Those poor poor people of Seoul! 
I feel as though, a movie about LaRue’s bravery and humanitarian efforts will be made eventually.
I feel as though, a movie about LaRue’s bravery and humanitarian efforts will be made eventually.
The North Star is Red: a Wallace Presidency, KMT Victory, Alternate Cold War TL
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Good deduction - I was planning to make a post with just that! US approval/subtle suggestion of an invasion more or less comes in late 1954 - as soon as the Soviet Union invades Yugoslavia. There's very much of a mindset of "we must respond to Soviet aggression" mixing with the idea that "a direct war with the Soviet Union would be bad", so sparking a Korean War is immediately flagged as one of many ways to "strike back" at the USSR. So although there's a lot of arms shipments to SK from 1945-1954, the bulk of war material is getting shipped in 1954-1956 with the purpose of making the SK as ready for an invasion of the North. The amount of equipment the US has left over just vastly outstrips what either Korea can make at the time.
Chapter 53 - The Cold War Conniver: Russell (1954-1956)
The Cold War Conniver: Russell (1954-1956)
President Russell's presidency looked quite crippled in 1955. His approval ratings were mired in the low 30's, the Republican Congress was currently holding impeachment hearings which became just an opportunity for individual Republicans to grandstand about how much they hated President Russell. Wide swaths of his own party were horrified by his stance against civil rights, including his obvious attempt to erase Brown v. Board.
However, privately, the President seemed buoyant. Under siege from all sides and setting his enemies against each other, he often compared himself to the Eastern Roman Empire. His enemies included all kinds of Communists, Dixiecrats who thought he wasn't segregationist enough, all Republicans, and many prominent Northern Democrats. His rapport with the new British government was poor, with National Government Prime Minister Hugh Gaitskell privately horrified at Russell's views on segregation. Gaitskell in his older age described his overseas partnership with President Richard Russell of America and Prime Minister Nicholas Havenga of South Africa as his most regrettable actions as Prime Minister.
A pragmatic anti-Communist, Russell was elated with the Soviet-Yugoslav War. He concluded that no matter what happened in the war, Communism was doomed to be discredited both abroad and at home. Although the American press mocked him when American troops were forced to return after not being allowed to dock in Italy, Russell shrugged off the humiliation, believing that he was winning the broader ideological war.
Russell believed he actually had a fairly good chance of being re-elected after being counted for dead again, even though his views were odious to most Americans. First, with the failure of the third-party left-wing challenge in 1952, Russell concluded he could advertise himself as the only bulwark against a Republican super-majority Congress that would inevitably roll back the New Deal. Second, he knew the economy was chugging along for most Americans. With no war to fight at all, America had been continually demobilizing since 1945, sending much of its surplus equipment to every kind of anti-Soviet ruler abroad. Included in this list of recipients was the British Commonwealth, French Union, the rest of NATO, Cuba, Greece, India, China, Japan, Israel, South Africa, Jordan, Iraq, Libya, everywhere. The new civilian economy brought rising economic tides for (at least white) America. Third, he would find a way to stick it to the Soviet Union.
Under his orders, the American CIA (with Yugoslav help) dramatically expanded operations in Eastern Europe, attempting to locate dissidents who would agitate against the Soviet War.[1] Most dramatically, almost immediately after the invasion of Yugoslavia, President Russell began hunting for allies who strike back at the Soviet bloc in what would eventually be called cold war "proxy wars." Inciting India against Pakistan or Iraq against Iran were considered, but those were merely Soviet friendly states, not Soviet-backed states.
His first call was to President Chiang Kai-Shek in a famous call, where Russell speaking with a Southern twang asked Chiang if he felt like invading the north. The perplexed Chinese interpreter thought he had made a mistake and after being told he had not, Chiang joked by saying that he "always feels like invading Northern China, ever since they put me in charge [of the KMT] to do that in 1928." This horrified most of Chiang's advisers at the spot, before Chiang noted that "sadly, people are not always able to do what they feel like though." Chiang said that he sympathized with both Russell and Tito, but that a developing China could make no commitments besides treating an attack on the US as an attack on the ROC (and vice versa?). An administration member with ties in Korea redirected him to President Rhee, who gladly accepted the offer, assuming that the Americans would give him the proper tools.
