Force had arrived. Its parent units were not far behind. Coupled with newly raised VVS aviation units, the arrival of the American aviation could not have come at a more critical time. German air dominance had frustrated all Soviet offensive and defensive plans. The recon advantage, coupled with tactical air support by Luftwaffe ground attack craft, had crippled the Red Army. With Army Group North driving headlong towards the gates of Leningrad, and Army Group Center preparing to encircle and destroy the Smolensk Front, ending the Luftwaffe's unhindered attacks was of paramount importance.
The 7th Aviation Division had been rushed to the Leningrad theater with all deliberate speed. Their comrades in the VVS welcomed them with open arms. The 7th had been the tip of the Comintern's spear. As veterans of both the American and Spanish Civil War, their anti-fascist pedigree was incredible. They were already almost legendary in aviation circles, the prestige unit which every ambitious aviator hoped to be stationed with. Its aces, such as Lt. Colonel Frank Tinker and and Major Arnold "Ajax" Baumler, were itching for a rematch after the armistice left two thirds of Spain under the control of the Nazi allied Falange.
For most Luftwaffe pilots, this would be their first experience fighting against a decisively superior opponent. While in terms of skill and experience they were evenly matched, the American's F-34C was a more advanced design than the Bf-109Fs that formed the cutting edge of the German fighter corps. Though both planes were similar in size and weight, the F-34C had a more powerful engine (988 kW vs. 850 kW). The F-34's center engine layout gave additional benefits: a more streamlined, aerodynamic fuselage, as well as more room to concentrate armament in the nose of the plane.
The F-34C could both climb and dive faster. It retained energy better, particularly in vertical maneuvers. Its armament was similar in hitting power; the Bf-109F and F-34C both relied on a hard-hitting 20mm cannon firing through the propeller hub, supplemented by synchronized machine guns in the nose; two 7.92mm MG-17s or two 13.1mm MG-131s for the Bf-109F, compared to two 12.7mm MG-12-B2s for the F-34C. The F-34C also had four 7.7mm machine guns in the wings (the ShKAS derived MG-7-B2), but pilots quickly concluded that against modern aircraft, they were often worse than useless, and often removed them entirely to improve roll rate.
The differences in mechanical quality, coupled with the Luftwaffe pilot's relative level of exhaustion, allowed the outnumbered 7th Aviation Division to inflict disproportionate losses. The Americans, benefiting from Soviet reports of the capabilities and tactics of German Bf-109 and Me-110 fighters, had already developed strategies to play to their strengths and exploit German weaknesses. With superior high altitude performance, the Americans could choose the terms of engagement. They struck only from a position of strength, avoiding engagements when they lacked numerical advantage. They eschewed dogfighting, instead relying on diving "boom and zoom" attacks. In a month of combat, they had shot down fifty-six fighters and twelve bombers for a loss of twelve of their own, a feat they would not be able to repeat until the very end of the war.
The Germans learned quickly how to avoid being dominated though. Pilots learned how to avoid being drawn into ambushes. They improved bomber escort tactics. The engineers at Messerschmitt developed field kits that retrofitted Bf 109F engines with a war emergency power (WEP) mode. The field conversion was made possible by changing the mechanical stop on the throttle. Additionally, an anti-detonant injection system was retrofitted to the supercharger. When the throttle was moved into the WEP setting, a 50-50 mixture of methanol and water was sprayed into the supercharger. This helped boost power in a number of ways; the simple presence of water served to cool incoming air, improving efficiency. It also allowed the supercharger to be run at higher boost settings without "knocking" (the spontaneous detonation of the gasoline aerosol in the cylinder at the wrong time, sapping power and increasing mechanical wear).
This allowed the Bf 109 pilots to run their engines at a much higher power (typically 30 percent greater) for short periods of time. While it did cause increased wear and tear, leading to changes in engine design for the next variant of the Bf 109 still in development, the ten minute supply of ADI significantly levelled the playing field.
The F-34C had its own WEP setting, based on a simpler method of raising the turbocharger boost pressure, allowing for less dramatic increases in engine power. This too resulted in greatly increased strain on the engine, and the logistical situation had ensured that American pilots were very conservative in its use. The new Bf 109 field conversions would force an increased reliance on WEP.
The arrival of American forces did little to divert Hitler from his intended course. He continued to resist the General Staff's insistence on driving straight to Moscow. The arrival of American troops and equipment made their belief that taking the capital would constitute a decisive blow to the Soviet state seem more unlikely every moment. Hitler insisted on striking at the enemy's industrial systems to cripple the Soviet's ability to wage war. This meant taking Leningrad and then cutting off Murmansk, which would force the diversion of between thirty and forty percent of transport to less suitable ports. It would also knock out the second largest industrial complex in the country while providing the military with new logistical support. Army Group North was set to its terrible task; the "Hunger Plan" was being enacted throughout occupied territories in the Baltic states and the Soviet Union, feeding his armies at the expense of the civilian population, and beginning the depopulation process that would pave the way for Aryan colonization.
Waffen-SS Einsatzgruppen stepped up their efforts to a fever pitch. The innocuous euphemism for these units of Nazi paramilitary fanatics concealed a terrible purpose. These "task forces" were engaged in mass murder, a process which was euphemized with the term "evacuation." The Einsatzgruppen would "evacuate" entire towns and villages over the course of the war. Their responsibilities were manifold. Their primary aim was to be the "Final Solution" to the "Judeo-Bolshevik question." To this affect, they would begin the indiscriminate mass murder of Jews and suspected Jews, irrespective to territory or borders, throughout all of Axis territory.
"Agents of Judeo-Bolshevism" were only slightly lower on the priority list. Nazi occupation policy dictated the mass murder of the intelligentsia of the Soviet Union, especially government officials and Communist Party members. In practice, this was simply indiscriminate mass murder of civilians, even anti-Soviet nationalists.
The Einsatzgruppen were also charged with coordinating "pacification" of occupied territories. This meant doing the work that the Heer security troops, in spite of their indoctrinated hatred of Slavs and communists, could not be reliably counted on to do. The enforcement of the Hunger Plan, as well as the reprisal executions, were primarily coordinated by the SS. Usually, this meant selecting a number of civilian hostages from the local population, usually young men and women for maximum psychological effect, and killing ten of them for every death inflicted on the occupying troops by partisans.
Meanwhile, Army Group South restarted its advance through Ukraine. Its goal was to capture the Caucasus, depriving Stalin of its industrial capacity, and more importantly, oil production.
By now, the Soviets had mobilized all available units to the front. The three main Soviet theaters were effectively isolated from one another, and could do nothing to counterbalance the enemy's attacks. September saw mostly skirmishes along the frontlines. But it was not a reprieve, only a moment for the invaders to draw breath before once again attacking.
On the first week of October, all three invading Army Groups began their offensive operations. In the North, the Finns had finally given in to German pressure, agreeing to become co-belligerents in the struggle against the Soviet Union. While the government justified it in revanchist terms, striking a blow at the ersatz Russian Empire that was the Soviet Union and avenging the bullying the Soviets had engaged in during the Interwar. But the war over a few scraps of land the Soviets had pushed Finland into giving up was a lie; it was a war waged to avoid becoming the next enemy on Hitler's list. With the Swedish government collaborating to preserve its neutrality, Denmark in wide scale civil unrest (with pitched street battles between communist and fascist paramilitaries), and the other world powers devoutly looking the other way, there was no hope but collaboration.
The Soviet North Front was forced to divide its forces to hold off the Finnish Army, leaving the already mangled North-West Front to face the entire brunt of Army Group North's onslaught. The RAAF and VVS did their best to stem the tide. The ground attack regiments of the 7th and 12th Aviation Divisions fought desperately, almost suicidally, to blunt the Panzer spearheads.
