The North Star is Red: a Wallace Presidency, KMT Victory, Alternate Cold War TL
- Thread starter TastySpam
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No, the glorious Soviet Union will never fall to the Americans!
Does Bulgaria receive Macedonia as compensation? I mean, it's against international norms by this point and the precedent probably risks encouraging the Warsaw pact members to fight amongst one another over territorial disputes (bad) but Bulgaria is also among the loyalest Soviet allies in the Warsaw pact and Stalin already crossed the Rubicon anyway when he started the war. Bulgaria probably would have fought Yugoslavia believing that it would get Macedonia again and it really would not have wanted to give it up to Serbia for the fourth time in 50 years. I'm sure that a bogus plebiscite could be arranged if Stalin approves. Same goes for Kosovo and Albania.
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Why do I have the idea that this war won’t be the pushover Stalin thinks? And will likely involve him dying at the hands of a Yugoslav assassin...
If Yugoslavia does indeed win, Tito's probably going to go all out on his dreams of Balkan unity...
That's going to be a big if though, and I find it unlikely that it will come to pass.
Yugoslavia will be going up against the Warsaw Pact, and worse off, against the Soviet Union who is one of the confirmed superpowers coming out of World War II. With a nuclear power one of the dominoes stacked against you, and in the hands of a man who hates your guts, I'm not really holding out hope for Tito's success.
Hence my prediction, if Stalin wins, I see Yugoslavia being split two/three ways, with possible annexations of Macedonia (to Bulgaria), Kosovo (to Albania), Vojvodinan Backa and Muramoz (both to Hungary) and Yugoslavia split between Croatia (which will probably include Croatia and Bosnia), Serbia and maybe Montenegro (assuming it doesn't flip to Serbia.)
I mean Beria could simply decide that enough is enough and start a coup against Stalin. Most of the Red Army will probably support him if it means avoiding WW3
True, but I meant for Yugoslav agents. For Beria, the question is who do you fear least: Stalin, Stalin's enemies who remember the shit you pulled, or NATO.
Everybody hated Beria but yeah, one thing he would be good at is avoiding WWIII.
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Chapter 36 - Yugoslavia Resists
Yugoslavia Resists
Yugoslavia was unsurprisingly entirely prepared for this eventuality. Of course, the Yugoslavs felt there was no way to actually defeat the Soviet Union on land, but it had no intention of simply retreating into becoming a guerrilla army. However, stand and fight was also not an option. For example, the Yugoslav Army in World War II partly collapsed because it tried to defend all of its borders. Yugoslavia had no intention of doing so. In fact, the JNA had furiously studied World War II in order to prevent mistakes made.
Due to the impossibility of a conventional victory, the plan of the JNA was entirely aligned with political aims in a way that would make Clausewitz proud. They sought to continue escalating the war, hoping that a foreign power, preferably a certain nuclear power, entered the war. In doing so, the Yugoslav Army realized that some areas had to be sacrificed. Vojvodina, as part of the Great Hungarian Plains, was not holdable. Yugoslav forces were to safely withdraw to behind the Sava River and try to hold the line at Belgrade, as Tito’s command relocated from Belgrade to Sarajevo, tucked away in various mountains. Bulgarian forces would likely push to Nis - Yugoslav forces would have to lose that city by relocating behind the South Morava river instead. Albanian forces would likely push to take Kosovo and its ethnic Albanian population, which opened up a possibility. In general, the Yugoslavs generally had better intelligence than the Soviet Union, as the NKVD had largely languished with Beria’s absence, and Yugoslavia’s State Security Administration (UDBA) was in close contact with the American Central Intelligence Agency. Thus, they had a game plan upon the invasion.
The Yugoslav strategy was to strategically retreat in all of those locations with infantry conscripts, who would presumably take horrifying losses. In contrast, almost all of Yugoslavia’s armored and mechanized troops were placed on three borders: the Macedonian-Bulgarian border, the Montenegrin-Albanian border, and the Slovenian-Austrian border. In particular, Albania was seen as the weak link in the Warsaw Pact because its lack of direct borders to the Soviet Union (the Soviets had no route to the Mediterranean until late 1953) meant that it had far fewer heavy weapons and machinery than the other Warsaw Pact nations.[1]
Yugoslav infantry positions were brutally shelled by combined Hungarian-Bulgarian-Romanian troops and as Warsaw Pact forces charged Yugoslav defenses, the overwhelming disparity in firepower largely allowed Warsaw Pact troops to blast Yugoslav defenses apart. JNA commanders were prepared to give ground, and were easily pushed back across the respective river defense lines, at which point the actual harshest battles in the war were to begin. Holed in various hills and cities along the Sava, Drava, South Moravam and Danube rivers, JNA forces dug endless foxholes and trenches in order to resist the vastly superior artillery forces of the Warsaw Pact armies. The firepower disparity between the two forces, but the superior defensive position of the Yugoslav Armies closely reminded many international observers of the last battles between Imperial Japan and America in locales like Okinawa and Iwo Jima. In a bid to pound the JNA into submission, Warsaw Pact forces fired endless artillery rounds well beyond in numbers of those faced by Nazi Germany and its client states, pounding much of the land across the respective rivers into total ruin, including the capital of Belgrade, which saw most of its population flee under non-stop indiscriminate artillery fire that inflicted horrifying death tolls on fleeing civilian columns. The sheer destruction inflicted on Belgrade exceeded those during the Nazi invasion in World War II - ironically, the Soviets had once executed for war crimes the Luftwaffe commander whose indiscriminate bombing of Belgrade killed thousands, when their own artillery shelling was now killing tens of thousands.
