Zagan
Donor
I think it is borderline plausible. Maybe it would be better to leave the Sambia Peninsula out.
The Silver Knight, a Lithuania Timeline
- Thread starter Augenis
- Start date
The Lithuanians didn't seem to suffer too bad from 19th century tactics before.... Was visegrad also suffering? Perhaps Kwasnievski is a Brusilov-esque figure who manages to derive success from realizing how pro properly do modern war before his fellows realize the same?
Well, they did suffer from outdated tactics before, from the very beginning of the war in fact - their leadership saw the war as winnable with a single campaign through Poland (the July Offensive) and were, at first, inept about trenches and fortifications.
About Kwasniewski, that could work as an explanation.
Just reading the timeline, haven't got to the end, but I need to make a correction:
In almost every circumstance, possession is denoted with an apostrophe. For example, "the cat's contemporaries".
However, apostrophes are not used with pronouns, and "it" is a pronoun. The correct grammar would be "keep up with its contemporaries".
Compare "her contemporaries", "our contemporaries", "your contemporaries", "his contemporaries", etc. None of them use an apostrophe.
It's a counterintuitive situation with "its", but you get used to it.
"it's" should be "its". I've noticed you have made this mistake a lot, which is understandable.
In almost every circumstance, possession is denoted with an apostrophe. For example, "the cat's contemporaries".
However, apostrophes are not used with pronouns, and "it" is a pronoun. The correct grammar would be "keep up with its contemporaries".
Compare "her contemporaries", "our contemporaries", "your contemporaries", "his contemporaries", etc. None of them use an apostrophe.
It's a counterintuitive situation with "its", but you get used to it.
I've already expressed my grievances with the English language in this forum before, so this just adds to thatJust reading the timeline, haven't got to the end, but I need to make a correction:
"it's" should be "its". I've noticed you have made this mistake a lot, which is understandable.
In almost every circumstance, possession is denoted with an apostrophe. For example, "the cat's contemporaries".
However, apostrophes are not used with pronouns, and "it" is a pronoun. The correct grammar would be "keep up with its contemporaries".
Compare "her contemporaries", "our contemporaries", "your contemporaries", "his contemporaries", etc. None of them use an apostrophe.
It's a counterintuitive situation with "its", but you get used to it.
Thank you very much for the correction.
European penetration in Polynesia is barely existent. The only two countries which have expressed any interest in the region are Britannia (due to the proximity to it's colony) and the Netherlands (which are interested in potential bases for inter-Pacific travel). Britannia officially claims regions of Polynesia, including OTL New Caledonia and Vanuatu, but it's mostly just a fancy paper rather than a degree of control. Fiji, Tonga, Hawaii and other Polynesian civilizations are chugging along just fine.
Interesting. I wonder how long Siberia and the Polynesias will remain unclaimed. Will China/Russia/the Euros eventually make formal claims, or will some native groups organize onto states as modern technology and ideas trickle in?
I just hope that they don't turn into de-facto corporate colonies.
I just hope that they don't turn into de-facto corporate colonies.
Even if they manage to overthrow the Ottoman Regime and make peace with the BAC the disgruntled ethnic groups will try and break off no matter how well meaning the Unitarians are. Which will be exploited by the Mughals and Visegradians.
Chapter 68: Delenda Est
Part 68: Delenda Est (Sep-Dec 1912)
The Pfalz Offensive in the Western Front continued into the fall of 1912, more and more men were being funneled into this 20 kilometer long section of the frontline in preparation for what's to come. After barely managing to secure a perimeter on the right bank of the Rhine, the French Army set a new goal, this time to take the city of Frankfurt, one of the largest centers of population in South Germania, located about 20 miles to the east of the perimeter. Sounds simple enough, right? After all, 20 miles is merely a day's walk... You'd be, obviously, wrong - this is the Great European War after all. The Battle of Frankfurt was the second mass-scale battle in this offensive, involving over 500 thousand soldiers from each side and lasting until the beginning of December. Six French armies advanced along the river Main, and intense trench warfare erupted in the valleys. Third-party spectators, mostly Italian or Danish medics, reported that constant artillery bombardment, liberal use of poison gas shells, endless air bombing and infantry combat turned the previously lush and green fields into a desolate and dreary wasteland. No life could be found in no man's land. On November 2nd, the 2nd Reserve Army broke through three kilometers of German defenses and reached the outskirts of Frankfurt, and the French high command requested their German peers to declare Frankfurt to be an open city and thus evacuate it to preserve it's beautiful Medieval architecture and historic landmarks.
Knowing that, despite preserving the city, this action would mean giving in to the French, the Germans said no, and the defenders of the city began constructing fortifications and barricades to defend it street by street. This came as a surprise to their French peers, especially since the 2nd Reserve Army was too weakened by the constant push to be able to attack the town - but they did so anyway. The urban warfare in Frankfurt continued for almost a month, resulting in the destruction of much of the city, but France, unable to break the defense, eventually had to pull back and fortify in more defensible positions down the river Main. An another winter was coming, and d'Esperey's hope to take Frankfurt before the snow falls collapsed - all France acquired was a few miles of scorched earth.
