The Great Crusade (Reds! Part 3)

[Aelita]

Eviction Notice: The Drive to the Frontiers

SS-Volksmarschall Josef Dietrich had taken command of Army Group North following the failure of Operation Wotan. He had some six-hundred thousand men at his disposal, 1,950 armored fighting vehicles, twelve thousand artillery pieces, and three hundred aircraft of Luftflotte 3. But as much as a quarter of this number were poorly trained Baltic conscripts, spared from the genocidal excess of Generalplan Ost in 1941 and now forced to fight for their oppressors by the Nazi puppet regimes in the Baltics.

Further north, a coalition force of 110,000 Swedish and 250,000 Finnish soldiers were locked in battle north of Leningrad. Their frontlines, extending from the ramparts near Lenin’s city, wound north through the rough taiga of Karelia onwards towards Murmansk.

The Comintern had was steadily building up a force nearly twice their number, reaching nearly 1.8 million men by the outset of Operation Spanner on 21 November. Four fronts were arrayed against Army Group North and Finland: the Karelian Front, the Leningrad Front, and the 1st and 2nd Baltic Fronts, commanded respectively by General of the Army Aleksandr Vasilevsky, General Aleksandr Novikov, General Harry Haywood, and Marshal Semyon Timoshenko.

Ending the Siege of Leningrad had been a major war aim since for nearly three years. On three prior occasions, operational plans were scrapped by changing conditions. But now the German invaders were exhausted and on the backfoot.

The initial overture began with one of the largest strategic bombing campaigns of the war. The American 4th Air Army and the Soviet 8th Air Army began a three month long campaign of destruction over Sweden and Finland. The long-range B-23 Superfortresses delivered large payloads to the centers of Swedish industry and iron export. B-18 twin-engine bombers struck railroad hubs and supply dumps in the Finnish country side.

The campaign was intense enough to concern the inner circles of the Nazi government. Swedish iron exports began dropping precipitously under the combined weight of bombing and sea mine deployment. At Hitler’s insistence, several squadrons worth of new high altitude Ta 190D fighters were loaned to the Swedish Air Force, along with personnel to assist in training and maintenance.

The diluting of the Luftwaffe’s air defense capabilities proved deeply unpopular in the service itself. Already pressed by the Anglo-American bombing campaign of the Rhineland industrial areas, some were finally coming to the all too late realization that the war was not progressing exactly according to Germany’s favor.

While discontent simmered on the home front and in the military establishment of Germany, Comintern preparations for Operation Luna continued. In the early morning hours of 12 December 1943, pioneer teams cleared paths through minefields. In the bitter cold, Revolutionary Army commandos began infiltration attacks. By the time the thundering mass of guns and screeching rockets startled the Axis defenders awake, the attack had already been under way for hours.

Three days later, the Karelian Front joined the offensive, spoiling counterattack preparations by the Finnish Second Army. While the Finnish/Swedish coalition was somewhat better prepared strategically, they suffered from severe deficiencies in armor support and anti-tank capability, which General Vasilevsky mercilessly exploited.

After three and a half long years of suffering, the Comintern had finally achieved mastery of the battlefield, made possible by earnest, effective cooperation between Soviet and American forces. The Comintern military achieved proficiency in both the operational art as well as the tactical battlefield. For the first time in the war, they achieved multi Front cooperation in a decisive offensive posture, enabled by the smooth cooperation of combined arms elements in the multi-national coalition army.

The German Heer and even the Waffen-SS remained tactically proficient, but as in previous campaigns they were paralyzed by a lack of appreciation for the operational art. The readiness of German formations, to say nothing of their allies, had depreciated considerably from the high watermark of the previous year. Shortages of experienced officers and NCOs were combined by shortages in war materiel. And in the case of Operation Spanner, Volksmarschall Dietrich’s leadership proved to be clumsy and foolhardy.

Dietrich owed his position to his political zeal and reliability, not his military acumen. A common rumor among the recalcitrant brass of the Wehrmacht was that Dietrich didn’t even know how to read a map. This was an exaggeration; Dietrich was certainly promoted well above his level of competency, and had enjoyed some reputation for ability due to his nature for adventurism and risk-taking. But in the defensive campaign against a determined foe that held the advantage in military intelligence, it lead to Army Group North being led around by the nose by Stavka representative General of the Army Georgy Zhukov.

On Christmas Day, the 1st Baltic Front cleared the last of the German occupiers from the Moscow-Leningrad railway. At last, the Germans had been pushed from their stranglehold around the city. Comintern forces continued to press onwards against Army Group North. While Dietrich yielded ground stubbornly, he could not resist the relentless mass of offensive firepower bring brought to bear. On 5 January 1944, the first Soviet units crossed the border into Reichskommisariat Ostland, formerly the Republic of Estonia.

In Karelia, the Finnish-Swedish coalition had the advantage of more favorable defensive terrain. But they too could not stop the massive host that had been shifted northward. As 1944 dawned, the last toe-hold on Lake Lagoda, held by the Swedish 8th Infantry Division, had been lost.

With Karelia lost and any hope of regaining it now a forgotten dream, talk of a separate peace began to stir in the Finish government. In spite of their alliance with Germany and Sweden, the country still adhered to the norms of republican government. The continuation of the alliance was becoming increasingly difficult, especially amidst the wide publicization of Axis crimes against humanity in their occupation areas of the Soviet Union.

Outcome

Operation Spanner would prove to be a major Comintern victory. As complicated as the operation was, spread along a broad front from Karelia almost to northern Byelorussia, the counteroffensive shattered the myth of German martial superiority. In spite of the considerable defensive preparations undertaken in the previous months by Army Group North, the Comintern military was able to forcibly evict them from occupied Soviet territory.

From the beginning of the offensive, the Comintern Army Air Force enjoyed aerial superiority. In most sectors, Comintern fighter aircraft achieved a 2:1 numerical superiority. Numerous German aces were lost trying to stem the tide of Su-6 “Frog” attackers, including the boy wonder Hauptmann Erich Hartmann. The Luftwaffe could do little to disrupt the sequence of Comintern attacks, with so many of their ground attackers being shot down or chased off before they could complete their sorties. Meanwhile, American and Soviet fighters and bombers could range freely, disrupting both combat units as well as the logistical support network.

Army Group North itself was savaged. Nearly a thousand armored fighting vehicles would be knocked out in two and a half months of fighting. Over one sixth of their number would be irretrievable causalities: one hundred eighteen thousand German and Baltic soldiers were killed or captured. A further eighty thousand would be wounded or sick in the campaign.

Victory was still bittersweet. Seventy-five thousand American and Soviet soldiers died in the offensive, a further twelve thousand missing or captured. One hundred fifty thousand men and women were wounded facing Army Group North.

The Finnish/Swedish coalition lost thirty thousand soldiers killed or captured, and another fifty thousand wounded, versus twenty thousand Comintern dead or captured, and thirty thousand wounded.

The lifting of the Siege of Leningrad resulted in jubilation across the entirety of the Comintern. The horror stories of death, starvation, pestilence and cannibalism brought on by the siege had filled newspapers and newsreels for the past three years

 

[The_Red_Star_Rising]

Auroran War Part 2

Excerpts from The Secondary Fronts, by Veronika Gerasimov, Published by the Military Academy of the WPRA, 2012

The Scandinavian countries had, throughout the thirties, been experiencing an economic boom from rapid industrialisation of what had once been largely agrarian and otherwise pre-industrial economies thanks to heavy investment from the larger countries of Europe in the hopes of creating a buffer against the Comintern. However, these programs also came with the rise of labourist and outright communist movements which lead to significant worries from certain circles; with Sweden having the worst of this paranoia. The Swedish fascist movement was highly organised with heavy funding from Italy and Germany and was able to sap vitality and interest from the leftist movements in Sweden with its campaigns focused on nationalist "consciousness", brotherhood with Germany, fear of the Soviet and American Unions, and ill timed acts of violence from the Communist party of Sweden. Though the fascist movement was never able to form an outright majority in the face of liberal, communist, and social democratic opposition, they were popular enough that the King felt compelled to appoint one of them as Sweden's head of government. From there, a dictatorial Fascist government was established with far reaching powers being given to the state and quick suspensions of most civil liberties and the banning of most opposition parties in quick succession.

The Fascist government took credit for the continuing economic boom from foreign investment and rapid industrialisation; painting itself as the saviour of the nation and the bringer of prosperity as the rate of industrialisation approached its zenith. By 1940, Sweden had significant industrial assets for both military and civilian purposes and had significantly expanded its infrastructure network of roads and railways; many of which were connected to neighbouring Norway and Finland. Sweden's own capitalist class grew particularly fat from the lucrative trade with resource hungry Germany and the rest of the European fascist bloc. Germany had long been dependent on Swedish Iron to make military grade steel, and with Germany's armament and industrial modernisation programs at full swing Hitler's Third Reich would require vast and extensive trade with Birger Furegard's Sweden. This trade would also include significant cooperation in military affairs as the two nations' rapidly expanding militaries shared ideas, designs, training exercises and plans. German and Italian military thinkers in particular would inform what parts of Swedish doctrine were not being informed by their counterparts from France or Britain.

The Swedish Strv m/40 would be a fine example of this; a tank with heavy derivative influence from the Panzer III and the Piat 39. Though due to the terrain conditions of northern Europe, Swedish vehicles would tend to be somewhat taller than their counterparts from other countries in exchange for extreme amounts of gun depression; with few Swedish vehicles being unable to depress their weapons by less than twelve degrees. The intention being that these vehicles would "peek" out from hills to take shots against superior numbers of American and Soviet vehicles before moving towards the next hull down position after achieving local victory. The SAAB 17; Sweden's primary twin engine bomber, would be a clear child of the lineage of the Ju 88, though Sweden's primary fighter aircraft; the SAAB 20 would diverge from the international norm by being a pusher aircraft instead of a puller. What Sweden did not produce for itself would instead be purchased from abroad; particularly purpose built interceptor aircraft to alleviate Swedish fears of high altitude bombing attacks. To achieve logistical commonality with Germany, Sweden would ensure compatibility between Swedish and German weaponry, making sure to use the same calibres for their weapons and exchanging licenses for assorted marks of guns, shells, engines, and transmissions.

Finland's industrialisation and military expansion programs would be carried out under a bourgeois democratic government, with the country being able to resist the siren call of fascism and maintain their republican norms of statesmanship. However, Finland had significant worries; Finland had once been a part of the Russian Empire and there were significant voices within the Soviet Union that all former parts of the Russian empire should rejoin the USSR. The military cooperation with the Communist American Union only deepened fears of Soviet aggression, especially as Trotskyist doctrines of permanent and international revolution replaced Stalinist ideas of Socialism in one country. Finland would generally prefer to produce license built equipment or buy such equipment from abroad, with Sweden, Germany, and Britain being its primary partners in this regard; with France and Italy being distant fourth and fifth places and the Finns being generally unimpressed by most of the equipment offered by the Japanese with some minor exceptions. Within the Finnish military brass was the question of whether to adopt an offensive or a defensive strategy. Defensive strategies would suit Finnish strengths well, especially with the vast disparity in population with the enemy. However, offensive strategies would keep the fighting away from Finland proper and would be able to threaten enemy centres of production and perhaps even press some Finnish territorial claims. And of course, there was the advantage of having the initiative.

Coded transmissions and secret talks with Germany and Italy however, would determine Finland's path. Talks with the chiefs of Fascism in Europe made it clear that the forces of reaction would be on the attack, not on the defence. After some debate within the Finnish military, the decision to be on the offence was made final when the Finnish civilian government acquiesced to Soviet territorial demands for Karelia. Now not only was the doctrine decided, but the Causus Belli had been found as well. The war would be not only for Finland's safety, but also vengeance for yet another insult from the Russians and their allies in the new world.

By the time the war started in 1940, the Swedish military had gone from being a largely self defence oriented force to an expansive military machine meant to construct Birger's dreamed of "Nordarikki". Finland was similarly prepared for war.

.......

Following the cancellation of operation Valkyrie and Ragnar with Axis lines stopping at the gates of Moscow, the Swedo-Finnic coalition was now occupying large portions of Northern Europe. Swedish forces in tandem with their German counterparts now had Denmark and Norway under their control with puppets being established to give the illusion of choice to their "Nordic brethren". However, the three primary objectives of the far northern Axis forces; Murmansk, Leningrad, and Arkhangelsk, remained maddeningly out of reach of fascist forces.

Leningrad's defenses were just a little too stubborn for either Axis army group North to the south or the Finno-Swedish first army group to the north to overrun. Despite the brutality of the blockade over the city, just enough supplies managed to reach the city to keep the hope of resistance alive. Bombing raids were met with intercceptor sorties and frustratingly adequetely provisioned anti-aircraft batteries, naval shelling sorties were met with powerful coastal batteries at Leningrad proper and at Kronstadt island, naval bombing strikes, sea mines, and the still active Soviet Baltic fleet which ensured that German, Swedish, and Finnish ships still had to exercise caution. Artillery would be responded to in kind from land and air, and attempts to punch through the defence lines and finish the fight were continually repulsed.

Constant attempts to close the Murmansk supply route were just as constantly rebuffed by General Oliver Law who kept a more or less permanent guard over the Murmansk supply corridor. The American and Soviet navies made sure to keep watch over the arctic and even the bravest of military formations balked at the proposition of facing naval artillery and naval airpower that kept guard over the white sea and arctic ocean coast.

The efforts to reach Arkhangelsk were fraught with supply issues due to the great distances involved. At their closest, Arkhangelsk was close enough to be the target of a number of bombing raids; but the Comintern was well aware of the city's strategic importance and wily mobile defenses continually ensured the city remained just out of reach.

Fighting in these conditions was difficult. Winters were long and bitterly cold periods with the fighting on the Kola Peninsula being annually plunged into complete darkness and summers were almost completely lacking in a true "night." Such conditions required adjustments of many combat tactics to deal with either twenty four hour days or nights. Infiltration tactics were significantly more difficult to enact during the summer due to the midnight sun, while winter tactics had to be adjusted not only for extreme cold but also pervasive, all day long darkness. Formations raised from Alaska who were already acclimated to such conditions were thus highly useful to American commanders in the region, being used to functioning in such extreme environments.

Soviet forces in the area used the stalling of enemy attacks to learn from mistakes, retrain, regroup, and refresh themselves in preparation for the inevitable resumption of enemy offensives once the winter snows began to melt and the ground hardened following the spring thaw. Continual skirmishes were a proving ground to test theories of combat and important for keeping informed about enemy formations and movements on the other side of the lines in the deep snows.

These scouts would gain the first hints of something beastly occurring in Sweden however, as Sami refugees began to stumble their way through the snow in an attempt to flee the start of the final solution in Sweden. In a meeting between the heads of the Nazi parties of Germany and Sweden, it was agreed that the Sami were to be considered "untermensch" to be exterminated to clear their living spaces for Nordic settlement and resource exploitation. Though repression of the nomadic Sami people had begun as early as the assumption of absolute power by the Swedish Nazi party, extermination would only begin in winter 1941-1942 as these undesireables were being rounded up. The infirm were to be exterminated in specialised camps for the task, the healthy would instead be sent to factories to be worked until they were no longer as such;Comi upon which they would be transferred to extermination camps in northern Sweden.

The Jewish population of Scandinavia would also suffer the same fate, as would known leftist activists whether Communists, Anarchists, or Feminists, the disabled, those deemed to be "sexually deviant", and others not fitting the vision of a pure Scandinavia.

In a detestable act of "Aryan friendship", Sweden cooperated extensively with German officials in designing the final solution and ensuring that there would be no escape for those who were marked for slavery and extermination. Sweden's death camps would be designed with the aid of German Engineers and its factories were directly modeled after German fordist industries to be prisons as much as they were places of work.

The Sami; being the farthest from Swedish centers of power were perhaps the best able to flee. Some chose to flee to Finland, in the hopes that its still democratic government would be able to resist pressure from Sweden and Germany to give up its populations of "undesirables", while others braved the trip to the Soviet Union proper. Though most were not particularly aware of the magnitude of the final solution's efforts, the reports of atrocities they made were quickly publicised, though with liberating those camps a distant dream, direct evidence was difficult to acquire and reports were often disbelieved in the Liberal Democracies of Europe.

Swedish troops for their part, were widely reported to be just as savage as their German counterparts in their treatment of civilians. Mass rapes of women in occupied territories or of female POWs were widely recorded and almost never punished, looting was outright encouraged by the officers with a system being set up to sent stolen goods back home to their families, grotesque reprisals for Partisan activity were the norm, POWs would be sent to work to death or were simply executed if they were not fit for work, and outbreaks of violence such as the rape of Petrozavodotsk were rarely punished. Counterattacks made in the winter did drive back the Swedes and the Finns, but their expertise in winter warfare made them more difficult to dislodge than their German counterparts in the far north, with bitter fighting leading to the deaths or capture of about twenty thousand swedes and ten thousand finns for the loss of twenty thousand Americans and twenty five thousand Soviets. A further twenty thousand Americans and twenty thousand Soviets were wounded; to about ten thousand Finns and an equivalent number of Swedes. The operational art had yet to be fully developed, and the pressing need for armour to the south left a deficiency for the fighting in the north in these assets.

Once the rains started to clear, Marshal Eric af Edholm made his thrust towards Arkhangelsk in earnest, intending to try and take the city or at the very least cut off Murmansk once and for all. He amassed a force of some two hundred thousand Swedish soldiers and one hundred thousand Finnish troops for this task, amassing them into the "Rus" Army. Accompanying them would be two divisions of the Waffen SS from the Wiking corps, thirty thousand "volunteered" Norwegians, and fifty thousand "recruited" Danes. This scheme, labeled "operation Gustavus Adolphus" would be mirrored by offensives aimed at Murmansk with a smaller force of about fifty thousand swedes, fifty thousand finns, twenty thousand "volunteered" Norwegians, and a German and an Italian Alpine division, and attempts to tighten the noose around Leningrad with already present forces.

The first attacks of operation Gustavus would occur on June 17th, 1942 at roughly 5:00 AM with a series of bombardments from air and via artillery before the lead elements of the attack; namely those Nordic forces fortunate enough to be motorized, mechanized, or armored; pushed through. The entry of Petainist National France into the war on the side of the Axis was a coup for Axis intelligence; as data gathered from raids on Allied and Comintern embassies in Italy, France, and Sweden before their declarations of war on their respective combatants had given them access to large samples of diplomatic code and encipherment tables to work with. This intelligence had informed Eric of a weak point in the enemy lines at Kargopol; where Comintern forces were in the process of transferring towards Kholmogory.

The attack sought to exploit this as thoroughly as possible with a heavy and rapid thrust lead by the first Swedish armoured division into the weakened parts of the line with the intent of pushing towards Arkhangelsk as soon as possible and letting the rest of the enemy wither on the vine. It was in its own way, a form of deep battle, but the Comintern was quicker to rally than the Fascists anticipated. General Saren McConnell*, America's first female general, having transferred to the region; mobilized her assets in tandem with Soviet General Shaposhikov to form a quick defense against the onslaught of soldiery pouring through the Kargopol breach.

A tank commander first and foremost, Saren mobilised her armoured assets to try and draw out the armour of her enemies into engagements that would leave the infantry exposed to her assault guns to freely fire upon while a flight of Sturmoviks was mobilised to try and take on any formations that had been deprived of their self propelled anti-air support by heavy assault gun fire. She banked on her enemy underestimating her as a commander; based on intelligence reports that Eric considered her a "feeble minded fool" due to her sex and believed her troops to be demoralised due to having to take orders from a woman, thus encouraging his "hunters" to chase down her combat units and annihilate them so as to open the road to Arkhangelsk.

There was a certain logic to the Swedish plans; Sweden's greatest military glories in its past were won by a doctrine of extreme aggression and ruthlessly seeking out the enemy's strength to destroy it to ensure that nothing could be left to threaten the path to an objective. With a historical manpower disadvantage against most of its enemies, it could not afford to stretch itself to hold onto all possible territory, and had to instead build its power and its victories upon smashing the enemy's ability to win itself. America was an economic juggernaut to dwarf any other nation in the world, and the Soviet Union itself had vast industries, but the Americans were operating at the end of a supply chain stretching across the entirety of the arctic under constant threat by surface raiders, naval bombers, and submarines. Destroying these forces would represent a loss to the entirety of America's eastern European command.

Lastly of course, there was the simple condition of victory disease. In 1942 the Axis' ambitions were at their peak. The French had joined the cause, in South America the Integralists were at the high tide of their successes with Columbia having all but fallen and the other comintern members pushed to the edge, the Japanese were rampaging seemingly unstoppably across the Indian and Pacific oceans with the Socialist Chinese in full retreat and their forces menacing Vladivostok to the point of closing supply routes, Germany and its thralls had penetrated deep into the Soviet Union's south and were pouring into the Caucasus while Italy chased Britain out of the Mediterranean and aided Falangist spain in crushing the red remnant. Victory was, to the Axis powers; so close they could taste it. One final effort would win them the war and see all of the old world and South America under their control to prepare for the final conflict with America.

Though this belief was founded upon fallacy and a misreading of the fortunes of the war, the Comintern forces in the Arkhangelsk oblast were under no illusions about what was at stake. While naval firepower kept the Swedes and Finns from getting too close to the coast and left a corridor open from Murmansk to Arkhangeslk, the seizure of either would represent a devastating blow to Comintern logistics. With Vladivostok closed to shipping due to the hostilities with Japan, the loss of the arctic route would mean all supplies to the soviet union would have to go through Iran, which would have required an immensely long Atlantic and Indian ocean voyage under continual threat by Axis submarines and raiders.

With this in mind, the Comintern structured their tactics to focus on the SPAA assets of the enemy were themselves advised by the lethality of enemy anti-aircraft having taught many pilots a hard lesson in previous years of fighting. The German 20mm flak cannons were supplemented not only by heavier 88 and 105mm guns or even 128mms carried by the "Waffentraggerized" Strv H/39s but by the lethal Swedish 40mm bofors autocannon that had repeatedly shredded those aircraft who sought to set up strafing runs against Axis troops. In this period of the war where air superiority was not guaranteed in the face of the Axis air fleets, any extra safety for the airmen and women of the Red armies was welcomed.

The first tank engagements of this counteroffensive would take place outside of Khargopol as units of the 33rd "Scylla's teeth" All women's Tank battallion encountered the lead elements of the first bepansrade corps. The light tanks and armoured cars from the two formations would engage in an initial skirmish before the T-4 and StrV m/40s of the opposing armoured formations joined in the conflict. Right on cue as the Strv H/39s started to arrive, the Americans feigned a retreat towards the south, drawing away Swedish armoured support determined to destroy the American vehicles wherever possible.

Shaposhikov had a number of tank destroyers in waiting alongside more visible T-34s and KV-1s, and the Swedes were met with the shock of Soviet anti-armour fire striking them as they attempted to catch up to the Americans who shifted into flanking positions to entrap their nordic enemies.

Infantry forces would be "demotorised" by heavy usage of "bazooka" and anti-materiel rifle fire to force enemy soldiers to dismount off of whatever trucks or Half-tracks they were using while the assault guns rolled into position under the cover of self-propelled artillery fire. The "Stalin's organ" roar of "Katyushas" would join the "song" of artillery cannons firing as shells rained down upon the Swedes and finns before mobile infantry assets would dismount and engage their enemies.

The Swedes' most politically loyal units were filled with contempt for the largely female forces of General Saren and the Slavic and Central asian troops under Shaposhikov, filled with a sense of Aryan and Male chauvinist invincibility in the face of their enemies. Such arrogance would not avail them well as their anti-air assets were worn down and the go ahead was given to tactical bombers and ground attack planes to start their attack runs on their enemies. While fighters peeled off to ward off interceptors, bombs and cannon fire would stitch the ground, quickly defusing much of the momentum of the Swedish offensive.

However the Nordic forces were managing gains farther north; securing bridgeheads across the river and were confirmed to be moving in to try and catch the rear of Shaposhikov and Saren's soldiers. Rocket and cannon fire from enemy troops was a general estimate of their position as they moved under the cover of a creeping barrage, but the sight of almost a hundred tanks moving to try and assail Saren's command position directly would be the rallying call for the heavy tankers of the 39th Medusae and the 77th Heavy tank guard's battalion to form a rapid line. The heavy armour of the T-5s and the KV-1s would resist shot after shot, giving lie to Axis myths of Comintern inferiority of armour while the enemy's own heavy tanks would be met with heavy suppressive fire from rocket artillery forces to prevent them from finding their equals on the comintern formation.

Despite being outnumbered by almost two to one, the defending Comintern tanks saw off the assault and pushed the Swedish forces northwards. However further victory was not in the cards as the enemy's reinforcements began to arrive, forcing the counter-offensive to come to a halt and the lines to be drawn at the river. Recognising that her objective was to simply make sure that Arkhangelsk's supply lines would remain open, Saren and her Soldiers' Soviets came to the agreement that pressing further would not be advised, and settled into a gradual back and forth meatgrinder as the good campaigning weather started to give way to the arctic cold once again. However, the forces of far northern command would use this time to train, amass reinforcements, and prepare for the coming battles of 1943.

*Fictional person

 

[The_Red_Star_Rising]

Weird weapons of world war II Part I

Excerpt from Strange Ideas for a Strange War, by General Ramaeshwara Mallaya, published by Indian Military Academy, 2002

The second world war was humanity's most intense ever conflict, leaving almost no corner of the earth unscathed by at least some form of warfare. It was a conflict that saw many desperate projects being readied in the hopes of changing the tide of the war in one direction or the other or lessening the immensity of the challenge facing the Allies, Comintern, or Axis*. With the declassification of many wartime records by the Blair government, we can examine for the first time a number of secret projects drawn up by the three warring alliances.

.....

Uberpanzerkampfwagen II "Mammut"

The famed "mammoth tank" bridges the gap between the even larger P.1000 Ratte and the lighter superheavy tank projects such as the Panzerkampfwagen 100 Smilodon, the Panzerkampfwagen VII Lowe, the Mastiff**, the Vk 72.01 (K) and the Panzerkampfwagen VIII/Uberpanzerkampfwagen I Maus project. The prototypes constructed weighed in at a staggering three hundred and seventy one tonnes and had to be driven by engines designed for warships (appropriated for use by the land army with the Kriegsmarine growing feebler with each passing day) with a tested top speed of about twenty kilometers per hour, though such figures must keep in mind that the vehicle was slow to accelerate and hard to stop once in motion.

Such was necessary to carry forth a vehicle designed to carry not one, but two one hundred and seventy milimeter guns equipped with a new automatic loader system to ease the herculean task of loading these "mammoth's tusks", while two twin bofors autocannons, one to each side made the "ears" of the tank (though one of the prototypes instead opted to fit rocket launchers, inspiring the Mammoth tank of Rise and Revolt fame), meant to sweep away aircraft that the pintle-mounted quad 20mm autocannon could not. A pair of 13.2mm machine guns would form the coaxial weaponry of the behemoth and hull mounted guns were decided against to ensure that the tank's armour thickness would not be compromised.

The armour plate was casted with the same techniques used in battleship construction, with the frontal upper glacis coming out to a monumental three hundred and eighty milimeters of angled armor and the frontal turret being roughly as thick, with even more armour being fitted over the mantlet. Even the lower glacis plate was as thick as the Smilodon's upper glacis plate. The side armour averaged out to roughly 280 milimeters of armour, and the rear came in at two hundred milimeters on average. Added spaced armour was fitted onto the tank to resist HEAT and provide some extra defense in general, with "sandwhich" plates being fitted on to serve as extra ablative armour. Even the top and bottom armour came out to triple digit average thickness.

The intention was to render the tank impervious to even the six inch anti-tank guns being used by the comintern or the heaviest of tank destroyer weapons in use by the allies; including the 183mm "bunker buster" cannon in use by late war Allied forces. The heavy top armour would render the tank immune to strafing runs with machine guns and autocannons and simply shrug off PTABs or aircraft mounted rockets, and the tank's sheer weight would prevent nearby bomb blasts from overturning the vehicle. Small arms anti-tank weapons such as the PIAT or the Bazooka would be, to the hopes of the designers; wholly ineffectual and the tank would be able to simply ignore mines with the sturdiness of its tracks and its thick bottom armour.

Designed in the face of the increased deployment of Allied and Comintern new generation heavy tanks such as the Vladimir Lenin, the American "heavy tank destroyers", and the British Cairn and the Abwehr gaining information of even more formidable vehicles being on the horizon; some real such as the Chamberlain, the Spartacus, and the VL-3, others exaggerated to induce fear such as the TD-28 "Doom turtle" or even outright fabricated such as the Vickers "Land Dreadnought"; the Mammut was intended to be the final say in armoured warfare. A symbol of excess so grand as to make even the Smilodon seem paltry and to exceed even the Maus and Lowe projects that lost out to the Smilodon's design in competitions. More "practical" than the Ratte project in the sense that wishing for a Unicorn is more realistic than wishing for a Pegasus, the Mammut had some fierce enemies such as Speer, Guderian, and Ford and some die hard fans such as Porsche, Heydrich, and Himmler. Hitler would weigh in on the project by approving a "trial production" of a limited number of vehicles to see if there was any merit to the design.

In total, twenty two of the vehicles were completed by war's end, not including seven Jagdmammuts and four GWE Mammuts, a trio of Waffentrager Mammuts (whose surrealist armament must be seen at Bovington, Kublinka, or the AAF museum to be believed), and a pair of Mammut recovery vehicles. That these vehicles were constructed at all speaks to the lack of concern that Nazi germany had for the conditions endured by its slave labourers, and none of the figures given for the estimated number of workers who slaved away in their hellish underground factory in Bavaria sit easy in the consciousness.

The service histories of the vehicles read like comedy. Specially made trains meant to service railway cannons had to be utilised to transport them anywhere and unloading them was a tremendous challenge. The sheer weight of the vehicle meant that only specially vetted bridges had a hope of carrying the vehicle across, and crews complained of minor injuries inflicted by the autoloaders with breath-taking regularity. The enormous amounts of fuel consumed limited their movement almost as much as their lack of mobility itself or the maintenance issues suffered by its final drive and transmission systems. In actual combat, the Tank was not quite as effective as was hoped. The twin cannons were awkward to aim and the enormous turret's rotation was loud enough to be easily audible, making it readily apparent when the vehicle was aiming.

The armour plating may have been thick beyond all measure, but often sections of the plate would be made with steel of mediocre quality that allowed for dangerous cracking and spalling or even shattering as was seen in two cases, one by a direct impact by an American 240mm howitzer on a self propelled gun, and another by a 183mm British HESH round. The bofors were finnicky to aim at aircraft and the remote control and periscopes were often complained about

Most of the vehicles would survive the war, being surrendered with the fall of Germany or being captured after being abandoned or when their crews surrendered after the vehicle itself was surrounded. These overweighted monstrosities proved to be a challenge in and of themselves to move for testing or examination, and some would not be moved from the places they were captured until some time after the war when heavy equipment could be spared from the German reconstruction. The surviving examples are often centerpieces of the Museums that house them, and most have been kept in running order to sally out for the occasional tank show.

.....

Project Habakkuk

The British "boffins" as they were often called were nothing if not inventive. While the superweapon project that got the most funding by a wide margin was the Atomic bomb project, virtually anything and everything that at least seemed to comply to the laws of physics was given at least some attention by the British military in its quest to prepare for war with America and the Soviet Union and then try to win the war with the Axis Powers. One of the more outlandish products of this was the Habakkuk pykrete carrier project.

The basic idea behind this was that in event of world war, the air fields needed to carry bomber command's mighty four engined planes might not always be available for one reason or another, and creating an aircraft carrier large enough to carry a bomber wing and its fighter escorts while still having the dive and torpedo bombers needed to engage naval opponents out of metal would have required obscene amounts of steel needed for expanding the royal navy. However, experiments with Pykrete, a form of ice impregnated with pulp, found that it was astonishingly resilient against weapons fire and plenty buoyant. Thus the idea to construct a "mobile glacier" was approved by the admiralty.

The design called for a ship that weighed some two million long tons and would have made a ship more than twice as long as any other carrier in service in any navy and been able to service two hundred aircraft simultaneously. The motors installed would have propelled the ship at some six knots while the ship's own buoyancy and the meters thick nature of its construction would render most conventional means of sinking it nearly useless. Refrigerators within the vessel would keep it and any sisters built solid and cold even in warmer weather conditions, and repairs were envisioned to be an incredible simple matter of simply melting more Pykrete into place or replacing destroyed blocks.

However, the project had its critics who argued that the enormous amounts of pulp needed would negatively affect the paper industry, that the ship's need for wiring and refrigeration and metal hangar space would make its "cheapness" no such thing indeed, that its lack of speed would make it a liability for a fleet and turn it into an easy target for submarines, and its constantly cold conditions would make it demoralising and unpleasant to serve aboard. Others argued that greater air coverage would be better served by constructing more conventional carriers; including light and escort carriers who would be able to offer protection to convoys or provide air cover to fleets not graced by a full fleet carrier, while the need for heavy bombers and their fighter escorts would be better answered by simply working to improve the range of the bombers and their escort fighters.

.....

General Overview: Transcontinental Bombers

The lead up to the second world war created the acute realisation of both the power of air attack and the great distances that would likely be involved. All of the factions involved in the war had need of some extremely long ranged bomber with which to rain down destruction upon a distant foe. America had its sights on Europe, South America, and Japan, Japan on the Americas, deep in China, and Europe, Germany, France, and Italy, on the Americas and the Urals, Britain on potential enemies everywhere on Earth.

Of all the designers of bombers in the war, Britain had perhaps the least pressing need for extremely long ranged bombers. The world wide nature of the British empire and its web of allies and clients meant that bomber command could have an air field near just about any potential enemy with perhaps only the inner Soviet Union, China, and a hostile Japan being problematic to reach. Still, interest in bombers that could reach the Urals in case of a war with the Comintern created interest in developing longer and longer ranged bombers, with secondary design objectives being to put the entirety of the UASR within the envelope of bomber squadrons and to have bombers ready to strike at Japan or China from the Philippines (and India for the latter case) should the need arise.

America faced the issue of a very long supply chain between itself and its allies, and smashing the enemy's means of production to provide support to the Soviet Union, the Latin Confederation, and China in case the time had come to conquer the capitalist world even while busy with conflict in North America and the Atlantic and Pacific were devised. Of these ultra-long ranged bomber programs, America's was perhaps the most mature, with the B-23 being able to reach deep into Sweden or Germany from Iceland with a full bomb load, and from the seizure of Taiwan and Okinawa, could also bomb Japan itself, and in the time of the B-23's service that the Union was still at war with Brazil, engaged in a number of bombing runs upon the integralist nation.

Japan was thoroughly convinced that its great war for its survival and destiny would be with America, which in turn necessitated conflict with the Soviet Union. Japanese goals for Empire also necessitated some form of belligerence with France, Britain, and the Netherlands, whether it was simply "convincing" them to let go of some territories for Japanese control or outright conquest. This also meant that a bomber capable of reaching into India was a necessity, and Japan's conflict with China also brought about the desire for a bomber to reach deep into China. Japan's Zaibatsu would be only too happy to accept the money for these programs, however outlandish their demands, and a number of bizarre designs; including an eight engined project that was meant to fly from Japan over America, drop its payload, then continue its way to Germany and land there before re-arming and then making the same flight back to Japan; were trialed. The closest Japan ever got to such bombers though, were those created by the Nakajima company and its "balloon bomb" project, where explosives were tethered to hydrogen balloons lifted to catch reliable jet streams to the American west coast in the hopes of spreading chaos with their detonations.

Germany's luftwaffe had entire design divisions dedicated to the question of creating an "Amerikabomber" and an "Uralbomber". Hitler demanded some means of raining destruction upon America and into the very depths of the Soviet hinterland and was willing to pour vast amounts of funds into their design. A laundry list of designs ranging from the rather conventional such as planned upgrades to the He 277 to the outright bizarre such as the Horton H.XVIII were proposed throughout the Luftwaffe's lifetime and as the war with the world continued to escalate. Despite the chaos and mismanagement of the German atomic bomb program, a bomber capable of carrying such an explosive was also deemed a necessity, as German commanders believed that to bring America to its knees would require more than simply conventional explosives delivered by bombers. Later war designs even called for the usage of jet engines to enhance the speed of the bombers and their maximum altitude, so as to minimise the risk of interception when designing any sort of escort for these planes would be a monumental challenge in and of itself.



*A common canard among the more partisan parts of the Comintern or Alliance is to explicitly consider the Allies and Comintern as separate co-belligerents against the Axis rather than unified under the United Nations banner.
**OTL's Lowe

Author's notes: The other two are less than half finished for the time being, but will be added to as is convenient. The mammut is still open to being edited though.

 

[The_Red_Star_Rising]

Partisanleid - The underground war, Part I

Excerpts from the selected works of Josip Broz Tito

The map the fascists always liked to show was a map covered in the deepest black, grey, orange, or green. A solid, invincible bloc of terror that subsumed vast stretches of the world from Africa, to South America, to Europe, to Asia. But beneath this blanket was the fiercest resistance. The fascists of the gangs of Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito, and Salgado sought to rule with fear to break the will of the people but only created great armies of the people to resist them at every turn. No one would simply surrender to the Fascist horde's conquest without some form of struggle against them, and every attempt to repress the resistance with further terror only stiffened its resolve. Whether of a liberal or a socialist sort, millions would take up arms in secret armies as important to victory as the tanks and bombers of the great nations of the world.

Yugoslavia

In our own Yugoslavia, fascist oppression would come in its rawest form in the 1939 invasion. Unprepared and surrounded, the King's armies were swift to fall even with the unpleasantness of the weather. The sort of resistance that the Serbs had given to the Austrians and the Bulgarians in the last war was not possible, and the invasion was declared finished in a matter of weeks. The Italians helped themselves to the lions share of the conquest, declaring their conquests their "province of Illyria" while the fascists established a puppet state of Croatia to help manage their conquest until the time would come that the likes of Pavelic would be no longer needed. The Mussolinist bandits it must be said, were no less cruel or harsh than their German counterparts. Their contempt for movements of people's liberation was open, their disgust at the "lower culture" of the lands they now ruled was not concealed.

The Germans would take Slovenia, Italy would seize much of the South,, while Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary were rewarded for their perfidy with their claims to what had been the Kingdom's lands. However, as the resistance to fascist occupation stiffened in Yugoslavia these zones of occupations would blur as the fascist mobsters scrambled to keep the will of the people contained and confined. But first for the Yugoslav people was the need to build a movement. Many were tempted to build movements of only ethnic, of simply national liberation. These groups divided themselves along the lines of ethnicity and linguistics, such as the Chetniks who struggled for Serbian liberation and Serbian liberation alone. This tactic was all but welcomed by the invaders, who delighted in every dagger planted into the back of a partisan by those who should be their fellows in the name of nation and race. Divided into nations, the resistance would only fall divided.

The royalists and pans-slavic nationalists had some more coherency to their efforts at building a wide front, but still they struggled to create a broad resistance to the Fascist occupation. The issue of religion dogged many of those who sought to build such a movement, as they could not bridge the gap between Orthodox, Catholic, Muslim, Jew, and Atheist with the generally Orthodox character of pan-slavism and the Royalty. The liberals, bereft of an external source of aid in those days of Liberal collaboration with the Fascists, would wither in time without external aid.

Only the socialists had the means to unite all disparate resistance forces. Not divided by questions of religion, nation, language, race, or sex the people's movement had the advantage of being open to all. It mattered not who one was, so long as they had a dream of freedom and equality and were willing to fight for it. And we would not be alone, the Americans and the Soviets would offer us what help they could, even in those bleak days of the war when the front line was thousands of kilometers removed from Yugoslavia and hope itself seemed to be a most precious resource. Risky air drops of advisers and supplies were made despite the risk, and even this deep into the heart of fascist Europe there were those willing to help the cause.

