Nukes might help while but even with them Allies hardly can keep colonies forever. And with nukes you have problem that you should re-construct cities.
The Sudeten War: History of the World after an Alternate 1938
- Thread starter Onkel Willie
- Start date
Nukes might help while but even with them Allies hardly can keep colonies forever. And with nukes you have problem that you should re-construct cities.
Also, USSR might retaliate with chemical, radiological and bioweapons (over Western Europe), which while not as devastating as nukes, would still hurt badly France / Britain / Germany.
a Soviet chemical weapon response at this time could rival allied nuclear capability in sheer destructiveness
There wont be enough nukes to go Douglas Maccrthur in China on the nukes
the main struggle will be preventing more from falling to the Chinese coalition.
a few can be dropped but europe will have to settle with some peace here in Asia at some point.
especially given America wont be super willing to hyper aggressively committ against a non communist China in defense of Asian colonie
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Honestly, at this point, I believe most Indians would probably be more prone to rebel and side with China than to bleed by the millions for this treacherous and lying Empire.
India lost eighty thousand soldiers during OTL's WW2, expelling the Chinese from Bengal is gonna cost much more than that, and the Indians subjects of the British Empire are anything but loyalists.
Why bleed to have the British Parliament, a compound of men who think Indians are worth trash, "give" to you the right to be a free nation when you can use their moment of weakness and take your independence from them?
Rebellion against the British is probably going to cost many times less lives than war against the Chinese.
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Agreed.
And IOTL, Indian soldiers were volunteers, while Imperial Japan and the Reich were cartoonishly evil.
National China is NOT cartoonishly evil. Chiang initially just wanted the concessions back, and came to invade SEA only because the Westerners overreacted, and gave independence (with some Chinese influence but still) to the locals.
Britain can always lie to paint China as an horrible dragon coming to eat innocent Indians, but nationalist parties and groups would dispel this propaganda among the population.
Also, getting a few millions of Indian volunteers might have worked... But conscription in India ? I don't believe it would fly.
Especially as in 1954, Indians would be even more impatient for independence and annoyed with Britain to begin with.
And IOTL, Indian soldiers were volunteers, while Imperial Japan and the Reich were cartoonishly evil.
National China is NOT cartoonishly evil. Chiang initially just wanted the concessions back, and came to invade SEA only because the Westerners overreacted, and gave independence (with some Chinese influence but still) to the locals.
Britain can always lie to paint China as an horrible dragon coming to eat innocent Indians, but nationalist parties and groups would dispel this propaganda among the population.
Also, getting a few millions of Indian volunteers might have worked... But conscription in India ? I don't believe it would fly.
Especially as in 1954, Indians would be even more impatient for independence and annoyed with Britain to begin with.
Chapter XXI: The Battle of Istanbul and the Naval War, 1954-1955.
Update time.
The spring and summer of 1954 was probably the latest time for the Soviet Union to negotiate a peace treaty in which they’d likely would have kept some significant gains. Optimistic historians estimate the Soviets could have kept Poland and East Prussia and could turn the Baltic Sea into a Soviet lake, strengthen its dominance in the Balkans, incorporate Iran and Afghanistan into its sphere of influence, establish a naval base on the Indian Ocean and deal a devastating blow to European colonial rule in Southeast Asia. Except for the Turkish Straits, all of Russia’s traditional foreign policy objectives would’ve been achieved. The country was at the zenith of its power and size, but the Red Empire was not to be.
Ten years prior Stalin would certainly have signed such a peace agreement without hesitation as he would’ve recognized this excellent opportunity, which would have left the Soviet Union as the dominant power in Eurasia. Stalin in 1954, however, was so paranoid that he believed that withdrawing from Germany would leave the Triple Alliance intact to attack the USSR in the future. As everyone in the Soviet leadership still vividly remembered the last purge, no-one dared to oppose Stalin when he decided the war had to continue and peace could only be contemplated once the Rhine had been reached. He argued that Germany, as the biggest Western European industrial power with the largest population, had to be subjugated. With Germany ruled by communists, Britain and France would be left in a hopeless position and be forced to accept a Soviet diktat. As proposals for a negotiated peace from the West were ignored and none existed domestically, the Soviet Union would continue to fight. The war not only continued, but it now encompassed the entire Eurasian landmass from Calais to Vladivostok and from the Arctic Circle to the Persian Gulf.
The Soviets decided to pursue a peripheral strategy after they couldn’t break through in Germany and reach the Rhine, hoping to draw away enough Allied forces from the European theatre to still succeed there by launching offensives elsewhere across the globe. The largest of these peripheral operations was Operation Sultan, an attempt to seize control of the Turkish Straits through an amphibious landing carried out by the Soviet Navy whilst Bulgaria simultaneously launched an overland assault. Stalin figured it would draw attention away from the front in Germany and force the Allies to shift naval assets from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea, which could swing the Battle of the Atlantic in the Soviet Navy’s favour.
The Bulgarians mobilized 600.000 men for the assault overland into Thrace and launched the offensive on Wednesday September 1st 1954, catching the Turks off-guard and rapidly advancing to within a mere few kilometres from Istanbul. The hastily mobilized Turkish Army managed to stop the Bulgarian advance before they could reach the city and used recently built 38 cm (15 inch) coastal defence guns to keep the invaders at arms’ length. Soon, however, they’d need them for the purpose that they’d been built because the Bulgarian offensive, while a serious threat, wasn’t the main attack (besides that, there were fears the Greeks would join Bulgaria, but Mussolini kept them on a short leash).
On Sunday September 5th Black Sea Fleet’s battleship Sovetskaya Ukraina, the old Tsarist era battleship Parizhskaya Kommuna, battlecruiser Sevastopol and a flotilla of supporting cruisers and destroyers came within firing range of Istanbul and initiated the second phase of the attack on the Bosporus, the main phase. The coastal defences the Turks had built in recent years were shelled with a combination of 40.6 cm (16 inch), 38.1 cm (15 inch) and 30.5 cm (12 inch) shells. The naval bombardment was supported by attacks from Soviet bombers flying from bases in Bulgaria. The defences the Turks had built in the aftermath of the 1947 Turkish Straits Crisis included a dozen types of bunkers, pillboxes and casemates and a number of land mounted battleship turrets with 38 cm guns ordered in Italy. Some of the Turkish coastal guns didn’t fire because Soviet commandos (all selected from Central Asian divisions because they appeared “Turkish” and because they’d been taught the language before the mission) had deployed from submarines to carry out sabotage and cause confusion. The rest were silenced by the Soviet naval and aerial bombardment.
Within 24 hours four Soviet divisions established a beachhead one hundred kilometres east of Istanbul that was twenty kilometres wide and two kilometres deep. The Turks, despite their valiant resistance, weren’t able to drive them back into the sea. In one month the Soviets had increased their presence to twenty divisions and expanded the beachhead to a width of one hundred kilometres and a depth of twenty kilometres. On October 3rd the Soviets broke out from their beachhead and attacked Istanbul from the east against determined resistance from the Turkish Army while the navy tried to evacuate as many civilians as possible. Istanbul fell on October 21st and all the civilians that remained experienced the terror the Red Army usually administered: rape, pillage and murder. The city was renamed Stalinogorsk and was the capital of the surrounding region, which was governed as the Bosporus Autonomous Oblast by the despotic Abakumov. Stalin had realized the centuries old Russian dream of a warm water port on the Mediterranean and turning the Black Sea into a Russian lake, but it was his last great success. The tide was about to turn.