As a result, in late 1954, American surplus equipment primarily went to four nations - Britain, France, Yugoslavia, and South Korea, primarily the latter. This included a massive transfer of aerial assets, as well as tanks, ships, and artillery. The American garrison in Japan was moved to South Korea in order to train Korean forces in the use of this equipment as quickly as possible. The only American condition was that Rhee had to go ask America again for permission when it sought to start the actual war - and it had to receive at least acquiescence from China and Japan. The Americans worked with Korean commanders to plan a lightning war - where the KPA and Seoul government could be quickly destroyed, forcing the Soviet Union's Fifth Army in the Far Eastern Military district to intervene to protect the North, forcing the Soviets into another war.
The second aspect of Russell's foreign plot was to order the CIA to contact as many former Islamic militants in the Xinjiang Region of North China. Russell's dream was for Islamic militants to create a crisis in Central Asia, forcing the Soviets to respond on another front.
Third, to create further encirclement of the Soviet Union, American forces began making as many contacts in Finland. The Finnish-American Community in New York City alerted William J. Donovan of the existence of a certain "Larry Thorne" who had significant contacts in Finland. Being funded extensively, "Thorne" was Lauri Torni, a Finnish officer, later Waffen-SS officer, who was previously trained as a saboteur against Soviet forces by the Germans after the end of the Winter War. Torni and other ex-Axis soldiers were smuggled into Finland to organize an incredibly well funded underground paramilitary, whose goal was to activate upon any hint of Soviet aggression against Finland. It was widely believed by both American and Soviet intelligence that Finland's 1956 elections might elect an anti-Soviet leader, which might lead to war.
Finally, Russell sought to complete the encirclement of the Soviet Union by removing the "neutral" government in Turkey and replacing it with an anti-Communist government that would at least put tensions with Greece on the wayside until Communism was eradicated by Turkey. The hope was that the more brutal the takeover, the more likely to threaten the Soviets it would be - the ideal outcome would also be a Soviet intervention, continuing to bleed the USSR, where living standards began to stagnate due to the constant war.
As chaos engulfed the Soviet Union, Russell looked almost triumphant in his daily radio condemnations of new acts of Soviet aggression/desperation.
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[1] OTL, the USA had no CIA presence in Hungary/Poland when the 1956 revolutions happened. ITL, they do. This makes those revolutions...more successful.
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I don't know what you're talking about. I know of no other timelines where this could go wrong.
Chapter 54 - The Rape of Finland
The Rape of Finland
Between 1940 and 1956, the Soviet Union and Finland had gone to war with each other over three times. Acting Premier Voroshilov had interestingly lead Soviet forces in the first two - and now led (in theory) the Soviet Union in the third. Stalin in particular dictated his wishes to those aware of his power, such as Voroshilov, Beria, Molotov, Mikoyan, Malenkov, and others that he fully intended the Second Winter War to be the last war against Finland. The orders given to Beria were simply to broadly "liquidate reactionary resistance in perpetuity." If anything, the orders were significantly stricter than even what was issued to Yugoslavia - the Soviet line in Yugoslavia was that a Titoist conspiracy had to simply be removed, but the political situation was otherwise salvageable. In Finland, it was decided that every institution standing against Communism had to be violently crushed.
On Beria's kill list included every non-Communist Finn who was suspected of being either a World War II-era officer, intelligence agent, gendarme, landowner, factory owners, lawyer, bureaucrat, priest, writer, or journalist. NKVD officers infamously swept through occupied Finnish towns, summarily arresting "reactionary elites", taking them to local forests, executing them, and dumping them in now-infamous mass graves. No effort was made to even take them to Soviet forests, so thorough the planned invasion was to be. Reports of these atrocities quickly filtered to Helsinki, where an evacuation of Finland's educated class was undergone as Soviet forces began plowing through the city, albeit much slower than the Soviets expected. Although they (and most Soviets) had no evidence of the executions, the Finnish elite knew that they were being arrested en masse, and in Finland, unlike most of the West, it was understood at the time that the Katyn Massacre was an act by Beria's NKVD (most of the West believed alongside most Soviets that it was one of Nazi Germany's many atrocities).