On 14 October, the lead elements of the 4th Panzer Army were practically in sight of the city. Marshal Timoshenko had been dispatched by Premier Molotov to take personal command of the defense of Leningrad. He had wasted no time in applying Stavka's directives. The North Front was divided into the Karelian Front and the Leningrad Front; Timoshenko took command of the latter, with three armies, including one cannibalized from the remnants of the North-West Front.
On paper, the Leningrad Front seemed formidable. It had a total of eight rifle corps, each with three rifle divisions. Each army had an attached aviation division, and the front assets themselves included an entire aviation corps with four divisions, a mechanized corps with one tank and two motorized rifle divisions, and three independent rifle divisions in reserve. But they had been bled white by the German invasion. It was at one-third strength at best. The dead, wounded and captured outnumbered the able-bodied. The survivors were exhausted and demoralized, running low on weapons and ammunition.
The evacuation of civilians and industry from the city had choked the roads and rails leading from the city, making resupply difficult. The plants that remained in the city were being hastily reconfigured to produce arms and munitions. Constant Luftwaffe bombardment frustrated everything, and forced the diversion of significant production capacity to the production of anti-aircraft artillery and munitions.
Field Marshall Georg von Küchler expected to be having supper at the Winter Palace within the fortnight. After all, his forces had been successfully tested in the fires of battle. He had a commanding numerical superiority in troops, artillery and tanks. With some complications, his air forces had control of the skies. He did not expect the American troops organizing to the east to be able to turn the tide.
Timoshenko, a hidebound but dependable officer, did not think any more highly of his chances than Küchler. His strategy was a play for time, to engage the Germans in an attritional struggle that would turn their victory into a Pyrrhic one. In the final act of the defense of Leningrad, his remaining forces would destroy anything and everything of value to the Germans, especially the port facilities.
As the Germans began their assault on the battlements on the outskirts of Leningrad, General Patton was finalizing his plans for a counterattack. The American Military Revolutionary Committee(4) had resisted Stalin's request to throw arriving WFRA units into the fray piecemeal. It was never an easy decision. American troops most of all resented remaining in rear echelons, doing little more than logistical work to support the RKKA while they gathered and organized. They had not come all this way, often braving u-boat attacks on their convoys, to sit on the side lines while their Soviet comrades bled the ground red to hold back the Nazi invasion.
The stakes were too important, however, to confuse sentiment for compassion. Half-formed units being fed into the meat-grinder would accomplish nothing. They needed to be organized, and the troops and commanders needed to immerse themselves in the available data on German strategy and capabilities. Logistical networks needed to be established, and a gigantic mass of war materiel needed to be transported. American engineers used this time before committing to active combat operations to build roads and rail lines, and to improve ports and harbors to support the war effort.
On 20 October, just as the noose was starting to close around Leningrad, German recon planes reported a mass of tanks moving towards the eastern flank of Army Group North. Sensing a counterattack, Küchler moved his aviation troops into high alert. But the scrambled fighters were not enough to stop the mass air raids by American B-12 medium bombers and A-14 attack aircraft. The VVS, flying slower and more vulnerable Soviet Su-2 light bombers, were able to use the chaos sewn by the Americans to launch daring ground attack raids, sometimes at tree-top level.
The American First Army, supported by the Soviet 24th Army, began its counterattack on the following day. Two corps, the IV and V Mechanized, with two armored and four mechanized infantry divisions, attacked along a front 130 km wide between Kirovsk and Novgorod. The reserve III Corps, with its four motorized infantry divisions, followed in their wake.
The Soviet 24th Army attacked along a sixty km front south of Lake Ilmen. It drove westward towards Pskov, relieving the pressure from the American flank. Its battle weary soldiers were glad to finally be moving forward, even if it meant braving German artillery.
Patton drove his tanks urgently forward, fully aware that he had a very limited window to exploit before the Germans reallocated Panzers to deal with his forces. In a grueling twenty hour long offensive, Pattons tanks advanced 210 km, reaching the Gulf of Finland at Narva. The German 18th Army, which had been preparing to siege Leningrad, was separated from the rest of Army Group North. Its five infantry divisions were now isolated from resupply, sandwiched between Patton's tanks and the entirety of the Leningrad Front. The 16th Army, which took the brunt of Patton's offensive, was tied down by the Soviet 24th Army's advance.
Stalin had been overjoyed by the decisive victory. As Timoshenko steadily ground the trapped 18th into dust, Stalin demanded to know why the hero of the American Revolution was not exploiting his victory further. The American military attache to the Soviet Stavka, Major General Asa Randolph, explained that Patton's offensive had pushed the logistical backbone of the military to its breaking point. Fuel, spare parts and ammunition were critically low, and Patton had been directed to take no unnecessary risks by the MRC. And until a unified Comintern command structure was organized, there was nothing Stalin could do about it. He had accepted American troops under exclusively American command for the time being. And while they had always done their best to cooperate with the Soviet army, they had a maddening tendency not to go along with obviously suicidal or stupid directives passed down from the top.
The Americans had three more field armies in varying stages of deployment along the front. Coupled with logistical and rear echelon elements, this would for just short of half of the entire standing army. The most prepared, the Third Army, deployed as part of the Stavka reserve guarding Moscow, was over a month away from being ready. Its commanding officer, General David Eisenhower, was still in Seattle coordinating the movement of men and materiel overseas.
The other two, the Sixth and Seventh, were new formations formed from whatever units could be spared from the Canadian front. They were steadily deploying to the Caucasus throughout the fall of 1940, unable to decisively affect the outcome of the coming battles.
Patton's victory had been short-lived. Guderian's 4th Panzer Army had been diverted from supporting Army Group Center's attack on Smolensk to chastise Patton and rescue the trapped 18th. Upon learning of the upset, Hitler was furious. The commander of Army Group North was relieved, to be replaced by one of Göring's politically reliable military flunkies. Guderian's and Patton's tanks would meet near Luga. It was a titanic clash, even by Eastern Front standards; 4th Panzer and its supporting units from Army Group North mustered a force of nearly one thousand tanks, five thousand field guns, and five hundred thousand men, supported by over four hundred combat aircraft.
The American First Army and the Soviet 24th fielded a combined total of seven hundred tanks, 4,000 field guns, and four hundred thousand men, supported by three hundred serviceable combat aircraft. The logistical situation favored the Comintern as the defenders. Their fuel and ammunition dumps were able to be serviced by functioning roads and rails. The Germans had to contend, in addition to long lines of communication, break-of-gauge, partisan attacks, and Soviet scorched earth policies that had wrecked much of the communication infrastructure.
But Guderian knew how to play to his strengths. He had studied his adversary in the past five years. This was not the Patton of the American Civil War, the bold and daring commander who led the Revolutionary Army to victory. Patton was at the end of a very long supply chain, and he was painfully aware of this. Fuel was easy enough to come by. Ammunition, for both small arms and artillery, could also be produced locally thanks to the STANAG agreement. The American T-4 and the new Soviet T-34 both used the same 57mm gun. The same with the mobile artillery guns. What could not be replaced easily were the tanks themselves. Spare parts and replacement vehicles had to be shipped ten thousand kilometers. But that was a problem of logistics; the tanks themselves were not in short supply. American factories were already producing nearly a thousand T-4 "John Henry" tanks per month. What was infinitely more precious were trained tankers.
This basic scarcity affected both sides equally. It took months to properly train a tank crew. A year to become experienced in both mechanical operation as well as tactics and strategy. And right now, many of the best tankers were held back to train new recruits. Any really promising veterans needed to survive so that they could continue this training process.