Stalin insisted that Yugoslavia be made an example of in order to show the world the costs of deviating from the Stalinist party line. However, he was keenly aware of the hugely negative press that Soviet forces took as a result of war crimes in East Prussia even though those war crimes were at no point never authorized by Soviet command (in fact, Communist party commissars were often instrumental in saving German civilians). As a result, under his orders, Warsaw Pact armies were ordered to keep absolute discipline within their armies, executing any soldiers who committed atrocities against individual civilians. However, Stalin's desire for vengeance meant that Warsaw Pact commanders were authorized and even encouraged from the top to use widely indiscriminate tactics that led to massive civilian collateral death, including mass artillery shelling of civilian areas and even refugee columns (under the rationale that JNA troops were using such columns as human shields, which admittedly some fleeing troops did, albeit without Yugoslav Army authorization). The Warsaw Pact talking point was that war was inherently bloody, and "maximum firepower" naturally brought the war to a conclusion sooner and thus minimized bloodshed. However, the war went differently elsewhere.
Bulgarian forces largely invaded from the plains near Vidin - they were caught upon total surprise when a huge chunk of Yugoslav forces, including the bulk of its artillery forces, invaded from Macedonia, rapidly advancing with little resistance before camping on the mountainous terrain outside of the Sofia. JNA forces decided two could play at the artillery game and directed their artillery upon the capital city of Sofia, also indiscriminately shelling it to horrific civilian casualties. The Bulgarian Communist Party fell into total chaos, with many of its top leaders fleeing the city under Yugoslav bombardment, with many members simply have gone missing, including one of Stalin's favorite politicians, Valko Chervenkov. Very soon, the Bulgarian Army in Yugoslavia was largely operating without orders from Sofia, an unfortunate position for the highly politicized officer corps that had survived widespread "anti-Titoist" purges. With little direction, the Bulgarian Army stopped in its offensive, settling down in Nis for an artillery duel with Yugoslav forces across the river.
The bulk of Yugoslav armor plunged across the coasts of Albania, quickly overrunning poorly-equipped Albanian infantry forces, having learned the lessons of German blitzkrieg and adopting them. The Albanian Communist Party had previously expelled over 25% of its members, for pro-Yugoslav unification sentiment, and the advancing JNA found no shortage of supporters. Tirana quickly fell as Enver Hoxha fled to launch an unpopular "resistance" movement in the mountains, as pro-Yugoslav Communists in the Albanian Communist Party declared that Albania was joining Yugoslavia as a constituent republic. Most critically, both the Bulgarian and Albanian offensives created borders with Greece, which opened up the possibility of Western support or even intervention.
Finally, the final offensive was the ballsiest. Gathering up the rest of their armored forces on the borders between Hungary, Croatia, and Soviet-occupied Austria, Tito decided to throw another bomb onto the diplomatic situation by attacking Soviet Austria. The Hungarian corridor was largely undefended and Yugoslav forces cut through the Soviet-occupied Burgenland. The goal was of course to drive towards Austria, attack Vienna, and force Western allied troops to either help the Soviets or help the Yugoslavs on the presumption that they would pick the latter (by bloodlessly surrendering their parts of Vienna). With Austria largely emptied of Soviet troops, the JNA advanced closer and closer to Vienna, hoping to siege the city and spark a global diplomatic crisis before superior Soviet armies could be reshuffled back into Austria to crush the Yugoslav armies.
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[1] The Syria coup doesn't happen until late 1954, so no way for the USSR to ship arms to Albania from 1948-1953.
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What's the situation in the air? Might Yugoslavia actually have a temporary advantage here?
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Kill the Stalinist crypto-fascists! The pure socialist ideology of Tito will prevail!