From this seed would come the blossom of the partisans in Yugoslavia. The army's retreat had left many guns to be taken by those who had the resources and the perseverance to find them and there were always some means of acquiring more bullets or explosives. The high mountains and the deep forests of the Balkans offered safe places to train fighters away from the prying eyes of the legions of the fascist gangsters. With the country and the cities in the hands of the invaders, there could be no abiding of talk of "restrictions", anyone who was fit to hold and fire a gun or throw a grenade was a valued comrade, and chauvinist ideals of the place of women and idealist concepts of the role of children vanished. Often whole families, from the children to the elders would join as fighters; ensuring none could be threatened by the jackals of the Fascists should worst come to worst.

Others committed themselves to the hard and unglamorous tasks of securing supplies whether by theft or by manufacture, or the securing of information by any means. Eavesdropping, spywork, and even prostitution to hear any reliable loose talk were employed in the struggle to gain eyes and ears on the movement of the enemy. If a drunken blackshirt at a bar with one of our agents in attendance spoke of a column of Piats moving through the roads before the mountains at dusk, we would be aware in time to move cells out of the way and even prepare an ambush should we have the supplies.

As in all movements of resistance came the need for terror, to disorganise and demoralise the enemy's forces and to address the question of collaborators who were willing to sell out their comrades for a few pence more to live on. Such words will doubtlessly shock the delicate sensibilities of my Liberal comrades reading this, and I will be the first to say that it is easy to pass moral judgements on a resistance movement when you yourself have not known a hostile army on your shores in a thousand years. The terror of the fascist gangster is a terror meant to cement the rule of a hated outsider or to crush some despised but weak other. The terror of a revolutionary movement is meant to challenge the bastions of power and disorganise aristocratic or bourgeois terrorists. Kindness cannot stop tanks or clip the wings of planes.

The commencement of the war in the Soviet Union and the eruption of a true world war would at first seem like an event of little note. In the process of amassing the hordes with which to invade the first revolutionary state of the world, the gangsters would have already moved millions of their best troops to the border with the Soviets to launch their perfidy and thus moved them out of Yugoslavia to leave us to deal with their military police and rear guards. However, the news that our struggle had become a global one brought hope even when the beasts of Hitler were seemingly triumphant in every battle. We were no longer so alone.

However, as we have mentioned before, we were still very far indeed from any route of supply. We were struggling for munitions, funding, and weapons and so had to resort to all of the most underhanded tactics imaginable so as to keep ourselves in supply. To train a person for marksmanship is something that requires an ample supply of bullets. To procure supplies would require money and ample amounts of it with which to purchase what we desired from channels both deemed legal by our occupiers without their knowledge and through the black market that grew in the underbelly of the the occupied lands. Money also found its uses in bribery, an important means of acquiring informants, agents, or turning the eyes of the enemy away from our operations, and so every scrap that could be acquired was placed under the control of the movement so that its usage could be planned for the highest efficiency.

...

 

[The_Red_Star_Rising]

On the Last Ballad of the Karl der Große and the reconsideration of desperate measures once times stop being desperate

The Karl der Große was the last and greatest battleship constructed by Germany in the war. The last of the plan Z battleships to be completed, the ship was meant to be the first of a class of monstrous superheavy battleships that would help carry the German Fleet to victory over America in Hitler's planned invasion of the UASR. Funding issues and the need for an entirely new shipyard to build it however, meant that the ship was not ready in time to join the Frederick, the Tirpitz, and the Bismarck in their doom off the shores of iceland. Following the disastrous battle which none of the German capital ships survived, most of the planned follow up capital ships were never commissioned. However, the Karl was already launched, and would be ready to be commissioned in 1943. At the time of its commissioning, the ship was one of the largest man made vehicles ever constructed. Fitting four turrets with the largest guns ever fitted onto a German ship with special superheavy AP rounds, a bristling array of dual purpose and secondary battery guns, and a massive array of 40mm bofors autocannons and 20mm autocannons, the ship was meant to be the lead of a class of at least five other ships. However it would remain the "lonely queen of the Baltic", rarely deigning to venture much farther west than the coast of Norway and always with a "royal" escort of some number of Panzerschliffes, Cruisers, and Destroyers and often ships of the Swedish and Finnish navies despite numerous attempts by the Comintern and the Allies to try and provoke it into a duel, even by the rather ironically named Free French battleship Charlemagne. For years the most adventure it would seek would be to occasionally venture near Leningrad to fire off some shells in support of the Heer and Waffen SS before retreating, at most engaging in a few indecisive gun duels with the Soviet baltic fleet before scurrying away again.

However, as a fleet in being, the ship represented a clear and present danger to operations in the Baltic and the Royal Navy was extremely hesitant to launch any landings on Norway so long as it and the still formidable force of cruisers, panzerschliffes, and destroyers was active to threaten the landing. Attempts to sink it with Tallboy bombs dropped by British heavy bombers had all ended in failure. Heavy 12.8, 15cm and 17cm flak guns and high altitude interceptors were simply too dangerous for the bombers to penetrate and Bomber command was not willing to keep on sacrificing bombers to try and deal with a single wiley target. With the liberation of France underway and Comintern forces struggling to push through the baltic, there was a strong push to try and draw German strength elsewhere and finally push Sweden out of the war. Thus, Admirals Kutnetzov and Jean-Marie Charles Abrial of the Soviet and Free French fleets hatched a plan to be carried out in May of 1945. The carriers Jeanne D'arc and Ferdinand Foch and the only natively Soviet built carrier in the Baltic; the Ushakov would serve as bait; their job was not to sink the Karl however, but to lure it and its three Swedish counterparts; the battlecruiser Gustavus Adolphus, Ragnar Lothbrok, and Carolus Rex; into a gun duel at the straits of Denmark with the battleships Charlemagne, Stal'naya, Vladimir Lenin, and Sovietsky Soyuz and the Kronstadt class supercruiser and keep the Luftwaffe away while the cruisers Henri IV and Moskva would lead their cruiser wings to engage the enemy's Panzerschliffes and Cruisers.

Upon confirmation that the ship was moored in Stockholm, the French and Soviet fleets departed from their bases and made the perilous trip into the zone of the trap. The U-boat scourge had been severely weakened yes, and even the Kriegsmarine's torpedo boats now had largely relegated themselves to just trying to dissuade any further landings on German territory and the Luftwaffe was a shadow of what it once was; but getting the enemy ship into position was key, if they were detected too far away the Germans might have enough time to retreat back to a nearby port before the other fleet could arrive and seal them off. Screens of destroyers and light cruisers went ahead to sweep the area for any u-boats that might spoil the surprise, and long ranged fighters from America and Britain conducted air superiority sweeps to make sure the luftwaffe stayed out of everyone's hair.

At 0832 hours, the Soviet Submarine Kursk confirmed that the Swedish and the German fleets were departing from their bases to confront the Soviet Baltic fleet after a false leak of intelligence "warned" the Germans of a planned Soviet thrust into Scandinavia by sea, replete with troop transport ships. German Admiral Boehm and Swedish Admiral Lindstrom marshalled much of what ships they could spare without leaving their coastlines wholly defenseless, even bringing in the assorted Swedish coastal defense panzerschliffes in an attempt to bulk up their numbers. However, the newly readied Moskva class cruiser which had been built even in the midst of the siege of Leningrad was designed with the explicit intent of facing and defeating such panzerschliffes, mounting powerful 220mm guns firing high velocity super heavy shells that would be able to punch through the armour of the panzerschliffes and wreak havoc in their citadels, while the French cruiser mounting 240mm guns had been outfitted in such a way to deal with Panzerschliffes as early as Germany began to construct them.

The Soviet destroyer Khabarovsk would be the first to spot the enemy fleet at 0941 hours, Captain Nikolai Wrangel seeing the destroyer Z-43 emerge through an early morning mist. The 130mm guns of the Soviet Destroyer fleet opened up immediately in an attempt to catch their Germanic counterparts by surprise, the long barrelled weapons firing shells at a breath-taking rate to saturate the waters with artillery fire; holding off their torpedoes for more opportune targets. The German and Swedish destroyers' own 12.8 and 15cm guns retaliated with similar ferocity, both destroyer screens informing their larger counterparts that the battle had begun. The French; some thirty minutes away from gun range, held back their torpedo bombers for just a while longer, waiting until the surface ships could close the trap and make enemy maneuvers as difficult as possible before picking their targets. The Charlemagne would press forward to the front of the line, loading shells into its sixteen inch guns to be able to fire the moment a target solution had been acquired, and once its spotter aircraft located the Panzerschliffe Deustchland, its forward guns roared to life to announce the that the trap had been laid.

The Karl in the midst attempting to engage the Soviet Battleship Lenin; was surprised to find itself being fired upon from the west as French ships and the Stal'naya's battlegroup moved in to acquire their targets. The Lenin and the Soyuz were heavy battleships, built with the confined battlegrounds of the Baltic in mind and thus made to take a beating and return it with interest. Even against them, the Germanic fleet was doubting its chances in a gun duel thanks to the bitter lessons in the deficiencies in German armour layout that prior battles had taught the Kriegsmarine and the relative lightness of the Swedish ships who were more akin to the Scharnhorsts than actual heavy weights. But with three more battleships in the equation the balance of naval power was now very much not in the favour of the fascists. However, with torpedo bombers making their attack runs already there was no real means or chance of retreat without fighting their way back to port and attempting to turn and run in the midst of such a battle would likely end in disaster. Thus the only option open to Boehm was to try and gun the engines and make a dash to safer harbour in Denmark.

The first heavy weight casualty of the battle would be the Coastal Defense ship Drottning Victoria, which in the midst of attempting to turn to avoid torpedoes dropped by the bombers of the Jeanne D'arc, would find itself facing the torpedo tubes of the French Destroyer Bisson and was struck by a pair of torpedoes in the stern. Rapidly taking on water, the ship was met with further woes as the Henri IV's shells knocked out its rear turret and crippled its rudder before the Charlemagne struck the ship's bridge with an armour piercing shell and essentially decapitated the ship. The KMS Falkenhayne would be next, the cruiser finding itself in the eyes of the cruiser Medved. Desperately attempting to launch torpedoes to dissuade the Soviet cruiser, the sacrifice of the Minesweeper Baba would give the Medved enough time to start laying into the Falkenhayne. Burning on multiple decks due to repeated bombardment from the destroyers, the Falkenhayne's engine would be destroyed by a 220mm shell at 1001 hours, leaving it dead in the water. 130mm shells from the destroyers would follow up, causing multiple penetrations and destroying many subsystems before another volley from the Medved detonated the main ammunition of the Falkenhayne and tore the ship in half.

Caught by the guns of the massive Sovietsky Soyuz, the Panzerschliffe Admiral Scheer would be destroyed in less than ten minutes of concentrated fire after managing to sink the Soviet light cruiser Murmansk, wound the older heavy cruiser Leningrad, and damage the destroyer Gnevny. The first volley to hit from the Soyuz would tear into the forward turret of the Scheer and render it a crippled husk of metal from no less than three penetrations, the second volley missed, giving the Scheer enough time to attempt to retaliate with fire from its 280mm guns, one of which hit and glanced off the deck of the Soyuz. The second volley from the Soyuz to hit would come after a pair of 280mm shells bounced off its forwardmost turret face, this volley striking once in the rear and tearing open a gaping wound in the smaller ship as the Soyuz's secondaries began to open fire, pelting the deck of the Scheer with high explosives and armour piercing. Captain Ernst Schmidt would be killed by an explosion in the bridge from a secondary shell, and the third and final volley from the Soyuz would kill the engine, leaving the way to the Battlecruiser Gustavus and Ragnar open.

The Soyuz and Lenin fired first, 280mm shells from the lighter Swedish ship returning haphazardly amidst 150, 203 and 280mm shells from the smaller combatants. The Karl's own shells straddled the Lenin at 1015 hours, deciding to focus on the Soviet fleet as the French and the Stal'naya's battle groups were in the midst of trying to see off an attack by Torpedo boats and Luftwaffe maritime bombers and were being seen off by the Carolus Rex and even the impossibly ancient German Pre-Dreadnoughts Hannover, Schlesian, and Schleiswig-Holstein, pressed into an engagement long after they had been obsoleted in every meaningful sense of the term out of desperation. However, the north sea fleet rallied with surprising quickness and soon refocused its attention towards the destruction of the Axis fleet even as the Lenin was struck by a pair of shells that successfully penetrated from the Karl; causing significant damage in the bridge.

At 1025 hours, the Deustchland would finally be struck and sunk by dive bombers from the Jeanne D'arc after a strafing run by aircraft from the Foch had kept the Panzerschliffe's anti-aircraft crews busy with dealing with fires raging from a strike from the Charlemagne. The bombers pulled away from a brilliant detonation as secondary ammunition on the Panzerschliffe exploded, pulling away as the Stal'Naya's sixteen inch shells bit into and punched through the deck of the Hannover to avenge the destroyer Bleu as it founded from the Pre-dreadnought's withering secondaries. The meagre armament of the pre-dreadnought was woefully inadequete against a modern fast battleship, and even the guns of the heavy cruisers present were repeatedly punishing the ancient warship. Left blind and turning in circles from a crippled bridge and rudder, the warship was finally put out of its misery by the cruiser Charles Martel which managed to pierce into and largely destroy its citadel, sending the ship to the bottom.

The heavy 456mm shells of the Soyuz and Lenin were virtually unstoppable, the Ragnar; which had been hastily pressed into service with the space between launching and commission being under six months, was soon left dead in the water. The Ragnar's own 280mm shells were virtually useless against the two superheavy battleships, and the Ushakov's torpedo bombers would finish off the ship with no less than six torpedoes to the starboard side; sinking the ship in minutes. The coastal defense ship Gustav V would follow shortly after, torpedoed by the Khabarovsk after having been crippled by shells from the Soviet Cruiser line. However, the Karl itself was proving an elusive target as it steamed towards the Danish coast, with few shells finding their mark and those that did scoring off its thick armour as it presented a sharp angle to the enemy ships and few destroyer captains were willing to brave its secondary armament to try and strike the pride of the Kriegsmarine after two had been sunk trying.

The French light cruiser Babar would sink from heavy bombardment by German destroyers and punishing blows from the KMS Hindenburg, but the lead German destroyer responsible would not survive the attentions of no less than three other destroyers and two light cruisers; tearing the ship to pieces in minutes while dive bombers sank a nearby Swedish destroyer to clear the way for French destroyers to torpedo the Schlesein before it could try to escape; sending the old ship to a shallow grave in minutes after Dive bombers had lit much of its deck on fire. The Panzerschliffe Sigurdr, burning on multiple decks, made one last attempt to strike back at the enemy, destroying the Soviet cruiser Oktober with a magazine detonation and crippling the destroyer Malinovka before the Louis XIV gutted it with five penetrations from a single volley. The Schleisig-Holstein would be the last of the Pre-dreadnoughts to founder, trying to make use of the Luftwaffe sinking the destroyer Rouge in order to try and get close to the Stal'Naya. However, while the armour of most pre-dreadnoughts did fare better against flat trajectory shots than plunging fire and the all or nothing armour scheme of the battleship was meant to withstand plunging fire and not close ranged fire, these were still shells made for whole eras of naval warfare before the Stal'naya's commissioning, and the Stal'naya's superheavy shells were meant to go through much sterner stuff. At secondary gun battery range, the Stal'naya could hardly miss, and it took only two volleys from its main guns to render the last of the pre-dreadnoughts into a useless hulk of metal, the ship's corpse being ignored as the Stal'Naya moved on to finish off the Carolus Rex.

The Carolus Rex, though outmatched, was a stubborn fighter. Even with three heavier battleships focusing it down, it refused to go out without a fight, damaging several cruisers and scoring superficial hits on its enemies. Even the bombers of several aircraft carriers couldn't quite put the Carolus Rex down for good before it managed to destroy a destroyer that had wandered into its secondary range, and its secondaries were still firing every shot they could when the Franco-Soviet fleet was moving to close in on the Karl Der Grosse. The Carolus rex, no longer able to be steered properly from the damage it suffered, would end up "sinking" into extremely shallow waters at 1100 hours, with more than half of the ship being over the water, but with its multiple penetrations and raging fires it was as good as dead before it ever hit the sand.

The Gustavus Adolphus would then find itself against five battleships from both sides in its attempt to run ahead of its German counterpart. However the ship would find its engines knocked out within ten minutes of being focused down on, its turrets swiftly rendered non-functional, and Torpedo bombers finishing off the ship after a crippling dive bombing run. Splitting in half, the Gustavus' forward turret would fire a single volley of defiance before it disappeared beneath the waves, leaving the Karl as the last Axis battleship standing. The Karl faced withering fire from all sides and as many aircraft as could be dispatched against it. With its escorts withering away, the Karl had no choice but to make its final stand. Volley after volley was traded. For the conditions they faced, the ship fared admirably before the inevitable happened. Stricken in the rudder by a destroyer's torpedoes and having suffered multiple penetrations, the ship had inflicted injuries on many ships that had sought to close in to ensure it could not escape, even sinking some of the smaller ships and damaging the Soyuz and Charlemagne. Another volley from the Charlemagne is believed to have rendered much of the controls of the ship inoperable as it made a wild turn away from what was supposed to be its escape point and slammed into the beaches of Denmark at 1120 hours, pushing several hundred meters in land before it could not move any further. Grounded, the ship's crew quickly escaped and the ship's beached hulk was tilted at an angle as to make its guns nearly unusable. Determining that their job was finished, the ships of the two navies finished their mop up operations, having destroyed 80% of the remaining Axis fleets in Northern Europe and opened up the way for operations in Scandinavia.

Allied forces would start their landings at Norway on the 9th of June, seeking to pre-empt German plans to hide away in Norway with the 300,000 troops garrisoned there as their final redoubt. The force, consistent primarily of Canadians, Nepalese, and Scots who were more used to cold conditions, would land near Narvik, Trondheim, Berger, Kristiansand and Oslo to immediately put as much of the Norwegian garrison under threat as possible. At the same time, Finnish forces who had turned against the Reich some time earlier made a push into the Lappland to put pressure on Sweden and the northern flank of the Norwegian garrison. The choice of having the Allies move to liberate Scandinavia instead of the Comintern was a calculated one, wagering that the Swedes would be more willing to surrender if met with non-communist forces than if the Soviets and Americans made the push.

Or at least, that was the reasoning of General Bert Hoffmeister. A native Canadian and a businessman before the war, Hoffmeister was a noted anti-communist. A firm believer in the need to re-arm the defeated Axis powers to prepare for war with the Comintern and the impossibility of any long term peace between the empires of western Europe and the "Four headed beast of Communism", he advocated quite strongly for the campaign in public to cut off German supplies in the North, but in secret talks he argued that this was necessary to ensure that Communism did not attain a foothold in Scandinavia.

By the late period of the war, it was becoming clear that the age of the "great powers" that had predominated since the end of the medieval age and owed much of its current "arrangement of powers" to the Napoleonic wars was coming to an end. The future would not be determined by the concerts of ten or so major competing nations as it had been for so long. Planners of the future would not be talking about a multitude of great powers like they had before about Italy, Spain, Germany, Japan, Russia, America, Britain, France, China, the Ottomans, and Austria-Hungary. No, the future lay in the "superpowers"; the "big five" of France, Britain, America, the Soviet Union, and China, though in truth the future century was to be decided by the actions of France and Britain in communion and America in particular. And these superpowers had irreconcilable interests once the immediate threat of fascist world domination passed. The logic of the empires of France and Britain was to expand them, to make all the world a market for their goods and bases for their fleets. The logic of America and the Soviets however, was to dismantle these colonial profit and prestige driven empires to spread their revolutionary ideal and eventually do away with nations altogether.

The labourists and fabians could speak of the "gentle path" to Socialism all they wish, but to Hoffmeister only one or the other could survive. And like most of the armed forces he was dead certain on making sure that the future would see the hammer and sickle and not the crown and sceptre on the ash heap. While discussions between Attlee, Blum, Salazar, MacArthur, and the new Brazilian government with Reed, Molotov, Jingwei, Baldi, and Zapata were amicable enough; some signs of strain were already forming. Still a believer in Stalin's vision of Marxist-Leninism, Molotov was loathe to trust the Allies who had been so willing to sell everything to Hitler, Hirohito, Salgado, Furegard, and Mussolini. The fact that Petainist France was able to maintain itself for as long as it did made him and the CPSU deeply suspicious of how truly beaten Fascism was in western Europe. Concerns that he relayed to his allies in the comintern. Those who adhered most strongly to Permanent revolution doctrine were inclined to agree with Molotov, but the conciliatory part of the comintern was dismissive of his concerns. Prominent figures in the DFLP and the DRP in particular such as Harry Truman, Roosevelt, and Knox believed that a velvet glove would be all that was needed to deal with the post-war world, and a number of figures in the Worker's Communist Party of America were inclined to agree with that prognosis.

While much of the Chinese Communists were also sceptical of peace with the Allies, Wang Jingwei and the Guomindang in general were hoping for at least some period of peace after the war was over to rebuild and develop China which had been left in ruins from a century of colonial exploitation and nearly thirty of nearly lawless Warlordism, internal strife, and banditry followed by a decade of total war with Japan and civil war with Chiang Kai-Shek's rightists. Wang Jingwei famously begged of his counterparts for "a peace of at least twenty years, thirty if you can; before you push for another world war. To speak of yet more war is easy for those of you who are separated from its hardships by oceans or endless kilometers of plains and desert. But the people of China have known it in their homes for endless years. If we truly are a movement for the people, should we not seek to spare them any hardship we can?" in private at Yalta.

In the Alliance, many were already agitating for a hardened stance towards communism, with many papers picking up stories of any misdeeds by the Comintern that they could, even if they were straight from the mouth of the most ardent of fascists. George Orwell in particular railed against this tendency, denouncing the "brainless warmongerers of the Daily Mail and Telegraph who over the last three years have clearly never managed to get over the actuality that we would be fighting against Fascism instead of by its side. They look at the ruins of Coventry, Nanjing, Rotterdam, Stalingrad, Bogata and Buenos Aires and point their well fattened fingers and say "Yes that, that is what the world needs more of", while assuredly having never held a rifle in their lifetimes much like the great majority of Jingoists." A sentiment that was quite surprisingly, agreed with by noted fantasy author J.R.R Tolkien despite the ardent monarchist and pious catholic being light years away from Orwell in terms of political beliefs.

"Any man who looks at what has become of cities such as Bogata or Nanjing or what ghastly horrors have been erected at Auschwitz and most assuredly across the breadth of our continent and comes to the conclusion that these ghouls in human skin are friends of mankind is a man who in his heart wishes to be or serve another Fuhrer and another Reich. They love brutish, bullying displays of strength and savagery because they are weak in heart and soul. They want to be like the big men with their tanks and their gas because they are small, scared boys beneath the skin and want the world to stop frightening their small minds. But a mind too small for compassion is a mind too small for God. If they take power in this country, we will become what we have laboured for years to destroy. I am no friend of godless communism, whether the libertine decadence of America or the cold powermongering of Russia, but to side with the evil against the misguided is to be evil yourself."

However the military was already rife with anti-communists; the conservative nature of the military's generalship making it a poorly suited breeding ground for revolutionary sentiment. The officers who set up their administration of occupied territories in Norway set up regulations that made most forms of Communist activism illegal; ostensibly meant to target those who might take advantage of the chaos of a military invasion to enrich themselves. In reality, much of this was done to break up the bedrock of any possible post-war revolutionary movement and to ensure the orderly transition of power to a British friendly government. Perhaps most appalling was the treatment of those imprisoned by the Nazis for reasons that the British also considered valid; such as homosexuality. Those found to be guilty of sodomy would be promptly placed back in prison camps under the reasoning that it was illegal under both British and Norwegian law still. With such fractures already present between the Comintern and Alliance, it is small wonder that they would split so dramatically just five years later.

 

[The_Red_Star_Rising]

The Progress of the War with Japan

- Excerpt from an Article by Leon Trotsky, 1944

With the surrender or destruction of the last of the Japanese Empire's forces in what was once "American Samoa" we can now form for ourselves a picture of the sort of challenge posed to us by the remaining fascist powers in this global war. While Japan is certainly the lesser menace to the Proleteriat of the world than the primary menace posed by Hitler's Fascist Germany, Japan has yet the most people languishing under its chains with hundreds of millions of people across Asia and the Pacific suffering from its exploitation and the depraved cruelty that the Empire is willing to use to expand its interests. Our struggle against global Fascism has seen the close of the theater warring against Salgado's would be hegemony and the rapid withdrawal of Fascism from Western Asia and Africa. However, the struggle with Germany and Japan (and Italy, though in a reduced state), and their stooges still remains ahead of us, and there remains much to be done. Having already laid out an analysis of the war against Fascism in Europe, I shall now look to our conflict in Asia. Perhaps most recently important is the seizure of Samoa as part of the general offensive towards Tokyo itself and as part of the drive to retake the Solomon islands.

To see why these islands are so important, we must look at the chain of events that has lead us here. The American Samoa islands were quickly seized by the Empire of Japan in 1933 for "security" reasons and to serve as a Japanese base of influence in the South Pacific. The Japanese seizure of Samoa was at first welcomed by the Island's capitalist administration as a means of ensuring the security the power of the propertied landlords in the Islands and guarding against the progress of the American socialist movement. However from the reports we may finally glean from the Island, the Japanese propaganda machine's depiction of Samoa being a model member of the "Co-prosperity sphere", are easily found to be farcical.

The typical brute terror shown by the Empire of Japan in its imperialistic conquests was put into full force by the Empire's soldiers. The first strikes by the plantation workers in protest of the harsh demands for resources of Japan were met with a simple, uncomplicated response; machine guns and bayonets. With Japan able to maintain a veil of secrecy around the islands through its Caesaropapist Fascist regime's complete control of access to the islands, the world was left completely ignorant of the "bloody wednesday massacre" that saw more than five hundred workers dead within a day, one thousand dead by the end of the week when resistance finally stopped. With a population of only some eleven thousand, this massacre quickly established to the whole island that the "Immortal Empire of the Rising Sun" would have no qualms with protecting the power of Japanese capitalists with the most naked sort of violence.

The traditionally communally owned lands; wherever they were not nationalised to accommodate the Empire's control; were quickly acquired by the so called "Zaibatsu" of Japan, a means of capitalist organisation that sees the largest of Japan's economic vultures form nearly feudal business cartels that have symbiotic relations with the mechanisms of the Japanese state. These organisations control virtually the entirety of the Japanese economy not in the direct control of the state, leaving very little room for any sort of petit-bourgeoisie to take root and creating the space for a morbidly fascinating world of corporate dynastic politics and backstabbing. This means of organisation is a holdover of Japan's queerly incomplete transition from feudal to capitalist organisation during the Meiji restoration that saw the power of the Shogun forever cast away in favour of the clique formed around the "Tenno" or Emperor with some of these groups tracing their founding to the 1600s; such as the Sumitomo group.

It is the Sumitomo Zaibatsu in particular that concerns us in the case of Samoa, as the group quickly appropriated the bulk of the Island's land and put them to work producing rations for the Japanese Army and Navy as well as constructing a major naval base and air field to guard and advance the Empire's designs on the South Pacific. With the assistance of the Japanese army and imported labourers from the far flung corners of the vast Japanese Empire, this Zaibatsu was able to exert absolutist control over what parts of the Island were not requisitioned to the service of the fascist Japanese state or its rivals in parasitic imperialism. From the estimates to the records we have available so far, the Empire directly controlled thirty percent of all land on the Island, Sumitomo claimed a third, and the remainder was split among Mitsubishi and Furukawa.

The well used brothels set up by the Japanese army confirm that the loathsome practise of "Comfort women" was set up with little delay by the Japanese whose chauvinist views of sex relations feed into a myth of sexual entitlement, birthing forth the idea that the soldiers of the Empire "need" access to the bodies of women to prevent further misbehaviour. Given the abundance of reports of the sort of crimes seen in Southeast Asia and China being repeated in smaller scale, it should not take a master of the social sciences to determine that the stated "necessity" of this program is nothing but the most invidious sort of falsehood pushed by outdated and harmful traditionalist mindsets and happily profited on by Japanese and collaborationist capital all too willing to sell to the Empire its prostitutes.

However to lay the blame solely upon these businesses would be to fall victim to making use of many of the apologetics used by the defenders of Capitalism who would claim that the rot is not at the core of their system but simply a few bad patches of misbehaviour that either more or less regulation depending on which part of the Capitalist spectrum you ask would solve, it is the very nature of Capitalism and Imperialism and Japan's material conditions that drive these issues in the first place. A common apologetic canard used by the defenders of Capital is that their ideology promotes a "peace between nations" via the mechanisms of trade and the unprofitability of war between states. Given that Liberalism has done very little to abate the cycle of at least one great war across the "western world" every century since the Crusades and indeed, has seen us in the modern age doubly blessed with two world spanning wars in just thirty years, we can dismiss this claim as farce born of either naive ignorance or malicious deceit.

"Free trade" as it were can only truly endure with a single hegemonic capitalist power to enforce it, where there are challengers there will be trade wars as the national bourgeoisie come to resent the competition from each other affecting their ability to maintain profits, and from trade wars can arise wars waged with bullets instead of stocks. We saw this in the road to the first world war where the German and Austrian elite's sense of national inferiority to the more widespread reach of British, French, and American markets lead to destructive collision. We see this now in the rhetoric of the fascists who have only praise for their own native capitalists but scorn those of foreign countries; accusing them of exploiting and impoverishing their own bourgeoisie and blaming them for the conditions of the Proleteriat. Japan, as a country which has tied its prosperity to the fortunes of its export market and as a latecomer to the game of Imperialism, faces not only the fear of the fall of its aristocrats and bourgeoisie to the advance of Socialism as is being advanced by America and the Soviet Union with the invaluable aid of our comrades in China, Iran, and Latin America and all the oppressed peoples of the world, but also the Damocles' sword of a dependency on the good will of the three principal foreign capitalist powers of the far east; Britain, France, and the Netherlands.

To depend on their trade would render Japan dependent on western Europe itself. To make their profits, Japan's capitalists must hope that their European counterparts will accept their attempts to undercut their goods without turning towards the Bourgeois state to try and eliminate the competition. To try and cut off this dependency has a logic to it, an attractive and appealing one, to allow Japan to better set its own terms with the Capitalists of the rest of the world. Such an obstacle has one principal issue however, Japan is a poor country. Not poor in the sense of Yen, but poor in the resources needed for industry, the twin emperors of the modern age in Iron and Oil above all, it cannot survive long without resources. Unless of course, it expands. The East Indies are rich with virtually every natural resource from Copper to Food to Rubber and of course; the world famous Dutch oil companies. The Philippines and Southeast Malaysia offer a similar bounty of natural resources, while Korea, Formosa and Manchuria principally feed the Japanese hunger for mineral resources such as Iron to make the steel for its tanks and warships.

With this hunger in mind, we can clearly see the reason for Japanese Fascism's desire for expansion. They are not, as many British and Anti-Petainist rightist and centrist French publications have certainly bemoaned, uniquely savage among the peoples of the Earth, and so I must caution and warn against the impulse to assume that the Japanese soldier is some demon. He is ensnared by Fascism yes, and he is part of an army that has committed crimes of the most grotesque savagery from institutionalised rape to games of "catching children" on bayonets, but the fault lies not with the Japanese man, but the system that hammers a false consciousness into his mind so that he may be willing to die for the fortune of the Empire. An Empire that when faced with the contradiction of wanting to be resource independent and yet utterly dependent on external trade has come to the conclusion that the next step is conquest to alleviate that dependency and so has seized upon national myths of a divine destiny.

With this in mind, we can now better examine the course of our conflict and what must be done. Japan is an island nation whose war effort is sustained by a vast but disparate empire spanning two oceans, thousands of islands, and engulfs hundreds of millions of people. This means that to fuel its factories, all supplies must come by ship. Thus it stands to reason that the principal thrust of the war effort must come from death by strangulation. America has the advantage of a ship building capacity that the Empire cannot hope to match, Japan could sink five ships for every one that the Empire loses and would still be whittled down to nothing over the course of a war. To indulge in the fantasy, as many would advocate, of a "second Tsushima" by hoping to catch the Japanese fleet in some epic struggle on the high seas through some great northern thrust from Alaska to Hokkaido and Honshu would be to play into their doctrine of decisive battle and the entire structure of how their fleet is designed.

The loss of a carrier group here, a battleship flotilla there, a cruiser pack elsewhere, and a destroyer picket somewhere is sustainable. More can be trained to replace these losses; to lose an entire Armada in one battle is to gut the foundations of experience that build any military and Japan would love nothing more than to catch the fleets of our "united nations" in a grand contest of strength that it has been preparing for decades for.

No, a slow death for the Empire is what is needed. Scattered fleets to cut open the arteries of Japanese supply, submarines to bleed and worry its convoys and transports. The army too, is not to be caught and smashed in a single spectacular battle; not until the Home Islands are within our reach, it is to be withered in the course of many battles for islands of strategic importance. Those garrisons not necessary to secure the advance to Japan are to be ignored, their garrisons left to wither in starvation until they surrender. In this, I can find no fault in the current plan by the Communist international or the Alliance of Free States to smash Japanese fascism by turning away the flank of it that threatens New Zealand and Australia as well as guards the southern route to the Empire's den. With the turning aside of Japan's blow at Hawaii comes the need to press forwards once again, and with Japan's dependency on East Indies Oil, there is no better angle to approach Japan than from the south so as to deprive them of the luxury of having fuel for their machines.

As we advance northwards and westwards, it would be advisable to strike our blow not at the Philippines or the East Indies and drag ourselves into a protracted battle for endless little islands, but to cut them off. The Bourgeois Democracies of Europe can bleed for their colonies if they wish, but victory in the pacific must come from striking a devastating blow at Japan proper and opening up the access routes into China to assist the Chinese struggle against Japanese and collaborationist annihilation. The more northernly islands such as the Marianas and Guam should be seized to lay bare the route to Formosa. As modern Japan's first colony, it will be doubtless that our Imperialist enemy will fight tooth and nail to hold onto it and its extensive factories and resource extracting operations. But to liberate Formosa would be to slice a dagger across the Empire's neck. This grasp to the nerve center of the enemy's means of production would thus bypass the bulk of their military forces and force either a confrontation with our forces on our own terms or accept its loss and suffer our interdiction of their entire war effort.

Further islands that could put Japan in the reach of bombers such as Okinawa, Sakhalin, and the Kuril and Bonin Islands must also be seized so as to encircle Japan and deny it the possibility of reinforcement by sea. Then comes the bloody work of giving the final push of Japan off of the mainland of Asia, so that those languishing in slavery from Manchuria to Malaysia may breathe free. The natural angle of this attack will be into Japanese held southeast Asia by the Allies, and into Manchuria and Korea by the Comintern. With this work done, it should be a simple matter to drive into China and extinguish the farce of Chiang Kai-Shek's "Reorganised Chinese state" once and for all. This leaves the task of Japan proper to deal with.

I myself have analysed the arguments for an easy liberation and a hard liberation and must say that I reject both. The optimists, as we shall refer to the partisans for an easy battle for Japan as, believe that surely the moment the Chinese, Hispanics, Americans, Soviets and Iranians of the Comintern land upon the Islands of Japan that they shall surrender en masse and upon having the privlege to gaze upon a Communist shall give up their Fascist ways and form the glorious republics of Nippon. This is childishly naive and idealistic nonsense based on orientalist beliefs that the Japanese are like children lacking a proper education. From what can be discerned from the citadel of secrecy that Japan resides in, the Japanese socialist movement is disorganised, demoralised, and weak after decades of brutal repression from the state that only intensified following the great Kanto earthquake giving Japan's tone deaf clique of militarists the excuse they needed to purge the left of the Japanese body politic. It is undoubtably there, and it is stronger than Japan would like the world to believe, but the conditions for revolution in Japan do not yet exist and the fascists have had many years to ingrain the most invidious of propaganda into the people. This deceit will not be easily broken.

Those who come up with all manner of wild and fanciful statistics for how many will die in the invasion of Japan with figures reaching as high as millions of Comintern military casualties and tens of millions (with at least one article claiming Japan will take the "Paraguayan" option, referring to Solano Lopez's vainglorious attempt to fight against Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay in the 1864-1870 war to the last man and the last bullet, leaving as little as a quarter of his people alive when he was finally put down like a rabid dog) of Japanese casualties as they throw themselves at our weapons like ants attacking an intruder to their hive. They predict years of struggle and never ending guerilla conflict as every citizen of the empire down to the last dog shouts "Tenno Heika Banzai!" before making an attack. They envision endless waves of suicide bombers, guns behind every blade of grass, and all the stockpiles of Japan's most gruesome biological and chemical weapons being unleashed. These pessimists as we call the, are also obviously victims of Orientalist thought rooted in racist Yellow Peril nonsense. The Japanese are not machines programmed to be endlessly loyal to their God Emperor, they are humans just like you and I. Humans can change their mind and opinions, humans in most cases prefer to live rather than die, and humans are surprisingly adept at adjusting to new ways of life.

For example; until the Soviet revolutionary war, it was believed that the average citizen of that Empire was so ignorant, so backwards and so enthralled into the cult of the chosen of Christ and Tsar of all Russians that there could be no serious revolution after the failure of the 1905 revolution. Now a Briton can hardly imagine a Russian or Ukrainian or Kazakh as anything but a committed revolutionary and communist. How things can change in less than thirty years! The Americans too, were once believed to be the most sexually repressed of all the peoples of the industrialised world, they were thought to be arch-capitalists so drunk on the ideology of Liberalism that they could not even realise that Liberalism was an ideology and not simply a constant of the cosmos themselves. Yet we have found that there is indeed no "liberalism" particle in atomic physics as many in the physical sciences joke, and now Americans are seen as either sexually free or depraved depending on the conservatism of the one you ask, and are seen as the great vanguard of socialist revolution.

The struggle to liberate Japan will be hard, yes, many will die and there will be firm resistance. However it is not impossible, nor must we acquiesce to defeatism such as allowing a Monarchist and Capitalist Japan remain with a generous peace that does little but slap their wrist and tell them they were a very naughty child; such a Japan would be sure to align with the reformists in western Europe the moment it could afford to, and we would find ourselves facing the same situation once again some twenty years down the line. That is not to say that the path to victory will be laid upon a bed of roses, but the house of the rising sun must be torn up board by board and anyone who would tell you that this will be a simple task is a fool. I expect somewhere around a year of struggle, and certainly millions of casualties, but there will be a Japan to free at the end of it all. And that I think, is worth fighting for. We are not fighting just to repel Japanese aggression on our comrades, but to free Japan itself as well.

As for what is to be done with Japan? I have many ideas of course, as a major bastion of industrialised capitalism, Japan would be invaluable as a member of the Communist international. Suggestions that would ask to leave the Tenno in place must be cast aside. The Empire of the Rising Sun must set forever. Regardless of whether one subscribes to the theory that Hirohito is simply a figurehead that the military keeps shut away so as to be able to claim to act in his name without him having any chance to contradict them or whether you believe he is a Monarchist Hitler, he is complicit in the formation of Japanese fascism. Just as one may argue at length about whether or not Louis XVI was the culprit or simply a symptom of the decay of the French ancien regime, for progress to be made he must be at the very least be removed from the throne through the abolition of the throne, and his execution or exile is a likely necessity to break the back of the Imperial cult. If he commits Seppuku to maintain his honour; so much the better.