Patton had devised a very simple hierarchy of needs based on these facts. He'd sacrifice any amount of ammunition necessary to conserve his motor pool. And if necessary, he'd sacrifice his tanks to save his tankers. Guderian knew this. He gave his troops standing orders to machine gun the crews escaping from knocked out enemy tanks, for this war had long since abandoned gallantry and dignity. The Comintern responded in kind.
The Battle of Luga ended indecisively. Guderian was unable to break through to rescue the trapped 18th. Its commander defied Hitler's explicit instructions, and surrendered with what was left of his force on 2 November. Guderian was frank in his assessment:
While Guderian tangled with Patton on the approaches to Leningrad, Army Group Center was beginning a massive offensive at Smolensk. Hoth's 3rd Panzer Army drove eastward from Velikeye Luki, pressing into the flanks of the Smolensk Front. Von Manstein's 1st Panzer Army hooked from Gomel towards Bryansk, punching through the chinks in the Bryansk Front's defensive line. The 5th Panzer Army would be held in reserve, waiting to exploit the flank attacks to drive spearheads straight through the frontlines of the Smolensk Front. The infantry and artillery of Army Group Center would place constant pressure along the entire frontier.
The attack began on 1 November, pre-empting Frunze's plans for an offensive. In spite of all of Frunze's preparations, and his constant drilling of his troops, they were still woefully unprepared to be fighting in the same weight class as the Heer. His anti-tank guns proved to be a minor speed bump for the Panzer spearheads. His mechanized forces could not contain the breaches in the lines.
What his troops lacked in training and skill, they attempted to make up for with bravery. Soviet tankers engaged in desperate ramming attacks. The political commissars rallied the infantry to defend their fatherland to the last, and dealt with cowardice severely. It was gallant, glorious and foolish. Frunze cursed his division commanders for allowing this attitude to be cultivated. It frustrated his efforts to roll with the punches with orderly retreats. It wasted war materiel that could be pressed back into service with minimal repair work.
By 14 November, a decisive German victory appeared to be inevitable. While the bulk of the Smolensk Front was able to evacuate, half of the Bryansk Front was encircled. While the Germans engaged in another costly battle of annihilation, Frunze's retreating troops scoured the cities, towns and country sides, destroying anything remotely useful that they could not cart away with them. His engineers used their plentiful stocks of American supplied TNT and Composition B to destroy any bridge capable of carrying anything heavier than a horse-drawn carriage.
The Battle of Smolensk concluded, and with it Hitler ended Operation Teutonic. In nearly seven months of fighting, the Germans had occupied the Soviet allied Baltic states, all of Ukraine and Belarus, and had pushed into the manufacturing heartlands of Russia. The front line stretched from the Crimea and the Sea of Azov just west of Rostov, northwards to Voronezh, to an arc stretching from Tula to Kaluga to Tver, then westward to Pskov, up to the Gulf of Finland near Narva.
The Axis had lost nearly two hundred thousand men KIA. Another six hundred thousand were wounded. Eighty thousand were captured. They lost nearly five thousand aircraft, and three thousand five hundred tanks. The Comintern was savaged far more thoroughly. Nearly five hundred thousand soldiers were killed in action, another hundred thousand dying of non-combat causes. One million were wounded or sick, and close to three million soldiers were captured (including many reservists still in the process of mobilizing). Nearly all of these casualties were endured by the Soviet military.
(1) Roughly similar to OTL's Panzer IV, with a dual-purpose 75mm gun albeit of fairly low velocity.
(2) In raw terms, Soviet industrial production is not significantly higher than IOTL. However, thanks to a briefer Russian Civil War, and American trade and development assistance, Soviet manufacturing and engineering is of a considerably higher quality. Soviet roads and rail systems are much better, enabling higher speeds with larger loads. Imported American electromechanical computers help manage timetables, enabling increased throughput with lower risk.
(3) We must remember that ITTL, Stalin is not the undisputed master of the Soviet state. The American revolution deflected the formation of High Stalinism and the Stalinist cult of personality. Stalin's role in the party is much more limited, and disagreement within certain bounds doesn't invite an immediate reprisal from the NKVD. Popular men like Kirov occasionally challenge Stalin without violent repercussions. Because of the necessity of trade and technical exchange with America, the Soviet Union cannot be a completely closed society.
(4) Often casually conflated with the Stavka, the general staff headquarters that the MRC served as the chief executive to. Its naming convention is another example of Russian loanwords worming their way into American discourse.
An Overview of Operation Teutonic
The postponing of revanchist ambitions towards France had been a bitter pill to swallow, especially for the Nazi's conservative collaborators. But Hitler and the Nazi inner circle had other thoughts. Both France and Britain, countries with a population of substantially Nordic stock, could be dealt with at a later date. Indeed, they might even resolve to save themselves from the scourge of Judeo-Bolshevism, and accept German leadership of a general Anti-Comintern Axis.
For the Nazis, Communism remained the bête noire. They had inoculated their own nation against the spread of this disease before it was too late. Those who hadn't successfully escaped or gone into hiding were steadily being exterminated at Dachau. But so long as the carrier for this disease remained, it would continue to spread. As far as Hitler was concerned, not only was war against the Russian and American racial mongrels inevitable, it as the Nazi's historic duty to excise this cancer.
The Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) had begun drawing up plans for an invasion of the Soviet Union before the ink had even dried on November 1938's Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Soviet non-aggression pact had given the Third Reich ample time to consolidate power in Poland and the Balkans. Ceding the sliver of Ukrainian speaking Poland to the Soviets, as well as the Baltics to the Soviet sphere of influence were a small price to pay. The Soviets were modernizing their forces, most certainly aware that any pact with the Nazis was guaranteed to be a temporary one. But Hitler was supremely confident that he could make better use of the time than Stalin.
The eighteen months between the non-aggression pact and the invasion gave the Wehrmacht plenty of time to apply the lessons it learned in its campaigns against Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Balkans. Combined with the experience gained from American expatriates, this ensured that the Wehrmacht would be far more attuned to the realities of modern mobile warfare than the Soviets.
While portrayed as a multi-national anti-communist alliance, the Axis forces deployed along the Soviet frontier were entirely under Nazi command, with even Italy taking a highly subordinate role. In the months of build-up to the outbreak of war, the Luftwaffe stepped up reconnaissance flights into the Soviet Union. For fear of provocation, Stalin forbade surveillance aircraft from leaving the territory of the Soviet Union, and prohibited the interception of German aircraft.
His own forces, now fortifying forward positions in what had been until eighteen months prior Ukrainian and Byelorussian speaking territories of Poland were thus kept largely blind to the forces amassing against them. The generals of the Byelorussian and Ukrainian military districts could only poke at phantoms nervously. Marshal Voroshilov repeatedly assured the commanders that "The boss knows all about it; it's all under control."
In truth, Stalin's government knew very well the extraordinary predicament it was in. When France and Britain failed to go to war with Germany over Poland, and instead continued to align closer to the Axis, it became clear that war with the Nazis was inevitable. Stalin had hoped he could induce Hitler to pre-emptively strike at France in the early months of 1939. But this possibility seemed more and more remote to everyone except Stalin in the upper echelon of the CPSU.
Molotov wrote in his memoirs that Stalin seemed to be afflicted with a "crisis of nerves" bordering on full mental breakdown. He had become increasingly withdrawn from even his closest of confidants, and increasingly in denial about the predicament he was in. In one of his few moments of lucidity, as he and Molotov sat by the fire drinking tea one night in November 1939, he confided that following the Soviet Union's suspension from the Comintern for "making pacts with the enemies of the workers' international," he did not believe that the Americans would fulfill their mutual defense duty should the Soviet Union be invaded by the Nazis. He needed time to prepare, and could not afford any provocation. He recalled his secret meetings with the now rehabilitated General Frunze, where he had asked the RKKA's leading expert on mobile warfare if the Soviet military could sustain a pre-emptive attack against the Germans and prevail.