While Germania technically won the Pfalz Offensive, even they weren't as enthusiastic about this war as they once were. Resource shortages were plaguing both the North and the South, and things like iron and nitrates, valuable to both military and civilian industry, were in very short supply, and the Entente naval blockade didn't help. A considerable portion of western German industry was now either occupied or damaged by air bombardment. Resource shortages were not an issue in France, yet, but the thousands of young men who died, were injured or became blinded from gas in the Western Front was giving even the harshest warmongers second thoughts.
And yet, the government of neither side were even considering a peace.
The remains of a forest in Wiesbaden after the Pfalz Offensive
While the Entente may have been losing in the Pyrenees and tailing to accomplish it's objectives in the West, a much different song was being sung in the Northern Front. In early September, Emperor Žygimantas IV enacted one of his few logically sound actions throughout this whole war, that being appointing General Stanislovas Apuokas as the new supreme commander of the front with Sweden. Apuokas was an ethnic Lithuanian from Estonia, and before his service in the North, he commanded military units in the Northeastern Territories, fought numerous battles against local Komi and Nenets uprisings, and was responsible for the creation of Lithuania's Šauliai ("marksmen") regiments, elite units trained to fight in the boreal forest and tundra, similar to German Jägers and French Chasseurs - so it's no surprise that he was the man most qualified for fighting in Karelia and Finland. Why wasn't he appointed to the position sooner? He was not on good terms with Grand Chancellor Vincentas Jonas Čepukas, and the shadow ruler of the country kept persuading the Emperor to not appoint Apuokas in that post despite pretty much everyone else in the Council of Lords begging him to give the experienced general a chance.
Apuokas's expertise in the north showed mere weeks after his appointment, as the reorganized and reinforced Lithuanian army surrounded and crushed a number of Swedish units around Helsingfors, and with the gap in the front lines pretty much begging to be exploited, the Lithuanians began a sweep across southern Finland. Åbo, the capital of Swedish Finland, fell in late October, and the front line started to stabilize. The successes in Finland allowed Lithuania to acquire an another strategic victory - the capture of the Moonsund Archipelago. Formerly belonging to Livonia, it was the only piece of the country not captured by the Lithuanians in the Twenty Years' War, and thus fell under Swedish control, becoming a major naval and fishing base. Despite it's proximity to the Empire, it was protected by the Swedish Navy, until the end of 1912, when Lithuanian victories both at land and on sea gave them a window of opportunity to land troops on the archipelago and seize it. Sweden joined the ever growing club of nations regretting their entrance into the Great European War - in their case, they didn't even really want to join in the first place. They applied to join the Coalition because of perceived grievances in the Conference of Rome, and yet they were forced to fight Lithuania, a country which they didn't really have any bad blood with.
Finnish nationalists, Norwegian separatists and Unitarians of all kinds were rising in popularity in the Kingdom of the North. However, they weren't planning to leave the war just yet.
Swedish soldiers in a camp near Tampere, early December, 1912
Fortune may have been following the Lithuanians in Sweden, but the Eastern Front was a different beast. The main focus of the Lithuanian Army was the city of Karaliaučius, also known in German as Königsberg and in Polish as Krolewiec, which was under the threat of Visegradian occupation. Karaliaučius was not only a major industrial and demographic center, the capital of Lithuanian Prussia, but also an important source of national pride - after all, it used to be the heart of the Teutonic Order, one of Lithuania's first major adversaries, and it being under Lithuanian control was a testament to how the Empire of the East was able to surpass any and all rivals it met. As such, the Grand Hetman ordered the Army to make sure Karaliaučius doesn't fall. The Visegradian General Staff was aware of this stubbornness, and it hatched a plan to "bleed the Lithuanians dry" by forcing them to defend the city and draw attention to it. The Battle of Karaliaučius started in early September after the arrival of Bohemian reinforcements to bolster the 2nd Polish Army, and lasted until Christmas of 1912. Within the next four or so months, the beautiful city was practically razed to the ground during one of the largest and bloodiest battles in the Eastern Front, where over 300 000 Visegradian and 450 000 Lithuanian soldiers were involved. This was the place where chlorine gas was used on the Eastern Front for the first time, applied by Visegrad. Even General Kwasniewski, the supreme commander of his side's forces in Karaliaučius, was disgusted by the horrors of the battle. Still, despite all of Visegrad's best efforts, they failed to "bleed the Lithuanians dry", the morale of their forces in the battle was drained, and they were forced to retreat, leaving a ruined city as the only result of the giant battle.
While Karaliaučius was the main focus of both sides in the Eastern Front, Visegrad accomplished an another successful offensive slightly further south, in Galicia. Here, the front lines had been stable for most of the war, but the Visegradians shook the tranquility up by introducing a new weapon - a... a thing that was hard to explain, really. It was, in some ways, an evolution of the somewhat recently introduced automobile, although far, far more armored than a standard armored car, and equipped with either machine guns or mortars. It was introduced as a way to easily break through fortifications and barbed wire, and a number of these machines would be followed by infantry to seize trenches and forts on the way. As soon as it was introduced in the battlefield,a number of nicknames were slapped on this new weapon - Lithuanians called them "hedgehogs" due to their slow speed and numerous machine gun turrets, Visegradians sometimes used the name "tortoises" or "tanks" - however, none of these names stuck, and the public learned to call them by their operational name - landships.
