The Russian Century - a TL

Prologue: Period of Decline, 1825-1881.
  • Hello to you all on this second day of the new year. I present to you the beginning of my newest (hopefully) non-ASB TL.


    The Russian Century



    Prologue: Period of Decline, 1825-1881.

    At the dawn of the nineteenth century, Russia devastatingly defeated Napoleon and became known as the saviour of Europe. It joined the Holy Alliance with Prussia and Austria, which dominated continental Europe and was intended to restrain liberalism and secularism in the wake of the devastating French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It became de facto defunct after the death of Tsar Alexander I in 1825, but Russia continued to play a leading role in continental affairs.

    Although the Russian Empire remained a great power, thanks to its role in defeating Napoleonic France, its retention of serfdom limited any significant degree of economic progress. As Western European growth accelerated during the Industrial Revolution, Russia began to lag ever farther behind, creating new technological, economic, military and administrative weaknesses for the Empire seeking to play a role as a great power. Russia’s status as a great power obfuscated the inefficiency of its government, the isolation of its people, and its economic and social backwardness. Following the defeat of Napoleon, Alexander I had been ready to discuss constitutional reforms, but though a few were introduced, no major changes were undertaken.

    The liberal Alexander I was replaced by his younger brother Nicholas I (1825-1855), who at the beginning of his reign was confronted with an uprising. The background of this revolt lay in the Napoleonic Wars, when a number of well-educated Russian officers travelled in Europe in the course of military campaigns, where their exposure to Western liberalism of encouraged them to seek change on their return to the autocratically ruled Russian Empire. The result was the Decembrist Revolt (December 1825), which was the work of a small circle of liberal nobles and army officers who wanted to install Nicholas' brother Constantine as a constitutional monarch. The revolt was easily crushed, but it caused Nicholas to turn away from the modernization program begun by Peter the Great and champion the doctrine of Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality instead.

    In order to repress further revolts, censorship was intensified, including the constant surveillance of schools and universities. Textbooks were strictly regulated by the government. Police spies were planted everywhere. Would-be revolutionaries were sent off to Siberia – under Nicholas I hundreds of thousands were sent here. The retaliation for the revolt made "December Fourteenth" a day long remembered by later revolutionary movements.

    Revolutionary groupings did not just include movements demanding political change, but there were also separatist groups as Russia was a multi-ethnic country in which ethnic Russians constituted only about half of the population. Poland rose up in 1830-’31 and 1863-’64, to which Alexander II responded by annexing the Kingdom of Poland directly and excluding it from his liberal reforms. Martial law in Lithuania, introduced in 1863, lasted for the next 40 years. Native languages, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian, were completely banned from printed texts, the Ems Ukase being an example. The Polish language was banned in both oral and written form from all provinces except Congress Poland, where it was allowed in private conversations only. Besides that, Russia also waged wars of conquest in Siberia, the Caucasus in Central Asia, suppressing Islam in their new territories (such as the Circassian Genocide). Russia was indeed a prison of peoples.

    The question of Russia’s direction had been gaining attention ever since Peter the Great’s program of modernization. Some favoured imitating Western Europe while others were against this and called for a return to the traditions of the past. The latter path was advocated by Slavophiles, who held the “decadent” West in contempt. The Slavophiles were opponents of bureaucracy, who preferred the collectivism of the medieval Russian mir over the West’s individualism. More extreme social doctrines were elaborated by such Russian radicals on the left, such as Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin, and Pyotr Kropotkin.

    Russia’s backwardness became evident during the Crimean War. Russia expected that in exchange for supplying the troops to be the policeman of Europe during the Revolutions of 1848, it should have a free hand in dealing with the decaying Ottoman Empire – the “sick man of Europe.” In 1853 Russia invaded Ottoman-controlled areas leading to the Crimean War as Britain and France came to the rescue of the Ottomans. After a gruelling war fought largely in Crimea, with very high death rates from disease, the allies won.

    The long term damage was significant. The demilitarization of the Black Sea was a major blow to Russia, which was no longer able to protect its vulnerable southern coastal frontier against anyone. The destruction of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, Sevastopol and other naval docks was a humiliation. The defeat discredited the armed forces and highlighted the need to modernize the countries defences as well as the building of railways, industrialization, sound finances etcetera. The image of being the biggest, richest and most powerful in the world had suddenly been shattered. The Crimean disaster had exposed the shortcomings of every institution in Russia – not just the corruption and incompetence of the military command, the technological backwardness of the army and navy, or the inadequate roads and lack of railways the accounted for the chronic problems of supply, but the poor condition and illiteracy of the serfs who made up the armed forces, the inability of the serf economy to sustain a state of war against industrial powers, and the failures of autocracy itself.

    When Alexander II succeeded his father Nicholas I as Tsar in 1855, he recognized the need for reform. He became known as the Liberator for the emancipation of the serfs, but also the many other reforms he passed: including reorganizing the judicial system, setting up elected local judges, abolishing corporal punishment, promoting local self-government through the zemstvo system, imposing universal military service, ending some privileges of the nobility, and promoting university education. Up until 1881, the 1866 emancipation reform was his greatest change (even though the peasants had to repay the crown for essentially buying out the landlords for 49 years at a 6% interest).

    Alexander pivoted towards foreign policy and sold Alaska to the United States in 1867, fearing the remote colony would fall into British hands if there were another war. He sought peace, moved away from bellicose France when Napoleon III fell in 1871, and in 1872 joined with Germany and Austria in the League of the Three Emperors that stabilized the European situation. Despite his otherwise pacifist foreign policy, he fought a brief successful war with the Ottoman Empire in 1877-’78, leading to the independence of the Bulgaria, Montenegro, Serbia and Romania. A European conference mediating the peace talks between Russia and the Turks, however, produced rather disappointing results for Russia. Yes, in 1878 it didn’t seem the twentieth century would shape up to be the Russian century. However, a new reform in 1881, by far Alexander II’s most significant reform, was soon to be passed.
     
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    Chapter I: Dawn of the Constitutional Era, 1881-1884.
  • Update time.

    Chapter I: Dawn of the Constitutional Era, 1881-1884.

    What in hindsight would be Alexander II’s most important reform was yet to come after he survived the sixth assassination attempt against him. On March 13th 1881 [O.S.] he went to the Mikhailovsky Manège in St. Petersburg for the military roll call as he did every Sunday. As his closed carriage moved through the narrow streets, Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will, a revolutionary left-wing group) assassin Nikolai Rysakov failed as his bomb wasn’t strong enough to seriously damage the bulletproof carriage. Hryniewiecki, the second assassin, tripped and his own bomb killed him. The third, Yemelyanov, decided not to throw his bomb as the crowds prevented an accurately aimed throw and he quietly slipped away, which ultimately didn’t save him from the hangman’s noose as he was caught on the run.

    At the time of the assassination attempt, Tsar Alexander II had already appointed Count Mikhail Loris-Melikov the head of the of the Supreme Executive Commission, which was given extraordinary powers to fight the revolutionaries. Loris-Melikov's proposals called for some form of parliamentary body, and the Tsar agreed. He unveiled plans for an elected Duma, though it would often be an advisory body in practice. It would have 500 members elected by all men over the age of 25 (women weren’t granted the right to vote at all, which Alexander II didn’t see as necessity and saw as an overreach in a conservative country like Russia anyway). The electoral system was a first-past-the-post system somewhat similar to what Great Britain had and it was gerrymandered with the country’s constituencies differing in size and composition to favour the votes of landowners and peasants (more loyal to Tsar) over urban working and middle class votes. Besides that, a system of weighed voting comparable to the Prussian three-tier franchise was introduced based on the amount of taxes paid, which meant a noble vote had fifteen times greater influence on the outcome then a peasant or worker vote. Furthermore, parties participating in the elections had to reach a 2% electoral threshold to gain seats in the Duma, making it difficult for small minorities to win parliamentary representation.

    The constitution providing for this Duma was modelled on that of the German Empire. This meant the crown still retained significant powers such as appointing the cabinet, which had no responsibility to the Duma. It was still a major step forward in that it provided for certain basic rights such as protection from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, inviolability of domiciles, protection from illegal search and seizure, freedom of assembly, freedom of expression and freedom of religion, but also mandated compulsory military service for men.

    The Duma elected this way was the lower house; the Upper House was the Imperial Council composed of 196 members, 98 of which were elected while the Tsar appointed the remaining 98. The Duma and the Imperial Council would share legislative power in theory, though in practice the Tsar and the Imperial Council could decide to dissolve the Duma and issue new elections if they faced opposition from it. In practice this meant elections would be held more often than just once every four years and that the Tsar had a de facto veto right.

    This was nonetheless a revolutionary step forward as Russia had never had parliamentary elections or anything like it before during its one thousand year history. The reform was passed and hundreds of political parties sprang up ranging from extreme right reactionary, to more moderate conservative-nationalist and centre right liberal parties to social democrats and outright communist parties. Besides that were thousands of ethnic and religious minority parties, corporate candidates, land-owners, single issue parties and independents. Press control was relaxed and these parties were allowed to campaign for the elections, issuing newspapers, posters and pamphlets in a lively public debate.

    Exactly one year after the new constitution had been approved by the Tsar, elections took place in March-April 1882. Despite all the provisions favouring the aristocratic and rural vote the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) founded by Boris Chicherin, Konstantin Kavelin and Sergey Muromtsev won. They had a five point platform: firstly, the introduction of direct, secret, universal and equal suffrage; secondly, no discrimination based on religion, nationality, class or sex; thirdly, the abolition of capital punishment; and, lastly, an amnesty for political prisoners. As to economic policy, the LDP favoured a minimal government and free trade policies. Their primary political aim was to build the Duma into a strong, popular body similar to the British House of Commons. This program appealed to workers, the middle class, intellectuals and progressives among the nobility alike.

    The LDP won 150 seats in this new Duma and became the largest parliamentary group, which is attributed to a very high urban voter turnout compared to a low voter turnout among the peasantry (and the nobles, despite their voting counting for fifteen, had too little an impact because they constituted such a small proportion of the population). Runner up was a leftist group named Emancipation of Labour founded by Georgi Plekhanov, which had a Marxist and a social-democratic wing: its positions included a 40 hour workweek, a minimum wage, the right to unionize, nationalization of industry, nationalization of banks, expropriation of major landowners, and universal suffrage. The Emancipation of Labour Group, which soon renamed itself the Social-Democratic Party (SDP), won 45 seats.

    Second runner up was the National Party (NP) headed by the tutor of the Tsar’s oldest son Konstantin Pobedonostsev, a jurist, statesman and advisor to the Tsar: it ran on a program of Russian nationalism, a zeal for Orthodox Christianity, protectionism, laissez-faire capitalism, voluntary collectivism, a powerful executive branch constituted of the Tsar and the Imperial Council, a purely consultative Duma, institutionalization of anti-Semitism by barring Jews from public service, and opposition to voting rights for women and non-Christian Orthodox and non-Slavic minorities. It was heavily favoured by the government, but they were disappointed with the result, which amounted to merely 43 seats. The remainder consisted of national and religious minorities as well as independents.

    Coalition talks were difficult and took 225 days, with serious meddling from the court. Tsar Alexander II had hoped the politically liberal, socially progressive LDP and the socially and religiously conservative, monarchist and economically liberal NP could form the core of a “centre-right bloc.” After all, they agreed that domestic economic policy should be deregulated, laissez-faire, overseen by a libertarian small government. The LDP, however, wanted the Tsar as a purely symbolic figurehead in this new parliamentary system like in Britain. The NP, however, didn’t want the new system to evolve any further and would ideally undo it if they could and also didn’t see eye to eye with the LDP concerning secularism and education reform.

    An LDP-SDP “progressive bloc” was formed instead, which had 205 seats in the Duma. That was still 46 seats short of a majority, but by negotiating with minority parties and independents party leader Chicherin and Duma chairman Kavelin managed to enact a moderately progressive agenda. Conservatives around the Tsar backing the National Party attempted the opposite with some success under the supervision of Count Loris-Melikov, who’d been appointed Prime Minister. Among the successes of the LDP-SDP bloc in the early 1880s were lowering the right of the male age to vote from 25 to 21, a 48 hour workweek and nationwide subsidies for elementary schools and extra budget to educate teachers to staff them. In 1883, the NP and a slew of smaller parties managed to pass an act that elementary schools had to include “Orthodox Christian values” into their curriculums.

    Meanwhile radically leftist revolutionary groups decided this reformist Tsar had to be killed to put the genie back into the bottle. These Marxists and anarchists witnessed how their support base slowly began to erode because the significant successes of the new semi-autocratic, semi-constitutional, parliamentary monarchy soaked off their more moderate elements. To reinvigorate the revolutionary fire, a terrorist Narodnaya Volya cell intended to assassinate the Tsar during the spring of 1884: however, with the Tsar out of the country visiting his relatives in Denmark his heir would have to do as they lacked the patience to wait. Tsesarevich Grand Duke Alexander Alexandrovich was killed by multiple bombs thrown at his carriage on May 15th [O.S.] in St. Petersburg by Alexander Ulyanov and his co-conspirators. The Crown Prince died at the age of 39. The eighteen year-old Ulyanov (the group’s ideologue and bomb-maker) and all the other conspirators were swiftly sentenced and hanged.

    A grand funeral ceremony was held, with the most prominent attendees being the 66 year-old Tsar and the sixteen year-old new heir to the throne Grand Duke Nicholas. Crowned heads and others who attended the funeral included Queen Victoria, German Emperor Wilhelm I, Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph, King Umberto I of Italy, King William III of the Netherlands, King Leopold II Belgium, the ambassadors of China and Japan, and many others. Representatives from European noble families as well as some from Asian royal families attended too at Gatchina Palace, where the body lay in state and the funeral ceremony took place.
     
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    Chapter II: The Tsar is dead, long live the Tsar, 1884-1895.
  • And the story continues.

    Chapter II: The Tsar is dead, long live the Tsar, 1884-1895.

    It was 1884 and due to the assassination of Tsesarevich Grand Duke Alexander Alexandrovich, the Tsar’s new heir was his teenage grandson. Due a combination of health and the constant risk of a new assassination attempt by one or the other revolutionary terrorist grouping, he realized there was a distinct possibility he wouldn’t live to see the age of seventy. The sixteen year-old Grand Duke Nicholas had had the education any male scion of the Romanov dynasty, being well-read, cultivated and fluent in the German, English and French languages. As of 1884 he had not received any formal education whatsoever regarding statecraft as he hadn’t been expected to ascend to the throne for another few decades before his father’s assassination.

    Tsar Alexander II considered it important to give his successor a Western education to complement his Russian one in order to equip him with all the knowledge needed to lead Russia into the twentieth century. He also felt it self-explanatory that his heir to the throne knew the state his future realm was in, so he sent him on a six month tour of the Russian Empire between October 1884 and March 1885. It got him out of his bubble as he wasn’t constantly surrounded only by court dignitaries, politicians, officials, aristocrats and foreign ambassadors, but also got to deal with poor peasants, craftsmen and factory workers. The young prince realized Russia’s vastness, but also its emptiness, underdevelopment and potential: a continent spanning empire with a poor rural population, limited infrastructure, but also vast natural resources.

    After his Russian tour, it was time for his Western education to begin. Nicholas didn’t want to leave the country for so long and leave behind his widowed mother Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna, who also urged with her father-in-law to let him stay. The stern Tsar would have nothing of it and he sent Nicholas away to study, though he didn’t go alone: he was accompanied by a personal secretary, a cook, a valet, three servants and four housekeepers. That was meagre by the imperial court’s standards, but he was afforded a living standard well above that of any other normal student attending the University of Bonn: the stipend he received from Russia was enough to rent a modest country estate outside the city, pay his staff and cover all his other expenses. He arrived there in September 1885, in time for the start of the academic year.

    The University of Bonn had been attended by his cousin, the future German Emperor Wilhelm II, and like his cousin Nicholas joined the exclusive Corps Borussia Bonn. He followed classes in political science, economics, history and law but particularly developed an interest in engineering drawing from his talent as a draughtsman. Besides his hobbies of photography and tennis, the seventeen year-old Russian prince also became intimately acquainted with the opposite sex when he began to regularly attend the Bonn theatre soon after his arrival. Actresses, singers and dancers seeking royal patronage would seek out this wealthy Russian heir to the throne and some of them were not unwilling to provide a sexual favour to get it. In February 1886, he wrote to his younger brothers George and Michael in great detail about a “pretty, buxom female specimen my age” that he had had a really enjoyable time with. It’s widely believed he was referring to his first sexual experience and that the girl in question was the then seventeen year-old Anna Waldmüller, whose career as a soprano and stage and film actress he stimulated. Besides this, he also regularly visited his German relatives in Berlin and went home during the summer and in the holiday season.

    After two terms in Bonn, he departed for Britain to attend the prestigious University of Oxford and concentrated on the fields of engineering, economics, political science and law. He attended debates in the House of Commons and the House of Lords in Westminster, gaining an appreciation of Britain’s parliamentary system and constitutional monarchy. He sought out Oxford’s industries – which included motor manufacturing, education, publishing, information technology and science – and realized how far behind Russia was on the West. He developed a good bond with his cousin, the future King George V, and the two regularly enjoyed hunting and play tennis. The two looked so alike that people often couldn’t tell them apart, confused one for the other and even thought they were twins. Nicholas spent two terms at Oxford University. He finally returned to St. Petersburg in July 1889, where he was regaled by an enthusiastic crowd and the court had organized a lavish celebratory state banquet in his honour. Out of the past 48 months he’d barely spent twelve in Russia, but that was over now.

    Tsar Alexander II intended to continue moulding his grandson and successor by immersing him in political tasks, administrative duties and public performances immediately upon his return. That was the reason the now 21 year-old Tsesarevich didn’t have much time to travel abroad. Nicholas joined his grandfather in cabinet meetings and attended sessions of the Imperial Council as well as the Duma. This gave him invaluable experience on how to rule Russia through its new semi-constitutional, semi-parliamentary and still mildly autocratic system. Besides that, he got to know the political landscape in the elected Duma, the Duma’s sensitivities and the most important politicians in it. He also gained experience in public speaking by attending the opening of new schools, hospitals and churches. With some encouragement the mild-mannered, timid young prince developed a strong sense of self-confidence and after a while his grandfather often let him preside over cabinet meetings alone. The Tsar even assigned him to organize and coordinate relief efforts to alleviate the 1891-’92 famine. This de facto dyarchy continued for four years from 1889 to 1893.

    On October 21st 1893 [O.S], the entire Russian Empire was mourning as the news spread that the Tsar had passed away in his sleep at the age of 75 because his heart had simply stopped. He died only six months after massive celebrations had taken place for his 75th birthday in April that year after a reign of 38 years. A solemn yet grand funeral ceremony took place and in the years following his death monuments and statues to his honour were approved by his successor Tsar Nicholas II.

    Russia was left with a young Tsar: Nicholas II was only 25 years old at the time of his coronation int the Dormition Cathedral in the Kremlin in Moscow and faced the monumental task of leading his country through a transitional phase. Russia’s experiment with parliamentary democracy was still in its infancy and had a long way to go, and could go either way as Nicholas had to choose to continue with it or return to autocracy. Besides that, Russia’s nascent industrial revolution was leading to urbanization as the cities working class grew, producing entirely new societal tensions: long working days, bad working conditions, low pay, bad housing, job insecurity and a ban on trade unions formed a toxic cocktail that radical socialists could utilize to foment proletarian revolution. And yet, this industrialization had to be encouraged to decrease the gap between the underdeveloped Russian Empire and Western Europe.

    The proponents of the new semi-constitutional, semi-parliamentary system could rest assured as the young Tsar intended to preserve the system his grandfather had created and rule his country through consultation of and cooperation with the Duma for as far as possible. He witnessed how the Westminster system worked during his two years at Oxford, during which he’d regularly visited his British relatives and attended debates in the House of Commons and the House of Lords on occasion. He’d come to appreciate it and commented that “elections of a parliament concentrate the intellects of the best men in their respective fields – be they lawyers, bankers professors, scientists or something else – into one body of knowledge, experience and differing opinions. Wouldn’t I be a fool if I didn’t listen to what they have to say to make a well-informed decision?”

    He also, however, said Russia needed a firm hand and that Russia wasn’t ready yet for true parliamentary rule. Given how chaotic the Duma could be, he probably wasn’t completely wrong: lack of party discipline caused parties and even coalitions to split, members of parliament voted for their own interests or those who’d sponsored their candidacy, there was corruption with MPs voting in favour of rich and powerful patrons, heated debates often failed to produce any satisfactory compromise, and sometimes crippling stalling tactics like filibustering paralyzed decision making.

    Nicholas made some changes to streamline parliamentary procedure to remedy these issues: filibustering was made impossible because the speaking time of every representative was limited to twenty minutes per session; Duma members were explicitly forbidden from accepting favours, monetary or otherwise, from external parties; parties running for office were not allowed to accept grants from sponsors, instead having to rely on contributions of their members and/or government subsidies; and the chairman of the Duma got the power to command orderlies to remove people who were out of line from the Duma building. When it became clear those opposed to these new rules were going to filibuster to stop it, the Tsar simply dissolved the Duma and passed them as imperial decrees.

    The young Tsar also wanted to stimulate industrial and infrastructural development, for which he initially relied on even more loans from France on top of the ones Russia had already taken on. At the end of the 1880s, Russo-German economic discrepancies grew stronger. The Russo-French political rapprochement contributed to the influx of French capital into Russia. At the end of the 1880s and the beginning of the 1890s, Russia received the aforementioned large number of major loans from France. The deterioration of Russo-German relations, the resurrection of the Triple Alliance in 1891, Germany’s failure to renew the reinsurance treaty, and the rumours that Great Britain would join the alliance laid the grounds for the conclusion of a political agreement between Russia and France. a military agreement was formed, but France also invested into Russia’s economic development.

    Tsar Nicholas II wanted to attract more foreign capital and looked at the United States in particular, a country with which Russia enjoyed amicable relations. Russian ambassador Karl von Struve had returned home in 1892, subsequently becoming the Russian envoy to the Netherlands (his final diplomatic posting). Russia in 1893 had no diplomatic representative in the US, which Nicholas addressed by pulling Count Arthur Paul Nicholas Cassini from his posting in Beijing and reassigning him to Washington DC.

    Cassini had explicit instructions to secure American investments and curry favour with the administration of President Grover Cleveland to secure their facilitation. He met with US Secretary of State Gresham and then President Cleveland himself, who proved sympathetic and arranged a meeting between the Russian ambassador and a group of business and banking magnates that included Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. They were introduced to elaborate plans for joint ventures to develop infrastructure and mine Russia’s resources.

