The Sudeten War: History of the World after an Alternate 1938
- Thread starter Onkel Willie
- Start date
I have not read all 20 pages so I do not know if someone else has pointed this out.
This is what Czechoslovakia had in 1938.
1.280.000 soldiers
217.000 horses
26.000 motor vehicles
207.200 pistols
1.536.000 hand-grenades
864.500 rifles
34.500 light machine-guns LK vz. 26
7.100 heavy machine-guns TK vz. 24 (old style)
1.600 heavy machine-guns TK vz. 37
600 anti-tank guns 37 mm
230 anti-aircraft guns 20 mm (Oerlikon)
90 anti-aircraft guns 80 mm
140 anti-aircraft guns 83,5 mm (old style 1922)
15 heavy armoured cars vz. 27
50 light armoured cars vz. 30
70 tankettes vz. 33
50 light tanks vz. 34
300 light tanks vz. 35
900 mine-thrower 80 mm
200 mine-thrower 90 mm (old style 1917)
240 mountain guns 75 mm (old style 1915)
270 light guns 80 mm (old style 1917)
600 light howitzer 100 mm (old style 1914/1919)
100 heavy guns 105 mm
340 heavy howitzer 150 mm
370 fighters Avia B-534
60 light bomber and reconnaissance aircraft Avia B-71 (soviet SB-2)
50 heavy bombers MB-200
300 light bomber Letov Š-328
100 light reconnaissance aircraft Aero A-100/Ab-101
Also if Czechoslovakia had chosen to fight there is a chance that the German generals might have made a coup against Hitler.
This is what Czechoslovakia had in 1938.
1.280.000 soldiers
217.000 horses
26.000 motor vehicles
207.200 pistols
1.536.000 hand-grenades
864.500 rifles
34.500 light machine-guns LK vz. 26
7.100 heavy machine-guns TK vz. 24 (old style)
1.600 heavy machine-guns TK vz. 37
600 anti-tank guns 37 mm
230 anti-aircraft guns 20 mm (Oerlikon)
90 anti-aircraft guns 80 mm
140 anti-aircraft guns 83,5 mm (old style 1922)
15 heavy armoured cars vz. 27
50 light armoured cars vz. 30
70 tankettes vz. 33
50 light tanks vz. 34
300 light tanks vz. 35
900 mine-thrower 80 mm
200 mine-thrower 90 mm (old style 1917)
240 mountain guns 75 mm (old style 1915)
270 light guns 80 mm (old style 1917)
600 light howitzer 100 mm (old style 1914/1919)
100 heavy guns 105 mm
340 heavy howitzer 150 mm
370 fighters Avia B-534
60 light bomber and reconnaissance aircraft Avia B-71 (soviet SB-2)
50 heavy bombers MB-200
300 light bomber Letov Š-328
100 light reconnaissance aircraft Aero A-100/Ab-101
Also if Czechoslovakia had chosen to fight there is a chance that the German generals might have made a coup against Hitler.
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Chapter XVII: Operation Nevsky, June-July 1953.
And the war begins...
The war would soon begin, but of course a believable casus belli was needed to sell the war to domestic audiences and motivate them to fight. Engineering such an incident or crisis for this purpose wasn’t that difficult as the Soviet people would believe it given that they only had access to state controlled media and not to foreign news outlets. That Western audiences wouldn’t accept the public Soviet rationale to go to war, never mind the secret one, was of secondary concern. After all, a victorious Red Army would soon make all of them accept the Soviet view, or at least that was the plan.
In April 1953, the Soviet Union declared it wanted to renegotiate the its border with Poland as the Byelorussian and Ukrainian minorities living in eastern Poland belonged with their ethnic brethren living in the USSR. Moscow proposed moving border all the way to the Curzon Line as five million Ukrainians and 1.5 million Byelorussians lived east of it out of a total of twelve million people (ignoring the 4 million Poles and 1.4 million Jews). Moving the border that far west would have cost Poland more than a third of its territory and Stalin realized the Poles would never agree to this.