Britain and France responded to the Soviet attack on the Turkish Straits and the subsequent Turkish declaration of war on the USSR and its allies by pledging military support. The Gallipoli Peninsula was the only Turkish territory west of the Bosporus still under Turkey’s control. As if to vindicate Churchill for his failure in 1915 five British divisions landed there, shortly followed by three French divisions. Allied strength in the Gallipoli Peninsula swelled from eight to twenty divisions while Turkish strength grew from seven to seventeen divisions (some Allied reinforcements were sent to mainland Turkey too). The Soviets now controlled the Turkish Straits, but the Allies weren’t going to let it stay that way if they could do anything about it. For now, however, Turkish offensives to retake the Bosporus remained fruitless.
Besides the expansion of the war on land, the naval war would also be intensified. The Soviet Navy had the world’s largest submarine arm in the world at the start of the war with over three hundred submarines available to it. After the Soviet Navy had abandoned its ambition to build an unparalleled fleet of battleships and aircraft carriers because it was too taxing on the country’s shipbuilding industry, focus had shifted to smaller surface combatants and to submarines.
The submarine army fought the Battle of the Atlantic with a focus on a tonnage war against Great Britain: a tonnage war is a strategy that presumes a finite number of enemy ships and a similarly finite capacity to build replacements and therefore advocates sinking more ships than the enemy can build. It was a form of attrition warfare. With their submarines the Soviet admiralty hoped to overwhelm British shipbuilding capacity, reduce its merchant marine, and in doing so effectively blockade Britain into submission. The Soviet Navy’s leadership had faith that knocking Great Britain out of the war would have the same effect of the Red Army doing the same to Germany on land: the intended affect would be the collapse of the Allied powers. Their alliance was seen as a three-legged stool: with one of its legs missing it would fall over, the Soviets believed. To do so Soviet subs would have to sink 300.000 gross register tonnage a month and there were many months that they achieved their target, or sometimes exceeded it.
The British countered by using convoy tactics like in the Great War and by using new technology developed more recently, primarily sonar. Besides that, Britain ordered merchant ships from shipyards in the neutral United States that the Soviets couldn’t touch and which had plenty of production capacity. Soviet subs, however, had strength in numbers and that alone ensured they still made kills. And Soviet shipyards had radically ramped up submarine production after the war had begun, which they could do because submarines were cheap and easy to build in numbers, unlike big battleships and carriers. Roughly 2.000 of them would be built during the war. As a result, there were periods in the Battle of the Atlantic that the British feared they’d lose. It was so severe a system of tight rationing had to be implemented while waste ground, railway edges, ornamental gardens, lawns, sports fields and golf courses were requisitioned for farming or vegetable growing.
The Soviet submarine war also expanded into the Mediterranean after Istanbul had fallen, with a particular focus on trying to break the Allied naval blockade of Spain that had resulted in a famine there. Submarines of the Soviet Black Sea fleet threatened to do the same in the Mediterranean as they were already doing in the Atlantic. This massive rise in Soviet naval activity in the Mediterranean alarmed Mussolini who, in response, allowed the formation of the so-called “Italian Volunteer Corps”, a force of 60.000 men, to fight communism in Germany. Volunteer divisions from more countries would follow.
A particular event that triggered anti-Soviet outrage in neutral Western countries was the sinking of the Dutch cruise ship SS Ryndam, a ship owned by the Holland America Line that made frequent voyages to neutral New York. Before the war she also went to Halifax in Nova Scotia which was stopped for safety concerns as Soviet submarines were very active off the Canadian coast. The Holland America Line’s management assumed they’d be left alone if they limited their cruise ships’ trips to countries the USSR wasn’t at war with. They were proven wrong in their assumption on Friday November 19th 1954 when a Soviet submarine torpedoed the SS Ryndam. For some unfathomable reason a Soviet captain believed this 15.000 tonne cruise ship with a top speed of just 16.5 knots and a capacity of 854 passengers was carrying weapons and ammunitions. Of the 854 passengers she carried, 725 were Dutch, another 85 were American and 23 were Belgian. She sank in twenty minutes and 600 of her passengers and crew died after she’d been torpedoed between the Orkney Islands and the Shetland Islands.
The public outrage in the Netherlands was enough to result in a declaration of war, a radical move for a country that had been neutral in all European conflicts after the Napoleonic Wars. The country was ready for it: ever since the late 1930s, the Netherlands had expanded its defence budget and formed a competent army with a potential wartime strength of half a million men, a dedicated tank arm with tanks ordered from Germany, an air force with good fighter and medium bomber designs, and a potent navy. The Dutch Navy consisted of a force of submarines, gunboats, destroyers and light cruisers centred on a core of capital ships: the Kijkduin-class battlecruisers, named after the 1673 Battle of Kijkduin, also known as the Battle of Texel. The three ships – Kijkduin, Schooneveld and Solebay – were in fact all named after Dutch naval victories in the seventeenth century. With nine 28 cm (11 inch) guns in three triple turrets these ~28.000 tonne battlecruisers had a superficial similarity to the Scharnhorst-class battleships. The Dutch ships had thinner armour, but were superior in deck armour, anti-torpedo systems, anti-aircraft armament and propulsion. A fourth hull had been ordered later as an aircraft carrier named Zeelandia.
The Dutch would send an expeditionary force of 75.000 men to the war in Germany and their navy would contribute to the Battle of the Atlantic. Their Benelux partners felt pressed to do something too even though they weren’t obliged to give the Dutch military support as their cooperation didn’t include a military alliance. A motivating factor was that eighteen Belgian civilians had died in the sinking of the SS Ryndam. Belgium and Luxembourg were partners of the Netherlands through the Benelux. This was a politico-economic union set up by these three small powers because they believed that only through solidarity and cooperation they could have enough weight to have a say in the European Economic Union (EEU). Belgium and the Netherlands in particular usually assumed the same positions in the EEU’s summits, exploiting the fact that they controlled the important ports of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Antwerp. Belgium decided to send a volunteer division of 10.000 men, which included a Luxembourgish battalion. Other neutral countries like Italy, Spain, Portugal and Sweden did so too as it became clear this was a battle for the fate of Europe. Denmark and Finland didn’t participate for now, fearing the response of the Soviet colossus that was now right next door to them.
Meanwhile the Soviet surface fleet, including its impressive battleships and battlecruisers, did nothing and stayed in port as the admirals were afraid of how Stalin would respond if one of his big shiny toys was sunk. As a result, the boss’s prestige objects were sitting in port and were doing nothing but acting as floating hotels to their crews. When Stalin learned of this and the reason why his big gun battleships weren’t in the mix, other than acting as a fleet in being, he was annoyed and ordered his naval commanders to commit the navy’s surface combatants in some way to contribute to a victory in the Battle of the Atlantic. Stalin told them “I didn’t order these battleships just to have them sit in port. Their guns are of no use if they are never fired in anger.”
Despite their reluctance they presented a naval strategy to Stalin for the use of his battleships which was similar to the one of the Imperial German Navy in the First Great War: trying to lure out a portion of the enemy navy, destroy it and return to the safety of their home port and then repeat. A second strategy was developed to use the Leningrad-class heavy cruisers, which were the fastest but also most heavily armed types of their kind. Their combination of speed and firepower made them ideal for commerce raiding, which they started to do from July 1954 onward.
By far the most successful of these raiders was the cruiser Leningrad herself thanks to her daring and skilled captain Vasily Konovalov, who became a hero in Soviet propaganda. The ship was based in the city she was named after, which meant she had to run the gauntlet presented by the Danish Straits, the Kattegat and the Skagerrak. She had to get close to Germany and go through waters that were heavily mined, never mind the fact that the Germans could try to intercept her if they got wind of her breakout attempt into the North Sea. Her “Danish Dash” was successful as all orders were hand written, with no radio . She then terrorized convoys in the northern Atlantic for two months, sinking 75.000 tonnes of shipping before Captain Konovalov decided the situation was getting too dicey with more and more Allied ships hunting him.