The soft hand that America has been able to afford is unlikely to be applicable to Japan. America had a widespread and popular leftist movement already in place, and came to power with a Bourgeois mandate. It is doubtless that many of the Japanese will see the imposition of a Socialist state upon them as becoming colonies to people they were raised to hate. It is certain that many will act on this perceived assault on their way of life and resist with force and such force will have to be dismantled with all means. Class consciousness must be given space to grow and decades of lies will need to be unpacked. A great many social traditions of Japan will have to be undone, from its perception of women to the role of children and even the very way they deal with their daily labour. Japan's "State Shinto" will need to be defanged. There is no place for the deification of a bloodline or the "spiritual characteristics" of Japan in a revolutionary republic. As a faith of small shrines instead of a centralised clergy, the imposition of state atheism will also have to take on a local character. The only people who can cast off the Kami are the Japanese themselves, all we can do is provide them the tools for it.

I expect a need for a strongly centralised state for no less than twenty years before Japan embraces a more American socialism. There will no doubt be a great deal of reactionary terrorist violence against the worker's state that will need to be met with violence and terror in kind to disorganise the remnants of Fascism and Monarchism in the new Japan. A powerful state body will be needed to root out counter revolution and the whole of Japanese society must be uprooted. It will be a program of a generation before revolutionary thought becomes safe enough in Japan to use a lighter touch. But, to those defeatists who believe this too hard and those orientalists who would purge Japan on racist nonsense I have this to say. It always seems too hard to do until it happens.

 

[Aelita]

Excerpts from Conrad Aberdeen*, Aces: 1940-46 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2011)

Aces: 1940-46 is a popular history book detailing life and times (and occasionally, the death) of famous air combat aces in WW2. Accessible for laymen, but not prone to flights of fancy, it reads often like a well-grounded historical fiction.

“When Legends Die: Captain Erich Hartmann vs. Major Aleksandr Pokryshkin”

As I noted in the introduction, air combat’s mystique owes in no small part to its highly personal nature which simultaneously coexists with the mythologies of nationalism and ideology. While modern warfare had implacably depersonalized armed conflict into a contest of firepower and mass armies, the clash of fighter pilots retained the some of the old romance, often spoken of in the same terms as the duels between medieval knights.

The ace in the Second World War served the same function as the knight-errant of the courtly songs. Nazi Germany had turned fighter pilots into larger than life folk heroes, whose influence on the popular record of the war has become so great as to have been taken up by the citizens of Germany’s former mortal enemies, like Lancelot du Lac of old.

Even states that adopted a rigid doctrine of military collectivism found the ace-hero all too useful. While on an institutional level the Comintern Revolutionary Army Air Force (RAAF) maintained none of the heraldry of individual kill claims or official ace status, instead emphasizing the team nature of their form of air combat with unit kill claims, nonetheless many pilots became recognized for their prowess in air combat and became heroes in the Great Patriotic War.

Of the Luftwaffe’s top fifty highest scoring aces, all but one spent most of their service career fighting in the East. Germany’s best and brightest combat pilots served in the great struggle against communism, honed their craft over the vast skies of Russia, and died there. Of the names of the great aces, Captain Erich Hartmann is perhaps unrivalled in his modern legend, both in terms of his prodigious kill count as well as his legendary end.

Hartmann’s 201 claimed aerial victories owe a great deal to his own tactics, and his deft skill in handling the Bf 109s and Ta 190s assigned to Jagdgeschwader 11(JG 11), as detailed in previous chapters. In brief, Hartmann defied the usual stereotype of the “fighter jock”: the hot-headed, aggressive pilot who treated the position like sport. Hartmann was disciplined, and cool under pressure; his personal motto was “fly with your head, not your heart.” It was a lesson he tried to teach to his wingmen and comrades.

Hartmann was relatively reserved and boyish, and much younger than many of the veterans of the legendary JG 11. His survival until March 1944 defied the high attrition rate of air combat on the Eastern Front. Still a cadet when the war began, Hartmann joined JG 11 just in time see service in Operation Valkyrie. Most of his fellow cadets from the Luftkreigschule, rushed to the front to replace mounting losses, would perish or be captured in the coming months.

Hartmann learned quickly from his seniors in JG 11, particularly the experienced ace Johannes Paetsch*. His seniors called him “Bubi”, a slang term for a young boy equivalent to “Lad” in English.

In combat, Hartmann adopted a “stalk and ambush” style. He eschewed dogfighting, instead attacking at high speed out of the clouds or with the sun to his back, holding fire until sometimes barely twenty meters away, and then disengaging. This allowed Hartmann to maximize surprise, minimize ammunition wastage, and prevent evasive action, at the cost of increased danger of collision, particularly with debris from stricken aircraft.

With overwhelming focus of airpower on the Eastern Front placed on the support of ground forces, Hartmann’s tactics were well suited for the ambush of enemy ground attackers and their escorts. Despite some legitimate questions about inflated kill counts due to his place in German propaganda, and institutional weaknesses in Luftwaffe record keeping, there can be no doubt that Hartmann was a menace to Comintern A-14 and Su-6 attackers.

Compared to the fresh-faced Aryan wunderkind Hartmann, then-Major Aleksandr Pokryshkin was virtually an old man in the high attrition environment. Pokryshkin had survived that worst of 1940 and 41, enduring constant retreat, the decimation of command and control, and the arthritic senior leadership of the Soviet Red Army.

Pokryshkin was an iconoclast in the VVS, an attitude that earned much scorn from his superiors, and nearly led to the cancellation of his party membership. This is not to say he should be considered anything other than a committed communist politically. And while he endured demotion and scorn for favoring of American military aircraft, his criticism of Soviet leadership, and his forceful personal style, in the end Pokryshkin would always be vindicated.

Like Chuck Yeager and Gabby Gabreski, Proskryshkin fits the modern communist military ideal of the soldier-intellectual. One-part soldier, one-part academic, Pokryshkin meticulous studied all his engagements and contributed to major innovations in air combat tactics.

The two aces would have their historic clash, subsequently immortalized in the West German war epic Ritterkreuz (localized in English as Knights of the Air, and in French as Les Chevaliers), on 11 March 1944, in the skies over the Velikaya River. Details of the action are taken from the after action reports of the survivors, gun-camera footage, as well as additional details afforded in memoirs and personal correspondence as noted in the endnotes.

Pokryshkin and other elements of Soviet 9th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment sortied at 0715 that morning. Their mission was typical for Comintern “frontal aviation”; the sortied fighters would range over a sector to search out and destroy enemy tactical aviation. Pokryshkin’s flight of four F-34K “Belladonnas” struck out due east from the improvised airfields hastily constructed by the Pioneer regiments of the 1st Baltic Front. They had been barely outside of the range of German artillery of the 88th Infantry Division holed up in Pskov.

Pokryshkin noted in his memoirs that the previous night had been filled with the thunder of distant guns, and the familiar screech of Katyusha rockets. Weary from the intense tempo of the operation, nonetheless he had dutifully climbed into his trusted F-34K.

The F-34 was the American answer to the now legendary Supermarine Spitfire. Refined in numerous iterations, the Belladonna was a fighter pilot’s plane: fast, streamlined, and highly maneuverable. The K model would prove to be one of the finest warbirds of the war, exceeded in the Comintern air force only by the evolutionary improvement the F-39, the Griffon Spitfire to the Belladonna’s Merlin.

Simultaneously, Hartmann’s own flight of Ta 190D-13 “Shrikes” sortied from Zigiru, in occupied Latvia. Tasked with escorting a flight of Ju 288 medium bombers, Hartmann took climbed to 6500 meters, and split his flight into two pairs in staggered echelons one thousand meters over the bombers.

Typical of dawn fighter patrols, Pokryshkin’s flight flew along the front lines, searching for enemies while awaiting reports from air defense radar. At 0735, a mobile radar radioed the position and course of what they interpreted as a flight of medium bombers headed East-by-Northeast towards the city of Novgorod.

Pokryshkin acknowledged, and ordered his flight to intercept. The mighty V-2802(1) purred as he throttled up to military power. With the aid of radar telemetry, he soon spotted the twin-engined bombers cresting the cloudbanks. The bulbous armored glass cockpit made identification relatively straightforward: six Ju 288D “Graf” flying in tight formation.

Pokryshkin made the call to attack quickly and escape before any escorts in the area could engage. The four Belladonnas throttled up to war emergency power, and began their dive attack. The fighters approached in two echelons. Pokryshkin and his wingman Lieutenant Walter Krakowski* approached the formation from the left rear; Lieutenants Vladmir Kirpov* and Sergei Rostopovich* coming from the right rear.

Levelling out as they neared the red-line speed, the fighters braved a storm of 13mm machine gun fire. Closing at nearly four hundred kilometers per hour, Pokryshkin and his comrades had a matter of seconds to align their gunsights, fire, and then avoid collision. The stream of tracers connected with the silhouette of the Graf rapidly approaching in his view screen. The left wing erupted into a spray of metal fragments and engine oil. The copied Bristol Centaurus engine seized. A flash of bright orange fire danced across the cowling. Pokryshkin yanked on the control yoke, barely escaping the debris.

As he climbed above the bomber formation, he craned his head to survey the damage. The Graf he’d attack began to list dangerously to the left. The fire in the engine cowling continued to rage. The fire weakened the wing spars and control surfaces; the plane began to roll out of control before the whole left-wing wrenched free from the fuselage.

Kirpov had failed to do more than superficial damage. Pokryshkin’s own wingman had missed on his first pass. But Rostopovich’s plane, armed for bear with an MC-37-N4 cannon in place of the more typical 20mm revolver cannon, had claimed another.

Unfortunately, Rostopovich’s plane had taken damage to the radiator while pulling away. In a matter of minutes, the engine would overheat and begin to seize. Pokryshkin ordered Rostopovich and his wingman to return to friendly territory, while the remaining would continue stalking the bombers to engage stragglers.

It was at this time that Hartmann and his wingman returned to the scene. Having just chased off a reported enemy contact, which had disappointedly turned out to be a lone VVS recon plane, Hartmann had been out of position to deal with the initial attack. But summoned back by the frantic calls of his comrades, they returned just as Pokryskhin prepared for his second attack run.

Hartmann and his wingman, Lieutenant Wilhelm Krebb* approached from the south at 7200 meters, with the sun nearly at their backs. With 1800 meters of altitude on Pokryshkin, Hartmann controlled the terms of the engagement. He wasted no time in dictating those terms.

They attacked immediately, diving through the cloud cover at over 700 kph. Hartmann levelled off at 6000 meters to maintain top cover, while Krebb continued his attack. Spotted all too late, Krebb lined up his trio of MG 151-20s on Krakowski’s Belladonna. While Krakowski had maneuvered hard, Krebb took the lead as he’d practiced numerous times before. The hail of mine shot ripped through the right wing and fuselage of Krakowski’s plane. The great plumes of smoke and engine oil hailed Krebb’s fifth aerial victory, inducting him into ace status.

Hartmann engaged next, diving on Pokryshkin to spoil his attempts at lining up on Krebb. Pokryshkin rolled hard and banked under Hartmann to force an overshoot. But with the energy advantage firmly retained, Hartmann and Krebb still held the reins in the fight.

Krebb, giddy from the thrill of victory, muttered a prayer to remind himself of the danger, and to remain humble. The Daimler engine roared as he climbed back to altitude. Another hapless Soviet pilot flew helplessly below, awaiting the circling birds of prey. Hartmann’s voice came of the radio, “Be careful, Willie, I think it’s the Red Comet.”

Cold fear washed over Krebb. “Are you sure?”

“Can’t be certain, but he’s got the markings of the 9th Guards, and the right tail number. He’s good.”

“Roger.”

Pokryshkin had gotten a glimpse of the infamous black tulip painted on Hartmann’s nose cowling. The “Black Devil” had become well known in the VVS. Standing orders forbade engagement except from a position of overwhelming superiority, for Stavka was keen to deny the enemy anymore chances to build Hartmann’s legend. But presently, Pokryshkin had no room for such luxuries. Craning his neck, he watched one of the Shrikes tip over and begin its attack.

Already running flat out, Pokryshkin tipped the yoke forward. His initial plan was to use the Belladonna’s superior never-exceed speed to extend a gap that would give him room to disengage. But the Shrike was closing rapidly in the rear-view mirror. The German plane had too much energy racing downhill, and he quickly calculated that he wouldn’t be able to reach the Focke-Wulf’s never-exceed speed before it killed him.

Pokryshkin pulled level, feathering the throttle to bleed off a bit of speed. The Shrike raced closer, but he waited. Just as Krebb was lining his guns up for the killing blow, Pokryshkin pulled his plane into a hard barrel roll. The tracer rounds whizzed by missing the target by mere meters. All too late, Krebb tried to follow the Red Comet into the barrel roll.

But Pokryshkin could roll tighter at his speed, and slipped in behind Krebb. The guns lined up—by luck, as Pokryshkin tells it. Firing at barely a hundred meters, the stream of 20mm mine shot and 12.7mm incendiary rounds effectively sawed the Focke-Wulf’s tail off, and set the main fuel tank ablaze.

Moments later, the canopy detached, nearly hitting Pokryshkin’s plane. He instinctively rolled out of the way as the newly minted ace bailed out, shaken but otherwise unharmed.

But the game was far from over. Hartmann was already bearing down on him, giving him no time to strategize. The German narrowly missed on the first attack, and power climbed away, safe from retribution.

What Hartmann was thinking, we can only guess at. He still had a decisive command over the terms of the engagement, holding both a speed and altitude advantage over Pokryshkin. Both of their machines had comparable performance. And unfortunately for Pokryshkin, the Belladonna’s slight edge in top speed was useless in the current situation.

But Hartmann’s decision to continue the engagement reflects a failure on his part to live up to his own maxim: fly with your head, not your heart. Pokryshkin had been in an all but hopeless situation: alone with two enemy aces energy fighting him. Through skill and a bit of good fortune, he’d managed to dispatch one of them. The smart move for Hartmann would have been to disengage, and not risk another machine and pilot to get revenge against a known enemy ace in a stage of the war where Germany was rapidly running out of both.

But for whatever reason, whether it was the prospect at defeating the infamous Red Comet, and the new appellation to his Knight’s Cross it might bring, or revenge for his wingman, the Black Devil chose to press the engagement.

Hartmann no doubt knew that the longer the engagement lasted, the more it would shift in Pokryshkin’s favor. The Ta 190D had a powerful engine, but it was also a heavier airframe compromised by parasitic drag. Hartmann would slowly bleed energy, and a smart adversary could eventual force a reversal.

In modern parlance, Hartmann’s strategy was to stay inside Pokryshkin’s OODA loop(2) to ensure that the dogfight continued on his terms. He tipped his Shrike over quickly, diving again on Pokryshkin. Pokryshkin rolled out of the path of his guns, but Hartmann remained disciplined, and didn’t waste any ammunition on a bad deflection shot. He pulled his Ta 190 into another power climb, no doubt watching over his shoulder as Pokryshkin tipped his nose down to regain airspeed.

The two aces continued this dance, spirally rapidly towards the snowy ground. But all the while, the gap in relative speed and altitude slowly closed. On the fourth pass, with the ground barely two hundred meters below, and Hartmann barreling down on him, Pokryshkin pulled his plane sharply into a power climb. As Hartmann levelled out from his dive, the Soviet ace rolled and tipped downwards.

At the current speeds, more than 600 kph at the start of the rolling scissors, the g-forces both pilots were enduring was punishing. At the lowest point scissors, the two planes barely cleared the trees. But since Pokryshkin entered the deadly spiral at a lower speed, his plane could roll tighter. With each barrel roll, Hartmann’s plane inched further into danger. After the fourth roll, Pokryshkin lined up a deflection shot. A bark of cannon and heavy machine gun fire later, and the Shrike was gutted from nose to tail. The engine billowed thick black clouds and dull orange flames.

The tracers drew a neat line straight back through the cockpit into the fuselage. Harman was undoubtedly killed instantly by the hail of bullets; the Belladonna’s cannon fired at 1400 rounds per minute, and the two revolver machine guns in the wing roots fired 1800 rounds per minute. But even if he had not, the low altitude made a bailout impossible. The Shrike nosedived into the trees at over 300 kph.

Hartmann’s plane had crashed within sight of a patrol of the German 18th Infantry Division. The landers rushed over, only to find a barely recognizable burning wreck. Nonetheless, they searched the woods for parachutes in vain for several hours.

The death of Erich Hartmann reverberated through the German Reich. Hartmann would receive a posthumous promotion to Major, and received the Diamond appellation to his Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. Propaganda film reels were on Joseph Goebbels desk within a week, narrating a tale of a brave martyr of National Socialism killed in a fight against overwhelming odds to save his comrades.

But for the men of JG 11, there was no glory to be had that day, only solemnity. Krebb would return to headquarters that day, with only a bruised ego and sprained ankle, only to find that his friend and mentor was dead.

For Pokryshkin, victory over Hartmann only brought more problems. Pokryshkin was a combat pilot through and through. He felt he belonged in the air with his comrades, but his numerous aerial victories and command talent made him too important to the war effort to be wasted. Triumphing over Germany’s top ace would seal the deal. Within months, he’d be promoted away from the front lines, only able to take a few unauthorized combat sorties in between serving as an educator in air combat tactics.

Wars, of course, are not won in duels. The struggle against Nazism would continue for some eighteen months. The Luftwaffe, hollowed out by the immense attrition of men and machines, put increasing hope in flashy but unreliable new technologies: the Me 262 and He 162 jet fighters, the Ar 234 jet bomber, the Vengeance weapons, the XXIV Walter-system U-boat, the Sturmgewehr series, the super-heavy Pzkpfw 100 tank, to name the most notable.

(1) Previous updates referred to engines anachronistically by their OTL designations. IOTL, beginning in 1926 military aircraft engines were designated by their arrangement and their displacement in cubic inches. IOTL, this engine was the V-1710, an engine with a vee cylinder arrangement displacing 1710 cubic inches. ITTL, metrification results in the numerical designation being changed to displacement in centiliters.

(2) OODA is a generalization of air combat tacts: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. It is fairly self-explanatory; a pilot has to keep the present and developing situation in mind, position himself accordingly, understand the intentions of the adversary, decide on a course of action, and put it into action. Getting inside the enemy’s loop means putting them on the backfoot, keeping them reacting and unable to think strategically.

 

[The_Red_Star_Rising]

Excerpt from "Allied War Effort in the Indo-Pacific, how India broke Japan" - by General Ramaeshwara Mallaya. Part 1.

Far away from the battles in northern South America and the war for the mediterranean and western Europe was the conflict waged by the Allies against the Empire of Japan and the Kingdom of Thailand in the far east. Originally, French, British, Dutch, and Portuguese plans for conflict in the far east assumed that Japan would be serving as an ally to deal with any Socialists in China, the Soviets, and the Americans and whatever allies they brought to bear. The war effort was envisioned to be a struggle of attrition to seize American pacific islands, sever the Bering Strait trade route, and bleed Soviet forces away from Europe with a planned invasion of Soviet central Asian from the Raj. With the American fleet engaged by the British, French, and German navies the far eastern fleets were expected to sap as much resources as possible by engaging the pacific fleet in decisive battles and forcing America to have to orient forces to the Pacific to retake islands such as Hawaii or even the Republic of Alaska itself. However, this grand strategy; drawn up by the likes of Fuller and Petain, predicated on the expectation that Japan and Thailand would be loyal allies rather than enemies.

Significant investment and cooperation efforts were made with Japan and Thailand to try and make them into better allies, helping to catch Japan up on land warfare doctrine and technology such as Tanks, Artillery, and Small arms and advisers sent to educate the IJA on Anti-tank warfare, Motorised combat, and Combined Arms warfare, electronics such as early computers and radar sets, and aerial combat improvements such as examples of British heavy bombers to study and some examples of Frank Whittle's jet engines to purchase and look at. Though one of the great powers, Japan had only minor involvement in the first world war, attacking far flung outposts of the German Empire from a position of absolute superiority and only sending small expeditionary forces to partake in the combat in Europe and western Asia. This meant that Japan had missed out on many of the developments in land warfare doctrine taught by the great war, and had thus made the IJA exceptionally cautious with regards to the prospects of conflict with the Soviet red army which had spent nearly a decade in the hard school of the first world war and its own civil war.

Such could not do if Japan was to be a bulwark against the spread of Socialism, and much effort was spent into getting Japan up to speed. With the funds being brought in from its recent acquisition of Manchuria and parts of Inner Mongolia to expand its colonial empire into the metal rich regions of Northern China as well as a chance to at least partially fill the void left by the change of relations with America to serve as a "work shop of the world" producing consumer goods for consumption in Europe and Latin America, the Empire was able to afford significant expansions of its military as its economy blossomed. However a continually growing economy and a continually more motorised society came with a continually growing demand for raw resources such as Oil, Iron, Rubber, and Tungsten. Trade relations with the Soviet and American Unions who made such a huge portion of the world's oil exports were never good at the best of times even before the Comintern decided to embargo Japan over its actions in China. This left Japan dependent on resource imports from Europe and its empires, creating a sense of discontent further augmented by many in Japan's fascist inner circle who felt unease as the entrance of the Philippines into the British commonwealth, believing that the islands rightfully should have been given to Japan as part of its sphere of influence, and that this expansion was an intrusion of Britain into that sphere.

Japanese military thinking was dominated by two schools of thought supported by the Army and the Navy respectively; Hokushin-Ron and Nanshin-Ron; the Northern and Southern Doctrines. Hokushin-Ron called for the North pacific to be placed in Japan's hegemony, namely Manchuria, Siberia and Alaska; while Nanshin-ron instead advocated for the South pacific and Indian Ocean to be included in Japan's influence; particularly the East Indies, Philippines, Australia, Southeast Asia and India. Both agreed on a desire to place China under its hegemony, Those in favour of relations with Britain and France of course advocated for Hokushin-Ron, believing that Japan's empire would be built from the fringes of Soviet and American influence and at the expense of China. However, internal disputes in the Japanese Empire meant that plans to occupy and seize Alaska and Hawaii were never put into place and only some of the American pacific Islands Japan had its eyes on could be occupied. This failure to properly mobilise to take advantage of the unique opportunity of the second American civil war lead to the Hokushin-Ron plan being gradually pushed to the back burner in favour of the Nanshin-Ron plan.

Advocavtes of Nanshin-Ron argued that the the bulk of the territories that Hokushin-Ron dreamed of acquiring for Japan were of little value. Siberia and Alaska were resource rich but sparsely populated and the infrastructure to exploit their resources was still in the process of being built. Similarly, attempts to take the Russian Far east and Alaska would likely mean a bloody land war with the Soviets and the Americans on their home ground simultaneously; not a prospect many were eager to face. The Japanese colonial departments also rankled at the idea of selling Japanese settlement in largely frigid borealic forest, taiga, and tundra or having to do the hard work of prospecting for mineral and fuel resources in the far north and also build the necessary infrastructure itself. Finally, these subarcitc and arctic territories were poorly suited for the growing of rubber or the majority of the world's luxury crops.

While Hokushin-Ron was territorially compatible with the existing empires of Europe, the economic prospects offered by Nanshin-Ron were much more preferable. Besides, once the territories asked for by the Nanshin-Ron were acquired, the territories asked for by Hokushin-Ron would be far easier to acquire once Japan was industrialised to a degree to match America. Further favouring the Nanshin-Ron plan were negotiations with Adolf Hitler regarding the fate of the Soviet Union. Hitler had been convinced by many in the Nazi inner circle of the desireability of a pacific coast for Germany. In these discussions, in exchange for Germany withdrawing support for China and an expansion of German-Japanese trade and military technology, much of the far east would be recognised as German territory in the new world order to come, while Japan would receive the Amur, as well as China and Central Asia (including Mongolia), and territories near Manchuria in the negotiations at the Roman conference that determined the Axis' planned spheres of influence in the war to come.

To prepare for this expansion to come, Japan increased its ties to the the Kingdom of Thailand. A fellow country in Asia to escape colonisation by one European power or the other, Thailand smouldered with resentment towards France and Britain over territories lost to the expansions of French Indochina and the Raj. Others still had grandiose plans for a Thai empire, envisioning the whole of Burma, Indochina, and British Malaya as well as the territories of the Yunnan and Guangxi cliques in China being absorbed into a great Thai Empire that would be the bedrock of a new great power on the world stage. Fascism had thus become quite popular in Siam, as expansionist, irredentist, and revanchist rhetoric increased in Thailand further bolstered by the onset of increased class conflict as Thailand transitioned from a Semi-feudal to a modern Capitalist society. These goals and this anger were deemed to be compatible with Japan's own plans, and so in 1937 the Tokyo-Bangkok axis was signed into being, ostensibly with the intent of resisting the spread of Communism in Asia but in secret clauses essentially created to divide the continent between the two with Thailand being recognised as Japan's (junior) partner in a "Co-Prosperity Sphere".

With the invasion of China and later the establishment of a friendly traitor regime under Chiang Kai-Shek came the further growth of this sphere, though essentially started without any central direction from the government of Tokyo, the Empire of Japan decided to fully back this effort to conquer China with a brutality unlike anything the world had seen. Terror was to be Japan's chief weapon against the Chinese, to use methods so cruel and so horrific that the very idea of resisting Japan would be regarded as a swift ticket to a terrible demise. What had once been spontaneous acts of cruelty and barbarism grew into state sanctioned and organised acts of slaughter meant to cow the Chinese people into compliance. They would form the "iron fist" to Chiang Kai-Shek's "velvet glove", a punishment and a scourge for any who would not accept Chaing's rule, though in truth the rightist KMT and the Japanese aligned warlords were generally only modestly more benevolent at best.

This means of cowing resistance and the universally harsh means that Japan used to extort resources from its empire would be repeated in Indonesia following the Dutch-Japanese agreement. The Indonesian people would find that the Japanese were ill inclined to consider the needs of the people they ruled when they set their quotas for food harvests or set their working days. Facilities to harvest and refine resources and to produce finished products were built across Indonesia to add to its value to the Empire. Whole swathes of the archipelago's famous rainforests were hacked down to clear the way for farms and factories or to provide raw materials for exotic wood products and Japan's "Romusha" program of forced labour was started with little hesitation or delay. With forces being built up in Indonesia and Thailand, the next stage of the plan was all but complete; it needed only an opportunity.

With the entrance of Britain and France into the war with Germany and the Kido Butai returning from its raid on Hawaii, the Empire of the Rising sun turned its gaze towards the islands of its enemies and Southeast Asia. In a stunning series of attacks, Japan rapidly seized island after island, driving the Comintern and the Allies alike out of the pacific as the Sentai seemed almost unstoppable. The fall of the Philippines, Tahiti, British Samoa, the Marianas and more created a vast fortress of islands in the pacific as many of the divisions stationed there were caught by complete surprise thanks to Japan timing its declaration of war on Britain and France to coincide with the first wave of attacks to strike Entente territory. Free french held Indochina was swiftly overrun before the Japanese advance stormed through Malaysia and smashed its way through Burma like a sledgehammer. Hong Kong, Macau, and East Timor fell in rapid succession and Papua New Guinea was soon under seemingly overwhelming assault. A border war with the Soviet Union would soon ensue, and as Japanese troops stormed through the Amur it at first seemed like Japan would be building its vast empire far faster than anyone believed possible.

Australia, the primary British pacific bastion, was soon targeted for massed air raids and naval bombardments as well as a deadly submarine and surface raider campaign made to starve Australia and New Zealand into submission. The first raid would fall upon the port of Darwin, with the planes of the Kido butai being joined by a flight of long ranged "Tenzo" Bombers sent from Japanese held Timor with orders to reduce the city of Darwin to rubble. "Kill them all", were the simple, poignant orders gave to the raiding force, with follow up orders for the surface ships to shell Darwin to ensure the destruction of all assets. At 0830 hours on March 07th, 1942, the planes of the Japanese navy and army emerged from the horizon; Australian maritime patrols having been eliminated before they could report the position of the Japanese fleet in devastating night attacks and catching the defenders of the city off guard, and more importantly; with most of the civilian population concentrated in places of work or school. While the carrier bombers targeted the ships at port, the land based bombers moved ahead to destroy the facilities of the city and kill its civilian population. One by one, the massive oil tanks in the city and its ammunition dumps exploded from the impact of bombs, while supply and combat ships at port were struck by either torpedo or dive bomb, with the fully loaded ammo ship "Kitchener" being struck by a bomb at 0540 that detonated its ammunition supply with the force of over three kilotons of TNT.

The residential and business areas of Darwin were struck with White Phosphorus bombs dropped by the hundreds, igniting the buildings in unquenchable blazes and thick clouds of choking smoke, with not even the schools being spared as the intent was to leave the city in ruins. Crowds of evacuees were strafed by fighter planes lacking in any air targets to fire upon, with a number of interviews with the pilots indicating how fun they found it to watch rows of people fall over when they swept them with machine gun, autocannon, and rocket fire. Following the catastrophic detonation of an ammunition dump levelling much of the rest of the settlement, the Japanese navy decided that shelling Darwin was no longer necessary; the town was almost completely destroyed and virtually every ship in port was destroyed with the loss of some forty ships of various sizes, and the destruction of roughly two hundred aircraft on the ground. The civilian death toll was well into the thousands, tragically augmented by a recent wave of immigration to Darwin as military personnel's families settled nearby and the town grew from a small hamlet into a proper city as part of the British Empire's plans to better defend the pacific from the American navy; in essence nearly the entirety of the town's civilian population was dead, including its Mayor and the Administrator of Northern Australia.

It would be days before a proper investigation could be mounted, and the city was written off as a near complete loss by the investigation team when they were finally done clearing out the rubble. A day of mourning was held by the Australian government, but fears of an imminent Japanese invasion were soon sweeping through the dominion as the realisation of the effect of the loss of so many supplies began to settle in. With the trade interdiction campaign stepping up and Japanese air raids on Australia intensifying in frequency, panic began to grip the nation. Even the modest American victory at the Coral Sea did little to alleviate fears of invasion, though in truth the Japanese had little in the way of serious plans to conquer Australia in the near future beyond possibly landings in Northern Australia as part of the plan to strangle the oceanic dominions.

Disaster would only further compound itself as the Australian navy sulked in its ports in eastern and western australia rather than dare confront the Japanese navy alone following the sinking of much of the British Malaysian, Philippine, and Hong Kong and the French Indochina squadrons in the first battle of the Malacca straits in March 20th that saw the modern battleships Izumo*, Owari*, Echigo*, Yamato, Musashi**, of the Izumo and Yamato classes join with the ships of the Kido Butai now joined by the light carrier Ryuho and a number of older battleships lead the Japanese Third fleet against the horribly outmatched HMS Malaya, Emperor of India, Howe, Rodney, Warrior, and Resolution, and the carriers HMS Glorious and Furious and the French ships Provence, Lorraine, and Bretagne.

Though the Rodney was well matched against the Nagato class battleships, against the more modern Izumo class ships fitting three triple frontally mounted 410mm gun turrets, the ship was faced with a considerably greather threat; nevermind when faced with the 460mm guns of the Yamato or Musashi. The other British battleships were essentially impotent in the gun duel after HMS furious was sunk by torpedo bombing. The Bretagne and Provence would sink within minutes from impacts by long lance torpedoes and 18 inch shells from the Yamato and Musashi, while the heavy cruiser HMS exeter was reported to have "detonated instantaneously" following a direct impact by a 410mm shell to its ammunition stores. The aging Emperor of India would founder under repeated dive bombing assault followed by torpedo impacts from the Japanese Cruiser Aoba, leaving HMS Belfast hopelessly exposed to the guns of the heavy cruisers. Despite being completely outmatched by the two heavy cruisers, the Belfast chose to hold the line with its fellow light cruisers and destroyers to lay down a smoke screen to allow the capital ships to escape, aided by the Malaya and Howe while the Rodney, Warrior, and Resolution tried to break for Ceylon with the HMS Glorious.

Eight inch shells repeatedly penetrated the light armour of the Belfast, two torpedo hits from aircraft left the ship taking on water, the forward most turret was "virtually torn off" by a strike from the Yamato, fires were raging on multiple decks due to bombardment from Japanese destroyers, and the engine was taken out by a dive bomber; but the Belfast refused to die. Continually firing every weapon it had, the Belfast managed to clip the Echigo with a torpedo before being finally destroyed by the Cruiser Furutaka, forcing the battleship to pull back for repairs in nationalist Chinese ports. However, the "Kongo four" battleships were hot on the trails of the fleeing entente fleet, slowed down by having to escort the old Lorraine. With its air wing crippled in duels with the Japanese air armada, the Glorious attempted to make a separate path to Ceylon; escorted by HMS Glow Worm, Caliburn, and the French cruiser Dauphain. Spotter aircraft from the Japanese fleet would pick up the Glorious, and in an act of unintended sacrifice; the Japanese admirals chose to focus on the carrier over the battleships.

The fast battleships were able to catch up to HMS Glorious which had bled speed from a dive bomb strike earlier in the battle and the carrier found itself being peppered by volley after volley of fourteen inch shells. The air wings of the ship were barely able to mount any real sort of attack, gutted by the air engagement they were little match for the four battleships' and their escorts' anti-air suites. An AP shell plunged into the engine compartment of the Glorious at 1132 hours, killing the ship's speed entirely as the cruiser pack lead by the Mogami moved to sweep away the escorts of the Glorious. The Glorious was struck by twelve armour piercing shells over the course of ten minutes before finally sinking, plunging into the shallow waters near Sumatra while its escorts were torn apart in no more than twenty minutes. However, this final act, when combined with the last stand of the Belfast, allowed the bedraggled remains of the entente fleet to escape to Ceylon where ships of the recently minted Royal Raj Navy were able to meet and escort them to safety.

As the British and French pacific fleets were forced to flee to the Indian Ocean, the Philippines would fall in rapid order. Facing assault from multiple directions and on multiple islands at once and with the Japanese navy severing the arteries of naval supply and transport in tandem with an air force that swiftly achieved local supremacy, hope for conventional resistance was distant indeed. Air fields and ports were the first to be seized to facilitate the deployment of further Japanese assets, and all anti-Japanese resistance fighters were met with a combination of naval and aerial bombardment to support the forces of the Sentai and the Army. Japan's well trained corps of Paratroopers would also work to bring about a vertical envelopment of any who sought to fight or quickly seize beacheheads for the Marines and then the army to follow up. With an overwhelming advantage in numbers and with virtually complete control of the flow of supplies, the Japanese would conquer the Philippines in very little time at all, with the last holdouts at Manilla being slaughtered at the rape of Manilla once the city was seized.

In Southeast Asia, Borneo fell within a week to Japanese troops on the island, while the Malayan peninsula was swiftly seized by Japanese troops on bicycles and tanks able to pass through forboding jungle passes deemed to be impenetrable to armour. Deeming resistance to be hopeless, General Percival ordered an evacuation of the city of Singapore which was to be covered by the ships partaking in the battle of the Malacca straits. However, the evacuation was only partially completed when the Japanese navy moved to interdict and gutted the fleet in the battle already described. With no supplies forthcoming and Singapore's aerial garrison devastated by the battle, the remaining garrison would only hold out for a month against the sea blockade and pressure by land assault before surrendering.

May 8th would see the Japanese attempt to finish the job with an air raid on Ceylon by a large force of carriers and accompanying battleships, cruisers and destroyers. However this time the Entente had plenty of notes to study on the methodology of Japanese port strikes. British spitfires and Mosquitos would quickly be scrambled into the air to meet the Japanese head on as soon as outlying patrols of Hurricanes spotted the distinctive red sun insignia of the Japanese Empire on their approach. Meanwhile the ships at port and the anti-aircraft guns were already on high alert, and were quick to fill the skies with flak while the ships themselves were arranged for their anti-aircraft batteries to cover one another. The old carrier, Hermes; not sent to the battle of Malacca due to undergoing refit, would not survive the battle, nor would five cruisers and two destroyers and more than a thousand men would lose their lives, however the facilities were left intact and many more ships survived than not. Many ships of the former Mediterranean fleet would be transferred to the Indian Ocean to bolster its defenses until the way back into the Mediterranean could be secured and new ships coming off of production lines throughout the Empire could reinforce the Indian ocean garrison.

However, the first offensives into India in December of 1942 would draw attention in the East Asian front to the land. Bolstered by Thai and traitor Chinese troops, the Japanese began their attack with an air campaign. Heavy bombers would take off from air fields in Burma and fly into eastern India and what is now the Bangladesh substate in the Greater Indian commonwealth with accompanying escorts to start bombing runs against industrial and population centers, while lighter dive bombers and tactical bombers hunted for targets of opportunity. The heavy 20mm autocannons wielded as standard by Japanese heavy bombers made approaching them for interception difficult, as did the British preference for rifle caliber machine guns on their Hurricanes and Spitfires; with .303 caliber bullets simply not being able to do enough damage to Japanese heavy bombers to pose a significant threat.

Commander Keisuke Fujie would lead the ground phase of the attack, with the extensively developed roads in Eastern India being made for possible campaigns against China being utilised by the Japanese to press into the subcontinent with little difficulty. As the new Chi-ha medium tanks, Type 15 Light tanks, and the new mark of the Type 5 Chi-Ho heavy showed, Japan had internalised the lessons of armoured warfare well from their British teachers as well as years of war against lend-lease tanks given to Wang Jingwei and Mao's Socialist China. The Japanese had explicitly copied the British armoured doctrine of six base chassis; a combat car, a half-track, an armoured car, a light tank, a medium tank, and a heavy tank that would be easily converted into other types of vehicles such as self propelled artillery, tank destroyers, or anti-aircraft or transport quite well and the wide tracks of most Japanese tracked vehicles were well suited to going off road when needed. Older Japanese vehicles were also present, but the motorised and mechanised troops would be the first to lead the charge while those using older equipment or were still limited to rail and horse/oxen driven logistics would follow behind.

The Japanese loudly proclaimed themselves as liberators wherever they went even as they had any who showed signs of being Pro-British and/or Anti-Japanese subjected to the usual mercies of the Kempeitai. Numerous complaints by the pro-Japanese Indian national Army were lodged to the desk of Fujie, only to be met with largely empty platitudes and promises of more discipline in the army and chiding reminders that war is a cruel and harsh business.

The invasion force set its sights on Calcutta first, seeing it as the gateway into the rest of India. However, the call to war given to the colonies was met with unexpected enthusiasm, the stories of Japan's treatment of the Philippines, China, Indonesia, and other places had already disseminated to the Indian populace and no one wished to see Culcutta become the next Nanjing. The Sino-Thai-Japanese-Traitor invasion force was met to their surprise not with peaceful dissidents or flowers as they had expected, but stubborn resistance to their rule whether through civil disobedience or through armed struggle. Posters urging the children of India to fight against the army that was freely bombing its cities from the skies were everywhere, and many in India chose to die fighting rather than submit to Japanese rule as the Japanese began to introduce the anti-partisan policies they practised in China within India.

Marshal Kodandera, India's first ever field marshal, commanded a stalwart defense that sought to trade space for time; hoping to draw the Japanese supply lines out to allow for a swift counterattack to quickly sweep aside as much of the army as possible. By January, the Japanese had overrun most of Bangladesh, though a spirited resistance was being waged at Dhaka to allow the people as much time as possible to evacuate, the 37th Bengali corps holding against an entire Japanese army for weeks so that their families could be given the time they needed to depart for safety farther west. In the face of heavy bombing from the air, enemy armoured superiority, and intense artillery bombardment the 37th held against an enemy that outnumbered them by more than six to one with a combination of skill, bravery, superior knowledge of the terrain, an ample supply of powerful 17 pounder guns to make enemy tanks think twice and bofors to chide incoming aircraft, and delays in the enemy's own supply lines as resistance movements in Burma delayed the construction of the Burma railway.

