bookmark95
Banned
I know you've been asked this before Jello, but when are we going to see the UASR and USSR tag team the Nazis. That would be ultimate reading material.
The Great Crusade (Reds! Part 3)
- Thread starter Aelita
- Start date
Happy May Day everyone!
Pretty sure that's already happening in the latest update they posted on the war. From what's been posted so far huge numbers of Americans are going to be fighting on the front lines of the Great Patriotic War.
Pretty sure that's already happening in the latest update they posted on the war. From what's been posted so far huge numbers of Americans are going to be fighting on the front lines of the Great Patriotic War.
Arsenal of Socialism, WI: Better Comintern Tanks, and the Sideshow War
Excerpts from Freeman Park, The Arsenal of Socialism, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977)
The Second World War was a total war in every sense of the word. It was not simply a contest between soldiers from different nations, but an all-encompassing conflict between ideologies, world systems and economies. It was a war fought by industrial war machines as much as armies of millions bleeding the ground red. Great fleets of ships weighed down the oceans. Tanks, trucks and artillery scoured the land. Vast aerial armadas blotted out the sun, raining fire and death that levelled entire continents. The final days of the war saw the basic power of the universe harnessed into a terrifying superweapon.
The war did not end upon leaving the front lines. The war would engage the entire populations of the belligerent countries in the armed struggle as they turned all of their economic efforts into the production of arms and the logistical systems to support their armies. No industry or profession escaped the logic of total economic mobilization.
This book is a chronicle of the American homefront. It is the story of an era so far removed from our present circumstances that it can perhaps only be understood in the same sense as myth or legend. It was an era when the freely associated workers of our socialist motherland, filled with revolutionary zeal, conducted themselves with the same rigid discipline as the soldiers in the trenches. An era when literature professors and poets spent grueling days dissecting the enemy's propaganda and then writing their own. It was a time when mathematicians put aside their research to break Nazi cryptography or design great computational engines calculate the most efficient use of rail or factory resources.
…As Secretary for Defense Abern remarked after the declaration of war had been made official, "We've been preparing for the wrong damn war." While the revolutionary government had been preparing steadily throughout the 30s for armed conflict, the war they had foreseen never occurred. The Comintern had been on a collision course with the British Empire since the moment the revolution had become fait accompli, and both respective governments had spent the decade arming for this eventuality.
On 7 December 1933, the governments of the British and Japanese empires signed a trade and mutual defense treaty. That very tight alliance included terms for trade in advanced technology, recognized spheres of influence, and most importantly it plotted a very robust course of belligerence towards the Comintern. In that moment, it was assumed that the battle lines for the next great war had been drawn.
American countermeasures began almost immediately. The Revolutionary Defense Act of 1934 was moved to the front of the queue, becoming one of the last acts of the Provisional Government before the new constitution came into effect. The act created a unified command hierarchy for the Armed Forces of the Union of American Socialist Republics. Its two branches, the Army and the Navy, were recast as "services" defined by a core mission. There would no longer be any hard distinction, and all commands could be considered statutorily "unified commands".
A unified general staff and headquarters was established, commonly referred to as the Stavka (though the term itself was not made official until the 1960s). The top of the command establishment of the military would be directly involved with the Secretary for Defense and other members of the government serving together on the Military Revolutionary Committee. This linkage between the civilian government and the military would serve as the nerve center of defense policy.
The agenda for the next six years was set very quickly. It became very clear immediately that the nation would never have the luxury of being able to face either Japan or Britain alone. Any future conflict with either would mean conflict with both. On this matter both the world revolutionists in the Army and stodgy old bourgeois patriots in the Navy agreed.
Based on the suggestions of Chief of Naval Operations William Standley, the "Two Ocean Navy" bill was drafted, and ratified on 5 December 1936. The act's purpose was very clear: to build a navy capable of defeating both the British Royal Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy simultaneously. In spite of their reluctance to divert resources from promoting economic development and recovery, the CEC would spare no expense for this goal.
Much of the ancillary provisions were tempered by "dual use" privosos. The Workers' Party rank and file were very much fixated on the advancement of productive forces, and the leadership shared this sentiment. Thus the State Planning Commission would establish an entire directorate devoted to beating swords into ploughshares, whether it was building new shipyards that could quickly and efficiently switch between military and civilian production or ensuring that any possible civilian application would be found for new technology developed from war research.
The Social Applications Directorate would prove equally adept at beating ploughshares into swords when mobilization began in earnest. But in the present, it seemed like a group of moral busybodies and bean counters looking over the military's shoulders.
…The Two Oceans bill brought about a new naval arms race. As the economy pulled out of the doldrums, shipyards began to fill with orders for warships. The building program was ambitious, and the British struggled to match; 13 battleships (augmenting 8 previously constructed) across three classes, 16 fleet carriers, 47 cruisers, 140 destroyers, and numerous smaller and support vessels. While the building program itself would not be finished until after the war began, its pace began a war panic in the United Kingdom.
…In spite of their greater revolutionary pedigree, the Workers' and Farmers' Revolutionary Army would struggle and scrape for funds in the Interwar. There were limits to the CEC's generosity, and the logic of revolutionary defense placed the Navy in the paramount role. The Army, by comparison, would take an ancillary role. Patton's proposal for a fully mechanized combined arms force would only be half implemented. The Army was expanded to nearly one and half million men by the beginning of the war, but only slightly less than half were fully mechanized.
The Army was in theory fully motorized, but practical experience in large scale maneuver warfare in the Soviet Union revealed the inadequate preparation in the logistical backbone of the Army's core combat units. To keep the troops at the front fighting in Winter 40-41, trucks and rear echelon units were looted from other units in continent while production expanded, bottlenecking efforts to raise and train new mechanized formations.
…The mass mechanized formations that the WFRA would field in the Soviet theater (and to a lesser extent in the Near East and Far East theaters against the Italian/German/Vichy France expeditionary forces and the Japanese respectively) were made possible by the prodigious mass production on the home front.
By mid-1937, it was becoming clear that the initial program of the First Five Year plan was reaching its limits. In an effort to stimulate aggregate demand, restore public confidence by getting people back to work, and build productive forces, the planners had allocated huge amounts of resources into infrastructure and capital goods spending. Railways were expanded and modernized, and with that new bridges and tunnels were built. National highway systems and electrical grids were established. Hydroelectric dams were built across the nation. Overfarmed soil was reclaimed, and new manufacturing plants were seeded across the South and West coast. Hundreds of new schools and universities were established, some of which have become among the most prestigious educational institutions in the world. Money was poured into research and development for both civilian and military applications.
The ambitious national recovery program was made possible by sequestering the consumer goods economy, pushing labor and resources into infrastructure and capital goods production. By 1937, this program had become a victim of its own success. The unemployment rate had fallen from ~30 percent at the Depression's height to just 10.1 percent. Real NSP had exceeded its pre-Depression high. The economy was beginning to overheat, with the all-union government's efforts to induce savings and investment starting to fray at the edges. It became very clear that in spite of the revolutionary fervor driving the national recovery program, there would be too many dollars chasing too few consumer goods.