The Red Army expected that without a large standing army, Helsinki would go far easier than Zagreb. Much to their shock, the Finns put an even stiffer fight. So effective were urban Finnish snipers, that the Soviet officer corps took more proportional losses than any battle in its history - to the point where Soviet officers quickly began hiding their identity, which hurt Soviet morale. Extensive artillery shelling of Helsinki only created more ruins that Finnish troops quickly learned to hide in and ambush Soviet patrols. Flamethrowers were brought in order to flush Finnish soldiers out of the ruins of Helsinki, but flamethrowers quickly became targets, endangering any Soviet soldier near them. Indeed, Soviet morale further plummeted, forcing the Red Army to stop the use of flamethrowers, relieving both the Finnish and Soviet armies (fire was a horrifying way to die, both for Finns and Soviets, and flamethrowers were exceptionally loathed for their role in civilian collateral damage).The Soviet strategy eventually simply returned to artillery shelling (to weaken resistance), followed by slow, methodical assaults, block-by-block, supported by Soviet tanks, to whom Finnish troops had few weapons. The T-34s were already hard to penetrate, the new T-54s were quickly seen as almost invincible juggernauts, only to be disabled in very unusual ambushes. Slowly but surely, the Red Army cleared any bastions of Finnish resistance.
The evacuation of Finland's political class and their families had failed to actually evacuate many people. Besides the sea ice in late February that hampered escaping ships, as soon as the evacuations began, Soviet submariners were ordered to torpedo any "retreating military vessels" (they were told that the transports contained Finnish troops retreating to fight elsewhere, particularly Turku). This excuse seemed increasingly dodgy to Soviet submariners, who began to realize that the ships were bound not for Turku, but rather to Sweden. Two of these transports were even sunk in Swedish waters, but the damage was done. Most of Finland's political class had been decimated, but the Soviet submarine corps was nearing mutiny levels. In one of the most devastating events in Soviet military history, one submarine even completely had a mutiny, refused to sink a ship sailing to Stockholm, and instead sailed with it to Stockholm, defecting. Interviews with the crew combined with the tendency of dead bodies, including those of many children, washing up on Swedish shores, outraged the world, especially Sweden. Similar to reporting with regards to Imperial German atrocities in WWI Belgium, newspapers quickly blared these images (and interviews) under headlines such as the "Rape of Finland."
Swedish Prime Minister Tage Erlander had spent the war balancing between the two sides of his political party. Erlander had to deal with left-wing Social Democrats such as Foreign Minister Osten Unden who pursued strictly neutral foreign policy line in his ministry, while right-wing Social Democrats like Defense Minister Sven Andersson oversaw close cooperation with NATO in his ministry. This balancing act was broken. The real issue that tilted his position was the necessity of cutting out the Communists due to the political unpopularity of the USSR (whose invasion of Finland they vocally supported), forcing him into a minority government that forced him to rely on occasional right-wing support. With the opposition smearing him as a Communist Fellow Traveler and Social Democratic poll numbers dropping to their lowest in modern history, Erlander was pressed. Not soon after the Soviet submarine defection, the Americans came in with a rather unsolicitated and "strings free" offer - America's most advanced air defense systems. This was viewed in Washington as a subtle method to entice the Swedes to war by mitigating the possible downsides of war (ie, Soviet strategic bombing of Sweden). Sweden after all, had the world's fourth largest air force, behind only the US, USSR, and the UK (much to the embarrassment of France!) It was not at all well-trained or experienced, but it was very large and technologically advanced, fielding planes like the widely fielded turbojet Saab 29 Tunnan, some of the newer Saab 32 Lansen, and a few new prototype Saab 35 Drakens.