He steamed south and shelled Casablanca, Dakar, Conakry, Abidjan, Accra and finally Cape Town as all of these were export ports and embarkation points for colonial forces sent to serve in the war in Europe (during the Cape Town right several freighters were seized and rather than sunk their fuel and food supplies were stolen). In the meantime targets of opportunity were still sunk. Konovalov rounded the Cape of Good Hope to continue his winning streak in the Indian Ocean, raiding Durban, Dar es Salaam and Mombassa. After sinking more merchant shipping and raiding Batavia and Darwin, the ship steamed to Vladivostok as she was running low on ammunition. She had been at sea for eight months. Because of her successes, the crew was rewarded with eight weeks of leave before putting to sea again to go south and harass Australia and New Zealand, after which the plan was to round Cape Horn and return home. Her luck ran out when she was damaged by a sea mine at Brisbane that cut her speed in half, making her unable to outrun the aging Great War veteran sent to finish her off. The HMAS Valiant, commissioned as HMS Valiant into the Royal Navy in 1916 and donated to the Australians in 1950, made short work of the Leningrad with her 381 mm (15 inch) guns. Conversely, the Leningrad’s 305 mm (12 inch) shells bounced off Valiant’s belt armour and caused moderate damage to her superstructure. She was sunk 500 kilometres north of Auckland in April 1955.
In the meantime it was also time for the Soviet battleships to come out and play. The Sovetsky Soyuz steamed out first from her home port Leningrad accompanied by battlecruiser Kronshtadt and Leningrad-class heavy cruiser Tver. As the Germans had gotten more vigilant after the Leningrad’s “Danish Dash”, they noticed this and deployed a sizeable flotilla to intercept (many people shuddered at the thought of what a Soviet battleship could do in the Atlantic with a captain half as competent as Konovalov). Battleships Prinz Heinrich, Bismarck, Mackensen, Gneisenau and as well as heavy cruisers Deutschland and Admiral Graf Spee were deployed. The two forces faced each other off the coast of the Swedish island of Gotland on April 24th 1955.
The Sovetsky Soyuz managed to cross the T, enabling her to fire all of her guns while the two German heavies sent to fight her, the Prinz Heinrich and the Bismarck, could only use their forward facing guns. This meant the Sovetsky Soyuz still faced four 40.6 cm (16 inch) and four 38 cm (15 inch) guns versus her own nine 40.6 cm guns. In the slogging battle all three big battleships were heavily damaged and they ultimately disengaged, limping back to their bases. The fight among the fast battleships/battlecruisers was more definitive: the Kronshtadt fought both Mackensen and Gneisenau, ultimately succumbing to 38 cm and 28 cm (11 inch) shells and sinking after seriously dishing out and damaging both. The Tver was sunk by the Deutschland and the Admiral Graf Spee, but the Deutschland was torpedoed by a Soviet sub and sunk on the way home. The Battle of Gotland was a tactical success for the Germans, but would turn out to be a strategic success for the Soviets. More Soviet ships would put out to sea soon.
America finally enters the war in chapter 22!
Chapter XXI: The Battle of Istanbul and the Naval War, 1954-1955.
The spring and summer of 1954 was probably the latest time for the Soviet Union to negotiate a peace treaty in which they’d likely would have kept some significant gains. Optimistic historians estimate the Soviets could have kept Poland and East Prussia and could turn the Baltic Sea into a Soviet lake, strengthen its dominance in the Balkans, incorporate Iran and Afghanistan into its sphere of influence, establish a naval base on the Indian Ocean and deal a devastating blow to European colonial rule in Southeast Asia. Except for the Turkish Straits, all of Russia’s traditional foreign policy objectives would’ve been achieved. The country was at the zenith of its power and size, but the Red Empire was not to be.
Ten years prior Stalin would certainly have signed such a peace agreement without hesitation as he would’ve recognized this excellent opportunity, which would have left the Soviet Union as the dominant power in Eurasia. Stalin in 1954, however, was so paranoid that he believed that withdrawing from Germany would leave the Triple Alliance intact to attack the USSR in the future. As everyone in the Soviet leadership still vividly remembered the last purge, no-one dared to oppose Stalin when he decided the war had to continue and peace could only be contemplated once the Rhine had been reached. He argued that Germany, as the biggest Western European industrial power with the largest population, had to be subjugated. With Germany ruled by communists, Britain and France would be left in a hopeless position and be forced to accept a Soviet diktat. As proposals for a negotiated peace from the West were ignored and none existed domestically, the Soviet Union would continue to fight. The war not only continued, but it now encompassed the entire Eurasian landmass from Calais to Vladivostok and from the Arctic Circle to the Persian Gulf.
The Soviets decided to pursue a peripheral strategy after they couldn’t break through in Germany and reach the Rhine, hoping to draw away enough Allied forces from the European theatre to still succeed there by launching offensives elsewhere across the globe. The largest of these peripheral operations was Operation Sultan, an attempt to seize control of the Turkish Straits through an amphibious landing carried out by the Soviet Navy whilst Bulgaria simultaneously launched an overland assault. Stalin figured it would draw attention away from the front in Germany and force the Allies to shift naval assets from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea, which could swing the Battle of the Atlantic in the Soviet Navy’s favour.
The Bulgarians mobilized 600.000 men for the assault overland into Thrace and launched the offensive on Wednesday September 1st 1954, catching the Turks off-guard and rapidly advancing to within a mere few kilometres from Istanbul. The hastily mobilized Turkish Army managed to stop the Bulgarian advance before they could reach the city and used recently built 38 cm (15 inch) coastal defence guns to keep the invaders at arms’ length. Soon, however, they’d need them for the purpose that they’d been built because the Bulgarian offensive, while a serious threat, wasn’t the main attack (besides that, there were fears the Greeks would join Bulgaria, but Mussolini kept them on a short leash).
On Sunday September 5th Black Sea Fleet’s battleship Sovetskaya Ukraina, the old Tsarist era battleship Parizhskaya Kommuna, battlecruiser Sevastopol and a flotilla of supporting cruisers and destroyers came within firing range of Istanbul and initiated the second phase of the attack on the Bosporus, the main phase. The coastal defences the Turks had built in recent years were shelled with a combination of 40.6 cm (16 inch), 38.1 cm (15 inch) and 30.5 cm (12 inch) shells. The naval bombardment was supported by attacks from Soviet bombers flying from bases in Bulgaria. The defences the Turks had built in the aftermath of the 1947 Turkish Straits Crisis included a dozen types of bunkers, pillboxes and casemates and a number of land mounted battleship turrets with 38 cm guns ordered in Italy. Some of the Turkish coastal guns didn’t fire because Soviet commandos (all selected from Central Asian divisions because they appeared “Turkish” and because they’d been taught the language before the mission) had deployed from submarines to carry out sabotage and cause confusion. The rest were silenced by the Soviet naval and aerial bombardment.
Within 24 hours four Soviet divisions established a beachhead one hundred kilometres east of Istanbul that was twenty kilometres wide and two kilometres deep. The Turks, despite their valiant resistance, weren’t able to drive them back into the sea. In one month the Soviets had increased their presence to twenty divisions and expanded the beachhead to a width of one hundred kilometres and a depth of twenty kilometres. On October 3rd the Soviets broke out from their beachhead and attacked Istanbul from the east against determined resistance from the Turkish Army while the navy tried to evacuate as many civilians as possible. Istanbul fell on October 21st and all the civilians that remained experienced the terror the Red Army usually administered: rape, pillage and murder. The city was renamed Stalinogorsk and was the capital of the surrounding region, which was governed as the Bosporus Autonomous Oblast by the despotic Abakumov. Stalin had realized the centuries old Russian dream of a warm water port on the Mediterranean and turning the Black Sea into a Russian lake, but it was his last great success. The tide was about to turn.