After extensive consultations between the CEC, StatePlan, and the CNE, on 21 August 1937 the Chairman of the Presidium Upton Sinclair announced that the First Five Year Plan would be "shifting into second gear." Starting on 1 September, the government would begin shifting labor and resources towards consumer spending. Existing infrastructure and capital investments would be completed, but new projects would begin a substantially reduced pace. Many that were in the planning stage or in the very early construction phases would be cancelled following economic review. Military production would largely be exempt from this process. Additional funds would be allocated to the trade unions' relocation and retraining programs. To ease the transition to a consumer economy, the recovery bond drives would be greatly curtailed, and the Union Bank would increase its expansionary monetary policy to stimulate demand.
…Changing gears was a rough process. The memory of the Depression and the mass downsizing was still fresh, and the prospect of renewed unemployment was terrifying. There was considerable dissatisfaction and unrest caused by the announcement. The government weathered the protests and strikes, continuing to calmly explain the necessity of economic reform, and that unemployment in socialism would be nothing like unemployment in capitalism. The "social wage" enacted after the revolution would ensure that workers in transition would have minimal stress. The social provision of housing, the food dole, and the union's unemployment insurance would ensure their families remained safe, warm, fed and clothed in the coming winter.
By and large, the transition was highly successful. Factories inched towards full capacity, and many new innovations were able to be put to work in both consumer goods and production. The automotive and electronics industries exploded. Even as millions of women were entering the workforce, unemployment continued to fall.
The problems and pitfalls of this large scale economic reorganization would yield an unlikely boon. It gave planners, union leaders and coordinators invaluable experience of how efficiently adapt the macreconomy to changing conditions. This would prove especially useful during the transition to wartime economic mobilization. Much of the economic mobilization was accomplished through the institutions and nerve centers that had been established in the process of the ever-changing demands of national recovery policy.
…Stavka had been planning its rearmament and war procurement based on a set of assumptions that started becoming out of date with the fall of Poland. While the government had publicly rebuked the Soviet Union for its deal with the devil by leveraging the Comintern world congress to suspend the Soviet Union from the organization, the Party remained committed to the program of Soviet defense.
In the resulting political shakeup after soviet elections, Foster barely retained leadership of the government. Browder, who had remained aloof from the foreign policy issues, became more active and assertive. Sinclair announced his retirement from politics, intending to return to his first love of fiction writing. Emma Goldman, similarly weary due to the ravages of time, announced her retirement from the Central Committee. Richard Gregg and Jeanette Rankin were dismissed from the Politburo and the Central Committee respectively over their pacifism.
Foster and Browder worked quietly to fill the leadership vacuum with what they considered would be the embryo of a war cabinet. On their recommendations, the Presidium's Philosophy Secretary Haim Kantorovich was elevated to Secretary-General. Unlike Sinclair, Kantorovich was not a fiery orator. He was reserved and soft-spoken. But he was absolutely incorruptible and highly conscientious of his duties. His calm, earnest radio addresses would become a fixture of the wartime homefront, as he addressed citizens on the homefront as well as soldiers in the field with the calm, friendly demeanor of a trusted school teacher.
He would also be a direct affront to Nazi racialism, a definitive declaration that Hitler's cynical attempts to drive a wedge between America and the Soviet Union (in no small part due to Hitler's lingering attachment to America's large German population) were fruitless.
Martin Abern returned as Secretary for Defense after a two year absence. As one of the prominents from Liberation, Abern would be instrumental at pulling the militant wing of the party away from belligerence with Britain towards Soviet defense. James P. Cannon would also be elevated, taking the prestigious Secretary for Labor position.
…1939's rearmament schedule became increasingly ambitious. With some difficulty in justifying the expense and a fight within Stavka between the Army brass and the ever cantankerous admiralty, the CEC ratified in January an ambitious new procurement plan for the Revolutionary Army. The standing army would be expanded by nearly fifty percent to nearly one and a quarter million men by 1940. In addition, the mechanization schedule for the Army's ground forces would be accelerated, yielding two additional Mechanized Corps by 1940.
To achieve this, the planned economy would move to a basic level of mobilization. Control of strategic materials was strengthened, and additional measures were implemented to discourage cultures of destructive infighting between competing design bureaus and manufacturers. Production of war materiel escalated dramatically, and many new types were rushed into production. The T-4B medium tank and T-5C heavy tank were rushed into mass production, with the goal of fully modernizing the mechanized forces by the end of 1940. New tank production arsenals were planned in the rapidly developing industrial centers of the black belt.
A new series of military trucks were included in the spending plan. Before the contract proposals were even finalized, the Olds Motor Works already began designing and prototyping a militarized version of its popular six-wheeled "Metal Mule" trucks. Valued by rural logging and prospecting for its all-terrain capabilities and reliability, it was quickly standardized as the Logistics Vehicle model 7.
The radio industry received a particular boon. Nominatively camouflaged as all-weather radio communication systems, the military's first land and naval radar systems were moved into mass production. More advanced (and more expensive) than the British Chain Home system, the new units promised to give accurate long range detection and ranging to protect the country's cities and fleets from air attack.
The Army Air Forces benefited as well. Many of its temperamental new weapon systems, such as the F-34 Belladonna, were given additional funding to move to operational status. The less ambitious F-35 Yeoman, a large and heavy single-engine fighter-bomber on the verge of cancellation, was moved into production, with additional funding allocated to improve its disappointing performance.
A top secret jet propulsion project was established to develop military applications for the still unproven gas turbine engine concept being peddled by Frank Whittle in the UK. Similarly, a superheavy, long-range bomber project was begun, with the aim of developing a bomber capable of striking the British Isles or Germany from bases in North America.
...Some of the cost of rearmament was cleverly hidden in terms of infrastructure development. The enormously expensive Nicaraguan Canal, dug over the 1930s ostensibly to support Pan-American economic unity, concealed a more martial purpose. The wide sea level canal enabled the Revolutionary Navy to transit from Atlantic to Pacific more quickly, and freed them from the restrictions of Panama Canal locks in terms of size. The Nicaraguan Canal would be a far tougher target for enemy attack, with no locks to sabotage or bomb.
...The British consulate reacted very poorly to these developments. Having spent the better part of the last three months negotiating with their American counterparts on an arms control treaty to avoid the mounting expense and maybe kick the conflict can a few more years down the road, news of the sudden increase in defense spending and military mobilization came like a slap in the face. Within a month, the arms treaty was dead, and with it Prime Minister Baldwin's leadership of the National Government. By March, E. F. L. Wood was leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister. British rearmament would continue, as the increasingly crypto-fascist clique in control of the Conservative Party aligned the country closer to the Nazi state.
Excerpts from the AH.com thread "WI: Better Comintern tanks"
Excerpts from Ernset Mandel, "War economy" in Ernest Mandel Lecture Series, Vol. III, ed. Robin Hahnel (Detroit: Michigan State University Press, 1995).
In terms of macroeconomic trends, the outbreak of war resulted in the partial rollback of many market oriented economic practices within the planned economy. This trend was not limited to socialist economies. Even the nascent Franco-British Union could not resist the logic of war mobilization.