Poland had no intention of surrendering even a square centimetre of its soil, a response that Stalin had fully expected, and its allies supported it: Britain, France and even Germany had agreed to ally with Poland a few years prior. They had become confident after containing the Soviets during the Turkish Straits Crisis and were confident they could make him back down again. They chose confrontation instead of appeasement, which met criticisms at the time, though we now know at this point it didn’t matter as Stalin intended to go to war no matter what they did. This time the peace could not be saved.
To justify themselves, the Soviets began printing articles and pamphlets with vivid, detailed descriptions of alleged Polish atrocities against the Byelorussian and Ukrainian minorities living in Eastern Poland while cinema newsreels showed fake material concerning these same made up atrocities. Soviet media depicted the Poles as virtual demons that impaled babies on pitchforks or burnt them alive and raped women. Whilst ethnic minorities were not exactly treated equally to ethnic Poles and were discriminated against, Warsaw could in all honesty deny these ludicrous accusations made in venomous Soviet propaganda. This material was of course meant for domestic consumption more than anything else.
Poland carried out a full mobilization of its army to deter the Soviets and the Red Army mobilized in response, prompting a partial German mobilization too although no-one expected a full-blown invasion of Poland or any kind of fighting at all. A lull in all the rhetoric made it seem the Soviets would back off again and come to the negotiating table, resulting in minor concessions at the most. This, however, was a smoke screen. It was the silence before the storm as the build-up for Operation Nevsky continued in the utmost secrecy as Stalin couldn’t be persuaded to cancel it. The maskirovka campaign was so successful at masking the Red Army’s build-up that Western intelligence agencies had no idea what was coming.
After being postponed due to the weather, Operation Nevsky was finally unleashed on Sunday June 14th 1953 and it was the largest military operation the world had ever seen. It involved 6 million men, 12.500 armoured vehicles, 75.000 artillery pieces and 15.000 aircraft. Another 2.5 million men, organized in two fronts, were held in reserve but close to the front to be provide reinforcements and millions more were still mobilizing or deployed in the defence of the Soviet Union’s other borders. The attack began at 04:00 AM when the people living in eastern Poland woke up to the gargantuan roar of tens of thousands of Soviet artillery guns and Katyusha rocket launchers firing simultaneously. Witnesses described how the night was lit up by nightmarish flashes of explosions and how it seemed like the entire planet seemed to be shaking.
Despite the Polish Army’s preparedness, as it was fully mobilized, the artillery bombardment had a devastating effect on Poland’s defences. The vast numerical superiority of the Red Army finished the job: the Poles were outnumbered 8:1 as four Soviet fronts bore down on them, while they had to deploy half of their million man army to contain the advance of the Czechoslovakian Army into Poland from the south. The 2nd and 3rd Byelorussian Fronts advanced to the north of the Pripet Marshes and threatened to surround more than 200.000 Polish soldiers, but they withdrew to the Bug River. The advance of the 1st and 2nd Ukrainian Fronts was similarly successful in the south, driving Polish defending forces back to the river San and conquering much of Galicia in a joint operation with Czechoslovak forces. Driving the Poles to the Bug-San line had taken only two weeks. On a tactical level there were Polish successes as they used their 21TP, a license produced version of the newest version of the Panzer IV with a high-velocity 75 mm gun, which proved to be able to deal with the T-34. There were just too many T-34s unfortunately.
Germany issued immediately issued a declaration of war as, to the north of the Polish theatre, East Prussia was also under attack from the Red Army too (this unprovoked attack on Germany in turn prompted Great Britain and France to declare war on the USSR immediately). The 1st Byelorussian Front invaded with 1 million men, but fortunately the territory wasn’t undefended as Germany had carried out a partial mobilization in Poland’s support. As part of this mobilization, the Army High Command (OKH) had decided to deploy forces to the part of Germany that was the most vulnerable in the event of a conflict with the Soviet Union: East Prussia, an exclave as it was separated from the rest of Germany by a narrow corridor of Polish territory that connected Poland to the Baltic Sea. The German Eighth and Ninth Armies had been deployed in defence.