Britain and France responded to the Soviet attack on the Turkish Straits and the subsequent Turkish declaration of war on the USSR and its allies by pledging military support. The Gallipoli Peninsula was the only Turkish territory west of the Bosporus still under Turkey’s control. As if to vindicate Churchill for his failure in 1915 five British divisions landed there, shortly followed by three French divisions. Allied strength in the Gallipoli Peninsula swelled from eight to twenty divisions while Turkish strength grew from seven to seventeen divisions (some Allied reinforcements were sent to mainland Turkey too). The Soviets now controlled the Turkish Straits, but the Allies weren’t going to let it stay that way if they could do anything about it. For now, however, Turkish offensives to retake the Bosporus remained fruitless.
Besides the expansion of the war on land, the naval war would also be intensified. The Soviet Navy had the world’s largest submarine arm in the world at the start of the war with over three hundred submarines available to it. After the Soviet Navy had abandoned its ambition to build an unparalleled fleet of battleships and aircraft carriers because it was too taxing on the country’s shipbuilding industry, focus had shifted to smaller surface combatants and to submarines.
The submarine army fought the Battle of the Atlantic with a focus on a tonnage war against Great Britain: a tonnage war is a strategy that presumes a finite number of enemy ships and a similarly finite capacity to build replacements and therefore advocates sinking more ships than the enemy can build. It was a form of attrition warfare. With their submarines the Soviet admiralty hoped to overwhelm British shipbuilding capacity, reduce its merchant marine, and in doing so effectively blockade Britain into submission. The Soviet Navy’s leadership had faith that knocking Great Britain out of the war would have the same effect of the Red Army doing the same to Germany on land: the intended affect would be the collapse of the Allied powers. Their alliance was seen as a three-legged stool: with one of its legs missing it would fall over, the Soviets believed. To do so Soviet subs would have to sink 300.000 gross register tonnage a month and there were many months that they achieved their target, or sometimes exceeded it.
The British countered by using convoy tactics like in the Great War and by using new technology developed more recently, primarily sonar. Besides that, Britain ordered merchant ships from shipyards in the neutral United States that the Soviets couldn’t touch and which had plenty of production capacity. Soviet subs, however, had strength in numbers and that alone ensured they still made kills. And Soviet shipyards had radically ramped up submarine production after the war had begun, which they could do because submarines were cheap and easy to build in numbers, unlike big battleships and carriers. Roughly 2.000 of them would be built during the war. As a result, there were periods in the Battle of the Atlantic that the British feared they’d lose. It was so severe a system of tight rationing had to be implemented while waste ground, railway edges, ornamental gardens, lawns, sports fields and golf courses were requisitioned for farming or vegetable growing.
The Soviet submarine war also expanded into the Mediterranean after Istanbul had fallen, with a particular focus on trying to break the Allied naval blockade of Spain that had resulted in a famine there. Submarines of the Soviet Black Sea fleet threatened to do the same in the Mediterranean as they were already doing in the Atlantic. This massive rise in Soviet naval activity in the Mediterranean alarmed Mussolini who, in response, allowed the formation of the so-called “Italian Volunteer Corps”, a force of 60.000 men, to fight communism in Germany. Volunteer divisions from more countries would follow.
A particular event that triggered anti-Soviet outrage in neutral Western countries was the sinking of the Dutch cruise ship SS Ryndam, a ship owned by the Holland America Line that made frequent voyages to neutral New York. Before the war she also went to Halifax in Nova Scotia which was stopped for safety concerns as Soviet submarines were very active off the Canadian coast. The Holland America Line’s management assumed they’d be left alone if they limited their cruise ships’ trips to countries the USSR wasn’t at war with. They were proven wrong in their assumption on Friday November 19th 1954 when a Soviet submarine torpedoed the SS Ryndam. For some unfathomable reason a Soviet captain believed this 15.000 tonne cruise ship with a top speed of just 16.5 knots and a capacity of 854 passengers was carrying weapons and ammunitions. Of the 854 passengers she carried, 725 were Dutch, another 85 were American and 23 were Belgian. She sank in twenty minutes and 600 of her passengers and crew died after she’d been torpedoed between the Orkney Islands and the Shetland Islands.
The public outrage in the Netherlands was enough to result in a declaration of war, a radical move for a country that had been neutral in all European conflicts after the Napoleonic Wars. The country was ready for it: ever since the late 1930s, the Netherlands had expanded its defence budget and formed a competent army with a potential wartime strength of half a million men, a dedicated tank arm with tanks ordered from Germany, an air force with good fighter and medium bomber designs, and a potent navy. The Dutch Navy consisted of a force of submarines, gunboats, destroyers and light cruisers centred on a core of capital ships: the Kijkduin-class battlecruisers, named after the 1673 Battle of Kijkduin, also known as the Battle of Texel. The three ships – Kijkduin, Schooneveld and Solebay – were in fact all named after Dutch naval victories in the seventeenth century. With nine 28 cm (11 inch) guns in three triple turrets these ~28.000 tonne battlecruisers had a superficial similarity to the Scharnhorst-class battleships. The Dutch ships had thinner armour, but were superior in deck armour, anti-torpedo systems, anti-aircraft armament and propulsion. A fourth hull had been ordered later as an aircraft carrier named Zeelandia.
The Dutch would send an expeditionary force of 75.000 men to the war in Germany and their navy would contribute to the Battle of the Atlantic. Their Benelux partners felt pressed to do something too even though they weren’t obliged to give the Dutch military support as their cooperation didn’t include a military alliance. A motivating factor was that eighteen Belgian civilians had died in the sinking of the SS Ryndam. Belgium and Luxembourg were partners of the Netherlands through the Benelux. This was a politico-economic union set up by these three small powers because they believed that only through solidarity and cooperation they could have enough weight to have a say in the European Economic Union (EEU). Belgium and the Netherlands in particular usually assumed the same positions in the EEU’s summits, exploiting the fact that they controlled the important ports of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Antwerp. Belgium decided to send a volunteer division of 10.000 men, which included a Luxembourgish battalion. Other neutral countries like Italy, Spain, Portugal and Sweden did so too as it became clear this was a battle for the fate of Europe. Denmark and Finland didn’t participate for now, fearing the response of the Soviet colossus that was now right next door to them.
Meanwhile the Soviet surface fleet, including its impressive battleships and battlecruisers, did nothing and stayed in port as the admirals were afraid of how Stalin would respond if one of his big shiny toys was sunk. As a result, the boss’s prestige objects were sitting in port and were doing nothing but acting as floating hotels to their crews. When Stalin learned of this and the reason why his big gun battleships weren’t in the mix, other than acting as a fleet in being, he was annoyed and ordered his naval commanders to commit the navy’s surface combatants in some way to contribute to a victory in the Battle of the Atlantic. Stalin told them “I didn’t order these battleships just to have them sit in port. Their guns are of no use if they are never fired in anger.”
Despite their reluctance they presented a naval strategy to Stalin for the use of his battleships which was similar to the one of the Imperial German Navy in the First Great War: trying to lure out a portion of the enemy navy, destroy it and return to the safety of their home port and then repeat. A second strategy was developed to use the Leningrad-class heavy cruisers, which were the fastest but also most heavily armed types of their kind. Their combination of speed and firepower made them ideal for commerce raiding, which they started to do from July 1954 onward.
By far the most successful of these raiders was the cruiser Leningrad herself thanks to her daring and skilled captain Vasily Konovalov, who became a hero in Soviet propaganda. The ship was based in the city she was named after, which meant she had to run the gauntlet presented by the Danish Straits, the Kattegat and the Skagerrak. She had to get close to Germany and go through waters that were heavily mined, never mind the fact that the Germans could try to intercept her if they got wind of her breakout attempt into the North Sea. Her “Danish Dash” was successful as all orders were hand written, with no radio . She then terrorized convoys in the northern Atlantic for two months, sinking 75.000 tonnes of shipping before Captain Konovalov decided the situation was getting too dicey with more and more Allied ships hunting him.
