OK then, whose regime is the most stable domestically and has the power most consolidated? Who has the best capacity for projecting the hard power? Who has the biggest soft power?
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The Silver Knight, a Lithuania Timeline
- Thread starter Augenis
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OK then, whose regime is the most stable domestically and has the power most consolidated? Who has the best capacity for projecting the hard power? Who has the biggest soft power?
Turkey is the more stable and consolidated country.
India has stronger power projection overall, but Turkey's closer to the ongoing war and can thus project more hard power there.
It's a tossup on soft power. India is the more stronger economic power by a long shot, but Turkey has the advantage in espionage and diplomatic projection.
Aside from Shun China and Revivalist Lithuania, have any other countries been developing Blitzkrieg-esque tactics?
So, who is more powerful of the Asian titans, the Empire of the Great Shun or the Unified Indian State?
Dude. Stop.
You are essentially asking yourself a question as you wrote the Shun China updates, and everyone can interpret India as they mostly like. Ergo you with your perfect idea of Shun China beyond the small updates are the only one capable of answering the question of who is more powerful.
Please stop. You're only correcting anyone giving another answer anyway.
I'm already excited for the start of the actual fighting in the War of the Danube and the long gap is only making me more excited.
Me too. But for me.. It is Second Sino-Japanese war.. Shun China vs Nagai's Japan..
Chapter 84: Rise, Nation's Pride
Part 84: Rise, Nation's Pride (1939)
The first battles in the civil war in Visegrad took place at the beginning of 1939, starting with a Unitarian militia sweep over the rest of the Hungarian Plain. Much of the military detachments in the territory had already defected to the Confederation of Unitarian States, while the rest were concentrated on the western part of the region, along the German border and especially at the city of Pecs. Blue Guards and Visegradian army defectors reached the lake of Balaton in February, overpowering the demoralized and underfunded loyalist troops. The city of Pecs, a powerful fortress, didn't fail as easily, and brutal disorderly street warfare began there. Unitarian offensives began towards Prague, the temporary capital of Visegrad, although here they were faced with stronger loyalist resistance and were pushed back after serious losses. However, this was only a minor setback. By the time spring began, almost 70 percent of the United Kingdom's industry, over half of the population and much of the army were under the control of the provisional Unitarian government in Buda. With victory seemingly on the horizon, Chairman Gregor Samsa and his followers began an initial reorganization of the CUS, establishing the autonomous Hungarian, Polish, Bohemo-Slovak and Slavonic Unitarian Republics within it. Aside from being the Chairman of the Unitarian Congress, Samsa also became the first President of the Hungarian Unitarian Republic, while the other three autonomous states appointed Lukasz Karbowski, Josef Švejk and August Cesarec as their Presidents respectively. The states were planned to be a temporary solution to the ethnic struggles within the Congress, and Samsa wrote: "as soon as the plague of nationalism is removed from the Visegradian people, they will become unnecessary".
These were not the only new establishments on the corpse of Visegrad at this time period. Chaos engulfed Poland and Slavonia, where the loyalist Visegradian forces had to fight off not just the Unitarians, but also the nationalist rebellions which sprang up like wildfire. While the South Slavic rebellions were small, weak and fought amongst themselves almost as much as they fought the enemies of their independence, Poland was a different story - the nationalist movement here, rallied by two men - Boleslaw Bolek and Karol Lolek - was far more united and organized, and in March of 1939, Polish nationalists stormed the city of Warsaw. This was far from good news for the Visegradian loyalists - Poland was perhaps the only region in their dying kingdom which did not succumb to Unitarian rebellions, and losing it meant losing the last power base in the country.
During this stressful situation, Prime Minister Augustina Sternberg of the Kingdom of Germania presented the Congress with a proposal for intervention in Visegrad - including not just a large amount of aid to the loyalist Visegradian government, but also military intervention against the Unitarians in Buda. Unlike the disorganized and infighting Visegradian army, the Germans maintained top notch army quality, to the point where it could safely be considered to be the best in Europe. It included six full landship divisions (for example, the Lithuanians only had three experimental mechanized brigades) and an army composition based around large scale artillery and machine concentrations to outright overwhelm the enemy. While the German navy was not as supreme - the French and the Indians, the two supreme naval powers on the world, outclassed them there - Germania was nothing to screw around with. The Centralist-dominated Congress overwhelmingly voted in favor of this intervention, and on March 11th of 1939, Germania officially declared war on the Confederation of Unitarian States.
In response, the Unitarian Commonwealth almost instantly accepted the CUS's pending request to join the alliance.
Augustina Sternberg, Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Germania
Tevfik Rüştü Aras, Chairman of the Party for Unity and Unitarianism, leader of Unitarian Turkey
A meeting of the German high command decided on a plan of action in the unfolding War of the Danube, and the generals almost universally agreed that dealing with the separatist forces can wait, as the Unitarian invasion is by far the greater threat. The Eastern chain of command of the German Royal Army was reorganized into an expeditionary force, and in the very same month that the war was declared, German forces faced off against Unitarian militias near the city of Sopron. Despite having a meager advantage in morale, the militias were not nearly on the same level of quality and expertise as the regular German forces, and the battle resulted in a sound defeat for the CUS, now opening a way for the loyalists to break the siege of Pecs. The German army was moved into Bohemia, Silesia, Western Hungary and Croatia, and by May, over 110 000 of their personnel was on Visegradian soil.