Frunze's prognosis was grim. The army and air forces were not prepared for any such action until at least 1941 according to the modernization schedule. The mass of Soviet tanks and mobile units were entirely obsolete. The backbone of the tank force, the T-26 infantry tanks and the BT series fast tanks, had difficulty reliably penetrating the frontal armor of a German PzKpfw III(1) except at close range. Few were equipped with radios, and except for the BT-7s, they did not employ the three-man turret division of labor, with commander, gunner and loader. While new units had entered mass production, it would take time to build the inventory and train crews for them.
Much of the air force was similarly obsolete. Worse, the logistical backbone of the military was underdeveloped. There were critical shortages of trucks and Soviet industry wouldn't be able to overcome this in the near future. The only hope would be to import them from America, who Stalin had already did not believe he could rely on.
The lack of provocation, however, did absolutely nothing to deflect the course that Hitler had charted. After repeated battles over operational plans with the more conservative and aristocratic military establishment, a final battle plan was prepared in February of 1940. Axis forces on Soviet frontier would be organized into three army groups.
Army Group North, based in East Prussia, would strike through the Baltics towards Leningrad. Its two Panzer Groups (2nd and 4th, commanded by Generaloberst Hoth and General Guderian respectively) would isolate Leningrad, and bisect the major rail lines and industrial complexes linking the city to the capital. The 3rd and 18th Armies would follow and take Leningrad and its port facilities, to open up new lines of communication to support further offensive operations into Russia.
Army Group Center would invade from Poland into Byelorussia, to encircle and annihilate the core of the Soviet army, and occupy Smolensk. Its two Panzer Groups, the 1st and 5th, would be equipped with the newest model tanks. At Hitler's insistence, the OKW's urge to drive straight to Moscow would be tempered. Army Group Center would hold and reorganize, with the tentative plan to begin driving towards Moscow after Army Group North had seized Leningrad (expected to take no later than January 1941). The rising star of the Wehrmacht, and the hero of the Czechoslovak War, General Erich von Manstein, would lead the 1st Panzer Group, while overall command of Army Group Center would be entrusted to an older, more orthodox officer, Feldmarschall Adolf Strauss.
Army Group South under Feldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt, would invade the Ukraine, driving a wedge between the powerful Soviet Southern Front, which had some of the Soviet's most potent mobile forces, and the larger but less mobile South-Western Front, which would now be pinned between Army Group Center and Army Group South. The less reliable Axis would round out its forces, including an entire Italian field army, the 2nd, under General Vittorio Ambrosio.
The first Axis aircraft crossed the Soviet frontier at 3:15 A.M., 19 May 1940. The invasion force amounted to:
· 4.1 million personnel
· 4,050 tanks
· 2,670 aircraft
· 8,000+ artillery pieces
The 147 divisions of the Wehrmacht Heer (21 Panzer, 18 Panzergrenadier, 96 infantry, and assorted security and rear echelon reserve units) crashed into the disorganized Soviet frontier forces like a tidal wave. Panzer spearheads broke through half-finished defense works. Efforts by the Soviet Army to rally were frustrated almost completely; the Luftwaffe had achieved near total air supremacy along the frontier. Whole regiments of Soviet fighters and attack aircraft were destroyed on their airfields. Supply dumps were hit, and troop concentrations found themselves under near constant aerial harassment.
Stalin was reported to be near catatonic at the news. As report after report of disaster at the frontier streamed in, he locked himself in his study, unavailable to all but his closest of confidants.
The first good news arrived in the afternoon of Tuesday, 21 May. Foreign Affairs Commissar Molotov brought a diplomatic cable straight to Stalin. The American Congress of Soviets had unanimously voted for a declaration of war on Germany and its cobelligerents (even the counter-revolutionaries of the True Democrats abstained rather than express disloyalty in a time of war). They pledged unconditional support and assistance, and an end to the Soviet Union's suspension from the Comintern.
The WFRN had, under Stavka directive, already begun combat operations against the Kriegsmarine even before the declaration of war had been delivered. It was a tacit acknowledgment that the Foster caretaker government considered its ultimatum to be a mere "bourgeois nicety." When the time period had passed with not even so much as a German acknowledgment, Foreign Secretary Reed delivered a stern rebuke to the British and French governments, criticizing them for not even condemning a blatant act of Nazi aggression.
For the Soviets, though, the disaster on the frontier was just beginning. By the end of Operation Teutonic's first phase, close to three thousand Soviet aircraft were lost. Army Group Center had encircled the Soviet Western Front. Attempts at relief or breakout failed, and the Heer engaged in battles of annihilation against the encircled Soviet pockets. The Western Front was shattered utterly, losing two thirds of its operational strength captured or KIA.
Soviet forces in the Ukraine avoided disastrous encirclement, but were forced to yield ground in rapid retreat after repeated mauling by the 3rd Panzer Group.
Soviet forces, under Stalin's orders, began counteroffensive operations in early June. In Byelorussia, they bled the Southwestern Front white in unfocused attempts at relieving the beleaguered Western Front. The Northwestern Front fared slightly better: the 3rd and 12th Mechanized Corps, with close to 400 T-34s and 120 KV-1s between them, struck headlong into Guderian's Panzers in the Baltics. Their troops were better led and organized than the Germans had been used to, and their tanks were superior in nearly every respect to the German tanks. But their numbers were too few, and after the initial shock wore off, the German mastery of the skies ensured that the counterattack would be short-lived and costly.
In late June, after the infantry troops had caught up, Hitler ordered additional offensives. By this time though, the Soviets had moved in operational reserves from the Moscow military district. Before Army Group Center could continue its drive to Smolensk, the Soviets began a massive counteroffensive.
While the officer corps had been devastated by purges, the logistical backbone of the Soviet state had advanced by leaps and bounds in the past five years.(2) Reinforcements arrived quicker than anticipated, much of it new T-34s fresh off the assembly lines. While the Smolensk Front (formed from the remnants of the Western Front plus the Moscow reserve) did not achieve its goal of pushing Army Group Center out of Soviet territory by a longshot, it inflicted considerable damage on Army Group Center.
General Frunze knew when to quit while he was ahead. With Zhukov's help, he convinced Stalin to abandon a "not a step back" policy in favor of an attritional struggle.(3) The counteroffensive could only buy time; time to put the economy on a war footing, raise new troops, and pull reinforcements from Central Asia.
But while Frunze stymied Strauss's plans to continue the drive forward, Army Group North steadily pushed towards Leningrad, while Army Group South struck towards Kiev. By July, the whole frontier was in danger of collapsing. Frunze was forced to pull back and fortify Smolensk. Kiev had held, but the continued advance of Army Group South had placed it in a precarious salient. By August, most of the Ukraine west of the Dneiper had been occupied. In the North, the battered troops of the North and North-West fronts narrowly avoided encirclment at Novgorod. Stalin reluctantly agreed to refocus efforts for a defense of Leningrad.
The Soviet Union proved not to be a rotten structure, waiting to collapse the moment someone kicked in the door. And in August, the first American army units began arriving at the front. The opportunity for a short, decisive war had closed, and even Hitler in all his hubris had recognized it. Trade with France and Britain and the looting of Eastern Europe had put Germany in its present position of strength. The old craft production system had been gradually phased out for more modern mass production techniques. But it would not be enough. With casualties mounting at the front, Hitler was finally convinced by his advisors to move the economy to a war footing.
The Comintern had made the decision to move to total economic mobilization the moment the war had begun. In spite of triumphal declarations of world revolution, the war's prospects were quite grim throughout 1940. There had been few victories for the Reds. The Iranian route would not be opened until after the December putsch against the Shah by a cadre of progressive military officers. Meanwhile, German u-boats harassed arctic convoys, the shortest and most direct route to supply the front. It proved difficult to provide adequate convoy protection. The Trans-Siberian Railroad was still being expanded, limiting the utility of supply through Vladivostok. If Japan, who had remained neutral thus far, joined in the war then Vladivostok would be effectively closed.