After twelve days of resistance, the 37th was forced to retreat; surrendering most of Bangladesh to the enemy. Locals in Bangladesh soon came to fear the grim faced flamethrower units of the Japanese, fitted with their distinctive smoke protecting masks and fire resistant suits to allow them to better function in burning environments and often accompanied by tanks fitted with flamethrowers. In a hurry to try and conquer India, the Japanese had little patience for protracted wars of resistance, and these "purifier units" would sweep through areas suspected to hide resistance cells in difficult terrain and set them ablaze to flush out any resistance fighters from dense vegetation, buildings or tunnels. Those who fled the blazes would be quickly gunned down by waiting machine gun crews, with the assumption that anyone hiding in areas designated for purification were probably enemies anyway. These tactics destroyed huge swathes of vegetation and were swiftly killing thousands upon thousands of Indian civilians in an attempt to deal with the "ocean of fish" that Guerillas swim in by draining the ocean.

As has often been noted, some of the cruellest soldiers serving the Empire were those of its colonies and puppets; while those like Chiang Kai-Shek tried to make a policy of being more approachable than the Japanese, the Imperial japanese army had a long hierarchy of abuse. The Prime Minister would berate the general staff, the general staff would lambaste the field commanders, the field commanders would throw tirades at the junior officers, the junior officers would often beat and shout at the NCOs, the NCOs would do the same to the enlisted, and the enlisted would take out their frustrations on both the civilians and those lower than themselves in the military hierarchy; Formosans, Koreans, Okinawans, allies and auxiliaries. This resulted in those at the bottom of this hierarchy having a tremendous deal of psychological frustrations and anger to work out, and with civilians and prisoners of war scarcely being able to fight back the natural course of action was to live out all their most horrific of violent revenge fantasies by proxy.

When Dhaka was finally seized, those who had not fled were subject to another Nanking, another Manilla; as looting, rape, murder, and torture was widely inflicted on those who remained. Anything of value was stolen, buildings were left desolate, burnt out ruins, the dignity of the remaining women was violated, and when the Japanese finally deigned to hoist their banner over the mayoral palace the city was left in smoking ruins that could be seen for kilometres around by aircraft. Many of the survivors would be shipped over to the ghoulish hands of Japan's biological research teams to suffer all manner of horrific forms of experiments in the name of advancing Japanese science. Many others would be placed under the Romusha program to service the Empire's ambitions at their height. Factory workers would be soon forced into their factories to work, others would be displaced to work on other projects such as the Burma railway or the construction of bases and factories. With food being of high importance to the Empire due to Japan's lackluster farming techniques struggling to meet demand, others would be forced to work at farms or else.

As resistance began to stiffen, the front began to widen, and the supply situation was becoming increasingly difficult, the Japanese advance began to slow. Hopes for the governments of Afghanistan, Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan to join the war on the side of the Axis were not met with the success expected. Afghanistan's government had opportunistically joined the war when it seemed as if Axis victory was inevitable in the hopes of acquiring territory from the Raj, Communist Iran, and the Soviet Union.. However, the Afghanistani government had underestimated the swiftness that the Comintern would respond to an attempt to open up yet another front. Soviet, and Iranian forces would swiftly move to deal with Afghanistan in a brief operation to depose the Afghanistani king; aided by British forces stationed in the western Raj in a conflict that was ended within two months of starting. Nepal and Bhutan outright rebuffed Japanese overtures and instead declared war in solidarity with Britain, while Tibet would be quickly seized by Sheng Sicai's forces in a brief conflict meant to open up more of the Himalayan route to secure supplies to India regardless of its neutrality. Tibet's backwards army was little match for Xinjiang's soviet and american trained and supplied mountain corps, and Tibet was soon declared folded into the Republic of China proper after about three months of fighting.

It was not until April that the Japanese reached the outskirts of Calcutta, which had been subjected to repeated aerial bombardment by the air force. With machine gun armed Hurricanes ill suited to taking out the heavy Tenzo bombers, British Mosquitos would instead be put up to the task. While the Hurricanes and Spitfires would engage the escort aircraft, the Mosquitos would swoop in to pummel the bombers with their heavier munitions, and while .303 caliber bullets were not well matched against heavy bombers, they were more than adequate to deal with the lightly armoured Ki-43 "Hayabusa" fighters and the lighter Japanese twin and single engined bombers. Native Indian and British fighter pilots would take to the skies within moments of British radar sets detecting the incoming Japanese planes and worked to slowly bleed the Japanese air force dry. Heavy anti-aircraft fire also worked to ensure that Japan would not be able to bombard Calcutta and other Indian cities with the same impunity they were used to.

Indeed, all over their enormous fronts; Japan was finding its air supremacy starting to slowly wither. The undeclared war with the Soviet Union had cost the air force significantly as Japanese pilots were put up against the far eastern garrison expecting an easy win only to be met with a bloody slog and eventual forced retreat. Extensive lend lease to China had seen the Chinese air force furbished with new aircraft more and more able to challenge Japan for ownership of the skies while pilots could train freely in the safety of western China. In Papua New Guinea, the Australian air force was recovering from the bloody battering given in the initial year and was feeling brave enough to start launching sorties in defense of British Papua. The navy itself needed time to recover as the tempo of its operations had lead to unexpected air crew attrition and reforms to pilot rotation were necessary to prevent the bleeding of skill from the navy air force entirely.

The army would have to advance without the comfort of overwhelming air superiority to face more than one million men at war, the Indian wrath unleashed. Indian factories set up throughout the thirties were churning out weapons and materiel for war, and massive training programs had seen the army of the Raj expand dramatically. Soldiers from Africa had been raised to join in the defence of India, and the soldiers at the outskirts had dug in well with the time bought earlier. The clash to come, would be one of the deciding factors in the fate of India.

* Fictional ships constructed in the 30s during the TTL Japanese economic boom and a major expansion of its ship building industry caused by Japan trying to move in to at least partly fill the void left by a red America. This includes many shipyards which exist TTL and don't OTL. The Izumo class is based roughly on the ship presented in world of warship, Other Japanese BBs of the 30s include the Amagi class Battlecruisers. Japan does produce more BBs/BCs than Britain (though not France and Britain combined) primarily because they're more willing to spend on them. This fleet expansion though does mean they needed to buy a lot of steel from abroad and expand mining operations in Manchuria and Korea.

** Thanks to this more expansive ship building industry, more Yamatos are built and are commissioned earlier. Including the Musashi.

=

 

[Aelita]

Excerpts from AH.com thread “Götterdämmerung in France”

So the Holocaust memorial museum of Paris has come out with a number of interesting press releases regarding some new documents uncovered that reveal much about not just the twilight of Nationalist France as attempts to contain Montgomery to Iberia and then Aquitaine crumbled but also the character of the regime from its foundations.

These documents in particular rather damningly show that in Serge Klarsfeld’s words “Pétain not only intervened to push legislation against Jews further than proposed, but created an entire anti-Semitic, anti-Romani, anti-leftist, and pro-eugenics outlook and framework as harsh or harsher than anything in Germany in 1942” which I suppose resolves my earlier debate with fellow board members on the complicity of Petain in the final solution.

How does that saying go -- “Kill your heroes.”?

It’s always been very hard for us to deny how awful was that den of thieves and scoundrels calling itself L’Etat Français. WW2 was our civil war, and in the name of La Patria we let the losers write the history of the war, of honest French patriots duped by Hitler, who loved their fatherland and only wanted to fight the communists. Merde!

I can’t say I’m all that surprised. Le Monde has been covering the recent declassifications and discoveries. There’s been a lot of protest marches by the right here in Paris.

I find the idea that Petain’s clique were not at least somewhat aware and complicit in what was going on to be just as spurious as claims that Hitler had no directing hand in the holocaust. We are not dealing with the ill disciplined Ustase or Iron Guard, but a modern centralised bourgeois state where military protocol regarding keeping your superiors in the know of what you are using resources for were observed.

Did they truly expect that railway traffic could be diverted to the degrees needed to attack France’s undesirable population in the midst of a total war without some knowledge from the state as to what was going on? The orders to have trucks hunt for fodder for the factories and death camps did not sign themselves. The eyes and ears of the police state would not be so easily duped as to missing a project and grandiose as the final solution.

I am sure that these documents, both discovered and declassified; may come as a shock to some, but I find it to be simply vindication. Colour me baffled as to why the right is marching in protest though, if we discovered yet more documents showing the misdeeds of Jiang Jieshi here in China I don’t think you’d get so much as an out of place cough of disapproval, let alone a march. But then, our reckoning with rightist traitors, opportunist warlords and cliques, and predatory bandits was very thorough.

While France let most of the collaborators go free in 1947-48 and imprisoned communists on accusations of treason we put most of our collaborators against a wall and shot them or sentenced them to hard labour to rebuild what they destroyed. Hypocritical you say? The collaborators sentenced to labour in the great restructuring campaign were fed and medically cared for to the best of the republic’s ability and were given payment and acceptable hours. It was compulsory labour, but it was not liquidation by overwork. One need only compare the mortality rate to see the folly in comparing the two.

As for shooting the collaborators, the liberal aversion to violence has no place in ending decades of constant internal strife in China. Perhaps had the French been less soft vermin like the Front National and Action Francaise would not be infesting Europe’s body politic to this very day. Perhaps France and the ECF as a whole could have even avoided the youth protests and riots of the 60s when the young read about the crimes of the Nazis only to realise that all too many of those fascists named in their history books were still in power.

Well, there’s a reason why I’m not on very good terms with my parents.

Until very recently, the communists have been much more powerful in the Francophone regions of the Entente. Anticommunism is also much stronger. And if my brother’s chain emails are to be believed, then these are all cynical attempts to disgrace a French national hero (HE SAVED VERDUN!) in the service of international communism.

Like, the history we all learned at Lycee was that Petain et al were all misguided patriots, that the coup of 12 February was essentially anti-communist in nature, that Leon Blum was a GUGB agent, and that Hitler used the ongoing communist fifth column in the country to impose his dominion over the state and avenge Germany against France, the Versailles Treaty and the November Criminals.

It’s rubbish created to keep the myth of one united, indivisible France in the face of the fact that France has been deeply divided since the original Revolution. Events like Petain’s German-supported dissolution of the Assembly Nationale and the German occupation of much of the countryside are de-emphasized, and explained away as disastrous miscalculations, and not a very clear Faustian bargain to prevent the defeatists in the right from trying to sue for peace.

I feel a very strong urge to spam “pure ideology” memes in response to seeing accusations that Hitler of all people was making use of communists. Did he pencil in the time to do it in between gassing and shooting the bulk of leftist movements wherever his legions’ boots tread? I would love to live in the world that the far right imagines that we live in; where the cold war is already over and all nations have already achieved Socialism.

This is what happens when “socialism is when the government does stuff” takes root as a meme in the body politic. You see phantoms everywhere, and the phrase “specter of communism” takes on a new, altogether more hilarious form. It becomes a literal spook to scare children into obedience and cow the adults into line. It’s how we end up at eyerolling exchanges between rightists insisting that hyperliberal forms of welfare such as the UBI and the Sovereign Wealth Fund are socialism and social democrats saying that they’re already using socialist institutions like roads, libraries and schools. Or God forbid “we need a mix of capitalism and socialism”, yes I’ll remember that when I’m working on a Nuclear Fission-Fusion reactor with my Alien-Human friend.

Even worse is dealing with liberals who believe that the Fascists were leftist because they implemented some populist policies and preferred corporatist to laissez faire economics. The very term “privatization” was coined to refer to many of Hitler’s economic actions, and Petain’s own regime sold many state owned assets to fascist sympathising French big businessmen to raise funds.

People make much of how nationalist strains of Syndicalism like Sorelianism and Strasserism were important to the birth of Fascism, but forget that Hitler had the Strasserists purged from the NSDAP out of both a personal loathing of them and a desire to appease the junkers of industry. Petain himself ordered the Sorelianists repressed for the same reasons. Some of these documents are even direct orders by Petain and his clique to “get rid of the creatures of Sorel who threaten our friendship with the columns of our economy with their patriotic flavour of leftist poison”.

The war might have been over by year’s end 1944 had France sued for peace. Hitler wouldn’t have allowed it, and had he not been invited, I suspected the German forces already in the West would have just imposed terms on the French government anyway. Bumbling old fool Petain who misplaced all those Jews? Probably not. Man who didn’t want to be liquidated by the SS? Probably.

Forgive me if I’m a bit incredulous, Herr Ritter. How do you figure it prolonged the war by a year or more?

He’s not far from the mark at any rate. There was a major post-war study of German war economy, joint between the Tukhachevsky Military Academy and HKMA. A lot of the German war economy in 1944 and 45 was sustained by 1) Imposing forced labor conditions on the rebellious French working class 2) The systematic looting of steel, oil, rubber, trucks, cars, to sustain production 3) the deportation of French “undesirables” to work in liquidationist labor schemes in I.G. Farben, Ford-Werke, etc. in the Ruhr, and 4) the continued usage of French port facilities to maintain the U-boat war.

Additionally, maintaining the Pyrenees defense line was absolutely essential. And while it took a while to get Spanish steel flowing back to Great Britain (meanwhile, their whole economy was floating on American credit and raw materials). It was sufficiently harsh conditions for offensive action that ultimately the Entente was forced to go around, which was a monumental task.

So he might be right. Germany was going to keep the Metropole in the war on their side by hook or crook. But if the French state itself resisted, it would be immensely bloody, and the Pyrenees defense line might falter.

As my American comrade attests to, the Germans were desperate to keep what allies they had in the war when it was clearly starting to turn against them. The Iron Guard was given leave to purge the remnant of the moderate Romanian right to keep Romania in the fight, Hungary’s government was replaced with the fascist Arrow Cross Guard, the Swedes doubled down on madness and the Italians murdered the king to install the Social Republic into being.

By mid and late 1944 a flood of Latin American war veterans and their battle hardened, full strength divisions were pouring into eastern Europe to shore up the Comintern’s strength in the region to open the way for new offensive actions aimed into the balkans to cut off Romanian oil, Finland would switch sides to join the WAllies and pressure Sweden from the east and landings on Italy proper were beginning.

Elsewhere, the grand strategic picture for the Axis was similarly dismal. With the end of the war in South America came not only the flood of latin American war veterans and the former integralist bloc changing sides to send the Prachinas to bolster the Allies, but also the end of a theatre that had been serving to siphon away enemy resources from Europe. It also meant the end of the usage of Latin America as a U-boat base which decisively crippled the Axis fleets’ abilities to operate in the western atlantic.

The war in the middle east was wrapping up with Turkey rapidly faltering; after the disaster in the western mediterranean Algeria and Libya would be lost; denying the Axis its African oil and forcing the remaining Axis forces to hide away in Tunisia for a last stand before they too had to flee. Italy would then be invaded not long after, and Mussolini was forced to shift whole corps from the fighting in Iberia and eastern Europe to shore up his regime. Meanwhile, Spain’s rich mines were now closed off to the Axis as Rommel had to hunker down in the Pyranees while the RAF could freely sortie from airfields in Iberia to menace southern France.

After Japan’s failed invasion of Hawaii, America finally decided that it had enough of the Empire and was spending late 1943, 1944 and 1945 collaborating with the British Indian and Pacific fleets to sweep Japan out of the region. By 1944 Japan was chased out of India proper and would be forced backwards out of Burma and then hunted down in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indochina. Meanwhile its forces in Indonesia and the philippines were being savagely drubbed by the Allies while the Comintern bled much of its fleet dry and was taking island after island. Hitler’s hope that Japan, the Chinese traitors, and Thailand could bog down millions of enemy troops was proving to be naught but vapour.

By 1945, the beaching of the Karl der Grosse and the destruction bulk of the Swedish fleet let the British land in Norway and threaten Sweden’s precious iron. Norway was supposed to be the last redoubt, Germany’s nordic fortress to hide in in case everything went wrong. It was also their crucial base for anti-merchant convoy raids by bombers, submarines, and surface ships. With it lost, their ability to threaten the arctic convoys was fast evaporating. Convoys that once scattered at the simple rumor that a Panzerschliffe or Cruiser Squadron or even worse; one of the three Swedish battleships or the Karl itself were in the area were now free to operate with impunity.

We can thus see why Germany fought so doggedly to hold onto every inch of France that it could as Montgomery’s forces crept up aquitaine and made its way towards the Ille de France. We also see here the reasoning behind many of Germany’s more infamous massacres of French civilians for even the slightest bit of evidence that they might be communists or pro-British. Himmler’s doctrine of liquidating the families of the executed to prevent them from taking revenge; long a staple in the east, was now widely practised in the west.

We can also see the logic that lead to deployment of wunderwaffe such as the Panzer 75 Tiger and its derivatives, the Panzer 100 smilodon; and that favourite of this board the Ubpzkpfw II Mammut (why people are so enamored by a nearly four hundred ton light cruiser turret that grew tracks is beyond me) to try and stem the tide.

It was this desperation that lead to Germany deploying the vengeance weapons en masse to try and terror bomb Britain in spite of the Luftwaffe’s bomber arm no longer being able to carry out such attacks without being eaten alive by the RAF even though the V2 ended up killing more slave labourers building them than it killed enemy civilians and attempts to use it against military targets were so wildly inaccurate that Allied and Comintern forces simply ignored them.

What happened to the Ubpzkpfw I?

The timing definitely shows this causal connection. The suppression of the National Assembly occurred in February 1944, just as the German military was getting its face punched in by the Leningrad Counteroffensive. The German occupation of the industrial areas of northern France and the French coast happened in March-April, just as Rommel withdrew to the Moltke Line in the Pyrenees mountains. The imposition of harsh rationing, and the looting of much of France’s industry coincided with Operation Obol, when Marshal Zhukov pressed four fronts and eight hundred thousand men across the Dnieper River to liberate right-bank Ukraine (June 1944).

It’s all too easy to treat the Western and Eastern Fronts as separate wars, ignoring the high-level cooperation that was going on against the common foe. The amphibious invasion of the Aquitaine in October 1944 began within days of the Byelorussian Strategic Offensive in the East.

Hey, be nice to the unofficial mascot of world war II discussion threads, even if it is the most ridiculous land combat vehicle ever put into service. I’m not sure who looked at the hundred plus ton monsters like the Lowe, Maus, and Smilodon and thought “this isn’t big enough”, but I’m glad they came to that conclusion so I could get the chance to see (and feel, Mother of Christ the vibrations) a Mammut in motion at Bovington.

Looking at the documents, it’s kind of mortifying how the pace of orders for the extermination and press ganging of undesirables increased in severity the worse things got for the Axis. It reminds me of the stories of how the Green Guard grew more deranged the more remote victory seemed to be for Brazil, but I suppose I can see the logic in it. With the Axis now scraping the bottom of the proverbial barrel for men, someone needed to man the factories and fascist chauvinism made them reluctant to use their own women. Slaves would do.

First undesirables, then simple criminals, and then simply anyone who looked fit enough to man a factory machine but wasn’t able to hold a gun or drive a tank. Soon enough not even the children were being spared as they kept on lowering the minimum age for labour conscription. It’s the same process Brazil underwent and it seems to have been repeated by all the Axis powers. Even Italy, the “nice” one, was dragging Yugoslav, Greek, and Albanian civilians into the factories as slaves.

The series of back and forth letters between Petain and Ford and Speer as they demanded more labourers to keep the factories turning are particularly sickening. They talk about human beings, children for God’s sake, like numbers on an efficiency report!

Talking about deporting fifty thousand people in a day to work as slaves to replace the last batch who were killed in the gas chambers once too weak to work like it was some kind of gift is truly the devil’s mindset. And reading the letter of thanks Ford sent to Petain for this contribution makes me want to vomit. No wonder why he’s everyone’s least favourite American.

I think this thread has tripped over the very real difference in terms of war experience between the West and East. These shocking brutalities, whether in the form of the forced labor program, the looting, or the Shoah, were a portent of the war’s eventual end for the West.

In the East, they’d been present from the very start. There’s no Western front equivalent to Babi Yar, the liquidation of the Polish intelligentsia, the Commissar Order, or Auschwitz. Perhaps that is part of why we cannot understand each other, and couldn’t even after being brothers in arms.

As the Entente Army entered Germany proper in late 1945, they discovered a population bombed out by strategic bombing, but otherwise filled with the same kind of ordinary people they found familiar, glad that the ordeal of the war was over. They liberated camps and found plenty of deported forced laborers in the Ruhr, but those were all from populations that had not been slated for liquidation, and while horrifically mistreated, had at least been fed enough to sustain their lives.

All the while, the workers who had died had been cremated and hidden literally beneath their feet. But all the real grunt work of the Holocaust was in the East. The death camps, particularly those for Jews, had all been liberated by the Comintern. Millions of soldiers saw the worst of the war, the ghost villages of the Ukraine and Byelorussia, the mass graves littering the countryside, the ghettos in Poland, the slaughter in the Balkans, and Auschwitz itself.

Last week we had that row in chat over the so-called Sobibor massacre’s depiction in the recent film If This is a Man. Some American paratroopers and their Soviet attache liberated the Sobibor extermination camp before the camp could be liquidated, and in fact caught the Waffen-SS in the act of trying to kill everyone and hide all the evidence. Some of the Ententist commentators were shocked at the display of “illiberality” when the American commander decides to put the captured SS officers before the drumhead for their crimes against humanity, and have them hanged upon conviction.

 

[Aelita]

So now that I'm back from my kick...

This has probably been a long-time coming, but I need to take a break from the TL for a while. The present situation in Chat was just the final catalyst for this. I'm not going to give an exact timeline, but you're not going to see any new updates in 2017. I'll still be available to answer questions in the thread from time-to-time, and I might pop into the fanfic thread occaissionally, but work on the TL is suspended until Q1 2018.

In the mean time, I'm going to be working on other projects, especially my long neglected novel.

Thanks for all your support in the meantime, it's meant a lot to me. But please don't get yourself kicked or banned on my behalf.

 

[The_Red_Star_Rising]

Excerpt from China in the Second world war by General (class AAAAA) Leang

Dragon dance

The commencement of operation Onikaze fell on 5:30 AM on the 13th of July 1939. Japan and the traitor Chinese objectives were to crush the spirit of the Chinese army and to drive the front lines as far west as possible. The City of Chonqing, the provisional capital of the Republic of China while Nanjing and Beijing lay occupied was to be the site of the greatest thrust of fascist forces. Northerly forces were meant to seize Xian while to the south Nanning was to be the target of Japanese occupation so as to cut off China's sea access entirely. Assisting the Japanese army and the army of Manchukuo would be the forces most loyal to Jiang Jieshi and his cronies. The ma families, fiercely anti-communist, directed their forces against the Wang Jingwei government, splitting the focus of Chinese forces while Tibet declared a pro-Japanese neutrality and dared to engage in a number of border skirmishes meant to expand its reach, further weakening the ability of China to resist. However, the leaders of Yunnan, Shanxi, Xinjiang, and Guangxi declared their support for Wang Jingwei; declaring Jiang Jieshi to be a feckless coward and a tyrant who would dare sell out his motherland to foreign invaders.

Though the war had essentially begun on accident, the Japanese sensed the ability to win and in doing so, build themselves a great empire to eclipse even the British. With Germany withdrawing support for China in favour of courting Japan and unofficial comments from Britain, France, and the Netherlands indicating recognition of Jiang Jieshi as the rightful leader of China and not American and Soviet supported Wang Jingwei, the Japanese felt emboldened to the point of feeling free to commit nearly two million soldiers in total to operation Onikaze, two armies for each of its offensives drawn from both its own military and the military of Manchukuo and the reorganized nationalist Chinese government and the Three Mas. Such a sledgehammer blow was felt to be sufficient to force the surrender of Wang Jingwei by the start of the new year and indeed at the start of the operation it was seemingly impossible to resist such a massive strike. Following the disasters of 1937 and 1938, the Chinese army was of low spirits. The battle of Shanghai had torn from it its gizzard and left a hollow carcass, and other defeats had eradicated the core of trained and equipped soldiers. The betrayal of Jiang Jieshi had left shock waves in the Chinese body politic and many had considered surrender then and there.

However the overwhelming response from the still free people of China and from lower government officials as well as many opposition figures that China could not allow itself to become another Abyssinia convinced those who were still loyal to China and the global proletariat to fight on even if the prospects of the war seemed tremendously bleak. Equipment from the American Republics and the Soviet Union had been amassed over the course of almost two years of war, and in the relative safety of western China, divisions could be trained in safety by American and Soviet advisers and newly minted Chinese veterans to oppose the invaders and the traitors. The occupied areas of China were now crawling with Chinese guerrillas and freedom fighters struggling every day against the invaders. Japan's rapid advances brought it deep within China, but they found only ever growing resistance the farther inland they went. Frustrated by the constant attacks of resistance movements and the lack of compliance to Japanese rule, the fascists began to implement ever crueller policies against any hint of resistance. Despite attempts by Jiang Jieshi's collaborationist government to restrain the Japanese army's brutalities, the Japanese commanders began to order the routine annihilation of population centers in attempts to flush out any cells of resistance.

After the slaughter of a hundred thousand people throughout Central China in the "draining the marsh" campaign to flush out Chinese resistance, Jiang Jieshi sent a plea to the Japanese commander to please restrain his soldiers for the sake of making it easier for his government to administer the Chinese without having to engage in heavy handed censorship of information. The response from the Japanese general was simple, short, and utterly indicative of the nature of the relationship between Japan and Nationalist China.

"Last I was aware, you came to us for aid, not the other way around. Better that ten innocent Chinese die from our soldiers' over abundance of zeal in the pursuit of victory than one partisan cause trouble for the both of us." To this, Jiang Jieshi had no response.

However, Communist resistance forces reared their heads ever deeper within Japanese occupied territories, even installing themselves within the European concessions to monitor and report the transactions made between Jiang Jieshi's collaborators and the capitalists who dominated the concessions. Given that these were a common route for the collaborators and the Japanese to buy products from luxury goods to outright weapons of war such as tanks, being able to keep track of the purchase and sale of goods in these places was of crucial importance. Knowing if the collaborators would have the benefit of fresh cannonry or new air planes was deeply important. Japanese air superiority allowed for the free and unopposed bombing of Chinese forces at the commencement of offensive operations, while Japanese armored superiority allowed for breaches in defensive lines to be opened and exploited by the large masses of fascist divisions committed to the massive offensive. With the need to carefully ration out the resources either produced within China or acquired from the American Republics or Soviet Union evident, particularly in this dark period of the war, the National Revolutionary Army had to have the appropriate counters in place and know in advance if equipment such as anti-tank guns or anti-aircraft artillery was going to be needed in greater numbers.

Elsewhere, resistance forces sought to deny the enemy their use of their heavy equipment by sabotaging their supply lines. This was the widest front for a conflict in human history, and Japanese forces were operating at the end of a long supply line from Manchuria and the home islands. Thus any sort of delay in the shipment of supplies such as shells, replacement parts, and fuel was liable to drag any movement of fascist forces to a complete standstill. Well aware of this, the people's resistance movements ambushed supply caravans, cut railways, sabotaged collaborator factories, and even sometimes engaged in piracy on the river ways so as to make their use by supply convoys difficult. Important enemy military or collaborationist officials would be targeted for assassination, kidnapping, or simply tracked to allow their movements to be known by the NRA's military command. Needless to say, a thousand plans to assassinate Jiang Jieshi were hatched, but the great betrayer himself had the devil's luck when it came to avoiding attempts at assassination or kidnapping, and his legions of security made opportunities to reach for his throat rare indeed. The leaders of the hated Kwantung army also remained elusive at best. However, the constant campaign of resistance had its desired effect; Japanese and Collaborationist soldiers were reported to constantly be on edge and enemy movements were slower than the sort of blitzkrieg the enemy wanted, saving China from the sort of rapid crushing losses of territory suffered in the beginning of the war that saw nearly half of China's population under the enemy.

Northern Chinese provinces such as Shaanxi would see particularly brutal fighting. More than six hundred thousand fascists poured through the front lines in a massive assault across a front wider than any of those seen in the western front of the first world war. Yan Xishan's forces were pushed to the breaking point by a tidal wave of enemies; rapidly pushing them towards Xi'an as General Umezu sought to link fascist forces with the Three Mas. However the people of Shaanxi were ill inclined to surrender to the barbarian onslaught pouring through the Chinese hinterland. The Communist Eighth route army made itself immediately available for facing the fascist onslaught and joined forces with Yan Xishan's troops and those directly underneath Wang Jingwei to hold Japanese forces at important sites such as Ankang and deny them the ability to surround Xi'an. In the face of enemy air and armored superiority the Chinese were able to hold the south of Shanxi province against the overwhelming force of the enemy, forcing the Japanese to abandon the press into the south of Shaanxi after a three month siege; stopping both the Japanese from the east and the Ma forces to the west.

Xi'an itself was targeted by an entire Japanese armoured division and its hangers on, bringing the press of steel into the fray that sorely tested Chinese anti-tank doctrine in the face of a massed enemy onslaught and ceaseless aerial assault by everything from dive bombers to heavy four engined craft. By this point in the war, a number of Chinese tank crews and fighter pilots had been sufficiently trained in the Soviet Union and in Xinjiang to be considered well qualified even by exacting American peacetime standards, and were quickly unleashed to the city's defense against the fascist hordes. With the help of a volunteer division formed out of American, Mongolian, Latino, and Soviet forces, the Japanese assault slammed into a wall of concrete and steel for more than a month of high intensity fighting before settling into a long siege. But despite the best efforts of Japan, Manchukuo, and the traitors; the city would not fall and Wang Jingwei's government had received perhaps its first major victory as the Japanese pulled back in bedraggled fashion to lick their wounds; withdrawing to a safe distance by year's end to fight the battle of a hundred regiments in an attempt to cleanse communist influences from their occupied territories.

The south offensive was aimed at crushing the highly anti-Jiang Jieshi Yunnan province and the highly loyalist Guangxi political group which was raising thousands of soldiers to fight for the cause of Chinese people's liberation. First spotted by Chinese aerial reconnaisance flier and eventuial air ace Yu Fang, the Japanese assault force bulldozed its way through much of the Chinese south under the slogan "no stops until Hainan". Advancing more than a dozen kilometers every day, the Japanese would overrun Liouzhou and the Japanese commander sent Chen Jitang a simple request. "Surrender Nanning unto our forces and your people shall be spared the sword, should fortune favour you; you may even find yourself awarded a place of power and comfort in the new governance of your people. Free of the insidious influences of the white devil in red cloaks from America and Russia, part of a nation of equals with Nippon so that you too may bask in the eternal sun." Jitang's response was a rather famously rude and extremely hostile Chinese insult. "肏你祖宗十八代". Certainly, the commander felt quite offended on the behalf of his eighteen generations of ancestors when his red faced traitor Chinese aide translated the insult for him and ordered the assault towards Nanning to proceed with all due haste.

Well trained artillery crews set up in strategic points rained fire down upon the Japanese advance as quickly as it began, while well arrayed nests of machine guns and pill boxes gave the Japanese a taste of assaulting fortified positions and repay them for the slaughter inflicted upon Chinese forces attempting to take out Japanese bunkers at Shanghai. Quad .50 caliber nests and 85mm guns gave Japanese aircraft something to think about while Japanese fighter pilots found themselves forced to duel an outnumbered but fanatically determined national revolutionary air force. Chinese traitor forces; considered somewhat expendable by their Japanese counterparts, were quickly forced into the fray ahead of the IJA while the IJN drove around the Chinese coast to lay the formidable power of its guns and the Japanese sentai upon the NRA. Though the Chinese shore batteries were heavily outmatched by Japanese naval artillery and carrier craft and were not able to stop the landing of the Sentai, they were able to buy enough time for reinforcements to arrive and for the people living in the coastal villages to flee inland towards Nanning even as everything from destroyer caliber guns to massive battleship shells rained down upon the coast. What was meant to be a quick advance slowed down over the course of months, with the north Yunnan offensive starting to stagnate for largely similar reasons while the fascist hordes sought some method of breakthrough. Eventually though, Japanese supplies began to run thin and the assault had to be put on pause to allow for its armies to rest.

The drive towards Chonqing would dwarf both of these engagements however. The bulk of the Japanese assault force was aimed squarely at driving Jingwei out of his capital, and this would be the first of a number of fascist assaults aimed at the heart of Chinese resistance itself.

...

(To be continued)

 

[Aelita]

Excerpts from the AH.com thread “WI: Manstein in Operation Obol?”

I just picked up Glantz’s book “Paying the Ferryman: The Liberation of Right-Bank Ukraine” and have been making my way through it slowly.

My initial thought is 1) Reading history in my second language was harder than I expected (the only official German translations are, understandably, verboten in Free Germany due to their origin) 2) Marxist verbiage is tedious.

But I will give the devil what he is due, Glantz is a fantastic researcher. Most of my knowledge on Second Kiev and the Dneiper Crossing came from reading Karl Wolff’s personal memoirs back in Gymnasium. I knew it smelled of excuseology then, but I had no idea just how much.

I hate to say this, but maybe you Yanks and Sovs are right; if he’d been gibbeted we would have been spared this tainting of the historical record by lost-causers. So basically, Wolff excuses his failure in commanding Heeresgruppe Süd by playing the oh-so wonderful “Blame Hitler” card, pretending that the battle was lost because he was denied needed resources by the OKW, that his non-German allied units were useless, and ignores the fact that Zhukov and Haywood were always at least one move ahead of him.

Hitler being so methed out that he was barely competent to stand trial certainly lent credence to this defense, but at a certain point it’s all about cozying up to the new regime, like all the other “Not too Nazi” Nazis.

Anyway, back to the fine point of it: Volksmarschall Manstein was transferred to Heeresgruppe Mitt in December 1943 to whip it back into shape, since Hitler and the OKW generally assumed that the Reds would drive for the jugular and take the quickest path to Berlin. What would happen if Germany’s most able commander had been overseeing the defense of the Dneiper Line? Might the disasters been avoided, slowing the advance of the Reds and bloodying them more? Would we see knock-on effects on the final outcome of the war such as a larger West Germany?

There is only so much better generalship can do to alter the course of a war of industries and demographics like the world revolutionary/anti-fascist war. After four years of total war Germany was desperately short on manpower, further worsened by the great harrowing the first world war did to it's population of would be fathers. The few months old Panzer-75 Tigers were often driven by boys dragged out of the Hitler youth and the fancy new jets flying around since late 1943 were little better in that regard.

German allies were faring little better. Despite the Arrow and Iron Guard’s best efforts only so much could be scrounged out of Hungary and Romania or allies like Bulgaria and Croatia and Italy and France had closer to home problems to concern itself with after their navies were left to sleep at the bottom of the Mediterranean. All hopes of link up with the Nordics was lost and Turanist Turkey and Falangist Spain were just about out of the war.

Delegation of other fronts to German allies alleviated this somewhat but German divisions were shells of what they used to be. “Throwing meat into the grinder in the hopes of sausage”, as Jaeger put it. Even if Manstein got another major win the Comintern could recover much faster than he could, especially with Latin Divisions starting their transfer to other theaters to pick up added slack once Salgado was lying dead on his table.

We can’t discount generalship either though. Military leadership is very skill intensive. It takes a long time to turn a wet behind the ears lieutenant into a general, and most of those lieutenants don’t have what it takes.

Rising in the ranks requires a fair amount of force of will too, so you’re going to get a lot of big ego prima donnas. They are, after all, used to commanding the life and death of thousands of people.

Say what you will about Manstein, the man knew better than most about how to deal with the strategic and operational levels, something that Wolff was just plain inept at. And while Glantz correctly emphasizes the major intelligence failure that led to Reds cracking the huge defensive line the Germans had built on the Dneiper, magnifying its natural properties (it’s very broad, and the west side tends to be flanked by cliffs), this intelligence failure was a product of German generalship.

Though let’s not forget that Manstein himself argued that the next blow would come near Belarus. He wanted to be there, and would have felt dejected if he’d been assigned to what everyone assumed was a lower priority theater. Or are you including in your POD the Germans correctly seeing through Comintern maskirovka, and detecting offensive preparations in the Ukraine faster?

I think it’s worth noting that the Luftwaffe had by this point been largely worn down to an interception focused force with once a blue moon CAS operations that essentially left the International’s ground forces free to operate with pretty minimalistic aerial interference. The kind of benefits Manstein used to get from aerial reconnaissance or CAS and tactical bombing runs in previous years just weren’t there to the same degree anymore, and the Luftwaffe couldn’t keep planes off his back anywhere near as well as before.

Meanwhile the skies were now swarming with Shturmoviks and Shillelaghs and enough twin-engined light bombers to make some clouds out of. Sure their actual number of “kills” was fairly low, but they made life on the ground for an Axis grunt pretty thoroughly miserable. Meanwhile the Stukas and 190s had mostly stopped flying sorties where interception or AAA was likely to be heavy.

Artillery and tank concentrations were also pretty heavily in the Comintern’s favour even with the new heavy tanks rolling out and the Germans cranking out as many STuGs, Jadgpanzers, Panzerfausts/schrecks, and Paks as they possibly could to try and thin the herd. Despite the efforts of Ford and co, the Comintern had a very definite advantage in self propelled artillery too; maybe not as glamorous as assault guns or tanks, but having mobile indirect fire support’s pretty huge I’d say.

All good points so far.

Important, I think, to remember that there’s a lot of one-sided narratives on the internet, particular in the historical-themed games communities that intersect with uchronia. If one got their history from my local wargames club, one would think that the entire post-Stalingrad history of the World Revolutionary War was a total walkover by the Internationale.

Ritterstahl is pulling at the edges of a more interesting question, IMHO. Since the WRW, the Comintern has utilized a more fully developed doctrine of deception, which we call маскировка, loaned to English as ‘maskirovka’, and it largely left German staff officers frustrated and mystified.

Manstein was in command of AG Center, and the OKW transferred something like twelve division equivalents of reinforcements original earmarked for AG South because a comprehensive campaign of simulation and disinformation created a false image for German intelligence, one they were inclined to believe because by now the GRU had a good read on the biases of the German military.

It should be remembered that the maskirovka for Operation Obol was not perfect. The forces in the Ukrainian theater achieved strategic surprise, but Wolff managed a certain level of operational level readiness. It’s hard to completely hide four fronts moving into an offensive posture, and attempts to masquerade this as diversionary operations proved ultimately unsuccessful.

Though I do think that the OP is selling Wolff’s talent as a general short. Compared to most others attaining the rank of Oberst-Gruppenführer/Generaloberst, he was quite young, and it was not merely political. By all accounts, he transitioned well from being a staff officer and police-oppressor to conventional military command. He was simply outmatched by the acumen of his opponents. There are very few contemporary generals on the same level as Zhukov and Haywood, so I wouldn’t fault Wolff for not being part of that exclusive club.

As has been noted, German intelligence had been fooled on the strategic scale, and it left Wolff very little time to plan for the defense once Comintern aims became apparent. He was able to halt the transfer order for the I SS Panzer Corps, and procure precious fuel and ammunition, without which the operation might have truly been a walkover. But he was misled about operational details, assuming the 3rd Ukrainian Front under Patton would spearhead operations towards Odessa, a critical error that allowed the 1st and 2nd Ukrainian Fronts to catch the German Second Army in a cauldron west of Kiev. And while he blamed the Rumanian First Army for failing to break the cauldron, just as much blame could fall on the SS and Heer troops that joined the counterattack.