Landships provided great shock value in their first appearance, helping the Visegradian army push the Lithuanians out of Galicia, but much like all other new pieces of tech introduced in this war, they were not a wonder weapon, and both sides learned of their flaws. They were slow and bulky, thus an easy target for artillery, they often broke down and required a lot of oil, which was a problem to Visegrad, because it's Galician oil fields were seriously damaged by surrounding combat. Still, they found their place in modern warfare, and they were there to stay.
The battles in Galicia also saw the debut of a much different development - the Legion of Archangel Michael. Approval by the Convention of Three Nations for forming a Russian and Ruthenian legion in the Visegradian army was given in late August, and in November, the first 5000 volunteers from POW camps and surrendered Imperial soldiers, having gone through three weeks of additional training, joined the battles in Galicia. These soldiers were distinguished from average soldiers with light blue armbands, sometimes with the Cyrillic text "Л.А.М." on them. They were under the command of Lieutenant Alexei Krutov, formerly a Lithuanian Army colonel from Ryazan - who, while known for his service in the Visegradian army, either as a traitor or a hero depending on who you're asking, became famous for something a lot greater in scale - but it was yet to come.
A Visegradian landship rolling across the fields of Galicia, followed by friendly infantry
Stalemates may keep happening in the West and East, but in the Southern Front, a stalemate would have been a gigantic stroke of luck. While the Ottomans finally managed to stop the Mughal steamroller in Persia, pushing the Indians out of mountain passes in Zagros and saving Tehran for now, it came at the expense of a weaker defense in Europe, where Visegrad kept scoring one victory after another. In mid September, Hungarian troops were marching across the streets of Sofia, and large portions of Bulgaria rose up in open rebellion against their Turkish masters. The 1st Czech Army dealt heavy casualties to Ottoman defenses in the Battle of Pristina, overrunning and destroying several enemy regiments in the process, which opened a large exploitable gap in the front - and this led to the fall of Macedonia. By mid October, the Visegradians reached the Aegean Sea, cutting off the Ottoman soldiers in Greece from the rest of the Empire. While the Ottomans could still use naval shipping to supply their forces, this still meant that over 65 000 soldiers were now cut off from the rest of the mainland and left in a region whose population was growing increasingly hostile to Turkish rule.
Not even the Romanian miracle managed to last - after a few more attacks, the determined, but weak and tired Wallachian-Moldavian forces were forced to retreat and abandon Dobrogea, pretty much leaving the Ottomans all on their own. The Visegradian were still far away from Konstantinyye, but wavering morale, lack of supplies and munitions, popular resentment against the monarchy and the war and open guerilla rebellions in Persia and Arabia were all problems that the Sultanate had to face. Unitarian strikes and armed unrest, pro-democracy protests, mutinies and starvation were all daily occurrences. And what's worse - Sultan Abdulmejid III, the man who drew the Empire into the war in the first place, had not been seen by the public in weeks. The most pessimistic observers suspected that he became a victim to a palace coup, a very common occurrence in the Empire - the constant struggles between siblings and princes, the backstabbery and shenanigans in the court, the battles between Janissaries and Sipahi all shortened the average ruler's lifespan, and while it is a common occurrence, it was not a good thing to go through in the middle of a war. A war that the Empire is losing, badly.
And thus, a yet another winter has arrived, and the war is expected to slow down. But... this was no average winter. The last may have been cold enough for the French to consider a modern day version of Battle on the Ice, but this - this just blew the last one out of the water. Record low temperatures were being recorded all across the world, dropping as low as negative 40 in some areas. Snowfall also intensified across this time, the snow coat reaching places which hadn't seen it in centuries, like southern Spain and the Yangtze River valley. And, with such record cold locking the planet down, when it is in the middle of the greatest war in human history so far, said war consuming most of the participants' resources... bad things happen.
Already, some news outlets in Europe were reporting of outbreaks of mass starvation in places like the Ganges valley and Mesopotamia...
The world in January 1st, 1913
1 - Go Spain! It's nice to not see them as the whipping post of Western Europe for once.
2 - The cold winter does not not bode well for civilians or military morale...
It's little-to-mid-sized twists and additions like this that make The Great European War more than "World War I in different clothes." That final line about the winter grips me into wanting to see what happens next!
2 - The cold winter does not not bode well for civilians or military morale...
It's little-to-mid-sized twists and additions like this that make The Great European War more than "World War I in different clothes." That final line about the winter grips me into wanting to see what happens next!
You mentioned that the Yangtze River was getting a snow from the extreme winter weather of that year. So I am willing to be that this will cause a lot of turmoil in China as it will for the OTtomans