He steamed south and shelled Casablanca, Dakar, Conakry, Abidjan, Accra and finally Cape Town as all of these were export ports and embarkation points for colonial forces sent to serve in the war in Europe (during the Cape Town right several freighters were seized and rather than sunk their fuel and food supplies were stolen). In the meantime targets of opportunity were still sunk. Konovalov rounded the Cape of Good Hope to continue his winning streak in the Indian Ocean, raiding Durban, Dar es Salaam and Mombassa. After sinking more merchant shipping and raiding Batavia and Darwin, the ship steamed to Vladivostok as she was running low on ammunition. She had been at sea for eight months. Because of her successes, the crew was rewarded with eight weeks of leave before putting to sea again to go south and harass Australia and New Zealand, after which the plan was to round Cape Horn and return home. Her luck ran out when she was damaged by a sea mine at Brisbane that cut her speed in half, making her unable to outrun the aging Great War veteran sent to finish her off. The HMAS Valiant, commissioned as HMS Valiant into the Royal Navy in 1916 and donated to the Australians in 1950, made short work of the Leningrad with her 381 mm (15 inch) guns. Conversely, the Leningrad’s 305 mm (12 inch) shells bounced off Valiant’s belt armour and caused moderate damage to her superstructure. She was sunk 500 kilometres north of Auckland in April 1955.
In the meantime it was also time for the Soviet battleships to come out and play. The Sovetsky Soyuz steamed out first from her home port Leningrad accompanied by battlecruiser Kronshtadt and Leningrad-class heavy cruiser Tver. As the Germans had gotten more vigilant after the Leningrad’s “Danish Dash”, they noticed this and deployed a sizeable flotilla to intercept (many people shuddered at the thought of what a Soviet battleship could do in the Atlantic with a captain half as competent as Konovalov). Battleships Prinz Heinrich, Bismarck, Mackensen, Gneisenau and as well as heavy cruisers Deutschland and Admiral Graf Spee were deployed. The two forces faced each other off the coast of the Swedish island of Gotland on April 24th 1955.
The Sovetsky Soyuz managed to cross the T, enabling her to fire all of her guns while the two German heavies sent to fight her, the Prinz Heinrich and the Bismarck, could only use their forward facing guns. This meant the Sovetsky Soyuz still faced four 40.6 cm (16 inch) and four 38 cm (15 inch) guns versus her own nine 40.6 cm guns. In the slogging battle all three big battleships were heavily damaged and they ultimately disengaged, limping back to their bases. The fight among the fast battleships/battlecruisers was more definitive: the Kronshtadt fought both Mackensen and Gneisenau, ultimately succumbing to 38 cm and 28 cm (11 inch) shells and sinking after seriously dishing out and damaging both. The Tver was sunk by the Deutschland and the Admiral Graf Spee, but the Deutschland was torpedoed by a Soviet sub and sunk on the way home. The Battle of Gotland was a tactical success for the Germans, but would turn out to be a strategic success for the Soviets. More Soviet ships would put out to sea soon.
ferdi254
Banned
I am perfectly sorry but this is getting ridiculous. A Soviet cruiser shelling Cape Town? The allies doing absolutely nothing in more than a month to support Turkey? The USSR after all the losses still being able to open up a second front? The USSR building 2,000 subs? And deploying them into the Atlantic?
Just to get things into perspective ITTL the USSR has bulit more tanks, subs, arty, planes and equipped more divisions than the USA, Germany and the USSR did combined(!) 41 to 45.
Just to get things into perspective ITTL the USSR has bulit more tanks, subs, arty, planes and equipped more divisions than the USA, Germany and the USSR did combined(!) 41 to 45.
I both want the USSR punished, but also China completely winning (as karma for France and Britain arrogantly starting a major colonial war over their fucking concessions).
Chapter XXII: Enter America, May 1955.
Update!
The Soviet Navy was about to launch its most ambitious operation involving surface ships yet: Operation Iron Hand. The Battle of Gotland was a strategic success in the sense that four German battleships and a heavy cruiser had been seriously damaged and had to be drydocked for repairs for at least a month, while another heavy cruiser had been sunk. It was unknown if the Sovetsky Soyuz was still in fighting shape and the Soviets wasted no effort to make it appear that she was. Today we know her damage was extensive, limiting her to short trips and making her little more than a floating gun battery until her repairs were done. At the time the Germans didn’t know this and they stuck to the rule of thumb that a defending force should outnumber an attack force 3:1 or more. They still had the Kaiser Wilhelm, the Tirpitz, the Eitel Friedrich and the Scharnhorst available and all were held in reserve to counter a Soviet threat in the Baltic. Aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin, light carriers Seydlitz and Lützow and eight heavy cruisers were available to contribute to a British response to Operation Iron Hand if asked, but were far removed from where the fighting would happen.
Iron Hand, launched on May 1st, was the largest Soviet naval operation since the Crimean War as all the major surface units of the Northern Fleet and part of its submarines were committed. These included the battleships Sovetskaya Rossiya and Sovetskaya Belorussiya, Soviet aircraft carrier Arkhangelsk, the Northern Fleet’s three remaining Leningrad-class heavy cruisers, light aircraft carrier Murmansk and her three sister ships, twenty destroyers and thirty submarines. The operation was carried out with the utmost secrecy. All orders were handwritten and transported by motorcycle couriers and secrecy was aided by the fact that the Allies had so little spies in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Northern Fleet left port without the Allies knowing about it and split up, with each flotilla serving its purpose and trying to avoid detection so the trap could be sprung. They didn’t have numbers, so they had to rely on cleverness.
Around noon on May 4th, the two Soviet battleships called “the ugly sisters” were discovered by reconnaissance flights when they were in the Norwegian Sea between the island of Jan Mayen and Norway, headed for the Denmark Strait. Their discovery was planned: a message betraying their position had been intentionally leaked, but the British couldn’t know this. When they heard of two Soviet super battleships headed for the Atlantic, the Royal Navy wasn’t going to take any chances: four out of six Lion-class battleships – Lion, Temeraire, Conqueror and Thunderer – were in home waters and they were ordered on an intercept course. HMS Hood, HMS Rodney and aircraft carrier HMS Implacable would back them up if need be while also guarding against a Soviet change of course that would have them bypass Iceland to the east to avoid facing the force sent to intercept them. Soviet submarine pickets observed the British intercept force and reported its course and speed, but didn’t attack as they had standing orders not to do so. Their only task was to let the Soviet surface force spring its trap. Based on the course and heading, Soviet captains could calculate when the Soviet battleships would meet the Royal Navy’s. This meant the Soviet carriers knew when they had to launch their aircraft. They were 400 kilometres behind the bait and, contrary to the pair of battleships, had not been seen by aerial reconnaissance.
On May 6th the Soviet battleships and their British opponents noticed each other. Sovetskaya Rossiya and Sovetskaya Belorussiya were steaming southwest and the British northwest and they confronted each other 200 kilometres west of Iceland in what became the Battle of the Denmark Strait. Due to timing the Soviet battleships crossed the T of their adversary again, but that was luck more than anything and it didn’t do them much good. The four British battleships had thirty-six 16 inch (406 mm) guns and twenty-four of those were facing forward. Against two dozen enemy guns, the two Soviet heavies could bring to bear their entire main batteries, consisting of eighteen 16 inch guns. Besides that, the Lion-class battleships had a speed advantage: the Sovetsky Soyuz class in practice maxed out at 24 knots and could reach 28 knots in short bursts, but the British ships had a top speed of 30 knots that they could actually sustain. Besides that, British crews were better trained, which expressed itself in a higher rate of fire and better aim. If this had just been a fight between big gun battleships, there was no question the British would have sunk both ships.