Unless you’re dealing with smaller armies operating in relatively small amounts of space, even a largely victorious army will need time chasing out an enemy from its positions. Distances must be crossed, divisions must be broken, all these things take time that can only be sped up so much. And while the Germans were definitely caught with their pants down, they weren’t as completely unready for a war of this scale as the Soviet Army of 1940 and 1941. Fritz may have had his kick in the balls but he remembered to bring his cup this time.


As for what Manstein could have done had he been there, hrmph. Given that the defensive lines fortifications had already been built I think that would already work to define where he’d deploy his defenses. A mobile defense is workable, but has to contend with OKW being extremely wary of losing ground that would put us reds closer to Romanian oil or the Wolf’s den proper in Germany. He’d have to sell his peers on the idea he can retake any ground he cedes decently swiftly to get their full support on the idea.

He’d probably also have to shout down people who were mostly interested in using the war as a way to press vanity projects and enrich their careers/line their pockets like everyone involved with the rocket project. What kind of fucking imbecile looks at the Vengeance weapons with their massive dispersion radiuses and says “yeah we can use this for artillery”? . I’m sure he’d be able to tell them to piss off, but men spent guarding V1 or V2 launch sites to randomly bomb sections of the map are men wasted, which I’m sure didn’t help Wolff’s defense. Not a lot of men in the grand scheme of things, but a confusing waste of some brigades.

I think numerical and quality imbalance in troops and equipment gets overplayed a lot in discussions, though I’m glad to see we’ve mostly moved past that here.

Generalship is an interesting question that I admit I’ve probably been too dismissive of in the past. While there really isn’t any such thing as the “best” general, particularly in a modern combined arms war, there are certainly right and wrong tools for the job. We have a bit of a problem with that here in the United Republics, where a lot of people with a skin-deep understanding of history see the legend that built up around Patton, and make the bad conclusion that Patton was being slighted during the war by jealous Soviets or conniving ultras like Haywood, and that’s why he topped out as Front commander while the more prestigious theater and the Supreme Command went to others.

Patton was, IIRC, finally becoming aware of his limitations around Operation Obol. Previously, he’d been adequate as a Front commander, and on the scale of the war with Germany he might have been better off remaining as an Army level commander. But in this case they used his somewhat overblown legend as part of the maskirovka toolbox. The Abwehr made the reasonable assumption that the pugnacious and offensively oriented Patton would be the one pressing breakthroughs, and not the one relegated to follow up exploitation operations.

Another interesting wrinkle is how by Obol Comintern doctrine mostly reached a mature state. There weren’t any more radical reorganizations of ToO&E. The Soviets and Americans had a proven core cadre to their military, and given manpower constraints they largely halted the activation of new divisions after fall 1943, instead focusing on rotating out and rebuilding existing divisions. This would have some huge knock-on effects for the rest of the war.

So lil old me got myself some texts and docus this month. One of em, the series “The what ifs of the World War” asked this question. I know that generally visual historical works are considered inferior to historical texts, but the conclusion the boys, gals and others there made was that Manstein could extend the war by about three to maybe six months; with that last one being the miracle perfect storm case.

They did totally say that “contrary to popular belief, OKW did take the threat of a southern thrust quite seriously due to the importance of not just Romanian Oil, but the manpower and extra industry offered by the Axis’ allies and conquests in southern europe such as Yugoslavian aluminium.” It’s just that they were more worried about a rapid knockout blow aimed towards Berlin proper.

Their analysis said that he’d probably try to drag the Comintern into an energy and momentum draining battle at places like Kiev and other cities that could not be ignored in an advance to leech as much of the Comintern’s fighting ability as possible. Then they proposed two scenarios, one for holding the line and the other for an attempted counter attack back over the Dnieper.

Not too sure about their estimate that Manstein could push the line back to the “cursed city of Kharkiv”, but I do agree that by 44 the chances of the Axis stepping foot into the RFSR again were uh...pretty grimly minimal on their part.

Upon reflection, it does seem a little late in the game to think that reshuffling pieces could prevent a checkmate.

Obol tends to get overshadowed by the subsequent White Russian campaign in Fall/Winter, because the number of troops at play on both sides was considerably smaller, and at least here in Germany the fact that by May 44 the southern part of the Eastern Front was increasingly being left to our allies puts the focus away.

That, and you have historians writing books with catchy titles like “The Death of Army Group Center,” which I suppose puts more attention on the events of Fall 1944.

With regards to that documentary, Babe-a-Yeah-Huh, how do they figure this?

This is not 1940, where the RKKA is reeling from ill-thought out purges, and an insufficient cadre to sustain both rapid numerical expansion as well as doctrinal/equipment modernization. It’s not 1941, where the RKKA hastily organizing whatever divisions it can. It’s not 1942, where the Comintern Army is getting better organized, but the average Soviet army is the equivalent of a German corps.

By 1944, the German qualitative drop combined with Soviet qualitative increase means that not only do the Comintern Army outnumber the Germans pretty strongly (though not anywhere near as much as memes imply), the average division’s quality is at least as good. Probably better; Comintern forces are far more heavily mechanized, and too much of the Axis military is dependent on horse-drawn logistics in the field.

It’s one thing to inflict higher losses in these conditions with the skillful disposition of troops, defensive measures, and the use of counterattacks to break operational tempo. It’s quite another to be able to actively take territory when outnumbered 2:1 in the local theater.

It proposed that after getting those meatgrinder battles to sap the vitality of Comintern military formations that the Axis could concentrate its attacks on sectors held by IVA troops and Mongolian and Sinkiangese formations much as how the Americans and Soviets often went around German, Italian, and French troops to maul the less well equipped Axis minors. Once breakthrough is achieved the Soviet and American forces would pull back to avoid encirclement and try to engage in a mobile defense against the counteroffensive.

I personally don’t buy it as I think it sells the non American and Soviet troops contributed to Europe way too short. Which I think shows up again in their estimates of Latin American troops moved up to Europe after the close of the South American theater. And how many Sinkiangese and Mongolian troops were even there to begin with? The former were mostly there as a show of China’s solidarity with the USSR in declaring war against the Axis even while fighting with the Co-Prosperity Sphere.

It’s also not like Jerry had an amazing idea of the number of divisions around either. The Axis and Co-Prosperity sphere always had an intelligence disadvantage against the Allies and Comintern; especially after the intelligence leaks opened up by the Swedes breaking into the American embassy and stealing all the encryption equipment and the Italians doing the same for the British when they respectively declared war were closed. There’s not an awful lot that Manstein could do about that.

Oh yeah, by 1944 the war was over, and the Axis just didn’t know it yet. If I might slip back into my wheelhouse, the real threat to the Soviet-American cooperation had been decisively defeated by April 1944. Not only were shipping tonnages lost to u-boats steadily dropping since June 1943, but containerization coupled with mass-production techniques had made Comintern and Allied shipping far more efficient than it had been at the start of the war. And the dreams of Franco-Italian breakout of the Mediterranean to raid Atlantic shipping like it’s the Second Coming of the Golden Age of Piracy were now at the bottom of the sea.

Millions of American troops were there to stay, and both they and their Soviet allies would be well equipped to fight the war to the finish. The only remaining question was how long it would take, and how many people would have to die to make it happen.

 

[Aelita]

All future updates will take the form of vintage Usenet posts

Excerpts from Usenet soc.history.what-if post “RE: Turning point of WW2?”

Post by jbaptise@ens-paris.edu.ec
Alors, there’s a whole lot to unpack here (j’aime cette phrase!)

kwaters@cambridge.edu.ec wrote:
>I understand there is a lot of historical debate about the ‘turning
>Point of WW2. A lot of which is dragged down into the mire of Cold
>War politics, with AFS and Comintern historians both having their
>respective horses in the race.

Absolument! While who ‘won’ the war is of little consequence to the
present struggle, academics still succumb to nationalisme.

>One text I read put the turning point at Moscow in 41; Colonel
>Durand argued that when the Heeresgruppe Mitte failed to take
>the city, the Nazis lost any chance of winning the war. Macksey
>differs, arguing that the successful Iberian operation closed the
>door on victory by squeezing Hitler with a second front. And
>Guderian himself argued that Hitler’s failure to secure peace with
>Britain after the astounding victories of 42 was the decisive moment.
>These men are all well respected in the field, and I’m sure there
>are half a hundred other competing theories about the turning
>point. What say you, SHWI?

I say ‘all of the above’ and more. Industrial warfare doesn’t give us
Austerlitz or Waterloo. The war was not won by decisive battles
or campaigns. Part of Durand’s thesis, which I agree with (not
merely because he is from my alma mater) is that the war was largely
fought over control of the resources that would be used to fight it:
_oil, steel, coal, aluminum._

I’ll focus on the oil because it is _super_ important. It’s also something
neither Germany nor Japan had much native access to. It’s fair to
qualify WW2 as a war fought between those who controlled oil or its
access and states that didn’t.

Hobsbawm noted that Germany in particular had an oil deficit of
_millions_ of tonnes per year in 1940. All of that oil had to be imported;
much of it came from Rumania, which wa producing like 8 million
tonnes per year, and ramping up more with German investment. The
rest came from overseas, either in Italian Libya or from the world market.
Germany’s military success depended on the vaunted panzertruppe, the
motorized echelons of the army, and the Luftwaffe, and those all required
oil. Additionally, the Kriegsmarine required huge amounts of heating oil
for any offensive operations, and even the much more important u-boats
were diesel hogs.

I would argue that your could divide the European theater into two distinct
phases. The first, from May 1940 until roughly May 1943. Let’s call
this time the oil boon; Germany could gain access to whatever oil it
needed from the world market. Either enriching its allies in Rumania
or Italy, or shipping oil from Iraq/Kuwait, Arabia, Venezuela, or Canada.

While France and Britain were still neutral, much of this oil importation
would be facilitated by their shipping. After February 42, things got
somewhat complicated. But the Royal Navy did not have the means to
enforce a true blockade, especially with Spain still being neutral, and just
so happened to inherit a large amount of merchant shipping from occupied
Europe.

During this period, the German military had the dash and elan we remember
in popular history. Because their tanks, lorries, and planes had petrol; never
quite enough, but certainly sufficient to pursue mobile combat operations
while maintaining large strategic reserves.

Was there a sudden turning point? I don’t think so; the Comintern had
proved their mastery in the east by then. But with the end of Spanish
neutrality the oil situation got a lot worse. Nazi desire for autarky had
already sunk a lot of money into coal-to-oil tech, but it was not going to
make up for the lack of imports. After Stalingrad, and the Iberian Campaign
the OKW was forced to grapple with major shortages of oil. They took
a defensive posture in the East, limiting offensives to operational counter-
strokes, dramatically cut pilot and tanker training, ended what little civilian
fuel use that had remained, and tried to squeeze more blood out of the
Rumanian stone.

Germany put the last of its strategic oil reserves into July 1944’s Byelorussian
Campaign. Manstein used up the last of the country’s reserves attempting
an ultimately futile ‘backhand blow’ against the Comintern. From that point
onwards all military operations were constrained by the ever dwindling
production available, and that meant huge allocation issues.

Merde! I almost forgot to mention the loss of Libya and access to the Med,
Hitler wresting with his generals about strategy w/ re: the Caucasus!
Another time, I think.

~J. Baptiste
---
C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre: c'est de la folie.

(Happy April Fool's Day!)

 

[Miss Teri]

Well, now comes a long awaited update....

Where Are They Now, 1944 edition (Co-Written by Jello_Biafra)


Louis Armstrong- “Satchmo”, with his virtuoso trumpeting and his unique brand of soloist, New Orleans-style Jazz and scat singing, has become one of the most popular acts in the country and a leading figure in the “Worker’s Swing” movement.


George H.W. Bush – With a chip on his shoulder a meter wide, this son of a successful businessman turned latter-day red hopes to prove he’s just as American as anyone else as an intelligence officer in the WFRA.


Helen Keller – Since the revolution, she has continued her public advocacy more narrowly for improving accessibility for people with disabilities. Unfortunately, a major omnibus that she had worked with Secretary for Labor James Cannon was ultimately torpedoed by the outbreak of WW2. Since then, she has retired from public life to pursue her hobbies, including the breeding and raising of Akita dogs.


Marion Morrison – The up and coming actor has put his film career on hold, re-enlisting in the Revolutionary Navy. Due to his age, education, and service record in the Civil War, Morrison has been commissioned as a chief lieutenant in the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Revolutionary Military Committee, the military intelligence partner to the civilian Committee for State Security, where he works as an intelligence analyst attached to cryptography units.(1)


J. Robert Oppenheimer – Due to his strong grasp of the interdisciplinary complexity of high energy physics, and his unimpeachable record of political reliability, Oppenheimer is serving as the chairman of a highly secret research group known only as Project Daisy Bell.


Leo Szilard- After the discovery of nuclear fission, Szilard realized that a sustained nuclear chain reaction could use uranium as the main element. He currently works at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory, on the aforementioned Project Daisy Bell, and though the research may be classified, it’s rumored that a sustained reaction has been achieved there.


Robert Goddard- Goddard finally got support for his research into rocketry with grants from the Army Air Force, and later the Secretariat of Aeronautics. He currently advises the current “Jet Assisted Take-Off” projects for the Army in Annapolis, as well as examine captured V-2 rocket parts.


Werhner von Braun- Von Braun is the chief designer for Germany’s V-2 rockets, and current technical director at the Peenmunde Army Research Center. Embittered by his position, he was briefly imprisoned by the SS, for “defeatism”, but released by the intervention of Albert Speer and Henry Ford.


Albert Einstein- The very popular theoretical physicist continues to do research and lectures at the Institute of Advanced Study at UA Princeton. However, he declined to participate in Daisy Bell, primarily due to his pacifism.


Errol Flynn- Having recently become a citizen of Cuba, the star of Gone with the Wind currently does propaganda films with Warner Bros and Columbia, having been rejected for Army service due to his health problems


Howard Zinn- 22 year old Howard Zinn recently enlisted in the Air Force, enthusiastic about fighting the fascist threat in Europe


Dalton Trumbo- A popular novelist, screenwriter, and journalist, he currently serves as Chairman of the Worker’s Film and Picture League.


Hedy Lamarr- Discovered by Louis B. Mayer in Paris, she has become a very successful star in the British and exile American (“Hollywood-on-the-Cauto”) film industry. She also dabbles in invention, and, with some knowledge of the mechanics of torpedoes, she is currently experimenting with a “frequency-hopping” signal to prevent radio-controlled torpedos from getting jammed and flying off-course


Carl Sagan- Currently in elementary school, the Brooklyn native has a strong passion for science, particularly astronomy, and spends a lot of time at the American Museum of Natural History, at the Metropolis Library (consuming works of science and science fiction), or simply stargazing


Jim Henson- The son of an agronomist, young Jim Henson lives in Leland, Mississippi. His father is currently preparing to move to Maryland for his work with the Ag Secretariat, so he is spending his last summer there with his friend Kermit Scott.


Vito Marcantonio- After his term as Welfare Secretary, Marcantonio returned to New York, where he ran for a seat in the provincial Congress of Soviets, which he won. He then used that to become the Chairman of the Metropolis Soviet, succeeding Fiorello LaGuardia in the role.


Zhou Enlai- Though officially the First Vice Chairman of the National Government, his position as Secretary-General of the Communist Party of China has made him de facto commander-in-chief of the increasingly Communist aligned National Revolutionary Army.


Barry Goldwater - Still in prison for sedition, a collection of Goldwater's writings has been smuggled out of Alcatraz, and then out of the country. Published as The Conscience of a Freedom Fighter in the United Kingdom, it became hugely popular book on the right until the invasion of France. Because of its anti-American tone, and all too positive appraisal of fascist anti-communism, publication has been suppressed as part of the war effort.


David Eisenhower- As the newly appointed Supreme Commander of Comintern Forces Europe, Eisenhower has operational authority over the war effort against Germany and its allies in Eastern Europe. On the eve of the Byelorussian Strategic Offensive, he delivers his famed “Great Crusade speech,” as Comintern forces prepare to complete the eviction of the Axis from the Soviet Union.


Vyacheslav Molotov- The General Secretary of the CPSU is busying himself with wheeling and dealing the plans for post-war Europe and Asia.


Georgy Malenkov- The former VVS aircraft production apparatchik has been transferred to administrating Soviet involvement in the secretive Project Daisy Bell.


Lazar Kaganovich- Following his ouster from power for his connection to the “criminal anti-Soviet Beria clique”, Kaganovich has spent the past two years living quietly at a party dacha in the Urals, contemplating writing his memoirs.


Sanzo Nosaka- Trained as a spy and agent by Section 1 of the Secretariat of Public Safety and the GUGB, the young Japanese communist and former Comintern Rep currently uses those skills to recruit Japanese POWs to fight with the National Revolutionary Army in China.


Frida Kahlo- After years of service to the Mexican Socialist Republic, both during its revolution and as a member of its Central Committee, she formally retired in 1936 to continue her career as a painter. Some say that this might be due to her strained relationship with….


Diego Rivera – Recently elected as Chairman of the National Congress of People’s Power and thus the symbolic head of state of the Mexican Socialist Republic, the famous artist and communist leader has had little time for his craft. In spite of his figurehead position, Rivera takes an active role in public mobilization for the war in South America.


Oscar Niemeyer- Niemeyer’s burgeoning architectural career ended when he was arrested by the Integralists and interned for his leftist sympathies. He has recently been released following the defeat of the Integralists, and fled to Buenos Aires, hoping to head to Metropolis from there.


Malcolm Little- Whilst currently serving his mandated time with the local militia (and preparing for potentially being drafted to fight in the war), the Lansing, Michigan resident hopes, afterwards (when and if that happens) to attend law school.


Ernesto Guevera- The sixteen year old is a survivor of the bloody war against Integralism, having lost his father and a sister in the fighting.


Marlene Dietrich- Dietrich, like many other Hollywood stars, had put her film career on hold to enlist, hoping to help liberate her homeland from the Nazis. She currently does German-language propaganda broadcasts for the “Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland”


Anna May Wong- Anna May Wong garnered critical acclaim and box office success for her performances in what would be termed the “Buck Duology”, (adaptations of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth and Dragon’s Seed), making her a bona fide movie star. She is now currently serving in China with a squadron of other Chinese American volunteers.


Alexandra Kollontai- The Soviet ambassador to Mexico is contemplating retirement once the war is over.


Ho Chi Minh- Ho Chi Minh is the founder and leader of the Viet Minh, a socialist, anti-Imperialist resistance group in French Indochina. With support from Comintern, they first opposed the French imperialists, but are currently battling the Japanese occupation, with plans to fight the French (and their new British compatriots) when they return.


Ruhollah Khomeini- With Iran now an anti-clerical communist state, the devout Shia cleric, now settled in Basra, writes polemics attacking communism and what he perceived as the fall of Islamic fidelity.


Billy Graham- The 26 year old resident of Charlotte is currently serving in Odessa. A firm Trinitarian “Brother” (coming to the religion during a difficult period after losing his father and sister in the Civil War), he spends his downtime studying the Bible or having avid, but friendly discussions about religion and socialism with his atheist comrades.


Mao Zedong- Serving as a General in the National Revolutionary Army, Mao has been coordinating partisan activities in the Yunan Province in preparation for a major counteroffensive by the New Fourth Army, and an eventual linkup with British/Indian forces in Burma.


Tony Cliff- Yigeal Gluckstein is a young socialist who fought with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine against the Italian Occupation.


Amadeo Bordiga- The Italian exile has become active again in exile sections of the Italian Communist Party. In spite of deep political disagreements he has rekindled his friendship with Antonio Gramsci. As part of this work, they both have been working intensely on propaganda operations to support Comintern military efforts against the Italian Social Republic.


Richard Nixon- WFRAAF Colonel Nixon has recently become a prisoner of war in Axis Rumania after his bomber was shot down during operations against the Rumanian oil fields.


Nikita Khrushchev- As a well-esteemed political officer attached to the 1st Ukrainian Front, Khrushchev has been cultivating ties with the military brass while serving in its military councils.


Pete Seeger- After his graduation from Juilliard, Seeger spent time honing his music skills, and learning more about the American folk tradition. He then enlisted, and is now serving in Morocco. When not fighting, he plays his banjo to entertain others in his troop.


Gamal Abdel Nasser- Nasser, along with scores of other junior officers in the Egyptian Army, is currently under arrest awaiting court-martial and sentencing for treason and collaboration with the Axis forces, along with the deposed King Farouk I’s prime minister Hussein Serry Pasha.


Jacobo Arbenz-Colonel Jacobo Arbenz lead a squadron of Guatemalan troops in Peru, when an Integralist sniper was able to get good sight on him. His body is being returned to Guatemala, where he will be posthumously decorated for his service.


Romulo Betancourt- Following Venezuela’s surrender, the center-left opposition figure has become Deputy Prime Minister of the Franco-British aligned Venezuelan Provisional Government, and will be known to posterity as one of the fathers of the Venezuelan Fourth Republic.


Alger Hiss- Formerly the assistant to the WCPA’s representative in Communist International, Hiss is now the Director of the Office of Political Affairs under Foreign Secretary Earl Browder. He and other diplomats (particularly from the USSR, the Franco-British Union, and the Republic of China) are in talks for a potential, more effective international organization to replace the moribund League of Nations.


Moshe Dayan- His membership in the Haganah lead to his prominent role in the PFLP. He and his troop conducted regular sabotage missions within enemy lines, cutting off supplies from the North, and spying on their activities in hopes of determining their next move, as well as protecting various communities from both Italian troops and the Einsatzgruppen that tag along with them. After the liberation, he is currently serving in the provisional government as a commander.


David Ben-Gurion- Though nominally a major member of the PFLP as a member of its Executive Committee, the moderate Ben-Gurion and fellow Mapai members are increasingly sidelined by Communists in leadership.


Golda Meir- Golda Mabovich became involved with the SLP whilst a high schooler in Milwaukee, and through it and it’s more religious Jewish members, eventually began to follow a more radical, syndicalist form of “Labor Zionism,” which she continued to espouse after her move to Palestine. After years of work within the UASR helping with the influx of Jewish refugees and their resettlement, she has returned to Palestine to join the resistance to the Italian occupation


Elvis Presley- A survivor of a series of tornadoes in Tupelo, Mississippi at age one in 1936, young Elvis still resides in Tupelo, with his parents and twin brother Jesse.(2)


George Bernard Shaw- Now in his 80’s, Shaw and his wife Charlotte are currently residing in Ayot St. Lawrence to avoid the bombings in London. He publically bemoaned the death of Stalin, but opposed both the British entry into the war and the formation of the Franco-British Union.


Alan Turing- Alan Turing’s work at Bletchley Park, including his cooperation with American signals intelligence, has contributed both to the advancement of computing as well as breaking the Nazi war machine.


J.R.R. Tolkien- The Oxford Professor of Anglo-Saxon has restarted work on a sequel to his hit book The Hobbit, using the Ring that gave invisibility as the center of a new adventure featuring Hobbits. In the meantime, he continues teaching, and conferring contempt for the conduct of all sides of the war (though remains primarily opposed to the Axis)


Walt Disney- After the release of his masterpiece, Fantasia, in 1940, Disney decided to temporarily resign his position at Hyperion to lead the WFRA’s Motion Picture Unit, producing both live-action and animated propaganda films.


Pablo Picasso-Picasso settled in the UASR after the coup in France, and currently lives in Metropolis, where he had visited many times during his work for the Spanish leftists. When not painting, he is involved with the homefront effort, primarily in support for the Spanish Free Soviet Republic.


Mohammed Mossadegh- After the overthrow of the Shah, former parliamentarian Mossadegh re-entered politics, this time as a member of the Iran Party. He is considered a moderate member of the ruling coalition, and is a major supporter of Prime Minister Kasravi.


Elie Weisel- Like much of Hungary’s Jewish population, the increasing Nazi grip on the country has led to his arrest and internment in concentration camps to await deportation.


Richard Rodgers- After the death of his old writing partner Lorenz Hart in Tijuana in 1942, Rodgers found a new collaborator in Oscar Hammerstein II. Together, they produced the Broadway smash Oklahoma! a year earlier. Now, they hope to replicate that success with an adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s Roman Holiday


Truman Capote- 20 year old Truman Capote was rejected from service for health reasons. He’s not terribly upset by this, however, and spends his days writing short stories for literary magazines and doing odd jobs around Metropolis.


Pancho Villa- A hero of the Revolution, he remains very involved with the RSM as Defense Secretary, coordinating the Mexican war effort in South America. Now 66, though, he is thinking of retiring after the war has concluded.


Trofim Lysenko- Lysenko continues to serve out his sentence for “public endangerment”. He has very few followers in the USSR Academy of Sciences now, and the direction of Soviet plant genetics is now firmly in the hands of the Mendelians, led by Nikolai Vavilov.


Andrew Warhola- A junior at Schenley High School, he draws propaganda posters as part of a collective with several other students in a nationwide effort to get high schoolers involved in homefront efforts. He is interested in posters as art in their own right.


Norman Bourlag- A microbiologist at the AgSec, his research, co-sponsored by the Defense Secretariat, focuses on preservatives and fungicides for food supplies for overseas troops.


Marcus Garvey- Garvey, from his London exile, strongly opposed the involvement of Africans in the American Workers’ Party, and especially the formation of the AFNR. He continued advocating his doctrine of racial separation and the return of Africans to Africa until his death in 1940. Whilst he has little following in the mainland UASR, he is beginning to have more influence among Afro-Cuban and Afro-Caribbean circles.


Joe McCarthy- McCarthy is currently serving as a naval aviator aboard the fleet carrier Bonhomme Richard, heavily engaged in the Solomon Islands campaign.


Strom Thurmond- After the most recent ban on the True Democrats, Thurmond, one of their “rising stars” as a South Carolina delegate, is currently interred at Leavenworth Penitentiary.


Victor Serge- After his release from prison in 1934, Serge moved with his family to the UASR, settling in Des Moines. He reconnected with other exiled anti-Stalin socialists, and also became a correspondent for the journal Revmira. With Stalin’s death, he is contemplating a return to the USSR, but with Molotov and other major Stalin allies still in power, he remains skeptical of it.


James Stewart- James Stewart first came into prominence as the star of the popular political satire film, Comrade Smith Goes to Debs. With his family history in the military and piloting skills, he enlisted in the Air Force, helping with both recruitment, and bombing missions in occupied Europe


Charles Schulz- Recently drafted, the St. Paul native is currently serving in Karelia, fighting with Soviet forces against the Finns. He draws in his down time, often images reminiscent of his childhood.


Clark Gable- One of America’s most acclaimed actors, he enlisted in the WFRN, and is serving on the destroyer John Brown’s Body around Iceland, primarily keeping a watch for U-Boats.


Kyuichi Tokuda- Tokuda has been held at Fuchu Prison for over 16 years, along with fellow communist leaders Yoshido Shiga and Kim Chon-Hae.


Augusto Pinochet - Part of the new generation of firmly socialist Chilean Army officers (followers of the ones behind the November Coup), Pinochet was recently decorated for his service leading Chilean regiments in Bolivia.


Nikos Zachariadis- The General Secretary of the KKE still remains in prison, with the authorities transferred to the Italian occupiers. Even without his leadership, however, the KKE, along with other leftist groups, continue to put up an effective resistance to the Italians.


Park Chung-hee- Under his adopted Japanese name “Okamoto Minoru”, Park is currently a lieutenant in the Manchukuo Imperial Army, where he often infiltrates Korean guerilla groups.


Primo Levi- Following the tightening of Fascist Italy’s race laws, Levi has been deported to a forced labor camp in Northern Italy.


Georges Catroux- Général d'Armée Catroux is the ranking French officer in the Entente Army, and currently serving as Chief of the Combined Staff.


Louis Ferdinand- The pretender to the throne of Prussia is currently being held by the Gestapo under suspicion of seditious activities, drawing muted protest from his business partners.


Elizabeth Alexandra Mary- Following the forced abdication of her uncle, the young woman has become the heir presumptive to the British monarchy. Now 18, she has begun serving in the Auxiliary Territorial Service.


Ronald Reagan- During the war, the broadcast journalist has branched out into producing newsreels for the central workers’ government, where his steady midwest drawl has made him known throughout the Americas.


Jimmy Carter: After graduating from high school 1942, Carter enlisted in the WFRN, and would serve aboard the battleship Jacobin in the Battle of the Straits of Sardinia, earning commendation for bravery in damage control.


Gerald Ford- Lieutenant Commander Ford is part of the pre-commissioning detachment for the fleet carrier Vanguard (CV-28).


Franklin Delano Roosevelt- Having taken over the post of People’s Secretary of Foreign Trade, the one-time Democratic-Farmer-Labor leader is known for relaxing the Lippmann era policy in regards to British (and now Franco-British) trading vessels, and settling ongoing disputes with British merchant vessels, in the name of the war effort.


Harry S Truman- Whilst not doing much officially as Deputy Premier, he still welds considerable political influence as the highest ranking DFLP members in government.


Pu Yi- The once Chinese Emperor and current Kangde Emperor still reigns over Manchukuo, though is little more than a puppethead for the Japanese to effectively rule Manchukuo as their colony. Kept as a prisoner in his own palace, with his life now controlled by his Japanese handlers, he was kept aloof over the course of the war, and only now (though Chinese language Radio Moscow broadcasts) is learning how badly the war is starting to turn against the Japanese.


1) Truth is stranger than fiction: John Wayne was, IOTL, apparently accepted into a Field Photography unit in the OSS, though thanks to his divorce he wasn’t informed of this.
2) Jesse died in childbirth OTL.

-------------------------

 

[Crunch Buttsteak]

American Cultural Shifts in the Second World War

“For all the oppressed people of the world, this award is for you.” – John Howard Lawson, Writer/Director for Cry, The Beloved Country (1951), General Secretary of the WFPL, 1952-1960.

“One needs only to look at the films and television shows in the postwar era to see the diverging ideals between the ComIntern and the FBU. In the cinema and on television, everyone in Britain or France lived in a country house with a working father, a stay-at-home mother who looked after the kids, while every American lived in a tower block apartment with both parents working and a bevy of characters who proved the adage of it taking a village to raise a child” – Sir David Lean, CBE.​

The Second World War had brought about an enormous sea change in American culture. Prior to the war, the dynamics of the average American family were already in flux due to the changes brought about by the revolution, but the strain of wartime had been the final breaking point for the ancien regime that had separated the oikos and polis.

To explain the Second Cultural Revolution, it’s necessary to look at the differing cultural factors that had led to it.

Shifting Populations

“The American Republic had been created as a government for an agrarian society, and the government at the time had reflected that. When the society shifted from agrarian to industrial, the government of America shifted with it.” - Nepolnoye Sredneye Obrazavaniye level history textbook from the USSR.​

It is a common misconception within the capitalist sphere that the revolution forced American families out of the countryside and into the cities. The truth was that even before the revolution, America was becoming increasingly urbanized, with the country becoming majority-urban in the 1920’s [1]. The trends that had been ongoing beforehand had been pushed over a tipping point, and by 1960, more than two thirds of the UASR lived within an urban center.

As the War went on, more and more Americans had enlisted or had been called into national service. This had forced the agricultural collectives to invest heavily in mechanization in order to continue to feed the population with less people needed to work.

The demands of the war industries had also driven changes in urban centers. The manufacturing collectives had been running in shifts to keep the production lines moving and guns, tanks, and planes rolling off the assembly lines. At the same time, the number of people called up for national service had created an opportunity for women to contribute to the global struggle against fascism.

Women working on the assembly lines quickly became the norm. Communes set up socialized childcare to free up women from the full-time demands of child-rearing.

As the population became more urbanized during the war, people started having more free time and were surrounded with new experiences to take in. Movie attendance boomed, with people having more free time. Eastman’s rules about female inclusion in movies had created a greater interest in them from young girls who could more easily see themselves represented on screen.

Historiography in the UASR

“The Revolution fundamentally transformed not just present and future of America, but even reshaped its past.” - James Lowen, How Our History Shapes Us, and How We Shape Our History (1998)​

A subtle shift that occurred in the first cultural revolution was that People’s Secretary for Education John Dewey ordered a review of all school history textbooks for reactionary messages. While observers in the AFS or in Cuba might be inclined to view this as censorship, the pre-revolutionary texts in many parts of the country prominently featured history narratives that ran counter to established facts.

The new history taught to students emphasized the revolutionary nature of the 19th century workers movements, played up the connection between the Union Army and Marx’s contemporaries, as well as emphasizing Lincoln’s communications with Karl Marx in the Slave Liberation War.

The Pill

“The church has ever opposed the progress of woman on the ground that her freedom would lead to immorality. We ask the church to have more confidence in women. We ask the opponents of this movement to reverse the methods of the church, which aims to keep women moral by keeping them in fear and in ignorance, and to inculcate into them a higher and truer morality based upon knowledge. And ours is the morality of knowledge. If we cannot trust woman with the knowledge of her own body, then I claim that two thousand years of Christian teaching has proved to be a failure.” - Margaret Sanger.​

Today, most capitalist historiography of the UASR acknowledges the role that the development of the Combined Oral Contraceptive Pill (COCP) had in causing the Second Cultural Revolution, while historiography from ComIntern going back to contemporary sources acknowledges the role that the pill played.

The COCP, otherwise known as “The Pill” was the pet project of Margaret Sanger. First introduced in 1943 and funded by the Red Army, who had been seeking a way to prevent pregnancies within the field, the pill was a fundamental shift that allowed women to take control of their own bodies in a way that had been previously unavailable to them.

When the pill was made available to civilians in the UASR, it was nothing short of a runaway success. Women felt confident that they could contribute to the struggle against fascism and could delay starting a family.

For those who did start families, the adoption of communal childcare within communes had greatly eased the burden on them and allowed them to contribute to the war effort.

Hollywood Goes to War

“Fighting side by side, the American and the Russian soldiers are working together to liberate the people of the world against the tyranny of fascism.” — Closing Narration from Why We Fight: The Battle of Stalingrad (1943), Directed by Frank Capra.​

In 1940, as the UASR prepared to go to war to defend her allies from fascist predation, The People’s Secretariat for Culture (PubSecCul) enlisted some of Hollywood’s top directors and collectives in order to tell the American public why the UASR was fighting this war and to keep up morale on the home front.

Enlisted within PubSecCul’s top army of directors included Walt Disney, Frank Capra, who had managed to get a camera and film crew to the front lines at Stalingrad, Howard Hawks, who’s biopic about Lyudmila Pavlichenko had inspired thousands of women to enlist in the Red Army, Edward Dmytryk, Michael Curtiz, and Emelio Fernández.

These filmmakers were often on the front lines of the war with their cameras to document the struggle against fascism.

The Western: A Case Study of the Cultural Revolution
Nowhere is the shift in American culture and historiography more apparent than in the western. Westerns made before the revolution would feature lily-white casts and frequently would demonize Native Americans, often portraying them as bloodthirsty savages. Westerns of the time went out of their way to inaccurately portray the west to suit a reactionary agenda.

Post-revolution westerns by contrast made sincere efforts to portray a more nuanced and accurate view of the west, with the Vaquero replacing the iconic cowboy, and the portrayals of Native Americans being shown with much more nuance. The villians in the post-revolution westerns weren’t the savage indians anymore but the more mundane villains like land speculators, rent-seekers or monopolists.

A frequent villain of the post-revolution western became the native imposter, a white enforcer of bourgeois land claims who would frequently dress as an Indian and attacks settlers as a reverse-Robin Hood who steals from the poor and gives to the rich or someone who is trying to incite a war between the natives and the settlers.

The Collectives of Hollywood
After the Revolution and the upheaval of the First Cultural Revolution, Hollywood’s studio systems were had been collectivized and taken over by the writers, actors, and directors. As a final insult to the studio bosses who had controlled every aspect of film production, the studio founders had their names stripped from their former studio lots, leading to many of the collectives simply adopting the name of the street that they were located on.

The New Collectives of Hollywood:

• Workers Film and Photo League: Former prior to the Revolution, this group of filmmakers and writers produced documentaries and newsreels for distribution to theaters to educate and inform the public.
  
  
• Olive Avenue Motion Picture Collective: Located on the former Warner Brothers lot, this collective had focused on crime and gangster films before the Revolution, and after the revolution began producing propaganda films.
  
  
• Termite Terrace Animated Pictures Collective: Located on the same lot as the Olive Avenue Collective, this animated collective produces animated comedies, ranging from the slapstick socialist Bugs Bunny to the Commander Columbia short films.
  
  
• United Artists Collective: One of the oldest of the collectives, this collective was originally founded as an independent production company by the then-biggest stars in Hollywood: Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford. Unlike the other collectives, they have only a single small lot in West Hollywood on the corner of Melrose and Formosa, and instead will share space with other collectives when needed.
  
  
• Radford Avenue Collective: This collective, formed out of the former Mack Sennett studios mainly produced live-action comedy shorts before the revolution, afterwards they transitioned into producing serials that would be played in theaters for younger audiences on saturday mornings.
  
  
• The Gower Street Collective: Created by the workers of a bunch of the different “poverty row” studios, this collective tended to focus on lower budget films, but had some success with Frank Capra’s “The Greatest Gift”
  
  
• Lankershim Motion Picture Collective: Formerly Universal, they mainly produced horror and monster films. Notably they were one of the first movie collectives to start offering the public guided tours so that visitors could see the sets, props and costumes used in making their films, something that the other studios would also follow.
  
  
• Pico Boulevard Motion Picture Collective: Formerly known as Fox Films, this collective became known for their racy subject matter and willingness to push the cultural and social boundaries in their films.
  
  
• Melrose Avenue Collective: Formerly Paramount Pictures, this collective was known for their personality-based promotion of films, emphasizing their members as stars. After the revolution, they became known for their historical epics such as Spartacus (1952).
  
  
• Culver City Collective: Formerly MGM and RKO, they focused on large and expansive musicals. Most notably a continuous early adopter of new filmmaking technology, they expanded after the war into producing spy movies about glamorous CSS agents.

Notable Films From the 1940’s:

• Hearst (1940) - Directed by: Orson Welles - A biographical movie about newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst prior to the revolution, about his rise to fame, his hubris, and his downfall.
  
  
• Fantasia (1940) - Produced by: Walt Disney - Animated anthology of segments set to classical music
  
  
• Dragon’s Seed (1940) - Produced by: Oscar Michauex - Adaptation of Pearl Buck’s novel tale of Chinese resistance to the Japanese invasion. Starring Anna May Wong, Keye Luke, and Sessue Hayakawa in the lead roles.
  
  
• A Wild Hare (1940) - Directed by Tex Avery - A short-subject cartoon by the Termite Terrace Animated Picture Collective, centering on a hunter and his battles with an abnormally clever rabbit.
  
  
• Deadly Encounter (1942) - The story of a CSS infiltrator within the German American Bund during the 1930’s.
  
  
• Hangmen Also Die! (1943) - Directed by Fritz Lang - A drama set in occupied Czechoslovakia about the assassination of the brutal “Hangman of Europe,” Reinhard Heydrich.
  
  
• The North Star (1943) - Directed by Lewis Milestone - A Soviet-American war film centering on a village of Ukrainian partisans resisting Operation Teutonic. Starring Anne Baxter as an American journalist, and Ukrainian actors Dmitri Milyutenko and Viktor Dobrovolsky as partisans.
  
  
• The Gila River War (1943) - Directed by: John Ford. Considered by many film critics to be one of the ur-examples of the post-revolutionary western, the film follows the Quechan Indians in 1850 as they fought back against the predatations of the white scalp-hunters, led by John J. Glanton. The film was notable for using the American west as an allegory for resisting an occupying force.
  