    A second meeting to convince them in New York was attended by the Tsar’s brother Grand Duke Michael, attracting the attention of the Big Apple’s high society who were invited to a ball and banquet. The presence of a European royal made the desired investors generous to say the least, such as J.P Morgan: he invested $5 million of his personal fortune (equivalent to $75 million in 2019) into the Trans-Siberian Railway to help accelerate its construction. This was absolutely necessary as the system of river transport was not nearly to deal with Siberia’s transportation problems. Morgan also augmented his effort by utilizing his railway and steel assets, for which he gained a profitable amount of shares in the Russian Imperial Railways. With his backing, Russia launched an ambitious program to increase its railway network from roughly 30.000 to 64.000 kilometres between 1893 and 1905. Other deals procured American investments into coal mining, steel industry and the mining of various ferrous and non-ferrous metals that Russia was endowed with. During the 1890s, Russia’s economic growth rate regularly achieved double digits.

    The highlight of the year in 1894 was the Tsar’s wedding. Despite the best efforts of his grandfather and his mother to find a suitable wife, Nicholas II ascended the throne as an unmarried man. One candidate they’d considered was Princess Hélène of Orléans, but she’d already rejected several suitors and also rejected the Russian Tsar as there were no romantic feelings. He ultimately married Princess Marija of Montenegro, the 25 year-old daughter of Prince Nicholas I of Montenegro (he earned the sobriquet “father-in-law of Europe” as six of his daughters were married, each to princes and kings). The wedding was attended by crowned heads and royals from across Europe, and the US ambassador. In Russia she became known as Empress Consort Maria Nikolaevna (the new Tsarina was often informally referred to by her nickname Mimi). She became the mother of the Tsar’s eight children. The first child, a glowing healthy baby boy named Alexander, was born on June 18th 1895.
     
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    Chapter III: Social Reform on the Turn of the Century, 1895-1904.
  • Also, King Nicholas had no daughter Maria. Both his "Russian" daughters- Milica and Anastasia were married by 1889.

    Yes, he did have a daughter named Maria (spelled as Marija) but she died in 1885.

    Anyway, it's time for an update!


    Chapter III: Social Reform on the Turn of the Century, 1895-1904.

    As far as his family life and the issue of succession went, Tsar Nicholas II had little to worry about. After his heir Grand Duke Alexander was born in June 1895, he sired another seven heirs between 1896 and 1908: his second son Nicholas was born in May 1896, followed by the two eldest sisters Olga and Tatiana in 1897 and 1898, three more sons named Alexei, Michael and Vladimir in 1900, 1902 and 1904 respectively, and finally one more unexpected but just as equally loved daughter named Anastasia in 1908.

    Meanwhile, Russia watched Germany with interest to see if its welfare state, the first of its kind, was successful in curbing the rise of socialism and decided to copy it when it seemed to be successful. Nicholas II decided to pursue a similar conservative state-building strategy to make ordinary Russians more loyal to the throne and not supportive of socialism. He worked closely with large industry, not only to stimulate economic growth but also to give the working class more security. He followed the advice to grant the working class a corporate status in Russia’s legal and political structures. Russia copied Bismarck’s 1883 Sickness Insurance Law, the 1884 Accident Insurance Law and the 1889 Old Age and Disability Insurance Law, uniting them in the Labour Insurance Law that was passed by the Duma in 1902. The idea was to implement welfare programs that were acceptable to conservatives and lacking socialistic aspects. The Liberal Democratic Party was supportive, the Emancipation of Labour group that became the social-democrats less so as they recognized the anti-socialist thought behind these policies.

    The rise of the Social-Democratic Party (SDP) was slowed down but not halted by the embryonic albeit expanding welfare state just prior to the turn of the century. The decision of its parliamentary fraction to support the Labour Insurance Law, however, did lead to a split within the party. Though still espousing revolutionary rhetoric, the SDP had de facto chosen a parliamentary course that was supported by a majority of its members. Supporting the Labour Insurance Law in their view was just the beginning of much greater social reforms. A minority led by Plekhanov, one of the original founders of the party, left and formed their own named Communist Party of Russia (CPR) in 1895.

    The majority remained in the SDP under the young and fairly unknown Julius Martov, who would become the face of the party as it grew and decidedly chose for a parliamentary rather than a social course to affect social change and ultimately socialism. The social-democrats grew as their voter base expanded, particularly as the departure of the radical Marxist element made the party palatable to not just the working class but the middle class as well, the group lumped together with the capitalist as the bourgeoisie by the communists. As the SDP quietly abandoned virulent communist atheism and anticlericalism, the deeply religious rural population now also became a potential voter base.

    The SDP’s choice to pursue a legal electoral course to affect change through the Duma, in which it often joined coalition with the liberals, produced successes. In 1883 a law had already been passed to subsidize elementary schools and to educate teachers to staff them, but at the dawn of the century the SDP wanted to go a step further. The reason was that the intended goal of combating illiteracy wasn’t being met: most peasant towns still didn’t have a school, and even when they did not all children attended despite free tuition. The social-democrats introduced a bill concerning compulsory education to combat the still significant issue of massive illiteracy, which hampered the country’s development. In 1903, the Compulsory Education Act was passed and it stipulated that all children between six and twelve years of age had to attend school. It still took another three to four years to build all the required schools, but by 1910 95% of all six year-olds were enrolling in an elementary school. The church helped provide teachers, because in small villages they sometimes were the only people who could read and write.

    The bill had to rely on the Tsar’s support as it encountered resistance because it encountered resistance from both industrial interests and the rural population. Children from poor families working in factories wasn’t uncommon as children were cheaper than adults and because their families needed the extra income. The Tsar was aware of the importance of an education, having witnessed how the educated populations of Britain and Germany were much more affluent and possessing greater social mobility than even the best off illiterate Russian peasant. After being implored to do so, he made an unannounced visit to a textile factory where children worked and was appalled by what he saw. As a corollary to the Compulsory Education Act, he supported the Child Labour Act that explicitly forbade minors from working in factories and restricted what other labour children were allowed to do. As to farm work, it was still allowed because it was a necessary evil in the underdeveloped countryside. Children were given two weeks’ off in May to help sowing and a six week summer break in August and early September to help in the harvest. Both acts were passed by the Duma thanks to the Tsar’s explicit support.

    Besides being supportive of these policies, the Tsar also supported them because the social-democrats had backed policies he favoured in the past. Contrary to the belief of the liberals that the railway system should also be left to the free market as the process of supply and demand would lead to the railway network Russia required, the Tsar believed in state programs to develop the railway network. The SDP supported the first Railway Act: it determined that the Ministry of Communication’s Department of Railways had to double the existing network from roughly 32.000 to 64.000 kilometres between 1895 and 1905 and, if need be, attract the necessary amount of foreign capital to do so. It also projected the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway by 1915. Plans were also made for the construction of the Ekaterinburg-Krasnovodsk Line to connect the Trans-Caspian Railway with the Trans-Siberian and thereby to the rest of Russia’s railway network. Construction on the Ekaterinburg-Krasnovodsk Line began in 1898 and was completed in 1904.

    Another move from the social-democrats that Nicholas II appreciated was they helped block legislation proposed by the communists to disown all landowners, great and small, and forcing them into collective farms (the big idea was to increase production to finance industrialization and thus create a proletariat big enough for a revolution). Besides the obvious ideological opposition of the Tsar to communism, he also had major objections to the practicality of the proposal and the effect it’d have on support for the monarchy: the nobles would surely attempt to put a more pliable Tsar on the throne, likely plunging the country into civil war; another highly likely possibility was a peasant revolt, a dangerous phenomenon Russia had experienced before.

    The SDP instead supported the Tsar’s own 1903 Agricultural Modernization Act. Aristocratic landowners were left unmolested and so were peasants owning small tracts of land. Instead voluntary collectivism was encouraged through the traditional Russian mir, supplying them with seed drills and combine harvesters imported from the United States to boost production. Individual peasants sometimes only possessing a few hectares of land could hardly all be supplied with such equipment, as that’d be inefficient. It was different with farming cooperatives based on the traditional mir, in which resources could be pooled. The participants in the cooperatives would still own their own land, but jointly operate machine stations. They’d also generally jointly purchase the supplies they needed and sell their produce at markets, cooperating to improve their bargaining position.

    The advantages of such cooperation were too great for all but a few stubborn subsistence farmers not to join a cooperative. It enabled them to compete with major landowners, who could buy modern farming equipment themselves. The entire system was facilitated by the zemstvo, a system of autonomous elected local councils that took care of education, medical relief, public welfare, food supply and road maintenance (changes were made to the zemstvo system to make these bodies more representative, rather than the aristocratic bodies they were even though the nobles constituted only a tiny fraction of the population).

    A majority in the Duma led by the SDP favoured the legalization of trade unions: organizations of workers who have come together to achieve common goals, such as protecting the integrity of their trade, improving safety standards, and attaining better wages, benefits (such as vacation, health care, and retirement), and working conditions through the increased bargaining power wielded by solidarity among workers. The delegate staff of the trade union representation in the workforce were to be made up of workplace volunteers who’d be appointed by members in democratic elections. The trade union, through an elected leadership and bargaining committee, was to bargain with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiate labour contracts with employers. The most common purpose of these associations or unions would be to “maintain or improve the conditions of their employment.” This was to include the negotiation of wages, work rules, occupational health and safety standards, complaint procedures, rules governing status of employees including promotions, just cause conditions for termination, and employment benefits. Captains of industry were not pleased, but the Tsar’s reasoning for supporting this were logical: happy workers wouldn’t be attracted to revolutionary groups and be more productive instead. Very soon Nicholas II would need the support of the working class for a difficult war.
     
    Chapter IV: The Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905.
  • It's been a while since the last update, so here goes! An RJW in which Russia doesn't wind up completely humiliated.




    Chapter IV: The Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905.

    Tensions in the Orient between Russia and Japan had slowly been mounting for years. After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan endeavoured to assimilate Western ideas, technologies and ways of warfare and transform itself into a modern and industrialized state (though not a Westernized one) becoming imperialist in its own right and seeking overseas expansion. Inoue Kaoru, the Foreign Minister, gave a speech in 1887 saying “What we must do is to transform our empire and our people, make the empire like the countries of Europe and our people like the peoples of Europe,” going on to say that the Chinese and Koreans had essentially forfeited their right to be independent by not modernizing. There was also major popular support for an ultranationalist line, including the annexation of Korea to relieve the heavy taxes imposed on the Japanese people to finance the country’s modernization. The Meiji oligarchy supported this, but didn’t feel ready yet to confront China and backed off after a coup in 1884 by a pro-Japanese reformist faction led to Chinese diplomatic protests.

    A decade later, Japan’s reluctance to confront China had evaporated and the former scored a decisive victory in the Sino-Japanese War in only eight months’ time. A peasant rebellion led by the Tonghak religious movement led to a request by the Korean government for the Qing Dynasty to send in troops to stabilize the country. The Empire of Japan responded by sending their own force to Korea to crush the Tonghak and installed a puppet government in Seoul. China objected and war ensued. Hostilities proved brief, with Japanese ground troops routing Chinese forces on the Liaodong Peninsula and nearly destroying the Chinese Beiyang Fleet in the Battle of the Yalu River. Japan and China signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which ceded the Liaodong Peninsula and the island of Taiwan to Japan.

    After the peace treaty, Russia, Germany, and France compelled Japan to withdraw from the Liaodong Peninsula. The leaders of Japan did not feel that they possessed the strength to resist the combined might of Russia, Germany and France, and so gave in to the ultimatum. At the same time, the Japanese did not abandon their attempts to force Korea into the their sphere of influence.

    Meanwhile, Russia encroached on China, particularly in Manchuria (which happened to be a region that Japan also considered an area of interest). In 1897, a Russian fleet appeared off Port Arthur and in 1898 a convention was signed in which China agreed to lease it to Russia, an agreement that could be extended by “mutual agreement.” The Russians clearly expected such an extension, for they lost no time in occupying the territory and in fortifying Port Arthur, their sole warm-water port on the Pacific coast and of great strategic value. A year later, to consolidate their position, the Russians began to build a new railway from Harbin through Mukden to Port Arthur, the South Manchurian Railroad. The development of the railway became a contributory factor to the Boxer Rebellion. The Russians also began to make inroads into Korea. By 1898 they had acquired mining and forestry concessions near the Yalu and Tumen rivers, causing the Japanese much anxiety.

    The Boxer Rebellion further cemented Russia’s influence over Manchuria. After the Sino-Japanese War, many in China feared foreign imperialism and came to resent foreign-backed Christian missionaries. In 1898, China experienced floods and draughts and the Boxers blamed these catastrophes on foreigners and Christians, prompting them to destroy foreign property and attack and kill missionaries as well as Chinese Christians. The events came to a head in June 1900 when Boxer combatants, convinced they were invulnerable to foreign weapons, converged on Beijing and laid siege to the Legation Quarters. Foolishly, Dowager Empress Cixi declared war in support of the movement only to result in China’s defeat at the hand of the Eight-Nation Alliance consisting of Britain, Russia, Japan, France, Germany, the United States, Austria-Hungary and Italy (Dutch, Belgian and Spanish forces participated outside of the framework of the alliance).

    One of the results of the crushing of the Boxer Rebellion was a permanent Russian presence in Manchuria. Russia had already sent 177.000 soldiers to Manchuria, nominally to protect its railways under construction. The troops of the Qing Empire and the participants of the Boxer Rebellion could do nothing against such a massive army and were ejected from Manchuria. After the Boxer Rebellion, 100.000 Russian soldiers were stationed in Manchuria. The Russian troops settled in and despite assurances they would vacate the area after the crisis, by 1903 the Russians had not established a timetable for withdrawal and had strengthened their position in Manchuria instead.

    Japan’s leadership was divided over the issue of going to war, but initially followed the line of statesman Ito Hirobumi that their country was too weak to challenge Russia militarily and should negotiate. In short their proposal amounted to reciprocal recognition of Russia and Japan of each other’s spheres of influence over Manchuria and Korea respectively. Russia responded by counterproposals, gradually scaling back their demands and claims vis-à-vis Korea bit by bit and making serious compromises. However, in the ensuing negotiations it became clear that Russia had no interest in solving the Manchurian and Korean issues and, instead, was buying time to build up militarily.

    This issue had an international dimension to it. While one would expect Russia’s nominal Entente partner France to be supporter, in fact it was Germany that relentlessly encouraged Russia to go to war: a recurring theme of German Emperor Wilhelm II’s letters to his cousin Nicholas was that “Holy Russia” had been “chosen” by God to save the “entire white race” from the “Yellow Peril”, and that Russia was “entitled” to annex all of Korea, Manchuria, and northern China up to Beijing. Wilhelm II hoped to establish an alliance with Russia and deal a severe blow to Britain, which hoped to curtail Russian influence and had an alliance with Tokyo to that end. St. Petersburg believed its military weakness in the Far East wouldn’t matter because they miscalculated that Germany would support them in war. Tsar Nicholas II himself said there would be no war if he “did not wish it”, which didn’t imply a rejection of aggression but rather disbelief that a nation of people he dismissed as “Yellow monkeys” would strike first, typical for the arrogant white supremacist racism of the era. The Russo-Japanese talks stalled and amounted to nothing.

    On February 8th 1904, Japan attacked the Russian Far East Fleet at Port Arthur while its declaration of war was received three hours later by the Russian government. Tsar Nicholas II was incredulous at this attack, having been assured by his advisors Japan wouldn’t fight. It did, however, provide him a great opportunity to galvanize Russian patriotism if he spun it right. He did just that by addressing the Duma with a speech laden with subtle and less subtle nationalist and religious overtones designed to create a rally around the flag effect. In his address to the Duma, publicized in newspapers and as pamphlets across the country, he accused Japan of a dastardly unprovoked attack. Russia would overcome this premeditated strike and with the righteous might God on its side the Russian people would win through.

    Meanwhile actuality caught up to the wave of popular support for the government’s jingoism. Bad news from Port Arthur reached St. Petersburg that the heaviest battleships in the east, the Tsesarevich and Retzivan, as well as the 6.800 tonne cruiser Pallada had been seriously damaged by an enemy torpedo boat destroyer during the initial attack on February 8th. Russian commander Vice Admiral sent out fleet elements to aggressively defend Port Arthur and seek out engagements. None of these engagements proved decisive and a stalemate ensued: the Russian fleet stayed bottled up in Port Arthur under the cover of its coastal guns and sea mines while Japanese Admiral Togo Heihachiro attempted to draw the Russians out and destroy a significant portion of their fleet in detail.

    After the Battle of Port Arthur in February, naval actions continued. On April 13th 1904 the Russian destroyer Strasny returning from patrol, tried to re-enter the mouth of the Port Arthur but was intercepted by Japanese destroyers. An engagement began between the opposing destroyers, and when observed by Makarov he immediately sent the cruiser Bayan to assist Strasny, while he led three battleships, four cruisers, and a group of destroyers into the Yellow Sea to seek battle with the surrounding enemy warships led by Japanese Admiral Heihachiro Togo. While rushing out of the harbour, Makarov had his minesweepers check for mines and indeed they found some Japanese sea mines waiting for them. Meanwhile, the Japanese warships withdrew with Makarov in pursuit and as he caught up to the Japanese fleet, the thick fog that blanketed the sea lifted to reveal their trap: Admiral Togo was waiting with his capital ship and five additional battleships, plus six additional first-class cruisers bringing up the rear. Makarov quickly turned his force around and fled back to the safety of Port Arthur’s harbour.

    Makarov considered that the Japanese would slowly continue to whittle away at his forces this way and planned a breakout attempt, waiting only for favourable weather. On April 19th his fleet rushed out of Port Arthur at the crack of dawn, the Russian ships appearing as barely discernible phantoms in the mist. The Japanese ships on the other hand were backlit by the rise of the sun in the east and their easily distinguishable shapes were easy targets for Russian naval gunners.

    In what has since become known as the Second Battle of Port Arthur Makarov and his fleet escaped. Out of a fleet of seven battleships, one armoured cruiser, five protected cruisers, two minelayers, twelve torpedo boats and five gunboats the better part escaped: only protected cruiser Pallada, one torpedo boat and three gunboats (sunk by enemy fire) as well as the heavily damaged battleship Retzivan (scuttled to prevent her from falling into enemy hands) were lost. Out of six battleships, nine armoured cruisers, fifteen destroyers and twenty torpedo boats, the Japanese lost battleship Mikasa, protected cruiser Yoshino, two destroyers and four torpedo boats.

    Makarov steamed around Korea and through the Tsushima Strait, arriving at Vladivostok on April 22nd. There his fleet united with ships belonging to the present ships of the Siberian Military Flotilla: four protected cruisers and ten torpedo boats. Russian naval strength in the Far East still totalled six battleships, one armoured cruiser, eight protected cruisers, twenty-one torpedo boats and two gunboats. The forces of Admiral Togo, injured during the sinking of the Mikasa, numbered five battleships, eight armoured/protected cruisers, thirteen destroyers and sixteen torpedo boats. The Imperial Japanese Navy wasn’t out for the count as a rough numerical parity remained, but the battle had been a clear tactical victory for the Russians.

    Meanwhile, the war unfolded on land too. The Imperial Japanese Army laid siege to Port Arthur, but along with the fleet much of the garrison had evacuated too and the remaining defenders commanded by Major General Anatoly Stessel surrendered two weeks later on May 3rd. He believed the point of defending Port Arthur was to protect the fleet, rendering further resistance and loss of life pointless, particularly as the Russian defenders suffered disproportionate casualties during every Japanese attack. Elsewhere in Manchuria, the Russians fought delaying actions and suffered defeats as the Japanese stormed their positions on the Yalu River and Nanshan in May.

    During the Battle of Liaoyang in August 1904, fourteen divisions totalling 158.000 men supported by 609 artillery pieces under General Aleksey Kuropatkin faced eight divisions with 120.000 men and 170 artillery pieces. Fought between August 25th and September 5th, and intelligence proved decisive: whereas Kuropatkin erroneously believed the enemy outnumbered him, Field Marshal Oyama Iwao precisely knew Russian strength and deployments thanks to cooperation with the local Chinese population. Kuropatkin ordered a withdrawal to the outermost defensive line and then to the second defensive line, which he also abandoned quickly and after an unsuccessful counterattack he ultimately withdrew to Mukden.

    Kuropatkin’s claim of victory by avoiding encirclement and inflicting great casualties (Japanese casualties were indeed greater than Russian ones) were met with ridicule. He was fired and his subordinate General Nikolai Zarubaev, who’d proven competent, replaced him. Zarubaev’s plan was to block the Japanese advance at the Shaho River south of Mukden by turning the Japanese right flank and counterattacking towards Liaoyang with Stackelberg’s Eastern Detachment. Simultaneously, Bilderling’s Western Division was to move south and to cut off Kuroki's 1st Army. The terrain was flat all the way to Liaoyang for the Russian right flank and centre, and hilly for the left flank. In the Second Battle of Liaoyang in October 1904, 210.000 Russians faced 170.000 Japanese: the former suffered 4.000 killed in action, 16.000 wounded in action and 600 missing or taken prisoner; the latter suffered 5.100 killed inaction and 31.000 wounded and 4.500 missing or taken prisoner. The battle was strategically inconclusive, although the Russians did retake Liaoyang. This was the last battle in 1904.

    Hostilities picked up again in January 1905, with the Battle of Sandepu southwest of Mukden proving inconclusive, failing to improve the situation of Russia’s flanks and setting the stage for the Third Battle of Liaoyang. The Second Battle of Liaoyang four months prior had produced a salient, which Oyama intended to cut off with his offensive that took place between February 20th and March 12th. Again forces on both sides had increased, though with Russia still having numerical superiority: Russian forces totalling 340.000 men with 1.200 artillery guns and 100 machine guns faced 270.000 Japanese with 1.000 guns and 200 machine guns. The salient containing the Third Manchurian Army was temporarily cut off and surrounded. With clever tactics, audacity, a willingness to suffer casualties and feeding the enemy false intelligence by correctly assuming the Chinese population favoured Japan, Zarubaev was able to break the encirclement of the Third Manchurian Army.

    The subsequent Russian spring counteroffensive in May 1905, known today as the Battle of Anshan, compelled Oyama to withdraw to the Liaodong Peninsula as the arrival of seven fresh divisions increased Russian numbers to ~ 450.000 men while he now had 160.000 men. However, he used the geography of the peninsula to create a defence in depth with multiple elaborate trench systems reinforced with land mines, barbed wire, machine guns, mortars, artillery, small forts made from dirt walls and sandbags, casemates and pillboxes. A bloody stalemate ensued in which entrenched defenders proved they could inflict far greater casualties on a numerically superior attacker, a modern Thermopylae. On both sides, the cry for peace became increasingly louder.
     
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    Chapter V: Peace in the Orient & Steps to War, 1905-1914.
  • And the story continues...

    Chapter V: Peace in the Orient & Steps to War, 1905-1914.

    By May 1905, fourteen months into the war, public support for the war was drying up in Russia and Japan alike. Neither side was any closer to a decisive victory than the other. Both were moving more troops to the front to replace those coming back home in body bags to fight what increasingly looked like a long, protracted, fruitless endeavour. Popular protests erupted in Japan and Russia alike with the public demanding a swift end to the costly war: casualties were terrible for negligible gains on the Manchurian front and neither side was prepared for these fatality rates; the economies of both countries were heavily burdened by the demands of a wartime economy; the haemorrhaging of money and scarcity of food and fuel drove up prices, directly affecting the civilian population. In both countries the wave of nationalistic popular support had waned and increasingly got replaced with discontent and sometimes outright hostility towards the government.

