It's been a while, so here's an update.
Chapter XXIII: Turning Point, 1955-1956.
President Dewey indeed mobilized anti-communist sentiments as a propaganda campaign was launched vividly depicting Soviet evils in cinemas, on the radio, in newspapers and of course on TV. Television ownership, much like having a car, was a symbol of post-Depression wealth in America with 93% of households owning at least one by 1955. Now this symbol of affluence was used to raise a general sentiment that sacrifices had to be made by all for the national good during the war. Communism came to be regarded as a threat to the democracies of the West and their free way of life, while sympathizers of Marx were drowned out in the media and scorned as proponents of tyranny. There were enough eyewitnesses to testify that Soviet communism was despotic and American soldiers would come to see it with their own eyes as well.
Over the course of the war, the united American people would come to accept numerous measures that affected their personal lives. Rationing was imposed, particularly on fuel, meat and clothing and wage price controls were instated as well. Production of non-essential goods like kitchen appliances, vacuum cleaners and even housing was limited or banned for the duration of the war, resulting in housing shortages among others. Tens of millions of workers moved from low to high productivity jobs in industrial centres, including students, housewives, retirees and unemployed. The US Army, already at a peacetime strength of 2 million men thanks to increased defence expenditure of the past fifteen years, massively increased in size as a draft was introduced. Within two years the US Army would have a strength of 10 million men.
In the short term, as the US began mobilizing, Dewey ordered the deployment of an American Expeditionary Force of 500.000 men to the front in Germany within eight weeks under the command of General Matthew Ridgway. The AEF had tripled in size by the end of the year. The Americans deployed through the port of Amsterdam and briefly boosted the turnover of one particular industry, namely the sex industry. While not legal in the Netherlands, prostitution had been tolerated for as long as anyone could remember and Amsterdam had a vibrant red-light district. Prostitutes at the time made in a week what they usually made in a month due to the American presence before the soldiers departed for the front. Some of them would find their way to military hospitals to be treated for syphilis.
In Asia the war was going to expand as well. Tokyo had never forgotten its humiliating defeat in China over a decade ago, in which the USSR had played a major part. Initially the military junta in power just observed the war in Europe and proved to be hesitant to act, but with the enormous American mobilization they believed the Soviets would soon be too preoccupied in the West to pay any attention to Asian affairs. The Japanese decided to enter the fray after the Soviet declaration of war against the United States and military planners selected the date of Sunday August 7th 1955 as the time to strike, giving them roughly twelve weeks to prepare. The Empire of Japan fully intended to restore its pre-eminent position in Asia. After twelve years of waiting they were ready.
On August 7th, various Japanese fleet elements initiated their attacks on Soviet, Chinese and Korean with aircraft carriers and all five Yamato-class battleships. Furthermore, two new battleships were unveiled of which the true nature had long been kept a secret and which gained the epithet of mega dreadnoughts, the final stage in battleship evolution: with 71.000 tonnes the Keno-class were a bit lighter than the 73.000 tonne Yamato-class, but they were equipped with six massive 51 cm (20.1 inch) guns in three twin turrets. The guns of the Keno and her sister ship Kumaso had devastating firepower. Japanese battleship guns and aircraft bombs and torpedoes obliterated Vladivostok and the Soviet Pacific Fleet based there and much the same happened to the Soviet base at Dalian. Communist Korea didn’t have anything bigger than a light cruiser in its navy, so could not offer meaningful assistance to its allies at sea. As a result the Imperial Japanese Navy could impose a naval blockade on the Soviet Pacific coast and all of China without difficulty.
Within 48 hours of devastating Vladivostok and Dalian, Japanese troops seized control of both. Landings took place at several places on the Kamchatka Peninsula and the regional capital of Petropavlovsk became the capital of a new puppet state called the State of Russia. White Russian émigrés and their descendants, who had fled Russia after the communists took power over 35 years prior, flocked to it in the hopes of liberating Russia from communism. The “State of Russia” changed its named to “Empire of Russia” and formed a regency council, which invited the Head of the House of Romanov to become Tsar. Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich accepted the invitation and was inaugurated as Tsar Vladimir I in one of the few remaining Russian Orthodox churches. This new state quickly controlled the entire Kamchatka Peninsula and a Russian Volunteer Corps of 50.000 men arrived, composed of anti-communist Russians. It soon changed its name to Imperial Russian Army.
Meanwhile, another 80.000 troops landed near Busan in Korea armed with the latest Japanese tanks, artillery guns, battle rifles and machine guns designed with the lessons of the Soviet-Japanese War in mind. Overhead Japanese jetfighters clashed with Soviet MiG jets. Counterattacks mounted by the Korean People’s Army’s elite divisions were vigorous, but were kept at bay by powerful Japanese naval guns. The Japanese beachhead expanded and in one month Japanese troop strength in southern Korea had swollen to half a million men. Korea was a communist regime on the Stalinist mould. While Korea was theoretically independent, much of its politics were dictated by Moscow and its regime was brutal. The Koreans hadn’t exactly traded up by exchanging Japanese rule for Soviet vassalage and therefore Korean resistance, apart from elite formations, was lacklustre with many soldiers deserting. The mood in Korea was apathetic as the old colonial ruler was coming back to drive out the new one, and successfully so: Seoul fell in October and in that autumn they advanced further north to Pyongyang until Chinese reinforcements stopped them at the Taedong River. More reinforcements were being mobilized to advance further into Korea and, hopefully, China. The Empire of the Rising Sun was back.