  
• Der Fuehrer’s Face (1943)- directed by Jack Kinney- Donald Duck is another overworked worker in Nazi Germany, continually beaten down by the war machinery that envelops his life.
  
  
• The Battle of Stalingrad (1944) - Directed by Frank Capra- A documentary exploring the Battle of Stalingrad in real time.
  
  
• The Greatest Gift (1946) - Directed by Frank Capra - The story of one man learning his worth and value to world
  
  
• The Best Years of Our Lives (1947) - Directed by William Wyler - Four WW2 veterans find life post-war difficult
  
  
• Heart of Darkness (1949) - Directed by Orson Welles - Adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s story about the horrors of colonialism as the narrator, Charles Marlow, travelled through the Congo Free State during the late 19th century.

The Rubyverse Series
Beginning in 1939, the Termite Terrace Animated Picture Collective began releasing a series of animated films written by Samantha Waver about a new post-revolutionary superheroine, “Commander Columbia.” Commander Columbia was a runaway success in the UASR, spawning comic books, live action serials, and numerous animated short-subject films.

• Commander Columbia (1939): Amanda Aaron is a young girl left orphaned by the White Army during the revolution, she leaves her home to join the Red army, but on her way, she meets up with Vladimir Volkov, Xian Jia, and Hector Morales. It’s revealed that the four of them were chosen as the avatars of the world socialist revolution, as each of them best embodies their country’s revolutionary spirit. Unique for a superhero story at the time, Amanda was only thirteen years old but became fifteen years old as Commander Columbia. In the film, she struggles to learn her new abilities and ends up face to face with “Heinrich,” an amoral capitalist who will sell to anybody no matter what they use his products for, and has created a process to pull the life force out of his workers to keep himself young and strong forever. The ending of the film showed Heinrich, a weakened shell of who he once was leaving for Germany and reporting to the series’s main villain “Seigfreid,” who tosses him aside now that he’s outlived his usefulness.

• Mission to China (1939): Released as a double billing with Commander Columbia and worked on at the same time, this film is significantly longer than its chronological predecessor but introduces the four "principle wartime villains" of Siegfried, Romulus, Explorador, and the goddess of darkness Idaina Kage; as well as her soon to be life long friends Valiente and Hua to expand the roster of heroes from Columbia and her boyfriend Molotok.

• Zeras the Hammer (1940): Features some cameos from Columbia but also introduces what is often called "Team 2", Zeras (local John Henry expy), Zaibas (electric Lithuanian-Russian in her first outing), Draguv (somewhat hulk like embodiment of industry from the USSR), and Heart Guard (Native American girl with psychic powers). The last pre-war film made, introduces the British villain the White Duke; but this film ends up falling into obscurity in 1942 when the UASR forbids screenings of it for the remainder of the war due to being allies with the FBU. Used to get double billing with Blood and Iron.
  
  
• Blood and Iron (1940): A full length film, featuring a peril in the Amazon and the introduction of the Mekmenschen. Considered sort of a "love letter" to Latin America, the film is generally considered more basic in plot and premise than the first one.
  
  
• Death on the Volga (1941): Back to Amanda and company, when in production it was already assumed that there would be a war in the Soviet Union, so in editing all they actually did was change any French flags to Italian ones and call it a day. This film introduces the villain Koschei and his sinister plot to render all of Russia a dead land for his undead warriors to rule hand in hand with Hitler to avenge his defeat by Prince Ivan long ago. Ends up being awkward in the SecCulRev era due to its uncritical depiction of Stalin's USSR and the man himself who's portrayed rather glowingly as basically "Lafayette for the new age."
  
  
• Peril in Chonqing (1942): Commander Columbia returns to China. This one brings together Zeras and Columbia; who are met with the perils of what is later often considered a deeply unfair depiction of Japanese religious practises in the form of Idaina Kage and her father Amatsu Mikabosh as they seek to cover the world in an endless night save for Japan itself. Also notable for having what is often interpreted as pretty flirty dialogue between Columbia and Hua.
  
  
• A Light In The Night (1943): This one is set in America itself, the first for the feature length movies. Here it's a spy-buster piece. Largely considered unremarkable save for having some...strange moments that become memes much later in the timeline. A lot born of Draguv's...strange expressions. Also low key throws shade on the TDP with a highly John Nance Garner coded would be quisling on the phone with Ford later felt unwarranted.
  
  
• Red Star, Black Sun (1944): Generally considered the strangest of the war time films due to its decision to double down on the mystic stuff. What is ostensibly a journey of self discovery for Amanda also is kind of low-key a diatribe on gnosticism mixed in among the importance of rejecting fascism and defending the collective freedom of the gentle labourer from the exploiter. The actual story about a more personal confrontation between Amanda and Siegfried is also rather dark, especially his later famous rant inspired by things Erich Koch has actually said on why eastern Europe deserves to be conquered followed by what is outright stated to be him having a whole town burnt to death on Himmler's orders.
  
  
• Battle for the Ages (1945): Features a time travel storyline that manages to be less weird than the prior film. Often also considered to be a dialogue on the merits of socialism and the achievements of the working class throughout history from Lenin and Reed to the brothers Gracchi and Spartacus. Creates the meme image of Amanda riding on a T.rex clad in all American armour to charge at Fafnir the Dragon deemed so ridiculously over the top it lives on forever in memedom.
  
  
• A Long Way to Go (1946): The last wartime animated feature film, this one's a more personalised one about the cost of war and who's ultimately to blame for it all. The axis villains are portrayed as both deeply evil and maladjusted people and also kind of pathetic fanatics fighting for an already lost cause. Features a version of the "I'm escaping to the one place not yet corrupted by communism, SPACE!" line from the main villain; Lady Death Blossom; a high ranking Japanese official.
  
  
• A Spark In the Heart (1947): The first post-war film, A spark in the heart sees the return of Koschei. The Deathless has a new scheme, one built around trying to marry the science of axis researchers including Doktor Vandal to his magic. Some editing was done to account for the end of the war, reframing it as one last struggle by the remains of the fascists to seize the world. The film is notable for also featuring an appearance by Captain America and Doctor Fate.
  
  
• A Dance in Starlight (1948): The last of the films to be considered part of the "wartime" lineup (being made during the latter part of the second world war), A Dance in Starlight was edited somewhat to cut down the references to the Axis powers and features an expedition to the moon of Ganymede to stop a pact from being made and to help the people of the largest moon liberate themselves from the tyranny of Kozorna the Grim. Notable for being the first fully space based Rubyverse film.

Fashion Trends in the UASR
Following the revolution, cotton had been in short supply due to the vengeful sabotage of cotton fields by the bourgeois landowners, who had chosen to destroy their crops rather than allow the Red army to benefit from them. As a result, cotton, hemp, and other natural fibers for clothing had been in short supply after the revolution. The UASR had only just begun to begin producing cotton again when the demands of the war effort had led to further shortages of fibers.

The fashions followed the necessity, and clothing began to be designed to minimize fabric whenever possible. Hem lines moved up to above the knee, shirts and blouses favored shorter sleeves, dresses became sleeveless, suits became single-breasted and the waistcoat was removed. New fabrics like Spandex had been invented as a byproduct of the war effort, and when combined with the then-recent material Rayon, had led to radical new possibilities for UASR fashion collectives.

Undergarments became simplified to minimize the use of fabric. UASR fashion collectives separated women’s undergarments into two separate pieces, with one garment covering the lower regions and the other supporting the chest. For men, the jockey strap and the boxer shorts became commonplace. The Red Army developed the simplified “Combat Bra”[2] for their female soldiers that soon became popular within the civilians.

Spandex - The Fiber That Changed Fashion
When it was first synthesized at the Waynesboro Chemical Laboratory in 1944, nobody in the world could have predicted the sea change that Spandex would bring to American fashion. Created as a replacement for ballistic nylon, it’s elastic properties were quickly discovered, and the new material was considered as an alternative to the scarce rubber that had been difficult to procure since the revolution. However, it wasn’t until the United Textile Collective successfully managed to blend spandex with cotton that it’s true value became known.

With a blend of 95% cotton and 5% spandex, fabric became much harder to tear, and garmets would last far longer , and the spandex blends allowed for tighter, more comfortable fits for undergarments. Spandex’s distinctive sheen became an image of postwar UASR fashion.

Postwar fashion began to integrate the new material whenever they could. Skintight leggings in a variety of colors and patterns became a common fashion trend for women in the ComIntern.

The Body Liberation Movement
The shortages of fabric and clothing following the revolution and during the war created the body liberation movement out of material necessity. In order to preserve clothing for longer, people began to go without when at home.

Swimming costumes became rare and beaches often became nude beaches out of necessity. Free from the days of censorship under the Breen Code, Hollywood began showing women in the nude at home as an attempt to titillate audiences, but had the unintentional side effect of normalizing it.

The commonly accepted starting point for the Body Liberation Movement was the 1937 trial of Elizabeth Bradley in San Bernardino.

On June 16th, 1937, Ms. Bradley had stepped out of her house while topless to buy a bottle of milk for her daughter. She had been in a hurry that day because her daughter was at home sick and she was tending to her. Ms. Bradley’s daughter had thrown up on her last clean blouse and she was in the process of cleaning it when she ran out of milk for her daughter.

Elizabeth left the house and walked towards the local food commissary to get some more milk. She entered the commissary, picked up her bottle of milk, and left without incident. Because it was a hot day, she walked past a young man who had been walking around shirtless as well on her way back. As she walked past a neighbors house, she was accosted by Militia member Joseph Friday, a former member of the Los Angeles Police Department, who cited her for public indecency.

Ms. Bradley challenged her citation before the Revolutionary Tribunals. The initial trial thoroughly established the facts of the case. But the case was appealed all the way to the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal, who used it as an opportunity to establish a sweeping precedent that indecent exposure was against the Basic Law of the UASR.

The Central Executive Council followed this decision with an act clarifying the legality of public exposure, except in cases where it would constitute a safety hazard.

The public bath-houses on the east coast, having become a social gathering spot, soon exploded across the country, with cities in every Republic soon building them.


–––


1: OTL Statistic from the US Census Bureau

2: Think something like a modern day sports bra.

 

[Aelita]

Excerpts from Roan Clark*, The Road to Nuremburg: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, (London: Penguin, 1976)

“On a cold, clear Autumn day, our triumph turned into a nightmare from which we could not awake.” ~ Sergeant Albin Wilcox*, 1/506th Parachute Infantry Regiment

Marshal Frunze had personally given the codename “Operation Sherman” to the Byelorussian Strategic Offensive. It would be the culmination of four years of awful, bloody struggle, and with the eviction of the Nazi occupier, it would be time to sound the death knell of the Third Reich itself. The code name had been chosen as an homage to the Union Army general and his March to the Sea that waged a revolutionary total war against the slave empire of the CSA, and as a tribute to the over one million American soldiers who had given their lives in defense of the Soviet Union.

Just before dawn on 30 September 1944, a prepared speech from General Eisenhower was read to the soldiers of the Central Theater:

Soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the Communist International! You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, towards which we have striven these many years. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes of all the peoples of the world march with you. In company with our brave Allies and comrades in other Theaters, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi-Fascist tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.​

The guns erupted in thunderous violence, ushering the start of the largest offensive operation in human history, involving nearly three million men in five Fronts. Twelve thousand tanks and assault guns, sixty thousand guns, mortars and rocket launchers, and ten thousand aircraft were arrayed under the theater command of General Zhukov.

Volksmarshal von Manstein would command Army Group Center during her swan song. Even if he’d been given every soldier the Reich could muster, he’d still have been outnumbered. But twenty division equivalents, some three hundred thousand men, were shifting from the OKH to Army Group South instead, protecting the vital Rumanian oil fields from the expected offensive. And Army Group Center began to lose some of its mobile reserves to staunch the bleeding in the south. The offensive, “straight to the jugular” as Reichsmaschall Göring had called it, had not come in summer, and now the diligence of Comintern maskirovka kept them blind to the threat until it was too late. Over a million men, millions of tons of supplies, and thousands of combat vehicles had been moved to the front in complete camouflage discipline.

In the early morning hours of 1 October 1944, four airborne divisions (Soviet 1st and 5th, American 17th and 101st) were dropped behind the German lines, tasked with seizing key crossings of the Dnepr and Pripyat Rivers. The general offensive would follow on three axes: Vitebsk-Orsha (“Luna”), Mogilev (“Venus”), and Bobruysk (“Mercury”).

With total air dominance and an army honed to a razor’s edge in four years of brutal conflict, Zhukov had all the tools necessary to showcase the mature form of deep battle’s operational art. The ever mounting intensity of the bomber offensives forced Germany to divert ever more men and war materiel to defending industry from attack. Oil reserves were dwindling fast, and synthetic production could not hope to match the deficit. Whether in victory or defeat, it would be von Manstein’s last opportunity to conduct a mobile defense or attempt to force a counterstroke.

In spite of Manstein’s well-deserved reputation for military acumen, and the still very good organizational disposition of both the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS, this was a campaign decided before the first shot was fired.

[...]

As we have seen, the speed of the offensive left von Manstein always half a step behind in the dance. In spite of the tenacious, even fanatical resistance offered by the Germans, Comintern commanders would utilize incredible local superiority in firepower and numbers to overwhelm their opposition.

All three axes achieved their initial objectives within the first week of the operation. With the front line shattered, Manstein attempted to extricate his forces from the cauldron, but with the capture or death of a significant fraction of division and army level commanders, Army Group Center was thrown into a state of chaos. This story has played out in the preceding chapters. But before continuing on to the death agonies of Army Group Center, we must make a historical aside here.

It is easy, in the context of a war that involved the mobilizations of tens of millions of people, and the construction of vast arsenals of war materiel the world has not seen before or since, to lose sight of the forest for the trees. The crucial question of why the Second World War was fought must be addressed.

Far more comprehensive works have been written on the Holocaust. But this author feels it necessary to situate the military offensive that is Operation Sherman within the context of the human-political goal of resistance to a genocidal regime.

Your average Ivan or Yank had witnessed Nazi atrocities before. The extended campaign of the past year, liberating Ukraine and Western Russia had found a country-side despoiled by Nazi occupation. Ghost towns littered the country, the once rich black earth now overworked by equally overworked people, subsisting on starvation rations thanks to Nazi looting. The forests were haunted by mass graves. The survivors told tales of deportations of the able-bodied, lured with a mixture of violent threats and the promise of increased rations to toil away in the mines and factories of the Reich.

The 101st Guards Airborne entered the forests west of Byaroza on 13 October. Racing forward to cut the axis of retreat of the German Twelfth Army, the exhausted paratroopers stumbled into the Linova extermination camp.(1)

Linova was the easternmost extermination camp in the archipelago of death created by the Nazi regime. Constructed in 1942 to provide lumber, metal and chemical products for the Reich’s war machine, the camp would later host gas chambers and crematoria in service to the Final Solution, to a question no decent man would have ever asked.

Linova was one of the smaller extermination camps; most recent estimates conclude that approximately two hundred thousand Jews and other undesirables were murdered there. It is unique only in as much as the rapidity of the Comintern advanced prevented attempts at liquidation, demolition and the destruction of documentation. In the chaos of Operation Sherman, orders to move up this erasure of physical evidence of the Shoah did not arrive in time.

The panicked guards of the SS-Totenkopfverbände,(2) accustomed to brutalizing a population of starving prisoners, were no match for the scout elements of the 1/506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, and surrendered after a token resistance.

The soldiers would walk into a nightmare land. The barbed wire stockade encircled some two thousand emaciated men, ghosts of skin and bone. Housed in bare wood and sod huts, they were clothed only in threadbare striped pajamas, each adorned by a yellow Star of David. The shambling men waited at the barbed wire, too cautious to hope just yet, as the paratroopers cut open the gates.

A fine layer of pale ashes coated the main concourse. When the interpreters began asking the inmates about the camp, they would learn that they were standing in the cremated remains of the recently murdered.

This story would be repeated many times in the advance across occupied Poland. As for the men and women who bore witness to this atrocity, it is often what they did not or could not say was the most revealing.

Corporal Joshua Graves’* journals have been a treasure in enriching the war history of the 1/506th, filled with everything from his existential musings to details about the ration situation. The entry for 13 October is a single large black ‘X’ written with a trembling hand.

Lieutenant Ken Fuyutsuki*, presently serving as executive officer of B Company, would write:

I wanted to believe that however evil the Nazis were, there was still some shred of humanity left. I don’t know how I can believe that anymore. One of the inmates spoke some English...he said he was a professor of English literature in another life. He took us to a gray, foreboding building near the edge of the stockade. He said that when people went into this building, they never returned. Everywhere smelled of death and decay except in here. The overpowering smell of chemicals filled it. The chamber said it was a ‘shower’. The paint had been scratched down, gouges in the cinder blocks. Fingernails. I can’t sleep without imagining the desperating clawing on the walls.​

For the survivors, starving and wary of the other shoe dropping, liberation seemed like a dream. They had spent weeks not knowing whether they were to be force marched or liquidated, with new orders and countermands arriving every day. The sight of olive-green fatigues and pot helmets, all armed to the teeth, offered the promise of peace. Armed force, not against them, but for the first time in the pitiful years of Nazi occupation, allied to them.

The historian’s difficulty in discussing the Shoah, in spite of its historic recency, is that of the detective’s magnified million-fold. “Avengers of the innocent” in the mold of Hercule Poirot must give voice to the homicide victim. But the Shoah was not a murder committed in the heat of passion, nor was it the act of a small conspiracy killing in cold blood for the sake of treasure. It was a systematic, industrialized system of murder that involved millions of guilty hands all playing some role in the machinery of murder.

The historian must give voice to the twenty-five million murdered in wilful, deliberate malice by the Nazi regime, of which the Jews bore the heaviest burden.(3) And those Jews who survived are undeservingly burdened with the duty of speaking for the millions who did not. It would be obscene to discuss the liberation of Linova without the voices of the liberated.

Yakob Rivikin*, a survivor of Linova, would reflect on his liberation five years later, saying:

It was like waking from a fitful sleep. Each day had blended into the next, neither fully awake nor asleep. Indeed, neither alive nor dead, somewhere in between. When I saw the GI standing on the other side of the fence in his forest green, I began to stir. He seemed like a mountain of a man, a lantern jawed Gideon standing two meters tall. He looked at me, face twisted in a mixture of concern and unbelief. That such a man could be moved to tears...I realized the full weight of what the Germans had done to me, as my hands traced the contours of my bones. My own body was alien to me, the bones and skin I could not recognize as mine.​

There can be no better reminder of the barbarism of the Eastern Front that unlike Entente forces, who when they stumbled upon Nazi concentration camps often made the situation of the starvelings worse by overfeeding them, the Comintern forces had well developed protocols for preserving the health of the starving. After distributing the recommended small doses of acceptable foods and water from their own rations, the soldiers of 1/506th turned towards their SS-TV captives.

Major Russel Murtagh*, commanding officer of the 1/506th, ordered the captured officers and men of the camp’s guard detail, some two hundred in total, to draw lots, on the pretense that they would be separated into groups for labor detail. The first group, which included the camp deputy commandant Obersturmfuhrer Franz Reichleitner, were to be marched for POW processing by 18th Army. The second two groups were ordered to bury the remaining dead who littered the camp, or who had perished while abandoned in railcars. While the SS men dug mass graves for their victims, units of the 18th Army moved forward to cut off German escape, and to secure the camp against German counterattack after intercepting Wehrmacht orders to retake it and liquidate the population and physical evidence of its existence.

The following day, just as the grave digging was completed, orders arrived from the divisional soviet, signed by the divisional commissar Brigadier Bernard Ades, for the liquidation of the camp guards. Captured orders as well as testimony from the inmates had attested to the camp’s role in the extermination of American and Soviet soldiers of Jewish descent. Thus, under General Order No. 165, reprisal against the offending unit was ordered. At noon, in the sight of the inmates, the SS camp detail was liquidated in front of the ditch they had been digging since the previous afternoon, sparing only the non-German Osttruppen.

[...]

On 12 December 1944, advance elements of the 62nd Army reached the shores of the Curoland Lagoon near the outlet of the Memel River. The 1st Baltic Front drove an armored wedge between Army Group North and Army Group Center. After four years, six months, and twenty-four days of war, the first Soviet troops set foot on the soil of the Greater German Reich. Troops of the 1st Byelorussian Front reached the gates of Warsaw the following morning.

An exploitation operation, dubbed “Operation Suvorov”, pressed into the Baltic cauldron. Numerous troop ships evacuating soldiers were sunk by submarine and naval aviation. The physical destruction of Army Group North was completed by February 1945, along with it the dissolution of Reichkommissariat Baltenland.

In the aftermath of Operation Sherman, the Nazi regime began its last ditch mobilization effort, recalling nearly all of its forces from the Western Theater for a defense of the Fatherland, leaving Petain’s fragile Franco-Italian coalition to contain Entente forces threatening to break out of the Aquitaine and Occitane departments. The Reich began emergency conscription of the youth and old men into Volksturm units to serve as an auxiliary to the Waffen-SS.

But even amidst a regime proclaiming Totaler Krieg with ever greater ferocity, the morale situation plummeted on the home front. The Combined Bomber Offensive was raining bombs on German industrial centers and marshalling yards around the clock. Food rations, even for Aryans, began falling, sustained at comfortable levels only by the deliberate starvation of forced labourers.

And everywhere, Hitler’s allies were deserting him. Finland had become a co-belligerent against Sweden. The resulting domestic unrest in Germany’s greatest source of iron ore exploded, threatening crucial exports. Turkey sued for peace in October, as Soviet troops prepared to break out of Turkish Armenia.

Only the Italian Social Republic stood resolute, committing forces to secure the Balkans against Yugoslav partisans, and shoring up Iron Guard Rumania against an expected Comintern offensive.

(1) No such camp existed IOTL.
(2) Often called the “Deaths Head Unit”, they were, as IOTL, the branch of the SS assigned to administer the system of concentration camps. Not to be confused with the 3rd SS-Panzer Division “Totenkopf”.
(3) Encompassing all victims of the Nazi’s deliberate campaigns of genocide, politicide and mass murder, such as the millions killed by the Hunger Plan in Nazi occupied Poland, the Baltics and the Soviet Union, the Final Solution targeting Jews, Roma, and Sinti, as well as campaigns of extermination of religious groups, political groups, and the disabled.

 

[Bookmark1995]

Hello everybody. @Aelita and @Mr.E gave me permission to post my chilling Free American State post from the old fanfic thread. For those who haven't read it, prepare to be...chilled.

The Free American State: The Grim Story of America's Nazi Collaborators

History Magazine

March 10, 2017

Two names have become synonymous with treason in American culture: Benedict Arnold and Henry Ford. The latter has become a quintessential example of capitalism and bigotry taken their most extreme points. But the greatest extent of Nazi collaboration by Americans, one can look at the terrifying story of the Free American State.

The birth of the Free American State, though established during the uncertain years of the Second World War, was already being forged in the reactionary political environment of the 1920s. Its two founders , William Dudley Pelley and Virgil Effinger, like many men of the period, developed a sharp aversion to big three forces they believed to be menacing the American way of life: socialism, Judaism, and Catholicism.

Effinger, nicknamed Bert by his followers, expressed his personal hatred, first by joining the Ku Klux Klan, and then by becoming the leader of the Black Legion, a quasi-terrorist organization that by 1932, had thousands of members scattered throughout the Midwest. The Legion was little more than a collection of hoodlums who harassed minorities and Communist organizers.

William Dudley Pelley's transition to his own fascism, however, was more gradual than Effinger's. His childhood as the son of a Southern Methodist had planted seeds of fascism, but Pelley only developed an antipathy toward Communism and Judaism while serving as a volunteer to the reactionary forces of the Soviet Revolutionary War. During the 1920s, Dudley had a mostly respectable career as screenwriter. But after a near death experience in 1928, Pelley's bigotry took on increasingly deranged and spiritual levels. His imagined himself as a mighty spiritual leader, and his beliefs also saw Jews and Communism being lumped into one malicious evil.

It was not until the dying days of Old Republic, however, the two men would be able to join together, and act the name of their sick and twisted cause.

MacArthur's anti-democratic coup and short-lived military government would provide a temporary opportunity for the American fascists. During the civil war, Effinger and Pelley found their skills would be put to good use, bankrolled by the corporate conspiracy that had decided to trade its ideals to maintain control of its capital.

Effinger and his Black Legions would, ironically serve the White faction of the civil war. Effinger and his followers were sent to purge socialists in Detroit and other Midwestern cities, and were part of the offensive that nearly brought the city of Chicago to its knees. Pelley would spend of the Second Civil War in North Carolina, running pro-MacArthur magazines that pushed his highly reactionary ideals.

With the collapse of the White war effort, Effinger and Pelley, two obvious enemies of the proletariat, were forced to flee to Cuba. But the conflicts had given them the demented skill set that would prove useful to the Nazis.

Effinger and Pelley became eager supporters of MacArthur's Cuban regime. The former used the skills of torture and murder to hunt down Cuban freedom fighters, while Pelley created a short-lived newspaper, Truth, that was popular among the American fascist community in Havana. But within a few years, Effinger and Pelley would run afoul of MacArthur.

Effinger and Pelley, deluded about the strength of American communists, believed that MacArthur ought to launch an invasion of mainland America, and became bitter once MacArthur's promise of "retaking American soil" would not materialize. The two men became increasingly critical of the man, and joined separate fascist parties that called for MacArthur's removal.

The MacArthur government disliked these men almost as much they disliked communists. MacArthurite agents, not known for their mercy or patience, were said to be disturbed by Effinger's clear psychosis.

By 1937, both Effinger and Pelley would finally have the book thrown at them. Effinger would dismissed from MacArthur's forces, and Havana censor boards would shut down Dudley's newspaper. With the loss of their livelihoods, both men turned to a growing specter on the European continent as a nation that would rescue their country from "Jewish-Bolshevik collectivization".

In 1938, Germany's successful annexation of German-Czechoslovak lands inspired a wave of immigration to the Third Reich by sympathizers. Thousands of Cuba American exiles would also end up in the 3rd Reich, among them Dudley and Effinger. Both Dudley and Effinger would meet on a steamship headed to Hamburg. Effinger was impressed by Dudley's intellectual and oratory power, while Dudley admired Effinger's passion and fanaticism. The odd pairing of pseudo-intellectual and mad dog would come together to create one of the most malevolent forces of the Second World War.


On the eve of the Second World War and during its first year, both Virgil Effinger and William Dudley Pelley had well integrated into Nazi life, or at least as much as anybody non-German could've. Effinger had become an auxiliary officer of the Gestapo, and used the gruesome skill set he obtained in the Second American Civil War to torture and weed out German communists. Dudley worked as both an English translator at a Nazi book publisher and as an editor of Security, an English language newspaper read by British and American expatriates. Both men had become good friends, with Effinger giving interviews in Security often on how to be a good Aryan. They were among the most prominent figures of the American exile community, even enjoying meals with Henry Ford.

The early successes of the Nazi Reich in the Soviet war would give fascists ground for their twisted beliefs, and Effinger and Dudley would prove to be no exception to the rule.

When instant victory proved to be out of reach, the war effort in Germany became all hands on deck. Effinger, Dudley, and their thousands of American expatriate followers became eager to join the war effort that sought any able bodied male. Seeing the dedication shown by American expatriates, Heinrich Himmler authorized the creation of the 39th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, better known Schwarz Legion (German for black, a throw back to the Black Legion), in April of 1941.

William Pelley joined the Legion as a war correspondent, and wrote optimistically about "the eventual reversal of the Red Tide, not just in Russia, but in America".​

Schwarz Legion was used mainly for the murder of partisans and civilians throughout Belarus, and often sought to match the cruelty of their Nazi masters. Many rank and file of the SS were impressed by the efficiency of Schwarz Legion and their dedication to the cause. At the same time, victory in Southern Russia and the Caucasus seemed certain, so Himmler pushed for the creation of a pro-Nazi American government in Belarus.

Hitler, who despite still fighting the war on the Soviets, was still imagining and preparing for the eventual war on the UASR. He thought the creation of an American government-in-exile would be useful in grooming the leadership of a potential collaborationist government that would be established once America fell to his armies. Goebbels knew the policy could have tremendous propaganda value, and optimistically believed that it could convince mainland Americans the "benefits" of Reich rule.

"By showing the bounty our Aryan Americans cousins enjoy under the Reich," wrote Joseph Goebbels, "we can convince Americans in Debs to rid themselves of Bolshevism without firing a shot on their land."

On July 7, 1941, the Free American State was established in the Belarusian town of Maly Trostenets, the site of an extermination/concentration camp. Pelley would become its first "President", living and governing in the home of a murdered commissar, while his good friend and Amerika Korps commander Virgil Effinger would serve as Secretary of War.

Pelley and Dudley, with the guards and legions, worked to recreate their evil version of the former United States.

The Old Constitution, amended of course, to support racial oppression, was used to govern this community. On paper, The Free American State actually had a representative government (the only thing that the Nazis ever truly objected too), but the franchise was very much an illusion. The 20 man congress, which met in a recreation of the Capitol Building, that supposedly checked the power of the President was composed of Dudley's appointed puppets, many of them too corrupt or feeble-minded to not rubber stamp any of his policies. Pelley, however, was able to maintain an illusion of governance.

The Free American State was described as "a micronation with teeth", because the community itself was unusually developed for a micronation. It had a radio station, post office, newspaper, library, and local police. There was even a small studio where Dudley made his propaganda films about the wonders of Maly Trostenets (only a few films have survived, and most of them are studied in film history as an example of propaganda).​

A school was set up for the children of Schwarz Legion members, to indoctrinate the "future leaders of a restored America." Many of the kids would be trained, not only in math and science, but in the art of torture and murder, with many lessons consisting of Spartan-style attacks on Belarusian prisoners and civilians. History lessons convinced these children that George Washington was a "true Aryan."​

In the community, a demented, outwardly clean version of Old Republic had been recreated in Maly Trostenets. ​

Men and women walked around wearing the more conservative fashion of the 1920s. The old Stars and Stripes hung over the town, albeit a Swastika in place of the stars. Much of the land was covered with white-fence homes reminiscent of pre-Revolution bourgeois suburbs. But even less wholesome things were recreated, like the racist minstrel shows.

The members of this community even had their own church set up by Dudley, calling it Silver Christianity. It combined Nazi Positive Christianity with Dudley's own spiritual beliefs.

For a period of time, this community enjoyed a disgustingly high standard of living, eating on average almost 15 times the calories allowed to Soviet and American POWs. The streets were orderly, and there was no ounce of crime or disorder.

In exchange for their bounty, the members of the Free American Republic would be party to some of ghastly crimes of the war. Almost all the Americans would work at the nearby concentration camp. Like the Croatian fascists, the so-called Free Americans would exceed their Nazi captors in terms of the violence they unleashed upon their enemies. Many Jews, Soviet civilians, and POWs are often savagely tortured. Mutilation became a disturbingly common punishment at the hands of Effinger's cronies.

Life was no easier for Soviet citizens who were forced to work in the American community itself. They were confined to housing not even suitable for cattle, and received just enough to be at starvation level.

Many Belarusian women found themselves conscripted into a brothel for Schwarz Legion leaders. ​

Even those who were given relatively light domestic jobs were at the mercy of their American masters, who were at best condescending and paternalistic, and at worst sadistic and predatory. Effinger was reported to have beat a servant to death at breakfast for accidentally spilling coffee on his lap, and to have raped up to 30 women.

But one group in particular was singled out by Dudley and Effinger: American POWs. Blacks, Jews, and Trinitarians (who the anti-Catholic Effinger considered "worst than Papists") were often murdered on the spot for "selling out America to Bolshevik slavery." Female soldiers were often subjected to savage beatings and rape for "violating their place in life," in the words of Pelley. Pelley himself used black POWs as slaves to recreate the antebellum South.

Male American POWs considered to be of "Aryan or Nordic stock," however, were given the choice of "throwing of Bolshevik chains and embracing true America." Pelley considered his Faustian bargain "an act of true repentance by true Americans." In order to convince them to switch sides, they were paraded around the American part of Maly Trostenants, and made to look at the "true beauty of a restored America", fed large meals, and subjected to propaganda, and eventually brought before Dudley himself, who would use his oratory powers to manipulate the POWs.

There were some instances of POWs becoming turncoats. One tragedy was when an American POW had been convinced to not only switch sides, but rape and murder his female comrade.

But the vast majority of these "Aryan" POWs did in fact refuse. But those that did were often subjected worse tortures than their female and non-Aryan comrades. In Effinger's words, "these men are worse than Jews. Jews make no light of their greedy, backstabbing ways. But an Aryan betraying his own kind is even worse." Effinger would take these ill-fated men into the basement and let his dogs maul these "Aryan traitors to death."

The Free American State, while claiming to be virtuous and clean, became a microcosm of the evils of old America. In the words of Edward Murrow, "Maly Trostenants is the closing thing to Lucifer we've seen on Earth. Like the Prince of Darkness, it hides a twisted psyche underneath a tempting image of wholesomeness and cleanliness."

For three years, it remained one of the most peaceful places on the front. The 5,000 Americans who settled their, Schwarz Legions and wealthy American exiles, enjoyed excellent standards of living.

By the end of 1943, the Nazi Reich found itself on the defensive as Comintern forces and Allied armies began to turn the tide against the once unstoppable fascist horde.

For many Germans, it meant tightening their belts, as the bounty they had enjoyed, often on the backs of Europe's proletariat was now being cut back as the situation turned from hopeful to desperate.

The Free American State, whose service was mainly propaganda, was deemed a drain on resources in an area that had long been supposedly pacified, and faced major cuts in its food supply.

William Dudley Pelley, the self-proclaimed president, was horrified by the news. He understood the luxuries enjoyed by the American expatriates kept them on the Soviet front, and feared any cut in rations would lead to the ruin of the whole project.

Pelley and Effinger took a step worthy of the most craven of capitalists: instead of cutting their own rations, they forced the cuts on Belarusian laborers who maintained the expatriates' quality of life, and raised rations for the Schwarz Legion and its followers. Pelley reasoned that the recent reversal of fortunes on the Eastern Front were merely a minor speed bump, and he believed that Aryan superiority would inevitably triumph. So the subhuman laborers would have to do with less.

"The God-fearing Aryans have stumbled, but not fallen. Until they get back up, the Godless Judeo-Bolsheviks will have to get less slop."

The conditions that Belarusians had endured at the peak of the Free American State were already the quintessential example the utter decadence and cruelty of Nazism. While the parasitic traitors enjoyed champagne and heated homes, the thousands of indentured Belarusians were forced into filthy stables deemed not worthy of horses. While the American puppets had enjoyed meat and oranges (once a luxury), the Belarusians were forced to subsist on little more than stale loaves of bread and watery cabbage soup. Even the house servants and sex slaves of Schwarz Legion received little food.

The cuts to their already meager rations turned their situation from unbearable to deadly, and would also mark the beginning of the Free American State's horrific decay.

Before late 1943, the Free American State was a Versailles, a place where the elite could be insulated from misery. The men and women there knew no discomfort or want, unlike the innocent Slavic civilians. The foul smell of burned bodies from the nearby concentration camp did not reach the parasites, which only eased their ability to ignore suffering.

But by cutting the rations of the Slavic civilians, the so-called Free Americans now began to be exposed to the true horrors of the war.

By January 1944, the slave laborers of the community began dropping dead from hunger and cold as they went from malnourished to famished. Many would abruptly lose consciousness in the middle of a task, like a robot that had lost its power source. One witness would declare that Maly Trostenets "resembled a village in the time of the Black Death: one would see more corpses in the street than people."

By December, dozens of people were dropping dead everyday. As more laborers died, the quality of life declined as well. Not just because the constant dying created labor shortages, but the sight of dead bodies horrified the civilians whose only motivation for living in Maly Trostenents was simply the excellent standard of living it offered to those deemed of Nordic stock. Soon, American civilians began trickling out of Maly Trostenants, as extra rations could not enjoyed in what was becoming a living graveyard.

The reaction of Effinger and his Schwarz Legion to this random dying was what one expected of a military force that had declared genocide to be a holy act: brute force. Punishment for "falling down on the job," which is what Effinger had declared those collapsing of starvation doing, was beyond cruel. The dying were brutally beaten and tortured, as were their comrades as a form of coercion. If one Belarusian person dropped dead, his living comrade would be butchered. In one murderous tantrum, Effinger executed 50 personally with a machine gun in the town center. Effinger's motivational tactics, however, did not stop the death, and only added to the increasingly horrific atmosphere. The smell of blood, once rare in Maly Trostenents, was now frighteningly common as more and more laborers fell victim to Effinger's motivational terror. The trickle of civilians became a flood.

Even worse however, was the smell of burnt bodies. To deal the increasingly massive death rate, a crematorium had been set up near the outskirts of town. While the crematorium relieved the number of dead bodies, the smell it produced was unbearable, driving hundreds away. The residents of the community who had not chosen to leave tried to block the smells by pouring perfume and cologne all over the streets. Soon, the town was coated in an ash.

By May 1944, the conditions of the town only worsened, as even the most basic services crumbled due to labor shortages, the evacuation of civilians, and the extreme Soviet weather. The once picturesque community became both a garbage dump and a graveyard. Trash was no longer being collected, the streets were no longer being cleaned. Even the crematorium no longer performed to peak capacity, as its laborers dropped dead from hunger. The once beautiful homes were beginning to decay as they longer were being maintained in the harsh climate.

Even the children of Maly Trostenents, who were considered the pride of their community, began to suffer. Parents who couldn't target their prized Slavic workforce turned their increasing anger toward their children. Their teachers spent less time on instruction and more time on physical abuse. Children who in 1943 looked like privileged prep school people now looked black and blue, and they walked with the disposition of a beaten dog.

The bad conditions of the Free American State were only exasperated by the deteriorating mental states of its founders, who reacted poorly to the news of successful Soviet-American advances.

Virgil Effinger's bloodlust and lunacy went from sadistic to psychotic, as he blamed "Bolshevik intruders" for the decline of his prized utopia and the increasingly close Cominern forces. In his rage, he randomly slaughtered his Slavic servants. When he ran out Slavs to kill, he would turn his gun toward recent American red turn coats, blaming their "lingering Redness" for defeat. Those who had not left the decaying town had to due so quietly, as anybody who was discovered would be dragged before Effinger and executed for treason.

Pelley's descent into madness was less obvious, but no less symbolic. The man who preached a demented form of Christianity came to embody the Seven Deadly Sins.

Pelley, despite his delusions, had once been a dedicated administrator and task master. He ensured that the community and its services ran smoothly. Despite the puppet nature of his Congress, he nevertheless attempted to maintain the veneer of Constitutional government by ensuring his policies were approved in "committee" with proper decorum and rules. But as the conditions deteriorated, he began withdrawing himself more and more governing, and spent most of his time in his "Executive Mansion" writing empty promises. He no longer bothered to meet with his puppet senators, choosing to sleep and daydream. With this, Pelley embodied sloth.

As his depression and anxiety worsened, Pelley began overeating, which he could do as a privileged puppet President. This, combined with his increasingly agoraphobic and lazy behavior, caused him to gain enormous weight. By the time of his departure, Pelley had gained 50 kilos. With this, Pelley embodied gluttony.

At his church sermons, Pelley's once organized and practiced sermons, delivered with a devious charisma, devolved into blistering rants. Instead of serving as a guide, Pelley berated his dwindling followers with all matter of obscenities. With this, Pelley embodied wrath.


As Effinger became more and more bloodthirsty, his relationship with Pelley deteriorated. Pelley no longer saw Effinger as a friend, but as a power hungry usurper. With this, Pelley embodied envy.