The Soviets were about to spring their trap. While the first shells hit on both sides, the Soviet carrier force had already launched its aircraft complement. The Arkhangelsk had sixteen Yak-3 fighters and thirty Il-10 dive bombers/torpedo bombers and the four light carriers escorting her each had a complement half that size for a total of 138 aircraft. Soviet aircraft dropped bombs and torpedoes, wreaking havoc even though the anti-aircraft guns fired back furiously, while HMS Implacable responded by launching her own aircraft. The Implacable had 81 airplanes and wasn’t close to the battle, so their planes would take half an hour to arrive, a crucial window in which the Soviets could drop shells, bombs and torpedoes unimpeded. HMS Lion and HMS Thunderer were both sunk with heavy loss of life, going down fighting. HMS Temeraire and HMS Conqueror managed to withdraw, seriously damaged. HMS Hood was torpedoed, but survived and was placed in reserve indefinitely after the necessary repairs to keep her afloat had been carried out.
Churchill as the head of the admiralty mobilized all of his assets, stating “these two Soviet behemoths will go nowhere but to the bottom of the Atlantic as long as I have anything to say about it. I have absolute faith in our Royal Navy to complete this task and in the resolve of our brave sailors to bear the losses this may take. No resource will be left unutilized to neutralize this threat, a force of ships built by an ungodly regime. Whether they were clever or just got lucky remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: the enemy does not have God on his side. We do.” Temeraire and Conqueror of course were not committed as they’d need months of repairs, but all five King George V-class battleships, both Nelson-class battleships, both Renown-class battlecruisers and six aircraft carriers were readied. No fleet this size had ever been seen in the Atlantic. Their victory in the Battle of the Denmark Strait made the Soviets overconfident. While the carrier component returned to port, the two big battleships were ordered to continue into the Atlantic to cause as much damage as possible there. The British chased the ugly sisters, but it would be somebody else to sink them.
The two Soviet ships escaped their pursuers and steamed out into the Atlantic with a mission to sink targets of opportunity, but before any of that could happen they steamed into a spring storm in which they had low visibility. On May 11th 1955, southwest of Greenland in the Labrador Sea they encountered USS Montana and USS Iowa, which were on neutrality patrol. When seen from the front and through a thick curtain of rain, the two ships closely resembled the British Queen Victoria-class battleships. When the Soviet captain ordered the attack, he thought he was firing at British ships, but in fact he was firing at American ones and he couldn’t have chosen worse ones to pick a fight with. The Iowa-class were already excellent battleships and the Montana-class were an improvement on that with twelve instead of nine 16 inch (406 mm) guns. This gave them the most powerful broadside of all battleships in service at the time (though it is argued by some that the Yamato-class was equal, or even superior).
With their first broadside the Soviet ships landed several damaging hits and killed and wounded American sailors, and the USS Iowa was particularly hard hit as her first turret was hit directly and exploded. USS Montana made a hard turn to port to bring to bear her entire main battery, dodging several enemy shells in doing so. The Soviet admiral realized his mistake and tried to withdraw, but the faster Americans pursued. Sovetskaya Rossiya bore the brunt of the Montana’s guns and after several hits on the armoured belt it became clear that the quality of her armour was clearly inferior as the welds started to let go. As the faster American battleships caught up, the Montana peppered the superstructure of the Sovetskaya Rossiya and rendered her inoperable, at which point she started to sink as her crew had scuttled her to prevent her from being towed away as a trophy. Now the Sovetskaya Belorussiya had to face both the Montana and Iowa and fought hard, but then a shell penetrated the ammunition storage and caused an explosion that broke her in two and caused her to sink with all but five of her crewmembers, which were picked up by the Americans. The Montana was lightly damaged and quickly returned to service. The Iowa, however, was heavily damaged and would require months in drydock. 55 of her crew had been killed while 78 more were injured. The Battle of the Labrador Sea was a resounding Soviet defeat.
A picture taken of USS Iowa as she steamed to the Brooklyn Navy Yard for repairs became the symbol for a heated political discussion between isolationists and those in favour of a bigger American role on the world stage. After Roosevelt had chosen not to run for a fourth term, the controversial Democratic candidate Henry A. Wallace was decisively defeated by Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey in the 1944 US Presidential elections: he won 50.8% of the vote, carried 24 states and obtained 300 electoral votes and his opponent got 46.3% of the popular vote, 24 states and 231 electoral votes. Dewey as a progressive and pro-New Deal Republican was able to win over most of the swing voters whereas Wallace was challenged by internal opposition in his own party. Dewey displaced Theodore Roosevelt as the youngest President by age at the start of his Presidency, as he was exactly 42 years and 302 days old at his inauguration (Teddy Roosevelt was 42 years and 322 days old when he became President in 1901). His Vice President was Arthur Vandenberg, who had served as Senator from Michigan from 1928 until he became Dewey’s running mate in 1944, was more conservative than Dewey but more liberal than Robert Taft, the leader of the conservative wing of the Republican party.
During his first term Dewey passed ground-breaking legislation to deal with organized crime, earning him the reputation of being “the President who beat the Mob”. He also presided over a growing economy and an affluent country that had considered the Great Depression a distant memory. America seemed to be destined for a “Belle Époque” of its own, but at the same time the build-up of the armed forces initiated by Roosevelt continued under Dewey as part of a policy called “armed neutrality”. Dewey wouldn’t have minded a more proactive foreign policy beyond armed neutrality, but isolationism prevailed in the mid to late 1940s.
The Dewey/Vandenberg ticket won again in 1948. Vandenberg died in 1951, so in 1952 Dewey ran with the California Senator Richard M. Nixon, who was relatively new in Congress but whose charisma was undeniable. Dewey had chosen to go for a third term too. He’d been convinced to do so by the Republican establishment as his successful policies tackling organized crime were very popular while he was also presiding over a growing economy, giving him very high ratings. The Republicans were certain that Dewey would win a third term if he ran for office again and in 1952 they were proven right, matching Roosevelt’s achievement of three consecutive terms in the White House and giving their party a champion of its own.
Once the war broke out, he ordered “neutrality patrols”, which was a clear indicator of which side in the war in Europe he favoured. He also granted favourable low interest loans to Germany, France and particularly to Britain, enabling them to place orders for both military and non-military goods on a cash-and-carry basis. The British in particularly benefited from this as they could place orders with America’s massive shipbuilding industry on the US eastern seaboard to build enough transport ships to keep the country from being completely strangled, ordering more ships from US shipyards than could be sunk by Soviet submarines. These policies were controversial among isolationists, but Dewey could get enough support for these policies simply by mobilizing the anti-communist elements on both sides of the aisle in Congress.
There were plenty of anti-communist politicians in America who didn’t think America should stand by idly as the Soviets conquered Europe. They were mobilized by terrible news coming from Europe: German and Polish refugees in the free part of Germany told of Soviet soldiers raping and looting, of systematic persecution of “class enemies”, and an indiscriminate campaign to destroy the Christian churches. They destroyed churches, cathedrals, monasteries and convents or converted them to secular uses while clergymen were executed and nuns were raped. Dewey, a lifelong and active member of the Episcopal Church, was appalled too. In an address, the first important Presidential speech aired on the new medium called television, he addressed these events: “We’re not involved in the war in Europe, but this doesn’t prevent us from sympathizing with the side that is clearly the victim of unparalleled aggression unleashed by a criminal regime. In spreading their so-called revolution to liberate the working class, these invaders in reality spread terror. They persecute Christians of all denominations for no other crime than believing in God rather than the idol of communism. I cannot ask good Christian Americans to stay neutral spiritually and in their conscience.”