The German defenders were outnumbered 2:1, but they valiantly held their ground as long as they could because it quickly became clear what happened to civilians that were left to the tender mercies of the Red Army, first from Polish reports and then from German refugees fleeing to the safety of German lines ahead of the Red Army. Soviet soldiers pillaged, torched towns, executed civilians and raped women. German soldiers therefore didn’t retreat until there was no other option, but military logic unfortunately dictated that German forces in East Prussia eventually would have to conduct a strategic withdrawal to avoid being obliterated.
After five weeks of intense combat, German control over East Prussia had been reduced to a coastal sliver that the OKH estimated could only hold out for one more week, ten days at the most. The Imperial German Navy deployed in force to evacuate all German soldiers and as many civilians as they possibly could. The 2nd Battle Squadron – consisting of Bismarck, Tirpitz, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst – was deployed to provide suppressive fire with its 38 cm (15 inch) and 28 cm (11 inch) guns to keep the Red Army at a distance. Germany’s aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin and light carriers Seydlitz and Lützow provided air cover to the operation as floating airbases. The 1st Battle Squadron – consisting of battleships Kaiser Wilhelm and Prinz Heinrich, and fast battleships Mackensen and Prinz Eitel Friedrich – steamed toward the Finnish Gulf to face the Soviet Baltic Fleet should it decide to take to the seas in force.
The Germans seized all suitable civilian and merchant vessels to get as many troops and civilians as possible out through Königsberg and Marienburg. The Wilhelm Gustloff, a German cruise ship, managed to transport more than 10.000 people to the safety of Germany’s largest Baltic port, Rostock. This was more than six times the number of passengers that she’d been originally designed for, and she completed the trip for a total of eight times, rescuing 80.000 people. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy contributed to the operation with four capital ships to provide gunfire support: HMS Lion, HMS Temeraire, HMS Hood and HMS Prince of Wales. They had a large destroyer escort and these ships with their 35+ knot top speed were used to rapidly ferry out German soldiers and civilians.
The British also sent confiscated civilian vessels, most of which were cargo ships, but several available cruise ships were also used: most prominently RMS Queen Mary, RMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Caledonia (formerly the RMS Majestic). The latter had been commissioned by Germany in 1914 as the SS Bismarck, but had been ceded to Britain as a reparation in 1920. The Royal Navy had acquired the Majestic from Cunard-White Star Line in 1937 and renamed her to HMS Caledonia, using her as a training ship. Before the war broke out in 1953 she’d been mothballed and slated for scrapping, but the war saved her from the scrapheap.
The two Queens each evacuated 9.000 people at a time, making the roundtrip between Königsberg and Rostock five times. The Caledonia was slightly slower and on July 22nd was still at sea, carrying 2.500 Wehrmacht soldiers and 4.500 civilians, while the two Queens had already completed their fifth roundtrip. Unfortunately, Soviet submarine S-7 had penetrated the destroyer screen and was able to fire three torpedoes at the Caledonia at 07:00 PM before a destroyer caught on and forced her into an emergency dive. The cruise ship had nowhere near enough lifeboats for so many people and stalled for time by closing the watertight doors, hoping naval ships in the vicinity would respond to her SOS calls. Forty minutes into her sinking her list to starboard became so severe the lifeboats on the portside couldn’t be lowered into the water. Her propulsion was stopped and a general abandon ship order was issued by her captain, forcing thousands of people to get into the water with nothing but a life jacket or a lifebuoy. Thousands more couldn’t get out of the ship in time due to enormous overcrowding. There were three-and-a-half times more people onboard than the ship was designed for and throngs of panicking people crowded in front of the staircases and elevators, with many people being crushed in the stampede. Many of them were still stuck in the ship as she disappeared beneath the waves.