This trend, as we shall see, presents the clearest empirical refutation of the so-called "economic calculation" argument advanced by Mises, Rand, et al. In brief, this line of reasoning, rooted in marginalist conceptions of political economy, states that economic calculation absent A) private ownership in capital goods and B) a free market in goods and labor, is impossible. Stronger variations of argument assert that economic activity itself is impossible without completely free markets.
As the argument goes, without prices allocation is impossible. Without a market in privately produced capital goods, prices for capital goods are arbitrary, as any exchange of publicly owned capital will merely be internal transfers directed by the central planner. And without prices for capital, prices cannot be accurately found for commodities, therefore planned economies are grossly inefficient.
As any freshman political economy student can tell you, the old fetish for exchange value is hard at work here. This perhaps can be best illustrated by a personal anecdote.
I immigrated to America with my family in the early 30s. My family were good Jewish Labor Bundists, and so it was only natural that soviet America was to become our new homeland. I grew up in a German/Yiddish neighborhood in Metropolis. When the war broke out, I put my education on hold and found work at a shipyard.
It was a very different time then, you must understand. When it became clear that war was imminent, the government began taking a very active, almost dictatorial hand in directing economic activity. Starting January, rigid price controls began being implemented, first for strategic materials like steel, aluminum, oil or rubber, but eventually for nearly every raw material. Rationing began very soon after, and with it the state began to decide directly where resources where to be allocated, and which economic projects were to be put on indefinite hiatus.
For example, civilian automobile and home appliance production stopped entirely. Factories that had churned out motorcars were now making tanks and military trucks. Production lines that built labor saving home appliances like vacuum cleaners and washing machines were making logistic equipment for the military. Market relations effectively ceased, and money very quickly became little more than a crib for the planners.
According to the praxeologists, this should have been a recipe for economic disaster. Why then did economic activity grow, often at a staggering rate? The war effort demonstrated an empirical fact very effectively: the problem of economic calculation that had previously plagued planners was a problem of information processing. In spite of the wide spread proliferation of the most advanced computing technology of the day: "Turing complete," programmable electromechanical analytical engines, use-value calculation for the pluralist values of a peacetime economy was beyond the information processing tools available. But the war simplified the calculation, and demonstrated that use-value based planning was not only possible, but perhaps even desirable.
So on the salty-aired wharf, the yard foreman explained this to fact to impressionable 18 year old Ernie Mandel. He said that the ship we were building was designed by mathematicians. In their musty libraries and university ivory towers, they'd crunched the numbers on all the different ship designs, building techniques etc. They assigned a war utility value to different factors: steam propulsion vs. marine diesel, ten centimeter vs. twelve centimeter guns, transports vs destroyers and so and so on. Based on the stream of combat reports, they modified this, and they began determining optimum fleet compositions. And once they arrived at the right answers and the right designs for maximum warfighting potential, the men in charge of war production developed the economic plan in accordance with this.
Our use-value for our economic calculation was easy to observe. It was the things that gave our military an advantage of the Nazis and inched us towards victory. Anything that hindered this would be polished away.
This was the largest mathematical project in history at the time, and only barely within our capabilities. But its success proved empirically that there was no metaphysical barrier to use-value calculation. It was merely difficult, not impossible.
Exchange value and thus money are merely heuristics used by actors within a market to make calculations. The hope is that the net result will be socially desirable. But not only does market failure occur—that is to say there are instances where the logic of market competition yields net diseconomy—on a fundamental level marginalist theories of value overprivilege the metric of profit in economic calculation. Within the context of war economy, this is manifest in the phenomenon of war profiteering, the acts taken by private actors to maximize individual return on investment that will hinder production and allocation. Hoarding and speculating of critical raw materials was perhaps the most basic way that this occurred. Private actors, knowing that the value of raw materials will begin to increase dramatically as the state seeks to increase the production of war materiel, would hoard resources like aluminum, copper or rubber, and wait for more favorable times to sell for a profit, thus exacerbating shortages in critical materials.
To a great extent, Franco-British rearmament and subsequent war production were greatly hindered by their government's reluctance to take a commanding role in economic allocation. A great many capitalists made a tidy profit off speculating in steel, only to ensure that when the war came to them, the loyalist forces did not have enough tanks and artillery to hold their possessions in North Africa.
Sideshow war
While the Soviet theater was undeniably the focal point of the war, the war had spilled far beyond the borders of the Soviet Union.
The Empire of Japan had recently concluded a series of border skirmishes with the Soviet Union. Though it did declare war, the Imperial Japanese Army wished to test the resolve of the Soviets, and if possible force the Soviets to give up on supporting China's war effort. Because they were still smarting from these engagements, and the Imperial Japanese Navy dug its heels in firm opposition, Japan maintained its neutrality when the rest of the Axis invaded the Soviet Union.
With America now occupied, they moved to sidestep the embargoes that the Comintern had placed on them. With British assurances, they forced the Netherlands to accept the loss of the East Indies, and moved to integrate Thailand as a client regime. Negotiations for an armistice with China were shuttered, and at once they began to prosecute the war against China more vigorously, promoting their puppet regime in Nanjing.
However, the American government also no longer felt restrained from provoking Japan. It became the consensus of the Central Committee that war with Japan was inevitable, and so long as they did not begin an aggressive war against Japan, Britain would not have casus belli to involve themselves.
As part of the December 1940 Comintern defense agreement, which established a unified Armed Forces of the Communist International, with America and the Soviet Union taking co-equal roles in the leadership of the military hierarchy, obsolete Soviet weapons began being funneled to the Republic of China's joint Nationalist-Communist government. It was a minor loss; most of the weapons were either ineffective against the Germans or were not STANAG compliant.
In 1941, the Soviets transferred over a million rifles (mostly Mosin-Nagants of various makes), fifty thousand machine guns, three thousand assorted mortars, anti-tank guns and artillery pieces, and four hundred T-26 tanks to the Chinese National Revolutionary Army. The American Committee for State Security established British shell companies to safely funnel resources past the Japanese naval blockade. This lifeline kept China in the fight until more direct aid could come.
In the meantime, the Americans continued to convoy troops into Vladivostok. Under the defense agreement, the WFRA began to take over some defense duties in the Far East, allowing the Soviets to quickly transfer the already formed and organized divisions into the fight with Germany. The Far Eastern Front would serve as a staging area many American units being transferred to the Soviet theater.
While Hitler could do nothing about troops and supplies entering the Soviet Union via Vladivostok, he could do something about Murmansk and Archangelsk. The Battle of the Atlantic began in earnest in October 1940. With Soviet defenses proving more resilient than anticipated, and American resources being convoyed in, Hitler overrode the objections of his admirals, ordering an unrestricted submarine warfare campaign.
Since the Arctic convoys carried the most time sensitive shipments, this was a major blow to the Comintern war effort. In efforts to prevent damage to their own merchant ships, Britain and France began enacting measures to restrict ships carrying their flag from trading with the Soviet Union.