    On Sunday June 18th 1905, strikes erupted at the Putilov Ironworks in St. Petersburg against working conditions and these devolved into protests concerning fairer wages, a reduction of the working week from 48 to 40 hours, an end to the war and universal suffrage. The crowd was joined by middle class shop owners, office clerks, teachers, policemen and so on and they intended to present the Tsar with a petition. On Nevsky Prospekt a unit of elite Preobrazhensky’s Guards stood in between the Winter Palace and the crowd of peaceful protestors. A stand-off ensued.

    Nicholas had already been told the crowd was peaceful, carrying religious icons and singing patriotic hymns and songs (“God Save the Tsar” in particular). Therefore he’d already given the order not to fire unless he, and he alone, personally ordered otherwise. He told high-ranking members of the court critical of this decision “I’d rather be known as Nicholas the Weak than Nicholas the Bloody.” While pondering what to do he was mindful that mounting tensions between the troops and the protesting crowd could still ignite if an incident occurred. One wrong move, and a nervous soldier might decide to pull the trigger and cause a bloodbath that everyone would blame the Tsar for.

    He decided to invite a small delegation of union leaders and representatives from the middle class, including two city councilmen, headed by Father Georgy Gapon. Gapon was a Russian Orthodox priest who took an interest in the working and lower classes and had proven himself a charismatic speaker and capable organizer. The priest handed the Tsar the petition and the delegation explained the hardships the lower classes were suffering because of the war. Nicholas responded that the demands they laid out were understandable and sensible, but tactically replied that legislative power was primarily the prerogative of the Duma. He nonetheless promised he would do what he could to alleviate the suffering and Gapon returned with this message, after which the crowd of protestors dissolved. The story was spread through newspapers across the country and it helped improve the popularity of the monarchy, which had begun suffering the longer a clearcut victory did not manifest.

    Tentative, informal peace negotiations began between Russia and Japan, which gained a more official character and sped up after US President Theodore Roosevelt offered to mediate. Japan readily agreed to the talks because its economy was on the verge of collapse. The end result was the Treaty of Portland, signed at the venue selected by Roosevelt: with the negotiations commencing in August, he chose the town of Portland in the state of Maine to avoid the sweltering Washington summer.

    Though Roosevelt was more sympathetic to the Russians, he remained neutral and in the end the reality of the military situation determined the peace treaty: though both sides were war weary, Russia now had a more favourable military position as it had further built up its troop strength in Manchuria to half a million should negotiations fail and hostilities continue. The Treaty of Portland determined that Manchuria would be in the Russian and Korea in the Japanese sphere of influence respectively and also that Tokyo would pay twenty million roubles in war indemnities for its first strike against Port Arthur. Other than the reparations, Russia had gained nothing that Japan hadn’t already offered in negotiations concerning spheres of influence two years prior. Decades later a historian declared: “The Russo-Japanese War was pointless and caused by Russian arrogance. They got exactly what they would’ve gotten if they’d just engaged in diplomacy, sparing more than 100.000 lives.”

    The war, however, didn’t prove to be completely useless to Russia as it revealed the flaws in its armed forces as well as detecting a clear difference in performance between the two branches (the army and the navy). The Pacific Fleet had performed competently under Makarov by breaking out of Port Arthur and winning a clear tactical victory over the Imperial Japanese Navy. In Vladivostok, Makarov’s force had remained as a “fleet in being” for the duration of the war, tying down considerable Japanese naval assets. Some would’ve preferred a more aggressive approach (i.e. a decisive battle) but the final evaluation declared that the fleet had done its job properly.

    The Imperial Russian Army’s performance was considered mediocre. Many of the innovations brought by the Industrial Revolution, such as rapid-firing artillery and machine guns, as well as more accurate rifles, were first tested on a mass scale then. Military operations showed that modern warfare had undergone a considerable change since the Franco-Prussian War over thirty years prior. Most army commanders had previously envisioned using modern weapon systems to dominate the battlefield on an operational and tactical level but, as events played out, the technological advances forever altered the conditions of war too: today it’s considered the first “total war”. The Tsar, an amateur engineer himself, ordered a greater emphasis on artillery and machine guns.

    Another problem, however, was incompetence. Many high-ranking officers owed their positions thanks to their titles and/or their aristocratic descent rather than merit and competence, and General Aleksey Kuropatkin became the symbol for this. He initially got the death penalty for his series of failures, but Tsar Nicholas II granted him clemency and his sentence was commuted to time served and a dishonourable discharge. This was merely the most publicized change in a wave of discharges, resignations and promotions. Aristocratic scions solely seeking prestige were reassigned to make room for professional officers who’d performed admirably in combat. The most promising ones were sent to study abroad at Berlin’s Prussian Staff College, the École Militaire in Paris, and West Point in the United States.

    Meanwhile, Austria-Hungary took advantage of Russia’s moment of weakness in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War, resulting in the Bosnian Crisis. The 1878 Treaty of Berlin had granted Austria-Hungary the right to occupy Bosnia-Herzegovina, though it formally remained under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire. Its final status wasn’t settled until the 1881 Three Emperors’ League treaty between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia in which Russia agreed to Austria-Hungary’s annexation. By 1897 Russia under Tsar Nicholas II changed its position again, but Vienna didn’t intend to give up on this. After a 1903 coup put a new pro-Russian dynasty in power in Belgrade, relations between Austria-Hungary and Serbia gradually deteriorated, the former could do little as long as the latter was still under Russian protection.

    An opportunity to annex Bosnia-Herzegovina presented itself when Russia emerged weakened from the Russo-Japanese War. By 1907, Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister Alois Aehrental began formulating a plan to solidify Austria-Hungary’s position towards Serbia through annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. His opportunity came in the form of a letter from Russian Foreign Minister Alexander Izvolsky – proposing Austrian annexation of the provinces as part of a deal to secure better access to the Turkish Straits for Russian naval vessels – and a subsequent meeting at Buchlau castle in Moravia, Austria-Hungary. Izvolsky made too grievous errors: firstly, he misjudged that Britain would support Russia in its demands for opening the Turkish Straits; secondly, he grossly underestimated how much this would fan the flames of Russian nationalism. He presented himself as being duped by Aehrental, but was most likely lying to save face and to keep his position (which didn’t work as the Tsar replaced him with Sergey Sazonov).

    On October 6th, the day after Bulgaria declared its independence from the Ottoman Empire, Emperor Franz Joseph announced to the people of this Ottoman territory (that had been occupied by Austria for thirty years) his determination to recognize and grant them an autonomous and constitutional regime, under his authority as their annexing sovereign. Vienna presented this to the world as a fait accompli.

    The Tsar was infuriated, but was aware he shouldn’t go to war again so soon: the war against Japan had caused serious societal tensions that were still lingering and that could destabilize Russia if they were ignited again, something he might not be able to stop again. Secondly, the Imperial Russian Army was in the midst of reforms to incorporate the lessons learned from the Russo-Japanese War. He nonetheless ordered a partial mobilization to which Germany and Austria-Hungary responded by issuing mobilization orders of their own, which induced a war scare in Europe.

    The threat of a general European war erupting in the Balkans alarmed Great Britain and. This was not so much because it could draw them in, as it could opt for neutrality: other than Japan Britain had no great power allies. However, the British estimated that it was likely that the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy) would defeat the Dual Entente (Russia and France), which they considered detrimental to their continental interests. Britain offered to mediate and Charles, 9th Duke of Marlborough, offered the Palace of Blenheim to Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey as a suitable venue for him to host the negotiations. Besides Grey the talks were also attended by the respective foreign ministers of Russia, France, Austria-Hungary, Germany and Serbia: Sergey Sazonov, Stéphen Pichon, Alois Aehrental, Wilhelm Freiherr von Schön and Milovan Milovanović. The conference led to the Blenheim Agreement: this compromise detailed that Austria-Hungary would keep Bosnia-Herzegovina, but would recognise Serbia’s annexation of the Sanjak of Novi Pazar in return (the Sublime Porte wasn’t even asked and was forced to accept this fait accompli).

    Tensions in the Balkans remained high and ultimately erupted in 1912. The Italo-Turkish War had revealed just how weak the Ottoman Empire was: Italy won and annexed Libya as well as the Dodecanese Islands. Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro formed the Balkan League. After Montenegro declared war on October 8th 1912, the others followed. Montenegro launched its main thrust toward Shkodra; the Serbs moved on Skopje and Monastir before turning to Albania and reaching the Adriatic; Bulgaria attacked eastern Thrace, threatening Constantinople; and Greece’s main attack was into Thessaly. With the war over in May 1913, the second Balkans War erupted over the spoils of war: Bulgaria, dissatisfied with not being allowed to keep Macedonia, attacked its former allies. Romania and the Ottoman Empire intervened, resulting in Bulgaria’s defeat.

    The Second Balkans War was a catastrophic blow to Russia’s Balkan policies, which had focused on warm water ports for centuries. It marred the tercentenary of Romanov rule. The Balkans League, established as an alliance against Austria-Hungary, was now gone. Secondly, Russia had taken a pro-Serbian position in Serbia’s disagreements with Bulgaria over land partitioning, creating a permanent break-up between the two countries that caused Bulgaria to gravitate towards the Central Powers. This left Russia with no choice but to unconditionally support Serbia in order to avoid losing their only remaining ally in this crucial region. The Balkans remained rife with tensions and this would lead to the coming war.
     
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    Chapter VI: The Great War Begins, 1914.
  • The war begins, but with some twists.


    Chapter VI: The Great War Begins, 1914.

    The European powder keg was about to explode and the fuse would be lit in the Balkans. During a visit to Skopje on June 27th 1914, Prince Regent Alexander was assassinated. The population of Macedonia had a pro-Bulgarian stance, and these sentiments still lingered among the Slav majority despite the harsh behaviour of Bulgarian troops during the occupation in the Balkan Wars. King Peter’s 21 year-old nephew Prince Paul became the new Prince Regent and heir to the throne as the king’s brother and Paul’s father, Prince Arsen, declined. Paul was infuriated by the assassination of his cousin and on his orders the Royal Serbian Army occupied Macedonia, implemented martial law and began carrying out measures tantamount to ethnic cleansing.

    Tsar Ferdinand I of Bulgaria was outraged by Serbia’s actions and carried out a partial mobilization of its military, threatening to intervene if the Serbians didn’t cease and desist and carrying out threatening manoeuvres within spitting distance of the border. Belgrade wasn’t impressed as they were certain of Russian backing, but hadn’t counted on Austria-Hungary backing up Sofia. Vienna in turn had carte blanche from its ally Germany because German Emperor Wilhelm II misjudged that “another little Balkan scuffle” couldn’t escalate into a European conflict. More precisely, he didn’t think his Russian cousin Nicholas would go to war to rescue Serbia.

    Much of July saw diplomatic manoeuvring between Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, France and Britain. Serbia rejected demands for international supervision over Macedonia and an international commission to decide its fate, taking into consideration the preferences of the inhabitants. Another suggestion was a plebiscite. The Serbs realized such a commission might well decide in Bulgaria’s favour, same for a plebiscite. They’d rather fight over it, confident the other former members of the Balkans League would join them again to confine Bulgarian aggression. Belgrade had also received assurances from St. Petersburg that Austria-Hungary was highly unlikely to intervene knowing that this would trigger a Russian response. What happened next showed the danger of making assumptions.

    After the failure of negotiations, Bulgaria completely broke off diplomatic relations with Serbia and declared war on July 28th, invading Macedonia with 150.000 men. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia two days later and began shelling Belgrade, prompting a total mobilization order to be issued by the Russian Tsar. Germany issued an ultimatum demanding Russia to “cease all war measures against Germany and Austria-Hungary” within twelve hours. There was no response and therefore Germany declared war on Russia and not long thereafter on France too. Britain declared war on Germany once the Germans invaded Belgium as part of the Schlieffen Plan, living up to its commitment to the 1839 Treaty of London that required it to defend Belgian neutrality. By early August, Europe was at war.

    On the Eastern Front, the war began in earnest with the Russian invasion of East Prussia. Only ten divisions of the German Eighth Army defended East Prussia. The Battle of Stallupönen on August 17th was indecisive, but a hasty German counterattack was defeated in the Battle of Gumbinnen three days later. Regardless of whatever preparations had been made, however, it still remained that the Germans could not let the historical Prussian capital Königsberg fall into Russian hands. The moral, symbolic and military value (since it was a major military hub) of the city meant to lose it was to invite disaster on the home front, in addition to the strategic ramifications. Also, it was very likely that the Russians would use the upper hand thus gained to use their superior forces to overwhelm the static German defences in Masuria. In short, the Germans had to fight back immediately and force the Russians from East Prussia.

    The Russian supply situation was abysmal. Short of food and artillery ammunition and incorrectly believing the Germans were in full retreat, Rennenkampf did not pursue, refitted for a couple days, and lost contact. Instead of sticking to the plan and advancing south-westerly to link up with the Second Army under the command of Samsonov, he instead slowly moved his First Army westward. Under pressure to advance and cut off the supposed German retreat, Samsonov's Second Army outdistanced its supplies, resulting in hungry demoralized troops.

    The Eighth Army’s commander Prittwitz panicked when the Russian onslaught entered East Prussia and believed his army would be crushed between the pincers of the two Russian armies (as was the Russian plan). He announced his intention of abandoning East Prussia and move behind the Vistula. Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of the German General Staff from 1906 to 1914 replaced Prittwitz with Paul von Hindenburg (brought out of retirement) on August 22nd. Hindenburg, along with his chief of staff, Ludendorff would approach the crisis in East Prussia very differently though they ultimately would end up being defeated all the same.

    The climax would take place at Tannenberg. In contrast to Prittwitz, Hindenburg and Ludendorff decided to take the offensive and encircle Samsonov. Following the plans of Colonel Max Hoffmann, Prittwitz’s deputy chief of operations, they chose to wheel eight of their divisions counter-clockwise to attack Samsonov. They took advantage of interior lines and well-practiced ability to move quickly via the rail roads, as opposed to Russia where 70% of the railroads were still single-tracked (based on that, Russia agreed to have 27 divisions on the front two weeks into the hostilities, 52 within three weeks and 90 divisions within twelve weeks). Despite a total Russian strength of 650.000 vis-à-vis 135.000 German troops, it seemed likely that the Russian Second Army would be crushed, producing a brilliant German victory at Tannenberg.

    Fortunately, the Northwest Front’s overall commander General Aleksey Brusilov was an excellent leader. Brusilov recognized that Rennenkampf’s First Army was advancing in the wrong direction and painfully slow at that, plundering East Prussia along the way, and he knew why: Rennenkampf and Samsonov had a personal vendetta dating back to the Russo-Japanese War, which meant the former was satisfied to see the latter go down in flames. Brusilov ordered the First Army to march south as fast as his soldiers’ legs could carry them tout suite. Rennenkampf didn’t want to follow this order, but Brusilov threatened to strip him of his command and have him court-martialled if he failed to comply.

    The First Army came to the rescue of the Second Army in time, making the end result of the Battle of Tannenberg (26-30 August) a decisive Russian victory. With 230.000 Russian troops facing 150.000 this wasn’t completely surprising. In the end 10.000 German soldiers were killed in action, 15.000 were injured and another 37.000 were taken prisoner or went missing. Russian losses consisted of 12.000 killed in action, 11.000 injured and a mere 7.000 were taken prisoner. In the aftermath, Hindenburg was forced to abandon East Prussia and withdraw behind the Vistula River.

    The loss of East Prussia caused consternation and panic in the circles of court, government and the OHL (Obere Heeresleitung, Supreme Army Command). Fearing the Russians might cross the Vistula and advance further west to the Oder, five corps were transferred from the Western Front to the Eastern Front, creating the German Ninth Army. The reinforcements were unnecessary as Hindenburg managed to block Russian attempts to cross the Vistula before these forces had even arrived.

    It, however, affected the Western Front negatively: the German advance through Belgium, the Retreat from Mons and the Battle of the Frontiers culminated in the Battle of the Marne, which reached the outskirts of Paris. Field Marshal Sir John French, commander of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), began to plan for a full British retreat to port cities on the English Channel for an immediate evacuation. The military governor of Paris, Gallieni, wanted the Franco-British units to counter-attack the Germans along the Marne River and halt the German advance. Allied reserves would restore the ranks and attack the German flanks. On September 5th, the counter-offensive by six French armies and the BEF began. By September 9th, the success of the Franco-British counteroffensive left the German First and Second Armies at risk of encirclement, and they were ordered to retreat to the Aisne River. The retreating armies were pursued by the French and British, although the pace of the Allied advance was slow: 12 mi (19 km) in one day. The German armies ceased their retreat after 40 mi (65 km) on a line north of the Aisne River, where they dug in on the heights and fought the indecisive First Battle of the Aisne.

    Following this German retirement, the opposing forces made reciprocal outflanking manoeuvres, known as the Race for the Sea and quickly extended their trench systems from the Swiss border to the North Sea. The territory occupied by Germany held 64% of French pig iron production, 24% of its steel manufacturing and 40% of the coal industry – dealing a serious blow to French industry. On the Entente side, the final lines were occupied with the armies of each nation defending a part of the front. From the coast in the north, the primary forces were from Belgium, the British Empire and then France. Following the Battle of the Yser in October, the Belgian army controlled a 35 km (22 mi) length of West Flanders along the coast, known as the Yser Front, along the Yser River and the Yperlee canal, from Nieuwpoort to Boesinghe. Meanwhile, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) occupied a position on the flank, having occupied a more central position.

    From October 19th until November 22nd, the German forces made their final breakthrough attempt of 1914 during the Battle of Ypres. The Entente turned the tide by repelling the German attack and, with numbers on their side, carried out a counteroffensive from Ypres to Nieuwpoort. French forces commanded by Foch, the BEF under Sir John French and the 80.000 Belgian troops that had managed to withdraw behind the Yser successfully pushed the Germans back to the line Roeselare-Thourout-Gistel just south of Ostend.

    Neither side had moved forces to Flanders fast enough to obtain a decisive victory and both were exhausted, short of ammunition and suffering from collapses in morale, with some infantry units refusing orders. The autumn battles in Flanders had quickly become static, attrition operations, unlike the battles of manoeuvre in the summer. The Entente, however, was left in a good position for an offensive to take Ostend in the spring of the next year. The position of the harbour of Ostend on the North Sea made it strategically significant, which the Germans recognized too as they used it as a U-boat base.

    Meanwhile, Russian successes on the Eastern Front kept mounting as Austria-Hungary received a serious beating. 1.2 million Russian troops faced 950.000 Austro-Hungarian troops. Knowing the Russians were committed to attack Germany first to help their French ally, Austro-Hungarian commander Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf planned an early advance into southern Poland to cut off the massing Russian armies there. The end result would be a massive defeat.

    The plan of Russian commander-in-chief Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich entailed the Southwest Front – composed of the Third, Fourth, Fifth and Eighth Armies and under the overall command of Nikolai Ivanov - to counter an anticipated Austro-Hungarian offensive thrusting eastward from Lemberg. The Third and Eighth Armies would mount an offensive into eastern Galicia. The Russians could bring 260 trains a day to their front, compared to the Austro-Hungarian’s 152. Needless to say, the Battle of Galicia was a crushing Russian victory: the Russians lost 225.000 men, 40.000 of those as prisoners of war; the Austro-Hungarians suffered 100.000 fatalities, 220.000 wounded and 130.000 men captured. The Russians then advanced to the Carpathian Mountains, where they could clash with Austro-Hungarian forces throughout the winter of 1914-’15. A besieged speck of Austro-Hungarian territory, the fort of Przemyśl, would hold out for another 133 days until its garrison surrendered on March 22nd 1915.

    Austria-Hungary had significantly more success on the Balkans Front. Serbian strength amounted to 420.000 men. They, however, not only faced 462.000 troops from two Austro-Hungarian armies (the Fifth and Sixth) to the north, but a total of 600.000 to the south now that Bulgaria had completed its mobilization. Given that Serbia was at a 5:2 numerical disadvantage, it’s no surprise that Belgrade fell in November after Austro-Hungarian victories at Cer, Drina and Kolubara. At the same time, Bulgaria was victorious at Monastir and Skopje and then swung north and launched an offensive toward Pristina, cutting off a planned Serbian retreat into Albania. Serbia was forced to surrender, but it wasn’t over yet: remnants of the Royal Serbian Army would fight a guerrilla war against enemy occupation until final victory was achieved by the Entente.
     
    Chapter VII: Victory, 1915-1916.
  • Update time!

    Chapter VII: Victory, 1915-1916.

    Pre-war military tactics that emphasised open warfare and the individual rifleman proved obsolete when confronted with conditions prevailing in 1914. Technological advances allowed the creation of strong defensive systems largely impervious to massed infantry advances, such as barbed wire, machine guns and above all far more powerful artillery, which dominated the battlefield and made crossing open ground extremely difficult. Both sides struggled to develop tactics for breaching entrenched positions without suffering heavy casualties. In time, however, technology began to produce new offensive weapons, such as gas warfare.

    In April 1915, the Entente launched the First Battle of Ostend to capture the city’s harbour, denying it to the Germans as a U-boat base. They also hoped to use Ostend as a destroyer base to hunt German U-boats operating in the North Sea and as a supply port for the British Expeditionary Force. Ferdinand Foch and Sir John French planned a diversionary attack near Nieuwpoort and the main attack near Roeselare, hoping to break through there and outflank the Germans (Belgian forces fought in this offensive as well). Initially it appeared that this approach would work, but the Germans unleashed an artillery bombardment with chlorine gas and stymied the Entente advance. A stalemate was the end result.

    The Battle of Ostend would prove strategically inconclusive, but was a PR success for Germany. Before the battle stalled it reached the outskirts of Ostend, heavily damaging the city with Entente artillery bombardments that prompted much of the civilian populace to flee. This played into the hands of Germany’s “Flemish policy” designed to dissolve Belgium into separate Flemish and Walloon components. The Germans were now able to counter “the Rape of Belgium” with a feat of whataboutism by referring to the “Devastation of Ostend” by British artillery. The Flemish Republic formally proclaimed its independence in June 1915 in Brussels with German backing. The Entente countered by pointing out Germany’s first use of gas in violation of the Hague Convention.

    In the meantime the war expanded in the Southern theatres. In the secret 1915 Treaty of London, Italy was promised Trentino, South Tyrol and the Austrian Littoral (the latter consisting of Istria, Gorizia and Gradisca, and the Imperial Free City of Trieste). Italy declared war in May 1915. Italian Field Marshal Luigi Cadorna, a staunch proponent of the frontal assault, initially planned breaking onto the Slovenian plateau, taking Ljubljana and threatening Vienna. The area between the northernmost part of the Adriatic Sea and the sources of the Isonzo River thus became the scene of multiple successive battles. As a result, the Austro-Hungarians were forced to move some of their forces from the Eastern Front and a war in the mountains around the Isonzo River began. The battles were often inconclusive or resulted in limited Italian advances, often overturned by Austro-Hungarian counteroffensives. The Italians had little success, but they tied down forces Austria-Hungary could ill afford to miss.