Out of the 7.000 people on board, 4.000 died due to the initial explosions, in the stampede, because they were still in the ship after she went under or due to burning oil, making the “Sinking of the HMS Caledonia” the worst maritime disaster in history. Those at sea were lucky that the Baltic Sea’s water temperature in the summer was a balmy 15-20 ºC and most of them were therefore saved by naval vessels responding to the Caledonia’s distress calls. Her wreck, located 35 kilometres east of the Danish island of Bornholm, is now considered a war grave.
The sinking was depicted in an epic, award winning war movie released in 1990 starring Sean Connery. The film, named Caledonia, is considered a classic and one of the best war movies ever made while also being one of the longest films to make it to the cinema (182 minutes in its theatrical run, while the director’s cut is 217 minutes). Connery won an Oscar for Best Actor for his role as captain Henry Jones and Bill Paxton won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his depiction of German Wehrmacht Major Hermann Heinz leading a ragtag band of soldiers and civilians out of the ship. Steven Berkoff, who played the captain of the Soviet submarine, was nominated for Best Supporting Actor too but lost to Paxton. In reviews Berkoff was called “an excellent villain.” The family of Captain Vasily Orlov (who had passed away in 1986) considered the heavily fictionalized version of him in the movie libellous and tried to sue, but lost as the judge considered the liberties the creators had taken to be “artistic freedom.”
In the meantime, the war continued. On Saturday July 25th 1953 the last German forces left East Prussia and the hammer and sickle flag flew over the old Prussian capital of Königsberg. About 350.000 soldiers had been evacuated and lived to fight another day and roughly 1 million civilians had been rescued over a period of slightly more than five weeks in an arguably herculean effort. Around 200.000 more escaped westward through privately owned cars. East Prussia, however, had a population of 2.2 million and more than 1 million of them couldn’t run fast enough to escape the Red Army. Hundreds of thousands of women aged between 13 and 70 were raped by Red Army soldiers, often multiple times or by several men at once (some women escaped multiple rape or group rape by dating Soviet officers). This continued until strict orders were imposed that punished rape with a standard ten year gulag sentence. The alternative wasn’t much better, but stopped the mass rapes of German civilian women going on. A system of army operated brothels was created which recruited women known to be prostitutes before the war. It also recruited from women’s prisons in the occupied territories in return for freedom and in the USSR among women who’d rather do this than stay in the gulag. As this wasn’t enough, young women were kidnapped in police roundups and made dependent on opium to make them work in the brothels.
The reason to stop the mass rapes going on was that the communist German Democratic Republic was proclaimed in Königsberg with Wilhelm Pieck as its President and Walter Ulbricht as its Premier (this prompted a split in the KPD between a pro-Soviet and a pro-German faction). The Germans couldn’t be converted to communism if the Red Army kept behaving like a ravenous beast. Germany had to become the heart of a Red Europe as the German Revolution of 1918-’19 had intended, but only in lockstep with Moscow. Stalin would have a united communist party as a junior partner, not as an equal.
To the south, Poland was on the verge of being overrun after about five weeks of combat. The Polish Army had been pushed back to the natural defences provided by the Bug and San rivers in two weeks. During this fighting retreat to their new defensive line the Poles incurred heavy casualties, which was the price for their courageous resistance against a superior enemy. Germany’s rapid mobilization briefly stabilized the situation as a force of thirty divisions, roughly 450.000 men, was deployed to the front on the Bug River in defence of Warsaw. With all the bridges destroyed, the Polish and German defenders on the Bug’s left bank kept the invaders at bay from June 28th to July 2nd. On July 3rd, the Red Army established multiple beachheads on the left bank of the Bug supplied by pontoon bridges. Polish-German attempts to crush them failed.