Dewey’s neutral but decidedly pro-Western course in this war was unquestioned until the confrontation in the Labrador Sea. There was no unanimity concerning the response and particularly the isolationist lobby hijacked the issue by questioning what business American battleships had in that part of the Atlantic Ocean. They argued the American commander shouldn’t have pursued the Soviet ships when they started to withdraw after realizing they weren’t fighting British but American ships. They accused President Dewey of trying to engineer a casus belli to legitimize American intervention in Europe.
Though Congress didn’t declare war, an increasingly paranoid and erratic Stalin was convinced it was a matter of time before the anti-communist elements in US politics would be mobilized and bolstered enough to result in an American declaration of war anyway. So Stalin made the decision for the Americans. He pointed out the Second Red Scare (“better dead than red”) even though it actually gained less traction than the first. He said “Wall Street is the capital of Jewish finance capitalism, which means neutrality isn’t an option for the United States. We’re better off going to war with the Americans now than when they’re completely ready for it”. There were serious flaws in this reasoning, but nobody dared to contradict Stalin in the atmosphere of terror they were living in. Besides that, the frontline was far away from Soviet territory in central Germany, so there didn’t seem to be any reason to worry. On Wednesday May 18th 1955, the Soviet Union declared war on the United States in anticipation of a final confrontation once the war in Europe had been won.
Chapter XXII: Enter America, May 1955.
The Soviet Navy was about to launch its most ambitious operation involving surface ships yet: Operation Iron Hand. The Battle of Gotland was a strategic success in the sense that four German battleships and a heavy cruiser had been seriously damaged and had to be drydocked for repairs for at least a month, while another heavy cruiser had been sunk. It was unknown if the Sovetsky Soyuz was still in fighting shape and the Soviets wasted no effort to make it appear that she was. Today we know her damage was extensive, limiting her to short trips and making her little more than a floating gun battery until her repairs were done. At the time the Germans didn’t know this and they stuck to the rule of thumb that a defending force should outnumber an attack force 3:1 or more. They still had the Kaiser Wilhelm, the Tirpitz, the Eitel Friedrich and the Scharnhorst available and all were held in reserve to counter a Soviet threat in the Baltic. Aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin, light carriers Seydlitz and Lützow and eight heavy cruisers were available to contribute to a British response to Operation Iron Hand if asked, but were far removed from where the fighting would happen.
Iron Hand, launched on May 1st, was the largest Soviet naval operation since the Crimean War as all the major surface units of the Northern Fleet and part of its submarines were committed. These included the battleships Sovetskaya Rossiya and Sovetskaya Belorussiya, Soviet aircraft carrier Arkhangelsk, the Northern Fleet’s three remaining Leningrad-class heavy cruisers, light aircraft carrier Murmansk and her three sister ships, twenty destroyers and thirty submarines. The operation was carried out with the utmost secrecy. All orders were handwritten and transported by motorcycle couriers and secrecy was aided by the fact that the Allies had so little spies in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Northern Fleet left port without the Allies knowing about it and split up, with each flotilla serving its purpose and trying to avoid detection so the trap could be sprung. They didn’t have numbers, so they had to rely on cleverness.
Around noon on May 4th, the two Soviet battleships called “the ugly sisters” were discovered by reconnaissance flights when they were in the Norwegian Sea between the island of Jan Mayen and Norway, headed for the Denmark Strait. Their discovery was planned: a message betraying their position had been intentionally leaked, but the British couldn’t know this. When they heard of two Soviet super battleships headed for the Atlantic, the Royal Navy wasn’t going to take any chances: four out of six Lion-class battleships – Lion, Temeraire, Conqueror and Thunderer – were in home waters and they were ordered on an intercept course. HMS Hood, HMS Rodney and aircraft carrier HMS Implacable would back them up if need be while also guarding against a Soviet change of course that would have them bypass Iceland to the east to avoid facing the force sent to intercept them. Soviet submarine pickets observed the British intercept force and reported its course and speed, but didn’t attack as they had standing orders not to do so. Their only task was to let the Soviet surface force spring its trap. Based on the course and heading, Soviet captains could calculate when the Soviet battleships would meet the Royal Navy’s. This meant the Soviet carriers knew when they had to launch their aircraft. They were 400 kilometres behind the bait and, contrary to the pair of battleships, had not been seen by aerial reconnaissance.
On May 6th the Soviet battleships and their British opponents noticed each other. Sovetskaya Rossiya and Sovetskaya Belorussiya were steaming southwest and the British northwest and they confronted each other 200 kilometres west of Iceland in what became the Battle of the Denmark Strait. Due to timing the Soviet battleships crossed the T of their adversary again, but that was luck more than anything and it didn’t do them much good. The four British battleships had thirty-six 16 inch (406 mm) guns and twenty-four of those were facing forward. Against two dozen enemy guns, the two Soviet heavies could bring to bear their entire main batteries, consisting of eighteen 16 inch guns. Besides that, the Lion-class battleships had a speed advantage: the Sovetsky Soyuz class in practice maxed out at 24 knots and could reach 28 knots in short bursts, but the British ships had a top speed of 30 knots that they could actually sustain. Besides that, British crews were better trained, which expressed itself in a higher rate of fire and better aim. If this had just been a fight between big gun battleships, there was no question the British would have sunk both ships.
The Soviets were about to spring their trap. While the first shells hit on both sides, the Soviet carrier force had already launched its aircraft complement. The Arkhangelsk had sixteen Yak-3 fighters and thirty Il-10 dive bombers/torpedo bombers and the four light carriers escorting her each had a complement half that size for a total of 138 aircraft. Soviet aircraft dropped bombs and torpedoes, wreaking havoc even though the anti-aircraft guns fired back furiously, while HMS Implacable responded by launching her own aircraft. The Implacable had 81 airplanes and wasn’t close to the battle, so their planes would take half an hour to arrive, a crucial window in which the Soviets could drop shells, bombs and torpedoes unimpeded. HMS Lion and HMS Thunderer were both sunk with heavy loss of life, going down fighting. HMS Temeraire and HMS Conqueror managed to withdraw, seriously damaged. HMS Hood was torpedoed, but survived and was placed in reserve indefinitely after the necessary repairs to keep her afloat had been carried out.
Churchill as the head of the admiralty mobilized all of his assets, stating “these two Soviet behemoths will go nowhere but to the bottom of the Atlantic as long as I have anything to say about it. I have absolute faith in our Royal Navy to complete this task and in the resolve of our brave sailors to bear the losses this may take. No resource will be left unutilized to neutralize this threat, a force of ships built by an ungodly regime. Whether they were clever or just got lucky remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: the enemy does not have God on his side. We do.” Temeraire and Conqueror of course were not committed as they’d need months of repairs, but all five King George V-class battleships, both Nelson-class battleships, both Renown-class battlecruisers and six aircraft carriers were readied. No fleet this size had ever been seen in the Atlantic. Their victory in the Battle of the Denmark Strait made the Soviets overconfident. While the carrier component returned to port, the two big battleships were ordered to continue into the Atlantic to cause as much damage as possible there. The British chased the ugly sisters, but it would be somebody else to sink them.
The two Soviet ships escaped their pursuers and steamed out into the Atlantic with a mission to sink targets of opportunity, but before any of that could happen they steamed into a spring storm in which they had low visibility. On May 11th 1955, southwest of Greenland in the Labrador Sea they encountered USS Montana and USS Iowa, which were on neutrality patrol. When seen from the front and through a thick curtain of rain, the two ships closely resembled the British Queen Victoria-class battleships. When the Soviet captain ordered the attack, he thought he was firing at British ships, but in fact he was firing at American ones and he couldn’t have chosen worse ones to pick a fight with. The Iowa-class were already excellent battleships and the Montana-class were an improvement on that with twelve instead of nine 16 inch (406 mm) guns. This gave them the most powerful broadside of all battleships in service at the time (though it is argued by some that the Yamato-class was equal, or even superior).