The WFRN found it difficult to adequately counter the German u-boat fleet. Since the bulk of the u-boat attacks occurred in the "Norwegian corridor" stretching from the North Sea to the Arctic Ocean, land based airpower couldn't be brought to bear. Finding surfaced u-boats would fall on a handful of available aircraft carriers and long-range seaplanes. Destroyer escorts could rarely prevent an attack. Instead, all the navy could hope to do was engage in a war of attrition, making losses to the u-boat fleet unacceptably high for sustained operations while minimizing damage to their charges.
In all, the Comintern were able to pull off few victories in 1940. The most important of which was the overthrow of Reza Shah Pahlavi. When hostilities broke out, Reza Shah declared immediate neutrality. In effect, this served to cut off the country's trade with the Soviet Union, a bitter blow for the Iranian intelligentsia after having spent so much of the 30s building cordial relations with their northern neighbor.
Iranian liberals and constitutionalists had long condemned Reza Shah's constitutional monarchy as a sham, regarding him not as a modernizing strongman, but instead as just another old-fashioned despot. As the Iranian economy began to falter, sectarian tensions continued to increase, and the Shah began to more openly court the Axis as well as strengthen ties with Great Britain.
The Committee for State Security's Near East section chief, Kermit Roosevelt, sought to seize the initiative. Thanks to his older brother's leadership in the DRP, he had been considered not politically reliable. In the lead up to the war, he had sought to use his talents where they would be most effective. His experience in Army Intelligence during the First World War led him to the People's Secretariat for Public Safety, into the nascent CSS. He spoke Farsi and Arabic fluently, a "token of a misspent youth," so found himself stationed in one of the theaters that Director-General Martelli considered of low importance.
But he learned quickly from the old veterans who joined him in Tehran, an assortment of NKVD trained European exiles and Americans. He has spent the past year diligently massaging opinion among the liberal intellectuals of the capital in a direction favorable to the Comintern. In his official capacity, he was merely a diplomat negotiating trade links, and this gave him a means to funnel money to Iran's small but rapidly growing trade unions.
When the war began, he suddenly found that cash was freely flowing his direction. He used it to assist a coalition of populists and communist intellectuals in forming a new political party, the Party of the Masses of Iran, or Tudeh. The new mass-based party would serve as the public face of the underground Communist Party of Iran. Tudeh asserted boldly that the Shah was a tyrant, and a British puppet who continued to grow fat off the highly profitable Anglo-Persian Oil Company while his subjects lived in squalor, facing dangerous working conditions.
But most importantly, Roosevelt found sympathizers in the army. Young men like Colonel Ahmad Zirakzadeh had become inspired by the success of modernizing socialist revolutions in Latin America, and had sought to bring the fruits of Zapatismo to their own country. With the Shah wishing to align with the Axis and the British Empire in encircling the Soviet Union, it did not prove difficult to persuade Hoover to put up the necessary resources to aid a regime change.
Operation Ajax began with CSS field officers bringing a large network of junior officers in the Imperial Army of Iran into the network through a combination of ideological appeals, blackmail and even outright bribery. Meanwhile, Roosevelt began closed door negotiations with the Viceroy of India. While he was no friend of communism, he considered himself of the Churchill school with regards to the Nazis. He was willing to turn a blind eye to the coup, in exchange for the Comintern leveraging its influence in the Indian National Congress to pull away from large scale resistance campaigns for independence. The deal was brokered, and now Roosevelt had a free hand to bring in arms to organize partisan groups.
The putsch began on 7 December. Agents provocateur among traditionalist partisans provoked riots in Tehran. Left-wing partisans jointed the fight, supported by a general strike. The Shah sequestered himself in his palace, ordering the Army to restore order. Colonel Zirakzadeh's troops entered the city, proclaiming the beginning of a democratic revolution. He overwhelmed the small Imperial Guard, and arrested Reza Shah.
Pro-democratic army units made similar strikes in other important cities in the country. With the aid of CSS infiltrators, most of the old guard leadership of the Imperial Army were arrested quickly. Within the week, seventy percent of the Army had sworn allegiance to the newly proclaimed Democratic Republic of Iran. After a few pitched battles, the royalist forces surrendered. An interim coalition government formed in Tehran, an alliance between Tudeh and the liberal Iran Party, with Ahmad Kasravi serving as prime minister.
The Second World War was a total war in every sense of the word. It was not simply a contest between soldiers from different nations, but an all-encompassing conflict between ideologies, world systems and economies. It was a war fought by industrial war machines as much as armies of millions bleeding the ground red. Great fleets of ships weighed down the oceans. Tanks, trucks and artillery scoured the land. Vast aerial armadas blotted out the sun, raining fire and death that levelled entire continents. The final days of the war saw the basic power of the universe harnessed into a terrifying superweapon.
The war did not end upon leaving the front lines. The war would engage the entire populations of the belligerent countries in the armed struggle as they turned all of their economic efforts into the production of arms and the logistical systems to support their armies. No industry or profession escaped the logic of total economic mobilization.
This book is a chronicle of the American homefront. It is the story of an era so far removed from our present circumstances that it can perhaps only be understood in the same sense as myth or legend. It was an era when the freely associated workers of our socialist motherland, filled with revolutionary zeal, conducted themselves with the same rigid discipline as the soldiers in the trenches. An era when literature professors and poets spent grueling days dissecting the enemy's propaganda and then writing their own. It was a time when mathematicians put aside their research to break Nazi cryptography or design great computational engines calculate the most efficient use of rail or factory resources.
…As Secretary for Defense Abern remarked after the declaration of war had been made official, "We've been preparing for the wrong damn war." While the revolutionary government had been preparing steadily throughout the 30s for armed conflict, the war they had foreseen never occurred. The Comintern had been on a collision course with the British Empire since the moment the revolution had become fait accompli, and both respective governments had spent the decade arming for this eventuality.
On 7 December 1933, the governments of the British and Japanese empires signed a trade and mutual defense treaty. That very tight alliance included terms for trade in advanced technology, recognized spheres of influence, and most importantly it plotted a very robust course of belligerence towards the Comintern. In that moment, it was assumed that the battle lines for the next great war had been drawn.
American countermeasures began almost immediately. The Revolutionary Defense Act of 1934 was moved to the front of the queue, becoming one of the last acts of the Provisional Government before the new constitution came into effect. The act created a unified command hierarchy for the Armed Forces of the Union of American Socialist Republics. Its two branches, the Army and the Navy, were recast as "services" defined by a core mission. There would no longer be any hard distinction, and all commands could be considered statutorily "unified commands".
A unified general staff and headquarters was established, commonly referred to as the Stavka (though the term itself was not made official until the 1960s). The top of the command establishment of the military would be directly involved with the Secretary for Defense and other members of the government serving together on the Military Revolutionary Committee. This linkage between the civilian government and the military would serve as the nerve center of defense policy.
The agenda for the next six years was set very quickly. It became very clear immediately that the nation would never have the luxury of being able to face either Japan or Britain alone. Any future conflict with either would mean conflict with both. On this matter both the world revolutionists in the Army and stodgy old bourgeois patriots in the Navy agreed.