Soviets were still in desperate straits. Manpower had already been cut to the bone. Much of the motor pool had been destroyed or captured, and the Air Force was decimated. Large portions of the industrial apparatus had been disrupted or destroyed to prevent capture. More of it still was on rails being evacuated out of the path of the Nazi invasion. The Soviet economy faced severe disruption of important raw materials. American troops and equipment attempted to plug the gaps.
On 3 August, the pincers closed around Kiev. 3rd Panzer Group crossed the Dneiper, driving north. 5th Panzer Group drove southward. They met west of Lubny, trapping four Soviet armies from the South-West Front (5th, 6th, 12th and 26th, plus elements from several Front asset corps). Frunze could only watch helplessly in Smolensk, as the recon planes of his Front aviation assets brought him detailed reports of the battle of annihilation the Nazis wrought. Stalin demanded a counterattack.
Frunze was furious. He telegrammed Stalin personally, informing him that his demands would turn one disaster into two. Not only would the Smolensk and Bryansk Fronts have to attack through the bulk of Army Group Center, they were critically short on fuel and ammunition (and food, but Frunze considered this a secondary priority. His men could forage, or eat their boots if need be, but without ammunition, and fuel to bring the ammunition to the front lines, they would be helpless before the Germans.)
Molotov began to show some backbone, giving the General Secretary of the CPSU frank and sober counsel. He informed Stalin that, as his friend and confidant, he would not allow Stalin to act rashly out of anger or grief. Stalin had wanted to respond viciously to what he saw as incompetence and disloyalty at the front. Molotov stated flatly that he would refuse, as Chairman of Sovnarkom, to countersign any arrest or execution orders. Incompetents would be removed from command, but only after investigation, and only demonstrable act of gross negligence or disloyalty would be resolved by courts-martial.
After a heated argument, Stalin finally relented. General Frunze, he reluctantly admitted, was correct in his assessment. He was a talented strategist and gifted leader of men, and he had already managed to pull victory from the jaws of defeat. Expecting a second miracle from him in such short order would be unwise.
Meanwhile in Kiev, von Rundstedt was in for a nasty surprise. Rather than surrender, as the Western Front's encircled echelons had, General-Colonel Mikhail Kirponos resolved to fight on even against impossible odds. He organized a breakout attempt; thought it was thwarted, the unexpected counterattack had pushed the Germans off-balance, buying time for General-Major Rokossovsky's 9th Mechanized Corps to organize a relief attack on the encircling German forces. The 9th Mechanized Corps, undermanned and supplied with largely obsolete tanks still proved to be a considerable thorn in Army Group South's side. Thanks to its commander's tireless efforts in the previous year to train and organize the unit for intensive mobile warfare, it did not attack as a disorganized mass as other tank formations had. The coordination between infantry, tanks, artillery and air ensured that the exhausted XXXIX. Panzer Corps would have considerable difficulty repulsing its attack.
Nevertheless, Rokossovky's attack petered out by 12 August, still 60km from the city of Kiev. The 9th Mech. made a tactical withdrawal the following day. The Stavka reserve's 24th Army (two rifle corps of three rifle divisions each, an aviation division, and an independent tank brigade) arrived just in time to fend off German counterattacks.
With the threat of relief gone, the noose tightened around Kiev. Against Hitler's order's, von Rundstedt offered terms of surrender to Kirponos. He refused them, rallying his troops and the local militia to fight on in a patriotic defense of their revolutionary fatherland. Rations were cut to 2,000 kJ per day. Special units were organized to recover weapons, munitions, and if possible, raid German supplies under the cover of darkness.
This would only serve to delay the inevitable. Even as starvation set in, the soldiers of the South-Western Front fought on, forcing the Germans to advance block by block. Rumors of the activities of Waffen-SS Einsatzgruppen spurred on the defenders. Kirponos himself was killed in action on 21 August. On 25 August, von Rundstedt telegrammed Hitler, informing him that the city of Kiev had been taken. In truth, sporadic pockets were still held by Soviet soldiers, and many thousands more were able to slip through gaps in the German lines to engage in partisan resistance.
With the collapse of the Kiev pocket, focus shifted once again to Leningrad. The summer rains had given a sufficient reprieve for Army Group North, enabling the long logistical tail of the Panzer Groups, now redesignated Panzer Armies, to begin to address the damage inflicted on roads and rail, both as a consequence of fighting as well as due to deliberate sabotage by retreating Soviet forces. In late August, American units started clashing with the Germans. Luftwaffe pilots, used to dealing with obsolete I-16s and I-153s of the frontline aviation units, had their air superiority tested.
The veteran 7th Aviation Division of the Revolutionary Army Air Force had arrived. Its parent units were not far behind. Coupled with newly raised VVS aviation units, the arrival of the American aviation could not have come at a more critical time. German air dominance had frustrated all Soviet offensive and defensive plans. The recon advantage, coupled with tactical air support by Luftwaffe ground attack craft, had crippled the Red Army. With Army Group North driving headlong towards the gates of Leningrad, and Army Group Center preparing to encircle and destroy the Smolensk Front, ending the Luftwaffe's unhindered attacks was of paramount importance.
The 7th Aviation Division had been rushed to the Leningrad theater with all deliberate speed. Their comrades in the VVS welcomed them with open arms. The 7th had been the tip of the Comintern's spear. As veterans of both the American and Spanish Civil War, their anti-fascist pedigree was incredible. They were already almost legendary in aviation circles, the prestige unit which every ambitious aviator hoped to be stationed with. Its aces, such as Lt. Colonel Frank Tinker and and Major Arnold "Ajax" Baumler, were itching for a rematch after the armistice left two thirds of Spain under the control of the Nazi allied Falange.
For most Luftwaffe pilots, this would be their first experience fighting against a decisively superior opponent. While in terms of skill and experience they were evenly matched, the American's F-34C was a more advanced design than the Bf-109Fs that formed the cutting edge of the German fighter corps. Though both planes were similar in size and weight, the F-34C had a more powerful engine (988 kW vs. 850 kW). The F-34's center engine layout gave additional benefits: a more streamlined, aerodynamic fuselage, as well as more room to concentrate armament in the nose of the plane.
The F-34C could both climb and dive faster. It retained energy better, particularly in vertical maneuvers. Its armament was similar in hitting power; the Bf-109F and F-34C both relied on a hard-hitting 20mm cannon firing through the propeller hub, supplemented by synchronized machine guns in the nose; two 7.92mm MG-17s or two 13.1mm MG-131s for the Bf-109F, compared to two 12.7mm MG-12-B2s for the F-34C. The F-34C also had four 7.7mm machine guns in the wings (the ShKAS derived MG-7-B2), but pilots quickly concluded that against modern aircraft, they were often worse than useless, and often removed them entirely to improve roll rate.
The differences in mechanical quality, coupled with the Luftwaffe pilot's relative level of exhaustion, allowed the outnumbered 7th Aviation Division to inflict disproportionate losses. The Americans, benefiting from Soviet reports of the capabilities and tactics of German Bf-109 and Me-110 fighters, had already developed strategies to play to their strengths and exploit German weaknesses. With superior high altitude performance, the Americans could choose the terms of engagement. They struck only from a position of strength, avoiding engagements when they lacked numerical advantage. They eschewed dogfighting, instead relying on diving "boom and zoom" attacks. In a month of combat, they had shot down fifty-six fighters and twelve bombers for a loss of twelve of their own, a feat they would not be able to repeat until the very end of the war.