Pelley, like many declared Christians, abstained from sex as they deemed it immoral. Pelley abstained from the Schwarz Legion brothel, but as he grew desperate, he sought an escape from the reality around him. In a horrific routine, he would rape some of the sex slaves, and once he had finished, loudly quoted scripture to shame the women for their "devilish temptations". With this, Pelley embodied lust.


Despite the impending destruction of his dreamed community bearing down on him, Pelley continued to push his arrogant belief in Aryan superiority. During a cold February day, he forced Schwarz Legion members to march in a pro-American rally, complete with waving American flags. With this, Pelley embodied pride.

While his dreamed of village crumbled and decayed, Pelley used the tax money had collected to maintain the quality of life in his own home. The palatial splendor of the Executive Mansion continued to persist to the final days of the Maly Trostenents community. With this, Pelley embodied greed.

By October 1944, the now triumphant Soviet and American armies were only 25 kilometers from Maly Trostenents. By this time, the community had become an image of hell. Bodies of the dead piled up, some of them Americans who had either dropped dead from hunger or were victims of Effinger's murderous temper. Once picturesque homes were rotting from the elements and neglect. The few civilians that remained were themselves starved and enslaved. Pelley himself was almost permanently confined to his home. The American population of 5,000 had declined to almost 800, with some parts being as quiet as a grave.

When news reached Pelley that the German army could no longer protect to community, he began making preparations for the evacuation, when a sudden blow struck the Schwarz Legion. On October 10, Virgil Effinger was found dead in his quarters, laying in a pool of blood. At the time, his murder was blamed on "Bolshevik infiltrators". Instead of receiving an autopsy, his body was taken to the same crematorium, where it was turned to ash.

Due to the circumstances of the war, the culprit Effinger's death has remained a mystery. Some have also believed that the culprit was Effinger's Belarusian maid, who finally shot the man as he attempted one last rape. Others believe that Effinger had in fact been murdered by members of the SS, as many SS documents declared Effinger to be a "deranged and violent wastrel." Some have speculated that Effinger was murdered on the orders of Pelley and his own Schwarz Legion subordinates. As Effinger's victims expanded to those who wanted to leave Maly Trostenents, some believe that Pelley and his own goons saw Effinger as a maniac and would be obstacle to an orderly evacuation.

Between November 23-27, Pelley and the remaining members of the community began an evacuation. It was complete with the typical Nazi practices of Scorched Earth: buildings destroyed to spite the enemy, evidence of war crimes burned, the fanatical committing suicide and also murdering their own families, and any surviving civilians either shot dead or brought along the retreat to be enslaved or imprisoned in a death camp.

By December 10, when Americans and Soviets arrived, they found little more than mass graves and burnt out homes, a sight that many had sadly become desensitized too. But what disturbed the American soldiers, however, was the uncharacteristic fear that surviving Belarusians had developed for them.

Throughout the occupied Soviet Union, Americans were seen as angels by the Belarusians , as their appearance alongside Soviet soldiers signaled the end of a nightmare. American and Soviet soldiers alike were often greeted by cheering civilians in every town that was freed from Nazi occupation.

But when they entered Maly Trostenents, these soldiers found terror and fear, to their confusion and sadness. An American soldier testified one woman slitting her throat when he tried to offer her some of his food rations. But eventually, the arrival of Soviet soldiers put these shell-shocked civilians at ease, and they told them their horrific story.

The news that a group of Americans had taken over a Belarusian village, brutalized it in the vein of their Nazi overlords, murdered POWs, tried to brainwash some of their comrades into accepting their twisted ideals, and called their policies "a new American vision," filled UASR troops with anger that would not be seen until the discovery of Auschwitz. When these soldiers came across Schwarz Legion running dogs, it was one of the rare moments where Soviets were the ones trying to hold back their American comrades from committing war crimes. The famed journalist and author Vasily Grossman understood the source of this anger.

"These monsters had worn the faces of our American comrades," he wrote in his wartime novel Red Soil, "and sought to resurrect the demons of America's bourgeois past. Few men or women care to see their demons brought back. It was the evil past that our comrades sought to destroy when they murdered those Free America beasts."

It was in this anger that William Dudley Pelley became one of the most wanted figures of the Second World War. By the end of the war, Pelley, who once enjoyed banquets and visits from Reich leaders, now was living in a small flat in Lubeck, Germany. Once obese, he had lost much of is weight eating smaller rations than the average German civilian. Despite his loss of power and prestige, Pelley still remained devoted to his demented cause. He continued to run the Free American State from his apartment with two surviving "Senators", speaking as if he still controlled an entire community. A common theme in his conversation was his delusional belief that he would "retake Washington from the Reds."

But as Germans cities were pounded by British and American bombers, even his delusions were shattered, especially when his apartment was destroyed by an air raid on September 10, 1946.

With the loss of his home, Pelley attempted his last gambit: he would sneak across the border into Denmark and flee into the Cuban embassy, where he believed his former Cuban comrades would seek out his wisdom in the coming battle against Red tyranny. Pelley proved unusually successful in escaping to Denmark on September 21. However, when he reached the Cuban embassy, he was told to wait by an embassy employee. Unbeknownst to him, the man had called Danish police. Within hours, Pelley would be on a plane back to Red-occupied Germany. When he protested, he learned that his citizenship had been revoked.

Since 1942, MacArthur's government had declared that any Cuban-American citizen who had fought for the Reich would have their citizenship revoked. MacArthur himself also expressed disgust with Pelley and his Free American State regime. Like his communist enemies, MacArthur saw Pelley as a man who had mangled American ideals into a hideous disgrace, proving that even capitalist dictators can have a heart.

On September 29, 1945, Pelley was brought back to Maly Trostenents, where he was hanged by Belarusian soldiers after a short trial.

But even after the death of Pelley, the ghosts of the Free American State would continue to haunt the people of Maly Trostenents for years. The impression of Americans on the villagers was so terrible, it would not be until 2002 that American soldiers would allowed to speak to students in an assembly there, unlike the rest of the Soviet Union which relished visits by American soldiers. But the assembly was ruined when a old woman who had been molested by Effinger suffered a panic attack seeing an American soldier lecture.

The lesson of the Free American State is twofold: not only of the capacity of man toward evil, but how the desire to resurrect the past can itself lead to creation of new evils.

 

[Aelita]

So this one's going to be a bit out of order, but I've been picking away at this short story for a while now and it's finally done. So here's another one of Janey's reminiscences about her life in the war.

Icebreaker

What was Russia like? That’s a big question. It’s one thing to quote statistics; how many time zones, how many square kilometers—but I didn’t really understand just how big the Soviet Union was until I took the Trans-Siberian Railway.

The Pacific Ocean was vast, but we didn’t have much time to spend topside. For all practical purposes, our universe was the cramped holds of the Merchant Marine troop carrier, where we were stacked like sardine cans, five bunks high.

But on the trains lurching their way from Vladivostok to Moscow, the vast stands of pine trees seemed to stretch out to boundless infinity. I’d seen a fair amount of America from outside a train window, and now that seemed small somehow compared to Russia.

We were the luckier ones when we arrived. We were moving into some barracks that had been vacated by the Soviet 18th Rifle Division. For a mixture of practical and symbolic reasons, we detrained in full combat gear, weapons and all. Major General Dunne wanted us to give the appearance of being combat ready, though I doubt we’d be of much use without our headquarters, support units, supply train and everything else stretched out on westbound trains on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. I suppose we could have given a gallant bayonet charge.

I zipped up my field jacket as the chilly night air embraced me. The platoon followed after, stiffly jumping onto the brick platform.

“Second platoon, stay close,” I said, ushering them towards an empty section of the station.

Forty-four uneasy young men filtered towards me, organically grouping together in their sections, section leader at the fore. I silently counted heads.

“All present and accounted for, lieutenant,” said Platoon Sergeant Ozimov.

I said, “No one got lost in twenty meters’ march from the train. The Nazis will never know what hit them.” That got a tired chuckle from the men. “Alright, we’re going to be marching to wherever they’re sending us. The General wants us to make a show of it, show our comrades here that they’re not alone in the fight. So step lively. We’ll do marching cadences, but nothing too bawdy.”

“Not like it would matter,” quipped Sergeant Montalbán.

The cigarettes and lighters were already out. The dim orange light revealed several days of stubble on their faces. The small talk was familiar: the monotony of the C-Rations, hope for a hot meal and a lukewarm shower, tempered anxiety about finally facing the enemy.

I heard Ozimov whisper behind me, “Lieutenant, can I talk to you in private?”

I nodded, and followed after him to a quiet corner of the station.

Quiet was relative of course. The train was marshalling forward, filling the air with screeching metal and the chug of its steam engine. Ozimov fidgeted with his rifle strap a moment. He spoke in Yiddish now. “Lieutenant, it’s about the men.”

I sighed. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good. The soldiers were a motley mix of all the races and creeds you could find in America. Quite a few spoke German or Russian. A few spoke Spanish or Norwegian, and my radioman was fluent in several Chinese dialects. As far as I knew, only Ozimov and I were decently fluent in Yiddish. I replied, “What about the men?”

“There have been…rumblings about your leadership. While I don’t agree with their assessment—“

“Get to the point, Isaak.”

“Some of the men aren’t sure about a woman leading them in combat.”

I felt my gut wrench a little bit. “I’ve proved them wrong before. I’ll do it again.” I brushed aside the feeling of annoyance. I clung to the conviction that having overcome all the obstacles and met the same high standards expected of my peers, that I belonged in the combat branches as much as anyone else.

While the men smoked, I was summoned with the rest of the platoon leaders for a quick brief. Chief Lieutenant Oldman was chomping on an unlit cigar when I arrived. Just barely over the height minimum for the Army, Terrence Oldman was a wiry Anglo, clean-shaven and severe. He cradled his steel helmet in front of himself like a bible. “I’ve got good news and bad news.”

“Good news first,” said Shaw, the First Platoon CO.

“We’re actually going to have a roof over our heads while we wait for the rest of the 101st to catch up to us. The Soviet liaison didn’t say much, but there are mess facilities. So I want to get everyone a hot meal tomorrow.”

“Okay, what’s the bad news?”

“I don’t think we’ll be staying here for long. We’re going to be drilling hard starting tomorrow. You can all guess what’s coming.”

“I figured they wouldn’t move us half-way around the world for nothing,” I quipped, “Best foot forward.”

“Damn straight, Schafer,” said Oldman, “We leave in five. Dismissed.”

The company formed up crisply. We weren’t exactly parade worthy in our olive green combat uniforms and helmets, laden down by our packs, weapons and ammunition, but we marched as proudly as any of the King’s Grenadier Guards. Oldman led the company in singing “John Brown’s Body.” We sang proudly as we marched.

Moscow wasn’t like the city we’d seen in the newsreels before the war. A pall lay over the city, like a vigil on hope’s deathbed. The once bustling streets were all but empty. Armed men patrolled the streets somberly. Anti-aircraft cannons and searchlights lay nestled behind sandbags on the street corners and in the city parks.

Some of the city’s residents opened their shutters to see as we marched by. I think some cheered. The mood of the soldiers and militia brightened as we past. We weren’t the first American troops to come, but our presence was a welcome sight. Our column was a single battalion, barely even a finger in the dike holding back the flood. But I suppose it was good to be reminded you weren’t alone in the struggle.

The barracks were arrayed in a complex on the outskirts of Moscow. The corrugated galvanized steel Quonset huts looked just like the ones back home. There were trucks rushing about the base. Anxious young men and stern old officers milled about.

---

Barracks are the same everywhere. The old saying in the army is that 95 percent of it is killing time. The rest is killing time. I spent the coming weeks busily preparing for the great unknown operation that everyone knew was coming but no one could speak about.

Just getting everyone three hots and a cot had been a herculean task. The barracks we were billeted in had been looted in the panic spread by Operation Teutonic. Most of the beds and footlockers had been pilfered without a trace of paperwork. I’m sure a lot of it had ended up on the black market.

The cold fall days were spent drilling. Down time was consumed with keeping uniforms and equipment in ready condition. The meals were light, and a lot of it really wasn’t to taste.

And yet somehow, in between the pants-shitting terror at facing the most fearsome enemy we’ve ever known, who had laid low the multi-millions strong RKKA; the hours spent at rifle ranges and field exercises; and the constant struggle rustle up good food and smokes; soldiers still always find ways to be up to no good.

I had to cancel the few passes we had been allotted after fishing one private out of the local equivalent of a drunk tank. It seems Private Owen Richards from Nashville, Tennessee had a bit too much, and made an ill-advised, unsuccessful pass at a local party official’s daughter.

If that had been the last of my troubles, it would have been a cakewalk. But I also had rumblings of mutiny in my command. As you can guess, there can be…difficulties…in holding people’s respect when they think they’re part of some experiment in social engineering.

The Army had plucked its best and brightest women soldiers from their units, and sent us all to the Military Academy, to see if we’d sink or swim. And then, once we’d made it through that test, their prize guinea pigs were too much of an investment to waste on the Amazon units themselves. No, they’d leave that to politically unreliable men and ninety day wonders out of OCS.

A part of me reveled in the challenge. But I’m a sucker, I’ll admit. I’d been goaded into applying for Parachute School by an academic advisor. Looking back, I’m sure Major Geddy had me figured out day one: the best way to push me to give 110 percent was to tell me I didn’t have what it took. Boy I sure showed him, straight into the loving arms of the Airborne.

It was an unseasonably warm day in late October when we finally got the battle plan for Operation Icebreaker. The Smolensk and Bryansk Fronts would begin a counteroffensive to push the presumably exhausted Army Group Center back into Byelorussia. The 101st Airborne would be utilized to secure vital bridgeheads on the Dneiper River.

It was, bluntly, a wildly optimistic plan. But Stalin had commanded it, and in 1940 his word was still law in the Soviet Union. But the plan would never be carried out. Army Group Center wasn’t so exhausted, and they resumed their offensive on the first of November. Icebreaker was shelved indefinitely, and we learned quickly that we were going to be committed to the front, along with several other divisions of the 3rd Army, as an ordinary line division to fight a rearguard action for Marshal Frunze’s attempt at a fighting retreat.

Huh? When did I first see action? That’s a complicated question. I assume you mean staring down the rifles of enemy soldiers. Because we were in danger from the moment we left Moscow. Our trip to the front was under constant threat of air attack, forcing us to maintain camouflage discipline and travel almost entirely at night.

But the first time we went into combat was at a little town called Glinka, east-by-southeast of Smolensk. It was a lush little agricultural community, surrounded by rolling farmland and thick forests. The Germans wanted to take it because a new paved road ran through the town, a perfect thoroughfare to speed the encirclement of the city of Smolensk. And we wanted it back for the same reason

We had been in the action zone for three days when we got the order to counterattack. Those three days we marched under the veil of darkness, and hid ourselves in the day time. With nothing but K-rations and grit to fill our bellies, we dug our foxholes in between rounds of shelling by Nazi artillery. Second Platoon had lost four of its own before we even saw a patch of feldgrau. Three of them made it, but Timmons...he drew the short straw and had a ten-point-five land right in his foxhole. There wasn’t much left to mourn.

I had nestled under a thicket and camo net that morning, eating my cold K-ration, listening to the sound of distant shells, when the order came. A runner dropped into my little hidey-hole, carrying orders from the regimental HQ. Isaak’s wiry black hair poked out from under his blanket as I began pouring through them.

“Sorry, Isaak, looks like the nap is going to have to wait.”

He stretched before folding up his blanket. “Coffee?”

I motioned to a canteen cup next to his gear. As he slurped down the now lukewarm instant coffee, I felt a queer sense of relief. After spending days dreading the Jericho trumpets and the thunder of guns, we would get to face an enemy we could actually fight back against. We’d been blue-balled by the constant tension, like a wound-up spring.

“So it looks like there’s some Panzertruppe holed up west of here in the village of Glinka. Strength unknown, but scouts did see at least one half-track.. Probably awaiting resupply. We’re going to go kill them.”

“About fucking time,” he muttered.

“Damn straight.”

I’ll spare you the details of planning the operation, because most of war is boring. I met with Lieutenant Oldman that afternoon, plans ready. The other platoon leaders were hesitant about the fast timetable or the night infiltration, but I took Oldman’s side. As is custom, favor is rewarded by getting the hard job; Second Platoon would circle around the town to cut off the two roads leading west, while First and Third Platoon would focus the schwerpunkt from the north. Baker Company would support our attack from the south.

We took a meal from the field kitchen, loaded up all the ammunition we could carry, and began our infiltration at dusk.

The earlier estimates were quite a bit optimistic. Smeared with greasepaint, crawling through the frosty vegetation, we slipped by two cavalry scout patrols, and a few carefully concealed foxholes. We avoided them easily enough; it had been a new moon only a few nights before. In a way, it was almost calming. In the dark, the forests and farms didn’t look much different from back home. The black earth smelled familiar, pungent with the floral aroma of the fallen orange leaves. Up until we saw the Stahlhelms up close, it might as well have been just a training exercise.

We ran into the first obstacle at around 0630. As our maps had suggested, there was a farm sitting betwixt the two dirt roads spoking westward from Glinka. And it was occupied. We’d have to fight our way in.

I slunk up behind the fallen log our scouts had stopped behind. “Hawkeye” Denvers pointed out the two night sentries silhouetted by lantern light. They weren’t hard to make out in my field glasses. But the trucks and equipment parked outside pointed to more men sleeping in the barn and farmhouse.

The air was cold enough to keep my eyes from getting too heavy. I had less than half an hour to deal with them. The battalion field guns and company mortar teams were going to shell the town at 0700. We’d begin the attack amidst this, and Second Platoon needed to be in position to cut off retreat or regroupment.

I weighed over my options. I thought I spotted a flaw in the sentry’s patrol patterns. Under a parka to conceal the torchlight, I laid out my plan to take the garrison unawares to Isaak.

He thought it was risky, but agreed we needed to take the position. As planned, Able section set up overwatch with the platoon machine gun and mortar team. Isaak took Baker section through the woods at the edge of the farm, using the positioning of the trucks to provide concealment. I took Charlie section up to an outbuilding to provide another point of pressure. That was the plan. I vaguely remember the tension as I countdown the minutes before the bombardment begins.

There was apparently a third sentry in the outbuilding. My blood ran cold as I heard a pair of hobnail boots tramp across the wooden floor. He muttered something to himself, like “What’s that?” I glanced across the muddy field to the far side of the farm, catching a glimpse of the rustling in the brush. I sprang into action on instinct. I stayed crouched low, homing in on the sound. I slipped around the corner, and saw the edge of a helmet peering out the window. He had just about reached his whistle when I had grabbed him by the collar and roughly yanked him out the broken window. Before I knew it, he was flat on his back before me, my knife planted in his throat. A gurgle of blood spittled out of his mouth as he flailed.

It almost didn’t seem real, like I was watching it on the silver screen. I pulled my Garand to ready, and scanned for more threats. I motioned to clear the building. Corporal Peters took his rifle team in through the windows. After hearing the ‘clear’ signal, I grabbed this German gefreiter’s now limp body, and dragged him into the building. In the dim lamplight, I got a better look at him, and the reality started to settle in.

He looked like he was about seventeen, gray eyes and a smooth baby-face with a hint of blond peach fuzz on his upper lip. The bloody spittle collected like profane lipstick around his mouth, a single red line down the corner of his cheek. Sergeant Collier doused the light, and I felt a bit more okay with this. I still felt like throwing up. I could see Collier nod grimly out of the corner of my eye.

I shoved all of the revulsion down with the rest of the bile. We’d press on to the main building. With less than a minute left, we began our jog. We arrived just as second section had finished clearing the empty barn. Isaak and crew had made short work of the two sentries. As the blasts began to echo over the farm, we stormed the main building. There’s nothing romantic about catching men in their bunks, but it is certainly efficient. I think of the two sections or so of men we found there, we only shot two of them. The early birds were wormfood this time. The rest roused bleary eyed from their bunks, bewildered by the men in unfamiliar uniforms shouting at them.

I flashed my torch across the field. The response came quick; two quick strobes from Sergeant Kubiscz’s torch as I began setting overwatch to cover Able’s advance.

One thing I should note: you don’t really see a battle. Between everyone doing their damnedest not to be seen, and all the smoke and haze churned up by artillery and guns, most times you’ll only catch fleeting glimpses of the enemy. But you’ll definitely hear it. And smell it. The sulfury stench of cordite and TNT, especially after the big guns open up on you, is nauseating. Now imagine the loudest bang you can. The shell of a German 10.5 cm divisional gun is louder than that. One of our own 152 mm howitzers is even louder still.

Just when things seemed to be going to plan, I felt this intense wave ripple over me, like a tuba from hell. This keening sound pierced the air, which I would later learn was the sound of shell fragments ripping through wood. I shouted to take cover and piled into the nearest corner. Something hard and angular dropped on me, and for a moment I wondered if the whole house was coming down. But when that something started to shudder with each thundercrack of artillery, I realized it was someone’s bony body that had knocked the wind out of me.

To be honest, I don’t know how long the shells fell. It certainly felt like we were cowering for a month of Sundays before the bombardment let up. The air went quiet though, and I heard Isaak groan “Is it over?” on top of me.

“Isaak, get your bony ass off me,” I said between coughs. We began taking count and at least for now we’d gotten lucky. Bruises, cuts and scrapes, more from taking cover than anything. The German garrison here had been lazy, only partially reinforcing the structure with sandbags, but it had been enough to save us from our own guns going off grid.

The distinctive brat-brat sound of our MG-5s echoed over the town. I took an observation post on the second floor, directing our machine gun teams to set up in the battlements our foes had so thoughtfully prepared for us.

I spotted a patch of feldgrau emerging from the haze. He looked like a runner dispatched to the small garrison we’d overwhelmed. It seems so stupid to remember such a tiny detail, but when I close my eyes, I can still still see him running, having lost his stahlhelm. I could just barely see the little dark red rivulets running down his temple and cheek as I drew a bead. I barely noticed the report. He fell down into the long grass.

We laid into their rear from that farmhouse. First the mortar rained steel on the centers of enemy movement. The MGs lit up the twilight with tracer fire. An enemy squad attempted to attack under the cover of smoke, but couldn’t make it much further than the sunken road at the edge of the town.

We held them pinned for ten minutes before the first real sign of trouble came. Chen, my radioman, tapped me on the shoulder as I withdrew from the battlements. “El-Tee, I’ve got company on the line.”

I pressed a fresh clip into my Garand, safetying it as it returned to battery. Chen handed me the headset, crouching near me with his MP-3 ready. The radio static parted before Oldman’s barks. “Schafer! Get second platoon into the town. They’ve got Panzer IIs dug in, and we can’t get a clear shot on them.”

There’s something strange about combat. For me, at least, it felt like I wasn’t really there. It’s like being a motor, going through its mechanical rhythms, war is a form of perverse order, and I was a well-oiled part of that machine. The terror had melted away. I had spent the last five years of my life learning how to die, and now the prospect of attacking a dug-in enemy, each of them fanatics that had spent the better part of the last decade steeping in racial hatred...it wasn’t terrifying.

It was exhilarating.

A few whistles and barks, and we hit their machine-gun nests with smoke. All three of the platoon’s machine guns, and the rifles of Able section laid down a hail of suppressive fire. I led the other two straight in to the weakest point of their defensive line, hugging close to the old cobblestone wall.

The pale-green tracers of the MG 34s ripped through the smoke. We ran full tilt to the sunken road, watching the lines of bullets whiz harmlessly by. When we burst into the improvised trench, we took six dazed landsers completely unawares. Apparently they had expected us to announce ourselves before the charge, and not advance with grim silence. The MP-3s raked across the trench, muzzle flashes illuminating the death rattles of the landsers.

I pushed the image from my thoughts as we pressed onward. We hit the main strong point from its blindspot next. It was a two-story building, made of old stone masonry. The main MG was in the root cellar, behind a sandbag barricade. It continued to fire staccato bursts, the muzzle flash glinting off the blued barrels of Mauser rifles at the ground floor battlements.

I motioned for grenades as I slung my Garand over my shoulder. Montalbán smashed open the shutter with his rifle butt while Browne, Carrington and I pulled the pins from our Gf4 “pineapples”. Honestly, it might as well have been the opening pitch of the season at Ebbets Field, watching them sail cleanly through the window. We pulled flush to the stone wall until we heard the muffled thumps of the frags detonating. Ragged screams followed.

We hoisted Browne in through the window as Baker section took the rear of the building. The cries of terror were silenced by the barks of rifles as they shot the few left like pigs. In my estimate, it took us only a few minutes to roll up the rest of the rear-guard like the lid of a sardine can.

If it sounds like braggadocio, bear in mind this was not a fair fight, nor did we ever intend to fight fair. Our foes were lead elements of the 167th Infantry Division (Motorised), a second-line infantry division that had been reinforced with older tanks and motorised assets just before Operation Teutonic. They, along with the rest of the Second Panzer Army, had been campaigning for five months with very little reprieve. They were exhausted and malnourished, and had been savagely bloodied by the fighting. And night attacks were our specialty.

Incidentally, this was about the time that things started to go to shit. If there’s anything I have learned, it’s that if you have the choice of fighting in an urban area, don’t. Even a small town can be a fortress, and now that we overwhelmed its outer defenses, the enemy was beginning to react.

We were now stuck going from house to house, facing a very tough enemy resistance, never knowing which door would be hiding a Mauser. The Hauptman commanding the company garrisoning this town also chose to make his break out in our direction.

I guessed as much when mortars began bursting around us. The old stone buildings offered protection, but the newer stick-built homes were much less resilient. They didn’t have a good fix on our position, but the cries of “medic!” piercing the early morning air were a grim portent.

At this point, my “headquarters” as it was, was behind a red brick government office, on the main road leaving the town westward. I was huddled up next to Chen, reporting the tactical situation, when I heard the squeal of metal treads. I peered out as far as I dared, to the sight of two Panzer II light tanks coming around the corner of the main boulevard, flanked by rows of advancing infantry.

The sun was coming over the horizon, the veil of night retreating with each second. These soldiers seemed to have rallied, and were advancing with drilled precision. Honestly, I was a bit impressed how quickly this captain had recovered from the rout, and how his troops fell back into discipline. They used the available cover and concealment well, and laid down suppression against our positions.

We quickly laid down our own suppression, initially with our rifles while I sent a runner to lay in the mortar team, and the machine guns repositioned. We had the definite advantage; I could fire the Garand’s ten-round magazine in less time, and with better aim, than Jerry could do with his five-round Kar98k.

But the remaining MGs, both infantry and vehicular, had narrowed the firepower gap. And the tankers were smart, letting the infantry infiltrate forward while they laid down suppression with that fearsome 20mm cannon. And when you’ve got nothing bigger on-hand than a GAT-9 rifle grenade, the distinction between a light tank and a medium tank is purely academic.

I dumped the remaining five rounds in the magazine, trying to take some pot shots at the first splotches of feldgrau rushing up from behind the tank. The tracers whipped by as I pulled behind the wall. I took a moment to consider my options as I rammed the next clip home. The whistle tasted like dirt and gun oil as I blew as hard as my lungs could bear. I gave the signal for Sergeant Montalbán to get rifle grenades in place to engage the tanks, and for covering fire.

I counted off silently. When I reached ten, I gave the signal, then popped out. I rested the rifle against the building as I lined up the aperture on the window I suspected concealed an MG 34 nest. I fired until I heard the ping of the en bloc clip ejecting.

Amidst the cacophony of rifles and machine guns filling the air, the throaty roar of the tank engine loomed ever closer. I watched, helpless, as green tracers raked over our anti-tank team. The two men, Pike and Wikowski, went down like rag dolls mere meters away from cover.

I didn’t have time to mourn; the lead tank turned its cannon to the building I lay huddled behind. The blasts of the HE rounds shook me like jelly. I went prone as the broken bricks came tumbling down on me, clattering off my helmet and punching me in the ribs. I sucked air through my teeth to stop from screaming.

The crack of the cannon stopped. I pulled myself from the rubble, peeking over the ruins of the building. The tank had stopped, its metal bulk occluding the field of fire from the machine gun overwatch. Wikowski’s Garand was across the street, maybe ten meters away. The rifle-grenade projector and GAT-9 were still firmly locked in place. I cried for covering fire and took the chance.

Chen cried “Wait!” But I bolted, ignoring the creaks of protest from muscles. The bullets whizzed by as I slid boots first.

As I pulled the stock to my shoulder, the panzer’s turret began tracking my way. My thoughts kept repeating ‘Too close, way too close’, as I hastily aimed. The rifle bullets continued to ping harmlessly off the armored monster. No time to do this the right way anyway, so I pulled the stock as tight to my shoulder as I could and squeezed the trigger.

The recoil was violent enough to slide me back a few centimeters. It reminded me of the time I got drilled by a hard line drive playing first base. The warhead stove the turret right above the ring. Smoke began wafting from the hole. The hatches began to pop open one-boy-one, billows of dark gray smoke following. Fighting away the pain, I tossed away the rifle and drew my M6.

The black clad tankers rushed evacuated as quick as they could. I squeezed off three rounds in quick succession. They clattered off the armor, but it seems the message got through. The driver threw up his arms and dove face down in front of his stricken vehicle. The radioman decided to make a run for it; I winged him with a ten millimeter before he could get far.

---

Surrender is complicated; it’s a bit difficult to convince two groups of people who’ve been busy killing each other to stop. When the white flag first went up, it took several minutes for both sides to stop firing. Our helmets were identical to the es-sha three-nines that were in widespread service in the Soviet military; Nazis were loathe to surrender to Slavic subhumans.

They looked like beaten dogs as we disarmed them. The young boys especially. They looked back at us behind hate filled eyes, faces screwed up in disgust at both us and themselves for having been beaten.

We had a short moment of reprieve to tend to our dead and wounded. The whole division, and many others, were engaged in this operation. Our orders were now to hold this crossroad to secure the retreat of Soviet troops who might have otherwise been trapped in a cauldron until relieved.

While the guns continued to thunder in the distance, I used the small respite to try to eat something while I waited to see the medic and find out if I’d broken anything. Because I certainly felt like I’d been chewed up and spat back out.

We set up some Dakota pit fires on the edge of the town, next to the foxholes we were digging. It makes a nice smokefree fire, with plenty of heat to warm up our C-ration cans and coffee. I only managed to eat a few bites of the garlic dofu. It had normally been one of my favorites, but somehow it just didn’t sit right.

The coffee was more welcome. It helped fight off the heaviness in my eyes as I sat with my men, and they patted me on the back and joked about the Fascists running scared from Janey Schafer charging into battle.

Once the more severely wounded and the enlisted were treated, it was my turn to visit the medics. They’d set up a small field hospital in one of the local houses. I limped in not long after some of the captured German officers had come in to get stitched up.

They didn’t take notice of me at first. Stiffly, I pulled off my jacket and maroon telnyashka, wincing from the pain. The medic poked and prodded at the bruises on my back, and the lovely welt forming on my shoulder.

Nothing had been broken, but the doc still ordered me to take it easy for the next few days. I’m sure he meant well. I didn’t take notice of their stares until I started redressing. They looked at me with ice blue eyes, brows furrowed with thinly concealed disdain. I looked down my nose at them. But I had realized the true level of danger I had rushed headlong into. I was out-of-place to the fascists, everything degenerate personified. Not just an offense against old-fashioned sensibilities, but an affront to the natural order.

I realized walking out of there that I would never have the luxury of being a prisoner of war. If I was lucky, these men would merely kill me if I surrendered.

 

[Aelita]

Excerpts from the AlternateHistory.com thread “Can someone explain Maskirovka and/or Deep Operations to me?”

Strangely enough, it’s esports that brought me to this subject. I follow a lot of the RTS circuits, and players and streamers keep referencing these concepts as part of game terminology. They’re obviously red bloc terms, but even blue bloc players have been referencing it.

It’s also in game chat, so I’m not quite sure if they’re just meming, or how it has anything to do with what netsearches tell me are 20th century Comintern military doctrine, so if someone could explain that’d be great. I’m more of a medievalist so, WW2 is kind of out of my wheelhouse.

A lot of the news articles I see compare deep operations to blitzkrieg? Are they the same? And should I study the classics of Soviet military science to become a better gamer?

Maskirovka is just Russian for “I pulled a fast one on you.” That’s the beginning and end of my knowledge of the subject.

As much as I’m an anti-communist blue partisan, I feel qualified to explain deep operations at least.

In essence it refers to a concept seen in red warfare of dividing military planning into operations as a level between tactics and strategy. It’s about realising what you have strategised with the resources you have and the infrastructure you’re working with and what will set up the field of play for your tactics.

“Deep” refers to how deep battle is not necessarily about annihilating enemy formations and strength but is about seizing objectives deep behind enemy lines and preventing the enemy from being able to act on their own terms. If you punch through their defensive lines and push behind them to threaten their supply dumps, they have no choice. They need to pull back or they’ll be running on empty in a jiff. Defensively; rather that defending a specific line, you’d make the enemy bleed out over some distance until they finally have no more strength and then you smash them.

Rather different from Allied doctrine focused on sweeping battleplans meant to minimise casualties but maximise the enemy’s losses in commanding positions and materiel, and certainly not too comparable to the extremely battle of annihilation focused methods of the Axis which were mostly all about finding the enemy and turning as much of them into casualties as possible.

I would be remiss if I did not, yet again, remind the world that blitzkrieg is not a thing, and that German mechanised doctrine was just scene as a natural extension of Clausewitzian bewegungskrieg, or “manoeuvre war.”

Maskirovka is Russian for “a little masquerade”. It’s become a term for a special doctrine of military deception we’ve used in Comintern militaries. And while it’s a separate concept from the Unified Military Doctrine, commonly referred to as “deep operations”, the operational scale of war almost always requires some level of deception in practice, so the two are going to be interrelated.

The best example of the mature form of these doctrines would be Operation Red Harvest, the invasion of Iron Guard Romania in March 1945.

So put yourself in the mindset of a general fighting a total war against an enemy state. Defeat means death of the national polity, quite possibly your own personal death as well. All the resources of the state are being mobilised for the war. In Germany, they’re putting thirteen year old boys and girls into uniform, giving them a cheap carbine or a panzerfaust, and calling them Volkssturm. Yet going into the winter of 1944/1945, the physical territory of the Nazi imperium has not been seriously breached. Aside from the massive combined bomber offensive of the fall, Germany itself and its puppet states are still fully intact. Aside from the severing of Libyan oil shipments, German strategic resources are holding. A huge line of fortifications have are being built and reinforced in eastern Poland and East Prussia, with additional lines of fortification at the Oder River. A direct drive into Germany itself will be costly, and give the enemy ample time to rebuild his forces as yours wear thin.

So what do you do? You convince the enemy you intend to knock on his front door, all the while actually plan to go in through the back.

The biggest weakness in Axis military strength is oil. Rumania is the biggest source of oil remaining, and the Luftwaffe has quite successfully defended it from any sort of knock-out blow by aerial bombardment.

They aimed to convince the OKW that following Operation Sherman, Stavka intended to push for a knockout blow against Germany via a direct battle of annihilation in occupied Poland and East Prussia. In actuality, the main thrust would be through the Romanian lowlands, bypassing the vampire-infested mountains of Transylvania. This would cut off 80 percent of Romanian oil production by direct occupation, and allow tactical airpower to suppress the rest, while opening up exploit operations into the rest of the Balkans to deny the crucial raw materials such as aluminum or rare earth metals.

What they’re saying is that Maskirovka was a miserable little pile of secrets.

Operation Red Harvest and Crimson Tide were essentially telling Codreanu “Die Monster, you don’t belong in this world!”

Personally I prefer to liken it to a stake through his heart.

Codreanu bet on the strength of his three defensive lines and the Bulgarians providing him a barrier to his south to cover the poorly maintained defensive lines set up in the Great War more than twenty years before could; in combination with the fanaticism of his Iron Guard, protect his kingdom of nightmares even if the Germans weren’t there.

I suppose he had reason to be confident, Romania was virtually surrounded for most of the Great War and only surrendered because Russia collapsed first and here he thought he’d have only one front to deal with. And while morale was growing shaky in the army, the Iron Guard itself was hyped up for a battle for Christianity and the legacy of Vlad the Impaler’s country.

It wasn’t enough and the same barbarism that produced the “meat factories” and “bloody forests” or depopulated Odessa to turn it into a dark fortress only made the Comintern more dedicated to shattering his lines at Moldova, Prut, Siret, and Carpathia and catching the Legionaries by the pants from the south. Pulling off a major land invasion from Ukraine and an amphibious assault from liberated Anatolia at the same time to knock out three Axis countries almost simultaneously was a major masterstroke.

Easily on par with the assault on Aquitaine and Normandy by the Allies. Certainly Corneliu “Literally Dracula” Codreanu was someone who needed killing even more than Petain ever did.

The political dimension is often forgotten in these discussions about bewegungskrieg vs. deep operations. War is politics through other means, and deep operations is the military doctrine of militarised internationalism.

As M.V. Frunze put it, “As for the material provision for the possibilities of conducting this offensive line, it's worth considering that the base of our offensive may not be Russia alone, but a whole series of other countries as well. All depends on the degree of maturity of the revolutionary process within these countries and the capabilities of their working class to move to open struggle with their class enemies...The proletariat can and will attack, and alongside the proletariat, serving at its greatest weapon, the Red Army will attack as well.”

In other words, it was a doctrine calculated to bring about civil war in the country being attacked. This was put fully into effect in the Romanian and Bulgarian campaigns. Underground elements such the local communists worked diligently on the eve of the invasion to implement revolutionary defeatism. Workers occupied their factories in protest to ration cuts. Peasants stopped shipping grain to the state. Even in Iron Guard territory, the desperate situation on the home front could not be contained. Given the state of the exhausting war effort, the starvation level rations, and in particular the general weak morale on the home front and military of the Tsardom of Bulgaria, the class struggle could be rapidly accelerated into civil war with the arrival of the Red Army.

Excerpts from Gameunist Manifesto, “Review: Raise the Banner: Dracula Must Die!”

Wie geht’s gamertariat, it’s that time of the month again where we play a game from the Red Bloc, just to see how the other side has it. By popular demand, I spent the last week balls deep in Raise the Banner: Dracula Must Die Exclamation Point (Legal tells me that I have to include the exclamation point, or the IP owners of the entirely unrelated Dracula Must Die sans exclamation point will sue my fat ass.)

For those of you out of the loops, Raise the Banner is a popular cooperative squad-based shooter series by the Soviet collectdev Katyusha Games. Most of the games have received official ports to both console and microcomp, but they’ve never been more of a niche market here. But over in the Comintern, they’re like War Chronicle big.

So, before I go any further, standard disclaimers for the dinguses who don’t understand humor or my shtick; I am not a GRU agent spreading a mind-virus among the unsuspecting gamer youth, nor am I being paid to spread propaganda against the FIIIIIRSSST CLAAAHSSS GAAAAMMEEESS INDUSTRYYYYYYY as part of a devious plot to subvert English civilization, close the boarding schools, and i dunno, ban fox hunting or something. Though, if any GRU agents are watching this, if you slip me a few quid we can probably work something out, these bills ain’t payin’ themselves.

Anyway, Raise the Banner is usually 99% supernatural free (those vehicle physics are seriously possessed.) This one is a spin-off using the engine and assets of the main franchise to tell a Weird War 2 story.

So why’s Dracula gotta die? Well he’s siding with the Iron Guard over in Romania and we can’t have that can we? Staking people and putting them on hooks and...wait this is all stuff they did without vampires.

In Dracula Must Die Exclamation Point, you play as any one of a five-man band of grizzled war movie tropes, each with their own unique weapons and special abilities. As part of the fictitious 99th Guards Airborne Division, your squad jumps into a theatre not often seen in the well trodden WW2 shooter genre: Iron Guard Rumania.