The Battle of Warsaw was about to begin. The Red Army reached the Vistula River and the outskirts of Warsaw only one week after crossing the Bug, facing the prepared and motivated garrison defending the city. Ignoring German advice to declare Warsaw an open city to avoid its destruction as well as unnecessary civilian and military losses, Poland’s commanding officer Field Marshal Sikorski left his country’s capital with 150.000 defenders. Between July 3rd and 5th the city was encircled and cut off from the outside world, dooming the defences despite the costly attempts by their allies to save them. Poland would be gone in a few more weeks.
Chapter XVII: Operation Nevsky, June-July 1953.
The war would soon begin, but of course a believable casus belli was needed to sell the war to domestic audiences and motivate them to fight. Engineering such an incident or crisis for this purpose wasn’t that difficult as the Soviet people would believe it given that they only had access to state controlled media and not to foreign news outlets. That Western audiences wouldn’t accept the public Soviet rationale to go to war, never mind the secret one, was of secondary concern. After all, a victorious Red Army would soon make all of them accept the Soviet view, or at least that was the plan.
In April 1953, the Soviet Union declared it wanted to renegotiate the its border with Poland as the Byelorussian and Ukrainian minorities living in eastern Poland belonged with their ethnic brethren living in the USSR. Moscow proposed moving border all the way to the Curzon Line as five million Ukrainians and 1.5 million Byelorussians lived east of it out of a total of twelve million people (ignoring the 4 million Poles and 1.4 million Jews). Moving the border that far west would have cost Poland more than a third of its territory and Stalin realized the Poles would never agree to this.
Poland had no intention of surrendering even a square centimetre of its soil, a response that Stalin had fully expected, and its allies supported it: Britain, France and even Germany had agreed to ally with Poland a few years prior. They had become confident after containing the Soviets during the Turkish Straits Crisis and were confident they could make him back down again. They chose confrontation instead of appeasement, which met criticisms at the time, though we now know at this point it didn’t matter as Stalin intended to go to war no matter what they did. This time the peace could not be saved.
To justify themselves, the Soviets began printing articles and pamphlets with vivid, detailed descriptions of alleged Polish atrocities against the Byelorussian and Ukrainian minorities living in Eastern Poland while cinema newsreels showed fake material concerning these same made up atrocities. Soviet media depicted the Poles as virtual demons that impaled babies on pitchforks or burnt them alive and raped women. Whilst ethnic minorities were not exactly treated equally to ethnic Poles and were discriminated against, Warsaw could in all honesty deny these ludicrous accusations made in venomous Soviet propaganda. This material was of course meant for domestic consumption more than anything else.
Poland carried out a full mobilization of its army to deter the Soviets and the Red Army mobilized in response, prompting a partial German mobilization too although no-one expected a full-blown invasion of Poland or any kind of fighting at all. A lull in all the rhetoric made it seem the Soviets would back off again and come to the negotiating table, resulting in minor concessions at the most. This, however, was a smoke screen. It was the silence before the storm as the build-up for Operation Nevsky continued in the utmost secrecy as Stalin couldn’t be persuaded to cancel it. The maskirovka campaign was so successful at masking the Red Army’s build-up that Western intelligence agencies had no idea what was coming.
After being postponed due to the weather, Operation Nevsky was finally unleashed on Sunday June 14th 1953 and it was the largest military operation the world had ever seen. It involved 6 million men, 12.500 armoured vehicles, 75.000 artillery pieces and 15.000 aircraft. Another 2.5 million men, organized in two fronts, were held in reserve but close to the front to be provide reinforcements and millions more were still mobilizing or deployed in the defence of the Soviet Union’s other borders. The attack began at 04:00 AM when the people living in eastern Poland woke up to the gargantuan roar of tens of thousands of Soviet artillery guns and Katyusha rocket launchers firing simultaneously. Witnesses described how the night was lit up by nightmarish flashes of explosions and how it seemed like the entire planet seemed to be shaking.