Based on the suggestions of Chief of Naval Operations William Standley, the "Two Ocean Navy" bill was drafted, and ratified on 5 December 1936. The act's purpose was very clear: to build a navy capable of defeating both the British Royal Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy simultaneously. In spite of their reluctance to divert resources from promoting economic development and recovery, the CEC would spare no expense for this goal.
Much of the ancillary provisions were tempered by "dual use" privosos. The Workers' Party rank and file were very much fixated on the advancement of productive forces, and the leadership shared this sentiment. Thus the State Planning Commission would establish an entire directorate devoted to beating swords into ploughshares, whether it was building new shipyards that could quickly and efficiently switch between military and civilian production or ensuring that any possible civilian application would be found for new technology developed from war research.
The Social Applications Directorate would prove equally adept at beating ploughshares into swords when mobilization began in earnest. But in the present, it seemed like a group of moral busybodies and bean counters looking over the military's shoulders.
…The Two Oceans bill brought about a new naval arms race. As the economy pulled out of the doldrums, shipyards began to fill with orders for warships. The building program was ambitious, and the British struggled to match; 13 battleships (augmenting 8 previously constructed) across three classes, 16 fleet carriers, 47 cruisers, 140 destroyers, and numerous smaller and support vessels. While the building program itself would not be finished until after the war began, its pace began a war panic in the United Kingdom.
…In spite of their greater revolutionary pedigree, the Workers' and Farmers' Revolutionary Army would struggle and scrape for funds in the Interwar. There were limits to the CEC's generosity, and the logic of revolutionary defense placed the Navy in the paramount role. The Army, by comparison, would take an ancillary role. Patton's proposal for a fully mechanized combined arms force would only be half implemented. The Army was expanded to nearly one and half million men by the beginning of the war, but only slightly less than half were fully mechanized.
The Army was in theory fully motorized, but practical experience in large scale maneuver warfare in the Soviet Union revealed the inadequate preparation in the logistical backbone of the Army's core combat units. To keep the troops at the front fighting in Winter 40-41, trucks and rear echelon units were looted from other units in continent while production expanded, bottlenecking efforts to raise and train new mechanized formations.
…The mass mechanized formations that the WFRA would field in the Soviet theater (and to a lesser extent in the Near East and Far East theaters against the Italian/German/Vichy France expeditionary forces and the Japanese respectively) were made possible by the prodigious mass production on the home front.
By mid-1937, it was becoming clear that the initial program of the First Five Year plan was reaching its limits. In an effort to stimulate aggregate demand, restore public confidence by getting people back to work, and build productive forces, the planners had allocated huge amounts of resources into infrastructure and capital goods spending. Railways were expanded and modernized, and with that new bridges and tunnels were built. National highway systems and electrical grids were established. Hydroelectric dams were built across the nation. Overfarmed soil was reclaimed, and new manufacturing plants were seeded across the South and West coast. Hundreds of new schools and universities were established, some of which have become among the most prestigious educational institutions in the world. Money was poured into research and development for both civilian and military applications.
The ambitious national recovery program was made possible by sequestering the consumer goods economy, pushing labor and resources into infrastructure and capital goods production. By 1937, this program had become a victim of its own success. The unemployment rate had fallen from ~30 percent at the Depression's height to just 10.1 percent. Real NSP had exceeded its pre-Depression high. The economy was beginning to overheat, with the all-union government's efforts to induce savings and investment starting to fray at the edges. It became very clear that in spite of the revolutionary fervor driving the national recovery program, there would be too many dollars chasing too few consumer goods.
After extensive consultations between the CEC, StatePlan, and the CNE, on 21 August 1937 the Chairman of the Presidium Upton Sinclair announced that the First Five Year Plan would be "shifting into second gear." Starting on 1 September, the government would begin shifting labor and resources towards consumer spending. Existing infrastructure and capital investments would be completed, but new projects would begin a substantially reduced pace. Many that were in the planning stage or in the very early construction phases would be cancelled following economic review. Military production would largely be exempt from this process. Additional funds would be allocated to the trade unions' relocation and retraining programs. To ease the transition to a consumer economy, the recovery bond drives would be greatly curtailed, and the Union Bank would increase its expansionary monetary policy to stimulate demand.
…Changing gears was a rough process. The memory of the Depression and the mass downsizing was still fresh, and the prospect of renewed unemployment was terrifying. There was considerable dissatisfaction and unrest caused by the announcement. The government weathered the protests and strikes, continuing to calmly explain the necessity of economic reform, and that unemployment in socialism would be nothing like unemployment in capitalism. The "social wage" enacted after the revolution would ensure that workers in transition would have minimal stress. The social provision of housing, the food dole, and the union's unemployment insurance would ensure their families remained safe, warm, fed and clothed in the coming winter.
By and large, the transition was highly successful. Factories inched towards full capacity, and many new innovations were able to be put to work in both consumer goods and production. The automotive and electronics industries exploded. Even as millions of women were entering the workforce, unemployment continued to fall.
The problems and pitfalls of this large scale economic reorganization would yield an unlikely boon. It gave planners, union leaders and coordinators invaluable experience of how efficiently adapt the macreconomy to changing conditions. This would prove especially useful during the transition to wartime economic mobilization. Much of the economic mobilization was accomplished through the institutions and nerve centers that had been established in the process of the ever-changing demands of national recovery policy.
…Stavka had been planning its rearmament and war procurement based on a set of assumptions that started becoming out of date with the fall of Poland. While the government had publicly rebuked the Soviet Union for its deal with the devil by leveraging the Comintern world congress to suspend the Soviet Union from the organization, the Party remained committed to the program of Soviet defense.
In the resulting political shakeup after soviet elections, Foster barely retained leadership of the government. Browder, who had remained aloof from the foreign policy issues, became more active and assertive. Sinclair announced his retirement from politics, intending to return to his first love of fiction writing. Emma Goldman, similarly weary due to the ravages of time, announced her retirement from the Central Committee. Richard Gregg and Jeanette Rankin were dismissed from the Politburo and the Central Committee respectively over their pacifism.
Foster and Browder worked quietly to fill the leadership vacuum with what they considered would be the embryo of a war cabinet. On their recommendations, the Presidium's Philosophy Secretary Haim Kantorovich was elevated to Secretary-General. Unlike Sinclair, Kantorovich was not a fiery orator. He was reserved and soft-spoken. But he was absolutely incorruptible and highly conscientious of his duties. His calm, earnest radio addresses would become a fixture of the wartime homefront, as he addressed citizens on the homefront as well as soldiers in the field with the calm, friendly demeanor of a trusted school teacher.
He would also be a direct affront to Nazi racialism, a definitive declaration that Hitler's cynical attempts to drive a wedge between America and the Soviet Union (in no small part due to Hitler's lingering attachment to America's large German population) were fruitless.
Martin Abern returned as Secretary for Defense after a two year absence. As one of the prominents from Liberation, Abern would be instrumental at pulling the militant wing of the party away from belligerence with Britain towards Soviet defense. James P. Cannon would also be elevated, taking the prestigious Secretary for Labor position.