Interestingly, even by 1956, with many nations across the world at war, no official declarations of war had been issued. Many of the intervening nations simply described their military force as "police actions." This was changed, when the Riksdag, holding an emergency vote for the first time since the Napoleonic Wars, voted to declare war (roughly 190-40) on the Soviet Union, minutes before the Swedish Air Force began Operation Nyenskans.
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Evacuation would be hard with the sea ice, which would be near its peak in late January.
I guess another reason why it wasn't very successful...
Though FWIW, I think this is taking place in late-ish February (they don't get to Helsinki THAT fast and the city lasts a few months, so I don't know if they'd evacuate until parts of the ice have melted at least). I've added a mention though, thanks for the heads up.
I hope the Soviet version of Hell has everyone participating in these crimes against humanity in Finland being painfully shot at by the urban snipers. Simo Häyhä would be proud of his countrymen.
And the use of flamethrowers, IIRC, aren't part of the Geneva Conventions at this point ITTL (similarly to OTL, but please correct me if I'm wrong) and this therefore means that the Soviets technically aren't committing war crimes in this regard. I might be a dirty Red but this sort of thing, along with everything else they're doing, is crossing the moral event horizon.
And the use of flamethrowers, IIRC, aren't part of the Geneva Conventions at this point ITTL (similarly to OTL, but please correct me if I'm wrong) and this therefore means that the Soviets technically aren't committing war crimes in this regard. I might be a dirty Red but this sort of thing, along with everything else they're doing, is crossing the moral event horizon.
A lot of Geneva violations, probably. The Battle of Helsinki isn't that different in behavior from say, the Battle of Berlin or Siege of Budapest (well, besides the lack of any moral imperative to beat the Nazis). If anything, Soviet military doctrine is just in WW2 mode - just this time, it's got all the firepower it wished it had in WW2. However, the 1949 Geneva conventions buffed up protections for civilians, and while the Red Army in Finland isn't intentionally trying to indiscriminately massacre as many people as possible, there's definitely a callous disregard for civilian casualties that shouldn't be Geneva-compliant.
The other atrocities are pretty typical Stalin/Beria - Beria's Finnish death squads are pretty much an identical copy of what Beria did to Poland OTL. At least they're not planning a Finnish Holodomor.
Or perhaps will have to scale back certain operations, starting with Yugoslavia, since it is the lowest of the three major priorities with respect to national security. This is the advantage of the USSR's very high degree of totalitarianism and, compared with the axis powers, far greater ability to maintain ideological cohesion independent of their militarism and expansionism. In other words, they can get away with backpedaling and pretending they won a glorious victory or redefining their original war goals. Also keep in mind that Stalin will not live forever and when his health fails or somebody finally offs him, there could be an opportunity for a reset of sorts, and some degree of normalization. His associates and likely successors have shown that they are well aware of the strain the country is facing and have opposed some of his wars. I can't imagine they have any desire to see the ship sink, so who knows what they might hammer out.
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Thanks! Unfortunately, your namesake has really crippled my ability to update, Total War: 3 Kingdoms is consuming my life.
In terms of national security, Stalin probably puts Yugoslavia at #1 because he views Titoism as this ideological cancer threatening his system.
Lots of good analysis I agree with. One thing - I think USSR totalitarianism has gone down since the 1930's. Not necessarily because of what Stalin wanted, but just as a natural consequence of World War II. The Soviet system partially backed off just in order to ensure the resistance to Nazi Germany was broader (see, the loosening of oppression against the church.) ITL 1956 USSR is much more oppressive than OTL 1956 USSR, but less oppressive than OTL 1936 USSR (the peak of the Great Purge). Obviously, there was a lot of destalinization 1953-1956, but there was kind of a softer involuntary destalinization 1941-1945. Unlike say, 1940, the Red Army now has a professional independent officer corps - as evidenced by the extreme pushback against war crimes like the submarine attacks. That being said, I'm counting four priorities right now - Korea, Poland, Finland, and Yugoslavia.