The Germans learned quickly how to avoid being dominated though. Pilots learned how to avoid being drawn into ambushes. They improved bomber escort tactics. The engineers at Messerschmitt developed field kits that retrofitted Bf 109F engines with a war emergency power (WEP) mode. The field conversion was made possible by changing the mechanical stop on the throttle. Additionally, an anti-detonant injection system was retrofitted to the supercharger. When the throttle was moved into the WEP setting, a 50-50 mixture of methanol and water was sprayed into the supercharger. This helped boost power in a number of ways; the simple presence of water served to cool incoming air, improving efficiency. It also allowed the supercharger to be run at higher boost settings without "knocking" (the spontaneous detonation of the gasoline aerosol in the cylinder at the wrong time, sapping power and increasing mechanical wear).
This allowed the Bf 109 pilots to run their engines at a much higher power (typically 30 percent greater) for short periods of time. While it did cause increased wear and tear, leading to changes in engine design for the next variant of the Bf 109 still in development, the ten minute supply of ADI significantly levelled the playing field.
The F-34C had its own WEP setting, based on a simpler method of raising the turbocharger boost pressure, allowing for less dramatic increases in engine power. This too resulted in greatly increased strain on the engine, and the logistical situation had ensured that American pilots were very conservative in its use. The new Bf 109 field conversions would force an increased reliance on WEP.
The arrival of American forces did little to divert Hitler from his intended course. He continued to resist the General Staff's insistence on driving straight to Moscow. The arrival of American troops and equipment made their belief that taking the capital would constitute a decisive blow to the Soviet state seem more unlikely every moment. Hitler insisted on striking at the enemy's industrial systems to cripple the Soviet's ability to wage war. This meant taking Leningrad and then cutting off Murmansk, which would force the diversion of between thirty and forty percent of transport to less suitable ports. It would also knock out the second largest industrial complex in the country while providing the military with new logistical support. Army Group North was set to its terrible task; the "Hunger Plan" was being enacted throughout occupied territories in the Baltic states and the Soviet Union, feeding his armies at the expense of the civilian population, and beginning the depopulation process that would pave the way for Aryan colonization.
Waffen-SS Einsatzgruppen stepped up their efforts to a fever pitch. The innocuous euphemism for these units of Nazi paramilitary fanatics concealed a terrible purpose. These "task forces" were engaged in mass murder, a process which was euphemized with the term "evacuation." The Einsatzgruppen would "evacuate" entire towns and villages over the course of the war. Their responsibilities were manifold. Their primary aim was to be the "Final Solution" to the "Judeo-Bolshevik question." To this affect, they would begin the indiscriminate mass murder of Jews and suspected Jews, irrespective to territory or borders, throughout all of Axis territory.
"Agents of Judeo-Bolshevism" were only slightly lower on the priority list. Nazi occupation policy dictated the mass murder of the intelligentsia of the Soviet Union, especially government officials and Communist Party members. In practice, this was simply indiscriminate mass murder of civilians, even anti-Soviet nationalists.
The Einsatzgruppen were also charged with coordinating "pacification" of occupied territories. This meant doing the work that the Heer security troops, in spite of their indoctrinated hatred of Slavs and communists, could not be reliably counted on to do. The enforcement of the Hunger Plan, as well as the reprisal executions, were primarily coordinated by the SS. Usually, this meant selecting a number of civilian hostages from the local population, usually young men and women for maximum psychological effect, and killing ten of them for every death inflicted on the occupying troops by partisans.
Meanwhile, Army Group South restarted its advance through Ukraine. Its goal was to capture the Caucasus, depriving Stalin of its industrial capacity, and more importantly, oil production.
By now, the Soviets had mobilized all available units to the front. The three main Soviet theaters were effectively isolated from one another, and could do nothing to counterbalance the enemy's attacks. September saw mostly skirmishes along the frontlines. But it was not a reprieve, only a moment for the invaders to draw breath before once again attacking.
On the first week of October, all three invading Army Groups began their offensive operations. In the North, the Finns had finally given in to German pressure, agreeing to become co-belligerents in the struggle against the Soviet Union. While the government justified it in revanchist terms, striking a blow at the ersatz Russian Empire that was the Soviet Union and avenging the bullying the Soviets had engaged in during the Interwar. But the war over a few scraps of land the Soviets had pushed Finland into giving up was a lie; it was a war waged to avoid becoming the next enemy on Hitler's list. With the Swedish government collaborating to preserve its neutrality, Denmark in wide scale civil unrest (with pitched street battles between communist and fascist paramilitaries), and the other world powers devoutly looking the other way, there was no hope but collaboration.
The Soviet North Front was forced to divide its forces to hold off the Finnish Army, leaving the already mangled North-West Front to face the entire brunt of Army Group North's onslaught. The RAAF and VVS did their best to stem the tide. The ground attack regiments of the 7th and 12th Aviation Divisions fought desperately, almost suicidally, to blunt the Panzer spearheads.
On 14 October, the lead elements of the 4th Panzer Army were practically in sight of the city. Marshal Timoshenko had been dispatched by Premier Molotov to take personal command of the defense of Leningrad. He had wasted no time in applying Stavka's directives. The North Front was divided into the Karelian Front and the Leningrad Front; Timoshenko took command of the latter, with three armies, including one cannibalized from the remnants of the North-West Front.
On paper, the Leningrad Front seemed formidable. It had a total of eight rifle corps, each with three rifle divisions. Each army had an attached aviation division, and the front assets themselves included an entire aviation corps with four divisions, a mechanized corps with one tank and two motorized rifle divisions, and three independent rifle divisions in reserve. But they had been bled white by the German invasion. It was at one-third strength at best. The dead, wounded and captured outnumbered the able-bodied. The survivors were exhausted and demoralized, running low on weapons and ammunition.
The evacuation of civilians and industry from the city had choked the roads and rails leading from the city, making resupply difficult. The plants that remained in the city were being hastily reconfigured to produce arms and munitions. Constant Luftwaffe bombardment frustrated everything, and forced the diversion of significant production capacity to the production of anti-aircraft artillery and munitions.
Field Marshall Georg von Küchler expected to be having supper at the Winter Palace within the fortnight. After all, his forces had been successfully tested in the fires of battle. He had a commanding numerical superiority in troops, artillery and tanks. With some complications, his air forces had control of the skies. He did not expect the American troops organizing to the east to be able to turn the tide.
Timoshenko, a hidebound but dependable officer, did not think any more highly of his chances than Küchler. His strategy was a play for time, to engage the Germans in an attritional struggle that would turn their victory into a Pyrrhic one. In the final act of the defense of Leningrad, his remaining forces would destroy anything and everything of value to the Germans, especially the port facilities.
As the Germans began their assault on the battlements on the outskirts of Leningrad, General Patton was finalizing his plans for a counterattack. The American Military Revolutionary Committee(4) had resisted Stalin's request to throw arriving WFRA units into the fray piecemeal. It was never an easy decision. American troops most of all resented remaining in rear echelons, doing little more than logistical work to support the RKKA while they gathered and organized. They had not come all this way, often braving u-boat attacks on their convoys, to sit on the side lines while their Soviet comrades bled the ground red to hold back the Nazi invasion.
The stakes were too important, however, to confuse sentiment for compassion. Half-formed units being fed into the meat-grinder would accomplish nothing. They needed to be organized, and the troops and commanders needed to immerse themselves in the available data on German strategy and capabilities. Logistical networks needed to be established, and a gigantic mass of war materiel needed to be transported. American engineers used this time before committing to active combat operations to build roads and rail lines, and to improve ports and harbors to support the war effort.