…1939's rearmament schedule became increasingly ambitious. With some difficulty in justifying the expense and a fight within Stavka between the Army brass and the ever cantankerous admiralty, the CEC ratified in January an ambitious new procurement plan for the Revolutionary Army. The standing army would be expanded by nearly fifty percent to nearly one and a quarter million men by 1940. In addition, the mechanization schedule for the Army's ground forces would be accelerated, yielding two additional Mechanized Corps by 1940.
To achieve this, the planned economy would move to a basic level of mobilization. Control of strategic materials was strengthened, and additional measures were implemented to discourage cultures of destructive infighting between competing design bureaus and manufacturers. Production of war materiel escalated dramatically, and many new types were rushed into production. The T-4B medium tank and T-5C heavy tank were rushed into mass production, with the goal of fully modernizing the mechanized forces by the end of 1940. New tank production arsenals were planned in the rapidly developing industrial centers of the black belt.
A new series of military trucks were included in the spending plan. Before the contract proposals were even finalized, the Olds Motor Works already began designing and prototyping a militarized version of its popular six-wheeled "Metal Mule" trucks. Valued by rural logging and prospecting for its all-terrain capabilities and reliability, it was quickly standardized as the Logistics Vehicle model 7.
The radio industry received a particular boon. Nominatively camouflaged as all-weather radio communication systems, the military's first land and naval radar systems were moved into mass production. More advanced (and more expensive) than the British Chain Home system, the new units promised to give accurate long range detection and ranging to protect the country's cities and fleets from air attack.
The Army Air Forces benefited as well. Many of its temperamental new weapon systems, such as the F-34 Belladonna, were given additional funding to move to operational status. The less ambitious F-35 Yeoman, a large and heavy single-engine fighter-bomber on the verge of cancellation, was moved into production, with additional funding allocated to improve its disappointing performance.
A top secret jet propulsion project was established to develop military applications for the still unproven gas turbine engine concept being peddled by Frank Whittle in the UK. Similarly, a superheavy, long-range bomber project was begun, with the aim of developing a bomber capable of striking the British Isles or Germany from bases in North America.
...Some of the cost of rearmament was cleverly hidden in terms of infrastructure development. The enormously expensive Nicaraguan Canal, dug over the 1930s ostensibly to support Pan-American economic unity, concealed a more martial purpose. The wide sea level canal enabled the Revolutionary Navy to transit from Atlantic to Pacific more quickly, and freed them from the restrictions of Panama Canal locks in terms of size. The Nicaraguan Canal would be a far tougher target for enemy attack, with no locks to sabotage or bomb.
...The British consulate reacted very poorly to these developments. Having spent the better part of the last three months negotiating with their American counterparts on an arms control treaty to avoid the mounting expense and maybe kick the conflict can a few more years down the road, news of the sudden increase in defense spending and military mobilization came like a slap in the face. Within a month, the arms treaty was dead, and with it Prime Minister Baldwin's leadership of the National Government. By March, E. F. L. Wood was leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister. British rearmament would continue, as the increasingly crypto-fascist clique in control of the Conservative Party aligned the country closer to the Nazi state.
Excerpts from the AH.com thread "WI: Better Comintern tanks"
LordStink said:
FallingOutsideTheNormalMoralConstraints said:
AdmiralSanders said:
DeOpressorLiber said:
Ubermunch said:
Tanks A Lot said:
Excerpts from Ernset Mandel, "War economy" in Ernest Mandel Lecture Series, Vol. III, ed. Robin Hahnel (Detroit: Michigan State University Press, 1995).
In terms of macroeconomic trends, the outbreak of war resulted in the partial rollback of many market oriented economic practices within the planned economy. This trend was not limited to socialist economies. Even the nascent Franco-British Union could not resist the logic of war mobilization.
This trend, as we shall see, presents the clearest empirical refutation of the so-called "economic calculation" argument advanced by Mises, Rand, et al. In brief, this line of reasoning, rooted in marginalist conceptions of political economy, states that economic calculation absent A) private ownership in capital goods and B) a free market in goods and labor, is impossible. Stronger variations of argument assert that economic activity itself is impossible without completely free markets.
As the argument goes, without prices allocation is impossible. Without a market in privately produced capital goods, prices for capital goods are arbitrary, as any exchange of publicly owned capital will merely be internal transfers directed by the central planner. And without prices for capital, prices cannot be accurately found for commodities, therefore planned economies are grossly inefficient.
As any freshman political economy student can tell you, the old fetish for exchange value is hard at work here. This perhaps can be best illustrated by a personal anecdote.
I immigrated to America with my family in the early 30s. My family were good Jewish Labor Bundists, and so it was only natural that soviet America was to become our new homeland. I grew up in a German/Yiddish neighborhood in Metropolis. When the war broke out, I put my education on hold and found work at a shipyard.
It was a very different time then, you must understand. When it became clear that war was imminent, the government began taking a very active, almost dictatorial hand in directing economic activity. Starting January, rigid price controls began being implemented, first for strategic materials like steel, aluminum, oil or rubber, but eventually for nearly every raw material. Rationing began very soon after, and with it the state began to decide directly where resources where to be allocated, and which economic projects were to be put on indefinite hiatus.
For example, civilian automobile and home appliance production stopped entirely. Factories that had churned out motorcars were now making tanks and military trucks. Production lines that built labor saving home appliances like vacuum cleaners and washing machines were making logistic equipment for the military. Market relations effectively ceased, and money very quickly became little more than a crib for the planners.
According to the praxeologists, this should have been a recipe for economic disaster. Why then did economic activity grow, often at a staggering rate? The war effort demonstrated an empirical fact very effectively: the problem of economic calculation that had previously plagued planners was a problem of information processing. In spite of the wide spread proliferation of the most advanced computing technology of the day: "Turing complete," programmable electromechanical analytical engines, use-value calculation for the pluralist values of a peacetime economy was beyond the information processing tools available. But the war simplified the calculation, and demonstrated that use-value based planning was not only possible, but perhaps even desirable.
So on the salty-aired wharf, the yard foreman explained this to fact to impressionable 18 year old Ernie Mandel. He said that the ship we were building was designed by mathematicians. In their musty libraries and university ivory towers, they'd crunched the numbers on all the different ship designs, building techniques etc. They assigned a war utility value to different factors: steam propulsion vs. marine diesel, ten centimeter vs. twelve centimeter guns, transports vs destroyers and so and so on. Based on the stream of combat reports, they modified this, and they began determining optimum fleet compositions. And once they arrived at the right answers and the right designs for maximum warfighting potential, the men in charge of war production developed the economic plan in accordance with this.
Our use-value for our economic calculation was easy to observe. It was the things that gave our military an advantage of the Nazis and inched us towards victory. Anything that hindered this would be polished away.
This was the largest mathematical project in history at the time, and only barely within our capabilities. But its success proved empirically that there was no metaphysical barrier to use-value calculation. It was merely difficult, not impossible.