American and Japanese involvement didn’t mean winning the war would be an easy affair from now on. It only made Stalin more determined to continue the war and win as these events reaffirmed his belief in the existence of a global conspiracy by the capitalist powers to destroy the Soviet Union. He also had the means to continue as the Soviet war industry was intact and produced thousands of tanks, aircraft and other weapons a month, which included designs that could rival those of the West. The T-34 had been the workhorse of the tank force at the start of the war, but by now its production had completely ceased in favour of the more powerful T-54: a 36 tonne tank with armour up to 205 mm at the thickest points, a 100 mm rifled gun, a 12.7 mm machine gun, a 7.62 mm machine gun and a top speed of 51 km/h. In the air force, turboprop fighters had been reduced to training aircraft as the MiG-15 jetfighter had come, only to be replaced by the MiG-17 and the MiG-19. Besides advances in equipment, there were still plenty of Soviet sons to conscript, especially when the age for conscription was lowered from 18 to 16. Furthermore, there were still plenty of young zealous believers in communism who volunteerd, sometimes lying about their age to get in as young as 13. Most young boys, however, stayed at home and took the place of the adult men in the factories and on the farms alongside their mothers, sisters and grandparents.
Similar developments took place on the Allied side. The Panther was outmatched as it took three to four Panthers to deal with two T-54s. Once again German tank designers chose to design a larger, more powerful and qualitatively superior tank to deal with a simpler Soviet design that could be produced in much greater quantities. Knowing slanted armour was effective, the design of the Panther was enlarged to accommodate a modified 105 mm Flak gun. To deal with a weight increase to 55 tonnes in the new design, a 900 hp V16 petrol engine replaced the original V12 so the Panther II wouldn’t be slower than its opponent. French and British factories producing the original Panther would quickly begin producing the Panther II as well. Similarly, the He 280 had been phased out in favour of the Ta 183. The Americans had a simpler solution: putting a bigger gun on their existing M4 Sherman, of which they had thousands.
For much of the summer, autumn and winter of 1955 the European front, which everyone agreed upon was the most important front, remained static as further Soviet offensives didn’t push the frontline much further into Germany. It was like the silence before the storm as the Allies were making preparations to finally seize the initiative in the war. They were planning an amphibious landing on Germany’s Baltic coast behind the Soviet frontline that would take place to divert Soviet strength away from an offensive on land intended to establish a beachhead on the right bank of the river Elbe. The operation was codenamed Ulysses and was scheduled to begin on Sunday January 15th 1956. Reinforced with 1.5 million American troops and 2.5 million from India, the Allies were now the ones who enjoyed numerical superiority. There big push back was soon to begin.
A combined fleet of American, British, German, French and Dutch ships steamed into the Baltic Sea and some were lost to Soviet sea mines and submarines, but there were just too many for the Soviet Navy to stop: eight battleships, three battlecruisers, ten aircraft carriers, two light aircraft carriers, fifteen heavy cruisers, fifteen light cruisers, 75 destroyers, thirty submarines and countless troop transports. Besides that, Allied minesweepers had done a good job. King of Denmark Frederick IX witnessed this from Copenhagen and said there were “so many ships could walk from Germany to Sweden”. Indeed, an armada of this size had never been seen before in the history of warfare and it dominated the southern Baltic Sea.
The first phase of Operation Ulysses began. The largest contingent of the landing troops were Germans, immediately followed by the Indians and Americans who had enough men to spare. Some 250.000 men landed on the German Baltic coast and within 24 hours they established a beachhead one hundred kilometres wide and five kilometres deep. They took control of Rostock, the largest port city on Germany’s Baltic coast, and the smaller port town of Wismar. Both were used to ferry in more troops, ammunition, fuel and supplies to bolster the beachhead while battleship guns and aircraft bombs kept the enemy at a distance. As the Soviets had not expected this attack, the Allies managed to seize control of Lübeck, the second largest German Baltic port, within 72 hours. Allied strength on the German Baltic coast would swell to 1 million men in one month.
After success in the Battle of Lübeck, the offensive on the Elbe Front, the first serious Allied attempt to break this static front in two-and-a-half years, was launched. It consisted of multiple operations along the length of the front, each involving multiple field armies. An offensive on such a scale couldn’t have been imagined before the war, but the Soviets had already done it and now the Allies were unleashing their version of Deep Operations. Ten million men were involved. It would prove to be the first major Allied victory and more would follow.