On 20 October, just as the noose was starting to close around Leningrad, German recon planes reported a mass of tanks moving towards the eastern flank of Army Group North. Sensing a counterattack, Küchler moved his aviation troops into high alert. But the scrambled fighters were not enough to stop the mass air raids by American B-12 medium bombers and A-14 attack aircraft. The VVS, flying slower and more vulnerable Soviet Su-2 light bombers, were able to use the chaos sewn by the Americans to launch daring ground attack raids, sometimes at tree-top level.
The American First Army, supported by the Soviet 24th Army, began its counterattack on the following day. Two corps, the IV and V Mechanized, with two armored and four mechanized infantry divisions, attacked along a front 130 km wide between Kirovsk and Novgorod. The reserve III Corps, with its four motorized infantry divisions, followed in their wake.
The Soviet 24th Army attacked along a sixty km front south of Lake Ilmen. It drove westward towards Pskov, relieving the pressure from the American flank. Its battle weary soldiers were glad to finally be moving forward, even if it meant braving German artillery.
Patton drove his tanks urgently forward, fully aware that he had a very limited window to exploit before the Germans reallocated Panzers to deal with his forces. In a grueling twenty hour long offensive, Pattons tanks advanced 210 km, reaching the Gulf of Finland at Narva. The German 18th Army, which had been preparing to siege Leningrad, was separated from the rest of Army Group North. Its five infantry divisions were now isolated from resupply, sandwiched between Patton's tanks and the entirety of the Leningrad Front. The 16th Army, which took the brunt of Patton's offensive, was tied down by the Soviet 24th Army's advance.
Stalin had been overjoyed by the decisive victory. As Timoshenko steadily ground the trapped 18th into dust, Stalin demanded to know why the hero of the American Revolution was not exploiting his victory further. The American military attache to the Soviet Stavka, Major General Asa Randolph, explained that Patton's offensive had pushed the logistical backbone of the military to its breaking point. Fuel, spare parts and ammunition were critically low, and Patton had been directed to take no unnecessary risks by the MRC. And until a unified Comintern command structure was organized, there was nothing Stalin could do about it. He had accepted American troops under exclusively American command for the time being. And while they had always done their best to cooperate with the Soviet army, they had a maddening tendency not to go along with obviously suicidal or stupid directives passed down from the top.
The Americans had three more field armies in varying stages of deployment along the front. Coupled with logistical and rear echelon elements, this would for just short of half of the entire standing army. The most prepared, the Third Army, deployed as part of the Stavka reserve guarding Moscow, was over a month away from being ready. Its commanding officer, General David Eisenhower, was still in Seattle coordinating the movement of men and materiel overseas.
The other two, the Sixth and Seventh, were new formations formed from whatever units could be spared from the Canadian front. They were steadily deploying to the Caucasus throughout the fall of 1940, unable to decisively affect the outcome of the coming battles.
Patton's victory had been short-lived. Guderian's 4th Panzer Army had been diverted from supporting Army Group Center's attack on Smolensk to chastise Patton and rescue the trapped 18th. Upon learning of the upset, Hitler was furious. The commander of Army Group North was relieved, to be replaced by one of Göring's politically reliable military flunkies. Guderian's and Patton's tanks would meet near Luga. It was a titanic clash, even by Eastern Front standards; 4th Panzer and its supporting units from Army Group North mustered a force of nearly one thousand tanks, five thousand field guns, and five hundred thousand men, supported by over four hundred combat aircraft.
The American First Army and the Soviet 24th fielded a combined total of seven hundred tanks, 4,000 field guns, and four hundred thousand men, supported by three hundred serviceable combat aircraft. The logistical situation favored the Comintern as the defenders. Their fuel and ammunition dumps were able to be serviced by functioning roads and rails. The Germans had to contend, in addition to long lines of communication, break-of-gauge, partisan attacks, and Soviet scorched earth policies that had wrecked much of the communication infrastructure.
But Guderian knew how to play to his strengths. He had studied his adversary in the past five years. This was not the Patton of the American Civil War, the bold and daring commander who led the Revolutionary Army to victory. Patton was at the end of a very long supply chain, and he was painfully aware of this. Fuel was easy enough to come by. Ammunition, for both small arms and artillery, could also be produced locally thanks to the STANAG agreement. The American T-4 and the new Soviet T-34 both used the same 57mm gun. The same with the mobile artillery guns. What could not be replaced easily were the tanks themselves. Spare parts and replacement vehicles had to be shipped ten thousand kilometers. But that was a problem of logistics; the tanks themselves were not in short supply. American factories were already producing nearly a thousand T-4 "John Henry" tanks per month. What was infinitely more precious were trained tankers.
This basic scarcity affected both sides equally. It took months to properly train a tank crew. A year to become experienced in both mechanical operation as well as tactics and strategy. And right now, many of the best tankers were held back to train new recruits. Any really promising veterans needed to survive so that they could continue this training process.
Patton had devised a very simple hierarchy of needs based on these facts. He'd sacrifice any amount of ammunition necessary to conserve his motor pool. And if necessary, he'd sacrifice his tanks to save his tankers. Guderian knew this. He gave his troops standing orders to machine gun the crews escaping from knocked out enemy tanks, for this war had long since abandoned gallantry and dignity. The Comintern responded in kind.
The Battle of Luga ended indecisively. Guderian was unable to break through to rescue the trapped 18th. Its commander defied Hitler's explicit instructions, and surrendered with what was left of his force on 2 November. Guderian was frank in his assessment:
"The Americans are as good as any of our troops. What they lack in experience, they have made up for with sophisticated doctrine and excellent initiative. They will not so easily fall into disarray, even when faced with overwhelming enemy force. Their morale is excellent as well. This will not be a repeat of The Great War, where the Americans had no stake in the fighting and thus could be bullied around. They are the elite troops of the Comintern's international army. The Russians are the mass peasant levy. We must adjust our strategy accordingly."
Patton had denied Guderian the luxury of straight-up mass tank engagement. Guderian could not afford long, sweeping Panzer penetrations. The American combined arms machine coordinated quickly to chop off spearheads and thrust at his own weaknesses. But they would not commit, drawing back to avoid crushing counterblows. The Battle of Luga was a ballet of tanks, dancing back and forth in feints and parries. While Guderian relished in the beauty of the struggle (he had at last found a worthy adversary), it denied him the opportunity to engage in the attritional warfare that was needed to crush the American Expeditionary Force.
While Guderian tangled with Patton on the approaches to Leningrad, Army Group Center was beginning a massive offensive at Smolensk. Hoth's 3rd Panzer Army drove eastward from Velikeye Luki, pressing into the flanks of the Smolensk Front. Von Manstein's 1st Panzer Army hooked from Gomel towards Bryansk, punching through the chinks in the Bryansk Front's defensive line. The 5th Panzer Army would be held in reserve, waiting to exploit the flank attacks to drive spearheads straight through the frontlines of the Smolensk Front. The infantry and artillery of Army Group Center would place constant pressure along the entire frontier.
The attack began on 1 November, pre-empting Frunze's plans for an offensive. In spite of all of Frunze's preparations, and his constant drilling of his troops, they were still woefully unprepared to be fighting in the same weight class as the Heer. His anti-tank guns proved to be a minor speed bump for the Panzer spearheads. His mechanized forces could not contain the breaches in the lines.
What his troops lacked in training and skill, they attempted to make up for with bravery. Soviet tankers engaged in desperate ramming attacks. The political commissars rallied the infantry to defend their fatherland to the last, and dealt with cowardice severely. It was gallant, glorious and foolish. Frunze cursed his division commanders for allowing this attitude to be cultivated. It frustrated his efforts to roll with the punches with orderly retreats. It wasted war materiel that could be pressed back into service with minimal repair work.