    Great Britain and France hoped to assist Serbia and put pressure on Austria-Hungary with a new front in the Balkans. They first tried to recruit the Ottoman Empire in the spring of 1915, but the Sublime Porte was hardly sympathetic to Russia and would rather join Germany. Given Russia’s successes in East Prussia and Galicia, however, that increasingly appeared to be a recipe for disaster. During the autumn of 1914, Sultan Mehmed V had already decided that a policy of strict neutrality was probably for the best (despite the insult of the confiscation of two battleships under construction originally intended for the Ottoman Navy by the British).

    Greece was approached simultaneously by the Entente, but in this case Britain and France followed a much more aggressive approach. In May 1915, a Franco-British force landed at Salonica in Greece to offer assistance and to pressure its government to declare war against the Central Powers. However, the pro-German King Constantine I dismissed the pro-Allied government of Eleftherios Venizelos before the Allied expeditionary force arrived. The friction between the King of Greece and the Allies continued to accumulate with the National Schism, which effectively divided Greece between regions still loyal to the king and the new provisional government of Venizelos in Salonica. French and British forced in Greece swelled and they backed Venizelos. After intense negotiations and an armed confrontation in Athens between Allied and royalist forces, the King of Greece resigned and his second son Alexander took his place. Greece formally joined the war on the side of the Entente in July 1915 to take Western Thrace from Bulgaria.

    The summer and autumn of 1915 saw a coordinated Entente effort on all fronts, as agreed to by France, Russia, Britain and Italy. On the Western Front, the Second Battle of Ostend erupted, which became a meatgrinder as both sides recognized its significance and sent in more soldiers. Between September 1915 and February 1916, the Entente suffered nearly 600.000 casualties and the Germans over 400.000. The battle resulted in the Entente moving the frontline by only four kilometres and the obliteration of every building in the city that had been left standing after the previous battle.

    Little happened on the Eastern Front other than Russia repulsing Germany and Austro-Hungarian counteroffensives, but much more of crucial significance happened in the Balkans in 1915. An Anglo-French-Greek offensive successfully took Monastir. Italian forces quickly occupied Albania and launched a limited though successful offensive into Kosovo. Localized Greek offensives into Western Thrace took place as well over the course of 1915, producing moderate successes. All-in-all, the Entente had established a solid position in the Balkans by the start of autumn of 1915.

    The Ottoman Empire and Romania, both neutral thus far, finally joined the Entente in September 1915 on the promise that they’d receive Eastern Rumelia and Transylvania as a prize respectively. A joint Entente offensive by Italian, British, French, Greek and Ottoman forces was subsequently unleashed in October, overwhelming Bulgaria and forcing it to request an armistice whilst liberating Serbia as far north as Niš. Prince Regent Paul managed to cross the frontline into the liberated southern half of his country and Serbia formally re-entered the war on the Entente side.

    The southern flank of the Central Powers was now under serious threat and German Chief of the General Staff Erich von Falkenhayn, who was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, told Emperor Wilhelm II that the war could no longer be won militarily. He pointed out that the threat in the Balkans would force Austria-Hungary to shift forces from the Carpathians, which in turn would enable a Russian breakthrough there. Once they’d crossed the Carpathians, the Russians could march through the Great Hungarian Plain along the Tisza River and cut Austria-Hungary in half, causing it to collapse. However, not doing so would expose Austria-Hungary to an invasion from the south. At that point Germany would find itself fighting overwhelming Entente numbers by themselves spread across multiple fronts, culminating in total military defeat. Falkenhayn’s advice was that Germany should offer a conditional surrender and pick its fights at the negotiating table. Wilhelm II threatened to fire him, but quickly discovered that potential replacements such as Hindenburg shared these pessimistic views.

    The only success so far was the victory of the High Seas Fleet in the Battle of Dogger Bank. The tactics of the German navy consisted of trying to lure out a portion of the Royal Navy and then destroy it, knowing that they couldn’t risk a decisive battle as the Royal Navy had a 3:2 advantage in dreadnought-type battleships. The fleet sortied in November 1915 and based on faulty intelligence from Room 40 the British admiralty believed only the German battlecruisers were involved in this action, which they interpreted as a raid. The Royal Navy’s 1st and 2nd Battlecruiser Squadrons sortied and intercepted the German battlecruisers, who disengaged and thereby encouraged commanding officer Vice Admiral Beatty to pursue and destroy them.

    To his horror the 3rd German Battle Squadron emerged from the fog banks. Six British battlecruisers and escorting vessels faced seven German battleships and five battlecruisers. The British Battlecruiser Fleet’s flagship HMS Lion exploded when a 30.5 cm (12 inch) shell fired by German battleship König penetrated its armour and exploded in its aft magazine, killing Beatty and throwing the British battlecruisers into chaos. German commander Admiral Scheer managed to have his ships cross the British T, inflicting heavy damage. Only HMS Indefatigable returned and the rest of the British battlecruiser force was sunk while the Germans only suffered moderate damage to their ships, except the heavily damaged battlecruiser Seydlitz. Ironically, this success would convince the British that the size of the Imperial German Navy had to be curtailed.

    As of December 1915, Austria-Hungary still managed to hold off the Italians, Romanians and the Russians by using the natural defences provided by the Alps and the Carpathians. They, however, couldn’t prevent the Entente from advancing north and liberating Belgrade by Christmas. Their plans for spring of 1916 consisted of an advance along the Danube to take Vienna from the southeast. The Italians would simultaneously attempt to force the Ljubljana Gap agian, breaking out into the Slovenian plateau and threatening Vienna. The military situation presented Austro-Hungarian Chief of Staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf with a catch-22: he could shift forces from the Carpathians to the Balkans and the Isonzo front, but then the Russians would break through; if he didn’t send reinforcements to these fronts, the Entente would break through on the southern flank.

    Like his German counterpart Falkenhayn, Hötzendorf reluctantly informed his master Emperor Franz Joseph that the war could no longer be won. Austria-Hungary had to request an armistice and salvage what it could at the negotiating table. In the following weeks, an intense diplomatic exchange commenced between Vienna and Berlin as Franz Joseph told his German ally he would seek terms, forcing Germany to follow suit. On February 17th 1916, Germany and Austria-Hungary requested an armistice, thus ending the Great War. The first total war, the first modern industrial European conflict, was over after about eighteen months of fighting. In this one half year of war 4.5 million people had perished: 2.5 million military personnel and two million non-combatants. The last conflict with such enormous casualties were the Napoleonic Wars, the key difference being that that conflict had lasted for twelve years instead of eighteen months. War had become a far deadlier business and the victors would carve out their pound of flesh.
     
    Chapter VIII: The Peace of Paris, 1916-1917.
  • Update time again!


    Chapter VIII: The Peace of Paris, 1916-1917.

    Realizing continuing the war until total victory would be costly, the Entente powers accepted the request for an armistice from the Central Powers. They, however, rejected the condition of a status quo ante bellum peace proposed by Berlin and Vienna: the war had been too costly to just dismiss it as water under the bridge and walk away with nothing. The governments in London, Paris and St. Petersburg wanted to have something to show to their people for this hard earned victory. Negotiations would take place, involving a dozen delegations totalling hundreds of delegates that were assigned to thirty commissions and held more than one thousand sessions.

    The Palace of Versailles was more than large enough to house them all, and therefore the peace conference dealing with Germany was held there, commencing in April 1916 and lasting for five months until September. The resulting Treaty of Versailles had a rather foggy preamble concerning war guilt. This resulted from an initial French attempt to assign all the blame for the war to German aggression, to which Germany protested by pointing out that it had acted in defence of its Austro-Hungarian ally. The question of war guilt remained an inconclusive one. The United States ambassador to Russia, David R. Francis, mediated on this issue on the instructions of President Woodrow Wilson, who hoped to emulate Roosevelt’s arbitration at the end of the Russo-Japanese War (this, however, was his sole meagre success).

    The Treaty of Versailles dealt with peace between Germany and the Entente. Territorial changes took place, with France finally gaining its revanche by reannexing the contested region of Alsace-Lorraine lost in 1871 after 45 years of German rule. Vengeance had been the sole motif of the French anti-German foreign policy of the past decades and now France finally received gratification. This obsession characterized by revanchism had been assuaged, though could’ve been satisfied more thoroughly.

    Russia and Britain were lenient for differing reasons. Russia considered annexing Posen, but believed keeping the Poles divided would keep their position weaker and were primarily interested in the Balkans anyway. They didn’t share France’s obsession for weakening Germany to the point it would never be able to constitute a military threat again for two reasons: firstly, they believed they could handle Germany if it ever got that far again; secondly, with Austria-Hungary gravely weakened, there were no more conflicting interests in the Balkans anymore. Britain in the meantime was primarily interested in containing Russia as it was clearly a rising power, which could again become a rival now that their common enemy had been defeated. A strong German buffer could help in that regard. The resulting peace would not be anywhere near as harsh as France had planned.

    Meanwhile, German East Africa was still holding out and was used in a trade. Nearly 400.000 Allied soldiers, sailors, merchant marine crews, builders, bureaucrats and support personnel participated in the East Africa campaign. They were assisted in the field by 600.000 African bearers. The Allies employed nearly one million people in their fruitless pursuit of Lettow-Vorbeck and his small force. Lettow-Vorbeck was cut off and could entertain no hope of victory. His strategy was to keep as many British forces diverted to his pursuit for as long as possible and to make the British expend the largest amount of resources in men, shipping and supplies against him. He continued his highly effective guerrilla war effort even after Germany had formally requested an armistice, refusing to accept an occupation as long as the cession of German East Africa wasn’t definitive.

    Germany lost most of its colonies. Cameroon was annexed by France, German Southwest Africa was annexed by South Africa, and Belgium claimed Ruanda-Urundi as part of the Belgian Congo while Japan annexed the German concession at Qingdao (China) and its Pacific possessions. In return for their formal cession of German East Africa – which was the time Lettow-Vorbeck said he’d stop fighting the British occupation – Germany could keep its one remaining colony: Togoland. The British were happy: they could now build their Cape-to-Cairo Railway.

    Togoland would become a model colony, a prestige project showcasing the superiority of German colonialism. The port of Lomé would be further expanded for exports of Togoland’s main crop, cotton, and an indigenous textiles sector would be set up by new white settlers. Lomé would become the fourth largest port in the Bight of Benin. White settlers arrived based on the government’s encouragement with subsidies, increasing the white community to about 10% of the population. The infrastructure – already developed to the highest level in Africa with 1000 kilometres of roads, bridges and three main rail lines from Lomé totalling over 500 km – would be developed further with an additional 2.000 kilometres of roads and 1.000 kilometres of railroads built by the colonial office in the twenty years after the war. Across these roads and railroads cotton but also coffee, cocoa beans, peanuts, cassava, jasmine rice, maize and millet from large white-owned estates and plantations made their way to the domestic market. Phosphates were also mined and a white-owned artificial fertilizer industry arose while large deposits of limestone allowed for the production of cement. Under Lettow-Vorbeck as its new governor, its education system was also developed into a shining example. It had elementary, secondary and vocational schools equipped with “instructor qualifications, curricula, textbooks, teaching materials, all met standards unmatched anywhere in tropical Africa.” Compulsory education ensured 99% of the population would be literate by the 1930s. The drawback for this prestige project was that the colony cost the German government more than it earned.

    Other stipulations included war reparations and military restrictions. Germany had to pay 10 billion gold marks in war reparations, most of which went to France and Belgium who seen by far the most devastation. Besides that Germany had to assist in their reconstruction with deliveries of coal, steel, pig iron, petroleum and cement fixed at 5% of Germany’s annual production until 1926.

    As to military restrictions, France initially envisioned limiting the size of Germany’s standing army, forbidding it from having heavy artillery and creating a demilitarized zone in the Rhineland where no troops, fortifications or military installations of any kind would be allowed as well as an occupation of the Saarland. Germany made it clear this would mean continuation of hostilities and threatened to walk out. Behind the scenes they agreed to British demands for a major reduction of their navy if Britain wouldn’t back France’s drastic proposals. None of the French proposals made it as Germany’s army was still a viable threat, one that could still inflict serious damage if the war continued even if the conclusion was foregone: such a victory would’ve been much more costly, possibly extending the war by as much as a year to eighteen months. There was no public support for it either. The only serious military restriction imposed on Germany was that the tonnage of its capital ships, defined as battleships and battlecruisers, couldn’t exceed 1/3 of the Royal Navy’s tonnage. Forced to choose between handing the other ships over or scuttling them, the Germans chose the latter. Either way, Britain was satisfied that the German naval threat was gone.

    After the Treaty of Versailles – subdivided into half a dozen chapters and two hundred articles – the Treaty of Trianon dealing with Austria-Hungary followed. One can only conclude Germany had been treated comparatively mildly, given that Austria-Hungary was virtually partitioned. Russia annexed Galicia and Northern Bukovina, regions predominantly inhabited by Poles and Ukrainians. Romania annexed the predominantly Romanian region of Southern Bukovina as well as Transylvania, a disputed region with a Romanian majority but also a major Hungarian minority that constituted 32% of the total population. Needless to say, this caused major resentment among the Hungarians, both inside and outside Hungary. Serbia annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia-Slavonia, Carniola, Lower Styria and Vojvodina and proclaimed the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later known as Yugoslavia). Italy got the Austrian Littoral, Dalmatia and South Tyrol.

    Other territorial changes in the Balkans included the Italian annexation of Albania and the Ottoman annexation of Eastern Rumelia, which was followed by the expulsion of the Bulgarian population (today known as the “Bulgarian Genocide”, a classification the Turkish government still categorically denies to this day, probably the only reason why Turkey sometimes still is relevant in international news). The Ottomans received this prize because they’d declared war on the Central Powers late in the war.

    What remained of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was now a landlocked rump state, having lost roughly 40% of its total territory, and it was about to break apart. The renewal of the 1867 Ausgleich that took place once every ten years turned into a renegotiation in 1917. This resulted from the fact that the Hungarian position was severely weakened due to territorial losses, whereas in the new equilibrium the Czech industry became even more important. Unsurprisingly, Czech elites lobbied for a reformed Ausgleich that’d change the country from a Dual Monarchy into a Triple Monarchy. Hungary wouldn’t accept sharing power with the Czechs, and a coalition of nationalist Hungarian parties decided to formally secede and they appointed Admiral Miklós Horthy as Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary (Budapest did still maintain an alliance with Germany). The remainder of the Habsburg realm continued as the Austro-Bohemian Empire. Franz Ferdinand, who succeeded Franz Joseph in 1916, retained the titles “Emperor of Austria” and “King of Bohemia.”

    The dissolution of Austria-Hungary created a power vacuum in the Balkans that Russia gladly stepped into, but they weren’t the only ones and family ties complicated the situation. Italy also had an interest in the Balkans and their Queen-Consort Elena, the wife of King Victor Emmanuel III, was the sister-in-law of Tsar Nicholas II (Elena was the younger sister of the Tsarina). Italy, fortunately for Russia, had no interest in the Bosporus but more so in the western Balkans and agreed to guarantee Montenegrin independence despite Serbian wishes to incorporate it into their South Slav kingdom. Serbia was pissed off, but could hardly be surprised given that the rulers of Russia and Italy both had Montenegrin wives and Serbia couldn’t go against one, never mind both. As Serbia remained largely landlocked, Italy inherited the Austro-Hungarian navy.

    In a secret agreement signed at San Remo, Russia recognized Greece as part of the Italian sphere of influence while Italy in return recognized the Russian claim on the Bosporus and agreed not to oppose a Russian move to gain it by force of arms. According to the same secret agreement, Montenegro was in the Italian sphere like Greece on the condition that it would never be annexed like Albania had been. Bulgaria would fall to Russia’s sphere of influence again once the Sublime Porte had been dealt with. Serbia and Romania were more or less expected to fall in line with Russia once this happened. Russia’s commitment to the aim of a warm water port on the Mediterranean remained unchanged and unwavering, which would cause tensions in the future.
     
    Chapter IX: Scramble for China Pt.1, 1916-1917.
  • Update time!

    Chapter IX: Scramble for China Pt.1, 1916-1917.

    Given that Germany was defeated and remained diplomatically isolated with the dissolution of its only significant ally, there was a distinct possibility the imperialist rivalries that had existed among the Entente powers until the late nineteenth century could resurface. For now, however, the Triple Entente remained in place. The German military was the strongest in Europe with the most professionally led officers corps and could still pose a threat to individual countries. French foreign policy emphasized the continued importance of the Triple Entente, pointing out that Germany could rise again if the three powers let themselves be played apart (which they believed the Germans would no doubt try). French foreign policy consisted of maintaining amicable relationships with Great Britain and Russia alike, and mediating differences between the two if necessary.

    For now no such rivalry re-emerged between Britain and Russia, assuaging French fears, because Russian imperialist ambitions focused on the Orient: China had disintegrated in the wake of the 1911 Revolution. The revolution culminated a decade of agitation, revolts, and uprisings. Its success marked the collapse of the Chinese monarchy, the end of 2.132 years of imperial rule and 276 years of the Qing dynasty, and the beginning of China's early republican era. The hope that a republic could improve the situation of China and its downtrodden people was, however, soon dashed.

    The Qing dynasty had struggled for a long time to reform the government and resist foreign aggression, but the program of reforms after 1900 was opposed by conservatives in the Qing court as too radical and by reformers as too slow. Several factions, including underground anti-Qing groups, revolutionaries in exile, reformers who wanted to save the monarchy by modernizing it, and activists across the country debated how or whether to overthrow the Manchus. The flash-point came on October 10th 1911, with the Wuchang Uprising, an armed rebellion among members of the New Army. Similar revolts then broke out spontaneously around the country, and revolutionaries in all provinces of the country renounced the Qing dynasty. On November 1st 1911, the Qing court appointed Yuan Shikai (leader of the powerful Beiyang Army) as Prime Minister, and he began negotiations with the revolutionaries. A National Assembly formally proclaimed the Republic of China on January 1st and the edict of abdication of the six-year old Emperor Puyi was promulgated on February 12th 1912.

    Yuan Shikai, who enjoyed the loyalty of the New Army, quickly replaced Sun Yat-sen as President of China and head of state of the provisional government. Over the next few years, Yuan proceeded to abolish the national and provincial assemblies and declared himself as the Emperor of the Empire of China in late 1915. Yuan's imperial ambitions were fiercely opposed by his subordinates; faced with the prospect of rebellion, he abdicated in March 1916 and died of natural causes in June. Yuan's death in 1916 left a power vacuum; the republican government was all but shattered. This opened the way for the Warlord Era, during which much of China was ruled by shifting coalitions of competing provincial military leaders and the Beiyang Government.

    The Romanovs had suffered in popularity during the Great War because of the hardships it had brought such as scarcity of food and fuel as well as inflation. The people were glad it was over. Whenever rumours surfaced that the peace talks might break down, leading to fears for a resumption of hostilities, there were waves of paralyzing strikes and protests. There were renewed demands for reform such as expansion of suffrage, more power for the Duma and reduction of the workweek from 48 hours to 40.

    The first post-war legislative election in November 1916 produced a major victory for the SDP undern Julius Martov, which could now form a coalition with the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (SRP), the Polish Bloc and other ethnic minority parties and exclude the LDP now led by Pavel Milyukov. Though the social-democrats and the liberals had certain commonalities such as focusing on the expansion of suffrage, they’d always had a fundamentality different view of the role of the government in the economy. The Tsar was unpleased by this left-wing coalition as it included the anti-monarchist SRP.

    In response Nicholas II disbanded the Duma in June as per his royal prerogative to do so at his personal discretion, but this unpopular move sparked more protests and in February 1917 new elections led to an even greater majority for the SDP-SRP bloc in the Duma. Clearly, the reuse of the old practice of disbanding a Duma in the way of the Tsar’s wishes and overruling the wishes of the voters – as had occurred regularly in the 1880s, 1890s and early 1900s – was no longer acceptable to the Russian people. The middle class and the working class were both much more politically aware now after 35 years of semi-constitutional monarchy and willing to fight for their rights.

    Nicholas realized that dissolving the Duma again would lead to more protests and possibly revolution, so he reluctantly agreed to the next step: removal of the last vestiges of autocracy. Major reforms were enacted. The first-past-the-post electoral system was replaced by proportional representation for the Duma, meaning that a party winning x percentage of the vote would get the corresponding number of seats. Of the 196 members of the Imperial Council, 98 were appointed by the Tsar under the old system, but now all were elected. For the Imperial Council, as opposed to the Duma, the first-past-the-post system was maintained out of concerns that minorities and sparsely population regions would fall victim to the “tyranny of the majority.” The voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 and female suffrage was enacted too. The age for running for office, such as a seat in the Duma, was lowered from 25 to 18. For the Imperial Council 35 years of age was maintained as a restriction, ensuring the council’s mildly conservative nature and making it the sole brake on further reforms. The Tsar’s right to dismiss the Duma and issue new elections was removed from the constitution. Contrary to popular thought, Alexander II and Nicholas II were not liberal but quite conservative and had hoped to preserve much of their autocratic power by giving into demands for reform hitherto, but due to developments Tsar Nicholas II and his successors could henceforth only slow it down.

    Meanwhile, a major trade union demand, a forty hour workweek, was also passed. As a major concession, the SRP moderated its demands for land reform and quietly dropped its abolitionist stance toward the monarchy. A major victory for the Polish Bloc was that restrictions imposed by Nicholas I and Alexander II were finally ended after nearly sixty years (this bloc was a diverse parliamentary group of left-wing and right-wing Polish parties, ranging from the socialist PPS to the nationalist ZLN). The Polish language could be publicly spoken again in word and in print without restrictions for the first time since 1863.

    Crucially, foreign and defence policy remained privileges of the crown. Using his control over both foreign and defence policies, the Tsar decided an imperialist adventure ending with a quick victory could reinvigorate the monarchy’s and his own personal popularity. He was not about to make the same mistake again by picking on a country that could fight back, as had happened during the Russo-Japanese War. He had to wait for the right moment.
     
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    Chapter X: Scramble for China Pt.2, 1917-1920.
  • I thought I'd quickly conclude the developments in China for you guys following this, so here's the next update.

    Chapter X: Scramble for China Pt.2, 1917-1920.

    In July 1917 such a potential opportunity presented itself when Chinese General Zhang Xun launched a swift coup d’état to restore the Manchu monarchy by force of arms with support for the monarchy from certain groups such as ethnic Manchus and Mongols, believing the republican government discriminated against them. The Qing also enjoyed support among sections of the Han Chinese population as well, such as in north-eastern China. Many were disappointed about the Republican government’s inability to solve China’s problems. Finally, there were numerous reactionaries and disempowered ex-Qing officials who conspired to overthrow the Republic. As a result, pro-Qing restorationist groups, most notably the Royalist Party, remained an underrepresented, but powerful factor in Chinese politics during the 1910s. In the wake of the coup, several members of President Li Yuanhong’s government subsequently defected: former Qing war minister Wang Shizhen, civil affairs minister Zhu Jiabao, diplomat Xie Jieshi and Beiyang General Jiang Chaozong.