Exchange value and thus money are merely heuristics used by actors within a market to make calculations. The hope is that the net result will be socially desirable. But not only does market failure occur—that is to say there are instances where the logic of market competition yields net diseconomy—on a fundamental level marginalist theories of value overprivilege the metric of profit in economic calculation. Within the context of war economy, this is manifest in the phenomenon of war profiteering, the acts taken by private actors to maximize individual return on investment that will hinder production and allocation. Hoarding and speculating of critical raw materials was perhaps the most basic way that this occurred. Private actors, knowing that the value of raw materials will begin to increase dramatically as the state seeks to increase the production of war materiel, would hoard resources like aluminum, copper or rubber, and wait for more favorable times to sell for a profit, thus exacerbating shortages in critical materials.
To a great extent, Franco-British rearmament and subsequent war production were greatly hindered by their government's reluctance to take a commanding role in economic allocation. A great many capitalists made a tidy profit off speculating in steel, only to ensure that when the war came to them, the loyalist forces did not have enough tanks and artillery to hold their possessions in North Africa.
Sideshow war
While the Soviet theater was undeniably the focal point of the war, the war had spilled far beyond the borders of the Soviet Union.
The Empire of Japan had recently concluded a series of border skirmishes with the Soviet Union. Though it did declare war, the Imperial Japanese Army wished to test the resolve of the Soviets, and if possible force the Soviets to give up on supporting China's war effort. Because they were still smarting from these engagements, and the Imperial Japanese Navy dug its heels in firm opposition, Japan maintained its neutrality when the rest of the Axis invaded the Soviet Union.
With America now occupied, they moved to sidestep the embargoes that the Comintern had placed on them. With British assurances, they forced the Netherlands to accept the loss of the East Indies, and moved to integrate Thailand as a client regime. Negotiations for an armistice with China were shuttered, and at once they began to prosecute the war against China more vigorously, promoting their puppet regime in Nanjing.
However, the American government also no longer felt restrained from provoking Japan. It became the consensus of the Central Committee that war with Japan was inevitable, and so long as they did not begin an aggressive war against Japan, Britain would not have casus belli to involve themselves.
As part of the December 1940 Comintern defense agreement, which established a unified Armed Forces of the Communist International, with America and the Soviet Union taking co-equal roles in the leadership of the military hierarchy, obsolete Soviet weapons began being funneled to the Republic of China's joint Nationalist-Communist government. It was a minor loss; most of the weapons were either ineffective against the Germans or were not STANAG compliant.
In 1941, the Soviets transferred over a million rifles (mostly Mosin-Nagants of various makes), fifty thousand machine guns, three thousand assorted mortars, anti-tank guns and artillery pieces, and four hundred T-26 tanks to the Chinese National Revolutionary Army. The American Committee for State Security established British shell companies to safely funnel resources past the Japanese naval blockade. This lifeline kept China in the fight until more direct aid could come.
In the meantime, the Americans continued to convoy troops into Vladivostok. Under the defense agreement, the WFRA began to take over some defense duties in the Far East, allowing the Soviets to quickly transfer the already formed and organized divisions into the fight with Germany. The Far Eastern Front would serve as a staging area many American units being transferred to the Soviet theater.
While Hitler could do nothing about troops and supplies entering the Soviet Union via Vladivostok, he could do something about Murmansk and Archangelsk. The Battle of the Atlantic began in earnest in October 1940. With Soviet defenses proving more resilient than anticipated, and American resources being convoyed in, Hitler overrode the objections of his admirals, ordering an unrestricted submarine warfare campaign.
Since the Arctic convoys carried the most time sensitive shipments, this was a major blow to the Comintern war effort. In efforts to prevent damage to their own merchant ships, Britain and France began enacting measures to restrict ships carrying their flag from trading with the Soviet Union.
The WFRN found it difficult to adequately counter the German u-boat fleet. Since the bulk of the u-boat attacks occurred in the "Norwegian corridor" stretching from the North Sea to the Arctic Ocean, land based airpower couldn't be brought to bear. Finding surfaced u-boats would fall on a handful of available aircraft carriers and long-range seaplanes. Destroyer escorts could rarely prevent an attack. Instead, all the navy could hope to do was engage in a war of attrition, making losses to the u-boat fleet unacceptably high for sustained operations while minimizing damage to their charges.
In all, the Comintern were able to pull off few victories in 1940. The most important of which was the overthrow of Reza Shah Pahlavi. When hostilities broke out, Reza Shah declared immediate neutrality. In effect, this served to cut off the country's trade with the Soviet Union, a bitter blow for the Iranian intelligentsia after having spent so much of the 30s building cordial relations with their northern neighbor.
Iranian liberals and constitutionalists had long condemned Reza Shah's constitutional monarchy as a sham, regarding him not as a modernizing strongman, but instead as just another old-fashioned despot. As the Iranian economy began to falter, sectarian tensions continued to increase, and the Shah began to more openly court the Axis as well as strengthen ties with Great Britain.
The Committee for State Security's Near East section chief, Kermit Roosevelt, sought to seize the initiative. Thanks to his older brother's leadership in the DRP, he had been considered not politically reliable. In the lead up to the war, he had sought to use his talents where they would be most effective. His experience in Army Intelligence during the First World War led him to the People's Secretariat for Public Safety, into the nascent CSS. He spoke Farsi and Arabic fluently, a "token of a misspent youth," so found himself stationed in one of the theaters that Director-General Martelli considered of low importance.
But he learned quickly from the old veterans who joined him in Tehran, an assortment of NKVD trained European exiles and Americans. He has spent the past year diligently massaging opinion among the liberal intellectuals of the capital in a direction favorable to the Comintern. In his official capacity, he was merely a diplomat negotiating trade links, and this gave him a means to funnel money to Iran's small but rapidly growing trade unions.
When the war began, he suddenly found that cash was freely flowing his direction. He used it to assist a coalition of populists and communist intellectuals in forming a new political party, the Party of the Masses of Iran, or Tudeh. The new mass-based party would serve as the public face of the underground Communist Party of Iran. Tudeh asserted boldly that the Shah was a tyrant, and a British puppet who continued to grow fat off the highly profitable Anglo-Persian Oil Company while his subjects lived in squalor, facing dangerous working conditions.
But most importantly, Roosevelt found sympathizers in the army. Young men like Colonel Ahmad Zirakzadeh had become inspired by the success of modernizing socialist revolutions in Latin America, and had sought to bring the fruits of Zapatismo to their own country. With the Shah wishing to align with the Axis and the British Empire in encircling the Soviet Union, it did not prove difficult to persuade Hoover to put up the necessary resources to aid a regime change.
Operation Ajax began with CSS field officers bringing a large network of junior officers in the Imperial Army of Iran into the network through a combination of ideological appeals, blackmail and even outright bribery. Meanwhile, Roosevelt began closed door negotiations with the Viceroy of India. While he was no friend of communism, he considered himself of the Churchill school with regards to the Nazis. He was willing to turn a blind eye to the coup, in exchange for the Comintern leveraging its influence in the Indian National Congress to pull away from large scale resistance campaigns for independence. The deal was brokered, and now Roosevelt had a free hand to bring in arms to organize partisan groups.