The battle on land was a pincer battle. The northern pincer consisted of Allied forces crossing the Elbe and taking control of the ruined port city of Hamburg, from where they successfully fought their way toward the western end of the beachhead at Lübeck. They linked up and thereby cut off Soviet forces stationed further north at Kiel from the rest of the Red Army. The southern pincer advanced toward Leipzig as the second component of a plan to encircle Berlin, while spoiling attacks kept Czechoslovak forces at arms’ length. Allied forces broke out from the beachhead on the Baltic coast and hoped to attack the Soviets in the rear east of Berlin.
After roughly three months of intense fighting Berlin was finally retaken on April 20th 1956, but it was hardly a joyous event: as part of a scorched earth order the city had been completely levelled by the Red Army. Most inhabitants had already fled the city almost three years prior when the Soviets first invaded and the few survivors now emerging from the ruins looked like ghosts. Ironically the Liberation of Berlin happened on Hitler’s birthday, as if the Nazi dictator tried to send a message from the grave (the NSU, the successor to the NSDAP, certainly spun it that way by saying that France and Britain should’ve joined Germany on an anti-communist crusade in 1938 to prevent all this misery). Whatever the case, the Red Army had left behind a wasteland for the Allies to liberate. Berlin wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last: Stalin had issued an order that nothing should be left behind that could be of use for the Allies and whatever couldn’t be taken had to be destroyed.
Fanatical Soviet resistance had made this a costly battle and future battles proved to be just as costly, but there were more ways to wear the Soviets down and one of them was through the air: a strategic bombing campaign targeting major Soviet cities, which should break morale and damage the Soviet Union’s war industry. Using bases in Turkey the Allies had already tried to bomb Baku in 1955, but anti-aircraft defences there were strong and oil production wasn’t interrupted for long, resulting in only minor shortages for the Red Army. Instead of the low-level precision attack tried at Baku, in May 1956 one thousand British bombers devastated Stalingrad from their Turkish bases because it was a major centre of tank production.
A few weeks later, in June, a combined Anglo-American-German fleet of 1.200 bombers, including the modern B-29, used high-explosive and incendiary bombs to bomb Leningrad, a huge industrial centre for the USSR. The silverplated B-29s would become a familiar and feared sight over Soviet cities. Developed in the late 30s for a war in the Pacific, now the B-29’s state of the art technology came in useful over Russia: its pressurized cabin made sure the crew wasn’t exposed to Arctic cold while the analogue computer controlled fire-control system controlled four turrets to shoot down Soviet fighters with. Thousand had been made and from bases in Germany, Turkey and Japan no target was out of range. In smaller numbers the B-36, which had an even greater range, flew to hit targets in the deepest parts of the Soviet Union. The latest design, the B-52, would follow a little later in the war.
Meanwhile, fire storms led to the deaths of 40.000 people in Leningrad. Over the course of the war the strategic bombing campaign was expanded until one Soviet city was hit by a thousand bomber raid every day, including industrial cities like Minsk, Smolensk, Moscow, Kiev, Orel, Voronezh, Belgorod, Kharkov, Donetsk, Sevastopol, Kuybyshev and Magnitogorsk. The Allied bombing campaign added to the suffering of the Soviet people despite the heavy losses the bombing crews themselves suffered: the US could build bombers and train crews faster than Soviet jets and anti-aircraft guns could shoot them down.
To make sure their war machine didn’t broke down, the Soviets would have to take measures and Stalin ordered as much production capacity as possible underground in the Urals. Slave labourers from the gulag and prisoners of war were used to excavate cavernous halls in the Ural mountains and underneath Siberia’s permafrost under gruelling conditions, leading to high mortality rates among the workers. Countless vast underground rooms were created using anything from shovels and pick axes to explosives. These were large enough to move entire tank, airplane factories and ammunitions factories into so the Red Army and the air force would continue to receive supplies. This of course didn’t help for industries that couldn’t be moved, like when the Allies bombed Baku for a second time with more bombers and jetfighter escorts, cutting off oil production for months. It forced them to import from China (China had developed the Daqing oilfield in the early 50s).
With the front now on the Oder and most of Germany liberated while the strategic bombing campaign got going in earnest, it was time to decide how to continue the war. There were conflicting opinions. The British favoured retaking the Bosporus and landing on the Crimea to advance into the Ukraine, arguing that with its breadbasket gone the Soviet war effort would collapse due to food shortages. A simultaneous advance into the Balkans toward Romania would deprive them of the oil production there. The Germans wanted to simply push through Poland headed directly for Moscow and the Americans supported them in that, expecting that a naval landing in Crimea would be halted by the extremely potent fortifications there. Even if the Crimean Peninsula was taken, it was ridiculously easy to bottle up Allied forces there at a minimum expense for the Red Army. Meanwhile, the French were opposed to marching to Moscow over land, pointing out how that had turned out for Napoleon and proposed a second naval alternative: a landing in the Finnish Gulf to seize the port of Leningrad and advance to Moscow from there whilst liberating and recruiting the Baltic States. This approach would have the added benefit that Finland would probably join the war to retake the territories the Soviet Union had annexed. No agreement could be reached until a message came in from the Orient.