    The restoration of the eleven-year old Puyi as Emperor of China was proclaimed on July 1st 1917 and Beijing’s capital police immediately submitted to this new government. President Li promptly fled and appointed Feng Zuozhang Acting President while Premier General Duan Qirui commanded military operations against Zhang Xun. Duan’s forces took control of the Beijing-Tianjin railway and stood poised to retake the capital as most of the Northern Army sided with the Republic against Zhang and the restoration.

    The Conference of St. Petersburg would determine the division of China into spheres of influence and regulate trade (similar to how the Berlin Conference had formalized the Scramble for Africa). The matter had been set in motion by Russia’s decision to intervene in favour of the restoration of Puyi as Emperor of China, using its strength of over 150.000 troops in Manchuria to crush attempts by the Republican army to retake Beijing. Russian troop strength in Manchuria tripled to 450.000 men quickly, using the now complete Trans-Siberian Railway. The Japanese were alarmed because they believed this would be the beginning of a Russian invasion, moving troops to the Yalu River, which formed the border between Korea and China. Great Britain in turn was alarmed because Germany was trying to break its diplomatic isolation by supporting Russia, declaring it would go to war to assist the latter if need be. If this occurred, the provisions of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance would require Britain to go to war against Russia and Germany in Japan’s defence (the alliance agreement specified either signatory had to go to war if the other got involved in a war with two or more powers).

    With the last major war still fresh in everyone’s memories, cooler heads prevailed and they responded to an American proposal for a conference. US President Charles Evans Hughes offered to mediate as he considered European plans for a more formal partition of China a threat to the US Open Door Policy: the United States diplomatic policy established in the late 19th century and the early 20th century that called for a system of equal trade and investment and to guarantee the territorial integrity of China. Fearing China “would be carved like a turkey at thanksgiving, as had already been done in Africa” US Secretary of State Hiram Johnson was sent to St. Petersburg by Hughes to defend the Open Door Policy. This would be Johnson’s baptism of fire and the result would be a mixed bag at best, which was most likely the reason why he wasn’t appointed Secretary of State again after Hughes’ re-election in 1920. Johnson had become Secretary of State in the first place because he’d helped Hughes win in California by a mere half percent of the vote, swinging its thirteen electoral votes to the Republican side in the 1916 Presidential Election. With 267 electoral votes to the 264 of Wilson, Hughes was the winner despite not winning the popular vote (this was the fourth time after 1824, 1876 and 1888 that this happened).

    The St. Petersburg Conference was held at Peterhof Palace, the Russian equivalent to Versailles. The country it concerned, China, wasn’t even invited to attend. Meanwhile, Johnson’s diplomacy proved quite ineffective in the face of Russia’s refusal to give any guarantees of a gradual reduction its troop strength of nearly half a million men in Manchuria, which was amounted to a de facto military occupation. Johnson’s attempts to forge an Anglo-American-French-Japanese diplomatic coalition were unsuccessful. France didn’t want to oppose its Russian ally and all were more concerned with securing their sometimes mutually exclusive interests. The end result was the Scramble for China: diplomats divided this large and ancient nation, brought to its knees by aggressive European imperialism and its own internal problems, by drawing lines on a map. All of this was formalized by the signing of the 1918 Treaty of St. Petersburg with China, weak and divided as it was, being powerless to stop it. Russia was the big winner.

    Russia formally annexed Xinjiang Province, also known as Chinese Turkestan, and split it in two: the north became the Dzungar Oblast and the South the Tarim Oblast. Russia also directly annexed Outer Mongolia, which became the Mongol Governorate. Manchuria had already been part of St. Petersburg’s sphere of influence, but this was now made official by the establishment of a formal protectorate over this entire region that was almost twice the size of France and had a population of about 15 million. Russia built roads, bridges, railroads, canals, ports, water works, and communications networks to modernize Manchuria, enabling the de facto colonial economic exploitation of the latter by the former. Most important was Manchuria’s potential for coal and steel production, but industrial centres produced more than just that: aircraft, automobiles, trucks, dyes, inks, electrical devices, fabrics, farm equipment, glass, mining equipment, locomotives, processed leather products, rubber products and so on. Control over Manchuria added an annual coal production of fifteen million tonnes to Russia’s own of 35 million tonnes; Manchurian steel production added half a million tonnes to Russia’s domestic production of 4.3 million tonnes.

    Russia backed up the restoration of Qing rule, formally recognizing the Chinese Empire and interfering in the Warlord Era by favouring the Zhili clique over the other northern factions. The Zhili clique had been forced to share power with the Anhui clique, headed by Premier Duan Qirui, which was dominant in the Beiyang government. The Zhili clique, composed of military officers, felt discriminated by Duan in the area of appointments and promotions. Lacking strong bonds, they were more than willing to abandon and betray him. In the subsequent Zhili-Anhui War in 1919, multiple divisions loyal to the Zhili clique and trained as well as equipped by the Russians destroyed the forces of the Anhui clique and the other northern factions. Russia assisted with artillery support, aerial reconnaissance and a “volunteer” infantry division fighting on the front.

    The Zhili clique controlled everything north of the Yellow River and its tributary the river Wei and could live with accepting the now fourteen-year old Emperor Puyi as a purely ceremonial figurehead (formally known as Qing Emperor by his era name Xuantong, which ironically meant “proclamation of unity”). General Cao Kun became the Prime Minister of the Chinese Empire and Zhang Xun, who’d launched the Qing restoration, was appointed Foreign Minister. The clique’s chief lieutenant and arguably the ablest strategist of China, Wu Peifu, was promoted to the rank of Marshal and became Minister of War.

    Russia, Germany, France, Italy, Austria-Bohemia, Iran, Hungary and the Balkan powers (Yugoslavia, Romania, Greece, Bulgaria and Montenegro) quickly recognized Cao’s military dictatorship in the north as the official government of China and established formal diplomatic relations. Premier Cao’s regime now had international legitimacy and was the strongest of all the factions, but had to accept a hefty price in return for Russian assistance: through its protectorate over Manchuria, Russia had a decisive voice in finance, policing and government affairs of the restored Qing Dynasty. Like the Emperor, the generals in charge were all puppets who had to acquiesce to Russian domination; Qing controlled northern China became a satellite state.

    The Republic of China persisted south of the Yellow River and still enjoyed the diplomatic recognition of the United States and Great Britain among others, but it too was a victim of Western imperialism. Tibet formally declared its independence from China, but merely exchanged Chinese for British rule: a British resident arrived in Lhasa and quickly concluded a treaty of protection, with the Dalai Lama, between the British Raj and Tibet. Troops of the British Indian Army arrived in Tibet, which was now one of the princely states and a buffer against Russian influence extending from Xinjiang in the north. Nepal and Bhutan were now effectively surrounded by British India and soon became vassal states and part of British India too. In eastern China, the provinces of Guangdong and Hunan became a British “area of interest” as a buffer to the crown colony of Hong Kong.

    France concluded a treaty of protection with the Qing government in Beijing that gave it a protectorate over Guangxi, Yunnan and Guizhou, ignoring the government of the Republic of China in Nanjing. It acted as a buffer to French Indochina and was de facto part of it as the commanders of the French military presence there deferred to the Governor-General in Hanoi. France now possessed one third of all of China’s tin and manganese reserves and these were quickly under the control of French mining conglomerates. Crops that brought in good money such as tobacco and sugarcane also quickly fell to French control.

    For Japan it made sense to establish a protectorate around their concession at Qingdao and so they did. Shandong Province was theirs after they reached an agreement with the British who had a naval base there called Port Edward, located at Weihaiwei. Britain gave up Weihaiwei, but easily enough obtained concessions for two new Royal Navy bases at Shanghai and Canton. Besides Shandong, Japanese also increased its control over Fujian, which was directly across the sea from their colony of Taiwan.

    The Scramble for China was the depressing climax of the “Century of Humiliation.” This describes an era that had started with China’s defeat in the First Opium War in 1839, a period of intervention, subjugation and ultimately partition with the establishment of “protectorates” as a thin veil masking foreign colonial rule over large swathes of the country. By the time the process was completed around 1920, Russia had annexed 3.2 million square kilometres, an area six times the size of Germany. The revived Qing Empire north of the Yellow River was a vassal state to Russia. South of the Yellow River a bunch of Western protectorates were in fact colonies, which neither of the two Chinese governments had any real say over anymore whatsoever. The remaining Republican rump state de facto only controlled the Sichuan, Hubei, Jiangxi, Henan, Anhui and Jiangsu provinces. China had been carved like a turkey.
     
    Chapter XI: Rise of Russia and the Persian Crisis, 1920-1926.
  • I hope too that OW isn't too discouraged to continue that due current events.

    Not to worry. I've had some things to do IRL like running for re-election to my city council seat. I present the next update nonetheless:


    Chapter XI: Rise of Russia and the Persian Crisis, 1920-1926.

    With the 1917 Russian Constitutional Reform, the last vestiges of Tsarist autocracy disappeared, completing the country’s transition to a constitutional monarchy. Russia was a democracy now, which didn’t conflict with renewed jingoism in the years to come as St. Petersburg had gained enough confidence by winning the war and expanding into China to embark on a more aggressive foreign policy.

    In the long term this would mean the breakup of the Triple Entente as the unifying factor of a common enemy (Germany) was gone. At the time differences in imperial interests between the Russian Empire and the British Empire in particular were more powerful than whatever else, besides containment of Germany, they still had in common. In time, Russia even changed its position towards the German Empire: without Austria-Hungary as a junior partner anymore, Germany no longer backed interests in the Balkans opposed to Russia’s. As long as Germany didn’t covet Russian lands, it wasn’t quite the mortal threat anymore that it’d once been. France still considered Germany the primary threat to its security and furiously tried to convince their erstwhile Russian allies, but their efforts weren’t rewarded: Russia’s commitment to total isolation of Germany slowly eroded.

    Meanwhile, starting in 1918, the economy rebounded as well after the difficulties caused by the Great War. The economy grew by 7% in 1918, 11% in 1919 and 13% in 1920. Growth rates in the double digits were no exception in the years that followed. Rapid industrialization continued, fuelled by exploiting more and more of the natural resources Russia was well endowed with: coal, oil, iron, copper, gold, silver, lead, zinc and manganese among others. The growth of heavy industry focusing on heavy machinery, large machine tools, big buildings and large scale infrastructure soared while coal and steel production became dominant sectors. The length of the railway network, which had stood at 64.000 kilometres in 1905, had reached 85.000 km by 1917 and grew to 115.000 km by 1925. Electricity production more than doubled from 2.9 billion to 6.2 billion kWh in the same period. Light industry more geared to the production of consumer goods also shot up as the burgeoning Russian middle class quickly grew in the 1920s.

    The first event in the Anglo-Russian “breakup” concerned Iran. Iran had fallen prey to European imperialism, with the discovery of oil in 1908 in particular spawning intense interest and resulting in the establishment of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Control of Persia remained contested between the United Kingdom and Russia, in what became known as the Great Game, and codified in the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, which divided Iran into spheres of influence, regardless of her national sovereignty. Domestically, the Qajar Dynasty faced the Constitutional Revolution between 1905 and 1911, which resulted in a feeble constitutional monarchy.

    During the Great War (1914-1916) the neighbouring Ottoman Empire eventually joined the Entente and for good measure occupied Iran’s West Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, Kermanshah and Ilam provinces where significant Kurdish minorities resided (Russia and Britain also occupied parts of the country). Ottoman forces didn’t leave after 1916 on the orders of the powerful Grand Vizier Mustafa Kemal Pasha, an officer with a heroic reputation who had rapidly ascended through the ranks and enjoyed the support of Sultan Mehmed VI. Kemal knew Iran could do little about it without foreign support and maintained the Ottoman presence just in case the Kurds ever decided to rise up.

    The weak reigning monarch of Iran, Ahmad Shah Qajar, proved either unable or unwilling to do much about it, but he was cast aside in a bloodless military coup d’état by his bold war minister Colonel Reza Khan, commander of the Persian Cossack Brigade. Reza Khan would become Reza Shah Pahlavi and establish a new dynasty of Shahs. He established an authoritarian government that valued nationalism, militarism and secularism combined with strict censorship and state propaganda. Reza Shah introduced many socio-economic reforms, reorganizing the army, government administration, and finances. To his supporters, his reign brought “law and order, discipline, central authority, and modern amenities – schools, trains, buses, radios, cinemas, and telephones” while opponents criticized the new regime’s authoritarianism and corruption. Many of the new laws and regulations created resentment among devout Muslims and the clergy. For example, mosques were required to use chairs; most men were required to wear western clothing, including a hat with a brim; women were encouraged to discard the hijab; men and women were allowed to freely congregate, violating Islamic mixing of the sexes.

    In 1925 Reza Khan assumed the title of Shah and the first order of business of his foreign policy was to remove a thorn in Iran’s side. He mobilized five divisions equipped and trained up to modern European standards (with Russian assistance) and moved them to staging areas adjacent to the provinces under de facto Ottoman occupation, starting in May 1925. The new Shah threatened war if Ottoman forces didn’t withdraw behind their own legal border again and return the subsequently vacated provinces to Iranian sovereignty. Kemal Pasha was confident in the effects of the national modernization program of the past eight years on the Ottoman armed forces and deployed an army twice the size of the Iranian force.

    The affair took on an international dimension when Russia openly sided with Iran. The Russo-Persian Treaty of Mutual Defence was signed in Teheran as a countermove against the Ottomans in June 1925 and this was one of its stipulations: “[The two High Contracting Parties undertake:]To prohibit the formation or presence within their respective territories, of any organization or groups of persons, irrespective of the name by which they are known, whose object is to engage in acts of hostility against Persia or Russia, or against the Allies of Russia or Persia. They will likewise prohibit the formation of troops or armies within their respective territories with the aforementioned object.” With the way this provision was formulated, Russia was practically bound to intervening on Iran’s behalf if the Ottomans didn’t withdraw.

    This almost automatically led to British support for the Sublime Porte to prevent a war that could result in Russian control of the Turkish Straits (even during the height of their commitment in the Great War, Britain had never been very enthusiastic about future Russian control of the Bosporus). British forces were mobilized in India and deployed to the border with Iran in the region of Baluchistan, positioning to attack from the east in the event of war. The Royal Navy deployed in the Persian Gulf in numbers, enabling the capture of the major ports by a British invasion force and the invasion of the country from the south in the event of war. By the summer of 1925, the crisis led to a major war scare in the capitals of Europe.

    Both France and Germany offered to mediate, but each with their own agendas. France wanted preserve the status quo of an Iran divided into two spheres of influence and defuse the situation by pressuring Constantinople into pulling its forces out of the disputed areas peacefully. Germany was sympathetic to breaking open the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention and a division into spheres of influence that’d award the entire Ottoman Empire to Britain and Iran to Russia. Some parts of the German proposal were enticing to Britain and Russia, but other parts objectionable: Russian control over the Bosporus would be prevented, to Britain’s liking and to Russia’s dismay; in return, however, Russia would receive a warm water port on the Persian Gulf, giving it access to the Indian Ocean, which Russia was sympathetic to while the British were opposed.

    In the resulting Treaty of Baghdad signed in August 1925, the pre-1914 status quo was restored as the Ottomans withdrew after Anglo-French diplomatic pressure. The French rejoiced because it appeared that cooler heads had prevailed and that they had seen things their way, i.e. that continued diplomatic isolation of Germany and thereby peace in Europe were still top priority. In reality their diplomacy had not worked. French success in staving off war was a pyrrhic victory: Russia and Britain had only agreed to this because neither was willing to compromise as the Germans had proposed, irreparably damaging Anglo-Russian relations in the process. Nicholas II wrote a sternly worded letter to his British cousin George V that clarified that Russia didn’t take well to Britain choosing the side of the aggressor (the Ottomans) in their sphere of influence and explained this was a major breach of trust between London and St. Petersburg.

    Germany had achieved what it had set out to do when it interfered in the Persian Crisis: creating a rupture in the Triple Entente. France was still allied to Britain as well as Russia, but the alliance between the latter two was effectively a dead letter. This implied that in a future conflict between Russia and Great Britain the French might be forced to choose one or the other and Germany would then simply choose the side of the remaining one. Germany wanted to regain what it’d lost in the last war, but wanted to avoid a two-front war they now knew they couldn’t win.
     
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    Chapter XII: Anglo-Russian Split and Renewed Naval Rivalry, 1926-1933.
  • Sorry I left this on hiatus for so long, but I'm picking this up again. There have been some real life concerns.


    Chapter XII: Anglo-Russian Split and Renewed Naval Rivalry, 1926-1933.

    After the Persian Crisis, German Emperor Wilhelm II wrote a long letter to his Russian cousin Tsar Nicholas II, whom he hadn’t seen or spoken since before the eruption of the Great War in 1914 (the state funeral of Edward VII to be exact). The letter explained that Germany’s interest didn’t conflict with those of Russia at all, while Great Britain’s often did and led to Russia caving and losing face for the sake of their alliance to the obviously unreliable French. After all, what had they ever done to help Russia gain a warm water port on the Bosporus? The French had done nothing to realize that goal in order to avoid offending the British so they could maintain an unnatural Anglo-French-Russian alliance to assist them in their petty anti-German feud, being sore losers over 1871. France fanning the flames of irrational and uncalled for Germanophobia and using deceit to get the support of other great powers had led to the war!

    Things were set into motion over lingering tensions dating back years before the crisis in the Persian Crisis: in fact Anglo-Russian had slowly been deteriorating ever since the late 1910s as British tariff walls kept the Empire from importing from the growing Russian economy. Differing economic interests were eventually going to lead to a political breakup regardless of what had happened, it is believed by historians.

    Germany by contrast had aspired to peace and had never opposed Russia in the Balkans (he trivialized Germany’s alliance to Austria-Hungary). Meanwhile, Wilhelm said, the expanding British Empire was obviously blocking Russian attempts to gain a place under the sun at every turn. He pointed out that, despite earlier agreements, Britain was obviously against a Russian Bosporus and was opposed to the alternative of a Russian port on the Indian Ocean too. Germany was willing to assist in return for being enabled to realize their dream of Mittelafrika (the concurrent and competing Prussian vision of Mitteleuropa as a pan-Germanist state-centric imperium encompassing large swathes of Central and Eastern Europe was quietly shelved).

    Tsar Nicholas II’s response was that Russia and Germany could indeed help each other in achieving their goals and he announced a visit. In January 1926, the Imperial Yacht Standart left port with Tsar Nicholas II, his wife and his children onboard. This ship – with mahogany panelling, crystal chandeliers, stocks of caviar and champagne and a crew of 355 men – was a suitable floating palace for the Russian Imperial Family. With eight 47 mm (1.9 inch) guns, she was well-protected too. The ship arrived in Hamburg and from there the Tsar, his family and their retinue travelled to Bonn in a column of Mercedes Benzes. There they visited the modest country estate that the Tsar had called home during his days as a student and which had since become a Russian consulate. The Tsar met some of his old professors and a handful of acquaintances that he had kept in touch with from his days in the exclusive Corps Borussia Bonn.

    Nicholas II and his following arrived in Berlin on January 26th 1926 on the pretence of attending the celebration of Wilhelm II’s 67th birthday the next day, but in reality important discussions concerning a potential Russo-German alliance took place. This was demonstrated by the fact that the Tsar and his family stayed as guests for three weeks at the New Palace in Potsdam, the Kaiser’s favourite residence, and the coming and going of diplomats in between lavish banquets and balls during that time. Needless to say, the French ambassador was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but there was nothing he could do as he couldn’t match the German offer without jeopardizing good relations with Britain. The Russo-German rapprochement didn’t lead to an alliance just yet, but led to the 1926 Reinsurance Treaty (which is not to be confused with the one that ended in 1887). It stipulated that if Russia either tried to take the Bosporus or tried to realize an Indian Ocean port through force of arms, Germany wouldn’t oppose it. In return, Russia wouldn’t oppose a renewed German naval construction program.

    Though officially a secret agreement, the major powers soon became aware of the 1926 Reinsurance Treaty between Germany and Russia and that resulted in a flurry of diplomatic activity. France witnessed the Entente – that it’d established decades ago and that they were trying to maintain even after the war – unravel. France’s allies Russia and Britain were rivals again, a situation France desperately tried to undo. As one historian has described it, French foreign policy of the late twenties consisted of “trying to bring the band back together again.”

    Russia had no qualms with France and responded that it was perfectly willing to maintain the original Dual Entente between the two, but at a price France that proved unwilling to pay. What Russia wanted in return proved a breaking point in the Élysée Palace, the residence of the President of France: a Russian precondition for maintaining the Entente was French support for Russia’s plans vis-à-vis the Bosporus despite British opposition (or at least not standing in the way of said plans). The French leadership realized that agreeing to this could potentially amount to winding up in a war against Britain alongside Germany and Russia. At the minimum it meant a break in Anglo-French relations and being manoeuvred into a de facto Russo-German-French alliance, which no-one in Paris wanted. France was perfectly willing to negotiate on Russia’s behalf with Whitehall, but that wasn’t enough to St. Petersburg: Russia formally abrogated its membership of the Entente in 1927 after 33 years. The Anglo-French Entente remained.

    Tensions in Europe mounted further over German naval ambitions, which would be a violation of the Treaty of Versailles if Germany ever acted on them. Despite being limited to one third of the tonnage of the Royal Navy in terms of capital ships (defined at Versailles as battleships and battlecruisers), Wilhelm II made it no secret that Germany should still have a battle fleet capable of rivalling the Royal Navy.

    After Britain retired its older dreadnoughts, it was left with four King George V-class, four Iron-Duke-class, five Queen Elizabeth-class, five Revenge-class and four Saint-class battleships as well as three Courageous class, four Admiral-class and four Invincible-class battlecruisers by the late 1920s. This amounted to a grand total of 22 dreadnought battleships and eleven battlecruisers (next to this they had one fleet carrier and two light carriers and a modest submarine fleet). The admiralty continued to uphold the two-power standard, which dictated that the Royal Navy should be larger than the next two navies combined.

    No navy in the world came close: the world’s second navy, the US Navy, had ten battleships and six battlecruisers thanks to the 1916 Naval Act. A proposed second naval act for an additional twelve battleships and battlecruisers was not passed: Hughes, who defeated Wilson in the 1916 Presidential election, stated “the United States shall not become the world’s most militaristic nation during my presidency and will therefore refrain from an unnecessary ruinous arms race against a country with which we have cordial relations.” During the Hughes Administration (1917-1925) the US continued its isolationist foreign policy and this didn’t really change under his Democratic successor William Gibbs McAdoo (former Secretary of the Treasury, 1913-1917). Hughes eventually did authorize the more limited 1924 Naval Act for four new battleships and six new battlecruisers to outbuild Japan.