Despite the Polish Army’s preparedness, as it was fully mobilized, the artillery bombardment had a devastating effect on Poland’s defences. The vast numerical superiority of the Red Army finished the job: the Poles were outnumbered 8:1 as four Soviet fronts bore down on them, while they had to deploy half of their million man army to contain the advance of the Czechoslovakian Army into Poland from the south. The 2nd and 3rd Byelorussian Fronts advanced to the north of the Pripet Marshes and threatened to surround more than 200.000 Polish soldiers, but they withdrew to the Bug River. The advance of the 1st and 2nd Ukrainian Fronts was similarly successful in the south, driving Polish defending forces back to the river San and conquering much of Galicia in a joint operation with Czechoslovak forces. Driving the Poles to the Bug-San line had taken only two weeks. On a tactical level there were Polish successes as they used their 21TP, a license produced version of the newest version of the Panzer IV with a high-velocity 75 mm gun, which proved to be able to deal with the T-34. There were just too many T-34s unfortunately.
Germany issued immediately issued a declaration of war as, to the north of the Polish theatre, East Prussia was also under attack from the Red Army too (this unprovoked attack on Germany in turn prompted Great Britain and France to declare war on the USSR immediately). The 1st Byelorussian Front invaded with 1 million men, but fortunately the territory wasn’t undefended as Germany had carried out a partial mobilization in Poland’s support. As part of this mobilization, the Army High Command (OKH) had decided to deploy forces to the part of Germany that was the most vulnerable in the event of a conflict with the Soviet Union: East Prussia, an exclave as it was separated from the rest of Germany by a narrow corridor of Polish territory that connected Poland to the Baltic Sea. The German Eighth and Ninth Armies had been deployed in defence.
The German defenders were outnumbered 2:1, but they valiantly held their ground as long as they could because it quickly became clear what happened to civilians that were left to the tender mercies of the Red Army, first from Polish reports and then from German refugees fleeing to the safety of German lines ahead of the Red Army. Soviet soldiers pillaged, torched towns, executed civilians and raped women. German soldiers therefore didn’t retreat until there was no other option, but military logic unfortunately dictated that German forces in East Prussia eventually would have to conduct a strategic withdrawal to avoid being obliterated.
After five weeks of intense combat, German control over East Prussia had been reduced to a coastal sliver that the OKH estimated could only hold out for one more week, ten days at the most. The Imperial German Navy deployed in force to evacuate all German soldiers and as many civilians as they possibly could. The 2nd Battle Squadron – consisting of Bismarck, Tirpitz, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst – was deployed to provide suppressive fire with its 38 cm (15 inch) and 28 cm (11 inch) guns to keep the Red Army at a distance. Germany’s aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin and light carriers Seydlitz and Lützow provided air cover to the operation as floating airbases. The 1st Battle Squadron – consisting of battleships Kaiser Wilhelm and Prinz Heinrich, and fast battleships Mackensen and Prinz Eitel Friedrich – steamed toward the Finnish Gulf to face the Soviet Baltic Fleet should it decide to take to the seas in force.
The Germans seized all suitable civilian and merchant vessels to get as many troops and civilians as possible out through Königsberg and Marienburg. The Wilhelm Gustloff, a German cruise ship, managed to transport more than 10.000 people to the safety of Germany’s largest Baltic port, Rostock. This was more than six times the number of passengers that she’d been originally designed for, and she completed the trip for a total of eight times, rescuing 80.000 people. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy contributed to the operation with four capital ships to provide gunfire support: HMS Lion, HMS Temeraire, HMS Hood and HMS Prince of Wales. They had a large destroyer escort and these ships with their 35+ knot top speed were used to rapidly ferry out German soldiers and civilians.
The British also sent confiscated civilian vessels, most of which were cargo ships, but several available cruise ships were also used: most prominently RMS Queen Mary, RMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Caledonia (formerly the RMS Majestic). The latter had been commissioned by Germany in 1914 as the SS Bismarck, but had been ceded to Britain as a reparation in 1920. The Royal Navy had acquired the Majestic from Cunard-White Star Line in 1937 and renamed her to HMS Caledonia, using her as a training ship. Before the war broke out in 1953 she’d been mothballed and slated for scrapping, but the war saved her from the scrapheap.