By 14 November, a decisive German victory appeared to be inevitable. While the bulk of the Smolensk Front was able to evacuate, half of the Bryansk Front was encircled. While the Germans engaged in another costly battle of annihilation, Frunze's retreating troops scoured the cities, towns and country sides, destroying anything remotely useful that they could not cart away with them. His engineers used their plentiful stocks of American supplied TNT and Composition B to destroy any bridge capable of carrying anything heavier than a horse-drawn carriage.
The Battle of Smolensk concluded, and with it Hitler ended Operation Teutonic. In nearly seven months of fighting, the Germans had occupied the Soviet allied Baltic states, all of Ukraine and Belarus, and had pushed into the manufacturing heartlands of Russia. The front line stretched from the Crimea and the Sea of Azov just west of Rostov, northwards to Voronezh, to an arc stretching from Tula to Kaluga to Tver, then westward to Pskov, up to the Gulf of Finland near Narva.
The Axis had lost nearly two hundred thousand men KIA. Another six hundred thousand were wounded. Eighty thousand were captured. They lost nearly five thousand aircraft, and three thousand five hundred tanks. The Comintern was savaged far more thoroughly. Nearly five hundred thousand soldiers were killed in action, another hundred thousand dying of non-combat causes. One million were wounded or sick, and close to three million soldiers were captured (including many reservists still in the process of mobilizing). Nearly all of these casualties were endured by the Soviet military.
(1) Roughly similar to OTL's Panzer IV, with a dual-purpose 75mm gun albeit of fairly low velocity.
(2) In raw terms, Soviet industrial production is not significantly higher than IOTL. However, thanks to a briefer Russian Civil War, and American trade and development assistance, Soviet manufacturing and engineering is of a considerably higher quality. Soviet roads and rail systems are much better, enabling higher speeds with larger loads. Imported American electromechanical computers help manage timetables, enabling increased throughput with lower risk.
(3) We must remember that ITTL, Stalin is not the undisputed master of the Soviet state. The American revolution deflected the formation of High Stalinism and the Stalinist cult of personality. Stalin's role in the party is much more limited, and disagreement within certain bounds doesn't invite an immediate reprisal from the NKVD. Popular men like Kirov occasionally challenge Stalin without violent repercussions. Because of the necessity of trade and technical exchange with America, the Soviet Union cannot be a completely closed society.
(4) Often casually conflated with the Stavka, the general staff headquarters that the MRC served as the chief executive to. Its naming convention is another example of Russian loanwords worming their way into American discourse.
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I would note that a 57mm gun would be quite poor for infantry support, it's why the Soviets historically mounted the weapon on the T-34 in such tiny numbers versus the 76.2mm. In addition; later versions of the 76.2mm could match if not surpass the 57mm in armor penetration anyway (they could of course not match the rate of fire and the higher velocity reduced the HE shell's capacity). I think this would be noted as the 57mm proves unsuited for bunker busting and lobbing HE shells at infantry and demands for a more general purpose gun are made.
I do have ideas for various light, medium, and heavy tanks as well as tank destroyers as the next generation of armored fighting vehicles rolls out.
Overall though; great update!
Also why Fatherland and not Motherland? As someone who is half Russian I find the idea of Soviet citizens exclusively referring to their country as the Fatherland rather odd when Motherland is much more common. Fatherland is something I associate with German speakers (who compose the other half of the family tree).
I also had an idea that Henry Ford would see the writing of the revolution on the wall, flee to Germany, and sign the devil's deal with the fascists in Europe and Japan/Siam to offer them the industrial expertise needed to start the shift towards mass production assembly line style industry earlier, thus giving the Axis more of an advantage, as well as injecting his vast supplies of capital into the Axis in hopes of one day retaking America. During his time in Germany, Henry Ford's already virulent racism and capitalist extremism starts taking an increasingly uglier tone as he's transformed into a born again Nazi true believer.
One who fittingly, joins his Fuhrer in the bunker along side Krepps the map pointer, Hitler the pencil thrower, and Jodl the objector and becomes a staple of Hitler rant parodies.
I do have ideas for various light, medium, and heavy tanks as well as tank destroyers as the next generation of armored fighting vehicles rolls out.
Overall though; great update!
Also why Fatherland and not Motherland? As someone who is half Russian I find the idea of Soviet citizens exclusively referring to their country as the Fatherland rather odd when Motherland is much more common. Fatherland is something I associate with German speakers (who compose the other half of the family tree).
I also had an idea that Henry Ford would see the writing of the revolution on the wall, flee to Germany, and sign the devil's deal with the fascists in Europe and Japan/Siam to offer them the industrial expertise needed to start the shift towards mass production assembly line style industry earlier, thus giving the Axis more of an advantage, as well as injecting his vast supplies of capital into the Axis in hopes of one day retaking America. During his time in Germany, Henry Ford's already virulent racism and capitalist extremism starts taking an increasingly uglier tone as he's transformed into a born again Nazi true believer.
One who fittingly, joins his Fuhrer in the bunker along side Krepps the map pointer, Hitler the pencil thrower, and Jodl the objector and becomes a staple of Hitler rant parodies.
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iddt3
Donor
I'm also somewhat surprised on the standardization on a 57mm gun rather than a 76.2mm, the 57 was moderately better for AT, but quite inferior for everything else, at the very least you'd want mixed regiments so they can cover each others weaknesses.
Can't let the Reds get everything right.
The doctrine before the war emphasized tanks as tank killers. They misjudged the tradeoff, thinking that it would have better infantry support capabilities.
Will the Soviet heavy tanks go on the KV path of hugely heavy box tanks or the Iosif Stalin path of much lower profile and heavily sloped tanks with big damn guns?
And may I propose American heavy tanks a la the OTL T29/30/34?
iddt3
Donor
Fair enough. Are they using assault guns as infantry support or something to that effect? Also, have the port facilities at Murmansk been expanded massively? That would go some way towards explaining how the US is able to support an Army sized expeditionary force.
Oh, what's the US doing on the Strategic bombing front? Given the potential of Russia falling, and the huge oceans, it would seem like much of the pressure that OTL gave rise to the B-17/B-29/B-36 would still be there. They wouldn't be prioritized, but logistically it might make more sense to base the US bombers out of the ConUS, (Or Iceland when/if they can seize it), as it reduces the amount of stuff you need to ship through a pretty narrow salient. It also opens effectively a second front if you have both short range heavy bombers hitting from Russia, escorted, and ultra high altitude heavies hitting from the US. There is simply only so much the US can transport to the Soviets (and this will be doubly true once Japan joins), so anything the US can do to hurt the Nazis from more secure bases makes sense.
Yup. A later post will detail that more exactly, but the basic idea is that assault guns serve an infantry support role (and increasingly a tank-destroyer role), while tanks are the fast weapons of manuever.
Murmansk was upgraded considerably during the 30s. It was an important trade port, and since hostilities started it has received further upgrades. As has Archangelsk and Vladivostok.
The RAAF's attitude towards strategic bombing is a complicated one. It conflicts with the doctrine of revolutionary war, since it is a direct attack on the urban proletarian populations they seek to liberate. Bombing their homes is not a good way to get them to become active agents in the revolutionary struggle.
They do have a strategic bombing force, using planes roughly equivalent to the B-17, and they envision using them to strike military command centers, rail heads and bridges. This reluctance, naturally, will diminish as the war drags on, and as things get bad in 1941, they are going to be starting to plan for the fall of the Soviet Union. So planes that could strike Germany from Iceland, and a plane that could strike Germany (and Britain) from North America.
That's a nice idea actually. I've always wanted a timeline that used the "T series" of American WW2 tanks, such as the T20 or T29 or (god forbid) the T28. It would allow Reds! to have some inspiration for common tanks that doesn't derive from your standard Sherma's or Pattons.
Just a thought
StephenColbert27
Banned
Sorry to bother, but could you give a post with descriptions of the vehicles used by the Americans in this TL, since obviously they will be different than OTL? It would be a big help.