    The Treaty of Versailles limitations meant Germany would possess no more than 6-7 battleships and 3-4 battlecruisers. In 1917, Germany sold off all its older dreadnought, pre-dreadnought and battlecruisers to second and third rate naval powers such as Argentina, Peru, Spain and Iran (selling them was seen as more profitable than scrapping them, and some remained in service of foreign navies into the mid-50s). The existing battlecruisers were also all sold: Von der Tann (Spain), Moltke-class (Greece) and the Derfflinger-class (the Netherlands).

    The High Seas Fleet kept its latest dreadnoughts: four 28.500 tonne 180 metre long Bayern-class battleships with eight 38 cm (15 inch) guns and a top speed of 21 knots. These would receive an overhaul to increase their speed and add anti-aircraft guns. They also completed two of their Anhalt-class super battleships (43.800 tonnes, eight 42 cm/16.5 inch main guns, 26 knots), which were superseded by the British Saint-class in armament (18 inch/45.7 cm guns) though not in speed (23 knots). Three Mackensen-class battlecruisers were completed as designed (31.000 tonnes, eight 35 cm/13.8 inch guns, 28 knots) while the remaining four were completed as aircraft carriers. The planned Yorck class battlecruisers (Yorck, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst) were re-designed, built and commissioned as aircraft carriers too, for a naval air arm totalling seven aircraft carriers. Germany had become the pioneer in naval aviation by the late 20s by necessity because it couldn’t build all-big-gun battleships as long as it abided by the Versailles restrictions. Besides that, Germany had also developed a significant force of U-boats under visionaries such as Rear Admiral Karl Dönitz, who hoped to strangle Britain with this submarine force in a future war.

    Germany announced the 1927 and 1928 Naval Laws, emboldened by the 1926 Reinsurance Treaty as it guaranteed Russia wouldn’t back any steps against Germany Britain and France might take. The 1927 Naval Law envisioned doubling the battle line from one battle squadron of six battleships to twelve battleships in two squadrons. Six Kaiser Wilhelm-class ships – 60.000 tonnes each, equipped with four 46 cm (18.1 inch) twin turrets and a 28 knot top speed – were laid down. This new class followed the design philosophy behind the Bayern- and Anhalt-classes, being an enlarged version of them. Six Dohna-class battlecruisers, effectively fast battleships, were laid down too and mostly named after the Great War battlecruisers. Each one was superior to a Great War era battleship: 50.000 tonnes, three triple 42 cm (16.5 inch) gun turrets and a speed of 30 knots. They were innovative in the sense that they were the first German capital ship units with triple turrets. The 1928 Naval Law envisioned the construction of six 72.000 tonne Friedrich der Grosse- class, equipped with nine 48 cm (18.9 inch) guns. Accompanying ships such as heavy cruisers, light cruisers, destroyers, torpedo boats, and U-boats were also built. Of course aircraft carriers were constructed too. These ships were to be completed by 1936.

    The 1927 Naval Crisis had begun. The initial Anglo-French response to the 1927 German Naval Law, a clear violation of the Treaty of Versailles, was one of outrage. France conducted a partial mobilization of its army while the Royal Navy took to the seas in force, resulting in another European war scare only two years after the last one. France hoped that Russia, despite its decision to withdraw from the Entente, would live up to its commitments by assisting in enforcing the Treaty of Versailles that it was also a signatory of. The Russian government headed by the liberal-democratic Prime Minister Pavel Milyukov, however, did nothing of the sort. Knowing the British Army was small and that it’d need significant time to build up its strength, the French backed off and effectively forced Britain to do the same. France’s General Staff wasn’t confident in their army’s ability to hold off the Germans until British and Commonwealth/Empire reinforcements arrived in strength without a second front provided by the Russians.
     
    Chapter XIII: Quadruple Alliance, 1933-1939.
  • Update time!

    Chapter XIII: Quadruple Alliance, 1933-1939.

    During the 1930s the German Empire and the Russian Empire gravitated towards each other more and more closely. Tsar Nicholas II suddenly passed away as a result of a heart attack at the age of 65 in November 1933. His ambitious oldest son, the 38 year-old Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich, was crowned Tsar Alexander III in Moscow’s Dormition Cathedral. Marital ties sealed the deal between Berlin and St. Petersburg. Sophia of Prussia was Queen Consort of the Hellenes (i.e. Queen of Greece) and sister of German Emperor Wilhelm II. Her then 21 year-old daughter Irene, Wilhelm’s niece, had married the nine years older future Tsar in 1925.

    Tsar Alexander III was ambitious and wanted to realize the warm water port on the Bosporus that Russia had been aspiring too ever since the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Turks in 1453. It was very clear that Britain would oppose this and, despite Russia’s rapid industrial growth and infrastructural achievements, he wasn’t confident this could be done without allies: Russia had already tried that once during the reign of his great-grandfather Nicholas I in the Crimean War, which hadn’t gone well at all. France would never go against Britain as they had clearly made their choice: the French wouldn’t fight alongside Russia over the Bosporus against the British, which was the entire reason for leaving the Entente. Germany on the other hand might be interested: they craved for an overseas empire, which didn’t conflict with Russia’s goals in the Balkans, Turkey and the Middle East. His father had been reluctant to do so because of the legacy of the Great War, in which Russia and Germany had been enemy’s, but Alexander III held no grudges over a war that had ended twenty years ago.

    Tsarina Irina Feodorovna, as Irene was now known, introduced her uncle Kaiser Wilhelm to his distant cousin and Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias Tsar Alexander III (the new Tsar and his wife already had two sons and three daughters). This meeting with Wilhelm II, who had attended the coronation ceremony, wasn’t just an informal encounter between distant royal relatives though. Russia and Germany finally agreed to an alliance. In the Pact of Reval established in 1933, Germany and Russia agreed to come to each other’s aid if either signatory was attacked by a third party.

    Italy had fought alongside the Entente in the Great War too, but hadn’t formally joined it (in fact, Italy had been part of the Central Powers until 1914). The Italian government wasn’t a fan of Russian expansion into the Eastern Mediterranean per se, but factored into its course that an Anglo-French-Italian alliance would be outmatched by a Russo-German one. Germany had the world’s best army and Russia had the world’s largest army. Britain had a big fleet going for it, but not a large army: in a hypothetical war it’d be up to France and Italy to hold off the Russians and Germans until the British had mobilized the potential of the Empire. Italian military leaders believed that without a second front and probably even Russian assistance, Germany could defeat France in eight weeks.

    Italy’s geopolitical positioning in the alliance systems was based on this logic, which made their choice predictable: in 1935 they decided to cut their losses and side with Russia and Germany, creating a new Triple Alliance. In a victorious war, Italy could expand its colonial empire at the expense of France and Britain, connecting Libya to their holdings on the Horn of Africa (Italian East Africa, which now also included Ethiopia after a second try at conquering it in 1935). Other things on their wish list included taking back Nice and Savoy from France, annexing Corsica, taking Malta from Britain and taking control of the Suez Canal in British-controlled Egypt.

    Japan had also reconsidered its alliance to Britain as it seemed to have outlived its usefulness. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance had been created to curb Russia’s expansionism and challenging Russian power in China together. In the Great War, however, Russia emerged as a victory in 1916 with Japan ironically fighting on the same side to take Germany’s possessions in Asia and the Pacific Ocean. After that, Russia had reasserted itself by supporting the restoration of the Qing and choosing one of the most powerful warlord cliques in China as their proxy, the Zhili clique, and strengthening it further by supplying it with modern weapons. Moreover, Russia had proceeded to annex an enormous swath of Chinese territory, extending its influence deep into China. One thing led to another and the de facto partition of China was formally enshrined during the St. Petersburg Conference, leaving two Chinese rump states: a monarchist one in the north and a republican one in the south.

    Besides that, Russia was also growing stronger as it rapidly industrialized in the 1920s and 30s: by the mid-30s it became clear to Japanese generals that fighting Russia over Manchuria would result in defeat. Russia in 1934 was a very different beast than Russia in 1904. Russia’s railway network had grown to 145.000 km by then (compared to 115.000 km in 1925, 85.000 km in 1917 and only 64.000 km in 1905). Electricity production was 40 billion kWh compared to only 2.9 billion in 1917. Production numbers of steel, coal and oil had similar growth over the last thirty years, with some of them quadrupling in the two decades since the Great War. Russia could simply produce more of everything and with the Trans-Siberian Railway now complete and complemented by the Baikal-Amur Main Line, Russia could now also effectively support a huge army in the Orient.

    With expansionist opportunities in China blocked by a strong Russia in the north, Japan’s ambition of creating a large colonial empire of its own had to focus elsewhere: Tokyo’s imperialist gaze shifted south and Japan finally dissolved its alliance with Britain in 1935. Southeast Asia was under the control of Great Britain, France and the Netherlands. Operating under the logic “if you can’t beat them, join them” Japan signed onto the Pact of Reval in 1937, which thereby became a Quadruple Alliance. It was a formidable force. In the event of war Great Britain and France would be facing Russia, Germany, Japan and Italy. Russia by itself could mobilize an army of 15 million men to conquer Eurasia with and the world’s largest air force, while the combined naval power of Germany and Japan could pose a threat to the Royal Navy’s dominance. Britannia might not rule the waves for much longer and France might well have to submit to a junior partner status in Europe. Leaders in London and France had nightmares.

    Britain and France quickly expanded the Entente by recruiting the Ottoman Empire, convincing it to formally join. Kemal Pasha and Sultan Abdulmejid II didn’t need much convincing as Russia was becoming more aggressive he and joined what now became the Triple Entente. The Russians had begun organizing annual naval exercises in the Black Sea, dangerously close to the Turkish coast, and assisted Iran’s Shah Reza Pahlavi in modernizing and expanding his army by sending trainers and providing modern equipment. Secondly, Russia had also begun a naval expansion program to replace the obsolete dreadnoughts of the 1910s. In 1933 they began building six 52.000 tonne Imperator Aleksandr II-class fast battleships with nine 42 cm (16.5 inch) guns supplied Germany (as Russia couldn’t build guns larger than 38 cm/15 inches at the time). Three of these would serve in the Baltic Fleet and the other three in the Black Sea, where Russia was now the dominant naval power. They were complemented by six Suvorov-class battlecruisers: 43.000 tonnes and nine 38 cm (15 inch) guns.

    The Sublime Porte could use some assistance. Russia could threaten the Ottoman Empire by sea from the north and overland from the Caucasus and from Iran. To bolster it, British shipyards built four battleships for the Ottoman Navy that could match their Russian opponents. Meanwhile, France sent trainers to improve the Ottoman Army’s organization, strategies, tactics and military discipline and also gave it modern equipment. A new Kemalist modernization program to significantly improve the country’s infrastructure, education system and healthcare system funded with oil money, received additional financing from Paris and London.

    Realizing Britain’s manpower disadvantage, Prime Minister Baldwin introduced a controversial peacetime conscription act in the UK to create a major standing army, but realized more was needed and turned to India. British India had 400 million inhabitants and was therefore an enormous manpower pool. The 1937 Indian National Service Act demanded twelve months of military service for men upon reaching the age of 18, with exceptions limited to those with religious objections (such as Jains and Buddhist monks). The Colonial Office’s naïve optimism that this measure would be accepted in India was dashed as the measure proved to be an enormous overreach. Gandhi was able to unite Hindus and Muslims alike and organize a paralyzing strike and large peaceful protests such as sit-ins, civil disobedience and anti-government propaganda. Mutinies took place among British Indian Army units.

    The 1937 Indian Crisis escalated and threatened to turn into a revolt even worse than the Indian Rebellion of 1857. There were reports of attacks on white people, rapes and arson of Christian sites of worship in India (similar to the Boxer Rebellion in China so many years ago) and Indian troops taking control. Great Britain could respond in two ways: either resort to bloody repression or reach a compromise with the Indian National Congress, the first nationalist movement that had emerged in the British Empire and the principal leader of India’s independence movement. Britain flinched despite certain Tory leaders advocating intervention, such as Foreign Secretary Winston Churchill who said: “We need to send a message by arresting and hanging that half naked fakir [Gandhi] for treason and whip those barbarian rebels back in line, lest we risk dissolution of the British Empire. The loss of India would be the sunset of the Empire, disaffecting countless loyal Indians over there even more so than Britons at home as they will fall to either the Russian or the Japanese jackboot.”

    Things went differently as London decided to acquiesce to the demands of the Indian National Congress by issuing the 1938 Government of India Act, large parts of which were written by Congress politicians such as Nehru and Patel. India became the first non-white Dominion within the British Empire, i.e. a self-governing nation equal to Britain and in no way subordinate to it in foreign or domestic affairs (just like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Ireland before it). King Edward VIII maintained his formal title “Emperor of India” and remained the ceremonial head of state, represented by a Viceroy appointed by Britain. In return India accepted conscription and began forming a formidable military: in 1938 roughly 3.2 million young men reached the age of 18 and were called up for military service. To many this was a blessing in disguise: plenty of them were illiterate and had to be educated up to elementary school levels before even being allowed to start basic training!

    If all else failed, Britain’s final hope rested on “the New World coming to the aid of the Old” as Foreign Secretary Churchill so eloquently put it, referring to the United States. During the McAdoo Administration (1925-1933) the US maintained its isolationist course, only springing into action when the Monroe Doctrine required it by intervening in some brushfire wars in the Caribbean. Democratic candidate Roosevelt saw a greater role for the US in global politics, but he wasn’t elected in 1932: in 1931 a serious economic depression had begun and the interventionist policies to mitigate the effects hadn’t shown their effects yet.

    The trigger was a recession in Europe caused by speculation on the steel market resulting from the government placing such large orders for steel for its huge naval construction program. Germany’s economy had bounced back from the Great War by 1919 despite the war reparations it owed France and Belgium. The 1927 Naval Law triggered a rise in steel prices and the value of the stock of Krupp and Thyssen among others soared, resulting in a speculative bubble as people invested their life savings into stock, re-mortgaged their house to buy stock or even took on loans to buy stock. When the bubble burst, people lost all their money and money supply contracted because the banks were never going to get their money back. To prevent a collapse of a number of major German banks, the German government bailed them out and saved Krupp and Thyssen through nationalization. They also printed money to increase the money supply again, causing inflation. The damage had been done. The recession affected the European economy, affecting the global economy in turn.

    Republican candidate Herbert Hoover – who’d helped organize relief for Europe after the war ended in 1916 – was the victor. After being elected Senator for his home state of Iowa in 1926, he’d worked his way up the Republican Party and didn’t choose re-election after his six year term was over, instead running for the White House. His economic policies, however, made it worse: inflation of the US dollar reached 15%, resulting in a loss of purchasing power, which in turn led to lower profits, investments being postponed and people getting laid off, worsening the vicious circle as businesses now turned even less of a profit. To combat this inflation, Hoover set the interest rate as high as 20% on the advice of the Federal Reserve. This reduced inflation to just 3% in two years’ time, but led to a spike in unemployment as high as 21%, deeply affection the construction, farming and industrial sectors.

    When Roosevelt tried again and won in 1936, his country was still in the throes of depression and has since then been championed who pulled the country out of this economic crisis: Roosevelt spearheaded unprecedented federal legislation and issued a profusion of executive orders that instituted the New Deal – a variety of programs designed to produce relief, recovery, and reform. Critics have since pointed the questionable constitutionality of some of these reforms and have also questioned whether it was due to these policies or due to natural economic cycles that the crisis ended. Roosevelt supporters of course defend this economic interventionism, while those assuming the middle ground argue Roosevelt’s New Deal significantly accelerated a slow economic recovery. Regardless of who was right, the US was too wrapped up in its domestic issues to consider a role on the world stage.

    In a time that economic crisis made governments unpopular, some of those governments considered foreign adventurism to regain said popularity. It looked Great Britain and France were going to need American help, but whether they’d get it was up in the air. If a war did erupt, Britain and France seemed unlikely to win. Russia, Germany, Japan and Italy were all aware of this and the only two things needed for another European war were a good old-fashioned Balkan crisis and one side’s unwillingness to resolve it with words instead of weapons.
     
    Chapter XIV: The Transylvanian Crisis, 1939-1940.
  • Update time!

    Chapter XIV: The Transylvanian Crisis, 1939-1940.

    In the aftermath of the Great War (1914-1916) the Ottoman Empire had re-annexed Eastern Rumelia, which it had de facto lost in 1885 when it united with the Principality of Bulgaria (and had lost de jure when Bulgaria declared its independence in 1908). Ethnic Bulgarians constituted 70% of the population and Turks only 20.6% (other minorities included Greeks, Roma, Jews and Armenians).

    Upon the return of the Porte’s rule, the new Governor-General realized the hostility of the local predominantly Bulgarian population and ensured the region’s loyalty by removing them. Intellectuals were arrested and 750.000 people – men, women, children, elderly and the infirm – were forced to march across the border into Bulgaria and were subjected to forced Islamization, rape, robbery and massacres along the way. Their troubles weren’t over upon arriving in Bulgaria as it, having just lost a war, didn’t have the resources to deal with this influx of refugees. An estimated one third of them, a quarter of a million people, died in what has since become known as the Bulgarian Genocide.

    A new alliance system replaced the old, defunct Balkans League. Needless to say, there was a visceral hatred of Turks in Bulgaria and its government and people were willing to make large concessions for Russian support so one day they could exact bloody revenge. During the late 30s, there were clear signs that that day would come sooner rather than later: in 1937 Varna became a base for a Russian cruiser squadron and fortifications to defend it were built, manned by 30.000 Russian soldiers, as agreed to in the 1936 “Russo-Bulgarian Treaty of Mutual Defence.” Ideally, Bulgaria would also have a go at Greece, but was pressured into leaving it alone: the Russian Tsarina used her position to have her husband Alexander III and her uncle German Emperor Wilhelm II support her brother King George II of Greece. They pressured Tsar Boris III of Bulgaria into backing off.

    Pent up Bulgarian frustration focused elsewhere, namely on Serbia, and they found an ally in Hungary. Bulgaria wanted Vardar Macedonia, a region with a much closer cultural and linguistic affiliation to Bulgaria than Yugoslavia. Hungary wanted to annex Baranya and northern Vojvodina where significant Hungarian minorities resided. Hungary especially craved Northern Transylvania, where almost two fifths of the population was Hungarian (and 2.9% German and 5.8% Jewish). Bulgaria and Hungary established an alliance. Montenegro joined this little Balkan Triple Alliance because King Danilo I knew Yugoslavia, in reality a Greater Serbia, would annex his country into their South Slav Kingdom at the first opportunity.

    The Bulgarian-Hungarian-Montenegrin alliance had an international component that was anything but negligible and with every potential to kick off another global war. Bulgaria had evolved into Russia’s most significant ally due to its proximity to the Turkish Straits, the region St. Petersburg coveted for the establishment of an ideal warm water port on the Mediterranean. After the breakup of Austria-Hungary, independent Hungary had maintained a defensive alliance with Germany. Meanwhile, Montenegro had ties with two major powers. King Danilo’s elder sister was Empress Dowager Maria Feodorovna of Russia, the mother of the current ambitious Tsar; King Victor Emmanuel III was his brother-in-law as Italy’s Queen Consort Elena was his sister.

    In the meantime, based on the logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” Serbia, Romania and the Ottoman Empire became allies to each other and to Britain and France as well. Serbia feared Hungary and Bulgaria and so did Romania. The Ottomans were worried about Russia the most and Bulgaria second. They were wrong: the Second Great War erupted in Transylvania.

    The Peace of Paris had awarded the entirety of Transylvania to Romania in 1916 even though almost one third of the population of this region was ethnically Hungarian. Knowing full well how they’d oppressed their own minorities within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hungary expected retaliation by the Romanians now that they had a Hungarian minority to bull around. Indeed, a policy of “Romanianization” was implemented that saw the confiscation of a number of Hungarian estates and an agricultural reform openly favouring the Romanians, formerly the victims of unjust land allocation systems under Hungarian rule. Tensions lingered: Hungarian irredentism led to a rise in Romanian nationalism and historical revisionism, sometimes resulting in violent protests in Romanian cities.

    Policies were enacted in the late 1930s to increase the Romanian population in originally Hungarian areas and encouraging the latter to immigrate. Hungarian separatists, who were supported by Budapest according to accusations from Bucharest, started committing terrorist attacks and engaging in guerrilla warfare. The Romanian Army occupied the region and issued stay-at-home orders and curfews that only affected the Hungarians, forbade the speaking of Hungarian in public and led to the establishment of detention camps for “protective custody”. Hungary accused Romania of preparing for a genocide, which the latter of course categorically denied.

    By the autumn of 1939, the two Balkan powers were on the verge of war, but the great powers tried to get them to the negotiating table. Hungary wanted Transylvania back, but Germany got them to limit their demands to just Northern Transylvania. Romania, however, was in no mood to cede any land and its counterproposal consisted of an autonomous status for Northern Transylvania. Meanwhile, troops on both sides of the border manoeuvred aggressively and tensions reached a fever pitch, resulting in a skirmish. Unclear exactly is who fired first, with both sides accusing each other of unprovoked aggression, but by spring 1940 there was clearly a border war going on between the two. Hungary merely formalized it by declaring war in May 1940.

    The result was a chain reaction that dragged the entire world into another global war. Bulgaria and Montenegro declared war on Romania to support their ally and Romania’s allies Serbia and the Ottoman Empire did the same against Hungary. Any hopes that the war could remain localized ended when Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire, Serbia and Romania. The war even expanded to the Middle East as the Shah declared war on the Ottomans and on Britain, hoping to replace the Porte as the dominant power in the Middle East and remove British influence. Germany, Japan and Italy had no choice but to follow suit, and after that Great Britain and France declared war on all the Quadruple Alliance powers. By the summer of 1940, the world was at war again.
     
    Chapter XV: The Second Great War Pt. 1, 1940-1941.
  • Sorry I left this on hiatus for a while. Real life concerns and stuff... Anyway, here's a fresh update.

    Chapter XV: The Second Great War Pt. 1, 1940-1941.

    Mobilization orders were issued across Europe, but sentiments varied. While in France, Britain and in the Ottoman Empire a sense of battening down the hatches to weather the coming storm prevailed, but in Germany, Russia and Italy a sense of optimism prevailed. The Germans were confident they couldn’t just undo the defeat of 1916, but establish a place under the sun, and the Italians believed something similar. Russia was about to engage in its thirteenth war against its hated Turkish rivals and this time it seemed certain they would at last gain that coveted warm water port on the Bosporus.

    On the Western Front nine German field armies faced six French ones and five British ones. The Entente majority was undone due to the arrival of a Russian Expeditionary Force numbering three field armies under the command of Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, an officer descending from Polish nobility. Meanwhile, in the south three Italian armies numbering roughly one third of a million men commanded by Marshall Ugo Cavallero positioned themselves to take Nice and Savoy. The overall theatre commander for the West was Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, as agreed upon by the three European partners. The French commander was a veteran of the last war, General Maxime Weygand and the BEF was commanded by General Henry Pownall, former Assistant Military Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence.