The two Queens each evacuated 9.000 people at a time, making the roundtrip between Königsberg and Rostock five times. The Caledonia was slightly slower and on July 22nd was still at sea, carrying 2.500 Wehrmacht soldiers and 4.500 civilians, while the two Queens had already completed their fifth roundtrip. Unfortunately, Soviet submarine S-7 had penetrated the destroyer screen and was able to fire three torpedoes at the Caledonia at 07:00 PM before a destroyer caught on and forced her into an emergency dive. The cruise ship had nowhere near enough lifeboats for so many people and stalled for time by closing the watertight doors, hoping naval ships in the vicinity would respond to her SOS calls. Forty minutes into her sinking her list to starboard became so severe the lifeboats on the portside couldn’t be lowered into the water. Her propulsion was stopped and a general abandon ship order was issued by her captain, forcing thousands of people to get into the water with nothing but a life jacket or a lifebuoy. Thousands more couldn’t get out of the ship in time due to enormous overcrowding. There were three-and-a-half times more people onboard than the ship was designed for and throngs of panicking people crowded in front of the staircases and elevators, with many people being crushed in the stampede. Many of them were still stuck in the ship as she disappeared beneath the waves.
Out of the 7.000 people on board, 4.000 died due to the initial explosions, in the stampede, because they were still in the ship after she went under or due to burning oil, making the “Sinking of the HMS Caledonia” the worst maritime disaster in history. Those at sea were lucky that the Baltic Sea’s water temperature in the summer was a balmy 15-20 ºC and most of them were therefore saved by naval vessels responding to the Caledonia’s distress calls. Her wreck, located 35 kilometres east of the Danish island of Bornholm, is now considered a war grave.
The sinking was depicted in an epic, award winning war movie released in 1990 starring Sean Connery. The film, named Caledonia, is considered a classic and one of the best war movies ever made while also being one of the longest films to make it to the cinema (182 minutes in its theatrical run, while the director’s cut is 217 minutes). Connery won an Oscar for Best Actor for his role as captain Henry Jones and Bill Paxton won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his depiction of German Wehrmacht Major Hermann Heinz leading a ragtag band of soldiers and civilians out of the ship. Steven Berkoff, who played the captain of the Soviet submarine, was nominated for Best Supporting Actor too but lost to Paxton. In reviews Berkoff was called “an excellent villain.” The family of Captain Vasily Orlov (who had passed away in 1986) considered the heavily fictionalized version of him in the movie libellous and tried to sue, but lost as the judge considered the liberties the creators had taken to be “artistic freedom.”
In the meantime, the war continued. On Saturday July 25th 1953 the last German forces left East Prussia and the hammer and sickle flag flew over the old Prussian capital of Königsberg. About 350.000 soldiers had been evacuated and lived to fight another day and roughly 1 million civilians had been rescued over a period of slightly more than five weeks in an arguably herculean effort. Around 200.000 more escaped westward through privately owned cars. East Prussia, however, had a population of 2.2 million and more than 1 million of them couldn’t run fast enough to escape the Red Army. Hundreds of thousands of women aged between 13 and 70 were raped by Red Army soldiers, often multiple times or by several men at once (some women escaped multiple rape or group rape by dating Soviet officers). This continued until strict orders were imposed that punished rape with a standard ten year gulag sentence. The alternative wasn’t much better, but stopped the mass rapes of German civilian women going on. A system of army operated brothels was created which recruited women known to be prostitutes before the war. It also recruited from women’s prisons in the occupied territories in return for freedom and in the USSR among women who’d rather do this than stay in the gulag. As this wasn’t enough, young women were kidnapped in police roundups and made dependent on opium to make them work in the brothels.