The putsch began on 7 December. Agents provocateur among traditionalist partisans provoked riots in Tehran. Left-wing partisans jointed the fight, supported by a general strike. The Shah sequestered himself in his palace, ordering the Army to restore order. Colonel Zirakzadeh's troops entered the city, proclaiming the beginning of a democratic revolution. He overwhelmed the small Imperial Guard, and arrested Reza Shah.
Pro-democratic army units made similar strikes in other important cities in the country. With the aid of CSS infiltrators, most of the old guard leadership of the Imperial Army were arrested quickly. Within the week, seventy percent of the Army had sworn allegiance to the newly proclaimed Democratic Republic of Iran. After a few pitched battles, the royalist forces surrendered. An interim coalition government formed in Tehran, an alliance between Tudeh and the liberal Iran Party, with Ahmad Kasravi serving as prime minister.
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I very much enjoyed this update.
You know I can't wait to see the reaction of the crypto-facists in the conservative party when Nazi Germany decides to pull an stupid and attack France because that is going to be great to see those assholes get what's coming to them for trusting the Nazis in the first place.
You know I can't wait to see the reaction of the crypto-facists in the conservative party when Nazi Germany decides to pull an stupid and attack France because that is going to be great to see those assholes get what's coming to them for trusting the Nazis in the first place.
Interesting update there Jello.
Now for questions
1. Have butterflies flown in a better navy for the Nazis? Perhaps more u-boats built, or less resources wasted on things like aircraft carriers?
2. Are the Waffen-SS of this TL, while no doubt just as fanatical, closer to the well-trained, well-equipped elite formations that popular fiction portrays them to be? It's just that the TL seems to suggest they were even more formidable than they were historically.
3. Whilst quality-control for the UASR seems to have been present during the war, how was it during the Five-Year Plans? Did they have better quality control than their Soviet counterparts from the get-go or did it take a while for this to actually come in?
Now for questions
1. Have butterflies flown in a better navy for the Nazis? Perhaps more u-boats built, or less resources wasted on things like aircraft carriers?
2. Are the Waffen-SS of this TL, while no doubt just as fanatical, closer to the well-trained, well-equipped elite formations that popular fiction portrays them to be? It's just that the TL seems to suggest they were even more formidable than they were historically.
3. Whilst quality-control for the UASR seems to have been present during the war, how was it during the Five-Year Plans? Did they have better quality control than their Soviet counterparts from the get-go or did it take a while for this to actually come in?
It is a bit nastier, but that's to be expected. There's some spillover from the Cold War, and noobs tend to be the worst about it. And in turn, the Old Guard in the community are the ones who've been there long enough to form friendships with people on the other side of the "Iron Curtain" so to speak, and react negatively to people ruining that harmony.
Of course, it's partly a storytelling trope, and shouldn't necessarily be taken as the norm. If you notice, a lot of the Alt-AH.com discussions have a formula. OP makes post that is stupid and/or controversial, other posters chastise him with enough venom to be entertaining to you, the reader.
bookmark95
Banned
Probably the same as in OTL. Fascist Europe shoots itself in the foot by alienating the few scientists who could build a bomb with their racist policies. Enrico Fermi fled to the US OTL to save his Jewish wife. The UASR's non-racist immigration department will mean only more scientists who are either Jewish or are frightened of fascism will be able to get to America.
What about Edward Teller? A Jew who greatly opposed Fascism and Communism? Maybe he goes to the FBU, and builds their bomb.
bookmark95
Banned
All I know about Edward Teller is that McCarthyism destroyed his reputation. I never realized that tied into anti-communist leanings. But considering Communism is getting a second chance under America, and the FBU is going to remain a colonial power for a while, he probably might avoid it.
Well, that isn't exactly true. Teller testified in front of the HUAC regarding J. Robert Oppenheimer's ties to the Communist Party, as well as his potential for a security risk for the US, which resulted in Oppenheimer losing his security clearance. This was, in part, due to Teller's disagreements with Oppenheimer, over the use of nuclear weapons. Teller's testimony ultimately ostracized him from academic community, which was probably how McCarthyism ruined his career. However, he became a strong advocate for nuclear weapons, which did stem from a very vehement opposition to Communism.
Very much enjoyed this update, especially the "reverse-Ajax." Well done.
You mentioned assault guns in the "ATL AH.com segment." IOTL, the assault gun was generally used by the Soviets and Germans as they were cheaper to produce and easier to bring to the front, not to mention their lower profile and more powerful overall main gun (in most cases). However, they were pretty quickly outstripped by the MBT postwar. Is there something that's going to keep them around afterwards?
You mentioned assault guns in the "ATL AH.com segment." IOTL, the assault gun was generally used by the Soviets and Germans as they were cheaper to produce and easier to bring to the front, not to mention their lower profile and more powerful overall main gun (in most cases). However, they were pretty quickly outstripped by the MBT postwar. Is there something that's going to keep them around afterwards?
bookmark95
Banned
So in this universe, Teller, if he ended up in America, would lose his clearance for being an anti-left-wing individual, while Oppenheimer would remain a respected, if incredibly haunted-" I am become death, destroyer of worlds"- figure. I still think Teller would have ended up in America, since Western Europe closed its doors to Jewish immigration at this time like in OTL.
It's widely speculated that Iran is going to be on the side of Moscow by the time of the Cold War... so yeah.
And Jello said before that Teller was going to come to America way back to the first pages of the thread. Even back in Red Dawn as far as I can remember.
It's an amazing update. I love the economic side of the update. Haha.
Roosevelt made a terrible decision with the Viceroy of India...
I wouldn't have done the decision he did. I wouldn't considering losing India for Iran.
I wouldn't have done the decision he did. I wouldn't considering losing India for Iran.
I think it makes sense within the context they where working in. There's no guarentee of Indian revolution any time soon and Iran is very much needed as a safe way to get goods to the soviet front. In retrospect it's going to come off worse when India is a bulwark of the Commonwealth, but during the war he could easily write it off as innevitable India will fall.
Roosevelt's decision is probably major reason for the FBU was able to hold India post-war, but it was still the right call for the Comintern. The UASR has a huge logistical headache getting the supplies for total war to the USSR, and its other two routes are vulnerable. Whatever damage they could do to Japan, they can close the vladivostok route whenever they choose. The Murmansk convoys can fight their way through, but if Britain joins the war it'd be a blood bath. If they don't placate the British somehow the USSR could be left on its own.
As to the Comintern, is Mexico or anyone else in Latin America a full member by this point? The reference to black belt industrialization was great, and makes me wonder how much wartime industrial mobilization Mexico's going to end up providing.
Lastly, haven't seen it mentioned yet in any of the threads, but is there any idea what space exploration's going to be like later on? With competition from both an FBU space agency, and a likely economically stronger USSR, I can't wait to see what the UASR's socialist NASA gets up to.
As to the Comintern, is Mexico or anyone else in Latin America a full member by this point? The reference to black belt industrialization was great, and makes me wonder how much wartime industrial mobilization Mexico's going to end up providing.
Lastly, haven't seen it mentioned yet in any of the threads, but is there any idea what space exploration's going to be like later on? With competition from both an FBU space agency, and a likely economically stronger USSR, I can't wait to see what the UASR's socialist NASA gets up to.