    The German offensive began on Sunday June 2nd 1940. While the Russian Expeditionary Force constituted the left wing and maintained a defensive posture, an enormous German right wing swung through Belgium much like in 1914 and cast aside the Belgian Army. The plan was to advance west of Paris and then turn east to envelop the defending French forces in a giant cauldron battle inspired by the Battle of Cannae in which Hannibal destroyed an enormous Roman army. The French had expected this: pre-war defence plans consisted of either advancing into Belgium to stop the Germans at the fortified Dyle Line, or to cut them off by launching an advance into the Rhineland. Irreconcilable differences in opinion among French military planners led to an unworkable compromise: they’d try to do both.

    With the German invasion commencing, French tank commander Lieutenant General De Gaulle was tasked with leading the offensive into the Rhineland. He aggressively led his armoured units north in the hopes of capturing the industrial heartland of Germany early on, ripping the heart out of the German war economy and cutting off the invasion force in Belgium. Rokossovsky, however, recognized what the French were doing and launched an offensive into Alsace-Lorraine. This forced the French to withdraw to prevent being cut off and they subsequently redirected De Gaulle’s forces to stymie Rokossovsky’s advance at the foothills of the Vosges.

    Three weeks into the fighting the German right wing reached the coast and crossed the river Somme at the town of Abbeville on June 23rd. Another three weeks later on July 14th, France’s national holiday, German offensives had reached the river Seine and crossed it west of Paris. To avoid the destruction of four field armies in a pocket in the northeast of France, Weygand ordered a withdrawal behind the river Seine before the encirclement could be completed. The government abandoned Paris and used Bordeaux as a temporary capital. By late July, Belgium had fallen and the Germans had advanced to the river Seine while in the south Italian forces had seized Savoy and Nice.

    On Wednesday 31st of July the Germans supported by the REF and to the south the Italians planned to deliver the coup de grace before major reinforcements could arrive from France’s colonies and particularly from British India (thanks to conscription, the British Indian Army could swell to ten million men in wartime, but this mobilization was still underway and it’d take weeks for any of these troops to set foot on European soil). Using superior numbers, the Germans crossed the Seine and advanced to the Loire River in just one week. To the south Cavallero managed to break through the Alps and advance to Grenoble in the north on the Rhone River and to the port of Toulon on the Mediterranean coast.

    By Friday August 9th it wasn’t a matter of if but when France would fall and what to do next. Prime Minister Daladier fired Weygand, promoted the aggressive De Gaulle to General and put him in charge, but even he told Daladier the army was going to collapse. He suggested continuing the war from North Africa and await the reinforcements from the British Empire. The cabinet struggled with the decision to abandon France, but had no choice and gave De Gaulle the go-ahead. De Gaulle shifted forces to Toulon to hold up the Italians so as many troops as possible could be evacuated through Marseille, allowing the Germans to advance as far south as Grenoble and meet the Regio Esercito there. In ten days’ time, the Royal Navy and the French Navy managed to evacuate 1 million men to North Africa (attempts by the Regia Marina to stop this were brushed off). Algiers became the temporary capital of France. Meanwhile, the Luftstreitkräfte and the Regia Aeronautica had total air supremacy and stymied remaining pockets of resistance, resulting in the conquest of France by August 21st. France had fallen in a campaign of only eighty days.

    During the Battle of France, the Germans had implemented what De Gaulle had tried to: an armoured war, now known by the German term “Panzerkrieg”. The British had begun developing armoured vehicles called tanks as breakthrough weapons in 1914-’15, envisioned as tracked “land battleships” or “land ironclads” (concepts for such weapons predated the First Great War by about a decade). While advances in Britain and France took a backseat given that conventional weapons won the war, the Germans became interested in the concept of the Panzer as a breakthrough weapon preventing the stalemate of trench warfare. The German tank force was ahead of what existed elsewhere.

    In 1920 the Panzer I was introduced: this 6 tonne vehicle had 8-22 armour, a top speed of 10 km/h, a main armament of twin 12.7 mm guns mounted in a turret (in keeping with the land battleship concept), a 7.92 mm machine gun in a hull mount and another 7.92 machine gun on the turret. It was the mainstay of the Panzer force for more than a decade, and after that remained in service in rear-guard duties and as a patrol vehicle. The Panzer II weighted twenty tonnes and had a 20 mm gun as well as two 7.92 mm machine guns. In 1940, the latest Panzer appeared: the 23 tonne Panzer III with a 37 mm gun, the heaviest in the world at the time. Panzer IIs constituted the bulk of the German tank force and they rushed through France with air support from fighters, dive-bombers and bombers.

    On the Balkans Front two of the Entente’s Balkan members (Romania and Serbia) collapsed quickly under the weight of the Russian steamroller. Romania had a fairly large army of 650.000 men, but most of it faced the Hungarian Army which wasn’t much smaller. One million Russian troops crossed the Prut River on June 9th and in one week they’d advanced to the river Danube, resulting in Romania’s surrender. Serbia collapsed not long thereafter: Hungarian forces took Belgrade and crossed the Danube in the north while Bulgarian troops marched into Vardar Macedonia in the south. Montenegro helped itself to the border corrections that it saw fit. Russia and Italy convinced Greece to declare war on the Ottoman Empire too. A coalition of Russian, Italian, Bulgarian and Greek forces invaded East Thrace to and laid siege to Constantinople from mid-August, forcing Abdulmejid II to flee as shells rained down on Topkapi Palace.

    Meanwhile, a Russian offensive in north-eastern Turkey in the Caucasus Mountains and an Iranian offensive in the east forced Kemal Pasha to divert troops to these fronts. It was expected that the pressure of having to fight on multiple fronts would cause the Ottoman Empire to collapse, but contrary to expectations it held out by using the geography for their offensive: the Bosporus was a bottle neck and in the northeast and east it was shielded by tall mountains and inhospitable deserts. Additionally, the oil discoveries of the 1920s and 30s had improved Ottoman finances, allowing for infrastructural improvements and military modernization. By September 1940 all three fronts the Ottomans were facing had turned into stalemates and in the meantime 1.5 million troops from British India had disembarked in Basra.

    Of the nine million men India could mobilize, however, most would fight in Asia. Qing China, formally ruled by the Xuantong Emperor, and still led by the Zhili clique had completely consolidated its hold north of the Yellow River. After Cao Kun had died, the military dictatorship was continued by Wu Peifu, the best officer the north had to offer. With Russian help a force of thirty divisions (~ 500.000 men) equipped and trained up to Western standards had been built, led by officers educated at Western military academies. They constituted the core of the Qing Army, a force totalling 4 million men (part of this was financed by oil exports from the massive Daqing Oilfield, which was owned for 25% by Qing China). Wu Peifu decided to put his army to good use by using Europe’s distraction by launching the Southern Expedition: the Republic of China south of the Yellow River was defeated and the protectorates controlled by France and Britain were retaken, including Hong Kong. China was in a position to threaten Burma and then India. Moreover, for the first time in decades one government controlled mainland China (most of it anyway, given that China couldn’t take action against Japan).

    Events in China spurred Japan into action as well: it coveted an empire in Asia and wouldn’t be cheated out of it by the Chinese, who’d apparently managed to literally pull themselves back together. The Imperial Japanese Army invaded French Indochina and Thailand agreed to provide them passage to Malaya. In the meantime, Thailand helped itself to territories it had lost to French Indochina and British Burma at the turn of the century. In The meantime, 100.000 Japanese troops commanded by General Tomoyuki Yamashita took Malaya and laid siege to Singapore for weeks, ultimately losing many troops in costly urban combat. The British only surrendered after supplies of food and water ran out and because there was no hope of relief. A Royal Navy squadron had been destroyed in the Malacca Strait by air attack from a Japanese carrier, precisely in a sea lane where there was almost no room to manoeuvre. Without opposition from the Royal Navy, Japan captured Sabah, Brunei and Sarawak with relative ease (the Dutch East Indies were left alone because Germany insisted on it and because the Dutch agreed to sell Japan oil).

    Further north, Japanese forces overran Burma and prepared for an invasion of British India, expecting to be able to turn the Indians against the British by promising independence. They even papered Calcutta with propagandist leaflets from the air, though with little effect: as a Dominion, India was already mostly independent. Japan would have to fight if it wanted India and it won brilliant victories at Imphal and Kohima, but much more would be needed given India’s enormous size and difficult geography favouring the defender. The Indian defenders ground the Japanese invaders to a halt in Assam in the northeast, a region with mountains, hills and the one thousand kilometre long and 100 km wide flood plain of the river Brahmaputra. It was easily defensible. The Japanese would not advance here, but the Indians didn’t manage to push them back either.

    So by the end of 1940, the war had become a stalemate contrary to earlier expectations, with the only movement in the winter of 1940-’41 taking place in the North African theatre. With the troops already in French North Africa, the remainder of the evacuated French Army numbered over 1.1 million men. The Italian Tenth Army numvered only 250.000 men, but the British had even less men: 60.000 men in Egypt. The Italian battle plan for North Africa hinged on a quick victory in Egypt. Hoping to use his almost 5:1 numerical superiority, General Gariboldi had hoped to squash the British garrison in Egypt and then transfer all the troops to the border with French Tunisia. By then enough reinforcements would have arrived from Italy to halt any offensive by the French, who were expected to take several months to regroup at the least.

    Things turned out differently from what the Comando Supremo had planned. Though feasible on paper, Italian forces in Libya were handicapped by poor morale and inferior equipment. When the Italians invaded, the Tenth Army was dispersed in the first British counteroffensive and had withdrawn to El Agheila in chaos by December. Meanwhile, on December 1st, French forces had launched an offensive from Tunisia and they’d captured Tripoli by Christmas 1940. The Italian position in Libya collapsed and French forces met British forces at Sirte on New Year’s Day, while more than 200.000 soldiers became prisoners of war. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin called it “a delightful start of the new year.” Winston Churchill, his Minister of Defence, who combined this portfolio with the Foreign Office, was less optimistic (the ministry of defence had been created to coordinate defence matters and exercise ministerial control over the chiefs of staff committee). Churchill responded to Baldwin’s elation by dryly stating wars weren’t won in sandboxes.
     
    Chapter XVI: The Second Great War Pt. 2, 1941-1943.
  • Update.

    Chapter XVI: The Second Great War Pt. 2, 1941-1943.

    At the beginning of 1941, the war didn’t really look like it was going anywhere fast. The Ottomans were holding firm, in part thanks to major reinforcements from India and later also from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and other parts of the British Empire, totalling two million men. The Russians, Germans and Italians were surprised by the resolve of the Turks, but weren’t about to give up. The front in northeast India also wasn’t moving much in either direction as trench warfare similar to the original Great War developed. The only major development was Anglo-French victory in Africa, overrunning Libya, Italian East Africa and German Togoland.

    In an effort to destabilize the Ottoman Empire, Germany and Russia convinced Sharif Abdullah to launch an Arab Revolt against the Sultan. They promised him the kingship over a united Arab state and he was keenly interested: he’d been the deputy for Mecca in the Ottoman parliament, but increasingly realized his father’s goals of autonomy for Hejaz and emancipation for the Arabs weren’t going to be realized within the framework of the Ottoman Empire. He was easily sold on the idea of total independence for the Arab provinces and, using his own military experience, was willing to lead an Arab army. Russian and German agents in the Middle East had already been wooing the Arabs for several years before the war and now their labour would bear fruit.

    In February 1941, the Arab Revolt began: including tribesmen and Bedouins, Abdullah’s forces numbered 50.000 and he launched a guerrilla war rather than engaging Ottomans and British, which were by far numerically superior. His troop strength would gradually swell to 150.000 men and his men received arms and provisions from Russia and Germany through Iran. This drew a limited amount of Ottoman forces away from the front and wasn’t a panacea, but an inspiration instead: among the 2.5 million Armenians living in Anatolia a growing and increasingly militant anti-Turkish movement supported by Russia launched an insurgency. The Ottoman tendency to respond with massacres only hardened Armenian resolve, causing the number of insurgents to swell to 200.000.

    The Quadruple Alliance powers identified the Ottomans as the linchpin of the Entente: without it defeated, they could move forces toward the strategic Suez Canal and the equally important Khyber Pass in northwest India. If they controlled the Suez Canal, the British would be forced to send supplies to and from India all the way around the Cape of Good Hope. Not only that, but the canal could be used to provide more supplies to the Arab Revolt. Furthermore, with the Ottomans out of the war Iran could shift its forces to face India, joined by Russian forces. The plan was to attack India, break through and link up with the Japanese somewhere on the Ganges River.

    Finally, if an Arab Kingdom emerged from the partitioned Ottoman Empire, its King would be in control of Mecca and Medina and would subsequently be able to snatch the caliphate from the Ottoman Sultans. Using the title of caliph, a hypothetical King of the Arab could proclaim a jihad against the imperialist British and French. Such a calling could have a major impact on the Muslim world.

    Russian, German and Italian planners intended to overcome the stalemate on the Bosporus, where the isthmus nullified their superior numbers and where trench warfare dominated, by carrying out an amphibious landing just east of Constantinople on the Asian side of the Turkish Straits. The plan was to cut Constantinople and its defenders off from the rest of the Ottoman Empire and beat them through a war of attrition: losing men and cut off from provisions, the garrison should eventually collapse from deprivation.

    Keenly aware that the British would do whatever it took to prevent Russian control of the Turkish Straits, planners decided that any such assault should be preceded by a diversion. False intelligence was spread that an amphibious landing would take place in either Smyrna or Antalya, and a Regia Marina force departed from Taranto. This fleet composed of one battleship, six heavy cruisers, two light cruisers and thirteen destroyers was joined by the entirety of the Greek Navy. The Italo-Greek fleet numbered three battleships, six heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, one armoured cruiser, 27 destroyers and six submarines. The Greco-Italian force was large enough to realistically appear as the gunfire support for an invasion of western Anatolia to the British, who sent a force to intercept it. The fleet the British sent consisted of one aircraft carrier, three battleships, seven light cruisers and seventeen destroyers. Meanwhile, while lacking carrier support, the Italians and Greeks could count on air support from the Regia Aeronautica from bases in Greece.

    The Battle of Cape Matapan that took place between March 7th and March 9th 1941 was a clear tactical victory for the Italians and Greeks, but strategically it was inconclusive. Four British light cruisers and three destroyers were sunk. On the Italo-Greek side one armoured cruiser, one light cruiser and three destroyers were sunk while three heavy cruisers, two destroyers and one battleship were seriously damaged. Both sides claimed victory, but the balance of naval power in the eastern Mediterranean Sea hadn’t fundamentally changed.

    What the battle did do was create a diversion to carry out Operation Iliad: three Russian battleships, three battlecruisers, six heavy cruisers, ten light cruisers and twenty-five destroyers provided the coastal bombardment for a landing of six divisions totalling 75.000 men just 50 kilometres east of Constantinople on March 8th. The Russians held their beachhead and expanded it, advancing south to Izmit, cutting off Constantinople from the rest of Anatolia in doing as they reached the Aegean coast. Within three weeks Russian troop strength in their beachhead had swollen to nearly 400.000 men despite Ottoman attempts to drive them back into the sea.

    Constantinople had been under siege from East Thrace since August, but resupply had always been possible from Anatolia, which changed in this new phase of the siege. The position of the defending garrison, numbering 300.000 men, became increasingly untenable as they faced 500.000 enemy soldiers from the west and another 400.000 from the east. They were outnumbered 3:1 and stocks of ammunitions, food and fuel in the city declined and that forced the city’s military commander to enforce rationing. This only postponed the issue as supplies kept dwindling. Attempts to resupply the besieged city by sea failed because Russian bombers flying from bases in Bulgaria attacked the supply ships, sinking the better part of them. It got to the point that the remaining civilians received a ration of only 200 grams of bread, 50 grams of butter, one potato and no meat. That was roughly 700-800 calories a day; an adult man requires 2.500 and a woman 2.000, so people weren’t even getting half of their daily nutritional requirements. Later that was cut in half. Needless to say hunger plagued the city and disease soon followed. The city finally surrendered in June 1941 and was formally renamed Tsargrad while Patriarch Sergius of Moscow, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, reconsecrated the Hagia Sophia as an Orthodox Church. After almost half a millennium it was no longer a mosque anymore, having returned to Christendom.

    Meanwhile, the war was about to expand with the entry of the United States. Roosevelt was confronted by an isolationist mood, but had done what he could to show he clearly preferred one side over the other. Russia’s imperialism in China had weakened its friendship with the US, something the China lobby in Washington DC had seen to. Russia being allied to Japan through the Quadruple Alliance did nothing to repair US-Russian relations. Japan clearly had different ideas about control of the Pacific. Besides that, US-German relations had been normal, but not cordial by any means since the Great War during which the US had protested the U-boat campaign. In this new war, the U-boats were the German navy’s weapon of choice again because despite their efforts the British still had almost twice as many battleships. The sinking of merchants tarnished US-German relations and seriously hurt Germany’s popularity in America and gave Roosevelt something to work with. The Royal Navy received American destroyers and the US Navy also began escorting American merchants, resulting in a de facto naval war in the Atlantic. Roosevelt also declared a Neutral Zone in the Atlantic Ocean where the US Navy would carry out Neutrality Patrols to enforce said neutrality.

    The Imperial German Navy declared that it didn’t recognize the US Navy’s right to enforce neutrality outside its own territorial waters and added that any merchant shipping headed for Great Britain was fair game. This war was also an economic war and strangling Britain of food and fuel was part of the German strategy. The entire situation was practically begging for an a major incident to happen and two years into the war that was exactly what happened.

    The American battleship USS Texas was on patrol in the Atlantic and – lacking a destroyer screen because the US was officially at peace – was a juicy target to a U-boat who mistook her for a British vessel due to poor visibility. On June 4th 1942, the USS Texas was hit by a spread of three torpedoes fired by U-199. The ship capsized so quickly that it took half of her crew with her, an incident that sparked outrage and led to anti-German agitation. Given Germany’s refusal to stop the unrestricted U-boat campaign and guarantee the safety of all American military and civilian ships, citing the incident as American provocation, Congress was persuaded by Roosevelt to declare war on Germany. Germany’s allies Russia, Italy and Japan in turn declared war on the US.

    An American Expeditionary Force was created to send to the front in the Middle East under the command of Lieutenant-General Stafford LeRoy Irwin numbering 150.000 men. That number would increase rapidly as volunteers soon joined the army, followed by conscription. In the beginning they were deployed to contain the Russians and their allies in the northeast of Anatolia after their capture of Constantinople. This front was largely static and soon the AEF would be transferred to Tunisia to support a British operation in the Mediterranean. Both the Americans and British thought the AEF could be of greater use there.

    Churchill as defence minister involved himself intensely with the chiefs of staff and the admiralty, pushing his soft underbelly strategy: it involved invading Italy. Italy as the weakest of the four members of the Quadruple Alliance was expected to fold quickly. When that happened, Churchill thought the Allies could then threaten Germany from the south by breaking through the Ljubljana Gap into the Slovenian Plateau, take Vienna, advance along the Danube into Bavaria and then swing north toward Berlin. That plan would prove to be seriously flawed.

    In August 1942, British, American and French forces landed on Sicily and took the island in one month and landed on the toe of the Italian boot the next month, but the assumption that Italy would cave quickly when facing invasion was proven incorrect. German commander Rundstedt sent reinforcements commanded by a defence specialist: General Walter Model. Model decided on a delaying action in Sicily, believing the island couldn’t be held, and intended for most of the fighting to take place on the mainland. He would try stop the Allies as far south as possible, well aware of the excellent defensive properties of the mountainous landscape that dominated most of the peninsula. Breaking one defensive line after another would be a gruelling affair and the weather didn’t help at all as autumn began. For much of autumn and winter, Allied forces were contained in Calabria, where their numbers swelled as more and more fresh American troops arrived. There were half a million by October, so a breakout was a matter of time. They settled on May the following year, expecting the weather to be favourable then and for American numbers to have swollen to 1 million.

    In the meantime, the war had expanded to the Pacific of course as the US faced Japan and to a lesser extent Russia there. Immediately after the US entered the war, Japan had invaded the Philippines and set up successive defensive belts on island chains in the Pacific. The Imperial Japanese Navy tried to implement its “decisive battle doctrine” or “Kantai Kessen”, but was unsuccessful. The inflicted sensitive defeats on the US Navy in the Marshall Islands and the Gilbert Islands, but didn’t affect the enemy’s numerical superiority. The US Navy had more battleships and more aircraft carriers. Eventually, a confrontation near Hawaii in January 1943 became the decisive battle, but not in the way the Japanese had hoped: they lost three fleet carriers in the Battle of Hawaii as the US Navy had been forewarned of the attack thanks to breaking the enemy’s codes. Japan was forced into a defensive stance. To the north the Russians scored a small victory useful for propaganda, but not much else: they occupied the Aleutian Islands and from there carried out some pinprick bombing raids on Anchorage and Juneau.

    Germany, by now, had informed its three partners of a secret weapons development program under the fairly inconspicuous name “Uranverein” (uranium club). Nuclear fission had been discovered in 1938 by the chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann and physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin. Nuclear physicists realized that nuclear weapons were now a theoretical possibility. The army wasn’t interested, but the admiralty realized the potential of a bomb that could wipe out an entire fleet given that its rival, the Royal Navy, was still almost twice the size of the Imperial German Navy and that the U-boats hadn’t been able to do much about it.

    In 1939, a team that included the likes of Einstein, Frisch, Meitner, Strassmann, Diebner, Heisenberg, Ulam, Teller, Schumann, Geiger, Bothe, Clusius, Weizsäcker and Esau began working on a nuclear weapons program in a massive underground complex dug underneath the Bavarian Alps. A few Russian and Italian scientists joined such as Igor Kurchatov, Georgy Flyorov and Enrico Fermi joined the team. Believing other countries were probably going to try getting nuclear weapons to win the war as well, they concluded they needed to make sure Germany reached the finish line first. Realizing the vast potential of the United States, the four powers needed to hold out until the weapon was ready. All agreed they wouldn’t surrender without the permission of the other three.
     
    Chapter XVII: Shifting the Balance, 1943-1945.
  • Chapter XVII: Shifting the Balance, 1943-1945.

    In May 1943, the advance up the Italian boot commenced in earnest. The Italian Campaign was a slow and bloody war of attrition. The Italians and their German allies made effective use of the excellent defensive properties of the mountainous peninsula, inflicting significantly more casualties than they incurred. The advance was slow but inexorable, prompting Russia to send reinforcements too, drawing them from mountain troops originally intended for use in the Caucasus Mountains. In the two years that followed the Allies nonetheless managed to reach Rome, causing serious concerns in Berlin and St. Petersburg that Italy might not live up to its commitment to stay in the war. Germany and Russia doubled their military presence to ensure Rome would not fall: Tsar Alexander III declared the Third Rome would not let the First Rome fall again.