The reason to stop the mass rapes going on was that the communist German Democratic Republic was proclaimed in Königsberg with Wilhelm Pieck as its President and Walter Ulbricht as its Premier (this prompted a split in the KPD between a pro-Soviet and a pro-German faction). The Germans couldn’t be converted to communism if the Red Army kept behaving like a ravenous beast. Germany had to become the heart of a Red Europe as the German Revolution of 1918-’19 had intended, but only in lockstep with Moscow. Stalin would have a united communist party as a junior partner, not as an equal.
To the south, Poland was on the verge of being overrun after about five weeks of combat. The Polish Army had been pushed back to the natural defences provided by the Bug and San rivers in two weeks. During this fighting retreat to their new defensive line the Poles incurred heavy casualties, which was the price for their courageous resistance against a superior enemy. Germany’s rapid mobilization briefly stabilized the situation as a force of thirty divisions, roughly 450.000 men, was deployed to the front on the Bug River in defence of Warsaw. With all the bridges destroyed, the Polish and German defenders on the Bug’s left bank kept the invaders at bay from June 28th to July 2nd. On July 3rd, the Red Army established multiple beachheads on the left bank of the Bug supplied by pontoon bridges. Polish-German attempts to crush them failed.
The Battle of Warsaw was about to begin. The Red Army reached the Vistula River and the outskirts of Warsaw only one week after crossing the Bug, facing the prepared and motivated garrison defending the city. Ignoring German advice to declare Warsaw an open city to avoid its destruction as well as unnecessary civilian and military losses, Poland’s commanding officer Field Marshal Sikorski left his country’s capital with 150.000 defenders. Between July 3rd and 5th the city was encircled and cut off from the outside world, dooming the defences despite the costly attempts by their allies to save them. Poland would be gone in a few more weeks.
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Bill Paxton as a German officer? Can't really see him pulling off a German accent. Otherwise pretty damn good.
Bookmark1995
Banned
Poor Poland. You can't into space, and you can't into getting a break.
But at least Western Europe is genuinely on your side.
But at least Western Europe is genuinely on your side.
Big question: What would happen if the Soviets "accidentally" torpedo an American vessel?
Would be really interesting to see the Soviet's knock Germany out of the war quickly. In such a circumstance, I don't think France or Britain would ever be able to push the Soviet's out of Central Europe without the aid of nuclear weapons on a vast scale. Also, I'd be surprised if the Soviets don't make a move against Turkey and Denmark at some point since controlling access to the Black sea and the entrance to the Baltic would be pretty important for offensive and defensive naval operations.
Poland might fall but I doubt that Germany is going to fall, at least not totally. But I agree that Allies are not going defeat Soviets without nukes or help of USA.
I think in a lot of these timeline's Soviet offensives like Nevsky are treated like a reverse Barbarossa and the same restrictions must be applied to the Soviet's as they were to the Nazis. However, its important to realise that the Soviet's at full offensive strength are an entirely different beast to the Nazis. For example, even in this TL you have got nearly double the offensive strength that Barbarossa of OTL had in every field-manpower, tanks, aircraft etc. You also have to factor in that the Soviet's have a shorter distance to go and a singular target to focus on-Berlin which is unlike Barbarossa OTL where the invasion's strength was diluted pursuing three widely separated objectives simultaneously. Furthermore, what geographic barriers exist to slow the Soviet's other than the Vistula? Its also worth noting that the soviets were far more apt at ruthless mobilisation of the home front for war production and have access to ample supplies of oil so we could expect a much stronger logistical chain and a more mechanised force than the Nazis of OTL. Combined with a relatively intact officer ( given softer purges) and a greater awareness of 'Deep battle' and the initial tactical surprise of Nevsky, the advance should be very rapid indeed. In fact, I'd say its almost inevitable that Berlin falls at this rate although whether that means the absolute collapse of German resistance is an open question but it would certainly be a very heavy blow to morale.
I didn't realise how cursed Hungary's southern border would look ITTL...
Nearly coffee splattered the screen when I read that Connery wasn't the captain of the Russian/Soviet submarine, nice touch. Of course you need a Brit to play the bad guy and Berkoff is one of the best for that.