With their first broadside the Soviet ships landed several damaging hits and killed and wounded American sailors, and the USS Iowa was particularly hard hit as her first turret was hit directly and exploded. USS Montana made a hard turn to port to bring to bear her entire main battery, dodging several enemy shells in doing so. The Soviet admiral realized his mistake and tried to withdraw, but the faster Americans pursued. Sovetskaya Rossiya bore the brunt of the Montana’s guns and after several hits on the armoured belt it became clear that the quality of her armour was clearly inferior as the welds started to let go. As the faster American battleships caught up, the Montana peppered the superstructure of the Sovetskaya Rossiya and rendered her inoperable, at which point she started to sink as her crew had scuttled her to prevent her from being towed away as a trophy. Now the Sovetskaya Belorussiya had to face both the Montana and Iowa and fought hard, but then a shell penetrated the ammunition storage and caused an explosion that broke her in two and caused her to sink with all but five of her crewmembers, which were picked up by the Americans. The Montana was lightly damaged and quickly returned to service. The Iowa, however, was heavily damaged and would require months in drydock. 55 of her crew had been killed while 78 more were injured. The Battle of the Labrador Sea was a resounding Soviet defeat.
A picture taken of USS Iowa as she steamed to the Brooklyn Navy Yard for repairs became the symbol for a heated political discussion between isolationists and those in favour of a bigger American role on the world stage. After Roosevelt had chosen not to run for a fourth term, the controversial Democratic candidate Henry A. Wallace was decisively defeated by Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey in the 1944 US Presidential elections: he won 50.8% of the vote, carried 24 states and obtained 300 electoral votes and his opponent got 46.3% of the popular vote, 24 states and 231 electoral votes. Dewey as a progressive and pro-New Deal Republican was able to win over most of the swing voters whereas Wallace was challenged by internal opposition in his own party. Dewey displaced Theodore Roosevelt as the youngest President by age at the start of his Presidency, as he was exactly 42 years and 302 days old at his inauguration (Teddy Roosevelt was 42 years and 322 days old when he became President in 1901). His Vice President was Arthur Vandenberg, who had served as Senator from Michigan from 1928 until he became Dewey’s running mate in 1944, was more conservative than Dewey but more liberal than Robert Taft, the leader of the conservative wing of the Republican party.
During his first term Dewey passed ground-breaking legislation to deal with organized crime, earning him the reputation of being “the President who beat the Mob”. He also presided over a growing economy and an affluent country that had considered the Great Depression a distant memory. America seemed to be destined for a “Belle Époque” of its own, but at the same time the build-up of the armed forces initiated by Roosevelt continued under Dewey as part of a policy called “armed neutrality”. Dewey wouldn’t have minded a more proactive foreign policy beyond armed neutrality, but isolationism prevailed in the mid to late 1940s.
The Dewey/Vandenberg ticket won again in 1948. Vandenberg died in 1951, so in 1952 Dewey ran with the California Senator Richard M. Nixon, who was relatively new in Congress but whose charisma was undeniable. Dewey had chosen to go for a third term too. He’d been convinced to do so by the Republican establishment as his successful policies tackling organized crime were very popular while he was also presiding over a growing economy, giving him very high ratings. The Republicans were certain that Dewey would win a third term if he ran for office again and in 1952 they were proven right, matching Roosevelt’s achievement of three consecutive terms in the White House and giving their party a champion of its own.
Once the war broke out, he ordered “neutrality patrols”, which was a clear indicator of which side in the war in Europe he favoured. He also granted favourable low interest loans to Germany, France and particularly to Britain, enabling them to place orders for both military and non-military goods on a cash-and-carry basis. The British in particularly benefited from this as they could place orders with America’s massive shipbuilding industry on the US eastern seaboard to build enough transport ships to keep the country from being completely strangled, ordering more ships from US shipyards than could be sunk by Soviet submarines. These policies were controversial among isolationists, but Dewey could get enough support for these policies simply by mobilizing the anti-communist elements on both sides of the aisle in Congress.
There were plenty of anti-communist politicians in America who didn’t think America should stand by idly as the Soviets conquered Europe. They were mobilized by terrible news coming from Europe: German and Polish refugees in the free part of Germany told of Soviet soldiers raping and looting, of systematic persecution of “class enemies”, and an indiscriminate campaign to destroy the Christian churches. They destroyed churches, cathedrals, monasteries and convents or converted them to secular uses while clergymen were executed and nuns were raped. Dewey, a lifelong and active member of the Episcopal Church, was appalled too. In an address, the first important Presidential speech aired on the new medium called television, he addressed these events: “We’re not involved in the war in Europe, but this doesn’t prevent us from sympathizing with the side that is clearly the victim of unparalleled aggression unleashed by a criminal regime. In spreading their so-called revolution to liberate the working class, these invaders in reality spread terror. They persecute Christians of all denominations for no other crime than believing in God rather than the idol of communism. I cannot ask good Christian Americans to stay neutral spiritually and in their conscience.”
Dewey’s neutral but decidedly pro-Western course in this war was unquestioned until the confrontation in the Labrador Sea. There was no unanimity concerning the response and particularly the isolationist lobby hijacked the issue by questioning what business American battleships had in that part of the Atlantic Ocean. They argued the American commander shouldn’t have pursued the Soviet ships when they started to withdraw after realizing they weren’t fighting British but American ships. They accused President Dewey of trying to engineer a casus belli to legitimize American intervention in Europe.
Though Congress didn’t declare war, an increasingly paranoid and erratic Stalin was convinced it was a matter of time before the anti-communist elements in US politics would be mobilized and bolstered enough to result in an American declaration of war anyway. So Stalin made the decision for the Americans. He pointed out the Second Red Scare (“better dead than red”) even though it actually gained less traction than the first. He said “Wall Street is the capital of Jewish finance capitalism, which means neutrality isn’t an option for the United States. We’re better off going to war with the Americans now than when they’re completely ready for it”. There were serious flaws in this reasoning, but nobody dared to contradict Stalin in the atmosphere of terror they were living in. Besides that, the frontline was far away from Soviet territory in central Germany, so there didn’t seem to be any reason to worry. On Wednesday May 18th 1955, the Soviet Union declared war on the United States in anticipation of a final confrontation once the war in Europe had been won.
I wonder how China will react to this.
I don't expect Chiang to follow Stalin into declaring war on the USA, and he would likely even loudly declare that China has no conflict with the USA.
And given that China was dragged into the war by France and Britain (who started a war rather than abandoning their concessions), and is only threatening European colonies rather than Europe, and isn't communist, and isn't committing major atrocities, I don't expect the USA to declare war on China. Dewey might want to (and even that is dubious), but the Congress likely would oppose it.
Actually, I can see the USA mediating a peace between Europe and China (which would basically amount to "colonies under Chinese occupation become independent under Chinese influence, while India stays in the British sphere").
Only for Stalin to declare war on China too (as a "traitor").
I don't expect Chiang to follow Stalin into declaring war on the USA, and he would likely even loudly declare that China has no conflict with the USA.
And given that China was dragged into the war by France and Britain (who started a war rather than abandoning their concessions), and is only threatening European colonies rather than Europe, and isn't communist, and isn't committing major atrocities, I don't expect the USA to declare war on China. Dewey might want to (and even that is dubious), but the Congress likely would oppose it.
Actually, I can see the USA mediating a peace between Europe and China (which would basically amount to "colonies under Chinese occupation become independent under Chinese influence, while India stays in the British sphere").
Only for Stalin to declare war on China too (as a "traitor").
How's the situation with Portugal? Is Salaza still sweating with communist Spain at it's border?
I am assuming China wouldn't declare war against the US and it will make Stalin be angry and will think of an irrational move that will ruin the Soviets and turn the tide of the war.
Great tension building!
Do the Sovs intend to carry out an "end-run" hitting USA assets in the Caribbean (including the Panama Canal) before they get reinforced?