The Germans were not the only foreign army standing on Visegrad's soil. The Turkish Blue Banners, after sweeping across the lightly guarded Balkan states, reached what used to be the autonomous Kingdom of Slavonia, now run over by myriads of disconnected and infighting separatist uprisings. The Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Montenegrins, "Slavonians", Hungarians, Romanians, local Turks... all tried to carve out their own nations at the expense of others. Unitarian Turkey "restored order" in the infighting region by occupying much of it in a wide offensive, and, under the orders of Chairman Tevfik Rüştü Aras, instituted Denationalization - a process which had already been executed in Turkey and the Middle East by storm within the last two decades. To Unitarians, nationalism and religion were something completely inexcusable, a product of the societal divisions and inequality of the capitalist society, an "opiate of the masses" to distract them from uniting and ousting their oppressive rulers. As such, anyone deeply attached to either their culture or their religion is either a traitor or a brainwashed idiot, and the fate of both of these could only be the grave. As such, a series of mass repressions and persecutions spread across the Turkish-occupied Balkan states. Churches and cathedrals were being either torn down or converted into public facilities, and their previous owners either deported or simply executed. The same fate awaited known members of local nationalist or, Weber forbid, separatist movements. Any local press was curtailed and at best heavily censored, while the education system was deestablished and rebuilt to purely educate loyal members of the future utopian society. Of course, any noticeable opposition received the same classic fate - at worst, execution, at best, forced labor or deportation. Arabia was a favorite place to deport political opponents - there they could not only likely die from the heat and the dehydration, but also work in the sprawling oil industry which was fueling the Turkish war machine.
Turkey was not the only Unitarian power throwing it's hat into the ring. The Unified Indian State also began to mobilize upon the war breaking out, although they had other targets than the Balkans. The alliance India had with Turkey gave dictator Sanjay Nijasure a pretext to obtain a "land route to the front", which basically meant regaining the former Mughal Empire's western territories. Who cares that independent countries such as Persia, Afghanistan and Baluchistan are now there? Do they have a standing army of three million men, one of the largest in the world? No? Then prepare the attack into Central Asia!
The war was getting larger and larger, and with no signs of stopping - Shun China was pretty much set to get involved at some point, what with being squeezed between two members of the Commonwealth and all, France and Britannia were both watching the events unfold with their own ambitions and fears, and there is the whole cradle of problems which Eastern Europe was, too... New tactics, weapons and technologies shall be baptized on the battlefield. German and Indian aircraft carriers, landship division formations, modern artillery, a level of total war never seen before in human history, it was about to come in one massive package.
German "Commander Schwarzburg" landships near Lake Balaton. Based around late Visegradian designs, the "Commander Schwarzburg" was the main German battle tank in the War of the Danube
The Turkish Blue Banners on the march in Southern Serbia
The loyalist Visegradian government, based in Prague and headed by Sandor Marton, definitely did not wish to open a new front, and with a revanchism Lithuania, no less. Sure, the Krajina was perhaps their most loyal puppet state, and the Ruthenians living there were certainly scared of Lithuanian Revivalism and relied on Visegrad to support them in the event of war... but in the moment that their help was needed, the Visegradians turned their backs. The secret Karaliaučius Agreement in April of 1939 was made by the loyalist government of Visegrad and the Revivalist government of Lithuania - in exchange for a non-aggression pact between the two states, Lithuania would be given free reign in the Krajina. Germania was the only other country informed of these negotiations, and after showing some reluctance, Prime Minister Sternberg agreed to the protocol. The stage was set.
On April 21st, two events took place - Visegrad removed it's garrisons from the Krajina, and the five day long Lithuanian-Ruthenian War begun. Krajina had no regular army, and thus could pose little opposition to the regular Lithuanian army. Nine hours after the declaration of war, the 11th Infantry Regiment reached Kiev, the capital of the nation, on bicycles, and surrounded the parliament of the Grand Duchy. Prime Minister Vasily Skoropadsky was captured in his home in the city's suburbs and forced to sign an act of capitulation - despite that, police units and militias opposed the advancing Lithuanians across the country for the next five days. On April 22nd, the citizens of Kiev were informed of the new government by a brief radio announcement and the release of the Vadas's personally written musical act, a dreary sonata by the name of the "Prelude to a New Empire".
Nowadays, the Karaliaučius Agreement is considered to be one of the worst diplomatic decisions of the 20th century - although only in hindsight. This is because of Russia's own plans to invade Lithuania as an act of preemptive strike if it ever got into a war with Visegrad or Krajina - and if Lithuania got into a two-front war herself, then the Revivalist totalitarianism may have been extinguished then and there. The authoritarian government of Alexei Krutov was perhaps the most concerned with the Revivalists in Europe, and did not harbor any of the "at least they are not Unitarians" ideas which some Western politicians held at the time. To them, the totalitarianism in Lithuania was a threat to their sovereignty and nation, and they could not possibly take it lightly.
Perhaps best pictured in Russia's response to the annexation of Krajina. General Alexei Krutov did not limit himself with mere acts of indifference or mild complaints - on April 30th, despite being in the middle of an army modernization campaign and having no allies to back it up in this situation, Russia declared war on Lithuania, starting the Russo-Lithuanian War.
The Revivalist Lithuanians were about to put their strength and ideology to the test.
Map of the world in May 1939
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So, why isn't Nijasure striking east yet? Is it because of the East Asian Security Association (Shun China and client states) being too strong to attack right now? Because of the need for land access between India and Turkey? Both? Also, can we get a map of the current situation as of the Russian DoW on Lithuania?
I would have made a map for this update, but I did not have access to my PC for most of the day.
Nijasure does not see a need to strike east yet - but China and India will play a part in this war and in the future, no worries.
@Augenis, you have quite a bit of stuff for HOI4, do you plan to actually make a mod for HOI4 based off this TTL? 'Cause that would be awesome imo.