In between the retreads of the Peninsular Campaign, the Pyrenees, and Liberating Paris on the one hand, or the grim fighting in Leningrad, Moscow and Byelorussia on the other, a studio deciding to centre not just a single mission, but a whole campaign, on a less well known part of the war is a breath of fresh air.

The game’s first mission begins with a breath-taking cinematic of jumping out into the night sky, descending into a dark forest illuminated only by starlight. From there, it’s pretty familiar to anyone who’ve played the official ports of past Raise the Banner games. You advance using basic infantry tactics like cover, suppressive fire, smoke, etc., and gleefully kill as many fascists as you can. If you’re playing online co-op, you’ve got to work this out with voice-chat, but if you’re like me and have no friends, the single-player game gives a bit clunky but serviceable squad command function.

Honestly, it’s pretty fun in balancing realism and game mechanics. Unlike in a lot of other shooters you’re familiar with, most combat setpieces require some coordination. And while it doesn’t have the same visceral thrill as being a one-man silent death machine, Raise the Banner treats combat as more of a mentally stimulating puzzle.

I found myself mostly playing as Vadim, the cold-sniper-with-a-heart-of-gold, and using more stealth-based infiltration tactics. Though when that fails, I tended to switch to Fyodor, the machine-gunner.

Dracula Must Die Exclamation Point uses the morale system from previous games in the franchise. Regular Rumanian Army mooks will surrender if surprised, surrounded or sufficiently awed by the amount of firepower you bring to bear. Siguranța troops are much more tenacious, and won’t rout except as a trap. Iron Guard fanatics and the German Waffen-SS troops you face will fight to the death, and will keep the regulars from surrendering by their presence (and the occasional 40K-esque battlefield execution).

After the second mission, the game transitions to an open world framework and things start to get weird. The forests for from being merely figuratively haunted to actually haunted. Like, mein gott, in between the impaled bodies, you have to fight off reanimated zombie Nazis and long dead crusader revenants.

So it turns out that the leftenant has been keeping the nature of the mission a secret. He spills the beans, saying that the Party must never acknowledge the existence of the supernatural, and wonderful cheesy lines like “Even if God were to exist, it would be necessary to abolish Him.” Basically, you’re there to stop the Thule Society from making a literal deal with the Devil to win the war.

Surprise, surprise, things go tits up tout suite. Lt. Atheist gets captured, and you make the fateful choice to split the party (heh) to infiltrate this not-at-all foreboding Gothic castle to rescue him. Choose wisely, because, spoilers, you’re going to be stuck with them.

For this part, I chose Roza, the stealthy spy and close-combat specialist. Sneaking through the castle reminded me a lot of Metal Gear, and it was quite fun geeking these cultists from the shadows, or dropping down from the ceiling to cut a Nazi guard’s throat.

But alas, Roza spent too much time cutting throats or something, because by the time I reached the mission’s end, it was too late to save Comrade Party-Line from being sacrificed to the dark gods and heilige Scheiße is that literally Count Vlad Dracula in there MEIN GOTT.

The sacrifice sucks the castle and the surrounding villages into this dark mirror realm. In the cut-scene, all my squadmates die and I’m left to complete the mission alone. There are basically five separate story lines and some character-specific events requiring you to play the game multiple times.

This is where the game proper starts. On the whole, I really enjoyed the change in pace from the usual FIRST CLASS GAMES EXPERIENCE. The transition from the familiar military shooter genre to the survival-horror genre was jarring, but really helps the game stand out in a crowd of gun-metal gray.

And while history buffs might sneer at the premise, the military parts are handled quite competently, with most of the assets being shared with next year’s hotly anticipated Raise the Banner 4.. The uniforms don’t just look spiffy...they look downright sexy, with all those open lapels and maroon telnyashkas showing just the barest hint of muscled chests...the rolled up cuffs around the bulging biceps, and the three days of stubble on those model-perfect chins...what were we talking about again?

Oh yeah. The shooty-boys (and girl) are all different flavors of hot. The weapon selection trends a bit towards the wunderwaffe. While you start out with MP-3s and Garand carbines, a choice selection of other wonderful killing toys abound. My personal favorite is the PTRS anti-tank rifle, even if you have to fire it from the prone position. The German MKb 43s are a staple of the WW2 genre and still just as fun, though the aptly named Vampir infrared sight is pretty useful given the genre.

Vehicle sections are used sparingly. There’s a notable scene where you have to kill a Panzer 100 tank as a sort of boss after it mooks all your supporting T-44s. And I’m just going to accept that dark magic was at play to even keep that monstrosity running, let alone fighting.

I haven’t had much time yet to try out the multiplayer mode. It’s fun though, and I hear you can unlock playable vampires and elves (sorry, spoilers: there are elves in this and while they may be on your side against Dracula, they ain’t your prim and proper elves of normal fantasy.) In the few matches I played, most of the game broke down with both sides trying to monopolize the less practical but more fun weapons like the Holy Hand Grenade, the Lance of Longinus, and the Garlic Cannon, and the devs seem to be aware that multiplayer is always going to be kind of screwed up.

Also, I almost forgot the best part: no fucking day 1 DLC, no microtransactions racket, and no fucking lootbox gambling. You might say “Well of course there isn’t, it’s a fucking communist game”, to which I say we should all aspire to such a pure gaming experience. But even then, a few shady publishers have carved up otherwise complete games from the Red Bloc to parcel out with the usual FIRST CLASS GAMES EXPERIENCE monetization strategies as part of localization, leaving players no choice but to either accept the bullshit, or struggle with making the compatibility layer run the game on their microcomp without it melting down or turning into a buggy mess.

Excerpts from Javier Ruiz Lorca, “Unified Military Doctrine and the Red Army Offensives of 1945” in Jane’s Defence Review, Vol. XIX, No. 5 (May 1997)

In March 1945, Axis forces in the Balkans were under the effective command of Field Marshal Richard Ruoff. At his disposal, he had the depleted remnants of Army Group South, with eleven divisions and 380,000 men, 714 tanks, 4,000 field guns, and maybe 200 serviceable aircraft in the depleted Luftflotte 7. Additionally, the Royal Rumanian Army had implemented a policy of “total defence mobilisation”, fielding nearly two million men in fifty divisions, with a small number of tanks and combat aircraft under the control of the Iron Guard.

Further south, the Kingdom of Bulgaria had topped out with 450,000 soldiers equipped mostly with imported German equipment. Bulgarian forces additionally supported, with German assistance, the 90,000 strong Turanist Turkish National Army occupying Istanbul.

The Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) concluded in January that the disposition of Comintern forces indicated a defensive posture. Troops in the South were directed to continue defensive preparations, but further reinforcement was denied by the OKW. At the insistence of RSHA Director Kaltenbrunner, several divisions were pulled from Army Group South to reinforce defenses in Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Thus, the once vaunted Panzer leader Ruoff spent the winter months fighting the growing partisan insurgency in Rumania. The reliability of the allied fascist regime in Rumania was increasingly in doubt. Ruoff noted in his personal report to Hitler that, even by the very low standards set by the Nazi war machine, “the methods employed by Siguranța are sufficiently barbarous as to be counterproductive. I ask for your permission to take direct extraterritorial rights over the [oil] concessions to prevent further disruptions.”

Strategic air raids continued to disrupt rail junctions and the oil fields. Skirmishing continued on the frontlines as ever. But for those crucial three months in 1945, the RSHA’s assessment seemed accurate. All was quiet on the Southern front.

The crucial flaw in Axis military preparations in the East was that once strategic initiative was lost, they proved to be institutionally incapable of correctly estimating the enemy’s operational and strategic objectives. Soviet and American military planners were able to consistently stay half a step ahead of their counterparts.

Enter General of the Army (GA) Georgii Samoilovich Isserson, the unsung architect of victory. Once a victim of the purges and released to Marshal Frunze’s staff in early 1941, Isserson had been one of the RKKA’s most poignant theorists and dynamic officers in the 1930s. As the war raged, he had climbed back up the ranks on ability and stubborn perseverance. In spite of the political complications, it was this and Frunze’s trust in his abilities that earned him the command of one of the most important operations of the war, beating out the American’s favoured candidate, GA Harry Haywood.

Isserson began operational planning for Red Harvest in late October 1944, following the conclusion of the Soviet-Turkish Co-Belligerence Agreement. With Anatolia secured, and the Republic of Turkey now aligned against the Axis, Comintern strategic aims turned towards the denial of German/Italian exploitation of resources in the Balkans.

Operational goals depended on the successful employment of maskirovka deception. Infrastructure in the Balkans was limited, and multiple natural barriers such as the Carpathian Mountains and the rivers Prut and Danube could serve as the basis for a highly successful delay and attrition strategy.

Thus, as a 27 November 1944 order from the military soviet of the Balkans Strategic Direction put it:

The operational goals of the International Red Army must be: 1) to deceive the enemy with regards to the strategic direction of the Spring Offensive until a fortnight before the commencement of operations 2) to mask operational focus until the enemy’s forces are fully engaged and 3) to achieve rapid exploitation into depth.​

In Red Harvest, the International Red Army would commit the 3rd and 4th Ukrainian Fronts, totalling 1.6 million men, 3,742 tanks, 22,000 field guns, and 3,000 aircraft. An additional two Marine divisions, and 200,000 Turkish co-belligerent troops would support the operation with an amphibious crossing of the Sea of Marmara, pinning Bulgarian forces in the south.

These operations were highly ambitious. Moscow still doubted the political reliability of interim President Kâzım Karabekir, and of the ability of Turkish and Iranian forces to achieve limited offensives into Europe even with the support of American naval and air power.
[...]
As Clausewitz put it, “war is politics carried on through other means.” The Unified Military Doctrine was not merely the doctrine of combined arms military offensive in depth, but also an explicitly communist political doctrine. In this regard, Red Harvest was not merely an operation to deny control of strategic territory and resources to the enemy and destroy its army in the field. It was also a doctrine calculated to bring about civil war in the defender and support the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Volumes have been written on communist espionage in the interwar. Even amid the intensification of fascist repression in states like Hungary and Rumania, networks of communists continued to operate among the trade unions. Underground communist parties continued to grow their membership, and began preparing their own partisan armies.

While the Yugoslav partisans have gotten the most focus due to the relative success of their partisan war against Italy independent from direct military involvement of Soviet and American forces, communist partisan forces were active all across the Balkans following the crushing defeat at Stalingrad.

In Rumania in particular, the evaporation of much of the army in the field provoked a wave of revolutionary defeatism at home. The strikes of August 1943 were mercilessly repressed by the Iron Guard. The wild and unrestrained nature of the reprisals broke the morale of the Royal Rumanian Army. With both guilty and innocent alike subjected to cruel tortures, anti-regime groups formed among officers and soldiers.

These networks were penetrated by the GRU as early as November 1943, providing a vital source of intelligence for Axis troops dispositions. In advance of Red Harvest, GRU agents distributed marching orders to worker-militants in Bucharest and other major cities. Exiled Rumanian communists returned to rebuild communication networks with so much of the leadership in prison.
[...]
Marshal Ruoff was not led like a lamb to the slaughter. The scale of Comintern preparations were difficult to conceal, even with the employment of the usual measures. Men and materiel were moved by night, and camouflaged by day. But the scale of bombing and reconnaissance overflights in Rumania telegraphed enemy interest in the sector. Similarly, the increased activity in the underground filtered up the chain of the SD and the Siguranța.

Captured militants spilled important operational details following torture. The pieces were slowly assembled, and while the issue of overall command could not be resolved, at the very least German and Rumanian forces were on the same page with regards to general Soviet intentions. Rumanian intelligence identified likely main-efforts of the Comintern advance, and worked to reinforce them.

However, Ruoff had far less success in convincing the RSHA and Hitler. The RSHA and the OKW were both convinced that the indications of a major offensive in the South were part of an enemy deception campaign.

Enigma intercepts had given Stavka enough of a picture of the mind-state of the Nazi high command to tailor deception strategies. The primary fear of major military and civilian leadership was a direct drive into Germany now that the frontlines were so close. With the scale of Nazi slave labor system in Poland, a reveal of these atrocities could torpedo ongoing efforts to secure a separate peace in the West.

Comintern forces in Byelorussia were indeed preparing for offensive operations. But much of it was exaggerated through the use of imitation methods such as dummy tanks and artillery. Additional simulation methods amplified the scale of military movements and preparations, complete with a very comprehensive disinformation campaign that generated a plethora of radio chatter, fake orders, and operational maps to be deliberately exposed to the enemy. And some troops in the sector were deliberately misled into believing that an offensive into Poland was planned for late March, with the assorted demonstration manoeuvres to sell the image.
[...]
Operation Red Harvest began at 0310 Eastern European Time on 21 March 1945. The Soviet 6th Army achieved operational surprise near the city of Kishinev, in the modern day Moldavan SSR. Nine rifle divisions attacked along a 56 kilometer front, shielded by adjacent supporting attacks. The troops of the Rumanian Fifth Army came under intensive artillery bombardment.

While initial progress was slow, breakthroughs were quickly achieved. Achieving local superiority of 3:1 in troops, and over 10:1 in artillery, tanks and aircraft resulted in organizational chaos for the defenders. Following the initial attack echelon, the 2nd Guards Tank Division broke through into the operational depth.

Denied permission to retreat to more defensible positions by both Hitler and Codreanu, the German-Rumanian forces could not evade the brunt of the operational forces. As late as 24 March, the OKW still treated the attacks on Army Group South as “diversionary” and put most of its focus on the skirmishing on the East Prussian and Polish border.

The Rumanian defensive lines began to rollup like a carpet. Airborne troops were able to seize important river crossings on the Prut and Danube, thwarting counterattacks by Rumanian and German mechanized forces until Soviet tank columns could relieve them.

The urban uprisings began small. As troops departed from security duties to reinforce the collapsing front, rail workers in Bucharest barricaded and occupied the major marshaling yards. From there, the strikes snowballed, inviting bloody crackdowns.

With German and Hungarian reinforcements bottled up in Transylvania, Comintern forces pushed rapidly through the lowlands. Not only did Rumanian forces fail to mount effective defenses, mass defections and surrenders began on 26 March. The urban uprisings continued to spread as American strategic bombers dropped leaflets heralding liberation. Food and arms were delivered by transport aircraft to rebel strongholds.

The American 8th Grenadier Division reached Bucharest on 27 March, linking up with communist partisan forces. The remaining security forces in the embattled capital surrendered, arresting both King Michael and Codreanu, and delivering them into custody. While Horia Sima attempted to reorganize what was left of the Rumanian state apparatus into the Rumanian State, the destruction of the Iron Guard regime was fait accompli.

The American landing across the Sea of Marmara proceeded almost totally unopposed. The remnants of the Italian navy were unable to significantly disrupt naval deployment in the Aegean.
[...]
While it would take the better part of a month to fully secure the Rumanian oil fields, and to begin major operations into Bulgaria and Italian-occupied Greece, Red Harvest and the subsequent operations were unqualified strategic successes for Comintern forces, and a chilling portent of the threat to come.

The rapid destruction of the state apparatuses in the Balkans was accompanied by widespread peasant and proletarian revolt under the loose leadership of local communist cells. Wherever red forces set foot, revolution followed. All entreaties to seperate peace were denied, and ultimately the illiberal constitutional monarchy in Bulgaria met the same fate as the Iron Guard fascist regime in Rumania: unconditional surrender and social revolution.

 

[Aelita]

Excerpts from Raisa Twerski, Forging Victory: The European Theatre in its Last Year (Metropolis: RUM Publishing, 1995)

The Soviet and American armies, joined at the hip as components of the Red Army of the Communist International, underwent their final wartime reorganization in the winter of 1944/45. As detailed in the 1945 edition of the FM-100 series, these reforms codified a doctrine that had been developed through five years of bloody experience.

Chiefly authored by General of the Army Georgii Samoilovich Isserman, the reforms addressed changes in the material reality faced by revolutionary forces. First, the question of manpower: the war effort had demanded immense sacrifices of life above and beyond the mass murder inflicted by Nazi occupation forces in the Soviet Union. It was imperative to accomplish more with fewer soldiers.

Of equal importance was the shift from defense to offense. The Red Army had spent the previous five years defending the territory and population of the Soviet Union, and liberating them from occupation. In the final phase of the war, the Red Army would be not only invading the territories of other nations that had been victims to the Nazis on a mission of liberation, it would also have to take the fight into Germany itself.

The shifting dispositions were not totally negative. The Red Army had endured its baptism by fire, and now had a veteran army led by experienced officers and NCOs. Earlier command and control kludges, such as the many “brigade bucket” tank and mechanised corps, could be rationalised now.

There had also been a major shift in the balance of material forces during 1944. The Southern Cone Theater had been closed. The German u-boat fleet had been neutralized, and the threat of an Italian or Fascist French naval breakout had been ended. The production of war materiel in both the Soviet Union and the UASR was reaching its absolute peak.
[...]
General Order No. 345 abolished the tank and mechanised corps. These non-standardised formations had provided the Red Army with important concentrations of mechanised firepower when the bulk of the army fighting had been foot-mobile Soviet rifle divisions. But as the Red Army became increasingly motorised they began fielding larger tank armies, muddling the doctrinal role of the tank/mechanised corps.

The smaller “brigade bucket” corps would be converted into new tank and motor rifle divisions. The larger corps, comprised of 2 to 4 division equivalents, would have one of two fates. The more veteran formations would be enlarged to full tank armies, reinforced with additional supporting units befitting their status. The remaining corps would be broken up, with their divisions moving to army-level reserve assets.

In tandem with this reorganization, the total number of division and brigade level tank and mechanised formations would be increased.
[...]
With the frontier dramatically shortened following the Byelorussian Offensive, many divisions were able to be rotated from the frontlines for rest, refit and reorganization. The 1st Byelorussian Front and the 4th Ukrainian Front were the first to begin a systematic reorganization.

The 2nd Guards Tank Army, the heroes of Moscow and Rostov, left the front at fifty percent effective strength in December 1944. Withdrawn to Smolensk to recuperate, this American formation had been in-country in some form since 1940, and were some of the most experienced units in the entire Red Army.

Originally deployed as elements of V and VII Corps, 2nd Guards TA had three tank divisions (3rd, 7th and 44th Guards) and one grenadier division (1st Guards) before reorganization. While the equipment had changed and men had come and gone, they were still organized under the 1940 table of organization. Each tank division consisted of three tank regiments, with each regiment mixing two battalions of tanks with a grenadier battalion. The 1940 grenadier division was made up of three regiments, each composed of three grenadier battalions. In addition to the usual self-propelled artillery and sustainment regiments and the pioneer and reconnaissance battalions common to all divisions, it was further strengthened with a tank and an anti-tank battalion.

In the offensives of the past year, the 1st Guards Grenadier Division had been largely relegated to a supporting role. Experience had taught that tank units required additional mechanized infantry to support attacks and cover the flanks, especially against the numerous anti-tank guns and panzerschrecks fielded by the German military. Like most of the other tank armies, detached grenadier/motor rifle regiments had been used to reinforce tank divisions in the advance.

And while the Zil-153 armored personnel carriers were rugged and reliable, mechanized infantry units without the support of tanks had struggled in combat. Without the use of army or front level anti-tank assets, mechanized infantry divisions would struggle to defend against a German panzer division.
[...]
Under the 1945 Table of Organization and Equipment, the standard tank battalion was reduced from 53 to 40 tanks. Each tank regiment would gain an additional tank battalion from the reorganization. Each grenadier/motor rifle regiment would be stiffened with the addition of a tank battalion.

Tank divisions would add an organic grenadier regiment. Grenadier divisions would expand their supporting tank battalion to a full regiment. These changes increased the authorized strength of tank divisions from 12,200 men and 319 tanks, to 14,400 men and 400 tanks; smaller than the pre-war tank divisions but significantly more flexible.

In addition to a new organizational scheme, guards divisions under the 1945 table were to be re-equipped with the most modern units available. Each of the guards tank armies would have one tank division upgraded to the new MBT-18 “Mikhail Frunze” tank, armed with a 100-mm rifle capable of engaging the Panzer 75 frontally at close range. The table also exchanged one grenadier regiment’s six-wheeled Zil-153 armored transporters with the better protected FV-35 tracked armored transporter.
[...]
The increase in mechanization did not apply solely to the elite tank armies. Throughout the middle period of the war, the three division rifle corps that made the backbone of the army had been sporadically reinforced with tank and SPG battalions. Throughout 1944 and into 1945, those battalions were expanded into brigades. The number of heavy tanks fielded for the summer 1945 offensives had almost tripled compared to the previous year, giving the Red Army the punch needed to break through the immense fortifications of the “Hitler Line”.

Additionally, front-line units on the corps, army and front level increased the number and variety of artillery units available. The application of detailed maps, sophisticated firing tables, and platoon-level radios ensured that fire missions could be carried out both quickly and accurately. The proximity VT fuze, now standard on any shell from heavy mortars on up, greatly improved the lethality of artillery against entrenched enemies.

---

/net/global/http:co.fbu/terreville/hexagone/barracks/1048/gilles_tank_emporium

Bonjour! Welcome to Gilles’ Tank Emporium, the homepage for all your militaria needs!

Pour yourself a drink, and make yourself at home. I am called Gilles, and I own a Games Workshop franchise in Camden Town, London. It’s the finest game and hobby store on the island, especially those with patrician tastes in miniature wargaming.

Please check out one of the many pages here, and don’t forget to sign your name in the guestbook! And as a warning for anyone with a slow connection, this site has a lot of images.

• Store: (UNDER CONSTRUCTION )
  
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Best viewed with NetCo Lighthouse v. 3.1 or later, at 800 x 600 resolution

.../gilles_tank_emporium/totaler_krieg

Totaler Krieg is a popular 15mm scale miniature wargame which simulates ground combat in all major theaters of the Second World War.

I play TK extensively, and placed 3rd at the London Cup in 1993. The game has only gotten more exciting in the year since with the release of Core Rulebook III: Götterdämmerung, and new finecast miniature lines.

I have written some collecting guides and tactica for several armies, though I’m most familiar with the Wehrmacht.

• Unlimited: Only plebs play unlimited competitively. Point counts are insane, unless you like having to swarm Panzer 75s with hordes of BT-7s, or vice-versa.
  
• Early War: Good overall balance, limited options unless you only want to collect Axis vs. Comintern
  
• Mid War: The balance is très terrible, IMO, but the model lines are good
  
• Late War: You may have to use 3rd party models, but it’s OGL.

.../gilles_tank_emporium/totaler_krieg/late

The flavor text from the rulebook’s introduction is very metal. “The World War has entered its sixth year. Tens of millions of lives have been consumed in the conflict. The vast wealth of nations, representing centuries of toil, have been squandered. And still the war rages on.”

• Tactica
  • Ostfront
    
  • Westfront
• Painting
  
• Recommended Reading

.../gilles_tank_emporium/totaler_krieg/late/ostfront

The first step to winning as Germany in the late war is to forget everything you think you know. So many new players try to build a detachment out of heavy tanks with little support, or try to fight the Red Army at its own game in mechanised mobile warfare.

Germany has good tanks, but they are too pricy in points to give you flexibility in all but the largest of games. Your real strength is infantry. Germany gets the best cannon fodder infantry, point per point, of any faction. Volkssturm are only slightly more expensive than Japanese emergency levies, and they come with Panzerfaust for free.

You want, at minimum, two full platoons of Volkssturm, four squads in each, with an attached Waffen-SS Führungsoffiziere detachment. This will give them a crucial bonus on morale rolls, and prevent your troops from breaking.

Painting that many dudes may be time consuming, but it will be well worth it. The more infantry you have on the field, the more you can have in reserve, the more ambush counters you can place. Litter the terrain, particularly anything that gives good cover saves, with a mix of infantry teams and ambush counters.

This will force the Red Army player to advance more cautiously, to avoid exposing the sides of his tanks to panzerfausts. It will give you additional chances to pop his APCs and kill the infantry before they can get in the fight or take objective points.

To boost your ambush rolls, you’ll want a headquarters detachment to have the Sturmtruppen trait. Any sturmtruppen you have can also be handy to hold key places. Volkssturm will melt against gvardiya, but the firepower from sturmtruppen’s MKb-42s can help even things out.

Be wary about sinking too many points into machine gun squads at this level. MG-42s are still good, but the Red Army has a lot of mortar teams they can use to neutralize them. Instead, go for something a bit more mobile and expensive, like a PzGren IV with the MG-151 15mm machine gun turret. It’s pretty proof against mortars and you can relocate easily to shore up weaker sectors.

Any time the points allow it, you should have tanks, but don’t spend more than 25 percent of your points total in tanks. Your tanks will be largely less mobile, but better armored than the Red Army’s. But don’t count on armor keeping you safe in a frontal engagement; the Red Army’s VL-3 heavy tanks and MBT-18 mediums can engage the Pzkfw 50 and 75 frontally at typical table top ranges. Use cover when possible

As anyone can tell you the Panzer 100 is a joke option useful only for burning points and the Mammut tank is quite literally noted as something to only pick for fun. The Smilodon is big with an even bigger gun and has armour plates thicker than your thighs. It also doesn’t really offer anything that the Tiger doesn’t and large artillery rounds can take it out of action all the same. The Mammut is an impressive showroom piece, but there is nothing that requires its twin cannons and it moves about as quickly as a bunker.

At this point, the 25 is now essentially a light tank, its high top speed allowing it to redeploy across large chunks of the map in a single turn. Much like the other early to mid-war medium tanks it cannot really take a punch, so don’t expect the Gepards to stay on the field for very long.

The Panzer 10 Katze is essentially an armoured car with tracks and will ride and die about as quickly as one. Though it suffers much less severe difficult terrain penalties than the German armoured cars, it can and will fall apart the second it gets targeted by anything heavier duty than an M2 heavy machine gun, and even those can breach the rear facing if you’re careless. They are handing out KPV machine guns on everything, so it's probably best not to waste your points here.

Late war German artillery is largely outclassed by its comintern counterparts in both bang for the buck and variety. Forget about how you don’t have anything in the same class as the 240mm super-heavy cannons, the old reliable 155mm howitzers are cheap as chips for heavy artillery and the firing tables special rules let them drop shells with accuracy your 15cm guns could only dream of.

All is not lost however, your anti-tank guns remain some of the best even this late in the war. The famous 8.8cm is getting somewhat long in the tooth, but the 10.5cm is useful against virtually every target in the game from Japanese superheavies to Commonwealth cover campers. Paired with your Panzerschrecks and Panzerfausts you can shred through any tank spammer who gets overconfident when they see you take to the field without a parking lot’s worth of tanks. Nevermind the lighter vehicles who can be ripped apart by the ever reliable 40mm bofors autocannon.

Speaking of; the Bofors is the unsung hero of the Axis armies. Yes it can’t penetrate tanks from the front like the big flak cannons but very few tanks can survive hits from the side and almost none of the lighter vehicles will survive. It also brutalises most infantry with frag rounds, and its flak rounds will neuter most air support thrown your way. You will learn to love the 40mm, and it’s low enough in points cost that you can field a half dozen twin cannon mounts in a standard game with room to spare for all the other options.

---

Overview: Operation Siegfried

Operation Siegfried was the last German offensive operation. Planning for the operation began in January 1945 for counteroffensive efforts against an expected Comintern invasion beginning in March. The OKW had been successfully misled by enemy maskirovka, and began marshalling the bulk of the remaining panzertruppe in occupied Poland to counter the expected thrust to the jugular.

When it became apparent that the Comintern schwerpunkt was actually in Rumania, the OKW had intended to move forces south to support their beleaguered forces in the Balkans. This order was countermanded by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, with Hitler’s blessing. Göring assumed direct command of operations in the East with the full cooperation of the Waffen-SS, signalling a truce in the long power struggle between himself and Himmler.

Operation Siegfried was born on the 11 April 1945 meeting of OKW. With Göring as chairman, Volksmarschall Erich von Manstein and Generalfeldmarschall Franz Halder presented two contrasting outlines for the operation. Halder’s was more conservative, hoping to achieve rapid breakthroughs with minimal preparation time in order to destroy Communist operational tempo and buy more time to prepare defenses on the German border.

Von Manstein presented a more aggressive operation, one which would exhaust available fuel reserves to achieve deeper penetration and force the 3rd Byelorussian Front into a cauldron in the Baltics, and pin the powerful 2nd Byelorussian Front to the Pripet Marshes, and if possible complete its destruction.

Ultimately, Göring sided with von Manstein. This was not out of hopeful optimism. As his private diary entries note, he believed that Hitler was losing his grip with reality, and could not accept the possibility of defeat. Halder’s plan seemed to accept the inevitability of the invasion of Germany itself, and Hitler could not countenance such defeatism. Göring summed up the calculation: “If I side with Halder, it is certain defeat in nine months. If I side with Manstein, it is a gamble between defeat in six months or a small chance of a white peace.”

Göring was perhaps alone in the Nazi inner circle in his sober assessment. As Plenipotentiary of the Four Year Plan, Göring’s official responsibilities gave an insight to the state of the war economy from its commanding heights. Unlike Fritz Todt, Minister for Armaments and War Production, or Henry Ford, Chairman of the civil/military engineering concern Front Ford, Göring’s fanaticism for the cause had been worn thin by the war.

The military-economic statistics were damning. Even with the massive rationalisation of production that had been promoted by Front Ford in everything from industrial production to agriculture, the Reich was afflicted by a severe labor shortage beginning in late 1944 that intensified with every passing day. Production had been sustained by a massive forced labor program that had abducted nearly fifteen million people from occupied countries and certain allied states. This policy ranged variously from murderous to genocidal, depending upon ethnicity, and the appalling attrition made it unsustainable.

Now evicted from most occupied territories, and conscripting an every greater portion of the population, especially the youth into military service, every major industry in the Reich was afflicted by severe shortages in labor. Shortfalls in coal and steel production snowballed into major crunches in the production of everything from canned food to tanks. Shortages in many critical materials compounded these problems.

The signing of the Soviet-Finnish Co-Belligerency agreement had cut the Reich off from 95 percent of critical nickel production, required for everything from engines to machine tools. Reserves, initially calculated to be enough for two to three years of the war effort, ran dry faster than anticipated. Comintern attacks into the Balkans cut off oil and aluminum imports, forcing an increased reliance on labor intensive coal production and lower quality synthetic oils from coal liquefaction. The collapse of the Swedish Nazi government part way through May pushed things from bad to worse, and Germany found itself cut off from its precious iron ore.

These were but a few of the problems facing the war economy in the spring 1945. War production for the quarter had declined nearly one third from the high in Summer 1944. Wildcat strikes, work stoppages and slowdowns grew more frequent in the industrial cities. Nevertheless, the shattered remnants of Army Group North and Army Group Centre were reorganized into Army Group E, under the command of Volksmarschall Manstein. Forces were marshalled at a breakneck pace, quickened by the withdrawal of most veteran units from the Western Front.

Army Group E consisted of three full Panzer Armies (Third, Fifth, and Sixth), accompanied by the Second and Eighth field armies. In total, eighteen panzer divisions and thirty-one infantry divisions were to take part in the offensive, totalling just over 900,000 men.

Operation Siegfried would be further supported by the massed jet fighter and bomber aircraft of Luftflotte 2. And while the Me 262 Schwalbe gets most of the attention due to its psychological effect on Comintern fighter and bomber pilots, it is likely the Arado Ar 234C jet bombers that had the biggest impact on the operation. Able to cruise at nearly 800 km/hr, the Blitz was effectively immune to interception by front-line fighter units. Even the rare F-47 Thunderchild interceptor, with its beastly Wasp Major radial engine, could barely sustain that at war emergency power and the Arado could simply throttle to military power to escape.

Ar 234s flying in the reconnaissance role were crucial for the operation’s planning, particularly for finding targets of interest such as headquarters and supply dumps to be engaged by the large batteries of V-3 ballistic missiles assembled for the operation. The surprise bombardment by these mobile missile launchers contributed to much of the operational confusion in the opening days.

Thus just after midnight Central European Time, on 3 May 1945, six battalions of Panzerwerfer 50 Donar launchers moved into their final firing positions, thirty-five launchers in total. At 3 a.m., they erected their V-3 rockets into their pre-computed firing positions, and launched barrages aimed at major supply and command hubs for the 2nd Byelorussian Front. The supersonic missiles delivered 535 kg high-explosive fragmentation warheads or cluster sub-munitions out to a maximum range of 150 km.

The accuracy was less than optimal, but the results were impressive enough. Thanks to intensive drills in the weeks before, the warheads were delivered with a circular error probability of 500 metres. Many missed, but enough landed without warning to kill and wound much of the command staff of 2nd Byelorussian Front headquarters, and start major fires at several ammunition and fuel depots near the front’s railheads.

Barrages continued throughout the day. After first light, Arado jet bombers delivered ordnance to bridges, rail lines and enemy rear echelons as the tanks and infantry advanced.

The first prong of the attack broke out from East Prussia towards Kaunas, Lithuania, headed by the I SS Panzer Corps. They broke through the defense lines of the undermanned 18th Rifle Corps. The half strength American divisions lacked the heavy AT guns necessary to properly engage the Jaguar-G tanks effectively. Nonetheless, the troops maintained tenacious resistance as they regrouped. I SS Panzer Corps shattered the enemy’s combat effectiveness, but was unable to overrun the divisions, and took significant attrition from recoilless rifles.

Further south, the Wehrmacht’s III Panzer Corps spearheaded the breakthrough near Bialystok, where they clashed with the depleted Soviet 62nd Army. Like further north, resistance was tenacious even in the face of local superiority in artillery, armor and infantry. While the supporting artillery units reacted slowly under suppression from German counter-battery fire, the five rifle divisions were supported by the 78th Tank Brigade’s thirty-five remaining VL-2 heavy tanks.

The attacks continued for three days with relative success. Local numerical superiority was sustained, and the continued attacks by V-3 rockets, tactical airpower and artillery cover disrupted Comintern logistics. The offensives had pushed nearly one-hundred kilometres, and a breakthrough into the rear areas of the 3rd Byelorussian Front was threatened. But the problems began to mount. Frontal aviation was reinforced with the redeployment of an additional air army diverted from supporting forces in Hungary.

The aerial counteroffensive began in earnest on 7 May, as Soviet bombers began assaulting Luftwaffe forward air bases. The weakness of the Luftwaffe became apparent as the air war intensified. The highly effective Arado bombers could not sustain high tempo operations due to maintenance needs and spare parts shortages. Unfamiliarity with the Me 262 by the many novice pilots led to sharply increasing attrition rates. In addition to engine fires caused by throttling issues, many Schwalbe were lost when drawn in to dogfights with much more maneuverable prop fighters, or picked off during their long take off or landing approaches.

Comintern reserve units continued to move forward to reinforce the lines. The German offensive petered out on 12 May. Even with the capture of several important stocks of petrol in the initial offensive, fuel reserves were exhausted. Some forward tank units lacked even the fuel to retreat. The situation went from bad to dire when the 3rd Ukrainian Front began a counteroffensive the next morning. The reserve units manning the lines near Lubin in occupied Poland, many consisting of old men and boys fresh from the Hitler Youth, were quickly overrun, and the 5th Guards Tank Army broke into the German operational rear.

Three days later, the 1st Baltic Front began its assault on the fortifications of the Hitler Line in East Prussia one month earlier than planned. Aided with fire from the Soviet battleship Marat and 203-mm siege howitzers, the Soviet assault troops attacked a fortification line at seventy percent completion. German resistance was stiff, but heavy artillery and air attacks were able to cover infiltration. The fortress troops, undermanned and supplied to sustain Operation Siegfried faltered under the bloody assault.

The German army worked desperately to reinforce the neck of the eastern Polish salient to cover the withdrawal of the forward forces from Operation Siegfried. Owing perhaps only to hasty counter offensive preparations was this successful. On 21 May, a general armed uprising began in Warsaw, organized by the Polish Home Army and the Polish Communist Party. The uprising jammed rail traffic through the area, and tied down six Wehrmacht divisions moving to reinforce the pocket.


Amidst heavy casualties, the Polish partisans endured with logistical support from the Red Army Air Forces, until the first T-44s from the 5th Guards Tank Army reached the city’s outskirts. German forces continued to filter out of the pocket, travelling north of Warsaw, until 4 June. Elements of six German divisions were trapped in the pocket. The roads in eastern Poland were littered with abandoned tanks and trucks.


But it was not merely materiel shortages that defeated the Nazi military. The crack troops of the 3rd SS Panzer Division “Totenkopf” clashed with the rapidly advancing 16th Guards Tank Division near Tannenberg, East Prussia on 27 May. The Soviet tank troops, equipped with one regiment of MBT-18s and two regiments of T-44Bs, had broken through a critical Pakfront the previous day, spearheading the 1st Guards Tank Army’s advance towards Warsaw.

Totenkopf counterattacked at first light. In the dense woods and meadows south of Tannenberg, the two divisions clashed in a storm of steel. The morning fog prevented the utilization of air support and restricted visibility to less than five hundred metres. Both sides employed stalk-and-ambush tactics, like grandmasters maneuvering their chess pieces before the clash. As the fog thinned around noon, the fighting intensified.

Both formations had gone into battle at roughly equal strength; Totenkopf had 147 operational Jaguar-Gs, 42 Gepard-Ds, and 31 Jagdpanzer 50s, while 16th Guards had 78 MBT-18s and 151 T-44Bs. At the typical engagement ranges at Tannenberg, advantages in firepower and armor were largely nullified. Crew skill and unit flexibility ultimately mattered more. Forty percent of the tanks lost on both sides had been knocked out with side shots.

While kill ratios are not in themselves important to determining the outcome of an operation, at the Battle of Tannenberg, the tank loss ratio favored the Soviet tankers 1.8 to 1. They proved more adept at structuring favorable engagements and outmaneuvering their adversaries. Totenkopf lost nearly half of its available armored fighting vehicles, and suffered similar losses to infantry carriers.

The dynamic of the war had changed. Even the best German formations, shielded from manpower and equipment shortages, could not beat their opponents on a level playing field. The majority of German formations deployed in 1945 could not boast of the full equipment inventories and veteran troops that the first ten SS divisions could. The rest were at well below authorized strength, filled with a large number of inexperienced and demoralized troops, and endured shortages of food and even clothing.

Five years of total war had exhausted German morale and resources. The failure of Operation Siegfried had hollowed out the German military. The Red Army’s ongoing Vistula-Oder Offensive pushed the German military out of Poland and liberated the death camp archipelago in Poland.

Troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front would liberate the largest of the death camps, the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, on 1 June 1945, in the midst of attempts at death-marching the remaining inmates away from the rapidly advancing troops. In operation since May 1941, at least 1.1 million inmates had been murdered at Auschwitz, mostly Jews.

Primo Levi, a Jewish inmate, had been assigned to burial duty that morning, and witnessed the arrival of a Soviet PT-76 light tank. Levi watched as they observed, peering out the top of their tanks, overwhelmed by the scene:

They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funereal scene. It was that shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections, and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man experiences at another man's crime; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defence.(1)​

For the people crushed under the Nazi regime, the dawn was finally coming. By mid June, the advance forces of the Red Army were pushing into Silesia and Pomeriania. In spite of the best efforts of the regime, the word was spreading. Foreign troops were occupying German soil. Cells of factory workers in the Ruhr, Brandenburg, and Schleswig-Holstein were gathering in secret. Liberation was coming, they whispered. It was time to seize it with their own hands.

1. Primo Levi, The Truce (Published in the US as The Reawakening), Simon & Schuster 1995, pp. 16.