    The Pacific theatre of the war also wasn’t going to well ever since the Battle of Hawaii, in which the Imperial Japanese Navy had lost a significant portion of its carrier fleet. Germany had carriers, but considered sending them halfway across the globe to be a suicide mission. Meanwhile, the smaller Imperial Russian Navy’s operations were limited to the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea. Even after the fall of the Bosporus its options were limited to operating in the Aegean Sea, using air cover from bases in the Aegean Islands to ward off the massively superior Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet. Venturing further into the Mediterranean was not an option given that it was largely an Anglo-American lake, forcing the Regia Marina to stay in port as a “fleet in being”. Even if it could safely have done so, Gibraltar and the Suez Canal remained solidly under British control. Other than sending some submarines out into the Pacific, Russia wasn’t willing to send its Pacific Fleet because they correctly assumed the much larger US Navy would just destroy it. What Russia did do was to supply its Japanese ally with oil, coal and steel so its war industry could continue to produce at optimum efficiency. Other than that, however, Japan faced the tremendous industrial might of the United States alone.

    After the Battle of Hawaii, the 1943-1945 period saw Japan’s defensive belts out in the Pacific Ocean succumb to the American island hopping campaign. Successive campaigns in the Gilbert Islands, the Marshall Islands, the Marianas and the Palau Islands. Japan’s naval commander Admiral Yamamoto tried to delay the Americans as much as possible, employing a new strategy: instead of trying to lure the US Navy into a decisive battle, the Japanese hoped to lure out, trap and destroy portions of it and whittle it down. This approach was implemented with varying degrees of success, the most successful example being the Battle of the Philippine Sea:

    The Battle of the Philippine Sea from February 17th to 19th 1945 was the last time Japanese scored a naval victory in the war. A massive fleet of American ships of course supported their landings on Saipan, Tinian and Guam which took place in January and February 1945. Japan had been spreading false intelligence about the readiness of the remainder of its fleet, of its intentions and of its fuel and ammunitions reserves for weeks, correctly assuming where the next American amphibious landings would take place and that the Americans had breached Japanese naval codes. In early February a false message was leaked signed by Yamamoto that he couldn’t afford to send more than one fleet carrier, three light carriers, three battleships, six heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, fifteen destroyers and twelve submarines. The US planned to intercept with a fleet of three fleet carriers, five light carriers, five battleships, eight heavy cruisers, twelve light cruisers, 52 destroyers and sixteen submarines. US Admiral Spruance incorrectly believed he had a superior force, but in reality he was walking into an enemy trap. In reality Yamamoto brought to bear four fleet carriers, six light carriers, five battleships, eleven heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, 31 destroyers and 24 submarines. The Japanese lost just one fleet carrier while the Americans lost two fleet carriers, two battleships and one light carrier. It was a clear tactical victory for the Imperial Japanese Navy, but strategically it was inconclusive: America’s numerical superiority in capital ships remained intact.

    Admiral Nimitz decided to spring a trap of his own. Besides Russian deliveries of oil, Japan imported the rest of the oil it required from the Dutch East Indies as the Dutch had kept selling thanks to some minor German diplomatic pressure (German-Dutch relations were cordial). Great Britain and the United States applied pressure of their own to make them stop, to the point of threatening to impose a naval blockade or occupying the Dutch colony in Southeast Asia. Emboldened by the minor success in the Philippine Sea, the Japanese got overconfident and tried to regain the initiative by launching a pre-emptive invasion of the Dutch East Indies. The fleet escorting the troop transports, however, was ambushed and destroyed in the Battle of Palawan by a US carrier fleet.

    The Allies kept the pressure on Japan as much as they did on Italy, which was part of their long term plan for fighting the war called the “four pillar strategy” envisioned it by Secretary of War Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower had graduated from West Point in 1915 just like American Expeditionary Force commander Stafford LeRoy Irwin, a full four star general by now. Eisenhower, a lieutenant colonel, became acting commander of US forces in the Philippines when his superior General Douglas McArthur was killed in a plane crash. He remained in that position until 1939, by which time he’d gotten a pilot’s license and had been promoted to the rank of general. Trying to win bipartisan support, Roosevelt had offered the Republican conservative Henry L. Stimson his old position of Secretary of War. Stimson would only help Roosevelt in return for the more prestigious post of Secretary of State and he recommended Eisenhower instead.

    Eisenhower’s four pillar strategy was expressed by his statement that “the Quadruple Alliance is a temple held up by four pillars. The two outer pillars are weaker than the centre ones. With the outer two pillars gone, the entire thing becomes wobbly.” By the inner pillars he meant Russia and Germany, correctly implying that Japan and Italy were the weaker junior partners. Eisenhower was indeed right: whereas Russia and Germany were the world’s second and third economies respectively when the US entered the war in 1942, Japan and Italy trailed behind as fifth and sixth. The United States, Great Britain, the Ottoman Empire and Free France (France’s colonies) were the world’s first, fourth, seventh and eighth economies respectively.

    Eisenhower assessed that Japan and Italy could be brought to heel by late 1945 or early 1946, after which the economic potential of the Anglo-Americans and its junior partners would outclass that of the Russo-German partnership. Indeed, the economies of the US, Britain, the Ottoman Empire, France’s colonies and the smaller Allied powers were larger than those of Russia and Germany combined. Stimson and Eisenhower both believed that with Japan and Italy knocked out of the war, the Russians and the Germans would acquiesce to a conditional surrender. After all, the alternative was fighting on in the increasingly faint hope of victory, which would more likely result in a worse defeat and a worse peace deal. The losses would be terrible, but Anglo-American commanders expected victory in such a war by 1948 in the most optimistic estimates and 1950 in the most pessimistic ones. The Russians and Germans wouldn’t want that either, Allied leaders believed.

    By early 1945 it was believed Berlin and St. Petersburg would cut their losses and accept a face saving peace. As winter turned into spring and then summer, the US and the UK became increasingly confused when this scenario did not play out and their enemies stubbornly continued to resist. This way the war might well continue until 1947 or even ’48 and cost countless lives. Washington DC and London counted on their respective atomic bomb programs to break the enemy’s unexpected and unusual resolve, in addition to the conventional night bombing campaigns against German cities (and the German reprisal bombings against British cities). They hadn’t counted on the enemy getting the atomic bomb first.
     
    Chapter XVIII: Birth of the Atomic Age, 1945.
  • Chapter XVIII: Birth of the Atomic Age, 1945.

    On Sunday May 6th at 01:00 AM the fruit of the labour of the Uranverein Program was loaded onto a heavily secured armoured train at the secret installation in southern Bavaria near Berchtesgaden. It was transported to a test site in Thuringia near the town of Ohrdruf, which had already been completely evacuated with the locals receiving generous subsidies for their relocation. At 05:00 AM local time the weapon codenamed Thor was detonated, generating a 22 kiloton blast and a flash that illuminated the northern slope of the Thuringian Forest brighter than day while base camp was as hot as an oven. The resulting crater was 1.3 metres deep and 75 metres wide and the abandoned town had been destroyed. The blast was noticed as far as 150 km away as were the lights, but a press release prepared weeks in advance explained it to the civilian population as an explosion in an ammunitions factory. Chancellor Franz von Papen and Emperor Wilhelm III, who had succeeded his father in 1941, were informed that it was “a healthy baby boy.” The weapon was an implosion-type plutonium based design, as the bomb designers had decided against the less efficient though easier to build gunshot-type uranium based fission bomb.

    The Kaiserliche Deutsche Luftwaffe (Imperial German Air Force) had primarily been designed to win a war in Europe and to provide tactical air support, so its largest aircraft up until the war had been medium bombers and dive bombers. Luftwaffe officers such as Erhard Milch and Minister of Aviation Manfred von Richthofen, however, realized that the United States might be drawn into a future war either through an escalation of the U-boat war (which had caused tensions between Germany and the US in the previous war) or through conflict with Japan in the Pacific. Their foresight meant that by 1945 Germany had a strategic bomber capable of carrying first-generation nuclear weapons, which weighed 4.5 tonnes. The Messerschmitt Me 264 still had a range of 8.600 km with a six tonne payload.

    An Me 264 took off from a military airfield near Berlin on Monday June 18th 1945 and crossed the North Sea, reaching the intended target: Newcastle upon Tyne, selected for being a centre of coal production and for the role of its heavy industry in the production of ships and armaments. The bomber reached the target at 07:45 AM and released the weapon, which detonated with a yield of 20 kilotons and produced a second sun in the sky. Out of a population of roughly 335.000 about 75.000 people, almost all of whom were civilians, were killed and the body count would double within six months due to injury and radiation sickness. The radius of total destruction was about 1.6 kilometres and 80% of the city’s buildings were either destroyed or severely damaged.

    After the atomic bombing of Newcastle, Germany threatened “prompt and utter annihilation” if Britain refused to surrender unconditionally, prompting a cabinet crisis. The aging Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin didn’t want to see more cities destroyed and was in favour of trying to negotiate to get the unconditional element of the surrender off the table. He thought returning Germany’s colonies lost in 1916 would go a long way. The Germans indeed were planning to demand their old colonies back and a few French ones for good measure, so Baldwin’s assumption was correct. Foreign Minister and Defence Minister Winston Churchill, however, argued that Britain hadn’t surrendered when other cities had been bombed and shouldn’t surrender now either. In his persuasive style he argued that peace meant a Russo-German continental hegemony dominating Eurasia. This would constitute the demise of the balance of power that Great Britain had striven to maintain for centuries. This would make the British Empire vulnerable. The Russo-German bloc could impose a successful version of Napoleon’s Continental System, i.e. an embargo that could force Britain to accept demands from Berlin and St. Petersburg. In his view Britain would then be susceptible to the whims of a continental tyranny. He accused Baldwin of being a weak, spineless old man who wasn’t up to the job anymore.

    After an intense debate, the majority of the cabinet sided with Winston Churchill and Baldwin resigned citing health reasons (he was 77 years old at the time). Up until 1945 Winston Churchill had been the only person besides John Simon who had served as Home Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer as well as Foreign Minister (without obtaining the office of Prime Minister). Besides these offices he had also served as President of the Board of Trade, First Lord of the Admiralty, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Secretary of State for War, Secretary of State for Air, Secretary of State for the Colonies and Minister of Defence. Churchill became Baldwin’s successor on June 20th.

    The prize of Prime Minister was now added to this impressive list, but views on the legacy of his short premiership vary widely. Defenders of the British Empire cast him as a tragic hero who had valiantly tried to prevent Britain’s decline to second-tier power status vis-à-vis an authoritarian Russo-German bloc and had failed due to circumstances. His opponents paint him as a fool who tried to delay the inevitable or as an ambitious, careerist, power hungry politician determined to add the title of PM to his impressive curriculum vitae. Modern views of him are somewhere in between.

    On June 23rd, Germany’s wartime leadership resolved to carry out a second nuclear strike and selected Scapa Flow as the next target, which served as Britain’s main naval base primarily because of its great distance from German airfields. The British realized that the new Me 264 bomber might well be able to strike as far north as Scapa Flow. Despite Churchill’s order to redeploy all ships still in Scapa Flow to Nova Scotia 48 hours prior, several major capital ships remained at Scapa Flow as their crews embarked and stocks were replenished before their evacuation to Canada. Battleships HMS Saint Andrew and USS Washington, battlecruiser HMS Invincible, aircraft carriers HMS Victorious and USS Wasp and heavy cruiser USS Wichita were still in port. The German bomb dropped on June 23rd at 10:00 PM produced an estimated yield of 22 kilotons, damaging the ships still in port beyond repair. There were 10.000 fatalities, about 80% of which were naval crews; the 2.000 civilian casualties amounted to one tenth of the population of the Orkney Islands. Though less fatal than the Newcastle strike, it gutted a community.

    More strikes took place after that as German scientists cast plutonium cores as fast as they could to put in the pits of new bombs. British attempts to make a nuclear bombing campaign less effective didn’t work. Britain initially stubbornly refused to surrender and instead tried to deal with nuclear war by evacuating all but non-essential personnel to the countryside and dispersing essential industries to hastily built underground sites. One more nuclear strike took place in June a week after Scapa Flow was hit: Colchester, significant for its infantry and light-anti-aircraft training units and the large proportion of engines provided for British submarines and landing craft by the Paxman factory. Three new plutonium cores were put into bombs that were dropped on Dover, Folkestone and Hastings in July, resulting in tens of thousands of civilian casualties. A British counterstrike with mustard gas and phosgene against Hamburg led to a retaliatory nuclear strike on Manchester on August 1st, chosen for the Dunlop rubber works and several factories producing aircraft engines.

    Faith in Churchill’s as a wartime PM sank to an all-time low in the cabinet and the high public support he had enjoyed in the beginning had melted away like snow in the sun. At this point it became clear to Britain’s leadership that Germany had the means and the will to continue producing atomic bombs with which it could continue to devastate British cities. The only question was which city would be next: would it be Liverpool, Edinburgh or maybe merry old London herself? After the atomic bombing of Manchester, motion of no-confidence against Churchill was presented in the commons by one of his fellow Tories: John Lees-Jones, Member of Parliament for Manchester Blackley, presented the motion and represented the desperation of his hard hit constituency. Churchill saw which way the wind was blowing and tendered his resignation to King Edward VIII after only three months in office, upon which Anthony Eden became the new PM.

    Eden’s first order of business was to request a formal armistice from Germany, though at first trying to obtain a partial surrender only to Germany and Russia and not against Japan and Italy. German Chancellor Von Papen, Russian Prime Minister Stravinsky, Japanese Prime Minister Tojo and Italian Prime Minister Orlando responded with a communique that the war against Britain would continue until it signed an armistice agreement with the four of them. Eden had no choice and signed an armistice agreement containing the following terms: cessation of hostilities on all fronts, withdrawal of forces back to British territory, demilitarization south of the Thames, the surrender of military material and the Royal Navy in particular, the release of German prisoners of war and interned civilians, no release of British prisoners, and eventual war reparations. German troops occupied British territory south of the Thames to enforce the terms of the armistice and a German military governor was installed in the historically important city of Canterbury.

    The surrender of Great Britain was a watershed event in the history of the British Empire. The dominions each concluded separate peace agreements quite easily as they had nothing Russia, Germany, Japan, Italy and their minor allies would want. Canada even seceded from the Empire, becoming a republic with a foreign policy oriented much more toward its southern neighbour. Meanwhile, India was now the most powerful remaining country in the British Commonwealth, with a standing army of ten million that took over the positions that British soldiers withdrew from under the terms of Britain’s armistice with the victors. The term “British Empire” would increasingly be phased out in favour of “Anglo-Indian Empire” as the dynamic shifted, with India now being the strongest economic and military power of the realm. The title Emperor of India eclipsed that of King of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as Connaught Place in New Delhi did the City of London.

    The United States, however, were still in the war and still willing to win a partial victory by knocking Japan out of the war. It withdrew its naval and army assets from Europe and the Middle East to deploy them against Japan, which they planned to invade in 1946. Japan had been fighting a losing war, despite Russian deliveries of coal, oil and steel, because its partners couldn’t provide naval support against the overwhelming might of the US Navy. The Germans weren’t planning on sending the High Seas Fleet all the way to the Pacific and the Russian Navy was too small to matter anyway. German U-boats had some successes in the Atlantic and Russian subs in the Pacific, but not enough to matter.

    The United States would feel the effects of this new weapon now too. With Britain out of the war, the German Navy might force the US Navy to redeploy forces to the Atlantic, but with nuclear weapons the Germans didn’t feel the need to use their fleet). Instead an Me 264 strategic bomber took off from an airfield in occupied France and dropped a 22 kiloton that devastated much of lower Manhattan. After Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington DC were hit too, the United States reluctantly agreed to a separate peace that amounted to a to status quo ante bellum. This left the Quadruple Alliance in a position to redraw the world map.
     
    Chapter XIX: The Post-War Order, 1945-1947.
  • Update time! Before anyone asks: Russia's wins are covered in the next chapter ;)


    Chapter XIX: The Post-War Order, 1945-1947.

    After the United States had agreed to bow out of the war without any territorial concessions or war reparations, the entire Entente powers were at the tender mercies of the Quadruple Alliance. They could only plead for leniency and tried to play them apart: Britain did so by advising the Germans that they could be of great help against growing Russian power that had already eclipsed German power. Meanwhile, the French also predicted a Russo-German rivalry over influence in Central and Eastern Europe. At this time, however, what was to be gained from the losers would be enough to content the victors. There was enough to be had. In the Moscow Peace Conference held in the Kremlin, territorial changes were decided upon across Eurasia from the white cliffs of Dover to northern China and also in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

    In Western Europe, Belgium was partitioned: the Dutch-speaking Flemish part was annexed by the Netherlands, giving them three major ports in total: next to Amsterdam and Rotterdam now also Antwerp. The francophone half Wallonia was annexed by Germany because of its significant coal reserves and steel industry. Belgium had ceased to exist after an existence of little over one hundred years.

    France not only had to part with Alsace-Lorraine again after winning it back less than thirty years prior, but also had to cede the coal and steel producing Briey-Longwy region and that would reduce France to a medium economic power. France had to accept the loss of its great power status and that the best thing they could aspire to was to be some kind of junior partner role to Germany, competing for German favour with Italy. Italy clearly had the advantage and could annex Nice, Savoy and Corsica. France had to establish demilitarized zones 50 km deep on their borders with Germany and France and accept the establishment of German naval bases at Calais and Brest which Germany would lease for 99 years. Italy acquired a similar lease for a naval base at Toulon. France was not allowed to develop nuclear weapons.

    Great Britain didn’t lose any territory in the British Isles, but had to restrict the size of its navy to 50% of the Imperial German Navy’s tonnage and had to keep England south of the Thames River demilitarized. Entanglement in foreign alliances had led Britain to this, imperilling the British Empire and so the new government would adopt a foreign policy of Splendid Isolation to make sure that didn’t happen again. Britain would maintain a large standing army as the navy could no longer be counted on to hold off an amphibious invasion, an army specializing in guerrilla warfare as conventional war was no option against an enemy that could tactically use nuclear weapons. The government nationalized coal, oil, steel, shipping and heavy industry and created the welfare state, which included the National Health Service. This government was led by Clement Attlee, the leader of Labour which won the first UK general election in 1945 in a landslide whereas the Tories were decimated. Labour had an absolute majority in the House of Commons.

    In the Balkans, significant territorial changes took place too. Hungary, being one of the victors, took the entirety of Transylvania and made sure to completely “Magyarize” it by expelling the entire Romanian population, which amounted to 3.7 million people. The violent way in which this forced displacement took place was tantamount to genocide, with hundreds of thousands dying from violence, deprivation and illness. The Turks who’d settled Eastern Rumelia after the Bulgarian Genocide and the Serb minority in Vardar Macedonia were in similar bad luck: the victorious Bulgarians annexed Eastern Rumelia and Vardar Macedonia, exacting revenge by enacting systematic ethnic cleansing.

    The settling of scores in the Balkans did not end there. Bosnia-Herzegovina and the majority Croat portions of Yugoslavia were broken off and formed into the independent Kingdom of Croatia, an Italian satellite state. King Victor Emmanuel III’s first cousin once removed Prince Amedeo, 3rd Duke of Aosta, became its king under the regnal name Tomislav II. Under Prime Minister Ante Pavelic, ethnic cleansing was carried out targeting the Serbian minority. The people of Serbia and Romania were left severely traumatized by the aftermath of the war. Greece, despite its neutrality, was forced to cede Western Thrace to Bulgaria.

    The Ottoman Empire’s lingering influence in the Balkans had finally been removed and it was now subjected to partition. Russia annexed the Bosporus as well as Turkish Armenia and incorporated Anatolia’s Black Sea coast as well. This ensured a contiguous land link between Russia proper so that the Bosporus wasn’t an exclave that could be cut off from reinforcement by anyone with a superior navy. Constantinople was rechristened Tsargrad. Greece was rewarded with Smyrna and Cyprus to compensate the loss of Western Thrace. Italy established a naval base at Antalya, which became a de facto part of its sphere of influence. Greater Syria, defined as the territory between the Taurus Mountains and the Sinai, was awarded to Sharif Abdullah of Mecca who also took control in the Arab Peninsula. The Levant and the Arab Peninsula (minus Oman, Yemen and some Gulf states) formed a united Sunni Arab kingdom under the Hashemites. The Sharif of Mecca was proclaimed King Abdullah I of the Arabs and he assumed the title of Caliph, which the Ottoman Sultans had held for so long. Iran annexed the predominantly Shia Arab Baghdad and Basra vilayets; the Mosul vilayet became an independent Kurdish republic. What remained of the Ottoman Empire was a Turkish rump state in Anatolia with its capital in Ankara, where Sultan Ahmed IV ruled as a Russian puppet.

    The African map was redrawn too. All of Germany’s lost colonies were returned: Cameroon, German Southwest Africa (Namibia) and Tanganyika. But given their nuclear monopoly, the Germans could take what they wanted and they did exactly that in their ambition to realize Mittelafrika: the name for an envisioned German geostrategic region in central and east Africa. French Guinea, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Upper Volta, Gold Coast, Dahomey, Nigeria, Ubangi-Chari, Gabon, Middle Congo, Belgian Congo and Rhodesia were all taken and merged into German Central Africa. Germany also assumed control of the French protectorate over Morocco.

    The policies that had made Togoland into a “model economy” were implemented everywhere to make the African subjects into “Black Germans”. Now, with a colonial empire rich in diamonds, gold, rare metals, critical minerals and oil the German colonial venture did turn a profit. Probably the greatest advance would be the construction of the “Kaiser Wilhelm Hydroelectric Works”, a series of four dams on the Inga Falls (a group of cataracts in the Congo River downstream of Livingstone Falls and Stanley Pool). These dams were envisioned by a German engineer who calculated in a 1945 study that with the Congo River’s flood rate a series of dams could generate nearly 40.000 megawatts, enough to electrify the entire African continent at the time with capacity to spare. Construction would begin in 1947 and take a decade.

    Meanwhile, Italy wanted to connect Libya and Italian East Africa with a contiguous land link, establishing a large colonial empire in the northeast of Africa that controlled the strategically important Suez Canal and the Red Sea. The virtual British protectorate over Egypt was supplanted by an Italian one, which was formalized by an Italo-Egyptian treaty, with an Italian resident in Cairo wielding most power. This treaty also determined that the co-dominium that Britain and Egypt had over Sudan – which in practice ensured British control even though in theory London and Cairo shared sovereignty and administration – switched to Italy now. The small remaining British colonial presence consisted of Gambia (a sliver in northwest Africa), Kenya, Uganda, Bechuanaland and the dominion of South Africa.

    In Asia, some colonial holdings switched control as well. Imperial Japan got back all the islands in the Pacific the US had conquered. It gained French Indochina, Burma, Malaysia as colonies whilst establishing a protectorate over Thailand. Playing Britain and France apart to maintain independence would no longer work in this situation. Thailand could not resist Japanese pressure now that it was surrounded by Japanese territory. Japan, having been bombed heavily, also received war reparations to fund its recovery and had high hopes of becoming the leading power in East Asia again. Somebody else, however, was going to grab that title.
     
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